Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle by Edgar Rice Burroughs

In peace he [Tantor the elephant] had lived with Dango the hyena, Sheeta the leopard and Numa the lion.  Man alone had made war upon him.  Man, who holds the unique distinction among created things of making war on all living creatures, even to his own kind.  Man, the ruthless; man, the pitiless; man, the most hated living organism that Nature has evolved.

It is time to read Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, the eleventh Tarzan book, which first appeared in serial form in 1927 and 1928 across five issues of Blue Book.  (The covers of the first two of those issues promoted Burroughs' latest latest Tarzan adventure with illustrations; the second cover was by famous illustrator J. Allen St. John.)  I'm reading my Ballantine edition of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, which has a $1.25 cover price and a Boris Vallejo cover depicting our hero Lord Greystoke rescuing a gorilla from a python.  This scene from the novel seems to be a favorite of illustrators and is brought to life on the covers of many editions of the novel, even though the craziest and most notable element of the book is the presence of people who are, more or less,12th-century crusaders.  Only Joe Jusko seems to have leaned into this medieval component of the book on the covers of a German 1995 printing and a 2021 US edition.

(I have to report that my Ballantine edition has some pretty distracting typos.  Tsk, tsk, Ballantine!)  

Characters in genre fiction get knocked unconscious all the time, and this commonplace occurrence befalls Tarzan on the third page of the text when the elephant Lord Greystoke is riding is spooked by musket fire from a member of a Bedouin hunting party.  Tarzan is captured by the Muslims, who, we learn, are members of an expedition led by Sheik Ibn Jad.   The sheik (whose title is variously spelled "sheik," "shiek" and "sheykh" here in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, a novel noteworthy for inconsistent spellings--e.g., "Beduw" or "Beduwy" or "Beduin" for "Bedouin"--and the exotic plural "'Aarab"--this word bears an initial apostrophe--for "Arabs" ), at the head of a large party of Arabs and black slaves, is marching through Tarzan's realm on the way to the little-known city of Nimmr, Ibn Jad having been told by a magician that a great treasure and a beautiful woman await him there.

Burroughs tries to build atmosphere by having the Muslims and their black slaves say "thy" and "thou" and use words like "menzil," "thob" and "thorrib;" my brief internet searches suggest that last word is rarely used outside of this novel.  A more substantive component of the Islamic facet of the novel is the relationships among the Arabs and blacks in the sheik's expedition.  One of the senior slaves, Fejjuan, a member of the Galla people, was seized as a child by Arab slavers; the Galla live near the supposed site of Nimmr and Fejjuan plots to escape bondage and return to his childhood home.  Sheik Ibn Jad wants his beautiful daughter Ateja to marry one guy, Fahd, but she is in love with another guy, Zeyd.  And then there is the sheik's brother, Tollog, who is plotting against the sheik; if anything happens to Ibn Jad, Tollog will inherit leadership of the expedition and ownership of any treasure it discovers. 

Tarzan presents a problem to the Arabs, seeing as Lord Greystoke forbids the hunting of elephants and the taking of slaves in this region, and of course these are precisely the practices the sheik's party has been engaging in as they pass through.  If Ibn Jad releases Tarzan, Lord Greystoke will round up a posse to force the expedition back to the desert from whence it came.  But just killing Tarzan is dangerous, as the ape man is popular among the local blacks, and if word gets out that the Arabs have killed the hero, the local tribes will gang up on the Bedouins and render their mission impossible, maybe kill them all.  

Ibn Jad instructs his brother Tollog to murder the bound Tarzan silently at night and hide the body so the Bedouins can claim Tarzan sneaked off to parts unknown, but the ape man summons an elephant to liberate him and then great apes of his acquaintance free him from his bonds.  The elephant attack scene and the scenes in which Tarzan negotiates with monkeys and then the apes are good, especially if it has been a few years since you've read such scenes in earlier Tarzan books.  It is unfortunate that these scenes, some of the best in the book, come so early.

A recurring theme of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is how humans are worse than animals and white people are the absolute worst of the worst.  On the very first page of the novel we get this kind of material from the narrator as he describes the feelings of that elephant, and elsewhere in the novel we get additional helpings of this sort of material from other animals and from Tarzan.  In the fourth of the novel's 24 chapters, a Western white man shows up to embody the book's denunciation of humanity of the paler persuasion.  Middle-aged stock broker Wilbur Stimbol and sophisticated young man James Blake are New Yorkers on safari, the former seeking trophies and treating the black porters cruelly while the latter hopes to photograph animals and treats the natives kindly.  These two Americans get in so many arguments that they decide to split up their safari.  While Blake is divvying up the supplies, Stimbol runs off after a gorilla, rifle in hand, and bumps into Tarzan, who rescues the gorilla from a huge snake and then from Stimbol.

J. Allen St. John's cover for the first book edition of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle
seems to be inspired by Frederic, Lord Leighton's sculpture Athlete Wrestling a Python

In a totally predictable but still effective scene, none of the black hirelings wants to go with Stimbol; they all want to accompany the kind Blake.  Stimbol is amazed by this turn of events because he thought the porters respected him because he was hard on them.  (This scene is of particular interest because in the last Tarzan novel, Tarzan and the Ant Men, Burroughs made it clear that women will admire men who treat them roughly, show them who is boss; I guess the logic that applies to relations between the sexes doesn't apply to white people's relations with black people.)  Tarzan has to order some of the natives to accompany Stimbol, whom he commands go directly to the nearest railhead; Tarzan also prohibits Stimbol from hunting.  Tarzan permits Blake's party greater freedom so Blake can take photos.

Stimbol ignores the ape man's ukase against hunting and so the blacks assigned to him feel justified in abandoning him.  All alone in the treacherous jungle, the stock broker eventually stumbles into the camp of Ibn Jad's expedition where he becomes a new component of the scheming among the Muslims.  Fahd frames Zeyd for the attempted murder of the Sheik, but he escapes execution the next day thanks to Ateja's clandestine aid.  Zeyd flees into the wilderness.  Zeyd is no match for the jungle on his own, but Tarzan appears and saves him from its hazards.  Fejjuan is sent ahead by Ibn Jad to negotiate with his fellow Galla, whom Ibn Jad figures can guide his expedition to Nimmr, and Fejjuan reunites with his family at his home village.

Meanwhile, a freak accident separates Blake from his safari, and he blunders into a valley where live thousands of white people, the descendants of medieval English crusaders who got shipwrecked over 700 years ago, and the black African natives who have joined their cause and self-identify as Englishmen.  These people wear medieval European clothes and wield medieval weapons, their buildings have medieval architecture, etc.  Way back in the 12th century the crusaders split into two hostile camps, and a sort of cold war has endured ever since between the two rather prosperous fortified cities built by the shipwrecked Englishmen; the valley has but two entrances, one to the north, one ot the south, and guarding each is a city and castle.  Blake enters the valley at the southern city, Nimmr, the very city that Ibn Jad is seeking.  Blake finds that no crusader has ever left the valley because they think a huge Muslim army has the valley surrounded.  

In the same way that, when we are among the Arabs, we get words like "nasrany," "beyt" and "mukaad," among the crusaders we get a lot of "methinks" and "ods bodikins" and "art thou."  Most of the crusaders of Nimmr take a liking to Blake, who knows how to ride and fence and is a decent and fun guy, so they accept him as a foreign knight.  As we expect in a Burroughs story, Blake, essentially the protagonist of much of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, develops a relationship with the local princess and this inspires the jealousy of one of the knights of Nimmr, and Blake ends up fighting a duel with this joker, winning further admiration for his swordplay and for his good sportsmanship.

Tarzan leaves Zeyd at a village where he will be safe and goes to Ibn Jad's expedition with the intention of forcing them to return to North Africa.  Ibn Jad decides, again, to have somebody murder Tarzan in his sleep, this time manipulating Stimbol into assaying the dirty deed, he telling the stock broker that Tarzan has scheduled Stimbol's execution for tomorrow.  Burroughs makes a mistake his editor should have saved him from by portraying Stimbol as reluctant to murder Tarzan. 

Stimbol had been an irritable man, a bully and a coward; but he was no criminal. Every fiber of his being revolted at the thing he contemplated. He did not want to kill, but he was a cornered human rat and he thought that death stared him in the face, leaving open only this one way of escape.

The quoted paragraph is compelling drama and characterization, but when he composed it Burroughs apparently forgot that 60 pages earlier Stimbol came upon an unconscious Tarzan and tried to kill the ape man (the New Yorker was stopped by a gorilla) and in that scene the Manhattan money grubber had no qualms about assassinating a sleeping man, in fact actually come up with the idea himself.  Tsk, tsk, ERB!  

After Tarzan is believed killed (in the dark Stimbol didn't realize the sleeping man he killed was Tollog, Ibn Jad's brother, whom the wily Tarzan had left in his place) the Muslims are guided to the valley by the Galla in return for surrendering all the Galla slaves they have in their party.  The Galla are confident they will never see the Muslims again, as no Galla who has gone into the valley has ever returned.

The Bedouins enter the end of the valley opposite that where Blake arrived, at the northern English city.  Ibn Jad's adventurers arrive at an opportune moment.    Every year, the two English crusader cities suspend their cold war unneighborliness to hold a magnificent tourney where they have jousts and duels and as the climax a big sort of melee.  Ibn Jad's band of Arabs arrives during the tourney, so they are able to take and loot the northern city, it being almost entirely unguarded.

Meanwhile, there is drama at the site of the tourney.  When the melee ends, the king of the northern city kidnaps the princess of Nimmr with whom Blake is in love and rides off with her; Blake and the other Nimmr knights pursue them.  Tarzan, looking for Blake, arrives at this moment and joins the fracas.  Blake is able to rescue the princess because he uses the automatic pistol he has with him to kill a bunch of the Northern knights; for his part, Tarzan uses his African hunting skills to get a leg up on the Northern knights.  One of the more memorable passages of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is Burroughs' description of Tarzan's reaction to the knights' behavior.

Never in his life had Tarzan seen such fierce, bold men, such gluttons for battle. That they glorified in conflict and in death with a fierce lust that surpassed the maddest fanaticism he had ever witnessed filled Tarzan’s breast with admiration. What men!

Before Tarzan can get to Blake, Blake and the princess are captured by Ibn Jad.  The English princess of Nimmr is the best-looking woman the Arabs have ever seen--more beautiful than a houri!  So they seize her and leave Blake bound up to be eaten by a leopard.  Tarzan saves Blake from the leopard--over the course of his career Tarzan saves people one second before they get killed, and is himself similarly saved, more times than can be counted, and even minor characters get into the act, as we see a few pages later.

The Muslims escape the valley but their camp erupts into chaos when Fahd tries to murder the sheik so he can carry off the crusader princess himself.  Ateja saves her father the sheik from eating poison with like one second to spare, but Fahd escapes with the English princess and with the hapless Stimbol.  Blake is captured by the Northern crusaders and chained up in a dungeon, but, before their wicked king can have him tortured to death, two Northern knights free him in recognition of Blake's chivalry during the tourney.  (These kinds of feel-good virtue-will-be-rewarded scenes are much more appealing than the "Tantor...avoided men--especially white men" passages that tell the reader the world and his life are deplorable.)

Burroughs wraps things up in the last few chapters, all the characters getting their just deserts.  A gorilla seizes the princess of Nimmr from Fahd, Tarzan rescues her and takes her back to Nimmr, where she is eventually joined by Blake.  Zeyd kills Fahd and reunites with Ateja--the lovers are given a job on the Greystoke estate.  The rest of the Muslims are killed by Tarzan or, like Ibn Jad, enslaved by the Galla.  It seems that the jewels Ibn Jad looted from the northern crusader city end up in Tarzan's hands.  Stimbol is humiliated and sent back to America.  (Stimbol gets off pretty easy--after all, he did try to murder Tarzan!)  One of the problems with Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is that there is no real climax--Blake shooting down a bunch of Northern knights and saving the princess would have made sense as a climax, but the novel has over 30 pages to go and both Blake and the princess get captured and rescued multiple times before they are happily reunited in Nimmr, and we've also got various other plot threads to resolve.  Instead of the novel building to a final crescendo, the level of excitement rising and then being relieved after a final explosion, the level of tension remains at a steady boil, people getting killed, captured and liberated all the way up to the final page.

Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, the eleventh book of Tarzan, is a good novel, but I feel it is a step down from the tenth, Tarzan and the Ant Men.  Tarzan and the Ant Men put us into three alien milieus--a cannibal village full of schemers, a matriarchal society of savages, and an urban civilization of quarter-sized slave-owning aristocrats.  All three of these weird societies was more interesting than Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle's Bedouin expedition full of schemers and medieval towns full of knights; Book 10's locales are horror and science fiction settings new to the reader, and Burroughs developed crazy architecture and economies and sexual mores for the latter two that served as satires that had the capacity to challenge the reader.  The Arabs and the English crusaders in Book 11 are just fictionalized reconstructions of real societies, and ERB's efforts to make them compelling or immersive consist largely of putting clunky words like "y-clept" and "mukaad" in the mouths of their inhabitants.  Burroughs does very little to make them satirical; the humor in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle revolves around Blake using Jazz Age slang and other artifacts of and references to 1920s New York which befuddle the medieval Englishmen.

While Tarzan and the Ant Men had something to say about sexual relationships on the level of the individual and of society, the ideological content of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is comprised primarily of Burroughs attacks on mankind and European civilization in particular.  Burroughs denunciations are silly and banal, and Burroughs sort of bungles them, making nonsensical claims and contradicting himself.  On the very first page, in the second paragraph, Burroughs tells us that only man makes war on his own kind.  But I'm pretty sure ants, rats and chimps wage wars amongst themselves.  And what are we to make of the fact that Tarzan, who on that first page is shown to be the best--or maybe the only good--white man because he is so much like an animal, is filled with admiration of the belligerence of the crusaders on page 159?  Is Tarzan a paragon for being closer to primitive man and the animals, or is he as foul as other white people?  

In the same paragraph as that questionable assertion about war, Burroughs declares mankind "the most hated living organism."  But then in the third paragraph of the novel Burroughs asserts that animals do not feel hate, greed or lust.  I suspect some animals actually do have these feelings, and that they express them in the pages of Burroughs' fiction, and if animals don't hate, how can man be the most hated organism?  Maybe in Burroughs' day people didn't know about the chimps making war thing, and maybe in lawyerly fashion you can argue the "most hated organism" line is a reference to self-hate, but these issues with Burroughs' declarations make Burroughs' argument feel shoddy.

Another problem with the sort of misanthropy we see in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is that it is sterile virtue-signaling at best, and at worst enervating.  Burroughs' attacks on feminism, high taxes, and Prohibition in Tarzan and the Ant Men imply policy solutions, like supporting traditional gender roles, lowering taxes and permitting the sale and consumption of alcohol; Burroughs identifies problems and offers prescriptions for resolving them.  Saying people are worse than animals and white people are worse than nonwhites here in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is just a pointless counsel of despair--what can we do about this alleged problem?  Are we supposed to burn down New York and Chicago and abandon the corn fields of Iowa and cattle ranches of Texas and devote our lives to catching bugs and squirrels with our bare hands and sticks?  It is simply ridiculous.          

As for the characters, Book 10's Esteban Miranda and the witch doctor who lost his daughter are more interesting than the Bedouins and knights in Book 11.  Stimbol had real potential as a bad man pushed to see how bad he really is and to then repent if Burroughs hadn't made the blunder I point out above.  Fejjuan the Galla slave is interesting but is underused--I expected him to become friends with Tarzan or Blake or save Stimbol or join the crusaders or have to choose between the Muslims who enslaved him but treated him decently enough and offered him wealth and his own people or something cool like that, but Fejjuan is just discarded after he reunited with his people.  Blake is OK as the protagonist of like a third or half the chapters.  The intrigue among the Muslims isn't bad, but the disputes among the Englishmen aren't interesting because we learn very little about the Northern king. 

As for the action scenes, Tarzan against the snake and Blake killing knights with a .45 are pretty good, but the escape from imprisonment and rescue of the Minunian princess in Tarzan and the Ant Men is better than the tourney and the desultory fighting between the crusaders and Saracens in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle.  (After worrying about the Saracens for 700 years the English crusaders' encounter with them should have been monumental, but instead there are just little skirmishes that demonstrate that the Bedouins' muskets are very accurate when they aren't shooting at Tarzan.)

Having leveled all these criticisms, I will reiterate that I like Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, but it is obviously inferior to its predecessor.  We've got more Burroughs coming up--let's hope our next ERB excursion will achieve a higher level of satisfaction than this one.  

Tarzan and the Ant Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs

"And you intend,” he demanded, ‘‘to defy a city of four hundred and eighty thousand people, armed only with a bit of iron rod?”

"And my wits,” added Tarzan.

It's been over a year since we read the ninth Tarzan book, Tarzan and the Golden Lion.  If I am going to read all 24 Tarzan books before I go senile I will have to pick up the pace.  Today we've got Tarzan #10, Tarzan and the Ant Men.  I own two Ballantine paperback printings of the novel, one with a Richard Powers cover featuring wild African masks (see also the Powers mask on the cover of the paperback of Chad Oliver's Another Kind) and one with a Boris Vallejo cover that features members of the two isolated branches of the human race that dominate the novel's narrative; these books' interiors were printed from the same plates, and it is this Ballantine version of Tarzan and the Ant Men, which first appeared in serial form in Argosy in 1924, that I will be reading. 

In Chapter 1 we immediately see how much Edgar Rice Burroughs deserves his reputation as a master of entertaining adventure writing.  We are reacquainted with Esteban Miranda, the big strong Spanish actor who has been impersonating Tarzan, whose sanity comes and goes (at times he actually thinks he is Tarzan), and who in the last book was captured by African cannibals.  Burroughs paints quickly and entertainingly the psychology of this greedy white criminal as well as those of the manipulative and power-hungry blacks who hold him prisoner and use him as a pawn in their competition for the allegiance of the tribe.  Eventually the canny Miranda, who is an actor, after all, a professional deceiver, tricks a naive teenage girl, the daughter of the witch doctor, into springing him from captivity.  Burroughs makes all the relationships among these people compelling and their behavior totally believable.  Their interactions all generate suspense, because Burroughs is not above killing these relatively minor characters off in gruesome ways.  The Iberian thespian Miranda kidnaps the 14-year old cannibal naif and periodically through the novel we check in on this odd couple as they try to survive in the jungle. 

In Chapter 2 we begin the novel's main plot line.  Tarzan's son Korak the Killer has taught Lord Greystoke how to fly a biplane, and on his first solo Tarzan spots a region he has never explored because a thorny forest separates it from his own stomping grounds and those of the tribe of which he is "Big Bwana," the Waziri.  Carelessly Tarzan crashes his plane within this mysterious land, and is captured by a strange tribe of primitive people.  As with the cannibals, Burroughs presents characters here who are alien but act in a way with which we can identify and efficiently describes their behavior and their psychologies in a way that is captivating.  These people, the Alalus, are a vehicle for Burroughs to present a satire on gender roles--the women among the Alalus are bigger and stronger than the men, and they do most of the hunting and initiate the sex act, and as a result, life among the Alalus is not only brutal (hey, everybody's life is brutal in Burroughs' Africa) but marked by a total absence of any form of love--between sex partners, between parents and children, and among siblings!  

The hideous life of the Alalus was the natural result of the unnatural reversal of sex dominance. It is the province of the male to initiate love and by his masterfulness to inspire first respect, then admiration in the breast of the female he seeks to attract. Love itself developed after these other emotions. The gradually increasing ascendency of the female Alalus over the male eventually prevented the emotions of respect and admiration for the male from being aroused, with the result that love never followed.

The huge muscular female Alalus live in crude villages with their offspring, while the adult males cower solitary in the forest, to be periodically hunted and captured by the females and forced to impregnate them before being sent off again.  Upon adulthood Alalus are sent off to live on their own and do not even remember who their parents are. 

Burroughs also uses the Alalus to voice an opinion more palatable to our tender 21st-century ears.  After regaining consciousness, Tarzan quickly escapes the compound of the female Alalus who seized him while he was out like a light after crashing his plane, and one of the young timid males accompanies him.  Lord Greystoke, who has spent so much time in London and Paris among European middle-class and aristocratic people, as well as among African savages and actual animals, reflects on how little separates civilized from primitive man, and Burroughs, as does Raymond Douglas Davies in one of his many fine compositions, demonstrates that the difference between the civilized and the primitive is education.  Tarzan endeavors to teach this Alalus man to be brave, to use tools, and to fight, and his efforts are rewarded.  (Woah, teachers really do change the world!)  After Tarzan is separated from this new and improved Alalus male, we return to his adventures at intervals, and observe as he gathers together a bunch of male Alalus who were living individually like hermits in the jungle, hiding from the larger women Alalus, and teaches them how to fight and exhibit courage; before long these men are revolutionizing Alalus society, beating the Alalus women into submission and reviving the natural order of male supremacy.  Under patriarchy the men and women of the Alalus relearn love and become happy, and Burroughs does not skimp on scenes of the men beating the women nor on the women groveling at the men's feet, looking up at their masters with eyes filled with love.

A third subplot to which we occasionally return concerns a diamond-studded golden locket of Tarzan's mother which the ape man loses during his captivity among the Alalus.  Tarzan and the Ant Men is full of bloodshed and depictions of death, and this locket, taken from the unconscious Tarzan by an Alalus male, gets caught around the neck of a vulture who is among the flock that devours the thief after he gets killed in a fight.  Via an unlikely series of events that involves additional episodes of carrion eating--and not just by vultures!--the locket returns to its rightful owner at the end of the novel.    

After leaving his Alalus student behind, Tarzan becomes acquainted with another race of humanity new to him, this one quite civilized: the Minuni, the ant men of the title.  Tarzan makes fast friends with the Minuni of the city state of Trohanadalmakus (oh, brother!) when he rescues their prince who has been seized by an Alalus female.  The Minuni are between one foot and a foot-and-a-half in height, and their cavalry ride little teeny antelopes; they have swords and spears and build tall towers (I guess like those ant and termite hills we see in nature films about Africa) and dig deep mines, but have not developed the bow and arrow--they are amazed when Tarzan makes short work of the Alalus woman with his own bow.

Burroughs spends a lot of time on "world-building" the civilization of the Minuni; we learn all about their architecture and politics and economies.  Basically, the ant-men live in competing city-states of like half a million inhabitants each; these are aristocratic slave states where slaves do all the labor and also form the middle class of businessmen and professionals while the aristocratic ruling warrior class is wholly devoted to preparing for and conducting the constant raids each city state inflicts on the others.  The walled city states never actually get conquered; the raids just yield slaves and other booty.  Slaves are essential to Minunian society--members of the warrior class are more or less obligated to marry members of the slave class, to prevent the inbreeding that might weaken the aristocracy and leave it easy prey for the warrior class of enemy city states.  Another aspect of Minunian society that Burroughs emphasizes is how efficient it is; when he describes Minunian military maneuvers he tells us that "not a motion is wasted."  One of the novel's science fiction touches is how the air of the labyrinthine and hive-like towers and mines is rendered breathable.   

Tarzan, a curious sort with no fear of fighting, decides to stand on the front lines during a raid on his new adoptive city of Trohanadalmakus by the forces of rival city Veltopismakus and gets knocked unconscious yet again during the engagement and captured; the prince is also taken by the Veltopismakians.  Tarzan awakes in the rival city and finds himself shrunken to the size of the Minunians!  The tyrannical and ambitious king of Veltopismakus has in his employ a scientist who has been trying to invent a ray that can grow Minunians to Alalusian size, but so far he has only been able to use it to shrink people, not grow them, and the unconscious Tarzan was chosen to be a test subject.  The king, who envisions taking over all of the Minunian kingdoms, hopes to grow soldiers to a war-winning six feet high.

The most boring part of Tarzan and the Ant Men involves court politics in Veltopismakus.  We've got the ambitious and vain king, his scientist, his bitchy daughter, and his cabinet of six ministers, who are outwardly sycophantic towards the king but most of whom are in fact skeptical of the king's acumen and ability and exasperated by king's policies, which include heavy taxation and a prohibition on alcohol consumption. These nine people are all plotting against each other and I find this court intrigue stuff a little tiresome.

Burroughs doesn't just use Veltopismakus to comment on current events like Prohibition (four years old when the serial version of Tarzan and the Ape Men appeared in 1924--it would endure until 1933,) portraying  the Veltopismakians in charge of confiscating booze as corrupt hypocrites who drink the booze to the point of becoming dead drunk and offering scenes in which Veltopismakian business people moan about how taxes are crushing the economy.  Burroughs also engages in some deeper philosophizing.  One of the more competent of the six ministers discourses on decadence and cycles of history, opining that too much peace and prosperity have weakened the nation and that what is needed to make true men of the populace is war and the hard work that it takes to prepare for and recover from war.    

Fortunately for those of us who have spent a lifetime reading people's scribbling and hearing people's blabbing about tax policy and drug policy and are kind of sick of these debates, the action and adventure stuff picks up after Tarzan is put to work in the mines as one of Veltopismakus teeming thousands of slaves.  Lord Greystoke makes friends with a beautiful female slave and defends her when a brutal male slave gets fresh with her.  (If you have read many Burroughs books you won't be surprised when this woman is revealed to be a princess.)  Tarzan hooks up with the prince of Trohanadalmakus and over several chapters they figure out a way to escape captivity and liberate the pretty girl.  These scenes are solid adventure material--the chases, disguises, traps, secret passages, treacherous climbs, fights, and treachery that we read these kinds of books hoping to find.  Burroughs takes advantage of the fact that Tarzan and the prince have to go to all different parts of the city to engage in more world-building exercises.  On the more sciency side, Tarzan's escape is facilitated by the fact that, while he is a quarter of his usual size, he is the same mass as before (I guess) so is super strong.  Burroughs also uses the two princesses to deliver some more commentary on female psychology and sexual relationships  The bitchy princess of Veltopismakus falls in love with Tarzan and, when the hunky ape man rejects her, she tries to murder him and his comrades, but everybody forgives her when they realize she is only an evil bitch because she is rebelling against her evil father, and a few pages later she is one of the good guys.  We also get some brief love-triangle action when the prince of Trohanadalmakus falls in love with the enslaved princess and suffers unfounded fears that she only has eyes for Tarzan.

In the last few chapters, Tarzan and his friends having escaped Veltopismakus, Burroughs ties together and resolves the various plot strands.  Tarzan returns to ordinary size but the process addles his brains; at the same time Esteban Miranda is "unable to reason" because the witch doctor's daughter hit him on the noggin while he was sleeping so she could effect her escape, "killing his objective mind."  This means we've got two big handsome hulks wandering around the jungle in a daze, either of whom the Waziri, Korak, Jane, and the cannibals are likely to believe is the Big Bwana himself.  Of course, in the end things turn out OK for the Greystokes, and even the scoundrel Miranda avoids death, but things don't end well for the cannibals, not even the teenaged girl.

Tarzan and the Ant Men is a good adventure story.  All the episodes of danger and violence, and all the gore, are effective and entertaining.  Most of the individual characters have interesting personalities and behave in ways that at least make sense and sometimes win your sympathy.  I really was curious what would happen to the three main cannibal characters and to Miranda.  The scientist is underutilized, I admit, but the one real problem character is the evil princess, whom I really wish had gotten killed by one of her own traps or nimbly escaped justice to commit more evil, rather than turning good in such an unconvincing way; her transformation into a goody is weak drama, though it jives with the Alalus material by suggesting that women are mere puppets of circumstance who lack agency, that when women lie, cheat, steal, or try to murder you they don't deserve punishment because, hey, you can't expect women to shoulder any responsibility, to make rational decisions, they are just a reflection of the men in their lives the way the moon merely reflects the rays of the sun and generates no light or heat of its own.  

This brings us to the ideology or philosophy of Tarzan and the Ant Men.  The stuff about women and sex roles people nowadays are going to find hard to take, but at least it is fully integrated into the story-- the Alalus and the princess of Veltopismakus demonstrate or represent what Burroughs is trying to say.  All the business about taxes and prohibition and decadence seems just tacked on and distracting, like the six ministers, who are introduced, each with a long silly name and an assessment of his ability to fulfill the role given him by the vain king, and then just forgotten about.  After all the talk about these six jerks and discontent among the populace over high taxes and prohibition I thought there was going to be a revolution in Veltopismakus, but no dice.    

I'm inclined to think Burroughs talks a little too much about the architecture and geography of the Minunian cities in the novel, but all this description does give you a sense of place, makes the action scenes more believable, more immersive, because you can better "see" where Tarzan and his friends are fighting in or sneaking around or riding hell for leather through.  So I guess I am giving a pass to all that stuff, I guess it really does contribute to the whole experience.

It took me a while to finish Tarzan and the Ant Men because I was distracted by family business and, of all things, weather conditions, but I quite enjoyed this tenth Tarzan novel and I am curious to find out what happens next in Burroughs' Africa in Tarzan #11, Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle.

Galaxy, Sept '52: K MacLean, E E Smith, G R Dickson, and J H Schmitz

In response to a blog post in which I mildly praised "The Faithful Friend," a story by Evelyn E. Smith, a woman who has over fifty short story credits at isfdb, one of my knowledgeable readers recommended Smith's "Tea Tray in the Sky."  "Tea Tray in the Sky" debuted in the September 1952 issue of H. L. Gold's Galaxy, an issue which also includes a discourse on heroism in fiction and in real life from Gold, reviews by Groff Conklin of collections of old stories by David H. Keller, A. E. van Vogt and John W. Campbell, Jr, and brandy new stories by Katherine MacLean, Gordon R. Dickson and James H. Schmitz.  Let's get a peek at what kind of product Gold was selling back in the fall of 1952, nineteen years before I was born, by reading MacLean's, Dickson's and Schmitz's stories as well as Smith's.

"The Snowball Effect" by Katherine MacLean

Looks like I've read three stories by MacLean over the years.  We've got "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" published in Ben Bova's Analog, and "Unhuman Sacrifice" and "Feedback," both from Campbell's Astounding.  I liked two of those three stories; let's hope "The Snowball Effect" makes that score 3 to 1.

The narrator of "The Snowball Effect" has recently been made dean and president of a university and charged with making the university profitable.  He goes to the head of the Sociology Department and asks this joker to explain how the Sociology Department can bring in money.  The professor claims he has come up with mathematical formulas that can describe and predict how organizations grow or shrink in size and power.  He tells the narrator that, if given six months, he can prove the value of sociology, and the prof and the prez develop a plan to experiment on some local people, try to make their little organization grow.

Using math equations, the sociology prof develops a scientifically designed constitution and organization chart for a local women's sewing club and gives it to the most ambitious and competent member of the club.  The twist of the story is that, four months later, when the prez checks in on the sewing club, he finds the competent woman has revolutionized the sewing club, turning it into a sort of social welfare NGO and using the super-scientific constitution and organization chart to grow the club into an entity of thousands.  The objective of this organization is to revolutionize the town, fashion it into "the jewel of the United States" with "a bright and glorious future—potentially without poor and without uncared-for ill—potentially with no ugliness, no vistas which are not beautiful—the best people in the best planned town in the country...."  By the sixth month mark the organization is huge, and has incorporated into itself businesses and politicians.  The protagonists predict in a decade or so the organization will take over America and then the world.  They expect that the organization will then, as all big institutions do, collapse, perhaps throwing the entire world into chaos, as when the Roman Empire collapsed.

This is an idea story that maybe is supposed to be funny, rather than a human story with suspense or human relationships, and everything about the idea is questionable, but "The Snowball Effect" isn't too long and it isn't poorly written or constructed, and I guess the idea is sort of interesting, so we're giving it a rating of acceptable.

I may think the story is just OK, but lots of editors are into it, maybe because it is very much about science, like a traditional science fiction story should be, but instead of romanticizing a hard science or engineering, disciplines anybody can see are awesome without having to be told they are awesome, in "The Snowball Effect" MacLean ups the level of difficulty she faces by tackling the task of trying to portray as effective one of those soft sciences we all instinctively know is a scam.  You can find "The Snowball Effect" in H. L. Gold's Second Galaxy Reader, Brian Aldiss' Penguin Science Fiction, Damon Knight's Science Fiction Inventions, multiple anthologies with Isaac Asimov's name printed on their covers, Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell's Ascent of Wonder, the Vandermeers' Big Book of Science Fiction, and still other publications.  I daresay "The Snowball Effect" is a wish fulfillment fantasy for leftists, who dream of technocratic elites using mathematical formulas to control the masses and reshape society to their own specifications, but, to her credit, MacLean in her story leaves room for the reader to believe she is suggesting that giving an organization the key to easily conquering the world might be a mistake, that "The Snowball Effect" is a horror story rather than a utopian story.           

"Tea Tray in the Sky" by Evelyn E. Smith

This story, the story that brought us to this issue of Galaxy, is a long plot-light satire of television, advertising, the metastasizing of the Christmas season far beyond December 24th and 25th, and, most importantly, the cult of tolerance and perhaps mass immigration.  We might say the story is about the internal contradictions of Western liberalism, or democratic capitalism, or whatever we want to call the ideology, mores and norms of the mid-20th-century United States.

It is the future of intergalactic civilization.  The human race is in intimate daily contact with dozens of other intelligent species.  In the interest of tolerance, the taboos (spelled here "tabus") of all races are enforced by law almost everywhere in the populated universe.  For example, in New York City on Earth, if you want to eat you have to do so very discretely, alone and out of sight, because one race of aliens finds eating as gauche to talk about and as private a matter as you or I might consider defecating.  Everyone in the inhabited universe must wear gloves and a hat because there are races of aliens who never show their fingers or the tops of their heads.  And so on--Smith gives many examples.  Perhaps most alarming is the outlawing of monogamy--marriage is forbidden, free love is mandatory.  There are, apparently, government spies and informers everywhere who will make sure you are thrown in prison for uttering any one of the verboten expressions or or performing any of the forbidden behaviors inscribed on the ever-expanding list of taboos imported from every cover of the known universe.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a young man who has spent his entire life in a sort of monastery or retreat in California, having been brought there as a young child.  Before advancing to the next level of membership in "the Brotherhood," he has decided to see what life is like in the mainstream world.  He takes an airplane ride to New York, and "Tea Tray in the Sky" story describes his experience of culture shock, offering us one farcical joke after another.  Besides all the wacky taboos, there is the fact that it is July, and New York is covered in red and green decorations because Christmas is approaching, and, more importantly, the ubiquity of television; TVs are everywhere, pumping out hard-sell advertising, and it is illegal to turn them off, as that would be an infringement of free enterprise.  This society is strongly committed to free trade and the market economy--the word "tariff" is a dirty one and price controls are not exercised.    

"Tea Tray in the Sky" seems to dramatize how some liberal values, like market economics, tolerance, freedom of movement, if pursued and defended to the nth degree, can infringe on other liberal values, like free speech and freedom of association.  Smith's story may also express the annoyance of publishers and broadcasters at having to craft their content with an eye to not offending religious people and anti-communists, and maybe even frustration at the way average white Americans may have been expected to alter their behavior to accommodate blacks and immigrants.

Anyway, the protagonist, after experiencing a New York full of aliens of all types where you can't get married or eat in public and where you have to scrupulously watch what you say and you can't even walk more than two hundred yards because the sight of you strolling around may trigger depression in aliens who have no feet, decides to return to the Brotherhood, where, and I guess this is sort of a twist ending, there are human female residents as well as human male, so he can cultivate the sort of sexual relationship and family life considered normal in the 1950s USA.

"Tea Tray in the Sky" is sort of interesting as an historical document, in particular because issues like mass immigration and tariffs and infringements on free speech in the interest of tolerance are so central to the politics of Western nations today in the Trump Era.  But as a piece of fiction it is not terribly compelling, it being variations on the same few jokes--bizarre taboos and annoying TV commercials--repeated again and again.  

Another acceptable story.  

H. L. Gold included "Tea Tray in the Sky" in the Second Galaxy Reader along with MacLean's "Snowball Effect."  The story would reappear in the 21st century in Smith collections and in an anthology of stories from Galaxy penned by women.  

"The Mousetrap" by Gordon R. Dickson

Here we have one of those stories which opens with the protagonist not knowing who he is or where he is.  Dickson describes our protagonist exploring a brightly lit landscape with a house on it in some detail, the flowers and grass and paths and rooms blah blah blah.  Though the area is lit there is no sun in the sky, and the main character, when he walks away from the house but then comes upon it again, realizes he is on some kind of sphere, like a tiny planet or something.

Gradually our guy begins to regain his memory, and we get a picture of a crazy future interstellar civilization centered on Earth.  Our hero was born on Earth, which faces spectacular overpopulation, which causes an unemployment problem.  The shortage of work is exacerbated by the fact that people who get rich on one of Earth's many colonies return to Earth to take the plum jobs.  So, like so many others, when our protagonist came of working age he was exiled to the colonies.

Our guy loved Earth; in particular, he loved moonlit nights.  He worked hard, for years and years, to get back to Earth.  The economy of the colonies is fast growing, and trade amongst the various colonies and Terra is brisk, and there is a lot of government corruption and onerous red tape and, as a result, lots of black market and smuggling activity.  By necessity, anybody who engages in interstellar commerce on any scale has to engage in all sorts of bribery and special favors done and that sort of thing.  Our hero became an expert at knowing who to bribe, how to bribe them, and whatever else it takes to get shipments hither and thither efficiently through the maze of unjust laws and sketchy lawbreakers.  Eventually somebody hired him for a big job and he took the huge amount of cash they gave him to use for bribes stole it for use in getting back to Earth.  He was eventually arrested and imprisoned for the theft, but at least he was on Earth and having bought citizenship with the stolen money he looked forward to living the rest of his life on Terra after getting out of prison in ten years or so.  His memory goes dark after his conviction--he doesn't know how he ended up on this lonely little brightly lit world.

Some nonhuman aliens land their spacecraft on the little world and they seem friendly enough but post hypnotic suggestion (that he has been hypnotized has been foreshadowed) leads to our hero throwing a switch which traps the aliens in a forcefield.  The aliens are stuck in the trap so long they die.  Then a government ship arrives and an official explains to our protagonist what is up.  The hero was "volunteered" for duty manning a trap satellite planted beyond the current reaches of the human space empire.  Such satellite traps provide the Terran government specimens for study; this gives Terra a leg up on aliens we haven't formally met yet, facilitating the incorporation of them into our empire.

The tragic ending is that our guy is not only now complicit in murder that facilitates imperialism, but can't go back to Earth because, having been in close contact with mysterious aliens, he must be quarantined for the rest of his life on a planet on the edge of human space.  To add insult to injury, this planet doesn't have a moon!  Our moonlight-loving guy will never see moonlight again!

This story is OK.  A lot of the exposition about the Earth economy and description of the trap satellite and even the protagonist's career seems superfluous--it isn't bad but it isn't very entertaining intrinsically and it doesn't really add to the plot.  The plot gimmick, of a criminal manning a trap for aliens he doesn't even realize is a trap, is similar to the gimmick of Eric Frank Russell's "Panic Button," which appeared in Astounding in 1959.  One has to wonder if Dickson's story here inspired or influenced Russell and/or Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. in the creation of that later (and I have to admit, more entertaining) story. 

"The Mousetrap" would be included in the oft-reprinted Dickson collection The Star Road and a German anthology which repurposed as its cover the cover of Richard Lupoff's Space War Blues, which is odd, as it is a pretty specific image, what with its Confederate States of America imagery; there is no Lupoff fiction included in the book--could one of the included stories also be about some kind of Confederacy in space? 

           

"The Altruist" by James H. Schmitz

This is probably the best story we're reading today, or at least the most ambitious, as it integrates philosophical ideas and SF speculations (and presents them seriously, not as some kind of joke or satire) and a human story with suspense and human relationships.  Schmitz's ideas revolve around the mysterious workings of the human mind; Schmitz proposes the theory that people are essentially altruistic and, often subconsciously, always trying to help society and others, and he takes as a main theme of the story knowledge and ignorance of quotidian things, the way we notice and fail to notice things, consciously, subconsciously, and due to the manipulations of others. 

Our protagonist is a colonel with a desk job, head of an important department in a regimented, authoritarian future state, the product of a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions following a period of hardship known as the Hunger Years.  One day the colonel can't find his scissors.  Then they mysteriously turn up just where they should be, but weren't a few minutes before.  The same day, a person from the statistics department brings up the subject of "Normal Loss;" inexplicably, for many years, two percent of supplies of many types have been vanishing without a trace.

The colonel is an intelligent and thorough man, as he has needed to be to rise in the current efficiency-obsessed, rigidly organized society in which the job performance of individuals blessed with professional government positions is carefully tracked and those who fail to measure up are are coldly, even callously, demoted and sent to toil among the undifferentiated masses of common people.  The colonel methodically uses logic, research in books, and experiments to uncover a mind-blowing reality about his world--a whole tribe of people has opted out of society and live like mice in the recesses of the world via the use of psychic powers.  These people can influence a normie's brain so adeptly that  the normie can't see things right in front of him, or hear sounds, or remember this or that, etc.  The invisible people live by stealing food and other necessities, using their psychic abilities to conceal any evidence of the theft.  Can the colonel, who isn't exactly happy in this authoritarian society, join this secret parasitic society of drop outs?  After all, if he was able to detect them, he must have something in common with them; perhaps they are recruiting him, allowing him to see them?

There are some twists and turns in the plot, with the colonel falling in love with one of the invisible people and deciding to commit suicide when it looks like the invisible people have rejected him because he demoted an incompetent and incompatible subordinate, but in the end it is clear that the invisible woman who has caught his fancy is also in love with him and he joins this invisible tribe, and we readers are given the hint that the colonel will lead the invisible people in a successful effort to make society less oppressive.  "The Altruist" in basic outlines follows the old SF template of a guy in a less than ideal society getting into contact with the secret underground and having to choose whether or not to join them in reforming or overthrowing the current order.

I think this is probably the most admirable of today's four stories, but I am not in love with it.  I'm not sure Schmitz really gets the story's two themes--the theme of noticing and not noticing and avoiding notice and the theme of how we are all acting altruistically even if we don't know it--to mesh all that well; they seem to be parallel and distinct rather than complementary.  Does the altruism angle even contribute to the plot?  Does it even make sense?  Aren't the invisible people acting selfishly rather than altruistically?  Is the colonel's desire to abandon his job and leave society because he's in love with some woman he just met altruistic?

A number of events and characters in the story left me feeling similarly uneasy, at least at first, wondering what they signified, what they had to do with the story's plot or themes; I'm not sure if this reflects unclear writing on Schmitz's part or the fact that I am too dim to easily grasp Schmitz's subtlety.  Specific examples (I include these for people who have read the story--feel free to enlighten me in the comments) are the question of the relationship between the statistician and the invisible people, the feelings of the secretary for the colonel, and why the colonel thinks, erroneously, that the invisible people will no longer contact him after he demotes the troublemaker.  There's also the matter of whether the colonel really was going to commit suicide, or if it was some kind of ploy to get the attention of the invisible woman.

Again we're calling a story from Galaxy's September 1952 issue acceptable, though recognizing that this story is on the higher end of the acceptable spectrum.  "The Altruist" was reprinted in English in the 2002 collection Eternal Frontier, but if you can read the language of Moliere, Voltaire and Proust, you can enjoy "The Altruist" in a 1976 French anthology of stories about telepaths.

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I guess I'm feeling wishy washy today, unable to make decisive judgments of these stories.  Or maybe all four of them really are middling or competent but flawed.  Or maybe I am the flawed one, maybe I am smart enough to recognize the value of stories that lack sex and violence, but not smart enough to enjoy them.

It has been like half a dozen posts about 1950s short stories, so we'll be shifting gears for the next post; stay tuned, we may find the sex and violence our animalistic subconsciouses crave!

  

Infinity, Feb '56: K Bulmer, D Knight and F Pohl & C M Kornbluth

In the last exciting episode of MPFL I looked at three stories from the February 1956 issue of Infinity and let it be known I didn't like them.  Today, however, I hope to praise this issue of Larry Shaw's magazine.  Well, I can start by lauding Ed Emshwiller's two illustrations for Kenneth Bulmer's contribution, "Quarry," one of which appears on the cover, while the other takes up an entire page on the inside.  But can I say anything nice about Bulmer's story?  And what about the included story by famed critic and editor Damon Knight?  And that by the "famous science fiction team" of C. M. Kornbluth and Frederick Pohl?  Well, let's dig in and find out.

"Quarry" by Ken Bulmer

I want to like Bulmer's work because he writes adventure stories and I like adventure stories, at least when they are good.  As you know, I love Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, and I have praised plenty of adventure capers by people like Edmond Hamilton and E. C. Tubb.  But I have often found Bulmer's work wanting.  Check out my blog posts about Bulmer's novels Cycle of Nemesis, The Diamond Contessa, and Kandar, for the sad details.  It has been like seven years since I have read anything by Bulmer, but today--in the spirit of a new year and new beginnings!--we are going to let bygones be bygones and read "Quarry," which the aforementioned Mr. Tubb reprinted in Authentic Science Fiction when he was serving as editor of that periodical and Francophonic Englishman Maxim Jakubowski included in a 1963 anthology for the French market.

"Quarry" is "The Most Dangerous Game" yet again. People in SF are aways getting thrown into the arena to fight to the death.  Luckily, Bulmer takes the scenario seriously and tries to generate real human emotion and suspense, and as a result "Quarry" is pretty entertaining.

It is the space faring future; mankind has colonized the solar system.  Unfortunately, before we could reach the stars, the extrasolar Rachen arrived and took over; we are at their mercy, second-class citizens on Earth, Mars, and the other heavenly bodies we have spent so much time and effort cultivating.  Patriotic humans are living in poverty--bodies skinny, clothes threadbare, lungs pink because they can't even afford cigarettes--while collaborators with the alien regime, those whom our protagonist calls "Rachentoads" and "Rachen-lovers" are living large!  Our hero is Dirk Gilmore, a man with big emotions and a quick temper, a hardened tough guy who has a racist hatred of the Rachen--when he sees them he wishes he could squash them like bugs!  This isn't nice, but it feels real.  

Gilmore has decided to make a terrible sacrifice to get some money for the kid he has with his faithless wife--Dirk has volunteered to be the prey in a Rachen hunting sport organized by a big fat human Rachen-lover!

The first hunt Gilmore gets involved in is a special one.  A Rachen prince, heir apparent to the throne of Mars, wants to hunt in an Earth city, one whose ten million human inhabitants have been forced to vacate so the metropolis can serve as a play ground for the snooty aliens.  The streets are deserted, but the robot trams and robot taxis and elevators and motion-activated fluorescent lights of the city still operate just fine.  The prince wants to hunt a woman, and Gilmore is paired with a girl--they are not allowed to split up during the hunt, and have devices strapped to their wrists that cause horrible pain if they get more than ten feet apart.  Bulmer here in "Quarry" uses all the most obvious devices to manipulate the reader, and the same way the human collaborator is a grossly obese and Gilmore starts the story dressed in rags and broken shoes, this woman, Trina, is beautiful, with a terrific body and clear eyes and so forth.    

The Rachen aristo and his cronies, armed with bolt-action rifles, have 24 hours to catch Dirk and Trina after the pair use their 15-minute head start to take public transit to get deep into the city.  Mysteriously, one of Fatso's lackeys gives Dirk a small pistol.  Is there a human resistance movement on Earth?  Is someone plotting to use Dirk to murder the prince so some other joker from beyond the solar system can become King of Mars?

Bulmer does a decent job with the development of the Dirk and Trina relationship, and with the action chase stuff in the city--running here, running there, laying traps, throwing a knife at a guy, outwitting the blob monsters that are the Rachen's bloodhounds, etc.  The chasing and shooting in the city does eventually feel a little moot, though, after we learn that the Prince's lackeys won't kill Dirk and Trina, just terrorize them, leaving them for the Prince himself, and, even worse, that the hunt doesn't automatically end at 24 hours if Dirk and Trina aren't killed--rather, at 24 hours, a gate in the electric fence surrounding the city is deactivated for 15 minutes.  Dirk and Trina are only safe if they can leave the city via this gate during that window, but since the Prince and his party know where the gate is and when it will be open, the hunters have no practical reason to hunt for D & T for 23 hours, they can just ambush them at the gate.  Oh, well.

Who will live?  Who will die?  I couldn't be sure until the end, which is good.  I'm giving "Quarry" a moderate recommendation; it is action-adventure filler, but performed competently.  Maybe I need to read more of Bulmer's short work, maybe that is where he shines.

"A Likely Story" by Damon Knight

Over the years, I have banged out on the keys of a succession of computers many hostile reviews of stories by Damon Knight, as well as attacks on the man himself.  But today, let's accentuate the positive.  I liked "Man in the Jar."  I liked "Masks."  I liked "I See You."  I liked "The Enemy." I called "The Beach Where Time Began" acceptable.  I like some of Knight's 1940s work as an illustrator.  I was cheering Knight on when he called Judith Merril's The Tomorrow People an overly feminine "shambles" full of science mistakes.  So, in the same way I reject the label of "Harlan Ellison hater" and consider myself an Ellison skeptic, I believe I give Knight a fair shake and am more than willing to praise him when his work aligns with my own taste and interests; I am just not one of the Knight groupies.        

Accentuating the positive is a worthy goal to reach for, but one which is sometimes beyond human grasp.  "A Likely Story" is a humor story about the SF community.  Ugh.  There are feeble and obvious jokes; for example, we are told that the association of pro SF writers in the story holds three kinds of meetings--meetings devoted to club politics, meetings devoted to drinking, and meetings devoted to lots of drinking.  Ha ha.  Also, the joke every person who has spent time in New York City makes, that it is very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter.  Oh, brother.  There are also smart guy jokes; a guy named Duchamp is smoking a pipe, for example; and more-or-less affectionate caricatures of a few prominent members of the SF community, plus a multitude of groan inducing puns on SF writer's names; "Preacher Flatt," for example.  

Three or four pages of these empty calories would have been enough for me; "A Likely Story" here in Infinity is sixteen god-damned pages.  Interminable and unforgivable. 

The plot.  Our narrator attends the yearly party of the professional SF writer association.  Strange phenomena occur, mostly banal slapstick, like Asa Akimosov's pants falling down to his knees or an unnamed woman's skirt rising up to show her legs, people dropping glasses or tripping and falling, but also inexplicable events like a joke from infallible funny man Bill Plass (I guess a stand in for Bob Bloch) falling flat.  Is this the work of a poltergeist?  No, the answer seems to be that somebody has figured out how to mess with probability, has the ability to make unlikely events occur.  The narrator and another writer try to figure out which of the SF writers is the culprit.  When they do, the man with the improbability device, the bespectacled "Harry Er-Ah," escapes by flying to Mars.

Just dreadful.

This soul-deadening lump of tedium was reprinted in Knight collections like Turning On and The Best of Damon Knight.

"The Engineer" by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

Let's check in on "The Most Famous SF Duo Ever."  Way way back, in 2014, I read Kornbluth's famous Hall-of-Fame story "The Marching Morons," and voiced many criticisms of it.  More recently, I called Kornbluth's collaboration with Donald Wollheim "Go Fast on Interplane" "competent filler" and his collab with Fred Pohl "Mute Inglorious Tam" "an acceptable sort of gimmick piece."  As for Pohl and Kornbluth's "Gift of Garigolli," I owned to actually hating it and described it as a "half-baked dish of garbage."  I have had nicer things to say about some Pohl solo works like "Survival Kit" and "To See Another Mountain," but long time readers of MPorcius Fiction Log will know much of his output has met a lukewarm reception here and others denunciations.

Well, let's see what "The Engineer," which was reprinted in the various English, German and Italian editions of The Wonder Effect as well as in the "Best of" Kornbluth and Pohl collection, Our Best, is all about.

Our protagonist, Muhlenhoff, began his career as a geologist and worker for an oil extraction company of the future, but found he had a talent for politics and leadership and worked his way up in the company until today he is a big wig in racist big business, managing a drilling facility 1800 meters below sea level off the coast of Mexico!  We learn this backstory after seeing Muhlenhoff in action in a meeting room and then in his office 1.118 miles down, responding to some kind of pressure leak that threatens to flood the submarine facility and kill everybody and lose the company a lot of money and give the Mexicans access to the oil.

The third part of the seven-page story has Muhlenhoff taking a break from work to read from a history book.  I had naively thought "The Engineer" a serious story about using science and psychology to resolve a crisis until this wacky joke--a facility manager taking a break during a life-threatening emergency--hit me over the head with the fact that the story was a satire.

By quoting and paraphrasing the book Pohl and Kornbluth tell us the history of the United States between the Second World War and the dawn of the 21st century.  The land of the free and the home of the brave led the defeat of the Warsaw Pact (Pohl and Kornbluth use the term "Cominform" which is one I don't see very often) but then early in the 2000s the US lost a war to Mexico!  The Mexicans, somehow, in the late 20th century developed technology and military tactics and training superior to that of the United States and conquered Texas, Oklahoma and the western states!  (A horror scenario for some, maybe wish-fulfillment for Pohl and Kornbluth?)  The history book suggests that the US lost the war because the US military was subjected to political pressure from many constituencies and its decisions before and during the war were focused on appeasing politicians, journalists, voters and lobbyists instead of defeating the Mexicans.

The final section of the story makes clear that Muhlenhoff and the underwater facility he manages are going to be destroyed because Muhlenhoff has been paying too much attention to career and political considerations and not enough to the science of keeping the facility safe.  

Pretty poor, but not abysmal; let's be generous and call "The Engineer" barely acceptable.

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Three pretty slight stories, though at least the Bulmer is a competent specimen of its type; the Knight is a particularly "cringe" example of an already questionable genre (the humorous SF story about a gathering of SF figures) and the Pohl and Kornbluth is a weak satire.

So we bid adieu to the second issue of Infinity.  Our next foray into the 1950s SF world will see us reading stories from a magazine with greater prestige than Infinity.

Infinity, Feb '56: H Ellison and R Wilson

The February 1956 issue of Infinity Science Fiction came to mind recently when I was looking at some of my old blog posts about Charles Beaumont.  One of those posts was about "Traumeri," which debuted in the Feb '56 ish of Infinity, the second of the magazine's 20 issues.  Looking through the archives, I see that I have also read the issue's contribution by L. Sprague de Camp, "Internal Combustion."  There are still more big names in this issue, so let's read their stories--and those by some little names, too!  The fact that these stories are by writers I either think are overrated or know little about may add some excitement to the proceedings.  

Today we'll handle the Harlan Ellison story and the two itty bitty stories by Richard Wilson.

"Glow Worm" by Harlan Ellison

I am not an Ellison hater but I am certainly an Ellison skeptic who thinks Ellison's fame is largely a function not of the quality of his work but of his wacky public persona, which is aggressive, self-aggrandizing, self-important, and at times ridiculous, and who finds many of the recurring characteristics of Ellison's work less than entertaining.  I discuss this matter at some length in a blog post about Ellison's 1980 story "All the Lies that Are My Life" (a post in which I also talk a lot about Barry Malzberg and present my theory that Ellison and Malzberg are very similar writers and even people, with Malzberg being the fine and admirable version of the type and Ellison the garish and shoddy iteration) and in another post, one about Ellison's 1976 tale "Killing Bernstein." 

"Glow Worm" is what I guess you would call a mood piece; there isn't a lot of plot or character or anything like that.  I suppose Ellison puts some effort into the images.

It is the future.  Much of mankind has left the Earth to live on other worlds in other solar systems.  For reasons Ellison does not explain, these colonists don't have any interaction with Earth; they don't communicate with the Earth and they apparently have no way to return.  The people who remained on Earth ended up getting involved in a war that exterminated all life on this planet you and I call home.  Except for one guy!  This guy, just before the cataclysm, was the most successful product of experiments meant to create super soldiers who could survive anything.  And he did survive the war!  But he is all alone.  

This guy, who glows and is proof from most physical injury and needs almost no food to survive, decides to leave Earth to find the colonists.  It is vaguely suggested he will serve as "a messenger," "an epitaph," "a symbol;" Ellison throws out this flashy over-the-top melodramatic stuff, but it is all surface, there is no depth to what Ellison is trying to say, it's all emperor-with-no-clothes goop.  What is the Glow Worm's message?  What does he symbolize?  I guess the Glow Worm is supposed to represent how evil and self-destructive the human race is, but since many members of the human race left Earth and (it is suggested) built new societies on other planets, and since the human race also produced this immortal man, the story itself demonstrates that it makes no sense to paint the human race with a broad brush as a bunch of evil failures.   

Anyway, the glowing survivor takes a few years to put together a space ship from wrecks and spare parts that survived the cataclysm, then takes off.  He didn't do a good job with the outer hull of the ship, he being an amateur welder, and the ship is not airtight, but that is OK, because this superman doesn't need air to survive and he is immune to radiation poisoning.

That ends the story; there is no climax or resolution or anything.  Maybe "Glow Worm" is supposed to remind us of the Wandering Jew, because the title character is immortal and is going to be (slowly, because his ship is jerry-rigged) wandering the universe.  But the Wandering Jew was an immortal wanderer as a punishment, and if Ellison's Glow Worm committed any sins for which he needs to be punished, I missed it.  Maybe the story just represents Ellison's alienation and it is expected that other SF fans will identify with the loneliness and alienation of the Glow Worm, who of course is not responsible for his own alienation and loneliness. 

The actual writing of "Glow Worm" and the images are not bad, so we'll call it "merely acceptable."  But it doesn't add up to anything.

"Glow Worm" AKA "Glowworm" was Ellison's first sale to a SF magazine, though I guess not technically his first genre story actually published.  It has been reprinted in the magazine Unearth and the oft-reprinted and updated The Essential Ellison.  Ellison, in the intro to "Glowworm" in The Essential Ellison, tells the story of his writing the piece and of his early days in New York, touching on his relationships with people like Infinity editor Larry Shaw as well as writers Robert Silverberg, Lester del Rey, Algis Budrys and James Blish.  (Why should Ellison feel alienated?  This essay makes clear that many people went out of their way to help Ellison.)  This intro, which I read in a scan of the 35th-Year Retrospective edition of The Essential Ellison, is more interesting and entertaining than most of Ellison's fiction, which, like the fact that Ellison's face appears on and within so many of his books, buttresses my theory that his fame is as much as a celebrity as a writer--his own life and behavior are more compelling than the stuff he put on paper. 

"The Futile Flight of John Arthur Benn" by Richard Wilson

Richard Wilson has two stories in this issue of Infinity; this one appears under the pen name of Edward Halibut.  I think this will be the fourth story by Wilson we have read, preceded by "Lonely Road," "The Big Fix!," and "The Story Writer." Both of today's Wilson stories are very short and each would see reprint in one of the anthologies of short-shorts edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph Olander; this one, "The Futile Flight of John Arthur Benn," little more than one page here in Infinity, was included in Microcosmic Tales and in the German derivatives of that anthology.

"The Futile Flight of John Arthur Benn" is a total waste of time.  A suicidal guy goes back in time, in hopes of being killed by a dinosaur, and Wilson lists famous historical figures he sees briefly as he travels back.  But his journey back stalls before the Mesozoic.  He falls asleep, and then he wakes up back in the 20th century--it was all a dream!  But his desire to kill himself was no dream, so he kills himself in a mundane fashion.

Thumbs down.

I've dismissed as weak or just plain bad at least
 four other stories from Microcosmic Tales:
Harry Harrison's "The Final Battle"
Barry Malzberg's "Varieties of Technological Experience"
Malzberg and Bill Pronzini's "A Clone at Last"
Harlan Ellison's "The Voice in the Garden"

"Course of Empire" by Richard Wilson

This short short, "Course of Empire," like three full pages in Infinity, reappeared in the language of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and whoever actually writes those James Patterson things in 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories and in the version of the book published in Dutch, Italian and Serbian. 

"Course of Empire" is a terrible shaggy dog story that consists of the absolutely lamest and most toothless of ethnic jokes and other childish excuses for humor.  Thumbs down!

It is the future and two men are gabbing.  One was a high official of the Earth world government; his department had the job of choosing the men who would govern the various Terran colonies across the solar system.  An Englishman was chosen to govern Venus because it rains a lot there.  A Bedouin was nominated to run Mars because it is sandy there.  Anyway, the punchline of the story is that the natives of Ganymede conquered the Earth and the two men gabbing are slaves of the Ganymedeans.  

Why would anybody publish this kind of material outside of a joke book for eight-year-olds?  Because they are the kind of people who will think it is hilarious when Muslims conquer Europe and the Chinese Communist Party conquers Japan, the Philippines and Australia?  

Back in November of 2014 I read 20 stories from 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories
and I actually liked some of them

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These stories are not good.  Maybe editor of Infinity Shaw was desperate for material, he having to compete with established magazines like Astounding, F&SF, Galaxy, etc. for the good stuff.  

Reading this blogpost to copy edit it made me a little uneasy, because one of my criticisms of Harlan Ellison is that he is kind of a self-important jerk, and my attacks on today's three stories make me sound like a similarly unpleasant character.  Well, we'll read more from this ish of Infinity next time--hopefully we'll see some better material and I'll be able to radiate some happiness and light instead of snark and complaint.