1970 science fiction stories by Pip Winn, Ted Thomas and Graham Charnock

It is time for three more stories from my perforated copy of Orbit 8, the 1970 anthology of all-new SF stories.  For Orbit 8, Damon Knight didn't just get stories from his wife and from award-winning and critically acclaimed authors like Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty and Harlan Ellison, but from people I've never even heard of!  Today we'll read stories by Pip Winn, Ted Thomas and Graham Charnock, minor SF authors to whom Knight offered a platform in one of the most important SF anthology series of all time.

Remember that Joachim Boaz, generous supporter of this blog and bulwark of the vintage SF internet community, has already digested Orbit 8 and discussed it at his blog and you should totally check out what he has to say about these three stories before or after you read what I have to say about them.  We disagreed about several components of the last batch of Orbit 8 tales, and maybe we'll get some more friction today?

"Right Off the Map" by Pip Winn

Pip Winn has only this single credit on isfdb, and it only ever appeared in Orbit 8.  "Right Off the Map" is a competent story with a brisk jaunty style, acceptable but no big deal; you might call it "filler."

It is the overcrowded future and even what today is the Sahara desert is covered in buildings.  Space is so tight that a vast government bureaucracy controls every moment of people's lives, scheduling what hour of each week you are allowed to go grocery shopping, for example, and even then everybody has to wait in long lines.

Our narrator, a biologist, and his roommate, a sociologist, by looking at an old map, learn that there is a lost valley in India still unoccupied by man, and they get government approval to explore and assess it for use as a site for more housing.  Once they get there the biologist sees one of the last tigers on Earth, and has to choose whether to return to civilization with the specimen or murder his roommate and live out his life in the jungle he is quickly growing to love.

An obvious overpopulation/environmentalism story, but I thought the style was good enough that it deserved a pass.  Joachim thought it so silly and tiresome that he condemned it as "bad."  I guess I'm a softie!

"The Weather on the Sun" by Ted Thomas

Ted Thomas, also known as Theodore L. Thomas, has a number of credits at isfdb, including two novels coauthored with Kate Wilhelm, Damon Knight's wife.  A few years after its debut in Orbit 8, "The Weather on the Sun" was included in one of those anthologies with Isaac Asimov's name on the cover, The Science Fictional Solar System.

Thomas was a legit scientist, and "The Weather on the Sun" is hard SF full of science.  (Sample: "The electron-positron pairs do not annihilate back to high-energy photons completely.")  I am in general sympathetic to hard SF; I like it when one astronauts is racing against the clock to jury-rig some busted gadget while his comrade is crunching the numbers on the only orbit that will conserve enough rocket fuel and oxygen to do wherever they gotta do before whatever horrible fate befalls them.  Unfortunately, "The Weather on the Sun," as I suppose I should have guessed from the title, is about that most boring of natural phenomena, the weather.  It is also one of those SF stories in which the scientists and politicians look down on the common people as children to be managed, in which the bogeyman to be staved off by the enlightened elite is "individualism," and in which we are reminded that politicians are in fact not cynical greedy power-hungry jerk offs who prey on the taxpayers, but martyrs who sacrifice themselves for us--remember that on April 15th, you ingrates!  Worst of all, "The Weather on the Sun" is also one of those SF stories which consists primarily of cardboard characters sitting around talking to each other about shit that is boring.

Here's a core sample from the story, a quote from the president of the world government, that perhaps tells you all you need to know about "The Weather on the Sun:"

"Our entire culture, our entire civilization, the world over, is built on weather control.  It is the primary fact of life for every living being.  If our ability to control the weather is destroyed, our world will be destroyed.  We go back to sectionalism, predatory individualism.  The one factor that ties all men everywhere together would disappear.  The only thing left--chaos." 

(Typing this quote out has forced me to consider the possibility that this story is a joke, a parody of the self-importance and myopia of elites and/or of histrionic SF stories.)

The plot:  Changes in the sun lead to a diminution of the government's ability to control the weather.  We get a long boring scene of the scientists finding this out, and a long boring scene of politicians finding this out totally independently of the eggheads.  Why two unconnected scenes which accomplish the same plot objective?  Maybe Damon Knight was paying by the word?  We get scenes of the politicians debating and voting on raising everybody's taxes to figure out what the hell is going on and scenes of the boffins discussing how to spend all that mullah ("Maybe a carbon alloy would improve the efficiency of the turnaround effect.")  The scientists figure out how to fix good ol' Sol--fly a space ship into the core of the sun and add some fluid--but a human has to be aboard the ship, and the ship won't be able to leave the sun one it has entered it--it's a suicide mission!  The president of the world suddenly learns he has a terminal disease so he volunteers for the one-way trip to hell and eternal fame.  Oh, brother! 

"The Weather on the Sun" is like twenty-four pages long, and after I had dozed my way through each page I riffled through the rest, counting how many more pages of this torture session lay before my bleary eyes.  Every scene is too long, with tedious descriptions of boring objects and opaque lines of gobbledygook, the hard SF version of "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."  Every joke, like the two-page scene in which it rains on a guy's picnic, falls flat.  There is no excitement and the many many characters are indistinguishable and convey zero human feeling until page 21 when Thomas turns the dial marked "sappy melodrama" up to 11 and everybody starts crying.  Gotta give this one a severe thumbs down--an irritating waste of time.

Joachim thought the story the pinnacle of hokiness, but still judged it "vaguely average."  Who's the softie now?
 

"The Chinese Boxes" by Graham Charnock

One of the reasons I decided to read every story in Orbit 8 instead of just reading the stories by Wolfe and Lafferty and moving on with my life is that on the publication page I saw that Graham Charnock in his story "The Chinese Boxes" had quoted T. S. Eliot's 1917 poem "Rhapsody on a Windy Night."  I've been reading a lot by and about Eliot and his cronies Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis lately, and I was irresistibly curious to see how Charnock would integrate Eliot's work into his story.  Readers of this blog may remember how I read Douglas R. Mason's From Carthage Then I Came for similar reasons and then was disappointed, but hope springs eternal!

"The Chinese Boxes" is a bleak story about the linked issues of our responsibility to others and the question of whether life has any meaning or even value, a story in which death is a recurring topic.  Initially, Charnock presents us with two alternating but parallel plot threads.  One concerns Carpenter, a man of above average intelligence who, because of the poor economic conditions of the near future in which the story is set, has serially taken and lost simple entry-level positions, like being a clerk at retail stores.  Currently he is employed on the campus of a major research organization; his job is to sit in a large room watching a giant cube.  He and his girlfriend wonder what the cube is all about.  The other thread is about a guy imprisoned in an almost featureless room, a man who is going insane, losing his memory and so forth.  It is not much of a surprise to us readers when Carpenter learns that the cube is an isolation chamber and the prisoner we have been witnessing go bonkers is in it; a former bartender, he volunteered to be the guinea pig in a psychological experiment seeking to find out how a person might react if he was isolated from all human contact for eighteen months?  This experiment is super hardcore--the only way the bartender can escape the box is via suicide!  Knowing the truth, Carpenter and his girlfriend have to decide if they want to be any part of this bizarre, risky, and morally suspect enterprise.  We readers, of course, see many similarities between Carpenter's ostensibly "free" life and the bartender's life trapped in the cube. 

Judged on a line-by-line, paragraph-by-paragraph basis, "The Chinese Boxes" is well-written.  Images are sharp and phrases and characters are all engaging; Charnock's writing is never boring or vague, and I quite enjoyed it.  How well the story is constructed as a whole, I am not really sure; it is ambitious, which of course is good, but may be too obvious, too earnest, too "arty."  I liked it, but others may find it showy and sophomoric, like a pretentious student film about the meaning of life.

A big reason I enjoyed the story was that Charnock's direct references to Eliot, which include a recitation of the last ten lines of "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," had me picking up and shaking out every passage looking for indirect references to Eliot's life and work, and I think I found some!  One of the noteworthy things in "The Chinese Boxes" is the presence of one of those IBM "THINK" plaques we encountered a year ago in Ted Sturgeon's 1965 story "The Nail and the Oracle," and I wondered if the invocation to "THINK" might also be meant to remind readers of the "nerves" section of The Waste Land.*  Various phrases (e.g., "But what do they do?") and themes (isolation in a place so boring that death is a liberation and the question of whether life and death are really so different) reminded me of Eliot's unfinished verse drama, Sweeney Agonistes.  Charnock even includes an unsavory Jewish character (the kind of character the kids call "problematic,") reminding us of the numerous questionable Jewish characters in Eliot's work.

*This "THINK" sign provides anexample of why I suspect people might find the story "showy" or "too obvious;" Charnock doesn't just mention the "THINK" sign once or twice, but again and again, with characters talking about it, staring at it, ruminating on it, etc.

I read "The Chinese Boxes" hoping for T. S. Eliot material, and Charnock's story is chockablock with Eliot material; I am more than satisfied.  For his part, Joachim proclaims this one "good" and laments that Charnock hasn't published more fiction.

"The Chinese Boxes" reappeared in a French collection of SF stories about doctors.  Charnock has like 14 short fiction credits at isfdb, most of them appearing in the various iterations of New Worlds, and is a very active SF fan; at his website you can find many issues of his fanzine, Vibrator, which appears to be deliberately written with an eye to offending people.  Sample quote from the September 2013 issue: "Please feel free to send me shit in the post if you disagree with this. I’m used to being Mr Unpopular."

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I think today's episode of MPorcius Fiction Log has been a worthwhile exploration of some minor SF writers--next week I may be scouring the Internet Archive for more stories by Graham Charnock. But first we'll be finishing up our ERB Moon project and reading the three final stories in Orbit 8, stories by people at the very epicenter of literary SF!

The Moon Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs

My Americanism was very strong in me--stronger, perhaps, because of the century old effort of our oppressors to crush it and because always we must suppress any outward evidence of it.  They called us Yanks in contempt; but the appellation was our pride.

Let's take a break from our exhaustive exploration of 1970's Orbit 8 to read the first half of the water damaged copy of 1974's Ace edition of The Moon Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs that my brother acquired at some point.  This volume, with its great Frank Frazetta cover and cool Roy Krenkel title page, includes both The Moon Men, first published in serial form in Argosy in early 1925, and The Red Hawk, which was serialized in the same magazine in late 1925.  We'll read The Moon Men today and handle The Red Hawk in the near future.

Like The Moon Maid, The Moon Men begins with a brief frame story set in the late 1960s in which the narrator talks to a man, "Julian," who can remember his past incarnations, including "past" incarnations that "took place" in the future!  One of the first things Julian of 1969 tells the narrator is something I have been wondering about since I finished The Moon Maid--what happened to evil genius Orthis, who took a lead role in designing Earth's first interplanetary ship and then sabotaged it on its first flight?  You'll remember that in the 2030s Orthis became leader of the revolutionary totalitarian Kalkars, and built high tech weapons which enabled the Kalkars to destroy the last lunar city to resist Kalkar rule, monarchical Laythe.

The Julian living in 1969 tells us in Chapter I of the The Moon Men that in the 2040s Orthis, having become ruler of the moon, designed and built a space fleet and in the year 2050 that space fleet, manned by 100,000 Kalkars and 1,000 Va-gas, conquered the Earth!  Earth, you see, was ripe for the picking because the world government, based in London and Washington, had slashed its military budget and enacted severe gun control and sword control policies:

It was a criminal offense to possess firearms.  Even edged weapons with blades over six inches were barred by law.    

Both Orthis and Julian 5th, hero of The Moon Maid, died in the last battle of this war of conquest when their flying warships met in battle, leaving Nah-ee-lah, princess of fallen Laythe and heroine of The Moon Maid, a widow.  These Moon books of Burroughs's are a catalog of tragedies!  Julian 5th's death was in vain, doing nothing to stop the conquest of mother Earth by the evil Kalkars, though without Orthis to lead them the Kalkars have no ability to build or maintain modern technology.

I'm guessing these are Juana, Julian 9th and
General Or-tis

The Moon Maid was in part an allegorical retelling of the Bolshevik Revolution, depicting the high tragedy of evil revolutionaries who bamboozle the public and overthrow a benevolent monarchy.  Well, The Moon Men pursues the next stage of this theme, presenting us with an allegorical description of sordid and humiliating life under communism, of a world of misery presided over by cruel, corrupt and incompetent brutes who justify their misrule with hypocritical sloganeering about brotherhood and community!  (Wikipedia suggests that The Moon Men was begun in 1919 as a story about life in Russia under the Communist Party dictatorship and that Burroughs developed that material into an interplanetary adventure story at the behest of his publishers.)

From Chapter II to the final chapter of The Moon Men, Chapter XI, the novel is narrated by Julian 9th, born in Chicago in 2100, and he paints a bleak picture of twenty-second century life!  Earth's lunar rulers forbid reading and writing among Earthlings; religion, even the very mention of God, is verboten, and marriage is illegal.  The skyscrapers, locomotives, and other infrastructure of modern life have fallen into ruin due to lack of maintenance--technological knowledge has degraded to a medieval level, and the Kalkars can't even manufacture more cartridges for their rifles, and so must maintain strict fire discipline!  Economic conditions are morbid; there is no money, so Earth people trade by barter and all commerce must take place in public under the eye of the tax collector, who seizes an arbitrary portion of each transaction.  As for social life, Earthwomen hide in their hovels rather than run the risk of being expropriated by lustful Kalkar officials.  Some Earthling mothers euthanize their female babies so that they will not have to suffer such a dreadful fate, and there are plenty of Lucrece-style suicides among Earth females.

The plot:  When Julian 9th is twenty years old the lazy and inefficient Lunarian officer who has been commanding the soldiers of the Chicago sector is replaced by a mixed race (part Lunarian Kalkar, part Earthman) go-getter, a real hands-on tyrant, General Or-tis, a descendant of the evil scientist Orthis!  Or-tis lays eyes on Juana, the beautiful girl Julian just recently fell in love with after rescuing her from feral dogs, and bends the apparatus of the state to the task of stealing her from our hero.  A parallel plot concerns a traitorous Earthman, a spy and informer; he reveals to the Kalkar authorities the clandestine religious services attended by the people of Julian's community as well as their possession of such forbidden artifacts of the good life of pre-Kalkar days as a crucifix and U. S. flags; thanks to this jerk (who is hoping the Kalkars will let him have Julian's beautiful mother) innocent people are arrested, tortured and murdered.  In the last three chapters Julian 9th launches a campaign of revenge against his community's oppressors and leads an uprising against the Chicago-area Kalkar authorities; Or-tis and the spy and various other petty tyrants are killed, but the Kalkars crush the uprising and Julian 9th himself is executed.  Juana, pregnant with Julian's child, does manage to escape--I think she is the only character with a speaking part who survives the grim and bloody tale of Earth's horrible future told by the Julian of 1969.

There are lots of SF stories that depict life in an authoritarian/totalitarian society, but The Moon Men, a relatively early example of the genre, has some interesting peculiarities.  For one thing, many of those other dystopian books are warnings about the dangers of science and high technology and depict the government exploiting all manner of electronic surveillance and communications devices and advanced psychological techniques.  (The Chinese Communist Party may well be bringing these sorts of horrors to life today and exporting them to other oppressive regimes.)  But here in The Moon Men, Burroughs presents totalitarianism as leading to severe economic and technological backsliding; rather than coolly efficient manipulators, the government tyrants in this book are indolent and stupid brutes who employ the simplest and least systematic methods.

I'm looking forward to seeing if this interaction,
depicted by Emsh here and Frazetta on later
editions, occurs in The Red Hawk--nothing
like this happens in The Moon Men! 

The Moon Men is also, for a SF novel, very patriotic and very sympathetic to religion.  American flags, apparently artifacts from World War I, are inspirational relics to opponents of the Kalkar regime, who go by the name "Yanks" and call their philosophy "Americanism."  There are plenty of SF stories that attack socialism and collectivism or advocate private property and individualism, as Burroughs does here, but casting my mind back for other SF examples of a sentimental patriotism that is specific to the United States and not just an advocacy of the market economy and representative government that transcends national boundaries, the only comparable specimen I am coming up with is in Gene Wolfe's "Viewpoint," from 2001.

Julian and his compatriots meet in secret at a concealed church for monthly ecumenical services where Catholics, Protestants and Jews are all welcome.  (Students of depictions of Jews in genre literature may find The Moon Men a worthwhile read--at the same time readers of high-brow literature might encounter expressions of skepticism and hostility to Jews in such places as T. S. Eliot's 1920 volume of verses, readers of the pulps would find in Argosy Burroughs's depiction of a sympathetic and courageous Jew, a victim of thuggish anti-Semitism and governmental tyranny who makes common cause with the Christians in his community and loses his life in the fight for that cause.)  I found Burroughs's positive view of religion here particularly interesting because I always think of Burroughs as a religious skeptic, based on his treatment of religion in the Barsoom books, in which John Carter strives to expose the diabolical conspiracy behind Mars's bogus religion.

In The Moon Men Burroughs seems to be presenting an ideal vision of America (and religion), a place where people are brave and band together across ethnic and religious boundaries to fight for individual liberty and fair play. 

The Moon Men is also recognizably a Burroughs story, and we have a protagonist in Julian 9th who, like a Tarzan or John Carter, is stronger than everybody else and fights evil people and vicious beasts with his bare hands, cracking their bones and tossing them this way and that in his efforts to defend himself, his beloved and his friends.  Unlike Lord Greystoke and the Warlord of Mars, however, Julian presides over a tragedy, his family and friends and followers, and himself, ultimately overcome by their enemies, and, with the sole exception of Juana, killed.

An atypical specimen of the Burroughs oeuvre and an interesting piece of SF history that addresses issues of politics, economics, religion and racism current in the 1920s and still current today, The Moon Men is quite engaging.  We'll see how Burroughs wraps up the Julian saga in The Red Hawk soon.

1970 stories by Liz Hufford, Robert F. Young, Robert Margoff & Andrew Offutt and Carol Carr

Let's continue our exploration of Orbit 8, the 1970 anthology of all new stories edited by Damon Knight.  I have a quite worn copy of the 1971 paperback edition published by Berkley, for which I paid 50 cents at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle.

"Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee" by Gene Wolfe

I read this in 2015 in the Wolfe collection Storeys from the Old Hotel and really liked it.  Joachim Boaz also read it in 2015, when he read Orbit 8, and he liked it.  I read it again today (it is only six pages) and I have to say it is a great science fiction story (it speculates on how the technology and politics of the future will affect human lives) and a great horror story (it is sad and disturbing.)  It is unanimous--you should read this story.

"Tablets of Stone" by Liz Hufford

Hufford has only three credits at isfdb; this is the first.

A spaceship has to land for emergency repairs on a planet with an overpopulation problem.  Because of the overpopulation problem, sex and pregnancy on this planet are taboo.  But one of the lonely space crew members manages to win the heart of the pretty girl who is the ship's liaison at the spaceport--they fall in love and she stows away on the ship so they can be be married and live happily ever after.

In its last paragraphs this five-page tale is revealed to be a gimmicky horror story.  The woman, who looks human, never told the spaceman that the females of her planet give birth to dozens of children at once, and that they mature at a very rapid rate.  When she produces a brood of approximately fifty infants the ship's captain realizes that this additional population will overtax the life support systems of the ship and kill everybody on board.  The young lovers commit suicide and the space crew have to hunt down the fifty babies and exterminate them.

Acceptable.  It looks like "Tablets of Stone" was never reprinted anywhere.

"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" by Robert F. Young

"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" is a New Wavey title, and the story is written in the present tense and includes lots of odd symbols, but Young offers a strong plot and writes in an economical style and addresses themes that are more or less traditional--weird aliens, travel through space and time, and the way so many men must choose between family life and freedom.  Here Knight offers us another quite good story; like Dozois's "Horse of Air" and Wolfe's "Sonya, Crane Wesselman, and Kittee" it is readable but has an edge, offering controversial content and surprises.

Some centuries in the future mankind has colonized the galaxy and encountered huge creatures who live in space, the asteroid-like spacewhales.  These creatures can travel not only through space but through time.  Their strong exoskeletons make perfect hulls for space craft, and so hunters called Jonahs invade the whales and blow up their brains so that their internal organs can be removed and replaced with cargo holds, crew quarters, electronic equipment, etc.

The conversion of dead spacewhale corpses into space ships takes place in orbit over Altair IV.  Over the centuries the human colonists of Altair IV have evolved in such a way that the planet is now some kind of matriarchy, as the women are much longer lived and substantially more intelligent than the men.  Women on Altair IV are also very beautiful and subject to voracious sexual appetites--they take many lovers or administer drugs to a single husband so he can perform sexually again and again in a single day. 

The protagonist of the story is John Starfinder, a former Jonah who now works on converting the dead whales.  He is also one of the few men on the planet who has one of the gorgeous Altair IV women all to himself, which can be looked upon as a blessing or as a burden.  When Starfinder starts receiving psychic messages from the whale he is helping to convert into a spaceship--it is still alive because it has a second brain which was only damaged, not destroyed, its captor failed to discover it--our hero (?) has a big decision to make.  He can kill the whale and stay on Altair IV, where for the rest of his life he will be dominated by a woman who will long outlive him, or he can make a deal with the whale, healing its brain, liberating it and partnering with it in an exploration of the universe and history.  Starfinder is a history and literature buff (his interest in the liberal arts is appropriately/ironically the result of a disastrous run-in with a spacewhale early in his career) and he relishes the idea of travelling back in time to witness first hand the glory that was Rome.

I found the climax and resolution of the story surprising, even shocking, in a way that was satisfying--Young does not pull his punches, but follows his themes to their utmost conclusions.  Joachim didn't care for "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams;" maybe because its treatment of male-female relations, and its shocking climax, offended his feminist sensibilities?  Personally, I found "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" to be compelling.  Not only does Young fill it with good SF ideas, surprises, and the kind of difficult sexual relationships I always find fascinating, but includes many direct and indirect allusions to the Bible and to Moby Dick.  Thumbs up!

"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams," I see, is one in a series of stories about John Starfinder and his relationship with spacewhales; it would later appear under the title "The Spacewhale Graveyard" in a 1980 collection of the Starfinder stories called, appropriately enough, Starfinder.

"The Book" by Robert E. Margroff and Andrew J. Offutt

Offutt is a famously odd character, the subject of a great New York Times article by his son Chris; Chris Offutt has also written an entire book on his father which I have not yet read.  I have read several things by Andrew Offutt and opined about them here at the blog; in general I have found them full of problems but somehow have enjoyed them anyway.  I am not very familiar with Margroff, though I know I read one of his collaborations with Piers Anthony, The Ring, back in the 1980s.

"The Book"'s protagonist is a cave man living in a milieu that is characterized by loneliness, abuse, murder, cannibalism, and, I fear, incest--men live alone and the strong steal weaker men's wives and children and sometimes eat their own children and (it is hinted) have sex with their own children.  Men who are old or ill kill their own wives so that the wife will keep them company in the afterlife.

Our hero (?) is different than other men.  When young, he was the strongest of men and dominated all the other men in the vicinity.  More importantly, he has in his cave an artifact of ancient or alien origin in the form of a book.  The book projects ideas and even desires into his mind, guiding his actions, often in ways that contravene his inclinations.  The book seems to be trying to civilize the cave man and his race, for example, informing him of more efficient hunting methods, nudging him to get other cave people to look at the book, and convincing him to put an end to that whole "kill your wife to bring her to the next world" business.

One odd element in the story is that the high tech book seems to want people to eat each other's brains.  Probably this is Margroff and Offutt invoking those famous planarian maze experiments that seemed to suggest (erroneously, it has turned out) that some creatures can gain the memories of those animals that they eat.

I kind of like this one, because it is so crazy and you have to try to figure it out (and it is not too hard to figure out.)  As with "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams," Joachim and I disagree over this one and I again wonder if maybe it is because of the story's depiction of male-female relationships--in this story women are stuck in subordinate roles and defined by their relationships with men and with children.

It looks like "The Book" has only ever appeared in Orbit 8.  Offut produced quite a few short stories, but it doesn't seem that any collections of his short fiction have ever been published.         

"Inside" by Carol Carr

Carol Carr is the wife of Terry Carr, the famous editor.  She has six fiction credits at isfdb.  "Inside" would reappear in an anthology edited by Terry Carr, as well as one edited by Robert Silverberg.

This is one of those stories that has a vague, dreamlike, hallucinatory feel, a story full of mysteries that are perhaps impossible to figure out.

A girl wakes up in a bedroom--out the windows can be seen mist, and when she opens the door she is confronted with empty blackness.  She sleeps, and wakes up to find a corridor leading from her door has been added to the house.  Every morning, for a month or so, new rooms and furniture, and eventually inhabitants--servants and people who eat in the dining room and act like they are at a restaurant--are added to the house.  The servants badger the girl but ignore her responses; the girl assiduously avoids the diners, but their conversations provide us readers clues that suggest that our nameless protagonist was an insane and/or depressed married woman who committed suicide.  Maybe she is now a ghost or in the afterlife or something like that, or maybe this is all just the fantasy or delusion of an unhappy and/or mentally ill individual, a reflection of her hopes for solitude and fears of and disappointments with her family and friends.  On the last page of the five-page tale the servants and diners disappear, and the story ends on a faint note of triumph--the girl/woman has successfully closed herself off from the world and from other people.

At first I was going to judge this one "acceptable," but while copyediting this blogpost I found myself again trying to figure "Inside" out; this is one of those stories that, the more you think about it, the better it seems, so I guess I'll call it marginally or moderately good.  Maybe it is just a psychological story of a troubled individual who rejects the world, or maybe it (also) is a feminist thing, an allegory of the lives of women who inhabit a world they didn't create and to whom nobody listens when decisions are to be made.  This allegory seems a little shaky, as in my own life experience it is wives and mothers who control how a house is furnished and decorated, but I guess that is just anecdotal evidence.

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Taken as a group, these four stories are pretty good; I certainly liked most of them more than did Joachim.  (Am I becoming a softie?)  Orbit 8 is looking like a strong anthology, and we still have six stories to go, including pieces by MPorcius faves Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty.  Fifty cents well spent!

The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs

"Yes, Nah-ee-lah, they are murdering your people, and well may Va-nah curse the day that Earth Men set foot upon your world."

The lunar barbarians are not, in fact,
six-limbed centaurs, but quadrupeds

Not long ago my brother mailed to me from our ancestral homeland of New Jersey our collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks.  Today MPorcius Fiction Log tackles the 1985 Ace publication of The Moon Maid, a tale which was first printed as a serial across five issues of Argosy in 1923.  This novel has appeared in a variety of forms, sometimes in an omnibus with the two other components of Burroughs's Moon Sequence, The Moon Men and The Red Hawk, sometimes on its own, as in this volume.  It was even serialized a second time in 1928-9 in four issues of the magazine Modern Mechanics and Inventions under the title Conquest of the Moon.

The Moon Maid's frame story, which makes up the six-page Prologue and like a page at the very end, takes place in 1967, shortly after decades of world war have ended with "the Anglo-Saxon race" having achieved "domination" of the world.  Aboard an airship the frame story's narrator meets a man who in the text goes by the pseudonym "Julian."  Julian claims to be able to remember in precise detail all of his past lives; some of these "past" lives took place in the future: "There is no such thing as Time," he explains.  In each of his incarnations Julian has been a descendant of one of his other incarnations, all of whom seem to be professional military men.  The main text of The Moon Maid, like 175 pages in fourteen chapters, is Julian's telling of the tale of one of his 21st century incarnations, "Julian 5th," who was (will be) a principal figure in Man's first interplanetary space voyages!

Julian 5th (henceforth "Julian") was born in the year 2000 and is an engineer and officer in the "Peace Fleet," the navy of airships which enforces severe gun control over the Earth and thereby maintains peace.  The Moon Maid takes place in the same universe as the Barsoom books, and for decades Earth has been in radio contact with the Mars of immortal John Carter.  The scientists of both worlds have finally developed vessels which can travel between Earth and Barsoom, and smartypants Julian is selected to command the Earth's first interplanetary ship.  Also assigned to the ship for its first trip to Mars is the lead scientist on the space ship project, anti-social genius Orthis, who just happens to be Julian's old rival from their university days.  Orthis is smarter than Julian, but Julian's goody-two-shoes ways and sterling work ethic often meant Julian edged Orthis out for top honors, and Orthis is just the kind of scoundrel who holds a grudge!

Those polar bears are not as cuddly as they look!

The trip to Mars has barely begun when Orthis gets drunk and sabotages the ship.  While Orthis is locked in his cabin, in irons, the other four members of the crew manage to make an emergency landing on Luna, guiding the vessel into a colossal crater and down a shaft hundreds of miles deep!  The Earthmen discover that Luna has a hollow core, and that on the inner surface of the Moon's crust is a fertile world of lakes and rivers, mountains and plains, forests and jungles, a world with no horizon and no night, illuminated without cease by the glow of radioactive rock.

Julian and the three loyal crewmen are gentlemen, so, when Orthis promises to behave, they free him and let him take part in their exploration of the Moon.  Julian and Orthis are captured by a tribe of the barbaric Va-ga people, nomadic cannibals who can run on all four of their limbs as fast as horses but can also stand erect and use tools with their fore paws.  Most lunar animals are inedible reptiles, so the tribes of the meat-loving Va-gas survive by raiding each other and eating male casualties, making no culinary distinction between friend or foe.  Raids are so common and so destructive that, among the Va-gas, males are far outnumbered by females (who are never eaten), and each male Va-ga's status is reflected in the number of females in his harem.

An earlier Ace edition

The nomads carry captive Julian and Orthis with them as they travel around the lunar inner world, hunting for other tribes to consume, and the Earthlings learn the language of the people of Va-nah (the natives' name for the Moon.)  After a storm (Burroughs spends some time describing the weather inside the Moon) we meet a member of another intelligent lunar species, the more sophisticated U-ga, who look like Earth humans.  The U-ga are able to glide around in the low lunar gravity by carrying bags of lighter-than-air gas and wearing artificial wings; Nah-ee-lah, the most beautiful woman Julian has ever seen and, like so many women we meet in ERB stories, a princess, falls among the Va-gas and is taken captive because the storm has damaged her bag of gas. 

While Julian is making goo-goo eyes at Nah-ee-lah (she of the "skin of almost marble whiteness," "hair of glossy blackness," and eyes that are "liquid orbs" like "dark wells of light"), Orthis is busy ingratiating himself with the monstrous leader of the Va-ga tribe, like David Spade in that conehead movie (see, I have seen some recent movies!)  Orthis convinces the tribal chief to give Nah-ee-lah to him, but, before he can take possession, Julian (who beats up Orthis for good measure) leads her out of the barbarians' camp under cover of a second ferocious storm. 

Princess Nah-ee-lah leads Julian on a search through the mountains of Va-nah, her object her home town, the city of Laythe.

"We are near Laythe?" I asked.

"I do not know.  Laythe is hard to find--it is well hidden."  

Laythe, the princess explains, is concealed because it is the home of the descendants of emigres who fled the revolution which exterminated the U-ga upper class and swept away the high civilization of the U-ga some centuries ago.  The revolutionaries, the Kalkars, with the class inequality of the ancien regime as their pretext, accidentally destroyed the technological and cultural achievements of the U-ga when they rashly overthrew the U-ga political and economic system, plunging Va-nah into its current period of barbarism.  The Kalkars still seek out the Laytheans for enslavement or destruction.

A Dutch edition

As they climb mountains and contend with reptilian great cats (ERB heroes customarily have to engage in hand-to-hand combat with some ferocious feline), Julian and Nah-ee-lah fall in love, but before they openly express their feelings for each other they are separated during a fight with some Kalkars!  Nah-ee-lah escapes, but Julian is thrown in a dungeon in a Kalkar city, where he meets another Laythean, Moh-goh.  Julian and this guy quickly engineer their own escape, and Moh-goh leads Julian to Laythe.

At Laythe, Julian presents himself as an aristocrat of Earth, and so is well-treated and introduced to all the nobility.  He finds that Nah-ee-lah made her way back to her family, the Emperor and Queen, but when he meets her she pretends to not know him!  Heartbreak!  Julian integrates himself into Laythean life, spending his time making friends and enjoying himself.  One of the nobles who befriends Julian is the head of a conspiracy to overthrow Nah-ee-lah's father; Nah-ee-lah having given him the cold shoulder, Julian at first tries to stay out of these stupid intrigues, which he doubts will lead to anything.  But, when he realizes this rebel Duke is in cahoots with the Kalkars, he can't just stand by; Julian does a little detective work, monitoring the Ducal-Kalkar relationship.  When relations between the rebel Duke and the Kalkars suddenly collapse and the Duke decides to immediately launch his uprising, Julian rushes to the Emperor's palace, getting their moments before the Duke's assassins burst in on Nah-ee-lah and her father.  Nah-ee-lah is preserved, but the Emperor is killed, sword in hand.

Nah-ee-lah and Julian are reconciled (she thought he had joined up with the Duke's rebels, as Moh-go was a known member of the conspiracy) and express their love for each other.  The Duke's rebels lay siege to the palace, and Julian commands the defense of the Princess, who, upon the death of her father, is now the monarch of Laythe.  In a scene that surprised me, the common people of the city rush to the palace, but not to save their beautiful Empress--their gullible minds stuffed with the lies of the smooth talking Duke, the mob sides with the rebels!  Here we see the skepticism of democracy and contempt for the common people that is so common in classic SF, in which the cognitive elite are always manipulating the masses, for good or for ill.

It is interesting to see Burroughs, presumably inspired by the French and Russian Revolutions, singing us a song of tragedy, complete with romantic descriptions of the fallen royals and their supporters, many of whom, including Nah-ee-lah's mother, commit suicide, instead of the more conventional triumph of good over evil we generally see in adventure fiction.  (Presumably we'll see the Kalkars brought to justice in future Moon books.)  Burroughs's pastiche of the French and Russian Revolutions here elides any responsibility the Bourbons and the Romanovs may have had in leading their nations into the kind of perilous condition that provided unscrupulous Jacobins and Bolsheviks an opportunity to seize power and inflict upon the people of the world their reigns of terror; on Burroughs's Moon, the monarchy is blameless and the common people are ingrates who fall prey to the clever lies of the evil revolutionaries.

An Australian edition

Just when the rebels are about to take the palace the Kalkars attack the city.  These bastards have artillery and hand grenades, built for them by that treacherous scientist Orthis!  The rebels and royalists of Laythe unite briefly to resist this high tech onslaught, but, armed with swords and spears as they are, it is hopeless--the city is demolished and the citizens are massacred.  Julian and Nah-ee-lah manage to escape and for a time enjoy an Edenic existence on a secluded island, but, even though they are together, they are not truly happy--Julian, a fighting man and engineer, and Nah-ee-lah, a politician (though not exactly a successful one), cannot be truly satisfied while idle.  Luckily, Julian's spaceship shows up--over the ten years of Julian's adventures, the three loyal astronauts have managed to repair the vessel.  Julian, Nah-ee-lah, and the three loyal crewmen return to Earth.  What happens to Orthis is not revealed; it seems like he may have become the Emperor of the Moon.  Hopefully we'll find out his fate in the next Moon book.

The Moon Maid has as its base elements used by Burroughs again and again--a superior guy finds himself in another world and fights barbarians and great cats and begins a love affair with a princess--but ERB livens up the proceedings with a few new components and some surprises.  The space travel stuff adds something different to the mix, and I rather enjoyed all that, and the success of the rebels and Kalkars and the destruction of Laythe was a turn of events I was not expecting.  Perhaps also of note is the theme of reincarnation in The Moon Maid; not only is Julian reincarnated as his own descendants and ancestors, but the religion of the U-gas, it is hinted, largely revolves around reincarnation.  And then there is the story's skepticism of scientists and intellectuals ("Kalkar" means "thinker") and technology; learned men like Ortis and the Kalkars are treacherous and selfish and use any intellectual ability they may have, and superior technology they can construct, to abuse and exploit others.

Burroughs also raises the philosophical issues around the eating of meat.  Not only do the barbaric Va-gas eat their own kind, but the civilized U-gas actually breed the Va-gas--intelligent beings!--within their cities as cattle!  In fact, the vast armies of Va-gas who inhabit the countryside are the descendants of particularly willful Va-gas who escaped the cities in the chaos of the Kalkar revolution of centuries ago--the Va-gas in Laythe are bred to be docile.  Julian debates with Nah-ee-lah on the propriety of eating intelligent beings, and while he himself refuses to eat meat while on the Moon, he does wonder if the U-ga practice of eating Va-gas is really any worse than the Earth practice of eating cows and pigs. 
 

I'm a Burroughs fan and I enjoyed The Moon Maid and appreciated the odd elements Burroughs included in this specimen of his many adventure tales.  But there are some annoying problems with this edition of the novel that had me wishing I had a copy of the 2002 omnibus edition of Burroughs's Moon books put out by Bison Books and the University of Nebraska Press, an edition promoted as "Complete and Restored."  For one thing, this Ace edition is plagued by typos--missing quote marks and misspellings and the like--and typesetting errors, like lines appearing out of order or appearing twice.  Very irritating--shame on you Ace!  Then there is a problem which is perhaps attributable to Burroughs himself or one of his magazine or book editors--I got the impression from Nah-ee-lah that Laythe is hidden from the Kalkars, so well hidden that even she had trouble finding it, but when Moh-goh takes Julian there it is clear that the Kalkars know right where the city is, that the city is not really hidden at all.  I wonder if the disposition of Laythe is more clear in the 2002 volume, which we are told "contains the story as published serially, along with numerous passages, sentences, and words excised from the magazine version or added later by the author."

We'll read the next book in Burroughs's Moon sequence, The Moon Men, soon, but first a trip to 1970 for short stories commissioned by famed SF editor Damon Knight.