In his editorial, Campbell talks about changes coming to Astounding--starting with the next issue the magazine will be smaller, but include no ads, and the use of a different printing process will allow the inclusion of photographs in the magazine. (Looking at the November issue, there really are no ads, and there are nice photos illustrating a story on anti-submarine warfare, but looking at the December issue we see that ads are already creeping back!)
The first piece of fiction in the October '43 issue is A. E. van Vogt's "The Storm." I am skipping it today, as I plan on doing a blog post in the future in which I read the fix-up novel The Mixed Men AKA Mission to the Stars and the stories which served as raw material for the novel, of which "The Storm" was one, and compare them. I conducted just such a project with novels by two of SF's most unique writers and wackiest characters, van Vogt's own The Beast and Barry N. Malzberg's Universe Day, and found it to be fun and enlightening.
(I'm also skipping Malcolm Jameson's quite long science article on tidal waves and Henry Kuttner's "The Proud Robot," which I read and blogged about back in 2014.)
After "The Storm" comes "The Analytical Laboratory," the column in which reader reactions to stories are tabulated, this time for the August 1943 issue. Readers voted an installment of the serialized version of C. L. Moore's "Judgment Night" the best story in the August issue--I blogged about an edition of "Judgment Night" in a paperback collection in 2018, giving it a negative review.
Alright, onto the meat of this blog post, my discussion of stories by Raymond F. Jones, Fredric Brown, and Frank Belknap Long.
"Fifty Million Monkeys" by Raymond F. Jones
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| Here we see Craig and Carlotta reading recordings of the minds of the members of Team 34 via hypnohelmets |
It is the future! The 29th century! A time so distant that The British Museum is considered a "mythical place!" Marvel at such wonders as space travel, wristphones, and the game of Chessmath, a type of chess with nearly three hundred pieces! And Jamieson & Son, a consulting firm whose owners and employees are all top scientists!
Beautiful blue-eyed blonde Carlotta, the third most senior egghead at Jamieson & Son and head of the Psychological Engineering section, reports to Craig Jamieson (he's the "Son" in Jamieson & Son) that all six members of Team 34, some of the firm's top men, are close to cracking up! Apparently the source of their mental woe is strain from bearing knowledge so horrifying that they sought hypnotherapy to relieve their anxiety, but the therapy failed.
We get a flashback to Craig and Carlotta's first meeting as university students and their early work together. By the year 2800 science was in trouble because far more knowledge had been collected by the human race than any one human could hold in his brain, and all scientists were now very specialized, their individual interests so specific that they knew little or nothing about the work of other researchers. Any new breakthrough could only be achieved by very close collaboration, but scientists are selfish individualists reluctant to share credit and work as a group. Physics student Craig presented this problem to headshrinker-in-training Carlotta and she figured out a personality test of such fine discrimination and such accuracy that it could be used to match up scientists who would feel as close an affinity as family members--or closer!--and thus could work together. Soon Jamieson & Son had eighty such "brain teams" and businesses around the world had shuttered their own research divisions and contracted with Jamieson & Son to have their brain teams conduct all their research and solve any problems that cropped up.
Back in the present, Craig wheedles out of a reluctant Team 34 just what is bugging them. It seems that the means of transmitting energy across space a Jamieson & Son brain team developed fifteen years ago and is now ubiquitous (so space ships don't need to carry their own power source, for example) has been causing what we call a negative externality, and energy is now leaking out of our universe into another universe. When enough energy has leaked, probably within a year or so, both universes, and everybody in them, will cease to exist. Oops!
"Fifty Million Monkeys" is like 44 pages long and over 30 of them are devoted to Craig and Carlotta's effort to solve the apparently insoluble problem of saving the universe, a problem that has to be kept from the public because it will drive ordinary men insane and cause a social collapse. Jones tries to instill the story with tension by describing how the universe is gradually becoming warped, so that increasing numbers of star ships find their instruments increasingly unreliable, and by telling us about Craig's stress dreams.
Carlotta uses her tests to find the eighteen scientists who are least likely to crack up upon learning of this threat, as they work on the problem, work which all of them think is futile, she monitors them to make sure they don't go bonkers. Carlotta, we see, does all the real work while Craig is the idea man, and his latest crazy idea is that somehow generating random strings of characters can help guide them out of this mess--thus the title reference to the hoary old adage about monkeys banging away on typewriters eventually producing the works of Shakespeare.
The eighteen mentally stable boffins latch on to this brainwave, and machines are developed that produce random mathematical equations and random chemical formulas as well as random strings of letters or words. Eventually, after much fine tuning, including the construction of a machine that sifts through all the random gibberish to find those strings that make some kind of sense, Jamieson & Son produces whole new systems of math and new technologies that, perhaps, can save the universe and open up new ways to improve life.
There is some foreshadowing that the random machines may be developing some kind of consciousness, and the sense of wonder ending comes when a being of light, the avatar of the laws of randomness, appears. Craig's machines have allowed this being to come into existence, and its purpose is to save the universe. That accomplished, the superbeing invites Craig to join it in exploring many universes, universes that, unlike our own chaotic universe, are orderly and peaceful. Craig is tempted, but then he realizes that one of the apparently random bunches of sentences produced by the random word machine is in fact a warning to not leave our universe--if Craig falls for the temptation of access to universal knowledge he will become a menace to our chaotic universe. So Craig sticks around in our universe, the random machines are all destroyed, and everybody lives happily ever after.
"Fifty Million Monkeys" is kind of crazy (the whole idea of learning new technologies by sifting through random strings of words or mathematical symbols seems ridiculous), but it is not boring or obvious, so it held my attention. While Jones's heroes are all scientists, he does focus on the risks associated with the development of new sciences and technologies and the search for knowledge in general. Also interesting is the theme of psychology--again and again the obstacles Craig and Carlotta have to overcome are thrown up by the psychologies of individuals (including Craig himself, whose ambition threatens out entire universe!) or groups, and our heroes use psychological means to overcome these obstacles. Jones treats psychology as just another hard science, with immutable laws and precisely measurable variables ("Their congeniality index was well up in the nineties.") In the world Jones depicts human beings are the building blocks of larger constructions, and superior people like Craig and Carlotta ("the world's greatest living psychologist") construct brain teams out of men the way an architect and a mason might build a bridge out of bricks and I-beams. Yikes.
Not great, but certainly acceptable, maybe mildly recommendable. Looking at the December issue of Astounding, we can see in the Analytical Laboratory column that readers voted "Fifty Million Monkeys" the best story in the October issue, with van Vogt's "The Storm" second.
"Paradox Lost" by Fredric Brown
I'll never forget Fredric Brown's story about a man-eating armadillo, which I read in 2014, or his novel about the relationship of a Christ-like rock and a bigoted thug, which I read in 2016. Good times, good times. So let's check out "Paradox Lost," which would go on to be the title story of a 1970s Brown collection.
This 12-page story is well-written and so a smooth and pleasant read, but it is a silly gimmick story full of absurdist jokes, the kind of thing that I don't care for.
Shorty McCabe is a college student sitting in a boring Logic class in 1943, watching a fly buzzing about the room; the fly suddenly disappears in midair next to his desk. Through trial and error experiments, McCabe discovers there is an invisible portal to another universe right there in the class, an arms' length from him! Circumstances impel him to step through the portal and he finds himself in a world of insanity, in the company of a mad scientist, who insists that in his world anything he wills can happen, because this world is just a creation of his own mind. The mad scientist has invented a time machine and he and McCabe go back to the Jurassic to hunt dinosaurs with slingshots--no gun necessary, as the only surviving dinosaurs are little ones a foot or two tall. The time machine also spends time in 1948, and Shorty McCabe indirectly interacts with his future self and in a happy accident sets the stage for a welcome development in his own life.
Well-written and well-constructed, "Paradox Lost" is obviously objectively a better-made piece of work than "Fifty Million Monkeys," but it isn't my kind of story--Brown is the superior wordsmith, but Jones's speculations about psychology interest me while Brown's jokes leave me cold. So I will call "Paradox Lost" acceptable but admit that other people are likely to rate it more highly. (Though perhaps not the bulk of World War II-era Astounding readers, who voted it fifth of the stories in this issue.) I will warn sticklers for scientific accuracy that they will groan at Brown's suggestion that the Jurassic Period was four million years ago, and feminists that they will not be happy about the role in the story played by its female characters.
"Willie" by Frank Belknap Long
There is a long history at this blog of me reading stories and novels by Frank Belknap Long and telling you they are not good, but Long is a major figure in the weird community and out of an interest in and allegiance to H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard and their associates, I keep plugging way at these Long pieces. Maybe "Willie" is one of the good ones? The fact that it was not even listed in the Analytical Laboratory rankings printed in December makes one doubt it is going to be a winner, however.
"Willie" would reappear in a book that I own, Night Fear, but my copy is currently inaccessible so I'll have to confine myself to reading the version of the 9-page story here in Astounding's October 1943 issue. It was also included in Centipede Press's 1100-page volume of Long stories, which was published in 2010 with a price tag of $225.00. Kaboom!
"Willie" begins with a fight between two men who wield stone axes, one a savage with a shaved head, the other a barbarian in a jaguar skin. The barbarian is the victor, and we learn he is a confused man, his bewildered mind tormented by vague memories of living in a high tech 29th-century city as a "Monitor" as well as memories of being the chief of a barbarian tribe. He ventures into the city of his memory, but there are no sophisticated citizens there, only robots who ignore him and the tribe members who look to him as their leader in the war with the brutal savages.
The savages attack, and the robots unexpectedly come to the aid of the barbarians--the savages are wiped out. The story ends as the protagonist's mind clears. It turns out he is Monitor 236, an inventor, who back in the 29th century built the first robot with real emotions, Willie. Then he invented a time machine, and on a test run found himself stranded a million years in the future, by which time humanity had fallen into primitivism and the city had been long abandoned. Travel through time had addled Monitor 236's mind, but he was still superior enough to the natives of this primitive future that a tribe made him their leader. And Willie, still operational after a million years, recognized his maker and directed the other robots to help him in hos war on the savages. With the savages exterminated and Monitor 236's brain back in top condition, our hero can lead humanity back to civilization!
An acceptable filler story, mediocre and inoffensive.
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These stories are alright, no big deal. Should this blog endure, expect to see more Astounding, and more Jones, Brown and Long discussed in future installments.
I hope this blog endures! And I want to read more of your thoughts about Jones, Brown and Long.
ReplyDeleteFingers crossed!
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