Campbell's editorial is about how nuclear proliferation will change foreign policy and foreign relations; he assumes that every advanced nation, including places like Belgium and Czechoslovakia, will soon have its own arsenal of atomic weapons and the U. S. had better develop some kind of defense tout suite. George O. Smith has a one-page article about the proximity fuse. Earl Welch has a long article about devices that measure electricity, complete with equations and circuit diagrams that I couldn't understand if my life depended on it. There is a Listerine ad in which two attractive young ladies decide not to invite Chuck to the party because he has bad breath. (Being rejected by pretty girls I can understand.) There are stories by "Philip Latham" and Emmet McDowell that I am skipping. It is the stories by George O. Smith, Ross Rocklynne, and Murray Leinster that I am reading.
"Fine Feathers" by George O. Smith
According to isfdb, "Fine Feathers" is a novelette and has never appeared any place else.
Smith appends to the start of his tale an italicized epigraph of three paragraphs he attributes to Aesop, the story of a crow smarter than the other crows who wishes he was a pheasant and starts wearing pheasant feathers and "lord[ing] it over the rest of the crows...." Wikipedia calls this story "The Bird in Borrowed Feathers." Smith's story here is a fable itself that warns you against being selfish and against trying to be something that you are not.
It is the future! Earth has a relationship with aliens who are smarter and more advanced than we, people known as the Galactic Ones. There are Galactic emissaries on Earth, but they don't interfere very much with what goes on here.
Our main character is a very clever human financier, Wanniston. He is so smart that he is constantly tricking and outmaneuvering the other local business people, always operating within the bounds of the law, to the point that other business people, humiliated and impoverished, are committing suicide.
Wanniston is anti-social and ambitious, not caring if he has friends or if he has children. He figures out how to make an electrical device that will increase his intelligence; he has to do so gradually, as large doses are dangerous, and just jolts himself a few seconds a day, raising his IQ by a few points with each treatment. These treatments cause sterility, which would dissuade many men, but not Wanniston.
Wanniston is friendly with the local Galactic emissary, Gerd Lel Rayne, and Rayne warns him against increasing his intelligence, but Wanniston does not listen. As they become more and more frustrated by him, the other middle-class people in the area plot to get rid of Wanniston, finally hitting on the scheme of framing him for murder, claiming one of the suicides was no suicide at all. Wanniston is innocent, but realizing a jury will be made up of people who hate him and will convict him regardless of the paucity of evidence, Wanniston steals Rayne's space ship and flies off to a planet of Galactics.
His machine has made him as smart as a Galactic, and so Wanniston feels at home in a beautiful Galactic city, and the Galactics welcome him. The Galactics have a socialistic society in which no work is necessary and there is no money--everybody's needs and desires are automatically fulfilled. (This is a fable, remember, not a serious exploration of economic systems.) Government officials among the Galactics are selected by a computer ("aptitude machine"), and Wanniston keeps using his intelligence-raising device and gets so smart that the computer assigns him to work in the office of the Governor of the entire galaxy.
Because his IQ is so tremendously high, Wanniston is in line to become ruler of the galaxy. But intelligence is not enough--he needs wisdom and experience as well. It will take him approximately 500 years of working in the governor's office to acquire that experience; the Galactics think this is reasonable because Wanniston has about 600 years of life left--when you become super intelligent your brain subconsciously repairs your cells so you age very slowly and just shrug off disease and injury. But Wanniston is impatient. He tries to build a machine that can transfer other men's experience into his own brain, but this turns out to be impossible. Unable to prove he is better than everybody else as quickly as he wants to, Wanniston cracks and commits suicide in a scene that is a direct duplicate of the first scene of the story, in which one of Wanniston's business contacts, who had lost everything in a failed venture, killed himself.
This is a merely competent filler story, inoffensive but unimpressive and forgettable. As a fable, none of the details of the story ring true (couldn't a decent lawyer or an honest judge protect him from being convicted of murder on Earth?; nobody cares he stole a space ship?; do business people really commit suicide that readily?) so there is no tension or human feeling. No wonder anthologists never snapped it up.
"A Matter of Length" by Ross Rocklynne
Like Smith's "Fine Feathers," Rocklynne's "A Matter of Length" is categorized by isfdb as a novelette and has never been reprinted. We dig deep here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
This is a story about racism or bigotry or whatever you want to call it. In form it is an adventure story, with people being captured, escaping captivity, fighting other humans and dangerous aliens, rescuing women, all that adventure caper jazz.
The human race's space empire is home to three types of people. There are the Ordinaries, people like you and me. Then there are the Hypnos, a tiny minority of people who have psychic powers and can make others see illusions. The Hypnos are the future of the human race, the next stage of human evolution. Many Ordinaries fear and hate the Hypnos, accusing them of crimes and atrocities, and currently a Galactic Civil War is raging between those Ordinaries who are on a crusade to exterminate the Hypnos and the Hypnos and sympathetic Ordinaries. The third type of people are Sensitives, people who can't influence other people with their psychic powers but who can detect Hypnos. Anti-Hypno crusaders have Sensitives in their military units to help them track down Hypnos--Hypnos claim that as soon as they are exterminated the Ordinaries will turn on the Sensitives and exterminate them as well.
The plot of the story concerns Joe Henderson, a Hypno who has been captured by anti-Hypno forces after a battle. He is held captive on the space ship of Captain MacDougall, who hates Hypnos because his daughter died while under the care of a doctor who turned out to be a Hypno. As if we didn't already know he was the bad guy, MacDougall is also fat. In the fighting, Joe killed MacDougall's navigator, and so the ship went off course and passed through a dust cloud which damaged many of its systems. The ship is now lost, and has landed on a planet to make repairs; this planet has turned out to be pretty dangerous. On this planet time moves slowly, so that the natives seem like statues, trees don't move in the wind, and MacDougall's people can't easily breathe the native air, because chemical reactions are slow or something. But while the ship is there the space crew gradually begins to move more slowly, getting more in line with the local pace. Joe, in his cell, stays moving at Earth speed because the energy field around his cell that blocks his psychic powers also blocks the radiation (or whatever) that makes everything on this world move slowly.
Other characters on the ship include an Ordinary who is an undercover intelligence officer with the pro-Hypno forces--he finds an opportunity to release Joe from the cell--and MacDougall's Sensitive, a beautiful woman. When the crew's speed matches that of the natives, the natives attack. The ship's heavy weapons were rendered inoperative by passage through that dust cloud, and the natives are huge monsters who do not easily succumb to small arms fire, so the ship's crew gets massacred. Joe, making use of his high speed relative to everybody else, saves the secret agent and the woman. They find a place to take cover and wait for help from a pro-Hypno ship, and Joe and the secret agent convince the woman to join the pro-Hypno cause. We are lead to assume that Joe and the woman will become lovers.
"A Matter of Length" is one of many SF stories in which a small minority of superior people is oppressed by the mundane majority. These stories have a broad appeal because they exploit people's natural love of aristocracy and natural bent towards elitism, while at the same time ostensibly being about sympathy for the downtrodden--the reader who thinks he is better than others because he is smarter or knows more science or whatever (and it is a safe bet that many Astounding readers thought this of themselves) identifies with Joe the superman and at the same time can feel like a good liberal because Joe also represents blacks, Jews, homosexuals, immigrants, or whatever marginalized group the reader has sympathy for.
"A Matter of Length" is an entertaining action-adventure story; it is filler, but a notch above "Fine Feathers" because the pace is fast, there is violence and a hint of sex, and things happen besides men having sedate conversations with each other--there are direct confrontations, danger, and death, and all the people are passionate, driven to pursue goals by deeply held beliefs and/or fighting for their lives.
"The Plants" by Murray Leinster
Planet Ailolo is one big featureless globe, entirely covered by a single species of flowers, each flower the same height, each flower occupying the same amount of ground. There are no animals or other plants on the planet, it is just a sea of these identical plants from horizon to horizon.
A space freighter crash lands on Ailolo and four men emerge. The ship had a crew of forty-eight, and only they and one other man survived the disaster. That fifth survivor is a saboteur who planted bombs in the ship that crippled it and killed most of the crew--this piece of human garbage escaped in a life boat before the explosions. The four innocent men, now marooned on Ailolo, figure their treacherous crewmate is going to meet up with a space pirate ship and then come to Ailolo to loot the valuable cargo of the wrecked vessel. The pirates, no doubt, will be armed to the teeth, and the four survivors of the crash landing have no weapons at all.
The story describes how the four shipwrecked men develop a relationship with the flowers, which turn out to be intelligent, and work with the flowers to try to fight the pirates and then use the pirates' ship to escape back to civilization.
This is a decent adventure story in which there are blasters, space suits, pirates, telepathy, and a hero who uses his wits to overcome obstacles, save himself and his friends, and punish evil-doers. Leinster tosses in a healthy but not distracting helping of science, like speculative ecology and biology and more grounded stuff about how the conditions of the atmosphere affect the boiling point of water and about the effect of its angle of approach on a space craft's entry into an atmosphere and ability to safely land on a planet. "The Plants" is also the right length (it is much shorter than the other two pieces we are looking at today.) I like it.
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| If you compare New Jerseyan Edd Cartier's cover for the hardback edition of Men Against the Stars with Australian Stan Pitt's cover for the first issue of Famous American Science Fiction, I think you can see Pitt based his cover on Cartier's, but added a beautiful woman to liven things up. |
None of these stories is boring or irritating, and one of them is borderline good, and another actually good, and we even learned some science and some ethics (that we probably should have known already.) I think we can chalk up a win today for Astounding and for SF readers.
In our next episode we'll be reading stories that were actually published during my lifetime, so stay tuned!
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