C. L. Moore: "The Bright Illusion," "Tryst in Time" and "Greater Than Gods"

It has been over a month since we've read anything from one of the 1930s magazines that for a while there were our primary diet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  I guess our last Thirties magazine foray was when we read three stories from Astounding about risk-taking scientists by Donald Wandrei.  Oh, wait, the Vice-President for Equity Excellence here at MPorcius Fiction Log is speaking up, telling me that it has been two months since we read anything by a menstruator!  That was in early December, when we read Leigh Brackett's mainstream thriller An Eye for an Eye and three Northwest Smith stories by C. L. Moore.     

So, now is an opportune time to read three stories by Catherine L. Moore that appeared in Astounding in the 1930s, two that were printed in the R. Orlin Tremaine years and one from the famous editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr.  All three of these stories would be included in 1975's The Best of C. L. Moore, so we have every reason to hope that these stories are good, and every reason to believe that they are important artifacts in the history of SF.

"The Bright Illusion" (1934)

Nobody can agree on what exactly "science fiction" is.  In a 1976 interview for the fanzine Chacal, which you can read at the internet archive, Moore admits that "I don't think that I ever wrote science fiction--hard science fiction.  Everything I did was fantasy...."  But in his 1975 introduction to The Best of C. L. Moore, editor Lester del Rey says, "Many of Moore's early stories appeared in Weird Tales, though they were basically science fiction."  Not only do they disagree on the classification of Moore's stories, but you can see by the hedging they do (Moore adds "hard science fiction" and del Rey modifies "science fiction" with a "basically") that they are not confident in their own definitions of what constitutes science fiction.  Is a Northwest Smith story a fantasy because it is about a guy who gets seduced by a witch with inexplicable powers and there is little or no speculation about the effects of future technology and increased knowledge on people and society?  Or is it a science fiction story because the witch is from another planet and she is foiled not by getting her head chopped off with a sword but by being burned with a ray pistol?  I'm afraid these discussions quickly reach the point where they are a meaningless waste of time, though I think these quotes from Moore and del Rey suggest that, in some circles, science fiction is held to be more prestigious than mere fantasy--Moore is being modest, while del Rey is talking her up, selling her to a perhaps skeptical audience of people who like hard science fiction.

Anyway, in that intro, del Rey talks about how when Laurence Janifer (whom he calls "Larry") was putting together his anthology Master's Choice, del Rey suggested three stories to him, one of which was "Bright Illusion," and Janifer ("Larry" to his friends, apparently) was thrilled by it.

"The Bright Illusion" is one of those stories that tries to blow your mind, to give you a sense of wonder about the vast alienness of the universe, to remind you how little about the universe you can really understand.  But at the same time it endorses some of the oldest, most cherished and least believable concepts in human history--the soul, the afterlife, and the power of love to conquer all!  

Our dude Dixon is lost in the desert without any water--he's had it!  But wait, what is that ahead?  A huge glowing dome of light?  With dead bodies around it?  A soldier of the French Foreign Legion?  An Arab?  A young white explorer in a pith helmet?  What killed them?  It must have been this giant bubble of light!  Oh no, it is sucking Dixon in!  Is it going to kill Dixon as well?

The bubble is an alien super-being, a sort of god from another universe where the atoms are arranged differently, there are different colors, etc.  It wants to conquer the planet of some other equally incomprehensible alien god.  The bubble came to our universe and our planet seeking a champion--because a human's atoms are arranged differently than the matter of the universe from which the bubble came, it thinks a human could sneak undetected into the temple of the god it wishes to supplant.  All those corpses out there are people the bubble examined and decided were not up to the task of being its champion, but Dixon fits the bill!  As we expect of one of these old SF stories, Dixon communicates with this alien bubble being via telepathy, and Moore writes many paragraphs describing the way it feels to have "washing through him" the "all-penetrating waves" that examine him, then communicate with him, then fill him with knowledge.  

In a flash the bubble and Dixon are above the planet the bubble wants to conquer, a world consisting of one huge city of buildings and bridges that obey a different geometry than any Earth city, inhabited by people like boneless serpents with one eye, people whose means of acquiring nourishment and of reproducing are incomprehensible to the human mind!  It strains Dixon's sanity to even look at this planet of impossible colors and mad physics--how can his Terran body interact it and his Terran mind survive conversation with its inhabitants?  The bubble solves all these problems!  It casts a shell of illusion around Dixon--to the enemy he will appear to be one of them, and to him they will appear human, their language English, their buildings like the classical architecture of Earth.

You'll remember that many of Moore's Northwest Smith stories are about a human getting mixed up in some kind of sexual relationship with an alien monster.  Well, what do you think the very first thing Dixon does when he gets to the temple of the local god he is supposed to overthrow and the very first cyclops snakezoid he meets appears to him as the hottest girl he has ever seen, and he appears to her as the most beautiful one-eyed vermiformian she has ever seen?  They start making out!  Dixon tells himself that what looks like a beautiful woman is in fact "a sinuous, faceless thing, a creeping horror with the tints of an incredible spectrum," but she is irresistible!  He is forced to ask himself, "Good Heaven, could it be possible for a man to fall in love with an hallucination?"

But Dixon and the worm creature are not just being made horny by surface appearances--they are truly in love!  They are soulmates from different universes!  Moore's story accepts the existence of the soul and of life after death, and following the fight between the bubble-being and the god native to this planet, Dixon and the worm creature commit suicide because they are certain that their souls, freed from their incompatible physical bodies, can be together in a third universe, the universe of the afterlife!

I have some gripes with this story's technique--it is too long and wordy and repetitive--and of course I don't believe in the soul or the afterlife or that it makes any sense that a human man might fall in love with a being of another species of incomprehensible sex from another universe with different laws of physics.  But Moore sells the plot and themes--the story is totally crazy and surprising in a good way because it is at the same time internally consistent and totally sincere; the second half of the story won me over, almost against my will.

Thumbs up for "The Bright Illusion"--del Rey and Larry are right, this is a winner.  And del Rey and Janifer aren't alone in singling it out--it seems that Moore herself chose it for the 1984 anthology Analog: Writer's Choice, Volume II.  I will have to keep an eye out for this anthology at the used bookstores, as it, apparently, includes author's intros to each story and I am curious what Moore had to say about it.      

"Tryst in Time" (1936)

Eric Rosner is one of these guys who travels the world on the cheap as an adventurer, stowing away aboard research ships, fighting as a mercenary in China, living as a bandit among the Tatars.  But at age thirty he is bored with life!  He has been everywhere!  He has done everything!  So when he meets a physicist who claims to have invented a one-way time machine, Rosner leaps at the chance to travel to some other period of history.

Burnishing her science fiction bona fides, Moore has this nerd give a little lecture on inertia and Newton's laws; the way his time travel device operates is that it anchors its subject to the "bedrock" of inertia that lies behind or beneath the universe, so that "time flows past" the subject and so ends up in a different time.  This method is totally random, because time doesn't move in a straight line, but it swirls and eddies, so you might go backwards or you might go forwards--you have absolutely no control of when you will reappear.

For some reason Moore feels the need to address, and dismiss, some of the traditional concerns about time travel.  The boffin assures Rosner that 1) he can't run into an older or younger self because the universe does not allow an item to exist in multiple iterations in the same time period and 2) he can't change history because the universe consists of multiple, I guess infinite, time streams; from each decision point a million futures branch off and our acts of free will don't change a time stream, they just determine which time stream we are living in.  If Rosner goes back to 1800 and murders Nelson and Wellington he may now live in a world in which France conquers Europe but the world he left behind, the world the nerd still inhabits, will not have had its history changed--by paving the way for the Corsican Ogre to tyrannize the world Rosner would not be changing the course of the ship of time, but rather switching trains in the railway station of time.

(You can forget that entire previous paragraph I just typed because none of those issues play any role in Rosner's actual time travel adventure.)

Rosner straps on the back pack that is the time machine and flicks the switches and starts popping in and out of different periods of history, real ones like ancient Rome (the arena!) and Elizabethan England (a London street scene!) and fictional Lovecraft/Howard ones where a high-tech race of super humans, perhaps of  extraterrestrial origin, live in cyclopean ruined cities and are warred upon by the brutish ape-men who are our ancestors.  In many of these time periods Rosner sees or actually meets a beautiful pale girl with blue eyes; this chick is arrogant and aristocratic, characterized by an iron will; in one of the lost city settings she commits suicide with a ray gun rather than let the missing-link people molest her.  In the 16th-century she is being burned at the stake as a witch and Rosner puts her out of her misery by shooting her.  In another fantasy setting Rosner rescues the woman from short little gnome-like people who are going to sacrifice her to their god.

Rosner and this proud and stubborn woman are soulmates, destined to unite in an immortal love!  Each time Rosner meets one of her incarnations, she is more familiar with him; this makes no sense, because sometimes Rosner encounters her in the prehistoric past, sometimes in the far future, and Moore admits that it doesn't make any sense, and just blows it off as one of the many mysteries of the universe.

Finally, the star-crossed lovers meet in a dimension of total darkness.  She now fully recognizes their relationship.  They hold hands and, I guess, spend eternity together in the afterlife, or something. 

"Tryst in Time" is not very good.  The early section of the story, with the physicist, is too long, and the time travel section is repetitive.  Moore expends a lot of ink explaining a bunch of time travel stuff that has no application to the main part of the story, and then makes no effort to explain the inexplicable fact that Rosner always appears near an incarnation of this woman and she somehow recognizes him because a future version of herself has met him.  The plot is resolved not by any of the character's actions or decisions or personality traits--fate has determined they be together, they don't have to achieve anything or overcome any obstacles to succeed, just wait until the train comes to the final stop.

"Tryst in Time" has a somewhat similar theme to that of "The Bright Illusion"--two souls, imbedded in bodies separated by conventionally unbridgeable gulfs, are fated to be lovers--but whereas the 1934 story had memorable images and some really "out there" concepts and the characters had to make some decisions, this story's images are banal (how many witch burnings and virgin sacrifices have we seen?) and the characters don't do anything.

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

The merciless staff of the MPorcius Fiction Log may be condemning "Tryst in Time," but Jacques Sadoul liked it, including it in a 1974 French anthology of stories from the F. Orlin Tremaine era of Astounding.  Vive le difference!  Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh are also on team "Tryst in Time," selecting it for their 1989 anthology of occult stories.

"Greater Than Gods" (1939)

Here's another story that received the Isaac Asimov seal of approval: "Greater Than Gods" was included in the volume of the Great Science Fiction Stories anthology series that covers 1939, a book which was first published in 1979 and has been published in a variety of forms with a myriad of different covers.    

 

The Time: July 7, 2240.

The Place: Science City, "which houses the greatest scientists in the world."

The Man: Dr. William Cory of Biology House.

His Work: Figuring out how to predetermine the sex of babies in the womb so there will never be a society-destabilizing imbalance between the sexes.

His Problem: He can't decide which of his girlfriends to propose to, Dr. Marta Mayhew of Chemistry House, or normie non-scientist Sallie Carlisle.

Cory's pal, Charles Ashley of Telepathy House, comes by to shoot the shit.  He gives one of those lectures about how time is a bunch of decision points with branches blah blah blah, and says if Cory could somehow look into the future and compare the branch in which he marries Mayhew to the branch in which he marries Carlisle, his decision would be easy.

On Cory's desk are holograms of each of his marriage prospects.  After Ashley leaves, the hologram of Sallie Carlisle suddenly changes--it becomes the image of a young woman with some of Cory's features and some of Sallie's--this kid is sending her ancestor a telepathic message from thousands of years in the future!  She tells Cory that when he married Sallie, Sallie was such a party girl that he had no time for his work on sex-determination and a sex imbalance occurred, with women outnumbering men, so that women took over the world and created a utopia in which there was no war, no work, no hunger, and no cities--a pastoral Eden!      
   

Over the course of this blog's turbulent life we have read many stories* which tell us that utopias where you don't have to work  lead to decadence, that humanity needs challenge and struggle to thrive, and "Greater Than Gods" is another one!  When Cory hears that marrying Sallie will lead to a feminist utopia of peace and indolence he is horrified that he might be responsible for such a catastrophe!  

*Here are links to a few of my blog posts about such stories: Leigh Brackett, "Child of the Sun (1942), Raymond F. Jones, "Rat Race" (1966), Henry Kuttner, "The Land of Time to Come" and "Remember Tomorrow" (both 1941), Ray Bradbury, "Pillar of Fire" (1948), Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, Fury, (1947), Kuttner and Moore, "The Two-Handed Engine" (1955), Poul Anderson, "Quixote and the Windmill" (1950). 

Then a similar message comes through from the hologram of Marta Mayhew, from a male descendent of Cory and Marta's.  In the future in which Marta becomes his wife, she enthusiastically supports him in his work and pushes him to release it to the public before adequate testing has been done.  Mankind embraces the ability to predetermine the sex of babies.  However, after almost universal adoption of the Cory technique a side effect becomes apparent--children whose sex has been determined by the Cory method are slavishly obedient!  The creation of a whole generation of yes-men gives an ambitious general the opportunity to turn America into a collectivist totalitarian dictatorship that conquers the world and then the solar system, creating an interplanetary empire of sternly disciplined conformists who are always spying on each other and are never happy or relaxed!  Another catastrophe!

There is a long--too long--section of the story in which the representatives of each future try to convince Cory that their future is the one he should choose.  Then Cory cuts the Gordian knot by proposing not to scientist Marta, and not to party girl Sallie, but to his assistant, Miss Brown!  The feminist hippie future and the military tyranny futures both wink out of existence and we are to presume that Cory develops his sex control technique and works the bugs out of it before gifting it to the world so we can colonize the solar system without becoming a bunch of goose-stepping stool pigeons.

I don't want to say that "Greater Than Gods" is bad.  The ideas and themes it addresses are fine, but some of those ideas and themes don't feel fresh to me in 2022, though maybe they would have felt new to people in 1939.  Worse, the story is too long, and is so contrived and gimmicky that it feels more like a fable than a story with credible characters that can generate genuine emotion in the reader.  I'll say it is acceptable. 

(On a side note, I am confident the story qualifies as "real" science fiction, despite Moore's modest assertion in 1976, because it is about the effect on society of technological change, even if the actual plot mechanisms of the story have to resort to religious explanations--it is a Cosmic Mind with a capital "P" Plan that allows Cory a chance to see possible futures.)

**********

Three stories about love relationships operating in a universe in which greater powers--Fate or gods--of varying beneficence guide us humans on the matter of who is a suitable mate.  In two of them those powers bring together two people from alien backgrounds, while in the third the inexplicable power instead gives a man the information he needs to make the right choice of partner.  In the first two stories love conquers all, but in the third we see love as a secondary consideration which must bend to the needs of society.  I think in two of these stories, though they appear in Astounding, we can see a topic that commonly shows up in Weird Tales: connections across the generations of people with their ancestors and descendants.  And in all three we see a characteristic of Moore's early work I often complain about--long-windedness.  Not only does she write long paragraphs, but she has a penchant for presenting the same information again and again and the same sorts of scenes again and again, both within a story and across different stories.     

It feels good to get back to the 1930s, but in our next episode we'll be returning to the jungles of the turn of the century with our hero, Tarzan!