Startling Stories, Sept '49: H Kuttner & C L Moore, J D MacDonald and L R Hubbard

In our last thrilling episode we read a story by Arthur C. Clarke that was reprinted in Startling Stories in September 1949.  That issue of SS also features stories by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, John D. MacDonald, and L. Ron Hubbard that I figured I would read, as well as fun illustrations of skyscrapers, monsters, and beautiful women by Virgil Finlay and some less famous artists.  As usual, I'll be reading the magazine at the world's greatest website, the internet archive, where preserved for all of us who have contrived to pay this month's electric bill is all that text and all those illustrations, plus ads for all the products a man needs to convince some dame to marry him, like razor blades, hair tonic, and a correspondence course in Swedish massage (not that we would expect a guy who reads a magazine with a cartoonish dinosaur on its cover to have any trouble with the ladies!) 

Forget her buddy, all you need is your fur baby and your collection
of scientifiction mags!

"The Portal in the Picture" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore 

Here in Startling this novel is credited to Henry Kuttner.  When it was reprinted in an Ace Double in 1954, it was renamed Beyond Earth's Gates and credited to C. L. Moore and Lewis Padgett (Padgett is a pen name Kuttner and Moore generally used for collaborations.)  In 1987 the story was reprinted in a Kuttner collection and attributed solely to him, and in 2012 Gateway/Orion produced an e-book of the tale that they credited solely to Moore.  It seems a little odd how different publishers have attributed the novel differently; I guess these are all marketing decisions and each publisher had a different theory about what would sell.

"The Portal in the Picture" starts with a prologue.  Our narrator, Eddie Burton, is in a Manhattan nightclub where a mesmerizingly beautiful woman, Malesca, is singing.  He tries to keep his eyes off this irresistible goddess as she performs.  After her song she comes to his table--Malesca and Eddie knew each other in the past, and she wants to go out with him after she knocks off work.  Everyone in the club is amazed when Eddie turns down the woman they consider the most beautiful in the world.

The main text, fifteen chapters, is a flashback to the adventure in which Eddie and a selfish and irritating woman, Lorna Maxwell, were accidentally transported to an alternate Earth where Lorna was transformed into the striking beauty Malesca.

It is the 1930s, and Eddie Burton is an up-and-coming Broadway actor with three successful shows behind him.  He has inherited a fancy apartment from his Uncle Jim, a world traveler who, when Eddie was a child, told him Edgar Rice Burroughs-style stories (Tarzan and John Carter are specifically cited) apparently of his own devising set in the fantasy land of Malesco.  In the apartment is a reproduction of Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy, and one night when Eddie is being visited yet again by Lorna Maxwell, a conventionally pretty girl who says she is in love with Eddie and is always nagging him to help her break into show biz, a vision of a crimson city--Malesco!--appears in the picture.  Somehow, to the amazement of both, Lorna is sucked away, through the picture and into Malesco!

Eddie is blamed for Lorna's disappearance, which he cannot explain; this wrecks his career and puts him in terrible legal jeopardy--the cops can't quite pin a murder on him yet, so Eddie is eventually let out of jail, but they are still looking for clues!  Eddie searches for some clues himself--can he figure out how to get through the print to Malesco where maybe he can find Lorna and clear his name?  It turns out he can!

"The Portal in the Picture" is a very "meta" story, a story about person going to another world to have an adventure that expends a lot of verbiage referring directly to other fiction about fantasy worlds and adventures; Barsoom, the Wonderland of Alice, Oz, Erehwon, and Graustark are all mentioned, and Eddie repeatedly compares himself to John Carter and Allan Quartermain.  At times "The Portal in the Picture" seems like a parody or a satire of those sorts of adventure stories, an effort to remind us how unrealistic they are; for example, Eddie often points out, jocularly and at length, that he is not an invincible fighter, that he can't jump up a ten-foot wall, and so on.

"The Portal in the Picture" is also a story which Kuttner and Moore seem to have based on their reading about various historical periods and events, in particular the French Revolution and Ancient Egypt and Ancient Rome, and about psychology and sociology.  (Kuttner studied for an advanced degree in psychology and we see a lot of psychology in Kuttner and Moore's work; I blogged about four examples here in 2015, but there are many more.)  K & M also bang a drum we've heard them bang before, making the argument that utopia isn't all it is cracked up to be.  (Consider: C. L. Moore: "Greater Than Gods" (1939), Henry Kuttner, "The Land of Time to Come" and "Remember Tomorrow" (both 1941), Kuttner and Moore, Fury, (1947), Kuttner and Moore, "The Two-Handed Engine" (1955).)

Eddie lands in Malesco, in a city in which he puts on a disguise and sneaks around and learns that Lorna the ambitious nag, in the months since her disappearance, has become some kind of idol to the people of Malesco, her face up on posters and films of her even projected onto the clouds!  Eddie meets a guy who looks like his Uncle Jim; this guy, Coriole, turns out to be Uncle Jim's son.  Uncle Jim, Eddie learns, was the leader of a rebellion against Malesco's theocracy, but he fled back to New York when the rebellion was on the verge of defeat.  His son Coriole has taken up the anti-theocratic cause, and he gives Eddie, and us readers, a lesson in Malescan history.

Malesco and our Earth are alternate timelines which had identical histories until the death of Caligula.  A different Emperor took over in Malesco than our Earth, and whereas our world witnessed the rise of Christianity in ancient times and the rise of the English-speaking peoples and representative government and capitalism in modern times, in Malesco a caste of priests who have a monopoly on math, science and technology took over and have ruled tyrannically for almost two thousand years.  They maintain their control through such means as outlawing the use of Arabic numerals--ordinary people are forced to use Roman numerals, which makes the math necessary for modern engineering difficult--and fostering a culture which regards curiosity as a sin, thus discouraging people from trying to figure out how the TVs, anti-grav elevators, and electric lights work.  A machine as simple as Eddie's cigarette lighter dumbfounds and fascinates the common people of Malesco.  

We on Earth don't know about Malesco, but the Malescan priesthood knows about our world--in fact, the priests can view our world on their TV screens.  A tenet of the absolutely bogus Malescan religion is that people who behave will go to our Earth upon death--people who are really good will go to the paradise that is New York!  The priests got hold of Lorna when she arrived and used plastic surgery and their mastery of the social sciences to mold her into a Platonic ideal of beauty!  Now she is like a spokesperson for their religion, posing as a messenger from heaven and broadcasting speeches the priests write for her that bolster their rule.  The anti-theocracy forces, led by Eddie's cousin Coriole, want Eddie to use his relationship with Lorna to get her to switch to their side.

Eddie equivocates over which side to join, and whether to join any side at all--all he wants to do is get back to New York with Lorna to save his skin from a murder rap.  He contrives to meet the high priest, who has the power to send him back to New York; this guy is fat, so we know he is the villain and Eddie will eventually join the Coriole crew.

The high priest agrees to send Eddie and Lorna back to New York if they will first give a pacifying pro-priesthood speech to a mob that has been assembled by Coriole's anti-theocratic forces--Coriole and company have been spreading the word that Eddie is going to teach them all the stuff the priests have been keeping form them about science and technology.  During the speech Eddie vacillates, unsure what to do, but his cousin and the other rebels influence Eddie so that Eddie turns the tables on the high priest.  The priest is killed by the very trap he had set for Eddie and Lorna, opening up the opportunity for Coriole and his conspirators to seize the throne and reform Malesco.

In the epilogue we learn that, back in NYC, Lorna is still pursuing Eddie, even though with her looks she doesn't need his help to get into show biz--she must really love him.  As we have seen throughout the story's sixty-five or so pages, Lorna is selfish, vapid, and annoying, so Eddie knows a marriage with her would make him miserable, but his resolve is weakening because she is now almost irresistibly good-looking.  

"The Portal in the Picture" is not very good because it is long, slow, and lacks narrative tension and narrative drive, due to many artistic decisions made by Kuttner and Moore which sap the story of drive and energy.

Eddie and Lorna are indecisive characters, and the plot is largely driven by luck and by the manipulations of Coriole, the high priest, and some other characters who have their own selfish agendas.  Eddie's motives are uninteresting--Kuttner and Moore decided to not make him driven by some kind of ambition, or ideological commitment, or love of a woman, but instead to make him "realistic," to have as his motivation merely self-preservation.  This might work if the authors had striven to portray Eddie as scared and depicted him as being in mortal peril, but Eddie never seems scared and we readers never feel he is in danger of getting killed or maimed or trapped in Malesco forever--we already know he gets back to NYC in one piece and the text includes so many jokes that no horror or suspense could possibly be generated.  As for Lorna, for some reason Kuttner and Moore made the conscious decision that she would be neither a heroine, nor a love interest, nor a villain--her character generates no strong feelings in the reader other than irritation (at times she is despicable and at other times she is pathetic) and she doesn't serve the plot as a goal for Eddie or as an obstacle to him, she is simply dead weight.  The way Eddie thinks about her and treats her is pretty shabby, but both of them are such boring characters we don't care.

"The Portal in the Picture" feels very slow, and very little actually happens.  There are way too many expository scenes of in which Eddie learns about Malesco through lectures from natives or by watching TV.  Kuttner and Moore spend more time on describing the details of history, geography and daily life in Malesco than on the characters' relationships or on adventure elements.  And what passes for "adventure elements" in "The Portal in the Picture?"  Scenes of Eddie walking around the city and having conversations with people.  Eddie does very little and shows very little initiative, but we still have to endure many long paragraphs that describe his thought processes and his speculations on the thought processes of others.  The final scene, in which Eddie and Lorna are to give speeches to the assembled crowd of people skeptical of priestly rule, contains paragraph after paragraph on mob psychology.  The references to other adventure stories are also too numerous; every time Eddie has to do anything he reflects on what the hero of a fictional adventure tale would do in a similar circumstance.  This gets repetitive, and further weighs down the already slow pace of the narrative and further deadens the already limited emotional impact of the decisions and challenges Eddie faces.

Gotta give "The Portal in the Picture" a thumbs down.    

"A Condition of Beauty" by John D. MacDonald

Way back in 2014 I read crime novelist John D. MacDonald's 1951 SF novel Wine of the Dreamers, as well as two of his 1948 short SF stories, "Ring Around the Redhead" and "A Child is Crying."  In 2015 I read MacDonald's 1949 story "Flaw" and his 1950 story "Spectator Sport" in a blog post I billed as devoted to pessimistic SF stories.  After a hiatus of over six years, MPorcius Fiction Log again offers coverage of John D. MacDonald's SF output!

"A Condition of Beauty" takes up like four pages of text here in Startling.  It is a competent filler story with an obvious and predictable twist, but, if we are feeling generous, we can say it is a rumination on to what extent our ideas of beauty are socially constructed and to what extent they are instinctive, hard-wired into our brains by evolution and heredity.

The story starts in a dungeon.  The three prisoners there, a young man, a young woman, and a pessimistic old geezer, have been condemned because they are hideously ugly and terribly strong.  The scene then shifts to a space exploration ship.  The crew scans a star system, finds the planet where the dungeon is, and discovers on its surface a Terran space ship which must have crashed there "a hundred and ten generations ago."  A squad of the spacers investigates and discovers the descendants of the crew of the wrecked vessel, which they use as a place of worship and sacrifice.  The conditions on this planet are only barely suitable for human life, and over the centuries, thanks to selective breeding apparently "guided" by "some sixth sense," the descendents of the shipwrecked Earthers have evolved radically.  MacDonald doesn't describe the evolved humans, but they are so disgusting that at the sight of them many of the spacemen vomit inside their vacuum suits.  The sight of aliens that look like slugs or insects or reptiles has never made these hardy adventurers toss their cookies, but these evolved humans are nauseating because they are a travesty of the human form and trigger disgust at a sub- or unconscious level.

The spacers free the people from the dungeon--as we expect, they are "throwbacks" who look like normal Earth humans.  The old guy keels over from shock, but the spacers will bring the man and woman, both of them lookers, to Earth and hopefully, among other conventional homo sapiens, they will get over their disgust with their own bodies and live normal happy lives.

Acceptable.  The emphasis on the unconscious, the subconscious, and alleged "sixth senses," as well as cultural and social pressures, in guiding human belief and behavior is sort of interesting.  

"A Condition of Beauty" would be reprinted in a 1966 magazine, Great Science Fiction Stories.   

"Beyond the Black Nebula" by L. Ron Hubbard 

People are down on L. Ron Hubbard because of his scam religion, but I enjoyed the parts of Battlefield Earth and Mission Earth I read as a kid when they were new (though I didn't like them enough to finish either of these sprawling sagas), and in 2014 when I read Hubbard's novel To The Stars I liked it; Final Blackout, which I read the same year, I thought merely acceptable, but not actually bad.  So I feel there's a chance I'm going to appreciate this here story, even though it looks like it was never reprinted in English.  According to isfdb, "Beyond the Black Nebula" is part of a series called "The Conquest in Space," and in the 1980s our Italian friends reprinted this entire series in book form.  

It is the spacefaring future.  Mankind has explored many systems, but many remain to be explored.  In his youth, Anthony Twain went on a few of the early interstellar missions, but then he switched careers, gaining fame and fortune as a writer whose beat was chronicling humanity's conquest of space.  

Like so many celebrity authors, Twain employed a squad of ghostwriters to maintain his output.  Somehow one of these ghosts penned and got published--without Twain's knowledge--a book appearing under Twain's name which is full of libelous bullshit.  Twain's reputation and finances were destroyed.  Now an old man, how can he recover his reputation?   

Twain has the crazy idea of getting together some money to go on a dangerous expedition to a part of space everyone is scared to go to, a big patch of blackness.  Nobody wants to finance such an expedition, but some criminals hear about Twain's eagerness to command a ship and they buy a decrepit old vessel and have it put into working order and offer it to Twain--they will be his crew.

The criminals don't want to explore some uncharted black region that everybody is scared of; they pull a gun on Twain and tell him to take them to some planet they have selected for some nefarious purpose which is never disclosed.  Twain tries to trick them, to fly to the black region without them realizing it, but they figure it out and a fight ensues.  Twain comes out on top, but during the fight the ship goes off course and becomes totally lost.  Twain eventually figures out where they are and how to get back to Earth.

Twain thinks his mission was a failure, but it turns out that the ship's black box automatic recording systems tracked the entire voyage and reveal to the technicians on Earth that Twain flew through the black region and now its mystery is solved.  Twain is a hero and his reputation is saved!

The style and basic idea of this story are fine, but the story feels like it was rushed, like it could have been improved with revisions that filled in some blanks (what crime were the criminals going to commit?) and made things more interesting (the black region is just a substanceless shadow?  Boring!) and more convincing (the black boxes keep track of and record the ship's location but the ship's systems can't do the same calculations or access the black boxes' recordings during flight?)  Merely acceptable.

********** 

Kind of disappointing, but they can't all be winners, can they?  And it is always worthwhile to explore the work of famous and/or important contributors to the SF field, so, no regrets!

Next time, we explore four stories by Fritz Leiber.