Worlds of Tomorrow: E Hamilton, A Derleth, A C Clarke and C Jacobi

In 1953, Pellegrini & Cudahy published Worlds of Tomorrow, a hardcover anthology of nineteen stories edited by August Derleth; recently, at Wonder Book in Hagerstown, MD, a place I strongly recommend to all fans of 20th-century SF, I purchased the 1958 Berkley Books abridged paperback edition of the volume.  The Richard Powers cover, with its asymmetrical rocket ship passing by Jupiter, and its male nude figure contemplating a city in the desert and a bizarre flying machine (?) may have served as the book's primary attraction, but this edition of Worlds of Tomorrow does include stories by people we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log, so let's check some of them out.  Today, we'll read tales by Edmond Hamilton, Derleth himself, Arthur C. Clarke, and Carl Jacobi.

Nota Bene: We've already read two stories that are printed in this paperback edition of Worlds of Tomorrow, Frank Belknap Long's "The Big Cold" and Mack Reynolds's "The Business, As Usual."  

"The Dead Planet" by Edmond Hamilton (1946)

This is a traditional space exploration story with a twist ending that must have appealed to editors, because it has been reprinted numerous times since its first appearance in Startling Stories, and has been translated into several languages, including Romanian, Croatian and Serbian.  

Our narrator is one of the three astronauts crewing an exploration ship of the Star Service, the organization whose duty it is to map the galaxy.  Out on the edge of the galaxy their ship malfunctions and they have to crash land on a planet that is orbiting a dying star, a frozen world whose atmosphere has long been drifts of snow under an airless sky.  They search for the metal needed to repair their ship, and come upon a domed city that is buried under a hundred feet of ice.  Their sensors indicate the material they need can be found in this dead metropolis.

In the city they are confronted by hideous monsters and assailed by psychic attacks which sap their morale, filling them with terror.  They figure out that the monsters are just harmless illusions and make their way to the towering building where their sensors indicate the needed metals are to be found.  In the building they receive a telepathic message, a recording from eons ago.  The people who once inhabited this planet were of a race that conquered the galaxy but then were attacked by extragalactic invaders, malevolent beings of pure energy.  They were almost entirely wiped out, but cached records of their accumulated knowledge in this city, and then caused their sun to emit a type of radiation that killed all the invaders but also the last survivors of their own people.  Their wisdom they left behind to help out the people of the future, the race that would succeed them--the illusory monsters and mental attacks were a test to make sure the people who inherited their science and technology would be worthy of it.

The three explorers have passed the test, and after repairing their ship leave with the invaluable wisdom of the extinct race.  The twist ending is that the narrator and his comrades are bird people and the planet they have just left is Earth--the race that sacrificed itself to save the galaxy was our own human race.     

I like it.

"McIlvaine's Star" by August Derleth (1952)

"McIlvaine's Star" is apparently one of a series of over a dozen stories written by Derleth about Tex Harrigan and eventually collected in the book Harrigan's File.  A year after its debut in If, it appeared not only in Derleth's Worlds of Tomorrow but also Donald A. Wollheim's Prize Stories of Space and Time AKA Prize Science Fiction Stories.  (The "prize" in question was the Jules Verne Award, isfdb is telling me.)

"McIlvaine's Star" is one of those stories in which there are multiple layers of frame story between us readers and the actual plot and characters.  Our narrator is a friend of Tex Harrigan, who is a reporter.  Harrigan tells the story of McIlvaine to the narrator; which he pieced together by talking to various other people, including McIlvaine.  I guess the power of the story is supposed to come from the tragedy of McIlvaine's psychology and relationships, but all the layers of obscurity between us and McIlvaine make it hard for us to feel for this pathetic guy--this story really should have been narrated by McIlvaine himself or an omniscient third-person narrator.

McIlvaine was a guy who had enough dough to not work.  He spent his time hanging with his buddies at a bar playing cards, and pursuing his other hobbies, like amateur astronomy.  When McIlvaine told his pals that he had discovered a new star, a dark star, they made fun of him, and when he further claimed he was trying to communicate with the people on the star they played a practical joke on him.  Some people, including McIlvaine, disappeared, and Harrigan describes various clues that indicate that either the aliens rejuvenated McIlvaine and as a side effect of rejuvenation he lost his memory, or, McIlvaine wandered off without telling anybody and his nephew who looks like a younger McIlvaine moved into his dwelling.  Presumably we readers are supposed to be moved by the fact that even though McIlvaine and his cardplaying cronies didn't have a very fulfilling network of relationships, now that the "disappearances" have broken up their cohort they are all sad and lonely.  

"McIlvaine's Star" is a boring waste of time, a weak filler story.  Parts of it don't even make sense, or maybe I should say are poorly constructed--we see scenes I don't think Harrigan could possibly have learned about, so it is like the story is switching between first-person and omniscient third-person narration without making it clear it is shifting perspective, but certainly making it clear that the framing devices impede rather than facilitate the transmission of the drama to the reader.  Thumbs down.

I can understand why Derleth would include this story in the book he is editing, because like most of us he felt the need to make money--I have certainly done mediocre work myself, including writing mediocre junk, in pursuit of the filthy lucre.  But I can't understand why whoever was giving out the Jules Verne Awards, whatever they were, gave one to "McIlvaine's Star."         

"The Fires Within" by Arthur C. Clarke (1947)

Here we have a story from one of the "Big Three" of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke.  "The Fires Within" first appeared in the third and final issue of a British magazine I never heard of before, Fantasy, and two years later was printed in Startling alongside stories by beloved married couple Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and detective scribe John D. MacDonald.  The story would go on to be published again and again in Clarke collections and in anthologies.  

"The Fires Within" is the kind of SF story that puts the "science" in science fiction and leaves out the sex and violence we see (and welcome!) in so many of the stories we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  At the same time, Clarke's tale actually has quite a bit in common with the more adventure-oriented Hamilton story we are also talking about today when it comes to its narrative strategies and its appeal.

Two people are sitting around.  One offers the other a report to read.  The report, which makes up most of the text of the story, is from a British scientist and addressed to a government minister.  It describes, in some detail, a sonar device that can scan below the Earth's surface, down to like fifteen miles; this device can identify elements and densities and that sort of thing.  We are told that just a few miles down that the Earth's mass is under tremendous pressure and heated to extremely high temperatures.

Shockingly, the sonar device reveals that there is a civilization of people living miles below the surface of England.  These people's molecular structure, it is theorized, must be such that they can, with trivial ease, pass through or push rock; at least I think that is what Clarke is getting at--I found it pretty vague, to be honest.  In theory, these beings are composed of "matter in which the electron shells are few or altogether missing....To such creatures, even the rock fifteen miles down would offer no more resistance than water...."

The real twist ending of the story is that the people discussing the report are not more British scientists or public employees, but two of the underworld people!  Members of the subterranean race found the report after they came to the surface on a voyage of exploration and accidentally killed us all.  Doh!  The additional sting in the tail of the story comes when these two subterranean people theorize that perhaps living fifteen or twenty miles below them is a race that will someday accidentally exterminate them while exploring. 

Pretty good.  

"The Gentleman is an Epwa" by Carl Jacobi (1953)

It seems that "The Gentleman is an Epwa" made its first appearance in the 1953 hardcover edition of Worlds of Tomorrow, though later that year it was reprinted in the magazine Cosmos.  The story would go on to be included in a book of SF meant to be inflicted on British schoolchildren, and Jacobi collections.

"The Gentleman is an Epwa" is like one of those Somerset Maugham stories about a British guy who mans a lonely post in the jungle in South Asia or someplace and his challenging relationships with the small numbers of Europeans around and with the natives he is responsible for.  Except in this story the guy is an Earther who is in command of a remote post on Venus, where the blue mold is likely to make you sick and the silence is likely to make you crazy.

Grayson's assistant has had to leave due to catching a Venusian disease.  The loneliness of the post is a real threat to human sanity, and so Grayson is eager for the arrival of a new assistant.  When a replacement finally arrives, weeks later, it isn't a man, but a robot who looks like a man that Grayson is supposed to call Rafael.

Rafael, as a robot, is very reliable and good at the work Grayson sets it, but offers no companionship.  In fact, Rafael is annoying.  Grayson plots to make the machine malfunction so he can request a human assistant in its place, but Rafael is very durable and survives all the accidents Grayson steers it into.  Finally, there is trouble with the natives and Grayson gets killed.  

Either this story is poorly put together, or is put together too subtly for my childish mind to comprehend, because I didn't find that the story's plot elements operated smoothly or in concert in a way that was compelling or satisfying.  For example, early in the tale Jacobi takes time to describe in detail certain peculiarities of Grayson (he has insisted on having a primitive veranda affixed to the modern building which is his post) and Venus (there is a blue mold that descends from the sky at a particular time of year) that I expected to pay off later in some way, but they are never mentioned again.  Similarly, dialogue delivered by Grayson's superior early in the story makes clear that Grayson is one of the very best station masters on Venus, but then he spends the rest of the story screwing everything up, undoing a decade of good work in mere weeks and causing a total disaster.  I guess the robot Rafael is radically throwing Grayson off his game, but Jacobi doesn't explain or describe this in a way that is convincing or interesting.  Grayson's final scheme to make Rafael malfunction is to get the robot addicted to playing solitaire and to give the droid a deck of cards that is missing one card; the robot, I believe, realizes a card is missing and acquires a replacement card, but is still, I believe, addicted to playing solitaire.  How Grayson hoped this addiction would help him and whether it actually ended up helping him or harming him, and how, I could not discern from Jacobi's text; similarly left incomprehensible was how the lack of a card was supposed to affect Rafael and how Rafael's supplying a replacement card affected Grayson's plans. 

I couldn't tell what Jacobi was trying to accomplish with this story--many elements of the narrative just sit there and, as far as I could tell, have no influence on the plot and actually work at cross purposes with each other when it comes to setting atmosphere and tone, making for a muddled and disjointed story.  And then there is the fact that in a futuristic space age of aircraft and radios the whole theme of being driven insane by being all alone in the wilderness--on a planet where there are plenty of other humans--doesn't make much sense.  

Thumbs down.          

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The results of today's reading are not particularly surprising, as in the past I have generally enjoyed Hamilton and Clarke's work, and have often been disappointed in how shoddy Derleth and Jacobi's stories can be.  Both Hamilton and Clarke's stories today are crafted in such a way that they make sense and deliver a consistent tone; they both portray humanity in a light that is both tragic and heroic, both have a twist ending and both attempt to blow your mind by offering a large scale vision of the universe that comes from a different perspective than we are used to.  Derleth and Jacobi, on the other hand, instead of embracing big science fiction concepts and using them to affect us intellectually or emotionally, found their stories on tired conventional templates--the journalist who learns about an eccentric person and the stressed out colonial administrator off in the wilderness dealing with a bunch of primitive natives.  Far worse, they construct their stories clumsily out of bits and pieces that don't even fit together to generate a consistent atmosphere or a plot that works logically.  Frustrating!

We may return to Worlds of Tomorrow, but our next episode will cover different--but sort of related--material.