Fritz Leiber: "The Ship Sails at Midnight," "The Enchanted Forest" and "Coming Attraction"

Years ago, at a central Iowa library sale, I bought a 1979 paperback printing of 1974's The Best of Fritz Leiber.  Today let's read three stories from its pages, all of them first published in 1950.

"The Ship Sails at Midnight" 

This story is about a "gang" of selfish hipster slackers who have just finished college and are hanging out in the college town, living off their parents, not brave enough to strike out on their own and pursue the careers among the creative class they envisage for themselves.  There's the narrator, a would-be writer; a female friend who is a mediocre sculptor; a guy who is a physicist; and a guy with a philosophy degree.  A new waitress appears at the local diner.  This blonde is amazingly gorgeous, and we know she is a telepathic alien immediately, because the story started off with discussion of local UFO sightings, and she divines one of the gang's orders without him having spoken it aloud.

The story describes how the four slackers' relationships with this blondalicious bombshell improve them as people and allows them to break out of their ruts, out of their mediocrity, and start carving out worthwhile careers in the arts or sciences.  Besides apparently having some kind of subconscious effect, this waitress asks good questions that inspire new ideas and opens up a wider world to the gang by telling them anecdotes about life and introducing them to people at the diner they would otherwise have ignored.  Her beauty inspires the sculptor and writer to push the boundaries of their abilities in their chosen fields.  The waitress also has some kind of sexual relationship with the narrator, but insists he keep it a secret from the others.

"The Ship Sails at Midnight" is one of the many SF stories in which good aliens (or robots, or elves if we include the fantasy subcategory of SF) act as a foil for humanity, serve as a contrast that shows how crummy the homo sapiens of Sol Three really are.  Six months or so after they met her, another disguised alien appears and tells the waitress--an explorer or academic or something--that their ship is leaving tonight--at midnight!--and she has to choose whether she wants to spend the rest of her life among these people whom he considers barbarians.  The waitress admits she loves the four slackers, and the whole human race, and decides to stay.  But then the four members of the gang all realize they have all been enjoying a secret erotic relationship with the waitress, and become terribly jealous.  The most hotheaded of the gang goes a little bonkers and shoots the waitress down.  Luckily this is before midnight, so her fellow aliens can take the waitress's body back to the stars.

Should we see this story as advocacy of a "free love" or anti-monogamy ethic?  Should we see the waitress from the stars as a Christ figure?  I generally find these tendentious anti-human stories kind of hard to take, and this one is particularly manipulative, its argument made entirely (and not exactly successfully, in my case at least) on the emotional level instead of on any kind of rational level.  It also feels long, with Leiber making it clear immediately that the woman is an alien and is going to act like a muse and inspiration to the four members of the gang, and then wasting our time presenting lots of superfluous clues she is an alien and describing the process of inspiring the four jerks at unnecessary length.  I'll say "The Ship Sails at Midnight" is merely acceptable.

After first appearing in Fantastic Adventures, "The Ship Sails at Midnight" has been reprinted in many Leiber collections, including several in foreign translation. 

"The Enchanted Forest"

"The Enchanted Forest," which debuted in Astounding, is set in a future milieu of FTL drives in which a million planets have been brought within human civilization and millions of others are within reach of travelers.  It appears that most everybody in this vast interstellar society is obedient, maybe even timid, but  that on one planet lived a billion people who were brave, reckless even, people who relished danger and novelty and did not feel bound by rules.  These people, the Wild Ones, were considered trouble by mainstream society and were recently wiped out--only one Wild One escaped the bombing of the Wild Ones' home world, and he is Elven, our main character.

Elven's small ship has crash-landed on a planet and been rendered inoperative.  The wreck rests in the middle of a dense forest of poisonous thorns that Leiber compares to the thorns in the story of Sleeping Beauty.  Elven carves a tunnel through the monstrous writhing vines with his ultrasonic ray gun and discovers a tiny settlement of four people who have no idea that there is a world beyond the impenetrable venomous forest.  Clues indicate they were raised by robots, and, in fact, these poor bastards wish they had wheels instead of feet and metal instead of flesh!

Halfway through the story we learn that the government annihilated the Wild Ones because they were working on a physics experiment--creating all new universes--and it was feared such new universes might destroy the current universe.  It is also revealed that Elven carries with him in the form of a tiny capsule or tablet the genetic seed or germ of every one of the recently exterminated one billion Wild Ones.  If Elven can find a large population of suitable mammals--humans, or cows, or something like them--he can impregnate them with clones of his people and bring to life a close simulacrum of his lost culture.

In search of such a population, he fights his way through the forest.  He comes to another settlement with four people, identical to the first group, and then another.  Each group responds to his unexpected arrival differently, some welcoming, others so hostile that a gory fight ensues.  Elven goes insane and he loses the tablet that holds the key to the resurrection of Wild One society.

The end-story reveal indicates that, by amazingly bad luck, of all those millions of planets, Elven landed on one that is a secret government laboratory, upon which there are a hundred almost identical settlements of four almost identical people, clones.  The government is trying to figure out what factors affect people's attitudes about strangers, and each settlement's members received slightly different educations or resides in a subtly different environment; these minor differences account for the diversity of responses displayed by those subjects we received an unexpected visit from Elven.  In the closing lines of the story, government officials wonder about the justice of experimenting on human subjects in this way--are they really any better than the Wild Ones?

"The Enchanted Forest" has more drama and excitement, more compelling images and interesting science, than "The Ship Sails at Midnight," and I also like the ambiguity of the piece--at first we think Elven the hero and the Wild Ones victims of oppression, but as the story progresses we are presented evidence that things may not be quite that simple.  One problem with the story is how Elven goes insane.  Leiber suggests that Elven loses his mind because the fairy tale atmosphere of the planet, something suggestive a government cop said to him about "fate conspiring against him," and the fact that he seems to be meeting the same people over and over again, even after he has killed them, has shattered his core convictions, those of an atheist materialist, and made him accept the supernatural.  This isn't quite believable, because Elven is himself very familiar with cloning technology, so should immediately wonder if the people he is running into are clones.

Despite this reservation, I can give this one a thumbs up.  

"The Enchanted Forest" has been reprinted many times in Leiber collections, anthologies, and foreign magazines.

"Coming Attraction" 

In "The Ship Sails at Midnight," Leiber presented us with a goody goody alien to show us how terrible humans are; in "Coming Attraction," Leiber offers us a goody goody Englishman to show us how terrible Americans are!   

It is the crime-ridden NYC of the future!  A limited nuclear war may have left the United Kingdom unscathed, but Manhattan, while still a bustling world city full of business and entertainment, is marred by craters and radioactive hot spots, and New Yorkers wear films that they regularly check to see if they have been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation.  The Cold War is still on, with the United States and the Soviet Union racing to build fortresses on the Moon, and our British narrator is in the Big Apple working on a trade deal, British electronics destined for use in the U.S. space program for American where.  This upstanding English gent finds that the Cold War has driven the American people to perversion and neurosis!

Immediately after the atomic bomb detonations, Americans wore protective armor against the radiation, and this started a fashion trend that is now general of women wearing masks, even though the full armor has been discarded.  The concealment of the female face has become a powerful social norm--in fact, more women walk around baring their breasts than their faces, and when a woman's mask slips, people look away, embarrassed!  This mask situation is related to a change in the relations between the sexes--women are scared of men and scared of sex.  It is so hard for men to get a date that newer model TVs come equipped with a slot into which you slide your hand--a mechanism inside makes you feel like you are holding the hand of the woman on the screen!  A prominent form of entertainment is wrestling between tall strong women and small quick men, and detective fiction now typically features murderous female criminals.

The plot of "Coming Attraction" concerns how our English narrator rescues an American woman on the street from criminals, and she then seeks his help escaping these insane United States to relatively sane England.  He finds her attractive (even though he can't see her face) and imagines some romance may be in his future.  But it turns out she is just as perverted and grotesque and untrustworthy as every other American!

You know I find these stories in which it is suggested that the United States is no better than the U.S.S.R. annoying, but "Coming Attraction" is undeniably good.  It is quite well-written, with great images and really compelling speculations and extrapolations on the possible psychological and sociological effects of the conflict between the liberal West (or in this story just the United States, as it seems like Europe has, somehow, divorced itself from the conflict) and the communist East and effective pacing which render every paragraph interesting and entertaining.  "Coming Attraction" also showcases Leiber's fascination with unconventional, perhaps taboo sex, though, unlike in so many later stories in which Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser rape women and girls seventeen and younger are treated as sex objects, in this 1950 story Fritz acts like he finds the idea of violent sex reprehensible.  Don't worry, Fritz; we won't rat you out.  

"Coming Attraction" has been very popular with editors and since its debut in Galaxy it has appeared in many anthologies with words like "Master," "Masterpiece," "Best," "Great" and "Hall of Fame" in their titles.  Adding together the subset of SF people who are communist sympathizers with the subset of SF people interested in out of the ordinary sex probably yields a majority of the SF community.

**********

I found a lot to criticize about these stories, but two of them are actually good, and the third isn't quite a failure.  Fritz delivers the goods this time.

I'm putting this 40-odd-year-old paperback back on the shelf; next time we'll be talking about a paperback over 60 years old.