Eric Frank Russell: "I'm a Stranger Here Myself," "This One's On Me," and "I Hear You Calling"

It is time to get our freaks on with Englishman Eric Frank Russell.  In 1962 Russell's countrymen published a hardcover collection of his weird-type stories, Dark Tides.  A 1963 paperback, green with a black figure with red eyes, followed, and then in 1964 a blue paperback, a copy of which I acquired recently in Maryland.  (I've heard English people on TV pronounce that "Merry-land," and, as someone who has lived in the state famous for crabs and Harm City, I am equipped to provide today to those who might benefit from it a service in the form of a pronunciation guide: we say "Mare-uh-lund," guvnah.)

We've already read three stories from Dark Tides, and today will read three more.  Today's stories are quite short--the three of them together take up only 20 pages of Dark Tides--and first appeared in the early 1950s in SF magazines, two British, one American.

"I'm a Stranger Here Myself" (1952)

First the American magazine, Other Worlds, edited by Ray Palmer, in which Russell's "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" debuts alongside a story by Mack Reynolds.  "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" is a "meta" twist-ending story, a sort of in-group joke for SF fans.  I find this kind of thing tiresome.

A teenager is brought to a therapist because he is always asking difficult questions and seems to doubt his parents are his real father and mother.  This kid reads SF, and has met other SF readers, and they have all come to the conclusion that they are not really human, that they are being deceived about their true nature.  The kid and the shrink engage in a logical and philosophical debate, and when the shrink is unable to convince the teen that he is truly human and the SF kids' theory is nonsense, he whips out a gun to kill the kid because the kid has stumbled on the truth.  The second layer of the twist ending is the revelation that the kid has outwitted the shrink with his special powers and the doctor cannot dispose of him so easily.  

Lame filler, a waste of time, thumbs down!

A translation of "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" would be included in a 1969 Dutch Russell collection which does not have the book title or author's name on its front cover, just a big eye, the artist's signature, and the identifier "SF."

LEFT: 1969's Dutch Russell collection Ik ben hier zelf ook vreemd
RIGHT: 1973 French anthology edited by Henry-Luc Planchat

"This One's On Me" (1953)

This one was apparently a hit; quite a few editors have reprinted it after its initial airing in Nebula Science Fiction, among them serial anthologists Groff Conklin, Peter Haining and Henry-Luc Planchat.

A newspaper columnist sees a sign in the window of a small shop: "MUTANTS FOR SALE."  Smelling a story, he goes in to have an antagonistic smart-alecky conversation with the proprietor who claims he has the ability to tailor-make life forms to order.  He also has a standard bargain line of off-the-shelf mutants, like a dog who can speak English.  The journalo doesn't believe the shopkeeper, thinking the talking dog is a ventriloquist's trick and the shop is really a front for a business selling drugs or bootleg booze.  As part of his investigation he snatches a vial of some unidentifiable liquid and drinks it, and it turns him into a monster, one he jocularly described earlier when sarcastically making up a hypothetical custom-job order for the mutant-maker; this fantastical animal is also described on the back of the paperback editions of Dark Tides.

Mere filler, I suppose acceptable.

"I Hear You Calling" (1954) 

Here we have another filler piece, and a lame one that ends on a non-sequitor pun.  Thumbs down!

A sailor has come ashore and wants to get drunk and have sex with a whore.  He doesn't want to deal with big city police and other big city hassles, though, so he travels forty mikes inland to a little town.  A month ago said town was in the news because of a UFO sighting.  Over the last two weeks a dozen people in the town have turned up dead, drained of blood.  The sailor, thus, finds the town basically deserted in the evening as all the residents hide from the blood-sucking monster.  The bars are empty, the streets deserted, there are no sex workers to be found.  He gets drunk, goes to his hotel room; out the window he sees a woman walking alone on the street.  Assuming she is a prostitute, he yells out the window at her.  "Yoohoo!"  She seems to respond, to head for the hotel.  The sailor opens the door to his room and waits for her to come up.  An alien monster comes into the room, and before it kills him says "I am Yuhu.  You called me."

"I Hear You Calling" first insulted the intelligence of SF fans in John Carnell's Science Fantasy.  Our Italian friends saw fit to include it in a Russell collection, and Peter Haining selected it for an anthology of time travel stories.  I had no idea this story was about travelling through time as well as wasting my time.  There is a scan of Haining's Time Travelers: Fiction in the Fourth Dimension at the internet archive, and I took a look at Haining's intro to "I Hear You Calling."  Haining claims the monster in the story--despite the reference in the story's first paragraph to a "flying saucer"--is from the far future.  Who knew?

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This was a rough patch!  And especially sad after we were so impressed by the first three stories in Dark Tides.  Well, we can only hope for better things in our next Eric Frank Russell segment.  But before we return to Dark Tides, we'll be turning the clock back an additional thirty-odd years to read an installment of an immortal genre fiction franchise.