"Green Fingers" by Arthur C. Clarke (1956)
Here we have the third of the "Venture to the Moon" stories, which were first published in 1956 in a British newspaper and went on to appear in many Clarke collections. I noted yesterday that the first two stories in the series were light and pleasant, but this one describes a sort of romantic tragedy!
A genius botanist has been brought by the Soviet ship to Luna. He regularly takes the risk of leaving the Soviet base alone to traverse the surface of the Moon (the American and British teams have a strict rule against being alone outside their bases, but it seems the Bolshies are short staffed or something) so nobody knows what he is up to out there. One day he fails to return, and when the narrator (the commander of the British team) and his comrades find him the botanist is dead. It turns out that he has secretly bred a plant that can survive on the surface of the moon! Because there are no wind or animals on Luna this botanist designed his plants to explosively propel their seeds away from themselves. Well, one of the plants has grown to maturity and it expelled a seed that penetrated the botanist's helmet and killed him!
"All That Glitters" by Arthur C. Clarke (1956)
This fourth "Venture to the Moon" story is about a wacky coincidence and expresses a jocularly cynical view of (hetero)sexual relations. The geophysicist on the American team has a wife back on Earth who loves diamonds, but her husband doesn't make enough money to buy the diamonds she covets. (Clarke includes jokes about how some of the men on the Moon, a quarter of a million miles from their spouses, are happier than they have ever been.) Over the years, this geophysicist became a sort of expert on the science of diamonds. On the moon, collecting samples at a volcanic site, he discovers a huge diamond. That very same day he gets a message from Earth--his assistants have successfully concluded his secret project of synthesizing diamonds! The joke is that the diamonds on the moon have now lost most of their value, and we are told that the geophysicist's wife eventually divorces him.
These "Venture to the Moon" vignettes are entertaining little pieces of hard SF--thumbs up for both!
"Operation Salamander" by Poul Anderson (1957)
In his intro to this tale of twenty-three pages, editor of F&SF Boucher tells us it is a sequel to "Operation Afreet" and is story about a "magic world of fantasy with all the stern logical rigor of science fiction." "Operation Salamander" would be integrated with three other stories to make up the 1971 novel Operation Chaos and would appear on its own in a 1984 anthology of stories about witches and the third volume of The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson in 2010.I groaned when I realized this was a joke story full of puns set in an alternate 20th-century America in which werewolves go to college and Ford and Chevrolet manufacture flying broomsticks. Our narrator is a werewolf Hollywood actor who served in a recent war and is attending college on the GI Bill because he aspires to be part of the space program. He and a witch are in love but she is on the faculty and there is a geas that prevents teachers and students from dating.
At a football game the cheerleaders are using a fire elemental--the salamander of the title--as part of the half time show fireworks, when a practical joker sets the salamander free and it starts setting the town on fire. The narrator and his witch girlfriend join the effort to dispel the rampaging fire elemental, and this fight takes up most of the text. Afterwards the witch gets the rule against students and faculty having relationships lifted and we are to believe that the narrator and she live happily ever after.
I can't take this sort of thing. Thumbs down!
Everything I've read by Poul Anderson has been a blend of science and fantasy that does both a disservice. There's a certain smugness, not to mention the unfunny jokes and protagonists who use oh-so-clever tricks to save the day. I recently stumbled upon a free copy of The High Crusade - maybe that will be better but I'm skeptical.
ReplyDeleteIn general, I like Poul Anderson's pro-individualist and tragic view of history and life, but I don't like absurdist humor and puns, so I have avoided things like the Hoka stories; I had no idea "Operation Salamander" would be a silly fantasy story--I sort of thought from the title it might be about a planet covered in magma or something.
DeleteI've enjoyed a lot of Anderson's more "hard SF" work, like the components of his future history about a young vital space civilization built by dashing merchants that evolves into a decadent and aristocratic space empire--the Van Rijn/Falkayn/Flandry stories--and stuff like Three Worlds to Conquer, Brain Wave, The Enemy Stars and "Call Me Joe." When I was young I read some of Anderson's 1980s and later work, and thought it long and bloated, even if I sympathized with his thinking, so when I started reading his magazine work from the '50s and '60s I appreciated how succinct it all was; 1979's Avatar, which I read in 2014, is sort of bloated, but I still liked it.
The protagonist who resolves the plot via clever trickery is of course central to classic science fiction, a literature of ideas that romanticizes science and intelligence and serves as a wish fulfillment fantasy for smart kids--the smart educated guy winning out is how many SF readers hoped the world operates, though weird stories like H. P. Lovecraft's, in which the guy's learning actually is what kills him, and sword-swinging stories like those of Robert Howard, in which the guy wins by dint of being strong and brave, perhaps often feel like more accurate allegories of life.
I read the popular The High Crusade before I started this blog and it is certainly memorable, but the central gimmick is perhaps silly.
The boys down in marketing want me to put these links to golden oldie blog posts here:
https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2014/10/three-worlds-to-conquer-by-poul-anderson.html
https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-avatar-by-poul-anderson.html
https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2014/03/return-of-sf-hall-of-fame-2a-heinlein.html