F&SF Jan. '57: Arthur C. Clarke & Poul Anderson

In the last episode of MPorcius Fiction Log we read the first two stories of Arthur C. Clarke's series "Venture to the Moon" in the December 1956 issue of F&SF.  I decided to check out the rest of the series while the first two were still fresh in my mind, so I rustled up the January 1957 number of F&SF, in which the third and fourth components of "Venture to the Moon" appear.  While I had that issue on the screen I figured I'd read the included Poul Anderson story, "Operation Salamander," and Anthony Boucher's book review column (Boucher loves Evan Hunter's novel Tomorrow's World, dismisses Margaret St. Clair's The Green Queen and Joseph E. Kelleam's Overlords from Space, suggests Donald A. Wolheim is not as good an anthologist as Groff Conklin or Judith Merril, and calls Robert Heinlein's "Year of the Jackpot" and Clarke's "Rescue Party" "excellent," Edmond Hamilton's "At the World's Dusk" "interesting if dated," and Amelia Reynolds Long's "Omega" "unspeakable.")

"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!

**********

The Clarke stories we read today feel authentic--they really sound like what you'd expect a guy who had been to the moon to sound like, they really transport you to the surface of the moon, and their tragedy and humor are based on human nature we can recognize and on science that doesn't short circuit our ability to suspend disbelief.  In contrast, Poul Anderson's story is like a lame Mad Magazine strip full of puns (somebody actually says "up Uranus") and Flintstones-style sight gags (broomsticks standing in for cars.)    

I'm not going to be reading any more of Anderson's "Operation Chaos" stories, but I will certainly read the rest of Clarke's "Venture to the Moon" stories.  Stay tuned!