F&SF April 1956: Robert Bloch, Tom Godwin and Henry Gregor Felsen

In our last episode we read a sex-positive, racism-negative story by Ward Moore that debuted in the April 1956 issue of F&SF.  (I called Moore's story a "lemon" and a "clunker," but editor Anthony Boucher said it was "one of the stories I have been most proud to publish."  Looks like opinions differ.)  While I have the internet archive scan of this issue of F&SF open on my computer, let's check out the stories it contains by Robert "Psycho" Bloch, Tom "Cold Equations" Godwin, and some guy I never heard of, Henry Gregor Felsen.

"I Kiss Your Shadow" by Robert Bloch (1956)  

Here we have a better than average Bloch story, one which doesn't include any of Bloch's stupid puns, one about how a domineering woman can change you, can make you do things you don't want to do, can drive you crazy, can drive you to murder!  "I Kiss Your Shadow" is a supernatural horror story that is structured as a detective story so that we learn what is really going on out of chronological order as the clues are uncovered and the lies exposed, but I'll just give you the plot outline in the order stuff happened, not the order the narrator and readers learn about what happened.

The narrator is a reporter, and his pal Joe Elliot works the rewrite desk at the same paper.  The narrator has an attractive sister, Donna, whom he admits is a ruthless and manipulative go-getter who always figures out a way to get what she wants out of people.  She wants a husband and kids, and falls in love with Joe and transforms him from a guy who is a slob who loves booze and fears marriage into a snappy dresser who deposits all his dough in the bank instead of the local watering hole and is eager to tie the knot and become a suburban dad! 

Or so it appears to the narrator!  In fact, Joe is always trying to break up with Donna, but she uses her hot body to get her way with him time and time again!  Joe cannot resist that body!  So Joe takes the terrible step of murdering Donna!  He makes it look like an accident, fooling the cops and the narrator!  (Some reporter, eh?)

A few weeks after Donna's sudden "accidental" demise, Joe tells the narrator he has started seeing a sort of ghost (he calls it a "shadow") of Donna at night.  Besides calling it a shadow he calls it a "succubus," because it demands kisses--and more!  Joe reports that every night Donna's ectoplasmic (or whatever) form has more substance, is getting stronger.  The narrator of course doesn't believe in ghosts and advises Joe to see a shrink; Joe takes this advice and gives the narrator the idea that he is getting better, just as the narrator is leaving the country for eight months on an assignment.  When the narrator gets back, the psychiatrist Joe has been seeing is dead, apparently having jumped out the window, a suicide.  But Joe, once again a sloppy boozehound, tells the narrator Donna is responsible, that she is now stronger than a man and pushed the therapist out the window because the meddling medical man was getting between Donna and her man!  The narrator still doesn't believe in ghosts, and when he finally figures out Joe murdered Donna, he supposes Joe killed the shrink because the doctor's probing of Joe's psychology was leading him to suspect Donna's death was no accident.  The climax of the story is when Joe dies of a mysterious stroke or heart attack or something while clawing at Donna's grave.  As we expect of a reporter, the narrator keeps his juiciest bit of information a secret, not telling the cops that Joe murdered Donna.  The shock ending comes almost a year later, when the authorities finally start to suspect Donna was murdered and open up her grave--to find not only Donna's corpse, but the corpse of a new born baby!  Donna wanted Joe to make her with child, and she got what she wanted, months after she died!

Thumbs up for "I Kiss Your Shadow," which exploits all of men's fears about women, sex, parenthood and having to take responsibility and throws in some twisted talk-to-a-guy-about-boning-his-sister, necrophilia and dead baby material.  The story would be reprinted numerous times in Bloch collections as well as anthologies like Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia's Horror Hunters.

"Operation Opera" by Tom Godwin (1956)

I was pretty hard on Godwin's novel Space Prison when I read it back in 2015, and in 2019 I called his long short story "Mother of Invention" "marginal."  Since then I have judged Godwin's "You Created Us" "acceptable filler" and "Before Willows Ever Walked" "competent but unremarkable."  So I am not exactly in the running for president of the Tom Godwin Appreciation Society.  But let's check this story out, even though Anthony Boucher warns us it is a "light fun-and-games satire" and it looks like it was only ever reprinted in the French edition of F&SF, and our escargot-slurping buddies didn't even put poor Tom's name on their cover!

"Operation Opera" is another sex-positive story (is this the special F&SF sex issue?), one that lampoons high-class prudery and hypocrisy.  It is also full of incidental jokes, and satirizes what we might call ethnocentrism or nationalistic chauvinism.

Drake is the the one-man crew of a ship sent on a diplomatic and investigatory mission to planet Geffon.  His is the second one-man mission to Geffon--the preliminary reports of his predecessor suggested the Geffonese were a very friendly and highly intelligent people whose culture revolved around the fine arts, but then he went insane; Drake is to find out what drove that guy batty.

As expected, the Geffonese are very welcoming to Drake, and spend day after day taking him to art galleries and to the opera and so forth.  After a week of this he has found no clues as to what drove the other scout insane, so HQ instructs him to video a tour of the city; maybe analysis of the film Earthside will provide some insight.  When the natives realize he has filmed some female Geffonese while they were posing nude, working as models for painters, Drake is sentenced to death for creating pornography--paintings of naked women are high art, but photos are vulgar and disgusting!  The Geffonese also explain that his predecessor was similarly convicted of a capital offence for hosting a tea party for the natives, because the tea had an intoxicating effect on the Geffonese and led drinkers to talk frankly about sex, breaking a severe cultural taboo.  Like that earlier scout, Drake is to be decapitated in the climactic scene of an opera (didn't the Romans do this sort of thing, integrate executions into theatrical performances?), and like his predecessor Drake manages to fight his way back to his ship and off the planet, and Drake is even sane enough to report what happened back to HQ.   

The final scenes of "Operation Opera" draw a parallel between Earth people and Geffonese.  The imperialistic and paternalistic Earth authorities lament that because the Geffonese are insane and do not know right from wrong they will not be able to shepherd them to a higher level of civilization.  Similarly, the snobbish and prudish leaders of Geffon sadly observe that both Earthers they have met have proved too immoral and mentally deranged to willingly submit to Geffonese tutelage and join their more sophisticated civilization.

This story is a little slight, but I think it actually works; the jokes are not laugh out loud funny and the points Godwin makes are banal, but neither the jokes nor the arguments are actually bad, and the story moves along pleasantly at a suitably brisk pace.  I'll say this story inches out of "acceptable" territory and just up into "good" territory.  

"The Spaceman Cometh" by Henry Gregor Felsen (1955)

Felsen, wikipedia is telling me, served in the Marine Corps during the Pacific War and wrote many books for kids and teens.  Whoever wrote this wikipedia page doesn't seem to have been a fan of Felsen's work, reporting that "He wrote about 60 books, many of them moralistically exploring the evils of drugs, sexism and racism."  

"The Spaceman Cometh" first appeared in a 1955 issue of Collier's, and Boucher tells us that Judith Merril, who it seems was always scouring mainstream publications for examples of writing that might be considered SF, pointed the story out to him.  "The Spaceman Cometh" would be reprinted in the Groff Conklin anthology 17 X Infinity in 1963 and a Scholastic anthology in 1979, Starstreak edited by Betty M. Owen, who has five SF anthologies from Scholastic listed at isfdb (the other four all seem to collect weird/horror stories.)

"The Spaceman Cometh" is a sort of joke story that uses aliens as foils to point out to us for the billionth time that Earth people are violent and dangerous.  This is the kind of thing Merril likes, banal left-wing whinging.  Thumbs down!

The narrator of "The Spaceman Cometh" is a space alien sent to Earth some ten or whatever years ago to scout us out in preparation for wiping us out.  In disguise as a human, he and an Earth woman fell in love, so he abandoned his mission and they married and settled down in Iowa to start a family.  A decade later she still doesn't know he is an alien.

As the story begins the narrator, a writer who is trying to draft a speech he has been asked to give, spots a space craft--one of his people has caught up with him.  He meets his fellow E.T. and strives to convince him that Earth people are harmless so there is no need to blow up the Earth.  The central joke of the story is that Iowa is full of hunters who shoot birds, teenagers who drive recklessly, and children who play war, and the second alien scout sees all these evidences of the violent nature of the human race within an hour of landing.  The same sort of jokes occur when the alien (also in disguise, of course) visits the narrator's house, where the narrator turns on the TV--all the TV shows are violent--and even has to spank his kids to get them to obey.

The twist ending is that the fearsomeness of Earth people, instead of scaring the second alien into calling for Earth's destruction, scares him into keeping Earth a secret from alien HQ.  The second little twist is that the narrator decides to make the topic of his speech the impossibility of space travel, I guess to help keep the violent people of Earth and his own people from ever meeting.

Besides being tired and obvious when it comes to both its ideology and its jokes, "The Spaceman Cometh" is not internally consistent.  At the start of the story we are told the narrator's people are violent genocidal imperialists who blow up all civilizations they encounter, then in the middle we are told they won't blow up Earth if Earth people are harmless, and finally we learn Earth will be spared because Earth people are so violent.  Similarly, there are jokes about how the narrator fails to recognize the new alien, whom he knew back home, implying that the aliens have distinctive individual  appearances, and then jokes about how all the aliens look exactly the same and it is odd to them that humans all look different.

Boucher, Merril and Felsen did the readers of F&SF a disservice with this one, and I am rejecting the defense that it is just a kids' story, because F&SF is supposed to be oh so sophisticated, as well as the defense that humor doesn't have to be internally consistent, it can be absurd, because I don't like absurdist humor--I like humor that reflects real human psychology.

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Putting aside the lame children's' story, today's exploration of an issue of F&SF has been a good experience; the Robert Bloch story is an above average example of his huge body of work, and the Tom Godwin story is the best Tom Godwin story I have read during the period of this blog's existence.  It feels good to go away from an interaction with another person feeling better about that person.

More short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.