Merril-recommended stories from '58: R Garrett and J E Gunn

Greetings, folks, and welcome back to another exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  Today we've got another blog post in which we cherry pick 1958 stories from the list of Honorable Mentions at the back of Judith Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume and I read and offer my dubious opinions of them.  Merril's list is alphabetical, and today we're sampling the "G"s, looking at stories by Randall Garrett and James E. Gunn. 

I tend to avoid Garrett as I think he's one of those guys who is always making totally lame jokes, but I just read some praise of Garrett from Barry Malzberg and so will give Merril's pick of Garrett's 1958 output a shot.  if we go to the videotape, we see that a year ago I read two Merril-approved 1956 stories by Garrett and liked one and not the other.

As for Gunn, in 2018 I read his sexist story "The Misogynist" and called it "acceptable entertainment."  In 2022 I read the three linked stories "The Unhappy Man," "The Naked Sky," and "Name Your Pleasure" that would go on to become Gunn's fix-up novel The Joy Makers and recommended the third in that list and said the other two were acceptable.  Last year I read Gunn's "Witches Must Burn" and also gave it an "acceptable" rating.

Looking at their mixed records, we see that today Garrett and Gunn both have a chance to rise in my estimation--how will these fixtures of the SF community fare before the cruel eye of Emm Pee Flog?

"Respectfully Mine" by Randall Garrett

"Respectfully Mine" is written in a chatty, colloquial voice and has the feeling of a tall tale--the narrator essentially tells you the story is conjecture and reminds you explicitly of how far from the truth are so many of the stories one hears about historical figures.  Garrett also immediately clues you in that this is a crime story with an epigraph from G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday and a mention on the story's first full page of Simon Templar.  

Our narrator describes to us one of the exploits of a famous criminal of a century ago, Leland Hale, an adventure that took place on a planet colonized by ethnic Germans three centuries ago, a planet on the edge of the human space civilization, one relatively poor and rarely visited by people from the rest of galactic society.  The planet is renowned for but one thing, as the place of birth of an artist unrecognized in his lifetime but later considered, galaxywide, as the peer of Leonardo and other immortal painters and sculptors.  This artist did his work early in the history of the human settlement on the planet.  

The plot revolves around the fact that evidence surfaces that a previously unknown work of this great artist may still be on the planet (all his other works were sold to offworlders.)  The planet is split into two polities which don't quite get along with each other (perhaps Garrett referring to the predicament of Germany after World War II.)  The northern of these states, purportedly the more sophisticated one, has a museum; in the celebrated artist's lifetime a time capsule was buried under the museum, and the new evidence just uncovered suggests there is a carving by the artist in the time capsule, which is due to open soon.  This sculpture will be worth a lot of money, and master criminal Leland Hale arrives on the planet, presumably with the aim of seizing the carving.  The interstellar police arrive shortly after him, their aim being to seize Hale.  The southern state then announces that they too have a (previously secret) time capsule which may also contain a sculpture produced by the famous artist; their capsule is set to open the day after the northern one.

We follow the four main characters--interstellar thief Hale, the head of the museum in the northern nation, a corrupt politician in the southern nation, and the interstellar cop commanding the force pursuing Hale--as the politico hires Hale to steal the sculpture in the northern time capsule so it can be placed in the bogus southern capsule and then revealed to great fanfare.  

In the end Hale gets paid, the northern museum director and the southern politico get humiliated, and the cop gets frustrated as Hale escapes.  There isn't much by way of thrills or climax--Garrett's narrator, living 100 years after the events described, just straightforwardly explains how Hale swindled everybody.

This story of a conman in a galactic civilization where some guys have private space yachts reminds me in its content of things written by Jack Vance, but Vance has a good writing style, Vance is actually funny, and Vance is also adept at writing tense and disturbing scenes of action and violence.  Garrett, at least here, doesn't deliver the thrills and chills or the verbal entertainment that Vance often does.  We'll judge "Respectfully Mine" merely acceptable.

"Respectfully Mine" is one of three Hale stories, and has been reprinted recently (2011 is recent, right?) along with its two fellows in a collection of the Hale tales.

"The Immortals" by James E. Gunn

Merril put her stamp of approval on three 1958 stories by Gunn, and here we have the first, "The Immortals," which premiered in an anthology edited by Merril's second husband, Frederik Pohl, Star Science Fiction #4.  (Pohl and Merril were married from 1948 to 1952; Pohl had two more wives ahead of him, but I don't think Merril married again.)  "The Immortals" has been printed time and again; maybe it is fair to say that it is one of Gunn's most successful works, that it is a good representative of his work.  "The Immortals" is also, it appears, one of four stories about the same doctor, Russell Pearce, all of which appear in a collection entitled The Immortals.

(I'm reading "The Immortals" in Isaac Asimov Presents the Great Science Fiction Stories: 20, in which Asimov tells us that "utopia" is "from Greek words meaning 'good place,'" even though I have always heard it was from Greek words meaning "no place.")

It is the dystopian future of almost ubiquitous disease, of mass crime, of widespread terrorism.  The cities are surrounded by electrified walls, and between them lurk roving bands of murderers.  The common people, many of whom are deformed, sell their blood to the elite establishment for use in medical experiments--criminals sell the heads and organs of their victims to the upper crust for the same use!  A small number of people are afforded access to immortality treatments as a reward for their service to the ruling class, and Dr. Harry Elliott, a physician, is one of those men pursuing such a boon.

Today, after a terrorist attack strikes the hospital where Elliott works, Elliott is given a secret mission!  The city has been out of contact with the governor for three weeks!  The phonelines are all cut!  The airwaves are jammed!  Somebody has to get a message to the governor!  An armed convoy will be ambushed, so Elliott has to disguise himself as a common citizen, leaving behind his nose filters and defensive weapons and medical paraphernalia, and walk--on his own two feet!--to the governor's mansion forty miles away!  And he has to bring with him Marla, a pretty 13-year-old girl, a seven-year old boy named Christopher, and a sort of folk healer, the blind and elderly Russell Pearce, who, it turns out despite Elliott's skepticism, has psychic abilities that enable him to diagnose people and even cure people's ailments just by touching them!  Gunn's story suggests that medical science and the germ theory of disease are a scam; among the pearls of wisdom we are gifted in Pearce's voice are that people's "bodies want to heal themselves...but our minds give counter-orders and death-instructions," "Germs can't hurt you unless you want them to" and "Aging is not a physical disease; it is mental."

Elliott's little party is almost wiped out by the headhunters who run a motel that is a death trap, but luckily Marla and Christopher (who also seems to have psychic powers) know what member of the elite Elliott does not--how to avoid such traps.  Pearce heals Elliott's wounds and utters gnomic wisdom.  The girl is captured by a band of "squires" who have motorized unicycles and jet-powered hang gliders and Elliott rescues her in an unconvincing scene in which he uses a machine pistol to cause a minor avalanche instead of just gunning down the bad guys.  Then Elliott is paralyzed by a guy who sells live but inert bodies to hospitals to serve as spare parts; Elliott's companions rescue him.  Marla turns out to be one of the immortals whose blood is the source of the drugs that confer immortality on others, a 17-year-old who just looks 13, and a transfusion of her super blood ends Elliott's paralysis.  I have to admit, it wasn't clear to me until this part of the story, like 40 pages into its 52-page length, that some people were born with immortality; maybe that was clear in the earlier stories in this series and Gunn assumed readers in 1958 would remember the '55 and '57 stories. 

(I'll note here that the way a--physically if not intellectually or chronologically-- 13-year-old girl is a sex object for both the villains and the hero will perhaps raise eyebrows.)

Gunn also waits until the end of the story to explain explicitly the structure of this feudal society in which the governor is a baron for life who resides in a fortress behind a piranha-stocked moat and the squires are his feudatories, rewarded for their allegiance with monthly injections of the immortality drug.  I still don't really understand who exactly are the terrorists who jam transmissions and cut phone lines and stop convoys between the city and the governor's mansion and bomb hospitals from their helicopters--squires from some other barony?  The squires who kidnap and plan to rape or dismember for parts the apparently 13-year-old Marla must be squires of the governor, but it can't be the governor's own vassals who are stopping the convoys to his mansion, can it?

The Governor turns out to be an immensely fat man, essentially immobile, who thinks of himself as a god.  Marla is his daughter, and the guv wants to have sex with her in hopes of creating more of the immortals who are the source of the immortality drug.  In the climactic fight Pearce reveals that he is also immortal, but not through heredity or blood transfusions or elixirs, just force of will--I guess there are three (four?) ways to become immortal in this story.  Pearce's apparent decrepitude is a sham--he transforms his body before the governor's eyes into that of a thirty-year-old.  Then Elliott, who has entered the guv's sanctum by disguising himself as Marla(?), kills the governor by throwing a lariat around his neck and strangling him--we are told Elliott has never thrown a lariat before, but he scores a bullseye in one try today.  As the story ends I guess we are supposed to expect that now everyone in the world will have a chance to be healthy and immortal.

The apparent ideology or philosophy of this story, including the idea that advances in medical technique and technology have made public health worse, is kind of stupid and certainly annoying, and the action and suspense scenes are sort of ridiculous, like something out of a cartoon.  Am I supposed to take this story seriously, or is it just a broad satire of class dynamics and economic inequality, a bitter gripe that rich people can afford better stuff than poor people?

I guess I'll call this barely acceptable--the more I think about it, though, the worse it seems.  I guess the over-the-top class envy politics of "The Immortals" appealed to socialists Judith Merril and Fred Pohl; the adventure elements, world-building and the effort to depict a growing relationship between Elliott and Marla are pretty mediocre.  One thing I can say conclusively--I'm not reading any more stories in the saga of Russell Pearce, even if I love the other two Gunn stories I am reading today.

"Powder Keg" by James E. Gunn

James Gunn must have been a big draw in 1958--"Powder Keg" was the cover story of the issue of If in which it appeared.  And it is another long one, like 34 pages, and like "The Immortals" it is the final installment of a series, what isfdb is calling the Amos Danton series (three stories), which is a component of the "Station in Space Universe" series (two additional stories for a total of five.)  Let's hope this is better than "The Immortals."

It is the future of nuclear proliferation!  Every country has atomic weapons, even the piddling little ones!  Scary!  America has a slight edge, a space station that tries to keep an eye on everybody and is capable--we hope--of bombing into oblivion anybody who misbehaves, but the station has been up there for like twenty years and in the interim many nations have moved their factories and missile facilities underground where they are essentially invisible, limiting the effectiveness of the station.  

Our protagonist for this caper is Captain Lloyd Phillips, an Air Force shrink!  The top Air Force general, Ashley, summons Philsy boy to his office deep under the Pentagon to give him a special assignment.  The general fears the crew of the space station may have been driven insane by the stress of the job and of being away from Earth for years at a time (yeah, this is reminiscent of Kris Neville's 1949 "Cold War.")  Ashley wants Phillips to go up there and evaluate the psychology of the crew; Phillips just assumes the men up there are unstable and that he will doubtlessly return with a recommendation that the station be shut down, and that is what Ashley wants.  The general suggests that while he is up there Phil might check out the rumors that the station crew is undertaking some major construction project on the side of the station that can't be seen from Earth.

This is a great job for Phillips, as he is fascinated by the psychology and sociology of space travel: why do individual men choose to run the terrible risks and suffer the life-shortening effects of being in space?; and why does our society devote to the space program such a volume of resources that could be more profitably spent on Earth?

Gunn in this story takes psychology seriously, accepting jazz like "sublimation" as totally legit and presenting psychology as a real science like biology or astronomy that is able to explain the world and make reliable predictions.  Phillips even compares people who are skeptical of the science of psychology to illiterates who fear books.  Sick burn!

Phillips doesn't just reserve his mad psychoanalytic skillz for the peeps up in orbit--he wields them on that REMF Ashely as well!  Looking at Ashley's file (a real psychologist can psychoanalyze you just by reading about you!) before leaving Earth, he sees the general suffers from space sickness that has made him unable to leave this big blue marble; Phillips determines that the general is pursuing the shutting down of the space station due to subconscious envy of those who can go to space, due to a need to see space flight as a useless waste of time; of course, Phillips agrees with Ashley that the station should be shut down, that the space program is a dead end and a waste of money, that Man Belongs On Earth, for his own reasons that he considers rational.

Once on the station, Phillips diagnoses all the crewmen except for the commander, Colonel Amos Danton.  All the personnel hate the shrink because they love the station and their commander Danton, and they are aware Phil is here looking for an excuse for Ashley to close down the station.  Phillip's method is to allow the men to fidget with "Rorschach clay" while he interviews them.  The shapes they form in the clay are a door to the unconscious and subconscious, providing surefire indications of their neuroses and psychopathologies--by looking at the blobs he leaves behind, Phillips can tell if a man is a homosexual, a sadist, a paranoid, or whatever.  Phil concludes that everyone on the station is mentally ill (he thinks Danton is paranoid just from talking to him) and the station should be shut down because any one of them could snap at any moment and bomb Earth, but the clay blob analysis is his only evidence--to all outward appearance, morale on the station is high and the men are doing a sterling job of maintaining the station's many mechanical and electronic systems.  Ordinary people without psychological training won't trust blob analysis--Phil needs more concrete evidence to convince the mundanes!

Finally, Phillips realizes that the station crew is falling down on the job when it comes to one facet of their duty--watching for enemy activity on Earth and keeping the bombs ready for retaliatory strikes!  When he pays a visit to the enlisted man who is supposed to be monitoring activity on Earth he finds this joker taking a nap!  And when he is alerted, Colonel Danton doesn't care!  The whole point of the station is to serve as an early warning system and a deterrent, and Danton is failing to perform either function, so the station is useless!

We get some action scenes as a saboteur sent to the station by Ashley tries to wreck the place but is foiled; this crisis occasions the story's big revelation, that--there are no retaliatory bombs!  Danton and his men have repurposed the missiles to build a spaceship with which to travel to Mars!  Danton knew years ago that the responsibility of commanding the space missiles was too much for anybody to handle, and came up with his own theory of how to ease the pressure of the powder keg that is Earth--by exploring a new frontier!  Danton unleashes some serious metaphors: 1) powder only explodes dangerously if contained--if allowed to spread out freely it just creates pretty flashes; and 2) the human race is like the fish of prehistoric days--to grow and thrive some people must evolve into amphibians who can live outside the Earth the same way some fish evolved to walk on land.  Danton's talk is pretty persuasive, and Phil is fully convinced when Danton picks up the clay and produces a beautiful sculpture that proves not only that he is not paranoid, but that he is a genius!  

Phillips' beliefs do a 180; he realizes that mankind's destiny is to explore space, that space is where mankind's problems will be solved, and that he is one of those amphibians.  He joins the illegal Mars expedition wholeheartedly.

While in structure "Powder Keg" is similar to "The Immortals"--a guy is sent on a mission by one strata of society and meets a sort of heroic figure and joins that hero in rebelling against the ruling class and causing a paradigm shift--"Powder Keg" is better than "The Immortals" in every possible way.  The action scenes are not silly, but believable and appropriate.  The social commentary is not broad and absurd and the "world-building" is not vague and unbelievable; instead everything is easy to grasp and easily creditable.  All the twists and turns of the plot are foreshadowed in a way that helps make them satisfying and believable to the reader--nothing just "comes out of nowhere" but follows logically from what came before.  The most prominent speculative science in the story--the Rorschach clay--while impossible to take seriously, is not so offensively stupid as what was going on in "The Immortals," and all the stuff about space ships and space suits and dealing with meteors and recycling the air is interesting and believable.  

Thumbs up for "Powder Keg."  Presumably Merril liked the way the story suggests U. S. military personnel should mutiny against the elected government of the United States and disrupt America's deterrent against communist attack, but I personally like the story's optimism about space travel and the ability of the human race to explore and conquer new frontiers.

It seems that "Powder Keg" has only ever been reprinted in Gunn collections of the Amos Danton stories or the entire Space Station series, including a German edition with a very fun but hilariously inappropriate Michael Whelan killer-bikini-babe cover that originally appeared on a DAW paperback edition of a C. J. Cherryh novel.

"Deadly Silence" by James E. Gunn

  

Another long cover story, this one for Fantastic Universe, looms before us--advertised as a novel, "Deadly Silence" takes up over 50 damn pages.  Wow!  This better be good!  Uh oh!  It seems like this one has never been reprinted in English.  Hopefully the jungen und madchen over in Deutschland who reprinted this thing in 1970 knew what they were about.

"Deadly Silence" is one of those stories, like A. E. van Vogt's Isher stories and Jack Williamson's Humanoids tales, in which a mysterious store opens in town and it disrupts the social order.  Our hero is Kevin Gregg, a freelance writer of fact articles in his early thirties, a naval veteran of the Pacific War who can't stand noise, perhaps because it reminds him of the sound of the anti-aircraft fire of the carrier he served aboard, triggering memories of attacking Japanese aircraft.  He dreads leaving his apartment because the city noise drives him to distraction, but he does venture forth sometimes to see his shrink and to chat at the bar with his pal, the overweight scientist/engineer Hugh Pryor, and talk over ideas for articles.

One day Gregg and Pryor discover a new store, one that sells only one product: a pocket-sized device that, apparently by projecting "cancelling vibrations," creates a zone of silence six feet in radius around itself.  Gregg join the throngs of people who buy one, and immediately falls in love with the pretty girl manning the counter.  She steadfastly rebuffs all Gregg's efforts to learn anything about her or about the device, which is almost indestructible and is powered in some undetectable, but infallible, fashion.

Soon everybody in town has a Silencer and uses it all the time.  Here we have one of the many aspects of Gunn's story here that isn't very believable and really limits the reader's ability to suspend disbelief.  Gunn seems to think people hate noise and love silence, and maybe Gunn does, and it certainly makes sense that war veteran Gregg does, but my suspicion is that many people actually hate silence--everywhere I go people are listening to music or watching TV or yapping on their phones, and unless I am trying to read or write, I am much the same--driving the car I listen to podcasts and rock music and doing the housework I watch Italian crime movies and British horror movies.  Rather than finding silence peaceful and beautiful, I suspect people in the main find silence oppressive and sad.      

Anyway, Gunn dramatizes his speculations on the effect on American society of a mass marketed device that radically dampens sound.  Like "The Immortals," "Deadly Silence" has elements of broad satire and several somewhat silly action scenes.  A target of Gunn's satire is advertising, which Gunn credits with the success of the American economy and blames for America's high suicide rate (Gunn says the US suicide rate is the highest in the world, which I seriously doubt was the case when he wrote it and am quite confident is not the case now) and offers us a goofy caricature of a capitalist grappling with the fact that people everywhere are using the Silencer to escape advertisements.  Gregg walks down the street and in the space of minutes witnesses multiple extravagant fatal accidents that occur because drivers and pedestrians can't hear sirens or warnings.  Murderers and thieves use the device to sneak up on people and to render alarms useless and cries for aid fruitless, and when it becomes clear that committing crime has become easy, people who were previously too scared to steal or murder begin to indulge their natural evil proclivities, leading to a rise in murder of 1000% and of burglary to the tune of 10,000%.  (This is where I agree with Gunn, that a large proportion of people would love to steal, rape and murder, and only refrain from doing so out of fear of being harmed in a fight with their proposed victim or punished by the community or the state.)  

Gregg publishes articles about the Silencers, but he needs more info, so he leans hard on his crush, the salesgirl, trying to get her to divulge the identity of her employer and the manufacturer of the Silencers.  He harangues the attractive young woman with talk of how the Silencers are destabilizing our society by causing accidents, facilitating crime, and severely diminishing economic activity by immunizing people to the advertising that drives sales and thus employment.  When he doesn't get anything from her, he starts investigating trucking companies to see who is shipping the Silencers to the stores.  You'd think this would be easy to figure out by just watching the stores and seeing what truck shows up, but instead Gregg starts visiting trucking companies to ask questions.

Like "The Immortals," you can't take the details of the plot of this story seriously--in real life running a high profile retail business in a city without the government knowing all about every aspect of it would be impossible thanks to business law and tax regulations--the owners and/or renters of the buildings in which the shop girls work, and the shop girls themselves, have to fill out all sorts of legal forms and tax forms and pay all sorts of taxes and so who owns the stores and built the devices would be impossible to keep secret from anybody who took time to find it out, and every city politician and bureaucrat, many federal pols and bureaucrats, and every journalist, would have almost irresistible incentives to seek out this data.  Criticisms like this weigh more heavily on Gunn's "Deadly Silence" than they do van Vogt's Isher stories or Williamson's Humanoids stories because those 1940s stories are set in a far future fictional milieu  and have some of the feeling of a myth or fairy tale, while Gunn makes it very clear that  "Deadly Silence" is set in the real life mid-1950s United States, going so far as to name-check J. Edgar Hoover and describe Gregg's service in World War II.

Anyway, Gregg figures out what trucking company is moving the Silencers, and he sneaks into the back of one of the trucks.  To his amazement, the pretty sales woman is also hiding in the back of this truck!  They fight, and he overpowers her and forces her to sit on his lap during the long silent ride; he even  kisses her against her will.  I wasn't expecting this sort of hubba hubba BDSM content, but it certainly livens up the somewhat tedious story a bit.

When the truck stops Gregg gets out to find he is at some factory; the sales clerk he is so crazy about escapes him but he hides behind a bush to spy on the factory anyway.  He gets shot by someone with a ray gun, and wakes up in the custody not of the makers of the Silencers but of the FBI, whose agents were also watching the factory and scared off whoever it was who stunned Gregg.  The FBI men don't know much more about the Silencers than does Gregg, though they are certain that the Soviet Union is not the source of the devices--they tell Gregg that, in fact, the Eastern Blo's communist masters are losing control because the ordinary people there have also acquired the Silencers.

Gregg pays a visit to his shrink, who professes to not believe Gregg's story of being shot with a high-tech stun gun and picked up by the FBI.  On his way down to the street Gregg witnesses something alarming on the elevator--a man's ear falls off and he picks it up off the floor and reattaches it; Gregg realizes if it isn't the USSR making the Silencers it must be space aliens trying to soften up Earth for conquest!  Aliens who don't have ears and so must be deaf!  Aliens who must communicate via telepathy!  Gregg then confronts the shop girl a third time.  She says she was in the truck spying on the makers of the Silencers herself, and Gregg convinces her she is employed by aliens bent on conquering the Earth and should join him in the resistance group led by Gregg's scientist friend Pryor.

Gregg has a brainwave--his shrink must be an alien!  Gregg dashes over to the therapist's office, where the aliens capture him.  As villains do all the time in fiction, the invaders provide their prisoner with fun information; for example, many aliens doing reconnaissance on Earth are posing as psychologists, just the sort of person to whom people are willing to tell all their secrets--in fact, the aliens have largely plotted their takeover based on Gregg's specific psychology, considering Gregg to be "the epitomized neurosis of human society"!  Minutes later Gregg is rescued by the same FBI people who saved him last time in another of Gunn's odd over-the-top action scenes.

Having been discovered, the aliens begin their invasion in earnest, spherical craft landing in all the major cities and deploying armored vehicles.  The aliens take the urban areas, but human resistance endures in the countryside.  Gregg, Pryor, the shop girl and various other minor characters I haven't named play roles in the resistance, firing off bazookas and developing high tech countermeasures and so on.  In a sort of switcheroo ending, Pryor invents a device that projects discordant noise on the wavelength of the aliens' telepathy--this device will work on the aliens in the same way the Silencer works on humans.  As the story ends, a long war lies ahead, but we can assume humanity will win and Gregg and the shop girl will be married.

"Deadly Silence"'s 50+ pages feels quite long, in part because the narrative is not particularly entertaining and does not flow smoothly.  Many scenes feel inconclusive or even extraneous, feel as if they go nowhere and fail to move the plot along.  Gregg goes out looking for clues, then ends up back at his apartment or the shrink's office with little to show for his expeditions.  The narrative doesn't feel like it goes from A to B to C to D, but like it goes from A to B to A to C to A to D.  "Deadly Silence" also feels long because the conventional text is regularly interrupted by newspaper clippings describing representative events which Gregg did not witness, like crimes committed using the Silencer and the alien landing, as well as stuff that Gregg himself experienced--we learn the tale of the ear on the elevator by reading a newspaper column about it for which Gregg was the source.  Why?

Exploring the consequences of a device that causes silence, and how an intelligent race that has no sense of hearing might get along, are not bad ideas, but Gunn embeds these ideas in long boring story with a poor structure and poor action and human drama elements, and some of the other science components of the story are hard to take.  There are animals that can hear without external earlobes, for example.  And in the very start of the story we hear that Pryor has built a "telepathy machine" but he doesn't know whether it is working, or even whether it is a transmitter or a receiver.  This is hard to get your mind around and seems more like a joke than anything serious, adding to the many factors that make suspending disbelief a challenge when reading "Deadly Silence."

I'm wrestling with whether or not "Deadly Silence" is worse than "The Immortals."  "Deadly Silence" feels longer and slower, and its narrative is less coherent and smooth, but the satire and action scenes are not quite so bad as those in "The Immortals."  We'll just say that both of these stories are "barely acceptable," shrug our shoulders at the fact that one is celebrated and one is forgotten, and move on with our lives.

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Cripes, this is a long blog post.  It feels like ages ago that I was reading those short Malzberg pieces.  I shouldn't cram four stories into a single blog post when most of them are over 30 or 50 pages long.  Note to self!

Gunn's "Powder Keg" is the big winner today; the other stories are like filler pieces, Gunn's two weak pieces like filler stories that have metastasized to monstrous proportions.  Don't expect to hear anything about Randall Garrett or James E. Gunn for a while here at MPorcius Fiction Log; what you can expect is more Barry Malzberg, more World War II era Weird Tales, and I think more crime from Fredric Brown.