The Witch Tree by Frank Belknap Long

There were five tall windows through which reddening sunlight was streaming, and about twenty articles of furniture, ranging from straight-backed chairs with ornately carved arms, upholstered in purple velvet, to wide-topped circular tables with dull walnut finishes, and settees which in spite of sturdy-looking legs still seemed about ready to collapse.  There was one large sofa, a highboy mounted on what looked like a revolving base and a baby grand piano, the top of which had seemingly gone undusted for all of the fifty years that the house had been boarded up.  

Shame on you, Professor Hilliard, Joan thought.  What kind of housekeeper are you?  Then she remembered how neat Barbara was and how, as a rule, she never allowed dust to accumulate anywhere and a wave of dismay swept over her.  If Barbara had let the piano remain as it was, it strongly suggested that the worst of her fears had been justified: Barbara must have been too frightened to give the piano a thought. 

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading Frank Belknap Long.  We just read three stories by Long that appeared in Weird Tales, one each from the decades of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, and they were not bad.  Today we read a Magnum Gothic Original printed in 1971--the year of my birth!--in large type on non-glare paper, The Witch Tree, credited to Lyda Belknap Long, a transparent pseudonym presumably designed to attract the readers of Gothic romances: women.  Long's wife's name was Lyda Alco Long, but according to wikipedia there is no reason to believe Mrs. Long had any role in the writing this novel, one of nine Gothics that Long produced to help make ends meet.  I'm actually reading a physical book this time, having bought a copy of The Witch Tree at Wonder Book back in December of 2022.

I've found much of Long's output to be poor, including one of his most celebrated works, The Horror from the Hills, but there are some gems in there as well, and I am curious about the career of a man responsible for such a large body of work that spanned so long a period and who was so closely associated with H. P. Lovecraft.  So I went into this reading experience with the expectation that it would not be good but with the hope that it might be interesting.

What I found was that The Witch Tree is quite bad and not very interesting.  The novel is poorly written when it comes to pacing, style, and structure, with page after page of superfluous or irrelevant descriptions and philosophic or psychological musings and lots of annoying literary tics that make each sentence two or three times as long as it need be and each scene twice as many paragraphs long as it need be.  A guy doesn't say "You look like your sister!" he says, "There are some folks who would say you and your sister look enough alike to be identical twins.....But I won't, because the resemblance just isn't that close.  But if Henry hadn't told me I'd have known straight off you had to be closely related."  Long describes in painstaking but dust dry detail locations in which nothing happens and which the characters never visit again.  He introduces characters who never reappear.  He exhaustingly describes people's psychological states and thought processes, whether or not the decision they are trying to make or the puzzle they are trying to figure out is interesting or important, bogging the narrative down on totally extraneous matter.  

As for the plot, very little happens and the main character is a spectator to all of it, making no significant decisions and taking no consequential actions.  A young woman leaves New York City (nobody follows my advice that you should never leave New York City--even I didn't follow it) and goes to an island off the Carolinas to help a professor do research on witches in the island's only house.  When her sister, our main character, gets worried about her a few weeks later she goes to the island herself to investigate.  Our heroine spends her time on the island having boring conversations, stumbling upon dead bodies, and fainting.  She only ever speaks to each other character in the novel once, so there is no building of relationships.  Finally, in the last 30 pages of text (The Witch Tree's 174 page count consists of like 160 pages of text, what with all the blank pages between chapters and the fact the story begins on page 7) our heroine is tied up to sacrificed to the Devil, to join the Devil as one of his brides!  The police arrive and save her, and the story ends with our heroine having accomplished almost nothing--it wasn't she who found her sister, she didn't figure out who the lead Satanist was, nor did she play any contributory role in the destruction of the Satanic cult.  Well, she did make a new boyfriend, which is I guess what counts.   

So, thumbs down for The Witch Tree, which has nothing to recommend it.  But don't think this terrible specimen of Long's work is going to put me off reading more fiction by Long--hell, it is not even going to put me off reading more of Long's gothic romances!  See you next time, gluttons for punishment!

If you are truly curious about The Witch Tree, read on for my blow by blow description of this sad piece of work, including examples of the problems I cite above and another sample of Long's regrettable prose.

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Off the coast of the Carolinas lies Hawk Island, upon which sits an eighteenth century house.  We readers soon learn that this island and house are considered cursed, that everyone who has lived there has suffered death from a strange disease or simply disappeared.

The Witch Tree has sixteen chapters and a prologue.  In the prologue a beautiful woman, fear-stricken, her clothes plastered to her slender body, is passing through a seaside village at night, having swum from Hawk Island to the mainland.  She then inexplicably turns around, heading back towards the sea, and is met by a man in a cloak carrying a five-foot high cross with a small animal crucified on it.  He grabs the girl and drags her off; he drops the cross but his assistant, a little hunchback, picks it up.

In Chapter One we meet Joan Rondon, who has arrived in the Carolinas with the intention of seeing her sister, Barbara, who is staying on Hawk Island.  Chapter One is occupied by Joan's conversation with the village pharmacist, who tells her all about the rumors of the island and how a friend of his just recently disappeared there.  Chapter Two flashes back some three weeks to New York City, Frank Belknap Long's lifelong home and the home of your humble blogger for over ten years.  Joan and Barbara live in a brownstone they inherited, and Barbara is packing to go to Hawk Island to do research on witchcraft with her boyfriend Richard.  Barbara and Richard's professor, the wealthy Dr. Hilliard, just bought the house on Hawk Island and B&R will be his assistants.  Over the following three weeks, a series of letters and brief phone calls convince Joan that Barbara is in some kind of trouble she won't or can't specify, and that is why Joan is now trying to get to Hawk Island.  

Chapter Two also includes a section headed "INTERMEZZO" in which we witness the start of a Satanic ritual involving a crucified black calf and a beautiful bound woman in white--Satan's bride!  I thought it an odd choice for Long to tell us right out that these were Satanists instead of letting us figure it out ourselves or letting a sympathetic character discover it in a shocking moment.  This overabundance of information is particularly surprising because, in the Prologue and Intermezzo, Long doesn't tell us the name of the woman, allowing us to believe it is Barbara but leaving open the possibility the scenes depict the fate of some other woman or are foreshadowing Joan's own fate.  

Chapter Three covers Joan's ferry ride to the island.  The guy operating the ferry tells her a little about the seven people living on the island--Hilliard; Barbara; Richard; the man Hilliard bought the island from, Winston; a second professor, old, famous and impecunious, Dr. Reyher; and two servants, a mysterious young woman and her taciturn uncle.  Long provides lots of descriptions of the ferry (which does not figure in the story again) and the island and musings about the sea ("...the sea was so vast and boundless that it dwarfed all human tribulations....Human tragedies passed, but the sea remained generation after generation....") that I guess are intended to build atmosphere or maybe to just run up the word count.

In Chapter Four we get more long romantic descriptions of natural phenomena and some bizarre metaphors as Joan walks along the beach of Hawk Island, looking for the stairway up the cliff to the house and getting distracted by seaside caves Long repeatedly likens to pagodas.  (How a cave is like a pagoda, I don't know, and I just looked at like a hundred images of pagodas online--metaphors are supposed to give you a sharper, more clear understanding of an image or phenomena, but Long's, way too often, obscure rather than enhance a reader's understanding.)  Drawn by some irresistible compulsion, Joan enters a cave and spots a mysterious light; investigating it, she finds deep inside the cave the mangled corpse of a man with a mark on his chest she recognizes as "the brand of Satan himself!"

Joan runs out of the cave, meets a mysterious man, and faints.  In Chapter Five she wakes up in a room she assumes is inside the only house on Hawk Island, and wonders if the mysterious man was the ghost of the dead man she had just discovered.  We get a multi-page description of the room and the house and its furniture, including quotes from Hilliard recorded in Barbara's letters to Joan, as well as discussions of Joan's fear and determination to overcome it, including some groan-inducing psychobabble expressed with mixed metaphors:

There were hidden reserves of courage in everyone, unsuspected until some terrible inward shattering took place and there was only one road to survival left.  The fragments must be pieced together and formed into a shield.

A chronic problem in Long's writing is the lack of a unity of purpose in a paragraph or section--if you want us to think Joan is scared, and if you want us to share her fear, don't tell us she is thinking about a boring letter from her sister about furniture and then spend two paragraphs quoting the letter.  If she was really scared she wouldn't be thinking about furniture, and if you want to instill fear in your readers, spend a single line saying some crap like "in the shadows of the dark room the chairs and wardrobe took on the aspect of grim specters," don't spend a page itemizing the furniture and explaining why in the 20th century an 18th-century house has 19th-century furniture.

Chapter Six covers Joan's conversation with John Winston, the previous owner of the Island and house, the man who rescued her when she fled from the cave, totally out of her mind.  Joan thinks he's as handsome as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, which I guess is a sort of urtext for readers of Gothic romances, the way "Tower of the Elephant" and Lord of the Rings are touchstones for Dungeons and Dragons kids.  Winston doesn't believe in the supernatural and says Joan must have hallucinated the Devil's Mark on the corpse she found, and also mentions for the first time in the novel the tree, mentioned in the title, that the house was built around and whose dead trunk can be seen in one of the rooms.  After spending time on such small talk, Winston says that Barbara has been missing since last night and the sheriff and thirty men from the village have been looking for her.  I groaned anew when I read this because if such an event was taking place why didn't the pharmacist or the ferry boatman mention it?

In Chapter Seven we get a detailed description of Joan's thought processes as she tries to figure out when Winston, who has gone to find the sheriff to report the body Joan found, will return, and then weighs whether or not to leave the guest room she is in.  She eventually leaves the room and we get lots of description of the layout of the house and of its furniture.  Finally, Joan searches Barbara's room and finds a clue--hidden documents--and Long lays a joke on us that made me laugh--Joan wonders if the documents are "an application to be enrolled in Satan's service."

Richard appears and talks to Joan in Chapter Eight; this conversation raises the possibility that Joan has a crush on Richard, but otherwise the two just reiterate stuff we already know.  After embracing Richard with relief in Chapter Eight, in Chapter Nine Joan finds reasons to suspect him, but still hands over the documents she found.  He tells her it is a psychiatric diagnosis--that of an incurable madman!  And the madman's name has been obscured!  Richard tells Joan reading the document will just upset her, and she decides to not read it, and then when he hears a signal from the sheriff outside he tells her not to come with him as he goes to see the sheriff, and she agrees to that, too.  What can you say about a book in which the main character deliberately avoids doing things that might be interesting for the reader?

Joan falls asleep in Barbara's room but wakes in Chapter Ten up to hear two men whom she thinks must be Hilliard and Reyher (even though she hasn't seen either of them yet) have some argument just outside the door.  Reyher wants to tell the sheriff something and Hilliard doesn't want him to do so and it sounds like Prof H beats up Prof R and drags him off.  In Chapter Eleven Joan, looking for Reyher and Hilliard, stumbles on the room in which one can see the Witch Tree that the house was built around two hundred years ago.  Hanging from the tree is Reyher, a noose around his neck!  Long on the one hand tries to convince us that Joan is terrified, but on the other details her thought processes as she tries to figure out if that was really Reyher's voice she heard, if maybe Hilliard was putting on an act for her benefit, and how the two men could have vanished from the corridor so quickly.

In Chapter Twelve the servants mentioned way back in Chapter Three make their first appearance on stage as they burst into the Witch Tree room, accompanied by a third figure, a man in hooded cloak that conceals his face.  A theme of the next few chapters is Joan's pondering the identity of the cloaked man; presumably it is Hilliard, Winston or Richard.   The young woman, who is 22 but looks 16 (hubba hubba), is wearing a French maid's outfit (hubba hubba.)  She and her uncle snatch Joan, and our heroine has horrifying visions, and then her captors prick her with a miniature pitchfork; the venom on this odd item knocks Joan unconscious, and she is carried off.

Chapter Thirteen starts with Joan's nightmare of being back home in NYC with Barbara and finding Barbara dead, her head crushed by a falling chandelier.  Joan wakes up to find herself bound, on the ground, outside beneath the stars.  She can hear the three Satanists who caught her in the Witch tree room having a petty squabble about whether the sexy French maid should go back to the house to make sure they didn't leave any clues behind and then a discussion of various facets of their scheme to fake Reyher's suicide and frame him for a murder, among them an argument over whether it had been wise to hang Reyher from the Witch Tree instead of a tree out in the woods.  When they realize Joan is awake the Satanists drug her.

Chapters Five, Ten and Thirteen saw Joan waking up in some unexpected place, and Chapter Fourteen continues the tradition.  After a three-page nightmare of being on a sailing ship in a storm, Joan wakes up to find she is still bound and now laying on a stone altar in a cave.  There is some discussion among the Satanists about whether they should put Joan in some fancy outfit, but they decide to keep her in what she wore to the island.  In Chapter Fifteen the ceremony begins, featuring over a dozen extras clad in animals skins, dancing away to flute music.  The uncle of the French maid is mere seconds from plunging a knife into Joan and making her one of Satan's brides when the sheriff, Winston, and a bunch of guys burst into the cave, shoot several Satanists, and capture the rest.  Among the dead are the uncle guy and the man in the hooded cloak, who Joan is shocked to find is Richard, Barbara's boyfriend!

Chapter Sixteen does some explaining and ties up some loose ends.  Barbara is dead--some other character found her body, we are not told who did this or where the body was or what condition it was in or anything potentially interesting like that.  Winston does some psychoanalyzing of Richard, who it turns out was the real legitimate heir to the house, and of Hilliard, who was manipulated by Richard.  We learn the truth of the document and of the conversation Joan heard through Barbara's door (a recording played to scare Joan.)  It is made clear that the supernatural is not real, though we don't get a rational explanation for Barbara's turning around after having escaped in the prologue nor for the light in the cave that directed Joan to the body.  As the story ends we can see that Joan and Winston are an item.  The End.

Frank Belknap Long: "You Can't Kill a Ghost," "Escape from Tomorrow," and "He Came at Dusk"

Looking over the bibliography of Frank Belknap Long, one of the more unusual characters whom we have talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log, I noticed that, in 1995, Necronomicon Press put out a 23-page pamphlet of three "previously unreprinted" Long stories from Weird Tales under the title Escape from Tomorrow.  Let's check out these stories in their original WT printings via the magic of the internet archive.

"You Can't Kill a Ghost" (1928)

"You Can't Kill a Ghost" debuted in an issue of Weird Tales that includes an installment of Edmond Hamilton's space opera "Crashing Sun," Tennessee Williams' "The Vengeance of Nitocris," and Robert E. Howard's story of Solomon Kane, "Red Shadows."  Wow, an important issue!  (We blogged about "Crashing Suns" and "The Vengeance of Nitocris" years ago; I read the Kane stories years before this blog appeared as if out of some nightmare realm and I don't think I have blogged about any of them--rereading Solomon Kane is another reading project I should add to the list that I may never get to.)

So much of Long's work is shoddy and poorly written that the quite competent writing of "You Can't Kill a Ghost" surprised me a little.  The plot is something of a trifle, though.  Like so many short stories, our first-person narrator is not the main character of the actual story--he is just telling us a story told to him by the real main character, who essentially becomes the first-person narrator.

The adventurer in question is a young American writer, a journalist, who got drunk while in Haiti and put on military clothes and acted in such a way that the government thought him a rebel or revolutionary and threw him in prison.  The joke that is the foundation and leitmotif of this story is that revolutions are always breaking out in Haiti, and the hero shares his cell with two Haitian "generals" who are also in prison for leading revolutions, men who are filthy and indistinguishable from each other.

The generals suggest a way that the American can cut through the window bars of their cell so he can escape--the fatalistic generals feel no urge to escape themselves.  Our hero succeeds in cutting through the bars and getting halfway out of the window, but then is stuck.  But then a guy, apparently a drunk, helps him out, even carrying him on his back to an American ship in the harbor when he is too weak and tired to go on.  When Haitian soldiers accost the pair, this good Samaritan gets them out of the mess, taking a bullet in the process.  The punchline of the story is that the American journalists' savior is the ghost of the president who had him thrown in prison in the first place, he having been assassinated soon after our guy was arrested.  It is suggested that the ghost helps the journalist because he felt like the presidency was a prison, and so identifies with our guy's struggle for freedom, and it is hinted that before he was president he too was a journalist and maybe even a revolutionary.  

By today's standards, this story is monstrously racist in that it suggests that Haiti is constantly wracked by political violence and its people are dirty and lazy and you can't tell one from another.  Putting that aside, the plot and style are OK--the jokes aren't laugh out loud funny, but they aren't annoying, either, and the depiction of the hero's means of escaping the prison are sort of entertaining.  We'll call "You Can't Kill a Ghost" acceptable.       

I'll note here that on the same page as the last few paragraphs of "You Can't Kill a Ghost," under an ad for acne medication, is a little notice advertising the services to writers of poetry and fiction of Long and H. P. Lovecraft as critics, advisors and revisers.    

In our own 21st century, "You Can't Kill a Ghost" has been reprinted in two expensive but very extensive and very cool collections of Long stories published by Centipede Press, one in their Masters of the Weird Tale series and one in their Library of Weird Fiction series.

"Escape from Tomorrow" (1939)

For some reason "Escape from Tomorrow" does not seem to appear in either of those Centipede Press volumes, even though with its unity of purpose and tone, its stark images of high technology and body horror, and its human themes, I am finding it better than most of Long's uneven body of work.  Maybe "Escape from Tomorrow" formed the basis of some longer Long work I haven't read yet?  Or maybe the Centipede people thought it more "science fictiony" than "weird"?

It is the authoritarian future of the Twenty-Ninth Century!  The government ("the Controllers") of the "Scientific World State" conditions you from birth for the job which has been assigned to you, and people are regularly administered drugs to keep them from acting anti-socially!  Our main character is one of the government flunkies who diagnoses you and pumps you full of the right drugs to make sure you behave ("glandular correctionist"), and his current top patient is himself!  Because he's on the verge of going rogue!

Maal hops in his "stratoplane" (one of the perks of being a high official) and flies from the East Coast to Spain to the research facility where the top scientist, Allelan, with whom he is in love is working on the first artificial man!  Such love between individuals is forbidden--the relieving of sexual urges is to be done within parameters set and monitored by the State!  Maal embraces Allelan in her laboratory, where she has been toiling night and day over the glass case in which pulses the blob of living plasm that is the product of her labors, an artificial brain.  The plasm contacts the lovers telepathically, revealing its vast intellectual superiority to natural humans!  And its contempt!  Why are they slaves to an oppressive government?  Why is science the master instead of the servant?  Why are "dull, stupid, beauty-hating people" in charge instead of "poets, artists, dancers [and] lovers"?  

The Controllers would execute any man who held such thoughts, and Maal recoils the artificial brain's arrogant advice that he and Allelan flee to a rebel colony.  In the same complex is a population of experimental freaks ("cretins"), child idiots whose bodies Maal has altered with surgery and drugs.  The artificial brain gives the horde of freaks intelligence and they rebel, enraged that Science, in its amoral quest for knowledge, has stolen from them the ordinary lives they might have enjoyed.  Finally, realizing it is dying, the artificial brain invades Maal and Allelan's minds, erasing their conditioning so they embrace the opportunity to escape to the rebel colony.

"Escape from Tomorrow" is a decent story, and, with its unsubtly declaimed themes, its romantic descriptions of the sea, and its quotations of poetry by Keats and some other poet I can't identify (perhaps Long himself), illustrates facets of Long's character which Lovecraft hints at in his letters*--Long's passionate love of art and poetry and his (perhaps merely performative) rebellious nature.  We're giving this rarely seen story a thumbs up! 

*For examples, see HPL to August Derleth, October 11, 1926, and HPL to C. L. Moore, June 19, 1936.

"He Came at Dusk" (1944)

This one has the Centipede Press stamp of approval, appearing in the 1100-page volume they printed in 2010.

Jim Reston is perhaps the finest builder of robots in the world, and he is broken hearted--as part of an experiment, he just dismantled Tom George, perhaps the greatest robot in the world--Tom George was the first robot with personality, the first robot with a sense of aesthetics, a robot that loved flowers and showed concern for Jim's welfare, a person whom Jim could talk to more intimately than to his own wife, Louise.  If Jim puts TG's parts back together, will it be the same TG he knew and loved?  

Things only get worse when Louise gets home with a gift for Tom George and finds the robot she adores is now just a bunch of spare parts.  Louise calls Jim a murderer, slashes his face with her nails, and stomps out, never to be seen again!

Jim rebuilds Tom George, turns TG on, but it isn't quite the gentle old TG he remembers.  The new robot silently takes a book off the shelf, opens it to a passage from Nietzsche about how man is not a goal in himself but a bridge that will be surpassed--a concept foreshadowed by Tom George's last words before the fatal experiment ("You're using me as a stepping stone, aren't you Jim?")--and then strangles Jim to death!

"He Came at Dusk" is OK; it is competently written, but I wish it was more clear why the original Tom George was a lover of mankind and the rebuilt TG was a destroyer, the purpose of the experiment that saw TG dismantled, and so forth.  Still, not bad.

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Well, these stories are better than I expected them to be, and "Escape from Tomorrow" and "He Came at Dusk," with their literary references and theme of the danger that science and technology misused may pose to mankind, feel more heartfelt and ambitious than much of Long's work.  I'm inspired to read some more Long, so you can look forward (or dread) hearing more about Long in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

Lester del Rey: "Carillon of Skulls," "Done Without Eagles," "My Name is Legion"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading a scan of Early del Rey, a 1975 collection of del Rey stories and autobiographical material about del Rey's career in SF and relationships with other SF figures.  We've already read the first eight stories in the book (see my blog posts here, here and here) and today we grapple with three more tales by del Rey, all three printed by John W. Campbell in his iconic magazines in the early 1940s.

"Carillon of Skulls" (with James Beard) (1941)

According to del Rey, Beard came up with the plot outline for this piece, and then del Rey actually wrote it, revising it under the supervision of Campbell, who sent him comments about each iteration until Campbell thought it good enough to print in Unknown, where it appeared under the pseudonym "Philip James."  "Carillon of Skulls" would reappear in 1960 in an anthology edited by TV horror host Zacherly, and is illustrated on the cover of the first volume of the paperback version of Early del Rey.

"Carillon of Skulls" is a would-be tragic story of the supernatural, at times dream-like, told in such a way that everything is mysterious and even confusing in the beginning, but everything is cleared up by the end.

Lefferts Park, decades ago, was a center of entertainment for the city, with a skating rink and a theater, the Apollo, staging vaudeville shows.  But for years the park has been a tangle, the Apollo a ruin, the haunt of homeless bums.  The last few weeks the police (all Irishmen in this story, aye beggorah) have been finding headless bodies in the park.

Our main character is a young woman whose memory is totally messed up--she is hanging around the park, knowing she is following commands, but not sure whose commands they might be nor what the commands are.  An old woman, Madame Olga, approaches her and gives her some items.  To make a long story short, I'll tell you that our heroine is in thrall to some monstrous clown guy, a ghost or demon, who is using her to attract men into the ruins of the Apollo, where he beheads them and uses their skulls in place of bells on the percussion instrument of the title.  (The authors refer to the demonic clown creature as a "nis," something I never heard of before, and typing "nis" into search engines is not getting me anywhere, either.)  She lures these guys to their doom and then forgets she did it.  Tonight's intended victim is a journalist who has entered the park to investigate the murders, whom she finds sitting at a fire.  The reporter and the young woman fall in love, and this love strengthens our female lead to the point that, after a dream-like sequence in which the young couple thinks the Apollo is still in business and they attend a performance of the villain playing his sinister song on his evil instrument, she uses the stuff Olga gave her to kill the clown and save her beloved.  Alas, our heroine was born fifty years ago and the clown's curse has maintained her looks of twenty-five years ago; knowing a love affair with a man half her age is impossible (I guess she never heard of Emmanuel Macron) our heroine flees.

This story is OK...I guess I'm finding it a little too convoluted, vague and abstract.  We spend so much time trying to figure out what is going on and so little with the characters that we end up not caring who lives, who dies and whether the leads' love blossoms or fizzles; the love of the two characters isn't put over very convincingly, and the monster's motivations and personality are little examined.  The problem of motivation extends to every character; I felt that the police and the journalist don't act like such people do in real life--"Carillon of Skulls" would probably be more believable set in a fantasy land or in medieval or ancient times, where it would make more sense for the government to sort of ignore the murders and a lone hero to investigate them, instead of in a modern American city.

"Done Without Eagles" (1940)

Del Rey had two stories in the August 1940 issue of Astounding; we've already read one of them, "The Stars Looked Down," and here is the second, which appeared under the pen name Philip St. John.

Campbell apparently considered this story "a standard tearjerker" and it is a competent filler piece meant to pull the old heartstrings.  

It is the near future, when Man has a colony on Mars and there are regular flights between this big blue marble and the red planet, but there are still only a small number of ships and space crew.  Our narrator is co-pilot on the Kickapoo.  The Kickapoo is sort of a famous ship, as the most famous of all space pilots, Court Perry, captained her for years, achieving many firsts and accomplishing many feats.  In those days the ship had clear windows and not enough shielding against radiation--today Kickapoo has no windows and she is flown entirely by instruments.

Court, when he got old, started getting a little sloppy in his landings and was grounded.  For years he has been out of the public eye.  But today he is a passenger on the Kickapoo!  And he has brought his son Stan with him.  The radiation the elder Court was exposed to on his many space flights messed up his genes and so Stan is a mutant superman with four arms, six fingers per hand, psychic powers, and a knack for electronics and mechanisms.  In mere minutes Stan builds his own radio with which to communicate with Earth from the Kickapoo so his father can talk to people back home without going through the ship's official radio.  

Court and Stan insist on inspecting the ship and pointing out every little problem and the drawbacks of all the innovations and reforms instituted since Court was last in charge.  Then a disaster that Court predicted occurs, and Court has to take over the controls and guide the ship by feel, seeing as there are no windows and all the instruments are busted.  Near the end of the story we learn that Court is blind; Stan has been guiding him with his telepathy.  Also, Court has a bad heart and is not expected to live much longer--he wanted one last trip on the Kickapoo before going to Mars to live his final days.  Court safely lands the ship he devoted his life to, and immediately upon accomplishing this final spectacular feat of spacemanship his overstressed heart gives out.

Somewhat over the top, but acceptable.  "Done Without Eagles" has not been anthologized, bur has appeared in various del Rey collections.

"My Name is Legion" (1942)

Here in Early del Rey, between "Done Without Eagles" and "My Name is Legion," del Rey talks about his friendship with Campbell, how they would exchange long letters about their shared hobby of photography and when del Rey came to New York the two would sit around arguing about some topic in the news while assistant editor Catherine Tarrant listened appreciatively.  Campbell was a harsh critic, but del Rey accepted his criticism good-naturedly as constructive and del Rey credits Campbell with greatly improving his writing.

"My Name is Legion" is a time travel/mad scientist/vengeance on Hitler story.  It starts with a perhaps superfluous opening section in which we accompany British mechanized troops as they warily advance into the town of Bresseldorf, eyes peeled for an ambush.  The Allies have conquered Germany but haven't found Hitler yet, who is somewhere in hiding, and the British officers are following up rumors Hitler is in Bresseldorf.  They meet a scientist who has a corpse that looks like Hitler, but a Hitler who looks like he's in his seventies instead of in his fifties.  Then we flash back a few days to the main story.

The scientist, Meyers, contacts Hitler and brings the Fuhrer out of hiding with promises of a duplicating machine.  Del Rey unleashes a lot of mumbo jumbo on us about the machine and how it operates and the idiosyncratic rules of it that make del Rey's plot operable, both as Meyers describes it to Hitler and at the end.  Essentially, the machine reaches into the future, snatches the future version of the item under its focus, and brings it back to our time, so you end up with two of the thing, one older.  Meyers can set the machine to grab a duplicate from tomorrow, from the day after tomorrow, the day after that, etc., in the space of moments, and demonstrates by duplicating a coin repeatedly and thus generating a pile of coins in mere seconds.  Meyer's scheme--or so he tells Hitler--is to duplicate Hitler himself thousands of times by snatching tomorrow's Hitler, the next day's Hitler, etc., every day until Hitler's death twenty years hence.  This will create a Nazi legion that can form the nucleus of a new world-conquering Axis army.

Meyers explains to Hitler that if he has a certain thought in his mind when he is duplicated, this thought will be uppermost in the mind of the duplicates and even serve as a kind of compulsion.  So, to make sure the 7000 Hitlers about to appear will obey Hitler No. 1 and not all fight each other to start their own Reichs, Meyers tells Hitler to fill his mind with the thought that all orders from Hitler No. 1 and from Meyers must be obeyed and HN1 and M must not be harmed and, yeah, also, no speaking unless spoken to.

The 7000 closelipped and obedient Hitlers appear and Hitler sets in motion his plans to acquire tanks and tank crewmen to be duplicated from a secret depot he thinks the British will likely not have found yet.  But the next day it becomes clear that the British have already cleared up that depot, so no tanks are forthcoming.  And then Meyers reveals that he has tricked Hitler in order to wreak a terrible revenge!  You see, years ago, Meyers married a Jewish woman and they had two kids but all three were murdered by the Nazis and then Meyers himself was put in a concentration camp.  In the camp, in his mind, Meyers devised his time machine, and built it when he got out of the camp.

The oldest of the 7000 Hitlers goes insane, which allows him to escape the compulsion and threaten to kill Hitler No. 1.  Hitler No. 1 is faster on the draw than his older self and kills him--Meyers has set up a condition in which Hitler kills himself!  Then, 24 hours after the duplication process was initiated, all of the living Hitlers, including Hitler No. 1, vanish.  You see, the "duplicates" summoned by the machine are not really duplicates at all, but the same object from different times.  The 7000 Hitlers are all the same man.  Hitler is doomed to live another twenty years, every day disappearing and reappearing in the ranks of the legion of 7000, remembering his earlier days in Besseldorf and shooting his older self but unable to speak or do anything but obey his young self, until the last day of his life when he will go insane and inspire his young self to shoot him dead.  So, when the British arrive, the 7,000 Hitlers are not there, just the oldest Hitler who went insane and was shot by the original Hitler.

This story feels long, partly because of the British Army scene, partly because of the mumbo jumbo, partly because Hitler gives a speech to his legion of duplicates and del Rey prints it twice, first when Hitler delivers it and again when the first "duplicate," the youngest member of the legion, hears it.  Another issue is that I often find it hard to wrap my head around these time travel stories.  However,  del Rey's style is not bad, so it is not a chore reading the story, and after some reflection I think I "get" the time travel aspects.  So, I'm not loving "My Name is Legion," but it is certainly acceptable.

"My Name is Legion" would go on to be reprinted in 1978 in Fred Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph Olander's Science Fiction of the 40's and in 1990 in Frank McSherry's Fantastic World War II.

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These stories are just alright, no big deal.  "Carillon of Skulls" is the worst, being sort of confusing and vague while lacking challenging, crazy ideas and human feeling.  "Done Without Eagles" is straightforward and obvious, has some wild ideas and tries to present human relationships and human drama, so reading it is smooth sailing; its problem is that it goes overboard into childish comic book territory with its superman who has every conceivable power and its melodramatic climax.  "My Name is Legion" is another somewhat confusing read, and too long, but its time travel gimmick actually is internally consistent if you are clever enough to understand it right off or make an effort to grasp it like I did (with the exception of the whole compulsion bit, which is just a mechanism required by the plot.)  We might argue "Done Without Eagles" is the best because it is pure entertainment full of classic SF stuff like rockets and homo superior, or that "My Name is Legion" is the best because of its ambitious time travel mechanics.

More Lester del Rey and more World War II era fiction awaits us in future installments of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Fredric Brown: "Boner," "The Monkey Angle," "Double Murder" and "See No Murder"

One of the stops on my recent road trip through the Upper MidWest, southern Canada and New England was Unnamable Books in Turners Falls, Mass, where I found many very cool Fredric Brown detective paperbacks.  These were all too expensive for me to actually buy, but today we get a consolation prize: four stories by Brown I found in scans of old pulp magazines at the internet archive.

"Boner" (1942)

This brief item appears in an issue of Popular Detective with a memorable Yellow Peril/Woman in Bondage cover.  The next year it appeared in a Canadian issue of Thrilling Detective.  

"Boner" is a patriotic and somewhat silly twist ending story.  An assimilated German-American, Heofener, who was born in Deutschland but has lived in the US for decades, is nightwatchman at a factory where they are building anti-tank guns.  That's the patriotic part, that this ethnic German born in Germany has embraced the American way of life.  He has been approached by a Nazi agent who wants Heofener to let him in to the factory.  Heofener has a cousin back in Germany, and the spy says that if Heofener will not cooperate, his cousin will die in a concentration camp.  The loyal American calls the FBI anyway and helps them capture the spy.  The spy says that his failure to report back to Germany will signal his colleagues to seize Heofener's cousin; the twist ending is that the immigrant's cousin is Heinrich Himmler--that's the silly part.  The spy knows that Heofener has a cousin back in the old country but doesn't know this cousin is a famous politician and one of Hitler's close associates?

Forgettable filler.    

"The Monkey Angle" (1942)

My mother-in-law watches that TV show Monk again and again and, when we are with her, should any one of us do something clever or is trying to figure something out or act in a way that might conceivably be considered neurotic, one of us will cry out "You're like Monk!"  I bring this up because "The Monkey Angle" stars "ace reporter Carter Monk," who I guess is a recurring character of Brown's.   

We've got more Nazis trying to infiltrate America's industrial establishment in this one.  Walter Harlow is a "well-known manufacturer" who has a beautiful little three-year-old boy, and the kid is kidnapped by Axis agents who demand plans of whatever new weapon Harlow's plant is producing in return for the kid.  The FBI is handling the case, using the local cops only for mundane guard duty.  But one middle-aged cop whose son was killed fighting in the Pacific wishes he could get right up in the faces of those Nazi bastards!  And then there's reporter Carter Monk, who has solved cases for the cops in the past.  Monk would like to stay out of the way of the FBI, but his gorgeous secretary has a crush on him and thinks he is a genius and perhaps the only guy who can crack the case, and so manipulates Monk into investigating the kidnapping himself!

I've just told you the entire set up, but Brown keeps lots of the info I just gave you a mystery until the middle or end of the ten-page story, so the revelation of this data comes across as plot twists.  The detecting part of the plot involves a fat Italian animal trainer who has a little farm and a monkey.  The action part of the plot occurs after Carter Monk figures out that the Italian's current monkey is no monkey at all but the three-year-old hostage sewed into a monkey suit!  Monk and that middle-aged Nazi-hating cop don't take the time to alert the Feds where the Harlow tyke is because time is of the essence--the FBI has given the Axis agents fake plans in hopes of getting the kid back without exposing America's war secrets, and the cop fears the enemy agents will realize the plans are bogus and murder the kid in their fascist rage!  So Monk and the copper bust into the Italian's little farm house and everybody concerned (excepting the Harlow kid but including Monk and the cop) gets shot full of holes and/or knocked unconscious.  Carter Monk earns a week-long hospital stay but it looks like all the other combatants end up six feet under--at least the Harlow kid and the Harlow war secrets are safe.

An entertaining little trifle.  I'll note here that back in 2014 we read another story by Brown with a pretty strange animal angle, "The Spherical Ghoul," and his influential novel The Screaming Mimi also features an odd animal.  I am also wondering if "The Monkey Angle" influenced one of Robert Bloch's best stories, "The Animal Fair."    

"Double Murder" (1942)

"Double Murder" debuted in the same issue of Thrilling Detective as "The Monkey Angle," but under a pseudonym.  "The Monkey Angle" and "Double Murder" were both reprinted in the February 1943 issue of the Canadian edition of Thrilling Detective, with "Double Murder" as the cover story.  "Double Murder" resurfaced in 1999 in a French Brown collection.  Where I am reading it, in the US Thrilling Detective, "Double Murder" is like 25 pages of text.

I was excited by "Double Murder" when I started it because it looked like its narrative was going to be driven by a passionate character propelled by his obsessive personality to pursue his insane goals come hell or high water.  Carl Lambert is a homicidal maniac with a pathological love for knives--and for carving up people with them!  He has escaped from the asylum, and is wearing ill-fitting clothes, stalking the city streets, hoping for an opportunity to obtain a knife!

I was hoping we'd follow this psycho as he attacked people and tried to escape justice, but he pretty quickly vanishes from the narrative and we get a story whose plot is driven by coincidences and misapprehensions and a complex web of deceit, leading to a twist ending that I found a little hard to accept.

Detective Mortimer Tracy has three days off and has gotten drunk; on the street he is accosted by a beggar--the beggar is Lambert, but Tracy doesn't recognize the murder fiend until after he has invited him to a bar and bought him a drink and the bartender has invited the stranger into the back for something to eat.  When the detective realizes his mistake the killer has vanished and there are two dead men in the alley behind the bar with fresh knife wounds.  While trying to catch the killer the inebriated Tracy slips and breaks his nose and is rendered unconscious.

His blunders earn him the ire of his superiors and it looks like Tracy will have nothing to do with the Lambert case but then, somewhat like what happens to Carter Monk in "The Monkey Angle," an attractive woman manipulates him into trying to solve the case all by himself.  Tracy travels here and there around the town, interacting with journalists, the woman who first discovered the two knifed bodies in the alley, and the gangsters who run the town's black market in booze.  Tracy pursues various lines of inquiry, making limited progress, and then the bad guy who really killed the two men and has been trying to pin the crime on Lambert commits blunders of his own and falls into Tracy's lap, so that Tracy gets back in his superiors' good graces.

I have to admit, having the course of the plot be determined by people's mistakes is a little disappointing after it looked like the plot was going to be driven by some serial killer's perverse psychology.  Brown did a good job depicting that inhuman monster's thought process in the first few pages of the story and I would have enjoyed an entire story in that vein.  

"See No Murder" AKA "Witness in the Dark" (1953)

My original scheme was to read this in a 1956 issue of Terror, where it takes up like 21 pages, even though "See No Murder" first saw print in New Detective in 1953.  But then halfway through I realized a page was missing from the scan of Terror, and I could discover no scan of the appropriate issue of New Detective.  Luckily, under the title "Witness in the Dark," this story has been reprinted in one of those Alfred Hitchcock anthologies and in the Brown collection Carnival of Crime, both of which can be found at the internet archive.  

I feel like a lot of thrillers feature a blind character (I recently saw Dario Argento's Cat o' Nine Tails and Lamberto Bava's Macabre, so maybe that is why I think that) and "See No Murder" features just such a character, a guy who is temporarily blind due to an industrial accident involving acid.  Our narrator, police detective George Hearn, on the penultimate day of his vacation, reads the story in the paper about how this blind guy, Max Easter, was hanging around at home with his friend Armin Robinson (their wives were out at the cinema) when some guy sneaked into the house, shot Robinson dead with Easter's revolver, dropped the gun--giving the blind Easter a chance to grab it and shot wildly at the killer--and then escaped.  Of course, after reading "Double Murder" (in which an apparently innocuous character turns out to be the real killer) and "The Monkey Angle" (in which what is apparently a monkey turns out to be a human toddler), I was wondering if the guy was really blind at all or in cahoots with the alleged murderer and other crazy theories.  And I'm not alone--George's wife Marge also voices some wild theories. 

Hearn figures out which minor character murdered Robinson by talking to various other minor characters.  Like so many Brown stories, it seems, an animal figures in the story--due to a bizarre series of circumstances a kitten is brought by the murderer to the Easter household and the feline is killed in the haphazard exchange of gunfire.  These strange circumstances seem to have been engineered by Brown to make Marge's off-the-wall theories entertainingly coincide with the truth.

"See No Murder" is probably the best of today's four stories because it depicts in a more or less convincing and perhaps even moving fashion contrasting sexual relationships--we witness George and Marge's pleasant sort of relationship, but then learn the horrible truth about poor pathetic Max Easter's relationship with his attractive but treacherously evil wife who is carrying on an affair with his work colleague, a thief who is willing to murder poor pathetic Robinson in order to conceal his crimes.

One of the 37 chilling exercises in Alfred Hitchcock Presents:
Stories to Be Read with the Lights On is Barry Malzberg's "Agony
Column" which we read back in 2022

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None of these stories is bad, but they are not really for me.  I'm not terribly interested in plots that consist of a long series of coincidences nor am I very interested in the mechanical aspects of committing or solving some elaborate or outlandish crime.  (When I watch those Italian crime movies I pay almost no attention to the plot--I watch them for the beautiful women, fancy photography, exotic settings, engaging music, etc.)  I am interested in human feeling--in suspense and fear and hate and lust and so forth--and ideally, to my taste, a story like "See No Murder" should be told from the point of view not of the police detective, a rather disinterested third party, but from the point of view of the victim--Max Easter, who is betrayed and tortured and fears for his life and takes desperate measures with horrible consequences--or one of the monstrous villains--Mrs. Easter or her lover, people driven by lust and greed to defy the social order and commit atrocities.

That's enough detective jazz for a little while--back to science fiction and fantasy in our next episode.

Merril-approved 1958 stories: K MacLean, L Cole, and D McLaughlin

This blog post is brought to you by the letter "M," which stands for MPorcius and Merril.  As you know, we've been cherry-picking stories from the honorable mentions list at the back of 1959's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume.  We've reached the "M" authors on the list, of whom there are five.  One is Richard Matheson, whose story "The Edge" Merril gave the nod; I read "The Edge" back in early May.  Another is Sam Merwin, Jr., whose novel The House of Many Worlds I read back in 2017 and said failed as a humor piece, as an adventure tale, and as a SF story.  Merwin's Merril-approved story, "Lady in the Lab," appeared in the men's magazine Adam, in an issue I cannot find a free scan of; seeing as I am too cheap to buy this magazine on ebay (looks like it goes for $13.00 or more) we won't be discussing "Lady in the Lab" today.  That leaves us with stories by three authors, Katherine Maclean, "T. H. Mathieu," and Dean McLaughlin, to read and dissect today.

"Unhuman Sacrifice" by Katherine MacLean 

After debuting in John W. Campbell's Astounding, "Unhuman Sacrifice" would be reprinted by British geniuses Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest in their oft-reprinted anthology Spectrum and by that American icon of high brow SF Damon Knight in his own oft-reprinted anthology A Century of Science Fiction.  So here we have a science fiction story that is endorsed by all the smarty smarts of the SF community regardless of their political commitments or geographic locations!  I read MacLean's "The Gambling Hells and The Sinful Girl" recently and enjoyed it so I have every reason to expect that I too can join the lovefest!

It is the future of common interstellar travel, and the human race has explored many systems and discovered many planets.  Our story begins on a planet inhabited by natives with stone-age technology, a planet on which three humans have landed.  We've got two engineers, who manage the vessel, and the man whom they were hired to ferry around the galaxy: a young missionary determined to convert the natives to his religion, which I guess is Christianity, though this is never explicitly declared.  The engineers find the missionary's constant talk about his religion annoying, and fear he is going to cause trouble with the natives with his efforts to convert them.

MacLean's style is good and all the science--the planet's ecosystem, the culture of the natives, and all the futuristic human technology--is well-thought out and interesting and she does a good job describing it.  The plot is replete with ironies and surprises--things are not quite what they seem to any of the human and native characters, nor do things don't turn out the way readers might expect, either.

To put things briefly and in broad terms, the engineers and the missionary initially disagree about everything, but come to agree that the natives perform cruel and unnecessary rituals of torture on a regular basis, at set times of the year, and the humans decide to try to stop these rituals, though they disagree on how to do so.  MacLean also gives us scenes from the point of view of one of the natives, one who is about to be forced to undergo this apparently horrifying ritual, and this guy has wildly inaccurate ideas about the humans and is also largely ignorant of his own people's customs and biology, which is trouble because the three humans learn most of what they know about the natives from this one naive guy.

In their efforts to succor the hapless native, the humans put their lives and their sanity at desperate risk, and, one might argue, make things worse for the native.  Or, perhaps, they actually do help this guy, but in an unintentional and ironic way.  You see, the creatures of this planet, the lower animals as well as the intelligent bipeds, have a remarkable natural life cycle.  Early in life they are animals that move around and eat other animals--the intelligent villagers hunt and fish and build huts and conduct trade and go to war with other tribes and so forth.  But then the rainy season comes, flooding the plains and forests where the animals and villagers live, these creatures, once submerged, metamorphosize into plants, taking root in the soil and losing their intelligence.  The "torture" ritual is the hanging up of young natives in tall trees by the elder natives right before the floods--this keeps the natives from fully metamorphosizing; they become skinny and weak, but don't lose their ability to walk and think.  The humans, cutting down their native friend and trying to get him into their ship, accidentally allow him to be submerged and become a bush--they have, unintentionally, facilitated the completion of the native's natural life cycle, something his culture's traditions for centuries have prevented.  (Seeing his friend become a plant turns one of the engineers into a neurotic obsessive.)

One of several good things about "Unhuman Sacrifice" is that there are no real villains or heroes in the text--all the characters do what they think is best and try to help other people, but their ignorance and prejudices render everything they do of questionable value.  The preacher, the engineers, and the native elders all act with good intentions in trying to master and alter conditions as they find them, but we readers don't necessarily have to agree that the changes they work are for the better.  MacLean's isn't one of those stories in which the religious guy is shown to be a total jackass and the science guys humiliate him with their superiority or one of those anti-imperialist stories with goody goody aliens and evil humans, which is nice, and MacLean cleverly sets the stage for just such a story but delivers something more nuanced and surprising, which adds excitement to the piece, and reinforces its theme of the need for epistemic humility--the characters don't know what is going on with the planet's ecosystem and culture and can't predict what is going to happen, and we readers equally can't predict how the story will turn out.

Pretty good.

"Cargo: Death!" by Les Cole (as by T. H. Mathieu) 

Cole is new to us here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  He has like 18 fiction credits at isfdb, and Merril seems to have recommended three of them.  This one debuted in Future Science Fiction, one of Robert A. W. Lowndes' magazines (Lowndes edited like a dozen magazines) and is like 40 pages long and feels like it is 140 pages long.    

It is the future of interstellar settler-colonialism!  The year 2106! Mankind has discovered and colonized many planets, and our tale begins upon on one such world 683 light years from Earth, a planet upon which humans arrived 20 years ago and which today is home to five human cities with a total of population of 50,000 human inhabitants; there are also 75,000 natives.  The planet is so newly colonized it doesn't even have an official name yet!    

A problem has arisen!  A diminutive creature like a mouse but with a bite that causes instant death to humans!  Our hero Art Hamilton, member of the civil service (this story forces us to endure the whining we are always hearing from government employees that the taxpayers are overworking and underpaying them--boo hoo!) is charged with the mission of returning to Earth to hand over a specimen of the killer mouse to the motherworld's scientists so they can figure out how to exterminate the little monster.  Art embraces this chance to see Earth again and to hit on the beautiful stewardess whom he knows works the ship that will take him back home.

Science fiction stories often base their space ship scenes on the Earth experience of sailing the high seas on a warship or ocean liner, but Cole chooses to base the space ship scenes in "Cargo: Death!" on 20th-century commercial air travel--hence the stewardess.  Art straps in across the aisle from a child and its mother and like a hack comedian groans in fear the kid will cry for the entire two-hour flight.

A lot of this story just feels wrong.  If the frontier planet is only two hours away from the center of human civilization, it doesn't really feel like its on the frontier.  And then there is the relationship between Art and the stewardess.  Sometimes they act as if they are going steady and considering marriage, but other times we get the idea that Art hasn't seen her in months and that she dates lots of other guys--it is all very unclear.  And then there is the fact that the mouse that can kill you with one bite is not kept in some kind of locked metal crate that you need a key or combination to open but instead in a flimsy mesh cage through which the monster may be able to bite people.  Cole indulges in jokes in which people think the monster is adorable and rush to the cage to get a close look and other characters slapstick-fashion physically interpose themselves between vapid human and kawaii beast.    

Anyway, Art is friends with the crew of the star ship that is supposed to take them to Earth in two hours, and they all find time to hang around together and shoot the breeze.  But then a disaster occurs, the atomic power plant failing and the ship coming out of hyperspace in some random spot between Terra and the mouse monster planet.  The sudden return to normal space causes the luggage to shift and the cage holding the instant-death venom rodent cracks open and the mouse escapes, compounding the problems of the captain, who is considering euthanizing everyone on the ship before they starve to death--it looks like the ship doesn't have the small tools ("microtools") aboard that are needed to fix the reactor.  The captain gives Art a hat to wear because this will inspire obedience from the other passengers and Art looks for the mouse with the help of the stewardess.  There's conversation about what to do and a subplot about a passenger with a burst appendix.  In the end, Art catches the mouse and a guy fixes the ship even without microtools and everybody gets to Earth safely.    

There's a lot going on in this story, but none of the individual components is really developed to the point that it is entertaining or interesting--in fact, many end up going unresolved--and all the different elements proceed in parallel rather than synergistically working in tandem to create a compelling story.  It's all just a bunch of barely acceptable stuff--much of it hanging fire or misfiring--cobbled together.  

There's the monster on the loose plot.  It is hinted the mouse is intelligent and has tiny little hands, and I thought this was foreshadowing that the mouse was going to become Art's friend and fix the reactor, but this doesn't actually happen.  Also, after all the talk at the start of the story of the need for a solution to the mouse problem, the story ends on Earth before any Terran scientist has even looked at the mouse.  

There's the love plot between Art and the stewardess; I expected the crisis on the ship to bring these two close together so they can get married, but when the story ends the future of their relationship still seems ambiguous.  As with the mouse, we readers are not granted the catharsis of a conclusion--we have no idea if Art has achieved either of his two goals.  Maybe those issues are resolved in the sequel to "Cargo: Death!", printed later in the year in Future Science Fiction; if so, "Cargo: Death!" should have been advertised as a serial.

There are long passages about the nature of colonization, about the layout of the ship, and about the nature of hyperspace--the strange alien colors and shapes passengers see out the window when the vessel is in hyperspace--that fill up column inches but contribute little to the plot and are not so well-written or so intrinsically fascinating that they make the story more entertaining.  Similarly, there are psychological themes and the author and the characters throw around various psychology terms and claims--e.g., "he suffered from the human failing of deriving more ego gratification from delivering bad news than good" and "the schizophrenic, split-personalitied scene played to its conclusion..." and "Humans grow used to certain sights and continue to see them, even if they no longer exist or are altered" that just waste your time.

There are a bunch of women characters who, I guess, each represent a different aspect of womanhood or course of life women can undertake--one female passenger is brave settler stock and a mother, while another is a self-important upper-middle-class nag, and then of course there is the competent stewardess, a good-looking career gal who could settle down with any of dozens of men who find her gorgeous.  It may also be significant that the mouse is also female and is pregnant.

There are lame jokes, like when in zero-gee, in the dark, Art's hat floats up against the stewardess and at first she thinks he is groping her and then fears it is the venomous mouse crawling on her.  (Does a hat really feel like fingers or a rodent?)  One of the characters is named John Paul Jones and he says "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead," which I guess is a joke about how people in the future will confuse 18th-century American naval officer Jones with 19th-century American naval officer David Farragut.  This kind of junk undermines any tension the escape of the poison mouse or the possibility of being lost in space may have generated.

Why did Merril like this story?  Because some of the female characters are brave and competent?  Or do we have to consider the possibility that Merril was friendly with Cole, who was very active in SF fandom, and this colored her judgment of the "Cargo: Death!"?  Maybe Cole was a great guy, but his story here is long and tedious because it works like half a dozen angles and not one of them goes anywhere and the story lacks any compensatory virtues.  Thumbs down!

"Cargo: Death!" was never reprinted in English, but in 1971 was reprinted in West Germany, the same place where multiple David Hasselhoff records have been certified platinum or gold.

"The Man on the Bottom" by Dean McLaughlin

Some time ago I purchased a 1971 paperback copy of McLaughlin's Dome World and since then it has collected dust on my shelf among a legion of similarly neglected books.  Well, today we read "The Man on the Bottom," which, it appears, was expanded and revised to form the first part of Dome World.  Maybe we'll love "The Man on the Bottom" despite its homosexual porn title and graduate to reading Dome World?  

It is the future of undersea dome cities!  Danial Mason, veteran of service on the Moon (we often hear how weary Earth gravity makes him), is in charge of Wilmington Dome in the South Atlantic, an American dome that mines iron and produces steel and manufactures the hulls of ships and additional domes.  Today he's got trouble!  All the domes have got trouble!  South Africa and the United Americas (capital: Panama) both claim some newly discovered mineral deposits that lay exactly fifty miles from both an American and an African dome and it looks like war is inevitable!  The politicians in Panama order the American domes evacuated and send Navy personnel to take command of each dome, but Mason is confident he should maintain authority over Wilmington and stays, as does his spunky red-headed assistant Jenny, who knows as much about the operation of the dome as Mason does.  Mason is a sort of informal charismatic leader among the dome commanders, and all the other dome commanders follow suit.  You see, Mason has a plan--he knows the domes are vulnerable and will all be destroyed in a war, so a war must be prevented.  As we see in a holographic conversation with the wise black chief who is in charge of one of the South African domes, Mason is buddies with all dome executives, not just the American ones, and the dome leaders no longer see themselves as Americans or Africans but as a new nation.  (I guess we are expected to see this as being like how the thirteen British colonies by the 1770s had come to see themselves as a culture distinct from Great Britain.)  When the war breaks out the domes all declare independence--Mason's security personnel seize the handful of naval personnel in the dome with a minimum of violence.  This ends the war between Panama and Johannesburg, who of course would rather trade with independent dome cities than have ownership of domes that are radioactive ruins.  Text from a history book of the future ends the story, telling us that the domes united in a confederation that becomes a major world power.

This is a pedestrian story.  It is better than Cole's "Cargo: Death!" because, instead of piling on extraneous information and laying the groundwork for payoffs that never come and presenting conflicts that are never resolved, McLaughlin only includes pertinent info and wraps up everything by the end, but "The Man on the Bottom" is still dry and obvious.  So, acceptable, but not exciting.  Presumably Merril liked it because it offered a relatively peaceful solution to great power conflict and presented sympathetic and competent women and black people who work in concert with white men and maybe because of the way military men are humiliated and the heroes eschew violence as much as possible.  She couldn't have chosen it for brilliant writing or memorable images or deep characters or touching human relationships because those things are absent.

"The Man on the Bottom" in its themes reminds me of Robert Heinlein's work.  Heinlein repeatedly depicted wars of independence in the style of the American Revolution, as McLaughlin does here, and Mason in "The Man on the Bottom" stresses that his security personnel shouldn't use "burp guns" in taking over the dome from the Navy, reminding me of how in Tunnel in the Sky the mentor figure tells the kids not to bring firearms to the dangerous alien world.  

Merely acceptable.    

Nobody saw fit to reprint this bland piece of work (unless you count the British edition of Astounding, which included it in a different month's issue), and I have to say the chances of me reading my paperback expansion of it are just about nil.  Nice Paul Lehr cover, though.

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MacLean's is obviously the best of today's three stories, seeing as McLaughlin's is mere filler and Cole's has so many problems I am a little surprised it was published in this form--Lowndes should have demanded a rewrite or rewritten it himself.  I may never read any stories by Cole or McLaughlin again, but I'll keep MacLean in mind.