Harlan Ellison: "Life Hutch," "Battle Without Banners," "A Friend to Man," "The Voice in the Garden," and "Soldier"

Way back in 2016 I read four stories from the 1973 printing of From the Land of Fear, a 1967 collection of Harlan Ellison stories which, bizarrely, has no table of contents and no page listing where the included stories first were published.  My copy has a dark cover illustration by an O'Brien and is emblazoned with the claim that Ellison is "the best-selling science fiction writer in the world."  The '67 printing has a cover illo by the Dillons and promotes the Roger Zelazny foreword, and the '74 printing has a wild prop and model photograph.  My favorite may be the French translation, the cover of which features a somewhat fanciful pterosaur (I love pterosaurs.)  Recent editions have that portrait of Ellison smoking a pipe that always makes my eyes roll. 

I read four stories from From the Land of Fear back in 2016, "The Sky is Burning," "My Brother Paulie," "Back to the Drawing Boards" and "'We Mourn for Anyone....'"  In 2022, when I read the collection Gentleman Junkie, I read "Time of the Eye."  I'm skipping the Zelazny foreword and the screenplay version of "Soldier," so that leaves five stories for me to wrestle with in this blog post.  Let's do it!

"Life Hutch" (1956)

The stories in From the Land of Fear have italicized intros from Ellison, sometimes long, but the one for "Life Hutch" is just seven lines, Harlan name dropping about a time he hung out with Robert Silverberg, Randall Garrett, and John W. Campbell, Jr., Silverberg and Garrett engaging in horseplay and Campbell playing the wise old man giving long-winded advice, like Nestor in the Iliad.

"Life Hutch" is a classic-style science fiction story about space men and space war, robots and computers, a man using his wits and knowledge of technology to save himself from a dreadful death.  All the science and tech stuff works, as does the psychological suspense stuff.  Thumbs up!

Our hero is the pilot of a one-man space warship serving in a fleet engaged in a major space naval battle.  His ship is hit and he crash lands on a little planetoid.  The planetoid has a "life-hutch," a little sealed room with food and a radio and medical equipment and so forth to succor people just like our hero who get into trouble out in space.  In the little building is also a robot that maintains the place and helps do heavy labor when necessary, unloading a supply ship or whatever.  When the pilot gets inside the little building the robot strikes him down, breaking his bones--the robot is malfunctioning!  It attacks anything that moves!  Can the pilot figure out a way to fix or destroy the robot...without letting it see him move?  If he can't, he'll die of thirst or from his internal wounds!

A good suspense story.  In the middle of the ten-page tale is a dream sequence in which Ellison pushes the idea that wars are based on race prejudice and this is ridiculous because people are all essentially the same.  At least I think that is the point of the dream sequence.  There is also a subtheme that the robot is malfunctioning because some greedy businessman cut corners or some politician was corrupt; this story flatters readers who might think of themselves as anti-establishment types.        

"Life Hutch" first saw print in an issue of If we've already looked at, the one with Frank Riley's "The Executioner," which both Judith Merril and I liked.  Besides Ellison collections, the story has reappeared in some anthologies, including Silverberg's oft reprinted Deep Space. 

"Battle Without Banners" (1964)

In the intro to this one Ellison pokes fun at manly men writers like Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway and says he thinks sports are boring and stupid.  He also clues us in to the fact that this story is about racism.

"Battle Without Banners" is a fantasy in which blacks and Jews work together to rise up against the gentile whites who oppress them full of loving descriptions of white gentiles being gunned down.  Set in a prison, the black and Jewish criminals collaborate in organizing an elaborate jail break, capturing automatic weapons, making improvised bombs and shooting it out with the guards, whom we are told again and again wear white uniforms.  In lulls in the fighting one of the African-Americans massages the back of one of the Jews (is this a clue they are gay lovers?) and some of the jailbirds talk about what landed them in prison.  One of the Jews threw a bomb into an Iowa church because one of the minsters was an anti-Semite.  One of the blacks shot down some KKK members who were on their way to punish a black man who had sexually harassed a white woman ("grabbed a feel off a druggist's wife.")  Another of the Jews "did something" to his gentile wife after she called him a "dirty kike" during sex; killed her, I guess?

Readers who keep score carefully may notice that the Jews show more remorse for their crimes, are less mentally stable, and more likely to surrender to the white gentile establishment, than the blacks. 

While on the one hand a wish fulfillment fantasy for bloodthirsty "anti-racists," "Battle Without Banners" is also a tragedy.  The inmates are compared to the crucified Jesus (their jailbreak attempt is called "their passion") and in the end some of them surrender and the rest are overwhelmed by a charge of the white uniformed guards; the last lines of the story are a lament that there are always too many white gentiles for the oppressed to overcome.  Time will tell,  I suppose.

A silly sort of exercise, I guess specifically written to "epater le bourgeois" or be "over the top" or to "push the envelope" or whatever cliche was operative in '64.  Thumbs down!  "Battles Without Banners" was first printed in Taboo, an anthology of stories "which no publisher would touch."  This book also presented stories by Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber and Charles Beaumont that I have not read yet--a Taboo blog post covering those stories might be a good idea, if I can find the stories.  (It looks like the actual book goes for over $100, so that is out.)   I don't think "Battle Without Banners" has been anthologized again; the other Ellison collection in which it has found a home is Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled.

I don't care what anybody says, Islands is a better album than 
Beat or Three of a Perfect Pair

"A Friend to Man" (1959)

This one is actually in a magazine I own, an issue of Fantastic Universe with art by Virgil Finlay and stories by Lester del Rey, Poul Anderson, George H. Smith and Robert Silverberg.  (I think the Anderson story would go on to be integrated into the novel Orbit Unlimited, which we read in 2018.)  I should read more from this thing.  Well, I guess today is a start, though I'm reading the book version of Ellison's contribution.

In his intro to "A Friend to Man" in From the Land of Fear, Ellison says he is against war and thinks only insane people would aspire to be soldiers and suggests our world has become "chickenshit" because nowadays people use firearms instead of fighting hand-to-hand.    

 
Somebody (it is implied it is the Chinese) is conquering the world!  America is devastated!  A robot, once owned by a painter, has collapsed due to a lack of lubricant--he is just steps away from a big barrel of oil that will bring him back into shape!  The robot loves his master and is confident his master will save him.

Meanwhile, his master is one of a band of guerillas awaiting the advance of the enemy.  The guerillas ambush an enemy column, and are wiped out, but not before creating conditions that in turn wipe out all the humans among the invaders--the enemy column includes a detachment of robots, and these survive the engagement.  The final scene of the brief story sees these invader robots, now independent, bringing lubricant to the American robot and implying that they will work together to rebuild the world destroyed by humankind.  I guess we are supposed to think not that the Chinese conquered the world, but that all humankind was exterminated, that the mutually annihilating skirmish we witnessed represents the entire war, which saw every human being killed.  The meek (robots) have inherited the earth!

Acceptable, I guess.  This is sort of Clifford Simak territory, what with the worshipful robots who think of themselves as subordinate to mankind but which the author implies are better than mankind inheriting our world.  I find this kind of thing absurd, of course, but the way I hear people talking about their pets, I guess it is possible that when humanoid robots are common this belief will become common as well.

"A Friend to Man" does not appear to have been reprinted anywhere besides From the Land of Fear.

Those are some serious eye lashes

"The Voice in the Garden" (1967)

isfdb says this one-page story debuted in a magazine called Lighthouse and Ellison in his intro says it was written as a "one-liner at the famous Milford, Pennsylvania Science Fiction Writers Conference."

The world has been destroyed by atomic war, and one man has survived and has been wandering the world, somehow getting from Europe to Ohio.  In Ohio he meets the last woman in the world.  They agree to recreate the human race together.  She says her name Eve and he says his name is George and that is the joke.

Thumbs down!

Harlan the comedian has included this story in other collections (I guess he considers it essential) and Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph Olander included it in Microcosmic Tales.

                

"Soldier" (1957)

In the intro to "Soldier," which is longer than the text of "The Voice in the Garden," Ellison reiterates his opposition to war and his contempt for soldiers.  From the Land of Fear also includes a screenplay for a TV version of the story which I am going to skip.  

The story begins with a vivid scene of war in the future featuring energy weapons and other high tech devices as well as psychic powers.  Then a one in a bazillion event occurs--being hit by the ray artillery in just the right way somehow sends the private we have been following back in time to the 20th century!  To a train platform!  Confused, he quickly gets into fights with civilians but is disabled by a police officer and dragged to jail.

The authorities in Washington quickly learn about the soldier's high tech equipment and have him brought before a language expert.  The soldier was on the Western side of a conflict between the West and a Russian-Chinese alliance and speaks an evolved form of English and it is not hard to teach him 20th-century English.  The government boys try to figure out what value this future guy can offer the United States, but he is essentially uneducated so he doesn't know how his weapons and equipment operate and while he knows military tactics, they are not applicable to 20th-century warfare.  

The pipe-smoking philologist who knows the future soldier best has the idea that if the time traveller can tell enough people how horrible war in the future is then maybe war can be prevented.  As the story ends, after the future soldier has publicly described his harrowing experiences on the future battlefield many times, people all over the world are signing petitions and legislatures are passing laws to abolish war.  Of course this is ridiculously naive--the measures depicted in the story have already been tried in real life and failed.  People have had access to vivid accounts of dreadful battles and horrible wounds since the Iliad and that has not stopped war; laws against murder and rape haven't stopped murder and rape, and countries like the USSR and the PRC don't even have legislatures that truly represent popular opinion or have any real power over their nation's rulers anyway.  Ellison of course realizes this and ends his story on a down note--the pipe-chomping intellectual recognizes that since the soldier exists, the future he comes from must be inevitable.

This story is well written, all the future battle and technology stuff is good and the soldier's reactions to finding himself in a different world are good.  So, thumbs up!

     

"Soldier" debuted in Fantastic Universe under the title "Soldier From Tomorrow."  Besides Ellison collections, it can be found in the Asimov and Greenberg anthology The Great SF Stories #19 and a 1996 book where it sits along side new novelizations of Outer Limits episodes. 

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Well folks, today we learned that war is bad but racism is worse, so if you call a minority a mean name he is allowed to murder you.  Morally permitted, mind you--in practice, murdering people is likely to lead to prison and martyrdom.

You don't have to take Harlan Ellison seriously as a pipe-smoking philosopher to recognize that "Life Hutch" and "Soldier" are well-written SF stories with intriguing speculative technology, effective portraits of men under psychological stress and exciting action scenes.  "The Voice in the Garden" is stupid, but "A Friend to Man" is OK and "Battle Without Banners," while bad, is useful for the insight it might provide into the time it was published and the mind of one Harlan Ellison.

Alliances between blacks and Jews and between the Russian and Chinese governments may or may not shake the world of the future, but I can confidently predict that the future will see me shaking my head at more Harlan Ellison stories, and probably enjoying a few of them, too.  So stay tuned.   

Harlan Ellison: "The Vengeance of Galaxy 5," "Cosmic Striptease," "A Furnace for Your Foe," and "No Planet is Safe"

Let's read some rare early Harlan Ellison stories, stories from 1958 that I do not believe have ever been printed in book form.  Seeing how they have not been widely disseminated, Ellison and his publishers perhaps fear they do not represent Ellison's best work and will not bring further glory to the illustrious Ellison name, but these tales might still be fun or interesting, and at the very least provide us denizens of the 21st century a little insight into the SF world of 1958, the year of the design of the now ubiquitous "peace symbol" representing opposition to nuclear weapons, Nikita Khrushchev's rise to premiership of the Soviet Union, the founding of France's Fifth Republic, and the invention of the integrated circuit.

"The Vengeance of Galaxy 5"  

For its appearance in Amazing, "The Vengeance of Galaxy 5" was adorned with a poorly rendered but well composed illustration of a cyclopean robot holding aloft in its monstrous pincers a shrieking bikini girl, so right there this story has me hooked.  (Though it is too bad the talented Wallace Wood, who illustrates a different story in this issue, wasn't assigned the robot and hot chick picture.)

"The Vengeance of Galaxy 5" is about 30 pages long, and has the basic structure of an Edgar Rice Burroughs or Edmond Hamilton story, with a guy arriving in a new world in which a beautiful princess is at war with an evil tyrant and our hero joins the princess and participates in the war and when the war is over she wants him to be her husband and king.  Ellison, at least here, is not as good at the action adventure jazz as ERB or Hamilton, though he tries, coming up with various types of energy weapons and psychic powers and war machines.  The interesting thing Ellison does is subvert, or at least cast a different light upon, the ERB adventure template.  Our hero is not a fighting man but a small businessman who travels from planet to planet conducting trade.  There are deadly fights in the story, but our protagonist does not do any of the shooting and killing--the princess does all the dirty work.  And when the princess wants to marry him and make him king, the merchant refuses--he rejects ascension to the aristocrat and resists the lure of government power because he is content to be a member of the bourgeoisie, to live a life not of war and rule but of freedom and trade.  Ellison doesn't use the terminology they might use, but "The Vengeance of Galaxy 5" pushes the sort of libertarian line you'd expect to hear from the people at Reason magazine or The Cato Institute, suggesting that a good society is not a closely integrated kingdom of lords and princesses and knights who intimately guide their people and demonstrate their prowess by engaging in all kinds of wars but rather a nation of shopkeepers each of whom charts his own course!

OK, analysis first, now plot summary:  

Interstellar merchant Loper Martin approaches planet Sygor and finds it surrounded by a force field; he is refused permission to land, even though he has done business here multiple times, the last time like two years ago.  Then he spots an aircraft approaching the limits of the planet's atmosphere, towing behind it a voluptuous woman in lingerie--it seems in this part of the galaxy they execute people by dragging them to the edge of space and then launching them into the vacuum.  When the forcefield is deactivated so this doomed beauty can be ejected into space, Loper slips beyond it and rescues the woman, sucking her through his ship's "scooper" and into the padded cargo hold.  

Loper introduces himself to the scantily clad Sygorian and finds her to be of queenly affect and rugged determination.  When fighter planes close in on Loper's ship she, apparently, uses psychic powers to cause them to explode.  On the surface, she explains to Loper what is going on.

Two years ago an evil emperor guy named Aslik started conquering this region of space, taking over one poorly defended planet after another.  Loper is astonished, as interstellar war is almost unknown, as everybody has done the math and realized there is no way interstellar imperialism can be made to pay.  Aslik must be insane, driven by a lust for blood and power, not any rational cost benefit analysis.    Sygor put up more resistance than most because it had "the Machine," a huge robot with psychic powers left behind by a prehistoric superior race.  The King of Sygor directed the robot to destroy half of Aslik's space fleet by driving the invaders to suicide.  Aslik called for a ceasefire and the King was stupid enough to agree--Aslik then just murdered the King.  (The universe is full of idiotic softies who fetishize ceasefires, even with the most deranged, duplicitous and despicable tyrants and terrorists.)  Now the king's teenage son is technically on the throne but in practice under Aslik's control, Alsik's brutes trying to learn from him the password to the Machine; the password is "hypnoburied" in the young monarch's mind.  Alsik's thugs hoped seeing his sister, princess Vedria, thrown into space to die might cause the mental anguish that would allow the password to surface.  This woman Loper just rescued is of course that very Princess Vedria.

(Vedria is sporadically in psychic contact with her little brother--little bro got the Machine to make the fighter pilots chasing Loper's ship blow up their own craft.  One of the story's flaws is that it is unclear to what extent the prince is in control of this robot--if he can control it why doesn't he kill all the invaders like his father did?)

Vedria guides Loper to a secret tunnel dug by that ancient race hundreds of thousands of years ago.  In three minutes an anti-grav subway transports them to the other side of the planet, to the labyrinth beneath the palace.  Thanks to psychic guidance from  Vedria's little brother they are able to navigate their way through the Elder's shifting maze to the Machine.  Little brother dies under questioning, and as he dies he shares the password telepathically with Vedria.  Vedria and Loper ride the twenty-foot tall robot to the palace--the robot smashes through walls and kills any of Aslik's men that get in the way.  It no longer uses psychic powers to kill people, relying instead on its ray guns.  It is suggested that this is because the Machine's psychic blasts are attracted to thoughts of blood lust, and now Vedria herself is now consumed with a lust for blood in her rage at the crimes committed against her world and her family.

In the final confrontation with Aslik it is revealed that Aslik also picked up the password--both Vedria and Aslik know how to command the invincible robot!  Like in a parody of Star Trek, because it is being given conflicting commands, the robot explodes, killing most of Aslik's henchmen.  The princess grabs the rifle Loper is carrying and shoots down Aslik.

The war is over, and Vedria invites Loper to marry her and become king.  But Loper isn't so keen on the princess anymore, having seen her animated by a lust for blood and actually slake that thirst, and he senses planet Sygor, having tasted violence and war, is now forever tainted, a restless world of danger, not a comfortable world of peaceful commerce, and he is a trader, not a soldier or a politician.  So he returns to the stars to continue his life as a gypsy wandering salesman.

As I was hoping, a somewhat entertaining and certainly interesting specimen of the large body of work produced by Ellison.  Worth the time of anybody interested in Fifties SF and Ellison in particular.

"The Vengeance of Galaxy 5" would be reprinted in 1975 is a magazine of reprints, Thrilling Science Fiction.

"Cosmic Striptease"       

This is one of two Ellison stories that appeared in Fantastic's January issue; "Cosmic Striptease" appeared under the E. K. Jarvis penname and has not been reprinted in even a magazine.  Even if the fiction is no good, this issue of Fantastic is worth a look because of the cool cover by Ed Valigursky and the multiple Virgil Finlay illustrations of creepy aliens and voluptuous ladies on offer within.  Unfortunately, the Ellison stories in the issue have undistinguished illustrations by lesser artists.

There is a long tradition in SF of contrasting our (allegedly) belligerent and puritanical society with goody goody aliens, of advocating nudism, and of criticizing TV, and in "Cosmic Striptease" Ellison encompasses all three traditions and even throws in some science speculation about electromagnetic fields.

The space program is in trouble.  Every time a rocket approaches the limits of Earth's electromagnetic field it explodes or malfunctions or just disappears.  The EMF, as Ellison calls it, is a recurring theme of the story, and Ellison talks about it at some length, though I don't know that I take seriously anything he says (I think he claims that the atmosphere, gravity, and magnetism are all due to the EMF.)  Physically exploring the universe seems impossible with current technology, so the space program focuses its efforts on looking out beyond the atmosphere with radar, radio waves, etc.  And they make contact with Mars!

The Martians have had a civilization for 35,000 years and look upon us as primitives.  (Though they haven't been able to get beyond the EMF either.)  The Martians have been spying on us forever, but now that we are aware of their existence they propose to take us under their wing and improve us.  They know how much we are all addicted to TV, so they will teach us how to live via TV broadcasts.  These broadcasts will project 3D images on the sky that everyone in the world can see--this phenomenon is possible because the EMF makes the atmosphere a perfect lens.

In brief, the meat of the plot of "Cosmic Striptease" is about how Martians wear no clothes and their TV broadcast, a documentary about daily life of an ordinary family on Mars, demonstrates this and Earth people, at first shocked, soon take up nudism and abandon clothes.  This is the first step in making violent unhappy Earth as peaceful and happy as utopian Mars.  The story feels long and tedious because Ellison introduces weak satirical material and feeble character-based drama and comedy.  A guy is working for an ad agency or something and gets the contract to make or sell or whatever the ads that will run in the sky during the Martian broadcast and he gets fired because the advertisers didn't know about Martian nudism but then he starts his own ad agency and blah blah blah...in addition, this guy has a secretary who is very good-looking and with whom he flirts without positive result until the end of the story when she embraces nudism and embraces him.

None of "Cosmic Striptease"'s 's four individual planks--the EMF stuff, the nudism stuff, the TV satire nor the love story--is good enough to make the story compelling,  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

"A Furnace for Your Foe"

The second Ellison story in January 1958's Fantastic appears under the pseudonym Ellis Hart and starts with a quote from Shakespeare: “Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.”  Like "Cosmic Striptease," it seems to have never seen print a second time, 

In an opening scene that feels sort of long a fat corrupt businessman, Weaver, hires a crook, Geordie, to ensure the participant of a race he is betting on is the winner; there is a lot of verbiage that initially feels superfluous describing how fat Weaver is, the negotiations over Georfie's fee, the fat slob’s high tech safe, the animosity between Geordie and the fatso’s right hand man Irvin, but a lot of it is actually groundwork for things that happen later so is forgivable.  The next scene is a month later, and Geordie, we see, is no ordinary thug but a professional racer, a contestant in the Indianapolis 1000, a jet plane race.  The course of the Indy 1000 is a circle described by towering pylons, and Geordie intentionally clips the favorite pilot's craft so that it crashes into a pylon and the expected winner of the race is killed.  The third scene has Geordie in court--the robot jury deems him "not guilty" but the human judge furiously reminds him that everybody in the world knows he is a murderer and his racing career is over.  Sure enough, our protagonist finds himself one of the most hated men in the world!

A nervous wreck, in fear for his life from "the mob," Geordie tries to blackmail Weaver into somehow helping him, and when he is rebuffed and humiliated, Geordie draws a gun and shoots the obese magnate dead.  But before he can get out of Weaver's office with some money, Irvin the right-hand man appears and contemptuously sees Geordie on his way empty-handed.  For months Geordie lives a life of misery, beaten up by strangers who recognize him as the unconvicted murderer of the popular racer, shunned even by other members of the underworld, subjected to murder attempts by people trying to get in good with Irvin, who now is in charge of the Weaver enterprises.  A year later Geordie contrives to get a menial job on a space liner.  This ship is taking rich clients on a cruise of the brothels of the asteroid belt, as well as hauling a cargo of 500 female sex slaves!  One of Weaver Enterprises' off-the-books endeavors is sex trafficking, and Irvin is on this cruise to make sure the merchandise arrives at its destination safely, and Geordie has got himself aboard in hopes of murdering Irvin.     

When the police stop the liner just outside the asteroid belt the 500 women are ejected into space to hide the evidence!  After the police leave, Geordie makes his move, pulling his gun on Irvin and the ship's captain, forcing the captain and crew to leave the ship in their space suits so he and Irvin can have a final showdown alone.  A stray energy blast from Geordie's gun causes heavy machinery to land on the two criminals, trapping them.  The ship goes out of control and plunges into the sun.  In the time it takes to reach Sol, Geordie comes to terms with his own cowardice and criminality and realizes he has been the author of his own fate and thus achieves some kind of equanimity.

"A Furnace for Your Foe" is a sort of conventional crime story, and some of the explicitly science fiction parts of it don't make sense (the liner has almost reached the asteroid belt, stops, and then falls into the sun in a matter of hours?) but in the latter parts of the story Ellison does a decent job with Geordie's psychology and I like the  story's "you make your own luck and control your own life" philosophy.  We can moderately recommend this one. 

"No Planet is Safe"

It is the era of interstellar colonization!  Our protagonists are officers of the survey service.  After planets have been discovered by the "bountymen" who merely observe them from orbit and report their locations, the survey teams land on them to see how fit they are for settlement.  Inevitably, these teams suffer casualties as they encounter deadly diseases, deadly animals, even deadly geography.  

Along with our heroes on their current wide-ranging survey trip is a famous writer who is doing research for a history of space colonization.  He is an eccentric character who spends most of his time drinking.  This scribbler wants to join the teams on the surface of the various planets under survey but he is kept aboard the ship because these frontier worlds are terribly dangerous and the officers have been given orders to preserve him.

The survey ship comes to a planet that appears safe.  But after a few days people start getting killed in mysterious ways.  And they can't leave because the ship's systems have mysteriously been damaged!  Is it invisible natives?  Tiny natives?  Natives who are energy creature?  Natives with psychic powers?

The writer solves the mystery and we get our twist ending--lame pop psychology.  The survey crews have been conditioned to expect danger, and when they didn't find any they got more anxious instead of less, leading to accidents, and even began subconsciously sabotaging their own expedition--one of the officers himself, in a sleep-walking trance, wrecked the ship's "drive controls" to fulfill his psychological need to face a deadly crisis.

I don't like the ending, but everything up to that is OK, so we'll grade this one merely acceptable.

"No Planet is Safe" appeared in an issue of Super-Science Fiction with another eye-popping hubba hubba cover by Kelly Freas--Freas deserves all those Hugos and Chesleys--and as far as I can tell has not been reprinted since.

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I'm not as enamored of Ellison as some people are, and I have savaged plenty of Ellison stories at this here blog, but Ellison is ambitious and takes risks and tries to do things that are new and different and so reading his work is an adventure.  Today's stories aren't ones promoted by Ellison and his cronies, but for the most part I found reading them worthwhile.  For our next episode I'll pull an Ellison collection off the shelves of the MPorcius Library and read some Ellison stories that the man himself made sure escaped the pages of the pulps to be immortalized in book form.           

Merril-approved 1958 stories by "F O'Donnevan" and C Oliver

We continue looking at 1958 SF by reading selected stories included by Judith Merril in her list of Honorable Mentions in the 1959 edition of her critically lauded anthology series.  Today the "O" authors from the list.  

"The Gun Without a Bang" by Robert Sheckley (as by Finn O'Donnevan)

I read this one without first looking it up at isfdb and so got tricked.  I usually avoid Sheckley because I associate him with joke stories and satires, and would have skipped this if I had known the true identity of its author.  Luckily "The Gun Without a Bang" is not a humor piece, but a well-written adventure story that reminds us of the limitations of technology as well as the adaptability of mankind.

It is the spacefaring future!  All over the galaxy brave men are having adventures, discovering lost civilizations, fighting monsters, building a space empire.  Some of these men get lucky and get rich.  Dixon is one of these adventurers, but so far he hasn't been one of those to get rich.  He is content with his fate, however.

Today he is alone on a wild planet checking on an automatic radio relay station.  He has with him a prototype disintegrator pistol--he is testing it in the field for its inventors.  When he is attacked by a pack of things like wolves or hyenas and a pack of things like killer monkeys he uses the disintegrator to fight them off.  The weapon is very good at disintegrating Dixon's assailants, but it has its drawbacks.  For one thing, the disintegrator doesn't make a loud noise and disintegrated animals don't cry out in pain or fear, nor leave dead bodies, so the other animals of the pack are not scared by the weapon even as it reduces their numbers.  For another, the disintegrator beam has a wide area of effect and is liable to cause collateral damage and friendly fire incidents; a branch falls from a tree that is partly disintegrated and hits Dixon, putting him in peril, and during a wild close range struggle Dixon disables his own spaceship with stray fire, marooning him on this planet of voracious monsters.

A year later the inventors of the disintegrator pistol come looking for Dixon and their prototype and find Dixon has survived using the most basic and primitive methods, like building a stockade and fighting with handmade bow and arrows.  The pistol he uses as a hammer.

The action scene is very good and the plot twists make sense, so thumbs up for Robert Sheckley, not a thing I expected to type and not a thing you can expect to read from me again.

"The Gun Without a Bang" has been reprinted in several Sheckley collections and multiple anthologies.  I read it in the issue of Galaxy in which it first appeared.  

"The Space Horde" by Chad Oliver

Merril might have liked it, but "The Space Horde" didn't set the world on fire when it debuted--it was not printed in book form in English until 2016, though our Italian friends included it in an anthology in 1972.  It first saw print in an issue of Amazing alongside a story by Harlan Ellison with an equally corny title, "The Vengeance of Galaxy 5," that looks like it might be fun.  

"The Space Horde" is structured like a stereotypical SF thriller, like a B-movie about some disaster, that tries to horrify you, teach you some science, and trigger in you that good old sense of wonder at the vastness and mysteriousness of the universe.  First we get an intro about the vastness of space, how space is like the sea and the stars and planets like islands, etc.  Then the plot starts--three spacecraft have landed on Earth and from each emerges a blob monster that can dissolve anything and is immune to conventional weaponry; the unstoppable jelly creatures expand as they feed, laying waste to ever more acreage.  Then we get talky scenes of American scientists discussing what to do, interspersed with horror scenes in italics depicting children and women being dissolved by the ever-growing blob monsters.  The Rand Corporation computer calculates that the goop will cover all of the world in two years.  One team of scientists comes up with a wild theory of how to save the world from the invincible alien slime, and this is what makes the poorly titled "The Space Horde" unusual and worthy of Merril's recommendation. 

Maybe, posit the scientists, somewhere on Earth there lives the next step in evolution, a creature more advanced than the human race.  (We get some pretty suspect lectures about evolution at this point.)  If such a superior species exists, maybe it can defeat the aliens!  The scientists brainstorm what this next stage of evolution would look like, figure it must have telepathy, and that if it hasn't already fought the space jelly then it must not be aware of it yet, must live in some remote area, like Madagascar!  So the scientists go to Madagascar and wander around, thinking about the threat posed by the blobs from beyond the stars and broadcasting a mental cry for help to creatures they don't even know exist.  There is a flash and the slime retreats and returns to space.  The scientists can't be sure, but we readers are made aware, that they were right, that there lives in Madagascar an inconspicuous community of little psychic people who look like rodents and have no need for technology; when they learned of the space ooze they acted to save the world and the human beings they see as cute and clownish children.  The crisis over, the scientists speculate about whether the human race will colonize other planets and what will happen if we ever meet the secret superior species they theorize saved us.

"The Space Horde" isn't too long, and while the alien menace is sort of tired Oliver's resolution of the crisis is crazy and feels fresh, so I can moderately recommend it.

**********

Well, there are the "O"s, or, I guess, the "O" and a ringer, two respectable science fiction stories with science and horror/adventure elements.  Merril has guided us aright today.  

More 1950s SF featuring adventure and violence (I hope!) in our next episode!

Merril-approved 1958 stories by A E Nourse: "Hard Bargain" and "The Gift of Numbers"

I have to admit that while I recognized Nourse's name I couldn't remember if I had read anything by him until I consulted the archives.  It seems in 2017 I read "Nize Kitty," in 2018 "Family Resemblance," and in 2024--this very year!--"Second Sight."  Oy, that is a bad memory!  I had read three stories and I couldn't remember any of them?  Embarrassing!

Anyway, as you perhaps already know, I'm slowly making my way through the list of Honorable Mentions in the back of Judith Merril's 1959 SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume, cherry-picking stories that sound interesting or give me an excuse to look through old issues of men's magazines, and today we hit letter "N" and find that two stories by Nourse are on the menu.  Dare we hope they are less forgettable than the last three stories by Nourse we have talked about? 

"Hard Bargain" 

This baby debuted in Playboy, in an issue with an article by Anthony Boucher about various technological feats and political events that were predicted by SF writers and good photos of beloved actors Jose Ferrer and Tony Randall.  You can also find it in The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, a paperback copy of which I own (I'm reading it there.) 

Arrgh, this is a stupid joke story about a guy making a deal with the Devil.  Why do people keep writing these stories?  Why do people like Merril keep encouraging them to do so?  

A guy has sold his soul to the Devil in return for ten years of wealth and hot chicks.  Three years in, he is bored because it is no longer any fun banging an endless supply of easy and experienced sluts--he wants to bang an innocent girl.  So he and Satan renegotiate--if the Devil can provide an innocent lover, one "never touched by a man," the protagonist will waive his right to the remaining seven years, but if the Devil can't procure such an innocent girl the deal is off.

A few days later our hero meets and seduces a sweet charming girl, but it turns out she is not quite innocent.  He thinks he has squirmed out of his deal with the Devil because she wasn't a virgin, but it turns out the girl's virginity was taken not by a man, but by Satan himself, so our guy is ushered into Hell.

Lame filler that I guess makes sense for Playboy because of its erotic and wish-fulfillment aspects but why is Merril promoting it?  Because she loves to point out that SF is prevalent in mainstream publications as part of her quest to bust down the artificial barrier between genre and the mainstream?  This is a legit enterprise, but we'd be better served if Merril promoted good SF that appears in the slicks and the men's magazines, not banal crud.

Thumbs down!  (Do check out those pictures of Ferrer if you are a fan of his or of portrait photography, though.)

"The Gift of Numbers"  

This story debuted in an issue of Super Science-Fiction with a colorful monsters-carrying-off-sexy-babes cover by Kelly Freas.  If you've got a thing for pale women with red lips--or for Chewbacca, I guess--this is the cover for you.  I'm reading the story in the Norse collection Rx for Tomorrow where it is titled "A Gift For Numbers" because I'm having trouble finding a scan of the magazine.

This is an OK joke story with a plot gimmick that I wish was the basis of a horror story, not a humor piece.  We'll call this thing acceptable.

Avery is a timid little bookkeeper with a weak heart who isn't even very good at his bookkeeping; he has fallen behind and is full of anxiety about his deadlines.  At the bar he meets a fancily-dressed con man who has various special abilities.  For one thing he is a math whiz, perhaps the greatest man in the world when it comes to practical manipulations of numbers.  Even more impressively, he knows how to transfer patterns of atomic particles between brains, so that he can give Avery his math skill.  He charges 20 dollars for this service, and attains an additional benefit from Avery--you see, the conman has a painful ulcer that prevents him from drinking booze or eating tasty foods, and now Avery is a genius with figures but he also has the ulcer, while the con man can now booze it up to his heart's content!

And it gets worse!  Avery not only has the con man's ulcer, but his greed and his compulsions and his contempt for the rights of others!  He starts picking people's pockets unconsciously.  When he balances accounts and prepares taxes he cooks the books to embezzle funds into his own account.  He is now addicted to gambling, and loses all the money he steals.  His life is a disaster!  

The twist ending is that eventually the con man wants his skills back and sets a meeting with Avery to switch back their molecule patterns or whatever, but minutes before the meeting the crook dies of a heart attack because he has Avery's heart trouble.

Acceptable filler.  

**********

Hopefully nobody will ask me about these Nourse stories next week, because by then I will probably have forgotten about them.  Nourse was Merril's only "N" for 1958, so when next we meet we'll tackle some "O"s.    

Nancy Kilpatrick: "The Case of the Demon Lover," "Sustenance" and "Going Down"

I warned you this might happen so I hope you are ready--today we read three stories by Nancy Kilpatrick which--I think--are going to be about women having sex with monsters!  All courtesy of the internet archive, world's greatest website!   

"The Case of the Demon Lover" (1996)

I'm reading this in The Best American Erotica: 1997, but I think it debuted in 1996's Noirotica: An Anthology of Erotic Crime Stories.  Noirotica also features a story co-written by Poppy Z. Brite, whose "Calcutta: Lord of Nerves," and "Homewrecker" I liked.  Noirotica also has a pretentious and hilarious introduction by editor Thomas Roche in which he talks about how Raymond Chandler is his inspiration and he is using erotica to reveal important truths about our hypocritical world.  Sure, buddy. 

Adrian hates all men!  She won awards for being a great cop when she worked up in Philly, but now she is working in New Orleans, and her partner is a fat slob with a Southern accent whom she thinks looks like a toad.  They are cruising around, looking for a man who has raped 24 women of all races and social classes, but it ain't easy, as none of the victims can offer any description of their assailant.  Or maybe they are refusing to offer any description....

Adrian takes a walk, leaving her partner behind, and ends up in a cemetery.  We learn a little about her background as daughter of a single mother and a person who is smarter and more competent than everybody else, and how she came to find men repellant.  She discovers the rapist--the most beautiful man she has ever seen!  He uses his magic powers to seduce her--she begs for him to take her, and she has over a dozen orgasms as he uses her!  He is no rapist--all those two dozen women begged to be used by him just as our Adrian is begging!  I guess the multi-page sex scene is meant to appeal to women who have fantasies of being submissive.

Even more than staking her vagina, this newly claimed territory left her feeling owned.  She offered herself up to him in complete submission, and he accepted the offering as if it were his right to take her.  As if she existed to be taken, which was how she felt. 

The story ends with the indication that this man is now her master and they will meet again, she wearing whatever he tells her to wear and doing whatever he tells her to do.  Adrian is the horniest woman this sexual athlete and erotic artist has ever met--she needs multiple treatments to achieve satisfaction!

This isn't bad for porn that flatters women's resentment of men at the same time it appeals to their desire to be dominated by men, especially if you like the idea of degrading sex in the dirt of a cemetery.  A little copyediting would have helped, though--people generally don't say "gun handle," they say "pistol grip."  We'll blame that on Thomas Roche.

"Sustenance" (1993)

This story debuted in 1993 in After Hours, a small press magazine, and would be reprinted in The Vampire Stories of Nancy Kilpatrick.  I'm reading it in M. Christian's Eros ex machina: Eroticizing the Mechanical.  Mr. Christian's book includes a story by prominent SF writer Mike Resnick, so don't think I am going far afield today in blogging about three pornographic stories--there is a lot of overlap in the world of genre, so this post is no more crazy than my posts about detective stories by Leigh Brackett, Henry Kuttner or Fredric Brown.  The intro to Eros ex machina is deliberately funny, a three page warning like the warnings you find in the manuals of appliances and electronics:

Neither Rhinoceros Books nor the editor of Eros ex machina: Eroticizing the Mechanical acknowledges responsibility for any accidental injuries resulting form the unauthorized and/or inappropriate use of this product.

"Sustenance" is the diary of a prisoner.  Our narrator was raped by a robot in an alley (she had many orgasms) and imprisoned in a stone cell to be raped every 24 hours by a robot (she has many orgasms.)  Life in the cell is so boring she comes to welcome the rape, which she calls "the feeding," which I guess is the tenuous vampire angle.  All day she hears noises from one of the walls--is it another prisoner digging through, erroneously thinking our heroine's cell is the outside world?  Eventually the fellow prisoner busts through--it is a robot in the shape of a woman!  The rape robot rapes them both at the same time, and our narrator enjoys watching her fellow rape victim being used at the same time she is being used, reminding her of how her boyfriend used to enjoy watching porn.

Like "The Case of the Demon Lover," "Sustenance" is about a woman who was disappointed by real men and has come to find sexual satisfaction through having sex with a monster, satisfaction she would not have found on her own, but only after being taken by force.   

This story is actually pretty good; Kilpatrick's depiction of the narrator's evolving psychology as she responds to developments in her sanity-busting situation and her descriptions of the smell of metal and of the expanding hole between the cells are effective.  Of course, a story in which a woman comes to appreciate being raped--by a robot!--until her orifices bleed is not for everybody.  

"Going Down"

This one debuted in Mondo Zombie, alongside a new story by Robert Bloch which I will likely get around to reading some day, and has reappeared in other zombie anthologies, including in one featuring a story by George R. R. Martin.  Kilpatrick hits the big time with this one!

"Going Down" is by far the most literary (i. e., most oblique, hardest to understand, and least plot-driven) of today's stories, and the most disgusting and depressing.  There are also lots of jokes that are not funny.  

Paddy is, I think, a small-time actress who, I guess, appeared in B-movies before the zombie apocalypse, and was sexually abused by her father and took lots of drugs for her psychological problems.  Nowadays she is the sole living human in a world of animated corpses, and wishes she would turn into a zombie herself, but her efforts to commit suicide fail and the zombies of her father and her neighbors don't want to kill or eat her.  She has hallucinations of Marilyn Monroe visiting her (dearest Marilyn masturbates with a Twinkie during one such visit.)  The story ends when Paddy eats her father's rotting penis.

Thumbs down for this one.  The big time is not what it is cracked up to be.

**********

All three of these stories are about men treating women badly, how men both fail to meet women's sexual needs and also treat women as sex objects to satisfy their own needs--ironically, the women in the stories are most satisfied when they are most exploited, most objectified.  Is Kilpatrick suggesting that women's minds have been warped by our patriarchal society ("Going Down" in particular, but "The Case of the Demon Lover" as well, take aim at big institutions--the entertainment industry in the former and law enforcement in the latter--for misusing or abusing women) to the point that women are complicit in their own oppression?  Or is Kilpatrick simply recognizing that women's biological makeup is such that they crave domination?    

**********

Well, we did it; we read a story about a police officer raped by some kind of voodoo wizard (she enjoyed it) and a story about a woman raped by a robot (she enjoyed it) and a story abut a woman having an incestuous relationship with a zombie (I guess she enjoyed it?)  Nancy Kilpatrick has a large body of work but I think a little bit of it goes a long way and you shouldn't expect to catch me reading any more of her oeuvre any time soon.    

Lester del Rey: "Though Poppies Grow," "Lunar Landing," and "Fifth Freedom"

It has been a month since we have talked about Lester del Rey, but we haven't forgotten about him.  Let's today continue reading 1975's Early del Rey, a book of short stories and autobiographical reflections about del Rey's career and relationships with other SF figures, in particular the editor of Astounding and Unknown, John W. Campbell, Jr.

"Though Poppies Grow" (1942)

In introductory passages, Del Rey talks about how he tried to come up with a story responding to American participation to World War II and produced this story, which he had to alter to get Campbell to publish it in Unknown, and how it is "dated...and the world can no longer react properly" to it.  Well, let's see if we can agree with Campbell's criticisms of and/or del Rey's belief that 1975 people wouldn't know how to respond to "Though Poppies Grow."

A man in a worn World War I uniform finds himself in Washington, D. C.  He has vivid memories of the horrors of the trenches, particularly of a friend being caught on the wire and begging to be put out of his misery by his comrades, but after that he has no memories--he doesn't even know his own name!  He walks around, marveling at how fashion and technology have changed, contrasting the public's attitude about the current war with the war in which he served.  He feels an urge to do something, as if he is on a mission, but he doesn't know what that mission could be.

He goes to a restaurant and meets an attractive young woman who is kind to him.  Then he wanders around town, trying to join up to fight again, but he is rejected because the doctor who gives him his physical can't find any pulse or heartbeat.  Our hero realizes he is dead, a ghost or an animated corpse or something; he can make contact with physical objects and even eat, but doesn't actually need to eat or breathe.  He tries to get a job so he can free up another man to go fight but can't find one because he has no skills.  (This story has some plot holes like this--couldn't he get a job as a janitor or farmhand or something?)

The dead soldier reads a newspaper editorial that argues the US shouldn't sink its resources into an offensive because the British don't deserve our help and we need to conserve our men and material to defend ourselves from the god damned.  The soldier, who has only been in the 1940s one day but already has strong opinions about foreign policy barges into the newspaper office to curse out the writer of this editorial.  Then it is back to wandering the streets.  Our guy finds himself near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

The young woman finds him; she has with her a general (she has friends in high places.)  She shows our guy a newspaper--the writer whom he confronted has changed his tune, writing an editorial admitting he lied and the Communists are our buddies and anybody who says different is a traitor to America.  The general thinks the dead soldier came out of the Tomb (he can touch objects and people normally but also pass through stone, I guess--you know, whatever the plot requires) and also has the magic power to persuade anyone of anything.  The government can use him to travel the country and use his powers to persuade anybody who questions government policy to toe the line and obey Washington like a good American should.  Then the dead soldier and the young woman walk off together to begin a wonderful new life.

Each individual sentence of this story is well-written, but the story is long and slow and kind of boring and has those little plot holes, and of course I'm not crazy about the government using necromancy to get us all to mindlessly go along with whatever FDR and his lackeys want to do.  We're calling "Though Poppies Grow" barely acceptable.

One of Campbell's two big complaints about the earlier draft was that the dead soldier didn't actually much of a contribution to the war effort--apparently in that first version the dead soldier took the job of guarding the Tomb so that those soldiers guarding it could go to the front.  This is a good criticism with which del Rey agreed; a long story in which a miracle gives life to a dead man and the dead man goes on to do some penny ante thing is pretty lame.  And in fact the story still mostly consists of the main character being a sort of spectator who does little purposeful but is instead pushed around by other people and forces.  Campbell's other significant criticism was that readers would find an implied sexual liaison between a living human being and some kind of animated corpse "horrible."  Del Rey disagreed and while he dutifully made this implication a little less in-your-face in this version, it is still there.

What about del Rey's suspicion that people in 1975 wouldn't "react properly" to "Though Poppies Grow"?  Well, the story is very patriotic, and very pro-government, and by 1975 the leftist intelligentsia had taken over all the cultural institutions but hadn't yet captured every level of government, so the loudest segments of the educated public in 1975 would no doubt see a patriotic story which praised government policy as totally square if not ridiculous and disgusting, especially a story focused on foreign policy, seeing as the US government's foreign policy for the last few decades had revolved around trying, however incompetently, to obstruct the operations of the left-wing intellectuals' heroes like Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong.  So, yeah, I can see del Rey assuming "Though Poppies Grow" might not receive a warm reception in 1975.

This mediocre story guaranteed to piss most people off with its flag-waving, or its sympathy for the USSR, or its glorification of the stifling of dissent, or its necrophilia has not been reprinted very often, though you can find it in the 2010 NESFA collection Robots and Magic.

Incidentally, this is the last story in the first part of The Early del Rey, and in the first volume of the two volume paperback publication of the collection.  This part of the book ends with a discussion of the story "Nerves," a piece which is well-regarded but which I didn't like when I read it years ago.             

"Lunar Landing" (1942)

As Part Two of Early del Rey begins, the author tells us Campbell had acquired a painting of a rocket sitting on the moon with the sun and Earth in the sky above and suggested del Rey write a story based upon it; "Lunar Landing" is that story. 

Our protagonist Grey is a somewhat unusual character, 80 lbs and 4' 10", suffering amnesia so he doesn't know who his family is.  He calls himself Grey because his hair and eyes are grey--even his skin has a grey look to it.  After waking memoryless,  and learning how to talk and read again, Grey, a man with a mechanical bent, worked in an aircraft factory and then became a skilled pilot.  When the first rocket to the moon, piloted by a Swanson, sent out a distress signal after a crash landing on Luna, Grey was chosen to pilot the rescue rocket, partly because he is so small he wouldn't add much weight to the rocket payload.

Part I of this longish (35 pages in The Early del Rey) story covers the trip to Luna and includes character backgrounds and a lot of banter among the crew that is characterized by sexual tension--there is a lot of cigarette smoking, for one thing (there was a lot of cigarette smoking with an erotic undertone in "Though Poppies Grow" as well), and when the rocket motors start malfunctioning the co-pilot, a red-headed young woman, in her fear, embraces Grey even though they have a very combative relationship.  There is another such odd couple among the crew who have a simmering inchoate sexual relationship.

Part II is on Luna after the crashlanding of Grey's rocket--these rockets seem to have a flaw that was not recognized on Earth.  The man who designed the vessels is among the crew on this ship, and this guy also has an acrimonious relationship with Grey.  

One of the distracting artistic choices del Rey makes in "Lunar Landing" is having the mysterious private entity who is sending these rockets to Luna fail to establish a chain-of-command or hierarchy among the crew of the ships--nobody aboard is formally recognized as captain and so there is a power struggle, with Grey coming out on top.  Adventure stories often feature these sorts of contests for authority, but it seems ridiculous to send a rocket to the moon--ostensibly only the second ever--without a designated captain.

Grey leads the majority of the crew (the designer stays behind to examine the engine) across the lunar surface towards what they think is the wreck of the first expedition.  The explorers discover native flora and fauna, and there are hints in the text that Grey, and/or other Earthers, have been to the moon before.  Sure enough, the rescue party finds not Swanson's wrecked ship but a third space ship!  An old woman among the crew, Alice Benson, tells the story of how she worked on this ship thirty years ago and has kept it a secret all these years; it was flown to Luna by her husband Bill.  It turns out she is the owner of the mysterious company organizing these expeditions.  The party returns to their ship only to find the designer has vanished.

Part III introduces a new conflict among the crew--Grey and Mrs. Benson are devoted to space travel out of a sense of romance, but another member of the crew is interested in exploring Luna in order to make money, and is even planning on exploiting the (as yet undiscovered) intelligent natives.  Grey and the redhead share their first kiss, and immediately afterwards share a cigarette.  From the nose of the rocket somebody, finally, spots Swanson's ship, and the sympathetic characters head for it, leaving the nasty money-grubbing imperialist behind.

Besides hoping to fin Swanson and his crew alive, the astronauts had hoped to find spare parts for their own engines, and are disappointed to find that the Swanson ship's motor has been removed--there is also no sign of Swanson, though the log describes the death of one of his two comrades and the disappearance of the other.  (Grey finds two unused cartons of cigarettes, so the sortie is not a total loss.)  When Grey and company get back to their own ship they find the imperialist is missing and the designer is back, but in a deep sleep.  When briefly roused he can't remember anything that has happened since he started a nap back on Earth!           

In Part IV Grey investigates the thirty-year old ship Benson ship--its rocket motors have also been stolen.  Whoever kidnapped the imperialist brings him back--like the designer he is in a deep sleep.  Grey and the redhead go up to the nose of their ship to spend a lot of time flirting and talking about cigarettes, which I guess is the thing they have in common that builds a bond between them.  They also spot a hole in the side of a cliff, and go investigate it with Mrs. Benson, figuring it will lead to the lair of whoever has been kidnapping their colleagues and seizing their rocket motors.

In Part V all is revealed.  Bill Benson's ship thirty years ago was spotted from Mars and a team from the red planet came to help the guy.  The Martians are experts in psychology, and have scientifically categorized people into two types, the goody goody idealists and the practical types who exploit others, and they can tell what type you are via their technology.  The idealists on Mars are running a secret space program that the exploiters don't know about.  The Martian lunar expedition was happy to find that Bill Benson was an idealist.  Similarly, Swanson and the survivors of his crew are idealists.  The Martians found that the designer and the imperialist were exploiters, and so erased their memories and returned them.  Obviously Mrs. Benson and the redhead are idealists.  As for Grey, he is the artificially created half-son of Bill Benson, a feat of genetic engineering sent to Earth with no memory.

The Martians propose a conspiracy.  Swanson and Mrs. Benson will go to Earth and claim the moon is a death trap with no valuable resources.  Then they will secretly get rich by mining all the valuable minerals on the Moon.  With all this money they will secretly manipulate Earth society so only idealists will have influence--the Martian idealists will do the same on Mars.  Eventually exploiters will have no power on either world.  Grey and the redhead will manage human operations on Luna--the Earth will be told they are dead.  The last line of the story is more flirting centered on cigarettes.

In the autobiographical text del Rey tells us "Lunar Landing" was a rush job and it is not a smooth read; the plot is repetitive and contrived, with too many boring characters and with people and ideas sort of popping up in the middle of the story as if from out of nowhere.  I actually like all the science stuff, the descriptions of space flight and space suits and lunar life and so forth, but all that stuff is just window dressing.  The rank elitism of the plot resolution--we can scientifically distinguish good people from bad people and the good people are allowed to do whatever they want to the bad people--for their own good, of course!--while sort of common in SF is also sort of annoying, and I didn't appreciate the constant gushing about how awesome cigarettes are--is this space program sponsored by Lucky Strike?

"Lunar Landing" hasn't been reprinted outside of del Rey collections, and we're calling it barely acceptable.  For del Rey completists and tobacco enthusiasts only!  

"Fifth Freedom" (1943) 

Here we have another story inspired by America's involvement in the Second World War.  The title of "Though Poppies Grow" is lifted from the famous poem "In Flanders Fields," which is quoted in the story and expresses the story's theme that the dead want us to keep fighting the Hun.  "Fifth Freedom" of course refers to FDR's 1941 speech about four freedoms, but del Rey does not refer to it in the story--it was Campbell who titled the story. 

It is the near future, and Germany is trying to conquer Europe yet again!  American opinion is galvanized into support for the war and there is a broad-based draft and the government seizes control of the economy.  Our protagonist is a conscientious objector and refuses to fight.  This is a science fiction story, so he has no religious rationale for his dissent--he just thinks war is bad!  His father disowns him.  The government sends him to a labor camp where the other laborers shun him--they are here because they are old or crippled or whatever--they are fully behind the war effort!  

Our sensitive hero is an amateur violinist, and on his off hours climbs a hill overlooking the labor camp to scrape away at his fiddle.  On the other side of the hill is a women's labor camp; there is a pretty girl over there, also on break, and the conscientious objector enjoys seeing her and imagining she can hear his music.  One day she actually comes up the hill to join him--she is also a music lover!  It's a love connection!

Our guy makes a friend in the labor camp, a cripple who is nonetheless a good fighter who helps protect our musician from a bully.  Life is looking up!  A girl and a friend!  The Air Force sends a representative to the camp to talk to the musician, who, it turns out, is also an expert pilot--his family was wealthy enough that he could afford a civilian model of one of the new rocket planes and he has like one thousand hours of flight time!  Uncle Sam would love to strap him into a USAAF rocket plane so he can drop bombs on Deutschland like a good American boy should!  Of course, our guy isn't interested in signing up, even after the Germans blow up New York and then Chicago with their radiation bombs!

The violinist, his friend the cripple and the girl are on that hill when the krauts bomb their labor camps.  The girl gets radiation sickness and dies, and, finally, the protagonist decides to enlist with the flyboys, though only after he reflects that America is better than Germany because in Germany the government forces people to fight and in the US the government just tries really really hard to persuade you to fight.

The ideological content and character relationships of "Fifth Freedom" are not very impressive, and the science fiction content is limited, though del Rey brags in the autobiographical section that follows that he is one of the first to stress the danger of radiation from atomic bombs, not just the game-changing volume of blast of such weapons.  Another barely acceptable story.      

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Three weak stories in a row.  In fairness to del Rey, he tells us early on in Early del Rey that this volume is going to consist of stories not previously collected, so we have to expect the content of the book to be below his average.  The main draw of Early del Rey's 400 pages is perhaps his reminiscences of his relationship with Campbell and his insights into the SF world of the '30s and '40s.  Probably when I have finished with this book I will read some collections of his more acclaimed work.