Three above the night: Leiber, Reynolds and Russell

Let's crack open another SF anthology available at the internet archive, world's greatest website.  Today we've got Groff Conklin's 1965 13 Above the Night, Dell 8741, which would be reprinted in 1969 with a more exciting cover depicting the Death Star blowing up a skull...hey, why not?  isfdb doesn't credit an artist for this compelling and anachronistic image, which is reminding me of George Ziel's cover for Damon Knight's World Without Children and The Earth Quarter.  Today we'll check out three of the thirteen stories reprinted in this cryptically-titled volume (what does "above the night" even mean?), those by Fritz "Grey Mouser" Leiber, Mack "Socialist Labor Party" Reynolds, and Eric "John W. Campbell, Jr.'s favorite author" Frank Russell.

(We'll be reading these stories in the first edition of 13 Above the Night which cost SF fans 60 cents.  The cover upgrade is worth the 15 pennies, believe me.)

"Nice Girl with Five Husbands" by Fritz Leiber (1951) 

Here we have another Fritz Leiber story about unusual sexual relationships.  This one is not all that titillating, and seems mainly to have been written to promote Leiber's apparent "free love" anti-monogamy beliefs (see "The Ship Sails at Midnight") with its depiction of a future in which people run around naked and have group marriages, an optimistic future of world peace and travel to Mars, of cheap energy and high IQs.  Leiber seems to be trying to suggest that nudity and the abandonment of monogamy are of a piece with solar panels and rocket ships, that monogamy and the nudity taboo are like technologies that will soon be rendered obsolete.

Leiber starts the story by positing that there are temporal winds that frequent specific spots on the globe, and if you are at such a spot at just the right time you will be carried to the future or the past.  Then we meet a guy, an artist, who gets swept into the future by one of these winds; he is in the desert so at first he doesn't know he is in the future of 2050, the landscape not having changed so much over a century.

The artist meets a hot girl and she introduces him to her group marriage and our guy learns about this utopian future.  Leiber's story is mostly just slightly oblique description of this utopian future; there is very little plot, the tepid "drama" of the plot consisting of whether or not the artist will realize he is in the future and whether or not the future people will realize the artist is from the past and not just a conservative or reactionary who has an eccentric taste for monogamy, but since we knew from page one the story was about time travel there is no suspense or surprise--and no drama--for the reader.  Leiber tries to add some tragedy to the story--the artist has the opportunity to join the group marriage and this peaceful world but that opportunity is lost when he gets blown back to the inferior monogamous Cold War world of 1950.     

I'm going to have to give "Nice Girl with Five Husbands" a thumbs down, even though it is well-written on a sentence by sentence basis, because it lacks plot and doesn't argue for group marriage and nudism in a logical way, just sort of asserts they are awesome.  Fritz Leiber is in good company when I criticize hi here, as his fellow Grandmasters Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon are also good writers who sometimes foist these earnest utopian stories on us.  Portraying alternative societies animated by different (purportedly "better") sexual mores and inhabited by superior individuals is a great SF idea, but these elements can't build an engaging story on their own--to provide the reader some entertainment they should be integrated into a story in which the characters grow or at least change and/or face obstacles as they pursue goals; if the utopia is all there is to the story it can be pretty boring.

Following its debut in the same issue of Galaxy as C. M. Kornbluth's famous "Marching Morons" (another tendentious story I panned), "Nice Girl with Five Husbands" has appeared in time travel anthologies and Leiber collections.  

"Prone" by Mack Reynolds (1954)

Let's take another gander at the odd career of Mack Reynolds, whom we have written about before, a leftist often published by the famously conservative John W. Campbell, Jr., a world traveler who published articles about booze in men's magazines like Mr. and Playboy, a guy whose SF writing I find mediocre but who somehow won some kind of reader's poll at Galaxy and If.

"Prone" is an absolutely lame joke story; the big central joke and all the little jokes over its short duration are all obvious, like jokes a kid could make.  Thumbs down!

      

It is the spacefaring future, and Earth has been at war with Mars for over a century; neither planet has been able to get a decisive edge over the other, leading to decade after decade of stalemate.  The story takes place in the office of Terra's supreme commander.  There is a lot of dialogue about a young service man who is what they call "an accident prone."  (All my life I have encountered "accident-prone" the adjective, but this story introduces me to "accident prone" the noun.  Always learning!)  Wherever this guy goes people trip and computers fail and buildings spontaneously catch fire and on and on, Reynolds giving many examples which I guess are meant to be funny.  A scientist says that most accident prones suffer injury themselves again and again, but this guy is one of the freaks who is never harmed himself but triggers catastrophic accidents to those nearby.  The Supreme Commander has a brainwave--they'll send the accident prone on a secret mission to Mars in hopes he causes the havoc there he has been causing on Earth.

This bargain basement filler piece debuted in F&SF and has been anthologized a fair number of times, somewhat to my surprise.  

"Now Inhale" by Eric Frank Russell (1959)    

Two losers in a row?  Ouch!  Maybe Eric Frank Russell can pull us out of this slump?

As we might expect of a story that debuted in Astounding, "Now Inhale" is a classic-style science fiction story in which a spacefarer uses his intelligence to survive an encounter with hostile aliens.  Russell's "Now Inhale" is reminding me a little of something Jack Vance might do, but unfortunately isn't as amusing or emotionally engaging as a Vance story--Russell fills the story with mild jokes and tries to generate tension with the fact the protagonist is imprisoned and could be killed at any moment, but somehow the story doesn't give you the legitimate laughs and chills a Vance story might.  Still, at least acceptable, maybe mildly recommendable--I kinda like it.  Maybe this counts as good filler.

 

Terra has colonized a hundred planets, and scouts search for still more.  This future human society is at peace with itself and others--criminal humans are given surgery to fix their anti-social personalities, and there is no point in going to war with nonhumans because there are so many valuable uninhabited planets that it makes no sense to waste resources fighting over an inhabited planet.  Of course, Earth still has a powerful space navy, just in case.

Our hero is a scout who operates a one-man craft.  He has to make an emergency landing on a planet inhabited by aliens capable of space flight--they have settled all three planets of this system.  They condemn our guy to execution as a spy.  These natives have a strange custom--as a form of public entertainment, all people on death row have to play a game of their choice (one like a board game or a card game that can be played in a small room) against an opponent chosen by the state before they are killed; the condemned get executed whether or not they win or lose, so they seek not so much to win as to drag out the game.  Invited to introduce the native TV audience to an Earth game, our hero opts to play a game that grinds on for day after day.  (Russell bases this game on what wikipedia is calling "The Tower of Hanoi;" the space scout attributes the game to the priests of the "Temple of Benares."  Wikipedia suggests this is a very famous puzzle but I have never heard of it.  Always learning.)  Over a year passes, by which time a Terran warship arrives to negotiate our guy's liberation.

"Now Inhale" was included in several anthologies, including one on the theme of television and another dedicated to aliens.  I'm not surprised editors wanted to reprint "Now Inhale," because Russell has a good reputation and this story isn't bad, but television broadcast plays very little role in the story, and the aliens aren't appreciably different from standard human villains from a standard adventure story in which the hero gets thrown in the arena or has to play cards for his life or something, so I am a little quizzical.

**********

These don't feel like stellar picks by Conklin, but maybe we'll return to the pages of 13 Above the Night to sample some more of his selections and be more impressed by those.  Stay tuned, time and space travel fans.