Robert Bloch: "Sales of a Deathman," "A Toy for Juliette," and "Report on Sol III"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories collected in the 1971 Robert Bloch collection Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow by finding scans of other magazines and books in which they appeared.  Of the book's dozen stories we've read all but three, and today we endeavor to wring enjoyment and enlightenment out of those stragglers.

"Sales of a Deathman" (1968)

Here we have a rare story--after its debut in Galaxy and its appearance in the French edition of Galaxy ("Galaxie" is what they call it over there--seems legit) "Sales of a Deathman" (groan) has only reappeared in Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow.  This issue of Galaxy, edited by Fred Pohl, is full of stories and art by people we like: Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, Brian Aldiss, R. A. Lafferty, Wallace Wood, Vaughan Bode, Jack Gaughan, Gray Morrow.  We'll have to get back to this one, as I don't think I've absorbed all of that material.

"Sales of a Deathman" is a satire full of the kinds of jokes 11-year-olds come up with, like "Deadicare" and "Grislyland."  Our text consists of extracts from the 2047-2067 diaries of a top government psychologist.  In 2047, the world is overpopulated--the USA alone is home to a billion people!  Pollution forces those people who still live above ground to wear respirators all the time.  

Our diarist is at a big meeting where the President and his staff discuss solutions to the overpopulation problem.  After various forms of mass murder, promotion of homosexuality and forced sterilization have been dismissed, the shrink penning this record  proposes an ad campaign that urges people to commit suicide.  The program works.  Soon people are killing themselves left and right!  But death becomes too popular, and after a few years there aren't enough productive people to maintain a modern society, to grow food, maintain order, control disease, lubricate the machines, etc.  So the human race goes extinct.

My interest in satires of advertising and stories that fret about pollution and overpopulation long ago withered to close to zero, and Bloch's treatment of these issues is way too childish to coax that interest back to life--"Sales of a Deathman" is just a bunch of lame jokes with no human feeling and nothing novel to say.  Thumbs down!

"A Toy for Juliette" (1967)

"A Toy for Juliette" debuted in Harlan Ellison's famous anthology Dangerous Visions.  Ten years ago I bought a hardcover green-jacketed copy of Dangerous Visions at a Half-Price Books in Iowa, so I don't have to search through the internet archive or luminist.org to read this one but can read the way our ancestors did, from the printed page!

In Dangerous Visions, "A Toy for Juliette" is preceded by three pages of introduction from Ellison and two pages of autobiography from Bloch.  Among other things, we learn that, when Ellison arrived on the west coast, Bloch lent him a large sum of money so he and his wife and child would have a place to stay and food to eat.  Ellison dotes on Bloch's famous story "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper," which, it seems, suggests a scenario in which the Ripper is immortal.  Ellison, intrigued by the idea of the Ripper living in the future, commissioned Bloch to write a story on that theme, and "A Toy for Juliette" is that story.  Apparently obsessed with the idea, Ellison wrote a Ripper-in-the-future story of his own, "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World," apparently a sequel to "A Toy for Juliette," and it is also printed here in DV.  

In the autobiographical passages, Bloch avers that his many stories about killers are an effort to "examine violence in our society" and laments that, over the two decades since World War II, American life has gotten more violent.

(I'll note here that Jack the Ripper is one of those cultural phenomena, like the sinking of the Titanic or the murder of JFK, that I am aware consumes millions of people but which interests me very little.)

Juliette is a beautiful blonde living in the high tech future--her ring remotely controls the lighting in her room, for example.  This is a grim, subterranean, post-apocalyptic future: only a few thousand people survive, and all the world--all the universe, apparently!--has been polluted by mankind's "meddling with the atomic order."  Juliette herself is something of an apocalyptic character.  Her grandfather is a time traveler, and he regularly goes back in time to collect weapons and torture devices for Juliette to play with, and people--men and women, children and adults--for Juliette to have sex with, to torture and to murder.  Sometimes Juliette lets Grandpa watch.  Grandpa, who it is hinted murdered Juliette's parents, jokes that Juliette will one day murder him and then murder the rest of humanity.

Having set the stage and presented the characters, Bloch quickly gives us the twist ending.  Grandpa brings back a Victorian gentleman for Juliette to play with.  Juliette is eager to have sex with this guy and stab him to death while he (or she, maybe) is having an orgasm.  But Grandpa has unwittingly summoned from the past none other than Jack the Ripper!  The Ripper outmaneuvers Juliette and cuts her into little pieces.

This is an acceptable macabre entertainment, with its erotic and gruesome subject matter presented in an economical fashion, without any distracting jokes.  (I feel like I say this almost every time I write about Bloch--he is a good writer of entertaining genre fiction if he can curb his desire to tell stupid jokes and keep his social criticism disciplined.)  "A Toy for Juliette" has been reprinted in Jack the Ripper-themed anthologies and in the many editions of Ellison's Partners in Wonder, a collection of Ellison's collaborations.      

"Report on Sol III" (1958)

Like "Sales of a Deathman," "Report on Sol III" is what I would call a rare story--besides in Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow, it has only ever been reprinted in a 1966 reprint magazine.

"Report on Sol III" is rare for a reason--it is a plotless jeremiad against life in the Western world!  It reads like communist propaganda!  Space aliens--tentacled people who communicate mind to mind and so have no spoken or written language--observe the human race and are horrified and disgusted to learn that humans go to war, compete in the market, eat other animals and have sex in private.  These creatures find television and popular music abhorrent and come to believe the family life of humans is oppressive and humans have no appreciation of natural beauty (all the art they see is by Picasso and other moderns.)  The final scene of "Report on Sol III" asserts that the only thing humans really care about is money, a concept that is absolutely alien to these E.T.s.

Stupid and lazy--everything Bloch says in "Report on Sol III" is banal, and he doesn't paint a superior alien civilization or present an alternative to bourgeois capitalism, or even really critique American life--he just presents aliens about whom we learn nothing pointing at us and saying "yuck."  An even more childish story than "Sales of a Deathman"!

Bad!

**********

So there we have it, folks--we've read all twelve stories in Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow.  I've had the H-1B interns (H-1B, H-1A, O-1--you think I know the difference?  Talk to the pencil-necked geeks down at the MPorcius Fiction Log legal department if you must!) compile a list of all twelve, with links to my blog posts about the first nine we read--feel free to click through, but if you find any typos in those posts, rest assured the blame lies with the  interns, who spend way way too much of their required 80 hours a week napping or chit chatting around the water cooler.  I myself will affix next to each title a "+" if the story is good, a "-" if it is bad, and a "0" if it is merely acceptable; I can't trust the interns to do that--they are slackers and softies who will just lay down a sea of "+"s and call it a day!  

"The Hungry Eye"                                         +

"The Old College Try"                                   +
"The World Timer"                                         -

"Crime Machine"                                            0

"Funnel of God"                                             +

"Bald-Headed Mirage"                                   +

"F.O.B. Venus"                                                -

"The Gods Are Not Mocked"                         0

"The Goddess of Wisdom"                             +

"Sales of a Deathman"                                    -

"A Toy for Juliette"                                         0

"Report on Sol III"                                          -

Collating the scores and running them through the various spreadsheets and chi square thingies we find that Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow, earns one point, it having five good stories and only four bad ones.  I have to admit, after these last six I thought Bloch was going to be underwater this time!  But it turns out I enjoyed the first six stories I read more than I had remembered.  A pleasant surprise.

Next time, more mid-century SF from guys with whom we have some familiarity.

Robert Bloch: "F.O.B. Venus," "The Gods Are Not Mocked," and "The Goddess of Wisdom"

Looking at speculative fiction books, magazines and comics all the time as I do, I see a lot of drawings and paintings of skulls.  It is easy to get jaded, but sometimes I still see one that I really like.  A skull that recently impressed me was the one on the cover of the 1975 edition of Robert Bloch's Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow, and I'm taking that as a hint I should read the stories therein.  I don't actually own a copy of the skulltastic 1975 Award printing, or the science fiction-themed 1971 printing, but I think I can find the stories elsewhere.  And of course I have already read a bunch of the stories in the collection; Bloch has a huge body of work, but I've been chipping away at it for years.  Let's link to my blog posts on the six tales reprinted in Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow that I've already grappled with.

"The Hungry Eye"

"The Old College Try"

"The World Timer"

"Crime Machine"

"Funnel of God"

"Bald-Headed Mirage"

Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow contains twelve stories, so we are left with six that have yet to be panned or praised here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Let's handle three today and three next time.

"F.O.B. Venus" (1958)

"F.O.B. Venus" was the cover story of an issue of Fantastic adorned with a sexy women-in-crystalline-bondage cover (on an adults-only Christmas tree?) that perhaps would catch the eye on the newsstand but also embarrass the serious SF fan.  Today the cover text of this ish is perhaps even more likely to amuse or embarrass; I know you are in suspense, so I'll explain that the "troons" in question are a family by that name who figure in a series of stories by John Wyndham.  We have actually read one of Wyndham's Troon stories here at MPFLog; back in 2015 we read "The Asteroids, 2194," in which Captain Gerald Troon meets his grandfather, Captain George Montgomery Troon, in a derelict ship in the asteroid belt.  

Enough with the troons--let's transition to the matter at hand, Robert Bloch and "F.O.B. Venus."  "F.O.B. Venus" is a joke story that reminds you how dangerous women are, a series of blackly comic vignettes with recursive elements, the plots of which reflect Bloch's deep involvement in crime fiction.  

Aliens who take the form of beautiful young women have been orbiting Earth in a "mother-ship," learning our languages and culture by picking up radio broadcasts.  Finally some land on Earth in capsules that disintegrate and disappear on arrival and begin infiltrating our society in order to gather knowledge via hands-on experience of human life.  In the first vignette one of these gorgeous bombshells approaches an anti-social nerd who works in a music store organizing the sheet music.  This guy loves German classical music and hates rock and roll.  (For those keeping track of all the popular musicians Bloch denounces in his oeuvre, it is Jerry Lee Lewis who is specifically named in this story.  Goodness, gracious.)  The alien shares his love of classical music, having listened to it up in orbit, and her first words to the nerd are "Take me to your lieder."  (Bloch has a penchant for these "take me to your leader jokes--see "ETFF.")

The second vinnie concerns an ex-con who is running an extortion racket in Reno.  A good-looker, he picks up women seeking divorces at casinos and has his friend photograph him in a motel bed with them; the women generally pay lots of cash for the photos and negatives because they could be used by their husbands to escape liability for alimony.  This creep runs into an alien who has come to Earth to study human reproduction, and is more eager to bang than most of the criminal's victims.  In fact, she is making the moves on him in the car on the way to the motel and he gets so distracted he drives into a moving freight train.  He survives the wreck but is driven insane when the beauty continues to grope him even though she is decapitated.

Vinnie number three concerns a fifty-something businessman who hires one of the aliens as a secretary.  She is so smart that she figures out ways to make his business prosper and then she uses legal tricks to steal his business from him and ruin his reputation so that he commits suicide.

The seemingly endless series of jokes rolls on--in v#4 an alien studying human anatomy marries some dude, has a child with him, then murders and dissects him--she gives Dad's eyeballs to their half-human child who plays with them like they are marbles.  The groan-inducing vignette-ending joke is "She has her father's eyes."

In the final vignette Bloch adds a new wrinkle to the story.  After the aliens in woman form have learned all about human culture and seized lots of power in the business and political realms the aliens stop landing bodily and start sending their consciousnesses to Earth to inhabit and control the bodies of Earth women.  Earth women suddenly get less interested in fashion and more interested in science and business, and they are a lot smarter now, too, smart enough to take over the world and exterminate the male of the species.  Giving the aliens new powers at the end of the story is particularly lazy and stupid--why didn't the aliens just send their psyches into people's bodies in the first place?  And why don't they take over male bodies?  Did Bloch write the first hundred, eh, I mean four, episodes and then struggle to come up with a conclusion? 

 

Not good.  If we are being very generous, we might say this story represents Bloch's less than enthusiastic response to feminism, to the growing power of women in society, but Bloch's addressing of this theme is very inchoate--this story is really just an unconnected jumble of dumb puns, winking references to science fiction cliches, and gory images.  It doesn't look like "F.O.B. Venus" has been reprinted anyplace besides Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow, with good reason.    

"The Gods Are Not Mocked" (1968)

Here we've got a story that debuted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.  I'm reading "The Gods Are Not Mocked" in a scan of the 1977 collection Cold Chills; the story is also the title story of a French Bloch collection, and the inspiration for the cover illo, though our Gallic freres in SFdom renamed the story something like "Teddy Bear is a Pyromaniac," which is pretty funny.  (See, there are reasons to admire the Frenchies beyond their delicious macrons and baguettes.)  

Harry Hinch owns a shop that sells ironic novelties and sarcastic bumper stickers and pinback buttons and kitschy posters and S&M gear; HH also sells pot and acid on the side.  When a biker buys LSD from HH, and picks up a girl at HH's store, and proceeds to kill himself and the girl in a crash, HH decides to hide out in his cabin in the woods for a while.  But then the girl's father comes a calling, armed with a small pistol (.25 caliber.)  

At this here blog we have often noted Bloch's predilection for social satire and his dim view of things like rock music and violent media and the counterculture in general.  Dad gives a speech that we have to assume represents Bloch's own sentiments, attacking the whole campy counterculture which Harry Hinch represents, a culture of rebellion which seeks to undermine mainstream culture and religion but does not deserve to be taken seriously--according to the grieving Dad and our author Bloch, it stems from psychological problems suffered by its adherents.  Dad/Bloch argue that this counterculture, by undermining old fashioned values, is undermining society, because the old myths and verities, the old customs and heroes, give people hope and stability and valuable models to follow.  Dad (a college professor--apparently one of the last conservative academics in the humanities or social sciences) employs a metaphor: such old-fashioned heroes and icons as Hamlet and Sherlock Holmes are like gods--though fictional, they are brought to life by worship and provide value to their worshipers and to society in general, and toppling them entails risk.

After Dad leaves, HH is, apparently, mauled to death by a bear.  We readers are allowed to entertain the possibility that Dad dressed up as a bear and murdered the drug dealing goofball, but we are sort of expected to accept that one of the icons Henry Hinch had particular hostility for, Smokey the Bear, came to life and destroyed the man who mocked his wholesome message.

We'll call this story acceptable.  It is economical, Bloch actually creates a compelling milieu in HH's store, some of the bumper stickers Bloch comes up with are sort of clever, and Bloch's psychological and social analyses are actually sort of interesting, and I like how he actually makes a coherent argument for his cultural conservatism instead of just sneering like he does at Jerry Lee Lewis is the previous story we looked at today.  

Bloch scholars may see "The Gods Are Not Mocked" as a variation on themes and narrative techniques we see in one of Bloch's better stories, "The Animal Fair" and one of his weaker ones, "The Funny Farm."       

The stories in Cold Chills are accompanied by little author commentaries; in the one appended to "The Gods Are Not Mocked," Bloch acknowledges that his hostility to the irreverent counterculture may be surprising to SF fans as he himself is always "roasting" people at SF conventions, but argues that he only roasts people who can respond in kind and he doesn't do it to undermine society, but only in jest.  Cold Chills reprints the aforementioned "The Animal Fair" and Bloch's autobiographical note on his personal experiences with the counterculture (essentially, a story about having loud lawbreaking neighbors) is worth reading.  (The note on "The Animal Fair" refers to a rock band without naming them--clues suggest Bloch is denouncing Canadian group The Guess Who.)

"The Goddess of Wisdom" (1954)

"The Goddess of Wisdom" debuted in an issue of Fantastic Universe that we'll probably be looking at again as it contains stories I don't think I have read yet by a bunch of people we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log, among them Jack Williamson, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, and Richard Matheson.  Every day are revealed to me new avenues to explore.

The narrator of "The Goddess of Wisdom" is a space man.  After six exhausting months spent in extrasolar space he is back at the main spaceport of our system, on Mars, and eager to spend his five days of leave with a female.  He doesn't say "woman" because there are almost no female humans on Mars--in the long SF tradition of interspecies sexual relationships (no doubt you are aware that John Carter has a child with a Martian who lays eggs!) he is going to have to spend his time off with a female alien!

The narrator goes to a bar and talks to the barkeep, his old friend.  Any females around?  Barkeep has a wild, and sad, story to tell.  He was doing illegal business with their mutual friend, Harley.  He and Harley financed operation of a one-man space ship, and Harley mined stuff on unclaimed asteroids--the barkeep fenced the stuff and and split the profits with Harley.  A few days ago Harley's ship crash landed on the red planet and inside the wreck the barkeep found Harley's corpse--somehow, Harley's head had exploded.  Also on the ship was the most beautiful woman imaginable.  She looks like a human, but she must be an alien--she doesn't talk or eat.  The barkeep doesn't know anything about this creature or what killed Harley in such a dramatic manner--Harley always faked the record tapes on the ship, in order to fool the government, so there is no way to know what planets he went to.

The narrator goes upstairs to see this alien female--maybe he can get some info out of her that the barkeep couldn't?  Sure enough, the beauty is willing to communicate with our narrator.  Which is his undoing!  She is telepathic, of course, and reads his mind, and takes from his mind the concept of Minerva (you philhellenes call her "Athena") and takes the name as her own.  Gradually our narrator learns why she has affixed to herself this name, of all the names that must be bouncing around in his cabeza.  Her race of people reproduce by transmitting a "seed" into the brains of others.  The seed grows within the host and eventually bursts out of the host in fully adult form!  Gestation time is a week, meaning our narrator has but a week to live.  As he finishes penning this memoir he is already getting a terrible headache as the alien grows in his skull!

I can give a moderate recommendation for "The Goddess of Wisdom."  Sure, the plot is traditional SF filler material, but the story is well-paced and well-written--the jokes and the psychedelic parts in which the narrator absorbs racial memories from the alien are kept within reasonable bounds and add to the texture of the story rather than overwhelming it and slowing it down, as jokes and trippy passages so often do.  Worth checking out.

"The Goddess of Wisdom" hasn't been reprinted very often; it was included in a German magazine in 1967, and otherwise has only reappeared in the first volume of The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch.

**********

One bad, one acceptable, one good--we could do worse.  But we could also do better.  In our next episode we read three more stories from Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow and we'll see how they compare to this batch.  In the meantime, avoid women and hippies as best you can.

Tarzan and the Golden Lion by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The ape-man held no great love for the Gomangani as a race, but inherent in his English brain and heart was the spirit of fair play, which prompted him to spontaneous espousal of the cause of the weak.  On the other hand Bolgani was his hereditary enemy.  His first battle had been with Bolgani, and his first kill.

The poor blacks were still standing in stupefied wonderment when he dropped from the tree to the ground among them.  They stepped back in terror, and simultaneously they raised their spears menacingly against him.

"I am a friend," he said.  "I am Tarzan of the Apes.  Lower your spears."

Let's continue reading the adventures of John Clayton AKA Lord Greystoke, AKA Tarzan of the Apes, with the ninth Tarzan novel, Tarzan and the Golden Lion, which first appeared in 1922 in serial form in the magazine Argosy.  Like all the Tarzan novels, which constitute an immortal pillar of popular American culture, Tarzan and the Golden Lion has been reprinted many many times.  I am reading the 1984 Ballantine paperback edition I own, which has a Boris Vallejo cover; I think this was originally in my brother's collection and is one of the books he handed over to me when he was downsizing.   

Tarzan and the Golden Lion begins with a detailed description, full of fancied insight into the minds of beasts and a hearty helping of violence, of how a tiny little lion cub became an orphan.  On their way back from their last series of adventures, chronicled in Tarzan the Terrible, Tarzan, Jane and Korak the Killer come upon this sad cub and Lord Greystoke decides to adopt it!  He names the great cat Jad-bal-ja (oy, Joe the Lion would have been easier to remember and to type) and spends two years training the beast; Tarzan's relationship with Jad-bal-ja is much like his relationship with all the animals and peoples of Africa--he helps the creature when it is in trouble, and forever after it obeys the ape-man and will do anything for him.  Throughout this book we are presented episodes in which black people and various animals who already know of Tarzan express and demonstrate their respect and love him, follow his orders and go out of their way to do him favors; when Tarzan meets new peoples or beasts, we see him win their love and respect by doing them good turns and demonstrating his superior abilities and his expansive generosity and sense of fair play.  One of the interesting facets of Tarzan and the Golden Lion is how a villain takes advantage of Tarzan's stellar reputation, rides the ape-man's coattails a while and even threatens to sully that sterling reputation. 

Tarzan and the Golden Lion has multiple plot threads that often proceed independently; we might see them as a sort of Goofus and Gallant or Francis Goodchild and Thomas Idle series of contrasts.  After our introduction to Jad-bal-ja and some time spent observing the happy Greystoke family, all their little jokes and their good relationship with the Waziri, the tribe that has accepted Tarzan as their chief, the scene shifts briefly to London where we meet six ne'er-do-wells.  Most prominent among them are an attractive Englishwoman, Flora Hawkes, who uses her sex appeal to manipulate men, and a tall and muscular stage actor, Spaniard Esteban Miranda.  Hawkes knows where there can be found a huge store of gold, and has assembled the other five crooks, all men, to help her get it--no easy task, as the gold is in a wild part of Africa and so an expensive expedition into dangerous territory must be mounted.  We later learn Hawkes was in the Greystoke's employ as Jane Clayton's maid and the treasure the woman is aiming to seize is a portion of the hoard of gold ingots hidden in the lost Atlantean the city of Opar, the very hoard that is the source of the Greystokes' wealth.  

Hawkes' gang is a multicultural one, and I suppose Burroughs here indulges in some ethnic and class stereotyping here as as he gives each crook a distinctive personality.  The Spanish actor, Esteban Miranda, is a hot-blooded and hot-headed lover, and has as a rival for the affections of Flora in handsome Russian dancer Karl Kranski.  There are two English prizefighters, who are perhaps indistinguishable from each other, and finally a cowardly German, Bluber, short and fat, who handles the money.  The English "pugs" have a manner of speaking that I took to be working-class, though Burroughs calls the pugilists "meaty fellows of the middle class"

"This 'ere Tarzan bounder he bumped off Esteban, which is the best work what 'e ever done.  Too bloody bad you weren't 'ere to get it too, and what I got a good mind to do is to slit your throat meself."

and Bluber a pronounced German accent; the former are ignorant brutes, and the latter, besides being cowardly, is always talking about money.

"Two t'ousand pounds, two t'ousand pounds!" wailed Bluber.  "Und all dis suit, vat it cost me tventy guineas van I can't vear it again in England unless I go to a fancy dress ball, vich I never do."

I complained that some of the characters in Tarzan the Terrible were lacking in personality, but Burroughs here in Tarzan and the Golden Lion succeeds in making all the characters distinct and memorable, at least if we consider the English thugs as a single unit.

From the get go these jokers are at each others' throats, bitching and moaning at each other, competing over Flora, trying to get larger shares of any stolen goods by cutting each other out or bumping each other off, a dramatization of the adage that there is no honor among thieves.

The Greystoke family is running low on funds, having donated so much of their funds to the Allied cause in the Great War, so Tarzan leads an expedition of fifty Waziri to Opar to collect more gold.  On the way down to Opar he finds a dead deer, slain not by a native's arrow but an arrow bought in a Western store.  Tarzan investigates, following a trail to a tribe of apes whom he expects to welcome him--instead these apes accuse Tarzan of murdering one of their fellows.  

We readers are soon appraised of something we have already guessed--Esteban is successfully impersonating Tarzan as he acts as a sort of spearhead or figurehead for Flora Hawke's own expedition to Opar.  Tarzan comes upon the Hawkes camp; Esteban is not around and Hawkes keeps her face hidden, and Kranski, the second smartest of the criminal crew, incapacitates Tarzan by putting a drug in his coffee.  (Just like so many people you know, Tarzan loves coffee!)  The European crooks leave behind the unconscious Tarzan, and Lord Greystoke falls into the clutches of Oparians; these particular Oparians are members of the anti-La faction and set about sacrificing Tarzan to their sun god.  Luckily the beautiful La, queen of Opar and president of the Tarzan fan club, helps our hero escape.  In fact, La accompanies Tarzan out of the city--she feels she hasn't long to survive in Opar, that the anti-La faction led by the high priest will soon dethrone her.

Instead of leading Lord Greystoke back towards his estate and the jungles with which he is so intimately familiar, La strikes out into uncharted territory inhabited by strange races she knows only by repute and Tarzan has never even heard of.  Divergent evolution in an isolated region was a theme of Tarzan the Terrible, and the same sort of thing is at work here in Tarzan and the Golden Lion.  Tarzan and La meet some black Africans who are even more primitive than those Tarzan usually deals with, and again and again we hear how these people are low on the evolutionary scale and how this determines their behavior.  (Burroughs here elides distinctions between cultural and biological evolution.)   

These primitive blacks, who have few words, never smile or laugh, and don't cook or make their own tools, are groaning under the tyrannical rule of gorilla-men who are more advanced, further along on the scale of evolution, than any apes Tarzan has ever seen--they walk upright like men, for example, and wear loads of diamond jewelry.  (One of Burroughs' oft-used narrative strategies is to offer radical contrasts.)  Tarzan witnesses the kinds of atrocities these bling-clad gorilla-men inflict on the local humans, and is moved to take the side of the blacks.  The gorilla-people capture La, and Tarzan has to rescue her from their strange building covered in diamonds.  In this Tower of Diamonds, Tarzan meets an old white man who has been a captive there since boyhood, and Burroughs generates tension and suspense by making it unclear (at least to Tarzan) whether this fellow Englishman will help Lord Greystoke or betray him to the gorilla-men who have been his masters for so many decades.

There is a lot of fighting as Tarzan performs regime change in the lost valley of diamonds and back in Opar.  I think the fighting in this novel is a little more interesting than that in Tarzan the Terrible, even if the gorilla-man society and Opar aren't as vividly described as the locations in that earlier novel; more crazy, surprising stuff happens.  The most remarkable thing about the gorilla-people is that their "emperor" is a chained lion to whom they feed human flesh (La, Queen of Opar, is on tonight's menu.)  The lion emperor is just a wild beast, not a lion-man or anything, and is just a sort of figurehead or god or mascot or something.  After Tarzan kills this lion, Jad-bal-ja, having escaped from the Greystoke estate, suddenly bursts on the scene to take part in the fighting--Jad-bal-ja rescues Tarzan more than once over the course of the novel, and for a brief period sits on the throne in the Tower of Diamonds, playing the role of the legitimate emperor of the valley.

After liberating the local blacks from the gorilla-men, Tarzan reorganizes the societies of these two peoples.  Recognizing that the local blacks are too primitive to run their own lives, Tarzan makes that old white prisoner their king.  This is an interesting scene as it embodies multiple ideological or philosophical themes of the Tarzan books.  The old white guy, understandably, wants to go back to his homeland in Europe, but Tarzan delivers a speech on how civilization is disgusting, how everybody in Europe is greedy and corrupt and this old English geezer will be happier ruling over these blacks than living among his own race and he will be doing a good deed besides!  And the dude actually buys it!

As for the gorilla-men, Tarzan convinces those who have survived the fighting to become La's bodyguard.  Why would Tarzan and La put any trust in a bunch of gorillas who cover themselves in diamonds and enslave and casually murder human beings--including women and children!--and whom they have just humbled in a tremendous bloody battle and deposed from their lofty station?  Well, unlike humans, it seems the gorilla-men never betray anybody.  At least that is what they say, and Lord Greystoke and the Queen of Opar buy it.  The sympathetic characters in these Tarzan novels are very credulous, very trusting.  Anyway, Tarzan and these gorilla-men janissaries lead the overthrow of the high priest of Opar and secure La's overlordship of the city.        

While Tarzan and his lion are engaged in beneficent nation-building, Miss Hawkes, Senor Miranda, and the other European crooks are living through a long series of dramas of deception and treachery.  Miranda manipulates people by tricking them into thinking he is Tarzan--even the noble Waziri, Tarzan's metaphorical children, fall for his act!  Esteban betrays his fellow thieves and steals the Oparian gold they have collected.  The Europeans make friends with some Arab traders with the idea of stabbing them in the back and stealing their ivory.  The blacks the Europeans have hired as guides and porters betray them and the whites are left in the jungle alone.  Jane comes looking for Tarzan and she gets mixed up in all this mess--at one point she thinks Tarzan has left her for another woman, and she also has to fight off a rapist.  When Tarzan comes back from Opar he has with him some diamonds from the gorilla-men's empire, and Kranski steals them and runs out on the other European criminals, only to end up dead by Esteban's hand.  Tarzan for a while thinks Jane has been killed in a fire.  Esteban goes insane, thinking himself Tarzan, and then ends up imprisoned forever by some cannibals who suspect he is some kind of supernatural creature.  This is all pretty entertaining, in part because the various characters all have distinct personalities and are driven by powerful, easy to identify with, emotions.  

I guess to demonstrate that lying and stealing are no way to live, all the schemes of Hawkes and her compatriots come to disaster, but while most of the malefactors suffer terrible punishments, Burroughs also puts in a good word for forgiveness and redemption.  Even though her adventures have led to the deaths of scores of people (mostly blacks and Arabs, admittedly), Lord and Lady Greystoke forgive Flora Hawkes her sins and hire her back into their employ!  John and Jane Clayton, you are too good for this fallen world!

The novel ends with Tarzan acquiring the gold Hawkes and crew took from Opar, thanks to the ingenuity of one of the many chiefs loyal to Tarzan, who tricks the treacherous guide who stole it from the Europeans into delivering it right to the Greystoke estate.

If you can overlook the fact that the same things happen again and again in these Tarzan novels--people get captured and escape, people are about to be sacrificed to some bogus god and are rescued in a nick of time, people think their loved one is dead only to find him or her alive, etc.--Tarzan and the Golden Lion is a fun adventure novel and of course I am recommending it.

Since the same sort of thing happens again and again in these books, it doesn't make sense, at least for me, to read lots of them in succession, so we'll be taking a healthy ERB break here at MPorcius Fiction Log and reading short stories by famous genre fiction writers for a while.  Until then, don't lie or steal and even though the world is full of liars and thieves, take everybody at face value and always forgive.

Tarzan the Terrible by Edgar Rice Burroughs

For him she felt the same keen, almost fanatical loyalty that many another had experienced for Tarzan of the Apes.  Beast and human, he had held them to him with bonds that were stronger than steel--those of them that were clean and courageous, and the weak and the helpless; but never could Tarzan claim among his admirers the coward, the ingrate or the scoundrel; from such, both man and beast, he had won fear and hatred.

Recent purchases and recent reading have put Edgar Rice Burroughs at the front of my mind, so why not take down from the shelf my 1963 paperback printing of the eighth Tarzan novel, Tarzan the Terrible, which has a Richard Powers cover hinting that Lord Greystoke is going to encounter Tyrannosaurus Rex?  Awesome!  Tarzan the Terrible made its debut in serial form in 1921 in the magazine Argosy; the cover of the issue with the first installment hints that Tarzan is going to encounter a woman in desperate need of depilatory cream.  I guess even the life of Tarzan of the Apes is not all awesomesauce all the time.

As the novel begins, Tarzan is on a long trek on foot, searching for his wife Jane, who was carried off by Germans in the last Tarzan novel, Tarzan the Untamed, which was set during the Great War.  Our hero crosses an almost impassable "morass" into an uncharted territory inhabited by animals he has never seen before; this land, known as Pal-ul-don, has been separated from the rest of Africa for long eons, and evolution here has taken a peculiar course, producing animals and peoples unknown to the outside world.

Tarzan soon meets some of the local people, whose species Burroughs labels "pithecanthropus."  These men and women look and behave more or less like the humans Tarzan, you and I are familiar with, but their feet are like hands and can grasp and hold, and they also have prehensile tails, giving them a fifth appendage with which to climb and fight, which comes in handy as almost every page in a Tarzan novel involves somebody climbing something or fighting somebody, and often both.  These monkey people come in two ethnicities, the white Ho-don, who have hair only on their heads, live in cities, and are politically united under a king, and the black Waz-don, who are covered in a think shaggy coat of hair and are separated into warring tribes that reside in cliffside caves.  The Ho-don and Waz-don are perpetually at war with each other, but Tarzan convinces the first Ho-don he meets and the first Waz-don he meets to become friends after saving them from lion attacks.  Like John Carter, the Earthborn warlord of Mars, Lord Greystoke is the white man who goes among violent dangerous aliens, proves to them his superiority as a fighter, befriends them, and then teaches them how to behave; these books are a sort of allegory of Western imperialism.  Before Tarzan the Terrible is over the title character will have made peace between the races of Ho-don and Waz-don and radically reformed the Ho-don religion, laying off all the priests (learn to code, smart guy!) and putting women in charge of the temples, women being the gentler sex and less inclined to human sacrifice.

Tarzan's new pals Ta-den the Ho-don and Om-at the Waz-don teach him the language of Pal-ul-don and when our guy learns the basics of the local situation he decides to hunt for his wife in the capital city of the Ho-don.  But first these three amigos visit Om-at's tribe; there Om-at defeats in one-on-one combat the cowardly jerk who is current chief of the tribe and Om-at is thus declared chief himself.  If that Wakanda movie I have heard people talk about is any guide, this is how the most advanced African nations choose their leaders, and here we see that the system works--new chief Om-at immediately institutes an executive order that suspends the age old custom of summarily executing all Ho-dons and other strangers, a stride forward for diversity that yields the immediate benefit of sparing the lives of Ta-den and Tarzan.  

Left: Richard Powers     Right: Boris Vallejo

Tarzan immediately demonstrates the benefits of the new policy of welcoming high-skilled immigrants.  Just minutes before the arrival of Om-at, Ta-den and Tarzan, the previous, now-deceased, chief of Om-at's tribe had tried to rape Om-at's girlfriend, Pan-at-lee.  Pan-at-lee, resourceful and brave, fought off the unscrupulous chief and escaped into the dangerous wilderness, but where she is now, nobody knows.  Tarzan leads the search party for Pan-at-lee, and the tailless stranger amazes the tailed natives with his ability to follow the girl's trail after sniffing around her bedroom--it seems the Ho-don and Waz-don don't have the keen sense of smell that Tarzan enjoys.  During the search, fights break out with a lion (over the course of these books Tarzan fights more lions than you would believe) and then with a neighboring tribe of Waz-dons, which offers Tarzan repeated opportunities to prove his value as a friend to Om-at and his people.

Tarzan the Terrible has plenty of good elements and I enjoyed it.  But there are problems.  The novel has a huge cast of characters and while Burroughs is good about giving most of them memorable personalities, a number of them are pretty nondescript and Tarzan's new best friends Om-at and Ta-den are perhaps the worst offenders, princes who are in love with princesses but otherwise lack individuality or compelling motivations; they are just props to hold up the plot.  And it doesn't help that almost all these monkey people have names that aren't easy to remember.  During this first section of TtT (feel free to call it "Triple T"), I kept forgetting which of Ta-den and Om-at was white and which was black and if it was the whites who lived in cities or the blacks.  I'm kind of a lazy dope who reads books for the feels and is rarely moved to put any effort into memorizing the names and affiliations of fictional people in fictional countries (and let's be honest, even when I was a college student thinking of becoming an academic specializing in British history I kept mixing up Bloody Mary and Mary, Queen of Scots and had to keep telling myself that George III was the grandson, not the son, of George II) so maybe this is a me problem, but Burroughs does include a two-page glossary of Pal-ul-don words and proper names in the back of the book, setting you straight on who is who, so maybe he anticipated that among the readers of his novel about men and women who get captured and escape again and again and sometimes ride a dinosaur would be dim bulbs like myself.

    

One of Tarzan's many periods of captivity in Tarzan the Terrible is among that rival tribe of hairy black monkey-men who are at war with Om-at's tribe of hairy black monkey-men.  Tarzan escapes pretty quickly, gets back on Pan-at-lee's trail, and rescues her from a member of a third species of tailed man, the gorilla-like Tor-o-dons.  Pan-at-lee is probably the most interesting of the monkey-people in the book, and her name is easy to remember because it sounds a lot like "panties."  Even though she is covered in hair, and has a tail, Burroughs keeps telling us Pan-at-lee is beautiful; more importantly, she has some real human emotion, and she actually rescues Tarzan, grabbing his ankle when he is about to fall down a cliff.  You go, girl!

Pan-at-lee's path of flight took her to a region the Ho-don and Waz-don all avoid, the stomping grounds of what we might consider the guest star of Tarzan the Terrible, the gryf.  The gryf is a descendent of triceratops which has evolved into a carnivore with sharp teeth, long talons and a monumental size--75 feet long!  The apex predator of Pal-ul-don (there is no tyrannosaurus in the book--don't trust the covers of SF books, people) is clever and tenacious, and despite its immense bulk can sneak up on even such a master of woodcraft as John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, the gryf being inexplicably capable of moving silently and also having very little odor.

Tarzan distracts the gryfs pursuing him and Pan-at-lee and so the hairy black girl manages to escape the valley of the man-eating triceratops, only to be captured by white hairless Ho-don slavers and dragged to their capital city--we get some slightly fetishistic scenes in which she wrestles and bites her captors and they have to bind and gag her and drag her by her hair.  Meanwhile, Tarzan discovers that the Tor-o-don gorilla-people have domesticated the gryf, and he imitates their methods and makes a steed of one of the 75-foot-long ceratopsians and starts riding to the Ho-don city.  At the city we get what we might consider a satire of religion as Tarzan claims to be the son of the god of the Ho-don and Waz-don and demands audiences of the king and the high priest.  Seeing that their religious practice includes daily human sacrifice and their temple is overflowing with wealth, Tarzan orders the end of the sacrifices and the distribution of the temples' store of fine goods to the poor.  The high priest, who as a purveyor of a false religion recognizes in Tarzan a fellow con artist, strives to publicly refute Tarzan's claims and have the interloper destroyed, and we get scenes of debate and trial--Burroughs ably portrays the monarch and aristocracy of the Ho-don, who believe their religion and fear both the demi-god whom Tarzan is masquerading as and their high priest, trying to hedge their bets, endeavoring to evade responsibility and stay on the good side of both contending forces, just as we expect of politicians.

I like when people in books behave in a psychologically realistic way.  I'll also note here that Burroughs does an entertaining job of describing the Waz-don cliff villages and the Ho-don cities, painting sharp pictures of these peoples' physical environs even if some of the actual people are not very interesting.

There are a lot of complicated shenanigans in the capital Ho-don city and nearby cities as various Ho-don factions battle it out--the high priest and the king are at odds, and then when the king is unexpectedly killed rival aristocrats (one of them Ta-den's father) fight over the throne.  Tarzan, Jane, and Pan-at-lee are in the middle of this and keep getting captured and helping each other escape only to be separated again.

Jane, it turns out, has been a prisoner in the capital Ho-don city for a while--both the king and high priest want to get their monkey hands on her tailless body, but each has been reluctant to rape her for fear of the other's vengeance.  Fiction is full of coincidences, and Burroughs' books probably more than most, and the high priest and king both decide to finally satisfy their lust for Jane at the same time, fortuitously at the very moment when Tarzan shows up.  Like Pan-at-lee, Lady Greystoke is a beneficiary of Tarzan's aid but also demonstrates initiative and determination, enduring hardships and overcoming obstacles at times all by herself.  We are privy to flashbacks to her experiences in German captivity, and then scenes in which she has to survive alone in the wilderness of Pal-ul-don and fight off an insane German officer.  This German ends up impersonating a god and siding with one Ho-don faction while Tarzan sides with the other.  The whole story climaxes when Korak the Killer, John and Jane Clayton's son Jack, a veteran of the British Army, arrives an instant before Tarzan is about to be sacrificed on an altar; Korak saves the day by gunning down the lead villains with his Enfield rifle.  Burroughs has foreshadowed this climax in multiple ways, so it feels appropriate, not like cheap deus ex machina.

As noted, I enjoyed Tarzan the Terrible but I kind of think it is below average for a Burroughs novel.  For me, at least, there are too many characters, and I am not a fan of palace intrigue plots in which you've got three or more factions and each is making and breaking alliances with the others and I'm supposed to keep track of them all.  In the same way my preference in detective stories is to limit the number of suspects and victims and to focus on the psychology and emotions of one or two highly-motivated characters, in a story like Tarzan the Terrible I would have preferred if, instead of a high-priest and five different competing monarchs in three or four (who can remember?) different cities and villages, we just had two rival big wigs and there was more attention paid to the warped desires of these tailed weirdos for the throne and for the goddess-like Jane and their twisted envy and fear of the god-like Tarzan.  I'm not that interested in the mechanical clockwork of clues and schemes, I am interested in human feeling, in danger, in love and hate, in triumph and tragedy, and that is what I hope to find in these books.

Anthologist Otto Penzler included Tarzan the Terrible in his 875-page
The Big Book of Adventure Stories, which also offers work by 
Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith and Damon Knight

Frederik Pohl, '74: "We Purchased People" and, w/ C M Kornbluth, "The Gift of Garigolli," and "Mute Inglorious Tam"

I recently unleashed upon the interwebs a blog post casting aspersions on some stories from the 1970s by Grand Master Frederik Pohl.  Today we'll address the same topic, Pohl's 1970s work, but with a little guidance from SF readers who suggested in the comments to that post that Pohl's better work includes the particular story "We Purchased People" and as well as collaborations with fellow Futurian C. M. Kornbluth.  "We Purchased People" was first published in 1974, and in that exciting year, the year of the resignations of Richard Nixon, Golda Meir, and Willy Brandt, the year your humble blogger turned three years old, Pohl also published two collabs with Kornbluth, who died in 1958.  Let's check these 1974 stories out!

(There's some juicy gossip out there about the relationship between Pohl and Kornbluth, and Pohl and Mrs. Kornbluth after her husband's early death, that I won't go into here, but I mention it briefly in a blog post from earlier this year in which a book edited by Mary Kornbluth figures; at that post are links to material written by Pohl about the Kornbluths and some evidence that Mrs. Kornbluth resented Pohl.)

"We Purchased People" by Frederik Pohl

People really like this story; after its debut in Final Stage, an anthology of "ultimate" SF stories edited by Edward Ferman and our hero Barry N. Malzberg but famously mangled in its first edition by a woman at the publisher, "We Purchased People" has been reprinted numerous times, including in Terry Carr's Best Science Fiction of the Year #4, Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann's Aliens!, David Hartwell's Foundations of Fear, and a bunch of foreign anthologies.  Having read it now, in my copy of the restored paperback edition of Final Stage, I have to report that the  hype is fully justified--"We Purchased People" is a great science fiction story that speculates about Earth's possible relationship with space aliens, a great human story about abnormal psychology and people's psychological responses to an abnormal situation, and a great horror story full of gruesome and evil deeds with a cunningly developed plot; with perfect pacing, Pohl skillfully builds a foundation of mountingly disturbing revelations that leads very convincingly to the final nightmare twist.  Thumbs up!

The Earth some years ago was contacted by aliens from a distant star system.  The aliens have a sort of radio that can send messages, much faster than the speed of light, straight into people's brains.  In fact, if a person has the right equipment connected to his noggin, the aliens can control him like a puppet!  (Cf. Robert Silverberg's 1968 "Passengers.")  The governments of Earth were quite willing to sell to the aliens heinous criminals for use as puppets, and through the puppets the aliens can learn all about Earth and make business deals with Earth people.  The aliens sell to the Earth technology of tremendous value to us--such technology has prevented war, for example.  From us the aliens buy art treasures and specimens of plants and uniquely Earthly stuff like that, even though the rockets that carry these items will take many centuries to reach their new owners.  Numerous alien races contact the Earth, and they each have their peculiar idiosyncrasies; this being a horror story, these idiosyncrasies are designed to make the reader uneasy.

Like half or so of the text of "We Purchased People" is a first-person narrative in the voice of a white American criminal who has been purchased by some particularly disgusting aliens.  Pohl does a good job of describing what day-to-day life is like for this guy as a slave of the aliens, and of building up sympathy for this guy in the reader while at the same time stoking our suspicions of him.  We start out feeling pity for this joker and hostility to the aliens and the human authorities for the way they treat him, but then we realize how monstrously this guy behaves if left to his own devices we have a moral dilemma on our hands.  The narrator is so dangerous, his crimes so shocking and outrageous, that we are left little reason to feel bad for him, especially since trade with the aliens has done so much to enhance human peace and prosperity.  Maybe the crime against his liberty, maybe the existence of slavery in 20th or 21st century America, is justified by all the benefits of interstellar trade?  And then at the end of the story Pohl has the aliens do something so horrible to him that maybe we feel bad for him again--or maybe not, as it is his own foul nature that, in only a slightly oblique way, leads to the mind-shattering horror to which he is subjected.

You'll remember that the mainstream-like story by Pohl we read recently, "I Remember the Winter," seemed to deny that human beings had agency and could be blamed for any regrettable results of their behavior.  "We Purchased People" has a much more interesting and challenging take on human agency and responsibility.  On the one hand, one might argue that the main character is not really morally responsible for murdering little girls because he is mentally ill, and, of course, the whole story depicts people under the ruthless control of more powerful people--a leftist can read "We Purchased People" as an allegory of how under the market economy we are all slaves whipped or robots programmed by "capital" or merchants or the decadent rich or bourgeois liberal governments rabidly pursuing GDP.  Even for non-leftists, the story raises the question of how much infringement on individual freedom we are willing to accept in exchange for safety, order and wealth.  (We might also point out that Pohl hints that the communist rulers in Moscow and Peking, and Third World dictators, are even more eager to sell undesirables to the aliens than is the US government.)

But, at the same time it depicts people who are under the control of mental illness and the rich and powerful, Pohl's story also portrays a main character who does seem responsible for his black fate, who does exercise free will.  For one thing, we see him carefully calculate all his moves during periods when the aliens temporarily relinquish their control over him--he clearly demonstrates agency, the ability of the individual to assess risk and allocate resources in pursuit of the personal goals he has selected.  And the mind-blowing horror the protagonist suffers in the end of the story is an outgrowth of his own murderous fetish--is Pohl arguing that people really are the authors of their own fates, even in a largely or apparently deterministic world?  

"We Purchased People" works as emotion-triggering entertainment as it generates suspense and horror with all that creepy sex and horrendous violence, and works as thought-provoking science fiction with its depictions of both free will-oriented and deterministic views of human life, and the possible character of interstellar trade.  Very good--highly recommended to horror fans and to fans of SF that makes you think about the realities of human-alien interactions and the nature of human agency.

"The Gift of Garigolli" by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

Oy, here we have a long and tedious domestic comedy with a little SF content and bland satire of the business world tacked on to it.  The structure and some of the themes of the story reminded me of those old black and white comedies like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dreamhouse, what with the hapless middle-class husband, his troublemaking wife, and the deus ex machina resolution of the plot.  In the Pohl/Kornbluth collection Our Best: The Best of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Pohl seems to hint he knows "The Gift of Garigolli" is bad (and seems to be trying to blame Kornbluth for the story's inadequacy), and compares the story to I Love Lucy.  Mr. Blandings Builds His Dreamhouse is tolerable because Cary Grant and Myrna Loy are quite likable, and I Love Lucy is lovable because Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, and William Frawley ably portray characters easy to identify with, and "The Gift of Garigolli" utterly lacks any corresponding virtues.  The story's characters are ciphers whose motivations are difficult to discern and it drags aimlessly along at a snail's pace for like 20 pages, alternately lulling the reader to sleep and irritating him.  Bad.

Dupoir (a joke name for DuPont?) is a suburbanite commuter who works in PR for the plastics industry, trying to inspire in the populace good feelings about plastic.  He writes scripts for radio spots and works with a guy in his office with what I assume is a joke name, Jack Denny, who draws sexy girls for the weekly plastics newsletter.  Environmental activists are one of his headaches.  But he's got a bigger headache.  When his brother-law-law, an addict, checked himself into a rehab center, Dupoir's wife co-signed the papers.  Brother-in-law bugged out to the coast to try to get into movies without settling his bill, and now Dupoir is on the hook for the rehab center's fee--over 14,000 simoleons!  Dupoir can't afford it and he is being sued by the rehab center and fears he will lose his house.

Much of the story is a first-person narrative in the voice of Dupoir, and much of the story's comedy and SF content consists of Dupoir doing a pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs, as if he is Tarzan; for example, he describes his competing for a seat on public transit the way ERB might describe Lord Greystoke struggling against some African beast.  Dupoir's Tarzan fixation, the stuff about plastic, and the space aliens, are like elements from three different stories just jammed together--each has no connection to the other.

Yes, space aliens.  The rest of the humor and SF content consists of the fact that Dupoir is under surveillance by teeny tiny airborne E.T.s.  These aliens are follow Dupoir around--he thinks they are fruit flies that are inexplicably attracted to him.  Sections of the text of "The Gift of Garigolli" are communiques from the leader of these alien observers back to HQ, discussing the various directives that serve as the guiderails for how the aliens are to interact with natives.  The aliens are supposed to help the natives, and when they perceive that Dupoir is in need of cash they try to create some gold for him through manipulation of molecules.  This does not work.   

Dupoir goes to a bar to drown his troubles, and meets another man trying to drown his troubles.  It turns out this guy is owner of the rehab center, depressed because he is owed 14,000 bucks.  The two get drunk and end up in the man's office at the rehab center, but nothing happens there and we readers wonder why the authors saw fit for them to go there.  In the morning these guys are both at Dupoir's house, where the tiny flying aliens have devised a process that turns plastic into alcohol.  This self-sustaining process enables Dupoir to pay his debts and also solves the problem of plastic litter, getting the environmental activists off the back of the plastics industry.

This story is horrible.  The plot is a total mess, the jokes are lame, and as I have suggested, I don't even feel as if the characters' motivations make sense, though maybe I missed the explanations of why they were doing what they were doing because the story was so boring my eyes were glazing over during the explanations.   

Thumbs down!

I may have hated "The Gift of Garigolli," but the world welcomed it with open arms!  Inexplicable!  You can find this half-baked dish of garbage in Donald Wollheim's The 1975 Annual World's Best SF and multiple Galaxy retrospectives.  Were editors buying this story in an effort to help Kornbluth's widow?  I don't get it.              

"Mute Inglorious Tam" by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

Here we have another posthumous collaboration between Pohl and his toothpaste averse friend that won accolades.  "Mute Inglorious Tam" debuted in a special anniversary issue of F&SF and Lester del Rey included it in his annual "Best of" anthology.  In 1977 Edward Ferman put it in the twenty-second of the Best of F&SF volumes.  In 1992 Mike Resnick included it in an anthology of recursive or meta SF stories.  Well, let's try to read "Mute Inglorious Tam" with an open mind, leaving behind any resentment resulting from our reading of "The Gift of Garigolli" and refusing to be swayed by the spirit of contrariness that whispers "just because del Rey and Ferman and Resnick like it doesn't mean you have to like it," true though that may be.

Sometimes you'll encounter people who think life in medieval Europe had a lot going for it, that peasants didn't work as many hours as do today's suburbanite commuters, that religion and the clearly defined social order gave life meaning and structure, that the food wasn't giving people diabetes and the air wasn't giving people cancer, etc.  And of course you'll encounter people who will suggest life in medieval Europe was a nightmarish hell where everybody was impoverished and the man who lived to see his 30th birthday was a true rara avis.  "Mute Inglorious Tam" takes the latter tack, depicting medieval Sussex as a sort of racist police state, the Normans lording it over the Saxons, everyone living in poverty and discomfort, people getting the death penalty for thought crimes against the lord or the priests.  

"Mute Inglorious Tam" is more like a tendentious history lesson full of questionable recreations (like the recreations on true crime and history TV shows, where instead of just interviewing a cop about the bank robber he nabbed or a historian about the president whose biography he penned, the TV producers hire some clown to slap on a balaclava or a tricorn and prance around, pretending to be a bandit or the father of our country for the supposed benefit of viewers) than an actual story with a plot and everything.  Lots of time is spent on the geography and economics of the Sussex village at the center of the story.  As for the recreations, our protagonist, Tam, gets himself mixed up in plenty of domestic violence.

Tam isn't just a peasant who knocks down and then kicks his wife when she neglects to brew his beer.  Tam is a dreamer!  Working the fields, he dreams of corn that is more fecund.  Guiding a wagon, he dreams of a self-propelled cart.  Looking at his dirty village, he dreams of a village that is clean.  As Pohl tells us explicitly in the intros to "Mute Inglorious Tam" in F&SF and in Our Best, Tam, in a future milieu, would be a science fiction writer.

This story is competently written on a sentence by sentence basis--the descriptions of the setting and of the domestic violence are engaging--and I find the debate over how bad life really was in the Middle Ages interesting, so we can call "Mute Inglorious Tam" an acceptable sort of gimmick piece aimed directly at the niche market of SF readers committed to the idea of progress.

**********

It's been a day of extremes here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  In "We Purchased People" we have something of a classic, a top notch piece of work.  And in "The Gift of Garigolli" we have something I am a little surprised was even published in this state, it is so poor.  That's the power of a bankable name, I guess.  

Thanks to my commenters for guiding me to these stories, all of which are challenging in their own ways.  In  our next episode we'll read a novel by an even more bankable name than Fred Pohl's.

Robert E. Howard: "The Good Knight," "Knife-River Prodigal," and "The House of Suspicion"

I recently went to Antiques Crossroads in Hagerstown, MD, where I saw a bunch of cool things and even purchased a few.  One of my purchases was a copy of the 1976 Zebra paperback edited by Glenn Lord, The Second Book of Robert E. Howard, a wide-ranging collection of stories and poems by Howard supplemented by introductions by Glenn Lord and illustrations by MPorcius fave Jeff Jones.  Let's check out three stories from the book that star Howard characters not nearly as famous as Conan, Kull or Solomon Kane.

"The Good Knight" AKA "Kid Galahad" (1931)

Nowadays the detective and various speculative fiction pulp magazines are well-remembered, but also popular during the pulp era were magazines of sports stories, and Howard sold quite a volume of material to them.  (Robert E. Howard Foundation has printed four volumes of Howard's boxing fiction and each volume is over 300 pages.)  "The Good Knight" is just such a story, making its debut in Sport Story Magazine under the title "Kid Galahad" and starring light-heavyweight boxer Kid Alison.  This is a somewhat slight but entertaining story, like a fun episode of a TV sitcom.  It feels odd comparing Robert E. Howard to P. G. Wodehouse or Jack Vance, but the slangy first-person narration and dialogue, delivered by a likable but somewhat confused and ignorant protagonist, and "The Good Knight"'s obvious but fun joke premise (a premise at least as old as Don Quixote) and all the little jokes along the way make reading the story a pleasant experience not unlike reading some of the works of those more critically acclaimed creators of Bertie Wooster and Cugel the Clever.

Our narrator is Kid Alison himself; he is on the West Coast while his manager is on the East Coast trying to set up a lucrative bout for Kid.  In hopes of keeping Kid out of trouble, a member of his entourage accompanies him to the library and suggests he read a book about Sir Galahad.  Kid becomes fired with the idea of emulating that noble knight, of helping damsels in distress and vanquishing malefactors.  So when he runs into a young woman who has been hit by her boyfriend after she caught him with another girl, Kid vows to teach her assailant a lesson.  Said assailant is a fellow boxer, a famously dirty fighter, and the woman contrives a situation that puts Kid and this knave in the ring together.  In the end, Kid knocks out the dirty boxer in front of a crowd and a sports journalist, buoying his career.  But the fickle woman regrets putting her boyfriend in such a tough situation and Kid finds himself, painfully, on the receiving end of her anger.  (This story illustrates the reality that abused women often defend their abusers in a sort of jocular way that people today may find in bad taste.)

A trifling thing that is fun, though the climactic bout may be a little too long.  In 1975 "The Good Knight" was printed in the fanzine Fantasy Crossroads, and in Britain in 1977 it appeared in The Robert E. Howard Omnibus.

"Knife-River Prodigal" (1937)

From sports to Westerns--there were also a bunch of Western pulps back in the day, and Howard wrote for those as well.  "Knife-River Prodigal" appeared first in Cowboy Stories; in 1975 it was brought back into print in the fanzine REH: Lone Star Fictioneer and since then has appeared in several Howard collections. 

As with "The Good Knight," in "Knife-River Prodigal" we have a first-person narrator who is something of an ignoramus who is good at finding trouble, starring in a somewhat silly humor story, much of the humor of which rests on unusual syntax and slang.  ("Git goin' before I scatters yore remnants all over the floor."  "Air we men or air we jassacks?")  The comedy business in this story is inferior to that in "The Good Knight," but the action is better.

Bruckner J. Grimes is a young Texan, a real hellraiser from a family of hellraisers who is always getting into feuds and fights.  (The central joke of "Knife-River Prodigal" is that Texas is a violent place.)  He causes so much trouble his family actually tells him to leave Knife River and to go to "Californy" to prospect for gold.  So he steals his brother's horse and heads west; upon arriving in New Mexico, thinking he is in California, he starts chipping away at some rocks, hoping to discover gold thereby.  Grimes gets mixed up with a band of desperadoes who decide to keep him around for laughs, and, when they terrorize the innocent folk of a small town, our hero belatedly realizes what's what and with his six-guns, bowie knife, and fists sets things to rights.

A pleasant diversion.   

   

"The House of Suspicion" (1976)

Here we have one of Howard's stories starring police detective Steve Harrison; we read another Harrison story, "Lord of the Dead," back in 2019.  "House of Suspicion" was first printed here in The Second Book of Robert E. Howard and would go on to appear in various collections of Steve Harrison stories printed here in the land of the free and the home of the brave and over in Europe, the land of croissants and home of pizza.

Harrison is looking for a man who has gone missing, the star witness in a murder case.  He has received an anonymous note, inviting him to the dilapidated mansion of a once wealthy, now decaying, Southern family--Harrison is warned to conceal his true identity from those at the mansion--the writer will reveal himself and guide Harrison to the missing witness.  At the mansion Harrison meets four people.  We've got the last member of the family.  We've got his uncle, rendered deaf, blind and dumb by disease.  We've got the hugely muscular black servant.  And last but not least we've got the biracial ("mulatto") maid.  Someone keeps trying to kill Harrison--throwing a knife at him from the shadows, tossing a water moccasin into his room, dumping poison in his coffee, etc.  Who wrote the letter?  Was the letter sincere or a trap?  Who is trying to kill Harrison and why?  Is that guy really deaf, dumb and blind or is he shamming?  And where is that witness?

There is some mystery business with clues and people concealing their identities and so forth, but mostly this story is about violence and death, with people beating up, blowing up, shooting up and stabbing (up?) other people on purpose or by mistake.  Much blood is spilt!  I enjoyed "The House of Suspicion," though it lacks the personality and atmosphere of "The Good Knight" and "Knife-River Prodigal"--the narration is third-person omniscient, and Harrison and the other characters are quite nondescript, cogs in the grinding gears of the plot.

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Our first two stories brought a smile to my face, and the violence in the third is pretty effective; we have here three undemanding and easy-to-read entertainments.  If you are a Howard fan, The Second Book of Robert E. Howard is definitely worth your time.  I paid ten bucks for mine, which seems like a good price, based on what copies are going for on ebay (mine is also in good shape--it was in one of those plastic bags at the store and I think I'm the first to read it.)  There is a 1980 Berkley printing with a Ken Kelly cover, which I assume is the same text, but Jeff Jones fans will definitely want a Zebra edition, with the great wraparound cover and the eight interior illustrations featuring skulls and bare male flesh.  I have to warn you, though, that "The Hand of the Black Goddess," though promised on the back cover, is not actually in this volume.  If isfdb is to be believed, "The Hand of the Black Goddess" seems to be a hard story to find; hopefully somebody will reprint it soon.

I'll probably read more Howard soon, but first some science fiction stories by a Grand Master.