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.

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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.