Robert Bloch: "The Proxy Head," "The Girl from Mars," and "Method for Murder"

Recently, a 1970 Bruna collection of Robert Bloch stories called Troost me, mijn robot came to our attention.  Over the years, we've read five of the seventeen stories that appear in Dutch in this book (see the links below)--

"Lucy Comes to Stay"
"The Man Who Murdered Tomorrow"
"Block that Metaphor"
"The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton"

"Two of a Kind" AKA "Two by Two"

--and the calculator is telling me that that leaves us with twelve stories selected by our clog-hopping tulip-growing friends over there in the Netherlands that we have yet to read.  We all know the Dutch as pioneers in the development of the market economy as well as tolerance of mind-altering substances and prostitution, so who better to guide us in exploring the huge body of work of the guy who created Norman Bates?  Today we'll get a start on those twelve Dutch-approved tales of science fiction and horror by reading three more stories that appear in Troost me, mijn robot, "The Proxy Head," "The Girl from Mars," and "Method for Murder."  

  

"The Proxy Head" (1953)

Sam Moskowitz and Roger Elwood, it seems, consider this story to be a masterpiece--at least it was reprinted in their 1967 anthology The Human Zero and Other Science-Fiction Masterpieces.  You can also find "The Proxy Head" in the 1986 collection Out of My Head and of course the magazine in which it debuted, Science-Fiction Plus, which is where I am reading it.

The protagonist of "The Proxy Head" is a robot built by aliens to look exactly like a handsome young Earth man.  The aliens, few in number, are hovering in their ship a hundred miles above, in constant contact with the robot, directing it and analyzing the data it collects as it explores an American city.  E. T. needs to know if human beings would seriously contest an alien invasion--the native Earthers far outnumber the aliens in the ship, and if mankind showed spirit and put up a fight Earth would likely prove unconquerable, so the aliens are striving to assess the human race's susceptibility to fear and propensity for aggressive resistance.

The robot holds two guys up at gunpoint, attends a boxing match, observes a speech given by an aged crackpot to assembled senior citizens.  The human race, the machine's controllers high above sense, is full of fear and susceptible to mass hysteria.  

Eventually the robot investigates teenagers at a penny arcade by the beach.  The youth are not full of fear as are the adults.  In a sort of recursive moment, the robot observes four young people at the magazine rack talking about a science fiction magazine, sort of playfully arguing over who should pay for the latest issue.  The aliens above want to look at the magazine, and direct the robot to buy it, arousing the ire of the kids, there being only one copy of it left.

As the robot has moved hither and thither through the town, Bloch has been reminding us again and again that it is very vulnerable to water--even high humidity is liable to cause it to malfunction.  So, when one of the teens shoots the robot with a water pistol it begins to act erratically; it is not long before it has fallen off a pier to its total destruction.  The aliens decide the human race has a core population of fearless individuals--teenagers--and the ability to think outside the box and discover alien weakness and so they abandon their scheme of conquering Earth.

"The Proxy Head" is pretty well-written; the tone and pacing are fine, with Bloch including a portion of his signature social commentary and unsubtle jokes while not overdoing it, but the plot poses some real problems.  For one thing, doesn't the behavior of a crowd at a boxing match demonstrate not that humans are fearful but that they are violent and passionate?  Worse, Bloch accidentally suggests in the end of the story that the aliens are afraid of water, though in the start of the story he told us that while the robot must avoid water, the aliens have no need to fear moisture, a blunder Bloch or the editor of Science-Fiction Plus, science fiction pioneer Hugo Gernsback, or managing editor Moskowitz, should have caught.  (We'll ignore the fact that people who could build a space warship that can cross the distance between the stars must be able to make a waterproof robot--their space craft must be airtight, right?)     

We'll call "The Proxy Head" acceptable--maybe it doesn't hold together, but it is a smooth pleasant read.

"The Girl from Mars" (1950)

"The Girl from Mars" debuted in Fantastic Adventures and is illustrated by Rod Ruth.  I love Rod Ruth's illustrations for 1972's Album of Dinosaurs, a copy of which I would often look at at my paternal grandmother's house as a kid, but I have to say his work in this magazine isn't too hot.

Ace is the not exactly scrupulous owner of a traveling carnival complete with freak show.  His girlfriend was part of the freak show as "The Girl From Mars" but she just ran out on him with the show's magician, so Ace is in a bad way both romantically and financially and so starts drinking.  The weather is bad so there is no business so he can't help but spot the gorgeous blonde with a fantastic body, unusual clothes and odd sort of expression on her face when she approaches the carnival.

This curvaceous babe speaks somewhat broken English with a weird accent and seems to think she is from Mars--the banner advertising "The Girl from Mars" is what attracted her to the carnival in the first place.  Ace figures she is a nutcase, but she is so spectacularly sexy he decides she will fill in nicely as both his girlfriend and his "Girl From Mars."  He gets her into a dark tent with promises of food--the blonde keeps saying she is hungry, the space ship that brought her here having crashed and she being the sole survivor and all that.  Ace starts putting the moves on the blonde and she doesn't resist his touch but the joke is on him because, when they are in a clinch, he learns the hard way that Martians are strictly carnivorous and prefer their meat to be as fresh as possible.

An entertaining little story that has a certain amount of titillating lasciviousness (there is a lot of verbiage about the Martian's body, and the abortive sex scene appeals to non-consent and exhibitionist fetishes) but maintains a surface level of conventional moral integrity by portraying a horndog who objectifies women suffering a horrible punishment for trying to take advantage of an apparently vulnerable woman.

I read "The Girl from Mars" in a scan of its original appearance in Fantastic Adventures, but is has been reprinted in multiple Bloch collections and Peter Haining included it in his oft-reprinted anthology Freak Show, which you can find in German as well as English.

"Method for Murder" (1962)

"Method for Murder" debuted alongside fiction by Ian Fleming in the men's magazine Fury.  I can't get my hands on this issue of Fury, so I'll never know the difference between an outdoor girl and an indoor girl nor will I be conversant with the legal issues around erotica in 1962, but luckily I can read "Method for Murder" in the 1966 Bloch collection Chamber of Horrors. 

This is a weak gimmicky story--forgettable filler.  Charles is a fat writer of suspense novels with a contract to produce four books a year, so he is always busy in his study.  His wife Alice is sick of him and one day, when Charles shows her sketches of the characters in his next novel, she has a brain wave.  The murderer in the next novel, a strangler, looks kind of like Alice's boyfriend, a Method actor.  So, she has the boyfriend dress up as the fictional killer and terrorize Charles; Alice pretends she can't see the strangler, hoping to make Charles think he is insane.  Eventually the boyfriend is assaulting and even killing people and he and Alice are trying to frame Charles for the crimes, but what if the boyfriend gets too deep into the role and forgets he is Alice's lover and starts to think he is Charles' fictional strangler?

We're rating "Method for Murder" barely acceptable.

**********

Of today's stories, "The Girl from Mars" is probably the most successful but the somewhat more ambitious, though flawed, "The Proxy Head" is perhaps my fave.  As for "Method for Murder," I can't say it is bad but it is pretty mundane and pedestrian.  All in all, not a bad batch.

More Bloch soon, and more short stories from the 1950s, though from a different famous author, in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

The Pleasure Tube by Robert Onopa

"The only such system known to man is on this ship," she reminds the camera.  "A hologram that's more than a hologram, controlled by you, automatically, unconsciously, instantaneously...."

"You are in control."

"Or out of it," the Oriental woman laughs....

I've owned The Pleasure Tube by Robert Onopa for a while and decided to finally read it a week or so ago because I'd determined it was time to read a novel after almost a month of reading short stories and the cover of the 1979 novel raised hopes that it would be a wild and crazy caper full of weird sex.  Onopa, who only has this one novel listed at isfdb along with a dozen short stories, seems to be some kind of college professor, which perhaps should have warned me this was going to be a boring and confusing piece of work.

Our narrator, astronaut Rawley Voorst, has just returned to Earth.  He was the pilot of the star ship Daedalus, which carried a scientific expedition to a black hole.  There was a disaster when something breached the ship's hull and three expedition members were killed.  This novel, especially the early portions, are a mish mosh of flashbacks, dream sequences, diagrams and computer readouts (someone praising the novel would likely point out how all the stuff Voorst and his comrades do on computers is kind of like using the internet), and there is little straightforward exposition about the story's milieu or technology so it is not exactly easy to tell what is going on.  For example, we are over fifty pages into the novel before we are explicitly told that while eight years passed for Voorst and his comrades out in space, eighty passed on Earth, though maybe I was supposed to figure this out myself earlier.  Discussion of space travel involves a lot of talk about "vanes" and "macroweather" and "microweather" so I guess the space craft in the story are (partially) propelled by the solar wind or generate turbulence in space with their emissions or some such thing.  

Anyway, Voorst and some of the other survivors of the mission are detained in government facilities on Guam after their return; there they are repeatedly interrogated by "SciCom" over the course of days or weeks, asked the same questions again and again.  An important element of the novel that I didn't grok until I was like halfway through it is that Voorst and some other people flying the Daedulus, significantly navigator Werhner and a guy named Cooper, are military personnel and not direct employees of SciCom, and SciCom and the military are engaged in some kind of interagency squabble, apparently fighting over who has the right to order Voorst, Werhner and Cooper around now they are back on Earth.  Can SciCom keep Voorst and his comrades in detention and try to get info out of them, or do they have to surrender them to the military?  One of the novel's mysteries is the status of Cooper, who apparently went insane during or right after the mission.  It is not clear where Cooper is, or whether he is dead or alive; Voorst gets the idea he was taken off Guam and committed suicide in Texas.  

Voorst gets off of Guam himself, perhaps by hacking the computers, and secures a VIP berth on a cruise managed by the company PleasureTube.  The cruise ship has interstellar capabilities but mostly just goes up into orbit and then lands on different places on Earth.  The ultimate attraction of the PleasureTube trip seems to be fully immersive holographic entertainment tailored to each individual passenger's specific tastes.  I suspect Onopa intends us readers to be unsure to what extent Voorst's adventures on this cruise ship are real and what extent illusory, perhaps even unsure whether he is really off Guam at all or this entire cruise is an illusion set up by SciCom to help squeeze out of him info about the black hole and the accident--eventually I think Onopa implies that Voorst perhaps never got away from the black hole and this entire novel is a dream or something.

A tall black woman named Collette who has skin like "cafe au lait," eyes "the green of the deep sea off Guam," hair that "falls in long curls to her shoulders" and "a dancer's legs" at first appears to be some kind of clerk and is staffing the ticket counter, but turns out to be Voorst's "service," his personal guide and prostitute for the cruise; she stays in Voorst's cabin and has sex with him and is soon saying she is in love with him.  The cabin reminds him of his quarters on the Daedalus, and again and again he will tell us that stuff on this ship reminds him of the black hole mission ship.  Onopa strives to keep things dreamlike, with Voorst telling us this or that feels "unreal," experiencing multiple cases of deja vu, and numerous instances in which people and things seem to be one thing (a girl an Indian, a watercourse dry) but turn out to be another (the girl is really Spanish or Latin American, there is a stream of water flowing there after all) just like Collette at first seemed like a clerk and turned out to be his personal servant.

This is all pretty boring and unengaging and I kept taking breaks from The Pleasure Tube to read from the stack of old Peanuts paperbacks and issues of Heavy Metal I got at antique stores recently.  (I buy the Peanuts books if they are two bucks or less, and the Heavy Metals if they are $5.00 or less.)  There isn't much plot to the first three chapters of The Pleasure Tube--Voorst isn't really trying to do anything--or human feeling or dramatic tension, and the vague descriptions of everything are frustrating rather than enticing--there is little in the text to grab a hold on to, nothing entertaining or compelling.

Chapter Four (The Pleasure Tube has nine chapters and is 212 pages long) consists of descriptions of the TV shows Collette and Voorst watch, including an advertisement much like an "infomercial" for the fully immersive holographic experience offered by PleasureTube--this experience, Collette warns, carries grave risks to people who are not in the best physical and mental health.  Another "show" consists of a live feed of a couple in another cabin having sex--Voorst recognizes the woman, Erica, a white blonde with a fleshy rather than athletic body, as someone whom he thought was a passenger but is in fact another "service" like Collette; she has been assigned to a bisexual artist.  Somehow Erica and the artist merge into Voorst's cabin and there follows a four-person drug and sex orgy.  When Voorst wakes up, Collette is gone, and Erica tells him she is now his service.  Voorst decides to try to find Collette, using his computer skills and his contacts--the stirrings of an actual plot!

Onopa tries to add tension in Chapter Five.  An agent of SciCom, Taylor, catches up to Voorst and demands he return to Guam, but for legal reasons Voorst has three days before he has to comply.  The ship stops at LasVenus, apparently the current name of Las Vegas, where Vorst and Erica gamble, and in a building where there are simulation virtual reality games Voorst plays a game that simulates piloting a star ship exactly like the Daedalus.  Like a guy in a detective novel, Voorst gets beaten up by a guard when he tries to get into an exclusive apartment building to talk to a woman executive, Eva Steiner, another passenger on the PleasureTube; Voorst has reason to believe this Steiner has something to do with Collette's disappearance.  Voorst earlier in the novel made friends with another male passenger, an Italian politician named Massimo who owns and drives race cars, and Voorst visits him at a LasVenus race track to ask him for help getting in touch with Steiner.  In scenes like those in a James Bond book or film, Voorst gets to drive this big wig's Ferrari around a race track.  

The novel comes to life in Chapter Six.  Eva Steiner is a mannish woman with a passion for race cars, so Massimo has no trouble coaxing her to the track.  Steiner brings with her a coterie of young women, apparently her "slaves," and Collette is among them.  Voorst challenges Steiner to a race; she drives some futuristic car, while Voorst drives the Ferrari and beats her; as his prize, Voorst gets Collette back.  Reinforcing the idea that this is all a dream or illusion, Voorst doesn't quite understand how he won the race.

I almost lose control--wind, a gust of wind?--my mind registered nothing, had to have been blank--the Ferrari breaks loose....I don't remember just why I broke loose....I still don't know what happened there...something happened, yes, the Ferrari was out of control, but from that error I locked into her slipstream and perhaps won the race because of it.

There is some mystery over to what extent Colette is working for SciCom and whether or not she is doing so voluntarily or under coercion of some kind.  Does she love Voorst like she says, or is he just an assignment or a target to her?    

After the Voorst-Steiner race, Massimo climbs in the Ferrari and, trying to beat Voorst's time or something, dies in a fiery crash, leading to scenes of Collette and Rawley vomiting, Collette having a sort of nervous breakdown, the two of them deciding to try to steal one of Massimo's other sports cars and fleeing to Mexico, and comforting each other by having sex.  They abandon the Mexico idea when they learn the government has decided to not force Voorst back to Guam with Taylor after all, I guess the military having won the bureaucratic struggle with SciCom.

I have to admit that driving across the Southwest with a woman who might be a spy sounded to me like it would be more interesting than spending more time on the cruise ship getting high and watching TV, and in what might be a meta joke, Onopa has Collette in Chapter Seven actually express this idea, more than once.

"...wish we had taken off in that beautiful car, just run from LasVenus....We would be in Mexico by now...what an adventure it would have been...."

After the action-packed Chapter Six, Chapter Seven sinks back into boredom, including more TV shows and another drug and sex orgy as the cruise ship orbits the moon. 

As Chapter Eight begins we are on page 153 of the 212-page novel--the home stretch!  The ship lands on a Pacific island called Vietahiti.  Already on the island is one of Voorst's comrades from the Daedalus, navigator Werhner; Werhner got off Guam because the investigation into the disaster is over--SciCom apparently has all the data it needs, their belief they needed new data was the result of some kind of computer error or something.  Voorst has a meeting with Taylor and Steiner in the bridge of the cruise ship--it turns out that Steiner is a high-ranking SciCom official and Taylor's boss!  Steiner wants to maintain custody of Cooper, who is alive after all but, allegedly, in a sort of vegetative state, but it looks like the military has the rights to him.  (Why she wants Cooper I never figured out.)  Steiner offers Voorst the kind of job flying the kind of ship she thinks he wants to fly if he'll help her keep Cooper; he refuses.  The chapter ends with Collette and Voorst going through some kind of tribal wedding ceremony, a ritual of Collette's tribe in which she invokes the four elements, cuts their wrists so they can combine their blood, and gives a mumbo jumbo speech full of jazz like

"This is the gift that gives wings to the feet for the journey to the unknown land where all totems are silent"

and

"Then shall the voice resound like the sound of the antelope...."

This is the first indication in the novel as far as I remember that Collette isn't a conventional Western woman but instead from a primitive tribe or deeply connected to her tribal ancestors--it is typical of the novel that new ideas and themes just pop up out of nowhere like this and then are forgotten, making no impression on the plot.

Chapter Nine, the final chapter, revolves around the climax of the cruise, the "total hologram," and begins with TV shows Voorst watches about total hologram and Collette and Erica's descriptions of the experience, which, as employees of The PleasureTube, they have been through before; while Collette seems to be looking forward to the experience, Erica seems to dread it.

For whatever reason, the ship sails close to the sun for the total hologram.  Onopa sets up parallels between Voorst's disastrous trip to the black hole and this trip to the sun and to the total hologram experience; for example, several times over the course of the book there has been discussion of how, in theory, if you go into a black hole you might become lost in time or achieve freedom from time and thus live the same moment forever, and as the ship approaches the sun, Collette explains to Voorst "how one loses track of time in the hologram."  The cruise liner suffers a minor accident on the way to the sun, ejected waste hitting the edge of the vessel, and Voorst recalls that the same thing happened to the Daedalus.    

Just before the total hologram is about to start, Voorst gets the urge to go to the morgue to pay his last respects to Massimo's remains.  He has to sneak through the ship's inner bowels-- "ducts, pipes, fittings, valves, line the ceiling of the hallways and the racks on the walls."  This whole sequence means nothing to the plot--Voorst doesn't learn anything from seeing the corpse or the man's effects, and even though he had to trespass in restricted areas to get to the morgue the crew who encounter him don't stop him or report him or anything.  I'm not even sure how he gets back to his cabin--Voorst has to have Collette use her ID to open a restricted hatch for him when he heads to the morgue, but she doesn't accompany him through the hatch--how does he open it from the other side on his way back?   

Anyway, back at his cabin he and Collette plug into the total hologram and have psychedelic visions.  Boring.  Then they are drawn out of the hologram because the ship is in trouble and Voorst, Werhner, and Cooper have to be on the bridge.  The regular crew is absent for some reason.  (Dream logic, again.)  The pleasure ship suffers damage just like that the Daedalus did, and the three men act just like they did during the disaster near the black hole.  Is this the total hologram working normally, this disaster a product of Voorst's imagination?  Or is SciCom forcing this hallucination on the three men to see how they react, to learn more about the Daedalus disaster?  Or did they all die in the Daedalus disaster and/or get caught in the black hole, doomed to live through the disaster as well as a fantasy of returning to Earth again and again?  We readers can never know, and I'm not sure we can ever care, either.

An unsatisfying ending to a pretty boring novel.  As I have suggested, it is not clear what is really going on at times, and I didn't find that The Pleasure Tube offered any emotional or ideological content--it didn't move me or make me think except for that single chapter with the car race and Voorst's duel with Steiner over Collette.  Voorst is a surprisingly bland and flat character, bereft of emotion and limited in agency.

To be fair to Onopa, I feel he is probably achieving his goals here--The Pleasure Tube is not sloppy, everything in it feels very intentional--but that his idea of the sort of book he wanted to write and my idea of the book I wanted to read are just too far apart for me to enjoy what he is up to here.

Reading an entire novel represents a high level of commitment and thus a relatively high risk.  Next time I'll be back in my comfort zone--short stories.