But before all that, let's list the seven stories reprinted in Strange Ports of Call that we have already read in other venues.
We start with a story that has been reprinted many times after its debut in Amazing, including in a Best of Amazing anthology in 1967 and in two different issues of Fantastic, one in 1965 and one in 1979. The cover of the '79 issue promotes "The Worm" as "Probably the most intriguing tale you'll ever read anywhere." Wow!
A few years ago I purchased the recent Howard Wandrei collections Time Burial: The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei (1995) and The Eerie Mr. Murphy: The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei: Volume II (2003) largely because I was captivated by H. Wandrei's grotesque drawings. I did read some stories from these books, among them "For Murderers Only," "The Molester," "Danger: Quicksand" and "The African Trick," but have left many more unread. "The God Box" (no hyphen) appears in my 2017 paperback edition of Time Burial, but I am reading it today in Strange Ports of Call, where, for whatever reason, the hyphen was introduced. (There is no hyphen in the title where the story was first printed, under a pseudonym, in F. Orlin Tremaine's Astounding.)
One of the odd wrinkles of using the box is that it attracts cats from all over the city to the building in which Pence found it, and the felines become such a nuisance that the men have to use the box's powers to dispose of them by the thousands.
I'm a little surprised I haven't read this one yet, I having read quite a volume of stories by Smith. "Master of the Asteroid" debuted in Wonder Stories, as the cover story, in the same issue as Hazel Heald's collaboration with H. P. Lovecraft "Man of Stone," which we read in 2017.
(Nota Bene: I will be reading all of today's stories in a scan of Strange Ports of Call, though I may check original magazine versions, or other reprints, if there are confusing typos or printing errors.)
"The Worm" by David H. Keller (1929)
For centuries Thompson's Valley, Vermont, was a prosperous village, with productive farms and a busy mill, but today the place is deserted, only the miller remaining, the mill still turning, though there is no corn for it to grind. The miller is a recluse, his only friends his books and his dog, and mechanically minded; he has hooked the mill mechanism up to generate electricity. This practical engineering ability is put to the test when appears an uncanny threat to the building in which his family has lived and worked for generation after generation.
The monster plot of "The Worm" has some similarity to Ray Bradbury's 1951 "The Fog Horn." The grinding of the mill has attracted a monstrous worm, a thing thirty feet thick, and it burrows up to the mill, thinking the sound of the mill is the sound of a worm of the opposite sex! Slowly, over the course of days, the mega-sized worm chews through the foundation of the mill and then up through the building's multiple floors, all the while the miller essaying various means to stop or destroy the monster in his determination to preserve his ancestral home. Who will win, man or beast?
"The Worm" has something of the ethic or ideology we see in lots of early science fiction. One man, alone, relies on his wits, sangfroid and knowledge of science and engineering as he struggles against a novel, alien, challenge. Keller may be subverting the expectations of science lovers who see man as equal to the task of mastering the natural world, though, when he has the man fall before the monster; Keller even specifically has the miller gain confidence, in the event unfounded, from reflecting that as a man he has "brains" and the worm is just a "thing."
"The Worm" is well written, Keller producing sharp images and ably using the reactions of the dog to generate emotional content--suspense and fear--and I was actually a little surprised that the worm killed the miller instead of the other way round. So thumbs up for "The Worm," a good science fiction horror story.
 |
| Stephen Fabian fans should check out the July '79 issue of Fantastic which features six pages of art by Fabian: knights, galleys, churning waves, a topless woman--some of your favorite things! |
"The God-Box" by Howard Wandrei (1934)
Like Keller's "The Worm," H. Wandrei's "The God-Box" stars smart knowledgeable guys who employ their wits in dealing with an alien challenge, and perhaps reflecting the author's weird sensibilities, in the end they come up short and are overwhelmed--like Keller's, Wandrei's tale is not of the triumph of the man of science but a sort of horror story.
Pence is an Egyptologist who, by bizarre coincidence, discovers in New York City a box the size of a camera made of what looks like gold but is incredibly hard and astoundingly dense--the little box weighs a ton or more! Elaborately carved with Egyptian motifs and characters, the box is studded with many little heads of pharaohs and of gods of the Egyptian pantheon. Pence contacts an engineer with a good reputation in the scientific community and the two of them tinker with the box, begin unraveling the secrets of its mind-boggling powers. After activating the box by charging it with electricity, they find that manipulation of the heads, which are like knobs, allows them to view as through a TV any spot in the universe! They can even create portals through which they can instantaneously travel to those distant locales or just manipulate the matter there, moving things and people around, drawing them to New York, or destroying them. The Egyptian box has conferred upon them god-like power!
Pence and the engineer are clever men but not necessarily good men, and Pence in particular lets his newfound powers go to his head. The box is used to commit many trespasses, some even worse than teleporting felines wholesale out of the greatest city in the world, and eventually the men scheme against each other and end up lost on a distant planet.
I didn't like the style of this one as much as that of Keller's, it being a little flippant and jokey rather than sharp and clear, but I'm still giving "The God-Box" a thumbs up. The premise of Damon Knight's 1976 "I See You" bears some similarity to that of "The God-Box," and Carl Jacobi's 1954 "Made in Tanganyika," has not only a similar premise but a similar plot. Were Jacobi and Knight influenced by Wandrei's story?
"Master of the Asteroid" by Clark Ashton Smith (1932)
The editor's intro to "Master of the Asteroid" in Wonder Stories tells us Smith's tale focuses on the psychological stress astronauts will face. Sure enough, the protagonists of the story are three men who, as members of a scientific expedition on Mars consisting of fifteen men, go insane and steal one of the expedition's ships and try to fly through the asteroid belt to a moon of Jupiter without bringing enough supplies with them. After a sort of preface or frame, we get to the meat of the story, the log discovered decades later aboard the stolen vessel where it lies wrecked on an asteroid; also found inside the ship was the skeleton of one of the three mutineers, while around the ship lay the remains of a bunch of grotesquely skinny insectoid aliens.
In brief, the narrator survives while the other two madmen expire during the trip. The narrator goes catatonic but recovers when the vessel crashes into a large asteroid which actually has an atmosphere and a whole ecosystem of plants, animals and people who have a culture that, apparently, includes religion. The ship is all bent so the narrator cannot open the airlock, and he lacks the weapons or tools to bust through the porthole or hull, so he is stuck in the ship, and learns all about life on the asteroid by watching through the porthole. We get a description of that life, and the man's mental trials, then finally clues as to the uncanny cause of his death.
"Master of the Asteroid" is a very good horror story set in space. The style is direct though not unadorned, and totally believable as the record of a man under terrible stress. The behavior and psychologies of the three broken men are very convincing and striking, and the story is full of dreadful, even haunting, images and events. Yet again Clark Ashton Smith proves he deserves his high reputation.
Recommended.
"Master of the Asteroid" has been reprinted quite a number of times over the years. In 1964 it appeared in Arkham House's Smith collection Tales of Science and Sorcery, which our French friends retitled Morthylla and put out in translation in 1989 with an ooo la la cover. (Those Frenchies know how to separate a man from his francs.)
**********
Three good stories, so kudos to the authors and to Derleth, who selected these pieces. All three stories have the trappings of science fiction, but instead of celebrating the work of the scientist and engineer and vindicating the ability of man to solve problems and master his environment, these stories exhibit a weird sensibility. The focus is on the horror of the alien, the danger presented by novel conditions, and the inability of humans, even those devoted to the scientific method, to survive the physical threats, solve the mysteries, and resist the temptations presented by alien beings, artifacts and conditions. You can't handle the truth of the unknown, man--it will destroy you physically, shatter you psychologically, and tempt you into abandoning your morality!
Errr, Porcius, a minor request ? Don't give away spoilers in your summaries, like you did for 'The Worm' ? i.e., "I was actually a little surprised........" heh......
ReplyDeleteSpoilers are an inextricable component of MPorcius Fiction Log, dyed deep into its very warp and its very woof!
Delete