Assignment in Tomorrow: J H Schmitz, H L Gold & F Brown

Let's read from another science fiction anthology courtesy of the magic of the internet archive.  I guess Frederik Pohl's 1954 Assignment in Tomorrow first came to my attention in January, when I read Theodore Sturgeon's "Mr. Costello, Hero" in my 1978 DAW edition of the 1958 Sturgeon collection A Touch of Strange. Assignment in Tomorrow reprints "Mr. Costello, Hero" and fifteen other stories, many of which are by people in whom we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are interested.  Today let's check out three, those by that guy who writes adventure stories about the ray-gun-toting heroines of the future, James H. Schmitz, the agoraphobic editor of Galaxy, H. L. Gold, and detective writer Fredric Brown.

"We Don't Want Any Trouble" by James H. Schmitz (1953)

Pohl in his intro to "We Don't Want Any Trouble" here in Assignment in Tomorrow says that the title story of Agent of Vega, a collection I read back in 2016, is "brilliant as a nova."  (I concluded my own analysis of "Agent of Vega" with the declaration that it was "not bad, not great.")  Pohl then assures us that this story here, which debuted in Gold's Galaxy, is "brighter still."  Well, let's see.

OK, this is an acceptable horror story.  More brilliant than a nova?  Not in my book.

A zoologist comes home to his wife to tell her the astounding news--he has been among the important men who interviewed a space alien!  This alien was like a frog man or lizard man, and a government intelligence officer and a bunch of scientists and politicians interrogated it.  All these important representatives of the American establishment were consumed by irrational negative feelings towards the alien, irresistible fear and undeniable detestation.  So disturbed was the zoologist that he could barely look at the alien and certainly couldn't come up with rational questions to ask it.  Our guy almost fainted when the alien's eyes fell upon him--only his fear of embarrassment in front of a blonde woman, the intelligence man's fiancé, there to take notes, kept him from swooning.

The eggheads were at a loss, but the intelligence man was a man of action and when the alien refused to answer questions he threatened the reptilian creature with torture and death.  The alien explained that his people are immune to pain and even death, and will do whatever they want on Earth, probably just act as tourists.  The E.T. was haughty and contemptuous of our civilization.

The intelligence man, hysterical, whipped out his pistol and gunned the alien down; his comrades wrested his gun from him.  Then the spook's hot fiancée stood up from where she was taking notes to strip naked!  The aliens are immune from death because they can move their consciousness from one body to another with trivial ease!  The intelligence man snatches another pistol, but is immediately shot dead himself by one of his fellows--no one can ever know if he intended to fire upon his fiancée's possessed body, or commit suicide.

As the story ends the zoologist speculates on how much human society will be altered by the alien tourists.  How many of these invasive tourists will there be?  And how long will they want to occupy a human body?  Will they be a minor inconvenience, or ruin lives and revolutionize society?

"We Don't Want Any Trouble" may remind readers of John D. MacDonald's The Wine of the Dreamers (1951) and Robert Silverberg's "Passengers" (1967) and probably some other things not coming to mind at the moment in which aliens take vacations (our English friends might say "'olidays") in our bodies. 

After first being reprinted here in Pohl's anthology, "We Don't Want Any Trouble," would go on to reappear in multiple American and foreign anthologies and in the Schmitz collection Eternal Frontier.

"A Matter of Form" by H. L. Gold (1938)

Some of the editors of the big SF magazines are as wacky as any of the big name SF writers, are writers in the own right, and should perhaps be seen as collaborators with the most honored SF writers, having workshopped ideas with them and guided them in developing plots, styles and themes.  At least that is the nice way of putting it--others who are less charitable have seen the big SF editors in question as self-important dictators who arrogantly interfered with the work of the writers whose fiction filled their magazines.  Either way, H. L. Gold of Galaxy and John W. Campbell, Jr. of Astounding are odd, perhaps tragic, perhaps reprehensible, characters who, for better or worse depending on your point of view, worked closely with the most prominent SF writers and played a pivotal role in shaping their work and the entire SF field.  Here in "A Matter of Form" we have a story by Gold that debuted in Campbell's essential magazine over ten years before Galaxy appeared on the scene, a story that has been reprinted many times in anthologies edited by such men as Isaac Asimov (with the help of Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh, of course) and Groff Conklin and in our own wacky 21st century in the Gold collection Perfect Murders: Detective Mysteries.

"Detective Mysteries?", you ask?  Yes, indeed.  "A Matter of Form" has the tone and atmosphere of a noirish hard-boiled detective story.  Set in New York City during the Depression, Gold's story is populated by educated people who are either down and out and suffering or living high on the hog through the proceeds of their diabolical criminal enterprises.  Our initial protagonist is a brilliant newsman, tall and skinny Gilroy, who, when he isn't bitching about how much he hates the septuagenarian rich guy, Talbot, who is half-owner of the newspaper, and relishing Talbot's imminent demise, is investigating the mysterious appearance on the streets of men, apparently unidentifiable bums with no local connections, who are catatonic and/or paralyzed.  What happened to these jokers?  Well, all of them have surgical wounds on the backs of their necks--could some mad scientist be experimenting on these poor bastards?  And why is the top surgeon at the hospital where the latest catatonic/paralytic ended up, Moss, famously a ruthless jerk, quitting his job of hospital director?

The narrative focus shifts to the adventures of Wood, formerly employed "in a stock-broker's office" as a "code expert" or "code translator," now spending his time on the streets, clad in rags, unable to find work.  Wood gets bamboozled by a bogus job offer and falls into the clutches of Moss and Talbot; Moss, it turns out, is experimenting on vulnerable men who lack families and connections in his quest to develop a means of moving people's consciousnesses from one body to another!  His research is supported by Talbot, who hopes Moss will fit him out with a fresh young body, his cis-body having a weak heart and scheduled to expire at any moment!  Moss has learned that to accomplish these identity shifts you don't have to move the entire brain, just a tiny little bit near where the brain meets the spine--this is where identity resides.  (Who knew?)  The unsuspecting Wood soon finds himself in the body of a dog!  In the same room is his old human body crawling around on all fours, it being animated by the consciousness of the dog.  

Gold's journalist and criminal scenes are pretty conventional, but the scenes of the man in a dog's body, fighting his way out of Moss's lab and evading capture by Talbot's flunkies and by the police, are pretty good--Gold's description of a human being's response to living the life of a carnivorous quadruped, of experiencing firsthand a dog's instinctive reactions to stimuli, are good speculative fiction.  It would be easy to give these portions of the book a thumbs up.  The sequences in which Wood, the code expert in a dog's body, strives to contact Gilroy the crusading journalo are not bad, and are fully in the tradition of science fiction that teaches you cool stuff (in this case, cryptography) and portrays people using logic and knowledge to overcome problems; unfortunately these scenes are repetitive and feel pretty long.  In fact, the entire story, which is like 60 pages in Assignment in Tomorrow, feels kind of long and repetitive, the characters doing and saying the same kinds of things again and again.

Another problem with "A Matter of Form" is the weak ending.  We follow Wood (in a dog's body) and Gilroy, accompanied by Gilroy's editor, a sort of superfluous but ever-present sidekick character, through a long sequence of climbing buildings and sneaking around which ends with a confrontation with Talbot and Moss.  Talbot dies of a heart attack in the excitement and, after long scenes of Moss showing contempt for his captors, Wood uses his dog body to just kill the defenseless mad scientist.

With Moss, the only man able to perform the identity transplant operation he pioneered, dead, Wood is  stuck in the dog body.  He and Gilroy get rich performing on stage and in Hollywood.  Gold talks about how Wood is sad and defeated, wishing he could live as a man again, which I think would have been a good moody ending for a hard-boiled detective story that is also an attack on our bourgeois capitalist society--all the money in the world can't make you happy if you are a second class citizen, if you have lost your humanity!  But Gold cops out and has Wood, in a way that is totally inexplicable and Gold does not even try to explain, return to his human body after a year as a pooch.  Lame!  

The plot of Gold's "A Matter of Form" is about as obvious and familiar as that of Schmitz's "We Don't Want Any Trouble," but Gold's story has a style, an atmosphere and an ideology, making it more engaging, even if I'm not impressed by the ideology--the story is suffused with the hatred of the middle-class smarty pants for the upper-middle class as well as that of the self-important creative type for those who work for money; presumably this endeared the story to Fred Pohl, alumnus of the Young Communist League.  Gold lays the atmosphere and ideology on pretty thick, having the reporter denounce Talbot again and again, and telling us again and again about Wood's worn shoes and unshaven face, contrasting his down and out mug with Moss's perfect shave, but a loud personality is better than no personality.  And the story does come to life in the action scenes in which the code expert has to learn how to operate a dog's body tout suite.  So we'll judge "A Matter of Form" marginally good, a notch above Schmitz's story; you commies out there will probably want to crank that up a few more notches.  

For more H. L. Gold coverage here at MPorcius Fiction Log, check out my blogpost on "No Medals,"  another story about poverty and a mad scientist practicing weird medicine, and "Trouble with Water," which is full of ethnic and sex stereotypes.

"Hall of Mirrors" by Fredric Brown (1953)

Here's another story from Gold's Galaxy--it's H. L. Gold day here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Fredric Brown's "Hall of Mirrors" debuted in an issue of Galaxy with a Christmas joke cover--Christmas covers and joke covers always make me groan.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we like blood and guts, sex and violence, thrills and chills, not Santa Claus and yukking it up. 

This is a brief gimmicky story that can serve as an example of the elitism of the science fiction community, its skepticism of the common people and its belief in technocracy and the rule of the cognitive elite.

"Hall of Mirrors" is written in the second person, addressed directly to the reader, who is the protagonist.  "You," a young math professor, wake up in a small room, wondering where you are, having just moments ago been hanging out with your sexy fiancé by the pool in Beverly Hills.  You step into a larger room with furniture of an odd style; you are naked, and put on weird clothes of a cut and fabric you don't recognize.

You find a note that explains your predicament.  You, a college professor about to get married in 1954, have been transported to the future of 2004.  Well, sort of.  The note explains that the inventor of the time machine is you of 2004, age 74.  Time travel in this story isn't really what I would consider time travel; at least I don't think it is--this story's science jazz is a little hard for me to make sense of.  When 2004 you put a manufactured cube into the time machine and set the cube to travel ten years back, when you opened up the machine you found the cube a pile of raw dust--the matter of the cube had returned to its state of ten years ago, before it was compressed into a cube.  Similarly, putting a six-week old guinea pig into the machine and setting the device to go back five weeks produced a baby rodent.  You believed that putting a human being in the machine would de-age the person; with the machine, people sick or old or otherwise on the brink of death could be given a new lease on life, made young again--the price of this longevity would be to erase all memories of the intervening period (if 60-year-old you was de-aged to 20, you would forget everything that happened for the last 40 years, but would be exactly as healthy as you were 40 years ago.)

Seventy-four-year-old you of 2004 figured people would use the machine to extend their lives, thus causing overpopulation.  In a world run by the cognitive elite, both the machine's use and people's ability to reproduce would be highly regulated to keep the population balanced, but, alas, we don't live in such an "enlightened" world yet.  You decided to lower your age, to rejuvenate yourself, and to keep doing so, providing yourself immortality so you could keep an eye on the time machine and make sure nobody learned of it until you were confident the government and populace were ready to use the time machine responsibly.

An acceptable filler story that, with its circular nature (different versions of the hero manipulating each other) and elite hero working behind the scenes to manipulate civilization and bring about an eventual paradigm shift, reminds us a little of A. E. van Vogt's work.  "Hall of Mirrors" has been reprinted in multiple Brown collections and anthologies, including one edited by our hero, Barry N. Malzberg.

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These are not bad examples of the kind of SF Fred Pohl likes, stories that tell you our society sucks and we should put college professors and journalists in charge of everything.  We'll probably read some more from Assignment in Tomorrow, but first a novel that is perhaps a little more action-adventure oriented.