Science Fiction Adventures, March 1958: R Silverberg, H Ellison, & C Anvil

A week or so ago we read fiction from a 1957 issue of Larry T. Shaw's Science Fiction Adventures, including the first of the three novellas that make up Robert Silverberg's "Lest We Forget Thee, Earth" series.  A few days ago we read the second novella in the sequence, also from a 1957 ish of SFA.  Today we crack open the March 1958 issue of Science Fiction Adventures and finish the series.  Once we dispose of Silverberg's novella we'll round out the blog post with a short story by our old pal Harlan Ellison and on from Christopher Anvil, a guy whose work I am not very familiar with.

Like the covers of the last two issues of SFA we looked at, the March 1958 issue, the tenth entry in the magazine's twelve issue run, is adirned with a beautiful woman painted by Ed Emshwiller.  Of the three, this cover is the weakest, appearing relatively flat and emotionless, whereas the earlier two were pulsating with life and energy, the first disturbing and the second captivating.  While it is true that the woman on this cover looks diabolically evil and she is accompanied by a man undergoing medical treatment or torture, this painting just isn't moving me as did the previous two.  A big problem is the monochrome yellow background--it looks like the publishers carved away much of the background to clear space for the text.

(Emsh provides some solid interior illustrations for Silverberg's story, we are happy to report.)

"Vengeance of the Space Armadas" by Robert Silverberg (as by Calvin M. Knox)

Thousands of years ago the human race ruled the universe, lording it over a million suns and a wide panoply of alien races.  But then those aliens banded together and overthrew the Earth Empire, and the human race was reduced to a few million men and women scattered in ones and twos across the many galaxies their ancestors had ruled.  But the aliens continued to respect the superior intellect of the human, and many planetary rulers had a human as a chief advisor.  

One such advisor was Navarre, who discovered the location of the lost Earth and the Earth's pregnant secret-- ten thousand human geniuses held in suspended animation underground.  With the idea of rebuilding the Earth Empire he revived these ten thousand and began acquiring through sneaky sneaky means a space navy for the geniuses to crew.  

Such we learned in the first two parts of this series.  Today we experience the final episode of the series, "Vengeance of the Space Armadas."  But who is getting revenge on who?  Is the Earthman getting revenge on the aliens who knocked over his empire so many centuries ago?  Or are all those weirdos with the blue, green and pink skin, with the fingers like snakes, mouths full of tusks, or single cyclopean eye, getting their revenge on us for disrupting their barbaric native cultures and teaching them how to behave like civilized people?  Let's see!  

Navarre thinks the Vegan advisor who supplanted him and is operating the king of Navarre's birth world like a puppet is going to send another fleet to the Sol system to strangle the second Earth Empire in the cradle and Navarre heads over there with the idea of murdering or manipulating the Vegan.  Along the way, he stops at the planet where his female partner in reviving Earth's fortunes is advisor to that planet's king.  (One of the ways Silverberg hints that all these damned aliens deserve to be ruled by humans is that they all have autocratic societies, while Navarre holds elections on Earth among the ten thousand.)  He gets captured and tortured before securing the protection of his female colleague.  This torture scene feels superfluous, Silverberg just padding out his story with descriptions of pain and of the ugliness of the torturers--as soon as his girlfriend learns of his predicament she frees Navarre, provides him a disguise, and sends him on his way--the torture and the torturers are not mentioned again and the torture has no effect on the plot.

Silverberg gives us a longish scene in which the incognito Navarre and the Vegan conduct negotiations--Navarre tries to cause a rift between two different planets so they won't ally against Earth.  But the whole negotiation is rendered moot when the Vegan sees through Navarre's disguise.  The negotiation scene is almost as superfluous as was the torture scene.  Navarre fights his way out of the palace and heads to another planet to manipulate some other potentate.  Silverberg describes in detail such operations as Navarre removing his disguise and drugging a guy so he can steal a small space ship and then we get a description of this third alien society's architecture.

Having secured through manipulative diplomacy a dozen more warships from that third alien planet in a scene that is the high point of this weak story because it is more character-driven and more philosophical and thus more engaging, Navarre returns to Earth.  With his small battle fleet he faces an alien fleet twice its size that has been assembled by and is commanded by the Vegan.  Through trickery the human fleet defeats the alien fleet, and the Vegan is killed.  Most of the enemy ships are captured and added to the human fleet.  As the story ends, it is implied the Earth will again conquer the universe.  To my disappointment, Silverberg doesn't present this future either triumphantly, baldly positing that human dominance of interstellar civilization will lead to peace and prosperity, or tragically, suggesting aliens will be abused or exploited and Earthmen will suffer in the process (nota bene: no Earth ships were damaged in the battle), or any combination of the two--the denouement, like most of the story, including the climactic battle, feels flat and unemotional.  

There are a host of problems with this novella and with the earlier two episodes in the "Lest We Forget Thee, Earth" / "The Chalice of Death" series.  How long it takes to get some place or do something, how long ago the Earth empire rose and fell, what sort of technology is available, all those sorts of things feel inconsistent and don't ring true to the reader.  The series as a whole, and "Vengeance of the Space Armadas" in particular, feels like a series of action and suspense scenes just strung together, not really leading logically one to the next, and most of the scenes are poor or mediocre--as I suggested about the second episode, "Earth Shall Live Again!," the descriptions of chases and fights and negotiations lack passion and lack style and so don't generate excitement. Silverberg doesn't describe the setting of the story in a consistent way, providing limited descriptions of places we spend a lot of time in and a detailed description of a place we see only once.  We get people's and planets' back stories late in the game, after they no longer are playing a big role in the narrative.  The entire series is just constructed haphazardly.  I wonder if Silverberg revised this material for book publication and the texts in the 1958 Ace Double or the 21st century editions are smoother and more polished.  

Gotta give the version of "Vengeance of the Space Armadas" I read here in Science Fiction Adventures a thumbs down.  

"Vengeance of the Space Armadas" was reprinted on its own in the British edition of Science Fiction Adventures edited by John Carnell.  The issue with "Vengeance of the Space Armadas" has on its cover an altered version of the cover illustration used on the issue of the U.S. edition that printed the first episode of the "Lest We Forget Thee, Earth" sequence.  This UK version of Emsh's painting lacks the pile of corpses that was one of the elements that made the American cover so unsettling.  Compare below!

Top: Detail from US Science Fiction Adventures June 1957
Bottom: Detail from UK Science Fiction Adventures November 1958

"Big Sam Was My Friend" by Harlan Ellison

Sometimes I tell you a Harlan Ellison story is astoundingly horrible, like when I excoriated the inexplicably critically lauded "Mefisto in Onyx."  But sometimes I praise an Ellison tale, like I did "Run for the Stars" just recently.  Cross your fingers, kids, and let's see what Ellison has in store for us today with this 13-page story which was reprinted in the famous collection I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (title courtesy of William Rotsler) and included by Peter Haining in his anthology The Freak Show.

Genre fiction writers love the circus and the carnival, and "Big Sam Was My Friend" is yet another story set in such a milieu, a travelling circus in the future of interstellar multi-species civilization.  The text consists of a memoir, our narrator recalling his relationship with a fellow human, seven-foot-tall Sam, who joins the circus the narrator works for, a circus whose performers all have psychic powers--the trapeze artist can levitate, the lion tamer can control the minds of animals, etc.  When the lion tamer stupidly tries to do his act drunk and the animals look about ready to tear him limb from limb, Sam, a member of the audience, teleports the man to safety.  Our narrator hires Sam for the circus, and Sam becomes a star attraction.  

Ellison describes Sam's act, and then we learn about Sam's terrible sorrow.  Sam's girlfriend was killed in a traffic accident right after she learned Sam had psychic powers, something which revolted her.  Sam is travelling the galaxy looking for Heaven, confident his girl is there.

Sam has been with the circus a year or so when the circus is working at the royal court on a planet inhabited by humans that has a pretty authoritarian monarchy.  The circus has arrived just in time for the human sacrifice these people perform every 25 years!  As we might expect, the sacrifice is a beautiful blonde virgin girl!

Ellison pulls a blunder in my opinion, having Sam save the girl, as we expect, but not in a way that jives with the earlier rescue he performed.  Sam was in the audience watching the lion tamer and teleported the man out from under the great cat's jaws to his side.  We readers expect Sam to similarly teleport the virgin girl out from under the executioner's blade to his side in the audience, but, instead, Ellison has Sam teleport himself to the chopping block where he fights the executioner hand to hand.  

The locals declare that this is blasphemy and Sam must die--even the virgin wants Sam to be executed!  The psychic carnies could rescue Sam with their psychic powers and escape, but there is a lot of money to be made on this planet and they don't want to offend their host or leave.  Sam could teleport away, but he doesn't want to live anymore--he lets the locals hang him to death in hopes he will go to Heaven and be with his girlfriend, even though she rejected him.

"Big Sam Was My Friend" is a pretty cynical, misanthropic and even misogynist story--people sacrifice their colleague (their "friend"!) for money and women callously reject a man who loves them, risks or even just gives his life for them, because they are bigoted.  

Ellison's style is good here, and the plot and themes are alright, but I think he bungles the teleportation scenes.  I've already described one such inconsistency, and I won't go into details, but I think Sam's act doesn't make a lot of sense, that Ellison didn't come up with a circus act that logically takes advantage of the ability to teleport.  "Big Sam Was My Friend" comes off like a draft that needs a revision or two--surely with a little additional effort Ellison could have come up with a more appropriate act for Sam, and made the rescue of the lion tamer and of the virgin more parallel.

We're calling "Big Sam Was My Friend" acceptable, though we are confident that with a little revision it would certainly be quite good.

Freak Show also reprints Robert Bloch's "The Girl From Mars," which we read last year,
and Margaret St. Clair's "Horrer Howce," which we read in 2024.

"Destination Unknown" by Christopher Anvil

I read my first Anvil story back in March.  Here comes my second.  "Destination Unknown" would wait over fifty years before being reprinted in book form in a 2010 Anvil collection, The Power of Illusion.  

I am going to have to admit I don't really "get" "Destination Unknown."  It depicts a sort of frontier milieu in which many men are gunfighters who are always looking to start and win informal duels to the death, their reward being prestige.  It is suggested that gunfighters carry around lists of those they have killed, and if you kill a gunslinger you somehow acquire his list and with it the prestige your victim earned by slaying all those other guys.  The illustration to the story here in SFA, though not the actual text, likens this to being a head hunter who collects heads of defeated foes and they heads they collected.

The setting of Anvil's story is a hollowed out asteroid that serves as a depot; space ships come and go regularly.  On the asteroid is an aspiring gunslinger, "the Kid."  I think maybe we are supposed to suspect the Kid is a homosexual, or maybe just effeminate; at the same time it is clear he habitually bullies people on the station, that people at the depot are scared of him.  You have to wonder why the government or the korporashuns permit such shenanigans on an economically critical outer space installation, but when I was a kid there were bullies the teachers did nothing about and my twitter feed is full of stories of creeps being arrested a dozen times for assault and judges setting them free so they can murder Ukrainian refugees and slash three-year-old children so maybe this story is perfectly reasonable.  

It is rumored that a famous gunfighter, Zellinger, will briefly be on the asteroid; Zellinger is old and on his way home to Earth to retire.  On Earth the government has things under control and these crazy impromptu duels do not take place.  The Kid is anxious to have a crack at Zellinger before Z is safe on Terra.  

The actual protagonist of "Destination Unknown" is a third guy whom the Kid abuses and who then tries to get even with the Kid by helping Z and/or feels sympathetic towards Zellinger because the guy is old.  The Kid realizes he is in over his head, that Zellinger is still more than a match for him and maybe gunfighting isn't his bag, and tries to get away from the asteroid, which maybe won't be so easy, as his admission of weakness makes him a target of other gunslingers.

I assume "Destination Unknown" is a pastiche or homage to Westerns and to those stories about 17th- and 18th-century guys fighting duels, but beyond that it was hard for me to tell what was going on, not only in regards to the plot, but also in the action scenes, which are also allusive rather than lucid.  The protagonist has a pencil gun that can shoot both lethal and nonlethal beams--he shoots a nonlethal beam at the Kid to discourage him when the Kid is demanding info from him.  The Kid has a cloth he waves around to distract or threaten people; I guess the cloth is robust enough that it can draw blood if snapped on somebody's bare skin.  For a while I thought the Kid was able to hypnotize people with the cloth, as he seems to put on a different voice when he uses the cloth to intimidate the protagonist, but I have abandoned that theory.  Zellinger also seems to snap the Kid with a cloth, but so fast nobody sees the cloth; the story has plenty of sentences like this one that you have to interpret:

Zellinger's hand blurred out and back, and the Kid was dragging in air roughly.

Maybe I am admitting in this review that I am a pretty poor reader.

Anyway, Anvil doesn't clearly spell out all that is going on, so I felt like this story was requiring work to figure out but that the characters were so bland and the plot so pedestrian that doing that work would yield no profit; as far as I can tell, there is little speculative or philosophical material here in "Destination Unknown" beyond the gunslinger plot.

Thumbs down.

**********

Three cynical hard-boiled stories in which people are broken, defeated, and exploit others.  Worse, two of them are undercooked and the other is deliberately opaque.  Oy, reading these crazy old magazines is not as easy as it looks!  Of course, I'm not going to stop reading these magazines--I'm not even going to stop reading Silverberg, Ellison and Anvil.  So, stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log for more craziness.