MPorcius Fiction Log

Friday, February 27, 2026

Asimov's Mar-Apr '78: B Aldiss, J D Haldeman II & R Wilson

I recently read Richard Wilson's 1958 story "Man Working" and gave it a mixed but more or less friendly review. One of this blog's well-read commenters pointed out that Wilson published a sequel to "Man Working," or at least a story set in the same setting, in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1978. It makes sense to read this '78 story while I still remember the '58 piece, so let's read it today. While we are at it, we'll take a look at some other stuff in that issue of Asimov's.

Right there in the beginning of the magazine is a crude ad for TSR's board game Dungeon! and an early edition of Dungeons and Dragons. As a kid I played tons of Basic/Expert D&D and 1st edition AD&D with my brother, and spent many many hours poring over the piles of rulebooks, modules and issues of Dragon magazine I accumulated, and I still think about Dungeons and Dragons every day, my mind still bubbling with ideas for dungeon layouts and quest hooks and different magic systems and easier ways to simulate the interaction between sharp or blunt weapons striking rigid or flexible, metal or cloth armor, and on and on. (Later we'd get into Warhammer 40,000 and I still think about Eldar psychic powers and jet bikes and Imperial Titans and superheavy tanks and comic relief Space Ork weapons systems.)

Then we get Asimov's boring editorial about the definition of the term "science fiction;" fun fact: Asimov doesn't care for "speculative fiction," the most successful candidate for a replacement for the term "science fiction." More entertaining is a sophisticated ad for an edition of Dunsany stories illustrated by Tim Kirk, and more valuable is Charles N. Brown's quite good book column, which briefly addresses many books and succeeds in saying useful things about each of them. In the back of the magazine we've got the letters column, including a chummy one from Barry Malzberg in which he expresses gratitude over how well his story "The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" was presented in the Winter 1977 issue. I feel like I recognize its title but I don't think I have ever read the story, so maybe we'll be seeing "The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" discussed soon here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

There's a ton of fiction in the Mar-Apr '78 issue of Asimov's but we are only going to read three pieces, those by Brian Aldiss, Jack C. Haldeman II, and the aforementioned Richard Wilson. I considered reading A. Bertram Chandler's included Grimes story, but decided to put it off--my memories of the Grimes stories I read in the period before this blog was summoned via occult procedures from the nether world are that they are just OK, and if I am going to tackle the vast Grimes corpus someday I will want to start with stories published earlier or that depict Grimes earlier in his career.

"The Small Stones of Tu Fu" by Brian Aldiss

Aldiss doesn't use the word, but this is a story about God and God's feelings about the world he created, and dramatizes a tension between the idea that God loves everybody and everything equally, and the idea that God has favorites.

Our narrator appears to be a time traveller from the future who likes to explore different places and periods in China. He is hanging out with an aged poet and sage, Tu Fu, visiting a site by a river where stand some monoliths. Were these monoliths placed by a king to commemorate his military victories during the era of the Three Kingdoms, or did they appear naturally? Tu Fu and the narrator exchange little puns and other little jokes--I have to question the appropriateness of Aldiss filling this story, in which people are, presumably, speaking Chinese, with English puns. Then things get philosophical. Tu Fu looks at how the action of the river has, over time, "organized" by size the stones and shells that lie on the river bank. Is this merely the result of random, natural, undirected action, or the work of some obsessively punctilious Intelligence that seeks to order and organize the entire world? And does this Intelligence hate humanity because people are forever undoing its organizing work, shifting stones and shells and everything else to suit its own whims, like the kids who are on the bank picking up and throwing stones, or further grand purposes, like the kings who equip armies and raise monuments? The old sage Tu Fu dies within an hour or so of raising these philosophical questions, and the time traveller returns to the far future, to a time when no human survives, and we realize our narrator is the Intelligence theorized by Tu Fu. We are assured, however, that, despite Tu Fu's fears, that the narrator, the creator and obsessive organizer of our world, does not hate humanity, but loves each human as he loves each pebble, recognizing the unique value of each person and of each stone. Still, it is clear he loves Tu Fu more than the rest of humanity, and will treasure a pebble Tu Fu picked up and handed to him more than any other pebble.

This story is well-written, and maybe some will find it profound in its attitude about God or clever with its paradoxes and jokes, but one could just as easily see it as a pretentious trifle, as filler of an uppity or presumptuous type. We'll mildly recommend it.

"The Small Stones of Tu Fu" has been reprinted in many anthologies of material from Asimov's as well as in a bunch of Aldiss collections.

"The Agony of Defeat" by Jack C. Haldeman II

Pop, my maternal grandfather, always watched Wide World of Sports, to which the title of "The Agony of Defeat" alludes, but I never got very interested in sports myself. It looks like Haldeman's contribution to Asimov's is a sports story and a joke story, but I'm reading it anyway--at six pages, I can probably take it.

It is the future--it is illegal for humans to participate in football games, the sport being judged too dangerous. So for a while the game has been played by robots. But this year a team of genetically engineered freaks who have enough oxen and gazelle ancestry to legally be recognized as non-human have made their way to the Superbowl.

This lame filler story describes that beast-man vs droid Superbowl and the way two sportscasters cover it. There are slapstick jokes and little else. Two sample jokes: 1) One of the freaks bites the ear off of one of the sportscasters. 2) The robot team is named the Armadillos and they have brought with them to the stadium hundreds of real armadillos as mascots--when some scamp releases all the little armored insectivores onto the field the freaks are stupid enough that they mistake an armadillo for a football.

Total waste of time.

A paperback book version of the contents of the March-April 1978 issue of Asimov's was produced under the title Comets and Computers and so that is one place where "The Agony of Defeat" was "reprinted." This piece of junk can also be found in Laughing Space, a big anthology edited by Asimov and his wife, J. O. Jeppson.

"The Far King" by Richard Wilson

This is why we are here, a novelette of about 43 pages that would be reprinted in various Asimov-associated publications, the anthology Another Round at the Spaceport Bar and a 735-page Wilson collection put out by Centipede Press in 2018.

Small town girl Ann Bagley is the daughter of a preacher. Dad is an unusual member of the clergy--he thinks other planets have fostered intelligent life, probably more intelligent than that on Earth, and that God has sent sons to those planets in the same way He sent Jesus to us Earthers. Teenaged Ann daydreams about meeting one of these dreamy Christs from another world the way another girl might dream of meeting Elvis or David Cassidy or Corey Haim or whoever (I don't know who the teen heartthrobs of today might be, or even if there are teen heartthrobs anymore.)

Our narrator is Jack Norkus, the same guy who narrated 1958's "Man Working," though "The Far King" offers a very different explanation of how he learned of the aliens' presence in Chicago than that laid out in the 1958 story. This discrepancy presages a pervasive theme of the story--people's names and identities are fluid and unknowable, and in fact everything a human (Ann, Jack or the reader) knows may turn out to be untrue.

Jack is the same age as Ann and grew up in the same small town and attended the church where her father preached; as teens they spent some time together, talking about her father's theories and looking over the books which formed the basis of his theories. It briefly looked like they might develop a sexual relationship, but this did not eventuate.

As adults, Jack and Ann meet again in the mile-tall skyscraper in Chicago which is the secret gathering place of space aliens come to Earth to conduct research or do some kind of business. Like Jack, Ann takes to spending all her free time in the bar 528 stories above the streets of Chi-town that caters to the aliens. Ann is often referred to by a new, jokey, name, but I am going to keep calling her Ann.

While "Man Working" was about show business, "The Far King" is about sex. Ann is a serious reader and an able sculptress, but also a terrible tease, and hangs around the bar, arousing Jack and the ETs, sitting in their laps and so forth, without giving them a chance to do anything more than kiss her. Jack, who seems to make most of his money selling alien drugs to Earthers, when short on funds, will sell his sperm at a local sperm bank; it is implied that the donation center makes the process of donating particularly satisfying, and that Jack goes there to relieve his pent up sexual excitement when Ann has got him all hot and bothered.

Many of the aliens who hang around the bar can read minds or have super vision or super hearing or whatever, and these unscrupulous types not only learn all of Ann's thoughts and read her copious notes and diary entries, but share all her secrets with Jack. Thusly we learn Ann's biography and her hopes and dreams, why she acts the way she does. The plot really gets going when an alien arrives who can project different images of himself to different viewers. To Jack and Ann, he looks like a handsome human; to the other aliens he looks like an attractive member of their own species. None of the aliens explain this to poor Ann, and she falls in love with this new alien, Leo Reo, purportedly royalty on his home planet.

Jack and we readers learn Leo Reo's life story from a talking robot encyclopedia. ("The Far King" isn't one of those stories in which the protagonist has a goal and we follow him in a straight line as he tries to overcome obstacles in pursuit of his objective; rather, Wilson's novelette is one of those gossipy stories in which the main plot is related piecemeal in little sub-stories, each of which is imbedded in a little frame, a story in which we learn most everything second hand or third-hand from not-quite-reliable narrators.) Leo Reo is the second son of a king of some alien society. While his older brother was being trained for kingship, the neglected Leo Reo engaged in an all-consuming homosexual love affair with an educated male. Leo Reo's lover acted as a mentor, teaching Leo Reo all about art and culture and how to win over people and manipulate them, so when his brother died in an accident, Leo Reo turned out to be a whiz at making friends and influencing people at court.

So, Ann thinks Leo Reo, whom everybody except she knows is a gay blob monster, is the man she has been waiting for since she was a teen who dreamed of meeting alien Christ analogs. Wilson doesn't do a very good job making clear the motivations of the characters in this story, but for some reason Leo Reo sort of leads Ann on, fosters her belief that she will have a chance to marry him and become a queen on some other planet. Then news arrives that his father has died and Leo Reo is now king. The Far King rushes off, leaving Ann behind. Ann, suffering the largely self-induced delusion that Leo Reo wants her to come to his world and marry him, buys a ticket to Leo Reo's planet and leaves Earth behind. On the alien world (where she never realizes all the people she meets are blobs in disguise, even though they touch her intimately), Leo Reo pays Ann only limited attention. He does use her, in conjunction with various aphrodisiacs and machines, to get aroused so he can produce the sperm needed to impregnate a female of his race--his life of homosexuality has made it very difficult for Leo Reo to get aroused by a female of his own species. Ann realizes that Leo Reo is more or less doing to her what she did to so many males back in Chicago when she aroused them to achieve her own perverted satisfaction and then left them hanging, frustrated. Ann returns to Earth.

As foreshadowed by Jack's own sperm donations, Leo Reo doesn't have sex with females, but has his sperm collected by machines that then impregnate many females, making sure there will be an ample supply of heirs. Leo Reo provides Ann with a little vial of his sperm and a memory tape which she can plug into a dream machine so she can experience virtual reality sex with him and then give birth to his child.

Or so she thinks! "The Far King" is all about people being deceived by others and deceiving themselves, about people pretending to be what they are not, putting on false appearances and bearing false names Jack gets a message from Leo Reo, who has somehow got the idea that Jack and Ann are going to be married--I guess Leo Reo has been deceived by Jack and Ann's alien friends at the bar. In the message, Leo Reo explains that the sperm in the vial Ann wears around her neck as a locket and is always caressing is not Leo Reo's; after all, he is a blob monster and his sperm could in no way impregnate a human woman. The sperm is in fact Jack's, a sample of which Leo Reo's agents purchased at the sperm bank that Jack uses as a brothel.

Jack reveals all to Ann, including his desire to make the lie that they are going to be married reality*, but Ann refuses to believe the truth and rejects Jack's proposal. Finally, however, the aliens at the bar get together to convince Ann to marry Jack and have children with him; why they are doing this was not clear to me, and the way they go about it is ridiculous, I guess just a set up for one of Wilson's jokes, perhaps a meta-joke about common SF tropes.

*One of the story's problems is that Jack never makes clear to the reader why he wants to marry Ann, never talks about what he likes about her, never expresses any affection for her or describes his fascination with her.

The aliens tell the humans that they have the power to look forward, to see possible futures, and that as a favor they will show Jack and Ann one possible future. This turns out to be a scam--the "future" they show Jack and Ann is in fact an immersive film about a guy whose wife gives birth to a messiah figure; in the film, father, who appears to Jack and Ann as Jack, and son leave Earth, abandoning mom (Ann), to start a ministry on an alien world; for some reason Jack and Ann's son, who has supernatural powers, murders Jack. Even though it is revealed that this is a hoax, experiencing the immersive film changes Ann, makes her more mature and wise. (How would the experience of being betrayed by your husband and son make a woman more mature and wise and more likely to marry the guy who betrayed her in the dream experience?) Ann decides to marry Jack and have two children, one from the sperm in the vial and one the old fashioned way by having sex with her husband. The end.

"The Far King" is not very good. The story is long and convoluted, the narrative zigging and zagging in ways that are frustrating, and which further stress the reader's ability to suspend disbelief in a story which is pretty incredible in many of its elements already. For example, we are to think Ann and Jack poor, but if the plot requires it they suddenly have the money to fly to another planet or rent a cabin on a lake. I don't know, maybe this is how the finances of drug dealers work, flush today and impecunious tomorrow, but it is just one instance of Wilson leading you to think one thing and then pulling the rug out from under you. The big final joke, that the aliens pass off a canned film as a view of the Jack and Ann's future, is also hard to credit, as the film seems to match in every particular Ann and Jack's strange relationships with Leo Reo and Ann's father. Maybe the film is so interactive that it conforms to the viewers' lives, or maybe it was already based on their lives, but, like Jack and Ann's finances, it is another thing about the story that strains credulity, that takes you out of the story.

Wilson makes it hard for the reader to care what happens in the story, what happens to the characters. The jocular tone does not jive with the actual events depicted in the story, all of which are sad. Is the reader supposed to feel for Ann and Jack? It is hard to sympathize with the characters because they all behave foolishly and/or unethically. And all the zigging and zagging, Wilson leading us to believe something and then revealing that it is not true, discourages the reader from taking anything seriously--should I feel bad that something happened to this girl, when it maybe didn't really happen?

Thumbs down for this mess.

**********

I'd be lying if I told you reading these three stories from the March-April issue of Asimov's was a wonderful experience. But hey, live and learn. And the Aldiss is not bad.

Thursday, February 26, 2026

Tanar of Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs

“Stellara!” he cried. “My darling!” But the girl turned her face away from him.
“Do not touch me,” she cried. “I hate you.”
“Stellara!” he exclaimed in amazement. “What has happened?”

It is time to read the third Pellucidar novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tanar of Pellucidar, which first appeared as a six-part serial in Blue Book in 1929. We've already read the first two Pellucidar books, At the Earth's Core and Pellucidar, the saga of the development of the empire of American David Innes in the savage inner world that lies far beneath our feet, a world whose sun sits forever at the zenith so your shadow always lies directly beneath you, a world that is home to stone age humans, psychic matriarchal pterosaurs, giant cave bears, plesiosaurs, and an endless array of other dangerous people and animals. It looks like this novel will shift gears and star not an imperialist reformer from the surface but a native of Pellucidar.

Like most of Burroughs' output, Tanar of Pellucidar has been reprinted many times. I'm reading the $1.95 Ace copy my brother sent to me back in 2019 when he mailed me our combined Edgar Rice Burroughs collection. This paperback, over 240 pages of text (like 60 pages longer than my Ace Pellucidar), has a brilliant Frank Frazetta cover; the composition is terrific--the curve of the muscleman's body, the way the wind pulls his hair, etc., --as are the moody colors. The man's face and expression are also good--sometimes Frazetta's faces are a little flat or lack expression, but this one is fully realized graphically and emotionally. A flawless Frazetta classic.

OK, Tanar of Pellucidar, taken as a whole, is the least of the Pellucidar books so far. It feels long and it feels repetitive, what with people getting captured, escaping captivity, and then getting captured again and how an apparently endless series of love triangles and repeated instances of irrational jealousy keep the love birds at the center of the story apart; and then there are some elements of the story that are derivative and a little silly. However, some parts of the book (mostly in the last quarter or so) are as good as anything in either of the two previous Pellucidar volumes, and amidst the repetitious escapes and fits of jealousy Burroughs gives us some satirical social commentary about sexual mores and some mind-bending science fiction concepts, so I am still recommending Tanar of Pellucidar, and looking forward to my next forays into Pellucidar and into the wider Edgar Rice Burroughs canon.

For a blow by blow recounting of the novel's plot and a look at its themes, and my own little criticisms, read on.

Five of the six issues of Blue Book in which installments of Tanar appear
have cover illustrations promoting Burroughs' serial that focus not on
how Tanar's love interest is constantly jealous but rather on how Tanar has to
fight one oversized mammal after another

**********

The Prologue to Tanar of Pellucidar is about how Burroughs has a friend, Jason Gridley, who has discovered a new radio wave; tuning into this wave on his receiver exposes him to some mysterious signals. Eventually, somehow, he starts receiving Morse code transmitted by Abner Perry, David Innes' right hand man, from the other side of Earth's 500-mile thick crust. Then comes the Introduction of the novel, which is in the voice of Perry, who reports that Innes and his empire are in trouble! A piratical sea-faring race of humans, previously unknown to the region of Pellucidar familiar to Innes, Perry and us readers, has been raiding the empire of Innes and, among other crimes, carried off Tanar, the son of one of Innes' closest native friends, a king of one of the principal constituent kingdoms of the empire. Innes has set out after Tanar in a boat with one other comrade and with a captive pirate as a guide.

The main text of Tanar of Pellucidar is written in the third person omniscient, and begins with Tanar captive aboard a pirate ship. The humans Innes encountered when he first arrived in Pellucidar had a stone age technology, but these pirates bear Renaissance or Early Modern equipment like high-decked sailing ships, arquebuses, and that sort of thing. Burroughs leans into the stereotypical pop-culture image of a pirate pretty heavily, in a way that I found kind of silly; these troublemakers hail from a country called Korsar and wear gaudy brightly-colored head scarves and sashes, carry cutlasses, and make people walk the plank. After the exotic and original Mahars and Sagoths of the last two books, a bunch of cartoonish pirates are a real let down, although I should perhaps count my blessings--one of my pet peeves is the romanticization of pirates, and Burroughs portrays these pirates as totally evil.

The Korsars' gunpowder is inferior to that developed by Perry and used by the people of Innes' empire, so Tanar manages to get better treatment from his captors by suggesting to the supreme leader of the Korsars, a man known as The Cid (good grief), that if he and his fellow prisoners are kept healthy they can teach the pirates how to manufacture superior powder.

Burroughs' heroes generally develop relationships with princesses, and, sure enough, the daughter of The Cid, Stellara, is aboard and Tanar and she see something, each in the other, that is intangible but alluring, much to the envy of Bohar the Bloody One, The Cid's lieutenant, a particularly ugly and emotional pirate. A freak storm wrecks the ship, leaving many aboard dead or facing an uncertain fate on the ship's scattered boats; when the storm passes the only living souls aboard the drifting hulk are Tanar and Stellara. Tanar learns Stellara is not really a Korsar, which he sort of expected because she was the only person among the pirates who wasn't acting like a total jerk. Stellara explains that she is the daughter of a woman of a stone age tribe resident on the island of Amiocap, the island of love. The Cid captured mom and took her as his mate--according to mom, Stellara was conceived just a few days before her mother was captured, so the Korsars think Stellara half-Korsar, but Stellara is confident she is 100% Amiocapian.

The derelict ship drifts to an island that turns out to be Amiocap. The stone age people there are skeptical of Starella's claim to be of their race, and similarly doubt Tanar's tale that he is from a kingdom and an empire they never heard of. While imprisoned and scheduled for execution, Stellara and Tanar begin to get an inkling that they are in love with each other, but they are too shy to open up about their feelings, dooming their love to travel a rocky road. The first actual expression of that love is Stellara's jealousy when a local girl who brings the prisoners food voices her great admiration for the handsome Tanar.

Mammoths attack the village and in the excitement Tanar and Stellara escape. Tanar, earlier in his career, was captured by a tribe of the monkey people we saw briefly in At the Earth's Core and they taught him how to travel in the jungle canopy and our hero uses this ability--which he teaches to Stellara--to flee the natives without leaving a trail. I have to admit I was a little disappointed to see Burroughs pulling a gag out of the Tarzan tool box so soon after giving us the trite pirate stuff and a guy named "The Cid."

They can't spend all their time aloft, and back on terra firma Tanar and Stellara are forced to contend with a Coripie, the bane of the humans of Amiocap, a sort of subterranean ghoul. Stellara pitches in during the fight; in fact, the Coripie would have killed and eaten them both if not for her participation in the struggle. Our heroes then meet a human mammoth hunter; he is fleeing an enraged mammoth, and Tanar helps him kill the beast. As we readers have been led to expect from earlier in-your-face foreshadowing, this man turns out to be Stellara's father, chief of a nearby village.

Tanar and Stellara take up residence in her father's village. Here Burroughs hits us with some social commentary. The people of Amiocap are very open about love; men and women have no compunctions about and face no social pressure against expressing their attraction to each other. Burroughs tells us that this is psychologically and sociologically healthy and that much of the unhappiness experienced in our own world here on the outer surface of the crust is the result of men and women failing to make manifest their love for members of the opposite sex. Of course, Tanar is not of this island, and while Stellara has the blood of these people, she was raised among the evil Korsars, so even in this free-love environment neither of our main characters directly reveals his or her love to the other, and this reluctance causes them a lot of trouble, with Stellara, for example, manipulating people to make an oblivious Tanar jealous.

Bohar the Bloody One survived the storm, and, while Tanar is away hunting, Bohar leads a Korsar attack on the village and carries off Stellara. When Tanar returns and hears this horrible news, he chases after the pirates. During a brief fight with the Korsars he falls in a hole and lands in the labyrinthine world of the Coripies, who capture him and add him to the local Coripie tribe's larder. Instead of tearing captives apart to be eaten at once, standard operating procedure among the Coripies, the chief of this tribe of the ghouls has decided to hoard enough captives to hold a big feast at which there will be enough fresh meat for every member of the tribe.

Most of the captives fated to be eaten alive at the upcoming feast are condemned criminals from this Coripie tribe or captives taken from other Coripie tribes, but with the arrival of Tanar two humans are now on the menu. The other human is a guy named Jude from the island of Hime. I wondered if this guy was going to be Burroughs' vehicle to comment on the Jewish people, and I am still not sure if this was Burroughs' intention. Jude is bitter, depressed, and full of hate for everybody; Tanar suspects this may be because he's been cooped up as a doomed prisoner for so long, and so this may not be a reflection of his original character or the character of his people, but soon enough he will learn the truth.

Jude being so disagreeable, Tanar becomes more friendly with one of the Coripies from a rival tribe of ghouls, Mow, than with his fellow human. Tanar learns from Mow all about the totally evil culture of the Coripies, who have no word for love in their language; I guess the ghouls are a foil for the free love humans of Amiocap. Subject to food shortages, the Coripies practice population control, executing any female who gives birth to a third child. As a result, male Coripies don't have sex with females they like, for fear of setting them up for execution, and instead rape females they don't like, and female Coripies do not love their own children.

Mow knows a secret way out of the cavern that is their prison, though team work is required to use it. Mow and Jude both hate all the other prisoners, but with his sunny disposition Tanar is able to weld the three of them into a team. Mow is killed during the escape, but after a long march through dim tunnels, during which Jude's extreme pessimism provides comic relief (this is one of the more entertaining sections of the novel), Tanar and Jude make it to the surface. Where, in one of the wild coincidences that are so common in Burroughs' work, they immediately stumble upon Bohar the Bloody One who is strangling Stellara because she has refused to have sex with him.

Tanar kills Bohar and he and Stellara finally give voice to their love for each other. But at the first opportunity Jude of Hime kidnaps Stellara, puts her in a canoe and heads for Hime. Tanar sets out after them but is delayed by having to fight an array of monsters, one after the other. Having defeated a sabre-toothed tiger, then crossed the water to Hime, then escaped a herd of bison, Tanar ingratiates himself with a native of Hime by killing a huge wolf that threatens him; this kid is the son of a chief, and he brings Tanar home.

The people of Hime turn out to be Burroughs' device for attacking the bonds of matrimony. (It is interesting to see Burroughs presenting this Ted Sturgeon type material as early as 1929--speculative fiction, even adventure-type fiction in which a guy gets captured and escapes every week or so and has to kill a monster every weekday and twice on Sundays, has always been questioning society and proposing alternatives.) The people of the island are all bitter and angry and the families constantly fight amongst themselves and against others, spouse against spouse, sibling against sibling, spouse against unfaithful spouse's adulterous lover, etc. Why? Because divorce and separation are forbidden on Hime, and when the members of a married couple no longer love each other they become so unhappy they not only cheat but get violent and their animosity poisons all relationships around them. I guess this is the complementary component of the free love philosophy Burroughs demonstrates on Amiocap--people should express their love freely, and then, if you are no longer in love with your lover, you should dump him or her tout suite instead of maintaining the loveless relationship.

Among these endlessly quarreling people Tanar encounters Gura, a young woman who isn't as full of hate and violence as the rest of the Himeans--she is half Amiocapian, her Himean father having kidnapped her mother. (All across Burroughs' body of work, heredity is very important in determining one's character and behavior.) Gura helps Tanar escape when her father plots to kill Tanar, he suspecting his wife is in love with Tanar. In fact it is Gura who is in love with Tanar.

Tanar and Gura, Jude and Stellara, and the eighteen Karsars who were previously under the command of Bohar the Bloody One all wind up in the same cave. Stellara, seeing the half-Himean/half-Amiocapian girl with Tanar, gets jealous and tells Tanar she hates him. The wily Jude escapes, but Stellara, Gura and Tanar all end up on a ship to Karsar--Tanar is separated from the women and doesn't see them aboard ship or when they arrive at the big city (population half a million) that is the capital of Karsar. We learn a little about the city, perhaps the largest and most technologically and economically advanced in Pellucidar; for example, the bearded and brilliantly attired people of Karsar lord it over a vast countryside of smooth-faced stone age slaves who grow the food the city dwellers eat. Societies in Burroughs' fiction that aren't absolutely stone-age seem often to have an economy based on slavery.

The last 60 or 70 pages of Tanar of Pellucidar, the parts after Tanar's arrival in the city of the Karsars, are more entertaining and interesting than almost all of what came before in the previous chapters. The monsters are more gross. The escape attempts are more tense. The satire and social commentary is gone, there is more gore, and more of a horror vibe, and the details all feel more unusual and more original. Did Burroughs draft this stuff at the end and the early chapters first and then pad out the novel's length by writing the repetitive middle?

Among the captives in the giant-rat-infested dungeon into which Tanar is thrown is David Innes, Emperor of Pellucidar. Innes and Tanar convince The Cid to treat them well and give them some freedom of movement so they can set up a manufacturing capability in Karsar for the production of decent gunpowder. (Karsar gunpowder fails to ignite like half the time.) They eventually manage to escape with Stellara and Gura after hatching a scheme that is sort of interesting, certainly more compelling than earlier escapes in the novel. They venture through and beyond the slave-inhabited countryside to cold regions few Pellucidarian have ever explored. Amazingly, their shadows lengthen, and off in the distance, beyond some kind of weird ocean, Innes sees what he believes to be Sol, the sun about which Earth orbits! This must be a passage between Pellucidar and the Arctic! The existence of this passage is among several clues that suggest that the Karsars are the descendants of 16th-century pirates who somehow made their way from the surface of the Earth down here to Pellucidar 400 or so years ago. (Remember how English crusaders got stuck in Africa in the medieval period and maintained their jousting culture all the way up to the 20th century in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle? I guess these pirate jokers similarly are still building sailing ships and making people walk the plank after four centuries.) This revelation, which I guess I should have predicted, makes the silly names and derivative behavior of the Karsars a little less annoying.

Having made this mind blowing discovery, the party turns back and starts the long march to Innes' empire, but they manage to get captured and imprisoned by Karsars yet again. Tanar and Innes are put in a different dungeon than last time, separately, in solitary confinement. In probably the best section of the novel, Tanar struggles to maintain his sanity in a tiny lightless cell where he is tormented by swarms of nonvenomous serpents. Of course he eventually figures out how to escape, but this is the most compelling escape attempt yet in a novel full of escape attempts. And of course the first people he runs into once he has escaped the dungeon are Stellara and the man who is about to beat her because she refuses to have sex with him, but the ensuing fight, in which Tanar kills this guy, is a pretty exciting fight. Tanar then cuts off this guy's beard to use in making disguises for himself and Stellara. The lovers bluff their way out of the city and a long chase follows, and then Tanar and Stellara make it back to Innes' empire. The novel ends inconclusively, however, with David Innes, apparently, still stuck in solitary under the Karsar city, and on a cliffhanger--in the "Conclusion," Burroughs' friend, Jason Gridley the radio inventor, declares he is going to do something to help Innes. What could this be? I'm curious to find out!

Well, stay tuned because ERB will be back on MPorcius Fiction Log soon, after some more recent short stories by divers hands.

Sunday, February 22, 2026

Weird Tales, January 1942: D Quick, M E Counselman and F Leiber

In December we completed a step in our journey to dark enlightenment when we achieved our goal of reading at least one story that appeared in each issue of D. McIlwraith's Weird Tales in the year 1941. Today we begin our eldritch slither through the year 1942 with the January issue of WT. This issue includes one of H. P. Lovecraft's best stories, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," and in the letters column we find August Derleth discussing the place of this story in the Cthulhu Mythos. I've read "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," multiple times, and blogged about it in 2018, so we won't be dealing with that masterpiece today. Instead, we'll read stories by Dorothy Quick, Mary Elizabeth Counselman and Fritz Leiber.

An interesting note. In Canada, a version of this issue of Weird Tales appeared with an Innsmouth-inspired cover and a May cover date.

"The White Lady" by Dorothy Quick

Like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The White Lady" is afforded an illustration by the great Hannes Bok. I have to admit I am not crazy about the way Bok depicts the ghost, however.

Our story begins with a long description of the looks and attire of two people, the handsome but cruel Abbot Telva and beautiful and elegant Mary Vetrell. The Abbot, resident in England but of Spanish blood, wants the English Mary to marry his nephew, Clement, but she is not interested; sure, the Abbot's family is prestigious, but so is Mary's, and Mary is not in love with Clement, but with heroic soldier Sir John de Winton. The Abbot is insistent, because he himself is in love with Mary, whom he has tutored since she was a little child, and if she marries into his family she'll always be nearby. Besides, a union of the Telva and Vetrell families will allow him to add some valuable real estate to the Abbey's. (Of course, we readers won't be placing any bets on the future prosperity of this Abbey, as we realize this story is taking place during the reign of Henry VIII.) Mary and her father refuse to agree to the marriage, so the Abbot storms off, promising to use his high position in the Catholic church to make life tough for Mary; for example, making it impossible for her to marry John de Winton.

John de Winton arrives and we get a long description of him. Quick's style is not very good.

He had a great chest and arms, with a figure to match, and was the type of man that women love.

Then arrives Mary's father, whom we are told looks like Santa Claus. Sir Charles Vetrell is on good turns with Cardinal Wolsey, the king's closest advisor, so Sir Charles writes a letter to Wolsely requesting relief from Telva's prohibition on any cleric marrying Mary and John. After John rides off with the letter, Sir Charles, a widower, and John's mother, a widow, reveal that they are in love and they plan to get married. Quick seems to be more interested in writing about jejune vanilla sexual relationships than about anything weird.

Halfway through the story it looks like the Abbot and Clement have gotten to the King before John got to Wolsey, so the King is on Team Telva and will make sure Clement and Mary wed. Mary says she'll commit suicide before marrying a Spaniard and then faints.

John, Wolsey, and Anne Boleyn concoct a scheme to get Mary out of marrying Clement. They convince King Henry that Sir Charles' manor house is haunted by a Lady in White. When the King and his court come by to attend the wedding of Clement and Mary the ghost--somebody in disguise--will appear and warn that the marriage should not take place, that Mary must marry for love.

There is a mix-up--Mary thinks she is to play the ghost and Anne Boleyn thinks she is to play the ghost, so there are two ghosts at the appointed hour and the whole thing is a shambles, both girls being seized by Henry's soldiers. But then a real ghost, Mary's mother, appears, and lays down the law. The king will compel the Church to marry Mary and John.

We have here a poorly-written and totally boring story. Quick makes a hash of the personality of the Abbot and we readers have no idea how we are supposed to feel about him--he is in the villain slot, but we keep hearing that Mary had a good relationship with him for years. Quick clumsily tries to exploit the reader's supposed interest in the court politics of Henry VIII and the English Reformation and supposed hostility to Spaniards and the Catholic Church, which feels like a cheap short cut, like she can't generate emotion in the reader on her own and so resorts to latching on to feelings she thinks you already have. Th descriptions are tedious and numb the mind instead of building atmosphere or painting images. As for the plot, "The White Lady" reads like a caricature of what men suspect fiction by women is like, a bunch of women using their social connections to get married.

Thumbs down!

"The White Lady" was reprinted in 2001 in an anthology by Forrest J. Ackerman and in the 2024 Quick collection The Witch's Mark and Others. I believe this is the fifth Quick story I have read--click the links to see how I rated "The Witch's Mark," "Turn Over," "Edge of the Cliff," and "The Lost Gods" and rest assured that I didn't dislike all of them.

"Parasite Mansion" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

"Parasite Mansion" is also adorned with a Hannes Bok illustration, but I am finding the composition of this one, and the faces and poses of the figures, below par for Bok. Too bad.

More bad news. "Parasite Mansion" is another long and tedious and poorly-written story. What is the world coming to?

Blue-eyed redhead Marcia Trent is a grad student in Psychology and a teacher at a girl's school in Carolina. When she hears that her fiancé is marrying her sister back home in Birmingham, Alabama, she hops in her car and sets out on a 400-mile trek, full of rage. She somehow ends up on a lonely road where she crashes the car because a sniper puts two rounds through her windshield. She hits her head and sprains her ankle and is carried into a decaying mansion by some weirdos, the Mason family. Counselman provides us, with sleep-inducing detail, descriptions of the Mason mansion and its occupants that stress how contradictory or paradoxical the milieu and its occupants are--the mansion is full of beautiful antiques, for example, but is also in a terrible state of repair. Our heroine is stuck in bed and a succession of mentally ill people shuttles in and out of Marcia's room for page after page after page.

We've got the sniper, Renny Mason, a murderous little boy who, having failed to slay Marcia with his rifle, tries to strangle her. Little Renny is trying to kill our redheaded academic because he fears she has come to take away his older sister. Renny's campaign of destruction is arrested by his adult brother, Victor Mason, a filthy drunk who is also a trained physician who wraps up Marcia's ankle and puts stiches in her noggin. (Victor is one of Counselman's paradoxes, a man of science who has become a slave to superstition, a handsome chap under a thick coat of booze and dirt.) We've also got a hideous old woman who married into this insane family long ago, Gran, whom we are told multiple times looks like a mummy. Gran thinks she is better than the others and is acquisitive, steals Marcia's money and jewelry. Finally we have teenaged girl Lollie Mason, Renny and Victor's sister, blonde and skinny and innocent; she thinks Marcia is a princess. Poltergeist-type phenomena attend Lollie, and she spontaneously suffers bloody wounds, as if an invisible demon has scratched her. Marcia, a scientist (you know, we all pretend psychology is a science, our of politeness), thinks Lollie's gruesome injuries are psychosomatic.

"Parasite Mansion" is like 17 pages long. Halfway through, Victor tells the history of the cursed Mason family. His great aunt and then his aunt were terrorized by an invisible monster, tormented until their deaths; Lollie is the third such victim. The first two victims of the monster were admitted to asylums but the doctors could do nothing for them, so Lollie and her family are determined to keep victim #3 from being similarly taken away, uselessly, to a depressing institution and so the Masons have shut themselves off from the world, leaving the family in poverty and Renny and Lollie with no education or social skills. Victor declares he cannot let Marcia leave, as she would attract the authorities and lookie-loos to the dilapidated estate and Lollie would end up in an asylum.

In the last third or quarter of the story, Marcia figures out what is going on and saves the day. Gran has the power of telekinesis and has been using it to terrorize the pretty Mason women whom she envies and resents because the Masons were not as wealthy a family she thought they were when she married into their family. As for the injuries, they really are psychosomatic, like stigmata. After she has been discovered, Gran tries to murder Marcia, fails, and has a heart attack and dies. We are led to expect that Victor, Lollie, and Renny will rejoin society and have normal lives--Victor will quit the booze and marry Marcia, he being a hunk once he is shaved and washed up.

Long, slow and repetitive, and irritating to read because of the clumsy style. I can't blame Counselman for the typos, but I can blame McIlwraith, and I can blame both of them for some of the lines that are so wacky as to take you right out of the story:

"It sounds like the supernatural, I know. But so did television, to people of Shakespeare’s time."

Thumbs down for "Parasite Mansion." Arkham House put out a Counselman collection, Half in Shadow, in 1978, and you can find "Parasite Mansion" in there. In 1987 Peter Haining included this clunker in his anthology Poltergeist: Tales of Deadly Ghosts.

For some reason I have read a stack of Counselman stories--behold the links: "The Unwanted," "The Black Stone Statue," "Twister," "The Girl with the Green Eyes," "The Cat-Woman," "Mommy," "The Web of Silence" and "Drifting Atoms." As with the list of Quick, stories, I actually didn't condemn all of these.

"The Phantom Slayer" by Fritz Leiber

After those two long boring pieces it is a relief to read a well-written story with some human feeling and some strong images. "The Phantom Slayer"'s content is just OK, but thanks to superior technique the story is miles ahead of Quick's and Counselman's.

Our narrator is sort of a loser who is going through some tough times. An uncle he never met dies, and he inherits unc's meagre estate; unc was a retired police lieutenant and paid his rent in advance, so our narrator gets to live in unc's apartment in the big city and eat unc's stockpiled canned food. Leiber does a good job describing the narrator's loneliness and what it is like to move into a little apartment in the big city. This material is right up my alley; I am fascinated by city life and small apartments, the sounds and the smells, the light and shadows and all that.

The plot concerns the narrator going through his uncle's things, in particular newspaper clippings about a series of murders by what we today would call a serial killer, and horrible dreams the narrator has after moving in to unc's flat. Or are they dreams? Is the narrator's uncle trying to communicate with his nephew from the grave? Trying to take over the narrator's body? Is the uncle trying to solve the case of the Phantom Slayer, or is he himself the Phantom Slayer? Is the narrator going to become a murderer himself or save the day and solve the crime?

It is not rare for a character in weird fiction to learn something dreadful about his own ancestry and/or identity, to have dreams that may in fact be memories of things he is doing while he thinks he is asleep, and to fear someone else is taking over his body. But Leiber handles this conventional material pretty skillfully. I can moderately recommend "The Phantom Slayer."

Sometimes under the title "The Inheritance," "The Phantom Slayer" has been reprinted many times, in various Leiber collections and in several anthologies.

**********

Not a great start of the 1942 leg of our long march through the history of Weird Tales, but when walking the weird road, you gotta take the rough with the smooth. And Fritz's contribution is good. As for this issue of the magazine, of course "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," Bok's illo for that story and Derleth's commentary on it make it worthwhile for the student of the weird.

We'll continue our explorations of 1942 weird stories soon, but first a novel from the late 1920s.

Thursday, February 19, 2026

Merril-approved 1958 stories by J Williams, R Wilson, J Wyndham and R F Young

The day we all doubted would come has finally arrived. The day we finish our tour of 1958's speculative fiction and bid farewell to our guide, critical darling (though one of our favorite critics, Barry Malzberg, has had some choice things to say about her) Judith Merril. For what seems like forever, I have been reading and blogging about selected stories from the alphabetical honorable mentions list in the back of Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy, 4th Annual Volume. And today the light at the end of the tunnel is visible up ahead as we arrive at the last letters of the alphabet, "W" and "Y" (Merril didn't encounter any stories by "X" or "Z" authors she felt worth recommending.) Today's blog post will be the final of this long term project.

(Find at the bottom of this post a long list of links to the previous posts in this series.)

Merril includes on her list five "W" stories and one "Y" story, and five of these pieces of fiction are easily accessible to us cheapos. Sadly, Merril's first "W" story, "Piggy" by Paul Wallach, appeared in an issue of Swank that I can't find any scans of. As for her second "W," that is James White's "Tableau," which we read in 2020. it is the remaining three "W" tales and the "Y" piece we'll be reading today in scans of the publications in which they debuted. Let's hope this project will be ending on a high note with four great stories!

"The Hunter and the Cross" by Jeanne Williams

Jeanne Williams seems to have penned many historical novels about the American West, as well as a few fantastical sex or romance novels. There are four short fiction credits at Williams' page on isfdb; this one is the third. "The Hunter and the Cross" debuted in Fantastic, in an issue with some weaker than usual Virgil Finlay illustrations and an ad on the back cover for the Science-Fiction Book Club that highlights John Christopher's No Blade of Grass ("The book that SHOCKED the editors of The Saturday Evening Post"), which I read back in 2015.

"The Hunter and the Cross" is a story about Catholic mysticism, with lots of blood and some fetishistic sex undertones, set in a village in New Mexico. The first paragraph sets the scene and offers some foreshadowing thusly:

It was the trail of the Penitentes, where they marched in the night wind, leaving a track of blood in the snow. There on the mountain at Easter they crucified one of their number, enacting the passion of Christ.

Soledad is a gorgeous girl who got married to some old geezer who can't get it up. One day she is out in the woods getting water, and Gil, from the village on the other side of the mountain, comes by. A great hunter, he is carrying the corpse of a mountain lion, his kill dripping blood on him. Gil has banged the hot wives of many of the men back in his village, including those of "the jefe" and "the colonel," but when he sees Soledad he thinks this is the hottest chick he has ever seen! He aches to possess her, but something keeps him from taking her by force and then carrying her off to his village. Is it the cross that hangs between her breasts? Is his love for her turning him into a believing Christian?

Gil takes lodgings in Soledad's village, gives the mountain lion's pelt to Soledad as a gift, starts attending church, even joins the Penitentes, who slash and flagellate his back, drawing blood, a process that deepens Gil's understanding of the sacrifices endured by Christ, a process Williams describes with gusto.

His back was a raw mass. In his belly was acrid sickness. But now he was one of the Brothers of Blood.

When Gil, feverish, makes a lonely pilgrimage up the mountain, a peon, I guess the Devil in disguise, tempts him with peyote, an episode I expect is to remind us how Satan tempted Jesus during those 40 days in the wilderness. Gil resists, but only for so long--after he succumbs, he, apparently, transforms into a monstrous mountain lion that terrorizes Soledad's village, devastating the crops and slaying multiple farmers. The jealous women of the village blame beautiful Soledad for the murderous attacks, accusing her of being a who transforms into the lion. It doesn't help that they catch her caressing the lion's pelt Gil gave her. Gil realizes Soledad loves him as much as he loves her!

In an effort to save Soledad, Gil promises the villagers he will kill the monster cat after he's finished participating in the current ecstatic Penitente ritual, in which his fellow Penitentes have assigned him the role of Christ. When they tie him up to the cross, Gil feels himself transforming into the monster lion again! In front of everybody! Soledad comes to him, her love redeeming him and turning him into a human again before he dies--this miraculous event proves to those watching that Soledad is not a witch.

A wild and crazy story that treats Christianity with deadly seriousness, condemns drug use, and also has the elements you expect to see in women's erotica/romance ("the hunkiest of hunks who has cuckolded all the elite men of his town comes to my town and can't resist my looks and I convince him to go monogamous for me.") The style is a little weak and the plot construction is a little clunky, but not terrible. We'll call it acceptable.

I can't find any evidence that "The Hunter and the Cross" was ever reprinted, and it is a little curious that Judith Merril, whom I think of as a Jewish Marxist, would recommend this ecstatic Christian story, but maybe she liked that it was written by a woman and included a woman falsely accused of witchcraft who, in the end, resolves the plot with her bravery? And maybe Merril, who was always trying to convince people that genre boundaries were a scam, thought the story a prime example of how broadly SF could be defined, how science fiction/fantasy devices like a guy transforming into a monster could be used for almost any purpose, to push almost any agenda.

"Man Working" by Richard Wilson

It seems this story, which debuted not in a magazine but in the fourth of Fred Pohl's Star anthologies, has never been reprinted in English, though it would show up in a 1970s German version of the Star series entitled Titan and in a 1984 French anthology. I believe this will be the fifth story by Wilson I have read. Back in 2016 I denounced his apparently well-regarded tale "The Story Writer." I liked "The Big Fix" and "Lonely Road" much better when I read them in 2024. But in January I read Wilson's "Course of Empire" and thought it terrible. So I guess anything can happen today with "Man Working."

As it turns out, "Man Working" is a trifling joke story, though it has some good SF concepts. You might argue that it is an anti-racist or pro-diversity story, and/or that it pokes fun at the banal stock phrases used by liberals who preach tolerance. The jokes and plot are not bad, they just don't amount to much. We're calling it acceptable.

It is the near future. A skyscraper 528 stories high has been built in Chicago. Unfortunately, a global depression hit soon after the mile-high tower was completed, so today only the lowest ten stories are occupied--floors 11 through to the observation deck are abandoned...or so they want us to believe!

In fact, the top-most stories are occupied by extraterrestrials of various species resident here on Earth in secret. These long-term visitors are not alien government spies or the recon squad of an invasion force or anything like that--most of them are somehow involved in show biz. There's an alien who can pass for human who uses his psychic powers to perform magic on Earth stages--it is rumored he has kidnapped a human woman, an Earth magician's assistant whom he made disappear but has not reappeared, for sexual purposes. There is a blob alien who, a handsome leading man on his planet, takes monster parts here in Earth films. Another alien is doing research on Earth for a book he is writing. One alien is trying to sell an English translation of an alien novel. And so on.

Almost no humans know about these aliens; our narrator, a down on his luck show biz guy with experience as a publicity man, is himself in the dark. If he doesn't make some money soon he'll be thrown out of his residence hotel--he is so low on funds he hasn't had his shoes shined in two days. (Some of the details in the story remind you it was penned in the 1950s.) He can make a few bucks if he can find a mind-reading act for a TV show airing tonight. He spots an old friend, an old crony from happier days, and asks for help. This second guy knows all about the secret a mile above Chicago's mean streets. He takes our narrator up to the top of the 528-story building via its ultra hi-tech secret entrance to try to find a mind-reading act. Some of the humor of the story lies in the amazement of the narrator that these aliens are on Earth, some in how his friend impresses upon him that the aliens are just folks with souls like you and me, so don't call them "aliens" because that is "Earth-supremacy talk," and besides they are better than humans.

There are lots of mind-reading ETs in the building, but none are really suitable for the TV spot, but our narrator makes the money he needs by taking a role as a monster in an alien movie--the aliens think us humans are as hideous and scary as we humans think blob people are.

Acceptable filler. Maybe the "immigrants are just as good or better than we are and none of them are going to try to change our culture, abolish dog-owning or pork-eating or anything like that" angle attracted Merril's admiration.

"Idiot's Delight" by John Wyndham

This is one of Wyndham's Troon stories. We read another, 1960's "The Emptiness of Space" AKA "The Asteroids: 2194" way back in 2015. Damn, I've been running this blog a long time. "Idiot's Delight" has been reprinted many times since its debut in New Worlds, often under the title "The Moon A.D. 2044" or just "The Moon," including in Fantastic, a Troon collection titled The Outward Urge, and several anthologies. I'm reading the New Worlds version, which is like 35 pages long.

John Carnell, editor of New Worlds, spoils the theme of the story in his little intro, which alerts you to the fact that "Idiot's Delight" is a sad British wish fulfillment fantasy--the British become the leaders of the post-World War II effort to colonize space--and a lame bit of bolshie apologia that suggests doing anything to deter or defeat a Soviet attack is a waste of resources. Ugh.

The first part of Wyndham's story establishes that fifty-year-old Michael Troon, commander of the British moon base, is a giant among men, that Britain's moon base would never have been established if not for his heroic efforts. But, boo hoo, today his subordinates don't appreciate him! They may even mutiny! Well, at least one of his crew is still on his side--a beautiful thirty-year-old woman doctor. They have a philosophical discussion on how good things can cause or be the result of bad things (the Roman Empire was brutal but laid the foundation for European civilization, cars and airplanes kill people but are extremely useful, etc.) and then we get the expository dialogue that sets the scene.

Ten days ago, war between the Soviet Union and the West erupted. As is usual in SF stories, nobody knows if it was the liberal capitalists or the totalitarian communists who started the war--many members of the SF community sympathize with the USSR and its goals, so SF stories are very reluctant to say anything critical of the USSR, at least not without also saying something bad about the United States. The American and Soviet moon bases launched many missiles, fully participating in the war, and, apparently, have been destroyed, but Troon (apparently) has held back, launching only a small notional number of medium-sized missiles, presumably to preserve the British moon base because he doesn't care about anything more than he cares about the quest for the stars. His men are unhappy because they came to the moon to deter the Soviet Union and, if necessary, to defend Great Britain with the many heavy atomic warheads they think the base is equipped with, and under Troon's leadership the base has failed to fulfill its raison d'etre, not done all it could to protect their homes and families. Troon's defense is that he hasn't received orders from Earth to launch the full complement of missiles, but his gung ho subordinates don't believe him or think he should launch them anyway on his own initiative. (The example of Nelson as Copenhagen is invoked.)

Troon takes a walk in his space suit on the lunar surface and reminisces, and Wyndham provides us a flashback to Troon's life and career. As a nepo-baby, son of a hero, Troon had the public prestige to convince the British government and public that a British moon base was a good idea, and Wyndham describes the various PR and psychological strategies Troon employed to get the British moon base constructed and some of the technical aspects of the base.

Halfway through the story Troon returns to the base interior and we get more conversation with that female doctor that reveals how Troon has temporarily defused the tension between him and his subordinates. We also get a brief feminist sideline, exposition on why women are on the base--to raise morale--which includes the assertion that women are more adaptable than men.

In the second half of the story a handful of Soviet troops, including the Soviet moon base commander, come to the British base claiming to be the only Soviet survivors on Luna. The Soviet officer describes in detail how his base destroyed the American base but then American robots destroyed his base--Wyndham goes to great lengths in this quite long section of the story to make the communists sympathetic and the Americans appear alien and sinister, to make you hope the Soviet soldiers, who have killed all the Americans on the moon, survive the US retaliatory strike. Wyndham goes even further--the wily Reds are smarter than the Americans and Troon's British subordinates--the commies are fully aware that the British moon base never had a full arsenal of heavy missiles, just that notional number of medium missiles that have already been expended! That is our twist ending--the British moon base was toothless all the time, a sham!

We readers are then encouraged to look forward to a future in which British tricksters and communist murderers join forces to explore the stars.

Obviously I think a story which paints the monstrous gangsters who ran the Soviet Union and their thugs as more sympathetic than the elected leadership of the United States and members of America's armed services is disgusting. But let's try to put that aside and judge whether this is a good or bad story based on whether it achieves the author's goals and whether it is entertaining or interesting to the reader.

All the technical stuff about building a moon base and the operation of war robots and so on is good. The action scenes in which the heroic Soviets face the evil American robots are good on a literary and entertainment level even though their purpose is morally reprehensible, and Troon's walk on the surface of the moon is not bad.

So much for the good parts. Now the problems. Most of the story is a series of conversations, which is kind of boring. Then there is the attractive doctor. We hear all about how elegant she is and her nice hair and pretty eyes blah blah blah but then she vanishes from the narrative half way through, playing little role in the plot. She was just there so Troon would have somebody to talk to, and when the Soviet commander appears she offers no more use to the author so he discards her. Another problem: we are kept in suspense by the question of the unfired missiles, the mystery as to why Troon hasn't launched the missiles and why HQ back on Earth hasn't ordered the launch of the missiles, only to find that there are no missiles, that Troon isn't making an heroic or foolish decision--he isn't making a decision at all because there is no decision to make. This is deflating. Finally, it is a little depressing and annoying that the whole story is an endorsement of elites deceiving the public and those who look to them for leadership. This is typical SF stuff, but it never sits well with me, as people who have followed my blog are well aware.

I am giving "Idiot's Delight" a thumbs down, but I can see why, with its celebration of elite manipulation, pro-Soviet and anti-American content, and two lines of tacked-on feminism, that leftists like Merril would like it.

(If you want to hear me attack more of Wyndham's work check out my blog post about Re-Birth AKA The Chrysalids.)

"Lucas Parkes" is a pseudonym of Wyndham's

"Magic Window" by Robert F. Young

There is a typo in the vary last line of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy, 4th Annual Volume--"Magic Window" is cited as having appeared in Fantastic Universe when it in fact debuted in the same issue of Fantastic as Williams' "The Hunter and the Cross," which we read earlier today. "Magic Window" reappeared in a 1968 reprint magazine, in a 1977 Japanese Young collection, and in a 2011 American Young collection.

This story is pretty lame, like a saccharine thing from a mainstream magazine or a particularly sappy episode of The Twilight Zone. I guess Merril liked it for its valorizing of the creative artist and its contempt for the boring ordinary people who actually do the real work that keeps society functioning. This is today's reminder that if you work an ordinary job in an office or factory or something like that, the people who write the books you read and perform the music you listen to and make the shows you watch think you are a little Eichmann.

A salesman living in a big city one day stumbles upon a sidewalk sale of art--a pretty girl has only one painting for sale but nobody stops to consider buying it. The painting catches the salesman's eye, and he talks to the girl briefly. All day he thinks about the painting, which sounds (to me) like a totally boring piece of junk a kid would produce, but which I guess Young wants us to think is magical--a landscape with sparkling lakes and a night sky full of stars of many colors. Good grief. Our guy can't stop thinking about this painting and it distracts him while he's trying to make sales and when he has lunch with his fiancé. Young makes clear that the fiancé is a square and that ahead of the salesman lies a square life in the suburbs with a house and kids.

Instead of keeping his dinner date with his fiancé, the salesman returns to the side walk sale to find only one artist remains, you know who, and she has not sold her painting. He buys it and takes the artist to dinner and they talk about Keats and Wordsworth blah blah blah. He takes her home and she shows him the window--she calls it her "Magic Casement"--through which she looks to see the visions she paints; he just sees the bricks of the building across the alley. She pleads with him, saying she can help him see the magic in the world, begs him to not become just another cog in the machine, another person who watches TV, but he leaves.

Some weeks later the salesman sees the girl on the street, looking unhealthy. Later he goes to her apartment but the landlord tells him the girl has left. It is May 1st, which I guess is significant; maybe another reference to Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," maybe a reference to the start of summer or International Workers' Day or something. Back home the salesman unrolls the painting and finds it is now a painting of bricks, not of a fairy tale landscape. The salesman is a sensitive person who had the opportunity to become a beatnik or hippy or whatever, but he has thrown that chance away to join the masses, working a 9 to 5 and watching TV with a suburban wife and suburban kids in a suburban house.

In general I have sympathy for the theme of middle-class men who regret settling down to a boring wife and a boring job instead of leading a life of risk or creativity or adventure or something. I love The Kinks' Soap Opera, for example. But Young's story here is sterile and lifeless, like something anodyne for a kid with no edge, no challenge, no excitement or personality, obvious banal filler. Thumbs down!

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I feel like our journey through 1958's SF is ending with a bang. I didn't think any of today's stories was actually good, much less great, but they run the gamut of topics that might appeal to the woman who became the cheerleader of the New Wave and they are provocative and are certainly inspiring a big reaction in me. Jeanne Williams' story is odd, a combination of ecstatic Catholicism and a womens' romance novel, something that is surprising to see in a SF magazine and on Merril's honorable mentions list. Richard Wilson's entry on Merril's list is a mere joke story but it has some interesting SF elements and is pretty economical. Today's John Wyndham story has politics that I find quite aggravating, but the story is ambitious and covers a traditional SF theme in a traditional SF format (a future history of the quest to conquer the stars) and its big action scene and the technical scientific stuff is well-handled. Robert F. Young's story is the blandest bit of filler, but certainly representative of the outlook of many people in the SF community.

Well, this has been an interesting project, and I will probably embark on a similar expedition in the near future. For now, find below a link to each of the previous entries in our exploration of Judith Merril's honorable mentions of 1958 SF stories.