P. G. Wodehouse: "The Man Upstairs," "Something to Worry About" and "Deep Waters"

In our last episode I enjoyed a story from the 1914 P. G. Wodehouse collection The Man Upstairs and Other Stories, so today let's read the first three stories from the book as a little break from our usual weird and science fiction fare.  I'm reading a scan of a Penguin 1958 edition you can read here, and if that link gives you trouble you can try the scan of the 1980 Barrie and Jenkins edition here or another of many other free sources of these stories available online.  All three of today's stories debuted in The Strand and were published the same year in American magazines; according to the Madame Eulalie website, "The Man Upstairs" and "Deeper Waters" were revised for American publication.  Besides in The Man Upstairs and Other Stories, "Something to Worry About" and "Deep Waters" were reprinted in The Swoop! and Other Stories.  

"The Man Upstairs" (1910)

This is a sort of undistinguished sappy story that lacks much of the humor of Wodehouse's more famous work.  We're calling this one acceptable.  

Three young creative types live in an apartment building in Chelsea.  One is a woman who is banging away at her piano trying to write waltzes.  She gets the waltzes published but they don't really sell--she even has to finance their publication herself.  We've also got two painters in the building, one who is kind of a self-important jerk, blaming the public's lack of taste if his paintings don't sell, and if something does sell, bragging about it acting better than the second painter, who seems like a real hack.  The hack is a real softy, a mild-mannered nice guy with a good attitude; the jerk painter is always explaining that this character's paintings suck, but the softy just takes it in stride, doesn't mind at all.  Maybe because he is independently wealthy and so his lifestyle or his self-worth are not tied up in making sales?

The girl composer has a temper and is always getting pissed off at the jerk painter and is often exasperated by the lame brain students she has to try to teach in order to make money.  She is initially angry at the softy because he lives directly above her and bangs the floor when she bashes away at her piano, but he quickly charms her with his good looks and good nature and stops his stomping.

The composer and the sunny-dispositioned hack painter spend time together, she visiting him to unburden herself of her problems.  The jerk painter's paintings begin to sell, and the composer's sheet music begins to sell.  The composer feels bad that the man upstairs isn't enjoying similar success, so she anonymously purchases one of his paintings.  Then another beneficiary of the hack painter's generosity accidentally lets spill the truth we readers may have suspected: the hack painter is using his terrific wealth to buy both of his friends' unsalable work and one of his properties is choked full of stacks of sheet music and boring paintings.  At first the composer is humiliated and angry, but how can she be?--she was doing the same thing on the modest scale she could afford.  Plus, the man upstairs explains that he saw her on the street and she was so good-looking he followed her and plotted how to move into her building and meet her, so the two of them decide to get married.

This story is less light-hearted than much of Wodehouse's more famous work, I think because the jerk painter and the woman with a temper are all too realistic--his smug unearned superiority and her anger feel too real for you to blithely forgive them their faults, and Wodehouse doesn't really play their anti-social behavior for laughs, so their personalities sort of weighs down the story.  As for the rich guy, he gets treated like a punching bag, which is a little disturbing, and then the way he uses his wealth to manipulate everybody else, even if it is for their own good, is also a little disturbing.  There are also far fewer jokes in "The Man Upstairs" than we are accustomed to seeing in Wodehouse stories.

Not one of Wodehouse's better stories, but not actually bad.  "The Man Upstairs" was first printed in America in Cosmopolitan, in an issue whose cover feature was on French painter Francois Flameng.  For Yankee readers, the story's setting is shifted to Washington Square.

"Something to Worry About" (1913)

"Something to Worry About" first appeared in the land of the free and the home of the brave in Metropolitan, the livest magazine in America, or so it says.  As I write this, you can read this magazine at this link, and if you do, you may be taken aback by how beautiful or fascinating each page of the magazine is; everything, from the typefaces to the illustrations to the photographs, looks great, warm or welcoming or soothing or impressive, nothing is boring or disquieting.  The people of the past, at least those who left any evidence of their passing through this vale of tears, were a bunch of tryhards, and from our vantage point we can only marvel at their works, even the quotidian ones.

"Something to Worry About" has much more of the charm and liveliness ("livestness?") we readers of Wodehouse's later work expect from the man than does "The Man Upstairs."  The fun characters whose faults don't stop us from liking them and the silly slang and the endless stream of clever turns of phrase and little jokes are all here.  Wodehouse even unleashes the word "zareba" on us in the course of a little bit of literary criticism.  Kaboom!  Thumbs up!

London girl Sally loves the cinema!  Her father, now a landlord who preaches on Sunday but who made his fortune as a servant at a big house in the country, thinks the cinema is a tool of the devil!  So Dad sends Sally to the village where he grew up and worked, a place Sally considers "the beastliest hole in existence" and "absolutely chronic," to live with his sister's family.  Life in this village is simple and peaceful...at least until Sally got there!  Sally is so beautiful that all the local yokels who fall into the "young male" demographic fall stupidly in love with her and in their simple country way try to court her and obstruct each other's pursuit of this big city beauty.  Sally accepts the proposal of a simple-minded gardener, Tom, who works at the same big house her father worked at and wooed her by giving her many cabbages and potatoes.  But when he won't do something underhanded that she, in a fit of pique, demands he do, she makes him jealous by admitting she is also engaged to another villager!  And another, and another!  Sally accepted four men's proposals in hopes word of her wild behavior would reach her father and he would summon her back to London!  Tom grows up, becomes a real man, winning Sally's love by proving his own commitment to her by challenging his rivals one after the other to hand-to-hand combat!  Fortunately, Tom's physical strength is augmented by his opponents' diminution of interest in Sally when they realize how duplicitous and troublesome a female she really is, though we are given reason to believe that Sally herself is going to grow up and stop being so selfish and flighty and manipulative once she is married to Tom.

A laugh-out-loud look at the rural-urban divide and the terrible reality of sexual relationships.  Every line of this story is good.  Recommended--five out of five cabbages!

"Deep Waters" (1910)

"Deep Waters" was published in Collier's in the United States and, apparently, that text is quite different than that to be found in the British Strand.  The Collier's text (find it here) and the The Man Upstairs and Other Stories text both include "zareba," though.  I guess people in both Britain and America all knew what a zareba was in that period of imperial adventure, the way everybody today knows what "PrEP" and "HRT" are.  

George is an expert swimmer.  He's also a young playwright, riven with anxiety because he has been watching the actors at rehearsals of his first big play and he thinks they stink!  George and the entire cast and crew of the drama are at a seaside town.  On the end of a pier, George seeks distraction from his worries, and finds it--swimming below is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen!  So distracting is she, so captivating, that leaning over the rail to get a good look he falls in the ocean!

The woman of his dreams is an excellent swimmer herself and seizes George and pulls him to shore--he pretends to be unable to swim, and she promises to spend a few days teaching him!  An ideal situation in which he can not only enjoy intimate proximity to this goddess, whose name is Mary, but even get to know her and pursue a campaign to win her hand in marriage!

George isn't the only person worried about the success of his play.  One of the actors fears the show is not getting the proper advertising, the proper publicity.  Against George's strenuous objections, this actor launches a desperate scheme, overturning a boat he and George are aboard so one can rescue the other and win a lot of publicity.  When Mary hears about the rescue she realizes it is a hoax, that George is a good swimmer, and she accuses George of using her the day before as an unwitting participant in a similar publicity stunt and gives him the cold shoulder.  But then the actor whose idea the boat-capsizing stunt was tells Mary the truth, and Mary and George make up and we are led to believe they will get married and told the play is in fact a huge success, the actors having gotten into the required groove.

"Deep Waters" is good on a line by line basis, but it feels short, truncated, with little by way of climax and a resolution that is abrupt.  I can only mildly recommend it.

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Three stories in which a guy falls in love with a woman because of her looks and, through subterfuge or violence, wins her, even if her personality maybe leaves something to be desired--presumably she will start behaving once in the bonds of holy matrimony.  The 1913 story is a direct hit, while the two 1910 stories have real problems--maybe Wodehouse just hadn't hit his stride yet.  Of course I recommend looking into these old stories and checking out the ancient magazines in which they debuted and which are full of fun advertisements and charming illustrations.   

Dream World, Feb '57: M Lesser, P G Wodehouse, & H Ellison

Advertising works!  We just took a look at the May 1957 issue of Amazing, and saw within it an ad for Dream World, another magazine edited by Paul W. Fairman.  Dream World endured for three issues, all appearing in 1957, and the value proposition of the magazine, though promoted as "A New Kind of Fiction...Stories of Incredible Powers," seems to have been that it carries stories about sex.  I guess this was in the wheelhouse of Fairman, author of several volumes of The Man from S.T.U.D. series, including 1968's The Orgy at Madame Dracula's and 1969's Rape is a No-No. These S.T.U.D. books appeared under a pen name, and it seems lots of Fairman's work appeared under false names or other people's names; we read his novel Whom the Gods Would Slay, credited to Ivar Jorgensen, way back in 2018, and according to isfdb, Fairman ghostwrote juveniles for Lester del Rey (del Rey provided extensive plot outlines), among them The Runaway Robot, a book I see all the time in antique stores and used book stores.

Let's look at the first issue of Dream World, and read some of the included stories, one by Milton Lesser (under his pen name Adam Chase), one by P. G. Wodehouse (wow!), and one by Harlan Ellison.  Thorne Smith, a famous guy I have never read, Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett also make contributions (Smith's an excerpt from a 1930s novel) to this new venture, but we'll be skipping those today.  I'm also skipping the Milton Lesser story that appears under the Darius John Granger pseudonym because it is twelve pages long and is apparently about football and ain't nobody got time for dat. 

"Legs on Olympus" by Milton Lesser (as by Adam Chase)

Like 66% of today's stories, "Legs on Olympus" has apparently never appeared in any form in any other venue.  This is a jocular retelling of the famous Judgement of Paris which you no doubt know all about from your readings in classical literature and study of art history.  Hollywood columnist Abner Paris is in Atlantic City in the greatest state in the union to judge a beauty contest.  A naked girl appears in his room at the Troy Hotel and asks him to judge a "celestial" beauty contest.  Lesser engages in lame puns and jokes of that nature; this woman doesn't know about air conditioning, for example, and doesn't know that "gag" is a synonym for "joke" or "gimmick," even though she uses other corny colloquial English like "The heck you say!" and "drat the luck."  Anyway, Abner thinks it's all a gag and agrees to judge the contest as a way of calling the girl's bluff and getting rid of her, but after he agrees she jumps on his lap and they (it is strongly implied) have sex.

When Abner wakes up he and the girl, who reveals herself to be Eris, the Goddess of Discord, are on a sheep-infested hillside and he is wearing a wool cloak.  Eris takes him to where he is to judge which is the fairest, Hera, Athena or Aphrodite.  The three goddesses, all haughty and self-important, show off their looks to Abner and offer him extravagant bribes, but in the end he gives the golden apple marked "FOR THE FAIREST" to Eris, with whom he has fallen in love.  This story has a pretty wholesome ending, a guy bangs one chick and then immediately gets engaged to her.

"Legs on Olympus" is a bland and mediocre filler piece, but never actually boring or irritating, so we're judging it barely acceptable.  I was actually curious what Lesser was going to do with the material as I read it, so reading it was no chore.

"Ways to Get a Gal" by P. G. Wodehouse

The cover of Dream World Vol. 1 No. 1 advertises "Ways to Get a Gal" as a "Brand New Story" by the world famous and universally beloved Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, but an elaborate and extensive website about Wodehouse's early work suggests "Ways to Get a Gal" is a version of "Ahead of Schedule," a story that appeared in 1910 in the British magazine Grand and was revised for publication in this republic of ours in 1911 in Colliers.  I decided to read the Dream World story and then read a version of the story found in a 1980 printing of the oft-reprinted 1914 Wodehouse collection The Man Upstairs and Other Stories and see what differences there might be.

As the world knows, Wodehouse writes in a charming and fun style, filling his texts with amusing phrases and little jokes based on the shortcomings of his characters, jokes which are lighthearted and affectionate rather than cruel or superior, and he goes in for fun silly little plots with happy endings; somehow, Woodhouse writes stories in which everything works out for everybody but at the same time acknowledges the reality that life is characterized by failure and the world is awash in evil, so that his stories don't bring you down but also don't come across as squeaky clean or saccharine lies.  The man is some kind of hero and genius.  He does all this characteristic stuff here in "Ways to Get a Gal," so of course I enjoyed it and am giving it a thumbs up.

The plot:  An Englishman with a title but little sense is in love with a blue-eyed blonde woman who works in a department store and has set out to marry her, following a scientific plan of campaign devised by himself.  Being totally incompetent, this guy's income consists of an allowance from a fat uncle who owns a very lucrative chain of restaurants over in the land of plenty, the U S of A.  Said allowance is sufficient to keep his Jaguar running and his valet on staff.  Trouble appears when fat uncle comes to visit Blighty and fat uncle falls in love with the very same blue-eyed blonde woman at the glove counter at the department store and embarks on his own campaign to make her his wife.  If our hero marries this chick, uncle may well stop sending the allowance.  If old fat uncle marries the chick, our hero will probably no longer be in line to get his full inheritance when old fat uncle dies, this woman being young and healthy.

The resolution of the plot comes when the blonde falls in love with our hero's valet--she seems to think the flowers the valet has been personally delivering for some days are from the valet himself, not some goofy lord.  Also, she is apparently more susceptible to the naive wooing methods the valet learned in his rural village than to the latest scientific methods current in London.  Our hero's finances are safe, and Wodehouse makes it clear that both he and his obese uncle (215 pounds!) are shallow twits who are falling in and out of love all the time and will forget the blonde woman in days if not hours, so no hard feelings.

OK, now the version of the story from The Man Upstairs and Other Stories, entitled "Ahead of Schedule."  (The hero's scientific method of pursuing women operates on a careful schedule.)  This version feels longer, and has longer sentences, with more details and more jokes, but the jokes are good so we don't mind.  The protagonist has a different name, and the obese uncle (sixteen stone five!) does not own restaurants, but a company that makes braces (I call them "suspenders") and is an American himself, a native of "Pittsburg," as the town was apparently commonly styled in 1910.  (Pittsburgh comes in for some ribbing in "Ahead of Schedule.")  The characters in this version of the tale all have more personality, more complex back stories.  The woman in question is a chorus girl, not a department store employee, for example, and she actually has some dialogue.  This version of the story also has more learned references, like a military history joke ("He hated to abandon the schedule. To do so meant changing a well-ordered advance into a forlorn hope") and more big or rare words ("The advent of an unbidden guest rarely fails to produce a certain gêne.") 

The plot is also a little more complex, with the hero accelerating the schedule of his scientific method in hopes of beating out his uncle in winning the hand of the fair maiden, and the chorus girl and the valet hooking up because they knew each other back in their village, were engaged but broke up and upon meeting again realized they had made a mistake.  

The '57 version of the story is more streamlined, but the additional, perhaps superfluous, material, in the 1910 version is actually entertaining, so I prefer the earlier version.

A fun little experiment, reading both versions of this story, both of which again and again brought a smile to my face.  The Dream World story "Ways to Get a Gal" would be reprinted in the 1990s in First Impressions, Mature Reflections, the fifth volume of Plum Stones, a small press series that reprinted rare Wodehouse stories that had previously been uncollected.

Left: 1958     Right: 1980

"A Bucketful of Diamonds" by Harlan Ellison 

Here we have a Harlan Ellison story that has never been reprinted.  Harlan completists, perk up!  

Davey the second-story man is in jail.  A djinni (Ellison insists on calling it an "Estrian" after telling us it looks just like a djinni) appears and offers Davey a deal.  The djinni can't touch anything in our universe, being from a "another time-line" and thus "immaterial," so he wants Davey to steal something for him at some unspecified future time.  In exchange, he will give Davey the ability to walk up vertical walls and use his djinni powers to make any possible witness look the other way while Davey is committing crimes.  Davey agrees--my twitter feed is full of stories of people getting arrested dozens of times and still being set free to massacre people, but this is the 1950s and fiction besides, and Davey has been arrested more than four times and it looks like this time they will really throw the book at him, so he has no reason not to agree to the deal with the djinni.

Davey's trial is in two days, so he hustles to use his new powers to escape confinement.  Then he commits one brazen robbery after another--the powers the djinni promised him are real!  Davey buys a nice house and enjoys a comfortable lifestyle, slows down his pace of robberies, only committing really lucrative ones once or twice a month.  For example, he climbs a skyscraper and infiltrates a party attended by movie and TV stars and a famous lady novelist and, Ellison going for some kind of obvious tried-and-true comedy, a "British-colonel type, complete to flowing white mustache" who says stuff like "By Jove!" and "I say!"  Nobody can see Davey, so he gropes women's asses or kisses them if they are trim and kicks them in the ass if they are fat, and his victims blame innocent men and a brawl erupts.  The sexiest and most famous woman at the party, I guess a Marilyn Monroe caricature, Davey robs of her necklace and strips of her clothes so everybody can see her naked.  This scene has no effect on the plot and I guess is just here to appeal to the desire of readers to sexually abuse women and to humiliate those they envy for their wealth and status.

The djinni finally calls upon Davey to steal that item for him.  Davey launches the operation, but comes to a bad end.  The item the djinni wants is the magical key that will set him (the djinni) free from the prison that is used by his race to confine criminals--this Earth.  The guardian of the magical key is another djinni, an agent of the djinni establishment that imprisoned Davey's benefactor, and thus can see Davey just fine--this djinni is also on this time-line and thus material and can kill Davey with ease, and does so.  This story is less wholesome than Lesser's, but in the end the people who misbehave are punished.

The start of the story, Davey and the djinn's relationship and Davey's escape from prison and his amassing great wealth, are entertaining.  But the Marilyn-Monroe scene is just OK, and the ending is sort of perfunctory and disappointing.  It feels like Ellison was making an effort in the first half of the story, then included the exploitation material he felt was called for by the venue in which the story would appear, and then just quickly wrapped things up with little thought.  I'm calling "A Bucketful of Diamonds" acceptable--the first half or so is better than Lesser's "Legs on Olympus."  

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The Wodehouse of course is quite good, and the Lesser and Ellison get passing grades--they are exploitation filler, but I didn't find them repulsive or snooze-inducing.  I can't truly recommend the first issue of Dream World unless you are a student or collector of Wodehouse or Ellison, but I'm not denouncing it, either.  I find these odd little corners of the SF world intriguing and so we will probably be reading from the second and the third and final issues of Dream World. 

      

    

  

                 

     

           

Amazing Stories, May '57: H B Piper, M Lesser & C E Fritch

We just read Harlan Ellison's story "Night Vigil," which debuted in a fanzine but was reprinted (with a new title) not long after in one of the most famous of SF magazines, Amazing.  That issue of Amazing, May 1957, has an intriguing cover, so let's see what that swimsuit girl and robotic falconer are up to, and investigate the claim that the issue prints a story that is "Too Hot To Handle."  I'm going to read these stories in a scan of the original magazine, and you can do the same at this link.

If it's Ellison content you crave, the May 1957 issue of Amazing has an ad for the May Fantastic, highlighting Ellison's "Satan is My Ally," which we blogged about back in 2017 when I read four 1957 stories by your pal Harlan.  If you are looking for jokes and gripes, the editorial to this issue is a lame joke that serves to notify readers about former Amazing editor Howard Browne's Hollywood career is going, and, as a joke, this month's letter column is mostly people writing in to complain about Amazing.  The letters column is legitimately funny, so check it out, laff-lovers.  

"The Edge of the Knife" by H. Beam Piper

The editor's intro to "The Edge of the Knife" asserts that "This story was rejected by two top-flight science-fiction editors for the same reason: 'Too hot to handle.' 'Too dangerous for our book.'"  If we choose to believe this claim, who could Amazing editor Paul W.  Fairman mean?  Campbell at Astounding?  Gold at Galaxy?  Boucher at F&SF?  Who am I missing?  Thrilling Wonder and Weird Tales were defunct in 1957.  Is James Quinn of If "top-flight"?  Well, there's a mystery for us.

"The Edge of the Knife" is quite long, like 40 pages here in Amazing, so it had better be good, or I am going to be bitter.  I definitely want to see why it might have been considered "too hot to handle," though.

World War II veteran Ed Chalmers teaches modern history at a college in California in the year 1973.  Chalmers has a secret special power--every so often he spontaneously develops "memories" of things that will happen in the future.  Chalmers knows all about wars and revolutions and other political developments that will occur decades and centuries in the future, but his info is not systematic or comprehensive; for example, he will rarely know the dates or even years of the future events he "remembers."  These memories of the future are so vivid and real that Chalmers will sometimes casually mention some such event, absentmindedly forgetting that the event has not happened yet, leading others to think he is joking or mentally unbalanced.  As our story begins, he is telling his class about the assassination of some contemporary Middle-Eastern potentate--"the greatest Moslem since Saladin"--an assassination that has not yet occurred.  Students and faculty have witnessed such queer comments from Chalmers before, and this is the last straw--enough people are now convinced that Chalmers is insane that they fear he will harm the rep of the school and want him removed, and the president of the college asks Chalmers for his resignation.  But Chalmers has all kinds of tenure protections, and resists being let go, and contacts his lawyer.

Things cool down for a month, but then that Muslim politician gets murdered in the very way Chalmers described and people start believing Chalmers can predict the future--including academics whose specialty is parapsychology and want to pump Chalmers for data--while the president thinks it is all some kind of scam or hoax and redoubles his efforts to fire Chalmers.  A big meeting is held in the president's office with many attendees from multiple stake-holding groups, and much of the story reads like a courtroom drama, with Chalmers' lawyer there trying to protect our guy.  

I wasn't thrilled to be reading scenes of tense meetings among academics and between a guy and his lawyer like Amazing was printing some mainstream novel that was blowing the lid off what goes on in the shadow of the ivory tower.  Am I opening up SF mags to read stuff like “As faculty members, any controversy involving establishment of standards of fitness to teach under a tenure-contract concerns all of us, because any action taken in this case may establish a precedent which could affect the validity of our own contracts.”  Did I accidentally pick up a copy of The Chronicle of Higher Education?  Zzzzzzzz....  

The most important result of the meeting is that everybody agrees that Chalmers submit to a psychological exam by a top government shrink.  The president of the college expects Chalmers to be declared insane and committed to a mental institution, so he can fire him, and most everybody else involved thinks Chalmers will be given a clean bill of mental health and that this will serve his interests.  But during the exam Chalmers gets new "memories" that indicate that California is going to be hit by multiple nuclear weapons during the brief war that will result from the assassination in just a few days.  The insane asylum is in a safe place beyond the mountains, so Chalmers deliberately fails the exam so he will be out of the blast radius and fall out zone of the enemy rocket detonations.  He also arranges it so two friends of his will to move to the town where the booby hatch is sited and bring with them his papers so he can continue his work.  

I like the final twist of the story.  I wish Piper had maybe spent more time on Chalmers' relationships with the two friends he preserves--they seem to be sort of tacked on to the story, and we spend much more time with the lawyer and the president who are doomed to be annihilated.  The meat of "The Edge of the Knife" is not bad, but feels slow.  We'll judge "The Edge of the Knife," the title of which refers to the thin separation between past and future and the narrow difference between sanity and insanity, to be acceptable.

But what do we make of the claims the story was "too hot to handle"?  There's no sex in the story.  The academic business--professors fighting the administration--seems like the typical stuff of fiction, and knowing the future but Cassandra-like being unable to change it feels like standard SF fare.  Maybe this story is a hot potato (if we choose to believe the sensational claims) because, while the Soviet Union is not named, the story depicts the commies unsympathetically; they are to blame for the nuclear war, and they lose, getting wiped out thanks to American ingenuity--the Pentagon has stocked America's moon base with an arsenal of missiles and our boys rain them down on the Reds.  Maybe other magazines were scared of offending their left-wing readers with this kind of anti-communist triumphalism, the idea that a nuclear war is winnable, and what amounts to an endorsement of the militarization of space? 

"The Edge of the Knife," isfdb is telling me, is part of Piper's Federation series, a series to which other people have apparently contributed fiction, and has been reprinted in Piper collections and Federation-centric anthologies.  This story's style is competent, and Piper seems skeptical of or hostile to the commies, so maybe some day I'll read other Federation stories; I have always avoided Piper's famous Fuzzy stories because I figured they were allegories/wish fulfillment fantasies of primitive natives outwitting the evil white capitalists, but maybe my guess is off.   

"Winged Planet" by Milton Lesser (as by Adam Chase)

We've read I guess five things by Lesser in the benighted era of this blog's bewildering existence, "'A' as in Android," "The Graveyard of Space," "Ennui," "The Impossible Weapon," and "It's Raining Frogs!"  Let's see what this caper, which is illustrated on the cover of the mag and appears under a pen name, is all about.  I've been lukewarm about Lesser, but maybe I will love this one?  C-3PO, I mean, isfdb, reports that "Winged Planet" has never been reprinted--hey, never tell me the odds!

It is the future of interstellar civilization, the 30th century.  Ann is one of the galaxy's greatest dancers, and she travels from star system to star system, entertaining the men of the frontier worlds.  Recently she was on Earth, which, to the alarm of us patriotic readers, is now some minor planet in the vast human space empire.  Some things change with the forward march of technology and history...but some things don't--the men of the future are still hornier than women can handle!  Everywhere Ann goes, men make passes at her, and she always rejects them.  

Ann is currently a passenger aboard a ship about to transition from hyperspace to real space, and she is in the observation lounge to watch the change--she never gets tired of seeing these dramatic transitions.  Also there is Cliff, an officer of the ship, and he keeps trying to make time with Ann, to the point she slaps the man.  Also present is a newlywed couple, Garry and Joyce; watching them, Ann pities the young woman because her new husband, Ann can tell by how he acts in anticipation of the transition, is a coward, and Joyce will soon fall out of love with this loser.

Immediately after the transition the ship crashes into a planet and almost the entire ship is wrecked, and almost everyone killed--it is only the observation deck that is spared, and our four cardboard characters.  Fire is spreading to the observation lounge, and Cliff the spaceman is unconscious and almost dead, and Joyce paralyzed with pain.  Ann has to badger and insult Garry to get the coward to help her carry the other two people off the wreck before they burn up.  

On the apparently barren planet, the injured Cliff and Joyce are immediately carried off by a huge bird.  Garry and Ann chase after the feathered kidnapper, so all four shipwreck survivors end up in the custody of a robot who strips them naked to experiment on them!  You see, the robot and its 100+ fellows, many centuries ago, crashed on this planet and all the humans with them were killed.  The robots feel a terrible need to serve humanity, so started experimenting on the local fauna, which consists entirely of avians and bugs, to figure out if they could create new masters.  Their researches have fostered the development of techniques that can heal animals and people almost instantly and, through genetic engineering, the ability to make animals smarter, bigger, stronger, etc., than normal.

All those centuries have degraded the robots' intellectual capacity, so they have to be convinced that they don't need to carve up the four shipwrecked travelers because they are human and can serve as masters to the robots; luckily the robots are convinced before anybody gets vivisected.  Goody-Two-Shoes Ann wants to hand these robots over to the government so the government can figure out the best way to use the healing and genetic engineering techniques they have developed.  Cliff, the kind of guy who aggressively pursues women, is also the kind of guy who likes the idea of getting rich and powerful by making the robots his personal army and using their groundbreaking methods to make himself dictator of the galaxy. 

Initially Cliff wins the allegiance of the robots, and starts plotting an ambush of the rescue ship that must be on the way and initial experiments on Garry and Joyce, but Ann figures out how to get the robots to switch their loyalty to her.  When Cliff kisses Ann against her will and tells her he wants her to rule at his side, she resists violently and declares her intention to kill Cliff.  The robots, having been ordered to protect Cliff, kill Ann.  But then their "serve mankind" programming kicks in and they prioritize serving the fallen Ann, bringing her back to life, and restrain Cliff, who instigated the violence that killed Ann.  The expected rescue ship arrives and the robots and their technology are placed in the beneficent hands of the government.  As the story ends we are reminded that Ann not only saved the galaxy from Cliff but taught Garry to be brave.

Barely acceptable; "The Winged Planet" is a sort of bottom-of-the-barrel standard SF story, even with its theme of multiple contrasting (but mostly wrong) ways of being a man and its self-sacrificing girl-boss central character who sees her job as teaching men how to behave and helping the government accrue as much power as possible.  (Ann obviously never heard Muswell Hillbillies.)  It is interesting seeing Lesser deploy these progressive values alongside exploitation material, like the women being subjected to losing their clothes and facing the threat of sexual violence and being cut to pieces while still alive.          

"No World for the Timid" by Charles E. Fritch

In 2024 I read Fritch's "The Big Wide Wonderful World" on the recommendation of one Judith Merrill and I liked it, so there is a chance this will be today's best story, though written by today's least well-known author. 

You know, I think this probably is today's best story.  For one thing, it is economical--short and to the point.  For another, it has real human feeling, something Piper's story, with its unsympathetic academics and attorneys, and Lesser's story, with its flat one-note characters, lack.  "No World for the Timid" is also sort of shocking, or at least makes a respectable effort at being shocking.

Our narrator is perhaps the last man in the world after the nuclear war.  Yes, this is yet another post-apocalyptic story.  He survived because he hid in a cave and a landslide sealed him in, far from the radiation.  In the cave system he met another survivor, perhaps the only woman left in the world.  Somehow, they survived down there, eating bugs and fungus and whatever, emaciated and covered in sores but alive.  Alive for years!  So long, that the woman gave birth to three kids!  Kids old enough to talk by the time they find an exit back to the sunlight!

This story is over-the-top grim; the editor introduces it with an over-the-top warning: "This is a story for readers who like their meat raw, their facts plain and unvarnished, their fiction tough and realistic."  "Realistic" may be pushing it--how do they see in the dark to catch food?  Still, "tough" is appropriate,  with the woman talking about eating her own children, the kids talking about one day getting big enough to overpower Dad and eat him, and Dad contemplating killing the kids before they are too big to overpower him.  And then there is the fact that the woman has grown so accustomed to living underground that she is reluctant, pathologically so, to stepping out into the sunlight again.  The story ends on a down note; they don't meet other survivors or helpful aliens or a cache of tools that will make life easier or anything.

Worthy of a mild recommendation.  "No World for the Timid" was reprinted in the Fritch collection Crazy Mixed-Up Planet (advertised as "spine-chilling"), a reprint magazine the main attraction of which is John Wyndham's "The Troons of Space" (I've read two of Wyndham's Troons stories, "Asteroids, 2194" AKA "The Emptiness of Space" and "The Moon AD 2044" AKA "Idiot's Delight" but not that one) and the ninth of Richard Davis' Space anthologies. 

**********

Well, we've wrung a lot of content out of this issue of Amazing, self-described as "The World's Leading Science-Fiction Magazine."  Let's spend some more time in 1957,  shall we?

Weird Tales Project: 1925

The Roaring Twenties! The time of jazz, flappers, Art Deco!  And Weird Tales!  

We here at MPorcius Fiction Log have seen fit to defy poor eyesight, bad memory, and the indifference of an uncaring universe to shoulder a monumental task--the quest to read at least one piece of fiction from each issue of Weird Tales, the essential speculative fiction magazine edited early on by Edwin Baird and in its most celebrated days by Farnsworth Wright and then Dorothy McIlwraith.  Each time I am able to cross a year off the list, having blogged about at least one story from each issue of the Unique Magazine with a cover date for that year, I put up one of these links posts that, first, lists each of the years finished thus far, and then, all the stories from that year which we have written about.  Today I can report that we have wrapped up our exploration of 1925, a year in which twelve issues edited by Wright hit the newsstands and were devoured by the speculative fiction fans of the Jazz Age.     

1923  1924

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939  

1940   1941  1942

January

Frank Belknap Long:  "The Ocean Leech"

C. M. Eddy, Jr.:          "Ahrl-a of the Caves"

H. P. Lovecraft:          "The Festival"

Henry S. Whitehead:  "The Fireplace"

E. Hoffmann Price:    "The Rajah's Gift"

February

H. P. Lovecraft:           "The Statement of Randolph Carter"

Harvey S. Whitehead: "Sea Change"  

March

C. M. Eddy, Jr.:            "The Better Choice" 

Harvey S. Whitehead:  "The Thin Match"

April

C. M. Eddy, Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft: "Deaf, Dumb and Blind"

May

Frank Belknap Long: "Men Who Walk Upon the Air"

June

Frank Belknap Long:  "The Devil-God"

July

Henry S. Whitehead:  "The Wonderful Thing"

H. P. Lovecraft:          "The Unnamable"

E. Hoffmann Price:    "The Stranger from Kurdistan" 

Robert E. Howard:     "Spear and Fang"

August

Murray Leinster:         "The Oldest Story in the World"

Robert E. Howard:      "In The Forest of Villefere"

Nathaniel Hawthorne: "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" 

September

H. P. Lovecraft:           "The Temple"

Frank Belknap Long:  "The Were-Snake"

E. Hoffmann Price:     "The Sultan's Jest"

October

E. Hoffmann Price: "The Prophet's Grandchildren"

November

H. G. Wells: "The Stolen Body"

December

Frank Belknap Long:  "The Sea Thing"

H. G. Wells:                 "The Valley of Spiders"

Harlan Ellison: "Night Vigil," "Lonelyache," & "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes"

Let's finish up my signed copy of the fifth (1979) Collier paperback printing of Harlan Ellison's 1971 collection Alone Against Tomorrow, about which I have already written at some length here, here and here.  After today I will have read every story in the book, in one form or another, and blogged about most of them.  (A few--the most famous ones, probably--I read before this blog quivered to glistening and sinister life, and I haven't felt like rereading them yet, and anyway, I feel like this blog offers the most value when I write about stories which haven't already been written about a million times.)  You shouldn't take anything I say, or anybody says, at face value, life and the world being what they are, so I encourage you to read Alone Against Tomorrow yourself--try these links--before seeing what I have to say about "Night Vigil," "Lonelyache," and "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes," or after.

"Night Vigil" (1955)

"Night Vigil" appears to have debuted in an issue of the fanzine Peon with a cover by Ed Emshwiller, which is pretty cool.  This side-stapled periodical also includes essays by Robert Bloch and Terry Carr.  Fun.  "Night Vigil" enjoyed a wider audience in 1957 when it was printed in an issue of Amazing with a cover suggesting our fine-feathered friends and the mechanical minds that owe their existence to our ingenuity are teaming up to exploit one of our most valuable resources--swimsuit models!  Don't count out the trim brunette who is representing our civilization, though--she's packing heat!  After seeing print in Amazing under the title "Yellow Streak Hero," "Night Vigil" has reappeared in many Ellison collections.

"Night Vigil" is a normal science fiction story about being in space and dealing with aliens and one man sacrificing to help his civilization, and a decent one.  Mild recommendation.

The human race, in its travels around the universe, has come upon evidence that other advanced civilizations have been wiped out by some mysterious enemy.  The government needs to deploy some kind of sentinel or tripwire on an asteroid at a specific strategic point way way out there, far from Earth, to watch for this enemy.  Using computers, they determine from among all the young men on Earth the man most likely to remain sane while living in a tiny one-room Quonset hut, bereft of human contact, year after year, decade after decade.  This nineteen-year-old is seized by the government as he is sitting on his front porch canoodling with his girlfriend, hypno-trained how to operate the communications system that he will need to use on the asteroid should the alien monsters appear, and then shipped to the watching post.

Our guy has been in the Quonset hut for 24 years.  Ellison does a good job of describing all the psychological phenomena he has endured over those years.  Then the scanners finally detect the approaching enemy and he sends the critical message to Earth.  He has sacrificed his life for his people.

A decent story.  Star Trek fans may find Ellison's use of the phrase "on the edge of Forever" amusing.  Maybe we should see this story as one that subverts our expectations, as the critics like to say.  Some stories might have this single guy outwit the aliens all by himself.  Other stories might have a twist ending in which there are no aliens and the government is using the alien scare to manipulate the populace.  Ellison here does neither, instead producing a story that depicts the sad truth that polities have enemies and those polities require people who will take risk and make sacrifices to oppose those enemies if they are to endure.

"Lonelyache" (1964)

"Lonelyache" debuted in Knight, "The Magazine for the Adult Male," in an issue that promises to introduce us to "the Aqua-Nudes," reveal to us "the truth about the Irish Sweepstakes," and share with us "pix" of Christine Keeler, the woman embroiled in the Profumo affair.  isfdb lists one anthology, a Belgian one, that reprints "Lonelyache;" otherwise, it has only reappeared in Ellison collections, many of them.    

This is essentially a mainstream story about people whose marriages have failed and how they have empty sexual relationships, adultery and one-night stands and so on, in a vain effort to fill their time or feel love, etc.  Also, perhaps, about how people with difficult childhoods have trouble making adult relationships work.  There are lots of uncomfortable angry conversations, and some literary-type metaphors.  The genre fiction elements consist of the protagonist's dreams, in which he has to fight for his life against a series of assassins, all of them former friends, and defeats them one by one, Ellison describing the gore of their horrible wounds, and a monster forming in the protagonist's small apartment, I guess a metaphor for the man's unhappiness, dissatisfaction, psychological collapse over his loneliness and his shame at using women for sex.  Finally, he pays a prostitute, and this degrading act brings the monster to completion, and the protagonist digs his old service pistol out of the closet and commits suicide.

"Lonelyache" is competent--no major blunders--and at times it is sort of clever or arresting, but it is also long and meandering, episodic, the scenes don't flow logically from one to the other, you almost feel that the scenes could be in different order and the story would work the same.  The gory dreams--which seem to be about comradely relationships with other men and a child's relationship with his parents--and the monster, which receives short shrift, seem tacked on, divorced from the main drama, which is all about sexual relationships with women.  We'll call "Lonelyache" acceptable and move on with our lives.

"Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes"  (1969)

Here we have a story about African-American life that uses the "n-word," so there is your trigger warning.  "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes" is actually a good story, better paced and structured than so many of Ellison's stories, so, thumbs up.

A white man who is some kind of hobo or tramp rides the rails illegally to the n-word section of a town to attend a funeral, using his special powers to avoid the railway police.  This guy, our narrator, is some kind of space alien, we eventually realize--he steals Hydrox cookies but mostly eats grass and weeds, and can "go dark," which I guess means "become invisible."

He spies on the funeral of a well-liked 82-year old black guy, Jed, planning to pay his final respects when all the other funeral attendees have left the room in which lies the body.  But then another (apparent) white person, an astoundingly beautiful woman, comes into the room she thinks is empty to (apparently) pay her respects.  She steals the silver dollars off Jed's eyes--according to the narrator, this means Jed won't have passage for the trip to Heaven and will end up in Hell.   

The narrator chases the woman all the way to a different city, using up a considerable portion of his small store of money to do so.  This striking beauty is a whore, and he confronts her at the brothel, and has to use his special powers to kill whatever you call the bouncer at a whorehouse.  Eventually, he gets her full story out of the beauty and we get his full story out of the narrator.  The narrator is a space alien and the kind, generous, giving, etc., Jed, who was always helping people down on their luck, helped the alien and taught him how to pass as a Earth human.  The prostitute is Jed's daughter, and they had an antagonistic relationship because she insisted on passing as a white woman and Jed, the narrator tells Jed's daughter,

"...took in all kinds, and didn’t care where they came from, or what they were. Just as long as they didn’t lie about it.  He had a lot of love."

There is quite a bit of stuff to think about in this story, if we choose to do so.  All three main figures in the story, alien, prostitute, and Jed, are unable to "go home"--the alien can't get back to his home planet, the prostitute isn't able to comfortably spend time with her own father or any black people (or even respectable white people, for that matter), and Jed also seems to have had trouble getting along with his own flesh and blood and is kept from Heaven.  The narrator and the prostitute are both passing, and are both in a sense Jed's children, and both lower class thieves--how great a parent was Jed if his real child and his de facto child both ended up on the wrong side of the law, making their way by doing things that conventional morality holds to be degrading and humiliating?  Ellison writes in the voice of the space alien,

Jed, Jed, you poor old nigger bastard. You knew I couldn’t get home again, back to whatever world it was I'd come from, and you taught me how to pass so they wouldn’t kill me, but you couldn’t handle it when it happened to you.

What does "when it happened to you" mean?  When Jed's own daughter tried to pass, and succeeded?  Or in some way was Jed also trying to pass, trying to hide white blood of his own or a sexual relationship with a white woman or both?

A successful story--even the action scenes work.  Worth your time, especially if you are interested in depictions of African-Americans by white authors, in particular efforts by white people to depict rounded and realistic black people who aren't just dangerous monsters or innocent victims or beleaguered saints.  

 

"Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes" debuted in Galaxy.  The text there is obviously different than that in my paperback copy of Alone Against Tomorrow, but I just glanced at the magazine version, didn't actually closely compare, and the differences may just be in mechanical stuff like punctuation.  Norman Spinrad, whom I have heard Ellison helped get work at places like Knight, included "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes" in his 1971 anthology The New Tomorrows, and it also turned up in the first Best From Galaxy volume. 

The moon and the woman's profile on The New Tomorrows seem to be copied
from the Dillons' cover for Over the Edge.  Weird.

 **********

I'm glad I could finish up my look at Alone Against Tomorrow with stories I can say something nice about, including one I can recommend without reservation (I don't count the trigger warning as a reservation.)  It might seem like it, but I don't open up Ellison's books and hunt down his magazine appearances hoping to point out problems and otherwise cut the man down to size--I am genuinely curious about Ellison's work and career and am glad when I can legitimately enjoy anything he has written.

Harlan Ellison produced a lot of work and no doubt we will be seeing more of him in the future here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Harlan Ellison: "Nothing for My Noon Meal," "O Ye of Little Faith" & "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" (redux!)

Let's take a break from Weird Tales and read three stories from my autographed paperback copy of Harlan Ellison's 1971 collection Alone Against Tomorrow.  (According to the copyright page, mine is a Fifth Printing from 1979.)  I won't wear gloves, but I will hit the soap and water before handling this holy relic touched by the very hands of science fiction's bad boy.  We've already read a bunch of stories that appear in this book--see these links:

LINK THE FIRST
LINK THE SECOND 

If you don't want to risk soiling your own copy of Alone Against Tomorrow by taking it out of the locked and climate-controlled glass case in which you keep your Harlan Ellison collection, you should be able to find these stories somewhere or other online.  Here are some links to give you a head start:

Hardcover 

Paperback

"Nothing for My Noon Meal" (1958)

Nebula Science Fiction was a British (the wikipedia article stresses that it was specifically Scottish) magazine that was published between 1952 and 1959.  There was a US edition offered in '58 and '59.  The wikipedia article includes quotes from Ken Bulmer, E. C. Tubb, and Brian Aldiss praising the magazine, and editor Peter Hamilton, to the skies.  "Nothing For My Noon Meal" debuted in Nebula, and appeared in both the British and American editions.

"Nothing for My Noon Meal" is a decent traditional science fiction story with space suits and space ships and all that, with the kind of high emotion and tragedy and alienation we expect from Ellison, but Ellison doesn't overdo it as he sometimes does--this story doesn't feel like Ellison is yelling and it doesn't feel like he's belaboring his points.  I can mildly recommend "Nothing for My Noon Meal."

Our narrator is a "poor space bum" who, I suppose, lives by exploring and mining new planets and that sort of thing.  He gets married and he and his wife approach a small planet with a strange day and night cycle, the result of the planet orbiting far from its star and having two moons that often eclipse the star, so that this planet experiences months and months of darkness at a time.

Approaching the planet there is a disaster and the ship falls apart.  The narrator is in the forward portion of the ship, which can serve as an escape pod or lifeboat (Ellison uses the word "hutch") but his wife is back in the galley getting coffee and so when the ship is wrecked she dies but he survives to land on the planet.  On the planet he discovers, accidentally, that the only living thing on the planet, a sort of flower, subsists on nitrogen and expels oxygen.  So there will be enough oxygen for him to survive, at least as long as the flowers are in bloom.  One of the story's plot elements is that the flowers seem to die off, but we eventually learn that they are just retracting into the surface and will be back.  Ellison's botany is a little all over the place; early in the story the flowers are described as "strange plants that sucked nitrogen from the thin atmosphere, circulated it and cast it back out as oxygen," but then at the end we are told that the flowers, feared dead, "had merely gone down to replenish their own oxygen supply from the planet itself...."  Well, whatever; Ellison doesn't have some kind of science or engineering training like Asimov or Anderson or Heinlein or one of those guys, and we don't expect the focus of his work to be actual science.

Exposure to the planet has a strange effect on the narrator--he grows a thing like a goiter on his face, a sac, that can store oxygen and which distorts his face so he looks like some kind of monster.  This is the first instance in real life of a mutation taking immediate effect instead of having to be passed on via heredity to an organism's offspring.

Our guy survives on this little planet for some months, and then an Earth ship arrives.  While the narrator is an old space bum with an old ship who has endured a tragedy that has often made him question whether or not he should continue living, the three people arriving on the ship, a brand new fancy shiny one, are young scientists full of energy and hope--Ellison really pushes the alienation theme here.  The three scientists want to bring the narrator back to Earth to study--Earth is in trouble because of overpopulation, thanks to antiaging drugs and a Christian lobby that is preventing the adoption of "really effective birth control laws," and maybe learning how to mutate people in their own lifetimes will help somehow.  But our guy, with his hideous face, doesn't want to live among normal people, and, besides, he can hear his dead wife's voice--she is floating in space, orbiting this planet, and doesn't want him to leave.  So he convinces the three scientists that they should send people to study him while he is here on this little world.  Maybe we should compare this story to the H. G. Wells story we just read, "A Dream of Armageddon," in which a guy has a one-of-a-kind contribution to the troubled world that only he can make and he refuses to make it because he would rather spend time with a woman he loves. 

I don't think "Nothing for My Noon Meal" has ever been anthologized, but of course it has been reprinted in the multiple editions of multiple Ellison collections, including Ellison Wonderland, which in 2015 appeared behind an embarrassingly lame and instantly dated try-hard I'm-a-phony-rebel cover with sickening colors that I can barely believe was actually sold to people instead of thrown in the garbage.  Disgusting.  In comparison, Bob Pepper's 1974 cover looks like a towering achievement from an era of awe-inspiring creativity, beauty, sophistication and elegance.

"Harl"?  More like "hurl," amirite?

"O Ye of Little Faith" (1968)

I have in the past noted how closely intertwined are the worlds of SF and that of men's adult magazines, and today we note that "O Ye of Little Faith" saw print in the magazine Knight the same year it appeared in the Ellison collection Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled.  Our pal Harlan is proud of this one--it appears in Harry Harrison's 1971 SF: Author's Choice 3, in which "Thirteen Science Fiction Masters" like Sonya Dorman and David I. Masson "Present, With Commentary, Their Own Favorite Stories."  Let's read the version of the story in my copy of Alone Against Tomorrow and then Ellison's commentary in the Harrison anthology, which will be easy for you cybersleuths to find online.

"O Ye of Little Faith" starts off with a dream-like action sequence that makes me wonder how Ellison got a reputation as a good writer.  Here's a sample sentence that seems to have all kinds of grammar issues (I'm not going to put all those "[sic]"s in there): 

The tips of his fingers skinned away from friction, and the pain was excruciating, for a long moment, but was lost in an instant as the shriek tore from his throat and he plunged, hitting painfully with his shoulders and the back of his neck that threatened to snap his spine, down into a depth of water black and viscuous and bottomless that closed over him, filled his mouth with foulness, blind, dragged into the grave-chill body of a moist lover terrible in her possessiveness, jealousy and need.

Maybe this sentence is full of printer's errors and typos?  Anyway, the action sequence stinks; not only is it poorly written but it feels like a dream sequence so you don't care if our protagonist, Niven, outfights or escapes the centaur or gets out of the arena or out of the tunnel or wherever the hell he is because you expect every painful and confusing paragraph to be followed by "Niven woke up in a cold sweat."

After two pages of this aggravation we learn that Niven was in Mexico on vacation and his centaur-fighting, into-a-pit-falling hallucination began in a soothsayer's shop.  We get one of the lists we so often find in Ellison's work, this one meant to convey to us how crazy Tijuana is, a list of the stuff money can buy in that town, like a ten-year-old boy virgin or the chance to see a sex show involving a dog.  The word "pudenum," in italics, makes an appearance, which I don't run into often in my reading.  Anyway, Niven and his 35-year-old girlfriend were in Tijuana to get her an abortion, and after the procedure she asked him where their relationship was going.  She didn't like his goofy evasive answer so stormed off and he chased her into the soothsayer's shop, where the Mexican oracle told Niven that he was a man without faith and so was damned and so Niven punched out this stooped old man and suddenly found himself in a "bowl" fighting a centaur.

After this flashback we are back to the hallucination.  Niven escapes the foul water and encounters Jesus, Bast, Apollo, and other deities, and realizes that like a god who has lost his worshippers, he failed to give his girlfriend a reason to have faith in him, to believe in him, and so he is lost like those forgotten gods.  Or maybe his girlfriend is like a god and he is like a worshipper who failed to have faith in her and so is lost.  It is a mess.  

This story is a pretentious but weak bit of self-indulgence, Ellison apparently trying to come to grips with his own issues with women and with the psychological pressures of being an atheist, or maybe just trying to mine his relationship problems and hostility to religion for material.  Poorly written and offering no entertainment value and only sham profundity, MPorcius Fiction Log has to give "O Ye of Little Faith" a bitter thumbs down.      

But let's look at Ellison's own commentary on the story in SF: Author's Choice 3, a five-page intro that precedes the nine-page story.  Oh, first I'll note that the text of "O Ye of Little Faith" in SF: Author's Choice 3 seems to have been cleaned up--the sentence I quoted above has somewhat better punctuation and grammar, and the italicized "pudenum" was changed to unitalicized "pudenda."

Ellison tells us that "O Ye of Little Faith" isn't really his favorite of his own stories--that would be either "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" or "At the Mouse Circus."  Then he relates the story of how, when he was a little boy, a little girl who was a Seventh Day Adventist tried to convert him because she thought Jews committed such crimes as grinding up gentiles to make matzoh and were doomed to hell.  Harlan then tells us he has become very interested in religion, bragging that he is reading Chesterton and Aquinas, and that in his writing he has been trying to come up with a modern pantheon of gods and figure out what happens to gods who are no longer worshipped--"O Ye of Little Faith" is one of those efforts.  Harlan also makes a sex joke that comes off as a dated and kind of creepy non-sequitur:

She may have been correct; I may be doomed, but not because I didn't read The Watchtower. And frankly, I can think of infinitely groovier things to do with little Gentile girls than grinding them up for matzohs.*

*[UPDATE 8/27/2026:  See the comments for an interesting observation on this passage from one of my eagle-eyed readers.]

Then we get the real reason the version of "O Ye of Little Faith" that I read is such a piece of junk--as a stunt, Ellison wrote it in one hour at the 1966 West Coast Science Fantasy Conference after Larry Niven won an hour of his time in a charity auction; one condition of the auction was that Ellison would include the name of the winner of the auction in the story as well as three words chosen by the winner (Niven chose "minotaur," "polyp" and "prognosticator," but in the heat of writing Ellison mixed up "minotaur" and "centaur.")       

    

Finally, Ellison babbles on about how important writers are in our violent world; "writing is a holy chore....a heavy responsibility....none of us who write take it lightly..."  Good grief, Harlan, you just told us you published--in a porn mag--as a completed story a rough draft you made up as you went along that is full of mistakes.

"The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" (1958)

Another porn mag story, "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" appeared in Rogue ten years before "O Ye of Little Faith" was printed in Knight.  This one also appeared in Ellison Wonderland, but I'll illustrate this part of the blog post with covers of The Essential Ellison, in which "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" was also offered to the public.

I felt like I was recognizing this story as I read it, and after I had drafted the below blog post I realized I had in fact read it in 2024 and blogged about it.  Oops.  I think the version I read today in Alone Against Tomorrow is different, however, and that justifies my just posting about "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" again, doesn't it?    

Arthur Fulbright is a "partial clairvoyant," which, in this story at least, means he can see some future events but not others.  He is also a 39-year-old virgin--you know what that means.  Art lived with his mother for like 33 years, and now, six years after her death, he has one of his visions of the future--that the world will end in two weeks.  He decides he'd better lose his virginity while he has the chance.

The story follows his clumsy attempts to date women and then his abortive plan to rape a woman.  Finally, guided by his ability to see the future, he meets a whore in a bar and seals the deal.  She asks for 15 bucks, and after he finishes having sex with her in his house he pays her four thousand dollars.  You might say that his last act on this Earth is to become the world's best tipper.  A moment later Arthur, the prostitute, and the entire world are incinerated.

This is today's most competent story; there are not any goofy blunders and all the characters act in ways that makes sense.  I'm not sure if "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" is today's best story, though, as "Nothing for My Noon Meal" is more creative and has a lot more stuff going on--"The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" is kind of obvious.  Is it better to be ambitious, take risks, and make mistakes, or set modest goals and achieve them?  I can't decide, so I'll just say I can mildly recommend "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" and leave it at that.    

**********

Two of our stories today are alright, but one of them is so bad it is kind of insulting that Ellison and his editors and publishers saw fit to shovel it at us, like we'd eat anything and enjoy it if it bore the Ellison label.  It shakes your faith in the whole enterprise of publishing, the whole culture of fiction.  

If my memory is to be trusted, and today we have seen it isn't, there are three stories remaining in Alone Against Tomorrow that I have yet to read.  I think I'll wrap up this project in our next post by blogging about "Night Vigil," "Lonelyache," and "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes."