Merril-approved '58 stories: A Barclay, C Beaumont & M Benedict

We're reading 1959 stories which Judith Merril included on her Honorable Mentions list in the back of her fifth critically lauded "Year's Best" anthology.  This is the second post in this series; in the inaugural post we handled three stories by authors whose names begin with "A," Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson and Christopher Anvil.  Today we'll read stories by "B" authors.  There are actually a lot of authors whose names start with "B" whom Merril thought published stories in 1959 worthy of note, so I think we'll be doing more "B"s next time; today we've got a pretty famous guy associated with The Twilight Zone, Charles Beaumont, and two people I don't think I have read before--I don't even know if I have heard of them before--Alan Barclay and Merle Benedict.

"Nearly Extinct" by Alan Barclay

World War II RAF veteran Barclay has over two dozen short fiction credits at isfdb and five listed novels.  "Nearly Extinct" debuted in John Carnell's New Worlds, but it seems has never been reprinted.  Let's see if we can figure out what Merril saw in this story that other editors, apparently, did not see.

"Nearly Extinct" is an acceptable story, reasonably well-written and somewhat entertaining and interesting, but it doesn't have a real plot.  In structure and setting it somewhat resembles Brian Aldiss' "The Lieutenant," but Aldiss' story had a plot--the lieutenant's personality evolved, the story chronicled a change, there was a climax.  "Nearly Extinct" does not really have that sort of narrative.

Some years ago, space aliens conquered the Earth and almost exterminated humanity.  Nowadays, the few surviving humans live as savages, almost animals, in the wild spaces.  Sometimes the aliens, black hairless people whom the humans call "Frogs," come out to the wilderness to hunt the humans on foot or in low-flying aircraft.

As the story begins, a woman whose family has just been killed is fleeing the Frog hunters.  She is saved by a young man, a stranger to her, who is skilled with knife and bow.  She escapes and he stays behind to fight--he gets surrounded by the Frogs, who have firearms.  In the next scene we find he has survived and is guiding the woman to his family's camp.  How did he get away from the aliens who had surrounded him?  We soon learn that his father, he, and his children can teleport to any spot they can see--his wives cannot.

Barclay provides scenes in which the Frogs attack and the humans deal with them.  Many Frogs are slain, but so is the male lead's father.  Then comes the final scene, in which it is implied that one day, the male leads descendants, humans who can teleport, will retake the Earth and maybe conquer the Frogs' home planet.

Lacking character development or a climax, this story feels like a fragment or an anecdote.  Maybe it is a character study of the kind of people who will survive an apocalyptic event like conquest of the Earth from space--the male lead is cold, emotionless, he doesn't seem excited to have sex with the members of his harem, much less to love any of them, and he is not moved by the death of his father in the fight with the Frogs.  He just seems coldly committed to keeping the human race alive.  

"Nearly Extinct" is OK.  I'm not sure why Merril liked it enough to include it in her list--maybe its fragmentary nature made her think it "literary," a sort of subversion of pulp expectations that we would see the human race get finished off (if this were a horror story) or see it achieve its liberation (in a conventional human vs alien invasion science fiction scenario)?

"Sorcerer's Moon" by Charles Beaumont

This story by the famous Beaumont debuted in your favorite jazz magazine, Playboy.  (Merril strives in her anthologies to find SF that debuted outside the SF mags.)  Besides coverage of the upcoming Playboy Jazz Festival, an article on yachting, and quite a bit of material about the Beats (even the centerfold is promoted as a Beat who loves Dylan Thomas, Prokofiev and organic food), this issue of Hugh Hefner's upscale skin rag has a story by Avram Davidson we read last month, "No Fire Burns."  

"Sorcerer's Moon" is a weak joke story, and very short.  There are only two wizards left alive in the world, two men several centuries old who are masters of black magic and in touch with hellish powers.  Instead of forming a little wizard club and spending their time goofing on the normies, or mundanes, or "muggles" as I guess the kids are calling them nowadays, these two wizards are feuding, each seeking to destroy the other to become the sole wizard in the world.  Won't the survivor be lonely?

Anyway, one sorcerer manages to trick the other into taking a sheet of paper with a rune on it.  When a particular midnight rolls around, the last wizard to have had possession of the rune will be destroyed.  So, each wizard tries to trick the other into taking possession of the rune, disguising it as a piece of mail or something.  One hires a private detective who is an expert process server to deliver the rune to the other, but can this private dick be trusted?

Lame filler.  I read it in the magazine, where it shares a page with a cartoon about incest, pedophilia, and the dirty minds of hicks that references Lolita, but you can also catch "Sorcerer's Moon" in The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural and multiple Beaumont collections.

We've already read a bunch of stories in The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural:
Beaumont's "Black Country" (it's about jazz),
Fredric Brown's "Nasty" (it's about erectile dysfunction),
Robert Bloch's "The Travelling Salesman" (it's a riff on travelling salesmen jokes),
Mack Reynolds' "Burnt Toast" (it's about alcoholism),
Richard Matheson's "First Anniversary" (it's about necrophilia),
Ray Bradbury's "Heavy Set" (it's about an Oedipal complex).

"The Dancing that We Did" by Myrle Benedict

"Myrle Benedict" is one of the pen names used by Sasha Miller, who went on to do historical novels (I guess about ancient Greece) and then fantasy novels, some in collaboration with Andre Norton.  She also worked on a GURPS supplement!  (I never had any GURPS stuff, though I had a lot of James Bond roleplaying material, Toon, Star Frontiers, Marvel Super Heroes RPG, and borrowed some Gamma World stuff from another kid.)  Merril included two Benedict stories in her honorable mentions list for '59; neither has, as far as isfdb knows, ever been reprinted.

As you might expect of a story written by a woman (if you were some kind of neanderthal misogynist!), Sasha Miller's "The Dancing that We Did" begins at a dance.  A country dance in hillbilly country; maybe it qualifies as a square dance ("...swing her where, I don’t keer, take that purty gal out fer air!”)  Our narrator Alan Wiley left this rural town to go to the big city to get an education, and today he is back and attending the dance.  He flirts with a 16-year-old girl, Letty Sue; these two seem to have crushes on each other from way back.  Adam likes Letty Sue because she is sleek and slim, almost childishly so--she has feet that are more slender and breasts that are smaller than those of the other pretty girls at the dance.  We hear all about her clothes and hair and all about the clothes and hair of Letty Sue's competition, big-breasted Jodene Bailey.

As if this material already wasn't boring enough, Miller does that thing that so many authors do that I find so tiresome, renders people's speech phonetically. 

"Ain’t even been here but a couple days, an’ every time I try t’ get near you, some over-grown lunk jest shoves me out o’ the way!”      

Anyway, by page two I was checking to see how long this story was--OK, only ten pages, I can do it.

Alan and Letty go to their favorite spot by the river and have their first kiss.  Alan banged a lot of chicks back in the city, but this kiss is the most wonderful experience he has ever had!  Then they go back to the dance and dance together and all the other people there marvel at how great they are at dancing. 

We learn that Alan is the smartest guy in town and will be the best farmer if he takes up farming but he would rather do something else with his life--he doesn't fit in here in hillbilly country.  Then comes our SF content--Alan is some kind of alien or merman or something!  He wears contact lenses to conceal his cat-like pupils and has only four toes on each foot.  Then comes our happy ending--Letty Sue reveals she is of the same race--they will marry and then search the world for their people.  

"The Dancing that We Did" is like a mix of a women's romance story and the standard SF reader's wish-fulfillment goop in which the main character doesn't fit in because he is better than everybody else.  The plot is almost nonexistent--there is no conflict (Jodene with the big boobs is introduced and then vanishes from the narrative), and the characters don't achieve happiness by doing anything, by overcoming some kind of obstacle or making some decision, rather, they are successful because of their genetic heritage.  Check your four-toed privilege, you freaks!

Maybe "The Dancing that We Did" was meant to be a chapter of a novel, to set the scene for the conflict to come in the later chapters?  The intro to "The Dancing that We Did" in the magazine that is the only place it has ever been published, Fantastic Universe, tells us that Sasha Miller owns a cat with a precious pun name and that "The Dancing that We Did" is a sequel to an earlier story about people with cat pupils, "Sit By the Fire," so maybe an entire series was envisioned, and this installment is just to help introduce the characters and concepts of the series.  

Not for me, thumbs down.  A weak choice by Merril--did she chose it to support a fellow woman writer?  Because it demonstrates how SF elements can be integrated with traditional mainstream story content?  

"The Comanleigh" by Myrle Benedict

Here's another story by Sasha Miller published in Fantastic Universe and set in a rural location, a fishing village where people say stuff like "“Sure, there’s na comanleigh,...na more thin Bess here has na Ma or Pa. What say you, Bess? A foundling you are, sure you’re na skeert o’ na comanleigh?”  Hmmm, let me check...ten and a half pages...well, we can do it.

Bess, a foundling, is a serving girl at the tavern.  Rad, the best sailor in the village, is a fisherman.  These two are in love but keep it a secret from everyone else.  Rad is saving up so they can get married.  Rad's mother does not approve of Bess, as nobody knows who Bess's real parents are.  

The comanleigh of the title is a monster many villagers believe becomes active when there is a storm and kills men foolish enough to be abroad during the storm.  On the way home from the tavern one night, a storm suddenly whips up and Rad sees a mysterious shape fly by and he, who always scoffed at the comanleigh before, comes to believe in it.  Some weeks later Rad has made enough money, and he and Bess marry and move into a cottage Rad built.  Soon Bess is pregnant, and goes on to give birth to a little girl.  

Shortly after becoming a father, Rad is out in his boat and gets caught in a storm.  The comanleigh, a ghost woman of great beauty, appears and tries to seduce him--she looks much like Bess.  The monster explains that it lives in the body of Bess, and has lived in the body of Bess's mother, grandmother, etc.  She will live on in the body of Bess's daughter when Bess dies.  Bess's love gives Rad the strength to resist the ghost's charms.  He fights the monster, which grows a wolf's snout brisling with cat teeth with which to rend Rad and a serpent's body with which to crush Rad.  When Rad strikes the comanleigh with a steel hook, Bess, back ashore, also suffers a penetrating wound.  Rad expires, but the comanleigh is dying, and sends its soul to Rad's cottage to take up residence in the baby's body.  The dying Bess, realizing the monster will live on in her daughter, breaks her baby's neck before she herself expires from her many gory injuries.  Rad and Bess's family has been annihilated, and they have liberated their village from the commanleigh.

The plot of this story is not bad, but the long passages of phonetic dialogue are kind of annoying and the domestic scenes feel too long.  We'll call "The Comanleigh" acceptable.  I guess Merril liked the centrality of women to the story--with the exception of Rad, the hero, the villain, and the victims are all women, and Bess and the monster are very proactive women who engage in activity that goes against conventional morality, like engaging in premarital sex and killing people.

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A weak batch from Merril's list.  Maybe the next bunch of "B"s will be better?  Let's hope so!

Merril-approved 1959 stories: B Aldiss, P Anderson & C Anvil

You may recall that I read around 70 stories published in the year 1958 because Trotskyist and cheerleader of the New Wave Judith Merril, whom Barry Malzberg has accused of waging a campaign to destroy science fiction, recommended them in tiny print in the back of one of her influential anthologies.  Well, we're going back Jack and doing it again!  Pages 318, 319 and 320 of Merril's The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition are taken up by a list of stories published in 1959, in alphabetical order by author, that Merril deemed worthy of honorable mention.  Over the coming months, maybe years, who knows?, I will be cherry picking stories from this list to read.  Today we read three "A" stories, tales by Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson, and Christopher Anvil, that debuted in science fiction magazines and I will take up your valuable time by expressing to you at length my opinions of the stories and maybe my guesses as to why Merril saw fit to promote them.  If your time really is as valuable as I suspect it is, remember there is no shame in just looking at the pictures.

"The Lieutenant" by Brian Aldiss 

Here we have a story by major SF figure Aldiss that appeared in the magazine Nebula and would not see reprint until 2013 in The Complete Short Stories.  (I read it in a scan of the magazine.)

In "The Lieutenant," World War II veteran Aldiss describes the contradictory and evolving, or perhaps degenerating, psychology of an inexperienced Army officer in a tough spot.  The world is being conquered by aliens, whom we eventually learn are not people but animals much like giant spiders, and our main character has to take command of an ad hoc unit of soldiers drawn from shattered formations as they travel across the devastated countryside, dealing with civilians as well as aliens.  Aldiss very convincingly displays the young officer making mistakes, putting on an act to convince others and himself of his fitness to command, and, after a shocking event, radically shifting from pursuing a course that is calm and cool and cautious to one that is risky and based entirely on unbridled emotion.

Well done, though its fragmentary and inconclusive nature and focus on psychology (demonstrated through behavior and not sterile talk about theories) is perhaps more literary than what we expect in genre literature; it is easy to see why "The Lieutenant" appealed to Merril, who was always looking for stories that defied the boundaries between the literary mainstream and SF.  The tone and setting might appeal to fans of post-apocalyptic fiction, and there are pretty effective shock scenes involving a dead body for all you horror fans.

Thumbs up for "The Lieutenant."

"Brave to Be a King" by Poul Anderson

This is a long one; our friends in Italy serialized it over three issues of Urania.  I don't think "Brave to Be a King" has been anthologized in a book, but it has appeared in a million Anderson collections.  In general I am not crazy about time travel stories, so the fact that isfdb is telling me this is the second installment in the Time Patrol series is giving me pause, but I like Anderson so let's give "Brave to Be a King" a chance.  I'm reading the novelette in a scan of the issue of F&SF in which it debuted, the issue that includes Carol Emshwiller's "Day at the Beach," which we read back in 2018; "Day at the Beach" is one of the stories Merril reprinted in The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition. 

The first two of "Brave to Be a King"'s ten chapters introduce us to our characters and the whole idea of the Time Patrol.  Manse Everard is one of the top Time Patrol agents, and he was going to relax for a few days in an apartment in 20th-century Manhattan reading Sherlock Holmes stories but his break period is interrupted by a knock at the door--it's the love of his life, blonde, blue-eyed, short Cynthia Denison nee Cunningham.  He hasn't seen Cynthia in three years, since she married his best friend, Keith Denison.  Cynthia has bad news and makes a desperate request for help--Keith has disappeared in ancient Persia, and the Time Patrol's efforts to find him have come to nothing.  Can agent extraordinaire Manse go looking for Keith?  Anderson pulls out all the stops describing the distress of Cynthia and Manse, how they are shaking and chain smoking and on the verge of screaming and all that.  He maybe pours it on a little too thick.

In Chapter III, Manse is in the Iran of the sixth century B.C. (that's BCE to you kids) and Anderson gives us a lecture on the reign of Cyrus and then a long description of a Persian town.  Anderson has quite complimentary things to say about Cyrus and 6th-century Persia.  Disguised as a Greek traveler, Manse in Chapter IV is at the mansion of a wealthy courtier, looking for clues as to Denis's fate and hearing from the courtier a biography of Cyrus that feels a little sketchy.  Manse has aroused the suspicion of this noble, and in Chapter V is interrogated by the head of Cyrus' security; things are looking hairy but then the King himself arrives and Manse finds that his old friend Keith, the man who stole his girl, is impersonating King Cyrus!

Chapter VI is Keith's story of how he became Cyrus the Great and his accomplishments as king.  Chapter VII is about how Cyrus and Persia are so important to creating the future, to saving the Jews and laying the groundwork for the spread of Greek civilization and Christianity, that Manse thinks he can't extract Keith from the role of Cyrus and bring him back to Cynthia--Cyrus's deeds are so critical to history they can't risk any of them not happening.  Anderson has the men yelling and knocking cups over and so forth, so we know how emotional they are.  The subtext, of course, is that if Keith stays in ancient Iran then Manse can probably get his hands back on Cynthia's perfect, if short, body.

Chapter VIII has a decent action scene as Manse is intercepted on his way back to his time machine by that security chief, who has an inkling that Cyrus and Manse are wizards from another universe; this guy is a patriot and wants to make sure Cyrus, who has been such a good leader, does not leave Persia, and maybe to force Manse to use his wizardry to help the kingdom.  There are some histrionics in this chapter, from the courtier as he dies, but I found them affecting rather than over the top.

In Chapter IX, Manse figures out how to get Keith back to the modern world while making sure somebody else is in the role of Cyrus and does all the history-making things Keith as Cyrus has done.  In Chapter X, Keith comes home to 20th-century NYC and Cynthia.  Cynthia seems thrilled, but Keith has some qualms--he was Cyrus the Great for 14 years, living in a palace and having sex with dozens of submissive women, being treated as a hero and obeyed unquestioningly; does he really want to live in a  tiny apartment with a single short woman who is going to be telling him what to do?

A pretty good adventure story.  Some of the the historical lectures may seem a little much, and some of the human drama in the first two thirds may feel overdone, but everything in the last third or so is actually good.  I sometimes read stories that start well and then fall apart or simply fail to live up to their potential, and I sometimes read good stories that have weak endings, and a story like "Brave to Be a King" that goes from OK to good has its advantages.  I am guessing Merril appreciated the effort Anderson put into the interpersonal drama stuff, as well as his laudatory description of a non-Western culture and all the nice things Anderson has to say about Cyrus' senior wife, who at one point saved the kingdom.

"The Law Breakers" by Christopher Anvil

I don't think I've read anything by Anvil before, so this is a real exercise in exploration for the MPorcius Fiction Log staff.  "The Law Breakers" was an Astounding cover story, so I feel like both the leftist herald of the New Wave and the right-wing architect of the Golden Age are telling me this is a good place to start with Anvil, but the fact that, like Aldiss' "The Lieutenant," Anvil's "The Law Breakers" had to wait until the 21st century to be reprinted is making me wonder if the market is telling me that, no, this is not the place to start.

Well, "The Law Breakers" is an OK adventure story told in a sort of jocular manner that tries to get across some historical and sociological theories.  I guess the big one is about the effect of diversity and competition on technological development, and  another is the drawbacks as well as the obvious benefits of the fact that the human race is ambitious and always striving, always trying to improve.  We might consider "The Law breakers" an example of the kind of stories Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. wanted to publish, an optimistic story that celebrates human achievement and teaches the reader something about science and technology.  

Our main characters are two space aliens whose civilization has achieved interstellar travel but has yet to develop an FTL drive.  These aliens look almost like humans and share humans' preferences for air and food and so forth, with the exception that their arms have more joints and these joints are extra flexible.  Our protagonists are on a commando mission to Earth.  Four hundred years ago, like 1600 or 1700, I guess, scouts came to Earth and saw that the human race was split up into many discrete and often hostile ethnic, cultural and political groups, and that there was no central authority controlling population growth or use of natural resources.  The aliens' scientists figured the human race was going to exterminate itself through war or overuse of resources or something in a few centuries, so the aliens would be able to colonize the Earth without having to kill us themselves.  

Recently, scouts returned to the vicinity of Terra and were astounded to find that the human race was not extinct--in fact, they had developed an FTL drive and were colonizing the galaxy!  The aliens fretted that if they didn't deal with the humans soon, they (the aliens) would be subordinated to the Earthers!  The alien space navy is far away, so to buy time and slow down Earth's expansion, successive small squads of commandos were sent to Earth to blow up the HQ of the human colonization effort.  None of these squads has returned; our protagonists are the latest pair sent on this dangerous mission, armed with invisibility devices and high explosives and hand guns and charged with the task of blowing up the skyscraper in the middle of a rural district that is Earth colonization HQ.  

Most of the text of "The Law Breakers" is moderately entertaining adventure stuff, the commandos crash landing, hiking to a road, stealing a car and driving to the skyscraper, sneaking around, setting the explosive charges.  They are invisible, but dogs smell them and humans get suspicious and so the aliens try to hide in the building.  The building includes, for training purposes, simulations of alien planets so the commandos, who can't read or speak English, blunder into a very cold room, a high gravity room, etc.  Finally they fall into a trap and are captured.

The aliens find that their predecessors were also captured, and are now fully integrated into Earth society.  We get lectures on the value of having multiple cultures and polities--the human race as a whole never became satisfied with any one method or piece of technology, because Earth had many competing cultures and polities.  The aliens never got a FTL drive because they were satisfied with the drive they have, and those that invented it and produce it, in a civilization with only one society, were able to discourage competition.

The aliens are offered jobs as car mechanics.  While the aliens' civilization has settled on a single, uniform, simple and reliable automobile, Earth automobiles are very complicated and very diverse and always being improved upon, so they require a lot of maintenance, and the aliens, with their super-flexible arms, can reach more easily into the recesses of an engine than can a human.  But our joke ending, in which the aliens have to serve jail time for stealing a car and speeding, will keep them from their new jobs for a while.  (The story title has two meanings--the alien protagonists broke Earthly laws relating to property and speed limits, while the human race has been breaking what the aliens considered laws of nature, like that you can't go faster than light.)

An acceptable story.  I'm not quite sure why Merril considered it a stand out...Anvil does depict international conflicts being resolved peacefully and the diversity angle extends to race--there are people of all races at the colonization center--so maybe that has something to do with it.  In 2007 the people at Baen included "The Law Breakers" in the Anvil collection The Trouble with Humans.    

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Not a bad start to our alphabetical journey through the SF of 1959.  Aldiss' story--oppressive, pessimistic, claustrophobically stuck in one guy's head--is probably the most literary of the stories.  Anderson's is tragic when it comes to the lives of individuals but optimistic when it comes to the sweep of human history, and depicts people doing the right thing and behaving with competence and confidence.  Anvil's story is the most gee whiz and optimistic of the tales, but like Anderson's it tries to teach you something as well as offer adventure thrills and human drama.

Keep your eyes open for our excursion into 1959 SF "B"s under the direction of one Judith Merril.

Weird Tales, Mar '42: R Bloch, D H Keller and A Derleth

Alright, it is time to take a look at the second of the six issues of Weird Tales published in 1942.  This issue has a lot of good interior illustrations, including several by Hannes Bok, so check it out, art lovers.  The March 1942 issue of D. McIlwraith's magazine also includes the first episode of a reprint of H. P. Lovecraft's twenty-year-old serial "Herbert West: Reanimator," which I won't be reading today, having read it many years ago and not feeling like reading it again yet.  There is a Malcolm Jameson story that looks like a joke story, so I am skipping it, and I am in no mood to deal with Stanton Coblentz and his joke stories and satires, either, so there's another story we can say we are putting off to another day and then absolutely forget about.

Let's get right to the three stories we are going to read; but first note that I am reading them in a scan of this original magazine, not in any later anthologies or collections.

"Hell on Earth" by Robert Bloch 

The narrator of "Hell on Earth" is a horror writer who is hired by two college professors--a fat man and a slender blonde woman with blue eyes--to act as a witness to their experiments into the occult.  Fatso and blondie have collected in an upper story of a Manhattan skyscraper a vast library of ancient and medieval manuscripts from around the world and acquired a storehouse of creepy sundries like eye of newt and candles made from the rendered fat of corpses in hopes of performing black magic.  The profs are sure that there is some truth to the tales of sorcery of the past, to the claims of wizards to be able to raise the dead, turn lead to gold, and summon demons, and they hope to master these esoteric skills and employ them for the good of modern man.  

Bloch does a good job describing all the occult paraphernalia and making black magic sound sort of rational and believable, and he is similarly successful depicting the ritual by which the blonde summons from hell Satan himself!  You'd think that the eggheads would start small, summon a minor demon, and they meant to, but one of the profs screwed up, it seems, and blondie read the spell that summons the demon at the top of Hell's org chart.  Luckily the college profs have set up a special cage of unbreakable glass reinforced by holy water and crosses and Satan is trapped within it.

The rest of the story, which is kind of long, chronicles how Satan tries to escape the glass cage by possessing or hypnotizing each of the three main characters in turn while they try to kill Satan with poison and similar means or send him back to Hell with other spells.  During the excitement, the narrator and the blonde fall in love, and the narrator has to drive Satan from her body by punching her and burning her possessed flesh with a crucifix.  This sex and violence material holds the reader's attention, but Bloch then resorts to providing us a long alphabetical list of different methods of divination that the narrator tries to employ and then a list of the various types of elementals the narrator  considers summoning and that stuff is a little tedious.  I guess Bloch did a lot of research for this story and, not wanting any of it go to waste, just dumps his notes in front of us.  I already find it a little annoying when a story has the same thing happen three times in a row (in this story the three principal characters all getting possessed, as if after the first possession they wouldn't be more careful) and the monotonous lists coming after that was hard to take.

The resolution of the plot is also disappointing.  The natural ending of "Hell on Earth" would be for the narrator to become Satan and conquer the Earth with an army of monsters, or, commit suicide to free himself from Satan's power, but I guess a happy ending was called for, and Bloch unfortunately doesn't provide a very convincing one.  Bloch put a lot of effort into, and achieved considerable success at, portraying how summoning the demons works and I think also succeeded in making the narrator's seduction by Satan convincing, but the way the narrator escapes and sends the devils back to Hell is half-baked, quite vague, and not very believable.  I think part of the problem is the requirement that the narrator be the hero--it is the writer who triggers the trap that confines Satan, and then frees the fat academic from bondage, and then the slim love interest, and then himself; it might have been better if fatso and/or blondie had returned the favor and saved the narrator instead of the narrator improbably saving himself.    

We'll call "Hell on Earth" mildly recommendable.  

If you can read Spanish, you can read "Hell on Earth" in an issue of the Argentine magazine Narraciones Terrorificas printed in 1944.  In 1966, the story was included by Peter Haining in his anthology Summoned from the Tomb and by Cylvia Kleinman Margulies in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine.  In 1985, the story was adapted into an artistically ambitious but unappealing graphic novel.  In 2000, "Hell on Earth" reappeared in book form as the title story of the second volume of the collection The Lost Bloch, which sports a Bernie Wrightson cover.

"Death of the Kraken" by David H. Keller

Back in August, tarbandu at Por Por Books Blog directed us to a 2024 interview of Betsy Wollheim in which interviewer Darrell Schweitzer says it is just as well that David H. Keller is forgotten.  Well, hold on to your hat, Darrell, because here at MPorcius Fiction Log we haven't forgotten Keller!  "Death of the Kraken" will be the fourteenth Keller story we've blogged about here at MPFL, and here are the links to prove it:  

"The Worm"

"The Goddess of Zion"

"The Thing in the Cellar" 

"The Seeds of Death"

"The Dead Woman"

"The Golden Bough"

"The Typewriter"

"The Last Magician"

"Tiger Cat"

"Valley of Bones"

"Dust in the House"

"A Piece of Linoleum"

"Lords of the Ice"

I'd like to support a fellow son of the Garden State, and I've liked the fiction of Schweitzer's that I have read, but "Death of the Kraken" is a good adventure story and so I have to say that Schweitzer is off base on the topic of Keller.  Well, maybe Schweitzer felt the need to suck up to the feminists or something; those face-to-face meetings can be tough, and if you are the kind of person who wants to have a career or friends you can find yourself saying any crazy thing to keep your job and keep the peace.

Keller gives us a frame story about a writer, our narrator, meeting an impoverished sailor and the sailor regaling the narrator with his twist ending adventure story.  The sailor's tale is about being hired to man a machine gun on a ship that a scientist takes to the Sargasso Sea; the scientist thinks there is a huge monster there that eats sailors, and a machine gun is just the thing to solve the monster problem.  Sure enough, as the ship drifts among the weed, past various dead hulks, crewmen begin disappearing.  These poor bastards don't even have a chance to cry our before vanishing; this huge monster must be a sneaky one!  Who among the passengers and crew will get back to America?  Will the sailor discover the true nature of the monster and end its reign of terror with a burst of machine gun fire?  Will the narrator, and will us readers, believe the sailor's gruesome tale?

"Death of the Kraken" is not a groundbreaking story, but it is written well and so it is entertaining.  "Death of the Kraken" was the cover story of an issue of that Argentine publication we just mentioned, and would reappear in Keller collections in 1976 and in 2010. 

"Here, Daemos!" by August Derleth

This is an obvious and conventional story, but not badly told.  Acceptable filler.

A new vicar takes over the parish of a English country village.  The previous vicar didn't handle the finances well, so the parish faces major debts.  The new guy has the idea of opening up some three-hundred-year-old tomb to take custody of the treasure said to be within it.  The local people are against this course of action--the tomb is of a man reputed to be a demonologist and is known to have a curse on it.  The new vicar considers this foolish superstition, and hires workers from outside the parish to help him loot the tomb.  The ghost of the demonologist and his big pet dog return to take revenge.  Derleth's story is very much a morality play and not an exercise in terror--the ghosts only harm the new vicar after he has made a decision that wiser heads have advised him against again and again, the ghosts don't wreak havoc indiscriminately throughout the countryside, victimizing innocent people or anything like that.

Anthologists seem to like "Here, Daemos!"  Peter Haining included it in Legends for the Dark in 1968, Vic Ghidalia and Roger Elwood included it in Beware the Beasts in 1970, and whoever edited Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Master/s Choice included it in that 1979 volume.  It also shows up in Derleth collections.

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None of these stories is bad, so this step in our journey through the history of Weird Tales has been a comfortable one.  The best material we read today was probably in the first third or so of Bloch's "Hell on Earth," but the final third of that story is not so hot, so David Keller's "Death of the Kraken" is today's top story.  Derleth's "Here, Daemos!" brings up the rear, but earns a passing grade.

More short stories in our next episode, kids.  Until then, stay weird.

Barry N. Malzberg: "Nordic Blue," "Safety Zone," and "Another Goddamned Showboat"

In 1990, the year I turned 19, a film full of actors I don't like was released based on the famous comic strip Dick Tracy.  Also released in 1990 was a paperback anthology of all new stories about Tracy entitled Dick Tracy: The Secret Files.  I've tried to get into the (original, Chester Gould) Dick Tracy comic strip a few times, but the art and the writing, I found, were just too boring.  (On the other hand, like everybody, I've loved the Daffy Duck spoof of Dick Tracy known as "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" since I was a kid.)  So, why do I care about Dick Tracy: The Secret Files?  Because I recently discovered that our hero Barry N. Malzberg contributed a story to it!

Today we'll read that story, and two other stories by Malzberg that appeared in 1990 anthologies, "Safety Zone" and "Another Goddamned Showboat."  I considered blogging about a fourth 1990 Malzberg story, "Playback," but when I looked at it I realized I had read it before but not blogged about it.  "Playback" is an annoying gimmick story, a sort of literary stunt in which Malzberg builds a story by augmenting a contemptuous spoof of science fiction penned by Raymond Chandler, quoting every line of Chandler's mocking parody and adding material between Chandler's sentences.  I'm in no mood to deal with this kind of thing; consider this a sub rosa blog post on "Playback," like an Easter Egg or hidden bonus track.

"Nordic Blue"

Back in 2018 I acquired a seriously battered copy of 1970's The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy for two dollars and today, to prepare myself for Barry's take on Tracy, you know, get a sense of the tone and themes of this American classic, I read three of the included 1940s Chester Gould stories, titled in this 1970 volume "88 Keyes," "Flattop" and "Breathless Mahoney and B. O. Plenty."  I still found the art to be pretty poor, even repulsively ugly, but the stories were actually entertaining, real hard-boiled portraits of human evil, monstrous individuals committing atrocities and more or less ordinary people succumbing to temptation or being seduced into the criminal underworld.  Many people--including women--get shot, run over by a train, set on fire, impaled with gardening tools, etc., and the death count is high.  Besides that welcome mayhem there is a lot of business with clues, Tracy finding something the killer dropped and the police lab analyzing it, that isn't exactly thrilling, but isn't too bad.  Perhaps the best parts of the strips are the extreme measures the villains take to hide while on the run, crawling down into chimneys or climbing into a bag of laundry and the like.  Maybe I have changed, become more amenable to this sort of material, or maybe the strips I tried to read years ago were not the best ones, and the ones I chose today represent the cream of the Gould crop.  Anyway, I can recommend at least those three sections of The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy, like 70 pages of a 250-page book.  

OK, let's take a look at Malzberg's take on the Tracy character, penned like 45 years after the Gould material I just read.

Well, it seems to me that Malzberg here uses the surface elements of Dick Tracy to write about his usual themes, like skepticism of technology and disastrous sexual relationships, and maybe to satirize the violence and pro-law-and-order attitude of Gould's strip; he doesn't seem to be trying to reproduce or pay homage to the elements of the '40s Gould strips that I found engaging, though maybe Malzberg is responding to later strips--somewhat to my surprise, the Dick Tracy comic strip is still going to this day, long after Gould's retirement in 1977.  

Malzberg's story starts at police HQ, with Tracy and a female subordinate getting word of a strange death, that of a man who froze to death, even though it is July.  A big theme of "Nordic Blue" is growing old and resentment of the change around you, and this woman colleague furthers this theme--it seems likely she will replace Tracy when he retires.  A male subordinate plays a similar supporting role in Malzberg's tale; this guy loudly complains about how things like the Miranda ruling and soft judges and juries have given criminals more freedom to operate and tied the hands of the cops; Tracy agrees, but is less vocal about it.  

During the investigation, Tracy uses high technology to solve the case, but he and his male colleague are nevertheless very skeptical of technology.  The villain is a manifestation of the dangers of high technology, a woman named Crystal Freezum who produces drugs via some process that generates extreme cold, cold that is killing people. Freezum also serves to represent the customary Malzbergian theme of the disastrous sexual relationship--she has two henchmen who are in love with her, even though she treats them like garbage. 

Malzberg shoehorns into his story still more themes.  One is pessimism about city life--the city is said to be "overpopulated" and unlikely to "make it out of the century."  ("Make it out of the century" is an example of a metaphor being used to obscure meaning and evade responsibility rather than clarify meaning and illuminate a point--what the hell does "make it out of the century" mean?  It can mean anything, so nobody can accuse Malzberg of being wrong in his dire prediction.)  To me, this feels like a 1970s attitude than a 1980s one.  More in tune with what I expect to hear from 1980s liberals like our sad sack pal Barry is the idea that the rich are building a two-tier society and walling themselves off from the second-class citizens.  Miranda, which gets mentioned a lot in this piece, means "perps could make believe that they were citizens," luxury hi-rises are said to be where people live to escape interaction with the doomed city, and we are told Crystal Freezum never leaves her apartment, the decor of which is entirely uniformly white.  The extreme extent of Malzberg's pessimism is revealed by the fact that, in this doomed city of haves and have-nots, Tracy is not universally considered a selfless champion of the have-nots!  We learn in no uncertain terms that some beat cops and ordinary civilians have been making snarky comments about how Tracy is now a celebrity who spends a lot of time on TV and only heads out to the field to work flashy cases!  

The plot of "Nordic Blue" is not great, and there are problems with the execution of multiple scenes.  In the '40s Dick Tracy strips I read, the villains kill people with their own hands in order to get their hands on others' cash, and then kill and deceive and corrupt still more people in their efforts to retain the cash and escape justice--everything in these WWII-era strips is very direct and morally clear.  In Malzberg's story, Crystal Freezum is some kind of drug dealer and what she is doing and why, and its moral valence, are far less clearly defined and far less exciting.  I couldn't really understand why she needed to generate deadly cold to manufacture drugs nor what the connection was between some of the injuries and deaths in the story and her drug manufacturing operations.  I can see that Malzberg wanted some grand guignol scenes, like the one with a veteran of the Bataan death march whose hands needed to be amputated because they froze, as a nod to all the terrible bloodshed in the original comic strips, but Crystal Freezum's connection to this atrocity  is sort of tenuous.  (Maybe Malzberg is trying to suggest that the really bad criminals in real life are not people who stab other people or set them on fire with their own hands but businesses who pollute the environment or something.)  Malzberg starts his story off on a bad foot with some pretty feeble jokes in the police station that don't seem to play any role in developing the characters or generating atmosphere.  The concluding action scene is not very well done--you can't visualize where people are or what they are doing, and their movements make no sense.  And the ending, a downer of course, is somewhat cryptic.

"Nordic Blue," which as far as I can tell has never been reprinted, is kind of a mess and I am going to have to give it a thumbs down.   

"Safety Zone" 

"Safety Zone" debuted in an anthology about ghosts in New England.  Like everybody, I like New England, a great road-tripping region.  Consider this a recommendation from MPorcius Travel Guide.  I am reading "Safety Zone" today in a scan of 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories, and you can also find it in Collecting Myself, one of the Malzberg collections recently published by the good people at Stark House.      

"Safety Zone" bears as an epigraph a quote from Joanna Russ that refers to the fact that H. P. Lovecraft had a very limited sex life, and apparently little interest in sex, and dealt very little with sexual relationships in his writing.  Malzberg's story is set in Providence, and is narrated by a young woman, Donna, who has never heard of Lovecraft and lives with a lame roommate who hates to leave the house and spends his time watching TV and writing his autobiography.  As for Donna, it seems like the center of her life is going to the singles bar.  

Tonight Donna meets an odd character at the bar--she doesn't realize it, but it is the ghost of H. P. Lovecraft, come back to Providence in this year, the year he would have turned 100, to try to learn about sex!  He clumsily tries to develop some sort of relationship with Donna, even gets physically aggressive, but Donna rejects him.  The ghost talks about hearing the hounds in the distance, I guess a metaphor for the realization of those no longer young that death is approaching.  Donna goes home, and after finding her roommate passed out in front of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, she goes to bed and for the first time hears the hounds in the distance.  It is implied that she, like Lovecraft, has an unhealthy attitude about sex and time may be running out for her to build a healthy sexual relationship before she dies, as it ran out for HPL. 

Like "Nordic Blue," "Safety Zone" is a "riff" on a major American pop culture phenomenon that Malzberg (it seems) is uneasy with or hostile to, a story about getting old and a story in which figure people who don't want to leave their apartments and otherwise erect barriers between themselves and others.  "Nordic Blue" is much better than "Safety Zone," though; the jokes are actually amusing and the characters' motivations more clear and their fates more poignant.  Here we have a solid Malzberg production.

("Playback" is another derivative piece drawing on the work of an iconic American genre writer--I guess this was what Malzberg was up to in 1990.  Detractors might call this behavior lazy, but fans can comfortably label these works "meta" and "recursive"!) 

     

"Another Goddamned Showboat"

I don't know a lot about Ernest Hemingway, so much of this story must be flying right past me.  In "Another Goddamned Showboat" Hemingway is a frustrated writer and has turned to the pulp market, focusing on science fiction.  He sits in a Paris cafe with his wife as the Germans advance on the city, groaning because "the kids" Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein have broken into Astounding but Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. has rejected all of Hemingway's many submissions.  The tone of Malzberg's story is despairing--Hemingway is broken up over the fates of his peers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce, feeling old, drinking too much, and worried because soon the money will run out and they'll have to leave France and he'll have to take some menial job.  But Hemmingway isn't giving up--he reads the Asimov and Heinlein stories with care, hoping to learn from them.  Malzberg's last line, "The war was on.  The war was coming.  Bit by bit, one by one, the stars were coming out" perhaps is meant to contrast how the world at large was entering a long period of terrible destruction and tremendous risk--global conventional war among all the great powers followed by the Cold War between the nuclear-armed hegemons that come out of the conflagration on top--but the world of science fiction was beginning its golden age with the appearance of Asimov, Heinlein, and others; maybe, among those others, along with A. E. van Vogt and Clifford Simak and Ted Sturgeon, in this alternate universe, will be Ernest Hemmingway.

A moderately good piece that presumably draws on Malzberg's own experience as an aspiring literary writer who had to resort to genre fiction to get published.  "Another Goddamned Showboat" debuted in What Might Have Been: Volume 2: Alternate Heroes, and in the same year appeared in the omnibus edition of both volumes of What Might Have Been.  In 1994 the story was again presented to the SF community in the collection The Passage of the Light: The Recursive Science Fiction of Barry N. Malzberg, and when our Italian friends put out a book of science fiction about science fiction in 2010 they included a translation of "Another Goddamned Showboat."

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We're on a journey here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and that journey is not a straight line to any particular final destination.  Sometimes we get diverted on to little side roads, see what is at the end of what turn out to be cul-de-sacs.  Our little Dick Tracy detour today may have been a disappointment, but time spent learning about major elements of American popular culture and the career of Barry N. Malzberg is not time wasted.  And the Hemingway and Lovecraft stories Malzberg put out there in 1990 are not bad.

More short stories next time, dear readers, stories from further back in time, back before I was born.

Asimov's Masters: A C Clarke, L Niven and B Malzberg

Barry Malzberg's "The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" came to mind while working on my last blog post, so let's read it today.  One of the places "The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" was reprinted is an anthology of stories from Asimov's magazine entitled Isaac Asimov's Masters of Science Fiction.  This is a curious artifact; it looks like they just took the same plates used to print the magazine and used them to print almost all the pages of this book.   I also have to wonder if any of the stories in the book live up in tone or content to the promise of the sex and violence cover. 

We'll read "The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" from a scan of this anthology, and round out this blog post with stories by two other masters, men whom we'd have to guess know a lot more than Barry about the hard sciences and also about bringing in the big bucks for publishers and bringing home those Hugos, Arthur C. Clarke and Larry Niven.

"Quarantine" by Arthur C. Clarke 

As Clarke describes in an intro to this story, "Quarantine" is a stunt.  Some British guy came up with the idea of printing up postcards with an entire SF story on them that SF fans could collect and mail to each other.  Asimov wrote one, and so did Clarke; "Quarantine" is that postcard-sized story.

"Quarantine" is a little cryptic, but I think I get it.  There is a vast interstellar empire of robots.  They keep sending recon units to Earth, but all these recon units get "infected" and so HQ destroys them.  After this has happened many times, the command program of the inorganic space empire directs the destruction of the Earth.  The surprise ending is that the "infection" suffered by the recon robots was getting addicted to chess, and the command program knew that this addiction, if allowed to spread, would so obsess the computers of the empire that the empire would collapse.

Acceptable.  After its debut in Asimov's, "Quarantine" has reappeared in multiple Asimov properties and Clarke collections.

"Cautionary Tales" by Larry Niven 

This is a brief philosophical piece.  We might say it has a twist ending or subverts one's expectations.  It is written in a vivid and easy to digest style.  We'll marginally recommend it.

Gordon is one of the few humans on some kind of space station or something full of intelligent aliens of many different species.  One alien approaches him, a being who has a similar body chemistry to a human.  This alien is obsessed with trying to achieve immortality, and has been spending his life travelling hither and thither throughout the universe, investigating every culture and every technology, trying to find the secret of immortality.  He has not found it yet, but he hasn't given up.  He has developed a sense that tells him when he meets other intelligent beings who share his obsession--Gordon he knows is one.

Gordon hears this alien talk, describe all the places he has been, all the time he has spent on the quest for immortality.  The alien is now too old to have children, something he has left undone; the alien lets slip that he has lived over ten thousand Earth years.  Then he asks Gordon to join him on his quest, which will afford Gordon access to knowledge and technology no human has ever before had access to.

The story thus far resembles the first chapter of a novel about a long quest, but this is a short story, and Niven's twist ending is that Gordon refuses to join this alien on his quest talking to the alien has opened Gordon's eyes to ancient wisdom--it is better to spend your brief life productively, not on a a quixotic quest seek to extend that life indefinitely.  Gordon heads back to Earth, presumably to meet a woman and build a family, the only real way to achieve anything close to immortality.

I like it.  "Cautionary Tales" shows up in a few of the aforementioned Asimov properties as well as a bunch of Niven collections.

"The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" by Barry Malzberg

OK, this is why we are here today.  Let's dig in!

"The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" is an epistolary story consisting of communications between different individuals; each individual gets his own font, at least in the Asimov's printings.  Through the documents we learn that it is the 24th century and a big organization handles what amounts to TV broadcasts across the solar system, maybe across the galaxy.  Our protagonist, the Roger of the title, is an expert on mystery stories, and has applied for a job composing mystery scripts.  He was rejected, largely because the mystery form is no longer popular and thus few mystery writers are needed.  Science fiction, westerns, pornography and "gothics" are much more popular, and the organization's management suggests Roger apply for a job writing military adventure stories set on Venus.

Roger is a very emotional and egotistical guy.  He is insulted by the suggestion he write SF, and argues passionately that the mystery is the form that built popular fiction entertainment and that soon it will again rise to dominance over SF, the western, and the gothics.  When the management still refuses to hire him, Roger hatches a cunning plan of revenge.  He has a friend who is already employed as a mystery writer, and Roger has this accomplice put scripts composed by Roger into the system.  These scripts cause an uproar as they, apparently, kill off famous fictional detectives like Hercule Poirot.

A pretty fun story with meta characteristics that are not cloying or indulgent but actually sort of amusing and interesting.  What genres will continue to be popular in the future?    

"The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" would be reprinted in various publications associated with Asimov, and Malzberg and his oft-times partner Bill Pronzini included it in their anthology of SF crime stories, Dark Sins, Dark Dreams.  The version of the story printed in Dark Sins, Dark Dreams lacks much of the distinctive use of fonts, but it includes an intro by Malzberg in which Barry tells us that, when he (Barry) publicly declared he was quitting the SF field, Philip K. Dick called Barry "a whiner."

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Three stories which accomplish their goals, which are not too long or too convoluted, stories in which people's behavior and motivations make sense, stories which have twist endings that do not strain credulity but sync up with what has come before and thus offer the reader satisfaction.  These stories are not breathtaking masterpieces, but the respectable work of craftspeople who show respect for their field, their audiences, and themselves.  Things don't always go so smoothly here at MPFL, so let's show some gratitude to Messrs. Clarke, Niven and Malzberg, and the editor of Asimov's, George H. Scithers.  

More short stories when next we convene here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

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.

More short stories next time, friends.