Merril-approved 1958 stories by P Ustinov, J Vance, J Vatsek and K Vonnegut, Jr.

The year: 1958.  Our mission: To explore the SF of that year.  Our guide: critical darling Judith Merril.  On the last leg of our journey through the year the Hope Diamond made its way to the Smithsonian Institution, the first communications satellite reached orbit, and the Fifth French Republic was founded, we finished off the "T" authors included on the Honorable Mentions list in the back of Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume, and today we'll tackle the sole "U" on the list and the three "V"s, reading two stories by people considered important outside our beloved SF ghetto that debuted in mainstream publications, as well as a story by one of the giants of SF that debuted in a lesser pulp and a story by some woman I've never heard of that first saw print in one of the most pretentious SF periodicals.  Today we are celebrating diversity here at MPorcius Fiction Log--when the revolution comes, tell them to spare me!

But first!  A list of links to the twenty-two (!) previous stages of this epic journey!

Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin
Pauline Ashwell, Don Berry, and Robert Bloch
John Brunner, Algis Budrys, and Arthur C. Clarke
"Helen Clarkson" (Helen McCoy), Mark Clifton, Mildred Clingerman and Theodore R. Cogswell
John Bernard Daley, Avram Davidson and Chan Davis
Gordon R. Dickson 
Charles Einstein, George P. Elliot, and Harlan Ellison
Charles G. Finney, Charles L. Fontenay, Donald Franson, and Charles E Fritch
Randall Garret and James E. Gunn 
Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert, and Philip High
Shirley Jackson, Daniel Keyes, and John Kippax

Damon Knight and C. M. Kornbluth
Fritz Leiber, Jack Lewis and Victoria Lincoln
Katherine MacLean, "T. H. Mathieu" (Les Cole) and Dean MacLaughlin 
A. E. Nourse
"Finn O'Donnevan" (Robert Sheckley) and Chad Oliver
Avis Pabel, Frederik Pohl, and Robert Presslie

John T.Phillifent, Kit Reed, Mack Reynolds, and Charles W. Runyon 

Margaret St. Clair, Thomas N. Scortia and John Shepley

Robert Silverberg and Clifford Simak

Cordwainer Smith, Will Stanton, and Job Stopa

Theodore Sturgeon, William Tenn, and Walter Tevis

"The Man in the Moon" by Peter Ustinov

Ustinov is one of those guys who people say is some kind of genius, and who am I to disagree?  I barely know anything about him!  I recognize his name and face, though, I guess from Spartacus and all those Agatha Christie things my mother would watch.  

"The Man in the Moon" debuted in The Atlantic Monthly, one of those magazines smart people are always talking about, alongside a poem by John Ciardi, whose translation of the Divine Comedy I read back when I thought there was a chance I might amount to something and figured I should read real books and not just stuff about monsters and adventures to improbable locales.  You can read "The Man in the Moon" at The Atlantic's website, which is what I did; PDF scans of the original magazine are also out there in the Wild West that, for the time being, is still the internet.  The story was collected in Ustinov's Add a Dash of Pity.

Ustinov was an Englishman, though of Russian ethnicity, and some kind of activist who worked to confer upon the world the dubious blessings of world government, and "The Man in the Moon" is a tepid satire full of lame and obvious jokes the point of which is to attack British imperialism and promote world government.  Good grief!  

A British scientist with a Swiss friend develops a means of reaching other planets.  He hopes to go to America to discuss his success with other scientists.  The British government stops him from going to the US because they want to keep the ability to explore other planets in British hands with the hope of regaining the leading position in the world that Great Britain had in the 18th and 19th centuries.  In response, the scientist gives speeches in which he decries fear of the Soviet Union, insists he is not a patriotic Briton but a man of the world, makes disparaging remarks about Rudyard Kipling, denounces European imperialism and racism, compares the current British government to that of Nazi Germany, and laments that if mankind reaches other planets the result will be racism against and exploitation of aliens and war between humans, a replay of the colonialism and world wars of the period 1492-1945.

The story ends with the revelation that the English scientist has managed to get his innovation to Switzerland and so the Swiss are the first to land on the moon.

Banal politics plus tired jokes about the scientist's relationship with his wife and kids equals a story that feels like filler and offers neither entertainment nor intellectual stimulation.  "The Man in the Moon" is like a Socratic dialogue you've already heard bolted onto a hunk of bare bones sitcom humor you've already seen.  Thumbs down!  (You've probably already figured out on your own why leftist Merril, who is always trying to shoehorn mainstream figures and mainstream publications inside the SF tent as part of her project of dissolving the barriers between the literary mainstream and genre literature, felt the need to promote this mediocrity with a snooty pedigree.)

"Worlds of Origin" AKA "Coup de Grace" by Jack Vance

From one of our most reputable publications to a pulp magazine that wikipedia and the Science Fiction Encyclopedia suggest is a piece of garbage, Super-Science Fiction.  "Worlds of Origin" is one of the ten Magnus Ridolph stories and has been reprinted many times in Vance collections as well as in a few Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg anthologies under the title "Coup de Grace."  I own a copy of the issue of Super-Science Fiction in which the story debuted, and actually have already read the issue's Robert Silverberg, Robert F. Young and Koller Ernst stories, and it is in its pages that I will read "Worlds of Origin" today.  I'll also note that the Emsh illustration to the tale, featuring an old bearded skinny guy and an old fat balding guy and a slender elfish young lady, is quite good.

This is a fun detective story full of clever and amusing science fiction elements.  Vance with admirable economy sets a scene and describes characters and alien societies in a way that is interesting and his charming dialogue brings a smile to the face of the reader again and again.  The story also seems to push (perhaps ironically and insincerely?) what we might call a liberal or left-wing commonplace--moral relativism, the idea that each culture has its own theory of right and wrong and it is pointless to judge one theory as better than any other.  

Magnus Ridolph is on holiday in a space station hanging in interstellar space that serves the role of a resort.  There are a bunch of people in the station, among them an anthropologist who has with him three "palaeolithics" or "cavemen" he has restrained with various high tech devices.  He approaches Ridolph, saying he needs help because he is being pursued by a woman.  Ridolph, being on vacation, is not very interested in helping, and their interview is interrupted besides.

The next morning the anthropologist is found dead.  The resort space station is floating out in a region of space claimed by no government, so there are no police to solve the crime, so the resort owner enlists Ridolph the famous detective.  Lacking the scanners and analyzers that an official police force would employ to solve the crime lickety-split, Ridolph must rely on his knowledge of the cultures of the many suspects to determine who must be the killer.  Each suspect is interviewed, and Ridolph solves the case.  Because Vance comes up with a strange and fun (and by 20th-century standards, amoral or evil) culture for each of the suspects, and because the relationship between Ridolph and the resort owner is amusing, the interviews are actually fun, not the tedious blah blah blah of red herrings we get in so much detective fiction.

Thumbs up for "Worlds of Origin," a successful detective story which is also a successful humor story and which includes many entertaining science fiction elements and is, perhaps, a tricky philosophical story about moral relativism.

         

"The Duel" by Joan Vatsek

On her website, Joan Vaczek Kouwenhoven's daughter, Elizabeth Arthur, includes a bio of her mother, whose "The Duel" appeared in F&SF under the name Joan Vatsek.  Vatsek was born in the United States during World War One, the daughter of a Hungarian diplomat, and lived in Europe, Canada, Ohio and Egypt before making her career and getting married twice in the environs of New York and Washington, D.C.  Vatsek has only three credits at isfdb, but produced quite a number of mainstream (maybe some of them are thrillers?) stories, novels and plays.  As for "The Duel," it was included in one of those anthologies with Alfred Hitchcock's name on the cover that has been reprinted in numerous formats.

Laurence, a writer, grew up in a 17th-century house in Virginia, the remains of a slave plantation.  He has returned to the now lonely and remote house with his wife, Janine, who is graceful and not conventionally beautiful, but like a Durer drawing, arresting and unforgettable.  Janine doesn't like the house.  She is a superstitious sort; for example, she doesn't like it when moonlight lands on the bed.  (This is a superstition I never heard of before.)  One day, Laurence finds Janine using a makeshift ouija board; Janine's mother taught her this technique of communicating with the dead.

Janine acts as if she has developed a relationship with a soldier who died during the War of Independence and is buried on this property.  This Major Jamieson brags about his martial and sexual successes, and is jealous when Janine is intimate with her husband Laurence.  Laurence of course thinks his wife is loony, and considers taking her to a shrink, even though she seems happier than she ever has been.  But he holds off, and we get the horrible climax--Janine, in love with the ghost, helps the Major slay Laurence, but too late Janine realizes that the Major does not love her, only enjoys killing men and seducing women, he seeing other people as no more than opponents to be manipulated and defeated.  Janine goes insane.   

Of course I think Merril chose to promote this story because it was written by a woman whose work had appeared many times in mainstream venues, but "The Duel" is pretty good so I can't fault her for the choice.  The story moves along at a decent clip and has various memorable images; in particular, a fetishistic erotic scene in which Janine, who uses a wine glass as the ouija board's pointer or planchette, grasps the stem of the wine glass and touches her mouth to its rim as if she is stimulating a phallus, all while her poor husband watches. 

We might see "The Duel" as a story about gender roles.  Janine's mother worked hard to provide Janine a good education, and had hopes Janine would be a writer or painter or actress or something.  Janine took a stab at these vocations, including doing actual remunerative work at an ad agency, but was never much good at them, or at least lacked the drive to succeed at them.  This sort of broke her morale.  Major Jamieson, the 18th-century womanizer, tells Janine a woman need not be useful, merely ornamental, and this assuages her guilt--embodying pre-feminist or anti-feminist views of a woman's role makes her happier than feminist career-oriented ones have, at least on the short term.  The story not only contrasts the frustrated career-oriented Janine of New England with the ornamental Janine of Virginia, but middle-class 20th-century Laurence and 18th-century aristocratic Major Jamieson--Laurence is committed to his wife and works for money, while the ghost is a guy whose life (and afterlife) are occupied with seducing women and killing men in duels.  The differences between the way Laurence manifests manhood and the Major does seems to advantage the Major--while Laurence, working hard on his books to pay the bills, cannot spend much time with Janine, the Major, a decadent and amoral aristocrat, is with her all the time and makes her happy.  Of course, the Major ultimately cannot satisfy Janine, he being totally selfish; "The Duel" may also be about how, for women, sexual relationships with men are always unsatisfactory.  

"The Manned Missiles" by Kurt Vonnegut 

Kurt Vonnegut is one of those writers of science fiction like J. G. Ballard and Doris Lessing who has a sparkling reputation among mainstream critics, and "The Manned Missiles" debuted in the mainstream women's magazine Cosmopolitan.  (Before TV took over the culture, magazines like Cosmopolitan included lots of fiction; I will also note that it appears that, before the 1960s, Cosmopolitan was geared towards wives and mothers, not sexually-active single career women, as it has been in my lifetime.)  It is easy to see why Merril liked the story, why it is in a women's magazine, and why the mainstream critics like Vonnegut--"The Manned Missiles" is a reasonably well-written sentimental and manipulative tear jerker (the characters actually cry) and it is also one of those stories that tries to get you to believe that the Soviet Union is no worse--hell, it's better!--than the United States.  A lot of educated people seem to believe this of the USSR, like a lot of educated people purport to believe that a man who cuts off his testicles (or says he plans to someday maybe cut off his testicles) is a woman, and it is hard to tell to what extent they really believe this stuff and to what extent they say it to advance and protect their relationships and careers.  "The Manned Missiles" is also one of those stories that tells you space travel is a total waste of time, that individuals probably can't handle it and the human race probably won't benefit from it.  (Remember that Camille Paglia quote about how if women were in charge we'd all still be living in grass huts?)

"The Manned Missiles" comes to us in the form of two letters, one from a citizen of the Soviet Union and one from an American, both working-class men who had ambitious sons who became astronauts and died when their space craft, the first manned Soviet and the first manned American space craft, collided out in space.  There is a lot of room for interpretation because both writers may be considered unreliable narrators, people deceived by their governments, but on the surface it seems like the Communists put up a manned satellite to study the Earth for peaceful purposes (or maybe spy on us?) and the untrusting Americans sent a rocket up to destroy the Soviet satellite (or maybe just spy on it?)  Vonnegut makes the Russian (though maybe he is Ukrainian) sympathetic and admirable, all high-minded and wise and cute (he calls satellites "baby moons"), with a son who was some kind of genius and suffered terribly in space from nausea and so forth.  The Yankee Vonnegut makes sympathetic but pathetic, a religious rube whose son was a single-minded and selfish square who was ambitious because of psychological problems.

Like Ustinov's story, "The Manned Missiles" is what you expect a story that employs science fiction devices but appears in a mainstream outlet to be, a rehash of lame left-wing politics married to family dynamics drama.  Vonnegut at least makes a go at writing in the voices of diverse characters and showing why space travel is stupid and the commies in the East are no worse than the hypocritical liberal market societies of the West instead of just speechifying about it like Ustinov, and Vonnegut tries to make you cry by portraying parents talking about their sons who were killed by the hubris, venality and paranoia of the ruling class instead of trying to make you laugh at bargain basement jokes about marriage like Ustinov does.  We'll call "The Manned Missiles" acceptable.

I read "The Manned Missiles" in a scan of 2017's Complete Stories and you can find it in other Vonnegut collections as well.

**********

The Vance is the most fun and entertaining and the most science-fictiony story of today's group, Vance coming up with wild settings and cultures, perhaps as a means to illustrate and maybe undermine the idea of cultural relativism.  The Vatsek is also a success as an entertainment and it is probably the most sophisticated of today's stories; she takes a traditional ghost story format and hooks it up effectively with a love triangle element with some powerful if sneaky sexual components, and uses this material to talk in an undogmatic way about gender roles.  Vonnegut and Ustinov's stories are just tendentious anti-Western Cold War dogmatism, Ustinov bludgeoning you while Vonnegut uses tried and true literary devices in an effort to pull your heart strings.  Taken as a group, not a bad illustration of the variety of what could be accomplished in 1958 with fantasy and science fiction techniques.

Bruno Fischer: "Girls for the Pain Dance," "Death Came Calling," and "The Chimes of Death"

I was disappointed by Bruno Fischer's 1950 novel The Lustful Ape, but maybe this guy shines in shorter forms?  Let's read three stories Fischer published under his pen name Russell Gray in late 1930s issues of Dime Mystery Magazine.  According to wikipedia, Dime Mystery Magazine was the first of the "weird menace" or "shudder pulp" magazines; wikipedia indicates that this genre is all about "torture and brutality" and features apparently supernatural phenomena that turn out to have mundane explanations.  

In 1937 [wikipedia tells us] the emphasis on sex and sadism in Dime Mystery's stories increased, but in 1938 the editorial policy switched back to detective stories. These stories now focused on detectives with some unusual handicap such as amnesia or hemophilia.

Well, we've got two 1937 stories and a 1939 story on today's dance card, so we'll see if they bolster wikipedia's descriptions or buck these alleged trends.  

"Girls for the Pain Dance" (1937)

The issue of Dime Mystery which includes "Girls for the Pain Dance" also offers a story called "Mate for the Thing in the Box," which sounds pretty wild, and a story by our old friend Ray Cummings, so maybe we'll come back to this publication some day.

A bunch of wealthy people are on holiday at some colony of rich peoples' estates near a lake in the woods, I guess in upstate New York.  Our narrator, his fiancé, and some of their pals see a pretty girl they know on the other side of the lake--she is naked, her skin looks burned, and she is doing some kind of frenzied dance!  The narrator and his friends swim across the lake but are too slow--the woman has danced back into the woods and they can't find her;m they proceed to the estate where she lives with her uncle.

The naked girl's uncle doesn't know where she is, and reports that she is sort of wild child, often away for days at a time.  Eventually she shows up, running into view in the dark of night, on fire, and dies among our shocked cast of upper-middle-class worthies after expending her last breathes in giving some vague clues about hell and the devil.

It is not long before another wealthy young woman has vanished and is then spotted across the lake, naked, her skin burned, doing a strange dance, just like her predecessor.  This time the cast hears from the victim's kidnappers, who demand a half million dollars from her father.  Daddy can only raise 300K, so he asks another rich guy, the narrator's future father-in-law, for 200, but father-in-law refuses, saying giving money to the kidnappers will only encourage them to kidnap more people.  The second victim, just like the first, bursts out of the woods after sunset, naked and on fire--we hear about how her formerly "luscious breasts" are now "two charred mounds"--and collapses among her friends and family.  With the last of her strength she offers semi-coherent comments about the devil.

The third victim is our narrator's fiancé, who is seized in a sort of commando raid by tommy-gun wielding men in devil costumes.  The police are on hand to prevent just such an eventuality, but if you've been watching the news you won't be surprised to learn that the villains outfight the boys in blue and escape scot-free on a motor boat, the future Mrs. Narrator in their clutches.  

Events occur that culminate in the narrator stumbling upon the abandoned coal mine where the men in devil costumes are holding his fiancé, and he watches as his nude betrothed "dances" in what amounts to a giant frying pan!  The big metal plate is divided into sections, and at a control panel the devils can heat up one section at a time--our narrator's fiancé jumps from one section to another as the temperature of the various sections increases or decreases.  The fiends are conditioning her to dance as the other two girls danced on the lake shore--the two previous girls, driven insane by pain, kept on dancing even when outside the frying pan.  

Insanity is a recurring motif of Fischer's repetitive story and multiple men lose their minds in reaction to the capture, torture and murder of their fiancés or daughters.  Our narrator isn't the only guy witnessing the torture session--his future father-in-law has been invited to watch the torture of his daughter, and this formerly tough egg starts losing it the sight of her agony.  The devil-clad men demand a million dollars from him.

The young woman in questions slips and falls, burning her hip, and this triggers the narrator's charge into the torture chamber.  He snatches up the devils' tommy gun and mows them down, saving the day.  Their leader turns out to be the uncle and financial guardian of the first victim; he killed her to get at her inheritance and then got greedy.

This story is not good.  We won't blame Fischer for all the typos, but we have to blame him for the less than credible behavior of the criminals and the police in the story, and the outlandish psychological effects Fischer suggests might result from being put in a giant frying pan, as well as the whole idea that frantically jumping from one spot to another would be interpreted as some kind of dance.  The best part of "Girls for the Pain Dance" is the response of the wealthy men to the capture and torture of the young women, which is pretty believable and thus disturbing.

"Death Came Calling" (1937)

While "Girl for the Pain Dance" was touted as a "thrill-packed terror novelette," "Death Came Calling," like Ray Cummings' "The Horror at Black Glen," also in this issue, is promoted on the table of contents as a "short tale of mystery and terror" and, indeed, it is like half the length of the saga of the giant frying pan we just endured.

The initial narrator of this caper is a reporter who handles the crime beat of a small town.  He is hanging around the cop shop when a man comes in bearing in his fist a human heart!  This blood-drenched man then takes over the job of narration as the journalist and police stenographer record his outré claims.  As he tells it, he banged some hot blonde chick but refused to marry her when she came by claiming she was preggers.  So she jumped in the river and drowned.

Being one of her friends, our guy had to attended the suicide's funeral, where he saw her body in the casket.  But when he got home, there she was!  Looking as hot as ever!  He couldn't resist her, and went to her, but blacked out and, when he awoke, wondered if it had all been a dream or hallucination.  But then the next day he saw the dead girl on mass transit!  

These sorts of episodes continue, wrecking the man's relationship with his new girlfriend and with his boss, who in separate incidents catch him embracing and kissing this woman who seems to come out of nowhere to seduce him with her gorgeous breasts.  He gets a new job, and then another when the living dead woman again appears to ruin his reputation at work; this happens again and again, driving the man into penury.  The living dead woman even comes on the scene to throw a monkey wrench into the works when our guy tries to hire a prostitute!

Eventually, the man decides to plunge a stake into the heart of the living dead woman, thinking that might put her in her grave permanent like.  After stabbing her with the stake again and again, he reaches into her oozing chest cavity to pull out her heart and bring it with him to the police station.

The reporter then resumes the responsibility for the story's narration, and we get the twist ending.  The woman who terrorized the man is the twin sister of the suicide and was derailing his career and relationships in pursuit of revenge.

"Death Came Calling" is a much more believable and compelling story than "Girls for the Pain Dance;" the gross out parts are less silly and everyone's behavior is more or less understandable.  The story also moves quickly and lacks the overabundance of characters and repetitive scenes that characterize "GftPD."  I can mildly recommend "Death Came Calling."

"The Chimes of Death" (1939)

"The Chimes of Death" is labelled (like its stablemate "The Case of the Frozen Corpses" by Ray Cummings) a "novelette of weird-crime adventure" and takes up about 16 pages.  Oy, I'm kinda wishing I had just picked out three eight-pagers like "Death Came Calling" for this blog post.

"The Chimes of Death" vies with "Girls for the Pain Dance" for title of today's most ridic story.  Our narrator is a private dick who happens to be very short.  He has been summoned by the mayor of a small city to help their overtaxed police force deal with the bizarre crime wave that has suddenly struck this little burg.  For the last three nights, precisely on the stroke of midnight, some normal citizen has gone berserk and assaulted another person for no reason.  Our narrator witnesses just such an event as the story begins: a couple are walking in front of city hall when the clock in the tower strikes twelve, and the man, well known as a devoted husband, suddenly starts clawing at his wife, ripping off her clothes and tearing at her flesh!  When the cops and our narrator pull him off his wife, the man comes to his senses and doesn't even remember what he has just done.

That same night, some thugs attack our little guy; he fights them off and as they flee he sees that one of them is a man he shot dead five years ago, a "notorious booze-runner"--the horrible injuries on the man's face, inflicted by our hero's bullets, are still evident! 

In addition to this wacky quasi-supernatural crime plot, "The Chimes of Death" provides us readers a love triangle plot.  The narrator is an expert ping-pong player and met a hot chick at a national table tennis tournament recently.  This girl is the daughter of the mayor of this town--it was she who got her dad to summon our narrator.  Some other dude is also smitten by the mayor's daughter, but she only has eyes for our hero; our guy rescues her when this rival tries to get fresh and, I guess, rape her.  The ensuing fight over the mayor's daughter is interrupted when the mayor's other daughter is assaulted by her wealthy boyfriend when the town clock strikes one.  People are now going berserk every hour instead of every twenty-four! 

Whoever is hypnotizing these people into attacking their loved ones has sent a note demanding 50k--these guys are not nearly as ambitious as the fiends in "Girls for the Pain Dance," or maybe their modest demands are just a reflection of the greater distance of this town from the economic juggernaut that is New York City.  The living dead booze-runner reappears; there is a car chase and gunfire, and the narrator is captured by the booze-runner after a crash.  The one-eyed revenant hypnotizes the diminutive detective--presumably planting the suggestion that he murder some individual at some specific time--and releases him. 

When our guy gets back to the police station he learns the mayor's daughter has been kidnapped.  But she reappears just before 4:00 AM.  She and our hero start making out, but when the clock strikes four, then begins the gore!  Each of these lovebirds turns into a frenzied killer bound and determined to tear the flesh from the other's bones with his or her fingernails and pearly whites!  The other guy who loves the mayor's daughter jumps in and preserves their lives, then carries off the woman.  When the detective comes to his senses he follows them, only to find his rival for the love of the mayor's daughter mortally wounded--the villains have killed him and captured our guy's sweetheart again!

The detective figures out where the criminals' hideout is and arrive just as the booze-runner with half a face is about to carve off half of the mayor's daughter's face.  Our guy captures the villains and gets his old foe to admit he spent the last few years in India learning hypnotism.  Another fight erupts and the detective guns down the villains.  Our hero is injured, but will live to marry the mayor's daughter.

While crazy, this story is much better than "Girls for the Pain Dance;" the wacky elements (a man with half a face, people tearing the flesh off their spouses, lovers and children with their fingernails and teeth) are actually sort of horrifying and not as risible as the material in the earlier story (like the spasmic dancing and thr giant frying pan), the plot operates somewhat more smoothly and the characters are significantly more interesting and behave more logically.  We're judging "The Chimes of Death" acceptable.

**********

This is shoddy exploitation junk, but "Death Came Calling" and "The Chimes of Death" have some entertainment value.  We may return to Dime Mystery Magazine for more twisted violence-against-women insanity, but our next adventures will find us in the pages of more influential and respectable publications.

Weird Tales Project: 1941

Progress can be reported!  I am now authorized by the MPorcius Fiction Log records department to announce that I have read at least one story from every issue of Weird Tales published with a 1941 cover date!  See below for links to my blog posts about each of the stories I read from the six issues of D. McIlwraith's magazine produced in that war year.  And first, links to other years, all of whose issues I have at least sampled a story from. 

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939   1940    ---- 

January 

Henry Kuttner: "Dragon Moon"

David H. Keller: "The Goddess of Zion"

Robert Bloch: "House of the Hatchet"

Ralph Milne Farley: "Test Tube Twin"

March

August Derleth: "Come to Me"

Dorothy Quick: "Edge of the Cliff"

Donald Wandrei: "The Crystal Bullet"

Thorp McClusky: "The Graveyard Horror"

May

Mary Elizabeth Counselman: "Drifting Atoms"

Carl Jacobi: "The Phantom Pistol"

Robert Bloch: "Beauty's Beast"

August Derleth: "Altimer's Amulet"

July

Ray Cummings: "The Robot God"

Clark Ashton Smith: "The Enchantress of Sylaire"

Ralph Milne Farley: "I Killed Hilter"

Manly Wade Wellman: "It All Came True in the Woods"

September

August Derleth: "Beyond the Threshold"

Robert Bloch: "A Sorcerer Runs for Sheriff"

Manly Wade Wellman: "The Half-Haunted"

Thorp McClusky: "The Music from Infinity"

Dorothy Quick: "The Lost Gods"

November

Edmond Hamilton: "Dreamer's Worlds"
Manly Wade Wellman: "The Liers in Wait"
Henry Kuttner: "Chameleon Man"
August Derleth: "Compliments of Spectro"

Weird Tales, Nov 1941: E Hamilton, M W Wellman, H Kuttner, and A Derleth

It is time to set our feet back on the sacred path, to resume our holy mission of reading at least one story from each 1940s issue of Weird Tales.  Today we reach a milestone as we finish up 1941 by reading four stories from the November '41 number, stories by Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, Henry Kuttner and August Derleth.  This issue has a pretty famous cover, an image by the great Hannes Bok that has been used on the covers of several later books, both anthologies of stories culled from Weird Tales and collections of stories by Weird Tales authors.  However, I have to say that this painting lacks the distinct character that marks most of Bok's most recognizable work; I suppose the subject matter--dead bones, the straight vertical lines of a column and a lectern, and the distant silhouettes of soldiers--didn't provide Bok the opportunity to exhibit his peculiar style, which generally finds its expression in curves and living forms.  Thankfully, within the magazine there are Bok productions more characteristic of the man's work that feature human and humanoid figures in various states of undress.

"Dreamer's Worlds" by Edmond Hamilton

One has to wonder if Hamilton in this story means to remind us of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," which bears as a subtitle "or a vision in dream.  A Fragment" and contains such lines as "A damsel with a dulcimer/In a vision once I saw."  The protagonist of "Dreamer's Worlds" is a prince named Khal Kan who lives on some alien planet inhabited by monsters and green-skinned barbarians as well as humans.  Khal Kan has been sent by his father, accompanied by two other fighting men, to scout an area for those greenies, but our guy decides to take a detour in hopes of catching a glimpse of a princess of the nomadic tribes of the desert who is famous for her beauty.  They infiltrate the camp of the desert people and lay eyes on this beauty, but the princess is a real she-cat, and when Khal Kan is recognized she has him bound and whipped.  Excited to find a woman of spirit, Khal Kan falls in love with her as she orders him whipped again and again.

We then learn an even more remarkable thing about Khal Kan--when he falls asleep at night he lives the life of a 20th-century paper pusher with a fat wife, American insurance company employee Henry Stevens!  When Stevens falls asleep, he lives the sword-swinging, monster-fighting life of Khal Kan!  All their lives these guys have had these recurring dreams that follow day by day the life of a man with a radically different personality in a radically different milieu.  Khal Kan assumes the dreary middle-class life of Stevens is just a dream, but Stevens isn't sure which life is the dream, and which the reality.  The insurance company functionary starts spending so much time thinking about Khal Kan's adventures that it has started distracting him from his work and damaging his relationship with his wife ("Henry Stevens, you haven't been listening to one word!...you're getting more dopey every day!....You go to bed earlier every night") that he goes to see a shrink.

When Stevens retires the night of the day he first sees the therapist, Khal Kan's comrades free the prince and he kidnaps the princess and carries her across the desert, kissing her against her will.  She very quickly goes from telling Khal Kan how he will be tortured when her people catch up to them to agreeing to marry him.  His new wife is at his side when just days later Khal Kan leads the defense of the kingdom against those green-skinned barbarians, who are led by Khal Kan's traitorous uncle.  The barbarians use poisoned arrows, and are winning the war, but Henry Stevens looks up in the encyclopedia how to make gunpowder and transmits this info to Khal Kan.  This innovation wins the war and saves Khal Kan's kingdom, but in the final fight against his uncle the prince is slain.  When the prince dies, Henry Stevens briefly wakes up and then dies himself, leaving both a beautiful sword-wielding desert princess and an obese housewife bereaved.  The shrink wonders if Henry died from some kind of "mental suggestion" when his fictional alter ego died, or if Henry was really in mental rapport with a man on another planet somewhere outside our solar system.

A decent filler piece, routine stuff but competent.  A mild rec, I suppose, for "Dreamer's Worlds."  It should probably be titled "Dreamers' Worlds." though.

In 1974, "Dreamer's Worlds" was reprinted in the Hamilton collection What's It Like Out There?, and in 2021 in the collection The Avenger from Atlantis. 

Left: USA, 1974  Right: Netherlands, 1975

"The Liers in Wait" by Manly Wade Wellman 

The narrator of this story is none other than Charles II, King of England!  Defeated by Cromwell's forces, the Royalist army is scattered and on the run, Charles himself in disguise as a wood cutter, making his way through a damp forest during a rainstorm.  He comes to a wretched little house inhabited by three odd characters, one of them the most beautiful girl he has ever seen, one of them a horribly diseased young servant, and the last a creepy tall man, father to the woman and master of the boy.  It turns out these three are witches and have used their black sorcery to trick Charles into coming to their disgusting domicile to cure the sick young man of his scrofula.  (As my well-educated readers all know, it was a common belief in the early modern period that the touch of a king could heal that disease.)  Charles heals the boy, who starts dancing around, so happy to be healthy for the first time in his life.  The witches then explain that they used their Satanic powers to make sure the Royalists were defeated by the Parliamentarians.  But these devil worshippers are not committed to the republican cause--they won the battle for Cromwell because of Parliament's backers purchased their infernal services!  And they are just as willing to turn their black magic to the cause of the King as that of the Roundheads!  The witches offer to put Charles back on the throne via sorcery in return for positions in his government; the gorgeous girl offers Charles her body.  Hubba hubba!  But Charles is a Christian and rejects the aid of the devil!

The father and daughter start casting spells to compel Charles, but the boy, grateful to the king for healing him, and considering how the Devil never lifted a finger to cure him of the scrofula which a follower of Christ liberated him from, renounces witchcraft and rescues his majesty; the two unrepentant conjurers and their spell book are destroyed.  The story ends with the suggestion that Charles II's commitment to religious tolerance later in his career stems from this weird encounter.

In some ways, "The Liers in Wait" is like a Conan story--Charles is a big strong guy, a leader of men, who finds himself on his own after a misfortune and beset by diabolical sorcerers and an evil seductress, to which Wellman adds some Christian and historical elements.  These real-life components are integral to the plot and atmosphere, and they, as well as the old timey vocabulary Wellman puts in the mouths of his characters, give the story a unique texture and make it more compelling.  The king is likable, and all four characters behave in ways that make sense, and Wellman does a good job describing the creepy setting and the mechanics and effects of the black magic.  An entertaining piece of work.  Thumbs up for "The Liers in Wait!"

Peter Haining included "The Liers in Wait" in his Black Magic Omnibus; when that volume appeared in paperback it was split into two volumes, with Wellman's story in the first.

"Chameleon Man" by Henry Kuttner 

This looks like a Kuttner story that has never been reprinted.  We love exploring the deep tracks here at MPorcius Fiction Log!  Unfortunately, "Chameleon Man" is an overly long humor piece, page after page of moderately ribald absurdity featuring a few recursive elements and an omniscient narrator who acts as a Greek chorus, commenting on the action of the plot.  The style and some plot elements of "Chameleon Man" are perhaps an imitation of P. G. Wodehouse.  The story's central gimmick is totally inconsistent, giving the story an "anything goes" flavor I did not appreciate; the jokes are weak, and the whole thing is long and repetitive.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

Vanderhoff is a guy who works in New York's most expensive women's clothier, a place where rich women and their hen-pecked men come to see fancy dresses and lingerie modelled by young ladies prior to selecting what to purchase.  Many of the gowns on offer are one-of-a-kind.

Vanderhoff is kind of a loser, a reader of science fiction magazines (Kuttner lists such authors as Verne, Wells, and himself, one of his little jokes) who has no personality of his own and so takes on the personality of those around him, as well as a man with no willpower who can't help but obey those who possess willpower, like his boss, manager of the store.

An irate customer, a red-faced colonel who served in Burma, chews out the manager and, after the colonel leaves, the manager takes out his frustrations on Vanderhoff.  I guess because of all the stress, or because the plot requires it, Vanderhoff's chameleon and yes-man traits manifest themselves in extreme and literal fashion.  Vanderhoff starts expertly mimicking the manager's every angry word and gesture--not voluntarily, mind you, but against his own will.  This apparent mockery further enrages the manager.  Then, after an extended period of precisely repeating the manager's words, when the manager says "I wish you would go drown yourself," Vanderhoff doesn't simply repeat this phrase, but is instead compelled as if by hypnotism to go to the subway station and take the long ride from Manhattan to Coney Island to jump in the ocean and destroy himself.  (Wait, this is Manhattan--couldn't this nut just have walked a few blocks east or west to the river?)

Out on Coney Island, Vanderhoff is diverted from his quest to drown himself by the command of another strong willed individual--a carnival barker--and Vanderhoff gets mixed up in wacky shenanigans at the peep show arcade and the boardwalk freak show.  His chameleon ability becomes even more extreme--when he looks into a coin-operated peep show machine and sees a gorilla abducting a native girl, his body takes on the form of a gorilla!  When he looks at a bearded man he takes on the man's appearance and is assaulted by the man's domineering wife!  At the freak show he takes on the shape of one freak after another.  A drunk attacks Vanderhoff, and our hero learns to control his ability to change his shape and uses this new skill to outfight the drunk.  

Somehow, Vanderhoff attains the power to create duplicates of himself.  Back in Manhattan, his yes-man persona shed, he uses this ability to humiliate his manager.  At a fashion show, the manager tells the assembled potential customers that the next dress they will see is a one-of-a-kind exclusive.  So Vanderhoff dons the dress, changes into a pretty girl, and creates dozens of versions of himself who stride out onto the stage in the purportedly unique dress, making his boss look a liar.  (One of Kuttner's blunders in the story is the inconsistent fashion with which he deals with whether Vanderhoff's powers to change himself can change or create his attire.)  A bunch of robbers bust in, keen to relieve the wealthy audience members of their jewels and cash, but Vanderhoff and his duplicates (whom he controls as easily as he does his own original body) revert to his natural shape and their overwhelming numbers allow them to outfight and capture the crooks.  Vanderhoff is now a hero!  He gets promoted by the owner of the store, taking the position of the manager who for years dominated him!  The angry colonel reappears and Vanderhoff uses his powers to manipulate the colonel into assaulting the former manager and achieving additional vengeance.

Fifteen pages of poor filler.

"Compliments of Spectro" by August Derleth 

Here we have a story inspired by such proto-superheroes as The Shadow and Doc Savage and the people who produced them.  Ashwell is an English author (why Midwesterner Derleth set his tale in England I have no idea) who created and writes novels weekly about Spectro, a guy in a cape who goes around retrieving stolen property and slaying archcriminals, leaving behind his trademark, an inscription of the phrase "Compliments of Spectro."  Sales of the Spectro novels have made Ashwell fabulously wealthy.

Ashwell is also a jerk, petty and snobbish and so forth.  A fan, Weedle, sent him a story of his own; unlike most of the unsolicited manuscripts Ashwell receives, the Weedle story is pretty good, and Ashwell plagiarizes it.  When Ashwell's and Weedle's stories, each using the same central gimmick, appear in print the same month, a court case results and Weedle is the loser.  The man commits suicide, leaving behind an impoverished widow.  

One of the character Spectro's signature gags is sending three warnings to a malefactor--the criminal thus has a chance to make amends or turn himself in or whatever and avoid the death Spectro inevitably deals out to those whose evil comes to his attention, should they refuse to repent.  Ashwell starts getting such warnings, but he doesn't take them seriously enough to forthrightly confesses his plagiarism and pay restitution and so doesn't live to the end of the story.

The ideas behind this story are good, but the resolution is a little lackluster.  For one thing, Ashwell dies in an unsatisfying fashion.  Worse, Derleth seems to leave open both the possibility that Ashwell's guilt led him to subconsciously give himself the three warnings and then kill himself and the possibility that it was some supernatural agency that warned and then slew him, but clues render both explanations unlikely, leaving the reader disconcerted as the story ends.

We'll call "Compliments of Spectro" acceptable.  Kurt Singer included the story in his anthology Tales of the Macabre, which enjoys some good living-dead-centric covers, and of course you can find it in Derleth collections. 

Left: UK, 1969.   Right: Norway, 1975

**********

Wellman's story is the winner here, though Hamilton's is a professional pedestrian piece of work.  I am against Kuttner's whole project here, and the story's execution is full of missteps besides.  Derleth's story represents a lost opportunity, Derleth having come up with a good idea but apparently lacked the time to bring it to fruition.

Wellman's only real competition for memorability comes from Hannes Bok's illustrations for a poem and two stories I didn't even read, plus his headings for the fan club and coming attractions columns.  Bok really makes this issue worth checking out.

With 1941 behind us, we can look forward to exploring stories from the six issues of Dorothy McIlwraith's magazine printed in 1942.  I have glanced at the tables of content of these issues and they are full of familiar names, so there is a lot of weird excitement ahead of us. 

Detail of Hannes Bok's illustration to the poem
"Haunted Hour" by Leah Bodine Drake

The Lustful Ape by Bruno Fischer

Probably she was telling the truth, Dirk reflected. But how could he be sure? Or it might be a half-truth, with information still withheld. It seemed as if every woman he spoke to these days lied to him.

It's been two months since we read a perverted piece of crime fiction, so after a multitude of blog posts about stories from science fiction magazines that people take seriously like Astounding and F&SF as well as some on the pulpier end like Thrilling Wonder Stories, let's descend back into the gutter!  In an antique mall in Verona, Virginia--purportedly the biggest in the United States!--I spotted an old paperback with a suitably nasty title and back cover description, The Lustful Ape by Bruno Fischer, published by Gold Medal in 1959.  This book has been reprinted multiple times since its initial appearance in 1950 under the pseudonym Russell Gray, so it was not difficult for me to find a digital version (full of typos, of course) for free online.  Wikipedia and Robert Kenneth Jones' The Shudder Pulps tell us Fischer is a German-born socialist and journalist who produced many stories for magazines like Dime Mystery Magazine and Terror Tales characterized by their lurid violence-against-women covers, so, if The Lustful Ape tickles our fancy, there is plenty more Fischer-penned depravity for us to explore.

Dirk Hart, protagonist of The Lustful Ape, was a police detective when he married Narda, a beautiful girl with a voracious appetite for sex and for money!  She convinced Dirk to quit the force and become a private eye!  This doubled his income, but it wasn't enough--Narda was so horny and greedy she started banging other guys and accepting fancy gifts from them.  As if that wasn't trouble enough, living in the same small house with Dirk and his whore of a wife was Dirk's Narda-hating younger sister, sexy 20-year old Lucy.

A couple of years ago Dirk finally threw Narda out.  But tonight she comes right into the house, right into the bedroom, half naked, and tries to seduce Dirk with that awesome bod of hers.  Dirk throws her out again, but a few hours later his old comrades at the police station call Dirk up--someone has shot Narda full of holes!  Hmm, didn't Lucy go out at like 1:15 in the morning, right after Dirk tossed Narda out on her ear?  So ends the first sex and violence-soaked chapter of The Lustful Ape, which consists of  twenty-three such chapters.  

The Lustful Ape is a story about honesty and mendacity.  Early on we are told Dirk is honest to a fault, and his reputation for honesty is referred to by other characters over the course of the book.  Throughout the narrative almost every one of the multitude of characters Dirk has to contend with lies and deceives, and we learn all kinds of facts about each character that each has been trying to conceal.  

“Why does every damn woman have to lie to me?”

The selling point of The Lustful Ape, as we can see from the cover illustrations and text, is sex--creepy sex!--and the novel's pervasive theme is of perverted, abusive, fetishistic sex--rape, voyeurism, sexualized torture, and sexualized violence against women.  Dirk slaps Narda in the face in the very first chapter, and he is supposed to be our hero, though the man called Ape performs most of the sexual abuse.

His head was so low over her that all she could see of him was his shaggy hair. She felt his fingers on the buttons of her pajamas. There was nothing she could do to stop him now, nothing she could say. She wondered if it would be a terrible beating or the thing that would be even worse. Her eyes closed.

Though a recurring motif, the sex in The Lustful Ape is not terribly explicit, more suggestive.  And the rape and sexual torture scenes don't go "all the way"--the title character, again and again, is about to rape somebody but then is stopped just short of doing so, leaving the victim merely groped, though grievously psychologically scarred.  Similarly, there is gruesome violence, but only rarely do we see anybody actually killed or maimed; multiple times the Ape has somebody in his clutches, having outfought a man or tied up a woman, but is prevented from killing him or crippling her.  As for the fights, these are probably better described as "beatings" or "assassinations."

The Lustful Ape is also about degradation and decay; all the characters in the story become worse over the course of the story, suffering physical and psychological and reputational damage as the tale proceeds.  Dirk is not only beaten up and tortured, but reduced to attempting suicide and, when that fails, begging another character to kill him!  More than one minor character succeeds in killing himself.  Many people are humiliated, lose their jobs, see their relationships sour--this is a depressing book! 

Another theme of Fischer's novel is the unreliability of women--women just won't come through for you when you need them most--and the terrible trouble women put men to, directly or indirectly.  Women deceive men (as well as other women) in pursuit of their petty goals, generally money, and men take terrible risks and make sacrifices out of a sense of duty to a woman, or because of love or lust for a woman, even when those women are less than deserving.  Dirk late in the story is confronted by an apparent dilemma, thinking he has to choose between his duplicitous sister and his faithless lover, forced by the villains to preserve one by sacrificing the other, though like so much of the drama in the novel this bit of excitement peters out and both dames are gonna survive, though hardly unscathed.

Ape said: “Boss, you’re smart, but it’s my neck too. Why’d you make me take her down? Jees, if we’re gonna whip — ”

“Because I’m smart,” Sheridan snapped. “I know my man. The only way to break him is through a woman." 

The plot of The Lustful Ape is kind of what you expect.  There is the murder of Narda, and then Dirk interacts with a huge cast of characters, almost all of them treacherous to one degree or another--each has something he is keeping from Dirk and many are likely to have loyalties to one or another of Dirk's adversaries.  Each of these persons is a suspect in Narda's murder and/or some other misdeed, and each of them runs the risk of becoming the murderer's next victim.  Dirk and his questionable allies run around town hunting up clues by interviewing people and looking through the archives.  Along the way, sometimes in chapters not featuring Dirk himself, we gain insight into various ongoing sexual relationships and witness the inauguration of fresh new sexual relationships; none of these relationships is life-affirming or joyful--at best they are tragic.  Additional crimes and perpetrators are uncovered and dealt with; Dirk gets beaten up, and in the final third or so of the novel Dirk and one of the story's many beautiful women spends a lot of time bound and tortured, eventually being rescued by one of Dirk's friends.

Then, as in so many mystery-type stories, after the climax in which the protagonist escapes death and the villains are brought to justice, we get an overly long talky section that wraps things up, in which the detective explains how he solved the case, the author ties up loose ends, and we readers get an idea of what the future holds for the surviving characters.  (The original King Kong and the first Star Wars movie wisely end very soon after the big climax in which the oversized menace is laid low, but detective stories often inflict upon the audience a long denouement sequence after the climax--Hitchcock's Psycho is notorious for this.)

Did I enjoy The Lustful Ape?  Can I recommend it?  Fischer's novel is reasonably well written; the pace is fast and there is no real fat, no extraneous descriptions of sunlight or ripples on the water or anything like that.  So the style is fine.

But The Lustful Ape is not fun.  It is sordid, cynical and sad, all the characters wounded, depraved or diabolical--the best of them commit blunders that get themselves and others in serious trouble, and everybody is scarred in some way, with many turning to the bottle or suicide.  Perhaps we should expect material like this from a socialist, who presumably sees the world through the lens of exploitation, and a journalist, who has probably been exposed to all kinds of crime, corruption and disaster.  Burt Fischer also fails to render any of his characters likable or easy to identify with, and it is hard for the reader to care who lives or dies or who is banging who.

So The Lustful Ape is not fun, and neither is it satisfying--it signally fails to provide the reader catharsis.  I've mentioned how the sex crimes and the fights are often cut off before a conclusion, either triumphant or tragic, and how the fights lack the dramatic thrust, parry and riposte of the fights you see in movies.  Our protagonist Dirk does not perform feats of derring-do; instead, he gets tricked by people and outfought by the Ape--repeatedly!  The Ape is incapacitated not by Dirk but by a minor character we have been primed to detest, a pretty boy who slapped Lucy early in the book, this guy with a peaches-and-cream complexion shoots Ape in the back from a place of concealment.  Ape doesn't see who got him, and we haven't actually seen Ape rape or kill anybody, so the whole thing lacks power--we can't cheer on the slayer or really rejoice in the death of the slain, and all the conflicts in the novel conclude this way.  Dirk doesn't dispose of the man behind the Ape, the brute's boss, either; Dirk's friend shoots that criminal mastermind while Dirk is literally tied up.  It is true that Dirk does overpower Narda's killer, but through the whole book this guy has been described as feminine and childlike, so big whoop.

Perhaps my biggest complaints about The Lustful Ape have to do with a major component of the plot, compromising photos taken by Narda and co-conspirators for use in blackmail.  For one thing, many of the blackmail victims react to the blackmailing in a way I found a little hard to credit.  But worse is the nature of the pictures.  When the pictures are introduced in the third chapter, a character who should know tells Dirk that the photos are not the product of trick photography but represent a real event and indicate real psychological facts about the people depicted.  But then, in Chapter Fourteen, over half way through the novel, we are told the pictures are, after all, special effects photos "any amateur" could have produced and the people in them aren't interesting eccentrics with weird fetishes but just normal people.  On this score, I felt Fischer wasn't playing fair with us, and I found this plot twist, which rendered the characters and plot less interesting than we had been led to believe, pretty galling.  Discovering that a person we thought was a normie is in fact a freak is compelling, but finding the opposite is deflating.  

“You’re a newspaperman. You’ve had lots of experience with montages and superimposed photos.”

“I can tell you right off that these aren’t. Notice how Ape and the girl blend with the background and with each other. Notice their positions — how their attitudes and faces and expressions are aware of each other. This is real stuff, Dirkie." 

I think I have to give the disappointing The Lustful Ape a thumbs down.  Sad!

Thrilling Wonder Stories, Fall 1946: H Kuttner & C L Moore, R Rocklynne, E Hamilton and M Leinster

A few days ago I was looking at the contents page of Bypass to Otherness, the 1961 Henry Kuttner (and C. L. Moore) collection.  Of its contents, it seems I have read seven stories: "Cold War," "Call Him Demon," "The Dark Angel," "The Piper's Son," "Absalom," "Nothing But Gingerbread Left," and "Housing Problem."  That leaves only one story to go, "The Little Things."  Let's read "The Little Things" today, in its inaugural appearance in the Fall 1946 Thrilling Wonder Stories, and three other stories in that issue of Sam Merwin's magazine.  We've already read the cover story of this ish of TWS, Kuttner and Moore's "Call Him Demon."   Looking back at my 2014 (the very dawn of time!) blog post on "Call Him Demon," my plot summary makes the story sound absolutely awesome, and of course then there are the illustrations of the story by Earle Bergey on the cover of the magazine and by Virgil Finlay inside that make the story appear to be a bondage sex extravaganza.  But in my blog post I go on to attack the story's characters, style, and length and to give it a negative vote.  I'm a tough grader!  

"The Little Things" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

"The Little Things" is credited to Kuttner alone in the magazine, and I am not sure on what basis isfdb also credits Moore.  The story has not been reprinted much, just in the aforementioned Bypass to Otherness and in a 2010 Haffner Press collection of Kuttner and Moore stories, Detour to Otherness.

This is an idea story, weak in plot and character--the protagonist doesn't know what is going on and doesn't have any decisions to make or obstacles to overcome.  He isn't likable and is hard to sympathize with.  The story is also about a revolution, but the motives and policies of the revolutionaries are pretty vague and elicit no intellectual or emotional response in the reader.  I suppose the drama of the story is meant to be generated by how the reader is led to believe the protagonist is a hero who is going to join the resistance and overthrow the government only to be told by the authors that the protagonist is no hero and will not be doing any such thing; Kuttner and Moore "subvert our expectations," something the critics always like to see, but maybe us readers aren't always crazy about.

Our guy was a gossip columnist of the second or third rank during World War II, a guy whose column was not nationally influential but was widely read in a medium-sized town.  As the war was ending he was seized and put in a prison by the people who were secretly taking over during the period of post-war chaos.  You see, the aftermath of the war was going to provide the opportunity for radical changes to occur, and, to make sure civilization was going to transition smoothly to its new form, people who had some level of ambition and influence, like our gossip columnist, but who were not smart enough to recognize the ideal form of society the secret masters were guiding us to and so might cause disruptions, were imprisoned and impersonated by doppelgangers.   These doppelgangers would use the positions of influence formerly occupied by the prisoners to smooth the transition, urging the public to support the correct policies, policies which the prisoners, if free, likely would oppose.  The prisoners, meanwhile, would live in relative luxury, with access to good health care and lots of books and music and so forth, even pets, but no contact whatsoever with the outside world--all those books and all that music is material published before they were imprisoned.  One reason the prisoners are well-treated is that, at least for a while, the doppelgangers share the prisoner's soul or life force and will die if the prisoner dies; eventually the duplicate develops its own soul.

The gossip columnist has lost track of how long he has been in his gilded cage with his pet cat.  He sees an opportunity to escape, and gets out of the prison.  (Kuttner and Moore refer to the prison as Chateau D'If and make some allusions to Dumas as well as to Tennyson's Enoch Arden.)  The outside world does not seem to have changed radically--just "little things" seem to have changed, like the names of the months and days of the week, and the fact that vehicles are now self-driving and people no longer smoke tobacco.

The gossip columnist tries to make contact with people he knew when he was a free man, and finds that the secret masters of the world have given him plastic surgery so he looks totally different (I guess there was no mirror or other reflective surface in his comfortable cell.)  It will be impossible for him to renew his old friendships--everybody who knew him before he was seized is sure that the doppelganger is the real him.  The gossip columnist meets a woman who has not been able to change with the times, but rather than oppose the quiet, creeping revolution, she just sits around and gets drunk.  It becomes clear the gossip columnist will be equally unable to put up any resistance to the changes.  While his doppelganger is living a fulfilling life and career promoting the policies of the secret masters, the original gossip columnist, after a brief period of fruitless resistance, will live a pointless existence of drunkenness punctuated by bouts of sterile nostalgia--Kuttner and Moore offer us the metaphor that this woman and the gossip columnist are essentially dead because they can't evolve with society.  We even get a scene in which we meet the secret masters and Kuttner and Moore try to convince us that they are swell guys, not dictators at all, but doing civilization a great service.

"The Little Things"' ideology is lame and unconvincing elitism, the day dream of people who want to have their lives regulated by their betters because they associate individual freedom with the rough days of the Depression and the cataclysmic upheavals of the Second World War.  And of course I, a man who only reads books or watches movies made over 25 years ago and groans in agony when in a store and his ears are assaulted by music recorded this century, finds the "move with the times or you are as good as dead" theme a little annoying.  As for the plot, it is limp and deflating.  Writers who are bloodthirsty commies might depict changing the world in an exciting way, with the middle classes getting murdered and suffering their property to be expropriated in the name of justice and commissars and activists of the vanguard dying martyrs' deaths as the bourgeois hoarders and wreckers, in their death throes, use their wealth to deploy weapons of mass destruction.  But Kuttner and Moore don't give us those kinds of thrills and horrors--the revolution in "The Little Things" is comfortable, with the masses not even knowing a revolution is taking place, while those who might oppose the revolution are imprisoned in luxury or just sadly drink themselves into oblivion.

Thumbs down!

Left: US edition, 1961     Right: UK edition, 1963

"The Good Egg" by Ross Rocklynne 

According to isfdb, this story has never been reprinted--not a good sign.

"The Good Egg" is a cynical story about how bad parenting leads to evil children, how attractive women use sex to manipulate naive men, how attractive men use their looks to manipulate romantic women, how crooks abuse government programs meant to aid favored constituencies, and how men join the armed services and run terrible risks for civilians who do not appreciate their sacrifices.  This may sound like a clear and accurate picture of real life, not SF at all, don't worry, Rocklynne also includes in "The Good Egg" wacky science fiction elements that function essentially as fantasy elements, like the doppelgangers in Kuttner and Moore's "The Little Things," though Rocklynne's tale otherwise has the plot and themes of a crime story.  "The Good Egg" is also one of those stories that explains that you have to have a firm hand when dealing with women because members of the fair sex are naturally both duplicitous and gullible and will generally benefit from--and most of them actually crave!--the tutelage of a take-charge kind of man.

Doc Ferris is some kind of magician.  He has long employed his pretty daughter Bernice as part of his "stage-setting," and her early recognition of how false the world is and how you can profit by tricking people has had a negative effect on Bernice's morals.  Now, at the end of the Second World War, Bernice is a young adult with a boyfriend, Hugh Grant, a recently discharged veteran of combat in North Africa and Italy.  Grant is sort of naive, and Bernice has him "wound around her little finger," as she puts it.

Doc Ferris has been showing Grant a magic trick.  Some time ago, in a bunch of eggs, Ferris discovered one egg with strange properties; the thing has little glowering sparkles running across its surface, and when you rotate it in your hand, at particular angles it seems to change shape and even vanish from view.  

Grant is interested in science and becomes obsessed with the egg and steals it.  The egg, we readers learn long before Grant does, was laid by a member of an alien race from another dimension.  Inside it is growing, and about to hatch, a telepathic little humanoid being, one fully mature and equipped with racial memory so it has full info about its home dimension and whose telepathy has allowed it to gather full info on our Earth.  This little guy can with trivial ease move between our dimension and that of its people, but if it returns "home" it will be killed by its fellows for having been contaminated by Earth ideas.  (Is this element of the story a satire of the Soviet Union?)

Faithless Bernice has fallen in love with a handsome man, Morrow, a cunning con artist.  Many materials are rationed due to wartime conditions, and are hard to acquire and thus can be sold at high prices on the black market.  Businesses owned by veterans get priority from the government rationing board, and Morrow's SOP is to set up a fake business, seduce a girl with a boyfriend who is a veteran, partner with the vet and thus acquire materials, and then abandon his partner and sell the materials to unscrupulous businessmen.  Bernice uses her sexual wiles to get a skeptical Grant to partner with Morrow; Morrow gets a big shipment of raw leather thanks to Grant's veteran status.  Bernice severs relations with Grant, stupidly thinking that suave Morrow will marry her now that he can make some money, but Morrow has no interest in Bernice, who is far from the first hot chick he has pulled this scam on.

The egg hatches and the alien appears and explains to Grant what is going on.  Grant goes after Bernice, and he and Bernice end up bound in the back of a truck of Morrow's, headed for a watery grave--Morrow has decided he has to murder Grant and Bernice because they are witnesses to his crimes.  Before our dopey and ethically challenged protagonists can be thrown in the river, the alien teleports back to its home dimension where it battles its fellows and seizes a ray gun that it uses to free Grant upon its return; Grant uses the ray gun to outfight Morrow and his thugs.  Morrow and crew end up in prison, and on the advice of the telepathic alien, Grant beats Bernice, turning her into suitable wife material.  The ending joke of the story is that Doc Ferris has found another egg from the alien dimension.

"The Good Egg" is acceptable filler.  The big problem with it is the inconsistent personalities of Hugh Grant and Bernice Ferris, which seem to change to suit the plot instead of being believably consistent and driving the plot.  For example, Grant is obsessed enough with the egg to steal it from the father of the woman he loves, even though he is supposed to be naive and innocent, and then he just forgets about the egg, leaving it alone in his fridge for days.  Sometimes Grant acts like a dope, sometimes like a hard-bitten combat veteran, other times like a science-loving nerd.  As for Bernice, her behavior is such that it is hard to sympathize with her and to hope she and Grant get together, though I guess it is implied that women's psyches are mere clay that have to be molded by the men in their lives so we need not sympathize with her for the story to achieve its goals.  The plot and SF content of "The Good Egg" is serviceable, and if Rocklynne or Sam Merwin had taken the time to polish the story and fix these character issues it would probably rise to good status, but life is short and writers and editors face deadlines and we've all got to pay the mortgage and get the dishes washed and the vases dusted and the lawn mowed and so can't always publish the best possible product.  Even so, historians might find "The Good Egg" useful for its 1946 depictions of the wartime economy and attitudes about women. 

"Never the Twain Shall Meet" by Edmond Hamilton

This tale appears under the byline "Brett Sterling," a pseudonym used several times by Hamilton and other people, including once by Ray Bradbury.  Like Rocklynne's "The Good Egg," it doesn't look like this story was ever reprinted. 

"Never the Twain Shall Meet" is a traditional science fiction story full of space suits, airlocks, little lectures about positrons that refer to Carl David Anderson and brainwaves that refer to Hans Berger, and speculations about where the planets and asteroids came from and how the Sun generates energy.  "Never the Twain Shall Meet" is also a melodramatic love story, perhaps based on the Hans Christian Anderson tale of The Little Mermaid.  Hamilton's style is simple and straightforward and the emotions of his characters, however over the top, ring true.  Thumbs up!

Farrel is the 30-year old captain of a space ship that has broken down near the asteroid belt.  For like 40 years, the human race has been exploring and colonizing the Solar System, but Venus and Mars are off limits, so humans are focusing their efforts on the moons of Jupiter and Uranus.  You see, half the matter of the universe is "positive," and half "negative," and Venus and Mars are negative, and if a piece of positive matter from Earth touches anything from V or M both will be annihilated in a blinding flash!

The crew of Farrel's ship are in serious trouble, but they can maybe fabricate the parts they need to fix the ship if they can drift close enough to an asteroid with the metal they need.  Unfortunately, half the asteroids are negative, making searching the belt very dangerous.

Amazingly, the crew spots another crippled space ship in the belt!  It has an odd shape--an experimental model?  Farrel goes out to investigate in his space suit--he can propel himself with a little hand-held rocket device.  Similarly equipped people come out of the other ship to meet him, one of them a beautiful woman.  Everybody is astonished when they realize they are from different worlds, represent different races--the beautiful girl and her ship are from Mars!  The two groups and their equipment can't touch each other, but Martians have developed devices that operationalize everybody's dormant telepathic ability, so Farrel can communicate with them.

Despite the obstacles facing them, Farrel and the Martian woman fall in love during a crazy adventure in which they get lost in the asteroid belt and have to use logic and science knowledge to reunite with their people, who, in their absence, have repaired their ships.  The Martian makes Farrel promise to meet her in this same spot in a year's time.  He does so, and they have a joyful reunion and start a happy life together because the Martians have figured out a way to change negative matter into positive, and the Martian woman volunteered to be the first human test subject of this technology so she could move to Earth and marry Farrel!

I like it.  The somewhat schmaltzy ending doesn't feel too saccharine because I didn't quite expect it; maybe I am dim, but repeatedly Hamilton had me thinking one of the lovers might die, sacrificing him or herself for the other, or maybe both could die, committing suicide because they prefer death to life without each other.  And, as I have told you again and again, I have a weakness for SF stories that are about people in space suits out there facing death in the void between the worlds.  "Never the Twain Shall Meet" deserves to be reprinted, in my humble opinion.

"Pocket Universes" by Murray Leinster

Yet another story that has not been reprinted, if we are to believe isfdb.  I have found Leinster to be a solid performer, so I have reason to hope I'll enjoy this piece as much as Hamilton's.

"Pocket Universes" is perhaps an illuminating sample of popular beliefs among Americans of people from Latin America, with our narrator, an American, saying stuff like

He was Latin-American—pure Spanish as far as I could tell—and you don’t expect Latin-Americans, somehow, to be scientists....You think of them and of revolutions and politicians, and if you know a few of them you think of poetry and literary effusions and highly intellectual and not very meaty talk. But science, no. Facts seem to hamper most of them.

Our narrator is buddies with a brilliant Latin American scientist, an emigre to the United States living and working in New York.  As the story begins, the scientist has just invented an amazing device.  When powered up, the apparatus, a bunch of copper and crystal pieces and wires, vanishes, and the space it previously occupied has odd effects on light that passes through it, and on objects which intrude into it.  It is as if the space no longer exists--if you reach into the queer blurry area occupied by the device before it was switched on, your hand will vanish inch by inch from your arm while immediately reappearing on the other side of the blurry space, still fully under your control.  Turning off the power causes the device to reappear, and, if anything is occupying the area, that intruding object is destroyed.  Leinster spends a lot of time trying to explain how all this works, both practically and theoretically, but I can't say he succeeds in making it very clear.  (Again, maybe I'm dim.)

The scientist and the narrator take a break from the lab and the sight of a newspaper headline prompts the inventor to tell his tragic life story.  Back home, he had an attractive wife whom his nation's dictator took a liking to.  The dictator's flunkies kidnapped her and she ended up getting killed.  The scientist fomented a revolution against the dictator, but his uprising was crushed.  The scientist fled to America, where he has had a successful career in academia, culminating in today's invention, which the narrator expects will revolutionize the economy and human life by, for example, allowing instantaneous travel between two points, regardless of what might be between them.  With a small portable device you can reach through walls and floors, a larger device walk through such obstacles, and if one is built on an industrial scale, like a highway, one could travel between cities as easily as one walks between two rooms.   

The newspaper story which inspired the inventor to spill his guts tells how the dictator is abdicating under the pressure of the accumulated threats of all his enemies, foreign and domestic, and coming to the United States, to New York, presumably bringing with him all kinds of money and valuables looted from his people and received from Nazis who fled to his country after the war.  To make sure we know the dictator is a bad guy, Leinster tells us he is fat and swarthy!  

The scientist uses upgraded versions of his device to sneak into the dictator's hotel room and seize the loot, which he has sent to the new government of his native country.  Then he murders the dictator.  The narrator upbraids him for risking his life on this adventure when only he can build the device which is going to radically improve human life by making trade and travel so inexpensive.  But the true tragedy of the story is that the scientist decides to experiment with a battery-powered version of his device, and somehow gets stuck inside the warped space--because the device is battery powered, the narrator cannot turn it off from our universe.  The narrator theorizes that, inside the warped space, time passes very slowly, so the batteries may not run out for what we here experience as centuries, even if the inventor only experiences it as a brief period.

(I have to admit I don't understand how the inventor got stuck inside the warped space, as earlier when a guy put his hand in the warped space his hand immediately reappeared on the other side of the warp--his arm wasn't in the warped space, the warped space is like space that is no longer existent.)

"Pocket Universes" is merely acceptable.  Leinster spends lots of energy explaining the device, but his explanations are not very clear and his speculations are wholly fanciful, unlike Hamilton's, which refer to real scientists and real phenomena like electrons and protons.  Leinster also spends a lot of time on the dictator, on describing how ugly and evil he is, but we readers can't get too enthused about the dictator because the narrator never meets him or sees him--he just reads about him in the paper or hears the inventor talk about him; the drama of the dictator's crimes and punishment all happens "off screen."  Unlike with Hamilton's "Never the Twain Shall Meet," I can see why "Pocket Universes" has never been reprinted.

**********

Only Hamilton's story here is a real winner, though Rocklynne's and Leinster's are not bad.  But none of these stories was a waste of my time, even Kuttner and Moore's, as I have a particular interest in the careers of Kuttner, Moore and Hamilton, and hope to read all of their work before I shuffle off this mortal coil (and I may be developing a similar attachment to Leinster.)  And as a grad school dropout who served time in a History and then a Poli Sci department, all the references to World War II are interesting.

The beautiful header to Thrilling Wonder Stories' letters column