Infinity, Feb '56: K Bulmer, D Knight and F Pohl & C M Kornbluth

In the last exciting episode of MPFL I looked at three stories from the February 1956 issue of Infinity and let it be known I didn't like them.  Today, however, I hope to praise this issue of Larry Shaw's magazine.  Well, I can start by lauding Ed Emshwiller's two illustrations for Kenneth Bulmer's contribution, "Quarry," one of which appears on the cover, while the other takes up an entire page on the inside.  But can I say anything nice about Bulmer's story?  And what about the included story by famed critic and editor Damon Knight?  And that by the "famous science fiction team" of C. M. Kornbluth and Frederick Pohl?  Well, let's dig in and find out.

"Quarry" by Ken Bulmer

I want to like Bulmer's work because he writes adventure stories and I like adventure stories, at least when they are good.  As you know, I love Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, and I have praised plenty of adventure capers by people like Edmond Hamilton and E. C. Tubb.  But I have often found Bulmer's work wanting.  Check out my blog posts about Bulmer's novels Cycle of Nemesis, The Diamond Contessa, and Kandar, for the sad details.  It has been like seven years since I have read anything by Bulmer, but today--in the spirit of a new year and new beginnings!--we are going to let bygones be bygones and read "Quarry," which the aforementioned Mr. Tubb reprinted in Authentic Science Fiction when he was serving as editor of that periodical and Francophonic Englishman Maxim Jakubowski included in a 1963 anthology for the French market.

"Quarry" is "The Most Dangerous Game" yet again. People in SF are aways getting thrown into the arena to fight to the death.  Luckily, Bulmer takes the scenario seriously and tries to generate real human emotion and suspense, and as a result "Quarry" is pretty entertaining.

It is the space faring future; mankind has colonized the solar system.  Unfortunately, before we could reach the stars, the extrasolar Rachen arrived and took over; we are at their mercy, second-class citizens on Earth, Mars, and the other heavenly bodies we have spent so much time and effort cultivating.  Patriotic humans are living in poverty--bodies skinny, clothes threadbare, lungs pink because they can't even afford cigarettes--while collaborators with the alien regime, those whom our protagonist calls "Rachentoads" and "Rachen-lovers" are living large!  Our hero is Dirk Gilmore, a man with big emotions and a quick temper, a hardened tough guy who has a racist hatred of the Rachen--when he sees them he wishes he could squash them like bugs!  This isn't nice, but it feels real.  

Gilmore has decided to make a terrible sacrifice to get some money for the kid he has with his faithless wife--Dirk has volunteered to be the prey in a Rachen hunting sport organized by a big fat human Rachen-lover!

The first hunt Gilmore gets involved in is a special one.  A Rachen prince, heir apparent to the throne of Mars, wants to hunt in an Earth city, one whose ten million human inhabitants have been forced to vacate so the metropolis can serve as a play ground for the snooty aliens.  The streets are deserted, but the robot trams and robot taxis and elevators and motion-activated fluorescent lights of the city still operate just fine.  The prince wants to hunt a woman, and Gilmore is paired with a girl--they are not allowed to split up during the hunt, and have devices strapped to their wrists that cause horrible pain if they get more than ten feet apart.  Bulmer here in "Quarry" uses all the most obvious devices to manipulate the reader, and the same way the human collaborator is a grossly obese and Gilmore starts the story dressed in rags and broken shoes, this woman, Trina, is beautiful, with a terrific body and clear eyes and so forth.    

The Rachen aristo and his cronies, armed with bolt-action rifles, have 24 hours to catch Dirk and Trina after the pair use their 15-minute head start to take public transit to get deep into the city.  Mysteriously, one of Fatso's lackeys gives Dirk a small pistol.  Is there a human resistance movement on Earth?  Is someone plotting to use Dirk to murder the prince so some other joker from beyond the solar system can become King of Mars?

Bulmer does a decent job with the development of the Dirk and Trina relationship, and with the action chase stuff in the city--running here, running there, laying traps, throwing a knife at a guy, outwitting the blob monsters that are the Rachen's bloodhounds, etc.  The chasing and shooting in the city does eventually feel a little moot, though, after we learn that the Prince's lackeys won't kill Dirk and Trina, just terrorize them, leaving them for the Prince himself, and, even worse, that the hunt doesn't automatically end at 24 hours if Dirk and Trina aren't killed--rather, at 24 hours, a gate in the electric fence surrounding the city is deactivated for 15 minutes.  Dirk and Trina are only safe if they can leave the city via this gate during that window, but since the Prince and his party know where the gate is and when it will be open, the hunters have no practical reason to hunt for D & T for 23 hours, they can just ambush them at the gate.  Oh, well.

Who will live?  Who will die?  I couldn't be sure until the end, which is good.  I'm giving "Quarry" a moderate recommendation; it is action-adventure filler, but performed competently.  Maybe I need to read more of Bulmer's short work, maybe that is where he shines.

"A Likely Story" by Damon Knight

Over the years, I have banged out on the keys of a succession of computers many hostile reviews of stories by Damon Knight, as well as attacks on the man himself.  But today, let's accentuate the positive.  I liked "Man in the Jar."  I liked "Masks."  I liked "I See You."  I liked "The Enemy." I called "The Beach Where Time Began" acceptable.  I like some of Knight's 1940s work as an illustrator.  I was cheering Knight on when he called Judith Merril's The Tomorrow People an overly feminine "shambles" full of science mistakes.  So, in the same way I reject the label of "Harlan Ellison hater" and consider myself an Ellison skeptic, I believe I give Knight a fair shake and am more than willing to praise him when his work aligns with my own taste and interests; I am just not one of the Knight groupies.        

Accentuating the positive is a worthy goal to reach for, but one which is sometimes beyond human grasp.  "A Likely Story" is a humor story about the SF community.  Ugh.  There are feeble and obvious jokes; for example, we are told that the association of pro SF writers in the story holds three kinds of meetings--meetings devoted to club politics, meetings devoted to drinking, and meetings devoted to lots of drinking.  Ha ha.  Also, the joke every person who has spent time in New York City makes, that it is very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter.  Oh, brother.  There are also smart guy jokes; a guy named Duchamp is smoking a pipe, for example; and more-or-less affectionate caricatures of a few prominent members of the SF community, plus a multitude of groan inducing puns on SF writer's names; "Preacher Flatt," for example.  

Three or four pages of these empty calories would have been enough for me; "A Likely Story" here in Infinity is sixteen god-damned pages.  Interminable and unforgivable. 

The plot.  Our narrator attends the yearly party of the professional SF writer association.  Strange phenomena occur, mostly banal slapstick, like Asa Akimosov's pants falling down to his knees or an unnamed woman's skirt rising up to show her legs, people dropping glasses or tripping and falling, but also inexplicable events like a joke from infallible funny man Bill Plass (I guess a stand in for Bob Bloch) falling flat.  Is this the work of a poltergeist?  No, the answer seems to be that somebody has figured out how to mess with probability, has the ability to make unlikely events occur.  The narrator and another writer try to figure out which of the SF writers is the culprit.  When they do, the man with the improbability device, the bespectacled "Harry Er-Ah," escapes by flying to Mars.

Just dreadful.

This soul-deadening lump of tedium was reprinted in Knight collections like Turning On and The Best of Damon Knight.

"The Engineer" by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

Let's check in on "The Most Famous SF Duo Ever."  Way way back, in 2014, I read Kornbluth's famous Hall-of-Fame story "The Marching Morons," and voiced many criticisms of it.  More recently, I called Kornbluth's collaboration with Donald Wollheim "Go Fast on Interplane" "competent filler" and his collab with Fred Pohl "Mute Inglorious Tam" "an acceptable sort of gimmick piece."  As for Pohl and Kornbluth's "Gift of Garigolli," I owned to actually hating it and described it as a "half-baked dish of garbage."  I have had nicer things to say about some Pohl solo works like "Survival Kit" and "To See Another Mountain," but long time readers of MPorcius Fiction Log will know much of his output has met a lukewarm reception here and others denunciations.

Well, let's see what "The Engineer," which was reprinted in the various English, German and Italian editions of The Wonder Effect as well as in the "Best of" Kornbluth and Pohl collection, Our Best, is all about.

Our protagonist, Muhlenhoff, began his career as a geologist and worker for an oil extraction company of the future, but found he had a talent for politics and leadership and worked his way up in the company until today he is a big wig in racist big business, managing a drilling facility 1800 meters below sea level off the coast of Mexico!  We learn this backstory after seeing Muhlenhoff in action in a meeting room and then in his office 1.118 miles down, responding to some kind of pressure leak that threatens to flood the submarine facility and kill everybody and lose the company a lot of money and give the Mexicans access to the oil.

The third part of the seven-page story has Muhlenhoff taking a break from work to read from a history book.  I had naively thought "The Engineer" a serious story about using science and psychology to resolve a crisis until this wacky joke--a facility manager taking a break during a life-threatening emergency--hit me over the head with the fact that the story was a satire.

By quoting and paraphrasing the book Pohl and Kornbluth tell us the history of the United States between the Second World War and the dawn of the 21st century.  The land of the free and the home of the brave led the defeat of the Warsaw Pact (Pohl and Kornbluth use the term "Cominform" which is one I don't see very often) but then early in the 2000s the US lost a war to Mexico!  The Mexicans, somehow, in the late 20th century developed technology and military tactics and training superior to that of the United States and conquered Texas, Oklahoma and the western states!  (A horror scenario for some, maybe wish-fulfillment for Pohl and Kornbluth?)  The history book suggests that the US lost the war because the US military was subjected to political pressure from many constituencies and its decisions before and during the war were focused on appeasing politicians, journalists, voters and lobbyists instead of defeating the Mexicans.

The final section of the story makes clear that Muhlenhoff and the underwater facility he manages are going to be destroyed because Muhlenhoff has been paying too much attention to career and political considerations and not enough to the science of keeping the facility safe.  

Pretty poor, but not abysmal; let's be generous and call "The Engineer" barely acceptable.

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Three pretty slight stories, though at least the Bulmer is a competent specimen of its type; the Knight is a particularly "cringe" example of an already questionable genre (the humorous SF story about a gathering of SF figures) and the Pohl and Kornbluth is a weak satire.

So we bid adieu to the second issue of Infinity.  Our next foray into the 1950s SF world will see us reading stories from a magazine with greater prestige than Infinity.

Infinity, Feb '56: H Ellison and R Wilson

The February 1956 issue of Infinity Science Fiction came to mind recently when I was looking at some of my old blog posts about Charles Beaumont.  One of those posts was about "Traumeri," which debuted in the Feb '56 ish of Infinity, the second of the magazine's 20 issues.  Looking through the archives, I see that I have also read the issue's contribution by L. Sprague de Camp, "Internal Combustion."  There are still more big names in this issue, so let's read their stories--and those by some little names, too!  The fact that these stories are by writers I either think are overrated or know little about may add some excitement to the proceedings.  

Today we'll handle the Harlan Ellison story and the two itty bitty stories by Richard Wilson.

"Glow Worm" by Harlan Ellison

I am not an Ellison hater but I am certainly an Ellison skeptic who thinks Ellison's fame is largely a function not of the quality of his work but of his wacky public persona, which is aggressive, self-aggrandizing, self-important, and at times ridiculous, and who finds many of the recurring characteristics of Ellison's work less than entertaining.  I discuss this matter at some length in a blog post about Ellison's 1980 story "All the Lies that Are My Life" (a post in which I also talk a lot about Barry Malzberg and present my theory that Ellison and Malzberg are very similar writers and even people, with Malzberg being the fine and admirable version of the type and Ellison the garish and shoddy iteration) and in another post, one about Ellison's 1976 tale "Killing Bernstein." 

"Glow Worm" is what I guess you would call a mood piece; there isn't a lot of plot or character or anything like that.  I suppose Ellison puts some effort into the images.

It is the future.  Much of mankind has left the Earth to live on other worlds in other solar systems.  For reasons Ellison does not explain, these colonists don't have any interaction with Earth; they don't communicate with the Earth and they apparently have no way to return.  The people who remained on Earth ended up getting involved in a war that exterminated all life on this planet you and I call home.  Except for one guy!  This guy, just before the cataclysm, was the most successful product of experiments meant to create super soldiers who could survive anything.  And he did survive the war!  But he is all alone.  

This guy, who glows and is proof from most physical injury and needs almost no food to survive, decides to leave Earth to find the colonists.  It is vaguely suggested he will serve as "a messenger," "an epitaph," "a symbol;" Ellison throws out this flashy over-the-top melodramatic stuff, but it is all surface, there is no depth to what Ellison is trying to say, it's all emperor-with-no-clothes goop.  What is the Glow Worm's message?  What does he symbolize?  I guess the Glow Worm is supposed to represent how evil and self-destructive the human race is, but since many members of the human race left Earth and (it is suggested) built new societies on other planets, and since the human race also produced this immortal man, the story itself demonstrates that it makes no sense to paint the human race with a broad brush as a bunch of evil failures.   

Anyway, the glowing survivor takes a few years to put together a space ship from wrecks and spare parts that survived the cataclysm, then takes off.  He didn't do a good job with the outer hull of the ship, he being an amateur welder, and the ship is not airtight, but that is OK, because this superman doesn't need air to survive and he is immune to radiation poisoning.

That ends the story; there is no climax or resolution or anything.  Maybe "Glow Worm" is supposed to remind us of the Wandering Jew, because the title character is immortal and is going to be (slowly, because his ship is jerry-rigged) wandering the universe.  But the Wandering Jew was an immortal wanderer as a punishment, and if Ellison's Glow Worm committed any sins for which he needs to be punished, I missed it.  Maybe the story just represents Ellison's alienation and it is expected that other SF fans will identify with the loneliness and alienation of the Glow Worm, who of course is not responsible for his own alienation and loneliness. 

The actual writing of "Glow Worm" and the images are not bad, so we'll call it "merely acceptable."  But it doesn't add up to anything.

"Glow Worm" AKA "Glowworm" was Ellison's first sale to a SF magazine, though I guess not technically his first genre story actually published.  It has been reprinted in the magazine Unearth and the oft-reprinted and updated The Essential Ellison.  Ellison, in the intro to "Glowworm" in The Essential Ellison, tells the story of his writing the piece and of his early days in New York, touching on his relationships with people like Infinity editor Larry Shaw as well as writers Robert Silverberg, Lester del Rey, Algis Budrys and James Blish.  (Why should Ellison feel alienated?  This essay makes clear that many people went out of their way to help Ellison.)  This intro, which I read in a scan of the 35th-Year Retrospective edition of The Essential Ellison, is more interesting and entertaining than most of Ellison's fiction, which, like the fact that Ellison's face appears on and within so many of his books, buttresses my theory that his fame is as much as a celebrity as a writer--his own life and behavior are more compelling than the stuff he put on paper. 

"The Futile Flight of John Arthur Benn" by Richard Wilson

Richard Wilson has two stories in this issue of Infinity; this one appears under the pen name of Edward Halibut.  I think this will be the fourth story by Wilson we have read, preceded by "Lonely Road," "The Big Fix!," and "The Story Writer." Both of today's Wilson stories are very short and each would see reprint in one of the anthologies of short-shorts edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph Olander; this one, "The Futile Flight of John Arthur Benn," little more than one page here in Infinity, was included in Microcosmic Tales and in the German derivatives of that anthology.

"The Futile Flight of John Arthur Benn" is a total waste of time.  A suicidal guy goes back in time, in hopes of being killed by a dinosaur, and Wilson lists famous historical figures he sees briefly as he travels back.  But his journey back stalls before the Mesozoic.  He falls asleep, and then he wakes up back in the 20th century--it was all a dream!  But his desire to kill himself was no dream, so he kills himself in a mundane fashion.

Thumbs down.

I've dismissed as weak or just plain bad at least
 four other stories from Microcosmic Tales:
Harry Harrison's "The Final Battle"
Barry Malzberg's "Varieties of Technological Experience"
Malzberg and Bill Pronzini's "A Clone at Last"
Harlan Ellison's "The Voice in the Garden"

"Course of Empire" by Richard Wilson

This short short, "Course of Empire," like three full pages in Infinity, reappeared in the language of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and whoever actually writes those James Patterson things in 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories and in the version of the book published in Dutch, Italian and Serbian. 

"Course of Empire" is a terrible shaggy dog story that consists of the absolutely lamest and most toothless of ethnic jokes and other childish excuses for humor.  Thumbs down!

It is the future and two men are gabbing.  One was a high official of the Earth world government; his department had the job of choosing the men who would govern the various Terran colonies across the solar system.  An Englishman was chosen to govern Venus because it rains a lot there.  A Bedouin was nominated to run Mars because it is sandy there.  Anyway, the punchline of the story is that the natives of Ganymede conquered the Earth and the two men gabbing are slaves of the Ganymedeans.  

Why would anybody publish this kind of material outside of a joke book for eight-year-olds?  Because they are the kind of people who will think it is hilarious when Muslims conquer Europe and the Chinese Communist Party conquers Japan, the Philippines and Australia?  

Back in November of 2014 I read 20 stories from 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories
and I actually liked some of them

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These stories are not good.  Maybe editor of Infinity Shaw was desperate for material, he having to compete with established magazines like Astounding, F&SF, Galaxy, etc. for the good stuff.  

Reading this blogpost to copy edit it made me a little uneasy, because one of my criticisms of Harlan Ellison is that he is kind of a self-important jerk, and my attacks on today's three stories make me sound like a similarly unpleasant character.  Well, we'll read more from this ish of Infinity next time--hopefully we'll see some better material and I'll be able to radiate some happiness and light instead of snark and complaint.  

F&SF, June 1955: Eveyln E Smith, Charles Beaumont & Chad Oliver

Another day, another docket of stories from 1950s science fiction magazines to be judged!  Today's victims are three stories from the June 1955 issue of Anthony Boucher's F&SF.  Way back in 2018, shortly after the discovery of fire, I read the Damon Knight story in this ish, "You're Another," and explained at length why I didn't like it, though I was happy for the excuse it provided to search the interwebs for 1950s photos of women clad in tweed.  Just a few days ago we read the issue's contribution from Manly Wade Wellman, "Walk like a Mountain," and I gave it a vigorous thumbs up.  Today a woman and two men stand before us, soon to be subjected to similarly subjective and mercurial judgement--Evelyn E. Smith, Charles Beaumont, and Chad Oliver.  None can predict who will be vaunted and who will be condemned. 

I'll be reading these stories in a scan of the original magazine.  And, yes, I know there is a Derleth/Reynolds Solar Pons story in here, but I'm in no mood for that sort of gaff today.

"The Faithful Friend" by Evelyn E. Smith 

From the title alone we know to expect that Evelyn E. Smith's contribution to this issue of F&SF will test to the utmost our ability to suspend disbelief (ha ha, he laughed mirthlessly.)  I think I've read three stories by Smith.  In 2015, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, I read "Softly While You're Sleeping" and liked it.  In 2020 I read Smith's gimmicky story about crossword puzzles, "DAXBR/BAXBR" and didn't care for it.  I didn't like her locked-room mystery "Really It Was Quite Simple" when I read that in 2021, either.  One score and two misses.  Well, if I like "The Faithful Friend," today Smith can achieve equilibrium here in the merciless and dyspeptic court of MPFL.

Earth has been conquered by insectoid telepathic space aliens who spend a lot of time indulging in recreational drug use via an "inhaler."  Generations ago the aliens destroyed most of humanity, they considering humans little better than animals who were marring the beautiful Terran landscape with their industry and wars.  Some humans were retained to be bred on farms as pets and slaves, and some escaped destruction and their descendants today live a parlous existence in the wilderness, occasionally raiding the alien compounds and killing alien guards, and sometimes in turn subjected to hunts by the aliens; the aliens find life on Earth, a planet far from the main space lanes, boring and hunting the natives relieves the monotony.

The plot of "The Faithful Friend" concerns the current alien governor of Earth, an old bug, and a young diplomat who comes to our poor colonized planet.  This young bug thinks Earth a drag, but it looks like the inevitable next step of his career is to become governor of Terra after the current holder of the office dies.  This young careerist thinks maybe he can make Earth more prestigious and make himself rich by breeding a large quantity of humans and offering them for sale across the space empire as pets and servants.  The current governor hasn't done this because he likes the natives and doesn't want to see them exploited; this sentimentalist has a human servant/pet of whom he is particularly fond, one who is particularly skilled at mixing the drugs for the inhalers.

A lot of this material feels like an allegory of British imperialism, that Smith has taken inspiration from stories of how the English admired the Irish landscape and lamented that the Irish people were cluttering it up, allegations that British people hunted Australian aborigines for sport, that sort of thing.  When Smith turns our attention to scenes of wild humans who creep up on the Governor's complex with the plan of assassinating the Governor, she seems to be lampooning Americans and their conceptions of freedom and independence.  The wild humans talk about liberty, using the phrase "give me liberty or give me death" but can't articulate what freedom is or how their lives will be improved by slaying the alien governor.  The raiders manage to surprise and kill the sentries and get to the house unawares (the insectoidal aliens have poor hearing and detest the sensation of hearing sounds, and so their sleeping quarters are sound-proofed.)  The Governor's human servant, however, cannot be persuaded to join the human raiders, and he warns the Governor of the danger he is in.  The aliens' high tech weapons make short work of the wild humans, but not before the servant, the faithful friend of the title, is killed by the raiders, who of course feel betrayed by this well-fed collaborator.

The final scenes of the story are about how much the Governor misses his faithful friend (his replacement can't mix the drugs right!) and how the young diplomat schemes to, once he becomes governor himself--perhaps by murdering the current governor--annihilate the free-range humans and use the story of the faithful friend to market farm-bred humans all across the galaxy.

Sometimes these stories about how foul are English-speaking people or white people in general or just all humans offer the left-wing reader the wish fulfillment fantasy of an alien civilization of communists or hippies or tribal people to whom good lefties like the reader can flee, or who can destroy or seize control of or serve as a model for our deplorable human civilization.  But "The Faithful Friend" is 100% dark, offering no such comfort!  The aliens are bad, and so are the humans, and by fighting for theor freedom the aliens only make things worse for themselves!  Smith has crafted a sad cynical story here.

I'm biased against these anti-human, anti-Western type stories, but "The Faithful Friend" is well-written, and everything that happens is believable, so I can mildly recommend it.  It doesn't seem to have been a hit though, only ever being reprinted in the French edition of F&SF (the readers of which no doubt enjoyed the people who liberated them from Germany in their own lifetimes taken down a peg.)

"The New Sound" by Charles Beaumont 

I think this will be the seventeenth (17th!) story by Charles Beaumont I have blogged about.  Oh no, it's time for links!

"Black Country"

"Elegy"

"Blood Brother"

"The Crooked Man"

"The Vanishing American"

"The Monster Show"

"Keeper of the Dream"

"Mass for Mixed Voices"

"The Hunger"

"Perchance to Dream"

"A Classic Affair" 

"You Can't Have Them All"

"The Dark Music"

"Night Ride"

"The Deadly Will To Win"

"Traumerei"

Charles Beaumont has a high reputation, but we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are inveterate contrarians and I have slagged many of the above-linked stories based on a diverse host of criteria.  But some I have enjoyed, so maybe we'll like "The New Sound," eh?

Message from the other side: this story is OK.  A rich guy who started collecting records and then narrowed his focus down to just collecting nature sounds makes the bizarre decision to narrow his interest further and exclusively collect the sounds of animals dying.  He hires some unscrupulous characters who bring him recordings of all different kinds of animals being killed.  He moves out of the city to the country, to a house that has a view of the city, so he has more room to store his records and so people will stop calling the cops when they hear cries of pain coming from his apartment.  

Eventually, he has a sound recording of the death of every kind of animal.  So he moves on to people!  Eventually he has a huge library of the last utterances of all different kinds of men and women as they are being murdered in all different ways.  

In the story's final scene a nuclear weapon is detonated at the city, and the protagonist rushes to his window with a tape recorder and tries to record the sound of the city's destruction.

This story's basic idea isn't bad and the style is good, but the ending is kind of a let down.  Maybe this ending is inevitable, though, if we see the story as social commentary or satire--the collector of death represents humanity, he is the avatar of humanity's cruelty, callousness, and addiction to violence, and to drive this metaphor home the story has to culminate in worldwide destruction.  If the collector killed himself or was captured by the police or suffered the vengeance of his victim's relatives or something then he would just be one bad apple at odds with society, and the story wouldn't work so well as a condemnation of humanity (but would work better as a human drama.)

We'll judge "The New Sound" acceptable.

"The New Sound" can be found in Beaumont collections that promote his work as "sinister"--the US Yonder and the British The Edge--and in an anthology, I guess a college text book that presents "Social Science Fiction" entitled Above the Human Landscape.

"Artifact" by Chad Oliver

In the summer of 1971 the US government launches a secret operation, the first manned flight to Mars and back.  The astronauts bring back to this big blue marble an astonishing find--a primitive tool, a scraper made from chipped flint or something like flint, evidence that there are, or have been, intelligent beings on Mars.  The government recruits an archaeologist to join the second mission to Mars.  On Mars, he uses various archaeological techniques which Oliver, an anthropologist himself, describes in some detail, to uncover more tools of the same technological level as the scraper, things like arrow- or spear heads.  There is no evidence of houses or pottery or agriculture, and it is theorized that the native Martians never developed such things because Mars lacks natural resources.

Mars is pretty desolate, most of it an arid desert with itty bitty plants and a small population of little gopher-like mammals and an even smaller population of reptilian predators.  But there is some water near the poles.  So the expedition heads to one pole and there they meet some of the intelligent natives.  We've read many stories in which Oliver romanticizes stone-age people and their life style, and he does the same thing here.  They may not have much of anything by way of technology, but the Martians are much smarter and much nicer than Earth people, and after this has been demonstrated the story has a sense of wonder ending as the archaeologist thinks--in the vaguest possible terms--of how the Martian culture is going to have a beneficial influence on Earth and our violent civilization.

Oliver's story is pretty well-written, and the archaeological dig he depicts is pretty interesting, but the story lacks plot and character; there is very little suspense or conflict or grappling with obstacles.  The Earthers meet the Martians, the Martians are perfect, the end.  You might even call "Artifact" utopian, though Oliver doesn't offer any recipe for creating a utopia other than "if everybody is a genius and a saint, the result will be a utopia!"  Boucher, in his intro to the story here in the magazine, launches a preemptive strike on the obvious criticism of the story--that it has no real plot--by saying that "Artifact" depicts the thrill and suspense of the practice of science, of the pursuit and discovery of truth, which he claims is more exciting than a detective's pursuit of a dangerous criminal across the galaxy.  Well, if you say so.

I'm wrestling with the decision of whether to judge "Artifact" merely acceptable or conclude that it sneaks just across the line into marginally good territory, and I don't feel like I am going to resolve this dilemma.  We'll just have to be content to call it "borderline" and accept the criticism that we are wishy washy.  If you want to judge for yourself, "Artifact" can be dug up from many locations, such as the 1955 Oliver collection Another Kind, later Oliver collections, and various European magazines and anthologies.

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I'm not in love with any of these stories, but we've all heard that if you can't be with those you love, you should love those you are with, and none of today's stories is actually bad, so maybe we can take that advice?  All three are well written, so we have to distinguish among them based on stuff like plot and character and subject matter.  Smith's is the best story, as it has a conventional plot with characters who exhibit human emotion and because imperialism and the need for society and individuals to balance liberty and security are inherently interesting, universal topics.  Oliver's is second best, as the archaeological stuff is fun, but there is no real conflict or climax, and the characters are flat.  Beaumont is the worst, though still OK, because it is just an idea and the ending, which I guess is supposed to be shocking or say something disparaging about humanity, is weak as drama.

Still more Fifties SF when next this court is in session.

Raymond E. Banks: "This Side Up," "The Littlest People," and "Double Dome"

Looking through the archives, it appears that over the last seven years or so I have read four stories by Raymond E. Banks, joke stories which bear marks of Banks putting a lot of effort into not just the jokes but also scientific and social speculation.  Most recently I read "Rabbits to the Moon" and liked it; the three stories I read earlier, "Walter Perkins is Here!," "The Instigators," and "Never Trust an Intellectual," I couldn't recommend, though their ambition was at times admirable.  One hit to three misses is a pretty bad record, but today Raymond E. Banks has a chance to even things up, even come out ahead, as I am going to read three more 1950s stories by the man who (I hear) was a manager at an electronics company and who would go on to write in the 1960s Meet Me in Darkness and The Computer Kill and in the 1970s Lust in Space and Lust of the Swampman.

In the interest of giving Banks every chance to succeed, I deliberately chose three stories published in Galaxy, a magazine with a reputation for trying to publish "literary" and "pertinent" work about social issues (in contrast to magazines like Astounding or Planet Stories that emphasize the hard sciences or action-adventure thrills) during the editorship of H. L. Gold, a famously hands-on editor, stories that were later anthologized--these three Banks stories have the imprimatur of the snobbier end of the SF establishment, and cannot be dismissed as hack work tossed off for some fast money, but must be seen as works that have gone through multiple layers of editing and gatekeeping.

I'm going to read all of these stories in scans of the appropriate issues of Galaxy.   

"This Side Up" (1954) 

This is a long absurdist story full of internal contradictions as well as lame jokes founded on the story's foundational gimmick, itself a stupid joke.  The alien Thurkians, who look exactly like humans, land on an Earth they find totally devastated.  The Thurkians may look just like Earth people, but their biology is radically different.  Thurkians pop into existence all wrinkled and bent over, and then straighten out and become vigorous, then begin shrinking until they vanish--their life cycle is the exact opposite of that of human beings.  So, when the Thurkians find a baby--apparently the last living human!--they figure this infant is an old man about to die.  The aliens figure a cemetery is a place from which new humans are dug up, and when they find the maternity ward of a hospital they come to believe women would have dying old people implanted into their bodies to achieve immortality.

This childish "opposite day" joke continues through the entire story.  Among Thurkians, a kiss isn't a sign of affection but an expression of hate.  Among Thurkians, high firm breasts and smooth clear skin are not attractive--sagging breasts and wrinkly splotched skin are attractive.  Thurkians hear with their mouths and eat with their ears.  And on and on, one groaner after another for like 16 pages.

As for the plot, one Thurkian scientist has figured out the reality of the life cycle of humans and voices his dissent against the famous scientist in charge of the expedition.  The rest of the expedition dismisses the dissenter's theories, but then a high level politician, a woman with whom the dissenting scientist went to school, arrives.  She comes to agree with the dissenter.  In a bizarre scene that may be some kind of lie told by the dissenter, or some kind of misunderstanding or hallucination he has suffered, the human infant kills the top scientist via trickery and the head scientist kills the baby with a knife before he expires.  Again and again in "This Side Up" the reader is confronted with behavior that is unconvincing and events that don't logically follow from preceding events.

Anyway, with the top scientist out of the way we get our happy ending as the the dissenter marries the politician.

This nonsensical story may be a clumsy satire of Christianity and conservatism and/or skepticism of technology and science.  Among the Thurkians, when a person overturns a scientific paradigm, the authorities execute him by carving a cross into his chest.  Thurkian history begins with world government and high technology, and then political authority fragments into increasingly smaller and more numerous states and societies become increasingly primitive technologically.  The top scientist argues this course of development is for the best.  Maybe this is meant to be a parody of luddites who fear technology and conservatives who oppose world government, but this element of the story renders "This Side Up" nonsensical--if the Thurkians have gone from a high-tech industrial society to a current low-tech agrarian society, how did they build a space ship to get to Earth, and what do scientists actually do?  

I don't get "This Side Up," and as a work of entertainment and speculation it stinks--thumbs down.  H. L. Gold was proud of it, however, and included it in a Galaxy best-of anthology.    

"The Littlest People" (1954)

This story's central gimmick has some similarities to elements of the Genesis song "Get 'Em Out By Friday," and its plot to the story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who, unsatisfied by real women, falls in love with a statue of a woman he himself carved.  

It is the future of interplanetary human civilization.  Many planets and asteroids have been colonized.  There is an unemployment problem on Earth, so people unable to find work are sent to the colonies.  Of course, shipping people through space is expensive, so, to save on fuel, food and O₂, these job seekers are shrunk to like 6 or 7 inches tall and put into suspended animation.  At the colony these inert little doll-sized people are inspected by employers (and lonely men looking for wives!) and if selected get returned to normal size.

Banks uses this conceit to address issues like class relations, sexual relationships, and the nature of economic life.  Most of the people who get hired and returned to full size do not succeed in the colonies.  Is this because they have no reason to integrate into a society which saw fit to ship them hither and thither like cargo, and because their lack of connections and social capital means they are unlikely to build fulfilling lives in the colonies?  Or because they are just intellectually or morally inferior--after all, isn't the reason they couldn't get work on Earth the fact that they were below-average workers?  Banks depicts the guilt felt by middle-class people about the plight of the losers among the working class, and the insincerity of relationships between employers and the barely-employable, how the low-skilled workers suck up to the new boss early on but are soon proving themselves lazy troublemakers.  At the same time, we hear a man who has made a success of himself, more or less, after being shrunk and resized, comment that nobody cares what happens to the shrunken people. 

The plot.  Our narrator, a kid, accompanies his father, a Personnel Director, when Dad does business with the regular rocket that brings new shrunken people to the barren asteroid colony where they live.  The guy who pilots the one-man rocket is getting old and disorganized and one of the shrunken people, an attractive young woman, through an unfortunate series of mishaps, ends up in the narrator's pocket and the rocket leaves without her.  The kid knows there are all kinds of laws and rules governing treatment of these shrunken people, and for fear of punishment doesn't just tell his parents about the pretty frozen shrunken woman--instead he hides her among his sister's dolls! 

In "This Side Up," Banks forced us to endure scenes of one alien scientist conducting abusive experiments on a human baby, and then another alien actually killing the baby.  In "The Littlest People" we have to countenance a woman in suspended animation getting her leg broken by a careless child.  The accident awakens the woman, and the narrator, still too scared to tell any adult what he has done, tries to patch up the woman himself.  The leg heals, but the little woman has a limp, and so despairs of ever getting a job or getting married and bitterly accuses the narrator of ruining her life and vows to kill him.  Sure enough, she tries to assassinate him while he sleeps, but she is too small to succeed; she does manage to kill the cat, though.

Our narrator expects to be employed in his father's office when he grows up, so tells the tiny woman, whom he dubs "Gleam" after her blonde hair, that he will give her a job as a school teacher in a few years.  Gleam is uneducated and has no interest in book-learning, so the narrator has to chain her up and torture her to get her to agree to become a dutiful student, with he as her teacher.  For years, the narrator is the only person this woman has to talk to, and it is he who gives her all the formal education she has ever received and he teaches who her everything she knows about middle-class life--in a sense he is creating her.   

The narrator brings the tiny woman with him when he goes to college on another asteroid.  On this world, full-sized people keep little people who are mentally ill or alcoholics or otherwise unemployable as pets, so he need not hide his little captive.  Gleam seems to lose interest in getting resized and finding a job, and starts to flirt with the narrator.  Has she become dependent on the narrator, has she accepted the role of pet and lost any desire to live as a full adult, a working member of society?

Or could it be she has fallen in love with the narrator?  Has the narrator fallen in love with her?  Has their unusual relationship made them unfit to spend their lives with anybody except each other?  What is going to happen to these two people who have transgressed so many of society's most basic rules?

This is a good story, well-written and full of suspense and ambiguity.  Thumbs up!

"Double Dome" (1957)

In 1963, "Double Dome" was reprinted in Human and Other Beings, an anthology whose cover blurb suggests that every story it contains is a condemnation of the human race as a bunch of meanies.  Good grief!  I know there are a lot of misanthropic SF stories out there in which we are told human beings are too violent or too focused on material gain or whatever, but often such stories will camouflage their preachiness or spring the lecture on you near the end--this book tells you right out on its cover that you are in for a dressing down for the stories within.  Who would buy such a thing?  A masochist?

The narrator of "Double Dome" is a personnel manager, like the narrator of "The Littlest People."  He works at a factory in a small town in the spacefaring future; the factory has fewer than 100 employees, and produces parts for spacecraft.  One day an office worker quits, and his replacement arrives the next day.  The replacement is an "adaptoman," a man with four arms, an additional sub-brain, and a third eye.  Such genetically modified men were first developed to operate space ships--they can do more work than the average man, saving costs on space travel by reducing crew sizes.  The working-class employees of the factory are unhappy to see him--is he the first of an army of adaptomen who are going to do the jobs of two men and slash the number of union jobs at the factory?  The engineers and the company doctor aren't too crazy about having this freak around, either.

The narrator is sympathetic to the adaptoman; others accuse him of having the values of a big-city inhabitant, not those of a small town guy.  The narrator in his youth wanted to be a spaceman, and sometimes wishes he was an adaptoman himself, and he and his wife have been considering signing up to have their own children, when they are ready to have kids, turned into adaptopeople.  (Adaptos are created by bathing the fetus in the womb with radiation soon after conception.)  

The plot of "Double Dome" is sort of episodic and mechanistic.  The adaptoman gains acceptance among the citizens of the small town through a series of psychological stratagems, each of them targeting some demographic among the factory employees and then the town as a whole.  This four-armed operator even manages to get engaged to the prettiest girl in town, daughter of the vice-president of the town's bank.  There is a conversation between the adaptoman and the narrator about how adaptomen are the future, suggesting that one day everybody will be genetically engineered, and in different ways for different tasks.  In a paragraph that today would be considered sexist and racist, the adaptoman says that Arab men like fat women and African men like women with "plate-sized lips" and hints that in the near future female fetuses could be engineered to have these characteristics. 

Everything is coming up roses for this adaptoman but at the last moment the town balks--the idea of a man with two extra arms and an extra eye and an oversized noggin marrying a normie woman is too much for the people of the small town to handle.  At the wedding ceremony the prettiest girl in town sees something that triggers her to run out of the church, leaving the adaptoman at the altar, and the adaptoman slowly walks out, four hands over his face, weeping, never to be seen again.

The sight of the adaptoman weeping pulls the heartstrings of all the women in town and they decide they want their sons and daughters to be adaptos.  I guess that counts as the first twist ending.  The second twist ending is the narrator's discovery of a clue that indicates that the adaptoman engineered the disaster at the church in order to get all the women in town to embrace the adapto future.  The adaptoman didn't really come to town to take an office job at a factory, and he didn't really fall in love with the prettiest girl in town--he is an agent of an activist organization that trained him in how to convince people in small towns to accept adaptopeople.  He travels from town to town, pulling the same tricks in every town in the interest of building the new adapto society.   

"Double Dome" fits squarely in the tradition of science fiction stories in which--boo hoo!--we see how hard a time superior people have in a world of mundanes; I always assume there are so many SF stories like this because so many SF fans think of themselves as better than everybody else even though they were bullied in school by other boys and ignored by the girls.  "Double Dome" is also one of those science fiction stories in which the cognitive elite are shown to be fully justified in using their superior intelligence to manipulate the masses.  I guess it is also a kind of allegory about the plight of minorities, like Jews and African-Americans.

"Double Dome" isn't great, but it isn't bad.  The style and pacing and all that are fine; the problem is that the plot and the individual plot beats all seem either tired (the adaptoman is beaten up by the working-class factory employees but they respect him afterwards because he put up a good fight) or unbelievable (women see a freak get his heart broken by another woman and this inspires in them a desire to give birth to their own little freaks.)  It is just too easy for the adaptoman to manipulate everybody.  Can you believe this guy, even with his second brain, can seduce the hottest richest chick in town after town?  And, after getting her to the altar, manipulate her into dumping him right there in church in front of all her friends and relatives?  (I have this same criticism of all those "gaslighting" horror and crime movies in which a cabal tries to drive somebody crazy to get her inheritance, and of Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories--people are just not that predictable.)  

Finally, I want to point out a choice Banks makes I found noteworthy.  Even though this story is set in the future (we are told adaptomen have been around for over 50 years, so this story must be in the 21st century), Banks includes dialogue that puts you in mind of the 1940s, having one character crack "Something new has been added" and another invoke "the four freedoms."  Maybe these early 1940s coinages were still in such wide use in 1957 that Banks assumed they would continue to be so for many decades?

 We'll call "Double Dome" acceptable. 

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So, these tales run the gamut.  We've got an abysmal piece of junk.  And a competent, if preachy and less than believable, traditional SF story.  And a fine story that offers interesting speculations and social commentary as well as an unreliable narrator and characters with complex and ambiguous, but still creditable, psychologies.  One has to wonder if Gold had a hand in ruining the bad story and/or elevating the good story, how responsible he was for my reaction to them.  A mystery that will probably never be solved.

More 1950s magazine SF in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.

R P Mills' Decade of F&SF: M W Wellman, R E Banks and A Davidson

Robert P. Mills edited Venture and F&SF in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and also edited a bunch of F&SF-related anthologies.  Let's check out some stories from his 1960 book A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which has a sort of abstract cover by Mel Hunter, a realistic work of whose I recently saw during one of my regular explorations of magazines at antique stores.

Of A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction's contents, we've already read John Ciardi's "The Hypnoglyph," Theodore Sturgeon's "Fear is a Business," and Mildred Clingerman's "First Lesson."  Today we'll attack stories from this anthology, all of which debuted in F&SF, by Manly Wade Wellman, Raymond E.  Banks, and Avram Davidson.  We'll probably investigate three more tales from the book in a future blog post.

Nota bene: I am reading all these stories in a scan of A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but if something looks fishy I will consult scans of the original magazines.

"Walk Like a Mountain" by Manly Wade Wellman (1955)

This John the Balladeer story first saw print in an issue of F&SF that also included Damon Knight's "You're Another," a story I took to task at great length in a blog post which also serves as one component of my defense of A. E. van Vogt against the Knight groupies.  This ish also offers stories by Chad Oliver, Evelyn E. Smith and Charles Beaumont I haven't read yet but may read in the near future.  Who knows what paths I will tread?

It is pretty common for SF stories to find inspiration in, and to directly invoke as a means of creating a mood or painting an image for the reader, elements of Greek and Roman or Norse mythology, or 19th-century British novels like Frankenstein or Dracula.  Here in "Walk Like a Mountain," Wellman changes things up a little, piling on references to the Bible and to American tall tales like those of Paul Bunyan and John Henry.  This not only feels like a refreshing change of pace, but makes sense for the milieu Wellman always sets his Silver John stories in--the rural South--and the characters who inhabit them--hillbillies, not the scientists, college professors, urban nerds and aristocrats who populate so many of the SF stories we read.

John has taken up the task of bringing to an old friend some money due to him from an inheritance.  This old friend now lives near the top of a mountain, in a little village of like five houses.  Above the little village, atop the mountain, is a sixth house, home of a man eight feet tall who is said to have the power to summon rainstorms and control lightning.  Up on the plateau where sits this giant's shack is the stream and pond that feed the waterfall that rushes past the village.

When John arrives at the village, he finds the place in turmoil.  The giant has kidnapped John's pal's beautiful daughter, a woman over six feet tall.  The villagers are of course scared to confront the giant, who, besides being hugely muscled sorcerer, can only be reached via a treacherous climb, during which the climber will be very vulnerable.

John volunteers to try to talk sense into the giant.  The silver-tongued bard uses his ability to sing and play his silver-stringed guitar, his knowledge of the Bible and folklore, and his natural cleverness and neighborliness to get in good with the giant.  After climbing up the cliff, John learns from the giant that the village is doomed--a big rainstorm is coming and it will swell the waterfall to the point it will wash away the village and its inhabitants--the giant carried off the beautiful girl to save her from this disaster.  The giant is in love with this tall woman, who besides being beautiful is brave and resourceful, but he couldn't care less about the other villagers, whom he suspects think him a freak.  With the woman's help, John uses psychology to persuade the giant to put his super strength and magical powers to the job of altering the shape of the pond so that water from the terrific storm will drain on another side of the mountain and not destroy the village.  This act of redemption wins the giant the hand of the beauty in marriage.

An entertaining story, Wellman rendering the images and ideas skillfully and making all the characters sympathetic--thumbs up!  "Walk Like a Mountain" has been reprinted in numerous Wellman collections and several anthologies.

"Rabbits to the Moon" by Raymond E. Banks (1959)

Here we have a dead pan, straight-faced, humor story.  While it isn't actually funny, the story is clever, even sophisticated at times, and the humor doesn't get in the way of the more serious character and speculative elements of Banks' story.  For example, I found Banks' depiction of a once-vital man going senile, and how those around him react to his decay, very convincing, even sad.  "Rabbits to the Moon"'s plot is also well-constructed; the disparate pieces operate smoothly so the story has plot twists and a compelling complexity but is not hard to follow or to credit, and Banks' wild science fiction speculations are not simply window dressing but are actually fully integrated into the plot.  Thumbs up!

It is the future of air cars and routine travel between Earth and the little colony of domed scientific facilities on the moon.  Reginald Goom is a wealthy businessman, head of Goom Looms, a boutique clothing manufacturer.  For generations, Goom Looms has been a small firm that trades in the finest attire for fashionable men, each article it produces and sells a work of art.  But today the company has an opportunity to get a huge contract, for space suit components, and expand its operations and profits radically.  Reginald Goom doesn't want his company to get into mass production, to abandon its essential nature; of course, most everybody else who has shares in the company wants to seize this opportunity to make stacks of money.  These people who care more about profits than tradition and quality can outvote Reginald Goom because, at the moment, they have more voting shares than he does; you see, Reginald's cousin Dick Mullen usually sends a proxy to Reginald so Reginald can vote his shares, but cuz is currently on the moon and the proxy won't arrive in time for the vote.

Reginald is one of the two surviving Gooms; the other is his niece, who is married to a scientist who is secretly working on a teleporter.  This scientist has been teleporting rabbits to the moon, but hasn't got all the kinks out of the process yet, so is scared to send a human being.  When Reginald Goon finds out about the teleporter he jumps into it when the inventor isn't looking, thinking this way he can get to Luna ad get his hands on the proxy in time to save his company from expansion.  When Reginald arrives on the moon he is like a blob--the teleporter transmits soft tissues and bones at different speeds, and his bones haven't arrived yet, and won't for a week or so.  Amazingly, life as a blob ain't so bad!  As a blob, your cells become pretty plastic, and you can devote additional cells to the brain to increase your intelligence (a cure for senility!) or to your muscles to increase strength, maybe even form wings and glide around.       

With the help of his clever, manipulative niece, Reginald Goom triumphs.  With the proxy from cousin Dick Mullen, he can vote down acceptance of the space suit contract, a contract no longer valuable anyway, because the success of the teleporter renders space suits obsolete.  Increased profits that can satisfy the shareholders are still available, however--separating yourself from your bones is going to become very popular among the fashionable set, and Goom Looms can get into the business of making the most stylish of exoskeletons for those who prefer to walk around instead of slither and ooze from place to place.  

I find this story unusual and entertaining, but it hasn't been reprinted much beyond the various editions of A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Here in "Rabbits to the Moon" Banks demonstrates the ability to construct a satisfying plot, develop science fiction speculations, and write likable and interesting characters, but it seems he never wrote a respectable science fiction novel, just goofy porn novels and hard-boiled detective novels which wikipedia says did not sell.  Sad!    

"The Certificate" by Avram Davidson (1959)

Here we have a brief and pungent horror story about life on Earth fifty years after the conquest of humanity by inexplicable and invincible space aliens.  These alien bastards destroyed most of what was on the Earth's surface in their irresistible attack, including most of the people, and the human survivors are maintained as slaves, put to work at jobs they don't even understand, pulling levers twelve hours a day that do they know not what, sleeping the rest of the day in poorly heated dormitories.

The aliens spare little for the humans, so that people's clothes wear out, for example.  Once a year you can petition the aliens for some boon by forgoing sleep and waiting in line on your off hours; if you make it to the head of the line before it is time to report for work you then fill out the request forms; lots of people ask for new clothes or for permission to visit relatives or friends they knew fifty years ago, before the invasion.

People like our protagonist are still able to work twelve hours a day fifty years after the conquest because the aliens have instituted a comprehensive system of socialized medicine.  All humans have had something implanted in them that immediately cures them of any disease they might contract or heals any possible injury in a matter of moments.  This system also serves as law enforcement--anybody who is late for work or otherwise misbehaves suffers horrendous physical and psychological torture which leaves no permanent damage.

This implant makes people almost immortal, and also makes suicide almost impossible.  And on the fifth and final page of "The Certificate" we learn what the main character has been waiting in line, scurrying from one office to another, and filling out forms to request--permission to die.

Thumbs up.  

After its debut in an "All Star" issue of F&SF, "The Certificate" was reprinted in several Davidson collections and various anthologies.

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Robert P. Mills did us a solid recommending to us these three stories, all of which are somewhat unusual and all of which hold the attention and generate real human feeling in the reader by depicting characters who face challenges and pursue goals that resonate with the reader and who evolve in response to changing circumstances.  Let's hope that the next time we open up A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction that the stories will be equally satisfying.