Weird Tales, Sept '43: R Bloch, A Derleth and R M Farley

It's time for another trip to the dark and dangerous world that is Weird Tales, the essential pulp magazine, edited, from 1940 to 1954, by Dorothy McIlwraith.  Today, the September 1943 issue.  We've looked into this issue already to admire "Fredric Brown's story "The Geezenstacks" and a Hannes Bok illustration.  But it is stories by Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and Ralph Milne Farley that bring us to WT's pages today.  Feel free to read along at the scan of the World War II-era magazine that I will be reading, which you can find at this link. 

"Black Barter" by Robert Bloch

"Black Barter" is a sequel to November of 1942's "Nursemaid to Nightmares," a story I called "an absolute waste of time."  I counted, and saw that "Black Barter" filled 20 pages of Ms. McIlwraith's magazine.  Then I gritted my teeth and forged ahead.  "Unto the breach once more, dear friends...."

Our narrator, in the earlier story, was hired by an eccentric hobbyist to look after his collection of mythical and supernatural individuals--a vampire, a werewolf, a mermaid, and the rest.  Then the eccentric collected a Medusa and it turned everybody to stone (except the narrator.)  As "Black Barter" begins, the narrator is missing his charges and his employer and hopes to someday figure out how to get them reanimated.  A witch, an old friend of the collector, comes to visit.  We get lots of lame jokes and silly interplay as the narrator tries to convince the witch to summon a demon to reanimate his friends.  Part of his strategy is to get the witch drunk, but when she performs the black mass to summon the demon she botches it and gets a substandard demon.  The narrator cuts a deal with the demon, and he reanimates the statues, but puts the wrong soul in each body--the mermaid's body is animated by the centaur's soul, etc.  These are the kind of jokes you get on Gilligan's Island and The Flintstones, but we like those shows because we already like the actors and/or characters and so care what happens to them--of course the characters in this story are interchangeable and forgettable.  Somehow the mermaid's soul gets stuck in a wax dummy the witch is using as a 1:1 scale voodoo doll.  Here I provide an example of the wordplay that Bloch engages in on almost every line.

“Nevertheless, the window dummy is mine. It’s my poppet, and I shall pop off with it.”

“Go fly your broomstick,” shrilled Trina the mermaid. “And don’t call me a dummy, you Halloween hag!”

Five or ten pages of this would be a waste of time, and here we have twenty.  And yet, "Black Barter," while bad, is better than "Nursemaid to Nightmares," because whereas its predecessor was an almost plot-free series of gags, "Black Barter" has a conventional narrative structure in which the protagonist pursues a goal.  The narrator takes the witch on a date, including a harrowing broomstick ride, hoping to seduce her into summoning another demon to rearrange his friends' souls; hijinks ensue when the jealous mermaid and all the other monsters try to chaperone the date, and everybody ends up in front of a judge at night court, rehashing the plot to the incredulous magistrate (this kind of thing also happens in The Flintstones) who orders the witch to summon the demon to put everybody back in the correct body--the wily sorceress double crosses our cast, leaving all the weirdos once again inanimate statues and the narrator all alone (as in an episode of Gilligan's Island, at the end of the story the characters are all back at square one.)   

A step up, but still way down in the basement.  Thumbs down.

"Nursemaid to Nightmares" and "Black Barter" were reprinted together in a 1955 issue of the magazine Imaginative Tales and in the Bloch collection Dragons and Nightmares; Dragons and Nightmares also reprints "The Eager Dragon," another Bloch joke story I have denounced here at MPorcius Bitch Blog, and "A Good Knight's Work," a 1941 story that debuted in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown which I expect I will be grousing about here some day.

This is how you sell garbage stories, in America, in Germany, and beyond

"Baynter's Imp" by August Derleth

Cyril Baynter is a fat, vain, lazy rich man whose wealth was inherited from his grandfather, a lumber baron who made a pile  devastating the environment.  Baynter is "a great hand with the ladies," thanks to his wealth, but one woman, the beautiful Belle Fassett, has given him the cold shoulder; she is instead interested in Bert Trayle.  By chance, Baynter acquires an old vessel, a sealed carafe, with warnings in Greek and Latin inscribed upon it; after he opens it, it becomes evident a supernatural entity has been released.  This imp reads Baynter's mind, sees his desires, and has Trayle killed in an accident and then Belle Fasset's father similarly killed, clearing a path for Baynter to marry Miss Fassett.  But Baynter worries about the imp--if he marries Belle and Belle finds out about the imp she will leave him or figure out what happened to her father and previous beau or something like that.  So Baynter tries to seal the imp back up in the bottle, but the imp reads his mind and turns the tables on him--Baynter is entombed in the bottle more or less forever, and the imp takes his form and marries Belle Fassett and lives happily ever after.

This is an acceptable filler piece, written in a somewhat but not quite obnoxiously sarcastic style; no big deal, but better than some of the junk Derleth banged out on the old typewriter (according to David Drake, a huge Olivetti) to help fill up the pages of Weird Tales.  "Baynter's Imp" would go on to be included not only in Derleth collections but the anthologies Alone By Night (1962) and 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories (1994).

"Wings of Death" by Ralph Milne Farley

Remember when I defended Farley from a scurrilous attack by one Isaac Asimov?  I was contending with giants in those days!  I would go on to praise Farley's story about a gangster who integrates cloning into his criminal enterprises.  I even gave a mildly positive review to Farley's story about a guy being sent back in time by a Hindu swami to strangle a young Hitler!  Let's hope I can champion Farley today; at least "Wings of Death" is a good title.  (Remember how much I loved H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald's "Winged Death"?  I was consorting with giants in those days!)  Plus, here in Weird Tales "Wings of Death" is accompanied by a decent illustration by Weird Tales veteran Margaret Brundage.

"Wings of Death" is a little long and a little convoluted, with too many twists and turns that I feel don't really accomplish anything and plot elements that are not quite believable, but not bad.  We're judging it acceptable.

Our narrator is a reporter, who is interviewing Ames, a New England business guy who inherited a fleet of ships, as he lounges poolside with his wife, both of them in skimpy swimwear.  Mrs. Ames suggests her husband tell the journalo the story of the sacred flies of Malea, and most of the text is a third-person account of Ames' wild adventure in the South Pacific.

Ames' father had a lot of business in the Pacific, and when Ames was a kid took him to an uncharted island only he knew about, Malea.  Ames senior was pals with the head of the tribe on the island, but not the priest, a skeletal old guy.  Ames junior made friends with the chief's son, Tamu.  These two kids realized that the tribe's religion was a load of crap.  The island of  Malea is infested with big flies, flies as big or bigger than wasps, which the tribesmen considered gods.  The flies emerge from a slimy pool that writhes with maggots.  According to the local religion, this is the pool of life, and if it were to expire, all life on Earth would die.  So, the tribespeople toss food--including human sacrifices--in the maggot pool all the time, and it is forbidden to kill any of the flies, even though they bite people.

Young Ames is hanging with Tamu one day when a fly bites him and he kills it by reflex.  When Tamu sees his white friend isn't immediately struck dead, he realizes his religion is a sham--no biggie, Tamu didn't like the sinister head priest, anyway.  The boys agree to, one day, maybe when Tamu is chief, to destroy the fake religion.

Ames didn't return to Malea until he was an adult, after his dad died.  He and Tamu have kept up a correspondence over the years, and get along well, and Tamu's sister has grown up to be very attractive.  When Ames talks about how hot this girl is, the reporter is a little surprised to see the businessman saying this stuff around his wife, whom the narrator takes to be a typical Bostonian.  Anyway, there is a whole complicated thing with a member of the ship's crew killing a fly and the priest witnessing it and sentencing the sailor to death and Ames coming up with a crazy plan to save the man and destroy the pool, a plan that miscarries at first.  At the same time, the annual Mating Dance comes up, a ceremony that imitates the mating practices of the flies.  The marriageable women dance around a fire, and pick men out of the crowd to dance with them--if nobody objects, they become man and wife.  But men in the audience are permitted to object, and then the two men fight.  Tamu has to fight some guy to get his girl, and Ames similarly fights to get Tamu's sister.  Tamu's sister is then instrumental in conceiving and accomplishing a back up plan to save the sailor and Ames and to discredit the local religion.  As we see quite often in these old genre stories, a woman takes initiative and puts herself at risk to resolve the plot, making me think "Wings of Death" has feminist elements, but since she performs this heroic deed to save her man and because the story fails the Bosporus test, I doubt academic feminists would appreciate the feminist aspects of the story.         

The twist at the end of the story is that Ames's wife is Tamu's sister.  I found it a little hard to believe that the reporter would have a conversation with a South Sea Islander in a swimsuit who learned English as an adult and mistake her for a "typically Bostonian wife."  This and some other needless complications and hard-to-swallow elements mean I can't really say "Wings of Death" is good, but it certainly falls in the acceptable range.

It looks like "Wings of Death" has never been reprinted, so I am one of the relatively few people to have read it--I guess you are one of the rather small number of people to have ever heard of it.  We dig deep here at MPorcius Fiction Log!

**********

Probably the high point of this issue of Weird Tales is "The Geezenstacks," but Derleth's and Farley's contributions are not shameful.  As for the Bloch, we'll sweep that one under the magic carpet.  Maybe the next issue, which features Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, and Ray Bradbury, will be a little better.  Fingers crossed!  

 

Theodore Sturgeon: "The Music," "Scars," and "Die, Maestro, Die!"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading a 1965 edition of the 1953 collection E Pluribus Unicorn by Theodore Sturgeon, the man who brought you such bizarre utopian visions as "If All Men Were Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?", "The Skills of Xanadu," and "...And Now the News,"  as well as those wacky tales of alien invasion, "Make Room for Me" and "The Incubi of Parallel X."  Yesterday we read three stories from E Pluribus Unicorn, one about two virgins, one good, one evil; one about a superior race of sexless women; and one about two unattractive people finding love against the odds thanks to the intervention of a flying saucer.  Who can guess what Ted has in store for us today in "The Music," "Scars," and "Die, Maestro, Die!"?  You can read along at a scan of a copy of the very edition I am reading at this link.

"The Music" (1953)

This little thing, one and a half pages, seems to have made its debut in E Pluribus Unicorn.  It is a sort of literary exercise and a slightly oblique horror story.  A guy is stuck in a hospital, maybe a mad house.  He likes to escape the stifling atmosphere of the institution to a balcony or to a loading dock or something, a place where he can lean on a rail and smoke and look out into the night, see the mist and garbage cans and a cat chase and kill a rat.  A recurring motif of the story is this guy's music--I guess music he hears in his head.  As the story ends it is implied that he imitates the cat and chases down and kills a fat nurse leaving the hospital to head home, maybe even eats her.

Acceptable.  

"The Music" has only ever appeared in Sturgeon collections.

"Scars" (1949)

Well, here's a change of pace.  "Scars" debuted in Zane Grey's Western Magazine; Sturgeon wrote enough Western stories, some in collaboration with Don Ward, to fill a collection.  Well, let's sample Ted's body of work about the Wild West.

"Scars" is a well-written cynical twist-ending story; the style is evocative and economical and the surprise ending works.  Thumbs up, cowpokes!

Two cowboys are working together, day after day, night after night, far from any other people, putting up a barbed wire fence or something in what amounts to the wilderness.  They rarely talk, but sometimes, Sturgeon tells us, a man has to get something off his chest.  One time the elder cowboy tells the story of how he lost part of an ear when he was fighting with a slick Easterner over a woman and the woman in question hit him in the head with a frying pan.  Another time, he describes how he was shot in the belly but survived a long hospital stay.

The younger cowboy one night is complaining about women, saying they all want a gentleman but their definition of gentleman is unattainable.  The old man says that he is a gentleman, and explains how he merits this appellation.  One day he was riding in some remote area and saw a woman bathing in the nude, the region being so thinly populated she was sure nobody would be around.  Startled, she fell in the water and hit her head and fell unconscious.  The cowboy rescued her and spent several days nursing the young widow back to health as she suffered blood loss, a fever, delusions our hero was her dead husband, etc.  While she was laid up he did work on her farm, repairing a door and pulling weeds and so forth.  Sturgeon, who in his stories often depicts touching human relationships, leads you to believe this is some kind of wonderful selfless love the cowboy is expressing, forgoing one opportunity after another to take advantage of this woman.  When the woman is recovered and it is time for the cowboy to leave, the widow tells him he is a gentleman, and there is even the suggestion she has perhaps fallen in love with him--she watches him until he disappears beyond the horizon.

When the young cowpuncher asks why the oldster never took advantage of the widow, the old guy makes clear it was because his bullet wound, which left his "plumbin'" "all mixed up and cross-connected," rendered him impotent.

When the issue of Zane Grey's Western Magazine that included "Scars" was reprinted in the UK, our British friends gave it a different, perhaps more exciting, cover.

"Die, Maestro, Die!" (1949)

It seems our mates across the pond couldn't top the US cover of the issue of Dime Detective in which "Die, Maestro, Die!" debuted and so used the same cover for the British edition of the magazine.  Understandable--the cover is pretty awesome.

Like the narrator of (spoiler alert) "Saucer of Loneliness," whom we met in our last blog post, the narrator of "Die, Maestro, Die!" has a birth defect, a tiny little mouth with sharp pointy teeth that renders his mug among the ugliest anyone has ever seen.  This guy, Fluke, also has an unusual voice, and so has a job with Lutch's hip and happenin' band.  While Lutch the clarinetist and bandleader and beautiful girl piano player Fawn and drummer Crispin and the rest of the band are doing their thing, Fluke, hidden in the dark, speaks cool patter into the microphone.  "Lutch is here, Lutch is gone, man, gone....Top of the morn from the top of the heap, Kizd."  This story is full of hip slang:

She pulled Lutch's swallow-tail between numbers, dropped it like it was hot, and stood there blushing like a radish....The music business is full of roundheels and thrushes who feed on seed; this kid was from fresh air.

Anyway, "Die, Maestro, Die!" is the story of how Fluke keeps trying to murder Lutch, whom he envies  because of his talent and Fawn's love of Lutch and whom he resents because it is to Lutch that Fluke owes his success.  One of the grim realities we experience in life that that we are all too reluctant to acknowledge, one that molds our relationships and has painful ramifications for society, is the fact that often it is not gratitude but resentment and contempt that beneficiaries feel towards benefactors; if you loan or give money to a relative, he won't necessarily be thankful, but instead hate you for humiliating him, for making your superiority undeniable, for making him feel he owes you, even if you deny that he owes you anything.  And don't get me started on how people who "work" for the government or who are on the dole feel about the taxpayers who are keeping them housed and fed.  Anyway, Sturgeon in this story offers some sad but all-too-accurate psychological insight--the more Lutch and the other band members are nice to Fluke, the more they try to help him, the more he resents them and tries to destroy them.

One of Sturgeon's themes throughout his career, and one he cleverly illustrates in "Die, Maestro, Die!" is his skepticism of individualism and his romantic view of collectivism.  In his SF work this often manifests itself as telepathy and collective consciousness and similar fantastical elements , but in this mainstream crime story it manifests itself in the orchestra.  All the members of Lutch Crawford and his  Gone Geese work together, get on the same wavelength, and produce great art.  Even when Lutch disappears after Fluke drowns him in a sink and throws him in a river, the band, from long intimate familiarity with Lutch, are able to produce the kind of work Lutch would have produced--having successfully built relationships, having sacrificed himself for the collective, Lutch lives on after death, his band creating and performing just the kind of music he produced and would have gone on producing.  And our villain, Fluke, because he wants to succeed on his own, without help, because he is an individualist, is a monster who keeps trying to kill Lutch, even the immortal Lutch that is the band, by sabotaging the band's performances.

In the end, Fluke is found out, but even then the band members, inspired by the example of Lutch, treat Fluke far better than he deserves.  Fluke is punished, however, if only by his own inner demons. 

Personally, I find collectivism detestable and think of myself as  radical individualist, but I can't deny that Sturgeon here makes his case skillfully.  The characters and their relationships are also well rendered, even if Lutch and the band members sometimes seem impossibly goody goody.  And I have to say that Sturgeon here does a better job of describing what the experience of performing and hearing good music is like than do a lot of people that strain their brains and their typewriters piling on surreal  metaphors trying to do so, like Charles Beaumont in "Night Ride" or Robert Bloch in "Dig That Crazy Grave!"  So, thumbs up for "Die, Maestro, Die!"   

**********

More than once on this blog I have suggested that I might enjoy Barry Malzberg's mainstream work more than his SF work.  Today's three stories by Theodore Sturgeon make me wonder if I might say the same thing about old Ted.  These stories are more economical and have more believable characters than a lot of Sturgeon's SF work, and "Scars" and "Die, Maestro, Die!" effectively address Sturgeon's typical themes without resorting to psychic powers or space aliens and without expressing contempt for the mundanes.

I think the remaining stories in E Pluribus Unicorn first appeared in Weird Tales, and so we will get to them in the course of our exploration of the Unique Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual, assuming the Grim Reaper doesn't catch up with me first--I still have a lot of issues of Weird Tales to get through.

Theodore Sturgeon: "The Silken-Swift," "A Saucer of Loneliness," and "The Sex Opposite"

In July, at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle, I bought a copy of the 1965 paperback edition of the 1953 Theodore Sturgeon collection E Pluribus Unicorn because of the Richard Powers cover. Today let's read three stories from the book, stories from the early 1950s--I have chosen stories specifically because they did not debut in Weird Tales, because I am going to read Sturgeon's WT  stories as part of my long term plan to read at least one story from each issue of WT.  But before we dig into "The Silken-Swift," "A Saucer of Loneliness," and "The Sex Opposite," find here links to my blog posts about four stories in E Pluribus Unicorn I have already read:  

"Cellmate"
"The Professor's Teddy-Bear"
"A Way of Thinking"
"The World Well Lost" 

Lastly, I note I will be reading these stories in my '65 paperback, but may consult the magazine versions at the internet archive.  The titles of the three stories above serve as links to the scans of those old magazines, and this link right here should take you to a scan of the very edition I am reading.

"The Silken-Swift" (1953)

"The Silken-Swift" appeared in F&SF the same year the hardcover first edition of E Pluribus Unicorn was printed. A big hit, this story has been reprinted in many anthologies.

"The Silken-Swift" is set in a fairy-tale world where the Squire lives in a Great House, a world inhabited by two beautiful women, one purest good and one purest evil, and a strong handsome man both women have their eyes on.  The topic of "The Silken-Swift" is Sturgeon's perennial topic, love and sex, and like so many of Sturgeon's stories, it is kind of edgy, perhaps disturbing or offensive--Sturgeon loves to challenge conventional morality.  I sometimes complain that writers include too much description in their stories, and Sturgeon really goes to town describing the Squire's Great House and the nearby Bog and what happens in these fantastical locales, but Sturgeon's descriptions, I feel, add to the atmosphere and make more comprehensible and creditable the behavior of the characters, behavior that is pretty extreme and perhaps only really believable in a fairy tale setting.

The Squire is often away, leaving his beautiful daughter Rita to her own devices.  Rita is totally evil, and loves more than anything to tease men to the point of madness, to humiliate them by insincerely offering them her body and then withholding it to torture them; she also tortures them in other ways.  Her latest victim is Del, the villager with the big beautiful muscles and the long beautiful hair.  Rita lures Del into the Great House and entrances him with her sexy dancing and the fancy food she serves, promising her body but keeping it from him.  The climax of her manipulations is to trick him into drinking a potion that renders him blind.  Then she continues to tease and trick him so that he chases her around the House and then outside the House, banging into things and falling down stairs so he is injured and stunned.

Living nearby is Barbara, a beautiful girl in touch with nature.  She is friends with all the animals and plants, and has a good attitude about life.  She is in love with Del but it is a noble and pure love--she isn't sick with frustrated desire because he doesn't pay any attention to her, but is warmed and comforted just to see the handsome and sturdy Del in the distance.  Similarly, when she sees the unicorn that comes to the pool of pure water in the Bog, Barbara cherishes the sight of the beautiful creature.

Barbara comes upon the injured Del as he lies dazed in front of the Great House.  She comforts and tries to heal him, her love giving her strength to lug his big muscular body to a comfortable place where she can tend his wounds.  Blinded and still amazed, Del thinks Barbara is Rita and that this helpful behavior is further tantalizing torture.  Barbara thinks it may comfort Del to hear about the beautiful unicorn, and she sings for Del the song she composed about the marvelous beast.  Thinking her Rita, Del rapes Barbara, taunting her with the fact that only a virgin can attract a unicorn.

Some time later Del's eyesight has returned and he confronts Rita.  Rita denies having tormented him outside the House and told him about a unicorn.  She offers to prove she is still a virgin by capturing this unicorn, and enlists Barbara, whom she knows is familiar with the Bog, to guide her to the pool.  Del and the rest of the villagers accompany the women.  What will happen when the unicorn arrives?  Will Rita the virgin capture it with the golden bridle she has brought with her?  Or will the unicorn flip the script and show favor to Barbara, who, though no longer a virgin, is a good person (after all, she didn't have Del dragged before the authorities for raping her)?

This is a well-written and compelling story which feels convincing when you are reading it even though it is pretty over-the-top with its cartoonishly good and evil women.  We expect Sturgeon's work to push boundaries and challenge our assumptions, edgy, and "The Silken-Swift" is challenging in multiple ways.  When I was in college, the feminists talked about the Madonna-whore complex, the way men see women not as complex nuanced personalities but as either super good and sexually innocent or super evil and sex crazed, and of course this is exactly how Sturgeon depicts the two women in this story (though of course Rita's real sin is not having too much sex but withholding sex after getting guys all revved up.)  Sturgeon also challenges us with his somewhat counterintuitive and perhaps confusing philosophy of love and goodness ("...Barbara's life was very full, for she was born to receive....loving is a most receiving thing, as anyone can attest who has been loved without returning it...it is the one who is loved who must give and give....") and with his expectation that we sympathize and forgive a rapist.  Even if we object to what Sturgeon is doing with "The Silken-Swift" or disagree with some or all of what he is saying, he presents it all in a way that indicates he is sincere and has actually considered these ideas, that he isn't just trying to shock you in a cheap exploitative way by saying something crazy or depicting creepy sex, and so the story is thought-provoking and engaging (and no doubt for some titillating in its depiction of abusive sexual behavior.) 

Thumbs up for "The Silken-Swift."

"A Saucer of Loneliness" (1953)

In the first two pages of "A Saucer of Loneliness," Sturgeon describes with extravagant dramaticism how a woman tries to commit suicide by stripping naked and jumping into the violent ocean waves and how a guy, our narrator, insists on saving her.  She scratches and punches her would-be lifeguard and he pulls her hair and karate chops her in the neck until she is unconscious so he can rescue her in peace.

(Don't worry, maybe in real life I take a walk in ill-fitting shoes and my foot is still hurting two months later, but in a book people get beaten unconscious and they are just fine twenty minutes later.)

On the third and fourth pages of "A Saucer of Loneliness," the two characters are talking on the beach, the woman demanding the narrator not touch her and saying "You don't know who I am.  Nobody knows who I am."  The next eight pages of the story are a flashback describing, for some reason in the third person, not in the voice of the narrator or this suicidal woman, who she is.

At seventeen she was an unattractive and not particularly intelligent girl from a not very well-off family.  Walking in Central Park in Manhattan, a flying saucer like five or six inches across came down from the sky and stuck briefly to her forehead before falling off.  In mere minutes the FBI got to her and the dead saucer and dragged her off to confinement where various government entities tried to get information out of the girl--it is believed that an alien intelligence or entity entered her brain from the saucer, and the government wants as much data as they can get from this alien encounter to help defend the Earth from hostile E.T.s or defend the West from the Reds.  But the girl, who never had a boyfriend or even a date, and never had a bedroom to herself, now finally had something of her own and refused to tell anyone anything about what she has learned from the aliens.

Eventually she was released, though she received a purely nominal punishment for contempt of court for not saying anything about the alien entity.  The papers and pop culture are full of her story, and all such media is unsympathetic.  Her mother the drunk doesn't want anything to do with her anymore, and people are afraid to have her around as they have the idea she may be a spy or a traitor.  Men date her but they all turn out to be policemen or intelligence agents of some type or another trying to get info about the aliens from her.  All alone, she has tried to fill her life with hobbies, like reading novels and learning about nature, but she was soon disillusioned with these pastimes.  (Novels, for example, are always about the beautiful people, with whom she cannot identify.)  She started throwing into the ocean bottles that contain a piece of paper with a little poem about being lonely written on it.  Eventually she quit throwing the bottles, as she realized the government was collecting them all.

But the Feds missed at least one!  It turns out that the narrator is a man as lonely as this woman.  He has a club foot and a speech impediment and an ugly face so can't get women or a job.  He found one of the bottles and through tireless research figured out where it must have come from.  The poem is the only thing the woman learned from the aliens--the saucer was a message in a bottle just like the ones she threw into the sea, only the aliens thrown their bottles across space.  By coincidence, the very day the narrator came to find her is the day she finally decided to kill herself.  Luckily he saved her and these two unattractive people can live together happily ever after.       

The big theme of Sturgeon's career is love and often in his stories he writes affectingly about human relationships, and "A Saucer of Loneliness" does that.  At the same time, Sturgeon is an elitist who has contempt for most of humanity, and that elitism and contempt are very present in "A Saucer of Loneliness," and, for me, mar the whole enterprise.  Sturgeon is scathing in his description of the crowd that surrounds the girl in Central Park when she collapses from being hit by a flying saucer, he makes fun of people worried about communism and enemy attack as if no communist ever hurt anybody and nobody ever attacked anybody else, and the only person he has anything positive to say about is a shrink.  Presumably this appeals to the many SF editors and readers who are leftists who take Freudianism seriously, but I find this misanthropy and whistling past the graveyard when it comes to foreign threats to be trying and annoying.

In addition, some of the scenes and plot elements feel overwritten and overdone, like the suicide attempt in the first two pages; I was all right with the extravagant detail and extreme personalities and behavior in "The Silken-Swift" because it was set in a fairy tale landscape, but laying it on similarly thick in the real world of New York City, the Soviet Union and psychologists damages the story's credibility.

I've got complaints, but "A Saucer of Loneliness" feels original and is always engaging, never boring, so I can mildly recommend it.

"A Saucer of Loneliness" debuted in a copy of Galaxy that we may be cracking open some day because it prints stories by Damon Knight and Algis Budrys I don't recognize; there is also a pretty hostile review of August Derleth's Beachheads in Space by Groff Conklin.

Mr. Derleth's twelfth anthology contains 14 stories, 5 of which are A, 2 are B-, one is C, and 6 are D or D-....Class A stories are Simak's "Beachhead," van Vogt's "Repetition," Russell's previously anthologized "Metamorphosite," Asimov's "Breeds There A Man . . . ?" and Wyndham's "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down." The rest of the tales (even the mildly "B" ones) we really can do without.

I think I've read six stories from Beachheads in Space, and you can see if I thought we could do without any of them here.      

    

"A Saucer of Lonliness" has been reprinted many times in Sturgeon collections (it is the title story of the seventh volume of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon) and anthologies including those that purport to offer "masterpieces" and stories that represent the SF of the 1950s.

"The Sex Opposite" (1952)

"The Sex Opposite" debuted in Fantastic, and, when Fantastic was going through some tough times in 1968, "The Sex Opposite" was one of the many old stories the magazine reprinted.  It doesn't look like "The Sex Opposite" was ever anthologized, though it did resurface in multiple Sturgeon collections.

"The Sex Opposite" has much of the structure and stock elements of a detective story, and again and again characters withhold information from each other and Sturgeon withholds information from us readers, information that is sprung later in a way that is supposed to be dramatic.  I often find this kind of thing annoying; I'm a simple soul with limited patience for dead ends, cul-de-sacs, and red herrings and would just like to get from point A to point B. 

Budgie is one of those young female reporters we encounter in genre fiction who is always wheedling and whining and cajoling in her efforts to get a scoop.  She busts into the morgue on Dr. Muhlenberg, as she apparently does all the time, looking for some juicy 411 to build a story around.  It also seems that Budgie and Muley have some kind of mutual but not quite acknowledged attraction to each other--if you were foolish enough to read the editor's introduction to the story in the Fall 1952 issue of Fantastic, you'd know that the climax of the story is Budgie and Muley finally becoming an item.  (Sex seems to be a theme of the issue--the cover has a wretched homeless bum on it, but the interior illos offer an abundance of femmes fatale and curvaceous ladies, including a portfolio of Heinrich Kley's drawings of nude women ice skating with crocodiles.)  Budgie and Muley each are aware of some very strange and exciting events, but instead of just telling each other the blockbuster news they have, they are both cagey and have to manipulate each other into giving up the goods.  To make a long story short, conjoined twins were in the park after dark, maybe making out or engaging in heavy petting or something (!) and got murdered--Budgie heard the scream of the dying, the most horrible sound she has ever heard, and after she recovered from the shock she followed the ambulance to the morgue where Muhlenberg is amazed by the bodies of the victims, they being the most perfectly formed and least-uncomfortably conjoined Siamese twins he has ever become aware of.  The two hear that unique scream again--was it outside, the cry of another victim?  Or are the "bodies" in the morgue still alive? 

While our hero and heroine are outside investigating, somebody with knowledge of surgery and chemistry uses chemicals to burn up the bodies in the morgue--nothing is left of the corpses after the 7000 degrees Fahrenheit inferno!  Sturgeon tries to turn Muhlenberg's fighting the fire into a thrilling action scene, but it is just confusing--Muley closes a door on the fire and then takes fire extinguishers in both hands and somehow puts out the fire but Sturgeon doesn't say that he set down any of the fire extinguishers or opened the door, but I guess he must have.  

Budgie is back home when Muley goes to a Mexican bar to drink beer and listen to Yma Sumac on the jukebox.  In the bar is a beautiful woman--she also loves Sumac!  This woman is Muhlenberg's dream girl, just the kind of woman he has always wanted, and he feels totally at ease, absolutely sympatico with her.  She goes back with him to his place where they listen to records and read classics aloud to each other.  She implies they are going to have sex but while he isn't looking she sneaks off; fortunately, they made a date for tomorrow night at a dive bar in a tough part of town.

The next evening after work at the morgue, Muhlenberg goes out to meet his dream girl and runs into Budgie.  Budgie tells him that today she met her dream man in the morning and spent the day with him walking in the country and made a date with him to meet right here at this dump.  The dream-creature appears, a woman in masculine clothes--she spent last evening with M and today with B.  

Then comes the long explanation.  Living among us is a race of females who reproduce asexually by budding.  This budding produces a clone, so, to make sure the race enjoys the benefits of genetic variation, these beings also perform what Sturgeon calls "syzygy"--two of the beings melt together, exchange some genetic material, and then separate, each changed to some degree.  Sturgeon says paramecium do this.  (If I am understanding this right, wikipedia calls this process "conjugation.")  Last night's murder victims were in the process of syzygy when some punks came upon them and killed them.  Why were these beings doing this in public instead of some safe place.  Because they love nature!

As we might expect of creatures in a Sturgeon story, these sexless women are superior to the human race in almost every way--peaceful, in touch with nature, equipped with psychic powers, possessed of empathy bordering on a collective consciousness, blah blah blah.  What they lack is the ambition, the affinity for risk, that we humans have and that leads us to build technology, machines, institutions.  So, they live in a symbiotic relationship with us homo sapiens--they benefit from our building and they use their psychic powers to inspire our greatest artists.  It was these psychic and empathic powers that she used to make M and B feel so warm and cozy with her--these sexless females are experts in all aspects of love except the sexual.  Of course, they have to keep their existence a secret because human beings are so violent and always try to kill people who are different--it was she who obliterated the evidence in the morgue.  (Science fiction readers love this "woe is me, I am different than everybody else (and better, of course) and so everybody is mean to me" goop.)  Sturgeon puts in a good word for world government through this woman's mouth, making me groan--giving the Chinese Communist Party and Islamic jihadis even more influence over my life is not what I am looking for, Ted.

The sexless woman has not only invited Budgie and Muhley to this crummy bar, but the three men who slew her fellows in the park while they were in the middle of the most wonderful of all (non-sexual) love experiences.  When she can see the killers out the bar window, she uses her psychic powers to make them kill each other.  Then she uses her psychic powers to make Budgie and Muhlenberg forget everything she just told them.  But after she leaves, her beneficent influence lingers--B and M admit they love each other and we readers are able to believe they live happily ever after.  (Science fiction readers love the idea of using special powers to get revenge on or manipulate the normies.)

This is today's weakest story, and I have enumerated my many complaints above, but like "A Saucer of Loneliness," "The Sex Opposite" is strange and challenging in the way serious SF should be and is never boring, so I'm putting it at the border of acceptable and good.

The Jan '68 ish of Fantastic prints two interior illos by Jeff Jones, so you 
Jones completists should check it out

**********

Sturgeon's action scenes are clunky, and some of his attitudes are silly and his ideas groaners, but he's a writer who is serious and passionate and holds the reader's interest and often throws stuff at you that feels new.  So a decent crop of stories.  Stay tuned for more interaction with Killdozer Ted, including stories that did not debut in science fiction magazines.

Bad Twitter News

It seems some ne'er-do-well hacked into my X account and put up some posts that break the X rules and so my X account has been suspended.  Many of my blog posts here include links to my X posts, and I have no idea if those links will send you to my photos of SF books and sculptures at art museums or some other less savory or even unsafe content, so I am posting this as a warning and/or apology.  I have appealed my suspension and if things go back to normal I may delete this blog post.

Merril-approved 1959 stories by T Godwin, "D Gordon," & W L Gresham

After "F" comes "G."  Back on July 9, we read three stories published in 1959 by authors whose names begin with "F," stories that Judith Merril, renowned anthologist, had recommended.  On the same list of Honorable Mentions in the back of Merril's critically acclaimed The Year's Best S-F: Fifth Annual Edition we find six stories by author's whose names begin with "G."  We're reading four of these, skipping Daniel F. Galouye's "The City of Force" because I read it in Bodyguard and Four Other Short Novels from Galaxy back in my New York days and Ron Goulart's "Parlor Game" because I avoid joke stories and always assume that is what Goulart is selling, and I am not in the market for joke stories.  But we've still got four capers torn from the science fiction magazines of the second Eisenhower term to explore.

"Empathy" by Tom Godwin 

Let's see what kind of story Merril thought worth promoting that was penned by Tom Godwin, author of the controversial "Cold Equations," a story heavily influenced by John W. Campbell, Jr.  "Empathy" debuted in Fantastic and would not be reprinted until our own wild 21st century in a Baen collection; I'm reading the Fantastic printing.

"Empathy" is one of those stories about how some white people who represent a Western power are nice to nonwhite natives and some other white people are mean to nonwhites and you should be one of the nice ones.  Also, a story about intragovernmental rivalries and the limitations of computers and the danger of doing everything by the book instead of thinking on your feet.

Captain Rider of the Frontier Corps used to be in charge of the Terran outpost on Deneb Five, a planet whose location makes it strategically essential to further Earth exploration, and he had a decent relationship with the natives, a bunch of black-skinned dragon-riding cavalrymen armed with slug rifles.  But just recently Deneb Five has fallen under the jurisdiction of the Extraterrestrial Relations Board (ERB--maybe a joke reference to the creator of John Carter?), a new agency that has been hoovering up all the funds once issued to the Frontier Corps.  Now Deneb Five's human outpost is under the control of a General Beeling, whom we know is no good because he is fat.  While Rider of Frontier Corps had a tiny staff of dog-people from the Altair system, people renowned for their powers of empathy, Beeling of ERB has a vast human staff, many of them young men tricked into joining ERB with promises of adventure.  Beeling has contempt for non-Terrans like the canine Altairian empaths and the black Denebian riders.  As the story begins, hundreds of native mounted troops are surrounding the Terran outpost, annoyed and scared by the arrival of Beeling's large force, and a final negotiation is about to begin--Rider fears that if Beeling botches the negotiation the far more numerous Denebians will kill all the Terrans (and the dog-people.)  When it rains it pours, and Rider has another problem on his mind-- one of the dog-people is off on a mission on the coast forty miles away and is about to be drowned by the very high tide caused by this planet's many moons, and Beeling won't authorize use of the helicopter to rescue her while there is a chance of native attack on the base--Beeling and ERB think of the Altairians as mere animals, as Rider's pets or mascots.  

Beeling has a computer analysis of the natives and it guides his negotiations into disaster--as Rider knows, computer analysis doesn't work in negotiations with people; sensitive people like Rider who have respect for others and can understand their emotions have to negotiate with people, not some haughty computer-user like Beeling, who sees people as soulless profit maximizers.  Rider is aware that ERB computer analysis has failed on almost every alien race, a fact the ERB has kept a secret from the chief executives of the Earth government.  So, it looks like tomorrow the Denebian riflemen will kill all the humans and dog people, even though the computer told Beeling the black natives would never actually attack the Terran base.     

Beeling, via helicopter, abandons his men at the base after sending a report to Earth blaming the Frontier Corps for the impending massacre; this report that will likely lead to the total defunding and disbanding of the Frontier Corps.  Rider marches forty miles to rescue the female dog-person.  When the natives see that Rider, unlike the absent Beeling, isn't a racist and a coward, they decide to resume negotiations; Rider not only secures the use of the planet as a refueling station for Earth, but the Denebian chief sends a message to Earth explaining how great Rider and the Frontier Corps are and how terrible are Beeling and the ERB.

This story's message and drama are both pretty banal and pretty over-the-top; for example, the dog people don't just look kind of like dogs, but act like dogs, wagging tails when happy and carrying stuff in their mouths and all that, so we readers get the hint that they are loyal and devoted, like dogs are, and should like them, while the General is a moron and a coward and a fatso and every other bad thing Godwin can think of.  We call this stacking the deck.  I wouldn't call "Empathy" bad, just weak filler, so we'll grade it "barely acceptable."  Presumably Merril liked "Empathy"'s anti-racist message.

"Despoilers of the Golden Empire" by Randall Garrett (as by David Gordon)

I tend to avoid Randall Garrett as I expect his stories to be joke stories, and the two stories by "David Gordon" recommended by Merril on her 1959 Honorable Mentions list certainly have joke titles.  I was, however, initially fooled by the pseudonym and didn't realize who the real author of these stories was until after I had psychologically committed myself to reading them, and a blog post with only two stories feels kind of light, besides, I am interested in John W. Campbell,  Jr. and Astounding, so it sort of makes sense for me to read these Garrett pieces if I am going to read any.

"Despoilers of the Golden Empire" is written in a chatty casual style, like the narrator is hanging out with you, and is one of those stories that has the feel of a popular history written in the far future, discussing events from the not quite so far future with a level of detached irony.  The narrator, for example, says stuff about how this or that question you might have about elements of the story aren't addressed by extant sources, and stuff like "Before you can get a picture of the commander—that is, as far as his personality goes—you have to get a picture of the man physically."

The commander in question is one of the most famous of the many adventurers of the Second Empire.  You see, long long the human race conquered the universe, then its empire collapsed into squalling factions, but then came the Second Empire, which tries to maintain control while allowing individual regions some autonomy.  The odd thing to the reader about this Second Empire is that gold, in some unexplained fashion, is key to the universe's economic and political systems, not uranium or petroleum or something that seems more intuitive, and so starships full of adventurers travel the galaxies looking for gold while scientists and businessmen struggle to figure out a way to artificially create gold.  Kelly Freas' opening illustration to the story makes crystal clear the connection of these Second Empire adventurers to the conquistadors and pirates of the days of Cortes and Drake.

After this background, Garrett offers his physical and psychological description of the tough 60-year-old soldier Commander Frank, and then it is on to his grand adventure.  Frank is confident he has found a planet loaded with gold, but investors are very cautious, so his expedition is undermanned and underequipped.  On the planet he and his men acts exactly like conquistadors, not scientists or astronauts or whatever.  Frank gives stirring speeches to his men, everybody is clad in steel armor and armed with swords and pikes because the charges for their energy weapons are expensive.  They march around the planet on foot, though they do have motorized "carriers," which are used like pack animals most of the time but in battle ridden cavalry charge style.

If Frank and his men are like conquistadors, the natives of the planet are almost exactly like Pre-Columbian Mesoamericans, red-skinned humans who don't have the wheel or riding animals and whose civilization consists of a ruling demographic that lords it over the lesser tribes of its vast empire. 

What follows the landing on the planet is a standard adventure story with very few science fiction elements.  The Terrans, though outnumbered, can outfight the natives with their superior equipment and they take over one village after another; other obstacles include disease and the fatigue of the march and snake attack and occasional dissension in the ranks.  Frank is shown to be a great fighting man able to take on multiple opponents at once and best them, as well as a cunning and charismatic leader.  Garrett throws in an analog of Christianity and a missionary priest who wants to convert the natives--this element suddenly appears in the middle of the story and feels tacked on.  When Frank's little army arrives at the capital city of the native empire, Frank captures the native emperor via trickery and takes over the planet.

Garrett then quickly sketches out the succeeding decade, in which Frank has to crush rebellions by both natives and Terrans.  Then comes the twist ending, in which Frank is murdered by traitors, and the big reveal, when Garrett explicitly admits that this story is a retelling of Pizarro's conquest of Peru.

As I was reading "Despoilers of the Golden Empire," I was expecting to give it an "acceptable" rating as an unoriginal, plodding, mediocre, but not actually bad, adventure story, but the final self-satisfied revelation of the story's lazy and cheap gimmick was so annoying that it sank the story down into bad territory.  Thumbs down!  Why would prestigious editors Campbell and Merril countenance such a thing? "Despoilers of the Golden Empire" has nothing interesting or new to say, no real point of view--it doesn't even have the "imperialism is bad" or "white people are greedy" theme you might expect--and no particular artistic merit--it isn't well-written or funny or make you feel sympathy for Frank or the natives or anything like that.  And why would anthologists like Stanley Schmidt and Robert Adams reprint it?  Schmidts anthology has a humor theme, but "D of the G E" is not funny.  Adams' anthology is about soldiers, and Frank/Pizarro is a soldier, but "D of the G E" is not particularly exciting or entertaining and doesn't say anything interesting or special about the life or profession or character of soldiers.  What were Campbell, Merril, Schmidt and Adams (or co-editors Greenberg and P. C. Adams) thinking?

When I worked in public academia I pretty regularly had to copyedit, and sometimes even compose, propaganda that was a bunch of lies, eh, I mean, qualitative research the conclusions of which I found unconvincing.  To do so, I would, like an actor, "get into the head" of some other person and make the kinds of arguments such a person would make.  Let's pretend I am being paid to come up with arguments that Campbell, Merril, Schmidt and Adams might make if you asked them what is good  about "Despoilers of the Golden Empire."  As for "D of the G E" as joke story, perhaps it is a satire of those science fiction writers who lazily rehash episodes from history as adventure stories, or maybe a puzzle pointed at science fiction readers, a test to see if they are familiar with history.  A brief mention of psychic powers which has no bearing on the plot may be a friendly little dig at Astounding editor Campbell, well-known to be fascinated by psychic powers and eager to print stories on that theme.  More philosophically, perhaps "D of G E" is a meta/recursive criticism of escapist literature that sets adventures in fantasy lands when real life includes locales and civilizations, journeys and battles, and characters and ideologies every bit as strange and amazing as anything a genre writer could dream up. 

I don't know if I am earning my pay today speaking for SF editors any better than I earned my pay speaking for academic pinkos back in my Manhattan days; these arguments of mine are not too hot.  The success of this story will remain inexplicable to me.    

"...or Your Money Back" by Randall Garrett (as by David Gordon)

This will probably be the last Randall Garrett story I ever read, so pay attention!

Like "Despoilers of the Golden Empire," "...or Your Money Back" chugs along competently though unimaginatively through a bunch of formulaic and mediocre scenes until we get a sort of twist ending that we sort of saw coming.  We'll call this one barely acceptable as it is shorter than the very long "D of the G E" and at least has some traditional science fiction elements like speculations about the future, you know, what you read an actual science fiction magazine looking for.

Our narrator is a Las Vegas attorney and Garrett runs up the word count with cliches about the law, you know, a lawyer is an officer of the court and has a duty to give his client the best possible defense even if he knows he is guilty and that sort of stuff.  You've already heard this stuff a hundred times, hearing it the 101st time won't hurt you.  A guy from New York hires the narrator to defend him--NY guy expects to get in trouble at the casino.  

Big Apple guy has a pocket-sized device with a dial on it and when he goes to the top casino in town he turns the dial to the number of the roulette wheel on which he has placed his bets and wins all his bets.  Garrett gives us a long scene in which Gotham guy does this stuff again and again and the people at the casino--casino staff, customers, police--react to the guy's amazing run of luck.  He and his device end up in the hands of the police, and he is indicted for cheating at gambling.  

Next up, a long trial scene in which our narrator and the district attorney question witnesses and the NYer and the judge says this and the jury does that blah blah blah.  The casino scene and the court scene feel like the thousand casino scenes and the million court scenes you have already endured on TV, in the movie theatre, and in books before.  

Anyway, the twist is that the device does nothing whatsoever, it is just a decorated box (it actually sounds like one of those fidget boxes that first became available a few years ago.)  The NYer has had success at the roulette wheel because he has psychic powers.  He wanted to bring this case to court to publicize the existence of psychic powers, which many people have but which generally lie dormant.  Three years later, human life has been revolutionized by the unleashing of humankind's psychic powers--for example, a space ship powered by psychics has just landed eighty astronauts on Mars and chemical and mechanical machines are becoming obsolete.

Astounding editor Campbell was fascinated by psychic powers so we can see why this optimistic story about such abilities might tickle his fancy.  I don't know why Merril liked this one.  I may think "...or Your Money Back" is better than "Despoilers of the Golden Empire," but SF editors don't seen to have thought so--this tale of cheating at the casino for the good of humanity has only ever been reprinted in the 1987 Garret collection Takeoff, Too!, sequel to 1980's Takeoff, which includes "D of the G E." 

"The Forsaken Earthman" by William Lindsay Gresham

Gresham of Baltimore has only five fiction credits at isfdb; he seems to have been more successful as a detective writer and a nonfiction writer specializing in spiritualism and the milieu of the carnival sideshow.  His life sounds more interesting than his work, to be honest; it seems Gresham's catastrophic mishandling of the family finances, his alcoholism and his infidelity drove his wife, poet and novelist Joy Davidman, to flee to England and marry C. S. Lewis, whose master wordsmithery had played a role in her conversion from atheistic communism to Christianity.  Anyway, "The Forsaken Earthman" debuted in Satellite* and does not appear to have been reprinted; did Merril, always trying to build bridges between and dissolve barriers between the genres and between the genres and the mainstream, promote "The Forsaken Earthman" because Gresham's 1946 novel Nightmare Alley was a hit and the basis for a film?  With its emphasis on human relationships--sexual relationships between men and women, the relationship between a man under stress and a man of the cloth, and the relationship between a man and his children--and because it is a sort of riff on Matthew Arnold's "The Forsaken Merman." "The Forsaken Earthman" often feels like a mainstream story. 

*Here in this bitchy footnote I will complain that "The Forsaken Earthman" here in Satellite ("THE BEST IN SCIENCE FICTION") is full of typos and the illustration that accompanies the story is crude and without style or charm. 

And maybe Merril liked "The Forsaken Earthman" because it is an anti-racist story and one of those stories that concocts a utopian society of aliens who are better than humans as a way of criticizing the human race.  The protagonist of "The Forsaken Earthman" is a crew member of the first serious expedition to Mars; he goes native, abandoning the mission to marry a Martian girl.  Part of the story is a first person account from the chaplain and morale officer on the mission, part of it letters written by the deserter to the chaplain from his new Martian home.  Early letters describes his happy life among the amphibious Martians, who have gills and spend most of their time underwater in their canals, which they long ago covered over with airtight buildings and rooves, to keep in the oxygen they need, which is scarce on the Martian surface--Mars is dead on the surface, but alive below the surface, in what the chaplain likens to an aquarium.  The Martians have a technology based on bioengineering--the airtight suits of armor they wear while on the surface are a bunch of living molluscs stuck together, for example, and they work steel by applying to it colonies of acidic germs or single-celled creatures or something.    Reading about how happy and smart and good-looking the Martians are and how beautiful their civilization, where everybody runs around naked and plays music all day is, paragraph after paragraph, kinda boring.

The deserter lacks gills, of course, and has to live in the buildings and on the ledges just under the roof of the canal, and in his letters keeps asking the chaplain to provide him diving equipment so he can spend more time with his family and explore the dark depths of the canals.  The chaplain eventually brings it, so we get more long descriptions of how beautiful everything is under the canals and how superior the Martians are.  The deserter writes a book about the stuff he discovers.

"The Forsaken Earthman" is a tragedy of sorts.  The deserter's Martian wife abandons him, leaving the part of the canal to which he is confined by his lack of gills, and she takes the kids with her--he never sees any of them again.  In his letters he goes on and on about missing the kids and eventually even missing Earth.  He becomes a drunk and dies of an infection the Martians don't know how to deal with.  But posthumously, he is a hero and statues are built of him.  His half-Terran, half-Martian kids are leaders in the development of a peaceful interplanetary civilization that consists of Venus (the people there are aquatic, too), Earth and Mars, and his book on submarine Mars is a classic pioneering work.  Most importantly, by defying the racism of his fellow Terrans and by disobeying orders and abandoning his post, he demonstrated the importance of being a rebel and the tremendous value of interracial marriage.  Yes, this story doesn't just say interracial marriage should be legally and socially equal to intraracial marriage, but is actually better because it advances the human species.

His tragedy was an illustration of a fact now accepted everywhere throughout die solar system—that when two species capable and desirous of mating are thrown together by circumstance, it is criminal to keep them apart by law, by force, by censure or by ridicule. Through the mating of similar species new species are developed which have their contribution to make in the ever upward spiral of life in the galaxy and eventually beyond.

"The Forsaken Earthman" feels like a filler piece as it covers well-trod themes without generating any excitement or surprise, married to an OK mainstream story about a guy who screws up his relationships but turns out to be a hero in the end because he's a rebel.  Is this a pathetic wish-fulfillment fantasy of Gresham's, a drunk whose wife and children left him for a more successful scribbler from a related but distinct culture?

Reading "The Forsaken Earthman" felt like a chore while I was doing it, but looking back on it, the basic plot and themes are more or less sound, it is just that Gresham lays it all on way too thick.  Barely acceptable is our verdict.

**********

Oy, another rough day here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Four stories that feel long and rehash shopworn themes without adding to them any novel twist or adorning them with some kind of unique style.  I guess we have to hope Merril will be serving up a better plate of "H"s than she has "G"s.  Stay tuned to find out if she does so.

Dark is the Sun by Philip José Farmer

Deyv said, “This is all very well, but how does it concern me? I won’t live nearly as long as a tharakorm, and these gateways terrify me. They are not guaranteed entrances to places where the Earth won’t die—for an unimaginably long time yet. Anyway, what is life to me without my own soul egg and my tribe, the people I know and love?....No, I’m not going one step further on this crazy quest of yours." 

Just a few blog posts ago I read Philip José Farmer's "The Alley Man" and was very impressed by it--the writing style, the images, the metaphors and similes were all good, the characters were compelling and believable, and the story had a good mix of humor, sadness, and edginess.  Farmer's stock in my mind went through the roof!  Then, while in Marietta, OH, among the 50¢ books at a flea market where I bought a Hot Wheels space agency rover, I spotted a paperback copy of Farmer's 1979 novel Dark is the Sun.  I felt like I recognized the cover, but from long long ago...had I read this in the Eighties?  I am astoundingly cheap, so I didn't buy it, but later decided to read (or reread?) the novel and downloaded a PDF to read right here on this very screen.  

Maybe we should consider Dark is the Sun one of those world-building exercises, one that takes place billions of years in the future, so Farmer can include any kind of idea in his world, no matter how wacky, explaining it as a result of high technology or alien influence.  We learn all about the ecologies of a multitude of monsters and aliens in the book, and their relationships to humanity, and the bizarre customs of the humans and semi-human people who inhabit the Earth in this far future, as well as the astronomy and geography of this far future universe in which the Earth no longer has any radioactive material and the very solar system has been changed beyond recognition by high technology and the compression of matter as the universe collapses in on itself.  For example, the inhabitants of this Earth are unfamiliar with sunrises or sunsets because the sun is dead, the sky is lit by artificial means.  

I suppose Dark is the Sun is in the tradition of Clark Ashton Smith's, Jack Vance's and Gene Wolfe's "dying Earth" works, though unfortunately Farmer doesn't demonstrate the brilliant wordsmithery of those three heroes, and he doesn't include the mystery and sorcery prevalent in Smith's and Vance's work, the humor in Vance's, or the challenging narrative strategies or Christian world view of Wolfe's.  We might also see Dark is the Sun as influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs, specifically the Tarzan and Pellucidar books--every two or three pages the main characters of Dark is the Sun have to fight or escape from some monster or primitive tribesmen or climb something or sneak into some place.  Unfortunately, Farmer's action scenes are not as exciting as ERB's, and at times I found them a little confusing, leaving me unsure who was standing or clinging where during a fight or while climbing a rope or whatever.  This isn't because Farmer's style is terse or sketch-like--on the contrary, Farmer overexplains, tells us more than is necessary, making individual scenes and the book as a whole seem too long.  Farmer won't tell you the characters went down the hill to the building when he can tell you that they had to go left to avoid a steep decline and then right because of a boulder and then this guy almost tripped and then that person almost dropped this item, etc.   And while I'm piling on poor Farmer, I'll say that his human characters here are not memorable or iconic like Cugel the Clever, Severian, or Tarzan of the Apes, but instead pretty forgettable and overshadowed by the superpowered nonhuman beings who guide and protect them.  

Even though Burroughs' books are full of violence and danger, they often serve as utopian, wish-fulfillment fantasies that contrast 20th-century industrial life with a simpler life closer to nature in which there is less concern with money and obeying the clock and wearing clothes and so forth.  While Farmer's book here grows steadily more dystopian and apocalyptic as it progresses, Dark is the Sun does feature some of that utopian jazz.  The main character of the novel, Deyv, is a member of a tribe of savages who don't have to work, because food is all around the seasonless equatorial jungle in which they live.  None of the tribesmen is sexually frustrated, because their society makes provision for unattached males, assigning the role of unpaid prostitute to certain women.  The problem of health care costs, a topic that every person I have to deal with in real life relishes discussing ad infinitum, has been solved because everybody in this book has the mental ability to focus attention on individual damaged cells and repair them tout suite.  The problem of razor prices has been solved, as humans have evolved to no longer have facial hair.  Farmer doesn't examine the social or long term implications of these conditions and abilities, they just sort of get mentioned and help smooth out the plot--you can march all day for weeks and fight all the time if you can heal fast, for example.      

Nine tribes inhabit Deyv's region, and they are more or less at war most of the time, hunting each other's heads and so forth, but on a regular schedule they meet peacefully to trade.  Among the things they trade are ancient high tech artifacts, items left behind by the many advanced civilizations of their ancestors which rose and fell over the past dozen billion years, items like swords that never rust or dull.  (Their own technology is at the poison blow dart and stone tomahawk level--they don't even have archery or the wheel!)  Everywhere around these primitives is evidence of their high tech ancestors.  The jungle is crisscrossed by highways so durable as to have endured billions of years.  The sky high above is regularly crossed by flying machines bearing incomprehensible symbols, a message from the past nobody can read.

A high tech artifact ubiquitous among the savages and central to their lives is the soul egg--each savage wears one around his or her neck on a cord.  The soul eggs are a kind of mood ring--if you are scared it turns one color, angry another, etc.  We eventually learn they can be used as lie detectors.  We immediately learn that people choose their spouses using the soul eggs--members of the opposite sex can perform a procedure that makes the soul eggs flicker and pulse, and if the two people's eggs flash in harmony they are compatible.  Usually young people find a compatible mate within the tribe, but, if not, they seek a spouse at the regularly scheduled trade meeting.  The different tribes are essentially different ethnicities whose members each have a distinctive look about them, and the occasional breeding across tribal lines introduces new blood to the tribes. 

As our story begins, Deyv has been unable to find a mate either among his own tribe, the Turtles, or among the other eight local tribes at a trade meeting.  So he sets out on a quest beyond the local region to find a girl in some far flung tribe and bring her back to introduce new blood to the region.  He is accompanied by his dog and his cat, which have the intelligence of primates and are quite large and thus a big help in the novel's innumerable hand-to-hand battles.

To make a long story short (we've got like 400 pages of text here), Deyv travels around, meeting other people and getting drawn into more and more elaborate quests and various side quests that involve fighting people and monsters, climbing stuff, and sneaking into places.  His soul egg is stolen, so he starts chasing the thief.  He meets an attractive woman whose egg has also been stolen and they chase the thief together.  Then  he meets a superior being, a plant man twice as big as a human and far more intelligent and knowledgeable, the descendent of a genetic engineering effort of long ago.  This veggieman gives science lectures and talk a lot about how the universe is collapsing.  He has had a device of his own stolen by the thief and joins Deyv's pursuit of the thief.  They catch up to the thief, a fox-man or something.  The thief was employed by a witch to steal the soul eggs, and the thief helps Deyv and company storm the witch's lair and capture her.  The witch wanted the soul eggs as part of a scheme to steal alien high technology from an alien snake-woman monster living in a wasteland.  So the witch and her household join the group and they go to the wasteland--on the way making friends with a robotic alien with a laser cannon--where they make friends with the serpent alien, who is like 50 feet long.  They all work together to find a gateway to another universe because this universe is collapsing faster than initially predicted by the plant man and snake woman.  A breeding population of humans will be needed in the other universe, so the plant man and snake woman have to trick tribes of humans, who have a superstitious fear of leaving the Earth for another universe, into joining the mission.  The less savory or easy-to-identify-with characters, like the thief, witch, and laser cannon robot, get killed or deactivated, but eventually Deyv and his girlfriend and the two smart giants get to another universe along with enough humans to constitute a viable gene pool.  The humans leave behind their dopey superstitions and religious fetishes, including the soul eggs, no longer needing those crutches--Dark is the Sun is in the science fiction tradition in which smart nonhumans are a contrast to wicked stupid humans, the common people need the cognitive elite to manipulate them to survive, and religion is denigrated, as well as the adventure tradition in which you've got to climb something or kill somebody every three or four pages.

When I was young, I watched a ton of TV.  Every so often something thrilling or brilliant would be on the screen, like a woman I had a crush on like Isabella Rossellini or Dana Delany or a monster like King Kong or Godzilla.  But mostly the TV was bland and inoffensive, merely a good way to kill time, one hour after another.  Dark is the Sun is kind of like that; it goes on and on, not boring or annoying, but for the most part lacking emotional or intellectual effect on the reader.  This monster's way of killing you, how the party builds a raft, the thief's expression of his love of stealing or the witch's expression of contempt for her children, et al, are all faintly entertaining or amusing, but not powerful, and you don't care who gets killed or who makes it to the other universe, and many episodes feel like they are superfluous or dead ends.  The tone of the novel is flat; every scene feels the same, Farmer apparently uninterested in building up to a climax or springing any surprises on you or doing that thing where he builds tension and then releases it in a catharsis.  But every scene is at least OK; Farmer is a professional.

We're calling Dark is the Sun acceptable.  It took me a while to read because reading it wasn't any more attractive than engaging in my other hobbies--the art museums, Telengard, the model trains, the antique stores--so I'd read only a few chapters a day, but it wasn't painful.  It may be a while before I read another long novel; in my opinion, the short story is a superior vehicle for presenting the SF ideas and horror scenarios that I find compelling.

If you want more insight into what is actually going on in this plot-heavy and incident-rich novel, feel free to read on for a blow by blow description of the saga of Deyv, the man dragged by fate and a talking vegetable to enlightenment and to another universe.  I'm warning you, though, that you may not find it asengaging as a trip to the art museum or the antique store.

**********       

The first five chapters of Dark is the Sun consist of Deyv fighting off and escaping from attacks by monsters, as well as dealing which such problems as needing to find food to eat and water to drink.  Many of the novel's 46 chapters deal with such every day events--eventually we even get passages in which the characters have to figure out where to go to the bathroom.  Recurring earthquakes that cause fissures, avalanches and tsunamis add to the constant danger faced by Deyv and all the people of this world.

The sixth chapter introduces the twist that gets the actual plot rolling--while asleep, somebody steals Deyv's soul egg!  Without a soul egg, Deyv's people believe, a man has no soul and so will be shunned, thought of as a ghost--when he dies, he will be unable to enter heaven and live forever with his ancestors.  Farmer in this novel is not only charting Deyv's physical journey from Earth to another, better, universe, but Deyv's intellectual journey, in which he leaves behind his dumb superstitions, and, if only tentatively, embraces science.  In Chapter 6 Devy is at square one, rock bottom, the slave to superstition.  The loss of his soul egg throws our guy into a deep depression, and he refuses to eat or drink, starts to die.  But then he is struck by lightning and this convinces him that the sky god wants him to live, wants him to find the thief and retrieve his soul egg.  So he sets out to after the thief, about whom he knows nothing, and whose trail has been erased by the rain--Deyv trusts in the sky god to guide him.

In Chapter 7 Deyv encounters a woman who has also had her soul egg stolen, an exotic beauty with blue eyes, blonde hair, a straight nose, thin lips, and small high breasts--Deyv's own people are dark and have thick lips and the women have big breasts.  Deyv and this woman, Vana, join forces to find the soul egg thief.  Soon they make friends, in Chapter 8, with another victim of the thief, a sort of centaur-plant-man of great intelligence and learning whose name to humans sounds like Sloosh.  The plant-man, broad-minded but a little arrogant in his superiority, throughout the novel is a sort of spokesman for what science fiction fans (Farmer presumes) believe (or should believe): the pursuit of knowledge is glorious, you should think of the future and consider the entire ecosystem in your decision-making, human beings are violent, selfish, short-sighted and greedy, etc.  Sloosh also drives the plot and overcomes most plot obstacles, being so much bigger and smarter and more moral than the humans.  He can see people's psychic residue, the traces they leave behind everywhere they go, making catching the thief a viable proposition.  By getting in touch with the memories of his fellow plants around the world, Sloosh can also sort of see into the past and into the future, and in Chapter 9 delivers a science lecture and a history lecture about the big bang, human history (mankind has risen and fallen many times, during the rises even having enough power to move Earth away from the dying sun and replace the sun with an artificial energy source) and the inevitable collapse of the universe.  This collapse will be soon on a cosmic timeline, but at this point Sloosh still thinks it many thousands of years away, so while it is a big deal to the plant man, Deyv and Vana just shrug it off.

The main cast catches up to the thief, a furry person.  The thief has been captured by a village's warriors, and in Chapter 10 Deyv and Vana watch from their perch in a tree, which affords a view over the village stockade, as the thief gets tortured.  (Siting up in a tree watching the activities in a primitive village is the kind of thing Tarzan does all the time that Deyv also does all the time.  In real life, don't the people who build fortifications chop down all the nearby trees, if only to serve as material for the fortification?)  In Chapter 11 the villagers are all drunk and D and V invade the village and outfight the few guards who aren't drunk as well as the village canines, but narrowly miss retrieving the eggs because the red-furred thief manages himself to escape in the confusion, snatching the eggs again in the process.  This whole sequence is an example of an action scene that is sort of confusing and overwritten, and a scene that feels like a dead end or like a superfluity--eventually, to advance the plot,  Deyv and Vana have to catch the thief and get their soul eggs, and in this scene they almost, but not quite, succeed, so we have to wait until a later scene accomplishes 100% of what this scene only achieves 90% of.

Chapter 12 continues the pursuit of the thief and is full of more monster encounters, and 13 features travel through a tunnel drilled through a mountain and then on dugouts on a river.  Farmer spends plenty of time on the debate among the characters about how to get to the other end of the tunnel.  The fourteenth chapter sees our heroes riding an organic air ship, a big bag of gas, pursuing the thief, who rides a similar living balloon.  A recurring theme of Dark is the Sun is animals genetically engineered by past civilizations to act as machines, in particular vehicles, that have gone feral after those civilizations collapsed.  These air beasts just drift with the wind, and the thief's gets carried on a different course than the one our heroes are riding due to a change in wind direction.  Deyv and company punch a hole in their organic vehicle so it descends.  In Chapter 15, while escaping some monsters, they discover an astounding artifact, a space craft that can be folded up into a cube three feet across.  The adventurers are able to whip this thing open fast enough to jump into it and seal it up when threatened by enemies--they do this in Chapter 16, which also features a monster that exudes a euphoric drug that reduces humans to joyful incompetent delirium.  I kept thinking they were eventually going to fly someplace in this space ship, but they never do.  They often use it as a mobile fort, however--while light enough to carry around, the space craft is also essentially impenetrable.

The plot moves forward in Chapter 17 when our heroes, a quarter or third of the way through the novel, catch up to the furry thief.  But he doesn't have the eggs--he was hired to steal them by a witch, and now she has custody of them, having seized them from the foolish thief, along with his own soul egg, without even paying him.  This woman is not a magician or a devil-worshiper like the witches we are used to, just a woman who has all kinds of ancient high-tech equipment and uses her arsenal to enslave people and generally exploit the locals.  (As in a Burroughs novel, slavery in Dark is the Sun isn't treated as some disgusting crime against humanity but just a fact of life.)  She is the latest in a long line of witches who have long dominated the area from behind their monster-guarded fortification.  Also present on the periphery of her lair are fruit trees that drug those who eat them into having a positive attitude about the witch, to thinking she is the victim of discrimination and not in fact a cruel tyrant and slaver.  Woah, maybe there was a tree like this in New York City that made the students at the grad school I worked at say all those odd things about Mao Zedong, Hugo Chavez, and Vladimir Lenin.

Our main cast, now augmented by the thief, sneaks into the witch's lair, which consists of three of the living gas bag  airships lashed together and floating at the end of a tether like 600 feet above.  The fight up on the three air beasts with the witch and her minions takes up Chapters 18 through 21.  The battle is very detailed, with lots of dialogue as the heroes plot their next moves and lots of sneak attacks and maneuvering among and between the various gas bag airships, and it all is a little hard to follow and not terribly exciting.

Immediately after the fight, in Chapter 22, we get a lecture from Sloosh on the rotation of the Earth--over the last few billion years, the Earth's rotation has varied due to manipulations made by super-high tech human civilizations.  D and V require this lecture because their people don't have clocks or even the concept of hours and minutes, and so have trouble understanding that the air ship they have captured is going 100 miles an hour thanks to a storm so they will be over a thousand miles from home by the time they can land safely.  During this flight our heroes torture those of the witch's family members and slaves whom they captured during the fight.  But these underlings don't know where the soul eggs are, so the plant man negotiates with the witch, who reveals where she hid the eggs--back where the air ships were moored, of course.  The witch explains why she hired the furry thief to steal the eggs, and tells her life story in Chapter 23.  As so often happens in these adventure stories, the villain is more interesting than the protagonists (consider Dracula, Fu Manchu, Darth Vader, etc.)

As a young woman, the witch, thrown out of her home by her mother, went on an adventure with the plan of stealing some high-tech artifacts from a space alien known as the Shemibob who is currently living on Earth.  This alien captured her and the witch had to serve the alien as a slave for some time; during this time the witch learned that the Shemibob had the secret of immortality and even had theories on how to travel to another universe when the collapse of this one was imminent.  Eventually the witch escaped and took up her rightful station, seizing her mother's lair and artifacts.  Now an old woman, the witch has been stealing soul eggs in hopes of thereby attracting heroic individuals who would venture to the land of the Shemibob--known as the Jeweled Wasteland--and acquire the secrets of immortality and how to travel between universes and bring them back to her--she would hold their soul eggs as hostages.  It seems the witch has stolen hundreds of soul eggs over the years and sent many adventurers into the Jeweled Wasteland, but none has yet returned.

The living airship eventually comes down in a body of water, and our characters narrowly escape from a diverse collection of sea monsters, including living sailing ships.  The folding space ship is unfolded, and they float inside it, drifting until they hit shore on an island in Chapter 25.  Having just introduced us to the idea of portals to other universes in Chapter 23, Farmer puts one on the mountain peak of this island two chapters later.  A man with a beard and pants, maybe a time traveler because man has left behind facial hair and pants many generations ago, or maybe just from a younger universe, appears briefly from the portal and then returns into it; the gateway projects a field that causes nausea, so our people can't enter it, not that Deyv or Vana wants to--at this point, only Sloosh and the witch are really interested in other universes.

Most of the characters want to leave the island, but the surrounding water is teeming with monsters big enough to destroy any boat they can build.  In Chapter 26 Deyv suggests boarding one of the smaller living sailing ships and seizing control of it.  Success is achieved in Chapter 27, and the protagonists guide the monster towards the mainland.  Along the way a larger sailing ship beast chases down their ride and has sex with it--the explosive ejaculations kill one of the witch's sons, but we don't care because just four pages ago the witch was saying how her sons were weaklings and she was ashamed of them.  "'What have I ever done to deserve such a brood? My slaves are better men than you, and that includes the women!”'  The witch has a daughter who is more admirable than her sons; besides being helpful to Mom and brave in the face of danger, she is "long-legged and slim but had huge breasts and a long narrow face, a long hooked nose, and dark eyes."  (If I was editing this book, I would have made sure the face and nose were described before the "but"--"slim but had dark eyes" doesn't make any sense.)

On the mainland the party begins the long march to the Jeweled Wasteland, Deyv and Vana having decided to accompany the quest for the door to another universe which animates the witch and Sloosh (the furred thief just wants to steal what the Shemibob has.)  They march for thousands of miles in Chapter 28; Farmer also uses the chapter to develop the sexual relationship between D and V, who haven't been having sex because they find each other's lack of a soul egg repellant, as do the witch's slaves, who reject D and V's advances.

In Chapter 29 our heroes are captives of a people who I guess are descended from dolphins or whales or something, people seven feet tall with blowholes on the tops of their skulls.  One of Farmer's little jokes is how these people, just as primitive as Deyv and Vana's tribes, paint both six-pointed stars and swastikas on their bodies, and Sloosh talks about how these symbols have had very different meanings over Earth's billions-years-long history.  These cetacean people have a stone and metal god that they have been trying to communicate with.  Every captive they take they tie up in front of the god and compel to try to communicate with the god via flashing lights--they give the captive an oversized firefly (growing up in New Jersey we called these "lightning bugs.")  So far, none of the captives has had much luck passing to the god the message that the village shaman would like the immobile god to come to visit the village shaman's hut.  Each captive has died in the attempt and then been eaten by the tribe.

In Chapter 30 our party is dragged to the god--the plant man thinks it is a machine, maybe a vehicle from outer space, that doesn't move because it is low on fuel or something.  The god's light pulses are laser beams that invariably slay any captive before they can exchange any information.  First to go among Deyv's companions captive is the witch's other despised son.  Only one captive is killed per meal time, two or three a day, so Deyv and Vana have time, under the pressure of imminent death, to realize their soul eggs were not the repository of their souls but just some device that became a crutch for fallible weak humanity and they should have been having a love relationship all this time.

After two of the witch's slaves have been lasered down and it is Deyv's turn at bat, Sloosh, in Chapter 31, persuades the tribe's leader to place captives a few feet to one side when they try to talk to the god so the laser will miss them.  Soon Deyv's party are learning the alien machine's language.  This part of the novel is less credible than the others--why didn't the shaman soon realize that he could preserve those he sent to talk to the god by letting them stand out of the line of fire of the communications laser?  Because the captives tasted good?  This whale-man section reads like a satire of religion more than something believable meant to generate excitement or suspense--it even ends deus ex machina style.

One of the many earthquakes that we hear about periodically strikes and the village falls into the sea and almost every member of the tribe of whale-people is killed. The surviving villagers commit suicide.  Deyv and Vana's party survives, as does the alien machine person--having fallen into the ocean it uses valuable scarce fuel to drive out of the drink.  In Chapter 32 the heroes find radioactive material--from the same meteorite that brought the machine alien--with which to fuel it up, and then ride it towards the Jeweled Wasteland.  Their journey is interrupted in Chapter 33 when they are attacked by a kaiju-sized ("tracks in the forest, prints at least two hundred feet long....the apish skull....was big enough to house several human families") creature--the alien robot machine cuts it down with its laser.  This sequence is the one excerpted behind the cover of the paperback to try to interest prospective buyers, but it is a non sequitur sequence that has no influence on the plot.  Deyv and companions then come to the Jeweled Wasteland, a landscape devoid of life that consists entirely of fields, hills, valleys, etc., of faceted translucent stones.  Our heroes drive through this place for some weeks, facing floods and earthquakes, until they reach the castle of the Shemibob.

In Chapter 34 our cast explores the castle, and in 35 they meet the Shemibob.  This alien is a sort of snake-centipede-centaur, a creature with a female human torso and head that are twice the size of a human head and trunk and are equipped with fangs and a long tongue and quills on the head instead of hair and a different number of fingers and so forth, while below the hairless genitals is a 40-foot-long hideous worm body with 40 humanoid legs.  The Shemibob reveals that she has been trapped in her castle by what acts like a one-way forcefield that has allowed the party in but won't let them out.  In a way I did not understand, the forcefield keeps water and air from coming to the castle, even though it let Deyv and Vana's party in, so the Shemibob's high tech machinery has been manufacturing new air.  This forcefield is an effect of a gateway, presumably to another universe, deep within the castle.  The gateway causes fear and nausea, like that at the island of Chapter 25, but they will have to go through it eventually because the time will come when the raw materials needed by the machines to make new air are exhausted.  Oh, wait, the forcefield starts contracting just after the Shemibob tells her life story so this alien monster and our adventurers have to jump into the gateway now.  In Chapter 36 they find themselves in what they think is a cavern in another universe.  Using their various pieces of equipment and their skills, they escape the rubble of the castle that is flying through the gateway behind them and bust through a cavern wall to the emerge below the ocean surface and then rise to an island beach where they come to realize this is not some other universe after all but just some other place on their Earth.  I always find these bait and switch things, when the author leads you to expect something wild is going to happen and then what happens is not really that wild, to be an annoyance.

In Chapter 37 the Shemibob reveals she has made soul eggs for D and V by scanning their brain waves.  The two check to see if they are compatible mates, and they are, but they wonder if maybe the Shemibob's eggs aren't legit, if the ophidian alien maybe fashioned the eggs specifically to show they were compatible, whether they were or not.  We readers learn more about the eggs. 

Here I will note that, despite all the descriptions of breasts, Dark is the Sun may be seen as a feminist story.  Vana is right in there with Deyv killing with her blow gun and stone tomahawk and arguing about what to do next.  The wisest and most ambitious human character is the witch, and her most admirable offspring is her daughter.  The most powerful character in the novel is the Shemibob, and she is portrayed as a good leader, pushing everybody around and deceiving them for their own good. 

The party begins the trek across the planet to the site of another gateway detected by the Shemibob--maybe this one will lead to another universe?  The plant man urges Deyv and Vana to sign on to the trip to another universe, arguing that this universe is collapsing faster than expected, as evidenced by the increased number of earthquakes, but the humans are not sure and tentatively plan to leave the party when they approach the lands of their tribes, which conveniently are on the way.  In Chapter 38, on this long march, Vana gets pregnant and the machine alien tells the story of its life and people.  An earthquake opens up a fissure and the machine alien falls into it along with the witch's daughter, who has survived this long without having any effect on the plot--I thought she would have a big moment, taking over the family business of being a witch, causing a love triangle with Deyv and Vana, something like that, but no, she just dies having made no impression on the narrative, just leaving in our minds the image of a girl with huge breasts and a long hooked nose.  The party does manage to rescue the machine that protects them with its laser weapon.  Whew, close one.

Chapter 39 largely concerns the personalities of the thief and the witch.  The party has arrived at another wasteland to be crossed, and the thief proposes killing the witch, whom he hates, saying feeding her in a land where no food is available would just be a waste.  The superior beings--the noble and wise Sloosh and the alien vermiform Shemibob--defend the witch, as do Deyv and Vana--this chapter is a SF staple, the human race put on trial by superior beings.  By defending the witch, Deyv and Vana pass the test.  Vana also gives birth in this chapter.

At the center of this wasteland the characters discover the 200-foot-high tower from which those indecipherable flying symbols regularly emerge and fly around the Earth.  You remember them, right?  It takes many pages but eventually our heroes get to the top of the tower and look down through an unbreakable skylight into this millions' years old unbreakable tower.  Inside sits a figure in suspended animation which Farmer's description makes us readers think looks like Santa Claus.  A joke, I guess.  Sloosh and the serpent alien come to believe the flying figures and this tower are a clock that foretells the end of this universe, and the end is soon.  This chapter, the fortieth, just tells us something we've been told already, and takes its time doing it.  I guess the value proposition of this chapter is that there is the Santa Claus joke and that we are supposed to enjoy the sense of wonder of the characters who are looking at a building and a machine millions or billions of years old, even though we've already been exposed to tons of stuff that is super duper old.

The long march continues and in Chapter 41 the child is starting to talk and Vana is preggers again.  The furry thief murders the witch and runs off with lots of Shemibob's high tech devices, but is killed in an avalanche.  The snake woman's devices are lost under the fallen rocks.  The machine alien has to shut down because it is out of radioactive fuel and there is no more to be found on this worn out old Earth.  In Chapter 42 it is months later and the surviving adventurers find another of the gateways.  D and V are finally convinced--by a dream--to try to get their tribes to join the mission to leave the Earth and reestablish the human race in another, younger universe.  In Chapter 43, the characters learn that Deyv and Vana's tribes have moved and cannot be found.  Can't Sloosh follow their psychic emanations like he followed the thief's?  Maybe Farmer explains this, maybe not, I forget.  Anyway, Deyv and Vana will have to go to another universe without their tribes, which causes much grief.  

To have a suitably large breeding community, says Sloosh, they will have to bring other tribes to the other universe.  To win a nearby tribe over to this scheme, which of course seems insane to the savage tribespeople, our heroes exterminate a colony of monsters who are always harassing the tribe--participating in the extermination campaign leads to the death of Deyv's dog, while back at the camp guarding the baby, Deyv's cat is killed by a snake which also kills Deyv's and Vana's child.  I guess Farmer wipes out all traces of Dyev's past life to emphasize that he is beginning a new life with a new tribe in a new universe.  Farmer describes all this negotiating and hunting and weeping in tedious detail in chapters 43, 44, 45 and 46.  Following long science fiction tradition, the cognitive elite--the alien snake woman and the plant-man--use trickery to get the humans to go along with their risky plan, which of course is entirely for the humans' own benefit.  Also, less than 25 pages from the end of the 400 page novel, Farmer is still describing quotidian activities like how people find food and where they go to the bathroom.  Farmer signally fails to generate a sense of excitement that we are approaching the end of this story--you would only know you are near the end because you know there are few pages left.

Finally, the heroes go through a portal to a young Earth-like planet that still has a conventional sun and thus sunrises and sunsets.  In Chapter 47 the people of those tribes they manipulated follow them through the portal, leaving their gods and ritual items behind.  The human race will endure after the collapse of our universe.