tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82594607728643939682024-03-18T23:05:22.581-04:00MPorcius Fiction LogBrief and spoilertastic notes on fiction I have readMPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.comBlogger1245125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-2724501855137899022024-03-12T18:39:00.000-04:002024-03-12T18:39:02.333-04:00Masterpieces of Horror by D H Keller, H Kuttner and R Bradbury<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSqfh3ILv4MrXdoSU_lcIDh0arb6qWpeNJAPX0RhfoBMzIyUjeTrzn4ILadr9XdV63t48QGP0oK6pO70HZf0ekW3jUrxgw52qqGj590kN9GDOiZkG4WgE1v4D1qiW74PcVwg97LJNpsZLriPShoqcOi4wBUGwfII_hMlFdcJp3iIZJslNHaSZy6C8Cqm4/s422/BerkleyX1497.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="422" data-original-width="250" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSqfh3ILv4MrXdoSU_lcIDh0arb6qWpeNJAPX0RhfoBMzIyUjeTrzn4ILadr9XdV63t48QGP0oK6pO70HZf0ekW3jUrxgw52qqGj590kN9GDOiZkG4WgE1v4D1qiW74PcVwg97LJNpsZLriPShoqcOi4wBUGwfII_hMlFdcJp3iIZJslNHaSZy6C8Cqm4/s320/BerkleyX1497.jpg" width="190" /></a></div>Bouncing around isfdb, I came upon evidence of the existence of an anthology ostensibly edited by Alden H. Norton but (we are told) in fact edited by SF historian Sam Moskowitz: <i>Masters of Horror</i>, published in 1968<i>.</i> It seems that Moskowitz and Norton had a sort of regular working relationship, collaborating on a number of anthologies, with Moskowitz sometimes getting credit, sometimes remaining incognito. We've already read some stories that have appeared in these volumes, like Henry Kuttner's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/01/strange-stories-from-1940-by-henry.html">"Time to Kill,"</a> which was reprinted in <i>Horrors in Hiding,</i> and Robert Bloch's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/11/mysterious-menacing-and-macabre-tales.html">"Head Man,"</a> which was included in <i>Hauntings and Horrors: Ten Grisly Tales</i>.<p>Today let's read three stories out of <i>Masters of Horror</i>, stories by peeps we are somewhat familiar with from <i>Weird Tales</i> and other fine publications: David H. Keller, the aforementioned Kuttner, and Ray Bradbury. I can't find a scan of the actual anthology, but will read printings of these stories from other publications in which they appear, scans of which are readily available at the internet archive, world's finest website.</p><p><b>"A Piece of Linoleum"</b> by David H. Keller (1933)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2kIgEiJd7AyMC_UiaKKYuP6gmgUGuM4XZSt4XPSIb4LxFXEL0jpXtLvq8IkcV-mbbdTgQVeLktUMFEME9ozjegD9hwNKDCUZuYt1op4d4FUrm6rNvljuCV1AS1JwfTqqg3aVJsLHymuKNAY9qf7AJSUdS_AoGgEILysxSO1ER9EDaVpj7ZtpxqVXzQLw/s586/ten_story_book_193312.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="586" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2kIgEiJd7AyMC_UiaKKYuP6gmgUGuM4XZSt4XPSIb4LxFXEL0jpXtLvq8IkcV-mbbdTgQVeLktUMFEME9ozjegD9hwNKDCUZuYt1op4d4FUrm6rNvljuCV1AS1JwfTqqg3aVJsLHymuKNAY9qf7AJSUdS_AoGgEILysxSO1ER9EDaVpj7ZtpxqVXzQLw/s320/ten_story_book_193312.jpg" width="218" /></a></div>"A Piece of Linoleum" first appeared under a pen name in <i>10 Story Book</i>, a magazine full of photos of scantily-clad women as well as fiction. I'm reading the story from a 1974 printing of the 1947 Keller collection <i>Life Everlasting and Other Tales of Science, Fantasy and Horror</i>. <div><br /></div><div>As you might expect of a story printed in such a periodical as <i>10 Story Book</i>, "A Piece of Linoleum" expresses a male viewpoint about women and sex. A guy, Harker, has just killed himself, and his wife has no idea why. Most of the text of the story consists of her describing her married life to friends, which she considers to have been very happy. Of course, her description makes clear to the reader that she was a tyrant who controlled every aspect of her husband's life while refusing to have sex with him or give him children, allegedly on account of her frail health. Obsessed with keeping the house clean, she lay pieces of linoleum by the sink so her husband wouldn't get water on the floor when he washed the dishes every night as well as wherever his visiting friends might sit, in case they smoked, to protect the carpet from ashes. The story's final sting is the widow's complains that when her husband slit his wrist he didn't have the courtesy to do it over a piece of linoleum and instead let blood get on the carpet.</div><div><br /></div><div>Not bad. August Derleth included "A Piece of Linoleum" in his 1963 anthology <i>When Evil Wakes</i>, which reprints a number of stories we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have already experienced, like Clark Ashton Smith's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/03/weird-tales-october-1933-jack.html">"The Seed from the Sepulcher,"</a> Frank Belknap Long's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2018/04/weird-tales-by-frank-belknap-long-from.html">"Death Waters"</a> and Derleth's collaboration with H. P. Lovecraft, <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2018/04/weird-tales-by-frank-belknap-long-from.html">"The Shuttered Room."</a></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhIf1P_1KC6WkPbAnB0bd1xiDlIJtyJA1xcmMbKoWM8C6PEvhhUbdafxW_w-v2LFShNvCpEhUObYYfE20PSpAROa42tbIJoeqBPsH5eiNLpzn9kO87D-KUMpCFMiad54Q6JT2NXNrd3fXXopXBZS7GlVmF_FldCNPvPvTU8RjIua-VNd34sWZ_KORKCKw/s500/nagnagnag.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="388" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhIf1P_1KC6WkPbAnB0bd1xiDlIJtyJA1xcmMbKoWM8C6PEvhhUbdafxW_w-v2LFShNvCpEhUObYYfE20PSpAROa42tbIJoeqBPsH5eiNLpzn9kO87D-KUMpCFMiad54Q6JT2NXNrd3fXXopXBZS7GlVmF_FldCNPvPvTU8RjIua-VNd34sWZ_KORKCKw/s16000/nagnagnag.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><b>"Before I Wake..."</b> by Henry Kuttner (1945)<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRkeDLD2L4dXZu0PR7RgrB-npGgqg2su8tdftIqgaaX9HMnELryjKhl_lVkZY_AyBEhTsHlH5JLRVs9vUaHwZcuC1nYcBEwbRHA4cjPbAVxrU9bRmebi4VTS_rtwPNbxVMdu9LToqF86fRAFRuj5U32K4DttZSUo1fsxbJwzySAAq-YMoPOyp2l0BSOCI/s541/famous_fantastic_mysteries_194503.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="541" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRkeDLD2L4dXZu0PR7RgrB-npGgqg2su8tdftIqgaaX9HMnELryjKhl_lVkZY_AyBEhTsHlH5JLRVs9vUaHwZcuC1nYcBEwbRHA4cjPbAVxrU9bRmebi4VTS_rtwPNbxVMdu9LToqF86fRAFRuj5U32K4DttZSUo1fsxbJwzySAAq-YMoPOyp2l0BSOCI/s320/famous_fantastic_mysteries_194503.jpg" width="237" /></a></div>Pedro is a teenager living in a Brazilian fishing village who spends long hours looking at the collection of books of a friendly doctor who lives nearby. The illustrations of Arthur Rackham, Sidney Syme and John R. Neill fill his young mind with visions of a brighter and better world, a world that does not really exist, and he day dreams about becoming a sailor and visiting that world. One day he saves a toad from being tread upon by his drunken father, and Kuttner gives us the idea that this little beast is the familiar of a dead witch. That night Pedro has vivid dreams of swimming underwater among colorful coral reefs. He sleeps so deeply his parents can't wake him up in the morning, and they call for the local gypsy woman, who manages to rouse him. Pedro's sleep is even deeper the next night, and the doctor resorts to a hypodermic injection to wake the kid up. Doc suggests that Pedro be permitted to enlist on a ship as a cabin boy, and Pedro's dad secures his son a berth on a ship setting sail tomorrow. The third night after the appearance of the toad, Pedro again has vivid dreams of a brilliant world of wonder like that he has seen in books; will Pedro die in his sleep and remain in that fairy tale world, or wake up to sail forth and experience the grimy and disappointing reality of the actual world that lies beyond his village?</div><div><br /></div><div>"Before I Wake..." feels long and slow. Individual characters are indecisive and passive--they don't make decisions and they don't accomplish much--and individual scenes consist of dreamy descriptions and little by way of events. As a result, the story does not engage the reader's emotions or provoke much thought, and so reading it is boring. The story would have been greatly improved if Kuttner had more vigorously and more transparently constructed it as a struggle over Pedro's soul between the doctor--man of science--and the gypsy woman--agent of the irrational--or maybe between a tag team of doctor and gypsy against the ghost of the witch, modern medicine and traditional medicine joining forces in a battle of good against evil, something like that. Stories in which people are just pushed around by fate or circumstances are not compelling. Gotta give this one a thumbs down. </div><div><br /></div><div>"Before I Wake..." was included in the Canadian magazine <i>Super Science and Fantastic Stories</i>, of which Norton was editor, later the same year it debuted in <i>Famous Fantastic Mysteries</i>. Frank McSherry, Jr., Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg included it in their 1988 anthology <i>Pirate Ghosts of the American Coast</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibMXHtJmSpFQRHMkuccq1yRmfJ_LgDbg5vHAfkjQsQicq5DIIEEhBeZWz3NYBYPruPkzR5tS6RyMAdlqyWgy-EHtiuVpnEtZv7E0krpbzc_NmHeAGHM4kRAmmG6N_d3bqxU85nGkbq_hU_OJTTZ6-eW5KM4-XHfLVlMjjB1FyurVFchvcsOgBIP5SaGTs/s500/pedro.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="373" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibMXHtJmSpFQRHMkuccq1yRmfJ_LgDbg5vHAfkjQsQicq5DIIEEhBeZWz3NYBYPruPkzR5tS6RyMAdlqyWgy-EHtiuVpnEtZv7E0krpbzc_NmHeAGHM4kRAmmG6N_d3bqxU85nGkbq_hU_OJTTZ6-eW5KM4-XHfLVlMjjB1FyurVFchvcsOgBIP5SaGTs/s16000/pedro.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>"The Candy Skull"</b> by Ray Bradbury (1948)</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiB7PlZc_BVHdy-tAupOwnwpNNHG5FpVyqT0Abhk65_TZgj2vQvPZD_pruaq0Som9UXddXa7Ot1d2wmJmWPCxNyiGnSmUcdsBjteZ9gYkOjcLSeqJf3jYUMXLS0011L-tZxg-UnUE3z761OzZ90C3K01MBxzIHF3t189SDMqxqKjpBd6VVG_NgJ14dEe8/s533/dime_mystery_194801.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiB7PlZc_BVHdy-tAupOwnwpNNHG5FpVyqT0Abhk65_TZgj2vQvPZD_pruaq0Som9UXddXa7Ot1d2wmJmWPCxNyiGnSmUcdsBjteZ9gYkOjcLSeqJf3jYUMXLS0011L-tZxg-UnUE3z761OzZ90C3K01MBxzIHF3t189SDMqxqKjpBd6VVG_NgJ14dEe8/s320/dime_mystery_194801.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>"The Candy Skull" first appeared in <i>Dime Mystery Magazine</i> and in 1960 was reprinted in Britain in <i>Detective Tales</i>. I am reading it in a scan of the 1984 collection of Bradbury's 1940s crime stories entitled <i>A Memory of Murder</i>. The wikipedia page on <i>A Memory of Murder</i> describes the strange circumstances under which the collection was published and suggests that Bradbury was neither thrilled about some of the included stories nor about seeing them reappear before the public eye. <br /><div><br /></div></div><div>The first scene of "The Candy Skull" sees Old Tomas, the retired bullfighter, sitting around the plaza, showing the little kids the scar on his hip where he was gored, then licking his lips as a "young Spanish woman" with "black and shining" hair and clad in a "gray gabardine suit" walks by, then finally spitting on the plaza tiles after seeing a "clean, loud, tourist American," a "young pink, blond man," up on a hotel balcony. Maybe this scene isn't politically correct, but, with its intimations of danger, lust and filth, it sets a tone and seizes the reader's interest.</div><div><br /></div><div>The blond American is writer Roby Cibber, the beauty with the black hair is Celia Diaz, and the plaza and hotel are in the center of Guanajuato, Mexico. Bradbury doesn't paint Mexico as some kind of charming vacation spot. "There was a smell of death through Mexico you never got away from," we are told, "no matter how far you went," and that is just a small sample of barrage of negative characterizations of the land south of the border.</div><div><br /></div><div>The story starts on the morning on the Day of the Dead, and Roby begins the day by finding that somebody left him a little gift while he was sleeping--sugar skull with his name written on it! </div><div><br /></div><div>Roby is in Guanajuato because it is the last place from which Roby received a letter from his friend, Douglas McClure; Celia knew Doug when he was here. One day Doug and his luggage just vanished. A lot of people suggested Doug had gone to Acapulco, and Roby looked there before coming to Guanajuato. Roby has more luck at the next place he looks for Doug--the catacombs under the local cemetery on the hill above Guanajuato! Poor Doug's body is right there among the mummies! (Didn't something like this happen to somebody in <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/12/playboy-1955-ray-bradbury-and-charles.html">the 1955 story we read by Bradbury</a> when we were reading stories by SF figures that appeared in <i>Playboy</i>?) Now Roby is scared somebody is going to try to murder <i>him</i>! </div><div><br /></div><div>There is a loud street party that night, with people shooting off fireworks and Old Tomas dancing around with a papier-mâché bull that is full of exploding firecrackers. Amid the noise and raucous confusion Roby is hit by a Roman candle--no, wait, that was a gunshot! Roby is bandaged up, and when he gets back to his room at the hotel he has another shock--somebody has left him another gift, a little miniature funeral, complete with miniature priest and miniature altar boys...and on the altar a little photo of Roby himself! Old Thomas comes by to hint that Celia is the one who left the funeral and the sugar skull before it! Was it beautiful Celia, a modern woman living in an ancient land, who killed Doug and is now gunning for Roby? Or Old Tomas, the only other character in the story?</div><div><br /></div><div>Bradbury does a good job of making of Mexico a scary place full of death and full of hatred for us gringos, a place where no one is to be trusted, not the police, not the doctors, not the retired bullfighters and not even the hot chicks! The gruesome ending, in which Old Tomas, who is jealous over beautiful tradition-busting Celia, who ignores the retired bullfighter and chases after <i>americanos</i>, forces Roby to play the role of bull in a reenactment of his glorious career as a toreador, is pretty good. So thumbs up for "The Candy Skull," a fun bit of pulp fear and violence that isn't afraid to exploit white uneasiness about non-white cultures.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji8Wkcz_BmYNPuFwPe2Xu7vnr6VNCJJu-XRq0iY-xJZ5Tj5NtcPJImQMUixwIZjxp0bnvxXwSKt_7mt1rGusj-1zaaDhihFdxJeAWx40_YOgS-uscbYCtExFF2vmZ-hZddUp-Z53D4HvHZHdcEz98Tfu53VR7DbIqLqLDRyf2nSf5fTGzOlS6mTAywumU/s500/celiayourebreakingmyheart.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="367" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji8Wkcz_BmYNPuFwPe2Xu7vnr6VNCJJu-XRq0iY-xJZ5Tj5NtcPJImQMUixwIZjxp0bnvxXwSKt_7mt1rGusj-1zaaDhihFdxJeAWx40_YOgS-uscbYCtExFF2vmZ-hZddUp-Z53D4HvHZHdcEz98Tfu53VR7DbIqLqLDRyf2nSf5fTGzOlS6mTAywumU/s16000/celiayourebreakingmyheart.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">**********</div><div><br /></div><div>The Keller and Bradbury stories from <i>Masters of Horror </i>are tight and economical, affecting your emotions and leveraging your suspicions as a white man of women and foreigners and the ridiculous beliefs women and foreigners all seem to have and in explicable behavior they are always engaging in. Kuttner tries to do something perhaps a little more sophisticated and perhaps more acceptable to the 21st-century palate, evoke the feeling of fairy tales and of a child's wonder at the world--at least the fantasy worlds created by imaginative writers and artists. But because his story is slow and because it lacks clear human conflict, Kuttner's story ends up being boring. The Bradbury and the Kuttner are an interesting contrast, because both men try to build an atmosphere with descriptions of strange places, but Bradbury's Mexico succeeds in instilling anxiety and fear in the reader and encouraging him to keep reading to find out what is going to happen, while Kuttner's descriptions of coral reefs and islands and clipper ships just made my eyes glaze over and hope the story would end soon. </div><div><br /></div><div>It is sad to see a guy we like, Henry Kuttner, misfire, but the reading life is full of ups and downs--for another example, we liked today's Keller piece, but <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/weird-tales-july-1938-d-h-keller-c.html">railed against the last thing we read by Keller</a>. Well, stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log for more ups and downs, genre fiction fans.</div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-27083074539120687282024-03-11T15:28:00.001-04:002024-03-11T15:28:10.882-04:00Merril-approved 1958 stories by Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzz5TZ36F2qkDLAnjSL6UwUaLVBnPtW9T0IRvao89lBXQ8nEdI1OTAEyjbehfbXyomuUehTy1EBFVb-MT6ZlXeyXFY2lYwkYYz9qDLi568Ntq5mRvaELitDzrkIqCneK3EKkSy7eDipDFqwRzMyYzSAqBDTA-4rJwjMsz_m0CQmxNQQAI2E9RbAxbsDkQ/s500/merril4.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="379" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzz5TZ36F2qkDLAnjSL6UwUaLVBnPtW9T0IRvao89lBXQ8nEdI1OTAEyjbehfbXyomuUehTy1EBFVb-MT6ZlXeyXFY2lYwkYYz9qDLi568Ntq5mRvaELitDzrkIqCneK3EKkSy7eDipDFqwRzMyYzSAqBDTA-4rJwjMsz_m0CQmxNQQAI2E9RbAxbsDkQ/s16000/merril4.jpg" /></a></div><p><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-robert.html">Reading 1956 stories</a> recommended by Judith Merril in the second edition of her famous anthology series <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-by-r-m.html">was a good experience</a>, so let's keep that ball rolling but shift to 1958 by using as our menu the three-page list of honorable mentions at the back of <i>SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume.</i> I'll pick out stories of interest from the list, three or four at a time, and we'll read and assess them, perhaps with an eye as to why Merril might have liked them. </p><p>The first name on the alphabetical list is Poul Anderson's, three of whose stories Merril recommends. I've already read one of them, "Last of the Deliverers," so to round out this blog post we'll read the included story by the second name on the list, famous actor Alan Arkin.</p><p>Before we begin our journey, I will note that, besides that list, two science articles, and a poem by Isaac Asimov, the fourth volume of Merril's much-heralded anthology includes 15 stories, of which I believe I have read nine; <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/09/1958-sf-stories-by-richard-gehman-rog.html">in one 2021 blogpost </a>I talked about the included stories by Richard Gehman, Rog Phillips, Gerald Kersh and John Steinbeck, and <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/09/1958-stories-by-f-leiber-b-aldiss-e-c.html">in another</a> the stories by Fritz Leiber, Brian Aldiss, E. C. Tubb, and Theodore Sturgeon, while <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2019/10/from-great-science-fiction-of-20th_23.html">back in 2019</a> I read the Avram Davidson story to which Merril gave the nod.</p><p><b>"Backwardness"</b> by Poul Anderson </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfy-n6mSR7ydr1vWJj6gCgANRdC-V3xyxtkms4xCKmxv9XNJWVlhgoUq23-9LxVsMZAZ6F8e03CejtYV63eOjkl3SJrn3nfJlxkJ_A-HSw7VhFyDWwPm3abY32rA3ixX0AGWKsuiZdrK6j8uCn0Jq948tmATe1dyGdiEHamjX49pOalL2jeYbSR-TawiM/s747/popul1.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="747" data-original-width="511" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfy-n6mSR7ydr1vWJj6gCgANRdC-V3xyxtkms4xCKmxv9XNJWVlhgoUq23-9LxVsMZAZ6F8e03CejtYV63eOjkl3SJrn3nfJlxkJ_A-HSw7VhFyDWwPm3abY32rA3ixX0AGWKsuiZdrK6j8uCn0Jq948tmATe1dyGdiEHamjX49pOalL2jeYbSR-TawiM/s320/popul1.jpg" width="219" /></a></div>This story seems well-liked. Anthony Boucher, after publishing it in <i>F&SF</i>, included it in the eighth <i>F&SF</i> "Best of" volume, Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander and Patricia Warrick selected it for their textbook <i>School and Society Through Science Fiction</i>, and Hank Davis included it in <i>Worst Contact</i>; the story has also been translated into French, Russian, Croatian and Japanese. Another place in which "Backwardness" appears is 1991's <i>Kinship with the Stars</i>, an Anderson collection I own, and I am reading it in there. <p></p><p>Rats, here we have something of a joke story that tries to "subvert conventions," as the cool kids say. "Backwardness" is a first- contact-with-the-Galactic-Federation story. Anderson's tale is a series of vignettes, in which various Earthmen of the nearish future interact with the representatives of the GF, who have arrived because they detected the first use of an Earth star-drive. The GF, which has been around forever and includes thousands of planets, investigates all civilizations that are on the brink of exploring the stars; violent civilizations are exterminated forthwith, but luckily Earth passed the test.</p><p>I suppose it is common for SF stories about aliens who arrive on a pre-FTL drive Earth to portray the visitors as wise or cultured or super-intelligent or something. Anderson's joke is to suggest that the people of the Galactic Federation--or at least these representatives--are unsophisticated rubes of average or even below average intelligence, by Earth standards; the Galactics have outstripped the people of Earth technologically simply because they have had so much longer to develop.</p><p>Anderson explicitly lays out his premise on the last page of the 12-page story; the preceding pages illustrate it. A party of the GF spacemen paints the town red in Manhattan, getting drunk, banging sluts and buying and adorning themselves with cheap garish jewelry. (All the aliens in the story look like Earth humans--the galaxy is full of human civilizations.) The head of the UN meets the captain of the GF ship and finds the alien can't explain anything at all about science or technology and that the GF has a quite laissez faire government--the alien captain, who has been to many planets, remarks that New York City is the biggest city he has ever seen and marvels at the ability of Earthers to govern such a huge conglomeration of people. A Catholic bishop meets the alien vessel's chaplain, expecting to be enlightened by a sophisticated thinker, a theologian, only to learn this guy is addicted to TV ("You got some real good TV on this planet") and that the religion of the ship's crew consists of sacrificing cows (rabbits on a ship, to save space) to appease the gods and bring good luck. (Alien planets don't just give rise to intelligent beings genetically similar to Earth people--the plants and animals there are also the same as Earth's.) Anderson's big concluding joke is that a New York con man with a bachelor's degree in psychology quickly susses out the aliens and <a href="https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-figures/conman-sold-brooklyn-bridge.htm">sells one of them the Brooklyn Bridge</a>.</p><p>As joke stories that try to subvert conventions go, this one isn't bad. The jokes are not annoyingly lame, and the idea that an intelligent species with an average IQ of 75 instead of 100 would eventually build nuclear reactors and space craft, it would just take longer than it has take us, is sort of interesting, So I'll call "Backwardness" acceptable.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_joxblvQ9EMj4MYdC6vA62wcfxjV2ygZH_SmWkNeuXB6_vn85TokLDIk0DMbVTtvmtxBDRdUv_RHr-leXGPZPls4I35nQF8vJ2jye1wvj6eYCxo23d6OvX_wocAx4edvcGib2dXYurINsId-3vPS0g5PVkgs4Bu_ns3grrMFIRJTHlvS7hY_3-JyN1v4/s500/poul2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="374" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_joxblvQ9EMj4MYdC6vA62wcfxjV2ygZH_SmWkNeuXB6_vn85TokLDIk0DMbVTtvmtxBDRdUv_RHr-leXGPZPls4I35nQF8vJ2jye1wvj6eYCxo23d6OvX_wocAx4edvcGib2dXYurINsId-3vPS0g5PVkgs4Bu_ns3grrMFIRJTHlvS7hY_3-JyN1v4/s16000/poul2.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><b>"The Apprentice Wobbler"</b> by Poul Anderson</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizGDN8Rxg2zufP4_Htf1Z9d064zbEUg0ZAxZNOy4LbikPnW5yss6iV2j8drHUAvRFz6IpcSAw_XKNCIh1v9KZXxrGOP1EKnpE8WDYXEC2gOG7RJpVMDORjc6eCSzDXH244J8nJNxCoR4LvoMT4AYiEGNX6rKWGklZl_IbX-Bq0_Tl0kjw8GXl9zQWFsSU/s2292/Star_Science_Fiction_v01n01_1958-01_Sam_Hall-sleipnir_edit_0000.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2292" data-original-width="1593" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizGDN8Rxg2zufP4_Htf1Z9d064zbEUg0ZAxZNOy4LbikPnW5yss6iV2j8drHUAvRFz6IpcSAw_XKNCIh1v9KZXxrGOP1EKnpE8WDYXEC2gOG7RJpVMDORjc6eCSzDXH244J8nJNxCoR4LvoMT4AYiEGNX6rKWGklZl_IbX-Bq0_Tl0kjw8GXl9zQWFsSU/s320/Star_Science_Fiction_v01n01_1958-01_Sam_Hall-sleipnir_edit_0000.jpg" width="222" /></a></div>Here we have a story that was, it seems, never reprinted after its initial appearance in Fred Pohl's short-lived <i>Star</i>, a magazine that had one issue! <i>Star </i>is kind of cool because Richard Powers was its art director. (I wrote a little about <i>Star </i>in 2021 when I read Brian Aldiss' <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/08/sf-authors-choice-brian-aldiss-poul.html">"Judas Dancing"</a>; just last year I read another story from <i>Star</i>, Robert Bloch's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/01/robert-bloch-show-must-go-on-daybroke.html">"Daybroke,"</a> which I denounced on several counts.) </div><div><br /></div><div>The stagnant and conformist near-future is entering a period of radical change! After a military coup in Moscow ended the Cold War, there followed a period of little economic or technological progress as people's desire for security and the extensive encroachment on business of the suffocating tendrils of government and labor unions inhibited the taking of risk by individuals and firms. But just two years ago Steve Wojcek burst onto the scene with his amazing machine! The Wojcek device is the size of a suitcase, covered in dials and gauges, and in the hands of a skilled operator it can manipulate energies at the atomic level, generating power with amazing efficiency; its most spectacular use is in levitating people and things and moving them through the air without consuming fuel or producing pollution. It takes a long time to train a Wojcek operator, and the Wojcek school in Iowa has limited capacity, so the number of Wojcek devices in use is still small, but it looks like eventually the entire world economy is going to be revolutionized as the atomic power and petroleum industries, the automotive and aviation industries, and much else, are all put out of business.</div><div><br /></div><div>Daniel Holloway is our hero, an engineer at one of the corporations that is trying to figure out how the Wojcek machine works, and failing--only people who take the year-long course given by Wojcek and co can make it perform its wonders. His superiors send Holloway on a mission he is to enroll at the Wojcek school outside Des Moines and learn all he can about the inexplicable machine that is changing the world, and perhaps figure out a way to sabotage Wojcek's project and preserve the economic and social status quo.</div><div><br /></div><div>Over in the Hawkeye state, Holloway learns to operate the device (colloquially called a "wobbly") quicker than do most, but it appears that nobody, not even Wojcek, really understands how it generates almost unlimited energy without producing waste or dangerous radiation, and without incurring any risk--no one has ever been injured or killed in a wobbly failure or accident. Study in Iowa not only gives Wojeck the opportunity to fly like a bird and manipulate objects from a distance, but shows him a new way of relating to other people--back in the rat race in New York, Holloway had to suck up, had to try to keep up with the Jonses, had to wear suits and ties and worry if his wife, a native of Oregon, would impress his colleagues and clients, but the Wojcek people don't take hierarchy seriously, they dress casually, and they aren't obsessed with chasing money and chasing status! </div><div><br /></div><div>The big revelation comes after Christmas vacation, when the Wojcek crew realizes Holloway is a spy. The wobblies are fake--they don't do anything concrete. What Wojcek discovered was psionics! Psychic powers only operate if you have faith in them, and if the people around you do as well, and since every educated person thinks psychic powers are fiction, it is almost impossible to get them to work. The wobbly tricks people into thinking telekinesis and ESP and all the rest are technological and physical, eliminating the inhibitions of the wobbly "operator" and the skepticism of onlookers. Holloway, it turns out, is a psyker of great potential, and after learning the truth proves himself able to fly and perform other psychic feats without the crutch that is the wobbly. He abandons his job at the New York corporation despite their promises of promotion and raises and joins the egalitarian Wojcek project of changing the world. </div><div><br /></div><div>This story is OK. The human drama is a kind of weak, so "The Apprentice Wobbler"'s oomph has to come from the science lectures and its ideas about economy and society. Anderson dramatizes some interesting tensions inherent in a market economy, and so it is easy to see why leftists Pohl and Merril liked it. For one thing, innovations and progress that are self-evidently good for society as a whole often cause disruption to the lives of individuals and pose new challenges--everybody benefits when a new more efficient product or process comes on the market, but the people who are producing and selling the current product or service that has been rendered obsolete suffer, at least in the short term, and their suffering can have social and political ramifications. A related tension is how individuals and firms that grow big by innovating, who have benefitted from the dynamism of the market economy, once they are big often use their influence to clamp down on innovation and tamp down dynamism in order to stifle competition and protect their own position. These are uncomfortable truths which supporters of the market economy may be loathe to admit, and which serve as a chink in the armor of a market orientation which enemies of the free market are always trying to exploit.</div><div><br /></div><div>Acceptable, but I see why "The Apprentice Wobbler" hasn't been reprinted; Anderson has produced plenty of stories full of adventure, human feeling and jokes that are more entertaining and have a broader appeal.</div><p><b>"People Soup"</b> by Alan Arkin</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPak05iGZlyqy5VQBwbmAM5roIYP_YI33kXJAt7WCJjNQofHvx9muSZlv5Z9ZIB6kIp-yzVRX_6MSegZC3kkh69lIVaZi1g6Mbp3tmo_irXrzxU1jvBAzfyyQ8wAqxyfKkJKsHijeEe_PkBplcDgC6wMMjKbPd4DBfbx6UxL2wL00PgpTY3T0gRMknmVw/s600/GALNOV1958.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="450" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPak05iGZlyqy5VQBwbmAM5roIYP_YI33kXJAt7WCJjNQofHvx9muSZlv5Z9ZIB6kIp-yzVRX_6MSegZC3kkh69lIVaZi1g6Mbp3tmo_irXrzxU1jvBAzfyyQ8wAqxyfKkJKsHijeEe_PkBplcDgC6wMMjKbPd4DBfbx6UxL2wL00PgpTY3T0gRMknmVw/s320/GALNOV1958.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>Alan Arkin is a beloved actor with a stack of awards but I have to admit that I find his face and his voice annoying and so as an adult I have not sat through any of his films or TV shows. (As a kid I saw on TV <i>The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming</i> and <i>The In-Laws </i>because my mother liked them, and it is possible my distaste for Arkin is a subconscious act of rebellion.) But maybe I'll like this story, one of three short stories with which Arkin is credited on isfdb.<div><p></p><p>"People Soup" is a trifle about precocious kids; it is five pages of obvious but inoffensive jokes. </p><p style="text-align: left;"><i></i></p><blockquote><i>Bob slopped a cupful of ketchup into the juicer, added a can of powdered mustard, a drop of milk, six aspirin, and a piece of chewing gum, being careful to spill a part of each package used.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>(I realize that I type the phrase "obvious jokes" often, and begin to fear that at age 52 I have heard all the jokes I am going to hear and so now <i>all</i> jokes are obvious to me.)</p><p>Mom is out shopping, so little Bob mixes ingredients apparently at random, puts the concoction in a pot and cooks it; he lets his sister Connie help after she pays him ten cents. They taste the finished product and pretend to have turned into animals. Then they pretend to have turned back and go out for ice cream.</p><p>To me, it feels like an acceptable filler story, but Merril isn't the only person to take "People Soup" seriously. Groff Conklin included it in the anthology <i>Science Fiction Oddities</i>, and another pair of anthologists whose names I am always typing out, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander (with the participation of Fred Pohl) included it in the 1980 anthology celebrating <i>Galaxy</i>. Arkin's name doesn't appear on the cover of any of these publications, so I can't say these editors and publishers are using Arkin's famous name in an effort to win attention from beyond the ranks of SF fans. Perhaps we are supposed to think this cutesy story has an edge. The way the text reads, the reader is permitted to believe the kids actually do change into a chicken (Connie) and then a St. Bernard (Bob) and then back. Connie doesn't like being a chicken, but Bob urges her to remain one as long as possible in order to collect information about chicken life. In the last lines of the story, Bob declares his intention to build an atomic bomb tomorrow. Maybe Arkin is suggesting that the search for knowledge in the late 1950s is being conducted by reckless men who blithely take terrible risks with the lives of others. The title of the story, after all, sounds a little grisly. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpYjcYjuGzuRY7WeLPYjkGyMUFWXiKfPTDxxdS98noaPAhAg78IZn9NL0K8jpTU18FiYtHr6-BjA9Eu_ZW7f5K_9yg16xV9S0H-xcjYrnfhhuB6qBPkIUzFXqK7HBplNUj3-t1ncZ3b7i7KbMtDYi-7Hv4RJ344Zdrh329dygRL-9VH1OCBlOE8VB5cOg/s500/peoplesoiup.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="396" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpYjcYjuGzuRY7WeLPYjkGyMUFWXiKfPTDxxdS98noaPAhAg78IZn9NL0K8jpTU18FiYtHr6-BjA9Eu_ZW7f5K_9yg16xV9S0H-xcjYrnfhhuB6qBPkIUzFXqK7HBplNUj3-t1ncZ3b7i7KbMtDYi-7Hv4RJ344Zdrh329dygRL-9VH1OCBlOE8VB5cOg/s16000/peoplesoiup.jpg" /></a></div><p>**********</p><p>None of these stories is bad, so we can say without reservation that the first step on our journey through 1958 with Judith Merril has been an easy one.</p><p>Keep an eye out for future installments of this series on 1958 SF stories; next time, however, we'll be looking at stories from earlier decades. </p></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-14883534882055332342024-03-09T20:42:00.000-05:002024-03-09T20:42:28.488-05:00Infinity, August 1956: D Knight, D Mason, H Ellison and R Silverberg<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzw7R1FvEPOk0iO_SBNbP1vIEE0BiGTYaMCKaTRvG6MVDMKQIXh-NFfgVO_gOVoVpBWrDbXMUvx8hk9ys9-soeVH8Yx4MtpdzlPDO1Mxly4JOqvfzqUMoSM99DCm7jTsSiKc4_okh51Y559haV9R3hcXxpm5g7RYZn8H1AEfg3f4pJNGZZDYellOgm528/s1063/Infinity_v01n04_1956-08_0000.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1063" data-original-width="750" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzw7R1FvEPOk0iO_SBNbP1vIEE0BiGTYaMCKaTRvG6MVDMKQIXh-NFfgVO_gOVoVpBWrDbXMUvx8hk9ys9-soeVH8Yx4MtpdzlPDO1Mxly4JOqvfzqUMoSM99DCm7jTsSiKc4_okh51Y559haV9R3hcXxpm5g7RYZn8H1AEfg3f4pJNGZZDYellOgm528/w282-h400/Infinity_v01n04_1956-08_0000.jpg" width="282" /></a></div>In our last episode we read Richard Wilson's "The Big Fix" from the August 1956 issue of <i>Infinity</i>, and back in June of 2023 we read Randall Garrett's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/06/merril-approved-1956-stories-galouye.html">"Stroke of Genius"</a> from the same issue. That issue of <i>Infinity</i> includes fiction by four other authors whose names we recognize, and today we check them out.<p></p><p><b>"The Beach Where Time Began"</b> by Damon Knight</p><p>Mediocre young man Albert Eustace Rossi moved from Seattle to New York City, hoping something good might happen to him. (Oy, this sounds painfully familiar.) He found himself unable to make friends and unable to hold down a decent job. (Ouch.) He became obsessed with the idea of travelling through time to a more salubrious epoch, and read various books and encyclopedia articles on the science and philosophy of time, and Knight fills the story with direct references to Einstein, Milne, Dunne, Minkowski and others, and with indirect references to Descartes and Heisenberg. The upshot of all Rossi's reading and thinking is that he becomes able to travel through time simply by willing himself to do so, after following some ritualistic procedures similar to the stereotypical behavior of a wizard in a fantasy story like chanting, drawing a circle and formulae on the floor and burning a piece of paper with formulae written upon it; "The Beach Where Time Began" has "meta" elements, another example being that Rossi is an avid reader of SF magazines.</p><p>Rossi's method of time travel isn't easily controlled or calibrated; he pops into one period after another, moving forward in time, spending only a few seconds in each period. When he reaches the end of time he then pops back to the beginning. People are able to see him, and address him, and, realizing he is a time traveller, they ask him questions, and the answers he gives alter the course of history in unpredictable ways. Rossi eventually figures out how to stop himself on a beautiful beach among the peaceful primitive people he has been longing to live among, but this kills him, turning him into a statue hard as stone whom the peaceful primitive people worship as a god.</p><p>An acceptable pessimistic joke story that has as its central figure a loser for whom the author has not sympathy but contempt and which leaves the reader (this one, at least) uneasy, even sad. "The Beach Where Time Began" was reprinted in a French Knight collection and a German anthology, but apparently not in English--maybe Knight's portrait of a SF-reading loser who had intelligence but no real talent or ability and so no friends and no success hit a little too close to home.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ5MCed_d1iH054D1FvIOk8jgcX6m60ZH4CwV5-_TFlCIs5eA8JLfPjopwPfqvkKe-gkKuCK8vBy-oBeUOdtFGpoXT8s0klzcvLFFZlklS55rQQ6bKh9EHMaX6T0T6duskk6S2l7kwptbuiWDNo81h2ghbi37id6pNYFQcgootIuEaYF4OHsrvjS7JdBU/s500/knight.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="379" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ5MCed_d1iH054D1FvIOk8jgcX6m60ZH4CwV5-_TFlCIs5eA8JLfPjopwPfqvkKe-gkKuCK8vBy-oBeUOdtFGpoXT8s0klzcvLFFZlklS55rQQ6bKh9EHMaX6T0T6duskk6S2l7kwptbuiWDNo81h2ghbi37id6pNYFQcgootIuEaYF4OHsrvjS7JdBU/s16000/knight.jpg" /></a></div><p><b>"The Fool"</b> by David Mason</p><p></p>Years ago I read David Mason's sword and sorcery novel <i><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2016/03/kavins-world-by-david-mason.html">Kavin's World</a> </i>and a commenter complained I hadn't understood it. Well, let's see if I understand this work of Mason's. Speak up if I flub it, Mason cognoscenti! <p></p><p>"The Fool" is a competent twist-ending story with an unreliable narrator, a sort of pastiche and/or allegory of European experiences with primitive native tribes and of the Gospels. The text of the story consists of one side of a conversation between the retiring representative ("Agent") of a Terran business concern (or maybe government agency?) on a planet of Stone Age barbarians and his replacement. The retiring Agent is our narrator, and he spends almost the entire story describing his own predecessor, Duncan, to whom he was assistant.</p><p>Duncan was educated and earnest, but according to the narrator totally incompetent, so much so that the narrator had to more or less do the Agent's job for him. The Agent's job is to trade with the natives, not to interfere with their wacky culture. The natives of this planet are a warlike race separated into hostile tribes who regularly conduct raids on each other, taking trophies much like headhunters on Earth (though, I guess as a joke, Mason has these people cut off each other's tails rather than heads) and seizing women, whom these people treat as chattel before they become mothers, but kowtow to after they have achieved motherhood. (The narrator says the natives have some kind of matrilineal inheritance customs, and because the story paints Duncan as a Christ figure I have to think Mason included this matrilineal jazz as a signal we are to think of these natives as somehow analogous to Jews, who famously have a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrilineality_in_Judaism">tradition of matrilinearity</a>.)</p><p>Instead of cutting business deals and keeping the account books up to date, Duncan spent his time trying to educate the natives, giving them speeches advising them not to treat women so harshly and to knock it off with all the warring and raiding; essentially, he is preaching that they love one another. According to the narrator, the natives treated these speeches as a joke. Duncan also set up a school and tried to teach math and other things to the native children, which the narrator dismisses as a stupid waste of time. The Agent is also supposed to maintain order, punish lawbreakers and so forth, and Duncan displayed a reluctance to do so.</p><p>The religion of the natives centered around a monstrous idol to whom they sacrificed women and children. Duncan blew up the idol, and in response the native high priest speared him, nailing him to a tree. As he died, Duncan forgave his murderer, and the natives were so impressed that they rebuilt the idol in the likeness of Duncan and ceased sacrificing people. The ending of the story hints that the followers of the teachings of Duncan may become the dominant power in the universe the way Christian Europeans came to dominate Earth (and in this story, at least, the galaxy.) </p><p>"The Fool" is an acceptable filler story. It appears that it has never been reprinted. </p><p><b>"Trojan Hearse"</b> by Harlan Ellison</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdHoGgmeMyZ9vdjZ8jHMkVSPv4OTDiSNYPsZdbnEQ7QnzksQtf2_Penap2LCYZwRkOM2T17am8bfheR7ZFPvyEK_nLD_wW-3sc7yGjcZGaf0ya3Je73tTIUQ1qPLIzxhXQQwc_cU7Pt3LNrqXpKGNvW-QFY0rjsBpQZQe30OQ_3IjjvabPV1HGIyJ00pk/s543/331309.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="543" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdHoGgmeMyZ9vdjZ8jHMkVSPv4OTDiSNYPsZdbnEQ7QnzksQtf2_Penap2LCYZwRkOM2T17am8bfheR7ZFPvyEK_nLD_wW-3sc7yGjcZGaf0ya3Je73tTIUQ1qPLIzxhXQQwc_cU7Pt3LNrqXpKGNvW-QFY0rjsBpQZQe30OQ_3IjjvabPV1HGIyJ00pk/s320/331309.jpg" width="236" /></a></div>"Trojan Hearse" is a component of Ellison's Earth-Kyba war series. Last year we read another Kyba story, <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/05/merril-approved-1956-stories-harlan.html">"The Crackpots,"</a> and I gave it a thumbs down, but it is possible this one will be to my taste. isfdb suggests "Trojan Hearse" has not been reprinted in a conventional collection or anthology, but informs us that there was an adaptation of it (or maybe just a printing of the text?) in the 1987 graphic novel upon which Ellison collaborated with Ken Steacy called <i>Night and the Enemy</i>--check out tarbandu's <a href="https://theporporbooksblog.blogspot.com/2023/12/night-and-enemy.html">recent post</a> on <i>Night and the Enemy</i> at the PorPor Books Blog at the link! <p></p><p>The belligerent Kyba, who produce nothing of value on their own planet but instead live by plundering other races, want to conquer Earth but Terra is too far away. So they have built a huge teleporter that can instantly transport an army of AFVs to Earth. But an Earth spy has gotten back to Earth with all the Kyban plans, so, when the Kyban war machines roll into their teleporter they roll out onto Earth and right into an Earth teleporter set up a foot in front of the Kyban destination point; the Earth teleporter has been set to teleport them to the vacuum of space where they will die at once. </p><p>This forgettable four-page gimmick story feels like a rush job. Ellison refers to the Kyban force of tanks and trucks as an "armada" or "fleet" instead of an "army" or "legion" or something more appropriate for a ground force. He says the Kyban dictator and his right hand man have fought together in many campaigns, and that the people of Kyba "were geared to a life of constant preparation for battle," but he also says Kyba hasn't fought a war for three hundred years. He says Kyba has conquered "this end of the galaxy" but he also has a Kyben character say that before the teleporter was invented a few years ago that "Interstellar war has never been feasible. Distances were too great." If the distances are so great, how do the Kybens know all about Earth, enough to pinpoint where their teleporter will land their army, and how did the human spy get to Kyba? </p><p>Barely acceptable filler. </p><p><b>"The Final Challenge"</b> by Robert Silverberg</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIKVfd4vO6cBHhy-fynikWJIYDe6FzgnTd1ec5Gyo-koleALbjBBHV8MWTmS5qakXJfJsO_TzaOfa9WTj4FkuxPIIun_GfleU1een0f2jZcGBYoChPyN-i3DacGXZhMyCjbkmNHUXQ1vbRDI6XAR-mmQ4vRwTBK2DkWm1iPSbU-xTe-8HC5HLOf_aeeBg/s638/shores.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="638" data-original-width="464" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIKVfd4vO6cBHhy-fynikWJIYDe6FzgnTd1ec5Gyo-koleALbjBBHV8MWTmS5qakXJfJsO_TzaOfa9WTj4FkuxPIIun_GfleU1een0f2jZcGBYoChPyN-i3DacGXZhMyCjbkmNHUXQ1vbRDI6XAR-mmQ4vRwTBK2DkWm1iPSbU-xTe-8HC5HLOf_aeeBg/s320/shores.jpg" width="233" /></a></div>"The Final Challenge" has been reprinted in the 1976 Silverberg collection <i>The Shores of Tomorrow</i>, which was translated into German in 1979.<p></p><p>Delaunay the musician and composer is a self-hating Earthman! "Earth was a planet of hate full of haters" that had fallen into decadence and decline after carving an empire out of the galaxy, a place that no longer produced noteworthy art, music or literature, no longer engaged in grand projects. So he left Earth to live on the planet of the Sallat, a race of goodie goodies with six fingers on each hand, a people whose music fascinated Delaunay. Delaunay doesn't want to be reminded of Earth--he even pushes his Sallat girlfriend away when she tries to kiss him because kissing is an Earth practice his girlfriend was aping; the Sallat have more "pure" and "beautiful" "ways of love." </p><p>One of the Sallat whom Delaunay knows is an influential politician, Demet. Some years ago it came to everybody's attention that the neighboring planet of the Krozni was going to be destroyed in some "freak cosmic accident." Instead of letting the Krozni be wiped out, Demet authorized their mass immigration to the planet of the Sallat. These ungrateful bastards are now raiding Sallat communities, and as the story begins, news has arrived that Demet's own son was killed in such a raid. The Sallat respond to these crimes not with a spirited resistance but a sad resignation--they don't have the capacity to hate like an Earthman does, like Delaunay does! Sure, the young Sallat join the army and march to the front, but they insist on observing all their daily and weekly religious rituals, and playing their beautiful music whenever they feel like it, which is often, and the Krozni attack during their prayers and concerts, massacring the unprepared Sallat forces.</p><p>Delaunay joins the Sallat defense forces and tries to persuade them to suspend the prayers and concerts for a while, so they can get down to the serious business of preserving the Sallat civilization, but to no avail. Delaunay, behind enemy lines, meets an Earthman--this guy is the general of the Krozni army! The Earth is behind the Krozni attack on the people of Sallat! </p><p>This Earthman explains that the Earth is decadent for lack of challenge. So he and his coterie of conspirators are grooming the war-like but primitive Krozni into a disciplined modern fighting force that will be able to build its own space empire and threaten Earth. Faced with the threat, Earth will, it is hoped, be shaken out of its torpor and rise to the occasion and once again be vital civilization. This general says it is sad that the Sallat are going to be wiped out, but the Sallat are even more decadent than Earthers, as their refusal to take seriously the war for their survival proves; if a dead end society has to be destroyed in order to rejuvenate a once great society that is at a low point but is salvageable and may be great again, well, that is a fair bargain. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe55a8XcTLfQdHrzNrolgB08_Tk5W0FOyhFEvD2R3VZUGPjv9hwdzwWeCRwDEZ7UJJTDlqO1gL-hMjSNtkktbeDKHxqz8YKNzHYx_tu9Z8_6e7o72dd6woJIvTK0eMZGw4wMckS944fWxY68OYdefTnsRgTg1usCiacvvzofjtEPbH_nQaRC_pY-Qq9xM/s500/513bBj8JvGL.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="313" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe55a8XcTLfQdHrzNrolgB08_Tk5W0FOyhFEvD2R3VZUGPjv9hwdzwWeCRwDEZ7UJJTDlqO1gL-hMjSNtkktbeDKHxqz8YKNzHYx_tu9Z8_6e7o72dd6woJIvTK0eMZGw4wMckS944fWxY68OYdefTnsRgTg1usCiacvvzofjtEPbH_nQaRC_pY-Qq9xM/s320/513bBj8JvGL.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>Delaunay protests at first, but then comes to agree that the Sallats are doomed and perhaps not worth saving. He does send a chill up the general's spine before leaving by suggesting that the Krozni may get out of hand and prove too tough for the human race to conquer.<p></p><p>"The Final Challenge" is more intriguing than Mason and Ellison's stories and not quite as big a downer as Knight's. One of the themes it addresses is that of responsibility, in particular responsibility to one's people and culture. Delaunay felt no responsibility to help fix an Earth that was in trouble--instead he selfishly abandoned Earth. Is it possible that the Earth general who is getting all kinds of Sallats killed is a better person than Delaunay, because he is doing something to help his people? Demet felt a responsibility to do the right thing by the Krozni, a responsibility to uphold an abstract principle of justice, but doing so doomed his own people to destruction. The soldiers feel a responsibility to their religion and traditions, and so keep at their rituals, even though it puts the very existence of their civilization at risk. </p><p>The actual things that happen in the story are kind of silly, but Silverberg's tale here is thought-provoking. I can mildly recommend this one.</p><p>**********</p><p>None of these stories is actually bad, though Ellison's is pretty close to the edge. Mason's is an interesting example of SF that comments on Christianity and Judaism in a way that is not entirely dismissive of religion, while Knight's and Silverberg's perhaps have something to say about the themes and attitudes of those two major figures in the SF community. (Knight sometimes comes off as an arrogant jerk, and he does so here.) So a worthwhile expedition into the pages of a 1950s magazine not as famous as, say <i>Astounding</i>, <i>F&SF</i> or <i>Galaxy</i>, to read some stories we'd have to say are on the rare side.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtpvd5WS35k7GcCO1oMQosGLOjtKybVrprkv71qacaWheDClhkdNIz_O5jEuPyKGb7wYQs7uzOecBmjgzIYs4HWurYrYbSX83cPdcNDE6z35QDmJ_I4PZSozEm5JSrnD0AL84_hrMAvQFlRtTt6GCOFeN5enpBaRoIEp5d13YzLzzkUsJGZUBFVFKzDZM/s500/infintyA.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="113" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtpvd5WS35k7GcCO1oMQosGLOjtKybVrprkv71qacaWheDClhkdNIz_O5jEuPyKGb7wYQs7uzOecBmjgzIYs4HWurYrYbSX83cPdcNDE6z35QDmJ_I4PZSozEm5JSrnD0AL84_hrMAvQFlRtTt6GCOFeN5enpBaRoIEp5d13YzLzzkUsJGZUBFVFKzDZM/s16000/infintyA.jpg" /></a></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-70878307958928200612024-03-08T10:06:00.000-05:002024-03-08T10:06:22.720-05:00Merril-approved 1956 stories by R M Williams and R Wilson<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXr8KoEc5sKqbkCzQmtKWdgZNtTUWO0AfjM8DsOgF3KiR8B-kqvO445HiIgFNrvO88XStvefNATFee4m847YG-_MBMphdy6gfZhpnkCYy5zK5wnika1qEu3iIrJEKtB2Kdr6ugU1cUNf4H-_-T2O6WQShax_Mt4kxPAs8ggoxurq-8RpP6U-nnx_BXhyphenhyphenM/s500/Merril2nd.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="374" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXr8KoEc5sKqbkCzQmtKWdgZNtTUWO0AfjM8DsOgF3KiR8B-kqvO445HiIgFNrvO88XStvefNATFee4m847YG-_MBMphdy6gfZhpnkCYy5zK5wnika1qEu3iIrJEKtB2Kdr6ugU1cUNf4H-_-T2O6WQShax_Mt4kxPAs8ggoxurq-8RpP6U-nnx_BXhyphenhyphenM/s16000/Merril2nd.jpg" /></a></div><p>We are witnessing the end of an era! For a year we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have been reading stories published in 1956 that appear on the Honorable Mention list at the end of Judith Merril's <i>SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume. </i>This list is alphabetical, and we started with A, and through 18 blog posts we have read something like 60 stories and made our way all the way to W, the final letter on the list (I guess Merril didn't like any of Robert F. Young's 1956 stories, and it doesn't look like Roger Zelazny published any stories in 1956.) And today we have post number 19 and a final three stories, one by Robert Moore Williams and two by Richard Wilson. (I wanted to read Anthony G. Williamson's "To Reach the Stars," but I can't find a scan of <i>Authentic Science Fiction'</i>s May 1956 issue.) </p><p><b>"Sudden Lake"</b> by Robert Moore Williams </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWit5k8o7JZf5_icI71BHZ-UDE4YRT1Hk3pWikJZ_83TJ9edQbgQ5Lcgj0nvhjPtn_7beh0yVvuiyKoA_UraCmrdv39Bm4E8RMaL7sXBUIweTRUPgTtbtfq7lzMY_xxzXMvAGAn5zq4dkyUv3xCN6qdJy0gBjZFSDwLQDNBwJc7sXyDzYvLvYZsU-q4K8/s829/OWVIRGIL.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="829" data-original-width="580" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWit5k8o7JZf5_icI71BHZ-UDE4YRT1Hk3pWikJZ_83TJ9edQbgQ5Lcgj0nvhjPtn_7beh0yVvuiyKoA_UraCmrdv39Bm4E8RMaL7sXBUIweTRUPgTtbtfq7lzMY_xxzXMvAGAn5zq4dkyUv3xCN6qdJy0gBjZFSDwLQDNBwJc7sXyDzYvLvYZsU-q4K8/w280-h400/OWVIRGIL.jpg" width="280" /></a></div><div>This blog doesn't have a particularly good relationship with Robert Moore Williams. While it is true that in 2018 I liked his 1938 tale <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2018/02/adventures-in-time-and-space-by-miller.html">"Robot's Return"</a> and that in 2020 I enjoyed his 1946 story <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/07/from-fantastic-adventures-1946-stories.html">"The Counterfeiter,"</a> in 2022 I read two of Williams' Jongor novels, <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/02/oct-40-fantastic-adventures-r-m.html">finding the first "an acceptable Tarzan pastiche with some half-baked science fiction ideas thrown in"</a> and the second <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-return-of-jongor-by-robert-moore.html">"bad,"</a> and his fourth Zanthar novel, which I declared <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/02/zanthar-at-trips-end-by-robert-moore.html">"bad in almost every way."</a> But seeing as Merril liked it, maybe I can hope "Sudden Lake" will at least be competent.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Sudden Lake" is set in a military installation the purpose of which is to store uranium. The uranium has been formed into little cubes, each little cube in a separate locked receptacle. One day, the alarms go off and it is discovered that one of the cubes is missing; it is soon discovered in the wrong receptacle, sitting atop the cube that belongs there. This is horrifying, because if a certain amount ("the critical mass") of uranium gets together, an amount which can't be precisely known because it is affected by various exogenous factors, it will explode, obliterating the facility and leaving a huge crater that the men jocularly call "Sudden Lake."</div><div><br /></div><div>The general who commands the base, Dawson, his long-time assistant, Major Lang, and the facility's head scientist, civilian Dr. Ferguson, try to figure out how this event occurred, and their investigation soon centers on a Private Yakey, a hulking superstitious brute from the South who was on guard the night of the incident, a man who fears nothing natural but is scared of ghosts. Under a truth serum he reveals what he refused to admit voluntarily, that he saw the errant cube of uranium floating through the air. It is assumed Yakey was drunk on guard duty, but despite this, Yakey ends up on guard duty again, and the same bizarre and mortifying incident again occurs.</div><div><br /></div><div>Lang takes charge of the investigation, using unorthodox methods to solve the mystery, and the solution triggers a paradigm shift, a radical change in our knowledge of mankind and the universe that sets the human race on a better path! It turns out that Ferguson hated nuclear weapons so much that his subconscious sought to destroy the uranium at the base--the egghead's hate was so titanic that it overrode his fear of death (or just exploited the death wish lurking within us all, I guess.) This hate also served to activate his latent psychic powers so that Ferguson could (without his conscious mind being aware of it) move the uranium through space-time! Lang, by threatening Ferguson with a pointless death, forces the scientist's subconscious knowledge and abilities to the surface--Ferguson can now consciously control his amazing powers! And presumably teach other people how to access these powers!</div><div><br /></div><div>It seems to me that these new powers would be like any new intellectual or technological development--decent people could use them to improve the lives of individuals and of the community, but evil people could use them to rob, oppress and murder others. But Williams and his characters are more optimistic than I am: they are confident that knowledge of other dimensions and the ability to travel instantaneously with only the power of the mind is going to end the arms race and make nuclear war impossible. Well, I hope so.</div><div> </div><div>This story isn't bad. Williams works diligently to bring his characters to life, giving them all personalities and constructing relationships among them and flinging various metaphors at you, and it essentially works. Like most genre fiction, "Sudden Lake" is of course a wish-fulfillment fantasy, catering to our wish for a deus ex machina resolution to the problem posed by the existence of nuclear weapons. Fortunately, Williams, by constructing his story as a sort of locked-room mystery that is solved by a detective willing to take risks, diminishes the problem I have with typical deus ex machina solutions--the victory Lang wins for the human race is earned, not just handed to him, and it comes at some cost. </div><div><br /></div>"Sudden Lake" was printed in Ray Palmer's <i>Other Worlds</i>, an issue with a Virgil Finlay cover that celebrates the beauty that is the female form. (This time out Virgil conceals the beauty that is the male form in a clunky space suit.) Judith Merril and I think the story worth your time, but it doesn't look like "Sudden Lake" has ever been reprinted.<p><b>"The Big Fix!"</b> by Richard Wilson </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3nnx92yuZAGxu0SKAUPr_i98krO9PvcP0tgdmwnjfqOvY5xM5_vFByFqn2LblNHClhP-q-MutzN2nNLbd3f8nIfyhB__iV0HBn9pm-0RegCFPfpA0NQVCZxrwEkFguZwZXavQqUX2RRnF3SBgoNRvpcEfoUdUuTWPF-SL9O8shyphenhyphenW5asc0QRtL8L6ACmg/s1063/Infinity_v01n04_1956-08_0000.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1063" data-original-width="750" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3nnx92yuZAGxu0SKAUPr_i98krO9PvcP0tgdmwnjfqOvY5xM5_vFByFqn2LblNHClhP-q-MutzN2nNLbd3f8nIfyhB__iV0HBn9pm-0RegCFPfpA0NQVCZxrwEkFguZwZXavQqUX2RRnF3SBgoNRvpcEfoUdUuTWPF-SL9O8shyphenhyphenW5asc0QRtL8L6ACmg/w283-h400/Infinity_v01n04_1956-08_0000.jpg" width="283" /></a></div>Back in 2016, I read Wilson's Nebula-nominated 42-page story <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2016/09/1979-stories-by-s-p-somtow-orson-scott.html">"The Story Writer"</a> and condemned it as "sappy, sentimental, self-indulgent and pandering," called the plot "absurd, banal and tired" and denounced the style as "long-winded and boring." And yet today I choose to grapple with Wilson's prose not once, but twice!<p></p><p>Round One! "The Big Fix!" </p><p>Our narrator is a man who "has been mainlining it for a decade" but has been "off the junk for three months," having had enough of the life of poverty and violence that is the lot of the junkie; to satisfy his needs he has been relying on mass quantities of alcohol. As the story begins, he is pursuing rumors of a new drug that isn't habit-forming and which can induce what I'd call collective consciousness ("open up the world for you so you'd be close, really close, to others like you....your mind would be their mind....union more terrific than any other kind....") His quest leads him to a Manhattan apartment where a mysterious dealer has him lay down and smoke a weird cigarette in a weird holder. </p><p>The narrator is transported to an extragalactic planet where there is no pollution or machinery and people share their thoughts telepathically and relax and eat delicious food in cities of short quaint buildings, not impersonal oppressive skyscrapers. (Come on, Wilson, I love skyscrapers!) But our narrator's visit is a brief one--if he wants to return to utopian Uru, he will have to sign up permanently, abandoning Earth forever. And he does!</p><p>Flash forward to the narrator's life on Uru--like so many people in SF, he has been <a href="https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipN-8KzwrlYkjcs0u87KzSzurWmKg7htY_4L_o_HQ5co3m6Oabn4xi63_pn4FLKs3w/photo/AF1QipOumZEfyzRZzDiFosAcv2rA_CB4rxy_4GYee59O?key=YWQwVm1nS01BdXJmUzJrVHFSM28wTlVwcXEzaFdn">thrown into the gladiatorial arena</a>! The former junkie participates in battles between teams of fifteen men, all wearing gloves and boots studded with steel claws and even mouthpieces with fangs! The drug dealer who recruited the narrator, a native of Uru, is commander of the team, directing his fifteen men via telepathy from outside the arena. These annual games resolve disputes between cities, and serve as a cathartic "letting-off of steam" for the natives of Uru, who through their telepathy can experience the emotions of the 30 gladiators shanghaied from all over the universe without themselves risking life and limb. This is his third and final fight; if the narrator, who has already lost a leg and an eye in his first two engagements, can live through this one he will be awarded a place in the aristocracy. </p><p>The fights are not free-for-alls, but a series of one-on-one duels. By coincidence, today the narrator is faced with a fellow Earthman. When the combatants realize they are both human (people from all over the universe look the same, it turns out) they refuse to fight, and so are sent back to Earth. On Earth these two wangle positions on teams conducting research on peyote--our happy ending is that the narrator has figured out a way to get paid to use drugs. </p><p>"The Big Fix!" is well-written, especially the first two-thirds on Earth, but I'm not sure the whole thing holds together well. Are we supposed to see some parallel between recreational drug use and vicarious enjoyment of violence? If we are, Wilson doesn't sell the parallel very well. If we aren't, "The Big Fix!" feels like Wilson just jamming together three different SF themes (mind-expanding drug use, the dark underside of utopia, and being forced into the arena) that don't really sync up well.</p><p>After the narrator abandons Earth the whole story feels discordant and disconnected, even if we ignore the nuttiness of the idea that smoking a cigarette can transport your physical body to another galaxy in the blink of an eye. How are we supposed to think about the people of Uru? Is Uru really a paradise if they trick foreigners into losing their lives in the arena? And if they are ruthless enough to fool people into becoming gladiators who are likely to die, does it make sense they are generous enough to send recalcitrant gladiators back home? The ending, in which the druggies find an ostensibly healthy way to devote their lives to recreational drug use, is not very satisfying--a more satisfying ending would be punishment for throwing your life away on drugs, or some kind of redemptive ending in which the druggies go straight. The ending we get, in which the druggies keep using drugs and are even paid to do so, feels like a cop out. Is this story just a roundabout endorsement of peyote? </p><p>I'm going to call this story acceptable; before the gladiator stuff started I was expecting to give it a thumbs up. "The Big Fix!" will be of value to those interested in depictions of the drug culture, and might also be seen an example of the romanticization of Native Americans, as the narrator closely associates peyote with Indians. Also of note are references to Aldous Huxley, whose book on his use of mescaline (the active agent of peyote), <i>The Doors of Perception</i>, came out in 1954. </p><p>"The Big Fix" first appeared in <i>Infinity</i>, in an issue we looked into in June of last year when we read another story promoted by Merril, Randall Garrett's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/06/merril-approved-1956-stories-galouye.html">"Stroke of Genius."</a> "The Big Fix" would be reprinted in an anthology of stories about drug use edited by Michel Parry called <i>Strange Ecstasies</i> and in the Wilson collection <i>Time Out for Tomorrow</i>, which in both its American and German printings has enjoyed some pretty awesome covers<i>.</i></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmUTaIdGnzv39_q2SGQ4d4MQGZb32okqHCcJBIOx32VS4rsIKOcpevTKn9GT_YfBX09c4HJi-wKn8YWSIshGaqGAbkmDjVajaPIEWvGnbT_0VfaZPZw-Z_hFM3KS2X1ncumFq_5ixAqnbn4XEOc_mEoIEQ4iaDe-eyB3KuTvdqBZTckhdLo9LI88g55mE/s500/fix.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="402" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmUTaIdGnzv39_q2SGQ4d4MQGZb32okqHCcJBIOx32VS4rsIKOcpevTKn9GT_YfBX09c4HJi-wKn8YWSIshGaqGAbkmDjVajaPIEWvGnbT_0VfaZPZw-Z_hFM3KS2X1ncumFq_5ixAqnbn4XEOc_mEoIEQ4iaDe-eyB3KuTvdqBZTckhdLo9LI88g55mE/s16000/fix.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>"Lonely Road"</b> by Richard Wilson<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2dhVYI1PtyN5UCRwZ3BiCwSyryaTnz14NBcfEmGhoCGa6RD8WpNjdLbgcXqLKDkwXKiq2hCb5LuV3x-ltgGsg4LXb0xCkyKtbnu0EhEzCznE-i-RQsvpeKqzwVxGFV9oFkh469ZmnlIi518ROA7aMT8umtfAYuZ7q-9xRzslrt3-98VCLxl4urH6XHmY/s600/FSFSep1956.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="424" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2dhVYI1PtyN5UCRwZ3BiCwSyryaTnz14NBcfEmGhoCGa6RD8WpNjdLbgcXqLKDkwXKiq2hCb5LuV3x-ltgGsg4LXb0xCkyKtbnu0EhEzCznE-i-RQsvpeKqzwVxGFV9oFkh469ZmnlIi518ROA7aMT8umtfAYuZ7q-9xRzslrt3-98VCLxl4urH6XHmY/s320/FSFSep1956.jpg" width="226" /></a></div>Round Two! "Lonely Road."<p></p><p>This is a sort of <i>Twilight Zone-</i>style story. Our main character is on a long drive homewards. He realizes that he has seen no other cars on the road for some time; he goes into restaurants and gas stations and finds no people around. We get several pages of him trying to find evidence of people, leaving money in empty businesses so he can feel comfortable about taking the food and fuel he requires. We also learn in passing that his young son died recently.</p><p>He's almost home when he starts seeing people again. Everybody is acting a little strangely, and when he asks about the last two days, the days when he seemed alone in the world, they don't have much to say, sort of avoid the topic. Back home with his wife we get some clues as to what happened. For one thing, at the approximate times her husband stopped seeing people, and started seeing them again, his wife noticed some pretty odd phenomena. More significantly, we hear about one of their son's last activities.</p><p>You see, their boy, when his illness got too severe for him to get up and around much, seriously took up tropical fish as a hobby. He even had his parents buy a second tank and, as an experiment, transferred the fish from their original tank to the second tank, which was arranged a little differently. Eventually he realized that one of the tank's denizens, a snail, had accidentally been left behind in the first tank. Then he put all the fish back into the first tank. Wilson gives us reason to believe that God or Fate or whoever or whatever moved the human race to a quite similar Earth--leaving the protagonist behind by mistake--and then after two days moved all the people back again.</p><p>This story is reasonably well-written, and all the stuff about grieving parents makes you a little verklempt, but what is the point of the weird SF element? The boy died soon after his abortive experiment, and the fish all died soon after that--are we to believe that God or the Universe and/or the Earth and its inhabitants are on the brink of death?</p><p>Wilson's depiction of a man left totally alone and of parents' heartbreak are pretty effective, so I'm willing to call "Lonely Road" good. "Lonely Road" made its debut in <i>F&SF</i>, in an issue which features Reginald Bretnor's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/meril-approved-1956-stories-bradbury.html">"The Past and its Dead People,"</a> a particular fave of Merril's, and a reprint of Evelyn E. Smith's joke story about people who design crossword puzzles, <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/01/1954-stories-by-carl-jacobi-clark.html">"BAXBR/DAXBR."</a> "Lonely Road" was a success, being reprinted in the Wilson collection <i>Those Idiots from Earth</i> and numerous anthologies, including John Pelan's <i>The Century's Best Horror Fiction 1951-2000.</i> </p><p>The Wilson story I hated appeared quite late in Wilson's career, and maybe represents a decadent phase of his writing; perhaps I should try to find these paperback collections with the terrific Richard Powers covers and sample more of Wilson's 1950s work. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3fKwJvk_8r8IDG5o5t9fg8LD0YhcTP0aklG37KBQrxAGgrGzqWylI3qUlH3gReamMEFSYSMUivKWqKFtyGNIXkoBBarTrqoIKJP7vF9gQdNdhXU7OdI5fBW2ZAtJWLhfyHq2pQRMC-WLI-Ulw3_ojyZveToyrNWdVfMS9iH187LG5_cIRCIhldcGJupk/s500/lonely.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="382" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3fKwJvk_8r8IDG5o5t9fg8LD0YhcTP0aklG37KBQrxAGgrGzqWylI3qUlH3gReamMEFSYSMUivKWqKFtyGNIXkoBBarTrqoIKJP7vF9gQdNdhXU7OdI5fBW2ZAtJWLhfyHq2pQRMC-WLI-Ulw3_ojyZveToyrNWdVfMS9iH187LG5_cIRCIhldcGJupk/s16000/lonely.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div>**********<div><br /></div><div>Well, there we have it folks, our final post on 1956 stories recommended by Judith Merril. This has been a rewarding adventure; many of the stories have been entertaining--including some by authors I have been avoiding and some I would not have encountered in the normal course of business--and even the weak stories offer us insight into the history of SF and present a puzzle--if I think a story is bad, why did Merril profess to like it?</div><div><br /></div><div>Finally, links to the entire run of blog posts based on Merril's list of honorable mentions from <i>SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume.</i> </div><div><br /></div><div><div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-robert.html" style="text-align: center;">Abernathy and Aldiss<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-p-anderson.html" style="text-align: center;">Anderson, Allen and Banks</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/meril-approved-1956-stories-bradbury.html">Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler</a> <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-carter.html">Carter, Clarke and Clifton</a> <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-clingerman.html">Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen</a><br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-de-camp.html">de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle</a> </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-j-barrow-c.html">Barrow, Beaumont and Blish<br /></a><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/05/merril-approved-1956-stories-harlan.html">Ellison and Fontenay<br /></a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/06/merril-approved-1956-stories-galouye.html">Galouye, Garrett, Grimm & Gunn</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/07/merril-approved-1956-sf-stories-by-r.html">Hart, Herbert and Jones</a> </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/10/merril-approved-1956-stories-kuttner.html">Kuttner & Moore, Lang, Leinster, L'Engle and McClintic</a></div></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-by-j.html">McConnell, McIntosh and Melchior</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-by-ward.html">Moore, Norse and Oliver</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-sf-stories-arthur.html">Porges and Presslie</a> </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-frank.html">Riley and Ritchie</a></div></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-roberts.html">Roberts, Russell and St. Clair</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/03/merril-approved-1956-7-stories-by-l.html">Shaw, Silverberg, Still and Sturgeon</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/03/merril-approved-stories-from-1956-by-e.html">Tubb, Wallace and Williams</a></div></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-53847231431765958922024-03-06T10:46:00.000-05:002024-03-06T10:46:23.114-05:00Merril-approved stories from 1956 by E C Tubb, F L Wallace and J Williams<p>In 1957, Judith Merril published, as the last section of her anthology <i>SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume</i>, a long alphabetical list of 1956 stories which hadn't quite made the cut for inclusion in the anthology but which she thought worthy of recommendation. In 2023 and 2024 we have been reading selected stories from that list, starting with the A authors and working our way through the list until today we hit T and proceed beyond. We've got three stories today, and I will also note that we've already read the story by a U author that Merril recommends for 1956, Helen Urban's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2018/09/penultimate-abc-eric-frank-russell.html">"The Finer Breed."</a> </p><p><b>"Into the Empty Dark"</b> by E. C. Tubb</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVbB4ajzy-iuR8l9qKTORK7H-pzhDmYZJhJ_lbcvPgxRpfSlFU0MTyN1nl0zQ2y31EKFUd1MFD6qNN06yXGkjlp2WubazaU1AZxl7MbPQm89trjd1vEbmQTd1x6LQIcPdM5SdPCQO924sL-n8Q8C7DujT4FaljSoFqUfzdGixwr7nZogqDpx8y_D2EY04/s869/neb.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="869" data-original-width="552" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVbB4ajzy-iuR8l9qKTORK7H-pzhDmYZJhJ_lbcvPgxRpfSlFU0MTyN1nl0zQ2y31EKFUd1MFD6qNN06yXGkjlp2WubazaU1AZxl7MbPQm89trjd1vEbmQTd1x6LQIcPdM5SdPCQO924sL-n8Q8C7DujT4FaljSoFqUfzdGixwr7nZogqDpx8y_D2EY04/s320/neb.png" width="203" /></a></div>First up, E. C. Tubb, creator of Dumarest of Earth. "Into the Empty Dark" debuted in <i>Nebula Science Fiction</i> ("Voted Britain's Top Science Fiction Magazine") and has never been reprinted.<p></p><p>"Into the Empty Dark" is serious old-fashioned science fiction, an attempt to realistically portray space flight in the near future. In the universe the story describes, mankind has only been travelling between the planets for twenty years, and journeys between the inner planets are slow, dull, and strain everybody's mental heath. The ships must strictly follow predetermined courses to get to their destinations, as they lack the fuel, sensors and communications equipment to safely or profitably make course corrections on the fly. So when Captain Strackland's ship gets an SOS from another vessel, one which has been hit by a meteor and thrown off course, there is not a hell of a lot Strackland and the two men who make up his crew can do to help them. </p><p>Tubb does a good job describing the way space flight work in this story, and a decent job describing the psychological effects on the spacemen as they face crisis and tragedy in the void between the Earth and Mars. The story's tone and atmosphere, and all the little details, bring home the idea that space travel is unglamourous and tedious, but still dangerous, and Tubb doesn't talk much about how mankind has benefitted from exploring and colonizing the solar system. The people on the other ship die, there being nothing Strackland and company can do to help them, and Tubb suggests Strackland and his crew will suffer lifelong psychological scars from the incident. </p><p>I like it. </p><p><b>"A Little Thing for the House"</b> by F. L. Wallace</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFrmfTiqfUA4w9dd6QyT0VWHGlKm0-VdvYHmLAAGKJ3kJDpAicPfqF6AG8cFR6c-1PbhvcG6sqLFlwnfkQrZwjXTZIvNFu22E5gML0csa0WL_aELQv4ZoaUjQqE5wNJs3tm8KVHx8IeHRmuZ0ZG8eDgvHjPOl3MZEKm-teLOsFG-VJBzYQTbfKIlojZyM/s1146/Astounding_v57n05_1956-07_EXciter-LennyS_FIXED_0000.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1146" data-original-width="819" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFrmfTiqfUA4w9dd6QyT0VWHGlKm0-VdvYHmLAAGKJ3kJDpAicPfqF6AG8cFR6c-1PbhvcG6sqLFlwnfkQrZwjXTZIvNFu22E5gML0csa0WL_aELQv4ZoaUjQqE5wNJs3tm8KVHx8IeHRmuZ0ZG8eDgvHjPOl3MZEKm-teLOsFG-VJBzYQTbfKIlojZyM/s320/Astounding_v57n05_1956-07_EXciter-LennyS_FIXED_0000.jpg" width="229" /></a></div>Over the years we have read two stories by Wallace, <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2019/08/spectrum-5-1950s-stories-by-wallace.html">"Student Body,"</a> and <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/12/odd-stories-selected-by-g-conklin-k.html">"Big Ancestor,"</a> and thought them relatively good. This story isn't bad, either, though it seems it has never been reprinted.<p></p><p>"A Little Thing for the House" is another of those stories that warns you utopia is going to suck and that to flourish people need some kind of challenge, need some kind of productive work to do. It depicts a future in which computers and robots do everything, and people are actually forbidden from performing any sort of real work, even such things as cooking their own food, much less building or operating or repairing machines. The computers allow people to be poets, artists, athletes and scientists, but the story suggests that since most people lack the talent to be truly successful at such work, many are unfulfilled. </p><p>Our hero Holloway is an aspiring mechanic; as a child his great grandfather told him stories about the old days when people had to make their own way in the world instead of having everything handed to them, and how he (greatgrandpa) had been a fixer or tinker, a guy who repaired tools and machines and did odd jobs. All his life that sort of work has appealed to Holloway, who has a mechanical mind but doesn't want to be a scientist--he likes to work with his hands. As the story begins, Holloway has managed to find a person, the married woman Madge, who has somewhat similar aspirations--Madge wants to bake and cook like people did in centuries past, not just tell the kitchen machines what to make and have it spat out of a little door at her. Holloway knows how to alter the kitchen machines to allow her to turn them off and on at will, so she can bake her own cookies (interestingly, in this 1956 story Wallace spells the singular "cooky") or whatever she wants. Accomplishing this task will take a while, so Holloway moves in for a few days--Madge tells hubby (who goes to an office to play a stock market simulation set up by the computers to fill up his time) and daughter Alicia that Holloway is an old friend just visiting.</p><p>Alicia is an exhibitionist who chases men and wishes she lived in the days when she could be a courtesan and bang a succession of guys. She flaunts her "hard young" body at Holloway and flirts with him briefly, but when she realizes how unlikely he is to become famous she turns her attention to another guy who starts showing up, the new local counsellor, a young guy taking the place of the old geezer who just retired. These counsellors are sort of like commissars who help people figure out what to do with their leisure-filled lives and also keep an eye out for people who might illegally be doing real work. This new guy is pursuing rumors of a "maladjusted" citizen, and Holloway is his prime suspect, but he gets a little distracted by Alicia's attentions.</p><p>When Holloway has reason to believe the counsellor has his number and is about to arrest him, the would-be tinker sneaks into the central computer for his city and puts to use all his mechanical skills to threaten the computer and compel it to loosen the regulations and allow people more leeway in which they can do productive work. After his success, Alicia throws herself at Holloway (he is kinda famous now) but he rejects her--he has another woman in mind. I figured this would be Madge, with whom he has something in common, but instead it is some woman whom Wallace hasn't mentioned before, Anne, I guess Holloway's wife or fiancé or something. We are told Anne has patiently waited for Holloway while he pursued his risky campaign to become a working mechanic in a world in which that is a crime. Is this Wallace telling us that the ideal woman is one who stays in the background and silently supports her man? Was Anne, who is only mentioned in one paragraph, a late addition to the story? </p><p>This story is OK, maybe marginally good. Feminists won't like that the active women in the story aspire to either bake and cook or become promiscuous groupies and that the woman the hero chooses as a romantic partner is neither of those risk-taking outgoing women but instead a woman who passively waits for him. Personally, I have to question the wisdom of introducing a new character on the penultimate page of a 29-page story--seeing Holloway take up with either horny little Alicia or accomplice-in-rule-breaking Madge, or just passing on women altogether to focus on his libertarian activist work, would have been more satisfying. But in general the themes, pacing, and structure of the story work; "A Little Thing for the House" is never boring or annoying, and I found it entertaining enough--in particular, it is interesting to see a depiction, over 60 years ago, of a world in which it is not necessary to work and so men become immersed in computer games and women devote themselves to using their sex appeal to win fame.</p><p><b>"The Asa Rule"</b> by Jay Williams </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzYtHnq49iST-CTOzS6nCu1JwtSxXkXKUpTcDfTMHZaBB6qYuA4RBAQicLmvjHxvDjwN3o5atPoFIhbgzZNCE-dniTTwEXGfd7zOhZCP3ay_1P_Xk7MaN0SoazuYm693Q-iEblyBzjJEWMtVSMB6C6aNjreF-tnZNzWV7pzMRQl0DpxRJ2-1dYSIEqpAw/s816/fsf6.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="816" data-original-width="530" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzYtHnq49iST-CTOzS6nCu1JwtSxXkXKUpTcDfTMHZaBB6qYuA4RBAQicLmvjHxvDjwN3o5atPoFIhbgzZNCE-dniTTwEXGfd7zOhZCP3ay_1P_Xk7MaN0SoazuYm693Q-iEblyBzjJEWMtVSMB6C6aNjreF-tnZNzWV7pzMRQl0DpxRJ2-1dYSIEqpAw/w260-h400/fsf6.png" width="260" /></a></div>"The Asa Rule" debuted in the same issue of <i>F&SF</i> that included Robert Bloch's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/01/robert-bloch-where-buffalo-roam-is.html">"All on a Golden Afternoon,"</a> which I declared "the Platonic ideal" of a Bloch story when I read it way back when. For some reason, on Merril's honorable mentions list in <i>SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume</i>, the source for the story is listed as <i>The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Sixth Series</i>, so we'll read it there to ensure we are experiencing the text Merril is recommending. <p></p><p>(The boys down in Marketing want me to post a link to my blogpost about the Poul Anderson, Ted Sturgeon and Avram Davidson stories in <i>The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Sixth Series</i>, so <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/04/1956-f-tales-by-davidson-t-sturgeon-p.html">here it is</a>.) </p><p>Lucy Ironsmith is an equatorial Martian with pale green skin, silver hair, crimson eyes, and a slender body, and is so striking that when Terran Leonard Jackson first sees her he spills his drink and the service robot has to roll in to clean him up. Leonard has come to Mars to study the ecosystem of the Martian tundra, and Lucy is going to be his assistant, teach him Martian culture and help him avoid offending the locals out of ignorance of their customs.</p><p>The Martians, we readers of stories recommended by Judith Merril are not surprised to learn, are better than humans--closer to nature, more peaceful, less aggressive. Lucy says that to Martians, Earth's history seems "bloody, senseless, and disagreeable." Leonard suggests that some humans are like Martians, naming "the Hopi, the Navaho, some Polynesian people, some of the Africans...," you know, peaceful and friendly, and that the rest of the human race is slowly catching up to those admirable demographics, learning to be peaceful. Lucy admits that Martians used to fight, but that was long ago; for two thousand years Mars has had its own United Nations, something which Earth has only had for less than 100 years. </p><p>Leonard wasn't sent to Mars to flirt with a green girl and explain to her that not all Earthers are as bad as white people, however; his job is to figure out a way to deal with the deadly swarms of insects that make the Martian tundra hard to cultivate. The clouds of bugs leave the villages of the local primitives, the grey-skinned, flat-nosed, semi-nomadic Asa, alone, but, when in the tundra, Martians of Lucy's green ethnic group, the Hvor, have to carry with them special protective suits to don should a swarm appear. The Asa are even more in touch with nature than Lucy's people, and "live by a rigid rule in which they must love and assist each other and even their worst enemies." The Asa hold the bugs to be sacred, and refuse to explain to others their method of keeping them from attacking. (You'd think that "assisting others" would include telling the Hvor, if not us deplorable Caucasians, how to avoid getting killed by the bugs, but I guess not.)</p><p>Monthly, the women of the Asa hold a secret ritual honoring the insects, a ritual no man must witness. Leonard sneaks off and spies on the ritual without informing Lucy or his Terran superiors, who specifically told him not to do this. He is caught, and, I guess having forgotten to identify as transgendered, is taken by the Asa to a special boulder out in the tundra, "given to" the bugs to suffer their judgement. When Lucy finds out she is pretty upset, being in love with Leonard, and even whips out a gun and threatens the Asa tribal leaders, to the amazement of the human accompanying her--he has never seen a Martian acting so aggressively before. Luckily, before anybody gets blasted, Leonard appears. He explains that after the Asa left him, the insect swarm arrived and started biting him, but Leonard, gosh darn it, is such an inquisitive scientist and such a nice guy that, even while they were biting him, he found the bugs fascinating and even "cute." As soon as he realized how adorable the venomous insects were they stopped biting him. You see, the bugs can sense hate and love, and they only bite haters; people full of love they leave alone. </p><p>The story ends as Leonard and Lucy are on the brink of sharing their first kiss.</p><p>"The Asa Rule" is written in a simple and childish style that matches its one-note characters, sappy message and all the little lectures on the UN and diversity and the environment--the story reads like a kid's book meant to mold your little tyke's personality and opinions. Thumbs down! I guess I should have expected this, as when I looked at the page on Williams at isfdb it appeared that most of his SF output consisted of juveniles about kids learning to cooperate or marveling at the fascinating culture of the Native Americans, but I did not (in fact, when I realized this was the story with the sexy green girl on the cover of both the magazine <i>and</i> the hardcover edition of <i>The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Sixth Series</i>,<i> </i>I got hopeful.)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTCxzTw4wuP11mU5DxlFkR2FoT-b-bGVxLWmKu6alj1ehm2dfJ4ix5nuiQI49EERFEt4tAC9j8xPNG8S9KswRnC86SUAWXwIfOAIDvHAPU2iU66rcmZXB2V4RDAtoyr_kLPEUwR8QSwdj5Z74Ampqb4QVE6DZMVk7VlGbL26GkoIpu9Cr5-g1P5GityYk/s500/jawilliams.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="364" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTCxzTw4wuP11mU5DxlFkR2FoT-b-bGVxLWmKu6alj1ehm2dfJ4ix5nuiQI49EERFEt4tAC9j8xPNG8S9KswRnC86SUAWXwIfOAIDvHAPU2iU66rcmZXB2V4RDAtoyr_kLPEUwR8QSwdj5Z74Ampqb4QVE6DZMVk7VlGbL26GkoIpu9Cr5-g1P5GityYk/s16000/jawilliams.jpg" /></a></div><p>**********</p>It is easy to see why Merril included these stories on her list; the Tubb and Wallace express skepticism of technological progress in the context of stories that also say something about human psychology, and while the Williams is like a propaganda piece directed at nine-year-olds, it promotes aspects of what I take to be Merril's own ideology. <p></p><p>We've been plugging away at this 1956 SF <i>a la Merril </i>project since <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-robert.html">March of last year</a>, and the final stage of the journey approaches! Stay tuned for the final episode of this caper, and cross your fingers in hopes the last stories we read from Merril's list are more like today's contribution from Tubb than that from Williams! </p>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-38346282633192768832024-03-03T23:14:00.001-05:002024-03-03T23:15:09.662-05:00Merril-approved 1956-7 stories by L Shaw, R Silverberg, H Still and T Sturgeon<p>Let's read some stories printed in 1956 (give or take a few months) by authors whose names begin with the letter S and which famous anthologist and mover and shaker in the SF community Judith Merril saw fit to recommend. There are many such stories, and we've already read a few of them, like Clifford Simak's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2019/10/stories-from-galaxy-by-e-e-smith-f.html">"Honorable Opponent"</a> and Theodore Sturgeon's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/04/1956-f-tales-by-davidson-t-sturgeon-p.html">"And Now the News,"</a> and today four more of them will be thrust under the hot lights and face the third degree here at MPorcius Fiction Log.</p><p><b>"Syllabus"</b> by Len Shaw (1956)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3VT_SmLEIItDCYRbjFTwL7SylsHJtqiwlZOLT7bXImykbxp2n2yy9dxSuu_AvezSDQSZ_4-9pMPH5KyECq_KcCCH1zcPTRm1lDqV72Au6OZumD3zeZRFf4v6CrU3OlZvdJQco7J9abUj3mayvyPrHOF-BX_QfdohNKcX6Pk2iwplLa-EZxfPE4CnTsOw/s500/science_fantasy_195602.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="342" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3VT_SmLEIItDCYRbjFTwL7SylsHJtqiwlZOLT7bXImykbxp2n2yy9dxSuu_AvezSDQSZ_4-9pMPH5KyECq_KcCCH1zcPTRm1lDqV72Au6OZumD3zeZRFf4v6CrU3OlZvdJQco7J9abUj3mayvyPrHOF-BX_QfdohNKcX6Pk2iwplLa-EZxfPE4CnTsOw/s320/science_fantasy_195602.jpg" width="219" /></a></div>Shaw has eight short story credits at isfdb. "Syllabus" appeared in the same issue of <i>Science Fantasy</i> as the debut of Brian Aldiss's <i>Non-Stop</i>, a book version of which we read way back in 2014 (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkwqiqsfoZw">when we were young and the world was free</a>), and while <i>Non-Stop</i> has been reprinted a billion times and even won some kind of retro award in 2007, it looks like "Syllabus" has languished in obscurity (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zz0s7yJefY">"success walks hand in hand with failure...."</a>)<div><br /></div><div>Well, its obscurity is easily explicable, as is Merril's quixotic decision to champion it. "Syllabus" has a simple plot: in the future of air cars, a husband and wife have a teen daughter who has been having trouble settling on a college major and career path. After a few false starts she finally chooses marine zoology. Her father's sleep is wracked by nightmares in which his daughter is eaten by a whale, so he takes the family flying machine to the women's college to talk to the imposing woman who is the headmistress, where he learns he is mixed up in the headmistress's scheme to manipulate his strong-willed daughter into revealing her budding psychic powers and signing up for study not in Zoology Dept but the school's Psionics Institute. </div><div><br /></div><div>The remarkable thing about "Syllabus" is its style. Shaw renders the story in the vernacular of the future, and reading "Syllabus" is like reading a long difficult poem. The text often ignores standard grammatical conventions--most of the sentences are technically fragments, and the reader has to supply a subject or a verb that is merely implied by context clues. Almost every line includes some unusual word and some tweaked version of a stock phrase or cliched allusion--"Cardiac-Queen" for "queen of my heart" is one example. Shaw's project in writing this story is not to narrate an obvious plot, but to illustrate the fact (explicitly mentioned in the editor's intro to the story) that English has evolved greatly over the last four or five centuries and will continue to evolve.</div><div><br /></div><div>What is going on in "Syllabus" is comprehensible, but it is no smooth and easy ride, and it is not fun. It is easy to admire the ambition, creativity and labor that went into "Syllabus," but it is hard to actually enjoy the product into which all those laudable resource has been put. (Shaw's story is rather more challenging, and much less rewarding, that Anthony Burgess' <i>A Clockwork Orange</i>; the experience of reading "Syllabus" reminded me much more of that time I reading Aldiss' <i><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/12/report-on-probability-by-brian-aldiss.html">Report on Probability A</a></i>.) </div><div><br /></div><div>Got to give "Syllabus" a thumbs down. Looking for silver linings here, I will suggest that reading it may offer some educative value--I for one learned a Biblical allusion new to me, "the law of the Medes and Persians," which is presented in this story as if it is a commonplace (maybe it was in 1950s England?) and perhaps other readers will encounter words or references new to them.</div><div><p>Finally, a shout out to luminist.org, where I read a scan of <i>Science Fantasy</i> Volume 6, Number 17, having been unable to find a scan at the internet archive.</p><p><b>"The Guest Rites"</b> by Robert Silverberg (1957)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXussSiimyqvW6XiRdMosEwQ6Ypu6NJBMzUpEuYPSCfqEZV2jL4Iz7lew1RCHx21MBGXMp8iVHBHMwopjl9mRrw-MIXNACMeZWNXhpqLNt4BhPdpPjsXJOnUpQFIX2W06Ng6xSt6mm06xHzoibhwfQuTNtM7KByicxLapUUnLT9YK4UNU5v9QkH2lPV24/s580/INFNTFEB57.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="580" data-original-width="420" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXussSiimyqvW6XiRdMosEwQ6Ypu6NJBMzUpEuYPSCfqEZV2jL4Iz7lew1RCHx21MBGXMp8iVHBHMwopjl9mRrw-MIXNACMeZWNXhpqLNt4BhPdpPjsXJOnUpQFIX2W06Ng6xSt6mm06xHzoibhwfQuTNtM7KByicxLapUUnLT9YK4UNU5v9QkH2lPV24/w290-h400/INFNTFEB57.jpg" width="290" /></a></div>Here we bear witness to Merril making a little mistake or maybe bending the rules a bit. The list from which we are drawing her recommendations appears at the end of her 1957 anthology <i>SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume</i>, and it indicates that "The Guest Rites" appeared in <i>Infinity Science Fiction</i> in February 1956, when in fact it appeared in the February 195<i>7</i> issue, an issue with a great cover by Emsh that brings to beautiful life such beloved SF elements as zero gravity, sexy spacesuits and their sexy inhabitants, colorful nebulae, and high tech equipment. We'll read "The Guest Rites" anyway, of course.</div><div><br /></div><div>Silverberg's is one of those stories that contrasts the wise aliens who are in touch with nature with us humans who are greedy and racist jerk offs. The story starts at a Venusian temple in the desert; an exhausted Earthman stumbles by, saying he has been lost in the starless desert as he has lost his compass. The Venusian main character, a monk or priest of the religion that worships the planet itself, offers him endless hospitality, as his religion obliges him to. But then a cleric from another temple nearby comes by and explains that the human enjoying shelter here is a thief--he stole the eye of the statue of the cyclops god Venus at that temple and ran off, accidentally leaving his compass behind.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGRa99nnkcgSFsvuQEVOSeEV7OW0vGTjBOqoFn0ZnisWmRMFNMXIZ3KdNx207Ue2vhYDW0Ipf3lULT8EKwwwIqYxTga6PKIow7SUT2TW3yO4oVZGvIX_247l6SKGjQZKLmIzgBURJIs5S7l5HAKN8BEJ_854LTcu1fiZaJ7I1EPh3unloUc04GKZhlB3Y/s500/51LBkTY9gmL.jpg" style="clear: left; display: inline; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="328" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGRa99nnkcgSFsvuQEVOSeEV7OW0vGTjBOqoFn0ZnisWmRMFNMXIZ3KdNx207Ue2vhYDW0Ipf3lULT8EKwwwIqYxTga6PKIow7SUT2TW3yO4oVZGvIX_247l6SKGjQZKLmIzgBURJIs5S7l5HAKN8BEJ_854LTcu1fiZaJ7I1EPh3unloUc04GKZhlB3Y/s320/51LBkTY9gmL.jpg" width="210" /></a>On the one hand, such sacrilege is punishable by death, but on the other hand, the thief has been offered the hospitality required by the god that is Venus--how to reconcile this legalistic theological dilemma? The Venusian clergymen trust that Venus will show the way. Sure enough, without his compass, the human cannot find his way out of the desert to a Terran settlement; try as he might, he always ends up back at the temple. The felonious Earthman is doomed to live out the rest of his life in this temple. When he dies in a few decades, which will seem short to the long-lived Venerians, the priests will retrieve the lost eye. The human of course tries to bribe a kitchen boy to guide him out of the desert, but unlike us lucre-loving Earth jerks, Venusians don't care about money! (Don't ask me how the Venusian economy works--these jokers all live in a desert in a temple and spend all day praying and profess to care not a whit about money, so how did they get all these temples built and how do they acquire the food they generously offer any strangers who come by?)</div><div><br /></div><div>Acceptable filler. Presumably Merril liked its anti-colonial, anti-Western attitude. "Guest Rites" would have to wait until the 21st century to be reprinted by Armchair Fiction in their 2011 <i>Science Fiction Gems: Volume Two.</i> </div><div><p><b>"Sales Resistance"</b> by Henry Still (1956)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE_kH19wtsL-mD4Q-rzEi32rXVGo-Jg5w2uXkP7fYNPNe0PgjZ8OcJ1Vcb8NkvkQCw7GkDJlRjW3SGXjkpyxYT64XACsUVyNAAd5Vbuw24GYmfPH30F1sTdmrVoi4KHC-GWarc-ebaM5bcQUxmfLosmf8Yws07prTVaw_jLqO2kypkqfIw7ReUdFf2-k0/s411/WOFIFAUG1956%20(1).jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="411" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE_kH19wtsL-mD4Q-rzEi32rXVGo-Jg5w2uXkP7fYNPNe0PgjZ8OcJ1Vcb8NkvkQCw7GkDJlRjW3SGXjkpyxYT64XACsUVyNAAd5Vbuw24GYmfPH30F1sTdmrVoi4KHC-GWarc-ebaM5bcQUxmfLosmf8Yws07prTVaw_jLqO2kypkqfIw7ReUdFf2-k0/s320/WOFIFAUG1956%20(1).jpg" width="234" /></a></div>Still has ten credits at isfb. "Sales Resistance" appeared in <i>If</i> alongside Frank Riley's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-frank.html">"Project Hi-Psi,"</a> another Merril recommendation which we recently read, one which I liked. <p></p><p>Here we have another anti-capitalism story. And unlike Silverberg's story, which is sort of structured as an adventure or horror tale, this is an absurdist satire in which salesmen are the priests of the late 21st century, Pulitzer prizes are awarded to ad campaigns and the hit songs are all sales jingles. Good grief. </p><p>Perry Mansfield is an oddball non-conformist in the consumerist future. When a salesman named Marlboro (oy, the joke names) comes to his house to sell him a machine that can use invisible rays of force to cook his food, clean and decorate his house, and even shave and dress him, he refuses to buy one. This is sacrilege, so later that day Perry is in court, where the lawyers and jury are all computers. The punch card spat out by the jury declares him guilty and the human judge sentences him to buying the machine. Back home he goes into a rage and destroys the machine (a scene illustrated with vim and vigor by Emsh, who is shaping up to be the star performer of today's blog post) and so he is carted off to the loony bin.</p><p>Banal and lame, maybe lefties who enjoy looking down their noses at our market society would find "Sales Resistance" to be acceptable filler, but I am giving it a thumbs down. </p><p>"Sales Resistance" itself seems to have been unable to penetrate the sales resistance of the world's SF editors after its initial sale to <i>If</i>; apparently it has never been reprinted. </p><p><b>"Fear is a Business"</b> by Theodore Sturgeon (1956)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitTt-hGDi4UCVFp_QWsdpCWmOQ0bRABNHSTqgj0K9M6D1aKuuU2JkrEI3zxqAlBnJV3urncmPtzyLRFEnYyKCBod9r39AVbPZESkY4Sfdu7uAcHAkSFjQC_ldwuTfM3M8FvW2dN9XuzZ88skzFcllyRMoXBcxubzhC8qP7Ly8A1_Qu84OfJ5C3zmxoncg/s600/FSFAug1956.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="423" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitTt-hGDi4UCVFp_QWsdpCWmOQ0bRABNHSTqgj0K9M6D1aKuuU2JkrEI3zxqAlBnJV3urncmPtzyLRFEnYyKCBod9r39AVbPZESkY4Sfdu7uAcHAkSFjQC_ldwuTfM3M8FvW2dN9XuzZ88skzFcllyRMoXBcxubzhC8qP7Ly8A1_Qu84OfJ5C3zmxoncg/s320/FSFAug1956.jpg" width="226" /></a></div>Here's the second Sturgeon story Merril recommended in her "Honorable Mention" list in the back of <i>SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume. </i>(Merril also printed a Sturgeon story in her 1957 anthology, <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-by-r_8.html">"The Other Man,"</a> which we read last year.) Since debuting in <i>F&SF,</i> "Fear is a Business" has been widely anthologized, including in Robert P. Mills' <i>A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction</i> and <i>Flying Saucers</i>, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Fear is a Business" is another absurd satire, another attack on our capitalist way of life, and another story featuring goodie goodie aliens who serve as a foil that points out how bad are us humans. Gadzooks! Ted includes some of his favorite themes, like collective consciousness and how it is awesome, and even shoehorns in some pretty out-there sex. There are also lots of jokes, and plenty of references to recent and current events (e.g., Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, the 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and the Air Force's report on UFOs) that are sometimes serious and other times fuel for topical jokes. We might also see "Fear is a Business" as a satire of L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics, and even a sort of prefiguring of the response to Robert Heinlein's <i>Stranger in a Strange Land</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Phillipso is a successful writer of advertising copy. One day, because he needs an excuse for skipping work, he claims he met aliens and fought them off, even faking a saucer landing site by marking the ground with a blowtorch he happens to have in his car. By coincidence, the first person to see the marks and hear his story is a journalist, and soon Philsy boy is famous and rich, a publisher having asked him to write a book about his experience and legions of fans wanting to hear him speak. He becomes essentially the leader of a cult known as the Temple of Space.</div><div><br /></div><div>On page four of the 14-page story a real space alien contacts Phillipso, appearing as an image of an ordinary human projected from his hovering spacecraft into Phillipso's office because what the aliens really look like would be more shocking than Phillipso could take. This alien wants to end war and crime and disease and poverty on Earth, but he can't because Phil's book has made everybody assume aliens are hostile--the alien seeks to persuade Phil to publicly retract all the stuff he has said about aliens. When Phil expresses doubts that the alien has the wherewithal to solve all of Earth's problems, the alien proves his power by using hypnotism or something to make Phil fuck himself. (Sturgeon doesn't type "fuck himself," but instead "something proverbial, unprintable, but not quite impossible. He didn't want to do it--with all his mind and soul he did not want to, but he did it nonetheless.") The alien then talks a little about his means of radically improving life on Earth. He proposes that in his next book, Phillipso include plans the alien can provide for constructing a simple device that will facilitate the rise of a collective consciousness among all mankind; the text will claim the device is a weapon that will protect the builder from the aliens. Collective consciousness would make language obsolete and lying impossible, which the alien says is awesome but which Phil says will overturn our entire culture and economy, which he admits are built on language and deception.</div><div><br /></div><div>Three pages form the end, the alien leaves Phillipso and our guy ponders helping the E.T. bring peace and prosperity and collective consciousness to Earth. But then he gets calls from that journalist and then his publisher which spur him to forget all about helping bring about paradise on Earth and instead continue his grift. <br /><p></p><p>This story is not very good. Its jokes are not funny, its themes and ideas are tired, the plot is shaky (though I guess in a satire that doesn't mater) and as for the structure of the thing, most of it is a tendentious conversation, like an annoying Socratic dialogue or something. The twisted horror scene in which the alien makes Phil (apparently) have anal sex with himself makes the personality of the alien and the whole tone of the story jarringly inconsistent. The alien is all about peace and love and empathy, but he inflicts this horrendous trauma on Phillipso:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>He fell back into his chair, sobbing with rage, fear and humiliation. When he could find a word at all, it came out between the fingers laced over his scarlet face and was "Inhuman...."</i></blockquote><p></p><p>Why didn't Sturgeon have the alien demonstrate his power by fixing some minor medical issue Philsy boy had, like near-sightedness or a heart murmur or a hangnail or something? Sturgeon seems aware of how ill-fitting this episode is, having Phillipso point out what the alien just did to him when the alien says he won't just conquer the Earth and make us behave because "We couldn't force even <i>one</i> human to do what we want done," but the alien just dismisses Phil's objection with the suggestion that it hurt him more than it hurt Phillipso, a sort of stock joke.</p><p>I'm giving "Fear is a Business" a thumbs down, but I can see how lefties who like joke stories might enjoy it; most importantly, Sturgeon is a good writer and I can't deny that all the individual sentences and paragraphs of the story are each a smooth and easy read, even if what they add up to is weak.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfCZMIW0u_9I1R6tCm0U3eSPhgqjFW9IH30_Pb6KV3mjeSzSRiQcPSTY0jM3VkztlC7D99ylkuvJaSCvlefECSMv5EOhPkqlIuRAmkUVBYkzv4UkhkF7piahz2624PgMT4UlVMy6SCBVBFTBaSUBRP759GMi4P_Q8APWP7CSaDDCEGpXPbNh6rnHSr_nY/s500/ted.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfCZMIW0u_9I1R6tCm0U3eSPhgqjFW9IH30_Pb6KV3mjeSzSRiQcPSTY0jM3VkztlC7D99ylkuvJaSCvlefECSMv5EOhPkqlIuRAmkUVBYkzv4UkhkF7piahz2624PgMT4UlVMy6SCBVBFTBaSUBRP759GMi4P_Q8APWP7CSaDDCEGpXPbNh6rnHSr_nY/s16000/ted.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div>**********</div><div><br /></div><div>More than anything, these four stories demonstrate the gulf between what I look for in a story and what Merril, it seems, looks for. I don't want lame jokes, I don't want absurdist satires, and I don't want recitations of the same tired criticisms of our individualistic market society I've already heard a million times. Of these four stories, Silverberg comes closest to delivering what I seek from fiction, as he at least tries to portray real human feeling and drama. I am sympathetic to what Shaw tried to do in his story, but it just was not enjoyable or enlightening. <br /><p>Well, maybe Merril and I will be on the same page more often once we leave the "S"s behind and start exploring the "T"s, "U"s and "W"s in the next episode of this long series on the SF of 1956.</p><p>Speaking of which, use the links below to check out any earlier stages on this journey you may have missed.</p><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP-aA-BTLJqmwfccNZNWq75WLOrbDCF443J-SLMu8fUIQzuHsYjqUcVTHFF5e3B20WE69iqwHTiWeN3IV6Vw3CURMgpy5GI_DVU9j4C2ev_3dal4KZJNqomM-xpG6wCjwisc_zyC_AOdfqB-SmZgOLJavU-YLcNZxi7QRfXeV6FrLhq-rezIFtM5biLro/s373/Merril2ndfronttiny.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="373" data-original-width="249" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP-aA-BTLJqmwfccNZNWq75WLOrbDCF443J-SLMu8fUIQzuHsYjqUcVTHFF5e3B20WE69iqwHTiWeN3IV6Vw3CURMgpy5GI_DVU9j4C2ev_3dal4KZJNqomM-xpG6wCjwisc_zyC_AOdfqB-SmZgOLJavU-YLcNZxi7QRfXeV6FrLhq-rezIFtM5biLro/s320/Merril2ndfronttiny.jpg" width="214" /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-robert.html" style="text-align: center;">Abernathy and Aldiss<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-p-anderson.html" style="text-align: center;">Anderson, Allen and Banks</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/meril-approved-1956-stories-bradbury.html">Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler</a> <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-carter.html">Carter, Clarke and Clifton</a> <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-clingerman.html">Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen</a><br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-de-camp.html">de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-j-barrow-c.html">Barrow, Beaumont and Blish<br /></a><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/05/merril-approved-1956-stories-harlan.html">Ellison and Fontenay<br /></a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/06/merril-approved-1956-stories-galouye.html">Galouye, Garrett, Grimm & Gunn</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/07/merril-approved-1956-sf-stories-by-r.html">Hart, Herbert and Jones</a> </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/10/merril-approved-1956-stories-kuttner.html">Kuttner & Moore, Lang, Leinster, L'Engle and McClintic</a></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-by-j.html">McConnell, McIntosh and Melchior</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-by-ward.html">Moore, Norse and Oliver</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-sf-stories-arthur.html">Porges and Presslie</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-frank.html">Riley and Ritchie</a></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-roberts.html">Roberts, Russell and St. Clair</a></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-40235003007530451372024-03-02T22:58:00.000-05:002024-03-02T22:58:52.895-05:00Weird Tales, October 1938: C A Smith, H P Lovecraft and M Leinster<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj0RB0Kt8_dXi9UtwircDBy2KJf1sd10f6QYUSPccb270f1SGyBpSIqFbOnyBk5ykYuHn-Yb-Q6QdTD6GNfR2GKGuc77G2ZnQUFePv-A0wRaSVWIL0CCMYcjNLlYc7NZoeNLfHF_eBLTUJpL3rsFDQ6gLLuLLlfbNVUZLP-HpE9GBawoCfrVArciTr0ok/s606/weird_tales_193810.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="606" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj0RB0Kt8_dXi9UtwircDBy2KJf1sd10f6QYUSPccb270f1SGyBpSIqFbOnyBk5ykYuHn-Yb-Q6QdTD6GNfR2GKGuc77G2ZnQUFePv-A0wRaSVWIL0CCMYcjNLlYc7NZoeNLfHF_eBLTUJpL3rsFDQ6gLLuLLlfbNVUZLP-HpE9GBawoCfrVArciTr0ok/s320/weird_tales_193810.jpg" width="211" /></a></div>The October 1938 issue of Farnsworth Wright's influential magazine <i>Weird Tales</i> is full of fiction by people we like here at MPorcius Fiction Log. We've already read the Manly Wade Wellman story in the issue, <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/05/masterful-dark-stories-m-w-wellman-c-l.html">"Up Under the Roof."</a> We are going to skip for now the Elak story by Henry Kuttner and the serial by Edmond Hamilton--barring sudden death, the time will come when we produce an entire blog post devoted to Kuttner's Elak series and another to Hamilton's serial "The Fire Princess." Today our focus will be three stories from this issue, those by California's Clark Ashton Smith, the man from Providence Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and <a href="https://www.richmondsunlight.com/bill/2009/hj755/fulltext/">Virginia</a>'s Murray Leinster. By some kind of coincidence, all three of these stories are reprints.<p></p><p><b>"The Maze of Maal Dweb"</b> by Clark Ashton Smith (1933)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr7MvkpExEKQXpqXKK_U4dDr0mmAxczylkM8ncBolTmTxxdVTD3DRR8z7Vw6sdeIdMytsIxG1casyYQGtB4Wiqd5jCkKpIbcvutAilY5BdXjAhILEAWDR2GZYxtMNoabfFGJJ-Ktzj-UBnfcHddjc0u-BTfsaPz3opODEtWqZXJdy4wjpCUPUp7bEmmHo/s641/xi.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="641" data-original-width="384" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr7MvkpExEKQXpqXKK_U4dDr0mmAxczylkM8ncBolTmTxxdVTD3DRR8z7Vw6sdeIdMytsIxG1casyYQGtB4Wiqd5jCkKpIbcvutAilY5BdXjAhILEAWDR2GZYxtMNoabfFGJJ-Ktzj-UBnfcHddjc0u-BTfsaPz3opODEtWqZXJdy4wjpCUPUp7bEmmHo/s320/xi.jpg" width="192" /></a></div>"The Maze of Maal Dweb" first appeared as "The Maze of the Enchanter" in the 1933 self-published Smith collection <i>The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies</i>. It seems the text of the version appearing in this issue of <i>WT</i> was altered in some way, so I am going to read it in the 1972 Smith collection edited by Lin Carter, <i>Xiccarph</i>; in his intro to the story and its companion piece, <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/04/clark-ashton-smiths-vulthoom-dweller-in.html">"The Flower Women,"</a> which we read in 2020, Carter says of "The Maze of Maal Dweb," "In this present printing, I have restored the text to its original form."<div><br /></div><div>"The Maze of Maal Dweb" is a well-written sword and sorcery story full of wild images and atmosphere, but with a pretty simple and straightforward plot and a downbeat, fatalistic tone. </div><div><br /></div><div>Planet Xiccarph has four moons, three suns, a surface dominated by dangerous plants and for a ruler the tyrannical wizard/scientist Maal Dweb. Once or twice a year Maal Dweb summons to his palace, which is surrounded by all manner of traps and organic and golem-like guardians, one of the planet's most beautiful women, and she is never seen again. (The communities of those who refuse suffer devastating bombardment from the air, so refusals are rare.) </div><div><br /></div><div>The latest woman to be called to the mountaintop palace is the lovely virgin Athle, who received the summons when one of her many suitors, Tigali the hunter, was away on a hunt. When Tigali learns of the tragedy, another of her suitors, the warrior Mocair, is no where to be found--presumably he has left for the palace on a desperate mission to rescue Athle and slay the tyrant. Over the years many men have pursued such missions, without success, and Tigali joins their number.</div><div><br /></div><div>Smith describes the many obstacles Tigali faces, and the equipment, strategies and tactics he employs to overcome them. Among the monsters guarding Maal Dweb's demesne are ape-like bipeds, but they don't molest Tigali because he has covered his body in a foul-smelling goop derived from one of Xiccarph's many noxious plants. In the palace Tigali discovers a room in which are many super-realistic statues of beautiful young women, representing all the different ethnic groups of the planet. The wizard Maal Dweb survives Tigali's attempt to assassinate him, and forces Tigali into his famous maze, telling him Athle and Mocair are already in the maze. Tigali encounters another of those ape creatures in the labyrinth, and then is seized by some monster plants; these plants drool a fluid on him that starts turning <i>him</i> into an ape-creature, and it becomes apparent that those ape monsters are those doomed heroes who preceded him into the palace, the one he just saw being Mocair. Tigali's feet, then legs, are transformed into those of a simian brute, and as the process continues he is afforded by Maal Dweb a view of Athle as she comes upon a magic mirror and, upon looking at herself within it, is turned into a statue. </div><div><br /></div><div>Maal Dweb admits that he is growing bored with preserving beautiful women and turning heroes into ape monsters, and so decides to mix things up a little today by allowing Tigali to retain his human brain and face--below the neck he is all simian, though. As the story ends we are permitted to cherish a hope that Tigali will be able to escape the maze and live whatever kind of life might be within reach of a man who is now only half human and has lost the woman he loves.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is a good story, but I found it leaned almost entirely on elaborate descriptions of its exotic setting and offered very little human feeling; Tigali, Mocair and Athle have almost no personality, and it is notable that Smith devotes far more ink to examining the psychology of Maal Dweb than to any of his innocent victims. Another curious fact is how Smith sets his story on an alien world, but still employs classical references like Daedalus and Laocoön. </div><div><p></p><p>"The Maze of Maal Dweb" AKA "The Maze of the Enchanter" has been reprinted many times, including in Lin Carter's <i>The Young Magicians</i>. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghnbFJyeD25tkZs6LXkP56Ad09RFJGLdM5y-lUjLV0RJ4Gms3w9rkiIs01jzg0Qtc5ivyBvfQ5p1gMDtOzBKB8aZP6BHByQX58Y2Nr5mzE4LMWQzu52WidwuQJFdHjCNlTF2Ku5YfRSaXFHXhXzGUd21LyRRiumy4DRgCfwF8di4b_Gm-61KIPpWCcdfU/s500/mazed.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="395" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghnbFJyeD25tkZs6LXkP56Ad09RFJGLdM5y-lUjLV0RJ4Gms3w9rkiIs01jzg0Qtc5ivyBvfQ5p1gMDtOzBKB8aZP6BHByQX58Y2Nr5mzE4LMWQzu52WidwuQJFdHjCNlTF2Ku5YfRSaXFHXhXzGUd21LyRRiumy4DRgCfwF8di4b_Gm-61KIPpWCcdfU/s16000/mazed.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><b>"The Other Gods"</b> by H. P. Lovecraft (1933)<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgzmiBiNbewOFapxzy87hhEoocTyDmIdkAnliZbMfkC8ua_-GTh-MBOqAvXr4pRlq7Yt4MMQkhNkkksI5yW3xjkx8nv8vRWZpLwlQerXZCG0a3CmF6nHgcQ0Vp5lU-PZ9VYnIQl-NLQo-IOMeaTgSmbYXXH0GVIfMMohEPvfNg0UFj_1_j7AToBkRYph8/s600/THFNTSFNNV1933.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="412" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgzmiBiNbewOFapxzy87hhEoocTyDmIdkAnliZbMfkC8ua_-GTh-MBOqAvXr4pRlq7Yt4MMQkhNkkksI5yW3xjkx8nv8vRWZpLwlQerXZCG0a3CmF6nHgcQ0Vp5lU-PZ9VYnIQl-NLQo-IOMeaTgSmbYXXH0GVIfMMohEPvfNg0UFj_1_j7AToBkRYph8/s320/THFNTSFNNV1933.jpg" width="220" /></a></div>Here we've got a story that first appeared in the fanzine <i>The Fantasy Fan. </i>I'm reading it in my copy of Arkham House's <i>Dagon and Other Macabre Tales</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>"The Other Gods" is part of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, and mentions Ulthar and its famous cats. I tend to not like these fairy-tale style stories as much as Lovecraft's stories set in modern times, and only rate this story as OK; I will say it has the virtue of being quite short and to the point, however.</div><div><br /></div><div>Earth's gods don't like to deal with humans, and so lived atop mountains. As men became bolder and bolder, and scaled higher and higher peaks, earth's gods retreated to increasingly tall mountains, and then finally moved to Kadath, the location of which no man knows. But earth's gods miss their former homes, and sometimes return for a visit--humans know when they do, because at those times the mountain peaks are shrouded in cloud. At such times the cautious avoid the mountains.</div><div><br /></div><div>The wisest man in the region is not cautious, however. An expert on earth's gods, he wants to see them frolicking, and so climbs the peaks just when he expects earth's gods to be there. Arrogant, he begins to feel he is wiser and greater than earth's gods, but his hubris is punished by the "other gods," those who protect earth's gods, and he suffers a terrible fate, being pulled up into the sky and never seen again.</div><div><br /></div><div>As we expect with any Lovecraft fiction, this story has been reprinted a million times. Perhaps most interestingly, L. Sprague de Camp included "The Other Gods" in his anthology <i>The Fantastic Swordsmen</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTENC9RhqxORWJYFt0m6GFA8g5uO0_9dYrYK5fZTRKPpif0aUDwxxCDMXTTOb3ErbABr3hi-l7FaX3Q8hHkArnwgLbwkSQz18tHmUZnXnhOl2leerYYZYIPk9GTcu9aj7VMqVXB3ZNSEXzlHZ-JK9GGKoLZTkgpsJrzKEOWpFNHP6vMXOM-TaEOrEXukk/s500/othergodshpl.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="401" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTENC9RhqxORWJYFt0m6GFA8g5uO0_9dYrYK5fZTRKPpif0aUDwxxCDMXTTOb3ErbABr3hi-l7FaX3Q8hHkArnwgLbwkSQz18tHmUZnXnhOl2leerYYZYIPk9GTcu9aj7VMqVXB3ZNSEXzlHZ-JK9GGKoLZTkgpsJrzKEOWpFNHP6vMXOM-TaEOrEXukk/s16000/othergodshpl.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div><b>"The Oldest Story in the World"</b> by Murray Leinster (1925)</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjjo0lgvLyb7oAJn5A-Hc0pU2Yvh5-MxR51G_cAKMHoekR3FiV1spveKf7BFwWM7TGY8y-mKQj9DDk_4jQJ3E_vf0BW7r7-OykvagQoNvzB2I06TUGBtRaG7itM1M7MR5_v31Rt2l7yTYPjAppOvlFEgXmgJG7IyY1iI3cUz6Ejy6qG2PlH6CqzuHQOmo/s581/weird_tales_192508.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="581" data-original-width="400" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjjo0lgvLyb7oAJn5A-Hc0pU2Yvh5-MxR51G_cAKMHoekR3FiV1spveKf7BFwWM7TGY8y-mKQj9DDk_4jQJ3E_vf0BW7r7-OykvagQoNvzB2I06TUGBtRaG7itM1M7MR5_v31Rt2l7yTYPjAppOvlFEgXmgJG7IyY1iI3cUz6Ejy6qG2PlH6CqzuHQOmo/w275-h400/weird_tales_192508.jpg" width="275" /></a></div>I think Leinster is more famous as a science-fiction pioneer, but he produced plenty of mysteries, westerns, and horror stories, including <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/10/murray-leinster-uneasy-home-coming-side.html">some memorable stories we read back in 2022</a>. Here we have a story that first saw print in <i>Weird Tales</i> thirteen years before this 1938 appearance, where it is advertised as "An Oriental torture tale." It seems like the only editor who has ever fancied "The Oldest Story in the World" is Farnsworth Wright, as the story, according to isfdb, at least, has never appeared elsewhere; it looks like today we are delving into one of the darker corners of the famous Leinster's vast body of work.</div><div><br /></div><div>Our narrator is in Rangoon (we're supposed to call it "Yangon" now) when a drunk accosts him and tells him what he calls "the oldest story in the world." This story is about an unscrupulous white man who, thousands of years ago, fled his people after committing a murder, and lived among Orientals, learning their ways, their languages, their secrets. He was supported by an Eastern woman, a dancing girl, who loved him, and then he left her in the lurch to travel to the decayed kingdom of Kosar, a place of ruins and abject poverty, ruled by a raja who wore a collection of rubies of tremendous value.</div><div><br /></div><div>In Kosar the disreputable white man prospered by exploiting some of the secrets he had learned, passing himself off as a priest of the god Khayandra, a god who, if properly propitiated, ensure a woman gives birth to a son. Approached by the raja's wife (the "ranee") he contrived to get access to the carefully concealed hiding place of the raja's rubies. He murdered the ranee and a guard, and then fled to another kingdom, Barowak. Pulling off the Kosar ruby job having given him confidence, he tried to seduce the ranee of Barowak, only to be captured by the raja of Barowak, a man with a reputation for having a peculiar sense of humor. The white man may have learned all about the culture of the East, but this raja had learned some of the culture of the West, having read from a book of Arthurian legends and a history of the Spanish Inquisition, and he proposed to try some Western tortures on the false priest of Khayandra. The white man tried to buy his freedom with the rubies, but the raja's people declared they were no more than costume jewelry! </div><div><br /></div><div>An additional twist, one which has been foreshadowed from early on, is that the drunk is telling his own life story, not that of a man from thousands of years ago; he is the murderer of a white man, a ranee and an Asian guard, and the victim of torture at the hands of the raja of Barowak. The surprisingly tame torture was what we generally call "Chinese water torture," but which I guess the raja learned about from the book on the Spanish Inquisition. The raja imprisoned the ruby thief in a room furnished and decorated entirely in red, and the water dripped on his head was also dyed red, and he today suffers a pathological fear of the color red. The final zinger of the story comes when a waiter accidentally spills a drop of red liquor on his noggin as he sits with the narrator, having just finished his story, and is driven totally insane.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is acceptable filler. One of the interesting things about "The Oldest Story in the World" is that, while he appeals to Anglophone readers' sense that the mysterious East is dirty and dangerous and its people are bloodthirsty and corrupt, Leinster repeatedly engineers parallels that suggest white people are little better than the Orientals. </div><div><br /></div><div>**********</div><div><br /></div><div>Three respectable stories by three important members of the speculative fiction community of the early 20th century. We cross our fingers in hopes that everything we dig up in our future expeditions into the world of SF will be so digestible. </div></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-59351885845309439162024-02-29T23:22:00.000-05:002024-02-29T23:22:39.790-05:00Weird Tales September 1938: A Blackwood, R E Howard & F T Torbett and M W Wellman & G Gordon<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj59M7rJCyXK-hjXEmTFsF_kUGjvFsMfae-q53ptCSgCR6Yo-oUn_SXK8-gmJpqvBitMS2ldJL_K37W7wJF4dGXmLjY89ORmdoxcbvFEGWOl-QesOIUwNtDe8IvJ6WVVL-s_kdpBA6nEPCAdKwP3sXdHxv6xXTM785zCOFcXZstd6HfUkqHmZXfJvNwHs/s570/weird_tales_193809.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="400" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj59M7rJCyXK-hjXEmTFsF_kUGjvFsMfae-q53ptCSgCR6Yo-oUn_SXK8-gmJpqvBitMS2ldJL_K37W7wJF4dGXmLjY89ORmdoxcbvFEGWOl-QesOIUwNtDe8IvJ6WVVL-s_kdpBA6nEPCAdKwP3sXdHxv6xXTM785zCOFcXZstd6HfUkqHmZXfJvNwHs/w281-h400/weird_tales_193809.jpg" width="281" /></a></div>Can't stop, won't stop! The MPorcius Fiction Log's quest to read at least one story from every issue of <i>Weird Tales</i> with a 1930s date on its cover continues. Today, the September 1938 issue falls before our manic glazzies. We've already read the Robert Bloch story from this issue, <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/05/robert-bloch-opener-of-way-secret-of.html">"The Mandarin's Canaries,"</a> but there are three more stories I'm interested in.<p></p><p><b>"The Magic Mirror"</b> by Algernon Blackwood</p><p>Blackwood is a guy one often hears being called one of the best of the writers of the weird, or even the actual best. So I guess it is about time I read something by him. "The Magic Mirror" is apparently something of a forgotten Blackwood story--at least isfdb suggests it was only collected once, as the title story of a 1989 volume with the subtitle "Lost Supernatural and Mystery Stories," and only anthologized once, in Peter Haining's 1986 <i>Tales of Dungeons and Dragons. </i></p><p>"The Magic Mirror" is one of those stories which has a frame story. Our narrator is on a cruise ship, and while hanging around at the bar he hears a fat guy ("Fatty") tell his two friends ("Baldy" and "Jimmy") the story of how in Monte Carlo he met a 100-year-old man who knew how to win at gambling--by leveraging the dangerous magic item he acquired in Tibet from a lama. Said item was a magic mirror--the old geez told Fatty he would be able to read in the mirror the number to play on a roulette wheel, but that he couldn't take advantage of the mirror's powers by himself, that he needed a partner. Fatty became the man's partner, and the two sat together at the roulette table where the old timer read the winning number in the mirror and Fatty placed the bets and and collected the inevitable winnings. They won time and again, making lots of money, but the old guy kept getting paler and sicker looking until he finally died right there at the roulette table. As he died the mirror broke into a thousand pieces.</p><p>This story is solid--well written and paced--but no big deal; moderately good is our judgement.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6ZTZuZL4HT6b_VXQN48no9dlPj748F_QGR_jnfRxta_rAZgoIlON_ZJ7smk36IIPMFwP7kd_eFoLWjQnuLQ0Ejkj9_pYAN0KteVMpB1yHcgmEhkGFatAPgYSwhb2CEmTn9MxP5DzxXjRiV5luESyMZKrfFO3bd0LhmYJgVRoyck5YJBB940hZZQxmCsk/s500/mirror.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="402" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6ZTZuZL4HT6b_VXQN48no9dlPj748F_QGR_jnfRxta_rAZgoIlON_ZJ7smk36IIPMFwP7kd_eFoLWjQnuLQ0Ejkj9_pYAN0KteVMpB1yHcgmEhkGFatAPgYSwhb2CEmTn9MxP5DzxXjRiV5luESyMZKrfFO3bd0LhmYJgVRoyck5YJBB940hZZQxmCsk/s16000/mirror.jpg" /></a></div><p><b>"A Thunder of Trumpets"</b> by Robert E. Howard and Frank Thurston Torbett </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY96nrFFe4QDtq0tHE41B6pXDJTgc3fRFSw618pVHHTwfz_hYbODjqy6ycQX6js_VneR7QV07oTkFMGkypVdaoAE3xQnjw6a3kdBvN8gS9V9C_jUDg04yr3izEqfHyqM5uc6oQOZ5NxrV-g3bQ1LKm5vEfxjbbSXP4qqJzC7zpl_VKC2R-fXto35j0x6o/s600/THNDRFTRMP2010.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="407" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY96nrFFe4QDtq0tHE41B6pXDJTgc3fRFSw618pVHHTwfz_hYbODjqy6ycQX6js_VneR7QV07oTkFMGkypVdaoAE3xQnjw6a3kdBvN8gS9V9C_jUDg04yr3izEqfHyqM5uc6oQOZ5NxrV-g3bQ1LKm5vEfxjbbSXP4qqJzC7zpl_VKC2R-fXto35j0x6o/s320/THNDRFTRMP2010.jpg" width="217" /></a></div>"A Thunder of Trumpets" is the only story credited to Torbett at isfdb--he also has three letters to <i>Weird Tales</i> listed. Its debut appearance here in <i>Weird Tales </i>is supported by a dream-like Virgil Finlay nude, and "A Thunder of Trumpets" has been reprinted in numerous Howard collections behind fun covers by people like Stephen Fabian, Ken Kelly and Neal Adams; for one such collection it even serves as the title story. While the title might invoke the image of a cavalry charge, if you are expecting high excitement from the story you are perhaps going to be disappointed.<p></p><p>"A Thunder of Trumpets" takes Howard's characteristic pro-barbarism, anti-civilization theme and marries it to the argument that what women want is a strong man to master them. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the story is watching Howard, who we conventionally think of as a racist who portrays black people in a terrible light, in this story exalt Hindu ("Hindoo") and Muslim ("Muhammadan") Indians over Americans and Englishmen, and suggest that Indians who deal too closely with Westerners, getting educated in England or serving in British military units, for example, are polluted and corrupted. Unfortunately, the story is sort of boring; instead of Howard's theories about sexual relations, race relations, and the relative merits of citified scholars, businessmen and priests on the one hand and animals, barbarians and savages who live close to nature being embedded in a thrilling adventure or horror plot, as is usually the case with Howard, here the creator of Conan just presents his theories again and again in a plot that seems like that of a weak imitation of Somerset Maugham full of passages like you might expect to see in a woman's romance novel--"A Thunder of Trumpets" is all about a white woman who is enamored with a nonwhite man and bored with white men and their dull ways.</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>A bit obtuse, as Anglo-Saxons are likely to be in matters not concerning business, he did not notice her abstraction. He had other things to worry him, and with an Englishman or American, business must always come before love. </i></blockquote><p></p><p>Bernice Andover is riding her horse alone in the Indian jungle and is thrown; as she lies stunned on the ground, a man-eating tiger appears and menaces her, giving Howard a chance to sarcastically mock man's assumption that he is superior to the beasts. A tall and supple native man with "Aryan" features rescues Bernice by staring the great cat down, and Bernice can't help but contrast this handsome man who is in touch with the natural world with her fiancé, who is too polite and doesn't know how she wishes he would sweep her off her feet and tell her what to do. Bernice's brief glimpse of what life is like in the jungle brings home to her how lame civilized life is, how British people--and the Indians employed by the British who have taken up British habits--stifle their emotions, repress their natural instincts. </p><p>Back in the palace of an Anglicized Hindu prince with whom her fiancé is conducting business, Bernice learns that the man who saved her is considered a yogi by the local people, is respected by Hindu and Muslim alike, and believed to have lived for centuries and to have power over animals. For weeks, while her fiancé is trying to swing deals with the recalcitrant and/or hard-bargaining locals, Bernice is going on long walks with this yogi, falling in love with him. The yogi is a chaste guy and never does anything untoward, but finally, one day, the yogi breaks down--for centuries he has pursued higher aspirations, quested after cosmic wisdom, but Bernice is so beautiful he can't resist her, against his better judgement he has fallen in love! He is going to abandon the long road that leads to The Truth That Is All to marry Bernice!</p><p>Bernice goes to tell her boring English businessman fiancé that their wedding is off. But seconds before she can break the news to him, an anti-white riot breaks out and the fiancé is knocked unconscious defending Bernice. The yogi appears out of nowhere to wield his magic powers to drive off the rioters and heal the fiancé's wounds. This demonstration of the gulf that lies between the yogi and the mortal woman convinces them that a relationship between them is impossible--to put a period on it, the yogi gives Bernice a glimpse of what he really looks like--a bent and wrinkled, toothless and bald old geezer! The yogi returns to the pursuit of The Truth That Is All, and Bernice, presumably, marries her fiancé, who minutes before the riot had inked a deal, assuring them a comfortable future.</p><p>Though perhaps interesting as a piece of insight into Howard's (and broader Western society's) views on relations between the sexes and the races, "A Thunder of Trumpets" is not very entertaining. I'm a Howard fan, and a fan of stories about love triangles, but this one gets a thumbs down; Howard it appears is not equipped to portray a love triangle effectively, and what he is good at, depicting action, adventure and horror material, he doesn't even try to do here.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijS8dQwztmDT8GtvGJX1pMaBb63ciXv5rQX4sN6aZ3742wLiDXd8CKdM266AMb5soYxUADOs7Mb1pKKY-0Ho7V15xfdyCor_ibGTa8kWS7W4QOS1fOdHLxc5mSVx-8rOJyw-VRT5cnB-HdsuAnKVqRWFgx7Ckof0Qp17Ns4h97-dbUdWaqvgx2uWsmb_0/s500/MRCHRSFVLH1978.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="383" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijS8dQwztmDT8GtvGJX1pMaBb63ciXv5rQX4sN6aZ3742wLiDXd8CKdM266AMb5soYxUADOs7Mb1pKKY-0Ho7V15xfdyCor_ibGTa8kWS7W4QOS1fOdHLxc5mSVx-8rOJyw-VRT5cnB-HdsuAnKVqRWFgx7Ckof0Qp17Ns4h97-dbUdWaqvgx2uWsmb_0/s16000/MRCHRSFVLH1978.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><b>'The Cavern"</b> by Gertrude Gordon and Manly Wade Wellman </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHegFA13mkZHCrW-cUD3KYzQiYJo8dQAtH5KSAVnFkFcPmwsuOXfpzYJnrREHlehgW9rBApwr0yPctS-b57mSGbwAzGZcNCLD_v4j5YjynUmemW7ACfe2sgKN8n_7XgHnFiVzLdDE-Uuea-57wLw9T2lJ9VOWEuaYGVV8MenMmw95YrccGTnliL7wwWrQ/s500/THDVLSNTMC2001.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="308" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHegFA13mkZHCrW-cUD3KYzQiYJo8dQAtH5KSAVnFkFcPmwsuOXfpzYJnrREHlehgW9rBApwr0yPctS-b57mSGbwAzGZcNCLD_v4j5YjynUmemW7ACfe2sgKN8n_7XgHnFiVzLdDE-Uuea-57wLw9T2lJ9VOWEuaYGVV8MenMmw95YrccGTnliL7wwWrQ/s320/THDVLSNTMC2001.jpg" width="197" /></a></div>Like Frank Thurston Torbett, Gertrude Gordon has only one fiction credit at isfdb, plus a handful of letters to SF magazines, in her case <i>Fantastic Novels* </i>as well as <i>WT</i>. "The Cavern" would be reprinted in the Wellman collection <i>The Devil is Not Mocked</i> and a few anthologies edited by Robert Weinberg.</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;">*Gordon's letter appears in the issue of <i>Fantastic Novels</i> with a Virgil Finlay cover that <a href="https://twitter.com/hankbukowsi/status/1691063232402800640">took my breath away in an antique store back in August</a>.</span></div><div><br /></div><div>"The Cavern" is a fun little filler story, slight but entertaining.</div><div><br /></div><div>The narrator and his friend Stoll are accosted by a fortune-teller. After the fortune-teller has left, the narrator wonders why she picked them out of the crowd, and Stoll says she could tell he was a believer, and then explains why he believes.</div><div><br /></div><div>Years ago Stoll was in Africa and met a young man on his first day in Africa by the name of Quade, a guy who is strong and brave and all that. The night of his first day on the Dark Continent, a fortune teller warns Quade that his death will be in a cavern, and Stoll will witness this tragedy. Quade goes to another fortune teller to get a second opinion, but fortune teller number 2 offers the same prediction, as does #3. (Africa is full of fortune tellers.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Quade leaves Stoll's party, as it is going to explore a tomb, which to Quade sounds uncomfortably like a cavern. Quade has an exciting career ten-year career in Africa, fighting in wars, hunting big game, gambling for high stakes, trading with native tribes, etc. He takes tremendous risks, he suffers illness, but he always survives. He also scrupulously avoids caves, caverns, and holes, even refuses to sleep in a house or a hut, always sleeping outside on the ground. A decade after their first meeting, he hooks up with Stoll again. The two go hunting hippos together, and on a river we get the twist ending we expected the moment hippos were mentioned.</div><div><br /></div><div>Minor, but successful.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgug-Tk3ZRqootl_kGLjI_iUHwcE5XrkhD_sZq0bTqKDj4ctNDU7Bf-PhNoTvXUgmXEDAGsJy8ZVXfjTRHqueaK57_CyUoIptDQL_8S6Lo2ZKc33trdjBtCOW8G-44JGTBHa0OzYMZ5nuvPhYBdJjApYnXIWdTksMTihQ0uDvxFtszZnRASHkInKfPt0B8/s500/gertrude.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgug-Tk3ZRqootl_kGLjI_iUHwcE5XrkhD_sZq0bTqKDj4ctNDU7Bf-PhNoTvXUgmXEDAGsJy8ZVXfjTRHqueaK57_CyUoIptDQL_8S6Lo2ZKc33trdjBtCOW8G-44JGTBHa0OzYMZ5nuvPhYBdJjApYnXIWdTksMTihQ0uDvxFtszZnRASHkInKfPt0B8/s16000/gertrude.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div>**********</div><div><br /></div><div>We are making good progress in our weird journey through the 1930s. Today we passed judgement on stories by some pretty big name weird authors, and more big names await us at the next station on the weird way, October, 1938. In the interim, you can check out MPorcius posts on <i>Weird Tales</i> from earlier in the 1930s at the links below.</div><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/06/weird-tales-project-1930.html">1930</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/07/weird-tales-project-1931.html">1931</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/07/weird-tales-project-1932.html">1932</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/11/weird-tales-project-1933.html">1933</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/11/weird-tales-project-1934.html">1934</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/12/weird-tales-project-1935.html">1935</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/10/weird-tales-project-1936.html">1936</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/10/weird-tales-project-1937.html">1937</a> </div> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZE2HK1Kh9fXrdSxiOuewusd-yD2dSOkuqsiKeSNcLq28uM8gRgPAILIJRmG5BIfPpxX9yH1uhM2hgxw_voYdKT4Il1ot4HMJ7ZtKC-l7miGMwFXK2PxO1xj1TQnu_xaiB8Fz4kgz9dJv8Dw7kkv2o77MCueGPcH6xP3bUpHCCk0vjOndFkve7OMfhvNc/s500/sept38.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="169" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZE2HK1Kh9fXrdSxiOuewusd-yD2dSOkuqsiKeSNcLq28uM8gRgPAILIJRmG5BIfPpxX9yH1uhM2hgxw_voYdKT4Il1ot4HMJ7ZtKC-l7miGMwFXK2PxO1xj1TQnu_xaiB8Fz4kgz9dJv8Dw7kkv2o77MCueGPcH6xP3bUpHCCk0vjOndFkve7OMfhvNc/s16000/sept38.png" /></a></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-14331305785150036612024-02-28T13:49:00.000-05:002024-02-28T13:49:19.991-05:00Unearthly Visions from W M Miller, R Z Gallun and C D Simak<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA1sKXnp0HbvJWFIpbQDVScFr-ZiIw9ihP3AZYR0IKJOJObUlcbjiOBvThUfcMAKVVJU4C3zlCbo5-LSBMDvtdedB5Kp2AjLt-GL4CUovLGD624T6K2-q69LkhxgW8CBIZqMkwcYVQfwIG680YPhyphenhyphenkzaPOKddDMeNHEWbbqB7ul_EdJUq9pMpq5a7VE8Y/s500/unearthly.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="417" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA1sKXnp0HbvJWFIpbQDVScFr-ZiIw9ihP3AZYR0IKJOJObUlcbjiOBvThUfcMAKVVJU4C3zlCbo5-LSBMDvtdedB5Kp2AjLt-GL4CUovLGD624T6K2-q69LkhxgW8CBIZqMkwcYVQfwIG680YPhyphenhyphenkzaPOKddDMeNHEWbbqB7ul_EdJUq9pMpq5a7VE8Y/s16000/unearthly.jpg" /></a></div><p>In <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-roberts.html">our last episode</a> we read the 1956 version of Eric Frank Russell's story "Legwork." "Legwork" would be reprinted in 1965 in the Groff Conklin anthology <i>5 Unearthly Visions</i>, a copy of which <a href="https://twitter.com/hankbukowsi/status/718959449080274945">I acquired down in Lexington, Kentucky in April of 2016</a>. <i>5 Unearthly Visions</i> also reprints Damon Knight's "Dio," a story I read in a Knight collection back in 2018 under the title <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2018/07/three-1950s-novels-by-damon-knight.html">"The Dying Man."</a> So, two unearthly visions down, three to go--let's finish out the anthology by spending the day reading the included visions by Walter M. Miller, Jr., Raymond Z. Gallun, and Clifford D. Simak.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgua5VAOyiq7V7HuLq2M98LiFYZij-LLmzJcRiZk66Jk06oLQdB-EouxwwpszmxBQn-aSDz6WBpGoA8Uad1aJiDG5H5hYyHjAIf0J5WKVd3iOwf0lTN4OqrxnBfPccscJitj-E_cimsT-8HzT7ZMAvjXHZ42CiIs7bDPl_b0_sj3SNYP8BHqw5OttNPzvk/s559/unearthly3.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="559" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgua5VAOyiq7V7HuLq2M98LiFYZij-LLmzJcRiZk66Jk06oLQdB-EouxwwpszmxBQn-aSDz6WBpGoA8Uad1aJiDG5H5hYyHjAIf0J5WKVd3iOwf0lTN4OqrxnBfPccscJitj-E_cimsT-8HzT7ZMAvjXHZ42CiIs7bDPl_b0_sj3SNYP8BHqw5OttNPzvk/s16000/unearthly3.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fellow SF fan "Petie," we salute you.</td></tr></tbody></table><p><b>"Conditionally Human"</b> by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1952/1980)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6I2VtNpu1jLn7Xh_bLzEXgKBDLUDSGMOTW8DmIh-Kfq8ey-yYS9cETpTshsrP-fy_AXNYNDNi-obb8SyQkbLs0CaofK6DgWvvSlbVoGDV33i43bZ29Qkpgr1Qag3CAcnwI0sHcpgeLr1jV-bTTXrKiWdjWIROGjT1tg5DSyA9TDib_90F5fkGzQp7zKA/s600/GALFEB1952.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="450" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6I2VtNpu1jLn7Xh_bLzEXgKBDLUDSGMOTW8DmIh-Kfq8ey-yYS9cETpTshsrP-fy_AXNYNDNi-obb8SyQkbLs0CaofK6DgWvvSlbVoGDV33i43bZ29Qkpgr1Qag3CAcnwI0sHcpgeLr1jV-bTTXrKiWdjWIROGjT1tg5DSyA9TDib_90F5fkGzQp7zKA/s320/GALFEB1952.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>Already my plan to read from my paperback copy of <i>5 Unearthly Visions</i> is going off the rails. isfdb indicates that the version of "Conditionally Human" in Conklin's 1965 anthology is substantially different from versions in other volumes, including Everett Bleiler and T. E. Dikty's <i>Year's Best Science Fiction Novels: 1953</i>, which purports to print texts speciallh revised by the authors. I can't find a scan of the Bleiler and Dikty book, so I am going to read the version of "Conditionally Human" in an internet archive scan of 1980's <i>The Best of Walter Miller, Jr.</i>, which I can see from the first line deviates from the text of the 1965 Conklin version.<p></p><p>It is the 2060s, the socialistic future in which the government gives you a test and tells you what job you get. Our hero, Terry Norris, has been assigned a job his new wife Anne finds abhorrent, a job which he describes as being that of an "up-to-date dog catcher." You see, the government, because of overpopulation concerns, also gives you a test to see if you are worthy of reproducing, and only the most impressive specimens are permitted to have a biological child. Some of those denied parenthood by the government are permitted to own a genetically engineered artificial life form in a ploy to satisfy their desire to be parents, to experience a simulacrum of the love shared between parents and children. For example, there are cat-things and dog-things that have the intelligence of a human baby and can understand and speak simple words of baby-talk English.</p><p>The most advanced of these artificial creatures are the "neutroids;" as their name suggests, these are sexless beings that look almost like a real human child. A neutroids' physical development ceases before it reaches what in a sexed being would be puberty; depending on what model you can afford and have a license for, your neutroid might top out at three or five or whatever, with the limit at about ten years of age. (As for intelligence, the neutroids are what I as a kid would have called "retarded" but now call "developmentally disabled.") Couples who do well enough on the tests to merit neutroid ownership get special treatment--government doctors shoot the female member of the couple up with drugs to give her some of the experience of being pregnant, like odd cravings, weight gain, and lactation. One of the story's little jokes is that before a couple receives delivery of their neutroid the wife goes to a hospital and the husband is expected to pretend to be nervous, to smoke cigarettes and pace back and forth in the maternity ward waiting room. </p><p>Norris's job is to manage all these artificial creatures that inhabit his 200-mile-square sector of suburban housing; his most onerous duty is catching and destroying any of the artificial creatures that prove defective or somehow become ownerless. Because the neutroids have something like an immature human's intelligence and personality, and, except for a little tail and lack of gonads, look kinda like human children, Anne thinks of her new husband, who has to toss neutroids into the handy gas chamber (complete with attached crematorium) in his back yard, not as a dog catcher but a baby-killer!</p><p>The various interwoven plot threads of "Conditionally Human" demonstrate the terrible psychological and sociological costs of the severe government limitations on childbirth and pubic policies that aim to fulfill women's maternal desires via Frankensteinian means. A batch of neutroids is suspected of being defective, and Norris has to wrest them from the arms of their loving "parents," and some put up a fight. Anne decides she wants to have a real child with Norris even though they are just class C, and doing so would risk separation and demotion to laborer status. When Anne becomes acquainted with one of the defective neurtroids--its "defect" is that it is almost a normal human girl, with intelligence within typical human parameters and a body with gonads that will go through puberty and be able to bear children--she becomes attached to it and determined to make sure it is not destroyed. (This story probably deserves a feminist analysis--women are its moral core, but they pursue traditional goals like wanting to care for and give birth to children.)</p><p>One theme Miller addresses is complicity. In one subplot, Norris goes along with a corrupt superior's rule-breaking, and when this misbehavior leads to a broken-hearted woman committing murder, Norris recognizes that he is partly to blame for the carnage and regrets going against the rules. But Norris also recognizes that he bears guilt for <i>following</i> the rules of the immoral government of which he is an agent. In the climax of the story Norris tries to sabotage the system, taking a risky first step that he hopes will set off a chain of events that will result in the end of the government's intrusive and oppressive reproductive policies.</p><p>Religion is another of Miller's themes, as it often is in his work, and a clergyman plays a role in the story in the end, and in the closing pages of the story Anne reads from the Bible.</p><p>Miller is a good writer, and tackles serious, compelling topics in "Conditionally Human," as he did in other stories of his I liked, like <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2019/08/stories-by-miller-jones-schmitz-and.html">"Crucifixius Etiam,"</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/03/stories-from-wilderness-of-stars-by-ray.html">"Death of a Spaceman,"</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2018/09/robot-stories-by-aldiss-brown-anderson.html">"I Made You"</a> and <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2018/09/i-j-l-m-stories-from-abc-by-washington.html">"No Moon for Me."</a> Miller's work feels mature in part because it is ambiguous, it doesn't offer easy answers and doesn't feel like propaganda. "Crucifixius Etiam" and "Death of a Spaceman" tell you that conquering space is a worthwhile goal, but fully admit it is going to entail horrendous sacrifice. "Conditionally Human" portrays the government's population control measures as bad, but in Miller's story the population problem is real, not an illusion pushed by goofball activists or exploited as an excuse by government tyrants in their pursuit of greater power. </p><p>Thumbs up, then for "Conditionally Human," another success from a consistently good writer. I do have some criticisms of the story's structure and length, though. It does feel a little long, and the climax at the end, when Norris decides to rebel and murders a fellow government employee, is less shocking and less climactic than the murder in the middle of the story. I have to wonder if maybe the other versions of the story, in <i>Galaxy</i> and/or in <i>5 Unearthly Visions</i>, might be tighter.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3E1SWVdJYJEMiwiwsjbaZpI52iUwchaYbLCfrCFBqflwmgMcKYaJsplM_TUtSdndJV6eF1X353R_Ku4-5rTNpt6GS1E3X6oOST9azyQfOtdDt76tIXBoKxedPZ-SFoHe6M4eDkSOLyMD2jwxpUiqOK4_Kg-XF4XU-60rw9H3A7hPH-cPPHROfV1JMWLo/s500/neutroids.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="387" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3E1SWVdJYJEMiwiwsjbaZpI52iUwchaYbLCfrCFBqflwmgMcKYaJsplM_TUtSdndJV6eF1X353R_Ku4-5rTNpt6GS1E3X6oOST9azyQfOtdDt76tIXBoKxedPZ-SFoHe6M4eDkSOLyMD2jwxpUiqOK4_Kg-XF4XU-60rw9H3A7hPH-cPPHROfV1JMWLo/s16000/neutroids.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><b>"Stamped Caution"</b> by Raymond Z. Gallun (1953)<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9B8h0VRaHa83zZi3gPIRasBOhkgIk0MbFSlq965JDfUl-t5JO_eUiPGSaIW_KSSyXuco1F1QpDEk-bLYL-9DGcI3jIK2jBccnXUVeiWtTm_r0yH8aTrrxSsGMNt0TMgp5-U917jybeM1yuws4ITtzNCrbnit9-LsdC4GoFmV0GxLpQ98i7XLqdCaHOKQ/s600/MLO4314.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="458" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9B8h0VRaHa83zZi3gPIRasBOhkgIk0MbFSlq965JDfUl-t5JO_eUiPGSaIW_KSSyXuco1F1QpDEk-bLYL-9DGcI3jIK2jBccnXUVeiWtTm_r0yH8aTrrxSsGMNt0TMgp5-U917jybeM1yuws4ITtzNCrbnit9-LsdC4GoFmV0GxLpQ98i7XLqdCaHOKQ/s320/MLO4314.jpg" width="244" /></a></div>"Stamped Caution" debuted in <i>Galaxy</i>, in an issue with a cover story by MPorcius <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2016/02/norman-conquest-2066-by-j-t-mcintosh.html">punching</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-million-cities-by-j-t-mcintosh.html">bag</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2015/12/four-more-tales-from-sept-51-issue-of.html">J. T. McIntosh</a>. In the lore of MPorcius Fiction Log, Gallun is the opposite of McIntosh (AKA M'Intosh AKA MacIntosh); Gallun is a guy whose work I almost always like. (See a list of links to Gallun-related blog posts <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/10/fantastic-story-fall-1951-hamilton.html">here</a>.) So I embark on reading "Stamped Caution" with a spring in my step.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Stamped Caution" is a well-written effort to construct a realistic account of Earth people's reaction to the first landing of Martians here on Earth, and then reaction of Martians to the first landing of Earthers on the Red Planet. Gallun strives to be optimistic as well as realistic, and perhaps to ignore or subvert some of the commonplaces of adventure fiction--people do get captured and do escape, but both humans and the aliens are trying to avoid war and build a relationship based on trade and friendship rather than conquest, and they actually succeed!</div><div><br /></div><div>In brief, a Martian ship crashes on Earth and all the crew die except for an egg. The narrator is given the job of incubating the egg and studying the creature that emerges from it, which turns out to be a tentacled thing with eyestalks, not a mere animal but an intelligent being able to use tools and learn English. Gallun's descriptions of the alien's form and behavior and the human efforts to study it and educate it are entertaining.</div><div><br /></div><div>By the time the Martian is an adult the people of Earth have built their own ship capable of going to Mars and the narrator and the Martian he raised form part of the crew that go there. The humans of the crew are captured by the Martians and their experience is somewhat parallel to that of their Martian friend--they are studied and tested and, eventually, the people of Earth and Mars take some first steps on the road to a mutually profitable relationship characterized by peace.</div><div><br /></div><div>I like it. Gallun's good record here at MPorcius Fiction Log endures. </div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4zUxJ_F2RmRpNQdYy1jLZnrMNxGrL8-YhNoWjjuv3ln40tOpf7PXE4wzD5TLc1BI6S6cbyqikOl9OiXIPqczOGIw-1uCULH0_Z3O_3VlcEwgaAky-HHi6trBu6F5OddUvyh-c90D-uiodHJ7G3m7pDscVkZneTOTP9JpiYDbil3dmtHADz9WAXQ4w5Jg/s500/nonamericanunearthly.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4zUxJ_F2RmRpNQdYy1jLZnrMNxGrL8-YhNoWjjuv3ln40tOpf7PXE4wzD5TLc1BI6S6cbyqikOl9OiXIPqczOGIw-1uCULH0_Z3O_3VlcEwgaAky-HHi6trBu6F5OddUvyh-c90D-uiodHJ7G3m7pDscVkZneTOTP9JpiYDbil3dmtHADz9WAXQ4w5Jg/s16000/nonamericanunearthly.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Swedish translation of <i>5 Unearthly Visions</i>, <i>Spionen utifran</i>, contains only the three<br />stories "Legwork," "Stamped Caution" and "Shadow World."</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><b>"Shadow World"</b> by Clifford D. Simak (1957)<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2kzI5kzgdTN5bE1DLDPU0OsVlzHvVEmMkA72vtDw1ZsZcQkp8MrqkBig0c9y90o0JIszZ0-BHI8oBa8BiC-FOuSjq9CBjFZ4H5FGHA1lVQdGSmdh0cvBYKE2qcB2Zg06g6FRhYkMaW8cIOSCvBMd-BPIOcN3I6t93-XCEZsm7tVjwFd_Smwhqp6wqYVg/s1086/Galaxy_1957_09_0000.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1086" data-original-width="811" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2kzI5kzgdTN5bE1DLDPU0OsVlzHvVEmMkA72vtDw1ZsZcQkp8MrqkBig0c9y90o0JIszZ0-BHI8oBa8BiC-FOuSjq9CBjFZ4H5FGHA1lVQdGSmdh0cvBYKE2qcB2Zg06g6FRhYkMaW8cIOSCvBMd-BPIOcN3I6t93-XCEZsm7tVjwFd_Smwhqp6wqYVg/s320/Galaxy_1957_09_0000.jpg" width="239" /></a></div>Simak seems like a good guy and he's a good writer, but sometimes his sentimentality can get too sappy, and sometimes his anti-urban, anti-modern schtick gets on my nerves, though he's not as bad as Chad Oliver. So I never know when I start a Simak story if I am going to like it. Let's roll the dice again, peeps.</div><div><br /></div><div>Looks like we rolled a 4 or 5*--"Shadow World" is a long and unsatisfying twist-ending joke story. It has as minor themes imperialism, colonialism and exploitation of the environment, but its major theme is the danger of addictive entertainment.</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;">*We might say 6, 7 and 8 would represent the various ranges of "acceptable;" 9 or more would be good or better, with 11 and 12 Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, Thomas Disch and Tanith Lee territory.</span></div><div><br /></div><div>Earth is sort of overcrowded, and so men have been searching the galaxy for Earth-like worlds to colonize. One such world is Stella IV. The survey team that discovered it found no evidence of native intelligent life, just some mysterious "cones" that could only be seen from a distance.</div><div><br /></div><div>The narrator is a member of the outfit building the colony on Stella IV. He tells us that mankind has learned its lesson and Stella IV will have a carefully planned economy, that there won't be individuals taking risks as they try to strike it rich on a frontier, but rather a systematic and orderly progression that won't waste natural resources. I couldn't tell if Simak was seriously advocating a planned economy or if he was being sarcastic, employing an unreliable narrator strategy here, i part because this political economy/environmentalist stuff was incidental to the plot. </div><div><br /></div><div>When the team of which the narrator is a member arrived on Stella IV they were immediately met by what they took to be native life forms, forms of an inexplicable, even supernatural, type they dubbed "shadows." Each man found he had a particular shadow who kept close to him at all times. These beings are humanoids who lack any facial features save for a single eye, have no sexual characteristics, and no clothes save a harness that holds a large jewel on its wearer's chest and a bag near the waist--the bag jingles like it is full of small hard objects. The shadows do not talk, or breathe, or eat. If you try to touch a shadow's jewel the creature simply vanishes and returns later.</div><div><br /></div><div>The shadows do not seem hostile or dangerous, but it appears that, in a mysterious and oblique way, they are slowing down the building of the colony. Every morning the bulldozers and cranes and things the human engineers and technicians need to build the colony are found to be "gummed up," and they have to be disassembled and cleaned before they can be put to use. The men are thus able to only put in a half day of productive work each day, slowing progress severely, and there is panic when the colony builders receive a message warning them an inspector is on his way to Stella IV. If the inspector finds they are behind schedule and have no idea how to resolve the problem caused by the shadows they are all likely to be fired!</div><div><br /></div><div>The narrator figures out what is going on by employing an illicit device. Simak portrays some of the men among the builders as jerks, and one of the jerks is the cook, who goes by the name "Greasy." Greasy has an illegal device called a peeper. As I said, Simak is a good writer and he uses various clever strategies in constructing "Shadow World" that make it mysterious, generating suspense and conveying a sense of strangeness. One of these strategies is mentioning peepers on the story's opening page and then not explaining clearly what a peeper is until like page 19. A peeper is what we might call a virtual reality device that looks like a pair of binoculars that you can strap to your face; it has 39 knobs that can each be set from zero to 39--each knob sets a parameter for the fantasy world in which you can live through the device. The peeper is extremely addictive, and is illegal.</div><div><br /></div><div>The shadows are very inquisitive--it appears they are sabotaging the machines at night in some undetectable way to provide themselves an opportunity of observing their disassembly and repair. The narrator, the only person who knows about Greasy's peeper, steals the contraband device and risks addiction himself to figure out how to set the peeper so that it will take a viewer on such a horrible trip that it will knock him unconscious. As he expected, his shadow looks into the peeper at the first opportunity and duly collapses. The shadow then decomposes in short order, leaving behind only a cone--the base of which was its eye--and the jewel and the bag of items. The jewels are a sort of 3D camera and they have been producing little miniature models of the Earthmen's equipment; these models represent, in exhaustive and precise detail, both the surface and the inner workings of the men's machines and tools. Among the little models of his equipment in his expired shadow's bag the narrator discovers a little model of himself.</div><div><br /></div><div>It turns out that the shadows are just mobile platforms for the two super high tech cameras, the cones that transmit video and sound to the hidden lair of their owners and the jewels that create perfect models. The hidden masters appear soon after the narrator solves the mystery of the cones and shadows. These highly advanced aliens are addicted to entertainment, and have been enjoying watching the humans through the cones. They want to pay for the fascinating show the humans have unwittingly been putting on for them, and offer as payment perfect full-sized working duplicates of the Earthmen's machines and supplies those little miniature models serve as blueprints for the aliens' duplicating machines. It seems these aliens can also duplicate raw materials like steel, which will make building the colony a snap. But when the humans realize the aliens have also created living duplicates of themselves they are outraged and horrified, and the narrator scrambles to acquire 500 peepers from Earth--it is not clear if he intends to use these as weapons against the aliens or as a radical psychiatric palliative treatment for the stress of living in a maddening new world of duplicate humans.</div><div><br /></div><div>Simak's writing style is smooth and "Shadow World" is well-structured as a mystery story. Unfortunately, the story isn't actually fun and doesn't generate human feeling in the reader, and I don't care for mystery stories that are merely a puzzle and lack any human drama or emotion. "Shadow World" doesn't really work for me as a science fiction story, either, as it lacks compelling ideas--the alien cones and duplicating machines and the human peepers are simply not believable; they are props for use in a satire, not elements of a sincere speculation about life in the future or an alternative milieu; as for the satire and the jokes--I guess about being addicted to TV--they are not insightful or funny. Marginal thumbs down for "Shadow World," I am afraid, though I can see other people liking it because it is well-put together on a technical level.</div><div><p>"Shadow World" was first printed in <i>Galaxy</i>, where it was illustrated by the Dillons. (Here's a note for all you fans of Diane and Leo who don't follow me on twitter: recently <a href="https://twitter.com/hankbukowsi/status/1761907357213180144">I stumbled upon a text book</a> with a cover by the Dillons at an antique store.) "Shadow World" would be reprinted in a few Simak collections, including some British and French ones, and a 21st-century Baen anthology edited by Hank Davis of stories depicting unfortunate first contacts titled <i>Worst Contact</i>.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0-2HlJjrxbdAxpWcKV9Fv03ik0yQANS1zlNqlCTxny2dIg-kiLsLOnk-8sxzok99p0YmGmmEIIk_URvEO6BQGvOifQH3FUpiMTJGm-jpJ0JMaqZVkSsgyhrf2EmnN1_UFCkm76Dx7q6t09FYseqlnv9jul8emGl6YRTBl56Lymeu6enTom_WTXpGHMuw/s500/sw.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="385" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0-2HlJjrxbdAxpWcKV9Fv03ik0yQANS1zlNqlCTxny2dIg-kiLsLOnk-8sxzok99p0YmGmmEIIk_URvEO6BQGvOifQH3FUpiMTJGm-jpJ0JMaqZVkSsgyhrf2EmnN1_UFCkm76Dx7q6t09FYseqlnv9jul8emGl6YRTBl56Lymeu6enTom_WTXpGHMuw/s16000/sw.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Off-Planet</i>'s cover depicts one of the shadows from "Shadow World"</td></tr></tbody></table><p>**********</p><p>The last page of my copy of <i>5 Unearthly Visions</i> is an ad for <i>Monsters Galore</i>, a paperback anthology of stories about monsters edited by Bernhardt J. Hurwood, a man with a varied career that included not only editing books of horror stories but penning TV and movie tie-ins, non-fiction books about torture and unexplained phenomena, and sex manuals. The ad claims <i>Monsters Galore</i> is illustrated, but the one review of the book on Amazon casts doubt on this assertion.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4S0ldK1RvW0iNMBEuUPVOTOkTRHgn1-wK06hs4oeE2liC0Z5uS8Ybn_hqJtSC7VAxBa6Umaq6-MD4OfWTr0QgNq2V5yLQUmEF0d1jieDpwQQwPEV61XQMApHcMUSSluko56Px1OMBFkIVBbnd22mUvM9UkEjrKgUyhbgPHmS3VADJ09qQXrrgM1hJlJY/s500/unearthly5.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="422" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4S0ldK1RvW0iNMBEuUPVOTOkTRHgn1-wK06hs4oeE2liC0Z5uS8Ybn_hqJtSC7VAxBa6Umaq6-MD4OfWTr0QgNq2V5yLQUmEF0d1jieDpwQQwPEV61XQMApHcMUSSluko56Px1OMBFkIVBbnd22mUvM9UkEjrKgUyhbgPHmS3VADJ09qQXrrgM1hJlJY/s16000/unearthly5.jpg" /><br /></a></div></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-74520135439738903702024-02-23T23:55:00.001-05:002024-02-24T17:57:42.450-05:00Merril-approved 1956 stories: Roberts, Russell and St. Clair<p>Our curated tour of 1956 SF stories continues. Who is doing the curating? Judith Merril, who included in her 1957 anthology <i>SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume </i>a long alphabetical list of "honorable mention" stories printed in 1956, and your humble blogger, who has been selecting stories from this list. I have been skipping many authors I already know I don't like, but giving some new to me a shot, a strategy which paid off in our last episode, when I enjoyed two stories by Frank Riley. Today we've got two stories by people--women, in fact!--I don't think I've read before, and two by a guy we have read a lot, Eric Frank Russell.</p><p>(See the bottom of this post for a list of links to previous posts on Merril-approved 1956 stories that sparked my interest.)</p><p><b>"When Jack Smith Fought Old Satan"</b> by Mary-Carter Roberts</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG65NFAwmIrhLymHXia5eeiIUAi77HT4jhLboXKP-s7DBoCPYN-fgjOlO9ivb3D-JoLd7QXAYhpWXu9DSoiaBUkPkGacYJaCGvfR3i-8Gq9NZNLwXKq6hkN4NKLGjXfLhfALmJBKFnENkr2JS7ZTCJgMYdQnCh1lEg95ZiyMOtVV43IUZJ7H6r2QIhwn4/s969/huddle.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="969" data-original-width="725" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG65NFAwmIrhLymHXia5eeiIUAi77HT4jhLboXKP-s7DBoCPYN-fgjOlO9ivb3D-JoLd7QXAYhpWXu9DSoiaBUkPkGacYJaCGvfR3i-8Gq9NZNLwXKq6hkN4NKLGjXfLhfALmJBKFnENkr2JS7ZTCJgMYdQnCh1lEg95ZiyMOtVV43IUZJ7H6r2QIhwn4/s320/huddle.jpg" width="239" /></a></div>Mary-Carter Roberts has four credits art isfdb. "When Jack Smith Fought Old Satan" first appeared in <i>Collier's</i>, but I am reading the version that appeared in <i>F&SF</i> in 1957, as it is easier to find. I generally find tiresome stories in which some mortal cuts a deal with the devil, so I am sort of inclined to skip this one (especially since it is like 22 pages long), but let's give it a try anyway.<div><br /></div><div>"When Jack Smith Fought Old Satan" isn't really one of those deal-with-the-devil stories, but a sort of tall tale that incidentally or obliquely dramatizes a sort of generalized left-wing anti-establishment/anti-rich/anti-law-and-order attitude.</div><div><br /></div><div>Her story is set in Delaware in 1769, and as Roberts starts it she hints that she should be considered an unreliable narrator and foreshadows that her tale will be essentially incredible by telling us the story has been passed down by word of mouth generation after generation, and by asserting in what feels like a sarcastic way that it must be true because all who have told it before her were "godly folk." Roberts also introduces the theme that people from Delaware are "exclusive," though I'm not 100% sure what that means or what it really has to do with the story and to what extent she is being ironic. (Frank Riley in <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-frank.html">"Project Hi-Psi"</a> suggests some of the behavior of that story's main character reflects his New England heritage and upbringing, and maybe what Jack Smith does in this story is supposed to reflect the characteristic personality of people from Delaware in a way that I am not getting because Delaware is one of those states I don't know much of anything about, like Maryland--oh, wait, having lived in Maryland I now know they put that stupid seasoning on everything.) </div><div><br /></div><div>Jack Smith is a big strong farmer, a twenty-year-old orphan who has served in the wars against the Indians and is a free thinker, an atheist who refuses to show respect to his social superiors or acknowledge the truth of the Christian religion. As a result he is ridiculed by the community when he comes into the village to drink at the tavern. Unnoticed by Smith, the "bound girl" Oma, a fellow orphan who works at the tavern, has fallen in love with him.</div><div><br /></div><div>The villagers have just finished building the area's first church, but are dismayed to find someone they can never catch has been vandalizing the church physically <i>and</i> supernaturally--not only do the parishioners often find the furniture in disorder, but the bell refuses to ring.</div><div><br /></div><div>The people figure Satan himself must be to blame--the Devil must be hiding out in the nearby dark woods. This accords with the old story that the "baronet" who owned the woods in the 17th century refused to donate some portions of the woods upon which to build a school for the poor, saying that he'd rather the Devil had the land than the poor--Satan must have finally taken that mean old rich guy up on his offer a hundred years later. One guy suggests that Satan's strength comes from the evil of the people of the community, and to drive Satan off they have to punish malefactors more severely--he brings up the case of a bound girl (a different one than Oma) who was caught stealing sugar and who received only a mere six lashes.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYg1JfyXGLpkxQlFA2h0K7nDyyA-qPW_V7u2dL9JZJHvwAtQwlcb0glevvPebm2jDOik7CHWXlgPWC7TrqHRa9lHflXE-SOhLbKKLMir690rtki15_QuawB2rdkBBtA543fWFepzCMnKORZWvg2n6WsLyQuEMBJLXM7s0Z7Mr05Vl-881fJf7aiSMbxDY/s600/FSFJul1957.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="426" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYg1JfyXGLpkxQlFA2h0K7nDyyA-qPW_V7u2dL9JZJHvwAtQwlcb0glevvPebm2jDOik7CHWXlgPWC7TrqHRa9lHflXE-SOhLbKKLMir690rtki15_QuawB2rdkBBtA543fWFepzCMnKORZWvg2n6WsLyQuEMBJLXM7s0Z7Mr05Vl-881fJf7aiSMbxDY/s320/FSFJul1957.jpg" width="227" /></a></div>Jack Smith the atheist scoffs at the idea that the Devil exists at all, much less is terrorizing the community--he suspects the culprit it is some bound man (lots of bound people in Delaware, apparently) venting his rage against the hypocritical religious person to whom he is bound. Jack Smith the champion of the poor, after considering catching this hypothetical vengeful bound man in order to disprove the Devil theory, decides against doing so because if caught the bound man will suffer some harsh punishment for his crimes. Smith also criticizes the idea of punishing criminals more severely.</div><div><br /></div><div>One thing leads to another and Smith ends up vowing to walk through the woods that very night and fight the Devil if he should encounter him. Sure enough, on the dark lonely trail, Smith meets Satan and Roberts provides a long and tedious and quite gory description of their fight. (This story is full of graphic violence.) In the end, of course, the Devil proves to be essentially unkillable--he only allowed the fight to go on so long because he was testing how tough a guy Smith was. Impressed by Smith's strength and determination, he tries to recruit Smith to his diabolical cause. Smith realizes that if Satan is real, so must God be, begs God for aid, acquires the strength to pull the biggest tree in the woods, a 500-year-old oak, out of the earth, and uses it to strike Satan and drive him back to Hell, liberating the community. Smith marries Oma and when a grateful populace gives them some money they use it to free from bondage that sugar thief.</div><div><br /></div><div>(I wonder if we are supposed to think that Smith found the vandal and convinced him or her to knock it off and then made up the devil story to tell the gullible Christians when he got back to the tavern.) </div><div><p></p><p>This story isn't bad, and Roberts' writing style is pretty good, but "When Jack Smith Fought Old Satan" is kind of long and it doesn't present any interesting ideas (we've all heard a million times that religion is a scam and that you shouldn't punish criminals) and because it is so unbelievable what happens to the characters doesn't have any effect on the reader's emotions. I'll call it acceptable.</p><p>isfdb doesn't list any appearances for this story besides <i>Collier's</i> and <i>F&SF</i>. </p><p><b>"Legwork"</b> by Eric Frank Russell</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_VLeg4ZeWbIzzUzewwtU1gRYFowsCq1_ui3mwOOnRg0p-tMdnBdCP5nzRmGxuIrMuOfCMlUWWlgMYHDt5kuPMx63BCGPTUjppMgtbtU22JxwfghcTLE3bZkXvk4E03C_2hdjMrAxip76urapDwK_r7alnPlaVRHf1bkFgi0ktkzLX02M9AwQYlCJ13sA/s500/ASF_0305.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="361" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_VLeg4ZeWbIzzUzewwtU1gRYFowsCq1_ui3mwOOnRg0p-tMdnBdCP5nzRmGxuIrMuOfCMlUWWlgMYHDt5kuPMx63BCGPTUjppMgtbtU22JxwfghcTLE3bZkXvk4E03C_2hdjMrAxip76urapDwK_r7alnPlaVRHf1bkFgi0ktkzLX02M9AwQYlCJ13sA/s320/ASF_0305.jpg" width="231" /></a></div>Merril includes two stories by Russell on her honorable mention list, both of them printed in <i>Astounding</i>. (<a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2016/03/three-stories-from-astounding-by-eric.html">Alan Dean Foster told us</a> that Russell was <i>Astounding </i>editor John W. Campbell, Jr.'s favorite author, you'll remember.) "Legwork" was a publishing success, getting reprinted in multiple Russell collections, a 1965 anthology by Groff Conklin which <a href="https://twitter.com/hankbukowsi/status/718959449080274945">I actually own</a>, <i>5 Unearthly Visions</i>, a recent British anthology about crime in the future, and two different Italian publications with Karel Thole covers. (NB: I am reading "Legwork" in a scan of the April 1956 <i>Astounding</i>, not my copy of <i>5 Unearthly Visions</i>.)<p></p><p>We encounter quite a few SF stories that use aliens as foils for humans in an effort to point out how humans suck--peaceful aliens who are a contrast to violent Earthers, communistic aliens with a collective consciousness that highlight the selfish individualism of humans, aliens who are at one with nature in contrast to us humans who bend the natural world to our will. You'll be glad to hear that here in "Legwork" Russell uses an alien foil to say something nice about human beings. </p><p>Russell's big theme is that the galaxy is full of intelligent races, and most advance through what he calls "flashes of inspiration" or "touches of genius." But Earth and the human race are outliers--sure, humans have had those unpredictable "flashes," but our civilizations also advance by simple determined hard work, what we today might call "grinding" and what Russell calls "slogging along," and "plain, lousy legwork."</p><p>The Andromedans have conquered many planets, defeated and enslaved scores of intelligent species. The first step in taking over some new planet is recon, and Andromedan Harasha Vanash is a scout who has investigated fifty planets which the Andromedans have subsequently taken over. Vanash has tremendous hypnotic powers, and with these powers he can almost perfectly camouflage himself, by projecting into your mind what he wants you to see and remember. This way he can walk among the natives of a planet, appearing to be one of them, interacting with them and collecting all the info about their culture and capacities required to make conquering them a snap.</p><p>The first part of "Legwork" follows Vanash as he lands in the USA and begins his reconnaissance. Russell makes of Vanash a compelling character and it is entertaining to watch him go about his business. The next part of the story has as its focus a big fat GF-man, a detective from the Treasury Department, sent to a small town to investigate a bank robbery we readers know Vanash pulled using his hypnotic powers. This part of the story is very much like a police procedural, with the obese fed Eddie Rider and local police captain Harrison talking about clues and hashing out theories and directing underlings and so forth--dozens of men around the country talk to people and follow possible leads and hunt through files, doing the exhaustive and exhausting legwork of the story's title. Russell actually makes all this detective stuff sort of interesting, and his style is smooth enough that it goes down easy; even though this story is 40 pages, it never feels long.</p><p>When it becomes apparent that an alien being with the ability to masquerade as any man is the culprit, the entire apparatus of the Federal government, including the armed forces, gets involved. In the end mankind triumphs, and not only is Vanash vanquished, but we get a sense of wonder ending that promises that the human race has taken its first step to seizing the stars and laying low those Andromedans! </p><p>Solid classic SF--thumbs up!</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU0E7ionpr_lIsnGyhRhPgaagsEwv0mwpL1l5gIvHe6hg9Wf_t06LDnww0uK8b9p4GlKh2fwDisXEjnqqu8PpD0xQZBmf3wMGbkq6s_S4YpcmvA5SO5sLAjPnr8GLdTy747d630n-iBsJUxoDGwMlQ74xuZdxcemdUSetrQkoVXcvkDdwh8b8b7Rnnio4/s500/legwork.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="364" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU0E7ionpr_lIsnGyhRhPgaagsEwv0mwpL1l5gIvHe6hg9Wf_t06LDnww0uK8b9p4GlKh2fwDisXEjnqqu8PpD0xQZBmf3wMGbkq6s_S4YpcmvA5SO5sLAjPnr8GLdTy747d630n-iBsJUxoDGwMlQ74xuZdxcemdUSetrQkoVXcvkDdwh8b8b7Rnnio4/s16000/legwork.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The <i>Urania</i> cover illustrates "Legwork"</td></tr></tbody></table><p><b>"Top Secret"</b> by Eric Frank Russell</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKb1posv4UpZO4rloZnaacLIu6jBDziwXgLsl-7opWoZ2hrf3rzvESoJY_Cl43KHGUMVnZyQB9gB6yBihyWIhV4nuIbFyJh2IuToFRAULlFh3VUVjDvnjt1fMLdAOwl9BLi7wCVmO-7_ctDKI9K_XZwcW6KCACWEFw376KPEZnDEF3mNgDCzgGMprN7dQ/s500/ASF_0309.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="366" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKb1posv4UpZO4rloZnaacLIu6jBDziwXgLsl-7opWoZ2hrf3rzvESoJY_Cl43KHGUMVnZyQB9gB6yBihyWIhV4nuIbFyJh2IuToFRAULlFh3VUVjDvnjt1fMLdAOwl9BLi7wCVmO-7_ctDKI9K_XZwcW6KCACWEFw376KPEZnDEF3mNgDCzgGMprN7dQ/s320/ASF_0309.jpg" width="234" /></a></div>After enjoying "Legwork" so much, "Top Secret" is a real letdown, a gimmicky joke story based on puns that tries to get on your good side by appealing to your perfectly natural distaste for government bureaucrats. (<a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2016/04/three-eric-frank-russell-stories-from.html">Russell often lampoons government and bureaucrats</a> so maybe "Legwork," in which government people at all levels work hard and do a good job and receive eager support from the populace, is an outlier in his body of work.) </div><div><br /></div><div>The Terran space empire and the Zeng space empire are on good terms and have been for ages, but the Terran officer in charge of defending the sector where they are adjacent still worries about how he and his men must act should there be a Zeng sneak attack. So he sends a message to the commander of forces at planet Motan offering direction on priorities should war break out. The way interstellar communications technology works in this story, people have to read messages aloud into machines, and because the message has to pass through many stations, eighteen different guys from all different cultures with all different accents have to listen to it and repeat it to pass it on, so that, like in the game of telephone,* the message received by Motan is nonsense. This gag isn't the springboard for the story's plot--the entire story is just a succession of such jokes as Terran HQ and the Motan base transmit messages back and forth multiple times seeking clarity, only to receive nonsensical messages that only add to the confusion.</div><div><br /></div><div>Waste of time, thumbs down. </div><div><br /></div><div>My denunciation comes too late to prevent Ace and The Dial Press from reprinting "Top Secret" in a 1958 Russell collection (<i>Six Worlds Yonder</i>) and a 1984 anthology (<i>From Mind to Mind</i>.) </div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;">*Today I learned that British people call this "Chinese whispers," which is funnier than this story.</span></div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTVGrYGa-0pg2buPrG4Tw8gkHwxIjoQsUCvZ9kPRRmGw_Pb7z9SWGGxYF4BRcruQZNbmuLb3LewNvoG_1WTpvWmJLh_Wo-jbKm7SVC6MiOOmHDjrOS2po0G_307rbrCvQ3LW2GkEdFV-jLeQO4sp82AJI8L-ISsI0tvAFMvaFQqB3JZKneA7zbyxbXbXs/s500/top.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="373" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTVGrYGa-0pg2buPrG4Tw8gkHwxIjoQsUCvZ9kPRRmGw_Pb7z9SWGGxYF4BRcruQZNbmuLb3LewNvoG_1WTpvWmJLh_Wo-jbKm7SVC6MiOOmHDjrOS2po0G_307rbrCvQ3LW2GkEdFV-jLeQO4sp82AJI8L-ISsI0tvAFMvaFQqB3JZKneA7zbyxbXbXs/s16000/top.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>"Horrer Howce"</b> by Margaret St. Clair</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAsWdWvnzjn_1SEhT6dfo9cLxV77JJ9lvC2-S9VxsA1w5iToGeR3L5WVaMAGyPWbIl0QoVOGkH9ZrU1cWQbClemQzmDCrJlOnbcFwjmgWCw7nGnOJTKQZFipIoSFux_jM-5E_D4WlSLJiLgofbvMl2G1oQg9f6ENQxdaM7Jbt3kSJrJdYTV1jGM1Bgnrs/s600/MLO4427.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="455" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAsWdWvnzjn_1SEhT6dfo9cLxV77JJ9lvC2-S9VxsA1w5iToGeR3L5WVaMAGyPWbIl0QoVOGkH9ZrU1cWQbClemQzmDCrJlOnbcFwjmgWCw7nGnOJTKQZFipIoSFux_jM-5E_D4WlSLJiLgofbvMl2G1oQg9f6ENQxdaM7Jbt3kSJrJdYTV1jGM1Bgnrs/s320/MLO4427.jpg" width="243" /></a></div>St. Clair produced a lot of stories under her real name and under the pen name Idris Seabright, but I have avoided her work because I had the impression she wrote joke stories. The title of this story leads me to suspect it is a joke story, but I'm giving it a shot anyway in a duplicitous effort to make people think I am open-minded. </div><div><br /></div><div>"Horrer Howce" made its debut in the same issue of <i>Galaxy </i>as Theodore Sturgeon's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2014/08/1950s-stories-from-algis-budrys-arthur.html">"Skills of Xanadu,"</a> which I penned a negative review of back in 2014 ("like a three page essay on what Ted thinks the perfect society would be stretched out to 26 pages....") People love "Horrer Howce;" it was included in multiple anthologies of stories from <i>Galaxy</i> as well as books edited by Peter Haining and Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. Could I be one of those people? Could I love "Horrer Howce?"</div><div><br /></div><div>My heart sank when I turned away from the Virgil Finlay illustrations to "Skills of Xanadu" (I'd never seen them before, having read Ted's utopian tedium in the paperback anthology <i>13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction</i>)<i> </i>and saw the editor's intro to "Horrer Howce" on the first page of St. Clair's story:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOQI5KeePv4XIcPzfi7AEDdecBaUcyNQE739cgwwHTVP-2ZdLeKvvEuek6XAnSwR6tVrzxRKK1hdz_3XwS9xfGirynVBMcNHVdqioCykmDJ-z2s-V6Vflw0Qx4MknqkptyH3_uxhZGlHJ_hP9_yTvaON8xPEyUlrXzxZ8cAtLQ1p5XdtZe25OCKC_B2Cg/s500/horrorindeed.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="238" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOQI5KeePv4XIcPzfi7AEDdecBaUcyNQE739cgwwHTVP-2ZdLeKvvEuek6XAnSwR6tVrzxRKK1hdz_3XwS9xfGirynVBMcNHVdqioCykmDJ-z2s-V6Vflw0Qx4MknqkptyH3_uxhZGlHJ_hP9_yTvaON8xPEyUlrXzxZ8cAtLQ1p5XdtZe25OCKC_B2Cg/s16000/horrorindeed.png" /></a></div><br /><div>Oh no, was this another pun story?</div><div><br /></div><div>Luckily, St. Clair's story has more to it than bad spelling. We have two characters, a guy who builds equipment for amusement park haunted houses--mechanical monsters and the like--and a guy who buys such equipment for a national chain of amusement facilities. After some foreshadowing that suggests artist guy is some kind of intellectual and maybe a political radical, he shows the buyer guy a conventional horror room, one that offers the illusion you are outside by a well--inside the well is an elaborate clockwork monster.</div><div><br /></div><div>The meat of the story comes in a second room. Various clues suggest this is not so much a room as a portal to another world inhabited by dangerous alien entities, and St. Clair offers a quite good action/horror scene in which artist guy drives a car on a congested highway--buyer guy comes as passenger--seeking to escape a black car driven by a monster with three arms; the pair witness a similar car catch up to another vehicle and tear apart a (simulated?) human driver. The pair make it off the highway and back to the office alive, but then the monster busts into the office and kills the buyer. </div><div><br /></div><div>It is strongly implied that the man just killed was the third such buyer to be shown the horror highway, and the other two were driven insane by the experience and are no longer in the horror house business. So the artist guy comes up with a new scheme--he will open portals to worlds where live even more horrible alien entities and use them to build horror houses for the three-armed monsters.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is an acceptable horror story, and I guess it is also a sort of joke story about how scary was driving on the new highway system? (I suppose the highways were in the news when the story was written and published, as in 1954 Ike appointed a committee to propose a plan for an interstate highway system, in 1955 Congress received a proposal from the administration, and by June 1956 the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 had been passed and signed.) Bad spelling and puns don't actually seem to play that big a role in the story--"Horrer Howce" is some graffiti the monsters have left outside the highway room, foreshadowing that they are able to leave the room. The name applied to the monsters, "Voom," is I guess just a reference to the onomatopoeia "vroom" commonly used to describe or imitate the sound of an automobile; maybe that counts as a pun?</div><div><br /></div><div>I guess I can mildly recommend this one. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX3oTgDdgMXwq24SODHvsAbFRq6w4drK5HDjt1dNghIn0m50rO9NdqLwznRf82jUYh05_zpYTIzhEYfXJkUwoARmwU2bjJ5xvfp_-NmIbvHXzibdsq6E130sejv1CMcxJ5gc3NR-YXkYikuD2-HVFFAV0At-qsCfpE5gby9xiWmSU_V93KQ0kiH6zhvxI/s500/voom.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="391" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX3oTgDdgMXwq24SODHvsAbFRq6w4drK5HDjt1dNghIn0m50rO9NdqLwznRf82jUYh05_zpYTIzhEYfXJkUwoARmwU2bjJ5xvfp_-NmIbvHXzibdsq6E130sejv1CMcxJ5gc3NR-YXkYikuD2-HVFFAV0At-qsCfpE5gby9xiWmSU_V93KQ0kiH6zhvxI/s16000/voom.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div>**********</div><div><br /></div><div>One of Russell's stories was lame (presumably Merril admired it for its attack on the minds of military men), but one was good and the Roberts and St. Clair stories had their moments and were thought-provoking. So, a decent batch of '56 stories.</div><div><br /></div><div>If you want to check out other stories in this series of Merril-inspired blog posts, the links below will facilitate your journey.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-robert.html" style="text-align: center;">Abernathy and Aldiss</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-p-anderson.html" style="text-align: center;">Anderson, Allen and Banks<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-j-barrow-c.html">Barrow, Beaumont and Blish<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/meril-approved-1956-stories-bradbury.html">Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler</a> <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-carter.html">Carter, Clarke and Clifton</a> <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-clingerman.html">Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-de-camp.html">de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle</a> <br /><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/05/merril-approved-1956-stories-harlan.html">Ellison and Fontenay<br /></a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/06/merril-approved-1956-stories-galouye.html">Galouye, Garrett, Grimm & Gunn</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/07/merril-approved-1956-sf-stories-by-r.html">Hart, Herbert and Jones</a> </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/10/merril-approved-1956-stories-kuttner.html">Kuttner & Moore, Lang, Leinster, L'Engle and McClintic</a></div></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-by-j.html">McConnell, McIntosh and Melchior</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-by-ward.html">Moore, Norse and Oliver</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-sf-stories-arthur.html">Porges and Presslie</a> </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-frank.html">Riley and Ritchie</a><br /></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-78537858971638829042024-02-22T13:54:00.000-05:002024-02-22T13:54:46.710-05:00Merril-approved 1956 stories: Frank Riley and Jack Ritchie<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj29AgpGjEMeU01s7XfUSp8DAQ32V9keSOzib2B2xJt6lUKCe2JNwxpWQBE9TIolq1vI77rNGRHWlAYozwFrfVkRba1seixkzeHZVV-AQS3FJzCBnytSmVS3wMQrjViOq_webcIz4yv14wThMTzdoNGv8WKPmsm_uMZFiL3_uJr-ebe00zp0IP727ZmuA/s500/Merril2nd.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="374" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj29AgpGjEMeU01s7XfUSp8DAQ32V9keSOzib2B2xJt6lUKCe2JNwxpWQBE9TIolq1vI77rNGRHWlAYozwFrfVkRba1seixkzeHZVV-AQS3FJzCBnytSmVS3wMQrjViOq_webcIz4yv14wThMTzdoNGv8WKPmsm_uMZFiL3_uJr-ebe00zp0IP727ZmuA/s16000/Merril2nd.jpg" /></a></div><p></p><p>Like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X78SDl8vnjU">Johnny Thunder</a>, we are stuck in the 1950s. Let's read some more 1956 stories recommended by Judith Merril, this time by authors whose names start with the letter "R." <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-sf-stories-arthur.html">Last time</a> we did this we had to slog through some overly long stories deploring human greed written by people whose names begin with the letter "P," but maybe today will be our day.</p><p><b>"The Executioner"</b> by Frank Riley </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlr8juLV7GETsIz8esIbnanrcanCbdDEhUtjeVDe_wrFvhi_UuYQ5iNgNdXwQzIAKxcRYlBBq4CD57oGqwIXWtM6KQFQ_54CBkL1lTCp82X60IZ_tFCQ54RNB7MSej7iVIVJ2Mw33ZkdYn8jz9TCN9qY1Hlw2ZOgS6EatV7ZHHZdF16haM6XVvbftwm3U/s508/WOFIFAPR1956.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="508" data-original-width="350" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlr8juLV7GETsIz8esIbnanrcanCbdDEhUtjeVDe_wrFvhi_UuYQ5iNgNdXwQzIAKxcRYlBBq4CD57oGqwIXWtM6KQFQ_54CBkL1lTCp82X60IZ_tFCQ54RNB7MSej7iVIVJ2Mw33ZkdYn8jz9TCN9qY1Hlw2ZOgS6EatV7ZHHZdF16haM6XVvbftwm3U/w275-h400/WOFIFAPR1956.jpg" width="275" /></a></div>Riley has eight short fiction credits at isfdb, and was co-author with Mark Clifton of the Hugo-winning novel <i>They'd Rather Be Right</i>, which I haven't read but which I hear the conventional wisdom has decreed is not very good. Riley's main work seems to have been as an L.A.-based journalist; he also wrote detective stories. It looks like nobody saw fit to reprint "The Executioner" after its debut in <i>If</i>, so maybe Judith Merril is this story's biggest fan. <p></p><p>(Though the story is not named on the cover, the Kelly Freas painting on the cover of this issue of <i>If</i> illustrates "The Executioner," the jewelry, lace, fingernail paint and absurdly elaborate hairstyle of the main character bringing to life the story's theme that a utopian life is going to feminize men. </p><p>It is the 22nd century, the future of air cars and pushbutton jobs, a neofeudal future complete with lords and ladies and public executions in the form of gladiatorial pistol duels in the arena. Life is so easy and boring in this high-tech low-work world that the execution duels are essential to maintaining public order by providing a safety valve for the masses' natural desires for excitement and cathartic violence.</p><p>The Lord High Executioner, Sir Jacques de Carougne, has twenty years of gunning down convicted felons in the arena behind him, but it hasn't always been smooth sailing--for one thing, he has an inhibition about shooting women and will often get an understudy to fight malefactors who lack a Y chromosome. Today he gets some bad news--the convicted felon he is supposed to duel is a woman, and not just any woman--it's Lady Ann of Coberly, the woman he was in love with before he started his execution career, the sole woman he has ever loved over the course of a life of having sex with dozens of executioner groupies! And Jacques isn't given enough time to get somebody to fill in for him! </p><p>Before the actual execution, the high court, installed on a moving dais in the center of the arena in full view of the crowd, has to vote on whether to veto the convicted's sentence. Ann takes this opportunity to give a speech saying that the men of her day are not men at all! (The text implies that 22nd century men have lost the ability to sexually satisfy women.) </p><p>Ann having been denied a stay of execution, Ann and Jacques face each other in the arena. Ann is smart, brave, and a good shot, and proves to Jacques that she could kill him and save her own life, but instead she misses on purpose, giving Jacques a chance to prove that he is the only true man left in the world--will he gun her down or spare her? What would a real man do?</p><p>This is a pretty good story; the writing is good, and it forces the reader to try to figure out what Ann considers a true man to be, and consider whether or not he agrees with her. We see the utopia-will-suck theme a lot, but I actually like that theme so I don't mind it the way I mind the tired themes that got on my nerves in our last episode. When it comes to "The Executioner" I'm right there with Merril--thumbs up!</p><p><b>"Project Hi-Psi"</b> by Frank Riley</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRmMNBpEE_Er09Kcl7qmMC9bERnwepaCYbt7WXg3cw3sw1lnFfENz9ZFXcGgMbcnd7WdhzX63tAJb06YSROsfJO7BgLU_nEBrrQ-Fo7gH_xCvE6aYBBreB7w0LuDe_HPvFPy-arRw4NgYvLm-OmoV-bAO2OoThWWkExbnqqZO6UdC2ZjREEKzpGkVRErk/s411/WOFIFAUG1956.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="411" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRmMNBpEE_Er09Kcl7qmMC9bERnwepaCYbt7WXg3cw3sw1lnFfENz9ZFXcGgMbcnd7WdhzX63tAJb06YSROsfJO7BgLU_nEBrrQ-Fo7gH_xCvE6aYBBreB7w0LuDe_HPvFPy-arRw4NgYvLm-OmoV-bAO2OoThWWkExbnqqZO6UdC2ZjREEKzpGkVRErk/s320/WOFIFAUG1956.jpg" width="234" /></a></div>That's right, Merril chose two stories by Riley for her list of honorable mentions, and this one also appeared in <i>If</i>. Like "The Executioner," it looks like "Project Hi-Psi" was forgotten by everybody with clout who wasn't born Judith Josephine Grossman after its publication in 1956, but if it is as good as "The Executioner" I will join Merril in championing it!<p></p><p>The early sections of "Project Hi-Psi" have a jocular tone, and our main character, Dr. Lucifer Brill, professor of Parapsychology at a university in California, son of a New England minister and descendant of Puritans, is an eccentric character. He has eccentric clothes, eccentric facial hair, eccentric pets, etc. This stuff isn't exactly funny, but fortunately for us readers it isn't annoying, either. (And it is interesting to see an author leveraging what he perceives to be readers' expectations and opinions of New Englanders--we saw Robert E. Howard do this recently in his famous horror story <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/01/weird-tales-may-1938-robert-e-howard.html">"Pigeons from Hell."</a>)</p><p>With the help of his fellow researchers into ESP and PK around the country, Brill has been compiling a comprehensive list of peeps in the USA who took <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zener_cards">Zener card</a> (Riley calls them "Rhine card") tests and following up on them. He stumbled upon an astonishing fact--over the last eight years over 3000 people who did well on the tests (suggesting they had psychic powers) have disappeared! We learn all this in expository dialogue as Brill meets with the head of the FBI office in L.A.</p><p>The federal government does some investigating, but it is Brill who puts his own life on the line to find out the truth. He spreads the rumor that he himself has taken a Zener card test and got a great score, and gets himself kidnapped like those 3000+ missing psykers.</p><p>Brill wakes up to find himself on an alien planet, an outpost of the space empire of the Capellans, where he and the 3000+ are subjected to long term experiments, including selective breeding experiments, by the aliens. The set up is a little like that TV show <i>The Prisoner</i>, where everybody has nice little quarters in a pleasant environment but you can't escape and you have to attend classes and you get manipulated and so forth. Brill does what investigating he can, and the fact that Brill actually doesn't have any psychic powers adds additional tension to the story--what will the aliens do when they realize he is a dud? </p><p>Brill is paired with a woman with psychic powers, and he is manipulated into impregnating her. (As with Ann in "The Executioner," this woman, Nina, offers her theory on what constitutes a real man and judgment of whether our main character is one.) Brill, as a scientist, has convos with the aliens about scientific methods, which are an opportunity for Riley to discuss some criticisms of the scientific establishment. One of Riley's themes is the way specialization retards progress, the way researchers in individual disciplines and fields will ensconce themselves in "cubicles" and fail to accept insights from other fields (when I knew scientists, well, "scientists," seeing as they were profs and students in the political science department, they would sometimes talk about getting out of their "silos" and going "interdisciplinary," and we also have the example of the guy in the novel version of A. E. van Vogt's <i>Voyage of the Space Beagle</i>, who synthesizes knowledge drawn from all fields of science.) Another of Riley's themes is how the followers of innovators like Freud and Einstein, instead of innovating themselves, will stifle innovation by defending an orthodoxy based on a rigid version of their heroes' ideas. </p><p>The aliens explain that psi powers were relatively common in Earth's medieval period, but the ideology of the industrial era stifled their development--those with psychic abilities hid them and refused to develop them, and the human race's psychic potential atrophied. The aliens' society followed a similar path, and the small cadre of Capellans at this outpost are trying to jump start a revival of psychic powers, which they feel will open up new vistas of learning and experience. They want Brill, whose career proves he is as passionate about psychic powers as are they, to work with them, and offer him facilities with a thousand times more potential than those Brill had back in Cali. And there are no restrictions on what methods they can employ--as Brill sees when he learns that one of the aliens' lines of research is to subject people to radical gene editing and extreme radiation experiments that produce mutants, many with psychic powers, but almost all of whom are wretched and pathetic monsters, hideous misshapen freaks (Virgil Finlay illustrates some of these sad beings on the title page of the story.)</p><p>Will Brill work with the ruthless and amoral aliens who can give him a chance to make strides in knowledge about which he could only dream back on Earth? His decision is complicated by the fact that among the 3000+ is a secret underground of Earthers, many of them war veterans who know how to lead, fight and sneak around, who have figured out how to disable the aliens' surveillance and security apparatus and aim to try to take over the facility--they certainly don't want to continue to be the guinea pigs of the aliens, and would perhaps prefer to die fighting. Which side will Brill, who has skills and knowledge that would be of great value to both the alien scientists and to the human freedom fighters, join?</p><p>After some plot twists, character developments and action scenes we get our sense of wonder ending-- the course of galactic history is changed and the human race stands on the precipice of a future of infinite challenge and opportunity.</p><p>"Project Hi-Psi" is a good story with many elements familiar to van Vogt fans--the expanding mental powers that lead to a radical paradigm shift, the competing secret groups, the sense of wonder ending--but Riley's writing is more clear than Van's and he is better at depicting personalities and relationships. I also like that Riley addresses the tension between the goals of progress and freedom. Thumbs up for "Project Hi-Psi;" in introducing us to Riley, Merril has steered us on a profitable course. </p><p><b>"Sim"</b> by Jack Ritchie</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi23iMYDGKW8i_uGVyFBdwmOv8HQDw5icnP6lh8xtegMeEossAcIGbaeGmU-1rwhtTVi3Ag02aoLmOzrbCYXUiFk2ykYWgawPJzOG5IHQweMiTkInM3RXiLpEEZtJCh0lBJ8KAqfiAKel-YPRfbCfhS_edcle4b7yZ_EAWiISd70FXTetl-2WLBz6K69G8/s1600/s-l1600.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1273" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi23iMYDGKW8i_uGVyFBdwmOv8HQDw5icnP6lh8xtegMeEossAcIGbaeGmU-1rwhtTVi3Ag02aoLmOzrbCYXUiFk2ykYWgawPJzOG5IHQweMiTkInM3RXiLpEEZtJCh0lBJ8KAqfiAKel-YPRfbCfhS_edcle4b7yZ_EAWiISd70FXTetl-2WLBz6K69G8/s320/s-l1600.jpg" width="255" /></a></div>Ritchie seems to be known not as a SF writer but a mystery writer, and while he has a decent-sized list of credits at isfdb, most of them seem to be stories that appeared in those anthologies with Alfred Hitchcock's name on them. "Sim" is not listed at isfdb, and first appeared in <i>Sir!</i>, which bears the subtitle "A Magazine for Males." At the internet archive there is a collection of what purports to be Ritchie's entire body of work, and it is there that I am reading a photocopy of the pages of <i>Sir!</i> that contain "Sim" as well as ads for pornographic cartoons, photos of women wrestling, a guide to how to win over women, and aphrodisiac perfume. <p></p><p>"Sim" is a competent filler story that is sort of like an episode of <i>The Twilight Zone</i>, the obvious foreshadowing and the obvious twist ending. The narrator visits his sister and brother-in-law after a long period of separation and meets their sons for the first time, a ten-year-old and an eight-month old. The ten-year-old talks about flying saucers and the narrator assures him no aliens will ever invade the Earth. The eight-month-old is some kind of super-strong genius, already able to walk with ease. They call him "Sim," short for "Simon." Sim loves to eat meat. </p><p>Two years later the narrator visits again. Sim is now like a teenager, brooding and sinister, and has weird yellow hair and yellow eyes. The narrator takes Sim to the zoo and realizes he has some mannerisms and physical attributes much like the lions! Sim even hints that "Sim" is in fact short for "Simba!" Then he notices some other weird-looking leonine kids hanging around. The narrator, now knowing too much, meets a grisly fate.</p><p>This story is merely acceptable. Presumably Merril recommended it as part of her project of rubbing out the already blurry boundaries between genres. </p><p>**********</p><p>I really enjoyed the Riley stories, and the Ritchie was not painful. So, a good start to the "R" leg of this journey through 1956. More 1956 "R"s next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log. </p>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-82089604521711681242024-02-21T01:37:00.000-05:002024-02-21T01:37:27.935-05:00Merril-approved 1956 SF stories: Arthur Porges and Robert Presslie <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp_LHX-WBXQ6TWngkwXNZmXDhA-5JTVN2jbqKgVL7kISnkvxGJyk7Jy5yUjiOyV89ygssYzR3Tk6s1eehsXtqn7K94PaTxjE0cprFjdt03WBczVQshqlnt9GJCr3_9R82NnODAQvyuwXmWBX-6dJiHEBlQhsspme-n1QVVZ8h3FEyzPsJtb3WJCHiZXXg/s373/Merril2ndfronttiny.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="373" data-original-width="249" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp_LHX-WBXQ6TWngkwXNZmXDhA-5JTVN2jbqKgVL7kISnkvxGJyk7Jy5yUjiOyV89ygssYzR3Tk6s1eehsXtqn7K94PaTxjE0cprFjdt03WBczVQshqlnt9GJCr3_9R82NnODAQvyuwXmWBX-6dJiHEBlQhsspme-n1QVVZ8h3FEyzPsJtb3WJCHiZXXg/w134-h200/Merril2ndfronttiny.jpg" width="134" /></a></div>You probably remember that the MPorcius Fiction Log staff is picking stories to read from the list headed HONORABLE MENTION at the back of Judith Merril's 1957 anthology <i>SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume</i>. These are stories printed in 1956 that Merril liked but which for whatever reason didn't end up among the 18 pieces actually reprinted in the book. The list is alphabetical by author, and we today look at the two P entries, "Masterpiece" by Arthur Porges and "The Creep" by Robert Presslie. If you wonder what A through O stories we've selected from Merril's list, click click click to your heart's content on the links below.<p></p><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-robert.html" style="text-align: center;">Abernathy and Aldiss</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-p-anderson.html" style="text-align: center;">Anderson, Allen and Banks<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-j-barrow-c.html">Barrow, Beaumont and Blish<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/meril-approved-1956-stories-bradbury.html">Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler</a> <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-carter.html">Carter, Clarke and Clifton</a> <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-clingerman.html">Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-de-camp.html">de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle</a> <br /><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/05/merril-approved-1956-stories-harlan.html">Ellison and Fontenay<br /></a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/06/merril-approved-1956-stories-galouye.html">Galouye, Garrett, Grimm & Gunn</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/07/merril-approved-1956-sf-stories-by-r.html">Hart, Herbert and Jones</a> </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/10/merril-approved-1956-stories-kuttner.html">Kuttner & Moore, Lang, Leinster, L'Engle and McClintic</a></div></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-by-j.html">McConnell, McIntosh and Melchior</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-by-ward.html">Moore, Norse and Oliver</a></div><div><br /></div><div><b>"Masterpiece"</b> by Arthur Porges </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJGYP16YGL_eUK7gm5UICF8UBxeeX9YFjzvk180aZPEJe7k_hEtgtBI60fWvKXARao3L-hQooAXyk8PFGFV_5eSjBNRUwNBt6jw1PvqZ_rfnq527wcPx1Vte9PSrsvPdmwEwXt-mjsc3uoruh61EdUMS77XyffIWKhWdQ_FZJCHJFb9gkKjxI1b6DUyl4/s3298/EscapadeMagazineSept1956D.D.TeoliJr.A.C.1_0000.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3298" data-original-width="2423" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJGYP16YGL_eUK7gm5UICF8UBxeeX9YFjzvk180aZPEJe7k_hEtgtBI60fWvKXARao3L-hQooAXyk8PFGFV_5eSjBNRUwNBt6jw1PvqZ_rfnq527wcPx1Vte9PSrsvPdmwEwXt-mjsc3uoruh61EdUMS77XyffIWKhWdQ_FZJCHJFb9gkKjxI1b6DUyl4/s320/EscapadeMagazineSept1956D.D.TeoliJr.A.C.1_0000.jpg" width="235" /></a></div>"Masterpiece" debuted in the hubba hubba men's magazine <i>Escapade</i> alongside pictures of topless ladies and full-page cartoons that slyly hint at bestiality, pedophilia, incest and white slavery. (There is also a sort of Easter Egg, a little photo of Bettie Page's face.) One of Merril's projects is to question the boundaries between genre and mainstream fiction and the distinctions between genres, and "Masterpiece" is not listed at isfdb, suggesting that few people recognized "Masterpiece" as SF, or at least SF notable enough to reprint in some anthology or collection. Well, let's surf on over to the scan of the September 1956 issue of <i>Escapade</i> at the internet archive, world's greatest website, flip past the report on fall fashion, the wine quiz, the profile of a pre-Ginger Tina Louise, and the "blow-by-blow account of what goes on" at a progressive jazz recording session, and read "Masterpiece" and then take a guess as to why Merril recommended it.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Masterpiece" is mediocre filler, but I guess, as a satire of advertising and people's greed and acquisitiveness, it appealed to Merril's leftist sensibilities. </div><div><br /></div><div>One of America's top ad men (he makes $80,000 a year) comes to a dive bar and talks to the the bar tender and the overweight blonde hanging around at the bar, telling them about some of his most successful publicity stunts, like painting a slogan promoting cigarettes in colossal print on the White Cliffs of Dover. The climax of the story is that he has arranged to have an advertising slogan written on the moon, the same gag we see in Robert Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" and in Arthur C. Clarke's<a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/f-feb-57-clarke-brown-anderson-derleth.html"> "Watch This Space."</a> </div><div><br /></div><div>The text of the story is overly long, adding in multiple little sub plots in which people reveal their avarice. And then there is the fact that the ad text is so long the letters of which it would be composed would be impossible to read with the naked eye (Clarke had just eight characters reproduced on the moon in his story, and one of Heinlein's ideas was that the commies might reproduce the hammer and sickle log up there.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Barely acceptable.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>"The Creep" </b>by Robert Presslie </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0RxBHp9nI_aAeVEXAdRXdd5kWQ4h6K_uByjefmX8PbUhpVCf6Beur7HHPbUPdBhHc_-MM2frL01DuOq10w8Cnz7fWc0YEFsmpxCqwJDP733nIuZdvtEwMvxc76zNnkatW_LjsAFEFJMcfCqhCWakwKdhsJLhdxUlODbkRJzf-RYJyfDQAbxV3lb7xQ10/s500/AUT_0065.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="329" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0RxBHp9nI_aAeVEXAdRXdd5kWQ4h6K_uByjefmX8PbUhpVCf6Beur7HHPbUPdBhHc_-MM2frL01DuOq10w8Cnz7fWc0YEFsmpxCqwJDP733nIuZdvtEwMvxc76zNnkatW_LjsAFEFJMcfCqhCWakwKdhsJLhdxUlODbkRJzf-RYJyfDQAbxV3lb7xQ10/w264-h400/AUT_0065.jpg" width="264" /></a></div>It looks like "The Creep" was serialized over two issues of <i>Authentic Science Fiction Monthly</i> and then never reprinted. It is pretty long--over 60 pages--so let's hope it is good.</div><div><br /></div><div>"The Creep" is about how the capitalists have been lying to the public in order to manipulate the stock market but a lone hero, a journalist, was willing to tell the people the truth, only to find that the common people preferred to be lied to! These same capitalists are going to kill us all with their silly competition with the Reds, but luckily some space aliens come along to save us with the help of the journalist and a woman. Obviously this goop is right up the alley of a pinko like Judith Merril. </div><div><br /></div><div>Like some kind of crappy stage play, the first half of "The Creep" takes place in a single location, a bar, and has a small cast, each member of which represents a class of people. </div><div><br /></div><div>World famous journalist Sam Garnet is drowning his sorrows. Garnet was working for the TV news program owned by Grossen Electronics Industries but got fired today because he told the apocalyptic truth on his broadcast. For one thing, he predicted a nuclear war in the next few days. (The story never uses specific place names or political identifiers like "USSR" or "the West" or "communist," just allusions, like "our side" and "the other side.") For another, he revealed that one of Grossen's consumer products, the Creepmeter that measures radiation, is calibrated to underreport how much the radiation of Western and Soviet weapons testing (people call this radiation "the Creep") is poisoning the environment, hiding from the people the fact that even if the impending nuclear war is averted then most people are going to die in a few days anyway from radiation sickness. And finally, Sam exposed on air the fact that the spheres that recently appeared in Earth orbit are not new Western defense satellites, as the Grossen suits want him to say, but vessels of totally unknown, presumably extraterrestrial, origin! A woman in the bar in fancy clothes some man bought her, Lena, expresses her anger at Sam for disabusing everybody of their illusions, of puncturing their blissful ignorance.</div><div><br /></div><div>Presslie pads the length of his childishly tendentious story with lots of filler text about people drinking booze and smoking cigarettes and so on; I don't know, maybe he thinks that builds tension. When the bar's roof caves in, presumably from a bomb blast as the nuclear war starts, we get detailed descriptions of everybody's physical injuries and psychological symptoms, and then we get Presslie's idea of a suspense scene, a blow-by-blow account of the lifting of a beam off the body of a fallen man that lasts an entire page; sample text below:</div><div><blockquote style="font-style: italic;">With the shifting of the beam his grip was now all wrong. One arm was bent more than the other. Max slid his left knee further forward until it pressed beneath his lowermost hand. He sucked in an enormous gulp of air....</blockquote><p>Sam is the truth telling member of the cognitive elite, I guess a stand in for SF readers who, of course, think they are smarter and better educated and more rational than everybody else. The man who gets killed by the beam represents the good members of the populace, the victim of the capitalist establishment's pursuit of profit. Lena represents the less savory aspects of the common masses (but don't worry, feminists, she'll redeem herself!) The owner of the bar turns out to be a communist spy, and represents the USSR and the revolutionary left, and to represent the capitalist bourgeoisie we have Max, a senior financier from Grossen Electronics, come to the bar try to get Sam to go on TV again to take back his predictions that everybody who isn't already in a deep bunker has like 48 hours to live. The pressure of being trapped in the ruined bar, which everybody is too scared to leave because its lead-lined walls are believed to be providing some protection against the Creep and the radiation from the bomb that (apparently) hit the town, leads to the bourgeois and the commie being exposed as just two sides of the same coin of selfishness and exploitative elitism (as opposed to Sam's and the space aliens' paternalistic elitism.) Both Max and the Red barkeep want to have sex with Lena in their last hours, and fight over her, and it is we readers who suffer through Presslie's tedious description of the hand-to-hand fight that ensues. The capitalist is the first to die, and then Sam helps Lena fight the commie, who is also killed.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZtQbzvw0Xbk7foHNEV6hOEKOxToC5krQ5iawlzUvZDKEyY55mJaNjV3OxN2dkIrJhJP6PcHnnCQYtIhDwcROMHJyHxJxiju9hEnMd4fXG1J3OHClBkjq1fnOpdGNu6GpwSH-yk1GsmJw7z2CW8skttJfh6HoqEqnJP5VvtRP2pMYnIopQXefxqFvuVOA/s500/AUT_0066.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="332" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZtQbzvw0Xbk7foHNEV6hOEKOxToC5krQ5iawlzUvZDKEyY55mJaNjV3OxN2dkIrJhJP6PcHnnCQYtIhDwcROMHJyHxJxiju9hEnMd4fXG1J3OHClBkjq1fnOpdGNu6GpwSH-yk1GsmJw7z2CW8skttJfh6HoqEqnJP5VvtRP2pMYnIopQXefxqFvuVOA/w265-h400/AUT_0066.jpg" width="265" /></a></div>The first episode of the serial thus ends with only two characters in the lead-shielded bar, Sam the journalist man and Lena, who under the influence of Sam instead of the capitalist or the Bolshevik starts to wisen up. </div><div><br /></div><div>The 31 pages of the second and final installment of this dreadful borefest starts with the observation that humans are like cats in that both species have a tenacious will to live. (SF people love cats.) Sam and Lena wake up when a space suited figure busts through the rubble blocking the entrance to the ruined bar. The figure collapses, and behind it Sam can see that one of the alien spheres has crashed across the street, flattening those buildings--it was this alien crash, not a Soviet bomb, that hit the neighborhood, and the man in the space suit is the only alien survivor of the crash. <p></p><p>It turns out that Sam and Lena are still alive because the crashed sphere is projecting a radiation-damping field that has neutralized the Creep within a radius of like 40 yards. We get a meticulous description of how Sam figures out how to get into the alien sphere; inside he finds the rest of the crew has died. Then he and Lena split up to search the radiation-free 80-yard diameter section of city for a medical professional who can keep the alien alive so he can explain how to extend that 80-yards to all of Earth and save the world from the pollution caused by the Cold War arms race. I could barely believe how much detail Presslie offered us readers in his description of the brass sign in front of the doctor's office, but I wasn't surprised by the play by play account of the surgery the doctor performed on the alien, a scene of five pages. (The doctor is a drunk who hasn't operated in years, but his contact with Sam and the alien revives him and redeems him, just like they are going to revive the entire human race!)</p><p>The alien recovers from open heart surgery in a few hours and then teaches Sam and Lena his language in thirty minutes--this is how efficient the alien language is! Even though Sam played the role of truth-loving bleeding-heart liberal earlier and Lena was a selfish deluded dope, for a few pages in the closing pages of the story they switch roles; Sam is skeptical, even hostile, to the alien, but Lena, who reveals she was a school teacher before she decided to live off rich men by exploiting her sex appeal, insists that to earn the alien's aid they must bare their souls to E.T. Explicitly comparing the alien to a parent and implicitly to a priest or god, she confesses the sins of the Earthman (sample sins: "greed for profit, greed for property, greed for territory, and the foulest greed of all--the desire to possess the very souls of other human beings...") to the alien, who agrees to clean the Earth of the radiation. It is implied that Sam and the alien will teach the human race how to behave in the future.</p><p>Bad! I am against these stories that offer goody goody aliens as foils for evil humanity, and I am against these stories that suggest the liberal West is no better than the Lenin and Stalin's Soviet Union. Even worse, this story is very slow and very boring, and is structured poorly, with the sudden switch from "we got bombed" to "it was really an alien crash landing" and the unbelievable evolutions of Sam's and Leda's characters being pretty annoying. Merril set a trap for us this time, and I fell right into it. </p><p>(I probably wouldn't have fallen into this spiked pit if I had remembered that I read a story by Presslie in 2018 and <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2018/08/1965-stories-by-keith-roberts-william.html">said it was tedious despite being full of weird sex, violence against women and body horror.</a> Having a bad memory sometimes leads to suffering!)</p><p>**********</p><p>Not a good batch of Merril-approved stories this time around, but no knowledge is wasted, and maybe by lifting up a rock and discovering these obscurities I have done a favor to all of you out there who are maintaining a list of anti-capitalist satires.</p></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-54554207218052976962024-02-20T13:03:00.000-05:002024-02-20T13:03:47.937-05:00Amazing Stories, July 1968: Edmond Hamilton, Milton Lesser and Paul Fairman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDZiAYyHDmuUnFFhvVOYE35PEIUdWGFMkQ8hFnT0DFPSW9ytTIl9YnEYEu_D6iDHKycjoqh9uUoFulu5D24XrpAT1yo6BRqkTmJPHlA5GGAIB0BM9aIhJutkOqFCCnlYWf-VjCPjMY9BHRZygWXylLy7DdDpz8ZXprm6KwseFGdFknoXPiOMOB2ucbigk/s572/amazing_stories_196807.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="572" data-original-width="400" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDZiAYyHDmuUnFFhvVOYE35PEIUdWGFMkQ8hFnT0DFPSW9ytTIl9YnEYEu_D6iDHKycjoqh9uUoFulu5D24XrpAT1yo6BRqkTmJPHlA5GGAIB0BM9aIhJutkOqFCCnlYWf-VjCPjMY9BHRZygWXylLy7DdDpz8ZXprm6KwseFGdFknoXPiOMOB2ucbigk/w280-h400/amazing_stories_196807.jpg" width="280" /></a></div>In our last episode we read a 1926 <i>Weird Tales</i> serial by Edmond Hamilton, "Across Space," and it came to our attention that in 2015 "Across Space" was reprinted in an Italian paperback omnibus along with another Hamilton tale, 1929's "Locked Worlds." "Locked Worlds" debuted in <i>Amazing Stories</i> <i>Quarterly</i> and was reprinted in <i>Amazing</i> <i>Stories</i> almost forty years later. Let's take a look at that 1968 issue of <i>Amazing</i>, an issue produced in the brief period when that magazine was edited by Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld fame.<div><br /></div><div>Despite Harrison's protests, publisher Sol Cohen's policy during this difficult time in <i>Amazing</i>'s long life was to devote most of <i>Amazing</i>'s page count to reprints of stories that had appeared earlier in the magazine (or its sister publication <i>Fantastic</i>) and it looks like this attitude extended even to the covers--the cover illo of this July 1968 issue is a mediocrity that had appeared first on <a href="https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/9/9f/NDSLRNNSNS1964.jpg">the cover of a German magazine</a> four years earlier! Is this the behavior of the "World's Leading Science-Fiction Magazine"? Sad!</div><div><br /></div><div>Harrison starts the issue off with an editorial about developments in the SF field that I confess I found to be a little vague and all over the place; he tackles many ideas and provides a minimum of supporting evidence (but throws in various personal notes) when I would have preferred he address a small number of ideas directly and clearly. Harrison suggests the avant garde of SF (he offers his drinking buddy J. G. Ballard as its exemplar) can be described as "subjective," in contrast to old-fashioned SF which is "objective." A subjective "new wave" story emphasizes not what the story is "objectively" about--what physically happens in the story--but rather what is going on in the "inner space" that is the minds of the story's characters, or the mind of the author writing the story. He argues that what such Ballard stories as "Terminal Beach" and "End-Game" are truly about is guilt.</div><div><br /></div><div>Harrison's editorial is not only descriptive, but proscriptive, and he warns against two trends in SF that he does not like: 1) the "vacuous" and "cliched" adventure story full of "standard props" like "blasters" and "starships" that has no plot other than violence and no meaning or wit; and 2) the overly complex or opaque story that uses experimental methods that inhibit rather than facilitate communication and whose writers import from literary fiction a snobbish "ivory tower" attitude.</div><div><i><blockquote>Look at the frightening example of James Ballard and see what can happen. His latest works are almost unreadable and incomprehensible, the direct opposite of his earlier magnificent efforts.</blockquote></i>I find these kind of controversial statements provocative and exciting, but their value--especially to those of us reading them 55 years later--is severely diminished by the fact that Harrison didn't offer examples of vacuous adventure stories full of violence and didn't specify which Ballard stories are allegedly "unreadable."</div><div><br /></div><div>More controversy is to be found in the book review column, in which Leroy Tanner attacks Algis Budrys, and in the letters column, in which Ted White attacks Tanner in response to Tanner's earlier attack on Roger Zelazny. (If you are looking in the pages of <i>Amazing</i> for some brotherly love, Poul Anderson gushes about an Isaac Asimov collection, <i>Asimov's Mysteries</i>. If you are looking for boredom, there is Brian Aldiss' two pages about a trip to Oslo--Aldiss met a bunch of fun and interesting guys in Norway, but doesn't tell us anything fun or interesting about them.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Alright, let's look at some of the fiction in this issue of <i>Amazing</i>. There is actually a new story, one by by "Samuel R. Delaney," a man better known as "Samuel R. Delany," but I think it is a portion of the novel <i>Nova</i>, a novel I read in the period before the birth of this blog and so I am passing it by. We'll turn our eye to three of the reprints: Hamilton's 1929 "Locked Worlds" and one story each by Milton Lesser and Paul Fairman first published in the 1950s. (Note that I am reading all three in their 1968 printings--this may have been a mistake, as I ran into quite a lot of typos.)</div><div><br /></div><div><b>"Locked Worlds"</b> by Edmond Hamilton (1929)</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkQn6mDB_AsRrfDs3z2m8uhCzUsxeescx5FvIqgVN-1Y06aGXXKH3ux_juC4bvFhchGZ4Zo4ZLm15ynV1981iqHqMl27tzSxGg5kaw45oe1kEJm43c_QwZi4WBuGgU9yMSkG-gcAdZb6qT-uEHvPFemGXzuFYi9uS6oLJsGwrHlH-QroekiyNS7mea2oE/s545/amazing_stories_quarterly_1929spr.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="545" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkQn6mDB_AsRrfDs3z2m8uhCzUsxeescx5FvIqgVN-1Y06aGXXKH3ux_juC4bvFhchGZ4Zo4ZLm15ynV1981iqHqMl27tzSxGg5kaw45oe1kEJm43c_QwZi4WBuGgU9yMSkG-gcAdZb6qT-uEHvPFemGXzuFYi9uS6oLJsGwrHlH-QroekiyNS7mea2oE/s320/amazing_stories_quarterly_1929spr.jpg" width="235" /></a></div>"Locked Worlds" is the account of Harker, an English professor employed by Northeastern University. As the story begins, the most famous academic at NEU is the 30-something physicist Adams, a man universally recognized by those in his field as a top innovator, an actual revolutionary, but unpopular for his bitter sarcastic tongue and arrogant nature. After explaining to us what atoms and electrons are, Harker describes the controversial theory put forward by Adams that sets the story's plot in motion in more ways than one. These long repetitive science lectures may have some readers longing for the "standard props" and violence that Harrison was complaining about in his editorial (such readers' patience will be rewarded.)</div><div><br /></div><div>In brief, Adams has discovered that the atoms in our universe all have two sets of electrons that move in opposite directions around the same nucleus and are dissimilar in number. This means (he says) that all the matter in our universe exists simultaneously in two different worlds that occupy the same space but are invisible to each other, and that atoms of one element in one world are a different element in the other world. If we can manipulate these electrons and reverse their courses we can travel between these two parallel worlds--the matter that is a person in this world can be sent to the other world, and in its place will appear in this world an equal number of atoms that are rocks or trees or whatever from the other world.</div><div><br /></div><div>The matter that is the scientists of this world find Adam's theory, known colloquially as the "interlocking atoms" theory, so ludicrous that Adams' formerly high reputation is dashed and he becomes the target of ridicule, so much so that his position as head of the NEU physics dept is threatened. Adams then disappears, leaving behind a cryptic note. Weeks later, Adams' assistant Rawlins, the narrator's friend, reveals that he has been examining the apparatus found in Adams' lab and believes Adams transposed himself into the parallel world described in his theory...and probably is planning to inflict a monstrous vengeance on this world whose inhabitants ridiculed him! Newspaper stories about people in remote areas like Iowa and Suriname reporting the disappearance of geographical features and the appearance in their place of some never-before-seen soil add meat to Rawlins' suspicions. Rawlins and Harker decide they must follow Adams into that parallel world in order to stop him from launching some kind of attack on our own.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Locked Worlds" is like 48 pages long, and after a dozen pages of all that sciency background stuff we get to the adventure portion as R & H find themselves in a world of mobile vegetation grazing low-nutrient blue soil under a blinding blue white sun, a world of spider people armed with disintegrator ray guns and anti-grav sleds that fly by managing the sleds' repulsion from and attraction to the planet's magnetic poles. The college professors don't get to explore on their own much, but are rather provided a tightly controlled guided tour by the spider men who immediately capture them and take them to a city of thousand-foot high conical buildings connected by a highway of cables so the city resembles a huge spider web. Adams the vengeful scientist has allied himself to the spider people, promised to transport them to Earth--a more fertile world than this infertile blue world--where they can conquer us. Adams has Rawlins imprisoned in the city's central building, intent on forcing him to act as his here as on Earth, assistant, and leaves Harker to the tender mercies of the spider people, who imprison him in a nearby tower, in the same cell as a bird man.</div><div><br /></div><div>This bird man, Nor-Kan, teaches Harker his speech, and schools him in the history of this world. The bird people built a high-tech civilization, but generations ago became lazy and so bred from mindless natural spiders a servant race of giant intelligent spider people to do all their work for them. In due course, the spider people overthrew their masters and took over most of the world--a small remnant of the bird people still holds out in a fortress on the south pole. (As did the slave race in that last Hamilton story we read, "Across Space," the spider people in "Locked Worlds" remind us of the shoggoths of Lovecraft's <i>At The Mountains of Madness</i> and are perhaps a warning against becoming reliant on machines and/or the labor of other ethnic groups that might have reason to resent you or ovet your position.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Nor-Kan and Harker escape their cell and climb up the side of the conical skyscraper in which is located the prison and then go hand over hand to the HQ building where are to be found Adams and Rawlins. While Harker frees Rawlins and makes an abortive effort to capture Adams, Nor-Kan retrieves the flying machine he was piloting when he got captured. The three barely escape after a bloody fight and fly south to the bird city at the pole, narrowly evading pursuit by spider-creature aircraft.</div><div><br /></div><div>The bird-people are easily convinced to launch an attack on the spider-city where Adams is almost finished creating the machines to transport spider cities and spider armies to our Earth, because if the eight-legged fiends conquer Earth, they can just go to Earth's South Pole and Adams can transport them behind the impregnable walls of the bird-city. The last ten pages or so of "Locked Worlds" concern the bird attack on the spider capital, a long naval battle in the air between two air fleets of over a thousand vessels each that climaxes with a hand to hand struggle between Adams and Rawlins on the apex of a conical tower over the controls of a machine that will either transport the spider horde to our Earth or exterminate the entire spider race. After the two-legs-good, eight-legs-bad ending, Harker and Rawlins return to an Earth that has no idea how close it came to being conquered by ray gun wielding arachnids.</div><div><br /></div><div>Though it gets off to a slow start with its repetitive lectures about electrons, I'm giving "Locked Worlds" a grade of moderately good. It has many similarities to "Across Space," which I judged as simply acceptable, but has many advantages over that 1926 story. It has an interesting villain, for one thing, and he spider city is also better than the subterranean city of "Across Space"'s Martian colonists. I enjoyed the long sequence covering the escape from the prison and then the aerial chase to the polar city, as well as all the different fun types of high-tech artillery and defense measures with which Hamilton armed the two alien war fleets. </div><div><br /></div><div>Like "Across Space," "Locked Worlds" would be reprinted by Haffner Press and by the Italian publisher Edizioni Della Vigna in our own 21st century.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6SiKbXlcWP2K3AISZgHfICX5KqEiGjqQX7B960F_zVRKcn9QkTvEtI3XGXQxjbwVPpnbpKg9102-G_Ei7iRcK7JsyK_EXyzQubLTtSx4jaZheZsUw6L1T81cnEvDApVs_EvVq3LYx7Z2Mk06bxC9_rjjiAmEOdOkoUpnzq6-XJtCOphMOup3wAI5eydY/s500/thisaintrockandroll.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="363" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6SiKbXlcWP2K3AISZgHfICX5KqEiGjqQX7B960F_zVRKcn9QkTvEtI3XGXQxjbwVPpnbpKg9102-G_Ei7iRcK7JsyK_EXyzQubLTtSx4jaZheZsUw6L1T81cnEvDApVs_EvVq3LYx7Z2Mk06bxC9_rjjiAmEOdOkoUpnzq6-XJtCOphMOup3wAI5eydY/s16000/thisaintrockandroll.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><b>"The Impossible Weapon"</b> by Milton Lesser (1952)</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUYal8JFW7KlmQ9kQs3AHXNEcyBB2LK24WIh7Z1-wF2snbXNSu_wO0MIu15P4uMJrZAOVNjVj65KfRA0M7pXuvwQgWL1PPb3Dndj6ps6FHyyYvOD7gdJdIFmBVq3ApUNVt_aPQhxvbfIA2hW7SqDAL8M26dSNWq_47SFSHzGOrhhPckArwaabdzsM_-Eo/s568/amazing_stories_195201.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="568" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUYal8JFW7KlmQ9kQs3AHXNEcyBB2LK24WIh7Z1-wF2snbXNSu_wO0MIu15P4uMJrZAOVNjVj65KfRA0M7pXuvwQgWL1PPb3Dndj6ps6FHyyYvOD7gdJdIFmBVq3ApUNVt_aPQhxvbfIA2hW7SqDAL8M26dSNWq_47SFSHzGOrhhPckArwaabdzsM_-Eo/s320/amazing_stories_195201.jpg" width="225" /></a></div>It looks like we've covered four short stories by Lesser on ye olde blogge, <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2014/05/three-1950s-novelets-de-camp-anderson.html">"'A' as in Android,"</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2015/08/april-1956-stories-by-edmond-hamilton.html">"The Graveyard of Space,"</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2017/08/way-out-stories-from-early-1950s-by.html">"Ennui,"</a> and <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/09/imagination-december-1950-john-wyndham.html">"It's Raining Frogs!"</a>; I read his fix-up novel <i>Secret of the Black Planet</i> before I started this blog. According to my notes I thought <i>Secret of the Black Planet</i> "bland and forgettable" and the links above attest to the fact that I was not terribly enthusiastic about those four stories, but maybe this one, "The Impossible Weapon" will be more exciting. Hope springs eternal, people.</div><div><br /></div><div>The writing style Lesser employs for "The Impossible Weapon" reminded me of that we find in hard-boiled or noirish detective fiction, bitterly, cynically jokey in a way that exposes human frailty. You science nerds don't have to worry, though--Lesser manages to integrate some science lectures about atoms and the behavior of light into his text. </div><div><br /></div><div>Earth is at war with the Venus-Mars-Ganymede League, a war which started with a nuclear sneak attack on this big blue marble of ours. Earth's fleet was defeating the enemy fleet when the Leaguers whipped out a new weapon, one that could penetrate any Earth forcefield. Now that Earth's ships and surface are defenseless, it looks like we may have to sue for peace with the villains of the League.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPmcUB5_HIp4Q8L21HIEZCS7vgFHk-ulfi6wTXRBvhN8aih8ep18Ok12a1f0y74HBuzYa5HBbNIg_kw0VVOD9StvuQ1sUeyq6gEwIwIazM6Slii488OX6I8PIYHjeHkQNz9W2R-VHfcupNOU1UFOsIVZjVam3Zt-K3rHGDim6fP4troOrDCXkp0Rsv-_E/s500/1612871283.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="328" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPmcUB5_HIp4Q8L21HIEZCS7vgFHk-ulfi6wTXRBvhN8aih8ep18Ok12a1f0y74HBuzYa5HBbNIg_kw0VVOD9StvuQ1sUeyq6gEwIwIazM6Slii488OX6I8PIYHjeHkQNz9W2R-VHfcupNOU1UFOsIVZjVam3Zt-K3rHGDim6fP4troOrDCXkp0Rsv-_E/s320/1612871283.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>Stanley Stokes is a "quantum technician," and he thinks he knows how to nullify the League's new weapon. His fiancé is the daughter of the United Nations' Assistant Secretary of Defense Weapons, Spatial Division, and he gets an interview with this bureaucrat, but the paper pusher considers Stokes' idea to be crazy. When Stokes gets drunk and complains about her father to his fiancé, she calls off their engagement. </div><div><br /></div><div>Stokes goes to a bar frequented by spacemen, meets a big hulking brute of a spacer, a guy who fights in bar brawls on the regular and even rumbles with the cops. This veteran sailor of the void between the planets, O'Hanrohan (of course this dude is Irish), wants to take the fight to the League, and so is willing to join forces with Stokes in a desperate effort to illegally acquire a space ship and the necessary supplies to test Stokes' theory out beyond Earth orbit, in the teeth of the enemy. Our heroes hold off the police, get their stolen ship into orbit, and prove that Stokes has developed a way to counteract the League ray weapon, making them heroes and getting Stokes' girl to agree to marry him after all.</div><div><br /></div><div>A little slight, but a fun story; Lesser's jokes actually work, and the humor and the science lectures don't overwhelm or distract from the plot but actually support it. Thumbs up for "The Impossible Weapon." Besides in its two appearances in <i>Amazing</i>, you can find "The Impossible Weapon" in the 2013 collection <i>'A' as in Android.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b>"This is My Son"</b> by Paul W. Fairman (1955)</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK5W1PWLSNw3MFd4nLVQxSbWo0FXvzsrHGplKFknW4SKfa2ljUZ_rw9DDaSB0aIiiuZoWDAImM1u4Wh7HdZeLITlTIGIAAaX_vfi2PQG-TuCpSadAWtSD6JrtzJTB6KUYSQzfNeP1pypG8d2u4Jvcte1N7RzgiZcLFQN6Xr_tR48a0i5mok-pYgDa88s4/s547/fantastic_195510.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="547" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK5W1PWLSNw3MFd4nLVQxSbWo0FXvzsrHGplKFknW4SKfa2ljUZ_rw9DDaSB0aIiiuZoWDAImM1u4Wh7HdZeLITlTIGIAAaX_vfi2PQG-TuCpSadAWtSD6JrtzJTB6KUYSQzfNeP1pypG8d2u4Jvcte1N7RzgiZcLFQN6Xr_tR48a0i5mok-pYgDa88s4/s320/fantastic_195510.jpg" width="234" /></a></div>I have little familiarity with Fairman's work; looking at the regular sources on line (isfdb, wikipedia, the internet archive) it seems Fairman was a prolific writer who had his hand in many genres, including science fiction, westerns, detective stories, novelizations of TV sitcoms I have never seen like <i>Bridget Loves Bernie</i> and <i>That Girl </i>and even soft core porn spoofs--isfdb credits Fairman with five titles in the series <i>The Man from S.T.U.D.</i>; two sample titles: <i>The Orgy at Madam Dracula's</i> and <i>Rape is a No-No. </i>Much of Fairman's work appeared under pen names, including the only thing I think I have read by him, the novel <i><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2018/01/whom-gods-would-slay-by-ivar-jorgensen.html">Whom the Gods Would Slay</a></i> which debuted in <i>Amazing</i> and would be published as a paperback with a Jeff Jones cover. I liked <i>Whom the Gods Would Slay</i> so maybe I'll like "This is My Son," which debuted in <i>Fantastic</i>, as well. </div><div><br /></div><div>It is the 2030s. John Temple is a young American physicist working on a major contract down in Latin America--this super duper important job requires that he spend six continuous years on the job site and not return home to the USA even once. He can talk to his wife and kid on the video phone, but that doesn't seem like enough, and again and again his colleagues have to talk him out of breaking the contract and rushing back to his family and thus ruining his career.</div><div><br /></div><div>Temple, as a college student and early post-grad, wanted more than anything to have a son. After marrying an attractive woman, Jill, he was very disappointed to find the two of them couldn't seem to have a child, even after two years of trying. When the Latin American opportunity came up--a six-year job which would yield enough money on completion of the contract to set them up for life--he only took it because he had no child--if he'd had a child he would have been unable to part from it. Poor Jill realized this and was broken-hearted because she loved her husband for himself, and it was now clear he primarily saw her as a potential mother.</div><div><br /></div><div>Amazingly, only a few months after he has arrived in South America, Jill tells Temple she is pregnant. It is a hard six years, but eventually Temple gets back home to live with his family. Everybody is happy until by chance Temple learns the truth--John, Jr. is not his biological son! Wanting Temple to love her, Jill purchased a bespoke artificial baby--an android--designed and conceived in a lab and has been passing it off as their natural son! Temple calls the kid a monster to his innocent little face and John and Jill immediately separate. For years Temple lives a life of gambling and womanizing, all the while sending to his estranged family all the money they might need. Then one day he sees in the paper that his son at private school has been severely injured while rescuing his classmates during a fire. John, Jr. is a hero, hovering on the brink of death! Temple rushes to the hospital and gives his son a blood transfusion, so that, in a way, he becomes his true flesh and blood, and we are led to believe that John, Jill, and John, Jr. will live together happily ever after.</div><div><br /></div><div>A pleasant little human interest story that explores how new technology might affect family life; we might even call this a pro-diversity story that argues that there are all different kinds of families and the traditional way of creating a family is no better than other less typical ways. Naysayers might argue this is not really a SF story, but a redecorated mainstream story about adoption, the way those same naysayers will tell you space operas and planetary romances and Jack Vance's revenge drama <i>The Demon Princes</i> are just redecorated westerns or detective stories or adventure tales about Western adventurers in the mysterious East. These analyses are appropriate, but do nothing to detract from a story's literary or entertainment value, and do not stop me from giving "This is My Son" a thumbs up.</div><div><br /></div><div>I like it, but it seems that after its second appearance here in <i>Amazing</i> that "This is My Son" has never been reprinted.</div><div><br /></div><div>**********</div><div><br /></div><div>It is understandable that members of the SF community in 1968, especially professionals like Harry Harrison, would want to read or work for a magazine that printed brand new stories and not a bunch of reprints. But the three reprints we read today are pretty good! The Hamilton and Lesser stories are solid classic SF about scientists who invent paradigm-shifting devices and get mixed up in wars in which people discharge a dizzying array of energy weapons at each other. And the Fairman actually has mainstream literary elements like those we expect a New Wave "inner space" story to have--it is about the psychology and relationships of three people, and about how new technology shifts paradigms not in the realms of war or transportation, but the world of the family. To me, this seems like a pretty rewarding issue of <i>Amazing</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>More 1950s SF in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgul6s5Q_Si66u5uY_-exhJgwbQswADvuw4VpWdr0qPJX_-0Imqphbx4ZczlpydkvTi0NiOnIv4NR7-KV7zhBC0wUDs9T9UM6sCISYEGaYPjv4DIJoOy_aCKtCpoZZyrdOXXXetOLkYAiY84YQkd9qU8j9c23wVOWbLpPKhpu7EERRHPWBQBgx3bmmByZs/s500/amazing500.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="133" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgul6s5Q_Si66u5uY_-exhJgwbQswADvuw4VpWdr0qPJX_-0Imqphbx4ZczlpydkvTi0NiOnIv4NR7-KV7zhBC0wUDs9T9UM6sCISYEGaYPjv4DIJoOy_aCKtCpoZZyrdOXXXetOLkYAiY84YQkd9qU8j9c23wVOWbLpPKhpu7EERRHPWBQBgx3bmmByZs/s16000/amazing500.png" /></a><span style="text-align: left;"> </span></div></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-33640142290870186692024-02-18T00:15:00.000-05:002024-02-18T00:15:43.265-05:00Across Space by Edmond Hamilton<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiLFo95mkrp8w5-e78r_01PTwRsjNpplvzFdGfIUHDzDGbiItWYxiD19kcIFgEHFzxwblhhYdIqlj0Lah4BZLtsX6_52U1QFC7XzK7QEZJ3F0nIWPHSJQZ_GHrQ0eYpBlx0e9tEsIaEzi3ct0qfOn7bxY9fsm_5iCY6KOsRU-r3gWbJoLh5ubJuejwwAw/s500/acrossspacewt.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="124" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiLFo95mkrp8w5-e78r_01PTwRsjNpplvzFdGfIUHDzDGbiItWYxiD19kcIFgEHFzxwblhhYdIqlj0Lah4BZLtsX6_52U1QFC7XzK7QEZJ3F0nIWPHSJQZ_GHrQ0eYpBlx0e9tEsIaEzi3ct0qfOn7bxY9fsm_5iCY6KOsRU-r3gWbJoLh5ubJuejwwAw/s16000/acrossspacewt.png" /></a></div><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>"They experimented upon me as on a guinea pig, turning different rays on arms and legs to observe their action. They would not kill me outright for I was too valuable a specimen. And God, how I prayed for death!"</i></blockquote><p></p><p>As you know, Bob, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have taken up a sacred quest--to read at least one story from each issue of the seminal speculative fiction magazine <i>Weird Tales</i> that was printed in the 1930s. And we have made some progress, as these links below attest:</p><p style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/06/weird-tales-project-1930.html">1930</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/07/weird-tales-project-1931.html">1931</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/07/weird-tales-project-1932.html">1932</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/11/weird-tales-project-1933.html">1933</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/11/weird-tales-project-1934.html">1934</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/12/weird-tales-project-1935.html">1935</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/10/weird-tales-project-1936.html">1936</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/10/weird-tales-project-1937.html">1937</a> </p><p style="text-align: left;">Of course, <i>Weird Tales</i> didn't begin publishing in the 1930s, but in the 1920s. Let's take a break from the '30s and embark on a brief trip to 1926 and read a serial from <i>Weird Tales</i> that appeared over three different issues behind three different women-in-peril covers, a serial penned by our pal Edmond Hamilton. <i>Weird Tales</i> is most famous for horror stories and sword and sorcery stories, but the Unique Magazine did offer readers some science fiction stories, like Hamilton's space opera <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2016/11/crashing-suns-star-stealers-and-within.html">"Crashing Suns"</a> and its sequels and Hamilton's post-apocalyptic tale <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2017/06/exile-day-of-judgement-and-whats-it.html">"Day of Judgement"</a>, stories full of mad scientists, space naval battles, aliens, mutants, and so on, and I'm guessing the topic of today's discussion, "Across Space," will be a science fiction tale of some type. Let's dig in and see!</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS0JqlzZXNRNtUx5Jh3soNFjlJe56WiX34_kXIeJuBotAPJUgXOFz0gzQTY4yUkntiLUhQd9WG2I_S05BMQz9QghGHmmcjcZpb6YG1u0CZGLZyTbn_OmFT6dpR5-XBL2CNoi_AEHctv-h0QJh33i_-sAlhoBLAQi7DUNTr6yBfs9wn7eWr61q99VNj7Fs/s1000/Weird%20Tales%20v08%20n03%20(1926-09)_0000.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="700" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS0JqlzZXNRNtUx5Jh3soNFjlJe56WiX34_kXIeJuBotAPJUgXOFz0gzQTY4yUkntiLUhQd9WG2I_S05BMQz9QghGHmmcjcZpb6YG1u0CZGLZyTbn_OmFT6dpR5-XBL2CNoi_AEHctv-h0QJh33i_-sAlhoBLAQi7DUNTr6yBfs9wn7eWr61q99VNj7Fs/s320/Weird%20Tales%20v08%20n03%20(1926-09)_0000.jpg" width="224" /></a></div>"Across Space" consists of 15 teeny little chapters, plus prologue and epilogue. The prologue describes a fat little astronomer in a mountain top observatory who is the first to notice that Mars has stopped orbiting the sun; he then goes home to eat some pie. This guy has a good perspective on life-work balance.<p></p><p style="text-align: left;">The story proper, we learn in Chapter 1, is a first-person narrative delivered by an assistant professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley. The first three chapters foreshadow (for example, the narrator has a dream of being tied to railroad tracks as a train bears down on him) and then announce the disaster Earth is in for--Mars is heading for Earth, certain to destroy us all! </p><p style="text-align: left;">Hamilton was a working writer who churned out copy in mass quantities to make a living, and as a result rehearsed the same themes and plots again and again. (H. P. Lovecraft, who saw himself as an artist, often complained that prolific writers like Hamilton and Jack Williamson were wasting or even ruining their talent via such practices. While Hamilton won the famous nickname of "World Wrecker Hamilton," in his correspondence Lovecraft would call Hamilton such things as "Hectograph Eddie" and "Single-Plot Hamilton.") And here in "Across Space" we see plot elements and themes we've seen in Hamilton's work before. Hamilton's space opera stories often entail intelligent agencies moving planets and stars around like so many ocean liners or aircraft carriers--see the aforementioned "Crashing Suns" tales as well as <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2017/05/four-stories-by-edmond-hamilton-from.html">"Thundering Worlds."</a> These space operas often also include a scene of torture, and "Across Space" includes just such a scene (see epigraph above.) Hamilton also provided <i>Weird Tales</i> readers a steady diet of stories in which all life on Earth is threatened, including <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/01/stories-from-january-1930-weird-tales.html">"The Life-Masters,"</a> <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-plant-revolt-death-lord-and-pigmy.html">"The Plant Revolt," "The Death Lord"</a> and <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/05/edmond-hamilton-murder-in-grave-house.html">"When the World Slept."</a></p><p style="text-align: left;">In Chapter 4 the narrator talks to a physicist who is a sort of mentor of his; this guy has pieced together clues derived from the newspaper, the behavior of his compass, and knowledge of his disappeared friend, and come up with the theory that the answer to this Mars disaster can be found on Easter Island! You see, the physicist's pal, an anthropologist, thought the statues on Easter Island were the work of a nonhuman race, and went to the island two years ago to investigate, only to disappear without trace. And just yesterday a ship reported that there was a volcanic eruption on Easter Island, which the physicist regards as unlikely. </p><p style="text-align: left;">In Chapter 5 the physicist and the chemist are on the U. S. Navy's most advanced bomber seaplane, flying to Easter Island in hopes of figuring out what is going on and saving the world! On the radio they listen to reports to how the common man is responding to knowledge that the world is about to be destroyed. He's not responding well! In India they are resorting to human sacrifice! In Africa the blacks are massacring the whites and each other! Chicago is in flames, and New York is one big party, the people having given themselves over to "unbridled license."</p><p style="text-align: left;">In Chapter 6 our heroes investigate Easter Island at night; what the sailors thought was a volcanic eruption is in fact a red beam of light a half-mile across that for a few minutes each night shoots up from the island's extinct volcano towards Mars--this must be what is drawing Mars to Earth! As the shaft of crimson energy glows, a sort of chanting can be heard from the volcano crater! In Chapter 7, twenty-four hours later, the chemist and physicist have scaled the volcano to get a closer look at the nightly fireworks, and are captured by skinny pale-skinned men with bat wings who carry them down into the volcano. This cliffhanger concludes the September installment of "Across Space."</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYWgUfIcXwAZ8bU_EAyN2OVH1p-JtmBbuXwSvDu_-VrGjgXDvefTMZsd3qK41Py9MvlW_uaxQFy8m31UmmzRlISmEGPhoXZIuBxHzU3ThHt4lb063u-bc1CfN1UtKpPMEeI0jvcTK6RJLu43hpM7ZlQUgCdr0fLKGzP5r-FAu8h2q2aIMDbxzOzlRRY7g/s609/weird_tales_192610.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="609" data-original-width="400" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYWgUfIcXwAZ8bU_EAyN2OVH1p-JtmBbuXwSvDu_-VrGjgXDvefTMZsd3qK41Py9MvlW_uaxQFy8m31UmmzRlISmEGPhoXZIuBxHzU3ThHt4lb063u-bc1CfN1UtKpPMEeI0jvcTK6RJLu43hpM7ZlQUgCdr0fLKGzP5r-FAu8h2q2aIMDbxzOzlRRY7g/w263-h400/weird_tales_192610.jpg" width="263" /></a></div>Chapters 8 through 13 grace the October issue. In chapters 8 and 9 we get a sort of travelogue as the two captive scientists are conducted down a huge elevator to a largely deserted subterranean city and put into a cell by the white bat-people, to be guarded by members of their slave race of slimy headless tentacle-armed beastmen. Already in the cell is the aforementioned MIA anthropologist, and in Chapters 10 through 12 this broken man, three of whose limbs the bat-fiends have burned off in their ray gun experiments, explains his torturers' origin (they are the descendants of Martian colonists who fled tyranny on a high-tech Mars when humans were mere apemen), history (they lived on a Pacific continent until it sank beneath the waves--only Easter Island, the mountain where they had erected statues of their kings, remained above the surface--and then retired to this city that they had built in a huge cavern) and current operations (over the centuries, life underground lead to low fertility, so now the colonists want to return to the surface, and have made friends with their brothers on Mars and figured out how to channel the Earth's magnetism and use it to draw Mars here so they will the necessary numbers to overwhelm us natives.) In his copious free time the anthropologist has been puzzling out a way to save the Earth, and Chapter 13 foreshadows the way the characters will pull our bacon out of the fire in the third and final installment in November.<p></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpKw9Smf9FHnJdrz04WcQGA4RjC_wc060TDPGkFoD_FihqBr7uAOR305N2xJM7xmp0h5lAjqX3ZThQiKdIgd-HzorrnzwUZ7OVadyRQRl1REdXf7mdKIYtWn_DWqp4hy-z0nrDPZbvLlr48GAz9kqq_2JmKEHoNeV5Wgzv9M62onrLfWnAHme-UaqLVDg/s610/weird_tales_192611.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="610" data-original-width="400" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpKw9Smf9FHnJdrz04WcQGA4RjC_wc060TDPGkFoD_FihqBr7uAOR305N2xJM7xmp0h5lAjqX3ZThQiKdIgd-HzorrnzwUZ7OVadyRQRl1REdXf7mdKIYtWn_DWqp4hy-z0nrDPZbvLlr48GAz9kqq_2JmKEHoNeV5Wgzv9M62onrLfWnAHme-UaqLVDg/w263-h400/weird_tales_192611.jpg" width="263" /></a></div>That November issue's chapters 14 and 15 deliver readers the tragedy and triumph of the story's climax. The Martian colonists' slave race are the products of what we might call genetic engineering--they are totally artificial life, almost mindless and controlled by telepathy, reminding us of the shoggoths of Lovecraft's 1931 <i>At The Mountains of Madness</i>. The anthropologist has over his months of captivity been experimenting with mentally influencing the slaves himself, and when all three men focus their thoughts on their guards they find themselves able to direct the slimy robotic creatures to set them free. The three scientists (the legless anthropologist has to be carried) sneak back through the empty city--all the Martians, save two guarding the ray projector, are attending services at their temple--to the surface and the magnetic ray control center. The one-armed anthropologist is killed in the fight, but our heroes take the control center. The physicist sends the chemist ahead, out of the volcano, ostensibly to get help from the pilot of the U. S. Navy bomber, and then he activates--at full power!--the green ray that pushes Mars away from Earth (the bat people were going to use this ray to slow the descent of Mars once it got close.) The bat-people come after him, but the physicist then activates both red and green rays--crossing the streams!--causing an explosion that kills him and every one of the Martian colonists. Earth is now Martian-free!<p></p><p style="text-align: left;">In the epilogue we learn that Mars is now a moon of Jupiter, and that there is a colossal statue of the physicist at the mouth of San Francisco Bay. One presumes that in the woke future, this statue, a monument to the man who committed genocide against the people of Mars in an act of human supremacy, will be torn down after the San Francisco city council has called for a retroactive ceasefire between Earth and Mars. This is your reminder to take time out to cherish any work of art you care about, because there is no telling when it will be unexpectedly destroyed. </p><p style="text-align: left;">"Across Space" is an acceptable entertainment spiced up with generous portions of speculative science and of gruesome horror. "Across Space" was reprinted in the first volume of Haffner Press's <i>The Collected Edmond Hamilton</i> in 2009 and in 2015 our Italian friends published it in a trade paperback with a lamentable cover along with Hamilton's 1929 story "Locked Worlds."</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsSRqYjlh6zhTGlD3V0lBwIRLsi44WS_XbGcoBjrxonGgmD-MnMYSltnOxv1kXOsldFB3n89OvUijYknbLl_lBHwQkZZYA5bP5mLRERAWq9htwwfrwDWkUORod797OYhDl2b3ABb7sPs8oSHXD3z7FSeCNjljbcHhemXdUntr6OzMYD9h_Vui26zVegVw/s500/thisaintrockandroll.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="363" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsSRqYjlh6zhTGlD3V0lBwIRLsi44WS_XbGcoBjrxonGgmD-MnMYSltnOxv1kXOsldFB3n89OvUijYknbLl_lBHwQkZZYA5bP5mLRERAWq9htwwfrwDWkUORod797OYhDl2b3ABb7sPs8oSHXD3z7FSeCNjljbcHhemXdUntr6OzMYD9h_Vui26zVegVw/s16000/thisaintrockandroll.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>**********</div><div><br /></div><div>Stick around for more Edmond Hamilton and more <i>Weird Tales</i> here at MPorcius Fiction Log.</div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-50002648530187271592024-02-16T10:36:00.000-05:002024-02-16T10:36:16.527-05:00Weird Tales, Aug 1938: H T Rich, M W Wellman and A Derleth<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmsII7ynkUgPW2mRjsDWXsylDstjAUqI7gIzBSaYUB-O9HGm4E5HRHNABMssd86htuGx9DjTL_D3mxpm-Tm0b1a3ltkVNus-oBz1HwX6jVMdgmfwA-Zn654iE-12ew2AyIvaxuUGYXCOhe9llSYV7dNDvFk0koUefsIRMAds873kp69F1JxCyhZ3IemeQ/s592/weird_tales_193808.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="592" data-original-width="400" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmsII7ynkUgPW2mRjsDWXsylDstjAUqI7gIzBSaYUB-O9HGm4E5HRHNABMssd86htuGx9DjTL_D3mxpm-Tm0b1a3ltkVNus-oBz1HwX6jVMdgmfwA-Zn654iE-12ew2AyIvaxuUGYXCOhe9llSYV7dNDvFk0koUefsIRMAds873kp69F1JxCyhZ3IemeQ/w270-h400/weird_tales_193808.jpg" width="270" /></a></div>Our exploration of 1930s <i>Weird Tales</i> slithers onwards. Today, the August 1938 issue. This number includes a reprint of a 1921 H. P. Lovecraft story we've already read, <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-tomb-tree-temple-moon-bog-and-hound.html">"The Tree,"</a> and installments of serials by Edmond Hamilton and Manly Wade Wellman we will probably read some day. Today we look into an included short story by Wellman that, unlike the serial, appears under his real name (the serial is credited to a pseudonym) and one by Lovecraft correspondent and co-founder of Arkham House August Derleth, But first, a story by H. Thompson Rich, a writer with whom we are not familiar who has 17 short story credits at isfdb; today's story, "Green Horror," seems to have come late in his writing career, being the second to last story listed. Rich, like Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, and your humble blogger, was born in New Jersey, but let's not hold that against him.<p></p><p><b>"Green Horror"</b> by H. Thompson Rich </p><p>New York lawyer Herbert Ames is in love with slim brunette Joan Kendall, so when he gets an urgent letter from her he rushes down to southern Georgia, to the edge of the "Okifenokee" swamp, where she and her father, a biologist experimenting with mutations, have been staying. He finds Joan and the "negro" servant Peter on edge, and the once robust Dr. Kendall frail and gray. Joan thinks the ghost of the previous resident of the house, Miles Denniston, a man with a bad reputation, is to blame, that this ghost has a malign influence on pops. Of course, Ames doesn't believe in ghosts. At dinner Kendall describes his work; he is trying to discover "the common denominator between life and death" and believes he has succeeded! First, he studied the protoplasm of slime molds, plentiful in this swamp, and then he studied the ectoplasm of "spirit emanation," plentiful in this house! Having isolated the "single basic principle" that protoplasm and ectoplasm share, Kendall then combined them to create "a mutation that is a being neither alive nor dead!" Of course, Ames just thinks the father of the woman he loves is insane.</p><p>In the evening, Ames spies on the scientist in his greenhouse and actually sees the ghost of Denniston! At night everyone hears a scream and in the morning Peter has vanished. The police are summoned, and remark that servants are always disappearing from this house. </p><p>Ames spies some more the next evening, and gets a real eyeful this time as the ghost hypnotizes Joan and tries to feed her to the giant blob monster living in the chamber under the greenhouse. By sheer force of will, Ames snaps Joan and her dad out of the ghost's spell and drags them back to the house; for some reason neither the ghost nor the blob monster chases them, and behind them they hear the greenhouse collapse. </p><p>The next day they learn that the ghost has somehow been laid to rest and the blob monster has died in the swamp. I think we are expected to think the souls of the people whose bodies went into the creation of the blob monster directed the monster to drag the ghost down to hell with them. (This plot, thus, has similarities to Clark Ashton Smith's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/01/weird-tales-april-1938-jacobi-smith-and.html">"The Garden of Adompha,"</a> which appeared in the April 1938 issue of <i>Weird Tales</i>.) </p><p>This story is terrible. The writing is bad on the level of the individual sentence and the individual paragraph, the plot structure and pacing stink, the heroes do little to resolve the plot, there are loose ends and plot holes, and the story's foundational gimmicks--the search for a common denominator between life and death and a ghost who wants to create a blob monster--are weak on their own and even weaker when paired together. </p><p>Very bad! New Jersey has another crime to answer for!</p><p>You won't be surprised to hear that isfdb has no record of "Green Horror" being reprinted.</p><p><b>"Dead Dog"</b> by Manly Wade Wellman </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOuuCdRheoiipNCYLAzWBXBykroR6ciBxGvv2jxfJCwoDyJVCVy9ocL4wvDCAm1Nxp41ZeMI8gM8BHcmpn91I8MJhdDt5C-37IwQHFqbEyYLDOdxl8495YCQaOP5j0ft_3WN7afflZhwwX2pYGZOxw-glLPGJ3IZrEpCbBjH64pF8v4LaHVH4IskYspvw/s500/51Eu8xHb1pL.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="324" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOuuCdRheoiipNCYLAzWBXBykroR6ciBxGvv2jxfJCwoDyJVCVy9ocL4wvDCAm1Nxp41ZeMI8gM8BHcmpn91I8MJhdDt5C-37IwQHFqbEyYLDOdxl8495YCQaOP5j0ft_3WN7afflZhwwX2pYGZOxw-glLPGJ3IZrEpCbBjH64pF8v4LaHVH4IskYspvw/s320/51Eu8xHb1pL.jpg" width="207" /></a></div>We recently <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/weird-tales-july-1938-d-h-keller-c.html">read a story by E. Hoffman Price</a> that appealed to Westerners' fascination with the Islamic world; well here we have a story that exploits white people's interest in and fear of black Africa. "Dead Dog" is set in Portuguese West Africa, where Wellman was born and spent his early childhood, and has an epigraph that purports to be an Umbundu proverb.<br /><p></p><p>Father Lassiter is a Belgian missionary. An African chief whose tribe has rebelled against the Portuguese comes to Lassiter to report that he will surrender to Captain Rodriguez, a famously ruthless rules-bending guy who is in charge of crushing the rebellion. The chief leaves with Lassiter his huge black dog, whose name is the Umbundu word for revenge. Lassiter tries to get Rodriguez to go easy on the chief, but as the rebel leader predicted, Rodriguez's idea of justice is a harsh one--he chops off the chief's head and has it delivered to Lassiter! The outwardly healthy dog dies a few hours later.</p><p>A few months later Lassiter gets a desperate summons from Rodriguez, and rushes through the night to the fort. The distressed captain tells of how for three nights running he has been haunted by a huge black dog, woken to find it at the window the first night, then on the second in his locked room, and finally on the third right beside him! Is it a dream, or black magic? What will happen tonight, the fourth night? Lassiter stays in the fort that night, and is thus on the scene when Captain Rodriguez meets his horrible fate.</p><p>A sort of obvious story, but well-told. I like it. Like Price's "Saladin's Throne Rug," "Dead Dog" characterizes the culture of the non-white alien "other" as steeped in esoteric knowledge and reprehensible practices, but their foulest deeds are a reaction to mistreatment at the hands of whites. "Dead Dog" can be found in Wellman collections and the various editions of Michel Parry's <i>The Hounds of Hell.</i></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6X3zTiSWcMJQtiJ_zJa3J2xaLF79nsnZ9jgbWNXXZsZzCfl6qOI7OSx-YSJYI1s0Vkmgd2fLd6sGiz8pJvjo6enf6FBLKf4a_TVg7_HjHpKp51-JyPMThpM4H4ph5srz9SHxOt05CPVQG5yq0Dul50xH-_yiWO4ACBR9QweEHqQRlAG1ca5xAbjXE4jc/s500/revenge.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="398" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6X3zTiSWcMJQtiJ_zJa3J2xaLF79nsnZ9jgbWNXXZsZzCfl6qOI7OSx-YSJYI1s0Vkmgd2fLd6sGiz8pJvjo6enf6FBLKf4a_TVg7_HjHpKp51-JyPMThpM4H4ph5srz9SHxOt05CPVQG5yq0Dul50xH-_yiWO4ACBR9QweEHqQRlAG1ca5xAbjXE4jc/s16000/revenge.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>"Three Gentlemen in Black"</b> by August Derleth<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlYssV8qtHdTgjQ40RRsy1P9FYuv2Ioes83GUEtAZn9A9ccn5N-YvDqm5UoOOO1-hDDfzT52Ws3MVdy9f9CpgEff8CSfyVHJyaNuL1rKciHjSLED_OzXPBPZwWCe8SVag-_Ji3OlzFiUWU1NYhk4vRVX929F1gs3OOAEZqvaiV1JUltOEh70QDG7C-ihY/s354/c1481.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="354" data-original-width="228" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlYssV8qtHdTgjQ40RRsy1P9FYuv2Ioes83GUEtAZn9A9ccn5N-YvDqm5UoOOO1-hDDfzT52Ws3MVdy9f9CpgEff8CSfyVHJyaNuL1rKciHjSLED_OzXPBPZwWCe8SVag-_Ji3OlzFiUWU1NYhk4vRVX929F1gs3OOAEZqvaiV1JUltOEh70QDG7C-ihY/s320/c1481.jpg" width="206" /></a></div>August Derleth's body of work is quite uneven, and here at MPorcius Fiction Log we have read quite a few mediocrities and annoying failures birthed from his pen. Fortunately, "Three Gentlemen in Black" is actually a pretty good crime/ghost story with an interesting character at its center. </div><div><br /></div><div>Orto Harper has just moved into a house in the English countryside; the place is oddly familiar, as if he has been there before, but he can't quite place it. Orto had a special reason to move to the country--to have a good alibi for when his uncle, Alexander, takes the poison pill Orto has hidden among Unc's supply of heart pills to be taken daily! Orto expects to thusly inherit Alexander's great wealth as well as exact revenge for the abuse he suffered from Alexander, the man who raised him after his father committed suicide. As we get to know Orto better, we learn why Alexander treated him so roughly: Orto is an evil man, and the son of an evil man, one who savors his own evil, takes pleasure in contemplating and committing foul deeds. </div><div><br /></div><div>Through dreams, the appearance of ghosts, and Orto's inquiries in the nearby village, we readers learn more about Orto's past and Orto recalls his connection to this country estate--it is the scene of a murder his father committed, a murder with some resemblance to the murder Orto himself is committing. Dad didn't enjoy the fruits of his crime, and the same supernatural agency that wrought a rough justice on his father will do the same to Orto before the story is over.</div><div><br /></div><div>Derleth does a creditable job with his depiction of the evil Orto and with all the story's supernatural elements. Thumbs up for "Three Gentlemen in Black."</div><div><br /></div><div>"Three Gentlemen in Black" would be reprinted in several Derleth collections, starting with the 1941 Arkham House collection <i>Someone in the Dark</i>, and some anthologies, including Vic Ghidalia's 1974 <i>Gooseflesh!</i> and 1993's <i>100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories</i> edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWa-ZvD-5Jf8-sXHgEIepc19yPnQnxOh2mFl1p048RVxEJtMj8P3KvRYN7-TIcx0knb7c0VUwVIZPV7XRkOw-JEbAdqj07kPHo94eZyAG5vAMJ_BXW8IK_vhE4XksXH5LqJjGkTM2PdvZBkPDY0qzRfNw1-rLlvkSPb9ca7nJwiPRAPaZzfAAw5nOq8_o/s500/orto.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="387" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWa-ZvD-5Jf8-sXHgEIepc19yPnQnxOh2mFl1p048RVxEJtMj8P3KvRYN7-TIcx0knb7c0VUwVIZPV7XRkOw-JEbAdqj07kPHo94eZyAG5vAMJ_BXW8IK_vhE4XksXH5LqJjGkTM2PdvZBkPDY0qzRfNw1-rLlvkSPb9ca7nJwiPRAPaZzfAAw5nOq8_o/s16000/orto.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>**********</div><div><br /></div><div>Mad scientists, blob monsters, scary black people getting revenge on villainous white people, ferocious canines, murderers, and more ghosts than you can shake a copy of the <i>Necronomicon</i> at--this is what <i>Weird Tales</i> is all about. And there is more where that came from; just stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log.</div><div> </div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-66268359017758721932024-02-13T19:46:00.000-05:002024-02-13T19:46:32.241-05:00Weird Tales, July 1938: D H Keller, C A Smith and E H Price<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3XdTiWS7nuuV0s3dMDoH5bB5Ieb_k7h7AlKx8LCgQHtCU9kPVDpWa4aMUMDDlm-yOeNWykHTuNWv6QtfmKzo4T7eoJfyg9-o094feew0DW6or3CbZxgmkrRfdQiO9Ak1KXmzvrBGywN9fxEtP66URQGxEPb1ddk-Vrwuw5X1E3bljXZGAQomxU1509oc/s570/weird_tales_193807.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3XdTiWS7nuuV0s3dMDoH5bB5Ieb_k7h7AlKx8LCgQHtCU9kPVDpWa4aMUMDDlm-yOeNWykHTuNWv6QtfmKzo4T7eoJfyg9-o094feew0DW6or3CbZxgmkrRfdQiO9Ak1KXmzvrBGywN9fxEtP66URQGxEPb1ddk-Vrwuw5X1E3bljXZGAQomxU1509oc/s320/weird_tales_193807.jpg" width="225" /></a></div>We've already read two stories from the July 1938 issue of <i>Weird Tales</i>, <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2017/06/three-more-best-of-edmond-hamilton.html">"He That Hath Wings"</a> by Edmond Hamilton and <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/05/robert-bloch-opener-of-way-secret-of.html">"Return to the Sabbath"</a> by Robert Bloch, and the issue includes work by Henry Kuttner (an Elak story) and Manly Wade Wellman (an episode of a serial) that we plan to read someday. But there are still more stories I believe worth our attention in this issue, tales by David H. Keller, Clark Ashton Smith, and E. Hoffman Price, and today we come to grips with them.<p></p><p><b>"Dust in the House"</b> by David H. Keller (1938) </p><div>This is one of those stories about a person who has to spend a night in a haunted house in order to gain an inheritance. Our hero has been living in Europe, where he knew some woman named Lilith Lameraux--Lameraux repeatedly tried to murder him, but he was witty enough to escape injury. Today he is back in New York because he is the only heir of his great-grandfather whom the family's lawyers could find. Exactly one hundred years ago, great-grandpa locked up the big family house, filled out a will, and then killed himself. The will directs that for one hundred years the house will remain sealed; when that period has passed, his descendants must spend a night in the house--those who fulfill this requirement must then destroy the house and all its furniture, then sell the land and divide the proceeds. The lawyer in charge of executing these ridiculous strictures tells our dude that he thinks it likely there is another living descendant of great-grandpa, a cousin of the male lead whom he can't find, a woman named Lilith Lameraux!</div><div><br /></div><div>The main character is guided by the lawyer through the house to the dining room in which the will demands he spend the twelve hours spanning from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM. Most of the house buried under inches of dust (the lawyer has anticipated this and wears "rubbers") but the dining room is spic and span, bereft of the dust Keller compares to the dunes of the Sahara. What it lacks in dust it makes up for in dead bodies and ealaborate weaponry--seated at the table are two skeletal mummies, one of a man, one of a woman, and buried in the male corpse is a dagger with a bright steel blade and an ivory handle carved into the shape of a nude woman!</div><div><br /></div><div>The lawyer leaves and the heir waits, eating sandwiches and drinking whisky in the same room with the century-old corpses. Eventually Lilith Lameraux appears and uses hypnotism, or something, to get him to commit suicide with the dagger. The final scenes of the story depict LL talking to the lawyer, explaining that she used a secret passage originating in the house next door to tidy up the dining room and then confront her cousin, who, she implies, broke her heart over in Europe. (In Europe people are always having love affairs with their cousins.) </div><div><br /></div><div>This story is pretty bad. For one thing it is clumsily written. More importantly, almost everything in "Dust in the House" is hard to believe, and there are lots of what I am considering loose ends (who are the two dead bodies? Why did great-grandpa set up this elaborate will?) The main character lacks personality (the male heir and the lead lawyer also lack names) and the behavior and motivations of all the characters are often inexplicable. The story also feels long and tedious; for example, many words are expended describing the male lead's thoughts as he considers or is beguiled into suicide, and it is not suspenseful, but rather mind-numbingly boring.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is possible the story is meant partially or primarily to be a joke--Lilith Lameraux is a neat freak who uses her womanly charms to convince the lawyer not to sic the cops on her and the lawyer is a nervous wreck who keeps taking nitroglycerine pills because his heart might not be able to take all the shocks of this adventure--but the jokes are not funny and of course they undermine any thrills and chills we might hope to get from a story about a woman scorned who turns murderous and that features gruesome dead bodies. </div><div><br /></div><div>Thumbs down for "Dust in the House." The story would be reprinted in the Keller collections <i>The Folsom Flint and Other Curious Tales</i> and <i>Keller Memento. </i>For more MPorcius coverage of Keller's work, click these links:</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/06/1930s-weird-tales-from-robert-e-howard.html">"The Thing in the Cellar"</a> </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/06/from-july-1931-weird-tales-d-h-keller-c.html">"The Seeds of Death"</a> </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-dead-woman-golden-bough-and.html">"The Dead Woman"</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-dead-woman-golden-bough-and.html">"The Golden Bough"</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-dead-woman-golden-bough-and.html">"The Typewriter"</a> </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/01/1932-weird-tales-by-edmond-hamilton.html">"The Last Magician"</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/12/weird-tales-october-1937-d-h-keller-h-p.html">"Tiger Cat"</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/10/weird-tales-jan-38-quick-hamilton-and.html">"Valley of Bones"</a></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRo1NVC_oIN4JaplzATXhQGqY_O7sYeyaQMAcCmsvqZe0ExLMFnzZ1yElNjIoQlCKeduf7Il3eBxCXDPEGE12kSgZGUNRQ63vJgKCQ5tgzO77eiy1dRqeifT3HBYNfZsKKFTdOnLI2SAI8BK40hppkpurSwZ0S_Oyoik1H0TuOYqmprTj2T0GrFGE8sKU/s500/dust.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="365" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRo1NVC_oIN4JaplzATXhQGqY_O7sYeyaQMAcCmsvqZe0ExLMFnzZ1yElNjIoQlCKeduf7Il3eBxCXDPEGE12kSgZGUNRQ63vJgKCQ5tgzO77eiy1dRqeifT3HBYNfZsKKFTdOnLI2SAI8BK40hppkpurSwZ0S_Oyoik1H0TuOYqmprTj2T0GrFGE8sKU/s16000/dust.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div><b>"Mother of Toads"</b> by Clark Ashton Smith (1938)</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy2n0uZY-PSfZyHFQV9EeOWhzSCD6fNIcPmx5X9rfilkXqDa5Oc9TzjFuDdN6HCQbaJ2EBKubT6AChqV2Sqk0RQ1ggwzZdGWJ5FqkWfIBLWbE9pe_QuQ-n-CMKQlnmpR-yNtksbgPSPUy-A8X-0kfxpAt1f_Z5ql3Fg2m1-28pqhuTQaoBxlb3KBO1kaM/s1272/Smith,%20C.%20A.%20-%20Mother%20Of%20Toads%20(1988-06.Necronomicon)%20%5BCosmicJukebox%5D_0000.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1272" data-original-width="1021" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy2n0uZY-PSfZyHFQV9EeOWhzSCD6fNIcPmx5X9rfilkXqDa5Oc9TzjFuDdN6HCQbaJ2EBKubT6AChqV2Sqk0RQ1ggwzZdGWJ5FqkWfIBLWbE9pe_QuQ-n-CMKQlnmpR-yNtksbgPSPUy-A8X-0kfxpAt1f_Z5ql3Fg2m1-28pqhuTQaoBxlb3KBO1kaM/s320/Smith,%20C.%20A.%20-%20Mother%20Of%20Toads%20(1988-06.Necronomicon)%20%5BCosmicJukebox%5D_0000.jpg" width="257" /></a></div>A note at isfdb tells us that the first publication of "Mother of Toads" here in <i>Weird Tales</i> had some sexual content removed, but we cheapos are in luck because the internet archive has a scan of the 1988 chapbook that prints a restored version of the story. Today's Keller and Price stories we are reading in the scan of the July '38 ish of <i>WT</i>, but we'll read "Mother of Toads" in that Reagan-era chapbook because we want maximum sex--I mean a text as close as possible to the intentions of esteemed top weirdie Clark Ashton Smith. </div><div><br /></div><div>"Mother of Toads" is a monument to fatphobia! And a sex-swapped depiction of date rape! Ripped from today's headlines, right?</div><div><br /></div><div>Set in Smith's fictional French province, Averoigne, what we have here is the sad tale of Pierre, an apprentice to an apothecary. Pierre has been sent to collect a vial of some substance or other for his master from the obese witch who lives by the swamp outside the village. This witch, whose monstrously fat body Smith describes at some length, is known as The Mother of Toads among the local people because an unusually large number of unusually large toads are always hanging around her hut and because she sort of looks a little like a big toad, what with her bulging eyes and sickly white flesh and so forth. It is also known that she has a crush on the apprentice, and as the story begins she is trying to seduce Pierre. Pierre resists her aggressive approaches, but accepts some wine. Of course the wine has a potion in it that arouses Pierre sexually and affects his sight and brain so that he is attracted to the witch and has sex with her.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the morning the potion has worn off and Pierre tries to sneak off while the witch sleeps, but the thickest fog he has ever seen and an army of toads that are capable of attacking him like "a monstrous hail" and even "a surging solid wave that towered over his [Pierre's] head" drives him back to the hut. When he rejects the witch's offer of another dose of aphrodisiac wine and tries to flee the scene, the toads, and the witch, apparently a giant toad herself, drown Pierre under their disgusting bodies.</div><div><br /></div><div>This story isn't bad, but feels a little simple and slight compared to many of Smith's other stories, and it is not particularly well-constructed. For example, the climactic scene of Pierre running through the foggy swamp, pursued and attacked by thousands of toads, isn't that different than the scene in the middle of the story about him being chased through a foggy swamp pursued and attacked by thousands of toads. I'm judging "Mother of Toads" just "OK." </div><div><br /></div><div>"Mother of Toads" is of course available in a host of Smith collections and horror anthologies in English and several other tongues, with or without sexually provocative/kind of gross cover art.</div><div><br /></div><div>(We've been reading lots of women-force-themselves-on-men stories lately, haven't we? There was Richard Matheson's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/nightmares-from-fritz-leiber-richard.html">"Lover When You're Near Me,"</a> then Robert Bloch's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/f-april-1956-robert-bloch-tom-godwin.html">"I Kiss Your Shadow"</a> and now this one, and even Charles L. Grant's execrable <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/nightmares-from-thomas-ligotti-robert.html">"The Last and Dreadful Hour"</a> has that childish seduction scene. And, you know, if we expand our criteria a little we'll find that almost everything we've read this month has been about how women are a menace to men. Sorry, ladies!)</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq5mzmw9s-0fyJEargsQa2Ox9ZpldES9BlGm7ZTyQYCSXVPA1K-VIFHcJ2X_61TWIaT8eJ3Klepca9NkUpiuZhxNqfbH3SyhykcgC2PVJbdsHXke39z4HwRTBldtit9WGHF3LX8k5NsW_gDcY4KlOziD_CmHh99gcO7nuf-QNpXNNrU4MYfBnYLAHXJWA/s500/toad.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="385" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq5mzmw9s-0fyJEargsQa2Ox9ZpldES9BlGm7ZTyQYCSXVPA1K-VIFHcJ2X_61TWIaT8eJ3Klepca9NkUpiuZhxNqfbH3SyhykcgC2PVJbdsHXke39z4HwRTBldtit9WGHF3LX8k5NsW_gDcY4KlOziD_CmHh99gcO7nuf-QNpXNNrU4MYfBnYLAHXJWA/s16000/toad.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><b><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4Ol2Ik8pubgJJPngzXrBhuVrk_r2x37Cb8BGunPVEusoFttA-MmrQ5NMXgfkOndQ8ki8SG7hdsc4xeedKhmBGq_fd1Nr1H25j2zLr_0hDrBMqZIwgM1wNrMiLHCWqtQWeQ-DXhU05xuWe5XRpMux8EQnWrbcAqboFb6A77IVEH7a4Bo4HDvL_evFZg-g/s500/reprintX.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="186" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4Ol2Ik8pubgJJPngzXrBhuVrk_r2x37Cb8BGunPVEusoFttA-MmrQ5NMXgfkOndQ8ki8SG7hdsc4xeedKhmBGq_fd1Nr1H25j2zLr_0hDrBMqZIwgM1wNrMiLHCWqtQWeQ-DXhU05xuWe5XRpMux8EQnWrbcAqboFb6A77IVEH7a4Bo4HDvL_evFZg-g/s16000/reprintX.jpg" /></a></div></div><div><b><br /></b></div>"Saladin's Throne Rug"</b> by E. Hoffman Price (1927)</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLDlmWHC8O2tsJ-8Xzef6yAQB5ocRKV7nepXjm0SQcHCQlc2O2b1yRLYGyhrET_YYwlLv4zidl4tC4ruTHQE95OAFBTBMd_-08kIo0dHQQPL54J_n8ydFhJ-9feEEH1UT3BhGc9drknT6nC42aBDrtzZAszIVaBxl8orkiAE9zft0kIV6BuJo9ahyphenhyphenDexc/s607/weird_tales_192710.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="607" data-original-width="391" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLDlmWHC8O2tsJ-8Xzef6yAQB5ocRKV7nepXjm0SQcHCQlc2O2b1yRLYGyhrET_YYwlLv4zidl4tC4ruTHQE95OAFBTBMd_-08kIo0dHQQPL54J_n8ydFhJ-9feEEH1UT3BhGc9drknT6nC42aBDrtzZAszIVaBxl8orkiAE9zft0kIV6BuJo9ahyphenhyphenDexc/s320/weird_tales_192710.jpg" width="206" /></a></div>The July '38 issue's Weird Story Reprint is E. Hoffman Price's "Saladin's Throne Rug," which first appeared in Weird Tales in 1927. Wasn't <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/01/weird-tales-march-1938-mcclusky-prout.html">our last Price story</a> about oriental rugs? This guy loves oriental rugs! A sophisticated man of taste! Johnathan Maberry and Kaye Lynne Booth included "Saladin's Throne Rug" in a recent volume entitled <i>Weird Tales: Best of the Early Years: 1926-27</i> so maybe we can cherish hopes of appending the "positive reviews" tag to this blog post after all!</div><div> <br />Our narrator begins his story with a discussion of the lengths true lovers of oriental rugs will go in pursuit of their passion, and then describes his discovery of a fragment of a particularly ancient and magnificent rug in a Chicago auction house and his desperate, and ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to secure it at the auction. This part of the story is very fun and engaging--Price's writing succeeds in transmitting to the reader the passion of the collector and the excitement of the auction.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ilderim Shirkuh bin Ayyub is the "Moslem" who wins the rug out from under the narrator, a man who looks like "a Kurd whom civilization had not robbed of his alert predatory air and desert gauntness." He befriends the narrator and invites him over to his mansion to talk to him about how he has been searching the Near East, Europe and America for this half of a rug for years. Bin Ayyub is a descendent of Saladin himself, and the fragment he has finally secured is the missing piece of the rug that adorned his esteemed ancestor's throne. Finally the rug can be restored to its former glory!</div><div><br /></div><div>Our narrator spends quite an afternoon at the mansion. He is served coffee by bin Ayyub's "negro" servant, the bitter black brew spiced with a powerful concoction of "countless myriads of blossoms and herbs, spices and gums...." He catches a glimpse of bin Ayyub's mistress, "a Transcaucasian, a Gurjestani, the most flawlessly lovely of all Oriental women." And he receives an awesome gift from bin Ayyub, a rug of such value he could never have afforded to buy it himself, a sort of consolation prize.</div><div><br /></div><div>That evening the narrator tells a friend about his adventure at bin Ayyub's mansion, and two weeks later he learns that his unscrupulous pal has contrived to acquire through subterfuge the now-restored rug which covered Saladin's throne! This jerk off took advantage of the ignorance and poor taste of the beautiful Gurjestani girl, trading her a flashier but far inferior rug for the throne rug. (Bin Ayyub never told her how important the throne rug was--she's just a woman, after all, you don't keep them around for conversation purposes!) The narrator seizes the throne rug and rushes to the mansion with it, but not fast enough to avert a tragedy!</div><div><br /></div><div>Thumbs up for this orientalist tale that convincingly depicts the experience of being an avid collector and exploits the fascination of Westerners with the exotic culture of the Muslim Near East, its decadence and its barbarisms, its beauties and its cruelties. If you are writing your master's thesis on orientalism in American pulp fiction this is a story you gotta check out, bucko. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWIIoIPtVgU-EaSgShOp4nKsO7WFsUljVjosfbVBDbH84Ucf8-tPkDHd_ZsZ2xBvBUGJZ_0zapEPNFV6BxMPmsjcHTHX725GUeaqkNQ9dTos1oINgBw4mhkgrUvWGtoI0tjiLdxtfAX8BSCDMzyzE6Y-F-DBrK2cEe8tHxTK8otUQ1SAQs1S_6y1cXZoo/s500/cutarug.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="378" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWIIoIPtVgU-EaSgShOp4nKsO7WFsUljVjosfbVBDbH84Ucf8-tPkDHd_ZsZ2xBvBUGJZ_0zapEPNFV6BxMPmsjcHTHX725GUeaqkNQ9dTos1oINgBw4mhkgrUvWGtoI0tjiLdxtfAX8BSCDMzyzE6Y-F-DBrK2cEe8tHxTK8otUQ1SAQs1S_6y1cXZoo/s16000/cutarug.jpg" /></a></div><br />**********</div><div> </div><div>The Keller is an embarrassment, and the Smith is a weaker sample of his generally fine work, but the Price is quite good. This is a good issue of Farnsworth Wright's magazine, which even includes in the letters column a missive from Henry Kuttner, bragging that he had a chance to visit Clark Ashton Smith's house and see Smith's sculpture, paintings, and his scary cat!<br /></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-88724450992799145312024-02-11T23:15:00.000-05:002024-02-11T23:15:07.103-05:00F&SF April 1956: Robert Bloch, Tom Godwin and Henry Gregor Felsen<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY41M7RMVwjHi6jqDBNAkSIdsi845TYOwcGLyhjW_3MN1nCtAFgJ-Kr6tZ1xlh853gIrljqSqIcslBsNEDT6RX_9c5xpS4WH0IpBnIX-Jhz8l90tqCE1MYapGiJ98jOSXG6S-NpR2mD4EcOCogXLEg7BvvJSh7JH-j-CqQD_uiVB86zeRWs8mdm1QJqrc/s500/fsfapril56.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="130" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY41M7RMVwjHi6jqDBNAkSIdsi845TYOwcGLyhjW_3MN1nCtAFgJ-Kr6tZ1xlh853gIrljqSqIcslBsNEDT6RX_9c5xpS4WH0IpBnIX-Jhz8l90tqCE1MYapGiJ98jOSXG6S-NpR2mD4EcOCogXLEg7BvvJSh7JH-j-CqQD_uiVB86zeRWs8mdm1QJqrc/s16000/fsfapril56.jpg" /></a></div><p>In <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-by-ward.html">our last episode</a> we read a sex-positive, racism-negative story by Ward Moore that debuted in the April 1956 issue of <i>F&SF</i>. (I called Moore's story a "lemon" and a "clunker," but editor Anthony Boucher said it was "one of the stories I have been most proud to publish." Looks like opinions differ.) While I have the internet archive scan of this issue of <i>F&SF</i> open on my computer, let's check out the stories it contains by Robert "Psycho" Bloch, Tom "Cold Equations" Godwin, and some guy I never heard of, Henry Gregor Felsen.</p><p><b>"I Kiss Your Shadow"</b> by Robert Bloch (1956) </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtLtcWABvWilJmILBIRu-rCtVjzauQI40WNDmGFhi2I5wTtQkrY3gMuEpZrITb8R5oq76r-PmWZnE2lncivSx8A4k0WWT29aeKMAJBWBRI1ftXAwCvrUIzoQApnaE42VDaV5v9pSCcUbYxiM9G2AtbVTYjgXq1zwijgjmoYUzJ6CPezo3YjcE80gpqMxA/s600/HRRRHNTRSJ1971.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="361" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtLtcWABvWilJmILBIRu-rCtVjzauQI40WNDmGFhi2I5wTtQkrY3gMuEpZrITb8R5oq76r-PmWZnE2lncivSx8A4k0WWT29aeKMAJBWBRI1ftXAwCvrUIzoQApnaE42VDaV5v9pSCcUbYxiM9G2AtbVTYjgXq1zwijgjmoYUzJ6CPezo3YjcE80gpqMxA/w241-h400/HRRRHNTRSJ1971.jpg" width="241" /></a></div>Here we have a better than average Bloch story, one which doesn't include any of Bloch's stupid puns, one about how a domineering woman can change you, can make you do things you don't want to do, can drive you crazy, can drive you to murder! "I Kiss Your Shadow" is a supernatural horror story that is structured as a detective story so that we learn what is really going on out of chronological order as the clues are uncovered and the lies exposed, but I'll just give you the plot outline in the order stuff happened, not the order the narrator and readers learn about what happened.<div><br /></div><div>The narrator is a reporter, and his pal Joe Elliot works the rewrite desk at the same paper. The narrator has an attractive sister, Donna, whom he admits is a ruthless and manipulative go-getter who always figures out a way to get what she wants out of people. She wants a husband and kids, and falls in love with Joe and transforms him from a guy who is a slob who loves booze and fears marriage into a snappy dresser who deposits all his dough in the bank instead of the local watering hole and is eager to tie the knot and become a suburban dad! <p></p></div><div>Or so it appears to the narrator! In fact, Joe is always trying to break up with Donna, but she uses her hot body to get her way with him time and time again! Joe cannot resist that body! So Joe takes the terrible step of murdering Donna! He makes it look like an accident, fooling the cops and the narrator! (Some reporter, eh?)</div><div><br /></div><div>A few weeks after Donna's sudden "accidental" demise, Joe tells the narrator he has started seeing a sort of ghost (he calls it a "shadow") of Donna at night. Besides calling it a shadow he calls it a "succubus," because it demands kisses--and more! Joe reports that every night Donna's ectoplasmic (or whatever) form has more substance, is getting stronger. The narrator of course doesn't believe in ghosts and advises Joe to see a shrink; Joe takes this advice and gives the narrator the idea that he is getting better, just as the narrator is leaving the country for eight months on an assignment. When the narrator gets back, the psychiatrist Joe has been seeing is dead, apparently having jumped out the window, a suicide. But Joe, once again a sloppy boozehound, tells the narrator Donna is responsible, that she is now stronger than a man and pushed the therapist out the window because the meddling medical man was getting between Donna and her man! The narrator still doesn't believe in ghosts, and when he finally figures out Joe murdered Donna, he supposes Joe killed the shrink because the doctor's probing of Joe's psychology was leading him to suspect Donna's death was no accident. The climax of the story is when Joe dies of a mysterious stroke or heart attack or something while clawing at Donna's grave. As we expect of a reporter, the narrator keeps his juiciest bit of information a secret, not telling the cops that Joe murdered Donna. The shock ending comes almost a year later, when the authorities finally start to suspect Donna was murdered and open up her grave--to find not only Donna's corpse, but the corpse of a new born baby! Donna wanted Joe to make her with child, and she got what she wanted, months after she died!</div><div><br /></div><div>Thumbs up for "I Kiss Your Shadow," which exploits all of men's fears about women, sex, parenthood and having to take responsibility and throws in some twisted talk-to-a-guy-about-boning-his-sister, necrophilia and dead baby material. The story would be reprinted numerous times in Bloch collections as well as anthologies like Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia's <i>Horror Hunters</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieVfHTWDlvjIrVvy38rUgQCVW6rYM1dfzh4VHDixIQvTZ_b0qm6GL2irG6kzZMKzSRj_VcxDfZ4d-GxoR-69v7vPQ-UpfnZ-FCRgGiXYW9G5Pgv5dcUMmzo2grg7AijB-ksYH_HQpQ2f72ctc45tu6frU0ifVN6aUJ5jBS6mXW-UDpwcPMx_JryoSQlWM/s500/ohhdonnaohhhdonna.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="411" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieVfHTWDlvjIrVvy38rUgQCVW6rYM1dfzh4VHDixIQvTZ_b0qm6GL2irG6kzZMKzSRj_VcxDfZ4d-GxoR-69v7vPQ-UpfnZ-FCRgGiXYW9G5Pgv5dcUMmzo2grg7AijB-ksYH_HQpQ2f72ctc45tu6frU0ifVN6aUJ5jBS6mXW-UDpwcPMx_JryoSQlWM/s16000/ohhdonnaohhhdonna.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><b>"Operation Opera"</b> by Tom Godwin (1956)<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpIPPcmE3wRzjGjDMnHZfG1EQLKSHe8xExfV0Biio__K3CB9ybIXRgpIx-2wC0zB2IoEjrX09Mur0-dmh-X2WnofD8ruUoFcIWHX_WKQXKAN5ncOSw2PfWRisOf6mQlO6rujknk-ZdTTorhJZqLSB7dTqwICPKxvgl6kJohinCX9gfMphPZqrH0cFgN28/s600/FSFApr1956.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="423" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpIPPcmE3wRzjGjDMnHZfG1EQLKSHe8xExfV0Biio__K3CB9ybIXRgpIx-2wC0zB2IoEjrX09Mur0-dmh-X2WnofD8ruUoFcIWHX_WKQXKAN5ncOSw2PfWRisOf6mQlO6rujknk-ZdTTorhJZqLSB7dTqwICPKxvgl6kJohinCX9gfMphPZqrH0cFgN28/s320/FSFApr1956.jpg" width="226" /></a></div>I was pretty hard on Godwin's novel <i><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2014/08/space-prison-by-tom-godwin.html">Space Prison</a> </i>when I read it back in 2015, and in 2019 I called his long short story <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2019/08/stories-by-miller-jones-schmitz-and.html">"Mother of Invention"</a> "marginal." Since then I have judged Godwin's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/01/four-mid-50s-stories-from-worlds-beyond.html">"You Created Us"</a> "acceptable filler" and <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/03/1980-stories-by-manly-wade-wellman-tom.html">"Before Willows Ever Walked"</a> "competent but unremarkable." So I am not exactly in the running for president of the Tom Godwin Appreciation Society. But let's check this story out, even though Anthony Boucher warns us it is a "light fun-and-games satire" and it looks like it was only ever reprinted in the French edition of <i>F&SF, </i>and our <i>escargot</i>-slurping buddies didn't even put poor Tom's name on their cover!</div><div><br /><div>"Operation Opera" is another sex-positive story (is this the special <i>F&SF</i> sex issue?), one that lampoons high-class prudery and hypocrisy. It is also full of incidental jokes, and satirizes what we might call ethnocentrism or nationalistic chauvinism.</div><div><br /></div><div>Drake is the the one-man crew of a ship sent on a diplomatic and investigatory mission to planet Geffon. His is the second one-man mission to Geffon--the preliminary reports of his predecessor suggested the Geffonese were a very friendly and highly intelligent people whose culture revolved around the fine arts, but then he went insane; Drake is to find out what drove that guy batty.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf_OLjev1JVz_fitf3LUxymzyDcy55hPqFIYebHtZn1E-LNnOCgug7wGWn4NF8KHQLQMecELqXftIwwPPp0Obm0MgS0hlS-uK0YAYIHdVH2l-j0osIykBzbFi1pPl_klJ01rC_c7Zo2kYdAW7g10bw_xNhZKJsrVtGeWpRHxitr5-hoRYEPjQgi77y0L4/s600/FCTNVKQSCW1957.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="413" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf_OLjev1JVz_fitf3LUxymzyDcy55hPqFIYebHtZn1E-LNnOCgug7wGWn4NF8KHQLQMecELqXftIwwPPp0Obm0MgS0hlS-uK0YAYIHdVH2l-j0osIykBzbFi1pPl_klJ01rC_c7Zo2kYdAW7g10bw_xNhZKJsrVtGeWpRHxitr5-hoRYEPjQgi77y0L4/s320/FCTNVKQSCW1957.jpg" width="220" /></a></div>As expected, the Geffonese are very welcoming to Drake, and spend day after day taking him to art galleries and to the opera and so forth. After a week of this he has found no clues as to what drove the other scout insane, so HQ instructs him to video a tour of the city; maybe analysis of the film Earthside will provide some insight. When the natives realize he has filmed some female Geffonese while they were posing nude, working as models for painters, Drake is sentenced to death for creating pornography--paintings of naked women are high art, but photos are vulgar and disgusting! The Geffonese also explain that his predecessor was similarly convicted of a capital offence for hosting a tea party for the natives, because the tea had an intoxicating effect on the Geffonese and led drinkers to talk frankly about sex, breaking a severe cultural taboo. Like that earlier scout, Drake is to be decapitated in the climactic scene of an opera (didn't the Romans do this sort of thing, integrate executions into theatrical performances?), and like his predecessor Drake manages to fight his way back to his ship and off the planet, and Drake is even sane enough to report what happened back to HQ. </div><div><br /></div><div>The final scenes of "Operation Opera" draw a parallel between Earth people and Geffonese. The imperialistic and paternalistic Earth authorities lament that because the Geffonese are insane and do not know right from wrong they will not be able to shepherd them to a higher level of civilization. Similarly, the snobbish and prudish leaders of Geffon sadly observe that both Earthers they have met have proved too immoral and mentally deranged to willingly submit to Geffonese tutelage and join their more sophisticated civilization.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>This story is a little slight, but I think it actually works; the jokes are not laugh out loud funny and the points Godwin makes are banal, but neither the jokes nor the arguments are actually bad, and the story moves along pleasantly at a suitably brisk pace. I'll say this story inches out of "acceptable" territory and just up into "good" territory. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>"The Spaceman Cometh"</b> by Henry Gregor Felsen (1955)</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN_DEj078Tqp0vu0klhd_sQHXr7BI_xjmsc0gqKarvkMamshK6d7u95mQ7KfoiV_XqnX27yqv6O63lZtupYcbSU8FJ-N4ve8l2r9Venhe_a0EKzhJkwNTZxaElg5FDAe7YW_yca7CT-2CCsp-ZkCLIMqPuGu1gu-09PC7xkg1kOhRiKk-AWEyvZoWs4Qo/s1500/1368875306.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="1127" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN_DEj078Tqp0vu0klhd_sQHXr7BI_xjmsc0gqKarvkMamshK6d7u95mQ7KfoiV_XqnX27yqv6O63lZtupYcbSU8FJ-N4ve8l2r9Venhe_a0EKzhJkwNTZxaElg5FDAe7YW_yca7CT-2CCsp-ZkCLIMqPuGu1gu-09PC7xkg1kOhRiKk-AWEyvZoWs4Qo/s320/1368875306.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>Felsen, wikipedia is telling me, served in the Marine Corps during the Pacific War and wrote many books for kids and teens. Whoever wrote this wikipedia page doesn't seem to have been a fan of Felsen's work, reporting that "He wrote about 60 books, many of them moralistically exploring the evils of drugs, sexism and racism." </div><div><br /></div><div>"The Spaceman Cometh" first appeared in a 1955 issue of <i>Collier's</i>, and Boucher tells us that Judith Merril, who it seems was always scouring mainstream publications for examples of writing that might be considered SF, pointed the story out to him. "The Spaceman Cometh" would be reprinted in the Groff Conklin anthology <i>17 X Infinity</i> in 1963 and a Scholastic anthology in 1979, <i>Starstreak</i> edited by Betty M. Owen, who has five SF anthologies from Scholastic listed at isfdb (the other four all seem to collect weird/horror stories.)</div><div><br /></div><div>"The Spaceman Cometh" is a sort of joke story that uses aliens as foils to point out to us for the billionth time that Earth people are violent and dangerous. This is the kind of thing Merril likes, banal left-wing whinging. Thumbs down!</div><div><br /></div><div>The narrator of "The Spaceman Cometh" is a space alien sent to Earth some ten or whatever years ago to scout us out in preparation for wiping us out. In disguise as a human, he and an Earth woman fell in love, so he abandoned his mission and they married and settled down in Iowa to start a family. A decade later she still doesn't know he is an alien.</div><div><br /></div><div>As the story begins the narrator, a writer who is trying to draft a speech he has been asked to give, spots a space craft--one of his people has caught up with him. He meets his fellow E.T. and strives to convince him that Earth people are harmless so there is no need to blow up the Earth. The central joke of the story is that Iowa is full of hunters who shoot birds, teenagers who drive recklessly, and children who play war, and the second alien scout sees all these evidences of the violent nature of the human race within an hour of landing. The same sort of jokes occur when the alien (also in disguise, of course) visits the narrator's house, where the narrator turns on the TV--all the TV shows are violent--and even has to spank his kids to get them to obey.</div><div><br /></div><div>The twist ending is that the fearsomeness of Earth people, instead of scaring the second alien into calling for Earth's destruction, scares him into keeping Earth a secret from alien HQ. The second little twist is that the narrator decides to make the topic of his speech the impossibility of space travel, I guess to help keep the violent people of Earth and his own people from ever meeting.</div><div><br /></div><div>Besides being tired and obvious when it comes to both its ideology and its jokes, "The Spaceman Cometh" is not internally consistent. At the start of the story we are told the narrator's people are violent genocidal imperialists who blow up all civilizations they encounter, then in the middle we are told they won't blow up Earth if Earth people are harmless, and finally we learn Earth will be spared <i>because</i> Earth people are so violent. Similarly, there are jokes about how the narrator fails to recognize the new alien, whom he knew back home, implying that the aliens have distinctive individual appearances, and then jokes about how all the aliens look exactly the same and it is odd to them that humans all look different.</div><div><br /></div><div>Boucher, Merril and Felsen did the readers of <i>F&SF</i> a disservice with this one, and I am rejecting the defense that it is just a kids' story, because <i>F&SF </i>is supposed to be oh so sophisticated, as well as the defense that humor doesn't have to be internally consistent, it can be absurd, because I don't like absurdist humor--I like humor that reflects real human psychology.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcpjOn6NsNNEl21t7TPrpGayfwWoYLH1H6npp7xH5LtU9ItEaIxV_Ir1LQOMMBvvsb58rR-VjtzX_B1NL7m4Vo31uwwZ1CZU1mBS-drezb4uTbG0Ps_Wo6x3w9pHsne1qioRNsf8C_ClEaEXdVQskJMmIUU3tZAmthH0V1QHMoejz8O822CwpggMO-U1s/s500/cometh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="402" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcpjOn6NsNNEl21t7TPrpGayfwWoYLH1H6npp7xH5LtU9ItEaIxV_Ir1LQOMMBvvsb58rR-VjtzX_B1NL7m4Vo31uwwZ1CZU1mBS-drezb4uTbG0Ps_Wo6x3w9pHsne1qioRNsf8C_ClEaEXdVQskJMmIUU3tZAmthH0V1QHMoejz8O822CwpggMO-U1s/s16000/cometh.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div>**********</div><div><br /></div><div>Putting aside the lame children's' story, today's exploration of an issue of <i>F&SF</i> has been a good experience; the Robert Bloch story is an above average example of his huge body of work, and the Tom Godwin story is the best Tom Godwin story I have read during the period of this blog's existence. It feels good to go away from an interaction with another person feeling better about that person.</div><div><br /></div><div>More short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfOIWjci62KIJNQHTyKx8A1NaMoAC27QPq2IAGeABeY4LKwEo5omGwHkFlVcbYCe6AdUbfypBwqoU4VExLK4SDvnYY7x46nH53ZypHGOafF8lwz3rzLXR6sNhCmp4W7PAIUXdEZA8OsxzEw1AJIpxvSA7lOq0-sApTjN1EV6h6HEDfKgEy0vyzbnLdgTQ/s500/fsffoot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="121" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfOIWjci62KIJNQHTyKx8A1NaMoAC27QPq2IAGeABeY4LKwEo5omGwHkFlVcbYCe6AdUbfypBwqoU4VExLK4SDvnYY7x46nH53ZypHGOafF8lwz3rzLXR6sNhCmp4W7PAIUXdEZA8OsxzEw1AJIpxvSA7lOq0-sApTjN1EV6h6HEDfKgEy0vyzbnLdgTQ/s16000/fsffoot.jpg" /></a></div></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-87701737310502357532024-02-11T00:57:00.001-05:002024-02-11T02:02:25.228-05:00Merril-approved 1956(?) stories by Ward Moore, Alan E. Nourse and Chad Oliver<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaukbYv0njriWMdTpZ58BkDXMuYnZ0Wd7T9W5xBRPEcAsAxIP3GEk9GfhKGEzuH0x4MXLqy9ia9XRkF2n2-9yjO94xP7-oRHBq7gqBsqO68yqjECsitWChtTrIRDKs4EjYweZUcw4Mw6eXDj-MYLg8Aru0LNF-LZ-9qZ7jDGnmj-3pZekaVTJmi_naypQ/s373/Merril2ndfronttiny.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="373" data-original-width="249" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaukbYv0njriWMdTpZ58BkDXMuYnZ0Wd7T9W5xBRPEcAsAxIP3GEk9GfhKGEzuH0x4MXLqy9ia9XRkF2n2-9yjO94xP7-oRHBq7gqBsqO68yqjECsitWChtTrIRDKs4EjYweZUcw4Mw6eXDj-MYLg8Aru0LNF-LZ-9qZ7jDGnmj-3pZekaVTJmi_naypQ/s320/Merril2ndfronttiny.jpg" width="214" /></a></div>If you were going to some place where they eat snails to throw soup on the <i>Giaconda</i>, or some place where they eat sheep's organs cooked in a sheep's stomach to hunt for Nessie, or some place where they eat raw fish in order to buy used panties, you might bring a Fodor's or Frommer's guide with you. Well, we're going to 1956 and we're bringing with us Judith Merril's <i>SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume</i> as our guide. This installment of Merril's famous anthology series includes a long list of 1956 speculative fiction stories which Merril thought worth recommending but which she didn't include in the book. We've been doing this for a while, working our way through Merril's alphabetical list, reading selected stories, and today we will tackle an "M," an "N" and an "O." If you are curious about earlier stops on this tour, check out the links at the bottom of this post, <i>mon cheri</i>.<p></p><p>(Nota bene: Merril recommends Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "And the Light is Risen," but I am skipping it because it would later be incorporated into <i>A Canticle For Leibowitz</i>, which I read ages ago, as a recent Rutgers grad working for minimum wage in a New Jersey bookstore, and may reread one of these days.)</p><p><b>"No Man Pursueth"</b> by Ward Moore (1956)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjri5TKRBFLt3SBPExoGMwjMIlEy9x3v8bxngGr9wCCjXV0AJBKjJckOu4-vZBAVB7itgN1Wzks5Q0DAW5t75TYYu7oEUPSEU_a7DyZvg2hRB_G0ER8_SD3vBlCTK8RpOdrECgwQEhHSwEieDRtsUHwn5cQapAMLnjgvCZcACuAB1QqBEv2UKyVKOjD3TA/s600/FSFApr1956.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="423" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjri5TKRBFLt3SBPExoGMwjMIlEy9x3v8bxngGr9wCCjXV0AJBKjJckOu4-vZBAVB7itgN1Wzks5Q0DAW5t75TYYu7oEUPSEU_a7DyZvg2hRB_G0ER8_SD3vBlCTK8RpOdrECgwQEhHSwEieDRtsUHwn5cQapAMLnjgvCZcACuAB1QqBEv2UKyVKOjD3TA/s320/FSFApr1956.jpg" width="226" /></a></div>I almost bought a <a href="https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/2/2d/BRNGTHJBLF1972.jpg">1972 Avon edition of Ward Moore's <i>Bring the Jubilee</i> </a>because I liked the Jeff Jones cover, but alternate history isn't my thing, and even the endorsement of Ray Bradbury was not enough to entice me into committing to reading it. Last year I read Moore's 1960 story <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/02/merril-approved-1960-stories-by-w-moore.html">"The Fellow Who Married the Maxill Girl"</a> and I didn't like it; I called it "sappy" and judged the points it was trying to make "banal." However, I did like the 1961 Moore story I read in 2015, <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2015/08/1961-sf-stories-by-kaatje-hurlbut.html">"It Becomes Necessary."</a> Maybe today's Moore story, "No Man Pursueth," will be a tiebreaker.<div><br /></div><div>Things got off on the wrong foot when, on page 3 of this 30 page story, Moore indulged in unfunny self-referential "meta" humor aimed at the SF community, with thinly veiled references to Sam Moskowitz and Forrest J. Ackerman and direct references to <i>Galaxy</i> editor H. L. Gold and <i>F&SF</i> editor Anthony Boucher. I find this kind of thing tiresome.</div><div><br /></div><div>Our lead is a famous stage actress, age 41, and she is having breakfast in a New York diner, reading the paper, when a balding guy introduces himself to her as the number three science-fiction fan in America, even slinging some SF lingo at her ("egoboo," for example.) After Moore is done with his in-jokes, the SF fan shares with the actress his theory about the recent spate of disturbing and inexplicable events that are dominating news coverage. All over the world, airplanes are disappearing and large numbers of ordinary people are reporting incredible experiences, the sensation of having been transported to, and then returned from, alternate worlds where people where unusual clothes. Number Three claims holes in the time-space continuum are responsible. Later, the actress finds herself in a church and hears another explanation for the phenomena, that they are the result of the accumulated weight of human evil.</div><div><br /></div><div>Bad news comes from La La Land via the telephone--the actress's second husband reports that her daughter, age 20, from her first marriage, tried to commit suicide (sleeping pills) and is in the hospital. Scared to fly, the actress and her black maid (whom Moore gives bad grammar and an accent) hop in the car and strike out west from New York City for the left coast. In Zanesville, Ohio (the maid says "Uhia") they stop to get out to eat and the actress is transported to the past or an alternate universe or something, to find herself an actress performing at a Nazi extermination camp! </div><div><br /></div><div>After hearing a black-clad soldier's racist monologue (he talks up the scientific methods employed by the Nazis, perhaps a dig from Moore at the sort of SF fans who are science-obsessed and read <i>Astounding</i>, in contrast to the more literary-minded readers of <i>F&SF</i>) she is transported back to our world, to backwoods Kentucky, where she gets some help from some poor Christians who don't have electricity and don't read the papers ("Sin enough in the world, without reading about it.") The maid catches up to her and they are continuing their journey west when they and their car are transported to a city with cobblestoned streets (apparently Vienna, centuries ago) where they witness some guys shoot a cat with an arrow.</div><div><br /></div><div>In some ways "No Man Pursueth" is like a mainstream story about the guilt of parents who focus on their careers instead of spending time with their kids, thus damaging the kids' psychology. There's even a "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Negro">magical Negro</a>" who dispenses wisdom about parenting in "blaccent." In Vienna, the maid cannot understand the speech of the cat killers, but the actress can comprehend both the Viennese and the Nazi; the actress figures this is because the black maid is good and the actress is herself evil, somehow on the same wavelength as the Jew-killers and feline-killers. It is also the maid who figures out how to get out of the cat-killing world and back to modern America (not by using logic or science, however, but just by following a hunch, as if Moore is following the tradition that while white men try to master the world through data collection and rational calculation, women and blacks just follow intuition or benefit from being close to nature.) </div><div><br /></div><div>As these adventures proceed we are privy to the actress's thoughts. For one thing, she seems to identify with the fictional characters she has played more than with real people. More importantly, we learn that her first husband cheated on her with her sister, and that hubby #1 urged her to abort their daughter because being pregnant might ruin her figure; the actress carried the pregnancy to term because the risks of the abortion procedure (septicemia) scared her, not because she loved her unborn child.</div><div><br /></div><div>The two women have almost reached California when the actress is again transported to another world, this a surreal one, a sort of abstract representation of a court of law and/or a theatre stage where she hears voices reciting, among other things, quotes from and about Sacco and Vanzetti. (When I was a kid in the '70s and '80s people talked about Sacco and Vanzetti all the time, but I feel like I don't hear so much about them any more.) The actress suddenly realizes that she has been a bad person because she has withheld love from others:</div><div><blockquote style="font-style: italic;">And what was evil? Cruelty, self-righteousness, stupidity, insensitivity, yes--but in the end it was essentially lack of love.</blockquote><p>Her sins include withholding sex from her first husband--she is not only to blame for her daughter's suicide attempt because she was a distant and cold mother focused on her own career, but is also to blame for her husband's infidelity because of her stinginess in sharing her body. Significantly, we learn that the maid, the person in the story who represents or exemplifies goodness and wisdom, is very sexually active. (As so often in white-penned fiction, black people in Moore's story are characterized as overflowing with sexuality.)</p><p>The phenomena of people travelling to other times and/or worlds, the actress now realizes, were the universe educating people in how to be good, and she somehow senses that these trips would soon end--enough people who were evil, like her, have now been educated, and the balance between good and evil has been restored.</p><p>(I think Moore leaves a huge loose end hanging regarding the disappearing airplanes--the actress feels the planes will stop disappearing, but I don't think Moore addresses whether the lost people and machines will ever come back. Why did he even include the whole concept of vanishing airplanes? I guess as a way to force the actress and the maid to drive cross country, but he could have just said the actress was afraid of flying, you know, like Isaac Asimov.)</p></div><div>As an historical document, "No Man Pursueth" is sort of interesting, it being a specimen of the pro-sex SF we generally associate with Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein, and of anti-racism SF that, even though it is all about how awesome black people are, itself feels sort of racist. The story's apparent low opinion of abortion, nowadays a centerpiece of elite morality, also marks it as being from another era, and we also have the matter of a male writer depicting a female character and passing judgement on her sex life--perhaps a no-no in 2024. </div><div><br /></div><div>As a work of entertainment or literature, however, "No Man Pursueth" is lame. In his intro to the story in <i>F&SF,</i> Anthony Boucher says "No Man Pursueth" is "one of the stories I have been most proud to publish." I guess Boucher was excited to print a SF story that, instead of trying to teach you science or entertain you with an adventure, tried to treat philosophically real-life relationship issues like marriage, parenting, and race relations. Unfortunately for all of us, Moore doesn't deal with these issues in a compelling way, and so he's getting a thumbs down from me. The universe giving people lessons by sending them into the past to witness atrocities is just lazy and childish <i>deus ex machina</i> goop, and Moore isn't even content to let the visions or whatever speak for themselves--after presenting his symbolism and offering his clues, he just tells you exactly what they mean, so his story has no subtlety or nuance or ambiguity, and demands no thought from the reader. Besides lacking intellectual challenge, "No Man Pursueth" also lacks any real fun or excitement, feels long because of all the extraneous material (like the SF in-jokes in the opening scene) and features a writing style that is merely adequate. Anthony Boucher, you sold us a lemon.</div><div><br /></div><div>Boucher included this clunker in the "Best of"<i> F&SF</i> anthology covering this period (<a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/04/1956-f-tales-by-davidson-t-sturgeon-p.html">I read the Avram Davidson, Theodore Sturgeon and Poul Anderson stories from the volume back in early 2022</a>) and in 1988 our Italian friends shared its pro-sex message with their countrymen (is this really a message they need over there?) in an anthology with a characteristically impressive cover illo by Dutch-born Karel Thole.</div><div> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpkNVmi8Vb42FALeEAg53rdX1WsPNkZy4r7u4_deHr6eLXsH73o0tHGEkfmAs64LmlasByqJTuSq9WpdVDN5A3uWc-LGeHtecNuVhuuR71PUjxjKmXlKRLahgvYmjHeoZGVFJP8XvXpnttOwJYMW658Gp9cnHzQNX-PWu81Gukaa_Px61IxoU12ubts8M/s500/moore.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="377" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpkNVmi8Vb42FALeEAg53rdX1WsPNkZy4r7u4_deHr6eLXsH73o0tHGEkfmAs64LmlasByqJTuSq9WpdVDN5A3uWc-LGeHtecNuVhuuR71PUjxjKmXlKRLahgvYmjHeoZGVFJP8XvXpnttOwJYMW658Gp9cnHzQNX-PWu81Gukaa_Px61IxoU12ubts8M/s16000/moore.jpg" /></a></div><div><p><b>"Second Sight"</b> by Alan E. Nourse (1956)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUhQM7AbPHKiVvRcZyi2d_uMBC-0Ek5q4MekRUpV77EDrX4LuShsW9NDPETsMqe_YhCS6lpW4osDmTmNCW1Y0QbhC9ahjKJqSZRirg5vlJhi27h6A7EBeaRav5R1yug6sbFCnXKy3Uq5F0hq5BUSKW4UQgdnnJ1Bk7yPE5soGo5-iOrSXAgKvcoim3Pa4/s520/fantastic_universe_195604.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="370" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUhQM7AbPHKiVvRcZyi2d_uMBC-0Ek5q4MekRUpV77EDrX4LuShsW9NDPETsMqe_YhCS6lpW4osDmTmNCW1Y0QbhC9ahjKJqSZRirg5vlJhi27h6A7EBeaRav5R1yug6sbFCnXKy3Uq5F0hq5BUSKW4UQgdnnJ1Bk7yPE5soGo5-iOrSXAgKvcoim3Pa4/s320/fantastic_universe_195604.jpg" width="228" /></a></div>I've read two stories by Nourse so far, a lame cat story called <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2017/08/stories-from-tomorrow-of-1975-by-j.html">"Nize Kitty"</a> and <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2018/09/n-o-p-q-abc-stories-by-alan-e-nourse.html">"Family Resemblance,"</a> which I condemned as "a ten-page fat joke." It's been over five years since I read those stories and tempers have cooled, so let's give Nourse a third look, why don't we? (And let's hope he fares better than Ward Moore has today, and that I can deal with this story in less that 1,500 words. MPorcius Fiction Log is at risk of blog bloat!)</div><div><br /></div><div>"Second Sight" is pretty well-written and makes an effort to develop real characters and inspire emotion in the reader, but the actual plot and twist ending are sort of slight. </div><div><br /></div><div>The story comes to us in the form of an excerpt from a journal that we are told has only recently been written down but which the journal writer has kept in her mind for years. The diarist is a young woman who can read minds, and through dialogue and exposition and so forth we learn that she is the world's only psyker, that as a little girl she so scared her parents they willingly surrendered her to government scientists. At the time covered by the journal excerpt she is in her early twenties and the text largely focuses on how one researcher may be in love with her and is sheltering her from experiments other researchers may want to inflict upon her. In the end she agrees to do work that consists of using her mind-invading powers to trigger the growth of psychic powers in others ("latents") who have psychic potential but can't seem to blossom on their own. The surprise reveal at the end is that the psyker is blind and deaf, that her entire relationship with the world is through the medium of her psychic senses.</div><div><br /></div><div>Acceptable filler. "Second Sight" would be reprinted in the Nourse collection <i>The Counterfeit Man</i> and in one of those themed anthologies credited to pteromerhanophobic Isaac Asimov and two other guys, in this case Martin Greenberg and Charles Waugh, this one on the theme of mutants. (I don't know that the woman in the story is really a mutant, though, as her genes, we are told, are normal and if she has kids they are no more likely to have psychic powers than any other person's offspring. Of course, biochemist Asimov probably knows more about who is and who isn't a mutant than I do.)</div><div><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpGsPW47Wx8n_6GOtBUP5jNWqB3Qh1s_cuj_u1KGeTeqV_5mH4V5YXhOChfg9HaUc8gQJXHsZc85jGpQZA_3rQ7kFCSZVLm9ZwMtbp65UXTnVoRWDXuXzfTEToqKYBg860zoX09oykTtxVz2phvSgwHE3fApjn-cxpjENZlIdMkw2Lc70NWsfKpQOr_vw/s500/nourse.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpGsPW47Wx8n_6GOtBUP5jNWqB3Qh1s_cuj_u1KGeTeqV_5mH4V5YXhOChfg9HaUc8gQJXHsZc85jGpQZA_3rQ7kFCSZVLm9ZwMtbp65UXTnVoRWDXuXzfTEToqKYBg860zoX09oykTtxVz2phvSgwHE3fApjn-cxpjENZlIdMkw2Lc70NWsfKpQOr_vw/s16000/nourse.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The cover of <i>Asimov's Mutants </i>illustrates one of Edmond Hamilton's<br />more "serious" and critically acclaimed stories, "He That Hath Wings,"<br />which <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2017/06/three-more-best-of-edmond-hamilton.html">we read back in 2017</a></td></tr></tbody></table><p><b>"Let Me Live in a House"</b> by Chad Oliver (1954)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiouxcQO9tYYy3Pl5LmbNYjcPpxtjkHBHHbNGXrIkkXvuZybJVKAQh5Q2Ittjyb7li8F8Fg2WWgpg-xG4ELIUrfqGhyphenhyphenKFoTdQcHZNzBc9U_4w40J6XbNFaabq8A9wQTTNRx4e8KcGALX0AzTRjgEJH92AwqfvP59DmM2eMNx2UNHTGFZ3Q4bQQ8q0e399g/s600/UNVRSESFMAR1954.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="416" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiouxcQO9tYYy3Pl5LmbNYjcPpxtjkHBHHbNGXrIkkXvuZybJVKAQh5Q2Ittjyb7li8F8Fg2WWgpg-xG4ELIUrfqGhyphenhyphenKFoTdQcHZNzBc9U_4w40J6XbNFaabq8A9wQTTNRx4e8KcGALX0AzTRjgEJH92AwqfvP59DmM2eMNx2UNHTGFZ3Q4bQQ8q0e399g/s320/UNVRSESFMAR1954.jpg" width="222" /></a></div>Merril recommends two Oliver stories in the back of <i>SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume</i>; we read 1956's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2014/08/three-stories-by-chad-oliver.html">"North Wind"</a> ten years ago, back in my Iowa days, and I said it was "acceptable." But "Let Me Live in a House" is new to us. According to isfdb this story debuted in 1954 in <i>Universe Science Fiction</i>, and then in 1955 appeared in a Groff Conklin anthology, <i>Science Fiction Terror Tales</i>. I guess Merril treated it as a '56 story because it was reprinted in a 1956 issue of the British magazine (then edited by E. C. Tubb!) <i>Authentic Science Fiction</i>. Despite this bending of the parameters, we're going to roll with it, and read "Let Me Live in a House" in <i>Authentic</i>, to make sure we read the precise version Merril was recommending. (The illustration in <i>Universe</i>--by the great Virgil Finlay--is better, though.) <p></p><p>I will always think of Oliver as the guy who <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2016/05/novelets-by-ray-bradbury-theodore.html">tells us modern life sucks</a> and <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2018/02/space-voyages-with-oliver-russell.html">we should live like stone-age Plains Indians</a>, and "Let Me Live in a House" does not alter my attitude. </p><p>"Let Me Live in a House" starts with a sort of sarcastic description of two houses ("cottages,") a sort of caricature of stereotypical suburban homes, each with a white picket fence and a refrigerator ("frigidaire") and a knick-knack-laden mantel and all that, reminding us of all those pop songs that goof on suburbanites, like "Little Boxes" and "Pleasant Valley Sunday" and "Shangri-La."* Again things were off on the wrong foot--I don't read SF to endure the sort of banal and snobbish criticism I can find (and have) in a multitude of other venues. Of course, part of Judith Merril's project was to emphasize commonalities between SF and the mainstream, so what I see as a bug she very likely saw as a feature.</p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*I'll note here that the great Dave Davies has asserted that "Shangri-La" is not in fact "a go at the little, common man."</span></p><p>Anyway, I learned on page two that Oliver's title from the story is from <a href="https://allpoetry.com/The-House-By-The-Side-Of-The-Road">a poem</a> I'd never heard of by Sam Walter Foss, apparently a poem about how you should live among humanity instead of living apart or above the community, even if you are some kind of brainiac; Foss describes the geniuses who live like hermits as "souls like stars" and "pioneer souls who blaze a path," and asserts that he is not one of them, but wants to live in communion with other men. One of the main themes of Oliver's "Let Me Live in a House" is that (most if not all) human beings are not suited to life in space away from the rest of humanity, and that those who go into space will suffer horribly, probably to no profit or purpose other than to appease their lust for glory--glory they will not receive! (Like Kris Neville, Chad Oliver prefigures the themes we see in the work of Barry Malzberg.) </p><p>Four people, three of them boring stereotypes--the dutiful housewife, the woman who is addicted to watching TV, and the middle-aged man still obsessed with his youthful football career--live in a tiny colony or outpost under a dome on barren Ganymede; the colony is built to simulate suburban life, complete with artificial sounds of wind and neighborhood children. The four people are there to keep an eye on the outpost for a year-long tour of duty; the two fake suburban houses are meant to keep them from being driven insane by the pressures of living in space, and the three I have described have been programmed to be drones, conditioned to act more or less robotically at the outpost--they almost believe they really are in a suburban American neighborhood. Our main character, Gordon, is the man whose mind is not as blinkered and hindered, the man charged with dealing with unexpected problems.</p><p>The plot of "Let Me Live in a House" is about Gordon's reaction to just such an unexpected problem--the arrival of an alien! After some scenes meant to build tension that presage the arrival of the alien, we get many pages of conversation between Gordon and the extrasolar being, who as aliens so often are in stories, is disguised as a human and has telepathy. Oliver uses these conversations to give us the backstory of the colony I have already summarized above, and to describe the aliens, who are a contrast to modern European humanity, and illustrate the idea that going into space is a waste of resources, as humans are not psychologically prepared for the challenges presented by space and conquering space will not solve human problems like war, only expand their scope, and the common people of democratic polities will realize this and turn against the space program.</p><p>The alien explains that his people are nomads, like "the ancient Plains Indians in the area you think of as North America;" they don't produce anything the way settled people do, so to live they prey upon "sedentary" civilizations, their mental powers giving them the power to trick and overwhelm natives whenever necessary. The human race is next on the menu. The first time Gordon tries to attack the alien, Oliver spends half a page describing the pain the alien inflicts on the guy via his telepathy. But in the end Gordon succeeds in defeating the alien. But his victory is a tragic one. For one thing, he is permanently mentally scarred. For another, none will know of his heroism: Gordon covets the dream that man will conquer space, and he knows that if the common people learn that space is inhabited by hostile aliens that the space program will be shut down. So he keeps the alien attack a secret. </p><p>I'm giving "Let Me Live in a House" a thumbs down. Obviously I find its satire of the suburbs annoying, I disagree that the Plains Indians are somehow better than civilized cultures, and I think the human race <i>should</i> conquer the stars and is capable of doing so. But I have reasons to condemn the story beyond my ideological differences with Oliver. Most importantly, "Let Me Live in a House" is weighed down with too many long and tedious expository passages. I also found that Gordon's triumph isn't particularly well explained, isn't all that convincing--he can't resist the psychic attack, and then he can? Maybe I am just prejudiced because I think Gordon's success works at cross purposes with what I think are Oliver's sincere ideological commitments.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLvEmJsrfggABH-mEWn8zIsGgr_alvjBTgZhgl-IyQoK258CCSFDVuecfchAwswyHHFCGFKGjQ6A03ME2EpMOwYfo-78g1fxK_SHY9CwX_YrK0nAS8ISvUP5P2jiRNPnWgr5ThKe2ZZ3Pvi6YtNNFH7XHGOO9oseJKszSBJ3b3McMmj6oUnbZc-9Xq6ao/s500/ollie.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="378" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLvEmJsrfggABH-mEWn8zIsGgr_alvjBTgZhgl-IyQoK258CCSFDVuecfchAwswyHHFCGFKGjQ6A03ME2EpMOwYfo-78g1fxK_SHY9CwX_YrK0nAS8ISvUP5P2jiRNPnWgr5ThKe2ZZ3Pvi6YtNNFH7XHGOO9oseJKszSBJ3b3McMmj6oUnbZc-9Xq6ao/s16000/ollie.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div>**********</div><div><br /></div><div>Not a stellar batch of stories this time; Merril presumably liked the Moore and the Oliver because they were consonant with her own leftist beliefs. <p></p></div><div>Thanks for reading this long blog post consisting of my dumb jokes and semi-coherent musings on 1956 SF stories. For more of the same, check out the links below to previous posts in our Merril-approved-1956-stories series:</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-robert.html" style="text-align: center;">Abernathy and Aldiss<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-p-anderson.html" style="text-align: center;">Anderson, Allen and Banks<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-j-barrow-c.html">Barrow, Beaumont and Blish<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/meril-approved-1956-stories-bradbury.html">Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler</a> <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-carter.html">Carter, Clarke and Clifton</a> <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-clingerman.html">Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-de-camp.html">de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle</a> <br /><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/05/merril-approved-1956-stories-harlan.html">Ellison and Fontenay<br /></a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/06/merril-approved-1956-stories-galouye.html">Galouye, Garrett, Grimm & Gunn</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/07/merril-approved-1956-sf-stories-by-r.html">Hart, Herbert and Jones</a> </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/10/merril-approved-1956-stories-kuttner.html">Kuttner & Moore, Lang, Leinster, L'Engle and McClintic</a></div></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/merril-approved-1956-stories-by-j.html">McConnell, McIntosh and Melchior</a></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-65654480730140669552024-02-09T14:50:00.000-05:002024-02-09T14:50:24.576-05:00The Screaming Mimi by Fredric Brown<p></p><div><blockquote>Anything you want. <i>Didn't God have something there: anything you want if you want it badly enough to concentrate on getting it. Any little thing like a million dollars or any big thing like spending a night with--what was her name?--Yolonda Lang.</i> </blockquote></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilxJX2gYZUFZgFWyT0h7TnRXHsT8_qqtJNpFpZNG5fPFZBvpqwQrlR5-vATx09TxIEcKyxGwqXCMI21XogY7RoX_Y34Q91foR9pSk2dCLZRAPqmxw_fF_iqBdWv4sV1Mho_NIk3AFc-KDRvcbQxnf7f4w1k1OMvhBFt7-PNQkE5AzfPko0K12mT66Y-E0/s441/2016mimi.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="441" data-original-width="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilxJX2gYZUFZgFWyT0h7TnRXHsT8_qqtJNpFpZNG5fPFZBvpqwQrlR5-vATx09TxIEcKyxGwqXCMI21XogY7RoX_Y34Q91foR9pSk2dCLZRAPqmxw_fF_iqBdWv4sV1Mho_NIk3AFc-KDRvcbQxnf7f4w1k1OMvhBFt7-PNQkE5AzfPko0K12mT66Y-E0/s16000/2016mimi.jpg" /></a></div></div>Long time readers of MPorcius Fiction Log may recall that I am a big fan of the often-arty, often-exploitative, Italian crime movies known to English speakers as "giallos" or <i>gialli</i>, and of the <a href="https://giallociaociao.podbean.com/">Giallo Ciao! Ciao!</a> podcast on which guys talk--for hours and hours!--about these and related films. For their recent 100th episode the Giallo Ciao! Ciao! crew revisited one of the most famous and influential <i>gialli</i>, 1970's <i>The Bird with the Crystal Plumage*</i>, directed and scripted by Dario Argento, and noted that the film was loosely based on Fredric Brown's 1949 novel <i>The Screaming Mimi</i>. Even though founding member of the podcast Matt "Creep Creepersin" Wall didn't have nice things to say about Brown's novel, I decided to read it--Brown has a very high reputation and I've <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2016/01/rogue-in-space-by-frederic-brown.html">read</a> plenty of Brown's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/07/a-century-of-noir-f-brown-g-brewer-m.html">work</a> here at MPorcius Fiction Log and <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/05/fredric-brown-grannys-birthday.html">enjoyed</a> a lot of it. I own a 2016 Bruin Books omnibus edition of <i>The Screaming Mimi</i> and Brown's 1951 novel <i><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-far-cry-by-fredric-brown.html">The Far Cry</a></i> (which I read in 2020) and will be reading that edition. (The covers of the other editions are much more attractive, however--feast your eyes below!**)<div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;">*<i>The Bird with the Crystal Plumage </i>is a great movie if you judge films by how beautiful are the photography and set design, how exciting the action scenes, and how fascinating the actors' faces. If you go to the cinema looking for a believable story and characters you care about, well, maybe not.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;">**Worse, this Bruin Books printing is rife with printing errors that I suspect are artifacts of the electronic scanning of an old text: missing words, missing punctuation, periods in the middle of sentences, words with most letters in one font and one letter in another font, etc.; at times I consulted earlier editions of the novel available for free at the internet archive. <br /></span><div><br /></div><div>Bill Sweeney of Chicago is an Irish-American who loves serious music and fine literature. He has a long successful career as a newspaper reporter behind him, but recently lost his job and is now a homeless drunk who sleeps in a park. His pal and fellow bum Godfrey ("God" for short) tells him that a man can get anything he wants if he wants it badly enough, including money, including a woman. Tonight Sweeney is taking a walk when he comes upon a crowd standing before the glass double doors of an apartment building. Just inside the door lies a prone woman, a striking beauty, inert, guarded by a huge dog, a behemoth more like a wolf than the typical domestic doggie. Everyone watches amazed as the woman comes to her feet with difficulty, revealing a bloody abdominal wound, and then the dog somehow pulls her dress off, revealing her naked body to the onlookers. Then she collapses again. The police incapacitate the dog and then tend to the gorgeous nude woman. Sweeney returns to the park determined to "get" the injured woman, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, expressing his desire as wanting to "spend the night with her."</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgZmQl-x39L2UtpeNsYW_x9yaTAjVjRFni4s7L48A3UltxIZyj9D-PhZsuDq2E764UGx6bvSxelGbU3gpCSfG4kUT5krAmHs3netHem2czkWXyV-r8Idqp6xthasnnod6bSLFHpyi6EaY3VCXvYDEUiwsd8gBiH8ZvT8IKhVeqQmPK9N4cKQaFD3AIS1o/s708/redmimi.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="708" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgZmQl-x39L2UtpeNsYW_x9yaTAjVjRFni4s7L48A3UltxIZyj9D-PhZsuDq2E764UGx6bvSxelGbU3gpCSfG4kUT5krAmHs3netHem2czkWXyV-r8Idqp6xthasnnod6bSLFHpyi6EaY3VCXvYDEUiwsd8gBiH8ZvT8IKhVeqQmPK9N4cKQaFD3AIS1o/s320/redmimi.jpg" width="226" /></a></div>No matter how ridiculous and perverse the idea of a dog trained to disrobe a woman might be, I thought this a good first chapter, and it piqued my interest, because it telegraphed that the plot was going to be driven by a man's single-minded dedication to a selfish goal, the kind of plot I like.</div><div><br /></div><div>Galvanized by his desire for that woman, Sweeney sobers up and gets his job back. He quickly finds out the name of the woman--Yolanda Lang--and taking advantage of his position as a journalist gets to work building up a relationship with her and hunting down her attacker, the homicidal maniac the press have dubbed "the Ripper" and credited with slaying three women before his dog-foiled attack on Lang. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>The Screaming Mimi</i> has nineteen chapters, and Sweeney spends 17 or 18 of them doing the stuff guys always do in detective stories--travelling here and there throughout the town--and beyond--looking at documents and talking to people--generally over drinks--in his quest for clues. He goes to bars, he calls in favors, he goes to a nightclub, he blackmails a creep, he rides a train, he commits a burglary, he suffers a burglary, he gets beat up. Brown writes in a chatty jocular style, as if he and you are hanging out together and he is telling you a story. There are lots of little ironic, sarcastic, cynical jokes:</div><div><i><blockquote>A streetcar went by on Clark Street and it didn't sound any louder than an earthquake or the crack of doom. Not much louder, anyway. </blockquote><p></p><blockquote>He crossed Wacker Drive, hoping that a car would hit him, but none did.... </blockquote><p></p></i>Brown doesn't go out of his way to paint images or inspire an emotional reaction in the reader; the text is very plot-focused, but there is a brisk pace and a strong sense of tension that is leavened but not undermined by the pervasive bitter jokes and the many references to classical music, the fine arts, and literature. The many little elements that make up the plot--the large roster of characters and all the individual clues--are like the tesserae of a mosaic; each has a strong individual personality conveyed efficiently in short clear strokes, each of individual interest, so you don't feel like you are inundated with trivial details, but instead enjoy each little piece of the jigsaw puzzle as it turns up, whether or not you know yet where it fits. </div><div><br /></div><div>Lang ("Yo" to her friends) is a dancer who performs at nightclubs with her monstrous canine, Devil; their act is called "The Famous Beauty and the Beast Dance" and climaxes with the dog removing her dress. Yo's booking agent, Doc Greene, a retired head shrinker who is in love with the sexalicious Yo, immediately realizes that Sweeney is a rival, and the two men instinctively hate each other with a passion and each half-suspects the other of being the Ripper. Greene does, however, help Sweeney in his pursuit of the Ripper, saying that he doesn't want the murderer to get another chance at Yo, and has hopes that Sweeney will be the serial killer's next victim. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_jKx4__0JiFfjgtUCv1J4AvJTWznOrXlkAYolnkH1M0O5He3SPbNLYgsA_P9sD5Bearh_KfGMF243RsNuhWBaaluVmyS-mRjXmHt2sn5Awibc2K33bYPtyCuuZolxXjY8jfS4rkNc6DuNgbbBpNzdiiuK_2tWZ3s5axDNsdf4u1PuaZRQvYNQRQmwUj8/s600/THSCRMNGMM1967.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="362" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_jKx4__0JiFfjgtUCv1J4AvJTWznOrXlkAYolnkH1M0O5He3SPbNLYgsA_P9sD5Bearh_KfGMF243RsNuhWBaaluVmyS-mRjXmHt2sn5Awibc2K33bYPtyCuuZolxXjY8jfS4rkNc6DuNgbbBpNzdiiuK_2tWZ3s5axDNsdf4u1PuaZRQvYNQRQmwUj8/w241-h400/THSCRMNGMM1967.jpg" width="241" /></a></div>The identity of the Ripper, and how Sweeney discovers the truth, are broadly similar to what we see in Argento's film. Sweeney uses a connection in the police department to secure an opportunity to talk to an imprisoned convict who was associated with the first of the Ripper's victims, and this guy directs our hero to the small shop where she briefly worked where he talks to the owner, a promiscuous homosexual. (As in Brown's <i><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2016/01/rogue-in-space-by-frederic-brown.html">Rogue in Space</a></i>, gay men are regarded as disgusting in <i>The Screaming Mimi</i>, with the characters employing terms like "faggot" and "fairy" in reference to them; when drunk and in need of money in Chapter 1, Sweeney even considers mugging a gay man he sees.) Sweeney learns that the Ripper's first victim was murdered just after, in the "queer's" absence, selling to an unknown customer a nude statuette in black material of a terrified woman, a bit of merch colloquially known in the trade as a "Screaming Mimi." (In <i>The Bird with the Crystal Plumage </i>the significant art object is a painting.) Sweeney tracks down to his rural shack the starving artist who sculpted the prototype of this mass-produced figure in clay; this guy based the statue on his sister, whom he saw being assaulted by an escaped mental patient. The sculptor saved his sister by killing the maniac, but sis ended up in the nut house herself--he was told she died there. </div><div><br /></div><div>Back in Chicago, Sweeney takes the steps that reveal to him the astonishing truth and put his and others' lives in desperate danger. "Yolanda Lang" is a pseudonym--Yo is that artist's sister, who went insane when she saw the statue memorializing the worst moment of her life and became the murderous Ripper! Doc Greene, whom we have been conditioned to think is blackly evil and probably the Ripper himself, sacrifices his reputation and his life trying to protect Yo from herself and the cops. Sweeney barely survives, in the penultimate scene using his erudition to basically hypnotize the naked and insane knife-wielding Yo, turning her into a sort of statue so she won't slash him or sic her monstrous dog on him. The three figures, man, woman and beast, spend an entire night in a stalemate, fulfilling in ironic fashion Sweeney's euphemistic ambition to "spend the night" with the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEishwaHJrdZsXWqbji8HGevhsv_meURYpgxXZgR9pnAFtMGjZlOAhdofI5MLzUKQShSpsxd-nXzuGRmqVR4N8TBQDkkGX9Z7j3jxhmgVVMroYkMtb2dTMaFDIb5opweN9nNSFZCXb-VFYx9OuTEbip9fE2SkmM-Zyoo1KbH5khIz8xE2Q_yXEaygDMEqkg/s612/THSCRMNGMM1949.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="612" data-original-width="434" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEishwaHJrdZsXWqbji8HGevhsv_meURYpgxXZgR9pnAFtMGjZlOAhdofI5MLzUKQShSpsxd-nXzuGRmqVR4N8TBQDkkGX9Z7j3jxhmgVVMroYkMtb2dTMaFDIb5opweN9nNSFZCXb-VFYx9OuTEbip9fE2SkmM-Zyoo1KbH5khIz8xE2Q_yXEaygDMEqkg/s320/THSCRMNGMM1949.jpg" width="227" /></a></div>Even if a dog undressing a girl and a man paralyzing a woman for hours by reciting snatches of poetry at her are a little unbelievable (the latter scene is like an illustration of an idea I've seen bandied about on right-wing twitter, that women don't react to the words men say so much as respond to the tone in which the man says them, you know, like a dog), <i>The Screaming Mimi </i>is convincing as a whole because all of Brown's moving parts fit together and operate smoothly, and payoffs for all the foreshadowing and the little twists (like the radical shift in how we feel about Doc Greene) are all satisfying. Obviously, by today's standards, <i>The Screaming Mimi</i> is sexist and homophobic and maybe even racist (all the talk of Irish people being like this or that) but it is a well-crafted and entertaining detective story and I can especially recommend it to fans of <i>The Bird with the Crystal Plumage</i> because it is fun to see what Argento took from the novel and what he left out or added.</div><div><br /></div><div>So, another thumbs up for Fredric Brown. Maybe we'll read another novel by him soon.</div></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-86926098432808362192024-02-07T10:13:00.000-05:002024-02-07T10:13:13.489-05:00Merril-approved 1956 stories by J McConnell, J T McIntosh & I Melchior<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuWofpXvOwTY6ywgowmndYCOy0uIdfu3D7lxGCV5FqUJagAS-dBXOAAowkm5ndfQnby7pSoKT0fqa_hlOA9A_QiFRipy3gKaKydD91QwPpzZtXyMdapYz_lEJ9UieRs5asgtFN9OZpYkjcT4ZGIDJmsF_GFbZLVkSNYQ9xUzc4-9f-6QMCbgoeeKITNnc/s373/Merril2ndfronttiny.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="373" data-original-width="249" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuWofpXvOwTY6ywgowmndYCOy0uIdfu3D7lxGCV5FqUJagAS-dBXOAAowkm5ndfQnby7pSoKT0fqa_hlOA9A_QiFRipy3gKaKydD91QwPpzZtXyMdapYz_lEJ9UieRs5asgtFN9OZpYkjcT4ZGIDJmsF_GFbZLVkSNYQ9xUzc4-9f-6QMCbgoeeKITNnc/s320/Merril2ndfronttiny.jpg" width="214" /></a></div>One of our long term projects here at MPorcius Fiction Log is the tour we are taking of 1956 speculative fiction under the guidance of famous and influential critic Judith Merril, who had an expansive view of what constituted SF. In the back of her anthology <i>SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume</i> is a long alphabetical list of stories she considered for inclusion in the volume but which didn't quite make the cut, and we have been going through the list, reading selected stories. Currently we are on the "M"s, and today will look at three stories by authors I am considering minor, including one guy I think is a pretty bad writer, but about whom I retain some curiosity.<p></p><p>But first--links to earlier stops on our Merril-guided tour of 1956.</p><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-robert.html" style="text-align: center;">Abernathy and Aldiss<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-p-anderson.html" style="text-align: center;">Anderson, Allen and Banks<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/03/merril-approved-1956-stories-j-barrow-c.html">Barrow, Beaumont and Blish<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/meril-approved-1956-stories-bradbury.html">Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler</a> <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-carter.html">Carter, Clarke and Clifton</a> <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-clingerman.html">Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen<br /></a><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/04/merril-approved-1956-stories-de-camp.html">de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle</a> <br /><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/05/merril-approved-1956-stories-harlan.html">Ellison and Fontenay<br /></a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/06/merril-approved-1956-stories-galouye.html">Galouye, Garrett, Grimm & Gunn</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/07/merril-approved-1956-sf-stories-by-r.html">Hart, Herbert and Jones</a> </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/10/merril-approved-1956-stories-kuttner.html">Kuttner & Moore, Lang, Leinster, L'Engle and McClintic</a></div><div><br /></div><div><b>"Avoidance Situation"</b> by James McConnell</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbgrciSboseSSAPcvZFHLppC6i9i2EtCbqfyisEoYL2k0Ly1AovRtWieTvCB1Y_xf7-uqbXy_m8IN7-t52CtrlYjnBiWB_zeroOcbCVO2_mH4htGPMXwarPPpxErwtIY5sx-SzVjfo5Bt3teb1uiksrL0VzHkZFX5gY40L2XnosNrk6BLUR75VwPA9OJo/s511/WOFIFFEB1956.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="511" data-original-width="350" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbgrciSboseSSAPcvZFHLppC6i9i2EtCbqfyisEoYL2k0Ly1AovRtWieTvCB1Y_xf7-uqbXy_m8IN7-t52CtrlYjnBiWB_zeroOcbCVO2_mH4htGPMXwarPPpxErwtIY5sx-SzVjfo5Bt3teb1uiksrL0VzHkZFX5gY40L2XnosNrk6BLUR75VwPA9OJo/s320/WOFIFFEB1956.jpg" width="219" /></a></div>McConnell has nine short fiction citations at isfdb, and is probably more important as a scientist than a SF writer--a biologist and animal psychologist, he was largely responsible for the later-exploded theory that planarian worms can learn information by gaining the memories of other planarians they eat. McConnell was also injured by terrorist Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. McConnell was a guy who could think outside the box and was something of a comedian, attributes that suit him for a little side career as a SF writer.</div><p style="text-align: left;">"Avoidance Situation" was a cover story for <i>If</i>, promoted as "A New Space Thriller." This issue of <i>If</i> includes a column by Forrest J. Ackerman, the lion's share of which is a report from a convention in Cleveland; students of the role of women in SF fandom should check out this column, as Ackerman talks at some length about how exciting it was to have some good-looking girls at the convention, seeing as how in his youth SF fans were few to none, and he names names of the 1956 SF hotties. Ackerman also offers a solipsistic look at the origins of the abbreviation "stf" for "scientifiction," and a little piece of trivia: that <i>Frankenstein</i> by Mary Shelly is banned in South Africa.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Now, to "Avoidance Station." A century ago mankind first travelled into space, and today huge starships that can "jump" in and out of "subspace" are exploring the universe. The human race has searched many star systems, but not yet encountered intelligent aliens. The first scenes of McConnell's tale see the captain of the <i>Sunward</i>, Hawkins, and the ship's psychologist, Broussard, in the ship's observatory, looking out at the stark empty blackness that is subspace as the vessel nears the end of a jump, discussing the psychological effect a universe empty of matter has on spacemen.</p><div>After the jump, <i>Sunward</i> travels for a few weeks to orbit and then land upon an Earth-like planet. During a rest and relaxation period, Broussard explains to Hawkins some aspects of Kurt Lewin's theory of vector or field psychology ("Avoidance Situation" is a classic-style science fiction story, complete with science lectures) which I guess describes human decision-making and personality as a sum of the influence of varying environmental forces, using physics as a sort of metaphor. (I never heard of Lwin before, so, for me, this story truly was educational.) The topic Broussard focuses on is how when faced with two equally unappetizing courses, people will seek a third (try to "leave the field.") Broussard also talks about his wish to meet aliens and put his psychology expertise to use dealing with them. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi45Qak4ZGFajmbWv2sQauo_xtHltXqnVIj_VUqInET1v9g3NZuLJh0_4B5kb8eqPIAZf_i5wKNwH7UNENc5WKyI-PP9HHGcoT9uEwnlvpJPgbSMo-Ce1NgvuNOu6V93_99uM06AqhZaasC1EoeoDyZyVEQK_vLYSbxZpvLYC0rJNzpGzOswSodof_ZDlI/s640/STRSHPS301983.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="384" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi45Qak4ZGFajmbWv2sQauo_xtHltXqnVIj_VUqInET1v9g3NZuLJh0_4B5kb8eqPIAZf_i5wKNwH7UNENc5WKyI-PP9HHGcoT9uEwnlvpJPgbSMo-Ce1NgvuNOu6V93_99uM06AqhZaasC1EoeoDyZyVEQK_vLYSbxZpvLYC0rJNzpGzOswSodof_ZDlI/s320/STRSHPS301983.jpg" width="192" /></a></div>The scene shifts to a one-man scout ship, piloted by an alien, Lan Sur, agent of the Dakn Empire. After a session in the simulator in which he fights a practice battle and then has his performance judged by a computer, the computer alerts him to the presence of aliens on a nearby planet--Lan Sur has stumbled upon the <i>Sunward</i>. The Dakn Empire is thousands of years old and comprises thousands of planets and many races, and Lan Sur opens negotiations with Hawkins and Broussard by telling them that his analysis indicates that Earth people are far less intelligent and less technologically advanced than any of the components of the Dakn Empire and so the people of Earth will be relegated to the slave caste. Slaves, of course, have their memories and personalities erased before being dispersed throughout the vast Dakn Empire. The weapons of the <i>Sunward</i> prove useless against even Lan Sur's personal force field, and Hawkins is given 24 hours to surrender; if he doesn't surrender Lan Sur will destroy the <i>Sunward</i> and direct the Dakn space navy to exterminate the human race.</div><div><br /></div><div>Hawkins, as we expect in these old SF stories, uses his knowledge of science and a bit of trickery to escape the equally dreadful alternatives of genocide and mindless slavery--to, as was foreshadowed, "leave the field." The sense of wonder ending of "Avoidance Situation" is that the human race will hide in subspace and bring with them the star systems which they currently occupy--it seems the Dakns don't know about subspace, instead relying on a drive that propels their ships within this universe at the speed of light squared.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is a decent story that I enjoyed; mildly better than acceptable.</div><div><br /></div><div>Like Merril, Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh approved of "Avoidance Situation" and they included it in their 1983 anthology <i>Starships</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>"Empath"</b> by J. T. McIntosh </div><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKx-5W_OlP44mSc9__8AEBo0by77F03bgLXO6Z02iUV7QZE1suG98-moK9aGilT-7vS6VniECZkt_ppp6w1O2yroMxoU9VpvnC7rml-5s0A9Jv5_Ql3bgLSgMqdMufihEZow2ftNvU7E7pFjXUGcvoOkUp2ake1ZP1CRRESfXvVjObprGX6WoFoZJ2Tz4/s600/NEWWRAUG1956.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="417" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKx-5W_OlP44mSc9__8AEBo0by77F03bgLXO6Z02iUV7QZE1suG98-moK9aGilT-7vS6VniECZkt_ppp6w1O2yroMxoU9VpvnC7rml-5s0A9Jv5_Ql3bgLSgMqdMufihEZow2ftNvU7E7pFjXUGcvoOkUp2ake1ZP1CRRESfXvVjObprGX6WoFoZJ2Tz4/s320/NEWWRAUG1956.jpg" width="222" /></a></div>McIntosh is a prolific writer with a long record at isfdb, but usually when I read his work I am not happy with it: at these links witness my attacks on the novels <i><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-million-cities-by-j-t-mcintosh.html">The Million Cities</a></i> and <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2016/02/norman-conquest-2066-by-j-t-mcintosh.html" style="font-style: italic;">Norman Conquest 2066 </a>and on the short stories <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2015/12/1962-stories-from-j-g-ballard-avram.html">"One into Two"</a> and <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/08/1964-stories-by-r-f-young-l-niven-j-t.html">"At the Top of the World."</a> So as I prepare to read it, I am questioning Merril's wisdom in promoting "Empath." It kind of looks like Merril may not be on the same page as the larger SF community on the topic of McIntosh, as, according to isfdb, after its appearance in <i>New Worlds</i> over on Terf Island, "Empath" was never reprinted. Seeing that "Empath" is almost forty pages long, I am sort of wondering what the hell I am doing as I start it. <div><br /></div><div>We get a little eroticized violence to start our story. Betty Lincoln is on the roof of the skyscraper from which Robert Green has just been pushed to his death by two brutish murderers. The murderers are gone, and Betty, sure to be considered the prime suspect by the police, rips her clothes and cuts herself to add credibility to the claim she will make to the cops that she was defending herself from a rape attempt by Green and he fell to his death during the struggle. But when the cops catch her up on the roof they don't believe her lies because Robert Green was a psychic ("empath") and was transmitting a mental distress call to another psychic working with the police, his brother Tim, in their battle against the criminal gang the Circle, which has its own psychic members.</div><div><br /></div><div>Tim, knowing she is innocent, has Betty released, and we get some exposition about the character of her world. It is a future of poverty, in which the small number of rich people (the "moles") live underground for fear of nuclear bombs. while the poor masses (the "angels") live aboveground in dirty cities. Worldwide poverty is apparently the result of misguided Western efforts to alleviate Third World poverty--people in London and New York are now as poor as those in Bombay and Peking--doh! </div><div><br /></div><div>Betty is attacked by one of the thugs who murdered Green and tried to frame her for the murder, but she outwits him and captures him. To protect her, the police then put Betty up in a mole hotel, a much nicer place than any Betty, an angel, has ever seen. Betty realizes that she is in love with Tim, and can sense where Tim is--her own psychic powers have awakened! She joins Tim, who explains that the Circle is led by selfish empaths who are trying to take over the world; he and his brother were the leaders of the empaths who are siding with the established order against the Circle revolutionaries.</div><div><br /></div><div>The last dozen or so pages of the story see Betty become the world's most powerful empath and she and Tim use their powers to guide the police to the empaths of the Circle, who are destroyed.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Empath"'s van Vogt-style plot isn't terrible, but the story is poorly written and some elements seem extraneous while others are underdeveloped--it feels like a rush job rather than something carefully crafted. The sexualized elements make "Empath" feel like a half-assed exploitation story, while one of the central conceits of McIntosh's tale--that to use your psychic powers you have to let go and just allow feelings to wash over you, rather than consciously focus and direct your powers--sort of drains the characters of agency. On the other hand, I sort of like McIntosh's cynicism--even the "good" empaths, Tim and Betty, are arrogant jerks who look down on the mundanes (I guess we'd call them "muggles" nowadays) and the cop who saves Betty in the final fight is able to do so because he is cold and ruthless, the sort of person who never has any friends and is not swayed by emotion but concentrates on getting the job done.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm not sure whether to condemn this story as poor or judge it as just barely acceptable filler--in a spirit of generosity let's give it a passing grade. This time McIntosh makes it past the post by a nose; this may be McIntosh's best work.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>"The Racer"</b> by Ib Melchior </div><div><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIFqNOoNI1U0viFkhHoJcxJ2yIUHttV4IOGclefpWohHynIpYr32_Epp6VBNzaeH_397oYGVYRssDse-7aF267T_xrjXtRxkYzrjVBATU8usGDCcAKdxwstF8MrpVz1lT3RFZxdgoELiPSVkQAuN18niX-w5PJgSsSEXxKfGnHNW_6KaSq0YCHtcSIPnU/s580/ib.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="580" data-original-width="434" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIFqNOoNI1U0viFkhHoJcxJ2yIUHttV4IOGclefpWohHynIpYr32_Epp6VBNzaeH_397oYGVYRssDse-7aF267T_xrjXtRxkYzrjVBATU8usGDCcAKdxwstF8MrpVz1lT3RFZxdgoELiPSVkQAuN18niX-w5PJgSsSEXxKfGnHNW_6KaSq0YCHtcSIPnU/s320/ib.png" width="239" /></a></div>Melchior has two novels and three stories listed at isfdb. According to wikipedia, the Danish-born Melchior had an exciting life of struggle against the Nazis and the Communists, working in Hollywood and as a writer of mainstream fiction and nonfiction. "The Racer" first appeared in the men's magazine <i>Escapade</i> and would be adapted for the screen as <i>Death Race 2000</i>; it has been reprinted repeatedly in anthologies like Charles Nuetzel's <i>If This Goes On</i> and Peter Haining's <i>Death on Wheels</i>. I can't find a copy of the appropriate issue of <i>Escapade</i> online, so I'm reading "The Racer" in Jim Wynorski's <i>They Came from Outer Space</i>, an anthology of short stories that served as the basis for films.</div><div><br /></div><div>As you probably already know, "The Racer" is a satire of the blood lust of the entertainment-loving public. (This is where I link to The Kinks' <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShsVJgEPCrk">"Give the People What They Want"</a> and 10,000 Maniacs' <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jORFcH5uAjM">"Candy Everybody Wants."</a>) Willie is a top driver in the world of cross country races in which drivers are not only judged on their times to the finish line, but on how many pedestrians they kill or injure. We follow him and his mechanic Hank as they start the New York to Los Angeles race, and Willie begins having second thoughts about the propriety of murdering innocent women and children, much to the chagrin of Hank, who has a hankering for the big bonus they will get for running over a record number of pedestrians.</div><div><br /></div><div>A simple story, but told with economy in a brisk straightforward manner--not bad.</div><div><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2mtVr58E8CKWpZ_z3mk379vK1XOYvoPnx0V59jFCXq-Y7FCfkYIN4DCSLP3GmwERXA7uPQlwAODlkLMx0RrwQKRHdhjLRUEYdlH6rMeBcwHOVKVG7PM9RoMTdlOojla8H0DX8STPhLFSxPjY9qV8ZY1xA7VtO1wHVzmuKlYc1qssftr4IUocRZkdTkkE/s500/intheclearingstandsaracerandadriverbyhistrade.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="411" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2mtVr58E8CKWpZ_z3mk379vK1XOYvoPnx0V59jFCXq-Y7FCfkYIN4DCSLP3GmwERXA7uPQlwAODlkLMx0RrwQKRHdhjLRUEYdlH6rMeBcwHOVKVG7PM9RoMTdlOojla8H0DX8STPhLFSxPjY9qV8ZY1xA7VtO1wHVzmuKlYc1qssftr4IUocRZkdTkkE/s16000/intheclearingstandsaracerandadriverbyhistrade.jpg" /></a></div><p style="text-align: left;">***********</p><p style="text-align: left;">It is easy to see why Merril gave the nod to McConnell's competently told psychology-centric classic-SF-style story and to Melchior's effective and economical satire of the debased public. As for McIntosh's borderline mediocrity...well, maybe she liked its cynicism and ambiguity, its portrayal of a world in which people's fates are determined by factors beyond their control, success is corelated with <i>not</i> caring and people with resources have contempt for their inferiors.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Another fun and thought-provoking leg of our long march through 1956. Keep your eyes open for the next installment of this journey through the year of Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin, the Montgomery bus boycott and the rise of Elvis Presley.</p></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-55707508780291801032024-02-06T11:55:00.002-05:002024-02-13T19:11:31.743-05:00Nightmares from Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman and Charles L. Grant<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWFcKlsDZNdtp0FXRoFdfTpAFjQTDRZEDctOScMy5Ua34nRCUpXPhMsy2bx7U_UkHubtt28m_eQEcNS0-wW8JjtmE4AZFvqscdVwEhk1A_LD2NE0q08EV6Fo4JYFthC1LxYDs8mGeCbohKVmozq4emGKfIpKlgyfq_-Wncac48dr2LFjrBwfmDJxWeDo0/s456/whenyousleep.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="221" data-original-width="456" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWFcKlsDZNdtp0FXRoFdfTpAFjQTDRZEDctOScMy5Ua34nRCUpXPhMsy2bx7U_UkHubtt28m_eQEcNS0-wW8JjtmE4AZFvqscdVwEhk1A_LD2NE0q08EV6Fo4JYFthC1LxYDs8mGeCbohKVmozq4emGKfIpKlgyfq_-Wncac48dr2LFjrBwfmDJxWeDo0/s16000/whenyousleep.png" /></a></div>The nightmare continues! Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we have been reading stories from <i>To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare</i>, a 1993 anthology<i> </i>edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg. <i>To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare</i> contains thirty stories, and we have read 14 of them over the years in various venues; interested parties can see what we thought about them by clicking the links below: <br /><br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-fearsome-touch-of-death-black-stone.html">"The Black Stone"</a> by Robert E. Howard <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/08/weird-tales-july-1933-edmond-hamilton-h.html">"Ubbo-Sathla"</a> by Clark Ashton Smith<br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/03/northwest-smith-stories-by-c-l-moore.html">"Scarlet Dream"</a> by C. L. Moore<br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/08/weird-tales-july-1933-edmond-hamilton-h.html">"The Dreams in the Witch-House"</a> by H. P. Lovecraft <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/01/weird-tales-may-1938-robert-e-howard.html">"The Isle of the Sleeper"</a> by Edmond Hamilton<br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/04/stories-by-fritz-leiber-robert-bloch.html">"The Unspeakable Betrothal"</a> by Robert Bloch <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/11/fiendishness-from-r-bradbury-c-beaumont.html">"Perchance to Dream"</a> by Charles Beaumont<div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/01/nightmare-stories-by-b-stoker-h-b-cave.html">"A Dread of Red Hands"</a> by Bram Stoker</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/01/nightmare-stories-by-b-stoker-h-b-cave.html">"The Watcher in the Green Room"</a> by Hugh B. Cave</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/01/nightmare-stories-by-b-stoker-h-b-cave.html">"The Lady in Gray"</a> by Donald Wandrei</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/01/nightmare-stories-by-b-stoker-h-b-cave.html">"Prescience"</a> by Nelson S. Bond<br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/nightmares-from-fritz-leiber-richard.html">"The Dreams of Albert Moreland"</a> by Fritz Leiber</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/nightmares-from-fritz-leiber-richard.html">"Lover When You're Near Me"</a> by Richard Matheson</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/02/nightmares-from-fritz-leiber-richard.html">"The Depths"</a> by Ramsey Campbell<br /><br />Today we'll read three more stories from the collection, those tales plucked by Messrs. D, W and G from the oeuvres of Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman and Charles L. Grant.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>"Dream of a Mannikin"</b> by Thomas Ligotti (1983?)</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOmNUlHcSGaEODMd_5kMgN8u4-0HZoSpkcrKu2ZBgEppJn_TiGMXGGd22PdqjAxJSSpKhcGut99n7G6EijgPhNS6fgA7xPbaY2an-Modvv6EPXsJge9zfC30f5Rqq8q1URnsgzH75CaoEQgyzmG6m1gL_ETZ5ia3EojhpKMCJiK2ew-HP5P9x6mKDswVc/s630/eldritch_tales_1983_n9.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="397" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOmNUlHcSGaEODMd_5kMgN8u4-0HZoSpkcrKu2ZBgEppJn_TiGMXGGd22PdqjAxJSSpKhcGut99n7G6EijgPhNS6fgA7xPbaY2an-Modvv6EPXsJge9zfC30f5Rqq8q1URnsgzH75CaoEQgyzmG6m1gL_ETZ5ia3EojhpKMCJiK2ew-HP5P9x6mKDswVc/w253-h400/eldritch_tales_1983_n9.jpg" width="253" /></a></div>This story has appeared in several books, sometimes as "Dream of a Manikin" and sometimes as "Dream of a Mannikin" and sometimes as "Dream of a Mannikin, or The Third Person." There is some confusion at isfdb over whether the story debuted in 1982 or 1983, but it looks to me like its first appearance was in the 1983 issue of the magazine <i>Eldritch Tales.</i> In 1989 Jessica Amanda Salmonson included the story in her anthology <i>Tales by Moonlight II</i>, which appears to be a collection of stories that first appeared in small press magazines; "Dream of a Manikin" was reprinted in the Ligotti collections <i>Songs of a Dead Dreamer</i> and <i>Nightmare Factory.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>I guess we sort of expect Ligotti stories to be a little challenging, to be the sort of story you have to figure out, and this is true of "Dream of a Mannikin," but it is not <i>terribly</i> difficult. The story takes the form of a long letter written by a psychiatrist to a fellow shrink, a woman with whom he is in love, and we learn more and more about his feelings for her and the nature of their relationship as the story progresses. The last paragraph of the letter is in italics and is apparently the female therapist's notes on or response to the man's letter.</div><div><br /></div><div>The main topic of the letter is the visit of a young woman, Amy Locher, to the letter writer. Locher has had a terrible dream and is seeking treatment, and it turns out she was directed to the narrator by the woman he is in love with. Ligotti puts multiple layers between the story and the reader as he has the letter writer describe Locher's dream, which mostly consists of a second, inner dream, the dream of the patient's dream version of herself. In real life (ostensibly) Locher is a clerk or secretary at an industrial firm, but in her dream she works in a clothing store and dresses the mannikins (the spelling is perhaps significant--I'd spell the term for those figures in a store "mannequin.") The retail worker version of the patient has a dream herself in which she is attacked by the mannequins she dresses and turned into a mannequin herself--this dream within a dream includes classic dream elements, like being unable to move and unable to scream when in danger.</div><div><br /></div><div>The woman shrink has some totally wacky theories about "otherworlds" and powerful beings who toy with lesser beings that may be subordinate "splinter" aspects of themselves, theories that the narrator feels are more metaphysical than scientific, and the male shrink in his letter accuses her of manipulating Locher, of hypnotically inducing her dream, in order to acquire evidence of her bizarre theories and to lay a trap for him. And an elaborate trap it is--it seems the narrator's secretary is an agent of the woman shrink.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the second part of the letter the narrator describes his investigations that lead him closer to the nature of the trap the woman psychiatrist has laid for him, which he nevertheless falls into. It seems the female shrink has somehow gained the ability, through contact with other worlds or dimensions, to take control of people and turn them into mannikins (also described as dolls--allusively, the lady shrink apparently had a doll named Amy as a child, and the word "darling" is spelled "dolling" multiple times throughout the story in multiple contexts) and she has done this to Amy Lochner and it looks like the male shrink is in the process of becoming her next victim. Or maybe the female psychiatrist can imbue dolls--and/or people--with alien souls she snares from outer space--one of the themes of the story is ambiguity and confusion about identity and transformation of identity. Or perhaps the female shrink is a space monster and all the other characters--Locher, secretary and male psychiatrist--are aspects of her soul which she plays with to help pass the aeons.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is a well-crafted story; the depiction of dreams feels totally believable, the images are strong, and every sentence feels significant, offering some clue to the plot or adding to the atmosphere. "Dream of a Mannikin" <i>does</i> require some patience and it will give your noggin a workout, though, so maybe it's not what everybody is going to think of as fun entertainment. </div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNXQleaL3Xt2omMGfzgaXKgLgYqFc-EJ5apzCIKIfO86RmvITe9OMc34-R6vO-dS1HuOp3RsNKlxbXD_SzBG77DxKA2OKww8bKJcWa1BBcFjbWAB2Zn0mS7612dhZHqgTvC3sGTTgjHbKZoB2xTUns-3MBuBdYSGM2zMK4NbNw8oJvmvWvwXTRfGkk5E8/s500/ligottid.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="410" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNXQleaL3Xt2omMGfzgaXKgLgYqFc-EJ5apzCIKIfO86RmvITe9OMc34-R6vO-dS1HuOp3RsNKlxbXD_SzBG77DxKA2OKww8bKJcWa1BBcFjbWAB2Zn0mS7612dhZHqgTvC3sGTTgjHbKZoB2xTUns-3MBuBdYSGM2zMK4NbNw8oJvmvWvwXTRfGkk5E8/s16000/ligottid.jpg" /></a></div></div><div><br /></div><div><b>"Never Visit Venice"</b> by Robert Aickman (1968)</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-RAgjV0kD4HUZuVDMkQ6YzE0j1V3HnOO3Ji27MCT11R-Ash2wOF5-ALTSThnNIpY1jEgnGZYB64Tvo2Udktr29vFWngpPvoEwBetFWFwWIn4V8ew7356wozmr38HEtz_YH1d7B8Gzb8eEnDoouGQRkqWsGtS3_447Nz5XwaO0yJBgYLvm8dWb0riARFw/s500/41XqJlZ6M-L.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="339" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-RAgjV0kD4HUZuVDMkQ6YzE0j1V3HnOO3Ji27MCT11R-Ash2wOF5-ALTSThnNIpY1jEgnGZYB64Tvo2Udktr29vFWngpPvoEwBetFWFwWIn4V8ew7356wozmr38HEtz_YH1d7B8Gzb8eEnDoouGQRkqWsGtS3_447Nz5XwaO0yJBgYLvm8dWb0riARFw/s320/41XqJlZ6M-L.jpg" width="217" /></a></div>Robert Aickman is another writer whose work I expect to strain the brain case. The title of "Never Visit Venice" made me wonder if I was in for allusions to Thomas Mann's famous "Death In Venice," which I have read a few times, and to Proust--Venice (Marcel's desire to go there and his eventual visit) is a recurring theme in <i>Remembrance of Lost Time</i>, and strange dreams, in which little Marcel has become an inanimate object or an abstract concept, are a prominent topic of the very first page of that monumental novel. And then came the epigraph that opens "Never Visit Venice," some lines from Celine, whose <i><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/01/death-on-installment-plan-by-louis.html">Death on the Installment Plan</a></i> and <i><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/02/castle-to-castle-by-ferdinand-louis.html">Castle to Castle</a></i> we read back in early 2022. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Fern is an Englishman, an office worker who is shy, unambitious, and not very social; he doesn't make as much money as he could because he doesn't see the point, and he doesn't make friends or achieve any success with women largely because other people interest him but little. He has a recurring dream about embracing a woman in a gondola in Venice, and eventually actually goes to Venice, where the dream comes true in a macabre and surreal fashion. As the story ends it seems that Fern, alone in the gondola with the skeleton of the woman who beckoned him into the little craft, will drift out to sea to be drowned; one of the last things he sees is a political slogan painted on a wall, I guess a quote or paraphrase from Mussolini, asserting it is better to live like a lion for an hour than to live a lifetime as an ass. </div><div><br /></div><div>Though the sudden revelation in the end, when the woman Fern has just had sex with becomes or is revealed to be a skeleton, is like something out of <i>Weird Tales</i> or EC comics, most of the story resembles literary fiction. The first part is page after page of Fern in England that focus on his ambiguous and diffident attitude toward life and career and money, and most of the remainder is page after page of Fern in Venice, finding everything disappointing and sensing that Venice's glory days are long past, a fact none of the living people in Venice are to acknowledge--only the ghost woman in the gondola will voice this sad truth. The pervasive atmosphere of the story is of ambiguity and irony--early in the story we learn Fern is both proud and embarrassed that he is different than other people and doesn't really get along with them, and we are told early in the Venice part of the story that Fern's expectations of what he would find in Venice, based on what he has read and been told, are not realized, that in fact he finds the opposite of what he was told to expect. And there are many other instances of irony and ambiguity. One of the more striking examples is the camouflaged suggestion on the last page that Mussolini, whom we always see portrayed as a monster or a buffoon, had a better idea about how to live than does the inoffensive Fern, a strange notion that I guess the quote from Celine, the notorious Jew-hater and Nazi-sympathizer, that begins the story foreshadows. </div><div><br /></div><div>But it could be that Aickman is not endorsing Mussolini and Celine. Perhaps Aickman's point is that people who put themselves out there, who embrace life with vigor, are often evil people, and that being forward and ambitious is dangerous and ultimately pointless (Mussolini and Celine are, of course, in the final equation, losers who get humiliated.) Consider that Fern tries to realize his dream of love in Venice only to have sex with a skeleton who tells him one should "Never visit Venice" (i.e., do not pursue your dreams) and then get killed, and that early in the story Aickman puts forward the idea that travel is pointless, suggesting, as would a skeptic of "globalism," that easy travel and communication have served to homogenize the world, turn a world of diverse cultures into one big monoculture, so that travel and communication are unprofitable, every place being now the same. </div><div><br /></div><div>Though not a lot actually happens in the story, Aickman's style, as in good literary fiction, is smooth and engaging and carries you along so the story doesn't feel long at all, even though there is little or no narrative drive. Thought-provoking and worthwhile.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Never Visit Venice" first appeared in the Aickman collection <i>Sub Rosa</i>, and was also included in the collection <i>The Wine-Dark Sea</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHwfQzNT3uW5z869TmdEArf3nKUMdSkfGK3yFzxDiafSnVfoYeKV-fInmXhRUlDQ31OPN6-fgUIuEfKw2lFJpRUOGARuxt-47alWFuJPL2uM-WwPZc-UDHz0PaHvfSwt7wynNphrQ29ARqSs3JsT3m-di9GpXsJEWrsqCze1DQr6WzVcgUDYiuNq3kfNw/s500/robertaickman.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="364" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHwfQzNT3uW5z869TmdEArf3nKUMdSkfGK3yFzxDiafSnVfoYeKV-fInmXhRUlDQ31OPN6-fgUIuEfKw2lFJpRUOGARuxt-47alWFuJPL2uM-WwPZc-UDHz0PaHvfSwt7wynNphrQ29ARqSs3JsT3m-di9GpXsJEWrsqCze1DQr6WzVcgUDYiuNq3kfNw/s16000/robertaickman.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div><b>"The Last and Dreadful Hour"</b> by Charles L. Grant (1986)</div><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhr-7hpjvh_MNG05gVWYd2d4KNmbo49lKsqkMd07rC8afNs8IVZsQZelu_KK7diiT_EzN71m0UZOz2uYVeeNbA7cOjKI3UOAS-UghbQvG8IInl3eRQbLSWrEefzw8sYG_uFTxg2X6jcY0tFgVQYXxIiWF78a8VjqCdG8vI9ATZU11AU6O9Scs31raQvF0/s500/51T9-lEL1lL.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="311" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhr-7hpjvh_MNG05gVWYd2d4KNmbo49lKsqkMd07rC8afNs8IVZsQZelu_KK7diiT_EzN71m0UZOz2uYVeeNbA7cOjKI3UOAS-UghbQvG8IInl3eRQbLSWrEefzw8sYG_uFTxg2X6jcY0tFgVQYXxIiWF78a8VjqCdG8vI9ATZU11AU6O9Scs31raQvF0/s320/51T9-lEL1lL.jpg" width="199" /></a></div>"The Last and Dreadful Hour" is one of Grant's stories about the town of Oxrun, and debuted in the collection <i>The Orchard.</i> <i>The Orchard</i> has appeared in numerous editions, and looking over their covers I was amused to see that in one edition the Stephen King blurb reads "One of the premier horror writers of his or any generation," but on another cover the quote has been misleadingly edited into "The premier horror writer of his or any generation." Was King aware of this inexcusable chicanery? </div><div><br /></div><div>Ligotti's "Dream of a Mannikin" is like 12 pages long, and Aickman's "Never Visit Venice" is some ten pages longer. Grant's "The Last and Dreadful Hour" is ten pages longer still, clocking in at 33 pages, a fact that made me groan after I had read the first of those thirty-three, which is wholly devoted to a description of the weather, complete with poetic repetition--while Ligotti and Aickman's stories felt like literary fiction, Grant's from square one felt like the work of a guy <i>trying</i> to be literary but succeeding only in wasting everybody's time.</div><div><br /></div><div>The second page of "The Last and Dreadful Hour" is given over to describing in mind-numbing detail the movie theatre in Oxrun. The aforementioned weather--a ferocious storm--causes a power outage, and the theatre manager goes on the sound system--which, unlike the electric lights, is somehow still working--to apologize. We are then introduced to a passel of boring characters with boring backstories, and forced to read bland and verbose retailings of their every move--</div><div><i><blockquote>...she straightened, rubbed a hand over the back of her neck, and waved him out to the aisle. He grinned and did as he was told, thanked her as she joined him, took her arm and pulled her down a pace while Seth and Davidson moved to carry the old man...</blockquote></i></div><div>--as they discover an unconscious man in the darkened theater. It is bad enough that Grant wastes our time detailing these boring people's every gesture, but his sin is compounded by the fact that his descriptions don't even work. Toni the medical student is holding Ellery the depressed bookstore clerk's hand, and then she lets go of his hand, but then two lines later she is "pull[ing] him slowly up the aisle," as if she never let go of his hand. So not only are all these descriptions tedious and useless, they are confusing, and then angering when you realize you are looking back up the page to reread boring sentences in hopes of figuring out if some dope is holding another dope's hand, even though whether or not these dopes are holding hands is meaningless. It is possible these apparent mistakes are intentional, an effort to make the story "dream-like," but I am betting Grant and his editor just screwed up.</div><div><br /></div><div>Some supernatural force locks all the doors and renders all the windows indestructible so the characters are all stuck in the candle-lit (and believe me, we hear like one thousand times about wax dripping off these damned candles) cinema, in which all the women flirt with Ellery and the local rich guy acts like a jerk. People start disappearing, and while Ellery and a woman (not Toni, who has disappeared) are away from the group looking for one of them, she strips naked and tries to seduce Ellery, and then turns into a medusa and then into a skeleton. Ellery faints, wakes up, finds everybody is gone. A third woman reappears and flirts with Ellery before joining him on another search. Another woman reappears to flirt with Ellery, and they search some more. (This story moves in sterile circles--phrases, images, and actions all get repeated while the plot goes absolutely nowhere.) The same sort of stuff keeps happening until the story finally ends with the awakening of the old man and the hint that this mind-bogglingly lame story that makes no sense and achieves nothing is all just the dream of that old man whom they found unconscious--or maybe it is the dream of sad Ellery himself. (Toni's out-of-left-field mention of the orchard way back at the start of the story that implies the orchard is a locus of black magic or demonic possession or something is forgotten--maybe "The Last and Dreadful Hour" is more like a chapter of an episodic novel than a short story that can really stand on its own.)</div><div><br /></div><div>This story is very bad. The plot stinks, with no resolution or development and lots of loose ends. The style is horrible, a mixture of the pretentious and the just plain dumb. The characters' actions and dialogue make little sense, are just a series of non sequiturs; characters in genre fiction often act stupidly so that the plot will work, but this story is even worse because it doesn't even have a plot in which anything happens.</div><div><br /></div><div>Grant has won a pile of awards but this story is garbage and I don't know why Dziemianowicz, Weinberg and Greenberg put it in their anthology; maybe they had run out of dream stories? I will now take Stephen King blurbs even less seriously, and shun stories by Grant assiduously.</div><div><br /></div><div>Incomprehensibly, "The Last and Dreadful Hour" would be included in the "Best of" Grant collection <i>Scream Quietly</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHvEg5lIBAezPmAW-YunLlQqBhAgW2O2NXX5fcEoU3DXsARILHxAoHg8HEafM5PhxzauAVSBN1UwRY96oMytGxEzKJq2q1SJTqgZJWuqE-IBF48_t57JY3Z1KLrV3-I88wB7hhdNtAyfszaP-upGQnGruf2auHYXitA89-M0OE9WdN1ZtGvDG-_Z-M2UQ/s500/orchard.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHvEg5lIBAezPmAW-YunLlQqBhAgW2O2NXX5fcEoU3DXsARILHxAoHg8HEafM5PhxzauAVSBN1UwRY96oMytGxEzKJq2q1SJTqgZJWuqE-IBF48_t57JY3Z1KLrV3-I88wB7hhdNtAyfszaP-upGQnGruf2auHYXitA89-M0OE9WdN1ZtGvDG-_Z-M2UQ/s16000/orchard.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div>**********</div><div><br /></div><div>So today we have three stories that remind you that pursuing women is hazardous, two quite literary stories that are well-written followed by a piece of junk that makes you question the wisdom and honesty of Stephen King and the entire horror fiction establishment. What a ride!<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>It's been like six weird and horror blog posts in a row here at MPorcius Fiction Log; when next we meet we'll do something a little different.</div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-57423458017897083472024-02-02T22:25:00.000-05:002024-02-02T22:25:28.217-05:00Nightmares from Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson and Ramsey Campbell<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe1SfVTB94h6NEjycJZixoPEgQXhuzoWzG0-T6DPZz7Cop9CqijGAHJQ_SzpsWvuq60NlW9OOkW4NRe4kJANP1h4e9e55tIf6fOUdaWgrBeOIMazd7Tkoe5tcRi0dN9F8ux7dMzyVMl5dObncbn0Fl2n4ENcD_fldQi7kUr4SdIC2zQMm70CmcPVaVCdU/s777/nightm.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="777" data-original-width="456" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe1SfVTB94h6NEjycJZixoPEgQXhuzoWzG0-T6DPZz7Cop9CqijGAHJQ_SzpsWvuq60NlW9OOkW4NRe4kJANP1h4e9e55tIf6fOUdaWgrBeOIMazd7Tkoe5tcRi0dN9F8ux7dMzyVMl5dObncbn0Fl2n4ENcD_fldQi7kUr4SdIC2zQMm70CmcPVaVCdU/s320/nightm.jpg" width="188" /></a></div>Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading from the 1993 anthology <i>To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare </i>edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg<i>.</i> Today we'll sample nightmares penned by Fritz Leiber, inventor of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser; the man behind Vincent Price's best movie as well as Steven Spielberg's best movie, Richard Matheson; and Ramsey Campbell, a guy I don't actually know much about, though I think I have read fifteen or sixteen stories by him over the course of this blog's tumultuous tenure. <p></p><p><b>"The Dreams of Albert Moreland"</b> by Fritz Leiber (1945)</p><p>Here we have a story that takes seriously a theme we have seen Barry Malzberg use more than once in a ridiculous context. "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" is also a story I can recommend with enthusiasm--in it Leiber marries Lovecraftian themes to real human drama via the medium of a strong and efficient writing style.</p><p>Our narrator is a guy living in a Manhattan boarding house during the early phases of World War II. He has befriended another resident of the boarding house, Albert Moreland, a man who makes a bare living out of playing chess at an arcade; he plays customers, and they need only pay the arcade if they lose, which they generally do, as Moreland is a genius at the game and could be a famous master if he had any ambition.</p><p>Moreland tells the narrator that every night he has a vivid dream in which he is playing a game somewhat like chess, but far more complex, with a board of some 500 varicolored squares and pieces bizarrely stylized and universally repulsive, apparently representations of architecture and life forms with little in common with any to be found in real life, at least on Earth. The dream fills him with a dreadful sense of anxiety and responsibility, as if the fate of the world or the universe might hinge on whether or not he will win the game, somehow it seems his and his unseen opponent's moves might be correlated with the events of the ongoing war in Europe. </p><p>The game continues night after night, getting more and more tense, Moreland's health declining day by day, until we get the shocking cosmic horror final scene.</p><p>This is a very good story--Leiber does a terrific job with all the descriptions of the alien pieces and of the narrator's and the chess player's emotional and psychological states, offering well-crafted physical descriptions as well as evocative metaphors. Leiber also does a good job depicting elements of big city life. The structure and pacing of the tale are also great; things move forward, the tension escalating, at just the right speed, and the story is the perfect length. </p><p>Lovecraft fans and Malzberg fans alike should certainly check out "The Dreams of Albert Moreland"--Leiber handles the themes and topics we expect to find in the work of the man from Providence and the sage of Teaneck in a way that is more accessible and more mature than often do those masters themselves.</p><p>"The Dreams of Albert Moreland" would be included in the Leiber collection <i>Night's Black Agents</i> and has been anthologized several times; strange to say for such an effective story, it first appeared not in one of the famous SF magazines but in the fanzine <i>The Acolyte</i> (though I think that the story may have been extensively revised for book publication.) </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXmnkWVkxGukUiewnSORxRbDcJ74F4TORxhx7mNajpogd7V5IBFpBTP6AiCMdIzi3nr5yL4-pnSI-D_EVqCrJUyhisySTGjmnzJ8S5PnJtvaCmW9Phn8aCQe99jXi7ZV-fuYTL6DPu7iRyHfVlaH1Lz0CrUNKReXOFrBWCcxWph4mznCHoPLZEkog_AI0/s500/moreland.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="365" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXmnkWVkxGukUiewnSORxRbDcJ74F4TORxhx7mNajpogd7V5IBFpBTP6AiCMdIzi3nr5yL4-pnSI-D_EVqCrJUyhisySTGjmnzJ8S5PnJtvaCmW9Phn8aCQe99jXi7ZV-fuYTL6DPu7iRyHfVlaH1Lz0CrUNKReXOFrBWCcxWph4mznCHoPLZEkog_AI0/s16000/moreland.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>"Lover, When You're Near Me"</b> by Richard Matheson (1952)<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE9qhEWJNVvPuV30DFtPzQNYUlhKhyphenhyphen-YUvUkaIT16vjhSD3gf7A2UpfixqLTjgIInEqr_TU7O4a8Whnl6KY_Nau7OuvpGKLuJfyPAmrghyphenhyphenPnALf6K2AHXSfqw6OcVPxpv3NaSBjpUayHfkJVAFCFQtnq7-Zf91ORPklc1Cw_OwDf2OifeUiay6L2MJQI4/s600/GALMAY1952.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="452" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE9qhEWJNVvPuV30DFtPzQNYUlhKhyphenhyphen-YUvUkaIT16vjhSD3gf7A2UpfixqLTjgIInEqr_TU7O4a8Whnl6KY_Nau7OuvpGKLuJfyPAmrghyphenhyphenPnALf6K2AHXSfqw6OcVPxpv3NaSBjpUayHfkJVAFCFQtnq7-Zf91ORPklc1Cw_OwDf2OifeUiay6L2MJQI4/s320/GALMAY1952.jpg" width="241" /></a></div>Here we have a story about how women's thoughts and lives revolve around love, the expression of love and the winning of a man's love, and how men fear women's power over them, fear sex and find the typical smothering and nagging of women a distraction and an obstacle to their work and other interests. "Lover, When You're Near Me"<b> </b>is also one of those SF stories that reminds me of W. Somerset Maugham's short fiction about Britons on the far reaches of the Empire administering lonely stations far from any other white people and having character-revealing and character-altering interactions with the natives over whom they have been given authority.<p></p><p>Lindell is an employee of a big firm that trades with primitive aliens all over the galaxy. The company has stations managed by lone Earthmen on various planets, and today Lindell is dropped off on the planet of the Gnee for a sixth-month stint running the trading post there. Lindell knows something must be odd about this planet because the tours of duty on most planets are much longer than sixth months--somehow the Gnee or their world must stress out Earthers, though it is clear the place and the natives are not actually physically dangerous. In some ways "Lover, When You're Near Me" is structured as a detective story, with Lindell gradually figuring out, in part by poring over documents, what is so strange and dangerous about the planet.</p><p>The meat of the story is Lindell's relationship with the native woman who is his cook and housekeeper. Gnee men are stupid, but Gnee women, Lindell quickly learns, are clever telepaths who dominate their men. Lindell's housekeeper uses her telepathy to trick him into christening her "Lover," and then she uses means both conventional--like cooking him delicious meals and giving him flowers and expressing tender concern about his every move and utterance--and unconventional--like controlling his dreams with her telepathy--to get him to welcome her into his bed. Because the Gnee are disgustingly ugly this is a nightmarish horror for Lindell, and her efforts to seduce him push him to the limits of his sanity and make it hard for him to focus on his job; his six-month term elapses mere hours--maybe minutes!--before he was about to resort to murder and/or suicide. Lindell makes it home to Earth alive but can never forget his terrible experience.</p><p>It is easy to see "Lover, When You're Near Me" as an allegory for how men are oppressed by overbearing and manipulative women whose oppression is difficult to resist because it takes the form of expressions of and a yearning for love, but there are reasons to see it also--or instead--as an attack on how men treat women and how imperial powers treat "natives." By looking at the records of previous station managers, Lindell realizes that Lover acts the way she does because the very first station administrator from Earth seduced her, giving her the name "Lover" and warping her mind so that she desired Earthmen--contact with the white man has polluted the peaceful natives! It is also significant how peaceful the natives really are, and that Lover isn't a Shambleau-like vampire or whatever, the only reason Lover's pursuit of Lindell is horrifying is that she looks like a monster--presumably, if Lover looked like <a href="https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/marilyn-monroe-1953">Marilyn Monroe</a> or <a href="https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/sophia-loren-images-1953?assettype=image&sort=mostpopular&phrase=sophia%20loren%20images%201953&license=rf,rm">Sophia Loren</a>, Lindell would welcome her attentions and this would be a story about a paradise and not a horror story; is Matheson commenting on how shallow men are?</p><p>"Lover, When You're Near Me" isn't bad but I am going to question the critical acumen of Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty, who put it in their anthology <i>The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1953</i> and of <i>Galaxy</i> editor H. L. Gold, who put it in <i>The Second Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction</i>. Personally, I judge the story to be merely acceptable. I like the themes, and the plotting and pacing are fine, but at times Matheson's tale feels clumsily overwritten. The biggest examples of this are Matheson's lengthy poetic descriptions of the landings and launchings of the rocket ships--these descriptions don't add anything to the story because "Lover, When You're Near Me" isn't about technology or travel, but about love and sex and ugliness, so that scenes aiming to get an emotional reaction from the reader with a description of a rocket ship landing are just a distraction, and even worse they aren't very good, being more confusing and boring than vivid or evocative. </p><p>"Lover, When You're Near Me," the title of which has a comma in some printings and no comma in others, debuted in <i>Galaxy; </i>among the Matheson collections in which it can be found are <i>Born of Man and Woman</i> and its abridged version, <i>Third from the Sun</i>.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkc2lSlaFsgv1ADG0gf73sGEbTqMTMDKcOjZe3H22R9TS-cD0Mu94JYhV6UPGfwjvpNJS7gJTW53NJ3ngrtp1XqTK1oE_bQbN0fzAY6LUzyiuFizW1wjUJvZVgrCrUXMz2jSPLI9DigPDFoxhHNZidfsMFLoJ8g9tzh_alZdlpjZ4d9JkHi0SsuNZ5LbA/s500/allhands.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkc2lSlaFsgv1ADG0gf73sGEbTqMTMDKcOjZe3H22R9TS-cD0Mu94JYhV6UPGfwjvpNJS7gJTW53NJ3ngrtp1XqTK1oE_bQbN0fzAY6LUzyiuFizW1wjUJvZVgrCrUXMz2jSPLI9DigPDFoxhHNZidfsMFLoJ8g9tzh_alZdlpjZ4d9JkHi0SsuNZ5LbA/s16000/allhands.jpg" /></a></div><p><b>"The Depths"</b> by Ramsey Campbell (1982)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc5OV76MFZJSKRUncafFiKngT1VQlFl6EkH9wFdzCvrhZTvGW9xHCI7ikVKznojIGzXrSXX2wXkalbVuLvV4VH90eBwuNJKN82PIFlai9yzx4xGm-s2-x2s0Sv7nRyXbamU4eRqhBZlAfA-a1x0ba8dhIoLDUCZIzwrBWJ8XHwg6HUTm-YzDbPTex4MWg/s450/DRKCMPNNSB1982.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="271" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc5OV76MFZJSKRUncafFiKngT1VQlFl6EkH9wFdzCvrhZTvGW9xHCI7ikVKznojIGzXrSXX2wXkalbVuLvV4VH90eBwuNJKN82PIFlai9yzx4xGm-s2-x2s0Sv7nRyXbamU4eRqhBZlAfA-a1x0ba8dhIoLDUCZIzwrBWJ8XHwg6HUTm-YzDbPTex4MWg/s320/DRKCMPNNSB1982.jpg" width="193" /></a></div>It looks like "The Depths" made its premiere appearance in the collection <i>Dark Companions</i>. Karl Edward Wagner liked it, including it in <i>The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series XI</i> and it seems Campbell himself was proud of it, as it appeared in <i>Top Fantasy</i>, an anthology of stories "selected and introduced by the authors themselves." In 2010, Allyson Bird and Joel Lane reprinted it in their collection <i>Never Again: Weird Fiction Against Racism and Fascism</i>, so maybe we need to scrawl our pronouns on our name tags and steel ourselves for a 17-page diversity training. (I may be forced to plead guilty to the charge that I "worship the written word"--<a href="https://overcomingracism.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/HANDOUT-SHARED-Characteristics-of-White-Supremacy-Culture-original-1.pdf">the fifth (pink) element of white supremacy)</a>, but nobody who has read this typo-ridden blog would think of convicting me of the first pillar of white supremacy, <a href="https://www.racialjusticeconsulting.com/post/perfectionism-a-pillar-of-white-supremacy-culture">"perfectionism."</a>)<p></p><p>Well, I guess we need not have worried about being subjected to some kind of diversity lecture by Campbell; there are no references to race in "The Depths" that I could detect, and if it is an anti-fascist story, it isn't obnoxious, or even obvious, about it. What "The Depths" <i>is</i> is one of those works of genre fiction that, as do so many TV crime dramas and tabloid newspapers, denounces those who make a living producing exploitative sex and violence content while itself being just such a piece of content, full of gore and perversity, serving as an example of the very thing it seems to be attacking. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJSCOwb4s5851IXD8H6s-8ypqCLmDjrGFmhY77m8zKl7mdKNIWblCLDDvg-sFfzq4e5gR8suSEnErsS6WUzvvHmpRR_-zwDuhXWdnZynrm6YF0HkAKrZGvnC5r6-e2W7PLW4_BxZw4NRg7ocIpqeX3bStJlTanbbWx2YKypk2bYKoZn79we-mO69mJdwA/s500/1906331189.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="324" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJSCOwb4s5851IXD8H6s-8ypqCLmDjrGFmhY77m8zKl7mdKNIWblCLDDvg-sFfzq4e5gR8suSEnErsS6WUzvvHmpRR_-zwDuhXWdnZynrm6YF0HkAKrZGvnC5r6-e2W7PLW4_BxZw4NRg7ocIpqeX3bStJlTanbbWx2YKypk2bYKoZn79we-mO69mJdwA/s320/1906331189.jpg" width="207" /></a></div>Our main character is Miles, a crime novelist popular enough that he gets interviewed for the TV. In the start of the story he is renting a house in which a previous resident killed his wife with a knife, carving her up so she was "unrecognizable as a human being" and then committing suicide; Miles is staying in the house hoping to get inspiration for his next book. Local people are unfriendly to him, thinking him some kind of sadist (at least some vandal paints the word "sadist" on the gate.) <p></p><p>Maybe because the house is haunted or something, Miles starts having terrible dreams of horrific crimes, among them the cooking of a live baby in a microwave. The story takes its time, shoveling at the reader many sentences about birds and trees doing their thing, trains clattering by and citizens walking around, but eventually Miles and we readers come to realize that the terror dreams Miles is having come true--in fact, Britain is suddenly in the midst of a record-breaking wave of violent crime! The public begins demanding the reinstatement of the death penalty for murder! (Maybe it is the common people's demand for law and order that led Bird and Lane to think "The Depths" appropriate for their themed anthology.) If Miles writes down the content of a dream quickly enough, the crime it presages does not occur, but the dreams are coming fast and furious and Miles' feverish writing of them obviously interferes with the writing his agent and publisher are expecting from him (we get scenes with both these individuals.)</p><p>One of the themes of "The Depths" is the idea that the taste of the reading public is in decline, or at least changing, and that this is a reflection of societal change and/or decline. The publisher guy says to Miles "I think the public is outgrowing fantasy, now that we're well and truly in the scientific age. People want to feel informed." Publisher guy urges Miles to pen material based on research into real crimes. He also shows Miles the cover of a new magazine that he calls "the last gasp of fantasy," a painting of a woman "being simultaneously mutilated and raped." Miles later sells his records of his horrendous dreams to this magazines.</p><p>The climax of the story suggests that Miles is a scapegoat, that all of the sins of Britain or the world have been loaded on to him, and his final dream turns out to be a prediction of his own torture and murder, which he does not realize until it is too late for him to write it down and prevent its coming to pass.</p><p>The central gimmicks (crime writer is somehow assigned responsibility for the criminal nature of his decaying society as well as the whole thing with his dreams and his writing being connected to real-life crimes) are not bad and the outline of the plot is alright, but the execution of "The Depths" obscures the virtues of the story's foundations and makes it hard to enjoy the story. "The Depths" is kind of hard to read; for one thing, it is full of extraneous details and scenes which I suppose are intended to create a mood but which, for me at least, are so much chaff that just bulks up the story unprofitably and interferes with the reader's comprehension and enjoyment of the plot and themes. (Leiber's "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" is a useful contrast to Campbell's "The Depths"--Leiber includes lots of details but each paints a vivid picture and adds to the atmosphere of the story.) I also found that Campbell's transitions between, on the one hand, metaphors and Miles' dreams and visions, and on the other, what was happening in the real life of the story, were a little confusing, so that "The Depths" was not a smooth read. The level of work required of the reader leaves him little energy left over for human feeling, and it is not like Campbell's themes of social decline and the writer suffering writer's block are so novel that they can on their own hold the readers' interest.</p><p>Gotta give this one a marginal thumbs down.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzRtWbajxthz5MaYiHt2gozfXjYEXNnxYQtVoHAdYEbH9ZGAcjBk9doBOQuMy-gCs0inxrupGKcAntXMNyb6MBsf8OsYFAGS08ltNxFOcP66ErkrK018N20aYiYNG8Z0F0yKi2BJj5iqWpjuGdAl00v_SRCcu-8KvaHNMuXv-dOgn_Dv79TjgzUcvGvgA/s500/depths.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="395" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzRtWbajxthz5MaYiHt2gozfXjYEXNnxYQtVoHAdYEbH9ZGAcjBk9doBOQuMy-gCs0inxrupGKcAntXMNyb6MBsf8OsYFAGS08ltNxFOcP66ErkrK018N20aYiYNG8Z0F0yKi2BJj5iqWpjuGdAl00v_SRCcu-8KvaHNMuXv-dOgn_Dv79TjgzUcvGvgA/s16000/depths.jpg" /></a></div><p>**********</p><p>The Leiber is a winner, but the Matheson earns no more than a pass and the Campbell, sadly, a failing grade. Hopefully our next and final batch of stories from <i>To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare </i>will live up to the standard set by Leiber.</p>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-83180642473845155322024-01-31T17:08:00.000-05:002024-01-31T17:08:33.150-05:00Nightmare stories by B. Stoker, H. B. Cave, D. Wandrei and N. S. Bond<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP-rwJwaiYEkYoLlXnIueDVb5h9FAgBybX8cQ504U9n-_GvkuSdwsFp7gczwzRVlKANq4DcFZxbDJLXRtvlwCapnIwUIk6OFig9w_YtDfW_g-CH60MTVbnbJyna3AlSg1PV7cJYmFclgBWnoBiwBW-zBfwAqgRtahShbC39mkgISJFd101BJBTVr2-75I/s419/TSLPHTMR141993.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="419" data-original-width="279" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP-rwJwaiYEkYoLlXnIueDVb5h9FAgBybX8cQ504U9n-_GvkuSdwsFp7gczwzRVlKANq4DcFZxbDJLXRtvlwCapnIwUIk6OFig9w_YtDfW_g-CH60MTVbnbJyna3AlSg1PV7cJYmFclgBWnoBiwBW-zBfwAqgRtahShbC39mkgISJFd101BJBTVr2-75I/w266-h400/TSLPHTMR141993.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>In the last thrilling episode of MPorcius Fiction Log we talked about a story by Edmond Hamilton from a 1938 issue of <i>Weird Tales</i> that would be reprinted in the 1993 anthology edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Weinberg entitled <i>To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare.</i> This volume is available for us cheapos at the internet archive, so let's borrow it and check out some more stories that won the favor of Messrs. D, G and W. <p></p><p>We've actually already read a bunch of things Dziemianowicz and company selected for <i>To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare</i>, and here are the linkerinos to prove it:</p><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-fearsome-touch-of-death-black-stone.html">"The Black Stone"</a> by Robert E. Howard <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/08/weird-tales-july-1933-edmond-hamilton-h.html">"Ubbo-Sathla"</a> by Clark Ashton Smith<br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/03/northwest-smith-stories-by-c-l-moore.html">"Scarlet Dream"</a> by C. L. Moore<br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/08/weird-tales-july-1933-edmond-hamilton-h.html">"The Dreams in the Witch-House"</a> by H. P. Lovecraft <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/01/weird-tales-may-1938-robert-e-howard.html">"The Isle of the Sleeper"</a> by Edmond Hamilton<br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/04/stories-by-fritz-leiber-robert-bloch.html">"The Unspeakable Betrothal"</a> by Robert Bloch <br /><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/11/fiendishness-from-r-bradbury-c-beaumont.html">"Perchance to Dream"</a> by Charles Beaumont</div><p>(Does anybody ever click these links? The interns are always bitching about how long it takes them to copy and paste these links sections together, and I assure them that they are doing God's work, but maybe their time would be better spent out in the yard pulling weeds and stomping on spotted lanternflies or something. Hell, probably my time would be better spent doing such things.)</p><p>At like 500 pages, <i>To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare</i> is full of stories new to me that look like they are worth reading, and today we'll explore four of them, tales by the inventor of the immortal Count Dracula, Bram Stoker; a guy I suspect is overrated, Hugh B. Cave; intimate associate of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, Donald Wandrei; and finally a guy I think I have only ever read one story by, but who has a long list of published SF stories, Nelson S. Bond.</p><p><b>"A Dream of Red Hands"</b> by Bram Stoker (1894)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFsxDtc19xZflXfegDRz-_riDwJ7T5vFpruz_7zI20EMrgy7iGEB0xTycXyCc7jCCyqMk3IlCiOTQ9yqzr7ihkLPQ6RSJQfLKrHvgVzuDUPuTe_6H_C9qm6v-6ymuf4VKRFq-IW2hCWFHLnHNo6HrAsm1ilGDJYy3jNoIpgYpl9p3P_V7RvdDlFUh4ZV8/s500/08hands1.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="332" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFsxDtc19xZflXfegDRz-_riDwJ7T5vFpruz_7zI20EMrgy7iGEB0xTycXyCc7jCCyqMk3IlCiOTQ9yqzr7ihkLPQ6RSJQfLKrHvgVzuDUPuTe_6H_C9qm6v-6ymuf4VKRFq-IW2hCWFHLnHNo6HrAsm1ilGDJYy3jNoIpgYpl9p3P_V7RvdDlFUh4ZV8/s320/08hands1.jpg" width="212" /></a></div>Like everybody, I love <i>Dracula</i>, and I actually think about <i>Dracula</i> all the time, having read it multiple times. I can still remember sitting in the New York Public Library periodical room as a grad student, reading <i>Dracula</i> when I was supposed to be absorbing some bloodless, impotent and sleep-inducing academic garbage from some sterile mind-numbing scholarly journal. My poor parents, tricked by my standardized test scores into thinking I was some kind of genius, financed my residence in Manhattan, where, instead of laying the foundations of a career in academia, I spent my time playing vanilla Angband, sitting by the river watching ships and birds go by, and eating the world's finest pizza, bagels and hot dogs. Time well spent!<p></p><p>(We read a short story by Stoker, <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/09/weird-tales-mar-35-robert-e-howard-c-l.html">"The Judge's House,"</a> back in 2021 when we talked about the March 1935 issue of <i>Weird Tales</i>.)</p><p>Here in "A Dream of Red Hands" we have a Christian story of redemption. Stoker's narrator is a gentleman and a writer who develops a friendship with a kind and generous working man who lives alone in a hut on the moor. One day the narrator comes calling to find the worker quite ill. The sick man says he can't sleep because God is punishing him with a terrible dream! Eventually the narrator learns the dream and its genesis. Years ago the worker was in love with some chick, and some scoundrel of a gentleman seduced her and ruined her life, and, in a sort of fit triggered by the rascal speaking disparagingly of the woman he had taken advantage of, the worker killed the gentleman and hid the body. Now the worker knows he is barred from heaven; in the dream that has been plaguing him, angels keep him from entering paradise because his bloody hands make filthy the white raiment worn by those permitted to pass through the pearly gates.</p><p>The narrator assures the man that God is merciful and if he truly repents and does good deeds he will, after all, be permitted to enter heaven. The murderer moves away, and years later, by coincidence, the narrator is close to the scene when the worker sacrifices himself to save a fellow worker during an industrial accident. The narrator sees the murderer's corpse; the circumstances of the accident have bleached the man's hands white, and the narrator is sure the man has been forgiven by God.</p><p>A well-written story, and one ripe for class and gender analysis at the hands of historians and social scientists for its depiction of Victorian attitudes about class (among other things, we see one gentleman outrageously abuse members of the working class and another act as a wise guide to them) and religion. </p><p>It looks like "A Dream of Red Hands" made its debut in the weekly newspaper <i>The Sketch</i> and has seen book publication in the oft-reprinted collection <i>Dracula's Guest</i> and other Stoker collections.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEJ_N19sgkaq8OlIZSkGKMaZBM2IA10BPRkM86nEq1qAcMG_V-RvatBBOcins03OjmuXzTiSTKXgwf9dSiYwQkn5l4X4F9PyArBti2HQFFU34WSDalO7dye_Xy67hRv5Fmxx7FVc-GGyxuBSTItp_quss27lBkMN32n59BvAaroiYYfYsJbFmVwDMfSCQ/s500/beourguest.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="417" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEJ_N19sgkaq8OlIZSkGKMaZBM2IA10BPRkM86nEq1qAcMG_V-RvatBBOcins03OjmuXzTiSTKXgwf9dSiYwQkn5l4X4F9PyArBti2HQFFU34WSDalO7dye_Xy67hRv5Fmxx7FVc-GGyxuBSTItp_quss27lBkMN32n59BvAaroiYYfYsJbFmVwDMfSCQ/s16000/beourguest.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><b>"The Watcher in the Green Room"</b> by Hugh B. Cave (1933) <div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbE8d53xZSK_vtqNv0ijRXBgRK2RxlBIUGwdtyYjwHw-Oufy3yTRhAN3BsPblfy7CGSmySpMEhoHyvpWZj11dF-yjjTZ9pZsEuqbdpI4YsnVYSEMq_L_mjyBq3Hsm1r_lqQ9ld0RL4RIeVm5-TFLjzU2NDawUc3UmoHU6KcmZo622UCCQD_s6NipeDRQA/s587/weird_tales_193309.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="587" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbE8d53xZSK_vtqNv0ijRXBgRK2RxlBIUGwdtyYjwHw-Oufy3yTRhAN3BsPblfy7CGSmySpMEhoHyvpWZj11dF-yjjTZ9pZsEuqbdpI4YsnVYSEMq_L_mjyBq3Hsm1r_lqQ9ld0RL4RIeVm5-TFLjzU2NDawUc3UmoHU6KcmZo622UCCQD_s6NipeDRQA/s320/weird_tales_193309.jpg" width="218" /></a></div>It looks like I've read nine stories by Cave over the course of this blog's hideous life. (JFC with the links again.) </div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2015/05/horror-from-1979-dennis-etchison-ramsey.html">"From the Lower Deep"</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/02/hugh-b-cave-city-of-crawling-death.html">"The City of Crawling Death"</a> ↓</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/02/hugh-b-cave-city-of-crawling-death.html">"The Crawling Curse"</a> ↑</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/02/hugh-b-cave-city-of-crawling-death.html">"The Black Gargoyle"</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/06/1930s-vampire-stories-by-h-b-cave.html">"Brotherhood of Blood"</a> ↑ </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/07/from-feb-33-issue-of-weird-tales-h-b.html">"The Cult of the White Ape"</a> </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/11/weird-tales-aug-34-r-e-howard-h-b-cave.html">"The Isle of Dark Magic"</a> </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/12/whispers-iii-ramsey-campbell-david.html">"The Door Below" </a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/03/tales-of-sex-and-horror-by-t-m-disch-r.html">"Ladies in Waiting"</a> </div><div><br /></div><div>Of these nine stories I only gave two positive reviews, but only one received a clear cut condemnation; running the numbers shows Cave's record to be better than I recalled; I guess my recollection is still dominated by my bad experience with a late novel of Cave's which I read before this blog sprang from my pate like Athena from the head of Zeus. We'll see how today's Cave story, "The Watcher in the Green Room," which made its debut in an issue of <i>Weird Tales</i> with a Margaret Brundage BDSM cover and <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2018/04/three-conan-stories-by-robert-e-howard.html">a Conan story with a good setting and good villains</a>, affects my opinion of Cave's body of work. </div><div><br /></div><div>Well, on the first page of the story I am reminded that I don't like Cave's writing style; in this story he tries to be fancy and elaborate but sentences like this one end ups being clunky:</div><div><i><blockquote>"He stood staring, apparently unaware that the hour was midnight and that the rain which had fallen steadily since early evening had made of him a drenched, disheveled street-walker."</blockquote></i>(Rain doesn't make you a street-walker, for one thing, and how would this guy's lack of awareness of the time be made apparent to others by the fact that he is staring? Is it abnormal to stare at certain times of the day? Are there certain behaviors we expect of people at midnight? Cave would be better off just straightforwardly telling us what he wants us to know instead of adding in superfluous phrases and concepts.)</div><div><br /></div><div>On the other hand, the plot of "The Watcher in the Green Room" is not bad, and there are some good images. Our "plump, stumpy" protagonist, Anthony Kolitt, lives in a city in an upstairs apartment--through the window over his bed comes green light from a neon sign on a nearby roof; this green light illuminates and casts shadows from Kolitt's oversized bureau, which we quickly learn is where Kollit has hidden the body of the complaining wife he murdered five days ago. He thinks of the bureau, and/or the shadows it casts at night, as a "beast" which has swallowed up his annoying spouse and even as a friend.</div><div><br /></div><div>The narrative describes Kollit's psychological state as he plots to escape the apartment with the body and has to deal with visits from his concerned neighbors--he told them that his wife left him and they are worried about his heavy drinking. Most of these neighbors Cave makes ethnic stereotypes, I guess some kind of reflection of life in the melting pots/glorious mosaics that are American cities (perhaps a sarcastic or derisive one--I don't know much about Cave, but we know that his more famous Lovecraft was no fan of ethnic diversity.) The most significant neighbor is a "Latin" "psychopathist" whom it is hinted may be a homosexual. This guy, Bellini, foreshadows the story's gory climax by cautioning Kollit not to imagine that the bureau is an animal, as one's imagination, he warns, can bring to life dangerous monsters.</div><div><br /></div><div>Also noteworthy are slight "meta" elements of "The Watcher in the Green Room"; Kolitt goes out and sees a movie about a wizard or mad scientist who summons a monster which destroys him, Kollit listens to a scary drama on the radio and reads a "weird detective" story. This consumption of genre fiction, in concert with the effects of booze and Kollit's fears of being found out by the cops, energizes his imagination to summon his own doom.</div><div><br /></div><div>IMHO, Cave messes up the ending of the story a little. We know from early on that Mrs. Kolitt's body is in the bureau, so the real shock ending is that a monster appears, eats half of Kolitt and then climbs out Kollit's window. But instead of making this incredible event the focus of the final scene, Cave extends the story further to include a scene of Bellini and the cops discovering the wife's dismembered corpse, and the story's final line is "It is his wife," as if this is a shocking revelation, when it is not at all a surprise to us readers. (If I was Cave's editor, I would have told him to make the Bellini-and-police scene a foreword, so the story would end with the discovery of Kollit's half-eaten body and the trail of green slime leading out the window.) </div><div><br /></div><div>I'll call this one acceptable. "The Watcher in the Green Room" would go on to be included in Cave collections as well as Christine Campbell Thomson's 1934 hardcover anthology <i>Terror by Night </i>and a 1952 issue of Donald Wollheim's <i>Avon Fantasy Reader</i>. </div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEq4lpR2RoxqB-XA7xVhxSDjdNhSo3dXAKLIN4UPSQFuvxBrm7IXTQOFYyF7-a4GHZUl9PwjzIJwsWiM7u7LEhdfwtCEC8Q1_QPMsU2fo0rxmZ_8oiDZG7nZwryJz4V29vpEk8RVx79wErVM9ATuJpPqoyQ9RvC77c14CEyZsUwES4jeruXU6mDPPPmuo/s500/meangreenmachne.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="377" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEq4lpR2RoxqB-XA7xVhxSDjdNhSo3dXAKLIN4UPSQFuvxBrm7IXTQOFYyF7-a4GHZUl9PwjzIJwsWiM7u7LEhdfwtCEC8Q1_QPMsU2fo0rxmZ_8oiDZG7nZwryJz4V29vpEk8RVx79wErVM9ATuJpPqoyQ9RvC77c14CEyZsUwES4jeruXU6mDPPPmuo/s16000/meangreenmachne.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You might know "The Witch from Hell's Kitchen" as "The House of Arabu"</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><b>"The Lady in Gray" </b>by Donald Wandrei (1933)</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHNSbtrn_P75WtbV9IGBT8-KGpx0iqmfo6AvQkBX086qKL8fLvwi_nC1g5pG7b-sOag9NNw0bk8NBq8Z9doouKYffJYimzJBZw8pcxwp6QS1-OzIkkHvbFzp7v_G5bCJeJBrEbDYtL-XsugYkrdSWN_qxm7MkNGWG7zxzGRTyQW2iwga4geR4yEIyNouQ/s552/weird_tales_193312.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="552" data-original-width="375" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHNSbtrn_P75WtbV9IGBT8-KGpx0iqmfo6AvQkBX086qKL8fLvwi_nC1g5pG7b-sOag9NNw0bk8NBq8Z9doouKYffJYimzJBZw8pcxwp6QS1-OzIkkHvbFzp7v_G5bCJeJBrEbDYtL-XsugYkrdSWN_qxm7MkNGWG7zxzGRTyQW2iwga4geR4yEIyNouQ/w271-h400/weird_tales_193312.jpg" width="271" /></a></div>The records suggest I have read 23 stories (kaboom!) by Donald Wandrei, and I may be courting a labor dispute here, but, hey, behold these links!</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2017/07/three-early-1930s-stories-by-donald.html">"Raiders of the Universes"</a> ↑</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2017/07/three-early-1930s-stories-by-donald.html">"Fire Vampires"</a> ↑</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2017/07/three-early-1930s-stories-by-donald.html">"Colossus"</a> ↑</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/01/1949s-other-side-of-moon-long-smith.html">"Something from Above"</a> ↑</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-lurking-fear-by-h-p-lovecraft-and.html">"The Red Brain"</a> ↑</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2020/04/stories-by-fritz-leiber-robert-bloch.html">"The Painted Mirror"</a> ↑</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/02/donald-wandrei-tree-men-of-mbwa-lives.html">"The Tree-Men of M'Bwa"</a> ↑</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/02/donald-wandrei-tree-men-of-mbwa-lives.html">"The Lives of Alfred Kramer"</a> ↑</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/02/donald-wandrei-tree-men-of-mbwa-lives.html">"Spawn of the Sea"</a> ↑</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/11/donald-wandrei-destroying-horde.html">"The Destroying Horde"</a> ↑</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/11/donald-wandrei-destroying-horde.html">"Infinity Zero"</a> ↓</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/11/donald-wandrei-destroying-horde.html">"Black Fog"</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/11/astounding-sept-1935-donald-wandrei-c-l.html">"Earth Minus"</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/12/astounding-april-1935-frank-belknap.html">"Life Current"</a> ↑</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/01/murderous-stories-by-harlan-ellison.html">"The Rod and the Staff"</a> ↑</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/01/murderous-stories-by-harlan-ellison.html">"Come Clean"</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/01/murderous-stories-by-harlan-ellison.html">"Dramatic Touch"</a></div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/01/donald-wandrei-man-who-never-lived-atom.html">"The Man Who Never Lived"</a> ↓</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/01/donald-wandrei-man-who-never-lived-atom.html">"The Atom Smasher"</a> </div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/01/donald-wandrei-man-who-never-lived-atom.html">"The Blinding Shadows"</a> ↑</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/03/astounding-may-35-j-w-campbell-d.html">"The Whisperers"</a> ↓</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2022/10/astounding-dec-1934-donald-wandrei-and.html">"Colossus Eternal"</a> ↑</div><div><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2023/10/weird-tales-dec-37-counselman-hamilton.html">"Uneasy Lie the Drowned"</a> ↑ </div><div><br /></div><div>Look at all those upwards-facing arrows! I guess I'm a big Wandrei fan! Figures don't lie! </div><div><br /></div><div>Whereas I found Cave's "The Watcher in the Green Room" poorly written but supplied with a good plot, I'm afraid "The Lady in Gray" is well-written, with many terrific images, but has a slight plot. </div><div><br /></div><div>The narrator tells us he is about to commit suicide. He relates how all his life he has had terrible terrible dreams, and how he has tried a multitude of drugs and therapies and consulted shrinks all over America and Europe in an effort to free himself from these nightmares, to no avail. Wandrei does a good job succinctly summarizing these dreams--with a minimum of verbiage, he summons up exciting, vivid visions. (It is noteworthy that Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian staples figure in the dreams--I guess this story is set in the "Cthulhu Mythos.") </div><div><br /></div><div>The narrator fell in love with and became engaged to a woman with a gray personality and gray eyes named Miriam (you know, like Felix's adorable girlfriend, who always seems so much more suitable a life partner than the somewhat annoying Gloria.) Miriam was killed in a plane crash the day before their wedding was to be held, and then the narrator started having dreams about her in which he and she travel in impossible ways to horrible alien environments, even interacting with a sort of monstrous slug or worm. When the narrator awakes he is greeted by physical evidence that these dreams have been in some sense real, that he really has been to slimy seas and met a huge disgusting worm with a sort of face. Upon awakening from the most recent of these dreams, the narrator found Miriam's animated corpse sitting beside his bed, which triggers his determination to slay himself. I guess he and Miriam will now spend eternity together, exploring the universe via esoteric means.</div><div><br /></div><div>I guess in the end I'm giving this one a marginal "good" grade, seeing as it is full of so many good sentences and striking images. I kind of wish more was going on, however, or that whatever is going ono was more clear to my dim understanding. </div><div><br /></div><div>"The Lady in Gray" first saw print in an issue of <i>Weird Tales</i> with one of my favorite Brundage covers; a masterpiece of Yellow Peril drama with better composition and use of color that Brundage's average. The story would go on to be included in, among other places, the Donald Wandrei collection <i>The Eye and the Finger</i> and Ramsey Campbell's <i>Uncanny Banquet.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJU_jveHUhcQjJfEZf8ECJlwB7xw_8j1Pl_Eg_7xA0mH53bozzoEEJPpS2jzzIK4a3gajK7lB_lYz9tXFh1hseYpdTmoB9jAYcarxd3Cg4LKrDSQP0S_nnh-BDhVcpqrYiPCH9msv2FCab6LZnxrDQSjAKBK7Q9qJC5EmgGliPEABkvDRK7ePwd13RJfQ/s498/giveemthefinger.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="387" data-original-width="498" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJU_jveHUhcQjJfEZf8ECJlwB7xw_8j1Pl_Eg_7xA0mH53bozzoEEJPpS2jzzIK4a3gajK7lB_lYz9tXFh1hseYpdTmoB9jAYcarxd3Cg4LKrDSQP0S_nnh-BDhVcpqrYiPCH9msv2FCab6LZnxrDQSjAKBK7Q9qJC5EmgGliPEABkvDRK7ePwd13RJfQ/s16000/giveemthefinger.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>"Prescience"</b> by Nelson S. Bond (1941)</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic_gKa-lmFEj14TLQdQ2hbQFLFcp3vKCg0ab1ZGnIhUqdZ8TQSq5JTFLGxdwiYh0s6ZlEiiaurYImxEt3VlDLzv_fqG0C7ZEnW4_ToVqbpHeJ_aBRJxB38gDYkZWN9gwJQ_imlNSqQfWzL2Q6p7-ga_lVvafDpGMLYxPellMGEsa-aQaNYPp3xV_uBXwg/s500/UNK_0027.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="367" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic_gKa-lmFEj14TLQdQ2hbQFLFcp3vKCg0ab1ZGnIhUqdZ8TQSq5JTFLGxdwiYh0s6ZlEiiaurYImxEt3VlDLzv_fqG0C7ZEnW4_ToVqbpHeJ_aBRJxB38gDYkZWN9gwJQ_imlNSqQfWzL2Q6p7-ga_lVvafDpGMLYxPellMGEsa-aQaNYPp3xV_uBXwg/s320/UNK_0027.jpg" width="235" /></a></div>I think of Bond, Nelson S. Bond, when people offhandedly assert that before such and such a date SF lacked strong female characters, because, during World War II, Bond published a series of three stories starring an admirable woman who is leader of her tribe in a post-apocalyptic America; I read one of these stories, <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2015/05/from-treasury-of-great-sf-stories-by_8.html">"Magic City,"</a> an <i>Astounding</i> cover story, back in the early days of this here blog. "Magic City" is in fact the only Bond story I've ever read--until today, when we read a Bond tale from John W. Campbell, Jr.'s other famous and important magazine, <i>Unknown</i>. "Prescience" debuted alongside Kuttner and Moore's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2014/09/best-of-kuttner-1-part-4-absalom.html">"A Gnome There Was,"</a> and would be reprinted in an anthology collecting "the greatest stories" from <i>Unknown</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Dr. Barton, psychiatrist, is having a case of the Mondays! He is sick of his job, sick of dealing with neurotics all day, every day. "They're fools--the whole lot of them!" he vents to his nurse. You see, Barton knows that all neuroses stem from fear--specifically, fear of the afterlife, and that this is foolishness, because there is no need to fear the afterlife.</div><div><br /></div><div>At the end of the day, a working-class woman comes to see Dr. Barton; nearly all of Barton's patients are middle-class, and in his tirade to his nurse he even made the claim that "the laboring classes of our race," like "'backward' or 'pagan' people" rarely suffer neuroses because they have no fear of the afterlife, so this housekeeper, Mrs. Williams, is an unusual case. Williams tells the shrink that she often has prescient dreams, that during the course of her days she often realizes that the quite ordinary event she is living through is proceeding exactly as something experienced in a recent dream. As the events are occurring in real life, she can't change her course of action, but feels compelled to do precisely what she did in the predictive dream. </div><div><br /></div><div>Barton doesn't take this woman too seriously, thinking she is just experiencing the very common phenomenon of deja vu. However, he decides to conduct a little experiment on Williams, feeling free to take unusual measures with her because she lacks social standing and the ability to damage his reputation. He hypnotizes her, making her think she is asleep, and she has one of her prescient dreams, and in her trance describes it to him. The dream, however, presages no quotidian event, but a devastating fire at the house where she works. As she describes climbing out onto the fire escape, Barton orders her to return into the burning house, insisting the fire is a mere illusion and harmless. Under his hypnotic influence, Williams, in her dream, climbs back into the burning building and chillingly describes the agony of burning to death and then the behavior of the demons and the damned in Hell! </div><div><br /></div><div>Barton finds Williams' description of death and the afterlife curious, but unimportant. He releases the woman from her trance; as usual, she remembers none of what she dreamed. Barton sends her home, figuring he has cured her. But the next day he reads a story in the newspaper--Williams has died in a house fire! Witnesses report seeing her escape the conflagration and then climb back into the burning house to be killed! Barton realizes that Hell is real and he goes insane!</div><div><br /></div><div>This is a pretty good story; maybe Bond deserves more screen time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0xsRvhs-L2qpJGysGY1lRk1W77BE-w_NWfnHs_Sd5rJqaDemVGq9DoI2HWn9d3_6SYNk4NMEe1mDZKrbgkY4ThyphenhyphenEHbFNBTAaaNVtZudp_V_5SuN8cxXPXm-1yloN634_u6CzGLY-Zz6aay5TomnnGeu9xv051jmMDQ0Ymh0caG3KFU3i3V0cMBCVoK6M/s500/duhgreatestr.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="416" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0xsRvhs-L2qpJGysGY1lRk1W77BE-w_NWfnHs_Sd5rJqaDemVGq9DoI2HWn9d3_6SYNk4NMEe1mDZKrbgkY4ThyphenhyphenEHbFNBTAaaNVtZudp_V_5SuN8cxXPXm-1yloN634_u6CzGLY-Zz6aay5TomnnGeu9xv051jmMDQ0Ymh0caG3KFU3i3V0cMBCVoK6M/s16000/duhgreatestr.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div>**********</div><div><br /></div><div>It looks like Dziemianowicz, Weinberg and Greenberg made good selections for this anthology, performing a service for their clients at Barnes & Noble and SF fans everywhere. We'll read more stories from <i>To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare</i> soon.</div><div><br /></div><div>(But before we part, one final link! To<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyDqcvRDTm0"> the trailer for the mediocre 1968 giallo <i>Nude... si muore</i></a>, a movie that is pretty disappointing as a whole, but has a good sex-and-violence opening and perhaps my favorite giallo vocal theme, a fast-paced song (perhaps inspired by the theme of the <i>Batman</i> TV show) with English lyrics all about nightmares. I highly recommend the first five minutes of <i>Nude... si muore</i>, but after the opening credits have rolled it's a whole lotta zzzzzzzzzz....)<i> </i></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbRlRnoeh75tE4eLQNJ1fv7VK2nvEtlrIi86sLqJAExZuSjFVUiGuQ4GDV_MycWKuVXD507YErT1eEt2HqLJcZ2PUZ6ytai3dGLA6nxWznVtd77pE8Sj71EhWDqvTpQDGZfef4MMSqJhfEK5Lg8quC8vidO-9z4BFspJfn8hAYo6c4Mysa5b3gOX39Cv0/s500/nightmare.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="140" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbRlRnoeh75tE4eLQNJ1fv7VK2nvEtlrIi86sLqJAExZuSjFVUiGuQ4GDV_MycWKuVXD507YErT1eEt2HqLJcZ2PUZ6ytai3dGLA6nxWznVtd77pE8Sj71EhWDqvTpQDGZfef4MMSqJhfEK5Lg8quC8vidO-9z4BFspJfn8hAYo6c4Mysa5b3gOX39Cv0/s16000/nightmare.jpg" /></a></div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-53670791129855289372024-01-28T22:06:00.000-05:002024-01-28T22:06:02.937-05:00Weird Tales, May 1938: Robert E. Howard, Edmond Hamilton & J. Wesley Rosenquest<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicaEjJfIAivtFM5zvYXKhwTllLOuZyzqoGsMblm8Q7Vakr0EraQflRsyX2hQmBIcVrQDX_uhnzTxfypj9F_cujvwY2WUVByGVDl7pIkA34KLvMZlF9td4bLWUJxusqbnInoZag1AnJp7NKfnjaslzC-f8c1zBNAhkVL01qA7-kkzL6hNguYtqqSQiU7zU/s604/weird_tales_193805.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="604" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicaEjJfIAivtFM5zvYXKhwTllLOuZyzqoGsMblm8Q7Vakr0EraQflRsyX2hQmBIcVrQDX_uhnzTxfypj9F_cujvwY2WUVByGVDl7pIkA34KLvMZlF9td4bLWUJxusqbnInoZag1AnJp7NKfnjaslzC-f8c1zBNAhkVL01qA7-kkzL6hNguYtqqSQiU7zU/s320/weird_tales_193805.jpg" width="212" /></a></div>Our exploration of <i>Weird Tale</i>s continues, today with the May 1938 number. This issue of "The No. 1 Magazine of Bizarre and Unusual Stories" prints installments of serials by two authors I like, Henry Kuttner and Jack Williamson, but on this occasion we'll limit ourselves to a famous story by Texan Robert E. Howard which I read decades ago, a piece by our pal Edmond Hamilton of Ohio, where I lived for a couple of years, and a tale by some guy I never heard of who only has two fiction credits at isfdb, J. Wesley Rosenquest.<p></p><p><b>"Pigeons from Hell"</b> by Robert E. Howard</p><p>Steven Tompkins, in his introduction to the 2005 Howard collection <i>The Black Stranger and Other American Tales</i>, calls "Pigeons from Hell" "one of the finest American horror stories," and it has been reprinted in a host of anthologies in numerous languages. I read the story ages ago, and as I recall was a little underwhelmed by it, considering its high reputation. But maybe I'll appreciate it more now that I am older and have feels like an uncountable number of weird stories under my belt.</p><p>Two New Englanders, buddies since childhood, are driving around the American South on a vacation. In a remote region they get off the treacherous poorly-maintained road to sleep in an abandoned mansion, and there experience a night of eerie horror and gruesome death! One of the men survives, just barely, rescued in a nick of time by the local sheriff who just happens to be in the area, a brave and resourceful man who throws around the "n-word" with abandon. The sheriff connects the clues the New Englander provides with some local legend, and then consults an ancient black man--a voodoo priest who has made a pact with an ophidian African god--and finally resolves the plot by returning to the mansion with the New Englander to destroy the monster and reveal the twist ending.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKMyS6DDWqTJeiVLhOyOfxOod2uN9kXXvt-I8Uf7oEss7LtyGfky2FlHNyd5OlPLG34dO4Q9A-NUpwUl-Tn55jbbxiqtPyi0jRFivQAayDPBRWSKuSGz9AFs-hxgSKuwqAIaPrr8kRXzxbwUWMmV3Q3j3e6gmDc-wnpkyF6tZB_gZKVLLgka-VgMVhXwg/s592/coverbymmignola.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="592" data-original-width="386" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKMyS6DDWqTJeiVLhOyOfxOod2uN9kXXvt-I8Uf7oEss7LtyGfky2FlHNyd5OlPLG34dO4Q9A-NUpwUl-Tn55jbbxiqtPyi0jRFivQAayDPBRWSKuSGz9AFs-hxgSKuwqAIaPrr8kRXzxbwUWMmV3Q3j3e6gmDc-wnpkyF6tZB_gZKVLLgka-VgMVhXwg/w261-h400/coverbymmignola.jpg" width="261" /></a></div>Despite what I thought when I first read it, "Pigeons from Hell" is a great story--five out of five brain-smeared hatchets! Howard stuffs every paragraph with compelling and entertaining material and we readers are subjected to zero fluff or filler. The plot, which under all the sickening gore and black magic fireworks has the structure of a detective story, is solid--scenes follow one another logically and people's actions are believable, so the narrative draws you in and carries you along unflaggingly, unencumbered by any dull spots or rough patches that threaten your suspension of disbelief. Both the supernatural content and the human dimension are well-handled; Howard's descriptions of the many horror images as well as of the surviving New Englander's wretched emotional state are sharp and powerful. I found particularly effective Howard's description of the experience of being a victim of hypnotism.<p></p><p>As we all have heard a hundred times, Howard tried to imbue his writing with a sense of history, and "Pigeons from Hell" is chock full of pointed references to American history--Tompkins is quite right to consider this a very <i>American</i> story. All the numerous characters' personalities and motivations reflect racial and regional stereotypes and grow out of the tragic and violent relationships between the European colonists who conquered the New World and the native Indians they met and the black Africans they dragged to the new civilization they founded there. Whether we regard Howard's sketches of archetypal New Englanders, white Southerners, and African-Americans to be insightful or merely extravagant racist caricatures, they are engaging and serve to add life and credibility to the story. </p><p>A major theme of "Pigeons from Hell," like Howard's <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2019/06/black-canaan-black-hound-of-death-and.html">"Black Canaan,"</a> which we read in 2019, is that black people have special knowledge and a peculiar connection to the supernatural. Says the sheriff: </p><p><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></p><blockquote><i>"We're up against something that takes more than white man's sense. The black people know more than we do about some things."</i></blockquote><p></p><p>But while blacks are certainly "the other" in the story, it is not like "Pigeons from Hell" presents white people in a universally positive light. The sheriff assumes the killer monster he is hunting is a living-dead "mulatto" woman, but in the end he finds that, in fact, the supernatural menace is a cruel white woman who has been warped by her relationships with black people and assumed some of the very worst characteristics of (Howard's pulp fiction vision of ) African culture. Howard's story suggests that relationships between the races are inherently destructive and degrading, causing immense suffering and bringing out the worst in participants of both races. </p><p>As the identity of the villains suggests, "Pigeons from Hell" not only offers readers a surfeit of race-based material, but plenty of sex- and gender-related content as well, with numerous female characters who suffer and/or commit all manner of crimes and mayhem. Also noteworthy, and this is hinted by the story's title, is the role of animals in "Pigeons from Hell": birds, reptiles, and other beasts appear in the story as striking symbols as well as concrete agents of the supernatural. </p><p>An entertaining and well-wrought classic with the ability to disturb 21st-century readers in a variety of ways. Recommended to all readers, whether you be of the thrill-seeking or academic bent.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlrWoxe1VjVpGxrMxskownrjuFAzZx-y5gD17WW7H67DA2hrS8-o390OYFSEtF09LX3tdgAGjV_b1ZamWKI18XX3P7JNpePWg51ejLXKx1QHXBZYVev0g9yKGG9RCxNDuYPE5ZpbQ9cPBdfyec3p0ZbYDJpEiXQL7QxUghOnH6hEkx9trbN_adSCZ6tqY/s500/pigeons.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="382" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlrWoxe1VjVpGxrMxskownrjuFAzZx-y5gD17WW7H67DA2hrS8-o390OYFSEtF09LX3tdgAGjV_b1ZamWKI18XX3P7JNpePWg51ejLXKx1QHXBZYVev0g9yKGG9RCxNDuYPE5ZpbQ9cPBdfyec3p0ZbYDJpEiXQL7QxUghOnH6hEkx9trbN_adSCZ6tqY/s16000/pigeons.jpg" /></a></div><p><b>"The Isle of the Sleeper"</b> by Edmond Hamilton</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzlSr2qlCuMEFlQCv-TQcSwgSrxuzJz_cNxP6o1YkbK9jXOYaZeITHguQz_dm27G2rUUuMzY4iE26BJNJ0Olba3xVlM9F6b-jMVT9zxPZ8OeWxIZZE-nQQFeU0XgwJrSRYMyWIf8iCBSgfCoH90oDwpqEBerHARq3jPrSaxSd_dywqDA46ZRo7uas7Nuw/s591/weird_tales_195105.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="591" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzlSr2qlCuMEFlQCv-TQcSwgSrxuzJz_cNxP6o1YkbK9jXOYaZeITHguQz_dm27G2rUUuMzY4iE26BJNJ0Olba3xVlM9F6b-jMVT9zxPZ8OeWxIZZE-nQQFeU0XgwJrSRYMyWIf8iCBSgfCoH90oDwpqEBerHARq3jPrSaxSd_dywqDA46ZRo7uas7Nuw/s320/weird_tales_195105.jpg" width="217" /></a></div>"The Isle of the Sleeper" might be considered one of the prolific Hamilton's more popular stories; in 1951 Farnsworth Wright's successor as editor Dorothy McIlwraith reprinted it in <i>Weird Tales</i>, and it would also resurface in Leo Margulies' 1961 anthology <i>The Ghoul Keepers</i> and a 1993 anthology edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Weinberg entitled <i>To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare</i>. <div><br /></div><div>Hamilton wrote tons of stories about guys who end up in another world and get involved with a princess and her wars, and we have read a lot of them here at MPorcius Fiction Log. "The Isle of the Sleeper" bears some similarity to those Princess of Mars-style stories, but has a twist and a note of sadness to it that is likely what caught the eye of editors. The gimmick Hamilton uses here is not unlike that employed by Ambrose Bierce in "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and William Golding in <i><a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2016/04/pincher-martin-by-william-golding.html">Pincher Martin</a></i>, but adapted for a speculative fiction audience. </div><div><br /></div><div>Garrison is the sole survivor of the sinking of a ship on the Pacific, and he is near death when his life raft runs aground on a forested island teeming with animals. He finds not only life-preserving food and water but a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl! They fall in love and enjoy several happy days together.</div><div><br /></div><div>The girl insists that the island, the flora and fauna of which Garrison finds are unusual for these climes, is the product of a man's dream--she even leads Garrison to the couch of the sleeping man. She implores our hero to refrain from waking The Sleeper--if the man awakes, she is sure, the island, including Garrison and herself, will vanish. Garrison thinks this is nonsense, of course, but, as the days pass, odd events render her theory more and more plausible. New geographical features and new island inhabitants appear, including monstrous beast-men whom the girl declares must be the product of the Sleeper's bad dreams. Garrison and his beloved are taken captive by the beast-men, and our desperate heroes decide that annihilation would be preferable to whatever torture the savages have in store for them, so they wake the Sleeper. Garrison witnesses the island and everything else around him disappear, and then wakes up to find that <i>he</i> is the Sleeper, that he is shipwrecked on a barren rock. He is rescued, but sadly doubts that he will ever find a woman he can love as much as the girl birthed from his own subconscious; the last lines of the story also suggest that some unique property of the rock actually did give material form to Garrison's dream girl and the lush ever-changing island of his dreams.</div><div><br /></div><div>A mildly good filler story, competently executed.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhguR2HerbHm0MSTyRjYP_JrRrGDwT_n0QjdhW_TfzNjS6WXKS5FwVAr6QSS_obQN_ISpZBIOYjpw1ucCy_8oIpVVvQHv_DIF8Si35h9Sdn9_PNxtMt8obZ1_zc6QRjbVmHA2BANuXBLB6TTi-WDKnoGSEMwXfhKL9NvGv1ArKrr0OFJ57TGAnuIJHJdGg/s500/isle.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="396" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhguR2HerbHm0MSTyRjYP_JrRrGDwT_n0QjdhW_TfzNjS6WXKS5FwVAr6QSS_obQN_ISpZBIOYjpw1ucCy_8oIpVVvQHv_DIF8Si35h9Sdn9_PNxtMt8obZ1_zc6QRjbVmHA2BANuXBLB6TTi-WDKnoGSEMwXfhKL9NvGv1ArKrr0OFJ57TGAnuIJHJdGg/s16000/isle.jpg" /></a></div><p><b>"The Secret of the Vault"</b> by J. Wesley Rosenquest</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6KS0iJvG28JfdUVZRov0x1CFp3Sn3A58h2fwubg5gtKR3LaUu_6DnCnirjkfCRGO5qtlqbFgzWYzjZMJ_fnW7ppwj-mE1TMCXRz6O8k71H7ui3v23-zuLCrIGt2UyiZx7WL1vI41-eKuiHBHTBBuvXJkXOQr7DWkYq0RJDo6RuBjau1L7jB1wtxlytiU/s500/51udo415cwL.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="307" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6KS0iJvG28JfdUVZRov0x1CFp3Sn3A58h2fwubg5gtKR3LaUu_6DnCnirjkfCRGO5qtlqbFgzWYzjZMJ_fnW7ppwj-mE1TMCXRz6O8k71H7ui3v23-zuLCrIGt2UyiZx7WL1vI41-eKuiHBHTBBuvXJkXOQr7DWkYq0RJDo6RuBjau1L7jB1wtxlytiU/s320/51udo415cwL.jpg" width="196" /></a></div>isfdb indicates that "The Secret of the Vault" was adapted for a segment of Rod Serling's TV show <i>Night Gallery</i>; a look at imdb reveals that the segment aired in 1972 and was entitled "You Can Come Up Now, Mrs. Millikan." Presumably Serling read the story in Peter Haining's 1968 anthology <i>Legends for the Dark</i>, which has a fun human sacrifice cover, though I suppose he might have owned or had access to a collection of old issues of <i>Weird Tales</i>. I have to say that it is hard to believe that the memorable components of the story could be profitably reproduced on the small screen.</div><div><br /></div><div>Our narrator is the youngest member of a large and wealthy family whose deceased predecessors are interred in a vault beneath the family mansion. The first part of the story is given over to effective descriptions of the narrator's childhood fears of the vault, into which his elders regularly descend to pray for their dead loved ones. Then the narrator indulges in odd speculations about the life force or soul, and about the character of death. Is a human's soul like a fire that radiates energy, a force that colors and influences the world around him or her? Is the division between life and death as sharp and clear as we generally believe, or does the life force in fact only gradually leak out of those bodies we consider dead, a proportion of it lingering long after the physical form we are sure is inert has been buried?</div><div><br /></div><div>Then comes the plot. The narrator's Aunt Helena was remarkably healthy and energetic, and it was a surprise to the narrator when she suddenly expired, leaving behind only two survivors of the once populous family, our protagonist and Helena's husband, Henry. Whereas in his childhood the narrator felt the vault emanate a black gloom, now, presumably illuminated by Helena's powerful life force, the underground crypt radiates a warm vitality. Uncle Henry goes down into the vault every day, the narrator assumes to pray beside his wife's tomb--that is until, drawn by some whim or force, the narrator intrudes for the first time into his uncle's forbidden library! Therein he discovers dozens of books he would not have expected a Christian to be familiar with, books on the necromancy of remote tribes, books of spells for raising the dead! The narrator's fears are confirmed when he finds Henry's diary, which Unc has been keeping up to date with descriptions of his activities since his wife's death--even more shockingly, the diary indicates that Henry convinced Helena to commit suicide so she could serve as the subject of his necromantic experiments!</div><div><br /></div><div>The ending of the story is a little mysterious. The narrator goes down into the family burial vault for the first (and last) time of his life, and sees the pentagram and candles and necromantic apparatus, and witnesses Helena's body return to animate life, upon which sight he flees the family house forever. Whether Helena and Henry are satisfied with the experiment and Helena is a healthy immortal, or Helena is instead some kind of monster, perhaps a vengeful one, is not made clear. </div><div><br /></div><div>Not bad, but I would have liked a more transparent conclusion; the reader (at least this reader) receives mixed messages from "The Secret of the Vault." Has Henry performed a miracle to be celebrated or committed a sin for which he will be punished? Is Helena a victim or beneficiary? Will this amazing event change the world or remain a secret forever? </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqdBS-kBlJ28baDkc3fVaoK7vvM2jOfprAeDuu-4PV6151kjHfCi_YbI7e8ySbsWhZQyR69vtsZuLkTGkQvyRFj4e3DsfVs4uR0YSzp-vMFtkQ3mqxMt__Y21d50H9_eOGArtdnI7zwVK1_V9hGLsn3aCFX7qXbjSOHzap1w-fAHLWrz8khcxp5hZ1jUQ/s544/numberone.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="485" data-original-width="544" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqdBS-kBlJ28baDkc3fVaoK7vvM2jOfprAeDuu-4PV6151kjHfCi_YbI7e8ySbsWhZQyR69vtsZuLkTGkQvyRFj4e3DsfVs4uR0YSzp-vMFtkQ3mqxMt__Y21d50H9_eOGArtdnI7zwVK1_V9hGLsn3aCFX7qXbjSOHzap1w-fAHLWrz8khcxp5hZ1jUQ/w200-h178/numberone.png" width="200" /></a></div>********** </div><div><br /></div><div>The Hamilton and Rosenquest stories are entertaining, but it is Howard's "Pigeons from Hell" that stands out as a classic of the genre. A good issue of <i>Weird Tales</i>, and one I expect to return to for the Kuttner and Williamson serials.</div><div><br /></div><div>More <i>Weird Tales</i> in our future--stay tuned!</div>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8259460772864393968.post-35498475913933706742024-01-23T21:45:00.000-05:002024-01-23T21:45:05.766-05:00Clark Ashton Smith: "The Tomb-Spawn," "The Black Abbot of Puthuum," and "Necromancy in Naat"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIE85Xp4ppoPI_ny7yKKRR5wSfW_qWLDxTzGQbtbO9tOaBCu2iobZcfpfoxLMfEPu8jpjmclbwynUN-p_KCCA3kWyTDgIv70d-qA4cvocbHVbjDSD5K1lzlUdOdr04fuIpN4OowWRXUAFGhjRUj2Jsch0PW-yQ5Yitv05tZttuw6EQcxusy70WXmphMFY/s500/bizus.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="153" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIE85Xp4ppoPI_ny7yKKRR5wSfW_qWLDxTzGQbtbO9tOaBCu2iobZcfpfoxLMfEPu8jpjmclbwynUN-p_KCCA3kWyTDgIv70d-qA4cvocbHVbjDSD5K1lzlUdOdr04fuIpN4OowWRXUAFGhjRUj2Jsch0PW-yQ5Yitv05tZttuw6EQcxusy70WXmphMFY/s16000/bizus.png" /></a></div><p>As you know, Bob, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have been <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/06/weird-tales-project-1930.html">spending</a> a lot of our time <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/07/weird-tales-project-1931.html">reading</a> stories from 1930s issues of seminal speculative fiction magazine <i>Weird Tales</i>. But some worthwhile stories have slipped through the cracks, including tales by one of the finest of the Weirdies, Californian poet Clark Ashton Smith. <a href="https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2024/01/weird-tales-april-1938-jacobi-smith-and.html">In our last blog post</a>, about a 1938 issue of <i>Weird Tales</i>, we read "The Garden of Adompha," one of Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique stories. Let's read three more tales of wizardly goings-on in the environs of Zothique, grisly tales of horror that debuted in <i>Weird Tales</i> in the mid-Thirties but which for whatever reason I have skipped in the course of my quixotic quest to read at least one story from every 1930s issue of the great magazine of the bizarre and unusual. </p><p>(NB: I am reading today's stories in scans of the original magazines in which they debuted; versions closer to Smith's original vision, based on Smith's manuscripts and free of editorial alterations, are available in the 21st century collections edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger.)</p><p><b>"The Tomb-Spawn"</b> (1934)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirtuDQCFG7myphvpSOEEPFlvc6bU9crbjQP3EqRdEUEmjoWRVPY-nZHNe5xBj_hJvnqmM2BUcMq2KtKT91mmlzhJ0ZqndJzAdBt_LZT939cZQXeaiAN5OGzMstz5syd6ALzKqLoyVnfQ0QnWXQp1O8xTCeReGMDAbyQk5J4kLpTyZax9r7EBV7gLvKLbA/s556/WEIRDTMAY1934.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="556" data-original-width="380" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirtuDQCFG7myphvpSOEEPFlvc6bU9crbjQP3EqRdEUEmjoWRVPY-nZHNe5xBj_hJvnqmM2BUcMq2KtKT91mmlzhJ0ZqndJzAdBt_LZT939cZQXeaiAN5OGzMstz5syd6ALzKqLoyVnfQ0QnWXQp1O8xTCeReGMDAbyQk5J4kLpTyZax9r7EBV7gLvKLbA/s320/WEIRDTMAY1934.jpg" width="219" /></a></div>This is a good sword-and-sorcery horror story with great images and metaphors. <p></p><p>Milab and Marabac are brothers, jewel merchants who travel across the desert from town to town with a caravan. In the first part of "The Tomb-Spawn" they are entertained by a storyteller. This guy relates a legend of nigh-forgotten times, when a sorcerer king tamed a monster from the stars, confining it in an underground vault and feeding it young women and young men; in return, the monster provided the monarch knowledge of other worlds as well as valuable advice. When the monster died the wizard king cast protective spells upon its tomb, and when he himself expired, his servants carried out his wish to be buried with the monster. The storyteller tells Milab and Marabac that the location of the city in which this drama took place is lost to history.</p><p>In the second part of the story, M & M's caravan is ambushed by half-human cannibals; by luck, M & M escape with their lives, but with neither their wares nor sorely needed supplies. Pursued by the cannibals, the jewel merchants flee across the desert, hungry and thirsty, and come to a mysterious ruined city which we readers of course recognize as the city of the long dead wizard king and his pet space monster. The third part of the story relates the horrific encounter of the merchants with the living dead amalgam of the sorcerer and alien creature--who will survive?</p><p>I like it. "The Garden of Adompha" had outré bestial and necrophiliac sex as one of its themes, and the physical combining of individuals of different species as another, and Smith includes these same themes, the former subtly, the latter explicitly, here in "The Tomb-Spawn." Yuck! You can find "The Tomb-Spawn" in various Smith collections, including 1964's <i>Tales of Science and Sorcery</i> and the 1989 French translation of that collection, <i>Morthylla</i>.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguy35i_hs4ClYfVggJ1WZ3vbgbpBHD2CCi1Up2IJLZ5PIau2bR_C-qG10azjNYK7hCtH84XMBuPC9Ewud9OOU8TYHBWz71012Q8BvMYgSe1KRwZtIGazd7FhTJ9qes-MiwPyPLTq9Bo1CE18yP_pBXss_T8Q2b56paWh7-10HLHkYhadoPCgkztQ1cnJM/s500/tombspawn.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="359" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguy35i_hs4ClYfVggJ1WZ3vbgbpBHD2CCi1Up2IJLZ5PIau2bR_C-qG10azjNYK7hCtH84XMBuPC9Ewud9OOU8TYHBWz71012Q8BvMYgSe1KRwZtIGazd7FhTJ9qes-MiwPyPLTq9Bo1CE18yP_pBXss_T8Q2b56paWh7-10HLHkYhadoPCgkztQ1cnJM/s16000/tombspawn.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>"The Black Abbot of Puthuum" </b>(1936)<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHJGxRHdSeP1qV0fonxa0Zr2gbbAeGIgjgDIaTxMbmqzaKR7dZ20xO7IbNVLQVaFLb02U_2dAOT5T_WYQl35ShBfZdbnD9B_0Tkh1xnZLrcw9g8Rhe6yqV26FQ3oCVBavRuaCHyI3AAZdZ5qIgvkj2vhGWkQThFVIo1mInTcjdgzm3sU1EQxyCytLnxJ4/s570/weird_tales_193603.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHJGxRHdSeP1qV0fonxa0Zr2gbbAeGIgjgDIaTxMbmqzaKR7dZ20xO7IbNVLQVaFLb02U_2dAOT5T_WYQl35ShBfZdbnD9B_0Tkh1xnZLrcw9g8Rhe6yqV26FQ3oCVBavRuaCHyI3AAZdZ5qIgvkj2vhGWkQThFVIo1mInTcjdgzm3sU1EQxyCytLnxJ4/s320/weird_tales_193603.jpg" width="225" /></a></div>Here we have an entertaining sword and sorcery adventure.<p></p><p>Cushara the pike man and Zobal the archer are two of King Hoaraph's most trusted and most experienced soldiers, so when the King hears of a beautiful girl in some distant outlying province and assigns an obese eunuch to go out there to buy the girl for his harem, he sends Cushara and Zobal along to serve as an escort--after all, between the capital and that province is a wasteland reputedly inhabited by giant goblins and haunted by demons. </p><p>The trio secures the beautiful girl, with whom both Cushara and Zobal fall in love. On the way home the party is confronted by an inexplicable black cloud; the cloud drives them across the desert to the residence of Ujuk, a "negro monk" of "immense girth and tallness" with "deeply slanted" eyes, "purple blubbery lips," and finger nails and toe nails that are three-inch long talons. While the girl and eunuch sleep in the monastery, and Cushara stands guard over them, Zobal is drawn to the monastery's catacombs by a mysterious voice! Down in the crypt, what appears to be a corpse addresses the archer. This tortured being is the father of Ujuk! A thousand years ago, this black wizard monk, a worshipper of the maiden goddess Ojhal and abbot of this very monastery, Puthuum. After living celibate for centuries, he was seduced by a she-devil who then gave birth to his monstrous child, Ujuk. For abandoning his vow, Ojhal cursed him to suffer eternal life as a decaying corpse, his sorcerous powers of vision making him an eternal witness to the crimes of his half-demon son Ujuk, devourer of men and rapist of women! </p><p>The cursed abbot implores Zobal to put him out of his misery, and explains how he can perform both this act of mercy and put an end to the evil career of the diabolical Ujuk. Smith does a good job with the scenes of sorcery and violence that follow. The eunuch is killed in the fracas, but so is Ujuk, and Cushara, Zobal, and the girl survive--the woman even narrowly preserves her virginity from Ujuk! Cushara and Zobal decide to abandon their mission of bringing the woman to King Hoaraph, and in the twist ending the fighting men draw lots (Ujuk's talons) to determine which of them will possess her, but she scoffs at this procedure and chooses one of the them of her own free will. You go, girl. </p><p>Among the collections in which "The Black Abbott of Puthuum" would reappear are <i>Genius Loci and Other Tales</i> (1948) and its two-volume 1987 French translation, <i>Le dieu carnivore</i>. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPdsnQXiTAropojtN-Tti6oHHHSyMcVlWazsL_uR-CYuNDz3TUi0ce9vxYaM3uKewPnkp2MeyTaEC85vIgMOe4qDJRukh7urWJOT0uHSV1cD2tMjnNTONBoZN8v7I8kNmeSmshWcC5UGFj_zjfzg6wFugAkuE3tk7uApI-75QlDVi3UXPQpvScjKNLHuA/s500/ujuk.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="368" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPdsnQXiTAropojtN-Tti6oHHHSyMcVlWazsL_uR-CYuNDz3TUi0ce9vxYaM3uKewPnkp2MeyTaEC85vIgMOe4qDJRukh7urWJOT0uHSV1cD2tMjnNTONBoZN8v7I8kNmeSmshWcC5UGFj_zjfzg6wFugAkuE3tk7uApI-75QlDVi3UXPQpvScjKNLHuA/s16000/ujuk.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b>"Necromancy in Naat" </b>(1936)<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLgZV8bwiSy8e85lBKIBppxCfklupdrQXiaECm1C8qAoohhijOaJvSfpkp49bSGH_bswp60_dI3nCMJqhnwExHyx7O93ADWTmpPYAPUMuhet62H1uIrPVEok4HenEl4pFHG2l_JFXlk4yw9NFEsBzj8OiECHTYY8qwK3IUFo7_rqOyzmazuSaRv9pOrOg/s605/weird_tales_193607.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="605" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLgZV8bwiSy8e85lBKIBppxCfklupdrQXiaECm1C8qAoohhijOaJvSfpkp49bSGH_bswp60_dI3nCMJqhnwExHyx7O93ADWTmpPYAPUMuhet62H1uIrPVEok4HenEl4pFHG2l_JFXlk4yw9NFEsBzj8OiECHTYY8qwK3IUFo7_rqOyzmazuSaRv9pOrOg/s320/weird_tales_193607.jpg" width="212" /></a></div>Here we have a story that has reappeared in sword and sorcery anthologies edited by Michael Parry (in 1977 under the pen name Eric Pendragon) and D. M. Ritzlin (in 2020.) <p></p><p>As in life, in Smith stories the pursuit of women is an endless source of trouble, and "Necromancy in Naat" relates the climactic adventure of Yadar, nomad prince, who has been searching the world for his fiancé, who months ago was captured by raiders along with other women of his tribe while Yadar and the other men of the tribe were out hunting. Yadar is pursuing vague rumors as a passenger on a merchant ship when the vessel is blown off course and finds itself captive of an infamous and irresistible ocean current, the Black River, that is said to lead to the island of Naat, home of necromancers and their undead servants.</p><p>The ship runs aground on breakers on the coast of Naat and is totally destroyed. Yadar is the only survivor, thanks to an adept swimmer, an undead woman who brings him safely to shore--this animated corpse turns out to be none other than Yadar's lost fiancé! A ship carrying her met the same fate as that upon which Yadar was a passenger, and her drowned body was brought back to a terrible half life by three of the fell sorcerers who lord it over this island and their staff of the living dead.</p><p>In the house of the three necromancers--a father and two sons, all incredibly old--the nomad prince learns why he was spared death. Tribes of black cannibals live on the other side of the island, and Yadar is forced to watch as one of these savages, a particularly robust specimen held in captivity by the wizards, is entirely drained of blood by a slinky weasel-like monster that emerges from a hole in the floor. This disgusting rodent is the senior necromancer's familiar, and Yadar is made aware that he will be on the menu come the creature's next monthly meal! </p><p>His ability to fight or escape inhibited by hypnotic spells, Yadar spends weeks on the island, hanging around his beloved, though her flesh is cold, her eyes are dull, she does not breathe, and her speech consists merely of repeating stuff Yadar or the necromancers, who employ her as a pearl diver, say to her. As the end of the month approaches, the two sons enlist Yadar in a scheme to murder their father, of whose centuries-long rule they have tired. They promise Yadar a ship and a crew of undead sailors should the desperate venture come off--the nomad prince will also be permitted to take away the animated corpse of his fiancé (they add to these inducements the suggestion that, if she does not get off the isle, decrepit old Dad will use Yadar's beloved as a sex toy.) </p><p>The sneak attack on the senior necromancer miscarries and Smith regales the reader with a long gruesome description of the horrible fight of the brothers and Yadar against the eldritch patriarch and his vampiric familiar that will thrill lovers of gore. Yadar is killed, but the surviving son raises him from the dead, and Yadar and his beloved spend eternity together as dim-witted animated corpses, toiling on the island of necromancers.</p><p>Good--Parry and Ritzlin were right to republish this memorable and striking piece of work.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbE8B-tnCnOcsb7HW5VobVNphjy-cztPFuHi1hpxmQ4KjABrDN0MqSrBfECu38FOM6D6I7oVgFxA78wPKGoVXKYagBeaf_Ajn8bjADZ8nCc1GPlqcXiY5f-slDSTNir6Is-ynLcgac9y7bo9GAFAZHb7oXJ8dV6sEOfzIzIj2xvg3CS3FWRsEYN5YrPBc/s500/necro.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="394" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbE8B-tnCnOcsb7HW5VobVNphjy-cztPFuHi1hpxmQ4KjABrDN0MqSrBfECu38FOM6D6I7oVgFxA78wPKGoVXKYagBeaf_Ajn8bjADZ8nCc1GPlqcXiY5f-slDSTNir6Is-ynLcgac9y7bo9GAFAZHb7oXJ8dV6sEOfzIzIj2xvg3CS3FWRsEYN5YrPBc/s16000/necro.jpg" /></a></div><br />**********<p></p><p>Three stories about the regrettable cheating of death, sickening body modification and disgusting sexual relationships that move at a brisk pace and are full of striking images, horrendous violence and clever sentences; here we have proof that Clark Ashton Smith really is the master of the weird that everybody is always telling you he is. Conventional wisdom confirmed!</p>MPorciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15515742639389937221noreply@blogger.com2