Dark Love: K Koja, B Copper, R Campbell and K E Wagner

We just read three stories by the great Tanith Lee about disastrous sexual relationships.  This is a theme close to my heart, so let's see what other material of the same bent we can find.  At an antique store recently, I spotted a hardcover copy of 1995's Dark Love, edited by Nancy A. Collins, Edward E. Kramer and the ubiquitous Martin H. Greenberg-- tag line: "twenty two all-original tales of lust and obsession"-- and took a gander at the table of contents.  No Lee, no Malzberg or Wolfe, but still some authors we read.  In the MPorcius tradition of absolute cheapness I decided to save four bucks and read my four selections from Dark Love via the internet archive.  

Dark Love seems to have been a success, winning the 1996 Deathrealm award, which I had never head of until today, and seeing print in Britain and France as well as in America.  Our European friends seem to have gotten the short end of the stick, however, as the US editions of the book have a quite fine Mel Odom cover illustration (check out the even more beautiful original Odom work from which this cover was adapted here) while the French cover is pedestrian and the British cover is embarrassingly lame.  U-S-A!

I guess Stuart Kaminsky is a big deal, but I don't know that I have ever heard of him before

"Pas de Deux" by Kathe Koja

This is a pretty sophisticated piece of work.  The pace of "Pas de Deux" is quick and there is a lot of titillating sex stuff and some violence but Koja also weaves together plenty of compelling scenes that explore multiple engaging themes about life and human relationships, including the relationship of a person to his or her own body--does your body determine your fate?  Does your body, even more than your mind, represent the real you?  

Our main character is a woman who is living in poverty in a crappy apartment in a big city, trying to make it as a ballet dancer.  But she has a troubled relationship with dance--as a kid she wanted to play soccer, but her fat mother forced her to take up ballet, and the woman at the strip mall ballet studio told her "No sports for you, you've got a dancer's body."  Our protagonist left the world of dance for a while and now that she is back in it she is probably too old to really make it.  Many an evening she goes to night clubs where people dance to thrash metal and "steelcore," which I have to admit I've never heard of.  (I'm always learning!)  Her dancing of course is better than anybody else's, and many men hit on her and she brings them back to her apartment for one-night stands; she explains her philosophy to them after having sex with them.  

The dancer's relationship with men is a major component of the story and Koja includes flashback scenes of her with her chain-smoking father in her teenaged years and with her former long term boyfriend, Edward, who himself had a strange relationship with his first wife and his mother-in-law, Adele, a successful dancer who knew Balanchine well, or at least wrote a book purporting such.  Our main character reads Adele's memoir of her relationship with Balanchine, and it has a powerful effect on the dancer's mind, as do her memories of Edward's critiques of her face and fashion choices.  Perhaps the main theme of "Pas de Deux" is to what extent we make decisions and to what extent other people and other external factors (along with the body we got stuck with) determine our choices.  The main character again and again does things she tells herself she doesn't want to do, but asks herself, "what else is there to do?" 

In need of money, she contacts Edward but he wants sex in return for a "loan" she probably will never be able to repay.  She refuses to grant him any sexual favors, in fact strikes him.  So she gets a job at a used bookstore; she steals from the place and gets herself fired.  She then gets a job as a stripper.

At the same time she pursues her doomed quest to become a professional ballet dancer, our heroine is on a quest to find a man, a partner in life--Adele in her book advises women to "find your prince."  This quest is also doomed--the men the dancer meets at thrash clubs won't do (her body, she feels, will tell her which of the men is her prince, but her body rejects man after man, night after night) and she never even considers the repulsive men for whom she strips.

The dancer's sanity slips, and she stops eating, becoming skeletally thin, which does not endear her to her clients or her boss.  The story ends somewhat inconclusively, like a literary story--there is a climax, in which the dancer encounters Edward again and she beats him up and wrecks his house, but we have to assume this is not going to improve her life and career prospects and that if she doesn't take Edward's unwanted advice ("You're very sick, you ought to see a doctor") she is going to die soon.

Maybe like the Lee stories we read in our last episode, "Pas de Deux" is about women who seek love and when men aren't willing to give it to them they lash out at the man who let them down and/or society at large.  But this is no wish fulfillment fantasy that celebrates a woman empowered--it is all about how women are at the mercy of others, men and women both, and factors over which they have no control.

A good mainstream story about a creative person crushed by the world that has enough sex, violence and creepiness that it also provides the thrills we look for in genre fiction--thumbs up!  "Pas de Deux" has been reprinted in Koja collections in English and in French, the language of (noir?) love.

(An odd little note: the artist Patrick Nagel is mentioned twice in "Pas de Deux," but both times here in Dark Love his name is misspelled "Nagle."  I found an electronic version of Velo/cities, and in there the name is spelled correctly.)

"Bright Blades Gleaming" by Basil Copper

We've reads three stories by Copper during this blog's chevauchee across the interwebs.  I liked "The Knocker at the Portico," and "Voices in the Water" but gave "Beyond the Reef" the old black ball.  making sure to keep in mind the law of small numbers, we must acknowledge that "Bright Blades Gleaming" will determine if Mr. Copper has a 75% or 50% hit rating here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Fingers crossed!

"Bright Blades Gleaming" is well-written on a page by page and sentence by sentence basis, with Copper constructing an interesting character and offering strong images.  Of course I am a sucker for stories in which a sensitive young man lives in a big city in a tiny apartment and spends a lot of time on the crowded streets wistfully looking at young women--there was a time when I was such a young man!  But the plot of "Bright Blades Gleaming" amounts to little and the twist ending is pretty disappointing.  It is frustrating when a guy like A. E. van Vogt comes up with a plot full of crazy ideas and astounding events but his poor writing style limits how much you can really enjoy the wild ride, and it is also frustrating when a guy has a good style but only applies it to a plot that lacks any sort of emotional or conceptual punch or any thrills.  We'll call "Bright Blades Gleaming" acceptable.

The text of "Bright Blades Gleaming" is the diary of a late 19th-century young man who has just moved to Berlin.  He describes in detail his new room and his fellow tenants and hints that he is some kind of weirdo with "inflammatory views" who is often in trouble with the police.   As the story proceeds we learn he is an atheist who loves animals and refuses to step on beetles he finds under his seat at the restaurant but hates human beings, a failed medical student who finances his slacker's lifestyle of sitting in restaurants and parks staring at the girls who go by through clever thievery. 

The diarist studies the slaughter of cattle at an abattoir, buys surgical instruments and practices the art of dissection on some dolls.  He starts having horrible bloody dreams and wakes up one morning to discover indications that last night, presumably while out of his mind, he killed somebody.  He flees Germany for England, where Copper provides the in-your-face clues that confirm readers' suspicions that the diarist is Jack the Ripper.

We follow this dude for page after page as he tidies his room, follows a girl on the street, has tense conversations with his land lady, and denounces aged veterans, slowly learning how truly odd and sinister he is, but instead of some kind of climax in which he achieves some dastardly perverse goal or he is foiled by the authorities or some brave civilian, our supposed pay off is being told he is Jack the Ripper?  Copper's attempt to appeal to the audience's supposed fascination with Jack the Ripper is cheap and unsatisfying, a cop out--it is like he wrote only half a story, just the setting and the character, leaving the reader to supply his own climax and resolution.    

(Defenders of "Bright Blades Gleaming" might call it a mood piece or a character study.  Let's also note that Dark Love is dedicated to Robert Bloch, so maybe this story is an homage to the Jack-obsessed Bloch.)  

Besides in Dark Love, you can catch this rump of a story in the Copper collections Darkness, Mist and Shadow: Volume Two and Cold Hand on My Shoulder.    

"Going Under" by Ramsey Campbell 

This story feels long and glacially slow, with long meandering sentences that fail to engage the reader's interest or inspire any emotion and a tedious pace that leaves the story seeming to move in slow motion.

"Going Under" takes place in a tunnel that goes under a river.  The tunnel is part of the highway system, and to celebrate an anniversary of its opening it has been closed to automobile traffic to serve as the route of a charity walk--a crowd of people has come to buy a ticket, the money going to their favorite cause, AIDS or whatever, and then walk the length of the tunnel.  Blythe is doing this charity walk by himself, having had a fight with his wife.  Blythe is one of the first people to own a cell phone or mobile phone or whatever English people were calling them in 1995 and while doing the walk, crammed cheek by jowl with strangers in the dense crowd, he leaves wifey a voice mail and then takes an incoming call--these calls are critical, as Blythe has to get his alimony check to his first wife (I think it's alimony--the word "maintenance" is used) in the mail or he will be imprisoned, and he wants his current wife to put the check in the mail, which he stupidly didn't do himself.  The tension of the story is meant to come from the fact that he has trouble getting a signal and then the answering machine malfunctions and then he drops his phone and it breaks blah blah blah.  Campbell tries to make his story funny and/or disturbing by describing how fat everybody doing the charity walk is and how their bodies radiate heat and by having people make fun of Blythe for using a phone in public.  Blythe then goes insane and starts harming people in his feverish quest to retrieve his phone or borrow or steal some other person's phone.

Bad.  Maybe this crummy story serves as a historical document of a time when it was fashionable to envy people who had cell phones and used them in public.  Didn't Stephen King write an entire book about how cellphones are bad?  "Going Under"'s defenders might say that it seeks to evoke the claustrophobic stress of being in a dense crowd at a public event.     

People love Ramsey Campbell, and Stephen Jones included "Going Under" in a best-of-the-year anthology.  You can also find it in multiple Campbell collections.

"Locked Away" by Karl Edward Wagner

Wagner brings to our exploration of Dark Love the gross explicit sex we were perhaps sort of expecting, plus little jokes for genre fans, like a mention of David Drake (a romance novelist in this story's world) and to Bambi and Thumper from the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever.  

Pandora is an Englishwoman in her late twenties, a divorcee and owner of an antique store in North Carolina.  She wins a box of jewelry at an auction, and fancies for herself a heart-shaped Victorian locket she finds among the lot.  Pandora puts on the locket, the clasp of which she initially finds difficult to open.  When she does manage to open it, it triggers immersive dreams of rough sex in which she is the subordinate participant; Wagner graphic blow-by-blow descriptions of these episodes are like something out of a porn story.  Soon the locket clasp is opening freely, practically on its own.  Some of the dreams are essentially rape and torture fantasies.  When Pandora wakes up from the dreams she finds underwear or sex toys from the dreams in her possession, ejaculate on her face and blood leaking from her anus--was she having sex in another universe or with ghosts?  

It turns out the locket was owned by a spinster, a very religious woman, and, perhaps, the dreams are that old woman's sex fantasies, which she never expressed or experienced, but kept locked away in the locket.  (SF stories and porn stories often ridicule religious people, suggest religious people are hypocrites; I guess people who put science or sex at the center of their identities see traditional religion as a rival school of thought, a way of organizing the universe which they must supplant or perhaps just resent.)  But Wagner also suggests that Pandora is just a pervert, her sexual desires warped by abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, maybe even the result of brain damage from blows to the head.  As the story ends Pandora tosses away the locket, puts on revealing clothes, and arms herself with a knife--she is going to have rough sex with men she meets at a bar, or maybe her young employees, an attractive woman and a handsome gay man (there is a lot of lesbian sex and lots of gay vibes in this story), and unlike in her magical locket-triggered fantasies, she is going to be the aggressor, is going to leave the other participants bleeding.

A nasty exploitative thing, the supernatural elements an excuse to describe brutal homoerotic scenes of men abusing a woman, abuse the woman ultimately enjoys.  But competent, I suppose.  We'll call it acceptable.

"Locked Away" would go on to be reprinted in three different Wagner collections, all of which sport covers that leverage Wagner's biker image.

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Well, only one of these stories, Koja's, is actually good, though Wagner's seems to accomplish its (modest) goals.  Copper's shows ability but was disappointing, while Campbell's was emphatically not my cup of tea.  Of course, I'll probably read all there people again next time they pop up in some anthology that has caught my eye, maybe soon, maybe years from now.

My Best Science Fiction Story: F Brown, M Leinster, F B Long, & T Sturgeon

In our last thrilling episode, we read a story by Sam Merwin, Jr. that appears in Oscar J. Friend and Leo Margulies' 1949 anthology My Best Science Fiction Story.  This hardcover volume contains 25 stories by "outstanding authors," and over the course of this blog's apocalyptic life we have talked about seven of them.  Roll out the links, MPorcius helots!

Robert Bloch: "Almost Human"

John W. Campbell, Jr.: "Blindness"

Edmond Hamilton: "The Inn Outside the World"

Henry Kuttner: "Don't Look Now"

A. E. van Vogt: "Project Spaceship"

Clark Ashton Smith: "The Uncharted Isle"

Sam Merwin, Jr. "The Carriers"

Let's read four more stories from My Best Science Fiction Story, those from titan of crime fiction Fredric Brown (I fear it is a joke story, but let's soldier on regardless), reliable pro Murray Leinster, the often disappointing Frank Belknap Long, and Grand Master Theodore Sturgeon.

"Nothing Sirius" by Fredric Brown (1944)

The most recent things we have read by Fredric Brown include a short story that I interpreted as a "satire" that suggests "modern life, the era of the radio and the motor car, is driving us crazy" and that I reported "unleashes a lot of speculative economics on us," a novel I called a "page-turner" but which I lamented included lots of "Psych 101 goop" and "pop psychology," and a World War II-era detective yarn in which an Axis agent disguises a baby as a monkey.  Let's see what wild stuff Brown has in store for readers in a story he was, apparently, quite proud of--as the title indicates, the stories in My Best Science Fiction Story were selected by the authors themselves.  "Nothing Sirius" debuted in Captain Future magazine, alongside the 17th Captain Future adventure, this one penned by William Morrison, and has been reprinted in many Brown collections.  I am reading it in the scan of 1977's Best of Fredric Brown at the internet archive.

Oy, "Nothing Sirius" is a yawn-inducing humor piece full of boring and obvious jokes that as you are trudging through it feels like it will never end.  Thumbs down!

Our narrator is a middle-aged married man; he and the wife are small business people.  They fly from planet to planet, setting up a tent full of coin-operated entertainment devices at each stop and then moving on.  In the space ship with them is their sexy daughter Ellen and the pilot of their ship, Johnny.  Johnny graduated from the space academy just two years ago, and one of the foundational jokes of the story is that Johnny is serious to a fault, a rule-follower who has no social skills and won't let his hair down to drink, smoke or chew the fat with the narrator and doesn't notice that Ellen has a crush on him.

One day the Johnny unexpectedly spots a new planet, and the narrator decides they should explore it on foot.  They come upon disconcerting evidence that Earth people have already been there.  They meet an old friend who tells them this planet has been kept a secret by the film production company that is renting it.  They also meet a beautiful movie star with whom Johnny falls in love at first sight, upsetting poor Ellen.  But then the narrator realizes that everything seems wrong, and proves that all the people and buildings on the planet, including their old pal and the actress, are just illusions, making them vanish.

The natives of the planet, people almost identical to little cockroaches, admit what is going on.  Like so many of the aliens in these old stories, they can read human minds, and they have been projecting those illusions, basing them on the memories of the narrator and his companions.  The bug people assert that their civilization and human civilization are totally incompatible--humans are concerned with material things, while the insect people are concerned with thought.  This planet has no mineral wealth and the soil is not fit for agriculture, so there is no reason for humans to ever come here.  

The four humans return to the ship.  Johnny has been shaken up by the experience of falling in love with an illusion projected by a telepathic bug, and for the first time in his life gets drunk.  This triggers or presages a welcome evolution of his personality--he becomes less stiff and serious and it is not long before he and Ellen are engaged.  

Though celebrated, "Nothing Serious" is totally lame filler with no drama or excitement.  All the SF stuff and all the jokes are banal.  Sad!

"The Lost Race" by Murray Leinster (1949)

Almost ten years ago we read an Edmond Hamilton story about an insane French botanist who wanted to reduce the speed of his life down to one-percent normal, "Alien Earth."  Five years ago we read a story by Leigh Brackett about a ruthless trapper who finds an anti-grav device factory in an abandoned Martian city, "Quest of the Starhope."  Three years ago we read a Ray Bradbury story attacking American culture and suggesting women manipulate men with their tears*, "The Concrete Mixer."   All three of these stories debuted in the same issue of Sam Merwin's Thrilling Wonder Stories, and today we (virtually) open the ish up again to read a fourth story offered therein, Murray Leinster's "The Lost Race."

*Like Charles Schulz, Ray Bradbury is a wholesome American institution whose brilliant work has broad appeal but which attentive readers may find surprisingly misogynistic.   

"The Lost Race" hasn't been reprinted much (though if you read German you can catch it in a 1966 issue of Utopia, and if Croatian is more your speed an issue of Sirius from 1985 has you covered), but it was one of the dozen stories that was included in the paperback version of My Best Science Fiction Story, so I can read Leinster's intro to it in the scan of that paperback at the internet archive.  Leinster talks about why he is particularly proud of the story and spoils all the min themes, telling us "The Lost Race" deals with the issue of the value of rocket fuel on the market, and that high value might impede the development of space travel, with psychic powers, and with how spacers will have to deal with the problem of boredom.

The first page of "The Lost Race" is more like a soap opera than a space opera.  Spaceman Jimmy Briggs is engaged to Sally; to amass enough money to marry her, he has signed up on a year-long space voyage.  The crew of the vessel is made up of eight men.  One of them is Danton, who is pathologically jealous about his wife Jane, who is Sally's best friend.  Another is Ken Howell.  Howell was engaged to Jane, but then while he was away on a voyage, Danton married Jane.  According to Sally, Danton employed some underhanded methods to achieve this feat.  Both Jimmy and Ken regret signing up for a voyage with the difficult Danton.

Mankind has explored and colonized many planets, and many more have been charted but await examination.  So commercial ships like the one Jimmy, Ken and Danton are aboard are obliged to make little stops along the way to investigate planets that might be viable for colonization.  On scores of planets, human explorers have discovered the remains of a highly sophisticated star-faring civilization.  This "Lost Race" raised hundreds of magnificent cities, but all have been thoroughly destroyed, apparently deliberately, as if the entire culture, a space empire spanning hundreds of light years, had committed suicide.  Many space men have seen these ruins, and many of them, as a little hobby, theorize as to why the Lost Race destroyed itself.  Ken Howell's theory is that the members of the lost race were able to see into the future and saw something so horrible they would rather die than live through it--he suggests that if Earth's people had foreseen the horrors of the, now long past, Third World War, they also might have opted to commit suicide rather than suffer through that tragedy.

Ken and Jimmy make an unprecedented find--a Lost Race installation that miraculously escaped destruction (it seems it was sheltered by a hill from the blast that flattened the nearby city.)  Their discovery is an amphitheater with a seat at one end--when Jimmy sits there, a holographic projection fills the amphitheater--the moving image is of Sally back on Earth, thinking longingly of Jimmy!  Jimmy figures that the amphitheater is a kind of televising remote viewer, and shows the places and people you are thinking about in real time.  

All the crewmen use the amphitheater and see images of their people back home living happily--this is a relief, as under ordinary circumstances the spacers would have no news from home for a year, their ship moving much faster than light.  Danton is an exception, however--he sees Jane cheating on him!  Danton goes berserk, and there is a whole drama involving ray pistol fire, stolen fuel, and hijacked life boats as Danton pursues a scheme of stranding the ship here and escaping on his own to get revenge on Jane and her lover.  Ken Howell foils the plot by diagnosing Danton's psychology.  Howell is one canny figure; he also realizes the Lost Race's projection device is not a real-time televiewer but simply projects images of a person's thoughts and expectations--Danton only saw Jane cheating because of his own paranoia.  Even more astoundingly, Howell solves the mystery of the Lost Race after finding some bones--the Lost Race were a people who had tails and other particular features, but their use of atomic energy was mutating them so that they were going to lose their tails and other characteristics--they would become what they saw as hideous monsters!  So they all killed themselves.  The shocking ending is the revelation that the people of the Lost Race were going to evolve so that they looked just like we Earth people do!  Could it be that we are the degenerate descendants of a Lost Race colony that didn't commit suicide?

This is a fun classic-style science fiction story with lots of technical, sociological, and psychological speculation, plus decent action and adventure elements and human drama elements.  Thumbs up for "The Lost Race!"

"The House of Rising Winds" by Frank Belknap Long (1948)

"The House of Rising Winds" debuted in an issue of Startling Stories alongside Henry Kuttner's "The Mask of Circe," which we read in 2022, and is illustrated by fan favorite Virgil Finlay.  It would reappear in the Long collection The Rim of the Unknown. 

A young orphan boy, Jimmy, is living with his aunt and uncle--who keep arranging accidents in hopes of killing the kid so they can enjoy his inheritance!  Long does a good job at describing the cruelty and the schemes of the aunt and uncle--it is actually kind of creepy and at times shocking.

Jimmy is hiding in the woods when he is approached by a space alien who calls himself Lacula!  Long, something of a poet, comes up with a long list of metaphors to describe Lacula and how he makes Jimmy feel.  

Lacula was like many things at once--things that Jimmy had seen and imagined and dreamed about.  A big twisted tree trunk....the gold and russet splendor of the autumn woods....the sea, wide and boundless....a mountain, rising pale and purple....a maze of complicated machinery....

Lacula is a kindly gent...and also a big game hunter!  He has with him cages full of vicious beasts from Mars, Venus, and other worlds.  With a little device, Lacula makes these cages float hither and thither.  I guess the cages are like intersections between different points in space or something--when Jimmy looks into one cage he sees the broad expanse of a Martian desert leading to mountains in the far distance, but he can also see through the cage to the mundane surface of the Earth neighborhood with which he is familiar.  Long relishes describing two of the ravenous monsters.  Lacula gives Jimmy a little pipe, and instructions on how to use it.  Later that day, when aunt and uncle contrive yet another attempt on Jimmy's life (they make the kid take a bath and arrange an electric hair curler--still plugged in--to fall into the bath to electrocute him), Jimmy blows the pipe and a ferocious wind hurls aunt and uncle out of the house and into one of Lacula's cages.  Lacula leaves Earth with his latest specimens of vicious beasts, and Jimmy can look forward to living his own life, inheriting the house and turning it from a place of fear and misery to one of joy by marrying and building a happy family within it.

The parts with the aunt and uncle are chilling, and the alien monsters are fun; the stuff with Lacula is maybe a little fey and a little too verbose, but I can still mildly recommend "The House of the Rising Winds" as a weird horror story that mixes fairy tale and science fiction elements.           

"Thunder and Roses" by Theodore Sturgeon (1947)

Here we have a very popular story by Ted "Killdozer" Sturgeon, one that has been reprinted a billion times in Sturgeon collections, Astounding anthologies edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison, and by Tony Lewis, surveys of the SF field published by DAW, Prentice-Hall, Wesleyan University, and Harper and Row, an anthology of stories about nuclear war and one of horror stories about the mind.  The first edition of that last anthology, edited by a British computer scientist who was a technical advisor on The Tomorrow People, a TV show I loved as a kid, has a striking woman-in-bondage/violence against women cover that I am finding mesmerizing.

"Thunder and Roses" is a well-written melodrama that counsels turning the other cheek, unilaterally disarming yourself in the face of your enemies.  It is set in the near future at a remote military base after a sneak attack has nuked the United States--the attack was so successful that the US didn't even fire back at the unnamed enemies, and the land of the free and home of the brave is practically wiped out, save for this remote base, where people are despondent and suffering radiation sickness that dooms them to early graves.  Sturgeon does a good job describing the struggles of the men not to commit suicide under these dire conditions.  

The second half of the story expands on the don't-commit-suicide angle.  A beautiful woman singer, apparently the most popular celebrity in America, who regularly broadcast performances weekly to military bases, is still alive, and arrives at the base, her terrible wounds concealed by cosmetics.  Her final performance has the object of convincing the survivors not to retaliate against the enemies who just murdered the entire United States, as this will result in the total destruction of all humanity.  She argues that a decent civilization might arise someday from the rest of the world, but if the United States launches its weapons then all life on Earth--even lizards!--will be killed so no new intelligent life can arise.  In the same way individuals struggled in the first half of the story to resist the inclination to commit suicide, in the second half of the story the handful of surviving Americans characters struggle against each other to resist the temptation to launch a retaliatory strike, which would amount to the suicide of the human race and all life on Earth.

"Thunder and Roses" is well structured and well written, so I must, albeit grudgingly, judge it a good story.  Some may think it over the top, that Sturgeon's depiction of the singer's martyrdom, for example, goes so far as to become comical, or that many individual scenes are too long or that some scenes are superfluous and repetitive (how many guys do we have to hear have committed suicide?) but it all works in my opinion.  My gripe is with the story's ideology--Sturgeon seems to think you shouldn't resist or deter aggressors and so he contrives an unlikely scenario in which resistance and deterrence are somehow unjustifiable.  This is the kind of thing the science fiction that aspires to be a literature of ideas does, and that Sturgeon and Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. in particular, do--question conventional wisdom, like that slavery and incest are bad, by coming up with crazy scenarios and counterintuitive theories that demonstrate that slavery and incest might actually be good.  I obviously think it is the duty of decent people to resist and deter those who would trespass against others and so I recoil from Sturgeon's ideas here, but I guess that is part of the point of the story and "serious" science fiction, to get a rise out of you.  ("Don't worry about it son," Campbell told a young Barry Malzberg after a long argument in the year 1969, "I just like to shake 'em up."*)

*As reported in Malzberg's 1980 essay on Campbell, available in Engines of the Night and Breakfast in the Ruins.

An important story in SF history, likely of value to those interested in science fiction written in response to the use of atomic weapons in World War II and to the Cold War, and science fiction influenced by Christian thought--though Sturgeon never directly mentions Hiroshima, the Soviet Union, or any religious figure or establishment--and science fiction that depicts stress and psychological trauma.

[UPDATE JANUARY 30, 2025: Tarbandu in the comments points out that a 1971 printing
of a 1968 horror anthology, Splinters, has the same cover as the 1970 Mind in Chains.
  Tarbandu blogged about Splinters back in 2015--check out his assessment at the link.]

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With the exception of Brown's sterile filler piece, all of today's stories are pretty grim in tone but well-executed and worth reading.  While Long's succeeds in depicting human personalities under stress, Leinster's and Sturgeon's do the same as well as offering compelling speculations on the effect on human personality and society of new technologies, offering good examples of SF that is both emotionally engaging and thought provoking.  

Nightmares from Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson and Ramsey Campbell

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading from the 1993 anthology To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg.  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.  

"The Dreams of Albert Moreland" by Fritz Leiber (1945)

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.  

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.

"The Dreams of Albert Moreland" would be included in the Leiber collection Night's Black Agents 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 The Acolyte (though I think that the story may have been extensively revised for book publication.)  

"Lover, When You're Near Me" by Richard Matheson (1952)

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" 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.

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.

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.

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 Marilyn Monroe or Sophia Loren, 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?

"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 The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1953 and of Galaxy editor H. L. Gold, who put it in The Second Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction.  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.  

"Lover, When You're Near Me," the title of which has a comma in some printings and no comma in others, debuted in Galaxy; among the Matheson collections in which it can be found are Born of Man and Woman and its abridged version, Third from the Sun.

"The Depths" by Ramsey Campbell (1982)

It looks like "The Depths" made its premiere appearance in the collection Dark Companions.  Karl Edward Wagner liked it, including it in The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series XI and it seems Campbell himself was proud of it, as it appeared in Top Fantasy, an anthology of stories "selected and introduced by the authors themselves."  In 2010, Allyson Bird and Joel Lane reprinted it in their collection Never Again: Weird Fiction Against Racism and Fascism, 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"--the fifth (pink) element of white supremacy), but nobody who has read this typo-ridden blog would think of convicting me of the first pillar of white supremacy, "perfectionism.")

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" is 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. 

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.)  

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Gotta give this one a marginal thumbs down.

**********

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 To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare will live up to the standard set by Leiber.

1977 Sword and Sorcery stories by R Campbell, M W Wellman and A J Offutt

On my current road trip I stopped at The Book Rack in the Quad Cities and bought three paperbacks that I thought looked worthwhile.  Let's crack open one of them today, 1977's Swords Against Darkness II, edited by Andrew J. Offutt, an anthology of eight "original novelets."  Offutt pens intros to the book and to individual stories; the book intro is cheerful and enthusiastic about fantasy fiction of the Conan style, which he wants to call "heroic fantasy" and abbreviate as "hf."  I don't think "hf" caught on; I find people are much more likely to say "sword and sorcery."  

We've already read Tanith Lee's contribution to Swords Against Darkness II, "Odds Against the Gods" in a different book.  Let's check out the stories in the volume by famous British horror writer Ramsey Campbell, Weird Tales stalwart and scholar of the Old South Manly Wade Wellman, and Offutt himself.

"The Changer of Names" by Ramsey Campbell

"The Changer of Names" is one of Campbell's stories of Ryre, a mercenary swordsman.  Our friend tarbandu praised the Ryre stories in a late 2021 blogpost and suggested "The Changer of Names" was one of the best horror tales of the Me Decade, so let's check it out and see if tarbandu and I are on the same page.

Ryre lives in a world in which people have a passionate and superstitious attachment to names and reputations.

In his youth, like most men, he'd [Ryre] roamed seeking others whom fate and their parents had given his name, to challenge them to fight for it.  But now he and his name were one, secure in the deeds they'd shared; he had no need to defend it.

In this story, Ryre arrives at a depressed port town (its economy is going downhill due to competition from a newer port) and a maniac appears who claims his name is Ryre and even takes credit for some of Ryre's heroic exploits, killing a famous pirate, for example.  This loonie assaults Ryre, and is quickly slain.  Ryre learns that a "name-changer" called Lith is in this port town selling the names of heroes like Ryre himself, and Ryre goes out to deal with this Lith.  There follow good horror images and decent fight scenes, elevated by Campbell's name theme--men who steal another man's name via Lith's sorcery gain some of that man's strength, at the expense of the original of that name; similarly, if the reputation of a name is blackened with lies, the bearers of the name are weakened.

This whole name-changing business feels fresh and original, and Campbell does a good job with various metaphors (e. g., unhappy tavern patrons "seemed pinned to the benches by a lifetime of burdens") and other literary tactics, presenting striking images and effectively building a bleak and depressing atmosphere, so this is a good dark sword and sorcery story.  Thumbs up!

"The Changer of Names" has been reprinted in several anthologies like Lin Carter's The Year's Best Fantasy Stories:4 and E. L. de Marigny and Jaime Martijn's Nirwana.  The Ryre stories were collected in a book of Campbell's sword and sorcery (or as perhaps you have taken to calling it, hf) tales called Far Away and Never that was first published by Necronomicon Press in 1996; DMR Books reissued Far Away and Never in a expanded form in 2021--it was this recent edition tarbandu reviewed at the link above.

"The Dweller in the Temple" by Manly Wade Wellman

"The Dweller in the Temple" is one of Wellman's tales of Kardios, a man whose name sounds like that of a superhero heart surgeon but who is in fact a swordsman and musician and probably the sole survivor of the sinking of Atlantis.  The story has been reprinted in one of those Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles Waugh anthologies, the one in question called Atlantis, and in a 2019 DMR Books anthology, Heroes of Atlantis and Lemuria that reprints four Kardios tales, as well as stories by one of our faves Leigh Brackett and a guy I know nothing about, Frederic Arnold Kummer, Jr.

For his story, Ramsey Campbell developed a grim and oppressive sort of atmosphere, but Wellman's tale is light-hearted, jocular and jovial.  Wellman's most famous character is probably John the Balladeer, a guy who wanders about the 20th century American South playing a guitar, and like John, Kardios is an enthusiastic singer and "The Dweller in the Temple" is full of Kardios's sunny and optimistic lyrics.  There are little anachronistic jokes, like a reference to the Shakespearean saw about brevity being the soul of wit--the brevity under consideration being that of the attire of harem girls.

Kardios arrives at a city where they have a curious custom--they choose their king from among strangers who happen by, and Kardios is duly crowned and given a feast and access to a harem of gorgeous girls.  Instead of sporting with the harem girls, Kardios charms and has sex with--and even composes and performs love songs about!--a servant girl.  She reveals the thing we all have been expecting, that the town chooses its king from among strangers because it must regularly appease the local monster god by feeding a king to it.  Kardios slays the god with his sword and installs the servant girl on the throne and then leaves.       

A pleasant sort of diversion that lacks chills and thrills but is entertaining none the less.

"Last Quest" by Andrew J. Offutt

In his introduction to his own story, editor Offutt describes his life and career in a sort of self-deprecating woe-is-me imposter-syndrome tone.  He also tells us that he worked harder on "Last Quest" than any of his previous productions; unfortunately, his industry seems not to have been rewarded, as this story is pretty lame.  The style is bad, with odd word choices and many characters having irritating accents and pseudo-medieval vocabulary.  The pacing and structure are bad, with long expository digressions about the past exploits of the many characters, who all have needlessly complicated relationships.  It is as if Offutt outlined a large cast of characters, each with complexly interwoven life histories, for an epic novel of three or four hundred pages, and then, for whatever reason, crammed them all into this story, which is less than 35 pages long, so way too much of the text is just background stuff.  As for the actual action scenes, they feel slow because Offutt overexplains and overdescribes instead of conveying excitement or tension.  

As for plot and theme, the plot is pretty conventional, and the pervasive motif (not surprising when we recall that much of Offutt's career output consists of pornography) is difficult or coercive sexual relationships, often with the woman being the villain (women in the story suffer as well as men, and there are brave women as well as brave men, but it would be easy to argue that this story is essentially misogynistic.)  Offutt's ostensible theme is how Love and Chance rule our lives, driving us hither and yon to unescapable fates; in particular, love will lead you to a terrible doom.  Offutt's chosen plot and themes could certainly serve as the basis of a successful story, but in his execution he fails to make them entertaining or interesting.

Twenty or so years ago the Emperor married the daughter of a wizard--this woman dominates him and is the real power in the Empire.  The wizard has just kidnapped his granddaughter, Shariya, and taken the girl to his keep in a hideous swamp inhabited by monsters.  The Emperor and Empress want their daughter Shariya back, as does Shariya's fiancé, an adventurer named Haj.  Haj, it seems, has rescued Shariya from various perils in the past, including an attempted rape by some king.  The Empress, who in the past tried to seduce Haj, gives Haj a whistle with which to enlist the aid of monsters and half-humans, and Haj and his friends go off to rescue Shariya.  These friends include a Prince to whom Shariya was betrothed before she was affianced to Haj--this prince fell in love with an amazon on an earlier adventure and had no objections to breaking off his engagement to Shariya; on this same adventure Haj was held captive and forced to have sex with many amazons, and then captured by a tribe of "lovemen," whom it is hinted are homosexual rapists.    

On the way to the swamp our heroes fight some giant lizards.  Then Haj uses the whistle to summon some winged men to fly himself and two friends--another adventurer and the adventurer's girlfriend, who insisted on going on the mission despite being told many times it was too dangerous--the rest of the way to the swamp.  The Prince stays behind, making the reader wonder why the Prince is in the story at all.  The bird men fly the three warriors to the swamp, and then at the edge of the swamp Haj uses the whistle to summon some giant spiders to carry the heroes through the trees to the wizard's keep.  

On the way the three spider-riders encounter a female giant spider.  This creature has an hypnotic sexuality that makes it irresistible to male spider and male human alike!  Haj's friend and his girlfriend are killed in the fracas that ensues; the she-spider mates with and paralyzes one of the he-spiders--she will soon lay her eggs in the still-living but motionless body.  The she-spider then turns off her allure magic, allowing Haj and his mount to proceed.  

At the keep Haj finds the old wizard dead; Shariya has taken his place.  Haj implores her to join him and return to civilization, but she explains that a wizard (or wizardress!) must reign in the swamp keep, or the various monsters and beast men that inhabit the Empire--giant spiders, flying men, giant lizards, et al--will be totally unrestrained and exterminate the human race.  When Haj persists in trying to win her back anyway, it turns out that she now has the same magic as the female spiders, and we are lead to believe she kills or imprisons Haj forever in the keep. 

I am a fan of the traditional quest theme and of femme fatale stories in which guys make dumb decisions because of lust or love and get destroyed, but Offutt fails to cultivate anything valuable out of this fertile ground.  Thumbs down!  

Unsurprisingly, it looks like "Last Quest" has never been reprinted.

**********

There are four pages of ads at the back of Swords Against Darkness II.  The first page is for Zebra's editions of books of Robert E. Howard stories and pastiches.  I have seen some of these in real life and they are pretty awesome; The Sowers of the Thunder, for example, has a Jeff Jones cover and interior illustrations by Roy Krenkel.   I'm a thousand miles from my bookshelves and my scanner, but I am pretty sure I own The Sword of the Gael, written by Offutt and with a wraparound Jones cover.  

The next page is an ad for books about the occult and paranormal, like one on the Bermuda Triangle, one about the Loch Ness Monster, and one about the secret powers of pyramids.  A page of ads for sensationalist books about the murder of JFK, the finances of John D. Rockefeller, and the trial of Charles Manson follows.  The fourth and final page touts two more Kennedy assassination books, but if that's not your kind of meat it starts out with an ad for a book of peanut recipes.  Who wouldn't want to try Peanut Baked Flounder?  My research on ebay indicates this book is actually shaped like a peanut and has as its subtitle "From Carver to Carter," which is pretty hilarious.

Astounding, Dec. 1934: Donald Wandrei and John W. Campbell, Jr.

The December 1934 issue of Astounding, edited by F. Orlin Tremaine, seems to have been a particularly impressive one.  We've already read Raymond Z. Gallun's "Old Faithful" (back at the dawn of time, 2013) and Howard Wandrei's "The Other" and given them passing grades.  The issue also includes a story by Howard's brother Donald, future co-founder of Arkham House, and three pieces of fiction and a letter from future Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.  One of Campbell's contributions is the first installment of the five-part serial The Mightiest Machine; we'll maybe look at The Mightiest Machine some day, but not today.  What we will be talking about is D. Wandrei's piece, "Colossus Eternalm" and then Campbell's two pseudonymous stories, "Atomic Power" and "The Irrelevant."

"Colossus Eternal" by Donald Wandrei 

This is a sequel to "Colossus," the cover story of the January 1934 ish of Astounding; we read it a few years ago.  At the end of "Colossus," Earthman Duane Sharon, who had travelled to a different universe (a "superuniverse" of which our universe was just a single atom!) and been captured by the giant inhabitants of planet Qythyalos, whom he called the Titans, was sent to planet Valadom to investigate the people there, who look quite human.  "Colossus Eternal" describes what happens to Sharon on Valadom.

The people of Valadom have amazing electromagnetic powers--Shyrna, the gorgeous woman Sharon meets after he steps out of his space ship, is able to examine the molecules in Sharon's brain and thus learn all about him, his life, and our universe, because inscribed upon the eternal sub-particles that make up every atom is its history from the beginning of time.  With ease she can project her thoughts into Sharon's mind.

Sharon of course falls in love with this superwoman immediately, and is upset to learn she is slated to be married to her planet's current ruler, Nrm 17'1, the "race-being-entity" of whom Shyrna says "he is as real as I am, but he is also the symbol of our race, the most perfect expression of our physical and mental traits.  He controls all our lives."  Of all the women of Valadom, Shyrna has been chosen to be the ruler's bride and mother of the next race-being-entity--she is a perfect specimen.  Every woman on Valadom would be thrilled to be chosen, but now that she has met Duane Sharon, Shyrna refuses to cooperate--she wants to marry her fortunes with Sharon's, not those of her monarch and her people.

The Shyrna-Nrm 17'1 plot element of "Colossus Eternal" is surprisingly similar to that the plot of C. L. Moore's "The Dark Land," which we just read.  Nrm 17'1 has astonishing powers--for example, he teleports himself and other people with ease--but he won't just rape an unwilling Shyrna; rather, he tries to win her consent, first in a sort of psychic battle.  Shyrna's resistance is fierce, so Nrm 17'1 imprisons her in his palace-citadel-museum, the repository of all knowledge of the Valadomian race, thinking she will eventually change her mind.  Meanwhile, the ruler incarcerates an unwitting Sharon in a "space-bend island" in which time does not pass.

Marrying Shyrna isn't Nrm 17'1's only ambition--he also hopes to figure out how to predict the future.  The Titans of Qythyalos, the only people in the superuniverse with more knowledge and power than the Valadomians, have this wisdom, and the dictator of Valadom seeks to get them to share it through threats of violence or conquest.  Nrm 17'1 has been using his powers to uplift the million inferior intelligent species in this superuniverse so they are powerful enough to help him take on the Titans.  A space navy of millions of ships with an array of planet- and star- and civilization-busting weapons converges on Qythyalos while a captive Shyrna watches from within Nrm 17'1's citadel.  (Wandrei gleefully lists all these super weapons over several paragraphs--"diseases contagious with the speed of light," "heat rays with a maximum of twenty million degrees," "a poison that caused blood to vaporize," and on and on.)  

Months pass as the space armada masses and Shyrna explores the vast museum, looking at records that remind the 21st-century reader of floppy disks or flash drives:  

...the recording of literature in pin-point electronic structures which, inserted in transcription machines, simultaneously presented audible sounds, visual picture meanings, and visible words.

(This is just one of a number of advanced technologies Wandrei describes in this story; another, more creepy one, is a computer made up of the dead brains of all the many Nrms that preceded Nrm 17'1 on the throne--this computer achieves consciousness and rebels against Nrm 17'1.)

One of Nrm 17'1's assistants falls in love with Shyrna, and Nrm 17'1 teleports this rival to a desert; while the ruler is thus distracted Shyrna liberates Sharon from the bubble of timelessness, but Nrm 17'1 just teleports Earthman to the same desert, thinking he'll get killed there.  Instead the two men, human and Valadomian, join forces, return to the palace, and, protected by forces projected from Qythyalos by the all-knowing Titans, rescue Shyrna (in the fight, the ruler's treacherous assistant is killed.)  Sharon and Shyrna go to Qythyalos in Sharon's ship, and then after conferring with the Titans, blast out of this superuniverse altogether, just before the war between Valadom and Qythyalos destroys the entire superuniverse.  (The Titans, in theory, could win the war with their superpowers or just surrender and thus preserve themselves and the superuniverse, but since they can see the future and have foreseen the superuniverse's destruction, they don't wipe out Nrm 17'1's space armada, just clear a path through it for Sharon and Shyrna.)

Sharon and Shyrna arrive in the next universe, of which the Titans' superuniverse was but a single atom, just after its big bang.  The lovers know they must die here soon, as no habitable planets have yet formed, but they are happy to die together and be onlookers at the beginning of all things.      

In "Colossus Eternal" Wandrei seems to be trying to inspire a sense of wonder with his time paradoxes and descriptions of entire universes being destroyed and created, and his lists of high technologies, psychic powers, alien races, and subatomic particle phenomena; he offers the reader an encyclopedic catalog of the diverse glories of the natural universe and the innumerable accomplishments possible to human intelligence.  At times the lists and descriptions and explanations feel a little long, but the individual ideas are all good, and Wandrei enumerates his marvels with a gusto that is contagious, so I enjoyed "Colossus Eternal."

"Colossus Eternal" did not set the SF world on fire, it seems; it wasn't reprinted until 1989 in Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei.  The "Notes" section at isfdb for "Colossus Eternal" says it is "not a close sequel" to "Colossus," which I do not understand--the protagonist is the same, the narrative picks up where "Colossus" left off, and the plot of "Colossus Eternal" has some of the same beats as its predecessor--in both a guy leaves a place that is being destroyed by war to explore a radically wider environment, and in both he leaves one universe for another.

"Atomic Power" by John W. Campbell, Jr.  

This story appears under the name Don A. Stuart and has been anthologized by Groff Conklin and by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.  In fact, I am going to read it in Hartwell and Cramer's The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF because the scan of the December 1934 Astounding at the internet archive is kind of hard on my 51-year-old eyes.

In their intro to "Atomic Power," the editors of The Ascent of Wonder suggest that, as editor of Astounding from 1937, Campbell was reluctant to print disaster stories, a mainstay of speculative fiction from its early days and a form that would be embraced by the New Wave, and this sets up the reader for an experience of irony because "Atomic Power" is in fact a gruesome and apocalyptic disaster story!

"Atomic Power" starts with a little sort of prologue about students visiting a nuclear power plant, and while their professor tries to convey to them the "grandeur" of the plant, Campbell seems to be undermining the prof by describing the installation as looking like a "mighty temple to an unknown, evil, god" and saying the blue light from the "tubes" makes the faces of students look "distorted and ghastly."

In the story proper we meet some scientists who have made a reality-defying discovery--the power of gravity and of "intermolecular bonds" is steadily decreasing!  So everything is losing weight (but not mass) all across the universe, and solid objects are becoming less durable.  The Earth begins to spiral away from the sun, so that temperatures drop rapidly and New York is buried under many yards of snow.  Buildings, bridges and machines fail as their metal components weaken and break.  Campbell throws lots of science at us, but also horrific vignettes of panicked crowds boarding the last ocean liner out of New York and causing it to capsize, and individuals whose limbs come off and whose hearts burst because they have exerted themselves and "the chemical power of muscles remained undiminished, while their tensile strength declined...people tore themselves apart by the violence of their struggles."

As the Earth becomes a frozen Hell and people die in droves, the scientists struggle to figure out why this is happening and how to fix it.  They invent a nuclear reactor and propagate a "counterfield" throughout the universe that restores gravity and intermolecular bonds to normal.  The day is saved, but more amazing yet is the sense of wonder ending we get which was foreshadowed in that prologue about the students: our universe is a molecule of a superuniverse, in which atomic reactors power a civilization by breaking down molecules--the diminution of intermolecular bonds was the start of the process of that superuniverse reactor breaking down our universe!  (A year in our universe is a millionth of a second in that superuniverse.)  Our universe was saved by building a nuclear reactor that operates by annihilating other universes!  Our own civilization's survival is predicated on committing mass genocide of other universes!  Mind blown!

This is a pretty good example of a hard SF story in which scientists save the day and the text of which tries to teach you science concepts.  "Atomic Power" also exhibits the propensity we see throughout Campbell's career to challenge the reader by contriving situations in which doing something dreadful is necessary or has beneficial consequences--we've read Campbell stories like "The Invaders" in which we are invited to consider the positive effects of aliens enslaving us and selectively breeding us, and of course Campbell is responsible for the ending of Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations," in which a young woman has to be sacrificed to save a large number of people.  "Atomic Power" also shares with "The Invaders" and "The Cold Equations" the use of violence against women to add drama to a story--one of the people whose body, having lost its tensile strength, comes apart is a girl on that ocean liner!

"The Irrelevant" by John W. Campbell, Jr.

Campbell committed this caper while undercover as "Karl van Campen."  It looks like it has never been reprinted. 

Kent Barrett wants to be the first man to see the far side of the moon, and he builds Earth's first rocket ship to achieve this dream.  His ship won't have enough fuel to get him back to Earth, but he doesn't care--some things are more valuable than life itself, he tells those who question his suicidal venture, and I guess one of those things is knowledge.  Once he has blasted off we get lots of talk about how the astronaut and ship respond to Earth's atmosphere, the cold of space, weightlessness, and other conditions, which is entertaining enough.  The main point of the story, however, is how the ship's fuel turns out to be more efficient than expected and Barrett actually gets back to Earth alive.  This phenomena is explained in passages which I found essentially incomprehensible.

Acceptable.

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Very sciency stories that, in the case of Wandrei's "Colossus Eternal" and Campbell's "Atomic Power,"  are enlivened by apocalypticism, sense-of-wonder stuff about our universe being no more than an atom of a higher universe and individuals confronting death.  Campbell's "The Irrelevant" is set on a smaller scale and its appeal is limited because the science it focuses on is not quite so mind-blowing and it largely dispenses with the appeals to reader interest in sex and violence that "Colossus Eternal" and "Atomic Power" indulge.

More short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log; next time some things from the 1970s that will likely be a lot less sciency.