F&SF April 1956: Robert Bloch, Tom Godwin and Henry Gregor Felsen

In our last episode we read a sex-positive, racism-negative story by Ward Moore that debuted in the April 1956 issue of F&SF.  (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 F&SF 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.

"I Kiss Your Shadow" by Robert Bloch (1956)  

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.

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! 

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?)

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!

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 Horror Hunters.

"Operation Opera" by Tom Godwin (1956)

I was pretty hard on Godwin's novel Space Prison when I read it back in 2015, and in 2019 I called his long short story "Mother of Invention" "marginal."  Since then I have judged Godwin's "You Created Us" "acceptable filler" and "Before Willows Ever Walked" "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 F&SF, and our escargot-slurping buddies didn't even put poor Tom's name on their cover!

"Operation Opera" is another sex-positive story (is this the special F&SF 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.

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.

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.   

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.

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.  

"The Spaceman Cometh" by Henry Gregor Felsen (1955)

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."  

"The Spaceman Cometh" first appeared in a 1955 issue of Collier's, 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 17 X Infinity in 1963 and a Scholastic anthology in 1979, Starstreak 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.)

"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!

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.

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.

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.

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 because 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.

Boucher, Merril and Felsen did the readers of F&SF a disservice with this one, and I am rejecting the defense that it is just a kids' story, because F&SF 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.

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Putting aside the lame children's' story, today's exploration of an issue of F&SF 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.

More short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Four mid-'50s stories from worlds beyond selected by T E Dikty: R F Young, F M Robinson, T Godwin & T N Scortia

For some reason it is hard to tear your eyes away from the cover of 1958's Six From Worlds Beyond.  Is it the representation of an atom in the upper right corner?  No, I don't think it is that.  Is it the crudely imagined laboratory apparatus and the poorly realized veiny brain behind it over  there in the right center?  Naw, can't be that.  Could it be the sexalicious nude blonde reclining there in the lower third of the cover?  Oh yeah, I bet that is it.

The arresting cover of Six From Worlds Beyond came to my attention recently when I read Robert Bloch's "I Do Not Love Thee, Dr. Fell," a story that is included in the anthology.  The pages behind that dreamy young lady and the accompanying collage of cliched science-related images are devoted to six stories extracted from T. E. Dikty's hardcover The Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels: 1956.  We've already read two of the six, the aforementioned piece from Psycho-scribe Bloch just a few days ago, and critical darling Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon" back in 2014.  Those stories are pretty good, so let's read the remaining four.  The internet archive, world's finest website, has a scan of The Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels: 1956 that one can borrow, so we'll be reading them there. 

"Jungle Doctor" by Robert F. Young (1955)

It looks like I have blogged about six stories by Young over the years, "The Ogress," "Thirty Days Had September," "The Dandelion Girl," "Ape's Eye View," "Starscape With Frieze of Dreams," and "When Time Was New" and I liked a majority of them.  

Lindsey is guy who works at a mechanic's, washing cars, and who loves poetry, often quoting Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Milton to himself.  He is also a drunk who drinks all day.

One cold snowy night Lindsey is walking home when he finds a beautiful blonde teenager just laying there unconscious in the snow-filled ditch!  This girl, as we know from the little prologue, is Sarith, a medical professional from a super high-tech galaxy-spanning civilization who has ended up on our little low-tech Earth because she fed the wrong coordinates into the interstellar teleporter device that hangs from her belt.  Oops!*

Lindsey carries Sarith to his home and lays her out on the couch.  (I guess that is Sarith on the cover of Six From Worlds Beyond.)  The drunk falls asleep before she revives; when Sarith comes to, she uses the psychic powers so many aliens in these old SF stories have to learn English from Lindsey's mind, and also become familiar with his biography--Lindsey is drinking himself to death because his significant other died.  Sad!  How exactly she died is buried deep.  Mysterious!

Lindsey figures he has to report this lost teenaged girl to the police, but said girl, name of Sarith, invades his mind and deploys a mental block that will keep him from doing so--she needs some time to figure out where Earth is so she can get back to the Galactic Federation and she doesn't want the native law enforcers interrupting her.  But after she has figured out how to teleport to the nearest Federation system she delves into Lindsey's mind again and gets a better grasp of his tragic fate.  Perhaps inspired by a book by Albert Schweitzer she found in Lindsey's house (with her alien brain she can read an entire book in a few minutes), Sarith decides to stay on Earth and heal Lindsey's mind and the minds of other Earth people.

Young does a good job of describing Sarith's powers and Lindsey's psychology; his descriptions are clear and compelling and he doles out the details, like in a mystery story, in a way that keeps you curious.  And of course, Young's story is a wish fulfillment fantasy which gives form to your impossible but oh so comforting dream that a gorgeous blonde teenager might just fall into your lap from out of nowhere and use her super powers to patch up this life of yours that you have totally FUBARed.  Either way you look at it, thumbs up for "Jungle Doctor."  

"Jungle Doctor" debuted in Startling, in the same issue as James Gunn's "The Naked Sky," which we read in May. "The Naked Sky" was illustrated by Virgil Finlay, and Ed Emshwiller provides illustrations for "Jungle Doctor," as well as for other pieces in the issue, making the issue one all you lovers of SF illustration will want to check out--Medusa, futuristic fishing gear, a winged woman, a nude woman whose brain is attached to a machine via wires, a woman opening a coffin to find within it a body just like her own, a woman running through a ruined city; all these visions are there for you to feast your eyes on.

*Stifle those jokes about woman drivers!

"Dream Street" by Frank M. Robinson (1955)

Back in September I read six stories by Robinson and liked a bunch of them.  "Dream Street" debuted in an issue of Imaginative Tales that has a cheeky cover that illustrates a story by Robert Bloch that is probably supposed to be funny (and probably isn't funny--I am firmly of the belief that in a better world Bloch would have ditched the comedy schtick and focused all his energies on tales of tragedy and blood and guts.)  Robinson actually has two stories in this issue of Imaginative Tales, one under a pen name.  Maybe I'll tackle that pseudonymous one someday, but today we attack "Dream Street," which would be reprinted in a hardcover anthology in 1971, The Days After Tomorrow.

This is a well-written story about a kid of the future, when there are colonies on Mars and Venus and scientific expeditions going to Saturn and so forth.  The kid is an orphan who is obsessed with becoming a spaceman.  He runs away from the orphanage to make his way to the biggest spaceport on Earth with the idea of stowing away on a rocket ship.  As the kid meets all kinds of disgusting characters on his journey, like thieves and prostitutes, and lots of people who tell him that being in space and being on alien planets is either boring or dangerous, Robinson seems to be suggesting that conquering space is some kind of mistake, but in the end it is suggested that, for some people at least, like our main character, the romance of space is justification enough for incurring all those risks and enduring all those hardships--some men are just called to the stars, the way so many men throughout history have been called to the sea.

A solid and smoothly presented story; there isn't a twist ending or an explosive climax or any of that, but "Dream Street" is still a good read, one in which all the emotions and all the decisions of the characters feel authentic.

"You Created Us" by Tom Godwin (1955)

Here we have a story by Tom Godwin, author of the famous "Cold Equations."  We read a novel by Godwin back in 2014, Space Prison, and I gave it a mildly negative review.  But we won't hold that against him.  "You Created Us," which first was printed in Fantastic Universe, doesn't seem to have been printed after it appeared in Six From Worlds Beyond, but we won't hold that against Godwin, either.

The main character of "You Created Us" suffered a head injury while serving in Korea; as the story begins he works as an executive for a firm with a factory in San Francisco and is driving through the deserts of the Southwest, near nuclear weapons testing sites, en route to the plant.  Suddenly, he spots bipedal reptiles taller than a man!  They must be mutants, created by the radiation of the weapons tests!

Over the next few years our protagonist, while still maintaining his job and not saying anything to anybody to make them think he is brain damaged or insane, conducts a low key investigation of the truth behind what he saw on that desert drive.  It turns out that the mutants are more intelligent than us humans and have psychic powers that allow them to hypnotize those humans who see them into forgetting them.  The main character's head injury and the steel plate in his skull offer him some protection from these hypnotic powers, which is why he remembers them.  He learns that the reptile people are using their mutant abilities on the leaders of the Soviet Union and of the United States to make war inevitable and make sure the commies defeat us!  Once the land of the free and the home of the brave is a cratered wasteland, the reptile race--immune to radiation--will inherit the Western Hemisphere and proceed to use similar tactics to bamboozle the human race in the Eastern Hemisphere to exterminate itself; then the scaley psykers will rule the world.  The small number of humans who survive the nuclear wars will be their cattle!     

Can the protagonist warn the human race of its peril, or will the reptile people focus their psychic powers and overwhelm his ability to remember the horrible truth he has learned?  Can he maybe figure out a way to warn himself even if his memory is erased?

This is acceptable filler; not bad, but no big deal.  I guess students of SF stories reflective of Cold War fears of nuclear war and communist domination, and stories about radiation and evolution, may find it has historical value.  "You Created Us" is perhaps noteworthy because it is pessimistic--the main character's efforts to save human civilization fail and the human race is doomed to be conquered by the reptiles, just like, the story says, the dinosaurs were overthrown by the mammals.  (I guess this story also has historical value in its illustration of 1950s theories about the extinction of the dinosaurs.)  Man's science is not going to save him--in fact, as the title of the story, a phrase used by the mutants, indicates, man's own scientific "progress," and his propensity for violence, are what is going to destroy or subjugate him.   

"The Shores of Night" by Thomas N. Scortia (1956)

It looks like I haven't read anything by Thomas N. Scortia since 2019, when I jawed at length (over the course of three blog posts) about nine stories by him: "Alien Night," "Caution!  Inflammable!," "Sea Change," "The Bomb in the Bathtub," "John Robert and the Dragon's Egg," "The Icebox Blonde," "Though a Sparrow Fall," "Morality," and "Judas Fish."  According to notes in The Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels: 1956 and at isfdb, "Sea Change," which I liked and which debuted in Astounding, is a small portion of "The Shores of Night."  So I guess I can expect to appreciate this full novella, which is over 50 pages in The Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels: 1956 and would be reprinted in a French anthology in 1977 and in English in 1981's The Best of Thomas N. Scortia.

"The Shores of Night" is full of learned references: we find indirect references to T. S. Eliot, direct references to Greek literature (the story opens with a reference to Argus of the thousand eyes and one of its chapters is called "Bellerophon" and features a spaceship called Pegasus) and to the Bible, as well as a remark that the landscape of Pluto looks like a "block print...struck in the severest style...."  This is sort of an ambitious story, and I think Scortia pulls it off.

It is also a fundamentally optimistic story; like Robinson's "Dream Street," "The Shores of Night" has as its theme the question of whether conquering space is worth the risk and sacrifice involved, and while admitting that the cost is high, argues that mastering the stars is worth it.

Mankind has spent a century working on a star drive, spending a bazillion dollars and losing many brave spacemen.  The star drive currently under development won't work near a strong gravity field, and so, to escape the reach of the sun, a huge expense has been incurred constructing and maintaining a star-drive construction and testing facility way out on Pluto.  The cost is not merely financial and material, of course--military men and scientists and technicians have devoted their lives to the project for decades, and many have suffered collapsed marriages, been millions of miles away while their kids grew up, etc.  

The boffins and service personnel out on Pluto are just months away from a final test of the Bechtoldt Drive, named after its designer, the top physicist on Pluto, Beth Bechtoldt, when the Earth government pulls the plug on funding for the project--the tax payers and voters have had it with all the expense, especially after colonizing Mars and exploring the gas giants and all that has not yielded anything by way of profits: the whole space program is a drain, nothing actually useful has been found beyond Earth's atmosphere.  Of course, the space program boosters tell them that the real profit will come when we reach other solar systems, but those starry-eyed idealists have been saying that for decades and the stars don't seem any closer than they did fifty years ago.

Beth Bechtoldt is willing to follow orders, but the head of the Pluto base, Major General Matthew Freck, decides they are going rogue, testing the star drive anyway in the next few weeks, before the ship arrives from Earth to bring them home!  Of course, rushing the test will make that perilous enterprise even more risky for the test pilot, Art Sommers.  A lot of the story's drama is in the relationships Freck, Bechtoldt and Sommers have with each other and with the program to conquer the stars, to what extent they are selfish, brave, scared, etc.  Scortia does a pretty good job with all this emotional stuff--for example, the three aren't just archetypes who butt up against each other, but evolve over the course of the story--and of course readers can see it all as an allegory of their own lives.  What gives your life meaning, and what have you sacrificed in pursuit of that meaningful project?  Have you played it too safe?  Have you sacrificed family to your career or some passion in a way you regret?  Should you have done more in service to humanity, or have you been presumptuous in thinking you knew what was best for others and arrogantly telling them what to do?

The test fails and Sommers is blinded.  When the relief ship arrives it has new technology developed on Earth while the Pluto team was away, which is used to integrate Sommers's brain into the controls of the next test craft; more closely attuned to the drive, Sommers is able to make it work!  But the government on Earth, which is determined to stifle the star program, suppresses the details of the test!  Freck, Bechtoldt and Sommers get frozen up there on Pluto in an accident, but their brains are saved; the government, wanting to get rid of Freck but also wanting to keep his valuable knowledge accessible, integrates the general's brain with the semi-organic super computer that runs the Earth's most advanced city.  

This super computer is made up of human brains thought to be dead; in fact, the consciousnesses of the brains' owners still endure, though weakly.  Freck is a man of powerful will, and his consciousness is still strong, and he is able to wrangle the other souls in the machine and take over the whole apparatus!  There is also a series of scenes in which Freck despairs and considers suicide, but his eight-year-old granddaughter, inspiring him with an act of self-sacrifice within hours of him first setting his electronic eyes on her, gives Freck the kick in the pants he needs to get off his duff and foil the government efforts to scotch the star program.           

        

In the final section of the story we are assured that the effort to conquer the stars will succeed, and that Freck, Bechtoldt and Sommer's consciousnesses, operating star ships and in total rapport with each other, will never be lonely and are part of the human race's glorious history.

Thumbs up for this endorsement of mankind's quest to bend the natural universe to its will and its romanticization of mankind as a collective, a sort of immortal being of which we are all components.

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Six From Worlds Beyond turns out to be a quite good anthology, with no bad stories; the mesmerizing picture of Sirath on the cover is not the only reason to pick one up!

1980 stories by Manly Wade Wellman, Tom Godwin and Charles L. Grant

There was a period during my residence in Ohio when I was seized by some kind of competitive mania or acquisitive impulse and bought lots of old SF magazines at a flea market and on ebay.  Here in the new house I just unpacked an entire box of these magazines, and decided to look into one--the lucky winner was the March 1980 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, a "SPECIAL ALL-STAR ISSUE" with a picture of a robot cowboy on the cover.  

This issue includes a hostile review by Algis Budrys of Doris Lessing's Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta--Budrys alleges that it is written in "Bureacratese," that Lessing's science is bad, and that the plot is full of old SF clichés that other SF writers have already worn out.  (In 2015 I wrote about Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Fifth Child and Ben, in the World but have yet to read Shikasta or any of the Canopus in Argos books.)  There's a long letter from Sam Moskowitz on the occasion of F&SF's 30th anniversary.  Moskowitz praises F&SF for its never flagging high standards, and tells some engaging stories about his relationship with F&SF's editor from 1949 to '58, Anthony Boucher, and the first time Boucher bought an article from him.  And there's an ad for Michael Bishop's Catacomb Years, which I own but have not read.  (Joachim Boaz loved it.)  So I guess I got my money's worth when I bought this magazine, even before I have read the three included stories I have selected for discussion today, those by Manly Wade Wellman, Tom Godwin and Charles L. Grant.

"What of the Night" by Manly Wade Wellman    

Dale Parr is exploring a mountainous region of the rural American South when his car breaks down on an unpaved road in front of a decrepit house.  He takes shelter from the rain within and falls asleep.  When he wakes up the house is in better shape and he meets a beautiful young woman, a middle-aged scholar, and a shy butler; Parr suspects they are ghosts.  The scholar, who it turns out is studying witchcraft and has a pentagram printed on a table in his well-stocked library, and the woman, who it turns out is a portrait painter, try to charm Parr and trick him into participating in a magical ritual that will trap Parr in the house along with them--they have been trapped there a long long time and are bored and lonely.  The butler, a sort of amateur scientist and inventor, loves the woman and is jealous of the attention she is lavishing on Parr, so he helps Parr escape.  Parr finds a multi-talented clergyman who not only gets his car running again but frees the souls of the three ghosts or revenants or whatever they are from the house.

A competent if somewhat ordinary tale of the supernatural that has a happy ending and endorses conventional Christianity.  "What of the Night" would be reprinted in several places, including the 1987 Wellman collection The Valley So Low and the 1988 anthology Dixie Ghosts.

"Before Willows Ever Walked" by Tom Godwin  

Back in 2014 I wrote a marginally negative review of Godwin's 1958 novel The Survivors AKA Space Prison, and in 2019 judged his 1953 story "The Mother of Invention" acceptable.  Let's see if this piece, which I believe is Godwin's last and has never been reprinted in English, is more to my taste.

"Before Willows Ever Walked" is the story of a cruel legacy hunter.  Derken has made friends with a wretched old drunk, Smith, a man of means who is on his last legs.  Derken puts the dying man up in his house in the desert and tends to him and runs his errands and so forth, and Smith, thinking he has no living relatives, has made Derken sole beneficiary of his will.  But as the story begins, Smith, who has like a week to live, learns his granddaughter Mary did not die in the car crash that killed her mother, as Derken has been telling him.  Smith wants to change his will to include Mary, meaning Derken won't be getting that $500,000 he has been dreaming of while washing Smith's dishes and burning Smith's letters from Mary!

The narrative follows Derken's efforts to secure the money by tricking and murdering Smith.  The fantasy element of the story has to do with Joshua trees.  There are Joshua trees all around Derken's house, and Smith loves Joshua trees, thinks they have feelings and thoughts and are perhaps the remnants of a noble lost race with magic powers, etc.  Derken hates Joshua trees, finding them creepy.  Much of the text of the story is about how the trees become an obstacle to Derken's evil schemes and ultimately foil them through a series of what might appear to outsiders to be strange coincidences.  

This is a competent but unremarkable sort of weird story.  If you read the wikipedia page on Tom Godwin you will see he had a difficult life full of tragedy and alcoholism; presumably the tone and themes of the story reflect his own sad life.  This adds a little interest to "Before Willows Ever Walked," but judged on its intrinsic merits here in the pages of F&SF, it is merely an acceptable eerie story in which the universe metes out justice to a wrongdoer.

"Secrets of the Heart" by Charles L. Grant

Fixture of the horror community Grant's "Secrets of the Heart" would soon reappear in his collection, A Glow of Candles and Other Stories, and, having been nominated for a Nebula, Nebula Award Stories Sixteen. 

Miriam, our narrator, is a little girl, one of those kids like the brat in Jerome Bixby's famous "It's A Good Life" who has tremendous mental powers and can basically make anything happen.  Having destroyed her parents long ago she lives alone in a house and lures people inside and traps them with her, with the expectation that they will treat her like a princess.  Inevitably, she becomes dissatisfied with their behavior and destroys them.  This story chronicles one such episode; at the end of the story we are presented with the possibility that Miriam is going to leave the house and radically alter the entire world.  

I think this story may be striving to say something about human nature, about how we are all bad--all the characters are broken or criminal and one of the characters, a child molester, says "we all have secrets of the heart" and Miriam, at the end of the story, says to us "being nice all the time can be very, very boring" as if it is some universal truth.  I suppose this makes "Secrets of the Heart" more of a true horror story than are Wellman's and Godwin's stories--in the worlds of "What of the Night" and "Before Willows Ever Walked" there are some good beings out there and mercy and justice exist, but in Grant's world as depicted in this story it is evil all the way down.  "Secrets of the Heart" may also be a satire of the idea monotheistic religions put forward that a being of absolute power could be perfectly good--Miriam is omniscient and omnipotent, but is petty and selfish and casually murderous, as well as psychologically uneasy, rationalizing her atrocities and even considering suicide.

This story is OK, no big deal.

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So, all three of these stories are of professional quality, but are unremarkable, doing little that is new or striking.  Oh, well.  

Stories by Miller, Jones, Schmitz and Godwin from Spectrum 5

Back in the middle of July I purchased a copy of Kinglsey Amis and Robert Conquest's Spectrum 5, a 1966 anthology of 1950s SF stories; my copy of a 1968 edition has an irresistibly beautiful cover painting by Paul Lehr.

In their introduction, Amis and Conquest defend science fiction from the haters.  After making an appeal to authority (reminding us that C. S. Lewis, Angus Wilson, and William Golding are all SF fans) they get to some more serious literary analysis.  Novelist and James Bond fanatic Amis and poet and Sovietologist Conquest argue that while a good writing style would be nice (they suggest J. G. Ballard and Algis Budrys as examples of SF writers with a good style) it is not essential in SF, as what makes SF what it is is mythic themes (they present Jules Verne as an example here) or ideas (for this they offer the example of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s "Who Goes There," an SF story with "a brilliantly engineered main problem" resolved by an "unexpected but logical solution.")  As for the development of character, another virtue supposedly absent in SF, Amis and Conquest follow the line of Edmund Crispin, who noted that science fiction is about the relationship of humanity to some novel "thing," an invention or alien or cataclysm or whatever.  The character in such a story need not, maybe even should not, be too unusual or complex, because he represents all of mankind, acts as a sort of everyman.  Amis and Conquest's examples here include, again, Verne, as well as H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, the narrator of which represents an ordinary Englishman.

I don't know to what extent I agree with everything Amis and Conquest have to say, but it is a thought-provoking little essay that makes me want to see the essays at the start of the other Spectrum volumes.

Let's read four stories from Spectrum 5 by writers we have already discussed at least a little here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Raymond F. Jones, James H. Schmitz, and Tom Godwin.  All four of these stories appeared in Astounding, which was sort of the flagship for SF that was about science and ideas and didn't necessarily focus on heroic or horrific adventures or prioritize literary style.

"Crucifixius Etiam" by Walter M. Miller, Jr.  (1953)

I loved Miller's 1954 story "I Made You," and liked his 1955 "The Triflin' Man" so I have high hopes for this one!

It is the year 2134, and Peruvian Manue Nanti wants to travel the world and see the sights: Notre Dame, New York skyscrapers, the pyramids of Egypt, the radioactive craters of Russia.  But he needs money to do so.  Solution: signing a five-year contract for a lucrative job on Mars!

On Mars Nanti works as a laborer, swinging a pick!  To breathe the thin air of Mars, laborers like Nanti have artificial lung machines implanted into their bodies.  The risk of using such a machine is that your body will likely forget how to breathe naturally, and your natural lungs will atrophy, and you won't be able to live without the uncomfortable machine, even back on oxygen-rich Earth.  (The engineers have better machines and better working and living conditions and don't run this risk as severely.)

Life for Nanti on Mars is a nightmare--no women, no friends (everybody on Mars is a jerk), the work is exhausting (there is a vague and not really convincing explanation for why they use picks and shovels instead of bulldozers and backhoes on Mars) and the lung machine is like a torture device, the valves pulling painfully at the skin in which they are embedded every time you move or try to breathe naturally.

For most of its 21 pages "Crucifixius Etiam" reads like one of those stories in which the space program is a foolish waste of time and humans aren't fit to live off of Earth--beyond Earth, Earthmen lose their culture, religion, morality, etc.  This is Barry Malzberg territory, and demonstrates that 1) Malzberg is not quite as innovative as he is sometimes considered, 2) pre-New Wave SF and Astounding in particular are not quite so technophilic and optimistic as sometimes considered!  It is also one of those stories in which the government and bourgeoisie abuse the working classes (represented by non-whites like Nanti) and major government and industrial projects, like terraforming Mars, don't have a legitimate goal, but are a scam that serve, as one character in "Crucifixius Etiam" puts it, as "an outlet for surplus energies, manpower, money....if the Project folded, surplus would pile up--[causing a] big depression on Earth."

The ending of Miller's story could be considered a twist--a hopeful and life-affirming twist!  When it is explained to Nanti that he and the other people stuck on the Hell that is Mars are building the first of 300 derricks and associated processing machines that will draw up subterranean frozen "tritium" and convert it to helium and oxygen so that in 800 years Mars will have an Earth-like atmosphere, he accepts his fate and believes his sacrifice is worthwhile.  Nanti suffers now so that people in eight centuries can live on a beautiful healthy world!  Miller doesn't come right out and say it, but I believe we are meant to see Nanti and his comrades as like Christ, sacrificing themselves for others, and like Moses, unable to enter the promised land to which they are leading humanity; Miller includes priests and rabbis as minor characters, nudging you, I believe, to make this interpretation.

Not bad--Miller's style is good and all the economic, religious, and technological stuff, whether or not any of it is really believable, is interesting and serves a human story.  Anthologists Judith Merrill and Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty would see merit in "Crucifixius Etiam" and reprint the story (in Human? and their The Best Science Fiction Stories series, respectively) in 1954, over a decade before Amis and Conquest did.

"Noise Level" by Raymond F. Jones (1952)

I really enjoyed Jones's novel about disembodied brains, artificial life, and the perils of socialism, 1962's The Cybernetic Brains, so I am also looking forward to this one!

It is the Cold War.  A bunch of physicists are gathered together by the U.S. government under conditions of strict security to watch a film.  The film depicts a twenty-something demonstrating to government officials his anti-gravity device, a thing like a backpack that lets you levitate and fly around!  But during the demonstration the device explodes, killing the young inventor!  The assembled eggheads are told the young inventor was a paranoid with no friends who left no notes or blueprints describing his amazing invention, and they have been summoned to work on the top secret project of studying the wreckage and this genius misfit's library and lab with the goal of rediscovering the secret of anti-grav!

"Noise Level" is a smooth and pleasant read, though some may say it is too long (like 45 pages in my copy of Spectrum 5) and doesn't amount to much: it consists mostly of conversations and throws around concepts like Einstein's postulate of equivalence and metaphors involving whirlpools and signal to noise ratios.  The point of the story is that people get too set in their ways to be able to think outside the box and that being more open-minded is the path to making major breakthroughs.

All the physicists, before seeing that film, thought that anti-grav was impossible.  Some of them maintain that anti-grav is impossible and that the film is a hoax.  But seeing the film convinces some of them that anti-grav is possible--they get to work on the problem and in a few weeks have a working prototype of an anti-grav vehicle that weighs one hundred tons.  The twist of the story is that the film and wreckage and lab are all a government trick, just special effects and props designed to get the country's best physicists to abandon their preconceptions and free their minds so they can develop a technology that will allow us to explore the universe and give us a leg up on the commies.  The sense of wonder ending is the revelation that all the things we think are impossible are in fact possible if we can first convince ourselves that they are possible, which will free our minds and give us a chance, through hard work of course, to make them a reality.

This story is alright, and it has many of the hallmarks of classic golden age SF: a bunch of scientists, a paradigm shift and a sensawunda ending, and the use of trickery and manipulation by an elite group on an inferior group for their own good.  I can't help but find the lionization of elite trickery of the masses, which we see so often in classic SF (Asimov's Foundation stories and Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress are my go-to examples) kind of sick and twisted, but at least this time the victims are themselves a bunch of geniuses.

"Noise Level" was included in two anthologies published before Spectrum 5, one by William Sloane and one by Edmund Crispin, and was also selected by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss for a 1973 anthology of Astounding material.

"Grandpa" by James H. Schmitz (1955)

I enjoyed Schmitz's 1943 horror tale "Greenface" and his collection of stories about female psychic space cops who manipulate people (or just shoot them, you know, whatever works), Agent of Vega, so I've got no qualms about reading this one.

Cord is a fifteen-year-old boy, a member of the two-thousand strong team preparing planet Sutang for colonization.  Schmitz stories usually portray women in positions of authority, and as the story begins a seventeen-year-old girl is warning Cord that he had better start behaving or the Regent, the head woman in charge of the colony, will have him sent back to his home planet in disgrace.  Don't think that Cord has been smoking crack and playing dice while neglecting his duties, dear reader--Cord is a junior biologist and when he is supposed to be following orders he has been capturing native fauna and studying them in his unauthorized private zoo.  Cord is from planet Vanadia, a world settled relatively recently by humans, and he isn't as enamored of rules and regulations as the Terrans who make up the vast majority of the team's members.  (I thought maybe Schmitz here was trying to remind us of how British people sometimes see Americans and Australians as unruly uncouth cowboys.) 

One of Cord's jobs, apparently, is as a driver, so when the Regent comes by to make an inspection of the Colonial Team's work, Cord drives the vehicles she rides around the colony.  One of these "vehicles" is a native animal, a thing like a giant lily pad, 25 to 50 feet across, with all kinds of tendrils and paddles underwater; people can climb aboard this creature, which the humans call "a raft," and direct its movement.  (All you animal rights activists will be booking flights to Sutang when I tell you that the way one directs a raft is by shooting it with a heat ray pistol--don't get your granola in a bunch, treehuggers, the heat ray is--well, usually--set on low power!)

A dangerous situation arises related to the larger than average raft Cord and the Regent's party are riding (this raft has been christened "Grandpa") and it is Cord who saves the day using his knowledge of biology and his powers of observation and quick-thinking and quick-stabbing.

The real star of this story is the ecology of Sutang--Schmitz does a great job of coming up with and describing interesting alien life forms.  The character of Cord, the slightly subversive teen-aged boy, is fun (he hopes that a disaster will occur so he can be a hero and save his position on Sutang.)  A good story.

"Grandpa" has been anthologized many times, in books edited by Brian Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Martin. H. Greenberg, Gardner Dozois, and still more. A well-regarded classic with something for everybody--alien monsters, the glorification of science and the colonization of the galaxy, people shooting off guns and stabbing enemies with knives, and women who tell you what to do for your own good whom the author doesn't portray as nags but as people we are supposed to admire.

"Mother of Invention" by Tom Godwin (1953)

So far, the stories I have read from Spectrum 5 have been stories that have been widely anthologized, stories that editors and/or readers have been crazy about.  But "Mother of Invention" has only been anthologized by Amis and Conquest, though it has also appeared in the Croat magazine Sirius in 1976 and a Baen collection of Godwin's work with a preface and an afterword by our hero Barry Malzberg.  Maybe this one is weak, or maybe Amis and Conquest have found an overlooked gem?  (It is also possible that this story's length, like 60 pages in my copy of Spectrum 5, has discouraged reprinting.)  Well, let's find out what is up with this one.

"Mother of Invention" starts with a sort of comedy scene, in which a concatenation of factors--including a nagging wife!--leads to a mistake by a technician engaged in inspecting a space ship's "nuclear converter."  This mistake, compounded with additional bad luck, leads to the five men who own the ship being marooned on a virgin planet they discover 30,000 light years away from civilization.

Aurora, the name they give this new world, has a very high percentage of carbon in its make up, and there are diamonds as big as your fist all over the ground and diamond dust in the air which plays havoc with the men's equipment as they search for the uranium and cadmium they need to repair their wrecked space ship. They are under a lot of time pressure, because in seven or eight months a star passing through this system (they erroneously thought this was a binary system--doh!) is going to annihilate Aurora.

Unable to find any uranium, and with their mining equipment ruined by the diamond dust anyway, the five adventurers decide to invent an anti-grav device.  Through dogged persistence, and by keeping their minds open, they accomplish in the wilderness what people in well-appointed labs back on Earth were never able to.  Then, like in an Edmond Hamilton story, they move Aurora itself away from the impending stellar collision and ride the planet back home.

Back in 2014 I read Godwin's novel The Survivors, AKA Space Prison.  As here in "Mother of Invention," in The Survivors a bunch of people find themselves on a barren planet but through hard work not only escape but trigger a paradigm shift and usher in a new period of human history.  "The Mother of Invention" is also like The Survivors in that it is quite bland.  The five explorers in "The Mother of Invention" lack personality, motivation and relationships--there is more human drama and characterization in the jocular little prologue than the main story.  (Maybe Amis and Conquest chose it specifically to prove their point about SF not needing characterization?)  After Schmitz's vivid and fascinating Sutang, Godwin's Aurora is woefully dull.  I gave The Survivors a marginal negative vote, but I'll say "Mother of Invention" is barely acceptable.  Like Jones's anti-grav story, it is very much a classic SF tale about male scientists who, in response to an external impetus, invent a technology that will revolutionize human life, but Jones injects more surprise, fun, and human feeling into his story.

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The first US edition of Spectrum 5 has a
wacky collage cover--I think Joachim Boaz
loves this kind of thing!

Godwin's piece is pretty marginal, but these four stories are all worthwhile reads, good examples of SF that glorifies science and technology and tells you that it totally makes sense to take terrible risks and make huge sacrifices to expand the power and reach of the human race.

Spectrum 5 includes eight stories; in our next episode I'll read the four stories in it by SF writers I don't think are quite as famous as Walter A Canticle for Liebowitz Miller, Raymond This Island Earth Jones, James Witches of Karres Schmitz and Tom "The Cold Equations" Godwin.

Algis Budrys's "Gus" stories

The third story in Budrys' Inferno is "And Then She Found Him," which isfdb is telling me is the second of the three "Gus" stories written by Algis Budrys and published between 1955 and 1957 under the Paul Janvier nom de plume.  I decided to look up the other two Gus tales at the internet archive and read the three of them in chronological order.

"Nobody Bothers Gus" (1955)

Augustin Kusevic is one of the early specimens of homo superior.  He has tremendous intellectual and psychic abilities--he can use math to foretell future social and economic developments; he need only read the first three pages of a novel to predict its course and conclusion; he can manipulate matter, say, turn a pen into a bouncing ball and back again or melt a twelve-lane highway, with ease.  But all these powers have come with a terrible price.  Gus autonomically generates a "field that damps curiosity," with the effect that people pay no attention to him, dismissing as magic tricks the psychic miracles he performs and forgetting that he was once heavyweight boxing champion of the world.  Superior to everyone, and  unable to form any emotional connection to an individual or to the larger culture, Gus is a lonely man without a country, without friends, without love.

"Nobody Bothers Gus" is a mood and character piece whose main plot (middle-aged Gus, having abandoned his too-easy boxing career, buys and fixes up a remote house only to lose it to eminent domain when the Feds decided to build Earth's first spaceport nearby) feels secondary.  The tantalizing component of the plot is the revelation that there are other people like Gus out there, presenting the possibility that maybe Gus need not be alone forever.

Not bad.  "Nobody Bothers Gus" first appeared in Astounding and was well received, chosen by Judith Merril for her first Year's Greatest SF anthologies and included since then in a multitude of anthologies edited by everybody ranging from Damon Knight and James Gunn to Barry Malzberg and Martin H. Greenberg.

"And Then She Found Him" (1957)

Gus Kusevic doesn't actually appear in "And Then She Found Him," making me doubt the utility of calling these three stories "The Gus stories," but the tale does take place in the same universe and address similar themes.  It appeared in Venture and later in the anthology No Limits, as well as the various printings of Budrys' Inferno (AKA The Furious Future) and some European publications.

"And Then She Found Him" is quite plot-driven, and even has a shock ending.  In Chicago a community of fifty of the superhumans with the curiosity-damping field has assembled.  Following various clues, one of the supermen, Deerbush, travels the country finding these mutants and bringing them back to Chi-town to be welcomed to the super-community.  Deerbush is sort of like a matchmaker; when he finds a mutant he usually senses that there is a person back in the Windy City who would make a perfect spouse for this new member of the homo superior colony.

In a town he finds Viola, a mutant who has been using her superpowers to steal expensive consumer goods.  Viola has a power Deerbush has encountered in no other mutant--she can hypnotize people into obeying her; nobody can resist her commands, even commands to steal or to assault others. So rapacious is Viola that her thefts are wrecking the local economy and making the local retailers and law enforcement personnel paranoid.  If the Viola crime wave is not ended soon many people may lose their jobs and innocent people may be imprisoned or suffer mob justice!

Almost as mindblowing as Viola's powers is that Deerbush the matchmaker realizes Viola is his soulmate and he falls in love!

Tragedy strikes when the extent of Viola's mental illness becomes fully apparent.  She refuses to go to Chicago and leave behind all the luxury items she has stolen, and she has no interest in marrying Deerbush.  Unreformable, her powers of hypnosis a threat to all of civilization, Deerbush has no choice but to kill her!

This story is acceptable, less moving and more sensationalistic than "Nobody Bothers Gus."  I suppose feminists might object to it as a story in which a woman is so selfish, materialistic, and manipulative that she has to be put down for the good of the universe, or just on the basis that it is a story written by a man which attempts to psychoanalyze a woman. 

"Lost Love" (1957)

Old Doc Bennett is riding a bus across the great state of New Jersey.  Doc is dozing on mass transit among the plebs instead of caressing the wheel of a Mercedes because he is the kind of doctor who ministers to the poor instead of providing face lifts to the haute bourgeoisie!  Doc notices a teen-aged boy across the aisle, a pathetic wretch clad in rags!  He wants to help this emaciated scarecrow of a human being, and engages him in conversation, even offering to let him stay in his household a while until he gets on his feet.  But the boy refuses Doc's help, saying it would be no use; he describes his life and we readers of "Nobody Bothers Gus" recognize that this kid is one of those supermen with a curiosity-damping field, that he can't make friends with us normies because we forget him as soon as we look away from him.  Case in point: every time Doc Bennett wakes up from a snooze the kid has to introduce himself again!  The kid has been travelling the nation, refusing to use his superpowers to steal and thus living on the edge of starvation, hoping he will somehow meet somebody who will remember him, somebody of his own superhuman species.

The tragic twist ending comes when Doc gets home.  He greets his wife but is surprised to find that a teenage girl who actually looks a little like his wife is also living in his house--this girl moans that Mom forgot to set the table for her yet again.  Dun dun dun!  Doc Bennett's own daughter is one of the superpeople, and if the boy had accepted Doc's hospitality he would have met his soulmate and his (and her!) abject loneliness would have been relieved for good!

Acceptable, but inferior to "Nobody Bothers Gus" because it is too sappy and too melodramatic.  "Lost Love" first jerked the tears of SF readers in a magazine called Science Fiction Stories edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes that endured for seven years (1953-1960, 38 issues total.)  Martin H. Greenberg would later include it in 101 Science Fiction Stories, which was published in the United Kingdom as The Giant Book of Science Fiction Stories.

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"Nobody Bothers Gus" stands above the crowd, but I think "And Then She Found Him" and "Lost Love" are just average, though I guess "And Then She Found Him" is remarkable for being one of those stories (like Tom Godwin's famous 1954 "The Cold Equations") that contrives a situation in which it makes sense to slay a woman who isn't perhaps really morally responsible for all the trouble she has caused.

We'll finish up Budrys' Inferno in our next blog post.

Space Prison by Tom Godwin

"They were on Ragnarok, the hell-world of 1.5 gravity and fierce beasts and raging fevers where men could not survive."

My copy of the 1962 printing, front and back

In 1958 Gnome Press published Tom Godwin's The Survivors in hardcover.  Renamed Space Prison, the novel appeared in paperback in 1960.  In May I purchased a copy of Pyramid's second printing, which came out in 1962 and has a more arty and less sexy cover than the first printing.  This edition has an ad for John Gunther's Inside Russia Today on its final page; it was, apparently, your go-to book for understanding the post-Stalin USSR.

Space Prison is your go-to book for understanding the Gern Empire and the planet Ragnarok.  The Gerns have Earth, which is running low on natural resources, under blockade.  The human race's plan to escape this trap is to fill the colonization ship Constellation with 8,000 men, women and children and race it through the blockade.  The Constellation will colonize the resource-rich planet of Athena, which the Earthers think the Gerns don't know about, and there build a space navy that can challenge the Gern Empire.

The Gerns are more clever than we humans realized, however.  They know all about Athena, and as the novel opens the Gern navy captures the Constellation, kidnaps all the people aboard with technical training, and drops the rest of the passengers off on Ragnarok, the famously inhospitable hell-world.

isfdb image of 1960 printing

This is a good set up for an adventure novel, but Space Prison (whose original name, Survivors, is actually more appropriate) doesn't follow a single protagonist or a small party as they overcome obstacles and make discoveries and fight enemies or whatever.  Instead, it is like those epic sagas by Edward Rutherford that my wife reads that cover a thousand years of English or Russian history, following not individuals but families and societies.  Mr. Jones meets Samuel Johnson in the tavern, his son fights alongside Wellington at Waterloo, his grandson shows Queen Victoria around the Crystal Palace, his great grandson helps bury Rupert Brooke, his great great grandson helps Alan Turing crack the German code, blah blah blah. I don't care to read a book like that; I had hoped to be spending 158 pages with the rifle-toting he-man and the blondtastic chick on the cover of the 1960 edition. You can imagine how disappointed I was during the first 40 or so pages of Space Prison, as Godwin again and again introduced a woman or man whom I thought was going to be a major character, only to kill that person off a few pages later.    

Four thousand humans are dropped off on Ragnarok, and they immediately start dying by the hundreds, felled by vicious beasts that attack in packs, the "Hell-fever," or simple vitamin deficiency.  Fifteen years later the colony consists of fewer than 100 people, but these are the hardiest people Earth has to offer, and as they have children the colony begins to grow.  Generations pass, the colonists build a transmitter, domesticate native animals, develop a magazine-fed rapid fire crossbow, etc.  (This is one of those SF books that romanticizes engineering and science; besides hearing all about the stuff they build, we get lots of info on Ragnarok's climate, orbit, axial tilt, weather, relationship to other bodies in its system, and how all these things tie together.)

Finally, 200 years after their ancestors were marooned on Ragnarok, the people of Ragnarok use their transmitter to trick a Gern ship into landing.  Now 6000 strong, they capture the ship, and use it to capture still more Gern ships.  Because they are native to 1.5 gravities, and the Gerns to only 1, a Ragnarok crewed ship can outmaneuver a Gern ship, so the humans can win all the space naval battles.  The Gerns of two centuries ago unwittingly bred the nemesis of their own race; in a decade the Gern Empire is shattered.

Space Prison is a story about manly men making hard choices, struggles for leadership, the way different people respond to life and death situations, and perhaps most importantly, the primacy of the group over the individual.  A main theme of the book is how a real man sacrifices himself for the good of the community, and we get exemplary stories that reminded me of Horatius at the bridge or the story of Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic, who stoically accepted the execution of his own sons, who were royalist conspirators.

For example, while away from the camp two men are attacked by monsters.  If they flee to the camp, the monsters will follow, find the camp and kill every human on the planet.  One man accepts this, and bravely faces certain death.  The other runs for the camp, and so the first saves the colony by shooting his comrade in the back before he can expose the camp to the monsters.

All three of the covers I am reproducing here
include Ragnorok's two suns; it's like the
artists actually read the book!

We also have a negative example, a fat guy who slacks and takes more than his fair share of food while everybody around him is starving, reminding me of the guy in the Broadway and Hollywood adaptations of Anne Frank's diary.  This hoarder and wrecker gets hanged when his cache of food is discovered, as immortalized on the cover of the Italian edition.

The theme of the importance of the community and need to sacrifice individuals for the good of the group echoes the theme of Tom Godwin's famous short story, "The Cold Equations."  (Important SF critic and writer Barry Malzberg, in the preface to a Baen collection of Godwin's work, tells us "The Cold Equations" is "perhaps the most famous and controversial of all science fiction short stories.")

Godwin's style is bland, sometimes poor; I found myself rewriting some of the sentences in my head, like when I'm copy editing student papers.  Because the style was not arresting, there were no individual characters to care about, and the plot held no surprises, Space Prison felt long.  I'm going to have to give this one a marginally negative review, just a few ticks below acceptable.  It is not offensively bad, just a little limp, flat, and long-winded.  

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I paid a dollar for my copy of Space Prison, but all you cheapos out there can read it for free online at Baen (the free sample chapters of their collection Cold Equations include the entire novel under its original title, The Survivors) or at Gutenberg, which reproduces the edition I own, even the ad for Inside Russia Today!