Merril-endorsed 1958 tales by S Jackson, D Keyes and J Kippax

If you buy a copy of Judith Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume for $2.00, a course I certainly recommend, you will find in the back of the 256-page book an alphabetical-by-author list of stories printed in 1958 and headed "Honorable Mentions."  Today we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are reading the lone "J" story, and two of the "K" stories. 

"The Omen" by Shirley Jackson   

I generally avoid Shirley Jackson because mainstream critics are always breathlessly telling you how great she is so I assume they are overdoing it out of some ulterior motive, and because when people tell me about "The Lottery," a story they make schoolkids read, my only response can be "Is that it?" But today we'll read "The Omen" in an effort to see what all the fuss is about. For some reason Merril cites the source of the story as The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Series 8, not the actual magazine issue in which it first appeared (the same issue of F&SF that printed Poul Anderson's "Backwardness" and reprinted Robert Bloch's "How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster," stories we read earlier this year) so I am dutifully reading "The Omen" in that anthology in case that version is updated or something.

"The Omen" is a cutesy humor story about a lovable grandmother and her adorable family and a nice young woman and her domineering, selfish, stifling, manipulative mother, so you know there is at least one realistic character is this story.  There is however, in my humble opinion, no actual SF content in the story, just a long series of purportedly funny coincidences.  What "The Omen" really is is a mundane mainstream story that looks at female relationships.

A sweet granny lives with her daughter, daughter's husband, and their two lovable kids.  Granny falls into some money unexpectedly and decides to go out and buy everybody in the family a gift.  She writes a vague shopping list which she loses on the bus the instant she sits down.

Then we have the pretty young woman who lives alone with her mother.  She has a steady boyfriend who has wanted to marry her for three years--she hasn't consented because her monstrous mother refuses to give her blessing; Mom doesn't want to live alone and goes on and on about how she will starve if the daughter leaves.  The attractive young lady has had it up to here with her mother and hurries out one day, exasperated, wishing she had the courage to disobey her mother and marry her guy.  She wishes she would find an omen that would give her the strength to pursue her own life and build her own family.  She gets on the wrong bus, finds the granny's cryptic list, and ends up in a part of town she has never been to before.  She has a series of adventures that seem to correspond to the brief notes on the list she has found, and the upshot of these adventures is that she finds the willpower to call up her boyfriend at his work and say she will marry him and Mom will just have to live with it.  These adventures involve encounters with other women and the highlight of these capers is her being mistaken for another woman.

Granny returns home with different gifts than her family asked for, but the kids still like their gifts.

I may be using the word "adventures" in describing Jackson's story here but this is not a thriller--"The Omen" is light-hearted and life-affirming, portraying no risk and no danger; for example, strangers all try to help granny--there are no Mike Tyson or George Floyd types in the story who try to rob her.

This is a competent, professionally put-together mainstream story that has very little provocative or surprising to say.  Why F&SF editor Anthony Boucher and Judith Merril think it is a big deal--or an SF story--is a little mysterious, but I guess Boucher thought Jackson's name on the cover might move copies and Merril hoped some of the high status of a New Yorker writer would rub off on SF--Merril is famous for shoehorning stories by prestigious mainstream figures into her anthologies and for striving to convince people that SF is just as good as the mainstream and distinctions between genres are bogus and so on.  Well, "The Omen" is not a bad story, so I guess I can't be too annoyed.

"The Trouble with Elmo" by Daniel Keyes

Like "The Lottery," "Flowers for Algernon" is one of those stories kids read in school--at least my class read it.  Having put up my first blog entry about the famous Shirley Jackson today we are also posting my first ever blog content about the famous Daniel Keyes!  It's a day of wonders!

Here we have another humor story, but whereas Jackson's "The Omen" was more or less realistic and set in the mundane real world, Keyes' "The Trouble With Elmo" is broad and silly and an actual science fiction story about the future, technology and ideas.

The story begins with an obese Senator haranguing the world's top expert on the computer that is running the world, a man whose failure to deactivate the computer (nicknamed Elmo) has led to him being demoted all the way to private.  Though a lowly private, our hero talks back to the senator, his unique skills being a sort of insurance policy, I guess.

Elmo was built and activated to solve a major world problem, but the solution the supercomputer instituted to that problem caused a new problem, and by solving that second problem Elmo triggered the arrival of a third problem, etc.  This has been going on for years.  The Senator is sure the computer is deliberately causing each of this succession of world-threatening problems in order to guarantee its own survival--after all, if Earth's problems are solved, Elmo will be deactivated.

Elmo solves the latest problem he has created by initiating first contact with space aliens and acquiring from them some valuable gas.  In exchange, the aliens want the landmass of Asia--Earth can keep the people.  Elmo foresees that Earth will need his services to manage the migration of the population of Asia to the rest of the world.

We get some run-of-the-mill political satire in the scenes of politicians in Washington responding to this deal.  Then the private solves everybody's problems by convincing the aliens to accept Elmo and himself as payment instead of Asia.  The private, in civilian life, was a fix-it man, and so likes the idea of solving the problems of alien civilizations in concert with Elmo, whom he considers a friend and is a good chess partner.

Lame filler.

"The Trouble with Elmo" has not been reprinted in America as far as I can tell, though it was included in foreign editions of Galaxy and in a Japanese collection of Keyes stories.  I am getting the impression that there has never been a Keyes collection printed in English, but maybe isfdb and wikipedia are steering me wrong (it wouldn't be the first time!)      

"Me, Myself and I" by John Kippax

Well, here's another guy I've never blogged about before.  Three excursions into virgin territory in one day!  John Kippax is the pen name of British writer and musician John Charles Hynam and he has quite a few short fiction credits at isfdb.  "Me, Myself and I" has a jokey title and I certainly hope it is not an absurdist humor story because it takes up 26 pages in the place I am reading it, Science Fantasy.

Thankfully, this is not an over-the-top joke piece, and Kippax turns out to have a smooth comfortable style, so that, while the plot is just OK and the ending something of a letdown, the story never feels boring or long.

Gordon Beale is one of those middle-class guys who rides the train in to the office everyday to work.  I was once one of those guys, though I lived in New York and Beale lives someplace in England and of course I was employed by the government so there wasn't really much work going on.  Also, at home I had a steady girlfriend who became my wife (that's "partner" to you kids) and Beale has nobody and is quite lonely.  

Beale is shy and standoffish and lacking in social skills so can't make friends or meet girls and spends his evenings alone at home--he's living alone but he neither likes it nor loves it.  But then one day on the train he finds a book he assumes somebody left by mistake.  He almost hands it over to the lost and found, but then he decides to take it home and read it.  It turns out to be a self help book with no author's name on it and no publication data on any page.  And like the note in Jackson's "The Omen," this strange document changes our protagonist's life--but this is a horror story so the change is not for the better!

The book encourages and guides Beale in an examination of his early life and uncovering of why he is a failure socially and then in the conception of a new version of himself that is a superior version of himself, similar but more bold, more assertive.  Visualizing a better Beale makes a better Beale actually appear!  A man who looks like Beale but is more confident, better able to focus and plan ahead, good at interacting with others, charming and persuasive.  This new Beale is christened "Harry," and goes from being a faint image to a solidly real man!  Gordon Beale starts staying home during the day while Harry Beale gets on the train and works in the office.  On the train Harry makes friends with a neighbor who is able to offer valuable connections and stock market advice.  At the office Harry bests Gordon's rival for the affections of a pretty young secretary (like 15 years younger than Gordon and Harry) and in the eyes of the boss, saving the company a stack of money by reexamining some figures.  Gordon thinks that after Harry has secured a promotion and had sex with the secretary and gotten her to agree to marry him he can dematerialize Harry and enjoy the newly salubrious and happy life Harry has secured for him.  But Harry has become too powerful to be dismissed!  And when it turns out Harry has stolen money from the company to buy jewelry for the secretary, Gordon has to go on the lam, staying in crappy hotels and hiding from the police!  But before the bobbies can drag him off to gaol with a "g," Gordon Beale keels over--Harry has found the book and has used it to create another Beale--Sam--and this has stretched the original's soul too thin.  At least I think that is what happened.

This story gets a passing grade but there are serious holes in the plot.  Where does the book come from?  If the book was instrumental in creating Harry, how come Harry doesn't know about it and also falls into its trap?  Gordon Beale is a fastidious rule-follower, bashful and lacking in initiative, so why does Harry turn into a brazen thief?  And since the theft was discovered, doesn't Harry also lose his job and his girl?  How does it help a now jobless and womanless Harry to create an additional duplicate who will also have to hide from the police?  I'm afraid Kippax didn't put enough energy into coming up with an ending for his story.

Besides the original magazine, you can find "Me, Myself and I" in a 2014 anthology of stories from Science Fantasy entitled The Daymakers.

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I don't consider any of today's stories good, but only Keyes' is actually bad.  Jackson's is the best because, while Kippax also has a good style, Jackson's plot is internally consistent and her characters all act in a believable way, while Kippax's plot goes off the rails a bit at the end.

More Merril-approved "K" stories from 1958 when next we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

"The Green Meadow" and "The Crawling Chaos" by H P Lovecraft and Winifred Virginia Jackson, and "The Last Test" and "The Electric Executioner" by Adolphe de Castro and H P Lovecraft

Remember when we read H. P. Lovecraft's revisions of three stories by Zealia Bishop and five stories by Hazel Heald?  Good times, good times.  Let's pursue a similar project, reading two stories Lovecraft revised for Winifred Virginia Jackson (leading Lovecraft expert S. T. Joshi says "there is little evidence to suggest that Jackson contributed any prose to either tale") and two the weird sage of Providence revised for Adolphe de Castro (Joshi tells us that these stories were both published in a book in 1893 and that Lovecraft completely rewrote them in the 1920s, "preserving only the skeleton of each work.")  I am reading these stories in my copy of the Corrected Fifth Printing of The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions; this volume is also my source for the above quotes from Joshi, the foremost of Lovecraft scholars.

"The Green Meadow" by H. P. Lovecraft and Winifred Virginia Jackson (1927)

According to wikipedia, "The Green Meadow" was written by Lovecraft in 1918-1919, based on a dream of Jackson's.  (The Weird Tales crowd loves recording and relating their dreams--remember when Frank Belknap Long included a dream of Lovecraft's in his The Horror From the Hills?)  "The Green Meadow" was not published until 1927, in The Vagrant, an amateur press publication, where it appeared under the pen names "Elizabeth Neville Berkeley" and "Lewis Theobald, Jun."  It would first see wide publication in the 1943 Arkham House collection, Beyond the Wall of Sleep.

"The Green Meadow" is like five pages long.  A prefatory note tells us the main text is from a book made from an unidentifiable substance that was found inside a meteorite; this text is in ancient Greek, apparently the work of a scholar from classical Hellas.

The narrator of the brief document tells us he woke up or found himself on an alien world with little memory of his identity or past.  He was on a narrow strip of land between bodies of water, and could see to one side the ocean and the other a forest.  A bit of land upon which he was standing broke off and he rode it down a river, towards what sounded like a waterfall.  He passed a strange meadow where creatures that looked like bushes (or were hiding within bushes) sang in an alien language.  Suddenly, he remembered his identity, realizing (as characters in Lovecraft stories sometimes do) he is not really human; he won't write down the details, as such knowledge would drive us readers insane.  (Thanks, pal.)  The text abruptly ends, the book having been damaged in some way that obscured the narrator's handwriting. 

A trifle, though it is interesting to see themes like the discovery of one's inhuman identity and the fact that true knowledge of the universe will drive you insane here in some of Lovecraft's earliest work.

"The Crawling Chaos" by H. P. Lovecraft and Winifred Virginia Jackson (1921)

Wikipedia tells us that "The Crawling Chaos," which was first published in what I guess is another of those amateur press periodicals, this one bearing the moniker The United Co-operative, was, like "The Green Meadow," written by HPL based on one of Jackson's dreams.  It appeared under very similar pseudonyms there, and was not published again until 1970 in the first edition of The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions.

During a plague, the narrator was given opium to treat his plague symptoms, but his overworked doctor administered an overdose, resulting in the narrator having a crazy dream, apparently a vision of the far future.  The dreamer finds himself in an exotic room in an exotic house, the house and its furnishings a mixture of Oriental and Occidental styles.  The house sits upon a cliff on a narrow peninsula, and below an angry sea batters the cliff, ripping away chunks of earth, threatening to cause the peninsula to collapse.  (I guess this sort of thing is a recurring theme in Jackson's dreams.)  The narrator walks away from the house, and is met by beautiful people who have the power of gods; these people help him fly out into space--he looks back and watches as the Earth is destroyed.  Then the narrator awakens from his opium dream, back in our plague-ridden but relatively mundane 20th-century world.

Another trifle, even less interesting than "The Green Meadow."

"The Last Test" by Adolphe de Castro and H. P. Lovecraft (1928)

I recently purchased a copy of Volume 9 of Hippocampus Press's Letters of H. P. Lovecraft, which is titled Letters to F. Lee Baldwin, Duane W. Rimel, and Nils Frome and was edited by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi.  Lovecraft discusses Adolphe de Castro at some length in several letters to F. Lee Baldwin, and de Castro, whom wikipedia describes as "a Jewish scholar, journalist, lawyer and author of poems, novels and short stories" comes across as a likable but wacky sort of character.  For example, de Castro in 1934 asked Lovecraft to revise a book of essays in which he endorsed Bolshevism and put forward a theory that Jesus Christ was Pontius Pilate's illegitimate son (see letter of December 23, 1934, in which Lovecraft offers Baldwin a long list of reasons to believe de Castro's theory about Jesus's parentage is just a fiction de Castro made up and doesn't even believe himself.)  Lovecraft appears to have passed on this assignment because de Castro couldn't pay in advance, and it seems the book of essays was never published.

Anyway, one job Lovecraft did do for de Castro was revising "A Sacrifice to Science," a short story that de Castro had published in 1893 in his book In the Confessional and the Following.  The revision appeared in Weird Tales in 1928, under the title "The Last Test."  (By the way, this is the same issue of Weird Tales that includes Edmond Hamilton's "The Polar Doom," which we read in the summer of 2017.) 

Dr. Alfred Clarendon has a reputation as a genius medical scientist with a single-minded obsession for discovering the truth.  He was a world-renowned figure among the egghead set by age thirty, having traveled the globe conducting groundbreaking research on all manner of terrible diseases:

....he had taken long, lone jaunts to strange and distant places in his studies of exotic fevers and half-fabulous plagues; for he knew that it is out of the unknown lands of cryptic and immemorial Asia that most of the Earth's diseases spring.

Whoa, ripped from today's headlines!

Clarendon returned to New York with a new personal assistant named Surama, a highly educated and skeletally thin North African, and a large staff of skeletally thin "Thibetans." Then he moved the entire household, including his sister Georgina, to a mansion in San Francisco. 

In his youth in New York, Clarendon's best friend was this dude James Dalton, another of these go-getter types.  While Clarendon was becoming a world authority on diseases and offering employment opportunities to the freakiest of the foreign freaks he would come across, Dalton was in sunny California, making his own fortune, and by the 1890s Dalton was governor of the Golden State.  Just a few months after the two old cronies meet up in Cali and Dalton renews his youthful romance with Georgina, Dalton appoints Clarendon to the position of medical director of San Quentin.  (Talk about cronyism!)

That background is covered in the first part of this 45-page story, which is broken into five parts.  In Part II we see Clarendon in action as head of the prison medical staff as an epidemic of "black fever," about which Clarendon is the world expert, breaks out in the prison.  A panic in San Francisco ensues, and a public controversy ensues, thanks largely to fake news promulgated by venal reporters (this story takes a very dim view of journalists): is Clarendon doing his level best to control the outbreak, or letting the disease spread unchecked among the prisoners in order to study it?  At the same time Georgina and Dalton worry that the creepy Surama, who is always chuckling behind their backs, is having a malign influence on Clarendon. 

In Part III disaster strikes Clarendon, as the California legislature, believing the worst about the doctor, passes a law that takes the power to appoint the head sawbones at San Quentin away from the Governor and gives it to the state prison board.  Clarendon, who has no ability to schmooze with politicos or journalos and doesn't even read the newspapers, is sacked by the prison board.  In Part IV the now-unemployed Clarendon experiments on animals in his private lab, the strange Surama at his side.  Georgina, by chance, comes upon clues that hint at the horrible nature of her brother's relationship with the North African genius and their work; for example, when he is frustrated because his rigorous schedule of experiments has depleted his supply of test animals, Clarendon utters a fanatic diatribe about how the individual is nothing and must be sacrificed  to the quest for knowledge for the good of the race--in this little speech he even mentions Atlantis and Yog-Sothoth.  Even more chilling is Georgina's witnessing of Surama outfighting and then carrying off one of the Thibetans, apparently to be experimented on in place of the exhausted supply of test animals--even more bizarre is when she overhears a conversation between Surama and Clarendon in which the former implies he is thousands of years old!

In the fifth and final part of the tale Clarendon takes steps to use his own sister as a test subject, but the providential arrival of his best buddy Governor Dalton snaps him back to sanity.  Clarendon explains to Dalton how he got mixed up with Surama, and what their research is really about--Surama is the last living member of a pre-human race that worships alien gods, and the black fever is no earthly disease, but a disease from another planet or dimension or something.  Surama is a sadist and he somehow turned Clarendon into a sadist--Clarendon has been infecting animals and people with black fever not as part of a program of research but merely to enjoy watching their suffering!  Now back in his right mind, Clarendon injects himself with the black fever and then burns down his lab while all his samples of the fever from beyond, as well as he and Surama, are in it, leaving the world to mourn the death of the great doctor and men of science to puzzle over Surama's queer half-mammalian and half-reptilian skeleton.

"The Last Test" is OK, no big deal.  I was very disappointed when the themes of selfish ambition (a guy experiments on people against their will to further his career as a scientist) and of individual-crushing collectivism (a guy experiments on people against their will in order to pursue the greater good of abstract knowledge and triumph over disease) were tossed in the garbage in favor of the theme of sadistic perversion (a guy injects people with disease in order to enjoy watching them die.)  This is a total waste of the character of Surama, an inhuman genius from Earth's prehistoric past with access to alien material--just any old 19th-century American creep can be a sadist, there is no reason to introduce antediluvian and otherworldly elements like Surama and Atlantis and Yog-Sothoth to the story if the main character is not going to be experimenting on people in order to achieve immortality or travel to another planet or conquer the world or something cool like that.  The sadist elements and the Yog-Sothery elements just don't gel very well here.  The sadism angle also robs the story of any philosophical or ideological interest; we all agree that torturing people for fun is wrong, but we all disagree over what the individual owes the community and what the community owes the individual, and we all make different calculations when it comes to compromising our principles in order to further our careers.  Clarendon's science-obsessed youth and his "the individual must be willing to sacrifice himself for the collective" speech don't gel with the sadism element either--the sadism business renders all the interesting parts of Clarendon's character moot.

"The Last Test" was first printed in book form--and with Lovecraft's name on it--in 1949's Lovecraft collection Something About Cats and Other Pieces, and would go on to be included in many Lovecraft collections.  De Castro's original version ("A Sacrifice to Science") appears along with "The Last Test" in a 2012 volume edited by the indefatigable Joshi entitled The Crawling Chaos and Others; maybe someday I'll get my hands on that book and compare both versions and puzzle out who is to blame for the story's problems.  (Incidentally, I totally love Zach McCain's covers for The Crawling Chaos and Others and its companion volume, Medusa's Coil and Others.)

"The Electric Executioner" by Adolphe de Castro and H. P. Lovecraft (1930)

De Castro's first version of this story appeared under the title "The Automatic Executioner" in 1891 in the magazine The Wave, and then was reprinted in de Castro's collection In the Confessional and the Following.  Lovecraft's revision of the story, re-titled "The Electric Executioner," appeared in Weird Tales in 1930 in an issue that also printed Robert E. Howard and Edmond Hamilton stories I haven't blogged about yet.

"The Electric Executioner" is like 18 pages long.

When the guy managing a Mexican silver mine for a San Francisco-based company disappears, absconding with all the important papers related to the mine's operation, the peeps in SF send our narrator, an auditor and investigator, down Mexico way to retrieve all those essential documents.  Our narrator finds himself alone in a train car late at night with another American, a big strong man who quickly overpowers him.  This menacing figure explains to our hero that he is a worshiper of ancient Mexican gods like Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopotchli (Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth are also in the mix) and also that he has invented a superior electric battery and uses it to power a portable electric execution device--he has the device here with him in his "portmanteau."  This device (essentially a flexible wire hood attached to the battery by a cord) has not yet been tested, and the muscular inventor, of course, proposes testing it on our narrator.

The narrator doubts that any battery a man could carry could store enough juice to kill a person (this is the 1890s, remember)--he is sure the hulking inventor is simply insane.  Of course, this nut is so huge--and armed with a gun and a knife, besides--that, physically, he is still an insurmountable opponent, and our hero assumes he will just murder him after the electric device inevitably fails to kill him,  So, he uses his wits to get out of this terrifying jam.  This part of the story is, I guess, supposed to be funny; thanks to the narrator's Bugs Bunny-like fast talking, and some sheer luck, the maniac ends up putting the hood over his own head and electrocuting himself with the device, which unexpectedly works as advertized.

The narrator faints when comes the blue flash and the inventor's screams, and when he wakes up the inventor and his device are gone!  The last few pages of the story indicate that the mad inventor was in fact the fugitive mine manager our hero was sent to find; in league with native Mexican Indian Cthulhu-worshipers, the fugitive astrally projected himself onto the train from a cave temple, where his corpse and his device were discovered by those who investigated the screams and the smoke coming from the body's charred head.

This story is OK, I suppose.  I'm not a big fan of joke stories, so I'm not really the audience for this one.  The story doesn't marry its going-native-and-worshiping-Cthulhu-with-Indians and inventor-makes-a-super-battery-and-wants-to-use-it-to-kill-people components particularly well.

Historians of racism will perhaps find interesting that, while he considers the Indians of Mexico beside whom he worships alien gods to be "sacred and inviolate" "children of the feathered serpent," the insane inventor has contempt for Mexicans with Spanish blood and calls them "greasers."

Like "The Last Test," "The Electric Executioner" was first reprinted in Something About Cats and Other Pieces.  De Castro's original story, "The Automatic Executioner," can be found in 2012's The Crawling Chaos and Others.

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These stories are all pretty disappointing, though at least none is as bad as "The Lurking Fear."  I guess I can give all of them the all-too-common rating of "acceptable."  Lovecraft's collaborations with Bishop and Heald were much more successful, maybe in part because Lovecraft was by that time a more experienced writer, maybe in part because Lovecraft had a much freer hand in developing them.

More Lovecraft collaborations in the next episode of MPoricus Fiction Log.