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 sudffers 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 a 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.

**********

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.

Planet in Peril by John Christopher

Raven said to Charles: "Well, Mr. Grayner?  Destruction or salvage?  A corrupt and decadent world--do you destroy it or do you try to mend it?"

Charles stood in silence; he felt that his irresolution must be written all over him.  Raven and Dinkhul were both looking at him--Raven with calm confidence, Dinkhul with the trace of a mocking grin.

He said: "I don't know--"  

I can't actually remember any
pretty blonde ladies in the book

Like so many people, I found John Christopher's first three Tripod books entertaining.  I liked No Blade of Grass when I read it a few years ago, and thought The Long Winter not bad when I read it before this blog first exploded into the public consciousness.  (Joachim Boaz rated The Long Winter "Good" back in 2012.) So, when I saw the 1959 Avon printing of Christopher's Planet in Peril with the cool Emsh cover, I got it.  As I announced to the world via twitter, which, despite my best efforts to create mesmerizing content like blurry pictures of the birds and graffiti I spot while visiting Akron, Ohio, is apparently in terminal decline, this edition is very fun, the book designer integrating elements of Emsh's cover illo onto the back cover and the title page.  My copy was owned previously by a Michael Wachover; amateur handwriting analysis suggests it was some other owner who wrote "Good" on the inside cover along with a long cryptic string of characters.  Mr. Wachover also wrote his nickname "Mike" on page 23, and that string of numbers (and letters?) appears a second time on page 11.  This paperback has lived a long and eventful life!

Planet in Peril was first published in the United Kingdom in 1955 with the considerably more appropriate title The Year of the Comet and stars Charles Grayner, 21st-century scientist.  Grayner is a sophisticated man--when he comes home and finds the cleaning lady has left the telescreen on the pop music channel, he switches it to the classical music channel.  After a long day studying diamonds as a possible power source, a little Mozart is just what he needs!  In the first ten pages of the book Grayner visits a used record store, where he runs into the guy who operates and stars on (as a kind of DJ or talk show host) the classical music TV channel, Hiram Dinkhul.  Even though they have only met once before, this guy seems to know all about Grayner's career, including the fact that the diamond expert has just this very day learned he will be transferred from Michigan to sunny California!

Fellow SF fan
Michael Wachover,
we salute you!

Planet in Peril is set in a world in which almost nobody, even a sophisticato like Grayner, knows any history.  Luckily Grayner and we readers have Dinkhul to handle the exposition duties for us.   Following a cataclysmic 20th-century war, the Western world was rebuilt by and is now run by "managerials," the various pre-war business sectors (they have names like "United Chemicals," "Atomics," "Steel," "Agriculture," "Genetics Division," "Telecom," etc.) consolidated into monopolistic entities which act as independent states.  These states are fascistic/socialistic, their citizens assorted into rigid classes and assigned their roles from above during their youth after psychological profiling.  (We learn that at school Grayner was assigned to Squad D, "research and development work.")  Like jobs, all goods and services seem to be distributed by the bureaucracy.

Outside this managerial system is "Siraq," a religious state (Dinkhul calls it a "deity-centered nation") that controls the "Near East."  (Though Grayner and Dinkhul are Americans, they use British lingo--Dinkhul at one point talks of the paucity of students who "read History" instead of the American usage "study History," while Grayner tells Dinkhul that he "tipped down the drain" the "containers of mescalin" provided him by his managers for use on vacation.)  While Westerners all smoke cigarettes, use "mesc" and engage in casual promiscuous sex (Grayner is said to frequent brothels), the Siraqis refrain, having what is said to be a "puritanical" culture.  (Christopher never uses the words "Islam" or "Muslim," just like he never uses "socialism" or "fascism.")

Like the Siraqis, Dinkhul is critical of the managerial states and to some extent lives outside of them.  His TV channel represents "one of the few remaining strands of capitalism in the modern world," he tells Grayner, and he complains that the society of the managerial states is decadent, pointing out the failure to colonize Mars and Venus though the technology to do so is available (Raymond F. Jones in The Cybernetic Brains also used the failure to explore space as a sign that a socialistic high-tech society had fallen into decadence.)  We later learn that Dinkhul, besides being a broadcaster, is a bigwig in an underground organization trying to undermine the managerial system, The Society of Individualists.  This group doesn't have a plan to take over, they just want to see the whole managerial system fall apart, assuming what comes next will be better.

I guess those are the Siraqis on their
diamond-powered flying machines

Grayner's managerial is United Chemicals, and his superiors transfer him to Cali to take the place of some other diamond expert, Humayun, who got killed in a boating accident.  Grayner falls in love with Humayun's (now his) assistant, Sara Koupol.  Koupol, like Humayun, is a political refugee who fled from Siraq; her father, a history professor, escaped Siraq with her.  Sara thinks Grayner's predecessor was murdered, and when she disappears before Grayner can even get in her pants (damn her puritanical Siraqi upbringing!) her father purportedly commits suicide.  Of course, Grayner and we readers think all these people have been kidnapped or murdered.

Much of the book consists of Grayner being cajoled or kidnapped by Dinkhul's Individualists or one managerial or another, all of them trying to convince Grayner to work for them.  Again and again Grayner is liberated from captivity at one managerial by another managerial or by the Society of Individualists--in this book people are always getting put to sleep by gas or drugged drinks or hit on the head by blunt instruments and then waking up in the custody of some other faction.  People in this book are also always putting on disguises, and members of one managerial keep turning out to be moles or turncoats who are in fact working for a different faction. When Grayner is "reunited" with Sara Koupol, Dinkhul, after some days, exposes this woman as an impostor (no wonder she was putting out!)  This is the kind of book in which the protagonist is carried along by the winds of fate and manipulated by mysterious forces--until the very end Grayner doesn't make any decisions, figure out any mysteries, or defeat any foes; Grayner does not drive the plot in any way, he is merely its passenger.

Anyway, all the managerials want Grayner (and Humayun and Sara Koupol) under their control because everybody realizes that they are on the brink of figuring out how to turn diamonds into a super efficient power source and super powerful weapon--if one managerial gets this power before the rest it will be able to rule the world.  Dinkhul, who I guess is like the book's conscience and Christopher's spokesman, tries to preserve Greyner's freedom to choose his own way while hoping Greyner will not stand in the way of a collapse of managerial society.

Loosely affiliated with the Society of Individualists is an underground cult of religious fanatics known as the Cometeers who think the appearance of a comet in the sky is a sign that managerial society is about to fall.  (You probably know that comets are associated with the crisis of the collapse of the Roman Republic and the Norman conquest of England.)  The managerials tolerate the Cometeers, and their revival-style meetings provide a cover for the Society of Individualists' own smaller meetings.  In the last 30 pages of the 159-page novel Dinkhul leads Greyner on a country-wide tour of Cometeer groups, seeking clues about the whereabouts of Sara Koupol.  As the puritanism of the Siraqis contrasts with the indulgence in drugs and promiscuous sex of the managerials, so the ecstatic Cometeers provide a contrast to the passionless managerials--on their faces Greyner sees "a concentration, a passion, which he never remembered seeing anywhere."  Dinkhul and Greyner get kidnapped again, and this time taken to Siraq--it turns out the Cometeers are being financed by the Siraqis as a means of further undermining the managerials.  We learn that Humayun, Sara Koupol and Professor Koupol have taken over Siraq in a palace coup, built the diamond-based super weapon, and are going to take over the world.  Greyner has to decide if he will try to alert the managerials and save the (drug-addled, corrupt and static) West from the (semi-capitalistic, imperialistic and puritannical) East, or just settle down with Sara and live a happy life with her as a member of the world's new ruling class.  

When I bought Planet in Peril, and when I started reading it, I had hopes it would be an exciting adventure story and/or a human drama.  I was disappointed because it is a kind of satire of and meditation on modern Western life, religion, radicalism and conservatism.  (I didn't realize it at first, but the character's names have an allegorical ring--Grayner, Ledbetter, Raven, etc.  Is "Humayun" supposed to reminded us of "houyhnhnm?")  Do I agree with Christopher that individualistic capitalist societies are more vital and productive than bureaucratic collectivist ones?  Of course I do.  Do I agree that while religion is a scam, it brings structure, meaning and even joy into people's lives?  You bet.  Does my agreement with what I think Christopher is trying to say here mean I loved this novel?  No way.

Sad!

Planet of Peril's plot, characters, and tone are weak.  The story conveys no emotion--all of the characters remain calm and detached, either gently ironic like Dinkhul or, even worse, cold fish like Grayner. Perhaps by design (to show how a technocratic society saps the life and emotion out of people), perhaps due to incompetence, Christopher's characters have no passion and the story develops no tension.  We don't get any sense that Dinkhul really hates the static collectivist society of the managerials or that Grayner deeply or ebulliently loves Koupol or is bitter or angry about the way the various factions are manipulating him.  The stakes feel low because the different factions don't threaten or bribe Grayner, and none of the characters gets shot at or risks death or maiming--looking back, I suspect that all the scenes of people getting knocked unconscious were played for laughs, though I didn't laugh.  The lack of feeling and danger makes the book flat and boring.

The scene I quoted as an epigraph to this blog post, in which Dinkhul and Raven (head of Atomics) both try to sway Grayner, reminded me of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which a representative of modern liberalism and a representative of religious and communist radicalism compete for the soul of a bland middle-class guy. The book as a whole reminded me of Anthony Burgess's satiric The Wanting Seed, which I also found didn't inspire in me much feeling.  Planet of Peril, however, suffers in comparison to The Wanting Seed because while Christopher is subtle (to be kind) or limp (if you want to be harsh about it), Burgess is loud, sharp, edgy.  Burgess just comes right out and tells you homosexuals are disgusting and that English people are superior to Third Worlders and lays his theories about history and religion right on the table for you to see.  This is a way to generate excitement, or at least interest, in your novel if it lacks human drama and tension.  Christopher's Planet in Peril, unfortunately, though it has a provocative theme (Muslims armed with a super weapon are going to conquer the world, and we decadent Westerners should welcome it!) isn't stirring or captivating because it is too soft and too vague.

Barely acceptable.

The Cybernetic Brains by Raymond F. Jones

They were dead, the cyberneticists said from the beginning.  The activation of the neurons was no more than the jerking of a dead frog leg by an electric current....But they couldn't know; no one could tell them. The mute prisoners of darkness could never tell.  They could only live--and hope for death.

How do I love this cover?  Let me count the ways.

I love the huge brain.

I love the monster frog.

I love the male and female profiles, which the artist (most likely Jerome Podwil, though some have claimed it is Richard Powers' work) imbues with a sort of iconic, essential humanity.  Here we see Everyman and Everywoman, together facing an indifferent universe.

And the colors, the width of the lines, etc.  I love it all!  But will I love Jones' novel?  In 1950 Raymond F. Jones contributed to Startling Stories a tale entitled "The Cybernetic Brains," and in 1962 an expanded version was printed in a magazine in Italy and in book form here in the good ol' U S of A.  My copy is a 1969 paperback, 128 pages, from the Paperback Library.  I recognize Jones' name, but I don't think I have ever read anything by him, at least not as an adult, so here I'm getting a first taste of his rather extensive body of work (isfdb lists over a dozen novels and many stories ranging from the early 1940s to the late 1970s.)

The Cybernetic Brains begins in darkness.  That's because chemist John Wilkins, whose body was destroyed in a car crash  along with that of his newlywed wife Martha while they were on their honeymoon (damn!) is a disembodied brain and they haven't hooked him up to the cameras yet!  Jones gives us a very effective description of what it is like to be a disembodied brain that really catches the reader's attention before we get the background exposition about the novel's future setting.

I guess that's Martha in her new body,
but don't be fooled into thinking this
is a light sexy story--it's a tragedy
and a cautionary tale about
central planning!

The Wilkins' world is a sort of socialist utopia, which Jones calls "the Welfare State" with caps.  Automatic factories run by computers produce everything anybody could possibly need, so only a tiny minority of ambitious and power-hungry people actually have jobs--everybody else just hangs out. The computers distribute everything--most people don't even know what the word "profit" means, the concept of business being so antiquated--and there is no crime because everybody has what he wants and psychopaths are euthanized at birth.

Where do the powers that be get computers with enough memory and processing power to manage the entire world economy?  Well, they use the brains of dead people as their computers!  The brains of the most intelligent and well-educated citizens killed in accidents (are they really accidents?) that (conveniently) left their noggins unharmed!  The cyberneticists who harvest, install, and maintain these dead brains don't realize (or do they?) that their process revivifies the consciousness of the people from whose skulls the brains have been extracted, so that two million human souls, for decade after decade, are living in an agony of sensory deprivation, just so the average man can sit on his ass all day!  I guess you could say they are using the brains as hardware, thinking the original software is gone, but it isn't gone!

John and Martha, as leading chemists, have been installed in a vast chemical plant. (The cyberneticists find that the dead brain computers work most efficiently when managing processes with which they were familiar in life.)  The disembodied newlyweds barely succeed in maintaining their sanity and then vow to do all they can to liberate the two million enslaved souls that are running the world economy!  Why haven't any of those two million ever rebelled?  We later learn that a slight tweaking of the revivification process has given John and Martha super-IQs, while the other two million are totally insane, schizos who have retreated into sterile dream worlds.

With their super IQs, John and Martha, in vats in unmonitored parts of the labyrinthine chemical factory, create little creatures they call "frogs" that transmit telepathic signals and act as their eyes and ears.  With practice, they graduate to creating human bodies that can walk undetected among real humans.  Through intermediaries--their family and friends--they alert the government and the Cybernetics Board that the brains are alive and the whole brain computer program should be suspended.  The authorities respond by trying to assassinate John and Martha's loved ones, leading to gory fights between the assassins and the frogs!  (Frog 2.0 has lots of sharp teeth!)  Next, John and Martha try to alert the people, thinking the common man will want to liberate the two million brain slaves.  Think again, naive boffins!  When the common man learns there is a threat to his cushy lifestyle he rises up against, not the slavers, but John and Martha's loved ones!  More gory fights, this time unruly mob vs toothy artificial frog!

I kept expecting a sense-of-wonder ending, with John and Martha winning over the populace through some stratagem and liberating the brains and creating a better world, or at least putting their own brains in new bodies and blasting off to live together forever in outer space, but Jones is writing a tragedy here.  As the novel ends the brains catastrophically cease production (chemical plant emitting poison gas, atomic plant exploding, etc.) and expire and world society, consisting of people who have never done any labor and don't know how to do anything productive, collapses into total anarchy.

Jones's novel has lots of cool disembodied brain, artificial creature, and high-IQ science-fiction stuff, and lots of human relationship stuff and psychological stuff in which people suffer breakdowns as they doubt they can go on after their significant other has gotten killed, but the real point of The Cybernetic Brains is to attack the cradle-to-grave welfare state.  The foundation of the welfare state is slavery, and it corrupts, infantalizes, emasculates, and dehumanizes everyone connected to it.  Jones' intelligent or admirable characters denounce it repeatedly in no uncertain terms, for example, suggesting that the welfare state represents man refusing to achieve maturity (by conquering the stars, say) and instead "returning to the womb."

All the SF elements are fun, the ending took me by surprise, I love stories about shifting brains and consciousnesses, and I still, after all these years, find debates over the role of the state compelling, so I quite enjoyed The Cybernetic Brains.  Probably some of the scenes, like John and Martha's grief-stricken sister-in-law standing naked atop a wall with a raging inferno behind her and a murderous mob before her, are a little melodramatic, a little too operatic or cinematic, but I don't think those few scenes sink the whole enterprise.  I can definitely recommend this one, especially if you are into van Vogt-style high IQ and conspiracy stories, and anti-socialist polemics.

And another word of praise for Jerome Podwil for producing not only a gorgeous cover, but one which is an accurate representation of everything that happens in the book!

Stories from 1960s New Worlds by Thomas Disch, Langdon Jones, Brian Aldiss and three other "top" authors

It feels like it was just last month that I was reading and passing a merciless judgement on stories selected by Judith Merril from New Worlds, the flagship periodical of the New Wave, brought to you by the British taxpayer. Let's do it again, this time with stories chosen by New World's famed editor and creator of Elric of Melnibone and sundry other doomed heroes, Michael Moorcock, as representative of the best work published in that magazine.

I read all of the tales described below in my 1971 copy of Berkley Medallion's Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4.  The anthology first appeared in 1969 in the UK, published by Panther.

"Linda and Daniel and Spike" by Thomas M. Disch (1967)

The US edition of the anthology declares this story "a disturbing fable" and when it appeared in New Worlds the title was written on a woman's bare back!  I actually bought this whole book for two smackers at Half-Price Books because I didn't already own this story and I am a Disch fan.  That's a lot of hype and hope to live up to!  Can Disch do it?

This is a sad story!  Disch, you are going to break people's hearts with this thing!

Linda is an unattractive secretary living in New York City who thinks of herself as an intellectual type but never went to college and is in fact a little dim.  (Disch, a smart guy who was very well-read, likes to laugh at dolts; remember "Problems of Creativeness"?)  She is so lonely that she has an imaginary boyfriend, Daniel.  Linda develops uterine cancer, but, in her delusions, thinks she is pregnant with Daniel's child. She gets a dog (that's Spike) and pretends/believes it is her child.  (Spike bites people, including Linda.)  When she dies of her cancer, the hospital puts Linda's tumors on display--they are of record-breaking size.  As all parents hope, Linda's memory will live on thanks to her offspring!

Sad, but with some laugh-out-loud moments of black humor, Disch scores a hit with this brief (seven pages) story and justifies my purchase and all the hype.

"Transient" by Langdon Jones  (1965)

This was a New Worlds cover story.  (Look how classy and serious this '65 cover is compared to the '67 collage cover by Charles Platt and Christopher Finch.  One looks like the bulletin put out by a staid art museum and the other looks like a zine handed out on a street corner by stoners.) Moorcock in his intro to the six-page piece says it is "transitional," a break from Jones' earlier work that shows some similarities to his later work, like the triptych "Eye of the Lens," which I (and Joachim Boaz before me) wrote about recently.

Our narrator wakes up in a hospital bed.  Jones has cleverly primed us to think that the narrator has been revived from death, but this is only metaphorically true--halfway through the story we learn that the narrator is a chimpanzee who has been operated on so as to have human-level intelligence and has had implanted into his brain facility with spoken English.  The story is a tragedy, because the treatment only has effect for two hours, and our narrator spends those two hours in misery, knowing he will soon lose his miraculous intelligence and return to his natural "state of mindless half-life."

(Compare with Daniel Keyes' famous Flowers for Algernon, which I had to read in school.)

Like the Disch story, "Transient" is a short and touching story about the mind and psychological anguish.  So far this collection is living up to its back cover promise to "blow the mind."

"The Source" by Brian Aldiss (1965)

In the far future mankind has colonized the universe and founded innumerable complex and sophisticated cultures.  People live so long that their brains fill up with trivia and periodically "the Machines" have to "expunge the dross" from your brain or you will start going a little bonkers.  In this story Kervis XI leads an expedition of "Seekers" to Earth, cradle of humanity, in quest of "the peak of man's greatness."  The Seekers are disappointed to find Earth's cities in ruins, and Earthlings living like primitives.  But Kervis XI, who has been skipping his brain-cleaning treatments, isn't ready to give up on Earth yet.

In a series of increasingly surreal scenes (it is often not clear if he is seeing reality, having spiritual visions, or just going cukoo) Kervis XI crosses a forest, enters a walled city, navigates a maze, and meets a woman who (I think) warns him that technology and sophistication are yokes that limit you even if you don't realize it.  In the end of the story Kervis XI decides to stay on Earth with the primitives and live the simple life of subsistence agriculture, playing pipes and dancing around a fire.

This story is just OK.  The start is good, but I find long dreamy sequences boring and I feel like I've been exposed to this "back to nature" message way too many times, and it is a message that is not that convincing.  Sure, I like to go to the woods and see birds and turtles and all that for a few hours, but then I like to go home to the air-conditioning, running water and my books.

"Dr. Gelabius" by Hilary Bailey (1968)

Way back in 2014 I declared Hilary Bailey's "Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth" to be the best story in the wacky experimental anthology Quark/3.  Bailey was married to Moorcock from 1969 to 1978, and seems to be into that thing where you write a sequel to a famous literary work; she has produced sequels to Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw, Jane Eyre, and Goodbye to Berlin, as well as a book about Sherlock Holmes' smarter sister Charlotte and her colleague, Mary Watson.

In this three-page tale we meet the title doctor, in his lab, surrounded by scores of live human fetuses in jars full of amniotic fluid.  Dr. Gelabius is part of a decades-old joint American-European project to improve the human race!  The babies in the transparent artificial wombs are the product of sperm and ova from the finest human specimens, carefully selected.  After birth they will be placed with equally carefully selected couples.  As adults, they will enrich the world with their good works and by spreading their superior genes.    

Well, not all of them.  The doctor examines each jar in turn, notes ten defective specimens, disposes of them.  Then a woman bursts into the room and, crying out "You killed my baby," blasts him with a pistol.  It seems not everybody is onboard with this whole race-improving program!

Bailey's images and style are good, but there's no real story here, just an idea.  This thing is almost like a prose poem.  Of course, if it been presented to me by one of the poets I know as a prose poem, I would have said, "This is a great poem, it's almost like a SF story!"

"The Valve Transcript" by Joel Zoss

Here we have another of the unspecified "six top authors" mentioned on the cover of the US edition of Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4.  In his intro to the story Moorcock warns us that this comic piece might take two readings to figure out.  It appears that Zoss achieved greater success as a musician and songwriter than as a science fiction author; he only has four entries on isfdb.

This story, four pages, is the transcript of an interview of a guy who works on big underground pipes that carry natural gas. The interviewer's questions are brief and straightforward, while the worker's answers are long and digressive.  It appears that the worker was sent into a pipe to repair a valve, and instead of returning to the surface via the hatch at which he was awaited, he walked further along the pipe, to egress at a hatch closer to his favorite diner.  (There are hints that the worker prefers to walk in the pipe rather than on the surface because it is cooler and the sun hurts his eyes outside.) Because his supervisors could not find him, they assumed he was still in the pipe, and so couldn't restart the flow of gas, with the result that the company lost vast sums of money.

This story is OK, I guess.  I didn't laugh, but I wasn't irritated, either.

"In Seclusion" by Harvey Jacobs (1966)

Moorcock in his introduction tells us that Jacobs works in American television, and this story is a sort of satire of Hollywood.  An actor and an actress fall in love while on the set of their big film, Beowulf, and break up with their spouses to pursue their relationship.  As a publicity stunt, or something, their studio sends them to a secluded building (an abandoned abbey) on the coast for a sort of retreat.  There they bicker and their relationship approaches collapse.  There are lots of jokes about how the main characters are sexually unfaithful to each other, narcissistic, and poor actors who get by on their looks, jokes which are not funny.

A kaiju-sized sea monster attacks.  The monster, an absurdist joke, is like an amoeba with many different pseudopod-like tentacles; some have fins, some have eyes, some have claws, etc, but also has memories and a personality and a sex drive.  The monster envelops the abbey, and reaches inside with its tentacles to try to devour the actor and rape the actress. For reasons that are supposed to be amusing but which are not, the movie stars survive the attack and one of their enemies, a gossip columnist, is killed instead.  (A bigtime Hollywood story has to have a sinister gossip columnist or theatre critic in it, right?)

Weak.  (Maybe people steeped in Hollywood lore will like it?)  

***********

The Disch and Jones are quite good, actually moving, and the Bailey is good; Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4 was a worthwhile purchase.  The Aldiss and Zoss are not offensively bad, but the Jacobs is the kind of absurdist nonsense that I don't care for, and furthermore is based on a topic (studio-system-era Hollywood) that holds limited interest for me.  (The Leiber, Sladek and B. J. Bayley stories I am passing by for now with tentative plans to read them for single-author blog posts in the unspecified future.)

That's enough highbrow avant garde stuff for a little while; in our next installment I think we'll be seeing some "swashbuckling sword-and-planet adventure."

Important New Wave Stories by Thomas Disch, J. G. Ballard and Langdon Jones

When people talk about the New Wave, one of the things they often mention is Judith Merrill's anthology England Swings SF, first published in 1968.  Now, I don't actually own a copy of England Swings SF, but I do own anthologies by two of the most famous and prolific New Wave writers, Thomas M. Disch and J. G. Ballard, which include some of their stories from England Swings SF. Additionally, Joachim Boaz, indefatigable SF blogger and promoter of SF which has faded from memory and perhaps deserves to be more widely read, has generously provided me access to the story by Langdon Jones which was printed in England Swings SF. So, let's check them out and try to gain some kind of insight into the New Wave phenomenon!

"The Squirrel Cage" by Thomas Disch (1967)

I've already praised Tom Disch on this blog numerous times, but Disch has done work I'm not crazy about (when I read them in the aughts, I thought Genocides overwrought and mediocre and Echo Round His Bones and Mankind Under the Leash left me cold) so there's no guarantee I'm going to love this one. "The Squirrel Cage" first appeared in the issue of New Worlds with Charles Platt's The Garbage World.  I read Disch's tale in my 1980 Bantam edition of Fundamental Disch.

Don't tell my wife, but I have had a
crush on this garbage girl for quite a while

"The Squirrel Cage" is one of those stories in which a guy is trapped in a mysterious high tech prison and has no idea how he got there or who put him there.  For some psychological reason I am afraid to carefully dig into, I love stories in which a guy is in a prison and his cell constitutes his entire universe (Araminta Station by Jack Vance and Cage A Man by F. M. Busby come to mind at once as particularly effective SF examples), so "The Squirrel Cage" was right up my alley.  Disch uses the story as an allegory of life (of course), how we all are truly alone and can't know why we are here and have no real understanding of the universe because we cannot trust our senses.  It is also, more specifically, about the psychological reality of being a writer--the prisoner has access to a typewriter, and the text we are reading is things he has typed on his machine.  However, the narrator's typewriter neither admits nor produces paper--the narrator has no reason to believe anybody is even reading what he is writing! (He hopefully fantasizes that his words are being reproduced electronically somewhere and read by someone, maybe lots of people.)  On the last page of the story, when we learn the name of the narrator ("Disch"), he admits that even more terrifying than this lonely meaningless life in the antiseptic prison is the thought of being forced to leave it; a comment on our fear of death or perhaps Disch's own horror at the thought of having to make a living doing work more onerous than writing?

I think "The Squirrel Cage" also serves as a sort of satire of people who learn everything about the world via the New York Times--every day a new copy of the Times appears in the cell and the previous day's copy vanishes.  The newspaper is the only contact the prisoner has, apparently, ever had with any other living entity, and it is his only source of information.  One passage (in which the narrator wishes he could keep the papers and pile them up into walls and corridors) reminded me of the famous Collyer brothers, and perhaps the whole story is a sort of subtle reference or homage to them.

Both bleak and amusing, "The Squirrel Cage" is well-written (Disch has a smooth and engaging style) and compelling.  I liked the "New Yorkiness" of it, and there's also the sad frisson I get whenever I read references to suicide in a Disch story.  Worth a look!                

"The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" by J. G. Ballard (1966)

As with Disch, I have really liked some Ballard, but also been disappointed by him (I know Joachim loves it, but I found Drowned World tedious and silly.)

In this sexiest of blog posts there is even something for the ladies: it's every woman's dreamPTboat, JFK!

"The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" first appeared in the magazine Ambit, and in New Worlds the next year.  This is a two-page gimmick story, an imitation or pastiche of a similarly brief gimmick story by Alfred Jarry ("The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race"), larded with dumb jokes and lame puns.  I guess the story is supposed to say something about our society's obsession with celebrity and political violence, and also to suggest LBJ and/or the citizens of Dallas or the American people as a whole are somehow complicit in or responsible for the JFK murder. There are lots of people who like this sort of flashy cleverness and irreverence, but to me this kind of thing is hollow and a waste of my time--as I suppose I have said before online, I'm sick of absurdist humor in which any random shit can happen and of humor based on references to other works of fiction or to celebrities or historical events.

You gotta read this thing because it is "important," but I think it is a facile scam.

"Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" by J. G. Ballard (1966)

Woah, maybe this post needs a
NSFW tag or a trigger warning!

Here we have a story in the same vein, a gimmicky JFK murder-related story about how people are sexually aroused by violence and by automobiles.  This one is in the form of a dry scientific report about therapy involving catering to the desires of mental patients to assassinate celebrities. Jokes include a clinical reference to a man inserting his penis into a car's exhaust. Presumably this was shocking in 1966, but we are now living in a permissive society in which some of us, me included, are almost entirely shocked out.

Like "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" first appeared in Ambit.  I read both of these stories in my copy of the 2001 edition of The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard.

While the Disch story deals with timeless issues, these Ballard stories are very time sensitive, very topical, very much focused on celebrities and events current in 1966.  I sometimes think including references to some "iconic" contemporary celebrity or event is an act of laziness on the part of the writer--instead of doing the work of inspiring the reader to feel by creating a character or a mood, the writer takes the shortcut of just invoking our ready-made feelings about, in this case, the bogus "Camelot" of the early '60s.  This maybe works on people who were old enough to pay attention to the news in 1963, but I was born in 1971, so the murder of JFK has no more emotional resonance with me than the murder of Julius Caesar or Cicero.

(If I am comparing them, Disch's story also has good writing, while these Ballard stories seem like loud jokes meant to dazzle you with their irreverence.)

"The Hall of Machines" by Langdon Jones (1968)

"The Hall of Machines" first appeared in New Worlds along with its two companion pieces, "The Coming of the Sun" and "The Eye of the Lens;" together, there three pieces form a triptych known as "The Eye of the Lens."  Joachim has shared with me all three of the components of "The Eye of the Lens," and I will discuss them all here, even though only the first appeared in England Swings SF.

(Check out Joachim's review of this triptych, and Langdon's entire collection of the same name; we actually cover different ground and have somewhat contesting and complementary views of the work.)

I guess Jones is one of the "etceteras."

"The Hall of Machines" consists of the notes of a scholar from some alternate universe (though see below) about an indescribably vast building which houses massive automatic machines of numerous types.  Most of the text is detailed description of various of the machines; one that consists of shiny blades making elaborate cuts (a "Death Machine"), one which extrudes tiny machines from a tube ("The Mother"), a colossal "Clock" made up of a huge spring and innumerable precise gears whose face is turned away from any possible viewer, and more.

I'm going to have to guess that the mysterious Hall of Machines represents the universe, and that the story is about how the laws that govern our lives seem mechanistic, predictable, and open to close inspection, but are so complex as to be practically indecipherable, and are bereft of any values or spiritual meaning.  Jones provides a clue, however, that this story does take place in our universe, and that he is making, or the reader is expected to make, some kind of ethical judgement: the word "Auschwitz" is inscribed on one of the three Death Machines.

"The Hall of Machines" reminded me of Herman Melville's 1855 "The Tartarus of Maids," which also includes detailed descriptions of allegorical machines.  It also reminded me of Thomas Ligotti's 1996 "The Red Tower," which, as I remember it, is just a description by an investigator of an old sinister factory, presumably in some alternate universe.

Jones presents vivid and exciting images, sets a powerful mood and gets the reader thinking.  Quite good.

"The Coming of the Sun" by Langdon Jones (1968)

"The Coming of the Sun" is a series of connected vignettes, spread over 22 pages, dealing with recurring themes that include insanity, fire, sex, religion, and the sun. The first of these 16 vignettes, a compelling character study of a pyromaniac imbecile, is very good, but after this very entertaining beginning the vignettes become increasingly tedious.  One, involving a grocer kicking a pair of mating dogs, is a shocking and memorable piece of "body horror," but some of the other little tableaus, like a one-and-a-half-page-long description of an elaborate clock burning, and a dream sequence about a guy on a motorcycle driving in circles around and then inside a cathedral, were so repetitive and boring I had trouble keeping my eyes open while I read them.  The last five pages of  "The Coming of the Sun" include poetry that is alternately mind-numbing ("Give me the red and the green of your love--my man, my woman, my child, my God") and groan-inducing ("...an old man masturbates his death-tool and spits white glory at the sun....")  Ugh.  The last page has a drawing of the sun, its flares like tentacles or petals, the words of the last poem jumbled all around it..

When tarbandu talks about the self-indulgence of the New Wave I guess this is the sort of thing he means.  I couldn't sincerely recommend "The Coming of the Sun" to anybody, though it is of academic interest and some might find it "so bad it's good" with its poetry about bloody semen and the cleansing venom of the "sun sun sun."

"The Eye of the Lens" by Langdon Jones (1966)

This one is a description of a film.  (I seem to recall Barry Malzberg resorting to this gag a few times; right now only The Men Inside is coming to mind.)  Jones starts by relating the type of film stock and filters used, and then describes the movie's two actors; all you feminists out there will be thrilled to learn Jones describes the female lead in precise detail over 27 lines, lingering on her breasts and body hair, while dispensing with the labor of describing the male lead in an efficient three lines, even though the man plays two parts.

Banned in Britain?

Then we get what amounts to a script, a description of the shots ("She passes out of the frame, kicking the statuettes idly as she walks") and of the soundtrack.  All you masochists out there will be thrilled to learn that the soundtrack includes just the kind of poetry about love that had us scrambling for cover like an 8.8 cm Flak had zeroed in on us back when we read "The Coming of the Sun"--"love me red with bloody arrows...love me brown, brown as leather..." etc.

The girl walks through a desert, encounters a statue that is crying, then men with flamethrowers who immolate any plants that appear on the desert surface.  (When I was in Denmark, the environmentalist capitol of the world, I saw how they killed weeds with a sort of scaled down flamethrower.  In Iowa I found that they spray Roundup on everything.) She visits a cathedral where a "psychedelic freak out" is taking place, and then comes upon Jesus on the cross. She gets into an argument with Christ, accusing him of being rude, stupid and shallow. In the final scene of the film the girl sits in a field of flowers.

I can't tell if this story is a sincere criticism of Christianity and our society or a parody of an art movie full of banal allegories. Either way it is a bore.

***************

Do these stories tell us anything about the New Wave?  (Let's pretend these stories are our first exposure to this New Wave we've been hearing people argue about.)  Well, they certainly lack many of the very things people tend to look for in conventional science fiction: there is no adventure plot (hell, there is no plot at all), there isn't really much science, and there isn't much speculation on what future societies or stuff in outer space might be like.  It is easy to see why casual SF readers looking for entertainment might be uninterested in the New Wave, and why committed members of the SF community who are into science and interested in what the future will bring might be exasperated by such work.

On the other hand, you can see how these stories would appeal to people who are interested in "serious mainstream literature" and think of themselves as free-thinking individuals or educated radicals.  The stories have the trappings of sophistication: they employ experimental literary techniques and/or abandon traditional literary elements like plot and character; they are pessimistic; they are irreverent or rebellious, implicitly or explicitly criticizing our society and traditional attitudes and beliefs; they include frank sexual content.  The Disch story and parts of the Jones stories are also well-written, and all the stories hope to say something about life or society.  The stories are also connected to long literary, artistic or philosophical traditions.  (And there's the fact that parts of the Jones pieces are difficult to read, and, as we see in academia, sometimes obscurity and tedium can pass for profundity.)

Disch, Ballard and Jones are all obviously thoughtful, well-educated, and capable of good writing--if anything good can come of the New Wave, these are guys who can make that happen--and in this selection I think we can see the golden opportunities presented by the New Wave to able writers, as well as the pitfalls for readers in the New Wave's excesses.  In the same way a quest story or a detective story or an alien invasion story, the kind of thing that has been done a billion times, can be emotionally and intellectually thrilling when it comes from the pen of a talented and dedicated writer, but predictable, shoddy and boring in the hands of the lazy or incompetent, we have to expect that there will be some fine New Wave stories, and some New Wave stories which are a waste of our time.  I think we have seen both kinds here today.

The Sunless World by Neil R. Jones

I have a weakness for stories about guys who put their brains in robot bodies and thus achieve immortality.  A manifestation of my fear of death, perhaps.  So when the wife and I stumbled on a Rotary Club charity book sale in a Fairmont, Minnesota shopping mall and I spotted Ace G-631, The Sunless World by Neil R. Jones, among a pile of westerns and murder mysteries and read its back cover, I decided to take it home.

The Sunless World is a 1967 paperback collection of three stories by Jones first printed in Amazing Stories in the 1930s.  Each stars Professor Jameson, about whom Jones apparently wrote over 20 short stories.  This collection presents the fourth, fifth and sixth stories about Jameson.

We get Jameson's backstory in a brief foreword to this volume.  Jameson, in the 1940s, figures out how to preserve his body after death, and leaves instructions that his corpse upon death be interred in a rocket and launched into orbit around the Earth. (This reminded me of 1957's "Mark Elf" by Cordwainer Smith.)  Forty million years later aliens, the Zoromes, find the rocket orbiting a lifeless Earth.  The Zoromes are brains encased in robot bodies, and obligingly plug Jameson's brain into one of their robot bodies and invite him to accompany them on their journeys through space.  Sounds awesome!

"Into the Hydrosphere" (1933)

This is a fun adventure story full of exotic settings, cool SF ideas, and mass violence.  It reminded me of other 1930s pulp adventures I have read, like those by Edmond Hamilton and Henry Kuttner.

Jameson and the Zoromes have cubic metal bodies with four legs and four tentacle arms.  (Gray Morrow, in creating the cover painting, actually seems to have been following Jones' description.)  They also have telepathy, which comes in handy. And they have the kind of names Star Wars droids have, like "744U-21" and "56F-450," which is kind of annoying for the reader.  Jameson's name is "21MM392," but, thank heavens, for the most part Jones refers to him as "Jameson" or "the professor."

Jameson and his fellow "machine men" decide to investigate a planet that is entirely covered in water.  There they meet and befriend two races of frog people, the Plekne and the Nacac, who live on floating cities made of kelp.  The frog people have never seen land, and their "museum of treasures" consists of rocks they have found in the bellies of dead fish over the years.

The frog people, who have no weapons more powerful than spears, inform their metal-bodied buddies that they are often raided by slavers who live beneath the ocean and have far superior technology.  Sure enough, these jerks attack, taking some of the Zoromes captive.  Luckily Jameson is just knocked into the ocean during the attack. He sinks to the ocean bottom (which is hundreds of miles below the surface) and proceeds to infiltrate and explore the country of the frog men's oppressors.  This "world" at the center of the planet is kind of like Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar, first seen in 1915's At The Earth's Core.  The surface is concave, the inside of the planet's hollow core, and it is lit by an artificial sun that hangs in the geometric center of the planet.  This artificial sun is in fact a city consisting of prisons, an arsenal, and the bright lights that illuminate the surface.

The slavers, the Uchke, are revealed to be "like fragments of an evil dream, their ruthlessness and brutal character plainly stamped on beetling visages," and have four clawed arms, two stumpy legs and torsos seemingly too small for their oversized skulls.  The Uchke are not native to the watery planet, but alien invaders whose submarine settlement is a base where they process slaves and build weaponry to ship back to their home planet. Jameson has no compunctions about massacring these swine retail by strangling them with his tentacles or wholesale by blasting them with ray artillery!

Airships regularly travel between the surface and the aerial city sphere.  Jameson hijacks one of these airships, rescues his fellow Zoromes, seizes the arsenal and inspires a slave revolt among the frog men living in bondage.  He is a leader in the resulting apocalyptic war of ray guns and airships which sees thousands killed and the inner world created by the Uchke absolutely destroyed.  This story is like 65 pages long, so Jones has room to entertain us with scenes in which captured Zoromes have had their legs unscrewed by the Uchke and resort to dragging themselves around by their tentacular arms, descriptions of the various vehicles and weapons involved in the slave war, and other bizarre visions.        

Fun!

"Time's Mausoleum" (1933)

After liberating the ocean planet, the Zor, we are told, travelled to the nearby planet of the Uchke and used their superior technology to blow up a few of the slavers' cities and bring them to the negotiating table.  It turns out that the evil slaver race gets its technology from a secretive and decadent elite of scientists, members of a more advanced species called the Qwux.  Only one of these Qwux, Zlestrm, knows the secret formula for making space ship fuel, and the Zor take him prisoner and carry him out of the system as a means of trapping the slavers on their world and thus protecting the frog people.

The main plot of this story concerns one of Zlestrm's inventions, which he brings with him onto the Zor ship.  It is a device which allows one to look clearly into the past, and to dimly perceive possible futures. Jameson explains how the idea of actual physical time travel is ridiculous and obviously impossible, which I found amusing because such time travel is a staple of SF.

The Zor ship, with its score of machine men and poor Zlestrm, flies across the galaxy for a few years (!) and comes to the now barren Earth, where Jameson uses the time viewing device to watch the Earth formed when a wandering star passes by Sol, witness the Crusades and the Napoleonic Wars, and observe as his nephew inters him in his rocket and launches him into space.  Then Jameson and the Zoromes (and poor Zlestrm) observe several million years of human evolution, political and economic development including space colonies and interplanetary war, and so on.

This is one of those stories in which the characters are primarily observers rather than participants, which I find to be a drag.  There is little drama, especially since we already learned in the foreword how Jameson came to achieve immortality.  Jones tries to inject levity by having the town drunk see Jameson's nephew snatching Jameson's body from the cemetery.  I kept hoping Zlestrm, whom the Zoromes had basically kidnapped and taken from his home (for years!) and whose genius and labor they were exploiting without offering him any kind of remuneration, would make a break for freedom or seek revenge or something.  However he does nothing but fret that his food supply and air supply (the Zoromes, of course, need no food or air) is running out; I guess he really was as effete and decadent as he seemed.

There is finally some drama at the end of the story when the time viewing device malfunctions and Zlestrm, who of course doesn't have an impregnable metal body like the Zoromes, is killed.  My dreams of Zlestrm playing the role of the Doctor Zachary Smith of the Zor ship over the next 10 or 15 Jameson stories were dashed.

I don't think I can really recommend this one; nothing much happens, and the most interesting character is unceremoniously killed.  Zlestrm the Qwux, I will not forget you!

"The Sunless World" (1934)

The Zor ship arrives at a huge planet which is just travelling through space, unconnected to any solar system.  The planet's interior is a honeycomb of tunnels and passages, and Professor Jameson and his fellow machine men encounter two alien races down there.

Remember how in Gods of Mars (1913), by our man Edgar Rice Burroughs, we learned that the people of Barsoom had been fooled into believing in a dopey religion which had them, just after becoming eligible for that sweet senior citizen discount at the Greater Helium Dunkin' Donuts, travelling to a secluded area which was supposed to be a paradisiacal afterlife but which instead was where they were devoured by monsters?  In "The Sunless World," Jameson, 34T-11 and 6W-438 meet the people of Ayt, who have a centuries-old superstition which leads them to send the elderly and criminals to a cavern full of bones where they are eaten by a brutish race of voracious creeps.  It is believed that, if this sacrifice is not made regularly, these creeps will attack and overthrow the city of Ayt.

Jameson and his mechanical comrades refute the native people's dumb religion, and lead them in a terrific war against the monsters.  At the same time this war is going on the hollow planet is hurtling into a solar system, on a collision course with a planet!  A demolition team of Zoromes blows up this planet (!) but a little too late; massive pieces of the exploding planet hit the hollow planet of the Ayt people, causing tremendous earthquakes which kill 75% of the Ayt population.  But with their religion abandoned, their enemies devastated, and their formerly wandering planet now in an orbit around a star, the Ayt people have a bright future ahead of them!

While not as good as "Into the Hydrosphere," "The Sunless World" is pretty fun. There are lots of cool things going on, like Jameson's fall through a shaft hundreds of miles deep, that cavern full of mountains of bones, the very weird monsters (the morphology Jones comes up for them is unusual and interesting), and Jameson's temporary imprisonment in the Ayt city, when the natives think he is the leader of the monsters.

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Taken as a whole, The Sunless World is an entertaining old-fashioned space adventure book about technology, astronomy, and waging wars in the interest of justice.  There's no love or sex (I told you our hero was in a robot body, right?) and almost no character relationships (I told you our hero's comrades don't even have names, right? Well, they don't have personalities, either.  You know who had a personality?  Zlestrm the Qwux had a personality, and you saw where that got him!)  But Jones makes all the aliens, locales and fights work, and I will certainly buy the other volumes in Ace's Professor Jameson series should I come across them in my travels.