From Great Science Fiction of the 20th Century: Davidson, Budrys & Knight

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are flipping through Great Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century, a glamorous 1987 reskin of 1980's The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction.  In our last episode we looked at the stories penned by Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury that editors Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg selected for the volume; today let's read their picks from the bodies of work of Avram Davidson, Algis Budrys, and Damon Knight, three writers about whom I've scribbled a bit in the last few months.

"Or All the Seas With Oysters" by Avram Davidson (1958)

This story won a Hugo after first appearing in Galaxy and has been anthologized many times, including by Neil Gaiman.  (I hear Neil Gaiman is one of the favorites of the kids these days.)

I guess "Or All the Seas With Oysters" might qualify as a joke story, but it is more sophisticated, at least in style, than the broad and absurdist joke stories I am always complaining about here at the blog.  Two men run a bike shop.  One, Oscar, is a hearty chap who seduces a lot of women and whose attitude is to take life as it comes, to make the best of the situations you find.  His partner is Ferd, a shy nervous type who reads books and worries over the things he reads about in the newspaper.

To make a long story short, over the course of Davidson's tale, clever and sensitive Ferd realizes that some sort of weird creature, one that looks like a safety pin in its larval form, a clothes hanger in an intermediate form, and a bicycle in its mature form, has infiltrated human society--Davidson's gimmick here is based on commonplace observations that you can never find a safety pin when you need one and that one's closet is always filled with superfluous coat hangers.  The story's punchline is the contrast between how Ferd and Oscar respond to this astonishing discovery and what fates their reactions lead them to.

One of the sophisticated aspects of the story is how Davidson doesn't make it too obvious which of the two men we should identify with, and whether we should view the story as a terrible tragedy or something of a goof.  Similarly, there is a vague reference to Ferd suffering anxiety over reading about communists in the newspaper, and Davidson doesn't let on whether Ferd is worried about the threat posed by the communists who are murdering and enslaving millions of people in Eastern Europe and China, or sympathizing with leftist Hollywood screenwriters whose careers are suffering some obstacles due to their beliefs.  This sort of ambiguity allows the reader to comfortably assume Davidson sees the world as he sees it, or forces the more thoughtful reader to think twice, which adds value to the story. 

Despite my aversion to absurd joke stories, I enjoyed and am recommending this one.  Over time Davidson is growing on me.

"Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night" by Algis Budrys (1961)

As has Davdison, Budrys, about whom I was skeptical when this blog first lurched on to the interwebs from the recesses of my fevered brain, has been growing on me.  Like "Or All the Seas With Oysters," "Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night" first appeared in Galaxy.  It would go on to be included in a number of anthologies, including Isaac Asimov and Greenberg's The Great SF Stories #23, which also includes a story we at MPorcius Fiction Log liked, R. A. Lafferty's "Rainbird," and two stories we loved, Jack Vance's "Moon Moth" and Cordwainer Smith's "A Planet Named Shayol."

It is the future--the 21st century!  Rufus Sollenar is an optical engineer and a successful businessman, who surveys beautiful Manhattan from his office atop a skyscraper--he can even see spaceships taking off and landing out at the Long Island spaceport.  He is on top of the world, his firm having just started manufacturing a new kind of TV, EmpaVid, that interacts directly with the viewer's emotions via subliminal messages and a biofeedback mechanism.  But word comes of trouble--a rival firm, that of Cortwright Burr, has been working with Martian engineers--the native Martians are a dying race, but they have all kinds of mysterious technology.  Presumably Burr has returned to Earth with an entertainment system superior to EmpaVid, putting Sollenar's firm, and all those who have invested in it, in terrible financial risk.

Utilizing some of the many gadgets and devices featured in this story, Sollenar launches a one-man commando raid on Burr's office and tries to assassinate him and steal his Martian technology.  But it seems that Burr has been given Martian immortality treatments and is almost indestructible!  A shattered, scarred and half-disguised Burr begins to haunt Sollenar at his office, at a big party, on the commercial space ship Sollenar takes to Mars to meet the Martian engineers himself.  On Mars, Sollenar and we readers realize that there are no Martian immortality treatments, that Sollenar is not being pursued by an immortal Burr revenant, but is hallucinating such persecution because Burr, using the hypnotic entertainment device he acquired from the Martian engineers, laid a trap for Sollenar, whom he expected to kill him.

Sollenar is, however, in fact being pursued by somebody, an agent representing an association of all the companies of the broadcast industry--this association enforces agreements and looks out for the broadcast industry's collective interests, and has decided that Sollenar, who is acting like a nut and thus putting all their investments in EmpaVid at risk, should be killed.  As the story ends Sollenar lays a trap for his killer similar to that which Burr laid for him.     

This is a solid SF story full of futuristic devices and processes and mysterious aliens; there is also, implicitly, the criticism of TV and big business we see in so much SF.  Budrys is a good writer and the images in New York and on Mars and the pacing throughout are quite satisfactory.  I have to admit that I was a little disappointed when I realized that Burr was not really a living-dead avenger chasing his assassin all over Manhattan's towers and the red planet's wastes, that it was all an illusion--I guess I have a childish fascination with immortality, revenge narratives and chases, as well as limited patience with "it was all a dream" stories.  But Budrys makes it work, and I can recommend "Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night."

(I'm glad I can give the thumbs up to two stories from Galaxy in this blog post, because I don't want people to think my lukewarm reaction to a bunch of Galaxy stories a few blog posts ago means I am some kind of irrational Galaxy-hater.)

"Stranger Station" by Damon Knight (1956)

"Stranger Station" got top billing on the cover of the issue of F&SF with the third installment of the serialized version of Robert Heinlein's Door Into Summer and a striking cover by Kelly Freas.  Like the other stories we have been talking about, it has been widely anthologized, and was selected for republication by, among others, respected anthologist Judith Merril and British men of letters Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest.

This is a traditional sort of SF story about space stations, a talking computer that may very well have developed a personality, psychic interaction between human and alien, and trying to figure out alien motives.

A century ago Earth astronauts encountered on Titan extrasolar aliens, colossal arthropod-like creatures with many limbs whose proximity caused an intense psychological pressure to the humans.  The aliens apparently also suffer from psychic contact with humans, and their suffering causes them to exude a fluid; this fluid, when taken by humans, greatly extends the human lifespan.

By the time of our story the process of trading with these aliens has been regularized, and human civilization is reliant on the alien longevity goop.  A space station orbits the Earth, and every twenty years a human spends a few months in one living compartment of the station, while an alien does the same in a huge adjacent compartment.  The mental stress on the human of being so close to the alien for such a long time is tremendous and tends to drive the human volunteer insane, though the details of that insanity, and what the aliens actually look like, is kept a secret from the common people.  The plot of "Stranger Station" covers one such period of interment at the station with the alien, that of Paul Wesson--we follow Wesson's wavering mental health, his relationship with the computer that runs the station and is meant to keep him company, and his efforts to figure out the aliens' motives for giving us this invaluable secretion for free.

There are many SF stories that contrast belligerent humanity with pacific aliens, and "Stranger Station" is one of them.  Wesson comes to believe that the elephantine bug-like aliens are not violent, and would thus be at the mercy of the aggressive human race when, in one hundred years or whatever, we invent an interstellar drive.  Contact with an alien mind alters a human's mind, making it more like that of the alien--for example, Wesson loses the ability to read and speak English during his exposure to the alien brainwaves--and Wesson theorizes that he is being manipulated into becoming a member of "the vanguard--the conquered men, the ones who would get along with their strange brothers, out among the alien stars."  The E.T.s are preemptively colonizing our psyches before we can colonize their planets!

This alien plan of altering our brains so we will be like them is characterized (as you might guess from the use of the word "brother" in the quote above) as "conquering by love," but in this case love is no match for good old hate!  Wesson's will, his ability to hate the hideous alien whose body "reminded him of all the loathsome, crawling, creeping things the Earth was full of" overcomes the alien efforts to adapt his brain and make it accept brotherhood with those freaks.  The alien dies, and in its death throes wrecks the space station, which Wesson presumes will mean an end to the goop handout, triggering human resentment and, when the human race does achieve interstellar travel, a campaign of revenge on the peaceful aliens.

A concurrent and interconnected subplot is how the computer may have developed free will and if so may be falling in love with Wesson.  The computer seems to break the rules a bit at Wesson's request, letting Wesson see a forbidden video feed of the repulsive oozing space monster that wants to be his brother, and it seems possible that it is this rule breaking that gives Wesson the ability to resist alien influence and set off the chain of events that will end the goop giveaway and set us on the road to interstellar war with these peaceful aliens.  Has love of computer for human tragically ruined any hope of love between alien and human...or rescued us from unnatural bondage to disgusting alien weirdos, from a betrayal of our essential nature?

(While I am holding on to the possibility that Wesson and his computer girlfriend should be seen as heroes for preserving human independence and free will from the machinations of giant alien hypno-bugs, Silverberg and Greenberg here in their intro to "Stranger Station" suggest Wesson's resistance is irrational racism.)

A good story.  I have been down on many of Knight's stories over the years, but I enjoyed "Stranger Station" and definitely recommend it.

**********

Three good stories.  Maybe we'll read more from Great Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century in the future.

"War-Gods of the Void," "Thunder in the Void," and "Soldiers of Space" by Henry Kuttner

Some years ago I purchased Haffner Press's 2012 collection of Henry Kuttner space operas, Thunder in the Void.  So far I have read eight of the thick volume's sixteen stories and discussed them across four blog posts:

"We Guard the Black Planet" (which I read in Sam Moskowitz's Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction)

"Raider of the Space Ways" and "Avengers of Space"

"The Time Trap" and "The Lifestone"

"Monsters of the Atom," "Red Gem of Mercury" and "The Crystal Circe"

Today, let's read three more of these tales of adventure.  These stories were first published in 1942 and 1943 in science fiction magazines and did not appear in book form until seven decades later, here in Thunder in the Void.  If you are so inclined, you can read the stories yourself for free at the internet archive in scans of the original magazines; I recommend checking these magazines out, as they are all quite fun, and because the texts may actually be easier to read there, because the scanning process introduced some errors into the texts here in Thunder in the Void.

"War-Gods of the Void" (1942)

"War-Gods of the Void" was first seen by readers of Planet Stories, where it is adorned with a picture of a man shooting a fishman in the face, a nice companion to the cover, where we see a woman shooting a fishman in the head.  (This is your trigger to wade into the philosophical and scientific controversy over whether fish feel pain.)  This issue of Planet Stories also includes an illustration by Damon Knight, who is far more famous for his editing and criticism--and for having his name added to the SFWA Grand Master Award twenty-seven years after the award was first given out--as well as a long letter from Sam Moskowitz seeking to refute some of Knight's criticisms of his story, "Man of the Stars."  I guess this letter constitutes one small blast in the long-running Moskowitz-Futurian feud.

Stocky Jerry Vanning is a cop, and he is on the trail of Don Callahan, a former diplomat and a would-be leaker who has got a hold of a secret treaty that, if revealed to the public, could cause a revolution!  Callahan is a master of disguise as well as an aspiring whistle blower, but Vanning has a sharp eye and has tracked him to the swampy hell that is Venus, where foolhardy Terran colonists farm herbs and "mola" trees and risk catching a virus that drives you insane.  When you catch North-Fever all you want to do is march north into the jungle, and nothing and nobody can stop you!  (Hmmm, doesn't this kind of thing happen to the guy in J. G. Ballard's Drowned World?)

Callahan caught North-Fever just before Vanning arrived, and Vanning catches it a few hours later and starts his march north through the swamp.  When you have North-Fever you don't eat, and you ignore pain, so, by the time Vanning gets to the mountains and the fever passes, he is a bloody emaciated wreck--there is a level of sensationalistic violence and gore in this story, as in some other of Kuttner's stories in this collection.

In the mountains, Vanning learns the truth of the North-Fever.  Living up there are a bunch of fish people who think of themselves as war gods.  These jokers have a highly advanced medical technology, and for centuries have used a virus they engineered to get people--first the mammalian human-like Venusians who live to the south and now Earth people as well--to make the trek up to their mountain fastness so they can enslave them.  (Could this story have been inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs's classic Gods of Mars?)  Many victims of the fever die during their long march, but that is perfectly acceptable to the fishmen--they only want strong slaves, after all!  Among the slaves Vanning meets an Earthwoman, Lysla, and is bunked with three other men, two humans and a Venusian.  Vanning is sure one of these three men is Callahan in disguise, but cannot tell which one.

These five characters manage to escape bondage, thanks in part to Callahan's ability to disguise himself as a fishman, and they inflict a terrible punishment on the fish people--Vanning figures out a way to infect them all with the North Fever, so they all march north out of the city...into a pool of lava!  Not only does Vanning free Venus from the tyranny of their false gods and their plague, he also gets that unpopular secret treaty from Callahan and destroys it.  Grateful for Callahan's help, Vanning lets that traitorous member of the deep state to escape.

A fun story.  The use of a secret treaty that ordinary people won't like as a McGuffin is perhaps a hint that Kuttner was skeptical of American foreign policy (see more below!)

"Thunder in the Void" (1942)

"Thunder in the Void" was the lead story (labelled a "Science Fiction Novel," though it is just 32 pages here in book form) of the October 1942 issue of Astonishing Stories.  This issue of Astonishing includes a short column on the war-related activities of SF writers, another on the joys of searching used bookstores for old SF books, and another on a section of H. G. Wells' Time Machine that appeared in the magazine version but was often left out of book publications.

A brief foreword provides background on the three races said to live in our Solar System.  There is the human race of Earth, about whom you presumably already know--at the time of this story we have achieved space flight.  Then there are the Varra, people of pure energy who live in the void between the planets and stars--they are friendly, but cannot survive within the atmosphere of a planet.  Then there are the vampiric devils who live on Pluto, the dark world of evil!  These monsters don't have space flight, but their psychic powers can reach across millions of miles of space and suck the life force out of human spacefarers!  Luckily, these psychic powers can't penetrate an atmosphere.  The Varra are immune to the Plutonian's diabolical powers, and individual Earth astronauts buddy up with individual Varra via the medium of a communications helmet, and these friendly balls of energy provide some protection from the Plutonians' soul-sucking brain rays.

Our hero for this caper is Saul Duncan, convicted murderer!  Duncan was born in a slum, but passed space pilot training and had a lucrative and prestigious job flying space ships when a guy groped his wife, Andrea!  Duncan killed the groper with his bare hands, and got ten years in the clink at the North Pole!  As our story begins, Duncan, half way through his sentence, has escaped from prison with the help of Brent Olcott, the famously handsome and unscrupulous businessman.  Olcott has a job for an expert pilot with nothing to lose--hijacking a space ship carrying a valuable cargo (a pound of radium) from Mars to Earth!  Because Duncan will be committing a major crime, he can't wear a Varra helmet while on this job--those Varra are real square, like, "hand in glove with the government," as Olcott puts it, and would immediately rat out a hijacker!  To make sure the hijacked ship doesn't call for help, Olcott already has hooked up Andrea with a job on the ship and instructed her to wreck its communications gear right before the scheduled hijacking!

This is one dangerous mission, but Duncan is stuck--if he doesn't hijack the ship his wife will be arrested for breaking the ship's radio at the appointed hour and probably be sent to the North Pole prison Duncan just broke out of.  But wily Duncan tricks Olcott and the alcoholic scientist who installed illegal stealth equipment on the ship Duncan is to pilot, Rudy Hartman, into coming on this risky venture with him!  The three crooks blast off and are soon flying alongside the civilian ship, demanding they send over the radium and Andrea.  But Duncan gets a heartbreaking message via the flickering Morse code lights: when Andrea turned off her Varra helmet, severing her connection with a Varra so she could commit her sabotage unobserved, the Plutonians sucked out her life force! 

The innocent civilians send over Andrea's corpse in a space suit and the box of radium, and then Duncan goes on a suicide mission to Pluto, determined to exact revenge on the vampires of that black planet and on Olcott and Hartman, the swine who callously put his wife in harm's way in the first place.  Olcott and Hartman are killed on this adventure after almost outwitting Duncan.

On Pluto, Duncan discovers the shocking, mind-blowing, paradigm-shifting truth: there are no Plutonian vampires!  It is the Varra who are the vampires!  Those duplicitous balls of energy fabricated the story of the Plutonians to facilitate building up a relationship with human beings so they could slowly suck us dry and so they had a convincing explanation ready when one of them decided to just devour somebody's life force whole.  Duncan gets a message back to Earth exposing the truth, but the measures he must take to keep the Varra from stopping him end his life.

An exciting story full of tragedy and death, with some surprises (I thought Duncan was going to go to Pluto and somehow get his wife's soul put back in her body), plus lots of strange science revolving around aliens and space travel.  I like it.

"Soldiers of Space" (1943)

The issue of Astonishing Stories that carried "Soldiers of Space" (along with stories by two people we have talked about at length here at MPorcius Log, Robert Bloch and Leigh Brackett) includes many letters praising Henry Kuttner, including one from Chad Oliver, the anthropologist SF writer.  Oliver says of Kuttner's "The Crystal Circe" that it "is a story that I, for one, shall never forget," and he awards Kuttner's "Night of Gods" 9.8 points out of a possible ten.  Oliver is a very precise reviewer--in the same letter he awards Malcolm Jameson's "Taa the Terrible" a 9.6½!

It is the future!  (The future, Conan?) The year 2000!  Gregory Lash, our narrator, is a veteran of the war that raged between Earth and Mars in the early Nineties!  He was a space ship pilot who won many dog fights against those rat bastards from the red planet, but what is he today, six years later?  A hobo who rides the (mono)rails!  The modern world has no place for a space pilot like Greg, who flew by the seat of his pants--today's flyboys fly by instruments!  And there is no work for low-skilled laborers--machines do everything, including washing dishes!  So men like Greg, who risked their lives for Mother Earth, are out on the streets!

Tonight Greg sits all alone in the wilds of Wyoming, eating "Mulligan." A space fighter just like the one Greg flew in the war crash lands nearby.  Greg gets in and finds the pilot unconscious, and messages coming in from Denver, so Greg flies the ship to Denver, where he learns it is being used for a movie about the war.  Thirty war veteran pilots, men bitter and always on a short fuse because they feel that, after they won the war for Mother Earth, she cruelly abandoned them, are today risking their lives doing stunt flying for the film, and the movie's budget is so low they aren't even getting a wage, just room and board!  With nothing better to do, Greg joins this crew.

One of these pilots is an old comrade of Greg's, Bruce Vane.  (Yeah, I know.)  Vane has a psychological problem--during the war he almost died in a crash on the asteroid known as Cerberus, and after that he would faint when he had to fly near Cerberus.  Well, guess where filming is resuming tomorrow, now that the government has outlawed the dangerous practice of filming space ship stunts in Earth's atmosphere?

Nobody knows about Vane's "spaceshock" except for Greg, so the film's director, Dan Helsing (yeah, I know), orders Vane to fly dangerously close to Cerberus, and Greg has to prevent him from passing out.

As we readers have been suspecting since the start of the story, the Martians' secret fleet appears and the only people who can stop it (the main Earth fleet is out by Venus because the Venusians are revolting) are these 30 men and their old space fighters.  They succeed because the Martian pilots are young people who have learned instrument, not seat-of-your-pants, flying.  Vane even overcomes his fear of Cerberus when he has to rescue Helsing, whose damaged craft is about to crash on Cerberus.

It is certainly interesting to see Kuttner write so much about shellshocked fighting men and about how society has abandoned servicemen (and this right in the middle of World War II!) and about how automation is putting low-skilled workers out of work.  Still, the stuff about the pilots coincidentally being in the right place at the right time to save an ungrateful Earth yet again is a little cheesy and contrived.  Another issue with the story is that Kuttner jams it full of material that he doesn't have room to explore.  There is, for example, tension between Vane and Helsing because they are both sweet on the same woman, a subplot that I think maybe should have gotten more attention or just been left out.

I am going to call this one acceptable.  Because of its social and political dimensions, "Soldiers of Space" is probably more interesting to scholars than "Thunder in the Void" or "War-Gods of the Void."  (It perhaps bears comparison to Kuttner's 1937 story "We Are the Dead," in which a ghost rises up from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery to urge a powerful senator to oppose legislation that will get the U.S. involved in foreign entanglements that might lead to American boys again fighting overseas.  Did Kuttner think the efforts of the United States government to punish Japan for its crimes in Asia and to help the British in their struggle with Germany and Italy before Pearl Harbor were a mistake?)  But I think "Soldiers of Space" is less entertaining to us readers of adventure stories than the other two tales we are looking at today.

**********

Three worthwhile reads.  Five stories remain in Thunder in the Void, and I plan to read them all at some unspecified point or points in the future.

Stories from Galaxy by E. E. Smith, F. Leiber, F. Pohl, D. Knight and C. D. Simak

My copy

I feel like a lot of critics are down on Astounding and the adventure-oriented pulps like Planet Stories and Startling Stories because they privileged the hard sciences and sensationalism (endless sword fights, ray gun fights, monsters and hot babes) over "sophisticated" literary values and the sorts of political and social concerns that excite the smart set.  These critics champion F&SF and Galaxy.  Myself, I love Astounding and Planet Stories and Startling Stories, but that doesn't mean I have anything against F&SF or Galaxy.  Let's check out five stories from the battered copy of The Third Galaxy Reader I bought in September for 50 cents from Second Story Books, that bright spot in the wretched hive of scum and villainy known as Washington, D.C.

"The Vilbar Party" by Evelyn E. Smith (1955)

The wikipedia page on Galaxy is full of quotes and paraphrases about how awesome Galaxy was.  Here is a paraphrase of a sentiment credited to Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove, the source cited being their Trillion Year Spree:

...through the influence of its reduced focus on technology, [Galaxy] played an important role in attracting women to write science fiction.

At the risk of misgendering somebody, I will suggest that the only woman in The Third Galaxy Reader is Evelyn E. Smith.  I read Smith's 1961 story "Softly While You're Sleeping" and was totally into it, so I have no fear about trying "The Vilbar Party."  But wait, Aldiss and Wingrove are quoted at wikipedia saying (in Trillion Year Spree):

[Galaxy] brought into the sunlight a number of excellent satirists, comedians and ironists

and "The Vilbar Party" would go on to appear in the 1982 anthology Laughing Space: An Anthology of Science Fiction Humor.  Oy.  I generally avoid joke stories, but let's give Smith the benefit of the doubt and give "The Vilbar Party," 12 pages, a shot.

The people of Saturn are like teddy bears with four arms and antennae.  Professor Narli Gzann is selected to be an exchange professor with a North American university; he figures human beings will find him repulsive, but he doesn't care because he likes to be alone and he has tons of work to do on his history of the solar system.  But when he gets to Earth, apparently the first Saturnian to visit Terra, everybody finds him just fucking adorable and they never leave him alone--they are always giving him gifts and taking him out and throwing him parties and caressing him and kissing him, etc.  He has no time to work on his history and he eats so well he gets fat.  By the time he gets back to Saturn he has become addicted to social life and attention--his solitary ways are over, contact with Earth having wrought a change in him, turning him into the life of the party.

"The Vilbar Party" is inoffensive but ultimately pointless; the jokes don't make you laugh, and there is no edge or tension or drama.  How this bland filler story got into The Third Galaxy Reader, I don't know.

Merely acceptable.

"Time in the Round" by Fritz Leiber (1957)

"Time in the Round" takes place in the far future, when life is sterile and safe.  People are conditioned to "automatically reject all violent solutions to problems" regarding humans.  We observe kids playing with their levitators and robot dogs in Peace Park.  The levitators have a built-in forcefield that prevents a levitating child from crashing into a tree or wall and getting hurt, and the robot dogs look and act exactly like real dogs, but can't be harmed.

The anti-violence conditioning is done to people when they are six years old, and one of the boys, Butch, who calls himself "the Butcher," is only five and still has a natural love of risk, danger and violence, and shoots spits balls at the other kids and wishes he lived in the past he has heard about, the days of Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin, the days of war and revolution and blood.

On the other side of Peace Park is the Time Theater, where people can watch a projection that shows life in the past.  Kids who have not yet been conditioned are forbidden to visit the Time Theater, but Butch is cunning enough to get inside and join the older kids.  While watching some Vikings, a disaster occurs--for the first time ever it is not only photons that pass through the time-viewing device, but people!  The Viking warriors emerge into the theater and try to kidnap the women!  Because of the conditioning, nobody can resist this raid, except Butch!  Boldly employing the forcefield integrated into a levitator and the invulnerable robot dogs Butch drives off the Vikings, saves the women, and becomes a hero. 

Minor and somewhat silly, but diverting, we'll judge this one a tick above acceptable, "marginally good," I suppose.  Most of the story is jokes, but I suspect Leiber is also suggesting that a life that is too easy will lead to weakness and an inability to meet unexpected challenges.  "Time in the Round" has not been reprinted much, but did show up in a huge (715 pages!) collection of Leiber stories put out by Centipede Press in 2016.

Fans of the Dillons should check out their illustrations for the presentation of "Time in the Round" found in Galaxy (link above.)  While I am interpreting the story as basically a goof, their illustrations are moody and sad. 

"The Haunted Corpse" by Frederik Pohl (1957)

Like Smith's "The Vilbar Party" this is another inoffensive story that is meant to be funny.  I don't know why H. L. Gold selected these light stories for The Third Galaxy Reader instead of stories that were striking or shocking or otherwise moving.

An unscrupulous scientist has figured out a way to transfer personalities from one body to another.  One of his colleagues alerts the government, and an army unit is dispatched to surround the mad scientist's house--this new invention no doubt has great military value, and must be protected.  Our narrator is the colonel in charge of defending the invention and also monitoring the inventor's work--he demands daily reports from the scientist, who rages at all this interference.

"The Haunted Corpse" is too long, I guess to fit in the multitude of mild jokes.  I guess the main joke is that military men are dim--it takes a long time for them to realize the scientist has invented a soul transfer machine and not a death ray projector, for example.  Secondary jokes include the fact that the scientist's colleague (the stool pigeon) is fat and loves to eat, and that the inventor calls the colonel a lieutenant.  These are the sorts of standard and obvious jokes that one cannot call bad, but which one does not actually laugh at, either.

Anyway, the inventor doesn't give a rat's ass about national security or getting rich or anything like that.  He is over 80 years old, and just wants to move his own soul into a young body.  He tricks the military into providing him an opportunity to shift his psyche into that of a hearty young soldier and then escapes.

Acceptable...barely.

"The Haunted Corpse" has appeared in many Pohl collections, and was even adapted for radio.

"Man in the Jar" by Damon Knight (1957)

Finally, here is the real thing, a story with weird ideas, strange people and devices, surprises, and dramatic tension, the reasons I read SF in the first place.  This piece is far more engaging than the three stories I have already read from The Third Galaxy Reader.

Through extensive research, ruthless alcoholic businessman R. C. Vane has come to believe that planet Meng was once ruled by a race of psychics who could, among other things, make diamonds out of graphite with the power of their minds.  But centuries ago they were overthrown by the other races of planet Meng and today are almost extinct, the few survivors hiding among the mundane Mengs, never using their powers for fear of exposure--nowadays many people consider the tales of the psychic overlords to be no more than legend.  Vane would like to have one of these psykers under his power, and the story takes pace in his hotel room in Meng City, where he has trapped a native he believes to be one of these secret mental powerhouses.  Using various ancient artifacts, high-tech devices, bizarre native flora, and psychic abilities, Vane and the native fight a battle of wits!  Who will come out on top, and how?

Thumbs up!  "Man in the Jar" would be reprinted in numerous Knight collections, and Gardner Dozois would include it in his anthology Another World: Adventures in Otherness.

"Honorable Opponent" by Clifford D. Simak (1956)

The Galactic Confederacy, hundreds of planets lead by Earth, is in trouble!  The human race has built working relationships with numerous alien races, but the race known as The Fivers is inscrutable.  Discussions with them are almost impossibly difficult because they don't even seem able, or seem to care, about such basic things as using a mutually agreeable system of keeping track of time so they can make appointments.  Worse still, they seem very touchy about their territory, very defensive, attacking without any sort of warning ships from any race that get too close.  The Fivers' attacks are irresistible, as they have weapons far more powerful than those of any other race, weapons which make their enemy's vessels disappear without a trace.

After much effort, a prisoner exchange has been arranged between Earth and the Fivers, and this meeting is what is chronicled in this story.  The Fivers arrive fourteen hours late, but they bring with them all the human space ships thought destroyed in battle, and all their crews, safe and sound--the Fiver weapons don't cause harm, they just teleport a target to a safe holding area, because the Fivers don't attack out of belligerence, but because they "fight" space naval battles as a game and assume all other races do the same.  After finally explaining this to the humans, the Fivers promise to give to Earth their teleporter weapon so the game will be less dangerous.  Thus this absurd joke story has a serious paradigm-shift ending--the human race need never fight a deadly war again because now people who misbehave can just be teleported into prison without harming them.

"Honorable Opponent" is getting a thumbs down.  Not only is it yet another joke story that is not funny, but the serious ending that comes after the punchline of the ludicrous plot means the story's tone is uneven--is this a sense-of-wonder story about mankind embarking upon an unprecedented era of peace thanks to high technology, or an absurdist joke story about the confusion of dealing with aliens whose actions make no sense?

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Science Fiction Book Club edition of
The Third Galaxy Reader

What is it with all the trifling, pointless, mild-to-the-point-of-sterility joke stories in The Third Galaxy Reader?  Was Galaxy supposed to provide a break from all the big ideas, all the thrills and chills, all the exuberant fun and shocking bloodshed to be found in other SF magazines?  Or is this just a sample size error?  Maybe it is just an odd coincidence that, of the five stories I read from The Third Galaxy Reader, chosen because of my interest in these five specific authors, four are light humor pieces--could it be that the other ten stories are full of moving drama and mind-blowing speculation on life in the future?

Well, whatever.  Knight's "Man in the Jar" is good, which was nice to see because I'm hardly a dues-paying member of the Damon Knight fan club, so I am still counting this mission a success.  But I can assure you that in our next episode I will specifically be seeking out thrilling adventure stories!

Three 1950s stores from Budrys' Inferno

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading Budrys' Inferno, a 1960s paperback collection of nine stories by Algis Budrys first published in science fiction magazines in the 1950s.  The collection is dedicated to Damon Knight, and in the introduction Budrys tells us the stories were selected by Thomas A. Dardis.

In our last blog post we read the second story in the collection, 1958's "Between the Dark and the Daylight."  Today let's read the first, fourth and fifth pieces.

"Silent Brother"  (1956)

This one appears to have been a hit.  After it first appeared in John W. Campbell's Astounding it was chosen by Judith Merril for the 1957 edition of her famous Year's Greatest SF anthology series, and would go on to be translated into French, German and Japanese.  I actually own that edition of Year's Greatest SF, and see that, in her intro to "Silent Brother," Merril praises Budrys fulsomely, jokes about his profusion of pennames ("Silent Brother" appeared under the pseudonym "Paul Janvier") and says he is "from Jersey;" Budrys was born in Konigsberg in 1931 but, his Lithuanian family in exile after the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe, Budrys spent his youth in the greatest state of the union.

Harvey Cable is an astronaut and engineer whose work was essential to making Earth' first interstellar voyage successful, but he wasn't able to fly to Alpha Centauri himself with his comrades because he had been severely injured in a test flight accident.  When his friends return from their unprecedented adventure, the invalided Cable envies the public acclaim they receive.  But soon he has other things on his mind--mysterious changes around his lonely house which suggest there is either an intruder in his home, or that in his sleep he is able to move freely, as if he had never been injured.  Whoever it is, a stranger or his own sleep-walking self, is constructing in the basement an electronic device that the waking Cable can make neither head nor tail of!

This is a good story, a sort of wish fulfillment fantasy about becoming a superman who will never be lonely again in a world of plenty and peace.  Cable's friends, out on some alien planet, were united with benevolent immaterial aliens, and have come to share these beneficent beings with the rest of humanity.  An Earthling living in symbiosis with such an alien is super healthy (in mere days Cable's ruined eye, useless legs, and lost teeth are regenerated) and can walk through walls and perform feats of technical wizardry.  Soon every person on Earth will have such a little friend and all our problems will be solved and we will be able to explore the universe.

I thought Budrys's handling of the scenes in which Cable tried to figure out the mystery of what was going on in his house clever and entertaining, and Budrys also provides us a sort of life-affirming story arc in which Cable misses and envies his friends but then learns that they have been thinking and caring about him all along.  This is a story about people getting along which isn't mawkish or saccharine and doesn't show its hand until the end--thumbs up!

Budrys' Inferno was printed several times in Great Britain under the title The Furious Future

"The Skirmisher" (1957)

This is a brief noirish detective story about a time traveler from the future who comes back to 1957 to set elaborate traps that kill people before they can produce the offspring whom, for unspecified reasons, somebody in the future doesn't want to have to deal with.  Maybe the most noteworthy element of the story is that the reader is expected to figure out that the assassin is a time traveler.  The meticulous planning of the deadly Rube Goldberg "accidents" in this story reminded me of Budrys's intricate descriptions of Harvey Cable's methods of investigating what is going on in his house in "Silent Brother," but while that story had an emotional arc and was optimistic, "The Skirmisher" is cynical and a little gimmicky, and too short to really develop characters or a world.   Acceptable.

"The Skirmisher" was first published in Infinity Science Fiction and has only ever resurfaced in Budrys collections.

"The Man Who Tasted Ashes" (1959)

Like "The Skirmisher," "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" concerns an outsider who puts into motion an elaborate scheme to murder somebody.  A space alien living in disguise on the Earth wants to start World War III and hires Redfern, an English adventurer who now lives in America and does things like gunrunning for a living, to murder a communist diplomat who is visiting Washington.  "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" is composed of scenes that feel like they were lifted out of espionage fiction: Redfern in a hotel room, trying to remain cool as a cucumber as he negotiates with the alien and receives high tech gadgets, Redfern's anxiety boiling over as he talks to a British diplomat in the shadowy corner of a restaurant, Redfern obsessively checking his watch as he drives down the highway in a stolen car, trying to reach the aliens' spaceship before blast off.  Will the diplomat from the Warsaw Pact be killed?  Will war erupt between East and West?  Will Redfern get to the alien ship on time?

I liked the car driving scenes, and Budrys starts the story in the car, in medias res (all those negotiations are related in flashbacks), and thus gets the reader's attention in a way that telling the story in strict chronological order might not.  And while the complicated crime stuff in "The Skirmisher" is the meat of that story, all the lurid spy and space alien skulduggery in "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" is used to construct a psychological portrait of a warped personality; I can recommend this one.

"The Man Who Tasted Ashes" first saw print in Damon Knight's If, and would go on to appear in an anthology of If stories and a 1966 book of SF stories designed for use in schools.

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More 1950s stories by Algis Budrys in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

"The Avenger" (1944) by Damon Knight and "Between the Dark and the Daylight" (1958) by Algis Budrys

In his introduction to Budrys' Inferno, a 1963 Berkley Medallion collection of some of his 1950s stories, Algis Budrys tells us that one of his favorite stories in the book is "Between the Dark and the Daylight," and that the story was inspired by Damon Knight's 1944 tale "The Avenger."  Budrys feels that "Between the Dark and the Daylight" is so heavily indebted to Knight that he thinks of Knight as a co-author of the piece.  So today, as a first step in our exploration of Budrys' Inferno, which I recently purchased down in South Carolina, let's read Knight's "The Avenger" and then the Budrys tale it inspired.

"The Avenger" by Damon Knight (as by Stuart Fleming) (1944)

It looks like "The Avenger" only ever appeared in the Spring 1944 issue of Planet Stories, where it was illustrated by Graham Ingels of EC Comics fame. (You may recognize the cover, also by Ingels, because we've already read that issue's lead story, Leigh Brackett's "The Jewel of Bas.")  I'm reading the scan of the issue available at that indispensable resource for the vintage pulp fan, the internet archive.

"The Avenger" begins with a half-page prologue in italics, a first-person narrative from the point of view of some being that is having a psychological breakthrough--it never had emotions before, but cries for the first time upon seeing the bloody corpse of Peter Karson.  When the main text starts we find it is a flashback, a third-person narrative all about Peter Karson when he was still alive!

Karson is an engineer and scientist working in his office in a skyscraper in the "Science City of Manhattan."  He is just putting the finishing touches on the "blackprints" of his latest invention, Earth's first space ship, when space aliens who can fly, pass through walls, and employ telekinesis appear on the Earth and cause all manner of mayhem.  These E.T.s have absolute contempt for us, treating us not like people with a civilization but the way human scientists treat insects and rodents!  Multitudes die because the world government is powerless to stop the invaders from using their mental powers to conduct such fascinating experiments as dissecting John Q. Public while he is still alive!

One of the aliens makes mental contact with Karson, putting Karson into a coma for nine months.  When he wakes up, the human race has resorted to digging underground cities in which to hide, but this is a fruitless measure: the number crunchers have calculated that, due to the continuing depredations of the aliens, the human race will be extinct in fifty years!

Karson's "blackprints" hold the key to humankind's only hope.  In an underground bunker the world's first spacecraft is quickly constructed; Karson is going to travel to space to expose a cargo of embryos (and himself!) to cosmic rays in hopes of creating a mutant superhuman race that will be as superior to the aliens as they are to us!  Karson's girlfriend, another genius inventor, wants to come with him into space, but he denies her request to board, saying that being mutated by cosmic rays would ruin her looks!

(Is now the time to recall how fifteen years later Knight lost a job by complaining that Judith Merril's 1960 novel The Tomorrow People was full of bad science and was way too girly?)

The last page of "The Avenger" returns us to the first person-narrative that began the tale.  The narrator is one of the embryos, now grown to adulthood, a superhuman with no emotions who could liberate Earth from the invaders.  But this first specimen of homo superior identifies with the cold-hearted alien invaders more than with the human race!  Karson implores him to go to Earth and save humanity, but the narrator refuses and euthanizes Karson by crushing his skull in his bare hands!

This story is alright.  It reminds me a little of those 1930s Edmond Hamilton stories about radiation and evolution I read when this blog was in its infancy.

"Between the Dark and the Daylight" by Algis Budrys (1958)

Budrys's tale begins under a dome on an alien planet, where squabble the mutated descendants of Earth people; these products of centuries of rapid, artificially-directed evolution have tremendous strength, a coat of fur, "sagittal crests" and "sharp canine tusks."  Their ancestors crashed on this inhospitable planet generations ago, and ever since the native fauna have been trying to break into the ship, while the colonists inside have been genetically engineering their offspring to have the superabilities needed to tame this inveterately hostile world from which there is no escape.  Tomorrow is the big day, the day when the nursery gates will be opened to the outside and the new generation of humanity will be released onto the planet surface, but for years the captain (he's also chief "biotechnician and pedagogical specialist") has kept the rest of the colonists in the dark about exactly what he has been doing to their children, and they are not happy about it!

This is a pretty good story.  Not only is the scenario and the images it gives rise to (a dome full of genetically modified humans under siege by an army of hideous alien monsters) striking, but Budrys does a good job of transmitting to the reader the crushing tension endured by the besieged humans, for example, in dialogue between the captain and his wife.

"You don't care for one living soul besides yourself, and the only voice you'll listen to is that power-chant in your head.  You married me because I was good breeding stock.  You married me because, if you can't lead us outside, at least your son will be the biggest and best of his generation."  

I like the Ahab-like determination of the captain, and the way Budrys in this story examines the common theme of his body of work, the question of what truly constitutes a man.  Are the people in the dome, the product of centuries of eugenic breeding and genetic modification, people who couldn't breathe the air of Earth and are so big and strong that furniture made on Earth is too fragile for them to use, still human?  Should we see the captain, who dominates his fellows and is emotionally distant from his family, as a real man (a mensch, as the Jewish colonist who celebrates Hanukkah on the day before the nursery is opened might put it) for his single-minded devotion to the mission his ancestors set him on, or as a selfish and obsessive tyrant?  These questions are tied up with the theme of Knight's 1944 story: when the captain opens the nursery and unleashes the children he has designed to thrive on this hostile world, will they have any reason to identify with their parents, whom they have not seen for years and who cannot even breathe the same air they do? 

"Between the Dark and the Daylight" was first published in Infinity and would go on to appear in two anthologies, including one I own, 1983's Changes, edited by Michael Bishop and Ian Watson.  It is a good enough story that I am looking forward to the rest of the pieces in Budrys' Inferno, which we will examine in our next two blog posts.

1970 stories by Liz Hufford, Robert F. Young, Robert Margoff & Andrew Offutt and Carol Carr

Let's continue our exploration of Orbit 8, the 1970 anthology of all new stories edited by Damon Knight.  I have a quite worn copy of the 1971 paperback edition published by Berkley, for which I paid 50 cents at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle.

"Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee" by Gene Wolfe

I read this in 2015 in the Wolfe collection Storeys from the Old Hotel and really liked it.  Joachim Boaz also read it in 2015, when he read Orbit 8, and he liked it.  I read it again today (it is only six pages) and I have to say it is a great science fiction story (it speculates on how the technology and politics of the future will affect human lives) and a great horror story (it is sad and disturbing.)  It is unanimous--you should read this story.

"Tablets of Stone" by Liz Hufford

Hufford has only three credits at isfdb; this is the first.

A spaceship has to land for emergency repairs on a planet with an overpopulation problem.  Because of the overpopulation problem, sex and pregnancy on this planet are taboo.  But one of the lonely space crew members manages to win the heart of the pretty girl who is the ship's liaison at the spaceport--they fall in love and she stows away on the ship so they can be be married and live happily ever after.

In its last paragraphs this five-page tale is revealed to be a gimmicky horror story.  The woman, who looks human, never told the spaceman that the females of her planet give birth to dozens of children at once, and that they mature at a very rapid rate.  When she produces a brood of approximately fifty infants the ship's captain realizes that this additional population will overtax the life support systems of the ship and kill everybody on board.  The young lovers commit suicide and the space crew have to hunt down the fifty babies and exterminate them.

Acceptable.  It looks like "Tablets of Stone" was never reprinted anywhere.

"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" by Robert F. Young

"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" is a New Wavey title, and the story is written in the present tense and includes lots of odd symbols, but Young offers a strong plot and writes in an economical style and addresses themes that are more or less traditional--weird aliens, travel through space and time, and the way so many men must choose between family life and freedom.  Here Knight offers us another quite good story; like Dozois's "Horse of Air" and Wolfe's "Sonya, Crane Wesselman, and Kittee" it is readable but has an edge, offering controversial content and surprises.

Some centuries in the future mankind has colonized the galaxy and encountered huge creatures who live in space, the asteroid-like spacewhales.  These creatures can travel not only through space but through time.  Their strong exoskeletons make perfect hulls for space craft, and so hunters called Jonahs invade the whales and blow up their brains so that their internal organs can be removed and replaced with cargo holds, crew quarters, electronic equipment, etc.

The conversion of dead spacewhale corpses into space ships takes place in orbit over Altair IV.  Over the centuries the human colonists of Altair IV have evolved in such a way that the planet is now some kind of matriarchy, as the women are much longer lived and substantially more intelligent than the men.  Women on Altair IV are also very beautiful and subject to voracious sexual appetites--they take many lovers or administer drugs to a single husband so he can perform sexually again and again in a single day. 

The protagonist of the story is John Starfinder, a former Jonah who now works on converting the dead whales.  He is also one of the few men on the planet who has one of the gorgeous Altair IV women all to himself, which can be looked upon as a blessing or as a burden.  When Starfinder starts receiving psychic messages from the whale he is helping to convert into a spaceship--it is still alive because it has a second brain which was only damaged, not destroyed, its captor failed to discover it--our hero (?) has a big decision to make.  He can kill the whale and stay on Altair IV, where for the rest of his life he will be dominated by a woman who will long outlive him, or he can make a deal with the whale, healing its brain, liberating it and partnering with it in an exploration of the universe and history.  Starfinder is a history and literature buff (his interest in the liberal arts is appropriately/ironically the result of a disastrous run-in with a spacewhale early in his career) and he relishes the idea of travelling back in time to witness first hand the glory that was Rome.

I found the climax and resolution of the story surprising, even shocking, in a way that was satisfying--Young does not pull his punches, but follows his themes to their utmost conclusions.  Joachim didn't care for "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams;" maybe because its treatment of male-female relations, and its shocking climax, offended his feminist sensibilities?  Personally, I found "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" to be compelling.  Not only does Young fill it with good SF ideas, surprises, and the kind of difficult sexual relationships I always find fascinating, but includes many direct and indirect allusions to the Bible and to Moby Dick.  Thumbs up!

"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams," I see, is one in a series of stories about John Starfinder and his relationship with spacewhales; it would later appear under the title "The Spacewhale Graveyard" in a 1980 collection of the Starfinder stories called, appropriately enough, Starfinder.

"The Book" by Robert E. Margroff and Andrew J. Offutt

Offutt is a famously odd character, the subject of a great New York Times article by his son Chris; Chris Offutt has also written an entire book on his father which I have not yet read.  I have read several things by Andrew Offutt and opined about them here at the blog; in general I have found them full of problems but somehow have enjoyed them anyway.  I am not very familiar with Margroff, though I know I read one of his collaborations with Piers Anthony, The Ring, back in the 1980s.

"The Book"'s protagonist is a cave man living in a milieu that is characterized by loneliness, abuse, murder, cannibalism, and, I fear, incest--men live alone and the strong steal weaker men's wives and children and sometimes eat their own children and (it is hinted) have sex with their own children.  Men who are old or ill kill their own wives so that the wife will keep them company in the afterlife.

Our hero (?) is different than other men.  When young, he was the strongest of men and dominated all the other men in the vicinity.  More importantly, he has in his cave an artifact of ancient or alien origin in the form of a book.  The book projects ideas and even desires into his mind, guiding his actions, often in ways that contravene his inclinations.  The book seems to be trying to civilize the cave man and his race, for example, informing him of more efficient hunting methods, nudging him to get other cave people to look at the book, and convincing him to put an end to that whole "kill your wife to bring her to the next world" business.

One odd element in the story is that the high tech book seems to want people to eat each other's brains.  Probably this is Margroff and Offutt invoking those famous planarian maze experiments that seemed to suggest (erroneously, it has turned out) that some creatures can gain the memories of those animals that they eat.

I kind of like this one, because it is so crazy and you have to try to figure it out (and it is not too hard to figure out.)  As with "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams," Joachim and I disagree over this one and I again wonder if maybe it is because of the story's depiction of male-female relationships--in this story women are stuck in subordinate roles and defined by their relationships with men and with children.

It looks like "The Book" has only ever appeared in Orbit 8.  Offut produced quite a few short stories, but it doesn't seem that any collections of his short fiction have ever been published.         

"Inside" by Carol Carr

Carol Carr is the wife of Terry Carr, the famous editor.  She has six fiction credits at isfdb.  "Inside" would reappear in an anthology edited by Terry Carr, as well as one edited by Robert Silverberg.

This is one of those stories that has a vague, dreamlike, hallucinatory feel, a story full of mysteries that are perhaps impossible to figure out.

A girl wakes up in a bedroom--out the windows can be seen mist, and when she opens the door she is confronted with empty blackness.  She sleeps, and wakes up to find a corridor leading from her door has been added to the house.  Every morning, for a month or so, new rooms and furniture, and eventually inhabitants--servants and people who eat in the dining room and act like they are at a restaurant--are added to the house.  The servants badger the girl but ignore her responses; the girl assiduously avoids the diners, but their conversations provide us readers clues that suggest that our nameless protagonist was an insane and/or depressed married woman who committed suicide.  Maybe she is now a ghost or in the afterlife or something like that, or maybe this is all just the fantasy or delusion of an unhappy and/or mentally ill individual, a reflection of her hopes for solitude and fears of and disappointments with her family and friends.  On the last page of the five-page tale the servants and diners disappear, and the story ends on a faint note of triumph--the girl/woman has successfully closed herself off from the world and from other people.

At first I was going to judge this one "acceptable," but while copyediting this blogpost I found myself again trying to figure "Inside" out; this is one of those stories that, the more you think about it, the better it seems, so I guess I'll call it marginally or moderately good.  Maybe it is just a psychological story of a troubled individual who rejects the world, or maybe it (also) is a feminist thing, an allegory of the lives of women who inhabit a world they didn't create and to whom nobody listens when decisions are to be made.  This allegory seems a little shaky, as in my own life experience it is wives and mothers who control how a house is furnished and decorated, but I guess that is just anecdotal evidence.

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Taken as a group, these four stories are pretty good; I certainly liked most of them more than did Joachim.  (Am I becoming a softie?)  Orbit 8 is looking like a strong anthology, and we still have six stories to go, including pieces by MPorcius faves Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty.  Fifty cents well spent!

1970 stories by Gardner Dozois, Avram Davidson and Thom Lee Wharton from Orbit 8

When I find myself near Dupont Circle in this nation's capital on a rainless day, I generally spend time looking at the clearance carts on the sidewalk in front of Second Story Books.  It is always fun to flip through the art books and military history books that are going for four bucks, and I have purchased quite a few SF paperbacks there for one dollar or even a mere 50 cents.  On my most recent visit I found two volumes in the Orbit series of original anthologies edited by Damon Knight, numbers 8 and 10.  A look at isfdb indicated that these books included stories by Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty that I did not already own and had not already read, so I parted with a dollar to take them home.  I'll read my perforated copy of Orbit 8 first--looking over the table of contents I have decided to read every story in this volume (excepting any I have already blogged about.)

Joachim Boaz, SF blogger extraordinaire and generous supporter of this here blog, read Orbit 8 and wrote about each story back in 2015.  Enough time has passed that my memories of his opinions are a little hazy, and I think I can read and assess these stories without being unduly influenced.  After I read each story and draft my own opinion I will check out Joachim's blog post and see if we are at loggerheads or seeing oculum ad oculum.

"Horse of Air" by Gardner R. Dozois

This is a well-written and compelling piece, a strong start to the book; Knight must have been excited to get it.  At least he included it in the 1975 Best from Orbit anthology.

Dozois employs an interesting narrative strategy: we get an unreliable first-person narrative, interspersed with a more honest stream-of-consciousness (or unvoiced inner monologue) narrative and a third-person omniscient narrative; these latter two texts emphasize or undermine the claims in the main text.  This is quite effective at presenting and distinguishing between different facets of the character, those he wants to display and those he'd rather not.

Our narrator is one of the few people left in a big city (I guess New York), trapped in a high rise apartment far above the street with a fenced in balcony like those one sees in public housing projects.  The start of the story consists of the narrator looking out over the city, of descriptions of his view and his intellectual and emotional responses to what he sees.  As I have told readers of this blog before, I love the kinds of descriptions of rooms and views we find in literary fiction like Proust's In Search of Lost Time (Marcel's room in Balbec, for example, and his view of the church steeples from a moving carriage) and Wyndham Lewis's Self Condemned (Rene Harding's Canadian hotel room) and Dozois really succeeds in painting an absorbing picture in the reader's mind here.   

Then the back story is filled in.  Our narrator, who studied at Annapolis, is a member of what he calls "the upper class" and even "the aristocracy."  (This isn't really the way educated Americans talk, especially self-described "liberals" as this guy is--perhaps a hint this is all a dream or fantasy?)  His class of people, in response to black crime, secluded themselves in these high-rises, and (shortsightedly) handed over political power to the managers of the high-rises.  Eventually the management company sealed the high-rises' inhabitants in, "for their own good." (The plumbing is maintained and twice a week food and supplies arrive via a dumbwaiter.) 

The narrator hates blacks because they "are responsible for the destruction, for the present degeneration of the world," but the third-person omniscient narration indicates that his hatred largely stems from envy--reminding me of the scene in Henry Miller's Plexus (Chapter 15) in which the narrator goes to hear W. E. B. Du Bois speak, Dozois enumerates the many ways (in the eyes of the narrator, at least) black people are better than white people; their easy sexuality, their depth of feeling, their exuberant and happy culture, their rebellion, all a contrast to the square and bland and boring and obedient ways of whites. 

In the final third of the story we are given an increasing number of clues that suggest that some, maybe all, of this SF stuff is the delusion or dream or fantasy of an ordinary man, maybe a businessman, who is stressed out by the pressures of city life in the late '60s/early '70s and a failed relationship with a woman.

"Horse of Air" is quite good, like a Malzberg story that has been carefully polished over a number of drafts instead of being slapped together at high speed as Malzberg's work so often appears to have been.  Joachim also liked it, saying it is the best story in the book.  Whoa, does this mean I should quit now?  "Horse of Air" would reappear not only in The Best of Orbit but the Dozois collection The Visible Man and the seventh Nebula anthology, it having been nominated.

"One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" by Harlan Ellison

I tackled this one, the second story in Orbit 8, back in 2016 when I read Donald A. Wollheim's 1972 edition of World's Best SF.

"Rite of Spring" by Avram Davidson

Here's another story that Knight included in The Best from Orbit.  "Rite of Spring" doesn't seem to have gotten a lot of traction otherwise, however--I think it only ever appeared in books with "Orbit" on the cover.

This is a trifling little vignette (less than seven pages of text) from some weird (post-apocalyptic?) future or alternate world.  I am guessing it is an acknowledgement and demonstration of the fact that customs and social arrangements are arbitrary and silly.  Davidson's story is full of hard-to-decipher allusions and hints about the alien milieu it vaguely depicts; maybe it is supposed to recreate in the reader the feeling of spending the briefest moment in a foreign culture or being exposed to only a few snatches of information about a foreign civilization, to give us the sense that all the apparently bizarre things these people are doing have deep roots and layers of meaning it would take a lifetime to fully understand.  Maybe Davidson is trying to put us in the shoes of an explorer or traveler confronted by alienness, like an 18th-century European who found himself briefly among  people in China or Persia or sub-Saharan Africa, or an Eskimo or Yanomamo who suddenly found himself in Victorian London or the Paris of the Second Empire.

"Rite of Spring" takes place on a farm, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Robinson.  Living there as well are a young man, Roger, a young woman, Betty, and a spectacularly obese woman, Mrs. Machick.  The action described in this deliberately opaque story suggests that the Robinsons are responsible for feeding the (apparently idle) Machick, and training young people like Roger and Betty in "the old ways."  It is suggested that both Betty and Roger are only the latest in a series of young people who are employed and tutored by the Robinsons; Betty does domestic chores and Roger does farm work, chopping wood and the like. Betty is from the city, where, the characters say, it is difficult to teach young people the old customs.  (These 1970s stories are down on city life; I guess I am lucky I moved to the Big Apple after it had been tamed in the mid-1990s.)  Roger wants to have sex with Betty, but he is told to wait until the time is right.  The arrival of the first robin of spring is the signal that the right time has arrived; Roger catches the bird, it is decapitated and its blood drunk, and then Roger roughly takes Betty, who initially puts up some resistance.

Gimmicky, a story that is technically competent but has no human feeling or real intellectual content.  Joachim liked it even less than I do, giving it only one out of five possible stars.  I am willing to say it is an acceptable experiment.

"The Bystander" by Thom Lee Wharton

Who is Thom Lee Wharton?  Well, this is his only story listed at isfdb, and that is all I know.

"The Bystander" feels like what I guess the mainstream detective novels I never read are like, if that makes any sense.  A retired dentist, in his forties, is now owner/manager of a bar in New Jersey (or as I call it, the greatest state in the union.)  An FBI investigator comes by to talk to him about his relationship with his business partner, "Joe the Nuts."  The dentist drives the flatfoot to the shore in his antique car (a 1934 Packard) where they talk in an old Coast Guard bunker from World War Two.  The bar owner describes how, like the guy in that Kinks song, he was a success as a bourgeois professional but was not satisfied and became a drunk.  After hitting bottom he lucked into owning a bar; the FBI man and we readers hear all about his struggles to make the bar a success.  And the bar is a success, because the Mafia supplies the food and entertainment.

In the story's last pages we learn that this interview was the first move in a war between the federal government and the Mafia in which many are killed.  The dentist is not killed however, and it is implied that he is somehow pulling the strings behind the scenes, that he caused this war because he is bitter that his wife and child died of a disease or something and he sees the Mafia and the government as equally bad.  Or something.  I don't get it.

This story has no SF content and as a mainstream crime story is a total waste of time.  Wharton makes no discernible effort to back up his apparent argument that the government is a racket just like the mob and is equally delinquent in any effort to portray the psychological pressures of a man broken by the loss of his family or dissatisfied with middle class suburban life.  I am very open to the argument that the government sucks and that middle class life is a tragedy, but the author offers only the tiniest of crumbs to dramatize these themes.  Instead we get twenty pages of pointless details, the literary equivalent of white noise.  Bad!  Joachim gives it one out of five stars and even admits he couldn't finish it!

Inexplicably, Knight not only included "The Bystander" here in Orbit 8, but in The Best from Orbit!  Damon, what are you doing?  Was Thom Lee Wharton the pen name of a loan shark? 

"All Pieces of a River Shore" by R. A. Lafferty

I recommended this one, the fifth story in Orbit 8, with some enthusiasm back in 2016 when I read it in Wollheim's 1972 World's Best SF.

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We'll get back to this 1970 anthology, but first we'll take a little trip to the 1920s and to the Moon with Edgar Rice Burroughs.                 

Five more stories from Bob Shaw's 1973 collection, Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

German edition, which apparently includes
fewer stories than the US and UK printings

In our second episode on the US edition of 1973's Tomorrow Lies in Ambush we look at five more science fiction stories from the late '60s and early '70s by Bob Shaw, whose novels Orbitsville, Night Walk, Fire Pattern and One Million Tomorrows I have enjoyed.  We are reading the stories in the order in which they appear in the book, not chronological order.

"What Time Do You Call This?" (1971)

"What Time Do You Call This?" made its debut in Amazing, in the same issue as the conclusion of the serialized version of Robert Silverberg's The Second Trip, which I consider one of the best of Silverberg's novels.  (Check out Joachim Boaz's blog post on The Second Trip.)  In 1971 Amazing was being edited by Ted White.  For years now I have been recommending to people White's story about his friend Harlan Ellison, "The Bet," and with Ellison's recent death White has produced another such memoir of his friend, available at the Falls Church News-Press website.  (The Falls Church News-Press is, it appears, a tiny free newspaper based in Northern Virginia, but this essay of White's deserves a wide audience--entertaining and insightful, I recommend it to all those interested in 20th-century SF and one of its most colorful and controversial characters.)

OK, back to Shaw.  "What Time Do You Call This?" is a humor story and its first line is a masturbation joke.  But its real theme and inspiration is not self abuse but that genre of SF story about alternate time streams in which characters hop from one time stream to another that includes Richard C. Meredith's At the Narrow Passage and Sam Merwin's House of Many Worlds and a multitude of others.  In this seven-page piece a scientist from another time stream appears in the apartment of a criminal.  After the mouthy scientist explains how his dimension hopping device (a belt) operates, the crook steals it.  This creep robs a bank, and when confronted by an armed guard he activates the belt.  To his dismay he reappears in a very similar time stream, right next to this dimension's version of himself and the armed guard, who captures both of the thieves--the media and the authorities suppose that these two bandits must be identical twins.

Acceptable filler.  "What Time Do You Call This?" would be reprinted in a German anthology with a fun cover illustration depicting a SF fan and his collection of magazines and tchotchkes, including a charming therapod (and a Hugo for best fanzine!)         

It is a lot of fun looking through these old magazines.  The September 1971 issue of Amazing also includes a letter by Bob Shaw, in which Shaw talks a little about his relationship with Damon Knight and responds to charges in a letter from a David Stever appearing in the March issue that his novel One Million Tomorrows was based on C. C. MacApp's 1968 story "When the Subbs Go" and J. T. McIntosh's 1965 story "The Man Who Killed Immortals."   

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"Communication" (1970)

This one appeared in Ted White's Fantastic.  "Communication" is about Riley, the worst computer salesman in Canada; in fact, he is in the running for worst computer salesman in the world!  After two years of total failure, out of the blue one Friday evening Parr, a man purporting to be a scientist (a sociologist no less--that's the worst kind of scientist!), comes to Riley's home to buy a computer--with cash!  (We are talking about a computer that costs $60,000 here!)  Parr wants it to keep a record of personal data and current location of everybody in the town of Red Deer, pop. 200,000*, and he has come to Riley's office, a lonely one-man operation, in order to keep public knowledge of his research project a secret ("you know, uncertainty principle," he explains.)

Riley deposits the cash in the company account and hands over the computer, but then on the weekend decides to play detective.  He figures out Parr's home address and drives up to Red Deer to snoop on him.  It turns out Parr is a con man, a bogus seer who conducts seances.  He plans to use the computer database of info about Red Deer's citizens to help him fool gullible people into thinking he has the power to communicate with the dead.  (By typing a client's name on a hidden keyboard he can instantly learn such data as the names of dead relatives and their occupations--Parr has hooked up his crystal ball to the computer's printout.)  The lame twist ending of the story comes when it turns out that, while Parr may be a fake, the dead really can communicate with the living, and ghosts appear.  Nonsensically, these ghosts want to use Parr's database to learn how things are going for their living relatives.  (If they were able to learn about Parr from "the other side," why can't they also learn about their own relatives?)  Parr is afraid of the ghosts, opening up an opportunity for Riley to work with them and start a lucrative career as a high tech "spiritualist." 

I'm guessing Shaw sets his story in Alberta to lend it an air of remoteness, but this setting also opens the door for an interesting (to me, and perhaps only me) element of the story: a passing reference to Social Credit, the notoriously incomprehensible economic theory enthusiastically adopted and promoted by expatriate American poet and crackpot Ezra Pound.  I have been trying to get a grasp of Social Credit for a while, as I have been reading the work of, and biographies and criticism of, those three leading modernists, Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis.  So far as I can gather, the moral basis of Social Credit is the claim that all citizens have a right to a share of the wealth that is derived from their society's cultural inheritance (by which is meant ideas and information); the political program of Social Credit is to make sure that the public has purchasing power that matches the level of production—Social Creditors think that production that is not purchased is the root cause of social problems like wars and poverty.  The Social Creditor’s policy is carefully calibrated government handouts and price controls that aim to make sure consumption equals production. Social Credit theory achieved its greatest political success in Alberta, where a Social Credit party dominated provincial politics from 1945 to 1971.  Social Credit theory is closely associated with Christianity, and in fact the Albertan Social Credit Party quickly evolved in such a way that it largely abandoned Social Credit's bewildering economic theories and became a more traditional conservative party, supportive of business and religion and hostile to socialism.  Shaw here in "Communication" exploits this fact for a joke: Riley’s boss is an active member of the Social Credit party and "has a strong Puritanical streak," and Riley foolishly makes a sex joke in his hearing.
 
Like all of the stories in this book so far, "Communication" is well put together and well-written, but the resolution of the plot is so disappointing I have to give this one a marginal thumbs down.  "Communication," after its magazine appearance, has only ever been reprinted in Shaw collections, including an Italian one.

*Wikipedia suggests that this is like double or more the real population of Red Deer, but maybe this dude is also cataloging people in the surrounding suburbs?

"The Cosmic Cocktail Party" (1970)

The German edition of Tomorrow Lies in Ambush takes its title from this story, which first appeared in the anthology Science Against Man, where it was titled "Harold Wilson at the Cosmic Cocktail Party." As all you Beatles fans know, Harold Wilson was prime minister of the United Kingdom in the periods 1964-1970 and 1974-1976. 

This is one of those stories in which people's brains can be scanned and their knowledge and personalities uploaded into a computer so people can still talk to "them" (in fact, simulations of them) after they are dead. Simulating every single neuron and synapse of a human brain takes a lot of memory and computing power, so the company that provides this (very expensive) service, Biosyn, has come up with an economy of scale that can help control costs--they have one huge computer ("the tank") that stores multiple personalities, instead of a bunch of individual computers devoted to single personalities.  This has proven to be penny wise and pound foolish.  The personalities have figured out how to interact with each other, and the strong personality of a Colonel Crowley, an adventurer who administered a colony in Africa, has begun dominating the milquetoast college professor types who make up most of the simulated personalities.  Crowley has created a fantasy world of dragons and barbaric hunts in which he is the hero and all those weak-willed intellectuals are his subordinates and enemies (victims.)  The personalities, thus occupied, have stopped communicating with the outside world, defeating the whole purpose of simulating them at such great cost and putting Biosyn's business model in jeopardy.

When an African politician comes to England to talk to Colonel Crowley in hopes of persuading the adventurer to campaign for him in an upcoming election in the country which Crowley once governed, the Biosyn staff have to come up with a way to lure Crowley back into contact with meatspace.  Their solution is to convince Crowley that the real world needs him to lead the resistance against socialist space aliens who are endeavoring to take over the Earth via hypnotism (to which Crowley, as a computer sim, is immune) and a simulacrum of a relatively benign socialist, one not associated with gulags and mass murder like Stalin or Mao--Harold Wilson.

"The Cosmic Cocktail Party" has some interesting science and the characters and their dilemmas hold your attention, even if it is sort of silly and the cocktail party theme feels forced; I'm judging this one marginally good.

"The Happiest Day of Your Life" (1970)

This is one of those short shorts, and has been reprinted many times in anthologies of short shorts.  These anthologies get printed again and again all over the world, so there must be a lot of people out there who like short shorts.  (Jerry Seinfeld voice: "Who are these people?")  Personally, I am a short short skeptic.  "The Happiest Day of Your Life" was first printed in Analog.

I guess the idea that your schooldays are the happiest days of your life is a sort of truism or cliche.  The joke title of this story is a reference to the future depicted in the story, when the cognitive and economic elite will, through hypnosis, drugs and surgery, get all their education in one day!  This results in eight-year-old attorneys and executives, and heartbreak for the mother in the story, who loses the opportunity to watch her boys mature naturally--they leave in the morning acting like eight-year-olds and come back in the afternoon acting like 22-year-old professionals!  To make matters worse, while her kids have IQs over 140, hers is closer to the mean, and so she has to suffer the indignity of not being able to converse on an equal footing with her kids, who are not even teenagers yet but condescend to her, treat her like a child. 

This one works.

"Element of Chance" (1969)

This eight-page piece first appeared in Galaxy, and stars Cytheron, a member of a race with super psychic powers--he can teleport, make himself invisible, see into the infrared and ultraviolet spectra, etc.  These aliens have apparently evolved beyond having to eat or breathe as well.  Cytheron has seen his thousandth birthday, and the elders of his race want him to mature--to join the "group-mind."  Unwilling to surrender his individuality, Cytheron tries to escape the adults, teleporting from one heavenly body to another, eventually getting trapped in a quasar which is in the process of becoming a black hole.  The gravity of this body is so great no particle can escape it, so Cytheron can't teleport out of it.  The elders break him out of this predicament by causing the quasar to explode as a supernova.  Cytheron is worried that the explosion might damage any life nearby, but is assured that there are no planets with life within range of the blast wave, though the wave will cause one planet that will eventually host intelligent life to have some unusually heavy elements.  This planet, the clues indicate to us readers, is Earth, and those heavy elements will be gold and uranium.  The weak joke of the story is that the wise aliens feel there is no reason to believe that the presence of gold and uranium will have any effect on the development of intelligent beings.

The twist ending of "Element of Chance" is lame, and the story is weighed down by all kinds of lyrical, metaphorical, descriptions of landscapes, "amethyst rain," amethyst snow, a horizon of "shattered silver daggers," and so on, stuff that numbed my poor mind instead of stimulating it.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  Since its debut it has appeared in the French edition of Galaxy and Shaw collections, including Cosmic Kaleidoscope.

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I had to give two of these stories a down vote, but the others are successful or at least acceptable.  Hopefully the final four stories in Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, which we will dissect in our next episode, will blow us away.