1955 stories by Damon Knight, Avram Davidson and Fredric Brown

Today we do a biopsy on a sample from Anthony Boucher's The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifth Series, first published in hardcover in 1956.  I own a copy of the 1968 paperback, Ace G-714; looking at the contents list of the first edition on isfdb, it looks like this paperback of mine is a slightly shortened version; a poem by Boucher is missing, and Boucher's intro was shortened.  (It looks like there is a scan of Ace F-105, the 1961 edition of this anthology, at the internet archive, in case any of you Silas Stingies out there want to read these stories.)

My copy of The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifth Series was owned by Private Charles E. Harris, who inscribed his name, rank, serial number and Social Security number on its title page.  Included in the start of this volume is a one-page "Proem" by Fredric Brown entitled "Imagine," a poetical exhortation to us readers to imagine not just easy things like witches and spacecraft, but difficult things like the fact that there are billions of stars in the universe and the true nature of the relationship between our consciousness and our bodies.

Based on Boucher's spoily intros to the stories, I'm expecting the three pieces we'll talk about today to be joke stories.  (A review from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of this very anthology, quoted on the first page of the book, accuses Boucher of having "a love of the droll.")  In our next episode we'll look at stories from The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifth Series that, I hope, are a little more serious.  All of these stories, and Brown's "Imagine," originally appeared in issues of F&SF in 1955.

Fellow SF fans Private Charles G. Harris and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, we salute you!

"You're Another" by Damon Knight

In the last installment of MPorcius Fiction Log we found that Knight had chosen some pretty good stories about robots and computers threatening our position at the top of the food chain for inclusion in The Metal Smile.  But throughout our career reading old SF stories we have also found that Knight can produce some pretty lame joke stories.  "You're Another" is a long story, over 30 pages here, so reading it is feeling like a risky investment.  So why am I doing it?  Well, once I walked through Central Park alone in the dark of night to prove to myself I wasn't as big of a p--I mean weenie--as I suspected I was.  Maybe this is a little like that.

"You're Another" actually starts in Central Park--our hero Johnny Bornish is there to do some sketching (in the 1940s Knight himself actually sold quite a few illustrations to magazines like Planet Stories and Weird Tales.)  Johnny is not only an artist, but a klutz who has bad luck--somebody's dog knocks him into the famous sailboat pond and when he goes to the Automat he drops his change and there is a major malfunction with the coffee machine.  (I don't know if Knight himself was a klutz.)  But Johnny has a good attitude.  You probably remember that when one of Don Quixote's acts of chivalry went awry the Knight of the Doleful Countenance would say "this adventure must be reserved for another knight!"  Well, when Johnny goes into an art supply store to purchase a new sketchbook and then forgets all about the sketchbook because he has spilled a can of red paint and made a mess of the store he thinks that "God did not care for him to do any sketching today."

On the day of these pond water, coffee and paint episodes Johnny has a revelation--whenever he suffers one of these catastrophes two people are nearby, a "tweedy woman" and an "old man."  Are they causing his bad luck?  And what about that Japanese coin he has been carrying around for ten years as a lucky charm...it is the only thing he hasn't lost in ten years.  Could it be an unlucky charm, or some kind of homing device used by the tweedy woman and old man?

One of the famous things about Knight is that he wrote a scathing and influential review of my favorite Canadian, A. E. van Vogt.  Here in "You're Another" we see a rather van Vogt-style plot, in which some guy learns about the secret weirdos who manipulate the universe behind the scenes, gains super powers and becomes one of those weirdos, but Knight, more or less, plays it for laughs.  I guess you could say this is, or very nearly is, a parody of van Vogt.

Johnny tries to get rid of the Japanese coin, but the thing always finds its way back to him, even flying through the air and adhering to his skin.  The coin gets damaged in the struggle, and then the old man shows up*, disguised as a "dark man," and there is some kind of malfunction and, by waving around the arm to which the coin is attached, Johnny can teleport through different dimensions or timelines or something.  Mostly he teleports to different Manhattan locations; eateries, the subway, a bus, the top of the Empire State Building.  This power gives him the upper hand over the old/dark man, and Johnny forces his former tormentor to tell him what is going on--it turns out that our world is just a movie set constructed by people of the future.  You and I, dear reader, are mere extras, while Johnny is the comic relief--the old/dark man and the tweedy woman are second unit directors or something like that, manipulating the unwitting "actors" like Johnny into following the script.  Johnny makes his way to the director and gets the script changed in his favor.

I'm giving "You're Another" a thumbs down; it isn't abysmal, but it is a marginal failure, a waste of time.  I don't care for parodies and spoofy imitations--I think Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back and Goldfinger and On Her Majesty's Secret Service are legitimately good movies, and things like Spaceballs and Austin Powers are a childish waste of time, the capering of buffoons; it is hard to create something sincere that is good, and easy to throw together a mocking imitation.  So, to the extent that "You're Another" is a goof on my man Van, I'm against it.

You can sort of look at this story as a straight SF story with a straight plot with lots of jokes appended to it; so maybe I should think more about why, if Knight is semi-seriously using a van Vogt-like form here, I enjoy this story far less than I have so many van Vogt stories?  I think that van Vogt's stories generally include one or more unusual theories about psychology or politics or sociology that can be thought-provoking (remember, SF is a literature of ideas, or so we like to tell ourselves) and help to generate an atmosphere of alienness and novelty; "You're Another" doesn't do much in this line.  Knight does refer to artists like Benvenuto Cellini and to New York mayor William O'Dwyer, which is kind of interesting, but those references don't add much to the feel of the story.  Also, in a van Vogt story, there is some usually some kind of war or revolution or killing spree going on, there is lots of danger and the stakes are high, which transmits to the reader tension and uneasiness.  Knight's story here has lots of little jokes that create a tone of light fantasy, make it a "romp" about which there is no reason to care, a limp contrast to van Vogt, who gives us a nightmare struggle for life or death and/or a mystery to be solved.

No ideas and no feeling means no good.

"You're Another" is included in the Special Wonder anthology published as a memorial to Anthony Boucher; I actually own the second volume of the paperback version of that anthology (I read a William F. Nolan story in it in 2015) and so I own two printings of "You're Another."  The story also appears in multiple Knight collections, including ones published in Europe.
 
*I had been hoping the tweedy woman was going to show up; more photogenic.  Sadly, Knight drops her from the narrative altogether--she has no dialogue.  Why even include her?  These kinds of extraneous elements help to make a story like this way longer than it needs to be.

"The Golem" by Avram Davidson

In his little intro Anthony Boucher tells us that the story of the golem is so famous that "it is familiar even to gentiles," so I need not rehash it here.  Davidson is a vast storehouse of knowledge, and often bases his SF stories on history and literature (he has a whole series of books I have not read that take medieval conceptions of Virgil as their jumping off point); the recent Davidson story we read included all sorts of references to figures of the period of the American revolution.  "The Golem's" characters live in sunny California, and Davidson alludes to a long list of old Hollywood notables, like my beloved Laurel and Hardy and a bunch of people I know little or nothing about, like Leatrice Joy and Harold Lloyd.

The Gumbeiners are a retired Jewish couple whose dialogue is full of words like "nebbich" and complaints about the Czar.  They sit on the porch, bickering back and forth ("When are you going to cut the lawn?," "Of course, of course...I am always wrong, you are always right") and are so busy with their squabbles that they don't pay much heed to the grey-faced man who sits down on the porch next to them and explains that he is a robot and, by reading Mary Shelly and Isaac Asimov, has come to realize war between robot and man is inevitable.

"Foolish old woman," the stranger said; "why do you laugh?  Do you not know I come to destroy you?"  

When the robot insults his wife Mr. Gumbeiner strikes it and cracks its skull so gears and wires are exposed.  Intimately familiar with the story of the golem, which he is certain is true (he even speculates that the "Communisten" may have sent the golem to Moscow), Gumbeiner contrives to get this new golem to mow his lawn the way the original golem in Prague carried the rabbi's water and cut his wood. 

I admire Davidson for having a huge brain full of cultural information and for being able to turn it all into genre stories (he apparently also wrote lots of detective stories set in various historical periods), but these stories rarely make me laugh or excite me.  Easier for me to respect than to love, this story is just OK, a sort of cute trifle.

The big wigs of the SF community seem to legitimately adore "The Golem" and it shows up in many anthologies with gush like "All-Time-Great," "Classic" and "Best of the Best" in their titles, as well as in anthologies of robot stories and of Jewish SF.

Click for a closer look at these quite good covers

"Too Far" by Fredric Brown

"Too Far" was first published in an issue of F&SF that, for whatever logistical or financial or artistic reasons, is lead by a story by J. T. McIntosh, one of my betes noir, and includes many reprints, including of pieces decades old.  Brown's piece is new, however, another one of these one-page jobs.  If you have a minute you can read the magazine version yourself at the link above to the internet archive, that fabulous resource for all of us interested in the popular fiction of the 20th century.

Editor Boucher calls these short-shorts "vignettes," and tells us that Brown calls them "vinnies."  Brown, we are informed, is a master of the form, a pioneer in the production of vinnies who has inspired others to take up the challenge of the vinnie.  "Too Far" is about a womanizer who lives in New York City.  He is also a lycanthrope who can change at will into a deer.  One day he decides to experience sex as a buck, and so sneaks into the Central Park Zoo to mate with a doe.  The doe turns out to also be a lycanthrope, a human woman who can also change at will into a deer.  (Who would have thought this was a common malady?)  She is also a witch (this I can believe) and casts a spell on our hero that makes him unable to change back into human form, trapping him in the zoo where he will be hers, all hers.

This story includes lots of puns, many around the fact that "buck" and "doe" are homophones for slang terms for money.

This story is linguistically clever and titillatingly hovers around the edges of good taste, what with its hints of bestiality and misogyny, and so I cannot deny that it has won me over.  This is a joke story that works--1) it is short, not 30-plus damned pages long; 2) it has some originality, and isn't just a "I'm too cool for school" half-assed mockery of what some other guy did sincerely; and 3) it actually generates in the reader some kind of feeling, because a) even though were-deer is an absurd idea, the characters are recognizable realistic types, the man who wants to sleep around and the woman who wants a steady relationship; and b) the bestiality and misogyny elements can disgust you or make you uneasy--the kind of "shock" humor I used to hear on the Howard Stern show in the late '80s and '90s, with Gilbert Gottfried and Andrew Dice Clay and other such characters may be low and vulgar and offensively sexist and racist and homophobic, but it gets a rise out of an audience in a way a guy spilling a can of paint does not.

"Too Far" appears in Brown collections, as well as in some anthologies about witches and scary sexual relationships.

**********

Knight's and Davidson's stories are "meta," reflecting self-consciously on other fantastic literature and referring to other art forms and to history, but Brown, who wrote one of the most "meta" of all classic SF novels in What Mad Universe, beats Knight and Davidson decisively in the comedy game and he does it in a fraction of the time. We admire such efficiency here at MPorcius Fiction Log!

More 1955 stories from F&SF in our next episode. 

Three 1950s "novels" by Damon Knight

Ah, Damon Knight, famed editor, critic, and short story writer, for whom the SFWA (which Knight founded in 1965) renamed their Grand Master Award some 25 years after its inauguration.  I've had mixed feelings about Knight's criticism and fiction, which means I have no idea how I am going to react when I set out to read something by him.  Today we'll be taking just such a leap into the dark not once, not twice, but three times!  Before me I hold a Berkley Medallion 1969 paperback edition of Three Novels, a collection which first came out in hardcover in 1967.  I recently received this volume, with its quite effective Richard Powers cover, from internet science fiction gadfly extraordinaire Joachim Boaz, one of something like 100 SF books he sent me recently.  This copy, which a stamp on the inside cover is telling me somebody, maybe Mr. Boaz himself, maybe Chip or Joanna Gaines, maybe David Koresh--hey, you never know!-- purchased at "Book Rack" in a shopping mall in Waco, Texas for 97 cents, has only 184 pages of text, so maybe the three included works, all from the 1950s, should be classified as "novellas" or "novelettes" instead of novels, but, hey, who's counting?  I will be reading the "novels" in the order in which they appear in this book, which is not the order in which they were published.

Rule Golden (1954)

This is a gimmicky story that applies to the personal level the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction deterrence, something we talked about a lot in my history and poli sci classes at Rutgers in the late '80s and early '90s.  Rule Golden is set in the future of the early 1970s, when videophones are widely used, and is a first-person narrative; our narrator is Robert James Dahl, a Midwestern journalist who brags about how great his paper is and acts like a tough guy.  Knight practically tells us the story's gimmick on the first page of the story, and then he writes page after page (this thing is like 75 pages in this edition!) about Dahl investigating this strange phenomenon.  Rule Golden is like a boring detective story, with lots of mundane places and people for the detective to examine or outwit before resolving the mystery to his satisfaction.

In brief, Dahl discovers that the United States government has taken captive a lone space alien named Aza-Kra who has come to Earth to spread an airborne catalyst that changes your genetic code so that you suffer (psychosomatically) any damage you inflict on another creature.  For example, on the first page of Rule Golden an abusive husband kicks his wife in the ass, and suffers pain in his own ass! (Comedy!*)  Knight gives lots of examples of this, including prison staff and butchers feeling unhappy or ill as a result of their work--we eventually learn that the engineering works on animals higher than insects, so carnivores like lions and tigers are going to go extinct.  Dahl meets Aza-Kra in the army base, and the creature tells him he is from the Galactic Federation of peaceful civilizations and they want the Earth to join but right now we humans are too violent so he is here to genetically engineer us so we behave.  Dahl helps the E. T., which can read minds and instantly put people to sleep, to escape to Europe, the Middle East and Asia, where he spreads the catalyst.  (The substance has to be spread wide quickly, or there will be a period, before the catalyst has made its way to Moscow and Peking, during which North America and Western Europe won't be able to defend themselves from an attack by the commies.) 

Knight tries to add tension to the tale by having Dahl wracked by doubts--is Aza-Kra telling the truth or is he just trying to soften us up so the aliens can conquer us--and by describing how Dahl and his alien buddy evade the authorities in country after country.  This stuff serves to make the story longer (have I told you this thing is like 75 pages?) but does little to make it more compelling.

Because there is no way to enforce the law, and no way for private individuals to protect their property, the world falls into anarchy, with people stealing, vandalizing, trespassing, and crossing borders as they see fit.  (Aza-Kra's genetic engineering doesn't make people feel bad about burning down the crops I spent a season growing or the business I spent a lifetime building.)  The cities are deserted and famine develops, but a fleet of spaceships arrives to hand out food and to revive Aza-Kra, who was near death from eating inadequate Earth food.  Aza-Kra is revealed to be not a professional explorer or diplomat, but a sort of artisan ("I am ordinarily a maker of--you have not the word, it is like porcelain....") who volunteered to risk his life amongst us humans.  (I guess carpenter would have been too obvious.)

Rule Golden appeared first in Science Fiction Adventures, and in 1960 was included in Groff Conklin's Six Great Short Science Fiction Novels.  I'm afraid I cannot concur with Conklin's generous assessment!  This story is so long, and uses so many tired elements (like mind reading and a Galactic Federation pacifying us against our will) that the novelty of the newish idea can't carry it, especially since Knight reveals the gimmick on page one.  Knight also doesn't address the moral issues related to making people behave by crippling them, removing their ability to choose between good and evil, as Anthony Burgess does in A Clockwork Orange.

Weak!  Maybe this story should have been like 10 pages?

*This reminded me of the Corsican brothers from The Electric Company.  That was a good show, with Joan Rivers narrating Letterman and Morgan Freeman as Dracula and narrator of those Spiderman shorts that starred a version of Spidey who never talked!   

Natural State (1954)

I guess you could say that this one is about the urban-rural divide.  It is the year 2064, most cities have collapsed, with only a few of the biggest, like New York and Chicago still standing, totally shut off from the countryside.  The cities have what we would recognize as modern societies, with TV shows and hover cars and social hierarchies and people going off to work every day, but things are getting tough economically--most people work multiple jobs and the lack of contact with the world beyond the city limits means there is no supply of essential raw materials, like metal.  Soon even mighty New York may collapse!  Another problem: the urban population is waning, while the rural population, whom the urbanites think of as unsophisticated rubes, grows, and soon the people of the countryside will be able to militarily or culturally take over the world and urban culture will go extinct!

The rulers of New York propose a solution--trade with the rural population, who presumably will be eager to purchase motor vehicles and telephones and TVs and power tools.  This will provide a source of metal and other much-needed resources, and spread urban culture to the ignorant hicks, preserving the sophisticated way of life enjoyed by city people.  They send out into the countryside the most popular actor on NYC TV, Alvah Gustad, with a hovercar load of trade goods to open up trade with the country folk.

What Gustad discovers is that the 150 million people living in the rural landscape are not a bunch of ignorant rubes--they are living in utopia!  Most of their time is spent sitting around working on little hobbies like whittling and needlepoint or putting on theatricals and having dances!  The basis for this life of leisure is genetic engineering; they breed and grow everything they need, a gimmick we would see decades later in Harry Harrison's West of Eden and Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000.  The country people don't need cars and airplanes, because they ride beasts and giant birds around!  They don't need mines or factories or construction equipment because they have plants that grow knife blades, bulbs that grow into houses, and giant turtles whose shells grow in transparent layers that can be easily peeled off to act as a sheet of unbreakable glass!  They don't know how to read because they have bred talking birds that can recite entire books!  (This last is a little reminiscent of one of my favorite Gene Wolfe stories, "The Doctor of Death Island," in which people abandon reading because of the development of talking books.)

That's Gustad in his hover car,
trying to sell power tools to the
country folk

The country folk don't need or want what Gustad is selling, but their intellectual class is interested in examining him, and they employ a creature which cripples his hover car (by eating an element of its power pack) to strand the New Yorker 1,000 miles from Gotham.  The locals (including a pretty lady who can actually read!) want Gustad to join their happy society, and in the same way that Dahl in Rule Golden has to decide whether or not to cleave to the alien Aza-Kra, Gustad here in Natural State has to choose sides.  Fortunately for the reader, this story is better in every respect than Rule Golden--the characters and their relationships are more compelling, the technological stuff is more interesting, the jokes are more amusing.

When it looks like their idea of fostering trade has failed, the rulers of NYC try some serious skullduggery, what the kids call a false flag operation, in an effort to start a shooting war between the rural people and Chicago--the New Yorkers plan to steal all the metal from the Windy City after the country folk depopulate it!  This scheme fails, and instead of attacking Chi-town the country people turn on the city that never sleeps and liberate the citizens of the Big Apple from the tyranny of books, TV shows, and a steady work schedule.     

Competent!

Natural State first appeared in Galaxy, in an issue you can read at the internet archive, in which Knight's story is adorned with some pretty good illustrations by Emsh.  Natural State was included in anthologies edited by Martin Greenberg, Frederick Pohl and Georgess McHargue, and was even expanded into a longer novel, Masters of Evolution, which appeared as half of an Ace Double. 

I love the Emsh cover to All About the Future with its sexy spacesuits
and diagrams of a rocket ship and a heavy pistol --gorgeous!

The Dying Man (1957)

Dio is a planner living in a post-scarcity future in which people are immortal and invulnerable to wounds and disease--they also have the power to levitate, which is pretty good (I have long wanted to float everywhere like the fighters in DragonBall Z.)   Everybody has lived so long that most people have actually forgotten the concept of death!  To keep existence from getting boring, planners like Dio rebuild the cities in different styles every year.

Planners are members of the student class, the intellectuals and scientists who read and keep records and figure things out.  Most people, it appears, are "players," members of a frivolous unproductive leisure class.  Claire is just such a player, and she and Dio are having a love affair when it becomes apparent that Dio's body has somehow lost its invulnerability and immortality.  He falls ill, recovers with the help of an army of students who study him to figure out how to create and administer medicines that have not been needed for centuries.  He begins to grow old, his body changing in ways that the rest of humanity finds alarming.

The story, which at like 40 pages is considerably shorter than Rule Golden and Natural State, largely concerns Dio and Claire's reactions to Dio's body experiencing natural human aging and death.  Dio's creative work evolves, becoming more mature and sophisticated--in fact, too sophisticated for his contemporaries, with the result that the city he is responsible for designing is abandoned.  He also embraces ancient ways of doing things, working with his own hands instead of through machines--he carves a reproduction of Michelangelo's Dusk* from stone with a chisel, for example, and grows his own crops with which to bake his own bread.  (I know this guy's feels--I ground the beans for my wife's coffee yesterday.  Sure, sure, I used the Mr. Coffee 12-cup Electric Coffee Grinder with Multi-Settings--I didn't say I was a luddite!) 

The Dying Man is also considerably better than the "novels" with which it shares this collection.  I'm biased because I like stories about immortality and its effect on individuals and societies (the aforementioned Gene Wolfe story, "The Doctor of Death Island," is about immortality as much as it is about reading), but beyond that, The Dying Man has real human feeling, real human characters, engaging settings, and no goofy jokes.  The science behind immortality was also well done.  This is a piece I can really recommend.

The Dying Man first appeared under the title Dio in Infinity Science Fiction, where it is billed as "Damon Knight's Best Short Novel."  This issue of Infinity is available to read for free at the internet archive, and features not only numerous fetching illustrations by Emsh (these include a generous helping of Claire's chest!) but a story co-written by Harlan Ellison and Algis Budrys and, in the book review section, discussions by Knight of novels by Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke.  This issue of Infinity is full to bursting with stuff by and about some of classic SF's biggest names!

Dio would go on to be reprinted numerous times, including in Groff Cronklin's 5 Unearthly Visions and Robert Silverberg's Alpha 4.  I actually own both 5 Unearthly Visions and Alpha 4 which means I own three copies of this story.

*Knight has Dio call it Evening, but my art books and Wikipedia are calling it Dusk.

**********

Back in 2014 Joachim Boaz read and wrote about this collection, presumably this very same copy.  (His post and the comments, in which people recommend their favorite Knight stories, are worth your time.)  I know it would be more fun to disagree with Joachim or to have my own off-the-wall idiosyncratic take on these stories, but I'm afraid Mr. Boaz and I are in basic agreement about the contents of Three Novels.  Maybe I am a little more forgiving about the two weak pieces?  I was definitely more forgiving than Joachim when I read Beyond the Barrier, a book Joachim thought so poor he dared me to read it! 

(I'm not always so kind to Knight!  I read a collection of five of his short stories entitled Off Center and declared most of them "Bad!," "Weak!" "Lame" or even worse!)

More 1950s SF from the Joachim Boaz wing of the MPorcius Library in our next episode!

Three stories by Jack Vance from 1951

I enjoyed Jack Vance's Son of the Tree so much during our recent month-long celebration of Ace Doubles that I decided to read my copy of Underwood-Miller's 1992 collection of Vance stories, When the Five Moons Rise.  I picked up my copy of this hardcover at a library sale soon after my move to what they are calling the Buckeye state.  (When you move to a new place you learn new things; for example, people in Ohio don't like it when you call them "Hoosiers"--it seems that applies to people from some other state!)

When the Five Moons Rise contains twelve stories, but I've already written about two of them--"The Devil on Salvation Bluff" and "Ulward's Retreat"--on this blog. The remaining ten I will read in chronological order over three different blog posts.  Today we deal with three stories from 1951, "The New Prime," "Men of the Ten Books," and "The Masquerade on Dicantropus."

There's the loyal retainer and the beguiling
courtesan right there on the cover!

"The New Prime" 

"The New Prime" first appeared under the title "Brain of the Galaxy" in Worlds Beyond, a SF magazine I never heard of before.  Edited by Damon Knight, it lasted only three issues--"Brain of the Galaxy" appeared in the third, alongside stories by big names like Poul Anderson, Richard Matheson, C. M. Kornbluth and Lester Del Rey--Knight evidently got high class material for the magazine but still it didn't sell.  Business is hard!

Most of this story consists of a series of exciting vignettes, each set in a different society.  A 20th-century Bostonian finds himself naked at a party and must escape the police.  A soldier leads his unit in a war against giant intelligent insect-men.  A loyal retainer has a limited amount of time to search a ruined city for the legal document that will save his lord from the death penalty--he meets a beguiling courtesan who tries to distract him from his mission.  An artist who creates images with his mind competes against other imagists in an arena.  Finally, a gentleman on a diplomatic mission is tortured by the merciless intelligence officers of a totalitarian state--will he reveal his country's secrets?

After the entertaining vignettes comes the explanation that ties them together.  Our entire Galaxy is overseen by an executive (the "Prime" of the title) and an eleven-member deliberative body of Elders.  It is time to select the next Prime, and the candidates have just completed a test of their character and personalities, each sitting in a special couch, his mind absorbed in what we would now call a virtual reality simulation; each of the vignettes was one facet of the test, each assessed a valuable quality like the ability to think quickly under pressure, imagination, loyalty, etc.

The Elders have the task of selecting a new Prime, or allowing the current Prime a second term.  The incumbent Prime scored highest on the test, but the Elders note that such qualities as compassion and sympathy were next measured by the test, and perhaps it is these qualities that are needed at the present time.  The character of the Galaxy Prime, they believe, exercises a psychic influence over the many civilizations of the galaxy, and the current Prime's boldness, steadfastness and singleness of purpose have inspired a trend around the galaxy of authoritarian government--on Earth the rise of the Bolsheviks and the Nazis, for example.  The Elders have another candidate in mind, one so mild the stressful test may have severely damaged his psychology!

The vignettes are well-written adventure stuff, and the interesting resolution gives us a little of the old "sense of wonder" as well as a sort of twist ending--thumbs up for "The New Prime."

"Men of the Ten Books"

"Men of the Ten Books" (I believe Vance's preferred title is "The Ten Books"--at least that is the name under which the story appears in 21st-century publications) first appeared in an issue of Startling Stories alongside The Starmen of Llyrdis, a novel by Leigh Brackett which I read in early 2013, before the birth of this blog, and Earthmen No More, a Captain Future novelette by Brackett's husband Edmond Hamilton which I have not read and which does not appear to have ever been republished in English (maybe it will appear in a future publication of Haffner Press?)

Ralph and Betty Welstead are a married couple who disagree about everything.  (Who says SF is unrealistic?)  It is the far future, when the human race has colonized much of the galaxy, but there are still areas to be explored, and the Welsteads are explorers who make ends meet by mining asteroids.

The Welsteads discover a planet that was settled 271 years ago by the sixty-odd survivors of a shipwreck--these people have had no contact with other humans for all that time, but have succeeded in building a high tech, high trust, highly cultured society--the Welsteads think it is practically a utopia, with less crime and corruption and better technology and higher living standards than on Earth!  Ralph and Betty are shown around the planet, called Haven, by the mayor of the city they landed in.  The people of Haven are thrilled to meet the Welsteads, because they have a very rosy picture of Earth--the only books that survived that shipwreck were ten propaganda pamphlets gushing in purple prose about how wonderful Shakespeare, Rembrandt and other geniuses were (without actually including the text of one of the Bard's plays or a reproduction of one of Rembrandt's paintings) while glossing over all the crummy stuff Earthlings have been pulling since the dawn of time.  In fact, the reason the people of Haven are so successful is that their society is united behind the goals of constructing a civilization worthy of humankind's (supposed) grand traditions and developing a space drive so they can get back into contact with Earth.

The people of Haven are eager for the Welsteads to integrate them back into the wider human civilization, but Ralph fears that contact with Earth will corrupt the good people of Haven and he plots to sneak off the planet without letting them get a look at his space drive.  Betty isn't so sure Ralph should be "playing God" and isolating the Havenites' against their will, and goes behind her spouse's back to warn the mayor about Ralph's scheme.  Ralph's plan is frustrated, and the Havenites are set on a challenging course--facing the disappointment of learning the truth about Earth and maintaining their innocent culture in the face of Earth corruption--but the mayor assures the Welsteads that challenge is what the Havenites want, that mankind, on Haven or any other planet, is at its best when confronting challenges.

A solid and entertaining story.  I especially like the way "Men of the Ten Books" raises the topic of the reliability of secondary sources, of the distorted view they provide of the past or of other peoples.  (Perhaps even more subversive is the idea that suffering delusions can be beneficial for societies.)   The idea that a society united in pursuit of some grand goal is a better society is also an interesting topic we see in fiction and in the opinion press from time to time.  "Men of the Ten Books" appears to have been well-received, appearing in the anthologies The Best Science-Fiction Stories: 1952 and 1960's Out of this World 1, which has an introduction by Bertrand Russell.

"The Masquerade on Dicantropus"

Another story from Startling, with another sexy babe and rocket ship cover--what young man could resist such advertising?

Like "Men of the Ten Books," "The Masquerade on Dicantropus" is about a married couple.  Did Vance have marriage on the brain in 1951?  Is it significant that Vance and his wife travelled the world and would live for months at a time in European and African locations?

Jim and Barbara Root are living on the barren desert planet of Dicantropus; Jim is maintaining an antenna and engaging in some scientific work, looking over bones and rocks with his microscope.  What he is really interested in is a mysterious ancient ziggurat nearby, but the primitive natives don't want him poking around over there, and he respects their wishes.  Barbara spends her time complaining, stomping around, and counting the days (three months and three days to go!) until they can leave this boring ball of sand where they are the only humans--she's been here with her boring husband for six months already!  Her interest is piqued when a clue surfaces suggesting the pyramid is full of diamonds, but Jim refuses to try to bust his way into the structure--his job is to maintain the relay transmitter, not go to war with the locals Cortez-style.

A ship makes an emergency landing on Dicantropus--its sole occupant is Marville Landry, mining engineer and hunk!  After he is cured by Jim of his illness, Marv and Barbara start spending a lot of time together, long walks in the desert after fancy dinners and that sort of thing.  Not only is Marv dreamy, he is a man of action!  When he learns there may be diamonds in the ziggurat, he steals Jim's pistol from Jim's drawer, takes up an atomite torch, and that night he and Barbara the skank are drilling their way into the pyramid under cover of darkness!

It turns out that the "primitive natives" are neither primitive nor native to Dicantropus. They built the pyramid to distract visitors, keeping their attention away from their hidden space cruiser.  When Marv and Barb break into the pyramid they realize it is not ancient and find it is totally empty.  Their secret revealed, the aliens attack. Landry is killed, but Jim rescues his wife (for some reason.)  Jim transmits a call for help and the aliens leave.  Jim and Barb patch up their marriage, and, oh yeah, Jim found the diamonds--they were in the volcano where the alien space ship was hidden, so the Roots are now filthy rich.

This story is just OK.  The story's gimmick (distracting pyramid) isn't as clever as the gimmicks in the other stories we looked at today (ruler of the galaxy's brainwaves influence alien civilizations; virtual reality test; distorted view of reality based on biased sources leads to better outcomes.)  The plot doesn't hold together as smoothly as it might; for example, Landry has the gun but instead of shooting the aliens when they attack, he uses the gun as a club, and Vance gives a reason why the high tech aliens would want to live secretly as primitives on a barren planet but it just doesn't feel very convincing.  I'm also finding the ending unsatisfying.  Landry is the one who figures out the aliens' subterfuge, but instead of being rewarded for his boldness he dies while Jim, who was against antagonizing the aliens, benefits from Marv's enterprising nature and willingness to take risks.  Barbara isn't punished for her infidelity, nor is Jim for his inattentiveness to his wife.  This sort of material could be presented as a morality tale or as a tragedy, but instead the whole thing feels wishy washy.  Oh well, as sports guys might say, you can't hit it out of the park every time you go up at bat.

**********

More Jack Vance stories from early 1950s SF magazines in our next installment!

Seven stories by Barry Malzberg from the period 1969-72

The backside of Ace Double 27415 presented to the SF fan of 1971, the year of my birth, In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories, a collection of fifteen tales by New Jersey's own Barry N. Malzberg.  Three of these stories I am skipping: "In the Pocket" because I am assuming it is material later integrated into the novel The Men Inside, which I read and wrote about in 2011; "Gehenna," which I read and wrote about in 2013; and "The Idea," which I read and wrote about in January of last year.  That leaves us with a dozen stories, six today (plus a special free bonus!), six in our next episode.

"Ah, Fair Uranus" (1971)

This is a very typical Malzberg story, and I think it only ever appeared here in this Ace Double and in an Italian translation of In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories in 1974.

It is the early 24th century!  Hostile aliens are setting up bases around the solar system, and, according to Earth's authoritarian government, they are plotting an attack on humanity!  So an astronaut by the name of Needleman (I'm guessing his name and the title of the story are a sort of childish joke or even a reminder of The Men Inside) is sent to Uranus in a one-man craft to deploy some super bombs.  Along the way Needleman starts sympathizing with the aliens, and then is contacted by the aliens, who suggest he use the super bombs to blow up the Earth.  We readers have no idea if the alien threat is real or a government lie, if Needleman is really talking to aliens or just hallucinating, and whether or not Needleman blows up the Earth.

This story bears similarities with Malzberg's 1973 "A Reckoning," and 1972 "Making it Through," both of which I read in October of last year; all three are about astronauts who may be insane approaching one of the outer planets and coming to believe they have been contacted by aliens, and the grave peril to the human race that insanity and/or close encounter represents.  "Ah, Fair Uranus" also reminded me of 1972's "Out From Ganymede," which I read years ago, and which I decided to read again this week to refresh my memory!

"Out From Ganymede" (1972)  

"Out From Ganymede" was first published in Robert Silverberg's anthology New Dimensions II.  I read it in my copy of Out From Ganymede, a 1974 collection put out by Warner.  It also appears in the 2013 collection The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg.

1974 paperback edition of
New Dimensions II

It is the future!  An Earth wracked by international disputes and racial tensions sends a one-man space ship to orbit Ganymede.  The sole crewmember of the craft, Walker, spends much of the flight in unhappy reminiscences of his failed relationship with his estranged wife.  Once in orbit around Ganymede he is visited by Ganymedean natives.  When mission control back on Earth is forced (by riots or some similar issue) to abort the mission and direct the craft to return, the aliens, perhaps by hypnotism, convince Walker to destroy the Earth with the ship's arsenal of super weapons.  Whether the aliens are real and manipulating Walker, or simply hallucinations, the product of Walker's pent-up frustrations about his wife and the stress of the trip, the reader is left unsure of.

This story, while very similar to "Ah, Fair Uranus," is superior because of its focus on Walker's relationship with his wife.  I think "Out From Ganymede" also better presents the theme of mankind looking to space for salvation or escape from its problems, only to be frustrated because mankind's problems are psychological or sociological and carried with him wherever he may go.  (Malzberg challenges the idea of those SF writers--Ray Bradbury is coming to mind--who argue that travel to other planets is essential because it will make mankind immortal.)

"Notes Just Prior to the Fall" (1970)

OK, back to Ace Double 27415.

"Notes Just Prior to the Fall" first appeared in an anniversary "All-Star" issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and stars Simmons the horseplayer and takes place at the Aqueduct racetrack in Queens.  (No doubt you remember that Malzberg's mainstream novel Underlay was set largely at the Aqueduct.)  Our narrator is some kind of alien or supernatural creature who can observe while remaining invisible, read horses' thoughts and manipulate people's brains.  He appears to Simmons, gives Simmons bad advice on what horse to bet on, then observes the poor man, who loses his money and questions his own sanity.

Entertaining.

"As Between Generations" (1970)

This brief (four pages) story, first seen in Fantastic, is an allegory of the tensions inherent in the relationships between fathers and sons, including Oedipal tensions.  On Sundays in the town in which the story is set, adult sons ritualistically ride carts pulled by their aged fathers, whipping them as assembled spectators watch.  In the first part of the tale we get the son's point of view: dad humiliated him in front of a girlfriend, cut his allowance, etc., and this weird ritual is the son's chance to punish the father.  In the second part, the father's point of view: junior embarrassed him and disappointed him with his low morals, never appreciated all of his financial sacrifices, etc., and the point of the ritual is to humiliatingly expose to the people of the community the son's ingratitude.

A good "fantastic" literary story, a metaphor of one of the many sadnesses of our lives.

"The Falcon and the Falconeer" (1969)

Like "Notes Just Prior to the Fall," "The Falcon and the Falconeer" first appeared in F&SF.  In it Malzberg has characters explicitly state the themes we saw in "Out From Ganymede," that going into space is not going to solve humanity's problems, because man will bring his real problems, which are psychological and sociological (a religious person might say "spiritual") with him:

"...we learned only to play out our madness and insufficiency on a larger canvas; that space drive and the colonization of the galaxy only meant that the uncontrollable had larger implications."

"...men tend to get crazy on these expeditions anyway....this is what is going to happen inevitably when you set out to colonize the universe: men have to occupy it, and men are going to bring what they are along with them."

This perspective is one of the things that makes Malzberg and his work distinctive and valuable, the contrast it provides to the confidence in mankind we see in so much SF, perhaps archetypally in Robert Heinlein (Damon Knight finishes his intro to the collection of Heinlein's future history stories, The Past Through Tomorrow, thusly: "Heinlein's money is on Man, and I think the next century will prove him right.")  I hurry to point out that I think Malzberg's pessimism is a complement, not a refutation, of Heinlein-style optimism; the sweep of history and our daily lives may be full of human actions and artifacts that are ugly and terrible, but they are also full of human creations and achievements that are beautiful and heroic, from a Greek vase or a Japanese garden to the Empire State Building or the landing on the Moon.

The text of "The Falcon and the Falconeer" consists of transcripts of interviews of members of an expedition to Rigel XIV; the expedition suffered a disaster, and as we read the story's seventeen pages we piece together just what happened. What happened?  Bored and homesick, as Christmas approached the crew of the expedition decided to hold a Christmas pageant, reenacting the first Christmas, with crew members (all adult men) playing Mary, the newborn Jesus, the three wise men, etc.  Playing the animals were the native Rigelians, who "look like asses."  Malzberg encourages us to consider all the multiple meanings of "ass" by having various crew members say the Rigelians are dim-witted and by having the expedition's psychologist report that the expedition commander is "anal-retentive" and a "latent homosexual."  There is evidence that the Rigelians were smarter than they appeared and used telepathy to inspire in the humans the desire for a Christmas pageant, but the psychologist insists it was all just "mass hysteria."  During the performance the crewman playing Jesus began throwing fits, and the rest of the expedition fled the planet, leaving him behind.

This one is pretty good.  We have reason to believe that Malzberg himself is particularity proud of "The Falcon and the Falconeer"--it appears in the 1973 anthology SF: Author's Choice 3, a cover description of which reads, "Thirteen Science Fiction Masters Present, With Commentary, Their Own Favorite Stories."  I would certainly like to read Malzberg's commentary on the story.  (Of course, readers of Charles Platt's Dream Makers know that by 1979 Malzberg's favorite story of his own was "Uncoupling.")

[UPDATE 4/23/2017:  In the comments ukjarry gives us a summary of the Malzberg commentary on "The Falcon and the Falconeer" from SF: Author's Choice 3, providing valuable insight into the creation of this tale and Malzberg's work process!]

"June 24, 1970" (1969)

This two page story is a letter from an editor to a SF writer with Malzberg's famous pseudonym of O'Donnell.  At the same time that it is a satire of the time travel story in which a guy might kill his ancestors, it is itself just such a time travel story, as well as a series of jokes revealing the sad truths of a career as an SF editor or SF writer.  Such a story runs the risk of being self-pitying or self-indulgent, but "June 24, 1970" is actually pretty clever, and people into "meta" and "recursive" SF will, I suspect, love it.

"June 24, 1970" first appeared in an issue of Venture with a striking but incomprehensible cover.

"Pacem Est" (1970) (co-written with Kris Neville)

This story, which first appeared in Infinity One, was co-written with Kris Neville; as we have discussed here at MPorcius Fiction Log before, Neville's pessimism about space flight presages Malzberg's own, and Malzberg has been one of Neville's biggest fans.

Unsurprisingly, this is a pessimistic story, about a space war which might lead to the destruction of the human race.  It is also full of symbolism (for example, the aliens look just like human beings) and histrionic melodrama.  Hawkins is an officer in a reconnaissance unit fighting on an alien planet, participating in ground combat that is perhaps supposed to remind you of World War One (there is poison gas and daily patrols beyond the barbed wire.)  A group of nuns who think that Armageddon is nigh are on the planet, tending to the soldiers, and one gets too close to No Man's Land, to the edge of the wire, where she breathes in alien poison gas and dies.  She lays there dead for a few days, until Hawkins, who passes her twice a day, departing on and returning from patrols, arranges to have her body retrieved.  He finds that the nuns have put up a wooden marker where she died.  After a talk with the nuns Hawkins lays down on the marker and awaits the enemy poison gas as a way of committing suicide.

I don't know if I am missing something, or if I am just supposed to be moved by the images of death and the decision of the main character to commit suicide rather than continue participating in the madness of the war.  Like all of us, I've experienced lots and lots of anti-war fiction, so for yet another anti-war story to have an effect on me it has to do something new or do something very well, and this story doesn't quite cut it. There is also the religion angle; the story begins and ends with italicized lines claiming that God was lonely and so he invented religion.  Is this some kind of indictment of religion for causing wars or of religious people for being selfish or a criticism of the depiction of God found in the Bible?

This story is acceptable, but I am not sure it succeeds in its aims.

*********

This crop of stories is rather good; not only do they touch on many of Malzberg's characteristic themes, but I think "As Between Generations," "The Falcon and the Falconeer," and "June 24, 1973," are better than average for Malzberg, more concise, better structured, and more entertaining than is usual for him.  Sometimes his work comes across as rushed or derivative of his earlier work, but the three stories just mentioned feel carefully crafted.  Let's hope the rest of the stories in In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories, which we'll look at in our next episode, will meet this admirable standard!

Dwellers of the Deep by Barry N. Malzberg (plus The Day of the Burning)

"You don't say?" Stuart says.  "That's very interesting.  That's one I never heard of before.  Must be very tough for you, hey, Izzie? Aliens!  Seizing your mind!  Imagine that."

"It's pretty tough," Fox says.  "There's no question about it."

"He's bearing up very well," Susan says.  "But he needs help and I thought the Solarians could give it to him."

Do I love Barry Malzberg?  Of course I do. But that love does not blind me to those of his idiosyncrasies which might fairly be considered faults.  One such fault?  Our man Barry, resident of the great state of New Jersey lo these many years, former employee of the New York City government, has produced a prodigious volume of salable writing, but one strategy that has made his tremendous output possible has been the recycling of plots and themes.  For example, here at MPorcius Fiction Log we have read numerous stories by Malzberg that feature hypnotherapy that allows the patient to experience socially unacceptable sexual liaisons and acts of violence.  Another plot Malzberg has reused has been the one about an astronaut who goes crazy and kills his comrades or bombs the Earth or both.  And those aren't the only plots Malzberg has used more than once.

Back in 2011 I read Malzberg's 1974 novel The Day of the Burning, in which an employee of the New York City government thought he was being contacted by aliens and believed that the fate of the world lay in his hands.  Just last year I reread Malzberg's 1973 story "Closed Sicilian," in which a chess player thinks he is in contact with aliens and the fate of the world rests in his hands.  Today, as part of our continuing series looking at Ace Doubles resident here in the MPorcius library, we are talking about Dwellers of the Deep, which appeared in Ace Double 27400 in 1970 under Malzberg's transparent K. M. O'Donnell pseudonym.  It is not exactly surprising that Dwellers of the Deep is about a former employee of the New York City government who thinks he is being contacted by aliens and believes that the fate of the world rests in his hands.

In the 1990s there were some rumblings among temporarily ascendant dissident factions of the New York City government that there might be some reforms made to CUNY.  CUNY professors and administrators, including those in my office, sprang into action to prevent any such reforms, and I did some work on a research project which consisted of calling up and interviewing people who had dropped out of CUNY without earning a degree.  No matter what these people said (many told me that CUNY had been just like high school, with nobody taking classes seriously), in our report they played the role of grateful alums asserting that the CUNY experience had wrought a vast improvement in their lives, even though they had not graduated from CUNY, and thus no reforms were necessary.  Of course, their names didn't appear in the report and there were no recordings of the interviews, so our report was about as verifiable as an urban legend related via a friend of a friend, or as my little anecdote here.

Dwellers of the Deep also appears in 1979's
Malzberg at Large...

Dwellers of the Deep takes place in the summer of 1951.  Our hero, 23-year-old Izzinius Fox, like an alternate reality MPorcius, a few months ago quit his city job conducting fraudulent interviews of "dispossessed or evicted welfare recipients...."  Why did he quit?  To collect unemployment compensation ("it would last at least twenty-six and possibly fifty-two weeks" and "cover his rent and food nicely") and devote himself full-time to collecting science-fiction magazines!

Malzberg seems to have chosen 1951 as the setting for his novel because this was a time of ferment in the science-fiction community. In this novel the leading SF magazine, Tremendous Stories, is being challenged by Thoughtful Stories and Thrilling Stories, periodicals which have more "prestige" than Tremendous and have stolen most of Tremendous' famous contributors.  The SF world is also embroiled in a dispute about the theories of SF writer Cupboard, who has recently published non-fiction articles with titles like "A New Engineering of the Mind."  You probably already realize this is all a parody of the once dominant Astounding facing competition from Galaxy and F&SF and of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics articles.

Fox fears he may be going insane, and well he might: periodically his consciousness is transported as if by magic to a space ship where aliens who claim to be minor civil servants of a galactic union demand he hand over a copy of the aforementioned article, "A New Engineering of the Mind."  If he does so, he is told, the aliens will bring peace and prosperity to Earth via membership in the Galactic Federation, but Fox does not trust them and refuses to cooperate, causing the aliens to threaten to resort to coercive measures.  These "Interceptions," as Fox calls them, last a maximum of ten minutes, but when he is returned to his body on Earth he finds no time has passed.  In fact, one Interception takes place while Fox, a virgin, is in the arms of Susan Forsythe, a bespectacled and large-breasted SF fan who is always trying to get Fox to join her fan group, the Solarians, and she doesn't even notice his disappearance and return!  Shaken by this Interception, Fox puts his makeout session with Susan on hold so he can describe to her his incredible problem.

With the single-mindedness we sometimes see in women trying to change men, Susan doesn't dismiss Fox's experiences as delusions, but instead uses them as a lever to get him to come to tonight's meeting of the Solarians!  She thinks "Izzie" should tell the Solarians his story, that maybe they can provide him useful advice!  The Solarian meeting, however, collapses in rancorous internecine warfare before Fox can relate to them his incredible tale.  (Presumably the passionate disputes among SF fans in Dwellers of the Deep are a satire of the famous strife in New York City SF fan circles in the 1930s, when Marxist SF fans like Donald Wollheim broke with Sam Moskowitz's Greater New York Science Fiction Club to form the Futurians, whose members included Communist Party member Fred Pohl and Trotskyist Judith Merrill.)

...and 1994's The Passage of the Light

After the Solarian fiasco, Susan takes Fox to see the leader of the splinter group which has broken off from the Solarians, a Miles Graffanatis.   In the story's climax, Fox learns, or has the delusion that, Graffanatis, along with Susan, is a collaborator with the aliens. Graffanatis, a four-hundred pound chain smoker, tells Fox that the aliens have stolen the Cupboard article from Fox's apartment, making both the aliens' efforts to convince him to voluntarily hand over the article, and his resistance, pointless.  This sort of undermines the whole plot, and I can't deny that the novel peters out limply here in the last dozen pages or so.  The real climax of Dwellers of the Deep is the wild meeting of the Solarians, or the section that follows the meeting, Malzberg's satire of Dianetics and Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.'s support of Dianetics. Cupboard's "A New Engineering of the Mind" argues that all of society's problems are the result of obsessions with sex, and calls for extreme measures to suppress the sex drive. I am guessing this is a jocular reference to the views expressed by top SF writers like Robert Heinlein and especially Theodore Sturgeon, who felt that society's problems were caused by sex taboos and repression of sexual desire.    

Despite its somewhat weak ending, Dwellers of the Deep is a fun book, full of fun little jokes and funny characters, most of whom I haven't mentioned (let's mention some of them: Susan and Izzie's insane landlord; Fox's overbearing mother; a fantasy version of Fox's deceased father who is obsessed with the roller derby; and Stuart Wiseman, a bookseller who always tries to overcharge Fox.)  Fox himself is a fun character, a decent enough and smart enough chap but a weak-willed loser from a line of losers who is manipulated by women and businessmen and government bureaucrats, a protagonist more interesting, more believable and more deeply realized than a lot of those we find in Malzberg's body of work.  Of course, any story set in beautiful New York City, where people live in little apartments and ride the subway, tugs at my exile's heart.  Fans of classic SF will perhaps enjoy trying to spot Malzberg expressing his own opinions, roman a clef style, about Golden Age SF; for example, when Fox says "Damon Tyson's" "Parking Ticket" is "lousy," is this SF critic and historian Malzberg hinting that he thinks Damon Knight's famous "To Serve Man" is overrated?  Besides Hubbard, Campbell, and Knight, Malzberg makes veiled references to Isaac Asimov and MPorcius faves A. E. van Vogt and the Kuttners, and no doubt others I didn't grok.

**********

In case something ever happens to Amazon, I am preserving here my 2011 review of The Day of the Burning.  Don't ask me what I am doing in case something ever happens to Google.

In 1974's The Day of the Burning Barry Malzberg uses a gimmick we have all seen on a hundred TV shows - George Mercer has a "friend" whom only he can see or hear, a sort of demon called Lucas. Lucas hangs around George, invisible to everyone else, yakking away and distracting George while George tries to complete his work at the office or complete the sex act with Delores, a fellow office worker. Of course, everyone suspects George is insane because he is always talking to himself.

Lucas eventually reveals that he is the emissary of the Galactic Overlords, and George has been selected to represent the human race to these Overlords, and must take a high stakes test. If he passes the test, the Earth will be admitted to the Galactic Empire; if George fails the test, the human race will be exterminated.

In The Day of the Burning Malzberg endeavors to subvert SF conventions, and, apparently, commonly held notions about government. George is obviously mentally ill - Lucas is a delusion and the idea of Galactic Overlords some sort of fantasy. The test these Galactic Overlords set for George is not any kind of quest or adventure or duel, but rather that he complete one of his office tasks. Malzberg slips into the novel some sarcastic complaints about his editors and readers - we are told that the Galactic Overlords (the novel is ostensibly a report written by George to these Overlords) dislike first person narratives, non-linear chronology and use of the present tense, the very literary techniques Malzberg customarily employs, and prefer the straightforward plotting and action scenes that almost never appear in Malzberg's work.

The narrative is sprinkled with passages related to a subplot about failed space missions to Mars and Venus (the futility of the space program is a recurring theme in Malzberg's writing) and widespread riots and terrorism in U.S. cities. A general theme of the book is the inability of the government and its bureaucracy to accomplish much of anything, be it quell terrorism, send astronauts to other planets, or administer welfare benefits efficiently (George works in the New York City welfare department). The government's incompetence is matched by George's own lack of ability to accomplish anything in his career or his social and erotic life.

I appreciate what Malzberg is trying to do in The Day of the Burning, and he is certainly effective in generating an atmosphere of hopelessness, but the book is a little long and some sections seem to drag and bored me. I guess I can recommend it to Malzberg fans.

I read the 1974 paperback from Ace with the full color ads for Kent cigarettes bound in the center and ten pages of ads for more famous SF writers than Malzberg at the end. This edition seemed to have lots of typos.

Four more stories from Operation Future: Russell, Simak, Del Rey and Knight

Let's read four more stories from 1955's Operation Future!  Today we'll be looking at tales by relatively well known members of the SF community: Eric Frank Russell, Clifford D. Simak, Lester del Rey, and Damon Knight.

"Exposure" by Eric Frank Russell (1950)

(I am going to be saying "It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering" under my breath for a week after writing this.)

Last year I read the 1978 collection The Best of Eric Frank Russell.  Here's a story which didn't make it into that collection, but which has been anthologized several times, not only in a Russell collection (Like Nothing on Earth) but in at least three anthologies with Martin H. Greenberg's name on them.  Perhaps even more remarkable, it was included in a 1952 anthology called Let's Go Naked: Love and Life in a Nudist Camp edited by SF super-editor Donald Wollheim!  (isfdb doesn't mention Let's Go Naked, but the editor of Operation Future, Groff Conklin, does in his intro to "Exposure," warning us that "Exposure" is the only SF story in that book.)

"Exposure" is a joke story about aliens who land in a secluded forest in the United States and go about collecting samples of Earth life; their people plan on conquering Earth and enslaving us natives, and this recon ship is here to learn as much as they can about us before the assault is launched.  These aliens are shape-shifters, and after they have collected (and dissected!) two human beings from a camp, their best scouts take on the appearance of humans and try to infiltrate several nearby towns in order to investigate our weapons and energy technology.  The punch line of the story is that the aliens took their sample humans from a nudist colony, so their scouts have no clothes and are immediately picked up by the authorities, which foils their reconnaissance mission and ultimately spares Earth the calamity of invasion.

This is a humorous story and it is full of little jokes, but Russell plays it straight; this is not a farce or an extravagant satire, and the jokes come out of believable characters and situations and are actually amusing.  The aliens and their recon methods are convincing and interesting, and I enjoyed the story as much or more for its "serious" bits as the comedy.  I can see why "Exposure" has been so widely anthologized--it is quite good.

"Exposure" first appeared in Astounding.  Also pictured: a 1956 edition of Let's Go Naked.

"Worrywart" by Clifford D. Simak (1953)

I haven't read any Simak in a long time.  I think Simak is a good writer, but I find his anti-modern, anti-urban, anti-industrial attitude a little tiresome.  Maybe it is just me, but I don't actually think the world would be a better place if the only humans left were roving bands of Indians who leave the cities to intelligent dogs and robot priests.

Simak was a newspaperman, and "Worrywart"'s text draws on this knowledge, and talk of how a 1950s newspaper was run adds some additional interest to the proceedings.  Our protagonist is a copyreader who comes across a number of stories describing almost impossible events, like a terrible plane crash which all the passengers survive and the miraculous recovery of a terminally ill child, and investigates possible connections between them.  He discovers that a man with amazing mental powers must be at the bottom of these unlikely deliverances.  This guy was an invalid as a child, and did lots of reading and fantasizing.  Somehow his fantasizing about travelling to other planets has put him in touch with alien intelligences, and this relationship has given him the power to manipulate matter, time and history!  If he wants something to happen, or something to unhappen, he can make it so!

"Worrywart" was first published in Galaxy

The psychic is very agitated about the possibility of a major war.  ("He's hell bent...to bring peace to the world," one character says of him.)  One assumes Simak is alluding to Cold War tensions (1952 and 1953 saw lots of exciting Cold War incidents, including Stalin's death, anti-Communist uprisings in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, the execution of the Rosenbergs, various nuclear weapons tests and the tail end of the Korean War) but Simak studiously avoids mentioning such words as "Cold War" or "Soviet Union" or "communism."  Perhaps Simak was chary of offending readers who had taken sides in the political and ideological struggle between the East and West; we don't all have the courage to say what we really think about the people who pay our bills, the kind of courage we see in Drexel professors.

Our newspaperman worries that the psychic, who has lived a sheltered life and never been to school and so is very naive, will clumsily use his astonishing powers in an attempt to ensure peace, perhaps in a way that will cause more problems than it solves. The newspaperman is aware that the psychic reads science fiction stories, and when he finds that a new magazine includes a story about a man who ends modern war by outlawing electricity, his worries go into overdrive--by tinkering with man's knowledge of electricity, or the natural phenomena of electricity itself, the naive psyker may impoverish mankind or even destroy the universe!

This story is well written and well paced and all that, so I don't mind recommending it, even if the plot is a little silly.  All you SF scholars out there can compare it to the famous Jerome Bixby story about a naive person who wields godlike power, "It's a Good Life," which was published the same year as "Worrywart."

"Day is Done" by Lester del Rey (1939)

"Day is Done" first chronicled
 microaggressions against Neanderthalers
in Astounding

Del Rey's last name is very familiar to me from the spines of Ballantine science-fiction and fantasy paperbacks (he and his fourth wife Judy-Lynn were both important editors) but I haven't read a whole lot of his fiction. When I read the short version of Nerves back in 2014, I thought it long and boring, but on this topic I was swimming against the tide: that version of Nerves has been widely anthologized and even included in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and Conklin praises Nerves in his intro here.

All you paleontologists and anthropologists will be thrilled to hear that "Day is Done" is about cavemen!  Del Rey spins the sad tale of the last Neanderthal, Hwoogh, who is not only driven out of the hunting business, but insulted and abused by the smarter, more dextrous, and more technologically advanced Cro-Magnons who moved into the area when Hwoogh was young.  They even violate his cave, which everybody knows is a caveman's safe space!  Del Rey describes these peoples' biology and culture in some detail; I have no idea how much of what del Rey tells us is based on scientific research and how much he just came up with.  Whatever the case, this story is entertaining enough, and will perhaps resonate with readers who have grown old and feel obsolete, or have witnessed their culture, people or way of life demeaned and swept away.

"Special Delivery" by Damon Knight (1954)

Like del Rey, Knight may well be more important as an editor than a writer, but I have actually read a bunch of Knight's own fiction, as well as stories he edited for such publications as the famous Orbit series.  It turns out that "Special Delivery" is a commonly used name for short stories; Kris Neville published a story called "Special Delivery" two years before Knight's.  Neville's "Special Delivery" was about an alien spy softening up Earth for conquest, while Knight's "Special Delivery" exploits new parents' anxieties about their children and how a baby will change their lives, and features some of the whining we never stop hearing from public school teachers about how the taxpayers don't shovel enough money into their pockets.

"Special Delivery" first sent chills up new
parents' spines in Galaxy

Moira, wife of school teacher Len Connington, a Columbia alumnus and aspiring physics grad student, is pregnant.  Knight signals the story's cynicism by telling us (in a sort of oblique way that softens the blow and muddies the issue) on the second page that Len regrets ever meeting Moira!  It quickly becomes apparent that their unborn child is some kind of mutant supergenius--he can read Moira's mind and see through her eyes and so forth, and while still in the womb can understand English and even talk--a doctor holding a stethoscope to Moira's belly hears the baby insulting him.  Yes, insulting him--this baby is a jerk! (Knight flings a healthy helping of cultural references at us in this story, and one such allusion compares the enfant terrible to Monty Woolley's character in the 1942 film The Man Who Came to Dinner--old movie fans and wikipedia will tell you this character was "notoriously acerbic"; internet film reviewer MonsterHunter calls him "consistently caustic" and "maddeningly self-absorbed.")

The baby, whom Moira names after Leonardo da Vinci, starts running the household by threatening to kick if he doesn't get his way.  Leo gets Len fired from his teaching job, forces Moira to read stacks and stacks of challenging books, and refuses to let Len sleep in the same bed with Moira!  Len and Moira fear that Leo will become a dictator and rule the world with an iron fist once he is free of the womb, but they needn't have worried: Leo's genius is the result of the low oxygen environment of the uterus; once he has to breathe normal air he reverts to being a normal infant, ignorant and helpless.

Not bad.  All you SF scholars out there can compare this to Bradbury's 1946 "Small Assassin" and Kuttner and Moore's stories about troublesome kids in conflict with their parents, like 1944's "When the Bough Breaks" and 1946's "Absalom."  It's true: babies are scary!

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All these stories are entertaining and worth the SF fan's time; the Russell and Simak indulge in far-out SF concepts but reflect the anxieties of a world embroiled in the Cold War in which the cataclysm of World War II was a recent memory, while the del Rey and Knight allegorically treat our personal worries about our places in the world and in our families.  Operation Future is a worthwhile purchase.