Four stories by C. L. Moore from Astounding

In 1952 Gnome Press published Judgment Night, a collection of work by C. L. Moore, famous creator of Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry and collaborator of Henry Kuttner, her husband.  The hardcover volume with a cover by Kelly Freas included the title novel and four short stories; in 1979 Dell reprinted the collection in paperback with a cover by God knows who.  I own one of those 1979 paperbacks, and in our last episode we read the title work, originally an Astounding serial, the story of a princess's first love affair and the collapse of her civilization, a denunciation of human violence and an expression of skepticism of the value of gods.  Today we will look at those four short stories, all of which appeared in Astounding after Judgment Night's appearance.  I'm going to read them in the chronological order in which they were printed, not the order they appear in this book.

"The Code" (1945)

"The Code" appeared under the pen name of "Lawrence O'Donnell," like all four stories we are talking about today.  This pseudonym was also attached to numerous stories on which Moore and Kuttner collaborated, including the highly regarded tales "Vintage Season," "Clash By Night" and "Fury," and served as the inspiration for one of the pen names used by Kuttner/Moore aficionado Barry N. Malzberg, "K. M. O'Donnell."

(The unusual cover of this issue of Astounding is a collage of US military personnel operating some of their heavier weapons.  Maybe this is related to the included Eric Frank Russell story, "Resonance," the intro of which indicates it is about the Pacific War and whose illustrations feature what we would probably consider racist caricatures of "the Japs."

Bill Westerfield and Peter Morgan are scientists, medical types.  They think that people get old and die for largely psychosomatic reasons:

"You've been conditioned to think you grow old because of time, and this is a false philosophy....you must be conditioned to reverse time.  The body and the mind react inseparably, one upon the other."

Bill's father Rufus serves as the guinea pig for their secret experiments on reversing the aging process, and they shoot the seventy-year-old full of drugs and hypnotize him so he will look at time differently.  And it works!  In the space of a few months Rufus develops the body of a healthy forty-year-old!  But something is amiss with Rufus's brain or mind; he has vague memories that cannot be his own.  Also, Bill and Peter think his face is different from that of the man Rufus was when he was forty...they suspect that Rufus isn't just "growing" younger, but changing into a different person altogether!  Then X-rays indicate that Rufus's bones and organs are changing--Bill's father isn't just  becoming a different person, but a whole different species!

Moore explains, using a metaphor about parallel train tracks that I did not find very convincing, that Rufus isn't regressing to the Rufus he once was, but an alternate reality Rufus in a universe where the evolution of intelligent life proceeded quite differently.  Rufus, as he grows biologically younger and gets closer to that alien track, changes more and more.  In his biological twenties he develops a nictitating membrane and becomes a drunk--the booze helps his mind cope with the overlapping memories of his English-speaking Earth youth and his alien youth in a world of strange languages and weird tuneless music; alcohol is also one of the few Earth foods his half-alien stomach can handle.  He then seals himself in his room and ceases eating altogether, his body burning his tissues for fuel so that he shrinks and eventually becomes an alien egg or larva--for a brief moment Bill and Peter see Rufus's alien mother, before she and the embryonic alien Rufus vanish as he is fully integrated into that other time track.

Because it moves at a rapid enough pace and throws lots of ideas at you this is an acceptably entertaining story, even if the ideas are all kind of ridiculous.  It also aspires to a high level of erudition.  Readers of Astounding are expected to know about science, and on the very first page of "The Code" Moore refers to snowflakes making "pseudo-Brownian movements"--I had to look that up on google.  Besides the science stuff there are plenty of literary references--Faust, Theseus, Alice in Wonderland, Shakespeare, Longfellow.  This is a story for the educated reader!  The title of the story refers to Bill and Peter's idea that the intellectuals of the past knew more than they are given credit for, and even conducted experiments like the one B & P are conducting on Rufus.  Our heroes think  their predecessors recorded their work in "code" in stories like the legend of Faust, and speculate that Faust's loss of his soul in the story represents some other loss suffered by a experimental subject back in the 16th century; at the end of the story our 20th century experimenters get the solution to the mystery.

"The Code" is like several stories I have read by Kuttner and Moore that are about Earth humans interacting with items or people from other times or dimensions.  "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" is the most famous example, others include "Prisoner in the Skull" and "Shock."  "The Code" is included in a handsome-looking 900-page collection of Kuttner and Moore stories published in 2005 by Centipede Press and titled Two-Handed Engine after one of Kuttner and Moore's most celebrated tales.

We read To The Stars here at
MPorcius Fiction Log in early 2014

"Promised Land" (1950)

It is several hundred years in the future, and mankind has colonized numerous planets and moons within the solar system.  To do so, scientists have used controlled mutation and selective breeding to fashion humans suitable for life on alien worlds.  Some pure strain humans fear that the engineered humans are taking over civilization, that they, however freakish they might be, are the future of mankind.  One such engineered human is Torren, the dictator of Ganymede, the product of the thirteen generations of breeding in "The Centrifuge" that was the abortive project to create people who could live on Jupiter.  Torren weighs five hundred pounds and lives every moment of his adult life in a bath of oily fluid because he lacks the strength to walk--he can barely lift his own arm!  (When I was a kid they told us that Brachiosaurus probably stayed in water to support his tremendous weight, but I think that theory has been abandoned.)  Via TV screens and other devices Torren rules the people of Ganymede, humans specially bred to be able to endure Ganymede's deadly cold and breathe Ganymede's toxic atmosphere.

Years ago Torren chose from among the brats at an orphanage an heir, Ben Fenton, a pure strain human.  Fenton is an adult now, and as "Promised Land" begins he has had it with Ganymede and tells Torren to find himself another heir--he is leaving!  Why, you ask?

Torren is a selfish ruler who feels that the tragedy of his own life as the only survivor of the Centrifuges means he owes others no consideration.  He is having Ganymede terraformed so a large number of pure strain humans can live on it and efficiently exploit its resources--this will mean the small number of peeps tailored for Ganymede will have to live under domes the way Terron and Fenton do today!  Fenton sympathizes with the Ganymedeans and wants no part of throwing them under the bus.

Fenton's attitude was easier for me to understand when I realized that the people engineered to live on Ganymede weren't hideous insect people or ogrish yetis or something, but seven-foot tall Scandinavians with blue eyes and blonde hair and "milk-white" skin, and our man Ben Fenton has a crush on one of them.

He did not think he was in love with Krisitn.  It would be preposterous.  They could not speak except through metal or touch except through glass and cloth.  They could not even breathe the same air.  But he faced the possibility of love, and grinned ironically at it.     

Fenton goes to meet Kristin, and, while they sit in his ground vehicle, an air vehicle bombs them.  They survive the attack, and Fenton sneaks back into Terron's palace to discover that a coup attempt is under way, Terron's pure strain assistant trying to take over.  Fenton foils the coup attempt, saving Terron, but as the story ends we know that Ganymede is about to be rocked by a civil war between Terron and his agents and the Ganymedeans, lead by Fenton, who are determined to resist the terraforming of their chilly home.  Who will win the war will be largely determined by the response to the crisis of the pure strain people on Earth and the engineered people living on Venus and Mars--who will intervene in the conflict, and on which side?  Perhaps the outcome of the Ganymedean civil war will signal whether the new artificially bred human races represent the future of the human race, or will always be subordinate to those who created them.

This is a pretty good story; like Judgment Night it conjures up a strange milieu and presents SF ideas and a civilization on the brink of a new era, but it is economical.  Perhaps Moore here is vulnerable to the charge of making things easy on herself by making the villain a big fatso and the innocent victims people who look like supermodels, however. 

"Heir Apparent" (1950)

To my surprise, I discovered on its first page that "Heir Apparent" was a sequel of sorts to "Promised Land," being set in the same universe, though on Earth instead of one of the other inhabited bodies of the Solar System and at a later period of time, when the solar system is in crisis as the engineered humans on Mars, Venus and Ganymede seek to achieve independence from Earth.  Our protagonist is Edward Harding, former member of Integrator Team Twelve-Wye-Lambda.  As we see in flashbacks, an Integrator Team is seven men, each with a high level of expertise in one field, who connect psychically across long distances via a computer called an Integrator, temporarily melding their personalities and skills within the computer to solve difficult problems related to the governance of Earth's interplanetary empire.  (A theme of this story is that empires collapse because managing them from what in college we called "the metropole" becomes too complicated.)  These psychic connections are so satisfying that those kicked off Integrator teams become depressed and wander the world like lost souls, suited for no other work.  Harding is one such lost soul, as is a former colleague of his, George Mayall, who blames Harding for getting him kicked off the team a few years before Harding himself was let go.

Bumming around the Pacific, Harding meets an obese rich guy, Turner, who is the head of a private espionage network.  (Does Moore hate fat people?  Or does she just hate rich people, and use obesity to signify indulgence and wealth?)  Turner tells Harding that Mayall is working with the seccessionists from a base on a Pacific island.  Mayall has camouflaged this island and surrounded it with traps so that it is almost totally invisible and inaccessible.  Turner wants to capture this island and work his own lucrative deal with the seccessionists, and thinks that Harding--who has the ability to integrate his mind with a boat's computer, controlling the vessel as if it was his own body, and has intimate knowledge of Mayall's way of thinking--is the only man who can get him to the island safely.  Harding and Turner become uneasy partners, each with his own agenda.

Once on the island Harding and Turner confront Mayall and we get doublecrosses and Mexican standoff situations involving guns, knives, holograms, paralysis rays, heat rays, post-hypnotic suggestions, etc.  These standoffs resemble the relationships between Earth and its colonies--they all want independence, but really need to cooperate to prosper, maybe even to merely survive.  The whole business of the Integrator, in which seven people fuse their psyches to produce a more efficient collective "being," mirrors this same theme.

During all the tense scenes on the island we learn why Mayall and then Harding were thrown off Integrator Team Twelve-Wye-Lambda, and what exactly Mayhall is up to on the island.  Mayhall has put together his own Integrator and set up his own Integrator team, one that is devoted to winning independence for Venus.  But who is on Mayhall's team?  Harding discovers that Mayhall has filled the other six seats at "the Round Table" of his Integrator not with human beings but with computer files!  Does this presage a future when human beings will be subordinate to machines, or surrender their humanity to become integrated with machines?  Like Judgment Night and "Promised Land," rather than ending conclusively, "Heir Apparent" ends leaving us expecting a radical shift in human history and wondering what--perhaps horrible--future is in store for mankind.     

Pretty good.  "Heir Apparent" was included in a 1988 French collection of Moore stories.   

"Paradise Street" (1950)

Jaime Morgan was one of the first men on planet Loki.  He is an irascible loner, a trapper who catches the sehft rats that infest the planet and drains their sehft sacs to sell the sehft oil.  But times, they are a changin'; once-wild Loki, a place for an independent manly man, is becoming civilized!  Settlers (Morgan denounces them as "Scum!") are putting down roots on Loki, starting farms and families, and they want to exterminate the sehft rats, who despoil their orchards.  Sehft has also been synthesized off world, so the value of sehft has gone down by like 99%, leaving Morgan in real financial trouble.  Law and order is also coming to Loki in the form of Major Rufus Dodd, an old friend of Morgan's--they grew up together on Mars.

"Paradise Street" is like a story about the old West, with a general store, a saloon, a new sheriff in town, desperadoes and ranch hands--there's even a minor character who is a Native American (a "hawk-nosed Red Amerindian.")  It is also like a 20th century crime story--100% natural and organic sehft (not the synthetic stuff) turns out to be a powerful narcotic, and Morgan, due to ignorance and carelessness, gets mixed up with organized crime and the cops (in the form of his childhood friend Dodd.)  Venusian crime bosses want to get their hands on some organic sehft, but Dodd has confiscated it and locked it all up, so the Venusians hire Morgan to cause a native herd of cattle to stampede; this will distract the settlers and the lawmen and give the Venus mafia a chance to liberate the sehft.

To stampede the beasts Morgan has to get in tune with nature, and Moore gives us a scene in which Morgan "feels" the rhythm of Loki through his fingers and toes as he crouches in the moss.  Moore also gives us a quote from A. E. Housman's "The Night is Freezing Fast."  (A. E. Housman seems to be a favorite of SF writers.)   Morgan directs the stampede so it wrecks the crops the settlers have spent a year tending, but then the Venusians, with firearms, throw the stampede out of control so it damages the town and even kills a handful of innocent people.  The settlers take up arms and outfight and then lynch the Venusians.  The settlers want to hang Morgan as well, but Dodd, quoting Kipling's "The Explorer," (Kipling is another favorite versifier of the SF crowd, at least the conservative/libertarian faction of people like Poul Anderson and Robert Heinlein) helps Morgan escape, directing him to a merchant space ship on which he can stow away and get to a newly discovered planet, where he can play "hermit trapper in touch with nature" again.  Morgan doesn't belong among civilized men, neither the boring community-minded types like the settlers nor the evil predatory type like the Venusian criminals--he belongs alone on the frontier.

There are some silly elements to "Paradise Street," and it does remind you of that famous Galaxy ad that derides that species of SF that is just Westerns in space, but it is smoothly written and entertaining.

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All these stories are worth your time.  "Heir Apparent," "Promised Land" and "Paradise Street" all have action and revenge elements, and all talk about imperialism and colonialism, how individual human beings and the government deal with exploring and conquering and exploiting new territories; "Heir Apparent" and "Promised Land" also do the thing that Malzberg told John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding, SF should do, explore how technology is "consuming" people, taking away their individuality and their ability to control their lives.  (See Malzberg's essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971," in which our pal Barry recounts his meeting with Campbell; I know I have recommended it before--it is a great essay for those of us interested in both Golden Age and New Wave SF.) 

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Squint or click to read about these Dell offerings

The last four pages of my 1979 copy of Judgment Night consist of ads for the Dell SF line.  Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake gets a page to itself, complete with glowing blurbs from Frank Herbert and Robert Silverberg and a sort of poorly reproduced illustration of a young lady grasping a scaly writhing phallic symbol.  I liked McIntyre's short stories "Recourse, Inc." and "Only at Night," (the techniques she used to tell these stories were quite good) and Dreamsnake won the Hugo and the Nebula, stamps of approval from the people and the pros, so I should probably consider reading it.

D. F. Jones's novel Earth Has Been Found also gets a page to itself (no blurbs, though.)  I thought it was funny that the marketing people at Dell thought that SF readers would be excited by the thought of a story about "California's finest doctor."  Gordon Dickson's novel about astronauts going to Mars, The Far Call, is another item that gets the full-page treatment; "undersecretary for space" sounds a little dry, but next to "best sawbones on the Left Coast," maybe it's not so bad.

If your criteria is efficiency, the best of the four ad pages is the one with a list of thirteen books.  I have a (peripheral, I admit) familiarity with a few of these.

For New Wavey, literary SF types, Dell offers Michael Bishop's Stolen Faces, which Joachim Boaz declared "a near masterpiece," and Richard Lupoff's Space War Blues (I read the ambitious and dense 90-page short story upon which this novel is based in my hardcover copy of Again, Dangerous Visions) and John Varley's The Ophiuchi Hotline, which I read before I started this blog and thought was alright.

Dell has stuff for the sword & sorcery and planetary romance fan as well.  I assume I read The Silver Warriors by Michael Moorcock decades ago (I know I owned a copy, which my brother probably still has back in New Jersey, greatest state in the union) but I can't remember any specifics about it; it is the second of the Erekose books and sometimes printed under the title Phoenix in Obsidian.  I actually remember the first Erekose book, more or less (I compared it to Edmond Hamilton's A Yank at Valhalla last year.)  I enjoyed all those Eternal Champion books in my teens, and often think about rereading them.  Flashing Swords #4 includes Moorcock's "The Lands Beyond the World," which I think makes up a third of the Elric book The Sailor on the Seas of Fate.  Flashing Swords #4 also includes one of the component stories of Jack Vance's delightful Cugel's Saga (AKA Cugel: The Skybreak Spatterlight.)  I own a copy of Andrew Offutt's Ardor on Aros, but haven't read it yet--I am interested in Offut's work, but I have got the idea that Ardor on Aros is a spoof, not a sincere adventure story, and this has put me off a little bit.  I read the first two Callisto novels by Lin Carter in the 2000 ibooks omnibus edition; they were mediocre.  Ylana of Callisto, according to isfdb, is the seventh Callisto book--I guess people were buying them.

Comments are welcome on all the advertised books, as well as on C. L. Moore, of course.

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More SF from 1940s magazines in out next episode!

The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett

"In yourself you are alien and strange and for that alone I would fear you because I do not understand.  But for that alone I would not wish you dead.  But I say that Rhiannon watches through your eyes and speaks with your tongue, that in your hands are his sword and scepter.  And therefore I ask your death." 

It's a Dhuvian!

When I announced to the world via twitter (your source for all important news!) that I had acquired a water-damaged copy of the 1975 Ace paperback edition of Leigh Brackett's 1949 novel The Sword of Rhiannon (original title The Sea-Kings of Mars), members of the classic science fiction community were quick to tell me how much they loved the book.  Fred Kiesche even commented on the terrific cover, which uses that font I love and matches my Ace copies of Alpha Centauri or Die! and The Coming of the Terrans.

Besides the fine cover, the creator of which isfdb does not know, this edition has a brief intro by Brackett's husband, Edmond Hamilton, in which he reminds us that Brackett was inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs, mentored by Henry Kuttner, worked with Bogey, and was obsessed with Celtic myth.

Enough preliminaries, let's get our asses to Mars and experience this "Incomparable Science-Fiction Classic!"  If you don't have a copy, the internet archive can hook you up with the magazine version from Thrilling Wonder's June 1949 issue.  Whoa, this issue's contents page is full of names classic SFfans will recognize, including people whose work has already been scrutinized here at the blog: Raymond F. Jones, John D. MacDonald, Murray Leinster, James Blish, and the aforementioned Henry Kuttner!  Nice!

Matt Carse is an educated Earthman, an archaeologist, who has lived thirty of his thirty-five years on Mars, and so he is accepted not only among college professors but also among the native underclass Martians of the crime-ridden Low Canal towns.  One of the greatest living experts on the million-year-long history of the people of Mars, when a Martian thief shows him the Sword of Rhiannon, the Fallen God of Martian myth, and claims he has found Rhiannon the Cursed One's tomb, Carse is quick to follow him there.  At the tomb the thief shows Carse a throbbing black sphere, something like a black hole, and when Carse is distracted the ne'er-do-well pushes the Earther into it!

When Carse comes out of the sphere he finds himself in the tomb again, but not on the arid dying Mars of his day--oh no, he now strides upon a green vibrant Mars of glittering oceans, dense forests and grassy hills, the Mars of a million years ago!

Carse's Earthly good looks get him in trouble almost immediately.  The local people, whose town is part of the empire of the Sarks, think he looks like a Khond, an enemy race, and he ends up captured and put to work as a galley slave, pulling an oar on the ship of the Sark princess.  The sight of this arrogant warrior maiden, Ywain of the eyes like "smoldering fires" who looks like a "dark flame in a nimbus of sunset light" has a peculiar effect on him:

Carse felt the surge of bitter admiration.  This woman owned him and he hated her and all her race but he could not deny her burning beauty and her strength....It would be good to tame this woman.  It would be good to break her utterly, to tear her pride out by the roots and stamp on it.

Sexy!

Desperate fight in Caer Dhu!

(You'll probably remember that one of the best Brackett stories we've read recently, "Enchantress of Venus," also had a rough sex vibe to it.)

When Ywain sees the sword that was confiscated from Carse when he was taken captive she realizes that he must know the secret location of the Tomb of Rhiannon. Because the Tomb purportedly is full of high tech gadgets, every Martian and his brother has been looking for the tomb for ages, so Ywain tries to torture its location out of our hero.  When that doesn't work she unleashes her Dhuvian buddy on Carse.  The Dhuvians are an ophidian race who themselves have access to high technology.  In fact, the reason Rhiannon was cursed so long ago was because he shared some of the super science of his people, the Quiru, with these evil snake bastards, and the reason the Sark are currently the dominant race on Mars is because Dhuvians lend them a hand with their weapons technology from time to time.  (While it's not at as rich and deep as Burroughs' Barsoom, Brackett, in the small space of this single 140-page novel, does a good job of creating an exciting Mars full of different human and nonhuman races and political units, each of them with its own special powers, sinister or tragic personality, and relationship with each of the other polities.)

Carse undergoing psychic examination
in the grotto of the Sea Kings

Carse is able to resist the Dhuvian snakeman's hypnosis device and then leads a mutiny of the galley slaves, taking over the ship and felling and then binding haughty Ywain.  The liberated vessel sails to Khondor, home of the Khonds and the Sea Kings, the last hold outs against the Sarks and Dhuvians.  Psykers there make obvious to everyone what has been hinted at numerous times already (and baldly spoiled on the back cover of my edition)--when he passed through that black sphere and between time periods the Earthborn archaeologist's brain was invaded by the soul of Rhiannon the Cursed One himself!  (Regular readers of MPorcius Fiction Log know I love it when different psyches inhabit the same brain, like in Robert Silverberg's 1971 The Second Trip and Ian Wallace's wild and crazy Croyd (1967) and A. E. van Vogt's 1943 Book of Ptath.)  In fear of the evil god who gave the nigh invincible Dhuvians their power, Carse is imprisoned and awaits a sentence of death while the voice of Rhiannon tries to convince him to surrender control of his body!

 A hapless Khond abases himself before
whom he thinks to be the evil god
Rhiannon--Ywain isn't quite so easily convinced

Playacting that Rhiannon has taken over his body so that everybody, in awe, will do whatever he says, Carse commandeers Ywain's galley, escaping Knondor and bringing Ywain aloing with him. They go straight to Sark, and then to the nearby city of the snake men, Caer Dhu.  Is Carse's ruse working on all these Sark and Dhuvian creeps, or are they just leading him into a trap?

In the crisis, Rhiannon, repenting of his ancient sin, really does take over Carse's body and uses the super weapons to exterminate every last Dhuvian.  Ywain's family is deposed, Sark is reduced to its original borders, and Carse/Rhiannon forces a peace onto the Martians.  Then, guided by Rhiannon, Carse and his new girlfriend Ywain travel to the future, back to Carse's time, while Rhiannon joins his brothers, the Quiru, who have forgiven him, in some other dimension.

"Sea-Kings of Mars" / Sword of Rhiannon has been printed again and again, in many countries and languages.  In fact, I own two copies myself, this now broken-spined Ace edition and a version with British punctuation in my copy of Gollancz's 2005 Fantasy Masterworks collection Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories.  Both of these editions are full of irritating typos, but they are different typos:

Typos aside, this is a very good adventure story.  Sure, we've seen all this stuff before from a host of people ranging from van Vogt (whose Ptath also features a god in a time traveler's brain) to Michael Moorcock (perhaps Brackett's most famous and outspoken fan, whose heroes are always bouncing between dimensions and getting involved in sword-swinging wars in which ancient super weapons and people switching sides play a part) but Brackett's writing is sharp, clear and vivid (whereas van Vogt is deliberately obtuse), her characters seem to bubble, on the brink of exploding, with raw animal emotion (whereas in my memory Moorcock's characters seem cold and detached, stark and inert mythic archetypes instead of passionate, flesh and blood people like Brackett's), and the plot here is compact and smooth, with diverse settings, a variety of types of scenes and a real velocity, and no unnecessary digressions or cumbersome subplots.  The Sword of Rhiannon is one of many sword and planet / planetary romance novels, but it is an above average specimen and has a unique and compelling feel; I recommend it to all the John Carter-, Conan-, and Elric-loving kids out there, as well as anyone interested in old-fashioned adventure-style SF.

Three stories by Leigh Brackett published during WWII

The hardcover edition of the collection,
cover by Jack Woolhiser

In our last episode we looked at four stories by Edmond Hamilton, published in the 1920s and 1930s and selected by his wife Leigh Brackett for inclusion in 1977's The Best of Edmond Hamilton.  Today the tables are turned--here are three stories by Brackett, first published during World War II and chosen for 1977's The Best of Leigh Brackett by Hamilton.  I'm reading them in my paperback edition from Ballantine-Del Rey with the Boris Vallejo cover, a celebration of the human body and stone surfaces.  This book also includes a very charming intro by Hamilton, which provides insight into Hamilton's and Brackett's quite different work habits and careers and their personal relationships (their friendship with Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, for example.)  It also enthusiastically informs us of their collaborative novel, Stark and the Star Kings, which was scheduled to appear in Harlan Ellison's abortive Last Dangerous Visions.

"The Jewel of Bas" (1944)

"The Jewel of Bas" first appeared in Planet Stories, where it was billed as an "Off-Trail Novel" of "Fascinating Power." I don't know what "Off-Trail" means, but it reminds me of those hipsters who tell you that when they go to London and Paris they don't want to see Trafalgar Square or the Eiffel Tower like a damned tourist, but "experience the real Europe," I guess getting punched or groped by an authentic drunk or pickpocket in some dingy street in a lower-class neighborhood or something. Anyway, this issue of Planet Stories is available for free at the internet archive; fans of EC Comics will perhaps be interested to see the illustrations for "The Jewel of Bas" done by Graham Ingels--Ingels also did the cover for this issue of Planet Stories.

(I know you come to MPorcius Fiction Log for my boundless optimism, unflappable good nature and "get along" attitude, but I have to say that I have never liked Ingels' drawing or painting, even his famous EC work, and his cover of Planet Stories is probably the least polished and least exciting of the scores of Planet Stories covers you can see there at the internet archive.)

"The Jewel of Bas" also appears in Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks #46, a copy of which I own

When I started this story I found it much better written than I had expected it to be, the setting and characters deeper and richer, more "real," than in Brackett stories I have read in the past.  Our protagonists aren't Tarzan or John Carter-like heroes, but poor people on the fringes of society, Ciaran, a sort of wandering minstrel or bard, and Mouse, a small skinny female thief, and they have a sort of semi-dysfunctional relationship, the kind we see in down-and-outers and artistic types in real life--they rely on each other, but also have endless disagreements which readily erupt into violence.  Ciaran and Mouse live on an alien planet with multiple suns which don't move in the sky, but the traditional songs Ciaran sings include clues that tell the reader that their ancestors came from Earth.  These songs also describe the powerful man, Bas the Immortal, who used an amazing artifact (his Jewel or Stone) to bring humans, and aliens (the short goblin- or kobold-like Kalds, who served as his evil army), to this world, as well as to build androids.  At the start of the story Ciaran doesn't believe the old songs, but over the course of the tale, which takes place in a forbidding desert far from civilization, Ciaran and Mouse have an adventure which reveals to them the truth behind those songs.

The plot is largely the usual adventure stuff.  Kalds who have been raiding border towns and enslaving humans add Ciaran and Mouse to their haul, but our heroes use their musician and thief skills to lead an escape.  They sneak around the base of Bas the Immortal, observing the hypnotized human slaves building some tremendous machine at the direction of the androids; Ciaran does some eavesdropping and starts learning thereby what is going on.  Mouse is recaptured, but Ciaran finds his way to the ankh-shaped couch where sleeps Immortal Bas, who has the body of a child even though he is thousands of years old--he got his immortality powers by mischance when he was just a kid on Atlantis, back on Earth.  Ciaran alerts Bas that the androids are rebelling against him, and Bas eliminates the androids and Kalds, liberating Mouse and the rest of the humans.

"Jewel of Bas" includes one of those revelations of how the universe really works that we see in so much SF--Ciarn and Mouse's world is in fact an artificial construct inside a tenth solar planet, the "suns" and everything else powered by the Jewel--as well as a revolution or paradigm shift, another thing we see in SF all the time--not only is the slave operation of the androids and Kalds overthrown, but the Jewel is running out of power; fortunately the androids' great machine turns out to be a generator capable of replacing the Jewel, and Ciaran triggered Bas' wrath just after it was finished.  Bas goes back to sleep, retreating into a perfect dream world he has created because he is sexually frustrated in his child's body--in his dreams he has an adult body and can experience adult physical and emotional relationships.

With Bas's dream world I think maybe Brackett is setting up a contrast between childish masturbatory fantasies which are "perfect" but sterile, and real life sexual relationships like that of Ciaran and Mouse, which are messy and difficult, but fundamentally more satisfying and productive.  "Jewel of Bas" may also be a sort of camouflaged attack or expression of skepticism of religion.  (Keep in mind that, in his intro to The Best of Leigh Brackett, Hamilton tells us that the book that turned Brackett on to genre fiction and fired her desire to be a writer herself was Edgar Rice Burroughs' Gods of Mars, in which John Carter exposes the religion of Barsoom to be an exploitative and murderous scam.)  In addition to the fact that the childish and selfish Bas is often described as a god (and even sleeps on a cross), Brackett includes a minor human character who is a hypocritical religious fanatic who impedes the humans as they try to escape the menacing androids and Kalds.

Perhaps also worthy of note are Brackett's mentions of Atlantis, Dagon, Cimmeria and Hyperborea, I suspect Brackett hearkening back to the Weird Tales tradition of which H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard are the most famous exponents, and of which her husband Hamilton and her friend Henry Kuttner were also a part.  The Best of Leigh Brackett is actually dedicated "To the Memory of Henry Kuttner."        

"The Jewel of Bas" is a good story full of interesting stuff, but I can't help but feel the second half isn't as good as the first half.  Because Mouse gets captured, the compelling relationship between Ciaran and Mouse plays no role in this second half of the story.  (In 1990 Karen Haber wrote a prequel to "The Jewel of Bas" called "Thieves' Carnival," and I wonder if she was inspired to write it by a desire to explore or expand upon the Ciaran-Mouse relationship.)  The fact that Ciaran isn't a traditional muscular sword or gun slinging hero sort of weakens the climax--Bas effortlessly resolves the plot with his invincible powers while Ciaran just sort of watches.  (One of my pet peeves is stories in which the main character is a spectator instead of the driver of the action.)  To be fair, Ciaran plays his harp to lead the hypnotized humans to safety pied-piper-style, but in my opinion this is weak sauce.

"The Vanishing Venusians" (1945)

"The Vanishing Venusians," first seen in Planet Stories, was selected by Isaac Asimov (and/or prolific anthologist Martin H. Greenberg) for inclusion in Volume 7 of Isaac Asimov Presents The Great Science Fiction Stories.  You can read the 1945 version for free and check out the accompanying illustration by a Crane (if you know this artist's first name please let us know in the comments) at the internet archive.

Twelve ships (with sails!) drift across the Venerian ocean, carrying over three thousand people who have long been searching for a place to land and start a new settlement.  All their earlier land falls were met by hostile natives or disease, and Earth immigrant Matt Harker is so pessimistic that he tells fellow human Rory McLaren that it would be better if McLaren's pregnant Venerian wife, Viki, died than if she and their child lived to face any more hardships and disappointments!  Forgive Matt for being such a downer--when he sleeps he dreams of the snows of Earth, and when he's awake he can remember that "I saw our first settlement burned by the Cloud People, and my mother and father crucified in their own vineyard."  Venus is a tough place for an Earther!

When land is finally spotted, Harker, McLaren and a big black guy, Sim, volunteer to climb a cliff to scout out a plateau.  The Earthers have long run out of ammo for their blasters, so when the three scouts have to fight half-plant, half-animal monsters in a tunnel they use knives and spears.  Sim sacrifices himself to save the white men, singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" inhis last moments as he holds off the Venerian hordes long enough for Harker and McLaren can make it out of the tunnel.

Atop the cliff is a paradise inhabited by birds, butterflies, and beautiful telepathic nudists.  Unfortunately these nudists consider sick or injured people to be unacceptably ugly, and when Harker falls asleep they cart McLaren, who is recovering from a wound received in the fight in the tunnel, over to the local trash pile to die, like they do all their sick and aged relatives!  Harker rescues McLaren from the refuse pit, then, confident that the nudists have no souls, has no moral compunctions about redirecting a river to flood their home and exterminate them.  Harker dies in the deluge, but McLaren survives, the paradise dries, and McLaren summons the three thousand wanders to start a settlement in this, their new home.

This is a competent if unexceptional adventure story.  Maybe the religious overtones (sympathetic to religion this time, unlike in "Jewel of Bas") and portrayal of a black character and of interracial marriage make it more interesting?  Should we applaud the inclusion of a black hero and of a human who is having a child with his nonhuman wife, or decry them as condescending tokenism, the exoticization of the "other," and a celebration of white sexual imperialism?  I'm willing to give Brackett the benefit of the doubt, but I'm also not the kind of cutting-edge thinker who thinks white women shouldn't sell burritos, so don't quote me to your humanities professor!

"The Veil of Astellar" (1944)

First appearing in Thrilling Wonder Stories (check it out at the internet archive), "The Veil of Astellar" would later be included by Terry Carr in a 1976 anthology of space operas, Planets of Wonder, and by Stephen Haffner of the great Haffner Press in a 2010 anthology celebrating Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett Day.

While there are space ships and blasters in "The Veil of Astellar," in many ways this is more like a weird or gothic horror piece than what I think of as space opera--it is about callous parasitic aliens from another dimension and a human who becomes an immortal vampire and then fears the punishment that awaits him in Hell should he ever die.  The hardbitten and regretful narrator who has to choose between a sexy dame and doing the right thing also reminded me of noirish detective stories--Brackett of course famously wrote fiction and screenplays in the hard-boiled detective genre.

The main text of the story is a document sent to the "Space Authority headquarters on Mars," the confession of one Steve Vance that explains the mystery of the bizarre disappearance of so many space ships in a glowing cloud over the last few centuries. As we read the document we learn, in dribs and drabs, out of chronological order, Vance's astonishing biography and the inside skinny about that glowing cloud that has bedeviled spacemen for so long.  I'll just give you the main outline in a straightforward fashion, like I'm handing you a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces already put together.

Three hundred years ago Vance was a pioneering astronaut, the first man to reach Jupiter.  History records that he crashed and died but in reality he was captured by vampires from another universe!  Because Vance was such a fine specimen, their leader, sexy Shirina (if you think chicks with antennae are sexy!) took him as her lover and gifted him many vampire powers.  Shirina took Vance to see the amazing sights and sample the sensual pleasures of many other universes, including the home base of the raiders, Astellar.  In return for all these boons Vance periodically moves among ordinary humans, getting work on ships as a spaceman, and then guiding these ships into the death trap that is the vampires' glowing "Veil."  The Veil brings the ships to Astellar, where the aliens devour the life force of the captured humans--Vance shares in the feast, a cannibal as well as a traitor!

Like the two other Brackett stories we have talked about today there is a lot of religion in "The Veil of Astellar."  There are references to "Satan," "Lucifer," and, in particular, "Judas" (Vance is like a Judas goat), one normal human who suspects Vance is a vampire tries to kill him with silver crosses, and one of Vance's vampire bodies is said repeatedly to have no soul.  Vance recognizes that what he is doing is evil, but one reason he keeps committing these crimes is that if he stops devouring other people's life force he will die, and he fears the punishment that awaits him in the afterlife.

Before Vance left for Jupiter three centuries ago, he had a wife, and one day on Mars he encounters a pretty young woman who resembles his wife; he realizes she is one of his and his wife's descendants.  This woman is a passenger on a ship he is going to guide into the Veil, and the prospect of murdering and devouring the soul of his own descendant shocks him into abandoning his three-century-long career of evil.  He battles it out with his alien lover and various vampiric friends using blasters, mental powers and his fists, wiping out the monsters and escaping in a lifeboat.  Knowing death is just around the corner for him, he pens this confession and sends it to the human government in hopes that someone will read the account and pray for his soul! At the same time, Vance is plagued by second thoughts--why did he turn his back on eternal life and the love of the gorgeous Shirina, when, compared to the immortal and beautiful people of Astellar, ordinary humans seem no better than cattle!

Pretty good, Brackett's plot and style are compelling.  Telling the story from the point of view of the villain, rationing out info one little piece at a time, and all the religious, moral and psychological stuff about who you should be loyal to and what rules should you follow make for an engaging story.

**********

Michael Moorcock is a big fan of Brackett's work, and has called her a major influence on his own writing and a sort of inspiration to the people who lead the New Wave. While I have long enjoyed Brackett, I always found Moorcock's praise a little exaggerated or overblown, based on what I had read of her work.  But reading "The Jewel of Bas" and "The Veil of Astellar" has made Moorcock's praise more comprehensible; the somewhat complex and strange sexual relationships depicted in the stories perhaps do remind one of the New Wave, and the importance of travelling between dimensions in "The Veil of Astellar" are reminiscent of the importance of travel among the different aspects of "the Multiverse" in Moorcock's voluminous Eternal Champion output.  The religious components of all three of these stories also add a layer of interest--these tales have given me a greater appreciation of Brackett and her work, and I can only hope I will enjoy the next batch of Brackett stories I read as much as I did these.  But first, back to Brackett's husband Edmond Hamilton for four stories from the 1930s.

Six stories by Barry Malzberg from the period 1969-1971

It's back to Ace Double 27415 and In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories, "A Grab-Bag of Science-Fiction Surprises" by Barry Malzberg published under his transparent pen name of K. M. O'Donnell.

"The New Rappacini" (1970)

"As Between Generations," in this same collection, was a four-page story about the sad reality of relationships between parents and children; "The New Rappacini" (all you English majors and Vincent Price fans know where Malzberg got the title) is a five-page tale about the sad truth of marriage!  How many of the things that spouses do that ostensibly are an expression of love, or reflective of love, are in fact done in the pursuit of selfishness, or mere playacting to obscure that selfishness from others and from the self?

Perhaps he had never needed a wife in the first place, only something accessible and socially approved to masturbate against....

Glover comes home one day to find his wife has died in a freak accident, falling down some stairs.  He buys a "kit" with which he can bring her back to life.  As he follows the kit's instructions, he considers many hard truths about their marriage.  Will his wife appreciate being brought back to life? Maybe she prefers death to spending time with him!  Is he bringing her back to life because he loves her, or just because he is horny?  Could he be bringing her back to life simply to perpetuate the facade that he loves her, in an effort to prove to the world, to his wife and to himself that he is capable of love and not just a selfish jerk?  The kit provides the material needed to "improve" his wife, make her smarter, make her breasts larger, make her vagina tighter... if he makes these alterations, will it expose his selfishness?

Very good.  "The New Rappacini" first appeared in an issue of Fantastic full of work by famous names like Keith Laumer, Brian Aldiss  R. A. Lafferty, and Jeff Jones.  Run out and pick this one up!

"Bat" (1971)

Have I told you that one of my favorite Woody Woodpecker cartoons is about a character named "The Bat?"

Image of the Italian trans of
In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories
from ebay--it can be yours for
6 euros (plus 45 euros shipping)

"Bat" is a first-person narrative from a drug addict living in New York City.  As he tells it, for three years the Earth has been in contact with a diverse array of extra terrestrials, but, unlike in most SF stories in which contact with aliens leads to revolutionary change or heroic drama, like dreadful wars or humanity's elevation to a higher plane of consciousnesses, these aliens just come as tourists, barely interacting with us natives!  Like all New Yorkers, our dope fiend of a narrator finds tourists, including these aliens, very annoying!  "...after you've talked to them five minutes you know everything you could possibly want to know about them and despite the fact that they come from distant segments of the universe, they all sound pretty much the same."

As the story progresses, we learn that the arrival of the aliens has not wrought tremendous changes to human life, only exacerbated one of our worst tendencies.  Being visited by superior who ignore us has led to a sort of psychological malaise, and more and more people are turning to drugs.

The plot of the story is a standard Malzbergian one: the aliens chose the narrator at random to take a test to see if the Earth should be allowed to persist or should be destroyed.  As is so often the case with Malzberg, we readers can't be sure how much of all this extraterrestrial business is real, and how much is the protagonist's hallucinations.

Good.  I think "Bat" has only ever appeared here in In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories, and in that Italian translation, making it an essential purchase for Malzberg fans, fans of SF that "subverts the expectations of the genre," and fans of SF stories about New York City drug addicts.

"A Question of Slant" (1971)

This is another of those "meta" SF stories about a guy in the SF biz, like "July 24, 1970," and it shows up in 1994's The Passage of the Light as well as here.  If you have a lot of money laying around and want to encourage the reprinting of old SF and strange experimental niche SF you should consider ordering The Passage of the Light from the good people at NESFA Press, which can be done for like 20 bucks.

A married-with-child 45-year-old SF writer named Constantine abandons SF to write a sex novel about a college professor who has sex with a female student who is trying to persuade him to change her grade.  (When I, your humble blogger, was considering grad school back in the '90s a guy told me I should definitely become a college professor because it opened up all kinds of possibilities to have sex with young women.  I've never been sure to what extent he was kidding.)  His wife and child present obstacles, perhaps insurmountable, to this shift in his career.

A funny but also tragic look at the life of the professional writer and family life in general.    

"What Time Was That?" (1969)

When I was quite young the first Choose Your Own Adventure books came out, and my brother and I spent a lot of time reading such titles as The Cave of Time and The Mystery of Chimney Rock.  When I was a little older came the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks spearheaded by Games Workshop founders Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson; my brother and I were so obsessed with these that when I went to London by myself in the '90s "buy British editions of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks" was right there on the must-do list with "see the Elgin marbles," "see Burne-Jones' The Golden Stairs and Rossetti's Prosperine" and "visit Imperial War Museum."  The very pinnacle, of course, of this whole gamebook phenomena was Steve Jackson's genius four-book Sorcery! series with its disturbing and gorgeous illustrations by John Blanche which I never tire of admiring.

I bring up the gamebook phenomena because in "What Time Was That?" Malzberg employs the rarely seen second-person perspective, putting you the reader into the story!  Max Robin is an uneducated goofball living on the dole who sits in the public library poring over technical articles he doesn't understand, trying to figure out how to make a time machine!  (All of this brought to mind Karl Marx.)  When Max has finally built a time machine, the narrator (who has told us that making a working time machine is obviously impossible) goes to visit Max, bringing the reader along.  Max grabs the reader and forces "you" into the device to test it!  When Max throws the switch the reader disappears.  Then there is some business I didn't understand about how maybe the reader is Max and scores of Maxes come out of the machine and start a melee.

OK.  "What Time Was That?" first appeared in If; on the cover Barry's name appears above Norman Spinrad's and Keith Laumer's!  Malzberg sometimes complains that his work was not recognized by the public, but nobody can blame editors for that--as far as I can tell they went out of their way to put Malzberg's work before the eyes of the SF-reading public.

"A Soulsong to the Sad, Silly, Soaring Sixties" (1971)

Though I am not indiscriminately against the 1960s (I love The Kinks and The Who, for example), the incessant self-indulgent romanticizing about the decade of Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock and all that by some people who lived through it can get on my nerves.  So I was a little wary about this story.  

"A Soulsong to the Sad, Silly, Soaring Sixties" is, I think, about a guy who goes insane and has hallucinations of participating in or being present at various iconic episodes of violence during the 1960s, events like the JFK murder and the police riot at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago.  Malzberg tries to give us a sense of the hallucinations in paragraphs that feel like a lot of opaque phrases jumbled together.  Half of the story's seven pages consist of these tedious and mysterious passages, and half the insane person's diary and letters to various people explaining his condition in vague terms.

This is the kind of story that perhaps would move someone who already has deep emotional commitments to the events hinted at, but which, because it is so vague and unclear, has no effect on a person like myself born in 1971 who has no more emotional attachment to JFK, Malcolm X or Abbie Hoffman than to Franz Ferdinand, Peter Bartholomew or Publius Clodius Pulcher, and just sees them all as colorful characters from the past who were at the center of some turmoil that, at the time perhaps felt apocalyptic, but which ordinary people in 2017 can be forgiven for knowing little if anything about.

I'm calling this one a failure.  A story like "The New Rappacini" works because most people have been involved in some kind of sexual relationship, and a story like "A Question of Slant" works because it teaches those of us who are not professional writers of genre fiction some interesting things about being such a writer.  Only somebody already all wrapped up emotionally in 1960s unrest can really grok "A Soulsong to the Sad, Silly, Soaring Sixties," and Malzberg does nothing to teach the reader who didn't live through the '60s anything about the period.

"A Soulsong to the Sad, Silly, Soaring Sixties" appeared in an issue of Fantastic with a cover I am totally loving by Steve Harper.

"Addendum" (1971)

Here we have another story which, I think, only ever appeared here in In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories.  "Addendum" is a time travel story, and feels like a combination of Moore and Kuttner's brilliant Vintage Season and Ray Bradbury's famous "Sound of Thunder," with a Malzbergian twist.

"Addendum" is the text of a report about a disastrous time travel mission.  It seems that in the future, people will go back in time to observe tragedies for fun (this is what happens in Vintage Season.)  And it seems that somebody went insane (it would hardly be a Malzberg story if nobody went insane, amirite?) and escaped the expedition's invisible vehicle and did something to change history (this is what happens in "Sound of Thunder.")  The Malzbergian twist is that a clue indicates that the expedition went back in time to observe the JFK assassination.

Like "A Soulsong to the Sad, Silly, Soaring Sixties" this story is really only going to move people who are already psychologically invested in something Malzberg himself is psychologically invested in.  This story is merely acceptable.

**********

Alright, another Ace Double, and another collection of Malzberg stories, behind us! In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories is a very good collection, a must for Malzberg fans, and a good collection for people curious about Malzberg who have yet to experience his unique body of work because so many of the stories are characteristic in their themes and ideas, and because so many are (in my opinion) more entertaining than his average.

Three Lovecraftian Tales from Henry Kuttner: "The Eater of Souls," "The Frog" & "The Hunt"

I don't know about where you live, but where I live in the Central Ohio area, the local library supports software called hoopla that allows patrons to "borrow" electronic books for free. My interest in Henry Kuttner reignited by my reading of A Million Years to Conquer (AKA Creature From Beyond Infinity), I looked up Kuttner on hoopla and found that a wide selection of books by him were available, and decided to read some of his Cthulhu Mythos stories.

Years before giving birth to this blog, I read some of the more famous of Kuttner's Lovecraftian stories, like "Spawn of Dagon" (a Weird Tales cover story), "Bells of Horror" (which has one bizarre and horrible scene that remains strongly impressed on my mind) and "The Salem Horror," so this week I read stories which have not been as widely anthologized: "The Eater of Souls," "The Frog," and "The Hunt."  All of these appear in The Book of Iod, a 1995 production of Chaosium, available on hoopla for reading on your mobile device.  If you are interested in Kuttner's horror writing but are reluctant to be a genre fiction free rider, consider supporting the good work of Haffner Press by purchasing their volumes Terror in the House: The Early Henry Kuttner, Volume One and The Watcher at the Door: The Early Henry Kuttner, Volume Two, wherein these three stories, and a multitude of others, appear.

"The Eater of Souls" (1937)

This is a sort of dreamy mood piece, a legend told among indescribable aliens on a world "beyond Betelgeuse, beyond the Giant Stars," who now live in peace but in the past suffered the oppression of a half-demon, half-god creature that looked like a white spider and lived in The Grey Gulf, an "abyss from which men say the nearer moon was born...."  This tormentor could summon to itself innocent victims, whose souls would be added to his weird entourage.  The legend relates how a monarch, ignoring the advice of his sorcerous advisers, journeyed to the bottomless pit to confront the Eater of Souls and sacrificed himself to liberate his people.

This brief piece is all style and images; maybe we should think of it as a prose poem. I like it.

"The Eater of Souls" first appeared in the same issue of Weird Tales as H. P. Lovecraft's
"The Thing on the Doorstep."  "The Frog"'s "frenzied outcry of blasphemy" was first unleashed on the
world in the same issue of Strange Stories that also printed Kuttner's story "The Invaders."

"The Frog" (1939)

Norman Hartley is a New York City artist who can't get any work done because his friends are always dragging him to night clubs.  So he rents an old house in the country.  Oh, Norman, I could have told you leaving the Big Apple was a mistake!  In the yard of his rental is an ugly stone with weird carvings on it; the local hicks claim it is the headstone of the burial site of an old witch whose father was a swamp monster, but our Norman doesn't believe in superstitions and the hideous rock offends his artistic sensibilities.  ("It throws the garden out of symmetry.")  So he hires some out-of-town laborers to remove the stone.  Oh, Norman, I could have told you engaging in some amateur landscaping was a mistake!

This is a sort of ordinary horror story, acceptable but not innovative.  From the grave arises the witch, a half woman and half frog monster, and she begins terrorizing Hartley and the village, breaking into old people's homes and ripping them to pieces, chasing Hartley down the street and into the swamp where the Indians say the her father, a sort of demon, lived.  The villagers scurry to organize a posse to defend their families and hunt the monster down.  I was hoping the villagers would turn on Hartley, try to appease the with by handing him over, but Kuttner doesn't take that tack: instead the country folk rescue the city slicker from certain death in the swamp.

Competent but not spectacular.  Weird fiction scholars may note the theme of miscegenation, a common one in Lovecraftian literature; I personally had hopes that Kuttner would push the theme of urban vs rural divide a little harder.

Holy crap, the people at Strange Stories don't
fool around!  According to isfdb, there is some
controversy over who actually created this over-
the-top-cover illo.  Kuttner has two pieces in this
issue, "The Body and the Brain" (w/Robert Bloch)
as well as "The Hunt."

"The Hunt" (1939)

This story is set in the same country village as "The Frog," which I thought was fun.  Researcher into the occult Will Benson has moved out here to conduct his experiments in peace.  His cousin, Alvin Doyle, is coming for a visit with a pistol in his pocket--if Doyle kills Benson then he, Doyle, will be in line for a sweet inheritance! But, wouldn't you know it, Benson is in the middle of summoning the ancient god Iod, Hunter of Souls, when Doyle arrives. Benson ushers Doyle into the pentagram and continues the "experiment," which once started cannot safely be halted.

But Doyle is a cold-blooded murderer, not a superstitious scientist, and he doesn't give a rat's ass about this goofy experiment.  He shoots Doyle dead and departs, oblivious to the fact that the pentagram has been broken. On his long drive home he gets sleepy, so pulls over to take a nap.  He dreams that he is being transported between different alien worlds, all with different colored skies, different terrain and flora and fauna, all of which Kuttner describes in vivid technicolor-- writhing vegetation!--towering ebon skyscrapers!-- teeming throngs of grotesque beings!  When Doyle awakes he sees floating above him Iod itself, an indescribable monster with semi-transparent reptilian skin through which can be seen glowing crystalline forms, an alien entity equipped with a faceted eye and a slimy tentacle.  Iod sucks out Doyle's soul but leaves Doyle's consciousness in his inert body, so that Doyle must experience his own burial and decay in the grave, must endure an eternal existence of total insanity!

This story is just alright.  The noteworthy part is the long travelogue of scary alien planets, but this lengthy section is really just filigree that has nothing to do with the actual plot.

**********

I think something special is going on in "The Eater of Souls," but "The Frog" and "The Hunt," while acceptable entertainments for those of us who have already had our tickets for the Lovecraft train punched many many times and are fully committed to this sort of material, are just ordinary horror stories of their type.

More Lovecraftian shenanigans in our next episode!

The Creature From Beyond Infinity by Henry Kuttner

"The Carriers kill instantly by touching their victims.  Lead-plated suits are being issued to the guardsmen, but these do not always work.  It depends on the quantity of energy emitted by a Carrier.  Dynamite has been placed at the New York bridges and tubes.  The mayor is ready to isolate Manhattan, if necessary, for protection."

I recently purchased a 1984 printing of Barry N. Malzberg's The Engines of the Night at Karen Wickliff Books.  This collection of doom and gloom essays about how SF writers are underpaid and machines are devouring the human spirit and SF fans are creeps is dedicated to Mark Clifton, Edmond Hamilton, Cyril M. Kornbluth, and Henry Kuttner.  Hamilton of course lived a long life (died age 72) and produced a multitude of work, but Clifton, Kornbluth, and Kuttner died relatively early in their careers, and our pal Barry, in his characteristic way, suggests in his essay "Mark Clifton: 1906-1963" that "the death certificates of all three should have listed science fiction under cause of death."

Let's check out a tale Kuttner published in Startling Stories in 1940, eighteen years before that grim reaper SF cut him down at the age of 42: A Million Years to Conquer.  A Million Years to Conquer was reprinted in 1952 in Fantastic Story Magazine, and then in book form by Popular Library in 1968 under the title The Creature From Beyond Infinity.  (The 1968 title really does not jive with the story.)  I own one of those 1968 paperbacks, and it has a great Frazetta cover, featuring a guy fighting a wooly mammoth in the arena, watched (?) by a sort of flying sphere.  (As we know, being thrown into the arena to fight to the death is the fate of many a science fiction character!)  Looks awesome, let's go!

(The 1952 issue of Fantastic Story including A Million Years to Conquer is readily available to my fellow cheapos at the Internet Archive website.  Marvel not only at Kuttner's novel and the accompanying Virgil Finlay illos, but also the fun ads for books (I Killed Stalin by Sterling Noel), magazines (16 issues of Ranch Romances for only $3.00!) and essential medical aid!)

Beautiful planet Kyria was doomed!  A small group of citizens built a spherical starship and fled their home world to seek out a new planet fit for human habitation. After spending long years investigating hundreds of useless planets and laying in suspended animation between planets, the Kyrians finally discover Earth.

At the very moment of their success the members of the expedition face two big problems!  One: they crash on Earth and only two people survive the disaster, expedition commander Theron and young Ardath, who was born in space and never saw Kyria with his own eyes.  Even worse, two: New York City hasn't been built yet; in fact, nothing has been built on Earth yet!  As Theron tells Ardath, Earth is a young world as yet only inhabited by single-celled organisms!  Thankfully, Theron is an optimist who takes the long view, and he tells Ardath that human beings will evolve from those single-celled creatures, some day, and Ardath should wait for them to appear. Then he should find two genius Earthlings and breed them to create a super race--this was how Kyria got so advanced, after all, through a eugenics program that bred "mental giants" until all Kyrians were at the genius level!  Having shared his wisdom, Theron dies of his crash-related injuries.

(Eugenics, of course, is a dirty word today, but in the first half of the 20th century many of the smarty smarties like John Maynard Keynes, politicians like Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and political activists like Margaret Sanger who are widely revered today were in favor of eugenics of one type or another.  So let's not judge poor Theron and Ardath too harshly!)

Like that lovely young couple Stevens and Newton did when they got marooned on Ganymede in 1931's Spacehounds of the IPC, Ardath excavates from his surroundings the ore, chemicals and energy (from steam--there are no fossils yet, so no fossil fuels) he needs to fix his ship.  Then he goes into orbit and into suspended animation to await the rise of mankind on Earth.  (I'm sure you remember how Neil R. Jones and Cordwainer Smith used this suspended-animation-in-Earth-orbit gag.) Periodically Ardath wakes up to check on Earth's progress, and to advance it, nudging the dinosaurs toward extinction, for example, and providing primitive man with fire, archery, the techniques of smelting iron and raising crops.  When mental giants appear he kidnaps them and carries them back into orbit; from various antediluvian Conan-style settings (remember, Kuttner was part of that Weird Tales circle that included Robert Howard and H. P. Lovecraft), as well as the Roman Empire--as Frazetta's cover illustrates, Ardath snatches a guy right out of the arena!--he seizes ambitious fighting men, an obese Chinese sage, a beautiful priestess of Dagon, and a merciless queen. Some of these selfish ingrates are not too happy about being whisked away from Earth and asked to spend the next thousand or so years in suspended animation, and they conspire against Ardath.

The novel's first eleven chapters switch back and forth between Ardath's adventures in ancient times and the early 20th century, where we meet a true super intellect in America's Middle West.  Kuttner and his wife and ofttimes collaborator C. L. Moore regularly write about ruthless children and manipulative homos superior, and little Stephen Court is another example.  Already equipped with encyclopedic knowledge and the ability to hypnotize people en masse, eight-year-old Court ditches his parents in 1924 to ride the rails with a hobo he hypnotizes to act as his guardian.  By 1941 Court, an emotionless man whose only love is knowledge, is "the greatest scientist in the world" and maybe the richest, thanks to a series of inventions he dashes off without breaking a sweat.

A mysterious plague begins turning people into glowing apparitions that feed on energy and are invulnerable to gunfire!  While trying to figure out the origin of this scourge Court detects Ardath's orbiting starship.  Even Court's super duper brain can't solve the problem of the plague with Earth science, so he invents a spaceship to go scavenge alien technology from Ardath's ship.  On page 75 of the 125-page novel Court enters the ship, where he finds in charge of the vessel not his fellow master of science and engineering, Ardath, but one of those ancient warriors, Thordred the Usurper!

Thordred sends the incapacitated Ardath on what he hopes will be a one-way trip to the sun, and the rest of the people on the ship split into two factions: the priestess of Dagon sticks with Thordred, while Court, the Chinese, and the Carthaginian gladiator join together.  (Thordred murdered the queen long ago.)  Resigned to the fact that the plague is going to kill everybody on Earth, Thordred decides to capture a bunch of people to take to another planet where he will build a new civilization with himself as dictator.  Court and his new friends escape to an evacuated post-apocalyptic Manhattan, where the garbage-strewn streets are haunted by the luminescent Carriers of the plague whose merest touch is death!  Faced with so much danger, death and destruction, the callous Court suddenly changes his tune, becoming filled with a love for humanity!  He even realizes he is in love with his lab assistant, who is back home in Wisconsin!

Court's multicultural party escapes New York, Ardath escapes being immolated in the sun, and together with Court's lab assistant they defeat Thordred in Wisconsin, figure out what is going on with that plague, and under the aegis of the world's governments manage a colossal public works project which puts an anti-plague shield around the Earth and gets all the people of the world to put aside their petty differences and live in harmony. Ardath abandons Theron's whole eugenics program and, with the gladiator and the Chinese, sets out to explore the universe in hopes of finding another planet with a hospitable environment.

The Creature From Beyond Infinity / A Million Years to Conquer is a quick and fun read, full of briefly sketched but engaging characters (the mad scientist who turns good, the scheming coup plotter, the warrior driven by a desire for revenge) and lots of cool SF themes and gadgets (e. g., Thordred is a real threat to Ardath and Court because he uses a brain reading device to transfer all of their personal and scientific knowledge into his own scheming skull.)  The story is full of science, like these old SF stories often are, and as is often the case, the science can be pretty sketchy--Kuttner portrays evolution as a direct march to some predictable ultimate form of life, for example.

A great specimen of Golden Age SF adventure.