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

My copy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merely acceptable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Haunted Corpse" by Frederik Pohl (1957)

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

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

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

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

Acceptable...barely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Science Fiction Book Club edition of
The Third Galaxy Reader

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

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

Whispers II: Leiber, Campbell, Drake, and Campton

Let's finish up Whispers II, the hardcover anthology of "stories of horror, supernatural horror, the macabre, and the generally weird" from 1979 put together by Stuart Schiff.  Only four stories to go, three of them by people pretty famous in the speculative fiction world.

"The Bait" by Fritz Leiber (1973)

I read the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories in the 1980s in Ace editions, five with Jeff Jones covers and one with a Michael Whelan cover, and I had definite opinions about which stories were good and which were not very good.  Looking at the contents pages of my six dog-eared Ace volumes and wracking my brain, I will say that the F&GM novel, The Swords of Lankhmar, and the short stories "The Seven Black Priests," "Bazaar of the Bizarre," "Lean Times in Lankhmar," and "Stardock" are among the definitely good.  Two long stories, "Adept's Gambit" and "Lords of Quarmall" I felt had the wrong tone and atmosphere, and a bunch of other stories were merely acceptable, and another group pointless trifles.  Among the pointless trifles was "The Bait," whose three pages I reread for this blog post.

(I often think about rereading all the F&GM stories...maybe some of the stories teen-aged MPorcius found mediocre or odd will appeal to a forty-something MPorcius?  But that is only one of many reading projects that I have conceived that have not yet blossomed into reality.)

Fafhrd and the Mouser are sleeping, dreaming of money.  They suddenly awake to find a naked teen-aged girl ("looked thirteen, but the lips smiled a cool self-infatuated seventeen") in their room.  They both want to have sex with her, and even propose to fight over her.  But then nine-foot tall demons appear in the little room, attack our heroes, and are quickly defeated.  The girl and the demon bodies then vanish.  F&GM speculate that Death, who appears as a character in a number of F&GM stories, sent the three beings to destroy them.

Leiber is a skilled writer and the style here, ironic and clever, is pleasant to read, but plotwise it is a big nothing and doesn't even really make sense.  The girl is not "bait," because she didn't lead the heroes to the demons, or even distract them so the demons could sneak up on them.  There was no reason for Death to send the girl there before he sent the demons; she is just included in the story to titillate the reader and set up jokes about Fafhrd and the Mouser's taste for girls in their early teens.

(One might also complain that "The Bait" has the exact same plot as 1974's "Beauty and the Beasts," and that both "Beauty and the Beasts" and "The Bait" are mere pendants to 1973's "The Sadness of the Executioner.")

"The Bait" was first printed in Whispers #2, and later included in the sixth Fafhrd and Grey Mouser book, Swords and Ice Magic (the one with the Michael Whelan cover), as well as a few other Leiber collections and anthologies.  I find the inclusion of "The Bait" in so many venues puzzling, because I consider it weaker than most Fafhrd and Grey Mouser tales; maybe it was a convenient buy for anthologists because it was so short and could fill in a last few vacant pages that needed filling?  Or maybe editors liked that it was silly and seemed to be a parody of sword and sorcery, a sort of goof on Conan-style stories? 

"Above the World" by Ramsey Campbell (1979)

Here we have what I am calling a meditation on loneliness and alienation.  A divorced guy, Knox, whose ex-wife Wendy and her second husband Tooley recently got killed in a mountain climbing accident, goes to the touristy town where he and his ex-wife had their honeymoon, and where she and her new husband recently stayed--I think this town is also where they were staying when they got killed.  Knox walks around the town, and again and again we get images and mundane events which speak of inability to achieve a connection, to communicate, with others--he hears voices but can't discern the words; the wind blows a postcard along the street--he tries to read it but it falls down a storm grate before he can snatch it; he goes to a book store to get something to read but the store is closed.  And, of course, seeing so many places where he spent time with his wife triggers plenty of recollections of her.  Knox is even staying in the same hotel room they stayed in on their honeymoon!

Knox hikes up a somewhat treacherous path, up a mountain, and finds it exhausting.  On the summit he weeps, and on the way down, encroaching fog hindering visibility, his attention distracted by something he thinks he sees carved into a tree trunk, he gets lost in a forest.  He begins to panic as the mist thickens and the sun begins to set.  As the story ends Knox comes upon two people, no doubt meant to remind us of Wendy and Tooley, who themselves died on a mountain climb, just Knox fears will now, and we readers have no idea if these mysterious figures are going to help him or if they are monsters who will kill him or ghosts who signify that he is already dead, or what.  (Early in his climb Knox had a severe chest pain that struck and then passed; maybe he died then and during the the rest of the story he has been a ghost.  Metaphorically, he has been dead for a while, because he has "a hollow at the center of himself" that began growing during his marriage.)

This story is OK; if you want to read page after page about a guy slipping on rocks and grasping at tree branches and tripping over roots, and semi-poetic ways of describing stuff that is far away ("A few dots, too distant to have limbs, crept along that ridge"), well, "Above the World" is for you.  Also, Campbell uses the word "cagoule," which I don't think I've ever encountered before.  Always learning...always learning. 

"Above the World" had its premiere here in Whispers II and has been reprinted in numerous anthologies and Campbell collections, including Dark Companions.  You'll remember that early last year we conducted an ideological analysis of a story from Dark Companions, "Napier Court."

"The Red Leer" by David Drake (1979)

David Drake is an important figure in the history of Whispers.  As he describes at his website, for much of the period in which the zine was published, Drake read the slush pile of manuscripts sent to Whispers, forwarding along to Stuart Schiff the small percentage in which he saw any value for Schiff to choose from among.  (Don't credit me with figuring this out--I got the link to Drake's interesting account of his tenure as assistant editor of Whispers from tarbandu's blog post on Whispers II.)

Old John Deehalter willed his 600-acre farm jointly to his son George and his daughter Alice, so now his son has to work the farm with his annoying brother-in-law Tom Kernes.  On the farm is an Indian burial mound, and Kernes wants to dig it up in hopes of finding a skull to display in his house.  Yuck!

The farmers bust open the mound and find what we readers immediately recognize as an alien high tech artifact.  Not long after that farm animals start turning up dead and people start seeing a strange figure in the night!  Deehalter and the Kernes are in the fight of their lives against a voracious alien creature--will they figure out its nature and weaknesses in time to defeat it, or will America's Great Plains soon be at the mercy of a slavering space monster?

This is sort of a standard horror story, but it is entertaining; Drake paces it well and is good at setting the scene and describing what goes on in the action sequences.  There are mystery elements around the powers and characteristics of the monster, but you can tell what the hell is going on, unlike the Grant and Campbell contributions to Whispers II, which leave you wondering whether the protagonist is dead or alive.

I liked it--thumbs up.  "The Red Leer" saw print first here in Whispers II and has resurfaced in several Drake collections and an anthology edited by Drake.

"At the Bottom of the Garden" by David Campton (1975)

Campton is a playwright and this story first appeared in a British juvenile anthology; like "Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole," I would have skipped such a thing under normal circumstances.  But while Ken Wisman's satiric folk song about marriage appeared in Whispers II and nowhere else, "At the Bottom of the Garden" appeared first in Armada Sci-Fi 1 and was included later in Whispers #9 and DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VI; maybe the wisdom of crowds indicates this story is actually good?

Mrs. Williams is a sad case: scatterbrained, shy and insecure, not very pretty, and a bad cook.  The first few pages of the story are largely taken up by a comic description of her disastrous efforts in the kitchen.  Mrs. Williams is so overwhelmed by her housework that she barely pays any attention to her equally unattractive and dim-witted daughter, Geraldine, who is I guess six or seven.  So Mom doesn't really take notice when Geraldine talks about her new friend; this new friend, according to Geraldine, removed the little girl's crooked and yellow teeth and straightened and whitened them and reinstalled them.

Having demonstrated prowess in the realm of dentistry, Geraldine figures her new friend might be able to cure her headaches and fix her terrible eyesight.  The friend disassembles the little girl, removing head from body and eyes from skull, to work on them.  When Mr. and Mrs. Williams see this shocking operation  underway in the distance, they sally forth in a state of panic, scaring off the little surgeon, who is some kind of alien or monster.  Geraldine, though in pieces, is still alive, and the uncanny medico could have put her back together again better than new, but the creature is too scared of the parents to return, so Geraldine, alive but immobile, is buried in pieces.

Because it first appeared in a SF anthology I thought we were going to learn all about the alien or whatever it is and how it can take people apart without shedding their blood or killing them, and I expected a warm and ironic happy ending in which Geraldine became smart and pretty and her parents never understood how this transformation took place, or, in their stupidity, took credit for their daughter's improvement .  But "At the Bottom of the Garden" is a surreal black humor horror story, not a science fiction story, so we learn nothing about the creature's origin or how it performs its medical miracles; the point of the story is to make us laugh at the antics of the members of the Williams family, three foolish and selfish dingbats, and/or make us imagine the mind-churning horror we would feel at finding one of our loved ones disassembled by a weird-looking creature.  And maybe consider the anguish of the helpful creature, whose efforts to do good were misunderstood and ended in tragedy.

Merely acceptable.

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So there it is, Whispers II.  I'm considering this a worthwhile exploration.  I enjoyed the very good Lafferty story and the solid Drake story, and the Davidson, Jacobi and Wellman stories deepened my quite limited knowledge of those writers and made me think better of them than I did before I cracked open Whispers II.  And next time I play Scrabble with the wife, maybe I can flummox her by whipping out "cagoule."   

Night Chills from Fritz Leiber, Dennis Etchison and August Derleth (with H. P. Lovecraft)

Recently I read and praised "People of the Black Coast," Robert E. Howard's tale of a dude whose reckless fiance crashes her plane in the Pacific and gets dismembered by giant arthropod scientists.  I ended up reading a scan of that gruesome story's first printing in a 1969 issue of Spaceway, but, while digging through the internet archive looking for the piece, I noticed that the second place "People of the Black Coast" was published was Kirby McCauley's 1975 anthology Night Chills.  Night Chills reprints 18 stories McCauley felt deserved a wide audience but which had not yet been printed in a widely available book, Karl Edward Wagner's great story "Sticks" among them.  Our mutual admiration for "People of the Black Coast" and "Sticks" leading me to suspect that McCauley and I might have similar tastes, I decided to try out some of his other choices.  Today we'll read the stories in Night Chills by Fritz Leiber of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser fame and important horror writer Dennis Etchison, as well as something that August Derleth came up with based on some notes left by speculative fiction icon H. P. Lovecraft.

(I read the versions of these stories in the scan of Night Chills at the internet archive; all three have been republished in other books since 1975.)

"Alice and the Allergy" by Fritz Leiber (1946)

"Alice and the Allergy" first saw light of day in the same issue of Weird Tales as Edmond Hamilton's "Day of Judgment," which we read back in 2017.

About three years ago Alice was raped by a serial killer who was terrorizing the upper Midwest, a man the  newspapers called "the mystery strangler."  Alice married the doctor who came to treat her after she suffered this crime, and six months after their wedding she began suffering severe allergies and bouts of depression and anxiety.  As our story begins, Alioce can't stop thinking the strangler is coming to get her, to kill her as he killed most of his other victims, even though he was found dead two years ago.

There is a lot of medical and psychological jibber jabber in this story.  Alice's husband, Howard, is working with pharmacists trying to figure out what Alice is allergic to so they can make up shots for her.  Howard also thinks some of her psychological problems are because of the prudish misandrist aunt who raised her and filled her head with fear of men.  Howard says jazz like "Maybe, in a sense, your libido is still tied to the past.  Unconsciously, you may still have that distorted conception of sex your aunt drilled into you, something sadistic and murderous."  When the latest of many tests provides evidence that Alice is allergic to "household dust," Howard suspects her allergies are psychosomatic--maybe Alice's system reacts to dust because Alice was raped on a dusty couch!

By some unbelievable coincidence the household dust for the allergy test came from the same room where the strangler was found dead, and when Alice is given the first shot to relieve her allergy symptoms she dies of a bronchospasm.     

Maybe all that psychoanalytic stuff felt fresh in 1946, but to 48-year-old MPorcius, in 2019, who has seen many movies and TV shows with psychoanalaytic elements, it feels tired and boring.  Even if Leiber here is introducing it as a red herring and using it to portray Howard as a callous dope, it takes up too much space.  The business of the dust sample used for the allergy test coming from the strangler's room is kind of ridiculous--are we supposed to think the strangler's ghost contrived via some uncanny influence to have dust from his body selected for use by the lab that Howard works with so it would be introduced into Alice's bloodstream and, because it is imbued with the strangler's consciousness or evil, it somehow killed her?  Or just that it was a crazy coincidence, and Alice really did die because her subconscious recognized the dust of her rapist entering her body again and just couldn't take it?  Either explanation is too complicated and unlikely for the reader to accept, crippling the story.   

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

"Wet Season" by Dennis Etchison (1965)

Etchison died earlier this year--check out Will Errickson's post from May commemorating Etchison's life and career at his terrific blog Too Much Horror Fiction.  I thought Etchison's 1979 story "The Dead Line" quite good; and am happy to report that I found this one, which first appeared in the short-lived SF magazine Gamma, equally admirable.

"Wet Season" is an effective horror story that plays on our sadness over the deaths of our loved ones, anxieties regarding unpredictable natural forces like the weather, and dismay over the changes to our environs and our own lives wrought by the arrival of new people.  Madden recently married Lorelei, a slim beauty with cool skin who moves with a dancer's grace; she brought with her to their marriage a pair of giggling twin boys.  Madden finds himself unable to bond with the strange little boys, and doesn't enjoy much emotional intimacy with beautiful Lorelei, either.  Not long after their marriage Madden's daughter from a previous marriage dies, drowned in the bathtub.  This tragedy precipitates a mind-blowing talk with Madden's brother, who lays out the clues, both quantitative--weather patterns and old photographs--and qualitative--unnerving feelings about changes in the town and in Madden's home--that suggest that, over the last two or three years, Madden, as well as other men in town, have married aquatic monsters who are transforming the county into some kind of swamp and killing anyone who stumbles on the horrible truth!

Much of "Wet Season" reads like a mature mainstream story about loss and relationships--Madden's relationship with his brother, his heartbreak over the death of his daughter, and his failure to relate with the giggling twins and his slinky beauty of a wife ring true and gave me chills.  The weird monster stuff that comes at the end is also good, and is effectively foreshadowed throughout the earlier parts of the story, so the realistic human drama elements and the Lovecraftian infiltration-by-and-miscegenation-with-evil-fish-people climax make a seamless whole.  Bravo.

An enthusiastic thumbs up for this one!

"Innsmouth Clay" by August Derleth and H. P. Lovecraft (1971)

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth," from 1936, is one of Lovecraft's masterpieces (I gushed about it in early 2018); let's see what connections to that story, if any, Derleth contrives in this story, which first appeared in his 1971 anthology Dark Things and has since been reprinted in the various collections of Derleth/Lovecraft "collaborations" going under variations of the title The Watchers Out of Time.  (It is my understanding that the stories in The Watchers Out of Time were essentially written by Derleth but that Lovecraft's meager posthumous contributions have often been exaggerated for marketing reasons.)

"Innsmouth Clay" is a sort of memoir about vanished sculptor Jeffrey Corey, penned by his closest friend and the administrator of his estate.  Around the time of the events described in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," Corey returned to America from Paris and moved into a seaside cottage five miles south of Innsmouth, home to some relatives of Corey's with whom he had never had much interaction.  After the Federal raid on Innsmouth and the Navy attack on the submarine colony of fish people mentioned in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," Corey found some blue clay washed up on the beach and decided to make a sculpture of a sea goddess out of it.  Like the guy in "The Call of Cthulhu," Corey does some sculpting while asleep, and wakes up to find he has given his sea goddess gills!

The narrator provides text from Corey's journal describing his dreams, dreams it is obvious to us are in fact memories of his real nocturnal activities, which include having sex with a mysterious woman and bringing his sea goddess sculpture to the ocean, where Corey swims with fish people.

The narrator accompanies Corey on one of his visits to the half-ruined town of Innsmouth, where they see the destruction wreaked by the Federal raid and talk to an old local who rehashes all the stuff we learned in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."

Eventually Corey and the sculpture disappear, and the final scene of the story describes the narrator's outing in a row boat, during which he is exposed to evidence that Corey has joined the fish people (like the guy in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," Corey is descended from the fish people, something Derleth makes clear on the story's first page) and that his blue clay sculpture of a beautiful woman has, like Pygmalion's, come to life and become his lover.

"Innsmouth Clay" is a pointless exercise that paint-by-numbers-style rehearses Lovecraftian themes and directly appropriates Lovecraft's characters and settings but denudes them of the mystery, horror and disgust that gave them power in their original form.  Derleth's only original elements, the Pygmalion business of sculpting a hot chick who comes to life to be your girlfriend, doesn't mesh at all with Lovecraft's philosophical ideas or emotional themes.  "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is a tragedy about degeneration, miscegenation, murder and parasitism, about learning truths (including about yourself) that are almost too horrible to face and lead to cataclysmic destruction, but the story of Pygmalion (and apparently Corey's own story) is a love story about the generosity of a deity, the joy of creation and the achievement of your heart's desire.  Derleth fails--he doesn't even seem to try--to integrate these two disparate components of the story, so "Innsmouth Clay" is not only totally derivative, but emotionally incoherent in a way that undermines the virtues and attractions of the source material he is stealing from.

A frustrating waste of time.

1992 and 2008 editions of The Watchers Out of Time

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Etchison's "Wet Season" is really good, but the Leiber and Derleth stories are misfires and I wonder why McCauley chose them.  Well, we'll read more from Night Chills and get a further sense of McCauley's taste in the near future.

1950s stories from Galaxy of Ghouls

Not long ago I purchased the 1955 paperback anthology Galaxy of Ghouls at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle in our nation's capital, intrigued by the raven-haired beauties on the cover and the name of Judith Merril, one of SF's most innovative and influential editors.  With her famous anthologies, including the dozen volumes of Year's Best S-F, Merril strove to expand the definition of what SF was and what it could be; England Swings SF in particular was a major impetus behind the developments and controversies in the SF field that came to be called "The New Wave."

While it is not all that clear from the somewhat confusing cover, which promises supernatural terrors but also includes a picture of heavily armed astronauts, Galaxy of Ghouls takes as its theme the way that, in the middle of the 20th century, SF writers updated for the space age such traditional horror tropes as the werewolf, the voodoo doll, and the vampire.  Text on the first page assures us, "The devil's brood inside these pages is strictly up-to-date--and often as not a step or two ahead of the times."  The fact that 1959 and 1961 editions of Galaxy of Ghouls were retitled Off the Beaten Orbit and adorned with "futuristic" covers by Richard Powers and John Schoenherr more typical for  paperback SF suggests that the boys down in marketing at Pyramid Books thought this first edition from Lion Library focused a little too much on the supernatural and not enough on the space age.

Let's check out five of the stories in Galaxy of Ghouls, all from the 1950s and all by authors we have talked about before here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

"The Ambassadors" by Anthony Boucher (1952)

In her intro to "The Ambassadors," which first appeared in Startling Stories, Merril tells us Boucher's work, in particular "Compleat Werewolf" (1942), has liberated the werewolf from the "medieval horror story" and that "The Ambassadors" is a follow up that brings lycanthropy to the future.

"The Ambassadors" is a joke story with "meta" elements.  As you know, here on Earth, intelligent life evolved from apes.  Well, on Mars, the first human explorers of the red planet discover, intelligent life evolved from wolves!  Upon his return to Earth, the biologist from that first Mars expedition issues a plea to the public for help--he thinks that werewolves are real, and he requests some werewolves come out of the closet and help build good relations with the Martians!  Most people think the man has gone crazy, but it turns our werewolves are real and this step inaugurates a new period of history for werewolves, one in which werewolves need no longer hide their true nature or suffer discrimination from prejudiced non-lycanthropes.  The joke at the end of the story is when a vampire hopes that some intelligent aliens who are descended from bats will be discovered so vampires too can achieve their civil rights.

Earlier this year I called Boucher's story "Transfer Point" "weak" and his tale "A Shape in Time" "lame," and today I am calling "The Ambassadors" barely acceptable filler.  I am not the audience for tepid joke stories.

I mentioned "meta" elements.  The story's big in-joke for SF fans is a passing reference to an expert on werewolves whose name is "Williamson," an allusion to Jack Williamson, whose werewolf novel Darker Than You Think is, according to Brian Aldiss, Williamson's best novel.

At four pages this qualifies as one of those short shorts that are so popular that anthologies of them get printed in mass quantities.  "The Ambassadors" would be included in Groff Conklin and Isaac Asimov's Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales which has gone through over 30 printings according to isfdb.

"The Night He Cried" by Fritz Leiber (1953)

Merril tells us this story is about an alien shape shifter with sex appeal!  "The Night He Cried" was first published in Fred Pohl's anthology Star Science Fiction Stories.  It would later be included in the 1974 collection The Best of Fritz Leiber (I own a 1979 paperback edition of The Best of Fritz Leiber, and so own multiple printings of this story.)

This is another joke story.  (One of the best humorous SF stories of all time is actually by Leiber, the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser classic "Lean Times in Lanhkmar.")  "The Night He Cried" is a totally over-the-top spoof of a Mickey Spillane-style detective writer and his work.  Our narrator is an alien agent from "Galaxy Center."  In its natural form this creature has seven tentacles, on Earth it disguises itself as a sexy woman, and two of the tentacles take on the role of "magnificently formed" breasts.  Leiber mentions the breasts again and again, using antiseptic euphemisms like "milk glands."  The alien has come to Earth to investigate Slickie Millane, author of the popular Spike Mallet books.  The alien wants to learn about sex on Earth, and is eager to interact with Millane because his books contain lots of smoldering male-female relationships, but the sex act is never consummated because Mallet always has to shoot the woman down before closing the deal, as it were.  (In the climax of the first Mike Hammer novel, I the Jury, Hammer shoots down a woman, the murderer of his friend, as she is trying to seduce and murder him.)  The alien suspects Millane has some kind of psychological issue with sex, and would like to help him if it can.  Millane's crazy relationships with women and the many permutations of the alien's shape shifting ability fill this story with absurd and bizarre images and events.

I guess "The Night He Cried" is acceptable; it holds the attention because it is so uninhibited and berserk--Leiber really lets himself go this time.  But are all the stories from Galaxy of Ghouls jokes?  As I say all the time on this blog, I have limited interest in joke stories.

"A Way of Thinking" by Theodore Sturgeon (1953)

Here's the 1965 paperback edition of
E Pluribus Unicorn

This tale, Merril tells us, is about sympathetic magic, of which she offers such examples as the voodoo doll.  "A Way of Thinking" apparently first appeared in the hardcover collection E Pluribus Unicorn, but that same year was also printed in Amazing.  This story seems to have been a hit, appearing in multiple anthologies with "Black Magic" or "Supernatural" in their titles, and being reprinted in Fantastic in 1967 and in Amazing in 1982.  Let us pray this is not a joke story, especially since it is like 28 pages long.

Sturgeon populates this tale with three endearing characters.  There is our narrator, a writer of SF stories with a long list of unusual jobs behind him.  There's a doctor, Milton.  And there's Kelley, a sailor with whom the narrator worked years ago on a "tankship" carrying oil between the Gulf Coast and the Northeast.  The narrator admires Kelley as an intelligent if uneducated man, and provides several examples of Kelley solving problems by looking at them from an unusual angle, we might say "thinking outside the box."  After not having seen him for years, the narrator meets Kelley again at Milton's doctor's office.  Kelley's brother Hal is dying of mysterious injuries, injuries perhaps psychosomatic.  Because Merril mentioned voodoo dolls in her little intro and the first page of the story in Amazing has a picture of a guy holding a doll on it, we are not surprised to learn, fourteen pages in, that Hal's bitter ex-girlfriend has a doll from Haiti, a gift from Hal.

The narrator and Kelley independently try to deal with this whole doll issue, the narrator in a sort of straightforward way and Kelley in his characteristic counter-intuitive way, and the story ends in shocking tragedy.  The ending actually was surprising, with Sturgeon coming up with a new way to look at voodoo dolls that isn't a goofy joke like Boucher's new way of looking at werewolves but something actually scary.  "A Way of Thinking" is quite good--I strongly recommend it.

Half the strength of this story is Sturgeon's success in depicting friendship and love between men in a way that is not sappy or maudlin but believable and even touching.  Life being how it is, it is nice to spend a little time in a fantasy world in which people are genuinely kind to each other and not just trying to exercise power over each other and squeeze money or sex out of each other.  (The thing Heinlein wrote about Sturgeon that appears in my edition of Godbody also gave me this warm pleasant feeling.) 

I quite enjoyed "A Way of Thinking;" it works as a story about people and as a black magic story, and Sturgeon's pacing and style and all that technical stuff are spot on.  But if I had to play progressive's advocate I'd say it depicts a world in which white men band together in a perpetual struggle against the inscrutable "other"--women and blacks--so let the 21st-century reader beware!

According to isfdb, Literature of the Supernatural was a textbook designed for high school use--
I went to the wrong high school!

"The Triflin' Man" by Walter Miller, Jr. (1955)

According to Merril, one of a witch's or warlock's most "enviable" powers is the ability to transform into a sexier version of her- or himself, and a character with just such an ability shows up here in Miller's story.

Lucey is an obese impoverished woman living in a shack in the swamp with her son, Doodie.  She only saw Doodie's father once, a large man who "made love like a machine."  Doodie is subject to spasms and fits, and as the story's dozen pages progress, we learn that Doodie's father was a scout from outer space who put on human guise in order to impregnate Lucey and so doing create a half-human intelligence asset on Earth!  Those fits of Doodie's are a side effect of Doodie exchanging telepathic messages with his father and with his half brothers across the world!  While Lucey cooks up a 'possum for dinner, Doodie arrogantly explains that his father will soon return with an alien military force to conquer the world!

The second half of the story details what happens when the alien deadbeat dad returns, and is equally effective as the first half.  This is a good one, solid SF that exploits the uneasiness (or worse) many of us feel over our sexual relations and our relations with our parents and/or children.  I might even go out on a limb and suggest it is a feminist story about a single mother who tries to do the right thing despite all the exploitation and abuse she suffers from all the men in her life.

"The Triflin' Man" is apparently this story's "deadname;" after first appearing in Fantastic Universe and here in G o' G under that name, it has been going by the name "You Triflin' Skunk!" in Walter Miller collections since 1965, though it does show up once as "A Triflin' Man" in a 1991 anthology of "Florida science fiction."  (Is there an anthology of New Jersey science fiction?  Barry Malzberg has been living in the greatest state in the union for decades!  I know there must be others!)

"Blood" by Fredric Brown (1955)

Remember when Anthony Boucher told us Fredric Brown was the master of the short short?  Well, here is another of Brown's short shorts (or as Brown calls them, "vignettes" or "vinnies.")  Brown keeps this story down to one page and Merril keeps her intro down to four lines that tell us Brown is "irrepressible" and this story is about vampires.

Mankind in the 22nd century finally realizes the vampire menace is real, and the blood-sucking fiends are hunted down and exterminated!  Only two of the parasitic monsters are left, and they hop in their time machine and travel to the far future, hoping to arrive at a time when their diabolical race has been forgotten and they can begin their depredations anew!  They use up the last of their time machine fuel, and emerge--unable to procure more fuel, they will be stuck in this time period forever.  To their dismay, animal life has died out and only vegetable life has endured--there are intelligent plants, but will a person descended from a turnip provide the blood a vampire needs?

Even at one page, a waste of time.  "Blood" first made the eyes of readers of F&SF roll, and has since appeared in many Brown collections and anthologies of vampire stories.

**********

Boucher and Leiber and Brown offered flat joke stories that inspired no feeling and no laughs, but Sturgeon and Miller made this excursion into Galaxy of Ghouls worthwhile.  I don't read these books looking for smartalecky jokes, I read them looking for human feeling and human relationships, for violence and excitement, and today it was Sturgeon and Miller who delivered.  Maybe copies of E Pluribis Unicorn and The View From the Stars are what I should be asking Santa for this year.

I, J, L, M: Stories from ABC by Washington Irving, Laurence M. Janifer, Fritz Leiber and Walter M. Miller, Jr.

It's four more stories from An ABC of Science Fiction, the 1966 anthology of SF stories edited by Tom Boardman, Jr.  I have the 1968 US paperback from Avon.  Because I read it in 2014, I'm skipping the K story, Damon Knight's "Maid to Measure," a brief joke story vulnerable to charges of sexism, of perpetuating the dumb blonde stereotype, and (worst of all) of not being funny.

"The Conquest By the Moon" by Washington Irving (1809--this version 1955)

Remember when people were taking public domain works by iconic writers from the Georgian and Victorian past like Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte and filling them with zombies and other faddish genre elements?  (Are they still doing that?)  Well here's an "updated" version of a work by an early 19th-century literary icon in which the included genre elements were part and parcel of the author's original version!

In 1955 Anthony Boucher included in F&SF a condensed selection from Washington Irving's satire A History of New York From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty entitled "The Conquest By the Moon."  Boucher credits leftist folk-singer Lee Hays with alerting him to this pioneering example of invasion-from-space speculation.  This adapted fragment of Irving's book hasn't been reprinted very often; maybe Boardman resorted to it because there are not many SF writers whose names start with an "I," or perhaps Boardman just likes stories that try to be funny while denouncing white racism and the human propensity for violence.  Whatever the case, it's time for me to get edjumakated because everything I know about Washington Irving up to now I learned from cartoons.

"The Conquest By the Moon" is more like a sarcastic essay than a story with a plot or characters.  First, Irving points out, in ironic parody, the weakness of the moral claim of European colonists to the New World.  Then he pulls the old switcheroo on us: how would the people of England, France and the United States like it if the inhabitants of the Moon, green cyclopes who find our white skin and lack of tails disgusting, came to Earth and used their "concentrated sunbeam" weapons to force us to renounce Christianity and abandon our cities to live on reservations in inhospitable Arabian deserts or icy Lapland?

Like Samuel Johnson's Idler No. 81, from 1759, this is an interesting historical artifact that documents Georgian era criticism of British and French imperialism in the Americas, but it is not really a work of fiction.  For SF fans "The Conquest By the Moon" is perhaps interesting for its depiction of extraterrestrials whose biology differs radically from our own and their high tech weaponry--"concentrated sunbeams" sounds a lot like the ray weapons that are a staple of SF.

I guess we'll call this acceptable.

"In the Bag" by Laurence M. Janifer (1964)

I recently read Janifer's Slave Planet, and here he is again. Unfortunately, "In the Bag" is one of those short shorts that is supposed to be funny.  This one employs the same gag used by Phillip Jose Farmer in his short short "The King of the Beasts," letting us think, until the end of the tale, that alien characters are humans.

Through an unlikely mix-up an alien emigre and rebel who is running a laundry service on Earth reveals himself to a customer whom he believes to be a human; the customer turns out to be an agent of the secret police of the government the disguised launderer is rebelling against.  This story may be a spoof of the strange phenomena we see in Edgar Rice Burroughs-type lost race stories in which the lost race consists of brutish men but sophisticated and sexy ladies--here Janifer posits a race of aliens the male members of which effortlessly pass as Earthmen while the women have five arms and three breasts and a foot like a slug or snail's.  "In the Bag" may also suggest that those who rebel against tyranny often turn out to be little or no better than the tyrants they oppose--the launderer is willing to kill the customer before the customer reveals he is also an alien.

Barely acceptable filler.  After seeing print first in F&SF, "In the Bag" reappeared in a collection of Janifer stories put out by our friends at Belmont as well as in several foreign magazines and anthologies.

"X Marks the Pedwalk" by Fritz Leiber (1963)

When I was in academia there was a lot of complaining among my leftie colleagues about suburban sprawl and white flight.  (Many of these carpers, of course, indulged in all the sins they deplored when committed by those of their fellow white Americans who had the misfortune to work in the private sector instead of within the taxpayer-funded walls of the academy, like owning houses in the suburbs, evading NYC taxes by claiming their summer home in the Hamptons was their primary residence, sending their offspring to private and/or suburban schools, etc.)  "X Marks the Pedwalk" by Fafhrd and Grey Mouser chronicler and Grandmaster Fritz Leiber is about the suburban-urban divide, though set in Los Angeles, that center of American car culture, instead of my own old stomping grounds of New York, because in Leiber's story that social divide is manifested in the conflict between motorists and pedestrians.     

"X Marks the Pedwalk" is also one of the joke/satire stories with which An ABC of Science Fiction seems to be infested, and as such its plot is a little absurd and the story full of absurdist jokes.  La-La Land, an environment characterized by a steadily decreasing level of sanity, is divided between the hoity-toity suburban Wheels and the slum-dwelling Feet--the Government tries to maintain order and avoid taking sides.  Leiber hints that the situation of LA is like that of Paris during the French Revolution, and it is apparently normal for drivers to run over pedestrians who can't scurry off the street in time, and for pedestrians to heave bricks at or lay spike traps for cars.  At the start of the story one clash between pedestrians and motorists leads to four fatalities, and sparks a heightening of hostilities.  Luckily, the leaders of Wheels, Feet and Government get together to hash out a deal which limits the sorts of weapons that can be used and defuses the tense situation, diminishing if not eliminating the violence of the long-running low-intensity conflict.

Leiber is a good writer, and this is a good story; the action scenes are good and the jokes (like the suburbanites' posh hyphenated names) add to the story, conveying informationand setting tone, instead of distracting you from it.  I had some deja vu reading this piece; I think I may have read it, or part of it, before.  "X Marks the Pedwalk" is an acknowledged inspiration for the Car Wars game, the early editions of which I played back in my school days, and maybe I encountered it in connection with that?

"X Marks the Pedwalk" made its debut in the first issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, an irregularly published magazine edited by Frederik Pohl for most of its run.  That first issue looks pretty good, with lots of big names--besides Leiber and Pohl there's Keith Laumer and Arthur C. Clarke on the writing side and Virgil Finlay, Wallace Wood and Jack Gaughan on the illustration side.  The story has been reprinted quite a bit, including in some anthologies marketed to fans of mysteries and horror, which I thought was interesting, as it is by no means a traditional mystery or horror story.

"No Moon for Me" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1952)

Here's the first story in An ABC of Science Fiction from Astounding.  "No Moon for Me" doesn't seem to have been as successful as many of the stories we've already looked at from this anthology, only having been reprinted in one other anthology, William Sloane's 1953 Space, Space, Space, which has a nice wraparound cover.

Colonel Denin has spent his career trying to convince the Congress to finance manned space exploration, and Congress has always refused to make the long-suffering taxpayers shoulder the extraordinary expense.  After all, what is the point of going to space?  There's nothing up there we don't already have down here!

But today, September 9, 1990, Denin and two other men are boarding a rocket to the Moon!  You see, a few years ago an indecipherable transmission, obviously artificial, started coming from the Moon, and Denin, a pilot, and an academic linguist are going to Luna to investigate!

I admit that I have read so much Malzberg that I have Malzberg on the brain, but I think I am perfectly justified in seeing Malzbergian elements and themes in "No Moon for Me."  These elements and themes:

1) The lack of public support for the space program.

2) The rocket ship carries nuclear weapons in case of trouble with aliens.

3) An astronaut (the fat college professor) goes insane on the trip to Luna, and Denin has arguably been insane for years: the transmissions from the Moon are not from aliens, but from a transmitter Denin himself secretly sent up there in an unmanned drone rocket, a scheme to trick the US government into financing his trip!  If that doesn't make you question his sanity, there's this: Denin plans to detonate the nuclear weapons so he and all the evidence of his scam (and two innocent people!) are destroyed, and the people of Earth will think a battle took place and be inspired to set up a permanent military base on the Moon and explore the universe in the interest of security!

How Denin and company's trip to the Moon is resolved is reminiscent of traditional adventure fiction, with people holding guns on each other and tying each other up, etc.

I like this one; I don't know why it isn't included in any of the Miller collections that have appeared over the years.  Maybe it is unrepresentative of Miller's work?  (I have read very little of Miller's oeuvre, so I can't judge such things.)  Maybe people think the plot twists are too obvious or too unbelievable?

**********

I'm halfway through An ABC of Science Fiction and I think I can detect some trends.  First, there are lots of brief joke stories--maybe a page limit forced Boardman to include many such stories if he wanted to present 26 total.  Second, the general tenor of the stories chosen by Boardman is very pessimistic, quite misanthropic.  There are plenty of stories denouncing white racism and the human propensity for violence; stories in which humans make bad choices, get outwitted or get defeated; stories that predict things will get worse in the future; and stories whose protagonists are criminals or fraudsters or the agents of tyrants.  There is a dearth of stories that exhibit hope for the future or celebrate man's ability to overcome adversity or anything like that.  Boardman seems to have deliberately constructed a book that is a downer!

Well, at least none of the stories in this batch (because we skipped Knight's contribution) were actually bad.  Hopefully the next batch will be at least as good--and maybe we can hope there will be at least a gleam of optimism among them?     

Stories of Contact with aliens by Walton, Leiber, Brown and Phillips

As you can see from this receipt (the true historian knows that truth lies in the documentary evidence!) I purchased Contact, a 1963 anthology edited by Noel Keyes, on June 7 of 2016 at A-1 Bookstore for $1.50.  This book was 50% more expensive than Planet of Peril by John Christopher, which I read in August of 2017.  The vagaries of the market!  Contact is Noel Keyes's only credit at isfdb, and the know-it-alls there pour salt in Mr. Keyes's wounds by claiming that famous SF historian Sam Moskowitz actually did much of the work putting Contact together.  Keyes (real name: David Keightley) was probably too busy studying Chinese history and literature to devote his full attention to Contact.  Priorities, man!

Let's check out four stories from Contact, two from people we are familiar with, Fritz Leiber and Frederic Brown, and two from guys I know little or nothing of, Harry Walton and Peter Phillips.

"Intelligence Test" by Harry Walton (1953)

This is a sort of Twilight Zone-ish story in which, shortly after a UFO is spotted over Everytown, USA, a handful of people find themselves trapped by a forcefield in a roadside diner, the subjects of an alien test of human intelligence!  A journalist among those trapped figures out how to escape, despite the obstructions presented by the presence of two members of the decadent and corrupt bourgeoisie!

This is a good story of its type and I enjoyed it.  "Intelligence Test" originally appeared in Science Fiction Plus, and forty years later was translated into Russian and included in an anthology alongside Clifford Simak's Goblin Reservation and Horacio Quiroga's "Anaconda."

 

"What's He Doing in There?" by Fritz Leiber (1957)

Fritz, the man behind the much-beloved Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, has been showing up on the blog a lot lately, which is good, because he had an interesting career and I like much of his work.  Of course, he doesn't hit it out of the park every at-bat (as you sports fans might say.)  "What's He Doing in There?" is a tepid joke story.  I can't really object to Leiber writing joke stories, because he wrote one of the very best comedy SF/F stories, "Lean Times in Lankhmar," published in 1959, but this one feels like no more than competent filler.

The first Martian to come to Earth makes a beeline to an anthropologist who has a wife, a "coltish" teenage daughter and a "little son."  After a nice chat the alien utters a vague phrase that the humies interpret as a request to use the bathroom.  They direct him, and he locks himself in...for hour after hour.  What could the Martian be doing in there?  In the morning he finally emerges and it becomes apparent that Martians sleep underwater, and the alien took the tub for a comfortable bed.

An acceptable trifle.

First appearing in Galaxy, in 1982 "What's He Doing in There?" was translated into (I think) Croatian and appeared in the Yugoslavian SF magazine Sirius.

"Knock" by Fredric Brown (1949)

Hubba hubba!

Remember when we read a Fredric Brown novel about a homophobic boozer and a god-like rock?  Good times!  Let's hope this short story is equally fun and crazy.

Aliens hose down the Earth with rays that kill all animal (but not plant) life, saving only a few score specimens for their zoo, among them one man and one woman.  These aliens don't die of old age, though they can die by violence, and are dumbfounded and disappointed when their brand new Earth specimens start dying of natural causes.  These E.T.s are also cold-hearted, with no conception of love or affection, and the last man on earth tricks them; he tells them Earth creatures live longer if petted and caressed, and suggests they show such affection to their rattlesnake specimen.  The aliens start keeling over, and somehow don't realize they are dying from snakebites--they think that Earth is the planet of death and they have started dying of old age like Earth creatures do.  So, they leave.

There is also a sort of subplot about whether or not the last man and last woman on Earth will ever have sex; she does not find him attractive.

I can't tell you that this story is bad, but it is leaving me cold.  More filler.

After first appearing in an issue of Thrilling Wonder with a cover that is making my eyes dilate, "Knock" has been reprinted many times; according to isfdb, Sirius presented it twice, the second time as the cover story!  Weird!

"Lost Memory" by Peter Phillips (1952)

Phillips's career seems to have caused some confusion among SF scholars--not only are there multiple SF writers with this name, but it was also used as a pseudonym by Howard Browne.  The Phillips we are acquainting ourselves with today is mentioned by Barry Malzberg in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, Malzberg telling us that Phillips was the first person to write about a machine that facilitates and manipulates dreams.

"Lost Memory" is yet another story about emotional robots who have lost knowledge of who first constructed them, like "Robots Return" and "Orphans of the Void," both of which we read earlier this week.  These here robots reside on a lifeless rock of a planet and have a complex society complete with a division of labor--there are politician robots, for example, and our narrator is a journalist robot.  These individualistic robots feel pride and fear and have differences of opinion, and some make a practice of customizing themselves--one has replaced his legs with wheels, for example.  Another converted himself into an aircraft and tried to escape the planet's gravity, without success.

When what we readers realize is a rocket ship crash lands on the planet, the robots think it is a robot from another world who has successfully converted itself into a space ship.  The injured Earth astronaut in the ship, via radio, tries to explain to the assembled robot politicians and journalists that he needs medical attention, but these robots have no experience with living things and continue thinking it is the rocket itself talking.  (The rocket's airlock was jammed in the crash and there are no windows or anything like that.)  A robot technician cuts open the rocket to conduct repairs, and the heat caused by the friction burns the human to a crisp.  Phillips really pours on the horror elements, with the astronaut repeatedly screaming things like "Dear Jesus!" and "You're burning me alive!" and then with the description of the corpse, which the robots think some sort of insulation.  This is like proto-splatterpunk!

Not only is the astronaut killed by his would-be rescuers, but the robots lose an opportunity to learn from him the secret of their origins.  I'll give this hardcore tragedy a moderately positive vote.   

"Lost Memory" has been reprinted numerous times in anthologies of robot stories and horror stories and translated into several foreign languages, including Japanese.

**********

I don't feel like any of these was a waste of my time, so a successful mission.  More fifty-plus-year-old SF stories in our next episode when I explore another of my paperback SF anthologies.

Shadows of Tomorrow cast by Leiber, Boucher, Shaara and Gunn

Here's another of my 50 cent finds from the carts outside Second Story Books in our nation's capital, 1953's Shadow of Tomorrow, edited by Frederick Pohl, alumnus of the Young Communist League and author of the classic Gateway.  My copy of the 379-page book is in pretty good shape if you ignore the water spots.  An earlier owner appears to have used the inner front cover as scratch paper while working on his algebra homework or trying to crack a KGB cipher.  I hope he passed the class or caught the Rosenbergs' controller or whatever.

The description of Michael Shaara's Orphans of the Void
sounds like it is for a different story.

In our last episode we looked at four stories from Astounding from the period 1938 to 1944.  Today's crop of SF capers are all from Galaxy, from the early 1950s.  Let's see if they are really "more vivid than anything you have ever read" and "possible," as the back cover promises.

"A Bad Day For Sales" by Fritz Leiber (1953)

In his intro to this volume Frederick Pohl says something that I don't expect to hear pinkos say: that the world and society are in pretty good shape!  The salutary state of the world in the early 1950s, Pohl continues, presents a problem to the SF writer who would play social critic: if things are so good, it is not easy to come up with a compelling story on how they should be improved.  One solution available to the able writer, Pohl tells us, is to write a story that points out not what course our society should pursue, but what course to avoid, and Pohl includes "A Bad Day For Sales" on the list of stories from Shadow of Tomorrow that take this tack.  In his intro to the individual story itself, Pohl offers his opinion that "A Bad Day For Sales" is the best story ever written by Fritz Leiber.

So, what world does Leiber suggest we should avoid in this brief tale?  A consumerist world in which popular culture is suffused with sex and violence and America is involved in mass war in the Muslim East!  (I have the feeling we haven't exactly been heeding Fritz's warning!)  The plot consists of a robot on the streets of Manhattan, trying to sell various items to the city dwellers, like lolly-pops, soda pop, booze, copies of comic books (Junior Space Killers to a boy, Gee Gee Jones, Space Stripper to a girl) and cosmetics (Mars Blood, a "savage new glamor-tint"), the last to a woman in six-inch heels and skin-tight pants who flaunts her body at the robot.  Nearby, a fifty-foot-tall animatronic mannequin dresses and undresses, advertising the latest fashions, while news about the Pakistan crisis flashes by on the Times Square news ticker.  Then a stealth missile lands in Times Square, killing scores of people; the robot salesman survives, but is confused by this turn of events.

This is a sort of trifling joke story, but some of the jokes are funny (I definitely laughed at Gee Gee Jones, Space Stripper.)  I thought it a little incongruous to find the author of the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, which feature light-hearted depictions of swordfights, thievery and rape*, apparently lecturing us on the issue of sex and violence in entertainment.  ("A Bad Day For Sales," by the way, features explicit depictions of people being maimed and killed by the missile attack--I expect these are meant to be disturbing, not amusing.)  I'm guessing Pohl loved "A Bad Day For Sales" because it feels like an attack on advertising and the sale and purchase of frivolous things like sugary sweets and cosmetics, and perhaps hints that all act as "the opiates of the people," distracting them and keeping them from changing the government which is getting mixed up in all the wars (Orwell and numerous other lefties make this sort of argument.)

I love Coca-Cola and Oreos and Goldenberg's Peanut Chews, and if I had seen Gee Gee Jones, Space Stripper on the shelf during one of my regular visits to Jim Hanley's Universe back in my Manhattan days I would have eagerly snatched it up, so I am looking at this story as an affectionate send up, a knowingly ironic homage, to our consumerist culture and giving it a thumbs up!  (Just call me Mr. False Consciousness.)  So there!

The immortal Charles Schulz was also mining the anti-social comic book title vein
in the early 1950s.  This panel is from the June 22, 1952 Peanuts strip.

"A Bad Day For Sales" has been reprinted many times in such books as the volume of Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories that covers 1953 and The Arbor House Treasure of Science Fiction Masterpieces.  (While the former is "headlined" by Asimov and the latter by Robert Silverberg, Martin H. Greenberg is second editor on both...perhaps it is Greenberg who was so very keen on this piece.)

Is it vivid?  Yes!

Is it possible?  Yes!

*Not wanting to unfairly #metoo the Grey Mouser, one of the heroes of my youth, I took my 1986 copy of Swords and Ice Magic off the shelf and reread 1973's "The Sadness of the Executioner" and I can confirm that therein the Grey Mouser rapes a teen-aged girl assassin and that the scene is played for laughs.   

"Transfer Point" by Anthony Boucher (1950)

Boucher is another well-known figure in SF with whose work I have little familiarity.  Because he also wrote mystery stories and his name starts with a "B," I sometimes mix him up with Frederic Brown, who once wrote a story about a man-eating armadillo.  I have a terrible memory!

Like Leiber's "A Bad Day for Sales," "Transfer Point" is a joke story, but whereas Leiber's story is brisk and brief and includes some funny jokes, Boucher's tale is long and tedious and not at all funny.

It is two thousand years in the future!  Modern medicine has advanced to the point that nobody suffers from allergies.  Well, this one guy does--he's got eczema!  The eczema-sufferer is a genius scientist, and constructs himself a "retreat" with super air-conditioning so he won't have to itch anymore.  (This guy joins the pantheon of literary characters who suffer from eczema that is headed by Jewish authority on Vermeer and man-about-town Charles Swann, who treated his eczema with pain d'epices, air-conditioning not having been invented yet.)  So when hostile aliens introduce a new element, an inert gas, into the atmosphere that causes everybody to cough and sneeze to death, this guy is safe!

Holed up with the genius scientist, safe in the retreat while the rest of humanity dies of the sniffles, is his vapid but sexy daughter and a young writer who is composing an epic poem about the history of the human race.  Sexy daughter flirts outrageously with the versifier (e.g., she eats fruits and sucks the juices off her fingers right in front of him!) but he is not interested because she is so dull-witted.  Bored, the poet kills time by reading some 20th-century science-fiction magazines he finds in the archives.  (Meta!)  He is amazed to discover that one of the stories describes his own time and plight--in fact, the story he is reading is the story we readers are reading.  He doesn't find it funny, either!

The scientist constructs a time machine and the poet ends up in 1948 where he becomes a SF writer and tries to romance a well-educated female editor and publish that story about himself and a human race menaced by alien chemical warfare.  Boucher piles on the meta with characters directly referring to Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros.  Then, after 20 pages of lame jokes, Boucher tries to switch gears and pull our heartstrings by having the romance with the editor fail and the poet's manuscript thrown into the fire instead of published, which means the time loop we've all been reading about is broken and the human race is exterminated in the year 3950 or whatever. 

Weak!

Despite my dismissal of this overly long and self-indulgent piece, Robert Silverberg included "Transfer Point" in the seventh volume of his Alpha series (promoted as a collection of "the greatest contemporary masterpieces") and it appeared multiple times in translation in Europe.

Is it vivid?  No!

Is it possible?  No!

"Orphans of the Void" by Michael Shaara (1952)

It's the guy who writes those novels about the religious beliefs of American Civil War generals!  Oh wait, he just wrote one of those--his son wrote the other ones.  Forgive me; everything I know about The Killer Angels I learned watching a two-minute review of the movie on the TV 25 years ago.

This is another sentimental robot story, one not as effective as the sentimental robot story we read in our last episode, Robert Moore William's "Robot's Return."  For three hundred years humanity has lived in peace and been capable of interstellar flight, but after centuries of exploration has yet to discover evidence of an alien race which has also achieved space travel.  (Planetbound alien civilizations have been discovered, but there is a strict rule that forbids contact with them.)  In this story, space explorers uncover the first ever sign of alien spacefarers, and track the clues to a planet covered in ruined cities, cities destroyed in a cataclysmic war.  All life on the planet was exterminated in the war, but the aliens' self replicating robots survived!

Here comes the sentiment.  To ensure obedience, the robots were programmed with a desire to serve their flesh creature masters, and suffer a sort of psychological pain when they are not serving.  Because their masters have been dead for millennia, the robots have suffered this pain for a long long time.  They even built space ships and went on a fruitless search for "the Makers," whom the robots, it is suggested, view in much the same way humans view God.  The happy ending of the story is that the human race will become these robots' masters; they will help us explore the universe, and need never feel that pain again.  (Shaara doesn't seem to explore the idea that humanity, by becoming these robots' masters, may be hubristically taking on the role of gods.)

The idea behind this story is OK, but Shaara failed to elicit any feeling in me; I just didn't care about these robots' psychological problems.  For one thing, the author fails to create any characters, human or robot, worthy of my sympathy.  He also breaks the "show me don't tell me" rules pretty severely.  Instead of us readers accompanying a human character as he uncovers this whole robotic psychology sob story, the truth of the robots' mental problems is revealed in a scene in which the captain of the space ship reads a report from his anthropology team.  Instead of using some literary techniques to inspire sadness in us readers, or convincingly display the captain's sadness, Shaara just tells is this whole thing is sad with lines like "Not since he [the space captain] was very young had he been so deeply moved."

There are lots of SF stories in which we are supposed to feel sad about robots who have problems, but such stories are a tough sell to me because I can never forget that a robot is just a machine.  When the Toyota Corolla has a flat tire I don't feel bad for the automobile--it's just a machine, with no feelings, and I am inclined to feel the same way about a robot.  Longtime readers of MPorcius Fiction Log may remember how much I gushed about Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover, which features a robot that, apparently, develops feelings and then gets destroyed, but that novel worked because Lee placed at its center a believable human character who loved the robot, and the robot served as a catalyst for emotion and change in that human character.

I tend to like stories about dudes in space suits exploring alien artifacts, but I gotta give this one a thumbs down... however, it is not so bad that I won't give some of Shaara's other short SF a try.

Like "Transfer Point," "Orphans of the Void" showed up in Alpha 7.  Silverberg and I are really not on the same page today.

Is it vivid?  Moderately vivid.

Is it possible?  I don't think so.

"The Misogynist" by James E. Gunn (1952)

Back in 2011 I read a novel James E. Gunn coauthored with Jack Williamson in 1955, Star Bridge, and gave it a middling, mildly positive review at Amazon.  Gunn is an important figure in the SF world as a writer, editor, historian and critic, but I don't think I have read anything by him since this blog set sail.     

Whoa, this is another of those stories which wouldn't fly today, full of assessments of women that men nowadays deny they believe if they know what is good for them.  We'll let "Their minds work in devious ways; they win what they want by guile and subtlety" serve as our example of many such lines of dialogue in this story.

Gunn's story is structured as a written account of a conversation between the narrator and the smartest guy in his office, Harry, who has a reputation as a storyteller.  Harry has been married for a month, and has noticed that his wife acts much differently now than she did before they were married.  He expounds to the narrator his theory that most or all women are members of an alien species, left on Earth long ago--this is the only way, he believes, to explain the radical difference between men, who are practical and creative and able to grasp abstract ideas, and women, who are none of these things, but parasites who manipulate men.  No doubt the feminine fiends will eventually figure out how to do without men, and then exterminate them.  Harry warns that men who catch wind of the female conspiracy end up in the asylum or the morgue, but the narrator just thinks he's kidding and blithely tells his own wife, and Harry's, all about Harry's theory.  Two or three days later both Harry and the narrator are out of commission.

An obvious sort of story, but Gunn doesn't let it go on too long, and enlivens it with lots of sexist quotes from famous thinkers and the Bible.  An acceptable entertainment.

"The Misogynist" seems to have struck a chord with the SF community, appearing in numerous anthologies, including SF: Author's Choice 4, one of those anthologies in which writers tell you which of their literary productions they are most proud of--apparently "The Misogynist" represents what Gunn considers his finest work!

Is it vivid?  It is entirely set in some guy's living room, so, who cares?

Is it possible?  That women are different than men?  Yes.  That women are from outer space?  No.

**********

Ouch, these stories are kind of a disappointment.  The Leiber and Gunn stories are reasonably well-written and brief, but their ideas (boilerplate Marxism and boilerplate sexism) are banal.  The Boucher is long and tedious, and the Shaara has a decent idea but is poorly delivered.  Better luck next time, I guess.

More science fiction short stories published before I was born in our next episode!