Weird Tales by Clark Ashton Smith from early 1932

You'll be disappointed to hear that there
is no sexy flapper in "The Monster of the Prophecy"

Wandering around the Second Story Books warehouse store in Rockville, MD recently, I came upon a copy of the 1971 Arkham House book of Clark Ashton Smith's Selected Poems, which was going for $75.00.  This brought Smith to mind, and, having enjoyed Smith's 1948 story "The Master of the Crabs" in June, I decided to read a bunch of Smith stories.  My copy of the 2002 Gollancz Masterworks collection The Emperor of Dreams being currently out of my possession, and none of the libraries in the suburban dead zone I now inhabit having any Clark Ashton Smith books, I resorted to the indispensable internet archive.  (I keep hearing talk about how the internet is ruining people's lives and ruining the country, but I find the internet has opened up innumerable avenues for me to pursue my hobbies and interests.)  I hit upon reading all the stories by Smith published in Weird Tales in 1932, which I believe comes to a total of eight stories.  We'll explore four today; three of them I read in scans of the original issues of Weird Tales, the exception being "The Monster of the Prophecy."

"The Monster of the Prophecy"

For some reason I couldn't find the January 1932 issue of Weird Tales at the internet archive.  Fortunately, in 1967 Robert A. W. Lowndes reprinted "The Monster of the Prophecy" in his Magazine of Horror, and that issue is available at the internet archive.  Lowndes presents a very charming intro to the story, all about the SF reading of his youth, with reference not only to C. A. Smith but also MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton and SF satirist Stephen Coblentz (you'll recall we read Coblentz's satiric 1935 novel Hidden World back in 2015.)

Smith immediately gets me on his side by setting his tale in New York City, where Theopholis Alvor, failed poet from "an upstate village," stands on the Brooklyn Bridge and contemplates suicide.  A mysterious figure appears, leads Alvor to his fine house, feeds Alvor his first decent meal in days.  Who is this character?  He is Vizaphmal, a space alien in disguise as a human, a mind-reading scientist who invented a means of travelling between star systems and has been hanging around the Earth, the inhabitants of which he finds "quaint and curious and monstrous," because he has "a taste for the bizarre."  It is time for him to go back home to the Antares system and he asks Alvor to come with (as my MidWestern relatives might say); he apparently chose Alvor because the poet looked like he was ready to leave Earth (the hard way) anyway.

Smith's description of the interstellar vehicle he devised for this story, a sort of projector with spinning disks for motors and strings like those on a musical instrument for controls, is pretty cool and interesting, but his description of the journey, on which Alvor faints and has insane hallucinations or visions, is mind-numbingly tedious--if this story had been written in the '60s or '70s I would have called it trippy or psychedelic (these terms are appropriate because the story includes references to opiates and narcotics.)  To the left find a sample, two long sentences that I was too lazy to type.

Alvor wakes up on Antares I, where the gravity is like a third greater than Earth's and the natives have three eyes, three legs, and five arms, and come in two classes: the small elite class of tall and sterile rulers and the short fecund working-class majority whom they control, eugenically guiding their breeding, for example.

Smith is into giving long descriptions, and "The Monster of the Prophecy" is a longish story, like 35 pages here in The Magazine of Horror, and we learn quite a lot about the material, political and religious culture of Antares I.  As for the plot, most of the inhabitants of the high tech and pleasure-loving kingdom of Ulphalor, where Viz lives, are superstitious, but scientist Vizaphmal is an atheist who is determined to take advantage of his fellows' credulity.  A prophecy says a white-skinned two-legged monster will be seen before the king's palace at such and such a date accompanied by a wizard, and this wizard will overthrow the current king and be crowned king himself.  Vizaphmal has been searching the galaxy for just such a creature, and of course Alvor fits the bill to a T.  The date Alvor recovers from his interstellar bad trip is the date in question, and when Vizaphmal and the Terran versifier show up at the palace the mob gathered to see if the prophecy was going to come true install Viz on the throne.

Alvor lives a life of lonely leisure for some time, but the priesthoods of the numerous gods of Antares I soon conspire to overthrow Vizaphmal, who, after a fight, disappears in his space travel machine, leaving Alvor in the hands of the priests, who inflict on him an elaborate torture--this torture is a good example of Smith's macabre creativity and the best part of the story.  Before he is subjected to any of the additional tortures the priests have on their agenda, Alvor, by luck, is able to escape the kingdom of Ulphalor and make his way to a less superstitious empire, where he is taken to the empress.  This empress is also a poet, and, despite their radical physical differences, Alvor and this three-eyed royal fall in love.

"The Monster of the Prophecy" is a fun story.  At times I feared the masses of description would overwhelm the plot, but this only happens on the trip between Earth and Antares I.  The story is vulnerable to the charge that the hero doesn't do anything, something I often complain about, but this problem is mitigated by the fact that Vizaphmal fills the role of active protagonist through much of the story, and because Smith doesn't really present "The Monster of the Prophecy" as a thrilling adventure so much as a travelogue and satire.  (In his intro to the story Lowndes contrasts the subtle satire of Smith to that of the heavy-handed Coblentz.)  Smith in this story pokes fun at modern tastes in art and poetry and takes aim at religion and intolerance, but this polemical material coexists comfortably with the fantastical and adventurous elements.  Thumbs up!

As SF historian Sam Moskowitz describes in his article, "The Most Popular Stories in Weird Tales 1924 to 1940," Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright kept track of reader correspondence and judged--scientifically(!)--which stories were the most popular in each issue; it was "The Monster of the Prophecy" that was the most popular story in the January 1932 issue.  "The Monster of the Prophecy" has been reprinted in numerous collections of Smith's work, including the 1942 Out of Space and Time and the 2009 The Return of the Sorcerer.

"The Planet of the Dead" 

Francis Melchior is a romantic and a dreamer, a dealer in antiques who loves the artifacts of the past
and an amateur astronomer who loves to gaze at the stars and imagine what other worlds are like.  With no great interest in women or making friends, he is a lone eccentric.  One late night he is staring at a distant star for which he feels a strange affinity, and suddenly, through some impossible process, finds himself drawn through space to an alien planet that orbits that oh so attractive star!

Melchior finds himself in the body of a poet, Antarion, of that alien world, Phandiom, home to a civilization so old its towering monuments to the dead and their loftily spired tombs far outnumber the residences of the living.  After a few minutes, Antarion only dimly recalls the boring life of Francis Melchior, which he considers was only a dream!

Phandiom's culture is one of decadence and sterility--the current generation is stifled by the omnipresent reminders of their people's long past, by their ancestors' voluminous history.  Antarion is one of the most vital and vigorous of his generation, but he is in love with the beautiful princess Themeera of the city Saddoth, one of their cohort's most depressed and moody and erratic members.

The palace wherein she lived, and the very streets of Saddoth, for her were filled with emanations that welled from the sepulchral reservoirs of death; and the weariness of the innumerable dead was everywhere; and evil or opiate presences came forth from the mausoleum vaults, to crush and stifle her with the formless brooding of their wings.   

Things only get worse for blonde beauty Themeera and all of Phandiom.  The ruthless king wants to have sex with the unwilling Themeera, and the astronomers predict that Phandiom's sun has only one month to go before it is extinguished!  Under cover of a sort of Carnival where everybody wears elaborate costumes (Smith describes the festivities in elaborate detail) Antarion and Themeera sneak out of the city of Saddoth and make their way to an abandoned city, moving by night and hiding by day among the innumerable crypts and monuments to the dead that cover the countryside.  Their slaves have preceded them and prepared for them an abandoned palace, where they live out their last days, drunk on their mutual love, until the sun dies and they, like everybody the world over, freeze to death.

Melchior wakes up in the chair in front of his telescope, and cannot find the star he felt such an affinity for.  Was it all a dream, or did his soul really travel to the doomed world of Phandiom to enjoy the final embraces of the princess Themeera?

This is a mood piece, and I consider it more or less successful.  Of the four stories I'm talking about today, this is the weakest, but it is still acceptable.

After first appearing in the March 1932 issue of Weird Tales, "The Planet of the Dead" would show up in numerous Smith collections, including the various printings of 1944's Lost Worlds.

I believe those are Smith's own sculptures there on the cover of the 1944 edition of Lost Worlds

"The Gorgon"

The April issue of Weird Tales included "The Gorgon" along with Edmond Hamilton's "The Earth-Brain," which we just read, and H. P. Lovecraft's "In the Vault."  Smith doesn't even get his name on the cover of this one.

Our narrator, in hopes of forgetting the woman he loved, who was sundered from him by death, traveled across the Earth, settling for some weeks or months in fog-shrouded London, the city of labyrinthine streets where the sun rarely shines!  In the beginning of this memoir he tells us that he has been fascinated by the macabre all his life, but was never truly disturbed by anything until that thing he saw in London one day, the memory of which has his mind teetering on the brink of madness!

On the streets of London a terribly old man in terribly old clothes with a sinister smile accosted our narrator and offered to show him the genuine head of Medusa,  the Gorgon slain by the hero Perseus!  As if hypnotized, our hero followed this character, whom he repeatedly compares to Charon, to his dilapidated mansion.  Smith gives the impression that this old man is able to travel through time because he knows of places where different eras and universes overlap, and that his house lies in just such a place, a place the style of architecture and decor of which the narrator cannot pin down because it exists in some grey zone between realities and is the product of influences from multiple cultures and time periods.

Once at the house the story proceeds more or less as we expect.  There are a bunch of "statues" from every period of European history that of course are the people who looked upon Medusa's head.  The narrator looks at the head in a mirror and resists the powerful urge to gaze upon its fascinating beauty and grotesquerie with his naked glazzies.  The old man attacks, trying to force our narrator to look at the baleful head, they wrestle with their eyes closed, the old man trips on one of the earlier victims and accidentally opens his eyes and is turned to stone himself, so our guy can escape.

This is a well-written and well-constructed story, but it suffers because the meaty part of it is kind of predictable. 

"The Gorgon" was reprinted in a bunch of Smith collections, including The Emperor of Dreams, which means I must have read it during my New York days, and a French collection of which it is the title story.  It has also been anthologized, including in a book credited to that beloved star of the cinema of the fantastic, the great Christopher Lee.

 

"The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis"

With the May issue, Smith's name is back on the cover of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual; inside lies his story "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis." This tale is categorized by isfdb as one of Smith's Mars stories and Sam Moskowitz reports that it was the second most popular story in the issue--with 25 votes it lost to David H. Keller's "The Last Magician," which received 26.  (Missed it by that much!)

The narrator of "The V of Y-V" is an anthropologist who has conducted excavations on Venus.  He is now on Mars, and writing a memoir to serve as a warning to those who may come after him, because he expects to die in a few hours!

The doomed man was a junior member of a team of eight humans and two Martian guides who went to explore the ruined city of Yoh-Vombis, which it is believed has been abandoned for over 40,000 years.  It is said the current race of Martians exterminated the race who built the city, the ruins of which lie close to the modern "commercial metropolis" of Ignarh.  For some reason, the eight archaeologists, who one presumes rode a space ship to Mars, didn't ride a helicopter or a truck to Yoh-Vombis from Ignarh, but spent seven hours marching there.  🤷

In the city, which the Martians refused to enter, the humans explored crumbling buildings and a vast network of catacombs full of oversized funerary urns--the Martians cremate their dead and every family has an urn of its own in which the ashes of the newly dead join those of their relatives who preceded them in death.  Smith does a great job of describing the subterranean vaults, and, more importantly, perhaps, of describing the horrendous monsters the Earthmen discover there, their vain efforts to combat the monsters and their feverish, nightmarish flight from them through the labyrinth.  The monsters are original and creepy, and Smith lays on not only the effective psychological terror but some shocking gore as the archaeologists all meet terrible fates at the suckers of their invertebrate tormentors.  In a story like "The Planet of the Dead" or "The Monster of the Prophecy" Smith sometimes seemed to be just piling on the baroque and rococo details for the hell of it, the images he painted being an end unto themselves, but in "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" Smith's vivid images serve the goal of conveying to the reader the foreboding, the shock, the horror and the disgust experienced by the Terran archaeologists.   

The narrator was the only human member of the expedition to escape Yoh-Vombis, and is in Ignarh as he relates his story, deathly ill due to a wound suffered in the catacombs and expected by the doctors to expire momentarily.  A postscript, however, indicates that our narrator suffered a fate worse than death--a portion of the protoplasmic Martian monster who wounded him has entered his brain, and he has an irresistible urge to escape the hospital and join his colleagues deep under Yoh-Vomobis, where they will serve the prehistoric aliens in terrible ways we shudder to imagine! 

This is a very good horror story; I have noted that is is more economical and cohesive than "The Planet of the Dead" or "The Monster of the Prophecy," and will add that it benefits greatly by having a new and original monster, unlike "The Gorgon," which, while well-written, features a monster we already know all about.  Highly recommended.  Four and a half out of a possible five Martian cinerary urns!

"The Vaults of Yoh-Vomnbis" has appeared in many Smith collections, was reprinted in magazines edited by Donald Wollheim and Robert A. W. Lowndes, and was chosen for inclusion in anthologies edited by S.T. Joshi and Martin H. Greenberg--I think we can call it an acknowledged classic of the weird.

**********

These are good stories--I'm looking forward to reading four more pieces from Weird Tales by Clark Ashton Smith in our next episode.

"Why Should I Stop?," "The Strength of Ten" and "The Mechanical Man" by Algis Budrys

If you have been following the exploits of the crew of MPorcius Fiction Log you know in the last few months we read two collections of 1950s Algis Budrys stories, Budrys' Inferno and The Unexpected Dimension.  Today let's read three Budrys stories which, after appearing in science fiction magazines in the year 1956, were never reprinted.  As I often do, I turned to that indispensable resource for those who would explore the pop culture of the mid-20th century on a budget, the internet archive, to read these tales which, it appears, the critics and editors weren't so crazy about.

"Why Should I Stop?"

This is a lame gimmicky story with superfluous recursive "meta" elements; it is no surprise that the people at Ballantine didn't include "Why Should I Stop?" in Budrys' Inferno or The Unexpected Dimension and that editors like Judith Merrill and T. E. Dikty, who included other Budrys stories in their "Best of" anthologies covering 1956, didn't leap at the chance to reprint this one.

(Also, this magazine has annoying printer's errors, with several lines repeated in inappropriate spots.)

"Why Should I Stop?" appeared in Science Fiction Quarterly and is actually the cover story.  (Somebody should be fired for allowing those printing errors on the damned cover story!)  It is an epistolary story, a record of correspondence between Budrys and the editor of Science Fiction Quarterly, Robert A. W. Lowndes.  Budrys sends Lowndes two stories on the same theme and asks what Lowndes thinks of them--these stories are included in the text we readers are presented.

The first story within a story, "Thus, Conscience," is an episodic biography of a scientist who feels that people should moderate their vices, like smoking and drinking--drinking a little or smoking a little is fine, but many people overindulge, which causes social problems and health problems.  As an adult this joker makes a device which will project a wave across the world that will reduce people's inhibitions so they even further overindulge; the boffin's theory is that he will have people the world over overindulge for two days, and then turn off his machine, so that they see the potential damage of their addictions and then reform.  The twist ending to this story is that the waves from the machine lead to the strengthening of the scientist's own predilection to make and operate such machines so that he does not turn off the first machine and instead constructs more.

The second story within a story is "Moderator."  A bunch of scientists and military officers are on a space station while war rages on Earth below.  The peeps on the station have low morale--some are close to panic--because the station weapons are out of ammo and if the station's camouflage measures are not up to preventing detection they will be easy prey for the enemy.  One of the scientists devises a machine that transmits radiation that, he tells the station commander, will calm everybody down.  But the egghead is lying: in fact, the radiation is going to make everybody even more scared!  The scientist's plan is to turn the transmitter on for an hour and then off; when everybody sees how dangerous their panic has been, he reasons, they will calm down.  As with the other story, the scientist, when affected by the radiation himself, decides to not turn the machine off but instead to build duplicate machines.

The topic of the two stories is obsession and addiction and the joke pressed home in the epistolary segments at the end of "Why Should I Stop?" is that the Budrys character keeps sending the Lowndes character very similar stories and gets more angry and more paranoid as they get rejected.       

This story has philosophical and science content (there is lots of talk about people's reluctance to believe in their own mortality, and talk about the readings of "Chi curves" on people's EEGs) but it is boring besides being gimmicky and the joke is not funny and way too long to tell.  Thumbs down.

"The Strength of Ten"

No doubt you remember Tennyson's "Sir Galahad":

My strength is as the strength of ten,

Because my heart is pure.

(If memory serves, Bertie Wooster was apt to quote this couplet, or fragments thereof.)

"The Strength of Ten" stars a self-important scientist, Langley.  Langley is a real jerk.  He busts into the corporate offices of the firm for which he is working, shouldering past secretaries and jumping in line ahead of people with appointments so he can talk to a big wig, Conway.  Langley unleashes a big chunk of exposition to Conway for the benefit of us readers--this is stuff Conway should already know.  Their company copies onto tape the brains of human beings with special skills--say, jet pilots--and then puts the tape into a robot so it can pilot a jet as well as a human but has the advantage of lacking human physical needs and frailties.  Langley then tells Conway he wants to carefully edit tapes to remove hatred and greed and such negative human traits and thus create the first truly good man!  Such a noble man would be perfect for the first manned mission to Mars!  When Conway suggests some other scientist lead the project because Langley is busy, or that Langley be part of a team, Langley arrogantly insists only he is qualified to head the project, and refuses to countenance such interference.

Conway refuses to authorize the project.  Budrys presents us with a sort of ironical philosophical twist ending here, the wording of which I have to admit I found a little confusing.  Langley's arrogant behavior has somehow convinced Conway that the project of creating an artificial man without greed, jealousy etc., would be pointless and even dangerous, because such a man would lack ambition and thus not be interested in leading important projects and going on dangerous missions.

Barely acceptable.  "The Strength of Ten" was printed in Fantastic Universe.

"The Mechanical Man"

We just recently read Harlan Ellison's story "Blind Lightning" about a guy sacrificing himself to help primitive aliens.  "Blind Lightning" first was printed in Fantastic Universe, and in the same issue SF fans of 1956 would have found Algis Budrys's "The Mechanical Man," which on the cover is vaunted as "an exciting novelet."  Exciting or otherwise, it was never reprinted.  Let's see "The Mechanical Man" is a forgotten gem unfairly looked over by anthologists over the decades!

Presumably I am the millionth person to notice that
this Emsh robot from 1956 looks a lot like the
Hoth probe droid designed by Ralph McQuarrie for
1980's The Empire Strikes Back

It is the future!  North America is the least respected component of the world government (it looks like the world government was set up after communists took over of the world--shit!), and the space navy is the least senior of the Earth's military services, the branch least likely to get what it wants out of appropriations bills.  Marshal Yancey is a North American and the head of the space navy, so he has a lot to prove!  He's on the moon for the test of the space navy's armored suit--if the suit is a success it will make his career and assure his branch's position.

Yancey is at a ball where all the high-ranking officers and their wives are subtly probing each other psychologically and trying to undermine each other socially when there is news from the armored suit test site--a nuclear weapon has gone off and the site is wiped out!  But wait, the armored suit is OK!  In a bit of symbolism, the guy in the suit, Major Pollack, is a North American and, in order to show the resilience of the suit and of North Americans, he is told to walk alone cross the lunar surface for hours and hours instead of using the suit's rockets--his literal lonely walk to the main base is like Yancey's metaphorical lonely walk of a career.  But Pollack, exhausted, disobeys orders and uses the suit's rockets to get back to HQ.  Then, understanding that he will suffer some kind of terrible punishment for his insubordination, he refuses to get out of the impregnable suit!

(Barry Malzberg is a big booster of Budrys, as I noted a few blog posts ago, and Pollack's plight feels like the sort of thing that would happen to a Malzberg character.) 

Yancey holds an official inquiry at which he gives his most dangerous rival, Colonel-General Malke, the death penalty for negligence in handling the nuclear weapon that blew up the research station.  Then he convinces Malke's wife to help him get Pollack out of the impenetrable armored suit--her feminine wiles and cold heart, so recently used (without success) against Yancey, are now turned to exploiting Pollack's neuroses about women in an effort to get him to relinquish the womb-like interior of the battle armor.  If Yancey can't deliver the suit to Earth in eighteen hours he will be in trouble with the President!

Yancey apparently succeeds in his career objectives but the twist ending shows up his personal weaknesses and the failures of personal life.  Pollack is not a North American after all but a South African, and the thing Yancey and Pollack have in common is that they are "immature neurotics" who are seeking a "mother substitute" and both have fallen in love with Madame Malke and neither will ever have a chance of winning her.

A recurring theme in Budrys's work is the question of "what is a man?"  In "The Mechanical Man" we are asked if a real man is the man who follows orders and procedure under any circumstance, no matter how dangerous, no matter what the pressure, or the man who bucks the system when he thinks it wrong.  Does a real man prioritize his own honor, abstract justice, or the well-being of the collective when they appear to be in conflict?  Does a real man side with his proximate comrades (his family or ethnic group or cultural group) or with the greater whole (the empire or the revolution or the entire world) when they are in conflict?

This is interesting enough material, but the story itself is all dialogue and descriptions of guys wiping their faces and gritting their teeth and plucking at the piping on their sleeves and that sort of thing, tense conversations in which everybody is about to explode but strives to keep a stiff upper lip as they use complicated social customs and legalistic chicanery to outdo each other.  "The Mechanical Man" is one of those stories in which different elites all ostensibly in the same organization are all trying to sink each other's careers and give their own departments the upper hand over other departments, and these sorts of stories leave me cold.

We're calling this one acceptable.   

**********

These stories reflect the fact that Budrys is a smart guy who is interested in philosophical issues and psychology as well as hard science, and writes literary stories about human beings instead of just adventure capers full of monsters, sword fights and gun fights.  But these three stories are not particularly fun or entertaining, and they didn't inspire much emotion in this reader.  I'm going to have to agree with all those editors who passed on them when choosing what Budrys material to reprint.

The Duplicated Man by James Blish and Robert Lowndes

Paul Danton found his brain whirling, lost in the complexity of it.  He felt curiously humble.  This duplicate, who differed from him only because a Security agent had thought him more devious than he really was, reasoned in a way that was utterly alien to him.

This recent weekend the Toyota Corolla conveyed the wife and me to Dayton, Ohio, where we took in the Alphonse Mucha exhibit at the Art Institute (strongly recommended) and ate dishes with "shish" in their names and drank coffee and tea at Olive Mediterranean Grill (MPorcius Travel Guide also recommends this establishment.)  On our way out of town we stopped at the One Dollar Book Swap, a huge warehouse next to the highway with masses of used books for sale for a dollar each.  It seems like it is some kind of charity or something, staffed by volunteers and only open on the weekends.  I pored over the SF shelves, which were not alphabetized and mostly had books too recent to interest me, but I did pick up two volumes, a 1990 edition of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s  The Moon is Hell! and a legitimately old book, the 1959 Avalon hardcover printing of James Blish and Robert Lowndes' The Duplicated Man.  Mine is a bedraggled copy formerly in the collection of the Lake Bluff, Illinois, Public Library and so covered in red "DISCARDED" stamps and hand-scrawled catalog numbers, but I'm a reader of books rather than a collector, and I think these evidences of former ownership add character to the volume, and I am certainly glad to have it for one dollar.

The Duplicated Man first appeared in a 1953 issue of Dynamic Science Fiction with an amusing declaration on its cover that assured potential readers that the novel was "complete" and "not an abridged 'magazine version.'"  For this magazine publication of the novel Lowndes used the pseudonym Michael Sherman--the Avalon hardcover of The Duplicated Man is actually dedicated "to the memory of Marcus Lyons, Michael Sherman, and John MacDougal," pen names employed by Blish and Lowndes, a little SF in-joke.  If you are not lucky enough to have secured your own copy of this novel for a dollar, the internet archive has you covered--check out the original 1953 magazine text, complete with disturbing Paul Orban illos, here.

The Duplicated Man is about four political hierarchies and their relationships with each other, each of them to varying extents revolutionary and tyrannical, three of them riven by no-holds-barred factional infighting.  The four political groups--the parliamentary rulers of Earth, the dictatorial cabal of Venus, an Earth revolutionary party which sympathizes with Venus and a revolutionary party on Venus which sympathizes with Earth, have been in a tense stalemate for many years, but political and psychological pressure has been building over that time, and the novel describes the course of events as things boil over into crisis and everybody takes extreme measures to win power or just survive.

I guess we should see The Duplicated Man as a meditation on the world politics of the 1930s, '40s and '50s, which were characterized by communist and fascist revolutionaries and mass war and saw, in response to economic and military crisis, a major increase in state power in liberal societies like the United States and Great Britain; the book also expresses Blish and Lowndes' negative view of technological change and their bizarre wish fulfillment fantasy of how geniuses might manipulate everybody to bring peace to the world.

The Duplicated Man is not structured in the way most of the novels I read are structured; rather than following a single sympathetic or interesting character or group of characters from start to finish, there are twenty or twenty-five characters who drop in and out of the narrative; many of them only appear in the first or second half of the book, none of them is very sympathetic, and only one is actually interesting.  Throughout the 222-page novel people make and break alliances, switch sides or reveal they were moles the whole time, double cross and stab each other in the back.  There is plenty of dialogue that consists of planning how to trick somebody or description of how somebody got tricked, and speculations of how somebody else is going to respond to events based on his or her psychological profile or strategic vision. Much of this stuff is neither easy to follow nor very entertaining.

The Background:  A century before , back in 1971 (the year of my birth!), the "Peace Squadron" bombed "the ice-cap," causing mass flooding worldwide and transforming the geographic and political landscape.  Countries like the United States and the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist, and a world government, the Security Council, took over. Each of the newly designated nations of Earth was given a seat on the Council.  The first thirty pages of The Duplicated Man follow a publicly-broadcast parliamentary debate (the Security Council prides itself on its transparency) lead by Joachim Burgd, representative of Antarctica, about the so-called Earth-Government-in-Exile on Venus; this debate also touches upon the Pro-Earth Party, an underground organization on Earth itself.

You see, not everybody is happy with the Security Council's rule.  When they first took over a bunch of people, including one of Earth's greatest scientists, Geoffrey Thomas, fled to inhospitable Venus where they established subterranean cities.  From Venus these people periodically launch missiles (with conventional warheads) at the Earth, about a dozen a year, indiscriminately blowing people and property to bits.  The Security Council is unable to counterattack because that genius Thomas has surrounded Venus with an energy screen through which no nuclear weapons or nuclear-powered vessels can pass, and the Venus settlements are too small, well-concealed and widely dispersed to target with conventional weapons--also, the Security Council's charter explicitly forbids warmaking!  This bombardment has been going on for like one hundred years (!) and the people of Earth are starting to crack under the strain!

The Pro-Earth Party is one of those revolutionary groups in which everybody has a code name and is in a three-man cell, the members of which signal each other in public via signs and countersigns like how they light their cigarettes.  These jokers hope to take over the Earth and end the bombardment by negotiating with Venus, but the Party's bloodthirsty leaders can't agree on methods and are always splitting into factions and purging each other, leaving the low-ranking members at risk of being on the wrong side of a purge at any moment. One such low-ranking member is the nominal protagonist of the novel, Paul Danton (his name, presumably, is significant.)

After introducing us to Danton and the Earth situation, Blish and Lowndes switch the camera to Venus, where we meet Thomas himself, leader of the exiles and a man of over 500 pounds and over 140 years--he needs the help of assistants just to walk!  He's having a meeting with the Directorate, usually called "the cabal," all of the members of which want to depose him and take his place and somehow squeeze the secret of immortality out of him.  On Venus we are also introduced to an underground group (one of the authors'' little jokes is that on Venus the "underground" organization meets on the surface) called the Earth Party which hopes to put Venus under Earth control--they too are having a meeting.

The Plot:  Danton has been investigating rumors of a Duplication Machine, a device which can create duplicates of human beings.  At a meeting of a division of the Pro-Earth Party he reports that the fabulous contraption is no myth--he has located it and seen it with his own eyes--and the leaders of the Party announce plans to seize the amazing machine and use it to support a direct military attack on the Earth government. Their idea is to kidnap members of the Security Council and duplicate them, which will sow confusion in the government hierarchy.  Immediately after this announcement, party members who are in fact government infiltrators shut down the meeting, capturing everybody present, including Danton.

Danton, it turns out, looks just like one of the members of the Venus cabal (this kind of thing happens in fiction all the time, like to our pal Fred, and even happens sometimes in real life!) and the Security Council enlists him for a mission to Venus. Imitating the Pro-Earth Party's aborted plan, the Security Council will use the machine to duplicate Danton five times and send all six of them to Venus, where they will disrupt the Venus government's operations.

At the same time, Thomas and the Venus cabal discover that their screen is down so they launch a preemptive invasion of Earth, desperate to conquer our big blue marble before the Earthers realize how vulnerable Venus now is.  The Venusians have sixteen warships, but only five take off because one of the cabal (pursuing his own agenda) joins the Earth Party and they sabotage the launch.  The Danton mission to Venus is also hamstrung: the Venusian preliminary bombardment (2000 missiles!) and assassins from the Pro-Earth Party waylay some of the duplicates on Earth, while the original Danton just stays on Earth because he has to distract a female member of the Security Council who has fallen in love with him!  Only two Danton duplicates and a Security Council secret agent make it to Venus.

One of the recurring themes of The Duplicated Man is how plans always fail--nothing anybody does seems to work as they had hoped--and another, related theme, is limited intelligence.  Because of the thick cloud cover of Venus, people on Earth have no idea what is going on on Venus (the Earthers don't know Thomas is immortal, for example, and assume he has been dead for thirty or more years), and people on Venus have little greater knowledge of conditions on Earth.  The Security Council activates the Duplication Machine without knowing how it really works, and, in the event, it doesn't actually duplicate Danton very well.  The "new" Dantons have all of the original Danton's memories, but their looks and personalities are all skewed and influenced by members of the Security Council apparatus.  One Danton dupe, thanks to the subconscious input of the beautiful woman on the Council who is in love with Danton, has powerful sex appeal, for example.  The passage used as an epigraph to this blog post refers to another dupe, one influenced by the aforementioned secret agent,

In the end of the book we find that everything that has happened has been orchestrated by Geoffrey Thomas and Joachim Burgd and that half the things everybody else, including us readers, believed is not true (e. g., there has never been an energy screen around Venus!)  Venus is now under the control of the one man on Venus devoted to peace and the Earth is under the thumb of the Security Council (but held in check by the Pro-Earth Party) so freedom and peace now reign throughout the solar system.  This ending is absolutely incredible* and very frustrating, in part because it undermines all the interesting themes of limited intelligence and failed plans we've been seeing for 210 pages--Thomas and Burgd are like omniscient and omnipotent gods who knew all and successfully manipulated billions of people to accomplish their goal.
* [in-kred-uh-buh l] adjective, 1. so extraordinary as to seem impossible: incredible speed. 2. not credible; hard to believe; unbelievable: The plot of the book is incredible.

The Duplicated Man is a pretty mixed bag.  The actual science fiction elements of the book are good--the passages on the form of immortality experienced by Thomas, the Duplication machine, the Earth agents' exploration of the Venusian surface, and the space war, are all interesting and evocative.  Blish and Lowndes also do a lot of psychology and sociology stuff I appreciated, even if I don't buy their theories--the stress endured by Earthlings who could be killed at any moment by a falling bomb and the claustrophobia of Venusians who live their entire lives underground; the lust for vengeance of some Venusians who feel they were unjustly exiled to that barren desert planet and the yearnings of other Venusians to live on Earth, even though they don't know a thing about life there; the psychology of people like Danton immersed in a merciless and totalitarian revolutionary organization.  No doubt feminists will not appreciate the psychological profiles the authors cook up for the women characters--like the Venusian femme fatale who uses sex to dominate men but is looking for a man to dominate her and the Earth politician at the top of the heap who falls in love with a low-ranking terrorist she just met and abandons her career for him--and I have to admit I never really understood why the Dantons were willing to undertake the dangerous mission to destabilize Venus--didn't Danton like Venus?

The plot and characters are flat, like watching a bunch of lifeless cardboard counters move around a gameboard until you lose track of which is which.  And Blish and Lowndes' philosophy is lame.  Instead of responding to the nightmare world created by the Bolsheviks and Nazis by considering that just maybe governments have too much power, they give us a childish fantasy of governments with even more power than Hitler and Stalin had but headed by selfless geniuses who can kill millions of people in just the right way to create peace.  It's bad enough to find yet another SF story in which we are supposed to welcome elites manipulating us (an idea the story undermines by portraying most of its characters as psychopaths--Thomas even tortures a guy!) but the authors also put into Burgd's mouth some pretty absurd luddism:

"Do you actually believe that we would need to run the Earth at its present peak of technology, if our only concern were to keep the people well-clothed, housed, fed, healthy and so on?  Nonsense!  We passed that peak around 1910.  Medicine, agriculture, education--none of them require a technology as advanced and as energy-expensive as the one we maintain."

1910?  Is that a typo? The magazine version and my hardcover copy both have "1910," so apparently not.  Did Blish and Lowndes really think that people's lives had not been improved by technological advances in medicine, agriculture and education between 1910 and 1950, and wouldn't benefit from further advances in the future?  Dumb!

Alright, time to sum up.  I've got a lot of complaints about The Duplicated Man as a piece of literature and entertainment, and I don't find its ideology congenial.  On the other hand, it feels ambitious, it addresses interesting issues in a way that (to me, at least) is strange, and it was never boring or painful--in fact, at times it was surprising, and I think surprise in fiction has value, even if the surprise is how crazy or foolish the author's opinions turn out to be.  One reason I read speculative fiction is because it exposes you to ideas and people that are outside the mainstream--A. E. van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Barry Malzberg, and R. A. Lafferty, to name a few, often write in ways or express ideas that ordinary people do not, and that is one reason I like them, even if I disagree with particular ideas or find particular writing techniques unsuccessful.  I've never read and have no interest in reading Stephen King, but I found the recent controversy about an underage sex scene in one of King's 1980s books a little bewildering--shouldn't we expect to find material that is challenging, offensive, disgusting, bizarre, etc., in horror novels and speculative fiction in general? Don't people read speculative fiction and horror specifically because they are looking for such material?  I'm not on board with a lot of what Blish and Lowndes do in The Demolished Man, but being exposed to it was worthwhile.

It's a borderline case, but I'm giving The Duplicated Man an "acceptable" rating.  I don't feel like reading it was a waste of my time...but don't expect to see me reading any more Blish soon.

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On the back cover of my copy of The Duplicated Man is an ad promoting Avalon's SF line, "The Best in Science Fiction."  I have read five of the listed titles, including the two Vances, which I read before this blog sprang fully formed from my febrile noggin, as well as The Space Egg, Across Time, and Hidden World, all of which have suffered this blog's attentions.  I own a paperback of Virgin Planet; maybe it's time I read it?