Four 1960 stories by R. A. Lafferty

It's been a while since we've read anything by R. A. Lafferty, so let's take my copies of 1970's Nine Hundred Grandmothers, an Ace Science Fiction Special with a cover by Leo and Diane Dillon, and DAW's 1972 collection Strange Doings, which has a Jack Gaughan cover, down from the shelf and read four stories by the Iowa-born Oklahoma resident and recipient of a 1990 World Fantasy Life Achievement Award.

"Through Other Eyes"

This is a story about how our beliefs and perceptions are not simply objective and accurate views of the outside world, but are guided or distorted by our attitudes and interests, so that we all see different, even live in different, worlds.  The first two pages of this fifteen-page story act as a sort of prologue, in which scientists Charles Cogsworth and Gregory Smirnov talk about the experience of using their time machine, which allowed them to view famous people and events of the past.  These viewings were a terrible disappointment--reputedly beautiful Isolde was obese, famously witty Voltaire was in fact a disgusting pervert, Sappho, remembered as a genius poet, turned out to be a tedious cat lady, the fabled hero Lancelot was in fact almost too feeble to mount a horse, etc.

The main plot concerns Cogsworth's new machine, the Cerebral Scanner, which allows one to experience the inner thoughts and view of the world of other people and creatures.  Through the eyes of a skeptical critic he sees a world that is unsavory and mean, through the eyes of an important business executive he sees a world of numberless details and infinite connections that can--and must!--be managed by a pull of a string here or there (the connections are likened to reins, the executive to God and to a general commanding an army), and so on.  Cogsworth is eager to use the machine to observe the world through the eyes of Valery Mok, a beautiful woman whom he thinks an angel, a wit, and a paragon of kindness. (Lafferty makes clear that she is in fact none of these things, just a pleasant but essentially ordinary woman--Cogsworth's love for her has distorted his view of her.)  When Cogsworth sees the world through her eyes he is painfully disillusioned--her world is one of pervasive, overwhelming, sensuality--to Cogsworth the sensations she enjoys as she smells trees, touches a rail, or looks at clouds are shockingly and grossly, filthy, coarsely obscene.  "I had thought Valery was an angel...it is a shock to find that she is a pig."

When Mok uses the Cerebral Scanner to see the world as Cogsworth sees it, she is amazed to find how bloodless, loveless, and lifeless his view of the world is, and compares him to a pig, a pig made of dry dead sticks.  "You live with dead people, Charles.  You make everything dead.  You are abominable."  Lafferty gives us a happy ending, though; Mok, we see, the lively and sensuous woman, is going to open the cold and clinical scientist's eyes to the throbbing vitality and earthy beauty of our world and the two will live happily ever after.

"Through Other Eyes" first appeared in Future Science Fiction and seems to have been well-received, reappearing in Robert Silverberg's Mind to Mind as well as Introductory Psychology Through Science Fiction.

"The Six Fingers of Time"

This is one of those SF stories in which a guy can halt or severely slow down time and then take advantage of people as they stand still as statues or (not quite so anti-socially) get some extra work done.  The most famous of these stories are perhaps John D. MacDonald's The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything from 1962, which I have not read, and Nicholson Baker's 1994 The Fermata, which I read in the 20th century and plan to reread sometime this century.  If Wikipedia and my memory are to be trusted, both those novels focus on sex and the use of the time-retarding power to do things like undress women against their will.  In E. C. Tubb's Dumarest series there are the drugs slow-time and quick-time that speed up or slow down your metabolism forty times--by taking these drugs you can heal forty times faster or do forty times as much work in an hour (in a memorable scene in Lallia Dumarest uses slow-time to produce enough product to meet a crucial deadline) or slow you down so tedious space voyages seem to pass forty times as quickly.  In some Warhammer 40,000 games psykers can invoke the power of the warp to slow or speed up time for particular individuals or small areas and so get more moves than their foes.

In "The Six Fingers of Time," Charles Vincent wakes up and finds that time has slowed so much that each second, to him, feels like a minute, each minute an hour.  After exploring the slow-motion city he goes to the office and catches up on two days worth of work before any of his colleagues even shows up.

The effect wears off and after some months have passed he begins to almost think that crazy day was no more than a dream.  But then he meets a mysterious figure whose face is hidden, who hints that Vincent, who has a deformed thumb that suggests a sixth digit, is a descendant of an ancient race of six-fingered people who inhabited the Earth before mankind.  This strange character teaches Vincent how to switch on and off his time-retarding power, and Vincent proceeds to uses his weird talent to play cruel jokes on people, to take advantage of women sexually, to steal money, to learn scores of foreign languages and to accumulate esoteric knowledge.

Besides adding the Weird Tales-style bloodline-of-an-ancient-lost-race-of-wizards angle to our guy-who-controls-time-and-abuses-people story, Lafferty, one of the SF world's most prominent and most hard core Catholics, adds a moral and Christian dimension.  The faceless figure, it appears, is the Devil, and Vincent risks a horrible fate for using his inhuman ability to harm others and enjoy benefits he has not earned.

"The Six Fingers of Time" was first published in If and later was the title story of an anthology of stories from that magazine which, somewhat bizarrely, pretended to be an anthology of stories from If's sister magazine Galaxy.  Both magazines were edited by Horace L. Gold, so I guess the publishers of the volume felt they would be forgiven this little trespass against the trust of the SF-reading public.  (No respect!)

"The Ugly Sea"

In three of the stories we are talking about today Lafferty uses traditional SF topics and themes ("I'm travelling through time!"; "I'm reading people's minds!"; "I can stop time!"; "I'm on an alien planet fighting a huge monster!") but "The Ugly Sea" is more of a mainstream literary piece, and appropriately enough first appeared in The Literary Review, a journal put out by Fairleigh Dickinson University of the great state of New Jersey.  (I once attended a wedding at Fairleigh Dickinson.  Fascinating, right?)  It takes up a traditional literary theme, the sea and its strange allure.  No doubt you remember the opening passages of Moby Dick, in which the narrator describes his own irresistible attraction to the sea, which he suspects all men share, and Homer's phrase "the wine-dark sea," which has become proverbial.  Rock music aficionados are familiar with Pete Townshend's use of the beach and the sea as recurring motifs in The Who's masterpiece Quadrophenia, while sword and sorcery fans (to bring us back to SF) may recall how, in Swords in the Mist,  Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser spoke of "their mistress, the sea...her rages and caressings, her coolths and unending dancings, sometimes lightly footing a minuet, sometimes furiously a-stamp, and her infinitude of secret parts."

In the frame story of "The Ugly Sea" Lafferty takes a counterintuitive but quite credible tack, having storyteller Sour John declare that the sea is ugly ("It has the aroma of an open sewer...it is perhaps the most untidy thing in the world...it is monotonous, with only four or five faces, and all of them coarse") but wins the love of men, including Sour John himself, just the same.  The main plot of "The Ugly Sea," which Sour John narrates, is about an associate of John's, a Jewish loan shark named Moysha Uferwohner, who falls in love with Bonny, a twelve-year-old crippled girl who plays piano (badly) at the Blue Fish, a bar frequented by seamen.  Bonny is fated to marry a sailor, so Moysha becomes a sailor himself, even though, as Sour John tells us, the Jews, "God's own people," have always "shunned" that "evil grave," the ocean.  Moysha, according to Sour John, is only the third Jewish seaman in all of history! 

Melville's Ishmael equates his desire to go to sea with suicide: "This is my substitute for pistol and ball.  With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship."  Lafferty's story here similarly conjoins seafaring and death.  It is very bad luck, we are told, for a seaman to marry a cripple, but a sailor marries Bonny when she is fifteen years old, anyway.  This tar soon dies of illness at sea, and Bonny remarries at sixteen--this second sailor is killed in a terrible accident in a ship's engine room.  Finally at seventeen she marries Moysha; Moysha leaves his five-year career as a sailor behind, and these two crazy kids live happily together inland for three years.

But the sea has gotten under Moysha's skin!  Those three blissful years end when Moysha is drawn back to the sailor's life.  He joins Sour John's crew, abandoning his wife and children for certain death.

I've had no luck finding an image online of the cover of the Fall 1960 issue of The Literary Review, so all you people who click over to MPorcius Fiction Log for the pictures will have to be satisfied with an image of the second place "The Ugly Sea" appeared, New Worlds of Fantasy #2 with its effective Kelly Freas cover.   

[UPDATE January 2, 2018: Commenter Todd Mason owns a copy of the Autumn 1960 issue of The Literary Review, and points out below that Lafferty's "The Ugly Sea" is in fact in the Autumn 1961 issue.  I was mislead by a typo at isfdb, which still lists "Fall 1960" as the issue in which the story appeared.] 

"Snuffles"

Planet Bellota is one strange world.  Though a mere one hundred miles in circumference, it has a gravity equal to half that of Earth's.  It is home to many insects, but each individual bug seems to be of a different species.  Lightning storms are constant, and the rinds of fruits are edible while the flesh is unpalatable.  And then there is the sole large inhabitant, a friendly beast much like a large bear which, like the insects, seems to have no sex or parents.  A team of six Earthling scientists is carefully studying this mysterious world until, unexpectedly, Snuffles the heretofore friendly psuedo-ursine suddenly attacks and they have to fight and then flee for their lives!

Lafferty wrote quite a few stories that feature horrendous violence, and "Snuffles" is one of them--the Earth expedition suffers heavy casualties in its struggle against Snuffles!  The survivors of the initial surprise attack march day after day, the wounded Snuffles hot on their heels, toying with them.  Lacking any supplies, the Earthers resort to eating native plants, including those with hallucinogenic properties.  Around the time they start eating this stuff, the survivors begin to receive what appear to be telepathic messages from Snuffles.  Lafferty has already given us reason to suspect Snuffles is a God or Devil or, most likely, a Gnostic demiurge figure (if you needed one, reading "Snuffles" provides a reason to read the Wikipedia entry on Gnosticism), and our suspicions are further fueled when Snuffle's messages (or are they merely hallucinations fueled by the scientists' exhaustion and ingestion of narcotic plants?--like "Through Other Eyes," this story is in part about how questionable our perceptions of the world can be) assert that Snuffles created planet Bellota, and maybe the entire universe.

I didn't know until I had finished the story whether any of the humans would get off the planet alive or if any of the planet's mysteries would be solved.

It is normal to read SF stories in which human beings are jerks who despoil the environment and are too quick to resort to violence.  But in "Snuffles" Lafferty makes sure we see the human characters as good people and even seems to be suggesting that we are too gullible, too eager to see the universe as benign when in fact it is inimical.  At the start of the story one character argues that Bellota is the only "fun" planet in the galaxy (when it is in fact the planet where they will be massacred), and during Snuffle's first attack the leader of the expedition chooses to shoot to wound instead of shooting to kill because "He was fond of Snuffles and gambled that it would not be necessary to kill him."  These people are too reluctant to resort to violence!  Another interesting aspect of the story is how Lafferty implies that Bellota, which seems like a topsy-turvy, atypical world, is actually the only sincere or normal planet in the universe, and/or is a mirror which displays reality to those few who have the opportunity to visit it.       

If you want to read another well-written story by a Catholic conservative about people pursued by an intelligent alien bear (I know some of you have very specific interests) I strongly recommend Gene Wolfe's "Try and Kill It" from 1996, a very good adventure/horror story.  I kind of wonder if "Try and Kill It" is a subtle homage to "Snuffles;" Wolfe actually uses the word "snuffling" in it, though that is hardly dispositive.  I'm also wondering if there is any chance "Snuffles" is an homage to A. E. van Vogt's 1939 "Black Destroyer," one of the inaugural stories of science fiction's Golden Age.  As you no doubt already know, in "Black Destroyer" a bunch of scientists make friends with an over-sized alien beast which seems friendly at first but later starts murdering them.

"Snuffles" first appeared in Galaxy and has been pretty successful, being included in anthologies in America, Britain, France, and Germany, including an anthology devoted to stories about religion.

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It is easy to recommend all four of these stories--they are all smooth and entertaining reads with fun little jokes and all feature interesting themes we've seen before but do different things with them.  Being written over 50 years ago by somebody who wasn't exactly taking pains to appeal to current trends in what constituted acceptable thinking, these stories can sometimes surprise--broad-brush assertions about women (they are more sensual than men!) and Jews (they never become sailors!) are good examples.  The stories also invite consideration of whether they have some deep meaning or philosophical point to make, even if Sour John in "The Ugly Sea" responds to a listener who asks, "Is there a moral to this?" with the flat declaration, "No.  It is an immoral story.  And it's a mystery to me."

Early '70s tales from Eddy C. Bertin, Arthur C. Clarke & Harlan Ellison

It's the fourth and final installment of our look at Donald Wollheim's The 1972 Annual World's Best SF!

"Timestorm" by Eddy C. Bertin (1971)

Bertin is a Belgian, and "Timestorm" first appeared in Flemish in De Achtjaarlijkse God, a collection of Bertin's stories.  Wollheim tells us it won the "'Sfan Award' as the best original story in the Lowlands language sector."  Bertin translated it himself into bland and unidiomatic English--witches are "hung" instead of "hanged," things appear "on intervals" instead of "at intervals."  Why didn't some native English-speaker copy edit this stuff?

In the year 2213 two wandering stars collide and cause a "timestorm."  Somehow this transports an Earthman, Harvey Lonestall, into a vast library of baton-sized cylinders, billions of them.  This "time tower" exists beyond space and time; here Harvey need not eat or sleep.  When inserted into a projector machine the cylinders each can transport Harvey's consciousness into the body of an historical figure; when he tests some they are all people involved in acts of violence; Lee Harvey Oswald murdering JFK, or a crewmember on the Enola Gay as it bombs Hiroshima, for example. Sneaking around the sprawling corridors of the time tower Harvey spies on aliens; these jokers are, apparently, manipulating Earth history!  (Somehow our hero can understand their speech as they talk about Nero, Waterloo, World War II, and other atrocious historical people and events.)  Harvey theorizes that the human race is naturally peaceful and these aliens are to blame for our history of crime and war. (Remember detective writer John D. MacDonald's Wine of the Dreamers?)

Harvey kills the aliens and then uses the machines to manipulate history in a peaceful direction, preventing the rise of Hitler and Napoleon, the outbreak of the First World War, the birth of the Marquis de Sade and the murders of Jack the Ripper.  He even goes back to caveman times to prevent humans from eating meat!  (In this world, Summer Kreigshauser, you would be Chopped Champion!)

Harvey returns to 2113 Earth where he happily joins the peaceful vegetarian society of primitive hut-dwellers who have not even invented the wheel.  Then we get our Twilight-Zone-style twist ending.  Evil space aliens arrive and the human race is too weak to resist them!  You see, the aliens in the time tower were beneficent, and were tailoring a human race strong enough to liberate the universe from these evil aliens! Oops!

The style of this story is poor, as I have already noted, and it is too long and feels tedious.  The plot is just silly, and Bertin fails to give it credibility or emotional power. (Invoking tragedies like famous murders and major wars is a cheap method of playing on the reader's feelings that has little efficacy here because we've heard about JFK, WWII and Jack the Ripper a million times already and because Bertin doesn't do any work to move us, he just throws the names out there.)  I have to give "Timestorm" a thumbs down.  I think Wollheim included this story not because it is one of the "best" from 1971, but because he thought a Continental story had novelty value.  (Science fiction from beyond the Anglophonic world seems to have been an interest of Wollheim's.  We await Joachim Boaz's assessment of Wollheim's 1976 anthology The Best from the Rest of the World.)  

"Transit of Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke (1971)

Here we have some of the hardest of hard SF, a realistic first-person account of an expedition to Mars in 1984 to observe the passage of the Earth across the face of the sun.  Drama is provided by the fact that our narrator is marooned on Mars after an accident, and will run out of oxygen soon after the transit ends.  Besides his description of the transit he provides memories of his life and charts his psychological state as death approaches at the very moment of his, and mankind's, triumph.  The astronaut (and Clarke) show off their taste and erudition with references to Samuel Johnson, James Cook (who observed the transit of Venus from Tahiti in the 18th century), Robert Falcon Scott (who, like our narrator, died after achieving the goal of his mission and left behind a record discovered by later adventurers) and to lots of classical music.  (Don't worry SF fans, Wells, Burroughs, and Bradbury also merit mentions!)

I don't generally seek out these super realistic SF stories, but this one is quite good. "Transit of Earth" first appeared in Playboy.

"One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" by Harlan Ellison (1970)

I actually read this story in my teens, maybe 30 years ago, and then forgot the name of it and over the years started mixing up the details of this story with Ellison's famous "Jeffty is Five," which shares with "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" a child protagonist and a nostalgic tone.  I was glad to read this story and batten down one of those untethered thoughts that had been fluttering in the back of my mind for decades.

Ellison stand-in Gus Rosenthal, a forty-two year old who brags about his success as a writer and how he was the only one to escape his Ohio town, leaving the rivals of his youth behind to work low-class jobs and marry fat women, travels back in time to meet his childhood self. Protecting little Gus from bullies and sharing with him a love of comic books and genre literature brings big Gus a happiness he hasn't felt in a long time, but he can't stay in the past; not only is he suffering time travel-related medical problems, but little Gus is becoming anti-social, stealing and so forth.  So, big Gus has to leave, which breaks little Gus's heart--big Gus realizes that it was himself, not bullies and poverty, that drove him to fight his way out of Ohio and to fame and success.

I find Ellison's braggadocio and self-congratulation a little hard to take ("One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" is squarely aimed at the stereotypical science-fiction fan demographic, the unpopular kid who thinks he is smarter than everybody else), and this story is a little too sappy and sentimental for my tastes.  However, it is well-written--the structure, pacing, and length are all just right, and there are plenty of interesting images--and I appreciated Ellison's little asides praising Jack Williamson and Harold W. McCauley.  So, thumbs up for this one.

"One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" first appeared in Orbit 8--if you haven't already, check out Joachim Boaz's review of that anthology--and was made into an episode of the 1980s Twilight Zone which I have not seen.

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The 1972 Annual World's Best SF is a good collection of stories; the Niven, Russ, Anderson, Lafferty, Clarke and Ellison stories all feel characteristic of what those authors typically do, but seem more fun, more streamlined, and more accessible than their average work.  Definitely worth a look.

Three late 1960s stories by Philip Jose Farmer from If

It has been a long time since I've read any Philip Jose Farmer.  When I was young I read quite a few of his novels, attracted by the adventure plots and the sexual content. As I got older my interest waned, though I liked To Your Scattered Bodies Go (the first Riverworld book) when I reread it in 2011, Dare when I read it in 2007, and The Green Odyssey, which I read in 2014, well enough.

The mark of D.L.

I bought Down in the Black Gang, a 1971 collection of Farmer stories from the 1960s, on a recent visit to Half-Price Books.  On the back cover is an ad for Len Deighton's novel Bomber, which is about an RAF bombing raid on Germany.  I'm interested in World War II air combat and all that stuff, but I've never read Bomber; I read Deighton's history book about the Battle of Britain, Fighter, in 6th grade and liked it.  (I was writing a report on the Battle of Britain--are grammar school kids still allowed to write reports on wars?)  My copy of Down in the Black Gang has a sort of insignia on its first page, inscribed in red by a previous owner, whose initials must have been "D.L."

Let's take a look at the first three stories in Down in the Black Gang.  All three of these tales first appeared in If, AKA Worlds of If.

"Down in the Black Gang" (1969-revised 1971)

On the publication page of my copy of the book we are told that "'Down in the Black Gang' was rewritten for this collection."

This is one of those stories, maybe we need to file it under New Wave, in which the narrator addresses you directly, as if you are part of the story, it is unclear at first what is going on, and there are references to sex with nonhumans.  The opening paragraph reads:

I'm telling you this because I need your love.  Just as you need mine, though you don't know it--yet.  And because I can't make love to you as a human makes love to a human.

As it proceeded I began to think of "Down in the Black Gang" as one of those "modern interpretations of angels" stories, like perennial Christmas favorite It's A Wonderful Life.  But later it becomes clear it depicts an exploitative supreme power, not a benevolent one.  I guess it is kind of like Damon Knight's "Be My Guest" or John D. MacDonald's Wine of the Dreamers, a story which proposes a supernatural or extraterrestrial source of human misbehavior and unhappiness.  

Our narrator is a space alien or robot (he weighs 2000 pounds without his anti-grav belt on and sweats mercury when stressed) in disguise as a human, moving among us here on Earth.  The universe is euphemistically or allegorically described as a "Ship," and our narrator is a stoker or engineer, responsible for maintaining thrust; he is occasionally contacted by the Captain or the Ship's officers, who are in some other part of the universe, and who are always demanding more thrust.

The narrator relates to us his final of thousands of missions (he has been on Earth trying to generate thrust as far back as when humans were mere apes.)  Deployed in a Beverly Hills apartment, he spied on the neighbors; equipped with spy rays and the like he was able to see and hear them, and he also has a device which measures people's psychologies or souls; this guy is depressed, that guy is full of rage, that woman is a narcissist, etc.  (There is a lot of psychoanalyzing of people, especially frustrated cartoonists and genre writers, in this story.)  It is detected that one young neighbor has considerable "Thrust Potential."  Our narrator, through disguises and other deceits, manipulated these people so that there was a terrible murder-suicide. This would, apparently, inspire the individual with "Thrust Potential" to become a religious leader in the future, creating the thrust that powers the universe.

That was our hero's final mission.  Sick of causing so much death and unhappiness, he has mutinied, and is pursued by the Ship's police forces.  This story is his message to humans, begging for sympathy and help overthrowing the current regime and figuring out a more humane way to run the Ship.

This story is silly, of course, and needlessly complicated.  I'm still not sure what the "thrust" really is--prayers?  Religious ecstasy?  Love (of the universe?)  Why does creating thrust always involve causing murders and bloodshed?

Perhaps the most interesting part about it is its depiction of frustrated creative people. One man has published detective and western novels but can't make ends meet without working a day job at a factory, another has published cartoons in periodicals as well as a book of cartoons he goes on TV to promote, but his family lives on the dole and handouts from relatives.  Maybe Farmer knew such people?
 
This one hovers around the "acceptable" mark.

"The Shadow of Space" (1967)

Here we have a story about a space crew, with space suits, air locks, energy guns, all that traditional SF furniture we love.  It also speculates about the nature of the universe and faster-than-light travel.  If "Down in the Black Gang" counts as "New Wave," "The Shadow of Space" surely counts as "hard SF" that tries to give you that "sense of wonder."

The experimental ship Sleipnir is to be the first vessel to travel faster than light.  What unexpected effects could exceeding light speed have on matter and people?  Soon humanity will know!  But before starting the experiment the ship rescues a woman scientist, Mrs. Wellington, from a damaged craft.  Mr. Wellington was killed in the accident that wrecked their ship, and Mrs. Wellington goes insane, becoming obsessed with the Sleipnir's commander, Captain Grettir, even thinking he is her own dead husband.  She locks herself in the engine room and holds off the space marines with an energy pistol while she tinkers with the engine--soon the ship is going 300,000 times the speed of light!  The marines blast open the engine room door with a ray cannon, and she strips naked and jumps out an airlock to her death!

Under the influence of physics nobody can understand, the Sleipnir, and the nude corpse, grow to tremendous size and pass outside the universe into an area of blackness.  Behind them is a grey sphere--the universe.  Grettir and the other members of the crew come up with and try out various methods of getting back into the universe; on one attempt they break through the "skin" of the universe, but the ship is so incredibly huge that they crash into galaxies and exterminate entire civilizations, trillions of people, causing major psychological problems for the crew!

They eventually get back inside the universe and back to normal size, but they have no idea what the Milky Way and human civilization will be like when they return home.  How much time has passed inside our galaxy during the brief time they were outside?  Has our home galaxy suffered any ill effects from the Sleipnir's astounding growth or repeated rupturing of the outer surface of the universe?

Pretty good, full of weird images and crazy ideas as well as the usual rocket ship and ray gun stuff.  It's like an above-average adventure of van Vogt's Space Beagle or Roddenberry's Enterprise.  (UPDATE JANUARY 4, 2016: Check out ukjarry's comment below on the connection between "The Shadow of Space" and TV's Star Trek.)

"A Bowl Bigger than Earth" (1967)  

This is a satire of conformity, collectivism and egalitarianism, and a depiction of the afterlife. The afterlife is a topic Farmer was very interested in; his most famous work, the Riverworld series, depicts an afterlife.

Our main character, Morfiks, dies and reappears in a city made of brass.  There is no sex or gender here, everybody, including Morfiks himself, has the same sexless and hairless body and the same voice.  Everybody does the same work and lives in the same kind of house--the unseen Protectors forbid people to even have names!  It is also illegal to talk about your life back on Earth, as it might foster envy or a sense of superiority, and in order to inspire collective spirit the entire community is punished for the antisocial actions of individuals.  "If a crime is committed, the guilt is shared by all because, actually, all are responsible."  Every person is the same, every day is the same, and Morfiks is doomed to live in this brass world forever.

As Morfiks looks back on his life on Earth, we learn he was the kind of guy who always followed the rules, obeyed society's dictates, worked hard to support his church and the Democratic party, even if he didn't agree with the Democrats' positions on some issues.  He didn't act this way because he really wanted to, but because he thought it his duty to his family and to society.  Farmer strongly implies that by living such a life, Morfiks chose this tyrannical, egalitarian and nightmarishly boring afterlife, and suggests that more individualistic or independent types have a different afterlife.

This story is OK; it is more of an idea, or a statement, or a setting, than a story with a plot and characters.    

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Farmer's novels often come across as kind of half-baked, like he had an idea, developed it part way, then filled in the rest of the required pages with competent but mediocre chases and fights.  After reading them these novels often left me feeling unsatisfied, as if there should have been something more.  I liked "The Shadow of Space," but "Down in the Black Gang" and "A Bowl Bigger than Earth" left me with that feeling of incompleteness.  The former could have used some revision to make what the hell is going on more clear, the latter had what felt like unnecessary detail and set up which didn't pay off, and neither had much emotional punch, even though both were trying to say something about how we live, and how we should live, our lives.

Well, more Farmer stories in the future.

Three 1950s stories by Damon Knight

It goes without saying that many science fiction writers are controversial, because of their political views, social views, writing styles, eccentric behavior, whatever.  My personal view of Damon Knight, probably unfairly, is largely defined by the controversies he was directly or indirectly involved in.  There is his famous denunciation of A. E. Van Vogt and the role Knight's name (affixed to the Grand Master title in 2002) played in the dispute over whether Van Vogt would be awarded the title of Grand Master by the SFWA.  There is the fact that he seems to have lost the job of book reviewer at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction because he wrote a review of Judith Merrill's Tomorrow People that pointed out how crummy it was.  And there was the friendly controversy between Joachim Boaz and yours truly over how crummy Knight's novel Beyond the Barrier was.  (Check out Joachim's assessments of Beyond the Barrier here and here, and mine here.)

I recently purchased a 1973 paperback edition published by Award Books of the 1965 collection of Knight stories entitled Off Center.  Let's check out three stories Knight wrote in the 1950s and see if they have the power to generate any additional Knight-related controversies.

"What Rough Beast" (1959)

The title of "What Rough Beast" comes from the 1919 poem "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats.  The only thing I know about Yeats is that he was the subject of that Cranberries song, so it took a Google search to alert me to where Knight got the title. I then dutifully read the poem.  It turns out that this poem is also the source of the phrases "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," and "Slouches toward Bethlehem," phrases which I feel like I hear all the time in one form or another.  Like Yeats' poem, Knight's story deals with apocalyptic visions and Jesus Christ.

"What Rough Beast" first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and is the story of Mike Kronski, our first-person narrator.  Mike is an immigrant to New York City, has some kind of accent and a speech pattern which under uses articles, and is working as a bus boy in a crummy diner.  Before long we learn that Mike has amazing supernatural powers--in fact, it seems like he can do almost anything with his mind from curing cancer to making money appear out of thin air to vaporizing people or buildings.  Mike has come to our dimension from some dimension in which Russians colonized North America (hey, wasn't Nobokov's Ada set in just such a dimension?)

Mike is some kind of Christ-figure; he always tries to help people, curing their ailments and giving them money and so forth, but there are always people trying to betray him or take advantage of him.  One scene in which Knight/Mike brings attention to the face of the president on a dollar bill seemed, to me, to be meant to remind you of how Jesus brought attention to the face of the Roman Emperor on a coin in the gospels, a clue we are meant to compare Mike to Christ.

In contrast to Christ, Mike tries to keep his powers a secret and to keep a low profile, but when he has to interact with the authorities they see through his deceptions and begin to investigate him.  After he helps some pretty girls (and who can resist the temptation to save damsels in distress?) he exposes his astonishing abilities to some working-class brutes who try to kidnap him and exploit him to get rich.

Mike isn't fully in control of his powers; while he sleeps at night any injury or illness, even a pimple, is cured autonomically, and when he gets scared his powers can lash out to protect him, even against his will.  At the end of the story he gets so scared he disintegrates New York City (nooooooo!) and everything for miles around.  Yeats' poem seems to suggest that 2000 years after Christ (who saved or redeemed the world) was born some kind of monster (who would wreck the world?) would be born in Bethlehem.  Is Mike, however well-intentioned he may be, that monster?  A monster because we, who have filled the 20th century with materialism, revolutionary violence and war, made him one?  

At the end of the story, after he has annihilated New York City, Mike shifts himself to a world in which Jesus Christ was never born.  Maybe here is a universe where Mike won't be harried by others.  (Is Knight hinting that perhaps a world without Christ would be a better one?)

On a human level this story works.  Knight draws the characters well and succeeds in eliciting emotions from the reader with the scenes he puts his characters through.  The story is well-structured and paced.  And all that speculation about how Knight's story relates to Yeats' poem and how Mike relates to Christ is interesting.  The very cool Galactic Journey blog likes "What Rough Beast" a lot and I can't gin up any real controversy over his opinion.  (At the same link check out GJ's examination of the lava cover of the issue of F&SF in which "What Rough Beast" appears.)

Where the story has problems is with Mike's powers, which can be a little difficult to understand, and may simply be arbitrary.  It seems like Mike's powers, for the most part, consist of the ability to flip through the multiverse, look through the infinite numbers of worlds in order to switch something over to, or take something from, a similar universe.  For example, if he is standing on the corner of 5th and 42nd and wants to give money to somebody, he looks through the infinite number of universes to find those universes that are more or less like ours but in which somebody dropped money on the sidewalk at 5th and 42nd, reaches into those universes, and picks up the money.  When a cop roughs him up he reflexively reaches into a universe in which that cop doesn't exist, was never born, but which is otherwise like ours.  (Maybe the cop appears in that other dimension where he doesn't belong; Mike says that my beloved New York City has appeared on a barren planet Earth which previously had no life on it--oh the humanity!)

Confusingly, while Mike can vaporize a cop or a town in a split second, when he is curing a young woman's scar tissue and giving her beautiful skin so she can find a husband, he has to concentrate and touch her naked body and alter each cell one at a time in a complex and tiring process (apparently trading this Anne's scarred cells for the healthy cells of dozens or hundreds of Annes from other versions of our world). When someone asks if he can cure diseases he says he can cure cancer but not a "germ disease, because is too many little germs."  Maybe this is because Mike is reluctant to simply give disease to people in other dimensions, and has to spread the bad cells around so the tiny doses are harmless?  There are other limits to his abilities--Mike can't undo changes he has made, and things in our universe that he has brought from other universes appear solid black to him, so, for example, he can't use money from other universes because he can't read the denominations.  Early in the story he sees his own reflection, and it shows solid black, so he can't even see his own face.

Maybe I am thick, but at times it seemed like Mike's powers were whatever served the plot, or seemed dramatic, at that moment.

I think this story deserves a moderate recommendation.  Rather than nitpick Knight's description and rationalization of Mike's magic powers the reader is probably expected to lament that we are all such a bunch of jerks that if Jesus Christ appeared today we would probably abuse him, to consider the heavy weight of responsibility a miracle-worker like Jesus Christ would feel, and to recognize that each of us has a responsibility for himself, and should not delegate that responsibility to others.

Off Center was first available as half of an Ace Double, both halves of which were by Knight

"Be My Guest" (1958)

This a long and tedious story with a goofy and uninteresting premise and unfunny comedy dialogue and unfunny slapsticky jokes.  It first menaced the world from its lair in Fantastic Universe, a magazine for which it is not easy to find a clear cover photo. 

Knight posits that it is common for people to be possessed by ghosts.  These "tenants" can strongly influence the thoughts, desires and actions of their hosts, and they generally inspire people to engage in interests similar to their own, so they can vicariously enjoy the pastimes they indulged in while alive.  Knight presents this as an explanation for why the human race is a bunch of stupid tasteless jerks:

It was no longer any cause for wonder that the books most normal people bought and the movies they paid to see were strictly and by definition psychoneurotic, nor that the laws made by the people for the people were an Iron Maiden, nor that a streetful of honest citizens could erupt into a roaring mob.

(The idea that, if people act like assholes perhaps it is because they are controlled by invisible outside agents, reminded me a little of John D. MacDonald's 1950 Wine of the Dreamers.)

The fact that most people are inhabited and manipulated by ghosts has remained virtually unknown for centuries; possessed people have no idea they are possessed.  That is until now, with the appearance of a miracle of modern science!

Our heroes are Kipling Morgan, a brilliant man who studied physics but then devoted his life to outdoor professions, like being a merchant sailor, a lumberjack, and currently a golf pro; Angelica MacTavish, a beautiful genius who is a player in city politics (the story is set in L. A.); and Nancy Liebert, an ugly girl with a difficult home life and many psychological issues.  Kip is in love with Angelica, whom he is dating, and Nancy is in love with Kip, whom she is (as we would say today) stalking.

Kip's old professor, a chemist and Nancy's father, just died.  The prof was working on some super vitamins, but when tested on monkeys it killed them, so he labelled the vial "POISON" and set it aside.  While vandalizing Kip's home Nancy put this liquid vitamin solution in Kip's food, and ingesting it gave him the ability to see and hear the four ghosts currently residing inside of him.  He realizes these ghosts love the outdoors (one was an Army officer, one a sea captain, etc,) and it was they who made him abandon a science career to become an outdoors type.  Much of the story's 70 pages consist of Kip's efforts to exorcise the ghosts.  For example, the four initial ghosts are anti-intellectual, so he exorcises them by reading difficult science texts.  But when those four leave, seven more move in.  He gets rid of those by sitting inside a cramped uncomfortable box, but then ghosts who love to drink and fight move in. (The exorcisms are actually much more complicated and boring than I have let on here.)

For obscure reasons, Kip, Angelica and Nancy have become invisible.  Not truly invisible, but people never see them, because, as if by coincidence, nobody ever looks their way.  This means that Angelica can spy on politicians and steal fur coats, and Kip, now a drunk, can steal booze and smash up bars, without legal repercussions. This invisibility is more of a curse than a blessing, however, and Kip, calling it a "quarantine," endeavors to end it.

After wasting a lot of time Knight wraps up the story in short order by having Kip learn in a mysterious way (the ghost of Nancy's father sends him a coded message) that a second dose of the vitamin juice will enable him to see and talk to other people's ghosts.  This allows him to find the ruling ghosts, who inhabit a rich guy's body.  He threatens these patrician ghosts with making the rich guy drink the vitamins, so they end the quarantine and shift Kip, Angelica and Nancy's ghosts around so they will all be psychologically healthy.  Then Kip drinks a third dose of the vitamins, which somehow deactivates the first two doses.  Now he realizes Angelica is not the girl for him and can marry Nancy and they can live happily ever after.

"Be My Guest"'s premise and plot feel contrived and convoluted, and everything moves slowly.  The characters are boring and you don't care what happens to them.  

Bad!  

"Catch That Martian" (1952)

More jokes!  More ghosts!  Another bizarre premise!  And more misanthropy!  The SF community first puzzled over this oddity in Galaxy.

People in New York City are being turned into ghosts!  Suddenly, in a theatre or cinema, in a restaurant or on the street, a person will be silenced!  He is still visible, but unable to interact with this universe!  The ghost can't hear us, we can't hear him, and the people and things he touches pass right through him!

A cop, through guesses and serious detective work, comes to believe that a Martian who is very easily annoyed must be to blame!  The alien is here to study our culture, but if somebody coughs during a film or jostles him on the subway, he sends the offending individual to another dimension where he can no longer be heard or felt.  In the course of trying to figure out which New Yorker is really a Martian in disguise, our hero makes an annoying noise of his own, and finds himself in the other dimension. Another victim suggests that, since every person is annoying in some way, eventually the entire human race will be sentenced to this netherworld.

Weak!

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The last three pages of my copy of Off Center advertize paperbacks from Award that "Probe the Unknown."  These include not only what "may well be the most thorough study on the incredible Abominable Snowmen" but two different books that can guide you in the use of magic to attain love and riches!  And if "Telecult Power" or "Kahuna Magic" don't do the trick, you can always fall back on ESP to achieve "immense personal success;" after all, "Everyone has ESP!"

Click to PROBE THE UNKNOWN

Pessimistic Science Fiction Stories from 1949-50 by John D. MacDonald and Damon Knight

There is this idea that science fiction as a genre is optimistic, or was optimistic before some particular date.  For example, we often hear Barry Malzberg described as an outlier or rebel because his work is so pessimistic, and hear that the SF "establishment" was upset when Malzberg won the first Campbell award.  So it is fun to discover old stories, stories from before events like the Kennedy assassination or the Vietnam War, which we are sometimes told "signalled the loss of America's innocence" or whatever, which are pessimistic.  Here are three voyages aboard the S. S. Pessimismo with blast off dates in 1949 or 1950, which I read in Isaac Asimov Presents The Golden Years of Science Fiction Sixth Series, published in 1988, an omnibus edition of Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories, Volumes 11 and 12, which appeared in 1984.

"Flaw" by John D. MacDonald (1949)

We've experienced some of famous detective novelist MacDonald's pessimistic science fiction before, in the novel Wine of the Dreamers and in some 1948 short stories.  "Flaw" first unleashed its negative vibes in Startling Stories.

You've probably heard of the phenomenon of "red shift," and how the fact that light from other stars is red shifted is strong evidence that the universe is expanding. (But have you heard the great Peter Hammill's song "Red Shift," in which he uses the fact that the universe is expanding as a kind of metaphor of the expanding psychological distance between people in the modern age?)  In "Flaw" MacDonald suggests an alternate, and quite wacky, theory to explain the red shift phenomenon.

"Flaw" is the brief memoir of Carol Adlar, a woman in the "future" of ten years after MacDonald wrote this story.  An atomic rocket motor has been developed, and Carol, who is a clerk at a space agency rocket station, and her colleagues were initially eager to explore the universe!  Our narrator's fiance Johnny was one of the first handful of astronauts to fly in an atomic rocket ship, but a disaster occurred, killing him and all hope that man can travel beyond the solar system, something our narrator figured out long before the eggheads did!

You see, over a month before Johnny's rocket was expected to return, a colossal meteor crashed near the space base.  Our narrator watched the excavations of the crater with binoculars, and something she saw proved her premonitions of her fiance's death to have been accurate--from the crater was hoisted a jeweled ring, a ring the size of a house!  Carol recognizes the ring as one she gave Johnny!  She realizes that the red shift phenomenon is caused by the fact that our solar system is shrinking, that the rocket ceased shrinking when it got far enough from the Sun!  ""If Johnny had landed safely, I would be able to walk about on the palm of his hand....It is a good thing that he died."

This story is drenched in pessimism.  Carol describes her own physical ("My fingernails are cracked and broken...") and psychological ("I rather imagine I am quite mad") deterioration since Johnny's death and the death of the human race's dreams of visiting the stars, and hopes she will die soon.  She repeatedly refers to how mankind has trashed the Earth, and points out that the ring she gave Johnny was that of her father, who was killed in the Pacific theater during World War II.  "We have made a mess of this planet, and it is something that we cannot leave behind us."

However silly the story's gimmick is, MacDonald is a good writer and there is a measure of human feeling to the tale, so I'd judge it moderately enjoyable.

"Spectator Sport" by John D. MacDonald (1950)

In the introduction to this story Martin H. Greenberg claims that MacDonald "still has great affection for sf and the people who write and read it."  Somehow I seem to recall MacDonald singing a different tune in the afterword to my edition of Wine of the Dreamers, but since my copy of Wine of the Dreamers is in storage I will just have to take Greenberg's word for it.

This cautionary tale about advances in entertainment technology first threatened the livelihood of Hollywood TV producers and electronics manufacturers in Thrilling Wonder Stories.

"Spectator Sport" is about a time traveller from 1950 who projects himself 400 years into the future.  He is astonished to find that there has been very little societal progress or change--there are no new buildings, and in fact things look unmaintained, decrepit.  A park bench the scientist recognizes from the 20th century is in place but decayed, as if nobody ever visits the park and the government never services it.

What has happened?  Everybody in the world is so addicted to what we would now call "virtual reality" (MacDonald references Huxley and "the feelies" by name) that few people have sex (population has diminished significantly) or even leave the house unnecessarily, and other forms of entertainment, like books and periodicals, are extinct.

There are two forms of virtual reality, "temps" and "perms."  Temps are like TV sets that have a knob you touch; through the knob is transmitted the emotional content of the show.  Wealthy people opt for more immersive (and expensive) perm treatment--they have their eyes removed and a feeding tube implanted, wires connected to their nerve endings and brain stem, and then live out the rest of their lives in fantasy worlds devised by the 24th century equivalent of TV executives and producers.

With its omniscient narrator, flat characters, and a central gimmick that doesn't feel fresh anymore (though MacDonald did use it five years before it appeared in Kuttner and Moore's "Two-Handed Engine"), I didn't enjoy "Spectator Sport" as much as "Flaw."  I'm more interested in drama and literary virtues than heavy-handed polemics, and "Spectator Sport" seems to rely for its impact on the reader's supposed anti-television prejudice and on its gore scene, in which we observe a person's body being mutilated in preparation for receiving "perm" service.  This story is merely OK.

"Not With a Bang" by Damon Knight (1950)

In his intro Asimov suggests the title of this story may refer not only to T. S. Eliot, but also to the sex act.  Asimov does not worry about spoiling the audience of his anthologies!  This condemnation of our species and civilization first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

"Not With a Bang" is an exercise in misanthropy.  Nuclear and biological warfare has destroyed civilization.  Only two people survive, one man and one woman. The man is desperate to have sex with the woman, willing to employ any means, but he is too weak to rape her, because he suffers from a wasting disease.  The woman is addle-brained from the shock of something she saw during the brief war, and, as a devoted Christian, refuses to have sex outside of marriage.  The man is so angry at her that he often feels like murdering her, but he needs her to give him life-saving shots when his disease causes him paralysis attacks.

Finally, he convinces the shell-shocked woman to agree to marry him.  He imagines not only the pleasure of having sex with her, but with a daughter they may have(!) Before the wedding he goes to a public restroom, and, as the door closes behind him, he has an attack of paralysis.  He will die of thirst standing there, and with him the human race, a race of murderers and rapists.

Knight is famous for the pun in his 1950 story "To Serve Man," and in the last paragraph of this story he gives us some misanthropic word play, declaring that the word on the door of the lavatory, "MEN," is a warning!

The audacity of the story, the way Knight goes to the limit, makes it fun, regardless of how seriously you might take his attitude.  Moderately enjoyable.

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I hope you've enjoyed these trips to classic SF's dark side.  Don't do anything rash!          

"Princess Mary" by Mikhail Lermontov (trans. Nabokov & Nabokov)

Back cover

Russian literature has a lot of boosters--even comedian Norm MacDonald is on the "you gotta read the Great Russians" bandwagon.  My own experience of Russian literature has not been extensive.  Recently I was flipping through a library copy of Penguin's The Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader, and noticed that the included translation of "Princess Mary," an 1840 novella by Mikhail Lermontov and a component of his novel A Hero of Our Time, had been done in 1958 by Vladimir Nabokov and his son Dmitri.  I'm a Nabokov fan, so I decided to give "Princess Mary" a shot.

Wikipedia says that the hero of A Hero of Our Time is "the embodiment of the Byronic hero."  So here was a chance for me to learn a little about Romanticism, another literary movement or period with which I am woefully unfamiliar.

"Princess Mary" is one of those stories in which fashionable witty people meet at resorts, "taking the waters," and have intrigues, some sincerely falling in love, others callously manipulating others for their amusement.  The story, like 60 pages in this edition, is in the form of the diary of Pechorin, whom Lermontov apparently intends to be an exemplar of the vices of his generation.  Pechorin is a master at seducing women and manipulating men, and considers "to subjugate to my will all that surrounds me, and to excite the emotions of love, devotion, and fear in relation to me" to be the primary source of happiness in his life.  At one point, savoring the knowledge that a woman is weeping over him, he compares himself to a vampire!

At one of those towns at the foot of a mountain where people go to enjoy the alleged benefits of "sulphurous" springs, Pechorin runs into several acquaintances of his, including a Grushnitsky and a Werner.  Pechorin is quick to point out to us that he has no friends: "I am not capable of true friendship.  One of the two friends is always the slave of the other, although, often, neither of the two admits this to himself." Grushnitsky he dislikes, but they hang around together because they met in the army. Werner, a doctor, and Pechorin are like two birds of a feather, both learned, cynical, witty.

"Consider: here we are, two intelligent people, we know beforehand that one can argue endlessly about anything, and therefore we do not argue; we know almost all the secret thoughts of each other; one word is a whole story for us....Sad things seem to us funny, funny things seem to us melancholy, and generally we are, to tell the truth, rather indifferent to everything except our own selves."       

Pechorin's wit reminded me of the kind of paradoxes I associate with Oscar Wilde--"platonic love is the most troublesome kind," "[I had] no charitable action on my conscience," "Women only love those whom they do not know," are representative specimens of his bon mots.

Also at the town is Vera, a woman Pechorin had an affair with in the past.  Vera is married to some old guy, but still aches with love for Pechorin.

Grushnitsky falls in love with a Princess Mary, a friend of Vera's who is in town, and Pechorin, for fun, encourages Grushnitsky to pursue her while he seduces the princess himself.  At the same time he is charming the princess Pechorin toys with Vera, breaking her heart.  After a climactic scene of humiliation, Grushnitsky, pursues revenge against Pechorin.  Despite Werner and others trying to stop them, Grushnitsky and Pechorin fight a duel--Grushnitsky tries to cheat, but is found out and is killed.  Vera, stressed out over the duel, can't hide her love for Pechorin from her husband, and her marriage and life are ruined; she is forced to depart, never to see Pechorin again.  Pechorin has a chance to marry the princess and live an easy life, but doesn't take it; he doesn't love the princess, in a final letter Vera begged him not to marry her friend ("you must make this sacrifice to me: for you I have lost everything in the world"), and Pechorin is a restless soul, irrationally unable to accept marriage and give up the freedom he doesn't even enjoy.  In the last paragraph Pechorin writes

I am like a sailor born and bred on the deck of a pirate brig.  His soul is used to storms and battles, and, when cast out onshore, he feels bored and oppressed, no matter how the shady grove lures him, no matter how the peaceful sunshines on him.   

Front cover; that's Tolstoy on the horse

As we expect from Romanticism, there's a lot of descriptions of natural beauty and sublimity: cliffs, gorges, sunrises, sunsets, rivers.  Pechorin describes his ride through a gorge to the location of the duel, dewdrops falling from leaves and refracting sunlight and all that, and tells us "more than ever before, I was in love with nature."  At one point Princess Mary looks down at the water while they are fording a river on horseback and she is hypnotized, almost falling off her mount.  One of my favorite passages of the story is when Pechorin describes the jagged rocks three hundred feet below the ledge where the duel will take place, rocks upon which Grushnitsky is about to fall to his death, as "dark and cold as the tomb...awaiting their prey."  In the final pages of the book Pechorin's horse dies underneath him while he is galloping in pursuit of Vera--"Everything would have been saved had my horse's strength lasted another ten minutes."

People in "Princess Mary" are at the mercy of the natural world, just as they are at the mercy of their own passions (which, of course, are part of the natural world--at one point Pechorin makes the materialist argument that the "soul is dependent on the body").  Pechorin, despite the fact that he is so clever and carefully plans all his moves, is driven by irrational feelings and succeeds or fails in his endeavours due to luck or "destiny," this is a repudiation of reason and rationality that, I am told, is one of the essential characteristics of Romanticism.

I enjoyed "Princess Mary."  Even though we are expected to see Pechorin as a creep, I found it easy to identify with his skepticism about friendship and his irrational fear of marriage, attitudes I have shared.  (I got over my fear of marriage.)  I liked how Pechorin and Werner were always referring to Cicero or Tasso or some other literary luminary; I wish I knew people who would say interesting things like that.  People I run into just talk about the weather, or, even worse, "the game."  When they whip out references it is usually to Saturday Night Live ("We're going to pump you up" or "More cowbell!") or Seinfeld ("He's a low talker" or "Not that there is anything wrong with that.")  Even the college professors I meet talk just like working class people, the men about sports or video games or some girl's ass, the women about shopping, gossip, and their "crafts."  

The style is good, of course, Nabokov having had a hand in it, and the character of Pechorin is engaging.  The plot isn't surprising, but is acceptable (except for the tragic ending it actually reminded me a little of a Wodehouse plot, people sneaking around and trying to outwit each other.)  The characters besides Pechorin are sort of just there to be acted upon by Pechorin, to show how superior but also what a jerk he is.  

There is at least one sizable problem with the story.  In a way that somewhat strains credulity, the plot is driven by the fact that Pechorin and Werner are always sneaking up behind people to listen to their conversations, or just by chance coming upon people, unnoticed, so they can hear critical information.  I suppose fiction, especially first-person narratives, wouldn't really work without these sorts of devices, and this goes for high literature as well as popular fiction: I can think of two pivotal scenes from Proust in which Marcel fortuitously finds himself in the position of observing, undetected, the exotic and secretive behaviors of homosexuals, as well as other scenes in which he observes people who are unaware he is watching them.  The reader of fiction has to be willing to suspend disbelief, even if what he is reading isn't full of nonsense like hyperspace and psionic powers.

So, a thumbs up for Mikhail Lermontov and the Nabokov family; "Princess Mary," a little excursion into Russian Romanticism, was certainly worth my time.

Two 1948 SF stories by John D. MacDonald

Just last week I read Wine of the Dreamers, a 1950s science fiction novel by popular mystery novelist John D. MacDonald. I thought it had good points and, on balance, was worth reading, and so today I read two of MacDonald's SF short stories, both from 1948.  I found these stories in the 1985 edition of Isaac Asimov Presents The Golden Years of Science Fiction, 5th Series, edited by Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg.  This book includes stories from 1947 and 1948 that Asimov and Greenberg consider "the best" from those years.

I own a copy of this anthology and appreciate the insane cover art by Romas Kukalis.  Every time I look at this cover I try to visualize what I would see if I looked up in the sky while a monster bigger than the Earth was approaching, within 100,000 miles or whatever, and how different the monster would look based on time of day and the position of the sun and the moon.  

This anthology is also interesting because the voluble Isaac Asimov fills it with his opinions. He tries to psychoanalyze famous SF editor John Campbell Jr., he gloats over the victory of the communists in Vietnam, he brags that he was so bright as a child that he made people uneasy, he expresses his amazement that people would want to live in a small town instead of New York City, he lets you know who his favorite SF writer is (Arthur C. Clarke), he complains that the English language is sexist.  If you want insight into the opinions of one of the movers and shakers of the SF world, Isaac Asimov Presents The Golden Years of Science Fiction, 5th Series, can help you fill that need.

"Ring Around the Redhead"

This is a trifling but pleasant story, full of jokes that are not actually funny but are not offensively bad either.  Gore and violent death are important elements in the story, but MacDonald endeavors to maintain a light-hearted tone.  In part the story is a satire of small town life - except for the inventor, everyone in the town is some kind of gossip, drunk, murderer, adulterer, etc.  

An inventor gets his hands on an artifact from another dimension after a government atomic test temporarily opens a gate to some other world.  The artifact is a large ring, like a hula hoop, I guess, and while you can't see through it, you can reach through it into other worlds. Moving the position of the hoop changes which dimension you can access; the number of worlds that can be accessed is practically infinite.

By chance a beautiful redheaded girl comes through the hoop and is stranded on Earth.  By subterfuge a greedy neighbor steals the hoop; this guy uses the hoop to bring valuable jewels to Earth, but in the process causes trouble for an advanced alien civilization.  The aliens kill him, and the inventor gets blamed, and is put on trial.

Acceptable.  

"A Child is Crying"

This is a very short story that includes the "predict the future via math" element we see in Asimov's Foundation stories (the first of which appeared in 1942), the "I know when you are going to die" element we see in Heinlein's 1939 "Life-Line," and the "psychic kid who is the next stage of human evolution" element I just read in Sturgeon's 1952 Baby is Three.  It is also an anti-nuclear war story.

A child of astonishing intelligence is born.  By age seven he knows more about physics than the top physicists.  He is so smart that he can hypnotize people.  He is so smart he can predict the future by simply examining the present state of things.  But he is totally unemotional, totally lacking in empathy, a mere calculating machine.  He doesn't care when his parents sell him to the Pentagon.  He admits that he has forseen an enemy attack on the United States, but he feels no desire to warn the people or government of the time or place of the attack.

Pentagon staff figure out a way to drug the kid so he is compelled to tell them when the enemy attack will come.  The kid informs them that the attack will occur within two months and a cataclysmic war will result.  All the Pentagon staff people will be killed, but the kid himself, and other super geniuses like him, will survive to build a unified global society.

I'm not sure why Asimov and Greenberg included this story in their book; there is nothing very special about it, the characters, plot and style are just adequate, and its ideas are not deeply explored.  Maybe they liked the idea of a bunch of cold-hearted geniuses inheriting the Earth, the way the story could be interpreted as pessimistic (our diverse and passionate civilization is going to be annihilated and replaced by a soulless one-world government of inhuman calculators with no religion, no art, no love) or optimistic (our stupid corrupt civilization of competing money grubbers and militarists is going to give way to a rational society without fear, superstition, or war.)

Acceptable.

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John D. MacDonald is a competent writer and these two stories are alright, but not anything special.  Maybe they serve as good examples of the sort of topics and tone you would find in the SF magazines in 1948.        

Wine of the Dreamers by John D. MacDonald

As Joachim Boaz reminded us on twitter, February 24 was famed SF artist Richard M. Powers' birthday.  By coincidence, just two days earlier, I had purchased at Half-Price Books the 1979 Fawcett paperback edition of John D. MacDonald's 1951 novel Wine of the Dreamers, largely because of the very engaging cover painting by Powers.  This piece is becoming one of my favorite things by Powers.

I'd never read anything by MacDonald, who, I guess, is primarily famous for writing mystery novels about a Florida detective who owns a boat.  Still, I try to be open to new literary experiences, and so this week I read Wine of the Dreamers.

MacDonald sets his novel some 25 years in the future, in 1975.  Society has become more permissive; female promiscuity is the norm, divorce is common, and a drugged soft drink that heightens perceptions is as popular as Coca Cola.  The radio news is full of stories of strange crimes - when the perpetrators are apprehended, they claim they have no idea why they were acting so strangely and irresponsibly.

The main characters on Earth are on the staff of a major joint military-civilian project, the construction of a star ship.  One of the most dedicated physicists on the project suddenly assaults the security personnel and smashes some delicate equipment, setting the project back four months!

The reader immediately knows, of course, that aliens or some other beings are entering Earth people's minds and causing mischief.  MacDonald's Earth characters - heroic scientists, a sexy female psychologist, and duplicitous careerist military men - are pretty boring, so it is fortunate for the reader that the chapters about the alien Watchers are pretty good.  These Watchers are human, but small in number, inbred and, for the most part, ignorant and physically feeble.  They live in a large building that robotically provides food, and which most of them think is the entire universe.  Illiterate and decadent, they kill time by laying down in booths and sending their minds across the galaxy to planets, including Earth, where they temporarily control the inhabitants.  Almost all the Watchers think the people they control and the worlds they explore are fictional "dreams" generated by a computer, and so they blithely direct the people they control to commit murder, suicide and all manner of mayhem.

A few Watchers, including a brother and sister who are more robust and brave than the rest and have gone to the unused corridors and learned to read the dusty books there, have an inkling that the people in the "dreams" are real.  When the literate Watchers try to contact the Earth scientists and to stop the Watchers from abusing Earthlings, there is trouble both on Earth and in the crazy Watcher society.  Eventually the kinds of paradigm shifts we often see in science fiction novels follow.
 
The whole "aliens taking over peoples' bodies for fun" bit is similar to Robert Silverberg's 1968 story "Passengers," which won a Nebula.  MacDonald also includes in the book the technique Silverberg had at the center of his novel The Second Trip - the government can erase the personalities of criminals or the mentally ill and install in their minds fictional memories and "healthy" personalities.      

This edition of Wine of the Dreamers includes a 1968 afterword in which MacDonald expresses contempt for science fiction and the science fiction community and brags about how prescient Wine of the Dreamers is.  He also claims that mankind's technology has been unable to improve the human condition or make life a more rewarding experience, which seems silly.  Thanks to modern sanitation, transportation, and communications technology, life in the West was obviously much better, materially and culturally, in 1968 than in 1868 or 1768.

Even though I found the afterword annoying, Wine of the Dreamers is a moderately good novel and an interesting piece of 1950s SF.  If I blunder across Ballroom of the Skies, MacDonald's other 1950s SF novel, for sale for the same price I paid for this one, I will probably buy it.