Stories by Miller, Jones, Schmitz and Godwin from Spectrum 5

Back in the middle of July I purchased a copy of Kinglsey Amis and Robert Conquest's Spectrum 5, a 1966 anthology of 1950s SF stories; my copy of a 1968 edition has an irresistibly beautiful cover painting by Paul Lehr.

In their introduction, Amis and Conquest defend science fiction from the haters.  After making an appeal to authority (reminding us that C. S. Lewis, Angus Wilson, and William Golding are all SF fans) they get to some more serious literary analysis.  Novelist and James Bond fanatic Amis and poet and Sovietologist Conquest argue that while a good writing style would be nice (they suggest J. G. Ballard and Algis Budrys as examples of SF writers with a good style) it is not essential in SF, as what makes SF what it is is mythic themes (they present Jules Verne as an example here) or ideas (for this they offer the example of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s "Who Goes There," an SF story with "a brilliantly engineered main problem" resolved by an "unexpected but logical solution.")  As for the development of character, another virtue supposedly absent in SF, Amis and Conquest follow the line of Edmund Crispin, who noted that science fiction is about the relationship of humanity to some novel "thing," an invention or alien or cataclysm or whatever.  The character in such a story need not, maybe even should not, be too unusual or complex, because he represents all of mankind, acts as a sort of everyman.  Amis and Conquest's examples here include, again, Verne, as well as H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, the narrator of which represents an ordinary Englishman.

I don't know to what extent I agree with everything Amis and Conquest have to say, but it is a thought-provoking little essay that makes me want to see the essays at the start of the other Spectrum volumes.

Let's read four stories from Spectrum 5 by writers we have already discussed at least a little here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Raymond F. Jones, James H. Schmitz, and Tom Godwin.  All four of these stories appeared in Astounding, which was sort of the flagship for SF that was about science and ideas and didn't necessarily focus on heroic or horrific adventures or prioritize literary style.

"Crucifixius Etiam" by Walter M. Miller, Jr.  (1953)

I loved Miller's 1954 story "I Made You," and liked his 1955 "The Triflin' Man" so I have high hopes for this one!

It is the year 2134, and Peruvian Manue Nanti wants to travel the world and see the sights: Notre Dame, New York skyscrapers, the pyramids of Egypt, the radioactive craters of Russia.  But he needs money to do so.  Solution: signing a five-year contract for a lucrative job on Mars!

On Mars Nanti works as a laborer, swinging a pick!  To breathe the thin air of Mars, laborers like Nanti have artificial lung machines implanted into their bodies.  The risk of using such a machine is that your body will likely forget how to breathe naturally, and your natural lungs will atrophy, and you won't be able to live without the uncomfortable machine, even back on oxygen-rich Earth.  (The engineers have better machines and better working and living conditions and don't run this risk as severely.)

Life for Nanti on Mars is a nightmare--no women, no friends (everybody on Mars is a jerk), the work is exhausting (there is a vague and not really convincing explanation for why they use picks and shovels instead of bulldozers and backhoes on Mars) and the lung machine is like a torture device, the valves pulling painfully at the skin in which they are embedded every time you move or try to breathe naturally.

For most of its 21 pages "Crucifixius Etiam" reads like one of those stories in which the space program is a foolish waste of time and humans aren't fit to live off of Earth--beyond Earth, Earthmen lose their culture, religion, morality, etc.  This is Barry Malzberg territory, and demonstrates that 1) Malzberg is not quite as innovative as he is sometimes considered, 2) pre-New Wave SF and Astounding in particular are not quite so technophilic and optimistic as sometimes considered!  It is also one of those stories in which the government and bourgeoisie abuse the working classes (represented by non-whites like Nanti) and major government and industrial projects, like terraforming Mars, don't have a legitimate goal, but are a scam that serve, as one character in "Crucifixius Etiam" puts it, as "an outlet for surplus energies, manpower, money....if the Project folded, surplus would pile up--[causing a] big depression on Earth."

The ending of Miller's story could be considered a twist--a hopeful and life-affirming twist!  When it is explained to Nanti that he and the other people stuck on the Hell that is Mars are building the first of 300 derricks and associated processing machines that will draw up subterranean frozen "tritium" and convert it to helium and oxygen so that in 800 years Mars will have an Earth-like atmosphere, he accepts his fate and believes his sacrifice is worthwhile.  Nanti sudffers now so that people in eight centuries can live on a beautiful healthy world!  Miller doesn't come right out and say it, but I believe we are meant to see Nanti and his comrades as like Christ, sacrificing themselves for others, and like Moses, unable to enter the promised land to which they are leading humanity; Miller includes priests and rabbis as minor characters, nudging you, I believe, to make this interpretation.

Not bad--Miller's style is good and all the economic, religious, and technological stuff, whether or not any of it is really believable, is interesting and serves a human story.  Anthologists Judith Merrill and Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty would see merit in "Crucifixius Etiam" and reprint the story (in Human? and their The Best Science Fiction Stories series, respectively) in 1954, over a decade before Amis and Conquest did.

"Noise Level" by Raymond F. Jones (1952)

I really enjoyed Jones's novel about disembodied brains, artificial life, and the perils of socialism, 1962's The Cybernetic Brains, so I am also looking forward to this one!

It is the Cold War.  A bunch of physicists are gathered together by the U.S. government under conditions of strict security to watch a film.  The film depicts a twenty-something demonstrating to government officials his anti-gravity device, a thing like a backpack that lets you levitate and fly around!  But during the demonstration the device explodes, killing the young inventor!  The assembled eggheads are told the young inventor was a paranoid with no friends who left no notes or blueprints describing his amazing invention, and they have been summoned to work on the top secret project of studying the wreckage and this genius misfit's library and lab with the goal of rediscovering the secret of anti-grav!

"Noise Level" is a smooth and pleasant read, though some may say it is too long (like 45 pages in my copy of Spectrum 5) and doesn't amount to much: it consists mostly of conversations and throws around concepts like Einstein's postulate of equivalence and metaphors involving whirlpools and signal to noise ratios.  The point of the story is that people get too set in their ways to be able to think outside the box and that being more open-minded is the path to making major breakthroughs.

All the physicists, before seeing that film, thought that anti-grav was impossible.  Some of them maintain that anti-grav is impossible and that the film is a hoax.  But seeing the film convinces some of them that anti-grav is possible--they get to work on the problem and in a few weeks have a working prototype of an anti-grav vehicle that weighs one hundred tons.  The twist of the story is that the film and wreckage and lab are all a government trick, just special effects and props designed to get the country's best physicists to abandon their preconceptions and free their minds so they can develop a technology that will allow us to explore the universe and give us a leg up on the commies.  The sense of wonder ending is the revelation that all the things we think are impossible are in fact possible if we can first convince ourselves that they are possible, which will free our minds and give us a chance, through hard work of course, to make them a reality.

This story is alright, and it has many of the hallmarks of classic golden age SF: a bunch of scientists, a paradigm shift and a sensawunda ending, and the use of trickery and manipulation by an elite group on an inferior group for their own good.  I can't help but find the lionization of elite trickery of the masses, which we see so often in classic SF (Asimov's Foundation stories and Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress are my go-to examples) kind of sick and twisted, but at least this time the victims are a themselves a bunch of geniuses.

"Noise Level" was included in two anthologies published before Spectrum 5, one by William Sloane and one by Edmund Crispin, and was also selected by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss for a 1973 anthology of Astounding material.

"Grandpa" by James H. Schmitz (1955)

I enjoyed Schmitz's 1943 horror tale "Greenface" and his collection of stories about female psychic space cops who manipulate people (or just shoot them, you know, whatever works), Agent of Vega, so I've got no qualms about reading this one.

Cord is a fifteen-year-old boy, a member of the two-thousand strong team preparing planet Sutang for colonization.  Schmitz stories usually portray women in positions of authority, and as the story begins a seventeen-year-old girl is warning Cord that he had better start behaving or the Regent, the head woman in charge of the colony, will have him sent back to his home planet in disgrace.  Don't think that Cord has been smoking crack and playing dice while neglecting his duties, dear reader--Cord is a junior biologist and when he is supposed to be following orders he has been capturing native fauna and studying them in his unauthorized private zoo.  Cord is from planet Vanadia, a world settled relatively recently by humans, and he isn't as enamored of rules and regulations as the Terrans who make up the vast majority of the team's members.  (I thought maybe Schmitz here was trying to remind us of how British people sometimes see Americans and Australians as unruly uncouth cowboys.) 

One of Cord's jobs, apparently, is as a driver, so when the Regent comes by to make an inspection of the Colonial Team's work, Cord drives the vehicles she rides around the colony.  One of these "vehicles" is a native animal, a thing like a giant lily pad, 25 to 50 feet across, with all kinds of tendrils and paddles underwater; people can climb aboard this creature, which the humans call "a raft," and direct its movement.  (All you animal rights activists will be booking flights to Sutang when I tell you that the way one directs a raft is by shooting it with a heat ray pistol--don't get your granola in a bunch, treehuggers, the heat ray is--well, usually--set on low power!)

A dangerous situation arises related to the larger than average raft Cord and the Regent's party are riding (this raft has been christened "Grandpa") and it is Cord who saves the day using his knowledge of biology and his powers of observation and quick-thinking and quick-stabbing.

The real star of this story is the ecology of Sutang--Schmitz does a great job of coming up with and describing interesting alien life forms.  The character of Cord, the slightly subversive teen-aged boy, is fun (he hopes that a disaster will occur so he can be a hero and save his position on Sutang.)  A good story.

"Grandpa" has been anthologized many times, in books edited by Brian Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Martin. H. Greenberg, Gardner Dozois, and still more. A well-regarded classic with something for everybody--alien monsters, the glorification of science and the colonization of the galaxy, people shooting off guns and stabbing enemies with knives, and women who tell you what to do for your own good whom the author doesn't portray as nags but as people we are supposed to admire.

"Mother of Invention" by Tom Godwin (1953)

So far, the stories I have read from Spectrum 5 have been stories that have been widely anthologized, stories that editors and/or readers have been crazy about.  But "Mother of Invention" has only been anthologized by Amis and Conquest, though it has also appeared in the Croat magazine Sirius in 1976 and a Baen collection of Godwin's work with a preface and an afterword by our hero Barry Malzberg.  Maybe this one is weak, or maybe Amis and Conquest have found an overlooked gem?  (It is also possible that this story's length, like 60 pages in my copy of Spectrum 5, has discouraged reprinting.)  Well, let's find out what is up with this one.

"Mother of Invention" starts with a sort of comedy scene, in which a concatenation of factors--including a nagging wife!--leads to a mistake by a technician engaged in inspecting a space ship's "nuclear converter."  This mistake, compounded with additional bad luck, leads to the five men who own the ship being marooned on a virgin planet they discover 30,000 light years away from civilization.

Aurora, the name they give this new world, has a very high percentage of carbon in its make up, and there are diamonds as big as your fist all over the ground and diamond dust in the air which plays havoc with the men's equipment as they search for the uranium and cadmium they need to repair their wrecked space ship. They are under a lot of time pressure, because in seven or eight months a star passing through this system (they erroneously thought this was a binary system--doh!) is going to annihilate Aurora.

Unable to find any uranium, and with their mining equipment ruined by the diamond dust anyway, the five adventurers decide to invent an anti-grav device.  Through dogged persistence, and by keeping their minds open, they accomplish in the wilderness what people in well-appointed labs back on Earth were never able to.  Then, like in an Edmond Hamilton story, they move Aurora itself away from the impending stellar collision and ride the planet back home.

Back in 2014 I read Godwin's novel The Survivors, AKA Space Prison.  As here in "Mother of Invention," in The Survivors a bunch of people find themselves on a barren planet but through hard work not only escape but trigger a paradigm shift and usher in a new period of human history.  "The Mother of Invention" is also like The Survivors in that it is quite bland.  The five explorers in "The Mother of Invention" lack personality, motivation and relationships--there is more human drama and characterization in the jocular little prologue than the main story.  (Maybe Amis and Conquest chose it specifically to prove their point about SF not needing characterization?)  After Schmitz's vivid and fascinating Sutang, Godwin's Aurora is woefully dull.  I gave The Survivors a marginal negative vote, but I'll say "Mother of Invention" is barely acceptable.  Like Jones's anti-grav story, it is very much a classic SF tale about male scientists who, in response to an external impetus, invent a technology that will revolutionize human life, but Jones injects more surprise, fun, and human feeling into his story.

**********

The first US edition of Spectrum 5 has a
wacky collage cover--I think Joachim Boaz
loves this kind of thing!

Godwin's piece is pretty marginal, but these four stories are all worthwhile reads, good examples of SF that glorifies science and technology and tells you that it totally makes sense to take terrible risks and make huge sacrifices to expand the power and reach of the human race.

Spectrum 5 includes eight stories; in our next episode I'll read the four stories in it by SF writers I don't think are quite as famous as Walter A Canticle for Liebowitz Miller, Raymond This Island Earth Jones, James Witches of Karres Schmitz and Tom "The Cold Equations" Godwin.

1950s stories from Galaxy of Ghouls

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

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

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

"The Ambassadors" by Anthony Boucher (1952)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the 1965 paperback edition of
E Pluribus Unicorn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Blood" by Fredric Brown (1955)

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

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

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

**********

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

Robot stories by Aldiss, Brown, Anderson, Budrys and Miller

Alright, more anthologized short stories (just what you wanted!)  Today we are tackling five stories I have selected from a 1968 anthology edited by Damon Knight and published by our friends at Belmont: The Metal Smile.  I was raking poor Damon over the coals just a few days ago, saying he had the absolute worst story in Tom Boardman's anthology of 26 stories, An ABC of Science Fiction, so today we have a chance to see Knight in a better light, as an editor instead of as a writer.  Another flip of the script: I often praise Belmont for their terrific covers (check out this one and this one and this one) but I own the 1974 edition of The Metal Smile and its cover is absolute garbage!  The colors are foul, the fonts are irritating, and the image is mind-bogglingly bad.  Even the composition of the cover, with the tutti frutti authors' names at the top, the title in the center, and the embarrassing illustration on the bottom, is terrible.  Perhaps most galling of all, the 1968 edition of The Metal Smile has a great cover!  When I saw the original cover on twitter, I was filled with envy! 

I have already read one of the stories in The Metal Smile, "Two-Handed Engine" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, and it is a good one that I recommend.  Hopefully I will be able to recommend the five stories I read today!

"The New Father Christmas" by Brian W. Aldiss (1958)

Brian Aldiss is on my good side today, having written one of the top three stories in An ABC of Science Fiction.  Let's hope he can stay there!

It is the year 2388!  Robin has been caretaker of an automatic factory for 35 years—he and his wife Roberta are the only humans authorized to live in the factory.  Robin is decrepit-- bedridden--and Roberta is an absent-minded softie who is letting three homeless bums live in the factory. These tramps have figured out a way to escape being thrown out with the trash by the robot who cleans up the factory every day.

In An ABC of Science Fiction we saw some relatively benign robots (in Daniel F. Galouye's "A Homey Atmosphere") and even robots who are nicer than people (in Robert F. Young's "Thirty Days Had September") but the cover text of The Metal Smile ("MAN VS. MACHINE") suggests that we can expect some scary robots today, and Aldiss here sets us off to a good start on our journey through mechanized mayhem.

Our story takes place on Christmas Day; Robin even receives a Christmas card in the mail from the Minister of Automatic Factories, possible evidence that there are other human beings alive beyond the factory—R and R never leave the factory themselves and sometimes suspect there are no people left alive out there.  (We are given some reason to believe that the robots consider humans obsolete and have been replacing them.)  One of the tramps decides that the factory owes them a Christmas present, setting off a course of events which results in all five characters coming to the unwelcome attention of the robotic security apparatus.

An entertaining little story, written in a fun jocular style that does not prevent it from feeling real or from generating a sense of menace.  Short and satisfying.  "The New Father Christmas" first saw print in F&SF and has since appeared in numerous anthologies and Aldiss collections.

I really like the Powers cover on No Time Like Tomorrow; it looks like a fungoid
Manhattan, and achieves a strong sense of size and depth

"Answer" by Fredric Brown (1954)

This is one of those short-shorts--one page long!

The story of "Answer" is that a society which has colonized many star systems and built many computers decides to network all the computers in the galaxy together to create what amounts to a single super powerful computer.  Once connected this computer is essentially a god, and not perhaps a kindly one!

I feel like I've already read a story with this exact plot--connecting a bunch of computers creates a dangerous deity--in the last few years, but I'll be damned if I can remember the author or title, and I guess I haven't been cataloging and labeling these blog posts efficiently enough for me to find any clues.  Frustrating!  Maybe I actually read this story long ago--"Answer," after first appearing in Brown's hardcover collection Angels and Spaceships, has been anthologized many times.  [UPDATE SEPTEMBER 23, 2018: The story that "Answer" reminded me of is probably Arthur C. Clarke's "Dial 'F' for Frankenstein.")

"Quixote and the Windmill" by Poul Anderson (1950)

Well, here's a story that has not been anthologized widely.  "Quixote and the Windmill" was first published by legendary editor John W. Campbell, Jr. in Astounding, and, excepting Damon Knight's The Metal Smile, has never appeared in an anthology, though it has been printed in five or six different Anderson collections, including two different German ones.  Did Campbell and Knight see something in the story other editors didn't?

Anderson starts his story off at a high literary pitch, with powerful metaphors (the robot has "the brutal maleness of a naval rifle or a blast furnace") and a brief sort of history of the philosophy of the robot that mentions "the Golem, Bacon's brazen head" and "Frankenstein's monster" and ends by telling us that the people of the utopian future of government handouts and copious leisure time in which Anderson has set his story are a little uneasy about the recently constructed super-strong, all-seeing prototype robot, equipped with the first artificial "volitional, non-specialized brain" that for the last year has been wandering around among them.

After the literary prologue we move to the down-to-earth primary scene of the story, a bar where two drunks complain that they don't fit into this utopia.  One is a technician who was smart enough to find his job so boringly routine that he quit, but not smart enough or creative enough to find a job among the elite planners and artists of this society.  The other is a laborer who can't find work because the machines do all the labor; his wife left him because she wanted a man who would amount to something other than a recipient of the "basic citizen's allowance."  With nothing to do these guys have become dedicated drinkers.

The robot walks by the bar, and the two drunks, seeing it as emblematic of their plight and a harbinger of a future with no humans, only efficient robots, rush outside to violently confront it.  The robot calmly explains that 1) even if the drunks are ill-suited to current society there will always be men with ability ("who think and dream and sing") who will carry on the human race and keep its glory alive and 2) that the robot itself is useless like the drunks are.  What need is there for a humanoid self-aware robot when we already have self-aware humans and a vast array of mindless automatic machines that can build things and grow food and accomplish menial tasks?  The reason this robot is just walking around is that its builders have no use for it!  SF is full of self-aware humanoid robots who do ordinary jobs, robot maids and so forth, so I thought this was an interesting tack for Anderson to take, proclaiming that humanoid robots are pointless.

If you read classic science fiction you encounter quite a few of these stories about how utopia is a bore because man needs challenges and accomplishments, and this one is hardly groundbreaking, which is perhaps why "Quixote and the Windmill" hasn't been anthologized much.  On the other hand it is entertaining and it is fun to see Anderson whip out all the literary and historical references (showing off that he is a member of the cognitive elite who need not fear being rendered obsolete by a machine!)  The problem of what role unskilled workers can play in an advanced society is of course an interesting topic, and Anderson doesn't offer any comfortable solution to this quandary--a certain percentage of people are just going to be unhappy and/or decadent parasites, and this percentage is going to go up as technology and the economy get more efficient.

For a second opinion, check out Thomas Anderson's review of "Quixote and the Windmill" at Schlock Value.

"First to Serve" by Algis Budrys (1954)

Another piece from Astounding.  Budrys is an unusual person with a strange biography and career, and I certainly want to like his work, but he doesn't always cooperate and produce stories that I think are good.  I was unhappy with his famous novel Rogue Moon, for example, though I thought Man of Earth a success.  Let's see what we've got this time.

"First to Serve" comes to us as a bunch of government records, mostly the diary of a robot who has been programmed with so much intelligence it has achieved self-awareness!  Rogue Moon and Man of Earth explore the question of "what is a man?", and "First to Serve" touches on the same topic; on the second page the robot writes "I'm still having trouble defining 'man.'  Apparently, even the men can't do a very satisfactory job of that."

Why has a robot with such intelligence been created?  It is the high tech future of the 1970s, and the armed services are looking for the perfect soldier in the form of a robot.  The scientists in the story have come up with the diarist, a prototype that fits the bill--the perfect soldier needs to be able to think independently and to improvise when confronted with unexpected obstacles or conditions, so such a robot soldier needs human-level intelligence.  But there is a problem--nobody really wants a robot that can think like a human because such a robot would be superior to a human; after all, it lacks a human's frailty and biological needs.  Such a superior being would threaten to replace humanity--one scientist, actually a spy who has been assigned to the project by one of the armed services, asks, "Suppose they decide they're better fit to run the world than we are?"

The climax of the story is when the aforementioned spy, drunk, tells the robot that the head of the project (whom the robot sees as a friend) has been neutralized and that the robot itself is slated for some unspecified grim fate.  We learn the aftermath in some letters and memos written by government officials.  In response to the spy's taunting the robot killed the spy and wrecked the lab; the authorities have encased it in concrete and sunk it in the Patuxent River.  The head of the project is on trial, but will probably be acquitted based on the evidence in the robot's diary.

This story is OK.  Perhaps because of the voices it employs, that of a robot and government employees speaking officially, it lacks the style and characterizations that enliven the Aldiss and Anderson stories.  Budrys flings a literary reference at us (Trilby) that flew over my head, so maybe there is more I'm missing?  "First to Serve" was reprinted in some Budrys collections and some anthologies with Isaac Asimov's name on them.

"I Made You" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1954)

Astounding strikes again!  I liked Miller's "No Moon For Me," a story about a guy who tricks the human race into exploring outer space that had adventure and hard SF elements as well as Malzbergian components, so I am looking forward to this one.

Whoa, this is a great military SF story, full of futuristic but believable equipment and weapons; it is also a good tense action story in which guys match wits with an alien "other" in a fight conducted under all kinds of restrictions--in some ways it reminded me of Fredric Brown's "Arena" and A. E. van Vogt's "The Rull."

A huge robot tank with an array of weapons is guarding a piece of territory on the moon.  The tank is damaged, so technicians drive over to fix it.  Unfortunately, the thing's IFF system is among the malfunctioning components, so it thinks every vehicle and person it detects is an enemy, and blasts the technicians.  Only one tech survives by hiding in a cave.  When more personnel arrive to help him out he struggles to figure out a way to defeat the tank in a short period of time (he is low on oxygen!) without blowing up the stuff the tank is guarding.

One of the cool things about the story is that it is largely told (though in the third person) from the tank's point of view; this kind of reminded me of van Vogt's "Black Destroyer." At the same time the humies are trying to figure out how to solve their problem, the robot tank is using logic and engineering knowledge to achieve its own goals!

Very good, an entertaining example of this type of SF--space suits and other futuristic gear, people puttering about on the moon, a life or death struggle, and engineering-based problem solving.

Thomas Anderson, a big fan of Miller's famous A Canticle for Leibowitz, has also written about "I Made You."  The story has deservedly been reprinted quite a lot, including in Joe Haldeman's Supertanks and Brian Aldiss's Introducing SF, both of which have striking covers that I love even though they exhibit very different cover design philosophies.

Car 54, where are you?

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Five worthwhile stories, all of them sort of pessimistic; though Anderson is confident that the gifted and talented among us will be fine, all the stories suggest that computers and robots will be a threat to the position or even lives of many of us.

More short SF stories written in the 1950s from the anthology shelf of the MPorcius Library in our next episode!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess we'll call this acceptable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adventures in Time and Space by Miller, Rocklynne, Williams and Bates

My copy of Selections from Adventures
in Time and Space, discovered on the
outside carts at Second Story Books

In 1946 Random House put out a huge hardcover anthology of SF stories entitled Adventures in Time and Space.  Edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas, this 1000-page volume has been reprinted numerous times and in 1952 won some kind of "All-Time Best Book" award from Astounding.  In 1954 Pennant Books put out a 200-page paperback selection of stories from the anthology, and in January of 2018 I paid 50 cents for a copy of this sixty-four-year-old paperback.

The first three stories in this book are by famous heroes of early 20th-century SF, Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt and "Lewis Padgett" (a pen name used by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), but today we are going to read stories from the volume by somewhat less famous people: P. Schuyler Miller, Ross Rocklynne, Robert Moore Williams, and Harry Bates.  I didn't plan it this way, but all these stories first appeared in Astounding when the famous John W. Campbell Jr. was editing the magazine.

"As Never Was" by P. Schuyler Miller (1944)

"As Never Was" appeared in 1944, and you can read the issue of Astounding in which it debuted for free at the internet archive.  Robert Silverberg included it in his anthologies Alpha 5 in 1974 and The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces in 1983--I guess we can say the story has the endorsement of the SF community.  Miller wrote a bunch of stories in the '30s and '40s and many essays and reviews for Astounding/Analog up to the '70s, but I don't know that I have ever read anything by him before.

This is one of those time-travel stories about an impossible paradox that hurts my poor brain.  In the 21st century one of the first archaeologists with access to a "time shuttle" travels to the future.  (There is little point in a scientist or historian traveling to the past because if you do so you inevitably change the future, creating and finding yourself in a different time stream so you can no longer return to the future you used to inhabit in order to share your findings.)  He returns with a knife made of a super metal and dies shortly after.  This metal has so much technological and economic potential that practitioners of every science bend every tool and technique at their disposal to duplicating the metal or finding more of it, but decades of such efforts are absolutely fruitless.  Legions of people travel to the future but they can never find a civilization that has even heard of the super metal, much less one able to produce it.  Finally, the grandson of the pioneering archaeologist figures out the mystery, which only reveals a still greater mystery: his grandfather discovered the knife 300 years in the future in the ruins of the museum where it was housed after his death in the 21st century--the knife exists only in a closed loop, it was never actually created.

This story is well-written, Miller injecting some melodrama and character stuff as well as ideas and images that keep it entertaining, and the central conceit is kind of mind-boggling, which makes it memorable.  I like it, and see why anthologists like it, but can't deny that the impossibility of it all has left an uncomfortable, nagging, residue of frustration in my mind, analogous to the feeling I get looking at one of those impossible tuning fork drawings.

"Quietus" by Ross Rocklynne (1940)

Isaac Asimov (or Martin H. Greenberg acting under his aegis) included "Quietus" in the volume of his series The Great Science Fiction Stories that covers 1940.  A year ago I read four stories by Rocklynne and found them to be a mixed bag.

Zoinks!  This is the kind of story that will get you fired from your cushy job at a tech industry giant!  In their introduction, the editors (besides telling you ahead of time it is a tragedy, thus killing the twist ending) say it may be that the "significance of this tale is its brilliant portrayal of the historical struggle of the feminine mind to cope with logic a priori." NSFW!

Tommy is the last man on Earth!  Extreme seismic activity, triggered by a meteor strike, has exterminated all life on Earth save for that in an area of about 100,000 square miles in North America, where Tommy lives, and that area didn't come through unscathed.  The holocaust occurred during Tommy's childhood, when he had run away from home and was hiding in a cave.  When he emerged from the cave everybody was dead.  (That'll show you, Mom and Dad!)  Since then he has lived by catching rabbits with his bare hands, his loneliness eased by his pet crow, Blacky, who repeats sentences Tommy says and sentences it heard before the cataclysm, phrases like "the price of wheat is going down" which mean nothing to Tommy.

Tommy is 21 now, and has a feeling of "hunger" for you know what!  (Most of us got that feeling around 12 or 13, but Tommy is perhaps a late bloomer.)  Luckily, he chances upon the last woman on Earth.  Skittish, she flees, and he pursues.  She is shy, but also curious, and never goes too far; in fact, when he hits his head on a log while swimming after her, she pulls Tommy's stunned form out of the water before taking flight anew.

Interspersed with this tale of boy meets girl is the story of married couple of alien explorers.  This pair of bird people fly above the Earth's devastated surface, looking for intelligent life.  When they see Blacky riding on Tommy's shoulder, the female bird person assumes that Blacky is intelligent and Tommy is his beast of burden.  Her husband isn't so sure, and urges her to refrain from jumping to conclusions.  The last woman on Earth is getting over her shyness and she and Tommy are about to properly meet when that chatterbox Blacky starts up with his damn squawking and scares her off.  Tommy, who has never been exposed to all that "bros before hoes" propaganda, is enraged and throws stones at Blacky, and the female alien shoots down the last man on Earth, thinking she is rescuing the last intelligent creature on Earth.  The last woman on Earth weeps over Tommy's body, and that is the end of the human race.

This story is OK, but feels contrived and is the weakest of the four items we are looking at today.

"Robot's Return" by Robert Moore Williams (1938)

I don't think I've read anything by Robert Moore Williams before; looking at isfdb, it seems he produced a lot of adventure novels with cool covers by people like Frazetta, Jones, Gaughan and St. John, stories of musclemen riding dinosaurs and astronauts fighting aliens with ray guns.  Sounds like a fun guy.  "Robot's Return" was first published in Astounding as "Robots Return;" you can read the original printing at the internet archive.  I think the introduction of the apostrophe is a mistake, either an artistic or typographical one, as there is more than one robot in the story.  I also like the 1938 illustration for the story by Charles Schneeman.

This is a sentimental piece with limited plot.  A squad of robots arrives on the far future Earth, a planet of ruined cities.  For thousands of years the citizens of the robot civilization have wondered where and how their people began.  As they search the decayed ruins of a once great metropolis, they debate such topics as the difference between a mere machine and a thinking robot and whether an animal, a creature which needs air and food to survive, could really have created their race of nuclear-powered metal people.  They finally find the answer, text engraved on a sort of memorial that proves that flesh creatures of this planet--men--built them to staff the spaceship that was to take the human race to Mars to escape an incurable disease.  Of course, the fate of the humans on the ship and why their robot servants lost their memories of Earth and humankind is still a mystery.

This tale is well-written, but there is really not much story to it--this one is trying to get by on sensawunda alone.  "Robot's Return" actually reminds me of one of those Lovecraftian stories in which a seeker after knowledge discovers the secret origin of his family or race and is horrified, even psychologically damaged, by his discovery, but Williams here uses the same story structure to achieve the opposite effect.  Instead of his protagonists being disillusioned and his readers disturbed by the revelation that human life is meaningless, Williams's robots are buoyed by the knowledge of their origins, and Williams seems to be trying to celebrate man's ambitions and abilities.  Not bad. 

"Farewell to the Master" by Harry Bates (1940)

Bates is another person whose work I am not familiar with.  He edited Astounding and Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror in the early 1930s, and wrote a bunch of space operas starring the hero Hawk Carse that I have never heard of before.  "Farewell to the Master" was published in Astounding after John W. Campbell Jr. had taken over, and was the basis of the film The Day the Earth Stood Still, one of those productions about how we should welcome alien imperialism because we humans are babies or savages who can't be trusted to behave without adult supervision backed by force.  These kinds of stories usually get on my nerves.  Well, let's see what the source material is like.

It is the future and mankind has colonized the solar system.  Three months ago a time machine constructed of a mysterious green metal suddenly materialized in Washington, D.C.  From out of the machine comes a dude with the face of an angel who radiates goodness and a giant green robot that looks like a naked muscleman with glowing red eyes.  The deific man only has time to say "I am Klaatu and this is Gnut" before some mentally ill guy snipes him dead!  Gnut stands still from that moment on, and a remorseful Earth builds a museum around the robot and the time machine and a tomb for Klaatu.  (We're not so remorseful that we refrain from trying to break into Gnut and the time machine with every drill and ray gun and acid we can come up with, but nothing we do can even scratch that green metal.)

Our hero is Cliff the photojournalist.  Cliff has been taking pictures of Gnut, day after day, and one day he is comparing his photos and realizes Gnut has moved a few centimeters!  The green gargantua must be moving at night when nobody is watyching, so Cliff hides out in the museum after it closes to see what happens.  (The security at this museum sucks!)

After some scenes of suspense and scenes of action, we learn that Gnut has been spending his nights in the time machine, working on an apparatus with which to reproduce Klaatu!  The sound each living thing makes is distinctive, like a fingerprint or DNA, and, with a decent recording of an animal or person's voice, Gnut's new machine can recreate the creature!  After some experiments (Gnut recreates an angry gorilla from a recording, and one of the action scenes is Gnut fighting the belligerent ape) and with some help from Cliff in getting the best possible recording of Klaatu's few words of greeting, Gnut has everything he needs and leaves in the time machine.  The twist ending of the story is the revelation that, while everybody assumed Klaatu was in charge and Gnut was his bodyguard or something, in fact it was Gnut who was the master!

Unless my memory of the movie is very faulty, The Day the Earth Stood Still shares only the rudiments of its basic premise with "Farewell to the Master."  "Farewell to the Master" is a good story, and I like it even if there is a big plot hole (there is a window in the museum through which Gnut and his glowing eyes are visible to those on the city streets outside, so it is impossible that he could have moved around at night unseen) and I don't quite get the real significance of the Gnut-is-the-master surprise ending--is it just a scary prophecy that in the future we will be subordinated to our machines?  Also, why did Gnut come back in time to visit us in the first place?     

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Despite their various problems, these stories are all interesting and entertaining, in their own right and as historical artifacts of the world before 1945.  A good purchase!

More 50¢ adventures in our next episode!