Whispers II: Etchison, Wisman, Wellman and Moore

Four more stories from Whispers II, the 1979 anthology of horror and fantasy stories edited by Stuart Schiff, who sought to bring to the world in his magazine and anthology series (both called Whispers) speculative fiction that was "less commercial" than those productions he felt were "diluted for the masses" now that the literature of the fantastic was "big business."

Our man tarbandu read and blogged about Whispers II back in 2010 at The PorPor Books Blog--I am just catching up now!

"We Have All Been Here Before" by Dennis Etchison (1979)

This is one of the stories that first appeared here in this hardcover edition of Whispers II.  It would later be included in the Etchison collections The Dark Country and Talking in the Dark.

I find those police procedural things in which the detectives sit in the precinct and talk about clues to be boring, and that is what we have here.  A psychic woman who loves to smoke cigarettes sits in a Los Angeles police HQ with the obese police chief, going into a trance and seeing visions and giving the Chief all the clues he needs to collar a prime suspect.  This woman, we learn, travels all over the country helping catch murderers and find missing persons and all that.

By the end of the story we realize that this woman really has psychic powers, but she doesn't always use them for good!  The murderer the fuzz are looking for, she can see, is some Hispanic vagabond, but she leads the coppers to her ex-boyfriend, a college professor who dumped her and broke her heart!  She is trying to send an innocent man to the clink for life!  And she has a list of other people she thinks wronged her that she is going to similarly frame!

Etchison complicates the story by coming up with a bizarre explanation of how the corpse of the girl murdered by that Latino vagrant came to police attention--a powerful rainstorm caused a mudslide at a cemetery and 47 corpses were disinterred and flowed down hill into people's yards.  When the cops counted up the bodies there was one too many, because that Latino killer buried his victim in the cemetery.  Maybe Etchison included this convoluted series of events in his story for symbolic purposes, or just to provide an opportunity to introduce some weird visuals into his tale.

I guess I'll call this one acceptable filler.   

"Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole" by Ken Wisman (1979)

Normally when I buy an anthology or get one from the library I just read a few stories that attract me and ignore most of the book's contents; life is brief, and I let my spider sense guide me away from stories I won't appreciate.  But sometimes, and this is the case this week with Whispers II, in a spirit of adventure and open-mindedness, I will grit my teeth and read all the stories in a book.  And here with "Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole" it is teeth-gritting time, because this story is making my spider sense tingle like crazy.  First, there's the joke title; I rarely like joke stories.  Second, when I flipped through Whispers II I noticed that four or five of this story's dozen pages were taken up with verse.  Thirdly, I had never heard of Ken Wiseman before and when I looked him up I saw that he had written an environmentalist novel about a baseball-playing Neanderthal.  "Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole" is the kind of story I would in ordinary circumstances dismiss out of hand and immediately forget even existed.

"Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole" is written in a kind of fairy tale/tall tale style, but I guess ironically.  To employ a word I rarely use, I think we can also call it "ribald."  In the surreal universe it depicts, men drive to the country, an area known as Mount Nemesis, where there are seven lakes inhabited by sexy aquatic fairies--mermaids and naiads and the like--to go fishing; "fishing" in this context means attaching jewels or sweets to a line and tossing it in the water and then reeling in one of the females who grabs it to have sex with her.  This story is an uninspired satire conflating the hobby of angling and the pursuit of love.

The plot:  The narrator, Oscar, and his oversized friend Archie, are on a fishing trip.  Here's a sample of Wisman's poetry, describing Archie, for you:

Now, Arch he was a Nemesis man;

A mountain o' man was he.

No bigger lover in the land,

His pole was a huge oak tree.

Archie learns that there is a secret eighth pool known as Hades Hole.  In it our heroes spot a particularly beautiful water nymph, a Scylla, and over the years they spend many fishing seasons trying to catch her.  Finally, they acquire the biggest pearl imaginable, one with a magic spell on it, and the Scylla takes this bait.  But instead of being dragged ashore for a quickie, the Scylla pulls Archie down into her labyrinthine lair, where she makes him her husband and he must clean the cave all day.

I will concede that "Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole" is a competent specimen of its type, but this is not the sort of thing I want to read.  I'll call this acceptable filler.

"Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole" made its debut in Whispers II, and for some reason has never been reprinted anywhere.

"Trill Coster's Burden" by Manly Wade Wellman (1979)

Manly Wade Wellman has a good reputation, wrote one of the Captain Future novels and appeared in Weird Tales and Astounding, so in theory I should be interested in him, but I've avoided him because my impression has been that he writes about hillbillies and the American South, topics that have never exercised much hold over me.  But maybe I have been wrong, maybe this guy is some kind of virtuoso wordsmith and will inspire in me a fascination with moonshine and mint juleps?

John (Wellman's most famous character and our narrator) and his fiance Evadare come to a small town in the mountains.  The sexiest woman in this town, Trill Coster, a slut who used her feminine wiles to break up families and ruin men's lives, has just died.  The people in this town believe in "sin-eating," that a living person can take on the sins of a recently deceased person so that person won't go to Hell, and the one man in this town who still had tender feelings for the impious and malignant Trill Coster is begging people to take on the dead troublemaker's sins.  Evadare, whom John portrays as a woman of pure character, always trying to help everybody, agrees to accept Trill's sins.

That night around the campfire Trill's sins, smoky forms with green glowing eyes, surround our heroes and offer them jewels.  A woman from the town, a sexy wench who envied Trill's power over men, also comes by to try to seduce John.  Evadare rejects the sins and John rejects the seductress, and in the morning we learn that the seductress, who longed to be like Trill, has gone insane--she took up one of the jewels and Trill's sins have been transferred to her.  John and Evadare are married in the spot where, by resisting all temptation, she affirmed her goodness and he affirmed his commitment to her.

This isn't really my thing but it succeeds in its aims, the pacing and structure and style are all good.  Moderate recommendation, I suppose.  I will probably stop giving Wellman such a wide berth.

"Trill Coster's Burden" is another story that was first published in Whispers II, but it has been reprinted in a number of Wellman collections and some anthologies.

"Conversation Piece" by Ward Moore (1978)

Yes, there are two stories with this title in Whispers II.  We read Moore's "It Becomes Necessary" three years ago.

It is Independence Day in New York, the year 1805!  In the midst of the festivities a businessman, Nicholas Apperson, sees a beautiful foreign woman, he suspects a Russian, and is so taken with her he leads her away and has sex with her.  These two don't even talk--this woman doesn't even speak English, so they can't talk!

After much sport in the dark during the fireworks display, the foreign beauty's dozen or so companions, most of them men, catch up to them.  The woman was willing and seems to have no regrets, but her compatriots are agitated, drawing swords and pulling pistols.  None of them can speak English, but make their desires known by signs, many of which involve the pistols.  The merchant and the foreigners go to Apperson's house, where Apperson eagerly agrees to marry the beauty, whose name is apparently Tatyana and who is apparently a princess.  The marriage is accomplished that very evening and followed by a raucous party, the Russians having brought with them a violin and Apperson directing his servants to empty the wine cellar for the occasion.  The Russians depart, never to be seen again, and Nicholas and Tatyana Apperson enjoy a long happy married life, during which they never speak intelligibly to each other, instead communicating via little signs and smiles.

"Conversation Piece" is long, with lots of details of interior decor, costume, social customs, politics and ideology (Apperson keeps stressing that he is a republican who disdains aristocracy, for example) that I guess are supposed to make you think you are in the New York of the Napoleonic Era.  If there is speculative fiction content it is well-hidden--I kept thinking maybe it was going to be revealed that these Russians were time travelling refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution or something like that, but there were no signals I could decipher of such an esoteric meaning lurking below the surface.

I can't say this story is bad, but I can't recommend it, either.  Yet again "Acceptable" is what we have to go with.

"Conversation Piece" was first printed in Whispers #11-12, and has never appeared outside the Whispers brand.

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All four of these stories are about women, as seen from a male perspective.  Women are mysterious, maybe incomprehensible; women have strange powers that can be used to make us do things that we don't want to do, things that may be immoral or dangerous; a relationship with a woman can make or break your life.

In our next episode we finish up with Whispers II.

From James H. Schmitz, Henry Kuttner, and Harlan Ellison: stories about being hunted!

In 1988 Baen Books published an anthology edited by David Drake, Things Hunting Men (a companion to another anthology, Men Hunting Things.)  Let's check out stories from this volume by three writers whose work we have talked about in the past here at MPorcius Fiction Log, James H. Schmitz (remember his stories about the female secret police of the future?), Henry Kuttner (remember his novel of a dangerous criminal who masterminds revolutionary change on Venus?) and Harlan Ellison (remember when he physically attacked Charles Platt?)

Things Hunting Men and the three magazines these stories first appeared in are all available for free at the internet archive; being a fan of classic SF is an inexpensive hobby.

"Greenface" by James H. Schmitz (1943)

In his intro to the story in Things Hunting Men, Drake reminds us that this is Schmitz's first published story, and suggests that he prefers it to Schmitz's interstellar espionage and psychic powers capers.  "Greenface" was printed originally in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown, and has appeared in numerous anthologies and collections, including ones edited by Ray Bradbury and Martin H. Greenberg, as well three different books from Baen--the people at Baen must really think it is a winner!

Hogan Masters is a small businessman just trying to make it in this world of ours!  It is the first season of his venture, Hogan Fishing Camp, a collection of cabins on Thursday Lake he rents to anglers and an ice house in which to store the fish they catch.  Hogan hopes that this inaugural season will be successful enough that he'll be able to get together enough money to marry his girlfriend, Julia Allison.  But one day (by coincidence, the day he decided to drink a few beers in the early afternoon--oh, Hogan, you know that's not good business!) he sees a sort of green blob of protoplasm with tentacles devour a garter snake.  A few weeks later the creature reappears, larger and more menacing, and Hogan is not the only one to see it, proving it's not just the booze messing with him!

"Greenface" is a solid and fun horror/thriller story.  We follow the course of Hogan's Ahab-like weeks-long effort to hunt down the steadily-growing monster, a duel which turns Hogan into a drunk, ruins his business, and wrecks his relationships with Julia and Julia's father.  (Damn you, Greenface!)  Schmitz does a good job with the SF monster stuff (as we expect in an old SF story, Hogan learns all about the monster's idiosyncratic biology and tries to use that knowledge to defeat the creature), the action scenes, and the more psychological character-based guy-who-ruins-his-life stuff.  (Spoiler: John W. Campbell, Jr. told Barry Malzberg that "mainstream literature is about failure" but science fiction is about heroes, success and discovery,* and "Greenface" has an un-Ahab-like happy ending.)

Thumbs up!

*See Malzberg's essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971."

"Happy Ending" by Henry Kuttner (1948)

Here in Things Hunting Men, and when it first appeared in Thrilling Wonder, "Happy Ending" was credited solely to Kuttner, but isfdb credits Kuttner's wife C. L. Moore as a co-author.  "Happy Ending" seems to have been well-received by the SF community--it was included in Bleir and Dikty's The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949 and by Damon Knight in the oft-republished anthology Beyond Tomorrow, as well as other publications.  In his intro to "Happy Ending" in Things Hunting Men, Drake laments that many SF writers fail to grow--their late work is no better than their early work.  Drake says that Kuttner, whose early work was "crude," grew better and better over the course of his career; as a case in point, he notes the structure of "Happy Ending," which is a little unconventional, starting with the ending and then filling us in on how the protagonist got there via flashbacks that ultimately turn upside down our beliefs about what was going on.

(Drake also praises C. L. Moore's Jirel stories, and admits that his own first published story, 1967's "Denkirch," a Lovecraftian thing, was not good.)

"Happy Ending" is a story that, like so many old SF tales, romanticizes science and logic and quick thinking, presents a world-shaking paradigm shift, and strives to give us that old sense of wonder at the boundless possibilities of technology and the future.  And it works!

It is 1949 and James Kelvin is a Chicago journalist spending some time in the warm air of California in an effort to relieve his sinus problems.  He meets a time-travelling robot who tells an unbelieving Kelvin that it needs gold to repair its time travel mechanism--the robot wanted to travel to 1970 but accidentally ended up in 1949.  In exchange for the gold plate from his watch, the robot gives Kelvin a device that can enable him to establish a rapport with the mind of a man in the far far future; people in the future have evolved super intelligence, so by transmitting his problems into a future man's mind Kelvin can receive answers to them.  If he can pose just the right questions to this future brain, Kelvin can become a rich man!  Unfortunately, on his first try the device malfunctions (user error!) and a being called Tharn becomes alerted to Kelvin's temporal mental probing.  The robot warns Kelvin that Tharn is a dangerous android and will now hunt the journalist down!

Much of the story follows Kelvin's use of the device to escape Tharn, who has seven fingers on each hand and wears a turban.  The device works as advertised, allowing Kelvin to read the mind of some guy in the far future and learn how to, for example, teleport or breathe while underwater, very useful skills when you are trying to escape from a relentless android!  As the story proceeds to its mind-blowing conclusion we are forced to revise our assumptions about the motives and even identities of all the characters in this crazy drama.

"Happy Ending" is a fun story, chalk up another success for Kuttner (and Moore?)

"Blind Lightning" by Harlan Ellison (1956)

Iowa-native Drake uses his intro to "Blind Lightning" to brag about how awesome Iowa is and to tell us how he first became acquainted with Harlan Ellison's writing--when a high school English teacher shared with him a copy of Ellison's 1961 collection Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-up Generation, which Drake calls "a stunning volume."

"Blind Lightning" was first published in Fantastic Universe.  When I looked briefly at the scan of the June 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe it was obvious that the version of "Blind Lightning" there was different than the version in Things Hunting Men, with paragraphs in different order, some different word choices, etc.  Hmm....  "Blind Lightning" was included in Robert Silverberg's 1966 anthology Earthmen and Strangers and the 1971 Ellison collection Alone Against Tomorrow; I own paperback editions of both (my 1979 copy of Alone Against Tomorrow is signed by Ellison--envy me, Ellison collectors!) and decided to read the version in Alone Against Tomorrow on the theory that that is the version in my possession most likely to be the one preferred by the author.

Xenoecologist Ben Kettridge, an old man (he's in his fifties!) is alone, exploring a jungle on planet Blestone; his comrades from star ship Jeremy Bentham will pick him up in six hours.  He gets captured by Lad-nar, a nine-foot-tall native barbarian--this monster's species is intelligent, with a language and a religion, but no tools or clothes or buildings.  Blestone is plagued by periodic electrical storms of terrible ferocity, and the natives must hide in their caves during these storms or be killed by lightning.  The storms are of long duration, so the natives typically capture some game to bring into their caves with them, and Kettridge is brought to Lad-nar's cave to serve just this purpose.  Kettridge learns all this because Kettridge and the native can communicate telepathically, to the surprise of both.

While waiting to be eaten Kettridge thinks back to earlier in his career, when he was on a research team which developed some chemical.  The chemical got loose or something and killed 25,000 people.  Kettridge feels guilty about this, and decides to earn some kind of redemption by helping Lad-nar's race, which Kettridge believes to be in terminal decline.  Kettridge is killed by lightning because he gives Lad-nar his elastic lightning-proof space suit so Lad-nar can walk outside the cave.  As he dies Kettridge instructs Lad-nar in how to contact the human exploration team and we readers are led to believe that Lad-nar's race will get help from the humans and not go extinct after all.

This story is just OK.  It is sentimental and melodramatic and the verbiage is a little extravagant, a bit loud and long-winded.  In my experience Ellison doesn't create characters in his fiction; it is always Ellison telling some story that is meant to hammer some idea into you or wring some emotion out of you, and when I read an Ellison story I always hear Ellison's voice in my head, and he is always yelling or snarling sarcastically or putting on some maudlin voice.  (This is where I confess that I don't really like Ellison as a person, and I am afraid it is an obstacle to my appreciating his work.)

I guess the interesting thing about "Blind Lightning" is the prominence of religion; Lad-nar considers the lightning to come from one god and is convinced that the human explorers are even greater gods, while Kettridge prays for help, and is himself a sort of Christ-figure--his walking in the deadly storm (providing a demonstration of the utility of his space suit to Lad-nar) is kind of like Jesus walking on water, and Kettridge dies while showing a race of people how to live without fear and how to get to the heavens.  In the scene in which Lad-nar and Kettridge inexplicably communicate telepathically, we are told that "To Kettridge it seemed there was a third being in the cave.  The hideous beast before him, himself...and a third" and I couldn't help but think the third might be God, trying to build a bridge between these two alien races and give Kettridge a chance to redeem himself.  Of course, I just recently read Gene Wolfe's 1,100 page The Wizard Knight and was just yesterday talking to my wife about U2's October and so have gotten into the habit of turning over every sentence to look for Christian messages, even where you wouldn't expect them, like in Ellison's writing.

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Three worthwhile stories.  More old SF tales in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

Three 1943 stories by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner

In the comments to my recent blog post about Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's Keeps stories, "Clash By Night" and Fury, George points out that the volume of Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg's The Great Science Fiction Stories covering 1943 includes five stories by Kuttner and Moore.  I had read three of them, "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," "Clash By Night," and "The Proud Robot," and decided to read the other two, "Doorway Into Time" and "The Iron Standard" tout de suite.  To round out this blog post I thought I'd also read another 1943 Kuttner and Moore story, "Open Secret."  I read all three in scans of 1943 magazines available at the internet archive.

"Doorway Into Time" by C. L. Moore

"Doorway Into Time" first appeared in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, and just look at the Virgil Finlay cover illustrating it!  Gorgeous!  A man in a space helmet, a hot chick, and a saurian alien with some kind of energy weapon--three of our favorite things!--in bold colors in what looks like a Mucha composition!  A masterpiece!  In fact, this whole magazine is beautiful, with Finlay illustrations for a 1930 novel by John Taine, Iron Star, and Hannes Bok illos for Robert Chambers' 1895 "The Yellow Sign."  Worth a look if you are a fan of either of these unique, idiosyncratic artists.

On another world, a being with a passion for beauty lives among the vast collection of exquisite things he has acquired on his many journeys through space and time.  Over the centuries of his existence he has acquired something else--a taste for danger!  The more risk incurred in the collection of an item, the more he treasures it, and, old as he is, he has seen much and grown jaded, so that only terrible danger can excite him!

Via a screen he scans the universe for a thing of beauty whose acquisition will present the risk he craves, and he finally discovers it--a human woman!  Never has he seen a human before, and the beauty of the female form has him jumping through his interdimensional tunnel in hot pursuit of this jewel! 

The Earth woman, Alanna, is hanging out in the lab of her boyfriend, scientist Paul, who is working on his lightning weapon.  When the alien snatches Alanna, Paul grabs up his brand new electro blaster and chases them through the dimensional portal.  Paul and Alanna explore the alien's palace, taking in bizarre sights and facing hazards.  They struggle against the alien collector and eventually escape back through the tunnel to Earth; the alien decides not to pursue them further.

"Doorway Into Time" has an odd, sad tone that seems calculated to remind you of the futility of life.  The alien, despite its tremendous power and experience, is dissatisfied with its accomplishments, and the humans prove a disappointment to him; he is immune to their electric weapon, so they do not present the challenge he sought.  As for the humans, Alanna is sort of a feckless ditz, while Paul suffers the dismay of watching the alien shrug off the blasts of the super weapon he just invented.  Alanna and Paul spend much of the story thinking that their trip to the alien palace is just a dream, and Moore's long passages describing Paul's fruitless efforts to gun down the invulnerable alien reminded me of those nightmares in which, no matter how hard I try, I can't open my junior high locker or get the car started or find my way in a labyrinthine university building or run from danger or scream for help.

The most memorable components of the story are perhaps Moore's descriptions of extraterrestrial objets d'art, decorations, and mounted specimens; there are a number of Kuttner and Moore stories, like "Shock," in which cleverly described futuristic or alien artifacts loom large.  These strange items are a part of Moore's admirable effort in "Doorway Into Time" to depict true alienness.  Some of the art installations Paul and Alanna look at are so strange to them, so radically beyond their experiences on Earth, that their minds can't really comprehend them.  Similarly, Moore tells us repeatedly that the alien collector has no idea what the symbols on some artifact mean, or if some beautiful items he has hanging on his wall were once alive or are simply inorganic, or what the people he robbed of a big glowing stone thought of the stone.  The pervasive theme of the impossibility of achieving understanding across cultures adds to the story's air of futility.

While many individual components of the story are good and show inventiveness and effort, I am reluctant to strongly recommend "Doorway Into Time"; as a whole it is just not satisfying.  None of the characters accomplishes anything and none of the characters gets killed or otherwise ruined, so the story lacks any cathartic triumph or tragedy and left me feeling uneasy, like there should have been something more, a second shoe that never dropped.  I can certainly recommend it as a curiosity, valuable to students of Moore's work and 1940s SF in general, but based on conventional criteria (is it a solidly entertaining reading experience?) I'd have to say it is just acceptable.

"Doorway Into Time" may have left me feeling dissatisfied, but SF historian Sam Moskowitz included it in the 1965 anthology Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction (I actually read a few stories from that anthology back in my Iowa days, during this blog's infancy) and it was also included in Gogo Lewis and Seon Manley's anthology of "sinister" stories by women, Ladies of Fantasy. 

"The Iron Standard" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore 

This is one of those SF stories in which smart guys get themselves out of a jam by using their brains.  This is fine in a story, of course, but we all know that in real life people overcome challenges through violence or sex appeal.

Our heroes in "The Iron Standard" are the six-man crew of the first ship to land on Venus, explorers carefully chosen for their intelligence and physical fitness.  This diverse cast includes a Navajo botanist, an Irish engineer ("a Kerry man" with fiery red hair and a fiery temper to match!) and the son of a rich WASP as the supercargo and handyman who, I guess, is on board the ship for kicks.  (Remember when a rich man's son got himself signed on to a space crew for the hell of it in A. E. van Vogt's The Man With a Thousand Names?  Now there was a trip!)  These dudes are in a bind because they traded away their food supplies to the Venusians for native food, and all that Venusian food has spoiled (those preservatives and GMOs aren't looking so bad now, are they, guys?)  Now the Earthers are facing starvation because they can't figure out any way to procure more food.

Kuttner and Moore come up with a long list of obstacles that stand between the Earthmen and the chow they so desperately need.  They surrendered their firearms when the natives proved to be so friendly so they can't just steal food.*  There are no sizable animals or edible plants in Venus's swampy wilderness so hunting, trapping, and gathering are out.  They can't buy food because the Venusians are on the "iron standard" of the title--gold and silver are very common on Venus, rendering the money the explorers brought valueless.  Venusian society is very stable and conservative, and the innumerable customs and institutions set up to prevent innovations or disruptions are the astronaut's biggest obstacle; for example, they can't beg for food or earn money by their labor because they aren't members of the beggar's guild or the laborer's guild, and to join a guild you have to pay some hefty entry fees.

The explorers scramble for ways out of their predicament, in the process realizing that many Venusians are open to change but those guilds have a stranglehold over politics and economics on Venus, suppressing any change because it might threaten their lofty position.  In a gimmicky way our heroes figure out a way to destabilize the Venusian economy while keeping within all those pesky laws; fearful of the first social or economic change in centuries, the guilds cry uncle, bribing the Earthers to cease their undermining ways with enough money to finance their food requirements until they can take off for Earth in a year's time.  It is suggested that the humans have given the static Venusian society a much-needed nudge and a period of dynamism and innovation is about to begin.

This is a mediocre story.  The whole thing feels contrived, it lacks any emotional content, and the characters all feel flat--the fact that one is an American Indian, another a short-tempered Irish-American and another a, as we might say today, "child of privilege," has no effect on the plot, it is just pointless window-dressing.  Maybe Kuttner and Moore simply thought it a good idea to show people from different backgrounds palling around and working together for a common goal?  That's commendable, and I guess understandable during the period of world crisis in which the story was published, but it's not compelling or entertaining writing.  While "Doorway Into Time" had numerous good elements but failed to really work as a whole, "The Iron Standard" is structured and organized in a way that functions but only on the most basic and simple level.  Barely acceptable.

After first appearing in Astounding, "The Iron Standard" was included in Martin Greenberg's Men Against the Stars and the British paperback Best of Kuttner 2.  (You'll remember that I read Best of Kuttner 1 back in 2014.  Good Lord, I've been operating this blog for-fucking-ever.)

*That's right, these high-IQ individuals went to an alien world where no Earthman had ever been before and the first thing they did was give away their weapons and food.

"Open Secret" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

Here's another story from Astounding.  All you dino fans out there will be interested to know this issue of Astounding includes a non-fiction article by Willy Ley that tries to convince you that Tyrannosaurus Rex was not a ferocious killing machine but a lumbering scavenger.  Don't go breaking my heart, science boy!  "Open Secret" was included by Murray Leinster in a 1950s anthology published in the US and the UK, Great Stories of Science Fiction.

Psychiatrist Mike Jerrold is visiting New York City on business.  Instead of going to the museum to look at sculptures, he visits his physician friend at his skyscraper office for a check up.  (Where are this guy's priorities?)  There is an accident with the elevator and Jerrold ends up on the wrong floor, where he sees an amazing sight--many-armed robots are doing something weird with electronic maps of Manhattan!

Shocked and amazed by these robots (this story is set in the early- to mid-20th century, so Mike the shrink isn't seeing robots everyday at the grocery store like you and I do), Jerrold decides to investigate.  First step in his investigation is to get a date with the beautiful redhead sitting at the reception desk in the office with those robots.  (I told you that this is how real people overcome obstacles!)  He learns that there is an office of robots in every big city in the world, that these robots are running human society by subtly, cunningly, altering our minds, crafting our desires and aversions so that our actions, in aggregate, shift society in the direction dictated by their own inscrutable objectives.  "They manipulate stocks, swing business deals, start wars and stop them," that hot receptionist, Betty Andrews, tells Jerrold.  "They want the world different, but I don't know how."

Jerrold switches to Method #1 in his effort to overthrow the robots' rule, but fails utterly--he shoots an automatic pistol into a robot and then pours acid on its elaborate three-dimensional map of Midtown Manhattan, but the robot just ignores him and his fruitless attacks!  Jerrold feels like a "gnat"--he and his best efforts are beneath the invincible robots' notice!  Soon the robots will tinker with his brain and, like his new girlfriend, he will accept that resistance to robot rule is hopeless!

Here we have a story that, like the first we discussed today, suggests life is pointless, that things are out of our control.  Like the humans in Moore's "Doorway Into Time," Mike Jerrold, through an unforeseeable twist of fate, enters a dream-like environment, one characterized by bizarre sights and a deep sense of futility.  Like the alien in "Doorway Into Time," Betty Andrews sadly realizes she is doomed to a life bereft of satisfaction, whether or not her immediate desires are fulfilled.

"I'm very lonely, Mr. Mike Jerrold.  I like you to hold me.  Do you know what may happen to us?"

"What?" he asked softly.

"Marriage," she said, shrugging a little.  "Or not.  It doesn't matter." 

Ouch!

"Open Secret" is the most straightforward and economical of the stories we're reading today, and while not as stylistically ambitious as "Doorway Into Time," I think it is the most satisfying and entertaining of the three.  Kuttner and Moore scholars will notice in the text a reference to the poetry of Lewis Carroll, in this case "The Hunting of the Snark" and recall that in this same year the Carroll-centric "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" was published.

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"The Iron Standard" is a conventional and bland puzzle story, "Open Secret" a more or less conventional sex and violence horror story that is quite ably put together, while the somewhat befuddling "Doorway Into Time" is creative and baroque, with one interesting character (the alien) and a strong sense of mood, but does not feel quite finished.  These were all worth my time, but they do not represent Kuttner and Moore's best work.

"Clash By Night" and Fury by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

Back in May of last year, in our nation's capital, I purchased the 1975 Magnum/Prestige paperback edition of Fury by beloved SF writing team and married couple Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.  I decided to read it this recent weekend but a quick look at the indispensable isfdb indicated it was a sequel to the story "Clash By Night," so first I went to the indispensable internet archive to read that story in a scan of its first appearance in John Campbell's Jr.'s Astounding.

"The Keeps know nothing of the Free Companions.  They don't want to."

"Clash By Night" (1943)

"Clash By Night" is widely admired, appearing in lots of "Best of" collections and in anthologies of military SF, so as a fan of Kuttner and Moore and a guy who likes stories about war and violence as much as anybody, I was looking forward to it.

Our tale is set on Venus, some centuries after the planet was colonized by Earthmen whose descendants today live in undersea dome cities, the surface being covered in deathworld jungles where every plant and animal strives to destroy the human and all his works.  These cities, known as Keeps, do not get along, and hire mercenaries in their wars on each other.  The mercenaries, known as Free Companions, unlike the soft city dwellers, have skins burned black (like Leigh Brackett's Mercurian hero Eric John Stark) by the rays of the sun because of all the time they spend on the surface, manning their warships and their coastal fortresses.

The protagonist of "Clash By Night" is Captain Brian Scott of Doone's Free Companions, and in this story we follow his evolving relationships with two women (the girlfriend he is leaving and the new one he is leaving her for) and a newly enlisted soldier (the new gf's brother), as well as Scott's rivalry with a fellow officer who envies Scott's higher rank.  We also observe one of Doone's Free Companions' military campaigns, consisting of some diplomacy as Scott is charged by the Doone's c-in-c with hiring another free company on as subcontractors, and then a big air-sea battle.

It is immediately apparent, from an introduction penned by historians residing in the peaceful Venus of the far future who doubt the veracity of what follows, and from an epigraph from Kipling's "Tommy," why "Clash By Night" appeals to military SF people like David Drake--the story sympathizes with soldiers, and one of its main themes is the gulf between civilians and fighting men: the civilian can never understand what the soldier has gone through, and civilians too often fail to appreciate how much they rely on soldiers for the peace, prosperity, and comfort they enjoy and how the progress a society makes is only possible behind the protection of its defenders.  The story's first scene takes place during a carnival season, in a bar, where civilians are insulting the Free Companions and Scott narrowly prevents a brawl from erupting.

"Clash By Night" has much to recommend it beyond this somewhat tendentious theme (we've all heard the case that service people make our cushy lives possible and don't get enough respect, but we've all also heard the case that we spend way too much on defense and a big military establishment and the glorification of the military leads to conflict.)  Another major theme of the story is change: the sadness of change, obstacles to the changes you want to see and the inevitability of the changes you'd rather not see.  Before the big battle Scott decides that it will be his last, that he will retire from the mercenary biz after the campaign and settle down within a Keep with that new girlfriend--but will events force him to remain with the company?  Throughout the story Scott harps on the idea that the days of warring Keeps and mercenary companies will soon (in a few hundred years) end and their exploits will be forgotten.  Earth was destroyed in a nuclear war after Venus colonization began (each Keep has a huge globe depicting the Earth in a central public place as a reminder of the world of their ancestors) and the use of nuclear power is forbidden on Venus--renegades who develop or employ atomic weapons are subject to summary execution, but these renegades keep popping up regardless.   

"Clash By Night" is also a very good adventure story.  Kuttner and Moore's Venus is a great setting, full of danger and intrigue, and the action scenes--surviving a ship wreck, traversing a monster-haunted jungle, fighting in a naval battle--are all well done.  The human drama scenes--yearning for a better life, clashes of will and differences of opinion--are also good.  I really enjoyed this one.

...man had stopped growing.  His destiny was no longer to be found in the Keeps.  The great civilization of Earth must not reach a dead end under the seas of this fertile planet.

Fury (1947)

Fury first appeared as a serial over three issues of Astounding and, a big hit, has been reprinted numerous times, including under a different title (Destination: Infinity) and in various languages.  My 1977 edition includes an introduction by C. L. Moore in which Moore talks about her writing partnership with Kuttner and tells us what she believes are the main themes of Kuttner's work and of her own.  (Former: "Authority is dangerous and I will never submit to it."  Latter: "The most treacherous thing in life is love."  These are good themes!)  Moore says she wrote an eighth or less of Fury, that she didn't really identify with the protagonist, and we will soon see why!

Moore's intro alone is worth the three bucks I paid for this book, and I recommend it to all those interested in Golden Age SF and the pulps.  Remember that Barry Malzberg, a man with a deep knowledge and commitment to SF, idolizes Kuttner and Moore.  (One of Malzberg's many pseudonyms, K. M. O'Donnell, is based on their initials and their pen name, Lawrence O'Donnell, the name under which these Keep stories originally appeared.) 

Fury takes place a few centuries after "Clash By Night."  Venus is united under a single government, so the wars between the Keeps are over and the Free Companies have been disbanded.  In this novel Kuttner and Moore expand on one of the themes of "Clash By Night" I didn't talk much about above, that Keep society is decadent and many citizens are self-described hedonists who do no work and spend their time using drugs and sitting in virtual reality machines and that kind of thing.  K & M also add a new wrinkle to Keep society: a sizable minority of Keep inhabitants are mutants who are tall and thin and have life spans of up to seven or even ten centuries; the child of two mutant parents inherits this same longevity mutation.  Because of their ability to amass greater experience and wisdom than the physically shorter and shorter-lived majority, in the more or less democratic society of the Keeps these "Immortals" have become a sort of ruling class.

The protagonist of the novel is Sam Reed, born Sam Harker.  The Harkers are a family of Immortals, in fact the leading family on Venus, so Sam has a long life ahead of him, but he does not know it!  You see, Sam's father was one of those decadent hedonists and also mentally ill, and behaves irrationally: Sam's mother died giving birth to Sam, so his vengeful father had his infant body distorted (by a drug addict endocrinologist willing to do anything for money for her next hit) to appear like that of a mortal and cuts all ties to the kid, giving him up to adoption by a mortal family.

Little Sam, who has the brain of one of the superior mutants but the body and social standing of a normy, feels bored with ordinary life and acts out, running away from home as a child, trying various jobs, and quickly becoming a misanthropic and anti-social criminal--a thief, a conman and a murderer.

In his early forties, Sam gets mixed up in the politics of the Immortals who run the Keeps by manipulating the technically independent legislatures.  The Immortal intellectuals can see that the human race is in terminal decline because it is losing all its get-up-and-go, the result of life being too easy.  The solution to this problem is for the Keeps to take up the challenge of colonizing the radically inhospitable surface of Venus, those hellish jungles full of colossal monsters and venomous plants.  A minority faction led by Robin Hale, the last surviving Free Companion, wants to start the colonization effort at once.  The vast majority of Immortals think Hale is jumping the gun, that humanity isn't ready to wholeheartedly engage in the colonization effort and that Hale will fail and this will terminally demoralize the human race, putting the last nail in humanity's coffin, so to speak.  So, this majority faction, led by the Harkers, hires Sam to assassinate Hale, but Sam instead decides to become Hale's right hand man in the colonization effort!

Sam spends a couple of months as Hale's PR man, manipulating the media and the masses to win their support for the colonization plan (which is repeatedly likened to the Crusades--Fury was written before college professors had convinced everybody that the Crusaders were the bad guys.)  But then one of Sam's women, secretly in the employ of the Harkers, betrays Sam, drugging him!  When Sam wakes up, forty years have passed!  Seeing that four decades have wrought no substantial changes to his physique, Sam finally realizes he is an Immortal in a body that only looks like that of a mundane!

Via various complicated crimes and acts of espionage, Sam gets some money together, hooks up with Hale again, and gets the stalled colonization effort back on track.  The climax of this part of the book sees Sam carve out a modus vivendi with the majority faction of Immortals by trouncing the patriarch of the Harker clan in a televised political debate through the liberal use of lies, skulduggery and acts of terrorism!

The bravest, toughest and smartest men in the Keeps volunteer for service on the surface, where they expand the colony inch by inch in the face of the resistance of the ravenous pulsating jungle.  Over the course of five hard years of labor and fighting, these volunteers grow into a new breed of man, a breed like the pioneers and adventurers of Old Earth--they are disciplined and independent, courageous and industrious, and they have contempt for the softies back in the Keeps who live off the work of others and let the Immortals do their thinking for them.  Also after five years, they come to realize that Sam's promises of the glorious treasures awaiting them on the surface were a load of crap, and they launch a mutiny!  The hi-tech war that erupts forces the limp and decadent populations of the Keeps to flee their easy lives and move to the nightmare surface--but to what extent is this war real and to what extent is it just another scam from Sam the sham, manipulator of the Venus man?

The last few pages of the book show us what happens twenty years after the migration from the Keeps to the surface: the human race has been saved from irreversible decline by Sam's ruthlessness and duplicity, but Sam has outlived his usefulness and he is brought down by the machinations of the Immortals.  The human race was in such trouble that it needed a merciless brute like Sam to get itself out of its rut, but once that problem is solved, Sam--a selfish jerk with no conscience and overweening ambition--is himself a society-threatening problem, and so he is neutralized.  Kuttner compares Sam to Moses, who led his people to the promised land but could not live there himself, while I was reminded of the character of Pirrie in Death of Grass (AKA No Blade of Grass) by John Christopher and of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, who, in One Lonely Night, begins to think of himself as the sort of evil man whom society needs to defend itself from still more evil men.

The captive Sam is informed that he is in fact a member of the Harker family against whom he has struggled, and what happened to him during those 40 years of slumber.  Then he is put to sleep again--he will probably live for another 900 or 1000 years, and is told that if the human race again needs him, he will be awakened.  (This reminded me of King Arthur.)  This opens up the possibility of a sequel, but I don't believe Kuttner and Moore ever did write a third Keeps story.

Fury is a good novel full of drama and SF ideas.  Parts of it read like scenes from organized crime fiction, with heists and intrigues in which Sam plays members of the powerful Harker family against each other, taking advantage of love triangles and drug addictions (people in this novel use lots of weird drugs derived from Venusian flora and fauna.)  Like the protagonist of a hard-boiled mystery, Sam has to deal with lots of criminal scumbags, whom he manages to outwit, and plenty of femmes fatale, to whom he falls victim.  The novel includes lots of SF gadgets and gimmicks, like those weird drugs and various cool monsters and weapons, and also addresses SF ideas like "how would knowing you are going to live 700 or 1000 years change your psychology" and "how would knowing you are going to live 70 or 100 years but some other guy is going to live ten times as long affect your psychology?"  There are discussions of cultural change and cultural conservatism, and on whether or not you can usefully predict the future (there is a character who can more or less predict the future but can't tell people his predictions because doing so will render them inaccurate, I guess a riff on Cassandra, Hari Seldon and the observer effect/Heisenberg uncertainty principle.)

Prominent in the novel is the anti-Utopian theme we have seen numerous times in fiction discussed at this blog, the assertion that man needs challenge to thrive, that the easy life of living off hand outs and passing the time with drugs and immersive entertainment is not the good life--the good life is overcoming obstacles and building stuff.  Another main theme of Fury we see all the time in classic SF is the idea that the common people need to be manipulated by the cognitive elite for their own good--Kuttner and Moore essentially endorse the rule of the Immortals.

The novel's style is good, vivid but economical--there isn't any fat or filler, and things move along at a good pace.  The authors assume you are literate, or encourage you to be so, filling the book with quotes from and references to the Bible, Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, A. E. Housman, Dickens, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, etc.

The Keeps stories represent another big success for those stalwarts of Golden Age SF, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.  Recommended. 

Four stories by C. L. Moore from Astounding

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

"The Code" (1945)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Promised Land" (1950)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Heir Apparent" (1950)

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

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

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

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

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

"Paradise Street" (1950)

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

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

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

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

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

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Squint or click to read about these Dell offerings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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More SF from 1940s magazines in out next episode!

Judgment Night by C. L. Moore

"Every race has come to this end, since the first men conquered the Galaxy.  Each of them sows the seed of its own destruction.  Always a few see the way toward salvation, and always the many shout them down."

Back in June I explored Riverby Books, a used bookstore near the Supreme Court that Washingtonian magazine called "cozy" and the somewhat overweight members of the MPorcius Fiction Log staff called "cramped," and emerged from its basement with a copy of the 1979 Dell edition of C. L. Moore's Judgment Night.  In my last blogpost I was citing C. L. Moore as an example of somebody from the Golden Age of Science Fiction who could write about "the human heart" and so it seems an appropriate time to check out this novel.

Judgment Night first appeared in 1943 as a serial spread out across two issues of John W. Campbell's Astounding, and then was published in book form in 1952, in a hardcover along with four short stories by Moore.  isfdb makes a distinction between the 1943 version of Judgment Night and the 1952 version, so maybe Moore revised it for book publication or something.  My Dell paperback, which, like the members of the MPorcius Fiction Log staff is quite thick (384 pages), reproduces the contents of that 1952 volume, including the novel (like 168 pages) and the four stories.

Since conquering the mysterious planet Ericon long ago, one hundred successive Lyonese Emperors, most of them fierce warriors and cunning statesmen, have ruled the galaxy.  Though Ericon is their capital, and has been for one hundred generations, much of the planet is unexplored and beyond the control of the Lyonese.  The vast forests that cover most of the planet have been declared off limits by the mysterious Ancients, living gods who are aloof but merciless if crossed--even aircraft which dare fly over their forests vanish in a flash of light!  And then there are the catacombs and labyrinths under the Lyonese palace, the ruins of the many civilizations that ruled Ericon before the Lyonese took over.

After centuries of growth and stability, the Galactic Empire of the Lyonese is in trouble!  The reigns of the 97th, 98th and 99th Emperors saw rebellions on many imperial planets, and since then many systems have been taken over by space barbarians, the H'vani; as our story begins, during the reign of the 100th Emperor, things are looking bleak!  The current Emperor has no son, so his daughter Juille has been trained in the arts of war and stalks around the palace wearing a helmet and a "fire sword."  Juille is aggressive and talks of "wiping out" the H'vani, and advises her father to be ruthless, but the old man is something of a softie!  He thinks the apocalyptic war Juille relishes could destroy not only his Empire but all of human civilization, reducing the galaxy's population to a bunch of cave dwellers, so he wants to make peace with the H'vani.

Here on the cover of Astounding we see our
cast of characters in the ruins beneath the palace.
The blonde with the helmet is Princess Juille,
the blond man is Egide, the redhead Egide's
super strong right-hand man, the man in red
is an Andarean conspirator, and behind Juille is
her treacherous mentor.   

A big council meeting where there will be a big vote is coming up, and Juille decides to take a little vacay before it convenes.  Orbiting Ericon is a satellite known as Cyrille where rich people have access to any pleasure, no matter how decadent or perverse!  SF is full of pleasure planets and space resorts and holiday satellites; I hear there's even a casino planet in one of the Walt Disney Star Wars movies.  This is one of my least favorite SF cliches; casinos and resorts do not really interest me.  I suppose the prevalence of this trope is a reflection of fears that modern wealth will lead to decadence, and the influence of the theory that the Roman Empire collapsed due to an abandonment of the stern republican virtues that built it.  Presumably in her story here in Judgment Night about an empire in decline, barbarians at its gates, Moore is channeling that idea that Rome was in crisis during the period of Alec Guinness and Sophia Loren because people were too focused on pleasure and not enough on duty.  (Who could focus on duty with Sophia Loren hanging round?)  Anyway, Juille goes to this pleasure satellite, incognito, largely to experiment with wearing dresses and acting feminine--all her life she has rejected femininity and "embraced the amazon cult wholeheartedly."  Awaiting her on the satellite are not only expert dressmakers and special effects that allow her to make her room perfectly resemble any planet in the galaxy, but an assassin!

In a fancy restaurant with floating tables, and then the virtual reality reproduction of a long ruined city of canals, the assassin, Egide, flirts with Juille; no one has ever treated the arrogant and militaristic princess so informally before, and Juille is both excited and frightened by the experience.  I guess this is Moore writing about a girl's sexual awakening, though in Juille's case it is a late awakening.  Anyway, Egide refrains from murdering Juille, and after three days of dates the princess just returns to the planet surface.

The war drags on badly, with the H'vani taking over planet after planet, in many cases aided by a mysterious fifth column.  Juille watches the battles on TV from the safety of Ericon.  Over Juille's objections, the Emperor sets up a peace conference with the H'vani; Juille refuses to attend and orders assassins to murder the H'vani envoys--she wants the Empire to fight the H'vani to the finish!  Watching TV, she recognizes Egide as one of the envoys--she, along with us readers, realizes that Egide is the leader of the H'vani barbarians!  She expects to see her assassins shoot him down, but the attack fails to materialize, so Juille marches into the conference hall and shoots Egide herself.  Egide is wearing a vest that reflects the energy of Juille's ray pistol and so survives, and in the confusion Juille is captured by Egide and some of the fifth columnists, who include Juille's own lady-in-waiting, her life-long mentor!  We learn that the fifth columnists are Andareans, the descendants of the people who ruled Ericon one hundred generations ago, before Juille's dynasty conquered the planet.

Moore's writing about these different "races," as she calls them--Lyonese, H'vani and Andarean--is a little muddled.  They are all human beings, but it is suggested that they have distinctive physical appearances--one guy is said to have "Andarean features," and Juille snarls that H'vani are "hairy." However, Juille didn't recognize Egide as a H'vani on Cyrille, and it is not clear if Juille knew her lady-in-waiting was an Andarean before she revealed herself to be amongst the leadership of the fifth column.  This is a little sloppy, but a much worse sin is that Judgment Night is one of those stories in which our protagonist is ineffectual and is more of a spectator of the plot than a driver of it--Juille's assassination plans all fall through, and she watches battles on TV instead of participating in them, while other characters and forces--her father, the mysterious Ancients, the mysterious Andareans--make decisions and accomplish things and dominate Juille.

1943 illustration of a llar by A. Williams;
just adorable, right?

Egide and the Andareans carry Juille down into the catacombs below the Lyonese city, where lie super weapons made of such fine materials that they have not suffered a blemish over a thousand years.  The Andareans hand some of these weapons over to their allies, the H'vani, though it is hinted the Andareans may doublecross the H'vani in the future.  Egide goes to the forest to consult the Ancients--he is the first in centuries to do so--and the Andareans foolishly leave Juille alone so her little pet alien, a "llar," can arrive to untie her and deliver to her a super weapon recently developed by the Dunnarians.  The Dunnarians are a race that remained loyal to the Emperor and whose planet was recently conquered by the H'vani (this is one of the planets Juille watched get bombed to rubble on TV.)  Only one person escaped Dunnar when the H'vani took it, and that guy, called "the envoy," brought with him a prototype super weapon.  (This novel is full of strange super weapons with weird, outlandish, effects that Moore describes in detail.)

The llar guides Juille to the Ancients and then disappears.  Juille herself consults the Ancients, who appear differently to each supplicant (like the Wizard in the original book version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) and give cryptic and vague advice.  To Juille they appear like smoke rings in a dark and disorienting space (Juille feels like a fly upside down on a ceiling in a pitch black room) and tell her she may be able to save her race, but only if she does not trust her instincts.  (No pressure!)  Egide captures and ties up Juille again.  (There is a lot of talk about Juille being a devotee of the cult of the amazon, dedicated to the art of war, but whenever she tries to murder people or gets in a fight with the H'vani she blows it.  Is a subtext of this book that fighting isn't women's work?)

Having been knocked out, our princess wakes up back on the pleasure satellite Cyrille, in one of its many holographic reproductions of a paradise planet.  Via a TV screen, she looks into the satellite's many rooms, seeing that the staff have been killed and that in a control room Egide is mounting one of those super weapons for use in bombarding the surface of Ericon below.  Now in the final third of the book Juille finally starts accomplishing things, making her way through the many corridors and illusory reproductions of Imperial planets (more than once she does that thing Princess Leia did on the Death Star, blasting a hole in a wall or floor and just jumping through it, to where she does not know), hunting for the control room and fighting not only perverts who live out their insane fantasies here on Cyrille but Egide's hulking right hand man as well.  (For a few pages it looks like Juille has killed this brute, but then we learn he is a robot and getting shot by Juille just slowed him down a little!) 

The cover of the 1952 edition of the book
features the Dunnar envoy and a llar

Unable to find the control room, Juille uses a hand held super weapon dropped by the robot when she shot it to destroy the satellite from within, jut blasting away at random.  In these scenes of destruction Moore throws a lot of allegories and symbolism at us.  Because Cyrille's innumerable rooms contain simulations of planets from all over the galaxy, Juille's destroying them with energy blasts is like the way the interstellar wars have been destroying the societies of one planet after another.  Juille's ability to destroy Cyrille and, metaphorically, all the galaxy's inhabited worlds, makes her like a god.  Judgment Night is not only an indictment of the human propensity for violence, but a denunciation of gods, or at least mankind's reliance on gods.

Juille wrecks the satellite but not before Egide has finished setting up his weapon and has used it to blast the Imperial palace below.  (I guess the fact that the heart of the Lyonese empire is destroyed from the pervert-infested pleasure satellite is part of Moore's Rome-fell-due-to-decadence theme.)   Juille has been outdone by Egide again; Egide even rescues Juille from the wreckage that is flying around the station due to the fact that the hull has been breached and the artificial gravity system is going haywire.     

Juille uses the Dunnarian super weapon to turn the tables on Egide, taking him captive.  They take a space boat down to the surface, slipping past the H'vani fleet and landing at the half-ruined palace, where the Emperor is organizing an evacuation into the hills.  Seeing what a ruin everything is, Juille realizes that 135 pages ago her father was right to pursue peace and she wrong to demand war--civilization really is collapsing!  Because of the Ancients' prohibition on aircraft, the final battle for the Lyonese Galactic Empire is fought by infantrymen and horse-mounted cavalry, the H'vani with the Andarean super weapons and the Lyonese with the Dunnarian super weapons.  Egide says he has changed sides and will fight for the Lyonese, but before he and Juille can join the battle the Dunnarian envoy reveals to them an astonishing secret--he is one of the all-powerful Ancients in disguise!  He tells them that neither H'vani nor Lyonese will win the war, that all of humanity will lose, and that the Ancients are tired of mankind and its violence.  The llar, creatures of wisdom who care neither for the individual nor for gods, but for the collective, will inherit the galaxy.  As the story ends we readers have no idea if Juille and Edige will live out the day.

1965 printing

Judgment Night has many good plot elements and ideas: a woman going through a difficult sexual awakening because her sexual desires are at odds with her emotional feelings and intellectual beliefs (Moore uses phrases like "her treacherous body"); an empire beset from without and within; a thousand year conspiracy centered on super weapons hidden in sinister catacombs full of traps; weird aliens with their own unfathomable motives; a character dedicated to war who changes her attitude when she sees the wreckage wreaked by war, etc.  Unfortunately, Moore's execution is not great; Judgment Night feels long and slow.  A lot of verbiage is invested in telling us about clothes, architecture, landscapes, and weather, and I'm not convinced that this investment pays off--rather than bringing the story to life a lot of that detail is just suffocating superfluity.  We get two pages of description of how Juille's black star-spattered dress is created and molded to her perfect body, we get fifteen pages about Juille's dates with Egide on Cyrille, and on and on.  Even the action scenes, when Juille fights perverts and the H'vani robot on Cyrille, are long and wordy and thus fail to transmit to the reader any urgency, any excitement.

I've already complained that Juille is too passive and too ineffectual for my liking--instead of directing events and mastering challenges, she is carried along by the plot and pushed around by the other characters--and another problem is how Moore, repeatedly, sets you up to expect something interesting or exciting to happen and then just lets the matter fizzle.  Right there in the beginning of the story Juille and her father talk about an upcoming contentious council meeting, and then the meeting happens off screen.  We are lead to expect assassination attempts but the attempts are aborted, the targets of the assassins never even knowing they were in danger.  We are given the idea that Juille is a great fighter but she almost never fights and when she does she doesn't kill anybody (well, save a bizarre pervert.)  I find this kind of thing frustrating.

Judgment Night is ambitious, with plenty of philosophical and psychological and political themes as well as lots of SF concepts, and it has the sex and violence we look for in our pulp literature, and I want to like it, but the structural and stylistic problems ruin it, it is neither compelling nor fun; a disappointment.

Even if I didn't really enjoy it, Judgment Night is still a cudgel I can use in my disagreement with portions of Harlan Ellison's 1974 review of Barry Malzberg's Herovit's World.  In that review (which is very interesting and informative and which I recommend even if I don't agree with every thing Ellison has to say) Ellison moans that SF must mature, must focus more on "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself" and abandon its focus on "sexless heroes" with no emotional problems who wield lots of hi-tech gadgetry.  Well, over two decades before Ellison wrote that review, we see Moore wrote a novel full of war and gadgets and a person brimming over with psychological conflict, and the first version of it appeared in John W. Campbell's Astounding, the cover story of the most important SF magazine of its time.  Ellison was mischaracterizing the SF of the past, not giving the field credit for its breadth, its diversity.

People commonly say SF before such and such a date was sexist or sexless or imperialistic or one-dimensional or whatever; these people commonly exaggerate.  Of course there were particular stories with the characteristics people like Ellison denounced in the 1970s and people continue to denounce today, but there were also stories, even before the end of World War II, that lacked those characteristics, or had the opposite characteristics, stories criticizing Earth imperialism (like Edmond Hamilton's 1932 "Conquest of Two Worlds"), stories with female heroes (like Nelson S. Bond's 1941 "Magic City," another Astounding cover story), stories written by women like Moore and Leigh Brackett that were published by male editors and admired by male fans.  It makes you wonder if maybe some of SF's critics haven't actually read very many 1930s or 1940s SF magazines and are just repeating what they have been told.  Always consult the primary sources before passing judgement, people!

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I can't tell you Judgment Night is good, but I have enjoyed C. L. Moore's work in the past, and I am interested in her career, so we'll be reading more of her work in our next episode!