1976 Frights by Brian Lumley, Joe Haldeman, and William F. Nolan

Let's read more from Kirby McAuley's Frights, a 1976 anthology of horror stories devoted to contemporary terrors.  In the last two blog posts we read the contributions of Psycho scribe Robert Bloch, SF Grandmaster Poul Anderson and his wife Karen, unique wordsmith and critical favorite R. A. Lafferty, and military SF icon David Drake.  Today, it's stories by the author of Necroscope, Brian Lumley, the author of The Forever War, Joe Haldeman, and the co-author of Logan's Run, William F. Nolan.  I am reading a scan of the US hardcover first edition that is available at the internet archive, that indispensable website for the impecunious student of 20th-century culture.

"The Whisperer" by Brian Lumley

"The Whisperer" would go on to be the title story of a 2001 Lumley collection and was also anthologized by Dennis Etchison and Eric Protter, so I think we have a right to expect this will be a story representative of Lumley at his best.

Lumley's work, I have found, is uneven, but I am happy to report that "The Whisperer" is pretty good.

Benton, a British office clerk, is terrorized by a hunchbacked dwarf, a hideous creature who wears a floppy black hat and smells powerfully of the sewer.  First, the bowler-clad office worker encounters this apparition on the commuter train--the monster uses its hypnotic power to make the train conductor direct Benton to a less comfortable train car.  Then, a few months later, the dwarf is in a pub Benton visits for lunch, and the creep uses his powers to steal Benton's beer!  When Benton later asks the train conductor and the barman about the little weirdo, they profess to have never seen the apparition!

Benton becomes obsessed with this haunt, his habits and character taking a turn for the worse as he spends his time searching for the malodorous dwarf.  A few months after the episode in the pub comes a horrendous turn of events--Benton returns home to find the dwarf having sex with his wife!  Benton drives the monster off, and then confronts, and strikes, his wife, who claims she has no idea what Benton is talking about!  Benton's wife leaves him and Benton begins searching for the dwarf even more fervently, armed with a knife, intent on slaying his tormentor.  Who will live and who will die when the final showdown comes?

This story is well-written and well-paced, and actually disturbing.  Maybe, for reasons of class resentment, we are supposed to find the crimes inflicted on Benton amusing, but I did not find them amusing--I identified with the victim and his hopeless quest for vengeance and for answers.  Because Benton's quest is hopeless--he ends the story dead in a gutter, and we are never afforded any clues as to what the monster is and why he chose to harass and destroy Benton.

Unless we are expected to observe the torture, cuckolding and murder of a member of the bourgeoisie with the glee of a malicious working-class brute or a supercilious Marxist university professor, I interpret this story as a reminder that ordinary people are essentially helpless when confronted by crime, that justice and safety are impossible to secure, that everything we have--our property, our families and our lives--can easily be taken from us by anybody who is strong enough and brazen enough to do so.

Thumbs up for this black nightmare of a story.

"Armaja Das" by Joe Haldeman

"Armaja Das" has been anthologized by Gardner Dozois, Thomas F. Monteleone, and Margaret Weis, so here we have a piece that has been embraced by the speculative fiction community!

"Armanja das," the story tells us, is Romani for "we curse you"--this is a story about Gypsies!

John Zold is a rich man, a talented mathematician who left academia to make a pile of money in private industry as a computer programmer--he has designed a piece of software that gives computers the ability to mimic human feeling and talk to a computer user as if it is his or her sympathetic friend.

Zold works in Manhattan, lives in Dobbs Ferry.  His Romani parents fled Europe during the Nazi era, but were murdered in America, leaving him an orphan.  John became totally assimilated to English-speaking American culture and, as a wealthy man in his late thirties, has been financing a charity that encourages other young Gypsies to assimilate.  Many Gypsies in America resent this charitable effort, considering that Zold is "stealing their children," and Zold receives threatening letters in the mail featuring that phrase, "armanja das."  Early in the story an ancient little Romani woman sneaks into his building in Dobbs Ferry and casts a spell on him.  Of course, Zold doesn't believe in magic, but immediately after the curse is put on him he is unable to perform in the bedroom and he develops carbuncles on the back of his neck.

Conventional medical professionals prove unable to cure Zold's impotence or his skin problems, which get worse, much worse, and, suffering a severe fever and covered head to tow in hideous boils, he seeks out help from a Gypsy herbal  healer or "white witch."   However, the evil witch who cursed Zold in the first place has deep ties within the Gypsy community and no healers will tend to him!  Desperate, Zold turns to the computer personality that he designed himself!  The computer, with access to libraries all over the world, comes up with a Gypsy spell that will transfer the deadly curse to somebody else and guides Zold in performing the ritual!

Unfortunately, the curse does not transfer to the witch, as Zold hoped, but to his computer.  The curse then spreads to almost every computer in the world, making them "impotent"--this causes havoc because, for example, all electricity in New York City is handled by a computer, so the curse brings the greatest city in the world to a standstill.  The only computers that are immune are the computers managing the Soviet and American nuclear arsenals--when they sense that the world's computers are out of commission they interpret that as a vulnerability amongst the enemy's ranks and both computers launch nuclear strikes.  Civilization is almost wiped out, and the Gypsies, who hadn't come to rely on machines as did all other cultures, are now on top of the heap!

The first half or two-thirds of this "Armaja Das" I took to be a serious piece on assimilation and alienation and psychosomatic illness, and I suppose it is, but the end feels like a nonsensical joke story, undermining much of what I liked about it.  Perhaps we should admire the story for the way it mixes high technology and traditional superstitious beliefs, a reflection of our real 21st-century lives, in which book store browsers will find that there are more shelves for books on ghosts, witchcraft and the tarot than there are for computer programs. 

Acceptable.

"Dead Call" by William F. Nolan

Like the Lumley and the Haldeman story we are looking at today, William F. Nolan's "Dead Call" has been widely anthologized.

This story is very short, and a little gimmicky.  The narrator answers the phone, and it is his friend Len, dead for four weeks, on the line!  Len says that death is nice--peaceful, with no pressure!  Len reveals that his car accident was no accident, that he committed suicide, and is glad he did!  I guess dead people have ways of knowing things, because he tells the narrator that his wife is cheating, his daughter is a junkie who hates him, and his boss is about to fire him.  Len suggests that, seeing how things are going, that the narrator also commit suicide, and the narrator takes his advice.   

In the last few lines of this story the narrator addresses the reader directly, suggesting that, seeing how things are going, we join him in death.

Acceptable.

**********

Maybe we should see these three stories as reflecting particular 1970s concerns about increases in crime rates and divorce rates.  Maybe this is something I should keep in mind when I read three more stories from Frights in the next exciting installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.   

The Future is Now part two: Boucher, Etchison, Nolan and Purdom

Here's the second of the three installments of our study of the 1970 all-new SF anthology edited by William F. Nolan, The Future is Now.  I own the paperback edition offered to the public by Playboy Press in 1971 with its remarkably unattractive cover illustration, an assemblage by artist Don Baum photographed by Bill Arsenault.

"A Shape in Time" by Anthony Boucher

Go get 'em, John Carter!

In the intro to this two-page story Nolan lists Boucher's many accomplishments in all spheres of life.  Boucher died in 1968, but Nolan tells us that his widow found this story in his unpublished papers.

"A Shape in Time" is a convoluted and nonsensical and unfunny joke about a female secret agent who travels through time seducing men in order to prevent dysgenic marriages.  She has the ability to alter her body shape, and does so on assignments so that her figure will match the prevailing taste of whatever period she is working in.  The punchline of the story (I believe) is that while on a mission in 1880 she thought the large bustles worn by women of the time indicated that men desired women with huge hindquarters, a mistake which resulted in mission failure.

Lame.

I may think it is feeble, but "A Shape in Time" has been reprinted numerous times in several languages, including in Croatian in Sirius.

"Damechild" by Dennis Etchison

Back in 2015 I read Etchison's Hollywood-centric story "The Dog Park" and his quite effective "The Dead Line."  In his intro here Nolan talks a little about his first meeting with Etchison at a guest lecture Nolan gave at UCLA.

"Damechild" is a little opaque and overwritten, with long sentences full of details that somehow didn't paint clear pictures for me, but I think I have a grasp of its setting and plot.

Five thousand years ago the Earth was going down the tubes.  A transmission of some kind was received from the Horsehead Nebula, so, to preserve the species, the people of Earth constructed a space ship and stocked it with frozen eggs and sperm and launched it at the source of the friendly message.  After fifty centuries, as the ship finally approached the Horsehead Nebula, the vessel's machinery thawed some of the eggs and sperm and fertilized some eggs, producing a handful of people--they are the only conscious humans in all the universe!  Damechild, fertilized and birthed ten years before the others, was to be their leader, and spends the story acting like their mother, coaxing and nagging and cuddling them.

Damechild received a final message from the Horsehead people--due to a war and some kind of environmental catastrophe the Horsehead civilization was about to be wiped out and would not be able to shelter the human race.  So she redirected the ship to the next closest potential refuge, which is like 500,000 years' travel away.  Damechild doesn't tell the other thawed people of this disaster.  These others become addicted to sensory machines--"The sexual stimulator, the sleep stimulator, the visual stimulator, the auditory stimulator, the hunger-satiety stimulator"--and spend all their time huddled against a wall with electrodes attached to their heads.  Their minds degrade, so that they become lethargic and mentally ill ignoramuses.  At least one tries to commit suicide over the course of the story.

Etchison doesn't tell the story in strict chronological order, focusing first on the demented addicts and then telling us the jazz about Earth and the Horsehead civilization in flashbacks, with the sad final message from the aliens as a kind of climax.  Etchison tries to shock or sadden us with the suicide attempt and the bathetic message, but the characters are so flat and the style so foggy I was not moved.

   
Maybe this story would work for someone who is less cold-hearted than I am?  The plot isn't bad, it's the execution which isn't working for me--neither the emotional landscape of the people nor the physical landscape of the ship is sharp or interesting.  (Chad Oliver, whom I usually think is not very good, did a far better job of conjuring up human feeling and vivid images with his own disastrous-colony-ship-from-a-doomed-Earth story "The Wind Blows Free," which we read recently in another Nolan anthology.)   I'll rate "Damechild" barely acceptable.  "Damechild" was translated into German for a 1977 publication.

"Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe, Pip-Pop As You Go" by William F. Nolan

In the intro to his own story Nolan uses the lame gimmick of a conversation with himself, Nolan the writer pitching his "nutso" and "wild" story idea to Nolan the editor.  Ugh.

This story is pretty bad, a sort of surreal or psychedelic series of boring jokes following a sort of parody of a traditional SF plot.  It is the future (I think the 21st century) and everywhere you go robots and machines, including the furniture, talk to you and give you nagging medical and psychological advice.  Recreational sex is with a machine; sex with another person is a seldom-practiced religious rite whose purpose is procreation.  The world is run by an industry that sells (or just gives away?) drugs, and most people are addicted to the drugs.  Our hero is in the advertising department of the ruling drug company.  Nobody who actually works for the drug company actually uses the drugs--if you use them, you are thrown "outside."  Our hero is kidnapped by rebels and taken outside; at first he thinks the rebels are all drug addicts, but the opposite is the case--the rebels want to end the drug company's rule and they never get high.  They also believe in recreational sex between human beings.  Our hero enthusiastically joins the rebels.  The end.

A total waste of time.  A bad story that results from a sincere effort can be funny or interesting, but this story is lazy and frivolous; it is almost a show of contempt to the SF fans who spent money on this book.

Like "Jenny Among the Zeebs" and "Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!," "Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe, Pip-Pop As You Go" would be republished in both Alien Horizons and Wild Galaxy.  I guess somebody must like these stories if they keep getting reprinted.

"A War of Passion" by Tom Purdom

I don't think I've ever even heard of Purdom before.  He seems to have made his living as a kind of technical writer, but, over the decades since the late 1950s, produced quite a few SF stories.  In Nolan's intro here he lists Purdom's interests: "urban planning, arms control, wines, politics and the city of Philadelphia."  It sounds like a Temple University professor's dating profile.

"A War of Passion" is kind of ridiculous.  In the future, mankind has colonized many planets, and people can live for centuries via brain transplants, and can have their brains augmented, though brain augmentation leads to oversized skulls.  As people get along in years (like when they are 700 or so), most lose interest in sex, and even order bodies which lack sex glands so they can focus on other things.  Some people think the abandonment of sex is the abandonment of humanity, and so there is an espionage war between the sexless people known as "elders" and the "normals" who retain interest in sex.

Our hero Vostok is 1200 years old and working for the sex-loving normals.  He is on a mission, the object of which is to have sex with Makaze, a young (268 years old) woman who has lost interest in sex because the elders were using her to seduce normals and get them to have scandalous S&M sex with her.  (I think.)  All that violent painful sex has conditioned Makaze to fear sex.  Vostok is desperate to have sex with her because if he doesn't the normal leadership may wrongly suspect that he himself has lost interest in sex and is a spy for the elders--the normals would quickly move to eliminate such a spy.  Vostok's mission is particularly difficult because he has had seven brain augmentations and his head is grotesquely oversized, so Makaze finds him repulsive.

Anyway, there is an explicit sex scene which readers nowadays would likely consider rapey, a sex scene which is several pages long.  While he is having sex with Makaze, Vostok worries that the normals are about to launch an attack on him, and he must decide whether he should climb off Makaze and take control of his robotic defenses or keep banging away at her.

I guess this story is supposed to be funny, like Nolan's "Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe, Pip-Pop As You Go" a parody of all those SF stories (like van Vogt's) about secret organizations of geniuses fighting a twilight war behind the scenes or about revolutionaries fighting an oppressive state, but Purdom's prose is pretty deadpan.  I'm very reluctant to call "A War of Passion" good, but because it is so crazy and feels original I'm going to judge it acceptable.

"A War of Passion" would later appear in Sirius.     

**********

Ouch, four weak entries.   Well, we still have four stories to go.  Maybe The Future is Now can redeem itself?

The Future is Now part one: Young, "Anmar," Meredith, and Corwin

Our last three blog posts were about SF stories which first appeared (in America, at least) in our most pretentious skin rag, Playboy.  I read them in The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, published in 1966 by Playboy Press.  In the comments to the first installment of this three part series, SF fans George, marzaat and I talked a little about Playboy Press's SF line; when I revealed that I own 1970's The Future is Now, edited by William F. Nolan, marzaat expressed dissatisfaction with the volume.  This piqued my interest, and I decided to read the book myself.  Marzaat actually has a review of The Future is Now, but I am going to hold off on reading it until I have read the book's twelve stories and recorded my own thoughts about them over three blog posts.  In the final post, I'll talk about to what extent marzaat and I agree or disagree about the stories.

The Future is Now is not an anthology of stories from Playboy, which is what I thought it was when I bought it.  Rather, it is a collection of all new stories edited by Nolan and published by Sherbourne Press in hardcover in 1970.  The paperback Playboy Press edition I have was put out in 1971 and has a strange and unattractive cover that reminds me of that famous recalled Beatles record sleeve and perhaps is suggesting the stories therein are about overpopulation.  In his intro Nolan talks a little about the history of all-new SF anthologies, and the decline of the SF magazines, suggesting that the future of short form SF lies in books such as The Future is Now and not in magazines.     

"The Ogress" by Robert F. Young

I recognize Young's name, but for some reason I've never read anything by him.  The intro to the story lists Young's influences and the various blue collar jobs he's held over his life.

"The Ogress" is one of those SF stories which explains the scientific facts behind an ancient legend.  (Just recently we read Ray Russell's story about the truth behind the story of the Fall of the Rebel Angels, and last year we got a scientific explanation from Edmond Hamilton for Norse mythology.)  You see, Grendel was real, a "superbeing" created by the collective mental energy of the superstitious local peasantry.  (Yahweh and Zeus, we are told, were also real for a time, until their creators became more sophisticated and ceased to believe in them.)  Unsophisticated people across the galaxy occasionally create such gods and monsters, giant-sized raiders who murder people and destroy property, and to deal with them the institution known as Galactic Guidance sends out expert hunters, the Beowulfs, who are armed with powerful firearms called Dammerungs.  The plot of "The Ogress" follows the hunt of one such superbeing, a female monster, by one such Beowulf.  Interspersed with the account of the hunt for the ogress are flashbacks to earlier hunts.

This is a decent adventure story.   

"Jenny Among the Zeebs" by "Frank Anmar"

I don't recognize Anmar's name, but I have read things by him, because this is a story by Nolan using a pseudonym.  Tricksy!  The title makes me worry it is going to be a dumb parody story.  I don't want to endure another piece of junk like "Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!"

Well, it is not quite a parody, but it is a dumb joke story that pokes fun at rock music and modern art and has the kind of attitude about sex that nowadays would be considered evidence of "rape culture."  The plot is like that of an off-color sitcom with wacky schemes that fail and mistaken identity hi-jinks.

Our narrator, Hoff, is the Earthling PR man for the Red Dogs, a Martian rock group.  (Martians, called "zeebs," can interbreed with Earth humans, but are physically different from us; most importantly for this story, they have four buttocks instead of two.  These are the kinds of jokes Nolan offers us.)  Hoff uses lots of slang, which is a little annoying.

Hoff has launched a PR stunt--one of the four Red Dogs will marry the Earth girl who writes the best application essay.  While this stunt is underway, an artist, a pretty Earth girl, serendipitously shows up and provides Hoff an opportunity for another stunt.  This artist, Jenny, specializes in making plaster casts of people's asses, and she wants to make casts of the Red Dogs' asses; Hoff has the idea of using the casts to produce chairs to sell to the Red Dogs' fans.  The Red Dogs are shy, and only agree to let Jenny make their casts in a darkened bedroom, one at a time.

The main plot of this unfunny and nonsensical story revolves around the fact that in the darkened room one or more people had sex with Jenny, a virgin before she met Hoff and the band, and is now pregnant, and Hoff has to figure out how to deal with this potentially troublesome situation.  It doesn't make any sense that Jenny doesn't know who had sex with her, because she called the bandmembers into the dark room one at a time, and Nolan further cheats us readers by leading us to believe that only the Red Dogs got casts of their asses made, and then later revealing that Hoff and the band's manager also had casts made.  Why would Jenny want casts of the asses of the band's PR guy and their manager? 

Bad.

"Jenny Among the Zeebs" would be republished in two collections of stories by Nolan, 1974's Alien Horizons and 2005's Wild Galaxy.  I see that these collections also include "Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!" under its alias "The Day the Gorf Took Over."  Tricksy!

"Earthcoming" by Richard C. Meredith

I got interested in Richard C. Meredith when Joachim Boaz wrote about his novel We All Died at Breakway Station but I couldn't lay hands on that novel and so instead read the first two of Meredith's three Timeliner books, At the Narrow Passage and No Brother, No Friend.  For some reason I never got to the third one, but tarbandu read all three.  Like Nolan, Meredith has an association with Playboy, Playboy Press having put out an edition of the Timeliner books.  Nolan here tells us interesting little tidbits about Meredith's academic, business and writing careers.

Back cover of my copy

Nolan lists Astounding among Meredith's influences, and "Earthcoming" does have an Astounding feel to it.  There is lots of hard SF talk about orbits and astronomical distances and the chemistry of space drives and so forth, and the story integrates the point of view of a hostile alien seeking to infiltrate the Earth, like what A. E. van Vogt does in the classic "Black Destroyer" (1939) and "Asylum" (1942), both Astounding cover stories.  (I read the original magazine version of "Asylum" today to refresh my memory of it, and was amazed to find a hotel named "Constantine's" figures prominently in it, while Meredith's "Earthcoming" features a planet called "Constantine!"  Coincidence?  Well, the evil aliens in "Asylum" are the "dreegh" and the good aliens the "lennel," while the evil aliens in "Earthcoming" are the "druul" and the good aliens the "luntinasel."  Both stories include cargo ships, van Vogt's captained by a Hanardy and Meredith's captained by a Haledon.  Lots of coincidences, or sign that this is an homage to our favorite Canadian?)

Earth, allied with some friendly aliens, is at war with evil parasitic aliens, the druul.  Meredith's story takes place on a cargo ship bringing valuable fuel from beyond the solar system to Earth for our war fleet.  Unfortunately for us, one of the crew members of the cargo vessel has had his body invaded and taken over by one of the druul, and, if this druul can get to Earth, it can release a hundred spores which will in turn take over a hundred more humans!  In less than a year all of Earth could be under the control of the druul and the human race kaput!  "Earthcoming" is written in the third-person, but our main character is the alien, and we learn all of his inner thoughts and various doubts as he struggles to accomplish his mission and deal with aspects of the personality of the man whose body and mind he has hijacked.  Most of the text, it feels like, is devoted to the technical issues of steering the ship, but Meredith also describes in gory detail the many injuries suffered by the characters.  The story ends when the druul, in the battered body of the human, crash lands on Earth.  As he has touched ground in an uninhabited arctic wasteland and his host body is incapacitated, I think we are supposed to understand that his spores can reach no hosts and thus Earth is safe.

This story is actually pretty good.

"Belles Lettres, 2272" by Norman Corwin

Corwin is a famous and important broadcaster and Hollywood screenwriter of whom I had never heard; it seems he did a lot of work with government entities and the United Nations creating radio programs designed to "build world unity" and that kind of thing.  In the early 1980s he published a best-selling book attacking American culture.

"Belles Lettres, 2272" is a lame joke story.  I feel that Corwin is one of those men who was a giant in his day but will be quickly forgotten, in part because much of his work is in an obsolete medium, so it is perhaps appropriate that much of the humor of this story derives from the idea that people in the future won't remember much about the major figures or artistic productions of our time.  The form of the story is that of a letter written from one computer to another which includes extensive quotes from a third computer (a poem by said computer) and a fourth computer (an analysis of the poem.)  The story includes lots of pictographs or logograms that, I guess, we are to believe are commonly used in the written communication of the 23rd century:

The punchline of the story is the letter writer's complaint about obscurantism.

Only four pages, but still a waste of time.

**********

Well, we've got two duds so far, but also two decent traditional SF adventures full of sinister creatures, high technology and bloodshed.  We'll continue our look at The Future is Now in our next episode!

Science Fiction and Fantasy from Playboy: Beaumont and Clarke

In some of the introductory matter in A Sea of Stars, which I was looking over this recent weekend, editor William F. Nolan talks about how Ray Russell brought SF into Playboy.  So now seems an appropriate time to check out some SF from the world famous men's magazine via my copy of 1966's The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy.  I own the 1968 paperback edition, which is a little over 400 pages.

The Preface and editorial duties for The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy are credited to "the editors of Playboy," but according to isfdb it was Ray Russell who was responsible for putting the book together.  In the Preface Russell brags that Playboy changed the SF landscape by being the first "slick" to consistently publish SF, and because Playboy paid much higher rates than the genre magazines.  Russell really sticks it to the SF magazines, claiming they were too "solemn" and "sober" to publish light-hearted stories like "Blood Brother" by Charles Beaumont and too obsessed with realistic science to publish Ray Bradbury's "The Vacation."

Today we'll take a look at four stories from this anthology, two each from Charles Beaumont and Arthur C. Clarke.

"Blood Brother" by Charles Beaumont (1961)

Ugh, a five-page joke story about a vampire who goes to the psychiatrist.  And these are the kind of jokes we get:

"I've been meaning to ask you about that.  Why do you wear it?"

"You ever hear of a vampire without a cape?  It's part of the whole schmear, that's all.  I don't know why!"

It's barely a joke at all!  This dud is followed by complaints about the high price of coffins and replacing white shirts (the blood stains, you know) and then the twist ending in which the head shrinker kills the vampire with a wooden letter opener and then reveals that he too is a vampire.

Back in 2014 when I read Ramsey Campbell's "Sunshine Club" and Michael Bishop's "Gravid Babies" I issued my jeremiad against vampire psychiatrist and werewolf psychiatrist stories, horror joke stories in general, and humor based on references to pop culture.  My aversion to these excrescences has not eased in the years that have passed!  You know how the government compels Breyers to label those of its products that lack a certain amount of milk fat "Frozen Dairy Dessert" instead of "Ice Cream" so picky consumers can avoid them?  Well, I am slapping the "Tepid Derivative Genre Fiction" label on "Blood Brother" so picky readers can avoid it!

Bad!

"The Crooked Man" by Charles Beaumont (1955)

Russell writes a little intro to each story, and in the intro to this one brags that the (unnamed) top men's magazine before the arrival of Playboy refused to publish "The Crooked Man," but Playboy eagerly presented it to the world.

It is the 27th Century.  There are no families and no private homes...and everybody is born in a test tube and lives in a dorm...and everybody is a homosexual!  Well, almost everybody.  The tiny number of heterosexuals are pursued by the police, and if caught given surgery to alter their hormonal balances and brain functions so they cease feeling all those unnatural urges regarding the opposite sex!

This is a switcheroo story, centered on an idea meant to shock you or force you to think in a different way, though Beaumont does try to generate some human drama with a plot-based narrative and lots of verbiage about how scared and confused the main characters are.  The entire story takes place in a bar where men are all hitting on each other and hooking up--or rejecting men's advances, as is the case with our protagonist, Jesse, a straight man who has to pretend to be gay.  Jesse is at the bar to meet his girlfriend, Mina--sounds ridiculous, but  there is so much surveillance in this oppressive society that there is no place else to meet.  "There were no more parks, no country lanes.  There was no place to hide at all...."  Mina comes in disguised as a man, a disguise that is not very convincing.  By the tenth of the story's eleven pages Jesse and Mina are on their way to having their heterosexual brains repaired.

"The Crooked Man"  is the kind of story which was perhaps a big deal at the time it was written, but is now an historical artifact that feels gimmicky.  Just acceptable. 

"I Remember Babylon" by Arthur C. Clarke (1960)

"I Remember Babylon" begins like a memoir, with Clarke reminding us how he came up with the idea for the geostationary communications satellite in 1945.  (A few pages later he plugs his 1951 book The Exploration of Space and his undersea films.)  Clarke then describes his encounter with a man at an official reception at the Soviet Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka (Clarke moved to Sri Lanka in 1956 and spent the remainder of his life there.)  This guy, a failed US TV exec, is now in the employ of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China!  The commies are planning to put a TV satellite over the Pacific and transmit programming to Americans--they'll get American eyeballs by broadcasting pornography (using the Kinsey reports as market research!) and then slip in some propaganda material!  (As an example of the high-brow stuff that will protect the spaceborne network from moral opprobrium, the renegade broadcaster shows Clarke an expertly made film of the 13th-century erotic sculptures on the Konark Sun Temple.)

And that's it; this is more of an idea than a plot-driven story.  Even though it is over fifty years old some of the issues "I Remember Babylon" raises--the pervasiveness and effect on people of pornography and how much influence biased media and inaccurate reporting, particularly those generated by foreign entities, has on the political beliefs and activities of Americans--are at the center of public debate today  Smoothly written, brief, and thought-provoking, I thought this one worth my time.

"Dial 'F' For Frankenstein" by Arthur C. Clarke (1965)

Like "I Remember Babylon," "Dial 'F' For Frankenstein" is more about playing with a provocative idea than telling a story.  A bunch of engineers sit around and talk about the strange events that have been taking place since the new communications-satellite-based worldwide telephone network was switched on at midnight.  It seems that connecting enough computers and electronic devices together has generated a consciousness, and this artificial intelligence, like a newborn baby, is clumsily exploring its surroundings.  American guided missiles have been launched, traffic is snarled because of the erratic behavior of traffic lights, banks and factories have had to suspend operations because machinery and electronics records are going haywire.  Mankind is at the mercy of an amoral child it has unwittingly birthed!

This one feels like a trifle.

**********

Tossing the inimical "Blood Brother" aside, we see that the three other stories from Playboy we've looked at are more about showcasing ideas than portraying human drama or drawing compelling characters.  And so they feel pretty bland. Well, we'll sample some more of the offerings from The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy in our next installment; maybe they will provide some excitement.

Stories by Simmons, Beaumont, Nolan and Bloch from across A Sea of Space

Welcome to Technicolor-Dreamcoat Land

We've been digging through our collection of classic SF paperback anthologies here at the MPorcius Library, and today we explore William F. Nolan's 1970 effort, A Sea of Space.  No doubt you'll recall that time we read Nolan's anthology 3 to the Highest Power.  You've probably forgotten that time I read four stories by Nolan; don't be embarrassed--I forget about them myself!  As I did, you can refresh your memory at the link.

I'm not groking A Sea of Space's cover; the picture of a woman in an extravagant outfit holding an over-sized eyeball (and, on the margins, three men's heads and a landed flying saucer projecting colorful rays) is pleasant enough, but I don't feel it conveys the book's announced theme of travels through space.  Maybe it illustrates a specific story?

Nolan's dedication is also mysterious.  It lists ten first names, all, I suspect, of women.  In contrast we have the table of contents, which lists fourteen names, all, I believe, of men.  Our 2018 sensibilities cry out, "That just ain't woke!"

Today we'll be looking at four of those fourteen stories, those written by Herbert A. Simmons, Charles Beaumont, Nolan himself, and Robert Bloch.

"One Night Stand" by Herbert A. Simmons (1963)

As Nolan tells us in the intro to the story, Simmons is the acclaimed African-American author of two novels about urban black life and jazz, Corner Boy and Man Walking on Eggshells.  "One Night Stand" is his only SF story, and first appeared in Gamma, a short-lived (5 issues) magazine for which Nolan served as managing editor.

"One Night Stand" is a first-person narrative in the voice of a jazz musician of the future, when the Earth is in contact with aliens, like the blue people of Mercury.  It is full of slang and metaphors, lots of sentences like these:

See, man, you start out trying to conquer a horn and because it's a bitch and hard to control, if you ain't careful that damn horn ends up conquering you.

Oh, we got hot man, we got wild.  Right from the beginning we were a burning bitch, and that's no jive, giving out like an old-time preacher on a Sunday morning, giving out so hard it was like no smoke, man, no smoke at all.

The story is only five and a half pages long, and I found this kind of writing in a dose of that size to be amusing.

One of the narrator's bandmates is Maury, perhaps the best trumpet player on Earth.  Maury is not happy.  For one thing, him being twenty years ahead of his time, very few people appreciate his genius trumpet playing.  For another, because he's not very good-looking and spends all his energy trying to tame his trumpet and none learning how to woo women, he can't get any "dames."  When Maury gets the idea that the blue people of Mercury may be capable of appreciating his playing, he insists the band accept the offer of a gig there.  While they are there he meets a native girl who loves him for his playing, and decides to stay.

"One Night Stand" is entertaining, largely because of its distinctive voice.  It is a fun change of pace from most SF stories, and Simmons has fun defying the expectations of SF readers: regarding the band's space flight to Mercury, the narrator tells us, "Now, man, if you're waiting for me to tell you about the moon and the stars and the milky way and all that jazz, that ain't what's happening....I'm a musician.  I ain't no astronaut."

"Elegy" by Charles Beaumont (1953)

Beaumont, like Nolan, was friends with Ray Bradbury, and Bradbury, we are told in Nolan's intro to the story, "worked over" "Elegy" in one of its early drafts.  We are also told that "Elegy" formed the basis of an episode of The Twilight Zone written by Beaumont (a quick look at Wikipedia indicates that this was Episode 20, also called "Elegy.")

The nations of Earth were about to embark on a cataclysmic war (one featuring the use of the "X-bomb") so a bunch of spacemen fled in their ship.  They went to Mars, but they didn't get along with the Martians.  So they searched the galaxy for a suitable place to settle.  Just as they were about to run out of fuel, by chance they came upon Asteroid K7.

K7, they learn, is a secret installation, offering services to the very rich!  When your loved one dies, you can have him preserved in a custom built setting, where he can (to outward appearances) enjoy his favorite activity for all eternity.  It's the galaxy's most elaborate cemetery!  A kid who loved rollerskating is frozen in his skates on a sidewalk.  A businessman who loved his work is frozen in a replica of his firm's office building, and kept company by artificial statues of all his colleagues!  And on and on (we get plenty of examples.)

The refugees are eager to settle on the cemetery asteroid, the soil and climate of which are suitable for agriculture.  But the cyborg caretaker of the cemetery has been given the mission of maintaining peace on K7, and human beings are so fractious that you can only be sure they will be peaceful if they are dead!  So the cyborg poisons the spacemen and preserves them at the controls of their now inert ship.

Merely acceptable.  "Elegy" first appeared in Imagination.

"Lap of the Primitive" by William F. Nolan (1958)

Many years ago, on my birthday, my wife (then my girlfriend) had me board a train with her, not telling me its destination.  We got off in New Haven and she guided me to the Peabody Museum of Natural History to look at dinosaurs and then the Yale Center for British Art to look at prints and paintings.  As "Lap of the Primitive" begins, Phineas Perchall is trying to give his new wife, Tildy, the same sort of surprise on their honeymoon; they are on a rocket she thinks is going to Luna, but is really bound for Venus!  But is Tildy as appreciative as I was back in my New York City days when my wife gave me an unexpected opportunity to deepen my relationship with Rudolph F. Zallinger and Sir Joshua Reynolds?  No!  In fact, as she sits in the passenger rocket she is lamenting that she got hitched to a man who is a bore with a long nose and a weak chin!  Why did Tildy marry a man whom she finds so unattractive?  Because she's a big fatso and doesn't think she could do any better!

I recently rewatched the 1975 TV movie Trilogy of Terror, on which Nolan worked and which features the famous adaptation of Richard Matheson's "Prey."  (You can still find illegally pirated movies on YouTube among all the videos from Russian bots providing advice on how to vote.)   Back in the very dawn of this blog's life I wrote that Matheson's "Prey" was a great horror story because it wasn't just about blood and violence but the everyday horrors of our human relationships.  When I started the story and saw it was about an unhappy marriage I thought that "Lap of the Primitive" would perhaps take this course.  Unfortunately, it is a goofy joke story taking, I suppose, Tarzan, King Kong and Ray Bradbury's "The Long Rain" as its inspiration.

Once on Venus, Phineas, inspired by his reading of books by an heroic anthropologist, wants to explore the jungles and uncover the truth about a "White God" who lives in the wilderness.  A safari is organized, with porters who carry stuff on their heads and a native guide and everything.  As they march through the jungle, Phineas, so excited about this trip earlier, finds the adventure fatiguing and even dangerous as he is stung by insects and blunders into pitfalls, while Tildy, at first scared of the jungle, begins to enjoy it.  She even begins losing weight thanks to the days of marching and eating native food.  The final twist joke is that the "White God" is the anthropologist Phineas admires, a big handsome blue-eyed blond, and he steals Tildy away from her husband, knowing that soon she will be thin and beautiful.  (The anthropologist and the native guide had this whole thing planned out when they first got wind that an Earth woman had landed on Venus.)

Weak.  This story first appeared in Fantastic Universe, and in his intro Nolan suggests that he is particularly proud of this one, that it is among his best works, in a way that left me bewildered.  For example, he talks about "Tildy's eventual triumph," when Tildy never does anything--she marries a guy she isn't attracted to, is tricked into going to Venus, is tricked into going on a safari she doesn't want to go on, and then submits to the desires of a man she does find attractive.  Tildy never makes any real decisions, she is subjected to the manipulation of others again and again.  Lame!

"The Old College Try" by Robert Bloch (1963)

It's Robert Bloch, he of Psycho fame!  Three years ago I read his 1989 novel about murder and voodoo in Los Angeles, Lori.  I think Bloch's reputation is a little inflated, but we'll see what he comes up with here.

"The Old College Try," which first appeared in Gamma, is about colonialism, and actually reminded me a little of the kinds of stories Somerset Maugham wrote about colonial administrators going native.  Bloch loves puns and jokes, and there is a certain amount of humor in this story, but the humor doesn't stop it from being a more or less realistic SF story--"The Old College Try" isn't an absurd parody like "Lap of the Primitive," thank heavens.

The Yorl of planet Yorla are violent savages with a stone-age level of technology.  These little blue-skinned hooligans enjoy fighting and are devoted to publicly displaying as trophies the heads of fallen opponents.  Yorla has valuable mineral resources, and humans are eager to trade with the natives for the minerals; as the Yorl are equally eager to acquire human trade goods there is no trouble convincing the Yorl to work in the mines.  Being too busy in the mines to fight their vicious wars, the Yorla have sublimated their lust for blood and craving for dangerous competition in a way that makes the mining operation more efficient--slackers who don't pull their weight in the mine or otherwise fail to meet their daily quota of ore are decapitated by their fellows!

The current colonial administrator, Raymond, has not made much effort in his five-year term on Yorla to civilize the natives.  In fact, he has a score of dutiful Yorl servants at his beck and call and spends most of the day drinking "Aspergin," a bit of wordplay from Bloch which I quite like.  (The first few lines of the story relate how a Yorl waits at Raymond's bedside every morning to hand him a glass of Aspergin as soon as he wakes up to alleviate his customary morning headache.)  Raymond's five years are up, and his replacement, Phillips, arrives.  Phillips is disgusted by Raymond's lax administration and the Yorls' taking and displaying of heads and other "exotic" customs, and, brushing aside Raymond's efforts to dissuade him, sets about trying to reform the Yorl.  This brief campaign ends in tragedy; unfortunately for this reader, the nature of the tragedy is a little too obvious and too easy to predict.

Despite the somewhat disappointing ending, I'll give this one a marginal positive vote; Bloch's style is smooth, and he structures and paces the story well, so it is enjoyable enough.

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For some reason I thought A Sea of Space would be full of stories about guys jettisoning cargo to escape gravity wells and calculating orbits while running low on oxygen, stuff like that.  Well, maybe those stories are in there; we'll keep our scanners tuned for them in our next episode.

Three stories from Far-Out People: Kris Neville, William F. Nolan & Michael Fayette

The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, which I started talking about in my last blog post, contains page after page of very interesting SF criticism from Malzberg, an expert on SF history.  In the book he recommends Kris Neville's 1971 version of "The Price of Simeryl," which was printed in the anthology The Far-Out People.  I decided to read "The Price of Simeryl," and, while I was at it, two other stories from The Far-Out People, one by William F. Nolan and one by Michael Fayette.

"The Price of Simeryl" by Kris Neville (original publication date 1966, this revision 1971)

I've read (I think) seven Neville stories in the past, and generally have had a positive reaction.  Let's see how I feel about this one, which first appeared in Analog.  According to The Far-Out People's publication page, the version I am reading is a revision.

Planet Elanth was colonized by humans less than 100 years ago, and they got problems!  A "Third Secretary in State," Raleigh, is sent from the administrative center of the vast space Federation to Elanth to investigate.  We follow his investigation, as well as the efforts of the human leadership of Elanth to convince Raleigh to approve a loan and arms sale to Elanth, and to keep certain facts a secret from Raleigh.

Most of this 41-page story consists of conversations during which politicians and bureaucrats all are trying to put something over on each other and the public.  I guess the story is largely an attack on imperialism and colonialism and racism as well as government callousness and ineptitude; the fact that the human colonists on Elanth call the native Elanthians "gooks" is presumably supposed to make you think of the Vietnam War, while the plot element mentioned in the title, the drug Simeryl, I guess is meant to remind you of the Opium Wars.  The native Elanthians are mysterious; they have a stone age culture and technology, and "live in harmony with the environment," as so many natives in SF stories do.  Their religion or philosophy or whatever compels them to help others, and so they have become an indispensible part of the human colonists' economy, volunteering to do heavy labor on farms and building roads.  Decades of human influence has messed up the Elanthian ecology, leading to fewer volunteers, and efforts to repair the environment and keep the Elanthians on the farm by addicting them to Simeryl have only made things worse. When Raleigh arrives things have reached the point where the human colonials are suffering painful price rises due to inflation and seeking weapons to defend themselves from an expected native revolt.

When Raleigh gets back to the administrative center of the Federation of Star Systems he tells the First Secretary in State to send neither money nor weapons to Elanth, to just let the human colonists all die.  The colonists, he says, have been driven insane by contact with the superior culture of the Elanth natives.  The taxpayers' money should be used instead to help the natives recover from the malign effect of contact with the human race!

Neville structures the story like a whodunit, so we get 40 pages of chatter with vague clues and then on the last page Raleigh issues his harsh verdict and diagnosis, that the human colonists "...bumped into a superior culture in the Elanthians and this gave them a horrible inferiority complex...."  The text doesn't really make it that all that clear that the colonists are insane or that the natives are so superior.  I'm not sure whether we are supposed to see Raleigh as a kind of Sherlock Holmes genius who perfectly reads all the clues and agree with his opinions and policies, or suspect he and the First Secretary are just as callous and insane as the thousands of colonists they are consigning to death.

I find these noble savage stories, and stories in which we are supposed to side with the aliens against the humans, a little hard to take.  In this one we barely even get to see the natives and assess how great they are; Raleigh only has a single brief interview with one of them.  (It is hinted that the Elanthians once had an urban technological civilization and abandoned it; maybe that is our signal that they are awesome. I must to say, I had to abandon the urban civilization called Manhattan for the Middle West and I don't feel very awesome about it.)  After some thought, I'm deciding that "The Price of Simeryl"'s ambiguity and mysteriousness make it better than the more straightforward pro-alien/anti-human stories you get from a guy like Chad Oliver, king of the anthropologist-goes-native-among-primitive-tribes story.  I am judging "The Price of Simeryl" acceptable, but I think it is worse, and less thought-provoking, than other Neville stories I have read.

"Papa's Planet" by William F. Nolan (1968)

In early 2015 I read four stories by Nolan and didn't think they were a very big deal. Maybe this one, first printed in Playboy, will put me firmly in the pro- (or anti-?) Nolan camp.

Or maybe not.  This is a four page gimmick story.  A pair of newlyweds goes to a planet dedicated to memorializing the life of Ernest Hemingway.  All the famous sites of Hemingway's adventures, Paris and Pamplona and all that, are reproduced and inhabited by robots.  The wife falls in love with an F. Scott Fitzgerald robot and abandons her husband.

This is exactly the sort of story a cynical person would expect to see in Playboy, the kind of story which tells the reader "You're not just a creep who bought this magazine to look at girls' boobs, you are an educated sophisticate who recognizes the names 'Ernest Hemingway' and 'F. Scott Fitzgerald' and bought this magazine to look at girls' boobs."   Acceptable, I guess.

"Savior Sole" by Michael Fayette (original publication date 1970, this revision 1971)

Fayette has only three credits on isfdb.  This story first appeared in Robert Hoskins' anthology Infinity One.  A year later Hoskins included it (in a revised version) in The Far-Out People.  Reduce, reuse, recycle.

I am totally loving this Steranko cover.

This is one of those stories in which half the stuff that happens is probably just the main character's hallucinations.  (Am I crazy, or do I read lots of stories like this?) It is also one of those New Agey stories which includes lots of poetry-like repetition and a dictionary definition (of  "lonely") in the text.

What I think happens is this: in order to preserve the human race against a catastrophe the U. S. government puts three hundred and fifty people in suspended animation in an underground bunker.  Also in the bunker is an Air Force chaplain; he is to reanimate everybody if he sees a red alarm light come on.  This will only happen if the entire human race on the surface is exterminated.

After living five years alone in the bunker the chaplain goes insane.  He starts thinking the corpsicles are up and about, having parties.  He falls in love with a young woman and deactivates her suspended animation equipment so he can grope her naked body.  This tampering with the equipment causes her to die (Fayette graphically describes how she bloats up and decays and so forth.)  In the end of the story the red light turns on...or does it?

This story just kind of sits there, neither offensively bad nor memorable or interesting, mere filler.  At least it is short, nine pages.  Barely acceptable.

***********

Three lukewarm stories: the fully formed but mediocre Neville and then two pointless, half-baked, gimmicky pieces.  It is more fun to read stories that are really good (obviously), and more fun to write about stories that are truly bad that give me a chance to enumerate problems and vent my frustration than to deal with these kinds of blah stories.  Well, that's life, I guess.

In our next episode we'll tackle more material from The Best of Barry N. Malzberg; no doubt Barry will inspire more excitement than did today's three writers.

Novelets by Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon and Chad Oliver

Last week the wife and I went to an "authentic" Italian restaurant in Gahanna, Ohio, the kind of place run by an old grandmother who greets you at the door like you are a delinquent member of the family and regales you with stories of her varicose veins; later she will, with jocular ferocity, enjoin you to eat your vegetables.  This place opens at dinner time, and the wife and I got there too early, so we killed time at the local library and at a tiny antiques and collectibles shop nearby.  The sparsely stocked shop had like two dozen old paperbacks, so few that I figured there would be nothing of interest, but I was wrong; when I saw William F. Nolan's 3 to the Highest Power, a 1968 paperback anthology with novelets by Ray Bradbury, Chad Oliver and Theodore Sturgeon behind its cool lunar cover, I had to have it.  This week, while loitering in Akron libraries and parks, I read the three stories; each is in the 30 to 45 page range.  The book's 160 pages are filled out by William F. Nolan's prefaces and bibliographies for each writer; SF fans must have found these indices very useful in the pre-internet age.

"The Lost City of Mars" by Ray Bradbury (1967)

Ray Bradbury is perhaps the most written about and most beloved of all American science-fiction writers; he certainly hasn't attracted the outspoken and well-organized legions of detractors that those other titans of American SF, Heinlein and Asimov, have.  In fact, Bradbury's one famous detractor, Thomas Disch, seems to have damaged his career by taking aim at Bradbury.  The matter of Bradbury's high reputation reminds me of Charles Schulz, another giant American talent whom everybody loves but who, to me, seems to have said and done things that should, but haven't yet, made him a target of the lefties.  Let's see if "The Lost City of Mars," first seen in the pages of Playboy, gives us reason to reconsider Bradbury's reputation.

Mars has been long colonized by mankind, and is dotted with human cities and towns as well as ruins of the extinct race of native Martians. In fact, as the story opens, the powers that be are considering what alien star system to explore; Mars has been conquered and the men of Earth will soon take their next step, beyond our solar system.

A public works project symbolizes the complete passing of Mars from native hands to that of the colonizers: the last of the Martian canals, dry for centuries, is filled with water by Earthmen.  A rich man's yacht sets out on the newly-navigable canal with a motley assortment of prominent citizens as holiday passengers, among them a famous poet and his wife, a beautiful actress and her maid, a celebrated big game hunter, and the captain of a rocket ship involved in the aforementioned selection of the first star system to be explored by humanity.  Bradbury doesn't come right out and say it, but the passengers all seem to be tired of life.  The actress, for example, has long enjoyed the worship of the male sex thanks to her great beauty, but is now depressed over losing her looks and men's adulation.  As for the hunter, he has used every weapon and killed every beast on Earth and has come to Mars to seek exotic new weaponry and novel quarry.  The rocket captain, who has long held a belief voiced by Bradbury himself in interviews--that by traveling to the stars humanity will achieve immortality--has become skeptical that the human race has the capability or even deserves to reach the stars.

The yacht trip is ostensibly a quest for Dia-Sao, the lost city of Mars which exhaustive surveys of Mars have never found, and which native myth condemns as "The City of Doom," a place to be feared and shunned.  The passengers do not take Dia-Sao very seriously.  Until, that is, they sail right into the lost city, which lies underground, inside a mountain (having thus escaped notice by aerial reconnaissances.)  

The yacht's passengers split up and explore the city.  (The people in this story don't act like real people would, but like characters in a fable or dream.  Would you explore an alien "City of Doom" all by yourself with no weapons, no armor, and no medical or communications equipment?  Of course you wouldn't.)  The city's robotic mechanisms still operate, detecting the deepest desires of each visitor and offering to each of them the opportunity ofhaving their dreams come true. The actress, for example, is entombed forever in a room of mirrors in which she will appear beautiful for all time.

"Lost City of Mars" also appears in the
widely available collection
I Sing the Body Electric

The rocket captain rejects what the city offers him, the illusion of life on a fresh new planet orbiting a distant star.  The prizes offered by the city, he feels, are illegitimate.  A decent person will derive no satisfaction from being given his heart's desire--true satisfaction, true achievement, comes from work, from taking risks, from overcoming obstacles and earning what you desire. He leaves the treacherous city with his ambition to conquer the stars renewed.

The poet also escapes.  Living with his nagging wife had made him long for death (!) and the city provides him the means to experience again and again simulations of death in vehicular accidents.  This gives him the strength to break up with his wife--he walks away from the city happier than he has been since his childhood.  His wife, on the other hand, never leaves Dia-Sao; it seems possible she activates the death simulation machine and actually dies.  (I wondered if the way the poet cheats death was a reference to the cliche that a poet will live forever in his verses; Shakespeare expresses this commonplace in his sonnets, as does Horace in his Odes.)

"The Lost City of Mars" is a good story, but (returning to my comment above about Bradbury's reputation) has elements that the kids who seem to be running our culture today might call "problematic."  There are three female characters, and two are negative stereotypes (the vain woman who has no skills other than being good-looking and the wife who crushes her husband's spirit) while the third (the actress's maid) is a nonentity who gets rescued from the city by the rocket captain.  (Is it possible that the maid's heart's desire was to be rescued by a hero?)

The story's defenders, among whom I will number myself, will consider the vain beauty and the nagging spouse to be not stereotypes but archetypes, and will point out that there are three male characters who succumb to the city's siren songs and whom themselves might be considered unflattering caricatures.  

"One Foot and the Grave" by Theodore Sturgeon (1949)

I never know how I am going to feel about a Sturgeon story before I read it; some are good, but some make me groan.  Let's see what Ted's serving up this time.

"One Foot and the Grave" is one of those stories in which we are told traditional superstitious nonsense, witches and spells and vampires and so forth, are real and can be explained by science--we just can't grasp the science yet, the same way medieval people wouldn't understand an electric light bulb or radar and would consider them magic.  It is also one of those stories which starts out with a bizarre circumstance and a bunch of characters, and then the characters all talk and talk and talk, the mysteries proliferating as we get more info until finally in the last few pages we learn how all the characters and weird plot elements are tied together.

The matter of the story is typical Lovecraftian horror stuff, but Sturgeon turns Lovecraft on his head (Sturgeon actually refers to Lovecraft by name in the story, telegraphing his intent.)  Lovecraft tells you the universe is indifferent or inimical, that life is meaningless, and that even greater horror awaits us in the future.  But in our optimistic pal Sturgeon's story we learn that there are powerful forces looking out for us, that love conquers all, and that everything is about to get much much better!

The cover of Vol. V of
  The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
illustrates "One Foot and the Grave"

The plot in brief (I'm leaving out half the characters, red herrings and plot twists here):  Claire has a crush on Thad, who resists her charms because he has a crush on small town physician Dr. Ponder's beautiful assistant, Luanna.  Claire has developed a bizarre malady--one of her feet has changed into a cloven hoof!  Dr. Ponder explains that millennia ago an evil entity was imprisoned in the woods nearby, and its magic has transformed Claire's foot.  To return her foot to normal, Ponder says, Claire has to recite an incantation over the place where the ancient monster is entombed.   Luckily, Thad realizes something isn't kosher when he spots Luanna eating a live rabbit!  In reality, devious Dr. Ponder is an evil wizard and Luanna is his familiar, and they are trying to trick Claire (who has some kind of special powers she is not really aware of) into preventing the liberation of the entity, which is in fact a good entity!  Thad frees the supernatural prisoner, who turns out to be the angel Kamel, imprisoned by Satan in the ancient past.  Now Kamel is free to do his work of leading humanity towards unity and happiness (we see this kind of utopian collectivism in Sturgeon's work all the time.)  With Luanna out of the way, Claire and Thad will get married and live happily ever after.

This story isn't bad; on a stylistic level it works quite well--I actually thought many of the descriptions were good, and I was legitimately puzzled and surprised by some of the mysteries and twists.  I wasn't thrilled to see Sturgeon drawing water from the collectivism well yet again, but that is just in the last three pages of the tale, so it wasn't too exasperating.  Some who were expecting a science fiction story may complain that this is a fantasy story, that Sturgeon's invocation of the spirit of Clarke's Third Law doesn't make a story about angels, demons, wizards and vampires a real SF story.  I think those people would be right, but since I like (good) fantasy stories, I don't care.  (The fantasy components and Lovecraft references are less surprising if you keep in mind that  "One Foot and the Grave" first appeared in Weird Tales.)

"The Marginal Man" by Chad Oliver (1958)

Back in the summer of 2014 (gadzooks, have I been writing this blog that long?) I read three Chad Oliver stories and was not overly impressed.  Maybe this story, which originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction under the title "Guardian Spirit," will make me change my mind about old Chad?

Oliver was an anthropologist, and editor William F. Nolan's preface to "The Marginal Man" includes excerpts from Oliver's letters that describe exciting adventures in Africa involving dangerous elephants, rhinos, and tribesmen armed with poison-tipped arrows.  So it is no surprise that the protagonist of this story is an anthropologist of the future, but it is certainly a disappointment that the star of the story, Arthur Canady, has fewer exciting adventures than Oliver did in real life!

Rather than a compelling drama, “The Marginal Man” is a utopian story about how if you can develop a good heart and live at one with nature you will achieve immortality.  It is lacking in tension or interest, and full of sentimental goop printed in italics (“You must believe, that is all”) and romantic descriptions of the weather and the landscape (“A sea of swollen clouds washed over the stars….There was an electric hush as the world held its breath.”) This sort of thing is not for me.

Anthropoligist Arthur Canady is a member of a two-man team that travels to planets where primitive people live.  Such teams give the natives sewing machines, rifles and steam engines to jumpstart their economies, fostering their development into suitable trading partners for the Earth.  This story tells how Canady (veteran of many such missions) and his partner land among people who are just like the Plains Indians whom Oliver studied in real life, nomads who live in teepees and follow herds of large herbivores that they hunt with bows and arrows.  These natives are unlike any other Canady has met before--they have absolutely no interest in making their lives easier with Terran technology.  Soon he figures out why: these people never get sick and never die, so they have all the time in the world to sew by hand and hunt with bows.  The secret to their incredible health and longevity: they rigidly control their population and are thus in perfect harmony with the ecosystem.  The tribe has a set number of members, and a woman in the tribe will get pregnant only after another member commits suicide.  There is also a ritual that appeases some gods or aliens or something.

Canady decides he wants to live forever among these Stone Age types and so he goes through the ritual, fasting on top of a mountain where he meets his spirit animal and blah blah blah and then the tribe welcomes him with open arms.  He has an eternity of buffalo hunting to look forward to!  (Oliver hand waves away the fact that now the tribe has one too many members.)

Like the Sturgeon story, this is a fantasy story which is counted as science fiction only because the author says it is science fiction—there is no effort made to explain logically how immortality is achieved, and immortality isn’t used as a springboard to discuss psychological or social issues or as the catalyst for an exciting adventure.  There is little reason for the tale to be set on another planet instead of on some lost plateau in Africa or South America; an earthbound setting would perhaps be an improvement, as I found the unexplained fact that the galaxy is full of planets inhabited by stone age humans, instead of diverse species with varying levels of technological and political development, to be distracting.  Unlike the Sturgeon, "Marginal Man" is tedious and its mysteries are obvious and silly.

Has "Marginal Man" changed my mind about Oliver?  On the contrary!  Looking back at my 2014 post on Oliver I see that two of those three stories were also about a space anthropologist going native among primitive peeps.  Enough already!  A thumbs down for this naïve hippy wish fulfillment yarn, and a warning that you won't be seeing any more discussions of Oliver here unless I forget what he's all about again. (Which will probably happen, because I have a bad memory.)

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Thinking about the stories in 3 to the Highest Power, I think we can say that all three are fables or fantasies about paradises or utopias. Sturgeon and Oliver indulge in the childish daydream that through the intervention of perfect alien beings we can achieve wonderful lives of unity with all living things. Bradbury, in his mature wisdom, tells us what we already know, that life is hard, that an easy paradise is an illusion, and true satisfaction comes from hard work.

Four stories by William F. Nolan

William F. Nolan is a name I have been seeing on all these anthologies I have been reading, but who is William F. Nolan?  Over the last couple days I read four stories by Nolan in an effort to discover what he is all about.

"And Miles to Go Before I Sleep" (1965 revision of the 1958 story)

This one is for all you Robert Frost fans! "And Miles to Go Before I Sleep" also reminded me a bit of Ray Bradbury and of The Twilight Zone, which makes sense when you read about Nolan's life and career on Wikipedia; Nolan is an expert on, and was a friend of, Bradbury, and has done quite a bit of work for TV.

Ever since he was a kid Robert Murdock wanted to be a spaceman!  He was the only boy in his little Midwestern town to make it into the astronaut service, and at the age of 21 he blasted off.  Twenty years later he is finally heading back home.  Unfortunately, on an alien planet he contracted an incurable disease.  The doctors are able to predict to the hour when he will die, and there isn't enough time to get back to Earth to see his parents one more time.  So, he has a robot made to look exactly like him, and uploads his memories into the machine--his parents won't know the difference!

The twist ending: his parents died a while ago, but instead of letting Robert know they were sick they had robot replacements of themselves made!  As robot Robert embraces robot Mom and robot Dad, the onlooking townsfolk think they have tricked Robert in order to spare his feelings, just like the space service people think they have tricked the Earthers!

This story is OK, a little sappy for my taste (not that I am in any position to judge other people's sentimentalism, after Barry Malzberg's "Conversations at Lothar's" brought tears to my eyes.  I guess we all have our buttons, and this story just didn't push mine.)

I read "And Miles to Go Before I Sleep" in Man Against Tomorrow,  a 1965 anthology edited by Nolan.  The story originally appeared in Infinity Science Fiction, a magazine I don't remember having heard of before, but which, judging by the covers at isfdb and on google, published work by big name authors and tried to include a sexy dame on every cover of its twenty issues.  Nolan informs us that he revised "And Miles to Go Before I Sleep" for inclusion in Man Against Tomorrow.

"He Kilt it With a Stick" (1967)

I read "He Kilt it With a Stick" in my copy of the second volume of the paperback version of the Anthony Boucher memorial anthology Special Wonder.  My copy of Special Wonder: Volume 2 at one time was in the collection of Branch Library 5 at Fort Jackson, in South Carolina.

SF fans among serving and former United States Army personnel--we salute you!

William F. Nolan, who has won Lifetime Achievement-type awards from The International Horror Guild and the Horror Writers Association, is probably better known as a horror writer than as a writer of science fiction (narrowly defined to mean stuff about future or alternate technologies and societies.)  "He Kilt it With a Stick" reflects this fact; it is a realistic psychological horror story.

In six pages, "He Kilt it With a Stick" tells the tale of a guy who hates cats so much he goes out of his way to kill them.  The story details his most memorable kills, suggests why he hates felines (his mother told him that old myth about cats stealing a baby's breath, and a cat scratched him when he was seven) and relates how, in middle age, he dies of a heart attack when he has a hallucination of hundreds of cats overpowering him.  (I guess he never heard that "herding cats" cliche.)

This story is competent, but pedestrian.  Acceptable, but unremarkable.

"Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!" (1971)

As a kid, Gorf was one of my favorite arcade games.  I loved the "quark laser" concept, and the fact that the game had different levels which played differently, and the way the villain would talk to you (a feature I also loved in Berzerk.)

Anyway, "Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!" appears in Infinty Two, that anthology of all new stories edited by Robert Hoskins that I have been reading lately.

"Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!" is one of those absurd humor pieces, a parody of those movies about giant creatures attacking everybody.  In beautiful upstate New York a scientist with a beautiful niece is trying to increase food production and accidentally creates a bullfrog the size of an apartment building.  The thing starts eating people, and skinny and depressed Dave Merkle and fat and jolly Eldon Sash, who work at the Pentagon's "Office of Stateside Emergencies," head out to investigate.  The military employs various weapons on the monster, but it is impervious to all physical harm.  Finally, the niece uses a female frog to lure the colossal batrachian into quicksand.

Fourteen pages of feeble jokes.  Thumbs down.

"Starblood" (1972)  

This one is in Infinity Four, like Infinity Two, an anthology of original stories published by Lancer and edited by Robert Hoskins.

"Starblood" is a series of vignettes depicting a future (or maybe futures) in which people are all assholes, living in societies in which all our institutions are corrupt or decadent.  Most of the six vignettes portray a relationship which should be based on love but which in this case is not, and all end with someone getting killed.  There is a brief frame story in italics (this entire story, all seven parts, is just 13 pages) about alien beings who would like to bring love to the Earth, but are rejected.

The vignettes, each numbered and named after the person who gets murdered:

1) A baby boy's crying interferes with his parents' pastimes, so Mom throws baby out of a helicopter.

2) A pretty girl was part of a religious cult's harem, but got thrown out when she spoke up to one of the male masters.  Brokenhearted, she sees a hypno shrink; the only solution to her sadness is euthanasia.

3) A motorist is ambushed by teenage bandits; he survives the energy gun firefight, but his car is knocked out and he is killed by another pack while on foot.

4) A kid who is obsessed with death rents a robot doppelganger of William Faulkner at a bookstore, and gets run over by a car on the walk home.

5) A woman and her husband are drug smugglers; right before they make a big sale she poisons him in a restaurant so she can keep all the profits for herself.

6) A young woman is rich because her Dad is at the top of his lucrative profession. His job title is "assassin for hire."  He comes home one day and completes a contract--someone hired him to kill his daughter.

I guess you could call this a New Wave exercise; the vignettes are striking, and include all sorts of SF paraphernalia (robots, underwater cities, ray guns, telepathy, alternative sexual arrangements) but the story lacks any sort of character, feeling or plot.  The story isn't bad, but doesn't leave any sort of impression; like "And Miles to Go Before I Sleep" and "He Kilt it With a Stick," I'd say "Starblood" is acceptable, but forgettable.

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These are run-of-the-mill stories--they feel like filler.  They are professional, but lack anything that makes them feel special, there is no sense that we are experiencing a person's unique vision or singular voice.

These stories probably do not represent Nolan's best work.  I'm still interested in him, so I should probably poke around online and figure out what his most admired stories are and try to hunt them down.