F&SF Feb 1958: C Oliver, R Phillips, & C Emshwiller

We've already read four stories from the February 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher, who in the book review column of this issue tells you he disagrees with Ayn Rand's philosophy and denounces Frank Belknap Long's Space Station 1, Kenneth Bulmer's City Under the Sea, David Duncan's Occam's Razor, Henry Gayle's Spawn of the Vortex, and Mach 1: A Story of Planet Ionus by Allen A. Adler as "worthless."  (Back in 2017 I read Mach 1 under its title Terror on Planet Ionus and I didn't care for it either.  The day may come when I read Long's Space Station 1, but I think I own other Long novels that I will tackle before that one.)

Anyway, the stories from this issue we've already passed judgement on are Poul Anderson's "The Last of the Deliverers," Robert Silverberg's "The Man Who Never Forgot," Avram Davidson's "I Do Not Hear You, Sir," and Charles Fontenay's "A Summer Afternoon."  Let's today drag before the merciless tribunal that is the MPorcius Fiction Log staff Chad Oliver's "Pilgrimage," Rog Phillips' "Love me, Love My -," and Carol Emshwiller's "Baby."  Order in the court!

"Pilgrimage" by Chad Oliver

This story immediately reminded me of the Clifford Simak stories we read in our last episode, as it concerns a small town and has as its hero an older man, an irascible character, who serves as a liaison between humanity and space aliens.  But it lacks any interesting SF content, the human feeling we saw in those Simak stories, and any sense of hope or wonder, instead indulging in cheap contempt for people.

Grandpa Erskine lives in a dry Southern county, in the town of Pryorville, and enjoys annoying people by walking clumsily, as if drunk, and showily carrying around books like Lady Chatterly's Lover and General Sherman: American Hero while singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."  It is not that he particularly likes booze or the North--what he likes is pissing people off.

This week is the Pryorville Pilgrimage, when the citizens dress up like Confederate soldiers or cowboys or pioneers or Native Americans, when there is a vintage automobile show and a Conestoga wagon shows up.  Pryorville, Oliver tells us, is stuck in the past, a bogus romanticized view of the past--I guess Oliver is giving us permission to have contempt for these people and cheer on Grandpa Erskine's efforts to hurt people's feelings as well as the aliens' somewhat non sequiter punishment of them.

Alien anthropologists, hovering in a starship high above (Oliver was an anthropologist and his profession informs much of his SF) are looking forward to observing the strange native festival that is the Pryorville Pilgrimage.  But they are here to do more than observe.  As the parade begins, they use a time machine (the aliens call it an STD or Selective Temporal Dislocator, one of Oliver's little jokes) to bring figures from Pryorville's past to the present day, and to send some 20th-century Pryorville inhabitants back into the past.  The Indians and cowboys and whores from the 19th century shoot up the town, rape the women and seduce the men, eat a dog, etc.  Grandpa Erskine gets along with these jokers just fine; he has been in league with the aliens, stealing artifacts (like his cousin's TV) and delivering them to the aliens, and I guess the aliens' payment to Grandpa for his aid is this humbling and enlivening of the town.  Are these aliens anthropologists, practical jokers or terrorists?  As for the 20th-century people unexpectedly sent back to the past for which they had such misguided nostalgia, they find that they are stuck in lives of poverty, violence and gender inequality.

I guess we can give this trivial and gimmicky joke story a grade of barely acceptable.  I suppose it is true that romanticizing the past is silly, but is pointing this out the basis for an entertaining or enlightening story?  Not really.  And it is odd to get this message from Chad Oliver, who, unless my memory fails me, has used multiple SF stories to argue that pre-industrial life was better than post-industrial life.  Maybe readers who like seeing Southerners humiliated will enjoy this story more than I did, though the way Oliver goofs on those who romanticize Native Americans may bother such people.

"Pilgrimage" was reprinted in various foreign editions of F&SF and chosen for inclusion in the volume produced as a memorial to celebrate Boucher.  In our own 21st century it appeared in the NESFA collection of Oliver's short stories.  

I own the red Volume 2 of the paperback edition of Special Wonder
and from it have read Kris Neville's "Old Man Henderson" and
William F. Nolan's "He Kilt it With a Stick."  It also reprints
Damon Knight's "You're Another," which I read in another publication.

"Love Me, Love My -" by Rog Phillips

When I started this blog post the plan was to read the Oliver, Davidson and Emshwiller stories from this issue of F&SF, but then I realized I'd already read Davidson's "I Can't Hear You, Sir" so I subbed in this story by Phillips.  I've only read one story by Phillips before, "The Yellow Pill," which I thought "OK."  This story, "Love Me, Love My -," only ever saw print again in foreign versions of F&SF.           

This is a banal story full of traditional jokes about how middle-class men in the corporate world are pushed around by women and by their bosses.  Barely acceptable.

Lin is a young executive.  Having finished up training and his first assignment on Venus, the company is sending him to Tau Ceti III.  He doesn't want to go because he has a girl on Venus, but if he doesn't go he will be fired and have to take a working-class job.  The company will pay to transport a wife along with him to Tau Ceti III, so he is told that if he marries the girl all will be well.  But the girl, Leah, refuses to leave her "vegy," and the company won't pay to transport a vegy as well as a wife.

It is the 25th century, and humans have had a relationship with vegies for almost a century.  The vegies are alien plant people who thrive on soil and sunlight and emit oxygen; one vegy produces enough oxygen to keep three humans alive.  Vegies have replaced mechanical means of producing oxygen on space ships and in the sort of dome cities humans have to live in on planets like Venus.  As smart and as strong as humans, vegies are often treated more like a member of the family than an employee and people tend to become attached to them, and Leah has had the same vegy all her young life and won't leave Venus without it.  She tells Lin that if he really loved her he would figure out a way to get her vegy passage on the star ship to Tau Ceti III, even though the passage costs twice Lin's yearly salary.  (To add insult to injury, the vegy isn't crazy about Lin and is always hanging around, keeping Lin from having sexual contact with Leah.)

Lin works with smugglers to smuggle Leah's vegy aboard, but the smugglers try to kidnap the vegy so they have oxygen on the space boat they are going to steal after seizing the diamonds the space liner is transporting to Tau Ceti III.  The vegy outfights the smugglers and in return for foiling their schemes Lin, Lea and the vegy get a big reward that is spent on transporting stuff the vegy wants transported to Tau Ceti III.  The upshot of the story is that Lin is at the mercy of his boss, his wife and his wife's alien friend, living the tragedy of middle-class life--responsibility for the survival and comfort of others who show him no respect.

"Baby" by Carol Emshwiller 

I've sort of avoided Emshwiller's work because the wikipedia article on her suggests the selling point of her fiction is that it is feminist, and, as someone who has spent decades of his life in and around academia and bookstores and art museums, I doubt there is any story written in the 1950s that is going to expose me to a feminist idea that I will find new and exciting.  But "Baby" is the cover story of a major magazine edited by a major writer and thus important to the history of SF, and when I read Emswiller's 1959 story "Day at the Beach" in 2018 I found it thought-provoking, so let's give "Baby" a spin.  It is only 13 pages and was reprinted by famous horror and crime anthologist Peter Haining in a book on the Frankenstein theme, so how bad can it be?

"Baby" is a pretty well-done last-man-on-Earth, postapocalyptic story with robots, which touches on themes like man's desire to grow up, the stifling of an overbearing mother, and how, left outside civilization, a man will act like a beast.  It has real human feeling and no dopey jokes.  Moderately good.

Baby is a 38-year-old man, naked, living among malfunctioning robots in a half-operational automatic house with machines that cook food and doors that open automatically and so forth, in the midst of an automatic city where some things still work but others do not.  Baby is getting thin as much of the equipment that cultivates and cooks food is failing.  Unfortunately, the robots that still treat him like a child, admonishing him to be polite and so on, are still fast enough and strong enough to catch him and force him into the bed that is far too small for him when he escapes.

We learn over the course of the story that the United States got involved in a cataclysmic biological war just as Baby was being born--his parents instructed the robot with the artificial womb to keep Baby in the womb an extra year--when he finally got out all the germs were gone, but so were (apparently) all the people.  So Baby has been treated like a kid by caretaker robots for 38 years and never seen another human.  He instinctively wants to grow up and become responsible for himself and to share love with another human, but is so ignorant that for a while he thinks he will grow into a robot, his two eyes merging into the single red electronic eye like those he sees on the robots who look after him, his arms becoming like tentacles and so forth.

The plot of this story, once all the background is out of the way, concerns Baby's most successful yet escape attempt.  He rides the underground slidewalks the furthest he has ever taken them, essentially at random, and stumbles upon a house similar to his own in which lives a woman in a situation almost identical to his, though her imprisoning house's cooking machinery is working better.  These two more or less fall in love, but, having had zero socialization, have little idea how to deal with each other, and of course the robots who are taking care of her (they call her "Honey") are in the way.  But over a period of time Baby and Honey are making progress, and it looks like we readers may get a happy ending.  But then Baby's caretaker robots finally catch up to him and drag him back home.  As the story ends, we know Baby is going to escape again and again, searching the vast city for Honey, striving to avoid recapture by robots and attack from packs of wild dogs, but we don't know if he will succeed.  

This is the best story we are reading today, the most serious and the best-written; maybe I should stop avoiding Emswhiller's work.

**********

A profitable excursion into the oeuvres of writers of whom I have been skeptical.  The Oliver and Phillips are tolerable, though the former leaves a bad taste in the mouth because it feels vindicative and arrogant and the latter, though it reflects real life relationships, is mediocre.  Emshwiller's story uses standard SF devices in a more mature way and exhibits real sympathy for the human condition and has the best images and finest style as well and serves as an argument to suspend my skepticism of her.

Stay tuned for more SF short stories in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, in which we will be guided by the aforementioned Mr. Haining.

Merril-approved 1958 stories by "F O'Donnevan" and C Oliver

We continue looking at 1958 SF by reading selected stories included by Judith Merril in her list of Honorable Mentions in the 1959 edition of her critically lauded anthology series.  Today the "O" authors from the list.  

"The Gun Without a Bang" by Robert Sheckley (as by Finn O'Donnevan)

I read this one without first looking it up at isfdb and so got tricked.  I usually avoid Sheckley because I associate him with joke stories and satires, and would have skipped this if I had known the true identity of its author.  Luckily "The Gun Without a Bang" is not a humor piece, but a well-written adventure story that reminds us of the limitations of technology as well as the adaptability of mankind.

It is the spacefaring future!  All over the galaxy brave men are having adventures, discovering lost civilizations, fighting monsters, building a space empire.  Some of these men get lucky and get rich.  Dixon is one of these adventurers, but so far he hasn't been one of those to get rich.  He is content with his fate, however.

Today he is alone on a wild planet checking on an automatic radio relay station.  He has with him a prototype disintegrator pistol--he is testing it in the field for its inventors.  When he is attacked by a pack of things like wolves or hyenas and a pack of things like killer monkeys he uses the disintegrator to fight them off.  The weapon is very good at disintegrating Dixon's assailants, but it has its drawbacks.  For one thing, the disintegrator doesn't make a loud noise and disintegrated animals don't cry out in pain or fear, nor leave dead bodies, so the other animals of the pack are not scared by the weapon even as it reduces their numbers.  For another, the disintegrator beam has a wide area of effect and is liable to cause collateral damage and friendly fire incidents; a branch falls from a tree that is partly disintegrated and hits Dixon, putting him in peril, and during a wild close range struggle Dixon disables his own spaceship with stray fire, marooning him on this planet of voracious monsters.

A year later the inventors of the disintegrator pistol come looking for Dixon and their prototype and find Dixon has survived using the most basic and primitive methods, like building a stockade and fighting with handmade bow and arrows.  The pistol he uses as a hammer.

The action scene is very good and the plot twists make sense, so thumbs up for Robert Sheckley, not a thing I expected to type and not a thing you can expect to read from me again.

"The Gun Without a Bang" has been reprinted in several Sheckley collections and multiple anthologies.  I read it in the issue of Galaxy in which it first appeared.  

"The Space Horde" by Chad Oliver

Merril might have liked it, but "The Space Horde" didn't set the world on fire when it debuted--it was not printed in book form in English until 2016, though our Italian friends included it in an anthology in 1972.  It first saw print in an issue of Amazing alongside a story by Harlan Ellison with an equally corny title, "The Vengeance of Galaxy 5," that looks like it might be fun.  

"The Space Horde" is structured like a stereotypical SF thriller, like a B-movie about some disaster, that tries to horrify you, teach you some science, and trigger in you that good old sense of wonder at the vastness and mysteriousness of the universe.  First we get an intro about the vastness of space, how space is like the sea and the stars and planets like islands, etc.  Then the plot starts--three spacecraft have landed on Earth and from each emerges a blob monster that can dissolve anything and is immune to conventional weaponry; the unstoppable jelly creatures expand as they feed, laying waste to ever more acreage.  Then we get talky scenes of American scientists discussing what to do, interspersed with horror scenes in italics depicting children and women being dissolved by the ever-growing blob monsters.  The Rand Corporation computer calculates that the goop will cover all of the world in two years.  One team of scientists comes up with a wild theory of how to save the world from the invincible alien slime, and this is what makes the poorly titled "The Space Horde" unusual and worthy of Merril's recommendation. 

Maybe, posit the scientists, somewhere on Earth there lives the next step in evolution, a creature more advanced than the human race.  (We get some pretty suspect lectures about evolution at this point.)  If such a superior species exists, maybe it can defeat the aliens!  The scientists brainstorm what this next stage of evolution would look like, figure it must have telepathy, and that if it hasn't already fought the space jelly then it must not be aware of it yet, must live in some remote area, like Madagascar!  So the scientists go to Madagascar and wander around, thinking about the threat posed by the blobs from beyond the stars and broadcasting a mental cry for help to creatures they don't even know exist.  There is a flash and the slime retreats and returns to space.  The scientists can't be sure, but we readers are made aware, that they were right, that there lives in Madagascar an inconspicuous community of little psychic people who look like rodents and have no need for technology; when they learned of the space ooze they acted to save the world and the human beings they see as cute and clownish children.  The crisis over, the scientists speculate about whether the human race will colonize other planets and what will happen if we ever meet the secret superior species they theorize saved us.

"The Space Horde" isn't too long, and while the alien menace is sort of tired Oliver's resolution of the crisis is crazy and feels fresh, so I can moderately recommend it.

**********

Well, there are the "O"s, or, I guess, the "O" and a ringer, two respectable science fiction stories with science and horror/adventure elements.  Merril has guided us aright today.  

More 1950s SF featuring adventure and violence (I hope!) in our next episode!

Merril-approved 1956(?) stories by Ward Moore, Alan E. Nourse and Chad Oliver

If you were going to some place where they eat snails to throw soup on the Giaconda, or some place where they eat sheep's organs cooked in a sheep's stomach to hunt for Nessie, or some place where they eat raw fish in order to buy used panties, you might bring a Fodor's or Frommer's guide with you.  Well, we're going to 1956 and we're bringing with us Judith Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume as our guide.  This installment of Merril's famous anthology series includes a long list of 1956 speculative fiction stories which Merril thought worth recommending but which she didn't include in the book.  We've been doing this for a while, working our way through Merril's alphabetical list, reading selected stories, and today we will tackle an "M," an "N" and an "O."  If you are curious about earlier stops on this tour, check out the links at the bottom of this post, mon cheri.

(Nota bene: Merril recommends Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "And the Light is Risen," but I am skipping it because it would later be incorporated into A Canticle For Leibowitz, which I read ages ago, as a recent Rutgers grad working for minimum wage in a New Jersey bookstore, and may reread one of these days.)

"No Man Pursueth" by Ward Moore (1956)

I almost bought a 1972 Avon edition of Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee because I liked the Jeff Jones cover, but alternate history isn't my thing, and even the endorsement of Ray Bradbury was not enough to entice me into committing to reading it.  Last year I read Moore's 1960 story "The Fellow Who Married the Maxill Girl" and I didn't like it; I called it "sappy" and judged the points it was trying to make "banal."  However, I did like the 1961 Moore story I read in 2015, "It Becomes Necessary."  Maybe today's Moore story, "No Man Pursueth," will be a tiebreaker.

Things got off on the wrong foot when, on page 3 of this 30 page story, Moore indulged in unfunny self-referential "meta" humor aimed at the SF community, with thinly veiled references to Sam Moskowitz and Forrest J. Ackerman and direct references to Galaxy editor H. L. Gold and F&SF editor Anthony Boucher.  I find this kind of thing tiresome.

Our lead is a famous stage actress, age 41, and she is having breakfast in a New York diner, reading the paper, when a balding guy introduces himself to her as the number three science-fiction fan in America, even slinging some SF lingo at her ("egoboo," for example.)  After Moore is done with his in-jokes, the SF fan shares with the actress his theory about the recent spate of disturbing and inexplicable events that are dominating news coverage.  All over the world, airplanes are disappearing and large numbers of ordinary people are reporting incredible experiences, the sensation of having been transported to, and then returned from, alternate worlds where people where unusual clothes.  Number Three claims holes in the time-space continuum are responsible.  Later, the actress finds herself in a church and hears another explanation for the phenomena, that they are the result of the accumulated weight of human evil.

Bad news comes from La La Land via the telephone--the actress's second husband reports that her daughter, age 20, from her first marriage, tried to commit suicide (sleeping pills) and is in the hospital.  Scared to fly, the actress and her black maid (whom Moore gives bad grammar and an accent) hop in the car and strike out west from New York City for the left coast.  In Zanesville, Ohio (the maid says "Uhia") they stop to get out to eat and the actress is transported to the past or an alternate universe or something, to find herself an actress performing at a Nazi extermination camp!  

After hearing a black-clad soldier's racist monologue (he talks up the scientific methods employed by the Nazis, perhaps a dig from Moore at the sort of SF fans who are science-obsessed and read Astounding, in contrast to the more literary-minded readers of F&SF) she is transported back to our world, to backwoods Kentucky, where she gets some help from some poor Christians who don't have electricity and don't read the papers ("Sin enough in the world, without reading about it.")  The maid catches up to her and they are continuing their journey west when they and their car are transported to a city with cobblestoned streets (apparently Vienna, centuries ago) where they witness some guys shoot a cat with an arrow.

In some ways "No Man Pursueth" is like a mainstream story about the guilt of parents who focus on their careers instead of spending time with their kids, thus damaging the kids' psychology.  There's even a "magical Negro" who dispenses wisdom about parenting in "blaccent."  In Vienna, the maid cannot understand the speech of the cat killers, but the actress can comprehend both the Viennese and the Nazi; the actress figures this is because the black maid is good and the actress is herself evil, somehow on the same wavelength as the Jew-killers and feline-killers.  It is also the maid who figures out how to get out of the cat-killing world and back to modern America (not by using logic or science, however, but just by following a hunch, as if Moore is following the tradition that while white men try to master the world through data collection and rational calculation, women and blacks just follow intuition or benefit from being close to nature.)  

As these adventures proceed we are privy to the actress's thoughts.  For one thing, she seems to identify with the fictional characters she has played more than with real people.  More importantly, we learn that her first husband cheated on her with her sister, and that hubby #1 urged her to abort their daughter because being pregnant might ruin her figure; the actress carried the pregnancy to term because the risks of the abortion procedure (septicemia) scared her, not because she loved her unborn child.

The two women have almost reached California when the actress is again transported to another world, this a surreal one, a sort of abstract representation of a court of law and/or a theatre stage where she hears voices reciting, among other things, quotes from and about Sacco and Vanzetti.  (When I was a kid in the '70s and '80s people talked about Sacco and Vanzetti all the time, but I feel like I don't hear so much about them any more.)  The actress suddenly realizes that she has been a bad person because she has withheld love from others:

And what was evil?  Cruelty, self-righteousness, stupidity, insensitivity, yes--but in the end it was essentially lack of love.

Her sins include withholding sex from her first husband--she is not only to blame for her daughter's suicide attempt because she was a distant and cold mother focused on her own career, but is also to blame for her husband's infidelity because of her stinginess in sharing her body.  Significantly, we learn that the maid, the person in the story who represents or exemplifies goodness and wisdom, is very sexually active.  (As so often in white-penned fiction, black people in Moore's story are characterized as overflowing with sexuality.)

The phenomena of people travelling to other times and/or worlds, the actress now realizes, were the universe educating people in how to be good, and she somehow senses that these trips would soon end--enough people who were evil, like her, have now been educated, and the balance between good and evil has been restored.

(I think Moore leaves a huge loose end hanging regarding the disappearing airplanes--the actress feels the planes will stop disappearing, but I don't think Moore addresses whether the lost people and machines will ever come back.  Why did he even include the whole concept of vanishing airplanes?  I guess as a way to force the actress and the maid to drive cross country, but he could have just said the actress was afraid of flying, you know, like Isaac Asimov.)

As an historical document, "No Man Pursueth" is sort of interesting, it being a specimen of the pro-sex SF we generally associate with Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein, and of anti-racism SF that, even though it is all about how awesome black people are, itself feels sort of racist.  The story's apparent low opinion of abortion, nowadays a centerpiece of elite morality, also marks it as being from another era, and we also have the matter of a male writer depicting a female character and passing judgement on her sex life--perhaps a no-no in 2024.  

As a work of entertainment or literature, however, "No Man Pursueth" is lame.  In his intro to the story in F&SF, Anthony Boucher says "No Man Pursueth" is "one of the stories I have been most proud to publish."  I guess Boucher was excited to print a SF story that, instead of trying to teach you science or entertain you with an adventure, tried to treat philosophically real-life relationship issues like marriage, parenting, and race relations.  Unfortunately for all of us, Moore doesn't deal with these issues in a compelling way, and so he's getting a thumbs down from me.  The universe giving people lessons by sending them into the past to witness atrocities is just lazy and childish deus ex machina goop, and Moore isn't even content to let the visions or whatever speak for themselves--after presenting his symbolism and offering his clues, he just tells you exactly what they mean, so his story has no subtlety or nuance or ambiguity, and demands no thought from the reader.  Besides lacking intellectual challenge, "No Man Pursueth" also lacks any real fun or excitement, feels long because of all the extraneous material (like the SF in-jokes in the opening scene) and features a writing style that is merely adequate.  Anthony Boucher, you sold us a lemon.

Boucher included this clunker in the "Best of" F&SF anthology covering this period (I read the Avram Davidson, Theodore Sturgeon and Poul Anderson stories from the volume back in early 2022) and in 1988 our Italian friends shared its pro-sex message with their countrymen (is this really a message they need over there?) in an anthology with a characteristically impressive cover illo by Dutch-born Karel Thole.

      

"Second Sight" by Alan E. Nourse (1956)

I've read two stories by Nourse so far, a lame cat story called "Nize Kitty" and "Family Resemblance," which I condemned as "a ten-page fat joke."  It's been over five years since I read those stories and tempers have cooled, so let's give Nourse a third look, why don't we?  (And let's hope he fares better than Ward Moore has today, and that I can deal with this story in less than 1,500 words.  MPorcius Fiction Log is at risk of blog bloat!)

"Second Sight" is pretty well-written and makes an effort to develop real characters and inspire emotion in the reader, but the actual plot and twist ending are sort of slight.  

The story comes to us in the form of an excerpt from a journal that we are told has only recently been written down but which the journal writer has kept in her mind for years.  The diarist is a young woman who can read minds, and through dialogue and exposition and so forth we learn that she is the world's only psyker, that as a little girl she so scared her parents they willingly surrendered her to government scientists.  At the time covered by the journal excerpt she is in her early twenties and the text largely focuses on how one researcher may be in love with her and is sheltering her from experiments other researchers may want to inflict upon her.  In the end she agrees to do work that consists of using her mind-invading powers to trigger the growth of psychic powers in others ("latents") who have psychic potential but can't seem to blossom on their own.  The surprise reveal at the end is that the psyker is blind and deaf, that her entire relationship with the world is through the medium of her psychic senses.

Acceptable filler.  "Second Sight" would be reprinted in the Nourse collection The Counterfeit Man and in one of those themed anthologies credited to pteromerhanophobic Isaac Asimov and two other guys, in this case Martin Greenberg and Charles Waugh, this one on the theme of mutants.  (I don't know that the woman in the story is really a mutant, though, as her genes, we are told, are normal and if she has kids they are no more likely to have psychic powers than any other person's offspring.  Of course, biochemist Asimov probably knows more about who is and who isn't a mutant than I do.)

The cover of Asimov's Mutants illustrates one of Edmond Hamilton's
more "serious" and critically acclaimed stories, "He That Hath Wings,"
which we read back in 2017

"Let Me Live in a House" by Chad Oliver (1954)

Merril recommends two Oliver stories in the back of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume; we read 1956's "North Wind" ten years ago, back in my Iowa days, and I said it was "acceptable."  But "Let Me Live in a House" is new to us.  According to isfdb this story debuted in 1954 in Universe Science Fiction, and then in 1955 appeared in a Groff Conklin anthology, Science Fiction Terror Tales.  I guess Merril treated it as a '56 story because it was reprinted in a 1956 issue of the British magazine (then edited by E. C. Tubb!) Authentic Science Fiction.  Despite this bending of the parameters, we're going to roll with it, and read "Let Me Live in a House" in Authentic, to make sure we read the precise version Merril was recommending.  (The illustration in Universe--by the great Virgil Finlay--is better, though.)        

I will always think of Oliver as the guy who tells us modern life sucks and we should live like stone-age Plains Indians, and "Let Me Live in a House" does not alter my attitude.  

"Let Me Live in a House" starts with a sort of sarcastic description of two houses ("cottages,") a sort of caricature of stereotypical suburban homes, each with a white picket fence and a refrigerator ("frigidaire") and a knick-knack-laden mantel and all that, reminding us of all those pop songs that goof on suburbanites, like "Little Boxes" and "Pleasant Valley Sunday" and "Shangri-La."*  Again things were off on the wrong foot--I don't read SF to endure the sort of banal and snobbish criticism I can find (and have) in a multitude of other venues.  Of course, part of Judith Merril's project was to emphasize commonalities between SF and the mainstream, so what I see as a bug she very likely saw as a feature.

*I'll note here that the great Dave Davies has asserted that "Shangri-La" is not in fact "a go at the little, common man."

Anyway, I learned on page two that Oliver's title from the story is from a poem I'd never heard of by Sam Walter Foss, apparently a poem about how you should live among humanity instead of living apart or above the community, even if you are some kind of brainiac; Foss describes the geniuses who live like hermits as "souls like stars" and "pioneer souls who blaze a path," and asserts that he is not one of  them, but wants to live in communion with other men.  One of the main themes of Oliver's "Let Me Live in a House" is that (most if not all) human beings are not suited to life in space away from the rest of humanity, and that those who go into space will suffer horribly, probably to no profit or purpose other than to appease their lust for glory--glory they will not receive!  (Like Kris Neville, Chad Oliver prefigures the themes we see in the work of Barry Malzberg.)  

Four people, three of them boring stereotypes--the dutiful housewife, the woman who is addicted to watching TV, and the middle-aged man still obsessed with his youthful football career--live in a tiny colony or outpost under a dome on barren Ganymede; the colony is built to simulate suburban life, complete with artificial sounds of wind and neighborhood children.  The four people are there to keep an eye on the outpost for a year-long tour of duty; the two fake suburban houses are meant to keep them from being driven insane by the pressures of living in space, and the three I have described have been programmed to be drones, conditioned to act more or less robotically at the outpost--they almost believe they really are in a suburban American neighborhood.  Our main character, Gordon, is the man whose mind is not as blinkered and hindered, the man charged with dealing with unexpected problems.

The plot of "Let Me Live in a House" is about Gordon's reaction to just such an unexpected problem--the arrival of an alien!  After some scenes meant to build tension that presage the arrival of the alien, we get many pages of conversation between Gordon and the extrasolar being, who as aliens so often are in stories, is disguised as a human and has telepathy.  Oliver uses these conversations to give us the backstory of the colony I have already summarized above, and to describe the aliens, who are a contrast to modern European humanity, and illustrate the idea that going into space is a waste of resources, as humans are not psychologically prepared for the challenges presented by space and conquering space will not solve human problems like war, only expand their scope, and the common people of democratic polities will realize this and turn against the space program.

The alien explains that his people are nomads, like "the ancient Plains Indians in the area you think of as North America;" they don't produce anything the way settled people do, so to live they prey upon "sedentary" civilizations, their mental powers giving them the power to trick and overwhelm natives whenever necessary.  The human race is next on the menu.  The first time Gordon tries to attack the alien, Oliver spends half a page describing the pain the alien inflicts on the guy via his telepathy.  But in the end Gordon succeeds in defeating the alien.  But his victory is a tragic one.  For one thing, he is permanently mentally scarred.  For another, none will know of his heroism: Gordon covets the dream that man will conquer space, and he knows that if the common people learn that space is inhabited by hostile aliens that the space program will be shut down.  So he keeps the alien attack a secret. 

I'm giving "Let Me Live in a House" a thumbs down.  Obviously I find its satire of the suburbs annoying, I disagree that the Plains Indians are somehow better than civilized cultures, and I think the human race should conquer the stars and is capable of doing so.  But I have reasons to condemn the story beyond my ideological differences with Oliver.  Most importantly, "Let Me Live in a House" is weighed down with too many long and tedious expository passages.  I also found that Gordon's triumph isn't particularly well explained, isn't all that convincing--he can't resist the psychic attack, and then he can?  Maybe I am just prejudiced because I think Gordon's success works at cross purposes with what I think are Oliver's sincere ideological commitments.

**********

Not a stellar batch of stories this time; Merril presumably liked the Moore and the Oliver because they were consonant with her own leftist beliefs.     

Thanks for reading this long blog post consisting of my dumb jokes and semi-coherent musings on 1956 SF stories.  For more of the same, check out the links below to previous posts in our Merril-approved-1956-stories series:

Abernathy and Aldiss
Anderson, Allen and Banks
Barrow, Beaumont and Blish
Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler  
Carter, Clarke and Clifton 
Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen
de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle 

Ellison and Fontenay

Galouye, Garrett, Grimm & Gunn

Hart, Herbert and Jones 

Kuttner & Moore, Lang, Leinster, L'Engle and McClintic

McConnell, McIntosh and Melchior

Fantastic Story, Fall 1951: Hamilton, Gallun, Oliver, & Reynolds

A few days ago, a knowledgeable SF fan, in a comment to one of my blog posts about Edmond Hamilton, pointed out a bunch of SF stories by important writers which share plot elements with Hamilton's "Fassenden's Worlds," a story we read in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Seventeen.  One of these stories was another Hamilton, 1935's "The Cosmic Pantograph."  Sam Merwin, Jr. reprinted "The Cosmic Pantograph" in 1951 in Fantastic Story, alongside new stories by three men we sometimes read here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Raymond Z. Gallun, Chad Oliver, and Mack Reynolds.  So, let's take a little trip to 1951 and read these four stories.  This is a suspenseful blog post, as I often--but not always!--find Oliver and Reynolds' work to be offensive as ideology and/or deplorable as literature.

"The Cosmic Pantograph" by Edmond Hamilton (1935)

"The Cosmic Pantograph" was the cover story for an issue of Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories, and it is a fun sense-of-wonder speculative piece conceived on the grandest of scales.

A few years ago Felton was a college student; one of his professors, Robine, had a habit of lecturing on the nature of the universe, reminding his students that one day the sun would grow cold, that eventually the entire universe will grow cold as all the stars die, and that mankind would thus be doomed.  Felton, the optimist, insisted that ever-innovative mankind would figure out a way to endure any such challenge.

Today, Robine has summoned Felton to his mansion with the promise that his former will pupil will be able to see the end of the human race!  Robine's huge basement contains a tremendous and complex machine--a machine which can detect the vibrations of every single atom in the universe, catalog them, and then reproduce them in tiny size inside a big metal sphere.  In this sphere, the machine can create another universe identical to the real universe, but much smaller!  Endorsing the determinist philosophies of such men as Spinoza and d'Holbach, Robine says that since the duplicate universe is identical to the real universe, its history will follow exactly the same course as the real universe.  Critically, because it is so much smaller, time moves more quickly in the duplicate universe, millions of years passing in one minute.  This means that Felton and Robine can observe the duplicate universe through electromicroscopes and watch the inevitable future unfold!  Will the natural decay of the stars lead to the extinction of mankind, or will Man triumph over this cosmic adversity and endure? 

Thumbs up for this effort to blow your mind and teach you various philosophical and astronomical principles.  "The Cosmic Pantograph" doesn't seem to have been printed a third time in the language of William Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson, but our friends over in Germany recognized its merit and republished it in a magazine in 1959 and in an anthology with a Frank Frazetta cover in 1974.

"Trail Blazer" by Raymond Z. Gallun (1951)   

We've been reading Raymond Z. Gallun since late 2013, and looking at the archives I see ten blog posts with the tag "Gallun" that cover 14 (or 15, I guess*) stories:

"Davy Jones' Ambassador" and "Old Faithful"*

"Telepathic Piracy"

"The Machine from Ganymede"

"Davey Jones' Ambassador," "Nova Solis" and "Avalanche"*

"N'Goc"

"Space Flotsam," "The World Wrecker" and "Derelict"

"Saturn's Ringmaster"

"Brother Worlds"

"Bluff Play"

"Double Identity"

*Yes, without realizing it I read two slightly different versions of "Dav(e)y Jones' Ambassador," in 2013 the original 1935 magazine version and in 2022 a 1999 anthology version, a testimony to my poor memory.

I liked almost all of these stories, and Andre Norton chose to include "Trail Blazer" in her anthology Space Pioneers, so we have every reason to expect I will like "Trail Blazer."

"Trail Blazer" is a good adventure story, and also provides grist for the mills of all you people out there interested in identity politics, decolonization, subaltern studies, and all that, because at the center of the story Gallun places a sympathetic Native American character.  Joe Whiteskunk is more or less the hero of the story, but his halting English and subordinate status may rankle the sensibilities of the more  advanced 21st-century readers, and I cannot deny that Joe is portrayed as a strange and inscrutable "other" who has access to knowledge and abilities out of reach of white people.

Our narrator is Dave the engineer, a recent college graduate; his twin brother Frank has also recently secured an engineering degree.  Their father has recently died, leaving the twins the family's southwestern ranch, from which they can see the rockets taking off that are carrying adventurous young men to the new lunar colony.  Frank and the narrator are eager to join the space colonization effort, but what to do about Joe Whiteskunk, the beloved farmhand who taught them how to shoot and to ride, but is sixty-five years old and maybe a little dimwitted, or at least perplexed by modern life?  Joe wants to come with the boys into space, but of course that is impossible--or is it?

Like something in a kid's adventure story, or on the news when the United States abandons its friends in Afghanistan to the tender mercies of the Taliban, Joe takes the dangerous expedient of stowing away in the unheated cargo hold of the rocket that carries Dave and Frank to the Moon.  Somehow the Indian survives this ordeal--it is implied that, as a primitive man in touch with the natural world, he has instinctual wisdom that saved him.  Anyway, Joe Whiteskunk, unlettered senior-citizen Indian, is on the moon among all the college grads, scientists and soldiers.  At first the brass wants to send him back home, but when they realize Joe is an expert tracker, they enlist him in the effort to investigate some mysterious marks on the lunar surface that Joe calls "devil tracks."  

Joe leads the brothers and a military officer around the lunar surface, following the tracks, and they discover physical evidence that thousands of years ago the Moon was a battleground fought over by Martians and the natives of the asteroid belt, then an intact planet.  Gallun presents this ancient war which lead to the destruction of the planet between Mars and Jupiter as a cautionary tale for readers living through tensions between the Western democracies and the communist tyrannies of the East.*  

Joe recovers all manner of technological and cultural treasures left on Luna by the Martians and Asteroidians, and then, on a solo mission, disappears.  Months later Dave and Frank are selected for the crew of a joint US-Soviet mission to Mars; there is an accident and it looks like they will die on Mars.  But then Joe Whiteskunk shows up to save them!  The cause of Joe's disappearance was his discovery, and then accidental activation, of a Martian spaceship!  The ship's automatic systems brought him from the Moon to the Red Planet where his fieldcraft, and use of ancient Martian technology, enabled him to survive, and proves to be the salvation of the twins and their comrades.

The story ends on a positive note as the West and the Reds work together to colonize Mars and Dave has hopes Earthmen will succeed in exploring the galaxy peacefully and avoiding the catastrophic fate of the warring Martians and Asteroidians.

Thumbs up! 

*Gallun never uses words like "communism" or "the Soviet Union" but makes it clear who he means.  

"The Reporter" by Chad Oliver

I've read quite a few stories by Oliver over this blog's life, and many times Oliver has made me groan with his denunciations of modern life and romanticizing of life as a stone age savage.  (Links to sample groans: "Rite of Passage;" "The Marginal Man.")  Well, Oliver is making me groan again, this time because "The Reporter" is a lame "meta," "recursive" joke story.  Thumbs down!

George Hartley is a journalist on Mars.  When Terrans first explored and colonized Mars, there were plenty of stories for Hartley to write about, but it turned out that the native Martian civilization was extinct and there is now no excitement, so Hartley hates his job, wishes he was on Venus where there are lots of monsters and intelligent natives to write about, and spends his time in a booze hall smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey.

Another journalist, a photographer, introduces himself to Hartley and they drink and smoke together and moan about how hard it is to be a journalist.  Hartley tells a long story, paraphrasing another reporter's final dispatch before losing his job.  Oliver makes it explicit that the story this third journalist filed and which ruined his career is a parody of a traditional SF adventure story; Hartley suggests the disgraced reporter made up the story, basing it on old SF magazines.  The story was about how the reporter discovered that the Martians were not in fact extinct at all, but, because they are peaceful types unable to kill, were hiding from the human colonizers in an underground city; the reporter was shown around their subterranean metropolis and in his story wrote at length about their technology.

The obvious central joke of "The Reporter" is that the disgraced reporter's story was all true, and the man who introduced himself to Hartley as a photographer is in fact a Martian reporter who has come to the surface to collect material for an article of his own.  

A waste of time--at least Oliver's stories about how we would be happier with no books and no industry push some kind of controversial ethos that readers can engage with; this story is just a feeble in-joke for SF fans.  "The Reporter," understandably, has never been reprinted.    

"Displaced Person" by Mack Reynolds (1951)

Reynolds is a leftist among whose claims to fame are the facts that he based much of his science fiction on speculations about political economy and that he was very widely travelled and wrote travel articles for men's magazines.  To me, his writing generally seems pretty lame, but he was a success, often appearing in Astounding and even coming in first in some kind of survey of readers of Galaxy and If.  (Sample my attacks on Reynolds' work and my jocular commentary on his wild and crazy career at these links: Commune 2000 A.D., "Revolution," "Freedom," "Subversive," and "Pacifist," "Compounded Interest," "The Business, As Usual," "Your Soul Comes C.O.D.," and "Fad.")  Like Oliver's "The Reporter," it seems that "Displaced Person" has never escaped the confines of the Fall 1951 issue of Fantastic Story, so again we find ourselves at MPorcius Fiction Log sampling the deep cuts!

"Displaced Person" doesn't have anything to do with utopias or socialism or economic systems, so is perhaps a rarity in Reynolds' body of work.  Instead, it is a competent filler story with a predictable twist ending.

Four veterans of wartime service in the space navy, pilots, are sitting around drinking.  There are actually only a small number of pilots in the space navy, so it is noteworthy that three of the men have never met the fourth.  The fourth explains why, telling what amounts to a little bit of military fiction.  

Flying a one-man patrol ship, he detected and was pursued into deep space, far from Earth, by the enemy.  He used up all his conventional fuel and all his food in the long chase, so he was basically doomed when the enemy gave up the chase--he had no safe way of getting back to a Terran base before he starved.  The only thing he could do was push the ship's warp drive to forbidden limits, so that he would exceed the speed of light, an act that is practically suicidal.

As was foreshadowed in discussions of this warp drive and the speed of light earlier in the story, the final twist is that this pilot, by exceeding the speed of light, propelled himself into another space-time continuum, the universe of the three other pilots, which is quite similar to his home universe.

Acceptable filler; better than a lot of Reynolds' work!

**********

Hamilton and Gallun deliver good stories that speculate about the nature of human history and are full of science; Oliver and Reynolds just try to produce entertaining stories, and Reynolds at least doesn't embarrass himself.  

I think this is our sixth blog post in a row to focus on SF short stories.  Our next blog post will mix things up a bit, as we read a novel which I suspect will lack such conventional SF elements as space travel, black magic, the living dead, aliens and speculations on what the future will be like.  Stay tuned!

"Doorway to Hell" by Raymond Palmer

"...instead of a batch of worthless shorts, get Patton to write another novel like 'Doorway to Hell.'"  So wrote voluble SF fan, and soon-to-be prolific SF author, Chad Oliver in a letter to Fantastic Adventures printed in the April 1944 issue.  "Frank Patton" was a penname used by several people who published stories and articles in magazines edited by Raymond Palmer, including Palmer himself, the author of "Doorway to Hell."  After reading that Oliver letter recently, I became curious about "Doorway to Hell," and decided to read it.  The story was serialized over the February and March issues of Fantastic Adventures in 1942 and has never appeared elsewhere.  Not exactly a ringing endorsement from the SF community.  But Chad's letter and the striking cover illustrating the story have me curious enough to surf on over to the internet archive, the indispensable source of primary documents for the student of early 20th-century SF, to check it out.

Max Welson is president of a downtown bank, the one right on King's Highway across the street from the newsstand.  Welson is not only a banker, but also a collector.  One of the art treasures he has acquired is a big pair of bronze doors carved with allegorical images of the deadly sins and of sinners being tormented in Hell and bearing the inscription "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."  Welson had these doors imbedded in the concrete exterior wall of the bank, right on the sidewalk, where all the foot traffic, people driving by, and the guy at the newsstand can see them.  They are not functional--they don't open...or do they?

The first installment of "Doorway to Hell" is a detective story with a strong supernatural element.  Our hero is Arnett Huston, a newspaper reporter who hangs around the downtown neighborhood where this bank is, the area being his beat.  He sees local gangsters mow down some joker with a tommy gun--the victim is standing by the bronze doors, and Huston could swear he glimpsed the doors open and somebody or something pull the bullet-ridden corpse inside...but where?  Not into the bank, surely, as a thick layer of concrete lies between the doors and the bank lobby.  

Huston investigates, talking to comic relief Irish-American cops, gangsters in the hospital, and the guy who runs the newsstand, and reading through files at the police station and at the newspaper.  He uncovers many clues involving some financial frauds and schemes, and learns the guy at the newsstand is in fact Peter Hardwicke, a financial wheeler-dealer in hiding from the fuzz because he was framed by crooked financier John Arkway.  Arkway, who was in league with the mob, died some time ago.  Hardwicke has seen numerous people go through those doors, and then Huston sees another somebody pulled through them, a hot girl who was lured to the dread portal by a letter from a friend who had disappeared!  In the brief time they are open, Huston sees beyond the doors fire and hideous monsters!  It turns out that the hot girl was Elaine Hardwicke, Peter Hardwicke's daughter, and the friend who had vanished was dating that fraudster Arkway!  

Huston and Hardwicke figure out a way to lure the head of the local mob to the doors, and as a stunned Huston watches, a bold Hardwicke takes the initiative, shooting down the mob boss after said gangster, somehow, opens the doors.  Hardwicke and the corpse pass through the doors, and Huston, who has fallen in love with Elaine Hardwicke, wants to follow, but the doors shut before he can reach them.  As the first episode of the serial ends, Huston has figured out the secret to opening the doors, and he and one of those Irish cops descend the stairs beyond the bronze portal, into a world of fire and monsters!

Since most of what was going on in that first installment of the serial was more or less realistic murder mystery jazz, I was dreading the possibility that the "hell" behind the bronze doors was a special effect consisting of a film projection and a guy in a monster suit or something.  So I was relieved to find that the doors were a portal to another planet and/or dimension, one where the laws of physics operate differently--the fire Huston saw was just his Terran eyes and brain misinterpreting the different ways molecules and waves behave in this other dimension.  All our ideas of what hell is like are based on such misunderstandings of people's brief glimpses through the bronze doors.

Palmer does in "Doorway to Hell"'s second installment what Philip José Farmer would do in the 1960s and the succeeding decades with his various "Riverworld" writings: come up with a whole science fiction explanation and depiction of the afterlife.  When we die, we go to this other world, where live some aliens but which is run by human beings who have very advanced technology, disintegrator pistols and teleporters and so forth.  Many of those who make up the bureaucracy and technical staff of this other universe are people from Earth who died and passed some kind of vetting or something.  Arkway, the crooked financial guy who was allied with the mob and framed Hardwicke, has continued his clever schemes in the afterlife!  He has gotten himself a good position in this afterlife world, and he has been learning about the technology there and amassing high tech equipment; he has even learned how to return to Earth after having died!  After some chapters in which Huston learns about the afterlife and tangles with the mob boss and reunites with Hardwicke and so forth, Arkway returns to Earth with an arsenal of super weapons and the hope of becoming dictator of Terra.  The resolution of the story comes about as the people who rule the afterlife world give Huston a ray pistol and send him and Hardwicke and the Irish cop back to Earth to destroy Arkway.  The afterlife overlords destroy the doors after Huston and company have passed through them so that these sorts of shenanigans never happen again.  

I generally am skeptical of these detective stories in which there are lots of clues, a convoluted plot full of doublecrosses and secret identities, and a legion of indistinguishable and disposable characters who serve as suspects and victims.  But Palmer moves things along at a brisk pace in the first installment, and I was curious about the truth behind the door and the monsters, so that first episode was not onerous.  The second installment is a little weaker, being somewhat slower paced and including some scenes set in various locales in the afterlife world that felt superfluous, to just be there to run up the page count.  But as a whole, "Doorway to Hell" is acceptable; it is not exactly good, but it is a curious production that is too strange and original to be considered mere filler, and put together more or less competently, with some decent violence and monsters.  I'm glad to now understand what the quite good cover of the February '44 issue of Fantastic Adventures is all about, and to have gained some familiarity with the output of Raymond A. Palmer, one of the many unusual characters who populate SF history.  

The Return of Jongor by Robert Moore Williams

In his editorial in the April 1944 issue of Fantastic Adventures, editor Ray Palmer, in introducing the second Jongor tale, "The Return of Jongor," relates to us SF fans a behind-the-scenes story about the first tale of Robert Moore Williams's ersatz Tarzan.  According to Ray, whom I practically called a liar in my last blog post, in late 1940 Fantastic Adventures was about to go out of business.  Only one more issue would be published!  That issue, the October issue, had a dinotastic cover by famous illustrator J. Allen St. John, bringing to life the cover story, Williams's "Jongor of Lost Land."  Williams, St. John, and Jongor saved Fantastic Adventures--the publisher decided to continue putting out the magazine when that October issue sold twice as many copies as the previous issue.

Besides the second Jongor caper, in the April '44 ish of FA we have a long letter from outspoke SF fan Chad Oliver, who would go on to produce many SF stories, of which I have blogged about quite a few.  Chad criticizes Fantastic Adventures with some asperity ("a succession of dull issues, that were inadequate to say the least,") sparing neither fiction nor art, even complaining that the covers too often depict women.  It's not unrelieved pans, though; like all of us, Chad loves J. Allen St. John and Virgil Finlay, and he has kind words for recent stories by Wallace West, Leroy Yerxa (writing under the pseudonym Lee Francis--Chad denounces with venom a story Yerxa published under his real name), and David Wright O'Brien.  He also expresses admiration for a story of Palmer's, "Doorway to Hell," which was published under the pen name Frank Patton--did Chad know about Palmer's and Yerxa's pen names?  Are some of his spirited assessments, in part, in-jokes?

This issue also includes a story by Robert Bloch, "Lefty Feep Does Time," but I can't bring myself to read a joke story today, even one from a series so popular that isfdb lists over twenty installments (among them, "Stuporman," "Time Wounds All Heels," "Jerk the Giant Killer" and "Son of a Witch."  Bloch loves puns.)  So we'll be sticking with Jongor, and give the rest of the fiction in this number of Fantastic Adventures a pass.

"The Return of Jongor" by Robert Moore Williams       

I had hopes that we would see Jongor in New York or on a steam ship or something, but "The Return of Jongor" starts up shortly after "Jongor of Lost Land," with Ann Hunter, her twin brother Alan, and their savior, Jongor, an American who was born in an Australian jungle full of pterosaurs after his parents' aircraft crashed there, marching away from Lost Land, towards whatever counts as civilization in Australia.  When they stop to drink from a pool, they see moving images on the surface of the water--Jongor says this is a message from one of his friends, Queen Nesca.  Her system of sending messages seems like magic, but for some reason Williams and/or Palmer want to maintain the perception that  "The Return of Jongor" is a science fiction story, and so in a footnote it is explained that there is a technological apparatus and a psychic element behind this medium of communication.

Alan spent months in a dungeon in a city of monkey people and only just recently escaped, a half-starved wreck, but he's not depressed or mentally scarred or anything.  I make this armchair diagnosis based on the fact that Williams spends much valuable ink describing Alan teasing his sister for being jealous over Jongor's having received a secret message from another girl.  I didn't sign up for this trip down under to hear the saccharine juvenile banter of two New York socialites, so I was relieved when Ann and Alan were captured by aborigines and tied to stakes alongside two white men captured earlier by the natives, Schiller and Morton.  These guys claim they are kangaroo hunters who got lost.  

I would have moved Alan to the head of the line, but instead the aborigines start torturing Morton.  Before Morton suffers any permanent damage, and before they even start on the New Yorkers, Jongor, riding a dinosaur, rescues the four prisoners.  Jongor announces that his trip to civilization must be postponed, as he is duty bound to return to Lost Land to answer Queen Nesca's plea for help her; after all, Nesca saved him from a pterosaur years ago.  The Hunter twins and the two 'roo hunters decide to go along, seeing as they will probably get killed if they aren't within rescue range of the indispensable Jangor.  Jongor, an expert judge of character despite the hermit's life he has lead, thinks there is something fishy about Schiller and Morton, but he lets them come along anyway.

Jongor stories are full of treachery and trickery.  That message Jongor received didn't come from Queen Nesca, but from one of her traitorous countrymen; Nesca's people love jewels, and in return for a handful of gems, this traitor is helping a band of monkey men get revenge on Jongor--he sent the message with the aim of luring Jongor into an ambush.  This band captures Ann, but fails to snag Jongor, who tricks one of the monkey men into revealing that the message purportedly from Nesca is a trick.

Ann manages to escape from the monkey people on her own steam, but then she is chased up a tree by a lion.  As fate would have it, Ann is rescued from the great cat by Queen Nesca, who guns the feline down with a ray gun and then brings Ann to the city of her people, a city older than Babylon which, while kind of decrepit, a reflection of how her race is falling into decadence, still houses some high technology.

Her name might lead you to think Nesca is the heiress to the fortune of a coffee and cocoa magnate, but in fact the noteworthy thing about Nesca is that she, like all her people, is a centaur.  These centaurs have idiosyncratic traditions and psychologies, and that traitor who sent the bogus message is exploiting these peculiarities to overthrow Nesca.  When Jongor, who has been following Ann's trail, shows up, we get a debate between Jongor and Nesca about how the centaur government operates.  (Remember the debates about government we got in Zanthar At Trip's End?)  Nesca's dedication to thousands of years of tradition prevents her from resisting the effort to overthrow her, so Jongor cuts the Gordian knot by just murdering an anti-Nesca official in the middle of the ceremony during which Nesca is to relinquish power.  The tradition that was shackling them thus shattered, the pro-Nesca forces leap into action and Nesca, her supporters and Jongor and company fight their way to a secret passage to an underground citadel and arsenal.  Schiller betrays them to the anti-Nesca centaurs, killing Morton and opening the gates to the enemy, so the Nesca team flees deeper into the mountain, to a beautiful temple. 

Jongor thinks they are going to make a last stand, but Nesca gives a histrionic speech about how her race is doomed, and Williams contributes a whole thing invoking evolution and Darwinism without using those words, suggesting the centaurs had some "elements of greatness" but also a genetic flaw or something and so had been "passed by" in "the fight for life."  Nesca tricks Jongor and the Hunter twins into a secret boat and, as the current of a subterranean river carries them to safety, the whole city blows up, exterminating the centaurs.           

"The Return of Jongor" is quite inferior to "Jongor of Lost Land."  The plot is haphazard, just a collection of underdeveloped people and loosely connected incidents.  Williams wants us to see some kind of tragedy in the fall of the centaur race, but he doesn't make them interesting enough that we care about their disappearance from the face of the Earth; the suicidal ending of the centaur people also renders moot all the debates about politics and all the fighting Jongor engages in.  Schiller and Morton are just stuck in there; unlike the two treacherous men in "Jongor of Lost Land," they are lacking in personality and do not add anything to the plot.  Like the characters, the fights and the alien technology in "The Return of Jongor" are less interesting than those in its predecessor, and less connected to the plot--instead of being integral pieces of the plot that help drive the narrative, they are just attached to the thin and inevitable plot like barnacles attached to the underside of a sluggish vessel put-putting in a straight line to a drab destination.  

The style is weak; I complained that the style of Williams's Zanthar At Trip's End felt like that of a children's book, with simple sentences that overexplained everything, and I got that same feeling here as well.  Also, there are too many jokes--Alan Hunter is like a jester character, constantly teasing Ann and teaching Jongor the battle cry the he-man uses throughout the story: "Give 'em hell, Yale!"  All the jokes and cutesy sibling teasing undermine any tension or horror the scenes of death and torture might generate.

Speaking of Alan, Williams pulls a major boner regarding this kid.  In "Jongor of Lost Land," Alan describes how he found the treasure rooms of the monkey city.  But in "The Return of Jongor," Alan needs to have explained to him that the monkeys have all that treasure.  Very annoying--it is like Williams and Palmer didn't reread "Jongor of Lost Land" before they penned and edited and published this thing.  

I have to call this one bad.  It doesn't look like I will be reading the third Jongor story, "Jongor Fights Back," any time soon.

In 1970, Popular Library put out a paperback edition of The Return of Jongor with a brilliant cover by Frank Frazetta.  So much do I admire this painting that a few months ago, long before I actually read any Jongor, I bought an old somewhat worn poster of this image at Wonder Book in Frederick, MD, though I have yet to frame it.    

Ray Bradbury: "The Monster Maker," "Morgue Ship," "Lazarus Come Forth" and "Defense Mech"

I think Planet Stories sometimes gets a bad rap, for being "lurid" and "garish" or whatever, but the magazine also has a vigorous defender in no less a figure than Michael Moorcock.  Not only does Moorcock (in the essay "Queen of the Martian Mysteries: An Appreciation of Leigh Brackett") argue that Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Startling Stories published fiction that was "more vivid and often more lasting" and featured "more idiosyncratic writing [and] more stylish innovation," than the work to be found in Astounding and F&SF, but, less tendentiously, he points out that a long list of major SF writers had their work printed in these pulps.  One such writer is Poul Anderson, three of whose tales from Planet Stories we blogged about last time.  Another is Ray Bradbury.  Today let's read four stories by Bradbury from 1940s issues of Planet Stories, stories which have rarely been reprinted and so might be new to many fans of Bradbury's work.  I am reading all of them from scans of these seventy-odd-year-old magazines available at the internet archive.

"The Monster Maker" (1944)   

The issue of Planet Stories which includes "The Monster Maker" is one we have looked at before, when we read Leigh Brackett's "The Jewel of Bas," and Damon Knight's "The Avenger."  Also noteworthy is the cover by famous horror comics artist Graham Ingels, who did little SF illustration, and an autobiographical sketch by Chad Oliver, at this time of his life a very active SF fan who often showed up in Planet Stories's letters columns.  Oliver here says that SF, for him, is a faith in a better future, and that after the current war is over SF fans must work to create that future.  If the stories of Chad's that I have read over the course of this blog's life are any indication, he gave up on the future and decided the good life was obtainable by abandoning technology and the city and living as a Plains Indian or some other hunter gatherer society.    

Ray Bradbury's "The Monster Maker" is a silly adventure story full of obvious joke dialogue, though a more or less serious plot in which, in classic SF fashion, the heroes use high technology and trickery to overcome their enemies and make the solar system a better place.

Two men search an asteroid for a den of space pirates; one is a huge hulking Irish space cop who says stuff like "Me father taught me; keep laughing and you'll have Irish luck," and the other is a cameraman obsessed with movie making--when he fears he is about to die in a space ship crash he asks the Irishman, "Is this where the Big Producer yells CUT!?"  

A horde of monsters appears and chases the two men, who take refuge in a cave; when the monsters don't show up on the photographer's quick-developing film, they realize the creatures are just illusions.  They sneak into the pirate's base, get control of the machine that generates the illusions, and trick the pirates into thinking an entire army of Irish space cops has arrived.

An acceptable trifle.  "The Monster Maker" has only ever seen print again in Kent State University's The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: A Critical Edition: Volume I: 1938-1943, published in 2011.     

"Morgue Ship" (1944)

Ray is on the cover of this issue alongside his friend Leigh Brackett.  (We read Brackett's story "Terror Out of Space" in 2014.)   

For years war has raged across the Solar System between the space navies of Earth and Venus.  Our two protagonists are the crew of an unarmed Purple Cross morgue rocket--they travel back and forth across the system, picking up the floating corpses and bits and pieces of dead spacemen for return to Earth.  On each trip they collect one hundred remains, and today 97 berths are filled; only three to go.

They spot their 98th cold passenger, or so they think.  It's a Venusian, and when they bring him into the ship they are amazed to find, first, that this guy is the famous righthand man of the Venusian dictator, and, second, he was playing possum and is still alive!  The vessel in which he and the dictator were travelling suffered a catastrophic failure and they have been hoping to trick their way onto just such a working ship as this one.  Gun in hand, the alien orders the unarmed Earthmen to find and pick up the dictator, who is floating nearby.  Will the humans give in or resist--is there a chance they can end the war by capturing the dictator?

This is a good story, with a great premise, a horror/noirish plot and tone, a psychologically interesting main character, good images, and metaphors that work.  "The Monster Maker" was a pedestrian piece of fluff, but "Morgue Ship" is more characteristically Bradburian and a sign of what Bradbury is capable of.  Thumbs up!  

I recommend it, but for some reason "Morgue Ship," like "The Monster Maker," has only ever been reprinted in 2011's The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: Volume I.

"Lazarus Come Forth" (1944)

"Lazarus Come Forth" was reprinted in the 1970s in a French anthology and in the 1980s in a Croat magazine, but not in English until 2014 in the second volume of Kent State University's The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury.  The issue of Planet Stories in which the story made its debut also includes fiction by Damon Knight and Frederick Pohl, both pieces appearing under pseudonyms.

Imagine my surprise when it turns out "Lazarus Come Forth" is also about two guys in a morgue ship crisscrossing the solar system in the wake of an interplanetary naval war, picking up the remains of lost spacemen!  Except this time Earth is at war with Mars!  Why do all these alien freaks make it so hard for us to get along with them?

A more important difference than which extra-terrestrial troublemakers are having their wings clipped by our fly boys this time out is that the two men on this morgue ship do not get along.  At all!  They even come to blows at the start of the story!  Boys!  Boys!  Save it for those red planet rapscallions, why don't ya?  

The plot of the story concerns an astonishing coincidence.  The morgue ship finds a body floating out in space, but this one isn't like the scores of others they are always collecting--from its attire it is clear that this corpse died like three centuries ago, and the protagonists can even approximate who this guy was--a member of the secretive coterie of super scientists who had reportedly developed a super weapon but were prevented from mass producing it by a sudden Martian attack.  The body is perfectly preserved, and with the miracles of 25th-century medicine at their disposal, the crew of the morgue ship bring this genius back to life!

One of the men wants to do the obvious thing: ferry this resurrected egghead back to Earth so he can build the super weapon and finish the war with Mars once and for all.  But his comrade is a bigger jerk than any of us ever expected!  He holds his patriotic shipmate at gun point and radios the Martians to sell them the recently revived inventor!  Unbelievable!

Will the sale go through despite the good spaceman's efforts?  Is the Earth doomed?  Will the crooked Earther double cross the Martians, or himself be double crossed? 

"Lazarus Come Forth" is like a variation on the themes and elements of "Morgue Ship," and like "Morgue Ship" it is a well-written horror/noir space adventure with a cool premise and an interesting bit of psychology at its center.  Thumbs up!  

"Defense Mech" (1946)

Holy crap! "Defense Mech" is like a Barry Malzberg story, written in the first-person present tense, our narrator a guy stressed out to the point of mental illness, a guy who doesn't get along with his superiors and who can't take the pressure of space travel.  The very first sentence of the story is "Oh my God, do you realize how far from Earth we are?"  Before that paragraph is over he is saying stuff like "Give me sedatives or hold my hand or run call mama," and before the first page (of this approximately six-page story) is over he has enraged the captain and driven the expedition's psychiatrist to extreme measures.

Our poor narrator is on a fourteen-man mission to Mars.  The captain needs every man to pull his weight on the red planet to get the job done, but our boy is going berserk with fear as the rocket approaches Mars, so the expedition's shrink hypnotizes him into thinking they are returning to Earth.  It is a Malzbergian moment when the psychiatrist admits that lying to a patient goes "against all the known ethics of my profession" but blithely does it anyway.  Once on the Martian surface Bradbury unleashes a stream of pretty good jokes on us; for example, the narrator is convinced that his space suit is his baseball uniform, and when a carnivorous Martian worm with teeth like a shark's attacks him he thinks it is his old dog Shep gone rabid.  Bradbury keeps this up all the way through, with hostile natives attacking and capturing the astronauts and throwing them into the arena, from which the narrator extricates them, the whole time thinking he's in New York, dodging automobiles and fighting police and street punks.

Plenty of fun--thumbs up!  "Defense Mech" appears in an issue of Planet Stories which features stories by MPorcius fave Henry Kuttner and DC comics stalwart Gardner Fox, and has only ever been reprinted in the third volume of Kent State University Press's The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury. 

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It is hardly breaking news that Ray Bradbury is a superior writer, but I can do nothing else but report the dog-bites-man story that these four 1940s stories by the 1989 SFWA Grand Master are worth your time.  I can strongly recommend "Morgue Ship," "Lazarus Come Forth," and "Defense Mech" to space opera and adventure SF fans as fun and exciting unjustly neglected gems of outer space fear and violence.  If you have money, invest in the The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, and if you don't have money, join me at the internet archive where you can enjoy these tales of death and insanity-laden rocket ships.