"War-Gods of the Void," "Thunder in the Void," and "Soldiers of Space" by Henry Kuttner

Some years ago I purchased Haffner Press's 2012 collection of Henry Kuttner space operas, Thunder in the Void.  So far I have read eight of the thick volume's sixteen stories and discussed them across four blog posts:

"We Guard the Black Planet" (which I read in Sam Moskowitz's Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction)

"Raider of the Space Ways" and "Avengers of Space"

"The Time Trap" and "The Lifestone"

"Monsters of the Atom," "Red Gem of Mercury" and "The Crystal Circe"

Today, let's read three more of these tales of adventure.  These stories were first published in 1942 and 1943 in science fiction magazines and did not appear in book form until seven decades later, here in Thunder in the Void.  If you are so inclined, you can read the stories yourself for free at the internet archive in scans of the original magazines; I recommend checking these magazines out, as they are all quite fun, and because the texts may actually be easier to read there, because the scanning process introduced some errors into the texts here in Thunder in the Void.

"War-Gods of the Void" (1942)

"War-Gods of the Void" was first seen by readers of Planet Stories, where it is adorned with a picture of a man shooting a fishman in the face, a nice companion to the cover, where we see a woman shooting a fishman in the head.  (This is your trigger to wade into the philosophical and scientific controversy over whether fish feel pain.)  This issue of Planet Stories also includes an illustration by Damon Knight, who is far more famous for his editing and criticism--and for having his name added to the SFWA Grand Master Award twenty-seven years after the award was first given out--as well as a long letter from Sam Moskowitz seeking to refute some of Knight's criticisms of his story, "Man of the Stars."  I guess this letter constitutes one small blast in the long-running Moskowitz-Futurian feud.

Stocky Jerry Vanning is a cop, and he is on the trail of Don Callahan, a former diplomat and a would-be leaker who has got a hold of a secret treaty that, if revealed to the public, could cause a revolution!  Callahan is a master of disguise as well as an aspiring whistle blower, but Vanning has a sharp eye and has tracked him to the swampy hell that is Venus, where foolhardy Terran colonists farm herbs and "mola" trees and risk catching a virus that drives you insane.  When you catch North-Fever all you want to do is march north into the jungle, and nothing and nobody can stop you!  (Hmmm, doesn't this kind of thing happen to the guy in J. G. Ballard's Drowned World?)

Callahan caught North-Fever just before Vanning arrived, and Vanning catches it a few hours later and starts his march north through the swamp.  When you have North-Fever you don't eat, and you ignore pain, so, by the time Vanning gets to the mountains and the fever passes, he is a bloody emaciated wreck--there is a level of sensationalistic violence and gore in this story, as in some other of Kuttner's stories in this collection.

In the mountains, Vanning learns the truth of the North-Fever.  Living up there are a bunch of fish people who think of themselves as war gods.  These jokers have a highly advanced medical technology, and for centuries have used a virus they engineered to get people--first the mammalian human-like Venusians who live to the south and now Earth people as well--to make the trek up to their mountain fastness so they can enslave them.  (Could this story have been inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs's classic Gods of Mars?)  Many victims of the fever die during their long march, but that is perfectly acceptable to the fishmen--they only want strong slaves, after all!  Among the slaves Vanning meets an Earthwoman, Lysla, and is bunked with three other men, two humans and a Venusian.  Vanning is sure one of these three men is Callahan in disguise, but cannot tell which one.

These five characters manage to escape bondage, thanks in part to Callahan's ability to disguise himself as a fishman, and they inflict a terrible punishment on the fish people--Vanning figures out a way to infect them all with the North Fever, so they all march north out of the city...into a pool of lava!  Not only does Vanning free Venus from the tyranny of their false gods and their plague, he also gets that unpopular secret treaty from Callahan and destroys it.  Grateful for Callahan's help, Vanning lets that traitorous member of the deep state to escape.

A fun story.  The use of a secret treaty that ordinary people won't like as a McGuffin is perhaps a hint that Kuttner was skeptical of American foreign policy (see more below!)

"Thunder in the Void" (1942)

"Thunder in the Void" was the lead story (labelled a "Science Fiction Novel," though it is just 32 pages here in book form) of the October 1942 issue of Astonishing Stories.  This issue of Astonishing includes a short column on the war-related activities of SF writers, another on the joys of searching used bookstores for old SF books, and another on a section of H. G. Wells' Time Machine that appeared in the magazine version but was often left out of book publications.

A brief foreword provides background on the three races said to live in our Solar System.  There is the human race of Earth, about whom you presumably already know--at the time of this story we have achieved space flight.  Then there are the Varra, people of pure energy who live in the void between the planets and stars--they are friendly, but cannot survive within the atmosphere of a planet.  Then there are the vampiric devils who live on Pluto, the dark world of evil!  These monsters don't have space flight, but their psychic powers can reach across millions of miles of space and suck the life force out of human spacefarers!  Luckily, these psychic powers can't penetrate an atmosphere.  The Varra are immune to the Plutonian's diabolical powers, and individual Earth astronauts buddy up with individual Varra via the medium of a communications helmet, and these friendly balls of energy provide some protection from the Plutonians' soul-sucking brain rays.

Our hero for this caper is Saul Duncan, convicted murderer!  Duncan was born in a slum, but passed space pilot training and had a lucrative and prestigious job flying space ships when a guy groped his wife, Andrea!  Duncan killed the groper with his bare hands, and got ten years in the clink at the North Pole!  As our story begins, Duncan, half way through his sentence, has escaped from prison with the help of Brent Olcott, the famously handsome and unscrupulous businessman.  Olcott has a job for an expert pilot with nothing to lose--hijacking a space ship carrying a valuable cargo (a pound of radium) from Mars to Earth!  Because Duncan will be committing a major crime, he can't wear a Varra helmet while on this job--those Varra are real square, like, "hand in glove with the government," as Olcott puts it, and would immediately rat out a hijacker!  To make sure the hijacked ship doesn't call for help, Olcott already has hooked up Andrea with a job on the ship and instructed her to wreck its communications gear right before the scheduled hijacking!

This is one dangerous mission, but Duncan is stuck--if he doesn't hijack the ship his wife will be arrested for breaking the ship's radio at the appointed hour and probably be sent to the North Pole prison Duncan just broke out of.  But wily Duncan tricks Olcott and the alcoholic scientist who installed illegal stealth equipment on the ship Duncan is to pilot, Rudy Hartman, into coming on this risky venture with him!  The three crooks blast off and are soon flying alongside the civilian ship, demanding they send over the radium and Andrea.  But Duncan gets a heartbreaking message via the flickering Morse code lights: when Andrea turned off her Varra helmet, severing her connection with a Varra so she could commit her sabotage unobserved, the Plutonians sucked out her life force! 

The innocent civilians send over Andrea's corpse in a space suit and the box of radium, and then Duncan goes on a suicide mission to Pluto, determined to exact revenge on the vampires of that black planet and on Olcott and Hartman, the swine who callously put his wife in harm's way in the first place.  Olcott and Hartman are killed on this adventure after almost outwitting Duncan.

On Pluto, Duncan discovers the shocking, mind-blowing, paradigm-shifting truth: there are no Plutonian vampires!  It is the Varra who are the vampires!  Those duplicitous balls of energy fabricated the story of the Plutonians to facilitate building up a relationship with human beings so they could slowly suck us dry and so they had a convincing explanation ready when one of them decided to just devour somebody's life force whole.  Duncan gets a message back to Earth exposing the truth, but the measures he must take to keep the Varra from stopping him end his life.

An exciting story full of tragedy and death, with some surprises (I thought Duncan was going to go to Pluto and somehow get his wife's soul put back in her body), plus lots of strange science revolving around aliens and space travel.  I like it.

"Soldiers of Space" (1943)

The issue of Astonishing Stories that carried "Soldiers of Space" (along with stories by two people we have talked about at length here at MPorcius Log, Robert Bloch and Leigh Brackett) includes many letters praising Henry Kuttner, including one from Chad Oliver, the anthropologist SF writer.  Oliver says of Kuttner's "The Crystal Circe" that it "is a story that I, for one, shall never forget," and he awards Kuttner's "Night of Gods" 9.8 points out of a possible ten.  Oliver is a very precise reviewer--in the same letter he awards Malcolm Jameson's "Taa the Terrible" a 9.6½!

It is the future!  (The future, Conan?) The year 2000!  Gregory Lash, our narrator, is a veteran of the war that raged between Earth and Mars in the early Nineties!  He was a space ship pilot who won many dog fights against those rat bastards from the red planet, but what is he today, six years later?  A hobo who rides the (mono)rails!  The modern world has no place for a space pilot like Greg, who flew by the seat of his pants--today's flyboys fly by instruments!  And there is no work for low-skilled laborers--machines do everything, including washing dishes!  So men like Greg, who risked their lives for Mother Earth, are out on the streets!

Tonight Greg sits all alone in the wilds of Wyoming, eating "Mulligan." A space fighter just like the one Greg flew in the war crash lands nearby.  Greg gets in and finds the pilot unconscious, and messages coming in from Denver, so Greg flies the ship to Denver, where he learns it is being used for a movie about the war.  Thirty war veteran pilots, men bitter and always on a short fuse because they feel that, after they won the war for Mother Earth, she cruelly abandoned them, are today risking their lives doing stunt flying for the film, and the movie's budget is so low they aren't even getting a wage, just room and board!  With nothing better to do, Greg joins this crew.

One of these pilots is an old comrade of Greg's, Bruce Vane.  (Yeah, I know.)  Vane has a psychological problem--during the war he almost died in a crash on the asteroid known as Cerberus, and after that he would faint when he had to fly near Cerberus.  Well, guess where filming is resuming tomorrow, now that the government has outlawed the dangerous practice of filming space ship stunts in Earth's atmosphere?

Nobody knows about Vane's "spaceshock" except for Greg, so the film's director, Dan Helsing (yeah, I know), orders Vane to fly dangerously close to Cerberus, and Greg has to prevent him from passing out.

As we readers have been suspecting since the start of the story, the Martians' secret fleet appears and the only people who can stop it (the main Earth fleet is out by Venus because the Venusians are revolting) are these 30 men and their old space fighters.  They succeed because the Martian pilots are young people who have learned instrument, not seat-of-your-pants, flying.  Vane even overcomes his fear of Cerberus when he has to rescue Helsing, whose damaged craft is about to crash on Cerberus.

It is certainly interesting to see Kuttner write so much about shellshocked fighting men and about how society has abandoned servicemen (and this right in the middle of World War II!) and about how automation is putting low-skilled workers out of work.  Still, the stuff about the pilots coincidentally being in the right place at the right time to save an ungrateful Earth yet again is a little cheesy and contrived.  Another issue with the story is that Kuttner jams it full of material that he doesn't have room to explore.  There is, for example, tension between Vane and Helsing because they are both sweet on the same woman, a subplot that I think maybe should have gotten more attention or just been left out.

I am going to call this one acceptable.  Because of its social and political dimensions, "Soldiers of Space" is probably more interesting to scholars than "Thunder in the Void" or "War-Gods of the Void."  (It perhaps bears comparison to Kuttner's 1937 story "We Are the Dead," in which a ghost rises up from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery to urge a powerful senator to oppose legislation that will get the U.S. involved in foreign entanglements that might lead to American boys again fighting overseas.  Did Kuttner think the efforts of the United States government to punish Japan for its crimes in Asia and to help the British in their struggle with Germany and Italy before Pearl Harbor were a mistake?)  But I think "Soldiers of Space" is less entertaining to us readers of adventure stories than the other two tales we are looking at today.

**********

Three worthwhile reads.  Five stories remain in Thunder in the Void, and I plan to read them all at some unspecified point or points in the future.

Three stories by Poul Anderson from 1951

There's Chryseis on Pelias the erinye.  Anderson's
text actually mentions the precious stones
she wears in her hair.

When people complain that SF from the past is sexist I think one of the things they have in mind may be the covers of Planet Stories--it seems that almost every one features some hot chick in trouble, or causing trouble for somebody else.  (The covers of Astounding from the same period present a stark contrast--I guess they are sexist because they rarely feature women on them at all, instead foregrounding technology, heroic men, and metaphorical tableaux.)

Another thing you'll see if you look at a bunch of covers of Planet Stories is Poul Anderson's name.  Let's check out three stories by Poul Anderson that appeared in 1951 issues of Planet Stories.  I think these stories are among Anderson's least well-known, but as my regular readers are well aware, I like reading things that have been largely forgotten or which have gotten a bad reputation.  I'll be experiencing all three of these tales of violence on other worlds on this very computer screen via the scans of the actual magazines in which they appeared that are freely available at the internet archive.

"Witch of the Demon Seas"

The January 1951 issue of Planet Stories actually includes two pieces by Anderson, the Dominic Flandry story "Tiger by the Tail" and the "novel" I'm reading today, "Witch of the Demon Seas," a cover story appearing under the pen name A. A. Craig.

"Witch of the Demon Seas" takes place on a planet where people live under a perpetually cloudy sky, fight with swords and bows, travel in sailing ships, live in castles and believe in magic (dismissed by some as mere "women's tricks.")  The surface of the planet is covered in oceans, and the many maritime kingdoms ("thallasocracies") are based on groups of islands, their economies based on seaborne trade and slave raiding.  The planet's human inhabitants come in many different ethnicities, including "blue-skinned savages" who serve as mercenaries in the armies of white kings.  One such white empire is Achaera, land of brunettes and the most powerful and extensive of the kingdoms.  The current king of Achaera is huge muscular Khroman.  As our story begins, Khroman's most dangerous enemy, huge muscular Corun the pirate, has just been captured.  Khroman's father, the previous king, conquered Corun's kingdom of blonde people, Conahur, and hanged Corun's father, the king of Conahur.  Ever since this conquest, Corun has been a fugitive and a pirate captain, attacking every Achaeran ship and town he can get his hands on.

King Khroman's top adviser is his father-in-law, Shorzon the sorcerer.  Khroman's wife died giving birth to their daughter, Chryseis.  Trained by her grandfather, Chryseis is reputed to be a powerful witch, and is also perhaps the most beautiful woman on the planet!  Anderson unleashes a lot of purple prose in this story, descriptions of landscapes and seascapes and the sky and how they make people feel, and we get elaborate descriptions of Chryseis's "chill sculptured beauty," "marble-white face," "eyes of dark flame," her clothes, her jewelry, her hair, etc.  Chryseis also has a tame monster by the name of Perias, a flying reptile of a species the characters call "erinyes" or just "devil-beasts"-- you can see witch-princess riding Perias on the cover of the magazine.  A pet monster, too?  This is like my dream girl!  Oh, wait, then there's the fact that she "ordered the flaying alive of a thousand Issarian prisoners and counselled some of the darkest intrigues in Achaera's bloody history."  Every rose has its thorn, I guess.

It turns out that Chryseis and Shorzon have bigger fish to fry than just maintaining the power and glory of Achaera.  The two magicians betray King Khroman, springing Corun the corsair from solitary after they have convinced him to join them on a quest that will shake the very foundations of this planet's whole civilization!  Chryseis is a real femme fatale, using her beauty as a carrot ("I like strong men") and her pet monster as a stick ("If you say no...Perias will rip your guts out.")   

Shorozon and Chryseis need Corun's guidance to get to the sea of the Xanthi, fish-people whose language lacks words for "fear" and "love" (but you better believe they have a word for "hate!")  Corun, besides being a first-class hunk and a cunning sailor, is one of the few people who has spoken to the Xanthi and lived to tell the tale, and so is a perfect addition to the crew of the wizard and witch's galley, which otherwise consists of blue men, "a cutthroat gang" whose "reckless courage was legendary."

Anderson's story totally lives up to the sex and violence reputation of Planet Stories--"Witch of the Demon Seas" fulfills the expectations set up by all those covers of beautiful girls facing or meting out horrible deaths. On the month-long voyage to the black castle of the Xanthi, Chryseis and Corun become lovers, and, in a fight against the Xanthi, we get to see Shorozon use his magic and Chryseis shoot her bow and ply her sword.  The sex-charged atmosphere, less-than-admirable characters and pervasive bloodshed reminded me of Leigh Brackett's work, which of course is a compliment!

Even though its full of dragons, sea serpents, witches and swordsmen, this is a science fiction story, not a fantasy.  What the characters seek is not a pile of treasure, but knowledge.  There's a scene in which Corun and another sea captain speculate about the possibility of using a chronometer and a sextant to determine a ship's position on the open sea (their world is too superstitious and low tech to accomplish these feats as of yet.)  All the magic is in fact telepathic hypnosis and illusion, as Corun learns when he does some espionage work, listening in on the negotiations between his girlfriend and her grandfather and the rulers of the scaly Xanthi, themselves formidable wizards.  Shorozon and Chryseis seek to join forces with the fish people and become as gods by enslaving the entire human race and using the masses of human brains as a source of psychic energy.  With their own minds amplified by those of thousands of slaves, S and C think that they and the Xanthi sorcerers can explore the universe beyond the clouds, riddle out the mysteries of nature, and achieve immortality!

When he realizes Chryseis is a megalomaniac who is going to screw over every human being in the world, Corun leads the blue-skinned sailors in a raid on the Xanthi arsenal, where he lights a fuse leading to a stockpile of the Xanthi secret weapon, "devil powder" (you and I would just call it "gun powder.")  The castle explodes during a running fight between the blue humans and the fish men--luckily enough blue people survive to man the galley.  Shorozon is decapitated in the fighting, while Chryseis and Perias escape into the jungle, pursed by a vengeful Corun.  Our hero kills Perias in a gory fight, gouging out one of the monster's eyes with his fingers--yuck!

With the monster dead, and Corun now immune to Chryseis's illusions, I was expecting the blonde muscle man to kill the witch in a cathartic Mickey Spillane-style ending.  I was disappointed to find Anderson was giving us a happily-ever-after ending--the death of her evil grandfather and her monstrous familiar broke the hypnotic spell Shorozon had put on Chryseis so many years ago, when she was just a little girl.  Chryseis was never really evil, she explains, she was just a pawn of her grandfather.  Now that the spell is broken her true (sweet) character is liberated, as is her sincere love for Corun.  As the story ends we are led to believe that Corun will marry Chryseis and eventually become the king of Archaera who unites Archaera and his native Conahur  on a basis of equality and brotherhood.

There is maybe too much blah blah blah about the luminescence on the waves and the smell of Chryseis's hair and all that, and I consider the happy ending that absolves Chryseis of all responsibility for her crimes a cop out*, but "Witch of the Demon Seas" is a pretty good sword fighting adventure story.  Robert Hoskins included "Witch of the Demon Seas" in his 1970 anthology Swords Against Tomorrow, and the Gene Szafran cover actually illustrates the story, depicting Shorozon's ship, a blue sailor, a fish man (with a face like a dog, unfortunately), and sexy sexy newlyweds Corun and Chryseis.

*Here's a question for all you feminists: which is more sexist, a story in which an evil woman uses her gorgeous body and superior intelligence to manipulate men in pursuit of becoming the world's greatest scientist and then gets killed by one of the men she manipulated, or a story in which a good woman is the pawn of a man who manipulates her to act against her goody goody nature and has to be liberated from this domination by yet another man?

"Duel on Syrtis"

"Duel on Syrtis" was printed in one of the most famous issues of Planet Stories, the one with Leigh Brackett's "Black Amazon of Mars" (one of the Stark stories) and A. E. van Vogt's "The Star Saint" (I reread this great story of a hunky superhero, told from the point of view of the "muggle" whom he cuckolds for the good of the community--ugh, even my thick skull is not impervious to that suffocatingly ubiquitous Harry Potter goop!)

In this story, Anderson portrays the human race as a bunch of jerks!  When mankind colonized Mars they enslaved the native Martians, who look like skinny four-foot tall owls, if you can imagine such a thing.    (There is a good illustration of a Martian on page 5 of the magazine.)  They also hunted them for sport!  Slaving and hunting Martians was recently outlawed, but successful interplanetary businessman and big game hunter Riordan hasn't bagged a Martian yet, and he goes to a secluded spot on the red planet where the authorities don't have everything locked up tight yet, to shoot himself an "owlie."

The Martian owlies are very challenging quarry because they are intelligent and psychically in tune with the flora and fauna of the desert landscape--bushes and rodents miles away can warn them of an Earthman's approach, and even attack the Earther.  The Martian Riordan has set his sights on is a particularly tough nut to crack.  Most Martians are now debased members of the urban lower class, but Kreega is one of the last wild Martians, living in an isolated ruin in the desert.  Something like 200 years old, Kreega was one of the greatest warriors of Mars, a witness of the arrival of the first Earthman and a veteran of many raids on the human colonists before the signing of the peace treaties and amnesties now in force. Along with a hunting dog and a hunting bird, Riordan sets out to hunt this wily and venerable Martian hermit.

Anderson gives us a good long action sequence, describing the several days of the hunt through the desert, the various weapons and traps and stratagems employed by the hunter and hunted.  In the end Kreega not only defeats Riordan but captures the Earthman's space ship, and we readers are led to believe that, like the Martians in Chad Oliver's 1952 "Final Exam," Kreega and his fellows are going to be able to copy the ship and weapons and build a military force with which to challenge Earth hegemony.  (More on this Anderson-Oliver connection below.)  Riordan himself is put into suspended animation, still conscious, so that he will be forced to lie inert for centuries, contemplating his defeat.

We see a lot of these stories in which cloddish Earthmen with their high technology are contrasted with aliens who are sensitive and/or artistic and/or live as one with the natural world; I guess all these stories are reflective of a sympathy for the peoples the world over whom Europeans conquered or otherwise dominated, as well as a fear of technology and concern about the environment.  For me, this noble savage stuff has worn thin, but the meat of this tale is the well-written chase, and I can strongly recommend "Duel on Syrtis" as an engaging adventure story, a quite successful entertainment.

"Duel on Syrtis" has reappeared in Anderson collections and a few anthologies, including 1975's The Best Of Planet Stories, edited by Leigh Brackett.  I will also note that, in the issue of Planet Stories that includes "Duel on Syrtis," there is a little one column autobiography by Anderson; among other things, Anderson says that a year spent in Washington, D.C. convinced him that it was not "a town fit to live in" and that his favorite contemporary author is Johannes V. Jensen (Anderson is really into being Scandinavian.)

"The Virgin of Valkarion"

The setting of "The Virgin of Valkarion" reminds one of the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Leigh Brackett--an old planet, thousands of years ago fertile and ruled by a glorious empire, now a desolate waste of dry sea beds and crumbling ruins.  Our hero is Alfric, a claymore-wielding barbarian who rides some kind of hoofed beast and has behind him a long career as bandit and mercenary general.  When he arrives at Valkarion, the capital of the last tiny remnant of that empire of long ago, two slaves marked in such a way that it is clear they are property of the priesthood try to ambush and murder him.  Why have they targeted him, a total stranger to the environs of Valkarion?

Alfric gets a room in a disreputable inn.  The room comes with what we now are calling a "sex worker," and what the introductory blurb of this story calls "a tavern bawd."  But this is no ordinary prostitute--she is one of the most beautiful women Alfric has ever seen, and she turns out to be exceptionally skilled in "the arts of love."  As that intro blurb told us (that intro is full of spoilers), she is also a Queen--the Empress of Valkarion!

Why are these strange things happening to Alfric?  Well, it all has to do with a prophecy and a major political crisis.  Not only is tonight important astrologically, but the Emperor is dying, and he has no heir.  The priesthood would like to take over the kingdom, but a prophecy from thousands of years ago (recorded in the "Book of the Sibyl") predicts that under just such circumstances an outsider will crown himself Emperor.  So the priests have been looking for a guy like Alfric (to murder) and the Empress likewise has been looking for a guy answering Alfric's description (to ally with.)  After their sex session, the Empress explains all this to Alfric, who is not unwilling to make himself Emperor, and then they get caught up in the open fighting between the agents of the Temple and those devoted to the Empress.  (If the traditionally anti-religious readers of SF haven't already gotten the message,  Anderson makes clear that the Empress would be a better ruler than the priests by pointing out that her financial policy features lower tax rates than that of previous administrations, and that the Temple tries to maintain a monopoly on knowledge of the high technology of the Empire's heyday, even executing those who read the old books and try to build the machinery described therein.)

Alfric and the Empress get captured, and the High Priest gives the Empress the opportunity to marry him, which would make him Emperor--if she refuses she will be gang raped by the Temple slaves and then burned at the stake.  She agrees, but, once untied, contrives to free Alfric, who kills the high priest.  The lovers escape the Temple, and lead the Imperial loyalists against the priests and their dupes, Anderson gives us several (too many) pages of tedious battle scenes.  The Empress herself wears armor and rides a beast and stabs people--I think we can say this story includes the much-sought-after "strong female protagonist."  The Temple and the Imperial Palace both get burned down in the fracas, but we readers are assured that Alfric and his lover will build a glorious new Empire and found a noble new dynasty.

This story is just OK.  I am tired of prophecy stories and the action scenes in this one are not particularly stirring and the characters are not very interesting.  "The Virgin of Valkarion" doesn't seem to have set the world on fire--I don't think it ever appeared in an Anderson collection.  It was translated into Portuguese, however, for inclusion in a 1965 anthology alongside pieces by H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and other worthies.

The issue of Planet Stories that includes "The Virgin of Valkarion" also includes a letter from Chad Oliver, the anthropologist and SF writer whose "Final Exam" I just compared to Anderson's "Duel on Syrtis."  In the letter Oliver praises the active SF community of letter-writers, makes literary puns, and says that Anderson's "Duel on Syrtis" was "outstanding."  Maybe he really did lift the central idea of "Final Exam" from Anderson!  Oliver also, bizarrely, denounces the cover of the March '51 issue, a cover whose use of color I find striking and whose central figure I find mesmerizing.  Chad may have been a good anthropologist, but he was no art critic!

**********

Three worthwhile stories by Anderson, even if "The Virgin of Valkarion" is borderline, and I certainly enjoyed rereading van Vogt's "The Star Saint," while the Anderson autobiography and the letter from Chad Oliver both provide fun insights for us classic SF fans.  Those old magazines available at the internet archive are full of gems!

N, O, P & Q: ABC stories by Alan E. Nourse, Chad Oliver, Fred Pohl and Frank Quattrocchi

We're working our way through the alphabet here at MPorcius Fiction Log, reading British editor and publisher Tom Boardman, Jr.'s 1966 anthology An ABC of Science Fiction in its American paperback edition.  Today we tackle N, O, P, and Q.  So far An ABC of Science Fiction has been dominated by joke stories and denunciations of human violence, mendacity and bigotry; let's see if these trends continue.

"Family Resemblance" by Alan E. Nourse (1953)

A year ago I read Nourse's pessimistic humor story "Nize Kitty," an experience which leads me to expect we've got another jocular downer on our hands here.

This story starts with a practical joke.  Three young doctors, stressed out by the long hours in the hospital where they are interning, get a little recreation by putting a piglet in among the newborn brats in the maternity ward, thereby intending to scare the unintelligent but pretty nurse on duty.  The nurse faints--mission accomplished!

By chance an anthropologist, Dr. Tally, is on the scene.  This college prof is suffering under the tyranny of the head of his department, a Dr. Hogan, who Nourse again and again reminds us is fat and looks like a pig.  Hogan is writing a book that seeks to prove that human beings are primates related to the apes, and makes his subordinates like Tally do all the real work on the book.  (In my experience this is actually how academic work is conducted, so Nourse gets realism points here.)  The unfolding of the joke gives Tally an idea that will destroy Hogan and further his own career.

Basically, Tally argues that perhaps man is descended not from apes but from swine.  He gets together the Board of Trustees (five skinny old men) and Hogan and takes all six men to the maternity ward.  What they see makes Hogan faint and convinces the trustees that Hogan is unreliable and that Tally's prima facie absurd theory deserves to be investigated.

I'm giving this story, a ten-page fat joke, a thumbs down, but I note that it follows the forms of a traditional SF story.  It is about science, and is one of the few stories in An ABC of Science Fiction that actually has some real science in it, as Nourse devotes over a page to the similarities between pigs and humans.  Like so many old-fashioned SF tales, the plot is resolved via intelligence and trickery.  Following this traditional SF template as it does, it makes sense that "Family Resemblance" appeared first in Astounding, the old SF magazine we most associate with hard core science and engineering.  "Family Resemblance" would reappear in Nourse collections and anthologies of SF about doctors and mutations edited by famous anthologist Groff Conklin.   

Click to read the fine print--whoever composed the cover text of Adventures in Mutation loved
to write "etc." and you don't want to miss that.

Whoa, we're almost back in
1940 Horror Stories territory

"Final Exam" by Chad Oliver (1952)

From a story about anthropologists to a story by an anthropologist, Chad Oliver.  We can usually count on Oliver to decry our modern industrial society and advocate living like a primitive in harmony with nature; let's see if old Chad is running true to form in this story selected by Boardman.

In "Final Exam" we have a sort of anti-imperialist wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the colonized primitives turn the tables on the colonizers.  Decades ago Earthmen colonized Mars.  The native Martians have almost disappeared; it is theorized that they died from Earth diseases. (The Earthling characters explicitly liken the taciturn and stoic Martians to Native American Indians, while also saying, again and again, in an echo of Rudyard Kipling, that the natives are like children.)  The plot consists of vapid tourists and academics on a field trip on Mars, visiting a sort of ranch where some of the few remaining Martians work. After eight pages of the humans acting dumb and callously we get our climax when these doomed Earthers are witness to the old switcheroo!

(The old switcheroo, as I call it, when a German U-boat captain is punished in Hell by having to sail on an Allied merchant vessel as it gets torpedoed or when a guy who torments spiders gets caught in the web of a kaiju-sized spider, is one of my least favorite literary devices.)

You see, most of the Martians, millions of them, have been hiding in caves--the small number of visible Martians who work at unskilled jobs for humies are spies.  The Martians may have been technologically backward when the Earthman first arrived, but by employing their mind-reading powers and their superior intelligence, the natives of the red planet have become experts on Earth technology, and the hidden Martians have been able to build a fleet of rocket ships and an arsenal of ray guns that are better than their Earth models!  As the story ends we can be confident that the Martians are going to exterminate most of the human race and keep a small number of us alive for their amusement!

Oliver makes his use of the switcheroo obvious by having the Martians, formerly silent but verbose now that they have the whip hand, repeat mockingly to the doomed humans all the bigoted things the Earthers said about them earlier in the story.  Oliver also makes it clear that we are not supposed to think poorly of the Martians or sympathize with our fellow homo sapiens—all the references to children, students and (despicable) teachers tell us that if the Martians do anything bad it is because we have taught them by example to be bad, and whatever they may do to us, we deserve it.

I was surprised by the cataclysmic ending to "Final Exam;" I was expecting it to just be one of those Ray Bradbury things in which it was sad that the Martians were going extinct but it was inevitable; maybe the Martians would kill a few explorers or colonists, the way in real life Indians massacred a few frontier settlements and defeated Custer, but they were doomed in the long run. Instead, we get a thing like Michael Moorcock’s Land Leviathan in which black Africans build a land battleship and conquer Europe and America.

"Final Exam" is heavy-handed and over the top, and I can’t cheer on Martians as they destroy Earth civilization (I wouldn’t cheer on Indians who destroy the United States or Africans who destroy Western Europe, either) so this one gets a thumbs down.

This is the best scan I can find of the front cover of the British edition of The Best from Fantastic,
but I didn't want you to miss out on another "etc."

"Final Exam" first appeared in Fantastic, and was reprinted in Amazing in 1965 and in the 1973 anthology The Best from Fantastic. 

"The Bitterest Pill" by Frederik Pohl (1959)

Frederik Pohl, important SF editor, writer and memoirist, got "The Bitterest Pill" in Galaxy during a period in which he was more or less editing the magazine himself ("ghosting" is the word Pohl uses in The Way the Future Was) because the official editor, H. L. Gold, was suffering psychological problems.  (Gold sounds like a real neurotic Jewish New York character--scared to leave his apartment, going through a divorce, yelling at his writers, fraudulently awarding victory in a writing contest to his cronies, etc.  Malzberg should write a roman a clef about this dude's inner life and his difficult relationships with women and writers.)

The plot of "The Bitterest Pill" is as follows: a baby boy takes pills that “weaken” the “blocks between cell and cell in your brain;” this renders him a super genius and in short order he makes himself emperor of the USA. This plot takes up like two pages, and Pohl tacks on like nine pages of sitcom/soap opera stuff that at times feels gratuitous.

The story starts with a complaint about what we would now call "income inequality"—what kind of world are we living in when our narrator, who spends his time in an air conditioned building, has more money than the cop who protects him, a man who spends his days out in the heat sweating?  (Wikipedia quotes Pohl as saying Gold wanted SF to be "relevant.")  Our narrator is Harlan Binn.  A few years ago Binn’s fiance Margery left him at the altar and ran away with scruffy and erratic scientist Winston McGhee.  After six months she returned, and Binn forgave her and married her.  (This is what I am calling "soap opera stuff.")  The couple live in Levittown, the prototypical suburb and the kind of place city boy pinko Pohl can be expected to detest.  The importance of this detail is reflected in the fact that when "The Bitterest Pill" was reprinted in the 1961 Pohl collection Turn Left at Thursday and the 1975 collection The Best of Frederik Pohl it appeared under the title "The Richest Man in Levittown."  How did Binn become the richest man, you ask?  After his marriage to untrustworthy Margery, Binn's uncle, some kind of big wheel in the petroleum industry in the Middle East, died and left Binn a fortune.

As our story begins Harlan and Margery are having a hell of a time handling their little kids and all the letters and telephone calls from people wanting to borrow money or sell them junk. Their baby boy eats dog food and puts a graham cracker in his ear and so forth.  (This is what I am calling "sitcom stuff.")  Then McGhee reenters their lives, asking them to finance his new invention, those intelligence pills. (Margery obviously is still attracted to McGhee, fixing her hair and changing into sexy clothes and so on--a fusion of soap opera and sitcom stuff?)  The baby, who, as we have seen, puts everything in his mouth, gets a hold of the pills and then becomes a genius and takes over America.  The body of the text is mostly the contentious meeting with McGhee and the juggling of the brats--we are just told about the baby's conquest of America in a tiny bit at the end.

I guess the point of this story is that the world is unfair and people are all selfish jerks, and that nobody earns big money--the rich got rich via swindles or dumb luck.  (Smart people are not to be trusted because their smarts just give them the power to swindle others.)  I suppose this is what we should expect from Young Communist League alumnus Pohl and from editor Boardman, who is filling this anthology with pessimistic stories and joke stories. This particular work of pessimism full of weak jokes is getting a thumbs down.

"The Bitterest Pill" was actually made into an episode of Tales from the Darkside in 1986. If the viewer reviews at IMDb are any guide, the episode is not a fan favorite.

In May I spotted a foreign language version
of F&SF with a version of this image on its cover,
but quite different contents

"He Had a Big Heart" by Frank Quattrocchi (1955)

I feel like I'm being a real hard ass today--three negative reviews in a row!  Maybe I'll like this story by Quattrocchi, who has eight short fiction credits at isfdb ("He Had a Big Heart" is the last one) and it will provide an opportunity for me to display the true core of my personality, the real me as it were, which of course is all sweetness and light.

In keeping with the tone of this anthology as a whole, "He Had a Big Heart" is a story about petty criminals and is full of jokes.  Our narrator is Bailey, a guy who hangs around with a bunch of other lowlifes at a bowling alley.  One of these lowlifes is Bailey's brother Dave--Dave makes a habit of stealing the narrator's unemployment checks and skipping out when it is time to pay the rent on the apartment they share, so when the narrator learns his brother has been shot through the heart by a jealous boyfriend while in bed with a young woman, it doesn't faze him.

Dave's heart was destroyed by the bullet, but Dave is still alive, having been hooked up to an experimental artificial heart, a machine I guess the size of a desk.  (The story takes place about the time it was written--news about Dave's remarkable survival vies for space in newspapers with news about Marilyn Monroe's nude calendar photos--these photos were one of the big stories of early 1952.)  The plot of the story is a mishmosh of the consequences of Dave being the first person to benefit from the experimental device: there is the question of whether the guy who shot Dave can be tried for murder when Dave is still alive; the artificial heart's inventor suggests he wants to unplug poor Dave so he can use the machine on the philanthropist who financed its development, who has heart trouble himself; Dave becomes a cause celebre and considers running for president, and is in some vague way involved with organized crime.  Quattrochi doesn't explore these plot threads in a way that I found very satisfying, they just fizzle out indecisively. 

The ideas behind this story, and the deadpan humor of a callous narrator who doesn't care if his ne'er-do-well brother lives or dies*, show potential, and maybe this could have been a good story if it had gone through some revisions.  (Genre fiction pros would perhaps have advised Quattrocchi to "run it through the typewriter one more time.")  "He Had a Big Heart" is a disappointment, but I am going to have a heart myself and judge it barely acceptable.

After its first appearance in F&SF, "He Had a Big Heart" only ever appeared in one other venue, here in An ABC of Science Fiction.

*Bailey is like the opposite of Rael, the protagonist of Peter Gabriel's masterpiece The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

**********

Don't you believe it!

Oy, this was a rough batch.  I wouldn't have bought or started reading this anthology if it had been advertised as a bunch of humor pieces and pessimistic satires.*  The come-on text on the first page makes no mention of the book being a downer or a would-be yukfest--in fact, it tries to convince you that the anthology is going to showcase variety--"All of SF's contemporary modes are utilized...." Sheesh!

Well, I'm committed to this mission to the bitter end!  Four more stories handpicked by Tom Boardman, Jr. in our next episode!

*If I had known that the anthology Boardman edited before this one was called The Unfriendly Future maybe I would have stepped back from the brink. 

Space voyages with Oliver, Russell, Temple and Neville

Let's cast our net back into A Sea of Space and see what we can drag wriggling to the surface!  Today Chad Oliver (!), Ray Russell, William F. Temple and Kris Neville are our guides into "the vast space wilderness."

The 1980 British edition
of A Sea of Space

"The Wind Blows Free" by Chad Oliver (1957)

I'll always think of Chad Oliver as the guy who writes contrived utopian stories about spacefaring anthropologists who decide to abandon Earth to live among Stone Age people who are at one with nature, stories I think are ridiculous and boring.  In his intro to this story, however, editor William F. Nolan tells us "The Wind Blows Free" is about a "life ship" (what I think we usually call a "generation ship") and is one of Oliver's best.  I like generation ship stories, and confident that this isn't about an anthropologist who goes native among primitives, I am willing to tackle "The Wind Blows Free"'s 26 pages.

Sam is born on a generation ship of narrow catwalks, tiny apartments and stifling rules.  The rules may well be necessary to keep the cramped self-sufficient society of the ship (which it is said may well be the last hope of humanity, Earth having been ruined 400 years ago in a cataclysmic war) going, but Sam is an individualist and chafes under them.  Bigger and stronger than the other boys, he bullies them and has no luck making friends.  Sam is fascinated by the sex and violence in the stolen books he reads, but it is drummed into him that guns are bad and when he tries to get into a girl's pants he is confined to the family apartment for an entire year--in the closed environment of the ship population must be rigidly controlled.  Because of his troublemaking, the powers that be do not trust him and as an adult he is stuck at a maintenance job instead of graduating to the "Crew" along with his peer group.  One day comes the final straw, and Sam throws the rules totally out the window and starts exploring the forbidden areas of the ship.

When the Crew catches up to him, Sam kills a man in a fight.  Knowing that he now faces execution or a lobotomy, Sam takes the drastic final step of stepping out of one of the airlocks in the forbidden outer decks of the ship.  He is amazed to find that the ship is a vine and rust-encrusted relic on a green and beautiful world!  The ship must have landed decades or centuries ago, but the Crew, after a lifetime of regimentation, risk-aversion and "mankind ruined the Earth" guilt-trips, has been too scared to disembark, and kept the fact that they have reached their destination a secret!  Sam advances into the jungle and soon meets other men as big and brawny and adventurous as he is; a happy life lies ahead of him.

Oliver yet again gives us a "guy leaves modern society to thrive as a primitive" narrative, but this story is actually a good one.  Oliver brings the ship to life,  doing a good job describing its physical and social architecture and effectively and efficiently setting a tone, and the psychological stuff about Sam is also good.  I'm maybe a little disappointed that the ship wasn't actually in space, but the tradition of generation ship stories is that the passengers are ignorant of their circumstances (generally, they don't realize they are on a space ship) and Oliver manages to adhere to this tradition and at the same time advance his own agenda, so it is forgivable.  Oliver also subtly pays homage to Robert Heinlein's classic generation ship story "Universe," which was fun.

I'm actually recommending a Chad Oliver story here at MPorcius Fiction Log!  Now there is a real plot twist!  "The Wind Blows Free" first appeared in F&SF.   

"I Am Returning" by Ray Russell (1961)

I have read only one Ray Russell story before and I thought it a waste of time.  If you are wondering who Russell is, Nolan tells us in the intro here that Russell was an executive editor at Playboy and "brought quality science fiction to its pages."  Maybe this story will be worth my time?

Not really.  "I Am Returning" is a gimmick story, the tale of the fall of Satan explained or reimagined as the story of a winged alien with antenna, the loser of a civil war, crashlanding his ship on Earth in the Mesozoic era.  Too proud to admit defeat, Satan burrows to the Earth's core, and from there uses his telepathic powers to influence the evolution of the human race, pushing us to develop high technology and to construct a space navy with which to continue the civil war.  As the five-page story ends it is the close of the 21st Century and Lucifer is leading his Earth-built fleet out into space to fight Round Two of the War in Heaven.

Because it is brief I will give "I Am Returning" a grudging acceptable rating.  It first appeared, I believe, in Russell's collection Sardonicus and Other Stories.

"The Undiscovered Country" by William F. Temple (1958)

Last year the MPorcius staff examined a pile of Ace Doubles, including 76380, which presented Temple's Battle on Venus and The Three Suns of Amara.  I guess I was sort of lukewarm about them.  Nolan in his intro to this story here briefly describes Nolan's adventurous life (serving in the Eighth Army during the long Mediterranean campaigns of World War II and then in peacetime rooming with Arthur C. Clarke) and commends "The Undiscovered Country" itself as a "tense adventure."

"The Undiscovered Country" turns out to be the kind of story I was expecting (hoping) from a collection billed as being about "voyages in space."  Astronauts have discovered that living on the surface of Pluto are people whose metabolisms move at a rate one fortieth of our Earth metabolisms.  Unfortunately, everybody on the first two Earth expeditions to Pluto died because Pluto's acidic atmosphere can burn right through a conventional spaceship and cause catastrophic failure.  The third expedition, of which our narrator is a member, crews a ship specially built to withstand the Plutonian atmosphere, but can only do so for a short time!

This third Pluto research team snatches a beautiful young Plutonian woman (did I mention that these Plutonians are nudists?) and puts her on the Earth ship in a special tank full of Pluto air.  The hope is to study her, perhaps even keep her alive and learn to communicate with her.  But the Plutonian girl does not appreciate being kidnapped and put in a tiny cell, and uses her previously unsuspected telekinetic powers to sabotage the ship!  Who will live?  Who will die?  Will the ship get to Earth, or will the alien beauty seize control of the vessel and take it back to Pluto?

A good adventure story; I actually think it is too short, that there are lots of ideas in the story that are not explored as far as they might be.  How often do I say that?  Temple tosses in Shakespeare references and historical analogies along with all the science blah blah blah, so reading it really makes you feel like a smart guy!  "The Undiscovered Country" was first published in Nebula.

"Worship Night" by Kris Neville (1953)

A few years ago I read several Kris Neville stories, as chronicled here and here.  Taken together, I found the stories pretty thought-provoking, and a few of them were actually touching or exciting.  So I have hopes for "Worship Night!"

Like Robert Bloch's "The Old College Try" this is a story about colonialism that reminds me of Somerset Maugham, but whereas Bloch's story was a humorous horror story Neville's story is sad and realistic.

George, a college professor, and his wife Wilma are Earthlings who have lived on planet Cerl for twenty years.  Today is moving day; they are relocating from a big city (presumably built to human specifications, as the natives seem like primitives) to a house in the country, apparently to retire.  George is planning to write a book on Cerl and its people, and his wife urges him to do so, because interaction with humanity is radically changing Cerl society and later historians will lack George's familiarity with the traditional ways of the people of Cerl.

Neville makes clear that George and Wilma identify more with the natives than with their own kind--for example, the native employees at their apartment building assemble on the roof to bid them farewell as they board the aircar to their new place, but none of George's human colleagues of twenty years come to see them off--George suggests that their fellow Earthers feel he and Wilma have "gone native."  But, as humans, a vast gulf separates them from the Cerl people.  At their new place they are treated in a standoffish and surly manner by the locals, and they recall how it took them long years back in the city to make friends with the natives there.  (The reader has to wonder to what extent the natives who worked at their apartment building were really their "friends" and not merely obsequious service workers catering to their customers, hoping for tips and the like.)  No longer young, George and Wilma may die before they can establish any relationships in their new environs, and George wonders if he shouldn't have taken a job offer he had of a position back on Earth instead of buying a house on this alien world.  Having turned their backs on their own people, and unable to fully gain acceptance among the people of this planet, George and Wilma may have doomed themselves to an old age of loneliness and alienation.

Not bad; the style is good, Neville efficiently painting images and conveying the emotions of these lost souls.  "Worship Night" was first published in F&SF.

**********

With one exception, a good crop of stories.  Our voyage into space has been fruitful!

More anthologized SF in our next episode!

1955 stories from Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Williamson and Chad Oliver

Front cover of my copy of
the 1962 edition

Let's read three more stories from Fred Pohl's 1955 anthology of brand new (to Americans) stories, Star Science Fiction Stories No. 3. This time we'll be tackling stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Williamson, and Chad Oliver (!?)

"The Deep Range" by Arthur C. Clarke

Scientist and diving enthusiast Clarke gives us a very hard piece of hard SF, all about technology and biology. This is also one of the many SF stories that gushes sentimentally over how smart and beautiful dolphins are.

In the future, the oceans are filled with electric fences, and "cowboys" in one-man submarines, with the help of dolphin "sheep dogs," shepherd herds of whales whose meat will end up on dinner tables the world over. Our hero is one such cowboy. When a forty-foot shark breaks through a weak spot of fence he uses sonar and the abilities of his two dolphin buddies to track down the predator; then he shoots it with a wire-guided poison dart torpedo, saving the whales for somebody's fridge.

This is a quite good realistic, straightforward, day-at-the-office-of-a-man-in-the-future story; Clarke paints a clear and sharp picture of what is going on in his speculative future. The story doesn't try to engage your emotions or achieve anything on the literary level, though it prompted me to read the wikipedia page about the Greenland shark, which can live to be 500 years old, something I hadn't known before. (Yes, the shark that gets killed in this story was probably swimming the seas when Samuel Johnson was compiling his famous dictionary and Napoleon Bonaparte was murdering people by the thousands--that shark was a witness to history but that didn't protect him from mammal privilege!) isfdb is telling me "The Deep Range" first appeared in the April 1954 issue of the British magazine Argosy; it would be expanded a few years later into a full-length novel in which we presumably witness still more endotherm on ectotherm macroaggressions.

"Guinevere for Everybody" by Jack Williamson

I have fond memories of Williamson's Legion of Space and some other of his books. But they can't all be winners!

It is the future, the period just after the management of large corporations has been turned over to computers! One of the biggest firms, Solar Chemistics (makers of delicious chemburgers), under the leadership of its managerial computer, Athena Sue, has begun marketing clones of a beauty contest winner. This doesn't sit well with the public--some object to what amounts to selling sex slaves, others feel threatened because the clones are apparently superior to us natural born humans. After a series of riots at the retail stores selling the clones and at Solar Chemistic's HQ, the board of directors shuts down the computer and puts a human being back in charge of the company; manufacture of clones is ceased. But why did Athena Sue pull such a blunder? A computer expert from General Cybernetics examines Athena Sue's workings and discovers she was sabotaged by the former general manager whom she was replacing! He also discovers that the beautiful and flirtatious clones were designed with planned obsolescence in mind--when you buy one it is a model of nubility, but overnight it ages into extreme senescence.

"Guinevere for Everybody," which is told in a light-hearted manner that undermines consideration of the various serious issues that are involved (what makes us human? how does our society and how do individuals respond to changes in the economy brought about by mechanization and computerization?) and whose jokes would probably be considered sexist today, feels like filler. Merely acceptable.

"Any More at Home Like You?" by Chad Oliver

If you are a regular reader of MPorcius Fiction Log, you may be saying to yourself, "Isn't Chad Oliver that guy MPorcius is always complaining writes the same dumb space-anthropologist-goes- native-among-primitives-who-live-in-harmony-with-the-environment story again and again? Why is he reading this?" The fact is, I am burning with curiosity: is there any chance that this is yet another story about a space anthropologist who finds low-tech aliens who are exactly like Earth humans, except that they live as one with nature, and so he decides to abandon his people and live out his life with the primitives in their mud huts or wigwams or whatever? How many times could he pawn off this same material on the SF community?

...and back.

When people talk today I all too often find myself unable to understand them, or simply recoiling at their vocabulary. I don't know what "gaslighting" means. I don't know the difference between a "big mess" and a "hot mess." When I am driving in the car I might say "I'm 200 miles from New York," or "I'm two hours away from Chicago," but I'd never say "I'm two hours out." ("Out?") I still say "Where are you?" instead of "Where are you at?"

One of the irritating neologisms I have just started noticing people saying is "nothingburger." This seems to be used primarily to describe accusations of a crime which you want to ignore, but "nothingburger" was the word that kept popping into my mind when I read "Any More at Home Like You?;" this is a story about as thrilling as an account of walking to the corner to borrow a book from the library.

A spaceship crashes near Los Angeles. An alien, who looks exactly like an Earth human, emerges. He claims to represent a vast galactic civilization and is taken to see the president and to speak before the UN about building peaceful relations with the rest of the galaxy. Then he sneaks away to talk to a college professor, a linguist. It turns out the alien is not a representative of a galactic civilization--he is a lowly grad student "studying the vowel-shift from Old English to the present" who wanted to sneak around the Earth undetected but fouled it up. The alien governments don't give Earth a second thought; the last alien to visit Earth, also an academic, was here a thousand years ago! The college prof gives him a crate of books that will make his research easy and the alien is picked up by his friends in a second spaceship. The End.

(This guy is going to base his dissertation entirely on secondary sources? Tsk, tsk!)

Oliver is going meta on us here, making a joke about how SF stories about alien landings usually feature an alien bent on conquering us or peacefully integrating us into a larger, more sophisticated, polity. But the reason those themes are common is because they are fun and interesting; a linguist coming to clandestinely research esoterica is boring. Oliver also includes what felt like a self-referential joke directed at critics of his work like me: before the alien has revealed his true mission, the Earth professor asks him if he is an anthropologist!

Like Williamson's story, this one feels like filler--while not offensively bad, it is merely acceptable.

**********

Clarke's story is kind of modest in its ambition, but is a perfect example of the type of SF it represents; a world reliant on herds of whales for food is an exciting and memorable vision, and Clarke makes it feel real. Williamson and Oliver try to be funny and clever, but leave us with something limp and forgettable. 

Three 1959 stories by Howard Fast

Internet SF maven Joachim Boaz recently reminded us of communist Howard Fast's birthday.  Besides winning the Stalin Peace Prize and authoring a huge pile of novels about American history, Fast contributed many stories to science fiction magazines. On the same fruitful expedition which yielded Theodore Sturgeon's Godbody, I purchased Bantam F3309, a "Bantam Fifty," entitled The Edge of Tomorrow, containing eight stories by Fast.  The book is copywritten 1961; my copy was apparently printed in 1966.

There is an unusual stamp on the first page of my copy of The Edge of Tomorrow, offering Christmas Greetings from Elisha Penniman of the Precision Tools company of Elmwood, CT.  Was this a gift to one of firm's customers?  Or was Penniman just using the Christmas stamp as a bookplate, perhaps accidentally?

Let's check out three stories by Fast which first appeared in The Magazine of  Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1959, by which time, wikipedia suggests, Fast had become disillusioned with the Communist Party and communist rule of the long-suffering people of Eastern Europe.

"Of Time and Cats"

This is one of those stories which is more or less straightforward but which the author tries to make more interesting by telling it somewhat out of chronological order, through dialogue and flashbacks.  Fast tells it in a matter-of-fact, deadpan style which, to me, came off as cold and flat.

At least these three F&SF covers
are awesome!

Two physicists in beautiful Manhattan build a machine ("a field deviator or something of that sort" says the wife of one of the boffins) that "ties a knot in time."  When one of the physicists (our narrator) "steps between the electrodes" he starts a process which repeatedly duplicates him; soon there are dozens of identical reproductions of him walking the New York streets.  He stops the process, and the duplicates disappear, causing a public sensation and a police investigation.  A similar accident has caused the second physicist's cat to be duplicated, and for some reason the cat duplicates cannot be made to disappear or even to cease appearing, raising the possibility that the world will be engulfed by an infinite number of cats.

I didn't quite get the science behind this one, nor understand why the reproduction cats couldn't be dealt with the same way as the reproduction college professors, and the story wasn't engaging enough for me to the sit down and furrow my brow and make a serious effort to figure it all out.  "Of Time and Cats" feels like filler; not particularly bad, but not special either, just acceptable.

"The Cold, Cold Box"

This is the story of Steve Kovac, bazillionaire!  Like "Of Time and Cats" it is told somewhat obliquely and out of order, I guess in an effort to add tension and surprise. The story reaches us in the form of a presentation to a Board of Directors (thrilling, right?) and portions of a doctor's diary.

Kovac was born into poverty, which turned him ruthless.  A genius, he became the richest man in America through building various businesses by any means necessary, and through his control of newspapers he was able to keep his wealth and power a secret from the general public.  At age 46 he was stricken by cancer, and hired the world's best doctor to treat him.  Doc froze him cryogenically, with the idea that he would be thawed when a cure for cancer was developed.  Kovac left his business concerns in the hands of a Board of Directors of 300 members; at the time of the story, this Board's members drawn from among all the people of the world, and half are men, half women.  The Board takes over the world peacefully through propaganda and bribery: "And above all, we bought control--control of every manufacturing, farming or mining unit of any consequence upon the face of the Earth."  Under the dictatorship of the Board the world finds unprecedented peace and prosperity, "deserts turned into gardens...poverty and crime a thing of the past."  Of course, when the cure for cancer arrives they don't thaw Kovac.

This is just the kind of fantasy you would expect a pinko to have.  A rich guy (who of course got rich by being an asshole, and was only an asshole because of the cruelties of capitalism) falls under the power of an elite multicultural cabal, and the cabal uses his wealth and cunning propaganda to seize the means of production and run the world as a beneficent dictatorship.  The story takes for granted that the common people are dolts easily manipulated by the lies of their betters and would be be better off if all their property was controlled by an unelected government of 300 people. This is like a version of 1984 in which Big Brother is the good guy!

Looking past the story's childish politics and economics, it is totally devoid of feeling or character, of tension or drama.  We are just told Kovac is a genius and a paranoid, none of this is demonstrated, there are no clues as to how he got rich and what crimes he committed or anything like that.  When Fast goes to the trouble of trying to manipulate the reader his efforts are risible: besides the Vietnamese Chairman, only one member of the Board is ever described, and in the three lines she is afforded we learn "She was a beautiful, sensitive woman in her middle thirties, a physicist of note and talent, and also an accomplished musician."  Wait, there's a hot chick on the Board?  Here, take all my stuff!

Lots of SF stories have unconvincing or objectionable political or economic ideas, but bring something else to the table that makes them fun or interesting.  But not "The Cold, Cold Box."

Lame.

"The Martian Shop"

Both "Of Time and Cats" and "The Cold, Cold Box" are about a dozen pages long. Those two stories were so unappetizing that when I saw that "The Martian Shop" was twice as long I almost bailed on reading it.  But I had already downloaded from isfdb the cover image of the issue of F&SF in which it appeared (alongside the short version of Robert Heinlein's famous Starship Troopers) so I soldiered on.  Sunk costs, you know.

"The Martian Shop" is practically the same damned story as "The Cold, Cold Box!"  Good grief!  Well, it is actually a little better than "The Cold, Cold Box," but it has the same themes and ideas.

New stores open up in Manhattan, Tokyo's Ginza district, and Paris; these stores purport to sell high tech devices imported from Mars! These devices are so incredibly advanced that the world economy is shaken.  The governments of the world investigate the "Martians," and in response the Martians flee with all their wares.  A police detective discovers a tiny scrap of film left behind by the aliens, and top scientists decode its text--the Martians are going to attack the Earth! Led by the French ambassador to the US, the world unites under a single government to fight off the expected Martian invasion force!

In the last three or four pages we learn the truth about the "Martians."  A businessman who rose up from poverty to become a major tycoon who controls the newspapers assembled a secret multicultural Board of Directors and hired the world's best craftsmen and bribed the police detective and the French ambassador and the top scientists to perpetrate a hoax on the public.  This hoax, making everybody, including the governments of all the major powers, think a Martian invasion was imminent, has not only increased demand for the tycoon's spacecraft and other high tech equipment (everybody loves those government contracts!) but lead to world peace!

"The Martian Shop" is better than "The Cold, Cold Box" because the detailed descriptions of the shops and their merchandise are fun.  I would really like to see these shops and these devices!  So this one gets a grade of "acceptable," but the ideological basis of the thing is the same, as is the absolute lack of character or emotion.

**********

1961 printing

The advertising blurbs on this collection call Fast "author of some of the most popular books of our time" and "one of the foremost literary figures of our century" but the style and plotting of these stories is pedestrian, and they lack compelling characters and human feeling.  What these stories have are ideas that will seem unusual to people unfamiliar with SF, but these ideas are little more than gimmicks, and don't serve as a background to an entertaining story or the springboard for exciting speculations, they just sit there, like a dead rodent brought to you by your cat.  Pussy doesn't try to sell you on the inert carcass, he just lays it there, sure you're gonna like it, like it's the kind of product that sells itself.  Fast's ideas do not sell themselves, but he doesn't bother to put any lipstick on these pigs.    

(These stories reminded me of the work of Chad Oliver and Mack Reynolds: repetitive polemics pushing tired and discredited ideas that lack literary or entertainment value.)

We'll see if I read any more stories by Howard Fast, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you!

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.