Stories from Galaxy by E. E. Smith, F. Leiber, F. Pohl, D. Knight and C. D. Simak

My copy

I feel like a lot of critics are down on Astounding and the adventure-oriented pulps like Planet Stories and Startling Stories because they privileged the hard sciences and sensationalism (endless sword fights, ray gun fights, monsters and hot babes) over "sophisticated" literary values and the sorts of political and social concerns that excite the smart set.  These critics champion F&SF and Galaxy.  Myself, I love Astounding and Planet Stories and Startling Stories, but that doesn't mean I have anything against F&SF or Galaxy.  Let's check out five stories from the battered copy of The Third Galaxy Reader I bought in September for 50 cents from Second Story Books, that bright spot in the wretched hive of scum and villainy known as Washington, D.C.

"The Vilbar Party" by Evelyn E. Smith (1955)

The wikipedia page on Galaxy is full of quotes and paraphrases about how awesome Galaxy was.  Here is a paraphrase of a sentiment credited to Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove, the source cited being their Trillion Year Spree:

...through the influence of its reduced focus on technology, [Galaxy] played an important role in attracting women to write science fiction.

At the risk of misgendering somebody, I will suggest that the only woman in The Third Galaxy Reader is Evelyn E. Smith.  I read Smith's 1961 story "Softly While You're Sleeping" and was totally into it, so I have no fear about trying "The Vilbar Party."  But wait, Aldiss and Wingrove are quoted at wikipedia saying (in Trillion Year Spree):

[Galaxy] brought into the sunlight a number of excellent satirists, comedians and ironists

and "The Vilbar Party" would go on to appear in the 1982 anthology Laughing Space: An Anthology of Science Fiction Humor.  Oy.  I generally avoid joke stories, but let's give Smith the benefit of the doubt and give "The Vilbar Party," 12 pages, a shot.

The people of Saturn are like teddy bears with four arms and antennae.  Professor Narli Gzann is selected to be an exchange professor with a North American university; he figures human beings will find him repulsive, but he doesn't care because he likes to be alone and he has tons of work to do on his history of the solar system.  But when he gets to Earth, apparently the first Saturnian to visit Terra, everybody finds him just fucking adorable and they never leave him alone--they are always giving him gifts and taking him out and throwing him parties and caressing him and kissing him, etc.  He has no time to work on his history and he eats so well he gets fat.  By the time he gets back to Saturn he has become addicted to social life and attention--his solitary ways are over, contact with Earth having wrought a change in him, turning him into the life of the party.

"The Vilbar Party" is inoffensive but ultimately pointless; the jokes don't make you laugh, and there is no edge or tension or drama.  How this bland filler story got into The Third Galaxy Reader, I don't know.

Merely acceptable.

"Time in the Round" by Fritz Leiber (1957)

"Time in the Round" takes place in the far future, when life is sterile and safe.  People are conditioned to "automatically reject all violent solutions to problems" regarding humans.  We observe kids playing with their levitators and robot dogs in Peace Park.  The levitators have a built-in forcefield that prevents a levitating child from crashing into a tree or wall and getting hurt, and the robot dogs look and act exactly like real dogs, but can't be harmed.

The anti-violence conditioning is done to people when they are six years old, and one of the boys, Butch, who calls himself "the Butcher," is only five and still has a natural love of risk, danger and violence, and shoots spits balls at the other kids and wishes he lived in the past he has heard about, the days of Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin, the days of war and revolution and blood.

On the other side of Peace Park is the Time Theater, where people can watch a projection that shows life in the past.  Kids who have not yet been conditioned are forbidden to visit the Time Theater, but Butch is cunning enough to get inside and join the older kids.  While watching some Vikings, a disaster occurs--for the first time ever it is not only photons that pass through the time-viewing device, but people!  The Viking warriors emerge into the theater and try to kidnap the women!  Because of the conditioning, nobody can resist this raid, except Butch!  Boldly employing the forcefield integrated into a levitator and the invulnerable robot dogs Butch drives off the Vikings, saves the women, and becomes a hero. 

Minor and somewhat silly, but diverting, we'll judge this one a tick above acceptable, "marginally good," I suppose.  Most of the story is jokes, but I suspect Leiber is also suggesting that a life that is too easy will lead to weakness and an inability to meet unexpected challenges.  "Time in the Round" has not been reprinted much, but did show up in a huge (715 pages!) collection of Leiber stories put out by Centipede Press in 2016.

Fans of the Dillons should check out their illustrations for the presentation of "Time in the Round" found in Galaxy (link above.)  While I am interpreting the story as basically a goof, their illustrations are moody and sad. 

"The Haunted Corpse" by Frederik Pohl (1957)

Like Smith's "The Vilbar Party" this is another inoffensive story that is meant to be funny.  I don't know why H. L. Gold selected these light stories for The Third Galaxy Reader instead of stories that were striking or shocking or otherwise moving.

An unscrupulous scientist has figured out a way to transfer personalities from one body to another.  One of his colleagues alerts the government, and an army unit is dispatched to surround the mad scientist's house--this new invention no doubt has great military value, and must be protected.  Our narrator is the colonel in charge of defending the invention and also monitoring the inventor's work--he demands daily reports from the scientist, who rages at all this interference.

"The Haunted Corpse" is too long, I guess to fit in the multitude of mild jokes.  I guess the main joke is that military men are dim--it takes a long time for them to realize the scientist has invented a soul transfer machine and not a death ray projector, for example.  Secondary jokes include the fact that the scientist's colleague (the stool pigeon) is fat and loves to eat, and that the inventor calls the colonel a lieutenant.  These are the sorts of standard and obvious jokes that one cannot call bad, but which one does not actually laugh at, either.

Anyway, the inventor doesn't give a rat's ass about national security or getting rich or anything like that.  He is over 80 years old, and just wants to move his own soul into a young body.  He tricks the military into providing him an opportunity to shift his psyche into that of a hearty young soldier and then escapes.

Acceptable...barely.

"The Haunted Corpse" has appeared in many Pohl collections, and was even adapted for radio.

"Man in the Jar" by Damon Knight (1957)

Finally, here is the real thing, a story with weird ideas, strange people and devices, surprises, and dramatic tension, the reasons I read SF in the first place.  This piece is far more engaging than the three stories I have already read from The Third Galaxy Reader.

Through extensive research, ruthless alcoholic businessman R. C. Vane has come to believe that planet Meng was once ruled by a race of psychics who could, among other things, make diamonds out of graphite with the power of their minds.  But centuries ago they were overthrown by the other races of planet Meng and today are almost extinct, the few survivors hiding among the mundane Mengs, never using their powers for fear of exposure--nowadays many people consider the tales of the psychic overlords to be no more than legend.  Vane would like to have one of these psykers under his power, and the story takes pace in his hotel room in Meng City, where he has trapped a native he believes to be one of these secret mental powerhouses.  Using various ancient artifacts, high-tech devices, bizarre native flora, and psychic abilities, Vane and the native fight a battle of wits!  Who will come out on top, and how?

Thumbs up!  "Man in the Jar" would be reprinted in numerous Knight collections, and Gardner Dozois would include it in his anthology Another World: Adventures in Otherness.

"Honorable Opponent" by Clifford D. Simak (1956)

The Galactic Confederacy, hundreds of planets lead by Earth, is in trouble!  The human race has built working relationships with numerous alien races, but the race known as The Fivers is inscrutable.  Discussions with them are almost impossibly difficult because they don't even seem able, or seem to care, about such basic things as using a mutually agreeable system of keeping track of time so they can make appointments.  Worse still, they seem very touchy about their territory, very defensive, attacking without any sort of warning ships from any race that get too close.  The Fivers' attacks are irresistible, as they have weapons far more powerful than those of any other race, weapons which make their enemy's vessels disappear without a trace.

After much effort, a prisoner exchange has been arranged between Earth and the Fivers, and this meeting is what is chronicled in this story.  The Fivers arrive fourteen hours late, but they bring with them all the human space ships thought destroyed in battle, and all their crews, safe and sound--the Fiver weapons don't cause harm, they just teleport a target to a safe holding area, because the Fivers don't attack out of belligerence, but because they "fight" space naval battles as a game and assume all other races do the same.  After finally explaining this to the humans, the Fivers promise to give to Earth their teleporter weapon so the game will be less dangerous.  Thus this absurd joke story has a serious paradigm-shift ending--the human race need never fight a deadly war again because now people who misbehave can just be teleported into prison without harming them.

"Honorable Opponent" is getting a thumbs down.  Not only is it yet another joke story that is not funny, but the serious ending that comes after the punchline of the ludicrous plot means the story's tone is uneven--is this a sense-of-wonder story about mankind embarking upon an unprecedented era of peace thanks to high technology, or an absurdist joke story about the confusion of dealing with aliens whose actions make no sense?

**********

Science Fiction Book Club edition of
The Third Galaxy Reader

What is it with all the trifling, pointless, mild-to-the-point-of-sterility joke stories in The Third Galaxy Reader?  Was Galaxy supposed to provide a break from all the big ideas, all the thrills and chills, all the exuberant fun and shocking bloodshed to be found in other SF magazines?  Or is this just a sample size error?  Maybe it is just an odd coincidence that, of the five stories I read from The Third Galaxy Reader, chosen because of my interest in these five specific authors, four are light humor pieces--could it be that the other ten stories are full of moving drama and mind-blowing speculation on life in the future?

Well, whatever.  Knight's "Man in the Jar" is good, which was nice to see because I'm hardly a dues-paying member of the Damon Knight fan club, so I am still counting this mission a success.  But I can assure you that in our next episode I will specifically be seeking out thrilling adventure stories!

Four 1950s stories by Frederick Pohl about psychology

Here we see two adventurers about
to explore a mysterious alien city. 
The cover should probably
depict a psychotherapist's couch.  

We've been reading 1950s SF stories here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and I see no reason to stop.  On a recent trip to North Carolina I purchased a gorge copy of Frederick Pohl's 1976 collection In the Problem Pit.  It contains four stories with 1950s copyrights, so let's give them a try.

"Rafferty's Reasons" (1955)

Before the reforms of Mudgins, Rafferty was an artist.  But after Mudgins was elected a strict policy of full employment was instituted by the government.  To create more work the use of technology was severely limited--for example, the computers which controlled self-driving cars were made illegal to create jobs for taxi drivers.  Artist Rafferty was put to work as an accountant at a public works Project, and he has to do all the math for payroll and everything else by hand, like he's Bob Cratchit or something! 

Under the Mudgins regime people are actually compelled to work; working at the same office with Rafferty is a woman who would rather be a housewife and spend time with her kids.  It is even suggested that, to maintain full employment, that surplus workers ("willfully unemployed") are simply executed--by the thousands!  To maintain efficiency, now that computers are largely outlawed for productive use, computers are used to hypnotically train people like Rafferty; Rafferty is practically incapable of making a math mistake.  This training can have damaging psychological effects, and in fact, Rafferty is dangerously insane.

This picture of Rafferty's world is slowly unveiled as the story (about 13 pages) unfolds.  The plot concerns Rafferty's feverish desire and desperate plan to murder the head of the Project at which he is employed, an overweight man called John Girty.  Rafferty talks to himself, a lot, mostly saying "I'll kill you, Girty" and calling Girty a cow or a pig; these silent mutterings appear multiple times on nine or ten of thr stor's pages.  After work one Friday, Rafferty follows Girty to a Turkish bath and there tries to murder him, but what Rafferty thinks is a knife is an old cigar he found on the ground, so Girty survives the attack.

I'm not quite sure what Pohl is trying to tell us in this story; it feels like it is all over the place.  The prohibitions on the use of machines and the forcing people to work (oh yeah, and the mass murders) are the work of the government, but this story is no defense of the free market against government intervention in the economy--even if we didn't already know Pohl is a socialist, his hostility to the free market is actually center stage in this story.  The world depicted in "Rafferty's Reasons" has a two-tiered economy, in which people like Girty get paid in "real money" that can be used at "free market restaurants" and other private establishments (e.g., the Turkish bath), while people like Rafferty are paid in "Project-vouchers" that can only be used at places offering second-rate products, like government cafeterias.  Maybe the story is a plea for government handouts of no-strings-attached cash instead of food stamps and housing subsidies and the like, benefits that everybody would be eligible to receive, regardless of their willingness or ability to work?  A more interesting possibility relates to the productivity of machines--maybe Pohl thinks a world without work is possible with computers and machines, and is arguing here in "Rafferty's Reasons" that worries that such a world would lead to dangerous idleness or decadence are overblown and should not influence policymakers or voters.  (It is sort of a common theme in SF stories that the easy life is unsatisfying or even somehow disastrous, and maybe Pohl is pushing back against that.*)

Another possibility is that Pohl is trying to dramatize the distinction between the ordinary man and the creative man.  It seems like the Mudgins system is popular--it has won elections--so maybe Pohl is suggesting that ordinary people are fools, mere sheep who would embrace any crazy system, while superior people, sensitive creative people (like Pohl and the readers of Fantastic Universe, of course!) would crack under such a system. 

Further confusing the issue, the Mudgins regime has, apparently, outlawed religion, free speech, even love--these prohibitions are just mentioned in passing and it feels like Pohl is just throwing into the mix every crummy thing a government might do, kitchen sink style, perhaps in an effort to appeal to every demographic.  The anti-free market stuff might appeal to lefties, while having Mudgins crush religion and force housewives to work, and having Girty paraphrase a cliche associated with Stalin ("you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs") is maybe meant to appeal to conservatives?  But the more crimes Pohl attributes to the Mudgins government, the less believable it is--who would vote for an anti-love regime?

As my twitter followers know,
  I saw a copy of this recently 

The idea of the story is good--tyrannical reforms drive a guy insane and he goes on a quest for bloody revenge and we see all this from his own passionate, obsessive, point of view, and learn about his world as we follow his gruesome self-imposed mission.  But Pohl blows it.  The story feels long, with Rafferty's declarations that Girty is a fat beast whom he will kill getting repetitious to the point that Rafferty's passion becomes stale, and Pohl's satire (his "world-building," to use a phrase every critic of SF uses all the time) is unfocused and unconvincing.  Gotta give this one a (marginal) thumbs down. 

Pohl writes a little intro to each story in In the Problem Pit but the intro here doesn't help us decipher the story's meaning.  In fact the intro itself is sort of confusing, or at least witholds the sort of information we'd like to have.  It seems Pohl sent "Rafferty's Reasons" to his favorite editor (unnamed) along with a second story (unspecified), and the editor bought that second story but not "Rafferty's Reasons," even though Pohl thought "R's R" was the better of the two.  It was Leo Margulies, editor of Fantastic Universe, who bought "Rafferty's Reasons" and printed it; since then it has only reappeared in the Pohl collection Alternating Currents (1956) and this one. 

*In the past I have exhorted my readers to not just accept second hand verdicts about the SF field but to investigate the primary sources, so here is some SF we've read here at MPorcius Fiction Log that features the "world-without-work makes people batty" theme: "Home is the Hunter" and "Two-Handed Engine" by Kuttner and Moore, Tanith Lee's Don't Bite the Sun, "The Miracle of the Lily" by Clare Winger Harris, "The Fence" by Clifford Simak.  We also see the idea that mass unemployment leads to wacky and risky behavior in many Judge Dredd comic book stories.

"What To Do Until the Analyst Comes" (1956)

When it first appeared in Imagination this story was titled "Everybody's Happy But Me."  Unlike "Rafferty's Reasons," "What To Do Until the Analyst Comes" was a hit, and has appeared in many anthologies of SF stories about drug use and psychology.  In his intro to it here in In the Problem Pit, Pohl assures us he wrote it "quite a while before the hippies and the beats made dropping out a national conversational topic."

The narrator of the story works at an ad agency.  When the government issues a warning about the ill health effects of smoking, the agency fears that business from its biggest account, a tobacco company, may dry up, so they cast about for another popular product that has no health issues.  The narrator hires a chemist who comes up with a chewing gum that causes euphoria but isn't "habit-forming" or unhealthy.  This product becomes so popular the efficiency of the world economy suffers because everybody is high all the time--newspapers appear with illegibly smeared pages, there is a radical increase in auto accidents, etc.  The narrator sends out his secretary to get him coffee and she comes back with a Coke.  (That is what qualifies as a joke in this story.  The story's central joke is that the narrator can't chew the gum and be happy like everybody else--he's allergic due to overdosing in the testing phase.)

On the other hand, people are all so happy there is no more crime or mental illness (I guess in Pohl's 1956 story mental illness is not the result of chemical imbalances but "worry" and "hang ups") and a psychoanalyst tells the narrator that the gum has made the world a better place.  I theorized that "Rafferty's Reasons" was a suggestion that we stop worrying about a world without work, and I am now theorizing that "What To Do Until the Analyst Comes" is a suggestion that we stop worrying about a world in which everybody is high.  Together these stories seem to be an experiment in finding the limits of traditional morality--maybe it made sense to stigmatize idleness when almost everybody had to work hard or starve, and maybe it made sense to stigmatize drug use when drugs were poisonous and chemically addictive, but if we have machines to do the work and a drug that isn't poisonous or addictive, maybe those moral strictures need no longer apply, having outlived their usefulness.

"Conducting experiments in finding the limits of traditional morality" sounds like a worthwhile project, but unfortunately neither of these stories is a very good work of literature or entertainment; like "R's R," this story feels too long, and the jokes don't actually make you laugh.  Another (moderate) thumbs down.

"The Man Who Ate the World" (1956)

Pohl's intro to this one is the insipid anecdote of how in 1948 he knew a five-year-old girl who combined the names of President Truman and his opponent Tom Dewey into the single name "Trummie."  This is like the written equivalent of being forced to look at some grandmother's pictures of her grandkids.

"The Man Who Ate the World" is like 29 pages long and is split into seven little chapters.  In Chapter I we meet Sonny.  Sonny is eleven, and lives in a huge house where he is educated and looked after by robots.  One robot looks and talks just like Long John Silver, another is Tarzan, and another is "Davey Crockett."  (Maybe Pohl threw the extra "e" in there for legal reasons--about when this story was written Walt Disney had a popular Davy Crockett TV and merchandise thing going.)  One robot is an obese black woman, Mammy, who says stuff like "Dat's nice when chilluns loves each other lak you an' that lil baby."  Yes, Sonny has a little sister, Doris, and the point of this first chapter is that Sonny steals Doris's robot teddy bear!  The end of the chapter gives us a clue to the point of this story when Sonny's flesh and blood parents appear.  Sonny's family is low in status and are required by the Ration Board to consume tremendous resources--in this economy, which thanks to robots overproduces, low status families have an obligation to consume.  His parents punish Sonny for wanting to consume a small teddy bear robot instead of a much larger Tarzan robot because by throwing him an additional birthday party.

Chapter II is like twenty years later--the underconsumption problem has been licked; robots now not only handle all the producing, but the consuming as well.  (Are there people who enjoy these absurdist satires?  For 29 pages?)  We are introduced to a young "psychist," the futuristic word for "psychiatrist" or "psychoanalyst."  The psychist has been called in to treat a man (later revealed to be Sonny) who grew up during the consumption era of twenty years ago--he was scarred by his pro-consumption childhood and is now a "compulsive consumer."  Pohl is hitting us with not just one tired and boring fictional trope--the attack on consumerism--but a second one as well--the analyst who discovers the source of a character's mental problems in his childhood.

In Chapter III things get more absurd yet.  Sonny (real name: Anderson Trumie) is a 400-pound adult who overeats and, in childish tantrums, orders his Davey Crockett robot to shoot his other robots (he has hundreds of robots and hundreds more to repair the hundreds that get shot) and cries and so forth.  Chapters IV through VII describe in repetitious detail the psychist's investigation of Sonny's past, his journey to Sonny's island, where robots build model cities and play wargames, and his treatment of the compulsive consumer (he gets a girl to dress up as a teddy bear, which is what Sonny has always wanted!)

This story is quite bad.  The ideas are tired, and instead of just inflicting them on us for four or five pages and then setting us free, Pohl hammers away at us for 29 damn pages.  Fred, none of us is going to live forever!  To fill up all these pages he repeats things; again and again we hear that the psychist is only 24 and worried if he has what it takes to cure Sonny Trumie, and we get multiple descriptions of how fat Trumie is and how disgusting are his eating habits.  In Chapter II a minor character just says what Trumie's psychological problem is in a single paragraph, but then Chapter IV is devoted to laboriously and superfluously elaborating on Sonny's youth and compulsive consumption.

Beyond the first three (already weak) chapters, nothing in this story is interesting or amusing or entertaining.  This story stinks.

"The Man Who Ate The World" was first printed in Galaxy.  I guess people really did like it (who...are...these...people?), because it was the title story of a Pohl collection, included in an anthology edited by the wife of Pohl collaborator C. M. Kornbluth, and featured in a theme anthology with Asimov's name on it (the theme: sin.) 

       
"To See Another Mountain" (1959)

"To See Another Mountain" was the only one of today's four stories to be included in the 2005 "Best of" collection, Platinum Pohl, a volume endorsed by a TV channel!  (This same TV channel endorsed the nineteenth Dune novel, so you know they offer a seal of approval you can trust.)  Maybe there is a chance this blog post won't go zero for four, as the sports lovers might say.  The story first appeared in F&SF (in the same issue as "Flowers for Algernon," which showed up in one of my reading class textbooks in school) and soon after was printed in the collection Tomorrow Times Seven.

In his intro to the story Pohl tells us how much he loves Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, which he saw performed at Carnegie Hall by Fritz Kreisler.  He says he listened to David Oistrakh's LP of the Concerto repeatedly while he was writing "To See Another Mountain."

It is the middle of the 21st century.  The greatest scientist of the last hundred years is Noah Sidorenko--Pohl compares him to Einstein more than once and all the major technology of the day is based on his discoveries.  Today is his 95th birthday, and he is living in some kind of elaborate mental institution for geniuses, subject to screaming fits ("Stop!  Stop!" he shrieks when President O'Connor comes by to give a speech on how awesome Sidorenko is) and prescribed drugs that cloud his memory because some horrible thing happened in his past that nobody wants him to remember.

The story includes a group therapy session, followed by the climactic scene in which Sidorenko sneaks through the institution at night (remember when a guy sneaked through a nursing home at night in Philip Jose Farmer's "The Henry Miller Dawn Patrol?"--that was fucked up, wasn't it?) and discovers that the other people in the group therapy session, all the other patients at the institution, are not patients but additional shrinks acting a part!  He also learns what they have been keeping from him--he believes he has psychic powers!  The shrinks all scoff at the idea of psychic powers, and have been trying to cure him of this delusion so he can get his super brain back on track making new important discoveries.  Now that he realizes what is going on, Sidorenko is determined to escape the doctors' clutches and pursue the development of his mind reading and precognitive abilities--these super powers will be his true legacy!

This one has some real human feeling and a mystery that actually made me curious; I'm giving "To See Another Mountain" a mild recommendation, declaring it marginally good.

**********

All of these stories are about psychology; no doubt you'll remember that Pohl's greatest work, Gateway, also had lots of psychoanalysis in it, as did a story I thought was great, "The Fiend."  But while those works are very successful, of today's four stories only one of them succeeds in presenting an interesting character or human relationship or any kind of human drama or adventure, and two of them don't even try.  The three loser stories consist primarily of uninspired recitations of bottom of the barrel economic and psychological theories, and two of them are weighted down with painfully obvious and crappy jokes ("that dude is fat!...my secretary is high!...waka waka!")

In his introduction* to this volume, and a short essay at the end of it, Pohl provides us some possible clues as to why so many of these stories are so lame.  In the brief essay, "SF: The Game Playing Literature," he talks about how SF is great for propaganda purposes and also for analyzing possible futures and alternate worlds; the "game" is tinkering with the "rules" of the physical or social or political world, the way you might tinker with the rules of Risk or Parcheesi, and playing out how these rule changes affect people's behavior and society.  I agree with Pohl that this is a valuable aspect of SF, but if a writer focuses too much on this game-playing and not enough on traditional literary concerns he can end up producing some pretty boring or clumsy stories, which is, I suspect, what happened to three of today's four stories.

I think it will be a while before we read any more Fred Pohl here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

*This intro is dated "Red Bank, New Jersey, November 1974."  In my last blog post I responded to learning of the existence of an anthology of "Florida science fiction" by wondering if there was an anthology of New Jersey science fiction--we can add Pohl to the list of possible contributors which so far includes Barry Malzberg!

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. 

Three science fiction tales by Ray Cummings from 1941

We’re still reading Ray Cummings stories purchased by Fred Pohl for inclusion in SF magazines, stories Pohl intimated (in his memoir The Way the Future Was) that he published even though he didn't like them. Today it’s three stories from 1941 issues of Astonishing and Super Science.  I read them all at the internet archive, and you can do the same--I don't think these pieces ever saw book publication, so the internet archive is probably your best option!

"Magnus' Disintegrator" 

The issue of Astonishing in which "Magnus' Disintegrator" appears carries an interesting editor's note (this department is called "Editoramblings.")  In it Pohl says that reader feedback has indicated that SF fans want longer stories, and so Astonishing's sister publication, Super Science Stories, is being rechristened Super Science Novels and will have more pages, a higher price, and feature longer works.  I'm not sure that I personally favor longer stories (I feel like I often, here at this blog, moan that a story is too long--in related news, when the wife and I are in a hotel room and one of those documentary shows about embezzlers or whatever comes on she has to endure my bitching that "they showed that clip already!" and "they told us this two minutes ago!" and "this show has 10 minutes of information and they are stretching it out to 45 minutes!") but if you go to the SF section of a big chain bookstore today and see how the shelves are full of books two inches thick and series that take up a foot because they consist of six or eight volumes, well, it is hard to disagree with Pohl's assessment of what the mass of customers want. 

"Magnus' Disintegrator" takes us to the New York City of the high tech future of the year 2000, where we meet a guy called Rance.  Wait, is this the synthetic food salesman from "Personality Plus," the best of the eight Cummings stories I've already written about this week?  Apparently not; this dude's first name is Peter, and he is a "private aircar operator," which I think is pronounced "chauffeur."  As the story begins our man Rance is in a lab out at Montauk with his employer, inventor and businessman John Magnus, and Magnus has a heat gun trained on poor Rance, and is saying he is going to blow up his experimental "disintegrator," a kind of reactor that can produce cheap energy, killing both of them.  It will all be worth it, however, because other eggheads will be able to study the recordings of the explosion and gain the knowledge needed to build a better reactor.

The bulk of the rest of the story consists of a flashback that explains why Magnus wants to die, and why he wants to murder Rance, during which it becomes clear I am supposed to sympathize with the businessman instead of his driver.  Magnus committed some business blunders that cost him much of his business empire and some engineering blunders with earlier versions of the reactor that got some peeps killed and got government regulators all up in his grill!  Magnus was just about to shoot himself with his heat gun when he learned that his sexy blonde daughter Carole wanted to marry Rance; Rance has a reputation as a womanizer and no doubt the main thing attracting him to Carole is her inheritance!  (Three of the five 1940 horror stories we read by Cummings just a few days ago had some jerk scheming to get an inheritance, and here Cummings is playing this tune yet again!)  Magnus would rather kill the chauffer than let him break his little princess's heart, so he concocted the plan of blowing Rance up along with himself by messing with the experimental reactor.  (For the reactor to operate, two people have to be at the controls, so he couldn't just blow himself up with it.)

The flashback brings us up to the present, to the lab out on the tip of Long Island.  Rance doesn't feel like sacrificing his life for science so he tackles Magnus and they wrestle over the heat gun.  The weapon goes off and hits the reactor in such a way that it emits poison gas that kills our horn dog chauffeur (the gas just makes the businessman/inventor pass out) and also somehow makes the reactor work smoothly so it doesn't blow up.  Magnus's daughter is safe from the womanizing Rance and the now perfected reactor will restore the finances of Magnus's company and slash energy prices and lead to worldwide economic growth.

Besides feeling contrived, "Magnus' Disintegrator" feels like it was constructed out of pieces plucked from the other Cummings stories we've been reading; it's like the Cummings of '40 and '41 has a limited number of Legos and each thing he builds out of them incorporates bricks we've seen already in somewhat different configurations.

The interesting facet of "Magnus' Disintegrator" is that the good guy is a big businessman and the villain is a working-class guy trying to get his mitts on the industrialist's daughter; I feel like most SF stories are written by pinkos who would side with a working-class dude against a magnate, or by libertarian types who would celebrate a young woman striking a blow for independence and fighting for the right to choose her own husband.  It is definitely weird that the penultimate paragraph of the story is about how great it is that Magnus will be able to guide his daughter's life--aren't most of the stories we read about individuals who (at least try to) forge their own destinies?

I like that Cummings is airing some unusual points of view in this story, but I wish it was better plotted; as it stands I cannot recommend it.

"Almost Human"

This issue of Super Science has a terrific cover--a man in a wifebeater T-shirt and a gorilla, both armed with elaborate modernistic dart launchers, are trying to rescue a gorgeous babe from the clutches of a giant baboon!  (Or is it a bear?)  This incredible tableau reminds me of the Schoenherr cover to my copy of A. E. van Vogt's The Battle of Forever, which introduced me to a hero whom I will always hold close to my heart, the rifle-toting HippoMan!

"Almost Human" is about a robot who develops a personality. Xor-2y4 is a robot pilot, an electronic brain which is interred in a stylized humanoid body which lacks the ability to walk; it is carried from one aircar or spacecraft to another when its duties change—and they have changed recently. You see, Xor was the personal aircar operator of Jon Dekain, famous robot maker and Xor's own creator, and spent a lot of time flying around with the doctor’s lovely daughter Barbara, known as Babs (yes, another Babs—Cummings reuses everything, including names.)  An alien from Asteroid 90, Sirrah Gerondli, was scheduled to meet with Dekain, and Xor was chauffeuring this xeno to the meeting and crashed the vehicle, killing the alien.  After this accident Xor was checked out (Dekain found nothing wrong) and transferred to the pilot’s seat of a space ship (yes, after killing one guy and wrecking a 100,000 dollar vehicle they gave Xor responsibility for dozens of people and a bazillion dollar vehicle. This is what we call failing upwards.)

As our story begins Xor is conning his first flight to Mars, and the passengers aboard include not only Dekain the engineer/businessman and his daughter Babs, but Sirrah Ahli, ambassador to Earth from Asteroid 90 and brother of crash victim Sirrah Gerondli!  

Xor has superhearing, and by listening in on conversations in the ship realizes the terrible position Babs and the entire solar system are in. The people of Asteroid 90 are aggressive and want to conquer Mars (evoking the image of Nazi Germany, it is said that the asteroid people "want living space, as they call it....")  In response to the burgeoning Asteroid 90 threat, the people of Mars have purchased military hardware from Dekain’s firm, and this very ship is carrying a load of “space-bomb sights” and “rangefinders for space-guns.” Ahli, who has managed to sneak aboard a squad of Asteroid 90 commando stowaways, is plotting to hijack the ship and take its valuable cargo (which includes sexy Babs--"A beautiful little thing--if you like Earthgirls, and I do") to Asteroid 90!

I've already told you Xor can't walk--well, he can't talk either!  (This is a serious plot hole—don’t pilots in real life have to communicate to crew and passengers all the time?  Who would build a robot that can take orders in English but can't talk back, if only to answer "how long til we get there?" and "does the vehicle require maintenance?" type questions?)  Xor can't walk, he can't talk, but he can feel, and he feels a fondness for Babs and even feels that he was created for the singular destiny of being Babs's protector!  So Xor takes matters into his own hands! The heroic robot accelerates the ship into the red zone—the asteroid people grew up in less gravity than did the Earthers, so the level of gravity that merely renders the humans unconscious crushes the bodies of the space Nazis, killing them.

When the humans wake up they almost deactivate and destroy Xor, but at the last moment uncover the dead imperialist stowaways and realize that Xor has saved them all.  In the last column of the tale we learn that Xor killed Gerondli because he had overheard that alien’s plan to kidnap Babs.

"Almost Human" is an acceptable classic SF story, you might call it a space opera, which addresses common SF topics (might a robot or computer become conscious, have emotions?) and employs traditional SF elements (robot and his inventor, hostile aliens, and the use of trickery and science knowledge to defeat the enemy and resolve the plot.)  This story is also in the long SF tradition of what we today might call “celebrating diversity;” Xor the robot is an "other" embraced by the flesh creatures and, while there are villainous aliens (Asteroid 90’s space Nazis), there are also good aliens (the Martians) who have treaties and conduct trade with Earth.

I never really got an answer on those cellophane pants.

"Aerita of the Light Country"

I'm always hearing how fiction needs to include strong female protagonists; well, if the cover of this issue of Super Science Novels is to be believed, Ray Cummings was working the strong female protagonist beat over 70 years ago!  Nothing says "strong female" like a woman blasting a  guy with a ray gun while he is testing out his new headphones, immersed in the delicate nuances and rococo intricacies of "The Firth of Fifth."

Among the Ray Cummings novels I recently received from Joachim Boaz are Tama of the Light Country and Tama, Princess of Mercury, novels originally serialized in Argosy magazine in 1930 and 1931.  Is the "Complete Book-Length Novel" under discussion today a sequel to those capers?  Is Aerita Tama's daughter or niece or something?  And what is up with the transparent bloomers?  Well, let's see.

The year is 2093, the place, a small town in upstate New York.  Alan Grant, 24, a towering hunk of an aircraft battery salesman who is just passing through, goes to a freak show to kill time and is entranced by a five-foot tall girl in her late teens with a beautiful face of mysterious ethnicity, silver hair and blue-feathered wings!  When he realizes she is being held captive by the freak show owner, he liberates her and she leads him to her space ship.  (Earth once had spacecraft, but no longer--there is a hint that Cummings's Tama books explain in greater detail why there are no human spacecraft in 2093.)  I guess being an airplane parts salesman is not as fun as it sounds, because Alan agrees to accompany the winged girl, Aerita, to Mercury.

On the flight Alan learns all about Mercury.  "The Light Country" is Mercury's twilight zone--it is bordered by the Fire Country on one side and the Dark Country on the other.  (When these old SF stories were written people thought Mercury was tidally locked to the Sun, with one permanently dark side and one perpetually roasted side; wikipedia is telling me that it was not until 1965 that radar revealed the truth about Mercury's rotation.)  Aerita is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Tama and an Earthman who traveled to Mercury long ago (or maybe the great-great-great-great-granddaughter.)  The hot little planet is going through a period of political crisis and change.  Mercurian men don't have wings, which gives them something of an inferiority complex, so, by law, when they get married, Mercurian women have their wings clipped so they can't fly anymore.  (Whoa, this is a real feminist story!)  Aerita is the head of a protest movement, leader of a thousand girls who have declared they will not marry until the law is changed and they will be permitted to keep their ability to fly after being wed.  These reformers have left the city and set up a camp in mountains only accessible by those who can fly.

Because of hi-tech wars in the past, studying science is forbidden on Mercury, but Aerita's grandfather Polter, like Aerita herself, is a freethinker!  He built the spaceship, the only one of its kind, that brought Aerita to Earth due to a malfunction.  Why did it malfunction?  Because another independent-minded scientist, Rahgg, not a kindly grandpapa but a dangerous criminal (Cummings hints that he is a rapist or pedophile; maybe he belongs on Planet Hollywood instead of Planet Mercury) who was exiled to the Dark Country, where he became leader of the savages there, hijacked the ship and kidnapped Aerita, and in the course of escaping his clutches Aerita accidentally directed the vessel into interplanetary space and couldn't figure out the controls until she was near our own big blue marble.

Alan quickly finds himself in the middle of all these political crises.  First he quells a working class riot (these incels want the government to force Aerita's adamant virgins to abandon their protest and get their wings clipped marry them) with his Earth ray gun.  Having the only firearm on the planet gives Alan a big advantage over the forces of evil, but then the gun-control crazy Mercurian government confiscates the pistol!  Doh!  So when a Light Country official who is colluding with Rahgg kidnaps Aerita and Alan joins a squad of flying girls in their effort to rescue her, he has to fight with a knife, just like the native Mercurians!  You'd think that 6' 4" Alan would be able to handle a bunch of Mercurian men (average height: 5' 6") in a knife fight, especially when his Earth muscles give him what amounts to super strength on Mercury, but things don't work out for our man--the winged girls get killed and Grant joins Aerita in captivity!  Doh!

Rahgg not only captures Aerita and Alan Grant, but captures the space ship again!  (Sometimes it feels like Rahgg is the only person in the story who can get things done!)  Directed by poor Alan, whom he gets to spill the beans on Earth by threatening to torture Aerita, Rahgg and company fly to Earth where they loot government munitions factories on the Hudson in upstate New York, including the ray artillery plant where Alan's brother Phil Grant, an eighteen-year-old scientist, is working.  Phil gets captured and taken back to Mercury along with all those ray pistols and ray cannons!

Alan may not know how to handle a knife, but he knows how to handle the ladies!  Among Rahgg's retinue of Dark Country savages is Zara, a sexy servant woman who brings everybody on the ship their meals.  (The people of the Dark Country are ethnically distinct from Aelita's people; among other differences, they lack wings.)  Zara is infatuated with big strong Alan, so she helps him move some of the Earth pistols onto a glider in the ship's hold; shortly after the ship enters Mercury's atmosphere Phil escapes on the glider and flies to the hideout of the protesting virgins.  When the ship lands at Rahgg's lair Zara helps Alan escape--much to Zara's displeasure Alan also springs her rival for Alan's affections, Aerita, leading to something of a cat fight.

Alan and Aerita are reunited with Phil and the 1000 flying virgins, and they attack Rahgg's army, which is marching on the Light Country's capital city.  A ray gun battle ensues, in which hundreds of people, including Phil, are killed or dismembered, but eventually the Earth brothers and the flying girls prevail.  Women having saved the Light Country, the working classes accept that they won't be clipping wives' wings anymore, and Alan and one-armed Phil set an example by marrying winged girls of their own.

"Aerita of the Light Country" is an entertaining Edgar Rice Burroughs/Edmond Hamilton/Leigh Brackett type of adventure story in which a modern Earther ends up making friends with people on another world and fighting in their wars; Cummings adds some interest to the story with all that gender conflict, class conflict, racial conflict, and luddism we've been talking about.  Brackett often electrifies her planetary romances with harsh violence and/or sexual energy, and Cummings does the same here; it seems Cummings didn't confine the topics of rape, torture and murderous love triangles to the fiction he produced for Horror Stories and Terror Tales, but integrated them into his more science-fictiony work.  It will be interesting to see if Cummings included this edge of sadism and eroticism in the two Tama novels, which appeared a decade before "Aerita."

**********

More Cummings soon, but first some more recent fiction from a book on the shelves of the Joachim Boaz Wing of the MPorcius Library!

Three science fiction stories by Ray Cummings from 1940

In our last episode we read five tales of gore, female nudity and inheritance schemes penned by Ray Cummings, who in his youth worked with Thomas Edison and who wrote quite a few SF adventures like Brigands of the Moon, a novel full of energy guns and futuristic vehicles which has the MPorcius Seal of Approval.  In 1940 Frederik Pohl began editing Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, and during his 20-month reign over these periodicals Pohl purchased numerous SF stories from Cummings.  In his fun memoir The Way the Future Was, which I recommend to anybody interested in classic SF, New York intellectual life in the 1930s and '40s, and what it is like to follow a career centered on the printed word, Pohl makes it clear that he thought all of the stories he bought from Cummings sucked--he bought them because he liked Cummings as a guy and wanted to do him a solid.  "[Cummings] was a personally engaging, roguish human being.  What he was not was a source of good stories."

When we think at all here at MPorcius Fiction Log, we think for ourselves, and I'm not going to just take Pohl's word for it that Cummings's 1940 and 1941 stories were bad.  So today we are reading three stories by Cummings that were printed in 1940 in magazines Pohl edited.  I read all of these at the internet archive, a treasure trove for all of us interested in the popular culture of the early 20th century. 

"Arton’s Metal" 

This piece appeared in Super Science Stories.  The cover of this issue is too cramped, crowded, confusing.

In 1939 James Blakinson stole Georg Arton’s wife! Our story is set forty years later, in the futuristic world of 1979, as Blakinson arrives at Arton’s laboratory, where Arton is said to be producing a new material of tremendous value!  Blakinson, who carries a cane and wears a cape, doesn’t just steal wives—he steals money, and has embezzled enough funds from the bank that employs him to end up in the "ghastly Polar Prisons of Antarctica" should the authorities uncover his crime.  So he needs cash, fast, and has come to see Arton for the first time in four decades in hopes of getting it!

After this set up, which has some dramatic potential, Cummings craps out on us. Arton demonstrates to Blakinson the process, which involves glowing electrodes, showers of sparks, and clouds of acerbic fumes, by which he creates or condenses, apparently out of the air or maybe from an almost invisibly thin wire, hunks of gold, platinum and radium. I couldn’t understand this whole system, and think Cummings did a poor job of explaining it, or just didn't bother to do so.  In any case, Arton, who, by the way, is in very poor health, uses his apparatus as a trap for Blakinson, as a means of revenge. Arton sets his machinery up to malfunction in such a way that both men are, I think, killed, perhaps totally annihilated, and the lab is destroyed in an explosion that produces lots of valuable metal.  The last part of the story has a chemist and a journalist examining the rubble; there are no human remains and the chemist suspects Arton’s apparatus led to "two material bodies...trying to occupy the same space art the same time," which of course causes an explosion.  (Cummings, I guess, is presenting this idea of "two bodies in the same space" as linked, poetically and metaphorically, to the way Blakinson had sex with or won the love of Arton's wife, this woman's body or affection being the space they were both trying to occupy.)

I didn’t understand what was going on with the apparatus, and I thought the "occupying the same space" poetic justice angle was weak, so I have to give this one a thumbs down.

"The Thought-Woman" 

Here's another story from Super Science, this one named on the cover.  This cover is better than the last one, with a dynamic and easy to "read" cover with more expressive and interesting faces and slightly less silly monsters.

At the center of "The Thought-Woman" is a strange conceit: that in another parallel dimension are stored all the ideas that people will ever have, put there by God Almighty, and that when an idea pops into our heads, we are withdrawing it from this idea warehouse.  (Cummings compares this to the realm of unborn children from Maurice Maeterlink's 1908 play, The Blue Bird, the basis of numerous movies.)

Stanley Durrant is a young inventor, wracking his brain to complete the big invention that will make his fortune. His childhood friend, Dorothy Livingston, is always hanging around—she has a crush on Stan, but he doesn’t see her as a woman, just a platonic buddy. She brings up the theory of the realm of unthought things, then goes home to pray or hope or something that Stan will receive the ideas he needs from that unearthly realm. And, wouldn’t you know it, after she has departed the inventor has a dream or vision of going to this place, giving Cummings an opportunity to bore us with a rapturous and sentimental (and tedious) celebration of technology and invention. Billions of empty shelves and galleries represent ideas that have already been thought up— Cummings refers to Edison, the Wright brothers, Fulton, blah blah blah. Some niches are filled with vague outlines of objects—inventions that have not yet been thought up, and Stan recognizes his own half conceived invention among them.

The realm of unthought things doesn’t just feature technological advances—a ghostly figure guides Stan among the galleries, and he eventually realizes it is the idea of Dorothy (or, as he calls her, "Dot") seen not merely as a platonic chum, but as a sexually mature, sexually attractive woman. When he wakes up and sees Dot again he immediately recognizes her nubility and embraces her, and we have every reason to expect they will live happily ever after.

A childish, boring, feckless (remember a few weeks ago when that was everybody’s favorite word?) fairy tale with no drama or surprises or compelling ideas, "The Thought-Woman" is no more than a sterile celebration of things (technological advance and erotic love) we all already think are good that gives short shrift to the challenges associated with these good things, which of course cripples the story because and it is those challenges that make good fiction!

"Personality Plus" 

"Personality Plus" appeared in Astonishing, behind a pretty bland cover.  Fortunately, here we have a legitimate SF story with a comedic edge.  There was science in "Arton's Metal," but all the fluorescing bulbs and calipers and sparks were just pointless window dressing, and in "The Thought-Woman" the science was mind-numbing romanticizing of inventors. "Personality Plus," on the other hand, not only addresses interesting science (the perennial nature vs nurture debate) but pokes fun at scientists. Also, the jokes are actually funny!

It is the year 2000 in New York City—I myself was living in NYC in 2000 (good times, good times...) though of course the Gotham of my salad says didn’t have slidewalks and aircars and criminals armed with heat guns.

Our narrator is Jack Rance, a synthetic food salesman. He gets mixed up in the work of Dr. Butterworth, whom I guess we would call a (research?) psychiatrist. Butterworth believes that your personality is determined by your experiences, and is bitterly opposed to the thinking of scientists who argue that personality is determined by genetic inheritance. Butterworth’s niece Dot (that's right, "Dot" again) has married a man Butterworth describes as a real jerk, George Trent, known to one and all as "Georgie," a man who, because of his superior intelligence and good looks, has become arrogant, selfish and totally unlikable.  Butterworth has invented an amnesia machine (Jack tells us it is a "gruesome apparatus" that looks like the “death chair at Sing Sing”) and tricked Georgie into sitting in it (Doc B told him it was a headache cure!) The machine erased Georgie’s memory of the past eight years, when he allegedly evolved into the jerk everyone detests, and fogged up earlier memories, leaving Georgie's character practically a blank slate! Butterworth says that Georgie will now be able to develop a whole new, more agreeable, personality, and asks Jack to observe this development.

In short order Georgie is acting like a dangerously selfish jerk, a man brimming with confidence who fears no personal risks and does not care if he puts others in jeopardy. He runs an insane scam, like something out of a Wodehouse novel or a Desilu production, and our narrator Jack is right there in the middle of it. Georgie, who doesn’t seem to take his marriage vows overly seriously, has attracted the adoration of an heiress who wants to be a famous actress in nude films. She isn’t very good-looking (“got a figure like an ironing board”) so she and Georgie plan a publicity stunt to jump start her career: Georgie is going to pretend to kidnap her, and a corrupt cop friend of his will then rescue her and allow him to escape. (Jack gets pulled into this dangerous ruse because Georgie needs a stooge to hold the ladder steady while he carries the aspiring actress down from the second story window of her suburban mansion.)

This stunt is a total disaster, and leads to the twist ending in which Dr. Butterworth reveals the true nature of his experimental treatment of Georgie!

It was a relief to read this entertaining story after those two inert clunkers "Arton's Metal" and "The Thought-Woman." Why can’t all of Cummings's stories be like this?  Maybe because Cummings needed to mass produce stories to pay the bills and thus didn't have time to carefully craft all of his stories.  Pohl theorizes that this is the case.

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In a letter to Super Science, printed in the February 1943 issue, Chad Oliver, the guy who writes all those SF stories about anthropologists going native among primitive aliens, grouses that Cummings includes a “female” in every story he writes, and it is true that all the Cummings horror stories we read in our last blog post included courtship and/or marriage as a plot element, and it is also true of all the SF stories we read today. I actually think sexual relationships are a very good topic for literature, but, unfortunately, in only one of today’s stories does Cummings do anything actually entertaining with this classic subject. One out of three is not good, but let’s give Cummings another chance—in our next episode we'll look at Cummings stories from Astonishing and Super Science issues printed in 1941!