From the Treasury of Great SF: stories by Richard Deming, George P. Elliott, & Joel Townsley Rogers

Among the famous names on the back cover of Volume 1 of Anthony Boucher's 1959 A Treasury of Great Science Fiction are to be found names of people I have never heard of before.  In the interests of exploring new frontiers and in hopes of uncovering buried gems, I read three stories by such people, one each by Richard Deming, George P. Elliott, and Joel Townsley Rogers.

"The Shape of Things that Came" by Richard Deming (1951)

Deming has only a few publications listed on isfdb, including a novel he ghost wrote as Ellery Queen and a novelization of a wacky-looking horror movie starring Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters.  He was born in Des Moines, where I have been spending a lot of time since my exile from The Big Apple.

"The Shape of Things that Came" first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and has appeared in a few places since then, including two foreign anthologies.

This story, a mere 5 pages, is a mere trifle; maybe it is supposed to be amusing.  A guy in 1900 travels forward in time to 1950, then, back in 1900, tells a guy how amazing 1950's technology is.  There is no plot to speak of, no conflict or risk or endeavor.  The point of the story seems to be that people take for granted the technology that is around them, not considering how remarkable technological change really is, and that 20th century people don't quite realize how the pace of technological change has accelerated since the industrial revolution.

This isn't an annoyingly bad story, and I can't argue with its banal "point;" I'd judge it acceptable.  But Boucher called his anthology A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, and this is certainly not "great"--it feels like filler.

"Sandra" by George P. Elliott (1957)

George Paul Elliott appears to have been a peripatetic academic who wrote in many genres and died in The Big Apple.  "Sandra" first saw publication in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction alongside stories by Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, and L. Sprague de Camp.

I liked "Sandra" from its first page, because it does the sorts of things I most enjoy in SF and in literature in general; it believably depicts a strange alien world, and not from the point of view of a 20th century Westerner, but from the point of view of one of the aliens, who does not find his world strange, and it tells the story of a difficult human relationship.

"Sandra" is a first person narrative set in an alternate 20th century California where slavery is common.  Our narrator is a bachelor, an engineer at a factory, and when he inherits a large house he buys a young and pretty white woman, Sandra, at a department store to keep his house, wash his feet, cook his meals, and have sex with him.  The plot of the novel follows their relationship, how it evolves as the narrator falls in love with Sandra, gives her her freedom, and then marries her.  The narrator discovers that Sandra was more attentive and easier to deal with as a slave than as a manumitted wife, and enslaves her again.  But that taste of freedom has made her rebellious, and he resorts to beating her with the whip that came with her when he bought her.

Elliott's style is smooth and even, understated and never manipulative.  He never breaks character; the narrator talks about Sandra the way a person in our world might talk about a difficult pet or high-maintenance automobile, with affection and regret that he didn't properly train the dog or maintain the sports car from the start.  As we see in Nabokov's Lolita, it is more challenging and exciting to learn about people with bizarre or perverted values from their own mouths than from a conventional point of view.

Elliott doesn't show all his cards, doesn't make clear what point he is trying to make--is this a satire of marriage? a meditation on the notion of freedom? a reminder that the customs of people from the past or foreign cultures may seem immoral to us but seem perfectly normal to them (and of course, that things we casually accept may be anathema to people of the future or from foreign cultures)? simply an effort to shock and titillate the reader?

Well-written, entertaining, and provocative--highly recommended.  

"Beyond Space and Time" by Joel Townsley Rogers (1938)

Rogers was an aviator and a prolific writer of genre fiction, praised by the likes of crime writers Ed Gorman and Bill Pronzini, and Edgar Rice Burroughs expert Richard Lupoff.  Recently Ramble House (check out their entertaining website) has made much of his work available to the 21st century public.  "Beyond Space and Time" was first published in All-American Fiction and was reprinted in Super Science Stories in 1950. 

It is the year 1968, and the world's greatest theoretical scientist, Hooker Hartley, and the world's greatest inventor, Helver Gunderson, have built a powerful rocket! Gunderson is our first person narrator, and he seems like a pretty enthusiastic, gung-ho kind of guy; check out this breathless sentence from the first paragraph of the story:

It was our purpose to explore outer space, to investigate the mystery of the cosmos, to solve the riddle of the fourth dimension, Time, and to reach that roof of heaven where, eighteen million light-years or more away, according to the best available data of mathematics, infinity curves and returns upon itself in a parabolic trajectory--to find the answer to the last question, in short, and the solution of the ultimate equation.

The entire story is like this--it is like the polar opposite of the elegant and sophisticated style employed by Elliott in "Sandra."

The plan is for Hartley, "the greatest scientific intelligence who ever lived!", to stay behind while Gunderson, who has Viking blood flowing through his veins (remember when that dude in that 1942 Henry Kuttner story had Viking blood flowing in his veins?), puts on his space helmet and flies to the very edge of the universe to "probe the final mystery!"

Before describing his trip, Gunderson reviews for us his life.  Born to abject poverty, by dint of intelligence and drive (remember that Viking blood!) he became a bazillionaire by inventing devices which revolutionized modern life (e.g., some kind of levitation device which means planes never crash, and a wrist TV.) He was befriended by suave upper-middle class genius Hartley, and got married to a gorgeous, haughty and intellectual Boston Brahmin named Nivea Saltonstall.  Gunderson worshipped Hartley and Nivea, and didn't realize that they only liked him for his money and were having an affair behind his back!

Gunderson's rocket blasts off at the speed of light, taking him to the edge of our universe, and beyond, to a universe which is a mirror image of our own, where time flows backward and Earth is called Thrae.  On Thrae he meets Mara, a woman who loves him for himself, and there he lives for fourteen years, making with Mara a happy family.  Then, in a way I couldn't understand, he looks back on Earth through a telescope ("which looks into the future, which is their past"), and sees Nivea cheating on him with Hartley.

Instead of just shrugging this off, seeing as he hasn't seen Nivea for fourteen years, has been unfaithful to her, and has a fulfilling life on Thrae, Gunderson flies back to Earth.  His flight back to Earth is also a flight back in time (I couldn't grok this part either), and he lands on Earth a millisecond after he took off, in the same exact spot. Hartley and Nivea think he hasn't left yet, and when Gunderson climbs out of the rocket, they ask if he has forgotten something.

Gunderson bashes open Hartley's skull with a wrench, crushing "the greatest brain that ever lived," and then strangles Nivea to death. When the cops come they don't believe Gunderson's story about going to another universe; they think he is off his rocker.  With Hartley dead, and Gunderson imprisoned and deemed insane, we are to believe that there will never be another interstellar rocket, and that the answer to the ultimate mystery will only ever be known to one broken-hearted man.

The science in this story is crazy and incredible, as is the way Gunderson behaves, but the over-the-top plot and style have a sort of garish charm.  Maybe this is what Ed Gorman is talking about when he says that Rogers delivers "the strong heady thrill of genuine pulp."  Numerous passages had me shaking my head or laughing as Rogers veered in and out of "so bad it is good" territory (or is it Gunderson veering in and out of "I'm a maniac" territory?)  Rogers's portrayal of how the decadent upper crust (Nivea and her father disdain work and have run out of money just before meeting Gunderson) and the conniving intelligentsia take advantage of a nouveau riche working-class striver is also interesting.

I'm going to slot "Beyond Space and Time" in the "entertaining curiosity" category and give it a thumbs up.

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The Deming was basically a dud, but the Elliott was a mature piece of literature and the Rogers was a gonzo thrill ride.  Reading new authors paid off this time.  I'm planning on reading stories by authors unfamiliar to me in Volume 2 of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction in the near future.

Future Corruption 2: Russ, Malzberg and Pronzini

Let's continue our exploration of evil and corruption with Roger Elwood and "science fiction's top writers."  As in our first episode, we'll judge these stories from 1975's Future Corruption based on whether they are successful as entertainment and/or literature, and take a reading on the evilometer, assessing whether they have anything interesting to say about corruption and evil, and the magnitude of the evil they depict. 

“Aurelia” by J. J. Russ

Just a few weeks ago I read J. J. Russ’s short story “Interview” and I thought it was OK.  Like “Interview,” “Aurelia” is a sort of grim joke.

The story takes place in the first two decades of the 21st century. Back in the 1980s the development of a contraceptive virus went awry, creating a plague that killed almost all the women on the Earth. Most men have turned to homosexuality for comfort and sexual satisfaction, but some live lives of lonely celibacy.  One such confirmed heterosexual is our narrator.

Perhaps the only woman left alive is Aurelia, the object of our narrator's obsession. Under the auspices of the National Parks Service, Aurelia performs a striptease several times a day. Seeing as she has a monopoly on the "female sex worker" sector of the economy, she is very popular, and her millions of fans have to make reservations years ahead of time to see her show. Our narrator sees her every three years or so.

Most of the story takes place at the National Monument that serves as Aurelia’s strip club. Russ describes Aurelia’s dance in detail, at a show at the end of the 2000s, and then one in 2011. While in line waiting for the 2011 show an aggressive “transvest” tries to seduce our narrator. When the transvest refuses to take no for an answer and starts groping the narrator, the protagonist punches his harasser.  The transvest then disrupts the show.  In the confusion Aurelia is revealed to be a robot: there are no women left in the world after all! The punchline of the story is when our narrator gets a look at Aurelia’s crotch, and finds an embossed plug which reads “Disney Enterprises.”

(It is always interesting to be reminded of how much counter culture types hate Walt Disney, though I think the Disney joke here pushes the story too far into outlandish farce territory.)

In the last lines of the story we learn that our narrator, after learning the truth about Aurelia, has succumbed to 21st century sexual mores and is now living with a boyfriend.

“Aurelia” isn't a great story, but I'd judge it acceptable as an entertainment.  I’m not sure Russ here successfully addresses the issue of corruption and evil; in his introduction to the anthology, Elwood tells us that “Aurelia” "hits the exploitation of sex--commercialization of a private act to a point of true obscenity," but I'm not buying it.  Is paying to watch a robot stripper worse than paying to see a real woman strip?  Does Elwood think all strip clubs are truly obscene exploitations of sex?  Is paying to watch a robot stripper really morally different than paying to see an attractive woman on a movie screen?  Does Elwood think the careers of Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor are truly obscene exploitations of sex? And who is being exploited in these situations, the women or the men, and who is exploiting them?  

"Aurelia"             Is it good?: It's OK                       Evilometer reading: Low

“On the Campaign Trail” by Barry Malzberg

Malzberg's fans know he is very interested in the JFK murder and presidents and political assassinations in general, and includes these elements in many of his stories. This story, a mere four and a half pages, consists of eight numbered paragraphs, each an entry in the journal or diary of the head of security of a politician’s national election campaign. Most of the text concerns attempts to murder the candidate, but the narrator also takes time to mention aspects of his not quite fulfilling love affair and to unleash some metaphors on the reader (“…when I replaced the receiver it was damp with little beads of sweat and saliva that clung to it like aphids.”)

I guess Malzberg is trying to paint a picture of a world gripped by paranoia and political violence, and in that he succeeds. Radicals and insane people are one source of the violence, but establishment institutions, like the police and the political parties, are also capable of political violence. The narrator writes in a cold and clinical style, perhaps to emphasize how “normal” political violence has become, and to suggest that people working for a political campaign are selfish cynics, their apparent dedication to the ideals they espouse just a pose. The description of the narrator's sordid and unfulfilling sexual relationship adds to the bleak picture of a world that has either degenerated, or, has simply stopped bothering to conceal the sad reality behind love and politics.

“On the Campaign Trail”    Is it good?: It's OK.    Evilometer reading: Moderately high.

“Streaking” by Barry Malzberg (as K. M. O’Donnell)

Malzberg sometimes manages to sell multiple stories to these anthologies by writing some of them under pseudonyms. (Malzberg has three stories in Future City, for example.  Future City was also edited by Elwood, and I sometimes suspect Malzberg gets multiple stories in these things because his friends are trying to shore up his finances.) There is a tradition of this kind of chicanery in science fiction; two of Robert Heinlein's more famous short stories, "Universe" and "Solution Unsatisfactory," both appear in the May 1941 issue of Astounding, the latter under the pen name "Anson MacDonald."

“Streaking” stars a spirit creature (or alien or something?) that can change its appearance and is able to predict the future.  (For the third time today we have a first person narrator.)  This being interviews college students who have run naked across the campus as a stunt; the creature is curious as to why the students are streaking. The being seems disappointed that the students would do something frivolous and pointless instead of committing violence in the name of justice: “’But three years ago you were rioting,’ I say, ‘you were burning the campus as a symbol of injustice and repression. Why this now?’”

The second half of this six page story is about the being’s interaction with a college chaplain. The chaplain gives a sermon on how the streaking is wrong, and the narrator takes the form of a laughing naked man and runs hither and yon through the chapel before vanishing. I don’t know if this is supposed to show how effective a means of epater la bourgeoisie streaking is, or how pointless it is; is the creature embracing the practice of streaking, or mocking it?

I'm not finding “Streaking”'s examination of corruption very persuasive. Is Malzberg suggesting that it is corrupt for the students to be doing something goofy and harmless like streaking instead of something destructive and violent like arson or rioting?  Is he suggesting that streaking is a sign of a lack of idealism?  To my mind such idealism was always a myth; protesters and revolutionaries talk about idealism, but their actions are in the pursuit of selfish psychological or material ends, they do what they do because it is fun to “get in the face” of people you resent and to steal or wreck their things, and/or because they are trying to seize power, privileges and wealth, or protect power, privileges and wealth they already have.  Streaking and burning down the campus have the same source and purpose--they are fun ways for young people to thumb their noses at the establishment (an establishment most 1960s and 1970s students were themselves already, or soon would be, a part of.)

In the same way I didn't get the "commercialization of sex" ideology of "Aurelia," I don't get the "you should burn down the campus" ideology of "Streaking."  And there is not much else to the story, so I'm going to have to give a thumbs down to this one.

"Streaking"                   Is it good?  No.              Evilometer Reading: Low

“Paxton’s World” by Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini, oft-times collaborator with Malzberg, hasn't exactly been winning accolades on this here blog, but maybe I’ll like this one?

Paxton lives in the 22nd century; he is a rich man because his father was a pioneer in robot development.  Paxton, however, hates science and technology: "He thought Science was a curse rather than a servant of mankind; he thought it was the direct cause of depersonalization and dehumanization, and that it was responsible for the death of individual freedom."

So, Paxton flees the Earth in a one-man space ship; over the course of the long journey he goes insane.

Paxton finds a planet where he hopes to live a life close to nature, without any science or technology.  The primitive natives worship Paxton as a god, and we see how much of a hypocrite Paxton is (or how insane the trip through space has made him) as he rules over the natives as a merciless dictator, destroying their culture and society to such an extent that they go extinct.  Paxton, the anti-science crusader, has inflicted on the aliens and this virgin planet all the evils he claimed science had foisted on the human race and Earth.  A century after Paxton's death Earth ships land on his planet and it joins all the other human colonized planets as a world dominated by science and technology.

This is the best story of the four I've read today; at least it is directly addressing the issue of evil and corruption in a way that makes some kind of sense.  Pronzini also leaves it up to the reader to decide how much to sympathize with Paxton: is the point of the story that people who complain the loudest about society are often hypocrites who would make an even worse hash of things if given the opportunity?  Or that science and technology are invincible tyrants, corrupting even the most resistant of people?

"Paxton's World"    Is it good?: Moderately good    Evilometer reading: High

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While not terrible, this batch of stories is a real let down after the first part of the book, which included the superior Lafferty and Gloeckner stories.  Lafferty and Gloeckner provided us believable characters in situations the reader can identify with, in stories that were really about corruption; today's stories are all flat fables with little or no concern for character or emotion, and three of them failed to say much interesting about evil or corruption.

Hopefully the writers represented in our final episode of Future Corruption-- Roger Elwood himself, Howard Goldsmith, Jerry Sohl and Gardner Dozois--can finish up the anthology on a high note.

Three Barry Malzberg stories from the early 1980s

Followers of my twitter feed will know that I recently purchased a pile of old SF magazines at the Des Moines Flea Market.  (They will also be aware that I drink a lot of Rich Chocolate Ovaltine, which is perhaps even more exciting.)  For my first foray into these digest-sized volumes I decided to read some stories by Barry N. Malzberg that I hadn't read before.  These three all appeared in 1980 or 1981, in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

"Fascination" by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg (1980)

This story also appears in the collection of Pronzini-Malzberg collaborations entitled On Account of Darkness.  Readers may remember my merciless reviews of three Pronzini solo stories of the "short-short" variety.

"Fascination" is a game played in a Times Square gaming parlor, in which you try to roll balls into pockets; sinking a ball in a pocket illuminates one of a number of light bulbs above the gaming table, and your goal is to activate five bulbs that lay in a straight line. Our narrator thinks the game is absolutely random, and/or fixed.  He also thinks that the New York area is suffering an epidemically high number of alien abductions.  He accosts another player of Fascination, an old man who insists that the game is winnable (if a goofball who believes in aliens is not distracting you) and that there are no aliens.  By the end of the story the aliens have abducted the narrator... or at least that is what he thinks; the old man cannot see the alien.

This story covers territory our man Barry has covered elsewhere: the (probably insane) protagonist who sees aliens that are (probably) not really there, games, New York, etc. There is even mention of the Oval Office.  Presumably the game is an allegory for life, and our conflicting beliefs that we are masters of our own fates and suspicions that life is determined by random forces or controlled by mysterious figures behind the scenes.

An acceptable entertainment, but nothing special.      

"The Twentieth Century Murder Case" by Barry N. Malzberg (1980)

This is where I exhort all you Malzberg completists to hunt down the December 1980 issue of F&SF on ebay and abebooks because "The Twentieth Century Murder Case"'s only appearance in our dear English language, the language of Samuel Clemens and Samuel Johnson, of Danielle Steel and Dan Brown, is within its moldering pages.  Of course, if you can sling the italiano you can just pick up a copy of Urania #903.

This story is a lame allegory.  The Twentieth Century has been killed, and our narrator is the gumshoe trying to solve the case.  He uncovers the conspiracy to murder the century: it twas advertising agencies, fast food restaurants, and TV networks that done the deed!

You have to wonder what a guy is thinking when he suggests the worst things that happened in the century of the Somme, Auschwitz, and the Rape of Nanking are the Big Mac and I Love Lucy, and that the worst people of the century of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao are Ray Kroc and Alan Wagner.  I get that sophisticated people are supposed to hate TV and fast food and advertising, but this seems a little over the top.

The story's half-baked ideology is only part of its problem.  The metaphor doesn't make much sense-- what happens when the century dies?  You just move the calendar forward?  That is what it seems like.  The metaphor is also mixed; sometimes you think "killing the century" with TV commercials and preservatives is a symbol about the populace's physical and psychological health, other times the story is very literal, with "sniper fire" and "a bear trap" employed to "murder the century" like the century is a guy just walking down the street.  The story also lacks any plot, characters, or laughs.

Maybe it sounds better in a romance language?

"There the Lovelies Bleeding" by Barry N. Malzberg (1981)

Add the September 1981 F&SF to your shopping list!  "There the Lovelies Bleeding" appears here, and nowhere else, in any language!  Your italiano isn't going to help you this time, bucko!

This story is short, less than three pages, and I immediately recognized the interesting elements of it.  Who could forget a couple sitting in a restaurant with robot waiters who witness one waiter explode, an insane person sucked away through a trap door, and people in the outside corridors being herded off to some horrible fate?  But where had I read this stuff before, if this is the tale's only appearance?

A little research reveals that this story was adapted for inclusion in Malzberg's 1982 novel The Cross of Fire.  I even described the relevant scene on this here blog back in May of this year.  Weird!

Anyway, "There the Lovelies Bleeding" depicts a dystopic future of terrorism, mass insanity, cannibalism, and cold loveless promiscuity.  Still, the female component of the couple is sure things have been improving over the last few decades, while the male narrator begins to believe he may have finally found love in this, his 54th relationship.  Sometimes Malzberg does give you a happy ending!

Not bad.

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Malzberg also has the"Books" column in the September '81 issue of F&SF.  He looks at Charles Platt's Dream Makers, a collection of interviews and observations about SF writers, and declares that SF writers are all "suffering" because writing SF is a "terribly painful and enervating pursuit," and, as a result, SF writers all employ various "defense mechanisms" and wear "masks of self-delusion." He lists a bunch of SF authors and what appear to be their "personae": Asimov wants to be seen as a "working man," Farmer as a "proletarian," Disch as a "litterateur," and so forth.  Malzberg isn't brave enough to slot Harlan Ellison's self-delusions into a single category, he says Ellison wants to be seen as "many things."  Malzberg tells us Dream Makers, for him, is "fearfully upsetting and unsettling."

Malzberg also talks about Fantastic Lives, a collection of autobiographical essays by SF writers, which sounds very interesting (R. A. Lafferty's contribution is said to be very bitter) but which Malzberg seems to think is not very good. Finally, he praises Jack Dann as a top rank writer who will produce much great work in the future.  (I enjoyed Dann's 1981 collaboration with Malzberg, "Parables of Art," and his 1982 collaboration with Gardner Dozois, "Down Among the Dead Men.")

Am I a jerk if I say I enjoyed this "Books" column more than I did the three short stories?

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I'm going to call this an interesting excursion into the career of an intriguing SF writer and critic.  And promise more Malzberg and more of my flea market haul in our next episode.

Ten Short Short SF Stories: Niven, Malzberg, Pronzini, Knight & Busby

From the public library this week I borrowed 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander and published in 1978.  The volume contains a mere 271 pages of text, and as all you math people out there have already figured out, this means that the average story is less than 3 pages long.  Or maybe that the average length of the stories is fewer than three pages each.  Over the last few days I read ten of these stories, and I will now assign them grades.  Seeing as I am covering ten pieces in this single blog post, I'll try to keep things snappy!

"Plaything" by Larry Niven (1974)

In The Hugo Winners Volume 3 (1977) Isaac Asimov tells us that hard science fiction, the science fiction about science, is what he likes to read, and that he is relieved that young Larry Niven has taken up this vein while he (Asimov) and Arthur C. Clarke and Hal Clement approach retirement.  Niven has three stories in this collection of short shorts; will they be about science?

In "Plaything," which is over four pages long (lengthy for this book), a robotic Earth probe lands on Mars and Martian children treat it like a piece of playground equipment, climbing all over it, vandalizing it, etc.  Niven includes interesting biological details about the Martians (their senses are finely tuned to detect slight changes in levels of heat, and this is reflected in their means of "talking") and interesting speculations about the robotic probe's means of gathering data about Mars. A good story.

Grade: B           Sciencey?:  Yes.

"Safe at Any Speed" by Larry Niven (1967)

The title is a nod to Ralph Nader, but the plot is a nod to Jonah of "and the Whale" fame.  A thousand years in the future a guy is "driving" in an air car over an alien planet.  The car is swallowed whole by a huge bird.  They crash, and the guy lives in the car (it has a toilet and a food-creating machine) for six months while he waits for the monster to decay sufficiently, lest he be dissolved by its stomach juices. Cleverly, the story is an advertisement written by the driver, explaining how safe the car is. Again Niven includes some biological and some technological details.  Not bad.

Grade: B-           Sciencey?: Yes.

"Mistake" by Larry Niven (1976)

In the near future, astronauts on long boring solo trips use drugs to get high and thus entertain themselves.  (The guy in "Safe at Any Speed" plays solitaire for six months.) The astronaut in this story hallucinates an alien who interrogates him about Earth defenses. The astronaut takes a pill that sobers him up, and the alien vanishes.

The main joke of the story is that the reader is not supposed to know that the alien is a hallucination until the end.  Besides being a weak joke, in his one-line introduction to the story (what the copy on the jacket calls "a sly and witty remark"), Asimov, in his infinite wisdom, tells you that the alien is an hallucination.  The other big joke of the story is the pun "bad trip."

The best part of the story is Niven's little inside joke that pays homage to his big supporter Asimov, and three other notable SF writers, adventure scribe Edgar Rice Burroughs, hard-SF exemplar Hal Clement, and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis.

Grade: D-  (AKA, "The Peppermint Patty")         Sciencey?: No.

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"Inaugural" by Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini (1976)

I like Malzberg, as I hope I have made clear on this blog.  However, I am sick to death of the irrational obsession so many people have with John F. Kennedy.  (In fact I experience a childish glee when people like the scribblers at Reason magazine or the gang at Red Letter Media try to poke a hole in the apparently undeflatable Camelot myth.)  Malzberg seems to be one of the many victims of this obsession, writing many stories that revolve around Kennedy or presidents getting murdered.  So when I saw the title of this story I groaned in anticipation of more Kennedy nonsense.

"Inaugural" is the text of the inauguration speech given by the first woman president ("Carole").  During the speech she quotes JFK's own inaugural speech.  It is a little difficult to puzzle out what we are supposed to take away from the story.  The new president returned six months earlier from the first manned interstellar flight, of which she was commander.  Her second in command ("George"), is now her husband. George appears to be the emotional one, and Carole has to scold him to keep him in line.  The vote (of billions of people) to elect them is said to be unanimous.  The words "unity" and "union" appear again and again in the text.

Did the new president win election by threatening to bomb the Earth from outer space (such things happen in Malzberg stories)?  Is this just a woman's hallucination (people are always hallucinating in Malzberg stories)?  Is the swapping of gender roles a joke or some kind of feminist commentary?  Are the references to union a sign that, like in so many utopian SF stories, in this one an alien element has transformed the human race into some kind of unified entity with a collective consciousness?  Are the references to a unanimous election a suggestion that the USA or the entire world now has bogus elections like in some dictatorship?

This story earns a passing grade, a wrinkled brow, and a shrug.

Grade: C        Kennedy?: Yes
          
"January 1975" by Barry N. Malzberg (1974)

This story is in the form of four letters from writer Barry to his editor, Ben.  Barry is suggesting that he write a series about an alternate universe in which Kennedy won the 1960 election and was later assassinated.  Barry promises that, while the series will be "in the dystopian mode," he will keep it "cheerful and amusing" and that the portrait of Kennedy as president will be "uplifting and noble."  (Ben is worried that "the Secretary" might sue for libel; I guess "the Secretary" is JFK himself.)    Ben rejects the idea, and in the final letter, in which Barry says he will sic "the union" on Ben, we learn how dystopian Barry and Ben's world really is: people in their universe attend "Slaughter Games" and "Public Tortures" for recreation!

The idea that people living in a world in which novelists are unionized and there are government-sponsored Roman-style blood sports and executions would consider our world a dystopia is faintly amusing and interesting.  So, a passing grade.

Grade: C         Kennedy?: Yes.

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"I Wish I May, I Wish I Might" by Bill Pronzini (1973)

If we include his collaboration with Malzberg above, Pronzini has four stories in this book!  Wow!

I'm not sure I "get" this one.  Maybe there is a joke or a twist I am missing.

David Lannin is a 14-year-old boy on the beach.  Pronzini carefully describes the kid's appearance, clothes, all the sights and sounds of the beach.  There's a lot of "the sonorous lament of the chill October wind" and "the wind swirled loose sand against his body," and "there was nothing but the sound of the tide and the wind and the scavenger birds...." You know what I mean.  I thought it was odd to see all this detail in a story that is like three pages long.

Anyway, David finds a bottle, opens it up, and out comes an invisible genie. The genie tells David he can have three wishes.  Then he crows that he has achieved his revenge on the mortal sorcerer who put him in the bottle, and leaves.  David goes home to his mother. He tells mom that he's got three wishes, and he's going to wish for "a million-trillion ice cream cones," for the ocean to always be warm, and for every boy and girl in the world to "be just like me."  The final line of the story is David saying the magic words from the story title; in the short paragraph before that we learn that David is retarded.  (Pronzini provides no clue in the first two pages that David has any developmental or mental disorders; his dialogue is in normal English, for example.)

Is the joke that David has just destroyed modern society or even the entire world with his dumb wishes? Or is the joke that David hallucinated the genie?  Either way, lame.

Grade: F (student is also directed to attend sensitivity training)

"Dry Spell" by Bill Pronzini (1970)

Kensington, a professional writer on the edge of financial ruin, has had writer's block for weeks.  Suddenly he comes up with an idea for a SF story in which aliens are plotting to take over the world.  These aliens can read everybody's mind, and if any Earthling figures out what is going on, they erase that info from his mind.  In a twist we all saw coming, Kensington's scenario is the truth, and the aliens erase it from his mind before he can commit it to paper.  The aliens are the source of his writer's block!

Weak.         

Grade: D-

"How Now Purple Cow" by Bill Pronzini (1969)

Again, I think I may be missing the joke here; is it a feeble reference to cattle mutilations?

[UPDATE JUNE 2, 2018: Commenter Geoduck in the comments below directs us to likely source material for Pronzini's (to me) mysterious story!]

A farmer spots a purple cow on his land.  He calls the local newspaper to get a reporter to come see it.  The reporter, on the phone, mentions recent UFO sightings.  Before the reporter arrives, the farmer touches the purple cow, and is turned into a purple cow himself.  The end.

Grade: F (student is also directed to schedule appointment with guidance counselor to discuss possibility of repeating this semester)

*************

"Shall the Dust Praise Thee?" by Damon Knight (1967)

This is another story I may not be quite grasping.  In this case there is a chance my limited knowledge of the Bible is hamstringing me.

(NOTA BENE: I am grading this story as it stands in 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories.  This story originally appeared in Dangerous Visions, where presumably it is supported by several pages of supplementary matter by the author himself and editor Harlan Ellison.)  

It is the Day of Wrath!  God, a moving pillar of smoke, accompanied by seven angels, comes to the Earth to find it desolate, apparently due to a nuclear war.  The Archangel Michael blames the English, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Americans.  God goes to England, where deep in a pit He finds a message, in all caps, "WE WERE HERE.  WHERE WERE YOU?", I guess some English person's lament that God had abandoned them, or maybe Knight's idea of a joke.  

I have to admit that these stories that suggest the people of the West were no better than Brezhnev, Mao, and their henchmen rub me the wrong way.  And as an atheist unfamiliar with the Bible maybe the power of the story's phrases and images are flying over my head.  So perhaps I am not equipped to judge this tale.  Still, I must judge, and this story seems melodramatic and bombastic, and not very successful at making its point clear, whether it be an atheist attack on religion, a leftist criticism of NATO policy, or a heartfelt lament that God had failed to intervene in the Cold War.

Grade: F          

"Eripmav" by Damon Knight  (1958)

A page of embarrassing puns and kindergarten-level jokes.  The title is a bad joke, and things proceed downhill from there.

Grade: F

"Maid to Measure" by Damon Knight (1964)

A three-page story with one pun, a pun worthy of a seven-year-old who reads Playboy.

A man is trying to break up with his blonde girlfriend so he can date a brunette.  The blonde is experimenting with witchcraft, and by saying, "I'll change into a bikini," she is transformed into a bikini.  The brunette stops by, and dons the bikini.

And to think I defended Knight's Beyond the Barrier against Joachim Boaz's denunciations!

Grade: F  (student is expelled)

*************

"I'm Going to Get You" by F. M. Busby

I liked Busby's Cage A Man, an adventure/horror novel with strong psychological and social elements about a guy who is kidnapped by solipsistic aliens who don't realize humans are intelligent beings and inflict excruciating experiments on him before he escapes.  So I picked him for my tenth short short.

"I'm Going to Get You" is a three page monologue from a crippled man, directed at God.  The cripple relates the many disasters of his life (family killed by drunk driver, being beaten up by criminals, etc.) and blames them on God's callousness and/or cruelty.  The cripple declares that he will achieve revenge on God by committing suicide.

In some ways this story is comparable to Knight's "Shall the Dust Praise Thee": God's existence and goodness are questioned.  But whereas Knight's story is loud and vague and ridiculous, Busby's story has a character and a story, some real emotion and some real thought behind it.

Grade: C+

**************

I'm not the audience for sophomoric joke stories or stories with an obvious "twist," and so Knight and Pronzini have been graded harshly.  But a short short story can be a decent traditional SF story, as Niven shows with two of his offerings, or a story with real character and heart, as Busby demonstrates.

I will probably read ten more selections from 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories next week.  Until then, my merciless red grading pencil will rest.

Three Stories by Charles L. Grant: "Crowd of Shadows," "Quietly Now," and "The Magic Child"

Charles L. Grant, my fellow Jersey boy, is a big deal in horror publishing.  People who care about horror, like Tarbandu and Will Errickson, have read his stories and his anthologies, and have educated opinions about him.  Three books currently in my possession contain stories by Grant, so this weekend I read them and made progress constructing my own opinion about his work.

ISFDB image of cover and spine

"A Crowd of Shadows" (1976)

I recently took custody of a hardcover copy of Nebula Winners Twelve, edited by Gordon R. Dickson.  The cover illustration of this volume is almost incomprehensible, at least on my withdrawn library copy.  The first story in the book is Grant's "A Crowd of Shadows," which first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and won Grant the Nebula for Short Story.

This is a well-written story about racism/bigotry/intolerance with an effective trick ending, so I'm not surprised it won the Nebula, which is awarded by professional SF writers.  In the future, androids who are almost indistinguishable from humans are common, but are afforded no legal rights and are widely looked down upon.  The narrator of the story goes to a what I guess you would call a small seaside tourist town, where he encounters a teen age boy with a number printed on his arm (yes, like a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp.)  These numbers indicate he is an android, and he is apparently owned by human couple who like to pretend he is their real son.  An old man calls the boy a "robie," an anti-android slur, and soon the old man turns up dead.  There is another murder, and the town is in an uproar.  A mob kills the boy, and it is revealed that, in fact, the boy is human and the parents are androids: the boy was a rich orphan who wanted the experience of having real parents, and pretended to be an android to show his solidarity with the oppressed artificial people.

It is not clear (to me at least) who really committed the murders; maybe the kid ordered one of his parents to commit them?  I think Grant often leaves these kinds of mysteries hanging in his stories.  The real point of the story is that people, even people who think themselves liberal, like the narrator, can be prejudiced and tribal, and feel a need to look down on somebody.  "A Crowd of Shadows" pushes the idea of what constitutes bigotry to the limit, because it is pretty clear the androids are no more alive and have no more feelings than a microwave or an automobile.  The androids are just machines, and the fact that people respond to them with friendship, sympathy, love or hatred says something about human nature.

A pretty good story; I liked the style and the surprise ending, which actually did surprise me.   

"Quietly Now" (1981)

"Quietly Now" appears in Tales of the Dead by Bill Pronzini, a copy of which I still have not returned to the library.  (The Iowa Library Association's SWAT team is probably studying my house on Google Maps as we speak.)  As Pronzini tells us in his intro to the tale, this is a story of "quiet horror," the type of story Grant has written and advocated his entire career.  "Quietly Now" is in the thick anthology's third section, which is entitled "Ghoul!"

This story takes place in suburban northwestern New Jersey, where a writer who has been divorced three times lives in an apartment complex near a school.  This part of New Jersey is almost rural, with lots of hills and woods, the setting of newspaper stories and rumors about tourists and hikers getting lost in the wilderness and dying of exposure, their bodies then partially eaten by animals.

This story feels long and slow; there are some passages consisting of description that made my eyes glaze over: "He stood in front, just below the once-belled steeple, and directly ahead the ground sloped gently toward the highway; beyond, a steeper incline, and behind a row of thick-boled elms the apartments began, rising and falling on the gentle swells of the old farm until the woodland reasserted itself, dark with noon shadows."  Oy!

Teaching at the school is a tall creepy woman whom the kids consider a vampire and who has arguments with the school janitor, who is a friend of the writer.  When a student and then the janitor turn up dead and mutilated, the writer investigates the creepy teacher.  But it turns out that a different character altogether, a mother of two who is attracted to the writer, is the murderous ghoul.  This woman had only appeared briefly in the story, and I had forgotten about her and never suspected she was the killer.    

Grant's idea of having the ghoul be a jealous woman who murders the writer's on-again-off-again girlfriend and then turns the writer into a ghoul so he can be a father to her kids is a good one, as it ties into the everyday anxieties men have about their relationships with women and children.  But the execution of the story was weak, with too many red herrings and not enough attention paid to the woman who turned out to be the monster.  There is also a scene which I didn't even understand, with the writer coming home to find evidence of a break in: his door is ajar, there are deep scratches around the lock, and inside he finds his drapes closed.  Then all of a sudden the drapes are open and there are no scratches on the door.  Was this an hallucination?  Or evidence of the ghoul's magic powers?

"Quietly Now" didn't hold my attention, and was confusing--thumbs down.

 "The Magic Child" (1973)

This is one of Grant's earlier stories, and appears under the name "C. L. Grant" in the anthology Frontiers 2: The New Mind.  Roger Elwood edited this collection of all-new stories.  I believe this is "The Magic Child"'s only appearance in English.

ISFDB image of cover of edition I own

This is a slightly experimental story--maybe we should categorize it as "New Wave."  It consists entirely of dialogue, and has no quotation marks.  The speakers are a government agent, whose speech is in italics, and a teenaged boy of below average intelligence, William Peter 777M1, "Billy" to his friends.  The government worker is interrogating Billy, and drugs him to ensure he is telling all. Thus we hear his sad story.

"The Magic Child" takes place in a future totalitarian world, in which the "scientific" government, ostensibly due to overpopulation, controls everyone's life.  People are only allowed to have a certain number of children, determined by their assigned social class; retarded or antisocial children are euthanized; and most people are given drugs to suppress their imaginations!     

Billy, apparently, was born normal, but an illness damaged his brain, lowering his intelligence.  Billy's parents somehow convince the government (which is represented at the local level by robot police called "Monitors") that Billy is dead, and hide Billy in their tiny apartment.  (Billy's father is one of the creative class allowed to retain their imaginations, and has access to the government records; he plans to forge necessary documents for Billy when his son reaches adulthood.)  When Billy accidentally kills his parents he is discovered by the authorities.  After his interrogation Billy is put to death.

This is an effective story: the experimental structure actually improves the story by making it more economical and more direct.  I quite like it.

*************

Perhaps unexpectedly, of the three stories I read by Charles L. Grant this weekend I liked the two science-fiction stories and didn't like the horror story.  This may be partly because a future of androids or a merciless totalitarian government is more interesting to me than a guy with women trouble in 1970s New Jersey.  The important differences, however, lie in the structure, clarity, and leanness of the stories; the SF stories are well-paced and economical, while the horror story is slow, confusing, and bloated.

I enjoyed "Crowd of Shadows" and "The Magic Child" enough that I hope to come across more of Grant's SF in the future.  As for the horror...well, the jury is still out.

Three More Mummy Stories: Wollheim, Williams and Grant

Let's return now to the copy of Tales of the Dead I borrowed from the library, to read three more stories from the section of the book which reproduces editor Bill Pronzini's 1980 anthology Mummy!

"Bones" by Donald A. Wollheim (1941)

I've already enjoyed Wollheim's work as an editor; in 1971 Wollheim founded the famous DAW Books, and I own and have read books by Jack Vance, Tanith Lee, A. E. Van Vogt, Lin Carter, Theodore Sturgeon, and others, published by DAW.  But until today I had never read any of Wollheim's fiction.

"Bones" first appeared in Stirring Science Stories, a magazine that lasted four issues, which Wollheim edited.  According to Wikipedia, Wollheim had no budget to pay for fiction, so he and his cronies wrote all the stories, often under pseudonyms.  According to ISFDB, one story Wollheim wrote was credited to "X" and titled "!!!"

"Bones" feels amateurish and overwritten.  "Half conquered by the smell of the antique houses, the subtle vibrations of past generations still pervading his spirit..."  Not too good, and the entire story is like this.  "...his nostrils were assailed by the inescapable odor of all such institutions - age!"  "The silence assailed his ears with a suddenness that all but took his breath away."  "Shortly Dr. Zweig announced himself ready to attempt the final work toward actually bringing the now pliant and vibrant corpse to life."  "The air was supercharged with tension, horror mixed with scientific zeal."  Oy.

The plot of this 7 page story is similar to Edgar Allan Poe's "Some Words with a Mummy": a guy is invited to be part of a group of intellectuals attending the unwrapping of a mummy, the mummy is electrified and comes to life.  But while in Poe's satire the mummy criticized democracy and American architecture, "Bones" is a mood piece with a trick ending, and when the mummy tries to speak, it falls apart.

Not very good.  

"The Vengeance of Nitocris" by Tennessee Williams (1928)

When you are reading from a book called Mummy!, you might think that you will not be exposing yourself to the work of great figures of American literature.  Well, you could not be more wrong!  Tennessee Williams, who penned A Streetcar Named Desire ("Stella!") and The Glass Menagerie ("gentleman caller") and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ("Big Daddy") was published in Weird Tales, the August 1928 issue, with this story long before he was the toast of Broadway.  "The Vengeance of Nitocris" appeared in the same issue as a story by Robert Howard about Solomon Kane and one by Edmond Hamilton about the Interstellar Patrol.

When you are reading from a book called Mummy! you probably expect all the stories to include mummies, but again you would be mistaken.  As Pronzini warns us in his intro, there are no mummies in "The Vengeance of Nitocris."  Instead this is a story set in ancient Egypt, about a pharaoh who neglects his duties to the gods, and is torn apart by an angry mob lead by rabble-rousing priests.  The impious pharaoh's sister, Nitocris, is a striking beauty with "thick black brows," "luminous black eyes," "rich red lips" and "slender fingers."  Hubba hubba, we can understand why the priests put her on the throne after murdering her brother, can't we?  

Nitocris has built a tremendous temple of great beauty, and invites all the priests to a banquet there in its subterranean dining room.  While the priests are living it up with booze and slave girls, Nitocris sneaks off and pulls a lever and the Nile rushes into the banquet hall, drowning all of the priests (and the slave girls!  Cold!)  Nitocris then commits suicide in a room full of fire.

This is more like an anecdote than an actual short story; Williams lets us know ahead of time what is going to happen, and all you classical scholars will know anyway, as Williams lifted the story from Herodotus.  So there isn't much suspense.  I myself hadn't heard the story before, and was disappointed when the priests were drowned; when Nitocris pulled the lever, "a moment of supreme ecstasy," I thought a pack of ravenous lions was going to burst into the banquet hall and tear everybody to pieces.

This story is just OK, though I feel like I learned something about American and Greek literature I should have known already, so I will recommend it.     

"The Other Room" by Charles L. Grant (1980)

I've never read anything by Grant before, though I have a book he edited, Gallery of Horror.  It seems that "The Other Room" only ever appeared in Pronzini's Mummy! and the omnibuses like Tales of the Dead in which Mummy! rose again.

It seems that Grant is a fellow New Jerseyean, and in fact was born in a town with which I am familiar, Hackettstown, where they make M&Ms.  

"The Other Room," Pronzini tells us in his intro, takes place in the New England town of Oxrun Station, the setting of several stories by Grant.  Like everybody, I love New England: the trees, hills, ocean, antiquing, old houses, etc.  After we bought our doughty Toyota Corolla my wife and I spent many weekends driving around New England.  One week we stayed in a spider-infested cabin in the Maine woods, next to a clear pond full of adorable turtles.  The power went out and for light to read by I had to hand crank a LED lamp.

Sometimes my life back in New York feels like a dream.

Anyway, in "The Other Room," two academics discover a secret chamber in an old Connecticut house.  The room contains sarcophagi, and an inscription that describes a simple spell.  When one of the academics completes the spell there is fire and smoke and everyone flees the house, and we are left to wonder what manner of doom is about to befall the world, now that a door to some ancient evil has been opened.

Grant spends a lot of time setting the scene and helping us get to know the characters, which include the wife and teenage daughter of the owner of the house.  This is fine, but I felt like there wasn't much pay off; what they actually find in the secret crypt and what happens next is left a mystery.  This story kind of feels like the first chapter of an adventure story about an army of monsters trying to conquer the Earth through a gate, and how a band of plucky ordinary people, or a special branch of the FBI, or an armored division of the US Army, has to stop the monsters before midnight or an eclipse or something.  Or the first half of a short story about a family or a pair of friends who outfight a monster in a house using the rifles from the gun cabinet, the rusty crossed swords that have hung over the fireplace for 20 years, and their knowledge of the Bible or The Necronomicon.  (My spell check wants to read a story in which people defeat a monster with their knowledge of microeconomics.)

Grant seems like an able writer - I want to read something else by him now - but I feel like there could have been more here.  My man Tarbandu, who has read lots of horror stories and doesn't seem to be a fan of Grant's, suggests at his venerable PorPor Books Blog that the lack of a "payoff" is characteristic of Grant's work.  Will Errickson, whose Too Much Horror Fiction blog is always interesting and full of great images, appears to like Grant more than does Tarbandu, and provides a more sympathetic view of the style of horror Grant wrote and promoted.    

***********

One poor story, and two OK stories; not so hot.  Still, I will rustle up and read more stories by Wollheim and Grant before giving up on them.  And I'm not done with Tales of the Dead; its third section, Ghoul!, lurks in my future.

Three Tales of the Dead about Mummies: Poe, Bloch, Malzberg

The second part of Tales of The Dead is a reprint of editor Pronzini's book of stories about mummies, Mummy!, first published in 1980.  Over the last few days I read three of these stories from the 1986 edition of Tales of the Dead I got at the library.   

"Some Words with a Mummy" by Edgar Allan Poe (1845)

Imagine my surprise to find this story a big joke.  A guy goes to sleep after eating four pounds of Welsh rarebit (apparently famous for causing bad dreams; witness Winsor McCay's comic strip) and then is awoken by a message: a friend is about to open a mummy case.  The narrator rushes off to witness this exciting operation in the company of several other intellectuals.  On a whim, electricity is applied to the mummy (in the late 18th and early 19th century, applying electricity to dead things to see what might happen was a common pastime for thoughtful people) and Count Allamistakeo of Egypt arises from his five thousand year slumber.

The Count asserts that all nineteenth century knowledge of the ancient world is inaccurate, and this sets the stage for Poe's tepid satire, which is an attack on democracy and Victorian-era triumphalism, particularity American pride in the architecture of New York and Washington D.C.  Count Allamistakeo insists that Egyptian architecture was far more grand than any modern building, and that Egyptian experiments with democracy led to mob tyranny.  Nineteenth century clothing and consumer goods also receive Poe's scorn.

This is an interesting story if you are curious about Edgar Allan Poe's attitudes, but it is not very funny or entertaining, and it is certainly not the horror or adventure story I was hoping for.

"The Eyes of the Mummy" by Robert Bloch (1938)

This is more what I have in mind when I decide to read a story from a book entitled Mummy! Greedy and ruthless archaeologists let no obstacle or moral qualm get in their way in their quest to unearth an Egyptian tomb reputedly housing a fortune in gems.  The tomb turns out to be an elaborate sorcerous trap; the soul of an evil Egyptian priest (servant of a crocodile-headed god, no less) still resides in the mummy.  This diabolical priest had his eyes removed before mummification and replaced with mystical jewels; through these jewels the mummy hypnotizes one of the archaeologists and switches souls with him.  The foolish American is now entombed in the crumbling mummy, while the ancient Egyptian priest marches out into the world in a young healthy body, no doubt intent on restarting his career of unmitigated evil!

This story first appeared in Weird Tales, and, though Bloch has his own writing style, it totally fits in with the H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Howard, and Henry Kuttner stories from Weird Tales I have read and enjoyed.  I haven't had very good luck with the Bloch stories I have read during the period I have been writing this blog, so it was gratifying to read a Bloch tale I can endorse: "The Eyes of the Mummy" is a solid horror story, with good tone, pacing, and plot.

Tales of the Dead in an earlier guise

"Revelation in Seven Stages" by Barry N. Malzberg (1980)

It looks like the prolific and unique Barry Malzberg wrote this story specifically for his friend's anthology; I don't think it has appeared anywhere else.  So it looks like all you Malzberg completists out there will need a copy of Mummy! or one of the various editions of Tales of the Dead on your shelves!  I recommend the 1986 edition, which includes Malzberg's name on the cover with such literary giants as Robert Louis Stevenson, Tennessee Williams, and Edgar Allen Poe.

I suppose you could dismiss this three (3) page story in seven (7) chapters as a joke, but there is nothing silly about it (there's "no Count Allamistakeo") and Malzberg tells it deadpan and with his usual pessimism.  By the middle of the 21st century the human race has exterminated itself in what Malzberg characteristically calls "the final war."  In the year 7528 space aliens arrive to survey the dead Earth.  (Cue "Watcher of the Skies.")  With their sophisticated scanners they find hundreds of thousands of Egyptian mummies.

The mummies are very valuable to the aliens.  The aliens are determined to explore and colonize as much of the universe as possible, and so send out countless probe ships.  An ancient law, regarded as taboo, prohibits sending out unmanned craft, and only maniacs and criminals would volunteer for such treacherous or boring duty.  Because the mummies are so well preserved (the aliens have never encountered such well-preserved corpses) they fit the (apparently not very exacting) criteria for space ship personnel.  The mummies are gathered in Queens, New York, and Earth becomes a major base for sending robot probe ships out to the furthest reaches of the universe, each "crewed" by a number of Egyptian mummies.

In the final paragraph of this odd story Malzberg asserts that eventually these probe ships, on their endless one way trip, will encounter a phenomenon which will reanimate their mummified occupants, and the human race will be reborn, with the Egyptians again as its foremost representatives. 

A strange story with a strange idea (presumably a nod to the ancient Egyptians' concept of  Ra's Boat of Millions of Years); I liked it.

**************

All three of these stories had some value; I feel like Pronzini did me a good turn by collecting these ones.  I'm thinking of reading three more stories from Mummy! in the coming week.

Three Tales of the Dead about Voodoo: Woolrich, Bloch & Stevenson

From the library I have checked out a copy of the 1986 edition of Tales of the Dead, edited by Bill Pronzini, frequent collaborator with Barry Malzberg.  The first third of Tales of the Dead is a reprinting of the text of Pronzini's 1980 anthology Voodoo!  This week I have read three of the Voodoo (am I supposed to spell it "Vudu" nowadays?) stories from the book.

(As an aside, I recently introduced my wife to the song and video "Mexican Radio" by Wall of Voodoo, which should be, and perhaps is, some kind of cult classic.  Maybe the video is considered insensitive nowadays?  The image at 2:34 has got to be offensive to somebody.)

"Papa Benjamin" by Cornell Woolrich (1935)

In his intro Pronzini praises Woolrich for being unrivaled in expressing a particular kind of pure terror, and reminds us that literally scores of movies and TV episodes have been based on Woolrich's work.  We all love Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window and Barbara Stanwyck in No Man of Her Own, don't we?

"Papa Benjamin" takes place in New Orleans.  I spent a few days in New Orleans over five years ago.  It wasn't my kind of town; I don't care about jazz, I don't drink, and the art museum didn't have the kind of art I like.  Still, the architecture was interesting, the World War II museum is cool, and my wife and I stumbled on a restaurant with very good Turkish/Greek food.  I haven't had Turkish food since I left New York over three years ago.  Frowning emoticon.

Anyway, "Papa Benjamin" is the tale of Eddie Bloch, famous band leader, one of the "ten idols of America."  Bloch staggers into a New Orleans police station, emaciated, with a face like that of a victim of a long illness about to die.  He hands a pistol over to the cops and declares that he has killed a man, a "colored man" known as "Papa Benjamin."
         
Bloch tells the fuzz the story of how he sneaked into a voodoo ceremony in order to steal ideas for his next big number.  When the "negroes" catch him his only means of escaping alive is to pretend to join their cult.  As part of the initiation he has to drink blood.  Yuck!  But it all seems worth it when the song he writes based on the voodoo drums and chants is a hit and gets his career back on track.  But then he starts to feel weak, to lose weight.  He visits the finest doctors and psychologists (Woolrich uses the word "alienists") in New York and London, but they can't figure out the cause for his ill health.  When he's little more than a skeleton he returns to New Orleans and confronts the voodoo leader, Papa Benjamin, and shoots him down with a pistol.


This story isn't very good.  There are two scenes in the "hard-boiled detective" style in which a private eye or a tough-as-nails police detective busts into the voodoo house and domineers the blacks, literally blasting holes in them with their pistols to get what they want.  The white police detective even disguises himself as Papa Benjamin and imitates his voice, and manages to fool the black worshipers, even though the cop never saw Papa Benjamin alive.  Besides being ridiculous, these scenes are superfluous, diminishing the horror aspects of the story and piling up poorly defined characters instead of focusing on the real main character, Eddie Bloch.  The story feels too long as it is; even setting aside the violent detective scenes, there are secondary scenes full of superfluous detail, police procedure stuff mainly, like going to see the commissioner and picking up another cop on the way.  When a sentence would have served to tell us this stuff, Woolrich gives us a page.

Instead of wasting our time with the white P.I. and the police detective, Woolrich could have spent more time making Papa Benjamin an interesting character.  Papa Benjamin is the title character, but he barely appears and has few lines.  With more screen time, Papa Benjamin could have been  developed into a fearsomely evil character, or a character driven by the sins of the white man to a terrible revenge.

The story also feels racist, which I suppose I would shrug off if the story was good.  Since "Papa Benjamin" isn't very good, the racist stuff is just one more annoyance.  One black guy is described as "gorilla-like," and the voodoo ceremony includes small animals being sacrificed and the worshipers ecstatically ripping off their clothes to crawl on the floor, where they lick up drops of the animals' blood.  The private detective casually shoots and tortures the blacks to get information out of them.

Disappointing... gotta give this one a thumbs down.

"Mother of Serpents" by Robert Bloch (1936)

From the guy who inspired Hitchcock's second best movie to the guy who inspired Hitchcock's best movie.

In his intro, Pronzini calls "Mother of Serpents," written by Bloch when he was 19, "one of the most chilling horror stories ever to use the voodoo theme."  

Bloch tells this story in a detached, journalistic tone.  It is about a fictional 19th century president of Haiti.  As a child, he was adopted by a Protestant minister, and sent to Europe to be educated.  When he returns to Haiti he has become "an affected dandy," wearing nice clothes and preferring the company of whites and "octaroons" to his fellow blacks.  This angers his mother, who is a voodoo priestess who lives in the hills among the "blood-sucking plants" where "necrophilism, phallic worship, anthropomancy, and distorted versions of the Black Mass were commonplace."  She is a particular adherent of a snake god.  Her son, we are told, is a "tall, coal-black man with the physical skull-conformation of a gorilla [who] harbored a remarkably crafty brain beneath his beetling brow."  He is clever enough, and ruthless enough, to marry a pretty and rich woman whose blood is mostly European, and to become president of Haiti.

The president doesn't invite his embarrassing mother to his wedding or his inauguration, so mom gets revenge by using magic to kill his lovely wife.  The president's army and police force cleanse the countryside, killing and torturing all the voodoo worshipers they can find, finally capturing the mother.  The president tortures his own mother for days before killing her, and makes a candle from her fat.  Then, when he is alone doing paperwork (as we have all seen on the TV news, being president isn't just about killing people, you also have to sit down and sign papers sometimes) the candle comes to life and strangles him, wrapping itself around his neck like a snake!

The ending of this story is ridiculous.  I like the idea of a story about how a parent doesn't recognize his or her kid after the kid comes back from college, how college makes the kid abandon his family's religion, ethnic traditions, and class.  But the tone and climax of the story are poor.  At least this one is short, 11 pages.

Marginally better than the Woolrich, but not good... another thumbs down.

"The Isle of Voices" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1893)

Every day I am given reason to lament my mediocre education.  Robert Louis Stevenson is one of those writers who is famous and important, but about whom I know nothing.  I've never read any of his books.  As a kid someone gave me a copy of Treasure Island but I never read it; God knows where it is now.  Until yesterday I had never even looked at a photo of Stevenson; when I googled him I was actually surprised by the photos that came up - Stevenson has a distinctive look, not at all what I was expecting.

So, yesterday I read my first Robert Louis Stevenson story, "The Isle of Voices." It is a stretch to include this story in a book called Voodoo!; the word "voodoo" never comes up, and the story isn't about Afro-Caribbeans, or African-Americans, or African anything. It is also not about death or the dead.  Instead the story is about Hawaiians.  Pronzini can be forgiven his stretching (especially after the weak specimens we had from Woolrich and Bloch) because this story is pretty good.

Keola, a lazy man, has married the daughter of a sorcerer.  The wizard always has plenty of money, but he doesn't seem to do any work, and his son-in-law is envious, and curious.  One day the wizard needs Keola's help in working his sorceries, and Keola learns his money-making secret.  The magician is able to magically transport himself to a distant island where he gathers shells, and with nobody else available to act as a necessary assistant, this time he brings Keola along with him.  The people living on this island, Keola finds, cannot see them, but can hear their voices. When Keola and the magician return to their physical bodies back in Hawaii, the shells have become dollars.

People who cross the wizard tend to disappear or die in mysterious ways, but Keola, after seeing how his father-in-law comes into his money, presses the sorcerer for some cash.  Keola promptly finds himself tricked by the magician and abandoned in the middle of the ocean, but is lucky enough to be picked up by a ship.  He takes a job on the ship, but a month later, not liking the hard work being a sailor entails, jumps ship and takes up residence on an island. To his horror, he realizes that this island is the one where his wizardly father-in-law collects shells!  The old sorcerer, invisible, might discover him at any moment and put him to death!

This story is better than the Woolrich and Bloch stories in almost every way.  It is also much less racist than the other two stories I read from Voodoo!  There are villainous non-whites, but some of the Hawaiians are sympathetic, and Keola and the wizard are actually interesting characters.  Stevenson also pokes fun at the way white people (sometimes to their peril) ignore the knowledge of "natives."

The whole business about using wizardry to collect money from a beach may be a satire on economics or the bourgeois or something of that nature.  It turns out that the Hawaiian sorcerer isn't the only wizard who collects shells from the beach - Keola, when there in his physical form, hears the voices speaking "all the tongues of the earth."  Perhaps Stevenson is commenting on how Third World people see that white people have piles of money but have no idea how they make it, or how working class people similarly see middle class people making piles of money without knowing how it is they do it.  The London banker or New York stock broker goes into his office and later emerges with riches, without having done any physical labor, as if by magic, just like the Hawaiian wizard goes into his house and later comes out with a handful of dollars.

An entertaining and interesting piece of work.  Score one for the Victorians.

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The second part of Tales of the Dead is a reprint of Pronzini's book of stories about mummies.  I will tackle that soon; we'll give Robert Bloch a second chance, check in with Barry Malzberg, and read a story by Edgar Allen Poe.  We'll see if the Victorians win round two of this horror story olympiad.