Adventures in Time and Space by Miller, Rocklynne, Williams and Bates

My copy of Selections from Adventures
in Time and Space, discovered on the
outside carts at Second Story Books

In 1946 Random House put out a huge hardcover anthology of SF stories entitled Adventures in Time and Space.  Edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas, this 1000-page volume has been reprinted numerous times and in 1952 won some kind of "All-Time Best Book" award from Astounding.  In 1954 Pennant Books put out a 200-page paperback selection of stories from the anthology, and in January of 2018 I paid 50 cents for a copy of this sixty-four-year-old paperback.

The first three stories in this book are by famous heroes of early 20th-century SF, Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt and "Lewis Padgett" (a pen name used by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), but today we are going to read stories from the volume by somewhat less famous people: P. Schuyler Miller, Ross Rocklynne, Robert Moore Williams, and Harry Bates.  I didn't plan it this way, but all these stories first appeared in Astounding when the famous John W. Campbell Jr. was editing the magazine.

"As Never Was" by P. Schuyler Miller (1944)

"As Never Was" appeared in 1944, and you can read the issue of Astounding in which it debuted for free at the internet archive.  Robert Silverberg included it in his anthologies Alpha 5 in 1974 and The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces in 1983--I guess we can say the story has the endorsement of the SF community.  Miller wrote a bunch of stories in the '30s and '40s and many essays and reviews for Astounding/Analog up to the '70s, but I don't know that I have ever read anything by him before.

This is one of those time-travel stories about an impossible paradox that hurts my poor brain.  In the 21st century one of the first archaeologists with access to a "time shuttle" travels to the future.  (There is little point in a scientist or historian traveling to the past because if you do so you inevitably change the future, creating and finding yourself in a different time stream so you can no longer return to the future you used to inhabit in order to share your findings.)  He returns with a knife made of a super metal and dies shortly after.  This metal has so much technological and economic potential that practitioners of every science bend every tool and technique at their disposal to duplicating the metal or finding more of it, but decades of such efforts are absolutely fruitless.  Legions of people travel to the future but they can never find a civilization that has even heard of the super metal, much less one able to produce it.  Finally, the grandson of the pioneering archaeologist figures out the mystery, which only reveals a still greater mystery: his grandfather discovered the knife 300 years in the future in the ruins of the museum where it was housed after his death in the 21st century--the knife exists only in a closed loop, it was never actually created.

This story is well-written, Miller injecting some melodrama and character stuff as well as ideas and images that keep it entertaining, and the central conceit is kind of mind-boggling, which makes it memorable.  I like it, and see why anthologists like it, but can't deny that the impossibility of it all has left an uncomfortable, nagging, residue of frustration in my mind, analogous to the feeling I get looking at one of those impossible tuning fork drawings.

"Quietus" by Ross Rocklynne (1940)

Isaac Asimov (or Martin H. Greenberg acting under his aegis) included "Quietus" in the volume of his series The Great Science Fiction Stories that covers 1940.  A year ago I read four stories by Rocklynne and found them to be a mixed bag.

Zoinks!  This is the kind of story that will get you fired from your cushy job at a tech industry giant!  In their introduction, the editors (besides telling you ahead of time it is a tragedy, thus killing the twist ending) say it may be that the "significance of this tale is its brilliant portrayal of the historical struggle of the feminine mind to cope with logic a priori." NSFW!

Tommy is the last man on Earth!  Extreme seismic activity, triggered by a meteor strike, has exterminated all life on Earth save for that in an area of about 100,000 square miles in North America, where Tommy lives, and that area didn't come through unscathed.  The holocaust occurred during Tommy's childhood, when he had run away from home and was hiding in a cave.  When he emerged from the cave everybody was dead.  (That'll show you, Mom and Dad!)  Since then he has lived by catching rabbits with his bare hands, his loneliness eased by his pet crow, Blacky, who repeats sentences Tommy says and sentences it heard before the cataclysm, phrases like "the price of wheat is going down" which mean nothing to Tommy.

Tommy is 21 now, and has a feeling of "hunger" for you know what!  (Most of us got that feeling around 12 or 13, but Tommy is perhaps a late bloomer.)  Luckily, he chances upon the last woman on Earth.  Skittish, she flees, and he pursues.  She is shy, but also curious, and never goes too far; in fact, when he hits his head on a log while swimming after her, she pulls Tommy's stunned form out of the water before taking flight anew.

Interspersed with this tale of boy meets girl is the story of married couple of alien explorers.  This pair of bird people fly above the Earth's devastated surface, looking for intelligent life.  When they see Blacky riding on Tommy's shoulder, the female bird person assumes that Blacky is intelligent and Tommy is his beast of burden.  Her husband isn't so sure, and urges her to refrain from jumping to conclusions.  The last woman on Earth is getting over her shyness and she and Tommy are about to properly meet when that chatterbox Blacky starts up with his damn squawking and scares her off.  Tommy, who has never been exposed to all that "bros before hoes" propaganda, is enraged and throws stones at Blacky, and the female alien shoots down the last man on Earth, thinking she is rescuing the last intelligent creature on Earth.  The last woman on Earth weeps over Tommy's body, and that is the end of the human race.

This story is OK, but feels contrived and is the weakest of the four items we are looking at today.

"Robot's Return" by Robert Moore Williams (1938)

I don't think I've read anything by Robert Moore Williams before; looking at isfdb, it seems he produced a lot of adventure novels with cool covers by people like Frazetta, Jones, Gaughan and St. John, stories of musclemen riding dinosaurs and astronauts fighting aliens with ray guns.  Sounds like a fun guy.  "Robot's Return" was first published in Astounding as "Robots Return;" you can read the original printing at the internet archive.  I think the introduction of the apostrophe is a mistake, either an artistic or typographical one, as there is more than one robot in the story.  I also like the 1938 illustration for the story by Charles Schneeman.

This is a sentimental piece with limited plot.  A squad of robots arrives on the far future Earth, a planet of ruined cities.  For thousands of years the citizens of the robot civilization have wondered where and how their people began.  As they search the decayed ruins of a once great metropolis, they debate such topics as the difference between a mere machine and a thinking robot and whether an animal, a creature which needs air and food to survive, could really have created their race of nuclear-powered metal people.  They finally find the answer, text engraved on a sort of memorial that proves that flesh creatures of this planet--men--built them to staff the spaceship that was to take the human race to Mars to escape an incurable disease.  Of course, the fate of the humans on the ship and why their robot servants lost their memories of Earth and humankind is still a mystery.

This tale is well-written, but there is really not much story to it--this one is trying to get by on sensawunda alone.  "Robot's Return" actually reminds me of one of those Lovecraftian stories in which a seeker after knowledge discovers the secret origin of his family or race and is horrified, even psychologically damaged, by his discovery, but Williams here uses the same story structure to achieve the opposite effect.  Instead of his protagonists being disillusioned and his readers disturbed by the revelation that human life is meaningless, Williams's robots are buoyed by the knowledge of their origins, and Williams seems to be trying to celebrate man's ambitions and abilities.  Not bad. 

"Farewell to the Master" by Harry Bates (1940)

Bates is another person whose work I am not familiar with.  He edited Astounding and Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror in the early 1930s, and wrote a bunch of space operas starring the hero Hawk Carse that I have never heard of before.  "Farewell to the Master" was published in Astounding after John W. Campbell Jr. had taken over, and was the basis of the film The Day the Earth Stood Still, one of those productions about how we should welcome alien imperialism because we humans are babies or savages who can't be trusted to behave without adult supervision backed by force.  These kinds of stories usually get on my nerves.  Well, let's see what the source material is like.

It is the future and mankind has colonized the solar system.  Three months ago a time machine constructed of a mysterious green metal suddenly materialized in Washington, D.C.  From out of the machine comes a dude with the face of an angel who radiates goodness and a giant green robot that looks like a naked muscleman with glowing red eyes.  The deific man only has time to say "I am Klaatu and this is Gnut" before some mentally ill guy snipes him dead!  Gnut stands still from that moment on, and a remorseful Earth builds a museum around the robot and the time machine and a tomb for Klaatu.  (We're not so remorseful that we refrain from trying to break into Gnut and the time machine with every drill and ray gun and acid we can come up with, but nothing we do can even scratch that green metal.)

Our hero is Cliff the photojournalist.  Cliff has been taking pictures of Gnut, day after day, and one day he is comparing his photos and realizes Gnut has moved a few centimeters!  The green gargantua must be moving at night when nobody is watyching, so Cliff hides out in the museum after it closes to see what happens.  (The security at this museum sucks!)

After some scenes of suspense and scenes of action, we learn that Gnut has been spending his nights in the time machine, working on an apparatus with which to reproduce Klaatu!  The sound each living thing makes is distinctive, like a fingerprint or DNA, and, with a decent recording of an animal or person's voice, Gnut's new machine can recreate the creature!  After some experiments (Gnut recreates an angry gorilla from a recording, and one of the action scenes is Gnut fighting the belligerent ape) and with some help from Cliff in getting the best possible recording of Klaatu's few words of greeting, Gnut has everything he needs and leaves in the time machine.  The twist ending of the story is the revelation that, while everybody assumed Klaatu was in charge and Gnut was his bodyguard or something, in fact it was Gnut who was the master!

Unless my memory of the movie is very faulty, The Day the Earth Stood Still shares only the rudiments of its basic premise with "Farewell to the Master."  "Farewell to the Master" is a good story, and I like it even if there is a big plot hole (there is a window in the museum through which Gnut and his glowing eyes are visible to those on the city streets outside, so it is impossible that he could have moved around at night unseen) and I don't quite get the real significance of the Gnut-is-the-master surprise ending--is it just a scary prophecy that in the future we will be subordinated to our machines?  Also, why did Gnut come back in time to visit us in the first place?     

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Despite their various problems, these stories are all interesting and entertaining, in their own right and as historical artifacts of the world before 1945.  A good purchase!

More 50¢ adventures in our next episode!

Four stories by Ross Rocklynne

In our last episode I read James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Milk of Paradise" from my copy of Harlan Ellison's 1972 anthology Again, Dangerous Visions.  I noticed a story in the volume by Ross Rocklynne, a writer I'd not yet read anything by, and decided to give him a whirl.  A quick look through my bookshelves and online yielded three additional stories by Rocklynne to serve as my introduction to his oeuvre.

"Escape Through Space" (1938)

Every story scientifically accurate

"Escape Through Space" was published in Amazing Stories; like I did, you can read it for free at the SFFaudio PDF page, which archives a scan of the original magazine's pages, including an illustration and a brief autobiography of Ohio-native Rocklynne.

This is a brief and sciency tale, but it also has political content, exhibiting the old level-headed American attitude that monarchy is stupid and socialism is evil.  Mankind has colonized the solar system, and such is man's hubris that the first pioneers on each planet and moon set themselves up as kings and queens!  As time has gone by, though, these monarchies have been getting overthrown and replaced with republics.  The latest revolution has been on Mars, where the revolutionaries are socialists and have killed all the aristocrats and royals with one exception, the Princess Helen.

American Larry Sharon is a young man of business, the youngest buyer at an import-export firm.  He is sent by his boss to the new Martian republic to negotiate a deal for some "tritonite."  On Mars, where Sharon witnesses signs that the socialists have been committing atrocities, he meets a high level official, who offers him a special job: ferrying the Princess Helen to Earth!  The revolutionaries can't just kill her in cold blood for fear of causing an interplanetary diplomatic outcry, but of course having her hanging around just encourages counter revolutionaries, so she has got to go.

Sharon doesn't trust the commies, especially when they stipulate that he not fly his own ship back to Earth but a clunky old rocket--they say it will be less likely to attract notice from bitter extremists eager to murder the Princess!  Of course, the new Martian government is giving him a slow ship so they can catch up to him and blow him and the Princess away far from any witnesses in the black void between the planets.

But Sharon has an ace up his sleeve.  He steals a march on the pursuing Reds by flying very close to the sun, within the "Boiling Zone" that, in normal circumstances, would destroy a ship.  He pulls this off by hitching a ride on a passing comet, using it as a parasol against the sun's rays!  Sharon gets to Earth with the cash money paid to him by the Martian bolshies, and the icing on the cake is that the gorgeous Princess has fallen in love with him--after a lifetime spent among effete aristos and diabolical commies, how could she fail to fall in love with an honest-to-goodness blue-eyed Irish-American hunk?  Another triumph for democracy!

Entertaining.

"The Men and the Mirror" (1938)

This story was first published in Astounding; I read it in my copy of Isaac Asimov's Before the Golden Age--it is the last story in that anthology. "The Men and the Mirror" is the third of Rocklynne's series of three stories about Lieutenant John Colbie of the Interplanetary Police Force and his pursuit across the solar system of a clever criminal, Edward Deverel.  In each story the 23rd-century gumshoe finds himself in what Asimov calls a "dilemma involving the laws of physics," and Asimov assures us that this tale is the best of them.

Using a disguise, Deverel has escaped the Terran base on Jupiter and Colbie pursues him to a rogue planet that has entered the solar system near the orbit of Neptune (these old stories are full of rogue stars and planets wandering into our precious solar system; we need to build a wall or something.)  On the surface of this interloping heavenly body is a huge circular mirror, like 3,500 miles in circumference, with an albedo approaching 1!  No doubt this was built by a vanished race far in advance of our own, a race of people determined to put our domestic mirror industry out of business!  The Terran Federation of Glaziers is sure to demand protective tariffs after it hears about this!

Deverel, though a pirate and a thief, fucking loves science as much as the next guy, so Colbie knows to search for him near the mysterious mirror, an engineering feat unique in the experience of humankind.  When he catches up to the pirate the two become friends (!) and decide to examine the mirror together.  They accidentally fall onto the frictionless concave surface of the alien mirror, and for 14 (fourteen!) pages slide back and forth within the bowl, trying to figure out how to get out!  Then comes the explanation of how they escaped, with sentences like this: "At the Earth's pole the plane of vibration of a pendulum turns around once every twenty-four hours, in a direction opposite to that at which the Earth rotates."

(I love to go to science museums to look at the dinosaurs, but I've never been able to really grok the pendulums they often have at these museums that, I guess, prove that the Earth rotates or something.)

Because they are now friends, Colbie lets Deverel get away, which gives me a chance to fling out one of my favorite public policy cliches: "mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."

"The Men and the Mirror" is an extreme example of the classic science fiction story which is about science and which shows the protagonist resolving the plot by using his knowledge of science and his ability to do complicated math (even without paper or slide rule, in this case).  I have to say that I am considering this story more a curious artifact than an entertaining--much less compelling--piece of fiction.  

"Cosmic Yo-Yo" (1945)

Here's another story I read at the SFFaudio PDF page, in a facsimile of its original appearance in the pages of Planet Stories.

Bob Parker and Quentin Zuyler are in the business of delivering asteroids to the estates of wealthy Earthlings for use as colossal lawn ornaments.  They have been hired to bring back a particular asteroid, but when they find it they face a problem: It is already in the hands of a beautiful young woman spacefarer, Starre Lowenthal, a rich girl with a spaceship shaped like a dumbbell. This problem is solved when a rival asteroid hauling firm attacks them, leaving all three of them for dead and seizing the valuable asteroid for themselves.

Starre has the presence of mind necessary to save them from death in the utterly cold darkness of space, and then Bob uses his knowledge of science to get their asteroid back.  It is illegal for asteroid hauling ships to mount heavy weapons, but Bob has Quentin attach Starre's ship to their hauler with a chain so the dumbbell-shaped vessel can be propelled and retrieved like a yo-yo.  Our heroes smash the rival firm's ship with the yo-yo and retrieve the asteroid.

An equally contrived bit of scientific shenanigans overcomes the objections of Starre's family to Bob and Starre getting hitched.

Like that of "Escape Through Space," the plot of "Cosmic Yo-Yo" relies on some pretty unlikely coincidences to work, but feels even more contrived and gimmicky. Merely acceptable.        

"Ching-Witch" (1972)

Finally we get to the story from Again, Dangerous Visions.  In his intro, Ellison laments the feud between the "old and new waves," which he thinks is ridiculous. One of the problems caused by this nonsensical dispute is that it has discouraged some older writers from producing new work; Ellison suggests these skittish scribblers look upon Rocklynne as an encouraging example of a writer from SF's formative years who is up to the task of producing valuable new work in the post-New Wave environment.

I found "Ching-Witch" difficult to get into; it feels long and tedious, listless and quite dated, and my eyes kept glazing over as I read it.  It is, I guess, a sort of sarcastic homage or gentle satire of youth culture and those SF stories that contrast a utopia with our crummy and violent Earth society--in his afterword Rocklynne informs us that the story was inspired by a ten-day visit to Haight-Ashbury in 1966.

For over a century, the war torn Earth has prevented travel and communication with the human colony on Zephyrus, where everybody is noble and peaceful.  Captain Ratch Chug, a product of genetic engineering (he's 80% human and 20% feline) realizes the wars on Earth are about to blow up the planet, and escapes just in time, to Zephyrus.  He finds himself worshipped by the teenagers there, and teaches them Earth dances and Earth slang.  After a few years the Zephyruans realize Earth has been destroyed and Chug has been lying to them, and they reveal their true nature, which is almost as hateful and violent as that of Earthlings.  Chug has to move to yet another planet to avoid being lynched.

Bad.

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These stories are quite characteristic of the type or sub-genres of SF they represent (the hard SF adventure in which the hero uses his engineering and science knowledge to overcome danger and get the girl; the science puzzle story; and the jocular New Wave story situated within the youth culture), but they are far from the most entertaining or most well-crafted specimens of those sub-genres.  They aren't well-paced or well-plotted and they lack human feeling or engaging characters.

I own the Ace Double which includes Rocklynne's collection The Sun Destroyers, but, even though Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison have praised its stories, my experience reading these four pieces today has not inspired much enthusiasm for cracking it open.