Whispers II: Brennan, Grant, Russell, Jacobi and Weinstein

Let's tackle five more stories from Stuart Schiff's 1979 anthology Whispers II.  Can anyone challenge the hold of R. A. Lafferty's "Berryhill" on the title of "Best Story in Whispers II?"

Patty cake, patty cake...

"Marianne" by Joseph Payne Brennan (1975)

Tuna, rubber, little blubber in my igloo...

I've never read anything by Brennan, but the Wikipedia article on him makes him sound like a fascinating guy with an interesting career: working at the Yale Library, publishing scores of stories and hundreds of poems, managing his own horror magazine and his own poetry magazine.  Let's get a taste of what this guy is all about!

"Marianne," which is like a page and a half long, describes a lonely tourist beach in chill October, the wind making padlocks clank and the grey waves and the cries of gulls and all that.  A guy goes to the water's edge and cries out the name of his girlfriend (or wife?) who drowned there.  Her corpse rises up and claims him for the sea!

This is fine for what it is, I suppose...it kind of feels like part of a larger work, like the end of a story of a disastrous relationship or the prologue of a story about aquatic zombies.  Acceptable.

"Marianne" first appeared in Whispers #6-7 and would be reprinted in the Brennan collection The Borders Just Beyond.

"The Fourth Musketeer" by Charles L. Grant (1979)

I've read a few Grant stories over the years.  There was that piano-playing witch, the sarcophagus found in a secret room in a Connecticut house, and those stories about robots and tyrannical governments and creepy New Jersey women.  "The Fourth Musketeer" was original to Whispers II and I don't think it ever appeared anywhere else.

"The Fourth Musketeer" is about mid-life crisis, and I guess about masculinity and gender roles.  Everett Templar is forty, and has quit his job and left his wife, and ridden a bus to the neighborhood of his childhood.  There is a lot of description of his aches and pains and his failing memory (the title of the story refers to the fact that he can't remember the names of all of Dumas's Musketeers) as well as of the landscape of his youthful haunts.  In flashbacks we see he quit his job because his superiors at the office thought he should act his age, that with his long hair and loud music he was starting to appear like a hippie and that might drive away clients; it is also hinted that his wife was a nag who complained about his toy trains.

Having been away from home for some months (he can't remember if it was two months or six months or something in between) he decides to telephone his wife and gloat (and maybe negotiate a reconciliation?)  But when Templar speaks into the phone his wife can't hear him, and we readers are given reason to believe that Templar is not really alive, that he is a ghost, or something--it's not really clear, at least not to me.  Maybe his inability to be heard, his lack of a voice, is symbolism for alienation and marginalization?

This is an OK mainstream story about a guy unhappy with his family and job with a little supernatural stuff tossed in.

"Ghost of a Chance" by Ray Russell (1978)

Oh no, it is Ray Russell, the guy who worked at Playboy and wrote lots of short-short stories that I think are a waste of time.  Let's see how Russell uses the two pages he usually limits himself to this time.

"Ghost of a Chance" is like a story written by a child.  (If you were paying me to sell the story I would say, "It's a whimsical flight of fancy into the macabre!")  One dude says there are no ghosts, that no proof of the existence of ghosts has ever been produced.  A second dude says he will prove to dude #1 that ghosts exist by committing suicide in front of dude #1 and then haunting him.  Bang goes the revolver!  After the police have left, sure enough, dude #1 sees a glowing form with the face of dude #2.  But dude #1 just figures it is a guilt-induced hallucination, and dude #2 laments that he killed himself for nothing.  It's like a skit from The Carol Burnett Show or something (you know you can see Tim Conway shooting himself in the head and then going "Wooooooooo...Harvey Korman...I am haunting you....")

A waste of everybody's time. "Ghost of a Chance" first appeared in Whispers #11-12 and would later appear in the Russell collection The Devil's Mirror.   

"The Elcar Special" by Carl Jacobi (1979)

Oh no, it is Carl Jacobi, the guy who wrote a story that was so bad it made me angry.  I feel like that fit of dismay and rage occurred just a week ago, but here I am giving Carl Jacobi another chance!  Don't believe what the beggars that hang around Dupont Circle say--I am a generous man!

The narrator of "The Elcar Special" is a loser, a 32-year-old who lives with his mother and keeps getting sacked from poorly paid jobs due to incompetence and negligence.  He gets a job helping to maintain the fleet of pre-World War II cars owned by a collector.  The prize possession of this collector is an Elcar used by Lillian Boyer the woman daredevil in her act, which consisted in part of climbing out of a moving car and onto an airborne airplane.  (I have to admit that I was a little surprised to find that Elcar and Boyer were real.)  Associated with the car is an unsubstantiated tale about the psychiatrist who bought it from wing walker Boyer, my new feminist hero.  This headshrinker married a Caribbean woman, a woman who practiced obeah.  When their marriage started falling apart the shrink killed the woman by running her over with the Elcar.

After setting the scene and presenting the characters, Jacobi bangs out a mediocre but not quite irritating supernatural story about the narrator driving the car, feeling a presence, thinking he has been transported from the roads of America to the roads of Martinique, picking up a sinister man and then running over a dark-skinned woman, only to wake up in the hospital, having crashed the Elcar.  The cops wonder why a shred of a woman's dress is stuck to the bumper of the wrecked Elcar.  Dun dun dun!

This is an unremarkable, standard issue horror story, which is an improvement over the half-baked abortion of a Jacobi story I had to endure a week ago.

"The Elcar Special" first appeared in Whispers II, and was included in the 1994 Jacobi collection, Smoke of the Snake.     

"The Box" by Lee Weinstein (1976)

Weinstein has four fiction credits at isfdb, and this is the first.  Its initial appearance was in Whispers #9, and Schiff also included it in his Mad Scientist anthology.

"The Box" is actually a good story, which is refreshing after reading so many poor and mediocre stories in a row.

The story takes place in a medical museum, which Weinstein describes in detail, all the skeletons, model eyes, jars containing diseased organs and deformed fetuses.  Every week for years a guy has come to the museum; today he comes in carrying a package--he's never brought a package before.  He picks the lock on a glass cabinet containing malformed fetuses, begins shifting a jar containing a baby with one eye.  He makes enough noise to alert the guards, who come to stop him, and we learn that the cyclops is his own son, and today would have been his 21st birthday--in the package is a wreath.

This is a sad and surprising story, and quite well-written, the second or third best tale in the anthology so far, a story which relies for its effects on universal human feelings for one's own flesh and blood and not supernatural nonsense or extravagant gore.  Thumbs up! 

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Five stories and only one you can consider a noteworthy success in the lot?  Sad!  Well, we'll be reading four more stories from Whispers II in our next blog post, and maybe we can dig up another story or two that is in the same league as those of Lafferty, Davidson and Weinstein. 

Four stories by C. L. Moore from Astounding

In 1952 Gnome Press published Judgment Night, a collection of work by C. L. Moore, famous creator of Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry and collaborator of Henry Kuttner, her husband.  The hardcover volume with a cover by Kelly Freas included the title novel and four short stories; in 1979 Dell reprinted the collection in paperback with a cover by God knows who.  I own one of those 1979 paperbacks, and in our last episode we read the title work, originally an Astounding serial, the story of a princess's first love affair and the collapse of her civilization, a denunciation of human violence and an expression of skepticism of the value of gods.  Today we will look at those four short stories, all of which appeared in Astounding after Judgment Night's appearance.  I'm going to read them in the chronological order in which they were printed, not the order they appear in this book.

"The Code" (1945)

"The Code" appeared under the pen name of "Lawrence O'Donnell," like all four stories we are talking about today.  This pseudonym was also attached to numerous stories on which Moore and Kuttner collaborated, including the highly regarded tales "Vintage Season," "Clash By Night" and "Fury," and served as the inspiration for one of the pen names used by Kuttner/Moore aficionado Barry N. Malzberg, "K. M. O'Donnell."

(The unusual cover of this issue of Astounding is a collage of US military personnel operating some of their heavier weapons.  Maybe this is related to the included Eric Frank Russell story, "Resonance," the intro of which indicates it is about the Pacific War and whose illustrations feature what we would probably consider racist caricatures of "the Japs."

Bill Westerfield and Peter Morgan are scientists, medical types.  They think that people get old and die for largely psychosomatic reasons:

"You've been conditioned to think you grow old because of time, and this is a false philosophy....you must be conditioned to reverse time.  The body and the mind react inseparably, one upon the other."

Bill's father Rufus serves as the guinea pig for their secret experiments on reversing the aging process, and they shoot the seventy-year-old full of drugs and hypnotize him so he will look at time differently.  And it works!  In the space of a few months Rufus develops the body of a healthy forty-year-old!  But something is amiss with Rufus's brain or mind; he has vague memories that cannot be his own.  Also, Bill and Peter think his face is different from that of the man Rufus was when he was forty...they suspect that Rufus isn't just "growing" younger, but changing into a different person altogether!  Then X-rays indicate that Rufus's bones and organs are changing--Bill's father isn't just  becoming a different person, but a whole different species!

Moore explains, using a metaphor about parallel train tracks that I did not find very convincing, that Rufus isn't regressing to the Rufus he once was, but an alternate reality Rufus in a universe where the evolution of intelligent life proceeded quite differently.  Rufus, as he grows biologically younger and gets closer to that alien track, changes more and more.  In his biological twenties he develops a nictitating membrane and becomes a drunk--the booze helps his mind cope with the overlapping memories of his English-speaking Earth youth and his alien youth in a world of strange languages and weird tuneless music; alcohol is also one of the few Earth foods his half-alien stomach can handle.  He then seals himself in his room and ceases eating altogether, his body burning his tissues for fuel so that he shrinks and eventually becomes an alien egg or larva--for a brief moment Bill and Peter see Rufus's alien mother, before she and the embryonic alien Rufus vanish as he is fully integrated into that other time track.

Because it moves at a rapid enough pace and throws lots of ideas at you this is an acceptably entertaining story, even if the ideas are all kind of ridiculous.  It also aspires to a high level of erudition.  Readers of Astounding are expected to know about science, and on the very first page of "The Code" Moore refers to snowflakes making "pseudo-Brownian movements"--I had to look that up on google.  Besides the science stuff there are plenty of literary references--Faust, Theseus, Alice in Wonderland, Shakespeare, Longfellow.  This is a story for the educated reader!  The title of the story refers to Bill and Peter's idea that the intellectuals of the past knew more than they are given credit for, and even conducted experiments like the one B & P are conducting on Rufus.  Our heroes think  their predecessors recorded their work in "code" in stories like the legend of Faust, and speculate that Faust's loss of his soul in the story represents some other loss suffered by a experimental subject back in the 16th century; at the end of the story our 20th century experimenters get the solution to the mystery.

"The Code" is like several stories I have read by Kuttner and Moore that are about Earth humans interacting with items or people from other times or dimensions.  "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" is the most famous example, others include "Prisoner in the Skull" and "Shock."  "The Code" is included in a handsome-looking 900-page collection of Kuttner and Moore stories published in 2005 by Centipede Press and titled Two-Handed Engine after one of Kuttner and Moore's most celebrated tales.

We read To The Stars here at
MPorcius Fiction Log in early 2014

"Promised Land" (1950)

It is several hundred years in the future, and mankind has colonized numerous planets and moons within the solar system.  To do so, scientists have used controlled mutation and selective breeding to fashion humans suitable for life on alien worlds.  Some pure strain humans fear that the engineered humans are taking over civilization, that they, however freakish they might be, are the future of mankind.  One such engineered human is Torren, the dictator of Ganymede, the product of the thirteen generations of breeding in "The Centrifuge" that was the abortive project to create people who could live on Jupiter.  Torren weighs five hundred pounds and lives every moment of his adult life in a bath of oily fluid because he lacks the strength to walk--he can barely lift his own arm!  (When I was a kid they told us that Brachiosaurus probably stayed in water to support his tremendous weight, but I think that theory has been abandoned.)  Via TV screens and other devices Torren rules the people of Ganymede, humans specially bred to be able to endure Ganymede's deadly cold and breathe Ganymede's toxic atmosphere.

Years ago Torren chose from among the brats at an orphanage an heir, Ben Fenton, a pure strain human.  Fenton is an adult now, and as "Promised Land" begins he has had it with Ganymede and tells Torren to find himself another heir--he is leaving!  Why, you ask?

Torren is a selfish ruler who feels that the tragedy of his own life as the only survivor of the Centrifuges means he owes others no consideration.  He is having Ganymede terraformed so a large number of pure strain humans can live on it and efficiently exploit its resources--this will mean the small number of peeps tailored for Ganymede will have to live under domes the way Terron and Fenton do today!  Fenton sympathizes with the Ganymedeans and wants no part of throwing them under the bus.

Fenton's attitude was easier for me to understand when I realized that the people engineered to live on Ganymede weren't hideous insect people or ogrish yetis or something, but seven-foot tall Scandinavians with blue eyes and blonde hair and "milk-white" skin, and our man Ben Fenton has a crush on one of them.

He did not think he was in love with Krisitn.  It would be preposterous.  They could not speak except through metal or touch except through glass and cloth.  They could not even breathe the same air.  But he faced the possibility of love, and grinned ironically at it.     

Fenton goes to meet Kristin, and, while they sit in his ground vehicle, an air vehicle bombs them.  They survive the attack, and Fenton sneaks back into Terron's palace to discover that a coup attempt is under way, Terron's pure strain assistant trying to take over.  Fenton foils the coup attempt, saving Terron, but as the story ends we know that Ganymede is about to be rocked by a civil war between Terron and his agents and the Ganymedeans, lead by Fenton, who are determined to resist the terraforming of their chilly home.  Who will win the war will be largely determined by the response to the crisis of the pure strain people on Earth and the engineered people living on Venus and Mars--who will intervene in the conflict, and on which side?  Perhaps the outcome of the Ganymedean civil war will signal whether the new artificially bred human races represent the future of the human race, or will always be subordinate to those who created them.

This is a pretty good story; like Judgment Night it conjures up a strange milieu and presents SF ideas and a civilization on the brink of a new era, but it is economical.  Perhaps Moore here is vulnerable to the charge of making things easy on herself by making the villain a big fatso and the innocent victims people who look like supermodels, however. 

"Heir Apparent" (1950)

To my surprise, I discovered on its first page that "Heir Apparent" was a sequel of sorts to "Promised Land," being set in the same universe, though on Earth instead of one of the other inhabited bodies of the Solar System and at a later period of time, when the solar system is in crisis as the engineered humans on Mars, Venus and Ganymede seek to achieve independence from Earth.  Our protagonist is Edward Harding, former member of Integrator Team Twelve-Wye-Lambda.  As we see in flashbacks, an Integrator Team is seven men, each with a high level of expertise in one field, who connect psychically across long distances via a computer called an Integrator, temporarily melding their personalities and skills within the computer to solve difficult problems related to the governance of Earth's interplanetary empire.  (A theme of this story is that empires collapse because managing them from what in college we called "the metropole" becomes too complicated.)  These psychic connections are so satisfying that those kicked off Integrator teams become depressed and wander the world like lost souls, suited for no other work.  Harding is one such lost soul, as is a former colleague of his, George Mayall, who blames Harding for getting him kicked off the team a few years before Harding himself was let go.

Bumming around the Pacific, Harding meets an obese rich guy, Turner, who is the head of a private espionage network.  (Does Moore hate fat people?  Or does she just hate rich people, and use obesity to signify indulgence and wealth?)  Turner tells Harding that Mayall is working with the seccessionists from a base on a Pacific island.  Mayall has camouflaged this island and surrounded it with traps so that it is almost totally invisible and inaccessible.  Turner wants to capture this island and work his own lucrative deal with the seccessionists, and thinks that Harding--who has the ability to integrate his mind with a boat's computer, controlling the vessel as if it was his own body, and has intimate knowledge of Mayall's way of thinking--is the only man who can get him to the island safely.  Harding and Turner become uneasy partners, each with his own agenda.

Once on the island Harding and Turner confront Mayall and we get doublecrosses and Mexican standoff situations involving guns, knives, holograms, paralysis rays, heat rays, post-hypnotic suggestions, etc.  These standoffs resemble the relationships between Earth and its colonies--they all want independence, but really need to cooperate to prosper, maybe even to merely survive.  The whole business of the Integrator, in which seven people fuse their psyches to produce a more efficient collective "being," mirrors this same theme.

During all the tense scenes on the island we learn why Mayall and then Harding were thrown off Integrator Team Twelve-Wye-Lambda, and what exactly Mayhall is up to on the island.  Mayhall has put together his own Integrator and set up his own Integrator team, one that is devoted to winning independence for Venus.  But who is on Mayhall's team?  Harding discovers that Mayhall has filled the other six seats at "the Round Table" of his Integrator not with human beings but with computer files!  Does this presage a future when human beings will be subordinate to machines, or surrender their humanity to become integrated with machines?  Like Judgment Night and "Promised Land," rather than ending conclusively, "Heir Apparent" ends leaving us expecting a radical shift in human history and wondering what--perhaps horrible--future is in store for mankind.     

Pretty good.  "Heir Apparent" was included in a 1988 French collection of Moore stories.   

"Paradise Street" (1950)

Jaime Morgan was one of the first men on planet Loki.  He is an irascible loner, a trapper who catches the sehft rats that infest the planet and drains their sehft sacs to sell the sehft oil.  But times, they are a changin'; once-wild Loki, a place for an independent manly man, is becoming civilized!  Settlers (Morgan denounces them as "Scum!") are putting down roots on Loki, starting farms and families, and they want to exterminate the sehft rats, who despoil their orchards.  Sehft has also been synthesized off world, so the value of sehft has gone down by like 99%, leaving Morgan in real financial trouble.  Law and order is also coming to Loki in the form of Major Rufus Dodd, an old friend of Morgan's--they grew up together on Mars.

"Paradise Street" is like a story about the old West, with a general store, a saloon, a new sheriff in town, desperadoes and ranch hands--there's even a minor character who is a Native American (a "hawk-nosed Red Amerindian.")  It is also like a 20th century crime story--100% natural and organic sehft (not the synthetic stuff) turns out to be a powerful narcotic, and Morgan, due to ignorance and carelessness, gets mixed up with organized crime and the cops (in the form of his childhood friend Dodd.)  Venusian crime bosses want to get their hands on some organic sehft, but Dodd has confiscated it and locked it all up, so the Venusians hire Morgan to cause a native herd of cattle to stampede; this will distract the settlers and the lawmen and give the Venus mafia a chance to liberate the sehft.

To stampede the beasts Morgan has to get in tune with nature, and Moore gives us a scene in which Morgan "feels" the rhythm of Loki through his fingers and toes as he crouches in the moss.  Moore also gives us a quote from A. E. Housman's "The Night is Freezing Fast."  (A. E. Housman seems to be a favorite of SF writers.)   Morgan directs the stampede so it wrecks the crops the settlers have spent a year tending, but then the Venusians, with firearms, throw the stampede out of control so it damages the town and even kills a handful of innocent people.  The settlers take up arms and outfight and then lynch the Venusians.  The settlers want to hang Morgan as well, but Dodd, quoting Kipling's "The Explorer," (Kipling is another favorite versifier of the SF crowd, at least the conservative/libertarian faction of people like Poul Anderson and Robert Heinlein) helps Morgan escape, directing him to a merchant space ship on which he can stow away and get to a newly discovered planet, where he can play "hermit trapper in touch with nature" again.  Morgan doesn't belong among civilized men, neither the boring community-minded types like the settlers nor the evil predatory type like the Venusian criminals--he belongs alone on the frontier.

There are some silly elements to "Paradise Street," and it does remind you of that famous Galaxy ad that derides that species of SF that is just Westerns in space, but it is smoothly written and entertaining.

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All these stories are worth your time.  "Heir Apparent," "Promised Land" and "Paradise Street" all have action and revenge elements, and all talk about imperialism and colonialism, how individual human beings and the government deal with exploring and conquering and exploiting new territories; "Heir Apparent" and "Promised Land" also do the thing that Malzberg told John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding, SF should do, explore how technology is "consuming" people, taking away their individuality and their ability to control their lives.  (See Malzberg's essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971," in which our pal Barry recounts his meeting with Campbell; I know I have recommended it before--it is a great essay for those of us interested in both Golden Age and New Wave SF.) 

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Squint or click to read about these Dell offerings

The last four pages of my 1979 copy of Judgment Night consist of ads for the Dell SF line.  Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake gets a page to itself, complete with glowing blurbs from Frank Herbert and Robert Silverberg and a sort of poorly reproduced illustration of a young lady grasping a scaly writhing phallic symbol.  I liked McIntyre's short stories "Recourse, Inc." and "Only at Night," (the techniques she used to tell these stories were quite good) and Dreamsnake won the Hugo and the Nebula, stamps of approval from the people and the pros, so I should probably consider reading it.

D. F. Jones's novel Earth Has Been Found also gets a page to itself (no blurbs, though.)  I thought it was funny that the marketing people at Dell thought that SF readers would be excited by the thought of a story about "California's finest doctor."  Gordon Dickson's novel about astronauts going to Mars, The Far Call, is another item that gets the full-page treatment; "undersecretary for space" sounds a little dry, but next to "best sawbones on the Left Coast," maybe it's not so bad.

If your criteria is efficiency, the best of the four ad pages is the one with a list of thirteen books.  I have a (peripheral, I admit) familiarity with a few of these.

For New Wavey, literary SF types, Dell offers Michael Bishop's Stolen Faces, which Joachim Boaz declared "a near masterpiece," and Richard Lupoff's Space War Blues (I read the ambitious and dense 90-page short story upon which this novel is based in my hardcover copy of Again, Dangerous Visions) and John Varley's The Ophiuchi Hotline, which I read before I started this blog and thought was alright.

Dell has stuff for the sword & sorcery and planetary romance fan as well.  I assume I read The Silver Warriors by Michael Moorcock decades ago (I know I owned a copy, which my brother probably still has back in New Jersey, greatest state in the union) but I can't remember any specifics about it; it is the second of the Erekose books and sometimes printed under the title Phoenix in Obsidian.  I actually remember the first Erekose book, more or less (I compared it to Edmond Hamilton's A Yank at Valhalla last year.)  I enjoyed all those Eternal Champion books in my teens, and often think about rereading them.  Flashing Swords #4 includes Moorcock's "The Lands Beyond the World," which I think makes up a third of the Elric book The Sailor on the Seas of Fate.  Flashing Swords #4 also includes one of the component stories of Jack Vance's delightful Cugel's Saga (AKA Cugel: The Skybreak Spatterlight.)  I own a copy of Andrew Offutt's Ardor on Aros, but haven't read it yet--I am interested in Offut's work, but I have got the idea that Ardor on Aros is a spoof, not a sincere adventure story, and this has put me off a little bit.  I read the first two Callisto novels by Lin Carter in the 2000 ibooks omnibus edition; they were mediocre.  Ylana of Callisto, according to isfdb, is the seventh Callisto book--I guess people were buying them.

Comments are welcome on all the advertised books, as well as on C. L. Moore, of course.

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More SF from 1940s magazines in out next episode!

Penultimate ABC: Eric Frank Russell, Clifford Simak, William Tenn & Helen M. Urban

Onward through the alphabet!  Today's chunk of Tom Boardman, Jr.'s 1966 anthology An ABC of Science Fiction covers those stories by writers representing the letters R, S, T and U.  Russell and Simak are prominent writers (titan of SF publishing John W. Campbell, Jr. once told Alan Dean Foster that Russell was his favorite writer, while Simak in the 1977 was the third person awarded the title Grandmaster) with whom I am somewhat familiar, while Tenn I have heard of but never read and Urban I don't know that I have ever heard of.

"Love Story" by Eric Frank Russell (1957)

Back in 2016 we read The Best of Eric Frank Russell; "Love Story," which first appeared in Astounding, was not in that collection.  It was reprinted, however, in Microcosmic Tales, a collection of 100 short-shorts, and similar German collections.

As short-shorts go, "Love Story" is inoffensive; it is competent filler, and I'm grading it "acceptable."  It is not really a science fiction story, though, more like a mainstream story set in the future, that could probably have been set in ancient Rome or Victorian Britain or something.

"Love Story"'s four pages relate a conversation between General Romaine and his colleague (I guess his aide-de-camp or something) Harding.  (General Romaine's hick cousin Iceberg and his snobby brother-in-law Arugula do not appear in this story.)  Romaine has to send three regiments (these are big regiments, with six thousand men each) from the Centauri region to the newly acquired Sirius region, and he is annoyed that so many men are trying to get out of going because they don't want to leave their wives and families.  He thinks a spaceman should renounce love, "as if he were a monk" and devote himself to serving Earth and dominating the cosmos.  Romaine goes on in this anti-love vein for a while, and then Harding points out a letter from a Sergeant Amadeo who says he doesn't want to leave Centauri because he had hoped to dedicate his life to the Centaurian Guard and doesn't want to be reassigned to the Sirian Holding Force: "they have taken away my helmet-badge, the silver horse of Centauri...."  This is a kind of love Romaine can respect, and he grabs the phone and pulls strings to keep Amadeo in his current unit and even sets Amadeo on the path to becoming a commissioned officer.

The figure on the DAW paperback of Microcosmic Tales looks like
a dude who is sick to death of hearing allegedly funny short-shorts

"Love Story" isn't exactly impressive, but it achieves its goals and is not irritating, so it is better than the last four stories we've read in An ABC of Science Fiction.     

I'm all for ladies running around in their underthings,
but if there is going to be any welding,
maybe throw on a bathrobe or something

"The Fence" by Clifford Simak (1952)

In my New Jersey youth and in my New York days I read lots of Simak's novels.  Simak is a good writer, but I haven't read much by him since this blog sprang from my cabeza fully armed like some kind of quixotic literary Minerva because I got kind of sick of his sentimentality and his famous "pastoral" attitude.  This "pastoral" attitude, as far as I could tell, manifested itself as a belief that rural life is better than city life and the world would be better off if the only inhabitants were animals, robots and stone age Native Americans.  A good example of where Simak is coming from is his 1953 story "...And the Truth Shall Make You Free," which I read back in 2014 (the blog post at the link includes an extended version of my anti-Simak spiel.  You can cut out the middle man and read the magazine version of "...And the Truth Shall Make You Free" yourself at the internet archive in an issue of Future Science Fiction with a very effective cover that features some of our favorite things--a gun, a skull, a space suit, and a healthy-looking blond.)

Earlier this year I considered embarking on a personal Frederik Pohl renaissance, Pohl being another author whom I read a lot of in my Garden State youth, but Starburst cooled me on the idea, and "The Bitterest Pill" hasn't reignited it.  Maybe "The Fence" is going to get me to (re)read some Simak novels?  The one I have fondest memories of is Heritage of Stars, but the one I actually own is The Visitors.  Well, let's see.

"The Fence" is a story about a writer who is worried nobody will ever read the stuff he spends hour after hour laboriously researching and writing!  That is hitting a little too close to home, I daresay!

It is the far future, so far that people don't have to work for money or food, murder is almost unthinkable, and the idea of marrying a woman and having kids with her seems "just a bit obscene" to our protagonist, Craig the historian.  Craig has a machine that can view the past, and he is conducting a detailed survey of events taking place in a single acre over thousands of years.  But lately his work seems a waste of time, and his Personal Satisfaction rating (P. S.) has dipped from 120 last year to a mere 75.  (P. S. scores are reported on a ticker tape that everybody can see.)  Craig goes to see a shrink, makes little progress, goes for a walk.

On his walk Craig meet a guy who is living "off the grid."  This joker, Sherman, says that people have it too easy now, that everything is handed to them so they feel no real satisfaction.  Sherman makes his own way, growing his own vegetables, trapping rabbits in snares and catching fish on a hook--he has satisfaction because he doesn't live on handouts.  Craig realizes that he is not sure where all the free stuff like food and clothes and energy that everybody except Sherman takes advantage of comes from, and Sherman subtly guides him to clues that suggest that aliens are keeping the human race as pets, that we are the object of their contemptuous pity.

Here we have one of the few legitimately good stories I've encountered in An ABC of Science Fiction; smoothly written and with gentle jokes that are actually amusing and philosophical ideas that actually deserve respect--thumbs up!  Like so many other stories in this anthology it is a pessimistic piece that portrays humanity as defeated and deceived, but it has a seriousness and maturity about it, and leaves room for a glimmer of hope in the form of Sherman, the man who has decided to live his own life as much as he can in manly defiance of the degrading conditions he finds himself in. 

Simak is giving Brian Aldiss a run for his money in the contest of who has the best story in this anthology.  "The Fence" first appeared in Space Science Fiction and has been reprinted numerous times in various languages.

"Project Hush" by William Tenn (1954)

I've always avoided Tenn's work, I think because I have got the idea he writes sarcastic satiric joke stories like Robert Sheckley and Ron Goulart, two writers I have written off.  I am sick of parodies (when you just imitate something else, like plunking Homer Simpson down in the same milieu as The Prisoner) and I am sick of comedy that is just mean-spirited score-settling with your political or class enemies.  I saw part of a Marx Brothers movie recently, and it just seemed to be about Groucho swindling and physically abusing others with his superior wit.  Am I supposed to identify with Groucho as he humiliates people?  I'm not the kind of person who humiliates people--I am the kind of person who gets humiliated!  I was sympathizing with Groucho's victims!  I like comedy that is based on human fallibility and human relationships.  I laugh every time I see Laurel and Hardy in Block-heads or Chickens Come Home, I love I Love Lucy and the original Flintstones and the first TV version of The Odd Couple (I am told there are other versions)--I can identify with screw ups who have been defeated by life, people who set themselves impossibly lofty goals and fall on their faces in pursuit of them.

My suspicions about Tenn are more a case of my spider-sense tingling than any actual direct or indirect research.  Well, today we conduct a little research in the primary sources!

I guess you could call "Project Hush" a joke story, a satire of government and the military, but Tenn plays it straight and the jokes consist of believable events and realistic dialogue, nothing absurd or over the top.

Our narrator, and his subordinates, are academics who have been mustered into the US Army and are leading the project of building a secret base on the moon from which to protect the USA from foreign attack.  (It is not made clear how a base on the moon will protect us from the USSR or Red China or whoever better than a base in Europe or Japan or something, but might as well just go with it.)  Our heroes secretly cross the void and are setting their dome up on Luna when a recon mission reveals that there is another dome on the Moon already!  Is it aliens?  Is it hostile foreigners?  Throughout the story the narrator has stressed again and again how the Army has striven to keep its moon base effort secret, and the punchline to the story is that the other dome has been set up by the US Navy, which has its own moon base project, just as secret as the Army's.

Marginally good; all the military and technology stuff feels real, as if this were a hard SF story, which I guess it kind of is, and as I have suggested the comedy stuff doesn't distract you from the story.  Maybe I have been unfair to Tenn and should look for more stories by him in my anthologies.  Originally appearing in Galaxy, "Project Hush" has been reprinted many times in compilations of short-shorts and anthologies of humor pieces, as well as Tenn collections.

"The Finer Breed" by Helen M. Urban (1956)

Urban has only six stories listed at isfdb.  After its initial printing in F&SF, "The Finer Breed" only ever appeared here in An ABC of Science Fiction.

"The Finer Breed" appears to be a spoof of advertising, TV and popular psychology, in particular specific verbal strategies or tics emerging at the time it was written.  The sometimes odd grammar and syntax of the story related to use and overuse of comparatives and superlatives (a lampoon of advertising verbiage and its alleged malign influence on ordinary people's grammar, I guess) make the story clunky to read, and its apparent reference to cultural trends from 15 years before I was born shook my confidence that I was really grasping what was going on.  Maybe Urban is referring to a specific TV commercial or ad campaign with which I am not familiar?

Anyway, in the future, government institutions have their own TV channels and ad campaigns—the captain of the police station at the center of this story, Northwest Station, ruefully monitors the TV commercials and programs of a rival station, Center Station, and considers that his station needs a better slogan.  These police organizations don't seem to be dedicated to deterring thievery and murder like we (vainly?) hope today's police are but rather to providing psychiatric services to people who self-diagnose mental problems and call the government up to voluntarily commit themselves to confinement for such infractions as “self expression.”  (Maybe this story is also about the conformity we always hear about when people complain about the 1950s.)  The "clients" who call up describe themselves in the same way people reporting a crime in detective and police fiction always describe a perp: "White; blue eyes; brown hair. five foot nine...."  The squads that collect these clients put on make up and are accompanied by a TV crew so their exploits can be .  (Maybe this story is goofing on the prevalence of TV shows about doctors and police?) 

The twist ending of the four-page story is that the captain of Northwest Station breaks the strange grammar rules of this future and has himself committed.

This story was annoyingly opaque the first time I read it and I was ready to give it a thumbs down, but on a second, more careful, read I think I sort of get it.  I didn't really enjoy it, but maybe somebody more familiar with the cultural artifacts or phenomena which Urban is parodying here might find "The Finer Breed" an amusing or interesting historical document.  Let's call it acceptable.

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A much better batch of stories than the last one.  In our next episode we'll finish our odyssey through the alphabet as represented by SF authors selected by Tom Boardman, Jr.

The Future Is Now conclusion: Dixon, Banks, Russell and Goulart

Here it is, the third and final installment of MPorcius Fiction Log's exploration of William F. Nolan's 1970 all-new anthology of SF stories, The Future is Now.  I own the 1971 Playboy Press paperback edition.

"Hate is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It" by Terry Dixon

Call me crazy, but "Crotch of Mother Death!"
makes me laugh

Dixon has only three fiction attributions at isfdb, all three short stories in anthologies.  The intro to this story includes a page-long block of text from Dixon himself, who quotes Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow and Joanna Russ.  Dixon, it seems, intends "Hate is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It" as a very hostile parody of New Wave stories (or maybe just bad New Wave stories.)  Dixon, in the intro, suggests the New Wave writers try to shock and impress with violence and sex and with literary techniques which may appear new to SF fans but are in fact old hat, and that they are guilty of inflicting upon readers bad poetry, hollow profundity, current slang and ideas which purport to be revolutionary but are in fact banal.

The four-page story itself illustrates Dixon's complaints, employing a multitude of different typefaces and bad puns and absurdist wordplay and references to religious figures, hemorrhoids, unappealing sex and disastrous mother-son relationships.  Lampooning the excesses of innovative literary and art movements is an old game and not a particularly difficult one, but it can be fun (I enjoyed the beatnik scenes in A Bucket of Blood, for example) and Dixon here made me laugh, so I am giving "Hate is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It" a thumbs up!

"Walter Perkins is Here!" by Raymond E. Banks 

Banks, with whose work I am not familiar, has a longish list of short fiction ranging from 1953 to 1970 at isfdb, and then seems to have spent the '70s writing SF porn.  Nolan tells us he made his living as a manager at an electronics firm and of an electronics magazine, and besides SF wrote hard-boiled detective novels.  Sounds like a productive life!

Nolan in his intro warns us that "Walter Perkins is Here!" is "surreal," and it is certainly pointless, generating zero interest and zero emotion.  I hope Banks's pornography is more stimulating than this thing.  In the future everybody carries around a little receiver like an ear bud and can put it in his or her ear to receive sage advice from a supercomputer on every issue great or small.  The computer makes everybody's life smooth by managing careers, sexual relationships, and everything else.

Our protagonist Perkins decides to start ignoring the computer one day, apparently on a whim.  He gets picked up by an ambitious local politician who (somehow) turns Perkins into a celebrity and inspires everybody in the world to stop working and to party all day, every day.  Society will keep on humming because it is the computer who produces food and maintains the roads and so forth.  The pol becomes president.

A waste of time.  For some reason this slice of nothing was included in Abbe Mowshowitz's Inside Information, which I guess is some kind of college textbook on literary explorations of the effect of computers on society, or something.

"The Darwin Sampler" by Ray Russell

Look, it's our old pal Ray Russell with a two-page story.  Nolan's intro here offers a lot of info about Russell; for one thing, our pal Ted White (I actually do like White's fiction and non-fiction, and his work as an editor, so this use of "pal" is not a sarcastic gibe) thinks Russell was Playboy's best ever editor.  Also, Russell wrote the screenplay for X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes!  

In the future of the 1990s, pollution is so bad that scientists have developed a drug that can be injected in people so that they can safely breathe, even thrive on, polluted air.  This drug is administered universally, but nostalgic types want to experience clean air, and procure tanks of oxygen.  They are in for a terrible surprise when they strap on their oxygen masks and their adapted bodies reject the clean air!  Russell structures his tale as a police detective procedural following two flatfoots investigating a death, and we readers don't get the explanation of the setting until the end.

An inoffensive gimmick story that succeeds in its object.  "The Darwin Sampler" was translated for inclusion in Sirius. 

"The Whole Round World" by Ron Goulart

I have always avoided Goulart because I associate him with SF stories that are supposed to be funny as well as books that are adaptations of comics and other media properties like Battlestar Galactica, TekWar, sexy sexy Vampirella and sexy sexy Flash Gordon.  (Women find Flash Gordon sexy, right?)  But today I am embarking on this 68-page story by Goulart in the interest of squeezing every last drop out of The Future is Now.  Nolan spurs me on by telling me that Goulart is like Hemingway and by quoting Avram Davidson's assessment of Goulart as a "mordant" Swiftian who "kills cliches."

"The Whole Round World" starts off as a satire of Hollywood TV production set in a chaotic future world in which the United States military is fighting leftist guerrillas in Latin America; meanwhile, China has just nuked India into oblivion.  A computer predicts that a Tarzan-style TV show will win big ratings so a network exec commissions one, but black activists have just burned down the studio's jungle set (Tarzan be racist, yo), so our hero, assistant Tim McCarey, is dispatched to the walled estate of a rich old guy, Vincent Belgraf; Belgraf is a botany-fan who has a few hundred acres of transplanted jungle on his estate, and it is hoped that the TV peeps can rent some of it for filming.

(Don't worry overmuch about the racial politics of this story, young people--two pages after the blacks burn down the studio lot a white left-wing terrorist group named "The Pallbearers" blows up some android police as well as some private property.) 

Over 50 pages of "The Whole Round World" takes place on the Belgraf estate, and Tim's time there reminded me of Sunset Boulevard.  The estate is inhabited by a bunch of wacky characters, including a gorilla, and the Belgrafs enlist Tim's aide in writing their PR copy.  Forged correspondence plays a role in the plot, as does Tim's being the object of two women's desire.

Vincent Belgraf's nephew Clem, a former "stock-plane racer," aspires to solve the unrest afflicting the United States by taking over the country and crowning himself Emperor.  Once Emperor, Clem plans to solve the unemployment problem through public works projects, primarily the construction of concentration camps where will be interned Chinese, Japanese, Russians, and, of course, Jews: "You really can't have a concentration camp without them."  When Tim arrives Clem is still debating whether blacks should be put in the concentration camps or just exterminated: "...none of the other inmates would want to be in the same concentration camp with Negroes.  You can't blame them for that.  Building separate but equal concentration camps may prove too costly."  Clem needs an army to take over the country, and has been recruiting and training one on the grounds of the estate.  This would-be Bonaparte has already suffered a mutiny among his troops, and during that bit of unpleasantness was so severely injured that his doctor had to transplant his brain into another body--human bodies were in short supply, so, when Tim meets him, Clem's brain is lodged in the body of the gorilla from his uncle's private zoo.

The plot meanders around, focusing on a love triangle: femme fatale Laura, Clem's sister, tries to seduce Tim, but Tim is more interested in Carrie, a secretary who is being blackmailed into working for the Belgrafs.  Finally, there is a second mutiny (not due to any actions of Tim's--Tim does not drive the plot of this story) and Clem is overthrown.

"The Whole Round World" isn't abysmal, but it is a waste of time.  It fails as a humor piece because few of the jokes are funny and the satiric jabs at Hollywood and political extremists are banal and perfunctory.  It fails as an adventure or drama because it is too silly for any suspense or excitement to develop and because Tim and Carrie are characters who lack personality and do little.  The most interesting characters are the villains, Clem, an ambitious man stuck in a gorilla's body who grows increasingly insane as the story progresses, and his horny sister who is always seductively touching her own breasts, because they have powerful motivations and try to accomplish things despite insuperable obstacles, but they don't dominate the narrative enough to make the story engaging.

**********

Let's rank the stories in The Future Is Now from best to worst and break them into three broad categories of Good, OK and Bad, even if directly comparing stories with very different aims--the traditional character- and plot-driven stories like "Earthcoming" and "Damechild" with brief literary experiments like "Hate Is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It" and "Belles Lettres, 2272," for example--is questionable:

THE FUTURE IS NOW SCORECARD

GOOD

"Earthcoming" by Richard C. Meredith

"The Ogress" by Robert F. Young

"Hate Is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It" by Terry Dixon

OK

"A War of Passion" by Tom Purdom

"Damechild" by Dennis Etchison

"The Darwin Sampler" by Ray Russell

BAD

"The Whole Round World" by Ron Goulart

"Belles Lettres, 2272" by Norman Corwin

"Jenny Among the Zeebs" by William F. Nolan

"Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe, Pip-Pop As You Go" by William F. Nolan

"Walter Perkins is Here!" by Raymond E. Banks

"A Shape in Time" by Anthony Boucher

**********

Erudite blogger marzaat encouraged me to read The Future Is Now, and I do not regret doing so; I enjoyed some of the stories and if I didn't like some of them, well, they were by authors important enough to the SF field that it is valuable to have some familiarity with their work.

Back in 2014 marzaat reviewed The Future Is Now, and now that I have committed my own opinions to pixels I am curious to see to what extent we agree and disagree on its contents.

It looks like for the most part we are seeing eye to eye on the stories in The Future is Now.  One big point of disagreement is Terry Dixon's "Hate Is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It."  I actually found it funny, and it seems that marzaat did not.  Marzaat suggests that Dixon's main target in his satire may be Harlan Ellison, which did not occur to me.  Now that I think about it, Dixon's long and self-important introduction to his own story is reminiscent of Ellison, but I'm not sure the actual story is, though I have read only a small portion of Ellison's massive oeuvre.  Marzaat is probably more familiar with Ellison's work than I am.  Marzaat also must be more familiar than I with Alfred Bester; he suggests that the odd prevalence of typographic symbols and pictographs in the stories in this anthology may be due to the influence of Bester.

"A War of Passion" was the first story by Tom Purdom I have ever read, but marzaat has read many of his stories and, in a separate blog post, has an interesting analysis of  "A War of Passion."  Marzaat has actually written a number of posts on Purdom, part of his project devoted to looking at all of Purdom's fiction.

Marzaat's blog is definitely worth a look for SF fans, and he has a wide range of additional interests, offering insightful reviews of books on economics, for example.  Check it out!

**********

So we bid farewell to The Future Is Now and those photos of dolls (there really never was a story that made the cover feel appropriate, was there?)  In our next episode, another book somebody encouraged me to read via the interwebs!

Science Fiction and Fantasy from Playboy: Bradbury, Bloch and Brown

Let's continue our look at the 1966 collection The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy.  Today we'll be looking at stories by Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and Fredric Brown that first appeared in Hugh Hefner's iconic magazine.

"The Vacation" by Ray Bradbury (1963)

Word on the street is that Ray Russell edited The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy (for whatever dumb reason the text just credits "the editors of Playboy.")  In his intro to "The Vacation," Russell pours the praise for his fellow Ray on incredibly thick, telling us "The name Ray Bradbury is synonymous with science fiction" and that Bradbury "singlehandedly" lifted SF "out of the shady demimonde of the pulps, into the respectable world of literature."  I think Bradbury is great and think he deserves most of the accolades he has received, but talk about debatable propositions!  (And again we see Russell's hostility to the genre magazines so many of us adore.  Maybe this is a reflection of the snobbery that was part of the Playboy brand?)

An unnamed man and his wife live in an unnamed city with their son Jim.  The father is a professional, every day putting on suit and tie and commuting to his office.  Mom and Dad are sick of city life, of keeping up with the Jonses, of their friends who aren't really friends, and the newspaper headlines reflect news so bad that they wonder if God is going to eliminate the human race and start over.  One evening the couple wish the human race would just disappear (except them and Jim, of course), and when they wake up the next morning their wish has come true!

The last family on Earth acquires a gasoline-powered handcar and the three of them happily set out exploring America by rail, but will they be happy with the world all to themselves, a world that presents no challenges or responsibilities, on what amounts to a thirty-year vacation?

Bradbury is a poetic sort of writer, and the story is full of brief but evocative descriptions of sounds and smells and sights, verse-like lists of cities and plants and animals, you know what I'm talking about:

They had awakened to the soft sounds of an earth that was now no more than a meadow, and the cities of the earth sinking back into seas of saber grass, marigold, marguerite and morning glory.

.... 

"No.  Let Jim be the last.  After he's grown and gone let the horses and cows and ground squirrels and garden spiders have the world."

Bradbury sets most of the story on a stretch of rail on a Pacific beach, giving himself a lot of sights and sounds to work with.

A good piece of work, but this is what we expect of Bradbury, there's nothing really eye-opening or surprising about it.

"Word of Honor" by Robert Bloch (1958)

The head of the University's School of Dentistry invents a truth gas and flies over the city, dumping the gas on the citizens so that everybody is compelled to be frank and truthful.  A journalist figures out why everything is going haywire--marriages are breaking up, politicians are resigning, a labor union leader has committed suicide, etc.--and is on hand when a storm brews up and the dentist's plane crashes.  The inventor is killed, but the journalist recovers all the guy's supplies and documents intact--the journo can, should he decide to, continue the inventor's work!  The reporter confides in his editor, telling him his plan to spray the gas over Washington and Moscow, arguing he can end war this way.  The editor discourages him, arguing that if people never lied and couldn't keep their true opinions to themselves chaos would result and our whole society would collapse.  The editor makes the journalist promise to forget the whole scheme, but the reporter's promise is a lie.

Acceptable.

"Puppet Show" by Fredric Brown (1962)

In his intro to this one Russell says that Brown composes his novels in his head while riding Greyhound buses cross country.  A cool story if true!

Strangers come out of the desert to the tiny town of Cherrybell, Arizona (pop. 42, says the sign), a man leading a burro and, on the burro, a bizarre figure, a "man" blue and red and skinny and nine feet tall.  Brown entertainingly describes these characters, the town and its citizens, and how they all interact.  You see, aliens have been watching Earth for a long time, and are now giving us a final test to see if we are qualified to join the Galactic Union.  The final test concerns the level of Earthly xenophobia--will Earth people be able to deal with aliens, or, like a few of the many intelligent species in the galaxy, will they suffer an irrational hatred or fear of the alien that renders them unable to get along with the other members of the Union?  The aliens' test, as the story's title hints, includes quite a bit of trickery.

I'm a little tired of trick ending stories, but this one isn't bad.  Judith Merril (whom Ray Russell praises in the microaggression-filled Preface to The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy as "a first-rate writer- anthologist," an "exception that proves the rule" that science fiction and fantasy are mostly written and enjoyed by men) included "Puppet Show" in the eighth volume of her famous Year's Best SF series of anthologies.  Merril and Brown both have names I commonly misspell, and Brown's name is actually misspelled on the cover of the British edition of The Year's Best SF 8, which is confusingly titled The Best of Sci-Fi 4.  See, we all make mistakes!

**********

I feel like there are too many "last man on Earth" stories, and too many "Earth on trial before Galactic Union" stories, but writers like Bradbury and Brown who can actually stick words together to make good sentences and stick sentences together to make good paragraphs can make me enjoy such old ideas and plots.  A good crop today.

More SF from Playboy by famous names in our next episode!

Science Fiction and Fantasy from Playboy: Beaumont and Clarke

In some of the introductory matter in A Sea of Stars, which I was looking over this recent weekend, editor William F. Nolan talks about how Ray Russell brought SF into Playboy.  So now seems an appropriate time to check out some SF from the world famous men's magazine via my copy of 1966's The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy.  I own the 1968 paperback edition, which is a little over 400 pages.

The Preface and editorial duties for The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy are credited to "the editors of Playboy," but according to isfdb it was Ray Russell who was responsible for putting the book together.  In the Preface Russell brags that Playboy changed the SF landscape by being the first "slick" to consistently publish SF, and because Playboy paid much higher rates than the genre magazines.  Russell really sticks it to the SF magazines, claiming they were too "solemn" and "sober" to publish light-hearted stories like "Blood Brother" by Charles Beaumont and too obsessed with realistic science to publish Ray Bradbury's "The Vacation."

Today we'll take a look at four stories from this anthology, two each from Charles Beaumont and Arthur C. Clarke.

"Blood Brother" by Charles Beaumont (1961)

Ugh, a five-page joke story about a vampire who goes to the psychiatrist.  And these are the kind of jokes we get:

"I've been meaning to ask you about that.  Why do you wear it?"

"You ever hear of a vampire without a cape?  It's part of the whole schmear, that's all.  I don't know why!"

It's barely a joke at all!  This dud is followed by complaints about the high price of coffins and replacing white shirts (the blood stains, you know) and then the twist ending in which the head shrinker kills the vampire with a wooden letter opener and then reveals that he too is a vampire.

Back in 2014 when I read Ramsey Campbell's "Sunshine Club" and Michael Bishop's "Gravid Babies" I issued my jeremiad against vampire psychiatrist and werewolf psychiatrist stories, horror joke stories in general, and humor based on references to pop culture.  My aversion to these excrescences has not eased in the years that have passed!  You know how the government compels Breyers to label those of its products that lack a certain amount of milk fat "Frozen Dairy Dessert" instead of "Ice Cream" so picky consumers can avoid them?  Well, I am slapping the "Tepid Derivative Genre Fiction" label on "Blood Brother" so picky readers can avoid it!

Bad!

"The Crooked Man" by Charles Beaumont (1955)

Russell writes a little intro to each story, and in the intro to this one brags that the (unnamed) top men's magazine before the arrival of Playboy refused to publish "The Crooked Man," but Playboy eagerly presented it to the world.

It is the 27th Century.  There are no families and no private homes...and everybody is born in a test tube and lives in a dorm...and everybody is a homosexual!  Well, almost everybody.  The tiny number of heterosexuals are pursued by the police, and if caught given surgery to alter their hormonal balances and brain functions so they cease feeling all those unnatural urges regarding the opposite sex!

This is a switcheroo story, centered on an idea meant to shock you or force you to think in a different way, though Beaumont does try to generate some human drama with a plot-based narrative and lots of verbiage about how scared and confused the main characters are.  The entire story takes place in a bar where men are all hitting on each other and hooking up--or rejecting men's advances, as is the case with our protagonist, Jesse, a straight man who has to pretend to be gay.  Jesse is at the bar to meet his girlfriend, Mina--sounds ridiculous, but  there is so much surveillance in this oppressive society that there is no place else to meet.  "There were no more parks, no country lanes.  There was no place to hide at all...."  Mina comes in disguised as a man, a disguise that is not very convincing.  By the tenth of the story's eleven pages Jesse and Mina are on their way to having their heterosexual brains repaired.

"The Crooked Man"  is the kind of story which was perhaps a big deal at the time it was written, but is now an historical artifact that feels gimmicky.  Just acceptable. 

"I Remember Babylon" by Arthur C. Clarke (1960)

"I Remember Babylon" begins like a memoir, with Clarke reminding us how he came up with the idea for the geostationary communications satellite in 1945.  (A few pages later he plugs his 1951 book The Exploration of Space and his undersea films.)  Clarke then describes his encounter with a man at an official reception at the Soviet Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka (Clarke moved to Sri Lanka in 1956 and spent the remainder of his life there.)  This guy, a failed US TV exec, is now in the employ of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China!  The commies are planning to put a TV satellite over the Pacific and transmit programming to Americans--they'll get American eyeballs by broadcasting pornography (using the Kinsey reports as market research!) and then slip in some propaganda material!  (As an example of the high-brow stuff that will protect the spaceborne network from moral opprobrium, the renegade broadcaster shows Clarke an expertly made film of the 13th-century erotic sculptures on the Konark Sun Temple.)

And that's it; this is more of an idea than a plot-driven story.  Even though it is over fifty years old some of the issues "I Remember Babylon" raises--the pervasiveness and effect on people of pornography and how much influence biased media and inaccurate reporting, particularly those generated by foreign entities, has on the political beliefs and activities of Americans--are at the center of public debate today  Smoothly written, brief, and thought-provoking, I thought this one worth my time.

"Dial 'F' For Frankenstein" by Arthur C. Clarke (1965)

Like "I Remember Babylon," "Dial 'F' For Frankenstein" is more about playing with a provocative idea than telling a story.  A bunch of engineers sit around and talk about the strange events that have been taking place since the new communications-satellite-based worldwide telephone network was switched on at midnight.  It seems that connecting enough computers and electronic devices together has generated a consciousness, and this artificial intelligence, like a newborn baby, is clumsily exploring its surroundings.  American guided missiles have been launched, traffic is snarled because of the erratic behavior of traffic lights, banks and factories have had to suspend operations because machinery and electronics records are going haywire.  Mankind is at the mercy of an amoral child it has unwittingly birthed!

This one feels like a trifle.

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Tossing the inimical "Blood Brother" aside, we see that the three other stories from Playboy we've looked at are more about showcasing ideas than portraying human drama or drawing compelling characters.  And so they feel pretty bland. Well, we'll sample some more of the offerings from The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy in our next installment; maybe they will provide some excitement.

Space voyages with Oliver, Russell, Temple and Neville

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

The 1980 British edition
of A Sea of Space

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I Am Returning" by Ray Russell (1961)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Worship Night" by Kris Neville (1953)

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

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

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

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

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

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

More anthologized SF in our next episode!