Stories by Miller, Jones, Schmitz and Godwin from Spectrum 5

Back in the middle of July I purchased a copy of Kinglsey Amis and Robert Conquest's Spectrum 5, a 1966 anthology of 1950s SF stories; my copy of a 1968 edition has an irresistibly beautiful cover painting by Paul Lehr.

In their introduction, Amis and Conquest defend science fiction from the haters.  After making an appeal to authority (reminding us that C. S. Lewis, Angus Wilson, and William Golding are all SF fans) they get to some more serious literary analysis.  Novelist and James Bond fanatic Amis and poet and Sovietologist Conquest argue that while a good writing style would be nice (they suggest J. G. Ballard and Algis Budrys as examples of SF writers with a good style) it is not essential in SF, as what makes SF what it is is mythic themes (they present Jules Verne as an example here) or ideas (for this they offer the example of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s "Who Goes There," an SF story with "a brilliantly engineered main problem" resolved by an "unexpected but logical solution.")  As for the development of character, another virtue supposedly absent in SF, Amis and Conquest follow the line of Edmund Crispin, who noted that science fiction is about the relationship of humanity to some novel "thing," an invention or alien or cataclysm or whatever.  The character in such a story need not, maybe even should not, be too unusual or complex, because he represents all of mankind, acts as a sort of everyman.  Amis and Conquest's examples here include, again, Verne, as well as H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, the narrator of which represents an ordinary Englishman.

I don't know to what extent I agree with everything Amis and Conquest have to say, but it is a thought-provoking little essay that makes me want to see the essays at the start of the other Spectrum volumes.

Let's read four stories from Spectrum 5 by writers we have already discussed at least a little here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Raymond F. Jones, James H. Schmitz, and Tom Godwin.  All four of these stories appeared in Astounding, which was sort of the flagship for SF that was about science and ideas and didn't necessarily focus on heroic or horrific adventures or prioritize literary style.

"Crucifixius Etiam" by Walter M. Miller, Jr.  (1953)

I loved Miller's 1954 story "I Made You," and liked his 1955 "The Triflin' Man" so I have high hopes for this one!

It is the year 2134, and Peruvian Manue Nanti wants to travel the world and see the sights: Notre Dame, New York skyscrapers, the pyramids of Egypt, the radioactive craters of Russia.  But he needs money to do so.  Solution: signing a five-year contract for a lucrative job on Mars!

On Mars Nanti works as a laborer, swinging a pick!  To breathe the thin air of Mars, laborers like Nanti have artificial lung machines implanted into their bodies.  The risk of using such a machine is that your body will likely forget how to breathe naturally, and your natural lungs will atrophy, and you won't be able to live without the uncomfortable machine, even back on oxygen-rich Earth.  (The engineers have better machines and better working and living conditions and don't run this risk as severely.)

Life for Nanti on Mars is a nightmare--no women, no friends (everybody on Mars is a jerk), the work is exhausting (there is a vague and not really convincing explanation for why they use picks and shovels instead of bulldozers and backhoes on Mars) and the lung machine is like a torture device, the valves pulling painfully at the skin in which they are embedded every time you move or try to breathe naturally.

For most of its 21 pages "Crucifixius Etiam" reads like one of those stories in which the space program is a foolish waste of time and humans aren't fit to live off of Earth--beyond Earth, Earthmen lose their culture, religion, morality, etc.  This is Barry Malzberg territory, and demonstrates that 1) Malzberg is not quite as innovative as he is sometimes considered, 2) pre-New Wave SF and Astounding in particular are not quite so technophilic and optimistic as sometimes considered!  It is also one of those stories in which the government and bourgeoisie abuse the working classes (represented by non-whites like Nanti) and major government and industrial projects, like terraforming Mars, don't have a legitimate goal, but are a scam that serve, as one character in "Crucifixius Etiam" puts it, as "an outlet for surplus energies, manpower, money....if the Project folded, surplus would pile up--[causing a] big depression on Earth."

The ending of Miller's story could be considered a twist--a hopeful and life-affirming twist!  When it is explained to Nanti that he and the other people stuck on the Hell that is Mars are building the first of 300 derricks and associated processing machines that will draw up subterranean frozen "tritium" and convert it to helium and oxygen so that in 800 years Mars will have an Earth-like atmosphere, he accepts his fate and believes his sacrifice is worthwhile.  Nanti sudffers now so that people in eight centuries can live on a beautiful healthy world!  Miller doesn't come right out and say it, but I believe we are meant to see Nanti and his comrades as like Christ, sacrificing themselves for others, and like Moses, unable to enter the promised land to which they are leading humanity; Miller includes priests and rabbis as minor characters, nudging you, I believe, to make this interpretation.

Not bad--Miller's style is good and all the economic, religious, and technological stuff, whether or not any of it is really believable, is interesting and serves a human story.  Anthologists Judith Merrill and Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty would see merit in "Crucifixius Etiam" and reprint the story (in Human? and their The Best Science Fiction Stories series, respectively) in 1954, over a decade before Amis and Conquest did.

"Noise Level" by Raymond F. Jones (1952)

I really enjoyed Jones's novel about disembodied brains, artificial life, and the perils of socialism, 1962's The Cybernetic Brains, so I am also looking forward to this one!

It is the Cold War.  A bunch of physicists are gathered together by the U.S. government under conditions of strict security to watch a film.  The film depicts a twenty-something demonstrating to government officials his anti-gravity device, a thing like a backpack that lets you levitate and fly around!  But during the demonstration the device explodes, killing the young inventor!  The assembled eggheads are told the young inventor was a paranoid with no friends who left no notes or blueprints describing his amazing invention, and they have been summoned to work on the top secret project of studying the wreckage and this genius misfit's library and lab with the goal of rediscovering the secret of anti-grav!

"Noise Level" is a smooth and pleasant read, though some may say it is too long (like 45 pages in my copy of Spectrum 5) and doesn't amount to much: it consists mostly of conversations and throws around concepts like Einstein's postulate of equivalence and metaphors involving whirlpools and signal to noise ratios.  The point of the story is that people get too set in their ways to be able to think outside the box and that being more open-minded is the path to making major breakthroughs.

All the physicists, before seeing that film, thought that anti-grav was impossible.  Some of them maintain that anti-grav is impossible and that the film is a hoax.  But seeing the film convinces some of them that anti-grav is possible--they get to work on the problem and in a few weeks have a working prototype of an anti-grav vehicle that weighs one hundred tons.  The twist of the story is that the film and wreckage and lab are all a government trick, just special effects and props designed to get the country's best physicists to abandon their preconceptions and free their minds so they can develop a technology that will allow us to explore the universe and give us a leg up on the commies.  The sense of wonder ending is the revelation that all the things we think are impossible are in fact possible if we can first convince ourselves that they are possible, which will free our minds and give us a chance, through hard work of course, to make them a reality.

This story is alright, and it has many of the hallmarks of classic golden age SF: a bunch of scientists, a paradigm shift and a sensawunda ending, and the use of trickery and manipulation by an elite group on an inferior group for their own good.  I can't help but find the lionization of elite trickery of the masses, which we see so often in classic SF (Asimov's Foundation stories and Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress are my go-to examples) kind of sick and twisted, but at least this time the victims are a themselves a bunch of geniuses.

"Noise Level" was included in two anthologies published before Spectrum 5, one by William Sloane and one by Edmund Crispin, and was also selected by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss for a 1973 anthology of Astounding material.

"Grandpa" by James H. Schmitz (1955)

I enjoyed Schmitz's 1943 horror tale "Greenface" and his collection of stories about female psychic space cops who manipulate people (or just shoot them, you know, whatever works), Agent of Vega, so I've got no qualms about reading this one.

Cord is a fifteen-year-old boy, a member of the two-thousand strong team preparing planet Sutang for colonization.  Schmitz stories usually portray women in positions of authority, and as the story begins a seventeen-year-old girl is warning Cord that he had better start behaving or the Regent, the head woman in charge of the colony, will have him sent back to his home planet in disgrace.  Don't think that Cord has been smoking crack and playing dice while neglecting his duties, dear reader--Cord is a junior biologist and when he is supposed to be following orders he has been capturing native fauna and studying them in his unauthorized private zoo.  Cord is from planet Vanadia, a world settled relatively recently by humans, and he isn't as enamored of rules and regulations as the Terrans who make up the vast majority of the team's members.  (I thought maybe Schmitz here was trying to remind us of how British people sometimes see Americans and Australians as unruly uncouth cowboys.) 

One of Cord's jobs, apparently, is as a driver, so when the Regent comes by to make an inspection of the Colonial Team's work, Cord drives the vehicles she rides around the colony.  One of these "vehicles" is a native animal, a thing like a giant lily pad, 25 to 50 feet across, with all kinds of tendrils and paddles underwater; people can climb aboard this creature, which the humans call "a raft," and direct its movement.  (All you animal rights activists will be booking flights to Sutang when I tell you that the way one directs a raft is by shooting it with a heat ray pistol--don't get your granola in a bunch, treehuggers, the heat ray is--well, usually--set on low power!)

A dangerous situation arises related to the larger than average raft Cord and the Regent's party are riding (this raft has been christened "Grandpa") and it is Cord who saves the day using his knowledge of biology and his powers of observation and quick-thinking and quick-stabbing.

The real star of this story is the ecology of Sutang--Schmitz does a great job of coming up with and describing interesting alien life forms.  The character of Cord, the slightly subversive teen-aged boy, is fun (he hopes that a disaster will occur so he can be a hero and save his position on Sutang.)  A good story.

"Grandpa" has been anthologized many times, in books edited by Brian Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Martin. H. Greenberg, Gardner Dozois, and still more. A well-regarded classic with something for everybody--alien monsters, the glorification of science and the colonization of the galaxy, people shooting off guns and stabbing enemies with knives, and women who tell you what to do for your own good whom the author doesn't portray as nags but as people we are supposed to admire.

"Mother of Invention" by Tom Godwin (1953)

So far, the stories I have read from Spectrum 5 have been stories that have been widely anthologized, stories that editors and/or readers have been crazy about.  But "Mother of Invention" has only been anthologized by Amis and Conquest, though it has also appeared in the Croat magazine Sirius in 1976 and a Baen collection of Godwin's work with a preface and an afterword by our hero Barry Malzberg.  Maybe this one is weak, or maybe Amis and Conquest have found an overlooked gem?  (It is also possible that this story's length, like 60 pages in my copy of Spectrum 5, has discouraged reprinting.)  Well, let's find out what is up with this one.

"Mother of Invention" starts with a sort of comedy scene, in which a concatenation of factors--including a nagging wife!--leads to a mistake by a technician engaged in inspecting a space ship's "nuclear converter."  This mistake, compounded with additional bad luck, leads to the five men who own the ship being marooned on a virgin planet they discover 30,000 light years away from civilization.

Aurora, the name they give this new world, has a very high percentage of carbon in its make up, and there are diamonds as big as your fist all over the ground and diamond dust in the air which plays havoc with the men's equipment as they search for the uranium and cadmium they need to repair their wrecked space ship. They are under a lot of time pressure, because in seven or eight months a star passing through this system (they erroneously thought this was a binary system--doh!) is going to annihilate Aurora.

Unable to find any uranium, and with their mining equipment ruined by the diamond dust anyway, the five adventurers decide to invent an anti-grav device.  Through dogged persistence, and by keeping their minds open, they accomplish in the wilderness what people in well-appointed labs back on Earth were never able to.  Then, like in an Edmond Hamilton story, they move Aurora itself away from the impending stellar collision and ride the planet back home.

Back in 2014 I read Godwin's novel The Survivors, AKA Space Prison.  As here in "Mother of Invention," in The Survivors a bunch of people find themselves on a barren planet but through hard work not only escape but trigger a paradigm shift and usher in a new period of human history.  "The Mother of Invention" is also like The Survivors in that it is quite bland.  The five explorers in "The Mother of Invention" lack personality, motivation and relationships--there is more human drama and characterization in the jocular little prologue than the main story.  (Maybe Amis and Conquest chose it specifically to prove their point about SF not needing characterization?)  After Schmitz's vivid and fascinating Sutang, Godwin's Aurora is woefully dull.  I gave The Survivors a marginal negative vote, but I'll say "Mother of Invention" is barely acceptable.  Like Jones's anti-grav story, it is very much a classic SF tale about male scientists who, in response to an external impetus, invent a technology that will revolutionize human life, but Jones injects more surprise, fun, and human feeling into his story.

**********

The first US edition of Spectrum 5 has a
wacky collage cover--I think Joachim Boaz
loves this kind of thing!

Godwin's piece is pretty marginal, but these four stories are all worthwhile reads, good examples of SF that glorifies science and technology and tells you that it totally makes sense to take terrible risks and make huge sacrifices to expand the power and reach of the human race.

Spectrum 5 includes eight stories; in our next episode I'll read the four stories in it by SF writers I don't think are quite as famous as Walter A Canticle for Liebowitz Miller, Raymond This Island Earth Jones, James Witches of Karres Schmitz and Tom "The Cold Equations" Godwin.

From James H. Schmitz, Henry Kuttner, and Harlan Ellison: stories about being hunted!

In 1988 Baen Books published an anthology edited by David Drake, Things Hunting Men (a companion to another anthology, Men Hunting Things.)  Let's check out stories from this volume by three writers whose work we have talked about in the past here at MPorcius Fiction Log, James H. Schmitz (remember his stories about the female secret police of the future?), Henry Kuttner (remember his novel of a dangerous criminal who masterminds revolutionary change on Venus?) and Harlan Ellison (remember when he physically attacked Charles Platt?)

Things Hunting Men and the three magazines these stories first appeared in are all available for free at the internet archive; being a fan of classic SF is an inexpensive hobby.

"Greenface" by James H. Schmitz (1943)

In his intro to the story in Things Hunting Men, Drake reminds us that this is Schmitz's first published story, and suggests that he prefers it to Schmitz's interstellar espionage and psychic powers capers.  "Greenface" was printed originally in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown, and has appeared in numerous anthologies and collections, including ones edited by Ray Bradbury and Martin H. Greenberg, as well three different books from Baen--the people at Baen must really think it is a winner!

Hogan Masters is a small businessman just trying to make it in this world of ours!  It is the first season of his venture, Hogan Fishing Camp, a collection of cabins on Thursday Lake he rents to anglers and an ice house in which to store the fish they catch.  Hogan hopes that this inaugural season will be successful enough that he'll be able to get together enough money to marry his girlfriend, Julia Allison.  But one day (by coincidence, the day he decided to drink a few beers in the early afternoon--oh, Hogan, you know that's not good business!) he sees a sort of green blob of protoplasm with tentacles devour a garter snake.  A few weeks later the creature reappears, larger and more menacing, and Hogan is not the only one to see it, proving it's not just the booze messing with him!

"Greenface" is a solid and fun horror/thriller story.  We follow the course of Hogan's Ahab-like weeks-long effort to hunt down the steadily-growing monster, a duel which turns Hogan into a drunk, ruins his business, and wrecks his relationships with Julia and Julia's father.  (Damn you, Greenface!)  Schmitz does a good job with the SF monster stuff (as we expect in an old SF story, Hogan learns all about the monster's idiosyncratic biology and tries to use that knowledge to defeat the creature), the action scenes, and the more psychological character-based guy-who-ruins-his-life stuff.  (Spoiler: John W. Campbell, Jr. told Barry Malzberg that "mainstream literature is about failure" but science fiction is about heroes, success and discovery,* and "Greenface" has an un-Ahab-like happy ending.)

Thumbs up!

*See Malzberg's essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971."

"Happy Ending" by Henry Kuttner (1948)

Here in Things Hunting Men, and when it first appeared in Thrilling Wonder, "Happy Ending" was credited solely to Kuttner, but isfdb credits Kuttner's wife C. L. Moore as a co-author.  "Happy Ending" seems to have been well-received by the SF community--it was included in Bleir and Dikty's The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949 and by Damon Knight in the oft-republished anthology Beyond Tomorrow, as well as other publications.  In his intro to "Happy Ending" in Things Hunting Men, Drake laments that many SF writers fail to grow--their late work is no better than their early work.  Drake says that Kuttner, whose early work was "crude," grew better and better over the course of his career; as a case in point, he notes the structure of "Happy Ending," which is a little unconventional, starting with the ending and then filling us in on how the protagonist got there via flashbacks that ultimately turn upside down our beliefs about what was going on.

(Drake also praises C. L. Moore's Jirel stories, and admits that his own first published story, 1967's "Denkirch," a Lovecraftian thing, was not good.)

"Happy Ending" is a story that, like so many old SF tales, romanticizes science and logic and quick thinking, presents a world-shaking paradigm shift, and strives to give us that old sense of wonder at the boundless possibilities of technology and the future.  And it works!

It is 1949 and James Kelvin is a Chicago journalist spending some time in the warm air of California in an effort to relieve his sinus problems.  He meets a time-travelling robot who tells an unbelieving Kelvin that it needs gold to repair its time travel mechanism--the robot wanted to travel to 1970 but accidentally ended up in 1949.  In exchange for the gold plate from his watch, the robot gives Kelvin a device that can enable him to establish a rapport with the mind of a man in the far far future; people in the future have evolved super intelligence, so by transmitting his problems into a future man's mind Kelvin can receive answers to them.  If he can pose just the right questions to this future brain, Kelvin can become a rich man!  Unfortunately, on his first try the device malfunctions (user error!) and a being called Tharn becomes alerted to Kelvin's temporal mental probing.  The robot warns Kelvin that Tharn is a dangerous android and will now hunt the journalist down!

Much of the story follows Kelvin's use of the device to escape Tharn, who has seven fingers on each hand and wears a turban.  The device works as advertised, allowing Kelvin to read the mind of some guy in the far future and learn how to, for example, teleport or breathe while underwater, very useful skills when you are trying to escape from a relentless android!  As the story proceeds to its mind-blowing conclusion we are forced to revise our assumptions about the motives and even identities of all the characters in this crazy drama.

"Happy Ending" is a fun story, chalk up another success for Kuttner (and Moore?)

"Blind Lightning" by Harlan Ellison (1956)

Iowa-native Drake uses his intro to "Blind Lightning" to brag about how awesome Iowa is and to tell us how he first became acquainted with Harlan Ellison's writing--when a high school English teacher shared with him a copy of Ellison's 1961 collection Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-up Generation, which Drake calls "a stunning volume."

"Blind Lightning" was first published in Fantastic Universe.  When I looked briefly at the scan of the June 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe it was obvious that the version of "Blind Lightning" there was different than the version in Things Hunting Men, with paragraphs in different order, some different word choices, etc.  Hmm....  "Blind Lightning" was included in Robert Silverberg's 1966 anthology Earthmen and Strangers and the 1971 Ellison collection Alone Against Tomorrow; I own paperback editions of both (my 1979 copy of Alone Against Tomorrow is signed by Ellison--envy me, Ellison collectors!) and decided to read the version in Alone Against Tomorrow on the theory that that is the version in my possession most likely to be the one preferred by the author.

Xenoecologist Ben Kettridge, an old man (he's in his fifties!) is alone, exploring a jungle on planet Blestone; his comrades from star ship Jeremy Bentham will pick him up in six hours.  He gets captured by Lad-nar, a nine-foot-tall native barbarian--this monster's species is intelligent, with a language and a religion, but no tools or clothes or buildings.  Blestone is plagued by periodic electrical storms of terrible ferocity, and the natives must hide in their caves during these storms or be killed by lightning.  The storms are of long duration, so the natives typically capture some game to bring into their caves with them, and Kettridge is brought to Lad-nar's cave to serve just this purpose.  Kettridge learns all this because Kettridge and the native can communicate telepathically, to the surprise of both.

While waiting to be eaten Kettridge thinks back to earlier in his career, when he was on a research team which developed some chemical.  The chemical got loose or something and killed 25,000 people.  Kettridge feels guilty about this, and decides to earn some kind of redemption by helping Lad-nar's race, which Kettridge believes to be in terminal decline.  Kettridge is killed by lightning because he gives Lad-nar his elastic lightning-proof space suit so Lad-nar can walk outside the cave.  As he dies Kettridge instructs Lad-nar in how to contact the human exploration team and we readers are led to believe that Lad-nar's race will get help from the humans and not go extinct after all.

This story is just OK.  It is sentimental and melodramatic and the verbiage is a little extravagant, a bit loud and long-winded.  In my experience Ellison doesn't create characters in his fiction; it is always Ellison telling some story that is meant to hammer some idea into you or wring some emotion out of you, and when I read an Ellison story I always hear Ellison's voice in my head, and he is always yelling or snarling sarcastically or putting on some maudlin voice.  (This is where I confess that I don't really like Ellison as a person, and I am afraid it is an obstacle to my appreciating his work.)

I guess the interesting thing about "Blind Lightning" is the prominence of religion; Lad-nar considers the lightning to come from one god and is convinced that the human explorers are even greater gods, while Kettridge prays for help, and is himself a sort of Christ-figure--his walking in the deadly storm (providing a demonstration of the utility of his space suit to Lad-nar) is kind of like Jesus walking on water, and Kettridge dies while showing a race of people how to live without fear and how to get to the heavens.  In the scene in which Lad-nar and Kettridge inexplicably communicate telepathically, we are told that "To Kettridge it seemed there was a third being in the cave.  The hideous beast before him, himself...and a third" and I couldn't help but think the third might be God, trying to build a bridge between these two alien races and give Kettridge a chance to redeem himself.  Of course, I just recently read Gene Wolfe's 1,100 page The Wizard Knight and was just yesterday talking to my wife about U2's October and so have gotten into the habit of turning over every sentence to look for Christian messages, even where you wouldn't expect them, like in Ellison's writing.

**********

Three worthwhile stories.  More old SF tales in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

1965 stories by Larry Niven, Vernor Vinge, Clifford Simak and James Schmitz

I was lucky enough to find a bunch of exciting SF paperbacks for a dollar each on a recent visit to a central Ohio Half Price Books.  Let's get started on the stack with Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr's World's Best Science Fiction: Second Series, the paperback version of World's Best Science Fiction: 1966.  Today, four stories, all from 1965 SF magazines, by some pretty big names in the SF biz.

"Becalmed in Hell" by Larry Niven

The narrator and his comrade Eric spent four months flying to Venus, and are now exploring its dense 600 degree atmosphere from within their space ship.  Eric, I should note, is a disembodied human brain whose nerves are connected to cameras and the rockets and so forth so he can control the ship like it's his own body.  But then, trouble.  Eric can't feel the ramjets, so the narrator has to go out into the deadly Venerean atmosphere to conduct repairs.  But is the problem mechanical, or psychological?

This is a good example of the type of hard SF that seriously tries to figure out what an alien planet might be like and how NASA might try to explore it, a story full of science and engineering. Niven also includes lighthearted references to less realistic SF stories about adventures on Venus and movies about disembodied brains.

Good.

"Becalmed in Hell" first appeared in F&SF and has been widely anthologized; it actually appears in another book I own, Damon Knight's A Science Fiction Argosy, from which we read "Lewis Padgett's" "The Cure" back in 2015.

We read Bayley's "The Ship
of Disaster" in September of last year,
remember?

"Apartness" by Vernor Vinge

I think this may be Vinge's first published story; it appeared originally in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds.  Back in 2015, I praised another early Vinge tale, 1968's "Grimm's Story;" like that story, "Apartness" involves ships, which is fine by me--I can't swim, but I love stories about the sea and one of the things I miss about New York is looking at the ocean and all the ships and boats on the river and in the harbor.  "Apartness" is also a lament about racism and intolerance and man's propensity for war.

It is the post-apocalyptic future!  A nuclear/biological/chemical war has obliterated the Northern Hemisphere; South Africa and South America have somewhat stable, somewhat autocratic, societies with an 18th or 19th century level of technology (muskets, sailing ships--one elite guy has a revolver.)  Australia still has modern technology, but they aren't sharing it, feeling humanity is not ready for it yet.

The narrative follows a South American scientist (he studied in Australia) and his team; they are on board a ship of the South American Empire, on the quixotic mission of searching for Coney Island, which most of the superstitious Latin Americans of the dark future think is a floating island which travels the world (alright! a New York-centric joke!)  The scientists know better, but keep mum--it is not healthy to cross the astrologers who surround the Emperor.  Anyway, the expedition investigates a primitive settlement in Antarctica.  After some tense scenes reminiscent of accounts of Cook's voyages and scenes in which clues are discovered, the scientists learn that these Antarctic villagers are descendants of the few white people who escaped South Africa alive after the blacks won the race war there which followed the cataclysmic war in the North.  In the final scene a South African diplomat expresses the desire to observe the Antarctic tribe and gloat over the fact that South African blacks are now more advanced than the whites who oppressed them generations ago, while the protagonist worries that another apocalyptic war, this one between the African and South American empires, may be inevitable.

This story is well put together, but I've been exposed to so much anti-racism and anti-war material in my life that the story's "meaning" feels a little banal.  People nowadays might accuse the story itself of being racist: the white Australians still have all the knowledge and technology of the 20th century but refuse to share it with the Hispanics and blacks, the Hispanics are ruled by a dictator and a superstitious aristocracy ignorant enough to not know what Coney Island was, and the blacks have an empire which Vinge suggests is animated by vengeful hate.

Moderately good.

"Over the River and Through the Woods" by Clifford D. Simak

"Pastoral" is the word often used to describe Simak's work, and, sure enough, the first scene of this story features a woman in a farmhouse kitchen canning apples.  Two children come to her door, claiming to be her grandchildren.  As we readers realize at once, and the farmer's wife realizes after looking into their bags, these kids are refugees from the future, when aliens are about to take over the Earth.  The kids have brought anti-cancer drugs, which will presumably extend the life of (great-great-) Grandma, whom future records indicate will die of cancer in 1904, just eight years from the present.  Will all this alter history?  Simak raises the question but leaves the answer up in the air.  

Simak often writes these sentimental things suggesting simple farm life is better than urban modern life, and I guess if aliens were killing everybody in the 21st century, the 19th century would look pretty good.  Otherwise, I'm not really on board with his attitude.  It looks like "Over the River and Through the Woods" has come to be seen as representative of Simak's entire body of work.  Ursula K. LeGuin included it in her anthology designed for use on college students, 1993's Norton Book of Science Fiction, and it is the title story of a 1996 collection of Simak stories.  It first saw light of day in Amazing.  

Acceptable.  I can recommend it more strongly to people who enjoy scenes in which people are astounded by zippers and confused by talk of airplanes and rockets.  ("They talked of plains....and rockets--as if there were rockets every day and not just on the Fourth.")

"Planet of Forgetting" by James H. Schmitz

The last time we met James H. Schmitz he was regaling us with stories about female intelligence operatives of the far future. "Planet of Forgetting," first seen in Galaxy, is in the same vein. (Schmitz is one of those writers whom the cognoscenti tell us we should like because he includes strong female characters, and those of us who don't need to spend any more of our brief lives sitting through tendentious preaching are fortunate in that Schmitz's stories--in my experience at least--aren't satires or lectures but straightforward outer space thrillers with a woman slotted into the super spy role.)

Earth intelligence operative Major Wade Colgrave wakes up on an alien planet with amnesia--how did he get here?  As the story's thirty-odd pages unfold we switch back and forth between Colgrave trying to survive on the planet, which is full of weird animals, and flashbacks to the mission that landed him here.  You see, the evil space empire of Rala was preparing to invade the territory of the Lorn Worlds, an ally of Earth, and Colgrave was carrying to Earth the secret dossier on Rala prepared by the Lorneans when his ship was captured by Ralans.  Instead of just imprisoning or murdering him, the Ralans tried to coax him into becoming a double agent, giving him the opportunity to escape in a lifeboat, dossier in hand.  The Ralans catch up to Colgrave and, with the fortuitous aid of the local fauna, he foils their pursuit.

This is an entertaining Flash Gordon/Star Wars type of thing--Colgrave shoots lots of people with his energy pistol, puts on an enemy uniform as a disguise, is menaced by monsters, that kind of stuff.  We've all seen this sort of thing a hundred times, but some of us (including me) still enjoy it if it is done well.  Schmitz also includes fun gadgets in addition to the various types of futuristic guns, like a space suit that can fly in the atmosphere and a sort of man-hunting drone.  The explanation of how Colgrave lost his memory and the implications of this phenomenon are also good.

A solid adventure/espionage story.  (By the way, Colgrave may be a man, but the lead Ralan agent in the story turns out to be a beautiful woman!)

**********

So far World's Best Science Fiction: Second Series is shaping up to be a great collection.  More from its pages in our next episode.

**********

Thank heavens, no, Mr. Cerf.

Because I have an abiding hatred of everything from the 21st century, when my wife wants to hang out and watch TV I usually insist we watch TV shows that are 20 years old, at a minimum.  One of the individuals prominent in the middle of the 20th century with whom we have become familiar thanks to my idiosyncratic viewing proclivities is Bennett Cerf, an important publisher who was a regular panelist on What's My Line? (Libertarian types might find Cerf's memoir of his relationship with Ayn Rand interesting.)  Cerf had a reputation as a humor writer, and actually published numerous books of jokes.  My wife and I find his renown as a funny man incomprehensible, as his jokes on What's My Line are universally terrible, and the stories in the one of his joke books which we picked up at an antiques mall are practically anti-jokes, anecdotes lacking any punchline, like something out of Jim's Journal.

Anyway, it was a cause of great surprise and hilarity in the MPorcius household when I opened my copy of World's Best Science Fiction: Second Series to find Cerf's face smiling up at me from an advertisement for the "Famous Writers School" of Westport, Connecticut.  Whether this ad was included in the book by Ace, or was just used as a bookmark by a previous owner, I don't know, but the ad does include some points of interest to all you SF fans.  For one thing, Rod Serling (whom my wife, a better comedian than Cerf, always calls "Rod the Bod") is one of Cerf's partners in crime at the Famous Writers School, and secondly, a SF author I never heard of before, who nonetheless has a long list of publication credits at isfdb, Robert Lory, credits Famous Writers School with getting his career going.

Submitted for your consideration....

Click the scan below to grok the bright image of Famous Writers School presented to the world by Cerf and his cronies, and then read the Wikipedia article on the school to get a look at the shadowy truth behind the glamour.

Agent of Vega by James H. Schmitz

Not my copy

In 1976, in ancillary matter included in his collection, The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, our man Barry, New Jersey resident and expert on SF history, proclaimed that James H. Schmitz was "the best modern writer of non-modern S-F."  Mercedes Lackey, in an intro to a 2001 collection of Schmitz stories, credits Schmitz with turning her on to SF and setting her on the road to being a successful author herself.  When I read Schmitz's "Lion Loose" and "Goblin Night" back in 2013, I thought the former middling and the latter good.  All reasons enough to read Agent of Vega, a 1960 collection of four (perhaps revised?) Schmitz tales that first appeared in science fiction magazines in the period 1949-51.

My copy

I kind of wish I had the sexy 1972 paperback from Tempo which I spotted at a Half Price Books in Illinois, or the sexy (and phallus-infested--Boris does love his phallic symbols) 1982 paperback from Ace. My copy is the 1962 edition from Permabooks, which I purchased in May in Canton, Ohio.  A previous owner appears to have sliced at the cover with a razor blade and then repaired it with some mysterious black tape.  (I think he or she was trying to remove the large letter "A" from the cover for use in constructing a note demanding ransom, then thought better of embarking on a life of crime.)  This baby is still readable, so let's check out this "fantastic story" of "interstellar espionage" "on a galactic scale" "set centuries" or even "thousands of years" "in the future" which we have every reason to hope stars a gorgeous big-haired babe and some dude with a rifle.

"Agent of Vega" (1949)

The one that started it all!  "Agent of Vega" first appeared in Astounding and seven years later was included by Andre Norton in her anthology Space Police.

It is the far future and the human-led Vegan Confederacy is trying to manage "eighteen thousand individual civilizations" spread across the galaxy.  The Department of Galactic Zones is the Vegan Confederacy's secret police force, and one of its top operatives is Zone Agent Iliff.  Iliff is sent to planet Gull to help one of Vega's few non-human agents, a new recruit by the name of Pagadan, a member of the race of telepaths known as the Lannai.  The Lannai may not be human, but Pagadan looks exactly like a hot chick with a head of hair that resembles "a silver-shimmering fluffy crest of something like feathers."  (It looks like Boris actually read the book!)  

Pagadan has stumbled upon an operation by noncorporeal parasitic aliens to take over the galaxy!  These aliens, the Ceetal, can take over your body and they have already infiltrated the elites of almost one thousand star systems!  To stop this conspiracy Iliff and our girl Pag do the stuff you expect people to do in detective stories, like putting on disguises, interrogating people, getting captured, and escaping.  It turns out the Ceetal have taken over the body of the galaxy's master criminal, a genius psyker and space pirate whom Iliff has been chasing his entire career!  In a blistering final battle involving space armor, ray guns, high tech booby traps and psychic blasts, Iliff and Pagadan defeat the pirate and save the galaxy.

The first page of my copy includes an excerpt from the title story

This story has lots of fun SF elements, from robots to alien monsters to all kinds of technological and psychic jazz, and social justice types may appreciate that a "woman" (actually an alien who looks like a beautiful woman) is the hero as well as the tolerance/diversity subplot--Galactic Zones wants to include more aliens in the upper levels of the Vegan Confederacy and is opposed by the faction of "Traditionalists" until Pagadan saves the galaxy and uses her feminine and psychic wiles to win over some key conservatives.  There is also a pervasive theme of people secretly manipulating their inferiors: the Vegan Confederacy is always manipulating planetary societies, Galactic Zones manipulates the other departments of the Vegan Confederacy, Iliff's superiors manipulate him psychologically, the Ceetals and Lannai invade people's minds to control them, etc.

On the bad side, I thought Schmitz's style a little difficult to follow, and that the way he constructed the plot sapped much of its potential for suspense and excitement. Instead of following Iliff and/or Pagadan closely so the reader learns the truth of what is going on as the heroes learn it, Schmitz includes lots of scenes from the points of view of the Ceetal and from that of Iliff's supervisors, so that we readers know more than the protagonists.  Further distancing us from the action are Schmitz's practices of providing information via a recitation of government reports and having some tense scenes described in dialogue after the fact.

Not bad, but not great.

"The Illusionists" (1951)

According to Wikipedia, "The Illusionists" is a later title for the story "Space Fear," which appeared originally in Astounding.  The copyright page of my edition of Agent of Vega implies the stories appearing therein may have been rewritten by Schmitz for book publication; instead of simply listing story titles and original places of publication, readers are alerted that Agent of Vega is "based upon" earlier (unspecified) work that appeared in Astounding and Galaxy.  Though the last written of the four, "The Illusionists" appears as the second story in this book.

Padagan, now a full-fledged Zone agent herself, is in the Ulphi system, her heavily-armed and super-fast one-man ship serving as bait for Bjanta space pirates.  (The Bjanta are hideous arthropodic people who regularly prey on innocent planets.)  While in the Ulphi system Pagadan uncovers a horrible conspiracy on the human-inhabited planet that orbits Ulphi--somebody has achieved the ability to control the minds of millions of Ulphins and made himself secret dictator!  In order to keep the Ulphi system isolated he has hypnotized the planet's entire population so that they suffer "space fear," a phobia that makes it impossible for them to leave the planet.

The issue of Astounding which featured "Space Fear" and the Baen collection which
includes all four stories we're talking about today, plus the aforementioned
essay by Mercedes Lackey; dig Bob Eggleton's interpretation of Pagadan and her feathery coiffure. 

Pagadan runs a complicated scheme in which she uses a Vegan academic currently resident on the Ulphin planet as bait (without bothering to obtain affirmative consent to this exploitation!) to trick the dictator into leaving the planet.  The academic is a member of the Traditionalist faction, which is skeptical about letting non-humans have positions of influence in the Vegan Confederacy and suspicious about the Department of Galactic Zones' lack of transparency and accountability, so I guess it is poetic justice that non-human Pagadan from Galactic Zones exploits her and then rescues her. For good measure Pagadan invades her mind and shatters her Traditionalist beliefs by bringing to the surface subconscious knowledge that she is not quite full-Vegan human.  

I could voice the same criticisms of  "The Illusionists" that I did about the first story; there are plenty of good SF ideas, but the style and structure weaken the story, making it a little hard to follow and draining it of emotion; there are lots of scenes of minor characters yapping and reading government documents, and action sequences which we learn about second hand through dialogue.  The most thrilling scenes are those in which the Traditionalist woman uses her anti-grav devices and hand to hand combat skills to escape a mind-controlled mob.

OK.

"The Truth About Cushgar" (1950)

In this story, which first appeared in Astounding, we learn that the Vegan Confederacy isn't the only interstellar political unit in the galaxy; in fact there are several rival organizations with jurisdiction over hundreds or more systems.  Cushgar is one such empire, one far more exploitative than Vega.  In the first page of the story we learn that the Department of Galactic Zones has managed to subdue Cushgar and install Vegan governors over all the Cushgar planets, all without resorting to war.  How?  The other departments of the Vegan Confederacy don't even know!  But we readers learn!

"The Truth About Cushgar" is the tale of Zone Agent Zamman Tarradang-Pok, a female member of an isolated strain of humanity, the Daya-Bal, that evolved on its own for some centuries into a beautiful elfish race.  We learn her story largely through second hand accounts from other characters and from flashbacks.  Zamm (as everybody calls her) was a young mother on vacation with her husband and son on a luxury space liner when the liner was captured by space pirates.  She was left behind when her husband and son were taken captive by the escaping pirates, who left no clues to their identity or place of origin; Zamm doesn't even know if they were human or alien!

Since that terrible day seventeen years ago Zamm has been hunting the galaxy and her own mind for clues that might lead her to the culprits and her enslaved family members.  As an agent of Galactic Zones she zips hither and yon, capturing space pirates and interrogating them.  In an eldritch bit of psychological wizardry, she has had lifelike robot replicas of her son and husband made--talking to and caressing these simulacra triggers vivid memories, and as Zamm relives the traumatic attack on the luxury liner a psychology robot taps into her brain, seeking just one vital clue to the identity of the kidnappers!  These repeated brain scanning sessions threaten to drive the psychologically scarred Zamm over the edge into total insanity!

Back cover of my copy, which includes an
excerpt from "The Truth About Cushgar."

Finally, Zamm finds the clue she needs, and heads to the heart of the Cushgar empire to rescue her family. While Zamm is in suspended animation ("deep rest"), the craft of other Galactic Zones agents, among them Pagadan, join her ship, forming a flotilla of vessels disguised as "ghost ships."  The Cushgar people (like the Daya-Bal, evolved humans, but evolved to be ugly and evil, not cute and sweet) are very superstitious, and the appearance of ghost ships leads them to surrender.  When Zamm wakes up she finds her husband and son have been liberated and the Cushgar tyranny defanged!

This is the best story in Agents of Vega so far; Zamm the distaff outer space Captain Ahab is a more interesting character than Pagadan or Iliff, and the scenes of terror and violence in this one are better, much more exciting.  (When an insanely envious scientist is holding his more successful brother in shackles, Zamm rescues the good brother by blowing the head off of the evil brother with a pistol; this is the kind of activity we look for in genre literature, isn't it?)  The style is also better; the story flows more smoothly and is easier to follow.  The somewhat silly ghost ship gimmick kind of comes out of left field and it is a little disappointing that Cushgar turns out to be a paper tiger, but this questionable means of resolving the plot only takes up the last fifth or so of the 38-page story, and of course is in the hard SF tradition of characters using superior knowledge and intelligence to trick their adversaries.

Good.

"The Second Night of Summer" (1950)

"Second Night of Summer" was
a Galaxy cover story

This caper stars a minor character from "The Truth About Cushgar," Zone Agent "Grandma" Elisa Wannatell of planet Noorhut.  For their own good, Grandma uses high technology and hypnotism to manipulate the people of Noorhut, who have a kind of 18th or 19th century technology--Grandma's aircar is even disguised as a beast-drawn wagon.

The plot of "The Second Night of Summer" reminds me of some kind of Warhammer 40,000 wargame scenario: malevolent extragalactic aliens, the Halpa, are about to teleport onto Noorhut and Grandma has to keep the human inhabitants of the planet ignorant of the threat and ambush the teleporting monsters.  If the Halpa start taking over the world the eight Vegan Confederacy battleships orbiting above (unbeknownst to the Noorhuttians) will use their extermination weapons to sterilize the planet.  We are informed that the Vegan government has already done this to over one thousand Halpa-infested planets over the last few millenia.

This story feels short and concise; it isn't overburdened with too many minor characters like the other three stories in Agent of Vega.  The Halpa are unusual, interesting aliens, and the details of the war between the Vegans and Halpa are also well thought out. Though it lacks the compelling emotional content of "The Truth About Cushgar," it vies with that story for title of best in the collection.

I like it!

**********

The four stories in Agent of Vega are entertaining specimens of traditional SF in which elites who callously manipulate the hoi polloi fight space pirates and hostile aliens with starships, ray guns and psychic powers.  Schmitz is good at presenting all the SF gadgetry and concepts we love.  Maybe 21st century readers will find Agent of Vega attractive because it is women who are manipulating the commoners, crossing the galaxy in search of revenge, hanging out with robots, and mowing people down with energy weapons.  These four tales are a worthwhile read for classic SF fans and people who want to investigate the conventional assertion that SF from the past is irredeemably sexist.

**********

The last page of my edition of Agent of Vega, Permabook M 4242, is an ad for a book, but not a science fiction book.  It's an ad for Hillel Black's Buy Now, Pay Later, a warning about the dangers of consumer debt!  For a quote from Buy Now, Pay Later check out libertarian luminary Virginia Postrel's November 2008 column in The Atlantic about consumer credit; spoiler alert--Postrel doesn't think consumer debt is anything to get too excited about.

Six more from The Best of Barry N. Malzberg

Back cover of my copy

After a short break it is back to The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, published in 1976 and containing 38 stories, all published in the 1970s, as well as lots of fascinating discussion of SF and the (genre) literary life.

Intro to "Revolution"

Back in 2011 Joachim Boaz and I both read "Revolution" in Future City so I am skipping it today.  You can read our efforts to figure it out at the link; much of the discussion is in the comments.

In the intro to "Revolution" in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg the author talks about and engages in SF criticism.  He praises Damon Knight, James Blish and Algis Budrys for their criticism, and laments that most SF readers don't take the genre seriously and don't care about criticism.  (It is not just SF readers who think criticism is a load of crap; flipping through T. S. Eliot's letters recently I found a 1922 quote from George Santayana in the footnotes to a letter from Eliot to Norbert Wiener dated 6 January 1915: "Criticism is something purely incidental--talk about talk--and to my mind has no serious value, except perhaps as an expression of the philosophy of the critic.")  Contra Santayana, Malzberg thinks that SF will stagnate without serious criticism.

Malzberg then lists whom he thinks are the best "modern" SF writers, splitting them into two categories.  Category 1 is "modern SF," and he crowns Robert Silverberg as the absolute best "modern writer of modern S-F."  "Running close behind" Silverberg are Thomas Disch, Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Fred Pohl.  Category 2 is "non-modern" SF, which he assures us is "not necessarily an inferior form."  The best "modern writer of non-modern S-F" is James H. Schmitz, with Poul Anderson a "close second."  What Malzberg means by "modern" in the two contexts in which he uses the word is not exactly clear.

I, and most readers of this blog, could probably spend hours disputing or defending these lists and puzzling over how Malzberg arrived at these rankings; readers should feel free to voice their opinions in the comments, but I don't have the energy to attack this thorny issue in this blog post today.

"Ups and Downs" (1973)

"Ups and Downs" was first published in Eros in Orbit, an anthology of SF stories about sex.  Malzberg jocularly mentions that there were two anthologies of science fiction stories about sex published in 1973; maybe he means Strange Bedfellows, which was published in late 1972?  (There is an ad for Strange Bedfellows in my copy of the April 1973 issue of F&SF.)

The year is 1996 and Jules Fishman is the sole astronaut on the first manned (or, as the feminists say, staffed) flight to Mars!  (Always down on the space program, Malzberg hints that the trip is an election year stunt meant to protect the incumbent.  Maybe in 2020 we'll be seeing a rocket of deplorables lifting off for the red planet.)  Jules unexpectedly finds a beautiful young woman is also aboard the rocket; this chick is incredibly horny and they have sex several times a day.  Jules begins neglecting his important duties, he is so busy engaging in what we like to call "horizontal refreshment."

Jules figures some kindly bureaucrat secretly requisitioned a woman for inclusion on the flight, to make the month-long (and that's just one way!) journey to Mars more comfortable.  Of course, we readers just assume Jules is going bonkers and hallucinating this woman.  Jules is sex-obsessed; in a funny flashback when he learns the trip will last two-and-a-half months total he worries that he won't be able to handle such a long period of abstinence--he is accustomed to having sex four or five times a week!

"What about masturbation?" I wanted to ask.  "Is this a plausible activity, or will the sensors pick up the notations of energy, the raised heartbeat, the flutterings of eyelids, the sudden congestion of my organ and beam all of it back to Earth to be decoded to a stain of guilt." 

I was a little disappointed that this one petered out at the end; Jules doesn't crash the rocket into Mars or Chicago or even Deimos or Phobos, which he thinks are artificial satellites built by a lost high-tech Martian civilization.  The real climax of the story is when he tries to develop a real human relationship with the woman on the ship, asking her her name, what her childhood was like and about her dreams and so forth, and she refuses to tell him anything.  Is Malzberg doing that Proust thing (you can never really know another person) or that feminist thing (men only care about women as sex objects and treat them as mere commodities)?  Maybe both?  Either way, "Ups and Downs" is pretty good.

"Bearing Witness" (1973)

In his intro Malzberg compares "Bearing Witness," first published in Flame Tree Planet and Other Stories, to "Track Two," which appears later in this volume and which I read and blogged about in February of 2015.

A man, not a Catholic himself, thinks he has detected signs that Judgment Day and the Second Coming are imminent, so he tries to get an audience with Catholic authorities, hoping for advice.  The priesthood and Catholic administrative apparatus, whom Malzberg depicts as more interested in bread and butter politics than the spiritual world, try to ignore and avoid the narrator.  On the last page of this three-page story the narrator climbs atop an automobile and addresses a crowd of people in the street, believing himself to be the risen Christ.

I'm bored with stories that offer shallow criticisms of Christianity, and this story felt like a trifle to me.  (I am an atheist, and as a youth I took the line that religion was a menace because it filled people's minds with a lot of nonsense.  Then I went to college and realized that people eagerly fill their minds with any kind of nonsense that comes to hand, and of all the nonsense available in the 20th and 21st centuries, Christianity and Judaism are among the most benign.  As I get older and older I find myself more and more in the position of what you might call a Christian sympathizer.)  Acceptable, but perhaps the weakest yet story in this collection.

Intro to "At the Institute"

I'm skipping "At the Institute" because I read it in 2015 (the same day I read "Track Two," it appears.  Reading that old blog post is fun because in it I express my fervent hope of owning a copy of The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, and now, over a year later, I do.  Dreams can come true, kids!) 

In his intro to "At the Institute" Malzberg talks a little about these stories of his in which people get therapy by having a machine facilitate the experience of vivid and crazy dreams, and how such devices are very plausible, considering recent scientific developments.  He cites SF writer Peter Phillips as being one of the first people (in the 1948 Astounding story "Dreams are Sacred") to use this literary conceit.

"Making it Through" (1972)

In the intro to this one Malzberg commends his friend, editor Roger Elwood, and his uncle, Dr. Benjamin Malzberg, author of such works as Mental Disease among Jews in Canada and The Mental Health of the Negro.  For decades Dr. Malzberg was Director of Research and Statistics at the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene.

In case you were wondering, I have an uncle who worked in a machine shop.  I worked in a machine shop myself for a little while; I didn't find all that noise and all those dangerous blades and drills very congenial.

"Making it Through" appeared in Elwood's And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire and Other Science Fiction Stories and brought to mind Malzberg's "Out of Ganymede," which I should probably reread.  Our narrator is the second-in-command of the crew of a two-man mission to Jupiter.  Jupiter is inhabited by arthropods who emit a ray which drives humans insane; they have already driven batty the crews of three ships.  The Earth wants to take over Jupiter, and so the narrator and his Captain are flying a specially shielded ship loaded with atomic bombs--their mission is to exterminate the arthropods.  The Captain goes insane and wants to turn back and use the nuclear weapons on his fellow humans; when the narrator ties him up, the Captain claims they are on a mission to merely study the arthropods, that the weapons are just a last ditch self-defense measure; the Captain insists it is not he but our narrator who is insane!

The narrator nukes Jupiter, and then wonders if perhaps the entire human race might be insane, and the ray of the Jovian arthropods their charitable effort to cure us!  

I like it.
    
"Tapping Out" (1973)

"Tapping Out" first appeared in Future Quest, an anthology aimed at kids.  In his intro to the story Barry muses that "juvenile" SF may actually have a bigger audience and influence than "adult" SF, and, citing "the phenomenal works by Robert A. Heinlein in the 1950s," considers the possibility that the best SF has been written in the juvenile category.

This story has almost the same plot as "On Ice," but with less rape and incest.  (Nota bene: "Less" does not mean "zero.")  A 17-year old boy has a mental problem, so his parents pay a packet of money to get their kid hypnodream therapy.  In the therapy sessions he murders his father and his therapist and "has his way" with a girl.  The therapist says that, since he is using the sessions as recreation rather than therapy, that hypnotherapy treatment will be ceased and the narrator sent to a conventional hospital.

This story is alright, but lacks the layers of meaning and the extreme sex and violence that make "On Ice" so remarkable.  It's like "On Ice" with training wheels!

"Closed Sicilian" (1973)

Whoa, Barry got the cover illo!

In his intro to this story, which first appeared in F&SF, Malzberg talks about fiction about chess.  He praises Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense (the edition I read was just called The Defense) as a "great work of literature."  He also admits that he'd rather be a professional chess player or symphony violinist than a writer, reminding me of the section on Malzberg in Charles Platt's Dream Makers, in which Platt experiences Malzberg's poor chess playing and painful violin scraping.

(Jokes about violins always make me think of Jack Benny, of course, and the portion of Casanova's memoirs in which Casanova is a violinist--Volume 2, Chapters VI and VII, in the Trask translation covers this period, I think late 1745.  This is also the period of Casanova's life in which he suffers and perpetrates many outrageous practical jokes; in Chapter X, in 1747, Casanova even digs up a corpse as part of a joke.)

I read "Closed Sicilian" in my copy of The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg back in 2011 and wrote two lines about it in my Amazon review of that collection.  I thought it was one of the better pieces in that collection, and in his intro Barry suggests it is one of his most successful stories, so I decided to reread it today.  

It really is one of Malzberg's better stories, tight and with real human feeling. Professional chess players, former childhood friends, are engaged in an important match before a large audience.  Through flashbacks we learn of the narrator's life, his relationship with his opponent and how, over the years, his obsession with chess lost him his humanity and apparently his sanity--he believes that this big match will determine the outcome of a war between the human race and evil aliens, and that his friend is a traitor to Earth, playing for the aliens.

"Closed Sicilian" would be expanded into the novel Tactics of Conquest.

"Linkage" (1973)

In his intro to "Linkage" Malzberg discusses the fact that (he says) literary critics dismiss science fiction as merely the "grandiose versions of the fantasies of disturbed juveniles;" while SF claims to be investigating possible human futures it is in fact childish "power fantasies."  Barry offers a very tepid defense of SF, admitting that (in his opinion) most SF is severely lacking in "literacy and technique," even if much SF does present valid ideas.

"Linkage," first presented to the public in the anthology Demonkind, is four pages long and feels like a response to such stories as Jerome Bixby's famous "It's a Good Life" and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore stories like "Absalom" and "When the Bough Breaks," stories about children with super powers who represent the next stage of human development and may very well be a menace to us poor homo sapiens.  The narrator of "Linkage" is an 8-year-old kid who has been put into an insane asylum because he claims to have psychic abilities that allow him to do anything (like the kid in "It's a Good Life") and to have been visited by people from the future who tell him he is the first of a new human species, homo superior, (like in "When the Bough Breaks.")  Of course, this being a Malzberg story, the narrator is obviously insane and obviously has no superpowers.

"Linkage" has what I am considering a shock twist ending--I think it is one of the very few Malzberg stories which may actually have a happy ending!  In the last paragraph we receive hints that the narrator is going to start cooperating with his therapist and abandon his delusions about future aliens and mental powers!  Of course, the waters are a little muddy, with Malzberg leaving open the possibility that the kid is going to pretend he is cured simply to escape the asylum and have sex and start propagating the superior race of whom he is the first, but I think I am going with the happy ending interpretation, because it is such a surprising departure for Malzberg.

Not bad, but not as fun and exciting as the apparent source material, the three stories I cited by Bixby and Kuttner and Moore.  So much of the culture of my lifetime is mockingly or dismissively derivative--South Park and The Simpsons lift memorable elements or entire plots from other works in order to goof on them, classic legends and iconic pop culture stories are retold with a diversity reshuffling of the main characters--but the new work rarely matches the power of the original, and often feels petulant or lazy.

**********

I respect Malzberg and enjoy his work, but there is a limit to how many stories narrated by insane people I can take in a short period of time, especially since Malzberg isn't the kind of writer who writes in different voices or tones; there is a sameness to his work that can become monotonous.  So, time for an extended break. The next few episodes of MPorcius Fiction Log will cover adventure capers which (I hope) feature dinosaurs and people fighting with swords.  But don't worry, Malzberg fans, barring sudden death on the road we'll get back to The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.   

“Goblin Night” by James Schmitz

Yesterday I read James Schmitz’s “Lion Loose” and was disappointed that it did not live up to the accolades SF authorities Malzberg and Dozois had accorded Schmitz.  Today I read Schmitz’s “Goblin Night,” which first appeared in a 1965 issue of Analog, and was pleased: it is better than “Lion Loose” in every way.

Telzey Amberdon is a 15-year-old college student on a camping trip in a vast and thickly wooded park.  Schmitz deftly sketches out an interesting milieu for Telzey and her adventure: before this planet, whose night sky is rarely dark because of the multitude of bright stars in the planet’s vicinity, was colonized by humans this forest was home to powerful creatures the settlers called spooks, dangerous predators which the colonists were forced to wipe out of the area.  Unknown to her fellow students, Telzey is a talented telepath, and her powers bring to her attention the fact that something horrible is going on in the park: an intelligent man, driven insane by a terrible disabling accident, has been using the park as a hunting ground for that most dangerous of game, his fellow humans.  Soon Telzey herself is the quarry in a deadly chase through the woods, contending with the sadistic villain’s both high tech and savagely primitive methods.

 

This is a hoary old plot, but Schmitz, by adding numerous SF elements, creating in his villain a compelling character, and by setting a fast pace and sticking to it, makes it work, and I quite enjoyed “Goblin Night.”   

   

I read the free e-text available at the Baen Books website; “Goblin Night” is the fourth chapter of the book Telzey Amberdon, which includes illuminating afterwords about Schmitz’s career and the setting of most of Schmitz’s stories by Schmitz fans Eric Flint and Guy Gordon.

“Lion Loose” by James Schmitz

In his introduction to The Best of Jack Vance, important SF critic Barry Malzberg praised James Schmitz, saying he was “the greatest portrayer of total alienness in science-fiction.”  I could not recall hearing of Schmitz before, and Wikipedia was full of praise from Gardner Dozois for Schmitz’s prominent female protagonists and well-developed , psychologically complex characters.  Sounded good, so I hunted down Schmitz’s Hugo-award-nominated story “Lion Loose.”  I read the Baen Books e-text (a free sample chapter from Trigger & Friends), because it popped up first during my search, but the Gutenberg version, which reproduces the Schoenherr illustrations from the story’s 1961 appearance in Analog, may be preferable to some.   

Broad-shouldered muscleman Quillan, some kind of interstellar G-man in disguise as a space pirate, is staying at the Seven Star Hotel, a space station hanging out in the middle of interstellar space that serves as a trade depot and luxury hotel, when he is approached by Reetal Destone, a sexy blonde he has worked with in the past.  She is a private detective/industrial spy, and, like Quillan, she is armed to the teeth with ray guns and espionage equipment.  Reetal informs Quillan that the manager of the hotel and the head of hotel security are in cahoots with the Brotherhood, a sort of space mafia, and, after making some kind of transfer of illegal goods, they are going to blow up the hotel and the thousands of people in it!  Unbeknownst to the hotel guests, the corrupt half of the security force has already murdered the honest half, taken over the control room of the space station, and planted the bomb nobody knows where.  Quillan, Reetal, and a handful of armed guests and hotel staff have just six and a half hours to retake the station from 70 ruthless criminals before the ship with the illegal cargo arrives.

Quillan easily infiltrates the criminals’ group, and, thanks to his fame in the underworld (the murderers and thieves know him by his nickname, “Bad News”) and his fast talking ability, is soon made one of the leaders of the criminal enterprise.  The head criminals reveal that the illegal cargo is fifty ogre-sized carnivorous monsters that have the ability to pass through solid matter.  The crooks had a sample monster on the station already, but it has escaped and it is now free within the hotel.  Quillan is given the job of recapturing the creature.

The style, characters and tone of "Loose Lion" are bland and pedestrian.  The plot, as Quillan hunts the dangerous monster and sows dissension between the two groups of criminals, isn’t bad, but it isn’t stellar.  Action fans may complain that almost all the fighting takes place “off screen,” and that the resolution of the monster portion of the plot is anti-climactic.  Most of the story consists of conversations. 

   

So, a middling pulpy story about space pirates, alien monsters and ray guns.  I have to admit that it did not live up to Malzberg and Dozois’s praise. It wasn’t particularly “alien”; in fact the characters sling tired 20th century clichés like “out of my cotton-pickin’ mind” and “it was big as a barn door!”  The woman protagonist gets captured and tortured by one man and then rescued by another.  And I thought the characters pretty cardboard.  Presumably Malzberg and Dozois had other Schmitz stories in mind; hopefully as I read a few more Schmitz tales I will encounter one of them.