"Though a Sparrow Fall," "Morality," and "Judas Fish" by Thomas N. Scortia

There are twenty stories in Thomas N. Scortia's 1975 collection Caution! Inflammable!  Back in September we read the five stories from the book that debuted in the 1950s; today let's tackle the next three stories to appear (chronologically.)

"Though a Sparrow Fall" (1965)

This story appeared in the same issue of Analog that had the first half of the serialized version of Poul Anderson's David Falkayn story, "The Trouble Twisters," which we read back in 2013.

"Though a Sparrow Fall" is a trifling filler story, four pages here, an idea rather than an actual story.  A biochemist who is also a cryptography buff decides to run the DNA of a person through a "truly synthetic" computer, and the computer figures out that the pattern of our DNA relates a simple mundane message.  Presumably this means the human race was created by aliens to leave a trivial message for other aliens; the computer even suggests that the message has already been received, which would mean that the human race's purpose has already been accomplished.

The plot of the story is the biochemist telling this to other academics at a party--the truth about humanity saddens some of those who learn of it.

Acceptable--it is just an idea, but the idea is pretty cool.

"Morality" (1969)

Occasionally we run into SF stories that purport to explain the origins of old myths and legends and religions.  MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton, for example, explained the scientific reality behind Norse myths of Loki, Thor and Freya in 1941's  A Yank at Valhalla.  MPorcius fave A. E. van Vogt explained the origin of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in his story "Ship of Darkness."  Well, here in "Morality," Scortia explains that the Minotaur who lived in a maze and was killed by Theseus was a psychic alien on a mission to save his people!  Scortia cleverly keeps the fact that he is talking about Crete and King Minos and all that a secret until the end of the story, but you were warned that this blog was spoilertastic, so no complaints!

Glat's people were dying of a plague, so Glat went searching the galaxy for a cure.  He found it on Earth, in lichen, some centuries before the birth of Christ (or as I am supposed to say now, "before the common era.")  But his spaceship crashed, and, injured, he was taken captive by a Bronze age king.  Glat realized that he can only subsist on one Earth food--human blood!  The cruel king provided him people to exsanguinate in return for Glat's use of his psychic powers to make the island king's armies victorious over his enemies.  Every day Glat sends out psychic messages, hoping that others of his race will enter the solar system and he can tell them of his life-saving discovery.  The plot of this story concerns not only the arrival of Glat's people, but the machinations of the King's daughter that lead to Theseus destroying Glat.

This is a good story, and I was enjoying it long before I realized it was about the Minotaur.  (In what might be a mistake, early in the story the planet Glat landed on is called the "fourth planet of this system," which made me dismiss any possibility it was Earth, which I always think of as the third planet.  Maybe Glat was confused by Luna?)  Not only is it fun to see a sword and sorcery plot from the monster's point of view, but Glat is burdened by an interesting moral dilemma--he feels guilty for murdering all those people in order to stay alive long enough to save his own race, and basically wants to commit suicide as soon as he has transmitted to his comrades the cure for the plague back home.

Thumbs up!  "Morality" appeared first in Fantastic, in the same issue as a discussion of Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron by Fritz Leiber, an essay on The Arabian Nights by Piers Anthony, reviews of books on J. R. R. Tolkien, a story by Thomas Disch, and a drawing by Jeff Jones.  An issue well worth checking out--Ted White ran a good magazine!

"Judas Fish" (1970)

It is the future!  ("The future, Conan?")  The year 2000!  Due to overpopulation, the world faces terrible food shortages.  America is wracked by revolutionary violence.  The Japanese government is euthanizing people by the hundreds of thousands in "the public chambers."  Government and big business are scrambling to develop new food sources, and one strategy is to bend all kinds of sophisticated technology to catch the schools of fish who live deep in the Pacific ocean.  A single operator, living alone in a pressurized dome called a "deep station," can control a squadron of robotic submarine probes to find schools of edible fish, and a "pressure net" to catch them.  Once a school of edible fish is captured, the operator can alter the genetic material of some of them, conditioning them to have leadership abilities and to have an affinity for the pressure net--such "judas fish," once released, will find schools of fish of the same species and lead them right into the pressure net, which is just a few steps away from hungry Americans' dinner tables.

(Jack Vance used this concept of a Judas fish in one of the Magnus Ridolph stories, 1949's "The Sub-Standard Sardines.")

The lion's share of "Judas Fish" is the journal of Jefferson Boyer, one of these guys who operates a deep station and catches fish by the ton with these high-tech techniques.  These jokers live all alone under the waves for two or three months at a time!  Prime conditions for somebody to suffer hallucinations or just go generally bonkers!

Boyer finds that some of the schools of fish he has coaxed into his pressure nets are being hijacked by what look like large squids who act in concert, herding the fish away like sheepdogs or wolves.  These apparently intelligent squid investigate Boyer's dome, then work their way in through an emergency hatch to sabotage Boyer's food supply as well as his communications with the surface!  Boyer is at war with intelligent squid!  Desperately low on food, Boyer manages to capture a squid and he eats from it.
        
The "squid" are in fact space aliens who carry racial memory in their DNA, and can read the racial memory of other creatures by eating them.  By eating part of an alien himself, Boyer gains access to those racial memories, and learns the history of these E.T.s, how they fled their home world because of climate change and colonized the deep ocean of Earth, where food was plentiful.  But now humans are eating all the fish, putting the alien colonists at risk.

Boyer, his body now full of alien genetic material, comes to understand and identify with the aliens, and he joins them.  Is Boyer going to be like a Judas fish himself, leading the human race to destruction at the tentacles of these aquatic aliens?  Or can we put a positive spin on this unexpected revolution in human biology and society and welcome the development of a new hybrid race, half human and half alien, which can solve the food shortage problem by mass cannibalism?  Because those eaten live on in the racial memory passed down from the eaters to their progeny, perhaps there is no reason to fear death!  (This is another idea used by Vance, this one in 1951's "Crusade to Maxus.")

This is a good story, well-written and full of classic SF elements: overpopulation, high-technology, aliens, a species of immortality, and a paradigm shift that will revolutionize society.

"Judas Fish" first was published in Harry Harrison's anthology The Year 2000.

**********

I'm quite happy with this batch of Scortia tales.  More Scortia in the future, but first another detour into horror fiction!

Five 1950s stories by Thomas N. Scortia

Via his twitter feed, Joachim Boaz of the Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations blog will often remind us of the birthdays of authors and artists of SF.  (Joachim's twitter account is seriously worth following if you are interested in classic or retro or vintage or whatever you want to call it SF.)  A recent birthday boy was Thomas N. Scortia; Joachim's tweet lead me to look at my blog posts about Scortia's Earthwreck!, a novel I liked, and "Alien Night," a novella I thought was "barely acceptable filler" and perhaps "a rush job."  I remembered that I own the 1976 paperback edition of Scortia's 1975 collection Caution! Inflammable!, and decided to check out some of its stories.  Instead of reading Caution! Inflammable! from cover to cover, let's today read the five stories therein first published in the 1950s.

"Caution!  Inflammable!" (1955)

When this story first appeared before the SF-reading public in Fantastic it was called "End of the Line."  (Remember what a big deal everybody made over The Traveling Wilburys?  These were musicians my mother liked, and I resented having to hear about them every time I turned on the radio or the idiot box.)  After appearing under its new edgier title as the title story of Caution! Inflammable!, this two-page joke story would later (in 1986, like two years before I had to endure the indignity of hearing the local TV news ratify my mother's taste in music) be included in one of those books with Isaac Asimov's name on the cover, Isaac Asimov's Magical Worlds of Fantasy #6: Mythical Beasties ("with headnotes by Isaac Asimov.")

A phoenix is building its nest on the roof of the city hall of some Midwestern burg.  A journalist interviews the bird, and learns that it can predict the future.  The concluding joke of the story is that the phoenix tells the reporter that it actually doesn't set itself on fire when it dies, but is ignited by some outside force--then we readers are given an obvious clue that the government is going to test an experimental nuclear weapon today and much of the USA will be incinerated.

A waste of time, just like my irrational pop music criticism.

"Sea Change" (1956)

After first appearing in Astounding, "Sea Change" has resurfaced in many anthologies--Scortia even included it in the anthology he edited with George Zebrowski titled Human-Machines: An Anthology of Stories About Cyborgs.  Interestingly (or maybe not, judge for yourself), in Astounding and Caution! Inflammable! the story is preceded by a six-line epigraph drawn from "Ariel's Song" in The Tempest, but in Human-Machines this is dispensed with.  (The extract in question includes the line included multiple times by T. S. Eliot in The Wasteland: "Those are pearls that were his eyes.")

Piloting spaceships around the solar system was too difficult a challenge for human beings, their reflexes were just not fast enough, and a computer powerful enough to independently run a space ship was just too heavy to be cost effective.  So travel between the Earth and the colonies that have been established on the other planets of our solar system is accomplished by ships conned by disembodied human brains!  When their tours of duty are over, these brains are put into robot bodies that almost perfectly mimic human bodies, but somehow it is not the same--Bart, the best of these pilots, has recently retired and been put into a robotic body, but he is not happy; he loiters around a Martian colony, feeling increasingly alienated from his humanity, losing what he calls the "basic human emotions" and "the basic ways of thinking that make you human" and fearing he is becoming no more than a machine.

Over the course of this 14-page story, Bart, through face-to-face conversations with flesh and blood humans and radio conversations with his comrades, disembodied brains who are installed in space ships and space stations around the solar system, realizes that the human brains integrated into space craft are a new form of human life equal or superior to the old kind, a form of human life that is at the forefront of "the biggest dream man ever dared dream"--the conquest of the stars!  The disembodied brain of a woman Bart loves is going to pilot the first space craft to travel to a different star system, and Bart decides to accept an offer to have his brain installed in the second such ship, and accompany his girlfriend on humankind's first interstellar adventure.

This is a good story, told in a literary style that is lyrical and emotional and full of images and sciency stuff, but also economical and to the point--a good example of a classic SF tale about the effect of future technology on the psychology and relationships of individual people, one that doesn't casually dismiss the challenges presented by high technology but concludes with the famous sense of wonder at the awesome possibilities of high technology to enable us to explore the universe.

Thumbs up!

"The Bomb in the Bathtub" (1957)

"The Bomb in the Bathtub" was first printed in Galaxy.  You can believe that I groaned when I saw that it was included in an anthology called Cosmic Laughter and was thus presumably a joke story.  (Galaxy editor H. L. Gold also included it in The Fourth Galaxy Reader, which I just recently saw in a Pennsylvania antique mall.)

This 15-page story is a spoof of detective fiction, a goof on psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and a series of absurd gags.  An alien from another dimension appears in Sidney Coleman's bathroom and leaves in his bathtub a large device which Coleman assumes is an H-bomb.  The alien apparently has deployed the explosive in order to destroy our universe--we learn that this act of what to us Earthers appears to be vandalism of the highest order is a component of the alien's psychotherapy.  Coleman goes to private eye Caedmon Wickes for help.  Wickes goes to see the bomb, which can talk and which sings "Frankie and Johnny."   The reader endures many more absurdities before the story ends.

As a child I liked parodies and spoofs (like Saturday the 14th) and absurdist humor (like Monty Python), but as an adult I consider such work to be a sterile waste of time.  "The Bomb in the Bathtub" I found to be almost unreadable, my eyes glazing over as I waded laboriously through each sentence.   

(I still laugh at humor based on human shortcomings and a recognition that life is a tragedy, like Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, the Tony Randall and Jack Klugman Odd Couple, Charles Schulz's Peanuts, the comic scenes in my new favorite movie The Driller Killer, and Peter Hammill's "The Polaroid." ) 

A dud.

"John Robert and the Dragon's Egg" (1957)

This story was printed first in Fantastic Universe under the title "John Robert and the Egg."  It was included in The Best of Thomas N. Scortia and in one of those anthologies with Isaac Asimov's name on the cover, Dragon Tales.

I don't know if I can take another joke story, so I am hoping this is a sincere straight piece.

John Robert is a farm boy, living with his aunt, uncle, and grandfather because his parents are dead.  One day he finds a weird egg in a swamp, and, over his aunt's objections, contrives to keep it.  (Grandpa is his accomplice.  Us men have to stick together!)  John Robert and Grandpa hatch the egg in an unused hen house and nurture the fire-breathing dragon that emerges.  When John Robert's aunt and uncle see the creature, grown larger than a horse in just a few month's time, they decide to sell it to a circus--these people are poor, after all (John Robert sleeps on a mattress on the kitchen floor and Grandpa sleeps on a couch.)  But before this transaction can take place John Robert and Grandpa climb on the dragon's back and fly off to explore this world and maybe others!

This is like a pleasant children's story--people say "tarnation" and "varmint;" the dragon eats cardboard and wooden planks and coffee grounds and just about anything else that doesn't move, like it's a cartoon goat; there is little tension and no sex or violence and there is no effort to explain anything logically--it is a celebration of imagination and childish joy.  There is a faint adult edge--Aunt Bess is said to have been a fun kid like John Robert as a child, but to have been hardened by a tough life.  I suppose it is filler, but it is charming, and Scortia's descriptions of the dragon are vivid, so I'll give "John Robert and the Dragon's Egg" a moderate recommendation.

"The Icebox Blonde" (1959)

This one first appeared in the men's magazine Rogue alongside stories by Harlan Ellison and Robert Bloch.  As the wikipedia article on the magazine indicates, Rogue had a close relationship with the SF community--Frank R. Robinson and Harlan Ellison edited the magazine, Bloch, Fredric Brown  and Alfred Bester wrote regular columns for it, Ted White wrote about jazz for the magazine, etc.  (Unfortunately, the internet archive does not seem to have any scans of Robinson- or Ellison-era issues.)  Scortia would later include "The Icebox Blonde" in Strange Bedfellows, an anthology he edited of SF stories about sex, and it would also show up in a sort of textbook, Marriage and the Family Through Science Fiction.

"The Icebox Blonde" is a feeble lampoon of wealthy British people and their attitude towards sex and towards American people.  There is no escaping these blasted joke stories!

Foringham is a middle-aged London business executive on an extended stay for his firm in New York.  His wife, the 42-year old daughter of a viscount (the owner of the firm) is with him.  One of Foringham's American colleagues is apparently trying to seduce Mrs. Foringham.  Meanwhile, a new product has come on the market, super sexy female androids that you can buy in the freezer section of the supermarket.  Mrs. Foringham decides to run away with the American, but she is a considerate wife, so she buys one of the sex androids--when Foringham comes back home one night to find his wife gone, one of the androids is in the bathtub, defrosting.  Their marriage was an arranged one, based on financial considerations rather than passion or attachment, so Foringham is not very put out, and looks forward to having sex with the android when she defrosts.

A waste of time.

**********

Scortia is obviously an able writer; "Sea Change" is quite good and "John Robert and the Dragon's Egg" goes down easy, but among these gems are plenty of pitfalls and booby traps in the form of frustratingly lame joke stories.  Hopefully the 1960s and 1970s stories in Caution! Inflammable! will have a higher ratio of worthwhile stories to useless joke stories.

"Chillbinding" 1950s Science Fiction from J. Blish, P. Anderson and T. N. Scortia

An unexpected road trip to Lincoln, Nebraska earlier this month put me within striking range of A Novel Idea Bookstore, where they were, fortuitously, having a sale in which individual customers were randomly assigned different discounts.  Yours truly hit the jackpot, winning a 50% discount, so the wife and I stocked up.  Among my purchases was Crest Book L728, the 1964 edition of a 1960 anthology of stories selected by Leo Margolies entitled Get Out of My Sky.  At $1.50, how could I resist that Powers cover and the promise of "chillbinding" novellas by three authors I am interested in, James Blish, Poul Anderson and Thomas N. Scortia?  Let's take a trip back in time to the late 1950s, and to a terrifying future with "three master craftsmen of the science-fiction suspense story."  We'll ask if each story is good, like we always do, but also assess if these stories are truly chillbinding, as advertised!

"Get Out of My Sky" by James Blish (1957)

The title story of this anthology is almost 80 pages long and appeared first across two early 1957 issues of Astounding.  Besides here in this anthology, it would later appear in a few Blish collections and an Italian magazine.  Mama mia!

Numerous times on this blog I have complained about elitist classic SF stories which seem to advocate the manipulation, by any means necessary, of the masses by the cognitive elite and even politicians(!)  And here we have another one!

Ocean-covered planet Home and desert planet Rathe are twins that revolve around a common point, each perpetually showing its sister the same hemisphere.  Along with a small star, the two planets form a Trojan system that orbits a large star.  Both planets are home to intelligent species of humanoids who have achieved what I guess we can call a 20th-century level of technology (nuclear bombs, rocket and jet engines, TV) and in just the last few years they have opened up communications via radio and television.  "Get Out of My Sky" is the story of this new interplanetary relationship, with the leading politician from Home, First Minister Aidregh, as our protagonist.

The main theme of the story is that the ordinary people of Home and Rathe are gullible, irrational, superstitious and religious fools, and their foolishness is driving the two planets towards a push button war that will likely lead to the extermination of one or both civilizations.  In fact, the first scene of the story, an italicized prologue, depicts what appears to be a tent revival, where a nameless demagogue drives the common people into a frenzy of hostility towards their sister planet.  Aidregh and the rulers of Rathe have to work together to prevent this cataclysm.

After the prologue, the novella is broken into nine chapters.  The early chapters largely concern the gathering of intelligence about Rathe.  Chapter I features observations of the desert planet from shipboard during an eclipse--did stories of Captain Cook's observations of an eclipse in 1766 and the transit of Venus in 1769 and inspire this scene?  There is also a secret space mission (Home's first manned space flight) to photograph Rathe's "dark" side.  The first five chapters also describe a lot of political jazz concerning different polities on Home (Aidregh is First Minister of the most powerful state on Home, Thrennen, but there are a few other countries on the islands of the watery planet with whom Thrennen has sometimes contentious relationships) and different political parties in Thrennen.  Blish portrays Aidregh's dealings with the voters and with the opposition party not as the inevitable features of a free society, but as a hassle, an obstacle to Aidregh's solving everybody's problems.  Aidregh seems to like the ruler of Rathe with whom he talks via TV, Margent, more than he likes the bulk of his own countrymen! 

In Chapter VI, Aidregh and the rest of our cast of characters fly to Rathe (this is Home's second manned space flight) to negotiate with the Rathemen.  In a secluded cave Margent explains to Aidregh that the Rathemen are mystics who for centuries focused not on developing material wealth and technology, but on developing telepathy and precognition; as a result, Rathe everybody loved everybody and there was no crime or politics or war.  Yes, "Get Out of My Sky" isn't just an elitist story, but a mystical utopian one!  Gadzooks!

But fifty years ago the Rathemen utopia was shaken by the invention of the radio!  The people started listening in on Home transmissions, and when the Rathemen learned about all the politics and crime and war on Home, it shook the common people to the core; in fear that the Home people would attack Rathe as soon as they learned of the Rathemen, the Rathe hoi polloi demanded the construction of a Rathe war apparatus.  Such technological and martial production began stunting Rathe psychic abilities, and even souring their lovey dovey attitude.  As things stand now, with the populations of both planets scared and suspicious of each other, nuclear war is only days away!

Luckily lead mystic Margent has a plan to make peace.  The Rathemen spend three days and three chapters teaching Aidregh a psychic trick--the power to sway audiences emotionally.  Then Aidregh uses this trick to get the people of both planets to step back from the brink.  An italicized epilogue exposes the fact that the italicized prologue was a trick played on us readers by Blish; the scene was really depicting Aidregh, resigned from the First Ministership (naturally, his son now holds the position), not preaching hatred of Rathe after all but spreading peace and love!

"Get Out of My Sky" is not very well written.  There is no human feeling, even though Blish wastes many words on the boring relationships between Aidregh and his son, his best friend, his dead wife, and his son's fiance (his best friend's daughter.)  Efforts to create drama can be silly--the astronaut who leads the months-long expedition to photograph the far side of Rathe dies of exhaustion immediately after giving his report (you know, like Pheidippides.)  The people in the story are aliens from a fictional star system, and Blish describes their appearance in some detail (the people of Home have six fingers and two thumbs and flat noses and a ridge above the eye sockets while the Rathemen have long noses and no ridge above the eyes, etc.), but Blish clumsily calls them "human" and has them use Earth metaphors (e. g., a determined woman is described as being like "a female tiger defending her cub.")  I also thought it was sloppy that Blish didn't come up with an actual name for Aidregh's planet, just referring to it as "this planet" or "Aidregh's world" in the first half of the story and then hitting upon "Home" in the second half.  Worst of all, the story is way too long, moving at a slow pace and burdened with extraneous detail and narrative dead ends.  Is this text a draft rather than a final version of the story?   

Neither am I impressed by the story's ideology or its SF ideas; the psychic powers of the Rathemen come across as infallible and unbelievable magic, which is boring and silly--contrast "Get Out of My Sky" with Algis Budrys's "The Peasant Girl," in which equally puissant psychic powers make compelling reading because Budrys shows the moral and psychological and sociological drawbacks and shortcomings of such powers.

"Get Out of My Sky" is getting a thumbs down from me.  Too bad.

Is it good?  No.                                               Is it chillbinding?  More like sleep-inducing!   

"Sister Planet" by Poul Anderson (1959)

Let’s see if Poul Anderson can deliver us a chillbinding story…or at least a good one.

Earth grows increasingly overcrowded, and at the same time that governments are becoming ever more intrusive and oppressive they are proving less and less able to handle the exploding crime problem. Some fear the building pressure will result in nuclear war that could wipe out humanity!

Our story is set on Venus, a world covered in a single vast ocean that teems with diverse and spectacular life.  A multicultural team of fifty Earth scientists and technicians work there on a floating research station; their work is financed by sending back to Earth “firegems” which the playful twenty-foot long Venusian whales bring the boffins in exchange for objets d'a and snacks from Earth.  These cetoids are eager to play and trade, and even help Earthmen in trouble, but they don't seem to use tools and efforts to communicate with them have been unproductive, so there is debate among the scientists over how intelligent they really are—do these creatures have a real civilization down at the bottom of the sea or are they just over-sized oceanic pack rats little smarter than a chimp?

Nat Hawthrone from New England, an ecologist, believes the cetoids are as intellectually advanced as humans, and halfway through the 40-page story one of the whales takes Nat down deep to show him something that proves he is right.

The same day Nat has proof that the whales are an intelligent civilized species, a geologist unveils his calculations that prove Venus can be affordably terraformed to create a second Earth; such a  colonizable frontier could relieve sociological and psychological pressure on the Earth and assure survival of the human race!  But the terraforming (which involves detonating nuclear bombs near the planet core to raise continents and release buried elements that will give Venus an Earth-like atmosphere) will kill all native life, including the whales.  When the assembled research team hears from Nat that the whales are an intelligent race, they all agree that the terraforming research will be suppressed, but that is not good enough for Nat “Dances with Whales” Hawthorne.  He knows that another scientist with access to the same data might make the same calculations, so, to save the whales, whom Nat prefers to humankind, he goes rogue, like the guy in Edmond Hamilton’s 1932 "Conquest of Two Worlds" or in James Cameron’s 2009 Avatar, which I have not exactly seen but have heard people talk about.

Nat knows that nobody will finance trips to Venus if there is no prospect of trade between the whales and humans, so he sparks a war between the cetoids and the scientists, blowing up the research station and killing his 49 human friends and then massacring the local tribe of his aquatic buddies. When Nat gets back to Earth he commits suicide; we are presented a clue that suggests his participation in the two-planet tragedy may have led the atheist Nat to embrace Christianity before jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Sister Planet” is a brisk and entertaining read.  For thirty pages Anderson pushes his customary themes--promoting science, trade, the fine arts and the study of history and deploring the government--and introduces us to a bunch of nice people, and then in the last ten pages he hits us with an apocalyptic melodrama in which one of the characters we like murders all the other characters we like and likely consigns the human race to extinction, all in order to protect some aliens. I think Anderson may have actually produced something “chillbinding” here!  The story is talky, with all the exposition about how the men cope with conditions on Venus and conduct their research, the science lectures, the debates about how intelligent the cetoids might be, and the historical analogies Anderson likes to present to his readers (some of the characters in "Sister Planet" suppose that the Earth is reenacting the fall of the Roman Empire and the start of the Middle Ages, with the scientists on Venus--none of whom are women--playing the role of monks.)  But all that stuff is pretty interesting.

After it initially appeared in Satellite Science Fiction, Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison included "Sister Planet" in their late 1960s anthology All About Venus, published in Britain as Farewell, Fantastic Venus!  Kinglsey Amis in 1981 put it in his anthology The Golden Age of Science Fiction.  It looks like this one is endorsed by the SF cognoscenti, and I am happy to agree with them.

Is it good?  Sure.                                               Is it chillbinding?  I think so!

"Alien Night" by Thomas N. Scortia (1957)

So far we've got one dud and one score.  Will Thomas N. Scortia's "Alien Night," around 46 pages here in Get Out of My Sky, a story which first appeared in Science Fiction Adventures and hasn't seen print since Margolies's volume, make it two hits out of three?

It is the future!  The Universal Insurance Company, based in the Universal Building in Universal City on the banks of the mighty Mississip, is in the process of conquering death!  For centuries they have been administering a longevity serum that you need only take every 25 years to indefinitely postpone senescence.  All over America their medical robots stand ready to rush to the aid of anybody who gets in an accident.  Skyscrapers are equipped with automatic nets which will snap into position if any clumsy person should fall out a window.  And if your girlfriend dumps you, don't bother considering anything rash--the Company has blanketed the country in a "hetrerodyne field" that will knock you unconscious if a brain scanning computer detects serious thoughts of suicide.

While "Get Out of My Sky" is one of those pro-utopia stories, "Alien Night" is one of those stories about how utopias are unhappy and unsatisfying places.  In response to a life without excitement, risk or even work (androids do almost all the work), around the country have arisen "hunt clubs" whose members pursue what we might call the most dangerous game.  So, the next step in the Company's quest to eliminate death is to try to put these clubs out of business.  Kenneth Huber has been spying upon the clubs for the Company, but when he learns he has a rare disease that the Company can't cure and has only five years to live, Huber decides to commit suicide in the indirect fashion of joining a hunt club as the quarry!

Thus begins Huber's 24-hour odyssey through three dozen pages of plot twists.  Huber tries to rescue a woman he thinks is also being pursued by a hunt club, then suspects that she is hunting him and so fights with her, only later to be told she was rescuing him from hunters.  Out of nowhere an alien spacecraft crashes nearby and Huber (an unemployed thermonuclear engineer) gets shanghaied into helping investigate it.  Huber survives a helicopter crash, participates in a fire fight, discovers that many androids in sensitive positions are in fact humans in disguise--no, wait, they are actually aliens disguised as humans disguised as androids.  These aliens have infiltrated the top ranks of the Company in order to prevent any possible reforms--human society is sliding into decadence and sterility thanks to the Company's elimination of risk and challenge, and an impotent human race is just what the aliens want so that they can easily take over our beautiful planet.  (They have targeted the hunt clubs because hunt club members are the only humans left with any bravery.)  The woman rescues Huber, again, and reveals herself to be the leader of the anti-alien resistance, an agent from the future of a timeline in which the aliens succeed in taking over Earth.  Together they neutralize the alien menace, making sure her timeline never occurs and that humanity will shake off its decadence by pursuing the exploration of outer space.  Huber (don't worry, a cure for his disease will be found), having gotten a good look at the alien space engine, will be a leader in the new space program.

"Alien Night" feels like a pastiche of an A.E. van Vogt story, what with all the jarring plot twists and the inclusion of every possible SF trope--immortality, decadence, time travel, time lines, space craft, aliens, androids, the sense of wonder ending--but it lacks something it is hard to define, a tone or style or something to match the material, maybe, and comes off as a little rushed and kind of silly.  It certainly fails to excite any emotion in the reader.  Barely acceptable filler, I guess.

Is it good?  Not really.                                               Is it chillbinding?  No.

********** 

The Anderson is the winner, obviously; I am totally on board with his libertarian sensibilities and view of life as a tragedy, but looking beyond my biases I think he has the story here which is best constructed and which actually succeeds in inspiring some emotion in the audience; he takes a little time to develop characters and their relationships so when somebody takes a radical step and everybody gets killed we readers actually care.  Blish's and Scortia's efforts to depict people and relationships in their stories in Get Out of My Sky feel cheap or just lame (in general, Anderson's story feels finished, polished, while Blish's feels like it could use a revision and Scortia's feels like a rush job.)

I don't know what Margolies saw in the Scortia's "Alien Night," but in defense of the Blish, it was voted second best story by readers in both issues of Astounding in which its component parts appeared, so its selection makes sense from a marketing point of view--I guess "Get Out of My Sky" reflects the preferences of those SF fans sufficiently committed to the genre to write to Astounding and make their voices heard.

Earthwreck! by Thomas N. Scortia

"If the situation is as bad as we are speculating, then we need the personnel of the Russian station very badly."

"Need them?  For what purpose?" Rothgate sneered.

"Because..." Janice Svoboda said slowly, "because they have all the women."

The words "science fiction" do not appear on the cover of my Fawcett Gold Medal paperback edition of Earthwreck!, and it perhaps makes sense to think of it as a mainstream disaster novel or a "technothriller" rather than a "real" SF novel.  I bought the book thinking it was a SF story, but I was not disappointed; it is an effective and entertaining novel.

Published in 1974 and set in 1986 or so, Earthwreck! presents us with a world wracked by terrorism and locked in Cold War--a unified Arab Republic supported by Red China contends with Israel, while the USSR and China fight border wars against each other and both communist powers grimly face the liberal West led by the United States.  These tensions, however, have not been permitted to prevent advances in the exploration of space--both an American and a Soviet space station orbit the Earth, one hundred miles apart from each other.  Each station is building a ship with which to deploy a permanent base on the moon.  The Communist space station has been sending a series of probes to Mars, and they have discovered evidence that the red planet was once covered in dense forests, and that that vegetation is beginning to grow back.

In the novel's prologue we sit in on a collaborative meeting of dissident Japanese communists with Muslim terrorists, and in Chapter One these insaniacs detonate nuclear weapons provided by the Chinese in Tel Aviv, causing a chain reaction that results in worldwide nuclear and biological war.  By Chapter Five the entire human race has been wiped out, except for the 300 or so people in the two orbiting space stations!  Because of radiation, and airborne spores carrying the Soviets' weaponized strain of rickets, the Earth is off limits for at least a century!        

The plot of Earthwreck! consists of the characters dealing with various technical problems (I lost track of the number of times Scortia uses the word "jury-rigged") and psychological problems.  Sample technical problems:  In Chapter Four the Americans detect a Soviet warhead coming their way, and Italian-American engineer Quintus Longo has 38 minutes to figure out a way to redirect the deadly "bird." Genetic engineer Janice Svoboda, the only woman on the US station, develops simple organisms like chlorella to generate oxygen and strains people's feces in hopes of finding viable seeds.  The astronauts and cosmonauts work to cobble together out of the half-built American and Soviet moonships a single vessel with which to colonize Luna.  Scortia, a chemist who worked in the aerospace industry, knows all about Delta Vs and polymers and that sort of thing, and the book's science and engineering feel authentic and realistic.

For those of us who barely have enough know-how to drive a car, much less design a spacecraft, the psychological problems are essential to the novel's success.  Sample psychological problems: Will Longo crack up over the loss of his wife and sons?  Can the cold Svoboda learn to accept love?  Can Colonel Rothgate and Captain Steinbrunner, who hold grudges against the commies because years ago their loved ones were killed by Reds, be willing to collaborate with the Soviets?    

There's quite a bit of sexual content in the book.  A major element of the plot is how there is only one woman on the US station, but scores on the Soviet one, so if any of the American men want to participate in the propagation of the human race, they will have to collaborate with the Soviets.  Both Longo and Svoboda reminisce about their family relationships and sexual experiences back on Earth.  Earthwreck! has a homoerotic vibe, and a preoccupation with body hair, that are a little odd.  In the description of Longo's life with his family we learn that he insisted his wife Martha not shave her armpits, because the feel and smell of her body hair and perspiration excited him.  We also get a description of how proud he was of his five-year old son's body, including little Gino's penis, which Longo made sure would not be circumcised.

Scortia also talks a lot about ethnicity.  Many characters remark that Italians are emotional and obsessed with their children, and we are told Martha "was a marvelously hairy woman, very much true to her French ancestry."  Then there's expert pilot and motorcycle enthusiast Steinbrunner, who escaped East Germany in his youth.  We learn, when Longo showers with him, that Steinbrunner is "a dusky blond with the hairiness of the northern German blonds...."

I thought the psychological and sexual content--all the flashbacks to the events on Earth that formed the characters of these people now lost in space, and all the descriptions of how they respond to the pressures of the desperate situation they find themselves in--was effective and interesting, in part because some of it was unusual--it is common in popular fiction to find loving or leering descriptions of a woman's breasts, so all the descriptions of body hair here constitute a memorable change of pace.

Scortia's style is smooth, and the novel is well-paced and well-structured.  The brief homerotic shower scene early in the novel effectively foreshadows the revelation in the end of the book that the formative event in Steinbrunner's young life was a homosexual love affair--by a shocking coincidence the man who turned Steinbrunner's lover in to the Stasi is aboard the Soviet station, which provides the pilot the opportunity to wreak a terrible vengeance!  Similarly, the brief mention of Mars early in the novel presages how, in the final third of the book, the Reds convince the Yanks to redirect their colonization efforts from the nearby barren moon to the distant surface of Mars, which is rich in valuable organic matter.  The last 60 or so pages of the 224-page book generate real suspense, as we readers wonder if Rothgate and Steinbrunner will really go through with their scheme to sabotage the Mars plan, which they feel is much riskier than the moon plan.

I resent the moral equivalency between the USSR and the West we so often see propounded in academia and popular culture in the same way I resent efforts to portray the Japanese as victims of the Pacific War when they were its instigators and aggressors.  (How much time has the president spent comforting the Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, Indians, Australians, Britons, Americans and others enslaved, tortured and abused by the Japanese?  Maybe he does that all the time, at the golf course or something, and it doesn't get much publicity, so I missed it.)  So if I have a gripe with Earthwreck! it is that, while the novel implicitly condemns socialism and the Beijing and Moscow regimes (with its references to tyranny in East Berlin, comparisons of the efficient and comfortable US station to the inefficient, ugly and smelly Soviet station, and its assigning of blame for the catastrophe to Chinese and Soviet weapons), none of the characters makes an intellectual or moral argument against communism--Rothgate's and Steinbrunner's hostility to the Soviets is born out of their having suffered personal injuries at the hands of Marxist terrorists and ruling parties, not out of a passionate love for human freedom or a scholarly recognition that socialism leads to poverty.  Anti-communism in the book is not an intellectual or moral choice, but a psychological problem that has to be overcome if the human race is to survive, which I think is unfair and unreflective of reality.  Well, let's be generous and chalk it up to an artistic and ethical choice made by Scortia, the decision to take as one of Earthwreck!'s themes the importance to the health of individuals and of societies of forgiveness.