Finishing up Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

British first edition of 11 stories

Here it is, the third and final installment of our look at the US edition of Bob Shaw's collection of short stories from the late 1960s and early 1970s, Tomorrow Lies in Ambush.

"The Weapons of Isher II" (1971)

The title of this one announces that it was inspired by one of the most famous works of Canada's finest export, A. E. van Vogt!  In the 1942 short story "The Weapon Shop,"  (which formed a component of the 1951 novel The Weapon Shops of Isher) the title weapons are energy pistols that are devised so that they can only be used in self defense--they won't fire if you are trying to rob or murder some poor bastard.  Shaw takes this idea and builds a middling joke story around it.

The protagonist of "The Weapons of Isher II" is Tilton, a journalist on planet Isher II, a rainy and muddy planet where the main industry is agriculture.  A popular spectator sport of the people of the space empire of which Isher II is a part is televised duels organized like heavyweight prizefighting is today (I guess; I don't really know anything about sports.)  These duels are formalized gunfights with pistols that strongly favor having a "quick draw," much like the showdowns seen in 20th-century Western movies.  Some planets, including Isher II, forbid dueling--all guns on Tilton's planet include a device which prevents them from firing at a person unless it is in self defense.  Two galaxy-famous duellists (the current champ and the #2 gun fighter) come incognito to Isher II, which Tilton discovers when one of them accidentally shoots down the robotic duck built by his eccentric relative, Grandpa Vogt!

In van Vogt stories the protagonist often discovers some crazy secret about society's elites, and in this story Tilton learns that the famous duels followed by so many sports fans are not nearly as deadly as they appear--most duellists who are "killed" are speedily revived by high tech medicine and then retire into obscurity.  (This is a secret because it is the high stakes--life or death--which make the sport popular.)  The climax of the story involves the two duellists fighting a duel on Isher II and trying to game the system that enforces the rule that you can only shoot a person in self defense--maybe under such conditions the gunfighter with the slower draw has an advantage?

This story is just acceptable--the references to van Vogt are cute but not actually funny, and the plot (which concerns Tilton's professional rivalry with another journalist as much as it does the rivalry of the two visiting gunslingers) is just OK.  One of the pitfalls "The Weapons of Isher II" risks falling into is that it reminds you of van Vogt's famous story, which is a complicated and ambitious piece of work that addresses major philosophical themes (the right to self defense, and the questions of what form of government is just and how a people might such a government) and Shaw's story here is just a silly trifle.  Van Vogt has many detractors, and I thought Shaw might appeal to them here by attacking van Vogt's idiosyncratic style or ideas, which would give the story an edge and invite debate about literary technique or philosophy, but Shaw doesn't do that--the story just kind of sits there inoffensively, a sort of kindly homage to van Vogt.  (A true homage to van Vogt should emulate van Vogt's work, and be challenging, surprising, difficult, crazy, peculiar and even offensive.)       

"The Weapons of Isher II" first appeared in the 45th anniversary issue of Amazing with an illustration by MPorcius fave Jeff Jones (who also did the cover of the issue.)  The story was later translated into Croatian and Dutch.

"Pilot Plant" (1966) 

This is a long one--like 60 pages!  It first appeared in New Worlds, I guess early in the third year of Michael Moorcock's tenure as editor, and has only ever been reprinted in the various editions of Tomorrow Lies in Ambush.

It is the 1980s, a future world of videophones, permanent moon bases and radical advances in aircraft design.  Aeronautical engineer and expert on cybernetics Tony Garnett owns and manages a firm that is designing and manufacturing a fighter plane with an "ion-augmented" jet and wings that consist of a force field--the immaterial wings can change size, growing smaller at high speeds to reduce drag.  Garnett is watching a test flight of this aircraft when it crashes right next to him and he is injured.  The moment before the injury he hears a mysterious voice for which their is no obvious source say, "Get me out of this, Xoanon."  Garnett has never heard of Xoanon before.

There is plenty of psychology in this story.  Garnett is short, and Shaw tells us several times about how his height affects Garnett's feelings and decisions; Garnett has a temper, which we see him display; while recuperating in the hospital Garnett meets a dietitian with a lazy eye or amblyopia or something (Shaw says she has a "a slight cast in one eye" which he also describes as "a slight in-turning"), Janice Wheeler, and we hear all about how she affects his mind as they go on a few dates.

Immediately after returning to work Garnett orders a project (a civilian version of the force field wing) cancelled, but months later, by chance, sees a photograph suggesting that some segment of the company (of eight thousand employees) is still working on this project.  Weird things begin happening as he investigates this secret "parasite" organization within his own organization--the clue in the photograph disappears, for example, and the first person he seeks to interrogate suddenly falls into a coma a second before Garnett asks his first question.   

Maybe I've got van Vogt on the brain, but this story also reminds me of the work of the Canadian mastermind!  There's all that psychology, there's an esoteric way of thinking (Garnett's cybernetic thinking reminded me of van Vogt's Nexialism and interest in non-Aristotelian logic), there's the weirdness with Wheeler's eye, and the uncovering of a secret organization.  In the later stages of the story, like in so many van Vogt tales, our hero must confront space aliens and unexpected truths about himself and our world, and the story concludes with a (admittedly more modest than that at the end of The Weapon Makers) sensawunda we-will-now-explore-the-universe ending.

Whatever "Pilot Plant" owes to van Vogt, it is a fun "thriller" full of cool technological and mental SF stuff.  Thumbs up!  (The worst part is the unattractive title, which I assumed referred to vegetation, though it makes sense if we consider "plant" as meaning "factory" and "something or someone placed somewhere deceptively.")

"Telemart Three" (1970)

"Telemart Three" was printed in If, "The Magazine of Alternatives," and the same year was included in a French publication of Philip Jose Farmer's third Tiers book, A Private Cosmos.

This is a brief humor piece (10 pages of text here) about wives who spend too much and husbands who respond by murdering them.  Or trying to--in this story the husband fails and the wife lives (albeit crippled) to spend again.  The SF content of this story consists mainly in the introduction of a holographic TV that broadcasts lots of commercials, and has an integrated teleporter that can send to your home the items being advertised should your dainty feminine finger press the purchase button on the remote.  The teleporter can also instantly send a security guard to your home if you press the emergency button, as the murderous husband realizes too late.

Acceptable filler to me, perhaps misogynistic hate speech to those born more recently?

(I assure you it is a coincidence that I read this story on "Black Friday.")

"Invasion of Privacy" (1970)

"Invasion of Privacy" debuted in Amazing and has achieved success, being chosen by such editors as Terry Carr, Martin H. Greenberg and R. Chetwynd-Hynes for inclusion in anthologies as well as translated into numerous languages.  Maybe we are ending this collection with a bang!

Middle-class suburbanite George Ferguson's mother-in-law has been dead for two weeks, but his son Sammy claims to have seen her earlier in the day--in the old abandoned house down the street!  That evening Sammy becomes terribly sick, and is rushed to the hospital.  Back home, anxiously awaiting news with his wife, who is beside herself with grief and fear, George goes for a walk--somehow his feet lead him to that weird old house.  He peers in a window and finds things are just as his son described--his dead mother-in-law is sitting in the decrepit house along with a bunch of other people he thought dead, reading a magazine!

George busts into the old house to investigate, and then confronts the family doctor who has been tending to George's mother-in-law, wife and son, and he learns the astonishing truth--the psyches of alien refugees have been fleeing to Earth to take up residence in duplicates of the bodies of Earth people who are terminally ill!  The alien scheme is a complicated one.  1) The local representative of the aliens, ideally a medical professional, becomes aware that some poor human is about to die.  2) This doomed Earthling is taken to a secret location and his body duplicated by a big computer in some kind of vat.  3) An alien psyche inhabits the duplicate body, and when the original human dies the dead body is disposed of and the dupe is returned to his family with the news that he is cured--the duplicate brain holds all the memories the dead person had, so impersonating him is not difficult for the alien.  The reason George's mother-in-law's duplicate is hiding in the abandoned house along with the duplication apparatus is that there was a scheduling problem--Sammy's grandmother died earlier than expected, at home instead of in the hospital, so there was no way for the E.T.s to hide the corpse and substitute their healthy duplicate.  (At least this is how the aliens describe their practice to George--it seems possible they are bending the truth a little and they are just murdering people, not actually waiting for terminally ill people to show up.) 

George has to decide if he should expose this invasion to the world, go on a one-man crusade against the invaders, or just passively accept the invasion--he has reason to believe that the Sammy now living with him and his wife is a duplicate inhabited by an alien personality, but he is not sure if the aliens murdered the real Sammy or if the real Sammy died of natural causes, and either way his sensitive wife might go insane or commit suicide if she learns that the real Sammy is dead.  One of the themes of the story is that George is a weak-willed character who always takes the easy way out, compromising and accepting circumstances instead of standing up for himself and boldly authoring his own fate, so we are not surprised by the course he chooses.

This story isn't bad, but the alien invasion process seems overly convoluted (in contrast with the straightforward raw emotions of the human characters confronted by the death of their loved ones) with the result that the moving parts of the story don't mesh together smoothly.  I have to judge "Invasion of Privacy" as just OK.   

 
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Let's sum up our reaction to the thirteen stories in Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, ranking the stories and separating them into three categories.

GOOD

"Call Me Dumbo"

"Pilot Plant"

"The Happiest Day of Your Life"

"Cosmic Cocktail Party"

"...And Isles Where Good Men Lie"

ACCEPTABLE

"Invasion of Privacy"

"Weapons of Isher II"

"Repeat Performance"

"Telemart Three"

"What Time Do You Call This?"

"Stormseeker"

NOT GOOD 

"Communication"

"Element of Chance"

In our first installment of this look at Tomorrow Lies in Ambush I pointed out that a couple of years ago a review of the collection appeared at the Potpourri of Science Fiction blog.  Now that I have finished the book it is time to see if I have any major disagreements with the writer of that review, Mykobia AA.

Mykobia AA and I must have very different tastes, because the story I thought the worst, "Element of Chance," he thought the best, awarding it a score of 4 out of 5!  (He thought "Invasion of Privacy" the worst, and scored it a 1.5.)  My second fave, "Pilot Plant," gets the second worse score he assigned, 2.5 out of 5--he also gives "Weapons of Isher II" and "Stormseeker" a 2.5.  (Mykobia AA seems to have a distaste for the style and themes of Golden Age SF, and also laments the portrayal of women in Shaw's stories, which may explain some of our differences in opinion.)

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Tomorrow Lies in Ambush didn't blow me away, but it was worthwhile.  I own a pile of Bob Shaw books I haven't read yet, so Shaw will be showing up again here at MPorcius Fiction Log, but our next few episodes will look at early '70s short stories by other SF authors.

Five more stories from Bob Shaw's 1973 collection, Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

German edition, which apparently includes
fewer stories than the US and UK printings

In our second episode on the US edition of 1973's Tomorrow Lies in Ambush we look at five more science fiction stories from the late '60s and early '70s by Bob Shaw, whose novels Orbitsville, Night Walk, Fire Pattern and One Million Tomorrows I have enjoyed.  We are reading the stories in the order in which they appear in the book, not chronological order.

"What Time Do You Call This?" (1971)

"What Time Do You Call This?" made its debut in Amazing, in the same issue as the conclusion of the serialized version of Robert Silverberg's The Second Trip, which I consider one of the best of Silverberg's novels.  (Check out Joachim Boaz's blog post on The Second Trip.)  In 1971 Amazing was being edited by Ted White.  For years now I have been recommending to people White's story about his friend Harlan Ellison, "The Bet," and with Ellison's recent death White has produced another such memoir of his friend, available at the Falls Church News-Press website.  (The Falls Church News-Press is, it appears, a tiny free newspaper based in Northern Virginia, but this essay of White's deserves a wide audience--entertaining and insightful, I recommend it to all those interested in 20th-century SF and one of its most colorful and controversial characters.)

OK, back to Shaw.  "What Time Do You Call This?" is a humor story and its first line is a masturbation joke.  But its real theme and inspiration is not self abuse but that genre of SF story about alternate time streams in which characters hop from one time stream to another that includes Richard C. Meredith's At the Narrow Passage and Sam Merwin's House of Many Worlds and a multitude of others.  In this seven-page piece a scientist from another time stream appears in the apartment of a criminal.  After the mouthy scientist explains how his dimension hopping device (a belt) operates, the crook steals it.  This creep robs a bank, and when confronted by an armed guard he activates the belt.  To his dismay he reappears in a very similar time stream, right next to this dimension's version of himself and the armed guard, who captures both of the thieves--the media and the authorities suppose that these two bandits must be identical twins.

Acceptable filler.  "What Time Do You Call This?" would be reprinted in a German anthology with a fun cover illustration depicting a SF fan and his collection of magazines and tchotchkes, including a charming therapod (and a Hugo for best fanzine!)         

It is a lot of fun looking through these old magazines.  The September 1971 issue of Amazing also includes a letter by Bob Shaw, in which Shaw talks a little about his relationship with Damon Knight and responds to charges in a letter from a David Stever appearing in the March issue that his novel One Million Tomorrows was based on C. C. MacApp's 1968 story "When the Subbs Go" and J. T. McIntosh's 1965 story "The Man Who Killed Immortals."   

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"Communication" (1970)

This one appeared in Ted White's Fantastic.  "Communication" is about Riley, the worst computer salesman in Canada; in fact, he is in the running for worst computer salesman in the world!  After two years of total failure, out of the blue one Friday evening Parr, a man purporting to be a scientist (a sociologist no less--that's the worst kind of scientist!), comes to Riley's home to buy a computer--with cash!  (We are talking about a computer that costs $60,000 here!)  Parr wants it to keep a record of personal data and current location of everybody in the town of Red Deer, pop. 200,000*, and he has come to Riley's office, a lonely one-man operation, in order to keep public knowledge of his research project a secret ("you know, uncertainty principle," he explains.)

Riley deposits the cash in the company account and hands over the computer, but then on the weekend decides to play detective.  He figures out Parr's home address and drives up to Red Deer to snoop on him.  It turns out Parr is a con man, a bogus seer who conducts seances.  He plans to use the computer database of info about Red Deer's citizens to help him fool gullible people into thinking he has the power to communicate with the dead.  (By typing a client's name on a hidden keyboard he can instantly learn such data as the names of dead relatives and their occupations--Parr has hooked up his crystal ball to the computer's printout.)  The lame twist ending of the story comes when it turns out that, while Parr may be a fake, the dead really can communicate with the living, and ghosts appear.  Nonsensically, these ghosts want to use Parr's database to learn how things are going for their living relatives.  (If they were able to learn about Parr from "the other side," why can't they also learn about their own relatives?)  Parr is afraid of the ghosts, opening up an opportunity for Riley to work with them and start a lucrative career as a high tech "spiritualist." 

I'm guessing Shaw sets his story in Alberta to lend it an air of remoteness, but this setting also opens the door for an interesting (to me, and perhaps only me) element of the story: a passing reference to Social Credit, the notoriously incomprehensible economic theory enthusiastically adopted and promoted by expatriate American poet and crackpot Ezra Pound.  I have been trying to get a grasp of Social Credit for a while, as I have been reading the work of, and biographies and criticism of, those three leading modernists, Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis.  So far as I can gather, the moral basis of Social Credit is the claim that all citizens have a right to a share of the wealth that is derived from their society's cultural inheritance (by which is meant ideas and information); the political program of Social Credit is to make sure that the public has purchasing power that matches the level of production—Social Creditors think that production that is not purchased is the root cause of social problems like wars and poverty.  The Social Creditor’s policy is carefully calibrated government handouts and price controls that aim to make sure consumption equals production. Social Credit theory achieved its greatest political success in Alberta, where a Social Credit party dominated provincial politics from 1945 to 1971.  Social Credit theory is closely associated with Christianity, and in fact the Albertan Social Credit Party quickly evolved in such a way that it largely abandoned Social Credit's bewildering economic theories and became a more traditional conservative party, supportive of business and religion and hostile to socialism.  Shaw here in "Communication" exploits this fact for a joke: Riley’s boss is an active member of the Social Credit party and "has a strong Puritanical streak," and Riley foolishly makes a sex joke in his hearing.
 
Like all of the stories in this book so far, "Communication" is well put together and well-written, but the resolution of the plot is so disappointing I have to give this one a marginal thumbs down.  "Communication," after its magazine appearance, has only ever been reprinted in Shaw collections, including an Italian one.

*Wikipedia suggests that this is like double or more the real population of Red Deer, but maybe this dude is also cataloging people in the surrounding suburbs?

"The Cosmic Cocktail Party" (1970)

The German edition of Tomorrow Lies in Ambush takes its title from this story, which first appeared in the anthology Science Against Man, where it was titled "Harold Wilson at the Cosmic Cocktail Party." As all you Beatles fans know, Harold Wilson was prime minister of the United Kingdom in the periods 1964-1970 and 1974-1976. 

This is one of those stories in which people's brains can be scanned and their knowledge and personalities uploaded into a computer so people can still talk to "them" (in fact, simulations of them) after they are dead. Simulating every single neuron and synapse of a human brain takes a lot of memory and computing power, so the company that provides this (very expensive) service, Biosyn, has come up with an economy of scale that can help control costs--they have one huge computer ("the tank") that stores multiple personalities, instead of a bunch of individual computers devoted to single personalities.  This has proven to be penny wise and pound foolish.  The personalities have figured out how to interact with each other, and the strong personality of a Colonel Crowley, an adventurer who administered a colony in Africa, has begun dominating the milquetoast college professor types who make up most of the simulated personalities.  Crowley has created a fantasy world of dragons and barbaric hunts in which he is the hero and all those weak-willed intellectuals are his subordinates and enemies (victims.)  The personalities, thus occupied, have stopped communicating with the outside world, defeating the whole purpose of simulating them at such great cost and putting Biosyn's business model in jeopardy.

When an African politician comes to England to talk to Colonel Crowley in hopes of persuading the adventurer to campaign for him in an upcoming election in the country which Crowley once governed, the Biosyn staff have to come up with a way to lure Crowley back into contact with meatspace.  Their solution is to convince Crowley that the real world needs him to lead the resistance against socialist space aliens who are endeavoring to take over the Earth via hypnotism (to which Crowley, as a computer sim, is immune) and a simulacrum of a relatively benign socialist, one not associated with gulags and mass murder like Stalin or Mao--Harold Wilson.

"The Cosmic Cocktail Party" has some interesting science and the characters and their dilemmas hold your attention, even if it is sort of silly and the cocktail party theme feels forced; I'm judging this one marginally good.

"The Happiest Day of Your Life" (1970)

This is one of those short shorts, and has been reprinted many times in anthologies of short shorts.  These anthologies get printed again and again all over the world, so there must be a lot of people out there who like short shorts.  (Jerry Seinfeld voice: "Who are these people?")  Personally, I am a short short skeptic.  "The Happiest Day of Your Life" was first printed in Analog.

I guess the idea that your schooldays are the happiest days of your life is a sort of truism or cliche.  The joke title of this story is a reference to the future depicted in the story, when the cognitive and economic elite will, through hypnosis, drugs and surgery, get all their education in one day!  This results in eight-year-old attorneys and executives, and heartbreak for the mother in the story, who loses the opportunity to watch her boys mature naturally--they leave in the morning acting like eight-year-olds and come back in the afternoon acting like 22-year-old professionals!  To make matters worse, while her kids have IQs over 140, hers is closer to the mean, and so she has to suffer the indignity of not being able to converse on an equal footing with her kids, who are not even teenagers yet but condescend to her, treat her like a child. 

This one works.

"Element of Chance" (1969)

This eight-page piece first appeared in Galaxy, and stars Cytheron, a member of a race with super psychic powers--he can teleport, make himself invisible, see into the infrared and ultraviolet spectra, etc.  These aliens have apparently evolved beyond having to eat or breathe as well.  Cytheron has seen his thousandth birthday, and the elders of his race want him to mature--to join the "group-mind."  Unwilling to surrender his individuality, Cytheron tries to escape the adults, teleporting from one heavenly body to another, eventually getting trapped in a quasar which is in the process of becoming a black hole.  The gravity of this body is so great no particle can escape it, so Cytheron can't teleport out of it.  The elders break him out of this predicament by causing the quasar to explode as a supernova.  Cytheron is worried that the explosion might damage any life nearby, but is assured that there are no planets with life within range of the blast wave, though the wave will cause one planet that will eventually host intelligent life to have some unusually heavy elements.  This planet, the clues indicate to us readers, is Earth, and those heavy elements will be gold and uranium.  The weak joke of the story is that the wise aliens feel there is no reason to believe that the presence of gold and uranium will have any effect on the development of intelligent beings.

The twist ending of "Element of Chance" is lame, and the story is weighed down by all kinds of lyrical, metaphorical, descriptions of landscapes, "amethyst rain," amethyst snow, a horizon of "shattered silver daggers," and so on, stuff that numbed my poor mind instead of stimulating it.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  Since its debut it has appeared in the French edition of Galaxy and Shaw collections, including Cosmic Kaleidoscope.

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I had to give two of these stories a down vote, but the others are successful or at least acceptable.  Hopefully the final four stories in Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, which we will dissect in our next episode, will blow us away.       

Four stories by Bob Shaw

Back in early 2017 I declared my intention to read my copy of the 1973 collection of Bob Shaw stories entitled Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, a volume which once was sold in now-defunct retail outlet Woolco.  And today I begin to make good on that intention!  I think we'll read Tomorrow Lies in Ambush's 13 stories over three blog posts.  I'll read them in the order they appear in this book instead of in chronological order--maybe they are in the order they are in for some artistic reason?

If you are in a hurry to read about Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, check out the 2016 review at Potpourri of Science Fiction Literature.  (I don't think the good people there like Shaw as much as I do, so it will be interesting to compare notes when I finish up this book myself.)

isfdb does not list it, but my Ace edition of Tomorrow Lies in Ambush includes a pleasant if generic interior illustration by a Waldman.  Who is this Waldman?  isfdb actually lists multiple Waldmans (Waldmen?) as illustrators, so it is something of a mystery.

"Call Me Dumbo" (1966)

"Call Me Dumbo" first appeared in If, edited by Fred Pohl.  Shaw's story is illustrated by Virgil Finlay, which is pretty cool.  On the page facing the first page of Shaw's story is an ad for Music from Mathematics, "music composed on computers and transducers...."  You can listen to this music at youtube...I dare you to listen to all 26 minutes.

"Call Me Dumbo" is a decent SF horror story of a type that might not get written today because it suggests gender roles are based on biology and exploits people's disgust at homosexuality and transgenderism.  As the story begins we are introduced to a sort of dimwitted woman who lives in a cottage in the countryside with her grumpy husband Carl and their three boys.  Carl calls the woman "Dumbo" and talks to her in a callous way and makes her take medicine regularly, but she doesn't really mind--she wants to be a good wife and works hard at the cooking and cleaning.

One day "Dumbo" starts feeling different, mentally, and most of the 23-page story consists of Dumbo unraveling the mystery of her life and identity.  The hallucinatory, euphoric medicine she has been taking has spoiled, and no longer effects her, which means she begins to see unvarnished reality--she isn't living in a wooden cottage, but a house made of repurposed sheets of metal!  Following her husband reveals that Carl doesn't go to a nearby village to buy supplies, but salvages them from a crash-landed space ship!  As "Dumbo's" memory improves and then as Carl, who finds her snooping, bitterly explains what's what, we learn the horrible truth!

Carl was a medical man, a surgeon in the space navy, and he and his assistant blasted off in their space ship to give succor to some sector that had been attacked by the enemy.  En route, an enemy special weapon (a "warp scrambler") hit Carl's ship, teleporting it to a random spot in the universe--they were lucky to find a planet suitable for human habitation, and had no chance of ever getting home, being, in all likelihood, a bazillion light years from the Milky Way galaxy.

For some reason Shaw's and van Vogt's
names are not on the cover--I guess
they are not marketing this thing to me!

Carl wanted to have children and start a colony on the planet, but his assistant, Victor, was a man.  Solution: he forced Victor to have a sex change operation (their ship had a well stocked organ bank as well as plenty of small arms and grenades) and artificially inseminated him (now her) over the years to produce three boys with three different fathers.  Carl himself refuses to have sex with "the freak."  The drugs have kept her ignorant of her true position, notonly deadening any memory of her past but making their makeshift house and alien landscape look like a charming cottage in the English countryside!

Because Dumbo has all those female glands and organs she likes being a woman and doing housework and raising kids and all that.  She also wants something else (hint hint), something Carl doesn't want to give her.  But when she gets the upper hand over Carl, knocking him out with a blow from a rifle butt, she uses those grenades to blow up the organ bank.  Now if he wants to create more children--and he wants at least one girl so the human race can continue on this planet--he will have only one way to impregnate Dumbo.

This is a good story, well-structured and well-paced and surprising.  In 1977 it appeared in Michael Stapleton's anthology The Best Science Fiction Stories alongside such works as A. E. van Vogt's "Process" and "The First Martian," some of Van's most accessible, least convoluted, material. 

"Stormseeker" (1972)

According to isfdb, the British edition of Tomorrow Lies in Ambush only had 11 stories; "Stormseeker" is one of the two additional stories included in the US edition.  It first appeared in Galaxy, and, besides in Shaw collections like this one, would be reprinted in a German anthology in 1982.

"Stormseeker" is six pages long, a first person narrative that is a little literary and a little opaque.  The first paragraph flings "volant," "crenels" and "corbels" at you, as well as various metaphors and a reference to Debussy preludes.  The narrator is a mutant in a future (post-limited nuclear war) world; he can sense electrical activity and direct it.  A physicist friend of his has had his government funding cut, so he can't afford to pay the power bill for his atom smasher.  The narrator flies some sort of hover sled or something into nearby thunderstorms and directs the lightning to the boffin's lab.  Shaw explains how lightning works: protons, electrons, etc.  The narrator invites his girlfriend to come with him, but when she sees how much he enjoys interacting with the electricity (the word "orgasm" is used), she becomes jealous and breaks up with him.   

Acceptable.

"Repeat Performance" (1971)

"Repeat Performance" was first printed in the same issue of F&SF as the first installment of Jack Vance's Durdane novels.  I'd like to reread the Durdane novels, which I have read only once (I've read the Cugel novels and Kirth Gersen novels twice) but in a fit of generosity like fifteen years ago I gave them away.  "Repeat Performance" would reappear in an Italian collection of Shaw stories in 1980.

This is a competent but minor joke story; it sort of put me in the mind of The Twilight Zone.  A theater owner in the Midwest who shows old movies witnesses odd occurrences at his establishment, and various clues and booze-fueled speculations lead him to believe that a shape-shifting space alien is coming into his theater every Wednesday night and leaving in the form of one of the actors on the screen.  He contrives to capture the creature with the help of the police and we get a not-quite-believable twist ending.

Shaw is a skilled scribbler and the style and pacing and structure and all that are good, but the central premise and plot just don't excite me.  This is acceptable as filler.

"....And Isles Where Good Men Lie" (1965)

"....And Isles Where Good Men Lie" shared an issue of New Worlds with the final installment of the serialized version of Harry Harrison's broad spoof of space opera and military SF Bill, The Galactic Hero. 

"....And Isles Where Good Men Lie" is about a scientist and some military men, a communist spy and some dangerous aliens.  It is the 1980s.  An apparently endless caravan of alien space craft has been entering the solar system, and every day for the last five years one of them has landed someplace on Earth and disgorged a horde of fifteen-foot long insects that exude deadly bacteria.  Scientists have come to realize that these aliens are not hostile invaders, but descendants of refugees from another world, passengers on robotic generation ships.  There is no way to communicate with these alien immigrants, and the ships land them automatically and have forcefields that cannot be penetrated by Earth weapons, so the only solution has been to kill the innocent but catastrophically infectious aliens when they emerge from the ships.  Cold War conflict has been put on the back burner while the nations of Earth work together to keep these uninvited guests from unwittingly spreading a plague that can kill all humanity. 

Our protagonist is Colonel John Fortune, commander of the force defending Iceland, a hero for having figured out how to kill the heavily armored aliens when they first appeared years ago.  He feels guilty about massacring all these innocent aliens, and has been working, on the side without government authorization and in concert with a civilian scientist, on a way to stop the robotic alien ships from landing on Earth at all.  This guy also has personal problems--his wife married him when he was a svelte war hero, and now that he is overweight and war weary she has been cheating on him.  Her latest lover is an agent for some Warsaw Pact nation--this commie has ferreted out that the Colonel has a freelance scheme to redirect the alien ships to some other solar system, and just when the Colonel is about to put the plan into operation, this blasted Red tries to foil his efforts.  Will the Colonel's plan succeed?  What lengths will he have to go to to see it through--will he jeopardize his career, even risk jail time?  Will he and his faithless wife patch things up in the interest of their child, or will she leave him for this Bolshie spook?

This story is moderately good; there is plenty of science stuff and plenty of character stuff--the Colonel, his wife, and the scientist all have interesting little back stories.  This story has only had limited success, however, only ever appearing in New Worlds and here in Tomorrow Lies in Ambush.

**********

So far, so good.  We've put 86 pages of this 281-page collection behind us, and so far nothing boring or irritating has cropped up.  Four more tales in our next episode!

Fantastic Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories, August 1972

Well, we just read Andrew Offutt and Richard Lyon's sword and sorcery trilogy War of the Wizards, the second volume of which was dedicated to L. Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber.  So it seems an appropriate time to read some fantasy-related work by those two influential writers.  One publication to which both de Camp and Leiber contributed was the August 1972 issue of Fantastic.  Over the years, via ebay and visits to flea markets, I have accumulated a bunch of issues of Fantastic, and this issue is in my collection.  Let's take a look at this "All-Star 20th Anniversary Issue" of the magazine--you can read along without having to scour the tables of flea markets or the listings at ebay by visiting the internet archive.

Jeff Jones provides the cover art, a sort of cthonic, primordial, monumental image of Conan--the Cimmerian looks like he is emerging out of a mass of stone, maybe like one of Michelangelo's famous unfinished sculptures of slaves.  Appropriate for an unvarnished, uncivilized, self-made man who owes his success and survival to his own native cunning and physical strength.  Among the listed contributors, besides de Camp and Leiber, we see two MPorcius faves, Bob Shaw and Barry Malzberg, as well as critical darling James Tiptree, Jr.  This is an exciting issue!

First we have Ted White's seven-page editorial.  (No doubt you remember Ted White as author of Spawn of the Death Machine and Harlan Ellison's long-suffering friend.)  Ted presents an interesting history of Fantastic, its many editors and its ups and downs and its relationships with other SF magazines, and gives us insight into his own editorial philosophy (he thinks a SF magazine should reflect its editor's personality, and include features like editorials and letters columns that generate a conversation and a community among SF professionals and fans.)  He finishes by bragging that Fantastic has received its first ever Hugo nomination!  Good work, Ted!

Next is the first half of Avram Davidson's The Forges of Nainland Are Cold.  I have decided to put off reading this novel, which appeared in book form under the title Ursus of Ultima Thule.  I will say that I like the illustration by Mike Kaluta, a stark female nude in front of a massive gnarled tree, that accompanies the piece.

"The Witch of the Mists" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

There's Conan and Conn, fighting some
crazy monster (could that be
Nenaunir on the flying beast?)  I feel like
Conn is facing the wrong direction.

I guess nowadays it is conventional to think de Camp and Carter are poor writers and their Conan stories are crummy, and I myself consider de Camp and Carter to be pretty mediocre, but let's give this story a fair and open-minded look.

"Witch of the Mists" would later appear in the 1977 book of four Conan stories by de Camp and Carter, Conan of Aquilonia.  Here in Fantastic the story is illustrated by Harry Roland, who, following the text, gives Conan a mustache!  This is an older Conan, whose mustache and famous "square-cut mane" are "touched with gray!"

Conan is King of Aquilonia, richest kingdom of the West, and is out hunting with some of his courtiers and his twelve-year-old son, Conn.  Conn gets lost chasing a white stag; the stag turns out to be an illusion, conjured by the witch Louhi to trap him!  Having captured the king's son, the witch and her tall skinny henchmen use him as bait to draw Conan away from his companions.  Conan follows the kidnappers' trail through a swamp and across the border of Aquilonia.  Along the way he is robbed by a pack of inbred degenerates (the descendants of criminals who have hidden in the swamp for generations--I thought this a Lovecraftian touch) who steal his horse, armor and weapons, so that Conan has to proceed practically naked, reduced to fighting off wild beasts with a stick!  When he gets to Louhi's castle, the HQ of her death cult, he is imprisoned with his son.

Louhi calls a meeting of the world's greatest wizards, and three other evil weirdos--Thoth-Amon of the West; Nenaunir, a huge muscular black shaman from the South; and an effeminate little sorcerer from the Far East, Pra-Eun-- teleport in to discuss what to do with Conan.  When Louhi tries to prove to Thoth-Amon that the King of Aquilonia is not the hot stuff he's been telling her he is by having one of her cultists humiliatingly cudgel the Cimmerian, Conan turns the tables on his tormentors and he and Conn fight all four wizards, plus Louhi's coven of death worshipers, with whatever furniture they can snatch up and throw.  During the fracas the Aquilonian knights finally catch up to their sovereign.  Louhi and her entire cult, along with Pra-Eun, are killed, while Thoth-Amon and Nenaunir teleport away.

This is a pretty routine and underwhelming story.  Nothing in "Witch of the Mists" feels fresh, and de Camp and Carter are incapable of elevating the pedestrian material with any literary style and fail to imbue it with a sense of drama or horror or fun.  The battle between the barbarian king of the most sophisticated nation of Caucasians and a multi-ethnic mixed-gender cabal of the planet's four most powerful wizards should feel grand and momentous, and come at the end of a long build up, but, shoehorned into this brief story about a kid lost in the woods, it feels small and petty, like a bar brawl.  Too bad; I'm judging this one merely acceptable--it feels like filler.

"Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket" by James Tiptree, Jr.

Alice Sheldon, the woman who wrote under the male pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr., is one of those SF writers the critics and college professors are always gushing about.  Early last year I read and liked a few stories by Tiptree; let's see if she continues to live up to the hype.

It is the 21st century!  The east and west coasts of the United States are vast megalopolises, Boswash and San Frangeles!  But our story takes placed in sparsely populated Alberta, where our protagonist, Dov Rapelle, young geo-ecologist, has a cabin in the snowy wilderness.

One day Rapelle is just hanging around in his cabin when a helicopter drops off a naked teen-aged girl ("sixteen at the oldest") nearby.  When he gets her inside he wraps her in his Hudson Bay blanket (wikipedia is telling me that the Hudson's Bay point blanket is an iconic article associated with Canada, and Tiptree tells us that this blanket has been an element of Dov's youthful erotic fantasies.)  The mysterious girl proclaims she loves him and starts grabbing at his pants, initiating a graphic sex scene in which she loses her virginity.  It turns out that the girl, Eulalia Aerovulpa, is a "time jumper;" her 75-year-old self, sixty years in the future, has switched consciousnesses with her 16-year-old self.  In one of those time paradox thingies which always hurts my brain, elderly Eulalia remembered how her marriage to Dov started, and has come back in time to make sure she meets Dov and kindles their love.  In an additional SF twist, teenage Eulalia's wealthy parents have had her conditioned to find men and sex disgusting so she won't get mixed up with males who are after her money, but elderly Eulalia knows the secret to undoing the conditioning: "The man whose toe she bites...she will love that man and that man only so long as she lives."  She bites Dov's toe after their second bout of intercourse, so, when 75-year-old Eulalie's visit to 16-year-old Eulalia's body ends after a few hours, young Eulalia is as madly in love with Dov as senior citizen Eulalia was.  (This presents the sort of philosophical conundrum presented by the love potion in the story of Tristan and Isolde: is Dov and Eulalia's love "real," or just the artificial product of psychological manipulation?)

Dov and Eulalia get married and briefly enjoy a happy life together, but Eulalia isn't content to let things be.  A few months after their wedding, Eve-like, Eulalia convinces Dov that they should use the time-jumping apparatus to learn about the future (and to give their elderly future selves a little vacation from senescence.)  Disaster occurs, and Dov is killed.  Now Eulalia will have to endure 59 years without the man she is hopelessly in love with, her only comfort the knowledge that she will spend a few torrid hours with him when she is 75.

Perhaps it is noteworthy, this story having been written by a woman masquerading as a man, that the tragic victim of the tale for whom our hearts are meant to go out is the woman, even though the story is written more or less from the point of view of the man, and he dies because of the woman's recklessness.  Also, Tiptree has Dov surprised by Eulalia's taking the sexual initiative, telling us that in his sex fantasies Dov is the aggressive partner.

This story isn't bad, but I'm not crazy about it.  The somewhat complicated structure works (though I'm not quite sure I like that the psychological trigger of toe-biting works on the teenage consciousness even though that consciousness is absent from the body when the toe-biting occurs) but the whole story is too jokey and silly for the tragic ending to affect me.  Acceptable.

"Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket" would later appear in the oft-reprinted and oft-translated collection of Tiptree stories entitled Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home and was chosen by Barry Malzberg for inclusion in the volume he edited for ibooks in 2003 entitled The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time.

"Allowances" by Barry Malzberg

Speak of the devil!  "Allowances" was reprinted in 1974 in Malzberg's collection Out From Ganymede.  I own Out From Ganymede, but haven't read "Allowances" yet.

The text of the story consists of the written testimony of eight employees of a race track and one customer, testimony presumably elicited by the management of the track or the police or some other government representatives.  (Malzberg usually writes in the first person and often writes about horse racing.)  Taken all together, these various reports tell the story of the day an insane and violent man came to the race track and made a serious nuisance of himself.  This man wears odd clothes and insists he is an alien.  His mental illness is, apparently, the result of his recognition that the universe is unpredictable (as symbolized by the unpredictability of the horse races) and general feeling that society is going downhill--machines dehumanizing life, the government becoming less trustworthy, etc.  (The testimony of the witnesses indicates they also feel life is getting worse, many phrases like "nuts now being all over the place" and "unless the Racing Commission severely tightens its rules and regulations I see no future for the sport" crop up in their testimony.)  The "alien" begs people for advice on who will win the races, even accusing them of fixing the races.  He believes that if he can't win a bet, his alien civilization will suffer, and in desperation he threatens dire consequences if he should fail in his mission of placing a winning bet today.

"Give me a tip or I'll blow up your planet!"  

(Malzberg stories usually include an insane person, and this person is often preoccupied with alien or supernatural beings and catastrophic events like the alien conquest of the Earth or the coming of the Messiah or the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, events for which they feel some level of responsibility.  There's a story in which a guy has to win a chess game or aliens will win a space war, for example, and another in which an employee of the New York City government has to fulfill one of his quotidian job tasks in order to impress alien overlords.)

As a coward, a cheapo, and someone who admires asceticism and fears he has a genetic predisposition to addiction, I avoid gambling and know almost nothing about betting on horse races.  So I had to google around to figure out what the hell this story's title referred to.  It appears that the second level of races a horse can participate in are "allowance" races, in which, based on their records, some horses have to carry more weight than others, to make the race more competitive.  A horse that has lost a bunch of races will be "allowed" to carry a few pounds less weight than a more successful horse, is how I am understanding it.

This is Malzberg doing what Mazlberg does, and if you are hip to Malzberg's jive, you will appreciate it (I rather like it), but if you are sick of Malzberg treading the same ground again and again, or never liked Malzberg in the first place, this story is not going to change your mind.

"The Brink" by Bob Shaw

I like Shaw and was looking forward to this one.  Unfortunately, it is a very short and gimmicky story that goes nowhere.

"The Brink" is a Cold War story and the title refers to "brinksmanship," the kind of thing we talked a lot about in history and political science courses when I was at Rutgers in the last years of the '80s and the first years of the '90s.  An American aircrew is transporting a superweapon ("a nuclear device which yielded its energy over a period of years instead of microseconds") to the Far East, where it will be used to interdict Communist traffic on the future equivalent of the Ho Chi Min Trail in some unspecified jungle.  The aircrew's huge cargo plane (which one character compares to the flying machines seen in the old film Shape of Things to Come,) is called Icarus, and the superweapon is repeatedly compared to the Sun.  The tone of the story is gloomy and foreboding, and it is implied that participation in the Cold War has wrecked the economy of the United States but not that of Great Britain.  (The UK is like Daedalus, the clever and creative father, with America as the reckless son.)

The cheap ending of the story is that, while the rest of the plane's crew is napping or in the cargo hold, the pilot sees a man with wings on his back flying through the air.  This birdman gets in the way of the Icarus and is struck and plummets to the surface, and, presumably, to his death.  No doubt the point of the story (besides being a sort of wish fulfillment story for Englishmen in which sophisticated and wise Britain is shown to be vastly superior to the upstart USA) is that the American use of technology to oppose Communism is self-destructive hubris, just like Icarus' flight in ancient myth.

Stories which portray the United States as the villain in the Cold War always stick in my craw anyway, and the in-your-face sophomoric and pedantic use of classical symbolism in this one had me groaning.  A waste of time, even at only three pages.   

"The Brink" was later republished in the 1976 collection Cosmic Kaleidoscope.

**********

I'm skipping "Agony and Remorse on Rhesus IX" by "Ova Hamlet."  The Ova Hamlet stories are parodies written by Richard Lupoff, each written in imitation of a different SF writer.  I have an aversion to this kind of broad and obvious humor and "Agony and Remorse on Rhesus IX," Ted tells us in the intro, is a parody of Phillip K. Dick.  I am not familiar with Dick's oeuvre, so I probably wouldn't even get the joke if I read it.

After the Lupoff piece comes an installment of Alexei and Cory Panshin's critical history of SF, "SF in Dimension," these 12 pages covering 1926 to 1935.  This article, for the SF fan interested in the period, is very engaging and very fun--it includes a long description of and excerpt from E. E. Smith's Skylark of Space, which the Panshins regard as extremely influential, a longish discussion of Stanley Weinbaum, covers the development of sword and sorcery as well as space opera and alien exploration-type SF,  and places changes in SF in the larger context of changes in mainstream popular culture.  Very cool!

Next up is Fritz Leiber's seven page feature of three book reviews, "Fantasy Books."  First Fritz talks about Robert Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil, which we at MPorcius Fiction Log just read!  Fritz starts off by telling us that Heinlein is his favorite SF writer, and that his favorite Heinleins are probably Double Star, Spaceman Jones, and Time for the Stars, and then proceeds to discuss Heinlein's entire body of work in a provocative way that includes comparing it to his own writing.  Very good.

Leiber's second review is of an anthology edited by Lin Carter, New Worlds for Old, which provides him an occasion to discuss fantasy literature in general and E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros in particular.  Finally, Leiber heaps praise on an odd book, Songs and Sonnets Atlantean, by Donald S. Fryer.  According to Fritz, this collection of poems, ostensibly translations of verse written by inhabitants of lost Atlantis accompanied by notes from 20th-century scholars, presents "a total picture of a fabulous Atlantis...more convincing and touching than that of a novel might be."

In the back of this issue of Fantastic are thirteen pages of letters (and Ted's detailed responses to the correspondents.)  Half of these pages are devoted to arguments about the TV show Star Trek; it seems Ted slagged the show in an earlier issue, inspiring a legion of Trekkies (Trekkers?) to rise to the program's defense.  There are also letters complaining that the magazine includes too many novels that are published in book form soon after, or even before, the magazine hits the newsstands.  And there is quite a bit of talk about how difficult it can be to find Fantastic, as the staff of some drug stores never even put the magazine on display.  Ted's responses are an eye-opening look into the life of a magazine editor and his surprisingly limited authority; again and again Ted explains that there are parts of the magazine over which he has little control, like the Table of Contents, use of some illustrations, and even the "typographical makeup of the title page of the stories--which I do not see until I have an actual copy of the issue in hand." 

The last two pages of Fantastic's 20th Anniversary issue consist of classified ads.  These ads are pretty fun, including as they do an ad for an anti-gravity device, an ad for a free book on how to hypnotize people, and an ad from the "School of Wicca" in Missouri.  "Obtain serenity and fulfillment," the ad promises, and offers a "serenity guide" and "protective pentacle" for only one dollar!  One hopes that reading about the less than serene and fulfilling conclusion to Louhi's career as a witch (screeching in agony as she burned to death, a barbarian monarch having heaved a brazier-full of hot coals on her) didn't discourage serenity seekers from sending their dollar to the witches of Missouri.

The School of Wicca (now the Church and School of Wicca, a wise
 tax move!) is apparently still in the business of selling 
protective pentacles, though this institution of higher learning (they offer doctorates!)
 has moved from Missouri to West Virginia.

**********

In his editorial Ted White argues that nonfiction "features" are an important component of a SF magazine, and his own magazine proves him right.  This SF fan found White's, the Panshins', and Leiber's nonfiction contributions to Fantastic's August 1972 issue more entertaining than much of the fiction! This magazine is full of info and educated opinions about 20th-century SF, and I recommend it unreservedly to people who care about that sort of thing.  The Shaw and Tiptree pieces seem below average for those writers, and the Conan story is a weak example of the genre, but the Malzberg is a good specimen of that idiosyncratic scribbler's output.  (And I do plan to read the Davidson novel someday!)

More Conan, Fritz Leiber, and Hugo news from a 1970s Fantastic in our next episode!

One Million Tomorrows by Bob Shaw

One shot each and--with care--Athene and he need not die.  He searched within himself for some trace of the exultation that ought to accompany the thought, but there was a strange blankness.  

Let's check out another novel by Bob Shaw, this one copywritten 1970.  I have the 1986 Panther paperback of One Million Tomorrows, acquired down in South Carolina in the impressive science fiction section of the used bookstore known as Rainy Day Pal.

(Joachim Boaz wrote about One Million Tomorrows back in 2011; you'll have to take my word for it that I hadn't read his review for four years and drafted the below post before rereading it, so any similarities in our posts are a coincidence.  We agree on the main points, I think, making similarities almost inevitable.  In the comments to his post Joachim and 2theD and I talk about Barry Malzberg and Vladimir Nabokov--this was before Joachim, now a big Malzberg supporter, had read any Malzberg!)

It is the future!  The year 2176!  People commute long distances at incredible speed via "bullet" cars.  Women wear clothes consisting solely of light projected from necklaces!  Gardeners use a ray gun that induces a seed to grow into a blooming flower in a single minute!  Partygoers drink from glasses that include miniature refrigeration systems so that ice doesn't water down their booze!  Most importantly, a drug is widely used that, when taken regularly, confers immortality!  If you start taking the shots at 20 your body will be as a 20-year-old's for centuries!  Awesome!

But there is a catch!  Men who take the drug become sterile and impotent.  No more facial hair either!  Such men are called "cools."  Men who have not taken the drug and can still get it up are called "funkies," short for "functional," and wear facial hair so all the ladies know what they are capable of.  That's right, women who take the drug are not sexually affected--they still have sexual desire and can still bear children.  The result is a society in which many women turn to all-female "Priapic Clubs" where strap-on dildoes see extensive use and in which it is common for adult women to date 13-year old boys!

Science fiction novels often chronicle revolutions and paradigm shifts, and we are led to expect that One Million Tomorrows is in that category.  Our main character is Will Carewe, a 40-year old funkie who works as an accountant at one of the firms which manufactures the immortality drugs.  As the novel begins he is told that his firm has developed a new immortality drug that when taken by men does not cause impotence and sterility!  And his bosses want to test it on him!    

One of the remarkable things about One Million Tomorrows is that our protagonist is kind of an ignoramus, even a dolt.  We are used to reading genre fiction in which the main character is the smartest or bravest or strongest member of his cohort, but Will Carewe comes off as the dumbest guy in the book!  People around him are always making allusions and using words ("Beau Geste" and "Luddite," for example) he isn't familiar with.  Early in the novel Shaw tells us he "had never succeeded in finishing a book"!  Carewe's career is going well, but several times Shaw indicates he is a slacker ("Carewe pushed the compucards out of sight before he opened the vision circuits--they should have been dealt with two days earlier") and a clock watcher, and that a rumor is current among his co-workers that his advancement is due to a homosexual relationship with the boss.

Carewe is one of the few people in this world of 2176 who has a one-on-one heterosexual marriage; his wife is the attractive and well-read Athene.  Right after these guinea pigs take the new drug their marriage collapses for reasons too complicated to describe here.  Carewe, heartbroken, volunteers for a dangerous mission to sub-Saharan Africa--some of the natives down there refuse to take the immortality drug and live as bandits, so people from Europe and America have to pacify their villages and inject them with the emasculating drug against their will.

Shaw assures us that the one-world government of 2176 has all kinds of regulations in place so that vehicles and power generation and such are super duper safe.  So when Carewe's hover car and then his airplane crash, nearly killing him, it can only be sabotage!  Someone is trying to murder Carewe!  He gets back to America (as in Fire Pattern, British writer Shaw sets his book in North America and presents us with American main characters, while including eccentric British minor characters) and finds that Athene has been kidnapped!  There follows a quite good action scene in an abandoned factory where are stored frictionless ball bearings, and then some weaker action scenes in which Carewe rescues Athene (saving his marriage!) and we get the big reveal.  The obvious big revelation is that it is Carewe's bosses who are trying to kill him.  This was obvious from the start because the book has too few characters for a mystery, leaving Carewe's bosses the only suspects.

The less obvious big revelation is that there is no new drug!  It was a money-making scam, mere snake oil! Carewe took a placebo and is not immortal and is still a funky!  This book is not about changes to society, but about changes in an individual. Carewe, over the course of One Million Tomorrows, goes from being an indolent ignoramus leading a sheltered life to a guy who escapes deadly traps, survives numerous hand-to-hand fights, sees his society from a different point of view, and, at the end of novel, after taking the real immortality drug that renders him sexless, decides to embark on a campaign of reading piles of books and maybe even becoming a writer himself!

One Million Tomorrows has its strong points.  Shaw tries to figure out what a world of immortals, and a world in which a majority of men are sexless, would be like, even examining how it would affect the financial sector and people's career arcs (people who have been top executives for a long time will cycle down to the level of new hires to make room for their subordinates' advancement and because they enjoy working their way up the ranks!)  There are interesting technical as well as social speculations, like those frictionless ball bearings (like leading SF writers Robert Heinlein and Gene Wolfe, Shaw worked as an engineer as well as a writer.)

From a purely literary angle I was a bit disappointed in One Million Tomorrows, however.  I've already noted that the mystery is no mystery.  The characters and human relationships also are a bit weak, underdone.  What makes Will Carewe love Athene Carewe, and why does she love him?  In a world in which monogamous straight relationships are rare, why do they have one?  The villains are only faintly drawn, so it is hard to hate them or fear them or find them interesting.  (On page 172 of the 176 page book Shaw gives a rushed psychological explanation of the motives of one of them--he's bad because of his relationship with his mother who caught him jerking off one day.  Too little too late, Bob!)

The African section is brief, and gives us little sense of what the hell is going on down there; Carewe makes (white British) friends in Africa who save his life, and even has sex with one of these people, but then these characters and relationships are forgotten (as is the saboteur, who escapes), and don't add anything to the story besides moving the labored sabotage plot forward.  The whole African episode should have been fleshed out or eliminated, in my opinion.  If Shaw felt the need for Carewe to "be off the grid" to make the sabotage seem more plausible and so he could meet "backwards" people who resist the emasculating immortality treatments (maybe this Africa section is an homage to the scenes in the hinterland in Brave New World), maybe Shaw could have gone with hillbillies in the Appalachians or inner city slum dwellers and had one instance of sabotage instead of three.

I'm willing to give One Million Tomorrows a mild recommendation, because of the solid SF ideas and the one cool fight scene, but in character, plot and pacing it falls short.  Those interested in immortality in SF should probably give it a whirl.  Maybe people who are studying depictions of race and of gays and lesbians in SF will want to investigate Shaw's brief (and not exactly flattering) flirtations with these themes.

Fire Pattern by Bob Shaw

"Secrecy has always been a big thing with you people," Jerome said, voicing a minor criticism as a camouflage for the deep revulsion the Dorrinian's words had inspired in him.

I guess like a lot of people my age, when I was in my teens in the 1980s my family had a copy of Reader's Digest's Mysteries of the Unexplained, a book about paranormal phenomenon.  One of the things which really got to me in the book was the section on spontaneous human combustion.  I wasn't a sailor, I didn't believe in God, and I lived in the suburbs, so sea serpents, demonic possession, and sasquatch didn't scare me, but spontaneous human combustion seemed like something that might be real and could happen to anybody, anywhere.  Around the same time this phenomenon was scaring a young MPorcius, Bob Shaw wrote and published a science fiction novel based on spontaneous human combustion, Fire Pattern.

Published in 1984 and set in 1996, Fire Pattern has the words "science fiction" on the back cover but starts out much like a conventional thriller, one of those books about an ordinary middle-class person facing quotidian life challenges who starts a new love relationship while doing detective stuff and uncovering a conspiracy. Fifty-year-old Ray Jerome is still recovering from the death of his wife and the loss of his job as an engineer.  His current job is as a reporter at a small New England newspaper (British subject Shaw set this novel in the United States, apparently an alternate universe USA in which Americans measure distances in "kilometres" instead of "miles" and call their summer homes "chalets.")  Jerome, who is older than everybody in the office and worked at a trade journal, is always correcting everybody's grammar and writing style and ridiculing people's beliefs in goofy nonsense like spontaneous human combustion.  Circumstances force him to change his tune about fortean phenomena when a case of "SHC" occurs in his little New England town, and the editor of the paper (a forty-year-old woman our hero has a crush on) assigns Jerome to investigate.

Like in any detective story, Jerome talks to the witness, reads background material, visits the morgue, looks for clues in photos, blah blah blah.  You can bet I was relieved when, 75 or 80 pages into the 208-page paperback, we plunge into Van Vogt territory!  Cases of SHC are revealed to Jerome to be botched mind transfer operations originating from Mercury!  For centuries the telepathic Mercurians (who call themselves "Dorrinians"), by the hundreds, have been colonizing Earth by switching bodies with Earth people (and in the process building up a colony on Mercury of Earthlings in Mercurian bodies!)  Jerome finds himself in the middle of a secret war between factions of telepathic Mercurians on Earth, and then, in classic wish-fulfillment fiction style, is transferred to a young healthy body on Mercury!  In the first part of the book Shaw kept reminding us of Jerome's arthritis and poor eyesight, making the move to the Mercury body cathartic.  Even better, the Terran colony on Mercury has a culture of sexual promiscuity--I mean free love!

Despite his improved physical health and active sex life, life on Mercury is no picnic for our hero!  He misses Earth and finds that he doesn't really get along with the natives, who can be arrogant, dismissive, and selfish.  But the wish-fulfillment fantasy continues when it is Jerome (earning the title "Dances with Dorrinians") who saves the Mercurian civilization and then helps the Mercurians secretly conquer the Earth with their telepathic powers! Like in so many anti-human/anti-Western science fiction stories (The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Killer Thing, Hero's Walk, Childhood's End, The Forever War, The Cosmic Rape, etc) we are expected to cheer on the aliens as human free will is extinguished and the Earth becomes some kind of utopia under the imperialism of the extraterrestrials.  If these Mercurian psykers hadn't hypnotized all of us, we'd all have died in a nuclear war caused by humanity's failings!  (Like my college professors, these SF stories never want to blame the Soviet Union for the Cold War, but instead blame the West or some abstraction like "tribalism" that places equal blame on the corrupt and racist bourgeois democracies and poor Uncle Joe's misunderstood, well-intentioned and hard-pressed worker's paradise.)  Jerome's reward for putting the Mercurians in charge of his fellow Earthlings is getting his memory of all he has learned about SHC and Mercury erased, getting his mind put back in (a healthier version of) his old body, and getting married to that sexy newspaper editor.          

Even if the ending disappointed me, there is a lot to like about Fire Pattern; it is a very entertaining read.  Shaw is a skilled writer, and the plot is good.  Because the cover illo and blurbs make no reference to outer space, I was truly surprised when the whole Mercurian telepath angle was sprung on me, and surprised again when Jerome ended up on Mercury in an alien body.  I had expected Shaw to explain spontaneous human combustion to be the work of callous big business or wealthy predatory physicians or something like that (sort of like what Pohl did in Drunkard's Walk.)  And because Shaw shows how self-important the Mercurians are, and has them keep bragging about how ethical they are (the Mercurian doth protest too much, I thunk), in the last few pages, when Jerome has to make his big decision, I thought there was a real chance he would side with the people of Earth over the invaders.

A curious element of the novel was its anti-computer, anti-technology attitude.  Computers put Jerome out of work, a computer that checks grammar is to blame for Jerome's fellow journalists' poor grasp of the English language, and Jerome thinks recording interviews via shorthand is more effective than using a tape recorder.  Mercurian engineering is inferior to that of the Earth, but the Dorrinians' superior mental abilities mean it is they who conquer us, without us even knowing what is happening!

Maybe I've got Van Vogt on the brain, but another thing about Fire Pattern I found interesting was possible links or similarities to that wild Canadian's work.  Besides all the telepathy stuff, the hidden secret aliens, and the secret conspiracies, I found Fire Pattern's explanation for spontaneous human combustion to be very similar to a striking scene in one of Van Vogt's better stories, "Secret Unattainable."  I also wondered if the ways Jerome was always criticizing other journalists' grammar and word usage was some kind of oblique reference to how Van Vogt's writing is famously confusing and clumsy.

Do I wish Fire Pattern was a ringing endorsement of human independence and loyalty to the Earth? Of course I do.  But since it is a well-written, well-constructed, and surprising novel, I still enjoyed it and am looking forward to reading the other Shaw books I own.