1950s stories from Galaxy of Ghouls

Not long ago I purchased the 1955 paperback anthology Galaxy of Ghouls at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle in our nation's capital, intrigued by the raven-haired beauties on the cover and the name of Judith Merril, one of SF's most innovative and influential editors.  With her famous anthologies, including the dozen volumes of Year's Best S-F, Merril strove to expand the definition of what SF was and what it could be; England Swings SF in particular was a major impetus behind the developments and controversies in the SF field that came to be called "The New Wave."

While it is not all that clear from the somewhat confusing cover, which promises supernatural terrors but also includes a picture of heavily armed astronauts, Galaxy of Ghouls takes as its theme the way that, in the middle of the 20th century, SF writers updated for the space age such traditional horror tropes as the werewolf, the voodoo doll, and the vampire.  Text on the first page assures us, "The devil's brood inside these pages is strictly up-to-date--and often as not a step or two ahead of the times."  The fact that 1959 and 1961 editions of Galaxy of Ghouls were retitled Off the Beaten Orbit and adorned with "futuristic" covers by Richard Powers and John Schoenherr more typical for  paperback SF suggests that the boys down in marketing at Pyramid Books thought this first edition from Lion Library focused a little too much on the supernatural and not enough on the space age.

Let's check out five of the stories in Galaxy of Ghouls, all from the 1950s and all by authors we have talked about before here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

"The Ambassadors" by Anthony Boucher (1952)

In her intro to "The Ambassadors," which first appeared in Startling Stories, Merril tells us Boucher's work, in particular "Compleat Werewolf" (1942), has liberated the werewolf from the "medieval horror story" and that "The Ambassadors" is a follow up that brings lycanthropy to the future.

"The Ambassadors" is a joke story with "meta" elements.  As you know, here on Earth, intelligent life evolved from apes.  Well, on Mars, the first human explorers of the red planet discover, intelligent life evolved from wolves!  Upon his return to Earth, the biologist from that first Mars expedition issues a plea to the public for help--he thinks that werewolves are real, and he requests some werewolves come out of the closet and help build good relations with the Martians!  Most people think the man has gone crazy, but it turns our werewolves are real and this step inaugurates a new period of history for werewolves, one in which werewolves need no longer hide their true nature or suffer discrimination from prejudiced non-lycanthropes.  The joke at the end of the story is when a vampire hopes that some intelligent aliens who are descended from bats will be discovered so vampires too can achieve their civil rights.

Earlier this year I called Boucher's story "Transfer Point" "weak" and his tale "A Shape in Time" "lame," and today I am calling "The Ambassadors" barely acceptable filler.  I am not the audience for tepid joke stories.

I mentioned "meta" elements.  The story's big in-joke for SF fans is a passing reference to an expert on werewolves whose name is "Williamson," an allusion to Jack Williamson, whose werewolf novel Darker Than You Think is, according to Brian Aldiss, Williamson's best novel.

At four pages this qualifies as one of those short shorts that are so popular that anthologies of them get printed in mass quantities.  "The Ambassadors" would be included in Groff Conklin and Isaac Asimov's Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales which has gone through over 30 printings according to isfdb.

"The Night He Cried" by Fritz Leiber (1953)

Merril tells us this story is about an alien shape shifter with sex appeal!  "The Night He Cried" was first published in Fred Pohl's anthology Star Science Fiction Stories.  It would later be included in the 1974 collection The Best of Fritz Leiber (I own a 1979 paperback edition of The Best of Fritz Leiber, and so own multiple printings of this story.)

This is another joke story.  (One of the best humorous SF stories of all time is actually by Leiber, the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser classic "Lean Times in Lanhkmar.")  "The Night He Cried" is a totally over-the-top spoof of a Mickey Spillane-style detective writer and his work.  Our narrator is an alien agent from "Galaxy Center."  In its natural form this creature has seven tentacles, on Earth it disguises itself as a sexy woman, and two of the tentacles take on the role of "magnificently formed" breasts.  Leiber mentions the breasts again and again, using antiseptic euphemisms like "milk glands."  The alien has come to Earth to investigate Slickie Millane, author of the popular Spike Mallet books.  The alien wants to learn about sex on Earth, and is eager to interact with Millane because his books contain lots of smoldering male-female relationships, but the sex act is never consummated because Mallet always has to shoot the woman down before closing the deal, as it were.  (In the climax of the first Mike Hammer novel, I the Jury, Hammer shoots down a woman, the murderer of his friend, as she is trying to seduce and murder him.)  The alien suspects Millane has some kind of psychological issue with sex, and would like to help him if it can.  Millane's crazy relationships with women and the many permutations of the alien's shape shifting ability fill this story with absurd and bizarre images and events.

I guess "The Night He Cried" is acceptable; it holds the attention because it is so uninhibited and berserk--Leiber really lets himself go this time.  But are all the stories from Galaxy of Ghouls jokes?  As I say all the time on this blog, I have limited interest in joke stories.

"A Way of Thinking" by Theodore Sturgeon (1953)

Here's the 1965 paperback edition of
E Pluribus Unicorn

This tale, Merril tells us, is about sympathetic magic, of which she offers such examples as the voodoo doll.  "A Way of Thinking" apparently first appeared in the hardcover collection E Pluribus Unicorn, but that same year was also printed in Amazing.  This story seems to have been a hit, appearing in multiple anthologies with "Black Magic" or "Supernatural" in their titles, and being reprinted in Fantastic in 1967 and in Amazing in 1982.  Let us pray this is not a joke story, especially since it is like 28 pages long.

Sturgeon populates this tale with three endearing characters.  There is our narrator, a writer of SF stories with a long list of unusual jobs behind him.  There's a doctor, Milton.  And there's Kelley, a sailor with whom the narrator worked years ago on a "tankship" carrying oil between the Gulf Coast and the Northeast.  The narrator admires Kelley as an intelligent if uneducated man, and provides several examples of Kelley solving problems by looking at them from an unusual angle, we might say "thinking outside the box."  After not having seen him for years, the narrator meets Kelley again at Milton's doctor's office.  Kelley's brother Hal is dying of mysterious injuries, injuries perhaps psychosomatic.  Because Merril mentioned voodoo dolls in her little intro and the first page of the story in Amazing has a picture of a guy holding a doll on it, we are not surprised to learn, fourteen pages in, that Hal's bitter ex-girlfriend has a doll from Haiti, a gift from Hal.

The narrator and Kelley independently try to deal with this whole doll issue, the narrator in a sort of straightforward way and Kelley in his characteristic counter-intuitive way, and the story ends in shocking tragedy.  The ending actually was surprising, with Sturgeon coming up with a new way to look at voodoo dolls that isn't a goofy joke like Boucher's new way of looking at werewolves but something actually scary.  "A Way of Thinking" is quite good--I strongly recommend it.

Half the strength of this story is Sturgeon's success in depicting friendship and love between men in a way that is not sappy or maudlin but believable and even touching.  Life being how it is, it is nice to spend a little time in a fantasy world in which people are genuinely kind to each other and not just trying to exercise power over each other and squeeze money or sex out of each other.  (The thing Heinlein wrote about Sturgeon that appears in my edition of Godbody also gave me this warm pleasant feeling.) 

I quite enjoyed "A Way of Thinking;" it works as a story about people and as a black magic story, and Sturgeon's pacing and style and all that technical stuff are spot on.  But if I had to play progressive's advocate I'd say it depicts a world in which white men band together in a perpetual struggle against the inscrutable "other"--women and blacks--so let the 21st-century reader beware!

According to isfdb, Literature of the Supernatural was a textbook designed for high school use--
I went to the wrong high school!

"The Triflin' Man" by Walter Miller, Jr. (1955)

According to Merril, one of a witch's or warlock's most "enviable" powers is the ability to transform into a sexier version of her- or himself, and a character with just such an ability shows up here in Miller's story.

Lucey is an obese impoverished woman living in a shack in the swamp with her son, Doodie.  She only saw Doodie's father once, a large man who "made love like a machine."  Doodie is subject to spasms and fits, and as the story's dozen pages progress, we learn that Doodie's father was a scout from outer space who put on human guise in order to impregnate Lucey and so doing create a half-human intelligence asset on Earth!  Those fits of Doodie's are a side effect of Doodie exchanging telepathic messages with his father and with his half brothers across the world!  While Lucey cooks up a 'possum for dinner, Doodie arrogantly explains that his father will soon return with an alien military force to conquer the world!

The second half of the story details what happens when the alien deadbeat dad returns, and is equally effective as the first half.  This is a good one, solid SF that exploits the uneasiness (or worse) many of us feel over our sexual relations and our relations with our parents and/or children.  I might even go out on a limb and suggest it is a feminist story about a single mother who tries to do the right thing despite all the exploitation and abuse she suffers from all the men in her life.

"The Triflin' Man" is apparently this story's "deadname;" after first appearing in Fantastic Universe and here in G o' G under that name, it has been going by the name "You Triflin' Skunk!" in Walter Miller collections since 1965, though it does show up once as "A Triflin' Man" in a 1991 anthology of "Florida science fiction."  (Is there an anthology of New Jersey science fiction?  Barry Malzberg has been living in the greatest state in the union for decades!  I know there must be others!)

"Blood" by Fredric Brown (1955)

Remember when Anthony Boucher told us Fredric Brown was the master of the short short?  Well, here is another of Brown's short shorts (or as Brown calls them, "vignettes" or "vinnies.")  Brown keeps this story down to one page and Merril keeps her intro down to four lines that tell us Brown is "irrepressible" and this story is about vampires.

Mankind in the 22nd century finally realizes the vampire menace is real, and the blood-sucking fiends are hunted down and exterminated!  Only two of the parasitic monsters are left, and they hop in their time machine and travel to the far future, hoping to arrive at a time when their diabolical race has been forgotten and they can begin their depredations anew!  They use up the last of their time machine fuel, and emerge--unable to procure more fuel, they will be stuck in this time period forever.  To their dismay, animal life has died out and only vegetable life has endured--there are intelligent plants, but will a person descended from a turnip provide the blood a vampire needs?

Even at one page, a waste of time.  "Blood" first made the eyes of readers of F&SF roll, and has since appeared in many Brown collections and anthologies of vampire stories.

**********

Boucher and Leiber and Brown offered flat joke stories that inspired no feeling and no laughs, but Sturgeon and Miller made this excursion into Galaxy of Ghouls worthwhile.  I don't read these books looking for smartalecky jokes, I read them looking for human feeling and human relationships, for violence and excitement, and today it was Sturgeon and Miller who delivered.  Maybe copies of E Pluribis Unicorn and The View From the Stars are what I should be asking Santa for this year.

The Parasaurians by Robert Wells

"But what do we know about Nils Bodee except his name, his passion for drugs, his expertise with a rifle and the presumption that he is a millionaire?"

"Mm.  He's a Sternius type, isn't he?  Decided man of mystery.  But I don't find that so unusual.  As I've said before, the people you meet here are full of surprises." 

Years ago I read Robert Wells' Spacejacks, and I wasn't crazy about it.  I lost my notes about Spacejacks in a computer mishap (back everything up to "the cloud," people!), but I remember typing lots of smart alecky complaints.  Then there's my man tarbandu, who could barely finish Wells' Candle in the Sun and awarded it 1 out of 5 stars.  But by the time I saw The Parasaurians on the shelf at Snowball Bookshop in Barberton, OH (one of those bookstores where kindly elderly women dote on the resident cats and customers soon find themselves participating in the doting), the name "Robert Wells" had evaporated from my consciousness.  If I had remembered he was responsible for Spacejacks maybe I would have passed The Parasaurians by.  But probably not; I love the red dinocentric cover and I'm always ready to read about dudes hunting dinosaurs!

There's a long tradition of SF about hunting dinosaurs. Ray Bradbury's 1952 "A Sound of Thunder" is of course one of the classic time travel stories (I own the 1983 collection Dinosaur Tales with the quite fine William Stout illustrations for "Sound.") L. Sprague de Camp's "A Gun for Dinosaur" is also famous. During the period of this blog's life I have read (and enjoyed) David Gerrold's long, repetitive and goofy 1978 novel Deathbeast.  Today let's check out Robert Wells 1969 contribution to the dino-hunting canon!

College professor Rossell Fletcher lives in 2173, a time of robot servants, self-driving cars and rejuvenation treatments that can keep a guy like Ross fit and spry to age 120 or more.  A wealthy expert on ballistics who works at "the State Rocketry Foundation," Fletcher is also a gun enthusiast and big-game hunter, and one day receives an advertisement from a secretive firm that owns a South American island and caters to hunters of means, Megahunt Chartered.  Megahunt, Fletcher is informed in a face to face sales pitch, has created super realistic robotic dinosaurs and for a cool million he can join a safari and hunt down these mechanical titans.

Our man Ross leaps at the chance, and finds himself on safari with three mysterious characters.  There's Sternius, one of Megahunt's guides, a taciturn sort; Kit Namoya, an attractive half-Asian, half-Caucasian freelance photographer hired by Megahunt to film the robot dinos; and Dr. Nils Bodee, an eccentric pill-popping physician, like Fletcher a Megahunt client and expert marksman.

Over 160 of the book's 190 pages take place on the island, and revolve around Fletcher getting to know his three compatriots as they go through orientation and then travel around the hunting grounds, confronted by oppressive weather conditions (among them wearying heat, ferocious thunderstorms and dangerous floods), rough terrain (swamp, jungle, mountain), the saurian robots and each other.  Wells' pace is deliberate, some might say slow; the novel is half over before Sternius actually leads Fletcher and Bodee to any dinos they can shoot.  The main "action" is all the tension between the characters--Fletcher has the hots for Namoya, while Sternius, Namoya and Bodee all seem resentful, suspicious and fearful of each other.  These three are always trying to keep an eye on each other, and always sneaking off alone to do something unbeknownst to the rest of the party, and all three try to wheedle information out of the oblivious Fletcher, or enlist his aid in their mysterious doings.  Gotta feel for poor Ross, who spent a mil to shoot dinos, not get mixed up in these kinds of shenanigans!

Wells drops lots of clues as to what is really going on and what each character is really up to; The Parasaurians in many ways is more like a thriller or even a detective story than standard science fiction.  In fact there is very little reason for it to be set 200 years in the future; Wells doesn't describe social changes, and the high technology described in the first part of the book is just window dressing--on the island everybody hunts with bolt action rifles and rides around in a conventional truck, and they don't have any futuristic medical or electronic equipment; their single radio is a big heavy box like out of a WWII movie, their flashlight runs out of juice in just a few minutes, Namoya's cameras are big bulky affairs, etc.

In the last 35 pages or so all becomes clear: Sternius is a woman in disguise, a mad scientist who is conducting experiments outlawed by the world government--these experiments involve breeding real live tyrannosaurs!  Her tyrannosaur breeding ground is on an isolated peninsula of the island, but her creations have escaped confinement and are now among the robot dinos on the main part of the island! Sternius is desperate to make sure the inquisitive Namoya and Bodee (he turns out to be an undercover investigator for the world government) don't expose what she is up to, and is willing to go to any length to silence them.  As we kind of expect in these kinds of scenarios, the mad scientist's own creation kills her, and Fletcher and Namoya fall in love and (I guess) live happily ever after.

Wells includes some very vague hints of a theme of man's close relationship to nature, and how it is critical that we not forget it, even if we live in automated underground metropolises.  While in a swamp, Fletcher, in the throes of a fever, raves "Listen to our little brothers and sisters singing us awake.  Yesterday!  Yesterday, Kit, we crawled out of the same slime.  And they are still here waiting to welcome us back."  The decision to make the villain a woman who disguises herself as a man perhaps suggests that Wells' "message" is that we shouldn't mess with what mother nature has provided us. But all this feels like an afterthought.  (The late revelation that the villain was a woman, a crossdresser in fact, reminded me of two of the early Mike Hammer novels, I, the Jury and Vengeance is Mine!  And of course it makes sense for a character who brings new life into the world to be a woman.)  

The Parasaurians is competent if not extraordinary.  It didn't bore or irritate me, and kept me entertained, so I'll give it a mild recommendation.

Add The Parasaurians to the honor roll of paperbacks
which have given their lives in service to this blog

Rogue in Space by Fredric Brown

Maybe gambling would be the answer, if he could find an honest game so he could enjoy it.  But finding an honest gambling game in Mars City--or in most other places in the system--was almost as hard as finding an honest woman.  Maybe there wasn't any such thing.  There was no honesty anywhere, not only not in gambling or women, but not in politics, business or anything else. 

Stalking the aisles of a Des Moines antique mall I spotted this 1971 printing of Fredric Brown's Rogue in Space, a fix-up novel first published in book form in 1957. Even though the last thing I read by Brown, a short story about a man-eating armadillo, was just OK, Brown was championed by big league scribblers Ayn Rand, Mickey Spillane and Robert Heinlein, so I felt like he deserved my attention, and that three and a half dollars wasn't too much to pay (though it was close!)

Rogue in Space is set in a dystopian future in which mankind has colonized the solar system.  How dystopian is it?  For starters, Albuquerque is the capital of the solar system!  Besides that, while democratic forms are preserved as a charade, the solar system is corruptly administered by the leading political party, a bunch of commies called "the Guilds," and the second place party, a bunch of fascists known as "the Gilded."  Not only is this society's politics tyrannical, arbitrary and corrupt, its culture is perverse and decadent.  The music is loud, simple and stupid; TV screens are several feet across and broadcast a wide variety of pornography; and homosexuality, voyeurism, prostitution, and necrophilia are rampant and accepted, even embraced, by the elite.  (Obviously Brown in the 1950s and a reader in the 21st century may have different ideas of what constitutes a perversity.)

What characters do we follow in this twisted world Brown has created for us?  Well, our main characters are a rock and a career criminal.  Yes, I said "a rock!"

Brown starts the novel off well with descriptions of his two main characters, who are compelling because they are so unusual.  On the first page of text we are told that life has appeared in the universe in only two places, on Earth and in a far corner of the galaxy, where a planetoid a mile wide achieved consciousness.  This rock is driven by its curiosity to explore the galaxy, and after billions of years of travel it approaches our solar system.

Brown based Rogue in Space on two of his short stories. The rock, which I was so excited to meet in the two-page introductory chapter, did not appear in the first story, "Gateway to Darkness" (printed in Super Science Stories in 1949), and so doesn't appear in this 163-page novel again until page 83.  Luckily we have our second main character to keep us company, a man called Crag.  Crag is a master thief and murderer who kills people with his robotic left hand.  Crag hates women, Crag hates homosexuals, Crag hates everybody, and over the course of the book we see him insult women, vandalize a gay couple's pornography collection, physically assault a male prostitute, and kill police in cold blood.  Crag is what the kids call "a hater."  Does he love anything?  Well, he loves to get drunk on the most exotic and expensive kinds of booze, and we see him do that as well.

Brown wrote crime stories as well as SF, and the first half of Rogue in Space is a crime caper in which Crag does stuff like pick locks, sneak into buildings, escape a prison, and get double-crossed.  The pace is fast, there are lots of cool SF trappings like space suits, space ships, and ray guns, and Crag, being an absolute jerk, is an interesting character, so I enjoyed this first portion of the novel, even if I was eager to get back to the sentient rock.

In that first half Crag falls into the orbit of the foremost politician of the Gilded, a man known as Olliver.  Olliver serves as a judge in Albuquerque, and has contrived to be the judge in a criminal case in which Crag is the defendant.  Olliver and his gorgeous wife Judeth help Crag escape prison and the "psycher," one of those devices we find in SF crime stories which erases your criminal personality and turns you into a law-abiding citizen.  Olliver and Judeth hire Crag to disguise himself and sneak into a genius's fortified laboratory on Mars to steal a disintegrator.  This device is so powerful it can disintegrate entire planets!  Olliver and Judeth have been telling Crag they want the disintegrator to finance the founding of a new political party, one which is sincerely devoted to democracy.  But when the three of them are on an asteroid, there to test the disintegrator, Olliver reveals that he doesn't really want to restore good government--he plans to use the disintegrator to become dictator of the solar system! Judeth and Crag won't stand for this, and kill Olliver.  Crag and Judeth admit they have a thing for each other, but have no opportunity to consummate their relationship because they are stranded on the asteroid, their ship having drifted away during the excitement.  First Judeth, and then Crag, run out of oxygen and die!

Us law-abiding types are always relieved when murderers and thieves like Crag die at the end of stories.  Justice has been served by the cosmos!  But wait!  My hero the sentient rock appears and brings Crag back to life as the second half of the novel (that corresponding to the second Crag story, "Gateway to Glory" from Amazing in 1950) begins!  Rock, what are you doing?  Maybe, as a rock who has never before encountered life, my hero doesn't know the difference between good and evil yet, and doesn't realize he should be using his godlike powers (he can manipulate any amount of matter at the atomic level) to provide restitution to Crag's victims, not bring Crag back to life?  Or maybe the rock knows that one should, as the kids say, "not hate the player, but hate the game."        

Apparently believing Crag is good on the inside, and has devoted his life to stealing, killing and drinking because of his environment (society made him do it!), the rock wants to be Crag's friend!  But instead of being thrilled by this First Contact, Crag tells the rock to leave him alone and flies back to Mars (the rock has summoned the ship back) to spend the money Olliver paid him on booze!  But Crag doesn't enjoy being rich; Brown does a good job of portraying a man who finds a life without risks or goals to be lacking.  While Crag is moping around bars and hotels, the rock alters the orbits of every asteroid in the asteroid belt so that they coalesce into a new planet! The government tries to investigate the new world, but is prevented by force fields and other phenomena.  The rock has made the planet for Crag, even manipulating the brain of the scientist who names the new heavenly body so that he will christen it "Cragon!"

Crag has made friends with a fellow criminal.  When this joker gets cornered by the fuzz during a jewel heist, Crag rescues him and, along with the jewel thief's cronies, they fly to Cragon, which they find to be a paradise!  No cops, no TV, no booze, no people, just the chance to start a new world, a place to build adobe huts, hunt and fish, sit and watch the fire and the stars.  To misanthrope Crag, disillusioned with the life of luxury that money can buy and disgusted by the pervasive sexual perversity of Earth and Mars, this may sound like a paradise (he realizes he doesn't need booze out here, that he used to get drunk to escape the pressures of human society) but the jewel thief and his hangers on don't want to live a primitive existence.  They take the ship and leave Crag alone, but Crag is not alone for long--the rock is able to recreate Judeth! Crag and Judeth live happily ever after on Cragon, watched over by the rock.  

1957 hardcover

Rogue In Space is pretty good.  Isn't part of the attraction of science fiction crazy characters, crazy settings and crazy capers?  Well, Brown delivers with main characters who are an intelligent rock and a murderous bigot who, we are supposed to believe, is a good person warped by an evil society, their bizarre relationship, and a depiction of (what Brown thinks is) a sick civilization.

Should we think of Rogue in Space as a satire of post-war life and society, or a warning that American society was headed in the wrong direction ?  Did Brown think 1950s pop culture was insipid and potentially a powerful negative influence?  That criminals, as rebels against society, are no worse, and perhaps better, than the rich and powerful, who are selfish and corrupt?  That the post-war boom was making life, which had been so challenging during the Depression and war years, dull, and making people soft, susceptible to decadence?  These kinds of questions add an additional level of interest to the novel, which already is a satisfying crime/adventure story about a man redeemed by friendship.  (Speaking of redemption, should we think of Rogue in Space as a Christian story, with the rock as God or his Son?)

I'd definitely recommend Rogue in Space--Ayn Rand, Mickey Spillane and Robert Heinlein did not steer me wrong!

The House that Stood Still by A. E. Van Vogt

"What's all this about?  Who are those people who were whipping you?"

"Oh--" she shrugged.  "Members of a club."

"What kind of a club?"

"The most exclusive club in the world," she said, and laughed softly.

The House That Stood Still first was unleashed on an unsuspecting world in 1950, as a hardcover.  Since then it has appeared under numerous titles and in numerous forms. Its second publication was an abridged version in a 1951 issue of Detective Book magazine, and the novel includes much of the apparatus of a hard-boiled detective mystery.  There are murder investigations, drugged drinks, stakeouts, lists of suspects, and a protagonist who has a contentious relationship with the D.A. and who drives around town interrogating people and rifling through desk drawers looking for clues. In the final scene the hero gathers together all the characters to announce who the murderer is.  But this still is an A. E. Van Vogt story, so we also get immortals, mind readers, ray guns, space craft, and revelations of the secret cabal that hides in the shadows, pulling the strings.

This weekend I read the 1968 Paperback Library edition.  The description on the back is quite misleading--there are no "indestructible aliens" and there is no "catastrophe that threatened to obliterate the universe from the heavens."  I don't even know what "obliterate the universe from the heavens" means.

Allison Stephens is our hero.  A strapping veteran of the Pacific War (like Mike Hammer), Stephens studied law after the war and is now representing Tannahill, a guy who owns lots of real estate in a little sea side town in California.  One of the buildings owned by Tannahill is a mysterious house made of marble that is over a thousand years old, known as "the Grand House."

Despite what you see on the covers,
Mistra Lanett is blonde

Like those Mickey Spillane novels, The House that Stood Still has its salacious elements.  The indispensable website for Van Vogt fans, icshi.net, suggests that some or all of this erotic material was added to the novel for a 1960 version entitled The Mating Cry.  Within the first ten pages Stephens is busting into one of the rooms in an office building Tannahill owns to find that a bunch of weirdos with a taste for pre-Columbian art have tied up a beautiful blonde, stripped her to the waist, and are whipping her bare back.  A few pages later she is offering her body to Stephens as a reward for rescuing her (he accepts the offer).

This woman, Mistra Lanett, is no damsel in distress.  Instead, she is a femme fatale, one of the group of immortals who are all hanging around the Grand House.  These jokers all have access to high technology, including "night vision glasses," energy pistols that shoot "needle beams," masks which make you indistinguishable from the person you want to impersonate, and space ships.  Like Empress Innelda in The Weapon Makers, Lanett is a woman with lots of power and limited scruples, who has realized that what she really wants out of life is a husband and children.  When it comes to husband material, Stephens fits the bill.  But first, she has a test for him.

Lanett and the other immortals face a dilemma: they are aware that an enemy nation plans to launch a devastating nuclear attack on the United States later in the year, so they have to decide whether to stay on Earth or flee to their base on Mars.  Lanett wants to use her space ship to launch a preemptive strike on the enemy in the next few days, destroying their nuclear bombs while they are still in the factories and warehouses, before they are distributed to the submarines and bombers.  Operating a space ship on a strategic bombing mission is tough work (who knew?) so she wants her dreamboat Stephens to accompany her on her ship.  If he joins the mission, she promises to make him immortal and to love him forever.  But should he trust her? Does he want to risk getting shot out of the sky?  Could he live with the deaths of hundreds of civilians, in an undeclared private war, on his conscience?

(For some reason Van Vogt doesn't finger the Soviet Union as the country which is going to nuke America into oblivion, but the fictional country of "Lorillia."  The Lorillians, Lanett tells Stephens, have "the most powerful anti-aircraft defense in the world."  It's an odd choice, considering that I assumed the novel was set in the early 1950s, when it was written, a time when few countries were manufacturing nuclear weapons and had fleets of submarines and strategic bombers to deliver them.)

Everything in this 159-page book is confusing and crazy.  For example, Tannahill, one of the immortals, has amnesia because he was shot in the head two years ago; at the start of the novel he has just arrived in town from a hospital back east. While in the hospital he had dreams of being buried alive, which of course were not dreams at all--the other immortals were using him as a decoy, shuttling his unconscious body between a New York hospital and a California graveyard for use at a funeral.  I also didn't quite understand where the immortals got their high-tech equipment; none of those we meet seems to be a physicist or engineer.

Anyway, the basic plot behind all the confusion turns out to be this: in ancient times an alien robot star ship crashed in California.  The telepathic "robot brain" convinced the local people, Stone Age Indians, to help repair the ship.  So that the Indians would live forever (it takes a long time to fix a star ship, apparently), the robot brain applied a radioactive treatment to the marble structure he directed the Indians to build above the buried ship.  This special radioactivity keeps whoever resides in the Grand House forever young.  Over the centuries various people, like Lanett, the daughter of a Roman official in 3rd century Britain, ended up at the Grand House, which became the scene of various struggles between those who realized that it conferred immortality on its residents.  In one such struggle Tannahill, then a conquistador called Tanequila the Bold, seized the house and killed most of the Indians.  (After reading this book I can't get that Procul Harum song out of my head.)  During the period of the novel there are 53 immortals, and one of the few surviving Indians, Tezlacodanal, is trying to wrest control of the Grand House from the others, which leads to the wounding of Tannahill and the murders Stephens is trying to solve.  Tezlacodanal has an advantage over the whites, because none of the whites realize there is an alien star ship buried underneath the house; in fact, Tezlacodanal wants to use the alien craft to rule the world!

In the end, Stephens finds the ancient star ship, and working with the robot brain, eliminates Tezlacodanal and stabilizes the whole situation.  He and Lannett marry, and he hopes to give to the world the gift of immortality and to explore the universe with the robot.

Take that, Lorillia!

I didn't enjoy The House that Stood Still nearly as much I did the two Isher books.  For one thing, I'm not crazy about complicated mystery stories, trying to keep track of all the suspects and motives and clues and all that.  (I'm not even sure why the book is called The House that Stood Still; maybe you should take my interpretation of the plot above with a grain of salt!)  Secondly, the Isher books have a fascinating setting and address interesting ideological issues, which this novel does not.

The material in The House that Stood Still provides Van Vogt opportunities to engage the emotions of the reader, but he does not take them. Stephens does not participate in the attack on the enemy nuclear facilities, and the air raid takes place "off screen" and succeeds even without his help.  Why include the war stuff at all if the war is won without the main character's participation, and if he gets the girl without taking the risk and making the sacrifice she asked of him?  Van Vogt drains the excitement out of both the atomic war plot and the sexual relationship plot right there.

Tezlacodanal could have been an interesting villain, a man driven by a lust for power/and or passion for vengeance on the Europeans who destroyed his people and stole their life-giving building, but this guy almost never appears "on screen."  (I guess this is partly because a convention of murder mysteries is that the murderer's identity is kept secret til the end.)  Similarly, Van Vogt doesn't spend any time making the two people who got murdered, a black groundskeeper and an elevator operator, anything more than props, so we don't really care that they got killed or whether their killer is brought to justice.

I am going to have to give The House that Stood Still the all-to-common "barely acceptable" rating.  A disappointment after the Isher books, to be sure.

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The last page of my copy of The House that Stood Still is an ad for No Right To Bear Arms by Carl Bakal, which (apparently) argues that the government should strictly control who is permitted to own firearms.  I thought this an amusing choice for an ad in a book by Van Vogt, in whose famous The Weapon Shops of Isher is expressed the sentiment "The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to be Free."

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The Van Vogt marathon at MPorcius Fiction Blog continues!  In our next installment, the 1974 novel The Secret Galactics, in its 1976 DAW edition, which appeared under the title Earth Factor X!      

The Land Across by Gene Wolfe

"Papa Iason isn't a good man.  I told Naala that already, and it's true.  He's a bad one trying to be good, like a lot of us."

I feel like I have been away from this blog for a long time.  This absence is due to several factors, some good (spending more time with the wife; additional work coming in; going through the closet and the basement preparing my old wargames to sell on ebay; seeing a nephew who is on leave from the USMC) and some not so good (mopping out the flooded basement of the house we rent.)  Another big reason I have not been blogging about the fiction I have read is that for over a week I have been reading Gene Wolfe's 2013 novel The Land Across.  I read it once, and then, in hopes of comprehending it better, I read it a second time.

The Land Across is the story of Grafton, an American travel writer who goes to some unnamed post-communist country in south east Europe, where he gets mixed up with the secret police (the JAKA) and their struggle against a coven of devil-worshiping magicians (the Unholy Way.)  To keep things complicated, also involved in Grafton's saga are a subversive religious group that is neither satanic nor magical (the Legion of Light), some magicians who are rivals of the Unholy Way, and the church.

The Land Across is about the struggle between good and evil, but it is as much (or more) about the struggle between good and evil within ourselves as it is about a fight between a bunch of establishment good guys and a bunch of renegade villains.  Almost all the characters are morally ambiguous, and it is not clear how far we are supposed to sympathize with Grafton, who is our narrator, or most of the other characters.  Grafton, and his closest associate in the JAKA, a female operative named Naala, do some things which are pretty terrible, and are not really in pursuance of their witch-fighting duties.  Wolfe subverts our expectations, trying to surprise us by having characters who at first seem to be villains turn out to be "good guys," and vice versa, and by showing the utility of institutions we are presupposed to have a bad opinion of (like a dictatorship and its secret police) and suggesting that institutions we tend to revere, like Western democracy, can fall into decadence and fail.  Several times characters voice the belief that human beings are made up of both good and evil, and most of the characters demonstrate this assessment, acting foully at some points in the book and nobly at other points.   

Structurally, the book is a kind of police detective-centered mystery.  People break into places looking for clues, search the city for fugitives, get imprisoned and escape, interrogate prisoners, and sit around in cafes, explaining to each other how they pieced together one facet of the mystery and then planning their next step in cracking the case.  There are fistfights with thugs and a climactic gun battle that reminded me of the memorable climax of Mickey Spillane's One Lonely Night.  The Land Across also reminded me of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, which I found quite difficult to follow.  The second time I read The Land Across I kept notes to make it easier to remember who is who, how they are related, and why they are doing what they are doing, and I realized that if you can focus and have a good memory (skills I don't really have), Wolfe gives you all the clues you need to follow what is going on.  Maybe that is true of The Big Sleep (which I read only once) as well.

Wolfe includes lots of horror and ghost story elements, including a haunted house wherein lies hidden treasure, a mummified hand that sneaks around and tries to strangle people, a lonely castle sitting on an island in the middle of a lake, voodoo dolls, and references to werewolves and Dracula.

Related to the horror elements, and central to the book, are its Christian elements.  Three characters are clerics, and of course there is the Unholy Way, who in the action climax try to sacrifice one of Grafton's love interests to the Devil.  Several times over the course of the book, particularly when Grafton is in a difficult situation, a character appears who reminds Grafton strongly of his father.  Grafton first sees this man in chapter one, and believes he is a member of a trio of border guards; this man takes custody of Grafton's passport.  This figure never speaks, and other characters don't seem to see him, but he offers Grafton moral support and, via gestures, provides our narrator with guidance that helps defeat the Unholy Way.  At the end of the book this man (or one who looks exactly like him) turns out to be the charismatic dictator of the country.  The dictator gives Grafton back his passport, calling it "a little gift."  All the clues (he is one of a trinity, he is like a father, and he provides salvation at the end of the adventure) indicate this character is a symbolic representation of God.

Similarly, there is a man in black who sometimes appears to Grafton.  This figure also never speaks, is not noticed by other characters, and guides Grafton via gestures, but he scares Grafton rather than buoying him.  The man in black also appears after one of the wizards who is not a member of the Unholy Way casts a spell.  Presumably, the man in black is the Devil.

There are several motifs that pop up in the novel repeatedly.  Hands are an important image in the book; not only is there the animated dead hand (which is much more than a monster; it is actually a character with a personality and motives), but people often shake hands and hold hands in significant ways.  Another motif is the decline of the United States; Wolfe really seems pessimistic about the current condition of the USA. One character laments the end of the gold standard, Naala tells Grafton, "We do not seek the destruction of Amerika, which you yourselves have too much destroyed already....", and Grafton at one point wonders if the country he is in, which is ruled by a dictator and his ruthless secret police, and where only members of the government have access to telephones, automobiles or computers, is really any crazier than the US.

Of course, Wolfe is writing in the voice of Grafton, who at times seems like a shallow sort (he is always talking about clubs and clubbing, for example) and Wolfe is famous for employing unreliable and not quite sympathetic narrators.  (Hopefully women will keep this in mind when Grafton spends half a page complaining that women talk too much and are always telling you extraneous and distracting details instead of getting to the point.)

Wolfe writes The Land Across in a spare and economical style; dialogue makes up the lion's share of the text, and there aren't many fancy descriptions or clever turns of phrase.  (We do get at least one groan-inducing pun: the chapter in which some guy gets decapitated is titled "Getting Ahead.")  I liked the book, but I have to admit I didn't think the characters were particularly interesting, there were few exciting images, and I wasn't affected emotionally.  As an intellectual puzzle The Land Across excels, but I didn't really care whether this person got killed, or whether that person got back to America, or who fell in love with who, etc.  This is a marked contrast to Wolfe's monumental masterpieces, like the four volume Book of the New Sun or the three volume Book of the Short Sun, which are chock full of awe-inspiring visions, fascinating people, and heartbreaking tragedies, as well as puzzles that had me breaking my brain.

It falls short of the lofty heights Wolfe has achieved with his finest work, but by any normal standard The Land Across is a major success, with an intricate and surprising plot and a generous sprinkling of thought-provoking passages.  Worth your time, even if you are a dolt like me and have to read it twice.          

The Starmen of Llyrdis and The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett

Via Twitter, Joachim Boaz of SFruminations reminds us that it is Leigh Brackett's birthday.  I have enjoyed a number of Brackett's books and stories, most recently (in January of this year, I believe) The Starmen of Llyrdis and The Big Jump.  I wrote reviews of these novels, then in a computer mishap erased them, but have drafts of these reviews that I will paste below; the Big Jump draft looks almost finished.

There is a blog dedicated to Brackett that does not appear to be updated regularly, but includes quite a few interesting posts: http://leighbrackett.blogspot.com/.

The Starmen of Llyrdis

This was a competent SF adventure story, not very innovative, but not bad.  A mid 20th century guy who has never felt like he has ever belonged, despite being the US Air Force's best test pilot, traces his roots in Europe and learns he is the offspring of the union of an alien and an Earth person.  It turns out that the universe is full of intelligent life, but only one race of space aliens (one that can breed with Earth people) has the mutation necessary to survive interstellar travel.  This race, thus, has a monopoly on interstellar trade.  They have been secretly buying Earth goods, like Scotch whiskey, French perfume, and American movies.  The main character joins this race of space merchants and travels the galaxy with them, becoming involved in rivalries between various factions of the merchant race and getting involved with a dangerous femme fatale.  There is a very effective scene on a planet covered in a fungus forest. 

The Big Jump

Originally appearing in 1953, then published in 1955 by Ace, The Big Jump is a noirish/hard-boiled tale of man's first extrasolar exploration.

The moon, mars, and other parts of the solar system have been colonized for genberations, buyt only noew has a ship tavelled to another star and returned.  However, only one member of the crew, Ballantyne, has come back with the ship, and he is an emaciated near-comatose wreck who dies soon after his return.  What happened to the others?  The only clue are Ballantyne's last words, whispered to his friend, musclebound construction worker Arch Comyn.  Comyn is determined to find out what happened to the expedition because he owes a favor to one of the men left out in space, and tpo do so he has to contend with various members of the wealthy Cochrane family, a ruthless bunch of robber barons wjho financed Ballantyne's expedition.

A pleasant pulpy sort of thing about tough guys, a sexy dame and hit men, as well as space travel and alien planets; people who like a little Mickey Spillane mixed with their rocket ships should check it out.
 

Trader to the Stars by Poul Anderson

Poul Anderson is one of the famous “deans” or “grand masters” of science fiction, having had a long glorious career, written dozens of books and won millions of fans.  My attitude towards Anderson’s work has always been mixed; I almost always like his plots and his point of view, but his style is never better than average, and his later work can feel terribly bloated.  In September in an Ames, Iowa used bookstore I picked up the 1976 Berkley paperback of Anderson’s Trader to the Stars (Z3199) which has a red Powers cover and blurbs declaring Anderson to be the most popular SF author.  

(I sometimes wonder about these Powers covers: why would marketing people think such an abstract piece would sell more copies than a realistic depiction of Nicholas Van Rijn, or of a space ship, or bizarre aliens, or men and/or women tensely gripping blasters?  Powers himself could paint and draw attractive and realistic people and space ships, as he did in profusion for Heinlein’s lamentable Number of the Beast – why not instruct him to? Maybe the abstract Powers covers were an effort to appeal to a more sophisticated audience?  Maybe the publisher knew the book would sell based on Anderson’s name, and used the abstract cover to save people embarrassment at the checkout counter or on the subway?  I know when I was on the New York subway I would wave a volume of Proust around like a banner, but bend and crush a Mickey Spillane collection all out of shape to make sure the cover was invisible.)

The bulk of the book consists of three stories featuring Nicholas Van Rijn, interstellar merchant during a period of history in which human beings are expanding their reach throughout the universe, meeting and trading with dozens of intelligent alien races.  There are also brief philosophical/historical passages that present a sort of background for the stories' libertarian capitalist setting.

I have to admit I expected Nicholas Van Rijn to be a slender or muscular hero type, either hard-bitten and blunt or sophisticated and flippant.  So I was surprised to discover he was an obese (we are told he has numerous chins) gourmand and lecher who splutters and complains at his employees like a sitcom boss.  This was an interesting surprise, though I did find Van Rijn's accent and speech patterns more irritating than amusing.   

“Hiding Place,” the first story in Trader to the Stars, has detective story elements, and a charming gimmick: the human crew of Van Rijn’s vessel have a brief period of time to figure out which group of alien creatures on a zoo ship are the intelligent beings who have the information they need to escape death at the hands of space pirates.  This is a particular challenge because the intelligent aliens have mistaken the protagonists for the murderous pirates, and are trying to hide every indication of their intelligence.  This is a fun and appealing story.  The intelligent alien race turns out to be quite reminiscent of the aliens described by Burroughs in Chessmen of Mars, written in 1921, making me wonder if Anderson had read that work.

I found the other two stories in Trader to the Stars, “Territory” and “Master Key,” less appealing and less memorable.  In both of them Anderson painstakingly develops preindustrial alien societies with complex social relationships, but the details about these societies faded from my mind as soon as I finished reading the story.

In “Territory,” Van Rijn is center stage, marooned on an alien planet when the spear-wielding natives rise up and drive off all the humans save him and a beautiful female do-gooder.  Van Rijn figures out the natives’ culture and society, gains their respect by defeating their champion in hand to hand combat, and then negotiates a business deal which will benefit himself and the natives, making Anderson’s point that private business and the profit motive are a better way to solve problems and order life than government and charity.  “The Master Key” has two first person narrators, a man who is visiting Van Rijn in his luxurious apartment and a Van Rijn employee who relates the main story, which is about his difficult experiences trying to establish trade with the natives on a newly discovered planet.  So sagacious is Van Rijn that he is able to figure out what makes the alien society tick just from his employee’s description.  Then Van Rijn passionately laments that most people do not truly desire freedom and independence, but prefer to be told what to do, provided for, and protected from others and from themselves.

Trader to the Stars is a readable, enjoyable, but average SF book, distinctive only because of its libertarian sensibilities, which will endear it to some but irritate others, and because its hero is fat (though being fat doesn't stop him from outfighting other men and getting the girl.)