Space voyages with Oliver, Russell, Temple and Neville

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

The 1980 British edition
of A Sea of Space

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I Am Returning" by Ray Russell (1961)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Worship Night" by Kris Neville (1953)

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

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

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

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

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

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

More anthologized SF in our next episode!

The Three Suns of Amara by William F. Temple

...Sherret reflected further that there was something disturbing about a Jackie's laugh....there was more irony than cruelty in it.  The laugher knew you were a fool, but knew that he was too.  He was laughing at the nature of things which made sport of him and of you.

Even though people were getting killed all over the place by poison gas and shell splinters, William F. Temple's 1963 novel Battle on Venus, the half of  Ace Double 76380 which we read in our last episode, has a kind of light-hearted tone and includes little jokes here and there. Temple's bio on the first page of the book is also supposed to be funny.  I didn't think the jokes in Battle on Venus were counterproductively overdoing it (I often think comic relief undermines fiction, but Temple avoided this pitfall) but I was on my guard when I read the other half of Ace Double 76380, 1962's The Three Suns of Amara--this novel actually starts with a jocular, puzzling, "CAST OF CHARACTERS."

Whereas lots of SF is about scientists and engineers who seek knowledge and use their understanding of the laws of the universe to solve problems and accomplish great things, The Three Suns of Amara suggests the universe is a chaotic mystery that we'll never figure out.  Again and again the novel's hero and readers are confronted by complex systems which are totally inexplicable and bizarre phenomena that are absolutely incredible, among them astronomical phenomena, human neuroses and forms of government and society.

Star ship Endeavor is on Amara, a planet whose eccentric orbit around three equidistant suns astrophysicists cannot explain.  Crewman Alexander Sherret decides to leave the ship when Captain Maxton learns that Goffism is sweeping the Earth and decides to run his own vessel on Goffist lines.  Goffism, the brainchild of a "psychosociologist" whom Sherret considers "a nut," prescribes that political units be run as dictatorships, with each individual member of the unit being given a turn at wielding absolute power.  Sherret assumes such a system will lead to disaster and wants no part of it.  There is another human ship on Amara, Captain Bagshaw's Pegasus, 300 miles away at Na-Abiza, and Sherret sets out for it, on foot, a journey directly compared to that of Odysseus.  (Over the course of the novel Temple refers to Homer, to painter Diego Velasquez's Rokeby Venus, and, repeatedly, to Shakespeare.)

Click or squint for an introduction to William F. Temple and his sense of humor

On the road, Sherret interacts with the many strange life forms native to Amara.  First up are specimens of the people Earthers have dubbed Paddies and Jackies; these figures set the tone of Sherret's odyssey.  Paddies are short and hairy, and their name is derived from a stereotype of Irish people which I am not quite familiar with, apparently a tendency of Irish people to speak cryptically or nonsensically.  (Maybe this is a reference to the paradoxes of Oscar Wilde, who isnamechecked later in the book?)

He greeted Sherret surlily, "Don't kill me, human, because if you do I shall kill you."

This kind of remark had earned the creature its sobriquet.

Sherret smiled.  "Don't e afraid, I shan't kill you.  I'm only out for a walk.  Have you ever been to Na-Abiza?"

"Yes, I have, human, but I didn't get there."

Jackies are tall and skinny, and "Jackie" is short for "jackass"--the Jackies are constantly laughing, maniacally, and like the Paddies speak in riddles.  The Paddy and Jackie provide Sherret incomprehensible advice, and then the Earthman proceeds onto his perilous journey, their warnings only making sense later, in context.

After he is subdued by Melas trees, which can only reproduce by reaching into a person's mind, Sherret is rescued by a member of the race known as the Petrans; like the Melas, Petrans have a psychic and parasitic nature.  A Petran can only survive as long as a member of a different race believes in it, and this Petran, Rosala, strives to keep Sherret from leaving, lest she fade away to nothing.  Among her means of convincing him to stay are her efforts to practice therapy on him--she is an artist and they collaboratively paint allegorical pictures of his neuroses as a means of expunging them.  (Remember how there was a lot of psychology in Battle on Venus, from Captain Freiburg's insecurities to Senilde's failure to achieve psychological adulthood?  Three Suns of Amara is also full of psychology.)  Then there's the fact that Rosala's appearance is determined by Sherret's preferences; he can tailor her looks to his exact specifications, so she looks like his dream girl.

Sherret falls in love, but his relationship with Rosala is tempestuous, claustrophobic, and plagued by jealousies, and he eventually leaves her to continue on his journey. He encounters more people from dysfunctional societies with psychological problems and more dangerous monsters who owe their existence largely to Sherret's own personality, as well as menacing and inexplicable natural phenomena, but finally makes it to Pegasus at the village of Na-Abiza.  He finds that Captain Bagshaw and his crew have fallen into decadence, having entered into an unstable and unsustainable exploitative relationship with yet another group of psychologically unbalanced natives, the inhabitants Na-Abiza.  The crew of the Pegasus is doomed, and they offer Sherret no way off Amara and no safe harbor.

Sherret heads back towards Rosala's place, and meets her on the way.  She has broken the laws of her people and abdicated many of her psychic powers, proving her sincere love for Sherret.  The lovers set out to reform the Petrans in hopes of founding the first healthy community on Amara.

The Three Suns of Amara first appeared in this 1962 Ace Double, F-129

Three Suns of Amara is more like a series of fantasy allegories of unhealthy individuals and societies than a "real" science fiction story in which the author speculates about the effects of novel conditions or extrapolates from real-life trends. Again and again Sherret confronts bewildering phenomena that are visually striking (like the oft-described light effects of the three suns and the glowing, slowly growing crack in the world, both of which Kelly Freas illustrates in his charming cover illustration) or make some metaphorical point, but when the Earthman asks an Amaran about them, he receives no explanation.  Instead of coming up with believable explanations for, say, Petran biology, Temple just has Rosala tell the Earthman that such things are secrets she cannot divulge.  The novel's point seems to have nothing to do with science, or to integrate a skepticism of science; perhaps Temple is trying to tell us that the universe is incomprehensible, but if we try to do the right thing and embrace love and friendship, maybe we can get by.  In making his point Temple presents the reader with lots of incredible stuff he refuses to explain, but I think the most outwardly ridiculous elements--Goffism, the Paddies and the Jackies--come at the beginning, and I don't think Temple ever slips across the line into absurdity or farce.

The Three Suns of Amara is more ambitious than Battle on Venus, but I don't think it is more entertaining.  It has a dream-like, unreal quality, which means it has little emotional impact, and since Temple tries to cram numerous topics into the small space afforded him (the novel takes up just 102 ages of text), he can only address them in a shallow way.

The Three Suns of Amara is acceptable, but not particularly remarkable or memorable. I certainly don't regret reading it and Battle on Venus, but they have not inspired me to actively seek out more of Temple's work.

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Another Ace Double adventure coming up next time at MPorcius Fiction Log!

Battle on Venus by William F. Temple

"Emotionally, spiritually, morally, intellectually you remained immature, with only one aim: pleasure--crude, immediate pleasure.  There's nothing in you of timeless serenity, the spirit of contemplation.  No wonder you're bored.  The boon of immortality is wasted on you.  Let me have it."

Let's continue our look at Ace Doubles with 76380 from 1973, starting with William F. Temple's Battle on Venus.  Battle on Venus actually was featured in two Ace Doubles, first in F-195 in 1963 (paired with Robert Silverberg's The Silent Invaders) and then ten years later in the book I own, which includes two Temple novels, the other being The Three Suns of Amara, first published in 1962.  (If Battle on Venus isn't terrible, in our next episode we'll talk about The Three Suns of Amara--no pressure though, BoV!)

Captain Jonah Freiburg, a middle-aged veteran of many risky space flights who is "losing his nerve," is the commander of the first Earth expedition to Venus.  Along for the ride with the astronauts is George Starkey, a young and optimistic "professional explorer."  When their ship breaks through the cloud layer that surrounds Venus it is immediately fired upon by anti-aircraft guns, and when the ship makes an emergency landing the crew is subjected to an artillery barrage and then surrounded by tanks!  The Earthers become the center of a battle between unmanned drone armored columns, and while the side protecting them wins, they suffer fatalities and their space ship is damaged.

Starkey takes the ship's helicopter and goes to look for Venusian natives, and, though his chopper gets shot down, he does meet some.  Luckily, the Venusians he meets aren't lizardmen or insectmen or blobpeople or anything like that--the first he meets is Mara, a beautiful and intelligent young woman, apparently the sole survivor of her village, and she and Starkey begin a love affair.  Soon the lovebirds meet Senilde, an immortal genius who has been the dictator of Venus for thousands of years.  He exterminated almost all Venusians centuries ago (those dense clouds are the residue of his genocidal poison gas campaign) and the worldwide war between armies of robot AFVs and aircraft is a game he cooked up for his own amusement.  Battle on Venus turns out to be like one of those Star Trek episodes in which the crew of the Enterprise meet a mischievous and amoral immortal (that's like half of them, right?)  Then the wisest man from Mara's village, Leep, a mystic who has psychic powers, shows up and matches wits with Senilde, hoping to attain the secret of immortality for himself.

The giant saw blades are in the novel,
but I felt they were not really well-
integrated into the plot.

Starkey, Mara, and Freiburg manage to get back to Earth to live happily ever after, but the fate of Senilde and Leep is unknown--as the Earth ship leaves, Venus is engulfed in an inferno of nuclear explosions as Senilde makes a last ditch attempt to stop the Earthlings (and the last of Venus' hot chicks!) from escaping.

Battle on Venus feels short and quick (it is like 105 pages of text), and is a pleasant entertainment.  I appreciated that Temple tried to give each of the named characters a believable personality and motivation, and addressed psychological and philosophical issues, however shallowly, in the context of what is essentially a light adventure. Also, we are always hearing how "old" SF either has no women characters or features females who are merely damsels in distress, but Mara is smart and independent and solves problems and makes bold decisions.  A minor novel in the scheme of things, but enjoyable.  The Three Suns of Amara, here we come!

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There are three pages of ads bound in the middle of Ace Double 76380; let's look at the titles the Ace people were pushing on the page headed, "The World's Best Award-Winning Science Fiction Comes from Ace."

Ace's Armageddon 2419 A. D. is a sort of fix-up or consolidation of two stories by Philip Francis Nowlan from late 1920s issues of Amazing Stories which constitute the first appearances of Buck Rogers.  I have often considered reading this (or the originals, available for free online) but have yet to do so.  The Ace edition advertised has a pretty cool cover, depicting a dirigible-like aircraft attacking a ground target with a lightning-like weapon, but the cover on the earlier Ace edition (F-188) featuring jetpack-equipped infantry (including a woman!) is even better.

The Big Show by Keith Laumer is a book I owned at some point, and I love the cover, but I can't find it on my shelves now; maybe I sold it when I left New York.  Laumer is one of those writers I want to like, and the profile of him in Charles Platt's Dream Makers: Volume II makes him seem like a strange and fascinating figure, but most of the stuff I have read by him was just OK.

The Black Star Passes by John W. Campbell, Jr, a collection of stories originally published in Amazing in the early '30s, is in the same series of space operas about three scientists as Invaders From the Infinite, which I read in 2011 and thought boring, as I told the customers of Amazon.com.

I read Gender Genocide by Edmund Cooper back in 2015, and still own the edition advertised here.  (The cover on this one is kind of embarrassing.)

I read Barry N. Malzberg's The Falling Astronauts in this edition in 2011 and wrote about it on Amazon.  I love the cover.  I got mine, which suffered significant water damage before it came into my custody, at a church thrift store on Route 69 outside of Osceola, Iowa.

I own the advertised edition of George Zebrowski's The Omega Point, and read it and wrote about it back in 2015.  Terrific wraparound cover.

I own a pretty worn-out copy of the Ace edition of Bob Shaw's Tomorrow Lies in Ambush with a Woolco price sticker on the cover.  All you history-of-North-American-retail nerds (and I know you are out there) already know what I just learned five seconds ago on wikipedia, that Woolco was founded in Columbus, Ohio, the current location of MPorcius Fiction Log's HQ, in 1962 and went out of business in the US in 1983.  I like Shaw and am eating broccoli this week in hopes of living long enough to fit reading this collection of thirteen short stories into my schedule.

Veruchia by E. C. Tubb is the eighth installment in the 33-volume saga of Dumarest of Terra, the wandering space gladiator, and I read it in 2014 in a digital edition.  The cover on the edition advertised here in Ace Double 76380 is a nice "arty" one.

Warlord of the Air is one of Michael Moorcock's Oswald Bastable novels.  In my teens I was crazy about Elric and the whole Eternal Champion idea, and I amassed and read a huge collection of Moorcock novels, including Warlord of the Air.  One of Moorcock's recurring themes is the presentation of (at times metaphorical or alternate reality) Britain and/or USA as the villain, and another is the guy who goes native or turns against the people he was supporting in the first part of the story because they are imperialistic or whatever.  Both of these themes turn up in Warlord of the Air, and I believe all the Bastable novels; Bastable is an English adventurer who finds himself in an alternate reality in which China goes to war against the West and Bastable comes to sympathize with the Chinese.  More memorable (to me at least) was the second Bastable book, in which Africans build a tank the size of a battleship and conquer the world, the final scene being a battle between the African megatank and (I believe, memory may be failing me) an iteration of the U. S. Capitol building that bristles with heavy guns.  For whatever reason I never got to the third Bastable novel, in which, I am guessing, Bastable comes to sympathize with communist Russia.  (Moorcock fans better-read than I should feel free to set me straight in the comments.)

I am unenthusiastic about Ross Rocklynne, Ken Bulmer, and Mack Reynolds, having read some of their work and had very mixed feelings.  Ace's The Men and the Mirror is a collection of stories; I read the title story and wrote about it earlier this year.  Ken Bulmer writes violent adventure stories, but is not as skilled a storyteller as E. C. Tubb nor as unusual and interesting as Andrew J. Offutt; I wrote about Diamond Contessa in 2015 and Cycle of Nemesis in 2014.  Mack Reynolds, who under dubious conditions was for a while heralded as the most popular SF writer in the world, seems to write mostly about utopias and socialism in stories and novels that are short on character development or plot and long on trivia and philosophical speeches.  Do all three of these guys deserve another chance from me?  Of course they do, and, if I was going to live forever like a Venusian dictator, they would definitely get it.  Seeing as the grim reaper awaits me as it awaits us all, well, we'll see what happens.  Rocklynne is represented in my small collection of Ace Doubles, so maybe he will crop up in MPorcius Fiction Log's current series of posts on Ace Doubles.

I don't have enough direct experience of the work of Margaret St. Clair, Arthur K. Barnes, and John Rankine (a pseudonym of Douglas R. Mason) to have any opinion about them.  I find in the realm of 20th-century SF that there are always new frontiers to explore, and maybe someday I will be able to scribble something on these blank spaces on the map.