Four more stories by Jack Vance from The Augmented Agent and Other Stories

Paperback editions from 1988 and 1989; the cover illustration on the 1988 printing has nothing to 
do with Vance's work--it originally appeared on Barrington Bayley's Rod of Light

Here at MPoricus Fiction Log we are reading 1986's The Augmented Agent and Other Stories, a collection of 1950s and 1960s stories by SF Grandmaster Jack Vance, the brilliant stylist behind such famous series as the Dying Earth and the Demon Princes.  I often think about rereading the three Alastor books and the three Cadwal books (I've already read the second and third Dying Earth books and all five Demon Princes books multiple times) but today I explore four Vance tales that I have never read before.  Having examined the first four of the volume's eight tales over the last two blog posts, today we'll be finishing up with my hardcover copy of The Augmented Agent and Other Stories.

"Crusade to Maxus" (1951)


In our last blog post I complained that Vance failed to convey to the reader the emotions of the protagonists of 1951's "Golden Girl," and that that story lacked any thrills that might hold the reader's attention.  Things are quite different in this 1951 story.  You see, Maxus is a planet to which slaves are brought, to be sold to the "Overmen" who employ most of them in vast industrial complexes which produce top-of-the-line electronics and machinery that are critical to the economy of the entire galaxy!  Travec has rushed to this world because his family has been captured by the space raider Arman and brought to Maxus to be sold to the highest bidder!  Without going overboard or getting too manipulative, but instead with economic understatement that is compelling, Vance depicts Travec's desperation and frustration as he hurries to the slave market to buy back his own flesh and blood and is delayed by all manner of bureaucratic red tape and demands for bribes.  Agony follows as he finds upon his arrival at the "Slave Distribute" that his mother Iardeth has died and his sister Thalla has been sold to some overweight aristocrat.  There is also melodrama and grue as fate decrees that, in the icy morgue where rests Iardeth Travec's corpse, Travec get into a fight with the noble who has purchased his sister--in the fracas a stray energy blast from the aristo's pistol kills Thalla!

Before she was killed, Thalla told Travec of another captive, a young woman named Mardien who was kind to her.  Following the tragedy in the morgue, Travec purchases Mardien at the slave auction.  He also goes to see a Maxus official, the High Commissioner, in hopes of purchasing his brother and a younger sister, who were sold before Travec arrived.  The High Commisioner offers to hand over Travec's siblings if Travec can deliver to him, dead or alive, the renegade son of a Maxus noble and a slave woman, a desperado who has committed crimes which humiliated members of the Maxus overclass--this offender is none other than Arman the slaver, somebody Travec wanted to kill anyway!

Arman is believed to be on Fell--his mother was an Oro, one of the highland people of planet Fell, all of whom the lowland people of Fell consider insane.  On their way to Fell, Mardien reveals to Travec that she is also an Oro, and that Arman is a hero to the Oros, herself included!  When Travec confronts Arman he learns that Arman, ostensibly at least, is leading the Oros in a long term plot to overthrow Maxus--they hope to build Fell into a similar industrial powerhouse and put Maxus out of business.  Part of the plan is selling to Maxus slaves like Mardien, volunteers who will conduct industrial espionage while toiling in the Maxus factories.

"Crusade to Maxus" starts off strong, but the resolution of the story is a little muddled and lacking in verve.  To me it felt sort of contrived, and much of it is related to us in a bloodless second hand fashion that is not very exciting or satisfying.

Mardien's attitudes about Arman evolve as her relationship with Travec evolves; our heroes declare their love for each other and Mardien reveals to Travec the secret of what makes the Oros so special.  The Oros are not only telepaths, but have discovered a method of achieving something like immortality, which renders them unafraid of death.  When an Oro dies he can shift his personality into the brain of a loved one, where it will merge with the primary personality and live on in a vague fashion.  I have to admit that I found this business rather unconvincing and uninteresting--it sounded to me like the consciousness of the dead person is quickly subsumed within that of the primary and quickly forgotten, and thus is not immortal at all.  Mardien absorbed her mother's soul, but it's not like she has her mother's memories or talks to her mother or has taken on her mother's likes and dislikes or anything like that--"I felt her presence for a few weeks, as if she were in the room.  Then gradually she melted completely into me."  This is not any different from when somebody you love dies in real life!  This is a half-assed concept that doesn't seem to change what death is like or change how life is lived very much at all, but seems to have been conceived by Vance as a plot device to produce people who are fearless because the plot needed a bunch of people to be fearless.  To this end, the Oros can teach people who are not telepathic the technique of shifting your consciousness into a loved one's brain as you die.

After they have killed Arman, Travec and Mardien take over the crusade against Maxus, abandoning the plan of building a rival superpower, a project that would take decades or centuries and probably be strangled in the cradle by the Maxus space navy before a Fell space navy could be cobbled together.  Our heroes, instead, direct the Oro slaves on Maxus to teach as many of the other slaves as possible the Oro soul-shifting ability.  Because their leaders can communicate telepathically, and none of the slaves fear death, the slaves can launch a campaign of spectacular suicide attacks--for example, all at once, in the space of a moment, every single slave chauffeur on the planet crashes the air car he is driving, killing over a million people.  The Maxus government crumples before such terrorism, and slavery is ended and a representative government installed.

"Crusade to Maxus" was first published as "Overlords of Maxus," a cover story in Thrilling Wonder Stories.  Prefixed to the story is a funny little note from Thrilling Wonder's editor, believed to be Sam Merwin, Jr.  It seems that some readers had written in to complain about SF stories depicting a future full of people fighting with swords and contending with slavers and so forth--surely sword fighting and slavery are anachronisms, totally out of place in a future of interstellar travel!  Merwin replies that the modern world of 1951 is full of people who believe in voodoo and is plagued by dictatorial governments who throw dissenters into forced labor camps--he avers that human cultural differences that we might call anachronisms exist now and no doubt will continue to exist in the future.

A glance at the 1951 magazine version of the Maxus story reveals many changes were made to the text for book publication in 1986--the protagonist's name is even different, changed from Gardius to Travec.  A long action sequence on Fell involving a fight with giant spiders was deleted--this section doesn't do much to move the plot forward, as it starts with Gardius, having been captured by Arman, being thrown in the woods to be eaten by the spiders, and then ends with Gardius, having slain the spiders, being captured again by Arman and this time sold into slavery on Maxus.  In the 1986 version Arman just sells Travec into slavery on Maxus immediately upon capturing him.  The 1986 version still contains the foreshadowing of the fight with the spiders--a lowlander tells Travec all about the monstrous spiders, so that the reader expects him to have to fight them, but they are never mentioned again!

"Crusade to Maxus" is like 50 pages, and I really liked the first 40 or so, which reminded me of the Demon Princes stories, but the ending is just OK.  "Crusade to Maxus" has appeared in numerous Vance collections; under the title "Kruistocht naar Alambar" (Alambar is the capital city of Maxus) it is the title story of one such Dutch collection.

"Three-Legged Joe" (1953)

This is one of those stories in which academically-trained young men with a lot of new ideas are shown up by the uneducated old-timers for whom they have contempt because they underrate the value of those old goats' accumulated lifetimes of practical experience.  In the end the newbies triumph over adversity, however.

John Milke and Oliver Paskell have just graduated from Highland Technical Institute and are going to planet Odfars to do some prospecting.  They chose Odfars because there is evidence that it is loaded with valuable minerals, but, for some reason, nobody has staked any claims on the planet.  Milke and Paskell try to find an old timer to accompany them as a hired hand, but none of the experienced prospectors they approach want to go to Odfars--these geezers even advise the boys to stay away from the place, making jocular comments about a "Three-Legged Joe" said to live there.

Milke and Paskell head to barren airless Odfars alone, making bone-headed amateurish mistakes both while preparing their expedition and while on the planet.  A mysterious three-legged creature which they can never seem to get a good look at bedevils their operations, and they try various means to destroy it; all fail, but they do manage to neutralize the creature without killing it and thus open up Odfars's deposits to exploitation that will make them rich.

This is a slight but entertaining SF story with some amusing bits and a healthy serving of science, mostly about electricity--Milke and Paskell know all about "hysteresis" and "field conflicts," the "resistance of superconductive metals at absolute zero" and "induction coils."  I don't know anything about that stuff, but I guess that is why they are rich and I consider buying a five-dollar book an extravagance.

After first appearing in Startling Stories, "Three-Legged Joe" would go on to be included in many Vance collections.  A brief skim reveals there are quite a few differences in the text of the original magazine version and the 1986 version; for example, in the magazine version Milke says "If it's liquid...I'll eat your hat" and in the hardcover book version, he says "If it's liquid...I'll eat my hat."  I'm finding the rationale behind some of the changes a little opaque.

"Sjamback" (1953) 

"Sjamback" first appeared in If, the top story of an issue in which editor James L. Quinn's editorial is devoted to complaints that his new fountain pen is too complicated and praise for the film Breaking Through the Sound Barrier.

Wilbur Murphy is a cinematographer on the TV show Know Your Universe!  One of the producers thinks the show is getting stale with all the scientific stuff they have been showing, and needs some sex, some mystery, some excitement!  So he sends Murphy to the planet Cirgamesc (the challenge of pronouncing this name is one of the story's jokes), chasing rumors of superstitions and unlikely supernatural happenings, like claims a guy rides a horse from the surface of the planet up into space to greet incoming star ships!

Cirgamesc was settled by Javanese, Arabs and Malayans, and Murphy hopes to be able to film some interesting traditions and exotic rituals, preferably involving dancing girls, but for the most part the people there seem pretty tame--the son of the Sultan of Singhalut, the city in which Murphy disembarks,  meets Murphy at the spaceport and tells him that "We left our superstitions and ancestor-worship back on Earth.  We are quiet Mohammedans and indulge in very little festivity."  One oddity does pique Murphy's interest, however: it seems that occasionally a citizen of Cirgamesc goes berserk--runs amuk--and becomes a "sjambak"--a bandit, a rebel against authority.  Such troublemakers wear a metal ornament on their chests, and to facilitate the detection of such renegades the Sultan has decreed that everybody go around bare chested...including the women, hubba hubba!

Murphy is discouraged from investigating this phenomenon by the native authorities, the common people, and by an offworld businessman who has lived on Cirgamesc for nine years--the Sultan runs a surveillance state and things don't go well for those who look too closely into the subject of the sjambaks.  A little detective work reveals that the Sultan's son is behind (or taking advantage of) the sjambak phenomenon--he wants to launch a jihad and these energetic rebels are to be his army.  Singhalut, like all the cities on airless Cirgamesc, is under a dome, which severely limits opportunities for the city to grow.  The solution, according to the atavistic (and perhaps insane) prince is to conquer some other dome cities or maybe some other planet.  (The metal thing on the chests of the sjambaks is the visible portion of a device implanted into the sjambaks that allows them to breathe on the airless planet's surface.)  In a way that is not very exciting or satisfying Murphy foils the jihad and figures out the kernel of truth behind the weird rumor of a man riding a horse in space.

("Sjamback" brought to mind those reader complaints of anachronisms mentioned by Sam Merwin, Jr. in Thrilling Wonder in 1951--when they venture outside the dome, the Sultan's soldiers wear spacesuits but are armed with crossbows and swords, and the sjamback that faces them down also wields a sword.)

"Sjamback" is just OK.  There isn't much by way of thrills, the resolution of the plot is underwhelming, and the satire of TV is a little obvious and rather gentle--Vance's depiction of TV  doesn't have the bile we see in other SF stories that address the threat posed by the idiot box, of which there are quite a few.  Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is perhaps the most famous and sophisticated of such attacks, but during the life of this blog I have encountered many others, among them Robert F. Young's "Thirty Days Had September," Robert Bloch's "Beep No More, My Lady," Charles Beaumont's "The Monster Show," and John D. MacDonald's "Spectator Sport."  Vance made a packet of money writing for the Captain Video TV show, and so maybe he had a soft spot for the boob tube.

"Sjamback" might be of value to those interested in SF depictions of Muslims, Asians, and Arabs and Western essentialist views of nonwhites that boil peoples down to a few stereotypical characteristics: that businessman tells Murphy that the people of Cirgamesc are "schizophrenic.... They've got the docile Javanese blood, plus the Arabian elan."  A number of SF writers have mined Islamic and Arab history for ideas; I haven't actually read Dune, by Jack Vance's friend Frank Herbert (Vance, Herbert and Poul Anderson would go sailing together in a boat they built themselves--we're talking about real men here!), but it is my understanding that it is largely inspired by Arab history, Islam, and T. E. Lawrence.  Andrew Offutt integrates stuff from the Islamic world in some of his work, like King Dragon, but as I recall mostly as romantic window-dressing.

"The Augmented Agent" (1961)

Finally we come to the title story, which was first printed in Amazing Stories under the joke title "I. C. a. BeM."  It was the cover story for that issue, and, when it was reprinted in The Best from Amazing Stories under the title "The Augmented Agent" in 1973, Jack got top billing again.  (Remember how in the July 1973 issue of Fantastic editor Ted White spoke at some length about what a crummy job the publisher did putting together The Best from Amazing?)  In the interim the story had appeared, under its original title, in the Spring 1968 issue of Great Science Fiction. 
       
"The Augmented Agent" starts off like something out of Warhammer 40,000, as we learn that CIA agent James Keith has had all sort of weapons and surveillance and communications equipment integrated into his body.  It is the 1990s, the Soviet Union is still a going concern, and Adoui Shagawe, premiere of the Soviet-aligned African nation of Lakhadi, has acquired some old intercontinental ballistic missiles (they lack warheads, for now at least!)  Keith has been given the mission of infiltrating the Lakhadi government and disguised to look like Tamba Ngasi, a minister of the parliament of Lakhadi with a face that is "dark, feral and harsh: the face, literally, of a savage."  Ngasi is a tough customer, a tribal chief who murdered his own family to win his seat in the Lakhadi legislature.

We observe as Keith sneaks into Lakhadi via submarine, assassinates Tamba Ngasi with one of his high tech secret weapons, takes the man's place and travels to the capital of Lakhadi, Fejo, a city built with Soviet money in a modernistic but African style where the hotel staff address the government bigwigs staying at the hotel as "comrade."  (Here we find the inspiration for Ned Dameron's jacket illustration which mixes African designs and figures with Soviet iconography.)  Keith as Ngasi attends parliament, where the wisdom of controversial policies of purchasing the ICBMs and allying more closely with the People's Republic of China are debated.  One guy even says that Marxism is bunk!  Lakhadi's policy is not set in stone, and Western, Soviet and Chinese agents are all there in Fejo, trying to influence the Lakhadi government, and Keith discovers that the Red agents are just as augmented as he is.

Was the man Keith killed the real Tamba Ngasi, or an impostor sent by Moscow?  Is the Polish operative who mistakes Keith for a Soviet agent really working for the USSR, or is he a double agent working for Beijing?  After much espionage business and killing, Keith, in his guise as Tamba Ngasi, finds himself dictator of Lakhadi.  As the weeks and months of his regime go by, Keith begins taking on the personality of the man he is impersonating, a man who is impetuous and ruthless, and his policies begin antagonizing the Soviet Union, the Chinese, and even the United States, attracting the attention of agents from all three great powers who seek to change his policy or get him off the throne one way or another.

"The Augmented Agent" is a good Cold War spy story.  I liked all the espionage techniques and all the many high tech devices, none of which I have detailed here.  The Cold War issues addressed--e.g., How should Third World countries pursue their interests in the Cold War world?  By adopting Western governing philosophies of revolution and socialism or democracy and capitalism?  By accepting material aid from the great powers that no doubt come with strings attached?  Or by forging a philosophically and materially independent course based on indigenous traditions and culture?--are compelling.  "The Augmented Agent" lacks a neat and tidy resolution, but this reflects one of Vance's goals for the story, which is to dramatize the likelihood that conflict between different cultures is inevitable and a peaceful Earth an impossible dream.  Like "Sjamback," if you are writing your master's thesis on the depiction of nonwhites by important SF writers, "The Augmented Agent" will provide some grist for your mill.

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With a single exception, the eight stories in The Augmented Agent and Other Stories are enjoyable, and it is definitely fun to find similarities between these lesser-known Vance stories and Vance's famous novels, and to see Vance's take on real life cultures and ideologies.

Science fiction stories from the 1960s in the next installment of MPoricus Fiction Log!

"Shape-Up," "The Man from Zodiac" and "Golden Girl" by Jack Vance

In our last episode I talked about "The Plagian Siphon," AKA "The Planet Machine" AKA "The Uninhibited Robot," a Jack Vance story with many versions and titles; I read the version in my hardcover copy of the 1986 collection The Augmented Agent and Other Stories, a book the cover illustration of which made me do a double and then a triple take.  Today let's read three more stories from this volume, 1953's "Shape-Up," 1967's "The Man from Zodiac" AKA "Milton Hack from Zodiac," and 1951's "Golden Girl."  These are what you might call Vance "deep cuts," stories which were published in SF magazines and then never anthologized, only reappearing in Vance collections.

"Shape-Up" (1953)

The first story in The Augmented Agent and Other Stories made its debut in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy.  A glance at the magazine version's first page confirms that the version from 1986 is revised, with the word "copper" being replaced by "coin" in the later version ("he plugged his next-to-last coin into the Pegasus Square Farm and Mining Bulletin dispenser....")

Gilbert Jarvis reads the Pegasus Square Farm and Mining Bulletin as he sits in a cafe, drinking hot anise he has purchased with the last of his coins (or coppers.)  In response to a classified ad, he goes to an inn for a rigorous job interview, which includes a sort of group interview component.  I still recall with dread some group job interviews of my experience, but this group interview that Jarvis finds himself involved in is more dreadful still.  The job applicants are all rough tough adventurer types, and have been called together under false pretenses--according to the man managing the interview process, the gathered men are all suspects in a murder, and have been brought together so that the killer can be identified and then summarily executed!

This is a decent thriller story about violent, dangerous men in a sort of lawless environment.  In true classic SF fashion the mystery is solved, and Jarvis's life is saved, because Jarvis is a quick thinker who knows about science (in this case gravity.)

"The Man from Zodiac" (1967) 

This one appeared first in Amazing, and was apparently the major selling point of the issue.  "JACK VANCE'S GREAT SHORT NOVEL" the cover cries out above a surprisingly bland and busy illustration totally lacking in hot chicks, monsters or spacecraft.  Amazing must have been in some kind of trouble, because, excepting "The Man from Zodiac," all the stories are reprints!  Not that I am knocking the issue--there is every chance that those reprinted stories, pieces by Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester and Neil R. Jones among them, are awesome.  And then there is the fun book column by Harry Harrison in which he says that SF may well be "the last bastion of the short story," praises Brian Aldiss, Keith Laumer and Samuel R. Delany, and takes swipes at widely beloved but also controversial figures Harlan Ellison:

The worst thing about Nine By Laumer by Keith Laumer (Doubleday, $3.95) is the overly long and pretentious introduction by Harlan Ellison.

and Sam Moskowitz:

Moskowitz has yet to understand that literary criticism is more than which parts of which stories resemble other stories.

Yeow, that one hurts!

OK, back to "The Man from Zodiac," which is like 40 pages in the 1986 version I am reading.

Martin Hack is the field representative of Zodiac Control, Inc., and owns an eight percent share of the company.  Zodiac Control is an interstellar contractor that offers services to polities large and small--Zodiac will maintain order, enforce the law, extinguish fires, educate the young, manage the economy, and fight foreign enemies of those entities that sign a contract with them--Zodiac basically sets up and operates governments.  The recent inheritors of 92% of Zodiac Control sign a seven-year contract with the state of Phronus on the planet Ethelrinda Cordas, and give Hack the job of managing this project.

Upon his arrival in Phronus, Hack learns that its people are semi-literate barbarians in a constant state of war (waged primarily at close range with swords and other such low-tech weapons) against their neighbors, the equally belligerent and primitive people of Sabo--the Phrones had hopes that Zodiac would supply them with high tech weapons with which to wipe out the Sabol.  A pack of raiders and pirates, the Phrones would also like to pillage a sort of artists' colony/intellectuals' retreat known as Parnassus that sits nearby and is managed by one Cyril Dibden--the offworlder eggheads at Parnassus are defended by energy fields against which the Phrone cutlasses and poniards are useless.  When Hack, surveying the territory of Phronus, suggests to one of the local lords that a charming seaside area be developed into a resort to cater to the tourist trade, this bloodthirsty campaigner responds, "Why entice strangers into the country?  Far easier to depredate our neighbor Dibden.  But first things first: the Sobols must be destroyed!"

The plot follows Hack's efforts to bring peace and order to the Phronus-Parnassus-Sabo region; through trickery he not only drags Phronus and Sabo into the modern civilized era, but uncovers a conspiracy on the part of Cyril Dibden, who was as interested in acquiring the Phrone and Sabol lands as those marauders were interested in despoiling Parnassus.  In the end Zodiac has not only the Phronus contract, but one with Sabo and Parnassus, and Hack is a hero back on Earth at Zodiac's corporate offices.

"The Man from Zodiac" is a sort of light entertainment; it is smooth and pleasant, and made me laugh several times, and I recommend it.  While it doesn't really engage with ideas (though we might see it as yet another example of SF elitism that dismisses democracy without a thought), there is one somewhat striking, somewhat incongruous, psychological passage:

At his deepest, most essential level, Hack knew himself for an insipid mediocrity, of no intellectual distinction and no particular competence in any direction.  This was an insight so shocking that Hack never allowed it past the threshold of consciousness, and he conducted himself as if the reverse were true.     

At the risk of seeming like Sam Moskowitz, I will point out that carefully planned subterranean explosive charges play an important role in the plot of "The Man from Zodiac," and that just such engineering plays a role in Vance's fourth Demon Princes book, 1979's The Face.  Also of note, the editor's intro to "The Man from Zodiac" in Amazing, and portions of the text that seem to foreshadow a relationship between Hack and a young woman who owns lots of Zodiac stock, suggest that there were plans, which apparently did not come to fruition, for a series of Martin Hack stories.

"Golden Girl" (1951)

This is a first contact story.  A reporter, Bill Baxter, goes to investigate a meteorite that has fallen in rural Iowa and discovers a burning alien space ship!  He pulls out the unconscious occupant, a beautiful woman aged 19 or 20 with golden skin!  Entranced by her beauty, he contrives to stay by her side in the hospital as she recovers, and, while the government and the press and the world wait with bated breath to learn what she is all about, it is Baxter who teaches her English.

The woman, named Lurulu (also the name of Vance's last published book), describes her society to Baxter--it is a standard issue utopia, with no more war, no more racism, no more crime, no need to work, etc.  Lurulu was taking a trip in her space yacht when it malfunctioned and she crashed here on belligerent, racist, crime-ridden, labor-intensive Earth.

Lurulu is shown around New York--her world, she says, has no such skyscrapers or vast bridges, people living in flying houses and not congregating in large groups.  Lurulu finds Earth exhausting.  Baxter worships her and asks her to marry him, but she refuses--their cultures are too different.  Shortly after, Lurulu commits suicide.  Vance hints that "Golden Girl" is based upon an 1839 story in a book by J. G. Lockhart, Strange Tales of the Seven Seas, the diary of an Englishwoman who was shipwrecked on the coast of Africa and taken in by a black tribe--though the natives treated her well, in fact worshiped her, she missed English people and English life and so killed herself.

This story is not very good.  The SF elements feel tired and obvious, and Vance has no success in making us feel Lurulu's homesickness or alienation, nor in making us feel Baxter's love or lust or infatuation or whatever it is, and the scene in which Baxter realizes she will commit suicide feels gimmicky.  This is a filler story, but with no jokes or violence or other entertaining or exploitative components that might hold your interest or give you some kind of thrill.  Gotta give this early Vance story a thumbs down. 

"Golden Girl" was first printed in an issue of Marvel Science Stories featuring a debate about Dianetics between L.Ron Hubbard, Lester del Rey and Theodore Sturgeon.

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In our next exciting episode we'll finish up with The Augmented Agent and Other Stories.  The wraparound illustration on the dust jacket of the hardcover edition of The Augmented Agent and Other Stories features a bust of Lenin and some other communist iconography, plus a female figure that reminds me of African sculpture.  I don't recall any references to the Soviet Union or to sculpture in "Shape-Up," "The Man from Zodiac" or "Golden Girl," so maybe the key to the mystery of what story the cover illustrates will be cleared up in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.  Or maybe we will have to go along with the theory put forward in the comments on our last blog post by Transreal Fiction, that the cover illustrates "The Planet Machine."

 




       

Three 1950s stories by Jack Vance: "The Miracle Workers," "The Men Return" and "The Planet Machine"

Flipping through the scan at the internet archive of the October 1958 issue of Astounding, seeking the illustrations for Pauline Ashwell's "Big Sword," which we read in our last blog post, I noticed that Astounding readers had voted Jack Vance's "The Miracle Workers" the best story in the July issue.  I'm pretty sure I read "The Miracle Workers" years ago, long before this blog's spontaneous and incomprehensible generation, but I didn't remember much specifically and so I decided to give it another read, along with two other 1950s Vance stories which have yet to be subjected to the MPorcius treatment, "The Men Return" and "The Plagian Siphon" AKA "The Planet Machine" AKA "The Uninhibited Robot."

"The Miracle Workers" (1958)

In the Preface to the 2006 volume, The Jack Vance Treasury, Vance says that he wrote "The Miracle Workers" with the specific aim of appealing to Astounding's famous editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., who, Vance says, "had a predilection for unusual ideas."  It speaks to Vance's ability to write for a market, and perhaps to Campbell's own ability to figure out what his readers wanted and transmit that info to writers, that "The Miracle Workers" was the most popular story in the issue in which it appeared.

I'm reading the version of "The Miracle Workers" that appears in The Jack Vance Treasury, via a scan at the internet archive; I believe the texts in The Jack Vance Treasury are derived from those prepared by the Vance Integral Edition project, and thus the text I am reading is as close as possible to Vance's original vision.

"The Miracle Workers" is set on Pangborn, a planet which was colonized by humans, the war-weary crews of space warships, over 1000 years ago.  Pangborn's current human inhabitants have access to very little of their spacefaring ancestors' hi-tech equipment or technical know-how--these people ride around on animals or in animal-drawn wagons, their soldiers lug around spears and crossbows.  But the Pangbornians of today do not pine for the conveniences of the modern industrial past--instead, they consider the few remaining hover cars and the energy weapons to be relics of an uncouth age, and consider empiricism and the experimental method to be mere superstition and mysticism!  In place of what you and I might call science and technology, dear reader, the intellectuals of the story's topsy turvy milieu embrace voodoo and fortune telling!  When Lord Faide's army marches off to war on Lord Ballant, behind his mounted knights and foot sore infantry roll the wagons of his cadre of wizards with their cabinets full of voodoo dolls!

The plot of "The Miracle Workers" largely concerns the esoteric work of, and rivalries among, Lord Faide's "jinxmen," "cabalmen" and "spellbinders," each of whom has different ambitions, attitudes and ideas; one young apprentice even suspects the scientific ancients' books and artifacts worth studying.  During the battle below the towers of Ballant Keep we witness the sorcery of the jinxmen and cabalmen of both sides--we learn the nature of their spell casting, which consists in part of telepathy and in part of very clever psychological manipulation.

Another major plot element of "The Miracle Workers" is the relationship of the humans to the planet's natives, called by the humans "the First Folk."  After Lord Fainde takes Lord Ballant's keep, wipes out the Ballant family and receives oaths of allegiance from Ballant's retainers, he is master of all humanity on Pangborn.  This is when the natives, still resentful after being driven out of their ancestral lands and into the forests by human beings many centuries ago, begin their anti-human guerrilla war in earnest--for a long time they have been breeding and training an army of arthropods of all sizes for this campaign of revenge and reconquest.  When Lord Faide finds that the conventional warfare methods of his knights and crossbowmen is of limited use in crushing the native uprising, he turns to his jinxmen, but since the jinxmen's sorcery relies on "getting into the heads" of their enemies, will it be of any use against the First Folk, whose mental processes, psychology and culture are radically different from that of humans?

This is a fun story, full of violence and understated jokes, but also a story about imperialism/colonialism and about ways of looking at the world, ways of thinking.  Presumably the fact that the story chronicles a renaissance of scientific thinking (the formerly laid back First Folk have seized upon the experimental methods and mass production practices of the early human colonists in their drive to build a war machine with which to take back their homelands, while the quasi-medieval humans, in response, begin to consider a return to such methods themselves--the miracle workers of the title are not the jinxmen but their ancestors who flew spaceships between the stars) appealed to the science-loving audience of Astounding.  The siege and bioweapon aspects of the story are obviously reminiscent of Vance's famous award-winning 1966 "The Last Castle" and his 1965 "The Dragon Masters."  I feel like I just recently read "The Last Castle" and "The Dragon Masters," but I guess it was over four years ago because I don't see that I have produced any blog posts about them.  Maybe it is time for a reread of those classics?

Quite good.  "The Miracle Workers" has appeared in many Vance collections and many anthologies, including some purporting to offer some of SF's greatest short novels and some devoted to tales of warfare or magic.

"The Men Return" (1957)
 
The Earth has drifted into a field of chaos, and logic no longer functions, the laws of cause and effect having been repealed.  The Earth's surface changes color and texture at random, the sun is absent from the sky and time is meaningless, the plants you ate "yesterday" may poison you "today."  Humanity has almost been wiped out, and only a small number of men survive: insane people, whose disordered minds somehow sync with the disorder of the landscape, and the Relicts, men whose grip on sanity is so firm, whose belief in logic so steady, that they generate a field of order around their own bodies.  But to survive, the Relicts must eat and drink from the world of disorder that surrounds them, a perilous endeavor.

Less than ten pages long ("The Miracle Workers" is like 65), "The Men Return" is more a catalog of absurd and insane visions and ideas (cannibalism is a given among the Relicts) than a plot-driven story.  We observe the desperate day-to-day existence of a few Relicts, their scrabbling and scheming to find food and avoid becoming food.  Then the Earth drifts out of the area of randomness, the sun returns and with it logic and causality--the insane people quickly die from trying to repeat the feats of daily life under chaos (e. g., stepping over a twenty-foot chasm or eating rocks) and the Relicts can begin building civilization anew.

"The Men Return" is well-written, featuring Vance's customary clever dialogue, but to my taste it lacks substance; you might call it experimental if you were being kind, a little gimmicky if you were being callous.  Maybe we should see this as a pioneering work of psychedelia.  (Remember when I pointed out the psychedelic nature of some passages in Clark Ashton Smith's 1932 story "The Monster of the Prophecy?"  Well, elsewhere in The Jack Vance Treasury--on page 384, in the author's afterword to "The Overworld"--Vance admits to being influenced by Smith, whom he read as a child.)

An acceptable strange entertainment.  I read "The Men Return" in The Jack Vance Treasury; it first appeared in Infinity Science Fiction, where its experimental nature is heralded on the cover: "A New Kind of Story by Jack Vance."  You may recall that we recently read the Algis Budrys story in this issue of Infinity, "The Burning World."  "The Men Return" has been widely anthologized, including  in Robert Silverberg's Alpha Two (alongside Vance's friend Poul Anderson's quite good "Call Me Joe") and in Brian Aldiss's Evil Earths (alongside Henry Kuttner's fun adventure novelette "The Time Trap.")

"The Planet Machine" (1951/1986)

In contrast to "The Miracle Workers" and "The Men Return," stories anthologized far and wide and beloved by multitudes for their memorable ideas, "The Plagian Siphon" has never been anthologized, only reappearing in Vance collections following its initial airing in Thrilling Wonder Stories.  The title used for the tale in the Vance Integral Edition, where it appears in the Gadget Stories volume, is "The Uninhibited Robot."  I am going to read the version in my hardcover copy of the 1986 collection The Augmented Agent and Other Stories, which I acquired at a book sale at an Ohio public library--in this book the story appears as "The Planet Machine."

The Augmented Agent and Other Stories is apparently somewhat rare, only 798 pages of this edition having been printed.  When I got it, it was in pretty good shape, but here in Maryland I live in the upper story of a 100-year-old house whose landlady considers maintenance optional, and is thus subject to strange and unpleasant variations in temperature, humidity, and odor; as a result, the condition of my books has deteriorated to some degree.  Ned Dameron provided The Augmented Agent and Other Stories with a mind-boggling wraparound cover in hideous colors that seems to integrate Soviet iconography and African-influenced modern sculpture.  I have not read the story "The Augmented Agent" (original title, "I-C-a-BeM"); when I do, maybe it will provide some insight into this outre vision.

Scans of my copy; feel free to click to zoom and get more intimately
 acquainted with this Pepto Bismal Socialist nightmare

(Curious caterpillar that I am, I read the first dozen paragraphs of "The Planet Machine" in my hardcover copy of The Augmented Agent and Other Stories and then the same paragraphs in "The Plagian Siphon" in the October 1951 Thrilling Wonder Stories and found quite a few additional words and phrases in the 1986 version.  There are also typos in the 1986 version that do not appear in the 1951 version.  The universe is in a state of entropy.)

Remember how in Heinlein's 1955 Tunnel in the Sky, Biggle's 1963 All the Colors of Darkness, and J. T. McIntosh's 1962  "One Into Two" there is a network of teleporters connecting different parts of the world and/or the galaxy?  Here in "The Planet Machine" there is a similar system connecting many different Earth locations as well as different planets, facilitating trade and travel.  Marvin "Scotty" Allixter is a technician whose job uis to maintain and repair these teleporters.  One day a slight irregularity is discovered with transmission to and from Rhetus--maybe the Rhetus machine just needs some fine tuning, but maybe some criminals have acquired their own teleporter machine and are rerouting transmissions of goods to themselves, stealing them.  So Allixter puts on an armored suit and straps on a disrupter pistol and steps into the "tube," bound for Rhetus to investigate.

He materializes not on Rhetus but some world unknown to man; he has walked out of an alien teleporter reception machine, but he sees no accompanying transmission machine.  How can he get back to Earth?  Using a computer translator, Allixter haltingly communicates with some natives of this world.  These little weirdos lead him through a landscape of ruins to a machine--it turns out that this machine runs the entire planet in the interest not of the natives but of some aliens, the Plags, mining and refining resources and teleporting them to the Plag home world.  The machine is supposed to run itself, and no Plags live on this planet.  The machine's security apparatus is currently malfunctioning, blowing up the mining and refining installations at random, and killing all the Plags sent to repair it.  With the aid of the natives and his translation device, Allixter figures out how to avoid getting killed by this security system himself, how to repair the machine, and how to get back to Earth.  He also figures out that his arrival here was no accident--he was deliberately sent as a kind of cat's paw by a clandestine Plag agent on Earth.  Allixter returns to Earth and neutralizes the Plag agent.  Then, in the kind of denouement you find in detective stories, he explains to everybody (including readers like me who couldn't figure it out ourselves) how he figured that stuff out.

"The Planet Machine" is not bad, maybe a little long.  Vance spends a lot of time exploring how a computer might go about learning an alien language so it can act as an interpreter between an English speaker and a heretofore undiscovered alien civilization, and on speculations on how a complex computer might work, how one might program it and distract it if need be. 

A version of "The Planet Machine" appears in this 1980 Dutch collection of Vance stories,
while the VIE edition of the story, "The Uninhibited Robot," appears in the 2013 collection Magic Highways. 

     
**********

When I think of Jack Vance I first think of things like the two Cugel books, which are so hilarious, the Demon Princes books, with their complicated villains and violent detective/secret agent plots, or the Alastor and Cadwel books, which touch on politics and social issues in the context of an adventure story.  But these three 1950s stories have at their centers science (in particular the scientific method itself and circumstances which seem to call it into question) and technology.  All three are worth your time, if only for Vance's charming style and clever little jokes, which always bring a smile to my face.

Expect to see more Jack Vance short stories in the near future here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Weird Tales by Clark Ashton Smith from late 1932

Let's check out five more stories by Clark Ashton Smith that first appeared in Weird Tales in the year 1932.  While three of the four 1932 Smith stories we read in our last episode are more or less science fiction that deal with other planets and depict alien societies, four out of five of today's pieces are closer to the sword and sorcery or science fantasy realms, depicting an ancient or medieval past when people fought with halberds and bills or a bizarre future full of wizards and necromancers.  Also of note, today we read stories from three of Smith's famous series, two tales set in Hyperborea, and one tale each set in Averoigne and Zothique.

"The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan"

It is the Year of the Black Tiger in Commoriom, the greatest city of Hyperborea, a prehistoric civilization full of wizards and monsters and so on.  The greediest money lender in Hyperborea, the Avoosl Wuthoqquan of the title, buys two colossal emeralds from a thief.  While he is playing with the emeralds (he passes time by pouring his gem collection out onto his table and sifting through them and making patterns with them like a child) they, of their own accord, roll off the table and out of the room!  The money lender chases them outside, down the street, outside of town, into the jungle, and finally into a cavern, where the emeralds join their fellows in a deep pool of thousands of fabulous jewels.  Avoosl Wuthoqquan greedily jumps into the pool of precious stones but begins sinking, as if in quicksand.  He panics and calls for help, and is addressed by the hideous monster who lives among the jewels, a creature with a toad-like face and a long pale body with limbs like the tentacles of an octopus or cuttlefish.  After the monster explains how it lost its emeralds and how it got them back, is swims over to the money lender and saves Avoosl Wuthoqquan from the indignity of drowning by eating the usurer alive.

"The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan" has some of the feel of a fairy tale that warns you against being greedy--there is even a prologue in which Avoosl Wuthoqquan refuses to give any money to a beggar and the beggar prophesies that he will suffer a terrible fate (don't take it too personally, Avoosl, when I refuse to give money to beggars in Dupont Circle and Union Station sometimes I get yelled at, too!)  But it also has some of the edge of a sword and sorcery story.  As with "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," which I praised in my last blog post, Smith's extensive descriptions here add to the story rather than distract from it and help to build a mood and inspire emotion in the reader.  I especially liked one of Smith's metaphors:

Somehow, somewhere, he had taken a narrow path that wound among monstrous trees whose foliage turned the moonlight to a mesh of quicksilver with heavy fantastic raddlings of ebony.  Crouching in grotesque menace, like giant retiarri, they seemed to close in upon him from all sides.

Clever and evocative, and, of course, flattering to the reader who knows what a retiarius is.

Quite good.  As well in many Smith collections, "The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan" has appeared in several anthologies that purport to represent the cream of Weird Tales or fantasy stories in general.

"The Maker of Gargoyles"

It is 1138, the year of the completion of the cathedral in Vyones, the principal town of the French province of Averoigne.  The two most accomplished of the cathedral's gargoyles were carved by Blaise Reynard, who grew up in Vyones but then left to wander the country and spend time in Paris.  Perhaps because of his ugly face, the people of Vyones never liked the temperamental Reynard, but he returned anyway because of his desire for Nicolette Villom, the tavern keeper's daughter.  He came back just before the cathedral was completed and was hired to carve those two gargoyles.  One of these exquisite masterpieces of the carver's art is a ferocious expression of Reynard's hatred for the people of Vyones, and the other the very quintessence of lasciviousness, an expression of the craftsman's lust for Nicolette.  Some of Reynard's many detractors claim the striking power of these representation of sinfulness could only have been created by a man in league with the Devil!

To the surprise of everybody in Vyones and nobody reading Weird Tales, not long after the cathedral is completed, citizens who venture out of doors at night are subjected to deadly attacks by a flying demon!  The efforts of the authorities temporal and spiritual to fight the airborne nocturnal killer with halberds and holy water are fruitless, and many people are mangled to death.  A second flying demon joins the first, but this one merely leers at women, often through windows, but does not assault them, as if "it was seeking throughout Vyones for someone whom it had not yet found."

One evening Reynard the unpopular stone cutter is sitting in the tavern of Villom, gulping down wine and staring at Nicolette.  He becomes enraged when Nicolette starts flirting with some guy, and Villom and his friends move to prevent a fight.  Suddenly, the flying demons burst through a window, one of them killing all the men save Reynard, who is knocked unconscious, and the other raping Nicolette.

When Reynard comes to, he collects a hammer and goes to the cathedral to destroy the gargoyles, which he now realizes are the monsters terrorizing the town, but he is killed in the attempt.

This story is just OK; it is not surprising--we all know that the gargoyles are going to come to life--and there isn't much to it that feels original.

The component of "The Maker of Gargoyles" that is sticking out at me is its ambiguous dealing with the matter of moral and personal responsibility.  Even if Reynard's rage and lust are to blame for the demons who kill all those people, including himself, he is not in fact consciously in league with Satan.  He does have a ferocious temper and a powerful lust--Smith makes it clear he would love to kill the guy Nicolette flirts with and then ravish Nicolette whether or not she was willing--but we don't actually see him commit any trespasses against other people.  So are we supposed to sympathize with him as a victim of society's prejudice, to recognize that he is an outsider merely because of his ugly face?  Or condemn him because of his hatred and lust, and see that (like the usurer in "The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan," a victim of his own avarice) it is his own bad character traits that have undone him?  Similarly, should we think of the townspeople who are killed by the monsters as somehow deserving their terrible fate because of their unfair suspicion of Reynard?  In the same way Reynard carved the murderous demons from stone, did they by shunning Reynard make him into a sinful monster?

This is a lesser piece by Smith; we can surmise something about its reputation by the fact that while it has been reprinted in many Smith collections, it has never been featured in an anthology.   

"Il Destino di Antarion," which I assume means something like "The Fate of Antarion," is the title
affixed to the Italian translation of "Planet of the Dead," which we talked about in our last blog post 

This cover by Brundage seems more mature
and sophisticated than much of her work,
particularly the overall composition and the
individuals' faces.

"The Empire of the Necromancers" 

Where Hyperborea is set in the distant past, Zothique is "the last continent" of a far future dying Earth where the sun is dim and people are depressed.  Smith, in a little prologue, tells us the story he is about to tell, that of Mmatmuor and Sodosma, is a legend told among the people of Zothique--it is a story of death and those who welcome it, a meet entertainment for those living in end times.

Mmatmuor and Sodosma were necromancers, driven from the town of Tinarath into the desert of Cincor by traditional-minded people who were uncomfortable with the duo's practice of raising the dead.  Two hundred years ago Cincor was a mighty empire, but a plague wiped out the entire population, and M & S find the desert sands littered with the skeletons and mummies of men, women and domesticated beasts.  With their black arts, they return to a semblance of life all these dead people and animals, as well as those they find in tombs.  At the head of an army of the dead, astride the dried cadavers of horses, M & S enter the capital city of Cincor, Yethryleom, and they raise from the dead everyone there, including every generation of the royal family that ruled Cincor for two thousand years!  The best preserved of the female corpses M & S take as their lovers--I know love comes in all shapes and sizes, but, yuck!

Mmatmuor and Sodosma are now dictators of a populous slave empire, their living dead subjects cultivating gardens, farming, building towers, etc., all the things they did in life.  The risen dead feel an ache to return to the peace of true death, but their death-diminished and sorcery-entranced minds are unable to resist the necromancers' commands.  But even from the ranks of the dead can heroes arise!  The last emperor of Cincor, who died two centuries ago, and the first emperor, who died twenty centuries ago, and are now serving as M & S's wait staff, begin to recall their days of glory and to resent the indignities visited upon them and their people by the necromancers!  The first emperor of Cincor was a wizard in life and recalls a prophecy (always with the prophecies in these stories) about the two necromancers that not only predicted their abominations but prescribes how to overthrow them.

In a secret vault the two undead emperors get a special sword with which to decapitate and then quarter the sleeping M & S.  Then they lead their people to a secret stairway that descends to a pool of magma ("the verge of that gulf in which boiled the ebbing fires of Earth")--the people of Cincor, happy to return to the sleep of death, jump into the lava and are annihilated.  Finally, before joining his people in eternal rest, the first emperor of Cincor casts his own spell of necromancy on M & S, each of whom is in five pieces.  Mmatmuor and Sodosma will live in the eternal torment of living death, unable to do more than wretchedly wiggle around the floor.

I like "The Empire of the Necromancers;" it is more strange and feels more fresh than "The Maker of Gargoyles," even if the plot relies on yet another prophecy.  According to Sam Moskowitz, who acquired some of Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright's records, "The Empire of the Necromancers" was the story most popular with readers in the September 1932 issue of the unique magazine.

"The Empire of the Necromancers" has of course been reprinted in plenty of Smith collections, but also in several foreign anthologies.

"The Testament of Athammaus"

This is a first-person narrative written by the former government executioner of the biggest city in Hyperborea, Commoriom--it is the story of why Commoriom was abandoned by all its many inhabitants!  The writer, the Athammaus of the title, warns us not to believe what others say about the fall of Commoriom, assuring us that we can trust him to give us the real story because he was there and saw the whole thing!

Of all nine of the 1932 stories by Smith I read for these two blog posts this one is the most successful at presenting a vivid and sympathetic character. In Athammaus the executioner Smith depicts a man with a realistic personality, a writer who displays a false modesty about his writing ability and career accomplishments, a pride in his work, civic pride in his city of Commoriom, and a deep feeling of loss for that city, which is now being overrun by the jungle.  The way this guy, now old, brags about how in his youth he daily chopped off numerous people's heads and in the next paragraph expresses his contempt for the "vulgar multitude" and their credulity is at once endearing, amusing, and a little disturbing!

Athammaus outlines for us the career of Knygathin Zhaum, a notorious bandito who terrorized the countryside in the last years of Commoriom's prominence.  Smith's descriptions of the physical nature of the marauder, and the rumors of his parentage, are fascinating, both funny and chilling.  Knygathin Zhaum is a sort of throwback to an earlier race who walks in a way that reminds one of a serpent and is reputed to have flowing in his veins the blood of Tsathoggua, one of the extra-galactic monster gods we find so often in stories by H. P. Lovecraft and his corespondents.  It was Smith who invented Tsathoggua in 1929, but many other writers have made use of him--for example, he is mentioned in two quite good stories co-written by Lovecraft and Hazel Heald that we read back in 2017, "The Man of Stone" and "Winged Death." 

Under mysterious circumstances Knygathin Zhaum is captured by the authorities and after a trial is brought to the block to be decapitated by our narrator:

As I looked upon him with a calculating eye, and made ready for the lethal stroke, I was impressed more powerfully and more disagreeably than ever by the feeling of a loathsome, underlying plasticity, an invertebrate structure, nauseous and non-terrestrial, beneath his impious mockery of the human form.  

Knygathin Zhaum is beheaded and buried in a disreputable grave in the city dump.  But the next morning he is up and about, and in full view of scores of citizens who are helpless to stop him, commits a shocking atrocity--eating a small businessman alive!  The fiend is again tried and executed, and this time buried in a pit carved out of the bedrock and covered in boulders.  Regardless, Knygathin Zhaum reappears again and repeats his crime of the day before, this time devouring a government official.  After his third execution the monstrous brigand's head is buried in one part of the city and his body in another, and an armed guard, led by our narrator Athammaus, spends the night where the head is interred in a metal sarcophagus.

Knygathin Zhaum has looked somewhat different, less human and less stable, after each of his resurrections, and when the head breaks out of the sarcophagus, as we knew it was going to, and starts rolling across town to rejoin the body, it is a sort of blob of goo.  When the monstrous creature is again whole it is a mish mosh of human and mostly inhuman body parts, with tentacles and suckers and the like, and after it has devoured some innocent townspeople, it begins to grow to kaiju size.  The monster being invincible, the entire city is evacuated.

This story is compelling and fun; Smith had my full attention from the first paragraph.  With its comic mix of understatement and hyperbole and its farcical repetition of impossible events, one might consider "The Testament of Athammaus" a joke story.  I regularly denounce joke stories with some venom, but Smith overcomes all such objections.  For one thing, the jokes here are actually funny, and for another, they are accompanied by truly effective horror elements and the rich descriptions that characterize Smith's work in general--"The Testament of Athammaus" feels like a legit sword and sorcery story, not a parody of fantastic literature, that is transmitted to us through the sensibilities and prejudices of a not quite trustworthy narrator whose own character adds a layer of humor to a fundamentally horrific tale of weird mayhem.

Very good--nine out of a possible ten flesh-eating orifices!

L. Sprague de Camp and Robert A. W. Lowndes saw fit to include this classic in their publications.

"The Supernumerary Corpse"

Here's the one science fiction story we're talking about today; our narrator for this caper is a bitter and jealous chemist, Felton Margrave!  Jasper Trilt financed Margrave's chemical research, setting up a lab for him in an old mansion, but then he took the lion's share of the profits that came from our hero's innovative work!  And then Trilt married the girl Margrave was sweet on, Norma Gresham!  And so, for years, the chemist has been plotting to murder Trilt, researching the most effective and the most untraceable poisons and synthesizing them in the lab Trilt himself had finance the construction of!   

One evening Trilt comes by the lab, drawn there by Margrave's hints that he has made some kind of breakthrough.  Margrave tells Trilt, who is a fatso who enjoys fine foods in mass quantities, that he has developed an elixir that will provide the drinker immortality and guarantee an "inexhaustible capacity for pleasure, a freedom from all satiety and weariness."  Trilt credulously gulps down a glass of the stuff and immediately falls to the floor paralyzed, unable to move but still conscious, still able to see and hear.  This is a torture we see people suffer all the time in genre literature; at this blog in October of last year we saw Clifford Simak and Poul Anderson inflict this fate on characters, though Simak's victim used her 1000 years of time off from moving to become a genius at higher maths.  Margrave's poison isn't meant to suspend animation however, just to kill Trilt after an hour, an hour during which Margrave insults and disparages his paralyzed employer.

After he thinks Trilt must be dead he calls up Norma to tell her that her husband just died of a sudden "seizure."  To his shock, before he can get a word out, she blurts out that Trilt has just died in their house of some kind of seizure.  When a disbelieving Margrave goes over to the Trilt house, sure enough, there is a corpse identical to that in Margrave's lab!

Margrave fears for his sanity, but examination of both corpses proves they are real, neither a hallucination or fake.  The body that Norma witnessed fall dead is embalmed and buried as per normal, but the body in the lab has queer properties--it does not decay, and the acids with which Margrave tries to destroy it have no effect!

I was curious to see how Smith would resolve this story, what explanation he would provide for this bizarre phenomenon.  Unfortunately, Smith offers no explanation.  Margrave says something vague about the universe being inexplicable, and predicts that he will go insane, and that is that.  Smith, bro, don't leave me hanging like that!

An inferior effort.  Not only is the end a disappointment, but the main plot has some weaknesses--would a cunning businessman in the field of scientific research just drink some goop that was there in the lab without having first seen hard evidence of trials?  Trilt obviously has some kind of antagonistic relationship with Margrave and he expresses skepticism that an immortality potion is even possible, so why does he just drink it then and there?  If the rest of the story was solid such a flaw could be overlooked, but the weak ending makes the weak middle less forgivable.  Let's be generous and call this one barely acceptable because the whole "shy boffin resents slick operator who got his girl" beginning showed promise.

"The Supernumerary Corpse" has only ever reappeared in collections of Smith's work, with good reason.

**********

I enjoyed these nine Clark Ashton Smith stories more than I had expected to--maybe The Emperor of Dreams, which I read over ten years ago, was not a good selection of his best work?  Or maybe my own sensibilities have changed over the years.  Whatever the case, this has been a successful foray into weird territory.

One of the things that struck me about most of these stories has been a sort of similarity to the work of Jack Vance.  There is the dying Earth setting of Zothique, obviously, but more importantly the subtle humor, the evocative lists of weird items and the esoteric words, as well as the gruesome scenes of horror, remind me of memorable facets of Vance's fiction.

I prophesy that there will be more Weird Tales and more Clark Ashton Smith in the future of MPorcius Fiction Log, though not the immediate future.

"Recruiting Station" and "The Chronicler" by A. E. van Vogt

Late in February I read Richard C. Meredith's 1970 story "Earthcoming" and thought it might be an homage to A. E. van Vogt.  Exploring this theory, I reread van Vogt's story 1942 tale "Asylum," which first appeared in Astounding.  I enjoyed "Asylum" so much I have decided to reread two other van Vogt stories from 1940s issues of Astounding, "Recruiting Station" and "The Chronicler."  These stories have been reprinted again and again, under various titles, but I will be taking advantage of the internet archive to read the very same texts SF fans read back during the reign of FDR and his successor Harry S. Truman.

Check out Isaac Walwyn's fun and informative website on van Vogt for more information on the crazy publishing histories of "Recruiting Station" and "The Chronicler" and any other production of our favorite Canadian; Walwyn's site has helped me time and again over the years as I have explored van Vogt's perplexing body of work.

"Recruiting Station" (1942)

Rogers's cover illo depicts the beastmen
securing Jack Garson in the cockpit
of a swift little war machine of
20,000 years in the future

I believe I first read this story in a library copy of the 2003 collection Transfinite: The Essential A. E. van Vogt, back in my Manhattan days.  "Recruiting Station," which takes up almost 70 pages of Transfinite, has appeared in book form, presented as a novel, multiple times under the titles Masters of Time and Earth's Last Fortress.  For its appearance in Astounding it was adorned with some respectable drawings by Hubert Rogers.

Ten years ago social science college student Norma Matheson rejected physicist Jack Garner's proposal of marriage so she could focus on her career.  Things haven't worked out so well, and tonight she stands in a dark city park, before a river, considering suicide!  She turns away from this drastic expedient, sits on a park bench, and is approached by a strange figure--a mysterious man, his face in shadow, who somehow already knows her name and her sad history, offers her a cushy job and a decent apartment!  She accepts the offer, and starts work at a recruiting center where American men can volunteer to fight for Calonia, a sympathetic country that is the victim of some kind of aggression (presumably van Vogt is trying to evoke from the reader feelings about the Spanish Civil War; George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia was published in England in 1938.)  Norma realizes at her first day at work that the volunteers she sends into a back room, ostensibly for a medical exam, are being transported via a huge machine to fight in some dreadful war in the future!  She tries to contact the police, but the  head of the recruiting office Doctor Lell, he who hired her and an individual who in light of day is revealed to be of obscure ethnic background (he has dark skin like an African's, eyes like an East Asian's, a nose like a European's, etc.) has irresistible powers of surveillance, punishment and reward, rendering her his slave!  Among Lell's powers are the ability to read Norma's mind, and to adjust her biological age: if she follows orders he can make her as healthy as she was at twenty, but if she shirks he can transform her into a feeble old crone!  "We are the masters of time!" he brags, and in return for Norma's service offers her "eternal youth!"

Norma is no dunce, and neither is she a pushover, so she tests the limits of Dr. Lell's mind reading, writing a letter to her old beau, Jack, telling him of her unbelievable predicament.  When Jack comes to rescue her (this guy is a real softie, coming to the aid of the girl who shot him down a decade ago and is apparently bonkers!) he unwillingly ends up as one of Dr. Lell's recruits!

The narrative shifts from Norma to Jack, and we watch as Dr. Lell gives him a lecture and a little tour of the Earth of 20,000 years in the future.  In 200 centuries this big blue marble of ours will be ruled by the Glorious, a few million aristocrats who hold sway over countless numbers of slaves, beast-like people biologically and psychologically engineered to be strong, dim, and obedient.  These brutes live in vast cities of thousands of identical unadorned buildings.  Again referring to issues salient to 1940s readers, Jack compares this severely hierarchical society and its rigidly planned economy to that of the Nazis and Communists, even suggesting the ugliness of the culturally barren city is another example of the inevitable failure of all planned societies--Dr. Lell bridles at the comparison.

Humankind has colonized the solar system, and the Glorious are at war with the nation states that have grown up on the other planets; this alliance is called the Planetarians.  (The war was precipitated by disagreements over how to deal with overpopulation of the Solar System.)  The Planetarians are winning the war, having landed troops on Earth and surrounded the very city Norma lives in (in the far future this city is called Delpa.)  Every day the hulking Planetarian war machines advance forty feet deeper into the city, pushing back the Glorious "time energy barrier," a sort of force field powered by time (or something... one of the story's themes is how time is "the only reality" and "a titanic energy" that can be directed and exploited, I guess like a superior version of atomic power.)  Running low on brutes, the Glorious are recruiting human soldiers from every period of Earth history to die by the hundreds every day buying precious time for their scientists; Delpa is the site of the laboratory where the Glorious are developing a still more effective time energy barrier, one which will make them invulnerable and enable them to snatch victory from the very jaws of defeat!

As the story progresses it gets more and more complicated and confusing as Jack and Martha meet new people, learn new things, and so many of these people turn out to be liars or just mistaken, and so many things learned turn out to be untrue or incomplete versions of the truth.  Van Vogt keeps us off balance, switching gears and defying our expectations at every turn.  When we get this passage describing Jack's confusion:

Garson sighed wearily.  He felt suddenly genuinely exhausted, mentally and physically, by the twisting course of events.

we readers sympathize with him!

Along with the rest of the day's complement of men shanghaied from throughout human history, Jack is put into a "depersonalization machine" to be brainwashed; the others emerge as automatons willing to sacrifice their lives for the Glorious war effort,  but the machine fails to work on Jack.  In addition, the physicist receives a mysterious mental message, telling him that if the Glorious super time-energy barrier is activated it will destroy the entire universe, and so he must warn the Planetarians of this fact!  Once pushed out onto the battlefield Jack endeavors to get to the Planetarian lines.  Hit by a "paralyzer," he wakes up to find himself a captive aboard a Venus-bound Planetarian space ship--while he was in his coma the other captives have launched a mutiny and taken over half the ship.  The mutiny seems to be led by a character named Dra Derrel, a big wig among the people known as The Wizards of Lin, a civilization which purportedly invented the first space ship thousands of years before the rise of the Glorious.  Wizards of Lin?  Are these the same people referred to in the Clane/Empire of the Atom stories?  Or just our man Van, an early adopter of today's cult of reusing and recycling, using a cool-sounding name twice?  Zoinks, is this an indication I have to reread another van Vogt production I read some ten or more years ago?*  Anyway, Derrel claims to be the source of that mental message Jack received, but Jack isn't so sure, and the goings on he participates in on the ship provide reasons for him to suspect that neither the Wizards nor the Planetarians are all they are cracked up to be.

Interspersed with Jack's adventures in the far future are Norma's back in the 20th century--for three years she works for Dr. Lell, who shuttles back and forth between the war in his time and his job managing the recruiting center in the 1940s.  Norma figures out the means by which Dr. Lell manipulates her biological age, and herself receives mental messages about the dangers of the Glorious time-energy barrier.  Like so many van Vogt characters, she develops tremendous mental powers (we later learn these are called "Insel mind powers"--write your own joke!) and these powers enable her to travel instantly through time and space and to telekinetically fight the robots and computers Dr. Lell sends against her.

Norma and Jack's plot threads join together again when Norma, in the midst of a battle with Glorious robots near where she earlier contemplated suicide, uses her newfound powers to teleport him from the Planetarian spaceship back to the 1940s to aid her.  During his time in the far future Jack has figured some things out, and at his suggestion Norma summons the "mysterious manipulators of the universe," man's ultimate evolutionary form, who live at the end of time and have been sending her and Jack those mental messages.  In the last two pages of the tale these beings resolve some of the mysteries Norma and Jack (and we readers) have been confronted with heretofore and also explain their complex method of saving the universe (it entails creating new universes in which to quarantine malignant elements so that this universe is the best of all possible universes...I think.)  But their power is not unlimited, and they need Norma's help to prevent the Glorious time-energy barrier's construction, just as they needed her help to get to the 20th century.  Norma transports herself back to the very moment when she first met Dr. Lell, to live again her three years of service to him, but this time she knows all his tricks and has those Insel mind powers, and can with ease sabotage the development of the Glorious universe-threatening barrier (and build a happy marriage with Jack.)

"Recruiting Station" is full of wild SF ideas--a woman's  experience of her thirty-year-old body transformed into a more vigorous and beautiful twenty-year-old one, and into a feeble and wretched seventy-year old one; a totalitarian society of supermen who lord it over masses of beastmen; a man suspended in nothingness for millions of years when his girlfriend tries to use her newfound mental powers to teleport him to her from the future and he gets stuck in a "time emptiness" near the time-energy barrier around Delpa--and more!  Van Vogt doesn't necessarily explore these ideas deeply; sometimes he just addresses them briefly or throws them at you, leaving you to puzzle over their ramifications or simply allow them to wash over you in a tide of perplexity as he continues his story at a breakneck pace.  The Canadian mastermind's object is not to do detailed and exacting "world-building," but to generate a mood of strangeness and excitement, a sense of wonder at the dizzying possibilities of nearly unimaginable periods of time and inconceivable amounts of power.

Van Vogt is not known for having a good writing style, but some passages of "Recruiting Station" are actually quite effective.  The opening scenes in which Norma comes close to killing herself and her first few days of work for Dr Lell, in which she learns the extent of his powers, are good, and I liked the description of the starkly uniform city of the Glorious and of the battle at the periphery of the force field.  The fighting in Delpa, in which Jack Garson and the other Glorious soldiers pilot little one-man "torpedo-shaped craft" in a desperate attack on the Planetarian land battleships. reminded me a lot of a battle in Jack Vance's Durdane books, which I read in my New York days and then gave away to a friend so I can't consult them now.  Where I felt things sagged a little was in the scenes on the Planetarian spaceship with the Wizard of Lin; this section of the novel is less vivid and interesting, and felt less connected to the overall plot.

This is a fun story, though I had to make some effort to really "get" some of it (I essentially read the story twice in a short period) and of course it lacks some of the things I routinely praise in stories, like complex characters and human emotion--the characters and tone are essentially flat, van Vogt hitting the same notes again and again, though I guess you could say he hits them harder and harder as he moves the story relentlessly forward, one crazy idea or twist after another until we arrive at the end, Van having taken us full circle and deposited us back at the beginning.  To appreciate "Recruiting Station" you have to enjoy the work of figuring it out, the occasional powerful images, and the recurring surprises and general feeling of confusion and amazement it generates.  ("Dream-like" is a phrase often used to describe his work.)

In my opinion, "Recruiting Station" is a good example of what van Vogt is all about.  It is also interesting as a product of its time, as I have suggested, and feminist readers might find noteworthy its depiction of a college-educated professional woman who is given the responsibility of saving the universe but who at the same time has a man at the center of her psychological life, a man whose help she needs to succeed in her awful mission and to achieve personal happiness.  Students of van Vogt's long career may find his descriptions of the soldiers in the story as lusty, adventurous men unafraid of death, to be of a piece with his interest in "the violent male."  "Recruiting Station" gets a big thumbs up from this van Vogt aficionado.

*After I drafted this line but before I copyedited and uploaded this post I purchased a paperback edition of Wizard of Linn at the maze-like D.C. bookstore Capitol Hill Books.

"The Chronicler" (1946)

Life on the streets of Naze: Vampiric muggers
drink the blood of their victim

I think I first read this one in my copy of the collection M33 in Andromeda, where it bears the poetical title "Siege of the Unseen" and takes up nearly 80 pages.  Later appearances of the story carry the title "The Three Eyes of Evil."  The story was serialized over two issues of Astounding, where it features illustrations by Walter Swenson which, as a group, exhibit both a simple modern design sensibility and a sort of woodcut look.

Stock broker and married man Michael Slade is slightly injured in a car accident.  A strip of skin is torn from his forehead, revealing a third eye!  His wife wants him to have this third eye covered up again via plastic surgery, and when he decides to keep it exposed and see if he can train it to work in concert with his other two eyes, she divorces him!

"The Chronicler" is mostly related in the third person omniscient, with press clippings and court documents providing plot elements and "color."  These "primary documents" also inform us from page one that Slade has been found dead--on page three we learn he was "crushed"--which renders the main text as a sort of flashback.  (Again I am reminded of 1950's Sunset Boulevard, which I just mentioned a month ago; that film starts with us aware that the protagonist has died under gruesome circumstances, and proceeds to explain how the main character came to this pass.)  This way of structuring the story makes "The Chronicler," somewhat like "Recruiting Station," a circle--we both start and end the story with Slade's (spoiler!--supposed) death.

Our man Van is interested in questionable alternative theories of medicine--for example, he was deeply involved in L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics.  In "The Chronicler" Michael Slade trains his three eyes using odd methods that include exposing the eye to direct sunlight, the kind of thing I have been told all my life is akin to eye suicide.  In his brief reviews of the Ace publication of Siege of the Unseen and the Simon and Schuster edition of War Against the Rull in If (as you know, all issues of If are available at the internet archive), Frederick Pohl points out that the methods used by Slade are those of discredited weirdo William Horatio Bates.  Van Vogt describes the methods in detail, but never uses Bates's name, which is a little odd.

Slade briefly gets his third eye operating at full capacity, and sees into a parallel universe of cave men and a naked woman with three eyes!  But then his interdimensional vision fails him, perhaps because of something that woman does.  Slade leaves the city to spend time at his childhood home on a farm, and there is able to transport himself bodily to that other plane of existence.  This alternate world is parallel to ours (the lay of the land, hills and valleys and so forth, are recognizable, but trees and buildings are different) and, exploring a little, he comes upon a landed spaceship in a field.  Aboard the ship he meets the same three-eyed woman, and again his third eye is stripped of its power in short order, and he is returned to our Earth.

A month later Slade heads back to the city where finds that the three-eyed lady (sing it!), has been to his home, leaving with his servant a note signed "Leear" and a self-destructing phonograph record so he can learn the language of the city of Naze!  According to the note, when he can speak the language, he is to make a midnight rendezvous with her at a specified spot out in the country.  When he makes the rendezvous, he doesn't see Leear, just hears her voice a moment before she teleports him to that other dimension, within the walls of the ancient and decrepit city of spires and vampires known as Naze!

Like Delpa in "Recruiting Station," Naze in "The Chronicler" is a city under siege, protected by a force field.  The inhabitants who crowd its streets during the day are decadent and depraved, with no work and no ambition other than to drink human blood!  (To this end everybody carries a syringe and a metal cup!)  At night the most vigorous vampires ambush those foolish enough to walk the streets past sunset, and during the day the weak beg the strong for a few drops of blood the way throngs of people beg me for a dollar every time I go into D.C. to visit the art museums and bookstores!  (In Naze you can whip beggars who importune you, but I don't think I'd get the approval of the authorities if I started tolchocking the impecunious citizens of "the District" with my umbrella.)  Leear has sent Slade to Naze to assist in its destruction, and, seeing the place, Slade is so appalled by it that he agrees that it should be destroyed by the spaceship that for centuries has hovered over the city, menacing the abominable metropolis...but is he sure he really wants to get mixed up with all these crazy people, to actually risk his life for them?  After all, Leear is found to be a master of deceit who has no qualms about sacrificing people to achieve her goal of destroying the city, and even the fifth columnists Slade meets in Naze are so addicted to human blood that they strap Slade down when he is unawares and steal some of his precious bodily fluid!

The people at isfdb warn that this edition is likely
abridged.

Leear's powers only keep Slade in Naze for 36 hours or so, and back on Earth Slade tries to put all this Naze insanity behind him and renew his marriage and relationships--to put an ordinary life back together he even tells his ex-wife he's willing to cover up his third eye.  But wifey and former friends want nothing to do with the three-eyed freak!  So Slade gathers together weapons and equipment, trains his third eye with determination, and transports himself to the other dimension under his own steam!

Slade makes sure he appears on the other side not in the city of Naze, but among those three-eyed cave people. This tribe turns out to not be primitives at all, but sophisticated moderns who have chosen to live the simple life!  (Is Van pulling a Chad Oliver on us?)  The tribespeeps have total control of their nervous systems (down to the molecule!) and begin training Slade in achieving control of his own body.  ("The Chronicler" is all about the importance of training.)  The most important thing they have to teach him is the ability to relax--all our bodily and psychological problems come from tension, and, to be happy and healthy, what you have to do is relax! 

After a month of training to relax, Slade's relaxation is ruined when it comes out that the tribe is training him to control his body so he can help Leear in her war on Naze--she thinks that only Slade can kill the cruel ruler of Naze, a man named Geean.  Leear is not one of the tribe, but the tribe is working with her because the mere existence of Naze limits them--if Naze is destroyed, they can master control of their bodies beyond the molecular level to the very electron level and thus achieve immortality!  Slade storms off into the wilderness, only to be captured by airborne Naze troops!

Back in the diabolical city, Slade meets Geean himself atop the city's central spire.  Slade is astonished to find he has already met Geean among the tribesmen--was the tribe working for Geean under duress and only lying about working with Leear?  Leear appears, and these two competing immortals explain the history of how the hi-tech city of Naze degenerated and why Leear and Geean have been at war for a thousand years.  Ten centuries ago, the human race on this plane was falling into decadence and ennui because they had achieved immortality via machinery.  A vote was held, and it was ordered that everybody destroy his immortality belt so they all could learn how to achieve immortality via the newly discovered relaxation method--as long as any considerable mechanical construction remained it would be impossible to achieve the electron level of relaxation, so all the cities would have to be torn down.

Two people were permitted to temporarily retain their immortality belts, Leear and a companion, who were to observe the transition from the space ship (Leear is the "chronicler" of the title.)  A small number of rebels who opposed this transition struck just after the belts were destroyed--Geean was their leader.  In the fighting every other city in the world was blow up with nuclear weapons, and Geean killed Leear's companion and took his belt and made himself dictator of Naze.  Leear managed to get the space ship airborne before Geean could activate his force field, and she destroyed the immortality belt manufacturing facilities from the air, rendering it impossible to return to a fully immortal society via mechanical means--everybody Leear and Geean had known for thousands of years died while they continued on, immortal, his city and her ship locked in a stalemate.

Slade is able to kill Geean because he is from another plane, and can send Geean to our plane; as they are all in a skyscraper, and there is no parallel skyscraper back in our world, when Slade does so the tyrant falls to his death (his immortality device will not work in a different plane, which Van foreshadowed by demonstrating that the gunpowder in Slade's pistols didn't work on the Naze plane.)  The authorities back on Earth misidentify Geean's crushed body as Slade's--to the two-eyed, I guess all (crushed) three-eyed dudes look the same!

Slade learns that Leear genetically engineered him to have a third eye and manipulated his life on our Earth so he could serve as her cat's paw in her war to liberate mankind on her plane from mortality.  Slade is willing to overlook this (and the ten thousand year age difference), and it is clear as the story ends that Slade and Leear will become husband and wife and live happily forever after.

Though there are plenty of people using disguises and lying, and plenty of people who are misled and spread misinformation, "The Chronicler" is more straightforward and easier to understand than "Recruiting Station."  The story is also less economical, with passages I would consider fat.  For example, the long scenes about the (curiously unnamed) Bates method.  There is also an explanation that "Naze," even though it looks like "Nazi" on the page, is not meant to make the reader think of the German National Socialist party.  Wouldn't it have been easier to just make up a name for the city that didn't look almost exactly like the colloquial name for one of the most famous and provocative organizations in history?  A strange artistic choice on the part of the author.

 I like it, but our man Van has done better.

**********

Two entertaining SF capers about cities under siege, people striving for immortality, individuals manipulated by superior beings, and men and women who ride a rocky road to marital bliss.  More van Vogt in our future!