1965 stories by Larry Niven, Vernor Vinge, Clifford Simak and James Schmitz

I was lucky enough to find a bunch of exciting SF paperbacks for a dollar each on a recent visit to a central Ohio Half Price Books.  Let's get started on the stack with Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr's World's Best Science Fiction: Second Series, the paperback version of World's Best Science Fiction: 1966.  Today, four stories, all from 1965 SF magazines, by some pretty big names in the SF biz.

"Becalmed in Hell" by Larry Niven

The narrator and his comrade Eric spent four months flying to Venus, and are now exploring its dense 600 degree atmosphere from within their space ship.  Eric, I should note, is a disembodied human brain whose nerves are connected to cameras and the rockets and so forth so he can control the ship like it's his own body.  But then, trouble.  Eric can't feel the ramjets, so the narrator has to go out into the deadly Venerean atmosphere to conduct repairs.  But is the problem mechanical, or psychological?

This is a good example of the type of hard SF that seriously tries to figure out what an alien planet might be like and how NASA might try to explore it, a story full of science and engineering. Niven also includes lighthearted references to less realistic SF stories about adventures on Venus and movies about disembodied brains.

Good.

"Becalmed in Hell" first appeared in F&SF and has been widely anthologized; it actually appears in another book I own, Damon Knight's A Science Fiction Argosy, from which we read "Lewis Padgett's" "The Cure" back in 2015.

We read Bayley's "The Ship
of Disaster" in September of last year,
remember?

"Apartness" by Vernor Vinge

I think this may be Vinge's first published story; it appeared originally in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds.  Back in 2015, I praised another early Vinge tale, 1968's "Grimm's Story;" like that story, "Apartness" involves ships, which is fine by me--I can't swim, but I love stories about the sea and one of the things I miss about New York is looking at the ocean and all the ships and boats on the river and in the harbor.  "Apartness" is also a lament about racism and intolerance and man's propensity for war.

It is the post-apocalyptic future!  A nuclear/biological/chemical war has obliterated the Northern Hemisphere; South Africa and South America have somewhat stable, somewhat autocratic, societies with an 18th or 19th century level of technology (muskets, sailing ships--one elite guy has a revolver.)  Australia still has modern technology, but they aren't sharing it, feeling humanity is not ready for it yet.

The narrative follows a South American scientist (he studied in Australia) and his team; they are on board a ship of the South American Empire, on the quixotic mission of searching for Coney Island, which most of the superstitious Latin Americans of the dark future think is a floating island which travels the world (alright! a New York-centric joke!)  The scientists know better, but keep mum--it is not healthy to cross the astrologers who surround the Emperor.  Anyway, the expedition investigates a primitive settlement in Antarctica.  After some tense scenes reminiscent of accounts of Cook's voyages and scenes in which clues are discovered, the scientists learn that these Antarctic villagers are descendants of the few white people who escaped South Africa alive after the blacks won the race war there which followed the cataclysmic war in the North.  In the final scene a South African diplomat expresses the desire to observe the Antarctic tribe and gloat over the fact that South African blacks are now more advanced than the whites who oppressed them generations ago, while the protagonist worries that another apocalyptic war, this one between the African and South American empires, may be inevitable.

This story is well put together, but I've been exposed to so much anti-racism and anti-war material in my life that the story's "meaning" feels a little banal.  People nowadays might accuse the story itself of being racist: the white Australians still have all the knowledge and technology of the 20th century but refuse to share it with the Hispanics and blacks, the Hispanics are ruled by a dictator and a superstitious aristocracy ignorant enough to not know what Coney Island was, and the blacks have an empire which Vinge suggests is animated by vengeful hate.

Moderately good.

"Over the River and Through the Woods" by Clifford D. Simak

"Pastoral" is the word often used to describe Simak's work, and, sure enough, the first scene of this story features a woman in a farmhouse kitchen canning apples.  Two children come to her door, claiming to be her grandchildren.  As we readers realize at once, and the farmer's wife realizes after looking into their bags, these kids are refugees from the future, when aliens are about to take over the Earth.  The kids have brought anti-cancer drugs, which will presumably extend the life of (great-great-) Grandma, whom future records indicate will die of cancer in 1904, just eight years from the present.  Will all this alter history?  Simak raises the question but leaves the answer up in the air.  

Simak often writes these sentimental things suggesting simple farm life is better than urban modern life, and I guess if aliens were killing everybody in the 21st century, the 19th century would look pretty good.  Otherwise, I'm not really on board with his attitude.  It looks like "Over the River and Through the Woods" has come to be seen as representative of Simak's entire body of work.  Ursula K. LeGuin included it in her anthology designed for use on college students, 1993's Norton Book of Science Fiction, and it is the title story of a 1996 collection of Simak stories.  It first saw light of day in Amazing.  

Acceptable.  I can recommend it more strongly to people who enjoy scenes in which people are astounded by zippers and confused by talk of airplanes and rockets.  ("They talked of plains....and rockets--as if there were rockets every day and not just on the Fourth.")

"Planet of Forgetting" by James H. Schmitz

The last time we met James H. Schmitz he was regaling us with stories about female intelligence operatives of the far future. "Planet of Forgetting," first seen in Galaxy, is in the same vein. (Schmitz is one of those writers whom the cognoscenti tell us we should like because he includes strong female characters, and those of us who don't need to spend any more of our brief lives sitting through tendentious preaching are fortunate in that Schmitz's stories--in my experience at least--aren't satires or lectures but straightforward outer space thrillers with a woman slotted into the super spy role.)

Earth intelligence operative Major Wade Colgrave wakes up on an alien planet with amnesia--how did he get here?  As the story's thirty-odd pages unfold we switch back and forth between Colgrave trying to survive on the planet, which is full of weird animals, and flashbacks to the mission that landed him here.  You see, the evil space empire of Rala was preparing to invade the territory of the Lorn Worlds, an ally of Earth, and Colgrave was carrying to Earth the secret dossier on Rala prepared by the Lorneans when his ship was captured by Ralans.  Instead of just imprisoning or murdering him, the Ralans tried to coax him into becoming a double agent, giving him the opportunity to escape in a lifeboat, dossier in hand.  The Ralans catch up to Colgrave and, with the fortuitous aid of the local fauna, he foils their pursuit.

This is an entertaining Flash Gordon/Star Wars type of thing--Colgrave shoots lots of people with his energy pistol, puts on an enemy uniform as a disguise, is menaced by monsters, that kind of stuff.  We've all seen this sort of thing a hundred times, but some of us (including me) still enjoy it if it is done well.  Schmitz also includes fun gadgets in addition to the various types of futuristic guns, like a space suit that can fly in the atmosphere and a sort of man-hunting drone.  The explanation of how Colgrave lost his memory and the implications of this phenomenon are also good.

A solid adventure/espionage story.  (By the way, Colgrave may be a man, but the lead Ralan agent in the story turns out to be a beautiful woman!)

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So far World's Best Science Fiction: Second Series is shaping up to be a great collection.  More from its pages in our next episode.

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Thank heavens, no, Mr. Cerf.

Because I have an abiding hatred of everything from the 21st century, when my wife wants to hang out and watch TV I usually insist we watch TV shows that are 20 years old, at a minimum.  One of the individuals prominent in the middle of the 20th century with whom we have become familiar thanks to my idiosyncratic viewing proclivities is Bennett Cerf, an important publisher who was a regular panelist on What's My Line? (Libertarian types might find Cerf's memoir of his relationship with Ayn Rand interesting.)  Cerf had a reputation as a humor writer, and actually published numerous books of jokes.  My wife and I find his renown as a funny man incomprehensible, as his jokes on What's My Line are universally terrible, and the stories in the one of his joke books which we picked up at an antiques mall are practically anti-jokes, anecdotes lacking any punchline, like something out of Jim's Journal.

Anyway, it was a cause of great surprise and hilarity in the MPorcius household when I opened my copy of World's Best Science Fiction: Second Series to find Cerf's face smiling up at me from an advertisement for the "Famous Writers School" of Westport, Connecticut.  Whether this ad was included in the book by Ace, or was just used as a bookmark by a previous owner, I don't know, but the ad does include some points of interest to all you SF fans.  For one thing, Rod Serling (whom my wife, a better comedian than Cerf, always calls "Rod the Bod") is one of Cerf's partners in crime at the Famous Writers School, and secondly, a SF author I never heard of before, who nonetheless has a long list of publication credits at isfdb, Robert Lory, credits Famous Writers School with getting his career going.

Submitted for your consideration....

Click the scan below to grok the bright image of Famous Writers School presented to the world by Cerf and his cronies, and then read the Wikipedia article on the school to get a look at the shadowy truth behind the glamour.

Orbit 4 stories by Harlan Ellison, R. A. Lafferty, and Vernor Vinge

On Labor Day I stopped in at Half Price Books to take advantage of the 20% off sale, and one of my finds was a copy of 1968's Orbit 4, edited by Damon Knight.  I like the cool green cover, with its resonant hints of alien planets, electricity, electronics, and the ocean deep.

There's no actual intro to the book as a whole, though on the first page there is a blurb from Publishers' Weekly that, without saying "new wave," comes across as celebrating that vaguely-defined phenomenon and Orbit's role in it: "Most of the stories typify the emerging new domain of science fiction, with its emphasis less on the 'out-there' than on the 'right-here, right-now.''  In the next sentence they give their prime example, the included Harlan Ellison story.

"Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" by Harlan Ellison

My man tarbandu has made mention of this story a few times at The PorPor Books Blog, and I was glad to have a chance to read it myself.  "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" has appeared in numerous other venues, including The Illustrated Harlan Ellison, where William Stout (I love Stout's dinosaur illustrations!) gave it the comic book treatment.

Rudy, a recently discharged soldier, comes to a decrepit gothic house looking for his former fiance, Kris, whom he still loves and wants to marry, even though he hasn't seen her in eight months.  The house is full of hippies, and Kris, like the rest of them, spends most of her time out of her mind on drugs.  Rudy moves in, and helps to support the hippies by running errands, bringing in money, and serving as a presentable public face for the hippie colony, things which none of these perennially stoned goofballs can really do.  Significantly, because "love" is so much a part of the hippy "brand," Ellison shows that the druggies have lost the ability to love or care for each other--their sexual needs are like those of animals,

Ellison describes the house the way you would describe a haunted house, all weird noises and shadows, and goes beyond showing that drug use has turned the hippies into useless, filthy decadents: in an oft-foreshadowed final dream sequence/metaphor, the hippies appear as vampires, werewolves and other monsters.  Drug addiction has turned them into parasites, cannibals, who infect others with their evil: Rudy eventually succumbs and starts taking drugs himself, leaving behind his productive life (before his time in the service he had a job as a mechanic) and his sincere and human love for Kris.

This story is pretty good; it is certainly vividly and economically written, with each sentence serving the story's purpose and being worth reading with care.  As an attack on the drug culture and a warning to stay off drugs, I suppose many people would dismiss it as a sort of SF version of Reefer Madness.  Though I am sympathetic to Ellison's message here (I'm as square as they come and never drink or use drugs), and Ellison's writing is far better, "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" did remind me a little of that over-the-top anti-gun story by Davis Grubb, "The Baby-Sitter." Both stories employ horror fiction conventions to issue a heavy-handed condemnation of what their authors consider a social evil, in the process exaggerating the seductive power of the vice that has inspired their ire, and diminishing the agency of individuals.

Mild to moderate recommendation.

"One At a Time" by R. A. Lafferty

It has been a while since I read any R. A. Lafferty, so I eagerly took this chance to do so.  Lafferty is sui generis.  When you read a SF story in which a guy is swinging a sword at some other guys, it is easy to say "this story is an attempt to emulate Burroughs" or Howard, or Tolkein, and to assess the story's success by comparing it to those beloved classics.  But what can you compare a Lafferty story to?  Damon Knight, in his intro to the story, suggests "One At a Time" is like an "ethnic" tale, Irish most probably, but also argues that Lafferty's stories are probably best described as "tales unlike other tales."

Sour John, a rowdy hard-drinking type who hangs around in bars in port cities, "collects odd ones."  So when he hears an "odd one" is hanging around Barnaby's Barn, he hurries over to the tavern to meet him.  The odd one is McSkee, who eats tremendous quantities of food and drinks vast volumes of booze--he's breaking all the local records!  Sour John spends the evening with McSkee, wandering the city, fighting and whoring, living it up--for Sour John and McSkee it is such hearty, simple pleasures that make life worth living, and McSkee can handle more of such pleasures than any man alive.  Sour John tries to figure out McSkee's secret, and McSkee is quite open about it: he has learned how to put himself into a kind of hibernation, to slow down his body and literally die, and then wake up again, years or decades later. McSkee has lived for ages, but only one day at a time, each day separated by many years.

This is a fun story, and you have to suspect Lafferty is somehow referring to such central elements of Christian thought as Jesus of Nazareth's death and resurrection and the immortality of the human soul, as well as exhorting all of us to live every day to its fullest.  The story perhaps contains hidden depths.

"One At a Time" would later appear in the 1970 collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers, which I own, but which is currently in storage along with most of my books.

"Grimm's Story" by Vernor Vinge

In a time that feels long ago, I guess early 2003, when I either had money or was behaving as if I had money, the wife (then my girlfriend) and I took a trip to Western Europe, staying in a hotel in London, with a friend of hers in Denmark, and with a friend of mine in Portugal.  On planes and trains I read Vernor Vinge's Deepness in the Sky.  It was the first science fiction novel I had read in a long time, and I rather liked it.  With its interest in human freedom and technological and social change, it reminded me of SF I had read in my youth.  Some time later I read The Peace War, but thought it was just OK; I remember thinking it addressed the same issues and had the same tone as a bunch of other SF work, including Deepness in the Sky, and being disappointed because I had been hoping for something new.

It had been approximately a decade since I'd read any Vinge when I bought Orbit 4, so I decided to check out the longish (over 50 pages) Vinge contribution, "Grimm's Story."  Isfdb told me that "Grimm's Story" is a component of a fix up novel called Grimm's World, which was later retitled Tatja Grimm's World.  If the cover illustrations of this novel were any guide, the story was about a sexy girl who has a battleship--that part of MPorcius's mind which is still 13 years old thought that sounded pretty good.

"Grimm's Story" is a traditional type of hard SF story.  In this category of story, which presumably has a name that I don't know, the author imagines a planet or planet-like environment which has some physical difference(s) from the Earth--the gravity or temperature or chemical composition or whatever are significantly different.  The author speculates on how civilization and/or the ecosystem would evolve and adapt in such an environment.  This alien world is then used as a setting for an adventure story in which the protagonists must journey from point A to point B and accomplish some mission; this journey provides the author opportunity to describe different facets of the world he has designed.  Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity is sort of the archetype for this type of story, but I think Poul Anderson's Three Worlds to Conquer and Larry Niven's Ringworld and Integral Trees books, and even Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, John Varley's Titan and Bob Shaw's Orbitsville qualify.

The planet in this story is a vast ocean with lots of little islands, inhabited by humans who are descended from Earth colonists who lost their high technology ages ago.  The planet is severely lacking in metal deposits; iron and aluminum are very rare, and as a result technological development has been slow.

Hard science fiction stories often glamorize scientists, engineers and merchants, and show contempt for religion and government, and Vinge delivers on these expectations.  Our heroes are an astronomer and the crew of a publishing enterprise that makes money by putting out girlie magazines and a journal of science articles and science fiction stories.  (Remember how, in his alternate world in Ada or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov called science fiction "physics fiction?"  In "Grimm's Story" the people call science fiction "contrivance fiction" or "c.f.")  These businesspeople make their own paper and print the magazines on a huge ship that travels around the planet, delivering the periodicals.  Vinge describes the chemical and mechanical processes by which this is done, which will no doubt thrill some readers and bore others.

The astronomer, Svir Hedrigs (I just realized that when you say it out loud in the German or Scandinavian accent it seems to demand it sounds like "severe headaches") is sitting in a bar with his little pet monster that has psychic powers (hard SF is ostensibly based on real science, and yet somehow often includes characters with psychic powers, just like extravagant action-based space fantasies like Star Wars and Warhammer 40,000) when the tall and beautiful woman who runs the publishing ship, Tatja Grimm, appears and seduces him.  Grimm uses her womanly charms to persuade Hedrigs to join the publishing company on a perilous secret mission.  This mission is to infiltrate the impenetrable fortress in the capitol of the most powerful nation in the world, which is ruled by a murderous tyrant.  This dictator has the world's only complete collection of the aforementioned science fiction magazine, and he is planning to sacrifice this literary treasure to the gods!  This crime against humanity must be stopped!  The only way to rescue the magazines from the fortress is to use Hedrigs's little psionic monster to fool the guards.

In fact, the ruthless and manipulative Tatja Grimm has even bigger fish to fry than preserving old issues of her world's analogue of Analog.  She ends up using Hedrigs and his little hypnotic pet to overthrow the tyrant and make herself Queen of that powerful country.  As it turns out, Grimm isn't just the sexiest woman on the planet, but the smartest human being.  She thinks that, at the head of the world's strongest economy, she can advance technology to the point that people can fly to a neighboring planet!  And why does she want to fly to that planet?  Because she is lonely and hopes that on that other planet is a man smart enough for her to love!  On the last page of the story Grimm says:

"...I am going to turn this world upside down, and regain the ancient arts that mythology said we once had.  For somewhere in this universe there must be what I need most...a man."    

Was that sound I heard feminists' heads exploding?

I thought this story was pretty good.  I love the idea of a huge centuries-old ship, and thought the idea that they were on a quest to save old SF magazines pretty adorable. And I thought Vinge did a decent job with Tatja Grimm, a sort of anti-hero with mysterious motivations about whom we learn more and more as the story progresses. Now I want to find that fix-up novel and see what happens to Grimm and her quest for love!

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I'm quite happy with this edition of Orbit--all three of these stories are entertaining and interesting.  (I read the included Silverberg story, "Passengers," some years ago and liked it, as well.)  I'll be reading more of the anthology in the future to see what else Knight served up the SF readers of 1968.

Three Worlds to Conquer by Poul Anderson

"As always, he found engineer thoughts soothing.  Forces and matrices were so much easier to deal with than people." 

My (and Bill Meeker's) copy of the novel

Jesse at Speculiction recently reviewed The High Crusade, one of Poul Anderson's more famous novels. I read High Crusade soon after the start of my exile (it was in the local library here on the prairie), like four years ago, and I have to agree with Jesse that the novel is just too incredible. The idea that medieval English fighting men might have admirable qualities that are lacking in modern technological societies, like physical courage or a willingness to take risks or whatever, is an interesting insight and is typical of Anderson's work, but it is too difficult to accept them conquering societies with the wealth and organization required to achieve interstellar travel.

(On the other hand, I recall High Crusade being more readable and memorable than some of Anderson's later work, like For Love and Glory, which I read and have completely forgotten, and Harvest of Stars, which I read and remember being tedious.)

I may not be Poul Anderson's biggest fan, but I enjoyed Brain Wave and The Enemy Stars, and on this blog I have praised several Anderson stories and collections. I am quite sympathetic to Anderson's point of view, so, despite periodic bumps in the road, I keep going back to him.  This week I read a novel published four years after 1960's High Crusade, Three Worlds to Conquer, which was first serialized in If in the first months of 1964. I have the Pyramid paperback, X-1875, printed in 1968.  This copy, for which I paid $1.50 in Minnesota, was originally owned by a Bill Meeker.  

Fellow SF fan Bill Meeker,
we salute you!

Three Worlds to Conquer is a traditional science fiction story about science and wars.  Our hero is Mark Fraser, an engineer on the Ganymede colony of 5,000 people.  He's a skilled pilot of space craft and also the human most adept in the lingua franca that has developed between humans and the natives of Jupiter known as the Nyarr.  Because Jupiter is so inhospitable to human life, humans and Jovians have never met in the flesh, but for over a decade the two civilizations have corresponded via a neutrino-based transmitter system.  As the novel begins Fraser's counterpart on Jupiter, Theor, is asking for Fraser's help because another Jovian society, the Ulunt-Khazul, have launched an aggressive war on the Nyarr.  But Fraser has his own problems--the civil war taking place on Earth has just spread to Ganymede, and the crew of a space battleship (a huge sphere bristling with gun turrets--awesome!) is arresting all the technical personnel on the colony!

The narrative alternates between Theor and his war on the Jovian surface and Fraser's struggle on Ganymede; Theor and Fraser conduct their relationship entirely through electronic communication.  Three Worlds to Conquer thus reminded me of those hard SF classics A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge (1999) and Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement (1954), which also centered on long distance human-alien relationships.

After suffering military defeats at the hands of their enemies, Fraser and Theor use their engineering ability, rhetorical skill, and willingness to incinerate people with rocket exhaust, to win the day.  

There is a lot of science in Three Worlds to Conquer; we hear all about neutrinos, the solar wind, the atmosphere and geology of Jupiter, and what kind of orbits space ships have to take to efficiently travel about the solar system.  I think Anderson spends two entire pages of Chapter 2 describing the neutrino communications device to us readers.  For the most part this stuff is convincing and interesting.  More fun, perhaps, is the strange ecosystem Anderson comes up with for Jupiter, particularly the plants, animals and people that fly/swim in the thick Jovian atmosphere.  He also makes a creditable effort to figure out what kind of technology the Nyarr and other people living on Jupiter's surface, under tremendous pressure and in terrible cold, would have.

Anderson has a tragic sense of life, and, besides all the people who get massacred in these wars, this is expressed in Fraser's relationships.  A skinny 40-year-old who complains about getting old, he has a wife and children, but his marriage has obviously grown stale.  When Fraser returns from a week-long mission to Io, he goes to the neutrino transmitter to talk to Theor before he goes to see his family.  ("Bros before hos," I guess, even if your bro is an alien you've never seen.)   Fraser and Lorraine Vlasek (mmm, pickles), a woman whose loyalties seem to vacillate between the two different sides in the Earth civil war, have a sad unconsummated love affair.  Fraser also deals with the stress of his work on Ganymede by smoking a pipe and taking "happypills," and frets when tobacco and "psych medicine" are in short supply.  Anderson doesn't imply any moral judgments about Fraser's attitude towards his family or his reliance on stimulants to get through a Ganymedean day.

Characters and style aren't the strong point of this short (143 page) novel; it's a story about plot and ideas.  There aren't any libertarian speeches like the one at the end of the Van Rijn collection Trader to the Stars, but Anderson's politics are in evidence; Fraser carps about government censors and bureaucrats, and Theor gets out of a predicament by trading with primitive natives he encounters.  Anderson portrays war as preferable to living under tyranny or surrendering what is yours, but many minor characters are willing to give up and/or collaborate and have to be convinced by people like Fraser and Theor to do the right thing and stand up for what is right.  And while wars will happen, at the center of the novel is the idea that different cultures will most profit through trade and friendship.

Not spectacular, but solidly entertaining; Three Worlds to Conquer has all the classic hard SF elements, and doesn't outlast its welcome, as new things keep popping up to maintain the reader's interest.

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Some four years ago Joachim Boaz reviewed Three Worlds to Conquer; you'll have to take my word for it that I read his review after drafting mine. 

If we have any substantial disagreements about the novel, it is about Fraser's wife, Eve.  Joachim seems to think her lack of "screen time" is a careless flaw, perhaps a sign of sexism.  I, as I have suggested above, think this is a conscious artistic choice by Anderson, an effort to depict a stale marriage.  The very last line of the book is actually about Eve, and Fraser's strained relationship with her, suggesting Anderson thought the Fraser marriage an important element of his novel.

Joachim also suggests the aliens in the novel are silly-looking, but I thought them better than the cat people, teddy bear people, and girls with blue or green skin we so often get in SF.

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The last page of my edition of Three Worlds to Conquer is an ad for the "Latest Science Fiction!" published by Pyramid.  Of the seven books advertised, I've only read the two included Jack Williamson Legion of Space novels, first written in the 1930s ("latest" indeed.)  I remember enjoying The Cometeers (yay, space war!), but being disappointed in One Against the Legion (instead of interstellar naval warfare we get a detective story in a space casino.)  Joachim read the Sturgeon collection A Way Home last year, and gave it a mixed review.

Feel free to let the world know via the comments why we should seek out The Butterfly Kid, Venus Equilateral, Against the Fall of Night, and The Synthetic Man, or why we should avoid them like we'd avoid the ammonia seas of Jupiter.