"Crashing Suns," "The Star-Stealers" and "Within the Nebula" by Edmond Hamilton

My copy, front cover

A year ago we served in a mind-blowing star-smashing intergalactic space war involving snake people, gas people, and a multicultural space navy from our own Milky Way when we read the 1964 printing of Edmond Hamilton's 1929 novel Outside the Universe. Outside the Universe sold so well, super-editor Donald A. Wollheim tells us, that Ace decided to put out more of Hamilton's 1920s and 1930s tales of the Interstellar Patrol, and in 1965 presented to the space-opera-loving public Ace F-319, Crashing Suns. Crashing Suns includes five stories by Ohio-native Hamilton plus a short intro by Wollheim (in which he brags about the "evident success" of Outside the Universe I mentioned above) and a fun interior illustration by Jack Gaughan.  Over the last week or so, between driving hundreds of miles across America's vast Middle West and visiting my wife's friends and family (lots of staring vacantly into space while they discussed sports and local gossip, but also a chance to watch a spaghetti Western with my mother-in-law), I read three of these stories, each of which first appeared in the famed genre magazine Weird Tales.

"Crashing Suns" (1929)

This story, which isfdb informs us is the first component of Hamilton's Interstellar Patrol series (Outside the Universe is the fourth), is over 40 pages long, and was published across two issues of Weird Tales.

It is one hundred thousand years in the future, and mankind has colonized the entire solar system. Our narrator, Jan Tor, captain of the "long, fishlike" Interplanetary Patrol Cruiser 79388, is summoned to Earth, to the Hall of Planets, the seat of the system's government.  The Chairman of the Supreme Council has bad news: in one year's time a star is going to collide with Sol, and the explosion will exterminate all of humanity! Luckily, one of Jan Tor's old friends, genius scientist Serto Sen, has just invented a new kind of space drive which permits travel at the speed of light.  Jan Tor is given command of the human race's first light speed vessel, a little ten-man job, and sent on a mission to investigate this mysteriously genocidal ball o' gas.

The plot of "Crashing Suns" is broadly similar to that of Outside the Universe.  Jan Tor and company get captured by spherical pink aliens and learn that these creeps' sun is worn out, and that they hope to rejuvenate it by crashing it into Sol. Hamilton gives us some horror scenes while Jan Tor and friends are in captivity, then they escape to Earth, where a fleet of 1000 light speed ships has been built.  Jan Tor is given command of this human armada, and he leads it in a tremendous naval battle against the pink spheres' navy, but it is another invention of Serto Sen's, a ray projector which redirects the alien sun, that saves human civilization.  It is the scientist, not the fighting man, who is the real hero of the story, and the last paragraphs of the tale look forward to the colonization of the galaxy by the human race, an heroic destiny made possible by Serto Sen's light speed drive.

"The Star Stealers" (1929)

There's Ran Rarak and Dal Nara now,
escaping their high rise cell on the dark star

This story takes place some two hundred thousand years in the future. The Earth is now a member of the Federation of Stars which includes all the intelligent species of the galaxy, and our narrator is Ran Rarak, captain of a “long cigarlike” cruiser capable of travel one thousand times the speed of Serto Sen's light speed ship.   Ran Rarak’s ship is called away from its duty as a component of the Interstellar Patrol’s fleet to Neptune, where Ran Rarak gets terrible news: from out of the black depths of intergalactic space a burned out star is rushing towards Sol! This black star is over a million times the size of our Sun, and if it enters our solar system human civilization will be devastated by its tremendous gravitational pull! Ran Rarak is given command of a fleet of fifty ships manned by scientists and engineers and sent off to try to divert this black star of doom from its genocidal course!

The plot of “The Star-Stealers” follows that of “Crashing Suns” so closely as to feel like a revision of that story. Ran Rarak and his friends are captured by the inhabitants of the dead star, tentacle monsters who live in pyramidal cities. There we are treated to a scene of horror, and learn that the tentacle people’s dying star will soon be so cold that survival on its surface will be impossible.  The hope of these fiends is that they can direct their dead sun close enough to Sol that our sun will be pulled into orbit around the black star and carried off. The tentacle peeps even plan to use their high technology to throw Earth and the other planets into Sol as additional fuel!

Fortunately, weeks after they were captured, Ran Rarak and his comrades (including Dal Nara, his female second-in-command) escape their prison, and at the same time the Federation Navy shows up to destroy the tentacle peeps' navy and clear the way for Ran Rarak to deactivate the ray that is directing the black star’s course, saving our system.

“Within the Nebula” (1929)

Our narrator for this caper isn’t a naval officer, but a politician, Ker Kal, Sol’s representative to the Federation’s council at Canopus. Is this story going to be about fraudulent universities, corrupt foundations, hacked e-mails and conflicts of interest? Hell, no! This story is about the dangers posed by genocidal nebulas!

In this story a nebula is a blob of burning gas too hot for a spaceship to enter. The cyclops who is the Chief of the Federation council explains to the assembled representatives that the huge nebula at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy has begun to spin and will soon explode; the burning gas ejected by such an explosion will exterminate all life in the galaxy! Luckily, scientists have just invented a material that can withstand the infernal heat of a nebula and built a spaceship out of it!

The new nebula-resistant ship can only carry three people, and our man Ker Kal is one of the representatives selected for the dangerous mission of figuring out what the heck is up with that spinning nebula and if there is anything we can do about it. He is accompanied by a plant man from Capella and a tentacle person from Arcturus; these three politicians fly to the peaceful inner eye of the fiery nebula storm and discover a titanic planet, sheathed in artificial metal plates.

Inside this planet our heroes are captured by hideous amoeba men! They endure scenes of horror, and learn the secret of the nebula’s instability: the nebula was contracting and threatening the survival of the amoeba people’s world, so they developed technology to spin the nebula and make it explode outwardly. Our heroes escape their prison and fight their way to the ray that is making the nebula spin and deactivate it. As our heroes blast away in their ship, the nebula collapses on the metal-skinned planet, exterminating the amoeba people whose manipulations were about to annihilate all other life in the Milky Way.  Ah, the ironies of practical astrophysics!

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A Japanese edition of Crashing Suns

I like all three of these stories, though there is no denying that they are trifling escapism with flat characters; we learn far more about astronomy and technology than people's feelings or personalities. For example, I don't think Hamilton produces an in-story reason or a literary reason why it is representatives of the council instead of the customary naval officers, scientists and engineers who crew the nebula investigation ship; its not like there is a scene of one of them using his baby-kissing powers or ability to lie to his constituents to resolve some plot obstacle.

Hamilton comes up with some fun technology: conventional space ships don't use rockets, but instead "gravity-screens" that act like the cavorite sheets in H. G. Wells' First Men in the Moon, while Serto Sen's new ship uses "etheric vibration-generators."  Solar power collectors and transmitters are used to turn barren Neptune into a green forested world.  Long range communication is via the "telestereo," which produces a "lifesize and moving and stereoscopically perfect image" of the person on the other end of the line.

There are also striking images, like the pyramid city on the dark star, where light comes not from the sky but from radioactive minerals in the star’s surface, the amoeba people who communicate by twisting their bodies rapidly into different shapes, and the massed traffic of commercial, military and pleasure ships that surrounds each Federation planet. The dreadful hand-to-hand fights with sickening aliens and the horror elements also work.

Of course there are all kinds of science lacunae (travelling at 1000x light speed has no unusual effects) and certified boners, like how the humans insouciantly walk on the surface of the dark star, even though Hamilton keeps telling us it is “millions of times larger than our own fiery sun” and has astoundingly powerful gravity.  If you are going to read lots of SF you just have to learn to shrug this sort of thing off.

The real problem with these tales is that all three of them are essentially the same, following almost exactly the same formula. People who read these stories as they appeared in Weird Tales back in the late ‘20s would have read each several months after reading its predecessor, and so probably were not quite as distracted by their similarities as was I, who read them all in the space of a few days.  With this in mind, I think I will put off reading the other two stories of the Interstellar Patrol in my copy of Crashing Suns, “The Comet Drivers” and "The Cosmic Cloud,” both of which appeared in Weird Tales in 1930, for a while.

The Parasaurians by Robert Wells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five Fates, Part 2: Harlan Ellison and Keith Laumer

An edition from 1975

Five Fates, copyright 1970 by Keith Laumer, is a SF experiment.  The book is a collection of stories by five Hugo-winners, each based on the same one-page prologue in which William Bailey goes to the Euthanasia Center, receives an injection, and is directed to his slab.

In our last episode we read Poul Anderson's, Frank Herbert's, and Gordon Dickson's offerings. All three authors took the experiment as an opportunity to denounce the kind of society that would have Euthanasia Centers and to advocate for individualism.  Unfortunately, of the three only Herbert used the experiment as a chance to tell an entertaining story.

Today we will be reading Harlan Ellison's and Keith Laumer's contributions to Five Fates.  Will either or both of them buck the trend and produce a story as good as Herbert's?  Will either of them come to the concept of the Euthanasia Center with an open mind and provide us a vivid picture of all of its good points?  Let's see!

"The Region Between" by Harlan Ellison

"The Region Between" is a sort of wild New Wave experiment, at least in its form.  The text switches between different font sizes and formats, with a few sections actually rotated 90 degrees, to indicate different speakers and settings.  Some of the chapters have odd headings (there are chapters "1 1/2" and "1 3/4.")  There are numerous sentences that consist of lists ("It was not a force, not a vapor, not a quality, not a potentiality, not a look, not a sense, not a capacity, not anything he could pinpoint,"), one line paragraphs, and repetitive paragraphs.  For the most part Ellison doesn't do these things just to be wacky, but with some kind of mood-setting or story-telling purpose, so they add to the story, rather than detract from it. One section, in which the text is a spiral, did challenge my poor eye sight.

Some printings of the story (though not the one in my copy of  Five Fates) are adorned with numerous decorations and illustrations by Jack Gaughan.  I am lucky enough to own a copy of Angry Candy which includes Gaughan's contributions, and I quite like them.  I'd be curious to see how they looked in the issue of Galaxy in which "The Region Between" first appeared. 

As for the story itself, it includes lots of striking images, some abstract, like souls stretched out to encompass all of space and time or a mind floating in a vast uniform emptiness, others sharp, such as the furry blue cyclops who crew intergalactic bombers on a suicide mission deep into enemy territory, or the half-cat/half-spider scout creature conducting reconnaissance in a sinister forest.  Ellison uses the death of Bailey as a springboard to tell a tale which ranges across all of space and several different universes.  Various alien entities, some known as Thieves, others as soul-recruiters, steal the souls of living creatures.  The foremost soul-recruiter is known as the Succubus; he harvests souls from a small number of planets and is able to sell them at a tremendous profit, for his souls are the finest on the market.  The Earth is one of the planets where he obtains these exquisite souls, and the Euthanasia Centers are the device that facilitates his recruiting.  (On other planets the Succubus employs gladiatorial combat, bogus religions, drugs, trapped teleporters, and similar schemes.)

Bailey is one of the souls captured by the Succubus and put in the bodies of the Succubus's customers, and we follow Bailey's soul from one body to another.  Bailey is a unique personality, unlike any of the souls the Succubus has dealt with before: a rebel, he tries to undermine the rulers of the societies he finds himself in.  "The Region Between" is quite anti-authoritarian; in its 46 pages we encounter multiple bogus religions and exploitative elites.  

The pace is fast, and while I didn't have any emotional connection to the characters or plot I was curious to see what crazy image or event Ellison was going to unveil next; I found the story to be totally unpredictable, though each component part was logical and believable.  "The Region Between" is also the most mystical of the stories in Five Fates; while some of the others deal with identity transfers and noncorporeal beings, they seem pretty materialistic and don't use the word "soul" or appear to take anything supernatural seriously.  "The Region Between" includes a meditation on what God is, and in the final confrontation with the Succubus, Bailey turns out to be God, the First Cause and the creator of the universes, and the story ends when Bailey destroys all of creation.

A good story, leaving us, so far, with two good stories and two not so good ones.

"Of Death What Dreams" by Keith Laumer

I was just saying I should read more Keith Laumer, and so here is my chance.

William Bailey is an independent thinker, a rebellious type in a collectivized, caste-bound, authoritarian world.  Food, housing and clothing are rationed and distributed by the government, and everybody needs to carry around a stack of ID papers and work permits.  People are given ranks that reflect their social class: "Class Three Yellow" is kind of low, like a technician might have, but "Class One Blue" is that of an aristocrat, a "Cruster" who dwells "Topside."  Bailey feels life is hopeless, so he goes to the Euthanasia Center to be put to death, but then he wakes up outside the Center.  How did he escape?  He can't remember!

Bailey sneaks into the underground levels of the city where an entire society of people live "off the grid."  A skilled statistician, Bailey goes into business as a bookie.  In an amusing wrinkle, people in this world don't bet on sports, they bet on government-released economic and social statistics!  Bailey makes enough money (the underground levels are full of rich criminals) to get a fake ID and to have his brain programmed with the education and mannerisms a One Blue would have.  In this disguise he bluffs his way up up up, all the way to the top of the social order, hobnobbing with decadent aristocrats and then confronting a high level magistrate, Micael Drans.

Bailey suddenly realizes why he has engaged in this arduous adventure: he has been programmed to murder Drans.  A genius from the future cast his mind back in time to recruit Bailey for this assassination mission, because Drans is going to bungle First Contact with aliens and start an interstellar war!  Who was this genius who was able to send his thoughts back through time?  Drans himself!

Somewhat diminishing the drama of a man organizing his own murder, Bailey is persuaded that he need not kill Drans, because if Drans is a good enough guy to contract his own murder to stop a war, he must be a good enough guy not to cause the interstellar war.  But wait, didn't he cause the interstellar war?  If he hadn't caused the war, why would he even come up with the idea of hypnotizing a guy in the past to kill him before he can cause the war?  (These time travel stories rarely make sense to me.)

Despite the problem with the time travel ending, this was a competently told and entertaining story, so it gets my recommendation.  I have to admit I also enjoyed that a minor character in the story was named "Lord Monboddo," presumably after the pioneering evolutionary theorist and minor but memorable figure in the writings of James Boswell.  Was Laumer a Boswellian?  I'll never forget finding out in Number of the Beast that Heinlein was in the anti-Boswell/anti-Johnson camp, and secretly cherish the hope that Heinlein was just kidding.       

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With three stories I can vouch for, I can feel comfortable recommending Five Fates and proclaiming this literary experiment (presumably set into motion by Laumer) a success.

All five of the stories are basically anti-authoritarian, from Anderson's conventional center-right small-government thinking to Ellison's depiction of God as a deranged madman.  All the stories suggest that power is corrupting, and in each the Euthanasia Center is the symptom of a sick society and/or some kind of trap.  I was hoping one of the stories would take a sympathetic view of the Euthanasia Center.  Pioneering science fiction writer H. G. Wells seems like the kind of guy who might cotton to the idea of Euthanasia Centers, and I'd be surprised if he was alone.  Many SF writers have expressed worries about overpopulation and human impact on the environment--what better solution to these perceived problems than government-sponsored mass suicide?  In the same way that Theodore Sturgeon's story that appears to advocate incest was effective in part because it is so "out there," a story in which a network of Euthanasia Centers is a critical component of a utopia might have been worthwhile due to shock value alone.  No such story appears in Five Fates, however.   

(There also was no explicit "Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey" joke; I was kind of expecting such a joke.)

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The last page of my copy of the Paperback Library edition of Five Fates has an ad for "exciting science fiction novels by the most imaginative s-f writers in the world...." Considering the reliability of ad copy everywhere, we shouldn't be surprised that about half the advertised books are collections and anthologies of short stories. 

The line up advertized actually seems like a pretty strong one.  With the possible exception of the de Camp, I would give any of these nineteen books a try.  I own the listed edition of M33 in Andromeda, which includes some of Van Vogt's famous Space Beagle stories, as well as "The Weapon Shop" and "Siege of the Unseen," both of which I liked.  I've not read House That Stood Still but I want to.  The collections Monsters and The Proxy Intelligence also include stories I've enjoyed, and stories I would like to read.

I own all the Jane Gaskell books listed (well, sort of; see below), which together make up the Atlan Saga starring Princess Cija, who has a love affair with a reptile-man in a war-torn fantasy version of the pre-Columbian New World.  I bought them all at once at a used bookstore in Columbia, Missouri when my wife was attending some kind of conference at the college there.  While my wife was at the conference I went to the art museum at the university and sat in the local library reading Gene Wolfe's "King Rat" in the 2010 anthology celebrating Fred Pohl.  (I always enjoy myself when my wife has to attend a conference.) 

My copies of Atlan and The City are Paperback Library editions and have covers I quite like, but my edition of The Serpent is from Pocket and has a cover by Boris Vallejo.  In 2012 I read The Serpent and wrote a pretty hostile review of it at Amazon, claiming it was too slow and full of anachronisms.  Somewhat confusingly, the Pocket edition of The Serpent is apparently only half of the full novel, so I can't read Atlan or The City until I track down a full edition (like the one advertized here in Five Fates) or the DAW or Pocket editions of the second half of The Serpent, published as The Dragon.  (Even though I wasn't crazy about The Serpent, a series of books about weird sex in a dinosaur world deserves a second chance, am I right?)  

It is funny to see that Quark, the title of Delany and Hacker's anthology series focusing on experimental work, was trademarked.  I own and have read the entire contents of Quark/3, as followers of my blogging career may remember.

   

"Raider of the Spaceways" and "Avengers of Space" by Henry Kuttner

I recently sold my first edition of Gods in Darkness, an omnibus of Karl Edward Wagner's three Kane novels published by Night Shade Books, on ebay.  A man with any sense, in my financial position, would have spent the profits at the grocery store, but I spent some of my loot at Amazon.com on Haffner Press's 2011 Thunder in the Void, a 600-page hardcover collection of sixteen space operas by Henry Kuttner.  This week I read the first two included stories, "Raider of the Spaceways" and "Avengers of Space."

"Raider of the Spaceways" (1937)

This 30-page adventure was published in Weird Tales, and was out of print until 2011 when Thunder in the Void was released.

Dal Kenworth is son of the "President of the Americas," but instead of raking in the dough at a bogus video journalist job or a charitable foundation sinecure he's on Venus, raising elysia plants.  That is until a space pirate hijacks the ship that transports the elysia goop back to Earth!

Kenworth and his girlfriend, Thona Thorton, are captured by the pirates, but not before Kenworth can send out an SOS to the Interplanetary Patrol.  The pirates decide to hide on the dark side of Venus, even though no space ship has ever returned from this mysterious region.  During a fierce dogfight with a patrol vessel Kenworth and Thorton seize parachutes and escape to the surface, where they have to deal with various native menaces.  In the end our heroes survive while the pirates meet a horrendous fate!

This is a really fun story.  In its short length Kuttner manages to introduce you to an interesting milieu, four memorable types of aliens (two types of Martians who are part of the pirate crew and two types of Venerians), and various interesting pieces of technology and space combat techniques.  Everything in the tale is vivid and easily visualized, and Kuttner holds your attention and doesn't resort to long science lectures or extravagant descriptive passages.  The plot is exciting and makes sense.

Solid entertainment!

"Avengers of Space" (1938)

"Avengers of Space" appeared in Marvel Science Stories, and years later caught the fancy of Mike Resnick, who included it in a Kuttner-centric anthology in 1997 called Girls for the Slime God.  In the introduction of Thunder in the Void, Resnick relates how he and his wife dressed up as characters from "Avengers of Space" at a science fiction convention in 1979 and won a prize.

Cover accurately depicts a scene from the story

Twice as long as "Raider of the Spaceways," "Avengers of Space" is also not as tight as that earlier story, being full of crazy coincidences, overwrought descriptions, and episodes that don't necessarily move the plot forward.  It has its high points, and I enjoyed it, but it is a step down from "Raiders" and I think Resnick and his wife may have enjoyed it somewhat "ironically."

Terry Shawn and his friends have just finished building the first space ship on Earth, The Eagle, a sphere that uses anti-gravity to propel itself.  (Sounds a little like H. G. Wells's First Men in the Moon, doesn't it?)  A squad of thugs from an unscrupulous corporation, International Power, drive up to the launch site to try to steal the ship, forcing Shawn and company to lift off precipitously.  In the confusion a beautiful female journalist, Lorna Rand, boards the ship and accompanies the men into space.

"Avengers of Space" is surprisingly salacious, and again and again throughout the story we hear about Rand's "ivory, softly rounded thighs" and "the pale cones of her breasts."  Shawn falls in love with her at first sight, and often stares at her.  In the gun battle between the scientists and the International Power brutes Rand's dress is torn by broken glass, and, similarly, several times over the course of her outer space odyssey she finds herself fighting or fleeing for her life while naked, monsters having clawed off her clothes or she having tried to distract pursuing creatures with her castoff attire.  At one point poor Rand is enslaved by aliens who bind her with cords that painfully mark her skin and then whip her naked flesh.

Almost immediately after The Eagle leaves Earth a fleet of golden torpedo-shaped spaceships appears and the Earth vanishes, apparently destroyed.  (This is a total coincidence, the golden fleet is not acting in response to The Eagle, which they don't even notice.)  Shawn and crew chase the golden fleet, but it outstrips them, and the last Earthlings search the system for them.  On Mars and then Titan they battle primitive natives, getting captured and being forced to fight in an arena or offered up for sacrifice, as often happens to people in these kinds of stories.  These aliens are not as interesting or original as the aliens in "Raider of the Spaceways."

Eventually the Earth people meet the arcane inhabitants of the asteroid belt, crystals who live lives of pure thought, with no need to eat or reproduce.  One of the crystals explains the reality of the golden fleet: these aliens come from another dimension, an old dimension where all the suns have burnt out, looking for a place to conquer.  They have not destroyed the Earth, just frozen it in stasis in a different universe.  The crystal does Shawn, Rand, and the entire human race a solid (as the kids say), exterminating the extradimensional interlopers and thawing the Earth, giving us a happy ending.

I can recommend "Avengers of Space," but not as enthusiastically as "Raider of the Spaceways." 

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I'm pleased with Thunder in the Void so far.  Hopefully the rest of the stories can reach the bar set by these two.

Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

My copy of the novel

Many years ago I tried to read The Adventures of Augie March by Canadian-born Jewish-American writer Saul Bellow. In my memory, the book is 3 inches thick and stuffed with tiny tiny print. I gave up on the third or fourth page.

I didn’t quite give up on Bellow, though, and five or eight years or so after being defeated by Augie March I read and enjoyed the much shorter The Dangling Man and The Victim, and a bunch of Bellow's short stories. Early in the period of my exile from New York City I read Seize the Day, which I liked a lot, and last year I read Henderson the Rain King. Recently the Des Moines Library had a huge booksale, and I bought a hardcover edition of Mr. Sammler’s Planet for pennies. This week I read the 1970 novel.

Artur Sammler is a Polish Jew, 70 years old, a more-or-less retired journalist, living on the West Side. (I lived on the East Side when I lived in Manhattan, and, as a stupid joke, pretended to be a rabid pro-East Side, anti-West Side, partisan. Whenever we would go to the West Side I would complain that the bus was slower, the subway was dirtier, etc. In fact, of course, there are many interesting and beautiful places on the West Side.) Sammler grew up in Poland and spent the 1920s and 1930s in England, among the intellectual elite, getting particularly close to H. G. Wells. But business took him back to Poland, where he and his wife and daughter got caught up in the start of the Second World War. Sammler’s wife was murdered, and Sammler and his daughter, separately, only barely escaped being killed.

Now, in late ‘60s New York, with one blind eye and British manners (he carries an umbrella around) Sammler lives among his various neurotic relatives who come to him to confess their sexual problems. In the course of just a few days Sammler suffers several shocks: he is terrorized by a black mugger, his nephew is revealed to be terminally ill, and his daughter, who ceaselessly urges Sammler to write a book on H. G. Wells, steals from a Punjabi scholar a valuable manuscript about the possibilities of colonizing the moon. Sammler, who lacks much family feeling, long ago lost his youthful illusions about improving society through revolution or government planning, and feels out of touch with the current sex-crazed generation, begins to seriously consider the notion of colonizing the moon and other planets.

This book kept reminding me of Thomas Disch. Like 334, this is a book about New York life, and like 334 it includes a reference to the first victim of Rashkalnikov from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In 334 a lesbian stabs her girlfriend with a fork; in Mr. Sammler’s Planet a woman says she will stab her abusive husband with a fork. Like On Wings of Song it includes a character who adapts old musical scores for modern use. Uncanny.

I was also reminded, more obliquely, of Jack Vance. A person who read this book before me underlined and inscribed question marks next to words he did not know, like “autochthon” and “dugong.” Jack Vance uses “autochthon” a lot, and I think the first time I came upon the word was in a Vance story.  Bellow also employs "tellurian," which I think I only ever have seen in books by E. E. Smith.

This novel also gave me the damndest case of déjà vu. One of Sammler’s relatives (a grand nephew, I think) had the idea of offering to rich people the service of identifying all the trees and shrubs on the lawns of their estates. Somehow, I was sure I had read about just such a scheme, just recently, but I could not remember where. I guess I must have read that passage the day I bought Mr. Sammler’s Planet, at the library booksale, when I was flipping through to make sure no pages were missing.

I enjoyed Mr. Sammler’s Planet quite a bit; it was certainly more fun than Henderson the Rain King, which I remember being too long and sometimes dragging. Mr. Sammler’s Planet does not drag; everything in it was interesting. Of course, the novel is largely about things that I find interesting -- New York, World War II and the Cold War, revolution, space exploration -- but I also found the various characters and their relationships and odd problems engaging. The ending, in which Sammler, despite all the horrible things he has endured and witnessed, asserts that we all know, instinctively, right from wrong, is powerful because it is so tragic. Either Sammler is sadly deluded, and good and evil are just opinions, or Sammler is right: we all know what is good and what is evil, and the world is full of people who do evil in the full knowledge that what they are doing is wrong.

So, a thumbs up for Mr. Sammler’s Planet; perhaps I have taken one small step (or maybe one giant leap) closer to tackling Augie March a second time.

UPDATE FEB 23 2014:  In the comments veteran book blogger Tarbandu points out a long and detailed, and quite good, essay on Mr. Sammler's Planet by Myron Magnet that focuses on crime and civilization in New York from the late '60s to the '80s.

Three tales from The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories: Wells, Kipling, and Williamson

Cover of the edition I borrowed

I wanted to read “Problems of Creativeness,” an earlier version of “The Death of Socrates,” the first chapter of Thomas M. Disch’s fixup 334, and so checked out a copy of 1992’s The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories. The collection, edited by Tom Shippey, seemed to have a number of interesting stories in it, so I put off Disch for a space and read several of them, today stories by H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and Jack Williamson.

“The Land Ironclads” by H. G. Wells

Published in 1903, in this story an unnamed hardy frontier nation of hunters, cowpunchers and “negro-whackers” (Shippey in his intro compares them to the Boers or the Australians) has been invaded by the army of a similarly anonymous urban, sophisticated nation of clerks and factory hands, presumably Europeans.  The skinny city boys easily defeat the rugged country boys by using what we would today call tanks, as well as bicycles.  Wells thinks bicycles are more suited to warfare than horses.

There isn't much by way of character or plot in this one, though the descriptions of the fighting are good.  Wells spends quite a bit of time describing the complex mechanisms of the land ironclads, and those that make their rifles so accurate; there are compensators that take into account the movement of the vehicle, for example, and a device that measures range to target and raises or lowers the gun barrel accordingly.  While Wells condemns war, he celebrates the triumph of science and the brain over spunk and brawn--the city boys in the tanks are described as doing their fighting in a rational, methodical, business-like way, which Wells heartily approves, and they share Wells's contempt for emotionalism, including patriotism.

"Land Ironclads" is more effective as an essay than as a piece of fiction; while competently written, there is no feeling beyond a facile "Gee Whiz!" response to the technological stuff and a smug confidence in the superiority of the educated elite.

“As Easy as ABC” by Rudyard Kipling

In the future (2065) there is what amounts to a world government, the Aerial Board of Control.  With a fleet of highly maneuverable aircraft armed with nonlethal weapons (blinding lights and deafening sound projectors), the ABC's multinational staff is an irresistible force able to maintain order anywhere in the world. 

(The ABC reminded me of the Space Patrol in Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet, which prevents international war by being ready at any moment to nuke aggressors.)

Kipling describes a post-democratic world in which the average person finds a crowd a disgusting source of physical and mental disease and voting to be an absurdity.  People lack any curiosity and are obsessed with privacy; there are no newspapers and everybody plants around their homes dense stands of quick grow trees to block line of sight.

A bunch of democracy activists has amassed in Chicago, however, and are demonstrating.  The local authorities are shocked at the sight of people standing so close that they brush against each other.  These demonstrations have inspired angry counter-demonstrations, and the ABC has to rush air ships to Illinois before the democracy activists are murdered by the anti-democracy crowd.  The members of the democrat crowd (and their families and friends who aren't even there!) are whisked away without any sort of trial to London, where their bizarre antics of taking votes and gathering in crowds will amuse the theater-going public.  Meanwhile the people of Chicago beg the ABC to take direct control of the town.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this story.  Is Kipling so worried about mob violence and so hostile to meddlesome elected politicians that he is advocating rule by an invincible and unaccountable elite that can carry you off without any kind of due process?  Or is he satirizing such fears?  Maybe he is just speculating that, if those of us in democratic countries don't show restraint and exercise responsibility when enjoying such freedoms as freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, and when voting for our representatives, that some kind of tyranny or other will arise.

All the clues point to Kipling believing that ABC rule is benevolent, however, that this story is a utopian attack on democracy and popular government.  The crew of the lead airship (an Englishman, an Italian, a Japanese, and a Russian) are depicted in a positive way, and it is suggested that all people in the world are rich because the population is low.  Maybe the ABC airship using force to keep the two Chicago crowds from fighting is analogous to a 19th century British imperial force taking up the white man's burden and maintaining order in some unruly Indian or African village.
            
On the "Gee Whiz!" front Kipling is as good as Wells.  Besides the aircraft and the fast growing trees, Kipling has automatic maps that act like a GPS computer, electric paralysis rays, and advanced medicine (people normally live to be 100.)  

An interesting, challenging story.

“The Metal Man” by Jack Williamson

It is perhaps not fair to compare Jack Williamson to major literary and cultural figures like H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling, but where "The Land Ironclads" and "Easy as ABC" try to make some point about society and human nature, "The Metal Man," published in 1928, is just a conventional piece of entertainment.

A scientist is searching the South American wilderness for radium.  For some reason he doesn't have any local guides or grad students with him.  He finds a ten mile wide crater full of a weird green heavier-than-air gas.  He blunders into the crater, and discovers that the gas in the crater turns organic matter into metal.  He finds lots of dead metal birds and even a metal prehistoric reptile.  He encounters a bizarre life form, intelligent crystals that have the power to defy gravity.  The crystals help him get out of the crater, but he is doomed to turn to metal.  He writes a letter to his best friend, and pays a guy to deliver his dead metal body to his friend with the letter.  When the friend accepts delivery he puts the metallic corpse in the museum of the college where the scientist taught.  The End.

A barely acceptable trifle.

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These three stories were more interesting than fun.  I have read more entertaining work by each of these writers in the past: Wells - Kipling - Williamson.  Still, the Wells and Kipling perhaps provide some kind of insight into the thinking of two important British writers. 

This weekend I will read some more tales from The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories.

Bizarre Tales of Terror by B. Malzberg, A. Merrit, and H.G. Wells

One of the many things I miss about living in New York is Book Off, a Japanese used bookstore near the New York Public Library’s Research Division on 42nd Street. It was always fun to look through the thousands of manga, and they bought and sold lots of books in English as well. Recently I have been looking at my copy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s book on French painter Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, which I purchased at Book Off.

Another book I purchased at Book Off is Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown, edited by Marvin Kaye, with a wrap around jacket illustration by Edward Gorey. This 1993 anthology, which I got for a dollar (sorry Marvin), contains over 50 stories, many from big names, including Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, Winston S. Churchill, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jack London. Today I read three stories, one each by Barry Malzberg, A. Merrit, and H. G. Wells.

"Beyond Sleep" by Barry Malzberg
This story is two pages long and first appeared in 1970, in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Its six paragraphs describe in the first person three different dreams suffered by a man under some terrible stress. How much do these dreams reflect reality? Did he really murder his wife, or try to? Did he really try to commit suicide? How much are these dreams the product of taking sleeping pills? A literary exercise.

"The People of the Pit" by A. Merritt
Merritt is important to the history of SF and I want to like him, but I tried to read The Metal Monster once and gave up in the middle as I didn’t like it. I decided to give Merritt a second shot with this story, first published in 1918.

Two guys are up in Alaska, headed for a mountain with five peaks where there is supposed to be gold. No Indian will accompany them there – they think the place is cursed! After seeing some weird lights in the sky a crippled man crawls into their camp. After sleeping for over a day the dying man tells the gold prospectors his horrible tale.

This man also sought gold at the mountain of five peaks. When he got there he found a ruined city at the base of the mountain, and below it a vast pit, several miles deep. A stairway took him down to the bottom of the pit, a march of some days. Down there was another city, an alien city, inhabited by translucent slug people! The slug people chained him up at an altar. All night the slugs sang a weird song, a seductive song that the human felt compelled to sing along with. All day the man scraped away at a link of his chain. Luckily the chain was made of gold, so after five days of scraping the guy was able to break free. Pathetically weak, he wore out his body crawling up the stairway, an epic trek of many days. At night the slug people would sing a siren song to him that more than once almost got him to return to them. His mind as well as his body prevailed, and he escaped the pit, but, worn out, he dies after telling the two gold prospectors his tale of terror. The prospectors decide to look for gold somewhere else; the end.

This is an OK story. I like stories of this type, but this one lacked anything to set it above the pack. Looking around online I find it said that the story is well regarded and even inspired writers like Jack Williamson and Edmond Hamilton to take up writing careers. Maybe this one deserves credit for being an early, perhaps even seminal, example of this type of story.

"In the Avu Observatory" by H. G. Wells
Like everybody, I’ve read and enjoyed War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. I read Invisible Man as a kid and remember nothing about it, and First Men in the Moon as an adult and thought it was not bad.  I think this is the first Wells short story I have read.

A scientist dude is in an observatory in Borneo, alone at night, watching the stars through a big telescope.  Then some giant bat thing flies into the observatory and the astronomer has to fight it!

There isn't much to this story, but the technique is good and I quite enjoyed it.  The images are vivid, the story flows well, and I didn't feel like I knew who was going to win the fight, who was going to survive.  So, bravo to Mr. Wells.

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So, three enjoyable stories, the first very ambiguous, the second mysterious, the third vividly clear but suspenseful.  It is easy to recommend Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown.