Way Out stories from the early 1950s by Milton Lesser, H. B. Fyfe, Algis Budrys & John Berryman

I already have more books and magazines than I know what to do with, but there is a limit to how many slices of pizza I can eat at Whole Foods while waiting for my wife's hair appointment to finish up.  When that limit is reached, I walk a block or two to Half Price Books and sort through the spinner racks of vintage paperbacks and the shelves of 40-, 50-, and 60-year old hardcover SF books. On one such recent trip, I resisted a hardcover Orbit 10, and an anthology of stories about cavemen and dinosaurs, but on the spinner racks my eyes beheld a 2-dollar beauty I could not leave behind.  This find was a paperback whose cover was totally detached from its pages, a volume stained by water and bearing, like a badge of honor, a "CLOSE-OUT .35" sticker, Way Out, an anthology edited by Ivan Howard and put out in 1963 by our friends at Belmont, the people responsible for so many remarkable productions, my love for which I have unabashedly chronicled on this here blog.  I adore the weird Powers cover illo, its starker monochrome reproduction on the back cover, and the book's bold black and yellow spine.  The cover text's convoluted diction elicits a chuckle rather than a sneer.  Let's hope Way Out's seven stories, each "designed to appeal to the far out fiend" also merit my love! Today we'll tackle the first four stories in this charming artifact, the contributions from Milton Lesser, H. B. Fyfe, Algis Budrys and "William C. Bailey."  Just for fun, besides judging whether these stories are any good, like we always do, we'll assess how "way out" they are.

"Ennui" by Milton Lesser (1952)

The cover of this 1963 paperback promises us "seven new and frightful tales," and the first page of Way Out declares: "Seven Science Fiction Stories never before published." But if you know Belmont like I know Belmont, you won't be surprised to learn all the included stories first appeared in the early 1950s.  The surprise is that of the seven stories, six first appeared in Dynamic Science Fiction, and five of them all appeared in the same December 1952 issue of that magazine!   "Ennui" is one of those December 1952 Dynamic stories.

(You probably remember that we read a story from Dynamic's December 1952 issue, Lester Del Rey's "I Am Tomorrow," back in 2014 when we worked our way through Belmont's Novelets of Science Fiction.  It seems like that issue was the Belmont crew's very favorite SF magazine!  The magazine is actually available at the internet archive should you be interested in taking a look at the original texts and the numerous illustrations.)

"Ennui" is a sort of experimental story that is supposed to blow your mind, and it uses the words "quiddity"  and "solipsism" repeatedly in its nine pages, as well as mentioning David Hume.  Our unnamed narrator believes that he is the center of the universe, that the rest of the universe doesn't really exist, is merely a figment of his own imagination.  He finds he can make people and things vanish merely be willing them to do so.  However, he cannot create anything new.  Out of anger and boredom he begins willing everything out of existence, eventually making the solar system and his own body vanish, so he is a lone spirit floating in the void.  Searching for diversion he travels the galaxy, then other galaxies, but each new phenomenon he discovers eventually bores him and he reacts to this boredom by destroying it.  Finally, he erases the entire universe and, then, himself.

Ultimately sterile and gimmicky, perhaps, but not bad.  I wrote a little about Lesser back in 2015, when I read a story by him that reminded me of Games Workshop's classic game Space Hulk.

Is it good?  Marginally.                                            Is it Way Out?  Yes!

"Knowledge is Power" by H. B. Fyfe (1952)

I recognize Fyfe's name, but I don't think I've read anything by him before.  isfdb lists many stories by him, appearing in many magazines, including Astounding, Amazing, and F&SF. Fyfe was born in New Jersey, so I'm already rooting for him!  "Knowledge is Power" appeared in that December 1952 issue of Dynamic Science Fiction, and Fyfe's name appears on the cover.

"Knowledge is Power" stars Myru e Chib, an alien with four eyes and six limbs who lives in a sort of tyrannical medieval-type society.  A former captain in the army, Myru now lives a down-and-out existence as a thief because he complained when the local ruler stole his girlfriend (she has gorgeous scales!)  The despot also had two of our hero's four hands chopped off and two of his four eyes burned away!  When Earthmen--an advance survey team--land on the planet, Myru makes friends with them, helping them find specimens in return for trinkets and tools. Then he tricks them into helping him overthrow the despot and make himself ruler.  Myru then orders the humans executed, a move he (and Fyfe, more or less) justifies by suggesting the humans were going to exploit or enslave the natives after establishing a substantial colony.

A traditional SF story with elements we've often seen before: pre-industrial aliens, explorers from Earth, anti-imperialism, trickery.  But it is entertaining; Myru is a surprisingly well-developed character, and I wasn't sure who was going to outwit who until the end--Myru is not entirely sympathetic (he murders defenseless people of his own species throughout the story) and he commits some mistakes, so it seemed possible he was going to be hoist by his own petard or simply overwhelmed by the Earthmen's modern weapons.  It is often very easy to predict how an adventure story will turn out, so a genuinely unpredictable ending is welcome.  

Is it good?  Yes.                                            Is it Way Out?  Not really.

"Snail's Pace" by Algis Budrys (1953)

"Snail's Pace" was the cover story of the October 1953 issue of Dynamic Science Fiction.  You probably remember that we've already read a story from that October issue, Frank Belknap Long's "Night Fear," when we read Belmont's Novelets.

Budrys has a high reputation (Gene Wolfe is crazy about him) and seems like an interesting guy (check out the interview of him in Charles Platt's Dream Makers), but I think he is a bit overrated, as I have said before on this here blog.  Well, let's see what he is up to this time.

It is the 1960s (I think) and the United States is about to start building the first artificial satellite.  And the world is about to erupt in a Third World War!  The main character, General Post of the Air Force and the US space agency, uses all his influence to make sure the rocket with the parts for the space station takes off, despite the distractions of the coming war--the space station is essential to human progress!  He commands and pilots the flight himself, and leads the effort to build the space station.  When the war starts he even deactivates the communications equipment so none of the astronauts will be distracted by news that their homes and loved ones have been nuked!

After a few weeks the half-built station is running out of food and water, and the scheduled supply rockets from America have not been arriving.  Presumably the USA is kaput.  One of the astronauts mutinies, reactivating the communications equipment to contact the Earth and extort or beg supplies out of whoever won or just survived the war down there.  The mutineer thinks the station, as a symbol of progress or whatever, is more important than mere politics, and if the only help forthcoming is from the people who vaporized all the astronauts' friends and family, well, so be it.  Post, however, orders the evacuation of the station, saying that the radio message will just allow the enemy to target the station and blow it up.  Though the effort to construct the space station was a failure, Post is confident that mankind will eventually reach the stars.

I'm giving this one a thumbs down.  Budrys tries to convey to the reader the tremendous stress everybody is under by having them "shout," "bark" and "bellow" their dialogue and otherwise emote all the time.  On the third page of the story we are told that "Post raked the man's face with his eyes."  Three brief paragraphs later, on the very same page, Budrys writes, "Post bored into him with his eyes."  Give those eyes a rest, General Post!  The story thus comes off as overwrought, and there are lots of typos and weird grammatical constructions, as if the story was not edited.  (Shouldn't an editor have suggested Budrys delete one of those repetitive eye metaphors?)

"Snail's Pace" features too much boring and facile philosophizing about how history works in cycles or on a twisted path or whatever, an annoying reminder of silly Marxist and Whiggish theories that argue that history has an inevitable end point.  The plot is also unsatisfying, feeling like it goes nowhere--a guy works hard to get a thing built because he believes in progress, but he fails to build the thing, and then says it doesn't matter anyway because progress is inevitable.  A story in which a guy builds a thing is a story of triumph, which can be moving.  A story in which a guy tries and fails to build a thing is a tragedy, which can also be moving.  A story in which a guy tries to build a thing, fails to build it, then decides it doesn't matter if he built it or not is a drag.

Presumably the "real" plot of the story is how the hero learned something, how he built something spiritually or psychologically and how that is more important than building a physical thing--we've all heard those quotes about how the greatest conquest is over the self or whatever.  I could accept that if Budrys had made the General's intellectual or emotional journey interesting, but he didn't.  This story is weak, and it is not surprising that it was never printed again after its appearance in Way Out.        

Is it good?  No.                                            Is it Way Out?  No.

"'X' for 'Expendable'" by "William C. Bailey" (John Berryman) (1952)

John Berryman has quite a few stories listed at isfdb, most under the William C. Bailey or Walter Bupp pseudonyms.  Berryman is another son of the great state of New Jersey, so let's help he will make us Garden Staters proud--according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction he was an economist and business executive, so maybe he'll provide us a different perspective than those of the engineers, scientists, and professional genre writers we usually get our SF from.

So much for new perspectives--"'X' for 'Expendable'" is like a mash-up (the kids still say that, right?) of genre conventions.  Berryman writes his story, a first-person narrative, in the style of a hard-boiled detective tale.  Here's a para from the first page:

The cashier had a sharp, knifey eye, keen enough for a big-shot in the System's biggest bank.  He slashed a glance at my badge and at me.  "How much do you want?" he asked in a tone as cold as a frog's belly.

It is the post-nuclear war future, in which the surface of Manhattan, the center of my world and the setting of my nightly dreams, is a  "drab" and "glassy" "atomic slag" and the Earth has colonized the solar system.  Our hero is a detective working for the IPO, which I guess is like the future's FBI or CIA.  The current iteration of New York City is an underground "warren," and the narrator spends the first half of the 47-page story in subterranean nightclubs and offices, interrogating people involved in the black market sale of cadmium.  He isn't afraid to use a little muscle to get the info he needs, and when he gathers clues that direct him to the colonies on the Jovian moons he uses the IPO's authority to requisition a space navy vessel and blast off for Jupiter to look for the illegal nuclear reactor that is using that unregistered cadmium to develop nuclear weapons.

Out Jupiter way he and the local IPO guys figure out which moons to investigate, and our shamus of the future requisitions a "rocket-plane" armed with a "proton gun" to do the investigating.  The second half of the story is like a James Bond movie (though "'X' for 'Expendable'" was published before the first James Bond novel was released in 1953.)  The narrator is captured while investigating the criminals' base, escapes in one rocket plane and is pursued by another. The extended chase scene is where we get all the hard SF stuff--Berryman unleashes a lot of science and engineering on us during the chase, as the narrator calculates orbits and manipulates all the technical aspects of his rocket plane to keep ahead of his pursuers and send a message to IPO via unconventional means because his radio has been knocked out by enemy fire.

The writing style of the story was tiresome, and the detective stuff in the first half bored me, but I liked the violent adventure and space race business of the second half.  I guess I'm giving "'X' for 'Expendable'" a grade of "Acceptable."

"'X' for 'Expendable'" appeared in that December '52 issue of Dynamic.

Is it good?  Half of it is.                                           Is it Way Out?  No.

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So far, so good, I guess.  In our next installment we finish up with Way Out.

April 1956 stories by Edmond Hamilton, Milton Lesser, and "Alexander Blade"

At an antiques store in Illinois called Winter Wheat I recently purchased, for like $2.20, a bedraggled copy of the April 1956 issue of Imagination.  According to Wikipedia all the critics think Imagination was a piece of crap, but flipping through the issue in Illinois, with South Carolina ("Look honey, I caught you this toad in the parking lot!") behind me and a stop at Steak & Shake ("Didn't I tell the waitress 'no mayo?'") ahead of me, the magazine looked like a lot of fun.  There's an Edmond Hamilton story and a charming little autobiographical essay by Hamilton, fun illustrations and comics that my college education requires me to warn you are sexist, a column that reviews fanzines, and a letters section in which fans of Imagination call the periodical "Madge," which I thought was just adorable.

This week I read three stories from the magazine; let's see if the critics are right to dismiss old Madge.  These three stories are available for free online at gutenberg.org, so even you cheapos out there don't have to let the critics (or me) do your thinking for you.

True riches come not from gold or diamonds, but from fulfilling relationships.

"The Legion of Lazarus" by Edmond Hamilton

This is one of those noirish stories in which a working class tough guy (in this case an electrician) uses his wits and his fists in a struggle against a ruthless interplanetary tycoon who has framed him for murder.  It also reminded me of a van Vogt story, in that an ordinary man develops psychic powers and super-intelligence and gets involved in a twilight struggle between merciless factions of weirdos.

Hyrst was working as part of a four-man team on Titan, doing maintenance on a robot mining operation.  The team's engineer, MacDonald, keeps bragging that he has found a vein of titanite, but won't tell anybody where he found it.  When MacDonald gets killed, Hyrst stands trial for murder on one of the moons of Mars, and, convicted, gets executed by being tossed out the airlock!

Fifty years later, Hyrst is revived!  He hears voices in his head; he is now a member of the Legion of Lazarus, a group of people with various ESP abilities!  After a scene in which Hyrst's son, who is now physically older than his father, denounces his father for ruining the family name, Hyrst follows the directions of the voices in his head and gets his ass to Mars.  On Mars he joins up with a group of Lazarites who are led by Christina, a beautiful but bitterly angry woman ("she was like a fire, burning with anger, burning with a single-minded, dedicated purpose.  She was beautiful, and frightening.")  Christina's group is at war with Bellaver, a businessman trying to win a monopoly on spacecraft construction; they have half-built the first interstellar ship, and Bellaver wants it.  To finish the ship, Christina's people need to find that titanite of MacDonald's.      

Over the course of the story (billed as a novel, and taking up like 50 pages of the magazine) people get captured and escape, there are space ship chases through the Asteroid Belt and a foot chase and siege on the surface of an asteroid, Hyrst beats people with a fire extinguisher, Bellaver uses an artificial gravity device to torture somebody, and other fun stuff.  The secret of who killed MacDonald (an employee of Bellaver's, of course) and the location of the titanite are extracted from Hyrst's brain. We also get a vague explanation of how all these people got their psychic powers and how they came back to life after being tossed into a vacuum.    

I thought this was a quite good space opera.  In particular, I liked how Hamilton described Hyrst's mental powers and how he grew into them, and the good job he did with all the settings: the snowy landscape of Titan; the surface of an asteroid littered with the eroded monuments of a prehistoric civilization; the cities of Mars, where the hooded natives, now a minority on their own planet, live in monolithic stone houses among the humans' modern buildings; Bellaver's orbital pleasure palace, etc. Hamilton also focuses on Hyrst's psychology, his shame, fear, anger.  The story also gives us hints of those staples of classic SF, the paradigm shift (when the public finds out about the Lazarites) and the "sense of wonder" ending, when the Lazarites in their hyperspace ship flash off to explore the universe.  "The Legion of Lazarus" also appeals to the apparently insatiable appetite of readers for tales of the evils of the bourgeoisie.  I find it hard to believe that the critics had this great adventure story in mind when they were badmouthing poor Madge!  

"The Graveyard of Space" by Milton Lesser

On August 7, via twitter, Joachim Boaz reminded us it was Milton Lesser's birthday. Jumping at a chance for a little self-promotion, I took this opportunity to remind the world that I had reviewed Lesser's novel Secret of the Black Planet at Amazon, pronouncing it bland and forgettable.  According to Wikipedia, Lesser, under the pen name Stephen Marlowe, won awards for his detective and mainstream fiction, so maybe he just put together Secret of the Black Planet on a bad day (or maybe back in January of 2012 I was just being a hardass) and I am going to love "The Graveyard of Space"!  Let's hope so!

Ralph and Diane Meeker (!) are headed home from Asteroid 4712, their efforts to mine it for uranium having come to nothing.  Their failure is straining their marriage. Then their second-hand space ship's radar fails, and they get sucked into the gravitational pull of a sargasso of dead spaceships, thousands of defunct craft orbiting in a swarm together.  (Remember Space Hulk?  Damn, my brother and I spent a pile of money on that stuff.)  The asteroid prospectors put on their space suits and split up to search the lost ships for a working radar set which will fit their model of ship.

This is an attempt at a horror story, and Lesser spends a lot of time describing the dead bodies on the wrecked ships.  Then Diane gets attacked by an insane man who has been stuck in the graveyard of ships for years and survived by cannibalism.  Ralph defeats the maniac in hand to hand combat.  Luckily, this very same ship has the radar set they need.  Ralph and Diane escape the Asteroid Belt; their ordeal has made them realize how much they truly love each other, and saved their marriage.

This story (fewer than 12 pages of text) feels like filler, but it is not bad.  An acceptable entertainment.  

"Zero Hour" by "Alexander Blade"

Who is Alexander Blade, you ask? I asked isfdb and Wikipedia the same thing, and found that it was a pen name used by many authors I have heard of, like Edmond Hamilton, Robert Silverberg, and John Jakes, as well as by authors I was unfamiliar with.  A few minutes googling did not provide any definitive info on exactly whose pen was responsible for "Zero Hour;" if you know better, please don't keep it to yourself!  Hamilton is a prime suspect; in the very next issue of Imagination his story "Battle for the Stars" appeared under the Alexander Blade pseudonym.  (I read the full length book version of Battle for the Stars and reviewed it at Amazon in January of 2012.)

I can see why nobody jumped up to take credit for this story; it's a trifle that reads like it was aimed at children, a strange contrast after Lesser's macabre story about failure, death, cannibalism and marriage.  Little Bobby's family lives on a high security government research base.  Bobby learns that his father is working on a rocket headed for the moon, and even learns the secret launching date.  On launch day Bobby sneaks aboard the rocket, assuming his dad is flying to the moon, but then gets cold feet, and sneaks back home to Mom before lift off.  It is lucky he did, because this was an experimental rocket which was sent, unmanned, to the moon to explode and mark the lunar surface with dye.

A competent but bland, innocuous sort of story.

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If most of Imagination's contents were like "Graveyard of Space" and "Zero Hour" I suppose the critics have a point, but I thought Hamilton's "The Legion of Lazarus" was an above average space opera, and I certainly have no regrets spending a little time with Madge.  Maybe I'll take my copy of this April '56 issue out of its plastic bag and take a look at the other three included stories in the future.

Last of the Novelets: Blish and Clarke

At this here blog we've been reading Novelets of Science Fiction, a paperback anthology of early 1950s stories published first in 1963 (I have the 1967 printing.)  In a spirit of friendly competition we will be crowning the writer of the best novelet, and so far Poul Anderson is in the lead.  But we have high hopes for today's contenders, James Blish, my fellow Jersey boy and Rutgers alum, and Arthur C. Clarke, writer, explorer, and TV and film icon.

"Testament of Andros" by James Blish (1953)

If you've been following my investigation of Novelets of Science Fiction you won't be surprised to learn, despite claims on the front and back cover of the book, that "Testament of Andros" appeared in a paperback collection of Blish stories in 1961 entitled So Close to Home.

"Testament of Andros" is the craziest and most experimental of the stories in Novelets of Science Fiction.  It consists of five first-person narratives, each told by a male with a name that is a variant of "Andrew," and each in part about the narrator's relationship with a female whose name is a variant of "Margaret."  These narratives all take place on an alternate Earth (among other things, it has 12 continents and its version of Wagner wrote an opera titled Tristan and Messalina) which is devastated by a solar flare that kills the majority of life on the planet.

Each of the stories details human unhappiness, and most of them feature some kind of injustice or depravity.  A scientist believes a grad student is taking credit for his research and having an affair with his wife, so he murders the student.  A working class orphan grows up to be a rapist and murderer and dies in prison when the solar flare hits.  An eight-year-old child who fantasizes about being a space hero tries to come to terms with his unhappy family and school life as well as the solar flare.  Some of the narratives take a dim view of religion, suggesting that organized religion has failed to comfort and guide people, while one of them is written by an insane person who claims to have seen God and has started his own religion.

This is a good "literary" story that reminded me of the kind of experimental work we associate with the New Wave of ten or more years later.  It tackles religion, psychology, gender relations, the family, economics, all that heavy stuff.

"The Possessed" by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)

This six page story in which Clarke ponders why lemmings sometimes jump to their deaths en masse is gimmicky and forgettable.   It was included in a 1956 paperback, Reach for Tomorrow.

A non-corporeal life form, parasitic in nature, is floating through space, looking for an intelligent species to serve as its host.  After millions of fruitless years of searching it lands on Earth during the Age of Reptiles.  With no intelligent hosts available, the creature opts for a desperate expedient: it will split in two parts, one portion remaining on Earth, the other half continuing the search.  Should the space-going half find an attractive host species somewhere else in the universe, it will return with the good news.  The two halves agree on a meeting place, which the Earthbound portion of the creature will return to periodically.

The Earthbound portion of the alien colonizes the minds of small mammals in hopes they will evolve intelligence.  Instead, they evolve into lemmings.   Millions of years in non-intelligent hosts takes a toll, and the parasite creature grows weaker and weaker until it is essentially dead.  The lemmings, however, retain an instinctive need to periodically return to the meeting place, an instinct which overrides any thought of safety, and the fact that the meeting place is now underwater.

This story is inoffensive, so I would grade it "OK" or "acceptable," but it has zero feeling and no characters or plot--it is just an odd speculation.

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It's time to rate the eight "superlative" stories found in Novelets of Science Fiction and crown a King of the Novelets!

James Blish put in a good showing, but I have to judge him our rummer up--which means Poul Anderson, with his story, "The Chapter Ends," is King of the Novelets!  "The Chapter Ends" has multiple interesting SF ideas, emotional content, characters who make big decisions, and memorable images, and actually made me consider what I would do and how I would feel in the situations he describes.  So, congrats to Poul.

Simak and Clarke's stories are sort of one note idea tales, lacking in plot or feeling, and so they bring up the rear.  Frank Belknap Long's "Night Fear" is also vulnerable to the charge that it is just an idea and not really a story, but I found the idea interesting and I think Long's piece had some added human drama.

Our three violent adventure stories, by Del Rey, Lesser and de Camp, make up the middle of the pack.  Each has its own charm; Del Rey has his ponderings about politics and free will, Lesser his hard-boiled stylings, and De Camp has his mediocre jokes.

Here are our rankings:

Winner                        Poul Anderson              "The Chapter Ends"
Runner Up                  James Blish                   "The Testament of Andros"
3rd place                     Frank Belknap Long     "Night Fear"
4th place                     Lester Del Rey              "I Am Tomorrow"
5th place                     Milton Lesser                "'A' as in Android"
6th place                     L. Sprague de Camp     "Ultrasonic God"
7th place                     Clifford Simak              "...And the Truth Shall Make You Free"
8th place                     Arthur C. Clarke           "The Possessed"  

Novelets of Science Fiction is a good collection; none of the stories were bad.  A worthwhile purchase for those, like me, interested in 1950s SF!    

Three 1950s Novelets: De Camp, Anderson, & Lesser

Those who follow my twitter account will already know of the new love in my life, the cover painting of the 1967 printing of Novelets of Science Fiction, edited by Ivan Howard.  Who gifted our undeserving world with this Platonic ideal of all our dreams of green winged women, heavily armed astronauts, colossal eggs which give birth to stars (?), and teeming flocks of Pteranodons?  Nobody seems to know!  Our benefactor chooses to remain anonymous!

This collection of early 1950s stories was first published in 1963.  (The fact that the stories were over a dozen years old when my edition was printed didn't stop the publisher, Belmont, from trumpeting this volume as "THE BOOK OF THE YEAR."  This is a self-confidence I can admire!)

I could go on all day about the cover of Novelets of Science Fiction, but as the careers of Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor have shown us, it's not looks, but what's on the inside that counts!  So let's take a gander at three "superlative" 1950s SF tales by "modern masters of science fiction," L. Sprague de Camp, Poul Anderson, and Milton Lesser.

"Ultrasonic God" by L. Sprague de Camp (1951)

When I was living back East I read a bunch of L. Sprague de Camp stories, mostly the Viagens Interplanetarias tales about guys going on sword-swinging adventures on an alien planet.  These stories were the product of De Camp setting himself the difficult task of writing John Carter style "planetary romance" or "sword and planet" stories that were more realistic than the Burroughs archetype.  The books (most of them have a capital "Z" in the title) were not bad, but were also not memorable.

"Ultrasonic God" is set in the Viagens universe, and is a pretty straightforward adventure story.  I suspect years ago I read a different version of it with a different title.

Adrian Frome is a blonde Englishman (he says stuff like "Cheerio!" and "Righto!" and "Delighted to meet you, old thing!") and an engineer working as a surveyor for the Earth-based government on an alien planet.  He gets captured by primitive natives, and is taken to another Earthman, a Thai, whom the alien tribesmen see as a god.  This ambitious human is trying to make himself emperor of all the disparate local tribes, and to that end is training this tribe in modern military discipline and making them simple firearms.  He forces Frome to work in his little gunsmithy. He has also captured an Earthwoman, a pretty missionary, and expects to found his dynasty with her.

In the grand tradition of pro-science and pro-engineering SF, our hero saves the day by doing some engineering.  The would be emperor issues commands to the natives, who have dog-like hearing, by blowing notes on a Galton whistle (what I would call a dog whistle.)  Frome attaches a dog whistle to a kettle and puts the full kettle on the fire; when the water boils it blows the whistle so loud that it distracts the natives, and they cannot hear the Thai's signals.  Frome rescues the missionary from being raped by the aspiring emperor, kills the Thai in hand to hand combat with medieval weapons, and then he and the missionary escape the natives.  Frome falls in love with the missionary, proposes marriage, but then runs out on her to a different planet when he realizes she takes her kooky religion, which she talks about unceasingly, seriously and their marriage will be a celibate one.   

This is an inoffensive but unimpressive story.  Maybe the numerous sly references to sex are daring by 1951 standards?  I guess one could also see the story as a kind of spoof of John Carter's career (remember, Carter became Emperor of Mars; in this story a man with such imperial ambitions is the villain, not the hero.  In "Ultrasonic God" our hero is a humble civil servant...who turns out to be an expert at fighting with machine guns, spears and swords.  So maybe not that different from John Carter after all.)  Feminists might want to study the story because most of the jokes are at the expense of women.  (Example: Frome says that Englishmen don't let their women walk all over them like the Americans do.)

I grade this one "acceptable;" presumably I will soon forget all about it.  


"The Chapter Ends" by Poul Anderson (1954)  

The beautiful front and back covers of Novelets of Science Fiction both proudly claim that the eight stories it contains have not appeared in paperback before.  Yet, according to isfdb, "The Chapter Ends" appeared in an Ace Double, Adventures in the Far Future / Tales of Outer Space, the same year it appeared in an American magazine and a British magazine.  Never trust a pretty face! 

It is many thousands of years in the future.  Mankind has spread throughout the galaxy, and the human race has been genetically engineered into a multitude of different races, each suited to a particular environment.  People now normally live to be over a thousand years old, and many people can simply fly through space without a space ship by tapping into "cosmic energy" with their GMO brains!

There is another powerful race of people in the galaxy, the Hulduvians, who can also tap into the cosmic energies with their brains.  Unfortunately, human and Hulduvian brains are different, so they cannot use their brain powers in each others' vicinity.  So the two space empires sign a treaty and divide up the galaxy; the humans get the galactic center, and the Hulduvians get the rim.  All humans must evacuate the rim systems.

One such system is that of Sol and the Earth.  Fifty thousand years ago Earth was the capitol of the human space empire, but nowadays Earth is a backwater and has almost no contact with Galactic civilization.  The few people who currently reside on Earth and are of primitive stock that only live 200 years and have no mental powers.  These people are living the environmentalist dream, using only 19th century technology, growing food with their hands, eating only what their own communities produce, engaging in no international trade.  Members of the Galactic civilization have to come to tell them they have to leave, and then spend years building space ships to take them away because their puny all-natural and organic brains can't carry them off the planet.

This is a mood piece with more sentiment than plot.  We see the different ways various people from the Galactic civilization respond to seeing the Earth, home of their ancestors, and how various Earthlings react to being forced to leave their homes.  Perhaps most entertaing are Anderson's descriptions of the vast ruins of Sol City, once capitol of the human part of the galaxy.  Also worth remarking upon is Anderson's vision of the lifestyle of the Galactics-- in contrast to the tightly-knit Earth villages, which almost seem like European peasant villages of a pre-industrial period, the Galactics have abandoned community entirely, living like hermits, with no marriages, no families, and, as one disgruntled Earthling says, "No tradition...I pity you Galactics!"

This is a good story that makes you think about tradition, community, and how people respond to change.  The more I think about it, the more I like it.    

"'A' as in Android" by Milton Lesser (1951)

Back in January of 2012 I read Milton Lesser's fix-up novel Secret of the Black Planet and wrote a mildly negative review of it on Amazon.  I think that is my only previous exposure to Lesser.  Here I am giving him a second chance--don't believe all those people who say I'm not open-minded!

"'A' as in Android" first appeared in a magazine, and in 2013 served as title story of a collection of Lesser tales published by Armchair Fiction as one of their Masters of Science Fiction series.

"'A' as in Android" is written like one of those hard-boiled detective stories, a first person narrative from a tough guy on an investigation.  Our narrator, Carmody, works for the government's Android Service, and he just got to Hyperion, one of Saturn's moons.  A club owner on Hyperion has a squad of dancing girls so beautiful, so graceful, that they can't be human; they must be androids.  The club owner hasn't paid the android tax, and Carmody has come to Hyperion to collect.

As it turns out, the girls are not androids, but infiltrators from another dimension in disguise.  There's a fist fight, and Carmody is overpowered (the extradimensional girls are super strong and don't even need to wear a space suit when exposed to hard vacuum, as the story's illustration shows) and the girls put him in one of their machines.  This machine transfers his mind from his body to an android body; his original body is then tossed in an alley!  After some more hand to hand combat Carmody escapes and tries to warn the authorities, but since he's in an android body, no one believes him.  Poor Carmody, trapped in an android body, has to watch as more and more clubs, throughout the Solar System, employ impossibly graceful dancing girls, alone in the knowledge that this is a sign of mankind's impending slavery to aliens from another dimension!

I don't think this story holds together if you look at it too closely, so I'm not going to look at it too closely.  Instead I'll just judge it "acceptable" as a piece of fast-paced and brief entertainment and move on with my life.  The whole thing is crazy enough that I am willing to read more lesser stories to see how crazy they are. 

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"THE BOOK OF THE YEAR" is probably a stretch, but so far I'm liking Novelets of Science Fiction.  I will read all the stories and crown a winner; so far Poul Anderson is in the lead.