Weird Tales by Frank Belknap Long from the 1920s

For decades I have been wondering, "What is up with that Frank Belknap Long?"  He has a good reputation and some nice awards, but when I read his work I am usually astounded by how poor it is.  Maybe what I need to do is go back, back, back to the very beginning, and read some of Long's earliest work, stories that appeared in 1920s issues of Weird Tales, including two stories the isfdb specifically places in the "Cthulhu mythos;" maybe this is the Frank Belknap Long everybody is in love with. 

"Death-Waters" (1924)

"Death-Waters" first appeared in Weird Tales in '24, and was reprinted by that unique magazine in 1933.  Both issues have covers guaranteed to start difficult conversations with your "woke" friends should they see them in your collection.  Maybe keep these babies out of sight, bro!  I read the 1933 reprint version in a PDF file available at the very useful SFFaudio Public Domain PDF page.

(Whether you find Margaret Brundage's sadistic sex-oozing cover entrancing or enraging, the September 1933 issue of Weird Tales looks like an exciting one, with a Robert E. Howard Conan story*, stories by MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton and critical darling Clark Ashton Smith, and letters from Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch.  Nice!)

A guy is travelling in a passenger ship along the coast of Latin America, accompanied by his friend, who lies dead in a coffin.  He tells the other passengers on the ship the story of how his friend got killed, and how he himself got all those nasty snake bites on his arm.

The guy (Long doesn't provide him a name) was in a canoe in the center of a lake fed by a jungle spring with his now dead buddy, Byrne, and "a huge black savage," the "oily skin" of whose "animal-like body" was "hideously tattooed."  Byrne wanted to bottle the water from the spring as a health tonic to sell to gullible people back in New York, but a taste test was required, and both he and the narrator were afraid to imbibe any of it, it being full of "animalcules" and smelling foul.  So Byrne forced the black guy to taste it.  After drinking it down the black dude screamed manically, his shrieks more like the sounds of "a gorilla under torture" than any utterance one might expect to come from a human throat.  Apparently in response to the scream, thousands of snakes rose out of the lake! These serpents, apparently a nonvenomous species, swarmed into the boat to bite Byrne, but not our narrator or the black man.

The black guy rowed them to the shore, then left them.  From over a hill crawled and slunk an army of poisonous toads, venomous snakes, and even horned lizards--a carpet of scaly death!  The white men beat at the swarm of herps, killing hundreds of them, but eventually the cold-blooded creepy-crawlies overwhelmed Byrne, poisoning him to death.  The beasties only bit the narrator when he tried to pull them off Byrne, and once Byrne has expired they squirmed away.

This story is entertaining because it is so crazy in so many ways.  There are the nightmarish and gruesome images of swarming reptiles being smashed by the score.  And there are the racial elements--students of depictions of non-whites in genre literature may find the story a valuable window into 1920s thinking about race; the narrator has a whole theory of the psychology of blacks and how whites should interact with them, and one might say that the point of the story is that Byrne suffered for not treating the black guy in a just and prudent manner.  And then there is Long's strange style which features odd phrases and makes strange little jokes; I'll just give you this one example: "I became as flabby as an arachnid on stilts."  What? 

I'm judging "Death-Waters" acceptable, largely as a curious, strange, artifact.

*It looks like nowadays, even though "The Slithering Shadow" is a fun title and looks great in the typescript chosen for use on the cover of the magazine, we are calling this story "Xuthal of the Dusk."

"The Were-Snake" (1925)

"The Were-Snake" appears in a book I own, the 1979 collection Night Fear.  (You'll remember I read the short story "Night Fear" back in mid 2014 when it was masquerading as a novelet.)  Night Fear has mind-bogglingly effusive praise for Long from Gordon R. Dickson and Richard A. Lupoff printed on its back cover (reproduced above) and on its front cover a painting by Clyde Caldwell of Chaugnar Faugn, star of "The Horror from the Hills," a long story I read back in late 2014.  Caldwell did lots of illustration work for TSR during the years my brother and I played endless hours of AD&D and Star Frontiers and devoured every month's Dragon magazine, and we became very familiar with Caldwell's style.  We called him "the Gemster" because every one of his paintings seemed to include a glittering jewel or gem, no matter how inappropriate its inclusion might be.

Our narrator for "The Were-Snake" is an American adventurer; this guy is visiting some remote ancient ruin, a temple dedicated to Ishtar, a goddess, we learn, whose worship goes back thousands of years before Homer, Stonehenge, and the Egyptian pyramids.  He tells his girlfriend, a Miss Beardsley, that Ishtar's "terrestrial manifestations" were femmes fatale who seduced and destroyed countless men.  He wants to spend the night alone at the temple, investigating, and dismisses Miss Beardsley's fears a native girl will seduce him while she is away.  Our narrator's native guide, in a sort of digression, tells him that the East is superior to the West because Easterners educate the soul and care not for technology--the West, he opines, went down the tubes when Europe chose Sir Isaac Newton over John Dee.

At night two green eyes appear in the darkness and try to mesmerize the narrator.  He shoots at the eyes, with no effect.  Miss Beardsley appears, wanting to help, but she is snatched by the creature and dragged down into the ruin.  When the hero catches up he can see that Ishtar is a thing like a giant snake that oozes slime and has a dog-like head.  Overcoming his fear, he chops off the monster's head with a sharp rock, rescuing Miss Beardsley.  In the morning his guide reports that a woman without a head and a disembodied cobra's head were found in the ruin.

The "Were-Snake" is a turgid mess that moves slowly and tries, with no success, to generate excitement by describing at length, but with little clarity or power, psychological states.  Much of the story is dissonant; the opening hints that Ishtar is sexy, but Ishtar turns out to be a thing like a slug; when bullets had no effect on the creature I thought it must be an illusion or a non-corporeal ghost, but then it grabs Miss Beardsley; the narrator goes from paralyzed by fear one second to galvanized into action in another for reasons that are not made clear; we are expected to believe that bullets don't harm the monster but a sharp stone can decapitate it in one blow; the monster is slimy like a slug at one point, scaly like a snake at another, and goes from having a canine head to a serpentine head.  The story is confusing in a way that is frustrating and irritating, that takes you out of the story, rather than in a way that sucks you in by exciting a desire to see a mystery solved.

Weak.  If I may be allowed to play editor to a World Fantasy Award winner, I would suggest that this simple plot could be made to work if the narrator and/or Miss Beardsley were interesting characters with psychological attributes which gave them the ability to overcome Ishtar.  Maybe their love for each other gave them strength, or their belief in Christianity, or a belief in reason andf familiarity with science that immunizes them to superstition and allows them to see through ancient myths to the reality behind them.  Maybe the hero could kill the monster with a knife his girlfriend gave him or a sword blessed by a priest, a symbol of what makes him and Miss Beardsley special as people.  Anything to make sense of the story and give readers some emotional or intellectual handle to grasp.

"The Space-Eaters" (1928)

isfdb tells us this story is part of "The Cthulhu Mythos;" it seems to be one of the first (maybe the very first) Mythos stories published by someone other than Lovecraft himself.  I read it in a scan of its original appearance made available by the good people at SFFaudio.

Frank, our narrator, and Howard, his friend, a writer of horror stories, are sitting around talking.  Howard engages in some interesting literary criticism, discussing the reason various horror writers' stories are effective and lamenting that he is not able to achieve in his own writing his goal of depicting horrors from outer space that have no earthly analog.  Then one of Frank's friends, Wells, bursts in to tell a story of horror that matches Howard's aspirations--as he was travelling through a foggy wood full of trees shaped like "evil old men," Wells experienced the most horrifying and most bizarre sights and feelings imaginable.  And he has the head wound to prove the truth of his story--a perfectly smooth and bloodless hole has been bored through his skull to his brain!

As the story progresses Frank and Howard must confront, and try to puzzle out the mysterious nature of, a creature which has come to Earth to suck out human brains.  One of the surprising things about this story is its solution to the problem of the aliens.  I think of Lovecraft's stories as being, in part, a refutation of traditional beliefs about the universe held by the faithful of the monotheistic religions--Jews, Christians and Muslims think that God manages the universe and that God loves and protects mankind, while in Lovecraft stories the universe and powerful "gods" are indifferent or even inimical to mankind.  But Long's "The Space-Eaters" suggests that some power, represented by the sign of the cross, has defended Earth from alien invasion in the past, and in this story that power does so again.  (An epigraph to the story, ostensibly from the John Dee translation of The Necronomicon, foreshadows this by attesting to the power of the sign of the cross.)   

This is a story I can recommend.  It is of course fun to see Long writing a story about himself and his buddy H. P. Lovecraft facing alien monsters, and I enjoyed the literary criticism "Howard" delivers in the beginning of the story.  "The Space-Eaters" also has some good images and genuinely disturbing horror elements, like when Frank is asked to hold up a lamp to help a doctor conduct brain surgery on Wells--our narrator is too scared to look at his friend's exposed brain and may not even have the guts to hold the lamp steady!  Long thus exploits not only our visceral disgust at physical gore and our cerebral fears about our place in the universe, but our fears of being too weak to aid our friends should they find themselves in desperate need.

"The Space-Eaters" has been reprinted numerous times, including in a 1988 edition of August Derleth's 1969 anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, which has a striking cover illustration by Tim White.

Hannes Bok appropriately depicts the Hounds as being composed of straight lines and angles
in his cover illo for the 1946 collection of Long stories published by Arkham House

"The Hounds of Tindalos" (1929)

OK, here it is, the (I believe) most famous Frank Belknap Long story, and one of the most famous Cthulhu Mythos stories by somebody other than H. P. Lovecraft, "The Hounds of Tindalos."  "The Hounds of Tindalos" is the title story of a 1946 Arkham House collection of Long stories, and the Tindalos "brand" is so recognizable that a 2008 anthology of stories written by Long and by a number of other writers inspired by his work was entitled The Tindalos Cycle.  Well, let's see what the fuss is all about!  I read "The Hounds of Tindalos" in a scan of the nearly 90-year-old issue of Weird Tales in which it made its debut that is available at the internet archive. 

Halpin Chalmers is a genius who breaks all the rules!  "I have always been a rebel, a champion of originality and lost causes...."  He has disdain for Bertrand Russell and the positivism and materialism of 19th- and 20th-century scientists, admires the alchemists and mystics of the more distant past, and reveres Einstein as "A priest of transcendental mathematics."  Chalmers wants to know the truth about man's origin and man's destiny, and condemns modern biologists for their slow progress in uncovering the secrets of human development.  He believes that, armed with his knowledge of modern mathematics, he can travel through time by using a drug little known in the West but used in the East by such savants as Lao Tze and see man's beginning and man's end!  "Time and motion," he declares, "are both illusions," and through the use of the Far Eastern drug he is going to "strip" from his eyes "the veils of illusion time has thrown over them."

(This story is full of name dropping: Darwin, Haeckel, Plotinus, Aquinas, and John Dee, a guy I never hear about whom Long brings up in three of today's four stories, are among those mentioned.  The story also reflects the fascination of Western intellectuals with Eastern mysticism and philosophy--Chalmers bases much of his thinking on the concept of the Tao.)

Like that of so many Lovecraftian-type stories, the bulk of "The Hounds of Tindalos" is a first-person narrative.  Our narrator is a friend of Chalmers's whose aid he requests in his drug-induced journey back in time.  "...if I go back too far you must recall me to reality.  You can recall me by shaking me violently."  Our narrator thinks the Tao and all this time travel jazz is "rubbish" and tries to dissuade Chalmers from this risky experiment with foreign intoxicants, but he is willing to help his buddy if he can't convince him to just say "no."

Chalmers takes one of his Oriental pills and our narrator sits and with his "pale green Waterman" fountain pen writes down everything his adventurous crony says during his "trip."  Chalmers reports that he can see all of time simultaneously, and reels off a list of incidents from Atlantis and Lemuria, medieval Italy and Elizabethan England, ancient Greece and ancient Rome, the migration of the Neanderthals and the age of the dinosaurs.  He can perceive time as "curves" and "angles," and far back, before the time of multi-cellular life on Earth, the angles become strange and horrifying.  Chalmers throws a fit and crawls around the room like a crazed canine untoil our hero shakes him and the mystic collapses, stunned.

After recovering with the help of some whiskey, Chalmers tells the narrator that, at the beginning of time, he saw the Hounds of Tindalos, creatures of angles who became the repository of all foulness after a terrible "deed" that is symbolized in our culture by the myth of the Fall.  (Like "The Space-Eaters," "The Hounds of Tindalos" makes use of Christian symbolism, Chalmers saying "The tree, the snake and the apple--these are the vague symbols of a most awful mystery."  As did Eve, Chalmers has taken a tremendous risk in the reckless pursuit of knowledge.)  Evil is represented by angles, and goodness by curves, and the angular Hounds lust to devour human beings, the good part of whom is descended from a curve.  Upon smelling Chalmers, the Hounds pursued him, or so he says--the narrator thinks this all nonsense.

The brief second part of the story tells how Chalmers, with the narrator's aid, used plaster of Paris to fill in all the corners and angles of his room, so that, as far as possible, Chalmer's room resembled the interior of a sphere.  Chalmers thinks this may keep the Hounds from reaching him.  The final part of the story is a series of excerpts from newspapers, a chemist's report, and Chalmer's own published work, providing us clues as to Chalmer's ultimate fate.

This is a good horror story, with strange ideas and memorable images, and it is more economically structured than "The Space-Eaters."  I can see why this would be Long's most renowned and influential story, reprinted not only in Lovecraftian volumes, but in anthologies of stories about drug use and stories representing an overview of 20th-century SF.

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"The Space-Eaters" and "The Hounds of Tindalos" are good enough that it makes sense that people still admire Long, even though he also produced a vast quantity of mediocre and poor work later in his career.  These stories have provided a useful addition to my weird education.

More Weird Tales in our next episode!

Early '70s horror stories by Robert Bloch, T. K. Brown III, and Eddy C. Bertin

Only three stories remain in 1974's The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series II; let's check them out!

Frontispiece by Jack Gaughan and title page 

"The Animal Fair" by Robert Bloch (1971)

This story, by the much beloved author of Psycho and a book I almost bought a few days ago at an antiques store in Catonsville, MD, first appeared in Playboy.  I wish I could like Bloch's work as much as so many people do, but generally I find him underwhelming.  "The Animal Fair" is apparently Joe R. Lansdale's favorite horror story, or at least Lansdale's favorite Bloch story (Lansdale wrote an essay introducing it that appeared in the collection Robert Bloch: Appreciations of the Master and the anthology My Favorite Horror Story) so perhaps we have here the prime slice of Bloch that is going to help me see in Bloch what everybody else sees.

Bloch loves puns and jokes and wordplay, and on the first page of "The Animal Fair" we get lines like "...Dave hit the main drag.  And it was a drag." and "Phil's Phill-Up Gas stood deserted."  This kind of stuff detracts from creating a mood of suspense or fear, in my opinion, foregrounding the third-person omniscient narrator and reminding you this is not real.  Fortunately, Bloch cuts it out after that first page, or at least I didn't notice it again.  (The actual title of the story may well be a subtle pun on the disparate meanings of "fair," referring to a place where animals are displayed before spectators, a beautiful creature, and a creature who is just.)

Dave is hitchhiking across Oklahoma, on his way to Hollywood.  Dave thinks Oklahoma and its people are disgusting! 

Dave could smell oil in the air; on hot summer nights in Oklahoma, you can always smell it.  And the crowd in here smelled worse.  Bad enough that he was thumbing his way through and couldn't take a bath, but what was their excuse?  

Dave goes to a travelling carnival to get a hamburger (all the local stores are closed) and finds himself in a tent full of "red-necks."  In a cage in the tent is a sick gorilla, forced to dance for Oklahomans!  Dave is so sickened by this crime he throws up!  He takes a nap on the side of the road, and when he wakes up he hitches a ride...on the trailer with the gorilla and its cruel master, "Captain" Ryder!

Ryder tells the sad story of his life as he drives with one hand and drinks a bottle of "fresh corn likker" with the other.  He was a trapper in Africa, then a Hollywood stuntman who handled big dangerous animals for jungle movies, and wore animal suits for closeups of fights between actors and beasts.  He got rich doing all this work!  But then tragedy struck!  Four drug-addled criminals he calls "hippies" broke into his house and drugged and raped his niece, the joy of his life, whom he had raised like his own daughter.  Ryder caught them in the act, and in the ensuing fight killed one of the rapists and seriously wounded two others, but his niece also died from an overdose of whatever the creeps had used on her.  The hippies' ring leader escaped.  Ryder went to prison for two years, and when he got out his career was ruined and he resorted to this carny business.

(The sensational crimes of Charles Manson, as well as the greatest movie of all time, King Kong, seem to have served as inspiration for much of this story.)

"The Animal Fair" appears in this Finnish
collection  

This blog is all about spoilers, so of course I am going to tell you what all the clues in Ryder's narrative add up to.  While in Africa, Ryder learned all kinds of crazy witch doctor stuff, like how a shaman can use drugs and psychological torture to make a person who has been sewn up inside a lion skin (!) think he is a lion.  Without coming out and saying it, Bloch is implying that Ryder used his jungle skills to track down the leader of the rapists, and then sewed this jerk up in his Hollywood gorilla suit and is achieving his revenge by (mis)treating the rapist like an animal!

(Remember how in the second Aubrey-Maturin novel the naval officer escapes from France by disguising himself as a bear?  I read a dozen or more of those books, but that was the most unbelievable passage, and ironically the most memorable, in all of them.)

This is a good story--Lansdale, Davis and Playboy didn't let readers down in promoting it.  Perhaps my favorite thing about it is how it took me by surprise--Dave's demeaning of the small-town Oklahomans, and the initial appearance of Captain Ryder, whom Dave hates, and his first few lines of dialogue, which consist of bitching about drugs, hippies and Hollywood, led me to expect that the story's point would be to mock retrograde country people from the point of view of a sophisticated liberal urbanite.  Instead, Hollywood, one of America's cutting-edge cultural capitals, is said to be in terminal decline, and we are given reason to hate and fear forward-thinking young people (as well as African medicine men) and lament their destructive and corrupting influence on healthy people like Ryder and his niece.  What I thought was going to be a smug animal rights piece morphed before my eyes into something like 1974's Death Wish!

("The Animal Fair" actually includes many of the themes I saw in Bloch's 1989 novel Lori, among them alcohol, an America in cultural and societal decline, and a young woman at the mercy of predatory men.) 

In addition to the way the story subverted my expectations, it is economically and smoothly written, and the central gimmick feels new and is surprising.  Thumbs up for "The Animal Fair."  Maybe I need to seek out more of Bloch's "greatest hits," guided by the horror cognoscenti like Lansdale.

"Haunts of the Very Rich" by T. K. Brown III (1971)

"Haunts of the Very Rich" first came under the eyes of the public in the very same issue of Playboy that printed Bloch's "The Animal Fair."  Was this a special horror issue of our most pretentious girlie rag?  (Actually, this issue is full of big names, like John Wayne, V. S. Pritchett, Jean Shepherd and Garry Wills, and there's an article about James Dickey, whose Deliverance I read just before moving out of New York State during my brief Westchester County period, and even an illustration by Gene Szafran, who did so many SF book covers.)

T. K. Brown III only has five credits at isfdb, but when you google his name you find that "Haunts of the Very Rich" was made into a TV movie in 1972 starring actors I don't like!  You can watch it on youtube!  (Having no desire to lay eyes on the  visages nor lend ear to the voices of Ed Asner, Donna Mills, Lloyd Bridges and Cloris Leachman, I'll stick to the printed word, myself.)

Six incredibly wealthy people pay an exorbitant fee to go on a mystery vacation--they are flown on a small jet whose windows are shuttered to a jungle resort by a lake surrounded by volcanoes.  Once there everything goes wrong--the power goes out so there is no air conditioning or refrigeration, natives raid their booze supply, the "exotic" prostitute turns out to be from Brooklyn.  Yes, this is a comedy, one which is not in the least bit funny.  When the characters, like the reader, realize nothing that is happening makes any sense, they theorize that they are dead and this is hell.

Lame.

"Like Two White Spiders" by Eddy C. Bertin (1971)

Bertin is a German-born Belgian, a prolific writer of genre stories and children's books.  As I said in the comments to the first installment of our look at DAW No. 109, when Mats Paulsson pointed out that the cover of this anthology is by Swiss-born resident of Sweden Hans Arnold, The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series II is a real international production.  I mercilessly criticized a story by Bertin from this same time period, "Timestorm," back in 2016, but gave a moderate recommendation to a late '70s story by Bertin, "My Beautiful Darkling," a year before that.

"Like Two White Spiders" comes to us in the form of a transcript of a tape recorded statement from a guy in an insane asylum.  This guy describes how, several times over the course of his life, his hands acted with a mind of their own to kill small creatures and even people!  He has been imprisoned because of his crimes, but he claims he is in fact innocent, that his hands have been taken over by some alien from another dimension, or are separate alien entities with their own internal organs, or some such thing.  Of course, the story is full of clues that hint that this guy is just a murderer with mental problems who has consciously or subconsciously come up with this bizarre possession narrative as an excuse. 

Bertin's is one of the more viscerally gruesome stories in this anthology, with descriptions of how it feels to strangle an eight-year old girl and crush the skull of a canary--and then there are the narrator's efforts to deter or liberate his hands by holding them in a fire or chopping them off with a scythe!  Jeez!

I should note, for all you Yog-Sothery fans out there, that besides comparing his hands to spiders and scorpions, the narrator likens them to The Hounds of Tindalos; even though he usually disappoints me, I really have to read the story of that name by Frank Belknap Long someday.

This is a good horror story that exploits our fears of our bodies betraying or failing us as well as our willingness to blame others for or otherwise rationalize our misdeeds.  And our fears of chopping off our own hands--yikes!  It is well-written and well-structured, the length and pace just right.  Thumbs up!  "Like Two White Spiders" was first printed as "Als Twee Grote Witte Spinnen" in the 1971 Belgian collection De Achtjaarlijkse God; the author himself translated it into English and it first appeared in the tongue of William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and Dan Brown in the 1973 collection that is the source of much of the material in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series II, Sphere's The Year's Best Horror Stories No. 3.

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DAW No, 109, The Year's Best Horror Stories Series II, is a good anthology; there is only one serious clunker, and several quite good stories.  Looking at Amazon, ebay and abebooks, I am getting the idea that it is sort of rare; maybe I shouldn't have bent the cover of mine scanning the title page and the page of ads in the back?

Ah, the ads.  Six DAW titles are pushed, including Brian Lumley's first Titus Crow novel, the eighth of John Norman's (in)famous Gor books, and the 1974 edition of Donald Wollheim's Annual World's Best anthologies that includes R. A. Lafferty and E. C. Tubb stories I don't own; I would probably grab this one if I saw it going for a buck or two.  Also promoted is D. G. Compton's The Unsleeping Eye; Joachim Boaz has gushed about this baby (5 of 5 stars!), which I own in a later Pocket Books edition, but I have yet to read it myself.  The Weathermonger, which I'd never heard of, is, apparently, some kind of "young adult" book about a future anti-technological England and was the basis for a TV series.

Monster From Out of Time by Frank Belknap Long

Everywhere Dorman's gaze traveled there were great drifts of blowing snow and in the far distance a gigantic wall of ice extended half across the plain, with boulders at its base so large that he would have mistaken them for small hills if they had not differed so drastically in shape.

In our last episode we read a paperback edition from Popular Library with a cool Frank Frazetta cover of a short novel written by an associate of H. P. Lovecraft--let's do it again!  Last time was 1940's The Creature From Beyond Infinity (AKA A Million Years to Conquer) by Henry Kuttner; today it's Frank Belknap Long's 1970 novel Monster From Out of Time.  I am often disappointed in Long's work, but I bought this baby for the cover and as a souvenir from a strange used book store where the owner was very chatty and seemed to be making up the prices right there at the register, ignoring the Post It notes stuck to each book.  (And good news that was, too, as those Post It note prices were pretty high.)

In the Prologue to Monster From Out Of Time, two Mexicans, an old man and his daughter Tlacha, are watching the employees of an American company dig up their fields looking for uranium and valuable minerals.  Tlacha complains that the Americans are ruining their farm land, while her father seems content with the fees the Yankees have paid him.  Then there is an earthquake and Dad is swallowed up by a crack in the ground!  From another crack a giant monster emerges, and a blinding glow--Tlacha falls unconscious and when she wakes up she is in a field of ice and snow!

Chapter One introduces us to two American archaeologists who are down in the Mexican jungle to look at ruins, David Dorman and Joan Raines.  When they see some Indian fishermen jump in their harpoon-gun-equipped boat to attack the monster that came out of that crack (the thing is bigger than a whale and has taken to the waters of the Gulf), they jump in the boat with them!  These gringos live for adventure!  The monster glows and the archaeologists, after odd visions of shifting landscapes, find themselves on a frozen plain bordered by a glacier--they too have been sent back in time to the Ice Age!

They soon meet Tlacha (I don't think Long gives Tlacha a last name) and her American boyfriend, Harvey Ames, one of the engineers from the gringo mining company she was criticizing back in the 20th century.  The four take up residence in an igloo built by Ames, and wear skins from animals killed by Ames.  But don't think Ames is doing all the work--when a monster appears Dorman shoots it (with Ames' pistol.)

After two weeks of igloo living, Raines is kidnapped by a local, a hairy man with a "cruel, thin-lipped face."  Dorman, Ames and Tlacha follow their prints in the snow and after encountering some prehistoric beasts are reunited with Raines when they too are captured by the kidnapper's tribe. This tribe of primitive humans has embraced as their leader a 20th-century man--this guy has our heroes thrown in the arena to fight a giant lizard.  (Don't ask why these Pleistocene people built an arena out of ice or why a lizard is living in this subzero environment.)  The tribe's leader turns out to be Tlacha's brother, who is mentally ill.  (I think we are supposed to think he has been driven insane by dreams of reviving the glories of the empire of the Aztecs and the humiliations visited on Mexico by the gringos.)  After Ames and Dorman kill the lizard, Tlacha grabs Ames' pistol and kills her brother.  Then, for no discernible reason whatsoever, our four protagonists are transported back to the 20th century.

This book is terrible.  The plot is feeble, the characters are lacking in any personality, and there is no sense of excitement or fear or even interest.  Very little actually happens in the story: it feels like Long had a target of 128 pages, and instead of filling the 128 pages with sex and violence or his opinions about anything even remotely interesting (the way our pals Ted Sturgeon and Bob Heinlein were liable to talk our ears off about politics, religion, the structure of the family and stuff like that), he filled those pages with extraneous detail and conversations about utterly mundane topics and peripheral matters.  When Dorman and Raines are in the fishing boat that is chasing the monster, instead of trying to transmit to us the thrills of such a dangerous and bizarre encounter, Long gives us several pages of David and Joan's argument over whether or not it is safe for David to stand in the boat so he can get a better look at the monster.  We get a detailed description of the igloo and of all the miscellaneous junk in Dorman's pack, but none of that stuff ever matters to the plot; we learn all about it and then it is forgotten.

Each scene is too long, and many sentences are too long, like Long was just trying to augment each sentence's word count.  This sentence, for example:

But the moon had passed behind some medium-dense clouds directly overhead, and the light that filtered down was the opposite of bright.

"Medium-dense" is twice as many words as "dense," and "the opposite of bright" is four times as many words as "dim."  Did  Long outsource this thing to his round-headed buddy Chuck?    

Long is definitely not the only person to blame for this disaster, as the book does not seem to have been edited.  In the Prologue a guy named Harvey Ambler, one of the American engineers, is mentioned.  This is obviously the same guy who, when he appears in Chapter Five, introduces himself as Harvey Ames.  On page 22 we get this phrase:

...dangling from his arm was a dun-colored sun helmet which he had taken off because he couldn't stand the heat which it generated.

Obviously a hat does not generate heat, but capture it.  These kinds of mistakes, and the many typos in the book, are distracting and even insulting, suggesting to the reader that Long and Popular Library have put no effort into this piece of work for which they expected us to pay 60 cents.    

Shoddy and boring, a frustrating waste of time.  Wikipedia suggests that in the 1970s Long was just mechanically producing books of little value (like seven Gothic romances under a transparent pseudonym) because he needed the money.  Well, I guess I can understand that--I've done some things and even written some things for money I am not exactly proud of.  Monster From Out Of Time is for Frank Frazetta fans and Frank Belknap Long obsessives only!

It Was the Day of the Robot by Frank Belknap Long

And how can a man take pride in his independence and proclaim that he is really free when he cannot make love to a woman, and feel her slender sweet body moving beneath him, and experience a rapture that blots out the present and the past, and makes only one moment seem eternal, as long as forever is.

Remember when I fell in love with the cover of a paperback I found in an Iowa antique store?  It was Belmont Books of fabulous New York City that had published this unforgettable masterpiece, and the heroes at Belmont had more than one arrow in their quiver!  The cover of Novelets of Science Fiction had prehistoric reptiles, militaristic astronauts, the birth of a brilliant red star (from an egg?), and a green-skinned alien fashion model with two big beautiful...eh, wings.  But what iconic component of science fiction was it missing?  A robot!  Well, Belmont has the crucial robotic-American demographic covered with the terrific illustration adorning the cover of 1963's It Was the Day of the Robot.  I've wanted to own this beauty for quite a while, having seen scans of it online, and was pretty stoked (that's what the kids say nowadays) to discover it in Wooster, Ohio recently.

Written by Frank Belknap Long, an intimate friend of H. P. Lovecraft and a famous writer whose high reputation, to be frank, I have found to be a little mystifying, It Was the Day of the Robot is an expansion of Long's 1957 story "Made to Order," which I have not read.  Long won various high profile awards as well as the praise of people like Lovecraft; maybe It Was the Day of the Robot will be the work that convinces me he deserved all those accolades?

Based on its cover, and the cover of so many foreign editions, I expected It Was the Day of the Robot to be like a Godzilla movie, about a cyclopean robot running amok while the government's top scientists and the National Guard scramble to end its campaign of destruction.  In fact, Long's book is about love, sex, and a war of independence against tyrannical paternalistic government!

It is the year 2263! Mankind is ruled by a computer known by its adoring fans as the Giant Computer, and colloquially, by skeptics, as The Big Brain. One of BB's signature policies is a strict eugenics regime that judges every individual's right to reproduce based not only on his or her fitness, but on the current needs of Society.  (BB's supporters put a capital "S" on "Society.")  As our novel begins, first-person narrator John Tabor has just had his third application for a license to mate rejected--he is a perfect physical specimen, but Society already has a sufficient number of his type.

Standing next to John in the "computer vault" where you go to collect BB's judgements, which are printed on metal strips that get spit out of the wall (I'm visualizing this place as like a cross between the automat and the DMV), is a beautiful woman, Agnes. Agnes has also just had her right to sex denied. Agnes and John fall in love then and there, but then there is a disturbance and when John turns back, Agnes has disappeared!

The solar system is full of men bereft of sexual relationships either because they have been deemed dysgenic by BB or because only men are allowed on Mars and Venus, where human habitations are under construction.  Luckily, substitutes for women are available! These include parlors with hypnotic helmets which provide simulations of sexual relationships, and, new on the market, android women! Lonely and horny, John orders an android woman.  (All of a sudden the title of the original story is making sense!)  By studying the narrator's own genetic code (genetics is a major theme of this novel) the android makers promise they will be able to produce a woman who exactly matches John's deepest sexual desires.  Well, physically, at least--the eggheads admit they haven't quite mastered creating artificial brains and John's android dream girl will probably have the mentality of a seven-year-old!

These androids are sort of a grey market item, and so it is no surprise when the cops come knocking at the establishment where John is picking up his artificial inamorata, whom he decides to call "Claire."  A scuffle and chase ensue, and John and Claire flee to the ruins of New York City, where live society's outcasts, eking out a rough existence beyond the oppression, but also the law and order, of BB's government. Most of the people in the ruins left BB's domain because they were denied the right to have sex by the electronic dictator, and there is much violent competition between men over women among the ruins of my old Manhattan stomping grounds.  In a wild coincidence, the first outcast John and Claire encounter is Agnes, whom John never expected to see again!  We've got a love triangle on our hands!

It doesn't take John long to choose between these two chicks, however.  Almost immediately Agnes is revealed to be an agent of the Big Brain, sent to John to seduce him. You see, John has telepathic powers, and spent two years working on Venus.  The men on Venus, far from BB's direct supervision, have gained an appreciation of freedom, but are frustrated by the lack of women.  BB has uncovered a conspiracy among these Venusians, an independence movement, and thinks John is just the man to infiltrate it!

Of course, our hero is, in fact, just the kind of guy who wants to sign up with the Venusian patriots!  He and Claire skip out on Agnes and run around the ruins, engaging in fight scenes and chase scenes that have brutish men trying to seize Claire to satisfy their lusts and BB's cops trying to capture John. All the while our narrator has to explain the simplest things to Claire, who has the mind of a child.

John and Claire try to hide themselves in a crowd of people going to the "bicycle races."  In the same way that it permits the New York ruins to remain outside its authority as a safety valve that bleeds off potential revolutionaries, BB permits an arena to operate where desperate men can race bicycles.  These races are based on the chariot races of ancient Rome, firmly embedded in the pop culture consciousness by the 1880 novel and various film versions of Ben Hur--the cyclists are armed with lances and flails, and while thousands of bloodthirsty spectators watch, the cyclists engage in brutal fights, hoping to impress the women in the stands.  John ends up escaping the cops by participating in the race himself, winning, and being carried away from the field by the adoring crowd.

All of the sexual and gender elements of It Was the Day of the Robot are going to set off alarm bells for the 21st-century reader. We are told that Claire shares many of John's genetic traits: "She would undoubtedly resemble quite a few of my great-great-grandmothers."  This reminds us of incest. Claire has the mind of a child, which reminds us of pedophilia. John repeatedly strikes Agnes, even throwing her against walls.  The women in the novel are what your college professor might call sexist stereotypes: Claire always needs help and needs everything mansplained to her, and Agnes is a spy and seductress, a femme fatale, who tries to get John to betray his principles. It Was the Day of the Robot is no safe space!  

This cover matches the actual themes
and content of the story better than the others  

Of course I won't hold any of this against the book.  I don't read science fiction to hear orthodox opinions repeated, and I don't read books from 50 years ago expecting to hear today's elite-approved opinions parrotted.  Science fiction has a long tradition, including among its most honored practitioners (Sturgeon, Heinlein and Farmer were all accorded Grandmasters by their peers) of questioning sexual taboos and depicting sexual relationships of unusual and potentially offensive character.  

Unfortunately, in the last scenes of the book Long craps out on us.  After the bicycle race, Claire and Agnes have a showdown, and it turns out that Claire is a normal woman, an agent of the Venus independence movement who has been pretending to be an android, while Agnes is an android pretending to be a real woman, built by BB to snare John.  So John didn't really smack around a (real) woman and didn't really have sex with a child or an artificial person, or really do anything that crazy at all.  Agnes isn't even killed by John or Claire in the final battle--she slips and falls on her own knife.  Lame!

More damningly, Long's style is not very good.  Long is very long-winded, slowing down the narrative with long dissertations on psychology and sexual relationships--even minor characters give lectures on love and sex. Long overwrites all the action scenes, deadening the pace with tedious descriptions of each yard of a chase or blow of a fight and with detailed explanations of the narrator's tactics and strategy. The bicycle race has elaborate and convoluted rules explained by a sports announcer whose own psychology and sexual history is explored by Long.  Long also shows off his erudition with many mentions of Freud and references to Watteau, Shelly, and Gourmont that don't necessarily add much to the novel's entertainment value.  (Though I have to admit that I don't think I've ever heard of Remy de Gourmont before.)

I like the novel's pro-individualist/anti-technocracy ethic, and having sex with an android, hiding out in the New York ruins, fighting in the arena, and fighting for the independence of Venus are all good ideas.  But I can't deny that Long bungled or undermined most of this material.  It Was the Day of the Robot didn't quite bore me or annoy me, and at 140 pages it didn't overstay its welcome, so I will award it a "barely acceptable" rating, but I am probably being generous.        

Lancer's Science Fiction line in 1972

In our last episode we read the edition of David Mason's Kavin's World published by Lancer in 1972, which they billed as a "science fantasy" in the "immortal tradition of Conan."  I guess Conan was a big money maker for Lancer; at the end of the book are three pages of advertising, and the first of them is for Lancer's line of Conan paperbacks.  We are told our local retailer may very well have a special Conan display!

I think people nowadays look down on these editions of Conan because they include pastiches and posthumous collaborations with Howard by people like Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp.  I think my brother and I had some of these as teenagers, but as an adult I bought and read those oversized paperbacks put out by Ballantine-Del Rey that have more authentic texts.

Perhaps more interesting than the Conan page are the last two pages of my copy of Kavin's World, which advertise Lancer's general SF line.  "Have you missed any of these recent LANCER SCIENCE FICTION best sellers?" we are asked.  Looking over the list I see I have actually read, and even written about, some of these!

Michael Moorcock: The Jewel in the Skull.  This is the first of the Runestaff/Hawkmoon books.  I was a Michael Moorcock fanatic in my teens and early twenties, and read all of the Hawkmoon books, though not in Lancer editions.  (I think I read the 1990 Ace edition of The Jewel in the Skull.)  Of the various Eternal Champion series, I thought these were below average, with less interesting characters and more tedious wars than in the Elric and Corum books, though I loved the idea that all the bad guys wore elaborate masks.  A theme that recurs in Moorcock's work is a portrayal of Great Britain as the villain, and with the exception of the Oswald Bastable books I think that theme is most blatant in the Hawkmoon series.  According to wikipedia the Runestaff books are full of weird in-jokes about the Beatles, British politicians and SF writers, jokes which I did not pick up on when I read them.

Michael Moorcock: The City of the Beast, The Lord of the Spiders and The Masters of the Pit.  These are the three Warriors of Mars books, which I liked least of Moorcock's adventure stories.  They felt totally uninspired, and I have heard they were written in a feverish rush due to a need for money to finance other projects.  I think my brother back in New Jersey still has my copies of these, the early '90s Ace editions, which have Dorian Vallejo covers.

Hal Clement: Needle: I own the 1967 Avon edition of this and read it in 2013 and thought it wasn't bad.  The way the alien communicates with the human protagonist was pretty ingenious.

Ted White: The Sorceress of Qar.  I own the Lancer 1966 edition of this, but have not read it yet.  I liked White's Spawn of the Death Machine, so will probably check it out after I get a hold of and read Phoenix Prime, which precedes it in the Qanar series.

Edmond Hamilton: Return to the Stars.  I own the Magnum edition of this, which looks almost exactly the same as the Lancer printing.  Was Magnum a division of Lancer, or a company which bought Lancer properties or what?  Mysterious!  The cover is by Steranko.  I read my copy quite a long time ago, I guess during my New York days.  I don't remember much specific about Return to the Stars--a guy's consciousness is flung into the far future into the body of an important personage involved in a space war--but I am pretty sure I enjoyed it.  Return to the Stars is a sequel to The Star Kings, a copy of which I own (1967, Paperback Library) but have not read.  Hamilton and his famous wife Leigh Brackett wrote another story involving the Star Kings, Stark and the Star Kings, which was supposed to appear in Harlan Ellison's abortive third Dangerous Visions anthology.  Fortunately in the 21st century Haffner Press and Baen made the story (which I have yet to read) available to Hamilton and Brackett's fans.

Poul Anderson: Satan's World.  I own the Berkley 1977 edition of this, and read it in April of last year.  I wrote a positive review of it at this here blog; it is a good space adventure story, full of hard science and libertarian politics, just the thing to cheer up you laissez faire types in this decidedly unlibertarian political season.

John Lymington: Ten Million Years to Friday.  I read this baby in September of 2011 and reviewed it on Amazon.  This is one of those stories in which Christians, businesspeople, and humanity in general are shown up by a superior alien.  As in way too many movies, the evil humans try to exploit the alien and the main character protects it.  I sold my copy of the Lancer edition in 2013.

Frank Belknap Long: Survival World.  The mysterious Magnum Books strikes again! I own the Magnum edition of this title, which looks almost exactly like the Lancer edition.  This is one of the worst books I have ever read; I suffered through it in late 2011.  As of today there are three Amazon customer reviews of Survival World, and all three award the book a single star; one of these reviews is mine, and you can read it here.

Robert Hoskins (ed): Infinity Two.  I own this anthology, and in 2015 read a few stories from it, including tales by William F. Nolan, Edward Bryant, and Barry Malzberg.  I should probably read more from this thing; there is a collaboration between Poul Anderson and his wife Karen, and stories by writers like J. F. Bone, Anthon Warden, and Russell L. Bates, about whom I currently know very little.

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Readers who have read any of the books from Lancer's late '60s/early '70s line, who think I'm all wrong about Michael Moorcock's Hawkmoon and Mars books, or who actually saw the special Lancer Conan display way back when, are invited to comment!

Odd Science Fiction by Frank Belknap Long

Frank Belknap Long is a name that comes up a lot in discussions of people associated with H. P. Lovecraft, and he won both the Stoker and World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement awards, but when I actually read a novel by Long, 1971's Survival World, I was shocked and amazed at how horrible it was.  (Check out my one star Amazon review from November 2011.)  Still, I liked Long's short story "Night Fear," and hope springs eternal, so early this week I read Odd Science Fiction, which is a paperback collection of three Long tales which the publishers assert is a novel, a legendary trilogy, and Long's finest work.

Odd Science Fiction was published in 1964 by Belmont, the heroes who adorned the world with my beloved Novelets of Science Fiction.  The people at Belmont don't play around: they trumpeted Novelets of Science Fiction as "THE BOOK OF THE YEAR" and of Odd Science Fiction, they say....

...what?

"The Horror From the Hills" (1931)

Arkham 1963 edition

This 94 page work was serialized in Weird Tales in early 1931 and in 1963 appeared alone in a hardcover edition from Arkham House.  It makes up like 70% of Odd Science Fiction.  ISFDB helpfully informs us it lies "right on the border between a novella and a novel."

It also lies right on the border between passable and bad.

Algernon Harris is a young man with degrees from Yale and Oxford who has recently landed the job of Curator of Archaeology at a Manhattan art museum.  Is this a horror story or a fantasy of the perfect life?

Harris sends archaeologists around the world looking for artifacts for his department. As we've learned from those Indiana Jones movies, being an archaeologist is hella dangerous.  One guy comes back from the Far East missing an eye, another guy returns from the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan missing an arm!  And those guys aren't the least fortunate!

Harris's old chum Ulman returns from Tibet with a statue of a horrific monster, a thing like an obese Buddha but with an elephant head and bat wings (with tentacles!) for ears.  This thing is Chaugnar Faugn, the god of a barbaric tribe, and Ulman tells Harris that it periodically comes to life and sucks Ulman's blood like it's some kind of pachyderm vampire!  For proof Ulman shows Harris his hellish wounds, but Harris just figures his buddy got mutilated by the barbarians and that all this jazz about living statues is his PTSD talking.

People in the museum, including Ulman, start turning up dead, and then the "statue" disappears.  Harris enlists the help of a mystic recluse, who relates a dream he recently had of being a Roman aristocrat who battled evil cultists over 2000 years ago.  According to Wikipedia, this dream was lifted by Long from a letter written to him by Lovecraft.  The recluse also gives a lecture on entropy, and then reveals the machine that can send Chaugnar Faugn back in time, a sort of entropy-neutralizing ray gun he has built.

Harris and company hop into a motor car and chase Chaugnar Faugn around New Jersey for hours, finally cornering the monster in a swamp and sending it back in time with the ray.  The chase doesn't make much sense; why does the monster stay near the road?  

There are good things in "Horror From the Hills."  Chaugnar Faugn is a good monster (the internet is full of fun depictions of it), and the Lovecraft dream is good.  Unfortunately the story is too long, and is burdened with too much extraneous matter that confuses and weakens its tone.  There is a lecture on developments in plastic surgery, for example.  For some reason Long also felt the need to include stupid jokes in his story.  In one scene the president of the museum, Harris's superior, is riding a city bus with Harris, talking to Harris about the nightmarish mutilation suffered by Ulman. He and Harris stand up a few blocks before their stop, and then the bus driver slams on the brakes and the president falls backwards and sits in the lap of a fat middle-aged woman.  What the hell is this slapstick doing in my horror story?

It is a close one, but I have to give this one a marginal thumbs down.

"Flame of Life" (1939)

On the contents page this is called "The Flame of Life," but on page 101, the page on which the story starts, the title appears as "Flame of Life."  On the publication page it also appears without the article, and with a copyright date of 1939.  I wouldn't even have noticed this trivial discrepency if isfdb hadn't listed both titles in Long's bibliography as if they were different stories published 20 years apart, one in 1939, and one in 1959.  Maybe the later one is a revision?  Anyway, it looks like the story appeared first in October 1939's Science Fiction, and was reprinted in June 1959's Future Science Fiction.  Maybe Long is like a clever grad student who writes a paper on prostitution in 19th century France for a women's studies class and then the following semester submits it to the prof of a class on French history.

Marshall is a shy lonely man, also an elite pilot.  Back in New York after the highest altitude flight of all time, Marshall glows in the dark, the result of exposure to cosmic rays! These cosmic rays also have given him the intermittent ability to see into the past or the future: when he looks at an old building he has a vision of how it looked in the 18th century, and sees a guy walking out of it wearing a powdered wig.  When he looks at one woman he sees her as a dead skeleton, when he looks at another he sees her as a little girl.  He even sees a huge saber-toothed tiger.

Marshall, taking a walk, comes to the river, where he witnesses a pretty young woman in worn clothes, a transplant from the Middle West who couldn't make it in the Big Apple, try to drown herself.  He rescues her, and they fall deeply in love. Marshall visits a scientist friend, who explains how the cosmic rays must have energized the "radiogens" in Marshall's body, giving him "godlike" perceptions.  He gives Marshall, and we poor readers, a lecture on entropy.  I guess entropy is one of Long's hobby horses.

When the extra energy in Marshall's radiogens runs out, the scientist laments that Marshall is no longer godlike.  But Marshall, who has his priorities straight, declares that he still feels godlike, because he is in love!  I have to admit this happy ending took me by surprise.  I thought maybe Marshall was going to see into the future and find that his girlfriend had dumped him, or turned into a nag of a wife.  Ignorance is bliss, Marshall!

Maybe a good writer could make this material work, but Long's style doesn't do anything for me, so the story is limp.

"Giant in the Forest" (1955)

This one was first published in Science Fiction Quarterly.

Peter is a physician in the 23rd century, stationed at a teleporter facility.  Spaceships have long been obsolete, and mankind now explores the galaxy by teleporting to virgin planets.  The teleportation process can harm the traveler, physically or psychologically, so Peter has his hands full.

When Peter's brother, one of the explorers, returns to report that he has discovered on Callix Six a village of artistic pre-industrial people who need medical help, Peter, and his telepathic Martian friend, teleport to the planet.  The people of Callix Six are run down, anemic, exhausted.  Peter and his companion discover that the villagers don't eat; instead, they are looked after by a fourteen foot tall giant who regularly injects them with nutrients.  Freed from the need to work as farmers or hunters, the villagers have time to become great craftsmen and artists, producing beautiful homes and furniture.

The villagers are ailing because the giant got knocked unconscious by a falling tree in a nearby forest.  Peter arouses the giant by shooting him full of caffeine.  The giant jumps up and runs to the village to inject all the villagers with his life-sustaining solution.  Peter and the Martian figure that the giant is a child, and the villagers elaborate toys or pets, put under his care to teach him responsibility.

While the ideas in the story are OK, Long fails to deliver them with any emotional impact, and his writing style is poor, so the story is bland and boring.  "Giant in the Forest" also includes material that feels extraneous, like talk about how the Martian paints in the style of Gauguin, but uses his telepathy to produce work superior to Gauguin's, and stuff about Peter's relationships with his brother and his girlfriend.  I expected there to be a pay off on Callix Six that somehow related to the Martian's artistic ability or Peter's relationships back home: maybe the giant would want to take the Martian captive and add him to his stable of artists?  Maybe Peter would teach the giant about mature adult relationships between equals?  But after finishing the story I have to suspect that those passages were just filler.

I'm afraid I am panning all three of the stories in Odd Science Fiction.

************

Disappointing.  Long seems to have interesting ideas, but the stories in Odd Science Fiction he builds around those ideas feel like unpolished drafts burdened with passages that should have been excised, and are perhaps present merely to inflate the page count.

I'm not giving up on Long yet; in the next few days I plan on reading some stories of Long's which can be found for free online, at SFFAudio.com and Gutenberg.org. Maybe I still haven't read any of the stories which earned Long those awards.

*************

The last two pages of Odd Science Fiction are covered in tiny print describing "Other Belmont Books" that "You Will Want To Read."  They aren't lying--I do want to read four or five of them!

Most of the titles Belmont is advertising are genre fiction: spies, cowboys, detectives, horror, and SF.  An exception sits at the top of the list: Union Square, the "giant All-American novel" which we are told has been "acclaimed by all critics."  According to Wikipedia, communist intellectual Mike Gold called Union Square "a gold brick, an utter bourgeois sham," but I guess the people at Belmont missed that issue of The New Masses.  (Favorite title of an article from New Masses: "Five Songs About Lenin.") The people at Belmont also assure you that this is a complete edition of Union Square, which I guess they felt was necessary because two of their Western novels, Feud at Blue Canyon (original title: Bandits of the Barrens) and Black Creek Buckaroo, and a mystery, Murder in the Family, which the New York Times hailed as "A baffler of the first order," are abridged.  I wonder if the abridgment made Murder in the Family more or less baffling.

I could probably be described as a bourgeois sham myself, but Union Square is not one of the Belmont books I'd like to read.  Neither is Tales of the Frightened, a transcript of radio broadcasts by Boris Karloff.  Like everybody, I like ol' Boris, but I've listened to some of the broadcasts at the Internet Archive, and they are pretty terrible, five minute long stories written by Michael Avallone that failed to scare me or even keep my attention.

Robert Silverberg is represented with a collection called Godling Go Home!, which internet SF maven Joachim Boaz reviewed recently, which I might read.  There are four selections by Frank Belknap Long on the list, including Odd Science Fiction.  I would buy Long's It Was The Day of the Robot based on title and cover illustration alone, and I am curious about the stories in Belmont's edition of The Hounds of Tindalos, which is split into two volumes.  Four anthologies edited by Ivan Howard, including my beloved Novelets of Science Fiction, are advertised, and I would probably buy them if I spotted them in the flesh.

Well, let's cross our fingers and hope I have a better experience with Frank Belknap Long and Belmont 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!    

Second Wave of Novelets: Simak, Long and Del Rey

The self-proclaimed "Book of the Year" strikes again--here are three more selections from 1963's Novelets of Science Fiction, a collection of 1950s tales from "modern masters of science fiction."  In our last episode, Poul Anderson took the lead in the race to be finest novelet; let's see if Clifford Simak, Frank Belknap Long or Lester del Rey can knock him off his perch.

"...And the Truth Shall Make You Free" by Clifford Simak (1953)

The text on the front and back of Novelets of Science Fiction claims that the stories it contains never before appeared in paperback.  Maybe this kind of claim would go unchallenged in 1963, when this anthology first appeared, but today even lazy people like myself have the isfdb at our fingertips and we can try to  keep the boys in the advertising department honest.  According to the isfdb, this story appeared in Strangers in the Universe, a 1957 paperback collection of Simak stories, but under a variant title, "The Answers."  Very sneaky!

Simak is one of those guys who is always down on humanity.  In his stories, robots, aliens, dogs, ants, whatever, are proven to be superior to humans.  And if there are no bugs or droids to compare us to, Simak will claim that primitive rural or nomadic human societies are better than industrialized urban human societies.  If you aren't buying what Simak is selling, you call him a misanthropic anti-Western luddite.  If you are buying it, you call him "science fiction's premier pastoralist."      

In "...And the Truth Shall Make You Free" a space ship lands near an abandoned village (Simak takes pains to point out that it is not an arrogant disruptive city, but a village) and four beings, representatives of a multicultural galactic civilization, step out.  There is an alien called a Globe, who floats around.  There is a Human, and a Dog (by the time this story takes place dogs have achieved the ability to talk) and a Spider (as with canines, arachnids are also the equal or superior of humans in this story.)  The dog still seems kindly disposed to humanity, but the spider seems to hold a grudge against us, maybe because of all that Raid we've been spraying on his ancestors.

The village was built by a mutant strain of humans who were better than the run of the mill humans like you and me, who, we are told, only just barely qualified for membership in the galactic civilization and are good for nothing but making machines.  His three comrades fly back into space, but the human remains to explore, and eventually finds the superior strain of human beings.  Long ago they deserted the village to live on isolated farms.  They spend all their time working the land, and, in their free time, they sit on their porches and gossip (we are assured this is "kindly" gossip.)  This is Simak's idea of paradise.

The galactic human senses that these people are happy because they know some great Truth with a capital "T."  He lives with them and works the land with them for some time, and eventually they reveal to him this great Truth--that the universe has no purpose and life has no significance.

This is more of an idea than a story.  It is interesting that Simak sees the absolute refutation of religion as the foundation of a stable and happy society instead of as a cause for despair, terror, and chaos, as many others have.  But not very interesting.

Simak is an able writer and he gets right to the point, and the Truth came as a surprise to me (I expected the Truth to be "be kind" or something like that) so I'm going to grade "...And the Truth Shall Make You Free" as "acceptable."

"Night Fear" by Frank Belknap Long (1953)

Frank Belknap Long has a good reputation, but in late 2011 I read his novel Survival World and was bewildered by how terrible it was.  (My one star Amazon review can be found here.)  Maybe that novel is not a characteristic sample of his body of work?

"Night Fear" is based on the idea that Lunar colonists might construct a base with artificial gravity, artificial sunlight, and a whole array of devices to create the convincing illusion they are living on Earth.  The moon colonists in this story go so far as to fool kids into believing they are on Earth until their eighth birthdays.  In the story a seven-year-old is broken-hearted when he figures out the truth.  Long keeps the reader in the dark as to what the secret is until the sixth and final page, and I actually was surprised; I thought they were on Earth and the secret was that the little boy and his mother were aliens or robots living a lie among real humans.

The story works, and the idea that living on the Moon is such a hell that you would keep it from your kids is an interesting contrast to the optimism of Robert Heinlein's work, in which space colonists (in "The Menace From Earth" or The Rolling Stones, for example) quickly develop robust and proud societies imbued with patriotism.  

I liked "Night Fear," but don't ask me how a six-page story qualifies as a "novelet."        

Cover illustrates the Alfred Coppel story

"I Am Tomorrow" by Lester del Rey (1952)

Of all the stories in Novelets of Science Fiction this is the one I faced with the most trepidation.  (I know, First World problems.  The kids are still saying that, right?)  It is long, 45 pages, and when I recently read Del Rey's "Nerves" I found it to be kind of a drag.  You can believe I groaned when I realized this story is about a US politician who aspires to the presidency; I was afraid this story would follow an election campaign.  Fictional election campaigns bore me to death.  I was relieved when the story turned out to be a crazy time travel and civil war story full of horrible violence.

Tom Blake is an idealistic politician who just won election as Governor of an unnamed state.  His brother James is a genius inventor, who has developed a ray pistol with an integrated force field.  Tom and James want to distribute the pistol widely, believing that if every man is armed with one then peace and equality will result.  Did A. E. Van Vogt or Robert Heinlein ghost write this story?

Before Tom even has a chance to celebrate winning the gubernatorial election people from 40 years in the future suck his mind out of his brain and implant it in the body of Jed, a working class schlub who happens to be the fastest shot of the year 2000!  Tom's mind has been captured by the police force of the dictator who rules the entire world 40 years in the future.  Who is this dictator?  Tom's older self!

The rebels who are always trying to overthrow year 2000 Tom rescue Jed without realizing Jed's body is now inhabited by 1960 Tom's mind.  Jed is given the job of assassinating year 2000 Tom during the next uprising.  Tom (1960 version) isn't sure which group is worse, world dictator Tom and his Iron Guard or the rebels, and Del Rey doesn't make it clear which side the reader is supposed to sympathize with.  The uprising fails, 1960 Tom flubs his shot at 2000 Tom, and lots of people get killed.  Del Rey doesn't romanticize the fighting, but rather includes lots of friendly fire incidents and gory wounds in order to make the reader doubt the uprising is worth it.

This story isn't bad.  Besides all the shooting and mind transference and time travel there is quite a bit of talk about time paradoxes and rumination about free will.  If the story has a "point" it seems to be to debunk morality: we aren't really responsible for our actions because everything is determined, and idealism has to be tempered by realism.  Del Rey ascribes both positive and negative attributes to both the dictator and the rebels, and suggests both sides are acting reasonably in response to the circumstances Del Rey puts them in.  One character who admits to being consciously amoral is not denounced, and all the other characters in the story become less moral and idealistic as the story progresses, but we still get a happy ending.

Not a great story, but definitely better than "Nerves."

**********

All three of these stories have some entertainment value, have somewhat odd points of view, and can surprise the reader, so I think all three are worth reading.  But none of them is very good, and I don't think any of them is superior to Poul Anderson's "The Chapter Ends."

In our next installment we look at the final two stories in Novelets of Science Fiction, those of James Blish and Arthur C. Clarke, and make our final determination of who is king of the novelets!