Three early 1970s stories from 1976's The Best of A. E. van Vogt

In 1976 Pocket Books put out a 256-page collection of stories by MPorcius Fiction Log's favorite Canadian (sorry, Norm!) entitled The Best of A. E. van Vogt.  When I read this book's entry on isfdb a week or so ago I found it irresistible and rushed to ebay to purchase a copy. Why irresistible? Well, there's the Harry Bennett cover, which, with its obvious brushstrokes, collage-like elements, beautiful blues and horrifying faces is more like something you'd see in an art museum than on the cover of a SF book. And then there's the intro by Barry N. Malzberg, another of our obsessions here at MPorcius Fiction Log HQ.

Let's take a look at this baby!

"Ah, Careless, Rapturous van Vogt!" by Barry N. Malzberg  

The intro by New Jersey's own Barry Malzberg is dated "Teaneck, N.J., September 10, 1975" and is over two pages long.  The title is actually a paraphrase of something said of van Vogt by Brian Aldiss.  Malzberg argues that van Vogt is difficult to assess and has been "under-assessed" or ignored by the critics (he lists Budrys, Blish, Knight, Russ and Panshin, just their last names, assuming the reader is a SF junkie who will recognize these worthies.)  Malzberg's own theory of van Vogt is that he is the most unique of the Golden Age SF writers:  

Heinlein, Asimov, Del Rey, Kuttner, are marvelous writers making their contributions as a group to a body of literature; van Vogt is standing off by himself building something very personal and unique.

Malzberg, who is a solipsistic sort, then says that he sympathizes with van Vogt because he feels like he has done the same thing in the 1970s that the Canadian mastermind did in the Golden Age, that they are both "sui generis," above all themselves, writers whose work is distinct from the main group of SF writers of their cohort.

Reading Malzberg compare himself in this way to van Vogt brought a smile to my face, because, for years now, I have been enjoying Malzberg and van Vogt in similar ways and seen them as similar writers.  Both eschew conventions and break the rules to produce strange and confusing work, shit that is so crazy and surprising it makes you laugh; both also hit the same themes and topics again and again, even recycling material in the interests of efficiency--for them writing is a business as well as an art.

I felt like with this essay I had already got my money's worth out of The Best of A. E. van Vogt, but there was much more to come, stories I'd never read and page after page of non fiction from van Vogt himself.  Let's check out three stories from the early 1970s, "Don't Hold Your Breath," "All We Have on this Planet," and "Future Perfect," as well as some of the accompanying nonfiction material.

"Introduction"

In his brief (just over a page) intro to this collection van Vogt brings up Marshall McLuhan and his theory of hot and cool media--"Long before McLuhan I did things with my style that were designed to make it even hotter."  He also defends "pulp" writing, and says "pulp" can be used to describe "fiction that has in it an unusual vitality," not neccesarily low quality junk.  Van Vogt brings up Norman Spinrad, whom he claims "maintains" that "people who enjoy pulp writing" are "lesser human beings." According to van Vogt, Spinrad has contempt for the vast majority of humanity and thinks the only people living meaningful lives are "the dissidents of the 1960s."   (My reading of Spinrad's The Men in the Jungle and my abortive effort to read Child of Fortune make me think van Vogt is not exaggerating very much.)  Finally, van Vogt claims that science fiction (which he likes to call "unreality writing") will be found to be "of greater importance than is now evident."

"Don't Hold Your Breath" (1973)

The stories in The Best of A. E. van Vogt include intros by the author, and some have afterwords.  In the intro to "Don't Hold Your Breath" van Vogt does the kind of thing Malzberg often does, jocularly complaining that nobody has read, and almost nobody has heard about, Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd's anthology Saving Worlds and its paperback edition The Wounded Planet, the venue in which "Don't Hold Your Breath" first appeared.  (I read a Malzberg story from The Wounded Planet and Malzberg's own dim appreciation of the anthology's marketability almost a year ago.)

It is the near future, a time of world government and visiphones, and the Earth is running out of oxygen!  The government is having huge underground complexes of tiny apartments built where people can breathe thanks to oxygen manufacturing plants, and also developing drugs which will transform people into flourine-breathers!  (Flourine is being imported to Earth from asteroids.)

Our narrator is Art Atkins, millionaire.  Atkins got rich by fulfilling government contracts for parts of the many subterranean living quarters--his absolute lack of morals and skill at schmoozing and manipulating people served him well in dealing with all-too-corruptible government bureaucrats.  Atkins has a lot in common with Dr. Carl Hazzard from "The Sound of Wild Laughter;" he's an expert on female psychology who juggles numerous mistresses and has a habit of hiding explosive charges here and there for possible future use!

Our convoluted story begins with Art, just days before the oxygen is going to run out, crossing the deserted city (everybody else is already hiding in the local shelter, but Art can wait to the last minute because he has built a secret personal entrance into the shelter) to visit one of his four mistresses.  He has to punch some sense into this chick because she has been defying him!  He assures us that he won't punch her too hard because he doesn't want to ruin her pretty face or curvy body!

It turns out that this mistress of Art's is working for the terrorist underground that opposes the transformation of humankind into flourine-breathers.  These rebels want Art to detonate the explosives he left in the local oxygen plant.  One of these supposed rebels is a double agent working for the government and Art soon goes from rebel hands into government custody. The government wants to know all about Art's secret entrances and hidden bombs, and to severely punish him for his various crimes, but maybe Art's skills at manipulation will help him escape justice!

I read "Don't Hold Your Breath" years ago when I borrowed 2003's Transfinite from the New York Public Library, but I didn't mind reading it again today--it's pretty good.  Art Atkin's narration--thanks to his quirky outdated slang ("I threw on some threads and ankled outside") as well as his abundant self-confidence and shocking amorality--is amusing.  In the Afterword to "Don't Hold Your Breath" van Vogt makes clear that he thinks the current concern over ecology is no more than faddish alarmism ("emotional madness") and opportunism ("The ecology scare, which extravagantly enriched a few writers....") and tells us he focused his story on Art Atkins instead of environmental destruction because he wanted his story to be timeless, not dated once the current pollution-obsession has been forgotten.

"All We Have On This Planet" (1974)          

In the intro to this piece van Vogt relates how, in the 1960s, a bunch of young SF writers appeared who thought SF should be "relevant" and reflect reality, and how the critics quickly jumped on this relevance bandwagon.  Since our man Van has been telling us that he writes "unreality stories" and thinks writing anti-pollution stories is a waste of time, we aren't surprised to hear that he was at odds with the newly revolutionized SF establishment, which declared van Vogt's work "kaput."  Van Vogt doesn't mention the names of any of those new writers here, but he singles out one of the critics, Algis Budrys.  Apparently, at some point Budrys declared he was leaving the SF field (members of the SF community are always quitting for a few years and then coming back) and one of the reasons he said he was doing so was that he found it frustrating that van Vogt still had a paying audience!

Van brags that, despite elite disapproval, his stories kept selling and getting reprinted.  Then he tells us that "All We Have On This Planet" proves that his success is no accident, because in it "I handle reality material of the inelegant type that has been so popular for so long in mainstream fiction and in 'relevant' science fiction."

"All We Have On This Planet" is a wacky satire in which van Vogt parodies literary writers and critics as people who think realistic fiction must include references to using the bathroom and having sex.  The main character of the six-page story is a novelist who craves the approval of others and produces suspense stories by tapping his subconscious via "automatic writing."  In the newspaper, which he sometimes reads while sitting on the toilet, he reads reviews of his own work (complaints that it doesn't reflect reality because it lacks references to bodily functions like going to the bathroom) and the latest news about the alien invasion.  He has two girlfriends, Sleekania, who is a psychic who can read his mind (and dislikes what she finds there) and Devestata, who is a military history buff.  Combining insights from these two women, the novelist calls his father, a brigadier-general at the Pentagon who can speak fourteen Asian languages, and tells him that the Earth space navy should attack the alien invaders every four hours, when they take an hour off to all go to the bathroom at the same time.  This advice saves the Earth.

I guess as a mocking imitation of experimental stories, "All We Have On This Planet" is sometimes written in the third person, sometimes in the first person, switching without warning.

This is a bizarre but memorable novelty, full of strange elements.  It first appeared in a British anthology edited by George Hay, Stopwatch, (according to van Vogt he was asked to contribute something "subversive") and would later be included in a French anthology with a very strange flesh and blood cover illustration by Chris Foss, famous in the SF world for his cold images of huge space ships and machinery (though also responsible for the drawings in the first edition of The Joy of Sex).

Introduction to "War of Nerves"

"War of Nerves" is one of the famous Space Beagle stories and I am already familiar with it and don't want to spend any time on it today, but the intro to the story is remarkable because in it van Vogt presents a kind of theory of science fiction.  Van Vogt brands mainstream literature and TV as "reality fiction," saying that most people like to read and watch TV about real life: "stories about hospitals, crime in the streets, personal tragedies, romantic and married love, etc."

Van Vogt tells us that his "brand of science fiction"--unreality fiction--is more challenging to the reader than reality fiction.

Each paragraph--sometimes each sentence--of my brand of science fiction has a gap in it, an unreality condition.  In order to make it real, the reader must add the missing parts.  He cannot do this out of his past associations.  There are no past associations.  So he must fill in the gaps from the creative part of his brain.  

Van Vogt argues that reading SF changes the readers brain for the better.

This is a fascinating and persuasive theory, and certainly seems to jive with the often confusing experience of reading van Vogt.  Case in point--the famous last line of The Weapon Makers (Malzberg quotes it in his intro to The Best of A. E. van Vogt) includes a word van Vogt just made up and for which he provides very little context.  This also goes along with McLuhan's theory that distinguishes between hot media--that are direct and easy to understand--and cool media--which demand audience participation--though it sounds like here Van is saying his work is "cool," while earlier he implied his work is "hot."

At the same time, you can't deny that this theory appears a little self-serving, as it suggests that van Vot's notoriously opaque work is difficult by design, not incompetence or laziness, and that it is readers who don't "get" van Vogt who are in fact the lazy or dim ones!

"Future Perfect" (1973)

The fourth piece in The Best of A. E. van Vogt is "The Rull," a great story (Malzberg thinks it may be the best thing van Vogt ever wrote) I have read multiple times already and don't feel like reading again today.  The fifth is a lecture on general semantics, one of van Vogt's interests, which I don't feel like reading today, either. But the sixth piece is a story I've never read, "Future Perfect."  In his intro van Vogt promotes SF as a vehicle for philosophical reflection--the SF writer can extrapolate currently fashionable political ideas and depict what a future society in which the "half-baked schemes" of "bleeding hearts" have been made the "law of the land" might look like.

"Future Perfect" is one of those stories about a future society in which the government is running everything.  Over the course of the story we learn that when boys approach puberty their "sex performance capacity" is "placed under control" by drugs, and, when a young man marries one of the small number of women the government computer judges a suitable match, he gets an injection that allows him to have sex, and then a second injection that causes "hormonic alignment" so he can only have sex with his computer-approved wife.  To ease the adoption of this system, the government has also indoctrinated people with new standards of beauty, so that all women are considered beautiful.

(As van Vogt fans know, the Canadian mastermind studied communism in China in preparation for writing his mainstream novel The Violent Man--in the introduction to Future Glitter he brags that he "read and reread approximately 100 books on China and Communism."  Some of the government workers' dialogue in "Future Perfect" suggests van Vogt based this whole idea of controlling sex and marriage on some Chinese Communist Party policy he read about.)

In the economic realm, there is no cash--all transactions are done electronically and carefully tracked by government agents.  You aren't allowed to inherit any money or property from your parents, and when you reach your eighteenth birthday, the government puts a million dollars in an account for you, and any money you earn goes to paying down this debt.  (Most people never pay off the entire debt, but there is no punishment if you chip away at it every week.)

The hero of our story, eighteen-year-old Steven Dalkins, rebels against the system, getting famous by wasting his million dollars and then escaping the government medical facility after his "sex performance capacity" has been reactivated but before he has been conditioned to only have sex with his computer-suggested wife.  After his escape, in theory, he could have sex with any woman he likes!  In practice, he doesn't go on a seduction spree, but instead spends his time organizing a non-violent resistance movement (having thrown away his million, he lives off donations from his followers.)  Much of the story's text follows the conversations of government psychiatrists and bureaucrats as they observe Steven and try to figure out what to do about him; with the help of a computer they try to diagnose whether he is "alienated" or not.  The alienated are dealt with harshly, but since Steven doesn't appear to be alienated, the state can take little direct action against him, as his rebellious acts--the biggest of which is distributing chemicals that allow people to deactivate their "hormonic alignment" and thus choose their own sex partners--are not quite illegal. It also seems like some factions in the government are sympathetic to Steven or see his rebellion as advancing their own not clearly stated agendas.

In the end it turns out that Steven didn't actually want to overthrow the government--he simply wanted to marry a particular woman of his own choice, one the computer would not have accepted because she is his own age (the computer always matches up men with women who are a few years older, because men die earlier than women.)  He is not alienated, but many of his over 50,000 followers are, and some of them have been expressing their alienation through acts of greed and murder.  Steven helps the government round up the alienated (most are exiled to the space colonies, but the murderers, it is hinted, are executed) and it appears that the government will endure, though Steven has made inevitable major reforms of the government's control of sexuality.

Generally, SF writers construct these totalitarian government settings to point out that such government interventions are immoral or inefficient and cause psychological, spiritual or material misery.  In the end of the story it is clear that van Vogt thinks the government control of the people's erotic life has been damaging, having forced them to live lives bereft of love.  But van Vogt doesn't really denounce his future world's economic system, and in his afterword our man Van suggests that the most interesting part of the story is not the oppressive government, but the "alienated."  Taking shots at young people who don't realize how good life is in the 20th century United States compared to life in earlier times and in other countries, he asserts that a certain percentage of people are going to be alienated and rebel due to childhood trauma, regardless of what kind of government they live under: "...in any forseeable future we shall have the same percentage of alienated types as now."  This provocative mechanistic theory of rebellion reminds us again of Carl Hazzard's mechanistic psychological theories in "The Sound of Wild Laughter."

As is typical of van Vogt, this story is a puzzle you have to figure out, but it doesn't have any adventure or human relationship type elements to interest you emotionally--because the fact that the reason for Steven's rebellion is love for a woman his own age is kept as a surprise to the end, there is no opportunity to develop this relationship--this woman has no dialogue and we never even learn her name.  Another issue I had with this story, which may have something to do with the volume's editor and not the author at all, is that there is no indication of when a scene has ended and a new one has begun.  In most fiction there is a blank line or a bunch of asterisks or a transitional phrase ("Three hours later he was in the offices of the head of the department...") to signal that a new scene is beginning, but in "Future Perfect" Steven will be sitting in a room, dealing with a guy, and then he says or does something, we think with that first guy, only to realize a few lines later that it is some time later and Steven is in a totally different room with a totally different guy.  Disconcerting, but, bizarrely, it is disconcerting in a way that van Vogt's writing is always disconcerting, so one wonders if it is a printing error or an intentional van Vogt mind game.

I guess "Future Perfect" is acceptable; I can't say I'm enthusiastic about it.  There are no human relationships or wild images to make it entertaining or emotionally stimulating like we see in some of the work I have mentioned in this blog post like Future Glitter, The Weapon Makers or "The Sound of Wild Laughter."  "Future Perfect" was first published in the third of Vertex's sixteen issues and has since appeared in quite a few American and European collections and anthologies, including Jerry Pournelle's 2020 Vision and a French collection for which it was the title story.

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Reading the first half or so of The Best of A. E. van Vogt has provided some interesting insights into his thinking and career; I'll visit the second half of the volume in the future when I finally read the Silkie stories and reread the Clane and Supermind stories.

In our next episode we take a look at my latest acquisition of work by A. E. van Vogt's largely unrecognized soulmate, Barry Malzberg!

Three 1960s stories by Norman Spinrad from Analog

I have had mixed feelings about Norman Spinrad.  Back in my Manhattan days, long before I started this here blog, I read 1983's Void Captain's Tale and quite enjoyed it as a story about space travel and weird relationships, but when I started 1985's Child of Fortune I quickly abandoned it, sensing it was some kind of hippy utopia travelogue that was going to feel very very long.  Some years later I read 1967's The Men in The Jungle, which I finished but which I thought tedious and absurd; I wasn't crazy about its apparent message (that people who read genre fiction are perverts or Nazis or something) either--Norman, if I want to be insulted, I'll just call up my mother!

On an impulse, while browsing a huge antique mall on Route 70 after touring Westcott House in Springfield, OH, I purchased eleven issues of Analog, all from 1963 or '64, for $22.00.  These issues include three stories by Norman Spinrad--I think these may be Spinrad's first three published stories--and I decided to give them a shot.  All three of these pieces would later show up in Spinrad's 1970 collection The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde, which Joachim Boaz at SFRuminations read and reviewed in its entirety back in 2014.  Let's see what Spinrad's early work is like, and if Joachim and I are on the same page this time.

"The Last of the Romany" (1963)

In the homogenized and sanitized world of the future, in which Tokyo looks exactly the same as New York and almost every position is a bogus make-work job, a man with a mustache and a cigar travels the globe, bumming rides and stowing away on aircraft.  He tells a bartender that he is looking for the gypsies, and that he is keeping the gypsy tradition alive.  What this means in practical terms is that he goes to playgrounds and sings old songs and tells old stories about pirates and heroes to kids, trying to spark in them a sense of adventure and romance and independence, things sorely lacking in the current safe and stable and sterile world.  Before the story ends we readers find reason to believe that the last Romany's efforts have not been in vain, that some kids have been inspired by him, and even that a new era of adventure, for those brave enough to seek it, will soon be found beyond the solar system.

This story is alright; its nostalgia and one-man-carnival elements reminded me of something Ray Bradbury might come up with.    

"Subjectivity" (1964)

"The Last of the Romany" includes some weak but innocuous jokes; "Subjectivity" feels like one big weak joke.

In the future the Earth is so overpopulated that psychological and sociological pressures are going to cause a cataclysm, so the world government is determined to colonize extrasolar planets.  The scientists can't figure out how to make a faster than light drive, so colonists will have to be aboard starships for at least eight years before they reach their destinations.  Unfortunately, experiments indicate that even specially picked specimens, men and women of exceptional mental health, go insane after less than three years in the close confines of a starship.

Here come the jokes.  The government decides to experiment with sending not Earth's best into interstellar space, but "the dregs."  Trigger Warning!  The "dregs" include the mentally ill and homosexuals!  The government sends off a ship with a crew of schizophrenics, one crewed by sadists, one crewed entirely by gay men, one whose crew are all lesbians, among others.  None of these crews survives the psychological pressures of interstellar space.

The government tries a new tack with the thirteenth ship; the crew will be provided with hallucinogenic drugs, and told to take the drugs every day for all eight years of their trip to Centaurus.  Most of this brief story consists of the spacers dealing with their hallucinations.  At first the spacefarers can control their hallucinations, and share them; if somebody hallucinates a giant snake, she can make the other crewmembers see it.  Then the hallucinations, which for some reason are not cuddly kitty cats or the future equivalents of Sean Connery and Sophia Loren like you'd expect people stuck in a ship for sixteen years to summon up, but ravenous monsters like a dragon, a tyrannosaur, and the aforementioned Hyborian-sized snake, take on minds of their own.  Afraid of getting eaten, the spacers use their drug-induced powers to teleport the ship back to Earth, where a military unit has to confront the monsters, which have become all too real.

This story is ridiculous and it is not redeemed by being funny.  Thumbs down.  (Analog editor and SF legend John Campbell thought it good enough to include in the anthology Analog 4--tastes differ!)

"Outward Bound" (1964)

Here's the stuff!  A real hard science-fiction tale with starships, Einsteinian time dilation, paradigm shifts, space merchants, a ruthless and short-sighted government, even a sense-of-wonder man-is-going-to-master-the-Universe ending, all those classic SF elements we all love.

Mankind has colonized over 60 star systems, even though there is no FTL drive; people travelling between the systems go into a deep sleep and wake up decades later at their destination.  This means that Earth is always many years ahead of the colonies technologically, with space merchants selling the latest technology from Earth to the colonies, primarily in exchange for raw materials.  The story centers on two of the oldest space farers, a merchant and an admiral in the Earth space navy, who find themselves at odds when a scientist who may be able to invent a FTL drive flees from Earth.  The merchant wants to sell the egghead's ideas, and the colonies will be eager to buy them (FTL would put them on an equal footing with Earth), but the Earth government wants to keep FTL under wraps to maintain its dominance.

Lots of compelling and entertaining things in this story: descriptions of the technical and psychological aspects of space flight, starships chasing each other, an aside about what it means to be a gypsy or a Jew, characters with interesting and believable motivations who have to endure bizarre scenarios like being alone in a room for twenty years working on math equations and to make hard decisions about what their duties and interests really are.  I compared "Last of the Romany" to Bradbury; "Outward Bound" is perhaps reminiscent of Poul Anderson.

I like it!

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So, I'm scoring these moderately good, poor, and quite good.  How did Joachim rank them?  Well, we essentially agree on "The Last of the Romany" and "Outward Bound." Our big disagreement is about "Subjectivity;" I thought it was lame, but of the three it is Joachim's favorite!  He seems to like it because it is "ultimately nihilistic" and suggests that mankind is not up to the task of conquering outer space.

In his review of The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde Joachim stresses that Spinrad's work is typically "bleak" and full of "rage," and notes that "The Last of the Romany" and "Outward Bound" are perhaps not very representative of Spinrad's oeuvre as a whole.  Maybe this is a clue that Spinrad isn't really for me, that I liked his most hopeful and traditional stories!

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I thought the incentive plan described in this box on page 44 of Analog's January 1964 issue was interesting:

Click or squint to read

I wonder if Anderson and the other writers actually tailored their stories in an effort to secure the financial prizes described, which were awarded based on readers' votes. Anderson, the winner of the October '63 issue, got an extra $190.00.  I think that is like $1,500.00 in 2016 money!  Jackpot!

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The last page of the January 1964 issue of Analog is a full page ad for merchandise from Edmund Scientific Co. of Barrington, NJ.  (You don't realize how cool your home state is until you leave.)  One of the items on offer is a set of dinosaurs and terrain molded in "unbreakable plastic" that sounds pretty damn awesome!  These little "bronthosauruses" and dimetrodons are not just for kids--they are usable as "off-beat decorations!"  I'd love to see a photo of these toys; I had a ton of plastic dinosaurs as a kid, and still have quite a few, and wonder if I am familiar with the molds they used for this set.

Doomsman by Harlan Ellison and Thief of Thoth by Lin Carter

Lin Carter has been on my mind recently; he came up in a twitter conversation during my recent visit to Chicago, where everywhere I went I was confronted with mysterious flags with a "W" on them, and then, despite my assertion that I didn't think Carter was a particularly good writer, I bought a copy of Carter's Invisible Death because of the cool Don Maitz cover.  A few days later, Harlan Ellison was brought to mind by Barry Malzberg's comments about him in 1976's The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.  I took all this as a sign that it was time to read my copy of BT50244, a slim volume printed in 1972 that includes Ellison's 1967 "Doomsman" and Carter's 1968 "The Thief of Thoth."  This curious publication, a Belmont/Tower Science-Fiction Double, was previously in the collection of a Shan, as indicated by the bold print on the green page edges. The odd little book is bereft of page numbers and heralds Ellison and Carter as two of America's most honored writers.

Fellow SF fan Shan, we salute you!

"Doomsman" by Harlan Ellison (1967)

"Doomsman," which is like 68 pages long, first appeared in an earlier Belmont double whose cover illo makes it look like a thrilling tale of SF violence.  Violence and dames! [UPDATE, November 5, 2016: In the comments, ukjarry sheds light on the history of "Doomsman," pointing out an earlier publication and a source of inspiration for Ellison!]  

In the year 2179 the Americas are, in theory, united under the rule of a single ruthless authoritarian government.  In reality, all over the New World there are upstarts, rebel groups and petty barons who threaten the government's authority on the local and regional level.  The central government lacks the resources to field a military establishment commensurate with the task of suppressing all these troublemakers, so instead they maintain a cadre of assassins trained at a secret academy hidden in the Rocky Mountains.  One of the bizarro world Harry Potters attending this school is Juanito Montoya, a feral boy from the Argentine wilderness, dragged to the Rockies to bend to use of the government the skills he learned while living as the Mowgli of the Pampas!

If 70 pages is "full length," then yeah, sure.

Mind probes at the assassins' school suggest that Juanito is the son of one of those very upstart lords the school for murder was created to deal with!  Juanito, who cannot clearly recall his early childhood, is determined to escape his service to the state his father rebelled against and figure out the truth about his heritage.  Suspecting a clue awaits him in the white north, Juanito wangles an assignment to Alaska, where the government forces have their hands full fighting the mongrel descendants of the local Eskimos and a Soviet-Chinese "horror battalion" which invaded the 49th state during World War III!  Then it's off to Chicago, where he encounters a hideous dwarf and liberates from the midget rapist's torture dungeon a woman who can lead him to his dad.

Maybe "liberates" isn't the word...Juanito seizes her, confines her, threatens her and tortures her until she leads him to his father's secret city on the bottom of the Pacific.  Juanito's father will soon lead the petty barons in a revolution against the government and bring a new order of peace and justice, and Juanito hopes to join this new order.  But, because of what the government has done to Juanito's body (implanted into his skull a booby trap that will kill his father) and his soul (demonstrated by his treatment of that female captive, who turns out to be his sister), he is incompatible with the new order--men like him must be destroyed if the new order is to flourish!

Ellison's writing isn't subtle or elegant, it is loud and fast, feverish, with metaphors like "the fear mounted in him like a crazy red monkey" and all kinds of extravagant, over-the-top action.  The reader witnesses a heaping helping of horrific torture and sickening violence, all elaborately described.  There's also plenty of high tech science fiction devices, traditional ones like energy guns, forcefields, and vibroknives, and a few that are somewhat more original.

Is "Doomsman" a commentary on the use by the United States of unsavoury methods in its prosecution of the Cold War?  (Near the end of the story Ellison warns us that sometimes means cannot be justified by ends.)  An ultraviolent exploitation story quickly banged out by Ellison for some money?  A parody of violent adventure fiction?  (It brought to mind Norman Spinrad's Men in the Jungle.)  Whatever the case, it's a brisk engaging read, though it is so yucky, what with the eye-gougings and dismemberings, that I am reluctant to call it "fun."  Moderate recommendation.

"The Thief of Thoth" by Lin Carter (1968)

Like the Ellison story, Carter's "The Thief of Thoth" was first printed in an earlier Belmont double, and it also has an exciting cover; this one shows an astronaut absconding with some king's crown, jumping into his rocket as a horde of creepos nips at his heels (it brings to mind the opening sequence of the first Indiana Jones movie.)  "The Thief of Thoth" is somewhat longer than "Doomsman," occupying maybe ten more pages and being printed in a smaller font.

The main character of "The Thief of Thoth" is Ser Hautley Quicksilver, a "Licensed Legal Criminal and Confidential Agent" of the far future.  The idea of the government formally giving someone a license to defy its authority and despoil its citizens is a curious one, and if the story was written later I might have thought it a satirical reference to Richard Nixon (Watergate), Teddy Kennedy (Chappaquiddick) or the Clintons (check your local paper for the latest outrage), but seeing as the story predates all those lamentable events, I am going to guess Ser Hautley's license to murder and steal is just a silly joke or something akin to James Bond's license to kill, a talismanic embodiment of the ordinary man's wish for total freedom from responsibility.

The tagline spoils the revelation
that appears in the 31st and final chapter

"The Thief of Thoth" reads like a pastiche, homage or imitation of Jack Vance.  Like several Vance characters (Magnus Ridolph and Miro Hetzel spring to mind), Quicksilver is kind of like a private eye, and he has gotten rich accepting commissions to undertake risky jobs, though in Ser Hautley's case these seem to mostly be burglary and assassination jobs (I suspect Ser Hautley's personality is based on Vance's Cugel the Clever, an amoral type with an inflated ego.)  Our hero lives on a tiny planetoid protected by a cloud of asteroids; only Ser Hautley can navigate the swarm.  Over the course of a single day Ser Hautley is approached by three potential clients, all of whom want him to steal an artifact of the extinct race of reptile people of planet Thoth.  The artifact, a jewel-encrusted crown, is protected by a cult of human colonists and their subterranean maze of death traps.  

Like numerous Vance books, "The Thief of Thoth" is set in a galaxy of many settled planets in which interstellar travel and communication are trivial, where people wear elaborate clothes and dye their skin unusual colors, read lots of newspapers and magazines, and eat weird complicated food.  After the three interviews, Ser Hautley flies over 1000 light years in less than two hours, to the Thieves' Planet where he dons a high tech disguise and seeks an audience with the one man, a master burglar, who has tangled with the cult of Thoth and lived to tell the tale.  (Reminding me of Barry Malzberg's oeuvre, a firm on the Thieves' Planet offers dream therapy in which you can murder and rape people, while another establishment can construct androids for you to "murder" that look exactly like your parents.)  A clue turns up that directs our hero to Earth, where he wears a different disguise.

The tone of "The Thief of Thoth" is comical (e. g., the author includes jocular references to two other prominent SF editor/critic/historians, naming a planet "Wollheim," and an alcoholic beverage "Moskowitz"), and Carter ratchets up the level of silly jokes during the Earth scenes, describing Earth as a primitive backwater where nothing interesting has ever happened and so on.  "The Thief of Thoth" also has characteristics of a shaggy dog story: Ser Hautley never gets the info he wants from the burglar, so his trips to Thieves' Planet and Earth were essentially a waste of time. But Ser Hautley still makes it to Thoth, and resolves the plot through the use of devices which confer invisibility.  (Carter stuffs the story with high tech spy devices until it is close to bursting.)  It turns out everybody wants the crown because it contains microdata plans for revolutionary weapons systems that will give whoever has them the ability to easily master the universe; the Thoth cultists, however, have figured out a way to keep the data from prying eyes, so galactic stability is secure for now.

This story is silly and trifling.  It is not offensively bad, but I'd be hard-pressed to recommend it.  Carter seems like a guy utterly devoted to SF who had a lot of fun writing "The Thief of Thoth," and I admire his dedication and enthusiasm, but I can't say that I found his sense of fun infectious.

Merely acceptable.

**********

If you are a big fan of Ellison and/or Carter it would make sense for you to get a copy of this Belmont/Tower Double, as I don't think these stories are widely available.  Since the stories are sort of ordinary, however, general readers should feel no need to go out of their way to acquire a copy....unless you love old advertisements!

At the end of BT50244 there are six pages of ads for books, but none are SF books!  There's a consumer's guide to marijuana, a home buyer's guide, a book on childbirth recommended by an anthropologist, a cookbook, a history of the Sahara desert, a western and a gothic romance.  I guess Belmont/Tower had their hand in every market!

Click to enlarge in case you are looking for advice from 1972
 on how to buy a house, give birth and get high 

Spawn of the Death Machine by Ted White

"This is the Com-Comp.  Your creator."
"I don't believe that."
"You are an artificially constructed human being, a mobile data-gathering device."

I recently praised two pieces of writing by Amazing and Fantastic editor Ted White, a short story that was apparently the first (and only) episode in an abortive series of stories about a barbarian exploring a strange world, and an autobiographical story in which Ted's buddy and fellow jazz critic Harlan Ellison abused their friendship.  I thought both items well-written, and became curious about White's work.  I still had some credit at the iTunes Store, a Christmas gift from my brother, and used it to purchase the Gateway digital edition of White's 1968 novel, The Spawn of the Death Machine.

Robert Tanner wakes up naked in a tiny metal room.  A computer voice tells him he was created to act as a data-collecting device, and now is the time for him to go gather up that data!  Tanner isn't sure how much of that to believe--he thinks he's a real human being!  A door opens into the sunlight and Tanner is sent out into what the computer calls "the world of Man;" he is to return in one year to have his memories downloaded.

Tanner has been released into New York City, but it is not the NY we know and ♥, it is a ruin grown over with vegetation, and almost completely abandoned!  Tanner wanders around Manhattan for five days, meeting no people, and starts getting a pain in his stomach.  Tanner's memory of his previous life is almost entirely gone, so much so that he has forgotten that he has to eat!  Things start to slowly come back to him, though.  (TRIGGER WARNING: Tanner's first meal is a domestic cat that he eats raw!)

It is when Tanner leaves Manhattan that his troubles truly begin.  (I know what that's like!)  All the bridges are down, so he swims to the Bronx, where he is promptly captured by cannibals!  (These guys haven't yet joined the feline cuisine craze.)

When his captors beat him Tanner gets angry, and goes Lou Ferrigno on them, killing their leader with his bare hands. Tanner, it turns out, is super strong. Accompanied by Rifka, a teenage girl whose life up to now has been characterized by rape and incest, Tanner marches on, leaving the cannibals and New York behind.  

As Tanner and Rifka cross the post apocalyptic landscape westward to California, battling rapists, dogs, and bears and making friends with various people and animals, Tanner's true identity, and his relationship to the computer that once ruled civilization, and then centuries ago destroyed it, gradually become clear.

In the first half of the book I suspected that White was trying to disgust the reader; besides all the explicit violence there are numerous references to vomit, defecation, semen, saliva, parasites, scabs, blood, etc.  We hear a lot about bad smells.  This eases up in the second half of the novel, and I now wonder if White meant this as a satire of traditional adventure fiction, in which close quarters combat, torture, the life of the "noble savage," and being shipwrecked or otherwise lost in the wilderness are romanticized, sanitized, and/or sensationalized. (As I say this I have Norman Spinrad's 1967 novel Men in the Jungle in mind.)  

Some of the towns Tanner and Rifka encounter are certainly vehicles for satire.  One has a culture based on the tiny collection of books that survived the apocalypse, most prominent among them Henry Miller's Sexus and a bound collection of Playboy magazines.  Another town, cut off from the rest of the world under a geodesic dome, is run stringently on eugenicist lines by a cadre of scientists who maintain a society of exactly 500 men and 500 women, and breed them for intelligence and other desirable genetic attributes.  The twist is that the scientists are "Negroes" and one's social status is largely determined by how dark one's skin is, the darker the better.  (The dome society's ruler is called "Mr. Black.")

Our travelers' journey ends in California, where, among the redwoods, lives a community of telepathic (more "empathic," I guess) nudist Indians who are in tune with each other and with nature.  White, who includes more than one obese villain in the book, makes sure to tell us that not one of these people is fat!  Tanner and Rifka are welcomed into this paradise, but Tanner cannot truly enter this Promised Land-- the empathic waves can't penetrate his stainless steel skull!

In the epilogue Tanner returns to New York to tell the computer that humankind will be better off without high technology, at least for a while.

I found The Spawn of the Death Machine entertaining, though I am not sure how widely I can recommend it.  In part I enjoyed it the way you might enjoy an exploitation B movie; the description of a cannibal rapist that includes the phrase "his genitals covered with the glistening slime of a rutting animal" makes me laugh, but maybe some would find such prose repellent.  The satire can be wacky (and what kind of book tries to tell you life in California is better than New York life?) but the satirical parts are not long-winded or hectoring, and, for me, the wackiness is part of the charm.  So I'm giving Spawn of the Death Machine a thumbs up, though with the caveat that it may take a particular kind of reader to appreciate it.

Beyond the Barrier by Damon Knight

Internet science fiction maven Joachim Boaz recently posted on twitter a "Wall of Shame" of what he termed "some of the worst SF ever written."  When I suggested that, despite Mr. Boaz's harsh assessment, I would be curious to read some of these books, he made me put my money where my mouth was. He mailed some of the Wall Of Shame books to me, as a trade for my superfluous copy of Jack Vance's The Face (a novel I adore; I retain the DAW printing) and Norman Spinrad's The Men in the Jungle (which I found to be a tedious and overblown attack on adventure fiction and those who read it.) Mr. Boaz picked out one of the Wall of Shame titles in particular, literally daring me to read Damon Knight's Beyond the Barrier. Nobody would mistake me for a member of the Damon Knight fan club, but I am curious about Knight's career, and so this weekend I met Mr. Boaz's challenge, reading the 1965 McFadden paperback of Beyond the Barrier which he sent me.

I like the typefaces used for the text, and the square motif that appears on the title pages. The front and back covers are pleasant and unusual.  The advertisement on the final page, which suggests that if you liked Beyond the Barrier you will also enjoy a book that sets out to prove the legitimacy of fortunetellers, is amusing.  If I'm permitted to judge this book by its cover, it's a winner!

Alright, what about the story, 135 pages of what a Canadian newspaper considered absorbing and spicy excitement?  Beyond the Barrier, an expanded version of a serialized 1963-4 magazine story, the Tree of Time, is the story of Gordon Naismith.

Naismith is a college professor in the Los Angeles of the future, the year 1980, a future of space travel, visiphones, and a machine that can duplicate you so you can teach five or ten classes at once; when class is over you get reintegrated and you have memories of all five to ten lectures!  (Get your asses to the unemployment line, adjuncts!)  Naismith is a victim of amnesia, and only has memories of the last four years.  This is due to being injured in an airplane crash while in the armed services... or so he thinks!

Strange interactions with odd students and other mysterious characters, and then crystal clear dreams, begin to reveal to Naismith that he is not native to the time and place in which he is living; in fact, he is from a caste-bound zero gravity environment, 20,000 years in the future, where he was a dancer in a zero gee entertainment troupe and a soldier in a war against aliens.  He is here in 20th century LA on some kind of mission, which he doesn't remember, and isn't sure he wants to pursue. But other travelers from his home milieu are manipulating him into doing what they want, shutting off his options by stealing the money from his bank account and getting him indicted for murder!

The plot is twisted and convoluted, and several times it turns out that what Naismith (and perhaps we readers) thought was going on is not quite what is really going on.  Halfway through the book Naismith is transported to the future, where he meets various factions, and Knight keeps it unclear how much of what they tell Naismith is true and which (if any) of the factions is worthy of our sympathy.

In the end, Naismith triggers a social revolution in the space station-based aristocratic society of 20,000 years in the future: the servant class and technical class are exterminated, the aristocrats become cattle to be eaten by aliens(!), and the Earth is repopulated with the creative artistic class!  

Knight is famous for his harsh criticism of A. E. Van Vogt's work, and some claim Knight materially damaged Van Vogt's career.  So, when I read Knight's Hell's Pavement some years ago I was struck by how oddly reminiscent it was of much of Van Vogt's fiction, including such elements as secret worlds that are suddenly revealed, and the discovery of secret cabals that are manipulating history and events behind the scenes.  I felt the same way reading Beyond the Barrier, which inspires in the reader the same kind of confusion and unease, the feeling that the world makes no sense, that Van Vogt often evokes, and includes, like much of Van Vogt's work, a protagonist who figures out the mysteries of the world as well as of his own mind and grows in power until he is master of all he surveys.  

Here's a party game for ya: if you could go
 back in time only once would you prevent
the Titanic disaster, JFK's murder, C.
Lombard's death, or  D. Hammarskjold's death?

Knight's style is weak and there is little characterization, but there are fun SF gadgets, robots and weapons and vehicles and so forth, and the crazy plot kept me interested.  I'm going to have to side with the Canadians on this one; I enjoyed Beyond the Barrier.  I'd judge it moderately good.

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

After reading Beyond the Barrier and drafting the above blog post I looked at the Wikipedia article on the novel, and read Joachim Boaz's hostile review from August 2011.  It turns out that I'm not the first to see similarities between Beyond the Barrier and the writing of A. E. Van Vogt--it is nice to know it's not just in my head!

Joachim gave Beyond the Barrier only one out of five stars while I am giving it a positive review; does this mean I can rebut his criticisms?

Not really.  I agree that the book is short on characterization and is "all plot" and that it includes "ludicrous" scenes.  But whereas Joachim found the "continuous action...utterly dull" and some of the more "ludicrous" scenes irritating or even offensive (Naismith, practically out of nowhere, calls a young woman "a dirty little slut" right to her face) I found the novel to be a wild and crazy thrill ride, punctuated by totally unexpected moments of insanity.  I think it just boils down to Joachim and I having different tastes.

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

Thanks to Joachim for bringing this book to my attention.  Hopefully I will find the rest of his Wall of Shame titles equally congenial!