1965 stories by John Baxter, E. C. Tubb, Ernest Hill, and John T. Phillifent

The rumors are true!  The staff of MPorcius Fiction Log have dragged themselves away from Space Hulk: Ascension and tiny jars of chocolate pudding long enough to read four more SF stories from 1965, the year Canada (you, like painter and novelist Wyndham Lewis, may know that country as "the hideous icebox") adopted its current flag.  These four tales constitute the remainder of New Writings in SF 6, which we started dissecting in our last offering to the interwebs.  As noted in that post, Joachim Boaz has already analyzed this artifact of the British Commonwealth's contribution to speculative fiction, and you can make your own judgments of its contents free of charge and without delay by reading one of its four editions at the internet archive.

"The Hands" by John Baxter

Baxter was born in Australia but has lived much of his life in Europe and America, producing a body of film criticism and several biographies of Hollywood figures like George Lucas, Woody Allen and Robert De Niro as well as a number of SF stories.  "The Hands" was reprinted in 2016 in Ann and Jeff Vandermeer's The Big Book of Science Fiction, a 1200-page book that seems to be designed for use by college professors as it appears to try to include a writer from every possible identity group while leaving out authors who might offend the sensibilities of an academic.  Maybe they needed an Australian and thought A. Bertram Chandler was too politically incorrect?

"The Hands" is a pretty good horror story about an alien invasion.  In a future in which the cities, after expanding, were then abandoned for the countryside, seven astronauts return to Earth from an exploratory mission to planet Huxley (perhaps named after Thomas Henry Huxley, "Darwin's Bulldog" and an expert anatomist.)  The natives of Huxley used their hypnotic powers to dominate the Earthmen and alter them in a shocking way--each astronaut has grown extra body parts.  One guy has a second head, one has a pair of hands sticking out of his chest, another has a bulging stomach where an additional set of intestines is growing, etc.  The punch line of this brief story is that the extra parts are going to achieve independence and wrest themselves from their Earthman hosts and then combine together to form a whole alien being, one which will, we are led to believe, commit dastardly deeds.

I liked it, but "The Hands" is really just an entertaining trifle.

"The Seekers" by E. C. Tubb

I quite like that prolific writer of adventure stories, E. C. Tubb, even if I haven't read much by him lately.  (Sadly, I have far too little time to read all the things I want to read.)  So I have been looking forward to this one.  Somehow or other Ann and Jeff Vandermeer overlooked the wordsmith behind the epic saga of Earl Dumarest, interstellar gladiator, when making selections for The Big Book of Science Fiction, but another Englishman left out of the Vandermeers' "Ultimate Collection," Brian Aldiss, saw fit to include "The Seekers" in a 1978 hardcover anthology called Perilous Planets, which appeared in paperback in 1980 with a garish and baroque wraparound cover by Alex Ebel.  Knowing it was endorsed by so august a critic and historian of SF as Aldiss has me looking forward to "The Seekers" even more fervently!

"The Seekers" is a competent, perhaps pedestrian, little story about the perils faced by those who cross the void between the stars, exploring the galaxy.  Tubb introduces us in turn to the five men crewing a spaceship, showing them engaged in their pastimes so we know each man's passion--one is an artist, one an engineer fascinated by machinery, another immerses himself in sex and violence escapist virtual reality dream games, a fourth an intellectual who wants to understand the workings of the universe.  Then there's the captain, who commits suicide and leaves the other four men without leadership so they devolve from a team into an undisciplined party of individuals who neglect the proscribed precautions and procedures.

The four astronauts land on a planet to investigate an intriguing alien building, but fall into its booby-trap, a defense mechanism which presents each man the beguiling illusion of the thing he most desires, a perfect work of art, for example, or a detailed model of the universe.  The explorers are mesmerized and forget all about the alien building and their own spaceship; presumably they will starve to death as they can't tear themselves away from contemplation of what, for each of them, is Heaven.

An acceptable entertainment with a conservative bent, stressing the importance of discipline and authority and the weaknesses of democracy and individualism.

"Atrophy" by Ernest Hill

Hill has three novels and 16 stories listed at isfdb.  His primary occupation was as advertising manager of Consulting Engineer, a technical journal.

This is one of those stories about how super-efficient production and high tech entertainment has resulted in people falling into decadence.  We follow a few weeks in the life of Elvin, who spends much of his time lying in bed watching TV or at the "Sensories," a cinema where you watch films and vis electronic devices can feel the oars in your hands and the water on your body as the hero is rowing a boat and feel the lips of the love interest on your own as she kisses the hero.  There is so little productive work needed, and so much seductive electronic entertainment, that the government has to take steps to keep people from "atrophying"--lapsing into a boredom-induced coma.  These steps include make-work jobs that exercise the mind (talking to a computer that awards you money if your conversation is logical) and compulsory sex sessions with your spouse at regular intervals (announced by a bell) that, it is hoped, will maintain some vestige of physical and emotional connection between live human beings.

The plot of "Atrophy" concerns Elvin's career and marriage; Elvin is a mere Worker, and his wife leaves him for a Thinker, which causes Elvin to feel real genuine emotions for the first time in a long time.  The shock of this personal tragedy actually pulls him away from the brink of atrophy and sets his mind in motion to actual creative thought!

Then, at the nuclear reactor where Elvin monitors sensors six hours a day, three days a week, there is a malfunction.  The Thinker in charge of his department is currently incapacitated by atrophy, so  Elvin shows initiative and steps into the breach, becoming a hero and getting a promotion from Worker to Thinker!  When his wife hears the news she returns to him, so entranced by the new Elvin that she is even willing to have sex before the bell has rung!

The point of the story, of course, is that facing real life challenges and dealing with real life people provides personal satisfaction and yields social rewards that cannot be matched by the mere passive consumption of entertainment.

Not bad.  It looks like "Atrophy" has never appeared elsewhere, however.

"Advantage" by John T. Phillifent (as by Arthur Rackham)

Way back in 2015 I read John T. Phillifent's Genius Unlimited and then shared my pain upon doing so with the SF community via this blog.  So I have not in any way been looking forward to reading "Advantage."  Genius Unlimited was so bad that I find Phillifent's career, which saw the publication of over 25 novels and over 50 stories, inexplicable.  They can't all be as bad as Genius Unlimited if  they kept selling, can they?  Maybe Phil was sick when he wrote Genius Unlimited?  Maybe Genius Unlimited was a manuscript written by his brother-in-law and Phillifent sent it in under his own name as a favor?  Well, here's our chance to give Phil another chance.  I actually own at least two more books by Phil, the Ace Double editions of Life With Lancelot (stabled with William Barton's philo-Semitic Hunting on Kunderer) and Treasure of Tau Ceti (printed dos-a-dos with Barry Malzberg's Final War and Other Fantasies.)  Is there any chance that "Advantage" is going to be so good that I am going to eagerly pull those volumes from the back of my shelves to devour the Phillifent contributions?

From the first page of the 1971
printing of
New Writings in SF 6

It is the future, and the human race is colonizing the galaxy.  Once a planet has been cleared for colonization, the settlers are preceded by specialist quasi-military units which prepare the settlement, building housing and roads and hospitals and so forth.  The commander of the finest of these units, the winner of awards for seven previous missions, is Colonel Jack Barclay.

What is the secret to the Colonel's success, you ask?  It's his assistant, Rikki Caddas!  Caddas, you see, is a psyker who can predict efficiency-sapping accidents at the work site, predict them early enough that they can be prevented and valuable lives, material and time saved.  And Caddas predicts these accidents the hard way, by experiencing the agony of those who will be injured if the accident is not prevented!  Because his crew has fewer injuries and accidents, Barclay's unit is the most efficient outfit in the service and Barclay is looking forward to a big promotion!  Barclay keeps Caddas's powers a secret, lest doctors or scientists cart the savant away for treatment or research.

I didn't expect it, but Phillifent here has produced a good story that actually feels fresh, and it is a story about human beings and human relationships as much as it is about colonies on alien worlds and psychic powers.  The ambitious Barclay; the slovenly and hypochondriacal Caddas; Barclay's second-in-command Major Dannard, who is jealous of the apparently useless Caddas's close relationship with the leader he admires; and Dahlia Honey, a former investigative journalist now working for the government who comes to the planet to inspect Barclay's unit, all have satisfying personalities and relationships with each other.  Oy, this may be my favorite story in this book!

The plot of "Advantage" concerns how the actions of Dannard and Honey threaten to separate Caddas from Barclay, and what this will mean for Barclay's career and the colonization effort.

Surprisingly good, I quite enjoyed it.  I really am going to have to reevaluate what I think of Phillifent now!  (Despite my satisfaction with it, "Advantage" has never been reprinted outside of New Writings in SF 6.)

But wait!  There's more!

As previously noted, Joachim Boaz gifted this book to me, and wrote about it himself in November of 2017.  Joachim and I have a severe disagreement about Phillifent's "Advantage," which he dismisses as "Bad" and awards 2.5 out of 5 possible stars.  Joachim's primary complaint seems to be that the story is about an unhealthy person (Caddas) being exploited (by Barclay) and that it has a female villain (Honey.)  Beyond saying that I think a story can be good even if it ain't "woke," I have a few points to make in defense of "Advantage" from Joachim's criticisms:

1) Phillifent is not celebrating without reservation Barclay's benefiting from Caddas's powers; in fact, Barclay is presented as a selfish careerist and he is defeated by Honey and Dannard in the end when Caddas leaves the planet with Honey.  You could argue that the story subtly portrays the protagonist as the villain and Honey, the antagonist, as the good guy.  One of the strengths of the story is that Phillifent draws nuanced characters who feel real and have both strengths and weaknesses.

2) Joachim seems to think Caddas is a minor, but in fact Caddas is an adult who just acts like a child (he is ineffectual, self-absorbed, prone to whining and eating sugary foods) and is thus treated like a child by people like Honey.  

3) While Barclay is certainly benefiting from his relationship with Caddas, he is employing Caddas's powers to save people's lives and protect the taxpayers' investment in the space colonization project-- to contribute to society.  The physically weak and emotionally immature Caddas seems unlikely to contribute to society without Barclay's guidance--you could argue that Barclay is enabling Caddas to lead a productive life while Honey is just infantilizing him.

**********

Not a bad anthology.  Another volume from the Joachim Boaz wing of the MPorcius Library in our next episode!

Kandar by Ken Bulmer

Quantoch chuckled his evil chuckle again.  "Not so, O my valiant Prince Kandar, Lion of Akkar, last scion of Dreaming Ferranoz!  We have all the time in the world, for nothing will age in Ferranoz while we are gone!"

Let’s take a look at the MPorcius scorecard for Ken Bulmer. In 2013 I liked Behold the Stars, but in 2014 I didn’t like Cycle of Nemesis. In 2015 I found The Diamond Contessa bewildering, but not exactly bad. I’ve been ignoring Bulmer for a couple of years, but on my shelf is a copy of Kandar, a 1969 “science-fantasy” from Paperback Library which I purchased because of its Jeff Jones cover. The cover reminds me of Joust, one of my favorite video games, though Joust lacked anything like the gorgeous babe we see accompanying the bird rider on this cover. The crew at Paperback Library really went all out with this publication--the back cover includes a fun illustration totally distinct from that on the front. Let’s see if Bulmer, in producing the text, met the high standards of Jones and the other people responsible for the cover.

The walled capital city of Ferranoz, seat of the God-Emperor Pandin Heliodotus, lies at the heart of the Akkarian empire.  As Bulmer's novel begins, the city is subjected to a sneak attack by mysterious enemies whose flying warships bypass all the empire's defenses; soon Ferranoz is overrun by pitiless half-man, half-wolf soldiers.  The Empire's greatest wizard, Quantoch, and the God-Emperor's son, Prince Kandar, are away conducting experiments, and by the time they arrive on the scene, Ferranoz is in flames and the wolfmen have overwhelmed the imperial soldiery and are carting away the women, including Kandar's fiance Elthalee!  Quantoch tries to use his magic to save the city, but the unknown enemy has a wizard of exactly equal power--as a result, their magic cancels each other out and Ferranoz is frozen in time.  In subsequent skirmishes outside the city walls Elthalee and Quantoch are severely wounded, so Kandar puts them within the city; in suspended animation like the rest of the metropolis, so they won't bleed to death.

Kandar then searches the world for the secret of the mysterious enemies who have attacked his home town and the magic spells required to unfreeze the city.   He makes friends, meets wizards, fights monsters, has sex with various young women, finally gets the magic he needs to summon a higher being (an immortal callipygian woman who rides a dragon) to intercede with still higher powers to liberate Ferranoz and annihilate the wolfmen.  In exchange for their help, he has to pledge 21 years service to the higher powers, and in the end of the book flies off on the back of the dragon with the voluptuous angel; it is strongly implied he will be having sex with this zaftig divinity.

This novel is not very good.  The writing and editing are sloppy, Bulmer using words and phrases in odd ways and using words I've never encountered before.  Here's an example from pages 39 and 40:

This is one bad sentence!  I've never heard "bunched out" before--does it mean "bunched up" or "spread out?"  And why not write the sentence in such a way that you need only use the word "swung" once?  Annoying!

Here's another short para from page 40:

I don't like "poised" here, I don't like "sent the shaft to bury," I think "sheared" should be used for the action of a blade, not the action of a point, and I don't know what the hell "like a hop pocket" means; is that a typo?  Is "hop pocket" British lingo for a guy who is blind drunk?   

The fight scenes are silly, confusing, and difficult to visualize.  When he is charged by two lancers, Kandar grabs their lances and lifts himself up on them like they are parallel bars in a gym--all the time, it seems, still holding his own sword.  He breaks the end off of one of the lances, stabs a foe with the point, and then kills another enemy with his sword, which is said to "gnaw" into the victim's neck.  Using a word that suggests slowness like "gnaw" in a scene all about quick thinking and galloping horses is unforgivably dissonant.

Bulmer's plot is poorly constructed, full of repetition, dead ends and subplots that go nowhere.  After Elthalee is wounded and put in the city for safe keeping, Quantoch and Kandar decide to study their magic books right there on the battlefield instead of going to their secret laboratory; Kandar thinks the crews of the flying machines overhead won't realize they are alive if they sit still.  When the two bookworms are attacked, Quantoch gets hurt and Kandar has to go put him in the city.  This kind of repetition is irritating; Bulmer should have just had both of these minor characters wounded in the same fight and deposited in the town at the same time.

When we first meet Kandar he is conducting electrical experiments, and numerous times in the novel he laments that he has to use magic to overcome an obstacle, when he would prefer to use science.  Despite all this foreshadowing, he never ever uses science to accomplish anything.  Similarly, we never learn anything about the mysterious entities who built the flying machines and sent the wolfmen to Ferranoz; these evil higher powers have no speaking part and never appear "on screen."  We never even meet one of their intermediaries, like we meet the sexy angel who is an intermediary to the good higher powers.  In a well-thought out adventure story, Kandar would have discovered the attackers were scientists, and he would have used his own science knowledge to counter the flying machines; maybe even had a debate with them over whether science should be used to liberate or control the common masses.  Maybe Bulmer was planning on doing such a thing and just ran out of time or pages?  This novel certainly feels like it was written without an outline and without revision, like Bulmer was desperate to meet a deadline.

In a later scene Kandar (who learns to be a passable wizard after spending an hour or two reading a book) is able to preserve the souls of two good men he killed due to the machinations of an evil wizard and a beautiful woman.  At first the spell works, and Kandar hears the voices of the men in his head--he has preserved their souls in his own body.  But then the spell fails, and the voices fade away--we are even told that the spell failed because Kandar forgot some elements of the spell.  Then a few pages later he hears the voices again; the spell worked after all!  Why does Bulmer go through this rigmarole of the spell working and then not working?  And why does he include this element at all?  The voices, as far as I can tell, don't provide Kandar any actual help, don't help move along the plot; I think they are just comic relief.

If my withering criticism hasn't
discouraged you, you can get an
electronic version of Kandar from
the good people at Gateway

Bulmer does periodically try to enliven his novel with lame jokes and juvenile wordplay, but the gags are never funny.  Sample joke:  A barbarian who yells out oaths like: "By the supple hips of sweet Vashtilulu the Buxom!"  Sample wordplay: "Quivering, quaking, querulous, Quantoch screamed and fell back." 

These anemic attempts at comedy, and a few sword and sorcery cliches (like demon worshipers trying to sacrifice somebody and that somebody being rescued in a nick of time) make me wonder if perhaps Kandar is meant to be a (in the event a not at all funny) parody of sword and sorcery stories.  The novel includes what feel like references to the work of Michael Moorcock and E. C. Tubb, Bulmer's (more talented) comrades in the trenches of the British sword-fighting adventure story industry.  Like Bulmer's Ferranoz, Imrryr, the capital city of Moorcock's famous empire of sorcerers, Melnibone, is called "The Dreaming City,"and like Prince Elric, Prince Kandar accidentally stabs his fiance.  E. C. Tubb's most famous character is Earl Dumarest, and Bulmer gives the name of "Dumarest" to one species of fantastic creature in Kandar.

Perhaps even more egregious than Bulmer's poor style and sloppy plot is the fact that the book is full of printing errors; on numerous pages we find lines printed in the wrong order, or lines printed multiple times.  Irritating!

A shoddy piece of work.  I have to give Kandar a thumbs down.

I Will Fear No Evil by Robert A. Heinlein

I find I like being female.  But it's different.  Now what shall we wear?

My copy; purchased at a Goodwill in
Indianola, Iowa in 2014

For almost two months I have been occupied by the move of MPorcius HQ from a moldy basement in Ohio to a smelly second-story apartment in Maryland, by holiday travel, and with reading 1970s biographies of Samuel Johnson by John Wain and Christopher Hibbert.*  But today I am back in the science fiction ghetto, dealing with one of that ghetto's most prominent citizens, Robert A. Heinlein, one of the foremost practitioners of the hard SF that promotes science and engineering, the libertarian SF that argues for the primacy of the individual against the government and the collective, and the taboo-challenging SF that depicts new or unconventional sexual and marital relationships.  The topic at hand: 1970's I Will Fear No Evil, which I read over 30 years ago in my youth, and reread in fits and starts over the past few busy weeks of driving cross country, celebrating the holidays with my in-laws, waiting at government offices and lugging my belongings to a storage unit.

Johann Sebastian Bach Smith (again with the "Smith!") is one of the world's most successful businessmen, the head of Smith Enterprises Ltd, a vast business empire which includes "sea ranches" where unlucky workers get eaten by sharks, a textbook publishing division and a machine tools division.  A self-made man and World War II veteran, Smith is over ninety and at death's door, monitored by nurses and computers 24-7!  But he is not ready to shuffle off this mortal coil just yet--his mind is still sharp as a tack, and he brags that he can remember yesterday's stock prices and "do logarithmic calculations without tables" (your humble blogger can't remember what he ate yesterday and doesn't know what a logarithmic calculation is!)  Smith's solution: becoming the world's first brain transplant beneficiary!  Smith orders his staff to find a young healthy body whose brain is legally dead and which shares his rare blood type, and through a tragic set of circumstances his brain ends up in the body of his beautiful twenty-something secretary, Eunice Barca!  A woman!  Even more incredibly, Eunice's consciousness has somehow survived death and the operation, and it shares Johann's brain with him!  (Heinlein leaves open the possibility that Eunice's presence is not "real," but a product of brain damage or mental illness, and Johann doesn't tell anyone that he is in constant communication with Eunice's "ghost" for fear he will be immediately diagnosed as insane.)

As you perhaps know from reading my blog posts about Leigh Brackett's Sword of Rhiannon, Edmond Hamilton's "The Avenger from Atlantis," Tanith Lee's Volkhavaar, and other works, I love any story in which people's brains or souls or consciousnesses are moved from one body to another, and/or in which different consciousnesses inhabit the same body and struggle for control or learn to live in harmony.  No doubt this fascination of mine springs from my fear of death and experience of loneliness and alienation from my fellow man.  But while the aforementioned Brackett, Hamilton and Lee stories are fast-paced adventure capers with horror elements, I Will Fear No Evil is a slow-paced philosophical novel about love and sex with very little dramatic tension.  The topic of a man unexpectedly finding himself in a woman's body could serve as fertile ground for a story of body horror, or a tale of identity crisis, or a feminist satire, but Heinlein does not take any of these tacks.

Instead of finding his new new body repulsive or even disconcerting, Johann embraces womanhood, taking the name "Joan" and immediately demanding cosmetics and nightgowns and an appointment with a hairdresser!  Within days Joan is going on extravagant shopping trips and enthusiastically throwing herself at every man who crosses her path!  In the second half of the novel Joan has sex with Johann's best friend, septuagenarian lawyer Jacob Salomon, her doctor, and various other of her employees, both male and female.  (Like Tiresias, star of Greek mythology and English art rock, Johann/Joan finds that sex is far more enjoyable as a woman than a man.)  With equal gusto Joan makes a beeline to the sperm bank and has herself impregnated with Johann's sperm, so that she becomes, more or less, both father and mother of the child she carries.

The novel briefly touches on legal issues surrounding the need of the courts to figure out if the person with Johann's brain and Eunice's body is legally Johann, Eunice, neither or both, because some of Johann's legal (though not biological) descendants hope to get their hands on his fortune through legal maneuvers, but these ineffectual antagonists never have a chance.  Heinlein devotes far more energy to following Joan's efforts to seduce and then wed Jacob, and to comfort Eunice's many friends and lovers who miss her and might find the presence of her body still walking around (with a ninety-year old dude's brain in it!) unnerving.

The lion's share of the novel's text, which weighs in at 500 pages, consists of conversations between the witty, impeccably decent and supercompetent characters (Johann is the world's greatest businessman, Eunice is the best possible secretary and kindest and most giving of individuals, Jacob is the world's greatest lawyer and great in the sack, the guy who performs the brain transplant is the world's finest surgeon, Eunice's husband Joe is a genius artist and a noble soul who doesn't care about money, etc.) and these conversations consist mostly of these paragons expressing their love for each other but sometimes expressing their (and presumably the author's) opinions.  There are also lots of descriptions of people's, especially women's, attire.  Conflicts or setbacks are few and far between.

One of the ecstatic blurbs on the back cover of my edition of the novel refers to the book's "frightening vision of the future" and the likelihood that it might be come true.  We learn about this "future world" of the early 21st-century in dribs and drabs, in characters' dialogue and in brief satirical segments that describe current events.  The world is overpopulated (overpopulation, Johann asserts, is the wellspring of all the other problems) and polluted, and the government is corrupt and incompetent, a welfare state that hands out generous benefits to the poor but whose efforts to control population (through a eugenics system of licenses that tries to limit who can reproduce) and crime (large swathes of urban landscape are no-go zones called "Abandoned Areas" which the police refuse to enter) and even educate children (many adults are illiterate) are an absolute failure.  Rich people like Johann and Jacob are driven around by thuggish guards in over-sized armored limos equipped with gun turrets, and Eunice's untimely (but opportune!) death is at the hands of a mugger in an elevator.

Sexy!  And patriotic?

Obviously Heinlein is vehemently opposed to all this socialism and laments the mass crime and pollution, but the novel's setting also features developments Heinlein (I presume) would have welcomed, like acceptance of public nudity and a looser attitude about sex--Eunice's marriage was an open one, and I think all the main characters have homosexual affairs.  Johann and Eunice describe to each other their early sex lives, and Heinlein uses Johann's reminiscences to suggest that the Victorians and the people of the early 20th-century were just about as sex-crazed as the college kids of the swinging Sixties, but were less open and more hypocritical about it.  Some readers may look askance at some of the sexual relationships described; for example, Johann was seduced by a thirty-five-year-old married woman when he was fourteen, and when he was twenty he had sex with a sixteen-year-old who would become his first wife.  (If there is any tension in this novel it is the tension between the author's and the reader's beliefs.)

I Will Fear No Evil presents a less than rosy image of what people in 1970 would have considered a traditional marriage: all the marriages in the story are either "open" or failed--all feature enthusiastic "swinging" or surreptitious adultery.  Johann was married four times, and all four of his wives cheated on him and gave birth to children fathered by other men.  Johann has no biological children, and his legal heirs--four granddaughters--are the story's rarely invoked and totally ineffectual villains.  One way of looking at the novel is to see the union of Johann's brain and Eunice's body, which unexpectedly renders their consciousnesses inseparable, as a sort of allegory of a perfect marriage--they are a til-death-do-us-part corporate entity who share their lives in the most direct and intimate way possible, help each other learn and grow and need never again fear loneliness.

I'm scratching my head over the
cover to this British edition

Another way of looking at I Will Fear No Evil is as a novel celebrating self-creation, the fact that you can be who you want to be, you fashion your own identity and need not accept what your parents and society have made you via genetics and culture.  Johann changed his name from Schmidt to Smith when he enlisted in the army in 1941, and the book includes multiple conversations with lawyers about how your legal name in the USA is whatever you say it is.  Johann wasn't born rich, but turned himself into the world's preeminent businessman, while Eunice's husband Joe, the sensitive and honorable artist, came from a family of worthless, dishonest, grasping scum.  The happening young people of the novel's early 21st-century believe there are six sexes, and people in the book decide what "sex" (the word incorporates what we today call "sexual orientation") they are; while today's conventional wisdom is that homosexuals are "born that way," Heinlein in the novel seems to suggest gay sex is a practice any open-minded person might simply opt to indulge in.  Late in the novel, discussing the parentage of the child she bears,  Johann/Joan brags "I did this on my own.  I alone am parent to this child."  It is also perhaps significant that Johann dismisses out of hand behaviorist psychological theories.

While I Will Fear No Evil is a celebration of individualism and tells you that you don't have to respect old taboos or follow in your parents' footsteps or take the authority of the government seriously, it is not a book that advocates being a hermit and ignoring everybody else.  Everybody in the novel is constantly complimenting and hugging and kissing each other, so you never forget that the main point of the book is that we should all love each other and that sex is an expression of love that should not inspire jealousy or be subject to restrictive rules.  The book also shows the deference to the cognitive elite (and contempt for the common masses) that we often see in classic SF; obvious examples are Asimov's Foundation stories and Sturgeon's award-winning "Slow Sculpture," fiction in which the authors advocate that shadowy unaccountable geniuses manipulate human civilization for its own good.  Public-spirited Johann tries to use his wealth to help humanity; most prominent in the novel is his subtle attempt to mold the gene pool by financing a eugenics foundation that collects the sperm of above-average men and uses it impregnate above-average female volunteers.  On the flip side we see the other end of the cognitive and moral spectra in action, as Heinlein depicts how the venal news media whips up riotous mobs with ease with misleading and salacious news reports.

Jack Gaughan goes literal for the magazine edition,
showing ancient Johann's withered mug
and Eunice in one of her boob-baring outfits

(A related theme we see in much of former naval officer Heinlein's work is the need for the crew of a ship to obey their captain without question, and this shows up in I Will Fear No Evil, with Johann demanding similar obedience from his employees.)

Heinlein's novels often include anti-bigotry messages, messages both explicit (characters deliver speeches denouncing racism, for example) and implicit (such as the inclusion of admirable characters who are not white, not male, and/or not human) and I Will Fear No Evil does the same.  Johann, whose grandparents were immigrants from Catholic southern Germany, grew up in what he calls variously "the Bible Belt" and "the Middle West" is best friends with the Jewish Jacob, and offhand I can recall admirable minor characters who are black, Polish and gay.  Probably most significantly, Heinlein leaves Eunice's ethnicity a mystery; we learn she was born an Iowa farm girl (like my mother-in-law!) but there is never a direct declaration of her racial background and I didn't notice any details about her skin or hair or whatever that might provide a clue to her ethnicity.  Heinlein seems to be telling us that what mattered about Eunice was not her ethnic identity, but that she loved everyone (as one minor character puts it, she treated everyone "like a human being.")

(If we want to nitpick, it is true that these "diverse" characters are perhaps stereotypes: the Jewish lawyer, the religious black man, and the sexy female secretary.)

I think it may also be worth considering what relationship I Will Fear No Evil might have to the famous "New Wave" movement in SF; some of the gushing blurbs on the back of my copy seem to be raising the issue by claiming "Those who have thought of science fiction as only child's play will see how wrong they are" and that the novel is "a sign of the changing nature of science fiction."  Most important in this context is I Will Fear No Evil's subject matter, which includes a minimum of high technology and adventure and instead focuses on gender roles and sex, and to a lesser extent psychology and the aforementioned dystopic society.  Perhaps more remarkable, however, is a passage early in the book, a page-long stream-of-consciousness section full of homophonic wordplay that depicts Johann Smith's state of mind just after his operation; this struck me as "New Wavey" in its technique.  And maybe the prominent role of yoga and meditation in the novel is New Wavey? 

I am in broad sympathy with Heinlein's beliefs and admire much of his work, but I know he has many detractors, and it is easy to see how a hostile reviewer could make hay out of this novel.  Through a feminist lens, Johann is a man exploiting a woman's body, and one might see the process of a man putting one of his organs into a woman's body and thereby gaining control of her as a sort of allegory of rape or symbolic depiction of marriage as a patriarchal institution.  And of course the book suggests that the characteristic role of the woman is to comfort people, give birth to children, and look good, not run businesses or wage wars or create art, as the men in the book do.  Through a Marxist lens, Johann is a member of the upper-middle class, exploiting one of his proletarian employees.  Eunice never expresses any resentment or envy about the treatment of women or the lower classes in the society that Jacob and Johann have fought their way to the top of.  Conservatives might argue that Heinlein's advocacy of free love fails to adequately address the risks and responsibilities of sexual activity--you can perhaps dismiss pregnancy and disease by referring to high tech medicine, but what about the jealousy and possessiveness that characterize most people's sexual feelings?     

To return to the plot, after Joan has comforted all of Eunice's old friends and straightened out Johann's legal affairs, Heinlein wraps up the book with a pair of deaths.  Jacob dies (he's an elderly gent, after all) and somehow his consciousness ends up in Johann's brain along with Eunice's, so their ideal marriage is now a threesome.  This appears, to me, to be conclusive proof that Eunice's presence in Johann's brain is the product of mental illness and not some kind of biological phenomenon resulting from his brain being connected to her body.  With her elderly husband dead, Joan volunteers for the Moon colony--one of the recurring themes of Heinlein's work is that you can leave the oppression and corruption of a decadent civilization by moving to the frontier (we see this in Between Planets, The Rolling Stones, Friday, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, etc.)  Joan dies while giving birth to her child, just after arriving on Luna.

Karel Thole delivers a pleasant and
appropriate cover for this German edition

Heinlein is an important author in the field so if you are interested in the history of SF or the depiction of gender roles or sex changes or brain transplants in SF you should probably read I Will Fear No Evil.  But can I recommend it is a piece of entertainment or literature?  That is a little trickier.  The novel presents many opportunities for thought on various issues, and Heinlein's style is smooth, but these 500 pages can feel long and repetitious, even tedious, and there is almost no conflict--it really can feel like page after page of people saying they love each other and describing their clothes and make up.  As a story about love and sex instead of a story about a dangerous journey, or an episode in a war, or people trying to solve a mystery, we can't expect a bunch of action scenes, but I Will Fear No Evil has none of the tension you find in a compelling love story--there's no fear of rejection, no unrequited desire, no jealousy, no star-crossed lovers kept apart by social mores or family feuds; everybody adores each other and is attracted to each other from the word "go," and they are all libertarians or libertines living in a libidinous society so there are no inhibitions to be overcome.  (Maybe I should also point out that there are no actual sex scenes; this book is by no means titillating or pornographic in the way a Piers Anthony novel might be.)  It is easy to see why fans of Heinlein's earlier work like adventure writer E. C. Tubb, who said in his 1979 interview with Charles Platt that he used to like Heinlein but that Stranger in a Strange Land and Heinlein's later work were no good and even hinted that any positive critical attention they received was somehow dishonest, would be disappointed in this long, slow, rambling testimonial in favor of free love.  I'll say that I Will Fear No Evil is acceptable for the initiated, but it is not the kind of thrill ride or barrel of laughs I can recommend to a wide audience.

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*In his introduction to his 1974 biography of the Great Cham of Literature, novelist and poet John Wain tells us that part of his project in writing the book is to make Johnson, famous as a Tory and an essentially Christian and conservative character, palatable to lefties, and Wain does throw around such verbiage as "eternal tug of war between labor and capital" and "plutocracy" that, I guess, will appeal to Marxists.  Wain, however, expends a lot more ink comparing the physically and culturally beautiful England of the 18th century with the industrial and technological England of the late 20th century, which Wain bemoans has become a cultural "ruin" in which every material thing is "hideous."  Wain is also the kind of biographer who makes wild guesses about long dead people's states of mind and reconstructs relationships and conversations based on no evidence whatsoever.  (There are no footnotes in the book, which is based entirely on published sources.)  Wain's book is entertaining, but a veteran reader of Johnsoniana and Boswelliana will probably learn more about the writer of this biography than the subject--Wain fills its 380 pages not only with his emphatic opinions about Johnson's century and his (and my) own, but with extracts from the poetry and criticism of 20th-century figures like T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Seymour Krim, extracts that have nothing to do with Johnson, and anecdotes from his own (Wain's own) life as an academic and a public intellectual.  One assumes Wain feels comfortable including all these digressions because Johnson himself used such scholarly work as the Dictionary and The Lives of the Poets as vehicles for expressing his own opinions and relating little personal anecdotes.

Popular historian Hibbert, in his 1971 biography of Johnson, which is also based on [now] published material and not original research, refrains from making himself and his opinions a central part of his book.  While Wain extols Johnson as a singular hero, denounces the 20th century, and addresses such scholarly topics as Johnson's adherence to the panEuropean culture of neoLatin scholars and resistance to Romanticism, Hibbert serves up the kind of stuff that actually arouses the interest of ordinary people in Johnson.  With a minimum of analysis or editorializing Hibbert showcases Johnson as a big-hearted guy and a pretty good comedian, the oddest and most interesting member of a large circle of odd and interesting characters.  Hibbert's book consists primarily of quoted and paraphrased anecdotes drawn from Boswell, Thrale-Piozzi and other sources, over 300 pages of amusing stories about Johnson's bon mots, idiosyncrasies and interactions with his many memorable friends and acquaintances and moving episodes in which Johnson expresses his love for others, his unhappiness, and his fear of death. 

Four 1960 stories by R. A. Lafferty

It's been a while since we've read anything by R. A. Lafferty, so let's take my copies of 1970's Nine Hundred Grandmothers, an Ace Science Fiction Special with a cover by Leo and Diane Dillon, and DAW's 1972 collection Strange Doings, which has a Jack Gaughan cover, down from the shelf and read four stories by the Iowa-born Oklahoma resident and recipient of a 1990 World Fantasy Life Achievement Award.

"Through Other Eyes"

This is a story about how our beliefs and perceptions are not simply objective and accurate views of the outside world, but are guided or distorted by our attitudes and interests, so that we all see different, even live in different, worlds.  The first two pages of this fifteen-page story act as a sort of prologue, in which scientists Charles Cogsworth and Gregory Smirnov talk about the experience of using their time machine, which allowed them to view famous people and events of the past.  These viewings were a terrible disappointment--reputedly beautiful Isolde was obese, famously witty Voltaire was in fact a disgusting pervert, Sappho, remembered as a genius poet, turned out to be a tedious cat lady, the fabled hero Lancelot was in fact almost too feeble to mount a horse, etc.

The main plot concerns Cogsworth's new machine, the Cerebral Scanner, which allows one to experience the inner thoughts and view of the world of other people and creatures.  Through the eyes of a skeptical critic he sees a world that is unsavory and mean, through the eyes of an important business executive he sees a world of numberless details and infinite connections that can--and must!--be managed by a pull of a string here or there (the connections are likened to reins, the executive to God and to a general commanding an army), and so on.  Cogsworth is eager to use the machine to observe the world through the eyes of Valery Mok, a beautiful woman whom he thinks an angel, a wit, and a paragon of kindness. (Lafferty makes clear that she is in fact none of these things, just a pleasant but essentially ordinary woman--Cogsworth's love for her has distorted his view of her.)  When Cogsworth sees the world through her eyes he is painfully disillusioned--her world is one of pervasive, overwhelming, sensuality--to Cogsworth the sensations she enjoys as she smells trees, touches a rail, or looks at clouds are shockingly and grossly, filthy, coarsely obscene.  "I had thought Valery was an angel...it is a shock to find that she is a pig."

When Mok uses the Cerebral Scanner to see the world as Cogsworth sees it, she is amazed to find how bloodless, loveless, and lifeless his view of the world is, and compares him to a pig, a pig made of dry dead sticks.  "You live with dead people, Charles.  You make everything dead.  You are abominable."  Lafferty gives us a happy ending, though; Mok, we see, the lively and sensuous woman, is going to open the cold and clinical scientist's eyes to the throbbing vitality and earthy beauty of our world and the two will live happily ever after.

"Through Other Eyes" first appeared in Future Science Fiction and seems to have been well-received, reappearing in Robert Silverberg's Mind to Mind as well as Introductory Psychology Through Science Fiction.

"The Six Fingers of Time"

This is one of those SF stories in which a guy can halt or severely slow down time and then take advantage of people as they stand still as statues or (not quite so anti-socially) get some extra work done.  The most famous of these stories are perhaps John D. MacDonald's The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything from 1962, which I have not read, and Nicholson Baker's 1994 The Fermata, which I read in the 20th century and plan to reread sometime this century.  If Wikipedia and my memory are to be trusted, both those novels focus on sex and the use of the time-retarding power to do things like undress women against their will.  In E. C. Tubb's Dumarest series there are the drugs slow-time and quick-time that speed up or slow down your metabolism forty times--by taking these drugs you can heal forty times faster or do forty times as much work in an hour (in a memorable scene in Lallia Dumarest uses slow-time to produce enough product to meet a crucial deadline) or slow you down so tedious space voyages seem to pass forty times as quickly.  In some Warhammer 40,000 games psykers can invoke the power of the warp to slow or speed up time for particular individuals or small areas and so get more moves than their foes.

In "The Six Fingers of Time," Charles Vincent wakes up and finds that time has slowed so much that each second, to him, feels like a minute, each minute an hour.  After exploring the slow-motion city he goes to the office and catches up on two days worth of work before any of his colleagues even shows up.

The effect wears off and after some months have passed he begins to almost think that crazy day was no more than a dream.  But then he meets a mysterious figure whose face is hidden, who hints that Vincent, who has a deformed thumb that suggests a sixth digit, is a descendant of an ancient race of six-fingered people who inhabited the Earth before mankind.  This strange character teaches Vincent how to switch on and off his time-retarding power, and Vincent proceeds to uses his weird talent to play cruel jokes on people, to take advantage of women sexually, to steal money, to learn scores of foreign languages and to accumulate esoteric knowledge.

Besides adding the Weird Tales-style bloodline-of-an-ancient-lost-race-of-wizards angle to our guy-who-controls-time-and-abuses-people story, Lafferty, one of the SF world's most prominent and most hard core Catholics, adds a moral and Christian dimension.  The faceless figure, it appears, is the Devil, and Vincent risks a horrible fate for using his inhuman ability to harm others and enjoy benefits he has not earned.

"The Six Fingers of Time" was first published in If and later was the title story of an anthology of stories from that magazine which, somewhat bizarrely, pretended to be an anthology of stories from If's sister magazine Galaxy.  Both magazines were edited by Horace L. Gold, so I guess the publishers of the volume felt they would be forgiven this little trespass against the trust of the SF-reading public.  (No respect!)

"The Ugly Sea"

In three of the stories we are talking about today Lafferty uses traditional SF topics and themes ("I'm travelling through time!"; "I'm reading people's minds!"; "I can stop time!"; "I'm on an alien planet fighting a huge monster!") but "The Ugly Sea" is more of a mainstream literary piece, and appropriately enough first appeared in The Literary Review, a journal put out by Fairleigh Dickinson University of the great state of New Jersey.  (I once attended a wedding at Fairleigh Dickinson.  Fascinating, right?)  It takes up a traditional literary theme, the sea and its strange allure.  No doubt you remember the opening passages of Moby Dick, in which the narrator describes his own irresistible attraction to the sea, which he suspects all men share, and Homer's phrase "the wine-dark sea," which has become proverbial.  Rock music aficionados are familiar with Pete Townshend's use of the beach and the sea as recurring motifs in The Who's masterpiece Quadrophenia, while sword and sorcery fans (to bring us back to SF) may recall how, in Swords in the Mist,  Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser spoke of "their mistress, the sea...her rages and caressings, her coolths and unending dancings, sometimes lightly footing a minuet, sometimes furiously a-stamp, and her infinitude of secret parts."

In the frame story of "The Ugly Sea" Lafferty takes a counterintuitive but quite credible tack, having storyteller Sour John declare that the sea is ugly ("It has the aroma of an open sewer...it is perhaps the most untidy thing in the world...it is monotonous, with only four or five faces, and all of them coarse") but wins the love of men, including Sour John himself, just the same.  The main plot of "The Ugly Sea," which Sour John narrates, is about an associate of John's, a Jewish loan shark named Moysha Uferwohner, who falls in love with Bonny, a twelve-year-old crippled girl who plays piano (badly) at the Blue Fish, a bar frequented by seamen.  Bonny is fated to marry a sailor, so Moysha becomes a sailor himself, even though, as Sour John tells us, the Jews, "God's own people," have always "shunned" that "evil grave," the ocean.  Moysha, according to Sour John, is only the third Jewish seaman in all of history! 

Melville's Ishmael equates his desire to go to sea with suicide: "This is my substitute for pistol and ball.  With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship."  Lafferty's story here similarly conjoins seafaring and death.  It is very bad luck, we are told, for a seaman to marry a cripple, but a sailor marries Bonny when she is fifteen years old, anyway.  This tar soon dies of illness at sea, and Bonny remarries at sixteen--this second sailor is killed in a terrible accident in a ship's engine room.  Finally at seventeen she marries Moysha; Moysha leaves his five-year career as a sailor behind, and these two crazy kids live happily together inland for three years.

But the sea has gotten under Moysha's skin!  Those three blissful years end when Moysha is drawn back to the sailor's life.  He joins Sour John's crew, abandoning his wife and children for certain death.

I've had no luck finding an image online of the cover of the Fall 1960 issue of The Literary Review, so all you people who click over to MPorcius Fiction Log for the pictures will have to be satisfied with an image of the second place "The Ugly Sea" appeared, New Worlds of Fantasy #2 with its effective Kelly Freas cover.   

[UPDATE January 2, 2018: Commenter Todd Mason owns a copy of the Autumn 1960 issue of The Literary Review, and points out below that Lafferty's "The Ugly Sea" is in fact in the Autumn 1961 issue.  I was mislead by a typo at isfdb, which still lists "Fall 1960" as the issue in which the story appeared.] 

"Snuffles"

Planet Bellota is one strange world.  Though a mere one hundred miles in circumference, it has a gravity equal to half that of Earth's.  It is home to many insects, but each individual bug seems to be of a different species.  Lightning storms are constant, and the rinds of fruits are edible while the flesh is unpalatable.  And then there is the sole large inhabitant, a friendly beast much like a large bear which, like the insects, seems to have no sex or parents.  A team of six Earthling scientists is carefully studying this mysterious world until, unexpectedly, Snuffles the heretofore friendly psuedo-ursine suddenly attacks and they have to fight and then flee for their lives!

Lafferty wrote quite a few stories that feature horrendous violence, and "Snuffles" is one of them--the Earth expedition suffers heavy casualties in its struggle against Snuffles!  The survivors of the initial surprise attack march day after day, the wounded Snuffles hot on their heels, toying with them.  Lacking any supplies, the Earthers resort to eating native plants, including those with hallucinogenic properties.  Around the time they start eating this stuff, the survivors begin to receive what appear to be telepathic messages from Snuffles.  Lafferty has already given us reason to suspect Snuffles is a God or Devil or, most likely, a Gnostic demiurge figure (if you needed one, reading "Snuffles" provides a reason to read the Wikipedia entry on Gnosticism), and our suspicions are further fueled when Snuffle's messages (or are they merely hallucinations fueled by the scientists' exhaustion and ingestion of narcotic plants?--like "Through Other Eyes," this story is in part about how questionable our perceptions of the world can be) assert that Snuffles created planet Bellota, and maybe the entire universe.

I didn't know until I had finished the story whether any of the humans would get off the planet alive or if any of the planet's mysteries would be solved.

It is normal to read SF stories in which human beings are jerks who despoil the environment and are too quick to resort to violence.  But in "Snuffles" Lafferty makes sure we see the human characters as good people and even seems to be suggesting that we are too gullible, too eager to see the universe as benign when in fact it is inimical.  At the start of the story one character argues that Bellota is the only "fun" planet in the galaxy (when it is in fact the planet where they will be massacred), and during Snuffle's first attack the leader of the expedition chooses to shoot to wound instead of shooting to kill because "He was fond of Snuffles and gambled that it would not be necessary to kill him."  These people are too reluctant to resort to violence!  Another interesting aspect of the story is how Lafferty implies that Bellota, which seems like a topsy-turvy, atypical world, is actually the only sincere or normal planet in the universe, and/or is a mirror which displays reality to those few who have the opportunity to visit it.       

If you want to read another well-written story by a Catholic conservative about people pursued by an intelligent alien bear (I know some of you have very specific interests) I strongly recommend Gene Wolfe's "Try and Kill It" from 1996, a very good adventure/horror story.  I kind of wonder if "Try and Kill It" is a subtle homage to "Snuffles;" Wolfe actually uses the word "snuffling" in it, though that is hardly dispositive.  I'm also wondering if there is any chance "Snuffles" is an homage to A. E. van Vogt's 1939 "Black Destroyer," one of the inaugural stories of science fiction's Golden Age.  As you no doubt already know, in "Black Destroyer" a bunch of scientists make friends with an over-sized alien beast which seems friendly at first but later starts murdering them.

"Snuffles" first appeared in Galaxy and has been pretty successful, being included in anthologies in America, Britain, France, and Germany, including an anthology devoted to stories about religion.

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It is easy to recommend all four of these stories--they are all smooth and entertaining reads with fun little jokes and all feature interesting themes we've seen before but do different things with them.  Being written over 50 years ago by somebody who wasn't exactly taking pains to appeal to current trends in what constituted acceptable thinking, these stories can sometimes surprise--broad-brush assertions about women (they are more sensual than men!) and Jews (they never become sailors!) are good examples.  The stories also invite consideration of whether they have some deep meaning or philosophical point to make, even if Sour John in "The Ugly Sea" responds to a listener who asks, "Is there a moral to this?" with the flat declaration, "No.  It is an immoral story.  And it's a mystery to me."

Son of the Tree by Jack Vance

"I order you!" exclaimed Elfane.  This was fantastic, insane--contrary to the axioms of her existence. 

Joe shook his head, watching warily.  "Sorry." 

Elfane dismissed the paradox from her mind.  She turned to Manaolo. "Kill him here then.  His corpse, at least, will provoke no speculation." 

Manaolo grinned regretfully.  "I'm afraid the clobberclaw is aiming a gun at us.  He will refuse to let me kill him." 

Elfane tightened her lips.  "This is ridiculous." 

April, famously the cruelest of months, has been Ace Double Month here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and here is our final Ace Double (for the time being, at least), Son of the Tree by Jack Vance, half of my battered copy of 1964's F-265.  The other side of F-265 is The Houses of Iszm, and both novels are adorned with a Jack Gaughan cover highlighting energy pistols and a small charming interior illo, also by Gaughan. Son of the Tree first appeared in 1951 in Thrilling Wonder Stories, where it was lead story, and has been reprinted numerous times.  In the period before I started this blog I read lots of Vance, but I never got to Son of the Tree, so I am looking forward to this.  isfdb says Son of the Tree is part of the Nopalgarth Series, along with Houses of Iszm and Nopalgarth; I know I read Houses of Iszm but suspect that, like Son of the Tree, I never read Nopalgarth (AKA Brains of Earth.)

Joe Smith is travelling across the galaxy on passenger starships.  At each planetfall he works for a while to accumulate enough money to take the next leg of the trip, hypnotized and shipped practically dead as cargo in the hold with scores of other such lower ranked passengers.  Thusly he has journeyed so far from his home planet of Earth that the people he meets think Earth is a mere myth.

Whoa!  This sounds a lot like the premise of E. C. Tubb's Dumarest of Terra series!  Is it possible Tubb was influenced by Son of the Tree?  I feel like a detective!

As the 111-page novel (novella?) begins, Joe arrives on planet Kyril, where two million aristocratic priests (called "Druids") lord it over five billion impoverished serfs (the "Laity.")  At the center of the planet's capitol city and its culture is a tree bigger than a skyscraper that the people worship--they think that when industrious workers die they become one of the three-foot leaves on the tree (slackers become "rootlets" mired in the "slime.")  One of the strategies the Druids employ to maintain control of the Laity is to keep the planet at a low technological level, so Joe, who has a technical background, easily finds a job as a chauffeur among the elite because he is able to improve on the shoddily cobbled-together aircars used by the Druids.

Like a lot of Vance books, Son of the Tree takes place in a future in which mankind has spread throughout the universe, and enough isolation, mutation and evolution has taken place that new races or subspecies of humans have developed. One of the first people Joe meets on Kyril is Hableyat, a Mang, one of the yellow-skinned people of planet Mangste.  Kyril is involved in a sort of Cold War with Mangste, a modern industrial world, and the Druids assume all Mangs on Kyril are spies. Working in the household of an important Druid, and being friendly with Hableyat, Joe quickly gets embroiled in life-threatening intrigue between different ruthless factions of Druids and Mangs.  Complicating matters is the fact that Joe falls in love with one of the callous aristocratic Druids, the Priestess Elfane, even though she is willing to kill the Earthman to pursue her goals and is involved in some kind of relationship with the equally ruthless Eccleasiarch Manaolo.

Joe, Hableyat, Elfane and Manaolo all take passage (not in the hold, but awake) on a starship headed for the planet Ballenkarch.  The people of Ballenkarch are politically and economically primitive, but rapidly developing and a source of raw materials and manpower, and both Kyril and Mangste hope to manipulate the planet to aid their side in the cold war (perhaps Vance is referring here to the role in the real-life Cold War played by places like Africa and the Middle East.)  Elfane and Manaolo have with them a shoot from their divine Tree (the "Son" of the title), and hope to plant it on Ballenkarch and convince the natives to worship it and join Kyril in a kind of religious union.  Hableyat's faction of Mangs and another, perhaps more influential, faction of Mangs disagree on how to respond to this Druid scheme, and both parties are willing to go to any length to enact their policy.  Joe is right in the middle of this multi-sided conflict among cold-blooded killers, not really caring about the Kyril-Mangste struggle but instead hoping he can convince the alluring Elfane to be his lover and the clever Hableyat to be his friend and that the three of them can leave all this murderous intrigue behind and go together to an easy life on the peaceful Earth.

In 1971 Ace rereleased the Son of the Tree/Houses of Iszm Double with
a different cover and a higher price 

As the Druid-Mang-Ballenkarch plot progresses Vance fills in the blanks of Joe's past and we slowly learn why Joe is crossing the galaxy, leading us readers to wonder if perhaps Joe in his own way is as fanatical as Elfane and as manipulative as Hableyat. On Ballenkarch the plot threads reach their violent conclusions, Joe learns the true natures of the elites of the three planets, and the main characters make decisions about how they want to live the rest of their lives.

Son of the Tree is a great thriller set in a vivid alien environment, full of Vance's signature witty dialogue.  Vance's style is often compared to that of the great P. G. Wodehouse, and the comparison is very appropriate: Son of the Tree, like so much of Vance's work, is a pleasure to read, almost regardless of the plot.  Not to criticize the plot of Son of the Tree; the story moves smoothly, all the twists and revelations are perfectly paced to maintain reader interest and all the characters' motivations and interactions with each other are interesting and entertaining.  A fun book that gets my enthusiastic endorsement.  I suggest you overcome your love of Jack Gaughan, however, and get a 21st-century edition of the novel that uses the Vance Integral text--my 1964 copy is full of typos.

Three stories by E. C. Tubb: "The Ming Vase," "J is for Jeanne," & "Blood in the Mist"

It's been a while since we read anything by E. C. Tubb, the scribe who recorded the many adventures of space gladiator of the far future Earl Dumarest.  Instead of cracking open one of my many unread Dumarest volumes, let's check out three short stories by Tubb which I found in magazines and anthologies from the MPorcius library.

"The Ming Vase" (1963)

"The Ming Vase" appears in numerous collections of Tubb stories, including two in which it is the title story, as well as the ninth of Judith Merril's famous Year's Best anthologies.  I guess this is one of Tubb's more critically acclaimed productions.  I read it where it first appeared, in my copy of the May 1963 issue of Analog.  (I recently read the Norman Spinrad story from that issue.)

It is the Cold War!  One of America's advantages over the Goddamned commies is our superior psychic program!  Unfortunately, one of our best psykers, Klieger, has gone AWOL from the psychic project's HQ at Cartwright House.  CIA operative Don Gregson (wait, is he supposed to be operating domestically?) is on the case, following Klieger's trail across the USA as he does things like steal valuable Chinese vases from tony antique stores.  But how can Don catch a man who can predict the future?  And why did Klieger, after obediently residing in the fortress of Cartwright House for a decade, suddenly make a break for it?  

This is a solid story with themes we've seen a bunch of times before (in our struggle with the Reds are we coming to resemble them?  Is the future determined or can it be altered by our actions?) and a decent "think-outside-the-box" ending.  In his interview with Charles Platt in 1980's Dream Makers Tubb tells the world he is a fan of Robert Heinlein's pre-Stranger in a Strange Land work (he hated Stranger, saying RAH had "done himself a tremendous disservice" in producing that and later books), so I was sort of primed to see similarities in "The Ming Vase" to Henlein's Cold War psyker story "Project Nightmare" (1953) and to "--We Also Walk Dogs" (1941), which also has a beautiful Ming ceramic as a major plot element--maybe those earlier stories were an influence on Tubb.

"J is for Jeanne" (1965)

In the interview in Dream Makers Platt portrays Tubb, and Tubb presents himself, as a "hack" who resides in the "skid row of the science-fiction ghetto," the "action and adventure" sub genre, and who is at a distance from, and perhaps even has some contempt for, "serious" or "ambitious" "literature."  So I think it is fun to see Tubb in such venues as Judith Merril's 11th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F along with such mainstream literary figures as John Ciardi (the translator of the version of Dante's Comedy which I read in high school and in college) and Jorge Luis Borges, as well as those critically acclaimed New Age pioneers J. G. Ballard, R. A. Lafferty and Thomas Disch.  It is in my copy of 11th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F that I read "J is for Jeanne;" the story first appeared in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds.

"J is for Jeanne" is not the kind of action and adventure story that we associate with Tubb and his fellows in their particular part of the SF ghetto.  Instead it is a lame gimmick story.  We are presented with an odd narrative in which, it appears, a woman is relating her recurring nightmare to a series of analysts.  As revealed at the end, and as the reader perhaps has predicted from various clues, Jeanne is not a woman at all but a computer, and the interactions between Jeanne and the engineers we have witnessed are just allegories or fantasies or indications tghat the computer has developed a (insane) personality.

In the interview with Platt, Tubb talks about throwing together brief stories to fill space when he, as editor of a short-lived magazine, needed material and the only stuff getting submitted was "rubbish."  This feels like a story that was thrown together in such a fashion.  Not good.

"Blood in the Mist" (1979)

I purchased my heavily foxed and water damaged copy of Heroic Fantasy, edited by Gerald W. Page and Hank Reinhardt and published in 1979, at a flea market in South Carolina last year.  I kind of bought it just so I would have something to show for having dragged my wife and in laws to a hideous parking lot where people who smelled like cigarettes were selling rusty old tools, prehistoric videotapes, and boxes of expired pasta and breakfast cereal.  But now, months later, I am warming up to this volume which I originally thought of as a mere consolation prize.

In the intro to "Blood in the Mist" the editors compare Tubb's ability and volume of output to that of Henry Kuttner, Robert Silverberg and Edmond Hamilton, but, annoyingly, spell Hamilton's name incorrectly.  They also tell us it is the third story by Tubb about the hero Malkar; Page and Reinhardt don't give us the titles of the first two Malakar capers, but I'm guessing they are "Death God's Doom" and "Sword in the Snow," both from 1973.  It seems that in 1999 the Malkar stories were expanded into two novels (Death God's Doom and The Sleeping City), or maybe these novels are additions to the Malkar saga.

"Blood in the Mist" is one of those stories in which a grizzled mercenary (that's Malakar) meets an ancient merchant who seeks immortality and a gorgeous veiled lady in a smoky inn and accompanies them on their perilous journey through a snowy waste where they face treachery and monster attacks and the merchant resorts to calling upon the aid of eldritch demons.  I like these sorts of stories, and Tubb does a good job with the pacing, plotting, tone and the descriptions of the settings, creatures and fights.  Worth the attention of sword and sorcery fans; I'd be happy to read more Malakar stories.

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"J is for Jeanne" is just bad, but "The Ming Vase" and "Blood in the Mist" are entertaining stories and good examples of their respective categories.  I also recommend that SF fans read the Tubb profile in Dream Makers; it has some laugh out loud moments and provides a memorably cynical and iconoclastic perspective from within (maybe just barely within) the world of SF publishing.

Classic SF Mysteries: Harry Harrison's 1971 introduction to Thomas Disch's One Hundred and Two H-Bombs

In his intro to the 1971 Berkley edition (S2044) of Thomas Disch's collection One Hundred and Two H-Bombs, Harry Harrison makes a number of provocative claims.  For one thing he says that the New Wave writers "brought a breath of fresh air into the dusty SF establishment at that time [the early 1960s] that still has the fossil saurians shivering."  Who are these dusty dinosaurs? Arthur C. Clarke?  Robert Heinlein?  Poul Anderson?  Isaac Asimov?  I wish Harrison would name names instead of just making these vague allegations.  I suppose Harrison had his career to worry about, but now I am going to be wondering who exactly Harrison is contemptuously condemning here in the same way I am still wondering who Jack Vance denounced to that New York Times reporter and who Harlan Ellison was sneering at in the intro to The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.

In praising Disch and the New Wave writers Harrison also asserts that they enjoy writing, that readers can sense the pleasure experienced by New Wave writers as they compose their work.  This sounds like boilerplate ad copy that the reader is free to accept or reject as he sees fit, but Harrison goes a step further, claiming that lots of SF stories are hack work produced by people who don't even like what they are doing:

There is also more than a touch of authorial pleasure in their [the New Wave writers'] writing, an ingredient that is missing from all too much of science fiction.  If a writer is not writing for his own pleasure or interest the fact is immediately obvious to all except the most cynical of editors and dimmest of readers.  The vacant interstellar spaces of SF contain far too much of this; less than an atom of interest per cubic meter.    

Who is Harrison talking about here?  What SF writers (and he seems to think there are many of them) were active in the '60s and early '70s who could be credibly accused of not enjoying their work?  Is Harrison talking about big name writers whose politics he didn't like, like (I'm guessing) Heinlein, Anderson, and E. E. Smith, who glorified businesspeople and fighting men?  Or prolific writers of straightforward adventure stories like Edmond Hamilton, E. C. Tubb, Ken Bulmer and Lin Carter?  I've read all those writers, and even when I didn't like something they did, I felt they were doing it with enthusiasm.  (Maybe I am one of the "dimmest of readers.")  If Harrison is talking about minor figures, people almost forgotten today, like John Glasby and Lionel Fanthorpe, then I think he may have been overstating his case.

Readers are invited to nominate candidates for Harrison's rogues gallery of dusty dinosaurs and uninterested hacks in the comments, based on knowledge of Harrison's other criticism or pure conjecture, in the comments.

Zenya by E. C. Tubb

"Open order, and no firing unless I give the order."

After reading two novels by giants of 20th-century British literature, I'm back to reading about a space gladiator dude!

Zenya first was published by DAW in 1974, with a cover by Kelly Freas; I own just such a copy.  I like the space ship on the cover, but I'm not crazy about the woman's face--Freas seems to be experimenting with odd angles (hello, nostrils!) and a sort of translucent or chalkboard look here, and I'm not sure it works.

Zenya begins with our man Earl Dumarest poring over old volumes in a library on planet Paiyar, looking for clues to the location of Earth, his home planet, which most people in his far future civilization think is a myth.  Dumarest and I are like two sides of the same coin--I was just poring over old volumes in a library on planet Pittsburgh! (I'm sure you'll agree that reading old R. Crumb, Tony Millionaire and Peter Bagge comics is approximately equivalent to scrutinizing old star charts and star ship logs.)

While among the stacks Dumarest gets picked up by a gorgeous blonde (I guess this is where Dumarest's and my lives diverge), the Zenya of the title, who is acting as an agent for her venerable grandfather, Aihult Chan Parect, the patriarch of the House of Aihult.  Paiyar is one of those planets where everybody is part of some house or guild, and House Aihult is the most powerful house.  Chan Parect thinks a period of instability is about to erupt, and he wants Dumarest, one of the galaxy's finest fighting men, on the side of House Aihult when the shit hits the fan!  He also thinks House Aihult has become decadent through too much inbreeding, and suggests that Dumarest could bring new blood to the House by marrying Zenya or Zenya's aunt, the equally horny Lisa.  Both of these women are eager to get into Dumarest's pants.

(Remember when Vic was going to bring new blood to that underground post-apocalyptic colony?  Good times!)

I got a kind of "Oriental kung fu" vibe from House Aihult, despite Zenya's blonde hair.  Everybody in the House, including Zenya, has "slanted eyes," they study a form of unarmed combat in which the open hand is used, and throw around phrases like "honored grandfather."

Dumarest's first job for House Aihult: go to the planet of Chard, accompanied by Zenya, to find Chan Parect's son, Salek, an intellectual and historian.  Why is Dumarest sent on this mission instead of one of Chan Parect's relatives or longtime retainers?  Grandpa is paranoid and has reason to suspect everybody in House Aihult is out to kill him!  Dumarest, of course, wants nothing to do with Chan Parect, Salek, Zenya, or Lisa, so what's to stop him from skipping out on these zany characters once he gets to Chard?  Well, while Dumarest was asleep, Chan Parect had a chip implanted in our favorite space gladiator that, should he try any funny business, will alert the evil Cyclan (they've been chasing Dumarest since book four, Kalin, because only he knows the secret formula those cold-hearted calculators need to control the galaxy) of his whereabouts!

(Remember when that wizard put an irritable creature bristling with talons inside Cugel the Clever's body that would keep Cugel on task when he was on the quest for The Eye of the Overworld?  Good times!)

Dumarest quickly gets himself hired as field marshal of the armies of the civilized farmers and merchants of Chard; their enemy is the primitive and formerly peaceful forest-dwelling natives known as the Ayutha.  The Ayutha are human, but they landed on Chard long before the farmer/merchant colonists arrived and evolved independently, developing a form of empathy/telepathy.  Tubb portrays the Ayutha as innocent and ineffectual hippies; their mental powers render them unambitious (they like to sit around and dream) and practically unable to hunt or fight (they can feel the terror and pain of their victims.)  Salek is living among these natives, helping them build weapons to protect themselves from the Chardians.

Dumarest's position as top general gives him the chance to give lots of "war is hell," anti-war speeches. "'War isn't a game conducted with neat, clear-cut rules. There is no glory, and little honor.'"  "'With sufficient force it is possible to defeat any enemy, but if the force used is too great, what have you won?  Corpses and desolation.  In my experience, it is always better to negotiate.'"  The folly of rushing into war without first weighing all the options and assessing costs is one of the novel's themes.  I interpreted the tenth Dumarest book, Jondelle, as being a warning about the dangers of inaction and an apologia for self-defense, and Zenya feels like a companion piece that warns of the dangers of recklessness and reminds us that violence should be a carefully considered last resort.

Dumarest figures out that the natives are not responsible for the attacks which touched off the war; a mutant strain of the plant the Chardians grow and sell to other planets, the very foundation of their economy, has been releasing spores which cause hallucinations and drive people to a murderous frenzy.  Those who come upon the gory remains of farm villages assume, wrongly, that the Ayutha are to blame.  Dumarest ends the war, but angers the growers by destroying their crops, so he has to leave Chard fast.  The House Aihult storyline is resolved when it turns out that Chan Parect was lying about the chip (!) and when Zenya and Lisa (who arrived on Chard on the next ship from Paiyar), get in a cat fight which leads to Lisa's death and Zenya's imprisonment.

Zenya, I'm afraid, is one of the weaker of the Dumarest novels I have read.  Zenya, Lisa, Salek, and Chan Parect aren't very interesting and don't get much screen time. The plot is convoluted, and not in a surprising or compelling way: I was disappointed that the chip was a lie, and a "war" consisting of a dumb mistake caused by a natural disaster, a war with no battles or villains, just a bunch of friendly fire incidents, is kind of boring.  Way too much time is spent on this bogus war: Dumarest lands on Chard on page 51, and on page 62 it is clear to the reader that the natives are blameless, but Dumarest's investigation, and his efforts to convince the skeptical Chardians, grind on for like 90 repetitive pages.  Again and again Dumarest orders the Chardians to hold their fire, and again and again they disobey and cause friendly fire fatalaties, out of incompetence or due to the influence of the spores.  The innocence of the Ayutha should have come as a surprise instead of being telegraphed to readers long before it was evident to the characters.  I would have preferred Tubb to spend more time developing the Dumarest-Lisa-Zenya love triangle.

A little disappointing, but acceptable.  Hopefully I will derive greater enjoyment from the twelfth Dumarest novel, Eloise.