Five early 1970s stories by A. E. van Vogt

It feels like a long time since we read anything by one of the Great White North's greatest exports, A. E. van Vogt.  Luckily, I have a 1972 printing of DAW's The Book of van Vogt handy!  This volume, DAW Collectors No. 4, has a great Karel Thole cover depicting a future city and some of its oh so charming inhabitants; a later DAW edition, retitled Lost: Fifty Suns, has a cover depicting three odd characters, one supposes a potentate and two of his advisers.

The first few books printed by DAW included on their very first page "A Statement to Science Fiction Readers" explaining what DAW was all about and bragging about how awesome Donald A. Wollheim was, and my copy of The Book of van Vogt has just such a first page.  Among other things, Wollheim promises that every DAW book is one which never before appeared in paperback.  "Thus, you can be assured that, besides being the selection of an expert, the DAW Book you buy will not be something you may have bought once before with a different cover."  You have to wonder if perhaps Wollheim, in the very first year of DAW's existence, was already testing SF readers' trust when you realize that two of the seven stories in The Book of van Vogt, "The Barbarian" and "Lost: Fifty Sons," are excerpts from fix-up novels printed in paperback in the 1960s (the former as part of Empire of the Atom and the latter as part of Mission to the Stars, an alternate title for the novel The Mixed Men.)  Presumably by 1979, when Lost: Fifty Sons was printed, this promise was long forgotten.

(Isaac Walwyn's very cool van Vogt site Sevagram is helpful for figuring out these confusing van Vogt bibliography issues.)

Today we'll be talking about the five stories in The Book of van Vogt that were first published in 1971 and 1972; four of these stories were original to The Book of van Vogt.

"The Rat and the Snake" (1971)

This is one of those switcheroo stories, like the Twilight Zone episodes in which a Nazi ends up in a death camp or a U-Boat captain ends up on a torpedoed freighter, or those EC comics in which a guy kills a spider and then gets caught in a giant spider web.  A dude loves feeding rats to his pet python.  Then Word War III breaks out and the resulting economic slowdown means there is a shortage of rats for sale! The python-lover tries to steal rats from a laboratory nearby, and the scientists there punish him by testing their new war gas on him.  This gas shrinks you to the size of a rat.  The python-lover is then eaten by his own pet.

I am going to give this one a marginal thumbs up, even though I find the switcheroo gimmick irritating, because I think my man Van is playing the whole thing for laughs rather than trying to make some banal philosophical point or indulging in some kind of fantasy of punishing his enemies.  And the following lines did make me laugh:

Until those words were spoken, Mark hadn't really thought about becoming a rat-stealing criminal.  Except for his peculiar love for his python, he was a law-abiding, tax-paying nobody.  

Also, this story is just three pages long--short and to the point.  And it reminded me of the scene in The Weapon Makers in which the protagonist has to fight a twenty-foot rat, and the scene in which he turns himself into a giant.  Good memories!

"The Rat and the Snake" was first published in Witchcraft and Sorcery, a periodical billed as "The MODERN Magazine of Weird Tales."  Since 1972 "The Rat and the Snake" has appeared in a few collections and anthologies, including two Continental European volumes with Chris Foss covers.

"The Timed Clock" (1972)

This is one of those time travel stories in which a guy goes back in time and becomes (or realizes he is) his own grandfather.  This is also one of those stories with an elaborate frame story in which a guy is hosting a party and tells his friends a wacky story and they have to decide if they believe it (hmmm..doesn't H. G. Wells' Time Machine also feature the time traveller describing his time travel to his buddies at a get together at his digs?)  I guess this story is a little off the beaten track because the main character's grandmother accompanies him to the present day to live with him as his wife.

Competent, so acceptable, but no big deal.

"The Timed Clock" has not appeared again in English, but our French, Dutch and Italian friends all have the opportunity to read it in their native jibber jabber in SF magazines and van Vogt collections.

"The Confession" (1972)

This is more like what we expect from van Vogt; "The Confession" is a story which is hard to understand and is full of psychology, hypnosis, ruthless superpowerful beings from another time or dimension, sexual relationships and class conflict.

Paul Marriott is the last of the Marriotts, the family that was once the richest and most important in town but which has fallen on hard times; not only is the big and once beautiful Marriott house mostly bare of furniture, but Paul is working at another man's shop, sweeping the floors!  Paul has started having strange hallucinations, or maybe they are vivid dreams, of the house being furnished, and of seeing himself, twenty years older, living with Judith, his girlfriend.  People in the town remind him that he was recently hypnotized by a travelling showman, and imply that Judith is no longer around.  Paul's hallucinations continue, he actually experiencing life married to Judith in an atomic-powered future of glittering lights and towering translucent buildings--in this future world Judith's business acumen has made them financially comfortable, reversing the decline of the Marriott family.  Is Paul getting glimpses of a potential happy future?  Is his psyche actually travelling back and forth between the dreadful present and a happy future?  Can he do anything to make sure that happy future comes to pass?  But where is Judith in the present day--what happened to her?

Paul tracks down the travelling hypnotist to get further clues, and then meets an even more eldritch character.  This figure suddenly appears on the penultimate page of the 15-page story, and his motives and actions are alien and somewhat opaque, but I think he is a time-travelling rogue who seduces (or rapes) women from different time periods.  It appears that after he had his way with Judith that she, fearing she was no longer good enough to be part of the exalted Marriott clan, committed suicide Lucrece-style.  Judith lays dead, a futuristic implement buried in her chest, but, somehow, as Paul and the future man wrestle, their actions, by accident or design, shift Paul and Judith onto another time stream and twenty years later, into that peaceful and comfortable atomic future.

This is the genuine van Vogt article; I like it.  "The Confession," like all the stories we are talking about today, appeared in translation in multiple non-English publications.

"Ersatz Eternal" (1972)

This is a trifling sort of thing, just four pages, that I cannot endorse.  Three Earthmen land on a barren planet; one by one they leave the vessel to look for fuel.  Each astronaut finds a simulacrum Earth complete with his friends and family and childhood home, etc.  Each lives for centuries--they do not age, and are immune from injury. Then, by chance, in New York City, two of the astronauts meet.  They speculate that some life force created this imitation Earth and they are "being held in reserve...possible substitutes if anything goes wrong."

This story feels like a waste of time, it is just too mysterious, amounts to nothing.  I may be missing its significance...there is a hint that the astronauts are from a different, happier, dimension, that the  imitation Earth is our own Earth, and that it is the product of the mind of the third astronaut, who is violently insane--if so, van Vogt is saying that you and I live in a nightmare world, a twisted caricature of the real happy universe!

Forrest J. Ackerman, who was van Vogt's literary agent (among others, Ackerman also represented Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury) included "Ersatz Eternal" in Best Science Fiction for 1973.  The story also saw print in foreign venues, including in an issue of the Polish SF magazine Fantastyka, which you can read at the internet archive.

"The Sound of Wild Laughter" (1972)

This is a substantial piece, like 50 pages long, a convoluted story with a plot like a soap opera's! Remember when we read Earth Factor X (AKA The Secret Galactics) two-and-a-half years ago?  Well, "The Sound of Wild Laughter" stars the same main characters, Nobel-prize-winning physicists Dr. Carl and Dr. Marie Hazzard, and some of the same supporting players!  It takes place earlier than the novel.

Carl and Marie's marriage is in bad shape, because Carl keeps cheating on Marie, so she refuses to sleep with him, and he hypocritically and irrationally flies into jealous rages, accusing her (unjustly) of cheating on him.  This has been going on for fourteen years!  It doesn't help that Carl, whose work doing Nobel-worthy research, managing Hazzard Laboratories--a successful firm that creates and sells scientific equipment--and acting as president of the Non-Pareil Corporation, as well as juggling two or three mistresses at any one time, is also an amateur expert on psychology!  He has a bunch of aphorisms about female behavior that he has inscribed in a journal he has entitled Women Are Doomed, and is always working them into conversation.  His aphorisms aren't like the ones we hear all the time, like "Girls rule, boys drool," or "A woman has to be twice as good as a man to get half as far," or "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."  No, Carl's aphorisms are more like:

"A perfect marriage exists when a wife is bound to her husband by emotional ties that she does not even try to understand."

and

"It takes a lot of energy for a man to get a frigid female into bed and progressively more energy for him to keep her there."

I guess Carl long ago wrote off any ambitions of working for the Google people.

Anyway, as the story opens, Carl has been hit by a truck and practically killed, but the world's finest brain surgeon, Dr. Angus MacKerrie, in a pioneering operation, has managed to save Carl's brain and preserve it in a nutrient fluid!  Mac hooks the brain up to machines so Carl, still conscious as what he calls "a nothing, a mind suspended in a great night" can talk to people.  Marie is our main character, and we follow her as she deals with the aftermath of these startling events:

• Mac the brain surgeon is in love with Marie and endeavors to seduce her (his seduction methods will look like rape to many 2017 readers.)

• Carl in his neurotically jealous way has long suspected that one of his and Marie's top employees, fellow physicist Dr. Walter Drexel, is having an affair with Marie, and now he thinks Walter was the one who ran him over.  Walter pressures Marie to limit Carl's opportunities to talk to the press and other people, as he fears his career (and Marie's) will be ruined if Carl's accusations become public.  Now that Carl is out of the way Walter also tries to get in Marie's pants--he is no more concerned with getting affirmative consent than is Mac, but he has his own neuroses that hamper his efforts.   

• Marie and Carl's lawyer helps her with the legal shenanigans revolving around Carl's will (he left money to several mistresses) and the decision of whether to petition the court to declare Carl, a disembodied but living brain, legally alive or legally dead.  The lawyer tries to blackmail Marie, seduce her, or maybe both--his dialogue is a little oblique and unclear.  Van Vogt stories are full of sentences and passages which are hard to understand, and this is at least partly intentional--Marie spends the whole story confused and disoriented (sample passage: "For Marie, resentment yielded to puzzlement...She couldn't quite decide what he was trying to say") and Van aims to make us readers feel the same way.

• As the story progresses we learn more about Carl and Marie's marriage--for example, over the years Carl has suggested multiple times that they jointly commit suicide, so they can be "together in some other plane, true lovers for all time."  Carl, from his perch inside a glass dome full of nutrient liquid, suggests such a suicide pact yet again, and tells Marie, and then demonstrates, that he has rigged up a way to detonate a bomb in his quarters that, he says, will kill them both!  BOOM!  Marie is clever enough to escape the explosion, but the fact that Carl also survives suggests that Carl's suicide talk all along has been nothing more than a ruse to provide him the opportunity to murder his wife!  Carl then convinces Mac and Walter that Marie triggered the explosion, that she was trying to murder him!  Now all the men can blackmail Marie!

In the end, Marie is under the thumb of the three men, in a position she compares to that of a slave.

This is a crazy story, and challenging to interpret.  Carl's theories, which Marie is always thinking about and talking about, and the story's last few lines, indicate that "The Sound of Wild Laughter" is about free will and determinism.  Carl comes down hard on the side of determinism--the courses of our lives are just as determined by physical laws (Carl argues that factors like "chemistry of their internal structure" and "electromagnetic flows in the body and brain" control people so that we are "like so many puppets") as are the orbits of Mars and the Earth around the sun.  It is even implied that we all live in a "great night," just like Carl, even though we may still have our eyes and bodies.  Van Vogt seems to agree with these theories, but at the same time we have to wonder because he puts them in the mouth of a neurotic liar and would-be murderer--is this the kind of guy whose theories we should wholeheartedly embrace?

"The Sound of Wild Laughter" depicts a sexist society in which men crush an intelligent woman (she's a Nobel-winner herself, remember), but if we are supposed to accept Carl's theories, are we then supposed to see such sexism as merely an inevitable tragedy we must learn to accept?  Does determinism mean we should absolve the men of their crimes against Marie and each other?  Or are Carl's theories just a rationalization, an excuse for the terrible things he does?  Is van Vogt portraying evil or mentally ill men with a focus on the way they justify their oppressive actions, perhaps even suggesting that we question to what extent theories about human life like Carl's simply describe reality, and to what extent such theories actually help create the sexist and otherwise callous or unjust world we live in?

"The Sound of Wild Laughter" is not necessarily conventionally entertaining, and heaven knows how people nowadays will react to a morally ambiguous story in which an innocent woman is successfully manipulated by neurotic and murderous men who, in a just world, would be in a prison, but it is a thought-provoking puzzle, and I like it.  This is the real van Vogt stuff.  "The Sound of Wild Laughter" was translated into Italian and German, but only ever appeared in English in DAW's various printings of The Book of van Vogt.

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The Book of van Vogt is a solid collection that every van Vogt fan will want to own because it includes these five otherwise difficult to acquire stories, and the Karel Thole cover is a nice bonus.  

More from our man Van in our next episode!

Four stories by Edmond Hamilton from the 1920s and '30s

In the past I've mentioned Del Rey's cool Best of series of paperback collections of stories by classic SF authors; in fact, back in early 2016, I read 1978's The Best of Eric Frank Russell, which has an introduction by Alan Dean Foster, cover to cover.  In 1977 Del Rey put out a volume dedicated to MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton, edited by Hamilton's wife, Leigh Brackett, as well as a book of Brackett stories edited by Hamilton.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we'll be reading both of these collections of classic adventure SF.  First up, four stories from The Best of Edmond Hamilton that first appeared in genre magazines in the 1920s and early 1930s.

"The Monster-God of Mamurth" (1926)

On its second appearance in Weird 
Tales, "Monster-God" didn't get
a cover mention; I hope Hamilton 
didn't feel like he'd got demoted!

This is Hamilton's first published story, and it is actually mentioned on the cover of the issue of Weird Tales in which it appeared, which must have been very exciting for a writer early in his career.  The Best of Edmond Hamilton is actually dedicated to the editor who bought the story, Farnsworth Wright, who edited Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940. "The Monster-God of Mamurth" has seen quite a few reprintings, including a second Weird Tales appearance in 1935.

"The Monster-God of Mamurth" is a solid Lovecraftian-type story, complete with lost city, alien and/or prehistoric god, and invisible monster.  (Though I label these elements "Lovecraftian," they were not invented by Lovecraft, and Hamilton didn't necessarily get them from Lovecraft stories; in fact, I think Lovecraft's big lost city and invisible monster stories, like "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Dunwich Horror" and "At The Mountains of Madness" were published after "Monster-God of Mamurth."  Lovecraft's "The Nameless City" was published in an amateur periodical in 1921, but was not widely available until the 1930s.)  Hamilton includes a (mercifully brief) frame story--our narrator is a white trader in the North African desert, and one night an American archaeologist who is near death crawls into his camp.  The archaeologist luckily has the strength to take up the narration for fourteen of the story's sixteen pages, telling us how he stumbled on written evidence (an inscription on stone in Phoenician) of a previously unrecorded ancient city, and went there by himself, even though the people who wrote the inscription and all the Arabs he talked to strongly advised him to stay away.  At the ruined city he explored an invisible temple and had to fight for his life against an invisible monster, much like a spider the size of a horse, presumably the god worshiped by the city's long dead citizens.

Hamilton paces the story well, and the descriptions of dealing with an invisible building and an invisible enemy are good.  More action-oriented and less extravagantly written than your typical Lovecraft story; maybe we should call this one "Howard-like"--after all, the archaeologist escapes the multi-limbed god, and it is via an adrenaline-powered feat of desperate strength, not by using his noggin or some dusty old book!

"The Man Who Evolved" (1931)

I've already written about the second story in The Best of Edmond Hamilton, "The Man Who Evolved," so I'll be skipping it here.  I read it in Isaac Asimov's fun and interesting 1974 anthology Before the Golden Age.

"A Conquest of Two Worlds" (1932)

First appearing in Wonder Stories, "A Conquest of Two Worlds" would be reprinted 16 years later by Startling Stories, whose editors heralded it as a "Hall of Fame Classic"!  Then Donald Wollheim, the hero behind DAW books and so many other laudable (and a few questionable) SF projects, selected it in 1951 for his Every Boy's Book of Science Fiction.  Sounds like a must read!

"A Conquest of Two Worlds" is a sort of "future history" in 32 pages of Earth's expansion into the rest of the solar system, a history which, as Brackett tells us in her spoiler-rich introduction to the volume, is surprisingly "downbeat" and "realistic."  This story, Brackett relates, is a response to SF stories in which the Earthman is portrayed as having the right to take over other planets, which are universally inhabited by evil monsters.  In this story the people of Earth are portrayed as driven largely by emotionalism and greed, while the aliens are largely sympathetic.

The plot: Some egghead invents an atomic power source--atomic propulsion systems and energy weapons soon follow. The boffin takes a single trip to scout out the inner planets and Jupiter, then dies in a crash upon landing on Earth.  The people of Earth quickly form a sort of world government, build a fleet of atomic rockets, and send out expeditions to exploit the vast natural resources of Mars and Jupiter; in a series of episodes that recall events in the history of British exploration and imperialism in North America, Africa and elsewhere, the Earthmen trigger and prosecute tremendous wars against the stone-age Martian and Jovian natives!  Like American Indians, the Martian and Jovian populations are seriously diminished and the survivors end up on reservations!

Besides depicting Earth settlement of Mars and Jupiter as resulting in immoral wars, Hamilton keeps reminding us how dangerous space travel and exploration are with many mentions of rocket ship crashes and illness due to cosmic rays and extraterrestrial environmental conditions.  This is a story drenched in pessimism, and unrelieved by the idea that challenges excite humanity to noble deeds of heroism, and in this it reminds me of Hamilton's 1952 story "What's It Like Out There?", which I read four or five years ago, during the Iowa period of my life, having borrowed from a university library via interlibrary loan a number of books of Hamilton stories.  "What's It Like Out There?" appears in The Best of Edmond Hamilton and I will be rereading it as part of this series of posts on Hamilton and Brackett.    

Most of "A Conquest of Two Worlds" reads like an encyclopedia entry about a military campaign, but there are dimly realized characters whose careers are pegged to the campaigns to conquer Mars and Jupiter.  In the last dozen pages of the story one of these characters, 60 years before Kevin Costner would do it, 70 years before Tom Cruise would do it, and almost 80 years before whoever the hell is in Avatar would do it, turns against his modern and imperialistic people and culture to join the primitive Jovians and aid them in their doomed struggle against the Earth!

While it is interesting as a pioneering example of a revisionist anti-Western-imperialism story, "A Conquest of Two Worlds," because it is dry and the characters are flat, is not very entertaining, so I'm awarding it merely a passing grade of "Acceptable."

A PDF scan of the issue of Wonder Stories in which "A Conquest of Two Worlds" appeared is viewable at the internet archive.  There you can see the included illustration by Frank Paul (depicting a major spoiler), a portrait of Hamilton, and an editorial introduction that tells you the story is about the crimes of the white race and greedy businessmen (everywhere I look I'm finding spoilers for this story.)  But that's not all!  The owner of the magazine hand wrote one-line reviews on each story's first page, and while he or she gushes about Jack Williamson's "The Moon Era" (and check out Williamson's slick hairdo and cool spectacles!), "A Conquest of Two Worlds" gets panned as "timeworn" and "hackneyed."  Ouch!

"The Island of Unreason" (1933)

Another piece that appeared in Wonder Stories and was accorded "Hall of Fame" status by the people at Startling, who only waited twelve years to reprint this baby.  As I learned at isfdb, "The Island of Unreason" also appeared in a mysterious 1946 publication along with another Hamilton story, "Murder in the Clinic."  This odd little book, published in Ireland by London outfit Utopian Publications, was part of a British series of books and magazines of short fiction by American authors whose covers were adorned with drawings or photos of naked women.  While many of the stories are by legitimately popular and important SF authors like Robert Bloch, Jack Williamson, Clark Ashton Smith and Ray Bradbury, it is hard not to suspect that the real selling point of the books was their covers, most of which you can see at isfdb, should you be curious.

"The Island of Unreason" takes place in a socialistic technocratic future that fetishizes "reason," efficiency and cooperation, and condemns emotion and individuality.  When Allan Mann, Serial Number 2473R6, an engineer in City 72 (the future name of New York City--what kind of media bias is this?--NYC should be Number 1!) questions handing over the atomic motor plans he has been working on for two years to another engineer because he wants to finish the designs himself, he is charged with a breach of reason.  The authorities exile him for an undisclosed period to the Island of Unreason, where there is no government.  Now, I know all you Kmele Foster fans out there are thinking an island without government would be a paradise ("please don't throw me in that brier patch!"), but the inhabitants of this technocratic society, including Mann see a place without government as some kind of living hell!  The director of City 72 thinks by exposing Mann to life outside the paternal state will teach him how essential government really is ("cure" him of "unreasonable tendencies.")

Mann is dropped off on the island and, while initially horrified, quickly learns to cope without all-powerful government with the help of the "unreasonables" already there, who have a primitive village and a rough and ready sort of social order.  When his sentence is up and the government agents arrive to bring him back to City 72, he decides he'd rather stay on the island.

This is a better story than "A Conquest of Two Worlds" not just because I like anti-big government stories, but because it focuses more strongly on individual characters and presents more vivid pictures of societies.  It is actually amusing to watch Mann, a member of "the world's fiftieth generation of vegetarians" who is used to eating the "mushy pre-digested foods" rationed out by the government, sleeping in a government dormitory and having sex with women whom the "Eugenics Board" orders him to impregnate, respond and adapt to a world in which he has to eat fresh meat, sleep on the ground, and compete for sex partners because people get to choose who they have sex with based on their own far-from-logical preferences.

While I am contrasting them from a literary and entertainment point of view, I think we can see strong thematic similarities between "The Island of Unreason" and "A Conquest of Two Worlds."  Both feature a character deeply embedded in his society, an elite member of that society, in fact, who changes his mind about that society after being exposed to a different, less technologically advanced, society.  Both also evince a level of skepticism about modernity and progress and make an argument that a concern for material well-being can lead a society to abandon traditional morality and compromise people's freedom to an atrocious degree.

Good.

"Thundering Worlds" (1934)

Back in March we read the story from this issue
attributed to Heald, a collaboration with
H. P. Lovecraft

Over the course of this blog's life we've seen a range of types of stories from Edmond Hamilton: mad scientist stories, stories about evolution, today a weird lost city story and two nakedly political stories expressing views about Western imperialism and the role of the state in our lives.  But Hamilton is perhaps most famous for his epics about interstellar warfare conceived on the grandest possible scale with the highest possible stakes, wars in which civilizations maneuver the very planets and stars like so many aircraft carriers and battering rams as they seek to avert or inflict genocide. "Thundering Worlds," first seen in Weird Tales, is just such a story.  I read "Thundering Worlds" during the same period in which I read "What's It Like Out There?", but I have no compunctions about reading it again.

It is the far future, and the human race has colonized all nine planets, and the system is ruled by a council consisting of the leaders of each of the nine worlds.  Our narrator is the top official of Mercury, and as the story begins he describes how mankind is under a terrible threat--Sol is cooling off and the nine planets will soon be uninhabitable! The solution to this crisis is to construct atomic thrusters of mind-boggling size on each of the nine planets and then drive them like huge ships across the black void of interstellar space to a new sun!

The Mercurian's narrative relates how the nine planets go from one star to another, looking for a home.  One star produces radiation that is deadly to human life (radiation looms large in Hamilton's oeuvre), while another star system is inhabited by hostile aliens, and a terrible space naval battle between swarms of human and alien craft results.  By some terrible coincidence, these aliens (amoeba people) live in a star system whose sun is about to go nova, so they have the idea of hijacking the solar planets to escape certain doom.  When the Solar space navy repels their invasion, the amoeba people construct their own colossal atomic engines and the nine solar planets are soon pursued by four amoeba planets!

When the human migrants finally find a suitable star to orbit their worlds around, a showdown with the amoeba people is inevitable.  The narrator decides that Mercury will make the ultimate sacrifice--all the Mercurians evacuate their little world and then the narrator rams it into the lead amoeba planet, causing a five-planet pileup that wipes out the amoeba race and leaves us humans masters of all we survey!  Go Earth!

This is a fun story.  The first-person narration and a sort of rivalry between the narrator and the rulers of Pluto and Jupiter means it doesn't fall into the trap of sounding like a dry encyclopedia article that "A Conquest of Two Worlds" does.  I'm a little surprised "Thundering Worlds" hasn't been reprinted more often; maybe its lack of social or political commentary made it less attractive to editors.

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All worthwhile reads by World Wrecker Hamilton, and pleasantly diverse in their subject matter and tone.  In our next episode we start The Best of Leigh Brackett with three of her stories from the 1940s.

Star Gladiator by Dave Van Arnam

"Did you know that every tenth planet, roughly, in the Zarmithian Empire has a Star Games arena of one sort or another?  I didn't, but that's over seventy arenas.  A hundred thousand lives a month....They're restocking from Kalvar."

Last week I stopped by Karen Wickliff Books, the terrific used book store on High Street in Columbus, Ohio, mere miles from MPorcius Fiction Log's current MidWestern HQ.  There I pored over the SF shelves and the wall of unsorted paperbacks, and discovered a treasure from our friends at Belmont, a 1967 Belmont Double featuring Kris Neville's Special Delivery and Dave Van Arnam's Star Gladiator.  The cover is irresistible, with its fun fonts, extravagant and exuberant tag lines, and its illustrations chock full of so many classic ("shopworn" to you cynics!) SF elements, but the contents were also intriguing.

Now, I've already read and praised Neville's Special Delivery at this here blog, but Van Arnam I know nothing about.  He doesn't have a lot of publications listed at isfdb, but he seems to have been a committed SF fan (he wrote an article entitled "How I Learned to Love Fandom" for the NyCon3 Program and Memory Book) and an expert on Edgar Rice Burroughs.  He also co-wrote some novels with Ted White, whom I like (one reason I spent all that money on ebay for all those issues of Fantastic is that I find White an interesting character.)  So, I have plenty of reasons to read Star Gladiator, which first appeared in printed form in this very Belmont Double and since then no place else (there is, however, an electronic version with an embarrassing CGI cover that seems to be channeling the Herald of Galactus.)  Science fiction is full of people getting thrown into the gladiatorial arena--let's see what Mr. Van Arnam does with this classic ("hackneyed" to you blase types!) theme.

It is the future and humankind has spread throughout the galaxy--men reside on a million or more planets, divided into numerous empires.  One such empire, of over 700 planets, is that centered on planet Zarmith II.  The Zarmithians are a real bunch of jerks who have been expanding their empire by conquest for centuries, largely to enslave people so they can throw them into their gladiatorial arenas to be murdered by beasts or celebrity pro gladiators.

Our hero is teen-aged Jonnath Gri, son of an important member of the Grand Council of the independent planet Kalvar, a planet with high gravity where everybody is physically strong.  (Shades of John Carter, whose success on Mars was partly the result of being born and bred on higher-gravity Earth.)  The novel begins when the Zarmithian military conquers Kalvar in a lightning quick attack, the Kalvarans lacking weapons that can penetrate the Zarmithian force fields.  The Zarmathians exterminate the Kalvaran leadership, but capture much of the population alive to throw into the arena!  Jonnath, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend's little sister escape extermination by hiding in a vacant mansion, where they find rifles and pistols which they use to stave off attacks by members of the Kalvaran lower classes, who are using the catastrophe as an opportunity to engage in a little looting!  Unfortunately, all that shooting draws the attention of the Zarmithian troops and by Chapter 3 (Star Gladiator has eight chapters that span like 88 pages) Jonnath is in the arena on planet Changar and his fiance and prospective sister-in-law are in parts unknown!

I like the font used for the chapter headings of Special Delivery/Star Gladiator

When Jonnath's dad wasn't calling for an independent prosecutor or legislating subsidies for his friends in the tech industry or whatever it is that a Grand Councilor of Kalvar does, he was training Jonnath in hand-to-hand combat, so Jonnath is a success in the arena and soon becomes one of those celebrity gladiators.  After three years of fighting every week for the pleasure of both live in-person violence fans and those who prefer to enjoy their gore in the comfort of their homes via the TV, Jonnath is elevated from the small Changar Arena to the big leagues on planet Tansavar.  On Tansavar he meets a bunch of other Kalvarans, who, like him, have become successful pro gladiators.  Jonnath has to decide if he will join their conspiracy to take over the planet, or, if he will seek his freedom "by the book": if he can defeat a series of especially difficult opponents in the arena at the annual High Games, the Zarmithian spectators will grant him his freedom.  Complicating matters is the fact that, on Tansavar, Jonnath has befriended an alien genius whom everybody else thinks is a dumb beast, and this genius has an agenda of its own.

This is an entertaining enough sword and planet kind of thing.  The action scenes are not bad, and Van Arnam tries to give the secondary figures little idiosyncrasies that add up to interesting personalities. At times I thought Van Arnam might be trying to emulate Jack Vance--there is an elaborate meal and Van Arnam lists all the weird courses, and symbolic attire also plays a role in the story.  In the last quarter or so of the piece, after Jonnath has won his freedom, he goes full Kirth Gersen, doing detective work to locate the Zarmithian soldiers who killed his family on Kalvar so he can get revenge on them.

A problem with Star Gladiator is that Van Arnam seems to have tried to cram 150 or so pages of material into the 88 pages he had available to him, so some ideas and portions of the story feel rushed or merely glossed over.  (The alien genius who looks like a beast of burden, for example, doesn't really play any role in the plot.)  The wikipedia article on Donald Wollheim, architect of the famous and much-adored Ace Doubles, says he sometimes chopped up some writer's novel to make it fit the Double format, and one wonders if somebody at Belmont took an axe to Van Arnam's piece here.

As longtime readers of this blog know, I like these kinds of adventure stories, and if I see any of Van Arnam's books in my travels (for the low low price I paid for this one), it is likely I will pick them up.

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At the back of Belmont's Special Delivery/Star Gladiator are three pages of ads, including two pages listing many speculative fiction and Fortean titles available from Belmont (plus a "handy reference" to the bon mots of Marilyn Monroe's most famous conquest and a guide to how to find buried treasure.)  Of the books listed (besides Special Delivery and Star Gladiator), I've read Murray Leinster's Space Tug (at Gutenberg.org), Doomstar by Edmond Hamilton (in a 1979 reprint edition), Doomsman by Harlan Ellison, and my beloved Novelets of Science Fiction. which I like to think of as "The Book of the Year."  There are plenty of Belmont books listed which I have not read and would probably snatch up if I saw them by authors like James Schmitz, Kris Neville, Lin Carter, Ted White, Robert Bloch, or with crazy titles like The Throwbacks and The Cosmozoids.  It is good to know that, out there in the world's used bookstores, there are still so many treasures waiting for me to uncover them!
 

Click or squint to study Belmont's October 1967 offerings

Four more stories from Operation Future: Russell, Simak, Del Rey and Knight

Let's read four more stories from 1955's Operation Future!  Today we'll be looking at tales by relatively well known members of the SF community: Eric Frank Russell, Clifford D. Simak, Lester del Rey, and Damon Knight.

"Exposure" by Eric Frank Russell (1950)

(I am going to be saying "It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering" under my breath for a week after writing this.)

Last year I read the 1978 collection The Best of Eric Frank Russell.  Here's a story which didn't make it into that collection, but which has been anthologized several times, not only in a Russell collection (Like Nothing on Earth) but in at least three anthologies with Martin H. Greenberg's name on them.  Perhaps even more remarkable, it was included in a 1952 anthology called Let's Go Naked: Love and Life in a Nudist Camp edited by SF super-editor Donald Wollheim!  (isfdb doesn't mention Let's Go Naked, but the editor of Operation Future, Groff Conklin, does in his intro to "Exposure," warning us that "Exposure" is the only SF story in that book.)

"Exposure" is a joke story about aliens who land in a secluded forest in the United States and go about collecting samples of Earth life; their people plan on conquering Earth and enslaving us natives, and this recon ship is here to learn as much as they can about us before the assault is launched.  These aliens are shape-shifters, and after they have collected (and dissected!) two human beings from a camp, their best scouts take on the appearance of humans and try to infiltrate several nearby towns in order to investigate our weapons and energy technology.  The punch line of the story is that the aliens took their sample humans from a nudist colony, so their scouts have no clothes and are immediately picked up by the authorities, which foils their reconnaissance mission and ultimately spares Earth the calamity of invasion.

This is a humorous story and it is full of little jokes, but Russell plays it straight; this is not a farce or an extravagant satire, and the jokes come out of believable characters and situations and are actually amusing.  The aliens and their recon methods are convincing and interesting, and I enjoyed the story as much or more for its "serious" bits as the comedy.  I can see why "Exposure" has been so widely anthologized--it is quite good.

"Exposure" first appeared in Astounding.  Also pictured: a 1956 edition of Let's Go Naked.

"Worrywart" by Clifford D. Simak (1953)

I haven't read any Simak in a long time.  I think Simak is a good writer, but I find his anti-modern, anti-urban, anti-industrial attitude a little tiresome.  Maybe it is just me, but I don't actually think the world would be a better place if the only humans left were roving bands of Indians who leave the cities to intelligent dogs and robot priests.

Simak was a newspaperman, and "Worrywart"'s text draws on this knowledge, and talk of how a 1950s newspaper was run adds some additional interest to the proceedings.  Our protagonist is a copyreader who comes across a number of stories describing almost impossible events, like a terrible plane crash which all the passengers survive and the miraculous recovery of a terminally ill child, and investigates possible connections between them.  He discovers that a man with amazing mental powers must be at the bottom of these unlikely deliverances.  This guy was an invalid as a child, and did lots of reading and fantasizing.  Somehow his fantasizing about travelling to other planets has put him in touch with alien intelligences, and this relationship has given him the power to manipulate matter, time and history!  If he wants something to happen, or something to unhappen, he can make it so!

"Worrywart" was first published in Galaxy

The psychic is very agitated about the possibility of a major war.  ("He's hell bent...to bring peace to the world," one character says of him.)  One assumes Simak is alluding to Cold War tensions (1952 and 1953 saw lots of exciting Cold War incidents, including Stalin's death, anti-Communist uprisings in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, the execution of the Rosenbergs, various nuclear weapons tests and the tail end of the Korean War) but Simak studiously avoids mentioning such words as "Cold War" or "Soviet Union" or "communism."  Perhaps Simak was chary of offending readers who had taken sides in the political and ideological struggle between the East and West; we don't all have the courage to say what we really think about the people who pay our bills, the kind of courage we see in Drexel professors.

Our newspaperman worries that the psychic, who has lived a sheltered life and never been to school and so is very naive, will clumsily use his astonishing powers in an attempt to ensure peace, perhaps in a way that will cause more problems than it solves. The newspaperman is aware that the psychic reads science fiction stories, and when he finds that a new magazine includes a story about a man who ends modern war by outlawing electricity, his worries go into overdrive--by tinkering with man's knowledge of electricity, or the natural phenomena of electricity itself, the naive psyker may impoverish mankind or even destroy the universe!

This story is well written and well paced and all that, so I don't mind recommending it, even if the plot is a little silly.  All you SF scholars out there can compare it to the famous Jerome Bixby story about a naive person who wields godlike power, "It's a Good Life," which was published the same year as "Worrywart."

"Day is Done" by Lester del Rey (1939)

"Day is Done" first chronicled
 microaggressions against Neanderthalers
in Astounding

Del Rey's last name is very familiar to me from the spines of Ballantine science-fiction and fantasy paperbacks (he and his fourth wife Judy-Lynn were both important editors) but I haven't read a whole lot of his fiction. When I read the short version of Nerves back in 2014, I thought it long and boring, but on this topic I was swimming against the tide: that version of Nerves has been widely anthologized and even included in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and Conklin praises Nerves in his intro here.

All you paleontologists and anthropologists will be thrilled to hear that "Day is Done" is about cavemen!  Del Rey spins the sad tale of the last Neanderthal, Hwoogh, who is not only driven out of the hunting business, but insulted and abused by the smarter, more dextrous, and more technologically advanced Cro-Magnons who moved into the area when Hwoogh was young.  They even violate his cave, which everybody knows is a caveman's safe space!  Del Rey describes these peoples' biology and culture in some detail; I have no idea how much of what del Rey tells us is based on scientific research and how much he just came up with.  Whatever the case, this story is entertaining enough, and will perhaps resonate with readers who have grown old and feel obsolete, or have witnessed their culture, people or way of life demeaned and swept away.

"Special Delivery" by Damon Knight (1954)

Like del Rey, Knight may well be more important as an editor than a writer, but I have actually read a bunch of Knight's own fiction, as well as stories he edited for such publications as the famous Orbit series.  It turns out that "Special Delivery" is a commonly used name for short stories; Kris Neville published a story called "Special Delivery" two years before Knight's.  Neville's "Special Delivery" was about an alien spy softening up Earth for conquest, while Knight's "Special Delivery" exploits new parents' anxieties about their children and how a baby will change their lives, and features some of the whining we never stop hearing from public school teachers about how the taxpayers don't shovel enough money into their pockets.

"Special Delivery" first sent chills up new
parents' spines in Galaxy

Moira, wife of school teacher Len Connington, a Columbia alumnus and aspiring physics grad student, is pregnant.  Knight signals the story's cynicism by telling us (in a sort of oblique way that softens the blow and muddies the issue) on the second page that Len regrets ever meeting Moira!  It quickly becomes apparent that their unborn child is some kind of mutant supergenius--he can read Moira's mind and see through her eyes and so forth, and while still in the womb can understand English and even talk--a doctor holding a stethoscope to Moira's belly hears the baby insulting him.  Yes, insulting him--this baby is a jerk! (Knight flings a healthy helping of cultural references at us in this story, and one such allusion compares the enfant terrible to Monty Woolley's character in the 1942 film The Man Who Came to Dinner--old movie fans and wikipedia will tell you this character was "notoriously acerbic"; internet film reviewer MonsterHunter calls him "consistently caustic" and "maddeningly self-absorbed.")

The baby, whom Moira names after Leonardo da Vinci, starts running the household by threatening to kick if he doesn't get his way.  Leo gets Len fired from his teaching job, forces Moira to read stacks and stacks of challenging books, and refuses to let Len sleep in the same bed with Moira!  Len and Moira fear that Leo will become a dictator and rule the world with an iron fist once he is free of the womb, but they needn't have worried: Leo's genius is the result of the low oxygen environment of the uterus; once he has to breathe normal air he reverts to being a normal infant, ignorant and helpless.

Not bad.  All you SF scholars out there can compare this to Bradbury's 1946 "Small Assassin" and Kuttner and Moore's stories about troublesome kids in conflict with their parents, like 1944's "When the Bough Breaks" and 1946's "Absalom."  It's true: babies are scary!

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All these stories are entertaining and worth the SF fan's time; the Russell and Simak indulge in far-out SF concepts but reflect the anxieties of a world embroiled in the Cold War in which the cataclysm of World War II was a recent memory, while the del Rey and Knight allegorically treat our personal worries about our places in the world and in our families.  Operation Future is a worthwhile purchase.

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

My copy, front cover

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

"Crashing Suns" (1929)

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

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

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

"The Star Stealers" (1929)

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

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

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

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

“Within the Nebula” (1929)

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

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

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

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

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A Japanese edition of Crashing Suns

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

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

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

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

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

1979 stories by John Varley, Tanith Lee, Joanna Russ, and Larry Niven & Steve Barnes

Let's check out stories from 1979 by writers I have some familiarity with: John Varley, Larry Niven, Steve Barnes, Tanith Lee, and Joanna Russ.  The stories we'll read today were selected by Donald Wollheim for inclusion in DAW's 1980 Annual World's Best SF.  My copy of the anthology features a front cover by Jack Gaughan (is that the Death Star?) and a back cover blurb from The Cincinnati Post (The Post went out of business in 2007), and was previously owned by a Shelia K. Wise (if I am reading her name rightly), who dated it "May, 1980."

Fellow SF fan Shelia K. Wise, we salute you!

Wollheim's intro to the volume includes a fun little mystery.  Wollheim tells us that he recently "spent an evening with a well-known science fiction writer and his wife whose hobby is world travel."  Another couple "with the same itching foot" was also there.  Wollheim doesn't name the couples, but I am going to put forward as my guess that he is talking about the Vances and/or the Andersons.  (Check out other SF mysteries I have hoped to solve here.)

These couples described to Wollheim visits to "primitive communities," and Wollheim reports that he told them that he thinks visiting primitive people would get pretty boring after a while, one bunch of primitives being much like another. (Microaggression!)  Then he switches gears and warns us readers that if we don't accelerate our development of nuclear and solar energy we will all be living "in mud huts" when the oil runs out.  Wollheim predicts that nuclear power plants on the moon and "solar power accumulator satellites" will arise to keep us all from reverting to primitivism; either that or it's "back to the jungle."  (How does the energy get to Earth from Luna or those satellites?  Wollheim doesn't say.  Let the boffins suss out the details!)

"Options" by John Varley

I read Varley's novel Titan shortly before I started this here blog; I enjoyed it as a sort of Rendezvous with Rama hard SF thing with added sex and violence, but I didn't enjoy it so much that I have ever felt the desire to read the sequels. "Options" is (according to isfdb) set in the same universe as "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" and Ophiuchi Hotline, both of which I also read before starting this blog and thought were not bad.

"Options," which first appeared in Terry Carr's Universe 9, is about topics we regularly see discussed in the news in 2016: sex changes, body modification, gender roles, homosexuality, women and mothers in the workplace.  It is set on the moon, a moon that has been colonized for over a century but still has a strong kind of pioneer spirit where everybody is expected to pull together as a unified community, perhaps because Luna is in some kind of cold war with the Earth government.  Everyone on Luna is required to work, so there is no slack in the labor pool to take up babysitting duties, so mothers bring their young children into the office with them, which causes some disruption in the workplace. The 28-page story follows a middle-class family of smarties (Cleopatra King, an architect who is currently managing the construction of a food factory, and her husband Jules La Rhin don't watch TV, instead spending their free time reading books) with several kids as they grapple with a rough spot in their relationship.

Sex changes have been available on the bustling moon colony for decades, but few people of Cleo and Jules' generation have taken advantage of this wonder of modern science; 99% of people are content to stick with the sex they were born into, even though the means of changing your sex is safe, easy and reversible.  In Varley's tale sex change doesn't involve surgically reshaping your genitals or pumping you full of chemicals; instead, a brainless clone body of you is grown, a clone with the X or Y chromosomes altered so that the clone body is like a twin of the opposite sex.  They can pop your brain into this clone body and you can explore life as a different sex while your original body waits in storage; if you find you don't care for life as the opposite sex, they can just put your brain back into its original vessel.

While Cleo and Jules' generation has essentially rejected this opportunity, the younger demographic is beginning to embrace it (a newspaper which apparently did not suffer the fate of The Cincinnati Post reports that 33% of people under 20 have experimented with sex changes.)  Cleo becomes intrigued by the idea of she and Jules both switching sexes; as the story progresses it becomes clear that Cleo is at least a little dissatisfied with the traditional female role she plays in the marriage--she does most of the child rearing (including breastfeeding) and she usually is on the bottom when she and Jules have sex, to cite some examples.  She gets breast reduction surgery (symbolically becoming less feminine and more masculine), experiments with lesbianism, and has a male clone body grown for her, a process which takes six months.  Jules resents and resists these changes, and they struggle to keep their marriage alive after Cleo has her brain put in that male body and changes her name to Leo.

"Options" is well-written and well-structured, and reasonably interesting and entertaining.  A story on these topics could have been a horror story that focused on the "eternal battle of the sexes" and the natural fear of radical social and physical change (and, with the character of Jules, Varley does address this angle); instead "Options" is an optimistic piece that embraces all those liberal pieties you heard in college: gender roles are largely socially constructed, change is good, you should broaden your mind and look at things from a new perspective, etc.  Varley asserts that people who have experienced life as both sexes are superior to "one sexers," so I guess the story fits more or less comfortably in the current (2016) zeitgeist, over 35 years after it appeared.

"The Locusts" by Larry Niven and Steve Barnes  

I really liked the last Niven story I read, "Fourth Profession," and I thought all the famous Niven novels, with or without Pournelle (Ringworld, Integral Trees, Mote in God's Eye, Footfall) I read in my youth had cool science ideas and cool settings, but when I reread them as an adult they seemed a little light when it came to the literary virtues, like style, plot and character.  Let's see what's up with "The Locusts," which first was published in Analog.

An overcrowded Earth makes its first efforts to colonize extrasolar planets! A small group of Earthlings lands on barren but habitable Tau Ceti IV, their ship full of frozen bacteria, seeds, and animal embryos with which they will create an Earth-like ecology on the rocky desolate world.  All goes well for two years: grass, trees, fish, and other Earth life spreads across the landscape.  But when the colonists try to create their own families disaster strikes--their kids are stupid hairy apemen!  Heartbroken, parents begin committing suicide in dramatic ways, including blowing up their orbiting space ship!  When the kids (who can only learn like a dozen words of English and are too dim to make their own beds) become sexually mature at age nine and start having sex, the colony is shaken by a violent dispute over whether the children should be allowed to breed, or should be sterilized.

I feel like I am always pointing out how elitist and anti-democratic classic SF is on this blog, and here is another chance for me to do so.  The colonists hold a meeting, and the mass of them favors having the kids sterilized, but the most educated person among the colonists (everybody calls him "Doc") refuses to let this decision stand, taking matters into his own hands and doing the right thing. Doc steals the colony's aircraft and flees with the children to an inaccessible part of the planet, where, to figure out if the kids are truly human, he has sex with one of them and raises a big family.  (Classic SF also has its share of outre sex!)

Larry Niven is a hard science guy; here's the speculative science he and Barnes are serving up for us.  Doc's research in the microfiche library suggests the colonists' children are Pithicanthropus erectus--why are all the kids born on Tau Ceti IV these "small-brained Pleistocene primates?"  Were the colonists infected by a germ from Earth which mutated due to exposure to space radiation on the long trip from Earth, or a germ native to Tau Ceti IV?  Did the planet's greater-than-Earth gravity or longer -than-Earth day cause the change?  In the end of the story a laser message with the news from the Earth of six or seven years ago explodes all these theories--all the babies now being born on Earth also resemble Pithicanthropus erectus!

Doc points out that when grasshoppers have used up the resources in their current environs they give birth to a generation of locusts, a form more adept at colonizing new territory, and opines that the human race, having used up the Earth, has gone through a similar transformation!  Clever and aggressive homo sapiens, with its risky wars and environment-threatening technology, is perhaps less suited to colonizing new worlds than simple-minded, quick-breeding, unaggressive Pithicanthropus erectus!

This story is alright.  The ideas are good, but Niven and Barnes fail to make the characters engaging--they are just names without any personality--or to generate any emotion in the reader, even as the characters experience all kinds of deep primal emotions (the desire to have children, the desire to protect children) and extreme psychological problems (suicide, being disgusted with your own children, knowing you have wasted your life on a doomed mission.)  Moderate recommendation.    

"The Thaw" by Tanith Lee

Regular readers of this here blog will know I am a big fan of Lee's short stories, and "The Thaw" does not disappoint!

"The Thaw," which first appeared in Asimov's, is a first person narrative, written by an insecure young woman, Tacey Brice, a failed artist living in the socialistic future of 2193, when everything from housing to water to clothing is rationed and people who aren't very productive, like our narrator, live more or less comfortably on the dole. Lee writes in a smooth, unpretentious, colloquial style imbued with Tacey's anxiety and lack of confidence; Lee succeeds in making Tacey seem like a real person.

"The Institute" has contacted Tacey: for the last two centuries people of means suffering from incurable diseases have had themselves cryogenically frozen, and the government has decided to revive them. The first test case will be an ancestor of Tacey's from the late 20th century, Carla Brice, "my great-great-great-great-great grandmother.  Give or take a great."  The Institute will provide Tacey a grant if she will serve as a kind of liaison between Carla and the world of 2193, and there is also the possibility of making easy money off the publicity, so Tacey agrees.  (It is significant that Tacey agrees to participate in this project not out of a love of her family, curiosity about the past, to gather inspiration for her art or to further the cause of science, but out of a selfish desire for easy money.)

At the clinic where Carla is revived Tacey meets a young black doctor ("black as space and as beautiful as the stars therein"), with whom she falls in love (though she never tells us his name.)  The "medic" only has eyes for tall, beautiful and confident Carla.  Tacey finds Carla intimidating, and when Carla moves into Tacey's little apartment, Tacey is psychologically dominated by her ancestor--Carla makes a servant of her, and Tacey does all the cooking, cleaning, running of errands, etc, for the 20th-century beauty.  I felt like Lee was suggesting parallels between Carla and some of our traditional ideas about vampires or witches; for example, near the end of the story Carla seduces the black medic, at which point Tacey applies to him the nickname "The Prince of Darkness."

We learn the almost unbelievable truth about what is going on at the end of the story, after Tacey discovers that Carla has murdered and eaten the black doctor. Early in the story, the medic had told Tacey that religious people of the past had worried about what would happen to the human soul during cryogenic storage, but of course 22nd-century people have abandoned such silly beliefs. Well, maybe such beliefs were not so silly! Evil noncorporeal space aliens have found that they are unable to take over the bodies of living humans, but that during cryogenic storage something (the soul, perhaps?) leaves the body, making room for an alien tenant. "Carla" is the vanguard of the alien invasion force!

Full page ad for Tanith Lee novels
from my copy of
1980 Annual World's Best SF

Now that Carla has been given a clean bill of health, the rest of the cryogenically frozen people, over 4,000 of them, will be revived!  Each is inhabited by an alien, and since each alien, when ensconced in a human body, can hypnotize hundreds of humans in the way "Carla" hypnotized Tacey and the black doctor, the E.T.s will be able to enslave the entire human race!

Very good; "The Thaw" is a horror story founded on the very real feelings many of us have around people who are taller, more attractive, smarter, or otherwise superior to us--feelings of insecurity and inadequacy--and on our knowledge that all too often such superior people use their superiority to manipulate and dominate us. As well as Lee's fine writing style, I enjoyed the SF ideas and the religious overtones. I seem to recall that Lee's novel Don't Bite the Sun also depicted an atheistic and decadent future (though that future was one of plenty while "The Thaw's" is one of scarcity) in which a female protagonist discovered hints that the forgotten religions of the past told valuable truths. Another interesting aspect of "The Thaw" is the possibility that Tacey is an unreliable narrator trying to manipulate the reader. In the last few pages of the story it becomes apparent that part of Tacey's project in writing this narrative is to assuage her survivor guilt (the aliens kill humans on a whim, but Carla has promised to protect Tacey, her pet human) and to beg forgiveness from mankind for being a tool of, practically a collaborator with, the alien invaders (continuing the religious theme, Tacey twice suggests that the human race considers her a "Judas.")  Could Tacey, who goes on and on about her shortcomings, be trying to win our sympathy, and diminish her own responsibility for the catastrophe the human race has suffered, by exaggerating her faults?

Highly recommended.

"The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" by Joanna Russ

As you can see, Russ's story got the cover
of the issue, an homage to Magritte by
Ron Walotsky

I'm sure we all remember Joanna Russ, the socialist feminist lesbian college professor. Even though I'm one of those people who think that humanities and social science professors comprise a hypocritical and parasitic priestly overclass which brainwashes students in hopes of constructing a North American Soviet Union in which they will be the commissars, I can't deny that Russ is an able writer and that I have enjoyed some of her stories. Maybe "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" will be a good one.

In his intro to the story Wollheim laments that, while Jules Verne's 150th birthday in 1978 was celebrated enthusiastically (among other things, there was issued "a set of commemorative dishes"!) in Europe, Americans did nothing to mark this momentous date. Russ was the exception; "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" was written in 1978 on the occasion of the anniversary, and published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction with the dedication, "Hommage a Jules Verne" in 1979.

I have to admit that I have little direct familiarity with Verne's work (embarrassing, I know), though I have seen the various movies based on Verne's books showcasing the talents of James Mason, Vincent Price, Kirk Douglas, and Ray Harryhausen, and so have a vague idea of the plots and themes of some of his writing.  Presumably I will be missing all kinds of allusions and references to Verne's oeuvre as I read Russ's story.

I feel like it is likely I missed something, because "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" feels like a pretty pedestrian tale.  Our narrator is a Frenchman in the 1920s.  Walking through a passageway that links different sides of a train station, he has a bizarre vision of a jungle.  A woman snatches his arm and tells him that at a certain time of day (this very time!) if one enters the passage he or she will be transported to one of many other, alternate, realities.  The woman, the Amelie Bertrand of the title, describes briefly her various trips to a dozen or so other universes, where she spends years having adventures, only to return to this train station at the same moment she left, unaged.  The narrator determines to go on just such adventures himself.  The End.

This is a very ordinary story--while not bad, it is slight; there have been a million "doorway to other universes" stories, and this one doesn't describe the adventures in those other universes, just devotes a few lines to describing each of the other worlds.  Does Russ bring anything new to this shopworn genre?

Well, there are "meta" elements.  These include a direct reference to Around the World in Eighty Days and an oblique reference to George Orwell (it is suggested that "Airstrip One" may be one of Mrs. Bertrand's otherworldly destinations.)  The Airstrip One reference made me wonder if Russ was suggesting that Bertrand was travelling to worlds that were based on famous books, an idea used by Robert Heinlein in Number of the Beast and A. Bertram Chandler in at least one of the later Grimes stories.  I also wondered if the "real" world of the narrator and Bertrand might be a fictional world and not our own.

The story has some feminist and diversity politics overtones.  Bertrand has exciting adventures (e.g., working as supercargo on a whaler in the Pacific for two years) in the alternate universes, adventures she, as a middle-class woman, can't have in the "real" world.  She also shows no regrets about leaving her husband for years at a time.  It is also perhaps significant that Russ's narrator describes the heroine as "plump" and "by no means pretty," a contrast to most SF heroines.  One of the most extensively described alternate universes, a moon colony in 2089, is a sort of identity politics utopia--the finest mathematician of the time is a woman, and her colleague, a black man, is a leading physicist.

Acceptable, but no big deal.  Verne experts and Russ's devoted fans will probably get more out of it than I did.

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While the Russ is leaving me a little cold, super-editor Wollheim made good choices with the other three tales.  The Lee has the most literary and entertainment value--style, character, human feeling, and a wild surprise ending--but the stories by Varley and Niven and Barnes both have solid speculations about science and make an effort to explore the psychological and sociological ramifications of those ideas and present human drama.  And all four of these stories are ripe for some kind of gender analysis, each touching directly on women's relationships with their families and/or with society.  

In our next episode more stories from DAW's 1980 Annual World's Best SF; this time by writers with whose work I am not very familiar.