The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe

"A knight is a man who lives honorably and dies honorably, because he cares more for his honor than for his life."

In 2001 Gene Wolfe wrote an essay for Karen Haber's Meditations on Middle-Earth entitled "The Best Introduction to the Mountains."  Haber rejected the piece, but it appeared in Interzone, and Andy Robertson purchased the right to reproduce it on his website, where I read it years ago.  It looks like Robertson's website has gone kaput, but you can access an archived version of the page in question at the link above--that's how I reread the essay earlier this month.  John C. Wright, I see today, reproduced "The Best Introduction to the Mountains" on his website in 2015, introducing it as the second best essay on Tolkien he has ever read and explaining the essay's title.

"The Best Introduction to the Mountains" is very entertaining and interesting, and I recommend it to all fans of J. R. R. Tolkien and/or Gene Wolfe.  Wolfe talks about the pulp magazines and genre paperbacks he loved as a kid, the SF like Thrilling Wonder Stories and the mysteries like Curtains for the Copper by Thomas Polsky.  Wolfe speaks with reverence of his hardcover copies of the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, which he mail ordered from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1950s in response to a positive review in that magazine of Tolkien's work by Anthony Boucher.  Wolfe reproduces the letter he received from Tolkien about the etymology of "orc" and "warg," and the inscription he added to each of his three volumes, long quotes from Thoreau, Conrad Aiken, and Robert Howard--Wolfe flaunts his independent thinking by telling us he thinks the Howard quote the best.

If this essay is so fascinating, why did Karen Haber reject it?  I don't know, but maybe the fact that Wolfe uses the essay to denounce politicians and government workers, businesspeople and essentially the entire modern world and the very idea of progress, working from moral and even scientific grounds, played a role in her decision.  The thesis of "The Best Introduction to the Mountains" is that the society of the medievals, in some ways at least, was superior to that of us moderns, that the people of "Christianized barbarian Europe" had a strong sense of "defined duties and freedoms" that bound them together, gave them a sort of universally acknowledged "code of conduct," something of inestimable value that we today, in our world where people are power-hungry, selfish and greedy, lack, and that Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is an important contribution to the revival of such a society, a society in which people can stand "shoulder-to-shoulder," a society of "freedom, love of neighbor and personal responsibility." 

Wolfe tells us in "The Best Introduction to the Mountains" that Tolkien has been a big influence on his work, and specifically points to a novel he was then working on, The Wizard Knight, suggesting that novel (published in 2004) owes more to Tolkien than his other work.  So, as I reread The Wizard Knight over the past two weeks, I had this essay of Wolfe's in mind, and kept my eyes open for signs of Tolkien's influence on Wolfe and of Wolfe's beliefs about what was right about medieval society and wrong about modern society.

The Wizard Knight is a bit on the long side, over 1000 pages (though I guess the print is sort of big), and was originally published in two volumes, The Knight and The Wizard.  I received the paperback editions of the two books from my brother as a Christmas gift in 2006, and I read them in 2007.  I often thought of the novel over the succeeding years, certain scenes and ideas having lodged in my scattered and fickle mind, but only reread it this year, 15 years after it was first published, the year of Wolfe's death.

The Wizard Knight is a first person narrative, a very long letter written by a man who, as a teenager, somehow found himself in a world of knights, dragons and fairies; the letter is to his brother Ben back in 20th (or I guess early 21st) century America, and describes his career in this swordswinging feudal world, his many interactions with queens, princesses, kings, witches, giants, et al.  Written in the voice of a regular guy, practically a kid, the text of The Wizard Knight is relatively simple and easy to read, but Wolfe is famous for employing unreliable narrators and presenting story elements obliquely, and we readers have to be on the look out for clues in every paragraph.  The narrator starts his fantasy world life when he wakes up in a seaside cave in which a woman is spinning a thread; she calls herself "Parka," and while this has no significance to the narrator, we readers of course recognize one of the Fates.

(Though parcae is Latin, The Wizard Knight owes more to Norse mythology and Arthurian legend than classical literature; I'm actually not that familiar with Norse myth and the stories of King Arthur, so while I caught obvious things like Valkyries and Jotun, I no doubt missed many allusions and references to those literatures.  There is also plenty of Christian symbolism; like Severian in Wolfe's immortal masterpiece The Book of the New Sun, the narrator of The Wizard Knight is a Christ-like figure.  While I am on the topic of references, there is an obvious allusion to Poul Anderson, and I have to wonder how many other, perhaps more subtle, references to SF writers I missed.)

Our protagonist leaves the cave and travels around a bit, meeting people and learning about his new environment.  Many of these people, like a knight, Sir Ravd, who explains to him what makes a man a knight, and a crippled hermit, Bold Berthold, who believes that the narrator is his long lost brother returned, act as mentors, providing explanations of what constitutes good conduct and serving as models of good behavior as well as offering practical knowledge.  The narrator, whom Parka called Sir Able of the High Heart, quickly starts acting like a knight, helping those in distress and fighting scoundrels and bossing around people who fall in between those categories.  This risky behavior is tenable because early on the narrator meets an Aelf Queen, Disiri, and she, seemingly in order to make of him a satisfying sex partner, transforms our hero into a huge muscleman.  Inside, the protagonist is still a boy, and Wolfe makes it abundantly clear that this is an allegory of how many adult men feel when faced with the responsibilities and challenges of adult life, that they are really just boys acting out the role of a man.

"You see our peasants plowing and sowing, and their women spinning and so forth, hard work that lasts from the rising of the sun until its setting in may cases.  But you need to understand that they have their own prides and their own pleasures.  Speak kindly to them, protect them, and deal fairly with them and they will never turn against you." 

In that 2001 essay praising Tolkien, Wolfe envisages a superior future society in which people of different social classes stand shoulder to shoulder, and he cites the example of Frodo and Sam from The Lord of the Rings as a model for such relationships.  The Wizard Knight again and again provides examples of the kinds of relationships one would find in such an ideal society; the sympathetic characters exhibit, with enthusiasm, loyalty and rock solid allegiance across the boundaries of social class, species and worlds of origin, accept without question established hierarchies, the need for obedience to authority, and recognize the mutual responsibilities between lords and vassals.  There are no liberals or members of the bourgeoisie or revolutionary socialists in this novel to make a case for equality before the law or individualism or republicanism or democracy or the redistribution of wealth or anything like that, and those characters who buck the system or fail to live up to their roles within it either reform or suffer grim fates.

After Able leaves Sir Ravd, Bold Berthold and Disiri behind (though they are never far from his thoughts) he travels widely throughout the kingdom of Celidon* on foot, on horseback and via ship, meeting a multitude of people and intelligent creatures, and we witness him repeatedly pledging fealty to royals and barons and kneeling and making sacrifices to gods.  In turn, individuals are always recognizing Able's astounding ability and high destiny and volunteering to be his slaves, servants or followers--these people take all kinds of risks and make all kinds of sacrifices to help and protect Able, and Able demonstrates that he deserves their allegiance and assistance by taking all manner of risks and making all sorts of sacrifices to help and protect his followers and subordinates.

*Tolkien (though he was not the first to do so) famously pointed out that "cellar door" was an English phrase of particular beauty.

One of the challenges faced by writers of sword-fighting adventure tales in which a single guy again and again triumphs in the face of overwhelming odds is making that guy's victories over dozens of foes and escapes from captivity believable to the reader.  Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, renders John Carter's endless string of victories over huge monsters and armies of swordsmen somewhat more digestible by presenting his hero as an immortal who has been sword fighting for centuries and is thus the most experienced swordsman in the solar system, and by placing him on Mars, where his Earth muscles make him the strongest man on the red planet.  Michael Moorcock's Elric has a magic sword and the help of various supernatural entities, and Howard's Conan has his barbarian upbringing, which makes him superior to any civilized man.

Wolfe here in The Wizard Knight makes Able's successes believable by providing him with an array of magical weapons and a veritable army of supernatural supporters.  He has a bow made from the wood of a magical tree, strung with a thread given him by Parka, so that Able is the greatest archer in the world.  (In one of the novel's many clever and somewhat disturbing bits, the string pulses with the life stories of many individuals, and these stories invade Sir Able's dreams, so that as he sleeps he lives out the lives of many different men and women.)  As the long novel progresses Able is joined by a huge fighting dog from a higher plane of existence (it can grow as big as a horse if roused), a self-important talking black cat (the familiar of a witch who is now dead but not silenced), two sexy vampire-like Aelfmaidens who can get in and get out of just about any place unobserved, making them ideal scouts, spies and thieves, and a super strong ogre whose scales can take on the color of his surroundings, making him an ideal assassin.  (This list of magic weapons and otherworldly comrades is representative, not exhaustive, and I haven't enumerated Able's multitudinous mortal comrades.)

Wolfe loves detective stories, and The Wizard Knight is full of scenes in which Sir Able and we readers are presented a bunch of clues and are expected to figure out who did what and why or the true identity and motives of one of many slippery shape-shifting characters--this includes a murder mystery that features one of those scenes in which people look at the victim's wound and determine whether the murderer was right- or left-handed.

A lot of time is spent on puzzling out the mythology and cosmology of the seven-layered universe Wolfe has devised--how one travels between these worlds, their internal politics and their relations with their adjacent worlds.  In brief, the middle level, Mythgarthr, the home of the humans of Celidon, the evil giants of the icy north (Jotunland) and the evil cannibalistic Osterlings of the east (Osterland), is the most stable level.  Directly above Mythgarthr is Skai, home of gods like the Valfather, tricky Lothur and chivalrous Thunor, and directly below it Aelfrice, home of elves, and below that Muspel, realm of dragons and demons.  Each world was constructed from the refuse left over from the creation of the realm above it, and so each realm is more debased and evil than the one above it.  Able journeys to several of these realms over the course of his adventures, meeting their prominent personalities and trying to figure out the various relationships and identities of these beings as they try to help, manipulate, or fight him.  Ideally, those living in one realm worship the inhabitants of the realm above them, and provide good role models for those below, and one of the many mysteries of the novel, and one of the problems Able has to work to resolve, is the perverse practice of some humans of worshiping Aelfs and of some Aelfs of worshiping dragons.  (The setting of examples and provision of good role models is a major theme of The Wizard Knight; as I recall, this was also a theme of Wolfe's 1999-2001 trilogy The Book of the Short Sun, which featured vampiric space aliens who misbehave in part because of the malign influence upon them of all-too-fallible humanity.)  Complicating matters is the fact that time moves at different speeds in each realm; after Able goes to Skai at the end of The Knight he spends twenty years up there, but when he gets back to Mythgarthr at the start of The Wizard, only a few days have passed for his companions.

"Brega, you've taken an oath, the most solemn oath a woman can take.  You've acknowledged Duke Marder as your liege, and sworn to obey him in all things.  If you break that oath, Hel will condemn your spirit to Muspel, the Circle of Fire.  The sacrifices you've offered the Aelf can't save you." 

The biggest mystery, perhaps, is who the hell Able really is, this man who travels between the seven realms, has been somehow conflated with an American boy, and, due to Aelf magic and Skai magic, has lost many of his memories.  At the same time that Able is like a big kid who is driven by his passions (he tells us he does everything in hopes of being with Disiri again) he is also considered a savior by everybody he meets--everywhere he goes potentates want him to protect their thrones or destroy their enemies; Able is one of the most important people in the history of this universe, and, like Gandalf (and Jesus Christ!) he is a man who, apparently dies but then returns to make the world a better place.
 
In the final third of The Knight, Sir Able and his motley party of human and supernatural companions join up with a large caravan travelling north to Jotunland on a diplomatic mission from the king of Celidon.  The armies of the Caans and Wazirs of Osterland are putting pressure on Celidon from the east, and the king has sent a baron, Lord Beel, to negotiate with the belligerent giants of the frozen north.  The giants of Jotunland are always raiding the human kingdom for slaves; male slaves are blinded and female slaves raped, and such rape is so common that there is a whole population of half-breeds living in the mountainous marches between Celidon and Jotunland, dangerous marauders rejected by the heartless giant society.  (The 13-foot tall giants call these 9-foot tall halfbreeds "The Mice.")  In order to cement a peace deal with the giants that will permit Celidon to focus its military might on the Osterling cannibals, Beel is to present to the king of the giants, Gilling, a bunch of valuable presents, including a gold encrusted helmet and Beel's own beautiful daughter, Idnn.  Idnn wretchedly dreams of being rescued from the horrible fate of becoming the queen of the giants by Able or some other knight, presenting Able, like Beel, a loyal servant of the king committed to the established rules of Celidon, a terrible moral dilemma.

"You say you want to be my follower.  I'll be loyal to you as long as you're loyal to me, but no longer."

In the last hundred or so pages of The Knight, Able becomes a leader of the caravan as it faces disaster, and, up in Jotunland, has a heartbreaking reunion with Bold Berthold, now a slave of the giants.  In the book's climax, Able finds in a subterranean temple the magic sword promised him by Disiri and summons an army of phantom knights; with this army he engages in battle against a titanic dragon and the army of Aelfs who worship the wyrm; victory achieved against the demonic serpent, Able is carried aloft to Skai by Valkyries.

The Knight is a big success; it never feels long, the text is smooth and the plot keeps you turning the pages.  The funny parts are actually funny, and the chilling parts (like the witch scene) are actually chilling, and the sad parts are actually sad.

The Wizard is not quite as entertaining as the first volume.  The Knight feels fresh and fast-paced as we follow Sir Able from one episode to another, exploring new locations and encountering new characters at a pretty rapid clip, the story's tone shifting as Able travels geographically and grows in power and experience; we get many funny, horrible, sad, and triumphant episodes that are too brief to wear out their welcome.  The first half of The Wizard, however, is sort of mired in one location, Jotunland, and with the many characters we met in The Knight, plus some new ones, all gathered there, the narrative gets a little unwieldy.  Sir Able has already achieved his apotheosis, so that sense of growth and progress is not there, and the wisdom-dispensing adult Able isn't as fun or charming as naive-child-in-a-man's-body Able.  We spend less time with Sir Able and a lot more time with his friends and servants as they pursue objectives in one part of Jotunland while Able is in another.  (The text is still technically in the first person, still part of the narrator's long letter to his brother Ben in the modern USA, but much of the conversation and fighting Able relates is based on things people told him and feels like a third-person narrative.)

This long Jotunland section does serve Wolfe's thematic purposes.  Jotunland is a sort of dystopia, a depiction of what a society totally bereft of loyalty and cross-class solidarity and respect for authority looks like--there are constant rebellions, for example, and no family life--the men and women have no love for each other, so the female giants actually live in a separate country!  Overcoming her fear, Idnn does her duty to Celidon and to her monstrous husband, embracing the role of queen of the giants.  Much of the text which deals with Able's companions and subordinates is meant, I believe, to show the positive influence of Able's good example on them--Wolfe's human characters are not static, but grow and change over the course of the long novel, and, reflecting Wolfe's purposes with this book and/or a sort of Christian optimism, almost all the human characters evolve into better people as the novel progresses.  While it helps Wolfe achieve his goals, this section is just not as fun and exciting as the other 700 or so pages of the long novel.

The second half of The Wizard is quite a bit more satisfying than the first half.  Many of those mysteries to which I alluded earlier (who is Able and what is his appointed role in the universe? who murdered the King of the Giants? what are the backstories and motives of the elves of Aelfrice and the demons/dragons of Muspel?) are explained and the subplots they represent resolved.  The cast, joining forces with the Aelfs, the half-human Mice and the female giants, fight their way out of Jotunland and back to Celidon.  Able, driven by a destiny he doesn't himself understand, goes to the capital of Celidon, to the King's court, where he competes in tourneys and gets mixed up in the dangerous intrigues boiling between the corrupt and sadistic king, the king's wife, and the king's sister, a sinister necromancer.  All the characters and interactions in the capital are compelling, and, maybe because Able isn't surrounded by a dozen other people, things move more quickly and more smoothly.

Able gets tossed in the dungeon, escapes to Aelfrice--where time moves more slowly--and when he returns to Mythgarthr he finds that the Osterlings have taken over most of Celidon and sacked the capital!  Able leads the human counterattack against the monstrous armies of the Caans and we get a happy ending for most of the characters (Able, for example, heals blind and infirm Berthold, and Berthold, we are told, will go on to become a prominent knight who will achieve revenge on the giants who crippled him.)

The Wizard Knight is the kind of book that you can read casually, enjoying all the descriptions of weapons and monsters and fighting, all the jokes and horror scenes, but it is also a dense and carefully constructed work with allusions and details and foreshadowing that reward the attentive reader, and the reader willing to go back and reread passages or entire chapters, because sentences that may have barely registered initially set up a satisfying pay off hundreds of pages later, and on a second reading overflow with layers of meaning and emotion.  Strongly recommended.

The Enemy of My Enemy by Avram Davidson

"Lermencas is part of the modern world; Tarnis isn't.  The Volanth aren't.  But they are going to become part of it, from now on.  And eventually, either with Lermencasi help or without it, the Volanth are going to have what they ought to have: a share in running their own country."

Last year Joachim Boaz, creator of the Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations blog, made a generous donation of SF books to the MPorcius Library, and on and off I have been reading and talking your ear off about these artifacts of the speculative fiction of days gone by.  Today we look at another of these donations, Berkley Medallion X1341, The Enemy of My Enemy by Avram Davidson.  Davidson is one of those critically acclaimed authors I have had mixed feelings about, but about whom I have not yet abandoned all hope of liking.  So let's give this 1966 novel a shot.  Joachim wrote about The Enemy of My Enemy in 2016, and our man tarbandu at The PorPor Books Blog wrote about it three years earlier still, in 2013; you should check out what they have to say, but I,  having, more or less, forgotten their assessments, will refrain from rereading their reviews until I have read the book myself and drafted my own thoughts.

Planet Orinel was colonized by Earthmen some 1500 years ago, and today is home to a dazzling array of distinct and complex human and native cultures and ethnicities.  We spend Chapter One in the port city of Pemath, an overcrowded hive whose high tech skyscrapers have been crudely subdivided again and again over the centuries to accommodate the tiny homes and businesses of the city's millions of impoverished citizens.  (In a memorable opening scene a man rides a disused freight elevator which now serves as the residence of a wretched family who make their meager living by charging passengers a pittance.)  Pemath wallows in public and private corruption, with merchants expecting to lose a fifth or a quarter of all shipments of goods to various species of theft.

In Chapter Two we get a taste of Tarnis Town, where the elites frown on commerce and instead devote themselves to the arts of war, gardening, painting, and scholarship.  We meet two different scholars whose interests are centered on the hairy and brutish natives of Orinel, the Volanth, savages who occupy much of the Tarnis hinterland.  As there has been no international war on Orinel for centuries, it is also the Volanth who are the focus of the Tarnisi aristocracy's periodic and enthusiastic warmaking.

While Pemath is a multiethnic center of international and even interstellar trade, Tarnis is an isolationist island whose dealings with the larger world are erratic, which lays the foundation for one of the big science-fictiony elements of The Enemy of My Enemy's plot.  Jerrod Northi, an orphan who has risen to the position of one of Pemath's top organized crime bosses (piracy a specialty) must flee Pemath because somebody is trying to kill him.  He decides to go to Tarnis, because, in that wealthy and sophisticated land where he will face little business competition, he figures he can make money in ways more safe and more honest than hijacking merchant vessels.  To get through Tarnis's very strict immigration controls Jerrod must hire the services of the mysterious Craftsmen, who perform upon him radical cosmetic surgery--surgery which even changes his voice--and "hypno-indoctrination" that implants false memories into his mind.  The remainder of the novel (which consists of twelve chapters and 160 pages in total) takes place in Tarnis.

Jerrod, posing as a returned exile, integrates himself in Tarnisi high society, where he acquires a girlfriend and sets up a lucrative import business.  When a Volanth uprising erupts he is called up as a member of the militia and participates in a gruesome punitive campaign against the natives, witnessing the aftermath of atrocities committed by the barbaric aborigines and, at first hand, the equally shocking Tarnisi reprisals.  Jerrod may have escaped from filthy and corrupt Pemath, but he has not escaped from the cruelty and horror of human life.

"They say, you--all of you--you always say, the Volanth are like animals.  And I've seen how they can be, and I know it.  But I've seen the Tarnisi like animals as well.  And so I see nothing to choose between them, and it's made all this land I longed so long for, it's made it abhorrent and abominable to me."

After this horrible episode Jerrod gets involved in politics, working, tentatively, in the interests of the exploited and abused Volanth and the Tarnisi landless class, as well as the ghettoized "Quasi," people of mixed Volanth and human race.  This work dovetails with the interests of the Craftsmen to whom Jerrod is beholden; they start calling in favors, and Jerrod finds himself helping other bogus "exiles" into positions of importance, setting the groundwork for a revolution against the Tarnisi aristocracy.  As the final third of the novel begins, Jerrod (while reading a book of economic history!) comes across a clue that indicates that the Craftsmen are agents of Lermencas (a country Davidson hasn't told us much about before, apparently a great power whose wealth comes from international trade) and explains why the Craftsmen want to overthrow the Tarnisi aristocracy--their lives of sophisticated leisure, punctuated by periodic wars against the wild Volanth, are terribly inefficient, leaving much land suitable for agriculture underused or even barren.  The Lermencasi hope to end the wars and cultivate all that unexploited wilderness, employing the Volanth as farm laborers.

Additional revelations follow as the novel builds to a climax.  Jerrod learns that he himself is a Quasi when a hairy witch doctor in the ghetto works his psychic powers on him, unearthing suppressed memories.  Quasi activists don't want to hand Tarnis over to the Lermencasi but to run it themselves, and so they call in help from Baho, another country Davidson gives us only hints of--the Bahon are in a Cold War with the Lermencasi, and are apparently of an authoritarian, anti-individualistic bent.  Jerrod, who is able to move in both Quasi and Tarnisi circles, who has connections to the Craftsmen and Pemath and of course his nautical and piratical skills, becomes a leader of the Quasi/Volanth rebellion that sweeps Tarnis and demolishes the beautiful Tarnisi civilization; he strives to not only liberate those with native blood from their oppressors, but to make sure the new Tarnis is not merely a puppet of the Lermencasi or Bahon.

I'm wracking my brain, but I can't recall any
giant worms appearing in this novel; maybe they
are in the accompanying short story by
Joe Hensley, "Alvin's Witch"

Davidson offers dense descriptions of all aspects of life in Tarnis and Pemath: rituals, social mores, cultural touchstones, etc.  This "world-building" is thick and convincing, and more or less interesting; readers may enjoy trying to figure out Davidson's models: Tarnisi culture seems to share much with that of Japan, and its politics perhaps owe something to that period of Roman history in which the Gracchi are prominent, while the plight of the Quasi may be informed by the experience of African-Americans who are able to "pass" as white.  But is The Enemy of My Enemy entertaining?  While the novel has adventure and detective elements like a chase scene, battles, guys finding clues, guys getting captured and escaping, guys having their air car sabotaged, etc., the story is heavy rather than thrilling, tragic and sad rather than light-hearted and fun; the pace is kind of slow and none of the many characters is really compelling (I found it a little challenging keeping all of them straight, to be honest.)  Jerrod is tormented by a lifetime of intimate experience with poverty, crime and inhumane behavior, and Davidson offers us numerous references to the murder of children and the rape and murder of women, including a shocking description of a maggot-ridden corpse.  The scenes of horror and violence are not sensational or exploitative but literary and depressing.

The Enemy of My Enemy is a serious book that is perhaps easier to admire than to enjoy.  Davidson addresses issues like racial and class conflict and the Cold War, but not in a satirical or cathartic way; he doesn't point fingers or present solutions or engage in wish fulfillment that flatters the prejudices of readers or satisfies their revenge fantasies.  The world changes, but working the change is dirty and sordid rather than glorious, and much that was fine is swept away, including Jerrod's girlfriend, killed by Volanth fighters when they destroy the city with the disintegrator weapons they have been provided by the Bohan.  Davidson describes the processes of history coldly rather than romanticizing them, and his book is sad but not actually moving because Jerrod doesn't really come to life, and neither do any of the other characters.

I'd say The Enemy of My Enemy is OK, a tick or two above acceptable.

Looking at their reviews, I see that tarbandu and Joachim had much less patience for The Enemy of My Enemy than I did; both of them gave it only two out of five stars and use words like "bland" and "dull" and "slow" to describe it.  Joachim compares The Enemy of My Enemy to Jack Vance novel, to Davidson's detriment, and such a comparison is appropriate enough, as baroque societies and divergent human evolution and rogues and semi-intelligent autochthons and detective fiction devices all loom large in Vance's body of work.  I can't really disagree with most of tarbandu and Joachim's specific criticisms, and would certainly bet that any random novel by Jack Vance would be more fun than The Enemy of My Enemy, but I think they are mistaken in looking at The Enemy of My Enemy as an adventure caper which has failed.  I think Davidson's project is to ruminate on conflict between classes and between races and to illustrate the tragedy that is history, and I think that project is a qualified success.

**********

The Enemy of My Enemy is the tenth book from the Joachim Boaz Wing of the MPorcius Library which I have read and discussed.  Here's a list of the first nine, with handy links to my blog posts about them:

Slave Planet by Laurence M. Janifer
Three Novels by Damon Knight
Dark Dominion by David Duncan
New Writings in SF6 edited by John Carnell
Tama of the Light Country by Ray Cummings
Tama, Princess of Mercury by Ray Cummings
A Brand New World by Ray Cummings
Ultimatum in 2050 A.D. by Jack Sharkey
The Power of X by Arthur Sellings

"Chillbinding" 1950s Science Fiction from J. Blish, P. Anderson and T. N. Scortia

An unexpected road trip to Lincoln, Nebraska earlier this month put me within striking range of A Novel Idea Bookstore, where they were, fortuitously, having a sale in which individual customers were randomly assigned different discounts.  Yours truly hit the jackpot, winning a 50% discount, so the wife and I stocked up.  Among my purchases was Crest Book L728, the 1964 edition of a 1960 anthology of stories selected by Leo Margolies entitled Get Out of My Sky.  At $1.50, how could I resist that Powers cover and the promise of "chillbinding" novellas by three authors I am interested in, James Blish, Poul Anderson and Thomas N. Scortia?  Let's take a trip back in time to the late 1950s, and to a terrifying future with "three master craftsmen of the science-fiction suspense story."  We'll ask if each story is good, like we always do, but also assess if these stories are truly chillbinding, as advertised!

"Get Out of My Sky" by James Blish (1957)

The title story of this anthology is almost 80 pages long and appeared first across two early 1957 issues of Astounding.  Besides here in this anthology, it would later appear in a few Blish collections and an Italian magazine.  Mama mia!

Numerous times on this blog I have complained about elitist classic SF stories which seem to advocate the manipulation, by any means necessary, of the masses by the cognitive elite and even politicians(!)  And here we have another one!

Ocean-covered planet Home and desert planet Rathe are twins that revolve around a common point, each perpetually showing its sister the same hemisphere.  Along with a small star, the two planets form a Trojan system that orbits a large star.  Both planets are home to intelligent species of humanoids who have achieved what I guess we can call a 20th-century level of technology (nuclear bombs, rocket and jet engines, TV) and in just the last few years they have opened up communications via radio and television.  "Get Out of My Sky" is the story of this new interplanetary relationship, with the leading politician from Home, First Minister Aidregh, as our protagonist.

The main theme of the story is that the ordinary people of Home and Rathe are gullible, irrational, superstitious and religious fools, and their foolishness is driving the two planets towards a push button war that will likely lead to the extermination of one or both civilizations.  In fact, the first scene of the story, an italicized prologue, depicts what appears to be a tent revival, where a nameless demagogue drives the common people into a frenzy of hostility towards their sister planet.  Aidregh and the rulers of Rathe have to work together to prevent this cataclysm.

After the prologue, the novella is broken into nine chapters.  The early chapters largely concern the gathering of intelligence about Rathe.  Chapter I features observations of the desert planet from shipboard during an eclipse--did stories of Captain Cook's observations of an eclipse in 1766 and the transit of Venus in 1769 and inspire this scene?  There is also a secret space mission (Home's first manned space flight) to photograph Rathe's "dark" side.  The first five chapters also describe a lot of political jazz concerning different polities on Home (Aidregh is First Minister of the most powerful state on Home, Thrennen, but there are a few other countries on the islands of the watery planet with whom Thrennen has sometimes contentious relationships) and different political parties in Thrennen.  Blish portrays Aidregh's dealings with the voters and with the opposition party not as the inevitable features of a free society, but as a hassle, an obstacle to Aidregh's solving everybody's problems.  Aidregh seems to like the ruler of Rathe with whom he talks via TV, Margent, more than he likes the bulk of his own countrymen! 

In Chapter VI, Aidregh and the rest of our cast of characters fly to Rathe (this is Home's second manned space flight) to negotiate with the Rathemen.  In a secluded cave Margent explains to Aidregh that the Rathemen are mystics who for centuries focused not on developing material wealth and technology, but on developing telepathy and precognition; as a result, Rathe everybody loved everybody and there was no crime or politics or war.  Yes, "Get Out of My Sky" isn't just an elitist story, but a mystical utopian one!  Gadzooks!

But fifty years ago the Rathemen utopia was shaken by the invention of the radio!  The people started listening in on Home transmissions, and when the Rathemen learned about all the politics and crime and war on Home, it shook the common people to the core; in fear that the Home people would attack Rathe as soon as they learned of the Rathemen, the Rathe hoi polloi demanded the construction of a Rathe war apparatus.  Such technological and martial production began stunting Rathe psychic abilities, and even souring their lovey dovey attitude.  As things stand now, with the populations of both planets scared and suspicious of each other, nuclear war is only days away!

Luckily lead mystic Margent has a plan to make peace.  The Rathemen spend three days and three chapters teaching Aidregh a psychic trick--the power to sway audiences emotionally.  Then Aidregh uses this trick to get the people of both planets to step back from the brink.  An italicized epilogue exposes the fact that the italicized prologue was a trick played on us readers by Blish; the scene was really depicting Aidregh, resigned from the First Ministership (naturally, his son now holds the position), not preaching hatred of Rathe after all but spreading peace and love!

"Get Out of My Sky" is not very well written.  There is no human feeling, even though Blish wastes many words on the boring relationships between Aidregh and his son, his best friend, his dead wife, and his son's fiance (his best friend's daughter.)  Efforts to create drama can be silly--the astronaut who leads the months-long expedition to photograph the far side of Rathe dies of exhaustion immediately after giving his report (you know, like Pheidippides.)  The people in the story are aliens from a fictional star system, and Blish describes their appearance in some detail (the people of Home have six fingers and two thumbs and flat noses and a ridge above the eye sockets while the Rathemen have long noses and no ridge above the eyes, etc.), but Blish clumsily calls them "human" and has them use Earth metaphors (e. g., a determined woman is described as being like "a female tiger defending her cub.")  I also thought it was sloppy that Blish didn't come up with an actual name for Aidregh's planet, just referring to it as "this planet" or "Aidregh's world" in the first half of the story and then hitting upon "Home" in the second half.  Worst of all, the story is way too long, moving at a slow pace and burdened with extraneous detail and narrative dead ends.  Is this text a draft rather than a final version of the story?   

Neither am I impressed by the story's ideology or its SF ideas; the psychic powers of the Rathemen come across as infallible and unbelievable magic, which is boring and silly--contrast "Get Out of My Sky" with Algis Budrys's "The Peasant Girl," in which equally puissant psychic powers make compelling reading because Budrys shows the moral and psychological and sociological drawbacks and shortcomings of such powers.

"Get Out of My Sky" is getting a thumbs down from me.  Too bad.

Is it good?  No.                                               Is it chillbinding?  More like sleep-inducing!   

"Sister Planet" by Poul Anderson (1959)

Let’s see if Poul Anderson can deliver us a chillbinding story…or at least a good one.

Earth grows increasingly overcrowded, and at the same time that governments are becoming ever more intrusive and oppressive they are proving less and less able to handle the exploding crime problem. Some fear the building pressure will result in nuclear war that could wipe out humanity!

Our story is set on Venus, a world covered in a single vast ocean that teems with diverse and spectacular life.  A multicultural team of fifty Earth scientists and technicians work there on a floating research station; their work is financed by sending back to Earth “firegems” which the playful twenty-foot long Venusian whales bring the boffins in exchange for objets d'a and snacks from Earth.  These cetoids are eager to play and trade, and even help Earthmen in trouble, but they don't seem to use tools and efforts to communicate with them have been unproductive, so there is debate among the scientists over how intelligent they really are—do these creatures have a real civilization down at the bottom of the sea or are they just over-sized oceanic pack rats little smarter than a chimp?

Nat Hawthrone from New England, an ecologist, believes the cetoids are as intellectually advanced as humans, and halfway through the 40-page story one of the whales takes Nat down deep to show him something that proves he is right.

The same day Nat has proof that the whales are an intelligent civilized species, a geologist unveils his calculations that prove Venus can be affordably terraformed to create a second Earth; such a  colonizable frontier could relieve sociological and psychological pressure on the Earth and assure survival of the human race!  But the terraforming (which involves detonating nuclear bombs near the planet core to raise continents and release buried elements that will give Venus an Earth-like atmosphere) will kill all native life, including the whales.  When the assembled research team hears from Nat that the whales are an intelligent race, they all agree that the terraforming research will be suppressed, but that is not good enough for Nat “Dances with Whales” Hawthorne.  He knows that another scientist with access to the same data might make the same calculations, so, to save the whales, whom Nat prefers to humankind, he goes rogue, like the guy in Edmond Hamilton’s 1932 "Conquest of Two Worlds" or in James Cameron’s 2009 Avatar, which I have not exactly seen but have heard people talk about.

Nat knows that nobody will finance trips to Venus if there is no prospect of trade between the whales and humans, so he sparks a war between the cetoids and the scientists, blowing up the research station and killing his 49 human friends and then massacring the local tribe of his aquatic buddies. When Nat gets back to Earth he commits suicide; we are presented a clue that suggests his participation in the two-planet tragedy may have led the atheist Nat to embrace Christianity before jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Sister Planet” is a brisk and entertaining read.  For thirty pages Anderson pushes his customary themes--promoting science, trade, the fine arts and the study of history and deploring the government--and introduces us to a bunch of nice people, and then in the last ten pages he hits us with an apocalyptic melodrama in which one of the characters we like murders all the other characters we like and likely consigns the human race to extinction, all in order to protect some aliens. I think Anderson may have actually produced something “chillbinding” here!  The story is talky, with all the exposition about how the men cope with conditions on Venus and conduct their research, the science lectures, the debates about how intelligent the cetoids might be, and the historical analogies Anderson likes to present to his readers (some of the characters in "Sister Planet" suppose that the Earth is reenacting the fall of the Roman Empire and the start of the Middle Ages, with the scientists on Venus--none of whom are women--playing the role of monks.)  But all that stuff is pretty interesting.

After it initially appeared in Satellite Science Fiction, Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison included "Sister Planet" in their late 1960s anthology All About Venus, published in Britain as Farewell, Fantastic Venus!  Kinglsey Amis in 1981 put it in his anthology The Golden Age of Science Fiction.  It looks like this one is endorsed by the SF cognoscenti, and I am happy to agree with them.

Is it good?  Sure.                                               Is it chillbinding?  I think so!

"Alien Night" by Thomas N. Scortia (1957)

So far we've got one dud and one score.  Will Thomas N. Scortia's "Alien Night," around 46 pages here in Get Out of My Sky, a story which first appeared in Science Fiction Adventures and hasn't seen print since Margolies's volume, make it two hits out of three?

It is the future!  The Universal Insurance Company, based in the Universal Building in Universal City on the banks of the mighty Mississip, is in the process of conquering death!  For centuries they have been administering a longevity serum that you need only take every 25 years to indefinitely postpone senescence.  All over America their medical robots stand ready to rush to the aid of anybody who gets in an accident.  Skyscrapers are equipped with automatic nets which will snap into position if any clumsy person should fall out a window.  And if your girlfriend dumps you, don't bother considering anything rash--the Company has blanketed the country in a "hetrerodyne field" that will knock you unconscious if a brain scanning computer detects serious thoughts of suicide.

While "Get Out of My Sky" is one of those pro-utopia stories, "Alien Night" is one of those stories about how utopias are unhappy and unsatisfying places.  In response to a life without excitement, risk or even work (androids do almost all the work), around the country have arisen "hunt clubs" whose members pursue what we might call the most dangerous game.  So, the next step in the Company's quest to eliminate death is to try to put these clubs out of business.  Kenneth Huber has been spying upon the clubs for the Company, but when he learns he has a rare disease that the Company can't cure and has only five years to live, Huber decides to commit suicide in the indirect fashion of joining a hunt club as the quarry!

Thus begins Huber's 24-hour odyssey through three dozen pages of plot twists.  Huber tries to rescue a woman he thinks is also being pursued by a hunt club, then suspects that she is hunting him and so fights with her, only later to be told she was rescuing him from hunters.  Out of nowhere an alien spacecraft crashes nearby and Huber (an unemployed thermonuclear engineer) gets shanghaied into helping investigate it.  Huber survives a helicopter crash, participates in a fire fight, discovers that many androids in sensitive positions are in fact humans in disguise--no, wait, they are actually aliens disguised as humans disguised as androids.  These aliens have infiltrated the top ranks of the Company in order to prevent any possible reforms--human society is sliding into decadence and sterility thanks to the Company's elimination of risk and challenge, and an impotent human race is just what the aliens want so that they can easily take over our beautiful planet.  (They have targeted the hunt clubs because hunt club members are the only humans left with any bravery.)  The woman rescues Huber, again, and reveals herself to be the leader of the anti-alien resistance, an agent from the future of a timeline in which the aliens succeed in taking over Earth.  Together they neutralize the alien menace, making sure her timeline never occurs and that humanity will shake off its decadence by pursuing the exploration of outer space.  Huber (don't worry, a cure for his disease will be found), having gotten a good look at the alien space engine, will be a leader in the new space program.

"Alien Night" feels like a pastiche of an A.E. van Vogt story, what with all the jarring plot twists and the inclusion of every possible SF trope--immortality, decadence, time travel, time lines, space craft, aliens, androids, the sense of wonder ending--but it lacks something it is hard to define, a tone or style or something to match the material, maybe, and comes off as a little rushed and kind of silly.  It certainly fails to excite any emotion in the reader.  Barely acceptable filler, I guess.

Is it good?  Not really.                                               Is it chillbinding?  No.

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The Anderson is the winner, obviously; I am totally on board with his libertarian sensibilities and view of life as a tragedy, but looking beyond my biases I think he has the story here which is best constructed and which actually succeeds in inspiring some emotion in the audience; he takes a little time to develop characters and their relationships so when somebody takes a radical step and everybody gets killed we readers actually care.  Blish's and Scortia's efforts to depict people and relationships in their stories in Get Out of My Sky feel cheap or just lame (in general, Anderson's story feels finished, polished, while Blish's feels like it could use a revision and Scortia's feels like a rush job.)

I don't know what Margolies saw in the Scortia's "Alien Night," but in defense of the Blish, it was voted second best story by readers in both issues of Astounding in which its component parts appeared, so its selection makes sense from a marketing point of view--I guess "Get Out of My Sky" reflects the preferences of those SF fans sufficiently committed to the genre to write to Astounding and make their voices heard.

Four more tales from Budrys' Inferno

I wasn't crazy about Algis Budrys's famous novel Rogue Moon when I read it in 2007, so I have been a Budrys skeptic for years, but I have to say that I have liked or at least found acceptable the first five stories in Budrys' Inferno, which we read over the last three blog posts.  Maybe I am becoming a softie, or maybe the high emotional pitch of Budrys's fiction works better in the short form than in a full-length novel, where it might get exhausting or silly.

Well, let's read the last four of the nine pieces in the 1963 collection, hoping as we do that I like them as much or more than the first five.

"Lower Than Angels" (1956)

This is one of those SF stories that feels like it is inspired by the voyages of Captain Cook.  (My wife and I recently ate at a restaurant called "Walrus," which gave me a chance to tell her the story of how Cook tried to get his men to eat walrus meat.)  Earth's empire spans much of the galaxy, and continues to expand!  The men who explore the edges of known space, identifying star systems with life and valuable resources and making first contact with those aliens and staking claims to those resources, are the heroes of their generation!  When twenty-six-year-old Fred Imbry gets out of the Terran Space Navy he immediately joins up with one of the most successful of the explorer teams, the crew of the Sainte Marie.  And he is immediately disillusioned!  These "heroes" are just in it for the money, and one is a drunk, another a coward, a third a serial fabulist, etc. 

A month after Fred signs on, the Sainte Marie enters a frontier system and our disillusioned and bitter buddy is on his first mission as the ship's explorers, alone or in teams of two, set out from the Sainte Marie in their space boats to check out the system's individual planets.  Imbry, alone, has two weeks to make friends with the natives on a hospitable planet covered in rain forests and act as a good influence on them.  If Fred can spur the natives, who currently have a stone age technology, to develop technologically and economically, they will eventually make good trading partners for the rest of Earth's space empire.  (Isn't this what the anthropologist in Chad Oliver's 1958 story "The Marginal Man" is supposed to do with the primitive aliens he meets?) 

This is a good set up for a story, but the aliens and Imbry's interactions with them are kind of boring, and take up what feels like a lot of pages.  ("Lower Than Angels" in this book publication is 30 pages long.)  The natives, fishermen who live in a small island village, think Imbry is a god, and he tries to disabuse them of this notion, as he fears it will open the natives to exploitation by Earthmen.  Imbry uses modern medicine to save a child who has an infected injury, which of course makes the villagers even more confident he is not a man, as he insists, but a god.  Then a hurricane strikes and the village is destroyed and many villagers killed; Imbray, in his space armor which has an integrated force field, is not harmed by the storm.  The surviving villagers now think Imbray must be some kind of devil who caused the storm or at least refused to stop it, as they assume he must have been able to.

"Lower Than Angels" consists of a prologue and six chapters.  The brief sixth chapter is set "three seasons" later.  It is a little opaque, but I think what this two page chapter tells us is that Imbray has made his peace with the men of the Sainte Marie and is working hard from orbit to nudge the planet's natives into building a modern society with a modern technology and economy.  Imbray's particular contribution is to put robots on the planet that look like short people; when the natives meet these dwarves, the dwarves act like they think the natives are gods because they are physically stronger and have have boats (which the fake dwarves ostensibly lack); in this way the natives will have the same experience that Imbray had, and realize that Earth people are just people, only with a more advanced society.

"Lower Than Angels" has some elements in common with stories in the long tradition of anti-imperialist SF in which Earthers exploit or enslave primitive aliens (Edmond Hamilton's 1932 "Conquest of Two Worlds," is one example that sticks in my mind) but in the end of the story Budrys seems to be suggesting that the Earth explorers are not so bad, that modernization and trade between alien races can be mutually beneficial.  The means by which the natives in this story are modernized (by tricking them with robots) reminds us of another long SF tradition, stories in which elites deceive their inferiors for their own good (Asimov's Foundation books are perhaps the most famous example, though Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Clarke's Childhood's End and Sturgeon's "Slow Sculpture" are similarly elitist award winners) as well as all the bizarre and complicated schemes these Budrys stories seem to feature.

I'm calling this one "barely acceptable" because it is too long and tedious, though I suppose it is not actually bad.  "Lower Than Angels" was the cover story of an issue of Infinity Science Fiction with a striking and sexalicious Emsh cover painting (which has nothing to do with Budrys's story) and was included by Robert Silverberg in the 1966 anthology Earthmen and Strangers (I own the 1968 paperback edition) and by Sylvia Engdhal and Rick Roberson in the 1975 anthology Universe Ahead.  I guess a lot of people found it more compelling than I did.

"Contact Between Equals" (1958)

William Schaeffer is a genius businessman, a millionaire five or six times over.  He was also born blind.  But today he lies in a secluded house with bandages covering his face--today is the day he will see, thanks to an operation by top surgeon Louis Champley.  His wife Alicia is standing right there as Champley removes the bandages and Schaeffer, our narrator, sees his wife and the world for the first time!  But neither his first view of beauty-contest winner Alicia nor his first sight of the beautiful wooded mountains of North America is the most mind-blowing revelation our hero has to confront!

Like several of the stories in Budrys' Inferno, "Contact Between Equals" has at its center an elaborate and complicated crime.  Schaeffer is a genius, and even when blind he realized that Alicia and Champley were having an affair, and that this summer cottage on the side of a hill had some rooms wifey and Doc had scrupulously kept him away from.  But marital infidelity is just the tip of the iceberg in this wild story which reminded me a little of A. E. van Vogt's work, in which so often shocking plot twists and exposed secrets follow each other in rapid succession.  Brainiac Scaheffer not only looks in a mirror and realizes that Champley has switched bodies with him(!), but, putting his top-of-the-line grey matter to good use, over the course of this short fast-paced tale, Scaheffer susses out that Champley isn't just trying to steal Scaheffer's benjamins but to throw off his trail a vengeful space alien who is imprisoned in a secret room behind the kitchen!

Thus speaketh Schaeffer:

"I never wonder about anything, Alicia.  I find out."

Our hero does find everything out, foiling the evil sawbones and his own evil wife (if this guy is so smart why did he marry an avaricious bimbo instead of an honest businesswoman or college professor?--I guess we all make mistakes!) and making friends with the alien and hooking the Earth up with a diplomatic and commercial relationship with the E.T.s that will make life better for every (decent) human being.

This is a fun example of the classic-style SF story in which a smart guy uses logic and knowledge to figure something out at breakneck speed and thus save his own life.  Budrys stuffs "Contact Between Equals" with iconic SF elements like a dangerous alien and high technology that lead to a sense-of-wonder paradigm shift, plus such hard-boiled detective elements as a first-person narrator who totes up the clues before our very eyes and a faithless back-stabbing dame.  I like this one quite a bit.

"Contact Between Equals" was first published in Venture under the pseudonym Albert Stroud.  It was also included in Harry Harrison's  SF: Author's Choice 2 ("A DOZEN SF GREATS PRESENT THEIR FAVORITE STORIES"), suggesting that, like me, Budrys thought it one of his better productions.  I appears in that 1970 anthology with an essay by Budrys about the story that I would like to read.  (On Wednesday I dug through the boxes of SF paperbacks at Second Story Books' Rockville location looking for SF: Author's Choice 2,  but had no luck.)

"Dream of Victory" (1953)

In his introduction to Budrys' Inferno, Budrys tells us that "Dream of Victory" was the first novelette that he wrote, and he thanks Amazing's editor Howard Browne for making it more "comprehensible," Budrys having initially drafted it as a "free-wheeling" exercise in "technical bedazzlement."

It is the high tech 21st century, a time of world government, peace and prosperity, of video phones, self-driving cars and "chutes" instead of elevators.  As we learn from a chunk of exposition in the middle of the story, there was a devastating war in the late 20th century which reduced the population of advanced countries to like a quarter of what it had been.  To rebuild civilization, multitudes of androids--artificial, organic men, almost exactly like real men but with no ability to reproduce--were created.  Now that the natural human population has bounced back, the androids are being phased out; no more are being produced and those still extant are gradually losing their jobs and being replaced with woman-born people.

The actual plot concerns an android who is going through a crisis, Stac Fuoss.  Fuoss is cheating on his android wife Lisa with a natural woman, Carol, and being pushed out of his job at an insurance agency.  He is also having terrible nightmares; these nightmares evince some of that "technical bedazzlement" Budrys warned us about:

She came from blackness, and it was into blackness that he went for her.

He rolled and jerked on the bed.  Time whinnied by like a silver beast.

The woman was gone, hidden in blackness.  His feet moved spasmodically against the sheets.

The blackness parted and the woman returned.  There was with her--

While the dream scenes are sort of annoying, there are good things in the story, mostly concerning what life is like as an android, the neuroses that spring up from being an artificial person who can't have kids.  The android men are all chain smokers, for example, android women were only created to provide companionship to the male androids, and Fuoss spent all his money paying the android-making company to destroy the template used to make his wife so she will be a unique being and not just one of many clones.  The recurring nightmare is meant to convey to us readers the obsessive nature of Fuoss's hopeless hope of having a child, but I think Budrys could have done the dreams better or come up with some other technique to get this across.  (Full disclosure: Dream sequences are one of my pet peeves.)

In the final pages of the story the celebrated android lawyer who is having an affair with Lisa comes up with a scheme that provides some measure of hope for the androids.  Androids will crew the first space ship to leave the atmosphere, and come up with bogus evidence that indicates that natural-born humans can't go into space but androids can.  This will create a reason to manufacture more androids and put in the hands of the androids the power to control Earth.  But, driven over the edge by his obsession with fathering a child and human prejudice (when he asks Carol to marry him she scoffs, "Me, marry an android?"), Fuoss assaults Carol, perhaps killing her.  News reports of his crime inflame the natural-born population against androids, ruining the lawyer's plan and dooming the androids to extinction.

While it is perhaps too long, I like the plot of this one, and judge "Dream of Victory" moderately good.  Like so many of these Budrys stories, it is about somebody who is out of place, alienated, but instead of being about a diplomat or an exile or a spy, it is about someone who is a second-class citizen; I assume the story is at least in part an allegory of the experience of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States.

"Dream of Victory" has not been widely anthologized; after its debut in the same issue of Amazing as one of my least favorite Henry Kuttner stories, "Or Else," it reappeared in Amazing in 1969, while that venerable magazine was being edited by none other than one of this blog's particular heroes,  Barry N. Malzberg!   

"The Peasant Girl" (1956)

Like those Gus stories, this is a story of homo superior and the difficult relationship they have with us mundanes.  But in this tale it is the supermen who have the whip hand!

It is the future, and the superhumans are our more or less benevolent rulers, using their astonishing psychic powers to make our lives more comfortable, convenient, and efficient.  For example, as the story begins, our homo sapien protagonist, Henry Spar the cabinetmaker, finds that his younger sister, whom he has raised, has vanished.  Because now there is only one person living in their rural small town domicile, the powers that be shrink the house to a more compact, more manageable size!  Similarly, when Spar decides to ride the bus to nearby NYC to confront the rarely seen supermen and find out where they have teleported Dorothy, the bus that comes by is just the right size for the number of waiting passengers--Earth’s psychic rulers can read all our minds and know at any moment how many of us need a bus and where we want to go!  Mundanes don’t even have to light their own cigarettes, because some guy somewhere is always reading your mind and will use his long-distance pyrotechnic powers to safely light it for you the moment you want it lit!  And, of course, when you are done with it, somebody somewhere teleports away the unsightly butt.

The supermen are always reading everybody’s minds, so they have no trouble finding their perfect mates; for this reason, mundane women regularly just vanish from their homes, teleported into the arms of their new superhusbands. Spar suspects that Dorothy has been taken against her will, but when he meets her and her superbeau she tells him she truly loves the mental giant who has whisked her away from the Spar household without warning and taken her to Paris for a new dress, to Rome to have her hair done, and to a seaside kirk in Scotland to be married.  As Dorothy's superspouse explains, because they are all constantly reading each other’s minds, the supermen can’t really commit any crimes.

Mundane men are understandably bitter about living in a surveillance state where the women in their lives can just be teleported away any minute, but the supermen aren’t happy either. They are socially and genetically distinct from us normies, but have no culture of their own (in part because they have no need to work with their hands or even walk); everything they do is a reflection of or derivative of us mundanes, who hate them. But Budrys ends his story on an upbeat, hopeful, note.  After she gives birth to superhubby’s son, Dorothy begins spending time with her brother again, and Spar develops a relationship with his nephew.  Said nephew begins to learn how to work with wood from his uncle, and we are given reason to believe that Dorothy's son will be one of the first of the supermen to show some kind of creativity, that he is a pioneer in the development of a native homo superior culture, and that his relationship with his uncle is a harbinger of a future in which superman and mundane will be better able to get along.

"The Peasant Girl" is a good story and a good way to end the collection.  It first appeared in Astounding under that Paul Janvier pen name and would later see print in Joan Kahn's 1969 anthology of suspense stories, Hanging By a Thread.

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I'm quite happy with Budrys' Inferno, and even purchased another book of 1950s Budrys short stories, 1960's The Unexpected Dimension, just this week.  I guess we have to say that Budrys' Inferno has converted me from a Budrys skeptic to a Budrys fan.

Back in 2017 Joachim Boaz reviewed Budrys' Inferno at his blog Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.  He also liked the book as a whole, but, a testimony to our divergent tastes, I think the story he may have liked most, "Lower Than Angels," which he awards 4.25 stars out of five, was the one I liked least!  (Joachim also gave "The Peasant Girl" a 4.25; there we are much closer to agreement.)  Joachim was also very harsh in his dismissal of "The Man Who Tasted Ashes," which I enjoyed.  So, to get a different perspective on Budrys' Inferno, definitely check out Joachim's take and the discussion there at his exciting blog.  (And remember that you can read these vintage science fiction tales, and thousands of others, for free at the internet archive!)

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More 1950s SF in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!     

Algis Budrys's "Gus" stories

The third story in Budrys' Inferno is "And Then She Found Him," which isfdb is telling me is the second of the three "Gus" stories written by Algis Budrys and published between 1955 and 1957 under the Paul Janvier nom de plume.  I decided to look up the other two Gus tales at the internet archive and read the three of them in chronological order.

"Nobody Bothers Gus" (1955)

Augustin Kusevic is one of the early specimens of homo superior.  He has tremendous intellectual and psychic abilities--he can use math to foretell future social and economic developments; he need only read the first three pages of a novel to predict its course and conclusion; he can manipulate matter, say, turn a pen into a bouncing ball and back again or melt a twelve-lane highway, with ease.  But all these powers have come with a terrible price.  Gus autonomically generates a "field that damps curiosity," with the effect that people pay no attention to him, dismissing as magic tricks the psychic miracles he performs and forgetting that he was once heavyweight boxing champion of the world.  Superior to everyone, and  unable to form any emotional connection to an individual or to the larger culture, Gus is a lonely man without a country, without friends, without love.

"Nobody Bothers Gus" is a mood and character piece whose main plot (middle-aged Gus, having abandoned his too-easy boxing career, buys and fixes up a remote house only to lose it to eminent domain when the Feds decided to build Earth's first spaceport nearby) feels secondary.  The tantalizing component of the plot is the revelation that there are other people like Gus out there, presenting the possibility that maybe Gus need not be alone forever.

Not bad.  "Nobody Bothers Gus" first appeared in Astounding and was well received, chosen by Judith Merril for her first Year's Greatest SF anthologies and included since then in a multitude of anthologies edited by everybody ranging from Damon Knight and James Gunn to Barry Malzberg and Martin H. Greenberg.

"And Then She Found Him" (1957)

Gus Kusevic doesn't actually appear in "And Then She Found Him," making me doubt the utility of calling these three stories "The Gus stories," but the tale does take place in the same universe and address similar themes.  It appeared in Venture and later in the anthology No Limits, as well as the various printings of Budrys' Inferno (AKA The Furious Future) and some European publications.

"And Then She Found Him" is quite plot-driven, and even has a shock ending.  In Chicago a community of fifty of the superhumans with the curiosity-damping field has assembled.  Following various clues, one of the supermen, Deerbush, travels the country finding these mutants and bringing them back to Chi-town to be welcomed to the super-community.  Deerbush is sort of like a matchmaker; when he finds a mutant he usually senses that there is a person back in the Windy City who would make a perfect spouse for this new member of the homo superior colony.

In a town he finds Viola, a mutant who has been using her superpowers to steal expensive consumer goods.  Viola has a power Deerbush has encountered in no other mutant--she can hypnotize people into obeying her; nobody can resist her commands, even commands to steal or to assault others. So rapacious is Viola that her thefts are wrecking the local economy and making the local retailers and law enforcement personnel paranoid.  If the Viola crime wave is not ended soon many people may lose their jobs and innocent people may be imprisoned or suffer mob justice!

Almost as mindblowing as Viola's powers is that Deerbush the matchmaker realizes Viola is his soulmate and he falls in love!

Tragedy strikes when the extent of Viola's mental illness becomes fully apparent.  She refuses to go to Chicago and leave behind all the luxury items she has stolen, and she has no interest in marrying Deerbush.  Unreformable, her powers of hypnosis a threat to all of civilization, Deerbush has no choice but to kill her!

This story is acceptable, less moving and more sensationalistic than "Nobody Bothers Gus."  I suppose feminists might object to it as a story in which a woman is so selfish, materialistic, and manipulative that she has to be put down for the good of the universe, or just on the basis that it is a story written by a man which attempts to psychoanalyze a woman. 

"Lost Love" (1957)

Old Doc Bennett is riding a bus across the great state of New Jersey.  Doc is dozing on mass transit among the plebs instead of caressing the wheel of a Mercedes because he is the kind of doctor who ministers to the poor instead of providing face lifts to the haute bourgeoisie!  Doc notices a teen-aged boy across the aisle, a pathetic wretch clad in rags!  He wants to help this emaciated scarecrow of a human being, and engages him in conversation, even offering to let him stay in his household a while until he gets on his feet.  But the boy refuses Doc's help, saying it would be no use; he describes his life and we readers of "Nobody Bothers Gus" recognize that this kid is one of those supermen with a curiosity-damping field, that he can't make friends with us normies because we forget him as soon as we look away from him.  Case in point: every time Doc Bennett wakes up from a snooze the kid has to introduce himself again!  The kid has been travelling the nation, refusing to use his superpowers to steal and thus living on the edge of starvation, hoping he will somehow meet somebody who will remember him, somebody of his own superhuman species.

The tragic twist ending comes when Doc gets home.  He greets his wife but is surprised to find that a teenage girl who actually looks a little like his wife is also living in his house--this girl moans that Mom forgot to set the table for her yet again.  Dun dun dun!  Doc Bennett's own daughter is one of the superpeople, and if the boy had accepted Doc's hospitality he would have met his soulmate and his (and her!) abject loneliness would have been relieved for good!

Acceptable, but inferior to "Nobody Bothers Gus" because it is too sappy and too melodramatic.  "Lost Love" first jerked the tears of SF readers in a magazine called Science Fiction Stories edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes that endured for seven years (1953-1960, 38 issues total.)  Martin H. Greenberg would later include it in 101 Science Fiction Stories, which was published in the United Kingdom as The Giant Book of Science Fiction Stories.

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"Nobody Bothers Gus" stands above the crowd, but I think "And Then She Found Him" and "Lost Love" are just average, though I guess "And Then She Found Him" is remarkable for being one of those stories (like Tom Godwin's famous 1954 "The Cold Equations") that contrives a situation in which it makes sense to slay a woman who isn't perhaps really morally responsible for all the trouble she has caused.

We'll finish up Budrys' Inferno in our next blog post.

Three 1950s stores from Budrys' Inferno

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading Budrys' Inferno, a 1960s paperback collection of nine stories by Algis Budrys first published in science fiction magazines in the 1950s.  The collection is dedicated to Damon Knight, and in the introduction Budrys tells us the stories were selected by Thomas A. Dardis.

In our last blog post we read the second story in the collection, 1958's "Between the Dark and the Daylight."  Today let's read the first, fourth and fifth pieces.

"Silent Brother"  (1956)

This one appears to have been a hit.  After it first appeared in John W. Campbell's Astounding it was chosen by Judith Merril for the 1957 edition of her famous Year's Greatest SF anthology series, and would go on to be translated into French, German and Japanese.  I actually own that edition of Year's Greatest SF, and see that, in her intro to "Silent Brother," Merril praises Budrys fulsomely, jokes about his profusion of pennames ("Silent Brother" appeared under the pseudonym "Paul Janvier") and says he is "from Jersey;" Budrys was born in Konigsberg in 1931 but, his Lithuanian family in exile after the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe, Budrys spent his youth in the greatest state of the union.

Harvey Cable is an astronaut and engineer whose work was essential to making Earth' first interstellar voyage successful, but he wasn't able to fly to Alpha Centauri himself with his comrades because he had been severely injured in a test flight accident.  When his friends return from their unprecedented adventure, the invalided Cable envies the public acclaim they receive.  But soon he has other things on his mind--mysterious changes around his lonely house which suggest there is either an intruder in his home, or that in his sleep he is able to move freely, as if he had never been injured.  Whoever it is, a stranger or his own sleep-walking self, is constructing in the basement an electronic device that the waking Cable can make neither head nor tail of!

This is a good story, a sort of wish fulfillment fantasy about becoming a superman who will never be lonely again in a world of plenty and peace.  Cable's friends, out on some alien planet, were united with benevolent immaterial aliens, and have come to share these beneficent beings with the rest of humanity.  An Earthling living in symbiosis with such an alien is super healthy (in mere days Cable's ruined eye, useless legs, and lost teeth are regenerated) and can walk through walls and perform feats of technical wizardry.  Soon every person on Earth will have such a little friend and all our problems will be solved and we will be able to explore the universe.

I thought Budrys's handling of the scenes in which Cable tried to figure out the mystery of what was going on in his house clever and entertaining, and Budrys also provides us a sort of life-affirming story arc in which Cable misses and envies his friends but then learns that they have been thinking and caring about him all along.  This is a story about people getting along which isn't mawkish or saccharine and doesn't show its hand until the end--thumbs up!

Budrys' Inferno was printed several times in Great Britain under the title The Furious Future

"The Skirmisher" (1957)

This is a brief noirish detective story about a time traveler from the future who comes back to 1957 to set elaborate traps that kill people before they can produce the offspring whom, for unspecified reasons, somebody in the future doesn't want to have to deal with.  Maybe the most noteworthy element of the story is that the reader is expected to figure out that the assassin is a time traveler.  The meticulous planning of the deadly Rube Goldberg "accidents" in this story reminded me of Budrys's intricate descriptions of Harvey Cable's methods of investigating what is going on in his house in "Silent Brother," but while that story had an emotional arc and was optimistic, "The Skirmisher" is cynical and a little gimmicky, and too short to really develop characters or a world.   Acceptable.

"The Skirmisher" was first published in Infinity Science Fiction and has only ever resurfaced in Budrys collections.

"The Man Who Tasted Ashes" (1959)

Like "The Skirmisher," "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" concerns an outsider who puts into motion an elaborate scheme to murder somebody.  A space alien living in disguise on the Earth wants to start World War III and hires Redfern, an English adventurer who now lives in America and does things like gunrunning for a living, to murder a communist diplomat who is visiting Washington.  "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" is composed of scenes that feel like they were lifted out of espionage fiction: Redfern in a hotel room, trying to remain cool as a cucumber as he negotiates with the alien and receives high tech gadgets, Redfern's anxiety boiling over as he talks to a British diplomat in the shadowy corner of a restaurant, Redfern obsessively checking his watch as he drives down the highway in a stolen car, trying to reach the aliens' spaceship before blast off.  Will the diplomat from the Warsaw Pact be killed?  Will war erupt between East and West?  Will Redfern get to the alien ship on time?

I liked the car driving scenes, and Budrys starts the story in the car, in medias res (all those negotiations are related in flashbacks), and thus gets the reader's attention in a way that telling the story in strict chronological order might not.  And while the complicated crime stuff in "The Skirmisher" is the meat of that story, all the lurid spy and space alien skulduggery in "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" is used to construct a psychological portrait of a warped personality; I can recommend this one.

"The Man Who Tasted Ashes" first saw print in Damon Knight's If, and would go on to appear in an anthology of If stories and a 1966 book of SF stories designed for use in schools.

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More 1950s stories by Algis Budrys in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

"The Avenger" (1944) by Damon Knight and "Between the Dark and the Daylight" (1958) by Algis Budrys

In his introduction to Budrys' Inferno, a 1963 Berkley Medallion collection of some of his 1950s stories, Algis Budrys tells us that one of his favorite stories in the book is "Between the Dark and the Daylight," and that the story was inspired by Damon Knight's 1944 tale "The Avenger."  Budrys feels that "Between the Dark and the Daylight" is so heavily indebted to Knight that he thinks of Knight as a co-author of the piece.  So today, as a first step in our exploration of Budrys' Inferno, which I recently purchased down in South Carolina, let's read Knight's "The Avenger" and then the Budrys tale it inspired.

"The Avenger" by Damon Knight (as by Stuart Fleming) (1944)

It looks like "The Avenger" only ever appeared in the Spring 1944 issue of Planet Stories, where it was illustrated by Graham Ingels of EC Comics fame. (You may recognize the cover, also by Ingels, because we've already read that issue's lead story, Leigh Brackett's "The Jewel of Bas.")  I'm reading the scan of the issue available at that indispensable resource for the vintage pulp fan, the internet archive.

"The Avenger" begins with a half-page prologue in italics, a first-person narrative from the point of view of some being that is having a psychological breakthrough--it never had emotions before, but cries for the first time upon seeing the bloody corpse of Peter Karson.  When the main text starts we find it is a flashback, a third-person narrative all about Peter Karson when he was still alive!

Karson is an engineer and scientist working in his office in a skyscraper in the "Science City of Manhattan."  He is just putting the finishing touches on the "blackprints" of his latest invention, Earth's first space ship, when space aliens who can fly, pass through walls, and employ telekinesis appear on the Earth and cause all manner of mayhem.  These E.T.s have absolute contempt for us, treating us not like people with a civilization but the way human scientists treat insects and rodents!  Multitudes die because the world government is powerless to stop the invaders from using their mental powers to conduct such fascinating experiments as dissecting John Q. Public while he is still alive!

One of the aliens makes mental contact with Karson, putting Karson into a coma for nine months.  When he wakes up, the human race has resorted to digging underground cities in which to hide, but this is a fruitless measure: the number crunchers have calculated that, due to the continuing depredations of the aliens, the human race will be extinct in fifty years!

Karson's "blackprints" hold the key to humankind's only hope.  In an underground bunker the world's first spacecraft is quickly constructed; Karson is going to travel to space to expose a cargo of embryos (and himself!) to cosmic rays in hopes of creating a mutant superhuman race that will be as superior to the aliens as they are to us!  Karson's girlfriend, another genius inventor, wants to come with him into space, but he denies her request to board, saying that being mutated by cosmic rays would ruin her looks!

(Is now the time to recall how fifteen years later Knight lost a job by complaining that Judith Merril's 1960 novel The Tomorrow People was full of bad science and was way too girly?)

The last page of "The Avenger" returns us to the first person-narrative that began the tale.  The narrator is one of the embryos, now grown to adulthood, a superhuman with no emotions who could liberate Earth from the invaders.  But this first specimen of homo superior identifies with the cold-hearted alien invaders more than with the human race!  Karson implores him to go to Earth and save humanity, but the narrator refuses and euthanizes Karson by crushing his skull in his bare hands!

This story is alright.  It reminds me a little of those 1930s Edmond Hamilton stories about radiation and evolution I read when this blog was in its infancy.

"Between the Dark and the Daylight" by Algis Budrys (1958)

Budrys's tale begins under a dome on an alien planet, where squabble the mutated descendants of Earth people; these products of centuries of rapid, artificially-directed evolution have tremendous strength, a coat of fur, "sagittal crests" and "sharp canine tusks."  Their ancestors crashed on this inhospitable planet generations ago, and ever since the native fauna have been trying to break into the ship, while the colonists inside have been genetically engineering their offspring to have the superabilities needed to tame this inveterately hostile world from which there is no escape.  Tomorrow is the big day, the day when the nursery gates will be opened to the outside and the new generation of humanity will be released onto the planet surface, but for years the captain (he's also chief "biotechnician and pedagogical specialist") has kept the rest of the colonists in the dark about exactly what he has been doing to their children, and they are not happy about it!

This is a pretty good story.  Not only is the scenario and the images it gives rise to (a dome full of genetically modified humans under siege by an army of hideous alien monsters) striking, but Budrys does a good job of transmitting to the reader the crushing tension endured by the besieged humans, for example, in dialogue between the captain and his wife.

"You don't care for one living soul besides yourself, and the only voice you'll listen to is that power-chant in your head.  You married me because I was good breeding stock.  You married me because, if you can't lead us outside, at least your son will be the biggest and best of his generation."  

I like the Ahab-like determination of the captain, and the way Budrys in this story examines the common theme of his body of work, the question of what truly constitutes a man.  Are the people in the dome, the product of centuries of eugenic breeding and genetic modification, people who couldn't breathe the air of Earth and are so big and strong that furniture made on Earth is too fragile for them to use, still human?  Should we see the captain, who dominates his fellows and is emotionally distant from his family, as a real man (a mensch, as the Jewish colonist who celebrates Hanukkah on the day before the nursery is opened might put it) for his single-minded devotion to the mission his ancestors set him on, or as a selfish and obsessive tyrant?  These questions are tied up with the theme of Knight's 1944 story: when the captain opens the nursery and unleashes the children he has designed to thrive on this hostile world, will they have any reason to identify with their parents, whom they have not seen for years and who cannot even breathe the same air they do? 

"Between the Dark and the Daylight" was first published in Infinity and would go on to appear in two anthologies, including one I own, 1983's Changes, edited by Michael Bishop and Ian Watson.  It is a good enough story that I am looking forward to the rest of the pieces in Budrys' Inferno, which we will examine in our next two blog posts.