1991 vampiric stories by B N Malzberg, K E Wagner & T Ligotti

OMG, more vampires!  Are you sick and tired of vampires?  I hope not!  Because today we have vampire stories first printed in 1991 in Ellen Datlow's A Whisper of Blood.  A Whisper of Blood recently came to my attention because it includes a Barry Malzberg story I don't own, but when I saw it also contained stories by Karl Edward Wagner and Thomas Ligotti, I figured I would read those as well.  Put that crucifix around your neck, eat some garlic, and make sure those are silver bullets in your revolver, because here we go.

(I'm reading these stories at the internet archive, in a scan of a 2008 omnibus volume titled A Whisper of Blood: A Collection of Modern Vampire Stories that includes the texts of 1989's Blood is Not Enough as well as 1991's A Whisper of Blood.)

"Folly For Three" by Barry N. Malzberg

I wouldn't say this is really a vampire story in a literal sense, though it is in a metaphorical sense and plays with the forms and themes of a vampire story.  On the surface at least it is a tricky sort of mainstream story.  Malzberg tells the story out of order, breaking it into five parts and starting with the part that is fourth, chronologically.  Then we get the third part, then the second, then the first, and finally the ending.  

"Folly for Three" is told in the third person, but there is one lead character whose thoughts to which we are privy, who is in every scene.  She is a married woman, and she enjoys sex, but her sex life with her husband has gotten stale--he is gaining weight, is stressed from overwork, she doesn't love him any more, and she has trouble getting wet.  Because of the unchronological order in which the story is told in, readers may think she, and perhaps her husband, are cheating, but we learn late in the piece that they are scared of catching AIDS if they are unfaithful, so what appears to be an extramarital affair is in fact the married couple playacting at cheating; they meet in a bar, pretending to be strangers, and then go to a hotel to have sex--this pantomime of adultery excites her.  At the bar a guy described as "priestly" sees them going off together, calls them "fornicators," and then follows them to the hotel, getting into their room (he has a key, somehow), where they are just about to have sex, toting a gun, apparently intent on killing them.

The literary flourishes Malzberg adds to the story include making the husband a salesman--he "sells" his wife on the idea of playacting to make their marriage more sexually arousing, and Malzberg implies that being a salesman consists of putting on an act, and the husband is going to use the same skills he uses to make money--putting on masks and playing roles--to save his marriage.  

All the marriage stuff works, but the guy who is going to murder them for being fornicators sort of comes out of left field.  His presence makes sense if we see Malzberg's story as a parody or "riff" on vampire stories, because priests typically appear in vampire fiction and try to kill the vampires when they are helpless (and the married couple are vampire-like in that they are pursuing satisfaction from people they don't love by pretending to be what they are not) but while Malzberg lays all the ground work for the married couple's relationship and it makes sense in the context of real life, the murderer comes out of nowhere and his actions don't seem to make much sense.  Of course he is crazy, but when you have a story in which two of the characters' motives and actions are carefully and realistically explained, it is incongruous to throw into the mix a third character whose motives and actions feel arbitrary--and how does he get the key to their room?

As I copy edit this blog post I recall that the last line of the story is the wife making a silly joke, and now suspect she may have hired the priestly man to murder her husband.     

This story is alright.  Maybe it is interesting as an historical document, depicting the fear of AIDS in the early 1990s among heterosexuals.    

In an afterword (the stories in A Whisper of Blood all have afterwords), Malzberg praises Datlow highly, crediting her for helping him with the story and even implying she turned it into a vampire story.  He also talks about Cornell Woolrich (an earlier draft of this story was a tribute to Woolrich) and George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle.  With his trademark pessimism, our boy Barry suggests that marriage is psychic vampirism, like all our relationships, which are fundamentally asymmetrical, one partner always taking more from the other than he gives.

"Folly for Three" has only ever appeared in the many printings of A Whisper of Blood, but that includes a translation into Finnish!  It is nice to see that the people of Finland have had an opportunity to experience Barry Malzberg in their native tongue.  

"The Slug" by Karl Edward Wagner

Martine is a sculptor who works in stone.  Wagner feels the need to tells us all about every aspect of her appearance and identity; we learn her height, her ethnicity on her father's side, her ethnicity on her mother's side, her eye color, her hair color, what rock music she listens to while she works, what gin she drinks, the brand of sneakers she wears, etc.  And Martine isn't even really the main character!

A writer, Keenan, comes to Martine for a visit while she is trying to work.  Most of "The Slug" is a first-person narrative related by Keenan as he describes at great length how a mutual acquaintance, Casper Crowley, who claimed to be related to Alistair Crowley, kept coming to visit him, interrupting him day after day while he was trying to work.  Crowley was fat and a messy eater, and would devour all of Keenan's food and drink all his beer.  These distractions made Keenan miss deadlines and wrecked his relationships with his publishers and his editors.  At the same time, Crowley kept saying his own writing--books about the occult on such goofy subjects as the connections between druids and Nazis or between witches and UFOs--was going gangbusters, editors snapping up his work.  Keenan, low on funds, has to sell some of his books and Crowley actually buys them at a used bookstore to aid his research for his own next book.

Keenan thinks of the obese Crowley as a slug, and tells Martine he killed Crowley by burying him in rock salt.  Keenan is drunk on Martine's gin, and she doesn't believe him.  But after he leaves, Martine has trouble chiseling away at the bust that is her current project, and we readers know that Keenan is now going to try to suck out her creative energy the way Crowley stole his.

This story is OK, a little too long and wordy.  And a slug isn't really parasitic; Wagner sort of admits that calling Crowley a leech would make more sense.  One aspect of the story that I haven't mentioned but which might be noteworthy is that Crowley tells lots of obscene jokes about women's privates and animals having sex, and Wagner includes many of these.

In his afterword to "The Slug," Wagner complains with some fervor and some sarcasm that people sometimes come to visit him while he is writing and make his work more difficult.  Maybe Martine is a female version of Wagner, which is why Wagner spent all that time describing her tastes--maybe they are his own.

"The Slug" was selected by Ramsey Campbell and Stephen Jones for Best New Horror 3 (1992) and can also be found in several Karl Edward Wagner collections.

The rock music Martine is listening to when Keenan comes by to confess
the murder of Crowley is performed by Lou Reed 

"Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel" by Thomas Ligotti

This is a superior story with a very fine central idea, an idea that is fresh and exciting, and is also written with style and economy, presenting vivid, powerful images.

The central idea of "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel" is that dreams are parasites, "maggots of the mind and soul," creatures or beings who lived in the black chaos before life arose, monsters that have no world and so, as we sleep, suck at and steal the essence of our world!  Dreams are the reason we grow old and die--if not for their nightly depredations we would be immortal!

The narrator tells us how, as a kid, he had horrible dreams and often awoke screaming and was left exhausted during the day.  His mother had an interest in the occult, and took her boy to see a strange old woman reputed by others to be a witch, a Mrs. Rinaldi.  Ligotti does a good job describing how she takes the narrator to dark room of her house that is full of cabinets and chests and there works a weird ritual or spell.  As part of the procedure the old woman opens a box, and the narrator sees that within it lives a sort of glowing vapor.

After this mysterious treatment the narrator's bad dreams ease up.  But he misses the dreams!  Dreams not only draw away our life forces, but give us experiences and knowledge we cannot acquire awake by day, and the narrator realizes that he has "an appetite" for "the absurd and horrible, even the perfectly evil."  The bad dreams return, but when his mother brings the narrator back to Mrs. Rinaldi they find the old woman is sick.  She tells her visitors that she made a mistake trying to treat the narrator, that his voluntarily "consorting" with the dreams not only caused her treatment of him to lapse but exposed her "angel" and herself to the dreams, and she and the angel are now grievously poisoned.  Not long after this meeting Mrs. Rinaldi dies, and neighborhood kids who spy through its windows tell the narrator that in the vacant house they have seen a thing creeping along the floor, a thing like a pile of dirty rags.

Thumbs up for this jewel of a creepy story!   

In his afterword Ligotti talks about how the vampire (like the werewolf, incidentally) has lost his power because too many writers have leeched the mystery out of him, carefully cataloging his powers and weaknesses and so forth, and using him not to represent some kind of fantastic evil and a menace to the soul but as an allegory for boring psychological, sociological or political phenomena or simply as a physical threat.

 "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel" would be reprinted in the Ligotti collections Noctuary and The Nightmare Factory.

**********

Unexpectedly, these stories are only about vampires in a metaphorical sense, which sort of endorses Ligotti's view that the vampire is no longer a powerful literary device.  

We may read stories from Datlow's Blood is Not Enough in the future, but our next stop is the early 1950s, space cadets.  

MPORCIUS FICTION LOG BONUS CONTENT!!!!

A Whisper of Blood contains a story by Kathe Koja called "Teratisms" which I read in the anthology Darkness back in 2015 and blogged about then.  I reread the story today in A Whisper of Blood and had drafted a discussion of it before remembering I had already blogged about it.  So I copyedited my draft and present it to you below as a sort of superfluous bonus track or remix:

"Teratisms" by Kathe Koja

"Teratisms" is about a wild and crazy family; in her little intro to the piece, Datlow compares this family to that in the film Near Dark, a movie I not only have never seen, but never heard of.  

Koja tells her story somewhat obliquely and opaquely, but I think I can grok it.  Mitch and Randle (not their real names) are a brother and sister who have to look after their retarded little brother Alex, having promised their mother on her deathbed that they would do so.  They may all be vampires; at the very least Alex is a cannibal--whatever they are, they are not conventional Dracula-style vampires, as they eat ordinary food sometimes and the sun doesn't kill them.  We do have incontrovertible evidence that Alex kills babies and eats them, however (speaking of Dracula.)

These sinister siblings travel across the USA by car.  They try to settle down, but Alex, whom Randle (whose previous names include Francey and Marie-Claire) lacks the energy to keep an eye on 24/7 (Mitch has to go to work to make money), always ends up murdering and eating a baby, so they have to move to a different town and take different names.  Randle always flirts outrageously with her older brother, showing him her breasts and laying her head on his thigh while he drives and so forth.  The highlight scene of the story is when Mitch drives them to McDonald's.  Mitch wants to get drive through, but the irrepressible Alex leaps out of the car, insisting they eat inside.  While inside the restaurant Alex vomits, and blood and a baby's finger come out!  Gross!

In the final scene of the story, Alex having committed yet another monstrous atrocity, Mitch decides the three of them would be better off dead and makes a snap decision to kill them all in a dramatic fashion.

A totally disgusting horror story that tries to leverage not only our horror at gore and monstrously evil crimes we wouldn't think of committing, but also the quotidian horror of our own lives: crummy jobs, crummy food, fights with your family members, sexual frustration, the weight of responsibilities you do not want, perhaps feel you don't deserve (at one point Randle screams "I'm not his mother!")  Well done, but sickening and twisted and vulnerable to the charge that it is exploitative and soul-crushing.  A possible defense against this charge, I guess, is that it is an allegory of the life of people from broken homes in our increasingly individualistic society in which (as conservatives lament) the church and the family are collapsing and (here's what commies would say) the government isn't spending enough money to help the poor and the mentally and physically ill.

Koja in her brief afterword says she doesn't like to write such ancillary material as forewords and afterwords, arguing a story should stand on its own.  I wonder what Harlan Ellison and Barry Malzberg thought when they read this! 

Ellen Datlow would go on to include "Teratisms" in three other anthologies, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, and Edited By. It also reappeared in Koja's collection Extremities.

Astounding, January 1946: George O. Smith, Ross Rocklynne and Murray Leinster

We just read Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's The Fairy Chessmen, a two-part serial that appeared in the January and February issues of Astounding in 1946.  Let's see what else was in the Jan. '46 issue of John W. Campbell, Jr's formidable magazine.

Campbell's editorial is about how nuclear proliferation will change foreign policy and foreign relations; he assumes that every advanced nation, including places like Belgium and Czechoslovakia, will soon have its own arsenal of atomic weapons and the U. S. had better develop some kind of defense tout suite.  George O. Smith has a one-page article about the proximity fuse.  Earl Welch has a long article about devices that measure electricity, complete with equations and circuit diagrams that I couldn't understand if my life depended on it.  There is a Listerine ad in which two attractive young ladies decide not to invite Chuck to the party because he has bad breath.  (Being rejected by pretty girls I can understand.)  There are stories by "Philip Latham" and Emmet McDowell that I am skipping.  It is the stories by George O. Smith, Ross Rocklynne, and Murray Leinster that I am reading.

"Fine Feathers" by George O. Smith

According to isfdb, "Fine Feathers" is a novelette and has never appeared any place else.  

Smith appends to the start of his tale an italicized epigraph of three paragraphs he attributes to Aesop, the story of a crow smarter than the other crows who wishes he was a pheasant and starts wearing pheasant feathers and "lord[ing] it over the rest of the crows...."  Wikipedia calls this story "The Bird in Borrowed Feathers."  Smith's story here is a fable itself that warns you against being selfish and against trying to be something that you are not.

It is the future!  Earth has a relationship with aliens who are smarter and more advanced than we, people known as the Galactic Ones.  There are Galactic emissaries on Earth, but they don't interfere very much with what goes on here.

Our main character is a very clever human financier, Wanniston.  He is so smart that he is constantly tricking and outmaneuvering the other local business people, always operating within the bounds of the law, to the point that other business people, humiliated and impoverished, are committing suicide.

Wanniston is anti-social and ambitious, not caring if he has friends or if he has children.  He figures out how to make an electrical device that will increase his intelligence; he has to do so gradually, as large doses are dangerous, and just jolts himself a few seconds a day, raising his IQ by a few points with each treatment.  These treatments cause sterility, which would dissuade many men, but not Wanniston.

Wanniston is friendly with the local Galactic emissary, Gerd Lel Rayne, and Rayne warns him against increasing his intelligence, but Wanniston does not listen.  As they become more and more frustrated by him, the other middle-class people in the area plot to get rid of Wanniston, finally hitting on the scheme of framing him for murder, claiming one of the suicides was no suicide at all.  Wanniston is innocent, but realizing a jury will be made up of people who hate him and will convict him regardless of the paucity of evidence, Wanniston steals Rayne's space ship and flies off to a planet of Galactics.

His machine has made him as smart as a Galactic, and so Wanniston feels at home in a beautiful Galactic city, and the Galactics welcome him.  The Galactics have a socialistic society in which no work is necessary and there is no money--everybody's needs and desires are automatically fulfilled.  (This is a fable, remember, not a serious exploration of economic systems.)  Government officials among the Galactics are selected by a computer ("aptitude machine"), and Wanniston keeps using his intelligence-raising device and gets so smart that the computer assigns him to work in the office of the Governor of the entire galaxy. 

Because his IQ is so tremendously high, Wanniston is in line to become ruler of the galaxy.  But intelligence is not enough--he needs wisdom and experience as well.  It will take him approximately 500 years of working in the governor's office to acquire that experience; the Galactics think this is reasonable because Wanniston has about 600 years of life left--when you become super intelligent your brain subconsciously repairs your cells so you age very slowly and just shrug off disease and injury.  But Wanniston is impatient.  He tries to build a machine that can transfer other men's experience into his own brain, but this turns out to be impossible.  Unable to prove he is better than everybody else as quickly as he wants to, Wanniston cracks and commits suicide in a scene that is a direct duplicate of the first scene of the story, in which one of Wanniston's business contacts, who had lost everything in a failed venture, killed himself.

This is a merely competent filler story, inoffensive but unimpressive and forgettable.  As a fable, none of the details of the story ring true (couldn't a decent lawyer or an honest judge protect him from being convicted of murder on Earth?; nobody cares he stole a space ship?; do business people really commit suicide that readily?) so there is no tension or human feeling.  No wonder anthologists never snapped it up.

"A Matter of Length" by Ross Rocklynne 

Like Smith's "Fine Feathers," Rocklynne's "A Matter of Length" is categorized by isfdb as a novelette and has never been reprinted.  We dig deep here at MPorcius Fiction Log.   

This is a story about racism or bigotry or whatever you want to call it.  In form it is an adventure story, with people being captured, escaping captivity, fighting other humans and dangerous aliens, rescuing women, all that adventure caper jazz.

The human race's space empire is home to three types of people.  There are the Ordinaries, people like you and me.  Then there are the Hypnos, a tiny minority of people who have psychic powers and can make others see illusions.  The Hypnos are the future of the human race, the next stage of human evolution.  Many Ordinaries fear and hate the Hypnos, accusing them of crimes and atrocities, and currently a Galactic Civil War is raging between those Ordinaries who are on a crusade to exterminate the Hypnos and the Hypnos and sympathetic Ordinaries.  The third type of people are Sensitives, people who can't influence other people with their psychic powers but who can detect Hypnos.  Anti-Hypno crusaders have Sensitives in their military units to help them track down Hypnos--Hypnos claim that as soon as they are exterminated the Ordinaries will turn on the Sensitives and exterminate them as well.

The plot of the story concerns Joe Henderson, a Hypno who has been captured by anti-Hypno forces after a battle.  He is held captive on the space ship of Captain MacDougall, who hates Hypnos because his daughter died while under the care of a doctor who turned out to be a Hypno.  As if we didn't already know he was the bad guy, MacDougall is also fat.  In the fighting, Joe killed MacDougall's navigator, and so the ship went off course and passed through a dust cloud which damaged many of its systems.  The ship is now lost, and has landed on a planet to make repairs; this planet has turned out to be pretty dangerous.  On this planet time moves slowly, so that the natives seem like statues, trees don't move in the wind, and MacDougall's people can't easily breathe the native air, because chemical reactions are slow or something.  But while the ship is there the space crew gradually begins to move more slowly, getting more in line with the local pace.  Joe, in his cell, stays moving at Earth speed because the energy field around his cell that blocks his psychic powers also blocks the radiation (or whatever) that makes everything on this world move slowly.

Other characters on the ship include an Ordinary who is an undercover intelligence officer with the pro-Hypno forces--he finds an opportunity to release Joe from the cell--and MacDougall's Sensitive, a beautiful woman.  When the crew's speed matches that of the natives, the natives attack.  The ship's heavy weapons were rendered inoperative by passage through that dust cloud, and the natives are huge monsters who do not easily succumb to small arms fire, so the ship's crew gets massacred.  Joe, making use of his high speed relative to everybody else, saves the secret agent and the woman.  They find a place to take cover and wait for help from a pro-Hypno ship, and Joe and the secret agent convince the woman to join the pro-Hypno cause.  We are lead to assume that Joe and the woman will become lovers.  

"A Matter of Length" is one of many SF stories in which a small minority of superior people is oppressed by the mundane majority.  These stories have a broad appeal because they exploit people's natural love of aristocracy and natural bent towards elitism, while at the same time ostensibly being about sympathy for the downtrodden--the reader who thinks he is better than others because he is smarter or knows more science or whatever (and it is a safe bet that many Astounding readers thought this of themselves) identifies with Joe the superman and at the same time can feel like a good liberal because Joe also represents blacks, Jews, homosexuals, immigrants, or whatever marginalized group the reader has sympathy for.

"A Matter of Length" is an entertaining action-adventure story; it is filler, but a notch above "Fine Feathers" because the pace is fast, there is violence and a hint of sex, and things happen besides men having sedate conversations with each other--there are direct confrontations, danger, and death, and all the people are passionate, driven to pursue goals by deeply held beliefs and/or fighting for their lives.

"The Plants" by Murray Leinster

Compared to Smith's and Rocklynne's stories, which never extended their reach beyond the confines of Astounding's covers, Leinster's "The Plants" was a big success, being reprinted in Martin Greenberg's 1950 Men Against the Stars as well as a 1952 British magazine, the first issue of Famous American Science Fiction, where it appeared alongside Robert Moore Williams' "Red Death of Mars."

Planet Ailolo is one big featureless globe, entirely covered by a single species of flowers, each flower the same height, each flower occupying the same amount of ground.  There are no animals or other plants on the planet, it is just a sea of these identical plants from horizon to horizon.

A space freighter crash lands on Ailolo and four men emerge.  The ship had a crew of forty-eight, and only they and one other man survived the disaster.  That fifth survivor is a saboteur who planted bombs in the ship that crippled it and killed most of the crew--this piece of human garbage escaped in a life boat before the explosions.  The four innocent men, now marooned on Ailolo, figure their treacherous crewmate is going to meet up with a space pirate ship and then come to Ailolo to loot the valuable cargo of the wrecked vessel.  The pirates, no doubt, will be armed to the teeth, and the four survivors of the crash landing have no weapons at all.

The story describes how the four shipwrecked men develop a relationship with the flowers, which turn out to be intelligent, and work with the flowers to try to fight the pirates and then use the pirates' ship to escape back to civilization.

This is a decent adventure story in which there are blasters, space suits, pirates, telepathy, and a hero who uses his wits to overcome obstacles, save himself and his friends, and punish evil-doers.  Leinster tosses in a healthy but not distracting helping of science, like speculative ecology and biology and more grounded stuff about how the conditions of the atmosphere affect the boiling point of water and about the effect of its angle of approach on a space craft's entry into an atmosphere and ability to safely land on a planet. "The Plants" is also the right length (it is much shorter than the other two pieces we are looking at today.)  I like it.

If you compare New Jerseyan Edd Cartier's cover for the hardback edition of Men Against the Stars
with Australian Stan Pitt's cover for the first issue of Famous American Science Fiction, I think 
you can see Pitt based his cover on Cartier's, but added a beautiful woman to 
liven things up. 

**********

None of these stories is boring or irritating, and one of them is borderline good, and another actually good, and we even learned some science and some ethics (that we probably should have known already.)  I think we can chalk up a win today for Astounding and for SF readers.

In our next episode we'll be reading stories that were actually published during my lifetime, so stay tuned!

The Far Reality (AKA The Fairy Chessmen AKA Chessboard Planet) by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

Recently at Second Story Books I acquired some paperbacks that caught my eye with their unusual covers or origins.  Today let's read one of those finds, a British paperback edition of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's 1946 novella "The Fairy Chessmen," which was first published as a two-part serial in Astounding under the penname Lewis Padgett.  My paperback edition from Consul Books was published under the title The Far Reality in 1963 and bears a price of 2 shillings and 6 pence; my copy has an old typewritten 50¢ price sticker over the British price and a recent handwritten 3 dollar price sticker put there by the Second Story Books staff--everything at Second Story Books's Rockville store is half off, so I paid $1.50 (actually less, because there was a buy five get one free or something sale.)  The most remarkable thing about this edition is perhaps the ad for life insurance on the last page.

The Far Reality is set in a bizarre post-war America.  The chaos of World War II resulted in the establishment of a new country in the middle of Europe, a multiethnic empire of emigres who call themselves The Falangists.  Kuttner and Moore describe this new nation as "a hybrid race, as Americans had once been...a new melting pot of races...black, yellow and white stirred up together in a cauldron under which a fire had been kindled."

As the story begins, this new nation and the United States have been at war for decades.  The U. S. civilian population has been spread out thinly across the country, so there are no concentrations that would make tempting bomb targets--the great cities are in ruins.  Meanwhile, the "warmen" live and work in industrial underground cities, workers building and supplying the robots that fight the war, the bureaucrats and military officers making the plans and directing the robots (Kuttner and Moore liken the mechanical war to chess.)

Subterranean life, with no pets and no children, is hard on the warmen, and to keep them sane, new drugs have been developed that reproduce the euphoric effects of alcohol without causing a hangover; warmen are also provided with films that directly stimulate the brain and addictive virtual reality games like the Fairyland machines that allow a player to "be Jehovah to a fantastically convincing illusion of a little world of his own, peopled with critters he could design and create himself."

The plot follows the staff of the office of the director of the Department of Psychometrics, Robert Cameron.  Cameron is getting stressed out, suffering hallucinations--Kuttner and Moore describe many of these hallucinations.  Cameron's two assistants, Ben DuBrose and Seth Pell, manipulate him with drugs and hypnosis and act as a buffer between their boss and Cameron's own boss, the Secretary of War, striving to keep Cameron from going totally off the deep end.  

This novella is all about psychology and mental illness, and one of the theories Kuttner and Moore put forward is the idea that mental illness is often caused by a sense of responsibility.  The example they offer is how a husband whose wife is injured will be crazed with worry and fear until the doctor arrives, and then he can relax because the responsibility for his wife's health is offloaded to the doctor.  Anyway, DuBrose and Pell think one reason Cameron is going nutso is the titanic responsibility of his job, and one way they try to stabilize his psyche is to take over some of his responsibilities by, for example, screening all of Cameron's calls on the video phone and all his visitors.

The Secretary of War has a big new job for Cameron and his department: US intelligence has acquired an inexplicable secret equation that the Falangists are using to develop super weapons, and America's top scientists and technicians are trying to figure the equation out, but trying to solve the equation is driving them insane!  The Sec of War needs Cameron and his staff to do something about this problem so we too can take advantage of the equation or the enemy will win the decades-old war.  DuBrose and Pell try to limit how much their boss knows about this new crisis; they don't let on how important this new task is, for example.  But the Secret Service agent who acts as the Secretary of War's courier,  Ridgley, always insists on delivering top secret packages from the Secretary directly into Cameron's hands, threatening to clue Cameron in to how much responsibility has been added to his shoulders.

A third of the way through the story DuBrose and Pell make a series of startling discoveries.  Those big silver spheres--impenetrable force fields--which suddenly appeared all over the USA 22 years ago are not dud Falangist weapons, as everyone has supposed--they are the artifacts of time travelling refugees--aliens!--from a horrible future who came to the 20th century but promptly died!  In the hour or so before they died these aliens emitted a radiation which caused nearby human babies still in the womb to mutate.  This mutation has just recently manifested itself--the mutants, seemingly normal for over twenty years, have gone catatonic, but if they are close to one of the spheres, they become semi-coherent, and exhibit the ability to see through time!  The mutant, for example, will evince awareness not only of the furniture in the room, but the furniture that was in the room in the past and has since been removed, and the furniture that has not yet been installed in the room, but will be.  This knowledge extends so far into the past and future that the excess of information overloads the human mind and drives the mutants catatonic.

As if this wasn't amazing enough, one mutant that Pell is treating comes out if his stupor when Ridgley comes by on one of his insistent deliveries, proving that Ridgley is an agent from another time!  The Secretary of War assures Cameron's staff that Ridgely has been a loyal American doing his part in the war on the Falangists for as long as he has known him, but could Ridgley be playing his own game?  It later becomes apparent that Ridgley is a genetically engineered warrior, a perfect fighting machine, another refugee from the future; his future is one of constant war which he fled because he was guilty of war crimes and vulnerable to prosecution.    

The first half of the novella ends with a surprise--American scientist Emil Pastor solves much of the strange equation, which drives him insane but does give him the power to make matter disappear.  He calls up DuBrose and Pell on the video phone, and to demonstrate his new ability to DuBrose this brain-addled boffin annihilates Seth Pell!  One of our main characters just died in the middle of the story!

In the second half of the novella Cameron and DuBrose find a scientist who can tackle the equation, Eli Wood.  You see, the equation presupposes, and in fact proves, that what we consider bedrock constants--e. g., the speed of light or the rate of acceleration imparted by Earth gravity--are not in fact constant, but variable, and can be changed.  Early in The Far Reality, one American scientist figures out part of the equation, and is able to tinker with gravity; he gains the ability to hover, but he is so psychologically shaken that he goes into a comatose state, a defense mechanism his subconscious resorts to because this scientist can't face the reality that the constants he has based his career on are not constants at all.  Cameron and DuBrose think Eli Wood can safely tackle the formula because he is a fairy chess player, and fairy chess is all about experimenting with changing the basic rules of chess, sometimes in radical and fluid ways.  (Pastor made progress on the equation because he was a Fairyland player who would make custom modifications to his Fairyland machine, altering many of its basic parameters.)

(Fairy chess is a real thing I never heard of until today.  When educated kids were playing chess and listening to Beethoven and Mozart I was throwing rocks at squirrels and watching Tom and Jerry and Gilligan and the Skipper on the idiot box.  No regrets, though!)  

At the same time this Wood subplot is playing out, insane Emil Pastor is wandering around America, taking public transport from one subterranean city to another, thinking he is God because he has the power to destroy the world or any individual part of it with a mere thought.  Government agents hunt him, their orders to kill him on sight, but a man who can annihilate you with a thought is hard to kill!  Meanwhile Cameron is trying to overcome his hallucinations, which he believes are caused by a Falangist attack, while he and DuBrose deal with Ridgely, the secret agent from the future who may be in the hire of the Falangists and is perhaps the source of the crazy equation which exposes the terrible reality that there are no unchanging facts, no invariable truths, and holds the key to winning the war.

In the end, Pastor and Ridgely are neutralized, and the US government gets a hold of the full equation and the counter equation that makes us immune to Falangist use of the equation, and the US wins the war.  But the novella ends ambiguously, we might even say ironically and tragically.  On the cheery side, DuBrose believes that the future which produced Ridgely, a world of endless war, can be averted; he thinks that now that the Falangists have been overthrown the human race can unite to invent space rockets and conquer the stars.  Humanity needs a goal, a mission, an obstacle to overcome--war provides that goal, but exploration of space can provide a healthier substitute to war.

Cameron disagrees.  He is certain that, even though the Falangists have been defeated, America cannot relax, but must remain on a war footing because other enemies might arise.  Even worse, Cameron realizes that his own policies of propaganda and indoctrination are at least partly responsible for the creation of men like Ridgely and a world of endless war--even though the Falangist attack on his brain that apparently caused all those hallucinations is over, this new weighty responsibility threatens to drive Cameron insane, and the last line of the novella is the same as a the first, a description of one of Cameron's hallucinations!

The January cover (left) depicts Ridgley trying to get to his chopper to escape to 
the Falangists, while Cameron's team uses the equation to conjure such
apparitions as monster chessmen to obstruct him

This downer ending--and this 1946 novella as a whole--is perhaps a reflection of, or an allegory of, the world and the United States after World War II--the Axis powers had been vanquished, but the existence of nuclear weapons and the threat posed by the Soviet Union, which had conquered and was brutalizing Poland (which Great Britain and France had gone to war to protect in the first place) and the rest of Eastern Europe, meant that the West could not relax and war still threatened the world.   

This novella is not bad, but it is not great, either.  We're giving it the coveted "Acceptable" ranking here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Kuttner and Moore put forward lots of interesting ideas, but many of them go nowhere--we learn about the ethnic makeup of the new country in Europe, but then we almost never learn anything else about the Falangists and their racial character has zero effect on the story.  We don't learn much of anything about the time travelling aliens, either; they are just there to cause the mutations that allow Cameron and his team to probe the future from whence Ridgley came.  We are told the people in the military and defense industries have to live underground, but we don't get much of a picture of this subterranean life, and it turns out lots of people live aboveground anyway--Pastor's lab is above ground, and isn't his lab important enough to hide from enemy bombs?

The way that the equation works is confusing and just seems to give the authors license to present whatever effects they want and move the plot in whatever direction they would like.  The Falangists use the equation to make bombs that can penetrate force fields and to project hallucinations into Cameron's mind (though it is ambiguous how much these hallucinations are native to Cameron's brain, the result of too much responsibility.)  One guy uses the equation to levitate, another to destroy anything.  When Cameron and crew finally get control of the equation they use it to attack Ridgley, in an effort to keep him from escaping and force him to use the counter equation so they can film him using the counter equation and thus learn how it works, but I couldn't tell if they were just making him hallucinate or actually causing chaotic shifts in the terrain around him and making items, like giant chessmen, appear.  And how would see him using the counter equation help them learn it?  Seeing the levitator and Pastor in action didn't help them solve the original equation.  And if Ridgely can use the counter equation, why is it he never uses the original equation? 

SF is full of stuff that makes no sense but which act as an allegory or facilitate thrills and excitement; we forgive nonsense like hyperspace and telepathy if they are used by the author to say something interesting about the human condition or tell a fun or moving story about people.  One of the problems with The Fairy Chessmen/The Far Reality is that Kuttner and Moore want us to accept the incredible idea of this equation, but the thrills and excitement their story offers are limited.  We are told the war is important and everybody is stressed out and on the brink of insanity but we don't feel any tension.  Partly this is because the majority of the text is men sitting around talking, in person or on the videophone--there are very few direct confrontations in the story.  Kuttner and Moore do try to show the relationship between Cameron and his wife, and how Cameron and DuBrose miss their friend Pell after he gets annihilated, but these efforts at eliciting human emotion from the reader didn't work for me.

Not a waste of time, but, as I have suggested, not spectacular.  Perhaps The Far Reality is interesting as a characteristic Kuttner/Moore work, with its references to Lewis Carroll, virtual reality machines that serve as an opiate for the masses, and all that psychology, elements we have seen in other K & M stories, or as a window onto views of the world--and America's role in it--just after the Second World War. 

Here's one for all you students of the history of life insurance

Barry N. Malzberg: "Heavy Metal," "Turpentine," "Quartermain" and "The Prince of the Steppes"

In a Malzbergian mood, this week I reread my copy of 1970's Dwellers of the Deep, which I first read and blogged about back in 2017.  A fun read.  Now let's fast forward from the Nixon era to experience some Malzberg stories from the Reagan and Bush years!  

In 1939, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded Arkham House to preserve in hardcover the work of their hero, H. P. Lovecraft.  In the year 2000, in one of those ironies with which life abounds, Arkham House published In the Stone House, a book of 24 stories by a guy who has it in for Lovecraft (see 1989's "O Thou Last and Greatest"), our hero Barry N. Malzberg!  I bought a copy of In the Stone House at Second Story Books in Rockville, MD, just recently for 15 bucks, which I consider a good price.  Let's read the first four stories in this 240-page volume (these four stories take up like 47 pages.)

"Heavy Metal" (1992)

Barry Malzberg is obsessed with world-class womanizer and murder victim John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, and this is yet another Malzberg story about the man.  I've been hearing people swoon and mourn over JFK my entire life and they just say the same goop again and again* and I am pretty sick of it, but I'm still going to slog through "Heavy Metal," which I know you were hoping would be about Ozzy Osbourne and Tony Iommi or iron, copper and tin.

The narrator of "Heavy Metal" is JFK's closest confidant; I think Barry means JFK's conscience or a ghost or something, not a real individual flesh-and-blood person.  Whatever he is, the narrator describes a bunch of behind-the-scenes incidents from the 1960 campaign, including JFK banging some chick, but mostly JFK talking to his brother about LBJ or journalist Theodore H. White (watch out you don't think he's the same guy as Englishman T. H. White, as I did for years!) or them arguing about strategy (Bobby wants Jack to try to stay faithful to his wife for a little while) or watching the returns on election night.  

The pivotal scene of the story is a meeting with Chicago mayor Richard Daley.  In Barry's alternate world JFK doesn't suck up to Daley, so JFK loses the election because Daley refuses to commit the fraud that would deliver Illinois's electoral votes to Kennedy.

This story is a drag unless you are some kind of Kennedy fanatic who will relish yet another opportunity to read about the Kennedy clan, Daley, White, Henry Luce, Johnson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson, David Powers, Richard M. Nixon, that whole cast of characters.  And if you are a Kennedy fanatic maybe the story will irritate you because it portrays the Kennedys and their allies and their quest for power as pretty sordid--Malzberg reminds us that JFK won a Pulitzer prize for a book some other guy wrote, for example.  I think, however, that Malzberg's aim in writing the story is to present a more human and sympathetic JFK than the one who existed in real life and the one we so often see portrayed, to present a more vulnerable JFK we can relate to--a victim--and a more moral JFK we wish we could identify with--a mensch who refuses to kiss the ass of the anti-Semitic Daley and thus breaks out of his victimhood but throws away his chance to be leader of the free world.

(I might also note that Malzberg writes in his usual slightly oblique style, using no quotation marks in the many scenes of dialogue, and never using JFK or LBJ's last names or Richard Nixon's name at all, so readers who aren't familiar with the 1960 election might have trouble telling what the hell is going on, though it seems impossible such people would ever encounter this story.)

To me, this story is a waste of time, but I will grudgingly admit that Malzberg achieves his goals here, so those who are the audience for a story like this will probably enjoy it.

"Heavy Metal," the significance of whose title is escaping me, was first printed in Mike Resnick's anthology Alternate Presidents.  Malzberg has two stories in Alternate Presidents; but the other one, which is apparently about Huey Long, is not in In the Stone House.  I'm curious what Malzberg has to say about Long, so maybe I'll look that one up in the near future.   

*Other presidents people argue about, other presidents are revaluated periodically, but people feel compelled to say the same stuff about JFK again and again and again...  

"Turpentine" (1991)

Looks like more alternate history.  Alternate history is a subgenre I avoid, but my commitment to Malzbergian studies is so great that I am going to hack my way through this one as well.  

"Turpentine" is about student revolutionaries in the New York City of the late 1960s--I guess it is based on Black Panther and Weather Underground violence in New York City in 1969 and 1970.  Malzberg also contrives a way to mention Chicago and Hilary Clinton's hero Saul Alinsky.

Our narrator is the number two man of a gang of revolutionaries who have taken over a Manhattan college campus, Ronald X.  The number one man is called Richard.  Richard and Ronald X are black, but the #3 revolutionary, Johnathan, is white, and there are other white people among the unnamed "soldiers" of the revolutionary gang.  

The black leaders of the group force a white college professor (this guy got his degree in Chicago, which is how Barry drags Chi-town into the story) to show them the secret way to the school's nuclear reactor.  (In real life, Columbia University built a nuclear reactor but never operated it, in part because of fears of student violence.)  Richard starts negotiating with the government, threatening to blow up New York City unless he is given control of the town.  Johnathan vigorously argues against this risky course, arguing that since LBJ has decided to not seek reelection he will be bitter and have nothing to lose and will respond to Richard's threats with air strikes--even a nuclear bomb!  Johnathan warns Richard that he is going to bring the Vietnam War home, Malzberg cleverly echoing, I guess somewhat ironically, the slogans and sentiments of the Weather Underground.  Sure enough, the story ends with the devastating aerial bombing of the nuclear facility.

A leftist who wanted to defend Malzberg might say this story demonstrates the plight of black people in America, the lengths they have been driven to and whatever, and Richard certainly complains about how hard life is for black people and how white allies of blacks always let them down, are just play acting at revolution before returning to safe bourgeois life.  And I suppose it depicts LBJ as a trigger happy warmonger.

I have to say, however, that to me the primary "takeaway" of the story is its depiction of blacks as a reckless, menacing, dangerous "other."  Malzberg writes grammatical errors and black accents for Richard and Ronald X, emphasizes black men's aggressive and threatening sexuality, and has Richard and Ronald X physically manhandle the Chicago-degree holding prof and poor Johnathan in a humiliating way.  Richard, for example, sees Johnathan cleaning his spectacles and snatches them from the white student's hands and deliberately smears his fingerprints all over the lenses.  Richard's course is not only suicidally risky, he also mistreats, with deliberate cruelty, the very people who are trying to help him!  (We might also add that eyeglasses are often used as a symbol of the intellectual, so Richard's deliberate defacing of a man's eyeglasses is a sort of symbol of his contempt for intelligence and learning--Richard is a savage or a barbarian.)  "Turpentine" suggests that white people who try to help blacks are fools whose efforts will not be appreciated, at best--at worst the blacks will abuse them and then they will get killed in the violence the blacks cause.         

This story is well-written--it pushes your emotional buttons and has lots of human drama, and is certainly thought-provoking.  Thumbs up!   

As for the title, I am guessing it is a reference to a metaphor Richard uses about how in the dark you can't tell a person's skin color but when the sun comes up or the lights are switched on it is obvious who is white and who is black and white people like Johnathan can get out of tough situations that blacks like Richard and Ronald X are stuck in.  I know that is not a good guess.  Maybe "Turpentine" is a reference to how LBJ is going to wipe NYC off the M-A-P?   

"Turpentine" debuted in the third volume of Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenburg's What Might Have Been series, Alternate Wars.

"Quartermain" (1985)

Life in the 22nd century is unsatisfying; machines do everything and the government manages your life for you, including selecting your friends and lovers for you, so people are alienated and prone to insanity.  A small number of people find satisfying work being cult leaders.  Our narrator, Quartermain, is a man who seeks to become a cult leader, but to qualify he has to overcome obstacles in a simulation, a simulation of the trials faced by our lord and savior Jesus Christ!  His government-assigned girlfriend and the computer that runs the simulation are pretty discouraging, but Quartermain is determined.  Within the simulation, he wrestles Satan in the middle of a desert for forty days, deals with Lazarus and Mary Magdalene, hangs on the cross.   At every step people advise him to abandon the simulation, even going so far as to say it is a scam, that nobody ever beats the simulation and the cult leaders are just government stooges playacting.  Nobody in the 22nd century believes in God!, they say.  But Quatermain stays the course.  The end of the story is ambiguous; it doesn't seem like Quartermain becomes a cult leader, and I can't tell if we are supposed to think he got killed in real life or just in the simulation.  If he got killed in real life, how is he still talking to us?  Is the afterlife real?  Maybe this story qualifies as a shaggy dog story.   

OK, I guess.  The story is short and there is enough sex and violence to keep your mind from wandering.  

Here's some SF trivia for you.  If isfdb is to be believed, "Quartermain" was going to appear in New Dimensions 13, but the book was never published, even though copies were sent to reviewers.  (Missed it by that much!)  The story ended up in Asimov's, and was even translated for a German anthology of stories from Asimov's.  

"The Prince of the Steppes" (1988)

In "Turpentine" Malzberg tried to speak in the dialect of leftist African-American college students--in "The Prince of the Steppes" he apes the English of Russian immigrants to the United States who are pretending to be defectors but are in fact agents of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!

Our narrator is Yuri Semeyonvich Tomavechki--he goes by Simon.  Simon has psychic powers--he can read the minds of people within 30 feet, and exert influence on them so he can do what he wants (he can park illegally and nobody will notice, people let him move to the front of a queue, that sort of thing.)  As far as Simon knows, he is the only psychic in the world.  The Communist Party has sent him to Brooklyn to live as a taxi driver and to investigate a young female defector, referred to as Elena.  Elena's older cousin, Nicholas, is also a defector, currently living in Los Angeles.  Nicholas is a scientist who invented a new type of super-bomb, the D-Bomb, and then fled to America.  Simon has been tasked with picking up Elena in his cab and reading her mind to discover if Nicholas has handed over the secret of the D-Bomb to the U.S. government.     

Simon is not portrayed as a die hard socialist eager to spread worldwide revolution; rather he is sort of hapless, a man who regrets how his psychic powers attracted the attention of the Soviet government and looks forward to getting this mission over with so he can return to Russia and live a simple life as a worker.  

What Simon learns from Elena's brain impels him to force her to rush to Los Angeles with him to confront Nicholas.  But the trick is on Simon--in the end of the story we learn the extent to which the psyker is not an agent of the monstrous Soviet government but instead one of its many victims.  Elena and Nicholas are not sincere defectors, but Soviet agents deep undercover, and Simon is not really a spy sent to investigate them--Simon is the D-Bomb, an artificial person created by Nicholas!  (I think.)  It is implied that the Soviet government has decided to destroy LA, and so Elena and Nicholas have manipulated Simon into going there, where he will soon be detonated!

I don't know if the plot to this one quite makes sense, but the slightly jocular style is pleasant to read.  Acceptable.

"The Prince of the Steppes" first appeared in F&SF--Barry's name is not only on the cover, it is at the top of the list, even above that of every hipster fanboy's fave, Harlan Ellison!--and has been translated into French and Italian, mio paisanos!

**********

"Turpentine" is the most memorable and provocative of these four stories, in part because it feels fresh--"Heavy Metal" and "Quartermain" are Malzberg remixing stories we already know (the 1960 election and the life of Christ) and addressing topics we have already seen him address.  "Turpentine" also seems serious, evoking real human emotions, while the other stories are too jokey or too incredible and mysterious to inspire sincere feelings.    

We'll get back to In the Stone House, Malzberg fans, but first we'll look at some things from 1940s issues of Astounding. 

Fritz Leiber: "Midnight in the Mirror World," "The Number of the Beast" and "The Mind Spider"

Let's read the remaining three stories in my coffee-stained copy of Ace 53330, The Mind Spider and Other Stories, recently acquired at Second Story Books in Rockville, Maryland.  According to isfdb, "The Number of the Beast" and "The Mind Spider" are components of the Change War series, while "Midnight in the Mirror World" is not.

"Midnight in the Mirror World" (1964)

Giles Nefandor is a retired chess master and concert pianist who sometimes publishes articles in astronomy journals.  Divorced, he lives alone and has a very comfortable life style.  He wakes up at sunset, goes up to the roof to observe the stars through his battery of telescopes, then at midnight walks downstairs to play the piano and work on chess problems.  

Halfway down the steps, on a landing, are two mirrors that face each other so that in each Nefandor sees a multitude of images of himself that diminish in size.  One night, as the clock is striking twelve, he sees that one of the series of reflections is not a duplicate of the others, but instead offers an image of himself with a horrified expression, menaced by a slender black figure!  The image reverts to normal when the clock ceases to strike.  The next night the same thing happens, but the impossibly independent reflection is one step closer in the series!

Over the next few nights, as the fearsome image grows closer with each appearance, Nefandor wracks his brain, trying to remember if there is anybody out there who might want to exact revenge upon him, and studies the properties of mirrors that are reflected in each other.  He figures out the mystery, which involves a strange but attractive woman who considers herself a witch, lots of math, suicide, and an ambiguous, or maybe I should say paradoxical, ending. 

Thumbs up--I like it!  This one is especially suitable for all you fans of suicide, disastrous sexual relationships, and black magic.  You gender studies kids may find lots in here about men's conflicted feelings about women--"Midnight in the Mirror World" is at the same time a male wish fulfillment fantasy about having a relationship with a woman 15 years younger than you and a warning about female cunning and single-mindedness.

"Midnight in the Mirror World" first appeared in Fantastic and has since been included in numerous Leiber collections. 

"The Number of the Beast" (1958)

"The Number of the Beast" appeared in the same issue of Galaxy as Jack Vance's "Ullward's Retreat," which I blogged about like eight years ago when I read the version titled "Ulward's Retreat."  Galaxy editor H. L. Gold (praise of whom from Barry Malzberg we just read) liked "The Number of the Beast" enough that he included it in The Sixth Galaxy Reader. 

"The Number of the Beast" is a detective story, and not like a Mickey Spillane detective story in which a guy gets beaten up by gangsters or commies, then guns down the gangsters or commies, and beds a woman, and then guns down the woman; no, "The Number of the Beast" is a logic puzzle based on math!  

It is the future!  Earth is a member of a space federation whose membership includes a dazzling array of intelligent spacefaring species.  A newly discovered race, the Arcturians, is considering joining, but its rulers are split between a pro-federation and an isolationist party.  Across the galaxy, all eyes are on Arcturus.  A politician of one of these parties was visiting Earth when he got murdered by a nonhuman hired killer; there are four suspects and the cops don't have any idea if it was insect man, tentacle man, man who can disassemble himself, or centipede man who did the deed.  All four have criminal records, and all four just received a large amount of money which could be the pay for killing the Arcturian.  For contrived reasons Leiber comes up with to add tension to this lame story, the cops have to accuse one of these freaks in 30 minutes or an interstellar incident will occur that may cause interstellar war, and if they accuse the wrong freak an interstellar incident will occur that may cause interstellar war.  Some stable federation you got there.

One cop guesses who the killer is by looking at the amounts of money each crook recently received and figuring out who paid it by comparing the amounts to that culture's numerology and number theory.  I find this pretty dubious.

This story has many of the hallmarks of the archetypal classic SF story, what with the galactic federation and crazy aliens and telepathy (a complication I didn't waste your time with until right now) and the hero solving the problem by logic and knowledge, but in its most boring form: a semi-jocular narrative with no emotion that consists of two guys talking.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

I don't know why isfdb categorizes "The Number of the Beast" as a Change War story.

"The Mind Spider" (1959)

This is a story about telepathy. The five members of the Horn family are all telepaths who can enter each other's minds to the point they can feel what the others feel, smell what they smell, taste what they taste, etc., even control each other's bodies.  Leiber plays up the incest fetish and homoerotic angles a little bit, having a brother and sister joke about the possibility of inhabiting each other's minds while they are with their lovers.  (SF writers think outside the box, and nothing is further outside the box than incest, which I guess is why it seems to come up so often in the writing of Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Tanith Lee, and our boy Fritz.) 

Every day the five family members, who live in different parts of the story's future Earth (which is ruled by a one-world democratic government and has achieved space travel, which is sort of incidental to the story) merge their minds telepathically to chat. But today a sixth mind joins them--an evil immortal alien who was imprisoned in Antarctica centuries ago by his enemies and tries to take over the Horns so he can revolutionize the Earth, raising an intelligent race of arthropods to lord it over us mammals.  (This story seems to owe a little to H. P. Lovecraft, a correspondent of Leiber's.)  Some Horns are taken over, and others have to work to free them and to keep the alien in its polar prison.

This story feels a little lopsided, with the setting of the scene describing the Horns' powers feeling long and the adventure portion when the Horns have to fight the alien feeling brief, even rushed.  If you count the pages, though, these two sections of the story are about the same length, so take my complaint with a grain of salt, all you literal people.

Acceptable.  

As with "The Number of the Beast" and "The Haunted Future," there seems no reason for isfdb to include "The Mind Spider" in its list of Change War stories.

"The Mind Spider" debuted in that Fritz Leiber special issue of Fantastic, and has reappeared in a 1969 reprint magazine and some 21st-century Leiber collections.     

**********

With only one bad story, and two very good ones ("The Oldest Soldier" and "Midnight in the Mirror World"), The Mind Spider and Other Stories has proven a worthwhile purchase.  More short stories from a Second Story Books purchase in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Fritz Leiber: "The Haunted Future," "Damnation Morning," and "The Oldest Soldier"

I recently went to Second Story Books' huge warehouse store in Rockville, MD, fabled in story and song, and as I had a gift certificate in hand I bought some stuff I might not have under ordinary circumstances.  Here's one example, an Ace paperback edition of Fritz Leiber's The Mind Spider and Other Stories published in 1976--I could easily read its six stories online or in magazines I own, but the great black monster cover by Walter Rane won me over.  I didn't realize until like 10 minutes ago that most of the stories in this book are from Leiber's Change War series, the first component of which I have not read.  Maybe the ideal course would be to read that first part (the novel The Big Time) before exploring these stories, but I'm saying "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" and today reading the first three stories in this collection, "The Haunted Future," "Damnation Morning," and "The Oldest Soldier."  Based on how it goes, we'll see if I read the rest for our next blogpost, go back to The Big Time, or abandon the whole Change War saga as not for me.

"The Haunted Future" (1959)

"The Haunted Future" debuted in a special Fritz Leiber issue of Fantastic under the title "Tranquility, or Else!"  "The Haunted Future" is set in one of those utopias where the government is all up in your business every second, for your own good, of course.  It is set in a suburb of "New Los Angeles" called "Civil Service Knolls"--gross!  Everybody in town behaves because they regularly receive hypnosis that prevents them from misbehaving--you are even hypnotized to walk random routes across your lawn so you won't wear a rut in the grass!

Our main character is Wisant, a Judistrator.  Wisant is the law.  Demonstrating how corrupt and inefficient this authoritarian government really is, Wisant's wife, Beth, was one of the people whose job it is to hypnotize kids, and years ago she went crazy and started implanting traps in the kids' heads, "posyhypnotic suggestions" that they commit shocking acts.  Beth today is in a nearby insane asylum; the asylum is full to bursting, as this ostensibly utopian society drives many people bonkers, a fact tax-eating government employees like Wisant keep from the public the best they can by faking the statistics they release.

The plot of the story, which is like 53 pages here in The Mind Spider and Other Stories, has multiple interwoven threads.  One thread concerns Wisant's meeting with representatives of a business which sells tchotchkes and doodads that help people express their individuality in this conformist society, like little items of apparel or little decorations that can help make you or your air car look a little different than everybody else's.  Wisant wants to curtail or suspend this firm's activities.  The most outspoken rep of the company, Dave Cruxon, a young man who likes monster movies, argues that creating a society which prioritizes safety, including psychological safety, over all other concerns not only tramples human freedom but causes mass psychosis.  (I know, ripped from today's headlines, right?)

"As long as they're tranquil and manageable, you don't care--it's even okay by you if you have to keep 'em in flip-factories and put the tranquility in with a needle.  Government by the three Big Cs of Commission, Committee and Conference!  There's a fourth C, the biggest, and that's the one you stand for--government by Censorship!"

Another thread of the story concerns Wisant's 17-year-old daughter, Gabby, whom Dave Cruxon is seeing.  The night before the big festival where Gabby is going to be crowned Princess of Tranquility (the ball is on the same day Cruxon delivers his anti-censorship speech to Wisant), Gabby, responding to a posthypnotic suggestion implanted by mom some time ago, tears off her clothes and viciously stabs a pillow right next to where Wisant is lying in bed; Gabby ends up in the insane asylum tout suite. 

A third thread concerns people in Civil Service Knolls having what appear to be hallucinations of a flying devilish face with glowing eyes.  Some of the characters think these incidents are further examples of the growing rate of mental illness in this tyrannical America, but in the second half of the story we realize that these poor souls are seeing Dave Cruxon, who is wearing a monster mask and a high-tech invisibility cloak and employing an anti-grav device. 

In the climax, Cruxon in his superhero get-up terrorizes those assembled for the festival just when Wisant is giving a speech, driving the already stressed-out Judistrator over the edge so that he ends up in the insane asylum.  Cruxon also takes refuge there in the booby hatch.  It is implied that Dave Cruxon and Gabby Wisant will become lovers and get married, and that the Wisants, reunited, will repair their psyches and their relationship; there is a strong suggestion that in this oppressive world the safest and happiest place is inside the asylum, where the government can't enforced its strictures on you.   

Besides the anti-censorship stuff we can also see in this story a sort of goof on California New-Age silliness (or whatever they would have called it in 1952), references to Shakespeare (Leiber comes from a theatrical family, as you know), and a hint of Leiber's interest in the sexuality of teenaged girls that is more explicit in stories like "The Mer She," "The Bait," "The Sadness of the Executioner" and "A Rite of Spring."       

I have mixed feeling about "The Haunted Future."  This story has lots of expository dialogue and many scenes that consist mainly of people yakking, and of course there is a lot of psychobabble.  But of course I like the story's anti-government, anti-censorship ideology, and I admire how it is structured, the way Leiber has all the different threads work together like interlocking gears.  So, is "The Haunted Future" just acceptable or actually good?  A borderline case.

"The Haunted Future" has been anthologized in German as well as in English by Gardner Dozois, and of course appears in Leiber collections.  I don't quite get why isfdb includes it in the Change War series--typo?     

"Damnation Morning" (1959)
         

As I read "Damnation Morning" I felt like I recognized it; maybe I read it as a kid, or maybe I just read about it, or somebody told me about it.  Anyway, this reads like an introduction to the Change War series.

Our narrator is a guy who has had a tough life that has featured  service with the British Army in North Africa during World War II,  multiple divorces and an alcohol problem.  He's in a crummy hotel room, suffering the DTs, when at the door appears a woman with a brand on her forehead of a thing like an asterisk with eight arms.  To make a long story short, she explains that two opposing secret armies of time travellers, the Spiders and Snakes, flit back and forth through time, fighting each other and changing history in ways that will accrue to their profit.  The narrator is about to commit suicide, but this woman, a Spider agent, can create a branch in his lifeline right before the suicide, creating another instance of him whom she will dissuade from killing himself and  gift him with time travelling powers if he agrees to serve in the Spider army.  The shock ending of the story is that at the same time she is creating a Spider-aligned version of the narrator a Snake agent is creating yet another branch off the narrator's lifeline so that the narrator will have an identical twin with an "S" on his forehead who will be fighting for the Snakes.

This "secret cabals of peeps with superpowers controlling the world behind the scenes" business reminds one a bit of van Vogt, but van Vogt's stories generally have a sense of wonder to them, and some of the secret cabal types are trying to improve humanity's lot or achieve some lofty goal, while Leiber's story feels gritty and sordid, with no sense that the Spiders or Snakes are anything but selfish jerks, and the ending strikes a note of dread.  

Acceptable.

"Damnation Morning" appeared first in Fantastic and has mostly resurfaced in Leiber collections but would be included in a 1966 reprint magazine and a 2013 Japanese anthology of, I guess, time travel stories translated from English.

"The Oldest Soldier" (1960)

   

Our narrator, a resident of Chicago, was an anti-war liberal in the 1930s, and when the United States was dragged into World War II he worked in a munitions factory.  But after the war was over he became fascinated by military history and men of valor and read tons of books about war, history books as well as fiction like C. S. Forster's Horatio Hornblower books.  Then he sought out veterans to talk to, and found a group of vets who sat around swapping war stories at a liquor store.  Among them was a guy called Max who told vivid stories of fighting in wars in the distant past and even in the far future, apparently putting on an act. 

Our narrator realizes that Max's stories are all too true when he spots a monster (like that on the cover of The Mind Spider and Other Stories) spying on them!  The narrator, who has long wanted to demonstrate courage, gets his opportunity to do so when he has to hold off the monster while Max goes through the process of travelling out of this time to escape the beast.  Instead of relating a hand-to-hand fight or a gun battle, Leiber comes up with clever and compelling psychological and psychic trials our narrator has to go through to save his friend; "The Oldest Soldier" is more of a horror story than an action story.

A good story with an interesting character and good ideas and images, well-written and well-paced.  Leiber also includes affectionate references to Robert Heinlein and Bill Shakespeare.  Thumbs up for "The Oldest Soldier;" horror fans might particularly like it. 

"The Oldest Soldier" debuted in F&SF and has been anthologized a few times, including by Dozois and by Darrell Schweitzer and George H. Scithers in a volume collecting SF stories set in bars and other drinking places.

**********

"The Oldest Soldier" is very successful, and "The Haunted Future" and "Damnation Morning" are good enough that I'll read the remaining three pieces from my copy of The Mind Spider and Other Stories and tell you what I thought of them in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.