The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Brian Ash

Tarbandu at the PorPorBooks blog recently has featured the cover of Brian Ash's Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction on his site, and blogged about the similar Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Robert Holdstock. Drake University has a copy of the Ash volume (sadly, the spine is quite broken and the pages threaten to achieve their liberty at any moment) and I spent some time looking through it.

After like 60 pages of timeline (called "Program"), listing major events in SF in from 1805 to 1976, the book is organized by themes (or as the book calls them, "Thematics") such as "Robots and Androids," "Mutants and Symbiotes," and "Warfare and Weaponry." This is the heart of the book, in which numerous stories and books are described. Then we get essays on topics like "Science Fiction as Literature," and "The Value of Science Fiction" in the "Deep Probes" section, and finally discussion of "Fandom and Media." Many of the sections of the book are written or introduced by recognizable SF authors and editors, including such important figures as Asimov, Anderson, and Pohl. This being a British book, British authors are well represented, including not only big names like Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard, but some I feel like I don't hear much about, such as Ken Bulmer and Edmund Cooper.

All 19 of the "Thematics" are introduced by "name" SF writers.  A. E. Van Vogt's contribution is characteristically bizarre; my man Van barely addresses the issue he was asked to talk about, espouses some of his weird theories, and actually calls out the people who produced the book he is writing for, saying "I observe that my current work is not appreciated by British critics of the genre; but it sells well...." Zing! Philip Jose Farmer writes about his religious beliefs, asserting that if we are not immortal, life has no meaning. Ouch! Ken Bulmer's contribution is all over the place; he decries technology as evil, complains that in SF "artefact" is usually spelled "artifact," and takes time out from his pessimism party to praise SF artists for their "honourable labour." The photo of Bulmer reminded me that I need to shave and get a haircut.

(I'll list all the Thematics and their introducers below the fold, as newspaper people say.  All you fashionistas will find Ken Bulmer's photo down there, too.  Get your clippers ready. )

I don't really like the design of The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.  The font is tiny and ugly and the pages feel crowded and cramped (every single page has a horizontal heading at the top of the page and most have a vertical heading on the outside margin.) There are many illustrations, mostly book covers and magazine illustrations, which of course is great, but I thought many of them mediocre.  I also don't understand why some particularly weak illustrations, like a panel from a Barbarella comic, are allowed to take up an entire page.  On the plus side, any illustration you haven't seen before has some kind of information value, and this book is full of illos I have never before encountered. There are many photos of author's faces, and, adding to the cramped feel of the book, many of them are cropped very close, the writer's chin and forehead beyond the borders of the image.

As with the illustrations, the text, even when I don't think the style is good, is full of interesting information about books, stories, and authors I have never heard of.  And the 19 Thematics intros provide some kind of insight into the character of writers with whom we may be familiar primarily through their fiction.  The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is definitely worth a look for classic SF fans, even if I don't grok some of its artistic and design decisions and I think some of the Thematics intros are wacky.     

The Battle of Forever by A. E. Van Vogt

So, I'm standing in Half Price Books, a sealed paperback copy of A. E. Van Vogt's The Battle of Forever in my hand, wracking my poor brain; is Battle of Forever a fixup of stories I already own, like so many of Van Vogt's later books? Or is this an original novel I have never seen before in my life, in a store or in a library, and so a necessary purchase? I'm finding that The Battle of Forever is hard to resist because on the cover, painted by the famous John Schoenherr, is my new hero, the rifle-toting avatar of the hopes and dreams of amphibious pachyderms everywhere, HippoMan!

I whipped out my battered iphone 4 and checked the ISFDB entry for Battle of Forever. I must not be the only one routinely baffled by Van Vogt's extensive bibliography, because some concientious SF fan had appended a special note to the page on Battle of Forever: "Note: Seems to not be a fix-up novel." Relieved, I was able to part with my $3.18 with confidence, and head home, looking forward to learning all the ins and outs of the saga of HippoMan and his sidekicks, CoyoteKid and Cheetahperson. Yesterday I unsealed the plastic and eagerly cracked open the book, published by Ace in 1971, wondering what adventures Van Vogt had in store for me.

It is thousands of years in the future, and mankind has evolved. People are about two feet long and have heads 14 inches across! People don’t eat food (they use photosynthesis) or walk (they have genetically engineered intelligent six foot tall mantis servants to move them around) and the very idea of sex or childbirth is disgusting to them. The human race, reduced in number to a thousand individuals, lives in a secluded sort of fortress, tended to by a legion of insect-derived humanoid servants.

For over 3000 years no human has bothered to see what is going on outside the fortress; humanity is now pacifistic and passive, feeling that life has no meaning and so there is not much point in doing anything.  As the book begins, Modyun, one of the more adventurous humans, agrees to undergo a four year treatment that will transform his tiny feeble body into the sort of body humans had long ago, so he can cross the barrier and explore the outside world, where live millions of the intelligent humanoid beasts that man bioengineered in the forgotten past.

Hippoman appears on page 10, a passenger in a car which Modyun hails. Also in the car are Jaguarman, Foxman, and Grizzly Bearman. Over the centuries the animal-people who live outside the barrier have forgotten all about humanity, and these four individuals are led to believe that Modyun is a species of ape they have never seen before. He tells them he just arrived from Africa, and they show him around the creature-man city, an automatic metropolis run by computers built by men millennia ago. At the same time that Modyun is learning about the city, he is learning what it is to have a body that can move and feel, growing accustomed to the tedious need to eat and use the toilet.

Mankind had left the various animal people in a state of equality, but it soon becomes apparent that the hyena men are now in charge.  Modyun discovers that space aliens have secretly taken over the Earth, and put the the hyena men on top to serve as their henchmen!  The peaceful animal people are being sent off into space in the millions to fight in the aliens' campaign to conquer the galaxy! These aliens ignored humanity as long as men stayed shut up in their fortress, but when Modyun starts poking around they blow up the human fortress with one blast.  Modyun is now the last man on Earth!

In a clever parallelism, we learn that thousands of years ago, before humans had "improved" animals through genetic engineering, the aliens had "improved" human beings, in a bid to turn them decadent, so they wouldn't resist conquest. Modyun, in his investigation of the aliens who have exterminated humanity and duped the animal people into being their foot soldiers, may have to bend the rules of his pacifistic philosophy a bit. This investigation takes Modyun into space, along with his four buddies, to various worlds where they face diverse challenges.

I thought Battle for Forever was fun, and easier to follow than many Van Vogt novels. I also thought this one had a little more human feeling, thanks to its portrayal of the first man in thousands of years to physically experience such emotions as fear, anger, and affection.  Modyun is also the first man in over 3000 years to attempt sexual intercourse. Some of Modyun's interactions with the aliens and with the animal people were quite amusing.

Battle for Forever still has much of the stuff we expect from Van Vogt, like mental powers, jarring plot twists and scene transitions, and poorly constructed sentences. I'm a supporter of Van Vogt's, but I have to admit that when it comes to the nuts and bolts of being a writer, like putting together sentences that are clear and/or beautiful, Van Vogt is not very good. I've come to accept this as part of the Van Vogt experience; not every SF writer can be a Tom Disch or a Gene Wolfe, after all.

HippoMan is not the leader of the animal people, or even his little band; in fact he is the youngest and the stupidest. But I still enjoyed The Battle of Forever.

Return of SF Hall of Fame 2A: Heinlein, Anderson, & Kornbluth

Cover of a later edition

Monday I decided to reread three of the novellas in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume 2A. 

Universe by Robert Heinlein

I can still remember reading Universe for the first time. I was standing on the corner of 34th Street and 8th Avenue, waiting for my wife (then just my girlfriend, as in those days I was righteously declaring that our love need not be ratified by any god or government.) We were going to eat at the Tick Tock Diner. (Google maps suggests that the Tick Tock Diner has managed to stay in business despite being bereft of my patronage for some years.) I had a battered paperback of Orphans of the Sky, a fixup of which Universe makes the first part. Not only was this paperback in parlous condition, but it had an inexplicably terrible cover (a photo of tracer bullets or street lights taken from a shaky camera by a Sidney Kramer), and a hilarious ad on the back for some kind of steamy bestseller (The King by Morton Cooper.) The back cover description of Orphans of the Sky sounds like it is for a different novel altogether.  I still own this bizarre artifact.

My copy of Orphans of the Sky

Anyway, I was immediately hooked by Universe. I can still remember thinking, "Wow, this is a good one!"  It must have been the first Heinlein I had read in years.  Rereading it in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame yesterday I again enjoyed it. It is a straightforward, old-fashioned SF tale about people on a generation ship who don't know they are on a space ship.  Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop (1958), which I read recently, seems to be a response to this story, and includes some minor details which felt like subtle references to this Heinlein work. 

Universe first appeared in 1941.  The main character, Hugh, is a member of a tribe of normal humans; smarter than average, he has the opportunity to learn to read and become a scientist.  The "scientists" of the tribe are more like priests than scientists, and think the explanations of things like gravity in their science books are in fact allegories for, for example, human sexual relationships.

Living elsewhere in the ship is a tribe of mutants.  (Any mutants born in Hugh's tribe are thrown down the "Converter" and recycled into electric power.)  The mutant tribe and Hugh's tribe are in a sort of low level war, and while out scouting Hugh gets captured by the mutants and enslaved.  Fortunately he becomes the servant of the mutants' leader, an intellectual who shows Hugh the control room of the ship and explains to Hugh that the ship is not in fact the extent of reality, but merely a vehicle traveling though a universe of astonishing and beautiful extent.  Hugh becomes a leader of the effort to make peace between the mutants and his own tribe and take control of the ship and bring it to a planet.

I like Heinlein's brisk economical style, and he does a good job describing the strange milieu of the ship, with the fight scenes, and with all the stuff describing the control room and the excitement of Hugh when he realizes the true nature of his world.  This is solid classic SF.

The characterization in Universe could have been a little better; several people show up in the end of the story that perhaps should have been described in more detail earlier.  Nowadays I suppose we would expect one of the three or four "good guys" to be a woman.  But maybe the story deserves a few points from the politically correct crowd because of Heinlein's advocacy of equality for mutants?  Universe is also one of the many SF stories to lampoon religion and show religious belief and the religious hierarchy standing in the way of a recognition of reality and of progress.    

Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson

I am sympathetic to Anderson's attitude and ideas, and often think he has good plots, but I also often find his characters and writing style to be weak.  Luckily, with 1957's Call Me Joe, which I reread today after some years, Anderson managed to marry a decent character and emotion story to his cool SF idea; this is one of the best of Anderson's many stories. 

To explore Jupiter's surface, where the pressure, temperature and atmosphere are so harsh space ships don't last long enough to make a return trip, scientists build a centaur-like creature in a lab.  They send the creature, Joe, to the Jovian surface, and from a satellite thousands of miles away a psychic, Edward Angsley, controls Joe.  Connected to various apparatus that magnify the psychic connection he has with Joe, Angsley sees, feels, and hears everything Joe does, and controls Joe's body as he does his own; essentially, when he is hooked up, he is Joe.

Angsley, once an active man, is a cripple confined to a robotic wheelchair, having lost most of his body below his chest in a terrible accident.  His time controlling Joe -- hunting, fighting, and taming native beasts and struggling to build tools and shelter on the unforgiving Jovian surface -- is for him a fulfilling life of freedom and purpose, a far better experience than sitting in his wheel chair, a head, two arms, and little else.  Eventually he migrates his entire consciousness from his wasted human body to the powerful Jovian body.  The denouement of the story indicates that Angsley is only the first of such mental transfers; other disabled people, as well as old people, will in the future be able to shift their minds from their weak bodies to strong ones and live longer, more exciting and fulfilling lives. 

Anderson does a good job with all the sciency stuff, the adventure stuff on Jupiter works, and perhaps most importantly Anderson succeeds in making Angsley a believable and sympathetic character.  Like Universe, Call Me Joe is solid classic SF, technophilac, optimistic, and telling the tale of a new and better world being discovered.  (Oh, if you are keeping track, there's no women characters in this one either.) 

(Cool illustrations by Kelly Freas for the first appearance of Call Me Joe are viewable at the SFFAudio site.)           

The Marching Morons by Cyril Kornbluth

I generally avoid Kornbluth's work.  I've spent most of my adult life in and around academia and bookstores, where everybody is some kind of left winger and wants to talk your ear off about how they hate SUVs and the taxpayers should pay their tuition, medical bills, and rent for them and how it would be so great to live in Canada where everybody is so civilized and sophisticated.  I've heard enough of that sort of thing to last me a lifetime. I always figure the fiction of Kornbluth, the member of the Futurians who had green teeth, will constitute an effort to convince me that I should be in the streets with a torch, setting fire to every Rolls Royce, Cadillac, ad agency, and Armed Services recruiting station I can find, and so it has been my practice to give it a wide berth.

Despite this, I read The Marching Morons years ago.  I then forgot the whole thing beyond the "time traveler finds future is inhabited by dolts" premise.  With the idea that I should probably be familiar with every story in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, today I reread The Marching Morons, which was first published in 1951.

The Marching Morons is a farcical satire meant to be funny.  Jokes include a man accidentally put in suspended animation in a 20th-century dental accident; his alive but inert body is used as a mascot at football games. The story is also "meta;" when awoken from suspended animation after hundreds of years the man expects the future to be like the science fiction stories he has read.  He is surprised to find that there are still "dollars" and not "credits," for example.

The future world population consists almost entirely of stupid people, 5 billion of them.  A small elite of people of normal intelligence works manically to keep everything running, and to fool the idiotic populace into being content.  For example, because the average person (IQ 45) is a horrible driver, cars are built which can only achieve 60 mph, but the cars are rigged so that the drivers believe they are going 150.  When the protagonist talks to one of the elite he is upbraided, told that the reason society is in such a mess is because middle-class people like him back in the day did not have as many children as the stupid "migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers" - The Marching Morons is a eugenicist tract!

It is also an attack on real estate agents or I guess businesspeople in general; the protagonist, besides being a racist, was a real estate agent in the 20th century and he immediately tries to bamboozle the future elites and make himself dictator of the world.  Kornbluth tells us he is directly emulating Hitler!  The 20th-century businessman helps the future elites trick the millions of morons into a death trap, and then the elites trick him in turn, sending him to his doom. 

What can you say about such an insane story?  How much of all this stuff did Kornbluth in 1951 believe?  And how much of it did the members of the SFWA, who chose it for their Hall of Fame in the late 1960s, believe?  Were the members of the SFWA a bunch of eugenicists who thought business people were lying Nazis?  Or did they just think all this stuff was hilarious?         

Even putting aside its eugenic and anti-business politics, I don't think the story is so hot.  It does include those in-jokes for members of the SF community, but I didn't think that they were particularly funny.  It includes several venerable SF devices and themes, like time travel, a small secret elite running the world, people (like the people in Heinlein's Universe) who have a radically inaccurate view of their world, and overpopulation.  But, being a big farce, the story has zero human feeling.  Also, I felt like Kornbluth was playing a trick on the reader, leading the reader to identify with the 20th-century man early on, and then suddenly revealing him to be a racist Nazi.  Is the reader then expected to identify with the future elite, even though they put the extermination program into effect?

I'm a little bewildered about the popularity of this story and its inclusion in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.  (Oh yeah, there's no women in this one, either, but since all the characters are either morons or mass murderers, I don't know if women will want to complain.)  

(The 1951 issue of Galaxy which includes The Marching Morons is available at the Internet Archive; the illustrations are unspectacular, but not bad.)

**********

Well, there is probably no need for me to reiterate it, but I think the Heinlein and Anderson stories are pretty good, and the Kornbluth story pretty weak.

I plan to read and reread more novellas from The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume 2A in the near future; I'm hoping the Korbluth entry is some kind of aberration.    

The Malacia Tapestry by Brian Aldiss

Back in the 1980s, as a teenager, I read Brian Aldiss's Malacia Tapestry and I loved it.  I enjoyed it so much that it is one of the few science fiction books I have retained over the decades.  While most of the SF paperbacks I read in my youth have been sold or are now in the custody of my brother back in New Jersey, my 1985 paperback copy of this 1976 novel has stayed in my possession over 25 years and traveled with me cross country, because I knew I would reread it someday.  This weekend this paperback's odyssey reached its conclusion when I reread it.

The novel is a smoothly paced first person narrative by Perian de Chirolo, an actor residing in his native town of Malacia, an Italian city state in an alternate universe. I had thought the time period was based on the Renaissance, maybe because the word "Renaissance" appears on the back cover, but some of the men in the novel seem to wear 18th century fashions (breeches and silk stockings, tricorn hats, powedered wigs or hair in a queue held by ribbons) and the illustrations in the book are reproductions of Tiepolos. Some of the capers in the book remind me of the Casanova I have read.  Of course, Aldiss isn't confining himself to one period; there are triremes and dinosaurs, after all, Byzantium is a going concern, and a man in the novel invents a camera and talks the Marxist jargon of exploitation, class enemies and revolution.

Malacia, though a vibrant and exciting center of commerce and culture, is a conservative place; characters say it has not changed in thousands of years, and Perian tells us that the city government's "immemorial duty is to protect Malacia from change." Progressives are burned at the stake or secretly murdered in a dungeon. Despite the efforts of the secretive city government and the predjudices of most of the populace, one of the main characters of the book, inventor and revolutionary Otto Bengsthon, an immigrant from a northern country (he was thrown out of his native town because of his radical ideas) is determined to bring change to Malacia. He not only is revolutionizing the world of art with his camera, but employs hydrogen balloons against the Turkish army which is laying siege to Malacia. (Some of his revolutionary comrades think that their cause will be helped by allowing the Turks to demolish the city, but Bengshton insists that first the "Turks must be defeated, then revolution comes from within.") Perian is in the middle of all these efforts, even though he himself has little interest in revolutionary politics; working with Bengshton allows him opportunities to impress Armida, the beautiful daughter of the inventor's patron, successful merchant Hoytola.

Perian goes to great lengths to woo Armida and impress Armida's father, and succeeds in winning Armida's love; she agrees to a secret betrothal. Despite his protestations of love for Armida, Perian is an incurable ladies man, and enjoys dalliances with many women behind Armida's back.  His promiscuity gets him in trouble with both the revolutionaries and the wealthy members of the middle classes.

Are we to admire Perian de Chirolo for his zest for life, his commitment to his art?  Or are we to deplore him for the way he treats women, how he betrays his friends, his indiference to the social problems which exercise Bengsthon?  Bengsthon, Armida, and others certainly lecture Perian often enough on his selfish and superficial attitude.  In part, the novel is the story of Perian's gaining knowledge and maturity, though Aldiss does not suggest that greater knowledge and maturity necessarily lead to greater happiness.  At the end of the novel the city council has taken care of their Turkish and Bengsthon problems, but it still seems possible that Bengsthon's followers are going to bathe the city in blood, and that Perian may actually join them.  Perhaps we can hope that Perian, who has had wide experiences in a broad cross section of Malacian society, can moderate the radicals and help lead Malacia through a period of peaceful reforms?     

Aldiss includes lots of entertaining elements in the novel: the characters discuss art; Aldiss describes their religion, which I guess you could call Manichean; and of course there is the theme of class struggle, social justice and change.  Even without the Turks or Bengsthon, it seems that Malacia's way of life is threatened; the dinosaurs are dying out and trade with Byzantium is drying up.  Perian's father's fortunes are in severe decline, and with his erudite monomania with historical trivia (a scholar, he spends countless hours researching what Philip and Alexander of Macedon ate) he seems like an examplar or synecdoche of Malacia as a society with a sterile or counterproductive obsession with the past.

I was surprised by how good the style and pacing were, how effortlessly and pleasantly the book flowed; I remember Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, and Primal Urge being ponderous and at times tedious. I even laughed out loud at some of the jokes in Malacia Tapestry.  There are lots of characters, but Aldiss makes sure each is different and interesting and memorable. 

(On the bad side, this edition has lots of typos.)

It might be worth considering whether Malacia Tapestry is really science fiction or rather should be categorized as fantasy.  The prophecies of the many priests and wizards in the novel seem uncannily accurate, though we learn that these prophets are susceptible to bribes and not above lying.  Most of the characters believe in spells and magic and wear amulets.  Perian has weird visions that reminded me somewhat of the allegorical visions the protagonist in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain has.  (Also as in Magic Mountain, we have a character whom competing theorists try to sway to their way of thinking about how the world should be.)  There is also the strange fact that Armida's hair is jet black when she is first introduced (page 35) but after Perian's most vivid vision and the dinosaur hunt in which he slays a towering therapod and "becomes a man," Armida's hair is described as "golden" (page 329.)  And then there are the satyrs (people who are half man and half goat) and the people who have wings growing out their backs and fly nude around the city.         

However we categorize it, Malacia Tapestry is a great, fun read.  I guess as a teenager I had pretty good taste!  Highly recommended.

Two 1948 SF stories by John D. MacDonald

Just last week I read Wine of the Dreamers, a 1950s science fiction novel by popular mystery novelist John D. MacDonald. I thought it had good points and, on balance, was worth reading, and so today I read two of MacDonald's SF short stories, both from 1948.  I found these stories in the 1985 edition of Isaac Asimov Presents The Golden Years of Science Fiction, 5th Series, edited by Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg.  This book includes stories from 1947 and 1948 that Asimov and Greenberg consider "the best" from those years.

I own a copy of this anthology and appreciate the insane cover art by Romas Kukalis.  Every time I look at this cover I try to visualize what I would see if I looked up in the sky while a monster bigger than the Earth was approaching, within 100,000 miles or whatever, and how different the monster would look based on time of day and the position of the sun and the moon.  

This anthology is also interesting because the voluble Isaac Asimov fills it with his opinions. He tries to psychoanalyze famous SF editor John Campbell Jr., he gloats over the victory of the communists in Vietnam, he brags that he was so bright as a child that he made people uneasy, he expresses his amazement that people would want to live in a small town instead of New York City, he lets you know who his favorite SF writer is (Arthur C. Clarke), he complains that the English language is sexist.  If you want insight into the opinions of one of the movers and shakers of the SF world, Isaac Asimov Presents The Golden Years of Science Fiction, 5th Series, can help you fill that need.

"Ring Around the Redhead"

This is a trifling but pleasant story, full of jokes that are not actually funny but are not offensively bad either.  Gore and violent death are important elements in the story, but MacDonald endeavors to maintain a light-hearted tone.  In part the story is a satire of small town life - except for the inventor, everyone in the town is some kind of gossip, drunk, murderer, adulterer, etc.  

An inventor gets his hands on an artifact from another dimension after a government atomic test temporarily opens a gate to some other world.  The artifact is a large ring, like a hula hoop, I guess, and while you can't see through it, you can reach through it into other worlds. Moving the position of the hoop changes which dimension you can access; the number of worlds that can be accessed is practically infinite.

By chance a beautiful redheaded girl comes through the hoop and is stranded on Earth.  By subterfuge a greedy neighbor steals the hoop; this guy uses the hoop to bring valuable jewels to Earth, but in the process causes trouble for an advanced alien civilization.  The aliens kill him, and the inventor gets blamed, and is put on trial.

Acceptable.  

"A Child is Crying"

This is a very short story that includes the "predict the future via math" element we see in Asimov's Foundation stories (the first of which appeared in 1942), the "I know when you are going to die" element we see in Heinlein's 1939 "Life-Line," and the "psychic kid who is the next stage of human evolution" element I just read in Sturgeon's 1952 Baby is Three.  It is also an anti-nuclear war story.

A child of astonishing intelligence is born.  By age seven he knows more about physics than the top physicists.  He is so smart that he can hypnotize people.  He is so smart he can predict the future by simply examining the present state of things.  But he is totally unemotional, totally lacking in empathy, a mere calculating machine.  He doesn't care when his parents sell him to the Pentagon.  He admits that he has forseen an enemy attack on the United States, but he feels no desire to warn the people or government of the time or place of the attack.

Pentagon staff figure out a way to drug the kid so he is compelled to tell them when the enemy attack will come.  The kid informs them that the attack will occur within two months and a cataclysmic war will result.  All the Pentagon staff people will be killed, but the kid himself, and other super geniuses like him, will survive to build a unified global society.

I'm not sure why Asimov and Greenberg included this story in their book; there is nothing very special about it, the characters, plot and style are just adequate, and its ideas are not deeply explored.  Maybe they liked the idea of a bunch of cold-hearted geniuses inheriting the Earth, the way the story could be interpreted as pessimistic (our diverse and passionate civilization is going to be annihilated and replaced by a soulless one-world government of inhuman calculators with no religion, no art, no love) or optimistic (our stupid corrupt civilization of competing money grubbers and militarists is going to give way to a rational society without fear, superstition, or war.)

Acceptable.

*********

John D. MacDonald is a competent writer and these two stories are alright, but not anything special.  Maybe they serve as good examples of the sort of topics and tone you would find in the SF magazines in 1948.        

Two Novellas from the Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Kuttner & Moore and Sturgeon

Title page of ed. I read

The last two posts on this here blog have been about Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.  When Jesse of the vast and impressive Speculiction blog pointed out the high marks Moore and Kuttner's novella Vintage Season received from science fiction readers, I decided to give it a read.  After a short walk I had my hands on a library copy of the 1973 hardcover edition of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 2 A.  Once I had it I decided to read the Theodore Sturgeon story also found therein, Baby is Three.

Vintage Season by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

Originally this story appeared in 1946, as by "Lawrence O'Donnell."  Based on my extensive research (10 seconds on wikipedia) it seems likely the story is mostly or entirely by Moore.  <UPDATE JUNE 2, 2019: In his 1980 essay "The Cutting Edge," Barry Malzberg says that "this story is now known to be one of the very few of their eighteen-year marriage and collaboration to have been written by Catherine Moore alone.">

Oliver Wilson owns a large old house in a large city, and rents the rooms.  Abruptly his rooms are in great demand from different groups of very elegant people, people dressed and coiffed exquisitely.  They claim to be foreigners, but will not say from what country.  Wilson slowly unravels the mystery of where these odd people are from, and what they are doing in his town, and why they are so eager to rent his rooms.

This is a very good story, and probably deserves to be in the "Hall of Fame."  This is a story about people, and Moore does a good job drawing the characters, making them all believable and interesting, and in exciting in the reader an emotional response to the characters.  The characters are actually sophisticated and nuanced, like real people, and as you get to know them better your feelings about them shift, and Moore does this in a way that seems natural, not manipulative.  I found the relationships between Wilson and some of the characters very affecting.

Moore also does a good job of building suspense; the reader gradually comes to realize something terrible is going to happen, and wonders exactly how horrible the tragedy is going to be, and exactly what the nature of the catastrophe will be.  Moore also succeeds in making the end pay off; I found the plot and climax quite satisfying.

An ed. with the sequel by Silverberg

As the reader quickly guesses, the people who want to rent the rooms are from a future society of great wealth, as evidenced by all the cool gadgets the future people have, and sophistication, suggested by how they, like connoisseurs, appreciate fine foods, fine music, and natural beauty.  But there is something a little unsettling about these people, hints that they are connoisseurs not only of beauty, but also of what Edmund Burke might have called "the sublime."  For example, they sometimes eat "candies" that are nauseating.  In the climax of the story we learn that the future tourists have come to Oliver's town to watch as the town is destroyed by a meteor and thousands of people are killed - Oliver's house provides a perfect view of the cataclysm.  Perhaps even more shocking, one of the future tourists is a genius artist who seeks inspiration from witnessing first hand human terror and death on a vast scale.

There are lots of interesting things going on in the story.  I liked how Moore's clues about the future had nothing to do with weapons, or power sources, or vehicles; instead she describes consumer goods like clothes, food, snacks and stimulants, and even hair products, the stuff of the everyday lives of everyday people, and forms of art and entertainment.

I also think the story is about how people from different societies, or different segments of the same society, can be so callous towards each other.  The future people have zero sympathy for the people of Oliver's town; even as the holocaust is going on around them they treat it as entertainment, or ignore it to focus on their own lives and relationships.  This is reminiscent of how we all respond to hearing about a plane crash or gas explosion or murder in the news; if we don't know any of the people involved, we just go about our lives, or we integrate the disaster into our lives as entertainment and avidly follow the latest developments.  Similarly, millions of us find reading books or watching movies or playing games about World War II, or the Napoleonic Wars, or the U. S. Civil War, to be a diverting hobby.  I suspect that the reason that Moore points out that there are servants living in the old house with Wilson and the future people, and then almost never mentions them, is to subtly remind us how easy it is for people to simply forget about people who are physically, temporally, or even socially distant.

A great piece of work, I strongly recommend Vintage Season. 

Baby is Three by Theodore Sturgeon

I've really enjoyed some of Sturgeon's work, like "Microcosmic God" and "The Other Celia," but found some of his other things just average, or actively irritating.  It is probably fair to say that I like Sturgeon less than most people who pay attention to "classic" SF.  In my mind, the typical Sturgeon story is a sort of hortatory polemic in which Sturgeon takes the role of apostle for greater brotherly love and human compassion and/or condemner of our individualistic society; I don't find that sort of thing very compelling.

(SFFaudio has the illustrations from the original 1952 magazine publication of Baby is Three on this webpage.  To me they seem pretty weak.)

Baby is Three is the first person narrative of Gerry, a boy who goes to see a psychoanalyst. The story is 50 pages long, and much time is taken up with the conversations between the therapist and Gerry. Sturgeon (apparently) takes psychoanalysis seriously, and there’s lots of stuff, like repressed memories, false memories, and hypnosis, that we’ve seen before, though maybe this material was fresh in 1952.

Gerry relates his strange life story. After living on the streets he became part of a family of kids with psychic powers. There’s the twin black girls who can teleport. There’s Janie, the little girl who has the kind of telekinesis that lets you make stuff disappear; she can clean the house by making the dust vanish, and can take the turds right out of your intestines so you don’t have to waste time going to the toilet. Then there is the baby, who benevolently rules the family from its basinet by communicating with Janie via a sort of baby sign language. The baby is an advocate for “bleshing,” which means everybody working together, the family being like a human body, with different people each being an essential part of the unified whole. The family survives by using their psychic powers to steal what they want from stores.

These kids live in a shack in the woods for three years and then move into the house of a wealthy spinster. The kids teach the spinster the folly of racism, and, when the spinster tries to send the baby to an institution because it appears to be unwell (it never grows) the kids physically assault her with their psychic powers until she reunites the baby with the other kids.

The climax of the story is when Gerry has a “breakthrough” during analysis and realizes that he and the kids represent the next stage of human evolution, that they are a single corporate entity. Gerry is the “head” (the baby is just a “computer” and was in charge temporarily while Gerry matured) the twins are the “hands,” and so forth. Gerry has the power to manipulate people’s minds, and makes the psychoanalyst forget all about him. Even though the kids are generally presented in a positive light, there is the hint that the kids and their (presumed) comrades around the world are going to take over and the rest of us may suffer.

Sturgeon is a skilled writer (the style and story structure are good) so this story is not painful, but corporate entities, psychoanalysis, and precocious kids aren’t really my thing. I’d grade this one “acceptable” or "marginally good," but it appears that the 1950s and 1960s SF community loved Baby is Three. It was expanded into the novel More Than Human, which Joachim Boaz (and the rest of the galaxy, if Wikipedia is any guide) considers a masterpiece, but which I feel no need to read.  

***********

Now that I've got The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 2 A in my custody I will probably read some more of the stories in it.  I should probably be familiar with all these SFWA-approved pieces if I'm going to be shooting my mouth off about classic SF. 

Well of the Worlds by Henry Kuttner

On Sunday I read two really good Henry Kuttner stories, which inspired me to do a little hunting for Kuttner things I had not read yet.  I was able to get an electronic version of the Prologue Books edition of Well of the Worlds through a university library with which I am associated.  The novel originally appeared in 1952 in Startling Stories; I can't find any info about the Prologue edition on their website, so I'll just have to trust that this is a good text.  There are several errors that I guess are scanning errors, like "black" for "back," "top" for "too," and quotation marks where they don't belong.

On the eighth level of a uranium mine in the northern wastes of Canada a passage to another world has opened, filling the mine with things the workers think are ghosts!  A beautiful girl from the other world, Klai, has come through the gateway, but she is afflicted with amnesia and remembers nothing about the other side.  A ruthless fat old man, Alper, has managed to contact an even more ruthless woman through the gate - this alien woman, Nethe, gives him energy which will prolong his life and health, but in return she wants him to murder Klai!  All these shenanigans have lowered uranium production, so the government sends manly man Sawyer to investigate. 

The plot is pretty convoluted.  Nethe is one of the aristocrats (the Isier) from the alien world, and Klai is one of the slaves (the Khom.)  The Isier are virtually indestructible because they can tap the energy from other dimensions, but Nethe has tampered with the Well through which they get such energy in an effort to overthrow the current monarch and take her place.  The Isier are now losing their invulnerability, so the Khom are going to try to rise up; at the same time an army of reptile people who live on neighboring flying islands are launching an invasion of the fortified city where the Isier and Khom live.  Sawyer and Alper, who hate each other and keep trying to outwit or kill each other, end up in the alien city in the middle of all these various conflicts, taking sides and trying to survive.  A lot of the story involves high tech devices which the characters steal from each other and use to dominate each other; we get page after page of "You'll never get the thing if you kill me!" and "Give me the thing or I'll kill you!" negotiations.  

It is noteworthy that Kuttner includes many references to "high" culture; Etruscan sculpture, "Laocoon," El Greco, a character from War and Peace.  Does this show that early 1950s SF fans were very literate, or that Kuttner hoped to inspire them to be so?  There's also lots of mumbo jumbo about atoms, electrons, isotopes, electricity, etc.  I guess a lot of pre-1960 SF fans were really into the nuts and bolts of science and engineering.  This novel gave me the opportunity to feel like a smarty pants ("Of course I am familiar with classical sculpture") and like an ignoramus ("A 'cathode' is a part of a TV, right?") 

In "Graveyard Rats" and "Home is the Hunter" the pace was quick, the writing economical, the images clear and vivid.  In Well of the Worlds everything seems to happen slowly, laboriously, and the images are vague and not very compelling.  The action scenes don't move, and the exotic images (of flying islands and travel between dimensions and the like) are hard to visualize.  There is also lots of dialogue, which drags things down.  The characters aren't very interesting, either; their motivations are thin, and there isn't much reason to care who succeeds or fails, lives or dies.  The obsessive status-seeker in "Home is the Hunter" and even the greedy and terrified caretaker in "Graveyard Rats" are more "real" psychologically than the characters in this story, which is like ten times as long.

I'm afraid I cannot recommend Well of the Worlds; the plot is average and the execution is poor.  It might, however, be a valuable read for those interested in attitudes about gender, class, and science and technology in 1950s SF, with its multitude of gadgets and science lectures, its female ruler battling a would-be female usurper, and its society of invincible aristocrats and throngs of slaves.