Three British Horror Stories: Coppard, Lumley, and Campbell

This weekend I was able to drag myself away from Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows long enough to read three horror stories; I didn't specifically set out to read British stories, but after I had read them that was the only thing I could think of that tied them together.

Utamaro print mentioned in "Arabesque"

"Arabesque: The Mouse" by A. E. Coppard (1920)

Science fiction writer Michael Bishop, in the notes section at the back of his collection Brighten to Incandescence, praises "Arabesque: The Mouse," a story by A. E. Coppard. I'd never even heard of Coppard, but a book which includes "Arabesque: The Mouse" is available for free at the Internet Archive, so I decided to check it out.

This story is full of stirring, even shocking images.  A middle-aged man sits alone in an apartment with a Russian novel; an Utamaro print showing a woman nursing a child hangs on the wall.  The man observes a mouse, and then reminisces about his unhappy life.  He recalls coming home as a child to find his mother squeezing her breasts and spraying her milk into the fireplace.  This is one of his last memories of his mother, because the next day she was run over by a horse drawn cart.  The cart crushed her hands, so a surgeon amputated her hands; despite (or because) of this treatment, she died that night.  More unhappy reminiscences and scenes follow.

As the title suggests, this is not a plot-driven story, but a sort of grotesque decoration on the themes of women's breasts, heart beats, and severed hands, and the power of memory to weigh us down, misguide us and make us unhappy.  A strange and effective story.

"Snarker's Son" by Brian Lumley (1980)

S. T. Joshi, the literary scholar and atheist activist who has done so much that fans of weird fiction and literate horror are thankful for, seems to really have it in for Brian Lumley.  I admire Joshi, but I have enjoyed quite a bit (not all) of the Brian Lumley I have read.  Lumley doesn't have a lot of literary pretensions, and doesn't take the philosophical underpinnings of  H. P. Lovecraft's work very seriously.  Often Lumley just uses Lovecraftian images or ideas as furniture or settings for adventure stories.  When those adventure stories are good, they are fun.  So, when I had a chance to buy Screaming Science Fiction for ten cents, I did so.  To my surprise this was a signed edition.

The first story in Screaming Science Fiction is the quite short “Snarker’s Son.” A lost little boy is helped in finding his father by a London police officer. The boy is from an alternate universe (where the British capitol is “Mondon, Eenland”) and in reuniting the child with his father the policeman is transported to this strange world. Confused, the police officer fails to follow the natives' curious advice and gets eaten by a monster.

This is a pedestrian story; there is just not much to it, and nothing new. How the boy and then the bobby travel between universes is not explained, and neither is it explained why in Mondon the lights are shut off at 10:30 PM and everyone hides inside, nor is it explained why or how the underground train tunnels are now home to giant monsters. The alternate universe city with a stringent black out reminds me of the alternate universe New York in Frederic Brown’s What Mad Universe (1949), and the scene with the monster at the end seems to have been inspired by the appearance of the monster in the penultimate chapter of H. P. Lovecraft’s 1936 “At the Mountains of Madness.” (The narrator of the novella and his comrade repeatedly compare the tubular protoplasmic monster that emerges at speed from a cave tunnel to a subway train.)

“Snarker’s Son” is an inoffensive but forgettable trifle.  

"Getting it Wrong" by Ramsey Campbell (2011)

I read this in A Book of Horrors, edited by the indefatigable Stephen Jones, author and editor of over 120 books.  In the intro to the anthology, Jones complains about the current trend of "horror" stories that are really romance novels or detective stories starring vampires, werewolves and zombies.  A Book of Horrors aims to appeal to people who want stories that are truly scary or disturbing.

I have an ambivalent attitude towards Ramsey Campbell; I have liked a few of his stories, but have found many to be uninspiring.  I haven't abandoned hope, though, of becoming a Campbell fan, and with fingers crossed started "Getting it Wrong."

A murderous psycho has kidnapped a woman who works at a movie theater.  He asks her film trivia, and if she gets a question wrong, he tortures her!  Fortunately, the psycho allows his victim to telephone a friend for help answering the questions.  Unfortunately, the colleague she calls thinks it is all a joke and doesn't try to give the correct answers!      

This story is reasonably well-written, and Campbell adds layers of alienation and frustration to it - the colleague is a film nerd with no friends who has been frustrated in his career as well as his social life.  The problem with the story is that it is clear what is going on after like three pages, but the story is 15 pages long, so there aren't really any surprises or shocks for the last 80% of the story.  People who like old films (James Dean, Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, The Three Stooges) may enjoy all the movie references.

"Getting it Wrong" is a little better than the Lumley, but not much.

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Of the three stories, only Coppard's "Arabesque: The Mouse" is really scary or disturbing.  Michael Bishop has not steered me wrong.  The Lumley and Campbell are competent but uninspired; both men have done better work.   

To The Stars by L. Ron Hubbard

Barry Malzberg, one-of-a-kind SF author and respected SF historian, in a video which I highly recommend available at YouTube, talks about his favorite fifteen issues of Astounding.  One of these is the February 1950 issue, which contained the first part of what Malzberg considers L. Ron Hubbard's best novel-length work, To The Stars.  I got a hold of a 2004 hardcover edition of the novel, and read it yesterday; it's pretty short, like 200 pages in this edition but with large print and wide margins. 

To The Stars is about the Einsteinian time dilation effect we see in numerous science fiction books, like Heinlein's 1956 Time for the Stars and Haldeman's 1975 Forever War.  If you fly in a space ship at a large fraction of the speed of light, then return to Earth, you will find that while maybe only a year or two has passed for you, on Earth much more time has passed, and maybe your little nephew is now twice your age or your whole society has gone through a political or cultural revolution and you don't fit in.  

At the start of To The Stars it is thousands of years in our future, and the solar system has a classbound society.  The rich nobility live in skyscrapers and the masses of the poor lack social services and swarm down on the surface.  Alan Corday is a young gentleman, highly educated, but his father has fallen into bankruptcy and our hero has no money to marry his girl or start his engineering business.  He goes to the slums around the New Chicago spaceport, hoping to get passage to Mars, where he thinks he can get a job with the duke who runs Mars.  But he gets shanghaied and impressed into the crew of a ship going to Alpha Centauri and Betelgeuse, one of the long haul ships subject to the Einsteinian time dilation effect.  By the time he gets back his girl is going to be an old hag!  Only desperate people with nothing to hold them on Earth crew these long haul spaceships, and now upper class Corday is trapped on a ship with a bunch of these lower class clods!

The style of To The Stars is a little weak, but I like the plot, and the characters are simple but interesting.  Hubbard portrays the ways the various members of the starship's crew deal with the stress of their bizarre lifestyle, which has them again and again landing on planets they left just a few months or years ago to find that decades or centuries of political, social, and technological change have taken place.  They are men and women without countries, who often can't even talk to the natives when they return to their own home planets because pronunciation, spelling and grammar have changed, not to mention social and political attitudes.  (When poor Corday gets back to Earth 60 years have passed and a revolution has occurred; everyone from his social class has been massacred and people are afraid to be seen with Corday because he is wearing old-fashioned clothes that they recognize from school text books as characteristic of the enemy class.)  Their country is the ship, but does life have meaning or value when you live in a country of a few hundred people suffering stress disorders and regularly face terrible dangers?

This book is much better than Hubbard's postapocalyptic The Final Blackout; To The Stars is a traditional SF story of guys flying around in a spaceship, solving problems with ingenuity and ray guns, trying to figure out their place in the universe.  In some ways it reminds me of those early Heinlein novels in which a young man matures and learns responsibility while having adventures; I guess I'm thinking of Starman Jones and Citizen of the Galaxy, because so much of them takes place on space ships.

Solidly entertaining: fans of classic rocket ship and ray gun adventures should check it out. 

"Born with the Dead" by Robert Silverberg

Maybe ten years ago I first read "Born with the Dead;" I accessed the 1974 hardcover collection bearing the same title as the story through inter-library loan at the university where I was working.  I remember being disappointed or underwhelmed by the award-winning novella; today I read it again, this time in the 2012 collection The Best of Robert Silverberg: Stories of Six Decades.

This edition includes a good intro in which Silverberg talks about the circumstances in his life when he wrote "Born with the Dead," and how the story came about and how it was received.  I always enjoy the writing Silverberg has done about his life and career, and he has done a lot of such writing in the collections published since the turn of the century.

"Born with the Dead" first appeared in the April 1974 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a special issue devoted to Silverberg.  It depicts the near future, the 1990s, when scientists are able to recreate extinct creatures like the dodo, passenger pigeon, and giant ground sloth, and "rekindle" people who have died.  The rekindled dead people abandon all connection with the people they knew during their lives and congregate in enclosed "Cold Towns" that the living (known as "the warm") are forbidden to enter.  The story, about 65 pages in this edition, follows Jorge Klein, an Argentine-born American college professor whose wife, Sybille, a fellow academic, has died and been rekindled.  As a couple they were inseparable, sharing the same interests and spending all their time together, and Klein is unable to deal with their separation, the idea that Sybille no longer wants to see him.  Detective-style he figures out which Cold Town she is in, and then Richard-Burton-style he tries to sneak in to see her, disguised as a dead person.  (Silverberg invites the reader to make the Burton connection, mentioning Burton early in the story during a sequence in Zanzibar.)  Klein is defeated, even humiliated, repeatedly; his former wife wants nothing to do with him, she and her new friends are irritated and annoyed by him.  The resolution of Klein and Sybille's problem comes with Klein's own death and rekindling; now that he is able to once again be a part of Sybille's existence, he finds he has no interest in doing so and they part ways, their love more dead than they are. 

Silverberg exposes the reader of "Born with the Dead" to some of his vast store of reading and learning.  The story has nine little chapters, and each has a sizable epigraph; two are from T. S. Eliot, one is from Thomas Pynchon, another is from Joan Didion.  (My favorite consists of excerpts from a beginner's guide to Swahili, which reads like a kind of window onto a society very human but very different from the society I have always inhabited: "Quarreling brings trouble.  These days the lions roar a great deal.  Joy follows grief.  It is not good to beat children much.")  Sybille and her new dead friends travel around the world, exploring Indian burial grounds in Ohio, going on an African safari (hunting the aforementioned recreated extinct animals on a preserve), and visiting Zanzibar.  Klein has a friend who is a Parsee (am I supposed to spell it "Parsi" nowadays?)  So Silverberg has a chance to describe to us at length Native American and Zaroastrian burial rites and extinct mammals and birds.  All this stuff is interesting, but, in the same way I wondered about the technical information on construction equipment in Theodore Sturgeon's "Killdozer," I have to wonder how much of Silverberg's paleontology and anthropology actually serves his story here.

The rekindled dead in the story aren't that much different from living people; they eat and use the toilet, they drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes, they perspire.  Silverberg includes numerous details that suggest that the differences between the living and the revived dead are no greater than the differences between the world's various ethnic and religious groups.  For example, Klein's Parsee friend never tells Klein his wife's name, even though the three eat dinner and have long conversations together, and a black African official comments that white people's skin looks artificial to him and that he has trouble discerning the gender of European names.

When Klein seeks advice from a renegade dead person on how to infiltrate the Cold Town where Sybille is residing (the one near Salt Lake City), the dead man warns, "'Ten minutes inside the Cold Town, they'll have your number.'"  Klein asks, "'They'll have my what?'" and the dead man responds "'Jesus, don't you even speak English?  Jorge, that's a foreign name...Where are you from?'"  As a Jew, an Hispanic and an immigrant, Klein in some ways is a member of an alien community living within the United States, just as the dead are.  Klein, who has lived in the United States over 30 years, is still identified by some as a "foreigner," a parallel to the way, earlier in the story, a child points at the living dead Sybille and, seeing her staring eyes, asks his father what is wrong with her, why does she look so weird?

As much as "Born With the Dead" is about speculations of a future in which science has conquered death, and a tragedy about the death of the love that two people once shared, I think it is about what today we call "diversity" and "multiculturalism."  About how difficult it can be for people from different cultures to understand each other, how in multicultural countries like the United States one finds ghettos and enclaves and neighborhoods and even entire towns (like Mormon Salt Lake City) with distinctive cultures or subcultures that may or may not be embraced by the wider culture, and may or may not welcome outsiders.  In keeping with the tragic nature of the story, Silverberg focuses on the alienation and conflicts that result from contact between cultures instead of the virtues to be found within different communities or the benefits of interaction between cultures.

"Born with the Dead" is quite good, a multi-faceted story that I recommend.  I think I was probably underwhelmed by it when I first read it in the 2000s because I was hoping it would be a utopia about how awesome it would be, or a horror story about how dreadful it would be, if the dead were commonly revived and walking among us.  There is some of that, but it is subtle.  This time around I appreciated the cultural stuff more, though I do think some of it could have been trimmed, maybe to make room for more tragic love story stuff.

Two stories by Theodore Sturgeon: "Occam's Scalpel" and "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"

Today I read two stories by Theodore Sturgeon of "Killdozer" fame, the shortish "Occam's Scalpel" (14 pages) and the longish "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" (44 pages.)  I'm inclined to think Sturgeon is overrated, but his writing style is good and he has a large body of work, much of which I have not yet read, and so I still have hopes of encountering something I will enjoy as much as my favorite Sturgeon stories.

"Occam's Scalpel" (1971)

I don't think of Sturgeon as a hard SF writer, but I read this story in David Hartwell and Kathyrn Cramer's The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard Science Fiction.  In the introduction to the story, Hartwell and/or Cramer admit that many members of the SF community wouldn't consider "Occam's Scalpel" a hard SF tale, or even SF at all.  We are also told that Sturgeon was regarded by his peers with "something akin to worship," that he was considered "the finest literary craftsman of his day in the genre," and that no writer in SF "has yet produced a body of short fiction superior to Sturgeon's."  It is this sort of talk that I have in mind when I suggest Sturgeon is overrated.

NB: Ted's story does not include an elf riding a dragon

Like the Hugo-winning "Slow Sculpture," "Occam's Scalpel" is about a genius inventor who lacks social skills and who is abused by society.  He starts successful businesses but his associates steal him blind and destroy his firms.  He has the bad luck to have his first wife leave him, his second wife die in a car crash, and then to be wounded by a stray round during a bank robbery, leading to a five month hospital stay.  Have all these disasters turned the inventor from a paragon of decency (he was inventing stuff like a way to preserve organic baby food and a plastic that can be burned without polluting) into something worse?  Let's hope not, because as the story opens he is about to become the head of a huge conglomerate, rendering him the most powerful man on Earth!  (I always think the most powerful man in the world is some politician, but in fiction the most powerful man in the world is often some business guy.)

One of the themes of Sturgeon's work is the importance of brotherly love and the tragic lack of intimacy between people in our world (in The Cosmic Rape he seems to be applauding an alien invasion of Earth that leads to all human beings joining a collective consciousness.)  This theme manifests itself in "Occam's Scalpel" in its frame; much of the tale of the genius inventor is told by a man to his brother during an affectionate reunion.  Then the brothers work together to trick the genius inventor into using his skills and power to clean up the environment.  Like "Slow Sculpture" this story is about how it would be great if intellectual elites would manipulate the rest of us because we are all too stupid and greedy to do the right thing.

This story is better than "Slow Sculpture" in areas like tone, style, and character, and it has some surprises, so I'd give it a marginal or moderate thumbs up.

Back cover of DV 35th Anniversary ed - sorry Ted!

"If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" (1967)

I read this one in the 35th Anniversary Edition of Dangerous Visions.  In democratic fashion, the original edition of Dangerous Visions, with the cover by the Dillons, listed all 33 authors in the same size type.  The 35th anniversary edition instead lists only 13 "luminaries," and Sturgeon is not among them.  Surely Sturgeon is a bigger draw than Damon Knight!  Oh, well.

Editor Harlan Ellison's intro to "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" is about how Sturgeon once wrote Ellison a letter in which he [Sturgeon] tells him [Ellison] that he [Ellison] is one of the few good people in the world.  Adorable.

The story takes place centuries in the future, when the Earth has long been destroyed by Sol going nova and humankind has colonized hundreds of planets.  Travel between these planets is a breeze, but there is one planet the powers-that-be are trying to keep people away from, Vexvelt.  And it is not just the elites, even the common people who encounter them detest the Vexveltians.  Our hero, through detective work, persistence, bravery and luck, makes his way to Vexvelt and befriends the people there.  These people are all super strong, beautiful, run around naked, and are eager to have sex with strangers.  Their planet is a paradise, their society a utopia.  (As in "Slow Sculpture," a big deal is made out of the fact that they can cure cancer, but the rest of humanity is resistant to learning their methods.)

So, why is it hard to get to Vexvelt?  Why isn't the rest of humanity eager to buy their superior products at lower prices, eager to embrace their cancer cure?  Because Vexvelt is the planet of incest!  The Vexveltians are so healthy and rich because they are the only sane people in the galaxy; the incest taboo has made the rest of humanity insane and held them back.  The Vexveltians (and perhaps Sturgeon himself) claim that incest isn't really bad or unhealthy, and that the incest taboo is the cause of all the wars, revolutions, and various unhappinesses the human race has inflicted on itself and the environment for millennia.  Sturgeon doesn't just nibble at the edges of the issue or hint at it obliquely, he goes all the way with this unconventional (to say the least!) line of thought.

In some ways "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" reminded me of those Heinlein novels in which there is an adventure but Heinlein is largely trying to lay his (liberal?  libertarian?) social ideas on us.  (Heinlein, I recall, also seemed to think the incest taboo silly.)

"If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" is well-written, and it is certainly "dangerous," and while it is didactic and even sententious, the pro-incest speech only takes up a few pages, so it isn't burdensome.  Part of the story's appeal is its unusual subject matter and point of view; we've all heard environmentalist rhetoric, feminist rhetoric, Marxist chicanery, a thousand times, but how many times have we heard someone arguing in favor of incest, or blaming the incest taboo for all our social and political problems?  This material is still challenging, and isn't one reason we read SF to get exposed to new, different, crazy, wild, ideas?  Partly because it is so "out there," this is one of the better stories by Sturgeon, and I recommend it.

Sturgeon's Afterword to "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" is also worth reading, shedding a little light on Sturgeon's life, his work process, and on the construction of Dangerous Visions itself; it is suggested that Ellison was "bitterly disappointed" with some of the submissions he received.  Presumably he wasn't disappointed in Sturgeon's story, which is both good and "dangerous."

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I was more impressed with these two stories than I was with "Killdozer" and especially "Slow Sculpture," so today Sturgeon's stock is a little higher in my book, which is a good feeling; I open the books I write about on this here blog with the hope of liking them, not execrating them. 

Hard Science Fiction Flashback: Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity and Gregory Benford's In the Ocean of Night

My copy looked like this.  I sold it.

There's a fun review of Hal Clement's 1953 Hard SF classic Mission of Gravity at the science fiction and fantasy book review blog From Couch to Moon.  Check it out!

I read Mission of Gravity in 2007, and while I can't disagree with any of the criticisms the reviewer at From Couch to Moon levels at the book, I think I enjoyed it more than she did.   On August 30 of 2007 I posted the following review (in which I fall into the its or it's trap) at amazon.com:

I read a 1950s hard cover of this Hal Clement novel, a sort of hard SF archetype well worth reading.

"Mission of Gravity" is suffused with what some might call a naive optimism about science and technology-- its like a love letter to physics and mechanical engineering. Lacking any literary pretensions, it is a straightforward account of how explorers deal with a series of technical challenges on a planet with a very unusual environment. Clement's fascination with science is infectious, and the book charmingly succeeds in accomplishing exactly what it set out to do; unlike some later hard SF novels which get loaded down with incompetent character development or boring philosophical digressions, Clement keeps his book lean and focused, and never tries to do something he isn't good at. A classic.

Someone who liked Mission of Gravity much more than I did is Thomas Disch.  I have been reading bits and pieces of Disch's 1998 book Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of over the last few weeks.  Much to my surprise, in the middle of this book, a book which seems to have been devised to offend every possible type of SF fan, I find Disch praising Mission of Gravity to the skies.  "When I first read Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, which ran as an Astounding serial in 1953, I thought it the best account of alien life on another planet that I'd ever read.  Forty-three years later my opinion has not changed."  Wow! Disch is full of surprises.       

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I think mine looked like this.  Also sold.

Hal Clement set out to write a SF book about science, and did just that, and I praised him for it.  I wrote my positive review of Mission of Gravity still smarting from my encounter with Gregory Benford's 1977 In the Ocean of Night.  I had read In the Ocean of Night in February of 2007, and in my opinion Benford's effort to include a lot of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll in his hard SF tale was a total disaster.  I bitterly assaulted the book on February 18, 2007, on amazon.com thusly:

Entombed in this 420 page novel is a decent hard sf short story about Earth's first contact with robotic aliens. Unfortunately, Benford takes on the ambitious task of marrying his traditional space alien story with a literary story about human relationships and the meaning of life, a worthy project he is not equipped to bring to a successful conclusion. So, the interesting alien encounter plot is buried under hundreds of pages of tedious domestic drama (the main character, a British-born astronaut, has a menage a trois marriage, and one of the women is terminally ill) and political infighting (the astronaut is a Bob Dylan- and John Lennon-loving rebel who refuses to play the dishonest games of the warmongering bureaucrats and religious fanatics in the U.S. government.) Benford gets an "A" for effort as he unleashes literary allusions, unconventional prose techniques, and scads of metaphors and similies, and piles on chapter after chapter about the sex lives, religious beliefs, cocktail parties, drug use, day trips to the beach and vacations of the astronaut and his circle, but the characters are uninteresting and the only parts of the book that really work are those two or three dozen pages in which a character is in the cockpit of a space ship or Lunar craft. Too bad.

Gregory Benford was, from a literary point of view, more ambitious than Clement, but it seemed to me all the sex and other soap opera stuff just got in the way, and I was disappointed.

(For those scoring at home, my hostile review of Benford has netted 26 helpful votes out of 31 total votes, while my kind review of the Clement got 4 "helpfuls" out of 6 votes.)

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It was fun to think about these books again - thanks to From Couch to Moon for inspiring this little space trip down memory lane.

Three stories by Larry Niven: "Inconstant Moon," "The Hole Man," and "The Jigsaw Man"

The copy of Hugo Winners Volume 3 I bought for 10 cents at a public library book sale includes two stories by Larry Niven.  This week I read those two Hugo-winning stories and a third story, "The Jigsaw Man," which first appeared in Harlan Ellison's famous anthology, Dangerous Visions.

"Inconstant Moon" (1971)

In his introduction to "Inconstant Moon" Isaac Asimov talks about Niven's facial hair, and his own facial hair, as well as referring to Niven's famous speculations about Kal-El of Krypton's sex life.  Because Hugo winners are chosen by a vote of science fiction readers, and not Asimov himself, Asimov says he is not comfortable talking about the actual stories.  One has to assume he doesn't like some of the Hugo-winning stories; for example, it seems possible that Asimov would dismiss "Ill Met in Lankhmar," a Hugo Winner in 1971, as a story about criminals sword-fighting in a fairy land.  (That's not me talking; I love Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser.) 

"Inconstant Moon" is set in the "present day" and on its first page the protagonist, a science writer living in California, puts Johnny Carson's Tonight Show on the TV.  (I like Johnny Carson, and I like a lot of the comics of that older generation, like Jack Benny, Bob Hope, George Burns, Danny Thomas, etc.  Even when they are not particularly funny, they all seem likable and mellow.  The comedians of my lifetime all seem to be bitter, angry, edgy, etc., so even when they are funny they are not endearing and watching them is not relaxing.)

The science writer notices that the moon is especially bright, brighter than he has ever seen.  When the moon continues to get brighter, he realizes that there must be some kind of solar catastrophe taking place; people on the other side of the Earth are no doubt being killed in the millions, and Americans will soon suffer the same fate.  He calls up a girlfriend, a computer programmer and astronomy buff, and they have to decide how to spend their last night on the Earth they have known all their lives.

This is a good story, and it is easy to see why it won the Hugo.  It is full of science and massages the sense of superiority of the science nerds who make up a sizable proportion of the SF crowd (most people in the story have no idea that the bright moon presages a holocaust, but the writer and programmer do and thus have several hours to prepare that the average Californian, due to his ignorance, lacks.)

People also love these cataclysmic stories and love being invited to place themselves in the story and wonder "how would I react to the end of the world as we know it?"  (Some of the earliest SF stories, like Wells' War of the Worlds and Shiel's The Purple Cloud, are about cataclysms and invite people to consider how they would act in like circumstances.  I haven't read it, but apparently Mary Shelly's 1826 The Last Man is also about life after an apocalypse.  It seems that the TV is full of post-apocalyptic programs; whenever my wife turns on the TV nowadays I see grey people in ragged grey clothes surrounded by grey rubble arguing or fighting.)

"The Hole Man" (1973)

Asimov in his introduction to this one says that "hard science fiction" is the kind of SF he likes best, and laments that it is mostly old timers like himself, Arthur C. Clarke, and Hal Clement who write it.  Asimov's definition of Hard SF is an SF story about science which includes a description of some scientific point.  He expresses relief that a young writer like Niven is continuing the Hard SF tradition.

"The Hole Man" is about astronauts discovering on Mars the abandoned base of alien astronauts.  The alien base includes a large machine, one of the components of which is a microscopic black hole.  (Our science lecture is on black holes today, class.)

Two of the astronauts don't get along, a genius physicist, Lear, who is absent-minded and out of shape, and the commander of the mission, Childney, an athletic type who meticulously follows the rules and tries to keep everything organized and efficient.  Childney is always poking fun at Lear's ideas, and punishes Lear when Lear's negligence almost leads to his own death.  Lear figures out how to murder Childney with the black hole and get away with it.

Like "Inconstant Moon" this is a good story which flatters the science nerd cadre within the SF community - it's a wish fulfillment fantasy in which the nerd kills the jock who laughed at him and is able to escape punishment because nobody is smart enough to convict him.  Also like "Inconstant Moon," "The Hole Man" includes some serious world shattering - not only is the discovery of the alien equipment and bodies going to shatter mankind's view of the universe (that's good world shattering), but the microscopic black hole is very likely to devour all of Mars within a few years (not so good.)  The fact that the nerd has not only killed the jock but committed a crime against science (even if you don't care about Mars the planet, the alien base and many of its valuable artifacts are going to get destroyed) increases the moral ambiguity of the story.  The typical SF reader is much more like Lear than Childney, and it is clever of Niven to sort of dare us to stand in solidarity with Lear who commits murder and the biggest act of vandalism in history.

"The Jigsaw Man" (1967)

I read "The Jigsaw Man" in a library copy of the 35th Anniversary Edition of Dangerous Visions.  (The Des Moines Public Library has the version with the Michael Whelan cover.)  Like so many recent books, the 2002 portions contain embarrassing typos; Asimov's name is spelled incorrectly on page xvi, and on one of the unnumbered pages before the title page Fritz Leiber's story is called "Gonna Roll Them Bones" instead of "Gonna Roll the Bones."  I've been noticing lots of similar errors in Thomas Disch's The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of: Gene Wolfe, Edmond Hamilton, and Stephen King all have their names misspelled in the course of that book.  Are recent books really as poorly edited as I think, or have books always been this way?  Well, I guess this is just a pet peeve of mine which signifies little.

Ellison and Niven seem to have a great relationship; not only does Ellison have nice things to say about Niven in his introduction to "The Jigsaw Man," but on a page devoted to expressing gratitude to those who have helped him make Dangerous Visions a reality, Niven receives "very special thanks for service way above and beyond...."  What did Niven do to support Dangerous Visions?  I do not know.

(UPDATE APRIL 1 2014: In the comments ukjarry points out how Niven helped out Ellison and Dangerous Visions.)

"Jigsaw Man" is just an average story, not as good (in my opinion) as "Inconstant Moon" or "The Hole Man."  Its premise is that when transplanting body parts becomes routine there will be a strong incentive for the voters to support extending the death penalty to even the most minor crimes, in order to provide opportunities to harvest the organs of relatively young people.  There is a gory action-adventure plot, but the story is too didactic for my tastes.  The astronomy lectures in "Inconstant Moon" and "The Hole Man"are brief and well-integrated into the story; in "Jigsaw Man" the sociology/political science lecture is the main point and the work of fiction about the guy who gets the death sentence for running red lights and tries to escape from the skyscraper prison feels sort of tacked on.

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I enjoyed the Hugo-wining stories, which combine planet wrecking with some human drama, but the Dangerous Visions story was just OK.  I just bought a paperback copy of N-Space, a 1990 collection of Niven stories and SF gossip, so I have more Niven shorts in my future.        

Three Stories by Cordwainer Smith: "Game of Rat and Dragon," "Scanners Live in Vain," & "No, No, Not Rogov!"

My recent reading of "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 2A turned me on to Cordwainer Smith.  So I investigated SFFAudio's PDF page and dug through my books and found three Smith stories, "Game of Rat and Dragon," "Scanners Live in Vain," and "No, No, Not Rogov!"

"Game of Rat and Dragon" (1955)

This story first appeared in the October '55 issue of Galaxy, and I read that original magazine version, available at SFFAudio, complete with the illustrations by Hunter, which are not bad.

"Game of Rat and Dragon" is about space travel, and I wonder if this story was the inspiration for some of the space travel stuff in Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000  universe.  Interstellar travel is achieved by a series of "jumps" or "skips."  Unfortunately, "underneath space itself" live malicious and voracious psychic entities who will devour people's minds whenever they have a chance.  These creatures can kill people or drive them insane right through the hull of a space ship, but they cannot abide bright light - for this reason they are never encountered within the solar system; the sun's rays, within that range, are too much for them.  Ships are vulnerable to attack during the middle stages of a space voyage, in the blackness of deep space.

The story is a description of mankind's response to these monsters.  Telepaths connected to an apparatus can detect the creatures and detonate explosives that generate a flash of light powerful enough to destroy them, but the monsters move rapidly, and can often exterminate a space ship's crew before the telepath can kill them.  So human telepaths work in concert with cat telepaths, cats being natural predators with quicker reflexes than humans.  The twist or "zing" of the story is that the human telepaths can develop a close relationship with their feline partners, which can become an obstacle to developing relationships with other humans - the main character of the 19-page story laments that he won't be likely to find a human woman who has the good qualities exhibited by one of the cat psychics he has worked, while women he meets openly, jealously, resent his abilities and relationships with cats. (This is the second Cordwainer Smith story I've read in which a human has a sort of love relationship with a feline.)

"Game of Rat and Dragon" is a fun entertaining tale, a little above average with a very cool premise.

"Scanners Live in Vain" (1950)   

"Scanners Live in Vain" was first published in the sixth issue of Fantasy Book, a "semi-pro zine," but would achieve wider exposure when it appeared in an anthology edited by Frederick Pohl and then the first volume of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

The story certainly deserved to be included in the Hall of Fame; it is a great story.  I can't believe I read it at Rutgers in 1990 and was not impressed by it.  Maybe I didn't actually read it, just heard it discussed in class.  Or maybe I'm a different person than I was then.

"Scanners Live in Vain" depicts a crazy world full of crazy people, but despite how crazy everything is, you care about the people in the story and what happens to them.

In the universe Smith depicts, travel in space inflicts on people a terrible pain and a desire to die.  If you stay asleep, in a special chamber, you can escape this pain and death wish, but of course if you are asleep you can't manage the ship.  To crew space ships criminals are given an operation which separates their brains from their body parts, eliminating every sense but sight, and diminishing the pain and death wish so they can do work on the ship.  This is called the Haberman process, named after its inventor, and the space sailors are called habermen.  The habermen's bodily functions are managed by implanted mechanical parts with exposed controls; at one point in the story a haberman is hyperventilating and a friend reaches over and turns a knob to slow his respiration.  Severed from their bodies, these space crewmen don't feel or hear or taste; they move about clumsily, only able to speak haltingly and communicating by reading lips and through an elaborate sign language of bold gestures.

Habermen who are severely wounded might not even notice, so somebody has to be around to take care of them.  These are the Scanners, volunteers who go through the Haberman process but are also provided with additional scanning equipment.  Scanners accompany the habermen on the space ships and use their devices to keep an eye on the ordinary habermen and repair them if they get damaged.  Scanners when off duty are permitted to periodically use a device that reconnects their brains with their bodies, so they can for short periods enjoy food, music, smells, and sex.

The plot of the story shows what happens when an inventor discovers a way to protect humans from the horrible pain of space.  All of a sudden the habermen and scanners are out of a job.  Rather than face the fact that their sacrifice of bodily feeling was pointless, the scanners try to murder the inventor before his invention can be presented to the rulers of mankind.  But one scanner betrays his comrades and maintains a greater loyalty, a loyalty to mankind and to the law, and tries to prevent the murder.

"Scanners Live in Vain" is a terrific story, a real SF classic.  It does expertly so many of the things that we often want science fiction to do, like depicting a strange world with advanced technology that is going through a revolutionary change, and also has emotional human elements and action/adventure suspense elements.  Very fine.

"No, No, Not Rogov!" (1959)

This one appeared first in If.  I read it in my copy of Hartwell and Cramer's Ascent of Wonder.

Most of "No, No, Not Rogov!" does not take place in the far future.  Instead, it is about Soviet scientists in the 1940s.  Rogov, one of the greatest minds in the Communist world, and his wife, another genius scientist, are allocated vast resources by Stalin to develop technologies to help defeat Nazi Germany and later the capitalist West.  They come up with a device which can receive brain waves.  In theory, one can hook up to the machine (by having an electric needle inserted through the skull into the brain, ouch) and then see and hear what another person, even thousands of miles away, sees and hears.  Experiments on unwilling prisoners who are well aware they will be executed to maintain security are not working out satisfactorily, so Rogov goes under the needle himself.

Somehow, the device tunes in on a person from 12,000 years in the future, and Rogov witnesses a musical and dance performance of the future.  The performance, the result of thousands of years of cultural evolution and influence from many sophisticated alien cultures, is so beautiful, so transcendent, it blows Rogov's mind and renders him useless to his Soviet masters.

Like "Game of Rat and Dragon," "No, No, Not Rogov!" is a fun entertaining tale with a neat premise; a little above average, but not spectacular.

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Three worthwhile stories, one in the top rank.  I will definitely keep my eyes open for opportunities to read more Cordwainer Smith stories.