Fantastic Universe, May '54: J Williamson, F B Long, C Jacobi, & H Kuttner

Our last exciting venture into 1950s speculative fiction included reading a story I didn't care for by Richard Matheson that appeared in the May 1954 issue of Leo Margulies' Fantastic Universe.  We noted then that this issue was full of stories by big names and by medium names we care about here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and today we're going to read some of them.  (Note that we read the Robert Bloch story in this issue of Fantastic Universe, "Goddess of Wisdom," when we were reading the stories in the Bloch collection Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow.)  Allow me to point out that I am reading these stories from the 1954 magazine, not later and perhaps revised printings in books.    

"The Hitch-Hiker's Package" by Jack Williamson

Yeah, yeah, the title of this one sounds like it belongs on a porn story, ha ha, always with the jokes, you guys.  "The Hitch-Hiker's Package" does not seem to have been a big hit for Jack Williamson--it was not reprinted until our own pornified 21st century, in the seventh volume of Haffner Press' Collected Stories of Jack Williamson.  (If I was rich, I would buy all eight volumes of this series, but of course if I was rich I would be living in Manhattan, spending my time exploring the world's greatest city, not sitting at home reading stories from old magazines, so I guess if I was rich I wouldn't buy all the books in that series after all.  Hmm.)  

"The Hitch-Hiker's Package" is an acceptable filler piece that would fit in just fine in Weird Tales, which published a bunch of Williamson stories back in the day, among them "The Mark of the Monster," "Wizard's Isle," and "The Plutonian Terror." 

Jason has picked up a pathetic skinny hitchhiker clad in worn-out clothes and gripping a package wrapped up in newspaper.  Another car recklessly gets in Jason's way and an accident is narrowly avoided.  When Jason looks over at the passenger seat he finds the hitchhiker is gone, but the package is there on the seat.

Jason begins to drive automatically, in a sort of daze, off the highway, to a small depressed town.  Jason has has never seen this place before, but every street and building of it feels oddly familiar, in particular the local bank, which is shuttered.  He drives up to an old house and goes inside to be ecstatically greeted by a black servant ("a negress") and by a skinny old woman who thinks he is her son.  Jason automatically opens the package--it is a stack of cash and a bunch of bonds.  He hears himself apologizing for robbing the bank years ago, driving it out of business and his father to suicide.

Then Jason wakes up to find people helping him--he has been injured in a car accident, and the hitchhiker is laying dead beside him; the package is absent.

An unobjectionable but forgettable Twilight Zone sort of thing, a supernatural story the mechanics of which can't bear much scrutiny but which is competently written and somewhat entertaining.    

"The Calm Man" by Frank Belknap Long  

Here's another story by a Weird Tales alum that would languish unreprinted until this wild 21st century of ours.

We just read a story by Richard Matheson in which an Earthwoman was impregnated by a Martian, and here we have a story by Frank Belknap Long on the very same theme.  Maybe try keeping it in your pants, you damned dirty Martians.  (Of course all you Martian sympathizers are going to say this is just legit payback for John Carter getting his Earth mitts on that dish Dejah Thoris, aren't you?)  

Sally is a shy young woman but also eager to get married, and so she agrees to marry a guy she meets at a party after only have known him for like 20 minutes.  This dude, James Rand, has a good job in the city and sets them up with a nice cottage in the country and pretty soon Sally is mother to a healthy baby boy, Tommy.  But is Sally happy?  No!  In fact she is miserable!  James is totally dispassionate, distant, cool; he even assesses his son the first time he sees him with less human feeling than a doctor might--there is no pride, no joy in the man's response to the sight of his son, and no joy in their marriage!  

The drab lonely marriage grinds on, year after year.  James is not cruel, but he is terribly distant, unaffectionate, disinterested.  Sally's only comfort is Tommy, but sometimes Sally gets hints that Tommy is much like his father, distant and aloof.

Tommy is eight when Sally gets a phone call from James' office--it is James, imploring her to rush to him!  James has always discouraged her from coming into the city to his office, and so Sally has never even seen the building his office is in.  Today when she enters James' office for the first time she finds  a dead body, unmarked by injury!  The body looks superficially like her husband, but on close inspection details like birthmarks and the volume of hair on the hands and the texture of the skin are all wrong--this is not James!

Sally hurries back home, in time to hear her husband and son talking through a door, and she learns the astonishing truth.  James is a Martian!  His ship crashed on Earth like nine years ago and he has been spending his time repairing it--in order to make money and to keep his true identity and activities a secret, he has been sending an android into the office every day.  James tells Tommy that the ship is now repaired, and the two of them can fly to Mars and live lives of adventure.  Martians, James explains, are eagles, while Earthers are mere sparrows, and the two of them can't be tied down to this lame planet and its lame inhabitants, not even by Tommy's mother and his own wife!  As a hidden Sally watches, her husband and her son blast off in a rocket ship, leaving her forever.

"The Calm Man" is better written and has more human feeling than many of Long's often shoddy productions, but there are problems.  James tells Tommy a Martian needs a son or he will wither and die, and that Mars is a world of adventure that has a "fire" and a "glow."  But if that is the case, why has James been so cold towards Tommy for eight years, and why has James in general always been so dispassionate and boring?  If Martians are "eagles" who love adventure and have a "fire" and a "glow" about them, why is James such a cold fish?  Long could have handled this aspect of the story a little better, perhaps making a point of how James was cold towards Sally but excited about his son and about some esoteric hobby, like astronomy or electronics or something like that that would foreshadow his eventual return to Mars in a space ship he patched up with his own two hands.  Oh, well.

An element of "The Calm Man" that jumped out at me has to do with Sally's trip to the city on which she unexpectedly discovers the devitalized android.  Those who have read H. P. Lovecraft's letters are aware that Long saw himself as an artist and had contempt for work done for money and that, for a while at least, Long was a communist and a supporter of the Soviet Union.*  I was reminded of this when reading about Sally's feelings as she rode into town and then walked through the office building where she believed her husband worked.

The ride to the office was a nightmare...Tall buildings swept past, facades of granite as gray as the leaden skies of mid-winter, beehives of commerce where men and women brushed shoulders without touching hands. 

 ....

How horrible it must be to go to business every day, she thought wildly. To sit in an office, to thumb through papers, to bark orders, to be a machine. 

These ideas come out of nowhere in the context of this story, but ring true as the authentic voice of the sensitive, alienated, and self-important young anti-capitalist poet!

I'm going to give "The Calm Man" a mild recommendation--I certainly recommend it to people interested in Long's career and personality.

*See H. P. Lovecraft's October 11, 1926 letter to August Derleth, June 19, 1936 letter to C. L. Moore, Nov 26, 1932 letter to Derleth, and early December 1932 letter to Derleth; also Robert E. Howard's Jan-Feb 1935 letter to Lovecraft.

"Made in Tanganyika" by Carl Jacobi

"Made in Tanganyika," yet another story by a guy I associate with Weird Tales, wasn't anthologized until 2016, but it was reprinted in 1964 in Arkham House's Jacobi collection Portraits in Moonlight.

I kind of like the tone and ideas of this story, and the motivations and behavior of the characters are good, but the plot doesn't quite add up, relying on multiple unlikely coincidences and operating under a surreal dream logic in which anything can happen; as a result, the story is a little hard to take seriously and is not quite satisfying.

It is the future of self-driving electric cars, of government experiments that hint that travel across time may be possible, of scientists claiming that "secondary worlds" may "impinge" upon our own.  Forty-year-old bachelor and sea shell collector Martin Sutter buys a new automobile and takes it for a spin.  He comes upon a strange sight--a roadside stand selling television sets.  An odd way to sell TVs, but Martin needs a new TV himself so he stops and buys one.  The thing he brings back to his apartment certainly looks strange, perhaps a new-fangled model, and he has trouble getting it working.  On its back it says it was made in the Empire of Tanganyika, which is odd, because Tanganyika is a colony of another power, not some kind of empire.

A guy comes to Martin's apartment--he is Lucien Travail, a fellow shell collector who is looking for lodging.  Would Martin accept a roommate?  Thinking it may be fun to live with a fellow shell fanatic, Martin agrees.  Lucien thinks he can fix the TV, and sure enough, after he fiddles with it, it begins to show a picture--of a beach littered with shells!  And not any shells Martin the shell expert is familiar with, but shells presumably from another planet or from one of those parallel dimensions Martin has been hearing about!

Martin returns to where he bought the TV, but the stand is gone.  He finds that this plot of land is some kind of state memorial park--it was here many years ago that the first hydrogen bomb was detonated!  (There is a sort of understated humor to this story that I like.)  Martin experiences strange phenomena in this park--at certain times of day this portion of his universe seems to intersect with a portion of another universe, that beach he saw on his queer new TV, the beach with the alien shells!  Martin fills a basket with the exotic shells and brings them home.

Parallel to the interdimensional communication and travel plot we've got a plot involving what appears to be the attempt of Lucien to steal some or all of Martin's shells.  Martin has amassed a large and very valuable collection and museums sometimes send him letters offering to buy it, offers Martin always rejects.  It seems like Lucien is not necessarily a lover of shells himself, but a man on the make just hoping to get rich quick in the shell game, perhaps simply by stealing Martin's shells and selling them.

Martin saws open one of the alien shells with a special tool, and upon close examination it looks like the interior of the shell consists of furnished rooms for tiny people!  A ray comes out of the Tanganyikan TV and Martin is shrunk and installed in the tiny rooms!  He manages to escape and return to normal size, and then hatches his own scheme: trying to get the increasingly obnoxious Lucien transported into the shell.  But Martin's plan goes awry, and he ends up trapped in the shell with Lucien, with no way for either of them to get out.

I think as with Long's "The Calm Man," I am going to give Jacobi's flawed "Made in Tanganyika" a mild recommendation because I enjoy the style and characters as well as the general atmosphere and spirit of the thing.

"Where the World is Quiet" by Henry Kuttner

This story appears under the pen name C. H. Liddell, and is another example of a story from this issue of Fantastic Universe that had to wait until the turn of the century before it was reprinted.  "Where the World is Quiet" is a traditional sort of weird adventure story, incorporating many elements we see in  the Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry stories of Kuttner's wife, C. L. Moore--in another dimension our hero encounters a seductive alien with psychic powers who tries to prey on humans; the alien is killed by gunfire after losing a psychic struggle.   

Our narrator, Dr. White, is an anthropologist working in Peru near the Andes.  The local priest, a cripple, tells him that seven young Indian girls have disappeared since the earthquake three months ago, apparently having walked one by one up into the foggy mountains.  The uneducated Indians believe these virgins have been summoned by some recently awoken demon or ancient Incan god, and they are too scared to go looking for the girls, and of course the crippled priest can't go.  So White, with his Ph.D. and working limbs privilege, goes looking for them.

Beyond snow and fog, at the top of a mountain, White comes to an unnaturally warm valley where he discovers alien ruins and alien plants.  He finds the Indian girls, but they are like zombies, more or less physically intact but practically mindless.  He also meets a friendly alien, a sort of five-foot-tall white flower that exudes femininity, can walk and communicate telepathically, and is accompanied by a servant robot, a sphere with three tentacular legs.  The flower explains that a space-time quake deposited this chunk of land from the far future, her and her robot from the distant past, and an evil monster from who knows when, here on the mountain top.  She will soon die because she subsisted in her naive epoch on cosmic rays that nowadays are too weak to sustain her.  White gives her some of his blood to help her last a bit longer.  The flower explains that the monster who was also stranded here by the space-time quake can survive by devouring the life force of human beings--it can use its mental powers to summon people and then suck them dry and, if it so chooses, inhabit and operate their bodies.  This monster must be slain or it will eventually conquer the Earth.  First, the Indian girls' bodies must be destroyed, so the monster has no refuge--it can only be truly be killed while it is in its own body.  Then the flower person gives White the lion's share of her own life energy so he will be strong enough to win the psychic battle with the monster; after the mental struggle, White shoots the monster dead with his pistol.  With the monster's demise, this warm valley starts getting cold, and our guy White bids farewell to the dying flower and the immortal robot who will stay up n this valley alone forever and returns to the base of the mountain.

An acceptable weird science fiction tale.  Like the C. L. Moore stories I mentioned, "Where the World is Quiet" is a worthy subject of all kinds of sex, gender, race and class analysis.  Get to it, grad students!  

With no money to hire an artist to depict the monster, the flower woman, or the spherical robot, the small presses which have published "Where the World is Quiet" in chapbook form resorted to mundane and presumably free images that reflect the story's Latin American setting

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While none of these stories is spectacular, each is creditable and neither editor Margolies nor any of the authors need have any regrets about the stories we've read today--I found reading them to be a pleasant diversion.  

More 1950s genre fiction in our next episode--stay tuned!

Richard Matheson: "Trespass," "When Day is Dun," and "The Curious Child"

On February 9 we talked about three Richard Matheson stories that were reprinted in The Shores of Space, a 1957 collection which I own.  Let's check out three more stories from this book which is leaving a trail of glue fragments and dried paper shards all over my house.

"Trespass" (1953)

This story first appeared in Fantastic under the title "Mother by Protest" and was advertised on the magazine's cover as a "thriller" and promoted inside as "daring."  "Trespass" has reappeared in many anthologies as well as Matheson collections.

Scientist Collier returns home from a six month trip to the Latin American jungle to find his wife Ann pregnant!  There is no way he could be the father, but Ann insists she has not been unfaithful.  This causes a rift in their relationship and Matheson does a good job depicting how both man and wife react to this dreadful situation.  Ann's pregnancy proceeds, and again and again the Colliers and their doctor are faced with unconventional phenomena--Ann can't stop eating salt; Ann feels compelled to seek out the cold; Ann catches a serious illness and then is miraculously cured without medical intervention; and on and on.  Ann, never interested in serious reading before, speed reads all of her husband's science books and then devours huge stacks of books on science and philosophy she gets from the library.

Collier and his friends come to a startling conclusion--Ann has been impregnated by a Martian and the alien baby growing inside her is already fully conscious and feverishly gathering info on our world and culture to facilitate Martian conquest of this big blue marble we call home!  It even seems like the Martian can take over Ann's body and read the minds of those nearby, as is normal for aliens in these old SF stories.

Will Ann give birth to a hybrid monster?  Is Ann the only victim of this manner of diabolical alien intrusion?  Can the Colliers marriage be patched up?

This is a pretty good one, though maybe a little too long and maybe a little anticlimactic; I was expecting something more in the way of fireworks at the end.

As I have told you before, I own a copy of the second volume of Richard Matheson: Collected Stories, and it turns out that all three of today's stories appear in this 2005 book.  In the brief commentary in that book after "Trespass" we learn that Matheson hated the title put on the story by the magazine staff, and that this story was made into a TV movie starring Barbara Eden called The Stranger Within.    

Left: John Schoenherr     Right: Frank Frazetta

"When Day is Dun" (1954)

Here's a short one that debuted in an issue of Fantastic Universe that also printed stories by Philip Jose Farmer, Henry Kuttner, Jack Williamson, Frank Belknap Long, Robert Bloch, and Carl Jacobi, a phalanx of authors we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Maybe we'll have to explore this issue further in the future.   

Unfortunately, "When Day is Dun" is annoying filler--thumbs down.

After a nuclear war, a poet thinks he is the last man on Earth and sits among the ruins writing poems that commemorate the end of the human race.  Matheson includes lots of this poetry; I thought he had intentionally come up with bad poetry, as a joke, but Matheson's commentary on "When Day is Dun" in Collected Stories: Volume Two suggests Matheson worked hard on the poetry and liked some of it, so, go figure.  Even the regular text of "When Day in Dun" is full of poorly-conceived (IMHO) poetical flourishes as a reflection of the poet's thoughts.

It turns out that this versifier is not the last man on Earth--another survivor approaches him.  Our twist ending, which perhaps dramatizes the sort of selfishness and irrationality that might have caused the nuclear war, sees the poet, who wants to be the last living human being, shoot his fellow survivor dead.

This irritating trifle has not been anthologized.

 

"The Curious Child" (1954)

"The Curious Child" takes place in Midtown Manhattan, where I worked in an office for over a decade, a decade which, now that I live out in the country among cows and tractors and sheep and horses and the smell of manure, seems like an impossible dream, more like something I read about than a portion of my own real life.

Robert Graham leaves his office at 5:00 to wade into the rush hour crowds.  He can't find his car--he has forgotten where he parked it!  He searches for it, and realizes he doesn't even remember what color or make his car is!  Wait, does he even own a car?  Doesn't he live in Manhattan?  Or does he live in New Jersey, or one of the outer boroughs?  Graham tries to find his address in his wallet, but he loses his wallet, and eventually even forgets his name.

Matheson writes all this pretty effectively; Graham's panic and his interactions with hurrying New Yorkers in whose way he is getting ring true.  However, the story is too long, Matheson hitting us with the same gag again and again, this guy forgetting yet another thing.

I'm not sure if the twist ending is superfluous or not; I guess it depends on whether you want "The Curious Child" to be a true horror story in which a man suffers a terrible and inexplicable fate, or you want it to have a sort of hopeful sense-of-wonder science fiction ending that explains what is going on and ameliorates the horror angle.  Anyway, it turns out that Robert Graham was born in the high-tech future, the son of a scientist who was building a time machine.  Little baby RG blundered into the time machine and reappeared in 1919, where he was found and put into an orphanage and has lived a more or less successful 20th-century life, getting a good middle-class job and getting married.  Today, in 1954, he is 37 and his real people, the people of the future, have finally found him and are bringing him back to the future.  For some reason, their approach screwed up his memory ("...the closer we got to you the more your past and present was jumbled in your mind....")  In his afterword in Collected Stories: Volume Two, Matheson seems to realize the time travel resolution of the plot is not a clear improvement, and admits he "tacked on a science fiction ending" because he was sure the story wouldn't sell without such an ending.   

We'll call this acceptable.  "The Curious Child" has reappeared in a few British and European anthologies and various Matheson collections the world over.

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"When Day is Dun" is a clunker but it is quite short.  "Trespass" and "The Curious Child" are well-written and "Trespass"'s plot is actually pretty successful, so as a whole, on a page-per-page basis, this has been a reasonably good batch of Fifties SF. 

More SF from the the 1950s awaits us in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Robert Bloch: "The Proxy Head," "The Girl from Mars," and "Method for Murder"

Recently, a 1970 Bruna collection of Robert Bloch stories called Troost me, mijn robot came to our attention.  Over the years, we've read five of the seventeen stories that appear in Dutch in this book (see the links below)--

"Lucy Comes to Stay"
"The Man Who Murdered Tomorrow"
"Block that Metaphor"
"The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton"

"Two of a Kind" AKA "Two by Two"

--and the calculator is telling me that that leaves us with twelve stories selected by our clog-hopping tulip-growing friends over there in the Netherlands that we have yet to read.  We all know the Dutch as pioneers in the development of the market economy as well as tolerance of mind-altering substances and prostitution, so who better to guide us in exploring the huge body of work of the guy who created Norman Bates?  Today we'll get a start on those twelve Dutch-approved tales of science fiction and horror by reading three more stories that appear in Troost me, mijn robot, "The Proxy Head," "The Girl from Mars," and "Method for Murder."  

  

"The Proxy Head" (1953)

Sam Moskowitz and Roger Elwood, it seems, consider this story to be a masterpiece--at least it was reprinted in their 1967 anthology The Human Zero and Other Science-Fiction Masterpieces.  You can also find "The Proxy Head" in the 1986 collection Out of My Head and of course the magazine in which it debuted, Science-Fiction Plus, which is where I am reading it.

The protagonist of "The Proxy Head" is a robot built by aliens to look exactly like a handsome young Earth man.  The aliens, few in number, are hovering in their ship a hundred miles above, in constant contact with the robot, directing it and analyzing the data it collects as it explores an American city.  E. T. needs to know if human beings would seriously contest an alien invasion--the native Earthers far outnumber the aliens in the ship, and if mankind showed spirit and put up a fight Earth would likely prove unconquerable, so the aliens are striving to assess the human race's susceptibility to fear and propensity for aggressive resistance.

The robot holds two guys up at gunpoint, attends a boxing match, observes a speech given by an aged crackpot to assembled senior citizens.  The human race, the machine's controllers high above sense, is full of fear and susceptible to mass hysteria.  

Eventually the robot investigates teenagers at a penny arcade by the beach.  The youth are not full of fear as are the adults.  In a sort of recursive moment, the robot observes four young people at the magazine rack talking about a science fiction magazine, sort of playfully arguing over who should pay for the latest issue.  The aliens above want to look at the magazine, and direct the robot to buy it, arousing the ire of the kids, there being only one copy of it left.

As the robot has moved hither and thither through the town, Bloch has been reminding us again and again that it is very vulnerable to water--even high humidity is liable to cause it to malfunction.  So, when one of the teens shoots the robot with a water pistol it begins to act erratically; it is not long before it has fallen off a pier to its total destruction.  The aliens decide the human race has a core population of fearless individuals--teenagers--and the ability to think outside the box and discover alien weakness and so they abandon their scheme of conquering Earth.

"The Proxy Head" is pretty well-written; the tone and pacing are fine, with Bloch including a portion of his signature social commentary and unsubtle jokes while not overdoing it, but the plot poses some real problems.  For one thing, doesn't the behavior of a crowd at a boxing match demonstrate not that humans are fearful but that they are violent and passionate?  Worse, Bloch accidentally suggests in the end of the story that the aliens are afraid of water, though in the start of the story he told us that while the robot must avoid water, the aliens have no need to fear moisture, a blunder Bloch or the editor of Science-Fiction Plus, science fiction pioneer Hugo Gernsback, or managing editor Moskowitz, should have caught.  (We'll ignore the fact that people who could build a space warship that can cross the distance between the stars must be able to make a waterproof robot--their space craft must be airtight, right?)     

We'll call "The Proxy Head" acceptable--maybe it doesn't hold together, but it is a smooth pleasant read.

"The Girl from Mars" (1950)

"The Girl from Mars" debuted in Fantastic Adventures and is illustrated by Rod Ruth.  I love Rod Ruth's illustrations for 1972's Album of Dinosaurs, a copy of which I would often look at at my paternal grandmother's house as a kid, but I have to say his work in this magazine isn't too hot.

Ace is the not exactly scrupulous owner of a traveling carnival complete with freak show.  His girlfriend was part of the freak show as "The Girl From Mars" but she just ran out on him with the show's magician, so Ace is in a bad way both romantically and financially and so starts drinking.  The weather is bad so there is no business so he can't help but spot the gorgeous blonde with a fantastic body, unusual clothes and odd sort of expression on her face when she approaches the carnival.

This curvaceous babe speaks somewhat broken English with a weird accent and seems to think she is from Mars--the banner advertising "The Girl from Mars" is what attracted her to the carnival in the first place.  Ace figures she is a nutcase, but she is so spectacularly sexy he decides she will fill in nicely as both his girlfriend and his "Girl From Mars."  He gets her into a dark tent with promises of food--the blonde keeps saying she is hungry, the space ship that brought her here having crashed and she being the sole survivor and all that.  Ace starts putting the moves on the blonde and she doesn't resist his touch but the joke is on him because, when they are in a clinch, he learns the hard way that Martians are strictly carnivorous and prefer their meat to be as fresh as possible.

An entertaining little story that has a certain amount of titillating lasciviousness (there is a lot of verbiage about the Martian's body, and the abortive sex scene appeals to non-consent and exhibitionist fetishes) but maintains a surface level of conventional moral integrity by portraying a horndog who objectifies women suffering a horrible punishment for trying to take advantage of an apparently vulnerable woman.

I read "The Girl from Mars" in a scan of its original appearance in Fantastic Adventures, but is has been reprinted in multiple Bloch collections and Peter Haining included it in his oft-reprinted anthology Freak Show, which you can find in German as well as English.

"Method for Murder" (1962)

"Method for Murder" debuted alongside fiction by Ian Fleming in the men's magazine Fury.  I can't get my hands on this issue of Fury, so I'll never know the difference between an outdoor girl and an indoor girl nor will I be conversant with the legal issues around erotica in 1962, but luckily I can read "Method for Murder" in the 1966 Bloch collection Chamber of Horrors. 

This is a weak gimmicky story--forgettable filler.  Charles is a fat writer of suspense novels with a contract to produce four books a year, so he is always busy in his study.  His wife Alice is sick of him and one day, when Charles shows her sketches of the characters in his next novel, she has a brain wave.  The murderer in the next novel, a strangler, looks kind of like Alice's boyfriend, a Method actor.  So, she has the boyfriend dress up as the fictional killer and terrorize Charles; Alice pretends she can't see the strangler, hoping to make Charles think he is insane.  Eventually the boyfriend is assaulting and even killing people and he and Alice are trying to frame Charles for the crimes, but what if the boyfriend gets too deep into the role and forgets he is Alice's lover and starts to think he is Charles' fictional strangler?

We're rating "Method for Murder" barely acceptable.

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Of today's stories, "The Girl from Mars" is probably the most successful but the somewhat more ambitious, though flawed, "The Proxy Head" is perhaps my fave.  As for "Method for Murder," I can't say it is bad but it is pretty mundane and pedestrian.  All in all, not a bad batch.

More Bloch soon, and more short stories from the 1950s, though from a different famous author, in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

The Pleasure Tube by Robert Onopa

"The only such system known to man is on this ship," she reminds the camera.  "A hologram that's more than a hologram, controlled by you, automatically, unconsciously, instantaneously...."

"You are in control."

"Or out of it," the Oriental woman laughs....

I've owned The Pleasure Tube by Robert Onopa for a while and decided to finally read it a week or so ago because I'd determined it was time to read a novel after almost a month of reading short stories and the cover of the 1979 novel raised hopes that it would be a wild and crazy caper full of weird sex.  Onopa, who only has this one novel listed at isfdb along with a dozen short stories, seems to be some kind of college professor, which perhaps should have warned me this was going to be a boring and confusing piece of work.

Our narrator, astronaut Rawley Voorst, has just returned to Earth.  He was the pilot of the star ship Daedalus, which carried a scientific expedition to a black hole.  There was a disaster when something breached the ship's hull and three expedition members were killed.  This novel, especially the early portions, are a mish mosh of flashbacks, dream sequences, diagrams and computer readouts (someone praising the novel would likely point out how all the stuff Voorst and his comrades do on computers is kind of like using the internet), and there is little straightforward exposition about the story's milieu or technology so it is not exactly easy to tell what is going on.  For example, we are over fifty pages into the novel before we are explicitly told that while eight years passed for Voorst and his comrades out in space, eighty passed on Earth, though maybe I was supposed to figure this out myself earlier.  Discussion of space travel involves a lot of talk about "vanes" and "macroweather" and "microweather" so I guess the space craft in the story are (partially) propelled by the solar wind or generate turbulence in space with their emissions or some such thing.  

Anyway, Voorst and some of the other survivors of the mission are detained in government facilities on Guam after their return; there they are repeatedly interrogated by "SciCom" over the course of days or weeks, asked the same questions again and again.  An important element of the novel that I didn't grok until I was like halfway through it is that Voorst and some other people flying the Daedulus, significantly navigator Werhner and a guy named Cooper, are military personnel and not direct employees of SciCom, and SciCom and the military are engaged in some kind of interagency squabble, apparently fighting over who has the right to order Voorst, Werhner and Cooper around now they are back on Earth.  Can SciCom keep Voorst and his comrades in detention and try to get info out of them, or do they have to surrender them to the military?  One of the novel's mysteries is the status of Cooper, who apparently went insane during or right after the mission.  It is not clear where Cooper is, or whether he is dead or alive; Voorst gets the idea he was taken off Guam and committed suicide in Texas.  

Voorst gets off of Guam himself, perhaps by hacking the computers, and secures a VIP berth on a cruise managed by the company PleasureTube.  The cruise ship has interstellar capabilities but mostly just goes up into orbit and then lands on different places on Earth.  The ultimate attraction of the PleasureTube trip seems to be fully immersive holographic entertainment tailored to each individual passenger's specific tastes.  I suspect Onopa intends us readers to be unsure to what extent Voorst's adventures on this cruise ship are real and what extent illusory, perhaps even unsure whether he is really off Guam at all or this entire cruise is an illusion set up by SciCom to help squeeze out of him info about the black hole and the accident--eventually I think Onopa implies that Voorst perhaps never got away from the black hole and this entire novel is a dream or something.

A tall black woman named Collette who has skin like "cafe au lait," eyes "the green of the deep sea off Guam," hair that "falls in long curls to her shoulders" and "a dancer's legs" at first appears to be some kind of clerk and is staffing the ticket counter, but turns out to be Voorst's "service," his personal guide and prostitute for the cruise; she stays in Voorst's cabin and has sex with him and is soon saying she is in love with him.  The cabin reminds him of his quarters on the Daedalus, and again and again he will tell us that stuff on this ship reminds him of the black hole mission ship.  Onopa strives to keep things dreamlike, with Voorst telling us this or that feels "unreal," experiencing multiple cases of deja vu, and numerous instances in which people and things seem to be one thing (a girl an Indian, a watercourse dry) but turn out to be another (the girl is really Spanish or Latin American, there is a stream of water flowing there after all) just like Collette at first seemed like a clerk and turned out to be his personal servant.

This is all pretty boring and unengaging and I kept taking breaks from The Pleasure Tube to read from the stack of old Peanuts paperbacks and issues of Heavy Metal I got at antique stores recently.  (I buy the Peanuts books if they are two bucks or less, and the Heavy Metals if they are $5.00 or less.)  There isn't much plot to the first three chapters of The Pleasure Tube--Voorst isn't really trying to do anything--or human feeling or dramatic tension, and the vague descriptions of everything are frustrating rather than enticing--there is little in the text to grab a hold on to, nothing entertaining or compelling.

Chapter Four (The Pleasure Tube has nine chapters and is 212 pages long) consists of descriptions of the TV shows Collette and Voorst watch, including an advertisement much like an "infomercial" for the fully immersive holographic experience offered by PleasureTube--this experience, Collette warns, carries grave risks to people who are not in the best physical and mental health.  Another "show" consists of a live feed of a couple in another cabin having sex--Voorst recognizes the woman, Erica, a white blonde with a fleshy rather than athletic body, as someone whom he thought was a passenger but is in fact another "service" like Collette; she has been assigned to a bisexual artist.  Somehow Erica and the artist merge into Voorst's cabin and there follows a four-person drug and sex orgy.  When Voorst wakes up, Collette is gone, and Erica tells him she is now his service.  Voorst decides to try to find Collette, using his computer skills and his contacts--the stirrings of an actual plot!

Onopa tries to add tension in Chapter Five.  An agent of SciCom, Taylor, catches up to Voorst and demands he return to Guam, but for legal reasons Voorst has three days before he has to comply.  The ship stops at LasVenus, apparently the current name of Las Vegas, where Vorst and Erica gamble, and in a building where there are simulation virtual reality games Voorst plays a game that simulates piloting a star ship exactly like the Daedalus.  Like a guy in a detective novel, Voorst gets beaten up by a guard when he tries to get into an exclusive apartment building to talk to a woman executive, Eva Steiner, another passenger on the PleasureTube; Voorst has reason to believe this Steiner has something to do with Collette's disappearance.  Voorst earlier in the novel made friends with another male passenger, an Italian politician named Massimo who owns and drives race cars, and Voorst visits him at a LasVenus race track to ask him for help getting in touch with Steiner.  In scenes like those in a James Bond book or film, Voorst gets to drive this big wig's Ferrari around a race track.  

The novel comes to life in Chapter Six.  Eva Steiner is a mannish woman with a passion for race cars, so Massimo has no trouble coaxing her to the track.  Steiner brings with her a coterie of young women, apparently her "slaves," and Collette is among them.  Voorst challenges Steiner to a race; she drives some futuristic car, while Voorst drives the Ferrari and beats her; as his prize, Voorst gets Collette back.  Reinforcing the idea that this is all a dream or illusion, Voorst doesn't quite understand how he won the race.

I almost lose control--wind, a gust of wind?--my mind registered nothing, had to have been blank--the Ferrari breaks loose....I don't remember just why I broke loose....I still don't know what happened there...something happened, yes, the Ferrari was out of control, but from that error I locked into her slipstream and perhaps won the race because of it.

There is some mystery over to what extent Colette is working for SciCom and whether or not she is doing so voluntarily or under coercion of some kind.  Does she love Voorst like she says, or is he just an assignment or a target to her?    

After the Voorst-Steiner race, Massimo climbs in the Ferrari and, trying to beat Voorst's time or something, dies in a fiery crash, leading to scenes of Collette and Rawley vomiting, Collette having a sort of nervous breakdown, the two of them deciding to try to steal one of Massimo's other sports cars and fleeing to Mexico, and comforting each other by having sex.  They abandon the Mexico idea when they learn the government has decided to not force Voorst back to Guam with Taylor after all, I guess the military having won the bureaucratic struggle with SciCom.

I have to admit that driving across the Southwest with a woman who might be a spy sounded to me like it would be more interesting than spending more time on the cruise ship getting high and watching TV, and in what might be a meta joke, Onopa has Collette in Chapter Seven actually express this idea, more than once.

"...wish we had taken off in that beautiful car, just run from LasVenus....We would be in Mexico by now...what an adventure it would have been...."

After the action-packed Chapter Six, Chapter Seven sinks back into boredom, including more TV shows and another drug and sex orgy as the cruise ship orbits the moon. 

As Chapter Eight begins we are on page 153 of the 212-page novel--the home stretch!  The ship lands on a Pacific island called Vietahiti.  Already on the island is one of Voorst's comrades from the Daedalus, navigator Werhner; Werhner got off Guam because the investigation into the disaster is over--SciCom apparently has all the data it needs, their belief they needed new data was the result of some kind of computer error or something.  Voorst has a meeting with Taylor and Steiner in the bridge of the cruise ship--it turns out that Steiner is a high-ranking SciCom official and Taylor's boss!  Steiner wants to maintain custody of Cooper, who is alive after all but, allegedly, in a sort of vegetative state, but it looks like the military has the rights to him.  (Why she wants Cooper I never figured out.)  Steiner offers Voorst the kind of job flying the kind of ship she thinks he wants to fly if he'll help her keep Cooper; he refuses.  The chapter ends with Collette and Voorst going through some kind of tribal wedding ceremony, a ritual of Collette's tribe in which she invokes the four elements, cuts their wrists so they can combine their blood, and gives a mumbo jumbo speech full of jazz like

"This is the gift that gives wings to the feet for the journey to the unknown land where all totems are silent"

and

"Then shall the voice resound like the sound of the antelope...."

This is the first indication in the novel as far as I remember that Collette isn't a conventional Western woman but instead from a primitive tribe or deeply connected to her tribal ancestors--it is typical of the novel that new ideas and themes just pop up out of nowhere like this and then are forgotten, making no impression on the plot.

Chapter Nine, the final chapter, revolves around the climax of the cruise, the "total hologram," and begins with TV shows Voorst watches about total hologram and Collette and Erica's descriptions of the experience, which, as employees of The PleasureTube, they have been through before; while Collette seems to be looking forward to the experience, Erica seems to dread it.

For whatever reason, the ship sails close to the sun for the total hologram.  Onopa sets up parallels between Voorst's disastrous trip to the black hole and this trip to the sun and to the total hologram experience; for example, several times over the course of the book there has been discussion of how, in theory, if you go into a black hole you might become lost in time or achieve freedom from time and thus live the same moment forever, and as the ship approaches the sun, Collette explains to Voorst "how one loses track of time in the hologram."  The cruise liner suffers a minor accident on the way to the sun, ejected waste hitting the edge of the vessel, and Voorst recalls that the same thing happened to the Daedalus.    

Just before the total hologram is about to start, Voorst gets the urge to go to the morgue to pay his last respects to Massimo's remains.  He has to sneak through the ship's inner bowels-- "ducts, pipes, fittings, valves, line the ceiling of the hallways and the racks on the walls."  This whole sequence means nothing to the plot--Voorst doesn't learn anything from seeing the corpse or the man's effects, and even though he had to trespass in restricted areas to get to the morgue the crew who encounter him don't stop him or report him or anything.  I'm not even sure how he gets back to his cabin--Voorst has to have Collette use her ID to open a restricted hatch for him when he heads to the morgue, but she doesn't accompany him through the hatch--how does he open it from the other side on his way back?   

Anyway, back at his cabin he and Collette plug into the total hologram and have psychedelic visions.  Boring.  Then they are drawn out of the hologram because the ship is in trouble and Voorst, Werhner, and Cooper have to be on the bridge.  The regular crew is absent for some reason.  (Dream logic, again.)  The pleasure ship suffers damage just like that the Daedalus did, and the three men act just like they did during the disaster near the black hole.  Is this the total hologram working normally, this disaster a product of Voorst's imagination?  Or is SciCom forcing this hallucination on the three men to see how they react, to learn more about the Daedalus disaster?  Or did they all die in the Daedalus disaster and/or get caught in the black hole, doomed to live through the disaster as well as a fantasy of returning to Earth again and again?  We readers can never know, and I'm not sure we can ever care, either.

An unsatisfying ending to a pretty boring novel.  As I have suggested, it is not clear what is really going on at times, and I didn't find that The Pleasure Tube offered any emotional or ideological content--it didn't move me or make me think except for that single chapter with the car race and Voorst's duel with Steiner over Collette.  Voorst is a surprisingly bland and flat character, bereft of emotion and limited in agency.

To be fair to Onopa, I feel he is probably achieving his goals here--The Pleasure Tube is not sloppy, everything in it feels very intentional--but that his idea of the sort of book he wanted to write and my idea of the book I wanted to read are just too far apart for me to enjoy what he is up to here.

Reading an entire novel represents a high level of commitment and thus a relatively high risk.  Next time I'll be back in my comfort zone--short stories.

Frederik Pohl: "Survival Kit," "The Knights of Arthur," and "My Lady Greensleeves"

Last month we declared our intention to read all the stories in Frederik Pohl's 1959 collection Tomorrow Times Seven, a decaying paperback edition of which I own.  Today we make good on this promise!  We've already read five of the pieces in this volume, and we'll read the remaining two, "Survival Kit" and "The Knights of Arthur," today.  Because two stories doesn't really feel like a full blog post, we'll supplement the post with a story from the same period, "My Lady Greensleeves."  All three of these stories made their debuts in Galaxy, the magazine of which Pohl would in 1961 be officially named as editor, though apparently he was doing editorial work at the magazine for years before that, aiding the mentally ill H. L. Gold.  On page 220 of my paperback copy of The Way the Future Was: A Memoir, Pohl writes:

In the late 1950s Horace began to go beyond that [i.e., having Pohl and others do his preliminary reading for him.]  At times he had me "ghost" the magazine for him: do all the reading, all the buying and bouncing, all the preparation of the magazine for the printer, all the writing of blurbs and house ads and editorials.

So it is possible that some or all of today's three stories were not only penned by Pohl but also purchased and edited by him.

"Survival Kit" (1957)

Here we have a quite effective crime story apparently based around the idea that American airmen serving in the Pacific War were issued survival kits full of items which would prove useful should they be shot down over some island and have to make their way through a jungle and/or among natives to a pickup point.  In Pohl's story here, a time traveler from the future gets lost in mid-20th century New York and has to use the devices in his kit to survive and reach at just the right moment a recovery point in Prospect Park in Brooklyn--the story is told from the point of view of the 20th-century man (an "aboriginal") of dubious morality who gets mixed up with the time traveler. You might call this a noirish story; none of the characters is very likable or good, and the main character is always trying to take advantage of others and as the story proceeds behaves more and more reprehensibly until he is finally hoist by his own petard. The ending does pull the punch a little, and after you have read "Survival Kit" you realize it is something of a joke story, but while you are reading it it feels somewhat brutal and scary.

Penniless loser Howard Mooney is spending the winter alone on the Jersey Shore in a relative's house, barely surviving on the meager supplies left there by the owner.  A time traveler knocks at the door--this guy requires a guide to a "nexus point" in Brooklyn where he must be at a specific time in a few days in order to get back to his own time period.  The time traveler has with him a box or case that is full of devices and artifacts of tremendous value and spectacular utility.  The promise of a fabulous reward leads Mooney to accept the job as guide.  As the story advances we learn that Mooney is a small time crook and a con-man who in the past sold (I guess fraudulently) freezers to suburban housewives.  (Young Communist League alumnus Pohl of course sees all sales and advertising as a kind of criminal conspiracy.)  Mooney is not content to accept a generous reward for helping the traveler get from the greatest state in the nation over to Crooklyn, and schemes to get the entire survival kit, which has the potential to make him the richest and/or most powerful man in the world; he commits ever graver sins as he tries to secure this boon, and we find he is not even above murdering his own uncle in his efforts to strike it rich.

A good story.  Pohl handles all the numerous future gadgets quite well, and the plot also operates admirably--all the various complications that pop up and Mooney's reactions to them are entertaining.  Thumbs up for "Survival Kit!"

"Survival Kit" has popped up again in several Pohl collections and is even the title story of one such British collection.  You can also find the story in the 1999 anthology Technohorror, though Fred's name isn't on the cover--come on, Grand Master Fred has gots to be more famous than Greg Egan!  

"The Knights of Arthur" (1958)

If you look at "The Knights of Arthur" in Galaxy you are immediately clued in to the fact it is a joke story--it is illustrated by Don Martin and so looks like something out of Mad magazine.  (I don't "get" Mad and have never been interested in it--it is too broad, too childish, and too topical for me, and I don't find Martin's boring and generic art at all appealing.  Life would be sweeter if I did appreciate Martin and Mad because the antique malls and used books stores I haunt are choked with mountainous piles of Mad and Don Martin books and it would be child's play to amass a huge collection.  Anyway, everybody and his brother loves Mad, so I generally keep this against-the-grain opinion to myself.)  "The Knights of Arthur" isn't quite as silly as Martin's illustrations suggest, but it isn't a very good adventure story or a fascinating speculation about future life, either.  I think we'll call this one barely acceptable.    

It is the post-apocalyptic future!  The population of New York City stands at 15,000, and this is considered a huge and unwieldy number in an America whose population is probably around 100,000.  Our narrator Sam and his friends Vern and Arthur were on the crew of a submarine nine or ten years ago when the nuclear war that killed almost everybody broke out, and so they survived.  The weapons employed by America's enemies produced very little blast, but very deadly waves of short term radiation, so America's infrastructure is more or less intact, though there are skeletons everywhere you go, and people today face little or no risk of radiation sickness.  Sam and Vern are hale and hearty, but Arthur's health status is unusual--he is a disembodied brain in a can!  A camera on a sort of tentacle affords Arthur vision, and he has mikes so he can hear, but to "talk" he has to be wired into an electric typewriter and hammer out his "speech."

These three amigos have left the country house where they have been living since coming ashore soon after the war and come to NYC to pull off some kind of scheme which Pohl keeps from us for much of the story.  The Big Apple is run by a strongman based in the Empire State Building; one of the few Army officers to survive the war, he is known as "the Major" and has a harem of over one hundred women.  An attractive woman named Amy approaches Sam and his friends; she is in the employ of the Major (and scheduled to soon marry him and join his harem) and has come to negotiate the purchase of Arthur!  Arthur, you see, can be plugged right into a computer system and handle the NYC power grid or a robotic factory or whatever, thus easing the Major's manpower shortages by doing the work currently done by dozens of men.  Arthur, Vern and Sam become important members of the Major's HQ staff, and behind the Major's back they pursue the plan that brought them to Gotham--they want to seize an ocean liner and sail out to sea.  Arthur joined the Navy to sail the open sea but only ever served on submarines, and since he lost his body in an accident he has dreamed being plugged into a modern ocean liner and controlling it the way you or I control our natural bodies.  Our guys get the help of Amy and other of the Major's staff by claiming they want to refurbish a liner to serve as the Major's yacht.  One thing they have to do is find enough fuel to power an ocean liner, and, and one of this story's big jokes is when Vern blows up fifty tankers by dropping a lit cigarette into a hold full of gasoline.

The protagonists' plan goes off with nary a hitch; they sail out to sea with Arthur in charge and Sam married to Amy, and even the Major, the putative villain of the story but an ineffectual and almost inoffensive dingbat, willingly surrendering authority over NYC to enjoy the open-ended cruise as a cabin boy.  Very little of consequence or interest happens in this forgettable story.   

Compared to "Survival Kit," "The Knights of Arthur" feels long and clunky.  "Survival Kit" flows smoothly and maintains a consistent tone, all the scenes being fun or important to the plot, the character's personalities and objectives driving the plot in a clear direction.  "The Knights of Arthur" in contrast stumbles along jerkily.  There are superfluous scenes that feel like dead ends and are seemingly there just to offer humor--Pohl spends a long time describing the search for fuel among the fifty tankers, a search which fails because Vern blows up the fifty ships, and then in just a few lines Pohl wraps up the issue of the need for fuel by just telling us Vern found some someplace else.  Another problem with "The Knights of Arthur" is that there are three main characters but usually only two of them are on screen at any one time while the third is off at some other location.  As for the jokes, most of those I can recall consist of one character getting spluttering mad at the dialogue or behavior of another, the most elementary of humor.

I may consider "The Knights of Arthur" a waste of time and borderline bad, but you'll find it in Platinum Pohl, the 2006 collection of Pohl's "best" stories that Connie Willis says is "wonderful," so take my dismissal with a grain of salt--I guess I'm going against the grain again. 

"My Lady Greensleeves" (1957)

Having finished up Tomorrow Times Seven, we now turn to our special bonus feature, which I will be reading in a scan of the issue of Galaxy in which it debuted.  (We've already read something from this issue, Thomas N. Scortia's "The Bomb in the Bathtub," which I declared "a dud" in 2019.)  

No mixing.  That was the prescription that kept the city-state alive.

It is the class-bound, segregated future!  The various social classes are kept apart, with professionals living in one neighborhood, clerks in another, laborers in another, government employees in another, etc.  The different classes are forbidden to interbreed, and if you try to pass yourself off as a member of a different class or conduct political activism advocating for the mixing of classes, you get a prison sentence.  All these repressive policies are justified by the idea that specialization is the key to civilization.

"My Lady Greensleeves" takes place in a prison and we follow lots of characters and never get to know any of them very well or care about any of them.  A young woman from the Civil Service class--daughter of a Senator no less--is in the prison for committing vandalism as part of a campaign in support of ending the policy of segregation and gets into trouble because she can't really understand what members of other classes are trying to tell her to do; each class has its own dialect.  She gets moved to the uncomfortable maximum security wing (called "Greensleeves" because of the uniforms worn there) just when some of the hardened inmates there use a shiv to take some guards hostage.  This act of rebellion inspires other cons throughout the complex, leading to mounting chaos in the prison and an escalating response from the authorities.  The Governor comes by to take command and gets captured by the rioters.

Race relations is a theme of Pohl's story here.  At the same time he reminds us repeatedly that in this future world there is no more racism and there are no longer any distinct racial categories (the senator's daughter has never heard the word "Jew") he portrays class conflict in ways that mirror real-life racial tensions.  The different social classes in "My Lady Greensleeves" ascribe to each other various, generally unattractive, character traits the way real life racists stereotype blacks as lazy and Jews as greedy or whatever.  There are also derogatory nicknames--clerks are known as "figgers," mechanics as "greasers," and laborers as "wipes."  Pohl further reminds us of real-life racial distinctions by offering an ethnically diverse cast.  One of the most prominent inmates--an architect imprisoned for repairing his own car and thus trespassing on the territory of mechanics--is black, another is Asian.  

Pohl stresses how strong class divisions are, how hard they are to overcome.  The prison is a dangerous institution to this segregated society, because the classes inevitably mix there, but mixing doesn't end prejudice and suspicion--people voluntarily embrace class distinctions even when not forced to do so, even when it is counterproductive to do so.  The senator's daughter is a liberal who wants to overcome such divisions in theory, but meeting laborers leads her to realize how different they really are from her and her fellow Civil Service members, and when push comes to shove she sides with a Civil Service man who is in a fight, saving him from a violent and dangerous laborer.  The black architect, a professional, becomes leader of the rebellion but has contempt for the laborers and mechanics.  Even though they have to work together to succeed in changing society, the different classes can't overcome their differences to fight in concert for social change.

The riot defeated in a way that is totally boring, the Governor gives a little speech to the Senator's daughter and another major character about how the division of society into classes has led to stability and Pohl drives this idea home in a final scene of some minor characters.  Pohl's portrayal of the segregated society is pretty ambiguous--the governor, the ultimate upholder of the system, is shown to act selflessly and wisely, almost as if Pohl thinks such a class-ridden society has something to recommend it.   

Pohl's takes on the division of labor, class/race relations and the role of prisons in society has the potential to be interesting, but he doesn't do much novel or compelling with these themes.  Worse, the story feels long, none of the characters is interesting, and the action scenes and efforts to generate suspense fall flat.  I couldn't bring myself to care who lived or died, and whether this society endured or was revolutionized.  Pohl in writing this story demonstrates a greater interest in social and economic theories than in entertainment and literary merit, and since his theories are not that clearly or compellingly argued the story is bland and drags.  Another barely acceptable piece from Pohl.

"My Lady Greensleeves" shows up in the Pohl collection The Case Against Tomorrow and in the anthology Human and Other Beings, which bills itself as being about "man's inhumanity to man."  These books present themselves as so misanthropic and pessimistic you have to wonder how they sold--were mid-century SF readers champing at the bit to devour these downers?  Still, "My Lady Greensleeves," like "The Knights of Arthur," would be included in Platinum Pohl, so I guess the sort of Pohl stories I find a drag are just the sort of stories of which Pohl is most proud.

**********

That's enough Pohl for a while; I'm thinking of reading a wild and crazy novel for our next foray into the speculative fiction world.

Super-Science Fiction, Dec '58: R Silverberg & H Ellison

In our last episode we read a story by Charles Runyon from the December 1958 issue of Super-Science Fiction.  This issue, edited by W. W. Scott and with an Ed Emshwiller woman-in-bondage cover, includes three stories by Robert Silverberg (two printed under pen names) and an apparently rare story by Harlan Ellison.  Let's supplement our reading of 1958 stories recommended by anthologist Judith Merril, the critics' favorite, with these four less acclaimed science fiction tales, though the Silverbergs can't be all that terrible, as Silverberg himself was happy to include them in 21st-century anthologies.  I'll note here that I am reading all of today's stories in a scan of an original copy of Super-Science Fiction I found at luminist.org, not in any book.

"The Aliens Were Haters" by Robert Silverberg 

The year is 2190.  Mankind has discovered and explored dozens of extrasolar planets, but never yet met intelligent aliens.  Our protagonist is a spaceman on foot, crossing the killer jungle of Kothgir II, carrying back to the US base a bag full of valuable plants that back on Earth will be processed into pain-killing drugs, when he makes first contact!

Spaceman Massi, of St. Louis, Missouri, comes upon a wrecked spacecraft in the jungle, and moments later four people from the Brazilian base on Kothgir II arrive.  The American and the Brazilians each claim the invaluable alien artifact for their nations.  The leader of the Brazilians is a mannish six-foot-tall woman; she and Massi enter the alien ship and discover two injured beings, people three feet tall, green and scaly.  Silverberg talks about women in this story in a way that perhaps wouldn't fly today among the enlightened; Massi reflects on how, while she has an ugly face, the Brazilian captain looks pretty good from behind in those tight shorts of hers, and while she is a real hard ass while bossing around her subordinates, her maternal instinct kicks in when she sees the injured diminutive aliens.  

That maternal instinct vanishes without a trace when the aliens wake up and gun down the three male Brazilians--she guns down the aliens and makes Massi her captive.  She forces him to accompany her in the march to the distant Brazilian base.  Before they get there, Massi employs a ruse to distract his captor and pounces on her, and we get some sexualized violence as he overpowers her.  They split up, she vowing revenge.  But before either of them can reach his or her nation's base, a second alien ship arrives and bombs both bases into oblivion, slaying thousands of Earthers.  As the story ends, Massi decides he has to hook up with that ruthless Brazilian woman--they are the only two humans left on the planet, and it will be a year before a ship arrives from Earth!  We readers are left to speculate whether she and Massi will fight to the death or become lovers.

This is an acceptable entertainment.  "The Aliens Were Haters" would be reprinted in the 2016 Silverberg collection Early Days: More Tales from the Pulp Era. 

"The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" by Robert Silverberg (as by Calvin W. Knox) 

It is the early 25th century.  The human race has trade relations with hundreds of other civilizations all over the galaxy, and in fact has a monopoly on the carrying trade, as, of all the intelligent races in the galaxy, only the human has developed a FTL drive.  Our protagonist, Garth, is a young employee of the Interstellar Merchant Service, a private company, and as the story begins he goes to the home office in Buenos Aries (today's Silverberg stories suggest Silverberg expected Latin America to come into its own as a rival of Northern Hemisphere countries in the future) to receive an important assignment.  Another of the IMS's employees, a Lidman, runs the one-man trading post on Murchison IV, planet Danneroi, a source of thorium, and he is suspected of selling drugs to the stone age natives!  Allowing aliens access to alien booze or drugs is strictly forbidden!  Garth is given the job of investigating--he will go to Murchison IV on the pretext of acting as Lidman's assistant, but his real job will be to investigate the allegations, and take the guy's job if he has to be sacked.   

On the planet we learn about how the trading post operates, and Garth sees that Lidman is doing a superior job and has great relations with the natives--this dude teaches English classes and has even learned how to perform surgeries so he can save the lives of natives who fall ill!  The allegations that he is supplying the aliens narcotics turn out to be accurate--at some point a native got sick and Lidman administered some medicine to the guy and it gave him "good dreams."  That alien was the first of many of the natives of Danneroi to became addicted to the medicine, and instead of trying to cure them of addiction, Lidman is handing the drugs out to them regularly.  

Garth confronts Lidman, who dramatically declares he had no choice but to provide the natives the drugs, and then kills himself.  Soon Garth, now in charge of the station, learns how the natives forced Lidman into supplying the narcotics they craved--these alien addicts threaten to commit suicide if Garth won't fork over the "dream-stuff," and Garth does their bidding after two of them disembowel themselves right in front of him!  Garth begins to lose his sanity and transmits a message to Earth, begging to be relieved of his duty.

I guess I say this a lot, but this story about two humans from a galaxy-spanning culture who occupy a position of authority among large populations of primitive aliens and suffer psychological and moral crises as a result reminded me of Somerset Maugham's stories of white men in a similar positions in 19th and 20th-century colonies.  Garth even expresses a sentiment apparently common among Western colonizers when he says to himself that the natives are like children.      

Silverberg in this story also addresses numerous aspects of economic theory--monopoly, the subjective theory of value, the role of honesty in a market society, the idea of a just price, etc.  Silverberg does a decent job of speculating on what interstellar trade might be like, and I thought this stuff was all pretty interesting. 

Silverberg's style here in "The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" is kind of pedestrian, flat and simple, but not bad.  The problem with the story is that the natives' means of compelling Lidman and then Garth to supply narcotics is not foreshadowed--the aliens' culture and society are not described in any detail at all, so when we learn they are willing to casually destroy themselves if denied a high, it comes out of nowhere.  In this story Silverberg does an entertaining job of speculating about interstellar trade, but the plot of his story isn't really about that, but about addiction and suicide, and what his plot calls for is speculations on the kind of society that would produce people who are quite pacific but nonetheless have little compunction about killing themselves in order to secure for their surviving fellows the hallucinogenics to which they are addicted.

I can mildly recommend this one.  If you are interested in SF depictions of imperialism/colonialism, interstellar trade and drug addiction, I would more strongly commend it to you.  "The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" appears in Early Days under the title "The Traders."

"Exiled from Earth" by Robert Silverberg (as by Richard F. Watson)

If "The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" suggests Silverberg had been reading some economics book, "Exiled from Earth" seems drawn from Silverberg's delving into English history and classic English literature--the thing is full of direct references to Shakespeare, at least one veiled reference to Coleridge, and its whole scenario is based on the period of the English republic under Cromwell.

Our narrator is a director in the legitimate theatre, the human head of a human troupe of actors on an alien planet who put on performances of highlights from Shakespeare and Euripides for the natives.  You see, a few decades ago, the Earth electorate voted in a Neopuritan administration that outlawed dancing, stripping, and acting.  Those in the performing arts who didn't want to change their professions were given a free space flight into exile.  

The plot concerns a septuagenarian actor who has gone insane.  He thinks the drama is again permissible on Earth, and that he has a shot at portraying Hamlet in New York.  He askes the narrator to help him get to Earth, and our hero tries to bribe Neopuritan officials into letting the guy return to Earth--even if there is no chance he'll be able to perform, the director figures his colleague would at least be pleased to die on Earth.  The Neopuritans, however, are true to their strict code, and no offer of bribe is going to get them to allow an exiled sinner to get to Earth.  So, the narrator hires some alien hypnotists to make the aged actor believe he has travelled back to Earth--this enables him to die happy.

Acceptable.  "Exiled from Earth" can be found in the 2006 collection In the Beginning: Tales from the Pulp Era.

"Creature from Space" by Harlan Ellison 

If isfdb is to be believed, "Creature from Space" has never been reprinted, and I can't even find a reference to the story at the Harlan Ellison website.  Ellison completists take note!

The star freighter Ionian Trollop is manned by the most hell-raising, womanizing, trouble-making crew in the galaxies, but they run a profitable enterprise because when it comes to getting a cargo from Point A to Point B they are the most reliable in all the known universe.  The story opens with joke descriptions of each of these hellions, and humor scenes in which the bald and overweight super-cargo's six-legged pet bird who recites Dante defecates on the star charts, to the frustration of the captain, who throws his cap on the deck in rage.  There are also multiple scenes in which the men physically fight each other.

(Like the Shakespeare and Coleridge references in Silverberg's "Exiled from Earth," the quotes from Dante here in "Creature from Space" strike me as the writers trying to convince readers or maybe just themselves that SF isn't just drivel written for childish dolts by hacks but something worthwhile, produced by thoughtful educated people for thoughtful educated people.)

The plot of the story concerns the last voyage of Ionian Trollop.  We watch as a meteor busts into the ship and turns out to be a shape-shifting alien who can imitate robots, people, writing implements, etc.  It starts killing the crew one by one.  It is apparently immune to ray pistol fire, or at least able to dodge the rays, and by taking the form of tools, men, or the pet six-legged bird, it is able to hide from the humans it hasn't yet murdered.  In the end it triumphs over the crew and it is hinted the monster will soon arrive on a human-inhabited planet and reproduce and conquer that world and maybe all of human civilization.

A merely acceptable entertainment.  All the comedy stuff about the crew is more or less competent, and the monster-on-the-loose material is OK--the robot scenes are actually quite good, the most entertaining and most productively speculative passages in the story--but these two aspects of "Creature from Space" don't jell or jive; the comic spacemen's idiosyncrasies don't help them overcome adversity nor do they prove to be their downfall, and the men don't grow or change as people over the course of the story, becoming more responsible due to their ordeal or whatever.  The men's personalities and back stories have zero effect on the plot, and thus feel superfluous once you have finished the story. 

**********

Silverberg and Ellison are skilled professionals and these stories maintain your interest and have fun parts, but they are sort of forgettable and at least two of them have some real structural flaws.  Not award winners, but worth your time if you are curious about 1950s SF or the careers of Silverberg and/or Ellison.

More late 1950s science fiction from a big name writer in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!