Frederik Pohl: "The Middle of Nowhere," "The Gentle Venusian" and "The Day of the Boomer Dukes"

We recently finished up reading all the stories in Frederik Pohl's In the Problem Pit, a 1976 collection.  Let's turn our attention to a Pohl collection first published in 1959, reprinted in 1969, and then reprinted in Germany four times in the 1970s and 1980s, Tomorrow Times Seven.  My copy of Tomorrow Times Seven is a 1959 one, with a Richard Powers cover.  The 1969 edition also has a pretty good cover, one by Robert Foster.

As the title suggests, Tomorrow Times Seven presents SF fans with seven stories.  We've already read and blogged about a pair of them, "The Haunted Corpse" and "To See Another Mountain," leaving us with five to go.  Today we'll read three of them, those appearing second, third and fourth in the volume.  (I'll note here that I am reading the stories in my decaying paperback, printed 12 years before I was born and leaving little yellow fragments all over the house; there may be differences between these book versions and the original magazine versions.)   

"The Middle of Nowhere" (1955)

Here we have a story about the colonization of Mars by greedy private sector Earthmen--Pohl explicitly likens the humans on Mars to the Hudson Bay Company and the East India Company and calls their enterprise a "monopoly"--and the resistance to this colonization by the native Martians.  Maybe we should see "The Middle of Nowhere" as a left-wing fantasy of Native Americans or South Asians triumphing over British imperialism, of killing white people en masse, and compare it to Edmond Hamilton's "Conquest of Two Worlds" and especially Chad Oliver's "Final Exam."

"The Middle of Nowhere" is a first-person narrative in the voice of a guard or soldier of the Company that is colonizing Mars.  Pohl does a decent job with the adventure setting stuff--Mars is a dangerous place where humans have to wear respirators and insulated capes because the air doesn't have much oxygen and both the fierce noonday sun and the bitterly cold nights are a threat to human health and life.  The native Martians appear to be primitives who live in huts, though humans have never seen a Martian up close--the natives sneak off whenever an Earther approaches.  The Martians do, however, have access to some high-tech weapons, weapons as good as some of those produced on Earth--no rifles and aircraft with which to fight Earthers toe to toe, but indirect fire-and-forget weapons, including self-guided missiles that home in unerringly on Earth vehicles, knocking them out and killing all occupants.  As a result, humans on Mars have to travel on foot, exposing themselves to the aforementioned solar radiation and frigid temperatures as well as the deadly sandstorms which strike with regularity.  Where do these stone age people get these missiles?

The plot of "The Middle of Nowhere" follows an expedition of which the narrator is a member, a relief force that travels from one human settlement to another--the latter has been devastated by a native attack.  The expedition is almost wiped out by the Martian indirect fire weapons and the terrible weather that is common to Mars.  The relief force does discover that the natives the humans have been encountering are, apparently, the fallen descendants of a lost Martian high-tech civilization--the primitives have just been finding the self-guided missiles and are able to launch them, but not maintain or construct them.  The concluding lines of the story suggest that the high-tech Martians are not extinct, but merely hiding, and will emerge in a few years and give the Terran invaders a run for their money.

An acceptable adventure story that is an ominous downer and has an anti-Western/anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist bent, a competent filler piece that will appeal to fans of Yahya Sinwar and Ho Chi Minh.  "The Middle of Nowhere" debuted in the issue of Galaxy in which Groff Conklin calls J. R. R. Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring and Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword "excellent" but admits he didn't finish either of them because he doesn't like fantasy.  "The Middle of Nowhere" would go on to be reprinted in various Pohl collections, and in a 1979 Soviet anthology of English and American SF.

The Frederik Pohl Omnibus also includes "The Day of the Boomer Dukes."
Science Fiction: English and American Short Stories apparently prints the stories
in English but has notes and an introduction in Russian.  The cover seems to show
a church, a curious choice for a book of science fiction stories printed in the USSR.

"The Gentle Venusian" (1958)

Another story from Galaxy, where it appeared as "The Gentlest Unpeople."  Is this going to be one of those stories that dramatizes how terrible humans (or just white humans) are by presenting a goody goody nonhuman as a foil to the rapacious and racist Earthman?  Galaxy editor H. L. Gold liked this one enough to include it in The Fourth Galaxy Reader alongside Avram Davidson's "Or All The Seas With Oysters," Margaret St. Clair's "Horrer Howce," and Robert Sheckley's "The Gun Without a Bang," all of which are the subjects of positive reviews here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  (You'll also find in The Fourth Galaxy Reader Fritz Leiber's "What's He Doing in There?," which I called "an acceptable trifle.")  "The Gentle Venusian" also shows up is the pages of a 1965 Hungarian anthology.  

"The Gentle Venusian" is a long tedious misanthropic joke story.  Thumbs down!

The insect people of Venus are smarter and nicer and blah blah blah than humans.  The first scenes of the story follow two Venerians as they play a complex version of golf in which you throw a bejeweled boomerang.  These boomerangs are passed down from generation to generation--boomerang golf is at the very center of Venerian culture and society.  The two insect men find that a fellow boomeranger has been murdered, his boomerang stolen.  The culprit--a low-IQ middle-aged Earthman, David T. Jiminez!  Dirty Dave, as he is called, was a horse jockey thrown out of the biz because he was found to have drugged a horse.  So he became a spaceman at the age of 49.  You see, few men can go to space--the cosmic rays slay them--and Jiminez is one of the handful of winners of the genetic lottery who has immunity to the rays.  The government sent Dirty Dave to Venus on a one-man autopiloted rocket to babysit research apparatus, but DD has been throwing out all the automatic survey equipment and filling the rocket with stuff he has stolen from the submissive and comically polite natives.  You see, thousands of years ago the Venerians were ambitious and aggressive and came to the brink of wiping themselves out in a war--after that close call they developed a culture of extreme politeness and deference.  DD plans to somehow alter the course of the rocket when it automatically blasts off for Earth and land it in some remote area like the Congo and there live off the gems and platinum he has seized from the Venerian natives--these commodities, rare on Earth, are common on Venus.

The Venerian bug men currently live in a utopia; while they play games all day, robots do all the work.  Robots also handle law enforcement and a huge robot arrests Dirty Dave for interfering with the boomerang gold game and drags him to the slammer.  Convicted by the robot cop, DD is sentenced to death.  The Venerians feel bad for him and tell him they are helping him escape, but actually they are only sparing him the anxiety of waiting to be executed--they lead him right into the arms of the robot executioner who tears him limb from limb.  I guess that is the punchline joke.  There is an additional final joke--a few bug men decide to climb into the automatic rocket and return with it to Earth.

Waste of time, a series of jokes about how Jiminez is stupid and arrogant and loves to drink and the natives are overly polite and obsessed with playing their boomerang golf game.  It is curious that Dirty Dave has a Spanish name--maybe in the 1950s there were a lot of famous Spanish or Latin American jockeys?  Or is there a chance his name is a reference to conquistador treatment of Native Americans?  (Not that the Aztecs and Incas were all that gentle or polite.)

"The Day of the Boomer Dukes" (1956)

This one debuted in Robert Lowdnes' Future Science Fiction, in an issue with plenty of fun illustrations by Emsh, Freas and Orban.  It would be reprinted in an anthology with a great cover by Ralph Brillhart, Masters of Science Fiction, and several Pohl collections, including the British volume Survival Kit. 

"The Day of the Boomer Dukes" is an ambitious piece of work, a jocular time travel and hidden-elites-are-ruling-the-universe story, split into four chapters, each with its own first person narrator, each of whom has a wacky name and a dialect with its own slang and colloquialisms, which can make reading it a little challenging; for example, our first narrator's memoir is sprinkled with French words that are spelled phonetically.  "The Day of the Boomer Dukes" is not a straightforward story; you sort of have to figure some of it out, some plot components being presented to you obliquely rather than spelled out simply.  I'm judging "The Day of the Boomer Dukes" to be almost good, or maybe borderline good, certainly better than the first two stories we looked at today.

In the far future a guy (or maybe a robot?) is bored and wants to live a life of adventure.  He studies old texts and a book called U.S.A. Confidential gets him excited about 1950s America--he collects a bunch of energy weapons and gets himself transported to New York City in the Fifties in hopes of joining the Mafia and waging war on society.  U.S.A. Confidential is a real book, published in 1952 by two journalists that, apparently, described the "dark underbelly" of American life in a way that offended lefties; Pohl here suggests that among the book's sins was its exaggeration of the size and power of the Mafia.

The time traveler runs afoul of teenaged street gangs.  The leader of a gang called The Boomer Dukes, our second narrator, acquires the time traveler's ray pistols and forcefield generator and, high on heroine, decides to go to war against the police--the cops' revolvers cannot penetrate the forcefield, rendering this thug almost invincible.  Our third narrator is a cowardly and incompetent journalist who is sent to investigate the fighting in Manhattan.  Our fourth is a woman secret agent from the future.  It seems there is a vast organization of time police or history police who are working undercover in every period of human history; they impersonate natives and employ an array of high tech devices as they strive to prevent time travelers from changing history.  She and her comrades neutralize the leader of The Boomer Dukes, and then she leads the effort to clean up the mess; many people have been killed and much property destroyed in the fighting, and this whole episode has to be kept from humanity, so the dead, and even witnesses to the fracas, are replaced with android simulacra who look like the deceased and will take on their appointed roles in history.  

Survival Kit includes all three of today's stories
The master recyclers at Belmont would reuse the gorge Brillhart cover on
Masters of Science Fiction four years later on the Theodore Cogswell collection The Third Eye 

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All three of these stories are about selfish individuals who threaten the status quo and are dealt with by their betters; SF often celebrates change agents and paradigm shifts, but these stories are all about distant, even secret, authorities maintaining the status quo.  "The Middle of Nowhere" is a serious-minded adventure story in which everything goes wrong for the protagonist, who doesn't realize he is the villain; in some ways it is more like a horror story than an adventure tale as he and his fellows suffer one disaster after another and a final cataclysm is foreshadowed on the last page.  "The Gentle Venusian" has the same anti-imperial/anti-Western/anti-capitalist politics as "The Middle of Nowhere" but is a broad humor story with silly caricatured characters and tired banal jokes (this guy is a dummy and a drunk!  Ha ha!)  "The Day of the Boomer Dukes" is also a joke story, but the humor is based on the personalities of far more believable and fleshed-out characters, it uses more challenging narrative techniques and deals with more complex science fiction themes, and the political themes are more subtle.

I don't share Pohl's political convictions, and I am allergic to joke stories, but there is inherently interesting material in two of today's stories, and Pohl is such an important figure in SF history even the story I thought was bad was worth reading in order to gain further familiarity with his body of work.  We'll probably finish up Tomorrow Times Seven soon, so stay tuned, pinkos!

Gil Brewer: Wild to Possess

He did want a drink.  He wanted one badly.  However, a good share of the hell that was on his back right now was there because he'd been drunk for so long--jumping at chances, blundering, unable to reason properly.  For damned sure, gin had done him foul play.

Back in November, I spent a day in Minneapolis, mostly to go to the art museum, though I did also go to Trader Joe's where I bought the dried apricots that would make me sick when I ate almost a pound of them on the long drive back to my mother-in-law's.  Oh, yeah, I also went to Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore and Uncle Edgar's Mystery Bookstore at its new post-riot location to look around.  I bought a little stack of books as souvenirs of my visit to this storied institution in the social history of genre literature, and among the pile were three Stark House reprints of Gil Brewer novels.  You'll perhaps recall that we read Brewer's Gold Medal novel Backwood Teaser in 2022.  (Also note that tarbandu has been reading Gold Medal books and blogging about them--check out what he has to say at the links!)   

Today, let's read Wild to Possess as it appears in a 2006 omnibus edition of Stark House Noir Classics; the volume also includes A Taste for Sin and supplementary biographical material from critically-acclaimed crime writer Bill Pronzini and Brewer's wife Verlaine.  Wild to Possess first was published in 1959 by Monarch Books.

Neither Lew nor Janice had any living family when they left Ohio and moved to Florida and got married.  Janice was beautiful and horny and the sex was fantastic!  But after some months she turned cold towards Lew, started cheating on him.  Both of them began drinking heavily, making dumb impulsive decisions.  Janice wanted a divorce--Lew refused.  One day he found her in bed with her boyfriend Deke on Deke's yacht--both of them were dead, shot through the head, apparently while making the beast with two backs!  Instead of calling the cops, Lew, drunk as usual, decided to toss the bodies overboard and propel the boat out to sea.  That was four months ago. Lew has moved to a different Florida town, set up a little sign-making business, and is dating another gorgeous chick who loves the old in-out, Rita.  Every day he is haunted by the memory of Janice, every day he hits the sauce in an effort to forget, though the only time he really can forget is while he is banging Rita.  Rita is putting her promiscuous slut days behind her--she is in love with Lew and has foresworn other men.  Taking the path of least resistance, Lew has been saying he loves Rita, but it's a lie--to Lew, Rita is just "a good lay."

As the story begins (we learn all the above in flashbacks and exposition interspersed throughout the first 30 pages or so of Wild to Possess) Lew, working late at night hammering into the dirt along the highway signs he has made, stumbles upon a car parked out of sight of the road.  Inside are a man and a woman--they have sex while Lew listens (this guy Lew is always tripping over horny chicks) and discuss their plot to commit murder!  Upstanding citizens like you or I would inform the cops of this discovery tout suite, but Lew decides to play solo detective and try to figure out who these two monsters are so he can blackmail them!

The car in which the killers were participating in a little horizontal recreation is quite recognizable, and Lew soon figures out their identities: Isobel, owner of an antique shop, and her boyfriend Ralph, who runs a shoe store.  Lew approaches Isobel at the antique store and gets himself hired making signs for an ad campaign for the store.  Lew again hears Ralph and Isobel having sex, this time when he is hiding in Isobel's bedroom closet, he having broken into her home as part of his investigation.  He also hears them planning the murder of Ralph's wife Florence--they will claim Florence has been kidnapped and extract a quarter million dollars from Florence's mother for ransom.  The next step in Lew's project is to spy on Ralph's house, where he sees Florence naked--Florence is the fourth gorgeous babe in this book, and, in fact, she looks like Janice!  Lew begins to hope Florence doesn't get killed.  

As if Lew doesn't have enough on his plate already, Deke's brother Herbert shows up--while Lew investigates and starts putting pressure on Isobel and Ralph, this guy Herbert is investigating Lew and putting pressure on him!  Herbert is confident Lew has something to do with his philandering brother's disappearance and the way Deke's yacht washed up in the Bahamas with nobody aboard.  And of course there's Rita, distracting Lew from his complicated operations with her cloying love, her desperate lust--she is a real freak in bed, but when he is having sex with her Lew is often thinking of Janice or, now, of Isobel.  

     

The night Ralph ties up his wife and carries her to Isobel's car, Lew is watching from the shadows, and, when Ralph drives Florence to a remote cabin like 50 miles away, Lew is tailing him.  What is Lew going to do?  Rescue Florence?  Kidnap Florence himself?  Kill her?  Drunk as usual, suffering pangs of conscience and stricken with lust for Florence's perfect body, Lew isn't quite sure himself what he is going to do with Florence when he busts into the cabin after Ralph has departed.  Does Lew have the nerve, is he cold enough, is he greedy enough, to do whatever it takes to get his own sweaty hands on the quarter mil that Florence's mother is, presumably, going to fork over* when Ralph, impersonating kidnappers, demands it?      

*You are going to have to take my word for it that I had "fork over" in the draft of this blogpost before I read it in the spoiler-rich back cover text of the 1959 Monarch edition of Wild to Possess.

In the final 40 or so of Wild to Possess's 120 pages, Lew, half out of his mind with booze and fear, has to match wits and fists with Florence, Ralph, Herbert, and Isobel in his insane quest for the $250,000, and each of them is approximately as clever and as desperate as he is.  People get shot, there are gruesome hand-to-hand fights, and who lives and who dies seems quite unconnected to moral virtue, physical prowess or intellectual ability--Brewer depicts a world in chaos in which outcomes seem to depend on luck.  In a brief moment of sobriety Lew realizes he is going too far, has to cut out all this nonsense with committing crimes and chasing easy money, but he is already in too deep and things only get more dangerous and insane.  Lew manages to survive because of luck and because of the love of Rita, who endures one dreadful experience after another because of Lew.

The ending of Wild to Possess is a little disappointing, as Lew neither gets off scot-free with his insane schemes, nor does he suffer what I would consider a just punishment--as with the misbehaving protagonist of Backwoods Teaser, I feel like Lew gets off a little too lightly after his rank misdeeds; sure, he is going to do some jail time, but Rita is going to wait for him.  You might argue Wild to Possess is a redemption story in which Lew changes for the better after seeing the error of his ways, but Brewer fails to portray Lew as making any kind of sacrifice or doing any sort of good deed that would earn forgiveness or balance the scales.     

Even if I might have preferred seeing Lew get killed or make it to Cuba with the cash in one sweaty mitt and the evil Isobel or the wronged Florence in the other, and it is never really clear why Lew wants that money so badly (he doesn't seem to need money to bag hot girls), I enjoyed Wild to Possess.  The novel is fast paced, with short sentences, short paragraphs, and short chapters full of action and tension.  The novel is tense, suspenseful--Lew is constantly sweating, constantly drinking, and again and again we hear about how his heart is pounding, his mind reeling.  The way I am writing about it may make Brewer's novel seem repetitive, and when I was orally describing the plot to podcaster Munchie I kept laughing because it all seemed so ridiculous, but when I was actually reading the book I didn't find it silly or monotonous at all, but legitimately absorbing.  Thumbs up for Wild to Possess.

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We'll be reading more Gil Brewer, but first it is back to short stories by science fiction Grand Masters.  Stay tuned!

Theodore Sturgeon: "The Other Celia," "The Pod in the Barrier," and "The Girl Had Guts"

Left, a 1964 Italian edition. Right, a 1970 US edition

Thank you for attending another of our Ted talks.  Today we finish up with my DAW 1978 edition of Theodore Sturgeon's 1958 collection A Touch of Strange.  The book has nine stories, and we discussed the first three here, and the middle three here.  Today we deal with the final three.  I have already read the first of today's three stories, and I liked it so much when I read it over ten years ago that I still remember it and have no doubt that this blog post will contain my favorite of the stories in A Touch of Strange.

"The Other Celia" (1957)

So here it is, perhaps my favorite story by Sturgeon, a brilliant weird tale I read long ago and reread today and happily find I love as much as I did the first time round.  Five out of five peepholes for "The Other Celia," a speculative fiction masterpiece!

In the past I have complained that Sturgeon has a penchant for describing activities in too much detail, to the point that it is boring and takes the reader out of the story--he does this in "Killdozer" and in "The Touch of Your Hand" when describing the operation of heavy construction equipment.  Here in "The Other Celia" he describes activities in similarly exhaustive detail, but in this story the actions he describes are bizarre and fascinating, and instead of boring you and wasting your time, Sturgeon paints vivid and striking images and generates almost unbearable suspense.  Perhaps more importantly, in "The Other Celia" Sturgeon creates two unforgettable characters, people quite alien to the reader (I hope!) and yet with disturbingly sympathetic personalities that lead the reader to identify with them despite their fundamental strangeness.

Slim Walsh is a tall, thin, shy guy who has no respect for personal boundaries!  He is driven by a powerful curiosity--he feels an irresistible urge to know as much about other people, their secrets, as possible.  He doesn't leverage these secrets to make money or anything, he just gots to know!  Sturgeon describes in detail how he spies on other people in his shabby boarding house, creating peepholes and trespassing while leaving no signs of intrusion and so forth.  All these descriptions are compelling and put the reader on edge--he is invading the privacy of others in a way that is disturbing, and at the same time we sort of sympathize with Slim and worry he will be caught.

The most unusual person in the boarding house is a nondescript woman who studiously keeps to herself, a Celia Sarton.  This woman seems to have no character, no personality--when Slim invades her apartment he finds no sign of any interests or relationships whatsoever.  Intrigued, he takes pains to learn more, and stumbles upon an almost unbelievable reality--Celia is of some other species which has somehow evolved in parallel with humanity and whose members masquerade as human.  Slim, and we readers, watch as Celia conducts the necessary operations to make her totally alien body conform to human shape so she can continue her lonely and humdrum life among us.  Slim, ever curious, interferes with Celia's assumption of her disguise, to see what might happen, and his meddling has tragic consequences.

We might consider "The Other Celia" a story about urban loneliness, and/or a feminist story, an allegory of how women do things in private to alter their appearances, things men might find strange or disgusting but which (according to feminists, at least) they are forced into by men if they want to lead any sort of independent existence in our society.  We might even say that it is the male gaze that kills poor Celia, who never hurt anybody.  Thinking more broadly, the story may be about we all have secrets and the revelation of those secrets might, if only metaphorically/psychologically, destroy us.  

A Sturgeon story the equal of or superior to his famous "Microcosmic God."  The thing is flawless:  every passage contributes to the plot or atmosphere.  Characteristics like Sturgeon's vaunted "humanism" and aforementioned tendency to describe in detail are present and contribute to the success of the story, while other of Ted's recurring attributes, the ones that might annoy me, like the elitism that leads a guy to become famous for saying that 90% of everything is shit and to stuff his stories with misanthropy and condescending lectures, are thankfully absent.  Strongly recommended to fans of all sorts of genre fiction, as "The Other Celia" has crime/detective elements as well as weird/science fiction/fantasy elements, what with all the suspenseful sneaking and spying going on.    

"The Other Celia" debuted in Galaxy, and has appeared in many science fiction and horror anthologies.  

"The Pod in the Barrier" (1957) 

Here we have a quite long space adventure with lots of exposition about the history of space empires and lots of dialogue in which people argue about science and explain, directly or indirectly, esoteric and unbelievable phenomena.  Luckily, I found all that jazz pretty entertaining.  Sturgeon also slathers the themes of love and redemption on pretty thick, providing characters who exemplify kindness and self-sacrifice and love love love, but that stuff, though kind of sentimental and goopy, also works, if only because it is leavened with plenty of whiz bang stuff about missiles and force fields and the like.  There is a ton of stuff going in this story, but little of it feels like padding--most of "The Pod in the Barrier's" text really does move the plot or contribute entertainment value to the experience of reading it. 

isfdb labels "The Pod in the Barrier" a novelette, and it has the structure of a novel, with lots of characters who have their personalities described and then demonstrate those personalities, and whose personalities and relationships evolve as the story proceeds in ways that drive the plot and resolve the plot obstacles.

I'll try to describe the narrative briefly, background first, which we don't learn in one gulp but in intermittent installments.  The human race is in trouble because of overpopulation, one symptom of which is riots breaking out all the time!  Mankind has explored many star systems, but very few inhabitable planets have been discovered, and the accessible ones are already being overcrowded with human colonists.  An additional bunch of systems with planets we could colonize have been discovered, but they are beyond an impenetrable forcefield!  The people who put up the forcefield, the Luanae, are very friendly, real generous goody goodies who would love to do us a solid, and in fact they have transmitted to us all kinds of useful information that has advanced human technology by leaps and bounds.  But they are unable to turn off the forcefield!  Sturgeon devotes long passages to describing the historical, sociological, and technological reasons why and how the Luanae set up a forcefield run by an AI that is now smarter than they are; these fictional history lessons are actually sort of convincing and rather fun.

The main plot involves the latest of many human expeditions sent to the forcefield in hopes of somehow getting through it to those much-needed planets.  The ship has a crew of four scientists and three crewmembers: the captain/pilot, a sort of handyman lackey guy they call the utility monkey, and a professional prostitute referred to as the crew girl or CG.  One of the scientists is our narrator.  Each of these seven people has an idiosyncratic personality, including the narrator, who is an arrogant jerk.  The CG, for example, is terrible at her (ostensible) job.  CGs are a typical component of star ship crews, and are there to have sex with the men to maintain morale.  But the CG on this trip has a personality that the four scientists find absolutely repulsive, so they have no interest in having sex with her.  This woman is a radical skeptic who doubts everything, and somehow, perhaps just with the tone of her voice, transmits her doubt to others, making the men doubt themselves and all their beliefs, a very uncomfortable situation.  Only the utility monkey can stand the CG, and they don't have sex, though the monkey is in love with her, and strives to get her believe in something.

The ship gets to the barrier.  Each of the four scientists has a theory on how to defeat the force field, and all fail--in fact, the captain points out the glaring faults in their theories even before they have been tried.  This mission has been conducted under false pretenses--the captain himself is an expert in many sciences, maybe the superior to the four passengers, and the CG is the key to penetrating the force field!  She casts a field of doubt that has the potential to make Luanae technology fail.  The captain explains to her how Luanae technology operates, and she doubts the explanation, and this dampens enough of the field that she can fly in a pod to the space station that controls the field and detonate a nuclear bomb to permanently deactivate the field and save the human race.  Her doubt also makes the ship's own Luanae-designed interstellar drive fail; it is expected that she will die in the nuclear explosion, because if she lives the ship won't be able to reach to any human habitable planets!  They have all been on something like a suicide mission!  The sacrifice of the CG drives the utility monkey berserk!

Luckily, the kindness of the Luanae saves the CG's life from the nuclear blast and the love of the utility monkey eases the CG's doubts so that the drive gets back online, so everybody survives the mission.

Like "The Other Celia," "The Pod in the Barrier" has hallmarks of Sturgeon's work--here all the love and Utopian jazz--that can sometimes sink a Sturgeon story, but these Sturgeon hobby horses are reined in so as not to be obnoxious or overwhelming and appear alongside effective adventure and speculative science material.  The result is a story I can recommend.  Thumbs up for "The Pod in the Barrier."   

"The Pod in the Barrier" first saw print in Galaxy, and has reappeared in many Sturgeon collections, but few anthologies--isfdb lists only one, a French one from 1977 with a title that means something like Star Beacons and Atomic Trails or Stellar Lighthouses and Atomic Wakes.

"The Girl Had Guts" (1957) 

Are you ready for a "mind-blowing" bit of "hard science fiction" set in the far future?  Well, that is what we have been promised by the cover text on Mike Ashley's 2006 anthology The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction, which includes "The Girl Had Guts."  

Oy, this story is extreme, and did make my mind reel--"The Girl Had Guts" is one of the most disgusting exercises in body horror I have ever experienced.  Gross!

Our narrator is a space captain who has just returned from a mission, a check up on some scientists conducting a survey of an Earth-like planet.  He describes to his wife what he discovered--the horror that destroyed almost all members of the survey team.  Sturgeon does not skimp when describing these people's horrible injuries, nauseating illnesses, and psyche-shattering terror.  The space captain relates the nightmare suffered by the scientists not in detective story fashion--narrating how he figured it out from documents and interviews and other clues--or in newspaper fashion--the most important facts followed by details--but like an adventure story, chronologically.

The scientists again and again got involved in fights with the large native fauna of the planet and also found themselves falling victim to natural disasters and all were injured, killed, and/or diseased.  One of the monsters was a sort of oozing blob creature that seemed to appear out of nowhere and secreted acids that could burn right through human flesh--a man's face and a woman's fingers were both melted away.  Horrific.  Eventually the astounding truth about this blob monster is revealed to use readers--the creature is the abdominal organs of a mammal, ejected through the mouth during a moment of terror to act as an autonomous defender of its erstwhile owner.  (Apparently Sturgeon got this idea from the behavior of some sea cucumbers, which expel parts of their respiratory systems when attacked, and the way some lizards shed their tails to distract predators.)  A native primate, scared by a scientist, "used" this involuntary, autonomic ability, ejecting its liver and stomach which then proceeded to flop around and attack the scientist.  Even more horrible, even more disgusting, this ability was not native to the primate, but the result of infection with a kind of parasitic virus, and the scientist unknowingly contracted the same ability!  And so did the other scientists!  And when they got scared by other dangers, their organs leapt out of their mouths to start attacking others!  Yikes! 

To cap off the horror, the space captain, after telling this story to his wife, learns his wife has been unfaithful to him with one of his crewmen when she gets a scare and ejects her abdominal organs, she having contracted the virus from his cuckolding comrade!  Yikes again!

A very effective story, well-written, well paced, and well organized, though I will repeat as a warning to the squeamish that the main effect of the story is to disgust the reader.  There are additional themes that develop in parallel to the gore and horror, including a celebration of the heroism of one of the women scientists, and a subtheme that concerns the nature of sexual relationships in the future.  (All three of today's stories have female characters who are integral to their plots and are sympathetic or admirable or both, and all have noteworthy sexual elements or at least undertones.)  Like "The Pod in the Barrier" there is a lot going on in this story and it is all pretty compelling, though the body horror business overshadowed everything for this squeamish reader.      

"The Girl Had Guts" appeared in the same issue of Venture as Poul Anderson's "Virgin Planet;" I read the novel version of Virgin Planet back in 2017 and enjoyed it.  "The Girl Had Guts" has been reprinted in a few anthologies besides Ashley's, including a 1984 French anthology.

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So, we finish off A Touch of Strange with three good stories, including two that are remarkable, "The Other Celia" being a masterpiece and "The Girl Had Guts" being remarkably disgusting.  Did the DAW people deliberately put the three best stories at the end of the book?  The stories are in a totally different order in the 1958 Doubleday hardcover, with "The Pod in the Barrier" the first story and "The Other Celia" and "The Girl Had Guts" together in the middle.  Hmm.

Well, I'm thrilled to have finished this series of blog posts with three winners after having contended with mediocre material in the first two installments of this three-part project, and to have gathered some examples with which to defend Sturgeon from the criticisms of tarbandu and other Sturgeon detractors.

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It's been I think eight posts in a row about short stories by major speculative fiction writers.  Let's mix things up with a crime novel next time.  See you then!

Theodore Sturgeon: "A Crime for Llewellyn," "It Opens the Sky," and "A Touch of Strange"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading the 1978 DAW edition of the 1958 Theodore Sturgeon collection A Touch of Strange.  Today we tackle the middle three stories of this printing, "A Crime for Llewellyn," "It Opens the Sky," and the title track.  Hold on to your seats as the boys down in marketing are promising us three unforgettable masterpieces and, in a blurb on an abridged 1965 edition of A Touch of Strange, Damon Knight proclaimed Sturgeon "certainly one of the top two or three living American science fiction."  Certainly!

"A Crime for Llewellyn" (1957)

First up, a story that debuted in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and was promoted on the cover alongside a violence-against-women illo that you probably shouldn't admit makes your heart go pitter patter!  Also present in this issue is a story by Robert Sheckley, whose work I generally avoid because I always expect his fiction to consist of broad jokes, though he and Judith Merrill have caught me via the cunning use of pseudonyms.  "A Crime for Llewellyn" has not been anthologized, though it did appear in British and Australian editions of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, mate, and a bunch of Sturgeon collections.

Llewellyn is a short fat guy who is none too bright.  He was raised by two maiden aunts who died when he was young, and has no family.  He works a job as a clerk at a free clinic; all the men with whom he works tell tales of their weekend drinking, gambling, bar fighting, and chick banging.  Llewellyn doesn't drink or smoke or gamble, and his colleagues think of him as a goody-two-shoes who has never sinned.  But Llewellyn doesn't think of himself as a goody-two-shoes--he thinks of himself as a rogue!  You see, Llewellyn has a dark secret that none of his colleagues know about!  Llewellyn is keeping house with a woman named Ivy, a smarty who does proofreading for a living, and has been for nineteen years!  Llewellyn's knowledge that he is living in sin--having sex on a regular schedule (six times a month)--means he feels the equal of the other men and isn't made envious or embarrassed by their braggadocio.  

But then one day Ivy reveals the terrible truth--very early in their relationship he got drunk (for the first and only time) and while he was blotto they got married!  He hasn't been living in sin after all!  He begins to feel like a loser!  Inspired by the soap operas he listens to on the radio, he decides to have a fling with an actress!  But he doesn't have any money--Ivy handles all the money--he doesn't even have a wallet!  Those spinster aunts taught him nothing, and Ivy has been doing everything for him, so he has no idea how to function in the world beyond their apartment or his cage at the clinic.

The story becomes a series of joke incidents in which Llewellyn tries to commit some sin in order to regain his self esteem and sense of himself as a man but is foiled.  He tries to steal bonds from Ivy but it turns out that the bonds are legally his.  He leaves Ivy and tries to commit bigamy by marrying some other woman, but in the meantime Ivy has talked to a shrink who has somehow diagnosed her husband's mental condition without ever meeting him and explained Llewellyn's problem to her and so she has had their marriage annulled--as a result he is not a bigamist after all.  Finally he drugs his new wife so she won't wake up while he is gone and sneaks into Ivy's apartment and tries to murder her first wife, but Ivy is already dead of pneumonia.  Llewellyn is doomed to a living death, a sinless existence in which he doesn't feel like a real man.

"A Crime for Llewellyn" is a story about what it means to be a man and about emasculation, about how being coddled by women who--for your own good!--deny you any independence destroys you and ushers in further destruction.  Ivy calls her husband "Lulu," which sounds like a woman's name.  He listens to soap operas with headphones because Ivy doesn't like them--the world turned upside down!  Lulu helps with the cooking and does the marketing, all based on a rigid schedule, just like his sex life!  Both of his wives handle all the finances, Lulu being unable to navigate even the most rudimentary process of banking.  Thus emasculated, Llewellyn overcompensates, committing (or at least trying to commit) terrible crimes to prove his manhood, hurting the women who love him.  (Chillingly, he doesn't seem to have any affection for these women, sees them as mere instruments in managing his own convenience and psychological well-being.)  

I enjoyed "A Crime for Llewellyn" for most of its length, when Llewellyn, Ivy, and the fat ugly woman who thought no one would ever love her until Llewellyn proposed and married her felt like real people with realistic relationships who earned my sympathy.  The style and pacing were comfortable and funny.  But as the story neared its conclusion and got increasingly crazy and the characters started doing terrible things and suffering terrible fates my enjoyment waned.  "A Crime for Llewellyn" is on the borderline between acceptable and marginally good.

The Berkley Medallion 1965 edition of A Touch of Strange prints only seven stories.
The 1978 Sturgeon collection printed by French firm Presses Pocket features an ant with a fleshless 
human skull for a head, which is a new one on me.  

"It Opens the Sky" (1957)

As with "A Crime for Llewellyn," I enjoyed "It Opens the Sky" until the end, which was disappointingly ridiculous.  This story bears some resemblance to Harry Harrison's first Stainless Steel Rat novel, which is sort of interesting, and has a structure much like that of a hard-boiled detective story.

It is the future--the human race has had a vast interstellar civilization for thousands of years.  Peace is maintained by the Angels, golden supermen who have an array of powers--invisibility, flight, teleportation, invulnerability, immortality, etc.  There has been no war and very little crime for centuries.  

Deeming is one of the few criminals.  He feels oppressed by ordinary life, as if the sky is a lid, weighing down on him--this is a metaphor that recurs throughout the story.  So he has become a master of disguise who lives a double life--normally Deeming is a boring clerk, but when he sees an opportunity to steal he takes on the role of expert con man and thief.  "It Opens the Sky" begins with a scene in which Denning robs a sad drunken widow of a very valuable watch, the only thing she has left from her husband.

A staggeringly rich businessman, Richard Rockhard, contacts Deeming.  He needs a man of Denning's abilities to undertake a perilous mission--as a reward, Deeming will receive a tremendous reward, far more moolah than he has ever seen!  Rockhard has a son who is in trouble, Donald.  Don is an archaeologist and wanted to conduct a dig on a planet the Angels have decreed forbidden and surrounded with an impenetrable force field.  Richard and Don came into possession of two tiny one-man alien space craft that can penetrate the force field.  Unfortunately, they didn't realize that the alien vessel can only penetrate the forcefield one way--now Don is trapped on the forbidden planet.  Luckily, Richard's boffins figured out how to modify the second alien ship to pass through the force field both ways.  Deeming's job is to take the second alien ship and rescue Don.  There are a bunch of intermediary steps to this mission that I won't go into here.

Sturgeon does a good job with all the things Deeming has to do to get to Don: all the technology--like how the space ships work--all the espionage and heist and chase elements, and all the moral dilemmas Deeming has to resolve.  Deeming learns on a news broadcast that the government has arrested Richard Rockhard and seized all his assets--should Deeming still take the terrible risk of trying to rescue Don, even though now no reward will be forthcoming?  While trying to achieve his mission, Deeming meets "a slender girl in her mid-teens" and falls in love with her--will he exploit her to get the job done despite her innocence and his feelings for her?  And so forth.

I was really enjoying this story for like 35 pages but then came the twist ending.  There is no Richard Rockhard!  There is no Donald Rockhard!  Deeming has not been outwitting the Angels as a thief since his childhood, nor in his effort to rescue Don!  It has all been an illusion, all a test run by the supergenius Angels!  Since he was a kid, Deeming showed great intelligence and ambition and these admirable characteristics have manifested themselves in his thefts and (apparent) evasion of detection by the Angels.  But it is now revealed to us readers that Deeming always gave back to people that which he had stolen!  And it is revealed to Deeming by the Angels that they were watching his every move since childhood because he is a candidate for Angelhood!  The commission from Rockhard, a man who does not exist, was an elaborate illusion, a test of Deeming's ability to solve problems and to make the correct moral choices while under pressure.  And he has passed the test!  Deeming can become an Angel!  The powers he will have as an Angel will end his feeling of being constricted, will open up the sky for him.

Before he takes on the mantle of Angelhood, the Angels hook Deeming up with that "girl in her mid-teens" and they get married and have a bunch of kids and grandkids.  Deeming is transformed into an immortal Angel after his wife dies of old age.

"It Opens the Sky" is the ultimate have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too story.  Deeming is a master thief who is always outwitting people--but still a very very good guy!  The future is a totalitarian police state whose overlords employ surveillance capabilities and invincible commissars the likes of which the Chinese Communist Party can only dream--but don't worry, the commissars who watch your every move are all nice guys who do everything to protect you and nothing to abuse you!  Deeming decides to devote his life to serving mankind, but he doesn't have to sacrifice love and family life to do so--he can spend 60 years building a beautiful family with a wonderful spouse and then be mustered into the ranks of the immortal guardians.  In real life we all have to face trade offs, make sacrifices, incur opportunity costs, but not here in Ted's wish fulfillment fantasy (in which you can marry a 16-year-old, hubba hubba!)  Ted has laid yet another utopia on us!    

Alright, so I have some gripes about the last four or five pages of this story.  But I am still going to say "It Opens the Sky" is moderately good.  For one thing, I really did enjoy like 80 or 90% of it.  Also, even though the ending threw me for a loop, Sturgeon plays fair; all the wacky stuff at the end is foreshadowed and could have been predicted by a smarter reader than your humble blogger.  The style is smooth and the pacing and structure are all good.  

"It Opens the Sky" debuted in Venture, and has not been anthologized in English as far as isfdb can tell, though it has appeared in Russian anthologies.

"A Touch of Strange" (1958)

Are mermaids still trending?  I feel like mermaids were a trend a few months ago--crappy stores I found myself in seemed to have among the junk they were peddling stacks of mugs and T-shirts with the word "mermaid" emblazoned on them.  Anyway, Ted back in 1958 was on top of the mermaid trend with this here story, "A Touch of Strange," which first appeared in F&SF, and people seem to have loved it.  "A Touch of Strange" has reappeared in quite a few anthologies, including two different F&SF retrospectives, one printed in 1970, one in 2009.  When Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann's Mermaids! first appeared in 1986, Sturgeon's name was on top of the list on the cover, above Gene Wolfe's and Jane Yolen's.  M. L. Carter included the story in 1972's Demon Lovers and Strange Seductions, which has a strong Jeff Jones cover.  When Demon Lovers and Strange Seductions appeared a year later in Germany under the title Horror-Love, it had a somewhat shocking cover that pushes our buttons regarding topics like masturbation and self-mutilation.  Be careful with those scissors down there, lady!

Considering the titles borne by Ms. Carter's anthology, I expected something horrible to happen to somebody, but "A Touch of Strange" turns out to be a meet-cute love story with a happy ending, though there are some odd and creepy elements to it.  

A guy has been regularly having nighttime rendezvouses with a mermaid on a bunch of rocks a short swim away from the shore known as "Harpy's Jaw."  Tonight he goes to meet her and finds a human woman already there--she has come to Harpy's Jaw for one of her regular meetings with a merman!  The two humans start to talking, learn that they both are ordinary boring people without any particularly outstanding characteristics or experiences.  Symbolizing this, his name is John Smith and hers is Jane Dow and they both hail from a town called Springfield, though towns in different states.  The most interesting, the only strange, thing that has ever happened to either of them is the recent relationship with a merperson.  These relationships have an erotic character, but do not seem to include conventional mammal-style sexual intercourse; for one thing, merpeople reproduce as do many fish--the female lays a bunch of eggs and then the male ejaculates on them.  The humans have been kissing the merpeeps, an odd and even unsettling experience because merpeople's lips and teeth and tongues are very different from a human's.  Perhaps even more weird and disturbing, merpeople like to be insulted and to learn new "cuss words," and a major component of both John and Jane's relationships with merpeople is the development and utterance of harsh names and bitter sarcastic complaints, like "you baggy old guano-guzzler" and "Was that really you singin' or are you sitting on a blowfish?"

John and Jane fall in love, and before either of their scaly dates arrive they hurry away to live happily ever after.  It is hinted that maybe the merpeople set these two up--the merpeople are definitely portrayed as manipulative and controlling.  "They have a way of getting you to do what they want," says John of the merfolk, and the name of the rocks where these encounters all seem to happen is perhaps an oblique reference to the sirens of Greek mythology who draw men to their doom with their irresistible singing.  

This story is OK, I guess.  Besides finding "A Touch of Strange" a little slight, I am also finding it a little cryptic.  On the one hand it seems to be designed as a heartwarming celebration of the magic that is love, and on the other it has those weird bestiality and fetishistic erotic elements.  I keep wondering if I am missing some element of the humans' relationships with the merpeople, something beyond the kissing and "cussing," something that is hinted at the way homosexuality and penis gigantism are hinted at in "The Affair of the Green Monkey," one of the Sturgeon stories we read last episode.  Jane suggests her relationship with the merman is different than his relationship with the mermaid, but I'm not sure how--maybe John really did have intercourse with the mermaid?  Or more likely she erroneously assumes John had intercourse with the mermaid and John just doesn't disabuse Jane of her misapprehension.  Also, I'm not really sure what the significance of the merpeople's fascination with "cussing" is, how it connects to the other elements of the story, if at all.  Is the idea (sort of like in "A Crime for Llewellyn") that John and Jane are too monochromatically good and need to misbehave a little to become well-rounded people and thus truly lovable?

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These three pieces are better than the first batch of tales from A Touch of Strange.  None of them is bad and I'm willing to entertain the idea that two of them are good.  So, a welcome trend.  In our next episode we will finish up with A Touch of Strange and I already expect to be rating one of the stories very high, having read it years ago, so the trend is likely to continue.

Theodore Sturgeon: "Mr. Costello, Hero," "The Touch of Your Hand" and "Affair with a Green Monkey"

The recent criticisms of Theodore Sturgeon voiced by master blogger tarbandu, at his famed blog The PorPor Books Blog and here in the comments section of my very own little enterprise, have brought old Ted to mind.  I've been pretty hard myself on a bunch of Sturgeon stories, including "The Skills of Xanadu," "The Wages of Synergy," "The Comedian's Children," "Fear is a Business," and the Hugo-winning "Slow Sculpture."  But while tarbandu attacks Sturgeon's prose, calling it "mediocre," my main gripe about Sturgeon is his utopianism, his elitism, and his attachment to the idea of collective consciousness--I actually think Sturgeon is an able writer, and I even liked works tarbandu specifically singled out for attack, like the posthumous novel Godbody and the Dangerous Visions story "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"  Other Sturgeon stories I have lauded here at MPorcius Fiction Log include "The World Well Lost," "Make Room for Me," "The Heart," "And Now the News..." and "The Martian and the Moron."  (I'm not listing the many Sturgeon stories I have read since the debut of this blog over ten years ago which I judged only "acceptable" or "marginally good.")  So I guess you are going to have to call me a Sturgeon fan and a dissenter from tarbandu's view.  

Let's read some more Sturgeon today from my 1978 DAW edition of the 1958 Sturgeon collection A Touch of Strange.  (The Hans Arnold cover of this DAW printing, DAW No. 286, isn't great, but I like the Jack Gaughan frontispiece; you can see both--and more!--by clicking those links to some of my most information- and entertainment-rich tweets, tweets guaranteed to yield a rich harvest of unregretted user-seconds.)  There are nine stories in A Touch of Strange and I haven't blogged any of them, though at least one, "The Other Celia," I read in the years before I started this blog.  We'll start from the beginning of the book, reading three stories today and covering the rest in two further blog posts.

"Mr. Costello, Hero" (1953)

With the way he romanticizes collective consciousness in works like The Cosmic Rape AKA To Marry Medusa and the molding of society by elites in works like "Slow Sculpture," I tend to think of Sturgeon as a collectivist elitist.  So I was a little surprised to see the villain of "Mr. Costello, Hero" espouse a philosophy of unity, pursue a policy of government planning of all social and economic activity, and cavalierly dismiss the profit motive, almost as if the story was a satire of collectivists and maybe even a defense of individualism and business people.  I suppose it may still be that in part, but by the end of the story Sturgeon has diluted that angle, also painting the villain as a religious fanatic and as a power-hungry man who has no principles and just likes to pit majorities against minorities along whatever fault lines are available (not just ethnic distinctions) in order to destabilize societies and gain control over them.  The way the story's themes are inconstant and jump from one angle to another is matched by the personality of the villain, the Costello of the title, whose powers and modus operandi, as well as his motives, are unclear and a little all over the place.  Is he a hypnotist?  Or just a charismatic manipulator who also makes brazen use of blackmail?  Sometimes Costello seems like a sincere totalitarian ideologue and a real clever operator, other times to be absolutely insane.

"Mr. Costello, Hero," is narrated by the purser of a civilian star ship, a trading vessel that follows a regular route, making port at the same five or six systems one after the other in a regular circuit.  The narrator is not very smart, but is a sort of whiz with arithmetic and statistics, and is ideally suited to the job of managing the ship's stores and merchandise and handling passports and manifests and things.  As the story begins, the captain of the ship is complaining that a passenger, Mr. Costello, has had a strange effect on crew behavior--the men trust each other less, and seem to have developed a reluctance to be alone.  Everybody on the ship, except the skipper, is very fond of Costello, and there is an off-stage political/psychological struggle between Costello and the captain which we learn about in fragments second or third hand--Costello is the winner of the struggle, largely by employing the strategy of making recording of people's speech and then using the recordings as blackmail or as misleading legal evidence. 

Costello gets off the ship at a planet the economy of which relies largely on trappers who live alone out in the wilderness for long periods of time and then bring furs to market.  When the narrator's ship comes to this planet next time he finds that Costello has reworked the entire society, turning the place into a totalitarian police state dedicated to his own stated belief that all of humankind should be "a single unit" and "sin" is the result of being alone, of enjoying privacy.  Being alone has become illegal and people are forced to live in barracks where they can't even use the toilet in privacy, and the trappers are a shunned and demonized class, and the fur trade has been destroyed.  Costello wants to hire the narrator to help him keep track of population and economic statistics, to help him better control this planet, and, when he expands his rule to other planets, the entire human race.  Costello even suggests the purser will be awarded a sexy blonde girlfriend, the woman who stars in Costello's propaganda broadcasts, on which she recites such arguments as "All sin starts in the lonesome dark" and "humanity is a thing made up of many parts...any part that wants to go off by itself hurts the whole...." 

Even as he is describing stuff about Costello that makes us readers skeptical or hostile to the man, the narrator steadfastly maintains his fondness for Costello and he considers taking the job when his current contract runs out.  But when he next gets to that trapper planet he finds the Earth's Space Navy has the place blockaded and Costello has been seized and put in a mental institution.  The narrator is allowed to meet the internee, and finds Costello manipulating native hive insects the way he manipulated people on that trapper planet, setting a majority of alien ants against a minority, the same way he pitted the urban majority against the rural trapper minority.

"Mr. Costello, Hero" is just OK.  I've already suggested that it lacks singleness of purpose.  In the end we are told that Costello's modus operandi is to find a minority in a society and drive a wedge between it and the majority, and that all that unity of mankind anti-individualism stuff is just a smokescreen.  But on the ship at the start of the story Costello doesn't seem to have found a scapegoat minority, and all the collectivist stuff seems sincere.  This muddles the message, or exposes the story as having only a banal message or no message at all, which is disappointing.       

Another problem with "Mr. Costello, Hero" is that it feels long (it is it is like 25 pages in DAW No. 286) and a little slow.  I have a sort of allergy to stories in which a guy goes through the same experience again and again, like going to the same planet again and again, as in this story, and seeing a neutered Costello in captivity in the end to get the psychological explanation is pretty anticlimactic.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, seeing as Sturgeon titled the story "Mr. Costello, Hero," we have the fact that our narrator is more of a spectator than a participant in the story--the story isn't about the purser's pursuit of goals (he doesn't have much of any) and isn't propelled by his handling of obstacles or making of decisions.  The real protagonist is Mr. Costello, but most of Costello's struggles, his triumphs and defeats, happen off screen, and his real motives and personality are not clear, but are a mystery that is solved not by the narrator but by minor characters who pop up now and then only to disappear soon after.  Maybe "Mr. Costello, Hero," is Sturgeon's meditation on the idea of the hero in popular literature, say like John Carter or Conan, or on the hero in history, say Caesar or Napoleon, the man who bends the universe to his will and remakes society to his specifications.  How do ordinary people view these larger-than-life figures?  What are the motivations of the great man that lead to his campaign to change the world?  Should we admire or fear such men? 

Despite all these many gripes, the story is not all that boring or annoying as you are in the process of reading it, so "Mr. Costello, Hero" gets tossed into that large basket of stories that are neither deplorable nor laudable but merely acceptable.

   

"Mr. Costello, Hero" debuted in Galaxy, and has appeared in many anthologies, among them Frederik Pohl's Assignment in Tomorrow and Tom Boardman's Connoisseur's Science Fiction, which has a strange and perhaps disturbing cover illustration.  

Am I crazy, or is that cavalryman's face a woman's squashed breasts?

"The Touch of Your Hand" (1953)

Another Galaxy story, this one the cover story, though the great astronaut image by Emsh on the cover of the ish illustrates some other piece and has nothing to do with Sturgeon's "The Touch of Your Hand."  "The Touch of your Hand" hasn't been anthologized, but it has turned up in many Sturgeon collections.  

Like "Mr. Costello, Hero," "The Touch of Your Hand" is a long one (like 43 pages here in A Touch of Strange), and it feels very long because Sturgeon spends page after page describing boring activities, like work at a construction site, and on exposition that instead of setting the stage for the action explains the action after the fact, including a lecture on logic and a somewhat ludicrous sociology and history lesson.  Also like "Mr. Costello, Hero," it seems to be addressing one set of issues but then switches gears, and also like that story has a protagonist who doesn't really drive the plot, which is resolved by minor characters.     

The first half or so of "The Touch of Your Hand" feels like a fable or a fairy tale, an exploration of economic history and the rise of civilization that touches on subjects like the division of labor and economies of scale.  Like "Mr. Costello, Hero," it also considers the motivations of the great men who bend the universe to their will and build and change society, and whether those of us who are not great should embrace or resist such men and their visions.  

Our protagonist is a beautiful blonde woman, Jubilith, who lives in a peaceful village where individuals grow their own food and make their own tools and only a few people are specialists who engage in trade.  She is in love with a tall strong handsome man, Osser, but has seen Osser bullying other villagers into working with him, for him, building a stone tower.  Who needs a stone tower?  Why does Osser insist on forcing people to help him build it, but refuse to permit Jubilith, who aches to be at his side and support him, contribute to the construction?

To explain, Osser leads Jubilith on a long foot journey to a huge crater, within which are metal ruins.  Osser takes Jubilith deep underground, navigating the darkness with flashlights, to a chamber where he shows her a black and white film--never before has Jubilith experienced electricity or motion pictures.  The film is a sort of documentary of space flight and of a huge modern city of skyscrapers, automobiles, aircraft, and extravagantly attired crowds.  Osser finds in the city a grand vision and a purpose for himself; no doubt the city was built by strong driven men like himself, in command of inferior men and in competition with other great men.  Jubilith is skeptical--is all this material wealth worth pushing people around?  Do people really need multiple sets of clothes or to fly in the air--do such things make them happier?  Osser insists that the greatness of the city is worth all the cruelty and hardship involved in building the city, and sees himself as the founder of a rebirth of the high tech civilization of their ancestors.  His stone tower is only the beginning.

The text thus far had led me to believe that the story was set on Earth after a nuclear war.  But Sturgeon then pulled the rug right out from under me after Osser and Jubilith had seen the film.  First, Jubilith repairs a malfunctioning flashlight, opening it up and working on the innards of the thing, even though she has never seen one before.  Then, when the two climb out of the underground cinema, Sturgeon tells us there are two suns--this cannot be Earth!

Jubilith, unsure what to do about Osser, goes to consult the village's wiseman.  The guru explains the astonishing truth behind what is going on with Osser and the nature of Jubilith's people.  You see, these people have telepathy and a sort of collective consciousness, but it operates on a sort of subconscious, autonomic level--they don't talk with each other through thought waves or transmit and receive images and feelings, the way telepaths usually do in SF stories.  Instead, they subconsciously share expertise when confronted by a problem.  When Jubilith's flashlight was failing, the memories of another person from some other village on the planet, who had at one point repaired a flashlight, flooded into her mind.  Jubilith and almost everybody else on the planet takes this power for granted, doesn't even realize the knowledge is coming from another person.  With access to this vast store of knowledge, these people don't need to congregate in cities and almost nobody needs to specialize, because the knowledge of any one specialist is available to all others on the planet.  These people also don't have any written language or movies, as they have a far more efficient means of accessing information.  

So, what is up with Osser?  Well, the behind-the-scenes rulers of this society wanted to see what a person would be like who didn't have this telepathy, so they hypnotized a baby so it couldn't receive the telepathic transmissions.  Osser was that baby.  Osser felt like a loser all his youth, as he had to work hard to figure everything out, whereas everybody else just seemed to know how to handle any problem automatically.  The secret masters guided Osser to that movie theater, and the film led him to believe that his society was a fallen society, a weak one, and that he, being physically strong, could rebuild this  high-tech superior society by leveraging his strength and pushing people around.  

So, what is up with those ruins and that the movie theatre?  Well, ages ago, aliens who lacked telepathy arrived on the planet and the friendly natives permitted them to build cities in designated areas.  But eventually the fast-breeding aliens started encroaching on territory without permission and the natives had to exterminate them.  But the film is not of those colonials' cities--it is a film of the Earth!  Realizing the threat posed by alien races, the secret masters have sent probes out to study alien planets and monitor alien space ships.  Earth is one such planet.  The rulers' conclusion is that the telepaths cannot live in harmony with non-telepathic people--such people are violent and imperialistic and the only solution is to destroy them upon contact.  

In the kind of coincidence we see all the time in fiction, the very day Osser is trying to herd all the villagers out of their individual houses to the environs of his stone tower to become city dwellers is the day a space ship is due to arrive from Earth.  Autonomically accessing high tech knowledge, the villagers build and deploy a powerful piece of energy artillery while Osser watches.  The bulldozer and the energy cannon they somehow throw together in just hours put his stone tower to shame, and Osser goes insane seeing the building prowess of his fellows, people he thought totally uninterested in, and almost incapable of, building.  The Earth ship is disintegrated in the air above (Jubilith is assured the Earthers died painlessly.)  The wiseman hypnotically reverts Osser to childhood--he will live as a child in an adult's body all his days, happily innocent, blissfully unaware he was turned into a dangerous guinea pig and put through a terrible ordeal by the authorities.  That is unless Jubilith, who is given the key to awakening Osser back into adulthood by the guru, decides to free him from the hypnotic spell.

"The Touch of Your Hand" is a pretty convoluted story that starts out on one tack and then changes course; unfortunately, the themes it takes up in the second half are less interesting than those I thought were the main topic while I was reading the first half--we go from a discussion of the meaning of progress, the role of the city, and the motivations of ambitious men to silly conspiracy jazz and childish utopianism: "well, golly, it would be awesome if we just knew everything everybody else knew without having to make any effort."  I'm already against utopian stories, and I'm already against stories in which aliens are shown to be better than Earth people, but at least most utopian stories suggest a program, and at least most stories that present goody goody aliens offer up the possibility that humanity could be positively influenced by the goody goody aliens; such stories hold out hope that our current society could be improved by the changes advocated by the writer.  But "The Touch of Your Hand" is total pessimism--in this story humanity was born deficient, and there is no hope of us just spontaneously developing collective consciousness or having it conferred upon is by the aliens.  The only solution for us is death!

Gotta give "The Touch of Your Hand" a thumbs down.    

"Affair with a Green Monkey" (1957)

In the intro to Robert Bloch's "Toy for Juliette" in Dangerous Visions, while discussing the "dichotomy" that the "gentle" and "peaceful" Bloch writes stories that are "gruesome and warped," editor Harlan Ellison brings up "...Sturgeon's lament that after he had written one--and one only--story about homosexuality, everyone accused him of being a fag."  Assuming Ellison is accurately reporting something Sturgeon said and Sturgeon was being truthful, what is the "one--and one only--story"?  Could it be "Affair with a Green Monkey?"  isfdb has a "LGBTQ+" tag on "Affair with a Green Monkey," so maybe!  Let's turn our gaydar up to maximum gain and investigate!

"Affair with a Green Monkey" is a slightly cryptic joke story, and the joke is sort of naughty (that is if I understood it.)  It is also one of those stories about how humans (or at least the male of the species!) are all jerks that presents aliens who are so much better than we are.  

Fritz Rhys is a big strong man, middle-aged, and head of a human services department of some kind in Washington.  He has a much younger wife, Alma.  At a park Fritz and Alma witness a gang of thugs attacking some guy--Fritz rescues the guy, driving off the malefactors.

Fritz prides himself on understanding people, and he immediately senses that the victim, who has a wacky name like Loolyo, is a homosexual and the thugs assaulted him because of this fact.  Sturgeon doesn't use any words like "homosexual" or "gay" but makes it all clear through little jokes and things.  Fritz has nothing against gays, and insists Loolyo stay in his home with his wife all day to recover from the beating, instead of going to the hospital.  While Fritz is at work, his wife and Loolyo go to all the tourist attractions together and read books to each other and play records together and so on.  Alma falls in love with this guy, whom Sturgeon hints is a space alien.

Some days later, Fritz finally finds time to have a serious talk with Loolyo.  A well-educated member of the elite liberal class, Fritz wants to give Loolyo, a member of an oppressed minority, some friendly, expansive, condescending know-it-all advice.  Fritz explains that people hate and fear those who are different and at the drop of a hat will form a mob to beat up those who are different should they discover them.  Fritz has his own little metaphor--if you painted a monkey green the other monkeys would form a mob and beat up the green monkey because it is different.  He advises Loolyo to act like a heterosexual man, to feign interest in fishing and hunting and be gruff and never show emotion and so forth.

Fritz finally sees his wife and Loolyo together and from the way Alma looks at the guy, Fritz can tell she has a crush on him.  Fritz tells them to go spend a few hours together, thinking Loolyo will explain he is a gay man and so their love is impossible.  Sure enough, when they are alone, after he kisses her and gropes her, and before she watches him hop into his space ship, Loolyo explains to Alma that they can't be lovers, but the reason is because, if I am reading the clues right, his erect penis is seventeen inches long and over five inches thick.  Alma, when she returns home, laughs about how small Fritz's penis is, humiliating him and likely threatening the survival of their marriage.

I guess we'll say this one is OK.

Besides Venture, where "Affair with a Green Monkey" first hit the stage, you can check out this elaborate dick joke, which I guess also serves as a warning not to judge people by their appearance, in various Sturgeon collections but also Modern Science Fiction, an anthology edited by Norman Spinrad, and a French anthology on the theme of invaders.  

**********

All three of these stories start off addressing some conventional but interesting topic (are ambitious men and their projects really so great for the rest of us?) or making some obvious but legitimate argument (don't beat up gay people!) and then veer off into convoluted plot twists involving less than credible psychological and biological explanations (we've all got a superpower you don't even realize you have, except for this guy we hypnotized as a baby...) or just an oblique bizarre joke (E.T. has a monster cock!)  Also, none of them is actually good.  Though only the longest of these stories is actually poor, it seems that today I cannot respond to tarbandu's criticism of Sturgeon with a ringing endorsement of ol' Ted.

But don't give up hope, Ted fans!  We've got three more Sturgeon tales coming up, and any one of them might be a blockbuster!