Strange Ports of Call: N S Bond, P S Miller, R A Heinlein and R Bradbury

We recently read stories from the 1948 anthology edited by August Derleth, Strange Ports of Call, that were written by three men I associate with Weird Tales, Clark Ashton Smith, David H. Keller, and Howard Wandrei.  Strange Ports of Call is billed as a book of "20 Science Fiction Masterpieces" and today let's read from it stories by four men I believe are thought of more as science fiction writers than weird or horror writers, Nelson S. Bond, P. Schuyler Miller, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury.  I of course recognize that such distinctions are kind of bogus--one piece of evidence casting doubt on the validity of any divide between fantasy and science fiction is the fact that all four of the men we are reading today published at least one story in Weird Tales, and Bond and Bradbury published many.  We all insist on making this distinction anyway.  

"The Cunning of the Beast" by Nelson S. Bond (1942)

I've read four stories by Bond over the course of this blog's improbable life, "Magic City," "Prescience," "To People a New World," and "Pipeline to Paradise" and here comes number five, even though of those four I only really liked one.  

"To People a New World" debuted in an issue of the magazine Blue Book, and was a story of the founding of our civilization which offered a science fictional explanation for the stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel which we find in the Bible.  Holy crap, "The Cunning of the Beast" is also a story that debuted in Blue Book and provides a SF explanation for the Biblical story of Adam and Eve.  What the....

On planet Kios lives a high tech race of people who are like electrified gas or pure energy, fragile forms that die if exposed to water.  (I think Bond hopes to remind us of the pillar of fire that is a manifestation of God in the Bible.)  Kios has rainy weather that can kill these puny people in seconds, so they spend a lot of time in their "Domes" and when they go outside they ride around in bipedal metal machines I guess kind of like the mecha in so many manga and anime.  Our narrator is a scientist who is working on developing space ships that will, it is hoped, carry these fragile people to a more hospitable planet.

(This story already has me scratching my head--if these pathetic jokers can't even go outside naked how did they mine and refine the materials to create the Domes they need to shelter in and the mecha they need to wear when outside?  This is one of those chicken and egg problems, I guess.)

The narrator has a colleague, a scientist named Yawa.  (Oh, brother.)  Yawa has a bright idea--to develop via what we today might call genetic engineering and selective breeding a new race of people that can survive naked outside the Domes; these hardy creatures could be the servants of the weak energy people, go outside to do whatever work is necessary.  Inside his Dome, Yawa creates a beautiful garden, a paradise, and populates it with a bipedal person, a man.  The man says he is lonely, and so Yawa takes a piece out of him and creates with it a woman.  This first woman is sort of a bad influence on the man, so Yawa comes up with a second woman who manipulates the man into becoming a productive worker.  This second woman also makes it her goal to get into Yawa's locked lab and acquire the knowledge Yawa has forbidden the man and woman--in this breaking and entering she is aided by her little buddy the serpent.  With that knowledge, she builds mecha and she and the man then begin attacking the energy people, breaking open their Domes and exposing them to the deadly rain.

The energy people capture the man and woman and stick them and Yawa into the prototype space ship the narrator has just completed and blast them off to exile.  In case you didn't get it yet, on the nineteenth and final page of this story the narrator tells you the first man and second woman are named Adam and Eve.  Mind blown?      

This story is pretty well-written on a sentence by sentence basis; I like the descriptions of the planet and of Yawa's lab.  But there is no tension, no drama, no surprise or suspense, because we immediately recognize that it is a retelling of the Adam and Eve story that we are already very familiar with.  Reading the story is a big "meta" game, as we read it we wonder how Bond is going to fit in this or that Biblical element, strain to remember if Lilith is actually in the Bible, that sort of thing, we don't care about the characters or get "immersed" in the story.  Even worse, because we know what is going to happen the story feels very long and slow.  Thumbs down for "The Cunning of the Beast."

This lame gimmick story appeared in Blue Book under the title "Another World Begins" but it was reprinted as "The Cunning of the Beast" here in Strange Ports of Call and elsewhere, such as the Bond collection No Time Like the Future (which has an awesome Richard Powers cover that just might depict Eve or Lilith and one of the energy people in its metal body, with the domes and rocket in the background) and the anthology Other Worlds, Other Gods.  

Other Worlds, Other Gods reprints Damon Knight's "Shall the Dust Praise Thee?",
a short-short I read in 2014 and graded "F."

"Forgotten" by P. Schuyler Miller (1933)

Miller is closely associated with Astounding/Analog, writing the book review column for John W. Campbell, Jr.'s magazine for over 20 years.  I believe I have read three short stories by Miller, "As Never Was," "Spawn," and "Bird Walk," two of which I liked.

"Forgotten," which debuted in Wonder Stories as "The Forgotten Man of Space" (perhaps a reference to a phrase appropriated by FDR in 1932 and after that saw wide use in popular culture) and then was reprinted in Startling in 1948 as a "Hall of Fame Story" is a decent adventure story about a guy who goes native, which is nice, as we can say Miller has a 75% pass rate here at MPorcius Fiction Log and not a 50% which is what he would have if I disliked this piece.  I am always rooting for the authors here at MPorcius Fiction Log--I want to like everything.

The main character of "Forgotten" is the youngest member of a team of three Terran prospectors on Mars.  It takes them six years, but eventually they mine enough uranium to make themselves rich.  The two older prospectors are ruthless knaves, and maroon the main character in the deserts of the Red Planet, flying off without him so they can keep his share of the uranium.

The three men had subsisted on Martian water and vegetation they gathered from a cave some miles away--they ferried the water and food back to base camp in the rocket when necessary.  There is no closer food source on this dying world, so the protagonist strikes out for the cave on foot, even though it will be like a ten day march--can he survive ten days without food or drink?

Some heretofore undiscovered natives provide succor to the man when he has only made it halfway to the cave.  Not only do they feed him, they basically adopt him into their tribe.  These Martians are like intelligent rabbits, and their culture is not very sophisticated; they have agriculture but very little by way of tools and no books or art or anything like that.  Their language has few words.

The man abandoned by his own race lives among these natives for twenty years.  Finally, he is found by some Terran prospectors.  These guys are as greedy as the men who marooned him--even though he tries to explain that the Martians are people, the prospectors plan to use them as a food source as they mine a rich vein near the natives' current settlement, so the main character sabotages the prospector's ship while he is aboard, killing them and himself.        

I am mildly recommending "Forgotten."  The remarkable thing about it is not the going-native theme, which is pretty common, but Miller's style, which is verbose.  Miller includes lots of images and lots of descriptions of the main character's psychological state, describing at length stuff the main character sees, hears and feels, when he is lucid and when he is half-dead and hallucinatory from thirst; probably Miller overdoes it a little--the pace of the story is slow--but I thought these dense descriptions effective in conveying to the reader what the abandoned miner was going through.  Somewhat less compelling is the long description of the rabbit-like natives' agricultural system.     

As for the plot and characters, they are pretty good; everything that happens in "Forgotten" makes sense, all the people's actions are believable, follow naturally from their personalities and the circumstances they find themselves in.  The story works so deserves commendation if not love.

We read Edmond Hamilton's Outlaw World back in 2014

 

"The Green Hills of Earth" by Robert A. Heinlein (1947)

This is a very famous story that I think I must have read years ago, before I started this blog.  "The Green Hills of Earth" debuted in the mainstream magazine Saturday Evening Post and has appeared in quite a few anthologies, including one edited by Orson Welles and one titled My Best Science Fiction Story and is one of Heinlein's famous Future History stories collected in the massive volume The Past Through Tomorrow.

"The Green Hills of Earth" presents itself as a sort of revisionist history; a recurring theme of Heinlein's work, and of a lot of SF, is people living in ignorance and then learning some truth about the universe.  (Heinlein's generation ship story "Universe" is a canonical example.)  It is the fictional readers of this story, the people of a future in which space travel is routine, who have been fed a sanitized image of a hero of the early days of space travel, Rhysling, who get a more accurate picture of their universe and in particular of Rhysling; along the way we real life readers get a sort of history lesson about Heinlein's imagined setting of Terran expansion into the solar system, which is inhabited by various native cultures.

Rhysling is an irascible sort of character, a lovable rascal who works in engine rooms of rocket ships, a guy who takes risks for the thrill of it and doesn't necessarily take norms and customs seriously but at the same time is the backbone of society, a competent man who again and again sacrifices himself for others.  One of the tensions in Heinlein's work as a whole is how he has a strong libertarian individualist streak but at the same time is an elitist who tells you a captain's word aboard ship must be law--Heinlein is into the liberty of the individual but also into hierarchy, which can be a little baffling.  Rhysling, the rebellious man who it turns out will do anything to protect his fellow man, and has the superior skill needed to get other people out of the scrapes their incompetence has dropped them and others into, sort of embodies that tension.  The reader has to decide if Heinlein is cleverly saying something about how complicated people and societies are, how they are riven with conflicting impulses and contain multitudes, or is just having his cake and eating it to, constructing superheroes who have all the attributes we love about the self-motivated rebel and about the dutiful self-sacrificing martyr.

The plot of "The Green Hills of Earth" is the Rhysling life story.  The guy flies on rockets, gets blinded saving one space flight which is in trouble because some dolt did a bad job in the engine room, and so becomes a wandering troubadour, hitching rides hither and yon across the solar system, paying his way by singing the songs he has composed.  Rhysling isn't only a genius engineer and a self-sacrificing hero, he is a bestselling poet!  We are told that he only became famous after his death, when his safe-for-work songs were published--his naughty ditties languish in obscurity.

After a long period of being a sort of traveling minstrel Rhysling is in the engine room of a ship when its motor malfunctions; he fixes the machine, saving everybody else, but dies from the radiation released by the accident.

"The Green Hills of Earth" is well-written and well-paced, an enjoyable read; both the life story of Rhysling and the glimpses of Heinlein's future history components are compelling, and the latter element leaves you wanting to read more of the Future History stories.  The story is vulnerable to the superhero and have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too criticisms I have already voiced, and maybe some people won't be crazy about how the story is full of Rhysling's poetry.  Personally, I think the poetry actually works as a way of indirectly telling you about the future milieu Heinlein has created--one of the strengths of this story is that readers learn about its future world from the inside, from its inhabitants, as if they themselves are among its inhabitants, not from a remove.

So, thumbs up for this famous story by the Dean of Science Fiction--I'm not playing iconoclast today, I guess. 

I've read a bunch of stories that appear in My Best Science Fiction Story, including
Henry Kuttner's "Don't Look Now," 
Edmond Hamilton's "The Inn Outside the World"
John W. Campbell, Jr.'s "Blindness"
Robert Bloch's "Almost Human"
A. E. van Vogt's "Project Spaceship"
Clark Ashton Smith's "The Uncharted Isle"
Sam Merwin, Jr.'s "The Carriers"
Frank Belknap Long's "The House of Rising Winds"
Fredric Brown's "Nothing Sirius"
Murray Leinster's "The Lost Race" 
and Theodore Sturgeon's "Thunder and Roses"

"The Million Year Picnic" by Ray Bradbury (1946)

Here's another story I think I must have read ages ago, one of the stories that was reprinted in The Martian Chronicles as well as other Bradbury collections and numerous anthologies.  The central gimmick of the story, that a human colonist on Mars tells his kids he is going to show them Martians and then, in the end of the story, points at their reflection in the water and everyone realizes they are the Martians, was sharp in my mind when I started the story, but I had forgotten the more grim, sad, even cynical elements.

The father of the family is a politician and has used his influence to secure for his family the opportunity to be among the first families permitted to colonize Mars.  He did so because he predicted what happens over the course of the story--a cataclysmic war erupts on Earth which, it seems, kills everyone there, and spreads to kill people here on Mars, though our protagonists escape.  The family travels by boat down a canal, past one dead Martian city after another, another grim note.

At the same time we get these depressing and apocalyptic story elements, the father and Bradbury seem confident that the human race is going to rebuild itself on Mars.  While Bradbury suggests that the destruction of Earth is a result of science getting of hand, outgrowing mankind's ability to control it, he also points out how science in the form of terraforming has made Mars habitable by humans.  As in the end of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury suggests that the human race's bellicosity and instinct for tyranny may cause a catastrophe, but that some wise and hardy segment of humanity will survive and continue the race, maybe even build a better civilization than that which preceded it.

A good story, though vulnerable to the charge that it is sappy and sentimental, a criticism that can be leveled at many Bradbury stories.

**********

The stories I read in June from Strange Ports of Call by men I think of as weirdies, Clark Ashton Smith, David H. Keller, and Howard Wandrei, are essentially horror stories in which men try to figure out the universe, to master it, and get defeated.  Today's stories from the same anthology, by people I think of as science fiction writers, Bond, Miller, Heinlein and Bradbury, have their share of trespass, tragedy and trouble, but are essentially about man's progress, his spreading out throughout the universe as a conqueror.  Miller and Heinlein present men who engage in self-sacrifice for their fellows, Bond focuses on (alien, it is true) scientists who produce universe-altering inventions, and while Bradbury's tale has apocalyptic images and content, it portrays the birth of a new human civilization as well as the extinction of one human civilization and the ruins of an alien civilization, and shows how science can foster life as well as destroy it.  The science fiction guys don't shy away from human evil and the tragic cost of progress, but are pretty confident people can master the universe, learn its secrets and bend it to their will, unlike the weirdies, who depict people totally overwhelmed by the complexity of the natural world.  This of course reminds us of the definition of science fiction that John W. Campbell, Jr. presented to Barry Malzberg, as reported in Malzberg's 1982 essay on Campbell*: a literature of "heroes," "a problem-solving medium" that deals with "success or the road to success" and argues that "man is a curious animal who wants to know how things work and given enough time can find out." 

*"John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971," written in 1980, published in The Engines of the Night

We may read some more stories that appear in Strange Ports of Call in the future--I'm sure we'll read Fritz Leiber's "Mr. Bauer and the Atoms," but probably when we extend our Weird Tales project to 1946 (currently we are toiling in 1941.)  And until that time I'm sure we'll conduct many other explorations into the adjacent and overlapping realms of weird fantasy and science fiction here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Howard Wandrei: "The 15th Pocket," "For No Ransom," and "Don't Do It, Mister!"

Just days ago we read four gruesome and titillating crime stories by Howard Wandrei that featured science fiction or sorcerous elements.  Those stories debuted in the 1930s in the magazine Spicy Mystery, and we read them in the 1990s Wandrei collection Time Burial.  H. Wandrei produced a long list of stories for crime magazines and yesterday I scoured the internet archive for scans of old magazines offering stories published under the H. Wandrei pseudonym Robert Garron, and now let's check out three of the short ones.

"The 15th Pocket" (1936)    

"The 15th Pocket" debuted in Spicy Detective, and would be reprinted in a 1938 issue of Private Detective as "Death's Passenger" under a different penname, and then (again as "Death's Passenger") in 2 Book Mystery Magazine in 1946.

Lord's is a manufacturer and seller of high-end lingerie, and business is good--Lord's 50-something Vice-President Bannon is rich.  Was rich--he turns up dead in an abandoned cab, shot full of holes and covered in bruises from a ferocious fight.  He wasn't robbed--his pockets are full of expensive watches and money--or was he?  One pocket is empty!  The cops figure the key to the mystery is what was in that pocket.

Police Lieutenant Hanrahan investigates.  The driver of the cab is cleared--somebody beat him up and stole his cab.  Hanrahan heads to the Bannon mansion looking for Mrs. Bannon; on the way somebody shoots at him, but misses.  At the mansion, Hanrahan finds the missus isn't home and badgers the sexy maid into admitting Bannon was having an affair with his secretary and Mrs. Bannon was having an affair with some young rich idler and that she (the maid) was plotting to blackmail them both.  The maid tries to seduce Hanrahan but he brushes her aside.

Hanrahan pays a visit to the home of Mrs. Bannon's lover and finds the two of them there; he decides they are too drunk to have been involved in the murder.  So he proceeds to the residence of Bannon's secretary, a third floor apartment.  Hanrahan becomes certain she and an accomplice are behind her boss's untimely death, and searches her apartment while she tries to distract him with her body.  The accomplice tries to sneak up on Hanrahan but Hanrahan's partner shows up just in time to gun the murderer down.  Then Hanrahan finds the item the murderer took from that empty pocket--a pair of banknotes worth ten thousand bucks each, Bannon's bonus from the owner of Lord's, which the secretary must have known he had received and coveted for herself.

I don't really get this story's central gimmicks.  Is it so remarkable that a guy who has fifteen pockets has one empty pocket?  In the summer I have like four pockets and half of them are empty.  And then there is the elaborate way the banknotes were hidden by the secretary and the murderer--they folded them up to the size of postage stamps and put them inside an empty watch case and sealed it with candle wax and tied a fishing line to it and threw the watch into a pond in the courtyard of the secretary's apartment complex but left one end of the fishing line in her apartment so they could pull the treasure up through her window.  Wouldn't the super or the gardener blunder into the fishing line?  Couldn't someone on the first or second floors see the line hanging in front of his window?

The interesting thing about this bland story is perhaps its misogyny.  "Murders are like women; they’re all the same’’ says one cop, and all the women in the story are monsters:

There were three women in this case, and none of them reacted to Bannon’s murder with any grief. The maid was disappointed because the neat fabric of her blackmail scheme was blown sky-high. Mrs. Bannon responded with hysterical gratification. And this Haworth dame [the secretary] was strictly indifferent. Damn their scheming, selfish, hard little hearts!

This story is obviously not good, but, with its fast pace and a car crash, a shooting, somebody getting punched or slapped or showing off her legs every page or so, it is not boring or annoying, so I guess we'll call it barely acceptable.

"For No Ransom" (1940)

"For No Ransom" is the cover story of the issue of Spicy Detective in which is appears.  I'm not finding any evidence it was ever reprinted.  

Edith is a junior executive at a Manhattan department store who aspires to work in the fashion industry.  And a gorgeous babe!  (One of the characters considers her "yum-yum.")  Edith is more or less engaged to her boyfriend Phil, a sculptor who works in wood who was born into a wealthy family.  Their wedding is on hold because they disagree about her work--he wants her to quit and be a housewife and she wants to keep working.  

Otto the retired surgeon has seen the yum-yum Edith walking about town and hired an unscrupulous private investigator to uncover where she lives and works and so forth.  When he has a thick enough dossier on Edith, Otto moves into an apartment in the same building as Edith's and contrives a way to get into her apartment and then to get her into his--his methods reminded me of the way children are warned not to help strangers who say they have lost a puppy or whatever and came off as a little unbelievable.  Otto chloroforms Edith and then injects her with some kind of tranquilizer and drives off with her unconscious form in the passenger seat after instructing the PI to stay in the Big Apple to keep his private eye on Phil.  

It's a 1200 mile drive west to Orto's destination, and he enlivens the trip by playing with the inert Edith with one hand while driving with the other.  Cripes!  When she wakes up in a hospital bed, Otto tells Edith she has been in shock.  Phil dumped her, he explains, which triggered a catatonic event!  After recovering in the hospital she married Otto, one of her doctors.  But then she had a relapse and when she awoke she had forgotten all about her marriage to Otto.  Weeks go by, and Edith starts to believe Otto's crazy story.  Back in New York, Phil and the police try to find Edith, but get nowhere.

Three months after Edith's disappearance, a sad Phil is listening to a live radio broadcast of a famous orchestra performing at a club in the Midwest.  Somehow, the mic picks up chatter in the audience and Phil recognizes Edith's voice!  (This story is pretty ridiculous.)  Phil flies to the town with the club.  The PI follows him, but Phil is big and strong from carving iron-hard wood and has noticed this jerk following him and gets the jump on him and beats him up.  Then he does a little detective work, figuring out what is going on, finally confronts Otto and beats him up and reunites with Edith.

This story is rather half baked.  The individual plot elements are not only silly but often clunky (for example, minor characters who don't contribute much to the drama) and the way they are put together poor (there isn't a sense of mounting tension or much of a climax, for example.)  Edith, Phil and Otto have personalities that have little or no effect on the plot, or lack personality altogether so you don't care what happens to them.  In a good story of this sort the author would convey the overpowering lust of Otto, the paralyzing fear and then deadening despair and finally mind-numbing resignation of Edith, and the maddening frustration and then tremendous relief of Phil, but Wandrei doesn't do any of that here.

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

"Don't Do It, Mister!" (1943)

 

This story does all the things I just told you "For No Ransom" didn't do but should have.  The characters have personality, exhibit emotions you can identify with, and the tension in the story grows as the story proceeds.  Thumbs up for "Don't Do It, Mister!"

Lewis likes beautiful things.  He likes stamps, and collects them.  He has a book of them, all the rare and lovely stamps he spends most of his income on--he hasn't bought a new suit or new shoes in two years--carefully arranged.

Or he had such a collection.  Lewis is married to a gorgeous brunette with a terrific body, Eleanor.  He thought he'd like to have such a beautiful creature around, but he didn't want a woman who would interfere with him, bother him, so he didn't just marry Eleanor for her looks--he married her because she was an ignorant dimwit.  

This decision today has bit Lewis in the ass.  While he was in his Manhattan office, Eleanor, back home in Brooklyn, decided she would go on a shopping spree, get an expensive dress.  I guess in the 1940s you could at some stores use uncancelled postage stamps like cash, just buy things with them as if they were money worth the value printed on them.  (What with the banknotes in "The 15th Pocket" Wandrei is giving me an education in Depression and World War II-era microeconomics.)  So Eleanor took a bunch of stamps out of Lewis's book, like 70 or whatever dollars worth face value, but worth thousands and thousands of dollars to a collector, to buy her dress.  Eleanor is not only a pea-brained ignoramus who has no idea the old stamps are worth more than the value printed on them and thinks Lewis can just get more at the post office any time, but also a resentful and bull-headed harpy who thinks his spending time every day looking at the book of stamps and using tweezers to add new stamps to it to be embarrassing childishness (we might charge this story with misogyny like we did "For No Ransom") and they have a fierce argument.

Wandrei's description of Lewis's shock and dismay, and the dialogue between him and Eleanor about the stamps and the dress, are totally convincing and very effective.  My heart sank along with Lewis's when he realized his wonderful rare valuable stamps were gone, and my blood temperature rose when Eleanor insisted he must be lying in telling her the stamps were worth more than what was printed on them.

Wandrei also does a good job with the murder scene and Lewis' psychological response to killing someone with his own hands, killing his own wife!  And the ending, which leaves us unsure whether Lewis has got away with the crime or not, but confident the sight of his wife's dead face will haunt him forever, is not bad.

"Don't Do It, Mister!" appeared in Super-Detective and as with "For No Ransom" I find no evidence it has ever been reprinted. 

**********   

"The 15th Pocket" and "For No Ransom" are just filler that are full of flaws, but "Don't Do It, Mister!" is a powerful crime story and psychological horror story about a man who makes terrible life choices but with whom we can sort of identify.  So this exploration into disreputable pulp detective magazines has paid off, even if we didn't find the mad scientists and evil wizards we met in the Spicy Mystery batch.   

Merril-approved '58 stories by C Smith, W Stanton & J Stopa

We're in no rush here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Stop and smell the flowers, we say!  So it has been like two months since we logged an installment of our tour of the speculative fiction of 1958 courtesy of Judith Merril, the critics' favorite anthologist.  But slow and steady wins the race, and today we again turn to the back pages of my copy of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume to Merril's long list of honorable mentions and pick out three stories to read.  Our journey through 1958 is an alphabetical one, and we are still on the letter "S," and today we check out stories by Cordwainer Smith, Will Stanton and Jon Stopa.

"Western Science is So Wonderful!" by Cordwainer Smith  

Merril recommends two stories by Cordwainer Smith in SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume; we read "The Burning of the Brain" back in 2019.  I recognize the title "Western Science is So Wonderful!" and am a little surprised I haven't read it yet, but maybe I put off reading it because I thought the title was sarcastic and I was in no mood for yet another slagging of the Western world after a lifetime of hearing such slaggings from college professors, grad students (the college professor in its larval form), journalists and now rapping nepo-baby mayoral candidates.  Whatever the case, today we see what this story, which debuted in Damon Knight's If and has never been anthologized but has seen reprint in many Smith collections, is all about by reading it in a scan of the appropriate issue of If.

"Western Science is So Wonderful" in fact is not an attack on Western society; the main target of its satire is actually socialism in Russia and China.  But it is also a silly and repetitive joke story.  

An exiled Martian is on Earth during the Second World War, and hangs around in rural China.  It can read minds and change its shape and effortlessly fly and so forth--it likes to take the form of a tree and feel the wind in its branches, for example.  The Martian encounters a U. S. Army liaison with the Chinese Nationalist Army and shocks the Yank and his Chinese porters with his bizarre behavior, like taking the form of the American's mother and then of a stripping Red Cross nurse in an effort to put him at ease.  One of the jokes of this sequence is that the Martian is fascinated by the American's cigarette lighter.  (It is this device that prompts the utterance that serves as the story title.)  The Martian erases all memory of this encounter from the soldier and those who accompany him.

In 1955 a Soviet liaison to the Chinese Communist Party arrives in the same spot and the Martian interacts with him and the Chinese people accompanying him.  The alien makes many comical efforts to make friends with these commies, like appearing as Chairman Mao and then a sexy Russian WAC and asking to join the Chinese Communist Party, and the commies respond comically by, for example, saying he must be a supernatural entity and thus must not exist because, as militant atheists, they believe the supernatural does not exist.  Eventually the Soviet and the Chinese officers convince the Martian to go to the United States, where people are religious and will believe in him, and where much of the Western science he so admires comes from.  This plot-light shaggy dog story ends when the Martian teleports itself to night time Connecticut and decides to take the form of a milk delivery truck made of gold.

I like that the story is largely a spoof of communism, and the jokes aren't terrible, but "Western Science is So Wonderful!" is still a waste of time and, though it pains me because I have been impressed by a lot of Smith's work, I have to give this production of Smith's a marginal thumbs down.

"Over the River to What's-Her-Name's House" by Will Stanton

Stanton has eighteen story credits at isfdb, and wikipedia is telling me he published hundreds of humor stories and essays in mainstream outlets like Reader's Digest, The New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post.  As I tell you every time I do one of these Merril-inspired posts, Merril was skeptical or even hostile to genre distinctions and loved to promote as SF stories by mainstream writers whether they appeared in dedicated SF venues or mainstream ones.  As it happens, "Over the River to What's-Her-Name's House" debuted in F&SF.  The only evidence of reprinting I can find is in the British edition of Venture, but I didn't put a lot of effort into searching for reprints because it turns out there are a lot of Will Stantons out there and I didn't feel like sifting through all the pages that came up that were obviously not applicable.

"Over the River to What's-Her-Name's House" is a sleep-inducing satire of suburban life in the mid-century, a slice of life story about the future when there are lots of labor saving devices and lots of collective institutions that take up people's time (for example, farcical versions of the Book-of-the-Month Club--the Trivet of the Month Club and the Sick Friend of the Month Club--and of women's charitable groups) and lots of self-help rituals to ease stress endorsed by Ivy League professors.  My eyes kept glazing over as I tried to read this sterile and vacuous ooze and maybe that is why I was unable to detect any plot--maybe the plot was about how the many mechanical and social systems designed to make life easier were in fact making life less satisfying and were breaking down anyway. 

Absolute waste of time--this hunk of junk makes the Cordwainer Smith story I just condemned as a waste of time look like a brilliant masterpiece fashioned by a hero.  Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, all is forgiven!

"A Pair of Glasses" by Jon Stopa

Stopa has only four fiction credits at isfdb but was apparently an enthusiastic participant in fan activities--he and his wife won an award at a convention for their skimpy costumes (or was the award really for their slender bodies?)--and in the production of nonfiction books about SF--he is credited with the competent if not inspired covers for many books of essays about SF including Damon Knight's famous In Search of Wonder.

This is a tedious story in which two old guys living in a post-apocalyptic world smoke pipes and have boring philosophical arguments, referring to Sigmund Freud, David Hume, and Herman Hesse.  In "A Pair of Glasses" Stopa contrasts those who, seeing the world is full of danger and confusion, retreat from the workaday world like monks to contemplate the spiritual world or like college professors to study sterile minutia, with those who engage with the world, try to meet its challenges and make it a better place for mankind.  Stopa also includes descriptions of glass blowing and of the work of the optometrist and optician.

Ben, who is fat, and Roger, who is thin, were friends as kids.  Mankind had exhausted the resources of the Earth, the oil and coal and iron and all that.  Then a terrible war erupted.  Now there is almost no industry or technology, and the military consists of archers.  Ben retreated to a valley in California to found a colony of people who focused on getting in touch with nature and the infinite.  Roger, on Lake Michigan, started a glass blowing shop to help rebuild modern civilization.  Now they are old men, and Ben has walked to Roger's place in response to a letter from Rog in which Rog told him he could provide his old pal with a pair of spectacles.  Obviously this is a metaphor; Roger is trying to help Ben see physically as well as intellectually--Ben even exhibits reluctance to wear the glasses, as they are uncomfortable and all the detail is confusing, a parallel to the willful blindness that led him to hide from life and reality in California.

The men have their boring debates, Stopa wasting our time with descriptions of their drinking lemonade and looking out over the lake and filling their pipes with tobacco and so forth.  

The twist ending is that, while Ben was isolated in his California colony, people in the outside world developed their innate psychic abilities and can now teleport.  The scientific method and engagement with the broader world are vindicated and the monkish life shown to be a dead end.  Somehow, while walking from California through Colorado to Illinois or Wisconsin or wherever Roger's glass works is, Ben never noticed anybody teleporting.  A little hard to believe.

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  I sympathize with its ideology, but "A Pair of Glasses" is boring and the twist ending is unacceptable.  I don't think this thing has ever been reprinted after debuting in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding.  

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Oy, three losers!  Judith Merril did us dirty this time around!  What can we salvage from the wreckage?  Well, each of these stories is a sort of time capsule of 1950s concerns; communism in Russia and China is a major theme of Smith's story and a minor theme of Stopa's, and Stanton's unreadable tub of goop is, I guess, a satire of life at the time it was written.  Stopa's story perhaps reflects the ideology and interests of the segment of the SF world which orbited around Campbell--pro-science, anti-religion, fascinated with psionic powers.  So, maybe these stories have value for the student of social and cultural history.  But entertainment value is very limited.    

We'll be back on the sex and violence beat next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log, folks!

Howard Wandrei: "Exit Willy Carney," "The Glass Coffin," "Master-the-Third," and "O Little Nightmare"

Let's read four stories from the Howard Wandrei collection Time Burial, stories that first appeared in the later 1930s not in respectable magazines like Astounding or Weird Tales but in the "shudder pulp" or "weird menace" magazine Spicy Mystery.  The appeal of this magazine is its depiction of women at risk of or actually suffering sexualized violence, and my flipping through the scans of Spicy Mystery I can find, and the assertions of Robert Kenneth Jones in his book The Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s, suggest this magazine had more illustrations than was usual for pulp magazines, and most of those illos featured scantily clad women in some terrible danger.  If you want to see drawings of young ladies in lingerie being tied up, slashed with knives, or thrown into bottomless pits or off of cliffs, Spicy Mystery is the periodical for you, but don't tell them I sent you.

This is far from the first expedition of the bold explorers of MPorcius Fiction Log into the salacious and sanguinary jungles of shudder pulp territory.  In 2021 we read, from the collection The Eerie Mr. Murphy, three other Howard Wandrei stories that debuted in Spicy Mystery, as well as a bunch of shudder pulp tales by E. Hoffman Price and one by Henry Kuttner  Prompted by a reading of Frederik Pohl's memoir, way back in 2018 we read five shudder pulp stories from 1940 by Ray Cummings.

(Nota bene:  I am reading all four stories from my copy of Time Burial, and an introductory note in the book indicates the texts are different from those printed in the 1930s issues of Spicy Mystery in which they debuted; we are told these texts are "much truer to the author's intent" and "appreciably more risqué.")      

"Exit Willy Carney" (1935)

This is a wild and crazy story full of sex and horrible criminal violence, with a surprise ending featuring one of my favorite SF tropes--the brain transplant!

Wandrei starts us with a sex scene.  Model Madge is having sex with organized crime figure Caldwell.  Caldwell is an expert lover!  But then an assassin shoots through the window of Caldwell's apartment--head shot!  Caldwell bites Madge's tongue as he dies, drawing her blood--gross!

Madge flees the scene, and we get a flashback to Madge's first days in New York, incidents of artists sexually harassing her and the start of her love affair with Caldwell.  Then, back in the present, we follow the cops as they pursue Caldwell's killer, professional hitman Willy Carney.  Carney is in his girlfriend's apartment, engaging in foreplay, when the cops arrive.  Carney sneaks out and his girlfriend tries to slow down the fuzz by offering them her body, but the flatfoots catch up to Carney regardless and a ferocious fight erupts in the apartment building's courtyard.  Carney is an expert fighter and triumphs over the forces of justice, killing multiple officers as he escapes.

Carney goes to a famous surgeon who does business with the underworld, hoping to get plastic surgery to hide his identity.  The surgeon has something else in mind, but they need to be patient, to wait for the ideal conditions in which to pull off a coup that pushes the envelope of medical science and of crime!

Madge shows up at the surgeon's, looking for an abortion--she was impregnated by Caldwell seconds before he died and this girlboss doesn't want a baby putting a crimp in her career!  Seeing how healthy Madge is, the surgeon sees that the time is ripe to put his innovative plan into action.  That annoying baby isn't the only clump of cells the doctor removes from Madge's perfect body--he also relieves her of her brain!  He puts the model's grey matter in Carney the killer's skull, and fills Madge's gorgeous brainpan with Carney's brain.

The surgeon releases Madge (in Carney's body) after a few months and when the cops catch "him" they consider him insane as he rants and raves about not actually being Carney.  Carney (in the body of sexalicious model Madge) learns how to walk in heels and to enjoy the feel of silky undergarments and so forth.  As the story ends it seems that somehow Madge's memories have been preserved in her body and her personality takes over Carney's implanted grey matter and he forgets he was ever a man and had brain transplant surgery and picks up Madge's life where she left off.

Wandrei's style here is a little crude, and there are elements of "Exit Willy Carney" that might be considered pornographic, gratuitously gory, and racist, and thus disturbing or offensive, but I found a lot of the story surprising and entertaining, and I can't deny I enjoyed it.

After appearing under a pseudonym in the September '35 ish of Spicy Mystery, "Exit Willy Carney" was reprinted in the March 1942 issue of Spicy Mystery under a different title, "Not Counting Death," and under a different pen name.  Tricky!

"The Glass Coffin" (1937)

Maxwell Heights is a well-to-do riverside neighborhood inhabited by wealthy fashionable people; lately young women of the district have been vanishing--fourteen of them, in fact!  We are introduced to beautiful Kathleen, her brother, painter Arnold, and Arnold's girlfriend, sexy Jeanne.  We learn all about these three people's good looks, especially the women's bodies, and witness Jeanne posing nude for Arnold and doing a sexy dance for him.

Kathleen becomes the fifteenth well-heeled young lady to disappear, and Arnold suspects Zuchet, the florist, a short fat guy, is to blame--the painter thinks Zuchet's evil eyes, his "sexual voice," and the way he looked at Kathleen one day, mark him as a pervert.  Jeanne dons her most revealing dress and goes to Zuchet's place of business to investigate--Zuchet knocks her out and takes her to a secret laboratory where he gropes her and then hooks her up to elaborate scientific machinery.

Arnold busts into the florist's when Jeanne doesn't return and punches Zuchet out (Wandrei describes people's bloody injuries in this story with as much gusto as he does women's breasts) and starts searching for the girls.  As luck would have it, as a youth he explored the beach below Zuchet's gardens, and knows there is a natural tunnel that leads inland to the basement of Zuchet's house.

In the lab, Arnold discovers the amazing, mind-shattering truth.  Zuchet is a genius, an expert in botany, biology, physics.  He has figured out a way to transfer the blood and the souls of people into orchids, thus creating orchids of unparalleled beauty that are sentient, mobile, immortal!  The orchid in which Jeanne's soul is entombed sends forth tendrils which caress Arnold--she recognizes him!  Zuchet appears, shoots Arnold full of holes with a revolver.  With his last breath, Arnold punches Zuchet and knocks the felonious florist out--while he is unconscious the tendrils of the flower that is Jeanne entangle him and suck his blood!  Zuchet awakes briefly before dying, long enough to know that his sixteenth victim is achieving her vengeance on him!

While not nearly as well written as something by Smith, the plot of "The Glass Coffin" reminds me of something Clark Ashton Smith would write, though set in some ancient or far future fantasy world.  A fun bit of exploitation insanity.

"The Glass Coffin" was reprinted under a different pseudonym and with a different title--"Murder for a Soul"--in a 1941 issue of Spicy Mystery.

"Master-the-Third" (1937)

 

This one is perhaps a little more ridiculous and less thrilling than "Exit Willy Carney" and "The Glass Coffin," and is also distinct from them in having a happy ending.  But the gore and sexualized violence are there, as well as a crazy science-fiction means of defying death.  While gruesome and full of people getting murdered, these stories all offer hope that humans can somehow achieve immortality through brain transplants, soul transfers, or, as in this one, being preserved for thousands of years via sorcery.  Of course, Wandrei's project may be to pour cold water on these hopes--in these stories brain transplants change your personality, soul transfers leave you a plant instead of a human, and sorcery may leave you a disembodied eye in a jar, slave to a renegade limey! 

Rawls is a detective, I guess in New York, investigating a mysterious suicide.  The dead man: a millionaire who just married the sexiest girl in town, Karen the world's most agile stripper.  Why would this rich guy who had the hottest chick in the world kill himself?  A little sleuthing turns up the fact that the millionaire recently made friends with a globe-trotting Englishman, Lamphier.  Lamphier is a student of the occult, in fact, he has been anointed "Master-the-Third" of the "Great White Lodge of the Himalayas."  Lamphier has a history of making rich friends and marrying rich women all over the world and then inheriting piles of money from them when they commit suicide. 

Rawls follows Karen, who is so good-looking he is falling in love with her, to Lamphier's apartment building.  Along the way he is ambushed and beaten up, but doesn't see who hit him--Wandrei makes it clear to readers that the detective was attacked either by an invisible man or a telekinetic force.  Through a rooftop skylight Rawls looks into Lamphier's huge studio apartment on the top floor, watches as Karen's clothes come off of her of their own accord and then Karen has ecstatic and acrobatic sex with an invisible man or, again some kind of projection of telekinetic force.  Now he's really in love with her!

Karen and Lamphier leave the building and Rawls sneaks into the Englishman's richly appointed apartment.  It's a trap!  Waiting in there is a gorgeous "golden-skinned" Asian woman who is an expert in hand-to-hand combat, and we get a sadistic and sexualized fight scene in which the woman's breasts are bared when her dress is ripped; she manages to overpower Rawls after kicking him in the balls and proceeds to torture him.

Lamphier returns and explains what is going on.  He has in a glass jar the thousands-year-old living eye of the king of Atlantis, a great wizard and the source of the Greek myth of Uranus.  The eye can perform all manner of magical feats, hypnotism and telekinesis and so forth, if you can order it around in Atlantean, as Lamphier through long study has learned how to do.  Wandrei provides a long gruesome description of the glass jar, its contents and the pictograms carved into it that is pretty cool.

It looks like Rawls is going to follow in the footsteps of the millionaire, committing suicide in an elaborate fashion thanks to Atlantean hypnotism, when an actual Atlantean busts into the apartment to save the day!  This sorcerer has been chasing Lamphier around the Earth, trying to get the eye of his king back.  It may have taken him a while to catch up to Lamphier, but this wizard is invincible.  The Asian karate girl tries to win his favor and gets humiliated in a disgusting sexualized way.  Lamphier's punishment is being blasted to pieces.  The Atlantean avenger spares innocent Rawls and Karen, even (it is suggested) uses his magic to make Karen fall in love with Rawls so Rawls can look forward to having sex with the world's foremost erotic athlete for the rest of his life.

After all this crazy wizardry, torture and sex, Wandrei's twist ending feels very mundane and anticlimactic.  When the police chief asks Rawls why he was so sure the millionaire had been murdered, even though all evidence clearly indicated suicide, Rawls explains that he and the millionaire were relatives and he knew his people were too tough to ever commit suicide.

It doesn't look like "Master-the-Third" was recycled by the editors of Spicy Mystery the way "Exit Willy Carney" and "The Glass Coffin" were.

"O Little Nightmare" (1939)

This is the best story we are talking about today, better written than those three other stories and with a better constructed plot; perhaps more importantly "O Little Nightmare" is a legitimately effective weird story and not just an exploitation story with weird elements tacked on.  And as a bonus for you feminists out there, the characters talk about our society's double standard, how the promiscuity and infidelity of men is tolerated while that of women is condemned.  

Rodney the successful Greenwich Village painter is married to Ursula, the gorgeous model.  These two hipster sophisticates drink too much and of course everybody knows artists of any talent are crazy and so when Rodney starts hearing weird noises in the apartment and glimpsing a little monster dashing through the bedroom neither Rodney, nor Ursula, nor we readers can be sure what to think.  Wandrei does a good job describing the sounds Rodney hears and the way Rodney reacts to them--solid horror story stuff.

Ursula has a buddy, a globe-trotting Englishwoman who is a big game hunter and Olympic athlete; this chick has great breasts, "one of those horsey English faces" and an apartment right across the street.  From horse-face's flat, Ursula, using horse-face's German binoculars, watches Rodney have sex with one of his other models.  When Ursula dismisses the idea of divorce, the Englishwoman talks about how, while on safari in Africa, two guys tried to rape her and she shot them down and the authorities listed the deaths as "hunting accidents" and suggests Ursula murder Rodney--she'd be rich after inheriting all the money Rod has made on his paintings and Ursula has several male friends who would love to marry her if she got lonely.

After the model leaves, Rodney sees the monster and it taunts him and he tries to destroy it, without success.  Again Wandrei, describing the creature and the fight, gives us superior horror story material.  Ursula comes home, changes and showers while Rodney watches, then goes to the cinema (Rodney has contempt for motion pictures.)  Soon after his wife's departure Rodney sees the rat-sized monster eat a roach.  Rodney is determined to destroy the monster, and this times fights with strategy as well as fanatical zeal.  When Ursula comes home she finds that her husband has gone totally insane and so she will have access to all his money without having to murder or divorce him, but she still shaken to the core by the sight of him eating some kind of little animal--we readers recognize he is following the example of the monster itself, eating the intruder the same way it ate the roach.

Thumbs up for "O Little Nightmare," a well-put-together weird tale with sexual exploitation elements tacked on to it.  In its action sequences and its family-life-is-hell theme it reminds me of Richard Matheson's famous "Prey."  I don't see any evidence "O Little Nightmare," though a gem, was reprinted before its reappearance in 1995 in Time Burial.

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I sometimes tell you a story is easy to admire but challenging to enjoy, but today I have to say the opposite about three of our stories, "Exit Willy Carney," "The Glass Coffin" and "Master-the-Third;" these shoddily written tales full of violence against women, torture and gore, racism and mad scientists, are hard to admire but easy to enjoy, I guess like junk food.  Luckily, I can recommend "O Little Nightmare" without reservation to fans of weird and horror stories--at least those that won't be offended by gratuitous descriptions of women's legs or breasts on every other page.

Well, we've had our fill of Spicy Mystery for a little while; next time we'll look at stories from somewhat more prestigious periodicals.

Strange Ports of Call: D H Keller, H Wandrei, and C A Smith

In 1948 Pellegrini and Cudahy published a 400-page hardcover anthology bearing the legend "20 Masterpieces of Science Fiction" on cover and spine alongside the title Strange Ports of Call.  Strange Ports of Call was edited by the tireless August Derleth, correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft and major figure in the effort to get weird material printed in book form, and this volume is full of stories by people we associate with Weird Tales.  Let's read three stories from Strange Ports of Call by weirdies today, those by David H. Keller, Howard Wandrei, and Clark Ashton Smith.  (We may read more from this book in the future, stories by people less closely associated with the weird.)

But before all that, let's list the seven stories reprinted in Strange Ports of Call that we have already read in other venues.

"The Crystal Bullet" by Donald Wandrei

"At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft

"Call Him Demon" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

"Far Centaurus" by A. E. van Vogt

"The Lost Street" by Clifford Simak and Carl Jacobi

"Thunder and Roses" by Theodore Sturgeon

"A Guest in the House" by Frank Belknap Long

(Nota Bene: I will be reading all of today's stories in a scan of Strange Ports of Call, though I may check original magazine versions, or other reprints, if there are confusing typos or printing errors.)

"The Worm" by David H. Keller (1929)

We start with a story that has been reprinted many times after its debut in Amazing, including in a Best of Amazing anthology in 1967 and in two different issues of Fantastic, one in 1965 and one in 1979.  The cover of the '79 issue promotes "The Worm" as "Probably the most intriguing tale you'll ever read anywhere."  Wow!

For centuries Thompson's Valley, Vermont, was a prosperous village, with productive farms and a busy mill, but today the place is deserted, only the miller remaining, the mill still turning, though there is no corn for it to grind.  The miller is a recluse, his only friends his books and his dog, and mechanically minded; he has hooked the mill mechanism up to generate electricity.  This practical engineering ability is put to the test when appears an uncanny threat to the building in which his family has lived and worked for generation after generation.

The monster plot of "The Worm" has some similarity to Ray Bradbury's 1951 "The Fog Horn."  The grinding of the mill has attracted a monstrous worm, a thing thirty feet thick, and it burrows up to the mill, thinking the sound of the mill is the sound of a worm of the opposite sex!  Slowly, over the course of days, the mega-sized worm chews through the foundation of the mill and then up through the building's multiple floors, all the while the miller essaying various means to stop or destroy the monster in his determination to preserve his ancestral home.  Who will win, man or beast? 

"The Worm" has something of the ethic or ideology we see in lots of early science fiction.  One man, alone, relies on his wits, sangfroid and knowledge of science and engineering as he struggles against a novel, alien, challenge.  Keller may be subverting the expectations of science lovers who see man as equal to the task of mastering the natural world, though, when he has the man fall before the monster; Keller even specifically has the miller gain confidence, in the event unfounded, from reflecting that as a man he has "brains" and the worm is just a "thing."

"The Worm" is well written, Keller producing sharp images and ably using the reactions of the dog to generate emotional content--suspense and fear--and I was actually a little surprised that the worm killed the miller instead of the other way round.  So thumbs up for "The Worm," a good science fiction horror story.

Stephen Fabian fans should check out the July '79 issue of 
Fantastic which features six pages of art by Fabian: knights, galleys, 
churning waves, a topless woman--some of your favorite things! 

"The God-Box" by Howard Wandrei (1934)

A few years ago I purchased the recent Howard Wandrei collections Time Burial: The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei (1995) and The Eerie Mr. Murphy: The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei: Volume II (2003) largely because I was captivated by H. Wandrei's grotesque drawings.  I did read some stories from these books, among them "For Murderers Only," "The Molester," "Danger: Quicksand" and "The African Trick," but have left many more unread.  "The God Box" (no hyphen) appears in my 2017 paperback edition of Time Burial, but I am reading it today in Strange Ports of Call, where, for whatever reason, the hyphen was introduced.  (There is no hyphen in the title where the story was first printed, under a pseudonym, in F. Orlin Tremaine's Astounding.)

Like Keller's "The Worm," H. Wandrei's "The God-Box" stars smart knowledgeable guys who employ their wits in dealing with an alien challenge, and perhaps reflecting the author's weird sensibilities, in the end they come up short and are overwhelmed--like Keller's, Wandrei's tale is not of the triumph of the man of science but a sort of horror story.

Pence is an Egyptologist who, by bizarre coincidence, discovers in New York City a box the size of a camera made of what looks like gold but is incredibly hard and astoundingly dense--the little box weighs a ton or more!  Elaborately carved with Egyptian motifs and characters, the box is studded with many little heads of pharaohs and of gods of the Egyptian pantheon.  Pence contacts an engineer with a good reputation in the scientific community and the two of them tinker with the box, begin unraveling the secrets of its mind-boggling powers.  After activating the box by charging it with electricity, they find that manipulation of the heads, which are like knobs, allows them to view as through a TV any spot in the universe!  They can even create portals through which they can instantaneously travel to those distant locales or just manipulate the matter there, moving things and people around, drawing them to New York, or destroying them.  The Egyptian box has conferred upon them god-like power!

One of the odd wrinkles of using the box is that it attracts cats from all over the city to the building in which Pence found it, and the felines become such a nuisance that the men have to use the box's powers to dispose of them by the thousands.

Pence and the engineer are clever men but not necessarily good men, and Pence in particular lets his newfound powers go to his head.  The box is used to commit many trespasses, some even worse than teleporting felines wholesale out of the greatest city in the world, and eventually the men scheme against each other and end up lost on a distant planet.

I didn't like the style of this one as much as that of Keller's, it being a little flippant and jokey rather than sharp and clear, but I'm still giving "The God-Box" a thumbs up.  The premise of Damon Knight's 1976 "I See You" bears some similarity to that of "The God-Box," and Carl Jacobi's 1954 "Made in Tanganyika," has not only a similar premise but a similar plot.  Were Jacobi and Knight influenced by Wandrei's story?

"Master of the Asteroid" by Clark Ashton Smith (1932)

I'm a little surprised I haven't read this one yet, I having read quite a volume of stories by Smith.  "Master of the Asteroid" debuted in Wonder Stories, as the cover story, in the same issue as Hazel Heald's collaboration with H. P. Lovecraft "Man of Stone," which we read in 2017.

The editor's intro to "Master of the Asteroid" in Wonder Stories tells us Smith's tale focuses on the psychological stress astronauts will face.  Sure enough, the protagonists of the story are three men who, as members of a scientific expedition on Mars consisting of fifteen men, go insane and steal one of the expedition's ships and try to fly through the asteroid belt to a moon of Jupiter without bringing enough supplies with them.  After a sort of preface or frame, we get to the meat of the story, the log discovered decades later aboard the stolen vessel where it lies wrecked on an asteroid; also found inside the ship was the skeleton of one of the three mutineers, while around the ship lay the remains of a bunch of grotesquely skinny insectoid aliens.

In brief, the narrator survives while the other two madmen expire during the trip.  The narrator goes catatonic but recovers when the vessel crashes into a large asteroid which actually has an atmosphere and a whole ecosystem of plants, animals and people who have a culture that, apparently, includes religion.  The ship is all bent so the narrator cannot open the airlock, and he lacks the weapons or tools to bust through the porthole or hull, so he is stuck in the ship, and learns all about life on the asteroid by watching through the porthole.  We get a description of that life, and the man's mental trials, then finally clues as to the uncanny cause of his death.

"Master of the Asteroid" is a very good horror story set in space.  The style is direct though not unadorned, and totally believable as the record of a man under terrible stress.  The behavior and psychologies of the three broken men are very convincing and striking, and the story is full of dreadful, even haunting, images and events.  Yet again Clark Ashton Smith proves he deserves his high reputation.

Recommended.

"Master of the Asteroid" has been reprinted quite a number of times over the years.  In 1964 it appeared in Arkham House's Smith collection Tales of Science and Sorcery, which our French friends retitled Morthylla and put out in translation in 1989 with an ooo la la cover.  (Those Frenchies know how to separate a man from his francs.)

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Three good stories, so kudos to the authors and to Derleth, who selected these pieces.  All three stories have the trappings of science fiction, but instead of celebrating the work of the scientist and engineer and vindicating the ability of man to solve problems and master his environment, these stories exhibit a weird sensibility.  The focus is on the horror of the alien, the danger presented by novel conditions, and the inability of humans, even those devoted to the scientific method, to survive the physical threats, solve the mysteries, and resist the temptations presented by alien beings, artifacts and conditions.  You can't handle the truth of the unknown, man--it will destroy you physically, shatter you psychologically, and tempt you into abandoning your morality!