J Merril's 5th Best S-F: C D Simak, F Leiber, J G Ballard and T Sturgeon

Let's read four more stories that Judith Merril, born Judith Josephine Grossman in 1923, included in her 1960 anthology The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition; we'll be experiencing these tales in a scan of a 1961 paperback edition of the book.  In our last episode we read from the volume a very good Ray Bradbury story, an OK story by Gordon Dickson and a weak Damon Knight story.  Let's see if Clifford Simak, Fritz Leiber, J. G. Ballard and Ted Sturgeon deserve to be relaxing up in first class with Bradbury or should be crammed into steerage down there with Knight.

"A Death in the House" by Clifford D. Simak (1959)

I think Simak is a good writer, but sometimes his anti-human, anti-urban and anti-technology themes get on my nerves.  Let's hope "A Death in the House," which debuted in an issue of H. L. Gold's Galaxy with a hubba hubba Wallace Wood cover, doesn't lean too heavily on those misanthropic and anti-modern tropes.

Mose is a widower living alone on his "runty" farm which has no electricity--Mose hates electricity!  He finds an alien on his property.  Now, the cover illo of the October 1959 Galaxy might give you the idea that if you go out into space you'll find it inhabited by curvaceous babes, but Simak here in "A Death in the House" suggests space is home to hideous smelly monsters that don't even have what we would recognize as a face.  The hideous alien in question is almost motionless, apparently on the brink of death, though the "worms" around its "head" are writhing with life, and it is making some kind of keening noise.

Mose carries the alien into his untidy house and tries to keep it warm and comfortable, even has the local doctor come by to look at it, but neither Mose nor the doc have any idea how to help the creature, so it dies.  Mose wants to give it a decent Christian burial, but the undertaker and the local minister don't want to provide services to a non-human; Mose thinks "what heels some humans are."

Mose buries the dead alien and from its grave, from an egg or seed on its person that shares its memories, sprouts a plant that after some months breaks free and is more or less the same alien.  (Simak has foreshadowed in multiple ways that this alien is essentially a plant, and so its rebirth is not that bug a surprise to us readers.)  The alien lives with Mose, and though they can't talk, Mose is happy to have a companion--the loneliness he has suffered for years is eased.  Mose helps the alien fix its spacecraft; Mose hates paper money and has a stack of silver coins, and the alien uses the silver to repair the vessel.  Then the alien leaves, but first gives to Mose a little translucent sphere with flickering internal lights, a device that projects a field or something that relieves loneliness--Mose will never be alone.  

This is a pretty good story, sort of heartwarming even if Simak indulges in some of the attitudes I just told you annoy me.  While Simak's tale is somewhat similar to Bradbury's "The Shoreline at Sunset," in that story the humans who interact with the alien are reprehensible, while here in the saga of Old Mose, while most humans are callous or exploitative, our protagonist makes an effort to do the right thing and he is rewarded for his good deeds by being made a sort of honorary member of a society superior to our own.  A good choice by Merril, and it serves her theory that the good stories of 1959 were about the question of what it means to be human.  

"A Death in the House" has taken seed within and reemerged from the pages of numerous anthologies and Simak collections; Merril liked it enough to include it in her Best of the Best anthology that re-reprinted her favorite stories from her famous anthology series.

Among the stories appearing in translation in Des souris et des robots is

"The Golden Bugs," which we read in 2018.

"Mariana" by Fritz Leiber (1960)

In her intro to "Mariana," Merril gushes about how awesome Leiber's "The Silver Eggheads" is.  I read the novel version of The Silver Eggheads back in 2022 and took to this here blog to share with the universe my many complaints about the book, which I called "banal," "unfocused" and even "a chore to read."  Merril also mentions that Leiber is currently writing the Buck Rogers comic strip, something I hadn't known, or had forgotten.  According to wikipedia, Fritz had this job for a little over a year in total, split over two periods.  Doesn't seem like the job was really for him.

In preparation for this story, I reread Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "Mariana," which is about a woman who lives in a decrepit house and wishes she was dead because her boyfriend is away and perhaps is not coming back.  The lion's share of the poem's text describes the female lead's decaying domicile; we don't learn about her life or her beloved or anything, though maybe we are supposed to come into the poem already knowing that stuff, the poem being inspired by Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, with which I am not familiar.     

"Mariana" starts out seeming like a feminist story and turns into one of those holo helmet virtual reality programmable dream therapy stories.  Mariana is stuck at home while her husband, a callous--even cruel--man who is her intellectual inferior, commutes to work every day.  She hangs out alone, with the robot servants.  One day she stumbles upon a secret control panel.  It turns out the house is on some barren moon, and the trees outside are not real, but an artificial matter projection.  The top switch on the hidden panel shuts the trees off.  Despite warnings, Mariana, over the course of a few days, throws the succeeding switches, one by one.  It turns out the house and even her angry husband are just matter projections.  When she hits the penultimate switch the moon disappears and Mariana is in a hospital, being treated for depression.  The moon house and unpleasant husband were "wish-fulfillment therapy."  Is Mariana ready for actual treatment from a doctor?  Or will she throw the final switch, which, it is implied, will kill Mariana--could she herself be no more than an artificial construct?

This story is OK, though I question the logic of much of it.  Why would wish-fulfillment therapy offer the simulation of a boring life with an unpleasant husband instead of a comfortable or exciting life with a loving or thrilling husband?  And what is the point of expending resources to provide therapy to an artificial construct, and why would an artificial construct have a psychological illness?  I guess one could come up with reasons for all these things (the unfulfilling virtual reality life is meant to shock her into desiring real therapy, her mental illness--if she is artificial--is like a computer virus or bug in her programming, etc.)  And I guess the point of the story is to blow your mind, not to make sense, and that Fritz's priority was to explore and emulate the elements and themes of Tennyson's poem about a suicidally depressed woman in a dilapidated house, not for the thing to an airtight plot.  But it just doesn't sit right with me, feels gimmicky.     

I'm tolerating rather than loving "Mariana," but it has been reprinted in many Leiber collections and anthologies since its debut in Fantastic.

Among the stories in Theodore W. Hipple and Robert G. Wright's The Worlds of Science Fiction
are Stephen Goldin's "Sweet Dreams, Melissa" and Chad Oliver's "Final Exam," both of which
we have blogged about here at MPFL.

"The Sound-Sweep" by J. G. Ballard (1960)

Ballard is beloved by the critics, maybe because of the experimental and abstract nature of much of his work, its focus on decay and degradation, and his penchant for explicit references to real life popular culture, you know, Marilyn Monroe, JFK, Ronald Reagan, that kind of thing.  I'm a Ballard skeptic, but I like to think I am open-minded about this guy, and I did like "Billenium" and "A Host of Furious Fancies."     

Madame Gioconda, presumably named after the famously enigmatic Mona Lisa, is a sort of Norma Desmond figure, a mentally ill former star of the opera who dreams of a comeback.  She lives in an old studio under a "flyover" (those of us who grew up in New Jersey would call this an "overpass") and every night has dreams or hallucinations that she can hear the applause and the jeers of an audience, as in her heyday.  Every day a young man who is a superfan of hers, Mangon, comes by to "sonovac" Gioconda's quarters.  You remember how in Kuttner and Moore's 1949 Astounding cover story, "Private Eye," the cops could glean audio and video of past events from the teeny tiny textures sound waves and photons left on surfaces?  Well, in "The Sound Sweep," Ballard uses a similar gag--people can hear, or at least be affected by the emotional content of, old sounds "embedded" in surfaces, and people like Mangon exorcize these sounds with a device much like a vacuum cleaner, then dump the sounds in a sound garbage dump.  Of course, Gioconda, old (48 or 49!) and fat, her teeth ruined by tobacco and cocaine, her mug covered in cosmetics, is insane and the sounds of the audience she "hears" are not real, but a delusion, but slavish fan Mangon still runs the sonovac all over the studio to placate her.

Mangon himself is a remarkable character, a man rendered mute by his mother, who punched him in the throat when he was three, and was raised in institutions, and is now a member of the untouchable class of sound-sweeps.  He is perhaps the world's finest sound-sweep, better able to distinguish and understand sounds embedded in walls than anybody; he even dumps in his own little hovel the sounds he collects from the sites of dinner parties so he can hear them and enjoy the conversations as much as if he attended the shindigs.

Having introduced his two characters, Ballard then gives us insight into the alternate reality world in which they live.  Gioconda's stellar career, and that of all singers, went into severe decline about ten years ago because of the development of ultrasonic music.  Such music makes no audible sound, but works directly on the brain, producing the emotional effect of music on the listener without causing sounds to be embedded in your walls and furniture.  The sounds of musical instruments can be turned into ultrasonic recordings and broadcasts, but human vocals cannot, and when ultrasonic music was embraced by the public, work for singers became very hard to find.  Another innovation: long pieces of music like symphonies can be compressed into a shorter form, just a few minutes, so you can get the good out of them in a fraction of the time.  (I guess all this is Balllard's allegorical commentary on the degradation of culture in the postwar period, what with the rise of rock music and TV at the expense of operatic and orchestral music and stage drama and serious cinema.  I thought Ballard's "The Garden of Time" took a similar tack.) 

The plot.  Madame Gioconda wants to blackmail a big exec in this world's analog of Hollywood ("Video City") so he will allow her to broadcast her singing over the airwaves--this would be the first public performance of a singer in ten years.  Mangon helps her collect blackmail material--he can learn things about this corrupt big wig by listening to old sounds of big wig's private conversation at the sound dump.  The blackmail plot succeeds, and Gioconda is grateful to Mangon, and the man expects his relationship with his beloved idol Gioconda is going to flower into something intimate.  Mangon is so happy, he gets his voice back--his condition was only psychosomatic!

Of course, Gioconda is a drug addict and has not practiced her craft for a decade--there is no way she can sing competently, much less put on the kind of world-class performance she put on regularly fifteen or twenty years ago.  With the help of Mangon, some broadcast producer and musician guys figure out a way to put on a performance that will not get out to the public but which Gioconda will be deceived into believing is reaching the public, using various technical means including the sonic sweepers with which Mangon is an expert.  Shortly before the big broadcast, Gioconda, confident that she is about to be rich and famous again, gives Mangon the cold shoulder--in fact, she insults him in a very demeaning and dismissive way, even though he loves her and was key to her expected comeback.  Mangon loses his voice again but gets his revenge, allowing Gioconda's atrocious performance to reach the public and causing a show biz disaster of epic proportions.

"The Sound-Sweep" is like 40 pages long but it only feels long here and there, when you hit one of Ballard's long descriptions.  Both the exposition about this alternate universe and the narrative about talented people who foolishly set themselves unattainable goals and suffer from turns of fate and from their own delusions are pretty compelling and entertaining, plus there are some clever little bits, like how Gioconda uses lots of cocaine and Mangon drinks lots of Coca-Cola.  (I've been trying to consume less sugar and so being reminded of my suspended relationship with my favorite beverage was a little saddening--I know there are plenty of people love Diet Coke and Coke Zero, but those just don't do it for me.)  So, thumbs up for "The Sound-Sweep."  The melodrama of Mangon debuted in Science Fantasy and has been reprinted many times in Ballard collections, as well as a Damon Knight anthology, Tomorrow and Tomorrow: Ten Tales of the Future.                

"The Man Who Lost the Sea" by Theodore Sturgeon (1959)

The title of this story feels familiar, so much so that I thought I'd read it until I double checked and found no record of a blog post about it.  In 1999, Arthur C. Clarke in an intro to the story in the anthology My Favorite Science Fiction Story announced that "The Man Who Lost the Sea" inspired his own "Transit of Earth," which we read in 2016.  Here in The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, Merril suggests that it no longer makes sense for SF to be about "rocketry" and "astrogation" and "planet-hopping," as the hard sciences have "caught up with us" and offer little room for speculation, and so SF writers are turning to what she calls, in quotes, "'humanic studies.'"  Then she wonders whether Sturgeon, whom she calls "Solo Sturgeon," with "The Man Who Lost the Sea" is doing old-style SF, exploring the "humanic studies," or even pioneering beyond them.

"The Man Who Lost the Sea" is a very literary story in that for much of its length it is confusing and surreal and has what amounts to an unreliable narrator, and offers tons of metaphors and similes and descriptions of images that are close to abstract.  At the same time, Sturgeon's story is a very traditional science fiction story that tells you science and technology are awesome and conquering outer space is going to be extremely dangerous and people are going to be killed but it will all be absolutely worth it.  A key to making this story a successful hybrid is that, rather than leaving everything ambiguous as modern literary stories so often do, in the end all the confusing things we put up with in the beginning of the story resolve themselves and are explained and the last line is a totally unambiguous normative statement.  Sturgeon here quite cleverly instigates an itch and then scratches it in a very satisfying way, so thumbs up for "The Man Who Lost the Sea," a big success for Sturgeon and a good selection by Merril.  

The narrative.  There is a guy half buried in the sand in a space suit, and a kid with a model aircraft and then a model space ship, and we get scenes of a kid who suffers a head injury in gym and loses some memories, but regains them, and a scene of a swimmer near a coral reef who gets into trouble and nearly drowns.  Sturgeon confuses us because he doesn't make it immediately clear if it is the spacesuit guy or the kid who is "real" and just imagining the other, and calls something "the sea" that we later learn is not the sea but a flat plain, and calls something a "monster" or "ameba," but that is just a metaphor for a painful and dangerous condition.  Anyway, the space suit guy is real and the kids and the swimmer are also him, at pivotal moments of his life that he is remembering as he lies on Mars, the first human to land on the red planet, dying because his ship crashed.  The spaceman in his youth loved science and was also athletic and took risks and suffered injuries that foreshadowed his death today on Mars--in the same way his injuries in gym class and while snorkeling temporarily disordered his mind, the crash on Mars messed up his mind so, for example, he thinks he sees the ocean when in fact he is looking at a plain.  When he came to his senses in school and on the beach he felt like he had triumphed over injury and over death, and when he comes to his senses on Mars, even though he is seconds away from dying, he also feels triumphant, because the human race has reached another planet.

I'll admit I found this one annoying for a few pages, but then came the snorkeling scene, which was quite good with its description of ocean creatures, and then when Ted resolved all the mysteries in the end he had fully won me over and then when he gave us a very pro-space exploration finale I was enthusiastically on his side.  Ted played me like a fiddle but I can only admire him for it.

Deservedly, "The Man Who Lost the Sea" has appeared in many anthologies as well as a bunch of Sturgeon collections since its first appearance in F&SF.

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These are pretty good picks by Merril; the Leiber doesn't really hold together, but it succeeds as literature and as entertainment, and the Simak, Ballard and Sturgeon hold together nicely and make their points quite ably.  The Ballard is a real downer, with people misbehaving and getting defeated and with culture becoming degraded by technology and democracy, but Simak and Sturgeon take a more balanced approach, showing triumph as well as tragedy, human decency and human achievement as well as (in Simak's case) human greed and callousness and (in Sturgeon's) human loss.  The Simak, Ballard and Sturgeon are worthy companions to the Bradbury story I praised in my last post.

More anthologized short stories next time, kids, but from over ten years later than today's.  See you then!

J Merril's 5th Best S-F: D Knight, R Bradbury, & G Dickson

Let's read some stories reprinted in Judith Merril's 1960 anthology The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition.  I've already read and blogged about three stories from this book: Avram Davidson's "No Fire Burns," Cordwainer Smith's "No, No Not Rogov!", and Carol Emshwiller's "Day at the Beach,"  I read a version of Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon" in school back in the Eighties.  But that still leaves a lot of material in the anthology which I have not yet read.  Today let's read three stories from The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, those by editor and critic Damon Knight, Ray Bradbury--in some ways perhaps the most successful of all American SF writers-- and the Dorsai guy, Gordon R. Dickson.  We'll probably devote our next blog post to three or four more stories from this book.

Keep in mind that while these stories debuted elsewhere, and have been reprinted in later books, I am reading them today in a scan of a 1961 paperback edition of Merril's anthology.

"The Handler" by Damon Knight (1960)

"The Handler" debuted in an issue of Rogue which is chock full of content from SF authors, including Harlan Ellison's "Final Shtick," which we read a few years ago.  This issue seems to have as its theme alcohol--I guess they figured it was pointless to compete with Playboy in the jazz department.  I have seen the Table of Contents of this issue on ebay, and Robert Bloch, Robert Silverberg, and Mack Reynolds all contribute articles about booze (William F. Nolan's article is about Dean Martin, which perhaps also qualifies.)  Is "The Handler" also about the sauce?  Well, in her intro to the story here in The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, Merril, after telling us how great a guy Knight is, hints that "The Handler" is a caustic attack on the entertainment industry.  SF doesn't have to be adventures in strange worlds and speculations on what life might be like in a future of different technologies, customs, and political and economic systems--it can also be a guy making fun of TV!

"The Handler," like 4 pages here in TYBSF5, is a boring joke story about how showbiz people are shallow phonies who are fooling themselves while they fool the public (who are also probably fooling themselves.)  A big party is underway!  Everybody is drinking!  A big handsome guys comes in--he is the hero of the hour!  Everybody loves him!  Big guy is, apparently, the host or emcee or whatever of a TV show, I guess like a Jack Benny or Steve Allen or Jack Paar sort of figure.  The just completed show was a huge success, and will get renewed, and everybody involved is ecstatic!  Then comes our twist!  The big handsome man is a machine, and the short ugly guy who sits in the machine and operates it climbs out of it to take a break from his hot sweaty work.  And all the many people who owe their livelihoods to him are cold to him, find him disgusting, even though they were falling all themselves expressing adoration of the machine, every move of which he controlled.  His colleagues urge him to climb back aboard the machine and when he does the love fest for the big handsome guy continues.

Knight provides us yet another reminder that we are all putting on an act at all times to maintain our careers and relationships, and that smart unattractive people envy and resent good-looking people and behind-the-scenes people envy and resent the figureheads who get the glory.  "The Handler" isn't bogus, and it has the virtue of being short, but it is banal.  So, just a marginal thumbs down rather than a vicious condemnation.  Her intro suggests Merril and Knight were friends, and that, and the fact that Merril loves including in her anthologies stories that debuted outside the category SF mags, perhaps suggests why she thought "The Handler" worthy of reprint here, and even in the anthology that collected her favorites from all her annual Best ofs.  "The Handler" has also reappeared in Knight collections and many more anthologies, including those that endeavor to define the parameters of the SF canon, prescribe what are the greatest SF stories, like Ursula LeGuin's The Norton Book of Science Fiction and Frederik Pohl's The SFWA Grand Masters: Volume 3.   

"The Shoreline at Sunset" by Ray Bradbury (1959)      

In the intro to Bradbury's piece in The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, Merril puts forward a sort of zeitgeist theory that all the good stories of a given year have the same topic or theme:

Against a background of the inevitable ninety per cent of inept or hackster trash, the better stories, as they emerge each year, always show some very definite--and different from the year before--emphasis on one area of speculation or another.

While unfalsifiable nonsense, this theory is sort of a fun way of looking at the world.  Anyway, Merril suggests that "The Shoreline at Sunset," like all the best SF of 1959, is about how we define what it means to be human.

Two guys, Tom and Chico, are beachcombers.  It seems they have wasted their lives hanging out on the beach, eking out a parlous existence by collecting junk that has washed up on the shore and coins tourists have dropped in the sand, and I guess seducing women, women they sometimes hope will find them marriageable, but which never do.  Tom and Chico are no longer young--they are getting grey hair.  Tom is talking about leaving the beach and Chico.

As the sun is about to set, an excited young boy approaches Tom and Chico--he and a friend have found a strange woman, washed up on the beach!  When the men see her, they find she is a mermaid!  Is she dead or alive?  They can't be sure--she is pretty inert, but upon touching her the men feel what may be a pulse.  Chico thinks they have finally struck it rich, and runs off to get ice to preserve this physical specimen of a heretofore merely mythical species so they can profit from it.  He instructs Tom and the kids to make sure the creature doesn't wash away in the rising tide while he is gone.

Chico and Tom are losers with questionable morals.  Obviously they should try to help the alien woman, who is probably alive and likely dying.  Chico just wants to profit from the woman's tragic situation.  Tom, on the other hand, is static, the kind of guy who does nothing, never makes a decision, just stands there and lets the world pass him by.  Instead of actively trying to help the woman or actively exploiting her, he just stands there while the waves carry her back to the ocean, we readers hoping she will wake up and go back to whatever life she was leading before misfortune struck her.

Chico returns and it is clear neither of these losers will ever leave the beach or get decent jobs or build a healthy relationship with a woman, and that this fate is meet and just because Tom and Chico are each immoral and/or lack drive.

Merril is of course correct that the story is in part about what it means to be human.  The mermaid has a human woman's upper half and a fish's lower half--is she human?  Chico treats her like a fish, not a woman, but Tom is not so sure.  As for Tom and Chico, their behavior suggests they are less than human, because they either act in a manner that is evil or fail to act at all, behaving like a passive vegetable instead of the erect and intelligent member of a complex society that he has the potential to be.  A "real" man supports and contributes to and defends society, these goofs are scavengers divorced from society at best, and are probably better described as parasites or even predators.

The themes and plot of "The Shoreline at Sunset" are good, and it is quite well-written--Bradbury slings the metaphors and descriptions like a master.  And there is a lot for the reader to consider, to analyze.  For example, why did Bradbury include the two little boys?  To remind us that Tom and Chico act like kids, living off society instead of contributing to it and failing to consider the future?  Are we readers to hope that the adventure of the mermaid will somehow affect these boys in such a way to ensure they grow up to be decent people and not losers like Tom and Chico?  

Thumbs up for "The Shoreline at Sunset!"  A solid selection by Merril.  The story, perhaps known to our British friends as "The Sunset Harp," first appeared in F&SF and, in the same year, A Medicine for Melancholy, the slightly different British version of which is known as The Day It Rained Forever.

"The Dreamsman" by Gordon R. Dickson (1959)

Here we have an acceptable trifle written by a man Merril, in her introduction, indicates is a singer and guitar player who performs SF songs he composes in cooperation with Poul Anderson and Theodore Cogswell.  "The Dreamsman" is something of a joke story that sort of mildly spoofs SF commonplaces, but it isn't that absurdist or bitter and doesn't feel like a subversive satire, just a bit of fun.  For some reason it is written in the present tense.  

"The Dreamsman" is one of those stories about how psykers feel alone and then meet fellow psykers, and is also about people who learn about the secret cabals at war in the shadows who are determining the course of history totally unbeknownst to us normies, as well as one of those stories in which aliens who are better than humans are judging whether we can join the galactic federation.

An old guy--some 184 years old!--is a psyker.  One morning while shaving he detects two other psykers, a married couple.  He goes to them.  They are all hopped up to join other psykers and form a group to contribute to society, to use their superpowers to help people in trouble, you know, like a kid who fell down a well, and promote unspecified progress.  The old geezer says that this idealism will not work, that the thing for them to do is to join the colony of psykers on Venus.  He takes them to a military base to a rocket--the old geez clouds the minds of the military personnel on the scene or even go to sleep.

Then comes the twist ending.  From out of the sky, another psyker, one much more powerful than the old guy, appears.  This psyker, an alien, says that the old geezer is a conservative who is killing the psykers he finds because he doesn't want the world to change--the rocket is a death trap!  There is no Venus colony!  The old geez isn't even as powerful as he seems--half the psychic stuff he does, like telekinesis, is just him using hypnosis to trick people.  The alien laments that this old guy has been retarding human progress for many decades, that if not for him, the Earth could have joined the galactic federation ages ago.  But the aliens can't kill or even imprison this troublemaker, violence and force being forbidden them.  The alien saves the couple, taking them to some real colony far away.

Not bad, but no big deal; competent filler that gets away with using old (but beloved!) ideas by using them a little knowingly, with an ironic wink.  Why Merril thinks it is so good, I don't know, maybe she thinks it is more subversive than I do, that its message is that cautious and careful people who follow the rules to preserve what they have--like the old geez, who has a strict dietary regimen and scrupulously follows the traffic laws--or maintain a strict moral code--like the aliens who refuse to use violence to help Earth and humanity advance--are holding us back.  Maybe as a socialist, Merril saw laws and traditions that, for example, respect private property, and those who uphold them, as ridiculous obstacles keeping us from building a workers' utopia right here in America.

"The Dreamsman" debuted in Fred Pohl's paperback anthology series Star, and would reappear in 1985 and in 2017 in Dickson collections.

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Obviously the Bradbury story is far and away superior to Knight's and Dickson's contributions.  But maybe when next we meet we'll read a story hand picked by Merril for The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition that can give the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles a little competition.

Tarzan and the Lost Empire by Edgar Rice Burroughs

“I wish that Nyuto would see me and talk with me,” said Tarzan of the Apes. “Then he would know that it would be better to have me for a friend than for an enemy. Many men have tried to kill me, many chiefs greater than Nyuto. This is not the first hut in which I have lain a prisoner, nor is it the first time that men have prepared fires to receive me, yet I still live, Lukedi, and many of them are dead."

In January, we read an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel in which Tarzan met the descendants of English crusaders who were still living like it was the medieval era right there in the middle of Africa.  In February, we read an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel in which David Innes met the descendants of 17th-century pirates who were living like it was the 1600s right there in Pellucidar.  Well, it's March and today we're going to read an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel in which Tarzan meets people descended from Roman legionaries who are living like its the 1st century A.D. right there in the middle of Africa.  Africa really is the most diverse continent! 

Tarzan and the Lost Empire debuted in 1928 and '29 across five issues of the magazine Blue Book.  Four of those issues of Blue Book have cover illos devoted to the latest saga of Lord Greystoke, and these illustrations are laden with spoilers--who could have guessed that Tarzan would fight a lion in this adventure?

I am experiencing Tarzan and the Lost Empire via my $1.25 Ballantine copy of the novel, Ballantine 24171, which has a Boris Vallejo cover.  The cover of the paperback says "complete and unabridged," but I don't know about that.  In Chapter 10 of this edition we find "rein" for what appears (correctly) as "reign" in Ace F-169, the 40¢ edition with the Frazetta cover, and in a 1931 Grosset & Dunlap hardcover.  Now, maybe that is just a typo.  But look at the epigraph I have placed at the head of this blog post, Tarzan telling a member of the Bagego tribe, who are preparing to burn Lord Greystoke alive, that he has been captured many times and escaped many times.  Tarzan, in my Ballantine edition, says "...nor is it the first time that men have prepared fires to receive me...."  But in the Ace and Grosset & Dunlap editions Tarzan says "...nor is it the first time that black men have prepared fires to receive me...."  The word "Negro," capitalized in my Ballantine, is not capitalized in the Ace or Grosset & Dunlap printings, and at least once "blacks" in the older books is replaced in the Ballantine with "Negroes."  Maybe not a big deal if you are reading Tarzan for fun, but something to keep in mind if you are reading these novels with an eye to learning about the period in which they were written or about Burroughs himself and what he actually wrote. 

Burroughs gets right down to business as we begin Tarzan and the Lost Empire.  After Tarzan's little buddy Nkima the monkey opines that the white man is the worst kind of man (Tarzan doesn't count, he being considered by all a creature of the jungle), a white man shows up to request Tarzan's help.  This guy is a German missionary, Doctor von Harben.  His son Erich, an expert linguist and archaeologist and an amateur mountain climber, is missing!  The Doctor and Tarzan, like everybody in the jungle, know of the legend of a white tribe living in the Wiramwazi mountains, and when Erich heard about the legend he decided to investigate it.  But he hasn't returned from this expedition, even though some of his African porters have come back.  These survivors of the expedition to Wiramwazi are pretty close-lipped about what happened, and the Doctor asks for Tarzan's help.  By the sixth page of text, Tarzan is already on his way to Wiramwazi, little Nkima (you can see him on the cover of Blue Book and in Frazetta's cover illo for Ace F-169) sitting on his shoulder.   

In Chapter 2 we join Erich on the slopes of the Wiramwazi.  Erich has been abandoned by all his black hirelings, their superstitious fears of the ghosts said to inhabit the mountains having overcome their courage.  These deserters took all of the expedition's food and rifles with them, but Erich isn't sore--after all, what can you expect from a bunch of Africans?  Anyway, he has his Luger and can hunt rabbits with it as he climbs the mountains in search of their secrets.

For much of the novel the narrative switches back and forth between Tarzan's adventures and Erich's.  As Tarzan proceeds to the Wiramwazi, Nkima, a coward and a blusterer, offers pretty entertaining comic relief.  It is thanks to Nkima's interference that  Tarzan falls while climbing the outer slope of the Wiramwazis and hits his head; unconscious, he is captured by a tribe of blacks, the Bagego.  For centuries, the Bagego have been in contact with the white tribe of the Wiramwazi; the whites sometimes raid the Bagego, and sometimes trade with them.  Among the Bagego there is no consensus on whether the Wiramwazi tribe is made up of flesh and blood men or ghosts--many think the white men are actually the ghosts of the Bagego's ancestors.

Meanwhile, Erich is rejoined by his most loyal black hireling, Gabula, and the two men go through several pages of mountain climbing which Burroughs renders quite entertaining.  On the other side of the Wirmwazi, Erich and Gabula find a valley with a swamp, forest, river and island; when they get down into the valley they are captured by black warriors.  These Africans speak a version of Latin, and bear swords and spears that remind Erich of those used by the ancient Romans!  These blacks are provincials of a small Roman empire, and take Erich and Gabula to the fortified city with an architecture much like that of classical Greece and Rome where live the people who dominate them.  This city is inhabited by a small elite of white people (among them a beautiful woman, daughter of a leading intellectual, Favonia, by whom Erich is smitten),  a soldier and commercial class of mixed-race people whom Burroughs refers to as "brown," and a working and slave class of blacks.  Apparently the  Roman ruling class arrived here almost 1900 years ago and have had no contact with other white people since then; they have made little technological or cultural progress and wear togas and throw people into the arena and so forth.

The Bagego village is raided by brown legionaries commanded by a white officer and Tarzan is captured along with a bunch of villagers.  it turns out here are two Roman cities in the valley beyond the Wiramwazi, each with its own Emperor, and they have been engaged in a cold war for over 1700 years.  The city Erich was taken to is Castrum Mare; Tarzan is dragged to the other, Castrum Sanguinarius.  Erich has managed to make friends over in Castrum Mare because he speaks Latin, but Tarzan can't speak Latin, and in Castrum Sanguinarius he is tossed in the dungeon under the arena, and then dragged before Emperor Sublatus.  Taller, faster and stronger than everybody else, Tarzan escapes the Emperor's court, humiliating the Emperor in the process.  Looking down into a courtyard from a tree, Tarzan spots an aristocrat trying to rape a woman, and, Good Samaritan that he is, he rescues her.  The would-be rapist turns out to be Emperor Sublatus's son, Fastus!  The woman is Delicta, daughter of a senator.

Erich is taken to meet the Emperor of Castrum Mare, Validus Augustus, and the Emperor is fascinated by Erich's knowledge of the history of Rome since the founder of Castrum Sanguinarius left Europe during the reign of Nerva.  Erich is shanghaied into the job of writing down all he knows about European history and even writing Validus Augustus' biography.  Here, at the midway point of the novel, we get exposition about the history of the two Roman cities here in this African valley and a dose of that court intrigue that I find kind of boring, and the novel, which has been fast paced and focused on interesting relationships heretofore, bogs down a little bit.  It didn't help that I briefly mixed up the conniving courtier of Castrum Mare, Fupus, adoptive son of Validus Augustus, with the equally villainous Fastus, son of Sublatus, over in Castrum Sanguinarius.

For weeks, while Erich is in Castrum Mare, ascribble scribble scribble (but taking breaks to flirt with Favonia), Tarzan is in hiding in Castrum Sanguinarius, protected by Delicta's fiancé, a popular officer in the army, and learns to speak Latin (which he could sort of read, already, thanks to his European education.)  But eventually Sublatus's lackeys get their hands on Tarzan and Delicta's fiancé, and they end up in the dungeons under the arena along with many blacks and a spy from Castrum Mare, an aristocrat out of favor with Validus Augustus but popular with the people sent here in a fool's errand.  Burroughs has been hinting that Castrum Mare is the better-run and less corrupt of the two Roman cities*, though the current Emperor is corrupt, and now he makes it very clear.  Also made more clear is that there are many many more Africans in the valley than white people; Tarzan begins to consider leading the blacks in an uprising against the cruel Sublatus regime.

*Heredity and eugenics are recurring themes in Burroughs' work, and we learn that there is almost no crime in Castrum Mare because, for many centuries, criminals have been executed--along with their families!  This keeps criminal tendencies from polluting the gene pool. 

The last third of Tarzan and the Lost Empire is solid adventure fiction, with Tarzan making friends with and becoming leader of the men with whom he is imprisoned and who fight at his side in the arena over the course of a week-long celebration and then in the uprising against Sublatus that Tarzan sparks.  What goes on in the dungeon, as the men plot to escape, and in the arena and during the uprising, the different types of fights that Tarzan and his comrades get forced into, is entertaining.  Burroughs puts a lot of focus on human relationships--the evolving and quite fickle sentiment of the crowd towards Sublatus and Tarzan, and Tarzan's own relationships with his fellow prisoners.  In the climax of the arena sequence, Sublatus, having failed to destroy Tarzan by making him fight men and then a lion, has six apes set upon him, only to see the apes recognize Tarzan as a friend.  These apes form an important part of the uprising, as do the black tribes of the valley and even Tarzan's own tribe, the Waziri, summoned from far away by Nkima.

Having overthrown Sublatus and put the father of Delicta on the throne of Castrum Sanguinarius, Tarzan and the Waziri, along with that spy and others, march at the head of an army to Castrum Mare to rescue Erich.  Erich has been thrown in the arena thanks to the machinations of Fupus, who wants to marry Favonia, but before the games begin the daring Gabula comes from out of nowhere to murder Validus Augustus in front of the assembled populace.  In the ensuing chaos, Erich and Gabula and the other people sentenced to the arena escape to hiding places within the city; Fupus becomes Emperor.  Fupus's agents find Erich and friends just as the army that is with Tarzan arrives and overthrows the unpopular and incompetent Fupus; Erich is saved and can marry Favonia, and that spy is made Emperor.  The novel ends with Tarzan praising the initiative taken by Nkima in bringing the Waziri.

Tarzan and the Lost Empire, the twelfth Tarzan book, is a step up from number 11, Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle.  The arena, fighting, and mountain climbing scenes here in book 12 are better than the jousting and fighting scenes in its predecessor, and the characters and their relationships are more fun.  The Roman cities embroiled in a cold war in this novel are more interesting than the medieval cities locked in a cold war in the previous novel.  So, thumbs up for Tarzan and the Lost Empire.  I'm looking forward to Tarzan #13, Tarzan at the Earth's Core! 

Detail of illustration from the February 1929 Blue Book

Merril-approved '58 stories: A Barclay, C Beaumont & M Benedict

We're reading 1959 stories which Judith Merril included on her Honorable Mentions list in the back of her fifth critically lauded "Year's Best" anthology.  This is the second post in this series; in the inaugural post we handled three stories by authors whose names begin with "A," Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson and Christopher Anvil.  Today we'll read stories by "B" authors.  There are actually a lot of authors whose names start with "B" whom Merril thought published stories in 1959 worthy of note, so I think we'll be doing more "B"s next time; today we've got a pretty famous guy associated with The Twilight Zone, Charles Beaumont, and two people I don't think I have read before--I don't even know if I have heard of them before--Alan Barclay and Merle Benedict.

"Nearly Extinct" by Alan Barclay

World War II RAF veteran Barclay has over two dozen short fiction credits at isfdb and five listed novels.  "Nearly Extinct" debuted in John Carnell's New Worlds, but it seems has never been reprinted.  Let's see if we can figure out what Merril saw in this story that other editors, apparently, did not see.

"Nearly Extinct" is an acceptable story, reasonably well-written and somewhat entertaining and interesting, but it doesn't have a real plot.  In structure and setting it somewhat resembles Brian Aldiss' "The Lieutenant," but Aldiss' story had a plot--the lieutenant's personality evolved, the story chronicled a change, there was a climax.  "Nearly Extinct" does not really have that sort of narrative.

Some years ago, space aliens conquered the Earth and almost exterminated humanity.  Nowadays, the few surviving humans live as savages, almost animals, in the wild spaces.  Sometimes the aliens, black hairless people whom the humans call "Frogs," come out to the wilderness to hunt the humans on foot or in low-flying aircraft.

As the story begins, a woman whose family has just been killed is fleeing the Frog hunters.  She is saved by a young man, a stranger to her, who is skilled with knife and bow.  She escapes and he stays behind to fight--he gets surrounded by the Frogs, who have firearms.  In the next scene we find he has survived and is guiding the woman to his family's camp.  How did he get away from the aliens who had surrounded him?  We soon learn that his father, he, and his children can teleport to any spot they can see--his wives cannot.

Barclay provides scenes in which the Frogs attack and the humans deal with them.  Many Frogs are slain, but so is the male lead's father.  Then comes the final scene, in which it is implied that one day, the male leads descendants, humans who can teleport, will retake the Earth and maybe conquer the Frogs' home planet.

Lacking character development or a climax, this story feels like a fragment or an anecdote.  Maybe it is a character study of the kind of people who will survive an apocalyptic event like conquest of the Earth from space--the male lead is cold, emotionless, he doesn't seem excited to have sex with the members of his harem, much less to love any of them, and he is not moved by the death of his father in the fight with the Frogs.  He just seems coldly committed to keeping the human race alive.  

"Nearly Extinct" is OK.  I'm not sure why Merril liked it enough to include it in her list--maybe its fragmentary nature made her think it "literary," a sort of subversion of pulp expectations that we would see the human race get finished off (if this were a horror story) or see it achieve its liberation (in a conventional human vs alien invasion science fiction scenario)?

"Sorcerer's Moon" by Charles Beaumont

This story by the famous Beaumont debuted in your favorite jazz magazine, Playboy.  (Merril strives in her anthologies to find SF that debuted outside the SF mags.)  Besides coverage of the upcoming Playboy Jazz Festival, an article on yachting, and quite a bit of material about the Beats (even the centerfold is promoted as a Beat who loves Dylan Thomas, Prokofiev and organic food), this issue of Hugh Hefner's upscale skin rag has a story by Avram Davidson we read last month, "No Fire Burns."  

"Sorcerer's Moon" is a weak joke story, and very short.  There are only two wizards left alive in the world, two men several centuries old who are masters of black magic and in touch with hellish powers.  Instead of forming a little wizard club and spending their time goofing on the normies, or mundanes, or "muggles" as I guess the kids are calling them nowadays, these two wizards are feuding, each seeking to destroy the other to become the sole wizard in the world.  Won't the survivor be lonely?

Anyway, one sorcerer manages to trick the other into taking a sheet of paper with a rune on it.  When a particular midnight rolls around, the last wizard to have had possession of the rune will be destroyed.  So, each wizard tries to trick the other into taking possession of the rune, disguising it as a piece of mail or something.  One hires a private detective who is an expert process server to deliver the rune to the other, but can this private dick be trusted?

Lame filler.  I read it in the magazine, where it shares a page with a cartoon about incest, pedophilia, and the dirty minds of hicks that references Lolita, but you can also catch "Sorcerer's Moon" in The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural and multiple Beaumont collections.

We've already read a bunch of stories in The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural:
Beaumont's "Black Country" (it's about jazz),
Fredric Brown's "Nasty" (it's about erectile dysfunction),
Robert Bloch's "The Travelling Salesman" (it's a riff on travelling salesmen jokes),
Mack Reynolds' "Burnt Toast" (it's about alcoholism),
Richard Matheson's "First Anniversary" (it's about necrophilia),
Ray Bradbury's "Heavy Set" (it's about an Oedipal complex).

"The Dancing that We Did" by Myrle Benedict

"Myrle Benedict" is one of the pen names used by Sasha Miller, who went on to do historical novels (I guess about ancient Greece) and then fantasy novels, some in collaboration with Andre Norton.  She also worked on a GURPS supplement!  (I never had any GURPS stuff, though I had a lot of James Bond roleplaying material, Toon, Star Frontiers, Marvel Super Heroes RPG, and borrowed some Gamma World stuff from another kid.)  Merril included two Benedict stories in her honorable mentions list for '59; neither has, as far as isfdb knows, ever been reprinted.

As you might expect of a story written by a woman (if you were some kind of neanderthal misogynist!), Sasha Miller's "The Dancing that We Did" begins at a dance.  A country dance in hillbilly country; maybe it qualifies as a square dance ("...swing her where, I don’t keer, take that purty gal out fer air!”)  Our narrator Alan Wiley left this rural town to go to the big city to get an education, and today he is back and attending the dance.  He flirts with a 16-year-old girl, Letty Sue; these two seem to have crushes on each other from way back.  Adam likes Letty Sue because she is sleek and slim, almost childishly so--she has feet that are more slender and breasts that are smaller than those of the other pretty girls at the dance.  We hear all about her clothes and hair and all about the clothes and hair of Letty Sue's competition, big-breasted Jodene Bailey.

As if this material already wasn't boring enough, Miller does that thing that so many authors do that I find so tiresome, renders people's speech phonetically. 

"Ain’t even been here but a couple days, an’ every time I try t’ get near you, some over-grown lunk jest shoves me out o’ the way!”      

Anyway, by page two I was checking to see how long this story was--OK, only ten pages, I can do it.

Alan and Letty go to their favorite spot by the river and have their first kiss.  Alan banged a lot of chicks back in the city, but this kiss is the most wonderful experience he has ever had!  Then they go back to the dance and dance together and all the other people there marvel at how great they are at dancing. 

We learn that Alan is the smartest guy in town and will be the best farmer if he takes up farming but he would rather do something else with his life--he doesn't fit in here in hillbilly country.  Then comes our SF content--Alan is some kind of alien or merman or something!  He wears contact lenses to conceal his cat-like pupils and has only four toes on each foot.  Then comes our happy ending--Letty Sue reveals she is of the same race--they will marry and then search the world for their people.  

"The Dancing that We Did" is like a mix of a women's romance story and the standard SF reader's wish-fulfillment goop in which the main character doesn't fit in because he is better than everybody else.  The plot is almost nonexistent--there is no conflict (Jodene with the big boobs is introduced and then vanishes from the narrative), and the characters don't achieve happiness by doing anything, by overcoming some kind of obstacle or making some decision, rather, they are successful because of their genetic heritage.  Check your four-toed privilege, you freaks!

Maybe "The Dancing that We Did" was meant to be a chapter of a novel, to set the scene for the conflict to come in the later chapters?  The intro to "The Dancing that We Did" in the magazine that is the only place it has ever been published, Fantastic Universe, tells us that Sasha Miller owns a cat with a precious pun name and that "The Dancing that We Did" is a sequel to an earlier story about people with cat pupils, "Sit By the Fire," so maybe an entire series was envisioned, and this installment is just to help introduce the characters and concepts of the series.  

Not for me, thumbs down.  A weak choice by Merril--did she chose it to support a fellow woman writer?  Because it demonstrates how SF elements can be integrated with traditional mainstream story content?  

"The Comanleigh" by Myrle Benedict

Here's another story by Sasha Miller published in Fantastic Universe and set in a rural location, a fishing village where people say stuff like "“Sure, there’s na comanleigh,...na more thin Bess here has na Ma or Pa. What say you, Bess? A foundling you are, sure you’re na skeert o’ na comanleigh?”  Hmmm, let me check...ten and a half pages...well, we can do it.

Bess, a foundling, is a serving girl at the tavern.  Rad, the best sailor in the village, is a fisherman.  These two are in love but keep it a secret from everyone else.  Rad is saving up so they can get married.  Rad's mother does not approve of Bess, as nobody knows who Bess's real parents are.  

The comanleigh of the title is a monster many villagers believe becomes active when there is a storm and kills men foolish enough to be abroad during the storm.  On the way home from the tavern one night, a storm suddenly whips up and Rad sees a mysterious shape fly by and he, who always scoffed at the comanleigh before, comes to believe in it.  Some weeks later Rad has made enough money, and he and Bess marry and move into a cottage Rad built.  Soon Bess is pregnant, and goes on to give birth to a little girl.  

Shortly after becoming a father, Rad is out in his boat and gets caught in a storm.  The comanleigh, a ghost woman of great beauty, appears and tries to seduce him--she looks much like Bess.  The monster explains that it lives in the body of Bess, and has lived in the body of Bess's mother, grandmother, etc.  She will live on in the body of Bess's daughter when Bess dies.  Bess's love gives Rad the strength to resist the ghost's charms.  He fights the monster, which grows a wolf's snout brisling with cat teeth with which to rend Rad and a serpent's body with which to crush Rad.  When Rad strikes the comanleigh with a steel hook, Bess, back ashore, also suffers a penetrating wound.  Rad expires, but the comanleigh is dying, and sends its soul to Rad's cottage to take up residence in the baby's body.  The dying Bess, realizing the monster will live on in her daughter, breaks her baby's neck before she herself expires from her many gory injuries.  Rad and Bess's family has been annihilated, and they have liberated their village from the commanleigh.

The plot of this story is not bad, but the long passages of phonetic dialogue are kind of annoying and the domestic scenes feel too long.  We'll call "The Comanleigh" acceptable.  I guess Merril liked the centrality of women to the story--with the exception of Rad, the hero, the villain, and the victims are all women, and Bess and the monster are very proactive women who engage in activity that goes against conventional morality, like engaging in premarital sex and killing people.

**********   

A weak batch from Merril's list.  Maybe the next bunch of "B"s will be better?  Let's hope so!

Merril-approved 1959 stories: B Aldiss, P Anderson & C Anvil

You may recall that I read around 70 stories published in the year 1958 because Trotskyist and cheerleader of the New Wave Judith Merril, whom Barry Malzberg has accused of waging a campaign to destroy science fiction, recommended them in tiny print in the back of one of her influential anthologies.  Well, we're going back Jack and doing it again!  Pages 318, 319 and 320 of Merril's The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition are taken up by a list of stories published in 1959, in alphabetical order by author, that Merril deemed worthy of honorable mention.  Over the coming months, maybe years, who knows?, I will be cherry picking stories from this list to read.  Today we read three "A" stories, tales by Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson, and Christopher Anvil, that debuted in science fiction magazines and I will take up your valuable time by expressing to you at length my opinions of the stories and maybe my guesses as to why Merril saw fit to promote them.  If your time really is as valuable as I suspect it is, remember there is no shame in just looking at the pictures.

"The Lieutenant" by Brian Aldiss 

Here we have a story by major SF figure Aldiss that appeared in the magazine Nebula and would not see reprint until 2013 in The Complete Short Stories.  (I read it in a scan of the magazine.)

In "The Lieutenant," World War II veteran Aldiss describes the contradictory and evolving, or perhaps degenerating, psychology of an inexperienced Army officer in a tough spot.  The world is being conquered by aliens, whom we eventually learn are not people but animals much like giant spiders, and our main character has to take command of an ad hoc unit of soldiers drawn from shattered formations as they travel across the devastated countryside, dealing with civilians as well as aliens.  Aldiss very convincingly displays the young officer making mistakes, putting on an act to convince others and himself of his fitness to command, and, after a shocking event, radically shifting from pursuing a course that is calm and cool and cautious to one that is risky and based entirely on unbridled emotion.

Well done, though its fragmentary and inconclusive nature and focus on psychology (demonstrated through behavior and not sterile talk about theories) is perhaps more literary than what we expect in genre literature; it is easy to see why "The Lieutenant" appealed to Merril, who was always looking for stories that defied the boundaries between the literary mainstream and SF.  The tone and setting might appeal to fans of post-apocalyptic fiction, and there are pretty effective shock scenes involving a dead body for all you horror fans.

Thumbs up for "The Lieutenant."

"Brave to Be a King" by Poul Anderson

This is a long one; our friends in Italy serialized it over three issues of Urania.  I don't think "Brave to Be a King" has been anthologized in a book, but it has appeared in a million Anderson collections.  In general I am not crazy about time travel stories, so the fact that isfdb is telling me this is the second installment in the Time Patrol series is giving me pause, but I like Anderson so let's give "Brave to Be a King" a chance.  I'm reading the novelette in a scan of the issue of F&SF in which it debuted, the issue that includes Carol Emshwiller's "Day at the Beach," which we read back in 2018; "Day at the Beach" is one of the stories Merril reprinted in The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition. 

The first two of "Brave to Be a King"'s ten chapters introduce us to our characters and the whole idea of the Time Patrol.  Manse Everard is one of the top Time Patrol agents, and he was going to relax for a few days in an apartment in 20th-century Manhattan reading Sherlock Holmes stories but his break period is interrupted by a knock at the door--it's the love of his life, blonde, blue-eyed, short Cynthia Denison nee Cunningham.  He hasn't seen Cynthia in three years, since she married his best friend, Keith Denison.  Cynthia has bad news and makes a desperate request for help--Keith has disappeared in ancient Persia, and the Time Patrol's efforts to find him have come to nothing.  Can agent extraordinaire Manse go looking for Keith?  Anderson pulls out all the stops describing the distress of Cynthia and Manse, how they are shaking and chain smoking and on the verge of screaming and all that.  He maybe pours it on a little too thick.

In Chapter III, Manse is in the Iran of the sixth century B.C. (that's BCE to you kids) and Anderson gives us a lecture on the reign of Cyrus and then a long description of a Persian town.  Anderson has quite complimentary things to say about Cyrus and 6th-century Persia.  Disguised as a Greek traveler, Manse in Chapter IV is at the mansion of a wealthy courtier, looking for clues as to Denis's fate and hearing from the courtier a biography of Cyrus that feels a little sketchy.  Manse has aroused the suspicion of this noble, and in Chapter V is interrogated by the head of Cyrus' security; things are looking hairy but then the King himself arrives and Manse finds that his old friend Keith, the man who stole his girl, is impersonating King Cyrus!

Chapter VI is Keith's story of how he became Cyrus the Great and his accomplishments as king.  Chapter VII is about how Cyrus and Persia are so important to creating the future, to saving the Jews and laying the groundwork for the spread of Greek civilization and Christianity, that Manse thinks he can't extract Keith from the role of Cyrus and bring him back to Cynthia--Cyrus's deeds are so critical to history they can't risk any of them not happening.  Anderson has the men yelling and knocking cups over and so forth, so we know how emotional they are.  The subtext, of course, is that if Keith stays in ancient Iran then Manse can probably get his hands back on Cynthia's perfect, if short, body.

Chapter VIII has a decent action scene as Manse is intercepted on his way back to his time machine by that security chief, who has an inkling that Cyrus and Manse are wizards from another universe; this guy is a patriot and wants to make sure Cyrus, who has been such a good leader, does not leave Persia, and maybe to force Manse to use his wizardry to help the kingdom.  There are some histrionics in this chapter, from the courtier as he dies, but I found them affecting rather than over the top.

In Chapter IX, Manse figures out how to get Keith back to the modern world while making sure somebody else is in the role of Cyrus and does all the history-making things Keith as Cyrus has done.  In Chapter X, Keith comes home to 20th-century NYC and Cynthia.  Cynthia seems thrilled, but Keith has some qualms--he was Cyrus the Great for 14 years, living in a palace and having sex with dozens of submissive women, being treated as a hero and obeyed unquestioningly; does he really want to live in a  tiny apartment with a single short woman who is going to be telling him what to do?

A pretty good adventure story.  Some of the the historical lectures may seem a little much, and some of the human drama in the first two thirds may feel overdone, but everything in the last third or so is actually good.  I sometimes read stories that start well and then fall apart or simply fail to live up to their potential, and I sometimes read good stories that have weak endings, and a story like "Brave to Be a King" that goes from OK to good has its advantages.  I am guessing Merril appreciated the effort Anderson put into the interpersonal drama stuff, as well as his laudatory description of a non-Western culture and all the nice things Anderson has to say about Cyrus' senior wife, who at one point saved the kingdom.

"The Law Breakers" by Christopher Anvil

I don't think I've read anything by Anvil before, so this is a real exercise in exploration for the MPorcius Fiction Log staff.  "The Law Breakers" was an Astounding cover story, so I feel like both the leftist herald of the New Wave and the right-wing architect of the Golden Age are telling me this is a good place to start with Anvil, but the fact that, like Aldiss' "The Lieutenant," Anvil's "The Law Breakers" had to wait until the 21st century to be reprinted is making me wonder if the market is telling me that, no, this is not the place to start.

Well, "The Law Breakers" is an OK adventure story told in a sort of jocular manner that tries to get across some historical and sociological theories.  I guess the big one is about the effect of diversity and competition on technological development, and  another is the drawbacks as well as the obvious benefits of the fact that the human race is ambitious and always striving, always trying to improve.  We might consider "The Law breakers" an example of the kind of stories Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. wanted to publish, an optimistic story that celebrates human achievement and teaches the reader something about science and technology.  

Our main characters are two space aliens whose civilization has achieved interstellar travel but has yet to develop an FTL drive.  These aliens look almost like humans and share humans' preferences for air and food and so forth, with the exception that their arms have more joints and these joints are extra flexible.  Our protagonists are on a commando mission to Earth.  Four hundred years ago, like 1600 or 1700, I guess, scouts came to Earth and saw that the human race was split up into many discrete and often hostile ethnic, cultural and political groups, and that there was no central authority controlling population growth or use of natural resources.  The aliens' scientists figured the human race was going to exterminate itself through war or overuse of resources or something in a few centuries, so the aliens would be able to colonize the Earth without having to kill us themselves.  

Recently, scouts returned to the vicinity of Terra and were astounded to find that the human race was not extinct--in fact, they had developed an FTL drive and were colonizing the galaxy!  The aliens fretted that if they didn't deal with the humans soon, they (the aliens) would be subordinated to the Earthers!  The alien space navy is far away, so to buy time and slow down Earth's expansion, successive small squads of commandos were sent to Earth to blow up the HQ of the human colonization effort.  None of these squads has returned; our protagonists are the latest pair sent on this dangerous mission, armed with invisibility devices and high explosives and hand guns and charged with the task of blowing up the skyscraper in the middle of a rural district that is Earth colonization HQ.  

Most of the text of "The Law Breakers" is moderately entertaining adventure stuff, the commandos crash landing, hiking to a road, stealing a car and driving to the skyscraper, sneaking around, setting the explosive charges.  They are invisible, but dogs smell them and humans get suspicious and so the aliens try to hide in the building.  The building includes, for training purposes, simulations of alien planets so the commandos, who can't read or speak English, blunder into a very cold room, a high gravity room, etc.  Finally they fall into a trap and are captured.

The aliens find that their predecessors were also captured, and are now fully integrated into Earth society.  We get lectures on the value of having multiple cultures and polities--the human race as a whole never became satisfied with any one method or piece of technology, because Earth had many competing cultures and polities.  The aliens never got a FTL drive because they were satisfied with the drive they have, and those that invented it and produce it, in a civilization with only one society, were able to discourage competition.

The aliens are offered jobs as car mechanics.  While the aliens' civilization has settled on a single, uniform, simple and reliable automobile, Earth automobiles are very complicated and very diverse and always being improved upon, so they require a lot of maintenance, and the aliens, with their super-flexible arms, can reach more easily into the recesses of an engine than can a human.  But our joke ending, in which the aliens have to serve jail time for stealing a car and speeding, will keep them from their new jobs for a while.  (The story title has two meanings--the alien protagonists broke Earthly laws relating to property and speed limits, while the human race has been breaking what the aliens considered laws of nature, like that you can't go faster than light.)

An acceptable story.  I'm not quite sure why Merril considered it a stand out...Anvil does depict international conflicts being resolved peacefully and the diversity angle extends to race--there are people of all races at the colonization center--so maybe that has something to do with it.  In 2007 the people at Baen included "The Law Breakers" in the Anvil collection The Trouble with Humans.    

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Not a bad start to our alphabetical journey through the SF of 1959.  Aldiss' story--oppressive, pessimistic, claustrophobically stuck in one guy's head--is probably the most literary of the stories.  Anderson's is tragic when it comes to the lives of individuals but optimistic when it comes to the sweep of human history, and depicts people doing the right thing and behaving with competence and confidence.  Anvil's story is the most gee whiz and optimistic of the tales, but like Anderson's it tries to teach you something as well as offer adventure thrills and human drama.

Keep your eyes open for our excursion into 1959 SF "B"s under the direction of one Judith Merril.