Possible Worlds of M Jameson, T Sturgeon & M St. Clair

One of my well-read commenters recently mentioned Groff Conklin's 1951 anthology Possible Worlds of Science Fiction and a story by Malcolm Jameson it reprints from Astounding, "Lilies of Life."  Let's get that mouse wheel spinning and read "Lilies of Life" and two other stories from a scan of the hardcover edition of Possible Worlds of Science Fiction; this is a big book at 388 pages and it contains a bunch of stories worth looking at, but today we'll confine ourselves to exploring that Jameson story, the story by Ted Sturgeon of "Killdozer" fame and Margaret St. Clair's contribution.

Before reading "Lilies of Life," "Completely Automatic" and "The Pillows," I'll note that of the 22 stories in Possible Worlds of Science Fiction we have already blogged about four, Frank Belknap Long's "Cones," James H. Schmitz's "Second Night of Summer," Arthur C. Clarke's "A Walk in the Dark," and Hal Clement's "Proof,"  I think I have read at least three more, the van Vogt, the Heinlein and theVance, back in pre-blog days.  Also, I remind you that I am reading the versions of today's stories that appear in Conklin's 1951 anthology, not the magazine versions.

"Lilies of Life" by Malcolm Jameson (1945)

"Lilies of Life" debuted in Astounding alongside Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "The Piper's Son," which I read over ten years ago (damn, don't that time fly) and Fritz Leiber's "Wanted--An Enemy," which I haven't read yet but will get around to some day, no doubt.

"Lilies of Life," I find, is a good classic science fiction story, a tale full of science and also a healthy share of adventure in the world of the exotic other, including anti-imperialist (but still racist by 2026 standards) depictions of Westerners corrupting and exploiting primitive peoples.

Venus is a source of valuable uranium, and so Earthmen have set up mining operations there.  But Venus has a bewilderingly diverse and complex ecosystem that includes all kinds of diseases that lay Terrans low at an alarming rate and terrifying speed.  Being on Venus makes humans so sick so fast that Terrans that go to Venus are forbidden to stay longer than six months, and the government has a harsh quarantine system that keeps many diseased Earthmen from ever seeing home again.  The intelligent natives of Venus are savages with duck-like feet to help them navigate the swamps that cover the second planet from the sun; they are very big, strong and healthy--if they stick to their own communities.  Those natives who leave their villages become just as vulnerable to all those diseases as are Earthmen, and they drop like flies.  And they leave in droves because the natives of Venus are very vulnerable to addiction to tobacco and will take any crummy job with the Terrans if it means payment in that stinking weed!  Those with a familiarity with European imperialism will recognize echoes in Jameson's story of British and French colonialism in the New World and the Far East, and Jameson drives this point home by repeatedly calling the Earthmen on Venus "white men" or just "whites."

They were the bearers, the helots of this hole. They stood gaunt and shivering, for they were sick men, too, sicker even than the whites. It was thought profitable to keep Earthmen alive by periodic doses of paracobrine, but a waste of good drugs when it came to natives.

Parks and Maxwell are human scientists.  They both are afflicted with "the jitters" and are trying to find a cure for this deadly Venerian disease that drives people insane and then kills them.  Every day they have to take a shot of "paracobrine," a drug with very uncomfortable side effects, to stave off madness and destruction.  P and M were working on a cure on Earth, using material smuggled in from Venus, but the government is cracking down on smuggling and so they resort to travelling to Venus themselves to investigate.

(A weakness of "Lilies of Life" is that it is not clear how Parks and Maxwell got the disease--does this story chronicle their second visit to Venus?  I don't remember Jameson ever mentioning a prior trip to Venus.)

On Venus, P and M follow clues that suggest something about the natives' crazy protects them from the jitters--all natives who work for the white man--the natives who get the jitters--are converted to Christianity because otherwise the natibves are too lazy and violent to make good workers.  (Like so much classic science fiction, "Lilies of Life" tells you Christianity is a scam.)  At the Venerian equivalent of an opium den, Parks and Maxwell meet a native who converted to Christianity, got the jitters, then abandoned the white man's wicked ways and is healthy again now that he is back to practicing his native religion.  With promises of tobacco, Parks and Maxwell get this two-time turncoat to guide them to a native religious ceremony that Terrans call "an orgy."  No Terran has ever witnessed this twice yearly sacred rite!  The first few days of the ceremony consist of the natives getting drunk.  The climax of the ceremony is when the priests defang spiders the size of your fist and feed to their parishioners the spiders' poison sacs!  P and M observe this drunken revelry and disgusting feast secretly, totally sober, but their native guide gets drunk and forces one of the poison sacs down Maxwell's throat!

The venom arrests Maxwell's symptoms it is what protects the natives from all the diseases.  The rest of "Lilies of Life" the story is about how Maxwell uses the scientific method to trace how the spiders fit into Venus' bewildering ecology and how to duplicate the beneficial effects of the spider venom without allowing a horde of greedy Earthmen to come to the temple and overhunt the spiders the way the American bison back on Terra has been overhunted.

I like "Lilies of Life," a fun pulpy melodrama that serves to glorify the man of science and cast doubt on the propriety of Western interactions with less advanced civilizations.  Jameson's speculative biology and ecology are entertaining, as is all the imperialism stuff.  Jameson depicts Parks and Maxwell's reaction to the realities of Terran-Venerian contact with grim realism--the scientists recognize the trouble humans are causing the natives but just accept it as inevitable and go about their business without becoming revolutionaries or going native or starting a civil-rights-for-Venerians NGO or something like that.  I appreciate that Jameson doesn't tell you how to feel about the world he depicts, just depicts it and lets you judge as you will.  

"Lilies of Life" was included in one of the paperback abridgements of Possible Worlds of Science Fiction as well as a number of other anthologies, including an Australian one titled Planet of Doom.  

"Completely Automatic" by Theodore Sturgeon (1941)

Another story from John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding, this one appearing alongside "Magic City," a story by Nelson S. Bond we read back in 2015 that I use as my go-to example of a SF story with a strong female protagonist that examines gender stereotypes long before the New Wave.  Sturgeon's "Completely Automatic" didn't make it into any of the multiple paperback edition of Possible Worlds of Science Fiction or any other publication until 1995 when it was included in the second volume of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Microcosmic God.  I guess we can call this a relatively rare story from Ted.

It is the socialist interplanetary future!  For 300 years ships have been travelling hither and thither across the solar system.  Nowadays the government controls the economy and maintains full employment by giving people jobs that require no work, including "supervising" those fully automatic space ships.  A passenger on a space liner asks a crewmember who has one of these fake jobs why these jobs even exist, when the ships are fully operated by machines and remote control from Earth.  The crew member tells a story about the bad old days when private companies ran the space ships and tried to increase profits by discharging all these superfluous crewmen, whom the story teller admits were mostly slackers who got these fake jobs through connections and not any kind of expertise.

The story within the frame story includes quite a bit of description of how space ships and space colonies three or four centuries from today might operate, and I suppose that is sort of interesting.  

Her capacity was something like two hundred thousand tons net, and she was loaded to the ceil plates with granular magnesium and sodium for the Sun mirrors of Titan. I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable.

Anyway, for over a hundred years the automatic ships have operated without incident and the superfluous crewmen have had nothing to do.  Then, on the very first space flight without the superfluous crewmembers, there is an incident.  Sturgeon describes in some detail the science behind the complicated chemical reaction that is caused by the incident and threatens to destroy the ship and kill the crew who still have jobs on the ship, men who are basically janitors and know very little science and very little about how the ship really operates.  Sturgeon also describes their many futile attempts to fix the problem and their agony as their predicament gets more and more painful.  Despite all the talk of pain, the story is told in a jocular tone, with lots of little jokes about how ignorant these guys are.

The ship and the crew are saved by what amounts to luck in a twist ending that is sort of jokey, sort of macabre.  The government insists that those superfluous jobs be filled again in case another once-in-a-century crisis occurs. 

If you happen to be a regular reader of MPorcius Fiction Log, you will know that stories that advocate for socialism, stories that are essentially jokes, and stories the outcome of which turn on luck, are not my bag.  However, Sturgeon's style here is smooth and the science regarding the space disaster and the speculation on what human life beyond Earth might be like are actually kind of interesting, so we'll judge "Completely Automatic" acceptable.

"The Pillows" by Margaret St. Clair (1950) 

"The Pillows" debuted in Thrilling Wonder Stories and was included in several of the paperback editions of Possible Worlds of Science Fiction as well as an Australian anthology, The Sands of Mars, and multiple St. Clair collections.

"The Pillows" is a decent SF thriller/horror story.  On otherwise barren and frozen Triton have been discovered "pillows," items like black disks a few inches across (St. Clair repeatedly compares them to sand dollars.)  These "pillows" are always warm, and are practically indestructible, and people have a sort of irrational fondness for them, and even think that they bring good luck.  A company has been mining the pillows from Triton and bringing them back to Earth and they sell like hot cakes, and everybody who has one has some story about how his relationships or business prospects or whatever improved after acquiring one.   

Our hero is a scientist who wants to figure out what is going on with the pillows.  He has acquired some, but can't learn much about them.  Even though they are famously always warm, in the lab they cool down to room temperature quite quickly.  To learn more, he signs on to work as a deckhand on one of the Triton-bound ships that collects the pillows and brings them back to Terra.

On Triton our guy realizes that the pillows are intelligent, can manipulate human minds, can "reverse entropy" and even "influence the flow of events."  No doubt they are using their powers to hitch rides to Terra en masse so they can take over our beloved home planet!  The scientist must prevent any more from coming to Earth!  But the pillows realize that the scientist is on to them!  The pillows can raise or lower the temperature, direct people's psychology, and exercise "some sort of control over events"--is there any chance the scientist can get back to Earth sane and alive to warn the world of this alien danger, or is Earth doomed?

This is a pretty entertaining story.  I legitimately didn't know who was going to triumph, the scientist or the alien monsters.  St. Clair also succeeds in describing the standard SF stuff we all love--space craft, space suits, ray guns, and aliens--in a fun way.  Thumbs up!

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Jameson is today's winner for best story, but St. Clair is not far behind.  Sturgeon's story is less economical, with a lot of what feels like extraneous material plus a surfeit of details, and is also less exciting because you know the story within a story is going to turn out OK, and because of all the jokes that deflate any suspense.  Not exactly bad, though.

We may return to Possible Worlds of Science Fiction, as I don't think I've read the included Poul Anderson, Clifford Simak, or Katherine MacLean stories, but we've got a lot of projects here at MPorcius Fiction Log running concurrently, so it may be a while.

Merril-approved '59 (kinda) stories: A Bester, R Brossard & F Brown

You are going back, young man (or lady), back...back...back...to 1959!  And what will you do in the year in which Fidel Castro took over the land where Desi Arnaz was born, the year Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev debated the best way to squeeze a lemon, the year the first Barbie dolls hit the market?  You're going to read magazines, of course!  But you won't be staying long in the year Norm Macdonald, Tracey Ullman and Colin Quinn were born!  So which magazines do you read?  Well, we have a guide for you!  Judith Merril read all the magazines in 1959, and even produced a list of stories worth reading from that year!

Yes, folks, today we're going to read more stories from Judith Merril's alphabetical list of honorable mentions at the back of her 1960 volume Year's Best SF: 5th Annual Edition. We're still on the "B"s, and today we've got stories by Alfred Bester, Raymond Brossard and Fredric Brown.  The Brown entry is a little odd and may not quite fit the supposed rules of this blog post or Merril's book, but we'll get to that after tackling Bester and Brossard.

"The Pi Man" by Alfred Bester (1959)

"The Pi Man" debuted in the 10th anniversary issue of F&SF alongside an installment of the serialized version of Starship Troopers and Theodore Sturgeon's "The Man Who Lost the Sea."  For some reason, Merril cites not that magazine but a 1960 book publication of the tale in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Ninth Series.  So I will dutifully read the story from a scan of that book rather than from the magazine, following Merril's advice to the letter!

I haven't read anything by Bester during the period of this blog's tortured existence, though I read the famous The Stars My Destination in my New York days.  Barry Malzberg wrote in 1976 that Bester was "The best stylist pound-for-pound (I'd make him a light heavyweight) in the history of this field," so Bester is probably one of those writers I should read more of; if I love "The Pi Man," maybe you'll see Bester's name a lot more here at MPorcius Fiction Log in the future.

Well, I'm afraid we are not making a love connection today.  "The Pi Man" is a show-offy literary piece full of quotes and foreign phrases, sentence fragments and strange typography, present tense first-person narration and onomatopoeia; you can see why critics who are into modern literature like Merril and Malzberg would like it.  The plot and themes of "The Pi Man" reminded me of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories, in which a guy is compelled to travel through time and space to fight in wars so that the forces of Law and Chaos remain in balance.  Except Bester here is largely kidding and we get a happy ending instead of a tragic ending (maybe.)

The narrator of Bester's tale is driven by an obsessive dedication to symmetry and balance.  For example, on his morning commute he reads the newspapers that he senses other subway riders are not reading.  At the restaurant he senses a lot of people are eating sugar so he takes his coffee black.  The story contains a multitude of gags like this.  Sometimes our hero acts voluntarily based on his own senses, like with the newspapers and the coffee.  Other times, otherworldly forces or an irresistible need compel him to do things he doesn't understand, doesn't want to do, in order to maintain some balance he isn't aware of--for example, he assaults an old man who works in an office, injures him and destroys his documents, his spectacles and his pens.  

We readers grok the gimmick after four or five pages of this, but there are still 14 pages for us to machete our way through.  Luckily, Bester enlivens most of these pages with some edgy material that may or may not directly relate to his plot or primary themes.  Bester satirizes beatniks (they don't bathe, etc.) and suggests that women are sexually attracted to men who treat them poorly.  There's actually a lot of sexually suggestive stuff in this story; e.g., beatnik men's beards are likened to pubic hair, the claim is made that Americans like "over-stuffed" women while Englishmen like "skinny" women, and there is even some implied homosexual activity.  Then there's the violence, like the revelation that the narrator beat his own dog to death.  This stuff is all played for laughs.

The narrator is caught by the FBI, partly because a woman is chasing him, a woman desperate to have sex with him, and her pursuit distracts him.  Then we get several pages of the narrator explaining to the Feds this whole balance thing.  As an agent of the balance, some kind of essential cog in the machine that is the universe, the narrator always escapes prosecution and imprisonment, but is always denied friendship and love.  The FBI has to let him go, but the girl who has been chasing him refuses to leave his side, and as the story ends there is the possibility that the narrator's loneliness will be assuaged, at least for a little while.                  

A crazy story that at times is pretty difficult or annoying to read, though it gets less difficult as you proceed.  We're going to call "The Pi Man" OK, though this feels like a cop out, seeing as it is the kind of story that will have some readers gushing over its ambition and zaniness and others yawning at its self-indulgence or gritting their teeth at the challenges it imposes.  And I suppose people may find the sex and violence offensive.

You can find "The Pi Man" in several anthologies, including one of Richard Lupoff's books about stories that he feels should have won a Hugo (the short story Hugo for 1960 went to "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes), and multiple Bester collections, including 1976's Star Light, Star Bright, for which, according to isfdb, it was revised.

Revised, eh?  Did Bester take out some of that sex stuff I highlighted above?  Were the references to beatniks and Englishmen's taste in women in the 1959 "The Pi Man" dated by 1976?  My inquiring mind wanted to know!  So I took a quick glance at a scan of Starlight, an omnibus that includes Star Light, Star Bright, and, sure enough, the 1976 version of the story is totally different, with no references to beatniks, England, or skinny women that I could find with my own bleary bespectacled 54-year-old eyes or with the internet archive's search function.  In the intro to the story penned by Bester himself, the author confides that the original version was "rather crude."  Bester, old boy, it was all that crude stuff that was keeping me awake!  Now I am wondering if Lupoff included the '59 original or the '76 revision in his 1981 What If? Volume 2, but I can't find a scan of the thing.  Maybe a trip to WonderBook is in order.   

Woah, some real treasures today from Richard Powers.

"Mr. Merman" by Raymond Brossard (1959)      

We all make mistakes.  Every time I go back and look at some old blog post of mine I find a typo.  Then there was the time I mixed up Greg Bear and Gregory Benford, or was it it Ben Bova?  And of course, for a while there I thought Fantastic and Fantastic Universe were the same magazine, the way Analog and Astounding are the same magazine or the way you call Amazing Stories just Amazing most of the time.  So when I tell you that on page 318 of the paperback edition of Year's Best SF: 5th Annual Edition, the story by Raymond Brossard that appeared in the July 1959 issue of Fantastic Universe is listed as "The Merman" when in fact the story in question is titled "Mr. Merman," I say it with love and sympathy, not derision or contempt.

Raymond Brossard only has this one story listed at isfdb or philsp.com.  Apparently he was a painter from New Jersey, greatest state in the Union, and spent much of his career in Mexico.  This story has never been reprinted, as far as I can tell.

"Mr. Merman" is a pretty conventional story with wish fulfillment and twist ending elements.  It is well written, though, so it is too bad Brossard didn't write more.  Hopefully he found his life as a painter satisfying.

Mr. Merman slips in the bathroom, hitting his head and falling into a full tub, unconscious.  He wakes up aware of a superpower of which he has heretofore been ignorant--he can breathe underwater!  Most of this story consists of Mr. Merman testing his abilities, then looting a sunken ship and quitting his job and living the high life on the cash he retrieved from the ocean floor, having sex with many different women.  When funds begin to run short he decides to loot a ship sunk quite a bit deeper.  Oops, the pressure down there is too much for him and he dies.

Well, not quite.  He dies alright, but all this business of being able to breathe underwater and finding sunken treasure and having sex with a bunch of hot babes was the dream he had as he was dying, drowning in the bath tub.  It's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" all over again!              

"Three" by Fredric Brown (1959, sort of)

"Three" appeared in Gent, a men's magazine that, like Playboy, included fiction by SF writers.  (For example, the cover of the February 1959 issue of Gent bears the names of Margaret St. Clair and Henry Slesar.)  I couldn't find a record of this story on isfdb, but a look at philsp.com solved the mystery--"Three" is a series of reprints, three stories that originally appeared in F&SF and Astounding.  We've already read the two F&SF stories, "Millennium" and "Too Far."   We'll read the third story, "The Weapon," in the issue of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding in which it debuted. 

"The Weapon" by Fredric Brown (1951)

Dr. Graham is a top scientist with a son who is, as Brown puts it, "mentally arrested"--don't worry, I'm not going to trigger you with the "r-word" like I did in our last post.  Harry, fifteen, has the mind of a four-year-old.

A guy comes to visit Dr. Graham.  Dr. Graham is working on a superweapon, and his visitor warns Graham that his work could end the human race.  Graham, of course, has heard it all before and wants to dismiss this crank.  The crank tricks Graham into leaving him alone with his (intellectually) 4-year-old son.  (Add your Michael Jackson and Marion Zimmer Bradley jokes here.)  The crank leaves, and Graham goes to Harry's room.  He finds his visitor has left Harry with a loaded revolver.  Brown ends his two-and-a-half-page story in italics:

...only a madman would give a loaded revolver to an idiot.

Groan.  Brown takes a one-line piece of manipulative elitist bumper-sticker sophistry and expands it to two and a half pages.  Thumbs down!

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Now is the time on Sprockets when we try to diagnose why Merril recommended these six (five?) stories.  Merril is famous as the cheerleader of the New Wave, and Bester's "The Pi Man" is like a New Wave story with its many experimental modernist narrative techniques and its emphasis on sex, so that one is easy.  Brossard's story is a little less explicable, but one of Merril's big life projects was to point out how the divisions between genre literature and mainstream literature were bogus, and "Mr. Merman," as the editor of Fantastic Universe Hans Stefan Santesson himself points out in his intro to the story, isn't really science fiction--it blurs or straddles the line Merril thinks isn't really there or at least shouldn't be there.  Also, it is a decent story, so maybe she legitimately really liked it.

Then we have the three Brown stories.  "Millennium" is a one-page story about a guy outwitting the Devil by making the Devil grant his wish that the general population be smarter and less evil; you could maybe interpret this story as exhibiting the kind of misanthropic elitism we expect of lefties like Merril.  "Too Far" is another one-page "vinnie," one with edgy sexual content, so maybe also New Wavey?  I'm guessing, however, that the main reason Merril liked "Three" was that its largest component, "The Weapon," is a story that tells you the American people are morons and so can't be trusted to have a defense against the Soviet Union.

A strange assortment today: a wild experimental piece that was radically rewritten a decade and a half after Merril promoted it; a competent one-off; and three short-shorts that actually were not new in 1959 but in fact reprints.  One reason I pursue these Merril-oriented projects is that Merril's choices are full of surprises (sometimes surprises to me because my sensibilities are very different than hers) and today really has borne that out.  Who knows what we will encounter the next time we take direction from Judith Merril?  Stay tuned to find out.

R Bloch: "A Question of Identity," "Death Has Five Guesses," and "The Bottomless Pool" (w/ R M Farley)

I think we've covered two of the thirteen stories that appear in the April 1939 issue of Strange Stories, Henry Kuttner's sword and sorcery tale "Cursed Be the City" and David H. Keller's story of a failed marriage, "The Dead Woman."  Behind the woman-in-esoteric-bondage cover of this issue also lurks Henry Kuttner's "The Bells of Horror," which I read before this blog began haunting the interwebs.  That leaves ten stories in the mag which constitute virgin territory.  We'll blaze a trail through three of those ten today, the three which were produced with the participation of the man who scripted Barbara Stanwyck's The Night Walker, the last black and white film made by Universal Pictures, Chicago-born Los Angeleno Robert Bloch.

All three of today's stories saw reprint in the 1998 collection Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies, a book which I mentioned in our last blog post, as well as a 1986 French collection with an amateurish cover illustration--zoinks, is that Bloch himself on the cover, caught in the act of molesting a green female mummy?  The title story of Les cadavres ne meurent jamais, "The Dead Don't Die!," we read way back in 2018, early in our now old and comfortable relationship with Bob "Psycho" Bloch.  Note that I am going to read these stories in their 1939 form in a scan of the issue of Strange Stories in which they first appeared.

"A Question of Identity" by Robert Bloch (as by Tarleton Fiske)

"A Question of Identity" treads very familiar ground, but it is well-written, so I enjoyed it.  So, thumbs up!  Besides the aforementioned books put out by Arkham House and our freres over in Gaul, "A Question of Identity" would be reprinted in 1983 in the British magazine Fantasy Tales edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton.

"A Question of Identity" is a first person narrative.  A guy has been buried alive!  He can't remember his true identity!  He fights his way out of his grave, walks around at night, eventually remembers who he is and how he died, goes to his fiancé's place and, as the story ends, realizes he is a vampire and is about to drink his horrified betrothed's blood.

The plot is obvious but Bloch does a good job describing the narrator's mental state--his emotions and his confusion--and his experiences of busting out of the coffin and exploring the cemetery and the town.  The tone and pacing are just right.  A creditable piece of work.

"Death Has Five Guesses" by Robert Bloch 

This story begins with a longish description of Rhine cards and a depiction of their use by a college professor with his class.  (Wikipedia calls these "Zener cards"; is "Rhine cards" like "B.C.," "retard" and "Negro," once common terms that have been replaced in our day by verbiage considered more sympathetic, or is Bloch just making a mistake here?*)  One student, Harry Clinton, is particularly good, amazingly good in fact, at guessing which card has been drawn, and he and prof spend a lot of time together experimenting.  As the months go by, Harry gets better and better at guessing the cards, but otherwise his mental state gets worse--his memory becomes poor, for example, and he suffers headaches and fatigue.  Sometimes the images from the cards--cross, circle, etc.--come to his mind unbidden during his off campus daily life.  He begins to have bouts of amnesia.

*[UPDATE APRIL 21, 2026: One of my number-crunching readers addresses the issue of "Zener cards" vs "Rhine cards" with hard data in the comments below!

Bloch loves puns and double entendres and homophones and that sort of thing, and he employs such devices here in "Death Has Five Guesses."  As you know, each Rhine/Zener card has one of five simple symbols printed on it.  Bloch's story becomes repetitive as Clinton, during amnesiac episodes, commits murders, one after the other, each thematically related to one of the five symbols.  For example, when his mind is oppressed by the image of the star, he takes up a mace, the head of which has five points, and kills a movie actress, you know, a "star."  Eventually Clinton kills himself.

This story is just OK, though well-written enough on a sentence by sentence basis.  "Death Has Five Guesses" is long and repetitive for one thing, what with the description of the cards and then five different killings.  Another problem is that the killings are largely lacking in motivation--when a person kills his or her spouse because spouse was stifling or cheating, or kills his or her boss or a business partner over envy or theft or whatever, it is easier to identify with murderer and with victim, but in "Death Has Five Guesses" the killer is killing for somewhat silly and contrived reasons and the victims lack personality and sometimes any connection to the killer.   

As the story proceeded, I was kind of hoping that, like in Warhammer 40,000 (at least the WH40K I paid attention to in the '80s and '90s), opening up his psychic powers had opened up Harry Clinton to control by alien monsters or the Devil, and I guess that reading is possible given the vague way Bloch explains what is going on in "Death Has Five Guesses," but it seems more likely that Clinton just went insane.  Not a bad story, but an overly long and convoluted filler piece.  I guess the emphasis on the trappings of psychology makes this the most characteristic of Bloch's work of today's three tales. 

"The Bottomless Pool" by Robert Bloch and Ralph Milne Farley (as by Ralph Milne Farley)

I think I've read eight stories by Ralph Milne Farley, and thought them all at least OK.  Here find links to my blog posts about them.

"The House of Ecstasy"

"Time for Sale" 

"Liquid Life"

"Horror's Head"

"The Stratosphere Menace" 

"Mystery of the Missing Magnate"

"Test Tube Twin"

"I Killed Hitler"

It would be wild if collaborating with the far more famous Bloch dragged down Farley's batting average here at the MFL.

The text of "The Bottomless Pool" is a testimonial penned by a man at risk of being accused of murder by the authorities.  You see, our narrator is a writer, and he had a friend who was a writer, but who was in poor health and had a terrible case of writer's block.  So the narrator invited his pal up to his cabin in the woods to relax.  Pal got better, and was always wanting to take hikes and explore the woods.  Pal actually grew up in this area, and takes the narrator to a sinister spot in the swamp he visited once as a kid--the Bottomless Pool!

The Bottomless Pool is like six feet across, and the writers see floating on its black inky surface a dead lizard.  When our guy tries to retrieve this specimen he finds a wire is attached to the little corpse and a hook is imbedded in the little dead creature.  When the line is jerked back under the water the hook slashes our guy painfully.  

The wound gives our guy a fever and he stays in while his friend investigates the obviously true but totally incredible fact that some kind of monster of the underworld is fishing for human beings through the eerie pool.  When the friend fails to return, our feverish narrator, a little out of his mind, continues the investigations and comes face to face with the reptilian fisher of the nether depths and retrieves an artifact of that secret world.  But will anybody believe him?  Will the government take steps to close up the pool?

This is a good story when it comes to topic, theme, pacing, etc.  So thumbs up.  (Farley's record here at MPorcius Fiction Log is safe!)  In general the style is good, but there are some odd word choices, clumsy metaphors, that should have been revised or excised.  I refer to "The limbs of dead trees interred the sunlight" and "warm blood scalded the deep wound in my side."  I checked a scan of 1998's Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies and "interred" and "scalded" are still there, so multiple professional writers and editors think the words I find distractingly inappropriate to be just fine.  What can I say?

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Nothing groundbreaking here, but two solid entertainments and one acceptable piece that demonstrates for the hundredth time Bloch's interest in psychology and wordplay.  Perhaps ironically, I think Bloch's best work is that which relies least on in-your-face psychological jargon and theories and least on puns and double entendres.  Maybe that stuff is more "literary" or "original" than vampires and Yog-Sothothery, but I find the metaphors of the vampire and of Lovecraftian alien monster gods more emotionally powerful and better at representing my view of life and the universe than Freudianism and puns.

More magazine short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, but we'll be rotating the time machine dial forward 20 clicks.

Weird Tales, May 1942: D Quick, R Bloch and M Jameson

Back in 2019, we read Henry Kuttner's twist-ending story "Masquerade," a tale I wasn't crazy about but which was admired by anthologists and even the people who produce TV programs.  "Masquerade" debuted in the May 1942 issue of Weird Tales, an issue which has three other stories the MPorcius Fiction Log staff is curious about, so let's take some time to check them out.

But before we get to the fiction, I am going to recommend you look at this issue of Weird Tales even if you couldn't care less about Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, Dorothy Quick or Malcolm Jameson, because this issue is chock full of striking illustrations by Hannes Bok and Boris Dolgov.  Skeletons!  Male and female nudes!  A woman being strangled!  Reptilian monsters! Ships in the moonlight!  Evocative architecture!  McIlwraith got some stellar work out these guys for this issue, work that deserves to be widely known among fans of horror and fantasy illustration.   

"The Enchanted River" by Dorothy Quick

This will be the sixth story by Dorothy Quick with which the staff of MPorcius Fiction Log has grappled.  Below find links to our first five bouts with Quick, who, it seems, was famous in her lifetime for her friendship with Mark Twain, a relationship immortalized in a TV movie in 1991.  Maybe this weekend you can watch Mark Twain and Me as the life-affirming half of a Weird Tales double feature with the movie in which Vincent D'Onofrio plays Robert E. Howard, The Whole Wide World, as the downer half.  (Are there Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch and H. P. Lovecraft biopics?  Clark Ashton Smith and E. Hoffmann Price are probably the most suitable Weirdies for cinematic memorialization, as Smith could be shown carving his crazy sculptures and Price actually spent time in foreign countries and participated in thrilling violence.)    

"The White Lady"
"The Witch's Mark"
"Turn Over"
"Edge of the Cliff" 
"The Lost Gods"

"The Enchanted River" is a decent happy-ending fantasy story, though it has some horror elements (a guy gets trampled into paste by an invisible elephant, after all.)  Quick's story also incorporates some elements we see all the time in weird fiction but which are pretty superfluous here, but these unnecessary components don't quite wreck the story.  Moderate recommendation.

You know how Arthur C. Clarke went to Ceylon and found the place and its people so captivating he spent the remainder of his life there enjoying its native beauty?  Well, the guy in this story does the same thing!  A rich business guy from the West, Wells Barrington, comes to Ceylon and falls in love with the place and decides to give up his career to stay forevermore.  Wells gets along just fine with the natives, especially after he shoots down a tiger that was terrorizing everybody.

One day Wells sees a beautiful girl bathing in the river.  Ava is her name.  Ava tells Wells that this is a magic river, that the spirit of the river helps guide lovers together.  She is at the river because she hopes the river will somehow bring the man she loves to her--Ava is in one hell of a pickle, the local priests having set her up with a guy she doesn't want to marry.  Of course, the man she wants to marry is Wells, the white savior who slew the tiger and has a pile of money.  And of course Wells is willing to marry Ava, she being so good-looking.  This story is pretty realistic!

Wells talks to the priests and the local prince and tries to solve Ava's problem the way we solve problems over here in the West, by handing out money.  Nothing doing--these natives care more about their faith than your filthy silver and gold and the gods have decreed that Ava will marry the prince.  As a last resort, Wells takes a nude dip in the river himself, Ava having maintained that the spirit of the river might help bring the lovers together.

At the bottom of the river Wells finds a little bell.  When rung, the little bell summons an invisible elephant.  This phantom pachyderm comes in handy when the prince and the priests lead a mob to Wells' house to kill him and Ava.  The elephant stomps the prince and cows the populace, who now see Wells as a hero blessed by the divine.  Wells and Ava live happily ever after.

Then comes the superfluous denouement that Quick tacked on to the end of her story or no reason I can discern after the satisfying gore climax and the assertion that our heroes will be living long happy lives in paradise.  You see, the prince, Wells, and Ava are the reincarnated members of a love triangle that rocked Ceylon thousands of years ago!  Tragedy befell the sympathetic couple that made up the base of the triangle even though an elephant tried to save them from the evil prince who was the disruptive third angle of the love triangle.  Today the ghost of that elephant finally finished the job it started so long ago by mashing the prince into a stain on the ground and making sure the two lovers could be reunited.  To my mind this reincarnation business is quite unnecessary, and if Quick felt the need to include it, maybe she should have hinted at it before the resolution of the plot instead of after.

"The Enchanted River" would not be reprinted until 2024 when S. T. Joshi retrieved it from the depths and included it in the Quick collection entitled The Witch's Mark and Others.

"Black Bargain" by Robert Bloch

Here's a Bloch story that both the aforementioned Joshi and editor Marvin Kaye included in anthologies, and which was included in a bunch of Bloch anthologies in English and in other tongues.  Everyone here at MPorcius HQ so enjoyed making the list of links above for Quick that we're putting together a list of Bloch links for this segment of the broadcast--links to my blog posts about stories that we have already read from the 1998 Arkham House Bloch collection Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies, one of those books in which "Black Bargain" reappeared.

"The Druidic Doom"
"Fangs of Vengeance"
"Death is an Elephant" 
"Power of the Druid" 
"He Waits Beneath the Sea"
"The Dark Isle"
"Wine of the Sabbat"
"A Sorcerer Runs for Sheriff"

"Black Bargain" is a pretty good horror story, and it qualifies as a tale of the Cthulhu Mythos because it mentions the forbidden book invented by Bloch, Mysteries of the Worm.  (Several of H. P. Lovecraft's friends created their own books of mind-blowing lore in imitation of and homage to HPL's famous Necronomicon.)  

Our narrator is a pharmacist who is operating a drug store.  Almost all his customers come in for ice cream, Coca-Cola, cigarettes, etc., and so his work more resembles that of a waiter or candy store clerk than that of a man who has a degree in pharmacy.  Probably the best part of the story is the narrator describing his customers and bitching about them like a butter guy in a mainstream story.

One evening, a nerdy-looking guy (he is skinny and has glasses and the narrator compares him to "Caspar Milquetoast") comes in and asks for specific chemicals.  He has with him a very old book, and drops clues we Weird Tales readers, and the narrator, recognize as signs that this joker is going to sacrifice a cat to a supernatural entity!

Our narrator crosses paths with this guy multiple times, and he learns that ol' "Caspar" in a matter of days has risen in status from an impoverished goofball with no women to a wealthy guy with a high status job and dates with the hotties!  His new position is at a chemical company--he already has his own office and authority over an entire division!  The mysterious chemist invites our guy to join the chemical firm as his assistant--after all, the narrator knows about chemistry from getting his pharmacy degree, and is sick to death of dishing out the ice cream and the cokes to the local brats.  But our guy notices something strange about the newly minted success' shadow--it seems to move independently of "Caspar," and it seems to become more solid and more independent the more successful "Caspar" is in his career and with the ladies!  Will this alien monster, the devil the chemist has made a deal with to secure success, become fully independent?  Will it take over the chemist's body?  Who will live and who will die?

It is no masterpiece, but "Black Bargain" is a competent bit of weird fiction that Bloch successfully integrates into a little early-20th century career drama.  

"Vengeance in Her Bones" by Malcolm Jameson

Naval officer Jameson's contribution to this issue of Weird Tales, the cover story, is a sentimental and somewhat silly thing, a real product of its time.  Captain Tolliver is retired--he lost a hand and a leg in the Great War.  But the United States government calls upon him to again serve his country!  In World War I, Tolliver commanded a cargo ship that had many wild adventures, including sinking multiple German naval vessels.  The ship was to be broken up after the war, but when workers went aboard to tear her apart, they died in mysterious accidents!  So it was decided to just let the ship sit and rust.  But come World War II, the government had her refurbished  and returned to service.  However, the ship keeps running aground, her rudder and engines inexplicably refusing to accept orders.  The government realizes only Tolliver can command this temperamental vessel.

Tolliver takes command, and just lets the ship run itself.  This ship is a genius, not only detecting torpedoes, submarines, and German raiders disguised as Allied merchantmen, but also figuring out which crewmembers aboard are German saboteurs!  Jameson's story is repetitive, the ship pulling off one improbable feat after another, such as pointing out to friendly warships the locations of enemy boats and ships so they can be destroyed or just ramming them herself.  Eventually the ship is totally wrecked and everyone aboard killed, and we get a sappy ending as Tolliver and his ship sink beneath the waves.

Barely acceptable.

I hope it goes without saying that I am a fan of the United States Navy and think that the Navy has been a force for good in the world since its founding and up to this day and so forth.  And I have no reason to doubt that as an officer in the Navy that Jameson did good work and contributed to the success of that great institution and our great country.  I baldly state all this because, as you may remember, a reader once took me to task for criticizing Alistair MacLean's writing, apparently thinking MacLean's exemplary war service rendered the man immune from criticism, and I have to report that Jameson's work, four specimens of which I have read as of today, have not exactly knocked my socks off.  If you are interested, check out my three earlier blog posts touching upon Jameson's career at the following links:

"Bullard Reflects" 

"Slacker's Paradise"

"Train for Flushing"

A lot of people seem to be more impressed with Jameson than I am.  Donald Wollheim included "Vengeance in Her Bones" in his Avon Fantasy Reader in 1949 and Frank McSherry, Jr. reprinted it in 1990's Fantastic World War II.

**********

Another step in our eerie march lies behind us--before you know it, we will have read a story from every issue of Weird Tales published in 1942.  We've already dealt with every year from 1930 to 1941, as the links below will attest.

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939    1940   1941

More such material when next we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Science Fiction Adventures, March 1958: R Silverberg, H Ellison, & C Anvil

A week or so ago we read fiction from a 1957 issue of Larry T. Shaw's Science Fiction Adventures, including the first of the three novellas that make up Robert Silverberg's "Lest We Forget Thee, Earth" series.  A few days ago we read the second novella in the sequence, also from a 1957 ish of SFA.  Today we crack open the March 1958 issue of Science Fiction Adventures and finish the series.  Once we dispose of Silverberg's novella we'll round out the blog post with a short story by our old pal Harlan Ellison and on from Christopher Anvil, a guy whose work I am not very familiar with.

Like the covers of the last two issues of SFA we looked at, the March 1958 issue, the tenth entry in the magazine's twelve issue run, is adirned with a beautiful woman painted by Ed Emshwiller.  Of the three, this cover is the weakest, appearing relatively flat and emotionless, whereas the earlier two were pulsating with life and energy, the first disturbing and the second captivating.  While it is true that the woman on this cover looks diabolically evil and she is accompanied by a man undergoing medical treatment or torture, this painting just isn't moving me as did the previous two.  A big problem is the monochrome yellow background--it looks like the publishers carved away much of the background to clear space for the text.

(Emsh provides some solid interior illustrations for Silverberg's story, we are happy to report.)

"Vengeance of the Space Armadas" by Robert Silverberg (as by Calvin M. Knox)

Thousands of years ago the human race ruled the universe, lording it over a million suns and a wide panoply of alien races.  But then those aliens banded together and overthrew the Earth Empire, and the human race was reduced to a few million men and women scattered in ones and twos across the many galaxies their ancestors had ruled.  But the aliens continued to respect the superior intellect of the human, and many planetary rulers had a human as a chief advisor.  

One such advisor was Navarre, who discovered the location of the lost Earth and the Earth's pregnant secret-- ten thousand human geniuses held in suspended animation underground.  With the idea of rebuilding the Earth Empire he revived these ten thousand and began acquiring through sneaky sneaky means a space navy for the geniuses to crew.  

Such we learned in the first two parts of this series.  Today we experience the final episode of the series, "Vengeance of the Space Armadas."  But who is getting revenge on who?  Is the Earthman getting revenge on the aliens who knocked over his empire so many centuries ago?  Or are all those weirdos with the blue, green and pink skin, with the fingers like snakes, mouths full of tusks, or single cyclopean eye, getting their revenge on us for disrupting their barbaric native cultures and teaching them how to behave like civilized people?  Let's see!  

Navarre thinks the Vegan advisor who supplanted him and is operating the king of Navarre's birth world like a puppet is going to send another fleet to the Sol system to strangle the second Earth Empire in the cradle and Navarre heads over there with the idea of murdering or manipulating the Vegan.  Along the way, he stops at the planet where his female partner in reviving Earth's fortunes is advisor to that planet's king.  (One of the ways Silverberg hints that all these damned aliens deserve to be ruled by humans is that they all have autocratic societies, while Navarre holds elections on Earth among the ten thousand.)  He gets captured and tortured before securing the protection of his female colleague.  This torture scene feels superfluous, Silverberg just padding out his story with descriptions of pain and of the ugliness of the torturers--as soon as his girlfriend learns of his predicament she frees Navarre, provides him a disguise, and sends him on his way--the torture and the torturers are not mentioned again and the torture has no effect on the plot.

Silverberg gives us a longish scene in which the incognito Navarre and the Vegan conduct negotiations--Navarre tries to cause a rift between two different planets so they won't ally against Earth.  But the whole negotiation is rendered moot when the Vegan sees through Navarre's disguise.  The negotiation scene is almost as superfluous as was the torture scene.  Navarre fights his way out of the palace and heads to another planet to manipulate some other potentate.  Silverberg describes in detail such operations as Navarre removing his disguise and drugging a guy so he can steal a small space ship and then we get a description of this third alien society's architecture.

Having secured through manipulative diplomacy a dozen more warships from that third alien planet in a scene that is the high point of this weak story because it is more character-driven and more philosophical and thus more engaging, Navarre returns to Earth.  With his small battle fleet he faces an alien fleet twice its size that has been assembled by and is commanded by the Vegan.  Through trickery the human fleet defeats the alien fleet, and the Vegan is killed.  Most of the enemy ships are captured and added to the human fleet.  As the story ends, it is implied the Earth will again conquer the universe.  To my disappointment, Silverberg doesn't present this future either triumphantly, baldly positing that human dominance of interstellar civilization will lead to peace and prosperity, or tragically, suggesting aliens will be abused or exploited and Earthmen will suffer in the process (nota bene: no Earth ships were damaged in the battle), or any combination of the two--the denouement, like most of the story, including the climactic battle, feels flat and unemotional.  

There are a host of problems with this novella and with the earlier two episodes in the "Lest We Forget Thee, Earth" / "The Chalice of Death" series.  How long it takes to get some place or do something, how long ago the Earth empire rose and fell, what sort of technology is available, all those sorts of things feel inconsistent and don't ring true to the reader.  The series as a whole, and "Vengeance of the Space Armadas" in particular, feels like a series of action and suspense scenes just strung together, not really leading logically one to the next, and most of the scenes are poor or mediocre--as I suggested about the second episode, "Earth Shall Live Again!," the descriptions of chases and fights and negotiations lack passion and lack style and so don't generate excitement. Silverberg doesn't describe the setting of the story in a consistent way, providing limited descriptions of places we spend a lot of time in and a detailed description of a place we see only once.  We get people's and planets' back stories late in the game, after they no longer are playing a big role in the narrative.  The entire series is just constructed haphazardly.  I wonder if Silverberg revised this material for book publication and the texts in the 1958 Ace Double or the 21st century editions are smoother and more polished.  

Gotta give the version of "Vengeance of the Space Armadas" I read here in Science Fiction Adventures a thumbs down.  

"Vengeance of the Space Armadas" was reprinted on its own in the British edition of Science Fiction Adventures edited by John Carnell.  The issue with "Vengeance of the Space Armadas" has on its cover an altered version of the cover illustration used on the issue of the U.S. edition that printed the first episode of the "Lest We Forget Thee, Earth" sequence.  This UK version of Emsh's painting lacks the pile of corpses that was one of the elements that made the American cover so unsettling.  Compare below!

Top: Detail from US Science Fiction Adventures June 1957
Bottom: Detail from UK Science Fiction Adventures November 1958

"Big Sam Was My Friend" by Harlan Ellison

Sometimes I tell you a Harlan Ellison story is astoundingly horrible, like when I excoriated the inexplicably critically lauded "Mefisto in Onyx."  But sometimes I praise an Ellison tale, like I did "Run for the Stars" just recently.  Cross your fingers, kids, and let's see what Ellison has in store for us today with this 13-page story which was reprinted in the famous collection I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (title courtesy of William Rotsler) and included by Peter Haining in his anthology The Freak Show.

Genre fiction writers love the circus and the carnival, and "Big Sam Was My Friend" is yet another story set in such a milieu, a travelling circus in the future of interstellar multi-species civilization.  The text consists of a memoir, our narrator recalling his relationship with a fellow human, seven-foot-tall Sam, who joins the circus the narrator works for, a circus whose performers all have psychic powers--the trapeze artist can levitate, the lion tamer can control the minds of animals, etc.  When the lion tamer stupidly tries to do his act drunk and the animals look about ready to tear him limb from limb, Sam, a member of the audience, teleports the man to safety.  Our narrator hires Sam for the circus, and Sam becomes a star attraction.  

Ellison describes Sam's act, and then we learn about Sam's terrible sorrow.  Sam's girlfriend was killed in a traffic accident right after she learned Sam had psychic powers, something which revolted her.  Sam is travelling the galaxy looking for Heaven, confident his girl is there.

Sam has been with the circus a year or so when the circus is working at the royal court on a planet inhabited by humans that has a pretty authoritarian monarchy.  The circus has arrived just in time for the human sacrifice these people perform every 25 years!  As we might expect, the sacrifice is a beautiful blonde virgin girl!

Ellison pulls a blunder in my opinion, having Sam save the girl, as we expect, but not in a way that jives with the earlier rescue he performed.  Sam was in the audience watching the lion tamer and teleported the man out from under the great cat's jaws to his side.  We readers expect Sam to similarly teleport the virgin girl out from under the executioner's blade to his side in the audience, but, instead, Ellison has Sam teleport himself to the chopping block where he fights the executioner hand to hand.  

The locals declare that this is blasphemy and Sam must die--even the virgin wants Sam to be executed!  The psychic carnies could rescue Sam with their psychic powers and escape, but there is a lot of money to be made on this planet and they don't want to offend their host or leave.  Sam could teleport away, but he doesn't want to live anymore--he lets the locals hang him to death in hopes he will go to Heaven and be with his girlfriend, even though she rejected him.

"Big Sam Was My Friend" is a pretty cynical, misanthropic and even misogynist story--people sacrifice their colleague (their "friend"!) for money and women callously reject a man who loves them, risks or even just gives his life for them, because they are bigoted.  

Ellison's style is good here, and the plot and themes are alright, but I think he bungles the teleportation scenes.  I've already described one such inconsistency, and I won't go into details, but I think Sam's act doesn't make a lot of sense, that Ellison didn't come up with a circus act that logically takes advantage of the ability to teleport.  "Big Sam Was My Friend" comes off like a draft that needs a revision or two--surely with a little additional effort Ellison could have come up with a more appropriate act for Sam, and made the rescue of the lion tamer and of the virgin more parallel.

We're calling "Big Sam Was My Friend" acceptable, though we are confident that with a little revision it would certainly be quite good.

Freak Show also reprints Robert Bloch's "The Girl From Mars," which we read last year,
and Margaret St. Clair's "Horrer Howce," which we read in 2024.

"Destination Unknown" by Christopher Anvil

I read my first Anvil story back in March.  Here comes my second.  "Destination Unknown" would wait over fifty years before being reprinted in book form in a 2010 Anvil collection, The Power of Illusion.  

I am going to have to admit I don't really "get" "Destination Unknown."  It depicts a sort of frontier milieu in which many men are gunfighters who are always looking to start and win informal duels to the death, their reward being prestige.  It is suggested that gunfighters carry around lists of those they have killed, and if you kill a gunslinger you somehow acquire his list and with it the prestige your victim earned by slaying all those other guys.  The illustration to the story here in SFA, though not the actual text, likens this to being a head hunter who collects heads of defeated foes and they heads they collected.

The setting of Anvil's story is a hollowed out asteroid that serves as a depot; space ships come and go regularly.  On the asteroid is an aspiring gunslinger, "the Kid."  I think maybe we are supposed to suspect the Kid is a homosexual, or maybe just effeminate; at the same time it is clear he habitually bullies people on the station, that people at the depot are scared of him.  You have to wonder why the government or the korporashuns permit such shenanigans on an economically critical outer space installation, but when I was a kid there were bullies the teachers did nothing about and my twitter feed is full of stories of creeps being arrested a dozen times for assault and judges setting them free so they can murder Ukrainian refugees and slash three-year-old children so maybe this story is perfectly reasonable.  

It is rumored that a famous gunfighter, Zellinger, will briefly be on the asteroid; Zellinger is old and on his way home to Earth to retire.  On Earth the government has things under control and these crazy impromptu duels do not take place.  The Kid is anxious to have a crack at Zellinger before Z is safe on Terra.  

The actual protagonist of "Destination Unknown" is a third guy whom the Kid abuses and who then tries to get even with the Kid by helping Z and/or feels sympathetic towards Zellinger because the guy is old.  The Kid realizes he is in over his head, that Zellinger is still more than a match for him and maybe gunfighting isn't his bag, and tries to get away from the asteroid, which maybe won't be so easy, as his admission of weakness makes him a target of other gunslingers.

I assume "Destination Unknown" is a pastiche or homage to Westerns and to those stories about 17th- and 18th-century guys fighting duels, but beyond that it was hard for me to tell what was going on, not only in regards to the plot, but also in the action scenes, which are also allusive rather than lucid.  The protagonist has a pencil gun that can shoot both lethal and nonlethal beams--he shoots a nonlethal beam at the Kid to discourage him when the Kid is demanding info from him.  The Kid has a cloth he waves around to distract or threaten people; I guess the cloth is robust enough that it can draw blood if snapped on somebody's bare skin.  For a while I thought the Kid was able to hypnotize people with the cloth, as he seems to put on a different voice when he uses the cloth to intimidate the protagonist, but I have abandoned that theory.  Zellinger also seems to snap the Kid with a cloth, but so fast nobody sees the cloth; the story has plenty of sentences like this one that you have to interpret:

Zellinger's hand blurred out and back, and the Kid was dragging in air roughly.

Maybe I am admitting in this review that I am a pretty poor reader.

Anyway, Anvil doesn't clearly spell out all that is going on, so I felt like this story was requiring work to figure out but that the characters were so bland and the plot so pedestrian that doing that work would yield no profit; as far as I can tell, there is little speculative or philosophical material here in "Destination Unknown" beyond the gunslinger plot.

Thumbs down.

**********

Three cynical hard-boiled stories in which people are broken, defeated, and exploit others.  Worse, two of them are undercooked and the other is deliberately opaque.  Oy, reading these crazy old magazines is not as easy as it looks!  Of course, I'm not going to stop reading these magazines--I'm not even going to stop reading Silverberg, Ellison and Anvil.  So, stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log for more craziness.