Amazing Stories, May '57: H B Piper, M Lesser & C E Fritch

We just read Harlan Ellison's story "Night Vigil," which debuted in a fanzine but was reprinted (with a new title) not long after in one of the most famous of SF magazines, Amazing.  That issue of Amazing, May 1957, has an intriguing cover, so let's see what that swimsuit girl and robotic falconer are up to, and investigate the claim that the issue prints a story that is "Too Hot To Handle."  I'm going to read these stories in a scan of the original magazine, and you can do the same at this link.

If it's Ellison content you crave, the May 1957 issue of Amazing has an ad for the May Fantastic, highlighting Ellison's "Satan is My Ally," which we blogged about back in 2017 when I read four 1957 stories by your pal Harlan.  If you are looking for jokes and gripes, the editorial to this issue is a lame joke that serves to notify readers about former Amazing editor Howard Browne's Hollywood career is going, and, as a joke, this month's letter column is mostly people writing in to complain about Amazing.  The letters column is legitimately funny, so check it out, laff-lovers.  

"The Edge of the Knife" by H. Beam Piper

The editor's intro to "The Edge of the Knife" asserts that "This story was rejected by two top-flight science-fiction editors for the same reason: 'Too hot to handle.' 'Too dangerous for our book.'"  If we choose to believe this claim, who could Amazing editor Paul W.  Fairman mean?  Campbell at Astounding?  Gold at Galaxy?  Boucher at F&SF?  Who am I missing?  Thrilling Wonder and Weird Tales were defunct in 1957.  Is James Quinn of If "top-flight"?  Well, there's a mystery for us.

"The Edge of the Knife" is quite long, like 40 pages here in Amazing, so it had better be good, or I am going to be bitter.  I definitely want to see why it might have been considered "too hot to handle," though.

World War II veteran Ed Chalmers teaches modern history at a college in California in the year 1973.  Chalmers has a secret special power--every so often he spontaneously develops "memories" of things that will happen in the future.  Chalmers knows all about wars and revolutions and other political developments that will occur decades and centuries in the future, but his info is not systematic or comprehensive; for example, he will rarely know the dates or even years of the future events he "remembers."  These memories of the future are so vivid and real that Chalmers will sometimes casually mention some such event, absentmindedly forgetting that the event has not happened yet, leading others to think he is joking or mentally unbalanced.  As our story begins, he is telling his class about the assassination of some contemporary Middle-Eastern potentate--"the greatest Moslem since Saladin"--an assassination that has not yet occurred.  Students and faculty have witnessed such queer comments from Chalmers before, and this is the last straw--enough people are now convinced that Chalmers is insane that they fear he will harm the rep of the school and want him removed, and the president of the college asks Chalmers for his resignation.  But Chalmers has all kinds of tenure protections, and resists being let go, and contacts his lawyer.

Things cool down for a month, but then that Muslim politician gets murdered in the very way Chalmers described and people start believing Chalmers can predict the future--including academics whose specialty is parapsychology and want to pump Chalmers for data--while the president thinks it is all some kind of scam or hoax and redoubles his efforts to fire Chalmers.  A big meeting is held in the president's office with many attendees from multiple stake-holding groups, and much of the story reads like a courtroom drama, with Chalmers' lawyer there trying to protect our guy.  

I wasn't thrilled to be reading scenes of tense meetings among academics and between a guy and his lawyer like Amazing was printing some mainstream novel that was blowing the lid off what goes on in the shadow of the ivory tower.  Am I opening up SF mags to read stuff like “As faculty members, any controversy involving establishment of standards of fitness to teach under a tenure-contract concerns all of us, because any action taken in this case may establish a precedent which could affect the validity of our own contracts.”  Did I accidentally pick up a copy of The Chronicle of Higher Education?  Zzzzzzzz....  

The most important result of the meeting is that everybody agrees that Chalmers submit to a psychological exam by a top government shrink.  The president of the college expects Chalmers to be declared insane and committed to a mental institution, so he can fire him, and most everybody else involved thinks Chalmers will be given a clean bill of mental health and that this will serve his interests.  But during the exam Chalmers gets new "memories" that indicate that California is going to be hit by multiple nuclear weapons during the brief war that will result from the assassination in just a few days.  The insane asylum is in a safe place beyond the mountains, so Chalmers deliberately fails the exam so he will be out of the blast radius and fall out zone of the enemy rocket detonations.  He also arranges it so two friends of his will to move to the town where the booby hatch is sited and bring with them his papers so he can continue his work.  

I like the final twist of the story.  I wish Piper had maybe spent more time on Chalmers' relationships with the two friends he preserves--they seem to be sort of tacked on to the story, and we spend much more time with the lawyer and the president who are doomed to be annihilated.  The meat of "The Edge of the Knife" is not bad, but feels slow.  We'll judge "The Edge of the Knife," the title of which refers to the thin separation between past and future and the narrow difference between sanity and insanity, to be acceptable.

But what do we make of the claims the story was "too hot to handle"?  There's no sex in the story.  The academic business--professors fighting the administration--seems like the typical stuff of fiction, and knowing the future but Cassandra-like being unable to change it feels like standard SF fare.  Maybe this story is a hot potato (if we choose to believe the sensational claims) because, while the Soviet Union is not named, the story depicts the commies unsympathetically; they are to blame for the nuclear war, and they lose, getting wiped out thanks to American ingenuity--the Pentagon has stocked America's moon base with an arsenal of missiles and our boys rain them down on the Reds.  Maybe other magazines were scared of offending their left-wing readers with this kind of anti-communist triumphalism, the idea that a nuclear war is winnable, and what amounts to an endorsement of the militarization of space? 

"The Edge of the Knife," isfdb is telling me, is part of Piper's Federation series, a series to which other people have apparently contributed fiction, and has been reprinted in Piper collections and Federation-centric anthologies.  This story's style is competent, and Piper seems skeptical of or hostile to the commies, so maybe some day I'll read other Federation stories; I have always avoided Piper's famous Fuzzy stories because I figured they were allegories/wish fulfillment fantasies of primitive natives outwitting the evil white capitalists, but maybe my guess is off.   

"Winged Planet" by Milton Lesser (as by Adam Chase)

We've read I guess five things by Lesser in the benighted era of this blog's bewildering existence, "'A' as in Android," "The Graveyard of Space," "Ennui," "The Impossible Weapon," and "It's Raining Frogs!"  Let's see what this caper, which is illustrated on the cover of the mag and appears under a pen name, is all about.  I've been lukewarm about Lesser, but maybe I will love this one?  C-3PO, I mean, isfdb, reports that "Winged Planet" has never been reprinted--hey, never tell me the odds!

It is the future of interstellar civilization, the 30th century.  Ann is one of the galaxy's greatest dancers, and she travels from star system to star system, entertaining the men of the frontier worlds.  Recently she was on Earth, which, to the alarm of us patriotic readers, is now some minor planet in the vast human space empire.  Some things change with the forward march of technology and history...but some things don't--the men of the future are still hornier than women can handle!  Everywhere Ann goes, men make passes at her, and she always rejects them.  

Ann is currently a passenger aboard a ship about to transition from hyperspace to real space, and she is in the observation lounge to watch the change--she never gets tired of seeing these dramatic transitions.  Also there is Cliff, an officer of the ship, and he keeps trying to make time with Ann, to the point she slaps the man.  Also present is a newlywed couple, Garry and Joyce; watching them, Ann pities the young woman because her new husband, Ann can tell by how he acts in anticipation of the transition, is a coward, and Joyce will soon fall out of love with this loser.

Immediately after the transition the ship crashes into a planet and almost the entire ship is wrecked, and almost everyone killed--it is only the observation deck that is spared, and our four cardboard characters.  Fire is spreading to the observation lounge, and Cliff the spaceman is unconscious and almost dead, and Joyce paralyzed with pain.  Ann has to badger and insult Garry to get the coward to help her carry the other two people off the wreck before they burn up.  

On the apparently barren planet, the injured Cliff and Joyce are immediately carried off by a huge bird.  Garry and Ann chase after the feathered kidnapper, so all four shipwreck survivors end up in the custody of a robot who strips them naked to experiment on them!  You see, the robot and its 100+ fellows, many centuries ago, crashed on this planet and all the humans with them were killed.  The robots feel a terrible need to serve humanity, so started experimenting on the local fauna, which consists entirely of avians and bugs, to figure out if they could create new masters.  Their researches have fostered the development of techniques that can heal animals and people almost instantly and, through genetic engineering, the ability to make animals smarter, bigger, stronger, etc., than normal.

All those centuries have degraded the robots' intellectual capacity, so they have to be convinced that they don't need to carve up the four shipwrecked travelers because they are human and can serve as masters to the robots; luckily the robots are convinced before anybody gets vivisected.  Goody-Two-Shoes Ann wants to hand these robots over to the government so the government can figure out the best way to use the healing and genetic engineering techniques they have developed.  Cliff, the kind of guy who aggressively pursues women, is also the kind of guy who likes the idea of getting rich and powerful by making the robots his personal army and using their groundbreaking methods to make himself dictator of the galaxy. 

Initially Cliff wins the allegiance of the robots, and starts plotting an ambush of the rescue ship that must be on the way and initial experiments on Garry and Joyce, but Ann figures out how to get the robots to switch their loyalty to her.  When Cliff kisses Ann against her will and tells her he wants her to rule at his side, she resists violently and declares her intention to kill Cliff.  The robots, having been ordered to protect Cliff, kill Ann.  But then their "serve mankind" programming kicks in and they prioritize serving the fallen Ann, bringing her back to life, and restrain Cliff, who instigated the violence that killed Ann.  The expected rescue ship arrives and the robots and their technology are placed in the beneficent hands of the government.  As the story ends we are reminded that Ann not only saved the galaxy from Cliff but taught Garry to be brave.

Barely acceptable; "The Winged Planet" is a sort of bottom-of-the-barrel standard SF story, even with its theme of multiple contrasting (but mostly wrong) ways of being a man and its self-sacrificing girl-boss central character who sees her job as teaching men how to behave and helping the government accrue as much power as possible.  (Ann obviously never heard Muswell Hillbillies.)  It is interesting seeing Lesser deploy these progressive values alongside exploitation material, like the women being subjected to losing their clothes and facing the threat of sexual violence and being cut to pieces while still alive.          

"No World for the Timid" by Charles E. Fritch

In 2024 I read Fritch's "The Big Wide Wonderful World" on the recommendation of one Judith Merrill and I liked it, so there is a chance this will be today's best story, though written by today's least well-known author. 

You know, I think this probably is today's best story.  For one thing, it is economical--short and to the point.  For another, it has real human feeling, something Piper's story, with its unsympathetic academics and attorneys, and Lesser's story, with its flat one-note characters, lack.  "No World for the Timid" is also sort of shocking, or at least makes a respectable effort at being shocking.

Our narrator is perhaps the last man in the world after the nuclear war.  Yes, this is yet another post-apocalyptic story.  He survived because he hid in a cave and a landslide sealed him in, far from the radiation.  In the cave system he met another survivor, perhaps the only woman left in the world.  Somehow, they survived down there, eating bugs and fungus and whatever, emaciated and covered in sores but alive.  Alive for years!  So long, that the woman gave birth to three kids!  Kids old enough to talk by the time they find an exit back to the sunlight!

This story is over-the-top grim; the editor introduces it with an over-the-top warning: "This is a story for readers who like their meat raw, their facts plain and unvarnished, their fiction tough and realistic."  "Realistic" may be pushing it--how do they see in the dark to catch food?  Still, "tough" is appropriate,  with the woman talking about eating her own children, the kids talking about one day getting big enough to overpower Dad and eat him, and Dad contemplating killing the kids before they are too big to overpower him.  And then there is the fact that the woman has grown so accustomed to living underground that she is reluctant, pathologically so, to stepping out into the sunlight again.  The story ends on a down note; they don't meet other survivors or helpful aliens or a cache of tools that will make life easier or anything.

Worthy of a mild recommendation.  "No World for the Timid" was reprinted in the Fritch collection Crazy Mixed-Up Planet (advertised as "spine-chilling"), a reprint magazine the main attraction of which is John Wyndham's "The Troons of Space" (I've read two of Wyndham's Troons stories, "Asteroids, 2194" AKA "The Emptiness of Space" and "The Moon AD 2044" AKA "Idiot's Delight" but not that one) and the ninth of Richard Davis' Space anthologies. 

**********

Well, we've wrung a lot of content out of this issue of Amazing, self-described as "The World's Leading Science-Fiction Magazine."  Let's spend some more time in 1957,  shall we?

Weird Tales Project: 1925

The Roaring Twenties! The time of jazz, flappers, Art Deco!  And Weird Tales!  

We here at MPorcius Fiction Log have seen fit to defy poor eyesight, bad memory, and the indifference of an uncaring universe to shoulder a monumental task--the quest to read at least one piece of fiction from each issue of Weird Tales, the essential speculative fiction magazine edited early on by Edwin Baird and in its most celebrated days by Farnsworth Wright and then Dorothy McIlwraith.  Each time I am able to cross a year off the list, having blogged about at least one story from each issue of the Unique Magazine with a cover date for that year, I put up one of these links posts that, first, lists each of the years finished thus far, and then, all the stories from that year which we have written about.  Today I can report that we have wrapped up our exploration of 1925, a year in which twelve issues edited by Wright hit the newsstands and were devoured by the speculative fiction fans of the Jazz Age.     

1923  1924

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939  

1940   1941  1942

January

Frank Belknap Long:  "The Ocean Leech"

C. M. Eddy, Jr.:          "Ahrl-a of the Caves"

H. P. Lovecraft:          "The Festival"

Henry S. Whitehead:  "The Fireplace"

E. Hoffmann Price:    "The Rajah's Gift"

February

H. P. Lovecraft:           "The Statement of Randolph Carter"

Harvey S. Whitehead: "Sea Change"  

March

C. M. Eddy, Jr.:            "The Better Choice" 

Harvey S. Whitehead:  "The Thin Match"

April

C. M. Eddy, Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft: "Deaf, Dumb and Blind"

May

Frank Belknap Long: "Men Who Walk Upon the Air"

June

Frank Belknap Long:  "The Devil-God"

July

Henry S. Whitehead:  "The Wonderful Thing"

H. P. Lovecraft:          "The Unnamable"

E. Hoffmann Price:    "The Stranger from Kurdistan" 

Robert E. Howard:     "Spear and Fang"

August

Murray Leinster:         "The Oldest Story in the World"

Robert E. Howard:      "In The Forest of Villefere"

Nathaniel Hawthorne: "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" 

September

H. P. Lovecraft:           "The Temple"

Frank Belknap Long:  "The Were-Snake"

E. Hoffmann Price:     "The Sultan's Jest"

October

E. Hoffmann Price: "The Prophet's Grandchildren"

November

H. G. Wells: "The Stolen Body"

December

Frank Belknap Long:  "The Sea Thing"

H. G. Wells:                 "The Valley of Spiders"

Harlan Ellison: "Night Vigil," "Lonelyache," & "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes"

Let's finish up my signed copy of the fifth (1979) Collier paperback printing of Harlan Ellison's 1971 collection Alone Against Tomorrow, about which I have already written at some length here, here and here.  After today I will have read every story in the book, in one form or another, and blogged about most of them.  (A few--the most famous ones, probably--I read before this blog quivered to glistening and sinister life, and I haven't felt like rereading them yet, and anyway, I feel like this blog offers the most value when I write about stories which haven't already been written about a million times.)  You shouldn't take anything I say, or anybody says, at face value, life and the world being what they are, so I encourage you to read Alone Against Tomorrow yourself--try these links--before seeing what I have to say about "Night Vigil," "Lonelyache," and "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes," or after.

"Night Vigil" (1955)

"Night Vigil" appears to have debuted in an issue of the fanzine Peon with a cover by Ed Emshwiller, which is pretty cool.  This side-stapled periodical also includes essays by Robert Bloch and Terry Carr.  Fun.  "Night Vigil" enjoyed a wider audience in 1957 when it was printed in an issue of Amazing with a cover suggesting our fine-feathered friends and the mechanical minds that owe their existence to our ingenuity are teaming up to exploit one of our most valuable resources--swimsuit models!  Don't count out the trim brunette who is representing our civilization, though--she's packing heat!  After seeing print in Amazing under the title "Yellow Streak Hero," "Night Vigil" has reappeared in many Ellison collections.

"Night Vigil" is a normal science fiction story about being in space and dealing with aliens and one man sacrificing to help his civilization, and a decent one.  Mild recommendation.

The human race, in its travels around the universe, has come upon evidence that other advanced civilizations have been wiped out by some mysterious enemy.  The government needs to deploy some kind of sentinel or tripwire on an asteroid at a specific strategic point way way out there, far from Earth, to watch for this enemy.  Using computers, they determine from among all the young men on Earth the man most likely to remain sane while living in a tiny one-room Quonset hut, bereft of human contact, year after year, decade after decade.  This nineteen-year-old is seized by the government as he is sitting on his front porch canoodling with his girlfriend, hypno-trained how to operate the communications system that he will need to use on the asteroid should the alien monsters appear, and then shipped to the watching post.

Our guy has been in the Quonset hut for 24 years.  Ellison does a good job of describing all the psychological phenomena he has endured over those years.  Then the scanners finally detect the approaching enemy and he sends the critical message to Earth.  He has sacrificed his life for his people.

A decent story.  Star Trek fans may find Ellison's use of the phrase "on the edge of Forever" amusing.  Maybe we should see this story as one that subverts our expectations, as the critics like to say.  Some stories might have this single guy outwit the aliens all by himself.  Other stories might have a twist ending in which there are no aliens and the government is using the alien scare to manipulate the populace.  Ellison here does neither, instead producing a story that depicts the sad truth that polities have enemies and those polities require people who will take risk and make sacrifices to oppose those enemies if they are to endure.

"Lonelyache" (1964)

"Lonelyache" debuted in Knight, "The Magazine for the Adult Male," in an issue that promises to introduce us to "the Aqua-Nudes," reveal to us "the truth about the Irish Sweepstakes," and share with us "pix" of Christine Keeler, the woman embroiled in the Profumo affair.  isfdb lists one anthology, a Belgian one, that reprints "Lonelyache;" otherwise, it has only reappeared in Ellison collections, many of them.    

This is essentially a mainstream story about people whose marriages have failed and how they have empty sexual relationships, adultery and one-night stands and so on, in a vain effort to fill their time or feel love, etc.  Also, perhaps, about how people with difficult childhoods have trouble making adult relationships work.  There are lots of uncomfortable angry conversations, and some literary-type metaphors.  The genre fiction elements consist of the protagonist's dreams, in which he has to fight for his life against a series of assassins, all of them former friends, and defeats them one by one, Ellison describing the gore of their horrible wounds, and a monster forming in the protagonist's small apartment, I guess a metaphor for the man's unhappiness, dissatisfaction, psychological collapse over his loneliness and his shame at using women for sex.  Finally, he pays a prostitute, and this degrading act brings the monster to completion, and the protagonist digs his old service pistol out of the closet and commits suicide.

"Lonelyache" is competent--no major blunders--and at times it is sort of clever or arresting, but it is also long and meandering, episodic, the scenes don't flow logically from one to the other, you almost feel that the scenes could be in different order and the story would work the same.  The gory dreams--which seem to be about comradely relationships with other men and a child's relationship with his parents--and the monster, which receives short shrift, seem tacked on, divorced from the main drama, which is all about sexual relationships with women.  We'll call "Lonelyache" acceptable and move on with our lives.

"Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes"  (1969)

Here we have a story about African-American life that uses the "n-word," so there is your trigger warning.  "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes" is actually a good story, better paced and structured than so many of Ellison's stories, so, thumbs up.

A white man who is some kind of hobo or tramp rides the rails illegally to the n-word section of a town to attend a funeral, using his special powers to avoid the railway police.  This guy, our narrator, is some kind of space alien, we eventually realize--he steals Hydrox cookies but mostly eats grass and weeds, and can "go dark," which I guess means "become invisible."

He spies on the funeral of a well-liked 82-year old black guy, Jed, planning to pay his final respects when all the other funeral attendees have left the room in which lies the body.  But then another (apparent) white person, an astoundingly beautiful woman, comes into the room she thinks is empty to (apparently) pay her respects.  She steals the silver dollars off Jed's eyes--according to the narrator, this means Jed won't have passage for the trip to Heaven and will end up in Hell.   

The narrator chases the woman all the way to a different city, using up a considerable portion of his small store of money to do so.  This striking beauty is a whore, and he confronts her at the brothel, and has to use his special powers to kill whatever you call the bouncer at a whorehouse.  Eventually, he gets her full story out of the beauty and we get his full story out of the narrator.  The narrator is a space alien and the kind, generous, giving, etc., Jed, who was always helping people down on their luck, helped the alien and taught him how to pass as a Earth human.  The prostitute is Jed's daughter, and they had an antagonistic relationship because she insisted on passing as a white woman and Jed, the narrator tells Jed's daughter,

"...took in all kinds, and didn’t care where they came from, or what they were. Just as long as they didn’t lie about it.  He had a lot of love."

There is quite a bit of stuff to think about in this story, if we choose to do so.  All three main figures in the story, alien, prostitute, and Jed, are unable to "go home"--the alien can't get back to his home planet, the prostitute isn't able to comfortably spend time with her own father or any black people (or even respectable white people, for that matter), and Jed also seems to have had trouble getting along with his own flesh and blood and is kept from Heaven.  The narrator and the prostitute are both passing, and are both in a sense Jed's children, and both lower class thieves--how great a parent was Jed if his real child and his de facto child both ended up on the wrong side of the law, making their way by doing things that conventional morality holds to be degrading and humiliating?  Ellison writes in the voice of the space alien,

Jed, Jed, you poor old nigger bastard. You knew I couldn’t get home again, back to whatever world it was I'd come from, and you taught me how to pass so they wouldn’t kill me, but you couldn’t handle it when it happened to you.

What does "when it happened to you" mean?  When Jed's own daughter tried to pass, and succeeded?  Or in some way was Jed also trying to pass, trying to hide white blood of his own or a sexual relationship with a white woman or both?

A successful story--even the action scenes work.  Worth your time, especially if you are interested in depictions of African-Americans by white authors, in particular efforts by white people to depict rounded and realistic black people who aren't just dangerous monsters or innocent victims or beleaguered saints.  

 

"Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes" debuted in Galaxy.  The text there is obviously different than that in my paperback copy of Alone Against Tomorrow, but I just glanced at the magazine version, didn't actually closely compare, and the differences may just be in mechanical stuff like punctuation.  Norman Spinrad, whom I have heard Ellison helped get work at places like Knight, included "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes" in his 1971 anthology The New Tomorrows, and it also turned up in the first Best From Galaxy volume. 

The moon and the woman's profile on The New Tomorrows seem to be copied
from the Dillons' cover for Over the Edge.  Weird.

 **********

I'm glad I could finish up my look at Alone Against Tomorrow with stories I can say something nice about, including one I can recommend without reservation (I don't count the trigger warning as a reservation.)  It might seem like it, but I don't open up Ellison's books and hunt down his magazine appearances hoping to point out problems and otherwise cut the man down to size--I am genuinely curious about Ellison's work and career and am glad when I can legitimately enjoy anything he has written.

Harlan Ellison produced a lot of work and no doubt we will be seeing more of him in the future here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Harlan Ellison: "Nothing for My Noon Meal," "O Ye of Little Faith" & "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" (redux!)

Let's take a break from Weird Tales and read three stories from my autographed paperback copy of Harlan Ellison's 1971 collection Alone Against Tomorrow.  (According to the copyright page, mine is a Fifth Printing from 1979.)  I won't wear gloves, but I will hit the soap and water before handling this holy relic touched by the very hands of science fiction's bad boy.  We've already read a bunch of stories that appear in this book--see these links:

LINK THE FIRST
LINK THE SECOND 

If you don't want to risk soiling your own copy of Alone Against Tomorrow by taking it out of the locked and climate-controlled glass case in which you keep your Harlan Ellison collection, you should be able to find these stories somewhere or other online.  Here are some links to give you a head start:

Hardcover 

Paperback

"Nothing for My Noon Meal" (1958)

Nebula Science Fiction was a British (the wikipedia article stresses that it was specifically Scottish) magazine that was published between 1952 and 1959.  There was a US edition offered in '58 and '59.  The wikipedia article includes quotes from Ken Bulmer, E. C. Tubb, and Brian Aldiss praising the magazine, and editor Peter Hamilton, to the skies.  "Nothing For My Noon Meal" debuted in Nebula, and appeared in both the British and American editions.

"Nothing for My Noon Meal" is a decent traditional science fiction story with space suits and space ships and all that, with the kind of high emotion and tragedy and alienation we expect from Ellison, but Ellison doesn't overdo it as he sometimes does--this story doesn't feel like Ellison is yelling and it doesn't feel like he's belaboring his points.  I can mildly recommend "Nothing for My Noon Meal."

Our narrator is a "poor space bum" who, I suppose, lives by exploring and mining new planets and that sort of thing.  He gets married and he and his wife approach a small planet with a strange day and night cycle, the result of the planet orbiting far from its star and having two moons that often eclipse the star, so that this planet experiences months and months of darkness at a time.

Approaching the planet there is a disaster and the ship falls apart.  The narrator is in the forward portion of the ship, which can serve as an escape pod or lifeboat (Ellison uses the word "hutch") but his wife is back in the galley getting coffee and so when the ship is wrecked she dies but he survives to land on the planet.  On the planet he discovers, accidentally, that the only living thing on the planet, a sort of flower, subsists on nitrogen and expels oxygen.  So there will be enough oxygen for him to survive, at least as long as the flowers are in bloom.  One of the story's plot elements is that the flowers seem to die off, but we eventually learn that they are just retracting into the surface and will be back.  Ellison's botany is a little all over the place; early in the story the flowers are described as "strange plants that sucked nitrogen from the thin atmosphere, circulated it and cast it back out as oxygen," but then at the end we are told that the flowers, feared dead, "had merely gone down to replenish their own oxygen supply from the planet itself...."  Well, whatever; Ellison doesn't have some kind of science or engineering training like Asimov or Anderson or Heinlein or one of those guys, and we don't expect the focus of his work to be actual science.

Exposure to the planet has a strange effect on the narrator--he grows a thing like a goiter on his face, a sac, that can store oxygen and which distorts his face so he looks like some kind of monster.  This is the first instance in real life of a mutation taking immediate effect instead of having to be passed on via heredity to an organism's offspring.

Our guy survives on this little planet for some months, and then an Earth ship arrives.  While the narrator is an old space bum with an old ship who has endured a tragedy that has often made him question whether or not he should continue living, the three people arriving on the ship, a brand new fancy shiny one, are young scientists full of energy and hope--Ellison really pushes the alienation theme here.  The three scientists want to bring the narrator back to Earth to study--Earth is in trouble because of overpopulation, thanks to antiaging drugs and a Christian lobby that is preventing the adoption of "really effective birth control laws," and maybe learning how to mutate people in their own lifetimes will help somehow.  But our guy, with his hideous face, doesn't want to live among normal people, and, besides, he can hear his dead wife's voice--she is floating in space, orbiting this planet, and doesn't want him to leave.  So he convinces the three scientists that they should send people to study him while he is here on this little world.  Maybe we should compare this story to the H. G. Wells story we just read, "A Dream of Armageddon," in which a guy has a one-of-a-kind contribution to the troubled world that only he can make and he refuses to make it because he would rather spend time with a woman he loves. 

I don't think "Nothing for My Noon Meal" has ever been anthologized, but of course it has been reprinted in the multiple editions of multiple Ellison collections, including Ellison Wonderland, which in 2015 appeared behind an embarrassingly lame and instantly dated try-hard I'm-a-phony-rebel cover with sickening colors that I can barely believe was actually sold to people instead of thrown in the garbage.  Disgusting.  In comparison, Bob Pepper's 1974 cover looks like a towering achievement from an era of awe-inspiring creativity, beauty, sophistication and elegance.

"Harl"?  More like "hurl," amirite?

"O Ye of Little Faith" (1968)

I have in the past noted how closely intertwined are the worlds of SF and that of men's adult magazines, and today we note that "O Ye of Little Faith" saw print in the magazine Knight the same year it appeared in the Ellison collection Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled.  Our pal Harlan is proud of this one--it appears in Harry Harrison's 1971 SF: Author's Choice 3, in which "Thirteen Science Fiction Masters" like Sonya Dorman and David I. Masson "Present, With Commentary, Their Own Favorite Stories."  Let's read the version of the story in my copy of Alone Against Tomorrow and then Ellison's commentary in the Harrison anthology, which will be easy for you cybersleuths to find online.

"O Ye of Little Faith" starts off with a dream-like action sequence that makes me wonder how Ellison got a reputation as a good writer.  Here's a sample sentence that seems to have all kinds of grammar issues (I'm not going to put all those "[sic]"s in there): 

The tips of his fingers skinned away from friction, and the pain was excruciating, for a long moment, but was lost in an instant as the shriek tore from his throat and he plunged, hitting painfully with his shoulders and the back of his neck that threatened to snap his spine, down into a depth of water black and viscuous and bottomless that closed over him, filled his mouth with foulness, blind, dragged into the grave-chill body of a moist lover terrible in her possessiveness, jealousy and need.

Maybe this sentence is full of printer's errors and typos?  Anyway, the action sequence stinks; not only is it poorly written but it feels like a dream sequence so you don't care if our protagonist, Niven, outfights or escapes the centaur or gets out of the arena or out of the tunnel or wherever the hell he is because you expect every painful and confusing paragraph to be followed by "Niven woke up in a cold sweat."

After two pages of this aggravation we learn that Niven was in Mexico on vacation and his centaur-fighting, into-a-pit-falling hallucination began in a soothsayer's shop.  We get one of the lists we so often find in Ellison's work, this one meant to convey to us how crazy Tijuana is, a list of the stuff money can buy in that town, like a ten-year-old boy virgin or the chance to see a sex show involving a dog.  The word "pudenum," in italics, makes an appearance, which I don't run into often in my reading.  Anyway, Niven and his 35-year-old girlfriend were in Tijuana to get her an abortion, and after the procedure she asked him where their relationship was going.  She didn't like his goofy evasive answer so stormed off and he chased her into the soothsayer's shop, where the Mexican oracle told Niven that he was a man without faith and so was damned and so Niven punched out this stooped old man and suddenly found himself in a "bowl" fighting a centaur.

After this flashback we are back to the hallucination.  Niven escapes the foul water and encounters Jesus, Bast, Apollo, and other deities, and realizes that like a god who has lost his worshippers, he failed to give his girlfriend a reason to have faith in him, to believe in him, and so he is lost like those forgotten gods.  Or maybe his girlfriend is like a god and he is like a worshipper who failed to have faith in her and so is lost.  It is a mess.  

This story is a pretentious but weak bit of self-indulgence, Ellison apparently trying to come to grips with his own issues with women and with the psychological pressures of being an atheist, or maybe just trying to mine his relationship problems and hostility to religion for material.  Poorly written and offering no entertainment value and only sham profundity, MPorcius Fiction Log has to give "O Ye of Little Faith" a bitter thumbs down.      

But let's look at Ellison's own commentary on the story in SF: Author's Choice 3, a five-page intro that precedes the nine-page story.  Oh, first I'll note that the text of "O Ye of Little Faith" in SF: Author's Choice 3 seems to have been cleaned up--the sentence I quoted above has somewhat better punctuation and grammar, and the italicized "pudenum" was changed to unitalicized "pudenda."

Ellison tells us that "O Ye of Little Faith" isn't really his favorite of his own stories--that would be either "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" or "At the Mouse Circus."  Then he relates the story of how, when he was a little boy, a little girl who was a Seventh Day Adventist tried to convert him because she thought Jews committed such crimes as grinding up gentiles to make matzoh and were doomed to hell.  Harlan then tells us he has become very interested in religion, bragging that he is reading Chesterton and Aquinas, and that in his writing he has been trying to come up with a modern pantheon of gods and figure out what happens to gods who are no longer worshipped--"O Ye of Little Faith" is one of those efforts.  Harlan also makes a sex joke that comes off as a dated and kind of creepy non-sequitur:

She may have been correct; I may be doomed, but not because I didn't read The Watchtower. And frankly, I can think of infinitely groovier things to do with little Gentile girls than grinding them up for matzohs.*

*[UPDATE 8/27/2026:  See the comments for an interesting observation on this passage from one of my eagle-eyed readers.]

Then we get the real reason the version of "O Ye of Little Faith" that I read is such a piece of junk--as a stunt, Ellison wrote it in one hour at the 1966 West Coast Science Fantasy Conference after Larry Niven won an hour of his time in a charity auction; one condition of the auction was that Ellison would include the name of the winner of the auction in the story as well as three words chosen by the winner (Niven chose "minotaur," "polyp" and "prognosticator," but in the heat of writing Ellison mixed up "minotaur" and "centaur.")       

    

Finally, Ellison babbles on about how important writers are in our violent world; "writing is a holy chore....a heavy responsibility....none of us who write take it lightly..."  Good grief, Harlan, you just told us you published--in a porn mag--as a completed story a rough draft you made up as you went along that is full of mistakes.

"The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" (1958)

Another porn mag story, "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" appeared in Rogue ten years before "O Ye of Little Faith" was printed in Knight.  This one also appeared in Ellison Wonderland, but I'll illustrate this part of the blog post with covers of The Essential Ellison, in which "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" was also offered to the public.

I felt like I was recognizing this story as I read it, and after I had drafted the below blog post I realized I had in fact read it in 2024 and blogged about it.  Oops.  I think the version I read today in Alone Against Tomorrow is different, however, and that justifies my just posting about "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" again, doesn't it?    

Arthur Fulbright is a "partial clairvoyant," which, in this story at least, means he can see some future events but not others.  He is also a 39-year-old virgin--you know what that means.  Art lived with his mother for like 33 years, and now, six years after her death, he has one of his visions of the future--that the world will end in two weeks.  He decides he'd better lose his virginity while he has the chance.

The story follows his clumsy attempts to date women and then his abortive plan to rape a woman.  Finally, guided by his ability to see the future, he meets a whore in a bar and seals the deal.  She asks for 15 bucks, and after he finishes having sex with her in his house he pays her four thousand dollars.  You might say that his last act on this Earth is to become the world's best tipper.  A moment later Arthur, the prostitute, and the entire world are incinerated.

This is today's most competent story; there are not any goofy blunders and all the characters act in ways that makes sense.  I'm not sure if "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" is today's best story, though, as "Nothing for My Noon Meal" is more creative and has a lot more stuff going on--"The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" is kind of obvious.  Is it better to be ambitious, take risks, and make mistakes, or set modest goals and achieve them?  I can't decide, so I'll just say I can mildly recommend "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" and leave it at that.    

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Two of our stories today are alright, but one of them is so bad it is kind of insulting that Ellison and his editors and publishers saw fit to shovel it at us, like we'd eat anything and enjoy it if it bore the Ellison label.  It shakes your faith in the whole enterprise of publishing, the whole culture of fiction.  

If my memory is to be trusted, and today we have seen it isn't, there are three stories remaining in Alone Against Tomorrow that I have yet to read.  I think I'll wrap up this project in our next post by blogging about "Night Vigil," "Lonelyache," and "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes."

H. G. Wells: "The Stolen Body," "The Valley of Spiders," and "A Dream of Armageddon"

The October 1925 issue of Weird Tales includes a full page ad heralding the coming appearance in the unique magazine of three stories by the "great English novelist" H. G. Wells.  These are reprints, not new stories, but perhaps "The Stolen Body," "The Valley of Spiders" and "A Dream of Armageddon" were hard to find in 1925 and '26, so maybe their appearance in this American magazine was a big deal.  Nowadays it is easy to find these stories, but I am going to read them in their Weird Tales versions, and you can join me by clicking the links in the previous sentence. 

"The Stolen Body" (1898)

"The Stolen Body," which first appeared in the British magazine The Strand* in 1898, is the cover story of the November 1925 issue of Weird Tales, an issue with a more professional than average looking cover illo for Farnsworth Wright's magazine.  With no sexy woman and no monster and not even some kind of armed foreigner, Andrew Brosnatch's cover looks like it would fit just fine on a mainstream magazine, though I guess there are ghosts or lost souls dimly recognizable in the illustration.

*Having typed this, I am going to have Bryan Ferry's voice in my head all day.

This is a very good story, so thumbs up.  We have a sort of journalistic narrator, a nameless person who has spoken to the two main participants in the drama the story relates and more or less gives the story from their point of view, first one, then the other.

A successful London lawyer, unmarried, spends his free time investigating psychic phenomena.  Before TV, middle-class people had crazy hobbies--if it wasn't for TV, the Cold War world would have witnessed untold numbers of astounding discoveries and horrendous crimes.  Anyway, the particular interest of this lawyer, Bessel, is in transferring thoughts and images from one mind to another.  So Bessel recruits a pal, Vincey, who lives two miles away, to conduct experiments with him.  At specific times, both will sit still in their London apartments and focus with all their mental energies on the other, trying to make psychic contact.  Four or five times nothing happens, but on the fifth or sixth try Vincey actually sees an image of Bessel, but Bessel looks haggard and anxious, like he's in trouble!

Vincey rushes to Bessel's apartment to report success and see if his friend is OK.  Bessel is absent, his room in terrible disorder, and a guy on staff at the apartment house reports bizarre behavior on the part of the lawyer.  The story follows Vincey's efforts to find out what is going on and to help his friend, and then we get the story from the point of view of Bessel.  There are various exciting events and compelling descriptions--Wells is a good writer and everything that happens is fun or disturbing or engrossing. 

In brief, Bessel separated his soul from his body and found himself in a sort of parallel realm inhabited by floating spirits and the souls of mortal men who have gone insane or somehow become detached from their bodies.  From this realm you can see everything going on on the real Earth, easily seeing through walls and floating around effortlessly, but you can't touch anything, and this parallel world is totally silent.  The spirits native to this world watch the world of the living with terrible envy and longing--it is torture for them to see the living going about life, talking and touching and building relationships and so forth, when they are stuck in a realm of silence in which no physical contact is possible.

Because Bessel has left his body, one of these desperate spirits is able to fill the vacancy.  Bessel's body, now controlled by the spirit, runs around London, crying out "Life!" and, in an ecstasy of joy, smashing, breaking, and setting afire property and people.  The disembodied Bessel witnesses the atrocities committed and risks run by his body and feverishly tries to get help from Vincey and other people, but contacting them through the barriers between the worlds is difficult.  After injuring many people and damaging much property, the piratical spirit sends Bessel's body falling down a deep hole at a construction site where nobody will think to look for him, shattering multiple bones in the process.  Bessel's body will die down there if nobody finds it soon!  Luckily, Bessel is able to contact his friend via a medium and his body is rescued, and is able to regain possession when the occupying spirit, unable to stand the pain of living in a broken body suffering dehydration and starvation, vacates the premises.

A very good story told in an understated but quite effective style.  Wells is one of those big names that deserves his high reputation and is also accessible to ordinary readers.  A good acquisition by Wright.  "The Stolen Body" has been reprinted in many Wells collections and several anthologies.

"The Valley of Spiders" (1903)

This one debuted in Pearson's Magazine, and I think this link will take you to a scan of "The Valley of Spiders" as it appeared in that periodical 123 year ago.  There are multiple illustrations, so maybe worth your time.  I am reading the December 1925 Weird Tales printing--this issue has a good sex and violence cover, with a nude blonde in the coils of a huge snake and a man with a big heavy rune-inscribed sword facing her--is she the snake's victim or is she in league with the legless abomination?  A delectable slice of classic Weird Tales insanity.

(We just read the Frank Belknap Long story from this ish, "The Sea Thing.")

Three men are in pursuit of someone, and ride into a queer valley.  Wells is cagey about who these men are and who their quarry is, giving us hints in dribs and drabs, not letting us settle into hoping these men catch those they pursue or hoping they are evaded.  We also don't know where they are, even what continent, just that they are in a wilderness where no people and few animals seem to live.  

As we learn that the leader of the party is wealthy and everybody is afraid to defy him, we readers,  aware that Wells is a socialist, begin to suspect this leader is the villain of the piece and the spiders of the title are going to kill him.  One of the rich man's companions, silently, raises doubts as to the justice of a society in which some command and others obey.  Maybe this guy, whom Wells calls "the little man," will kill the leader, who is often described as "the master"?  Eventually this leader guy is called not just "master" but "lord," leaving us to wonder if he is a representative of the aristocracy or of the bourgeoisie.  We also learn that the men are pursuing a "half-caste" woman who resisted the leader of the party, but is she fleeing of her own volition in the company of friends or has she been kidnapped or something?  

The spider attack comes, and it is of an unexpected form, Wells unleashing some real creativity on us.  The unusual nature of the monster attack earns "The Valley of Spiders" a thumbs up right there.

In the confusion of the fight, one of the men, the taller and more loyal of the two subordinates, is killed after saving the master's life.  The lord and the skeptic of hierarchy escape the spiders with their lives.  The little man accuses the lord of cowardice, of not helping his faithful subordinate.  A showdown ensues.  Wells does not show the showdown, but in the last part of the story we see that it is the lord who has survived.  

Wells is not presenting here a left-wing wish fulfillment fantasy in which a rich guy gets killed.  Instead, he is offering us left-wing allegory and metaphor--the rich are like venomous spiders!  On the very last page of the story the "master" AKA "lord" is clearly identified with the killer spiders--the valley of spiders is the world!  Realizing the half-caste girl has escaped him, the master resolves to emulate the spiders--"Next time I must spin a web."  But Wells offers advice to those who would overthrow the upper and middle classes.  The spiders' initial attack is effective because the eight-legged predators ride in tumbleweed-like balls of silk, bouncing and gliding at high speed when the wind is strong.  But, when there is no wind, and the balls of silk are broken or still, the spider's ability to suck the blood of others is very limited.  "From the ground without either a wind to carry them or a winding sheet ready, these things, for all their poison, could do him little evil."  Is Wells telling us that the aristocracy and bourgeoisie can only push around the proletariat and peasantry because of their superior wealth and technology, and those advantages only obtain during periods of specific environmental (economic? political?) conditions?

Wells' science fiction and action content are good, and he weaves the political goop in with it quite well, so "Valley of the Spiders" is a good story, even if, like me, you spend every day with your fingers crossed hoping the bourgeoisie can maintain the liberal order in the face of threats posed by socialists and jihadis foreign and domestic.  "The Valley of Spiders" served as the title story for an oft-reprinted Wells collection--among these reprintings is a movie tie-in edition promoting the Joan Collins film Empire of the Ants; "The Valley of Spiders" can also be found in various anthologies.

"A Dream of Armageddon" (1901)

"A Dream of Armageddon" appeared in the March 1926 issue of Weird Tales, an issue with a dearth of fiction by people whose names I recognize.  Frank Belknap Long has a poem about a body of water in a desolate landscape haunted by a sea serpent, and E. Hoffmann Price has a poem about a dark woman who has contempt for her many male admirers.  And then there is the Walt Whitman poem, "Death Carol," in which Whitman addresses death as "Dark Mother" and "Deliveress" and unabashedly, ecstatically, sings her praises.  This issue is a goldmine if your goth band has music written but is in need of some lyrics.

"A Dream of Armageddon" is sixteen pages, and feels kind of long.  It tries to be powerful, tries to move the reader with its depictions of love and loss and its warning that high technology will make war terrible, or I guess more terrible, I mean, Waterloo and Antietam weren't exactly picnics, but "A Dream of Armageddon" is not very successful in getting across its message or in entertaining the reader, as the main story is choked with a lot of superfluous framing impedimenta, and the main character is more of a spectator to the plot than a participant, and the whole thing is pretty repetitive, the same points hammered at again and again, and they aren't even interesting points. 

The first frame consists of our narrator encountering on the train a tired-looking guy who gets on the same car with him.  After what we might jocularly call foreplay, this second guy tells our narrator about his recent vivid dreams in which he was, apparently, projected into the future to live out the tragic ending of the career and life of a major political figure in the high tech future.  I am always skeptical of these stories in which, instead of the author just telling us the adventures of a character, we have to hear that a narrator meets a guy who then relates the adventures of a character, or, that the adventures of the character are in some other milieu that the narrator or protagonist enters while in a dream.  Why not just tell us the character's adventures in the voice of the character or in that old standby the third person omniscient?  Anyway, we get both of these framing devices here and I guess Wells does this to connect his polemical story to real middle-class English life at the end of Victorian era and the start of the 20th century, so it feels less like a fantasy and more like a warning or prophecy that 1901 readers should take seriously.

The future guy in whose body the train passenger found himself in his dreams was a big wig in politics, one of the good guys who was against "the Gang" that is corrupt.  But he left politics to spend time with a beautiful woman on the island of Capri.  Wells describes how beautiful Capri is and how beautiful this girl is in tedious detail, so that while I was reading about the sunlight on boats and the blue green of the water and the architecture of the dance hall I was thinking, "come on, let's get to Armageddon already."  We can see how much of a utopian and an optimist Wells could be when he tells us that the music and dancing of the future will put the music and dancing of the 19th century to shame.   

Anyway, in this first dream, a member of the protagonist's political party begs the protag to return to politics because war may result from the hash the hero's colleagues are making of things in his absence.  But the hero refuses to leave his girl and reenter the dirty game that is politics, saying war is impossible.  But in the second dream it looks like war is in fact likely.  In succeeding dreams war erupts, war involving fleets of aircraft and long range artillery.  I guess a Wells booster would call "A Dream of Armageddon" prophetic, seeing as World War I was all about long range artillery and World War II was all about fleets of aircraft, but this material takes up like one page of this long story and the few details Wells offers don't really predict how war in the air worked out in real life ("They were great driving things shaped like spearheads without a shaft, with a propeller in the place of the shaft....They fired the guns backwards, out of the base of the leaf, so to speak, and rammed with the beak.")  

The protagonist and his girlfriend flee here and there, in and among throngs of fleeing peasants and marching soldiers (this is where Wells is less optimistic, his idea that the Southern Europe of two or three centuries from 1900 would still be inhabited by hordes of peasants) ending up in a picturesque location, the ancient temple complex at Paestum.  I'm guessing Wells chose Capri and Paestum for the dramatic sections of his story because he figured his readers would be familiar with them, that English people of culture and means, the kind of people who could steer society away from mass high tech war, would have been there or known people who had been there and would talk their ears off about them.  Anyway, the girl is killed by a piece of shrapnel when a shell explodes nearby, and the protagonist carries her melodramatically into one of the Greek temples, and, when enemy soldiers try to take the temple, the protag tries to stop them (not by fighting them, just with a demonstration of moral righteousness) and their officer just runs him through the heart with a sword.

His alter ego of the future now dead, the train passenger says he doesn't have those kinds of immersive and memorable dreams any more, just nightmares of large birds fighting.

I'm calling this story barely acceptable, as it is long and boring and it tries too hard (today's other stories made their points and wrung emotion out of the reader more subtly and effectively) and its message is boring and banal and ill-suited to entertainment.  I did a class analysis of "The Valley of Spiders;" let's see if I can do a class analysis of "A Dream of Armageddon."  The future guy is a member of the educated upper-middle class, a guy with tons of money and influence.  We are told again and again that he has the power to prevent the cataclysmic war that ends up laying waste to the world.  But he does not do this good thing--instead he turns his back on politics because he would have to leave the woman to do so.  (One of the problems of Wells' story here is that he doesn't really specify why this guy can't marry this woman or keep her as a mistress while he is up in London or wherever the seat of power is while he is saving the world.)  I am guessing Wells is suggesting that the world will go to hell if middle-class people refuse to keep society in line and instead become preoccupied with their private pleasures.  Perhaps more interesting than the idea that a guy would shirk his responsibilities to the world at large for a dame, which is a big "no shit, Sherlock," is a hint that this successful guy has another reason for not doing what he, and only he, can do to save civilization:

Why, in spite of all, should I go back, go back for all the rest of my days to toil and stress, insults and perpetual dissatisfaction, simply to save hundreds of millions of common people, whom I did not love, whom too often I could do no other than despise, from the stress and, anguish of war and infinite misrule?

The hero of the future world, a man we are told "had been a master man away there in the north, with influence and property and a great reputation," a man who in politics had made of himself "a big man, the sort of man men come to trust in, to group themselves about....Millions of men who had never seen me were ready to do things and risk things because of their confidence in me" despises the common people and basically says "the hell with them" and lets them get mixed up in a war, but then that war kills his girlfriend and himself.  Wells is telling middle-class people that they are in the same boat as the stupid proles, that if they (the middle classes) don't shoulder the burden of leadership and steer society around disasters that they will suffer as much as the workers and peasants when the ship runs aground.

Not a very good story, but perhaps interesting and important if you are curious about fiction as a means of prophecy and as a tool for influencing public opinion.

"A Dream of Armageddon"'s first appearances was in serialization across four issues of the magazine Black and White Budget; you can see the appropriate issues of that magazine, including eight or so illustrations for the story, at these links:

                                                 ONE     TWO    THREE    FOUR

"A Dream of Armageddon" would reappear many times in Wells collections and in a few anthologies like Peter Haining's The Nightmare Reader.

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Wells is a skilled writer with strong points of view, and "The Stolen Body" and "The Valley of Spiders" are quite successful.  "A Dream of Armageddon," maybe not so successful.  An interesting element in  the history of Weird Tales.