Merril-approved '59 stories by W T Haggert, J Harmon, "Larry M. Harris," and H Harrison

Brace yourself for more late Fifties content!  Way in the back of her 1960 anthology The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, Judith Merril presents a three-page alphabetical list of honorable mentions, stories printed in 1959 she thinks worthy of note that for whatever reason didn't actually make it into the anthology.  In July we sampled the "G" authors and today we cut off a slice of "H"s, of which there are eight.  Today's piece of H pie will be four authors thick, covering W. T. Haggert, some joker who has only two stories listed at isfdb (Merril liked both of them); Jim Harmon, who in 1964 published a novel called Sex Burns Like Fire (tell your doctor if this is the case) and has three or four dozen stories listed at isfdb; Laurence M. Janifer, whose Merril-approved story appeared under the pen name "Larry M. Harris" (sometimes the list of ingredients on your pie's wrapping is deceptive); and Harry Harrison of Slippery Jim diGriz, soylent, Deathworld and West of Eden fame.

Here find cryptic links to the scans of the stories I will be reading today so you can read them yourself with a minimum of fuss and see how I have totally misunderstood them and/or distorted their clear meanings to further my own selfish and perverse agendas, horrible truths of which the world at large will remain in blissful ignorance.

WTH    JH    "LMH"    HH

"Lex" by W. T. Haggert 

Judith Merril isn't the only person who was impressed by "Lex;" Galaxy editor H. L. Gold didn't just print the story in his magazine, but included it in The Sixth Galaxy Reader.  

"Lex" is a "real" science fiction story, one that has engineers as characters and is all about science and technology and how they can affect the economy and human life, a story that glorifies the self-made man, the radical individualist who looks at the world, sees people aren't doing things the best possible way, and, all on his lonesome, carves a path towards doing things the best possible way.  There is also a wise mentor-smart student relationship, like in so many Heinlein stories.  Haggert describes, in some detail, both good and bad business practices as well as the mechanical operations of a fully automated factory, and he does it in a way that is not boring, and he doesn't just talk about engineering and economics, but biology, as well, as the operation of the factory is largely designed to mimic the workings of an animal's nervous system.

The plot.  A smart young guy, an engineer, is having trouble finding a job.  He gets a line on a job opening which many men have applied for but failed to get.  He applies.  The building to which he goes for the interview has a number of curious characteristics which he takes note of.  Things inside are even more curious.  It turns out only one human being is inside--everything, including answering the phones and mail, is done by computer and robot.  The factory's sole human occupant is a big strong self-confident man, though he is obviously old and weakening.  The interview is tough, but our young hero has the right attitude and pleases the owner of the automatic factory.  The big man explains why the engineer has been having a tough time finding a position, and relates the story of how he, with limited training but a powerful will, created this super-profitable factory which is a decade or two ahead of the competition.  Then comes what we might call a twist, or just the logical conclusion of building a machine designed to mimic a living nervous system--the factory developed a personality and fell in love with the owner, a widower.  (This twist is advertised in the editor's intro to the story.)

The more surprising twist is that when the owner of the automated factory dies, the night after the interview, the factory commits suicide.  Luckily the owner has prepared a will that gives all his wealth to the young engineer.

Thumbs up, even if the ending is maybe a little over the top.  It is too bad this guy Haggert didn't write more stories.

"Measure for a Loner" by Jim Harmon

"Measure for a Loner"'s sole appearance in print was in an issue of Amazing we've already looked at--Merril also recommended Les Coles' story in the issue, "Question of Comfort,"  something I am unable to do.  I can recommend the Virgil Finlay illos in this issue.  Let's see if I can join Merril in commending this story by Harmon, or if again, as in so many things, Merril and I are at odds.

"Measure for a Loner" is a sort of joke story full of weak little jokes.  It is the future, though it can't be too far in the future, as the narrator as a kid saw Charles Lindbergh when Lucky Lindy was an old man.  It does seem to be some generations in the future, though.  Anyway, our narrator is a head shrinker of the future.  His job is not treating living people, because nowadays everybody as a child is conditioned to be psychologically healthy, so there aren't many patients out there.  Instead, his job is psychoanalyzing the dead for historians or curious descendants.  But he puts that work aside when he is recruited by the government to find the loneliest man on Earth, no easy task when there are no more lonely people in evidence.  Why does the government need a lonely man?  To crew the first interstellar spacecraft, that's why!

The text of the story, multiple times, says the government is looking for a "lonely" man, but it seems what they really want is a man who likes to be alone.  In conventional English, isn't a man who feels "lonely" a man who doesn't want to be alone?  The title gets it right, using the word "loner," but the actual story insists on "lonely" and "loneliest."  Why didn't Amazing editor Cele Goldsmith clear this up?  This pissed me off so much it soured me on the whole story and I had a hard time judging the rest of the story with the usual fair and open mind for which I am renowned.

The text of "Measure for a Loner" is the psychologist's oral report to the General in charge of the project, and it reads like this shrink is addressing the reader, like the reader is the General.  We hear about the disputes the narrator has with his liaison with the government, a man who knows much more about psychoanalyzing and treating live patients than does the narrator.  And we hear about the narrator's interviews with two men who are prime candidates to be loneliest man in the world, and the tests they are put through.  When it becomes evident that deception as to the nature of a test flight is a major component of these tests, Jim Harmon and his characters directly refer to Robert Bloch's "The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton," about which I posted a negative review back in 2013, as if that story by our pal Bob is a classic everybody in the future will know, like Romeo and Juliet or Dracula.  I have to say I found the whole government program from the first page nonsensical --maybe this could be justified by the claim that the story is an absurdist joke--and confusing--this I am asserting is an unjustifiable consequence of the story being poorly written.  "Measure for a Loner" ends as I expected it would on its twelfth page, with the narrator admitting he is the loneliest man on Earth and volunteering for the first interstellar flight.  He feels lonely because of guilt--the two candidates, each in a one-man interplanetary ship as part of the tests, have refused to return to Earth because they are enjoying being alone out in space, and the narrator feels like he has murdered them, and as a murderer feels ostracized by society.  

Bad, thumbs down.  The plot twist is predictable and the story's construction and execution are shoddy.  Why does Merril like this mess?  Because of its skepticism about the space program and government in general?  Because of its skepticism of psychology?  Because she thought it was funny?  An inexplicable choice by Merril.

"Hex" by Laurence M. Janifer (as by Larry M. Harris)

I've read two novels by Janifer, Slave Planet and Bloodworld AKA You Sane Men, but that was over seven years ago and I don't remember much about them.  According to my blog posts about these books, they are philosophical novels with exploitation elements revolving around sex and violence, provocative examinations of the ideas of liberty and authority and equality that are meant to shock the reader by depicting not only victims of torture and slavery but the perpetrators of such atrocities in a way that you might say is nuanced or even sympathetic.  Pretty wild.  The two Janifer short stories I've read,  "In the Bag" and "A Few Minutes," also seem to have been pretty philosophical, efforts to say something about big issues like racism and authoritarian government.  Let's see what "Hex," which debuted in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding, is trying to say.

Marie Wladek is a widow who grew up in the USSR and now lives in America and she isn't crazy about life in these United States.  She strongly resents the fact that, to get her welfare money, she has to allow the New York City welfare office to invade her privacy.  When people suggest she or her son get a job, she admits that the freedom and ease of living on the dole are worth surrendering a little privacy, but she still bitterly resents the imposition.  Wladek thinks of the government and the taxpayers who are feeding her not as her benefactors, but as "Cossacks," as "monsters."  If only the case workers could understand that she needed enough money to hire a maid!  Her apartment is full of dust--do the case workers expect her or her son to dust their apartment?

Wladek has a new welfare case worker, a 21-year-old blonde, Gloria.  Gloria is a psyker!  She can read minds!  She doesn't tell anybody about her powers, but Wladek's nose was trained in the old country to sniff out people with supernatural abilities and she senses that Gloria is "a witch."  Even though she can read minds, Gloria is an innocent young liberal, eager and enthusiastic, always looking on the bright side, happy to be working at the welfare office where she and her colleagues are helping people.  As Janifer's story proceeds, we learn that Gloria has a whole array of powers.  She can tinker with people's minds, for example.  When Wladek comes in for her regular appointment and lies about being unable to work and lies about her son assiduously seeking a job and failing to find one, Gloria reaches into the immigrant's mind and alters it to give her a sort of compulsive desire to get a job.  The she reaches across town to where the Wladek son is plotting a crime with his cronies and does the same to him!

The old woman recognizes that this sudden urge to go to the employment agency and get a job must be the work of the witch!  She resists the sorcery of the slim and pretty blonde, sorcery to which her son has no defense--he gets a job in a matter of hours!  The widow Wladek visits a gypsy woman, another psyker, and pays her handsomely--two bucks!--for her help.  When the gypsy finds that Gloria is a mightier witch than she, Wladek goes to the church for help in her struggle to avoid employment, but, as you can imagine, she doesn't get too far with her complaints that her son has been ensorcelled into getting a job and that she is at risk of suffering the same grim fate.  "Well I...," says the priest, nonplussed, "we all have to work."  

Meanwhile, Gloria is using her powers with some assiduity to put other young ne'er-do-wells back on the straight and narrow, turning their minds away from idleness and criminality and towards a desire to work and help their relatives and contribute to society.  We eventually learn that Gloria has the best record in the city for getting people off the dole and helping them become productive citizens, that the Wladek woman is the only person on Gloria's caseload who hasn't gotten off relief.  Gloria's bosses at first were suspicious of the young woman's record of success, but investigations indicate her clients really are getting out of trouble and into jobs, that she is not running some kind of scam.  Of course, a somewhat higher than usual number of her clients have died, but, hey, people die all the time--only Gloria knows that she telepathically compels the real troublemakers, like a violent drunk, to commit suicide or get into "accidents."

In the end, Mrs. Wladek demands to see Gloria's supervisor, and when she accuses Gloria of being a witch, Gloria's boss has the immigrant widow sent to Bellevue.  According to Gloria, everything has turned out for the best--Wladek's son will no longer be under Mom's malign influence and will become a productive member of the workforce, while the widow Wladek is actually getting what she really wants, to be taken care of by others.

As with those provocative novels of Janifer's, "Hex" is a thoughtful story that gets your attention by saying or implying things that might be offensive, like that many people on the dole are frauds, layabouts, or dangerous criminals and that many people, and in turn all of society, might benefit from having a woman with psychic powers force them to go to work or, if they are really dangerous, commit suicide.  "Hex" explores the justness of the welfare state and the tension between the social welfare state liberalism of the New Deal and after and the values of traditional 18th-century liberalism upon which the United States was founded.  To what extent should we allow the state to interfere with your life to make sure you are not a parasite or a thief or a killer?  Gloria destroys that drunk before he has actually killed anyone, because she is pretty confident he will kill somebody, eventually, and this obviously goes against our Anglo-American tradition of jury trials where you can face your accuser and the idea that every man is innocent until proven guilty.  And, Clockwork Orange style, is taking away people's free will and ability to make moral choices really making them better people, or just turning them into slaves or robots?  Could turning the worst people in society into slaves or robots actually be justified by the fact that by doing so we relieve a burden on and end a menace to the majority of the population, which consists of people who aren't on the dole and who aren't committing crime?                         

Quote good.  I should look for more of Janifer's short stories.  This is a good pick by Merril--it works as an entertaining and dramatic black magic story (Gloria actually makes clay dolls of those she "helps" to aid in focusing her mind on them) with believable characters, and it works as a thought-provoking rumination on the social and political stuff I have been blabbing on about--"Hex" is a model of what a good author working in the speculative fiction form can achieve.

"Hex" has reappeared in Peter Haining's Black Magic Omnibus and in a book of stories from the 1950s edited by Barry Malzberg, who himself has written multiple works of fiction set within New York City's welfare apparatus, and Barry's pal Bill Pronzini.

"I See You" by Harry Harrison

When I was a kid growing up in Northern New Jersey most of our TV and radio stations were based in New York City.  One of the DJs we commonly heard in the car was a guy named Harry Harrison who was on the oldies (1950s and early '60s music) station, and in my youth I sometimes thought of how strange it was that there were two pretty famous Harry Harrisons, each in a different niche market, oldies and SF.  Today in middle-age I get to think of how strange it is that one of Damon Knight's best stories shares a title with this Merril-approved piece by Harrison.

Like Harmon's piece, this is "true" science fiction, a story that speculates about how technology will change society that features a central figure who is a smart engineering type with an independent streak; it likewise has a human drama narrative with a twist ending.  Harrison is a good writer, and "I See You" moves briskly but still conjures up vivid images of the scary future it depicts.  In common with some of Harrison's famous work, the story's protagonist is a criminal-slash-rebel.  

Carl Tritt lives in a high tech city in which computers and robots do most of the work and the government apparently has control of all aspects of property and the economy  Tritt is a telephone technician, installs lines and that sort of thing.  Like most of us, he'd like to have more money, and unlike most of us (I hope) when he sees a chance to steal from lockers that have cash in them, he jumps at it.  Harrison does a good job describing Tritt's effort to pull off the heist, which is just complicated enough to be technically interesting but is at the same time easy to comprehend and carries some emotional weight, some tension--the whole story is like this, well-balanced and engaging.

Tritt lives in a surveillance state and his crime is detected and he is captured and sentenced to twenty years of punishment.  In this future world they don't put you in a prison, really, they just keep you separated from all amenities as you go about a life in the city that is totally planned for you--the doors to bars and restaurants won't open to you--you can only eat at a kind of public cafeteria with bland food; you can't ride the subway or a taxi but have to walk everywhere; you are given a boring job; you live in a part of town that the sanitation robots don't clean as often; you can't get mainstream books at the library, only morally instructive books, etc.

Tritt is both resourceful and impulsive, and we observe his life as a convict, how he tries to improve his situation whenever an opportunity to do so appears but also, through his temper and lack of self-control, commits more infractions and earns further punishment.  Harrison gives the reader the opportunity to shake his head at Tritt's foolishness and selfishness as he assaults people and damages property, or, to sympathize with Tritt and cheer on his cathartic violence as he rebels against the mechanical authoritarian state that seems to generally keep the city clean and safe and to keep most people content.  Are the docile and obedient people wiser or better than Tritt, or are they inhuman cogs whereas he is a real man?  Harrison doesn't tell you outright how to feel about Tritt and the society he weas born into.  In the ending, which is the least credible part of the story, Tritt escapes into a section of the city where there is no surveillance and where, perhaps, he can live a life of ease, even power, manipulating the system instead of being manipulated it.  But another rebel has preceded him into this position, and Harrison ends the story without telling us if Tritt's risk-taking will pay off in a better (if morally suspect) life or leave him dead after a brief fight with a foe who has a superior weapon.

Thumbs up--a good action and adventure story with good science fiction elements that offers moral dilemmas and doesn't just come out and tell the reader how to feel about those moral issues.  "I See You" was the cover story of John Carnell's New Worlds and was included by Michael Moorcock in The Best of New Worlds.  When it was reprinted in Fantastic Universe it bore the alternate title "Robot Justice."  You can also find it in Harrison collections.

On Merril's recommendation, we read "Mr. Merman"
by Raymond Brossard from this ish of FU 

**********

Wow, three "thumbs up!" stories in one blog post--Merril did us a favor today.  As for that exasperating fourth story, we'll just sweep that garbage under the rug!  Kudos to Messrs. Haggert, Janifer and Harrison for writing such exemplary work, and let's not forget editors and anthologists like H. L. Gold (and/or Fred Pohl if he was actually in charge of any decisions related to the August '59 ish of Galaxy), John W. Campbell, Jr., John Carnell, Peter Haining, Malzberg, Pronzini and Moorcock for making these good stories widely available.

Keep your socks ready for hoppin', because we've got more 1950s material scheduled for next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Milton Lesser: "The Man Who Made His Dreams Come True," "So You Want to be President," & "He Fired His Boss"

The first issue of Dream World, the magazine edited by Paul W. Fairman that promised "A New Kind of Fiction" and "Stories of Incredible Powers," printed two stories by Milton Lesser; we read one of them recently, skipping the one that looked like it was about the gorillas of the gridiron.  The second issue of Dream World boasts three stories by Lesser, each under a different pen name.  Let's flip through this second issue of this odd 1957 magazine, apparently designed to appeal to readers' fascination with sex, that only endured for three issues, and then read Lesser's three contributions.  

This May '57 ish of Dream World has an editorial by Fairman in which he argues that the original purpose of fiction was to provide entertainment and escape, and tells us that Dream World's stories represent a return to that role, a role which has been neglected in our modern world in which fiction is supposed to be realistic and educational and prepare people for "the grim struggle ahead" that is life, which is full of "frustrations and limitations."  I thought this an odd thing for a SF editor to say, as the people who founded SF magazines like Amazing--which Fairman was editing when he wrote this Dream World editorial--and populated fandom in science fiction's early days thought the point of science fiction was to teach people about science, prepare them for the future, and/or propagandize them into embracing socialism and world government.  Or at least claimed that was the point.  Presumably, if you spoke to the guy, Fairman would say that there is room in the SF world for both fun adventure and sex stories and stories that critique society and speculate on the future, but he doesn't say that in this editorial. 

There are five pages of weak cartoons in the back of Dream World Vol. 1 No. 2, and a joke quiz consisting of ten pretty stupid questions that is said to have been devised by some egghead to help you choose what kind of person to marry. 

...if you checked more brackets than circles, it is imperative — according to our psychologist friend — that your intended be a person of strong moral fiber....if you checked more circles than squares you should marry a person who doesn’t take life too seriously....We personally feel there’s a much better basis for selecting a bride or groom for yourself. A little thing called love.

Groan.

The highlight of this ish of DW as far as I can tell is a full page illustration by the great Virgil Finlay depicting a devil girl tempting a man in a suit; this illustration is appended to the second of today's stories, "So You Want to be President."  None of today's three stories was ever reprinted, it seems, so I'll decorate this blog post with that illo and with some of the quiz questions.  To read these rare stories yourself--and take the full quiz!-- head over to the internet archive here or luminist.org here.  But don't blame me if you feel you wasted your time--I am warning you right now that none of Lesser's stories is good.

"The Man Who Made His Dreams Come True" 

Alex is at his bachelor party--tomorrow he marries Janey.  His old college chum, who is still carrying the torch for Janey, is drunk and claims Alex is only marrying Janey because Janey's dad will get Alex a nice cushy job!  A fight breaks out.  But is Alex's drunken pal right? Janey is far from Alex's dream girl--she's just OK.  

At night, after drinking still more while alone in his apartment, Alex, in bed in his PJs, is visited by a gorgeous woman who appears in a cloud of incense.  After some rigamarole in which this woman teases and then pushes Alex away, multiple times, she explains that she is a creature of the subconscious--Janey's subconscious!  She is the woman Janey wishes she (Janey) could be.  This being of the dream world hates Janey for bottling her up, and tells Alex to not marry Janey, but to instead stay single and frolic with her (the dream girl)--she promises that if Alex agrees, she (the dream girl) can bring all kinds of wonderful things and experiences from the dream world for him to enjoy, the same way he can enjoy her.

The next day Alex marries Janey, even though the dream girl is there, haunting him, distracting him, trying to get him to jilt Janey.  This idealized version of Janey also shows up in Paris, where Alex and Janey are honeymooning, and she keeps trying to separate Alex from his newlywedded wife.  One night, after having sex with Janey, Alex is persuaded by the dream girl to go with her into the dream world, an Orientalist city where the women walk around topless and he is given the job of managing the sultan's harem. 

In this dream world the friend he had that fight with is the sultan and Janey is a newly acquired slave girl.  The sultan demands Janey for the night and Alex doesn't want to hand her over, so he leads her on a daring escape through the city out into the desert.  Then we get a deus ex machine ending in which Alex gets three wishes and the last of them is wishing that Janey take on the admirable attributes of the dream girl, who after all is Janey's own vision of herself but better, sexier.

This story starts off mediocre and gets worse and worse as it goes, each page less sensical and less entertaining than the last.  The rules of how the dream world works and interacts with the real world keep changing and many scenes are repetitive or superfluous, making for a long and boring and  irritating story.  Thumbs down! 

"So You Want to be President" 

The basic idea of this story is like something you'd expect to see on a kid's TV show that intends to offer the kiddos valuable moral instruction.  An ordinary guy thinks the President is making mistakes, has his own ideas for the policies the President should pursue (like giving away lots of food--wait, doesn't the government already give away lots of food; maybe not in '57?) and then through supernatural agency he comes to realize the President's job is not so easy as he thought it was.  Good grief!  This is not the sex the cover promised me or the escape Fairman promised me in his editorial!  Thumbs down!

His friends being out of town, our narrator, a bookkeeper, is all alone in the District, as those of us who spend time there call the swamp, and he gets to talking to an attractive woman in a bar.  He loves to talk about how he thinks the President could do a better job, how he, the narrator, could do better at some aspects of the job.  The woman invites him back to her apartment, but when he tries to kiss her she hits him with an umbrella and tells him she didn't bring him here for the obvious form of entertainment, that was just a ruse, but to give him his chance to be President.  She uses her special powers to cast this dope's mind into the body of the President, presumably (but maybe not really!) replacing the mind of the man chosen by the people to lead our glorious republic.

Our guy panics and stays locked in the Presidential bedroom for days, saying he is sick but refusing any doctor entry.  Then he finally emerges and tries to enact all his policies, like handing out more food.  His advisors explain why that policy, and all his other ideas, would be a disaster.  (Too many handouts would lower the price of food and cause the collapse of food producers, they say.)  None of the bookkeeper's ideas is put into practice.  Then comes a big meeting in Switzerland with the leader of the Soviet Union and two other unnamed nations.  It turns out all the leaders of big countries are ordinary goofballs occupying the bodies of the men who formally came to power.  When he gets back to the White House, the narrator is confronted by that woman again.  She explains that he is being returned to his normal body and the next goof is being put into the President's body--it seems the world is ruled by an endless series of average joes manipulated by beings like this woman, who only has the Angus Young Highway to Hell horns and tail in Finlay's picture, not the text.

Bad filler.  Maybe a little better than "The Man Who Made His Dreams Come True," because it is shorter and less boring, but only a little better.

"He Fired His Boss" 

Anderson works at an ad agency with a sort of joke name--this story is full of feeble jokes.  The boss, Smedley, is a tyrant who likes to humiliate the employees.  Here's one of Lesser's jokes: the boss has "bovine eyes" that "looked as out-of place on his craggy-lined catastrophe of a face as lavender and old lace on an elephant's rump."  What?  

Anderson has failed to get the contract with a big client, a perfume manufacturer, renewed.  The boss calls him in to yell at him; also in the office is the boss's daughter, who also has cow eyes.  The boss insists Anderson make another stab at getting that perfume contract again, implying the sexy woman who represents the perfume company will sign if Anderson makes a pass at her.  If he fails to get the contract renewed, he will be fired.  

His attempt at making a pass at the perfume executive is a disaster--she slaps Anderson's face.  That same night Anderson attends the reading of the will of an aunt he didn't know he had until she keeled over.  It turns out this aunt owned more than half the stock of the advertising agency.  So, Anderson gets fired but inherits enough common stock to seize control of the firm from which he has been fired.  He fires his former boss, and, when the perfume exec hears about Anderson's new position as head of the advertising firm, she runs over to Anderson's apartment and throws her clothes off.  But before Anderson can bang this chick, the boss's daughter comes to the apartment to throw herself in his arms, offering her body in exchange for Anderson giving her Dad his job back.  Or any job.  Anderson realizes those bovine eyes look pretty nice.

When the two women realize they are both in Anderson's apartment to have sex with him they get pretty angry with him, but Anderson realizes the way to deal with women is to be firm, and he lays down the law.  The women admire the "iron" and "fire" they see he has "in his blood" and so Anderson is able to have sex with cow-eyes in the living room after promising her father a job as office manager and then go to the bedroom to have sex with the perfume company executive, who, apparently, always found him cute but couldn't get aroused by a man unless he had high status.  It is implied Anderson is going to be banging these mercenary chicks regularly in the future.

I'm going to call this story barely acceptable filler.  "He Fired His Boss" is cynical, but at least resembles the kind of dream of incredible power that enables a man to have sex with multiple women that this magazine promises--"So You Want to be President" is a bait and switch with no sex and instead a lame moral lesson.  And "He Fired His Boss" isn't shoddy or overly long and boring and full of superfluous repetitive scenes like "The Man Who Made His Dreams Come True;" there isn't a lot of fat in this third story, every paragraph of the story advances the admittedly lame plot or is exploitative or is an admittedly weak joke.  "He Fired His Boss" succeeds in achieving its meagre goals and deserves a "C-", a passing grade that nobody should be bragging about.

**********

Based on today's experience I have to tentatively conclude that Lesser is not a very good writer and Dream World is not a very good magazine.  Of course, I'm the kind of person who puts his hand in the fire a second time to make sure it burns, so we'll be checking out the third and final issue of Dream World soon.  

   

September Antique Store Sightings

I spend a lot of time at antique stores, flea markets, junk stores, and the like because I am incredibly cheap and I hate everything new.  I used to tweet about interesting things I saw on my trips to such establishments, but now that hackers have destroyed my twitter account I thought I'd post here some stuff I spotted on my antiques browses but didn't buy that maybe would be of interest to readers of the blog.  Click the images for larger versions. 

Here we have Star Trek Fotonovel #6, which I guess is like my Ninotchka book, though I'd rather look at hundreds of photos of Garbo's mug than DeForest Kelley's, and the second edition of the Star Trek role-playing game.  The #2 Star Trek Fotonovel is on internet archive, if you want an idea of what these are like.  All you Sally Kellerman fans should click the link--her hair looks great. 

As a kid I watched TV constantly, and I loved Battle of the Planets, and I still love the original Flintstones seasons.  Flintstones merch is fun because every manufacturer seems to have had a different theory as to what Fred looked like.

Here's an 8-track tape decorated with (imitation?) covers of underground comix.

We'll finish up with this disturbingly vandalized Peanuts collection which suggests Charlie Brown and the gang have formulated deeply-held opinions about the fate of the Sudetenland, and a folk art scorpion. 

P. G. Wodehouse: "The Man Upstairs," "Something to Worry About" and "Deep Waters"

In our last episode I enjoyed a story from the 1914 P. G. Wodehouse collection The Man Upstairs and Other Stories, so today let's read the first three stories from the book as a little break from our usual weird and science fiction fare.  I'm reading a scan of a Penguin 1958 edition you can read here, and if that link gives you trouble you can try the scan of the 1980 Barrie and Jenkins edition here or another of many other free sources of these stories available online.  All three of today's stories debuted in The Strand and were published the same year in American magazines; according to the Madame Eulalie website, "The Man Upstairs" and "Deeper Waters" were revised for American publication.  Besides in The Man Upstairs and Other Stories, "Something to Worry About" and "Deep Waters" were reprinted in The Swoop! and Other Stories.  

"The Man Upstairs" (1910)

This is a sort of undistinguished sappy story that lacks much of the humor of Wodehouse's more famous work.  We're calling this one acceptable.  

Three young creative types live in an apartment building in Chelsea.  One is a woman who is banging away at her piano trying to write waltzes.  She gets the waltzes published but they don't really sell--she even has to finance their publication herself.  We've also got two painters in the building, one who is kind of a self-important jerk, blaming the public's lack of taste if his paintings don't sell, and if something does sell, bragging about it acting better than the second painter, who seems like a real hack.  The hack is a real softy, a mild-mannered nice guy with a good attitude; the jerk painter is always explaining that this character's paintings suck, but the softy just takes it in stride, doesn't mind at all.  Maybe because he is independently wealthy and so his lifestyle or his self-worth are not tied up in making sales?

The girl composer has a temper and is always getting pissed off at the jerk painter and is often exasperated by the lame brain students she has to try to teach in order to make money.  She is initially angry at the softy because he lives directly above her and bangs the floor when she bashes away at her piano, but he quickly charms her with his good looks and good nature and stops his stomping.

The composer and the sunny-dispositioned hack painter spend time together, she visiting him to unburden herself of her problems.  The jerk painter's paintings begin to sell, and the composer's sheet music begins to sell.  The composer feels bad that the man upstairs isn't enjoying similar success, so she anonymously purchases one of his paintings.  Then another beneficiary of the hack painter's generosity accidentally lets spill the truth we readers may have suspected: the hack painter is using his terrific wealth to buy both of his friends' unsalable work and one of his properties is choked full of stacks of sheet music and boring paintings.  At first the composer is humiliated and angry, but how can she be?--she was doing the same thing on the modest scale she could afford.  Plus, the man upstairs explains that he saw her on the street and she was so good-looking he followed her and plotted how to move into her building and meet her, so the two of them decide to get married.

This story is less light-hearted than much of Wodehouse's more famous work, I think because the jerk painter and the woman with a temper are all too realistic--his smug unearned superiority and her anger feel too real for you to blithely forgive them their faults, and Wodehouse doesn't really play their anti-social behavior for laughs, so their personalities sort of weighs down the story.  As for the rich guy, he gets treated like a punching bag, which is a little disturbing, and then the way he uses his wealth to manipulate everybody else, even if it is for their own good, is also a little disturbing.  There are also far fewer jokes in "The Man Upstairs" than we are accustomed to seeing in Wodehouse stories.

Not one of Wodehouse's better stories, but not actually bad.  "The Man Upstairs" was first printed in America in Cosmopolitan, in an issue whose cover feature was on French painter Francois Flameng.  For Yankee readers, the story's setting is shifted to Washington Square.

"Something to Worry About" (1913)

"Something to Worry About" first appeared in the land of the free and the home of the brave in Metropolitan, the livest magazine in America, or so it says.  As I write this, you can read this magazine at this link, and if you do, you may be taken aback by how beautiful or fascinating each page of the magazine is; everything, from the typefaces to the illustrations to the photographs, looks great, warm or welcoming or soothing or impressive, nothing is boring or disquieting.  The people of the past, at least those who left any evidence of their passing through this vale of tears, were a bunch of tryhards, and from our vantage point we can only marvel at their works, even the quotidian ones.

"Something to Worry About" has much more of the charm and liveliness ("livestness?") we readers of Wodehouse's later work expect from the man than does "The Man Upstairs."  The fun characters whose faults don't stop us from liking them and the silly slang and the endless stream of clever turns of phrase and little jokes are all here.  Wodehouse even unleashes the word "zareba" on us in the course of a little bit of literary criticism.  Kaboom!  Thumbs up!

London girl Sally loves the cinema!  Her father, now a landlord who preaches on Sunday but who made his fortune as a servant at a big house in the country, thinks the cinema is a tool of the devil!  So Dad sends Sally to the village where he grew up and worked, a place Sally considers "the beastliest hole in existence" and "absolutely chronic," to live with his sister's family.  Life in this village is simple and peaceful...at least until Sally got there!  Sally is so beautiful that all the local yokels who fall into the "young male" demographic fall stupidly in love with her and in their simple country way try to court her and obstruct each other's pursuit of this big city beauty.  Sally accepts the proposal of a simple-minded gardener, Tom, who works at the same big house her father worked at and wooed her by giving her many cabbages and potatoes.  But when he won't do something underhanded that she, in a fit of pique, demands he do, she makes him jealous by admitting she is also engaged to another villager!  And another, and another!  Sally accepted four men's proposals in hopes word of her wild behavior would reach her father and he would summon her back to London!  Tom grows up, becomes a real man, winning Sally's love by proving his own commitment to her by challenging his rivals one after the other to hand-to-hand combat!  Fortunately, Tom's physical strength is augmented by his opponents' diminution of interest in Sally when they realize how duplicitous and troublesome a female she really is, though we are given reason to believe that Sally herself is going to grow up and stop being so selfish and flighty and manipulative once she is married to Tom.

A laugh-out-loud look at the rural-urban divide and the terrible reality of sexual relationships.  Every line of this story is good.  Recommended--five out of five cabbages!

"Deep Waters" (1910)

"Deep Waters" was published in Collier's in the United States and, apparently, that text is quite different than that to be found in the British Strand.  The Collier's text (find it here) and the The Man Upstairs and Other Stories text both include "zareba," though.  I guess people in both Britain and America all knew what a zareba was in that period of imperial adventure, the way everybody today knows what "PrEP" and "HRT" are.  

George is an expert swimmer.  He's also a young playwright, riven with anxiety because he has been watching the actors at rehearsals of his first big play and he thinks they stink!  George and the entire cast and crew of the drama are at a seaside town.  On the end of a pier, George seeks distraction from his worries, and finds it--swimming below is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen!  So distracting is she, so captivating, that leaning over the rail to get a good look he falls in the ocean!

The woman of his dreams is an excellent swimmer herself and seizes George and pulls him to shore--he pretends to be unable to swim, and she promises to spend a few days teaching him!  An ideal situation in which he can not only enjoy intimate proximity to this goddess, whose name is Mary, but even get to know her and pursue a campaign to win her hand in marriage!

George isn't the only person worried about the success of his play.  One of the actors fears the show is not getting the proper advertising, the proper publicity.  Against George's strenuous objections, this actor launches a desperate scheme, overturning a boat he and George are aboard so one can rescue the other and win a lot of publicity.  When Mary hears about the rescue she realizes it is a hoax, that George is a good swimmer, and she accuses George of using her the day before as an unwitting participant in a similar publicity stunt and gives him the cold shoulder.  But then the actor whose idea the boat-capsizing stunt was tells Mary the truth, and Mary and George make up and we are led to believe they will get married and told the play is in fact a huge success, the actors having gotten into the required groove.

"Deep Waters" is good on a line by line basis, but it feels short, truncated, with little by way of climax and a resolution that is abrupt.  I can only mildly recommend it.

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Three stories in which a guy falls in love with a woman because of her looks and, through subterfuge or violence, wins her, even if her personality maybe leaves something to be desired--presumably she will start behaving once in the bonds of holy matrimony.  The 1913 story is a direct hit, while the two 1910 stories have real problems--maybe Wodehouse just hadn't hit his stride yet.  Of course I recommend looking into these old stories and checking out the ancient magazines in which they debuted and which are full of fun advertisements and charming illustrations.   

Dream World, Feb '57: M Lesser, P G Wodehouse, & H Ellison

Advertising works!  We just took a look at the May 1957 issue of Amazing, and saw within it an ad for Dream World, another magazine edited by Paul W. Fairman.  Dream World endured for three issues, all appearing in 1957, and the value proposition of the magazine, though promoted as "A New Kind of Fiction...Stories of Incredible Powers," seems to have been that it carries stories about sex.  I guess this was in the wheelhouse of Fairman, author of several volumes of The Man from S.T.U.D. series, including 1968's The Orgy at Madame Dracula's and 1969's Rape is a No-No. These S.T.U.D. books appeared under a pen name, and it seems lots of Fairman's work appeared under false names or other people's names; we read his novel Whom the Gods Would Slay, credited to Ivar Jorgensen, way back in 2018, and according to isfdb, Fairman ghostwrote juveniles for Lester del Rey (del Rey provided extensive plot outlines), among them The Runaway Robot, a book I see all the time in antique stores and used book stores.

Let's look at the first issue of Dream World, and read some of the included stories, one by Milton Lesser (under his pen name Adam Chase), one by P. G. Wodehouse (wow!), and one by Harlan Ellison.  Thorne Smith, a famous guy I have never read, Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett also make contributions (Smith's an excerpt from a 1930s novel) to this new venture, but we'll be skipping those today.  I'm also skipping the Milton Lesser story that appears under the Darius John Granger pseudonym because it is twelve pages long and is apparently about football and ain't nobody got time for dat. 

"Legs on Olympus" by Milton Lesser (as by Adam Chase)

Like 66% of today's stories, "Legs on Olympus" has apparently never appeared in any form in any other venue.  This is a jocular retelling of the famous Judgement of Paris which you no doubt know all about from your readings in classical literature and study of art history.  Hollywood columnist Abner Paris is in Atlantic City in the greatest state in the union to judge a beauty contest.  A naked girl appears in his room at the Troy Hotel and asks him to judge a "celestial" beauty contest.  Lesser engages in lame puns and jokes of that nature; this woman doesn't know about air conditioning, for example, and doesn't know that "gag" is a synonym for "joke" or "gimmick," even though she uses other corny colloquial English like "The heck you say!" and "drat the luck."  Anyway, Abner thinks it's all a gag and agrees to judge the contest as a way of calling the girl's bluff and getting rid of her, but after he agrees she jumps on his lap and they (it is strongly implied) have sex.

When Abner wakes up he and the girl, who reveals herself to be Eris, the Goddess of Discord, are on a sheep-infested hillside and he is wearing a wool cloak.  Eris takes him to where he is to judge which is the fairest, Hera, Athena or Aphrodite.  The three goddesses, all haughty and self-important, show off their looks to Abner and offer him extravagant bribes, but in the end he gives the golden apple marked "FOR THE FAIREST" to Eris, with whom he has fallen in love.  This story has a pretty wholesome ending, a guy bangs one chick and then immediately gets engaged to her.

"Legs on Olympus" is a bland and mediocre filler piece, but never actually boring or irritating, so we're judging it barely acceptable.  I was actually curious what Lesser was going to do with the material as I read it, so reading it was no chore.

"Ways to Get a Gal" by P. G. Wodehouse

The cover of Dream World Vol. 1 No. 1 advertises "Ways to Get a Gal" as a "Brand New Story" by the world famous and universally beloved Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, but an elaborate and extensive website about Wodehouse's early work suggests "Ways to Get a Gal" is a version of "Ahead of Schedule," a story that appeared in 1910 in the British magazine Grand and was revised for publication in this republic of ours in 1911 in Colliers.  I decided to read the Dream World story and then read a version of the story found in a 1980 printing of the oft-reprinted 1914 Wodehouse collection The Man Upstairs and Other Stories and see what differences there might be.

As the world knows, Wodehouse writes in a charming and fun style, filling his texts with amusing phrases and little jokes based on the shortcomings of his characters, jokes which are lighthearted and affectionate rather than cruel or superior, and he goes in for fun silly little plots with happy endings; somehow, Woodhouse writes stories in which everything works out for everybody but at the same time acknowledges the reality that life is characterized by failure and the world is awash in evil, so that his stories don't bring you down but also don't come across as squeaky clean or saccharine lies.  The man is some kind of hero and genius.  He does all this characteristic stuff here in "Ways to Get a Gal," so of course I enjoyed it and am giving it a thumbs up.

The plot:  An Englishman with a title but little sense is in love with a blue-eyed blonde woman who works in a department store and has set out to marry her, following a scientific plan of campaign devised by himself.  Being totally incompetent, this guy's income consists of an allowance from a fat uncle who owns a very lucrative chain of restaurants over in the land of plenty, the U S of A.  Said allowance is sufficient to keep his Jaguar running and his valet on staff.  Trouble appears when fat uncle comes to visit Blighty and fat uncle falls in love with the very same blue-eyed blonde woman at the glove counter at the department store and embarks on his own campaign to make her his wife.  If our hero marries this chick, uncle may well stop sending the allowance.  If old fat uncle marries the chick, our hero will probably no longer be in line to get his full inheritance when old fat uncle dies, this woman being young and healthy.

The resolution of the plot comes when the blonde falls in love with our hero's valet--she seems to think the flowers the valet has been personally delivering for some days are from the valet himself, not some goofy lord.  Also, she is apparently more susceptible to the naive wooing methods the valet learned in his rural village than to the latest scientific methods current in London.  Our hero's finances are safe, and Wodehouse makes it clear that both he and his obese uncle (215 pounds!) are shallow twits who are falling in and out of love all the time and will forget the blonde woman in days if not hours, so no hard feelings.

OK, now the version of the story from The Man Upstairs and Other Stories, entitled "Ahead of Schedule."  (The hero's scientific method of pursuing women operates on a careful schedule.)  This version feels longer, and has longer sentences, with more details and more jokes, but the jokes are good so we don't mind.  The protagonist has a different name, and the obese uncle (sixteen stone five!) does not own restaurants, but a company that makes braces (I call them "suspenders") and is an American himself, a native of "Pittsburg," as the town was apparently commonly styled in 1910.  (Pittsburgh comes in for some ribbing in "Ahead of Schedule.")  The characters in this version of the tale all have more personality, more complex back stories.  The woman in question is a chorus girl, not a department store employee, for example, and she actually has some dialogue.  This version of the story also has more learned references, like a military history joke ("He hated to abandon the schedule. To do so meant changing a well-ordered advance into a forlorn hope") and more big or rare words ("The advent of an unbidden guest rarely fails to produce a certain gêne.") 

The plot is also a little more complex, with the hero accelerating the schedule of his scientific method in hopes of beating out his uncle in winning the hand of the fair maiden, and the chorus girl and the valet hooking up because they knew each other back in their village, were engaged but broke up and upon meeting again realized they had made a mistake.  

The '57 version of the story is more streamlined, but the additional, perhaps superfluous, material, in the 1910 version is actually entertaining, so I prefer the earlier version.

A fun little experiment, reading both versions of this story, both of which again and again brought a smile to my face.  The Dream World story "Ways to Get a Gal" would be reprinted in the 1990s in First Impressions, Mature Reflections, the fifth volume of Plum Stones, a small press series that reprinted rare Wodehouse stories that had previously been uncollected.

Left: 1958     Right: 1980

"A Bucketful of Diamonds" by Harlan Ellison 

Here we have a Harlan Ellison story that has never been reprinted.  Harlan completists, perk up!  

Davey the second-story man is in jail.  A djinni (Ellison insists on calling it an "Estrian" after telling us it looks just like a djinni) appears and offers Davey a deal.  The djinni can't touch anything in our universe, being from a "another time-line" and thus "immaterial," so he wants Davey to steal something for him at some unspecified future time.  In exchange, he will give Davey the ability to walk up vertical walls and use his djinni powers to make any possible witness look the other way while Davey is committing crimes.  Davey agrees--my twitter feed is full of stories of people getting arrested dozens of times and still being set free to massacre people, but this is the 1950s and fiction besides, and Davey has been arrested more than four times and it looks like this time they will really throw the book at him, so he has no reason not to agree to the deal with the djinni.

Davey's trial is in two days, so he hustles to use his new powers to escape confinement.  Then he commits one brazen robbery after another--the powers the djinni promised him are real!  Davey buys a nice house and enjoys a comfortable lifestyle, slows down his pace of robberies, only committing really lucrative ones once or twice a month.  For example, he climbs a skyscraper and infiltrates a party attended by movie and TV stars and a famous lady novelist and, Ellison going for some kind of obvious tried-and-true comedy, a "British-colonel type, complete to flowing white mustache" who says stuff like "By Jove!" and "I say!"  Nobody can see Davey, so he gropes women's asses or kisses them if they are trim and kicks them in the ass if they are fat, and his victims blame innocent men and a brawl erupts.  The sexiest and most famous woman at the party, I guess a Marilyn Monroe caricature, Davey robs of her necklace and strips of her clothes so everybody can see her naked.  This scene has no effect on the plot and I guess is just here to appeal to the desire of readers to sexually abuse women and to humiliate those they envy for their wealth and status.

The djinni finally calls upon Davey to steal that item for him.  Davey launches the operation, but comes to a bad end.  The item the djinni wants is the magical key that will set him (the djinni) free from the prison that is used by his race to confine criminals--this Earth.  The guardian of the magical key is another djinni, an agent of the djinni establishment that imprisoned Davey's benefactor, and thus can see Davey just fine--this djinni is also on this time-line and thus material and can kill Davey with ease, and does so.  This story is less wholesome than Lesser's, but in the end the people who misbehave are punished.

The start of the story, Davey and the djinn's relationship and Davey's escape from prison and his amassing great wealth, are entertaining.  But the Marilyn-Monroe scene is just OK, and the ending is sort of perfunctory and disappointing.  It feels like Ellison was making an effort in the first half of the story, then included the exploitation material he felt was called for by the venue in which the story would appear, and then just quickly wrapped things up with little thought.  I'm calling "A Bucketful of Diamonds" acceptable--the first half or so is better than Lesser's "Legs on Olympus."  

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The Wodehouse of course is quite good, and the Lesser and Ellison get passing grades--they are exploitation filler, but I didn't find them repulsive or snooze-inducing.  I can't truly recommend the first issue of Dream World unless you are a student or collector of Wodehouse or Ellison, but I'm not denouncing it, either.  I find these odd little corners of the SF world intriguing and so we will probably be reading from the second and the third and final issues of Dream World. 

      

    

  

                 

     

           

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. 

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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?