Laurence M. Janifer: "Expatriate," "Who You Callin' a Monster," and "It's Magic"

In our last adventure I expressed admiration for Laurence M. Janifer's 1959 story "Hex," published in one of the most important SF magazines, John W. Campbell's, Jr. Astounding, and promoted by Judith Merril, one of the most celebrated SF anthologists and critics.  Today let's check out three stories from early in Janifer's career that were printed in a SF magazine I have not spent much time looking at or talking about, Cosmos.  A total of four issues of Cosmos appeared across 1953 and 1954; the magazine was ostensibly edited by L. B. Cole, a guy who is, as far as I can tell, more famous as a comic book artist (he apparently created the character "Wiggles the wonderworm") than as a SF editor.  According to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia and isfdb, it was Janifer himself who actually edited Cosmos.

I'll be reading today's three stories, which appear under two different pen names, from scans of this curious magazine; feel free to read along at the following links (said the spider to the fly):

"Expatriate"

"Who You Callin' a Monster"

"It's Magic"

"Expatriate" (1953)

This is a pretty stupid fantasy joke story that is kind of hard to follow, the "rules" of how its fantasy world works being doled out in the middle and end of the story instead of the beginning.  The jokes consist of bottom of the barrel stuff, like a guy tripping over a root in a forest and a guy having sneezing fits, a female character who is stupid and a male character who is also stupid and models all his behavior on that of the knights in a book of tales about the Knights of the Round Table, which makes it easy for a smarter character to take advantage of him.

Our two human characters are ghosts; even though they are ghosts, the dim-witted but beautiful Alma and the dim-witted but handsome and Lancelot-emulating Charlie are having a loving sexual relationship--at least that is what it looks like to me.  Maybe I am dim-witted, because I think Alma and Charlie are sympathetic, but the actual main characters of Janifer's story are a bunch of grotesque gnomes who outwit and exploit the human ghosts.

In the same way that the pots of many stories about vampires or werewolves are built around the "rules" the monsters are subject to, like a vampire can't cross running water or enter a house unless invited or tolerate the light of the sun or whatever, Janifer presents a bunch of rules about gnomes.  This right here is a weakness in "Expatriate;" vampires are exciting, and are linked to Christian theology and they and their behavior can serve as powerful metaphors for a vast range of things that have an immediate emotional or intellectual impact on the reader.  But gnomes?  Short boring little nothings?  Who gives a second thought to gnomes?  Who cares about gnomes?  Nobody!  What makes gnomes interesting?  Nothing!

Anyway, there are a bunch of gnomes in this story that are supposed to be funny.  One is in charge, nominally, but is insane, thinking he is the reincarnated Napoleon Bonaparte and speaking with a faked French accent.  Another is a scientist, who, I guess, can look into the future; I guess this gnome scientist is the story's real protagonist.  Or the protagonist is the gnome known as Riw, who is buried in the same cemetery as Alma and Charlie.  Gnomes don't breathe, so they can't die (we are told.)  But when they get to a certain age, 210, gnomes are buried alive.  They lay quietly in their graves, but every so often, when horny, leave their graves to have sex with somebody.  The gnome authorities (that Napoleon gnome is head of the Gnome Intelligence Services) are supposed to look into the future to make sure they don't bury a gnome in the same region where human beings will be buried, but they neglected to do so in Riw's case, so Riw was buried, 100 years ago, where humans would put a graveyard.  Alma and Charlie are interred in this graveyard, and Riw has fallen in love with (the ghost of) Alma, but since he is short and has a huge nose and huge ears, Alma refuses to throw (the ghost of) Charlie over for Riw.

The scientist solves Riw's problem.  Gnomes who suffer the sorts of injuries that would kill a human, I guess like getting shot full of holes or chopped into bits or whatever, don't die, but their souls transmigrate into a nearby body, stealing it from its occupant.  The gnome scientist digs a tunnel into the graveyard (he can't just walk in because the iron fence is impassable by gnomes) and tricks Charlie by taking advantage of the man's chivalrous nature into committing suicide at the same time that Riw is made to suffer a non-disfiguring injury that causes him to transmigrate.  How a ghost commits suicide or can serve as a vessel into which some other soul can transmigrate is left unexplained.  Anyway, Riw is now tall and handsome in Charlie's ghost "body," so he can have sex with Alma, and Charlie now inhabits a short and hideous body with sinus trouble.  I feel like a horrible crime has been committed against the innocent human ghosts by the gnomes, but maybe we are just supposed to laugh even though this event is not funny, or maybe we are supposed to sympathize with the gnomes because they are more intelligent than the humans or because, the way white people took America from the natives, humans have been taking the world from the gnomes, so this is a just vengeance?  Regardless, I am siding with my fellow dim-witted humans and so this story is leaving a bad taste in my mouth, besides being objectively bad.

Thumbs down for the terrible "Expatriate."  I may hate this story, but it was included in the 1968 Janifer collection Impossible? and a 1956 issue of the Australian magazine Science Fiction Monthly, most of the contents of which--including the bondage cover--seem to have been reprinted from Cosmos.

             

(The issue of Cosmos and of the land down under's Science Fiction Monthly which printed "Expatriate" also presented to readers Carl Jacobi's story "The Gentleman Was an Epwa," a story I read in 2022 and didn't find worthy of readers' time, either.)

"Who You Callin' a Monster" (1954)

"Expatriate" and "The Gentleman was an Epwa" are so bad that I am questioning my rash decision to read three stories from Cosmos by the guy who edited Cosmos.  But we forge on--"Expatriate" was like 11 pages of Cosmos Vol. 1 No. 2, but "Who You Callin' a Monster" is only ten pages long, so its gotta be less painful, right?

"Who You Callin' a Monster" is a story about a comic strip writer, and in part a parody or spoof of comic strips, and thus offers me a chance to unleash upon my unsuspecting readers one of my "hot takes," as the kids call them.  Mel Brooks was in the news lately, having turned 2000 years old or something, and one of my "hot takes" is that I don't like Mel Brooks' work.  Every Mel Brooks production, as far as I can tell, is just the most obvious and sophomoric jokes, puns and double entendres, jokes a 12-year-old boy could come up with, like changing "force" to "schwartz" and reminding you of the most banal thing, like that a Star Wars laser sword is a phallic symbol, or doing the most obvious switcheroo opposite-day irony thing, like having an elderly white woman be conversant with African-American slang (maybe that's a Zucker thing--I'm not singling Brooks out here, not really, his work is just among the most prominent examples of a widespread species that gets my goat.)  And his work is not original or sincere or in any way meant to say anything useful or interesting about real life, it is just bottom-barrel parody and spoof, totally derivative of other fiction; Brooks takes some long-established property that has well-proven appeal, that speaks to people on a human level and had a powerful effect on individuals and the culture, like Robin Hood or Dracula or the Western or Star Wars, and makes the most obvious possible jokes about it--Brooks' body of work is not creative or generative, but parasitic and destructive.  Sometimes you hear comedians claim that sincere drama is easy and comedy is hard, but they are just lying--creating Superman was real work and incorporates real human feeling, calling it "Stuporman" or "Superduperman" was something anybody could do without any effort that lacks or in fact deadens human emotion.  (I don't get Mad Magazine, either.)

Alright, back to "Who You Callin' a Monster."  Mike is a comics creator whose hero, Enormo, I guess based on Superman, fights a different monster every six weeks, vanquishing it at the end of that period, monsters like The Nose, The Eyes, the Mouth, or The Faceless--I guess this is a spoof of Dick Tracy.  (Kal-El and Bruce Wayne and those guys never actually kill Lex Luthor or the Joker or whoever, just fight them again and again and again.  At first this seems unrealistic, but consider that perhaps it is a metaphor for how bad ideas like socialism and Islam can never seem to be vanquished, only temporarily beaten off.)  Mike needs a new monster soon, and draws a truly hideous man that has not just one deformity, but many.  The sight of his own drawing scares Mike.

Mike goes to dinner with friends and there meets a beautiful woman much like the female lead of his comic strip.  The two fall in love, hope to marry.  But then Dad shows up and, as we readers have been led to expect, he looks just like Mike's latest monster.  Dad hates Mike's strip, says it warps the minds of children, and forbids the marriage; Dad is so scary Mike can't really stand up to him to win his daughter's hand unless he dresses himself as the invincible Enormo, but when he cosplays as Enormo he takes on the pure-hearted Enormo's attitude towards women, which is strictly hands-off.  The plot is resolved when Mike redraws the new monster into a kindly man.

Mediocre filler, but competent--far far better than the mess that was "Expatriate."  Acceptable.

As with "Expatriate," our mates down at the intersection of kangaroo boulevard and koala lane reprinted "Who You Callin' a Monster" in an issue of Science Fiction Monthly.  The cover of that ish of Science Fiction Monthly is also a copy of a cover that appeared on Cosmos, though the flag of Australia replaces the Stars And Stripes.  (And no doubt the galley of that rocket is full of Vegemite instead of apple pie.)

"It's Magic" (1954)     

Here we have today's shortest story; "It's Magic" occupies only nine pages behind the dominatrix cover of the final issue of Cosmos.  Say what you want about the contents of Cosmos, but at least the fetishistic covers of three of the four issues are engaging.

Holy crap, this is a sequel to "Expatriate," with the gnome scientist and the gnome who cosplays as Bonaparte!  isfdb didn't warn me this Gnome Intelligence Services business was a series!

The two gnomes are attending a conference of wizards and supernatural creatures.  They are in an auditorium where a wizard is giving a lecture. The lecture is boring and the gnomes are distracted by the beauty of a female attendee--they compare her to Alma from "Expatriate," but for some reason instead of "Alma" they keep saying "Irma."  Didn't author Janifer or editor Janifer consult the earlier issue of Cosmos when composing or editing this piece of junk?   

The lecturer provides a demonstration of the principles of his discourse, casting a spell that transports the auditorium into a dimension of nothingness.  Out the windows is nothing but black.  To cast the spell, the wizard used a "cantrap," which I guess is a scroll with the words of the spell on it.  Somewhat confusingly, the scroll also projects an aura or field of protection from the nothingness outside, allowing the wizard to reach out the window.  But when he does reach out the window, he drops the cantrap.  He hasn't memorized the spell's words, so now they are all trapped in this nothingness dimension, and the oxygen many of the attendees need will run out in 30 minutes.

The gnome scientist hypnotizes the other gnome to overcome his fear so he'll go out into the nothingness to retrieve the cantrap.  But upon touching the nothingness, the head of GIS is paralyzed, stands immobile, not even blinking, at the threshold.  The beautiful woman is a were-butterfly, and has changed into insect form to conserve oxygen, and when she flits over to examine the would-be-Bonaparte she accidentally touches the nothingness herself and is similarly frozen in time.  Then the gnome scientist has a brainwave.  He hypnotizes the wizard so he remembers the spell and can cast it to bring them all back to real space.  So grateful is the were-butterfly to the scientist that they (we are led to assume) have sex.

Bad filler, but better written and constructed than its abominable predecessor.  Still, nobody--not even Australians!--has seen fit to reprint this limp exercise.

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Every expedition into the jungle or the mountains doesn't return with a pouch full of diamonds or saddle bags full of gold, and we certainly didn't find anything precious on this adventure.  But we'll always have those BDSM covers.  Look on the bright side, kids.

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 

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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.

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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.

**********

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."  

**********

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.