Tarzan at the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The lake of the Horibs lies at a considerable distance from the eastern end of the mountains of the Thipdars, perhaps five hundred miles, and where there is no time and distances are measured by food and sleep it makes little difference whether places are separated by five miles or five hundred.

The time has come to read the thirteenth Tarzan book and the fourth Pellucidar book, Tarzan at the Earth's Core.  Today's subject first appeared as a seven-part serial in Blue Book, spanning September 1929 to March 1930.  I'm reading a 1970s Ballantine edition with a Neal Adams cover.  (I actually saw a print of Adams' cover illustration, signed by Adams himself, at an antique store a few years ago.)  You can see that Adams tried to reproduce the unique sky of Pellucidar in the background of painting--as every schoolboy knows, Pellucidar is the world on the inner surface of the Earth's crust, so there is no conventional horizon, you just see the surface geography of your inner world curving upwards, like if you were a tiny bug in a huge bowl (with another bowl placed upside down on top.)  The people of Pellucidar live in a perpetual noon, as the weird sun that hovers in the center of the hollow Earth never moves, and as such Pellucidarians have little or no sense of time, something Burroughs dwells on in these Pellucidar books, I guess part of the wish-fulfillment element of the Pellucidar series, an effort to appeal to the dread of 20th-century people of the schedules and deadlines and tick-tock clocks that allow our modern society to operate.  (Remember that loud stupid Harlan Ellison story everyone loves about how Harlan Ellison shouldn't have to follow deadlines and schedules?  I bet you do.)  

Anyway, Tarzan at the Earth's Core has been printed many times and has had many dramatic covers, and Adams' contribution can stand proudly among them next to those of Frank Frazetta and J. Allen St. John, each of which shows Tarzan fighting for his life against some monster.

You'll probably remember that, in Tanar of Pellucidar, James Gridley discovered a new radio wave and was able to tune in to messages sent by scientist Abner Perry from Pellucidar, messages that detailed how David Innes, founder of an empire in Pellucidar, had been captured by the piratical Korsars.  The premise of Tarzan at the Earth's Core is that Gridley recruits a bunch of Germans to build a superior dirigible with which to enter Pellucidar via an opening in the Earth's crust at the North Pole that Innes had discovered, and then recruits Lord Greystoke, your hero and mine, to lead the expedition.  A squad of Waziri, brave African fighting men who recognize Tarzan as their chief, accompany Tarzan.  For comic relief, accompanying the Germans as cook is an African-American soldier who settled in Deutschland after being captured during the Great War.  Burroughs renders this guy's dialogue phonetically ("'S funny...dey ain't no one stirrin'--mus' all of overslep' demsef") and we spend enough time with him early on that I thought he might play a role in the plot, but he does not; mainly Burroughs uses the cook's perplexity at how there is no time in Pellucidar to remind us readers of this salient fact about Pellucidar, something he persists in reminding us of again and again in a multitude of ways. 

Burroughs' style is smooth and comfortable, so after we get past Burroughs' explanation of what Pellucidar is in the two-page forward it is fun to read about how Tarzan and Gridley meet and about the construction of the dirigible and all that.  Once in Pellucidar, we get a long series of interesting and compelling scenes that mostly entail fighting prehistoric beasts or barbaric men, getting captured and escaping, or climbing mountains.  Tarzan at Earth's Core doesn't build up to a climax really, instead we have these various adventure episodes and cliff hangers in which people face death or captivity but retain life, limb and liberty, and then the plot is all wrapped up neatly thanks to coincidences.  You might say the novel is poorly structured, but the individual action and horror scenes are all fun so I enjoyed it regardless.

Immediately upon arrival, Tarzan goes off on his own and gets lost (with no stars and shadows that never change, it is hard to tell what direction you are facing) and immobilized in a trap and contemplates death as a saber-toothed tiger approaches him--Tarzan, we learn, is what an insufferable hipster might call "not religious but spiritual" and cherishes a hope that there is life after death.

Tarzan of the Apes was not a church man; yet like the majority of those who have always lived close to nature he was, in a sense, intensely religious.  His intimate knowledge of the stupendous forces of nature, of her wonders and her miracles had impressed him with the fact that their ultimate origin lay far beyond the conception of the finite mind of man, and thus incalculably remote from the farthest bounds of science.

When they realize Tarzan is lost, Gridley, a few Germans, and the Waziri, go out looking for him.  The search party blunders into an astounding danger--a big pack of saber-toothed cats are herding a huge crowd of deer, mastodons, giant sloths, "dinotheriums," etc., into a clearing to slaughter and devour them, and Gridley's party gets trapped among the doomed herbivores.  This massacre gives Burroughs a chance to share his own theory of why the dinosaurs and other prehistoric megafauna went extinct, and even a theory on the grim future of mankind; in its earlier chapters Tarzan at the Earth's Core feels like "real" science fiction, what with these sorts of speculations (however wacky) and with all the talk of how to build a superior airship.  But not the science fiction that romanticizes mankind's ability to solve problems and master the universe with science and technology; at the same time that Tarzan at the Earth's Core shows men advancing technologically and demonstrating selflessness and bravery, the novel still is full of that misanthropy we often see in these Tarzan stories, a lot of extravagant silliness about how man is less virtuous than animals:

...man, who is unquestionably the Creator's greatest blunder, combining as he does all the vices of preceding types from invertebrates to mammals, while possessing few of their virtues.

This is fun rhetoric to read, but come on, what "virtue" could we possibly say is possessed by a trilobite or an ammonite, by a skittering skink or slinking snake?  Like the idea that people in Pellucidar have no sense of time because there are no heavenly bodies and no night and day, the idea that animals--even bugs!--are better than people is an idea that makes the novel better by adding a layer of thought and feeling and alienness, but is utter balderdash.   

Tarzan is rescued from the cat who menaces him by a tribe of Sagoths, a savage people with approximately the intelligence of a human but the bodies of gorillas.  They speak the same ape language that Tarzan learned as a boy, so he is able to make friends with one of the biggest and strongest of them.  This prominent Sagoth is exiled from his tribe, and he and Tarzan set off together.  Soon they are joined by a normal Pellucidar human, a man of the mountain country of Zoram.  Like John Carter on Mars, Tarzan in Pellucidar plays the role of the civilizing imperialist who makes the natives less savage, more diplomatic and friendly, and gets the Zoramian and Sagoth, traditional enemies, to become comrades.  

Burroughs' novels generally include a princess and a man--an outsider--who ends up marrying her.  Zoram is famed as a land whose women are the greatest beauties in Pellucidar, and a third of the way into Tarzan at the Earth's Core we meet the expected princess, Jana, known as the Red Flower of Zoram.  We get a long description of her beautiful hair and and barbaric clothes, including her jewelry, made from the bones of a dimorphodon and other small creatures, and then a good chase scene as a chief of a lowland tribe, people whom the mountain tribes hold in severe contempt, and his lackeys try to capture her for the obvious purpose.  In the middle of the chase Jason Gridley appears.

Gridley survived the saber-tooth tiger feast, but was separated from his fellows, and when he got back to the zeppelin he took off in the airship's scout plane to look for his friends.  A pteranodon brings down his monoplane and he bails out, his parachute carrying him providentially right by the beleaguered Jana, who is not only about to be attacked from one side by lowlanders but from the other by hyenadons (when it rains in Pellucidar, it pours.)  Gridley with his Colt .45 revolver and Jana with her spear fight these creatures side by side, driving them off and falling in love, though Gridey doesn't quite grok his own feelings and Jana is reluctant to admit her own.

Adding a note of bitter realism to our male wish-fulfillment fantasy in which guys outfight saber-toothed tigers, pteranodons and cave bears, Gridley says the wrong thing and Jana starts saying she hates him and threatening to murder him and to commit suicide.  Jana performatively runs off and the quarelling couple are legitimately separated by a flood after one of Pellucidar's rare rain storms and Gridley must proceed alone, without a guide; in the process he loses his clothes and his rifle and must face the world as naked as its natives and armed with a spear and a bow he fashions himself.  One of the last things Jana said to him before she left him was that "Only a man may go where goes the Red Flower of Zoram," and by learning how to navigate the obstacles of a world of voracious monsters and treacherous cliffsides without clothes and without firearms, Gridley becomes that sort of man.

Tarzan and his two new buddies head for Zoram after finding the crashed plane and Gridley and Jana's footprints headed that way.  Tarzan is carried away by a pteranodon, and we get additional superior action sequences as he escapes the flying reptile's nest and then has to fight a giant cave bear on a narrow ledge.  The cave bear was attacking a prince of the Clovi people, people who, like the Zoram tribe they habitually raid to steal women, live in the mountains of the Thipdars, and saving the prince allows Tarzan to make friends among the Clovi.  While Lord Greystoke is there, a Clovi raiding party returns with a beautiful captive--none other than Jana, the Red Flower of Zoram, herself! 

Not everybody among the insular Clovi is crazy about Tarzan, and it looks like Lord Greystoke will be executed and Jana will commit suicide as she is forced to marry some local guy.  So the prince of the Clovi helps our heroes escape to a plain inhabited by triceratops and snake people known as the Horibs who ride pareiasaurs, reptiles which Burroughs depicts as being faster than a horse.  Tarzan watches as a squadron of snake people lancers hunt down a triceratops, and then he and Jana are captured by the mounted ophidians.

Meanwhile, Gridley makes friends among the Zoramians by killing a stegosaurus that was attacking Jana's brother.  (At least four times in Tarzan at the Earth's Core, Gridley or Lord Greystoke make friends with people by showing up at the very moment some monster is about to kill them.)  One of the crazier scenes of Tarzan at the Earth's Core is this one, in which the stegosaur glides by jumping off a ridge and lowering its characteristic plates to the horizontal so they serve as wings.  Jana's brother thinks Jana must have been captured by lowlanders, so, while we readers know she is has in fact been in the clutches of the Clovi mountain folk and then the snake people, we observe as Gridley and his new friend seek the Red Flower of Zoram in a village in a swamp.  This swamp is full of giant reptiles of all types, and Gridley is amazed to see a huge snake swallow a trachodon whole.  Further amazement follows as Gridley and friend are captured by Korsars and carried down a river towards the sea.  The pirates' boat is attacked again and again by giant reptiles, and then, finally, by Horibs, whose steeds are just as agile in the water as on the land.  Burroughs gives us a long and mind-blowing horror/battle scene with a surfeit of gruesome wounds and gallons of blood; once the pirate boat is taken by the snake people, Gridley has to watch as the reptile men eat the dead pirates.  Gridley and Jana's brother are carried off by the Horibs to be fattened up for a feast!

In the closing chapters of the novel, Burroughs wraps things up a little too quickly and a little too anticlimactically.  The snake men unwittingly bring Tarzan and Gridley back together, while chance reunites them with the Waziri and then the German airship.  With their modern rifles the Waziri make quick work of the Horibs, then the airship and its bombs awe the Korsars into handing over David Innes.  Somewhat oddly, we don't get a scene of Tarzan and/or Gridley meeting Innes and/or Abner Perry, shaking hands and thanking each other or something.  Despite the uncountable fights and chases they have all been in, the crew that entered Pellucidar on the airship has suffered only one casualty--one of the Germans is MIA.  Gridley decides to stay in Pellucidar to look for mein herr, and when she sees that Gridley is sticking around, Jana finally stops giving him the cold shoulder and the two openly express their love for each other.

(One of my gripes is that Burroughs didn't give the German for whom Gridley is going to search any personality that I can remember, or develop any kind of relationship between Gridley and this German.  Instead of expending time on the black cook, Burroughs probably should have given this German a personality.  Or, had the American cook, maybe through some goofy misstep, get lost in Pellucidar and have him be the man whom Gridley vows to find.)

Tarzan at the Earth's Core is made up of the same basic building blocks of so many of Burroughs' works, but the action scenes and horror scenes are better than average, or at least I enjoyed them more than usual.  The minor characters are not as good as some we have seen, but they aren't bad, and I have already said I enjoyed the stuff about the German dirigible and Burroughs' various evolutionary theories.  It is a little hard to judge, seeing as it has been a while since I read them, but I think I like this one better than the last three or four Burroughs novels I've read. So, thumbs up, I certainly recommend Tarzan at the Earth's Core.

It looks like the fifth Pellucidar novel appeared in 1937, preceded by the fourteenth through nineteenth Tarzan books, so it will be a while before we return to the Earth's Core.  I wonder if Gridley ever finds that German.

Clark Ashton Smith: "Marooned in Andromeda," "The Amazing Planet" and "The Eternal World"

Let's read three early 1930s stories by that titan (or as we might start saying after today, Anakim) of the weird, Clark Ashton Smith, the California-based poet, short-story craftsman, sculptor and painter.  Today's stories debuted in Hugo Gernsback's magazine of prophetic fiction, Wonder Stories, so these might be more like science fiction stories than actual weird tales, but we'll see to what extent Smith puts his own weird stamp on these tales of life beyond mother Earth.

Note that I am reading the magazine versions of these stories, which may well be quite different than later book versions.  Here find links to the very scans of the magazines that I will be reading:

Wonder Stories, October 1930  

Wonder Stories Quarterly, October 1931

Wonder Stories, March 1932

"Marooned in Andromeda" (1930)

Here we have the first of two stories about a Captain Volmar published in Smith's lifetime.  The two published Volmar stories later appeared together in the Smith collection Other Dimensions, in an Italian Smith collection with a Boris Vallejo cover, and in the 21st-century volume Red World of Polaris, which compiles five Volmar tales, three of which were never before published.

Volmar is in command of Earth's second mission beyond the solar system.  The crew of his starship consists of only the finest physical specimens, each of whom has a superior intellect and an extensive education.  But after five years in the barrenness of space, three of these superior men can't take it any more and launch an ill-fated mutiny.  Volmar and the loyal members of the crew quash their uprising, and the three traitors are deposited, without weapons or supplies, on an alien planet in the Andromeda region. 

I like the start of "Marooned in Andromeda."  Smith's poetical verbosity conveys the glory and terror of a long space trip and Volmar has personality and motivation.  But the story becomes sort of tedious on the planet, as the three mutineers lack any character or goals, and are just passive spectators who observe the native flora and fauna and meteorological events.  Smith describes the stuff they see at length, for example the one-eyed reptile-riding native pygmies who capture the mutineers, but these long descriptions don't generate emotion in the reader; in fact, sometimes Smith's creatures seem a little silly.  The monsters Smith comes up with here are obviously more creative than the monsters you might find in a Robert E. Howard story, but we readers immediately know how to feel about a giant snake or a giant ape, while a man with two mouths and an elephant-like proboscis and a knife with a knob at one end is just too strange to inspire an immediate, visceral reaction beyond bewilderment.  Also, a Howard protagonist fights the monsters he encounters, while Smith's three indistinguishable scientists (who, by the way, don't use their science knowledge for anything) are at the mercy of Smith's monsters. 

Captured by these pygmies, the three humans are briefly put to work and then suffer one outrageous horror after another, horrors they are powerless to resist.  The pygmies try to sacrifice them to their god, an aquatic worm with many eyes and five mouths, each slimy orifice big enough to swallow a man whole.  By luck the marooned spacemen escape, to be carried along a subterranean watercourse which debouches into a lake on the planet surface, where they are captured by a colossal avian with a pelican-like pouch.  They share the pouch with giant eels over a flight of hundreds of miles.  The flight ends when kaiju-sized carnivorous plants seize the monstrous bird.  One of the mutineers is eaten by a plant, but the plants turn out to be allergic to Earth-food and eject the two survivors from their writhing jungle.

The two survivors stagger across a dried sea bed and come to an island covered in ruins where they are attacked by a swarm of insects, each the size of a crow.  Then Captain Volmar's ship appears.  An accident has killed some crew members, leaving Volmar short staffed, so he is willing to forgive the two surviving mutineers if they will help operate the ship.

"Marooned in Andromeda" is a shaggy dog story with almost no plot; it is just a list of horror scenes featuring wacky aliens concocted by Smith.  Some of the monsters are interesting, and there are some amusing bits of dead pan humor and black humor, but the story as a whole is not good.  We're grading this one acceptable.  

"The Amazing Planet" (1931)

This story, in 2003's Red World of Polaris and in 2007's The Door to Saturn, appears under the title "A Captivity in Serpens," but the 20th-century reprintings, like in the Winter 1951 Fantastic Story Quarterly, bore the title under which it debuted in Wonder Stories Quarterly, "The Amazing Planet."

"The Amazing Planet," especially in its first half, is much like "Marooned in Andromeda," a shaggy dog story in which humans are subjected to a series of horror scenarios in which they have little or no agency.  Volmar's ship approaches a planet that, like Mercury was believed to when Smith penned this tale, has one side that permanently faces its sun, leaving the other in permanent darkness.  Simply because the spacers need a break from the monotony of shipboard life, Volmar lands in the narrow twilight zone between the planet's two extreme environments.  Volmar chooses one crewman with which to go off alone; somewhat oddly, to my mind, Volmar selects one of the men whom, in the last episode, he called "rubbish" and set down on a deadly planet as a punishment for mutiny.  Go off alone into the wilderness with a man who has a record of breaking the rules and now has a reason to get revenge on you?  Sure, why not?  Smith, in today's three stories, puts very little effort into making the characters' motivations and behavior believable.

Volmar and the mutineer quickly get mixed up in a confrontation between native hunters and their monstrous prey, and get captured by the hunters.  These aliens sell the humans to more advanced aliens who are visiting this planet by space ship.  The scientifically minded aliens carry Volmar and friend to their world, to a metropolis where the humans are subjected to medical examination.  After the exam, the aliens draw their Earth blood and inject it into members of their own lower class--the humans watch as the alien guinea pigs die in agony, swelling up and turning purple.

Volmar and pal think they are about to be euthanized, and "The Amazing Planet" becomes a somewhat more conventional adventure story as the humans fight their way out of the lab and flee across the city, fighting off efforts to ambush them on a perilously high skybridge between two skyscrapers, then climbing the seemingly endless internal stairway of a tower to its top, an observatory.  The aliens attack the observatory again and again, but they are short and, apparently, are not trying to kill the humans but merely capture them, and their attacks are repulsed repeatedly.  Many aliens are slain.  Finally, the aliens overwhelm the observatory, capturing Volmar.  His companion escapes, and we get more chase scenes and more monsters and more horror scenes before he is also captured.

Again, the behavior of Smith's characters is hard to credit.  The aliens are ruthless enough to kill two of their own kind (albeit those of a lower social class) but they won't kill humans, even after those humans have killed scores of their comrades?  Maybe the aliens are afraid to shed human blood because they think it might pollute their atmosphere?  

Reunited, the men wake up tied to an anti-gravity platform that begins ascending to outer space, the aliens apparently being finished with them but not wanting to kill them outright.  Luckily, the crew of Volmar's ship spotted the captain and his comrade being carried off from the Mercury-type planet and followed the aliens to this planet, and have been orbiting above the city.  Their fellow spacemen spot the rising platform and rescue our guys before they can freeze to death.

"The Amazing Planet" has more action, but is not really any better than "Marooned in Andromeda."  As I have told you many times over the course of this blog's history of over 1500 postings, I prefer a story in which the plot is driven by and resolved by characters' personalities, goals, abilities, and decisions.  These two Volmar stories feature random stuff happening to nonentities who live or die based on factors over which they have no control.  The survivors don't survive because they are brave or strong or smart, but because they are lucky.  They don't do much of anything, and when they do do something, it doesn't matter--Volmar and his fellow spaceman manage to escape captivity and in the course of evading pursuit kill many aliens, but ultimately they end up right back where they started, as captives, all those pages of mayhem having not moved the narrative forward an iota.

The descriptions of the alien city are pretty good, and the defense of the observatory isn't bad, so we'll call this one acceptable. 

"The Eternal World" (1932)

Chandon is an inventor who lives among beautiful mountains.  He has discovered and developed "negative time-force," an energy that can negate "the positive energy of time, that fourth dimensional gravity which causes and controls the rotation of events."  Now, considering he has mastered the negative time-force, you might think the vehicle he has devised, a metal cylinder with a glass upper portion, is a time machine and so Chandon will be travelling to the past to deal with Romans and dinosaurs or the future to deal with people with oversized heads.  But you would be wrong!  Amplified negative time-force, in fact, "would not permit of travel into the past or future, but would cause an instant projection across the temporal stream that enfolds the entire cosmos in its endless, equal flowing."  What?

Chandon climbs into his machine and activates it, and after some surreal passages ("It seemed as if the barriers of his brain had been extended to include the whole of the cosmic flux") finds himself in a world where nothing changes, a world of crystalline marble megaliths "beyond time."  

He had projected himself beyond time into some further cosmos where the very ether, perhaps, was a nonconductor of the time-force, and in which, therefore, the phenomena of temporal sequence were impossible. 

Is Chandon trapped here for all eternity, unable to breathe or move at all, and thus unable to truly live, but also unable to die?

No, because another invader of this eternal world of timelessness appears, this one able to move.  A huge space craft that extends a mechanical arm and collects three megaliths, which Chandon senses are living entities in statis, like himself.  Then it collects Chandon's cylinder--when he is inside the space ship, time exists for him again; his heart resumes beating, his lungs breathing.  He sees through the glass of his machine the crew of the ship, people with spherical bodies and lots of tentacles, some of which end in eyes.

The megalithic people awake, change shape, growing eyes and appendages of their own.  They shoot rays at the crew, and the crew use a paralysis device on them, and on Chandon, when they notice him moving about within his machine.  

The space ship arrives on the globe-people's planet, landing in a city of astoundingly tall buildings made of black material.  The globies have to turn off the paralysis rays to move the megalith people out of their ship, and the megaliths become super powerful, shattering the ship.  One of the giants sets Chandon's cylinder on its shoulder.

As Chandon watches, a ferocious battle ensues, a battle of psychic powers as well as rays.  The megalithic people of the timeless world grow to a height that rivals the black skyscrapers, and use ray to destroy the towers and their occupants.  The little globe people, who had shanghaied the timeless ones in order to enslave them and employ them in a war against some other community, are humiliated and then annihilated, their city and then their entire planet consumed.  Smith describes this apocalypse at great length, hitting us readers with classical (Laocoon, the Cyclops) and Biblical (Sodom, the Anakim) similes and metaphors. 

Finally, having destroyed the globe people's planet and grown to cosmic size, the three timeless beings travel the universe, along the way depositing Chandon and his machine back on Earth in Chandon's own laboratory among the mountains.

This is the third of today's stories in which the main character is more of a spectator than an actor, in which the threadbare plot is just an opportunity for Smith to present to us his surreal visions, and is probably the most extreme example, with the craziest visions and the most ineffectual protagonist.  The wild scenes of entire cities and planets being destroyed, the bizarre aliens, the mind-bending theories about time and space, mean little to me when there is no human element, no suspense.  We'll call "The Eternal World" acceptable.

"The Eternal World" has been reprinted in Smith collections, and included in a Spanish magazine, Delirio.

**********

I'm not the customer for stories that are just a bunch of psychedelic visions, even if they include crazy words you rarely see like "lustrum" and "Anakim."  In my opinion, these three stories are among Smith's weakest work.  His strongest work?  I would suggest "The Testament of Athammaus," "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," and "The Dweller in the Gulf."  

We'll leave you with an example of Smith's prose from "The Eternal World."  'Til next time, fellow adventurers!

Weird Tales, July '43: R Bradbury, R Bloch & O A Kline and F B Long

Welcome back to MPorcius Fiction Log and to another 1943 issue of Weird Tales.  Big names today, including two of the biggest, plus one of H. P. Lovecraft's closest associates and Robert E. Howard's literary agent.  Within this July '43 issue of D. McIlwraith's magazine we also find a decent new illustration from Hannes Bok of a very skinny guy and a bunch of nice Boris Dolgov illos of monsters (four-legged goblins, skeleton in hat.)  And for the poetry crowd, verse by Dorothy Quick (a person is changed forever after hearing elf music under the moonlight) and Clark Ashton Smith (a guy disdains civilization in favor of the solitude of the desert where he has crazy visions of vacant silent spaces and notes that one day civilization will be gone, itself claimed by silence and emptiness.)  Check it all out yourself at this link or this and note well that I will be reading today's stories in just such scans of the original WWII-era magazine, not in one of the many books where they have been reprinted and which may include revised versions of the stories.  

"The Scythe" by Ray Bradbury 

I know I read this thing, maybe more than once, before I started this blog, and I think I remember what it is all about, but I recently had the humbling experience of reading Bradbury's "The Crowd" and finding I had totally false memories of it so I am trying to come at this one with an open mind.

A couple with two kids are driving across the country, having lost their farm to the Dust Bowl.  They run out of gas by a farm, the father goes into the farmhouse to find a dead man and his will--the dead man has left the farm to whoever arrives to find his body.  The will also refers vaguely to duty and fate.  

The family takes over the farm, thinking this a tremendous piece of luck.  The farm has a huge wheat field, one that appears much too large for a single man to deal with.  But the wheat is never all ripe at one time, but instead ripens in patches small enough for a man to reap in one day.  The wheat, once cut down, rots at once; by the next morning a different patch has ripened and is ready to be reaped.  Cutting this wheat is pointless, as the wheat cannot be used, but the man feels a compulsion to take his scythe and cut away every single day.

Eventually he realizes he is the Grim Reaper, that each stalk of wheat represents a man or woman, and that individual dies the day he cuts that stalk down.  He is able to identify when he comes upon the stalk of somebody he knows.  When the time comes to cut down his wife and kids, he balks.  The farmhouse burns down while he is in the field, and finds his family asleep inside, among the ashes, alive but comatose, suffering a fate worse than death!

The man goes a little crazy and starts chopping away at the wheat at random, reaping the ripe and the unripe.  This is World War II, Bradbury suggests, indiscriminate death not ordained by God.

"The Scythe" is well-written, so thumbs up, but the theology of the Second World War being outside of God's control is a little sketchy.  Of course, this has been reprinted a billion times.  Multiple editions of the Bradbury collection The October Country have covers that refer to "The Scythe" directly. 

"Yours Truly--Jack the Ripper" by Robert Bloch

This is one of Bloch's most famous and important stories. Speculative fiction's bad boy Harlan Ellison, for example, got Bloch to write something like a sequel to "Yours Truly--Jack the Ripper" for Dangerous Visions, and then the Ohio-born master of litigation-fu wrote an additional sequel to it himself for inclusion in that much heralded volume.  "Yours Truly--Jack the Ripper" has been anthologized a million times and, according to Ellison, adapted for radio and TV many times, and widely imitated (Ellison says "plagiarized.")  Because I read all that material from Dangerous Visions--those sequels and Bloch's and Ellison's long intros and afterwords--I feel like I know what to expect from "Yours Truly--Jack the Ripper," but I don't know, maybe I'll be surprised?

The narrator of "Yours Truly--Jack the Ripper" is a Chicago psychiatrist.  (As you know, psychological theory and psychiatric practice are at the center of Bloch's body of work.)  A British guy with a vague sort of position at the British embassy, maybe he's a diplomat or something, comes to visit the shrink, and begins a conversation about how London is the perfect location for murder and murder is an enduring feature of British culture.  Sherlock Holmes and Alfred Hitchcock are namechecked, and we get a list, one of those lists I always suspect are just an effort to pad a story's word count, of novels (and plays?) apparently about murder; I didn't recognize any of the titles but maybe they were famous in 1943.  The Englishman then fills up a page with an account of the career of Jack the Ripper.  Eventually, he presents his theory, a theory based on painstaking research in documents and legwork all over the civilized world, that the Ripper is alive, has been killing women all over the place for decades, and is now in the Windy City!  How could a guy in his 80s still be running around, slaying women and evading the authorities?  He's a wizard who kills women at just the right moment, when the stars are aligned, and offers their blood as a sacrifice to dark gods (Hecate is mentioned by name), and those malignant deities in turn reward him with eternal youth, that's how!

The "stage Englishman," as the narrator calls him, wants the shrink to introduce him to his friends among the bohemian intellectual set of Chi-town, of which he is aware due to detective work that the narrator is a member.  The Briton is sure Jack is hanging out with that crowd.  First stop is a party.  Bloch whips out some ethnic humor I'd never heard before, calling a game of craps at the party "African polo."  These two examples of Bloch's humor, though based on ethnic stereotypes so perhaps offensive to our delicate 21st-Century ears, are integrated into the story, tell us something about the narrator and his milieu, so actually contribute to the story rather than distracting us and thus diminishing the effect of the narrative, as Bloch's more absurd and pun-based humor so often does.  Not that there aren't lame puns in "Yours Truly--Jack the Ripper"--there are, but they come from the mouth of a drunken life-of-the-party hipster, so they fit comfortably within the structure and narrative of the story.

After that party, our two heroes investigate what in this 1943 version of "Yours Truly--Jack the Ripper" Bloch calls a "colored neighborhood" but which in the 1988 version of the story in the anthology Dark Descent is referred to as a "black neighborhood."  Maybe if the story gets reprinted in the future the phrase will be updated to a "Black neighborhood."  The word "Negro" also crops up in this magazine version of the tale--that word is excised from the '88 version, along with the phrase "prognathous jaw and ape-like torso."  Obviously you can't say this sort of thing about black people today but it creates a vivid image and gets a rise out of the reader, so, on objective criteria, it makes the story more powerful and effective.  I wonder what black people write about white people's looks to make whites seem scary or disgusting..."his skin was white like"..."the stomach of a lizard"?  "His hair was straight and his nose pointy like"...I keep thinking of arrows and swords and rockets and fighter planes, but those are things that are awesome, not things that are disgusting.  Well, there must be something.      

Anyway, in the African-American slum the identity of the Ripper is revealed and blood is spilt.

"Yours Truly--Jack the Ripper" is a better than average Bloch.  I like the black magic elements, the descriptions of bohemian life and the slum are not bad, and it seems that many people find the Ripper content more compelling than I do.  The resolution, the revelation of which character is the Ripper, is acceptable.  The stage setting in the shrink's office, where we hear the story of the Ripper for the hundredth time and get that analysis of British culture that is a little questionable ("British law regards a prisoner as guilty until proven innocent") is kind of weak, but I guess you sort of need it to get up to speed people who are not familiar with Jack, and Bloch sort of admits that that first part of the story is a little boring--"I’ve given the gist of that first interview in all its intricate and somewhat boring detail, because I think it’s important," the narrator tells us--so it is easy to forgive.  Not a great story, but a good one.

"Return of the Undead" by Otis Adelbert Kline and Frank Belknap Long

This collaboration would go on to be reprinted in the 1992 anthology Weird Vampire Tales and in the colossal (1100 pages!) Frank Belknap Long collection presented to the world in 2010 by Centipede Press.  

In the tenth chapter of the second volume of his memoirs, Giacomo Casanova tells the story of how a guy played a practical joke on him, sabotaging a board over a muddy creek so that our Giacomo fell into the mud and soiled his beautiful clothes.  In revenge, Casanova, something of a sociopath if you ask me, dug up a corpse and cut off its arm and then used the arm to scare the other joker late at night while said joker was trying to sleep.  The victim of Casanova's joke went insane and Casanova, whom everybody assumed was the culprit because he was the only man they knew who would do something so crazy, was charged with blasphemy, in part because a woman was out for revenge on Casanova because he had beaten her daughter with a broomstick for refusing to have sex with him after he had paid her six zecchinni.  Casanova's memoirs are pretty wild.

I bring this up because in "Return of the Undead" a bunch of medical students dig up a corpse for use in a practical joke.  Their fellow student Fred is squeamish, and they are envious because he has a date with cutie pie redhead Nancy.  So the four students dig up the body of a hermit who "lived like an animal, alone in the woods" and put it in Fred's room while he is on that date.  The four jokers watch from a dorm window, and after hearing a strange noise, see a figure running from Fred's room out into the night.  They assume the running man is Fred, scared out of his mind, and the noise the sound of Fred tearing away the screen on his window in his frantic eagerness to flee.  But when they get to Fred's room the corpse of the hermit is gone, and Fred is there, almost dead, suffering a neck injury, drained of blood!  

The rest of the story concerns the various college kids, Fred, Nancy, and five or six others, trying to figure out whether the dead hermit is a vampire or if it is just some mundane but mischievous murderer who is threatening them; once that mystery is solved, the battle for survival against the villain continues.  Various people get killed or injured, and we are presented with some bloody sexualized violence against women, but we also witness Nancy saving a woman by shooting the villain with an arrow.  In addition, we have various subplots and themes about young people's sexual relationships on campus that betray a pretty cynical view of young love on the part of Messrs. Kline and Long.  This story left me feeling a little soiled and depressed; "Return of the Undead" really has some of the spirit of a teenage slasher picture.  

We'll call this one acceptable, though exploitative and with parts that are a little clumsy.  

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No bad stories today--all three of these pieces have a plot that is engaging and all three provoke thought or emotion or both from the reader.  You'd have to say these stories are each a success.  Let's hope we can say the same about whatever it is we talk about in our next blog post!

   

Merril-approved 1959 stories: Davidson, Davis, De Vet & Dickson

The last time we mined stories from the Honorable Mentions list at the back end of Judith Merril's Year's Best SF: Fifth Annual Edition, we read stories by four people whose names began with "C" and with whose work I was not very familiar.  Today we've got some Merril-approved "D"s and two of them are pretty famous writers whose work I have read, Avram Davidson and Gordon Dickson, while two of them, Chan Davis and Charles V. De Vet, are not very famous and I don't think I've ever read anything by them.

To give these tales a shot yourself, use the handy links in the above paragraph to be carried magic-carpet-like to the scans of the stories I am reading.

"The Woman Who Thought She Could Read" by Avram Davidson 

This story debuted in F&SF alongside the short version of Fritz Leiber's "The Silver Eggheads;" I read the book version of The Silver Eggheads back in 2022 and thought it pretty bad.  "The Woman Who Thought She Could Read" would be reprinted in Davidson collections and in anthologies edited by David G. Hartwell and Isaac Asimov (the former assisted by Kathryn Cramer, the latter by Martin H. Greenberg and Charles H. Waugh--in my academic career I learned that "assisted by" can mean "did all the real work," so keep that in mind.)

"The Woman Who Thought She Could Read" is a competent but essentially conventional twist-ending, you- shouldn't-trust-in-supernatural-advantages story, not bad at all but sort of ordinary.  Maybe it is special in its themes of people from different cultures being unable to communicate with each other, and its suggestion that more information often won't actually help you make better decisions.  We might also consider Davidson's story as a reflection of a Jewish-American perspective, or an allegory of the life of Jews in America.  Of all gentile nations, the United States has probably been the most welcoming to Jews, and Jews have achieved success here and contributed admirably to American life  in a myriad of ways.  At the same time, Jews might worry that, in the event of a catastrophe, they might be scapegoated by the very neighbors who so recently tolerated or embraced them, and it is just this sort of thing that happens in "The Woman Who Thought She Could Read."  A tragic, depressing story, in any case.

Our narrator is telling us a story of his youth.  He begins by retailing to us the history of the house he grew up in, which maybe Davidson does to bring to mind the way history is characterized by change, with families and businesses rising and falling over time, often due to unforeseeable developments beyond their control.

Living next door to the narrator's family was an Eastern European woman.  This woman spoke English with a heavy accent, and she had never been taught to read, not even her native language--where she grew up, only boys, not girls, were taught to read.  A witch, however, taught her to divine the future with beans.

Davidson lays some family relationship stuff on us; the bean reader's son is a muscleman who travels the country as a professional wrestler ("The Masked Marvel," "The Slav Slayer," etc.), and the narrator's older sister marries a guy the narrator gets along with very well.

One day, the narrator's sister and her husband are going to take some kind of holiday boat excursion.  The bean counter cautions them--the beans warn that water is dangerous to them and they should avoid the water.  So they don't go on the boat, but instead take a drive.  Due to the behavior of another driver, the car ends up in a canal where the narrator's sister and brother-in-law drown.  The boat does get into trouble, but not as severe as this--if the narrator's sister and brother-in-law had been on the boat, they would have lived.  The narrator and his parents, somewhat irrationally, blame the bean counter for this disaster, and the bean counter declares she will never read the beans again and soon leaves town.

Davidson writes his story well--the characters all convincingly to life, for example, and as I suggested earlier, the story is ripe for all kinds of analysis, so I can recommend "The Woman Who Thought She Could Read" even though the plot is just sort of typical. 

"Adrift on the Policy Level" by Chan Davis

Mathematician Chandler Davis' "Adrift on the Policy Level" debuted in Fred Pohl's fifth Star anthology, which I am having trouble finding a scan of.  Luckily, Pohl also included the story in his 1962 anthology, The Expert Dreamers (reprint, reuse, recycle), and I have been able to find a scan of that volume.  

"Adrift on the Policy Level" is a story that dramatizes with exaggeration and efforts at humor the supposed contrast between academic life and life in the private sector.  You'd think academics would be grateful to the taxpayers for financing (albeit at the point of the gun wielded by academia's brutish crony, the government) their cushy jobs, but no, academics have contempt (at best!) for business and are always seeking to demean or actually destroy the private sector.  You'll even find academics who feel that the public sector is Lucy to the private sector's Dracula instead of the other way around.  Anyway, "Adrift on the Policy Level" is a satire of the free enterprise system, with a focus on the power of salesmanship, just the kind of thing commies like Judith Merril and Frederik Pohl eat right up and are eager to serve to the rest of us.   

Our protagonist is a scientist who has discovered a natural chemical in plants that could be used to preserve wheat crops from disease and this 22-page story is all about his efforts to get a big business called "The Corporation" that owns big wheat-growing "colonies" in Antarctica with names like "Churchill" and "Great Slave" to take on the new chemical.  The scientist has to navigate the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Corporation, but luckily he has a professional salesman to guide him.  Part of the humor of the story is the scientist's naivete--he is flabbergasted at the sight of a pretty girl, for example.  The salesman provides Davis a chance to satirize Social Darwinism; the salesman uses the phrase "survival of the fittest" approvingly, for example.  He also uses "altruism" slightingly, which may be an attack on Ayn Rand; I am not familiar enough with Rand's work to know if she talked with specificity about altruism before 1959.     

One of Davis' main themes is that in business success is achieved by charisma and trickery, while in academia success is based on results.   Now, I wasn't in academia in the 1950s, but in the 1990s and 2000s, so maybe my experience is different than Davis', but in my experience the opposite is the case.  In business you succeed when people are willing to buy your product or service--the product or service, and the money you earn by selling them, are the result.  In academia there are all too often no tangible results, just unreplicable and unfalsifiable assertions entombed in documents nobody reads, so success comes from sucking up and through corruption.  Allow us to consider a wholly hypothetical example.  (Any similarity in this example to real people or events is wholly coincidental.)  You have a friend at the, er, Fnord Foundation.  Friend gives your research center half a million bucks.  You use the half million bucks to buy your grandkids Hannukah and Christmas gifts and to furnish your Manhattan apartment and your beach house in the Hamptons and to take your friend at Fnord Foundation to the most expensive restaurants in Manhattan and to hire a bunch of ass-kissing ESL grad students to write a bunch of nonsense that looks sort of like a research report after you hire a young M, er, Pontus to copy edit it.  If a young MPontus goes to the government agency that ostensibly oversees the half million dollars to tell them about the Hannukah gifts and the Christmas gifts and the furniture and the lunches, young MPontus is reminded that this government agency gets 20% of the half million and so if anybody were to jeopardize the research center's future acquisition of additional funds from people's friends at the Fnord Foundation it would be the copy editing guy whose job would be threatened, not yours as head of the research center.  

Anyway, in the end the scientist, like Winston Smith in 1984, falls prey to the persuasive methods of his oppressors and joins their ranks, becoming an enthusiastic collaborator in his own oppression.

Obviously this story's style, themes and attitude rubbed me the wrong way, and it feels repetitive and banal besides.  I am giving "Adrift on the Policy Lebel" a thumbs down, but commies might like it.  As you might expect, a story about how poor innocent academics are the victims of big business has been reprinted in textbooks for use in the classroom like Above the Human Landscape: A Social Science Fiction Anthology and Political Science Fiction: An Introductory Reader.

"Seedling" by Charles V. de Vet

Here we have an acceptable science fiction twist ending story that addresses interesting topics we see addressed pretty regularly in SF.  Short and to the point.

De Vet sets the stage with a brief description of the reptilian animals in a jungle on an alien planet.  Then we meet our three characters, two human astronauts and their buddy.  They tell their buddy, whose memory is all messed up and has the body of a big ape-man kind of thing, that they have done biological modifications to him so he can blend in with the natives.  That way he can gather anthropological data from the inside.  Buddy hates his own smell in this native body, but as he goes off to join a tribe of natives, he gets used to it.

Among the natives the native stuff in his brain allows him to mingle with ease.  The human components of his brain make him disgusted by the smell of his fellows, keep him from accepting the sexual advances of a female native, and drive him to build a hut when it rains.  The other natives are impressed by the hut, and build their own.  

The twist ending is that this guy is not a human who has been modified to mix with the natives, as he has been led to believe, but a native who has been modified to have higher intelligence so he will do stuff like build a hut and introduce fire and the wheel among the natives with the aim of getting the primitive natives to advance to civilization more quickly than they naturally would.  The two astronauts discuss a little the moral propriety of interfering with a people's natural development and putting an innocent alien through the disturbing experience that has made his own people and lifestyle repugnant, but decide it is all for the good in the end, as a superior level of culture and technology will make life safer and healthier and more comfortable for the natives.

We might consider this story in comparison to stories like Lee Corey's "Letter from Tomorrow" in which aliens jumpstart humanity's technological and cultural development.  And to Chad Oliver's "The Marginal Man," which, like de Vet's "Seedling," has Earthmen giving technology to primitive aliens to jumpstart their development.

Acceptable.  This minor story was reprinted in the British edition of Astounding, if that counts, and no where else.  I think this is the first thing by de Vet I have read, and I wouldn't be averse to reading other work by him, though  his novels look a little gimmicky (a guy has to play life or death chess like on Barsoom; aliens drop a monster on to Earth and film its attacks for entertainment for the masses back home.)

"The Amulet" by Gordon Dickson 

I'm a Dickson skeptic, having found some of his novels and short stories weak, but "The Amulet" is a very good witch story.  The magic in the story is quite good, and the images, and Dickson makes use of animal metaphors in an effective way.  In the same way I hypocritically decry the decadence of our culture and the corruption of our government at the same time I exemplify that decadence and benefit from that corruption, I, like everybody else, like cats even though I recognize the cruelty and the selfishness that characterize the feline, and Dickson's chief metaphor in "The Amulet" is just this, comparing a sadistic criminal, a man with a young, strong, healthy body and a cunning mind, to a cat again and again.

Said criminal beats up a teenaged boy for fun and then flees town hobo-style, hopping on and then off a freight train.  In the back woods he encounters first one, and then another, witch, first an old crone and then a young beauty.  Dickson's descriptions of the woods, the women, and their eerie domiciles are evocative and vivid.  The charming criminal matches wits with these evil women--will he side with one against the other as one tempts him with money and the other sex?  Or try to outwit them both?  Can a normal man, no matter how evil and clever, really go toe to toe with women who are servants of the Devil and have an array of supernatural powers at their disposal?

I really like it.  Thumbs up for "The Amulet."  

"The Amulet" debuted in an important issue of F&SF, the one with Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon," which was in one of my school text books back in the day and was adapted into an award-winning film.  This ish also prints Fred Pohl's "To See Another Mountain," which we read some years ago.  Rod "The Bod" Serling (as my wife the comedienne calls him) and a German named Gunther included "The Amulet" in anthologies, and you can also find it in the Dickson collection The Last Dream.

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Davidson and Dickson's weird stories, which use the supernatural to talk about real huma psychology and relationships with which we can all identify, are better written and more entertaining than Davis and de Vet's legitimate science fiction stories, the one an irritating and tendentious satire and the other bland speculation on the methods and ethics of human interaction with aliens.  My brain thinks that science fiction is better than fantasy because the author is trying to say something about technology and society but my heart resonates to fantasy stories in which people are driven by their anxieties and desires.  On a certain level, stories about witches, which are not real, are more "realistic," better reflect our actual daily lives, than stories about rockets, which are so very very real.  So don't be surprised when you find MPorcius Fiction Log is back on the Weird Tales track when next we meet.

P. Schuyler Miller: "The Red Plague," "Dust of Destruction," and "'The Man from Mars'"

In our last episode, one full of car wrecks, Hollywood-bashing and dangerous women, we read a good story by the Hugo- and Locus-Award winning P. Schuyler Miller, and thought it good enough that further exploration of the Miller body of work was warranted.  Let's start in Miller's early days with stories he saw printed in Hugo Gernsback's Prophetic Magazine of Mystery, Adventure and Romance, Wonder Stories, in the dawn of that periodical's existence.

(In response to public demand, embedded in the first para of each section below are links to a scan of the early-1930s magazine in which I will be reading the story under discussion so that you can experience the mass destruction, pioneering space journeys and curious social commentary the stories provide with trivial ease.)

"The Red Plague" (1930)

The July 1930 issue of Wonder Stories was only the second issue of the magazine to appear under that title--the magazine was a merger of Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories, periodicals that began publication in 1929.  "The Red Plague" bagged Miller $150 by winning first place in a contest announced in the February 1930 issue of Air Wonder Stories that called for stories based on the cover illustration by pioneering SF artist Frank R. Paul of that issue.  Miller was, allegedly, one of over 500 entrants to the contest--damn, imagine reading 500 amateur stories about men in space suits attacking a space ship.

Miller begins "The Red Plague" with an elaborate description that dwells on light and color of what I thought must be a Martian town but turned out to be Earth's first space port--much of the surface of our beloved planet is a red desert because of the plague that arrived on Earth via a meteor.  Three rockets blast off from the port, carrying with them Earth's hope of finding a cure for the plague.

The meteor deposited in the American South West a radioactive element new to Earth, a catalyst that, spread in tiny amounts by the wind or birds or whatever, turns rock and soil to a red dust; this dust renders water unavailable for use by irrevocably adsorbing it.  (I could probably use some of this new element in my basement.)  That really is a "d" in there, by the way--Miller is teaching me some science today.  In five years, much of the New World is covered in red desert, and the Old World's strict embargo has begun to fail and so soon all of humanity is threatened with death through lack of water.

There is hope, however.  The red of the dust is identical to the red we see on most of the surface of Mars, and astronomers' careful observations reveal that the ice caps of Mars are growing--the inhabitants of Mars must be reclaiming their planet from the red plague that first afflicted their world long ago!  Three space ships are built and man takes his first steps outside Terra's atmosphere!  The 21st-century reader will be thrilled to find that one of the three rockets is commanded by a "burly, spectacled Negro."  Miller's depiction of this African-American hero's personality and speech might not win the author 21st-century plaudits, though, and then there is the fact that only one of the three ships makes it through a meteor swarm (these meteors are a real pain in the you-know-what) and it isn't the black guy's.

The sole-surviving rocket crash lands on Mars; only four of its six-man crew emerge alive.  The four astronauts fly in their helicopter towards the poles, over the ruined cities, over the canals, over the red deserts that are slowly being taken back by green foliage.  At the glacier sheet they meet the native Martians, short little guys who fly around in special suits and who live underground.  The Martians telepathically interrogate the humans, putting Terra's representatives on trial to determine if they deserve to learn the solution to the red plague, or deserve to be killed.

The human race passes the test thanks to the fact that we have developed atomic power, which the Martians have not--they rely on the somewhat less efficient solar power.  The Martians relate to the astronauts the history of their people and their long relationship with the red plague, and share with the Earthers the secret of how to reverse the life-threatening adsorption of the plague and how to render the world green again.  The Martians even build the humans a new space ship!  A new era of interplanetary cooperation is inaugurated--the Martians' scrawny bodies are unfit to explore the universe, but their superior intelligence will help us hardy Terrans accomplish this marvelous adventure, and we will bring back to them the wonders we find out there on Venus, beyond the asteroid belt, and beyond the limits of our solar system.

"The Red Plague" has many elements of those old science fiction stories that read like a popular history article written in the future and focus on science speculations and make very little effort to create characters and portray individual human drama.  At the same time, Miller tries to be poetical, giving us some pretty long and somewhat oblique passages, like in the beginning of the story when he works overtime painting a picture of Mankind's first space port without coming right out and telling us what it is till he's used up half a page.  Instead of just saying "a crowd of men" and "a squadron of aircraft" he employs the conceit of a god-like being watching from afar to whom the crowd is a "restless smudge" and the flying machines "a swarm of gnats."  Another example of this oblique approach is the sentence that informs us that the African American's ship and all its crew have been killed in the meteor swarm:

Swerve, leap swerve again, and then a blur of flame in the screen, a tearing of metal, and blackness!

This stuff shows ambition, but it is harder to read than just bald facts, and I'm afraid it is too clunky to add literary value to the story.

We're judging "The Red Plague" acceptable.  Forrest J. Ackerman reprinted the story in a 2001 anthology whose gimmick is that all the stories have a color in their titles.  Ackerman was a nutty character.

On the left is the issue of Air Wonder Stories whose cover served as the
basis for "The Red Plague"

"Dust of Destruction" (1931)

Miller's name appears prominently on the cover of this issue of Wonder Stories, which also includes stories by Ray Cummings and David H. Keller.  It is likely we'll be coming back to this one.

Our first Miller story today prominently featured red dust that had the power to adsorb water and thus make Earth almost uninhabitable.  Our second story features green dust that is the product of a ray that destroys air and, if allowed to play over the entire Earth's surface, would render Earth uninhabitable by humans.

"Dust of Destruction" has a first-person narrator, Hank, who shares with us the astounding and horrifying adventures he endured in the future of 1967, the year humanity came perilously close to extinction at the hands of malevolent aliens.  As his memoir begins, Hank, a a travelling salesman, and is in the country like ten miles from Norfolk, NE, when a windstorm of apocalyptic power strikes.  Miller goes overboard describing in meticulous detail how the wind knocks over a tree, and then how the narrator's car and then he himself are carried off by the wind.  Our guy Hank gets tangled up in wire and tied to a tree that flies for miles, sometimes flipping end over end, sometimes dragging its base on the ground, at least once smashing through a house, etc.  It's like one of those endless CGI sequences in a recent movie, but also valid SF speculation--what would it be like to experience such winds first hand?

Hank wakes up in Norfolk, next to another man who is still unconscious, a big muscular criminal named Red whom the narrator recognizes from wanted posters.  The narrator seizes Red's firearm before the bank robber wakes up, so when the thief does regain consciousness, our guy has the upper hand.  Red agrees to help look for survivors and Hank promises not to rat him out to the cops, should they meet any.  Part of Miller's literary project with "The Dust of Destruction" is to generate suspense with the character of Red--will Red be reformed and redeemed, or will Hank's tolerance and open-mindedness bite him in the ass?

Hank and Red explore the ruined town of Norfolk, which is covered in a layer of green dust, and find no survivors, but many bodies that have been torn asunder, apparently exploded from within.

A rocket lands nearby--it is mankind's first space ship.  The vessel is manned by Hank's old college pal, Dick, and their physics professor, Jarvis.  Dick's rocket was on a test flight in the upper atmosphere when the disaster struck--low pressure (an "inverted cyclone") in Norfolk which made people explode and vacuumed stuff nearby--including Hank!--into the gore-filled town.  This low pressure event was no natural phenomena, but the work of a ray from the moon!  The four men blast off for Luna on the human race's first interplanetary flight to take care of the source of this ray that destroyed Norfolk and its twenty thousand inhabitants.  Miller does some real science speculation, describing in some detail what Earth might look like from space and how Dick's rocket works and how and why a ray from the Moon might turn the atmosphere into green dust, lowering the Earth's air pressure so our home will be more hospitable to Lunarian colonists.  On the way moonward the men practice maneuvering in their space suits--Red, a natural athlete, turns out to be the most adept.

On Luna we get descriptions of what the Moon's surface is like and the experience of travelling on foot under the lower gravity.  The four humans split up to make their individual ways to the source of the ray.  Eventually, after travelling through the moon people's tunnels, pneumatic subway system, rocket ship factory, and water system, all of which are abandoned and apparently operating automatically, Hank, Red and the professor reunite in a chamber full of voracious insects a foot long.  The swarming insects try to eat them, and the men fight them hand-to-hand and with grenades.  Are these bugs the intelligent aliens who built the ray projector and the rockets, or the vermin who are driving the Lunarians to try to colonize Earth, or a slave race subservient to the true Lunar masters?  Hidden figures fire ray guns at our heroes as they advance upon the giant ray projector that is at that very moment devastating Asia and Europe, killing millions; Red suppresses their ray fire with his conventional slug rifle.

Then Dick appears, he having approached from a different angle in an aircraft he brought to Luna but kept a secret from Hank.  Dick throws himself into the machinery of the ray projector.  All the Loonies' power production systems were patched into this super weapon, so Dick's his self-sacrifice (immortalized on the cover of this issue of Wonder Stories) sets off a chain reaction that destroys all the moon's native inhabitants.  Earth is preserved from lunaforming and lunar colonization.  Hank, Red and Professor Jarvis survive the explosions and get back to Terra, and as the story ends Hank considers what a bounty the next humans to explore the Moon will find, all those rocket ships and the other technology left by the now extinct natives of our natural satellite.

This is a decent adventure story with lots of science speculation onto which Miller grafts a Christian or progressive social message that perhaps reminds us of the canonization of armed robber George Floyd in our own crazy 21st century.  Immediately, to my mind irrationally, middle-class citizens Hank and Professor Jarvis embrace Red, the armed robber who moans that he has always been on the outside looking in and declare he is no worse than they are, despite his bank-robbing ways.  Dick is skeptical at first, but not for long.

“Come on, Dick,” I said, “loosen up a bit. Don’t be such a crab. Red’s just as good as any of us here, and don’t you forget it! Maybe he slipped up a few times — who hasn’t?"

Miller doesn't fully integrate this theme into his story as well as he might have--shouldn't Red have committed suicide to save humanity, thus earning forgiveness for all those armed robberies?  Instead it is scientist Dick who sacrifices himself to save mankind--must he die to repent his sin of doubting Red?  I feel like Miller doesn't really wrap up the Red story line conclusively; I kept expecting Red to cut a deal with the Moon people or try to steal Dick's rocket or something, and Miller certainly doesn't do that, but neither does he have Red turn out to be the key to the mission or anything.  

Despite my uneasiness with the Red plot line, "Dust of Destruction" is quite a bit better a story than "The Red Plague," with more action, more compelling images, and significant improvement when it comes to characters, but it seems it has not been reprinted.  Ackermann could have included this one in his story, just rename it "Red Hitches a Ride."  

"'The Man from Mars'" (1931)

Here we have a story with a title that, like that of David Bowie's "'Heroes,'" contains quote marks, I guess implying that the man in question is not really what he seems.  "'The Man from Mars'" debuted in an issue of Gernsback's Wonder Stories Quarterly; I guess we'll be getting back to this magazine as well, seeing as it contains a story by Clark Ashton Smith that I don't think I've read.  Miller's story in the issue would reappear in 1939 in Startling Stories as a nominee for the Scientifiction Hall of Fame under the title "The Man from Mars," shorn of those annoying quote marks.  In 1949 an anthology of nominees to the aforementioned Hall of Fame was published and "The Man from Mars" was included in that.  All you Virgil Finlay junkies, and I count myself among you, should check out the ish of Startling linked above, as well as the cover of From Off This World, which I actually saw in real life almost ten years ago, as they both showcase some fine Finlay creations.

"'The Man from Mars" is more recognizable as a "modern" science fiction story than "The Red Plague" or "Dust of Destruction," which are all about cataclysms and men of science who save the human race from them.  "'The Man from Mars'" is more character driven and built on a smaller, more intimate, scale.  Like E.T., its center is a sympathetic alien that is both better than human beings but also so weak that it can be exploited by evil humans and so needs aid from good humans.  I find this kind of thing a drag but I guess it sells because it is not a rare plot by any means.

Our narrator goes to a travelling carnival that advertises a man from Mars.  The Martian in question has a bald oversized head and skinny limbs and sits on a throne and plays a theremin-like musical instrument and by some obscure means makes electricity and water dance around in the air.  Miller describes the Martian's venue and its show in great detail, and it is kind of boring--I find fireworks boring to watch in real life, so reading about fireworks, well, you can imagine.  

The Martian's manager is a college chum of the narrator.  From this guy we learn all about the Martian.  The alien has great psychic powers, but its telepathy only works haltingly with us dumb humans.  Still, the two human heroes of the story can sort of communicate with the alien.  Chum bought the Martian from the religious farmer who found the alien after the alien's ship crashed and chum set the Martian's circus act up.  The Martian sits within a shell, a fake body mounted on the throne, while it performs; the audience never sees anything of its true form.  When not performing the Martian appears as a bald head emerging from a crystal cylinder--the Martian doesn't walk around and manipulate things with hands like you and me, but floats around in the air in this cylinder and manipulates items with telekinesis.  

The owner and the manager of the circus know that the Martian has psychic powers.  They want to lay off their manual laborers and have the Martian pitch and strike the tents telekinetically, perform an act in which the alien lifts an elephant off the ground with its mind, and so forth.  Unlike for Yoda, for the Martian size matters, and such feats would wear it out.  The people who run this carnival won't take no for an answer, so chum enlists the aid of the narrator in escaping the circus.

Electrical fields inhibit the Martian's powers, so when our three heroes try to escape the exploitive carnival, the carnival staff try to stop them by firing up a "Wimshurst static machine" with "a dozen big condensers."  (This thing is real--Miller is schooling me yet again.)  Our heroes outwit the carnies and escape.  But then there is a thunderstorm, which builds up a charge in the Martian's cylinder and causes an explosion that destroys the narrator's car.  Its crystal cylinder gone, the Martian's body below the bald head is revealed to be that of a yard-long slug!  With tentacles!  Yuck!  But in a diversity-celebrating moment, the narrator cradles this monster in his arms--this slug-thing is just as human as he is, he realizes!

The alien takes control over the narrator's body by sticking its tentacles into a wound he suffered in the explosion and connecting to his nerves.  The Martian works him like a puppet and he runs, carrying the slug-creature, with speed and agility the narrator could not have himself achieved, to the Martian's chosen destination.  This sounds like something out of a horror story, but the narrator assures us he enjoyed it, even though running at 110% capacity through a forest and through a swamp, leaping over fences and all that, exhausted and damaged his body.

The Martian and its helpless human steed arrive at a buried spaceship--inside is a baby Martian in a vat!  The narrator's enslaved body moves the baby from one vat to another, manipulates controls, and otherwise ensures the baby slug-person's health.  The narrator, released from alien control, collapses, but the Martian puts on a spare cylinder and nurses him back to health before leaving for Mars with its baby.  The last line of the story reveals in italics that the Martian was a woman!  "'The Man from Mars'" is a diversity-celebrapalooza!

This kind of story is not really my thing, and beyond that, I'm not sure the plot really works.  Why is the Martian woman performing at the carnival at all?  Why didn't she direct the farmer or the narrator's chum to take her to her baby?  Or just fly to the baby itself via her cylinder's motive power?  Could the space ship at the end of the story be an additional shipwreck and the baby some other Martian slug's offspring whose incubator sent out a distress signal coincidentally just when our favorite Martian escaped the carnival?  How is she able to just fly away now, but not earlier?  Has Miller's sometimes oblique writing left me confused?  Or is my confusion due to the fact that our narrator can't really understand what is going on himself, not being fluent in Martian?   

We might also want to look at the story's feminist bona fides.  Obviously Miller meant to strike a blow for the fair sex by depicting a female who exhibited special powers and willpower and compassion.  But do our 21st-century feminists want to see a woman honored for caring for a child?  Shouldn't a woman in fiction be judged by how much money she makes or how many men she kills, like men in fiction are judged?    

With the exception of the overly long and tedious music and light show at the carnival, ""The Man from Mars'" is well written and constructed, and the crazy stuff that goes on is provocative, so we're giving it a passing grade.

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These three stories have problems, but none is bad and I think they demonstrate that science fiction has long been home to stories that argue either explicitly or implicitly for "tolerance" and for racial and sexual equality.  "'The Man from Mars'" puts the lie to the oft-heard claim that aliens in "old" science fiction stories are always evil monsters while women are always damsels in distress.  (These critics sometimes seem to be basing their attacks on SF on the covers of old magazines, which are so often so much more exciting and sexy than the contents.)  Today's three stories by Miller also demonstrate the commitment of early science fiction writers to teaching science to readers, and to airing speculations on what the future will be like with Miller's presentations of what space travel might be like and what the moon's surface could be like.  I think some of Miller's descriptive passages also demonstrate a commitment to literary achievement on his part, though I am skeptical this commitment bears fruit in any of today's stories.  (Miller's literary efforts are more successful in his 1943 horror story "John Cawder's Wife," with its references to Shakespeare's sonnets, one of the stories we read in our last episode.)

Expect to see more coverage of P. Schuyler Miller in the future, and until then stay tuned for explorations of a diverse selection of SF writers here at MPorcius Fiction Log.