Weird Tales, Nov 1943: E Hamilton, M W Wellman, R Bradbury & A Derleth

After today I will have read at least one story (in fact it looks like I will have read at least three stories) from each of the six issues of Weird Tales with a 1943 cover date.  We are making progress in our grand quest to have read something from each issue of Weird Tales, a periodical the life of which spans from 1923 to 2025.  And today may be a red letter day, with stories by blockbuster writer Ray Bradbury, fan fave Manly Wade Wellman, MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton, and Lovecraft correspondent and Arkham House founder August Derleth.  This might be the best issue of Weird Tales from 1943!  You can read along at the internet archive here and find out how this ish of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual stacks up in real time!

"The Valley of the Assassins" by Edmond Hamilton 

Mark Stanton and Bill Bradley are American engineers working to maintain the railway in mountainous northern Iran over which the Western Allies are shipping vital supplies to the Soviet Union so the diabolical Reds can enslave Eastern Europe I mean so Mother Russia can defeat Nazi Germany.  A landslide has blocked the railway, but Stanton and Bradley's hundred-plus Persian laborers have thrown down their tools because they have gotten a sign from The Sons of Murder!  That sign is a peacock tied to a rock.  No doubt the Order of the Assassins, founded ten thousand years ago by a wizard and still active to this day, don't want this railway to operate.  Or so the locals think.  Stanton figures German agents put the bird there.

Stanton uses his automatic to get the Iranian workers back to clearing the railway and Bradley rides off to follow the trail of whoever left that peacock there.  When Bradley returns he has a glazed look on his face and he tries to murder Stanton and the other white person at the worksite!  The young man goes berserk when captured and bound and there is no sign he recognizes his friends.  Is Bradley delirious from some accident or fatigue, as Stanton hopes?  The victim of the some drug-wielding Nazi psychologist, as Stanton fears?  Or have the Assassins stolen the young engineer's soul with their black magic and turned him into a mindless killer, as all the Persians believe?

Their superstitious dread overwhelming them, all but one of the Iranians flees.  Stanton sends the third white man back to Tehran for help, and he and the lone Persian brave enough to remain at his side go out to find whoever warped poor Bradley's mind.  Bradley feels a compulsion to return to his insidious masters, and serves as a guide to them.  The ensorcelled Bradley leads Stanton and his Persian companion into a trap high in the mountains and they are captured by a party of men--some Iranian, some Arab, Turk or Syrian--who do not speak and who bear the same mindless stare and exhibit the same grim determination as the enslaved Bradley.

The zombie-like Assassins take Stanton and friend to a monumental black castle behind which lies a narrow valley of stupendous beauty, full of flowers, glazed-eyed women and screaming peacocks.  In the castle they are dragged before Hasan Sabah, world's foremost expert in the science of the mind!  He has survived many centuries, battled Crusaders, met Marco Polo, tangled with Genghis Khan and Napoleon!  Hasan Sabah hypnotizes Stanton's Persian comrade, making him the latest of his servants, and then announces his plan to transfer his soul from his current old wrinkled body to Stanton's healthy young form!  This is how Hasan Sabah has survived for some many lifetimes!  In Stanton's body he can make sure the Axis powers win the war, which will throw the Middle East into chaos so that he, Hasan Sabah, can take over the Middle East.

In science fiction fashion, Stanton uses quick thinking, trickery, and his knowledge of science to foil Hasan Sabah and save himself, his friends, and the Anglo-American lifeline to Uncle Joe Stalin.  

The ending of "The Valley of the Assassins" is a little weak--the villain, who is a genius thousands of years old, shouldn't have fallen for the trick Hamilton came up with--but not terrible.  Otherwise, "The Valley of the Assassins" is quite good, a fun melodrama.  Hamilton knows just the right amount of detail and description he needs to paint a picture and elicit emotion in the reader without going overboard and becoming boring or confusing, and the action scenes similarly are just long enough and detailed enough to be exciting and get across what is happening to the reader.  (Just recently I was complaining that some of Ted Sturgeon's action scenes, and at times his writing in general, include too much detail and get tangled up in themselves.)  Thumbs up for "The Valley of the Assassins."

Kurt Singer included "The Valley of the Assassins" in his 1972 anthology Ghouls and Ghosts and Helen Hoke eight years later reprinted it in Fear! Fear! Fear!  Our paisans over in Italy had a chance to read Hamilton's story of the fall of Hasan Sabah in the language of Dante in 1987 when "The Valley of the Assassins" served as the title story of an Italian anthology of stories from Weird Tales.

"The Third Cry to Legba" by Manly Wade Wellman

The cover of this issue of Weird Tales advertises "A new mystery series by Manly Wade Wellman" and "The Third Cry to Legba" is the first installment of that series, which isfdb calls the John Thunstone series and lists over a dozen component stories.

Thunstone is a huge strong man who has studied the occult.  We see many such students here at MPorcius Fiction Log; I guess "the occult" is a crowded field, though I never met any such students myself as an undergrad in New Jersey or as a grad student in New York City.  Thunstone is out at a Manhattan night club with a former flame, the blonde and blue-eyed Countess Monteseco.  (Come to think of it, we meet a lot of these blue-eyed blondes here at MPFL as well, don't we?)  When they first met, some years ago, she was just Sharon.  

The act at the club tonight is a reproduction of a voodoo ceremony, a call to the furry god Legba, a dance that climaxes with the scantily clad dancer breaking the neck of a chicken.  Thunstone, a writer who can get into places by saying he is a journalist, talks to the dancer backstage while another big strong man, Thorne, chats up Sharon--Thorne is also a student of the occult, a man who has spent plenty of time in Haiti, which Conan O'Brien tells me is a real beauty spot, but Mike DeWine tells me is literally hell.  Well, opinions will differ.

Thunstone's and Thorne's opinions certainly differ--our guy Thunstone is a crusader against the forces of darkness, while Thorne is a devotee of black magic who hopes to get his mitts on Sharon, Countess Monteseco's inherited wealth to finance some kind of diabolical large-scale project.  (Today's secret word is..."diabolical.")  Thunstone has some powerful friends, and calls in their aid.  He gets the police to close the night club over a fire safety code violation.  In Harlem he consults a black preacher who gives him more info on Legba, citing, among other volumes, Zora Neal Hurston's Tell My Horse; Thunstone and this man of the cloth conclude that the next performance of the call to Legba at the club, the third, might have catastrophic consequences.  And in Midtown he gets from a jeweler an old brooch that he hopes will provide protection from the forces of darkness--he gifts the brooch to Sharon the Countess.

We get a good detective scene in which Thunstone figures out where Thorne lives and busts into his place to look for clues.  Then a decent climactic action scene in which Thunstone interrupts a private performance of the crucial third chicken-sacrificing dance ceremony.

This is a pretty fun story--thumbs up!  I often find detective stuff, following clues and all that, to be a drag, but enjoyed the detection business in "The Third Cry to Legba."  Hopefully the succeeding tales of Thunstone, which I will be reading as they come up in Weird Tales, are as entertaining.  I wonder if Sharon and Thorne will be back.

"The Third Cry to Legba" has been reprinted in Thunstone-centric Wellman collections. 

"The Ducker" by Ray Bradbury

Here we have a rare Bradbury that was not reprinted in an English-language Bradbury collection until our own bizarre and unusual 21st century.  "The Ducker" did pop its head up in a Japanese 1972 collection, a British 1977 anthology edited by Mike Ashley, and a 1989 Italian anthology of pieces from Weird Tales, however.

"The Ducker" is a somewhat silly story, the gimmicks of which remind me a little of that Roberto Benigni movie Life is Beautiful and of that Stephen Spielberg TV episode in which an artist magically drew the landing gear on a stricken B-17 to save himself, stories that inject a little magic and whimsy and child-like wonder into the serious business of the Second World War in the European theater in a way that some might find moving (women were sobbing in the theatre lobby where I saw Life is Beautiful) and others ridiculous or even offensive.  "The Ducker" is a pretty weak story by Bradbury standards, and the use of the gag gets repetitive, so I'm judging "The Ducker" merely acceptable.

Johnny Choir is an 18-year-old who hasn't really grown up--he still has the interests and mentality of an eleven-year-old.  He used to run around with a bunch of kids, playing at war and at being cowboys, an endless series of arguments of the "Bang, you're dead!"  "No, you missed!  Bang, you're dead!" type and somehow basic training as an infantryman in the United States Army has not stopped him from continuing to think of warfare in this childish way.  Johnny gets shipped off to fight in North Africa and when German aircraft strafe his unit, he is among the bursting shells of an artillery barrage, or German machine gunners are trying to hose him down, he is immune because he treats it all like a game, saying "Missed me!" and "I ducked!" and so forth.  To kill German infantrymen he just has to say "Bang! Bang!" and Hans and Fritz just fall over.  It is kind of ludicrous, and Bradbury doesn't just do this stuff once, as a climax or a punch line, but runs these gags multiple times over multiple pages.  In the end, after Johnny has taken a German position single-handed, one of his comrades, Private Smith, says some goop about how God protects children and Johnny still has that protection because he never grew up, and so Smith will endeavor to make sure Johnny never grows up and thus remains safe.  This is a little hard to take, seeing how criminals abuse and murder children all the time and children regularly get killed by bombs during modern warfare.

Ray of course is good at putting sentences together and slinging the similes and metaphors, so reading "The Ducker" isn't painful, but it is not one of finest moments of Waukegan's gift to literature.

"A Thin Gentleman with Gloves" by August Derleth

Of the four authors we are reading today, I probably like Derleth the least; he certainly seems to be the most likely to deliver a half-assed clunker to the editor and get it published.  But maybe today he will put in a stellar performance.  

     

Bellaman is a London barrister almost all of whose clients are dangerous criminals.  But he has one decent client, Potter, and when this honest man dies, Bellaman handles his estate.  The deceased Potter, a student of the occult (of course), left all his money, a considerable sum, to an old girlfriend who hadn't heard from Potter in ages.  Bellaman thinks he can steal some of the inheritance from this woman--diabolical!--but as he goes about this crime, he keeps seeing a strange figure that gives him the creeps.  The man who seems to be following him whenever he misappropriates some of Potter's estate is a very skinny man in gloves, his face somehow always obscured--Bellaman recalls that a similar man always accompanied Potter on the rare occasions when Potter left his abode, a tall thin man who never spoke, whose face nobody can remember.

Bellaman's investigation indicates to us readers something Bellaman himself refuses to believe--Potter, a wizard, raised a former enemy from the dead and bound the corpse to be his familiar.  The living dead slave will be released form servitude and able to rest when Potter's estate is properly disposed of, and so the monster is endeavoring to make sure Bellaman doesn't abuse his office of executor.  The climactic ending in which the monster slays Bellaman and the denouement in which the police find the unusual state of the two bodies, barrister and skeletal corpse, are pretty effective.

"A Thin Gentleman with Gloves" is an obvious, straightforward, traditional horror story, but Derleth does a good job with it, and there are no annoying mistakes (true, there are typos in this WT printing of it, but I can't blame Derleth for that.)  Derleth wrote quite a few of these stories in which a character you are expected not to like suffers a terrible rough justice at the hands of a supernatural entity or phenomena, and sometimes Derleth just seems to think the person should die because he or she is rich or vain or fat or has low intelligence or something, and to me such stories feel vindictive and exploitative.  The guy who gets killed in this story is actually a thief who is robbing a woman and a fraud who is failing to meet his obligations to a client, so I was able to cheer on his destruction.    

I can mildly recommend "A Thin Gentleman with Gloves."  The adventure of Bellaman the fraudulent attorney was included in the Derleth collection Something Near, an anthology Derleth edited, When Evil Wakes, and an anthology edited by Mary Danby, Realms of Darkness, that has an introduction by beloved thespian Christopher Lee.  Followers of my sadly defunct Twitter feed may recall that I recently purchased at an antiques mall the NECA Christopher Lee as Dracula action figure.

**********

Let's pretend we are good at math and score the six 1943 issues of Weird Tales based on what I felt about the three or four stories I read from each.  The January ish had two stories I liked (+2), one I thought acceptable (0), and one I didn't like (-1), so January has 1 point.  Grading the rest similarly, we get this list:

Jan:   1

Mar:  1

May: 0

July:  2

Sep:   0

Nov:  3

So, my hopes that this November issue of Weird Tales was the best 1943 issue have been fulfilled!  Good news for once!  We've wrapped up this stage in our weird journey from 1923 to 2025 with a bang.

More Weird Tales next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log--cross your fingers in hopes the next batch of stories we read will be as good as today's collection.

Weird Tales, Sept '43: R Bloch, A Derleth and R M Farley

It's time for another trip to the dark and dangerous world that is Weird Tales, the essential pulp magazine, edited, from 1940 to 1954, by Dorothy McIlwraith.  Today, the September 1943 issue.  We've looked into this issue already to admire "Fredric Brown's story "The Geezenstacks" and a Hannes Bok illustration.  But it is stories by Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and Ralph Milne Farley that bring us to WT's pages today.  Feel free to read along at the scan of the World War II-era magazine that I will be reading, which you can find at this link. 

"Black Barter" by Robert Bloch

"Black Barter" is a sequel to November of 1942's "Nursemaid to Nightmares," a story I called "an absolute waste of time."  I counted, and saw that "Black Barter" filled 20 pages of Ms. McIlwraith's magazine.  Then I gritted my teeth and forged ahead.  "Unto the breach once more, dear friends...."

Our narrator, in the earlier story, was hired by an eccentric hobbyist to look after his collection of mythical and supernatural individuals--a vampire, a werewolf, a mermaid, and the rest.  Then the eccentric collected a Medusa and it turned everybody to stone (except the narrator.)  As "Black Barter" begins, the narrator is missing his charges and his employer and hopes to someday figure out how to get them reanimated.  A witch, an old friend of the collector, comes to visit.  We get lots of lame jokes and silly interplay as the narrator tries to convince the witch to summon a demon to reanimate his friends.  Part of his strategy is to get the witch drunk, but when she performs the black mass to summon the demon she botches it and gets a substandard demon.  The narrator cuts a deal with the demon, and he reanimates the statues, but puts the wrong soul in each body--the mermaid's body is animated by the centaur's soul, etc.  These are the kind of jokes you get on Gilligan's Island and The Flintstones, but we like those shows because we already like the actors and/or characters and so care what happens to them--of course the characters in this story are interchangeable and forgettable.  Somehow the mermaid's soul gets stuck in a wax dummy the witch is using as a 1:1 scale voodoo doll.  Here I provide an example of the wordplay that Bloch engages in on almost every line.

“Nevertheless, the window dummy is mine. It’s my poppet, and I shall pop off with it.”

“Go fly your broomstick,” shrilled Trina the mermaid. “And don’t call me a dummy, you Halloween hag!”

Five or ten pages of this would be a waste of time, and here we have twenty.  And yet, "Black Barter," while bad, is better than "Nursemaid to Nightmares," because whereas its predecessor was an almost plot-free series of gags, "Black Barter" has a conventional narrative structure in which the protagonist pursues a goal.  The narrator takes the witch on a date, including a harrowing broomstick ride, hoping to seduce her into summoning another demon to rearrange his friends' souls; hijinks ensue when the jealous mermaid and all the other monsters try to chaperone the date, and everybody ends up in front of a judge at night court, rehashing the plot to the incredulous magistrate (this kind of thing also happens in The Flintstones) who orders the witch to summon the demon to put everybody back in the correct body--the wily sorceress double crosses our cast, leaving all the weirdos once again inanimate statues and the narrator all alone (as in an episode of Gilligan's Island, at the end of the story the characters are all back at square one.)   

A step up, but still way down in the basement.  Thumbs down.

"Nursemaid to Nightmares" and "Black Barter" were reprinted together in a 1955 issue of the magazine Imaginative Tales and in the Bloch collection Dragons and Nightmares; Dragons and Nightmares also reprints "The Eager Dragon," another Bloch joke story I have denounced here at MPorcius Bitch Blog, and "A Good Knight's Work," a 1941 story that debuted in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown which I expect I will be grousing about here some day.

This is how you sell garbage stories, in America, in Germany, and beyond

"Baynter's Imp" by August Derleth

Cyril Baynter is a fat, vain, lazy rich man whose wealth was inherited from his grandfather, a lumber baron who made a pile  devastating the environment.  Baynter is "a great hand with the ladies," thanks to his wealth, but one woman, the beautiful Belle Fassett, has given him the cold shoulder; she is instead interested in Bert Trayle.  By chance, Baynter acquires an old vessel, a sealed carafe, with warnings in Greek and Latin inscribed upon it; after he opens it, it becomes evident a supernatural entity has been released.  This imp reads Baynter's mind, sees his desires, and has Trayle killed in an accident and then Belle Fasset's father similarly killed, clearing a path for Baynter to marry Miss Fassett.  But Baynter worries about the imp--if he marries Belle and Belle finds out about the imp she will leave him or figure out what happened to her father and previous beau or something like that.  So Baynter tries to seal the imp back up in the bottle, but the imp reads his mind and turns the tables on him--Baynter is entombed in the bottle more or less forever, and the imp takes his form and marries Belle Fassett and lives happily ever after.

This is an acceptable filler piece, written in a somewhat but not quite obnoxiously sarcastic style; no big deal, but better than some of the junk Derleth banged out on the old typewriter (according to David Drake, a huge Olivetti) to help fill up the pages of Weird Tales.  "Baynter's Imp" would go on to be included not only in Derleth collections but the anthologies Alone By Night (1962) and 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories (1994).

"Wings of Death" by Ralph Milne Farley

Remember when I defended Farley from a scurrilous attack by one Isaac Asimov?  I was contending with giants in those days!  I would go on to praise Farley's story about a gangster who integrates cloning into his criminal enterprises.  I even gave a mildly positive review to Farley's story about a guy being sent back in time by a Hindu swami to strangle a young Hitler!  Let's hope I can champion Farley today; at least "Wings of Death" is a good title.  (Remember how much I loved H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald's "Winged Death"?  I was consorting with giants in those days!)  Plus, here in Weird Tales "Wings of Death" is accompanied by a decent illustration by Weird Tales veteran Margaret Brundage.

"Wings of Death" is a little long and a little convoluted, with too many twists and turns that I feel don't really accomplish anything and plot elements that are not quite believable, but not bad.  We're judging it acceptable.

Our narrator is a reporter, who is interviewing Ames, a New England business guy who inherited a fleet of ships, as he lounges poolside with his wife, both of them in skimpy swimwear.  Mrs. Ames suggests her husband tell the journalo the story of the sacred flies of Malea, and most of the text is a third-person account of Ames' wild adventure in the South Pacific.

Ames' father had a lot of business in the Pacific, and when Ames was a kid took him to an uncharted island only he knew about, Malea.  Ames senior was pals with the head of the tribe on the island, but not the priest, a skeletal old guy.  Ames junior made friends with the chief's son, Tamu.  These two kids realized that the tribe's religion was a load of crap.  The island of  Malea is infested with big flies, flies as big or bigger than wasps, which the tribesmen considered gods.  The flies emerge from a slimy pool that writhes with maggots.  According to the local religion, this is the pool of life, and if it were to expire, all life on Earth would die.  So, the tribespeople toss food--including human sacrifices--in the maggot pool all the time, and it is forbidden to kill any of the flies, even though they bite people.

Young Ames is hanging with Tamu one day when a fly bites him and he kills it by reflex.  When Tamu sees his white friend isn't immediately struck dead, he realizes his religion is a sham--no biggie, Tamu didn't like the sinister head priest, anyway.  The boys agree to, one day, maybe when Tamu is chief, to destroy the fake religion.

Ames didn't return to Malea until he was an adult, after his dad died.  He and Tamu have kept up a correspondence over the years, and get along well, and Tamu's sister has grown up to be very attractive.  When Ames talks about how hot this girl is, the reporter is a little surprised to see the businessman saying this stuff around his wife, whom the narrator takes to be a typical Bostonian.  Anyway, there is a whole complicated thing with a member of the ship's crew killing a fly and the priest witnessing it and sentencing the sailor to death and Ames coming up with a crazy plan to save the man and destroy the pool, a plan that miscarries at first.  At the same time, the annual Mating Dance comes up, a ceremony that imitates the mating practices of the flies.  The marriageable women dance around a fire, and pick men out of the crowd to dance with them--if nobody objects, they become man and wife.  But men in the audience are permitted to object, and then the two men fight.  Tamu has to fight some guy to get his girl, and Ames similarly fights to get Tamu's sister.  Tamu's sister is then instrumental in conceiving and accomplishing a back up plan to save the sailor and Ames and to discredit the local religion.  As we see quite often in these old genre stories, a woman takes initiative and puts herself at risk to resolve the plot, making me think "Wings of Death" has feminist elements, but since she performs this heroic deed to save her man and because the story fails the Bosporus test, I doubt academic feminists would appreciate the feminist aspects of the story.         

The twist at the end of the story is that Ames's wife is Tamu's sister.  I found it a little hard to believe that the reporter would have a conversation with a South Sea Islander in a swimsuit who learned English as an adult and mistake her for a "typically Bostonian wife."  This and some other needless complications and hard-to-swallow elements mean I can't really say "Wings of Death" is good, but it certainly falls in the acceptable range.

It looks like "Wings of Death" has never been reprinted, so I am one of the relatively few people to have read it--I guess you are one of the rather small number of people to have ever heard of it.  We dig deep here at MPorcius Fiction Log!

**********

Probably the high point of this issue of Weird Tales is "The Geezenstacks," but Derleth's and Farley's contributions are not shameful.  As for the Bloch, we'll sweep that one under the magic carpet.  Maybe the next issue, which features Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, and Ray Bradbury, will be a little better.  Fingers crossed!  

 

Theodore Sturgeon: "The Music," "Scars," and "Die, Maestro, Die!"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading a 1965 edition of the 1953 collection E Pluribus Unicorn by Theodore Sturgeon, the man who brought you such bizarre utopian visions as "If All Men Were Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?", "The Skills of Xanadu," and "...And Now the News,"  as well as those wacky tales of alien invasion, "Make Room for Me" and "The Incubi of Parallel X."  Yesterday we read three stories from E Pluribus Unicorn, one about two virgins, one good, one evil; one about a superior race of sexless women; and one about two unattractive people finding love against the odds thanks to the intervention of a flying saucer.  Who can guess what Ted has in store for us today in "The Music," "Scars," and "Die, Maestro, Die!"?  You can read along at a scan of a copy of the very edition I am reading at this link.

"The Music" (1953)

This little thing, one and a half pages, seems to have made its debut in E Pluribus Unicorn.  It is a sort of literary exercise and a slightly oblique horror story.  A guy is stuck in a hospital, maybe a mad house.  He likes to escape the stifling atmosphere of the institution to a balcony or to a loading dock or something, a place where he can lean on a rail and smoke and look out into the night, see the mist and garbage cans and a cat chase and kill a rat.  A recurring motif of the story is this guy's music--I guess music he hears in his head.  As the story ends it is implied that he imitates the cat and chases down and kills a fat nurse leaving the hospital to head home, maybe even eats her.

Acceptable.  

"The Music" has only ever appeared in Sturgeon collections.

"Scars" (1949)

Well, here's a change of pace.  "Scars" debuted in Zane Grey's Western Magazine; Sturgeon wrote enough Western stories, some in collaboration with Don Ward, to fill a collection.  Well, let's sample Ted's body of work about the Wild West.

"Scars" is a well-written cynical twist-ending story; the style is evocative and economical and the surprise ending works.  Thumbs up, cowpokes!

Two cowboys are working together, day after day, night after night, far from any other people, putting up a barbed wire fence or something in what amounts to the wilderness.  They rarely talk, but sometimes, Sturgeon tells us, a man has to get something off his chest.  One time the elder cowboy tells the story of how he lost part of an ear when he was fighting with a slick Easterner over a woman and the woman in question hit him in the head with a frying pan.  Another time, he describes how he was shot in the belly but survived a long hospital stay.

The younger cowboy one night is complaining about women, saying they all want a gentleman but their definition of gentleman is unattainable.  The old man says that he is a gentleman, and explains how he merits this appellation.  One day he was riding in some remote area and saw a woman bathing in the nude, the region being so thinly populated she was sure nobody would be around.  Startled, she fell in the water and hit her head and fell unconscious.  The cowboy rescued her and spent several days nursing the young widow back to health as she suffered blood loss, a fever, delusions our hero was her dead husband, etc.  While she was laid up he did work on her farm, repairing a door and pulling weeds and so forth.  Sturgeon, who in his stories often depicts touching human relationships, leads you to believe this is some kind of wonderful selfless love the cowboy is expressing, forgoing one opportunity after another to take advantage of this woman.  When the woman is recovered and it is time for the cowboy to leave, the widow tells him he is a gentleman, and there is even the suggestion she has perhaps fallen in love with him--she watches him until he disappears beyond the horizon.

When the young cowpuncher asks why the oldster never took advantage of the widow, the old guy makes clear it was because his bullet wound, which left his "plumbin'" "all mixed up and cross-connected," rendered him impotent.

When the issue of Zane Grey's Western Magazine that included "Scars" was reprinted in the UK, our British friends gave it a different, perhaps more exciting, cover.

"Die, Maestro, Die!" (1949)

It seems our mates across the pond couldn't top the US cover of the issue of Dime Detective in which "Die, Maestro, Die!" debuted and so used the same cover for the British edition of the magazine.  Understandable--the cover is pretty awesome.

Like the narrator of (spoiler alert) "Saucer of Loneliness," whom we met in our last blog post, the narrator of "Die, Maestro, Die!" has a birth defect, a tiny little mouth with sharp pointy teeth that renders his mug among the ugliest anyone has ever seen.  This guy, Fluke, also has an unusual voice, and so has a job with Lutch's hip and happenin' band.  While Lutch the clarinetist and bandleader and beautiful girl piano player Fawn and drummer Crispin and the rest of the band are doing their thing, Fluke, hidden in the dark, speaks cool patter into the microphone.  "Lutch is here, Lutch is gone, man, gone....Top of the morn from the top of the heap, Kizd."  This story is full of hip slang:

She pulled Lutch's swallow-tail between numbers, dropped it like it was hot, and stood there blushing like a radish....The music business is full of roundheels and thrushes who feed on seed; this kid was from fresh air.

Anyway, "Die, Maestro, Die!" is the story of how Fluke keeps trying to murder Lutch, whom he envies  because of his talent and Fawn's love of Lutch and whom he resents because it is to Lutch that Fluke owes his success.  One of the grim realities we experience in life that that we are all too reluctant to acknowledge, one that molds our relationships and has painful ramifications for society, is the fact that often it is not gratitude but resentment and contempt that beneficiaries feel towards benefactors; if you loan or give money to a relative, he won't necessarily be thankful, but instead hate you for humiliating him, for making your superiority undeniable, for making him feel he owes you, even if you deny that he owes you anything.  And don't get me started on how people who "work" for the government or who are on the dole feel about the taxpayers who are keeping them housed and fed.  Anyway, Sturgeon in this story offers some sad but all-too-accurate psychological insight--the more Lutch and the other band members are nice to Fluke, the more they try to help him, the more he resents them and tries to destroy them.

One of Sturgeon's themes throughout his career, and one he cleverly illustrates in "Die, Maestro, Die!" is his skepticism of individualism and his romantic view of collectivism.  In his SF work this often manifests itself as telepathy and collective consciousness and similar fantastical elements , but in this mainstream crime story it manifests itself in the orchestra.  All the members of Lutch Crawford and his  Gone Geese work together, get on the same wavelength, and produce great art.  Even when Lutch disappears after Fluke drowns him in a sink and throws him in a river, the band, from long intimate familiarity with Lutch, are able to produce the kind of work Lutch would have produced--having successfully built relationships, having sacrificed himself for the collective, Lutch lives on after death, his band creating and performing just the kind of music he produced and would have gone on producing.  And our villain, Fluke, because he wants to succeed on his own, without help, because he is an individualist, is a monster who keeps trying to kill Lutch, even the immortal Lutch that is the band, by sabotaging the band's performances.

In the end, Fluke is found out, but even then the band members, inspired by the example of Lutch, treat Fluke far better than he deserves.  Fluke is punished, however, if only by his own inner demons. 

Personally, I find collectivism detestable and think of myself as  radical individualist, but I can't deny that Sturgeon here makes his case skillfully.  The characters and their relationships are also well rendered, even if Lutch and the band members sometimes seem impossibly goody goody.  And I have to say that Sturgeon here does a better job of describing what the experience of performing and hearing good music is like than do a lot of people that strain their brains and their typewriters piling on surreal  metaphors trying to do so, like Charles Beaumont in "Night Ride" or Robert Bloch in "Dig That Crazy Grave!"  So, thumbs up for "Die, Maestro, Die!"   

**********

More than once on this blog I have suggested that I might enjoy Barry Malzberg's mainstream work more than his SF work.  Today's three stories by Theodore Sturgeon make me wonder if I might say the same thing about old Ted.  These stories are more economical and have more believable characters than a lot of Sturgeon's SF work, and "Scars" and "Die, Maestro, Die!" effectively address Sturgeon's typical themes without resorting to psychic powers or space aliens and without expressing contempt for the mundanes.

I think the remaining stories in E Pluribus Unicorn first appeared in Weird Tales, and so we will get to them in the course of our exploration of the Unique Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual, assuming the Grim Reaper doesn't catch up with me first--I still have a lot of issues of Weird Tales to get through.

Theodore Sturgeon: "The Silken-Swift," "A Saucer of Loneliness," and "The Sex Opposite"

In July, at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle, I bought a copy of the 1965 paperback edition of the 1953 Theodore Sturgeon collection E Pluribus Unicorn because of the Richard Powers cover. Today let's read three stories from the book, stories from the early 1950s--I have chosen stories specifically because they did not debut in Weird Tales, because I am going to read Sturgeon's WT  stories as part of my long term plan to read at least one story from each issue of WT.  But before we dig into "The Silken-Swift," "A Saucer of Loneliness," and "The Sex Opposite," find here links to my blog posts about four stories in E Pluribus Unicorn I have already read:  

"Cellmate"
"The Professor's Teddy-Bear"
"A Way of Thinking"
"The World Well Lost" 

Lastly, I note I will be reading these stories in my '65 paperback, but may consult the magazine versions at the internet archive.  The titles of the three stories above serve as links to the scans of those old magazines, and this link right here should take you to a scan of the very edition I am reading.

"The Silken-Swift" (1953)

"The Silken-Swift" appeared in F&SF the same year the hardcover first edition of E Pluribus Unicorn was printed. A big hit, this story has been reprinted in many anthologies.

"The Silken-Swift" is set in a fairy-tale world where the Squire lives in a Great House, a world inhabited by two beautiful women, one purest good and one purest evil, and a strong handsome man both women have their eyes on.  The topic of "The Silken-Swift" is Sturgeon's perennial topic, love and sex, and like so many of Sturgeon's stories, it is kind of edgy, perhaps disturbing or offensive--Sturgeon loves to challenge conventional morality.  I sometimes complain that writers include too much description in their stories, and Sturgeon really goes to town describing the Squire's Great House and the nearby Bog and what happens in these fantastical locales, but Sturgeon's descriptions, I feel, add to the atmosphere and make more comprehensible and creditable the behavior of the characters, behavior that is pretty extreme and perhaps only really believable in a fairy tale setting.

The Squire is often away, leaving his beautiful daughter Rita to her own devices.  Rita is totally evil, and loves more than anything to tease men to the point of madness, to humiliate them by insincerely offering them her body and then withholding it to torture them; she also tortures them in other ways.  Her latest victim is Del, the villager with the big beautiful muscles and the long beautiful hair.  Rita lures Del into the Great House and entrances him with her sexy dancing and the fancy food she serves, promising her body but keeping it from him.  The climax of her manipulations is to trick him into drinking a potion that renders him blind.  Then she continues to tease and trick him so that he chases her around the House and then outside the House, banging into things and falling down stairs so he is injured and stunned.

Living nearby is Barbara, a beautiful girl in touch with nature.  She is friends with all the animals and plants, and has a good attitude about life.  She is in love with Del but it is a noble and pure love--she isn't sick with frustrated desire because he doesn't pay any attention to her, but is warmed and comforted just to see the handsome and sturdy Del in the distance.  Similarly, when she sees the unicorn that comes to the pool of pure water in the Bog, Barbara cherishes the sight of the beautiful creature.

Barbara comes upon the injured Del as he lies dazed in front of the Great House.  She comforts and tries to heal him, her love giving her strength to lug his big muscular body to a comfortable place where she can tend his wounds.  Blinded and still amazed, Del thinks Barbara is Rita and that this helpful behavior is further tantalizing torture.  Barbara thinks it may comfort Del to hear about the beautiful unicorn, and she sings for Del the song she composed about the marvelous beast.  Thinking her Rita, Del rapes Barbara, taunting her with the fact that only a virgin can attract a unicorn.

Some time later Del's eyesight has returned and he confronts Rita.  Rita denies having tormented him outside the House and told him about a unicorn.  She offers to prove she is still a virgin by capturing this unicorn, and enlists Barbara, whom she knows is familiar with the Bog, to guide her to the pool.  Del and the rest of the villagers accompany the women.  What will happen when the unicorn arrives?  Will Rita the virgin capture it with the golden bridle she has brought with her?  Or will the unicorn flip the script and show favor to Barbara, who, though no longer a virgin, is a good person (after all, she didn't have Del dragged before the authorities for raping her)?

This is a well-written and compelling story which feels convincing when you are reading it even though it is pretty over-the-top with its cartoonishly good and evil women.  We expect Sturgeon's work to push boundaries and challenge our assumptions, edgy, and "The Silken-Swift" is challenging in multiple ways.  When I was in college, the feminists talked about the Madonna-whore complex, the way men see women not as complex nuanced personalities but as either super good and sexually innocent or super evil and sex crazed, and of course this is exactly how Sturgeon depicts the two women in this story (though of course Rita's real sin is not having too much sex but withholding sex after getting guys all revved up.)  Sturgeon also challenges us with his somewhat counterintuitive and perhaps confusing philosophy of love and goodness ("...Barbara's life was very full, for she was born to receive....loving is a most receiving thing, as anyone can attest who has been loved without returning it...it is the one who is loved who must give and give....") and with his expectation that we sympathize and forgive a rapist.  Even if we object to what Sturgeon is doing with "The Silken-Swift" or disagree with some or all of what he is saying, he presents it all in a way that indicates he is sincere and has actually considered these ideas, that he isn't just trying to shock you in a cheap exploitative way by saying something crazy or depicting creepy sex, and so the story is thought-provoking and engaging (and no doubt for some titillating in its depiction of abusive sexual behavior.) 

Thumbs up for "The Silken-Swift."

"A Saucer of Loneliness" (1953)

In the first two pages of "A Saucer of Loneliness," Sturgeon describes with extravagant dramaticism how a woman tries to commit suicide by stripping naked and jumping into the violent ocean waves and how a guy, our narrator, insists on saving her.  She scratches and punches her would-be lifeguard and he pulls her hair and karate chops her in the neck until she is unconscious so he can rescue her in peace.

(Don't worry, maybe in real life I take a walk in ill-fitting shoes and my foot is still hurting two months later, but in a book people get beaten unconscious and they are just fine twenty minutes later.)

On the third and fourth pages of "A Saucer of Loneliness," the two characters are talking on the beach, the woman demanding the narrator not touch her and saying "You don't know who I am.  Nobody knows who I am."  The next eight pages of the story are a flashback describing, for some reason in the third person, not in the voice of the narrator or this suicidal woman, who she is.

At seventeen she was an unattractive and not particularly intelligent girl from a not very well-off family.  Walking in Central Park in Manhattan, a flying saucer like five or six inches across came down from the sky and stuck briefly to her forehead before falling off.  In mere minutes the FBI got to her and the dead saucer and dragged her off to confinement where various government entities tried to get information out of the girl--it is believed that an alien intelligence or entity entered her brain from the saucer, and the government wants as much data as they can get from this alien encounter to help defend the Earth from hostile E.T.s or defend the West from the Reds.  But the girl, who never had a boyfriend or even a date, and never had a bedroom to herself, now finally had something of her own and refused to tell anyone anything about what she has learned from the aliens.

Eventually she was released, though she received a purely nominal punishment for contempt of court for not saying anything about the alien entity.  The papers and pop culture are full of her story, and all such media is unsympathetic.  Her mother the drunk doesn't want anything to do with her anymore, and people are afraid to have her around as they have the idea she may be a spy or a traitor.  Men date her but they all turn out to be policemen or intelligence agents of some type or another trying to get info about the aliens from her.  All alone, she has tried to fill her life with hobbies, like reading novels and learning about nature, but she was soon disillusioned with these pastimes.  (Novels, for example, are always about the beautiful people, with whom she cannot identify.)  She started throwing into the ocean bottles that contain a piece of paper with a little poem about being lonely written on it.  Eventually she quit throwing the bottles, as she realized the government was collecting them all.

But the Feds missed at least one!  It turns out that the narrator is a man as lonely as this woman.  He has a club foot and a speech impediment and an ugly face so can't get women or a job.  He found one of the bottles and through tireless research figured out where it must have come from.  The poem is the only thing the woman learned from the aliens--the saucer was a message in a bottle just like the ones she threw into the sea, only the aliens thrown their bottles across space.  By coincidence, the very day the narrator came to find her is the day she finally decided to kill herself.  Luckily he saved her and these two unattractive people can live together happily ever after.       

The big theme of Sturgeon's career is love and often in his stories he writes affectingly about human relationships, and "A Saucer of Loneliness" does that.  At the same time, Sturgeon is an elitist who has contempt for most of humanity, and that elitism and contempt are very present in "A Saucer of Loneliness," and, for me, mar the whole enterprise.  Sturgeon is scathing in his description of the crowd that surrounds the girl in Central Park when she collapses from being hit by a flying saucer, he makes fun of people worried about communism and enemy attack as if no communist ever hurt anybody and nobody ever attacked anybody else, and the only person he has anything positive to say about is a shrink.  Presumably this appeals to the many SF editors and readers who are leftists who take Freudianism seriously, but I find this misanthropy and whistling past the graveyard when it comes to foreign threats to be trying and annoying.

In addition, some of the scenes and plot elements feel overwritten and overdone, like the suicide attempt in the first two pages; I was all right with the extravagant detail and extreme personalities and behavior in "The Silken-Swift" because it was set in a fairy tale landscape, but laying it on similarly thick in the real world of New York City, the Soviet Union and psychologists damages the story's credibility.

I've got complaints, but "A Saucer of Loneliness" feels original and is always engaging, never boring, so I can mildly recommend it.

"A Saucer of Loneliness" debuted in a copy of Galaxy that we may be cracking open some day because it prints stories by Damon Knight and Algis Budrys I don't recognize; there is also a pretty hostile review of August Derleth's Beachheads in Space by Groff Conklin.

Mr. Derleth's twelfth anthology contains 14 stories, 5 of which are A, 2 are B-, one is C, and 6 are D or D-....Class A stories are Simak's "Beachhead," van Vogt's "Repetition," Russell's previously anthologized "Metamorphosite," Asimov's "Breeds There A Man . . . ?" and Wyndham's "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down." The rest of the tales (even the mildly "B" ones) we really can do without.

I think I've read six stories from Beachheads in Space, and you can see if I thought we could do without any of them here.      

    

"A Saucer of Lonliness" has been reprinted many times in Sturgeon collections (it is the title story of the seventh volume of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon) and anthologies including those that purport to offer "masterpieces" and stories that represent the SF of the 1950s.

"The Sex Opposite" (1952)

"The Sex Opposite" debuted in Fantastic, and, when Fantastic was going through some tough times in 1968, "The Sex Opposite" was one of the many old stories the magazine reprinted.  It doesn't look like "The Sex Opposite" was ever anthologized, though it did resurface in multiple Sturgeon collections.

"The Sex Opposite" has much of the structure and stock elements of a detective story, and again and again characters withhold information from each other and Sturgeon withholds information from us readers, information that is sprung later in a way that is supposed to be dramatic.  I often find this kind of thing annoying; I'm a simple soul with limited patience for dead ends, cul-de-sacs, and red herrings and would just like to get from point A to point B. 

Budgie is one of those young female reporters we encounter in genre fiction who is always wheedling and whining and cajoling in her efforts to get a scoop.  She busts into the morgue on Dr. Muhlenberg, as she apparently does all the time, looking for some juicy 411 to build a story around.  It also seems that Budgie and Muley have some kind of mutual but not quite acknowledged attraction to each other--if you were foolish enough to read the editor's introduction to the story in the Fall 1952 issue of Fantastic, you'd know that the climax of the story is Budgie and Muley finally becoming an item.  (Sex seems to be a theme of the issue--the cover has a wretched homeless bum on it, but the interior illos offer an abundance of femmes fatale and curvaceous ladies, including a portfolio of Heinrich Kley's drawings of nude women ice skating with crocodiles.)  Budgie and Muley each are aware of some very strange and exciting events, but instead of just telling each other the blockbuster news they have, they are both cagey and have to manipulate each other into giving up the goods.  To make a long story short, conjoined twins were in the park after dark, maybe making out or engaging in heavy petting or something (!) and got murdered--Budgie heard the scream of the dying, the most horrible sound she has ever heard, and after she recovered from the shock she followed the ambulance to the morgue where Muhlenberg is amazed by the bodies of the victims, they being the most perfectly formed and least-uncomfortably conjoined Siamese twins he has ever become aware of.  The two hear that unique scream again--was it outside, the cry of another victim?  Or are the "bodies" in the morgue still alive? 

While our hero and heroine are outside investigating, somebody with knowledge of surgery and chemistry uses chemicals to burn up the bodies in the morgue--nothing is left of the corpses after the 7000 degrees Fahrenheit inferno!  Sturgeon tries to turn Muhlenberg's fighting the fire into a thrilling action scene, but it is just confusing--Muley closes a door on the fire and then takes fire extinguishers in both hands and somehow puts out the fire but Sturgeon doesn't say that he set down any of the fire extinguishers or opened the door, but I guess he must have.  

Budgie is back home when Muley goes to a Mexican bar to drink beer and listen to Yma Sumac on the jukebox.  In the bar is a beautiful woman--she also loves Sumac!  This woman is Muhlenberg's dream girl, just the kind of woman he has always wanted, and he feels totally at ease, absolutely sympatico with her.  She goes back with him to his place where they listen to records and read classics aloud to each other.  She implies they are going to have sex but while he isn't looking she sneaks off; fortunately, they made a date for tomorrow night at a dive bar in a tough part of town.

The next evening after work at the morgue, Muhlenberg goes out to meet his dream girl and runs into Budgie.  Budgie tells him that today she met her dream man in the morning and spent the day with him walking in the country and made a date with him to meet right here at this dump.  The dream-creature appears, a woman in masculine clothes--she spent last evening with M and today with B.  

Then comes the long explanation.  Living among us is a race of females who reproduce asexually by budding.  This budding produces a clone, so, to make sure the race enjoys the benefits of genetic variation, these beings also perform what Sturgeon calls "syzygy"--two of the beings melt together, exchange some genetic material, and then separate, each changed to some degree.  Sturgeon says paramecium do this.  (If I am understanding this right, wikipedia calls this process "conjugation.")  Last night's murder victims were in the process of syzygy when some punks came upon them and killed them.  Why were these beings doing this in public instead of some safe place.  Because they love nature!

As we might expect of creatures in a Sturgeon story, these sexless women are superior to the human race in almost every way--peaceful, in touch with nature, equipped with psychic powers, possessed of empathy bordering on a collective consciousness, blah blah blah.  What they lack is the ambition, the affinity for risk, that we humans have and that leads us to build technology, machines, institutions.  So, they live in a symbiotic relationship with us homo sapiens--they benefit from our building and they use their psychic powers to inspire our greatest artists.  It was these psychic and empathic powers that she used to make M and B feel so warm and cozy with her--these sexless females are experts in all aspects of love except the sexual.  Of course, they have to keep their existence a secret because human beings are so violent and always try to kill people who are different--it was she who obliterated the evidence in the morgue.  (Science fiction readers love this "woe is me, I am different than everybody else (and better, of course) and so everybody is mean to me" goop.)  Sturgeon puts in a good word for world government through this woman's mouth, making me groan--giving the Chinese Communist Party and Islamic jihadis even more influence over my life is not what I am looking for, Ted.

The sexless woman has not only invited Budgie and Muhley to this crummy bar, but the three men who slew her fellows in the park while they were in the middle of the most wonderful of all (non-sexual) love experiences.  When she can see the killers out the bar window, she uses her psychic powers to make them kill each other.  Then she uses her psychic powers to make Budgie and Muhlenberg forget everything she just told them.  But after she leaves, her beneficent influence lingers--B and M admit they love each other and we readers are able to believe they live happily ever after.  (Science fiction readers love the idea of using special powers to get revenge on or manipulate the normies.)

This is today's weakest story, and I have enumerated my many complaints above, but like "A Saucer of Loneliness," "The Sex Opposite" is strange and challenging in the way serious SF should be and is never boring, so I'm putting it at the border of acceptable and good.

The Jan '68 ish of Fantastic prints two interior illos by Jeff Jones, so you 
Jones completists should check it out

**********

Sturgeon's action scenes are clunky, and some of his attitudes are silly and his ideas groaners, but he's a writer who is serious and passionate and holds the reader's interest and often throws stuff at you that feels new.  So a decent crop of stories.  Stay tuned for more interaction with Killdozer Ted, including stories that did not debut in science fiction magazines.

Bad Twitter News

It seems some ne'er-do-well hacked into my X account and put up some posts that break the X rules and so my X account has been suspended.  Many of my blog posts here include links to my X posts, and I have no idea if those links will send you to my photos of SF books and sculptures at art museums or some other less savory or even unsafe content, so I am posting this as a warning and/or apology.  I have appealed my suspension and if things go back to normal I may delete this blog post.

Merril-approved 1959 stories by T Godwin, "D Gordon," & W L Gresham

After "F" comes "G."  Back on July 9, we read three stories published in 1959 by authors whose names begin with "F," stories that Judith Merril, renowned anthologist, had recommended.  On the same list of Honorable Mentions in the back of Merril's critically acclaimed The Year's Best S-F: Fifth Annual Edition we find six stories by author's whose names begin with "G."  We're reading four of these, skipping Daniel F. Galouye's "The City of Force" because I read it in Bodyguard and Four Other Short Novels from Galaxy back in my New York days and Ron Goulart's "Parlor Game" because I avoid joke stories and always assume that is what Goulart is selling, and I am not in the market for joke stories.  But we've still got four capers torn from the science fiction magazines of the second Eisenhower term to explore.

"Empathy" by Tom Godwin 

Let's see what kind of story Merril thought worth promoting that was penned by Tom Godwin, author of the controversial "Cold Equations," a story heavily influenced by John W. Campbell, Jr.  "Empathy" debuted in Fantastic and would not be reprinted until our own wild 21st century in a Baen collection; I'm reading the Fantastic printing.

"Empathy" is one of those stories about how some white people who represent a Western power are nice to nonwhite natives and some other white people are mean to nonwhites and you should be one of the nice ones.  Also, a story about intragovernmental rivalries and the limitations of computers and the danger of doing everything by the book instead of thinking on your feet.

Captain Rider of the Frontier Corps used to be in charge of the Terran outpost on Deneb Five, a planet whose location makes it strategically essential to further Earth exploration, and he had a decent relationship with the natives, a bunch of black-skinned dragon-riding cavalrymen armed with slug rifles.  But just recently Deneb Five has fallen under the jurisdiction of the Extraterrestrial Relations Board (ERB--maybe a joke reference to the creator of John Carter?), a new agency that has been hoovering up all the funds once issued to the Frontier Corps.  Now Deneb Five's human outpost is under the control of a General Beeling, whom we know is no good because he is fat.  While Rider of Frontier Corps had a tiny staff of dog-people from the Altair system, people renowned for their powers of empathy, Beeling of ERB has a vast human staff, many of them young men tricked into joining ERB with promises of adventure.  Beeling has contempt for non-Terrans like the canine Altairian empaths and the black Denebian riders.  As the story begins, hundreds of native mounted troops are surrounding the Terran outpost, annoyed and scared by the arrival of Beeling's large force, and a final negotiation is about to begin--Rider fears that if Beeling botches the negotiation the far more numerous Denebians will kill all the Terrans (and the dog-people.)  When it rains it pours, and Rider has another problem on his mind-- one of the dog-people is off on a mission on the coast forty miles away and is about to be drowned by the very high tide caused by this planet's many moons, and Beeling won't authorize use of the helicopter to rescue her while there is a chance of native attack on the base--Beeling and ERB think of the Altairians as mere animals, as Rider's pets or mascots.  

Beeling has a computer analysis of the natives and it guides his negotiations into disaster--as Rider knows, computer analysis doesn't work in negotiations with people; sensitive people like Rider who have respect for others and can understand their emotions have to negotiate with people, not some haughty computer-user like Beeling, who sees people as soulless profit maximizers.  Rider is aware that ERB computer analysis has failed on almost every alien race, a fact the ERB has kept a secret from the chief executives of the Earth government.  So, it looks like tomorrow the Denebian riflemen will kill all the humans and dog people, even though the computer told Beeling the black natives would never actually attack the Terran base.     

Beeling, via helicopter, abandons his men at the base after sending a report to Earth blaming the Frontier Corps for the impending massacre; this report that will likely lead to the total defunding and disbanding of the Frontier Corps.  Rider marches forty miles to rescue the female dog-person.  When the natives see that Rider, unlike the absent Beeling, isn't a racist and a coward, they decide to resume negotiations; Rider not only secures the use of the planet as a refueling station for Earth, but the Denebian chief sends a message to Earth explaining how great Rider and the Frontier Corps are and how terrible are Beeling and the ERB.

This story's message and drama are both pretty banal and pretty over-the-top; for example, the dog people don't just look kind of like dogs, but act like dogs, wagging tails when happy and carrying stuff in their mouths and all that, so we readers get the hint that they are loyal and devoted, like dogs are, and should like them, while the General is a moron and a coward and a fatso and every other bad thing Godwin can think of.  We call this stacking the deck.  I wouldn't call "Empathy" bad, just weak filler, so we'll grade it "barely acceptable."  Presumably Merril liked "Empathy"'s anti-racist message.

"Despoilers of the Golden Empire" by Randall Garrett (as by David Gordon)

I tend to avoid Randall Garrett as I expect his stories to be joke stories, and the two stories by "David Gordon" recommended by Merril on her 1959 Honorable Mentions list certainly have joke titles.  I was, however, initially fooled by the pseudonym and didn't realize who the real author of these stories was until after I had psychologically committed myself to reading them, and a blog post with only two stories feels kind of light, besides, I am interested in John W. Campbell,  Jr. and Astounding, so it sort of makes sense for me to read these Garrett pieces if I am going to read any.

"Despoilers of the Golden Empire" is written in a chatty casual style, like the narrator is hanging out with you, and is one of those stories that has the feel of a popular history written in the far future, discussing events from the not quite so far future with a level of detached irony.  The narrator, for example, says stuff about how this or that question you might have about elements of the story aren't addressed by extant sources, and stuff like "Before you can get a picture of the commander—that is, as far as his personality goes—you have to get a picture of the man physically."

The commander in question is one of the most famous of the many adventurers of the Second Empire.  You see, long long the human race conquered the universe, then its empire collapsed into squalling factions, but then came the Second Empire, which tries to maintain control while allowing individual regions some autonomy.  The odd thing to the reader about this Second Empire is that gold, in some unexplained fashion, is key to the universe's economic and political systems, not uranium or petroleum or something that seems more intuitive, and so starships full of adventurers travel the galaxies looking for gold while scientists and businessmen struggle to figure out a way to artificially create gold.  Kelly Freas' opening illustration to the story makes crystal clear the connection of these Second Empire adventurers to the conquistadors and pirates of the days of Cortes and Drake.

After this background, Garrett offers his physical and psychological description of the tough 60-year-old soldier Commander Frank, and then it is on to his grand adventure.  Frank is confident he has found a planet loaded with gold, but investors are very cautious, so his expedition is undermanned and underequipped.  On the planet he and his men acts exactly like conquistadors, not scientists or astronauts or whatever.  Frank gives stirring speeches to his men, everybody is clad in steel armor and armed with swords and pikes because the charges for their energy weapons are expensive.  They march around the planet on foot, though they do have motorized "carriers," which are used like pack animals most of the time but in battle ridden cavalry charge style.

If Frank and his men are like conquistadors, the natives of the planet are almost exactly like Pre-Columbian Mesoamericans, red-skinned humans who don't have the wheel or riding animals and whose civilization consists of a ruling demographic that lords it over the lesser tribes of its vast empire. 

What follows the landing on the planet is a standard adventure story with very few science fiction elements.  The Terrans, though outnumbered, can outfight the natives with their superior equipment and they take over one village after another; other obstacles include disease and the fatigue of the march and snake attack and occasional dissension in the ranks.  Frank is shown to be a great fighting man able to take on multiple opponents at once and best them, as well as a cunning and charismatic leader.  Garrett throws in an analog of Christianity and a missionary priest who wants to convert the natives--this element suddenly appears in the middle of the story and feels tacked on.  When Frank's little army arrives at the capital city of the native empire, Frank captures the native emperor via trickery and takes over the planet.

Garrett then quickly sketches out the succeeding decade, in which Frank has to crush rebellions by both natives and Terrans.  Then comes the twist ending, in which Frank is murdered by traitors, and the big reveal, when Garrett explicitly admits that this story is a retelling of Pizarro's conquest of Peru.

As I was reading "Despoilers of the Golden Empire," I was expecting to give it an "acceptable" rating as an unoriginal, plodding, mediocre, but not actually bad, adventure story, but the final self-satisfied revelation of the story's lazy and cheap gimmick was so annoying that it sank the story down into bad territory.  Thumbs down!  Why would prestigious editors Campbell and Merril countenance such a thing? "Despoilers of the Golden Empire" has nothing interesting or new to say, no real point of view--it doesn't even have the "imperialism is bad" or "white people are greedy" theme you might expect--and no particular artistic merit--it isn't well-written or funny or make you feel sympathy for Frank or the natives or anything like that.  And why would anthologists like Stanley Schmidt and Robert Adams reprint it?  Schmidts anthology has a humor theme, but "D of the G E" is not funny.  Adams' anthology is about soldiers, and Frank/Pizarro is a soldier, but "D of the G E" is not particularly exciting or entertaining and doesn't say anything interesting or special about the life or profession or character of soldiers.  What were Campbell, Merril, Schmidt and Adams (or co-editors Greenberg and P. C. Adams) thinking?

When I worked in public academia I pretty regularly had to copyedit, and sometimes even compose, propaganda that was a bunch of lies, eh, I mean, qualitative research the conclusions of which I found unconvincing.  To do so, I would, like an actor, "get into the head" of some other person and make the kinds of arguments such a person would make.  Let's pretend I am being paid to come up with arguments that Campbell, Merril, Schmidt and Adams might make if you asked them what is good  about "Despoilers of the Golden Empire."  As for "D of the G E" as joke story, perhaps it is a satire of those science fiction writers who lazily rehash episodes from history as adventure stories, or maybe a puzzle pointed at science fiction readers, a test to see if they are familiar with history.  A brief mention of psychic powers which has no bearing on the plot may be a friendly little dig at Astounding editor Campbell, well-known to be fascinated by psychic powers and eager to print stories on that theme.  More philosophically, perhaps "D of G E" is a meta/recursive criticism of escapist literature that sets adventures in fantasy lands when real life includes locales and civilizations, journeys and battles, and characters and ideologies every bit as strange and amazing as anything a genre writer could dream up. 

I don't know if I am earning my pay today speaking for SF editors any better than I earned my pay speaking for academic pinkos back in my Manhattan days; these arguments of mine are not too hot.  The success of this story will remain inexplicable to me.    

"...or Your Money Back" by Randall Garrett (as by David Gordon)

This will probably be the last Randall Garrett story I ever read, so pay attention!

Like "Despoilers of the Golden Empire," "...or Your Money Back" chugs along competently though unimaginatively through a bunch of formulaic and mediocre scenes until we get a sort of twist ending that we sort of saw coming.  We'll call this one barely acceptable as it is shorter than the very long "D of the G E" and at least has some traditional science fiction elements like speculations about the future, you know, what you read an actual science fiction magazine looking for.

Our narrator is a Las Vegas attorney and Garrett runs up the word count with cliches about the law, you know, a lawyer is an officer of the court and has a duty to give his client the best possible defense even if he knows he is guilty and that sort of stuff.  You've already heard this stuff a hundred times, hearing it the 101st time won't hurt you.  A guy from New York hires the narrator to defend him--NY guy expects to get in trouble at the casino.  

Big Apple guy has a pocket-sized device with a dial on it and when he goes to the top casino in town he turns the dial to the number of the roulette wheel on which he has placed his bets and wins all his bets.  Garrett gives us a long scene in which Gotham guy does this stuff again and again and the people at the casino--casino staff, customers, police--react to the guy's amazing run of luck.  He and his device end up in the hands of the police, and he is indicted for cheating at gambling.  

Next up, a long trial scene in which our narrator and the district attorney question witnesses and the NYer and the judge says this and the jury does that blah blah blah.  The casino scene and the court scene feel like the thousand casino scenes and the million court scenes you have already endured on TV, in the movie theatre, and in books before.  

Anyway, the twist is that the device does nothing whatsoever, it is just a decorated box (it actually sounds like one of those fidget boxes that first became available a few years ago.)  The NYer has had success at the roulette wheel because he has psychic powers.  He wanted to bring this case to court to publicize the existence of psychic powers, which many people have but which generally lie dormant.  Three years later, human life has been revolutionized by the unleashing of humankind's psychic powers--for example, a space ship powered by psychics has just landed eighty astronauts on Mars and chemical and mechanical machines are becoming obsolete.

Astounding editor Campbell was fascinated by psychic powers so we can see why this optimistic story about such abilities might tickle his fancy.  I don't know why Merril liked this one.  I may think "...or Your Money Back" is better than "Despoilers of the Golden Empire," but SF editors don't seen to have thought so--this tale of cheating at the casino for the good of humanity has only ever been reprinted in the 1987 Garret collection Takeoff, Too!, sequel to 1980's Takeoff, which includes "D of the G E." 

"The Forsaken Earthman" by William Lindsay Gresham

Gresham of Baltimore has only five fiction credits at isfdb; he seems to have been more successful as a detective writer and a nonfiction writer specializing in spiritualism and the milieu of the carnival sideshow.  His life sounds more interesting than his work, to be honest; it seems Gresham's catastrophic mishandling of the family finances, his alcoholism and his infidelity drove his wife, poet and novelist Joy Davidman, to flee to England and marry C. S. Lewis, whose master wordsmithery had played a role in her conversion from atheistic communism to Christianity.  Anyway, "The Forsaken Earthman" debuted in Satellite* and does not appear to have been reprinted; did Merril, always trying to build bridges between and dissolve barriers between the genres and between the genres and the mainstream, promote "The Forsaken Earthman" because Gresham's 1946 novel Nightmare Alley was a hit and the basis for a film?  With its emphasis on human relationships--sexual relationships between men and women, the relationship between a man under stress and a man of the cloth, and the relationship between a man and his children--and because it is a sort of riff on Matthew Arnold's "The Forsaken Merman." "The Forsaken Earthman" often feels like a mainstream story. 

*Here in this bitchy footnote I will complain that "The Forsaken Earthman" here in Satellite ("THE BEST IN SCIENCE FICTION") is full of typos and the illustration that accompanies the story is crude and without style or charm. 

And maybe Merril liked "The Forsaken Earthman" because it is an anti-racist story and one of those stories that concocts a utopian society of aliens who are better than humans as a way of criticizing the human race.  The protagonist of "The Forsaken Earthman" is a crew member of the first serious expedition to Mars; he goes native, abandoning the mission to marry a Martian girl.  Part of the story is a first person account from the chaplain and morale officer on the mission, part of it letters written by the deserter to the chaplain from his new Martian home.  Early letters describes his happy life among the amphibious Martians, who have gills and spend most of their time underwater in their canals, which they long ago covered over with airtight buildings and rooves, to keep in the oxygen they need, which is scarce on the Martian surface--Mars is dead on the surface, but alive below the surface, in what the chaplain likens to an aquarium.  The Martians have a technology based on bioengineering--the airtight suits of armor they wear while on the surface are a bunch of living molluscs stuck together, for example, and they work steel by applying to it colonies of acidic germs or single-celled creatures or something.    Reading about how happy and smart and good-looking the Martians are and how beautiful their civilization, where everybody runs around naked and plays music all day is, paragraph after paragraph, kinda boring.

The deserter lacks gills, of course, and has to live in the buildings and on the ledges just under the roof of the canal, and in his letters keeps asking the chaplain to provide him diving equipment so he can spend more time with his family and explore the dark depths of the canals.  The chaplain eventually brings it, so we get more long descriptions of how beautiful everything is under the canals and how superior the Martians are.  The deserter writes a book about the stuff he discovers.

"The Forsaken Earthman" is a tragedy of sorts.  The deserter's Martian wife abandons him, leaving the part of the canal to which he is confined by his lack of gills, and she takes the kids with her--he never sees any of them again.  In his letters he goes on and on about missing the kids and eventually even missing Earth.  He becomes a drunk and dies of an infection the Martians don't know how to deal with.  But posthumously, he is a hero and statues are built of him.  His half-Terran, half-Martian kids are leaders in the development of a peaceful interplanetary civilization that consists of Venus (the people there are aquatic, too), Earth and Mars, and his book on submarine Mars is a classic pioneering work.  Most importantly, by defying the racism of his fellow Terrans and by disobeying orders and abandoning his post, he demonstrated the importance of being a rebel and the tremendous value of interracial marriage.  Yes, this story doesn't just say interracial marriage should be legally and socially equal to intraracial marriage, but is actually better because it advances the human species.

His tragedy was an illustration of a fact now accepted everywhere throughout die solar system—that when two species capable and desirous of mating are thrown together by circumstance, it is criminal to keep them apart by law, by force, by censure or by ridicule. Through the mating of similar species new species are developed which have their contribution to make in the ever upward spiral of life in the galaxy and eventually beyond.

"The Forsaken Earthman" feels like a filler piece as it covers well-trod themes without generating any excitement or surprise, married to an OK mainstream story about a guy who screws up his relationships but turns out to be a hero in the end because he's a rebel.  Is this a pathetic wish-fulfillment fantasy of Gresham's, a drunk whose wife and children left him for a more successful scribbler from a related but distinct culture?

Reading "The Forsaken Earthman" felt like a chore while I was doing it, but looking back on it, the basic plot and themes are more or less sound, it is just that Gresham lays it all on way too thick.  Barely acceptable is our verdict.

**********

Oy, another rough day here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Four stories that feel long and rehash shopworn themes without adding to them any novel twist or adorning them with some kind of unique style.  I guess we have to hope Merril will be serving up a better plate of "H"s than she has "G"s.  Stay tuned to find out if she does so.