Merril-endorsed 1958 tales by S Jackson, D Keyes and J Kippax

If you buy a copy of Judith Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume for $2.00, a course I certainly recommend, you will find in the back of the 256-page book an alphabetical-by-author list of stories printed in 1958 and headed "Honorable Mentions."  Today we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are reading the lone "J" story, and two of the "K" stories. 

"The Omen" by Shirley Jackson   

I generally avoid Shirley Jackson because mainstream critics are always breathlessly telling you how great she is so I assume they are overdoing it out of some ulterior motive, and because when people tell me about "The Lottery," a story they make schoolkids read, my only response can be "Is that it?" But today we'll read "The Omen" in an effort to see what all the fuss is about. For some reason Merril cites the source of the story as The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Series 8, not the actual magazine issue in which it first appeared (the same issue of F&SF that printed Poul Anderson's "Backwardness" and reprinted Robert Bloch's "How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster," stories we read earlier this year) so I am dutifully reading "The Omen" in that anthology in case that version is updated or something.

"The Omen" is a cutesy humor story about a lovable grandmother and her adorable family and a nice young woman and her domineering, selfish, stifling, manipulative mother, so you know there is at least one realistic character is this story.  There is however, in my humble opinion, no actual SF content in the story, just a long series of purportedly funny coincidences.  What "The Omen" really is is a mundane mainstream story that looks at female relationships.

A sweet granny lives with her daughter, daughter's husband, and their two lovable kids.  Granny falls into some money unexpectedly and decides to go out and buy everybody in the family a gift.  She writes a vague shopping list which she loses on the bus the instant she sits down.

Then we have the pretty young woman who lives alone with her mother.  She has a steady boyfriend who has wanted to marry her for three years--she hasn't consented because her monstrous mother refuses to give her blessing; Mom doesn't want to live alone and goes on and on about how she will starve if the daughter leaves.  The attractive young lady has had it up to here with her mother and hurries out one day, exasperated, wishing she had the courage to disobey her mother and marry her guy.  She wishes she would find an omen that would give her the strength to pursue her own life and build her own family.  She gets on the wrong bus, finds the granny's cryptic list, and ends up in a part of town she has never been to before.  She has a series of adventures that seem to correspond to the brief notes on the list she has found, and the upshot of these adventures is that she finds the willpower to call up her boyfriend at his work and say she will marry him and Mom will just have to live with it.  These adventures involve encounters with other women and the highlight of these capers is her being mistaken for another woman.

Granny returns home with different gifts than her family asked for, but the kids still like their gifts.

I may be using the word "adventures" in describing Jackson's story here but this is not a thriller--"The Omen" is light-hearted and life-affirming, portraying no risk and no danger; for example, strangers all try to help granny--there are no Mike Tyson or George Floyd types in the story who try to rob her.

This is a competent, professionally put-together mainstream story that has very little provocative or surprising to say.  Why F&SF editor Anthony Boucher and Judith Merril think it is a big deal--or an SF story--is a little mysterious, but I guess Boucher thought Jackson's name on the cover might move copies and Merril hoped some of the high status of a New Yorker writer would rub off on SF--Merril is famous for shoehorning stories by prestigious mainstream figures into her anthologies and for striving to convince people that SF is just as good as the mainstream and distinctions between genres are bogus and so on.  Well, "The Omen" is not a bad story, so I guess I can't be too annoyed.

"The Trouble with Elmo" by Daniel Keyes

Like "The Lottery," "Flowers for Algernon" is one of those stories kids read in school--at least my class read it.  Having put up my first blog entry about the famous Shirley Jackson today we are also posting my first ever blog content about the famous Daniel Keyes!  It's a day of wonders!

Here we have another humor story, but whereas Jackson's "The Omen" was more or less realistic and set in the mundane real world, Keyes' "The Trouble With Elmo" is broad and silly and an actual science fiction story about the future, technology and ideas.

The story begins with an obese Senator haranguing the world's top expert on the computer that is running the world, a man whose failure to deactivate the computer (nicknamed Elmo) has led to him being demoted all the way to private.  Though a lowly private, our hero talks back to the senator, his unique skills being a sort of insurance policy, I guess.

Elmo was built and activated to solve a major world problem, but the solution the supercomputer instituted to that problem caused a new problem, and by solving that second problem Elmo triggered the arrival of a third problem, etc.  This has been going on for years.  The Senator is sure the computer is deliberately causing each of this succession of world-threatening problems in order to guarantee its own survival--after all, if Earth's problems are solved, Elmo will be deactivated.

Elmo solves the latest problem he has created by initiating first contact with space aliens and acquiring from them some valuable gas.  In exchange, the aliens want the landmass of Asia--Earth can keep the people.  Elmo foresees that Earth will need his services to manage the migration of the population of Asia to the rest of the world.

We get some run-of-the-mill political satire in the scenes of politicians in Washington responding to this deal.  Then the private solves everybody's problems by convincing the aliens to accept Elmo and himself as payment instead of Asia.  The private, in civilian life, was a fix-it man, and so likes the idea of solving the problems of alien civilizations in concert with Elmo, whom he considers a friend and is a good chess partner.

Lame filler.

"The Trouble with Elmo" has not been reprinted in America as far as I can tell, though it was included in foreign editions of Galaxy and in a Japanese collection of Keyes stories.  I am getting the impression that there has never been a Keyes collection printed in English, but maybe isfdb and wikipedia are steering me wrong (it wouldn't be the first time!)      

"Me, Myself and I" by John Kippax

Well, here's another guy I've never blogged about before.  Three excursions into virgin territory in one day!  John Kippax is the pen name of British writer and musician John Charles Hynam and he has quite a few short fiction credits at isfdb.  "Me, Myself and I" has a jokey title and I certainly hope it is not an absurdist humor story because it takes up 26 pages in the place I am reading it, Science Fantasy.

Thankfully, this is not an over-the-top joke piece, and Kippax turns out to have a smooth comfortable style, so that, while the plot is just OK and the ending something of a letdown, the story never feels boring or long.

Gordon Beale is one of those middle-class guys who rides the train in to the office everyday to work.  I was once one of those guys, though I lived in New York and Beale lives someplace in England and of course I was employed by the government so there wasn't really much work going on.  Also, at home I had a steady girlfriend who became my wife (that's "partner" to you kids) and Beale has nobody and is quite lonely.  

Beale is shy and standoffish and lacking in social skills so can't make friends or meet girls and spends his evenings alone at home--he's living alone but he neither likes it nor loves it.  But then one day on the train he finds a book he assumes somebody left by mistake.  He almost hands it over to the lost and found, but then he decides to take it home and read it.  It turns out to be a self help book with no author's name on it and no publication data on any page.  And like the note in Jackson's "The Omen," this strange document changes our protagonist's life--but this is a horror story so the change is not for the better!

The book encourages and guides Beale in an examination of his early life and uncovering of why he is a failure socially and then in the conception of a new version of himself that is a superior version of himself, similar but more bold, more assertive.  Visualizing a better Beale makes a better Beale actually appear!  A man who looks like Beale but is more confident, better able to focus and plan ahead, good at interacting with others, charming and persuasive.  This new Beale is christened "Harry," and goes from being a faint image to a solidly real man!  Gordon Beale starts staying home during the day while Harry Beale gets on the train and works in the office.  On the train Harry makes friends with a neighbor who is able to offer valuable connections and stock market advice.  At the office Harry bests Gordon's rival for the affections of a pretty young secretary (like 15 years younger than Gordon and Harry) and in the eyes of the boss, saving the company a stack of money by reexamining some figures.  Gordon thinks that after Harry has secured a promotion and had sex with the secretary and gotten her to agree to marry him he can dematerialize Harry and enjoy the newly salubrious and happy life Harry has secured for him.  But Harry has become too powerful to be dismissed!  And when it turns out Harry has stolen money from the company to buy jewelry for the secretary, Gordon has to go on the lam, staying in crappy hotels and hiding from the police!  But before the bobbies can drag him off to gaol with a "g," Gordon Beale keels over--Harry has found the book and has used it to create another Beale--Sam--and this has stretched the original's soul too thin.  At least I think that is what happened.

This story gets a passing grade but there are serious holes in the plot.  Where does the book come from?  If the book was instrumental in creating Harry, how come Harry doesn't know about it and also falls into its trap?  Gordon Beale is a fastidious rule-follower, bashful and lacking in initiative, so why does Harry turn into a brazen thief?  And since the theft was discovered, doesn't Harry also lose his job and his girl?  How does it help a now jobless and womanless Harry to create an additional duplicate who will also have to hide from the police?  I'm afraid Kippax didn't put enough energy into coming up with an ending for his story.

Besides the original magazine, you can find "Me, Myself and I" in a 2014 anthology of stories from Science Fantasy entitled The Daymakers.

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I don't consider any of today's stories good, but only Keyes' is actually bad.  Jackson's is the best because, while Kippax also has a good style, Jackson's plot is internally consistent and her characters all act in a believable way, while Kippax's plot goes off the rails a bit at the end.

More Merril-approved "K" stories from 1958 when next we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Merril-recommended '58 stories: Harrison, Herbert & High

In 1959 the fourth volume of Judith Merril's critically adored anthology series, SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy, was published, and in the back of the book was included a list three pages long of Honorable Mentions--stories from 1958 Merril thought good but which were not reprinted in the book.  We here at MPorcius Fiction Log been looking through this alphabetical list and investigating listed stories by authors who interest us, and today we'll read some of the "H" stories.

"Trainee for Mars" by Harry Harrison

Science fiction writers love the idea of super-realistic simulations, as we have seen so often on TV (space battleship Yamato has that recreation room where stressed out space crew can relive happy times back on Earth, and I hear that the ship in the new Star Trek has a "holodeck" where robots can play Sherlock Holmes and have sex) and in the cinema (I actually saw The Matrix when it was new and I have heard about The Truman Show.)  Here in "Trainee for Mars," Harrison envisions the government preparing in large pressure tanks elaborate mechanical simulations of conditions on Mars for use in immersive trainings of the first men who will land on Mars.

After the opening scene in which we witness a guy commit a blunder and get killed on Mars, only to learn it is just a simulation and he'll be OK, we learn that the military men running the space program are having a hell of a time finding anybody conscientious enough to send to Mars.  The first team to land on the red planet will consist of two astronauts, and they have run simulations of the Mars mission again and again and every time at least one member of each two-man team gets himself "killed."

The head of the Mars landing program tells our main character, one of the few trainees who has survived every simulated expedition he has been on, that the government shrinks have a theory--men are negligent during the simulations because they know it is a simulation and that their errors won't really kill them.  So it has been decided that the next simulation, in which our hero will participate, will be truly deadly--if a guy's space suit is ruptured the boffins won't open up the chamber to rescue him but instead let him freeze or asphyxiate to death!

The twist ending of Harrison's story is perhaps obvious.  Our hero and his partner--another man who has always survived the simulated missions--face many new challenges on the expedition they think is a deadly simulation, but overcome them.  The mission is almost over on its twenty-fourth day when the men realize this is no training exercise--they are really on Mars!  In the concluding scenes back on Earth, Harrison engages in psychological and sociological speculation about the ability of human beings to face the stresses of space flight and exploring other planets.

Thumbs up for "Trainee for Mars."  The adventure stuff works, the characters all behave realistically and sympathetically, and the psychological themes as well as the perhaps controversial theme of how individuals have to take risks and make sacrifices--and leaders perhaps have to treat their subordinates shabbily--for civilization to progress, are compelling.  A good selection by Merril.

In the same year it debuted in Fantastic Universe, "Trainee for Mars" was published in New Worlds, the British magazine then edited by John Carnell, and it would be included in multiple later Harrison collections, including War with the Robots.  I read the story in its original magazine version in a scan at the internet archive of FU.  

"Cease Fire" by Frank Herbert 

Here we have a story from Astounding by the author of Dune that would go on to be reprinted by famous editor and critic Damon Knight in A Century of Science Fiction and appear in The Best of Frank Herbert, so I guess it is fair to say this story represents Herbert in top form and has been embraced by SF tastemakers.  I hope I too can embrace it.  I'm reading the original Astounding version today.

"Cease Fire" is a well-written story in the classic mold of an Astounding story--it romanticizes science and the scientist, has some adventure elements, and also takes a provocative and perhaps counterintuitive stance that challenges conventional thinking.  John W. Campbell, Jr. strove in his own writing, and as editor of Astounding, to present to his readers stories that would "shake 'em up," as he put it to Barry Malzberg when they met in 1969, a meeting Malzberg chronicled in his 1982 essay on Campbell which you can read in Engines of the Night. 

"Cease Fire" takes place in the early Seventies, when the "Allies" are at war with some dangerous unnamed enemy in the Arctic--I'm guessing it's the god-damned commies, but there are really no clues.  Our main character was a chemist in civilian life who today is a corporal in the Army, manning a solo observation post; both the Allies and the enemy have detectors that can sense life, but luckily the Allies have a shield that can keep life forms like our hero from being detected by them.  

There is an engaging action scene in which the protagonist has to figure out if some life forms he has detected are enemy soldiers or just wild animals.  But the meat of the story is how he suddenly, in the middle of an engagement with the enemy, extrapolating from the principles of the life detector and shield, has an idea for a new device that can win the war for the Allies.  The middle part of the story consists of him trying to convince skeptical superiors his idea is legit and not the product of combat stress-induced madness or a shirker's plot to get off the front line.  The final part of the story covers the experiments that prove his idea is a workable one--he has invented a device that can remotely detonate any explosive, and not just the shells in an arms depot or the cartridges in a rifle magazine but even the gasoline in a motor car or the matches in a matchbook.  Our hero thinks this invention can not only win the current war, but will prevent all future war.  His superiors are not so sanguine--these cynical professional fighting men figure war will continue but take different forms, with a return to swords and archery and/or new and horrible poison gasses and bacteriological weapons.

In his 1930s stories like "Machine" and "Invaders" Campbell tried to get readers to consider that maybe even prima facie horrible things like being enslaved or conquered by space aliens could have a long term positive effect, and here in "Cease Fire" in Campbell's magazine, Herbert tries to get readers to consider that what would strike many as obviously beneficial development, the abolition of atomic bombs, heavy artillery and machine guns, might have a negative effect.  This adds a level of interest and sophistication to an already entertaining story that could have simply ended with victory over the foe and the dawning of an age of peace.   

Pretty good.

"Risk Economy" by Philip High 

Back in 2016 I read High's novel The Mad Metropolis and thought it merely acceptable.  "Risk Economy" will be only the second thing by High I have ever read, but since Merril liked it and since it was included in a 2002 "best of" collection we have reason to hope it will be better than the first thing I read by him.

Well, "Risk Economy" is a mediocre thing, the style bland and the ideas OK but not developed very far nor serving as the springboard for a compelling human story.  Another merely acceptable production from High.

Our protagonist is a spaceman, the first human to leave the Solar System!  For five years he has been travelling via hyperspace, passing by various stars and planets, his computer scanning them and cataloging data about them.  Today he returns to Earth.  He is well aware that while five years have passed for him, nine hundred years have passed on Earth, and his friend, the inventor of the hyperspace ship, and his sexy girlfriend, must be long dead.

Earth is not at all like what he expected.  Nobody cares about the data his computer has collected.  And his buddy the inventor and his sexy girlfriend are alive, and don't look that much older--but they don't remember him!  Ten years after he left, an immortality drug was discovered and everybody took it.  Even more amazing, this drug changes your genetic makeup so your kids are also immortal.  Quickly the world became overcrowded and there were food shortages and tremendous wars took place.  Eventually it was discovered that the human brain can only hold about 150 years worth of memories.  Bummer!  Luckily the inventor kept a diary back in the 20th century and has preserved it, so he knew to meet our protagonist, even if he doesn't remember him or even how he invented and built the star ship.

After the wars ended, the new government instituted a new economy which rendered the world relatively crime-free and war-free but also led to social and technological stagnation.  Robots and computers do all the work, and people get money that is keyed to their unique biological identifiers so nobody else can use it.  To receive money, people have to risk their lives, performing feats like walking a tightrope over a canyon or participating in a dangerous rocket car race or whatever.  A computer rates how risky the feat is; if you only have a small risk of getting killed (being a spectator in the stands at the rocket car race, for example) you only get a little money.  Taking a big risk (like driving one of the crash-prone rocket-propelled automobiles at the race) yields more money--if you live, of course.  People who choose to perform low-risk feats, of course, have to risk their lives relatively often.  Those who live through actions that were predicted to almost certainly kill them are permitted to live risk-free forever.

This system has caused widespread mental illness, as people are always on edge, plotting what life-threatening feat to essay next, obsessively weighing the ratio of risk to reward.  Even people who have earned risk-free immortality are not happy, having suffered physical or mental scars from their near-death experiences and being surrounded by unhappy people in a world where there is no productive work.  The hero of the story decides to return to outer space to hunt for a planet to live on, and he convinces his girlfriend to come with him.

With its focus on risk vs reward calculations and a planned economy in which nobody has to work, I would have expected this story to be a pointed attack or absurdist satire on capitalism and/or socialism but High doesn't really go there, that I can tell.  Similarly, unexpectedly being reunited with your genius friend and your sexy girlfriend and having them not even remember you offers the possibility of a powerfully tragic human story, but High doesn't fulfill the possibilities of this facet of his story, either.  It's like he came up with these ideas that have potential and then did nothing with them.  An acceptable but forgettable filler story is what we end up with here in "Risk Economy."

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The Harrison and Herbert stories are actually good, both authors exhibiting good writing style as well delivering scientific and adventure content, believable characters, some human emotion, and some thought-provoking ideas; Harrison and Herbert here offer good examples of what can be achieved in the traditional science fiction format.  High's story falls short on every metric, but not so short that it is irritating or boring, so he gets a pass.  All in all, Merril's 1958 "H"s have treated us pretty well.  On to "J" and "K"!  (Merril didn't give the nod to any "I" authors this year.)

SF Classics selected by T Carr: Rocklynne, Brackett, Kuttner & Moore, and Wollheim

When last we met, we noted that Terry Carr (remember when we read his novel Cirque?) included Lester del Rey's odd story "The Smallest God" in his 1978 anthology Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age.  Let's check out some other stories Carr reprinted in that book, after of course pointing out that we have already blogged about some of his selections: A. E. van Vogt's "The Vault of the Beast,"  Eric Frank Russell and Maurice G. Hugi's "The Mechanical Mice," and Robert A. Heinlein's "--And He Built a Crooked House--."  (And that, before this blog was conjured up from the black labyrinth of my mind and began to lurk the intertubes, I read still more of them, like Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps.")

"Into Darkness" by Ross Rocklynne (1940)

I have a poor memory, and so I wasn't sure if I had read "Into Darkness" before or not, so I dug through the archives to make certain and uncovered sobering evidence of how bad my memory really is--in 2018 I read and blogged about Rocklynne's story "Quietus," and then in 2023 I read and blogged about "Quietus" again, having totally forgotten I'd read it five years earlier.  Embarrassing!  (Is Nancy Pelosi going to engineer a campaign to have me deposed as head of this blog?)

Well, I'm pretty confident I haven't read Rocklynne's "Into Darkness" before (no, really), even though I own it in the collection Sun Destroyers (which is the other half of the Ace Double that reprinted Edmond Hamilton's A Yank at Valhalla), so let's have at it.  "Into Darkness" first saw print in Astonishing, edited by Fred Pohl.  I am reading the story, like all of today's stories, in the internet archive's scan of Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age, though of course I took a quick look at the magazine to see the (below average for him) Hannes Bok illo for "Into Darkness."

In his intro to the story, Carr suggests "Into Darkness" is "far out," and it definitely is an effort to blow your mind and inspire the famous "sense of wonder."  The universe is inhabited by creatures of pure energy, creatures millions of miles across, creatures that live for billions of years, creatures that absorb energy from stars, move planets about for fun, and can shift between any of the forty-seven different levels of hyperspace, each of which obeys different laws of physics.  Rocklynne's story is a sort of biography of one such creature, and we witness its early millennia, its adolescence and its growth to maturity.  Named "Darkness" by its mother, Sparkle, our main character is different than its fellows--smarter, more inquisitive, abandoning childish play earlier than others in its cohort and seeking to fulfill some purpose in its life.  (Presumably the kinds of smart kids who are thought to be the audience for science fiction, kids who love science and want to learn about the world around them and to accomplish something with their lives, are expected to identify with Darkness.)  Darkness yearns to resolve the riddle of what constitutes the meaning of life, to learn what is beyond the edge of the universe, and is not discouraged when one of the oldest of the energy beings, known as Oldster, warns such investigations lead to sadness and death! 

Darkness was named by Sparkle after the darkness at the edge of the universe, and insists on living up to its name and exploring that mysterious void.  Darkness devours a star bigger than any star it has ever seen, and with that energy breaches the edge of the universe and travels through the emptiness for millions of years.  Finally, Darkness comes to another universe much like the one it left.  There it meets another energy creature, but whereas Darkness has a purple core, this being has a green core.  Darkness falls in love, and proposes passing a life of exploration with its new acquaintance, but this creature would rather lead Darkness to a forty-eighth level of hyperspace Darkness has never heard about before and there take possession of our hero's purple core.  Darkness learns that the purpose of life is to create more life, which green-core energy creatures do by accepting into themselves purple cores...of course, without their cores, purple-core energy creatures wither and die.  (Woah, is this a story about how women will steal your life force and you should avoid having sex with them?)  Before it expires, Darkness creates a planet and seeds it with life-giving protoplasm, which I guess we are supposed to think is Earth.

I sort of expected Darkness to create the human race, but the revelation that these energy creatures reproduce sexually and that the male can only do the deed once--and that it is fatal!--was a surprise.  I'm not sure it is a good surprise, though, as the fact that they reproduce through sex makes the aliens in this story less alien and thus less mind-blowing.

"Into Darkness" is just alright; besides the somewhat disappointing ending, it feels a little long and repetitive, as we hear again and again that Darkness lives for millions of years and is millions of miles across and travels millions of miles and so on--stuff that is supposed to fill you with wonder ceases to be mind blowing with familiarity.  More conventional sense-of-wonder stories start out more or less mundane and then grow steadily more strange until the final page tries to blow you away with the idea that the universe is open to exploration and contains infinite adventure; "Into Darkness" starts out strange and by depicting life on an epic scale and actually becomes more mundane at the end (just like so many ordinary guys. the alien creature loses his heart to a girl.) 

"Into Darkness" has been reprinted in a few anthologies besides Carr's here, and was followed by three sequels, all of which can be found in that Ace Double collection I mentioned, The Sun Destroyers.

"Child of the Green Light" by Leigh Brackett (1942)

We've read a lot of science fiction and crime fiction by Leigh Brackett, wife of Edmond Hamilton and crony of Bogie and The Duke, but I don't think we've read this one before.  "Child of the Green Light" made its debut in Super Science Stories (this issue also has illustrations by Bok, images more characteristic of his work that are worth checking out) and was reprinted in a 1951 ish of Super Science and in a book I have owned since 2013, Martian Quest.  (Why do you buy these books if you don't read them?, asks my financial advisor.)   

"Child of the Green Light" is a somewhat confusing story as it depicts a crazy scenario that Brackett sketches out in a pithy style and doesn't really explain until the end, leaving me struggling at times to visualize what is going on.  Of course, the real meat of the story isn't its questionable science but themes of loyalty and sacrifice and one's relationship to his people--do you owe something to people you haven't met just because you share their blood or culture?  

A young man, naked, is living in or on a conglomeration of wrecked space ships (in Warhammer 40,000 we'd call this a "space hulk"), somehow surviving in the vacuum of space!  The space hulk is in the form of a disk or wheel, with a green light at its center.  The young man, who goes by the name of Son, is in communication telepathically with a being he calls Aona, who lives on the other side of a "Veil" with a capital "V," which is growing thinner all the time; I guess the Veil and the light are one and the same or closely related.  Aona is a female being whom he loves; though she calls him "Son" and could be said to have raised him, I guess their relationship has an erotic character or erotic potential, and they look forward to the time the Veil falls and they can be together.

Another ship appears and lands on the hulk, and from it emerges a multicultural expedition of men in space suits; some of them are Earth humans, other hail from Mars or one of the moons of Saturn. Through their dialogue we learn that that green light passed through the Solar System, attracting to it and carrying off space ships as it went and finally settling here near Mercury.  The green light is bathing the System in radiation that is radically accelerating the aging process in humans--soon civilization will collapse because nobody lives long enough to learn the science and engineering required to maintain a modern high-tech society.  This team, among whom is the last living physicist, constitutes humanity's last hope of destroying the green light before it is too late.

Son and Aona want to preserve the light, so Son stops the physicist from approaching it, killing the man in the process.  The ray guns of the humans have no effect on Son, but they are able to tie him up, however.  Through more dialogue we learn that Son is the only survivor among the passengers and crew of all the many ships brought here by the green light; he has an adult body now, but he was just a baby when his parents' ship was captured and his parents were killed five years ago.

Aona then explains more of what is going on.  She is native to another universe, where people are immortal.  Her universe suffered a cosmic cataclysm, and the resultant explosion destroyed most of her universe and threw a tiny surviving sliver of it (a sliver still big enough to include multiple planets) through the dark barrier between universes so it intersected with our universe.  Son has become a superman because his atoms are changing, starting to vibrate at the frequency of Aona's universe--currently, a fraction of his atoms are still in our dimension, while most are vibrating at the frequency of Aona's dimension.  Eventually he will join Aona's universe, I guess when all his atoms are vibrating on Aona's frequency, or maybe because the Veil has finally eroded.  This story is a bit confusing, as I said; sometimes I think we are meant to visualize universes are physically distinct with dark empty space--the "Between" with a capital "B"--separating them, like they are raisins in a cake, but other times it is suggested the different universe are parallel, inhabiting the same space but at different vibrations.

To save human civilization, the green light must be destroyed, which will separate the two universes.  The only way to destroy the green light is for Son to enter the light before he has fully transformed; the presence of alien atoms will cause the green light to expire and the universes to be separated; Son will, however, fall into the Between, forever barred from entering either our or Aona's universes.  Son, only now realizing that other living things beside he and Aona exist, and that he is the product (the "son") of a race and civilization distinct from Aona's, has to decide if he is going to destroy himself to save his people (about whom he knows almost nothing), or allow his people to expire so he can live in eternal bliss with Aona.

There is also a subplot about how a member of the expedition tries to murder all his comrades, become a superman, destroy the green light, and then become dictator of the Solar System.

"Child of the Green Light" features many themes we've seen before in Brackett's work and that of her husband--many Hamilton stories are about a planet or star whose people suffered a cosmic catastrophe and so they are moving their heavenly body into some other system, and many Hamilton stories depict radiation changing people, and I think that Brackett's novel The Big Jump, which I read before founding this blog, involved a guy stabbing people on his expedition in the back so he could bathe himself in radiation and become a superman.

This story is not bad, but I found it a little challenging to follow--Brackett provides a minimum of information, so I had to really pay attention to get what was going on, and I still am not sure it all makes sense.

"The Twonky" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (1942/1975)

I've read stacks of stuff by married couple Kuttner and Moore, things they produced individually as well as collaborations, but I haven't read this one; I kind of think I have been avoiding it because its title makes it sound like a joke story, and Kuttner's (many) humor pieces generally fall flat with me (sample MPorcius pans of Kuttner humor pieces: "Or Else," "The Ego Machine," and "See You Later.")  But let's give "The Twonky" a shot today.  

The publication history of "The Twonky," at least as described by Carr in his intro to the story here and by isfdb, presents a few mysteries.  Carr says "The Twonky" has always been attributed to Kuttner, but isfdb credits both Kuttner and Moore.  Carr points out that here in his book a line obliquely referring to World War II that has been left out of reprintings of the story in Kuttner collections has been restored, but isfdb lists the version here as a 1975 version first seen in the American book The Best of Henry Kuttner.  (The British book The Best of Kuttner 2, according to isfdb, reprints the 1942 version.)  I'm just going to read the version here in Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age and leave these mysteries to other investigators.

People in Kuttner and Moore stories are always popping in and out of different times and universes, and the first section of "The Twonky" finds us at a factory in our world that manufactures "console radio-phonograph combinations" and introduces us to a factory worker from the future who has somehow been transported to it.  Disoriented and suffering from amnesia, the man goes to a workbench and, using advanced techniques he knows instinctively, he builds a device from his native time, "The Twonky," but camouflages it so it looks exactly like the other radio-phonographs being pumped out of this mid-20th century factory.  When his mind is fully clear and he realizes how he got here, the workman travels back to the future.

A lot of Kuttner and Moore stories depict people interacting with the technology of a more advanced civilization (e. g., "Juke-Box," and "Shock,") and the second part of "The Twonky" is about a college professor who has just had a new radio-record player console delivered and is alone with it because his wife is off visiting relatives.  The console is a robot that, after scanning the prof and assessing his psychology, performs as a perfect servant, walking around the house washing dishes and lighting the prof's cigarettes and so forth.  But Carr in his intro told us that "The Twonky" is a warning about dictatorship, and, as those of us who follow the Cato Institute on Twitter are aware, a powerful entity which seems eager to help you can quickly become a tyrannical master, and the robot uses physical force to forbid the prof from listening to music or reading books or consuming food and drink of which it does not approve--the Twonky is the embodiment of the Nanny State!  And worse--it begins tinkering with people's minds so that they behave, and, if they try to dismantle it, killing them with a death ray!  

Thumbs up for "The Twonky."  The murders at the climax are a chilling surprise--because most of the story comes off as light-hearted and the characters are all likable, you don't expect them to be massacred but to have the plot resolved for them peacefully.  A good horror story.

When it first appeared in Astounding, "The Twonky" was printed under the penname often used by Kuttner and Moore, Lewis Padgett, and among the many collections and anthologies in which it has been reprinted is the 1954 Padgett collection Line to Tomorrow, which has a great Mitchell Hooks cover.

"Storm Warning" by Donald A. Wollheim (1942)

"Storm Warning," by major SF editor Donald A. Wollheim (who made a recent appearance on my twitter feed), made its first appearance in Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, where it was illustrated by another important SF editor, Damon Knight.  Editors seem to have liked the story--Groff Conklin and Robert Silverberg both included it in invasion-themed anthologies.

Today I am not on board with all these editors; "Storm Warning" is a kind of boring story full of descriptions of air movements and the movements of clouds and odd smells and temperatures.  Have to give this one a thumbs down.

Our narrator is a meteorologist living in Wyoming.  A meteor is seen landing a few miles away in the desert.  He and a fellow weatherman ride horses into the desert to see if they can find the meteorites.  The temperatures they encounter and the smells they experience feel a little off.  Also, an unusual storm seems to be brewing.  They find some hollow crystalline spheres taller than a man; no doubt that are the meteorites, and they are cracked open.  The storm hits, and the men witness what appears to be bodies of air pressing violently against each other, as if they were alive and fighting.  The meteorologists surmise that in Earth's atmosphere live invisible creatures whose bodies are akin to water vapor, and that somewhat similar alien creatures arrived on Earth in the glass globes, and that the native air creatures are fighting the invaders, who seek to remake our home planet's atmosphere in their own image.

I've told you many times that I don't like stories in which the characters are spectators instead of participants, and today I am telling you that I am not interested in descriptions of weather, either.  Another knock against "Storm Warning" is that it is repetitive--we hear about the smells and get descriptions of clouds again and again.  A weak choice from Carr; though Conklin and Silverberg disagree with me.

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The Kuttner and Moore story is the stand out, with Brackett in second place; these stories are about human beings and human relationships and the life choices we have to make, the way we have to balance our desires with our responsibilities.  Rocklynne's story is OK, but Wollheim's is like a filler story that lacks the sex and violence or twist ending that might make a filler story entertaining.  

Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age seems like a pretty good book.  Each story is preceded by an introduction of five or six pages which includes a list of references and not only covers biographical info on the author of the following story but tries to put his or her work in some kind of historical context and includes anecdotes about important SF people whose stories are not reproduced here, like John W. Campbell, Jr. and Hugo Gernsback; taken together these intros are like a history of SF in the period covered.  Pretty cool.

Lester del Rey: "The Smallest God," "The Stars Look Down," "Doubled in Brass," and "Reincarnate"

In the last episode of MPorcius Fiction Log we read four stories from the important pulp magazine edited by Edwin Baird and Farnsworth Wright, Weird Tales, stories about guys having crazy revelatory dreams and people trying to make contact with other universes and with alien monster gods.  Today we'll read four stories from two important pulp magazines edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., three from what was long the top science fiction magazine, Astounding, a magazine associated with serious science and speculations about the future, and one from what many critics consider the finest of all fantasy magazines, Unknown.  All four of today's stories were written by Lester del Rey and appeared in 1940, and I am reading them in the 1975 collection Early del Rey, which includes lots of autobiographical material between the stories from del Rey himself.  Fort paperback publication, the book was split into two volumes with pretty effective cover illos by the Brothers Hildebrandt and retitled The Early del Rey.

(We've already read the first four stories in The Early Del Rey; today's stories are the fifth through eighth.)

"The Smallest God" (1940)

"The Smallest God" is the title story of the Spanish translation of The Early Del Rey: Volume 1.  It is a somewhat silly story about artificial life and academic rivalries that includes a large cadre of comic relief minor characters, among them a foreigner with a goofy accent, a vapid boy-chasing teenage girl, an Irish cop and a superstitious drunken Irishwoman.  Ay, begorrah!

Two rival scientists at the University are working on creating artificial life.  The biochemist has created in a tank a perfect adult human male body, but it lacks life.  A physicist resents the biochemist, because he and the biochemist are always competing over funds, and scoffs at the biochemist's attempt to create an artificial man--he knows that the secret of life is radioactive potassium.  He has artificially created some radioactive potassium himself, and is confident that if this material was added to the lifeless body that it would spring to life, though he jealously keeps this a secret from the biochemist.

There's another radioactive substance the physicist has come up with, the product of a failed experiment, a kind of thick rigid tar; the physicist considers this gunk useless and doesn't even know the exact proportions of its ingredients.  Among the detritus of this guy's cluttered and disorderly lab is a rubber cast of a six-inch-tall statue of Hermes he bought for his daughter but decided not to give her--hollow, this statue is quite light and keeps falling over.  To give it some heft so it will sit still when he is banging on the table or whatever, the physicist softens that useless tar with alcohol and fills the hollow Hermes with the now pliable substance.

Now that it has been softened by alcohol, the goop comes to life!  The tar is very intelligent, and telepathic--it can read the minds of others and even into them words and images!  Perhaps the best parts of this story are del Rey's descriptions of the minds of a cat and of a dog as perceived by this artificial creature.

(In the autobiographical section following "The Smallest God," del Rey suggests that he made the cat in this story too selfish and cold, that nowadays he is aware of how affectionate cats can be.)

A lot of stuff in this story beggars belief--would a real scientist take some weird substance he cooked up and just use it as ballast in a decoration?  Even more incredibly, the artificial substance (which has no eyes but can see by detecting "vibrations"--these vibrations include infrared and UV light) sees the physicist's daughter and falls in love with her.  Would a sexless blob fall in love with a human woman?  It is bad enough when in SF stories Terrans fall in love with cat people or whatever, but at least both humans and felines have gonads--this thing is just a uniform handful of goo!  Incomprehensible.

The artificial creature has numerous adventures as it seeks out more alcohol, gets tossed in the garbage when its efforts to communicate with the physicist give the scientist the heebie-jeebies, learns to move and makes the flexible rubber statue walk around and even manipulate objects with its hands as if it were a real (six-inch tall) person, is perceived as one of the "the Little Folk" by the aforementioned inebriated Irishwoman, and stalks the physicist's sexy teenaged daughter.  This chick has seven dates a week with four different guys, and all four of them are six feet or taller; the blob in the rubber Hermes statue becomes determined to somehow grow tall enough to meet her stringent height requirements.

The unliving artificial body in the biochemist's lab disappears, and the biochemist accuses the physicist of stealing it--innocent, the physicist accuses the biochemist of trying to frame him.  The creature in the Hermes statue saves the day, revealing itself to the feuding scientists and explaining that it can read their minds and knows both are innocent.  Having paved the way for them to reconcile, the weird creature then finds the synthetic body, which was stolen and is being held for ransom by the biochemist's scoundrel of a nephew, who was one of the physicist's daughter's four boyfriends.

The two scientists are now friends, and collaborate, finding that radioactive potassium does indeed bring the synthetic man to life, but only to unthinking life, a sort of vegetative state--the perfect male body's heart pumps and lungs breathe, but it doesn't think or make voluntary movements.  As we readers have sort of been expecting, the heroic blob gets himself installed in the brain of the perfect man and entertains hopes he will win the favor of the physicist's daughter.  The operation works, the blob is now practically human, but, alas, that girl has just got married to a more reputable tall guy than that felonious nephew!  But don't worry about the telepathic blob in the perfect male body--the physicist has another daughter, and she may only be eight years old, but the blob is willing to wait ten years before having his way with her.

This story is kind of ridiculous, and its treatment of women is pretty dismissive, but I like artificial life stories and unrequited love stories and "The Smallest God" is never boring, so I'm going to say it is acceptable.  Terry Carr included this odd piece of work in his 1978 anthology Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age, but otherwise it has only ever reappeared in del Rey collections.

(Early del Rey seems to consist of stories by del Rey which didn't exactly set the world on fire; they were all collected for the first time in this volume, and there doesn't seem to be any overlap between the contents of this book and 1978's The Best of Lester del Rey.  If reading Early del Rey continues to be a worthwhile experience maybe I'll read The Best of Lester del Rey.  Anyway, I bring this up because I want to note that none of the three remaining stories we are reading today have ever been anthologized, as far as I can tell.) 

"The Stars Look Down" (1940)

Here we have an Astounding cover story whose title and the  cover illo with which it is associated have got me looking forward to some space adventure with space suits and all that sort of thing.  In his autobiographical remarks before "The Stars Look Down," del Rey promises action scenes, his somewhat petulant response to editor Campbell's telling him his real ability lay in characters, not action scenes and gimmicks.

More rivalry between top scientists!  Edwin Morse was born into a wealthy family.  Gregory Stewart is a child of the streets who didn't know where his next meal was coming from!  But both dream of conquering space!  They met in college, where they became frenemies whose tempestuous relationship is characterized by their many disagreements.  For one thing, they were both after the same girl.  For another, each has his own theory on how to escape Earth's gravity.  Morse believes that nuclear power and ion engines are the path to the stars.  Stewart puts his confidence in refinements of conventional explosives and rocket fuels.

Today, as businessowners in late middle-age, each has purchased an island off the Atlantic coast and been competing to construct Mankind's first space ship.  Stewart has grown fantastically rich and acquired considerable political influence by selling munitions to the government during the war torn middle of the 20th century, and in his race for space with Morse he doesn't play by Marquess of Queensbury rules.  He engages in lawfare--even getting Morse convicted of negligent homicide and imprisoned for four years over the death of Morse's son in an accident (Morse should have got Alec Baldwin's lawyers!)--and in sabotage--even hiring thugs to firebomb Morse's facilities from an aircraft (lucky those blueprints were in fireproof filing cabinets!)

Much of that stuff is described in exposition, as the narrative begins as sixty-year-old Morse gets out of prison and finds his employees are on the brink of success, having just sent a small remote-controlled rocket to photograph the far side of the moon and then successfully landed it back on the island.  The Morse team--which includes Stewart's estranged son--finishes a full-sized nuclear-powered ship, overcoming Stewart's legislative efforts to ground it and then an actual paramilitary assault led by Stewart's right hand man Russell, who is killed in the fighting.  Morse pushes himself hard, working long days and keeping a secret from everybody that he has a weak heart and is putting his health in danger in pursuit of mankind's destiny in space (and of course beating the unscrupulous Stewart.)

Morse in his nuclear-powered ship and Stewart in his fueled rocket blast off on their maiden voyages at the same time.  Morse reaches space and then brings his vessel back safely, having a heart attack just as he lands, but don't worry--he recovers, though the sawbones forbid him to ever fly again.  Stewart's fueled rocket fails, but he is one of the survivors of the crash.  In a dramatic scene of reconciliation, Morse and Stewart, in front of a bunch of reporters, realize Mankind has only one working space ship and one pilot healthy enough to fly, and join forces--Stewart will fly the nuclear ship so Man's quest for the stars need not be delayed long enough to train new pilots.

"The Stars Look Down" isn't very good.  It includes all the plot elements of melodrama--the love triangle, class conflict, bitter competition between onetime friends, conflict between father and son, death in the family, over-the-top demonstrations of loyalty, prodigies of self-sacrifice, betrayal, redemption, bloody violence.  But del Rey doesn't wring much entertainment or emotion out of any of these elements, failing to provide enough room for them and granting enough attention to them for them to have any effect on the reader.  Instead of picking one or two or three melodramatic elements and developing them as major themes, he includes like ten of them and deals with each one in a cursory fashion.  There are lots of characters but they are almost interchangeable, even though del Rey tries to give each a defining character trait--one guy is fat, one guy is skinny, one guy is Chinese and has a wacky accent, etc.  (I think all four of today's stories have characters with allegedly funny dialects.  Yoicks!)  The fight scene del Rey brigs attention to in his preamble is neither very believable nor thrilling, even though del Rey in the autobiographical material brags that he has been more deeply involved in sports and participated in more fights than most SF writers.  "The Stars Look Down" also lacks a structure that builds to a climax, instead being just a series, almost a list, of events, of obstacles that quickly pop up out of nowhere and are just as quickly overcome and forgotten.

"The Stars Look Down" is quite mediocre, but it wasn't boring or offensively bad, so I'll say it is barely acceptable.  In the autobiographical material after the story, del Rey admits there are a lot of things wrong with the story and focuses on the caricatured way the Chinese characters are presented and on some science errors he made and Campbell didn't catch.  (Science fiction writers in the 1930s and '40s really thought part of their job was teaching science to people, or at least getting people excited about science, something easy to forget when the most popular SF of the post-war period has been Star Wars type adventure stories, twist-ending social commentary like The Twilight Zone, or a combination of the two like Star Trek.)

In the quite entertaining autobiographical passages, del Rey also praises Virgil Finlay and tells an interesting story about Finlay's cover for the August 1939 Astounding; brags about how great a photographer he is (at least technically, at judging distances and light levels by eye so he can produce clear sharp photos--del Rey admits he can't compose compelling pictures); and tells us he made a pile of money writing confession stories, which he reports are easier to write and pay more than does SF.  

"The Stars Look Down" was included in the 1948 del Rey collection ...And Some Were Human.     

"Doubled in Brass" (1940)

In this collection's autobiographical matter, del Rey tells us repeatedly that he really likes writing fantasy, and here we have one of his fantasy stories, a sequel to a story that appeared in Unknown's September '39 ish, "Coppersmith."  (I'll read "Coppersmith" if I ever read The Best of Lester del Rey.)  

"Doubled in Brass" isn't one of those fantasies in which a sexy princess helps a barbarian escape from a dungeon so he can fight an evil wizard, but one of those fantasies in which a three-foot-tall elf who wears bells on his shoes talks to rabbits and disguises himself as a midget so he can get a job in a 20th-century human town repairing car parts with his magic brazier and offer sage advice to the humies.  The plot of "Doubled in Brass" is like a Bertie Wooster sort of thing.  The elf's boss at the car mechanic shop has a son.  Son is in love with a girl.  (Le sigh, it happens to the best of us.)  But girl's family is in financial trouble so she is dating an overweight rich jerk.  The elf uses his magic to make sure the kids marry each other and have enough money and that the fat rich guy gets humiliated.  Good grief.

Maybe this story is supposed to be light-hearted and cute and distract you from the current world crisis or something, and I suppose it is competent, but it is not what I want to read by any means.  Gotta give "Doubled in Brass" a thumbs down.

"Reincarnate" (1940)

Boyd is a young scientist, working on an experimental nuclear reactor with an older established scientist.  He's also got a pretty girlfriend, Joan, who loves science.  One day something needs to be investigated, so Boyd and his mentor suit up and go into the reactor--Joan also wants to come, but of course Boyd insists she not.  There's an explosion and Boyd's body is totally wrecked--however, his brain and spine are more or less intact!  A German scientist is able to implant Boyd's nervous system into a robotic body, and over many months Boyd learns to use this body, and finds it is in many ways superior to the 100% natural organic body he was born with--he's stronger, his reflexes are faster, he has telescopic and microscopic vision, he's immune to disease, he need never sleep, etc.  (Looks like sex and children are out the window, though.)

"Reincarnate" actually begins when Boyd wakes up after the explosion, and we learn how he was maimed through what amounts to a flashback.  Del Rey spends quite a bit of time describing how the new robot body works and how Boyd has to be trained to use it.  I find the idea of having my brain put into a robot body fascinating, and enjoyed all this material; del Rey succeeds in making it all pretty interesting and even emotionally affecting.  Once he is able to walk around and get back to work on the reactor, Boyd has to face the fact that he is one of a kind, all alone in the world, perhaps unable to have any kind of comradely human relationship with his fellow scientists and engineers, he now being so different than they.

"Reincarnate," however, has a happy ending that del Rey in the autobiographical material that follows the story admits is kind of corny.  For one thing, Boyd succeeds in building healthy relationships with his fellow workers.  But more important is the twist ending.  Boyd has to go back into the reactor to solve the problem that got him blown to pieces in the first place--with his new armored body with super reflexes, probably he can resolve the issue.  But the people who own the project (as in "The Stars Look Down," the history-making operation at the center of the story is managed by private enterprise, not big government) send somebody into the danger zone with him to help him--another disembodied brain in a robot body!  Boyd assumes it is his mentor--he was told that guy had died, and Boyd thinks they must have just been keeping this second medical miracle a secret from him!  The two cyborg-Americans fix the reactor, and then robot person number 2 drops a bombshell--she is Joan, Boyd's girlfriend!  Boyd thought she was avoiding him all this time because how could a flesh and blood woman and a sexless robot man make a life together?  You see, Joan sneaked into the reactor on the black day of the explosion and she was also blasted to pieces and then installed into a superior mechanical body!  The two of them can now spend their (very very long) lives together, pursuing their mutual passion for science and engineering side by side, the two toughest and fastest eggheads in the world.

Del Rey does a good job of describing what it might be like to have your brain installed in a mechanical body, and the ending is a little sappy but still kinda heart-warming; "Reincarnate" is a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy for those who fear death, dream of superpowers and of having a love relationship that is based on such elevated sentiments as intellectual compatibility and enduring shared interest instead of base and perhaps short-lived mutual physical lust.  "Reincarnate" is the best of the four stories we are reading today whether we are judging by style, content, structure or ideas.  Thumbs up!

"Reincarnate" debuted in the same issue of Astounding as the first installment of the L. Ron Hubbard novel Final Blackout, which we read back in 2014, and A. E. van Vogt's "Repetition," AKA "The Gryb," a story I read before I started this blog and should reread someday in its various magazine, fix-up, anthology and collection versions.  

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If we put aside the fairy-tale romcom of "Doubled in Brass," we've got three stories that address endlessly compelling classic science fiction themes--artificial life, the heroic quest to conquer space, immortality, disembodied brains and the intersection of man and machine.  Now, it is true that in "The Smallest God" and "The Stars Look Down" that del Rey makes mistakes when it comes to storytelling, but he doesn't make the biggest mistake a fiction writer can make--that of boring the reader.  And "Reincarnate" actually works.  So, over all, not a bad batch of stories from Campbell's famous magazines published early in World War II.  Expect to hear me talking about three or four more stories from Early del Rey soon.

Weird Tales, June-July 1939: C A Smith, H B Cave and H P Lovecraft

Weird Tales only published 11 issues in 1939, and the one we look at today is dated June-July 1939 on its contents page.  This issue has quite a lot of reprints in it, and the stories we'll be reading by Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft appeared earlier in WT or in other venues, but we'll also tackle a piece by Hugh B. Cave which debuted here in this issue of Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine.

"The Willow Landscape" by Clark Ashton Smith (1931)

isfdb tells us that Clark Ashton Smith's "The Willow Landscape" first saw print in Philippine Magazine, and then was included in the 1933 small press collection The Double Shadow.  After its inclusion in Weird Tales in 1939, here it was promoted as an "ingenious Chinese fantasy" on the contents page, it would resurface in several Smith collections.  If you are scoring at home, be aware I am reading the Weird Tales version.

"The Willow Landscape" is a creditable little fantasy, one with a happy ending, something we don't necessarily expect from California's chief weirdie, who kills off protagonists at a pretty alarming rate.

Shih Liang is a lonely man, a scholar with a clerical job at the imperial court, but no friends or family save his younger brother, who is studying to become a scholar himself.  His ancestors left Shih Liang a bunch of art treasures but also a pile of debts, and most of Shih Liang's salary goes to paying off these debts and financing his little brother's education.  The man's only real recreation is staring at his favorite painting, which depicts a beautiful landscape with willows and a bamboo bridge, and, on the bridge, a pretty young woman.  Admiring this painting refreshes Shih Liang as would a walk in the country.

Disaster strikes!  Thanks to the maneuvers of some jerk off at the imperial court, Shih Liang loses his job!  Disgraced, no other job is open to him.  To survive, and to complete payment on his brother's schooling, Shih Liang has to start selling the art collection.  He leaves his favorite painting until last.  As he takes one final look at the painting, he is magically transported to the world of the painting, where he lives happily ever after with the young woman--in the last line of the story Smith hints that if anybody watched the painting carefully they'd notice Shih Liang having sex with her.  Cheeky!

Not bad, though you can see the ending (entering the painting) a mile away (the sex joke is a surprise, at least.)  

"The Death Watch" by Hugh B. Cave (1939)

Here we have a quite good Lovecraftian story written in a more direct and accessible style than that which we associate with Lovecraft himself.  Thumbs up!

Our narrator, Harry Crandall, works at a radio station, but the station doesn't broadcast the 1939 equivalents of Led Zeppelin, Rush Limbaugh, U2 and Howard Stern--this station sends and receives important business and safety messages for ships and their owners and that sort of thing.  Our story is set in Florida, and there are lots of references to spiders and swamps and insects as well as what those so inclined might consider opportunities for "Florida Man" jokes.  

An attractive young woman of Harry's acquaintance, Elaine, was very close with her brother, Mark, and they lived together in a big house set far from any other building, on the edge of a swamp.  Elaine moved out when she married Peter, a writer who, like so many of us nowadays, works at home.  Mark died recently--Harry was at his bedside as he expired.  Elaine and Mark have moved into Mark's big house, and Peter often comes to hang out with Harry at night at the radio station, when Harry is on watch at the radio set--Peter seems pretty interested in radio and learns a lot during his time at the station.  While hanging out there, Peter reports on the horrible effect Mark's death has had on Elaine--she has started reading occult books and has hired a Seminole Indian to work at the big house and she spends a lot of time with this taciturn, creepy drunk and barely talks to Peter.  Most disturbing of all is how Elaine keeps saying Mark told her he would come back to her from the grave, and how she actually seems to believe he will.

Harry suggests that Peter read some of Elaine's crazy books so he can better refute their stupidities and convince his wife to abandon the insane idea her brother can return from the dead.  Peter stops coming by the radio station, and a curious Harry goes to visit the big house on the swamp.  These visits offer Harry some disturbing revelations: Elaine and that Indian, in furtherance of their quest to bring Mark back from the grave, are trying to contact alien gods Nyarlathotep and Hastur via traditional black sorcery means, while Peter--who has read Elaine's books and found them not stupid but pretty damn persuasive--has set up an elaborate radio apparatus in an upstairs room and is himself trying to communicate with N and H via cutting-edge 20th-century means.  Peter has let Elaine think he is doing his writing up there--he wants to the good news to be a surprise to her should he actually ever get through to the other side and summon back her beloved brother.  Imagine her surprise when it turns out Mark wanted to return from the grave not because he loved Elaine but because he felt Elaine betrayed him by marrying Peter and wanted to exact on her a gruesome vengeance!

I really like "The Death Watch"--the love triangle aspect, the use of modern technology, the Native American element, the critter-haunted swamp, all of it works, and Cave's style here is effective.  Recommended to all Yog-Sothery aficionados!  In 1977 "The Death Watch" was reprinted in the Cave collection Murgunstrumm and Others and in 1994 it appeared in the Chaosium volume Cthulhu's Heirs alongside a bunch of brand new Mythos fiction.

"Celephais" by H. P. Lovecraft (1922)

"Celephais" first appeared in The Rainbow, the elaborate and professional-looking fanzine of H. P. Lovecraft's wife, Sonia Greene.  (Lovecraft was Greene's second husband, and after their marriage collapsed she married a third time, erroneously thinking Lovecraft had finalized their divorce--oops.)  "Celephais" was printed a second time in another fanzine, Marvel Tales, a dozen years after its debut in The Rainbow and five years before its posthumous appearance in Weird Tales.  Of course, it has been reprinted a gazillion times since then.  I'm reading "Celephais" in my copy of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (the corrected Ninth Printing.) 

"Celephais" bears considerable similarities to Smith's "The Willow Landscape," but is more dreamy, long-winded, bitter and sad, in part because it is set not in some vague fantasy version of the Mysterious Orient but rather in something like real life in the West.

An Englishman's once-wealthy family has decayed and he is the last of his line, living a lonely life in a London garret, the country estate where he grew up lost.  He has abandoned his writing because anyone who saw it considered it ridiculous, and the comfort and joy of his existence is to be found in his dreams in which he travels to other universes where different laws of physics apply and to other lands, among them the valley of Oorth-Nargai, where people do not grow old and where ships can fly from the city of minarets Celephais up into the clouds to other cities stranger still.  Once having visited Celephais, the Englishman strives to return to it, taking drugs he hopes will facilitate sleep until he runs out of money and is thrown out of his garret.  The final lines of the story indicate that the failed writer dies after falling off a seaside cliff and bitterly suggest a fat businessman now lives in his ancestral home, but before we get that we hear all about how the writer meets a party of knights who carry him off to Oorth-Nargai, where he reigns as a god over the people whom he created in his dreams.  I guess we can choose to think the writer's soul really is enjoying life in a better world, or that he was just a nut, .

I don't have to tell you that the young Englishman in the story is based on Anglophile Lovecraft himself, also a writer who, during his life, was little appreciated and also a man who came from a formerly wealthy line then in financial decline but who didn't quite feel up to getting a regular job and earning a respectable income, and that "Celephais" is part bitter plaint and part wish-fulfillment.  "Celephais" is OK; the long passages describing the worlds the Englishman sees, and where he actually does very little, can feel a little tedious, and a story in which a guy doesn't do anything but is just acted upon by others, for good or for ill, is sort of a hard sell.  

"Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" AKA "Under the Pyramids" by H. P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini (1924)  

The "Weird Story Reprint" in this issue is "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," which was attributed to Harry Houdini when it first appeared in WT in 1924, during the time of Edwin Baird's editorship.  This 1939 reprinting of the story is prefaced by a notice that while Houdini provided the "facts" of the narrative and "O.K.'d" the "printer's proofs," the "actual writing" was done by Lovecraft.  I am reading the tale in my aforementioned copy of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, where it appears under the title "Under the Pyramids."

This is a pretty long story, and much of the start of it is like a travelogue, our narrator Houdini describing his trip with his wife across Europe to Egypt, en route to Australia.  We get his opinions of various sights in Port Said, Cairo and Giza, and trivia on who is said to have built which pyramid, how tall this pyramid is, etc.  This is sort of entertaining, I guess.  I am always of mixed mind whether this sort of realistic material is a waste of the reader's time or is useful for making the alien and weird aspects later in the story stand out in sharper relief.  

Houdini hires a guide and this joker gets into a fight with some other local, and the two solemnly declare their intention to duel atop the Great Pyramid after midnight.  Houdini is eager to witness this bit of local color, and he accompanies the duelists and their two dozen seconds up to the peak of the pyramid only to find it is all a trap--the Arabs tie Houdini up and gag and blindfold him and then lower him by rope down a stone shaft into a cavern deep below the surface; the sides of the narrow shaft tear his clothes and draw blood from many small wounds, and Houdini loses consciousness and has wild dreams that hint that his treacherous guide is the descendant or reincarnation of the pharaoh who built one of the pyramids and is a sort of representation of Ancient Egypt, a land of evil and sorcery, a civilization preoccupied by death.

Houdini escapes his bonds and starts crawling around the stygian black cavern--he can see nothing, as there is no light, but can smell something horrible, and then he hears something horrible--the sound of a marching party, the footsteps of many types, as if animals are walking in time with men.  Houdini connects these queer sounds with the rumors he has heard that the ancient Egyptians constructed composite mummies--mummies part human and part animal--and with the Egyptian belief that the life force of a dead person might fly around and sometimes enter the body of a dead creature and animate it.

The members of the hideous and disgusting procession of half-human and half-animal mummies, and of half-eaten and half-torn corpses, carry torches, and so provide the hiding Houdini light with which to spot the staircase out of this prehistoric subterranean temple dedicated to a god of death.  The magician escapes, but not before getting a mind-reeling eyeful--the evil priests and their congregation of living dead freaks and cripples offering worship and sacrifices to the giant multi-headed monster god that  emerges from a huge aperture.  

"Under the Pyramids" is a pretty good Lovecraftian story, even though the behavior of the monster-worshipers may not make much sense--they go to a lot of trouble to capture Houdini and lower him down to the evil temple, but then they leave him alone?  Didn't they capture him in order to feed him to their monster god?  Isn't Houdini, as a European-American magician whose "magic" is like a mockery of their legit sorcery and whose ethnicity and civilization constitute their age-old enemies, an extremely important captive to them?  Houdini sees the treacherous guide among the leaders of the worshipers--why didn't this villain go to the place to which he had lowered Houdini and have his crocodile-headed and hippo-bodied congregants seize the American and lug him over to the orifice from which the monster emerges?  And if the guide walked down a set of stairs to the underground temple, why didn't the Arabs just carry Houdini down the stairs with him?  There's also the idea that a small monster was pecking away at Houdini while he was unconscious, a mystery which is never really resolved.

I like "Under the Pyramids," but there are problems, as you can see.  Besides in the pages of many of the component volumes of the vast mountain of available Lovecraft collections, you can find the story in a handful of anthologies with an ancient Egyptian theme, including a tie-in to a British TV series that explores the cultural impact of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen.

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None of these stories is bad, which is nice; here we have a comfortable leg of our long journey through the 1930s issues of Weird Tales.  A leg which offers an interesting surprise: the best of the stories we have read today is by Hugh B. Cave and not the iconic H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith who doth bestride the weird world like cyclopean colossi.  Maybe I'm a simple-minded man, but I prefer stories about tangible things in which people set goals and pursue them to stories about dreams in which the characters are buffeted by forces beyond comprehension.

More short stories await us in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.