Hugh B. Cave: "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures," "The Fugitive Face" and "The Mission"

When we read Shirley Jackson's story from the Saturday Evening Post admonishing you to embrace newcomers to your community even if they forthrightly admit that they use magic, "Strangers in Town," we learned that Hugh B. Cave also had a story in that famous magazine in the year 1959.  Today we'll read that Saturday Evening Post story of Cave's, "The Mission," but first we'll sample some of the genre work for which Cave is famous, a long blood-drenched horror piece from a 1934 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine, "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures," and a short story from a 1942 issue of Dime Detective, "Fugitive Face."

"Inn of the Shadow-Creatures" (1934)

At some point I downloaded a scan of the December 1934 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine and that is where I am reading "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures," but today I can't recall where I found it.  Luckily for you if you want to read this gruesome exploitation novella, I can direct you to this link to a scan of a 2012 Cave collection, Devils in the Dark that reprints "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures" and two other 1930s Cave creations.

"Inn of the Shadow-Creatures" is not very good.  On the plus side, Cave imbues the tale with a feverish energy that is stimulating and entertaining; on almost every page Cave tells us about how protagonist Cary is haunted by the vision of face of the man he beat to death for raping his sister, or is in agony over his bullet wound, which periodically starts bleeding again, or is stricken by fear at seeing some strange figure, be it a mutilated corpse ("Blood congealed in Cary's veins and he stood rigid, eyes bulging") or a living man who merely looks like a corpse ("Black fear chilled Cary's muscles, left him a prey to the slashing blows of Sibley's balled fists") or a man all in black, only his evil green eyes visible ("But the terror-scream in Cary Booth's heart was an unuttered sound of madness...Welling into his throat it gurgled there, became a hoarse sob as the monster turned to look at him.")  Cave employs some crazy metaphors--"His hands opened, closed convulsively like broken crabs;" "Gravlin scuffed forward like a monstrous toad;" "Like a gnome in some dark grotto, he sat hunched in his chair and the chair was bigger than he, despite the deformity that made a camel-hump of his bent back;" "Strong arms lifted Cary from the chair, enfolded his trembling body as the tentacles of an octopus might have coiled about the body of something to be crushed and devoured."  This material isn't exactly good, but it is sort of amusing, and shows some kind of spirit, some vim and vigor.  This story is not boring.

Unfortunately, the plot of "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures" is pretty terrible, just an excuse to string together descriptions of injuries, corpses, and gory fights.  The characters, of which there are many so as to afford the author a long list of suspects, never behave in a way that makes any sense, though Cave tries to inoculate himself from this charge by making it clear that all the characters are insane or on the brink of insanity.  Objectively, we have to say that "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures" is a bad story, but somehow I still kind of enjoyed it.  I guess I'll score it acceptable, and tell you that it perhaps resides in "so bad it's good" territory. 

Below follows a summary of the plot I just excoriated complete with a recounting of much of "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures"' exploitative and often sexualized violence.  Feel free to skip ahead to our next story if you are pressed for time. 

Cary Booth is in trouble, trudging along the less-travelled roads, exhausted, pain emanating from a wound in his side inflicted by a bullet from a police officer's service weapon!  How could this college man who studied medicine (but never got a medical license, it seems) have come to this desperate pass?  Well, Cary's sister, "sweet and lovely" Madge, was ravished by some rich city slicker, Bastone!  Now Madge's eyes are "dead" and "dull" with "black shame"!  So Cary went to Bastone's luxurious apartment and beat the hell out of the ravisher!  Bastone's screams brought the police who shot at Cary as he fled!  Cary figures he killed Bastone and the fuzz are on his tail to send him to the electric chair!

Cary is now trying to reach some rural village on foot so he can flop down in an inn.  A car pulls up--the driver is a pretty girl, Irma Sibley, who offers to give him a lift.  She drives him to her fancy house, where she lives with her brother John and her controlling father.  On the way a sinister figure crosses their path, briefly visible in the headlights of Irma's roadster.  A horrified Irma tells Cary that this monster has been terrifying the village for a long time, committing murders.  

Cary can't stay with the Sibleys because Dad is such a suspicious control freak, leaving our guy no choice but to stay in the inn, even though Irma and her brother John warn him not to.  The inn is run by the Gravlins: obese mother Mariah, hunchbacked father Abel, and "half-witted" "moron" son Saul.  Cary hasn't been in his room long when he hears something queer in the hall and peeks out to see a naked man, his body bloated like a corpse's, stumbling down the corridor.  Cary hears a woman's scream and rushes to find the strange figure covered in blood, in a coma, in a room where hangs from the ceiling the butchered corpse of a bottle blonde with heavy breasts!  Affixed to one of those breasts with a pin is a note--a warning that the dead have risen and the living cannot safely stay at this inn!

"Inn of the Shadow Creatures," advertised as a "chilling feature-length novel" and a "full-length mystery-terror novel" is made up of six chapters.  In Chapter Two we learn more about the cast of suspects and potential victims.  Abel Gravlin is a retired chemistry professor who only recently purchased the inn.  A fat guest, Quentin Planchard, is in town to buy up property, confident it will increase in value when the new state highway comes through the village.  Clay learns these truths about the secretive Gravlin and Planchard from a nervous old maiden lady, Hattie Benson.  For her part, Mariah Gravlin thinks the bloated and now comatose naked man, a guest named Redfern, is a vampire.

People's behavior in this insane story makes no sense.  For a variety of reasons, nobody calls the police or a doctor, and Cary returns to his room and gets locked in by a mysterious figure who fills his room with poison gas.  Cary busts out of the room just in time to see a sinister figure and hear a woman's scream before he falls unconscious in the hall.  When he wakes up he has been bound and stands accused of the murder of that source of accurate gossip Hattie Benson, who lies in the same room, naked and mutilated!  Cary manages to loosen his bonds and run out of the inn.

In Chapter Three, Cary is pursued through the village and eventually takes refuge in the cellar of the big Sibley house.  When he hears Cary stumbling around down there, John Sibley comes down to investigate.  John knows how crazy the villagers are and is willing to shelter Cary.  But John and Irma's father wants nothing to do with Cary, draws a gun on him.  Old and cadaverous, but tall and strong, Mr. Sibley and Cary end up grappling and pounding each other after Irma interferes and Dad knocks his daughter to the floor with a sweep of his long arm.  Cary realizes he has fallen in love with Irma and is enraged, but old Sibley outfights our hero, knocks him out, and hands him over to the village mob.  In Chapter Four Cary is back at the inn where all the murders and mutilations took place, once again tied up--the events of Chapter Three have had no discernible effect on the narrative, leaving Cary back where he was in Chapter Two, though we later learn that proximity to Mr. Sibley has provided Cary a clue to the identity of the killer.

A black-clad figure, only its green eyes visible, appears at the inn in Chapter Four, drives off the scared villagers (who shot at Cary and sicced hunting dogs on him--where did the rifles and dogs go?) and takes off Cary's rope bonds to put metal shackles in their place.  Cary is carried to a room where Irma lies on a bed, unconscious, almost naked.  In Chapter Five, Cary has to watch as the mysterious figure tears off Irma's lingerie, listen as his tormentor gloats that he will kill both Cary and Irma.  The villain even tells Cary that he read in the newspapers that Bastone isn't dead, has fully recovered, and is going on an extended trip to Europe, so Cary was fleeing through the countryside for nothing!  The monster strips Cary naked and lays him on top of the drugged Irma and then takes up a hammer and a metal stake with which to bind them together.  But Cary somehow manages to outfight the black-robed man, kicking him with shackled feet and biting him.  The monster flees.  Out in the corridor, the idiot son of chemistry professor Gravlin shoots dead a black robed figure, but it is not the man who sought to murder Cary and Irma, but another man who apparently put on the killer's robes after he tossed them off in flight.  Cary then trips thanks to his shackles and falls unconscious again.        

As Chapter Six begins, Cary wakes up as the police are filing off his shackles.  It is revealed that the man Saul the imbecile shot down was Mr. Sibley!  The senior Sibley, son John explains, was insane after an accident that burned his face and hands; not wanting to see anyone ever again, he moved the family to this tiny village.  Like Pritchard, r. Sibley knew a state highway would be built through the village and sought to purchase the inn from the Gravlins, and to enhance its reputation as a place of horror because he thought that would bring in tourists.  (He moved to a place to get away from people and then tried to attract mobs of tourists to the place?  He really was insane!)  Everybody thinks that the mystery is solved, that Sibley committed all the murders, but Cary knows better!  After  the police leave and everybody else has gone to bed, Cary searches the inn himself.  He finds the corpse of Redfern hanging in a closet, apparently having been impaled on a metal stake, and then sees the black robed monster in the corridor!  There is a vicious fight.  The robed one draws a revolver that shoots not bullets but poison gas, but Cary gets the gun away from the fiend and beats the monster to death with it.  And that monster is revealed to be John Sibley, Irma's brother!  Ah, but not her natural brother, but her step-brother!  As Irma explains, John hated Sibley, and tried to frame his step-father for the murders he committed.  Oh, by the way, Redfern was not a vampire, but a man with a terrible disease that distorted his body, made him wander around naked, and sometimes caused hemorrhages.  Irma and Cary, now that the mystery is truly solved, and anybody who might be trouble is dead or in Europe, can live happily ever after, a fact symbolized by the singing of an oriole near the big Sibley house, which is now all Irma's.            

"The Fugitive Face" (1942) 

The issue of Dime Detective Magazine in which "The Fugitive Face" appeared is readily available at the internet archive here.  I poked around a little online and can't find any evidence "The Fugitive Face" has ever been reprinted.  

Nick Sydney is an "agency dick" working out of Miami.  "King" Clark is a New York pretty boy and a gangster who has been charged with three murders--but he beat the rap all three times!  Myra Donelson is a girl who is always getting into trouble, daughter of a Florida hotel magnate.  Mr. Donelson has hired Nick to get back Myra, who apparently had been kidnapped, by paying the ransom demanded.  Instead, Nick has figured out Clark is involved and followed the gangster to an island in the Everglades that is surrounded by alligators.  Nick finds the two lovebirds--all that talk of kidnapping is a ruse to get money out of Papa Donelson--in the big shack on the little island, but the three of them are stranded on the island when somebody, presumably one of Clark's criminal associates, steals the boats tied up outside.  Nick has to tie up the beautiful girl and the handsome crook, but Myra gets free while Clark is outside building a raft at gunpoint and she turns the tables on our guy so that Nick is now tied up and Myra and Clark have the guns.  You see, the local sheriff came over to the island after following the same clues Nick did, and when he freed Myra she knocked him out from behind.  Kids these days.

Clark's criminal associate, the huge and bandaged-covered Dirk, returns.  Dirk, a wanted man, just had plastic surgery to change his facial features and jokes that he looks like a mummy.  Clark drowns the unconscious sheriff in the swamp.  Nick manages to escape to the mainland, and hooks up with the cops.  They stake out all the plastic surgeons in Miami; Nick watches the office of the most likely suspect, a plastic surgeon with a "hazy background."  Sure enough, Clark and Dirk show up and Nick rushes in to capture them.  You see, while the wanted man was sleeping off a drunk, and Clark and Myra were outside looking at the moon, Nick took off Dirk's bandages, wrote "KILLER" on his face in iodine (Myra carries iodine with her for some reason--maybe this is something women do, who knows what they have in their purses, especially in the 1940s?), and then put the bandages back on.  Dirk has come to the doctor's office to kill the sawbones, he thinking the doc disfigured his face with acid.  Dirk shoots the surgeon before Nick can gun down Dirk.  Clark gets arrested and Papa Donelson gets Myra back and puts her over his knee and spanks her while Nick watches.  (Is this the only punishment Myra will receive?  Isn't she now an accessory to murder and some kind of fraudster besides?)  The story ends with a sort of homoerotic joke as Mr. Donelson suggests he should also spank Nick.

This story is OK.  On the island the constant talk of mosquitos and snakes and 'gators is sort of fun.  And while people get tied up and physically abused and murdered, like in "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures," the plot of "The Fugitive Face" holds together more or less and there are little bits of detection and trickery and little jokes, which you can't say about the story of Cary Booth's unconventional courting of Irma Sibley.  A tick or two above "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures," but not quite in "good" territory.

Admit it, you want to read about what inspires Diane Sawyer, what Bill Cosby thinks
about fatherhood, and why teenagers aren't drinking their Ovaltine like they used to

"The Mission" (1959)

I'm reading "The Mission" in the 1959 anthology in which I read Jackson's "Strangers in Town," and you can do the same here.  "The Mission" was apparently a big success, and was even published in book form, even though it is pretty short, like 18 pages of text in The Saturday Evening Pots Stories 1959.  In 1987, "The Mission" was republished as a serial across two issues of the Saturday Evening Post, which by that time had apparently evolved in the interest of appealing to TV audiences.

"The Mission" is set in Haiti, where Cave spent like five years after working as a war correspondent in the Pacific and before moving to Jamaica where he lived for a while until the Jamaican government seized his business.  This guy lived a life of adventure.

Yolande is six years old, a peasant girl, and is trying to walk the 90-odd miles from her home to Port-au-Prince because her mother died and her father is working in the capital.  Wherever she goes she sets a good example for people, and they are nicer and more disciplined after she leaves.  A father sees her washing herself in a stream, and tells his own kids they are dirty and should wash more often.  This guy's wife is a nag who never stops complaining, but the example of Yolande's gratitude and generosity at the dinner table serves as an example to the nag to have a better attitude.  A shop owner who charges high prices to customers and offers low prices to his suppliers is shamed into changing his ways by Yolande when she refuses to accept his overpriced merchandise.  

Yolande arrives in Port-au-Prince during Mardi Gras.  She asks for her father, whom Mom told her was a famous artist, but nobody seems to have heard of him.  Yolande puts her own quest for her father on hold when she encounters a little middle-class girl even younger than she who has lost her parents.  Seconds after they find the little girl's parents, Yolande saves her from a speeding truck with bad brakes and is injured herself in the process.  (I guess it is symbolic that Yolande is felled by the wing of the figure of an angel on a passing parade float.)  The little girl's father takes her to the doctor--she's gonna be OK.

The middle-class guy does some detective work and discovers that Yolande's mother lied, there is no artist by the name Yolande's mother gave her and there is no evidence of who Yolande's father is (they actually say "the child has no father," maybe a clue Yolande is a Christ figure?) The man decides to adopt Yolande.  He tells her that he was friends with the (nonexistent) artist she expected to find here in the capital and he recently died but before expiring asked him to look after Yolande.  He says that he wants to be her new father and live with her in his big fancy house, and, when he makes it clear it will make him happy, selfless Yolande agrees to stay.

"The Mission" is a competent mainstream story, a wish fulfillment fantasy in which virtue is rewarded and people who are misbehaving are shown to have the capacity to reform.  A little sappy for my tastes, but acceptable.

**********

Well, now I have a broader and more intimate familiarity with the work of Hugh B. Cave.  Are you interested in more MPorcius Fiction Log content about Cave?  Maybe I'll look further into Cave's oeuvre, sample more of his Saturday Evening Post stories, many of which take place in the Caribbean.  Until then, you can click the links below like a pigeon in a Skinner box and your wish will be fulfilled.

"From the Lower Deep"

"The City of Crawling Death"

"The Crawling Curse" 

"The Black Gargoyle"

"Brotherhood of Blood"     

"The Cult of the White Ape" 

"The Isle of Dark Magic" 

"The Door Below" 

"Ladies in Waiting" 

"The Watcher in the Green Room"

"The Death Watch"

October Collections Post

I spend a lot of time in antique stores, second hand book shops, and flea markets, and sometimes the desire to add something to the collection overwhelms my inherent cheapness.   Let's look at a few recent items added to the shelves and stacks at MPorcius HQ.  I think if you click, you can see larger versions of the photos.

At the most recent Big Flea event in the DMV, I think at Timonium, MD, I spent fifty bucks on this copy of Victor Arwas' Art Deco Sculpture, which is more than I like to pay for anything, but there were a bunch of images in it I had never seen before, so I ponied up the cash.

At the Wonder Book in Hagerstown, MD I spent ten dollars on this paperback copy of The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz by Weston Naef, which is closer to what I like to pay for art books.  Last time I checked, you can look at a scan of this book at the internet archive at this link.  

Whenever I am flipping through Cold War-era issues of my favorite magazine about jazz, Playboy, I read the one-panel cartoons.  And, of course, some of the SF magazines have these sorts of one-panel cartoons.  Just recently, you may recall, I read two or three entire books of such cartoons by Peter Arno.  So I was intrigued when I saw Ghouling Around, edited by Phil Hirsch and Paul Laikin, at Route 11 Antique Mall in Hagerstown, MD, and bought it for three bucks.  The content of this book turns out to largely consist of groan-inducing puns for children, but there are also some cartoons I have to admit I didn't really get.  Two are reproduced above; maybe you can explain them to me.  On the left, we have a dog stabbing a man in the back as he reads a newspaper.  What is the joke?  Is it a riff on the cliche that "dog bites man" is not news but "man bites dog" is news?  Are we supposed to consider whether "dog stabs man" is news?  Or maybe the joke is that the man has in the past hit the dog with a rolled-up newspaper, and, so seeing the man with a newspaper in his hand, the dog has decided to launch a preemptive strike on his supposed master?  On the right, we have a fat janitor in the morgue, smiling down at a dead body as he grips his broom.  Why is he smiling?  Is he going to eat the corpse?  Is that why he is fat?  I hope the joke isn't that he is a necrophiliac, that the way he holds is broom handle is supposed to make us think of masturbation.  Could it just be that he swept dust into the drawer wherein resides the deceased, like the traditional joke in which a lazy worker sweeps dust under a rug?  "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust"?  I don't get it.

As a kid I was dinosaur-crazy, and I still love dinosaurs, not necessarily the science of paleontology, but dramatic and gruesome representations of dinosaurs, like in old paintings such as those of Zdenek Burian and Charles R. Knight, and old movies, like the original King Kong, the greatest film of all time.  I collect the dinosaur books I had as a kid and those I borrowed from libraries, and books from the same era with a similar aesthetic.  At an antique mall in Spencer, WV, I picked up this British dinosaur book for like $1.50, it being on sale.  This book's art is pretty amateurish, the colors drab, the perspective and anatomy questionable, and the dinosaurs wearing human-like expressions, but it is suitably gruesome.  I also have to wonder about the science presented in the book, though, when a three-fingered horned dinosaur is labelled "Tyrannosaurus Rex."

Speaking of dinosaurs, I picked up a plateosaurus I think is by Marx (the seller said it was Marx) at a flea market in an outlet mall parking lot for 25 cents and three Flintstones figures--plus a stegosaurus--for a similar price at a yard sale in a church parking lot.

Let's finish up with this (original, repro, or totally bogus, I have no idea) lobby card for the 1925 film The Lost World, a pioneering special effects film featuring many dinosaurs fighting each other and running amok in London.

Maybe we'll do this again next month; until then, keep an eye open for bargains and keep an eye on your dog.

Merril-approved 1959 stories by S Jackson, C Kapp and G Kersh

Let's continue our investigation of 1959 with Judith Merril, reading the sole "J" and two of the "K" stories from her list of Honorable Mentions at the back of the fifth of her famous Year's Best anthologies.  Damon Knight's "What Rough Beast?" is a third "K" story that merited the Merril nod, but we read it way back in 2015.  That leaves us with Shirley Jackson's "Strangers in Town," Colin Kapp's "Breaking Point," and Gerald Kersh's "The Oracle of the Fish."  The titles of the stories in the previous sentence are links to the scans of the stories that I will be reading, so feel free to read along as we enjoy or endure these stories recommended by the critic all the critics adore.

"Strangers in Town" by Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson is one of those writers I, childishly, I know, avoid because people are always telling you to read her.  The more people tell me to do something, the less I want to do it, and I'm not going to grow up now at age 55.  But today we are cosplaying maturity and reading this thing that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post behind a cover that is some kind of joke about traffic jams and alongside an installment of a Perry Mason serial.  I'm reading "Strangers in Town" in an anthology of stories drawn from 1959 issues of The Saturday Evening Post, a book with a cover illo that I guess is making fun of a woman for being a poor singer, a poor dresser, and/or ugly; enough with the punching down, Saturday Evening Post snobs!  It's not like we can all be as blessed as a Peter Gabriel or a Deborah Harry!  One of the stories in this anthology is actually by Hugh B. Cave, a name I didn't expect to find in The Saturday Evening Post.  Jackson's "Strangers in Town" would also be anthologized in one of those Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthologies, Alfred Hitchcock's Witch's Brew.  Damn, spoiler alert.

"Strangers in Town" starts with a traditional obvious joke.  Our narrator, a housewife, tells us she hates gossip, and then proceeds to provide us readers page after page of gossip and descriptions of the many ruses and maneuvers she engages in to facilitate her spying on her new next door neighbors so she can talk about them with her other, long-term, neighbors.  Based on limited evidence, she fears the new neighbors keep a dirty house and drink a lot.  Then she meets the next door people's maid, and it turns out she is a witch who uses magic as a labor-saving device.  I guess the joke is that the witch, and the lady of the house when our narrator meets her, just openly talk about magic instead of being sneaky about it.

The narrator and her fellow gossips are suspicious of the new neighbors, whom they think may be foreigners and/or heathens, but the new neighbors are very kind and sweet, always using their magic to do good deeds about the town, so I guess the banal point of this story is that suburban people are closed-minded and judgmental and mean to new comers and minorities who try to join the community even though the new comers and minorities are generous and helpful and in fact better than the suburbanites, smarter and more sophisticated (this family with the witch for a maid have modern furniture and are vegetarians.)  I guess this story is an allegory of blacks or Jews or Catholics or bohemians or whoever moving into a middle-class WASP neighborhood and being cruelly rejected by the bourgeois WASPs, who are scared by their different (but superior!) cultural practices.   

Anyway, the kids in the little town like the new people because they give them gifts and because their talking cat can tell them stories.  Eventually the women of the town get together in a mob (except for a fat woman who is late to the gathering because she has to put on her corset) and insult the new people and the new people leave.  But the strangers leave something behind--their magical cat impregnated the narrator's cat and the kittens have strange eyes and are quite oversized; the neighborhood kids adore these kittens but they scare the adults.

I can't say there is anything wrong with "Strangers in Town"--the pacing is fine, the characters all act in a more or less believable way, Jackson gives the narrator a personality and a consistent voice, and so forth.  (I won't get into whether or not there is a risk associated with inviting strangers into your town, whether they might rape your daughter or burn down your townhall or defraud your welfare system or start a grenade-throwing gang war with the other immigrants you invited in last month.  Jackson asserts that immigrants and minorities are awesome and we are going with that.)  "Strangers in Town" is professionally written and polished.  But the themes and the plot are boring, like stuff we've seen a hundred times before on TV--this isn't the first time I have been told that suburbanites are unsophisticated jerks and native-born middle-class white Christians should treat non-whites and immigrants and non-Christians better than they do.  I'll call "Strangers in Town" acceptable.  We don't have to wonder why Merril would enjoy and promote this story, as it expresses boilerplate liberal/left ideology and appeared in a mainstream publication, and Merril is always looking for examples of mainstream writers and outlets in the act of employing speculative fiction devices in order to buttress her contention that genre boundaries are bogus.

"Breaking Point" by Colin Kapp

Ten years ago we read Kapp's "The Cloudbuilders" and Patterns of Chaos, and more recently his "Enigma" and "Ambassador to Verdammt."  "Breaking Point" debuted in John Carnell's New Worlds and has never been reprinted.  Maybe we will join Merril in seeing something in this story that other editors and anthologists missed?  Or maybe Merril just liked it because she is the cheerleader of the New Wave and this story is in the vanguard of that movement--Carnell, without using the words "New Wave," firmly places the story in that category in his intro to "Breaking Point":

...the current story which follows, a breakaway from the traditional approach to a psychological story. Colin Kapp now joins Brian Aldiss and Jim Ballard as British writers who are pioneering the new type of science fiction which is rapidly replacing the old.

"Breaking Point" is a quite pretentious but quite weak story full of empty and uninteresting philosophical banter among the various uninteresting characters; all the major characters declare each other insane and unfit to wield authority, though each has some kind of claim to authority, and then it is revealed that all the characters are secretly working together.

Civilization (sometimes spelled "civilisation" in this poorly copyedited story which doesn't maintain fidelity to either US or UK spelling but switches between them) is collapsing and the nation is being shaken by mass rioting.  Our lead character is Lieutenant Penny, an Army officer and a psychologist.  The Army is trying to quell the riots, without success, and we get poorly written action scenes in which the mob attacks the soldiers with bricks and bottles, Army trucks crash while trying to negotiate the barricaded streets, and so forth.  Serving in the same unit as Perry is Major Bannerman.  When Penny's unit is about to be overwhelmed and destroyed by the mob, a tall man among the the crowd, Pandi, stops the attack by emotionally manipulating the mob members using poetry.  Penny and Bannerman compare this man's charisma, his ability to drive men hither and thither with words that seem like nonsense, to Hitler's.  They also discuss the nature of civilization--is it natural or unnatural?  Colonel Foresyte appears on the scene, demands the capture of Pandi and conducts an interrogation of this enigmatic figure.  Here is a sample, from that interrogation, of typical dialogue from this sterile and dog-chasing-its-own-tail story.

"...that which is obvious is frequently not logical, and therefore difficult to justify. I claim that you cannot give me a rational reason why you must save civilisation.”

“That may be true, but the relevance escapes me. Civilization is an illogical entity. It has a different meaning for every man. I intend to save it for what it means to me.”

“Would you believe me,” asked Pandi, "if I said that your kind of civilization is already dead?”

“No,” said Foresyte,“it is going through a period of trial, but it will rise again.”

“Not so!  It should never have existed...."

Foresyte's interrogation becomes extreme, little better than torture, so Penny assaults Foresyte and liberates Pandi.  Bannerman appears--is he trying to capture Penny and Pandi or trying to help them?  Is he trying to run them over with his truck or trying to pick them up?  A theme of this story is that everybody's motives and goals are unknowable and changeable besides.  The Army camp erupts into gunfire, bullets and shells whipping every which way.  Is there an enemy attack under way?  No, like civilization itself, the Army camp is collapsing into violent insanity because modernity--"dogma, advertising, education, politics, brainwashing, and similar invasions of the soul"--have driven every individual and the entire human race insane.  Or sop says Bannerman.

Bannerman, Penny, and Pandi take refuge in a remote cabin.  Pandi leaves with the truck and returns with the injured Foresyte.  Bannerman reveals that Pandi is an actor working for Foresyte.  Foresyte set up the whole complicated business with Pandi in order to test to see if Penny was one of the few sane men left in the world.  And Penny passed the test!  Such men as Penny will be sent to an island like Arthur was sent to Avalon--the few sane men will rebuild civilization after all the insane have killed each other.  Penny in the last sentence of the story weeps.            

Thumbs down for this ridiculous thing.  We might see it as a New Wave story, but at the same time it bears many resemblances to the work of Golden Age SF writers like Asimov, Heinlein, and van Vogt, in which the cognitive elite behind the scenes manipulate people with their superbrains and incredible knowledge of psychology and sociology in hopes of guiding fragile civilization to the conquest of the stars someday.  But while those old stories had a measure of gee whiz fun about them, and felt fresh and exciting, "Breaking Point" is depressing and drab and wears you out.  

"The Oracle of the Fish" by Gerald Kersh

Merril read "The Oracle of the Fish" in an issue of Nugget that has a lovely green cover and trumpets its inclusion of a "guide to amatory literature" for "gentlemen."  Wow!  Lamentably, I can't find a text of this treasure trove of invaluable knowledge, so I'm reading "The Oracle of the Fish" in a scan of the Kersh collection The Terribly Wild Flowers.

"The Oracle of the Fish" is a joke story the beginning of which is full of obvious jokes of the kind with which Jackson tried to entertain us, people saying something and then contradicting it with their actions.  A barkeep says she trusts her customers but always empties the till into her pocket when she leaves the bar, a Welshman says that Welshmen all brag about their ancestors, but he never does, and then proceeds to do so.  Set in Wales, Kersh also makes jokes about how long and unpronounceable Welsh names are.  these jokes are not bad, but feel very tired.  

The narrator, an Englishman, encounters a Welshman with a PhD and has a long conversation with him; the Welshman takes over as first-person narrator and his story is the meat of "The Oracle of the Fish."

The Welshman tells the story (full of digressions and trivia) of how in 1939 he acquired by his cleverness from a talking fish an ancient ring with symbols on it, and then a goat accidentally pointed him to an ancient standing stone carved with identical symbols, so he hired a mute imbecile (mentally damaged by a fall on his head two decades prior) who is also an expert miner to help him dig under the stone.  The two explored a cave, found ancient coins and fossilized bones of cave men and mammoths, and eventually came upon a lost race of troglodytes, descendants of the Picts driven underground by the Romans who have kept up their numbers and diversified their gene pool by kidnapping babies from the surface at night.  The imbecile realizes these are his people, and joins them--the PhD escapes the hideous cannibalistic subterraneans by blinding them with the flash bulb on his camera.  The Welshman planned to explore the caverns further, with a heavily equipped team, but an errant German bomb hit the site and caused a cave-in that destroyed everything.

A jocular version of an H. P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard story.  Parts are engaging, some of the jokes inspire a smile, but portions of "The Oracle of the Fish" are long and tedious.  Adding up the pluses and minuses, we come to zero, the break-even point, and conclude this story is acceptable.

**********
 

These stories are not great.  But I feel like they are a good representation of Merril's characteristic and closely linked projects--dissolving the boundaries between genres and promoting the New Wave.  We've got two professionally written mainstream stories from magazines that are not ostensibly dedicated to speculative fiction, and we've got a story from a science fiction magazine that features no high technology and focuses exclusively on psychology and sociology and is vague, philosophical in a show offy but ultimately empty way, and pessimistic, thus ticking plenty of the boxes of what we think of as New Wave.

A crop of stories that are more interesting from an historical point of view than actually enjoyable to read.  Maybe the 1959 "L" stories picked by Merril will go down more smoothly?  Stay tuned and find out.

Tales of Supermen by P Anderson, R Silverberg and P A Chapdelaine

In 1984 here in America there appeared the anthology Supermen, the third volume of the Isaac Asimov's Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction series.  A British edition followed in 1988.  We here at MPorcius Fiction Log have read seven stories from the book (links to the appropriate blog posts below) and today read three more.  To experience these super stories yourself, in the very form in which I will be reading them, try this link. 

"Angel, Dark Angel" by Roger Zelazny

"What Rough Beast?" by Damon Knight

"Resurrection" AKA "The Monster" by A. E. van Vogt

"Pseudopath" by Philip High

"Worlds to Kill" by Harlan Ellison

"In the Bone" by Gordon R. Dickson

"Death by Ecstasy" by Larry Niven

"Un-Man" by Poul Anderson (1953)

Cripes, this is a long one!  Over 80 pages here in Supermen!  It had better be good!  Life is short, Poul!

It is the future--the 21st century!  Much of Chicago has been abandoned, its streets full of grass and broken glass and rats.  The highways are similarly crumbling.  People in Illinois now live in skyscraper apartment buildings 300 stories high, two miles long, with a view of the vast corn fields, get where they want to go via airboats and moving sidewalks, and have group marriages or open relationships instead of monogamous marriages.  Donner is an agent of the United Nations, living in just such a building, eight floors above the secret regional HQ of a subversive political party.  We follow him as he sneaks into the troublemakers' apartment, makes a mistake and gets captured, and then is tortured.  The self-destruct device in his skull kills him before he can reveal any info.  Anderson handles the SF setting and the espionage business in these first two chapters in an entertaining way, so I stopped worrying abut the length of the story.

Chapter III sees us on Mars, where man first set foot thirty years ago, a tough frontier world where colonies are slowly expanding.  We meet Rosenberg, a Jewish guy who has been living and working on Mars for some time, but after an injury has to return to Earth, to retire, he no longer being strong enough to endure the endless danger and risk that is life on the red planet.  Before he leaves, he checks in with a friend in the domed city from which his ship to Earth will depart, a medical man and researcher who has, by studying Martian flora and fauna, perhaps discovered a means of putting humans into suspended animation.  Also visiting this doctor is a Pilgrim, a member of a fanatical and anti-Semitic sect, come to Mars to build a new Jerusalem.  Rosenberg finds this joker, and an American flag he spots nearby, distasteful, and hopes the UN will soon seize control of Mars and all the planets and all ethnic and national distinctions will be dissolved.

In Chapter IV we meet Naysmith, the UN agent who will be taking over for Donner.  Donner and Naysmith are both members of what everyone keeps calling The Brotherhood, a cadre of super agents whom, it is strongly implied, are clones, and we learn a little more about conditions on Earth, how the world has been through a period of chaos and the UN, through any means necessary--including assassination and coups d'etat of independent-minded governments--is trying to keep that chaos from returning.  Many individual governments, like that in the United States, still have some independence, and there are both pro- and anti-world government members in the US Congress, wrangling over how much power to hand over to the UN--the USA has already handed over its moon bases to the UN, but conservatives and UN skeptics have maintained a security apparatus independent of the UN, and as part of its counter-espionage activities it hunts down members of the Brotherhood.  As the story proceeds, Anderson elides any distinctions among the various anti-UN groups, suggesting the federal governments security forces and anti-UN terrorists are all one and the same.

In Chapters V and VI Naysmith goes into action.  He looks and acts much like Donner, who was one of the few people in this world who had a monogamous marriage.  So he goes to Donner's house to impersonate the dead man, fooling his wife and child.  Mrs. Donner could be useful to the anti-UN radicals whom Donner was killed by, so Naysmith wants to get her out of the area ASAP, but federal agents appear soon after Naysmith does and he and Mrs. Donner have to shoot their way out of the house to Naysmith's aircraft--they survive because they are shooting to kill and the enemy is trying to capture them.  The fugitives fly to a hideout in the mountains in Chapters VII and VIII.  Throughout these four chapters we get history lessons on post-WWII developments that justify the UN taking over the world and assassinating people and overthrowing national governments. 

Naysmith leaves Mrs. Donner in a well-supplied cabin high in the Rockies without fessing up to the fact that he is not her husband, and gets down to work, capturing an anti-UN rebel and using a truth drug to interrogate him, learning how Rosenberg and the Puritans on Mars fit into the plans of the anti-UN faction, and then murdering him.  In Chapter IX, Naysmith works with a fellow member of The Brotherhood (the UN has hundreds of such clones, geniuses who all quote Shakespeare and have perfect physiques, with which to take over the world I mean save the world) to rescue Rosenberg from anti-UN thugs who try to kidnap the guy as he gets off the ship from Mars.  In Chapter X, Rosenberg, under hypnosis, tells all about the suspended animation theories he learned on Mars.  We also get a lecture on how human society has gotten so complex we need an elite to manage our lives--the clones will be this elite.  Reminding us of the Nexialism in the book version of A. E. van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle, there is a new science abroad, Synthesis, that combines all the old sciences, and members of the elite that will rule the world are learning it. 

Human society had grown too big, too complex and powerful. It was a machine running blind and wild....The sciences had grown too big and complex, like everything else, and there was too much overlap between the specialties. Further progress required 'the fully trained synthesizing mentality. 

Naysmith leaves Rosenberg with Mrs. Donner and admits to her that her husband is dead and he is an imposter.

A Synthesis-trained clone conceives a cunning plan that involves Naysmith allowing himself to be captured by the enemy, and so in Chapter XI our hero is in captivity being studied and interrogated by the anti-UN faction, who don't know about the clones yet but suspect something is up because, unnervingly, they keep having to fight guys who look like guys they have already killed, keep finding evidence--fingerprints and so forth--that the same man has been in two places at once.  (One of the remarkable things about "Un-Man" is that Anderson never uses the word "clone" and most of the characters seem to have never even heard of the concept of clones.)  During the interrogation, Naysmith humiliates the anti-UN people by psychoanalyzing them, telling the woman rebel that she is a rebel because she is ugly and can't get a man, another guy that he is a sadist, another that he is anti-UN because he is an exogene grown in a vat and growing to life outside a woman's womb made him insane, etc.  It is implied that the leader of this regional anti-UN group is against the UN world government because he suffered homosexual rape as a child.  Throughout the story, Anderson characterizes opposition to the UN not as a matter of ideological commitment, but as a symptom of insanity, equates anti-UN opinions with sickness.   

In Chapter XII Rosenberg and Mrs. Donner talk and we learn Rosenberg's back story and that he knew the genius who was the source of the gene plasm that was used to produce the clones that today form The Brotherhood, a guy who fought for the UN in various wars on Earth and then went to space and invented a very useful valve.  Anderson lays it on pretty thick--this guy knew a dozen languages, had more appreciation of fine literature than a college professor, was a musician and a painter and a photographer and so forth.  A superman!  Supes was Rosenberg's best friend on Mars, and died at age 60 in an accident--at 60 he was a physical match for other men who were in their 20s, and died while saving Rosenberg's life during a cave-in.

In Chapter XIII Naysmith and three other Brothers are in the secret anti-UN base on an Atlantic sea station where they meet the big boss of all the various anti-UN groups.  Before anything interesting can happen, a UN assassin, yet another clone, kills this boss of bosses, resolving the story's plot.  In the fourteenth and final chapter Naysmith indulges in reflections on how the superior Brotherhood of clones may have defeated the current threat to world government, but will have to remain in action because other mentally ill people will no doubt rise up to oppose the rule of the UN.  Then, reminding us of goings on in Elsinore and the Biden household, Naysmith hooks up with Mrs. Donner--our superiors act in curious ways.

We might compare "Un-Man" to Philip E. High's "Pseudopath," which also features a behind-the-scenes struggle in which the good guys have to resort to ruthless extralegal methods for the good of humanity and who try to break the morale of the enemy by trickery about the capabilities of their superman.  And to Larry Niven's "Death by Ecstasy," in which the hero is captured and tortured and guides his comrades to the enemy leader while using psychology to rattle his captors. 

Obviously, I myself am not a cheerleader for the UN or world government, if only because a majority of people beyond the borders of the United States are committed to socialism and/or Islam and have no interest in free speech, trial by jury, or private property (only half the people within the borders of the United States fit that description) and I don't favor having such people ruling over me.  And I find the rank elitism of "Un-Man" distasteful.  This makes it hard for me to really become immersed in "Un-Man" and sympathize with Donner and Naysmith, even though it seems like Anderson was envisaging a UN that stood for truth, justice, and the American way and fought against commies and jihadis.  It doesn't help that Anderson doesn't actually make much of a case for the UN and world government, mostly just asserts it and tells you any who disagree with his unargued case are mentally ill.

The political and philosophical themes of "Un-man" lacking heft, we have to judge it on its science fiction ideas and its thriller aspects and its human relationships, and those are not bad, though the jack-of-all-trades nature of the clones, who are geniuses in every field of endeavor, and the science of Synthesis, are a little hard to take (though they perfectly exemplify the superman theme of this anthology.)  I guess in the end I can mildly recommend "Un-Man."

"Un-Man" is a part of Anderson's Psychotechnic League series, a future history he didn't name himself and which is very distinct from the more libertarian Technic League that features interstellar businessman Nicholas van Rijn and imperial agent Dominic Flandry.  "Un-Man" seems to have been a success, debuting as a cover story of Astounding and reappearing in several anthologies and Anderson collections.

"After the Myths Went Home" by Robert Silverberg (1969)

Continuing the trend of stories the politics of which get on my nerves, in the first paragraph of "After the Myths Went Home," the narrator praises Marx, Lenin and Bonaparte and criticizes Winston Churchill.  You see, it is the 125th century, and the people of the far future can "call up" people from the past to talk to them.  Then they decide to call up fictional characters, specifically figures of myth and legend which were central to the efforts of ancient people to understand and give order to the universe.  I guess these are simulations based on records or something--Silverberg isn't clear, and it doesn't matter because this is not a "real" science fiction story but a gimmicky New Wave joke story that I found kind of irritating.  

Adam and Eve are called up, then Pan (he has sex with some guy's wife, but it is OK because this is the promiscuous future and hubby is proud to be cuckolded by a simulation of a god) and then Silverberg gives a long list of characters from Greek and Roman literature, Native American religion, Norse Myth, blah blah blah.  Then Catholic saints, and then Galileo and Newton and Einstein, I guess Silverberg making the point that people in the 20th century use science to make sense of the universe and comfort them and justify their behavior much like people of the past used religion.  Then Abraham Lincoln and JFK.  Another of Silverberg's points is that we mythologize people of the past, and real people like Galileo and Freud, called up, bear the attributes of gods, being 15 feet tall and crackling with electricity and so on.

JFK is the last of these mythological figures called up, and we are told that in the 21st century and later there were no more myths because life had become so easy and so myths were not needed.  The people of the future interact with the called up gods and heroes for a while, and then send them back.  The called up Cassandra warns that a society needs myths, that one without myths is doomed, and, sure enough, after the gods and heroes are all gone, space aliens conquer the Earth and enslave everybody.

A lazy waste of time.  Science fiction writers will ofttimes refer to Shakespeare or T. S. Eliot or W. B. Yeats or whoever in their stories to show off how learned they are, and such name dropping is fine as a little spice or color or as a way to emphasize a point, but this entire story is nothing but such references, like a big slab of icing with no cake beneath it.  Thumbs down!

"After the Myths Went Home" first wasted the time of readers of F&SF, and the SF community has embraced it the way a circa 1950s Poul Anderson embraced the UN.  Donald Wolheim and Terry Carr selected it for World's Best Science Fiction 1970--Silverberg's name is at the top of the list on the cover!--and in 2004 Stefan Rudnicki chose it to be the title story of the first volume of his anthology series Imaginings (I don't know if there was ever a second volume.)  You guys are cheap dates--a story isn't good just because a guy typed out a list of names he could have got from the Oxford Dictionary of the Classical World!

"Brood World Barbarian" by Perry A. Chapdelaine  (1969)

Chapdelaine was a mathematician who published a few novels and over a dozen short stories and was one of the editors of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s letters.  I don't think I've ever read anything by him.  "Brood World Barbarian" debuted in If, and reappeared twice, here in Supermen and in the 1989 anthology Space Gladiators.

This is an adequate filler piece.  Our narrator, as a child, was plucked from his barbaric world by the slavers of a high tech monarchy planet ruled by a dictator and inhabited by bloodthirsty sports fans.  The narrator's people are so primitive they don't even have names!  Trained as a gladiator and educated via machine so that he can quote Plato and Ben Franklin, Lewis Carrol and Shakespeare, he was thrown into the arena and has had a long successful career; currently he is one of the most famous and popular gladiators.  He hates the dictator and has sworn revenge on him--at the same time, he has fallen in love with the dictator's beautiful daughter and has sworn to possess her.  The daughter, he feels, signaled her desire for him with her eyes one day when the royal family visited the slave quarters.

The gladiators don't fight with swords or spears or whatever, as they usually do in these kinds of stories, but with pressor beams and tractor beams, which allow them to jump around the arena like John Carter on Mars or Kal El on Terra as well as tear each other limb from limb from a distance.  The dictator throws our guy into the arena with a giant reptile man from a high gravity planet who is much stronger than the human narrator and also has armored skin.  The narrator's long experience gives him an edge, though.  As normally happens in these gladiator stories, the narrator makes a deal with the reptile man on the floor of the arena while crowds are watching.  I always think these scenes are a manifestation of left wing wish fulfillment, that they represent the socialists' dream that the white working class will ally with the black lower class, or immigrants, or Muslims, or whoever, to massacre the bourgeoisie.  Anyway, our narrator and the reptile man use their pressor beams to propel the narrator out of the arena and into the stands where he kills many spectators and guards and escapes, the first gladiator to ever escape the arena.

The narrator makes it to the mountain snows, but eventually the dictator and his men catch up to him.  He is taken to the mines, like so many people in science fiction stories.  He escapes the mines, killing many prisoners and guards in the process, and then is captured by illegal wildcat miners from some other planet.  The three men travel through space, but then the government space fleet detects them and pursues them; the criminals crash land on a planet and are killed, while the gladiator survives and takes cover in a jungle where he has to fight monsters.  The creatures in this jungle sense emotion and can be manipulated by projecting the emotions they respond to.

The gladiator marches for thousands of miles through the jungle, occasionally hiding from space ships that are hunting him.  Eventually he decides to attract one of the ships, thinking to capture it.  He learns that he is a hero back on the monarchical planet, renowned as the greatest gladiator of all time and awarded his freedom by the dictator.  

Back on the dictator's planet the narrator has to fight that reptile man again--this hulking brute has been acting champion in the narrator's absence.  Being out of practice, our guy can't beat the lizard man until he uses what he learned on the jungle planet to project emotions onto the scaly athlete that bring him to his knees.  The reptile man is popular enough that the crowd insists his life be spared.

The narrator now lives as a free civilian, and plots his revenge on the king.  He gets a better education from better machines, and tries to kill the king, but is captured again.  He realizes he no longer wants to kill the king, no longer hates him, and is freed.

Then comes the twist ending.  Centuries ago mankind built a vast space empire and then it collapsed, leaving many colonized planets to fall into savagery or barbarism.  The genetic stock back on Earth was attenuated, weak.  So the leaders of Earth decided to send forth space ships to capture humans who had been mutated, who had evolved, under alien suns, and bring them back to Earth to be tested in the arena!  The monarchical planet is Earth!  The strongest, the smartest, the most courageous, having proven their worth in the arena, are allowed to contribute to the gene pool.  The dictator himself was a gladiator once!  And our narrator succeeds the dictator to become dictator himself and continue the practice of kidnapping promising specimens and throwing them into the arena for the pleasure of the bloodthirsty crowd.

Not a bad story, but no big deal.  Like so many of the stories in Supermen, it is terribly elitist, and justifies or even romanticizes throwing the liberal norms that have made life in the Anglophonic West so prosperous and comfortable right into the garbage if the stakes are high enough.  The superman is above conventional morality!

**********

So we bid farewell to Supermen.  A worthwhile exploration.  What's up next at MPorcius Fiction Log?  Even I don't know!  But stay tuned regardless.  No doubt something will happen.

Stories of Supermen by H Ellison, G R Dickson and L Niven

Look!  Up in the sky!  In our last episode, we read a story by Philip E. High about a guy who masqueraded as a telepath by stretching his body-language reading skills to the limit.  After debuting in New Worlds, "Pseudopath" was reprinted in 1984 in the anthology Supermen edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh.  In 1988, Supermen was reprinted in the UK with what I initially took to be a sort of Conan-type cover.  Before experiencing "Pseudopath," we'd already read three other stories that were included in Supermen:

"Angel, Dark Angel" by Roger Zelazny

"What Rough Beast?" by Damon Knight

"Resurrection" AKA "The Monster" by A. E. van Vogt

That still leaves a bunch of stories in the book of interest to us that we have not yet read.  I'd really like to change the world, save it from the mess it's in, but I'm too weak, I'm so thin, I'm just going to read three stories from this anthology and call it a day.  Put on your cape and fly over to this link and maybe you can read along with the rest of us nine-stone weaklings with knobbly knees. 

"Worlds to Kill" by Harlan Ellison (1968) 

"Worlds to Kill" in Supermen comes to us in five chapters (other versions may differ.)  In Chapter I we witness a spy operation as our protagonist, Jared, disguised as a cripple, watches a human sacrifice in a huge stadium and then proceeds to a place where he can send his message off world without the theocrats' bugs hearing him.  This planet has high technology, like high speed walkways like those in Robert Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll," but is also run by religious fanatics.  In Chapter II we observe as Jared's space navy conquers the planet using chemical warfare that affects the psychology of the population, surgical strike bombing and commando raids.  Then Jared, a mercenary who has conquered over 100 planets for clients this way, accepts payment from squid-headed aliens and these Cthulhu-types take over the planet and murder three-quarters of the humans who have lived there for centuries and enslave the remainder.  We see how manly a man Jared is when he outfights the leader of the squid-people when the top mollusk gets on his nerves.

The setting of "Worlds to Kill" is a universe in which hundreds of thousands of planets have intelligent spacefaring populations; many such populations are human, the descendants of Terran colonists, but many are various alien species.  In Chapter III we observe Jared in his HQ, a hollowed out moon in a system whose star is dead that he has fashioned into an impregnable fortress and learn about his career.  Jared receives a multitude of requests for his planet-conquering services and rejects most of them.  One reason he is successful at conquering planets is that he has built a huge computer and it makes accurate predictions and gives great advice.  The apparent theme of "Worlds to Kill," that men are terrible, all of them (us!) violent hypocrites, is furthered when Jared is approached by a delegation that is, ostensibly, trying to bring peace to the universe and Jared's spy services reveal that these peaceniks are no better than any other men, will also hire Jared to conquer people.  Jared is meant to symbolize all human men, I guess, he being from Earth and surrounding himself with Earth artifacts.  

Chapter IV baldly tells us that women are better than men, 

It had been made obvious, however, centuries before, that women ruled better than men. Thus, the government of Khaine was almost entirely female, with "the High" a woman elected by a combination of popular vote and computer selection. 

and then describes how Jared, on Khaine, captures the leader of that woman-dominated planet, "the High," and brings her to his HQ.  In Chapter V, Khaine is conquered and Jared stops the client, a skinny alien, from killing the High in addition to taking possession of the planet.  Then we get the twist ending.  Jared is conquering all these planets and giving them to creeps like Squidy and Skinny as part of a complicated plan to unify the universe under one government and thus bring peace and order to every single person and planet.  The High is recruited to be his wife (to humanize him, to keep him from becoming too much like his super computer) and his successor should he be killed, and to bear him further successors.  Jared is compared to a god who works in mysterious ways--how is conquering all these planets going to lead to a one-universe government that maintains order without becoming corrupt and without trampling individual liberty?  Ellison doesn't tell us, and suggests that the whole scheme might not work anyway, so that Jared will be thought of by history as what he appears to be, a greedy bastard who kills millions of people for money.

"Worlds to Kill" is acceptable filler; it doesn't generate excitement or any other emotion, but it isn't annoying or boring.  The spy and action scenes, and all the high tech jazz like the moving sidewalk and Jared's bed of air jets and the many security measures on Jared's HQ moon are OK; they not bad, but feel sort of perfunctory, like they are just window dressing.  The main point of the story, that religion and government are corrupt and kill people for inexplicable reasons and ask of others faith that they don't deserve, but somehow maybe are actually capable of making life better for the fortunate majority of people they don't kill or enslave, is also OK.  Pessimistic and cynical, but probably justified by our experiences in life and knowledge of history.  The superiority of women theme feels kind of just thrown in there, though there is perhaps the suggestion that the super computer is manipulating events to put a woman in charge of the universe, that five-times married Ellison really thinks women humanize men and are better rulers than men and believes putting a woman in charge of your life and everybody's life is a good enough idea to justify all manner of short term localized hardship.

"Worlds to Kill" debuted in Frederik Pohl's If, where it is at least somewhat different than the later version we read.  This March '68 issue of If looks great on the inside, with lots of Virgil Finlay, Jack Gaughan and Vaughan Bode illustrations that are quite good.  "Worlds to Kill" found its long term berth in the Ellison collection The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, where it is split into five chapters, like in Supermen.  

"In the Bone" by Gordon R. Dickson (1966)

Dickson starts off his story with a didactic page about how it isn't technology that matters when "a time of decision comes," but the man who uses it, his representative example being the armored knight of the medieval period.  

Our narrator is a PR man working with a ground-breaking space mission.  The point of the spear of the mission, Harry Brennan, after two years of training, climbs into his space ship and is the first man to warp through hyperspace ("shift through alternate space") to other solar systems and send back to Earth exciting data on them.  The narrator baldly tells us (today's stories so far are lacking in subtilty in making their points) that Brennan becomes arrogant with all the power his training and his space ship give him and that he is about to cometh to a fall.  The narrator then recedes and we get what amounts to an omniscient third-person narration of Brennan's astounding adventure.  Should we be skeptical of what we hear because we are getting it not directly from Brennan but through the medium of a PR guy?   

Brennan finds on an Earth-like planet an alien installation, a pyramid which is the hub for a bunch of machines that are rolling hither and thither, and E. T. proves to have even more power--expressed in rays and beams and lightning bolts--then does Brennan in his super vehicle.  The vehicle is wrecked and Brennan ejects and has to face the world naked without technology, even without his normal education and intelligence, as the shock of his disastrous encounter with the aliens has reduced his mind to that of a clever animal acting on instinct!  Rest assured, this instinct stands him in good stead--he quickly learns how to find food and water and shelter in the jungle he has been stranded within.  

Eventually, after a month or so, I guess, Brennan's memories of being human and of Earth and of his space adventure begin to return to him.  He remembers the pyramid that played its rays and beams and lightning on his vehicle, shooting him down and reducing him to an animal.  He becomes determined to face his enemy.

Over many days, Brennan, still half animal, studies and through cleverness and cunning overcomes the many obstacles that stand between him and the pyramid.  Once inside, he explores, leaving and returning to the pyramid again and again for weeks, learning more and more about its operation and the alien who operates it, using automatic robots of a multitude of types to research the geology and ecosystem of this planet.  Full of hatred for the alien, Brennan eventually confronts it and in a fight scene that may be the basis for the cover illustration of the British edition of Supermen, kills the alien, an explorer like himself.  His vengeance achieved, and now firmly ensconced in a technological environment, Brennan becomes more fully human, and six months later has figured out how to operate the pyramid, which is in fact a starship.  Brennan brings the ship back to Earth, proving that the success of mankind is owed not to technology, but to something innate to the human animal.

"In the Bone" is a pretty good traditional SF story that talks about technology and science and the people who expand our knowledge and mastery of the universe, but focuses not on scientists and sophistication but on inherent human qualities of tenacity and cunning that have their roots in our animalistic past.  Dickson, like Ellison, who in "Worlds to Kill" shows us a money-grubbing mass murderer and then reveals that this killer is committing his almost unfathomable sins for a good purpose, gives us a plot twist, leading us to expect a hubristic man to suffer a fall, depicting that fall, but then showing us how he rises from defeat through adversity to conquer and secure for the human race an unprecedented treasure.  The man's arrogance is justified, but not because of his advanced training and his modern technology, but because of qualities mankind has possessed for millennia, that have powered man's rise to world domination and will power his rise to further conquests beyond the solar system.  Dickson's themes are more interesting and his action scenes more exciting than Ellison's, and the tone and style make the story more immersive, more "real;" also, the things that happen in the story feel integrated into the story's themes, unlike so many of the events in Ellison's story, which I thought felt like "window dressing."

"In the Bone" debuted in If, another issue with lots of illustrations by Virgil Finlay and Jack Gaughan as well as some good ones by Gray Morrow.  In the letters column of this October '66 ish of If is a missive from Muriel Eddy, wife of C. M. Eddy, in which she reminisces about spending time with H. P. Lovecraft and gushes that she loves If and the work of Robert Heinlein, David A. Kyle and the aforementioned Morrow.  (We read three stories by C. M. Eddy in August and back in 2020 we read four collaborations between Eddy and HPL.)  "In the Bone" would go on to be included in the Dickson collections Ancient, My Enemy and In the Bone: The Best Science Fiction of Gordon R. Dickson, among other places.

"Death by Ecstasy" by Larry Niven (1969)

This is apparently the first of the Gil Hamilton stories, of which we have already read "Defenseless Dead,"  Like so much of Niven's famous work, the Hamilton stories take place in the Known Space.  A popular story, "Death by Ecstasy" has been reprinted in quite a few anthologies as well as multiple Niven collections.  It first hit the streets in Galaxy under the title "Organleggers;" where it enjoys some pretty good illustrations by Jack Gaughan.  In this issue Gaughan also provides comic illustrations for what I guess is a joke story collab between Harlan Ellison and Keith Laumer, while Algis Budrys in the book column proclaims Samuel R. Delany the best science fiction writer in the world after reading Nova.

"Death By Ecstasy" is a good story that integrates a pile of standard science fiction themes--the overcrowded future, asteroid miners forming a distinct society out there in the dangerous environment of space, psychic powers, speculations on the effect on law and society of technological breakthroughs like medical advances, advocacy of free love and nudism--within the context of a detective plot in which the narrator, a hard-boiled detective, investigates the death of one of his comrades, the man who saved his life back when they were living through a perilous adventure together.  (Doesn't the first Mike Hammer novel have this kind of plot?)  Niven handles the overcrowding and narrator Gil Hamilton's psychic powers quite well, and the flashbacks to Hamilton's time as an asteroid miner before he became a federal police agent are also good, with lots of stuff about space suits and how one mines asteroids and all that, as are the speculations about how culture and society might change in a different milieu (space) and under different conditions (better medical technology.)  The stuff about how great promiscuity is and how the federal police force has a woman psyker therapist who comforts all the cops by using her mind-reading ability is less convincing, and less well-integrated into the plot and its themes, butt doesn'tt weriously weaken the story.  Niven also gives a shout out to Fritz Leiber, suggesting that in the 22nd century Leiber's novel The Wanderer will be famous, like Lolita or Don Quixote, a cultural touchstone everybody will be familiar with.  

The plot of "Death by Ecstasy" revolves around the future phenomena Niven described in his 1967 story "Jigsaw Man," which appeared in the famous Dangerous Visions anthology edited by Harlan Ellison (and apparently financially supported by Niven.)  In that story, which I read in 2014, we find that, when organ transplants become so reliable and easy to perform that you can almost achieve immortality by just having failing parts of your body replaced by those from donors, that a shortage of such spare parts results and so the voters push politicians to pass laws mandating the harvesting of parts from criminals condemned to death and then laws that extend the death penalty to relatively modest crimes.  "Death by Ecstasy" adds to the mix the latest in addiction--hooking yourself up directly to electric current to stimulate the pleasure centers of your brain.  

I'm not going to describe the detective plot blow by blow--we've all read or seen detective fiction, the long discussions of motive, of method, of how the clues fit together, the efforts to get into the head of the victim and the killer, the issues of jurisdiction, the hero tied up in the criminal's lair, etc.  Suffice to say, Niven does a decent job and I'm giving "Death by Ecstasy" a thumbs up.  I like this story enough that it has me thinking of reading the Gil Hamilton novel Patchwork Girl, a paperback copy of which I own with illustrations by Fernando Fernandez, whose Zora I have long admired.

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Not a bad crop of stories.  We've got your old pal Harlan with a fairy tale full of unbelievable cardboard characters who act in unconvincing ways in order to set you up for a radical twist ending and illustrate a point which ends up being pretty ambiguous.  Then Dickson who also has a broad point to make, but one that is less sordid and depressing than Ellison's, and who uses science fiction concepts in a more believable way and to buttress his argument rather than just as decoration.  Finally we have Niven who does the technology stuff as well as Dickson and also has some success in painting a picture of future societies, of putting the "speculative" into "speculative fiction," and who also tries, again with some success, to portray believable human emotions and human relationships.  Bad stuff happens to people in Ellison's and Dickson's stories, but we don't care because Ellison and Dickson aren't writing about real people, but about archetypes who are there to demonstrate their philosophical points.  But we have an emotional reaction to things that happen to Gil Hamilton and his comrades, because Niven has put some effort into making Hamilton and his fellow asteroid miners feel like actual human beings.       

More Supermen await you in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  Til then, don't let the gas bills, rent bills, tax bills, and phone bills get you down.