Henry S. Whitehead: "Across the Gulf," "Jumbee" and "The Projection of Armand Dubois"

Let's read some 1926 Weird Tales.  Today's author: Henry S. Whitehead.  We read three Whitehead stories recommended by anthologist Robert Weinberg back in 2024, "The Shadows," "The Fireplace," and "The Passing of a God" and more recently read Whitehead's "The Door," "Sea Change," "The Thin Match," and "The Wonderful Thing."   And let's not forget Whitehead's collaboration with H. P. Lovecraft, "The Trap."  Today we add three to this pile, "Across the Gulf," "Jumbee" and "The Projection of Armand Dubois;" click the links in this sentence to read the same magazine versions of these three stories that I am reading.  If physical media is your thing, all three of today's stories are included in the big 2012 Whitehead collection Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead.

"Across the Gulf" 

I'm not here to truck in ethnic stereotypes, but today's three stories are, and "Across the Gulf" suggests that Scottish people are superstitious.  And here I thought they were cheap.  Well, I guess they can be both.  Anyway, Carrington the successful business lawyer is in his late thirties when his "Scotch" (I don't know when you are supposed to say "Scottish" and when you are supposed to say "Scotch;" I always say "Scottish," but Whitehead says "Scotch," like when he says "the Scotch are a dour race") mother dies.  Mom often claimed to have been visited by her own dead mother in dreams, right before something bad happened, and Carrington, though not superstitious himself, kind of worries he might see Mom in his dreams.  But for like six years, Mom stays out of Carrington's dreams.

Carrington is a workaholic, and, at age 43, his doctor tells him he'd better take the summer off.  So he goes to the Adirondacks to help a cousin on his mother's side, a minister who quit the clergy to become a fiction writer and run a boy's camp; the camp's business manager has keeled over and cuz could use some help from a man of business like Carrington.

Life in the country greatly improves Carrington's mental and physical health.  Then one night he dreams about his mother.  Then a couple of days later he eats some poisonous mushrooms; fortunately, the African-American cook staff help him vomit up the poison and he is OK.  Carrington realizes that his mother is still looking after him, a heart-warming experience.

This story is not very good.  There are lots of extraneous details; about the minister's career, for example, and then Whitehead describes for many paragraphs the discovery of the mushrooms, the examination of the mushrooms, the cooking of the mushrooms, and then Carrington's illness and recovery thanks to gulping down copious amounts of mustard, which induces vomiting.  People will complain that Herman Melville describes whales and the equipment and techniques of whalers in too much detail in Moby Dick, that it is boring, but as a 20th-century slacker I have no direct experience of whales and whaling, so I found that stuff engaging, the description of an alien world.  But cooking and eating and getting food poisoning are pretty common events, and having all this quotidian kitchen activity described in detail, even competently in Whitehead's able prose, was far from thrilling.  Also, the utility of the dream seems to be nil--Mom in the dream doesn't say "Don't et any wee poison mushrooms, laddie," or anything useful like that, all she does is tuck him into bed.  Whitehead does not establish a link between the dream and the poisoning, and leaves us wondering if this story is supposed to be creepy or heart-warming.

I have to give "Across the Gulf" a thumbs down, though a mild one--it is limp and boring rather than annoyingly bad, a story that is sort of long but confused and adds up to very little.  Maybe people who have or had good relationships with their mothers, or are very interested in mushrooms and mustard, will like it more than I did. 

"Across the Gulf" has reappeared in a few Whitehead anthologies, and in one of those Barnes and Noble instant remainder anthologies edited by Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg, 100 Wild Little Weird Tales. 

"Jumbee"

It being the title story of a Whitehead collection, I am hoping for great things from "Jumbee."  In particular, I am hoping it is an actual voodoo story, as I have heard that Whitehead learned all about voodoo while living and working down in the Caribbean and put this knowledge to good use in his fiction, but in my readings of Whitehead's work thus far I have seen very little evidence of this!

In old books, people are always going away for a few months for their mental and physical health.  Lee is a Virginian, a veteran of World War I, a victim of a mustard gas attack.  To help recover, he goes to St. Croix for some months.  Curious about local customs, he asks around about something occult he has heard mentioned, "jumbee."  Black laborers and shopkeepers profess to not believe in such superstition--some even claim white people made it all up to scare their black employees into staying home at night.  But Lee gets a different answer from a wealthy man who is one-eighth African, Jaffray Da Silva, whose answer comes in the form of a creepy story.

Da Silva had a friend, a big fat Dane prone to heart attacks.  Da Silva and his pal were interested in the occult and supernatural, and had a pact--the first to die would try to contact the other from the other side!  Sure enough, when the fat guy dies, Da Silva suffers a terrifying visitation, apparently the Dane's soul or spirit contacting him, wordlessly alerting Da Silva that he has passed beyond the veil to the afterlife!

An hour or so after the disturbing visit, a servant comes from the fat guy's wife to Da Silva's house to summon him and alert him of his friend's death.  On the way to his dead friend's house, Da Silva sees an apparition--three ghosts of black people, hanging in the air, turning to continue facing Da Silva as he walks by.  These are the "jumbees" of the title, the ghosts of black people who always appear in a group of three.  They don't do or say anything, just hang there, looking at you.

Da Silva sits up with his friend's wife and sister-in-law a while, and then they go to bed as two black servants prepare the deceased's body.  Da Silva heads home; there is an old black woman sitting on the steps, apparently asleep.  Da Silva looks away a moment, looks back, and the woman is gone, but a white dog is bounding towards him to attack!  The woman was a were-dog!  Da Silva hits the dog a powerful blow on the skull with his walking stick, throwing himself off balance with the effort of his swing.  When he looks up again, the dog has vanished.

And that's it.  There is no explanation what connection there might be among the three crazy supernatural incidents, Da Silva's white friend sending him a message from beyond, the vision of the three African-Caribbean ghosts, and the attack by the were-dog.

Each of the three incidents is well-written and effective, but it is a little odd that Whitehead makes no effort (that I could see) to link them.  Are the jumbees mourning the dead white man?  Warning Da Silva of the impending attack by the lycanthrope?  Why do they always come in threes?  Maybe the idea is that jumbees and were-beasts are always stalking the night, and Da Silva hadn't seen them before because he wisely stays home at night, and the death of his friend serves as the impetus for him to venture forth into the haunted night of St. Croix.

I'll mildly recommend this one.  I suppose I should also warn my 21st-century readers that the characters in "Jumbee" express contempt or pity for black people (Da Silva says "full-blooded Africans"), suggesting that blacks are like children and also have excellent hearing, like that of a dog or cat.  I have to admit, I can't recall ever hearing that Africans have particularly good hearing before--there's so much racism out there, there are racist beliefs I haven't yet heard of!

"The Projection of Armand Dubois"

This is one of the Gerald Canevin stories; we've already read two Canevin tales, "The Trap" and "The Passing of a God" (links to my blog posts above.)  This one is set in St. Croix, before Canevin, the narrator, "became a landed-proprietor, as I did later, and was still making a variable living by the production and sale of my tales."  Canevin is the narrator merely of the brief frame--the actual story is one told to him by a white woman in her seventies, a widow who serves as narrator for like seven of the story's eight pages.

The woman in question was the young wife of an Anglican minister on St. Martin in the year 1880.  By chance, she discovered that her husband was owed money by two men, one a "white gentleman planter" and the other a "prosperous" "colored man."  Hubby had decided, for years, to not pursue these debts, but wife endeavored to get back the money they were owed.  The white man pays up within six months.

The "colored" individual, one-quarter African, is the Armand Dubois of the title.  We are told that Dubois was not respectable like so many West Indian "quadroons," but instead "his leanings, as sometimes happens, were to the Black side of his heredity" and he pays up, but "with a very bad grace" and only after visiting the rectory where the minister and wife lived, accompanied by a gang of blacks, to demand a chance to speak to her.  On the advice of a devoted black servant, who thinks Dubois very scary, the minster's wife refused to speak to Dubois.  There is reason to believe Dubois was planning to splash "vitriol" on the minister's wife from a vial he carried--I guess this would be sulfuric acid.

(Like "Jumbee," "The Projection of Armand Dubois" portrays black people as childish--impulsive, emotional, selfish, imitative and unoriginal.  Whitehead includes the parallel debt of the white man to suggest that Dubois only asked for a loan because he heard that the white man had got one, was aping the white man.)  

A month after the debt was reluctantly paid through the minister's agent, the minster's wife is awakened in the night by a series of supernatural apparitions.  The first is of Dubois in her room, menacing her, pantomiming the act of splashing a liquid on her.  She is awakened a second time by the appearance in her room of a goat, and a third time by the image of Dubois again, walking around her house, then through a wall.  The next day she learned that Dubois died the night before of some fever.

"The Projection of Armand Dubois" is similar to "Jumbee," what with a guy projecting his presence after death to another person, but this story is better constructed--we know why the supernatural events occur, because Dubois hates the woman who forced him to pay what he owed.  I guess whether Dubois really died of a fever and on his way to the afterlife terrorized the woman, or, died because he was casting a spell with the intention of seeking revenge, a spell that took the hazardous course of separating soul from body, is a mystery.  I personally recommend that you keep body and soul as closely bound together as possible, just to be safe.

I can moderately recommend "The Projection of Armand Dubois;" it is perhaps a little better than "Jumbee;" as I have suggested, the story's components are more coherently linked together, and Whitehead includes little details of life in the 19th-century West Indies that are sort of interesting (a lot more interesting than kitchen tips.)  This story is closer to what I was expecting when I started reading Whitehead, a tale of white people confronted by malignant black sorcery.  "The Projection of Armand Dubois" can be found in Jumbee, which I think our British friends published as two paperbacks, the second (which contains the saga of Monsieur Dubois) titled The Black Beast.

**********

We'll be taking more trips to the creepy West Indies with Henry S. Whitehead, but that will be in 1927.  For now, expect more 1926 weirdness here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Fantastic, Jan '59: R Bloch, J Wyndham, R F Young and L M Janifer

Let's read four stories from the January 1959 issue of Fantastic, sister magazine to Amazing, both of which at this time were edited by Cele Goldsmith.  This issue has a memorable but somewhat mysterious cover by Phil Berry and, inside, two solid interior illustrations by the great Virgil Finlay, one of a woman being murdered in fetishistic fashion, the other of men in spacesuits in serious distress.  The editorial is by editorial director Norman Lobsenz, and in it he laments the death of Weird Tales and Unknown and the apparent lack of respect currently afforded fantasy--all the good authors today, he fears, seem to be focusing on science fiction, so that there is no heir to Lovecraft, Poe or Machen.  Lobsenz thinks there is still a market for good fantasy and suggests Fantastic will include more fantasy in coming issues.

Check out all this exciting content, and today's four stories, in their original magazine form, at the internet archive here, which is where I will be reading them.

"The Screaming People" by Robert Bloch

The title of Bloch's story is promoted on the cover, but not Bob's name, for some reason.  Remember when we read Bloch's cover story from the January 1960 issue of Fantastic and I found it to be "one nihilistic story...[in which] Bloch suggests that the human race is so crummy that its destruction is not a tragedy but a consummation devoutly to be wished"?  And then there was Bloch's cover story to the August 1960 issue of Fantastic, which I considered "twenty-four (24) pointless pages" consisting of a "bunch of bad jokes and then a bunch of superficial alternate history goop" and finally "a long and absolutely unconvincing utopian tract" proposing the theory that "the institution of the family is the cause of all our problems."  Hopefully Bob has a better attitude this time around!  (Or could it be that I am the one who needs an attitude adjustment?)

"The Screaming People" starts with a very good sequence of like half a dozen pages (this thing is like 35 pages long in toto), the depiction of a man committing terrible crimes at the direction of a mysterious voice in his head.  Our narrator, Steve, works in broadcast advertising, in sales, in Los Angeles, and has a lot of psychological trauma after a terrible car accident.  Has this trauma opened him up to control by some demon or alien or something?  Whatever the voice is, it wakes him up at night and directs him to dress, walk to a mansion, sneak in, murder an old man in his bed and steal some item from the mansion before returning home.  Our guy thinks it's all a terrible dream, but after his lovely red-headed wife wakes him in the morning he finds the box that once held the item he stole in the supposed dream right there in his jacket pocket!

Skipping work, he rides the bus to his shrink, neurosurgeon Dr. Wagram--along the way he passes many Los Angeles landmarks and Bloch takes this opportunity to rag on L. A., to compare its denizens to vampires and suggest LA is a world of fakery.  (Bloch attacks the City of Angels and Hollyweird in lots of his stories, something that surprised me when I first started reading him.)  Steve has a kind of breakdown as he arrives at his doctor's house, but recovers in the special room the good doctor has prepared for him--a room that reminds him of the security of the womb!  

We learn more about that traumatic automobile accident.  Our guy was thirty years old when he was in the one-car crash in the desert between L. A. and Las Vegas, suffering injuries that put him into a coma.  The doctor was the first to come upon the accident, and took our guy on as a patient, shepherding him back to health.  The narrator physically recovered under the care of this immigrant from Germany, but Steve has amnesia and can remember nothing that occurred before the accident.  The generous doctor helped him get a job, where he met his wife.  Bloch gives us a flashback to the conversation in which Steve convinced Roxie the aspiring but talent-deficient singer to marry him.        

We learn about Wagram's medical practice.  The good doctor takes on the brain injury and psychiatric cases that other doctors believe are hopeless, and employs innovative and controversial techniques.  These techniques are morally questionable--Wagram is a mad scientist!  For example, if a patient has sadistic or masochistic tendencies, or sexual problems, Wagram provides the sufferer life-like mechanical dummies to act out his or her perverse fantasies with!  Yikes!  As for patients whose insanity is caused by horrible memories, Wagram administers shock treatment that removes those pesky memories to reduce their personalities to that of a baby still in the womb--then he can build their personalities up again, in effect creating new people!

Steve realizes, largely through coincidences but also through the kind of detective work that involves threatening and torturing people to get them to tell their secrets (you know, the detective methods that work in real life, unlike that Sherlock Holmes "the lint on your lapel proves it was you who dun it" nonsense), that Wagram is using his memory erasing and personality crafting skills to build a sort of criminal army, and Steve himself is one of Wagram's top soldiers!  And Wagram isn't working alone--other people, people who represent Hollywood and how corrupt, mercenary, and deceptive Tinsel Town really is, are in league with Wagram, and Steve has to confront each of these backstabbing lying pieces of human garbage one by one--who will live and who will die as the successive gory climaxes hit and then hit again?  And of the survivors, who, if anybody, will be sane at the end of the story?  

Robert Bloch and Cele Goldsmith have foisted some real clunkers on us (have I mentioned Bloch's cover story for the November '58 issue of Fantastic, a story that I called "an unconnected jumble of dumb puns, winking references to science fiction cliches, and gory images"?) but "The Screaming People" is a winner.  The hypnosis scenes are good, the gore is good, and the one gruesome-catastrophe-after-another ending is good.  Bloch's negative portrayals of psychiatry/psychology and Hollywood here ring true, or at least feel appropriate to me, a skeptic of those institutions.  I don't deny that "The Screaming People" suffers from some of the usual shortcomings of detective fiction, like the convoluted conspiracy and the long scene in which the (amateur, in this case) detective explains the criminals' scheme and how he figured it out, but these elements don't sink the story.  So, thumbs up for "The Screaming People."    

"The Screaming People" would be reprinted in the Bloch collection Chamber of Horrors and in a Finnish collection with a particularly gruesome cover.  

We've now read, I think, four stories that appear in Chamber of Horrors, today's entry, plus:
 "Method for Murder," 
a version of "Two of a Kind," 
and "The Unpardonable Crime"

"The Troons of Space: Mars A.D. 2094" by John Wyndham (1958)

The editor's intro to "The Troons of Space: Mars A.D. 2094" reads "In this third part of his novel-length saga written especially for Fantastic, famed British author John Wyndham ('The Day of the Triffids') writes a deeply penetrating story of man in far space."  But isfdb says that this story had already appeared in New Worlds over in Albion in 1958 under the title "The Thin Gnat-Voices."  I'm not going to expend any energy trying to figure out who was trying to trick who here.  Instead, I'll remind you I've already read some Troons stories: "The Asteroids, 2194," and "Idiot's Delight."  I think there are five Troons stories, so we still have a way to go until we are fully Trooned out here at MPorcius Fiction Log; seeing as I didn't give either of those two stories a positive review, we may never fully Troon out.

Our narrator is a Troon on Mars, one of the first people to land on the red planet, a descendent of a long line of Troons who each played a major role in the early stages of the exploration of space.  Wyndham uses the Troon family as a way to tell a fictional history of the future, and we get a long history lesson about the war that destroyed the northern hemisphere and left Brazil and Australia the leaders of civilization.  As is usual in these stories, nobody can be blamed for starting the nuclear war, the implication being that the liberal West is no better than the Soviet Union.  The narrator is British by ethnicity, a citizen of Brazil, one of his ancestors a British officer who was on vacation in Jamaica when the Northern hemisphere was wiped out and who was made head of the Brazilian space agency.

Then the narrator's own biography.  He was chosen to be one of three crewmen on the first ship to Mars, a ship designed and built by his father's team.  The ship lands on its tail as according to plan, but the surface of Mars turns out to be unstable, in many places a thin crust over a vacuity, and one of the ship's three legs breaks through the surfsce into a cavern and the ship falls on its side.  One of the crewmen dies, and another is hit in the head and becomes insane.  The radio is also wrecked.  The insane man at first suspects that the narrator is a Martian, and then that there are Martians outside plotting an attack on the stricken ship, and finally that the narrator is in league with the Martians.  I took this to be a satire of people in the West who feared communist spies or an attack from the USSR--Mars is a totally barren desert, as the narrator saw while the madman was unconscious--there are no Martians.  I don't read the current SF magazines, and I wonder if they are full of stories that imply that people who worry that Muslims will attack Christians and Jews or that Russia will try to conquer Eastern Europe are insane.

Much of the plot of this story consists of the narrator trying to get the maniac to come to his senses about the nonexistent Martians and to help get the radio fixed and the ship back into operation, efforts that come to nothing.  The madman tricks the narrator into leaving the ship, then the madman makes a desperate attempt to get the ship to take off from its horizontal position.  The attempt fails and the madman dies, stranding the narrator on Mars, where he drifts in and out of sanity.  We get a little lecture on how man cannot accomplish anything alone, how important "corporate strength" is, not only to conquering space, but to maintaining sanity:

We need numbers to sustain us; in numbers we can dispel the terrors; alone, we are weak, mutilated. Taken from our pool of corporate strength we gasp, we wriggle defenselessly while the terrors circle round, slowly closing in . . . 

I guess this is a plea that we make friends with the Soviet Union?  Or just temper our individualistic culture with a hearty does of collectivism?

The actual science and technology stuff in "The Troons of Space: Mars A.D. 2094," the space suits and space ship and the little aircraft the narrator constructs and all that, is good, and Wyndham's writing is very smooth and professional.  But the fictional history parts of the story (which is 28 pages total; like 8 or so are the history lesson) drag, and as I have suggested, I am not impressed with the story's ideology.  The story also lacks passion, feels slow.  I'm calling it acceptable; people who think the space program  is a mistake or who blame the West for the world's problems may like it more than I did.

You can find "The Troons of Space: Mars A.D. 2094" AKA "The Thin Gnat-Voices" (the latter title a reference to Rupert Brooke's "The Jolly Company," which is quoted in the story) in the Troon collection The Outward Urge.  I'm a Wyndham skeptic, but he is very popular, and The Outward Urge, sometimes credited as a collaboration between Wyndham and his pen name Lucas Parkes, has been reprinted many times.  One Italian edition has a cover featuring a hot babe smoking a cigarette, which is kind of funny.  Is there a hot babe in a Troon story I haven't read yet?  I wouldn't associate Troons with hot babes based on my experience with Troons thus far, but I guess anything is possible.

"Passage to Gomorrah" by Robert F. Young

I feel like I've been reading lots of stories with prostitutes lately.  There was Harlan Ellison's "Pennies Off a Dead Man's Eyes," Harlan Ellison's "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman," and Harlan Ellison's "The Toad Prince, or Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure Domes."  Well, I guess I have just been reading lots of stories by Harlan Ellison lately.  Anyway, the editor's intro to Robert F. Young's "Passage to Gomorrah" tells us that the story is about "the Galaxy's most beautiful whore."  Wow!

Lady Berenice, the blonde-haired and blue-eyed "lady of the stars" (groan) is being exiled to Polaris 2 aboard a one-crew, one-passenger star ship.  She flirts with the pilot, Cross, and Cross gets sexually frustrated because he doesn't have enough money to afford the services of such an expensive prostitute.  He is so discombobulated that, when he gets a message form HQ that a time storm is up ahead, instead of coming out of hyperspace he pushes the wrong buttons and dives right into the storm!

Hyperspace travel in this story exploits a "separation of pure space and pure time from the thing-in-itself, or from basic reality," contracting a parsec to half a kilometer, allowing interstellar trips to take place in hours or days instead of years.  In a time storm a ship is likely to find itself in pure time, and its passengers and crew to relive past experiences.  Because "in pure time, individuality does not exist," people on a ship that enters a time storm will experience each other's pasts as well as their own.  Could it be that Cross' subconscious caused him to push the wrong buttons out of a desire to experience the sexy sexy past of the Lady Berenice?

We get a bunch of flashbacks to the two characters' childhoods, learn why Cross became a space pilot (he was ashamed as a child because he proved too scared to climb a tree all the way up and the other kids taunted him) and why Berenice became a whore (her father and mother fought all the time and Dad was often away on business and then left for good when she was ten.)  

“I’ll show them! Space is a tree, in a way. Space is a tremendous tree reaching up into infinity, and I’ll climb as high into it as I can get and I’ll laugh back down at them in their silly suburban houses...."

The anti-suburban theme, common in 20th-century literature, in this story manifests itself in odd ways:

“Think about it, Nate,” his father went on, puffing self-righteously on his suburban pipe. “You’re still young. You’re only 19. Why don’t you wait for a while...."

"Suburban pipe"?  Good grief!  Young never presents an urban milieu or sensibility to contrasts with the suburban milieu and beliefs his characters rail against; in "Passage to Gomorrah," "suburban" is just a euphemism for "conservative" or "religious."   

Considering the social geography Young concocts for his story, "provincial" or "Earthbound" might have been a better word for him to use than "suburban" to describe the villains of his story.  Through the flashbacks of our two characters, we learn that, in Young's fictional universe, society on Earth and society beyond its atmosphere are totally separate.  People who opt to go to space surrender their rights as Earthers, including the right to marry and have kids, because the radiation in space means that the children of people who spend time in space are mutants--even "monsters."  Because spacemen can't get married, to relieve their horniness the world's oldest profession, still looked down upon on Earth because of religious prejudice, is in space a noble calling--one minor character calls it "The Galaxy's Noblest Profession."  Whenever a woman does get pregnant with a mutant child she is exiled to Polaris 2, AKA Gomorrah, the world of mutants.  That is why Berenice is headed for Polaris 2--she apparently neglected to use her Farbes and Donniger contraceptor-field and got preggers, though she insists the device malfunctioned.

(One of the interesting things about "Passage to Gomorrah" to a 21st-century audience is how it suggests that abortion is so unspeakably horrible to 1959 people that it isn't even mentioned in the story, even though you have to imagine the kind of adventurous or desperate women who would abandon their families and friends on Earth to become prostitutes would be quite willing to have an abortion to avoid exile to some planet purportedly full of monsters.)     

We follow the careers of these two spacers, the eager male tryhard adventurer who quickly rises in the ranks and the resigned whore who hates her clients.  Young's story at one and the same time seems to be trying to convince the reader that objections to prostitution are silly, the result of the irrationality of religion, and to portray being a prostitute as terrible.  I guess he explains in a half-assed way that prostitution in outer space is gross because it is controlled by corporations--I guess goofy attacks on big business go hand in hand with goofy attacks on religion and on the suburbs.  

Then comes our first twist ending.  Berenice is preggers not because her contraceptive device failed--she is carrying Cross's child because they have sex in the time storm and being in a time storm sometimes causes things to happen out of sequence--she had sex with Cross today, and this lead to a pregnancy that began a few weeks ago.

Because Cross and Berenice in the time storm are reliving their lives, and each other's lives, Young has the audacity to reprint in the second half of the story an entire page of dialogue between them from earlier in the story, so we can relive that conversation along with them--annoying.

Anyway, after going through the time storm together, and having sex that has resulted in pregnancy, Cross and Berenice are like the platonic ideal of a married couple, though legal or religious marriage is denied them--they know each other better than any married couple on Earth could, having lived each other's lives.  Berenice is radiant:

...her face, bereft now of all the hardness and the cynicism civilization had imposed upon it, was like a little girl’s.

Our other twist is that the mutants on Polaris 2 are not hideous monsters but beautiful angels with wings and everything!  Space radiation is not bad for people, but turns them into the incubators of homo superior!  How ironic that the whores the religious establishment denounces are the source of the angels those religious dopes glorify on their stained glass windows!  The corporations have kept this astounding fact secret from the Earth.  Cross and Berenice take up residence on Polaris 2 AKA Gomorrah, where people don't live in suburbs but on farms.

If you read 20th-century fiction you encounter plenty of attacks on religion and big business and the suburbs, and some of them are silly, and "Passage to Gomorrah" is one of the sillier ones.  The story isn't very well-written or exciting, either.  The plot is crazy, audacious, so I guess that makes it kind of interesting, but it is not a good read, the science makes no sense but is merely a contrivance to set up the anti-religion plot, and its arguments are asserted rather than argued.  Gotta give Young's story here a moderate thumbs down; it not terrible like Laurence M. Janifer's "Expatriate," but still bad.

This strange artifact reappeared in a 1966 reprint magazine, The Most Thrilling Science Fiction Ever Told and is also in a 21st-century Young collection from Ramble House.

I think I've read eleven Young stories now.  Zoinks, it is links time.

"The Ogress"
"Thirty Days Had September"
"The Dandelion Girl"
"Ape's Eye View" 
"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams"

"Jungle Doctor"

"When Time Was New"

"Your Ghost Will Walk"

"Time Travel Inc."

"Magic Window" 

Probably I should do an analysis of these almost-dozen stories and see how many of them bitch about the suburbs and religion.  Maybe next time I read a Young story...if there is a next time.

"Replace the Horse" by Laurence M. Janifer

"Replace the Horse" was reprinted in the 1968 Janifer collection Impossible?  In the intro to that collection, besides bragging about how thin he is ("People who diet hate me,") Janifer tries to give the impression that he is a special guy and a special writer, a rebel who wants to do new things, wants to break the rules.  More endearingly, Janifer is also generous to those who helped him, among them Cele Goldsmith (he says "Cele Lalli," using her married name) whom he singles out as perhaps the editor most willing to let him experiment (in contrast to Horace Gold and John W. Campbell, Jr., who each made him rewrite a story eight times.)  I wonder if Lalli gave the writers at Modern Bride, where Lalli worked for three decades, over ten of those years as Editor-in-Chief, as much opportunity to experiment as she gave SF writers during her six or seven years at Amazing and Fantastic.

I've read enough stories that could have used some additional editing from Goldsmith's Amazings and Fantastics that I am skeptical of her laissez-faire editing style,* but I have to congratulate her and Janifer on "Replace the Horse," which is a kind of P. G. Wodehouse style story that is quite fun. 

*See the aforementioned Fantastic cover stories by Bloch and Jim Harmon's "Measure for a Loner,"   

Our narrator is a horse trainer who gets mixed up in the schemes of a scientist.  This egghead has invented anti-grav and wireless energy transmission.  The scientist thinks he can make more money through cheating at horse races than selling his paradigm-shifting technology to the government or private industry, and wants our narrator to act as his trainer to make his scam look more legit, and to be his guide through the world of horse racing.  The scientist buys a pathetic old horse that anybody with any experience at the track can tell is a loser and puts a saddle on it that has, concealed within it, an anti-grav "printed circuit."  Given enough power, the anti-grave device reduces the weight of saddle and jockey to zero, so the horse can race totally unencumbered.  The scientist has built power generators and transmitters into a pair of binoculars--as long as somebody is training the binoculars on the saddle, even this old worn out nag can outrun a good horse.

As we expect, things eventually go down the tubes, but for a while there our protagonists are really making money running this specially equipped horse.

Good jokes, a good style, an entertaining story, thumbs up.  I'm surprised "Replace the Horse" hasn't been printed more often--aren't there a stack of anthologies of allegedly humorous SF stories?  This story of Janifer's deserves to be in those.  Well, just this summer "Replace the Horse" appeared in a webzine called Black Cat Weekly and edited by John Gregory Betancourt, so maybe now it will get the attention it deserves.  (The same e-issue of Black Cat Weekly also includes Young's "Passage to Gomorrah," so I guess Betancourt just read this issue of Fantastic.)

**********

The Bloch and Janifer are winners, the Wyndham is respectable, and while it is not good, the Young at least is crazy.  So, a good, memorable, issue of Fantastic.  Goldsmith edited over 70 issues of Fantastic and I am sure we will be reading from more of them, so stay tuned.

Laurence M. Janifer: "A Gun with a Heart," "Liana," and "El Rey"

You gotta have faith!  Did I like any of the three stories by Laurence M. Janifer, published in the early 1950s under pen names in a science fiction magazine Janifer himself ghost-edited, that I read in our last exciting episode?  No, I did not.  Does that mean I am going to stop reading Janifer or 1950s magazines?  Not on your life!  I dug around the internet archive and philsp.com and luminist.org and found three stories by Janifer published in 1950s mystery/detective magazines, all appearing under pseudonyms, and today we read them (in the order I found them, not chronological order.)  If you care to, read these stories yourself at these links:

"A Gun with a Heart"       "Liana"      "El Rey"

"A Gun with a Heart" (1958)

This one debuted in a 1958 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but I'll be reading it in a scan of the British 1984 printing of the anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents: 16 Skeletons from my Closet.  This book also reprints a 1957 Robert Bloch story, "Man With a Hobby," that I read back in 2019 and about which I had nice things to say.

Compared to the fantastical stories by Janifer we read last time, "A Gun with a Heart" is very professional, smooth and easy to understand, all the characters acting in a way that makes sense.

George is a hitman working for the "organization."  Years ago, he got his cousin Fred, a guy he was very close to, practically a brother, a job in the organization.  Fred was a smart guy, moved up in the organization, knows all about its operations.  But now Fred wants to go straight!  He has turned his back on the organization!  So George has to go to New York, find Fred, and murder him.

George faces many obstacles--George's wife doesn't want him to kill Fred, for example, and when George finds his cousin there's a third person present who is willing to defend Fred, and of course George has his own doubts about killing his own flesh and blood.  Janifer focuses more George's psychology than the chase or the fight, and we are privy to George's thoughts as keeps going over why he has to kill Fred, why he has no choice but to do so.

I can mildly recommend "A Gun with a Heart."  I wasn't sure what would happen in the end, maybe because I don't read as many crime stories as SF stories, which helped to keep me interested.

"Liana" (1956)

"Liana" covers some of the same territory as "A Gun with a Heart": we've got the question of whether you can go straight after having spent time in organized crime, and we've a guy going over in his mind, gun in his shoulder holster or right there in his hand, the decision to kill or not kill somebody with whom he has an emotional attachment, weighing the risks of failing to kill the person he is being paid to kill.

Our narrator is a professional killer, and this time he's been hired to kill his ex-wife!  When he is in her apartment with her, he realizes he still loves her!  She is remarried, and resists his advances at first, but pretty soon she is admitting she still loves him!  Can the narrator leave the rackets and reunite with his wife?    

A pretty good crime story.  The sexual component, the themes of obsession and addiction (the narrator needs his fee for killing his ex-wife because he wastes money at the race track, and then there are his obsessive thoughts of his ex-wife) and the portrayal of how inconstant dames are, make "Liana" more edgy and powerful than "A Gun with a Heart."  "Liana" appeared in Pursuit, alongside a Solar Pons story by August Derleth.  I'm not seeing any evidence this three-page story has been reprinted. 

"El Rey" (1955)

Like "A Gun with a Heart" and "Liana," "El Rey" is a story about the decision to kill someone close to you--what do you want enough or fear enough for it to make you decide to kill a person you have shared much of your life with?  This one is also about obsession.

Garrison and Hart grew up in the same little town and as childhood friends shared a fascination with a famous mountain climber, Mallory, I guess a fictionalized version of Sir Edmund Hilary.  One of these guys, as an adult working for a seller of rare books, finds in an old volume evidence of the existence of a remote and forgotten mountain, the world's tallest!  The two men decide to be the first to scale this super-mountain, even though all they know about mountain climbing they learned in books.  It takes them 15 years to get the money together to finance this risky climb, and when they begin the ascent they are in their 40s!  With no practical mountain climbing experience!

Somehow, amazingly, these two goofballs make it to the top of El Rey, world's tallest mountain, stand  higher than any man has ever stood before.  They are excited to become famous.  But stupidly they forgot to bring a marker.  They need to leave something on the mountain peak to prove to others, to those who follow them, that they were the first.  They can't leave any equipment or supplies--they need that stuff to survive the descent!  And they can't go back down, get something, and then climb again, as they only just barely made it this time, another attempt would kill them.  One of them decides to kill the other--the corpse will prove they made it up there!

A decent filler story.

"El Rey" appeared in Manhunt alongside a novel by Bruno Fischer; we read Fischer's disappointing novel The Lustful Ape and three short stories by him that I considered "shoddy exploitation junk."  A quick look around online isn't turning up any reason to believe "El Rey" has ever been reprinted.

**********

These stories aren't bad, but they are mere trifles, filler.  Probably I should read stories from Janifer's 1968 collection Impossible?, a copy of which I own, if I want to get a look at the man's more serious or significant work.

SPECIAL BONUS CONTENT  

During my search at philsp.com I was excited to see content by Janifer in the famous magazine Manhunt.  I read one such item from 1955, "The Alligator Man," only realizing it was not fiction at all as I was reading it.  Having already done the scut work for its inclusion in the blog post, like downloading the issue's cover image and investigating other items in the issue and taking notes about them, I was loathe to let that material go to waste and so I append it here as a sort of bonus non-fiction component of this Janifer blog post. 

"The Alligator Man"

"The Alligator Man" (1955)

"The Alligator Man" appeared in Manhunt.  This issue has a good blondetastic cover and stories by Richard Marsten, also known as Evan Hunter and Ed McBain, a famous mainstream and detective writer who also has a few SF stories under his belt, and Sam Merwin, Jr., who wrote quite a bit of science fiction--in January of 2025 we read four Merwin SF stories and I thought they were not bad.

This brief piece, like two pages, is not fiction at all, but a summary of questionable veracity of the career of real life Texas restaurant owner and World War I veteran Joe Ball, a man who is purported to, in the 1930s, have murdered young women and fed their bodies to his alligators before committing suicide upon the cops catchging up to him.  I really thought "The Alligator Man" was fiction when I started it; there is very little to outwardly distinguish it from the fiction in Manhunt, and even the style in which it is written is jocular, chatty and ironic, like you might expect of a short story.  I guess I shouldn't have let my 55-year-old glazzies slide uncomprehendingly over that parenthetical notation ("ar" for "article") at philsp.com or over the heading on the Manhunt Table of Contents ("Features") under which "The Alligator Man" is listed.  My bad.

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

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

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

"Expatriate"

"Who You Callin' a Monster"

"It's Magic"

"Expatriate" (1953)

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

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

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

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

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

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

             

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

"Who You Callin' a Monster" (1954)

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's Magic" (1954)     

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

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

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

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

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

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

**********

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

Merril-approved '59 stories by W T Haggert, J Harmon, "Larry M. Harris," and H Harrison

Brace yourself for more late Fifties content!  Way in the back of her 1960 anthology The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, Judith Merril presents a three-page alphabetical list of honorable mentions, stories printed in 1959 she thinks worthy of note that for whatever reason didn't actually make it into the anthology.  In July we sampled the "G" authors and today we cut off a slice of "H"s, of which there are eight.  Today's piece of H pie will be four authors thick, covering W. T. Haggert, some joker who has only two stories listed at isfdb (Merril liked both of them); Jim Harmon, who in 1964 published a novel called Sex Burns Like Fire (tell your doctor if this is the case) and has three or four dozen stories listed at isfdb; Laurence M. Janifer, whose Merril-approved story appeared under the pen name "Larry M. Harris" (sometimes the list of ingredients on your pie's wrapping is deceptive); and Harry Harrison of Slippery Jim diGriz, soylent, Deathworld and West of Eden fame.

Here find cryptic links to the scans of the stories I will be reading today so you can read them yourself with a minimum of fuss and see how I have totally misunderstood them and/or distorted their clear meanings to further my own selfish and perverse agendas, horrible truths of which the world at large will remain in blissful ignorance.

WTH    JH    "LMH"    HH

"Lex" by W. T. Haggert 

Judith Merril isn't the only person who was impressed by "Lex;" Galaxy editor H. L. Gold didn't just print the story in his magazine, but included it in The Sixth Galaxy Reader.  

"Lex" is a "real" science fiction story, one that has engineers as characters and is all about science and technology and how they can affect the economy and human life, a story that glorifies the self-made man, the radical individualist who looks at the world, sees people aren't doing things the best possible way, and, all on his lonesome, carves a path towards doing things the best possible way.  There is also a wise mentor-smart student relationship, like in so many Heinlein stories.  Haggert describes, in some detail, both good and bad business practices as well as the mechanical operations of a fully automated factory, and he does it in a way that is not boring, and he doesn't just talk about engineering and economics, but biology, as well, as the operation of the factory is largely designed to mimic the workings of an animal's nervous system.

The plot.  A smart young guy, an engineer, is having trouble finding a job.  He gets a line on a job opening which many men have applied for but failed to get.  He applies.  The building to which he goes for the interview has a number of curious characteristics which he takes note of.  Things inside are even more curious.  It turns out only one human being is inside--everything, including answering the phones and mail, is done by computer and robot.  The factory's sole human occupant is a big strong self-confident man, though he is obviously old and weakening.  The interview is tough, but our young hero has the right attitude and pleases the owner of the automatic factory.  The big man explains why the engineer has been having a tough time finding a position, and relates the story of how he, with limited training but a powerful will, created this super-profitable factory which is a decade or two ahead of the competition.  Then comes what we might call a twist, or just the logical conclusion of building a machine designed to mimic a living nervous system--the factory developed a personality and fell in love with the owner, a widower.  (This twist is advertised in the editor's intro to the story.)

The more surprising twist is that when the owner of the automated factory dies, the night after the interview, the factory commits suicide.  Luckily the owner has prepared a will that gives all his wealth to the young engineer.

Thumbs up, even if the ending is maybe a little over the top.  It is too bad this guy Haggert didn't write more stories.

"Measure for a Loner" by Jim Harmon

"Measure for a Loner"'s sole appearance in print was in an issue of Amazing we've already looked at--Merril also recommended Les Coles' story in the issue, "Question of Comfort,"  something I am unable to do.  I can recommend the Virgil Finlay illos in this issue.  Let's see if I can join Merril in commending this story by Harmon, or if again, as in so many things, Merril and I are at odds.

"Measure for a Loner" is a sort of joke story full of weak little jokes.  It is the future, though it can't be too far in the future, as the narrator as a kid saw Charles Lindbergh when Lucky Lindy was an old man.  It does seem to be some generations in the future, though.  Anyway, our narrator is a head shrinker of the future.  His job is not treating living people, because nowadays everybody as a child is conditioned to be psychologically healthy, so there aren't many patients out there.  Instead, his job is psychoanalyzing the dead for historians or curious descendants.  But he puts that work aside when he is recruited by the government to find the loneliest man on Earth, no easy task when there are no more lonely people in evidence.  Why does the government need a lonely man?  To crew the first interstellar spacecraft, that's why!

The text of the story, multiple times, says the government is looking for a "lonely" man, but it seems what they really want is a man who likes to be alone.  In conventional English, isn't a man who feels "lonely" a man who doesn't want to be alone?  The title gets it right, using the word "loner," but the actual story insists on "lonely" and "loneliest."  Why didn't Amazing editor Cele Goldsmith clear this up?  This pissed me off so much it soured me on the whole story and I had a hard time judging the rest of the story with the usual fair and open mind for which I am renowned.

The text of "Measure for a Loner" is the psychologist's oral report to the General in charge of the project, and it reads like this shrink is addressing the reader, like the reader is the General.  We hear about the disputes the narrator has with his liaison with the government, a man who knows much more about psychoanalyzing and treating live patients than does the narrator.  And we hear about the narrator's interviews with two men who are prime candidates to be loneliest man in the world, and the tests they are put through.  When it becomes evident that deception as to the nature of a test flight is a major component of these tests, Jim Harmon and his characters directly refer to Robert Bloch's "The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton," about which I posted a negative review back in 2013, as if that story by our pal Bob is a classic everybody in the future will know, like Romeo and Juliet or Dracula.  I have to say I found the whole government program from the first page nonsensical --maybe this could be justified by the claim that the story is an absurdist joke--and confusing--this I am asserting is an unjustifiable consequence of the story being poorly written.  "Measure for a Loner" ends as I expected it would on its twelfth page, with the narrator admitting he is the loneliest man on Earth and volunteering for the first interstellar flight.  He feels lonely because of guilt--the two candidates, each in a one-man interplanetary ship as part of the tests, have refused to return to Earth because they are enjoying being alone out in space, and the narrator feels like he has murdered them, and as a murderer feels ostracized by society.  

Bad, thumbs down.  The plot twist is predictable and the story's construction and execution are shoddy.  Why does Merril like this mess?  Because of its skepticism about the space program and government in general?  Because of its skepticism of psychology?  Because she thought it was funny?  An inexplicable choice by Merril.

"Hex" by Laurence M. Janifer (as by Larry M. Harris)

I've read two novels by Janifer, Slave Planet and Bloodworld AKA You Sane Men, but that was over seven years ago and I don't remember much about them.  According to my blog posts about these books, they are philosophical novels with exploitation elements revolving around sex and violence, provocative examinations of the ideas of liberty and authority and equality that are meant to shock the reader by depicting not only victims of torture and slavery but the perpetrators of such atrocities in a way that you might say is nuanced or even sympathetic.  Pretty wild.  The two Janifer short stories I've read,  "In the Bag" and "A Few Minutes," also seem to have been pretty philosophical, efforts to say something about big issues like racism and authoritarian government.  Let's see what "Hex," which debuted in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding, is trying to say.

Marie Wladek is a widow who grew up in the USSR and now lives in America and she isn't crazy about life in these United States.  She strongly resents the fact that, to get her welfare money, she has to allow the New York City welfare office to invade her privacy.  When people suggest she or her son get a job, she admits that the freedom and ease of living on the dole are worth surrendering a little privacy, but she still bitterly resents the imposition.  Wladek thinks of the government and the taxpayers who are feeding her not as her benefactors, but as "Cossacks," as "monsters."  If only the case workers could understand that she needed enough money to hire a maid!  Her apartment is full of dust--do the case workers expect her or her son to dust their apartment?

Wladek has a new welfare case worker, a 21-year-old blonde, Gloria.  Gloria is a psyker!  She can read minds!  She doesn't tell anybody about her powers, but Wladek's nose was trained in the old country to sniff out people with supernatural abilities and she senses that Gloria is "a witch."  Even though she can read minds, Gloria is an innocent young liberal, eager and enthusiastic, always looking on the bright side, happy to be working at the welfare office where she and her colleagues are helping people.  As Janifer's story proceeds, we learn that Gloria has a whole array of powers.  She can tinker with people's minds, for example.  When Wladek comes in for her regular appointment and lies about being unable to work and lies about her son assiduously seeking a job and failing to find one, Gloria reaches into the immigrant's mind and alters it to give her a sort of compulsive desire to get a job.  The she reaches across town to where the Wladek son is plotting a crime with his cronies and does the same to him!

The old woman recognizes that this sudden urge to go to the employment agency and get a job must be the work of the witch!  She resists the sorcery of the slim and pretty blonde, sorcery to which her son has no defense--he gets a job in a matter of hours!  The widow Wladek visits a gypsy woman, another psyker, and pays her handsomely--two bucks!--for her help.  When the gypsy finds that Gloria is a mightier witch than she, Wladek goes to the church for help in her struggle to avoid employment, but, as you can imagine, she doesn't get too far with her complaints that her son has been ensorcelled into getting a job and that she is at risk of suffering the same grim fate.  "Well I...," says the priest, nonplussed, "we all have to work."  

Meanwhile, Gloria is using her powers with some assiduity to put other young ne'er-do-wells back on the straight and narrow, turning their minds away from idleness and criminality and towards a desire to work and help their relatives and contribute to society.  We eventually learn that Gloria has the best record in the city for getting people off the dole and helping them become productive citizens, that the Wladek woman is the only person on Gloria's caseload who hasn't gotten off relief.  Gloria's bosses at first were suspicious of the young woman's record of success, but investigations indicate her clients really are getting out of trouble and into jobs, that she is not running some kind of scam.  Of course, a somewhat higher than usual number of her clients have died, but, hey, people die all the time--only Gloria knows that she telepathically compels the real troublemakers, like a violent drunk, to commit suicide or get into "accidents."

In the end, Mrs. Wladek demands to see Gloria's supervisor, and when she accuses Gloria of being a witch, Gloria's boss has the immigrant widow sent to Bellevue.  According to Gloria, everything has turned out for the best--Wladek's son will no longer be under Mom's malign influence and will become a productive member of the workforce, while the widow Wladek is actually getting what she really wants, to be taken care of by others.

As with those provocative novels of Janifer's, "Hex" is a thoughtful story that gets your attention by saying or implying things that might be offensive, like that many people on the dole are frauds, layabouts, or dangerous criminals and that many people, and in turn all of society, might benefit from having a woman with psychic powers force them to go to work or, if they are really dangerous, commit suicide.  "Hex" explores the justness of the welfare state and the tension between the social welfare state liberalism of the New Deal and after and the values of traditional 18th-century liberalism upon which the United States was founded.  To what extent should we allow the state to interfere with your life to make sure you are not a parasite or a thief or a killer?  Gloria destroys that drunk before he has actually killed anyone, because she is pretty confident he will kill somebody, eventually, and this obviously goes against our Anglo-American tradition of jury trials where you can face your accuser and the idea that every man is innocent until proven guilty.  And, Clockwork Orange style, is taking away people's free will and ability to make moral choices really making them better people, or just turning them into slaves or robots?  Could turning the worst people in society into slaves or robots actually be justified by the fact that by doing so we relieve a burden on and end a menace to the majority of the population, which consists of people who aren't on the dole and who aren't committing crime?                         

Quote good.  I should look for more of Janifer's short stories.  This is a good pick by Merril--it works as an entertaining and dramatic black magic story (Gloria actually makes clay dolls of those she "helps" to aid in focusing her mind on them) with believable characters, and it works as a thought-provoking rumination on the social and political stuff I have been blabbing on about--"Hex" is a model of what a good author working in the speculative fiction form can achieve.

"Hex" has reappeared in Peter Haining's Black Magic Omnibus and in a book of stories from the 1950s edited by Barry Malzberg, who himself has written multiple works of fiction set within New York City's welfare apparatus, and Barry's pal Bill Pronzini.

"I See You" by Harry Harrison

When I was a kid growing up in Northern New Jersey most of our TV and radio stations were based in New York City.  One of the DJs we commonly heard in the car was a guy named Harry Harrison who was on the oldies (1950s and early '60s music) station, and in my youth I sometimes thought of how strange it was that there were two pretty famous Harry Harrisons, each in a different niche market, oldies and SF.  Today in middle-age I get to think of how strange it is that one of Damon Knight's best stories shares a title with this Merril-approved piece by Harrison.

Like Harmon's piece, this is "true" science fiction, a story that speculates about how technology will change society that features a central figure who is a smart engineering type with an independent streak; it likewise has a human drama narrative with a twist ending.  Harrison is a good writer, and "I See You" moves briskly but still conjures up vivid images of the scary future it depicts.  In common with some of Harrison's famous work, the story's protagonist is a criminal-slash-rebel.  

Carl Tritt lives in a high tech city in which computers and robots do most of the work and the government apparently has control of all aspects of property and the economy  Tritt is a telephone technician, installs lines and that sort of thing.  Like most of us, he'd like to have more money, and unlike most of us (I hope) when he sees a chance to steal from lockers that have cash in them, he jumps at it.  Harrison does a good job describing Tritt's effort to pull off the heist, which is just complicated enough to be technically interesting but is at the same time easy to comprehend and carries some emotional weight, some tension--the whole story is like this, well-balanced and engaging.

Tritt lives in a surveillance state and his crime is detected and he is captured and sentenced to twenty years of punishment.  In this future world they don't put you in a prison, really, they just keep you separated from all amenities as you go about a life in the city that is totally planned for you--the doors to bars and restaurants won't open to you--you can only eat at a kind of public cafeteria with bland food; you can't ride the subway or a taxi but have to walk everywhere; you are given a boring job; you live in a part of town that the sanitation robots don't clean as often; you can't get mainstream books at the library, only morally instructive books, etc.

Tritt is both resourceful and impulsive, and we observe his life as a convict, how he tries to improve his situation whenever an opportunity to do so appears but also, through his temper and lack of self-control, commits more infractions and earns further punishment.  Harrison gives the reader the opportunity to shake his head at Tritt's foolishness and selfishness as he assaults people and damages property, or, to sympathize with Tritt and cheer on his cathartic violence as he rebels against the mechanical authoritarian state that seems to generally keep the city clean and safe and to keep most people content.  Are the docile and obedient people wiser or better than Tritt, or are they inhuman cogs whereas he is a real man?  Harrison doesn't tell you outright how to feel about Tritt and the society he weas born into.  In the ending, which is the least credible part of the story, Tritt escapes into a section of the city where there is no surveillance and where, perhaps, he can live a life of ease, even power, manipulating the system instead of being manipulated it.  But another rebel has preceded him into this position, and Harrison ends the story without telling us if Tritt's risk-taking will pay off in a better (if morally suspect) life or leave him dead after a brief fight with a foe who has a superior weapon.

Thumbs up--a good action and adventure story with good science fiction elements that offers moral dilemmas and doesn't just come out and tell the reader how to feel about those moral issues.  "I See You" was the cover story of John Carnell's New Worlds and was included by Michael Moorcock in The Best of New Worlds.  When it was reprinted in Fantastic Universe it bore the alternate title "Robot Justice."  You can also find it in Harrison collections.

On Merril's recommendation, we read "Mr. Merman"
by Raymond Brossard from this ish of FU 

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Wow, three "thumbs up!" stories in one blog post--Merril did us a favor today.  As for that exasperating fourth story, we'll just sweep that garbage under the rug!  Kudos to Messrs. Haggert, Janifer and Harrison for writing such exemplary work, and let's not forget editors and anthologists like H. L. Gold (and/or Fred Pohl if he was actually in charge of any decisions related to the August '59 ish of Galaxy), John W. Campbell, Jr., John Carnell, Peter Haining, Malzberg, Pronzini and Moorcock for making these good stories widely available.

Keep your socks ready for hoppin', because we've got more 1950s material scheduled for next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.