1973 stories by G Eklund, M Bishop and C D Simak

Following an unexpected hiatus, transmissions from MPorcius HQ resume!  Today let's read over 100 pages of The 1974 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim, father of DAW Books, and Arthur Saha, father of Heidi Saha and of the term "Trekkie."*  We've got three stories queued up, one by Gordon Eklund, whose novel A Trace of Dreams I called "long and dull" in 2014, one by Michael Bishop, whose novel Ancient of Days I gave a mixed review to in 2013, and one by Clifford Simak, whose novel A Heritage of Stars I suggested we consider a "pioneering text of wokeness" in 2019.  There is every possibility I will attack these three stories as ferociously as I attacked the Harlan Ellison story reprinted in The 1974 Annual World's Best SF in our last episode, so gird your loins.

*[UPDATE APRIL 5, 2026:  One of my knowledgeable readers in the comments pushed me to research this claim that Saha coined "Trekkie," and a little digging online suggests attribution to Saha of the creation of the term is an unconfirmed rumor.] 

(I'm reading all these stories in a scan of a hardcover edition of the 1974 DAW anthology.)

"Moby, Too" by Gordon Eklund 

Wollheim and Saha introduce this story with disparaging comments about those who hunt for sport, and a sly suggestion that we will be reading the latest version of "The Most Dangerous Game," so I guess we have to prepare ourselves for a satire.

Our narrator is a mutant sperm whale, a creature more intelligent than any human, a creature with psychic powers that allow it to read minds, to communicate with other minds, to kill with its mind!  The whale speaks to us directly, tells us its biography, how it realized its fellow whales were unintelligent, their minds little more than darkness, of its joy at discovering humans whose minds were almost as alive as his own, and his rage when he realized humans were killers of whales!  He describes his campaign of revenge in which he tortured and murdered men with his mind!  (Don't worry; like the guy in that cable show every body talked about ten years ago about a serial killer who only kills bad people, the whale only kills bad people.  People love to kill, and art and literature are forever coming up with ways to allow audiences to vicariously kill people, retail and wholesale, without feeling guilty about it.)  Eventually our cetacean narrator abandoned both mankind and whalekind to live alone in  bitter coldness at one of the poles.  When he returned to warmer climes, he found that whales were extinct, he the last!  Or so he believed until he found another whale, luckily a female around his age!  They fall in love, even though she is almost mindless.  They go to the pole, and when they eventually head equatorwards, they find the human race is extinct, exterminated by some biological warfare agent.  Or so they believed until they find the last two humans, a man and a woman, the last two of their kind.  At first our narrator plans to kill the humans, but then he realizes how similar the two couples are, both pairs of lovers the last of their species in a harsh world.  The whale spares the human couple, and he hopes that the humans will have children, just as he and his mate are having their first offspring, and that the new whale race and the new human race will build a better world than that built by humans last time.  This story, we learn, is the whale's monologue to his new son, who I guess has inherited Dad's super intelligence and psychic powers.

I can mildly recommend "Moby, Too."  The style and pacing and images and all that are pretty good, the story moves smoothly along and is always interesting.  The story is of course misanthropic, a sort of environmentalist wish-fulfillment fantasy in which mankind gets what some nihilistic lefties think mankind deserves, but its main character is believable and the story ends on a note of universalism and hope--"Moby, Too" is a dose of Seventies pessimism but it is neither the absurd satire nor the unrelenting one-note hammer to the skull that I feared it might be.

"Moby, Too" debuted in Ted White's Amazing, where it is illustrated by Jeff Jones, and saw reprint in the 1975 French anthology Univers 01 and the 2016 Eklund collection Retro Man.

Also appearing in Univers 01 are Harlan Ellison's "The Deathbird,"
A. E. van Vogt's "Ersatz Eternal,"
and Fred Pohl's "The Fiend"

"Death and Designation Among the Asadi" by Michael Bishop

Here we have a 70-page long story (isfdb calls it a novella) that in plot and structure is quite like a Lovecraftian piece.  Clever and sophisticated, and carefully crafted, "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" is full of literary allusions and references, and addresses a host of philosophical and historical issues.  Unfortunately, Bishop's tale is slow, repetitious, and tedious, lacks human feeling and can be a real slog to get through with its surfeit of description and host of repetitive episodes in which the narrator is more a spectator than a participant.  "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" is one of those stories that is easier to admire than to enjoy, a story that is something of a puzzle the solution to which is unsatisfying--once you've finished reading it you aren't quite sure if you've figured it out because what you have come up with seems a little underwhelming.  "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" is also one of those stories which is more fun to think about after grinding your way through it than it is to actually read, at least the first time.    

"Death and Designation Among the Asadi" comes to us as a bunch of documents, most of them composed by anthropologist Egan Chaney, a citizen of the interstellar civilization of the future.  A major theme of "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" is the untrustworthiness and unreliability of science and scientists, and in general all writers, reporters, and written/recorded accounts.  A related theme is that sad truth of our lives, that different cultures cannot understand each other, and that even different individuals of the same culture cannot really understand each other.  The story dwells on and illustrates the fact that strong cultures and strong individuals tend to exploit and destroy weaker ones.  Intentionally or perhaps coincidentally, Bishop echoes Lovecraft in depicting a  protagonist who is on a quest for knowledge and encounters a degenerate race and as a result of this encounter experiences a change in his view of his own identity, perhaps losing his mind and even his life.

Very early in Bishop's story, we learn that Chaney is preoccupied with the idea that all the primitive cultures of Earth have died out, apparently destroyed by more advanced cultures.  When he reads about the mistreatment of the primitive "other" by modern man in books, Chaney suffers guilt, but as the story progresses we find in his interactions with flesh-and-blood "others" that Chaney himself is liable to hate and perform violence against "others," though ultimately he goes native and joins the aliens who are central to the story.  Such paradoxes and ironies abound in "Death and Designation Among the Asadi."

The majority of the text of "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" consists of Chaney's "professional tapes," "professional notebooks," and his "private journals," though we also get brief footnotes and commentaries from other men who accompany Chaney on the mission to planet BoskVeld of the star system Denebola.  Chaney spends like half a year alone among the natives of BoskVeld, the Asadi, out of contact with the other human members of the expedition--Chaney brings no radio, and collects the food and supplies dropped to him weekly after the helicopter has flown away from the drop site.  We readers are encouraged again and again to doubt everything we learn from Chaney's texts.  Chaney admits some elements of his writing are fictional, that he compresses time to "suit artistic/scientific purposes" and that he includes allusions he does not expect the reader to understand.  The man who edits the transcripts of the recordings admits he has rearranged the order in which passages appear without specifying which sections have been so rearranged.  (In this story, materials that are ostensibly scientific or journalistic--ostensibly concerned with conveying true information--are treated by their composers and editors like fiction meant to achieve an emotional response or like deceptive arguments that cherry-pick data in order to make a self-serving point.)  We learn that Chaney is addicted to drugs that are purportedly "absolutely nonaddictive."  Sometimes Chaney tells us, or his comrades, that things he has earlier written or said are mistakes or that he just made them up; sometimes his colleagues' notes and commentaries point out errors or lies in Chaney's texts.

The plot.  Chaney is left among the Asadi, bipedal aliens whose behavior is bizarre and mysterious, often paradoxical.  Primitive, they seem to have almost no tools and almost no culture, to sleep alone in the woods without any constructed shelter and then during the day to congregate in a clearing where they do not talk but just mill about and have sex--sex which seems animated by anger rather than love.  These aliens do not have any family life, nor any agriculture, and they do not hunt--the Asadi seem to subsist mainly on bark and other difficult to digest food.

The Asadi have big hairy manes, and the one element of culture earlier human anthropologists have detected among the Asadi is how they shave the mane off of individuals who have apparently transgressed some-as-yet-undetected rule; the tribe then totally ignores the maneless individual, studiously pretend he is not there.  Chaney is able to live among the Asadi and be absolutely ignored by them because, as a human who makes sure his hair is shaved, he looks more or less like one of these Asadi who is in internal exile and thus scrupulously shunned.

As the story slowly progresses, Chaney gains some limited insight into mind-blowing truths of Asadi culture.  The tribe has a chief who is accompanied at all times by a sort of bat or pterosaur creature.  The chief doesn't seem to really do any governing or leading, to be honest (the Asadi don't seem to have any problems to solve or goals to achieve), and to what extent the flying monster that sits on his shoulder is controlling him or is a servant of some kind is hard to judge.  Bishop offers us many long descriptions of the rituals and other behaviors performed by the chief and by his flying monster and those that constitute the response of the rest of the silent tribe.  In brief, these rituals involve cannibalism and reveal that an Asadi who has his mane shaved off is not an internal exile or outcast but in fact the Asadi male chosen to be the next chief once the current chief dies.

When it is time for this shaved individual to become chief, he goes to a high-tech temple kind of like a pagoda, a tall building that apparently appears and disappears as needed--Chaney can only find this building when he follows the shaved Asadi to it, and Chaney's colleagues in their helicopter never see the building during any of their weekly flights.  Inside the temple are various futuristic artifacts and devices that Bishop describes in detail but which function pretty mysteriously.  This building was apparently built by the Asadi's ancestors, who had a high civilization but fell into decadence and primitivism, or maybe by the little flying monsters.  Are the bipedal Asadi or the flying creatures the masters?  Did one create the other via some high tech process?  Whichever is the case, when Chaney kills the flying monster, the new chief goes to the periodically disappearing and reappearing temple to awaken a new flying thing by cracking open one of multiple metal spheres in which it lies dormant.

There is still more to the temple.  Within it lies a huge library of electronic books that humans will never be able to read.  Also significantly, the Asadi who is on his way to becoming chief hangs himself from a metal chain and drools out silk something like a spider's web, which the flying monster uses to construct a cocoon around the maneless Asadi.  When he emerges from the cocoon, the new chief has a mane again and takes up the role of his predecessor.  

All this is perhaps Bishop's symbolic representation of government as a machine that exists to destroy the innocent and reproduce itself, but I don't know.  A series of Asadi rituals Chaney witnesses and which I haven't summarized here are perhaps Bishop's allegory of war.

Chaney interferes with these bewildering Asadi behaviors now and again, and we wonder how much his relationship with the Asadi and their response (or lack of response) to him is influenced by the fact that he looks kind of like an Asadi who has been tapped to be the next chief.  Chaney's sanity and sobriety is always in question, and near the end of his sojourn among the Asadi he goes kind of bonkers and summons his human colleagues by firing off flares.  Chaney spends some time among his fellow humans, who try to treat his evident mental problems, but eventually he sneaks off to join the Asadi, whom he now considers his people; in his farewell note he suggests he does not seek to be a ruler among the Asadi, but one of the "milling throng."     

"Death and Designation Among the Asadi" is a challenging story.  Michael Bishop is obviously a smart, educated, sensitive, thoughtful guy who put a lot of effort into this work, but there is a pretty low entertainment-per-page ratio here--the story lacks surprise, excitement, or characters that we care about.  If Bishop is just trying to tell us that life is terrible and people suck, well, each of us has already embraced or rejected that view and nothing Bishop says here is going to change our minds, and because the story feels so flat and cold, it won't comfort those who think Bishop is agreeing with them or anger those who think Bishop is disagreeing.  "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" is impressive, but it just kind of sits there so I can only recommend it those with a strong interest in literary SF, SF about anthropologists, or Michael Bishop fans.

"Death and Designation Among the Asadi" first appeared in If and was included in a Best from If anthology as well as the Bishop collection Blue Kansas Sky.  According to isfdb, a revised version of the novella serves as the prologue of Bishop's 300-plus-page novel Transfigurations.  The book jacket of the novel indicates it is about Chaney's daughter and her mission to BoskVeld--accompanied by a genetically engineered faux-Asadi--to figure out what happened to Dad and the truth of Asadi history.   

"Construction Shack" by Clifford D. Simak

"Construction Shack" first saw print in the same issue of If that saw the debut of Bishop's "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" and presents a sort of contrast to Bishop's piece--each is a good example of the type of SF it is a specimen of.  "Construction Shack" is a traditional hard science fiction story about three scientists who are sent to examine a huge alien artifact and discover a mind-blowing truth about the universe, a story with a sense-of-wonder ending.  I like this sort of thing so thumbs up, but one might fairly consider this story a mere trifle.

Basically, in the period in which the human race has a base on Luna and is sending its first half dozen manned expeditions to Mars, unmanned probes provide ambiguous info about Pluto, so a manned mission is sent out there.  One of the three crewmembers of the Pluto mission is our narrator.  The three guys discover that Pluto is an artificial construct, apparently a sort of base or shack used by the extrasolar aliens who designed and built our solar system out of cosmic dust.  What did they build the solar system for?  Is our solar system working like a well-oiled machine, or are anomalies an indication that something went wrong, that the aliens bungled and our system is a lemon?  

Simak doesn't answer these questions, and his story doesn't offer much by way of drama (there are no fights and no sex and the three astronauts get along just fine on their two-year flight from the Moon to Pluto) so the entire value proposition of the story is the pleasant science and engineering exposition, the smooth description of exploring the surface of the steel sphere that is Pluto, and the concluding revelation that the solar system is artificial and perhaps broken, the suggestion that the human race is a sort of experiment or a sort of pet, or maybe just some kind of wacky mistake or accident, like an infection.

Lester del Rey included "Construction Shack" in his Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Third Annual Collection alongside R. A. Lafferty's "Parthen," and you can also find it in at least two volumes of stories from If, multiple European anthologies, and several Simak collections.

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All three of these stories are admirable, and each seems to have achieved its author's goals, so you didn't have to endure the kind of slagging I meted out to your old pal Harlan last time we met.  And today's productions are a diverse crew, though you might see them all as facets of 1970s misanthropy that remind you that the white man has mistreated third-worlders and animals, hint that humanity is inferior to fictional aliens and even suggest the human race might be some kind of mistake.  Each of them inspires and deserves serious thought from readers, though only Eklund's has real human feeling and only Eklund's story is just the right length and depth--Simak's feels a little spare and undercooked, while Bishop went kind of overboard.  Simak's is my fave, as I am a sucker for space ships and space suits and that sort of thing, but I recognize that Eklund's is the best if we judge by objective criteria, but Bishop's extravagant piece is far from a failure.  Three reasonable choices from Wollheim and Saha, so bravo to those guys. 

It's 1960s stories next time, stories which may be a little more lurid than today's somewhat serious fare.  See you then!

1973 stories by R A Lafferty, H Ellison & E C Tubb

I saw a hardcover copy of Donald Wollheim and Arthur Saha's anthology The 1974 Annual World's Best SF at a flea market while on a recent road trip and found intriguing a number of the things listed in its table of contents.  Today we'll read three stories from the volume, those by R. A. Lafferty, Harlan Ellison and E. C. Tubb; maybe next time we'll read three more stories from the book.

But first, let's take a gander at Wollheim's introduction to The 1974 Annual World's Best SF.  Wollheim talks of science fiction being "a literature of prophecy, of prediction, of investigation into the worlds of if...", which I always like to hear somebody say, as I feel like, in the period I have been producing this blog, that all the cool kids have been saying "well, actually, science fiction is not about the future at all...."  Many of the men and women who wrote and edited science fiction in the Twentieth Century were absolutely trying to predict the future, prepare people for the future, and shape the future.

Wollheim, however, admits that more important than all that speculation and prediction stuff is the fact that science fiction is "entertainment" and "escape."  Wollheim believes that in 1973 science fiction is still in a transitional period, as it has been for a few years, but he doesn't offer any suggestion of what the genre is transitioning into.  He notes that science fiction has been getting academic attention, but asserts that the academics misunderstand the genre because they ignore or hope to deny the reality that science fiction is mainly escapist entertainment, not something "world-shaking."  Wollheim provides a little survey of the state of the magazines and anthologies, and takes some swipes at the New Wave and in particular Brian Aldiss' history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, which he accuses of being myopic, of ignoring 90% of the actual science fiction that gets published.  Wollheim quotes a review of Billion Year Spree that appeared in TLS (unfortunately, he doesn't provide a date or an author's name or anything) that argues that SF should be clear and straightforward, not focus too much on stream-of-consciousness and the trappings of the "psychological novel," and dismisses the New Wave as a lame revival of the surrealism of the 1920s and '30s.

Well, whatever Wollheim thought of the New Wave, here in The 1974 Annual World's Best SF he reprinted stories by Lafferty and Ellison, people who are at times associated with that vaguely-defined movement.  Time to check those stories out, plus a story by a guy who I don't think anybody ever mistook for a new waver, adventure writer Tubb.  Note that I am reading the versions of the stories found in the Wollheim/Saha anthology, not in the places they first appeared or in other reprints.

"Parthen" by R. A. Lafferty 

This story was a hit with the editors--after its first appearance in Galaxy it was reprinted in not only Wollheim and Saha's yearly "Best of," but Lester del Rey's and Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss'.  A tale embraced by the broad SF community!  Wollheim and Saha in their intro here in The 1974 Annual World's Best SF tell us it is about women's lib!

"Parthen," no doubt short for "parthenogenesis," is a fun little diversion.  Aliens have announced their arrival on Earth, making clear that half of humanity is obsolescent and the other half will be reduced to servitude.  But no Earther has spotted an alien!  Every day now is cloudy, murky, the sun hidden from sight.  Businesses are all going under and men are losing their jobs, running out of money!  But are the men sad, desperate, despondent, depressed?  No!  Because everywhere they look there are beautiful women, women who have suddenly appeared as if from nowhere!  Women so beautiful that men's desire for them is not sexual!  The beauty of these goddesses has inspired the male consciousness to ascend to a higher plane!  Men no longer think of sex, no longer think of money, no longer think even of food!  As the dark months go by, men stop having sex with their wives, stop even touching them!  Somebody, who knows who, buys up all the businesses, and the businesses now have a strict policy of only hiring women.  Every man becomes a harmless, ambitionless vagabond, laying in the street, starving, dying, but dying happy, his mind filled with the beauty of these mysterious women.

A little slight, not as funny or as gruesome or as surprising as more spectacular specimens of Lafferty's work, but fun enough.      

"The Deathbird" by Harlan Ellison

This is an important story, I suppose, it having won a Hugo and a Locus award, served as the title story of an Ellison collection and seen reprint in many anthologies.  "The Deathbird" first appeared as the cover story of an issue of F&SF with a wraparound cover by Ellison's favorite artists, the Dillons.  I hope this story is as good as Ellison's famous "A Boy and His Dog," which I liked, or at least better than that famous Tick Tock Harlequin thing, which really rubbed me the wrong way.

"The Deathbird" takes up 27 pages and is split into 26 little chapters or sections.  In Chapter I, Ellison uses that caustic yelling tone I associate with him, directly addressing the reader, asserting authority over the reader--he is a teacher and this document is an exam, complete with questions we readers, his students, are to respond to.  Good grief.  

We meet our characters in the next few chapters, a man, Norman Stark, who has been buried underground for 250,000 years and the huge shadow creature that awakens him.  The giant shadow, a snake, gives Ellison a chance to do that mind-numbing list thing--as the mysterious immaterial creature passes through the earth, Ellison lists all the different kinds of rock he could find in the encyclopedia, taking up five lines and using the word "through" over a dozen times: "...through mica schist, through quartzite; through miles-thick deposits of phosphates, through diatomaceous earth, through feldspars, through diorite;" and on and on.  I guess this is meant to be poetic. 

We follow Stark and the giant snake on their quest over a desolate Earth; they have to climb a mountain and on the peak, in a crystal palace, Stark has a tedious psychic combat with a powerful figure--the adventure elements of "The Deadbird" are like a C. L. Moore story.  Stark is like the Eternal Champion, born and reborn innumerable times throughout history, his first incarnation being Adam.  This mediocre quest narrative is broken up by various sections of quite different but similarly over-the-top material.  Ellison includes excerpts from the Book of Genesis and then a long list of traditional criticisms of the Bible and Christianity in the form of questions for us readers, his students.  For example, if God is all-knowing, why is he angry that Eve ate the apple--didn't He know she would do that?  Ellison implies that the Bible is like a slanted news story, that in reality the snake is the hero and God the villain, and Hell (where Stark was resting for a quarter-million years) is a comfortable place to take cover in while the Earth falls into ruin.  We also have exposition about the horse trading for the Earth conducted by alien space empires, one empire losing control of Earth to another empire in arbitration--the arbitrators are cricket-people who are absolutely trustworthy and wise and who enforce their rulings by threatening to commit racial suicide.  Gadzooks.  Then comes a digression in which we hear about somebody's experience of his or her dog dying, a chapter spiced up with references to old Hollywood (The Thief of Baghdad, Jackie Coogan, Viva Zapata, etc.)  This chapter is followed by more questions, Ellison being so audacious as to include that tired chestnut about how "dog" is "God" spelled backwards.  There's also a section I was falling asleep during in which an earlier incarnation of the Eternal Champion has sex with Mother Earth.

Halfway through "The Deathbird," we get a chapter on the death of Stark's mother back in the 20th century.  This and the dog section are competent mainstream fiction, not bad but unremarkable; maybe they represent Ellison working out his feelings about the deaths of his own real life loved ones?  Perhaps our old pal Harlan should have just focused on that realistic material instead of trying to integrate it with the Weird Tales / Erekose material about psychic combat and a giant snake made of shadows that gives the hero special equipment.  Then we get the psychic fight with the despicable monster whom Jews and Christians have wrongly lionized as God.  After Stack's victory over God we learn a little about Stack's bout of pneumonia as a child and his earlier incarnations' service in battles like Agincourt and Verdun.  Why are these memories after the climax in stead of before it?  Then a chapter about Zarathustra--I don't know much of anything about Nietzsche so this was like a non-sequitur to me and my eyes glazed over like they did during the Mother Earth segment.  Then Stark puts the dying Mother Earth out of its misery (foreshadowed in the scene in which he euthanatized his flesh and blood mother), and then we get the five-word final chapter, Ellison's ALL-CAPS dedication of the story to Mark Twain, who also spoofed the Book of Genesis.  (This whole exercise is Ellison doing stuff people have already done.)    

Pretentious and self-indulgent junk.  The criticism of religion is banal college freshman goop; I wouldn't call it wrong, really, but it is like shooting fish in a barrel that everybody has already shot full of holes.  The science fiction and adventure material is stuff C. L. Moore and Michael Moorcock have done better.  The tear jerking material about euthanizing your cancer-ridden dog and your cancer-ridden mother is acceptable, but all of it together all adds up to a thumbs down.  Like that Harlequin story that tock-ticked me off years ago, "The Deathbird" is overrated, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing and childish slosh.  Why did this thing get a Hugo?  Because the voters agreed with its boring anti-religious sentiments?  Name recognition?  Or maybe Ellison's competition in the novelette category, something by Vonda McIntyre and something by James Tiptree, Jr., was even more difficult to stay awake through?                  

"Evane" by E. C. Tubb 

"Evane" didn't debut in a magazine, but in an anthology edited by Call-Him-Kenneth Bulmer.  The story would go on to reappear in some European anthologies and a 21st-century Tubb collection.

This is a competently written, acceptably produced twist ending story; at a stretch we might say it is a story about the plight of the human male, his relationship to women and to his society, how women and society manipulate men to achieve their goals at men's expense.

Charles is the one-man crew of a space ship travelling at near-light speed.  He has been on this ship for decades, and is getting quite old.  A computer with a female voice runs the ship.  The ship's mission is to find planets suitable for colonization, and carries in its hold frozen and dehydrated organisms and germ plasm and so forth for use in seeding such a planet.  The ship carrying Charles across the galaxy is one of a million such vessels. Charles wonders why he is on the ship at all, seeing as the computer does all the real work.

All alone for decades, Charles has developed in his mind a vision of what the computer woman might look like, and their relationship is kind of like that of a man and his nagging wife.  The people who built the ship included pornography and an inflatable doll among the equipment, but after trying to use these decades ago Charles destroyed them, apparently because he was embarrassed to masturbate in front of the all-seeing computer.

Anyway, the themes and style of the story are handled well enough by Tubb; the story is OK.  The ending is similarly middling to fair.  It turns out that men are included on these ships to act as clocks.  Not 100% sure how Einsteinian time dilation and cosmic radiation and the stress of being alone on a ship for year after year will affect the human lifespan, an individual person is included on each robotic exploration ship to gauge the limit of how far a later colonization ship will be able to reach before an unacceptable number of the colonists has keeled over.  When Charles dies the ship will turn around and seed the colonizable planet it has most recently passed.  Charles, having realized this, is killed, his body preserved in itty bitty pieces to help seed the future colony world.

   

A little better than filler, I guess.  

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Lafferty and Tubb get a pass, but Ellison is getting a big fat "F" from this grader.  We'll see if I can be more enthusiastic about the next three stories I read from The 1974 Annual World's Best SF when next we meet.  Stay tuned.

J Merril's 5th Best S-F: C D Simak, F Leiber, J G Ballard and T Sturgeon

Let's read four more stories that Judith Merril, born Judith Josephine Grossman in 1923, included in her 1960 anthology The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition; we'll be experiencing these tales in a scan of a 1961 paperback edition of the book.  In our last episode we read from the volume a very good Ray Bradbury story, an OK story by Gordon Dickson and a weak Damon Knight story.  Let's see if Clifford Simak, Fritz Leiber, J. G. Ballard and Ted Sturgeon deserve to be relaxing up in first class with Bradbury or should be crammed into steerage down there with Knight.

"A Death in the House" by Clifford D. Simak (1959)

I think Simak is a good writer, but sometimes his anti-human, anti-urban and anti-technology themes get on my nerves.  Let's hope "A Death in the House," which debuted in an issue of H. L. Gold's Galaxy with a hubba hubba Wallace Wood cover, doesn't lean too heavily on those misanthropic and anti-modern tropes.

Mose is a widower living alone on his "runty" farm which has no electricity--Mose hates electricity!  He finds an alien on his property.  Now, the cover illo of the October 1959 Galaxy might give you the idea that if you go out into space you'll find it inhabited by curvaceous babes, but Simak here in "A Death in the House" suggests space is home to hideous smelly monsters that don't even have what we would recognize as a face.  The hideous alien in question is almost motionless, apparently on the brink of death, though the "worms" around its "head" are writhing with life, and it is making some kind of keening noise.

Mose carries the alien into his untidy house and tries to keep it warm and comfortable, even has the local doctor come by to look at it, but neither Mose nor the doc have any idea how to help the creature, so it dies.  Mose wants to give it a decent Christian burial, but the undertaker and the local minister don't want to provide services to a non-human; Mose thinks "what heels some humans are."

Mose buries the dead alien and from its grave, from an egg or seed on its person that shares its memories, sprouts a plant that after some months breaks free and is more or less the same alien.  (Simak has foreshadowed in multiple ways that this alien is essentially a plant, and so its rebirth is not that bug a surprise to us readers.)  The alien lives with Mose, and though they can't talk, Mose is happy to have a companion--the loneliness he has suffered for years is eased.  Mose helps the alien fix its spacecraft; Mose hates paper money and has a stack of silver coins, and the alien uses the silver to repair the vessel.  Then the alien leaves, but first gives to Mose a little translucent sphere with flickering internal lights, a device that projects a field or something that relieves loneliness--Mose will never be alone.  

This is a pretty good story, sort of heartwarming even if Simak indulges in some of the attitudes I just told you annoy me.  While Simak's tale is somewhat similar to Bradbury's "The Shoreline at Sunset," in that story the humans who interact with the alien are reprehensible, while here in the saga of Old Mose, while most humans are callous or exploitative, our protagonist makes an effort to do the right thing and he is rewarded for his good deeds by being made a sort of honorary member of a society superior to our own.  A good choice by Merril, and it serves her theory that the good stories of 1959 were about the question of what it means to be human.  

"A Death in the House" has taken seed within and reemerged from the pages of numerous anthologies and Simak collections; Merril liked it enough to include it in her Best of the Best anthology that re-reprinted her favorite stories from her famous anthology series.

Among the stories appearing in translation in Des souris et des robots is

"The Golden Bugs," which we read in 2018.

"Mariana" by Fritz Leiber (1960)

In her intro to "Mariana," Merril gushes about how awesome Leiber's "The Silver Eggheads" is.  I read the novel version of The Silver Eggheads back in 2022 and took to this here blog to share with the universe my many complaints about the book, which I called "banal," "unfocused" and even "a chore to read."  Merril also mentions that Leiber is currently writing the Buck Rogers comic strip, something I hadn't known, or had forgotten.  According to wikipedia, Fritz had this job for a little over a year in total, split over two periods.  Doesn't seem like the job was really for him.

In preparation for this story, I reread Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "Mariana," which is about a woman who lives in a decrepit house and wishes she was dead because her boyfriend is away and perhaps is not coming back.  The lion's share of the poem's text describes the female lead's decaying domicile; we don't learn about her life or her beloved or anything, though maybe we are supposed to come into the poem already knowing that stuff, the poem being inspired by Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, with which I am not familiar.     

"Mariana" starts out seeming like a feminist story and turns into one of those holo helmet virtual reality programmable dream therapy stories.  Mariana is stuck at home while her husband, a callous--even cruel--man who is her intellectual inferior, commutes to work every day.  She hangs out alone, with the robot servants.  One day she stumbles upon a secret control panel.  It turns out the house is on some barren moon, and the trees outside are not real, but an artificial matter projection.  The top switch on the hidden panel shuts the trees off.  Despite warnings, Mariana, over the course of a few days, throws the succeeding switches, one by one.  It turns out the house and even her angry husband are just matter projections.  When she hits the penultimate switch the moon disappears and Mariana is in a hospital, being treated for depression.  The moon house and unpleasant husband were "wish-fulfillment therapy."  Is Mariana ready for actual treatment from a doctor?  Or will she throw the final switch, which, it is implied, will kill Mariana--could she herself be no more than an artificial construct?

This story is OK, though I question the logic of much of it.  Why would wish-fulfillment therapy offer the simulation of a boring life with an unpleasant husband instead of a comfortable or exciting life with a loving or thrilling husband?  And what is the point of expending resources to provide therapy to an artificial construct, and why would an artificial construct have a psychological illness?  I guess one could come up with reasons for all these things (the unfulfilling virtual reality life is meant to shock her into desiring real therapy, her mental illness--if she is artificial--is like a computer virus or bug in her programming, etc.)  And I guess the point of the story is to blow your mind, not to make sense, and that Fritz's priority was to explore and emulate the elements and themes of Tennyson's poem about a suicidally depressed woman in a dilapidated house, not for the thing to an airtight plot.  But it just doesn't sit right with me, feels gimmicky.     

I'm tolerating rather than loving "Mariana," but it has been reprinted in many Leiber collections and anthologies since its debut in Fantastic.

Among the stories in Theodore W. Hipple and Robert G. Wright's The Worlds of Science Fiction
are Stephen Goldin's "Sweet Dreams, Melissa" and Chad Oliver's "Final Exam," both of which
we have blogged about here at MPFL.

"The Sound-Sweep" by J. G. Ballard (1960)

Ballard is beloved by the critics, maybe because of the experimental and abstract nature of much of his work, its focus on decay and degradation, and his penchant for explicit references to real life popular culture, you know, Marilyn Monroe, JFK, Ronald Reagan, that kind of thing.  I'm a Ballard skeptic, but I like to think I am open-minded about this guy, and I did like "Billenium" and "A Host of Furious Fancies."     

Madame Gioconda, presumably named after the famously enigmatic Mona Lisa, is a sort of Norma Desmond figure, a mentally ill former star of the opera who dreams of a comeback.  She lives in an old studio under a "flyover" (those of us who grew up in New Jersey would call this an "overpass") and every night has dreams or hallucinations that she can hear the applause and the jeers of an audience, as in her heyday.  Every day a young man who is a superfan of hers, Mangon, comes by to "sonovac" Gioconda's quarters.  You remember how in Kuttner and Moore's 1949 Astounding cover story, "Private Eye," the cops could glean audio and video of past events from the teeny tiny textures sound waves and photons left on surfaces?  Well, in "The Sound Sweep," Ballard uses a similar gag--people can hear, or at least be affected by the emotional content of, old sounds "embedded" in surfaces, and people like Mangon exorcize these sounds with a device much like a vacuum cleaner, then dump the sounds in a sound garbage dump.  Of course, Gioconda, old (48 or 49!) and fat, her teeth ruined by tobacco and cocaine, her mug covered in cosmetics, is insane and the sounds of the audience she "hears" are not real, but a delusion, but slavish fan Mangon still runs the sonovac all over the studio to placate her.

Mangon himself is a remarkable character, a man rendered mute by his mother, who punched him in the throat when he was three, and was raised in institutions, and is now a member of the untouchable class of sound-sweeps.  He is perhaps the world's finest sound-sweep, better able to distinguish and understand sounds embedded in walls than anybody; he even dumps in his own little hovel the sounds he collects from the sites of dinner parties so he can hear them and enjoy the conversations as much as if he attended the shindigs.

Having introduced his two characters, Ballard then gives us insight into the alternate reality world in which they live.  Gioconda's stellar career, and that of all singers, went into severe decline about ten years ago because of the development of ultrasonic music.  Such music makes no audible sound, but works directly on the brain, producing the emotional effect of music on the listener without causing sounds to be embedded in your walls and furniture.  The sounds of musical instruments can be turned into ultrasonic recordings and broadcasts, but human vocals cannot, and when ultrasonic music was embraced by the public, work for singers became very hard to find.  Another innovation: long pieces of music like symphonies can be compressed into a shorter form, just a few minutes, so you can get the good out of them in a fraction of the time.  (I guess all this is Balllard's allegorical commentary on the degradation of culture in the postwar period, what with the rise of rock music and TV at the expense of operatic and orchestral music and stage drama and serious cinema.  I thought Ballard's "The Garden of Time" took a similar tack.) 

The plot.  Madame Gioconda wants to blackmail a big exec in this world's analog of Hollywood ("Video City") so he will allow her to broadcast her singing over the airwaves--this would be the first public performance of a singer in ten years.  Mangon helps her collect blackmail material--he can learn things about this corrupt big wig by listening to old sounds of big wig's private conversation at the sound dump.  The blackmail plot succeeds, and Gioconda is grateful to Mangon, and the man expects his relationship with his beloved idol Gioconda is going to flower into something intimate.  Mangon is so happy, he gets his voice back--his condition was only psychosomatic!

Of course, Gioconda is a drug addict and has not practiced her craft for a decade--there is no way she can sing competently, much less put on the kind of world-class performance she put on regularly fifteen or twenty years ago.  With the help of Mangon, some broadcast producer and musician guys figure out a way to put on a performance that will not get out to the public but which Gioconda will be deceived into believing is reaching the public, using various technical means including the sonic sweepers with which Mangon is an expert.  Shortly before the big broadcast, Gioconda, confident that she is about to be rich and famous again, gives Mangon the cold shoulder--in fact, she insults him in a very demeaning and dismissive way, even though he loves her and was key to her expected comeback.  Mangon loses his voice again but gets his revenge, allowing Gioconda's atrocious performance to reach the public and causing a show biz disaster of epic proportions.

"The Sound-Sweep" is like 40 pages long but it only feels long here and there, when you hit one of Ballard's long descriptions.  Both the exposition about this alternate universe and the narrative about talented people who foolishly set themselves unattainable goals and suffer from turns of fate and from their own delusions are pretty compelling and entertaining, plus there are some clever little bits, like how Gioconda uses lots of cocaine and Mangon drinks lots of Coca-Cola.  (I've been trying to consume less sugar and so being reminded of my suspended relationship with my favorite beverage was a little saddening--I know there are plenty of people love Diet Coke and Coke Zero, but those just don't do it for me.)  So, thumbs up for "The Sound-Sweep."  The melodrama of Mangon debuted in Science Fantasy and has been reprinted many times in Ballard collections, as well as a Damon Knight anthology, Tomorrow and Tomorrow: Ten Tales of the Future.                

"The Man Who Lost the Sea" by Theodore Sturgeon (1959)

The title of this story feels familiar, so much so that I thought I'd read it until I double checked and found no record of a blog post about it.  In 1999, Arthur C. Clarke in an intro to the story in the anthology My Favorite Science Fiction Story announced that "The Man Who Lost the Sea" inspired his own "Transit of Earth," which we read in 2016.  Here in The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, Merril suggests that it no longer makes sense for SF to be about "rocketry" and "astrogation" and "planet-hopping," as the hard sciences have "caught up with us" and offer little room for speculation, and so SF writers are turning to what she calls, in quotes, "'humanic studies.'"  Then she wonders whether Sturgeon, whom she calls "Solo Sturgeon," with "The Man Who Lost the Sea" is doing old-style SF, exploring the "humanic studies," or even pioneering beyond them.

"The Man Who Lost the Sea" is a very literary story in that for much of its length it is confusing and surreal and has what amounts to an unreliable narrator, and offers tons of metaphors and similes and descriptions of images that are close to abstract.  At the same time, Sturgeon's story is a very traditional science fiction story that tells you science and technology are awesome and conquering outer space is going to be extremely dangerous and people are going to be killed but it will all be absolutely worth it.  A key to making this story a successful hybrid is that, rather than leaving everything ambiguous as modern literary stories so often do, in the end all the confusing things we put up with in the beginning of the story resolve themselves and are explained and the last line is a totally unambiguous normative statement.  Sturgeon here quite cleverly instigates an itch and then scratches it in a very satisfying way, so thumbs up for "The Man Who Lost the Sea," a big success for Sturgeon and a good selection by Merril.  

The narrative.  There is a guy half buried in the sand in a space suit, and a kid with a model aircraft and then a model space ship, and we get scenes of a kid who suffers a head injury in gym and loses some memories, but regains them, and a scene of a swimmer near a coral reef who gets into trouble and nearly drowns.  Sturgeon confuses us because he doesn't make it immediately clear if it is the spacesuit guy or the kid who is "real" and just imagining the other, and calls something "the sea" that we later learn is not the sea but a flat plain, and calls something a "monster" or "ameba," but that is just a metaphor for a painful and dangerous condition.  Anyway, the space suit guy is real and the kids and the swimmer are also him, at pivotal moments of his life that he is remembering as he lies on Mars, the first human to land on the red planet, dying because his ship crashed.  The spaceman in his youth loved science and was also athletic and took risks and suffered injuries that foreshadowed his death today on Mars--in the same way his injuries in gym class and while snorkeling temporarily disordered his mind, the crash on Mars messed up his mind so, for example, he thinks he sees the ocean when in fact he is looking at a plain.  When he came to his senses in school and on the beach he felt like he had triumphed over injury and over death, and when he comes to his senses on Mars, even though he is seconds away from dying, he also feels triumphant, because the human race has reached another planet.

I'll admit I found this one annoying for a few pages, but then came the snorkeling scene, which was quite good with its description of ocean creatures, and then when Ted resolved all the mysteries in the end he had fully won me over and then when he gave us a very pro-space exploration finale I was enthusiastically on his side.  Ted played me like a fiddle but I can only admire him for it.

Deservedly, "The Man Who Lost the Sea" has appeared in many anthologies as well as a bunch of Sturgeon collections since its first appearance in F&SF.

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These are pretty good picks by Merril; the Leiber doesn't really hold together, but it succeeds as literature and as entertainment, and the Simak, Ballard and Sturgeon hold together nicely and make their points quite ably.  The Ballard is a real downer, with people misbehaving and getting defeated and with culture becoming degraded by technology and democracy, but Simak and Sturgeon take a more balanced approach, showing triumph as well as tragedy, human decency and human achievement as well as (in Simak's case) human greed and callousness and (in Sturgeon's) human loss.  The Simak, Ballard and Sturgeon are worthy companions to the Bradbury story I praised in my last post.

More anthologized short stories next time, kids, but from over ten years later than today's.  See you then!

J Merril's 5th Best S-F: D Knight, R Bradbury, & G Dickson

Let's read some stories reprinted in Judith Merril's 1960 anthology The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition.  I've already read and blogged about three stories from this book: Avram Davidson's "No Fire Burns," Cordwainer Smith's "No, No Not Rogov!", and Carol Emshwiller's "Day at the Beach,"  I read a version of Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon" in school back in the Eighties.  But that still leaves a lot of material in the anthology which I have not yet read.  Today let's read three stories from The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, those by editor and critic Damon Knight, Ray Bradbury--in some ways perhaps the most successful of all American SF writers-- and the Dorsai guy, Gordon R. Dickson.  We'll probably devote our next blog post to three or four more stories from this book.

Keep in mind that while these stories debuted elsewhere, and have been reprinted in later books, I am reading them today in a scan of a 1961 paperback edition of Merril's anthology.

"The Handler" by Damon Knight (1960)

"The Handler" debuted in an issue of Rogue which is chock full of content from SF authors, including Harlan Ellison's "Final Shtick," which we read a few years ago.  This issue seems to have as its theme alcohol--I guess they figured it was pointless to compete with Playboy in the jazz department.  I have seen the Table of Contents of this issue on ebay, and Robert Bloch, Robert Silverberg, and Mack Reynolds all contribute articles about booze (William F. Nolan's article is about Dean Martin, which perhaps also qualifies.)  Is "The Handler" also about the sauce?  Well, in her intro to the story here in The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, Merril, after telling us how great a guy Knight is, hints that "The Handler" is a caustic attack on the entertainment industry.  SF doesn't have to be adventures in strange worlds and speculations on what life might be like in a future of different technologies, customs, and political and economic systems--it can also be a guy making fun of TV!

"The Handler," like 4 pages here in TYBSF5, is a boring joke story about how showbiz people are shallow phonies who are fooling themselves while they fool the public (who are also probably fooling themselves.)  A big party is underway!  Everybody is drinking!  A big handsome guys comes in--he is the hero of the hour!  Everybody loves him!  Big guy is, apparently, the host or emcee or whatever of a TV show, I guess like a Jack Benny or Steve Allen or Jack Paar sort of figure.  The just completed show was a huge success, and will get renewed, and everybody involved is ecstatic!  Then comes our twist!  The big handsome man is a machine, and the short ugly guy who sits in the machine and operates it climbs out of it to take a break from his hot sweaty work.  And all the many people who owe their livelihoods to him are cold to him, find him disgusting, even though they were falling all themselves expressing adoration of the machine, every move of which he controlled.  His colleagues urge him to climb back aboard the machine and when he does the love fest for the big handsome guy continues.

Knight provides us yet another reminder that we are all putting on an act at all times to maintain our careers and relationships, and that smart unattractive people envy and resent good-looking people and behind-the-scenes people envy and resent the figureheads who get the glory.  "The Handler" isn't bogus, and it has the virtue of being short, but it is banal.  So, just a marginal thumbs down rather than a vicious condemnation.  Her intro suggests Merril and Knight were friends, and that, and the fact that Merril loves including in her anthologies stories that debuted outside the category SF mags, perhaps suggests why she thought "The Handler" worthy of reprint here, and even in the anthology that collected her favorites from all her annual Best ofs.  "The Handler" has also reappeared in Knight collections and many more anthologies, including those that endeavor to define the parameters of the SF canon, prescribe what are the greatest SF stories, like Ursula LeGuin's The Norton Book of Science Fiction and Frederik Pohl's The SFWA Grand Masters: Volume 3.   

"The Shoreline at Sunset" by Ray Bradbury (1959)      

In the intro to Bradbury's piece in The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, Merril puts forward a sort of zeitgeist theory that all the good stories of a given year have the same topic or theme:

Against a background of the inevitable ninety per cent of inept or hackster trash, the better stories, as they emerge each year, always show some very definite--and different from the year before--emphasis on one area of speculation or another.

While unfalsifiable nonsense, this theory is sort of a fun way of looking at the world.  Anyway, Merril suggests that "The Shoreline at Sunset," like all the best SF of 1959, is about how we define what it means to be human.

Two guys, Tom and Chico, are beachcombers.  It seems they have wasted their lives hanging out on the beach, eking out a parlous existence by collecting junk that has washed up on the shore and coins tourists have dropped in the sand, and I guess seducing women, women they sometimes hope will find them marriageable, but which never do.  Tom and Chico are no longer young--they are getting grey hair.  Tom is talking about leaving the beach and Chico.

As the sun is about to set, an excited young boy approaches Tom and Chico--he and a friend have found a strange woman, washed up on the beach!  When the men see her, they find she is a mermaid!  Is she dead or alive?  They can't be sure--she is pretty inert, but upon touching her the men feel what may be a pulse.  Chico thinks they have finally struck it rich, and runs off to get ice to preserve this physical specimen of a heretofore merely mythical species so they can profit from it.  He instructs Tom and the kids to make sure the creature doesn't wash away in the rising tide while he is gone.

Chico and Tom are losers with questionable morals.  Obviously they should try to help the alien woman, who is probably alive and likely dying.  Chico just wants to profit from the woman's tragic situation.  Tom, on the other hand, is static, the kind of guy who does nothing, never makes a decision, just stands there and lets the world pass him by.  Instead of actively trying to help the woman or actively exploiting her, he just stands there while the waves carry her back to the ocean, we readers hoping she will wake up and go back to whatever life she was leading before misfortune struck her.

Chico returns and it is clear neither of these losers will ever leave the beach or get decent jobs or build a healthy relationship with a woman, and that this fate is meet and just because Tom and Chico are each immoral and/or lack drive.

Merril is of course correct that the story is in part about what it means to be human.  The mermaid has a human woman's upper half and a fish's lower half--is she human?  Chico treats her like a fish, not a woman, but Tom is not so sure.  As for Tom and Chico, their behavior suggests they are less than human, because they either act in a manner that is evil or fail to act at all, behaving like a passive vegetable instead of the erect and intelligent member of a complex society that he has the potential to be.  A "real" man supports and contributes to and defends society, these goofs are scavengers divorced from society at best, and are probably better described as parasites or even predators.

The themes and plot of "The Shoreline at Sunset" are good, and it is quite well-written--Bradbury slings the metaphors and descriptions like a master.  And there is a lot for the reader to consider, to analyze.  For example, why did Bradbury include the two little boys?  To remind us that Tom and Chico act like kids, living off society instead of contributing to it and failing to consider the future?  Are we readers to hope that the adventure of the mermaid will somehow affect these boys in such a way to ensure they grow up to be decent people and not losers like Tom and Chico?  

Thumbs up for "The Shoreline at Sunset!"  A solid selection by Merril.  The story, perhaps known to our British friends as "The Sunset Harp," first appeared in F&SF and, in the same year, A Medicine for Melancholy, the slightly different British version of which is known as The Day It Rained Forever.

"The Dreamsman" by Gordon R. Dickson (1959)

Here we have an acceptable trifle written by a man Merril, in her introduction, indicates is a singer and guitar player who performs SF songs he composes in cooperation with Poul Anderson and Theodore Cogswell.  "The Dreamsman" is something of a joke story that sort of mildly spoofs SF commonplaces, but it isn't that absurdist or bitter and doesn't feel like a subversive satire, just a bit of fun.  For some reason it is written in the present tense.  

"The Dreamsman" is one of those stories about how psykers feel alone and then meet fellow psykers, and is also about people who learn about the secret cabals at war in the shadows who are determining the course of history totally unbeknownst to us normies, as well as one of those stories in which aliens who are better than humans are judging whether we can join the galactic federation.

An old guy--some 184 years old!--is a psyker.  One morning while shaving he detects two other psykers, a married couple.  He goes to them.  They are all hopped up to join other psykers and form a group to contribute to society, to use their superpowers to help people in trouble, you know, like a kid who fell down a well, and promote unspecified progress.  The old geezer says that this idealism will not work, that the thing for them to do is to join the colony of psykers on Venus.  He takes them to a military base to a rocket--the old geez clouds the minds of the military personnel on the scene or even go to sleep.

Then comes the twist ending.  From out of the sky, another psyker, one much more powerful than the old guy, appears.  This psyker, an alien, says that the old geezer is a conservative who is killing the psykers he finds because he doesn't want the world to change--the rocket is a death trap!  There is no Venus colony!  The old geez isn't even as powerful as he seems--half the psychic stuff he does, like telekinesis, is just him using hypnosis to trick people.  The alien laments that this old guy has been retarding human progress for many decades, that if not for him, the Earth could have joined the galactic federation ages ago.  But the aliens can't kill or even imprison this troublemaker, violence and force being forbidden them.  The alien saves the couple, taking them to some real colony far away.

Not bad, but no big deal; competent filler that gets away with using old (but beloved!) ideas by using them a little knowingly, with an ironic wink.  Why Merril thinks it is so good, I don't know, maybe she thinks it is more subversive than I do, that its message is that cautious and careful people who follow the rules to preserve what they have--like the old geez, who has a strict dietary regimen and scrupulously follows the traffic laws--or maintain a strict moral code--like the aliens who refuse to use violence to help Earth and humanity advance--are holding us back.  Maybe as a socialist, Merril saw laws and traditions that, for example, respect private property, and those who uphold them, as ridiculous obstacles keeping us from building a workers' utopia right here in America.

"The Dreamsman" debuted in Fred Pohl's paperback anthology series Star, and would reappear in 1985 and in 2017 in Dickson collections.

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Obviously the Bradbury story is far and away superior to Knight's and Dickson's contributions.  But maybe when next we meet we'll read a story hand picked by Merril for The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition that can give the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles a little competition.

Tarzan and the Lost Empire by Edgar Rice Burroughs

“I wish that Nyuto would see me and talk with me,” said Tarzan of the Apes. “Then he would know that it would be better to have me for a friend than for an enemy. Many men have tried to kill me, many chiefs greater than Nyuto. This is not the first hut in which I have lain a prisoner, nor is it the first time that men have prepared fires to receive me, yet I still live, Lukedi, and many of them are dead."

In January, we read an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel in which Tarzan met the descendants of English crusaders who were still living like it was the medieval era right there in the middle of Africa.  In February, we read an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel in which David Innes met the descendants of 17th-century pirates who were living like it was the 1600s right there in Pellucidar.  Well, it's March and today we're going to read an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel in which Tarzan meets people descended from Roman legionaries who are living like its the 1st century A.D. right there in the middle of Africa.  Africa really is the most diverse continent! 

Tarzan and the Lost Empire debuted in 1928 and '29 across five issues of the magazine Blue Book.  Four of those issues of Blue Book have cover illos devoted to the latest saga of Lord Greystoke, and these illustrations are laden with spoilers--who could have guessed that Tarzan would fight a lion in this adventure?

I am experiencing Tarzan and the Lost Empire via my $1.25 Ballantine copy of the novel, Ballantine 24171, which has a Boris Vallejo cover.  The cover of the paperback says "complete and unabridged," but I don't know about that.  In Chapter 10 of this edition we find "rein" for what appears (correctly) as "reign" in Ace F-169, the 40¢ edition with the Frazetta cover, and in a 1931 Grosset & Dunlap hardcover.  Now, maybe that is just a typo.  But look at the epigraph I have placed at the head of this blog post, Tarzan telling a member of the Bagego tribe, who are preparing to burn Lord Greystoke alive, that he has been captured many times and escaped many times.  Tarzan, in my Ballantine edition, says "...nor is it the first time that men have prepared fires to receive me...."  But in the Ace and Grosset & Dunlap editions Tarzan says "...nor is it the first time that black men have prepared fires to receive me...."  The word "Negro," capitalized in my Ballantine, is not capitalized in the Ace or Grosset & Dunlap printings, and at least once "blacks" in the older books is replaced in the Ballantine with "Negroes."  Maybe not a big deal if you are reading Tarzan for fun, but something to keep in mind if you are reading these novels with an eye to learning about the period in which they were written or about Burroughs himself and what he actually wrote. 

Burroughs gets right down to business as we begin Tarzan and the Lost Empire.  After Tarzan's little buddy Nkima the monkey opines that the white man is the worst kind of man (Tarzan doesn't count, he being considered by all a creature of the jungle), a white man shows up to request Tarzan's help.  This guy is a German missionary, Doctor von Harben.  His son Erich, an expert linguist and archaeologist and an amateur mountain climber, is missing!  The Doctor and Tarzan, like everybody in the jungle, know of the legend of a white tribe living in the Wiramwazi mountains, and when Erich heard about the legend he decided to investigate it.  But he hasn't returned from this expedition, even though some of his African porters have come back.  These survivors of the expedition to Wiramwazi are pretty close-lipped about what happened, and the Doctor asks for Tarzan's help.  By the sixth page of text, Tarzan is already on his way to Wiramwazi, little Nkima (you can see him on the cover of Blue Book and in Frazetta's cover illo for Ace F-169) sitting on his shoulder.   

In Chapter 2 we join Erich on the slopes of the Wiramwazi.  Erich has been abandoned by all his black hirelings, their superstitious fears of the ghosts said to inhabit the mountains having overcome their courage.  These deserters took all of the expedition's food and rifles with them, but Erich isn't sore--after all, what can you expect from a bunch of Africans?  Anyway, he has his Luger and can hunt rabbits with it as he climbs the mountains in search of their secrets.

For much of the novel the narrative switches back and forth between Tarzan's adventures and Erich's.  As Tarzan proceeds to the Wiramwazi, Nkima, a coward and a blusterer, offers pretty entertaining comic relief.  It is thanks to Nkima's interference that  Tarzan falls while climbing the outer slope of the Wiramwazis and hits his head; unconscious, he is captured by a tribe of blacks, the Bagego.  For centuries, the Bagego have been in contact with the white tribe of the Wiramwazi; the whites sometimes raid the Bagego, and sometimes trade with them.  Among the Bagego there is no consensus on whether the Wiramwazi tribe is made up of flesh and blood men or ghosts--many think the white men are actually the ghosts of the Bagego's ancestors.

Meanwhile, Erich is rejoined by his most loyal black hireling, Gabula, and the two men go through several pages of mountain climbing which Burroughs renders quite entertaining.  On the other side of the Wirmwazi, Erich and Gabula find a valley with a swamp, forest, river and island; when they get down into the valley they are captured by black warriors.  These Africans speak a version of Latin, and bear swords and spears that remind Erich of those used by the ancient Romans!  These blacks are provincials of a small Roman empire, and take Erich and Gabula to the fortified city with an architecture much like that of classical Greece and Rome where live the people who dominate them.  This city is inhabited by a small elite of white people (among them a beautiful woman, daughter of a leading intellectual, Favonia, by whom Erich is smitten),  a soldier and commercial class of mixed-race people whom Burroughs refers to as "brown," and a working and slave class of blacks.  Apparently the  Roman ruling class arrived here almost 1900 years ago and have had no contact with other white people since then; they have made little technological or cultural progress and wear togas and throw people into the arena and so forth.

The Bagego village is raided by brown legionaries commanded by a white officer and Tarzan is captured along with a bunch of villagers.  it turns out here are two Roman cities in the valley beyond the Wiramwazi, each with its own Emperor, and they have been engaged in a cold war for over 1700 years.  The city Erich was taken to is Castrum Mare; Tarzan is dragged to the other, Castrum Sanguinarius.  Erich has managed to make friends over in Castrum Mare because he speaks Latin, but Tarzan can't speak Latin, and in Castrum Sanguinarius he is tossed in the dungeon under the arena, and then dragged before Emperor Sublatus.  Taller, faster and stronger than everybody else, Tarzan escapes the Emperor's court, humiliating the Emperor in the process.  Looking down into a courtyard from a tree, Tarzan spots an aristocrat trying to rape a woman, and, Good Samaritan that he is, he rescues her.  The would-be rapist turns out to be Emperor Sublatus's son, Fastus!  The woman is Delicta, daughter of a senator.

Erich is taken to meet the Emperor of Castrum Mare, Validus Augustus, and the Emperor is fascinated by Erich's knowledge of the history of Rome since the founder of Castrum Sanguinarius left Europe during the reign of Nerva.  Erich is shanghaied into the job of writing down all he knows about European history and even writing Validus Augustus' biography.  Here, at the midway point of the novel, we get exposition about the history of the two Roman cities here in this African valley and a dose of that court intrigue that I find kind of boring, and the novel, which has been fast paced and focused on interesting relationships heretofore, bogs down a little bit.  It didn't help that I briefly mixed up the conniving courtier of Castrum Mare, Fupus, adoptive son of Validus Augustus, with the equally villainous Fastus, son of Sublatus, over in Castrum Sanguinarius.

For weeks, while Erich is in Castrum Mare, ascribble scribble scribble (but taking breaks to flirt with Favonia), Tarzan is in hiding in Castrum Sanguinarius, protected by Delicta's fiancé, a popular officer in the army, and learns to speak Latin (which he could sort of read, already, thanks to his European education.)  But eventually Sublatus's lackeys get their hands on Tarzan and Delicta's fiancé, and they end up in the dungeons under the arena along with many blacks and a spy from Castrum Mare, an aristocrat out of favor with Validus Augustus but popular with the people sent here in a fool's errand.  Burroughs has been hinting that Castrum Mare is the better-run and less corrupt of the two Roman cities*, though the current Emperor is corrupt, and now he makes it very clear.  Also made more clear is that there are many many more Africans in the valley than white people; Tarzan begins to consider leading the blacks in an uprising against the cruel Sublatus regime.

*Heredity and eugenics are recurring themes in Burroughs' work, and we learn that there is almost no crime in Castrum Mare because, for many centuries, criminals have been executed--along with their families!  This keeps criminal tendencies from polluting the gene pool. 

The last third of Tarzan and the Lost Empire is solid adventure fiction, with Tarzan making friends with and becoming leader of the men with whom he is imprisoned and who fight at his side in the arena over the course of a week-long celebration and then in the uprising against Sublatus that Tarzan sparks.  What goes on in the dungeon, as the men plot to escape, and in the arena and during the uprising, the different types of fights that Tarzan and his comrades get forced into, is entertaining.  Burroughs puts a lot of focus on human relationships--the evolving and quite fickle sentiment of the crowd towards Sublatus and Tarzan, and Tarzan's own relationships with his fellow prisoners.  In the climax of the arena sequence, Sublatus, having failed to destroy Tarzan by making him fight men and then a lion, has six apes set upon him, only to see the apes recognize Tarzan as a friend.  These apes form an important part of the uprising, as do the black tribes of the valley and even Tarzan's own tribe, the Waziri, summoned from far away by Nkima.

Having overthrown Sublatus and put the father of Delicta on the throne of Castrum Sanguinarius, Tarzan and the Waziri, along with that spy and others, march at the head of an army to Castrum Mare to rescue Erich.  Erich has been thrown in the arena thanks to the machinations of Fupus, who wants to marry Favonia, but before the games begin the daring Gabula comes from out of nowhere to murder Validus Augustus in front of the assembled populace.  In the ensuing chaos, Erich and Gabula and the other people sentenced to the arena escape to hiding places within the city; Fupus becomes Emperor.  Fupus's agents find Erich and friends just as the army that is with Tarzan arrives and overthrows the unpopular and incompetent Fupus; Erich is saved and can marry Favonia, and that spy is made Emperor.  The novel ends with Tarzan praising the initiative taken by Nkima in bringing the Waziri.

Tarzan and the Lost Empire, the twelfth Tarzan book, is a step up from number 11, Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle.  The arena, fighting, and mountain climbing scenes here in book 12 are better than the jousting and fighting scenes in its predecessor, and the characters and their relationships are more fun.  The Roman cities embroiled in a cold war in this novel are more interesting than the medieval cities locked in a cold war in the previous novel.  So, thumbs up for Tarzan and the Lost Empire.  I'm looking forward to Tarzan #13, Tarzan at the Earth's Core! 

Detail of illustration from the February 1929 Blue Book