Science Fiction Adventures, Dec '57: R Silverberg and H Harrison

In our last episode, we read from the pages of Science Fiction Adventures a Robert Silverberg novella, "The Chalice of Death," that was the first installment of a three-episode series.  Let's read the second episode today, a tale entitled "Earth Shall Live Again" that debuted a few months after "The Chalice of Death" in an issue of the very same short-lived magazine edited by Larry T. Shaw.  "Earth Shall Live Again" appears under the Calvin M. Knox pseudonym alongside an additional novella by Silverberg that is credited to the man's real name; we'll read that piece as well.  To round out the post we'll check out another piece of fiction that debuted here in Science Fiction Adventures' December 1957 issue, the magazine's eighth, Harry Harrison's short story "Captain Bedlam."

But first I've got to mention Emsh's cover for this issue of Science Fiction Adventures--it is one of the most beautiful covers I have ever seen!  The colors are terrific, and the female figure with the long neck, long fingers, long hair and big eyes, pictured at such a striking angle, is mesmerizing.  Even if the stories we read today are no good, Emsh has rendered this publication an immortal classic!

"Valley Beyond Time" by Robert Silverberg

We start with a tale billed as "Silverberg's Best Novel!" that takes up like 41 pages of text and is graced by some pretty good drawings by Emsh.  "Valley Beyond Time" would later appear in an issue of John Carnell's Science Fantasy and several Silverberg collections, including one for which it serves as title story.

"Valley Beyond Time" is one of those stories in which people are magically transported to a strange environment by a god-like entity and squabble among themselves in a way that the author intends will address philosophical issues.  The bulk of the story is acceptable filler stuff, kind of repetitive and a little boring but not exactly bad.  But then comes the abrupt ending, an ending which is annoying and serves as the straw that broke the thoat's back.  Gotta give "Valley Beyond Time" a marginal negative grade.  

It is the 27th century; mankind has colonized numerous planets and has dealings with a bunch of alien races.  Our main character Thornhill is 37, an engineer born on Earth who now owns a mine on a colony planet.  One day he wakes up in a beautiful valley on some other planet with no memory of his real life--he thinks he has lived his entire life here.  Some other people hail him and explain the situation and his memory returns in an hour or so.  Why did Silverberg include the lost memory jazz if the guy was going to get his memory back two pages later?

There are nine people in the Valley.  All were teleported here while going about their normal business.  The natural leader of the group is a short man who is a big game hunter, an outgoing type who is determined to escape the valley.  There is a forcefield blocking the easy route out of the valley, and the mountains to either side of the valley are steep, so the hunter has his work cut out for him.  Other obstacles include the fact that the immaterial being that brought them here and calls itself "the Watcher" informs the internees that if any one of them gets out of the Valley, all nine of them will have to leave, and some of the internees don't want to leave.  Most prominent of those satisfied with life in the Valley is an aged academic, an Earth man who was living on Mars so his weak heart could take advantage of the lower gravity; he wants to stay in the Valley because here he feels perfectly healthy.  In fact, when a big strong guy punches him and kills him, the academic comes back to life in a few minutes--others watch as his wounds heal miraculously in moments.

Among the nine is a beautiful girl astronomer and she and engineer Thornhill almost at once become an item.  The bulk of "Valley Beyond Time" is like a wish fulfillment fantasy for the kind of nerds who read SF magazines in the Fifties--without any effort on your own part you get sent to a place where you can't get sick or get killed, and in hours you are snuggling up to a hot chick who--just like you!--is interested in science!  Of course, Silverberg introduces the typical SF theme that utopian life is not what it is cracked up to be, that if life is too easy, if there are no obstacles and goals, life becomes unsatisfying--the people in the Valley don't even have to hunt and gather food, nourishment just falls from the sky three times a day!  The people in the Valley are not living the lives of real men and women, but of pets, the pets of the Watcher.  The elderly academic certainly prefers the life of a pet to death as a man, especially when he hits it off with the other human woman among the nine, and Thornhill and the astronomer, who worked hard all day at stressful jobs back in real life, seriously consider whether this life as a pet is better than holding responsible positions back in the real world.

One reason I am giving "Valley Beyond Time" a negative review is that Silverberg introduces all kinds of elements and then doesn't exploit them profitably, just dispenses with them perfunctorily.  There are nine people in the Valley, but the three nonhumans and the woman who gets involved with the academic don't do much of anything, don't have personalities.  Conflict is introduced among some of these various characters and then just waved away when the plot needs to move forward.  Why didn't Silverberg just cut some of these figures in a later revision?  Did he (like Harlan Ellison, in an interview in the December 1981 issue of Twilight Zone magazine claims he did) not bother to revise his stories, just write them as he went along and then send a first draft off to the editor?  

You'd expect the philosophical core of the story to be the issue of whether life as a pet or child is preferable to life as a responsible adult.  In real life, living on public assistance in public housing, or in your mother's basement, has its attractions, so the choice has some tension, the issue has some ambiguity.  Silverberg's story starts out with such ambiguity, but doesn't maintain it, instead Silverberg quickly adds new factors that make the decision a "no-brainer" and the academic and his squeeze do a 180 and Thornhill and the astronomer climb off the fence.  You see, when Thornhill and the astronomer declare their love for each other, they find they can't have sex!  (Silverberg is a little cagey about describing what happens, saying "It was then when Thornhill discovered that sex was impossible in the Valley.  He felt no desire, no tingling of need, nothing.")  And when the pets realize they are growing younger, there is the fear they will be reduced to infancy.  So all nine internees agree to climb a mountain in an effort to escape the Valley.  

At the top of the mountain, for some reason, the Watcher appears, and it isn't immaterial at all, but a sort of serpentine or vermiform creature with a helmet that gives it psychic powers.  In a way I didn't catch, the big game hunter is able to grab the Watcher, when before the Watcher seemed to just fly around at will in a gaseous form.  It was also unclear to me why the Watcher, who earlier in the story used its psychic powers to pacify the humans when they got violent, allowed itself to be grappled and slain by the humans.  I also didn't understand why the death of the Watcher and the wreck of its helmet didn't strand the people in the Valley but instead led to them being teleported back, safe and sound, to the time and place from which they had been plucked.  

Draining his story of any possible mystery or tragedy, Silverberg has Thornhill telephone the astronomer, who lives in another star system, and she agrees to join him at his mine; if she wants to maintain her career, Thornhill is wealthy enough to build her an observatory right there at the mining colony.  Every single time something bad can happen to any of the nine characters, every single time they might have to make a hard choice or make a sacrifice or suffer from a mistake, Silverberg pulls their feet out of the fire.  Not good.

"Earth Shall Live Again" by Robert Silverberg (as by Calvin M. Knox)

(Consult my last blog post for a summary of "The Chalice of Death," part one of the series isfdb calls "Lest We Forget Thee, Earth" and which was published in book form under that title in 1958 and under the title The Chalice of Death in 2012.)

Navarre returns to the planet of his birth after a year away.  Silverberg gives us more info on the history of this planet and Navarre's own family than he did in episode 1.  That Vegan advisor has apparently turned the king whom Navarre closely served against Navarre, and the planet is essentially ruled by this Vegan, less gently and efficiently than it was when Navarre had the king's ear.  Navarre knows all the secret doors around the palace, so is able to get to the king despite the Vegan's prohibitions.  Navarre finds the king practically a prisoner--the Vegan is almost dictator of the planet!  The king is happy to see Navarre, hopes Navarre will help him regain power from the Vegan, but the clever Vegan appears and he has proof that Navarre hopes to reconstruct the Terran Empire with the ten thousand humans he revived when he found them on Earth.  So Navarre winds up in the dungeon.

Navarre tricks a guard into giving him his blaster and Navarre blasts his way out of the dungeon.  Then he mugs and bribes people in order to disguise himself as a non-human (remember, he is the only human on the planet.)  Navarre manages to bluff his way onto a space liner and off the planet--he has to do something to protect the humans he revived because that the Vegan is on to their scheme to restore the human hegemony of one hundred thousand years ago and is sending a war fleet to take care of them.

Navarre rejoins the half-breed and the beautiful woman who were his comrades in the quest to find Earth in "The Chalice of Death."  The woman is the advisor to the king of another planet, and she wangles Navarre a position as admiral in the planet's space navy and command of three warships.  The two pure-blood humans discover that their half-breed buddy has betrayed them to the Vegan, told the Vegan where Earth is.  Navarre guns down the biracial traitor and takes his three ships to the system of Sol, where he ambushes and easily captures the three ships sent by the Vegan.  The aliens crewing the six ships are imprisoned and replaced with revived humans--these six vessels will form the nucleus of the force which will, Navarre hopes, regain for Earthmen control of the universe.

"Earth Shall Live Again" feels like weak filler.  The espionage and action material feels pedestrian and banal, sometimes even silly; the characters lack personality and you don't care about them; and Silverberg makes little mistakes like using "galaxy" to mean "universe" sometimes but other times making it clear that the characters are travelling between or among different galaxies.  The only real suspense the story generates is by making the reader wonder if Silverberg is going to ultimately endorse Earthman dominance over non-human races, or at the last moment reveal that the Earth empire was bad and rebuilding it is immoral or a mistake; throughout the entire story humans are shown to be superior to nonhumans, but at times Navarre acts pretty violently and ruthlessly.  I keep wondering what exactly Silverberg's models for the humans in the story are--are they like the Jews of the Diaspora rebuilding Israel, or like Romans or Englishmen rebuilding the Pax Romana or the Pax Britannica?     

I'm afraid I have to give "Earth Shall Live Again" a thumbs down; Silverberg just doesn't bring to this adventure/espionage material the kind of style or passion that people like Jack Vance, Edmond Hamilton, and Leigh Brackett do. 

"Captain Bedlam" by Harry Harrison

I read a lot of Harrison before embarking on the odyssey that is this blog, and as a kid I enjoyed the broad satire of Bill the Galactic Hero and the somewhat less broad shenanigans of Deathworld and the Stainless Steel Rat novels as well as the pretty straightforward dinosaur adventures of West of Eden.  My appreciation of satire and of humor stories has severely atrophied, but when I reread West of Eden over a decade ago in my forties I enjoyed it and more recently I have liked some Harrison short stories like "Powers of Observation," "Trainee for Mars," and "A Criminal Act."  Of course, in the same period I have denounced plenty of Harrison stories as, for example, "groaners," "a waste of time" or "a homily for a child."  So I have no idea how I will respond to "Captain Bedlam," the joke title of which suggests it is supposed to be funny.

My fears were unfounded--this is no joke story.  "Captain Bedlam" is in the long tradition of elitist SF stories in which a tiny faction of members of the cognitive elite put one over on the common run of humanity and in the tradition of pessimistic SF stories that suggest man is not fit for space, that going beyond Earth's atmosphere will kill you or drive you insane tout suite.  I'm not sympathetic to these attitudes, but Harrison employs them to produce an effective story full of SF speculations and human drama.  Thumbs up!

Mankind has established installations on other planets within the solar system.  His whole life, young Jon has been fascinated by space and wanted to be a space pilot.  He gets into the space crew training program, and is one of the tiny minority of students smart enough and independent-minded enough to recognize that the picture of space the establishment has been giving the public, even the thousands of staff who actually maintain space ships, is bogus!  Exposure to radiation, lack of gravity, and a score of other pervasive phenomena up in space make people insane and thus render them unable to pilot a space ship!  So how are all these ships flying between Earth, the moon, and Mars?  The government takes the finest physical and intellectual specimens of humanity and induces a split-personality disorder in them!  The new personality is carefully tailored to accept all the maddening conditions of space and vigorously trained to have perfect focus, super strength, super reflexes, etc.  This second personality only emerges upon entering the cockpit of a spaceship, and the two personalities share zero memories.  A pilot feels like he steps into the cockpit and then immediately out of it at his destination, but he has to talk to normies as if he remembers the entire flight. 

We follow Jon as he is trained and graduates--Harrison does a good job making this believable and interesting while maintaining a strong human angle.  (According to wikipedia, Harrison himself served as a gunnery instructor in World War II and this experience perhaps contributes to his depiction.)  Harrison also skillfully handles the adventure and sense-of-wonder climax, when, on a trip to one of Jupiter's moons, the furthest journey an Earth ship has ever attempted, a meteorite strikes the ship and Jon wakes up during the flight, injured.  Jon's normal personality, his second super personality, and a third emergency personality, must work in succession to save Jon's life, the life of the frozen scientists aboard, and the mission and ship.  

"Captain Bedlam" is very good--economical, exciting, full of cool speculations and human emotion.  A real relief after Silverberg's two mundane and even shoddy contributions.  

John Carnell reprinted "Captain Bedlam" in a 1958 issue of New Worlds, and the story has reappeared in multiple Harrison collections.

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I can't deny that my look at this magazine has been a disappointment, but Emsh with the cover and interior illos for "Valley Beyond Time" (the astronomer and aliens look great) and Harrison with "Captain Bedlam" do masterful work and remind us of the potential of SF to captivate and arouse excitement in the reader.

Next time we'll look at the third and final episode of Silverberg's "Lest We Forget Thee, Earth"/"Chalice of Death" series and some of the stories that were printed alongside it in the March '58 ish of Science Fiction Adventures.

Science Fiction Adventures, June 1957: A Budrys, H Ellison, R Silverberg & C Fontenay

Let's check out the June 1957 issue of Larry T. Shaw's Science Fiction Adventures, a magazine whose twelve-issue run lasted from late 1956 to the summer of 1958.  Back in 2018 we read the first ish of Science Fiction Adventures; the topic of today's discussion, the fourth, is graced with a well-painted but pretty crazy cover by Ed Emshwiller.  Sure, the woman is beautiful with that big head of red hair and that tight white suit, hubba hubba, but what is she doing?  Suffering some kind of fit?  Taking a hit from long range fire from the man in the lower left of the frame?  And what is up with the pile of corpses that is reminding me of Gustav Adolf-Mossa's 1905(6?) canvas Elle?  Maybe we'll find out when we read Harlan Ellison's contribution to the issue, which this cover illustrates.     

Alongside Emsh's disturbingly grisly but also edgily sexy image is text announcing the magazine offers three complete novels by Ellison, Algis Budrys and Calvin M. Knox, a pen name for Robert Silverberg (isfdb calls two of these novellas and the other a novelette.)  There's also a short story by Charles N. Fontenay.  

We'll be reading all four of these pieces of fiction today, but first let's glance over the departments.  Shaw's editorial is just boilerplate stuff about how the magazine is doing well and 95% of letter writers like that it includes three short novels and the art is improving, etc.  The fan column includes a little memorial to the recently deceased Ray Cummings, about whom I have blogged numerous times, and discussion of numerous fanzines, including a review of a Swedish fanzine--we are told Sweden has a remarkably high per capita population of SF fans.  Andrew J. Offutt, another guy I have blogged about quite a few times, also makes an appearance in the fan column.  Mr. Offutt, we learn, has an extensive collection of old SF magazines and novels, and is interested in trading with other collectors--the paragraph devoted to Offutt describes his collection and what he is interested in acquiring.  Finally we have the letters column, in which people praise the magazine and discuss why they like science fiction; this letters column is pretty tame compared to some I've seen in the past.

OK, on to the three "novels" and the "bonus short story."         

"Yesterday's Man" by Algis Budrys

"Yesterday's Man" is something of a rare work by Budrys that has  never seen reprint in book form (according to isfdb, at least.)  Apparently the only place "Yesterday's Man" has ever resurfaced is in a 1958 issue of the British edition of Science Fiction Adventures, where it appeared alongside the Robert Silverberg story we'll be reading today, "The Chalice of Death," and C. M. Kornbluth's "The Slave," soon to be retitled "The Enslaved Person."

It is the post-apocalyptic future!  Forty or fifty years ago a plague killed 90% of the human race!  American society collapsed, but a guy name of Wheelwright built a new American Republic in the MidWest, its capital Chicago.  After ten years he was overthrown, but the succeeding republics were each in turn toppled after even shorter tenures, and now many people miss ol' Wheelwright and the semblance of order he was able to maintain.  Today the rulers of the Seventh American Republic have hired a mercenary, Custis, who owns a big AFV bristling with guns, to help them look for Wheelwright, whom it is suspected may still be alive.  Accompanying Custis and his loyal crew of seasoned mercs as they drive out into the wilderness on their search is a Seventh Republic commissar, Henley.

The cliche analysis of Budrys' work is it is about what constitutes a man, and "Yesterday's Man" fits the cliche.  The story compares Custis, the cool tough leader of soldiers who earns the respect of others; Henley, the excitable conniver who lacks both originality and loyalty; and several other men, like Custis' father, who sacrificed himself to save his son, a bandit leader out in the wilderness whom our protagonists encounter, and of course the famous Wheelwright.  Custis wonders:

Some men stood taller than the rest, and it wasn't a thing of inches....Why?  What was a man born with, that made people turn themselves over to him? 

Custis and Henley spend time in the bandit leader's camp and we observe opportunities each man in the story has to demonstrate what kind of man he is--attractive and calm and brave, like Custis?  Or repellant, paranoid and treacherous, like Henley?  A bunch of men get killed, most at the hands of the heroic Custis; Custis picks up a girl who helps him survive dangerous trials; there is a lot of talk about whether Wheelwright is alive or not and whether he would even return to Chi-town if he was alive.  Eventually Custis and his AFV, his crew intact and augmented by the girl--and sans Henley--head back to Chicago, Custis planning to become a leader in the mold of Wheelwright, hoping he has the leadership ability to create order out of chaos and bring peace and prosperity to the Midwest.

Not a bad story but no big deal; mild recommendation, I guess.  Budrys' focus on his perennial theme, all the ambiguity about the status of Wheelwright, and the cool vehicle with its twin 75 mm guns and all its machine guns make this story more engaging than mere filler.       

"Run for the Stars" by Harlan Ellison

"Run for the Stars" is a component of Ellison's Earth-Kyba war series.  I gave a thumbs down to a 1956 Earth-Kyba story, "The Crackpots," back in 2022, but Judith Merril liked it, so rest assured that you are supposed to like it despite anything I might say.  I praised what I guess is the first Earth-Kyba story, "Life Hutch," also from 1956, when I read that one in 2024; that same year I read "Trojan Hearse" (yet again '56) and called it a "barely acceptable" "rush job."  There is no predicting whether I today come to praise Ellison or to bury him.

The editor's intro to "Yesterday's Man" asserted that Budrys was "muscularly handsome," which I thought an odd thing to bring up, and also suggests Budrys is "self-effacing."  The intro to Ellison's "Run for the Stars" makes clear that Ellison is not the self-effacing type; Shaw reports that at a recent convention Ellison gave a speech in which the Ohio native regaled listeners with his claims that he wrote "from his guts," and not for money--heaven forbid!--but because he "had" to.  Oh, brother.  

Anyway, let's get to the story.

Already, in the first two paragraphs, Ellison's florid prose is getting on my nerves.  

The scream of the Kyben ships scorching the city's streets mingled too loudly with the screams of the dying.

Is it the scream that is scorching the streets, or the ships?

Bills and change tinkled from his hands, scattered across the rubble-strewn floor.

I get that Ellison, who doesn't care about money (no sir, not him) is likening money to human waste, but saying that "bills" tinkle is not good at all--should have just stuck to the coins, Harlan.

After these, and one or two additional bad sentences, either Ellison stopped writing bad sentences or I stopped noticing them; after the first page or so I was able to enjoy "Run for the Stars" as a melodrama with reasonably well-drawn characters and an exciting and cynical plot.  Budrys' "Yesterday's Man" is better written and more believable and more profound, but Ellison's over-the-top material and delivery make "Run for the Stars" more fun.

An outlying planet of the human space civilization has been seized by the alien Kyben after they bombed the place into rubble, killing over 99% of the two million inhabitants.  Our protagonist is a drug addict, caught in the act of looting a store by agents of human Resistance.  This joker wasn't stealing food, but money with which to try to buy drugs, I guess in hopes some drug dealers were among the 1% of those who have survived the alien bombardment.  Ellison does a good job pointing out again and again that this drug addict thinks more about drugs than about how his planet is being destroyed and his entire race is facing extinction.  Ellison's skepticism of/hostility to drugs and alcohol is one of the ways in which Ellison, of whom I am often very critical, and I are on the same wavelength.

The Resistance is looking for a cowardly jerk just like this druggie.  They implant a super bomb, one that can blow up the entire planet and anything in its orbit, into his body.  They radio the occupying Kyben force, tell them about the super bomb, and promise to not detonate the bomb if the Kyben let the last few thousand humans on the planet escape.  It is essential to these patriotic sons of Earth that they get away because they have to warn Earth that the borders of its empire have been penetrated--they didn't manage to get a radio message off to Terra before the Kyben bombed the long-range transmitters.  All the Resistance guys have little back stories and personalities and react to the druggie in slightly different ways--they feel like real people.  One of my complaints about Ellison's work is that he always writes like he is yelling, that he always turns things up to 11, but that extreme volume totally works for a drug addict and for people who have seen 99% of their society murdered and are desperate to prevent the same fate befalling the rest of the human race.

The human survivors depart for Earth, leaving the druggie behind.  The Kyben don't pursue them because the Resistance warned the aliens that if they detect any Kyben departures from the planet or its orbit that they will detonate the superbomb.  Instead, the Kyben hunt for the bomb and the druggie flees across the countryside--the aliens can detect the bomb's neutrino signature or something and so have a general idea where he is.  The druggie, stiffened at first by doses of his drug of choice (he discovered a healthy supply in medical stores), and then by a lust for blood and eventually by a hatred of all life, becomes an efficient guerilla soldier, killing dozens of Kyben from ambush.  He loses an arm, but fights on, killing one alien by driving the fingers of his remaining hand through the Kyben's eyes--this story has quite a bit of what we might call "body horror."

The druggie manages to sneak and fight his way onto the command ship of the Kyben force.  He finds a doctor who speaks English; he tortures the medico, and gets him addicted to drugs, so that the guy will perform surgery on him, taking the superbomb out of his stomach and grafting it to the stump of his lost arm!  He demands that the surgeon give him the ability to detonate the planet-busting bomb at will, and also set it to detonate if he should die.  Now everybody in a 5,000 mile radius has to do whatever he says!  As the story ends, the druggie becomes commander of the Kyben squadron, and declares he will lead it to Earth to achieve revenge!  He is cured of his drug addiction--being some kind of evil pirate dictator is enough of a rush for him now!

A crazy and fun story.  Thumbs up for "Run for the Stars."

(Within the pages of this ish of Science Fiction Adventures, Emsh provides drawings of specific events in "Run for the Stars," but I guess the cover painting is just a generalized illustration of the story's cynical, apocalyptic, and horrific themes, a depiction of mass murder.)

"Run for the Stars" can be found in the oft-reprinted The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World and a few other Ellison collections.  The story was also anthologized in a 1992 Tor Double with an embarrassingly lame cover by Barclay Shaw.  Shaw is some kind of favorite of Ellison's, and he has done covers for many Ellison publications.  I have to say Shaw is a dismayingly large step down from the Dillons, Ellison's other favorite artists; Leo and Diane Dillon have a distinct and evocative style, while Shaw's work is marginally competent banality, like Michael Whelan if Michael Whelan was less technically skilled.  (Bob Pepper, who did the cover of a Signet paperback edition of The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, would have been a better choice than Shaw for a uniform edition of Ellison's work.) 

I have not yet read many stories that appear in The Beast That Shouted Love at the
Heart of the World, but I did tackle "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" like ten years ago.

"Chalice of Death" by Robert Silverberg (as by Calvin M. Knox)

It is the far future of intergalactic civilization!  Millions of planets harbor multicultural societies composed of a vast array of diverse intelligent species.  Humankind is one of these species, but the sons and daughters of Earth have fallen on hard times!  Only a million or two humans are left alive, and they live in ones and twos on a multitude of different planets!  A hundred thousand years ago the human space empire centered on Earth ruled the universe, but then the nonhumans united and, outnumbering the Earthpeople a bazillion to one, destroyed the Empire.  The Empire was so thoroughly scrapped, and it happened so long ago, that no human today even knows where Earth is, not even which galaxy it is in!  But human superiority is still recognized; among non-humans, humans have a reputation for wisdom, and many non-human potentates have human advisors.  (Is Silverberg in this story influenced by the history of the Jews, and/or speculating on what might happen to white people in a future in which Third-Worlders take over Europe and North America?)  Our main character, Navarre, is one such advisor to a non-human king on some sort of feudalistic planet where the king resides in a palace but most people live in huts and the king once a week hears petitioners.

Normally it is the wise Navarre who passes Solomonic judgement on the petitioners, but he was out all night partying with the chicks ("Chalice of Death" is one of those stories in which humans are sexually attracted to and can even breed with non-humans) and so he gets to court late today and another advisor, a Vegan, has taken over Navarre's role.  When the king asks why Navarre is late, Navarre comes up with an outlandish excuse, claiming he was busy this morning tracking down clues as to the whereabouts of a legendary chalice somehow associated with Earth that has the power to give people immortality!  That Vegan then gets himself a promotion to head advisor by suggesting to the king that Navarre be sent on a quest around the universe for this chalice, which of course Navarre doesn't even believe in.  (Remember when Clodius got Cato assigned to Cyprus?)  

Navarre and a half-human friend go off on this totally bogus taxpayer-funded quest across the universe and decide to use it as a pretense to find Earth.  The king doesn't provide Navarre a ship of his own, so our heroes have to take a commercial liner to the next system, and that damned Vegan puts assassins on the liner and on the first planet our guys land on we get detective/spy action with a chase and a shootout.  Navarre and his pal land in a local government dungeon, but the human advisor to this planet's ruler springs them--amazingly, the human advisor here is a hot chick!  She joins the quest for Earth and provides Navarre and his companion access to the royal library.  Again and again in this story Navarre achieves his goals by resorting to violence, and it is by force that he acquires from the librarian, a snake man, a book published 30,000 years ago that clues them in to what galaxy Earth is in.  

The woman has a personal starship, and after a billion light-year trip that takes them seven days the three questors land on a planet where another search of another library turns up an even older book that contains a map of our solar system.  (I guess these books are made of acid free paper.)  So our three heroes end up on Earth, where they find that the inhabitants have degenerated into twisted dwarves who reside in pathetic huts.  Sad!  But wait!  The dwarves direct the extragalactics to a cave where, in vats full of fluid, sleep tall good-looking humans!  These heroes and geniuses, carefully selected from among the human population right before the aliens conquered Earth at the climax of the fall of the Earth empire, are in suspended animation and can be aroused to rebuild Earth's superior civilization.  On a plaque Navarre reads, the machine that has preserved these ten thousand superior individuals is metaphorically referred to as a chalice.

The story ends here--"The Chalice of Death" is only the first of three stories in this sequence which was published in book form as Lest We Forget Thee, Earth in 1958 and then with the Chalice of Death title in 2012.

This is a pretty entertaining story, and I am curious to see if Silverberg paints the rebuilding of a human space empire favorably or goes the white guilt route and has the humans' revival be some kind of crime or mistake, so we'll be reading the next two episodes in the near future. 

Left: Ace Double publication, 1958     Right: A German 1966 printing

 

"Moths" by Charles L. Fontenay       

In the 1500-post history of this crazy blog, I have read two stories by Charles Fontenay, both because Judith Merril recommended them, "The Silk and the Song" and "A Summer Afternoon," and I liked them.  Let's hope I also like "Moths," which has only been reprinted in the British version of Science Fiction Adventures.

This is a pretty good classic-style science fiction story in which a deadly problem arises and engineer/spaceman types prove their superiority to a fat businessmen by using logic and science knowledge to solve the problem.  They only manage to solve the problem after the overweight bourgeois has been killed by it, mind you.  The crewmen also get to shoot off energy pistols and kill lots of monsters.

A space boat has crashed during its descent from a space ship in Venus orbit to the Venerian surface.  The crew and the sole passenger survived the crash, but they are some miles from the city that is their destination, their ship disabled in a dangerous wilderness.  Venus is inhabited by flying monster plants, like leaves ten or fifteen feet across, that seek water.  If it isn't raining and there are no pools close by, these huge "moths" will envelop a human being and suck him or her dry.  After trying a few abortive means of getting to the city, one of the smart crewmen figures out how to neutralize the monsters so the survivors can march to the city.

A filler story which uses characters in a pretty obvious and uninspired way, I guess, but I kinda like it anyway based on how good the monster and the setting are.  Marginal recommendation.

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Four hard-boiled high-body-count stories full of weaponry, alien environments and dangerous journeys among weirdos, none of them bad.  Shaw, Budrys, Ellison, Silverberg and Fontenay gave 1957 readers value for their 35 pennies and lived up to the promises made on the issue's cover--these really are science fiction adventures full of violence and death.      

Expect similar material next time we meet, tough guys!

Bizarre! stories by A C Clarke, R Bloch, C Woolrich, A Derleth and J H Schmitz

Flipping through a guide to old pulp magazines at Antique Crossroads in Hagerstown, MD, I came upon reproductions of the exciting covers of the second and third issues of Bizarre! Mystery Magazine, a periodical that endured through only three issues during 1965 and '66.  With big names like Robert Bloch, August Derleth and Arthur C. Clarke on its covers, this seemed like a magazine worth checking out.  So, today let's read five stories that appeared in this magazine edited by a John Poe, a man who doesn't seem to have any other credits on isfdb.  

"The Last Command" by Arthur C. Clarke (1965)

The second issue of Bizarre! has stories by Philip Jose Farmer, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Bloch that pique my interest.  The Farmer appears under a pen name and I'm not having any luck finding a copy of it online, so we'll start with the Clarke, which debuted here behind Bizarre!'s fascinating female-nude-with-cobwebs cover and has been reprinted many times.  I'm reading "The Last Command" in a scan of one of many editions of the collection The Wind from the Sun.

"The Last Command" is a gimmicky story, like two pages long.  (We just read another brief gimmicky story by Clarke in late February.)  A guy in space has learned that nuclear war has destroyed his country back on Earth.  This guy is in a space craft loaded with missiles, charged with serving as a deterrent to his nation's enemies.  But deterrence has failed, and he expects to be ordered to nuke into oblivion the survivors of his people's enemies in an act of revenge.  But the message he receives, a prerecorded order from the now-dead President, is a surprise to him!

We've got two twist endings here.  The first is that the Prez doesn't order the spaceman to wipe out the enemy that has exterminated his countrymen.  Au contraire!  The presidential recording orders the astronaut to jettison his weapons and go to Earth to help the destroyers of his people build a better world!  The second twist ending is that the space man isn't an American, but the last living citizen of the Soviet Union!  

It was a relief to know that the United States was still extant, but at the same time it was annoying to see Arthur C. Clarke portraying the United States as a rampaging monster and the USSR as some kind of paragon of selflessness.  But what are you going to do?; the SF world is full of pinkos.

"The Last Command" sparks an emotional reaction and the twists are legitimately surprising, so I have to admit this story is a success, even if its political content is ridiculous and disgusting.

"Enoch" by Robert Bloch (1946)

"Enoch" is the story most energetically promoted on the cover of second ish of Bizarre!, but it is a reprint of a 1946 Weird Tales piece that has been reprinted in a million places.  I am reading it in a scan of the issue of D. McIlwraith's magazine in which it debuted, the cover story of which is Edmond Hamilton's "Day of Judgement," which we read almost nine years ago.

"Enoch" is a better than average performance from our old buddy Bob "Psycho" Bloch, a very good witchcraft story with gore, perversion, and tragedy.  We meet our narrator, who lives in a shack in the swamp, and gradually learn his crazy life story--his mother was a witch, and she summoned a familiar to protect her son should she die, she knowing her son was a dimwit who couldn't look after herself.  The familiar, Enoch, a sort of invisible semi-material gremlin or something, sort of lives in the narrator's skull.  Enoch has psychic or magical powers and uses them to guide the narrator.  Of course, Enoch is a satanic monster, absolutely evil and selfish, and requires from the narrator payment of a high order in return for its support.  At Enoch's direction, the narrator murders and mutilates innocent people and Enoch feeds on their souls and/or brains--it is a little unclear, but Enoch enjoins the narrator to preserve and then remove the heads of his victims.  The story really shifts into high gear when the law and an angry lynch mob catches up to our serial killer narrator.  Will the narrator end in prison? In an asylum?  Or at the end of noose?  Will Enoch aid or betray the narrator?  And what about the government officials and medical men who interview the narrator--how will Enoch handle them?

I've read a lot of mediocre and some actually bad Bloch stories, but every so often Bloch lays a brilliant bit of work on me and I realize anew that he deserves his high reputation.  Thumbs up for "Enoch."

We've already read several stories from Horror-7:
"The Opener of the Way," "The Secret of Sebek,"
"Return to the Sabbath," "The Mandarin's Canaries"
and "The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton"

"Too Nice a Day to Die" by Cornell Woolrich (1965)

The most heavily promoted story of the third and final issue of Bizarre! is a reprint of a Mickey Spillane tale, "The Lady Says Die!", which we read back in 2022.  Next on the list is a Cornell Woolrich story reprinted from the 1965 collection The Dark Side of Love: Tales of Love and Death; I am reading this caper, "Too Nice a Day to Die,"  in a scan of that collection.

"Too Nice a Day to Die" is a competent mainstream story without any of the witchcraft, space aliens or even, really, mentally ill folks that inhabit so much of the fiction we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  I'm going to call Woolrich's story merely acceptable, though it is well written on a sentence by sentence basis, as it is not very satisfying--the characters lack personality and the plot is essentially random, its course determined not by the characters' decisions or personalities but extraneous uncontrollable factors.  Sure, maybe Woolrich means that to be the point of his story, that our lives are not under our control but subject to the winds and tides of fate, but such an attitude makes for a weak story, in my opinion.  

A woman is estranged from her family and living alone in New York City, in beautiful Manhattan, working a boring office job, and decides to commit suicide.  At the last minute a random happenstance saves her life.  So she goes for a walk around town, thinking she'll kill herself tonight or tomorrow.  Sitting in Rockefeller Center near the skating rink, a thief seizes her handbag but then a Midwestern transplant, an architect I think, retrieves and returns the bag.  Suicide lady and Indianapolis boy walk around town together all afternoon and fall in love.  In the evening she invites him up to her place but then she gets hit by a car and killed.

The descriptions of New York and the processes of committing suicide, falling in love, and getting hit by an automobile are all good, but "Too Nice a Day to Die" doesn't add up to much for me--maybe, in the same way people who have had BDSM sex or smoked crack long enough can't get no satisfaction from vanilla sex or marijuana, after hundreds (thousands?) of stories about witches, aliens and psychos, I can't derive much from stories about office girls and the architects who love them.  But I'm going to keep saying that his ois not an MPorcius problem but a Cornell Woolrich problem, that "Too Nice a Day to Die" doesn't work for me because a story's course and resolution should be the product of its character' easily comprehensible personalities and decision-making.     

"Walpurgisnacht" by August Derleth (1961)

Listed third on the cover of the final ish of Bizarre! is August Derleth's "Walpurgisnacht," a reprint from the 1961 collection Wisconsin in Their Bones.  I am reading the story in a scan of that collection.

Like Woolrich's story, Derleth's "Walpurgisnacht" is a mainstream story about love and death but it has much more human feeling and feels like real life rather than a twist-ending gimmick story.  We also might call it a feminist story.

An old woman's husband is in the hospital, on his deathbed.  Her neighbor, an old maid who lives with her brother, comes over to commiserate.  Soon we readers learn all about how the husband was a violent drunk who never worked a steady job but fished and scavenged in the dump all day and played the accordion at night at bars; his wife had to bring in cash doing various menial jobs as well as tend the garden.  When the women process that this abusive slacker is dying they throw all his scavenged wooden scrap, his fishing rod, his accordion and his favorite chair into a pile and set them on fire and dance around the blaze in ecstatic celebration.

Pretty good.     

"Faddist" by James H. Schmitz (1966)   

"Faddist" debuted in the third and final issue of Bizarre! and was not reprinted until 2002 when it reappeared in the collection Eternal Frontier, which is where I am reading it.

This is a competent filler piece, an obvious twist-ending gimmick story.  Acceptable.

Herman loves pastries and whipped cream.  But for years such delights were denied him because he married health-food nut Elaine, a woman whose will dwarfed that of the sweet toothed Herman.  after almost two decades of marriage, Elaine vanished on her way to an organic farmer convention, and since then Herman has been eating delicious baked goods to his heart's content.  He does keep his promise to Elaine to carefully maintain her organic garden, though.

The twists are that Herman harvests but throws into the trash the produce from the garden, and that he murdered Elaine.  You see, when Elaine left for the convention, she immediately circled back to spy on Herman, and caught him rushing to the bakery and returning with a (un)healthy supply of pastries.  Elaine confronted hubby before he even had a chance to eat this glorious bounty, and Herman finally decided he loved sweets more than his nagging wife and slew her and buried her in the garden, where her body nourishes her beloved fruits and veggies.

**********

Five tragic stories of death, none of them bad, a few of them good.  Clarke's appeals to the prejudices of anti-anti-communist liberals who think fears of the Soviet Union overblown.  Bloch's is a quite fine black magic story about people exploited by satanic forces to which their own inadequacies make them vulnerable.  Woolrich, Derleth and Schmitz offer mainstream stories, Woolrich's kind of gimmicky and nihilistic with flat, bland characters; Derleth's sadly realistic and genuinely depressing, while Schmitz's, though jokey, at least has characters with personality whose actions and fates are dictated by their personalities.  The crown has to go to Bloch, with Derleth a close second and Clarke at third; Woolrich and Schmitz get passing grades.

Today's complement included only one "real" science fiction story, the remainder being about the supernatural or just crime and bad luck, but next time we meet science fiction is back on the menu, under the "Entrees" heading, or so I hope, as we look at stories from a 1950s magazine that has spacecraft on its cover.

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.

**********

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.