Farnsworth Wright: "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension," "Poisoned," and "The Great Panjandrum"

A few weeks ago we read three 1920s stories by Farnsworth Wright, famous editor of Weird Tales.  Let's go back, Jack, and do it again!  Two of today's stories were printed in Weird Tales in 1923, when the magazine was edited by Edwin Baird; the third appeared in the first issue Wright edited, the November 1924 number.

"An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" (1923)

In 1997 there appeared an anthology edited by Marvin Kaye and John Gregory Betancourt and graced with a great Stephen Fabian cover entitled The Best of Weird Tales: 1923, and "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" was among its contents.  So I guess we have a treat ahead of us!

Or not!  This is a wacky joke story, a sort of filler piece.  It isn't good, but it isn't particularly annoying, so we'll call it barely acceptable.  

The narrator of "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" is a goofy sort of character who addresses us chummily and colloquially.  I guess we are supposed to both like him and look down on him as a dope, sort of like how we look at a Wodehouse narrator.  He relates to us a ridiculous tale in which a space ship from Jupiter lands right next to him in Chicago.  Hundreds or thousands of Jupiterians emerge form the ship; the aliens are hard to visualize because the narrator describes them in a way that is totally absurd, and their behavior is almost as ridiculous.  A college professor of the narrator's acquaintance s on hand and he explains that the Jupiterians are from or encompass a fourth-dimension, so can fold themselves inside out, change their size, pass though walls, etc.   As we expect of a college professor, he prefers the aliens to his own race, calling them superior, the only true intellectuals, etc.

The leader of the expedition from Jupiter gets drunk on the narrator's whisky, and loses some of his fourth-dimension powers and so is trapped here in Earth.  His fellows try to rescue him and in a way I won't describe this leads to an explosion that kills all the aliens...and wakes up the narrator, who was having a nightmare after trying to read a book by Einstein.

The somewhat understated style of humor in "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" is easier to swallow than the style of humor employed by Robert Bloch in the story we read by the Psycho scribe for our last blog post, this story is mercifully brief, and I appreciated the satire of college professors, so I'm not being as hard on Wright's filler piece here as I am on so many other joke stories.  Still, I find it confounding that Kaye and Betancourt considered "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" one of the best stories from Weird Tales' first year, and that in 1927 it was included in the anthology The Moon Terror, like four years after its debut in the October 1923 ish of WT.  Don't people open up Weird Tales for the blood and guts, the sex and violence, the terror and despair?  Are people really looking to Weird Tales for laughs?

"Poisoned" (1923)

"Poisoned" feels like a mainstream story about scandal and broken friendships and blackmail and all that sort of thing--it has no weird or science fiction elements.  It is also boring.  Thumbs down!

Two middle-class guys, an apothecary and a lawyer, are best buddies.  They do everything together!  They both bear the first name Aubrey.  They got the flu together and recovered together, both tended to by the same nurse.  One of them fell in love with the nurse, and he and the nurse are engaged to be married.

These jokers play cards together every day, and every day get into stupid arguments because one of them plays carelessly, throwing down a card that only a dolt would play, and then saying he'd made a mistake and should be able to take the card back and put down a more appropriate one.  One day their argument gets very heated and one of the men storms off and the men stop seeing each other.

The plot gets kind of convoluted and the Aubrey who is not engaged tries to get his mitts on the nurse to which his former pal is engaged and as part of his strategy reveals to her that the other Audrey, her fiancé, has an illegitimate child with some other woman.  The marriage is called off and the nurse marries some third guy.  

Both Aubreys are miserable, each lacking the woman he desired and lacking his only real friend.  The lawyer contemplates suicide and buys poison--the apothecary hears through the apothecary grapevine about the purchase of the poison and looks forward to hearing of the other Audrey's demise, but the attorney decides not to kill himself after all.  The apothecary goes to visit the lawyer to see how unhappy he is and there is a complicated scene involving wine with poison in it and some uncertainty about whether one guy wants to commit suicide in front of the other guy and/or murder the other guy blah blah blah and both of them end up drinking poison and keeling over.

Waste of time.  In general I like disastrous sexual relationships and men acting stupidly over a woman and people committing suicide in my fiction, but Wright absolutely fails to make these characters interesting and the business with the cards and with the glasses of wine is a little hard to follow even though Wright spends too many words explaining it all.  A failure.

"Poisoned" has never been reprinted.

"The Great Panjandrum" (1924)

This story, appearing a year after "Poisoned," was printed under a pseudonym in an issue of the magazine Wright himself edited.  The identity of the author of the piece would have been no mystery to veteran readers of the magazine, as under the bogus name we see "Author of 'The Teakwood Shrine,'" a tale which appeared under Wright's real name in the September 1923 issue.  A little joke, I guess.

Jokes abound on the ten pages which "The Great Panjandrum" occupies.  Wright immediately gets on my bad side by employing one of my least favorite literary devices--using phonetic spelling to represent an accent.     

‘‘Why yo’ all didn’t go an’ ’list in de ahmy an’ come back f’um France a hero, like Mandy Johnson’s man, so’s I could be proud ob yo’? I’se plumb tired ob scein’ de same ol’ face, day aftah day, day aftah day. Ah sho wishes yo’ had gone an’ ’listed.’’

Maybe this would be amusing to hear an actor say, but reading it is kind of a chore.

The protagonist of "The Great Panjandrum" is George Washington, an African-American gentleman of leisure who lives on the South Side of Chicago with his wife Martha.  Martha, quoted above, regrets that her husband didn't join the army, but how could our hero have joined the colors and fought the Hun when he suffers from rheumatism?

Out delivering a load of laundry Martha has washed, George crosses paths with the man he considers the wisest among the inhabitants of the South Side.  Eavesdropping, George realizes that this savant is in cahoots with a voodoo master, the Great Panjandrum, who is going to launch a race war in hopes of establishing an independent black nation right there in Chicago.

George hurries to the police station to report the coming revolution, but the Irish sergeant on duty there just insults George, dismissing his valuable intelligence on the coming revolt--scheduled for this very afternoon!--as the delusions of a drunk.  So George takes matters into his own hands!  He makes his way to the Great Panjandrum's HQ and fast talks his way past the various voodoo-adherents into the lair of the voodoo master himself!  The diabolical sorcerer has just sacrificed a goat and its heart sits in a bowl of blood!  George's entreaties that the uprising will only cause pointless death on a large scale among the "colored" population of the Windy City fall on deaf ears, and a comic fight ensues that sees George, the high priest of darkness, and several other "negroes" fall down into a pit under a trap door.  In the fracas, George's hat is dislodged, and some of the blood of the poor goat who is the real victim of all this stains it.  Somebody has corroborated George's report and so the police arrive, and find the blood-stained hat before they find George.  The authorities report to Martha that her husband has been slain, and Mrs. Washington makes a dramatic show of being hysterical over her hero husband's untimely demise in the course of sparing the South Side a catastrophic race war.  But when George shows up, having finally been rescued by the police, she sets him to work helping her with the washing and points out that in the excitement he seems to have forgotten he has "de rheumatiz."

In depicting black people as ridiculous schemers and deceivers, and in its liberal use of the "n-word," "The Great Panjandrum" is very racist by today's standards.  The jokes are weak and the plot is just a rickety frame upon which to hang the jokes.  Thumbs down for this one, which has never been reprinted as far as I can tell.

**********

Not good, Mr. Wright, not good.  Three stories full of banal material ("It was all a dream!" "Blacks are lazy!" "Did he switch the glasses while I was in the other room?"), two of them silly joke stories, none of them with any legit weird elements.  It is unlikely we will read any additional stories by Farnsworth Wright, though two more lurk in 1930s issues of WT.

Hopefully we'll encounter some more impressive material the next time we crack open a copy of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual.

Weird Tales Project: 1942

Yes, we are still doing this!  Trying to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales printed in the 1940s!  We've already done this for the 1930s, after all, so why do you doubt we can do it for the 1940s?  It is early days, admittedly, but we still going to celebrate our conquest of 1942's six issues of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual.  Below find links to the 1942 WT stories we have blogged about, as well as links to the 1930-1941 indices that will send you to my blog posts on hundreds of earlier WT stories.

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939    1940   1941

January

H. P. Lovecraft:                        "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"

Fritz Leiber:                             "The Phantom Slayer" 

Mary Elizabeth Counselman:  "Parasite Mansion" 

Dorothy Quick:                        "The White Lady"

March

Robert Bloch:        "Hell on Earth"  

David H. Keller:    "Death of the Kraken"

August Derleth:     "Here, Daemos!"

May 

Henry Kuttner:        "Masquerade"

Dorothy Quick:       "Enchanted River"

Robert Bloch:          "Black Bargain" 

Malcolm Jameson:  "Vengeance in Her Bones" 

July

Manly Wade Wellman:   "Coven"

August Derleth:              "Lansing's Luxury"

Hannes Bok:                   "Poor Little Tampico"    

September

Clark Ashton Smith: "Epiphany of Death" AKA "Who Are the Living?"

Robert Bloch:           "A Question of Etiquette" 

Fritz Leiber:              "Spider Mansion"

David H. Keller:       "The Bridle"

November

David H. Keller: "The Golden Bough"

Robert Bloch:     "Nursemaid to Nightmares"

Ray Bradbury:    "The Candle"

Fritz Leiber:        "The Hound"

Hannes Bok:       "The Evil Doll"

 

Weird Tales, Nov '42: Bloch, Bradbury, Leiber, & Bok

The November 1942 issue of Weird Tales has one of the worst covers in the magazine's history--the composition haphazard, the style primitive, the colors dull.  Ugh.  But there are some big names inside--Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Hannes Bok, Damon Knight, H. P. Lovecraft, David H. Keller, Stanton Coblenz.  Let's whittle the list down a bit.

Coblentz's story, "The Victory of the Vita-Ray" is probably a lame joke or a broad satire, so I'm skipping it, even though it is advertised on the cover (curiously, without mentioning Coblentz's name.)  Should you be hankering for MPorcius commentary on Coblentz, I offer my blog posts about the stories "Triple-Geared," "The Daughter of Urzun," and "The Man from Xenern" and the novel Hidden World. 

I blogged about Keller's 1934 "The Golden Bough" back in 2020.  (It says "NO REPRINTS" on the table of contents, but this is a reprint.  Tsk, tsk.)

I read a book version of "Herbert West: Reanimator" long ago and don't feel like reading it again yet.

Damon Knight's contributions to the issue are illustrations that include skulls and bones in their sort of flat, wood-cut like compositions.

So that leaves us with Bob "Psycho" Bloch; the man who is likely mainstream America's favorite SF writer, Ray Bradbury; Fritz "Grey Mouser" Leiber; and one of the most distinctive of SF illustrators, Hannes Bok.  We'll read these gents' stories in their 1942 versions.

"Nursemaid to Nightmares" by Robert Bloch

The narrator of "Nursemaid to Nightmares" is one of those creative types who is astounded to find that his alleged artistic ability is not much help getting a job.  Our guy has been showing up at the employment agency only to be told there are no jobs for which he is qualified, seeing as he has no marketable skills.  But today he is luck!  Some eccentric millionaire is looking to hire a servant with an IQ over 180 who can ride horses and who can climb trees!  Our guy fits the bill and gets the job sight unseen!

"Nursemaid to Nightmares" is an irritating joke story.  Margate the eccentric millionaire collects mythical creatures, and he doesn't chain them in a dungeon to work experiments on them or shanghai them into his evil army or anything cool like that; Margate treats the monsters as houseguests and assures the narrator that they are "goodhearted."  The monsters are an occasion for Bloch to subject us to childish jokes.  The millionaire has his guest the vampire's teeth pulled by a dentist.  He has the narrator buy his werewolf flea powder, and also directs him to take the werewolf on a walk around the block.  The werewolf urinates on a tree that turns out to be a hamadryad.  And Bloch doesn't spare us the puns, either:

Jason Harris operated one of the most thriving mortuary chapels in the city.  Business was never dead.  Mr. Harris himself was always on hand to welcome a fresh customer.  That’s the only way he liked his customers—fresh.

There's not much plot to "Nursemaid to Nightmares," just a series of stupid episodes.  The narrator helps the vampire buy a new coffin.  He and a mermaid start dating.  He takes the centaur to the smith to be shod and the centaur manages to get his hands on some beer, gets drunk, and causes a bar brawl.

The final episode, which is foreshadowed clearly, involves a new creature joining the household--Medusa the Gorgon!  She turns almost everybody, including Margate, to stone, but the narrator shows her a mirror and turns her to stone.  The final gag of this anemic story is the narrator using the various creatures, now statues, to decorate the estate's lawn.

An absolute waste of time--thumbs down!  A sequel to "Nursemaid to Nightmares," "Black Barter," appeared in 1943.  These two Margate stories were combined to form a novella included in a 1955 issue of Imaginative Tales and in the 1969 collection Dragons and Nightmares.

Were people enraged when the book advertised to them with photos of 
beautiful women turned out to be filled with joke stories?

"The Candle" by Ray Bradbury

This story, apparently, is Bradbury's first published horror story.  In his intro to 1975's The Best of Henry Kuttner, Bradbury expresses a low opinion of "The Candle," excepting the ending, which he tells us was written by Kuttner.  As it turns out, this is a pretty good story, with a strong central theme, good images, and a good (if obvious) twist ending.  Thumbs up for "The Candle."

Our protagonist, pale, dark-haired, tall and skinny Jules Marcott, has big problems, which we learn about in dribs and drabs amid the descriptions of his actions and the sights around him.  In brief, his wife Helen has left him for his friend Eldridge and will soon be flying to Reno to get a divorce and to marry Eldridge.  Marcott looks into the window of an odd little shop, at all the old firearms, thinking of buying a gun and killing Eldridge.  But among the weapons is an even more alluring artifact--a blue candle wrought in the shape of a beautiful naked woman.  Though unlit, the candle seems to glow, and it draws Marcott into the store almost against his will!

The ugly store owner, whose appearance is in every way the opposite of young Marcott's, explains to Marcott the candle's black power, how it can be used to kill from a distance.  Uggo stupidly teaches Marcott the spell before Marcott has passed over any money, and Marcott, who can't afford the announced fee, physically beats down the proprietor and steals the candle.

Marcott comes up with a too-clever-by-half scheme to get Helen to cast the spell and destroy her lover--will Marcott's diabolical plans backfire as we readers expect?

A cynical story in which every character is evil and foolish, a story with solid sex and violence elements.  I like it; Bradbury and Kuttner deserve their high reputations.  If you prefer the Bradbury of stories like "The Silent Towns" and "The October Game" to the more sentimental Bradbury, check out "The Candle." 

A year after Bradbury himself dismissed "The Candle" in print as no good, Peter Haining over in jolly old E reprinted it in the anthology The First Book of Unknown Tales of Horror.  It seems this rare tale by Bradbury, which in my opinion is nothing to be ashamed of, has only ever been reprinted in the land of the free and the home of the brave in the first volume of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury (2011).

"The Hound" by Fritz Leiber

Here's today's second werewolf story, a story that has been reprinted in many Leiber collections and multiple werewolf-themed anthologies.

Leiber presents a depressing picture to us in this story.  David works in the bargain basement at a department store and is dating a wholesome but "serious, not-too-pretty" salesgirl.  He lives with his very sick father and quite sick nag of a mother in an apartment they can't afford to heat properly.  He can't sleep because of oppressive thoughts and nightmares involving a wolf; images of wolves have haunted him since childhood, generating fears closely linked to the unpleasantness of early 20th-century urban life--the loud trains and automobiles, the rats, big city smells.  The monster wolf in his mind is associated with black grease and oil, the lubricants and power source of modern machinery.  

As the story proceeds, David' thoughts of wolves seem to be manifesting themselves in reality, to himself and even to others!  Who got into his locker at work and dug through his lunch bag?  What was that sniffling his mother heard last night?  Did his girlfriend really see a big dog among the throngs at the store?  Why is he always finding black grease everywhere?

The story ends sort of inconclusively.  David flees the city, in a sort of daze, arrives at a suburban zoo in the dark of night, the cage where the arctic wolves are housed.  One of the wolves is no mere wolf, but "malformed," with "eyes" that are "those of no animal."  This thing, the monster from his nightmares, chases him back towards the city, its true lair, and eventually it catches up to him, injures him.  The attack is witnessed, and the witness says the attacker was nothing like a wolf, but rather like "something from the factories of hell."  David has survived the attack, and is relieved that he is not the only one to have seen the monster, that the danger the monster represents is a "danger shared."

Rather than being about a traditional werewolf, this is a story about the horror of modernity--the city, the factory, the machine.  "The Hound" is well-written and I like it and I am giving it a thumbs-up, but is the werewolf really a good symbol for urbanism or industrialism or modernity or capitalism or whatever it is Leiber is complaining about here?  Isn't the werewolf a symbol of man's animal nature or the barbarism that lurks beneath the veneer of civilization?  Does it really make sense to link the wolf with grease and oil, the black goop that makes machines run?  Maybe Leiber chooses the werewolf because the werewolf turns its victims into werewolves, the way a commie might say capitalism or modernity "manufacture consent," turn people into cogs in the machine, but vampires and zombies kind of do the same thing, don't they?  I guess Leiber just likes the wolf as a symbol--recall when we read that collection The Night of the Wolf?  

How do we feel about the more or less hopeful, but absolutely vague, ending?  I sort of expected David to be killed, or turn out to be a werewolf, or get turned into a werewolf.  I guess Fritz, after painting his horror vision of modern life, wants to suggest we can escape modernity if we all work together to build socialism or return to the land or something like that, but without even hinting at what the solution to modernity might be.  I guess the first step is admitting you have a problem.   

I have problems with the story's ideology (I loved living in New York City and think motor cars and locomotives and skyscrapers and the market economy are fine) and question its choice of symbols and the nature of the ending and all that, but "The Hound" is well-written and structured and paced and works on an emotional level, so good on Fritz.  

"The Evil Doll" by Hannes Bok

Here we have a rare story, a story that it seems was never reprinted.

Maksim is a starving artist!  Skinny, subject to bouts of weakness, so poor he has to wire his dilapidated furniture together, whining to his girlfriend Eileen that she doesn't have enough faith in him and that the bourgeoisie are keeping him down.  Oy, these creatives, always a pain to have to deal with!  (I like that Bok, a painter himself, portrays a painter as an absolute piece of garbage.  It can be fun when a writer depicts his own profession in a negative light, and is usually aggravating when people deify or canonize their fellows, the way teachers and journalists always are.) 

"I know that my work is good. These art dealers—bourgeois pigs!—how can they understand what I am trying to express? They look at my work—pictures that I have slaved over, sweat blood in the making — and they say, 'Yes, it is good, but will the public understand it?’’’  His voice squeaked in mimicry. "The public! How can it understand what it has never been given the chance to understand?”

Maksim refuses to get a real job, and Eileen is sick of financing the production of his unprofitable paintings--she barely has enough money to keep herself fed and sheltered.  It looks like they are quits!  Before Eileen leaves for good, Maksim convinces her to let him make a doll of her, to serve as a souvenir, a memento of their doomed relationship.  This chick is so ingenuous she humors Maksim to the point that she kisses the wax doll and trims a fingernail and a lock of hair for him to integrate into the doll.  It isn't long before another woman is telling Eileen that Maksim is a witch and will use the doll to control Eileen, and it isn't long before Eileen realizes that girl was telling the horrible truth!

I liked "The Evil Doll" quite a bit when Maksim was railing against the bourgeoisie and dominating and manipulating women, and when these women were trying to seduce or murder Maksim or commit suicide.  But then Bok introduces a new character, a self-described lonely bookworm who is also physically strong and courageous and who takes control of the situation, pushing Eileen around for her own good and also pushing around Maksim to save the day.  The scenes with this guy also muddy the waters when it comes to whether the voodoo dolls actually work as advertised, or the women are just suffering psychosomatic symptoms due to the power of suggestion.  I'm afraid the bookworm acts inconsistently, sometimes acting as if he doesn't believe in magic and other times acting as if he does, and Bok writes some scenes to suggest the magic is truly effective and others that indicate that the women are victims of their own anxieties, anxieties exploited by Maksim.  This bookworm's behavior and personality also aren't as believable and as compelling as those of Maksim, Eileen, and the second woman.  This new character really derails the story, in my opinion--it feels like Bok had written himself into a corner and so has this new guy come out of nowhere to resolve the plot, but he does so unconvincingly and unsatisfyingly.  Too bad.

I'll call this story acceptable, but it could have been legitimately good if Bok had come up with a better ending, with either Eileen or Maksim determining the outcome by putting into practice some brilliant stratagem or by committing some terrible blunder instead of having some super-competent bookworm with whom readers are expected to identify resolve the plot with ease in a way that is a little confusing.  I'll even play intrusive editor, take on the role of a John W. Campbell, Jr. or an H. L. Gold, and tell you my ideas for ending the story.  First off, no damned bookworm character for god's sake.  Secondly, Eileen and Maksim both die as the climax of a hand-to-hand fight over the doll of Eileen--because Maksim is so sickly and Eileen is so desperate, she is a match for him.  Possibilities: She pushes him into a roaring fireplace, but he has the doll of her in his hand, so she burns up just as he does.  Or, he falls out a window and every bone in his gaunt body is shattered, but lands on the doll so she gets mysteriously crushed to death back upstairs.  Or, he falls in the river and drowns and, because he has the doll with him, she also, inexplicably, drowns while on dry land.  If we want Eileen to live, maybe use the fire idea but instead of burnt to a crisp, Eileen is only horribly scarred for life, having reached into the fire to retrieve the doll before it is entirely consumed--her arm and face are ruined, but she lives on, her hideous scars a constant reminder of her brush with the supernatural!  (It is too bad Bok didn't send this story to Henry Kuttner!)

*********     

Bloch is doing his comedy thing, which I do not appreciate, especially in a story with no plot that is just a series of wretched gags.  Compare to Bloch's much later "ETFF," which we read two years ago.  Bok's story starts out competent, with solid black magic and exploitative sexual relationship material, but then he muffs the landing.  Disappointing.  Leiber's story is well-written and takes a strong stand, but I think today's biggest success is the Bradbury-Kuttner collab, which portrays horrible human relationships, gore, and black magic quite compellingly.  The exasperating Bloch aside, this has been a solid chunk of World War II-era weirdness.  Stay tuned as we continue our journey through the weird of the 1940s, marveling at the jewels and excoriating the dross.

F&SF May '59: J T McIntosh, C Oliver, M A deFord & A Davidson

In our last exciting excursion into the world of mid-century speculative fiction, we read two stories that appeared in the May 1959 issue of Robert P. Mills' F&SF (as we people who hate to type call it), A. Bertram Chandler's quite good "The Man Who Could Not Stop" and Rosel George Brown's pretty lame "Lost in Translation."  Let's read four more stories from this publication, a long story by J. T. McIntosh and short stories by Chad Oliver, Miriam Allen deFord, and Avram Davidson.  That is the order in which they are printed in the magazine, and by coincidence (?) this correlates with how much I am expecting to like each story.

"Tenth Time Round" by J. T. McIntosh

Many have been the times I have told you that J. T. McIntosh sucks.  But last year I found McIntosh's novel The Rule of the Pagbeasts AKA The Fittest an involving and enjoyable read.  So there is a chance that I will find worthwhile "Tenth Time Round," a story that takes up 19 pages of this ish of F&SF and was reprinted in Japan's premier SF magazine in 1960 and, in 2019, in the British Library's Beyond Time: Classic Tales of Time Unwound.

"Tenth Time Round" is one of those stories about timelines and branching points in history that create new universes and all that.  You see, in 1986 an amazing new service opens for business.  For over $100,000, this firm can send your consciousness back to an earlier iteration of yourself, though no further back than 1975.  You will take over your old body, but retain your current memories, all the knowledge you have accumulated.  Your greater experience and maturity, and your knowledge of the future, will offer you a lot of advantages, so maybe you can succeed in this new universe where you failed in your original universe.  There are limits, though.  For one thing, if you behave differently than you did the first time around, which is inevitable, you will cause changes in this timeline, and so your memories of the first 1978 you went through won't match one-for-one this new 1978.  Second, some historical events, labelled "immutables," cannot be changed, no matter what you do.

The protagonist of "Tenth Time Round" is Gene Player, a writer.  He is in love with a woman, Belinda, and keeps going back in time to restart his life in 1975, a few weeks before he meets Belinda, in hopes of getting her to fall for him.  As our story begins, he is going back in time from 1986 for the tenth time--he has failed to win Belinda nine times, spent 99 years trying to win her, and each time losing to a guy named Henry.  Player is beginning to wonder if Belinda's love for Henry isn't one of those "immutables."

Most of the text of "Tenth Time Round" is romance movie stuff.  There's the "meet cute" that Player experiences for the tenth time.  There's Player plotting to win Belinda over Henry.  There's the surprise appearance of a fourth character, Doreen, who falls in love with Player.  This universe is far different than the last nine--this is the first time Doreen has entered the equation, and it looks like Henry's position with Belinda is not as secure as it has been in the earlier versions of 1978.  Will Player end up with Belinda or with Doreen?

This story is OK.  It is pretty well written, though maybe a lot of it is not very substantive.  The various elements of the story--Belinda, Doreen, the legal and the cosmic rules of time travel, the effect of this story's version of time travel on stuff like Gene Player's literary career (Player writes the same novel in every universe, but having written it nine times already, this tenth version is the most streamlined)--are each handled competently, but do they really all mesh together well, buttress and complement each other to further a single theme?  Maybe not.

A little better than acceptable, maybe a mild recommendation for "Tenth Time Round."    

"The One That Got Away" by Chad Oliver

Anthropologist Oliver often tells us that life as a stone age barbarian is better than life among skyscrapers and books and factories and motor cars*; let's see if he's banging the same drum this time or has something else going on. 

*(See "Let Me Live in a House," "Rite of Passage," and "The Marginal Man.")

"The One That Got Away" is set out in the great outdoors, a valley where there are lots of ranches for "dudes" and cabins for tourists to rent so they can go fishing and engage in other rural-type activities.  The last two years there have been many fires in the valley; multiple people have perished in the conflagrations, and everybody suspects an arsonist is at work.

[C]ome to think of it, just about every modem building in the town had burned down.

The protagonist, who rents "rustic cabins," is glad he didn't build any such "modern buildings" on his own property, but our hero is not immune to the other problem plaguing the valley--the fishing is getting worse for some unknown reason.

The protagonist takes a nap behind a rock at a river, and when he wakes up observes a space alien (E.T. doesn't notice our protagonist).  We realize this is a joke story, even though we've been hearing about innocent people getting killed.  The alien stuns the human anglers by the river side and uses advanced technology to catch a huge haul of fish with ease.  Our protagonist approaches the visitor from the stars and fast talks his way onto the alien's space boat and up into the orbiting star ship.  Our hero knows how to deal with tourists from the city who want to enjoy nature for a few days, which is just what the aliens on the star ship are--they have been burning down the "modern buildings" in the valley so as to preserve its rustic charm, the charm they travel light years to experience, their own worlds being totally urbanized.

"We come a long way every year to find what we want, and we simply cannot permit this commercialization. That’s what we’re trying to get away from, don’t you see?”

“So if we build something you don’t like you bum it down?”

“Naturally." 

I guess the point of this joke story is that businessmen are evil.  The alien businessmen casually slay native Earthers, and threaten to kill our hero.  But our guy figures out how to persuade them to stop monopolizing the fishing in his neck of the woods and move to a different valley, where, he convinces them, there are even better fishing spots.  The fishing in his valley recovers and local buildings stop burning down, though now other Earthpeople are getting mysteriously burned up--not that our protagonist cares.

"I don't care a used salmon egg about men from another world, and I never worried any about Earth either. I care about my business...."

"The One That Got Away" is a sort of traditional light science fiction story in which an intelligent human outsmarts aliens, resolving the plot conflict with quick thinking, but it has the anti-modern bias we see in so much of Oliver's work as well as the hatred of businesspeople we expect to see from college professor types.  Oliver's reprehensible politics and his many references to fishing (Oliver himself was an avid angler) give "The One That Got Away" more character and substance than a filler story, so I can't dismiss it as such, but I still don't care for it.  It doesn't commit any literary blunders, so we'll call it merely acceptable--pinkos and fly fishermen will likely enjoy it more than I did.

"The One That Got Away" was reprinted in the Japanese magazine I mentioned earlier, the British Venture, and right here in the USA, where the businessman has achieved his ultimate expression, in the  2003 Oliver collection A Star Above It.

"First Dig" by Miriam Allen deFord

This will be the second deFord story we have addressed here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Two years ago we read "The Margenes," which I deemed, as I do so many stories, "merely acceptable."  Hopefully "First Dig" will be more entertaining or enlightening.  The editor's intro to the story makes us expect it is some kind of ironic gag story, but we're going to "keep hope alive!" and read this thing (five pages) anyway.

One of my pet peeves about fiction is the shortcuts writers take in their task of manipulating the reader's emotions.  For example, writers know that putting a child in danger will get a rise out of readers because people have a natural sympathy for defenseless children.  The writer doesn't have to convince the reader about anything, the reader will naturally worry about the child.  Similarly, if a writer wants to serve the bloodlust of readers with depictions of a sympathetic protagonist who kills lots of people, he can make the people getting killed Nazis--all our lives we've been told killing Nazis is good, so the writer doesn't have to put any time or effort into explaining why the hero is justified in killing all these people.  The use of these kinds of shortcuts can diminish the tension of the story by absolving the reader of any responsibility, freeing him from doing any kind of intellectual work--nobody sympathizes with or identifies with somebody who harms a child or a Nazi, so the reader doesn't have to figure out if the violence in the story is justified and doesn't have to work through his emotional response to the violence.  Much more challenging, for reader and writer, would be to put not children or Nazis in danger, but government bureaucrats, wealthy businessmen, nagging spouses, African-American burglars, communist spies, or Christian clergy.  Such types of characters inspire a range of attitudes in readers; plenty of readers will sympathize or identify with such characters while at the same time plenty of other readers will hope to see such figures punished; this generates tension because readers won't know where the story is going and are forced to think through intellectually what the story is trying to say and whether they agree with it.  And to achieve the desired result from a maximum number of readers, the writer will have to make a convincing case, and he or she can play games with us readers, getting us to change our minds about the characters over the course of the story.

(A story can use these shortcuts and still be a good story, of course, if other elements of the story generate tension or if the story has other virtues--the most cliched and obvious plot and characters can be the foundation of a great story if it is well-written by some savant like Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, or Tanith Lee, with sentences that are beautiful and/or paragraphs that are economical.)

Anyway, in "First Dig" I think deFord is taking a shortcut by appealing to people's admiration for William Shakespeare.  In the same way we all are disturbed when we hear a child is in danger or feel justice has been served when we see a Bf-109 go down in flames or a U-boat sink with all hands, we all know Shakespeare is awesome, so by putting the Swan of Avon at the center of her tale, deFord has liberated herself from the need to convince us to go along with one of her main themes.

"First Dig" has a science fiction setting but is actually a weird or fantasy/horror story.  The intellectual and emotional tension of the story is generated by raising the question of whether our lives have any meaning, whether human excellence matters.

DeFord's story begins with a little prologue in which we observe the attendees of a funeral; the event is described in a vague way, no really famous names of people or places, though deFord offers clues that will indicate to those familiar with the Bard's biography what is going on.  Then the main text, set 50,000 years in the future.  Earth has long been nothing more than a barren waste, and the billions and billions of humans who live all across the galaxy know almost nothing about the history of the planet upon which their ancestors evolved.  They don't even know if Earth humans had a religion, they can't read a single word of any language written before mankind conquered the stars.  All they know about the "Old Planet" is its location.

A college professor brings some archaeology students to Earth for a dig; this is a training exercise, and the students are not expected to find anything of value, and the prof, who comes across as cynical, cold, arrogant and dismissive, pooh-poohs the bones and things the students find.  The most energetic and romantic student, a kid emotionally committed to the past and the profession of archaeology, finds a gravestone.  He senses, without any rational reason, that this headstone is a big big deal, even when the prof dismisses the stone as valueless.  Driven by some compulsion, the student laboriously copies by hand the inscription on the headstone, even though he can't read a word of it, the letters mere squiggles to him.  Then he drops dead.

The story ends with the revelation that this kid found the gravestone of Shakespeare, upon which was engraved a curse on any who would disturb the Bard's bones.  While the realistic portions of the story suggest our lives are meaningless, that even the greatest of the world's artists and their cultures will be forgotten by those who follow them, the fantasy portion of the story suggests that great artists are like wizards, their art--in Shakespeare's case, the written word--like magic, able to shake and shatter human hearts and minds.

Competently written, and thought-provoking (nowadays you could use this story in a college class to interrogate "whiteness"--the elevation of the white male, white worship of the written word, white obsession with time, you know what I'm talking about), I can mildly recommend this one.  

"First Dig" was included in the 1971 deFord collection Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow and Helen Hoke dug it up and exposed it to the world in her 1977 anthology Eerie, Weird and Wicked.

Hey, comics fans!  Two points:
1) The cover of Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow is by Richard Corben
2) Hoke also included in Eerie, Weird and Wicked Robert Bloch's joke story about
comic books "The Strange Island of Dr. Nork," which last year I told you was terrible

"The Montavarde Camera" by Avram Davidson

Here comes the story I had the highest hopes for.  I gave Oliver a low "C," and McIntosh and deFord low "B"s, so it shouldn't be hard for Davidson to go to the head of the class!  Let's hope he's on his game today!

Davidson's style here in "The Montavarde Camera"--the vivid, emotionally evocative, images of people and places, the little subtle jokes--is quite good, so right away the story gets a thumbs up.  As for the plot, we are in weird territory again.  (I take a break from reading Weird Tales, but they keep pulling me back in!)  A guy in turn of the century England is mysteriously drawn to a shop owned by a remarkable figure who is probably the Devil or one of Satan's servants.  The protagonist is interested in photography, and the smooth and charismatic shopkeeper sells him a very special camera, one constructed by a pioneer of photography, a somewhat mysterious individual with a chequered history, a man rumored to have produced pornography and to have links to satanic cults.

Clues mount that the camera has a diabolical influence, that it drains the strength, the life force, from objects and people whose image it captures.  Will the protagonist do the right thing and try to destroy the infernal device?  Or will he be corrupted by it, seek to use it to liberate himself from his nagging penny-pinching wife?  

An entertaining weird tale.  "The Montavarde Camera" has been a hit with editors and reappeared in multiple anthologies and Davidson collections.

********** 
 

The Davidson piece is the best of today's stories, the most fun to read, but also the hardest to write about, because it seems to be designed solely to be an entertainment that transports you to an earlier age with its references to the technology, events and aspects of daily life of a past era; in contrast, the Oliver story seems to be trying to make a banal argument about our market society while deFord's story seems to be trying to make profound points about the meaning of life and the roles of the artist and of the scientist, favoring the former over the later in a provocative way.  McIntosh's contribution is mostly trying to entertain you with a story about human relationships, but has the speculative element we expect to find in "real" science fiction, asking the question, if you could travel back in time under certain parameters, how might it affect your relationship life and career life?

A diverse bunch of stories, none of which is actually bad.  So, a good issue of F&SF.  Kudos to Mr. Mills and all concerned.

Merril-approved '59 stories: R G Brown, A Budrys and A B Chandler

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading selected stories printed in 1959 (more or less) that critically-lauded anthologist Judith Merril saw fit to include in the list of honorable mentions in the back of the 1960 edition of her annual Year's Best S-F series.  Today we'll finish up the "B"s and start the "C"s.  One of Merril's missions in life was to dissolve or at least point out the fatuity of distinctions between genre and mainstream fiction, and so she liked to include in her anthologies and honorable mentions lists stories that appeared in mainstream outlets that shared aspects with the material appearing in category SF magazines, and among her 1960 honorables we find a story by a William Chamberlain entitled "The Flying Jeep" that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post.  Chamberlain, a distinguished U. S. Army officer, was apparently also a prolific writer of fiction.  (It is amazing to the lazy among us how productive some people are.)  I can't find the text of "The Flying Jeep" anywhere online, so we'll have to skip Chamberlain and go right to A. Bertram Chandler after digesting Rosel George Brown and Algis Budrys.

"Lost in Translation" by Rosel George Brown

Editor of F&SF, where we are reading Brown's "Lost in Translation," Robert P. Mills, tells us that Brown is good-looking and that she majored in Ancient Greek.  Sounds awesome.  Then he hints that "Lost in Translation" is a joke story.  Not awesome.  Well, the story takes up only nine pages, so we can probably hack it.  

Brown immediately clues us in to the fact that her main character, Mercedes, is a contemptible poseur.  She is a virgin of the sex-positive future who reads ancient Greek texts in translation but doesn't understand them as well as a devotee of the current neo-Victorian fad.  Why does Brown think we will want to spend nine pages with someone whom she keeps telling us is contemptible?  So we can enjoy looking down on her?  As I keep telling you, SF is full of elitism.

Mercedes, who keeps affecting Victorian mannerisms, is visited by a man she has never met before.  Mercedes' father is a college professor and this is one of Dad's grad students.  Dad and this joker have invented a time machine and they want to test it out on Mercedes.

You may remember that Brown's novels Sibyl Sue Blue and The Waters of Centaurus were about a hip happening chick who was sexually promiscuous--how could you forget Sibyl Sue Blue having casual sex with lizard people from another planet?  Well, Mercedes here in "Lost in Translation" is the opposite of Sibyl Sue Blue, a square and a prude.  Our gal gets sent back to ancient Greece equipped with a translation device and finds the Greek literature and lifestyle she has been pretending to understand and revere is, in fact, to her neo-Victorian mind, vulgar and offensive, full of talk about sex, populated by  women who wear revealing attire and extravagant make up.  Mercedes falls in with some prostitutes who teach her how to apply cosmetics; now all dolled up, men are attracted to her.  (Brown here in this story illustrates the fact that women are positive that men prefer women with lots of cosmetics slathered on, no matter how often men tell them different.)  Never before have men desired her, and Mercedes finds she likes the feeling.  At a party she gets drunk and loses her virginity to a rich guy, though she barely remembers the actual intercourse.  Transported back to her time of origin, it is clear Mercedes has become a normal woman who will abandon prudery and start troweling her visage with artificial goop and have lots of sex.

A weak filler story that goofs on prudery and advocates sexual promiscuity and cosmetics.  Maybe "Lost in Translation," while failing to entertain us, serves to enlighten us denizens of the 21st century, is valuable as a primary document of 1959 feminism and progressive thought, offering insight into how the feminist line on stuff like sexual activity and the use of cosmetics has evolved over time.  I am going to judge "Lost in Translation" barely acceptable--it is not fun or funny and its attitude is banal and off-putting, but it isn't terrible.

Our mates over on Airstrip One reprinted "Lost in Translation" in a 1965 issue of Venture, and the story also reappeared in the 1963 Brown collection A Handful of Time.  

"The Stoker and the Stars" by Algis Budrys

Merril uses her honorable mentions list to promote two stories by Algis Budrys, but we've already read "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" so we're just addressing "The Stoker and the Stars" today, a tale that debuted in Astounding under a penname and would not be reprinted until 2011 in Leigh Ronald Grossman's Sense of Wonder. 

The cliched analysis of Budrys' work is that it is about what it means to be a man, and in "The Stoker and the Stars" Budrys almost comes right out and says this, in a passage that reminded me of Seneca's 86th letter to Lucilius (like Mercedes I read the classics in translation, and the trans. of Seneca's letters I read is Robin Campbell's.)

I couldn’t really describe him to you. He had a duffelbag in his hand and a packed airsuit on his back. The skin of his face had been dried out by ship’s air, burned by ultraviolet and broiled by infra red. The pupils of his eyes had little cloudy specks in them where the cosmic rays had shot through them. But his eyes were steady and his body was hard. What did he look like? He looked like a man.

"The Stoker and the Stars" suggests that being a man means taking risks to help others, and being a leader who supports his society.  The story comes to us as the memoir of a space man, a crew member on a Terran space ship who rose in rank to become captain of such a ship.  His career began in a difficult, humiliating time for the human race.  You see, after developing an interstellar drive, the human race tried to conquer other planets and races, and the alien races defeated us, chasing us back to Terra and then sort of quarantining our solar system, allowing only a small number of trading vessels to leave our system every year.  Our narrator is on the crew of one of those few trading ships.

A guy joins the crew to be a "stoker"--this man is the actual protagonist of the story, not our narrator.  The interstellar drives on ships during and just after the wars are temperamental and dangerous; a person--the stoker--has to stay in the engine room and constantly tend to the drive, clad in uncomfortable armor because the drive can arc and kill unprotected individuals.  The new stoker is obviously a veteran of the wars, but doesn't talk about his service.  By chance, the narrator learns that he was a Marine, one of that hardy crew of men who fought the most heroically during the wars, took the most risks, participated in the most savage fighting, etc.  Our narrator and others fear that, when the ship arrives at the trading post, that this Marine will launch some kind of kamikaze revenge terrorist attack on the aliens and ruin Earth's trade relations with the aliens, maybe even lead the aliens to wipe out humanity once and for all.

On the trip to the trading post, the stoker becomes a hero, suffering injury while saving the ship when the drive goes haywire.  Even though he is an enlisted man, his behavior while aboard, singing songs and so forth, raises morale and makes the ship operate more efficiently--he is obviously a talented leader of men.  This makes it hard for the narrator and his fellows to do anything about the man whom they fear is going to cause a diplomatic disaster once they arrive at the trading post; they just leave him be and hope for the best. 

When the day comes, the former Marine puts on his wartime uniform and walks right over to the aliens he fought with earlier in his career.  Instead of a disaster erupting, the Marine signs on to be a stoker on the aliens' ship.  In the denouement, we learn that this Marine, no mere grunt but a ship commander during the war, becomes a good will ambassador to multiple alien races, working as stoker on one ship after another, and is so charismatic and makes Earth look so good that the aliens allow more and more trade ships to leave our system and Earth eventually becomes integrated peacefully into the multi-racial galactic civilization.

A smoothly written and entertaining story with suspense, characters you can identify with who act in a believable manner, and a nuanced view of humanity and of what it means to be a man and a leader.  Thumbs up for "The Stoker and the Stars"!             

 

"The Man Who Could Not Stop" by A. Bertram Chandler 

Merril included two stories by Australian sailor A. Bertram Chandler on her list.  "The Man Who Could Not Stop" is classified at isfdb as a component of Chandler's famous series of stories and novels about space navy officer John Grimes, and it is set in the same universe as the Grimes stories, but Grimes himself does not appear.  Which is perhaps for the best as the Grimes stories I read in the dark age before I started the blog were kind of underwhelming. 

"The Man Who Could Not Stop" is an entertaining sort of slice-of-life story, set in the furthest reaches of the Milky Way, among the Rim Worlds.  Chandler sketches out effectively what life is like on these unattractive worlds, so far from Earth and the well-populated planets, and then introduces us to a pretty despicable fellow, a highly intelligent master thief who has pulled some major heists and killed at least one person in a fight.  He has fled from planet to planet through the galaxy, and ended up at one of the Rim Worlds because they are under a different jurisdiction and will not punish immigrants for crimes committed back among the Inner Worlds.  Chandler then chronicles this master criminal's life on the Rim in sort of jocular style, but the jokes are not absurd or based on puns or otherwise annoying or offensive.

In brief, Chandler depicts how the protagonist is an inveterate breaker of rules and exploiter of others--he is unreformable and essentially addicted to stealing from others.  Chandler also contrasts the law enforcement systems of the Inner Worlds, where criminals are coddled and prisons are comfortable places it is hoped will reform malefactors, and the law enforcement systems on the Rim, where criminals are punished with hard labor and poor food.  At times "The Man Who Could Not Stop" feels like a law and order conservative's satire of liberal "soft on crime" policies.

Again and again the protagonist robs somebody and is then thrown in prison for some months, only to get out and steal again and be captured and imprisoned again.  Chandler's descriptions of the man's crimes and his time in stir are entertaining.  Then comes the twist ending.  You see, while in prison the protagonist gets training as a mechanic.  After his third infraction he, along with many other irredeemable crooks, are impressed onto the crew of a starship about to embark on a dangerous mission--to leave the galaxy and attempt to reach an alien galaxy.  Few people would volunteer for such an arduous journey, so men who have been given a chance to straighten out and fly right but have proven unable to respect the law and the rights of others will crew the ship and in that way, finally, contribute to society.

Thumbs up for "The Man Who Could Not Stop," which I certainly enjoyed more than the John Grimes stories I read in the period before this blog came into operation.

"The Man Who Could Not Stop" debuted in the same issue of F&SF as Brown's "Lost in Translation" and would go on to be included in the collection Beyond the Galactic Rim.

"Familiar Pattern" by A. Bertram Chandler

"Familiar Pattern" was printed in Astounding under a pen name--Chandler had another story under his own name in this issue of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s magazine.

Chandler makes extensive use of his experience as a seaman here in "Familiar Pattern."  Our protagonist is the Australian captain of a merchant ship.  By chance--or so it seems!--an alien craft lands in the ocean near his ship, and he meets the aliens, who are more or less human-like.  They are pretty friendly, say they came to our planet because they were low on water and Earth, which they had no idea was inhabited, was the closest source of that oh-so-essential H2O.  The aliens and the humans trade small items, mostly booze and cigarettes (the aliens love to smoke, and Earth tobacco is more powerful than theirs, apparently) and then leave.

The aliens return and request to deal again with the protagonist.  Soon Earth is receiving regular trading delegations from alien space ships.  Interstellar trade remains based in Australia, and Chandler spends a lot of time detailing the logistics of moving stuff from the starships to the surface and the Earth goods to the starships and so forth.  Among the aliens who spend a lot of time on Earth are not only a trade commissioner and merchants but also alien missionaries.  Their religion, which preaches frequent use of alcohol and sexual indulgence, starts getting popular.

Throughout the story Chandler and his human characters point out parallels between European contact with Pacific natives and these aliens' new relationship with Earth humans.  In particular, there is a "pure-blooded Polynesian" bosun among the protagonist's crew who plays a sort of Magic negro role in the story, he being a better sailor and more phlegmatic and more wise than all the white people in the story.  This guy predicts, though in vague terms, what happens by the end of the story.

The provision of alcohol by the alien church serves as competition to local breweries.  And the sexual license promoted by the alien church offends the local prudes.  These conservative forces conspire to generate a mob that destroys the alien church.  This gives the aliens a pretext to bomb Earth ("gunboat diplomacy") and eventually take over our planet.  Has their entire series of visits, even the first, been a scam to provide the aliens a chance to conquer our world?

This story is OK.  The satire is a little too obvious and the description of trade negotiations and logistics a little too lengthy.  We're calling this one solidly acceptable, an uninspired but professional piece of work.  It doesn't seem to have been reprinted if you don't count British editions of Astounding or an appearance in Ellen Datlow's internet magazine in 2005. 

**********

In these Merril-approved posts I often try to figure out why Merril chose to include these specific stories on her list.  It is easy to see what Merril liked about today's stories by Rosel George Brown and Algis Budrys--they can readily be seen as attacks on the civilizations of Great Britain and the United States that lefties like Merril thought so reprehensible.  Brown's joke story is an attack on the bourgeois attitudes about sex of the English-speaking world, an attitude that liberals and leftists throughout the 20th century labeled "Puritanism" and blamed for a host of psychological and social problems.  As for Budrys, he may not himself be a liberal or leftist, but his story can be seen as, in part, a condemnation of the violence and imperialism of the British Empire and the Cold War USA (the Earth playing the allegorical role of the English-speaking world in the story) as well as a dramatization of the left-wing aspirational dream of seeing the First World humiliated by the socialistic Second World and/or the non-white Third World.  Of course, Budrys' story (unlike Brown's silly piece) also has literary merit--its characters have personality and behave realistically and face moral dilemmas--as well as entertainment value, and can be seen by us free-market types as arguing that trade is the key to productive international relations, making it a choice by Merril that is easy for me to endorse.

The second of Chandler's stories is even more of an anti-Western text than Brown's or Budrys', so we can see how it must have warmed Merril's heart.  Chandler's first story, however, with what it seems to say about recidivism and the foolishness of leniency towards criminals, would seem to go against what I would have expected Merril to believe, but it is a pretty fun and well put together light-hearted crime story, so maybe Merril promoted it purely based on her recognition of its merit as a piece of entertainment.  Or maybe she thought it a very subtle dig at punitive crime policies because the criminal was portrayed with sympathy and society eventually found a use for him instead of executing him or condemning him to a lifetime of incarceration?

These stories, whether I loved them or merely tolerated them, all provide food for thought.  So, a good batch.  More "C" stories next time we hop on the Merril tour bus and further explore exotic 1959.