Remember when people were taking public domain works by iconic writers from the Georgian and Victorian past like Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte and filling them with zombies and other faddish genre elements? (Are they still doing that?) Well here's an "updated" version of a work by an early 19th-century literary icon in which the included genre elements were part and parcel of the author's original version!
In 1955 Anthony Boucher included in F&SF a condensed selection from Washington Irving's satire A History of New York From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty entitled "The Conquest By the Moon." Boucher credits leftist folk-singer Lee Hays with alerting him to this pioneering example of invasion-from-space speculation. This adapted fragment of Irving's book hasn't been reprinted very often; maybe Boardman resorted to it because there are not many SF writers whose names start with an "I," or perhaps Boardman just likes stories that try to be funny while denouncing white racism and the human propensity for violence. Whatever the case, it's time for me to get edjumakated because everything I know about Washington Irving up to now I learned from cartoons.
"The Conquest By the Moon" is more like a sarcastic essay than a story with a plot or characters. First, Irving points out, in ironic parody, the weakness of the moral claim of European colonists to the New World. Then he pulls the old switcheroo on us: how would the people of England, France and the United States like it if the inhabitants of the Moon, green cyclopes who find our white skin and lack of tails disgusting, came to Earth and used their "concentrated sunbeam" weapons to force us to renounce Christianity and abandon our cities to live on reservations in inhospitable Arabian deserts or icy Lapland?
Like Samuel Johnson's Idler No. 81, from 1759, this is an interesting historical artifact that documents Georgian era criticism of British and French imperialism in the Americas, but it is not really a work of fiction. For SF fans "The Conquest By the Moon" is perhaps interesting for its depiction of extraterrestrials whose biology differs radically from our own and their high tech weaponry--"concentrated sunbeams" sounds a lot like the ray weapons that are a staple of SF.
I guess we'll call this acceptable.
I recently read Janifer's Slave Planet, and here he is again. Unfortunately, "In the Bag" is one of those short shorts that is supposed to be funny. This one employs the same gag used by Phillip Jose Farmer in his short short "The King of the Beasts," letting us think, until the end of the tale, that alien characters are humans.
Through an unlikely mix-up an alien emigre and rebel who is running a laundry service on Earth reveals himself to a customer whom he believes to be a human; the customer turns out to be an agent of the secret police of the government the disguised launderer is rebelling against. This story may be a spoof of the strange phenomena we see in Edgar Rice Burroughs-type lost race stories in which the lost race consists of brutish men but sophisticated and sexy ladies--here Janifer posits a race of aliens the male members of which effortlessly pass as Earthmen while the women have five arms and three breasts and a foot like a slug or snail's. "In the Bag" may also suggest that those who rebel against tyranny often turn out to be little or no better than the tyrants they oppose--the launderer is willing to kill the customer before the customer reveals he is also an alien.
Barely acceptable filler. After seeing print first in F&SF, "In the Bag" reappeared in a collection of Janifer stories put out by our friends at Belmont as well as in several foreign magazines and anthologies.
When I was in academia there was a lot of complaining among my leftie colleagues about suburban sprawl and white flight. (Many of these carpers, of course, indulged in all the sins they deplored when committed by those of their fellow white Americans who had the misfortune to work in the private sector instead of within the taxpayer-funded walls of the academy, like owning houses in the suburbs, evading NYC taxes by claiming their summer home in the Hamptons was their primary residence, sending their offspring to private and/or suburban schools, etc.) "X Marks the Pedwalk" by Fafhrd and Grey Mouser chronicler and Grandmaster Fritz Leiber is about the suburban-urban divide, though set in Los Angeles, that center of American car culture, instead of my own old stomping grounds of New York, because in Leiber's story that social divide is manifested in the conflict between motorists and pedestrians.
"X Marks the Pedwalk" is also one of the joke/satire stories with which An ABC of Science Fiction seems to be infested, and as such its plot is a little absurd and the story full of absurdist jokes. La-La Land, an environment characterized by a steadily decreasing level of sanity, is divided between the hoity-toity suburban Wheels and the slum-dwelling Feet--the Government tries to maintain order and avoid taking sides. Leiber hints that the situation of LA is like that of Paris during the French Revolution, and it is apparently normal for drivers to run over pedestrians who can't scurry off the street in time, and for pedestrians to heave bricks at or lay spike traps for cars. At the start of the story one clash between pedestrians and motorists leads to four fatalities, and sparks a heightening of hostilities. Luckily, the leaders of Wheels, Feet and Government get together to hash out a deal which limits the sorts of weapons that can be used and defuses the tense situation, diminishing if not eliminating the violence of the long-running low-intensity conflict.
Leiber is a good writer, and this is a good story; the action scenes are good and the jokes (like the suburbanites' posh hyphenated names) add to the story, conveying informationand setting tone, instead of distracting you from it. I had some deja vu reading this piece; I think I may have read it, or part of it, before. "X Marks the Pedwalk" is an acknowledged inspiration for the Car Wars game, the early editions of which I played back in my school days, and maybe I encountered it in connection with that?
"X Marks the Pedwalk" made its debut in the first issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, an irregularly published magazine edited by Frederik Pohl for most of its run. That first issue looks pretty good, with lots of big names--besides Leiber and Pohl there's Keith Laumer and Arthur C. Clarke on the writing side and Virgil Finlay, Wallace Wood and Jack Gaughan on the illustration side. The story has been reprinted quite a bit, including in some anthologies marketed to fans of mysteries and horror, which I thought was interesting, as it is by no means a traditional mystery or horror story.
Here's the first story in An ABC of Science Fiction from Astounding. "No Moon for Me" doesn't seem to have been as successful as many of the stories we've already looked at from this anthology, only having been reprinted in one other anthology, William Sloane's 1953 Space, Space, Space, which has a nice wraparound cover.
Colonel Denin has spent his career trying to convince the Congress to finance manned space exploration, and Congress has always refused to make the long-suffering taxpayers shoulder the extraordinary expense. After all, what is the point of going to space? There's nothing up there we don't already have down here!
But today, September 9, 1990, Denin and two other men are boarding a rocket to the Moon! You see, a few years ago an indecipherable transmission, obviously artificial, started coming from the Moon, and Denin, a pilot, and an academic linguist are going to Luna to investigate!
I admit that I have read so much Malzberg that I have Malzberg on the brain, but I think I am perfectly justified in seeing Malzbergian elements and themes in "No Moon for Me." These elements and themes:
1) The lack of public support for the space program.
2) The rocket ship carries nuclear weapons in case of trouble with aliens.
3) An astronaut (the fat college professor) goes insane on the trip to Luna, and Denin has arguably been insane for years: the transmissions from the Moon are not from aliens, but from a transmitter Denin himself secretly sent up there in an unmanned drone rocket, a scheme to trick the US government into financing his trip! If that doesn't make you question his sanity, there's this: Denin plans to detonate the nuclear weapons so he and all the evidence of his scam (and two innocent people!) are destroyed, and the people of Earth will think a battle took place and be inspired to set up a permanent military base on the Moon and explore the universe in the interest of security!
How Denin and company's trip to the Moon is resolved is reminiscent of traditional adventure fiction, with people holding guns on each other and tying each other up, etc.
I like this one; I don't know why it isn't included in any of the Miller collections that have appeared over the years. Maybe it is unrepresentative of Miller's work? (I have read very little of Miller's oeuvre, so I can't judge such things.) Maybe people think the plot twists are too obvious or too unbelievable?
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I'm halfway through An ABC of Science Fiction and I think I can detect some trends. First, there are lots of brief joke stories--maybe a page limit forced Boardman to include many such stories if he wanted to present 26 total. Second, the general tenor of the stories chosen by Boardman is very pessimistic, quite misanthropic. There are plenty of stories denouncing white racism and the human propensity for violence; stories in which humans make bad choices, get outwitted or get defeated; stories that predict things will get worse in the future; and stories whose protagonists are criminals or fraudsters or the agents of tyrants. There is a dearth of stories that exhibit hope for the future or celebrate man's ability to overcome adversity or anything like that. Boardman seems to have deliberately constructed a book that is a downer!
Well, at least none of the stories in this batch (because we skipped Knight's contribution) were actually bad. Hopefully the next batch will be at least as good--and maybe we can hope there will be at least a gleam of optimism among them?
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