Four stories by Bob Shaw

Back in early 2017 I declared my intention to read my copy of the 1973 collection of Bob Shaw stories entitled Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, a volume which once was sold in now-defunct retail outlet Woolco.  And today I begin to make good on that intention!  I think we'll read Tomorrow Lies in Ambush's 13 stories over three blog posts.  I'll read them in the order they appear in this book instead of in chronological order--maybe they are in the order they are in for some artistic reason?

If you are in a hurry to read about Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, check out the 2016 review at Potpourri of Science Fiction Literature.  (I don't think the good people there like Shaw as much as I do, so it will be interesting to compare notes when I finish up this book myself.)

isfdb does not list it, but my Ace edition of Tomorrow Lies in Ambush includes a pleasant if generic interior illustration by a Waldman.  Who is this Waldman?  isfdb actually lists multiple Waldmans (Waldmen?) as illustrators, so it is something of a mystery.

"Call Me Dumbo" (1966)

"Call Me Dumbo" first appeared in If, edited by Fred Pohl.  Shaw's story is illustrated by Virgil Finlay, which is pretty cool.  On the page facing the first page of Shaw's story is an ad for Music from Mathematics, "music composed on computers and transducers...."  You can listen to this music at youtube...I dare you to listen to all 26 minutes.

"Call Me Dumbo" is a decent SF horror story of a type that might not get written today because it suggests gender roles are based on biology and exploits people's disgust at homosexuality and transgenderism.  As the story begins we are introduced to a sort of dimwitted woman who lives in a cottage in the countryside with her grumpy husband Carl and their three boys.  Carl calls the woman "Dumbo" and talks to her in a callous way and makes her take medicine regularly, but she doesn't really mind--she wants to be a good wife and works hard at the cooking and cleaning.

One day "Dumbo" starts feeling different, mentally, and most of the 23-page story consists of Dumbo unraveling the mystery of her life and identity.  The hallucinatory, euphoric medicine she has been taking has spoiled, and no longer effects her, which means she begins to see unvarnished reality--she isn't living in a wooden cottage, but a house made of repurposed sheets of metal!  Following her husband reveals that Carl doesn't go to a nearby village to buy supplies, but salvages them from a crash-landed space ship!  As "Dumbo's" memory improves and then as Carl, who finds her snooping, bitterly explains what's what, we learn the horrible truth!

Carl was a medical man, a surgeon in the space navy, and he and his assistant blasted off in their space ship to give succor to some sector that had been attacked by the enemy.  En route, an enemy special weapon (a "warp scrambler") hit Carl's ship, teleporting it to a random spot in the universe--they were lucky to find a planet suitable for human habitation, and had no chance of ever getting home, being, in all likelihood, a bazillion light years from the Milky Way galaxy.

For some reason Shaw's and van Vogt's
names are not on the cover--I guess
they are not marketing this thing to me!

Carl wanted to have children and start a colony on the planet, but his assistant, Victor, was a man.  Solution: he forced Victor to have a sex change operation (their ship had a well stocked organ bank as well as plenty of small arms and grenades) and artificially inseminated him (now her) over the years to produce three boys with three different fathers.  Carl himself refuses to have sex with "the freak."  The drugs have kept her ignorant of her true position, notonly deadening any memory of her past but making their makeshift house and alien landscape look like a charming cottage in the English countryside!

Because Dumbo has all those female glands and organs she likes being a woman and doing housework and raising kids and all that.  She also wants something else (hint hint), something Carl doesn't want to give her.  But when she gets the upper hand over Carl, knocking him out with a blow from a rifle butt, she uses those grenades to blow up the organ bank.  Now if he wants to create more children--and he wants at least one girl so the human race can continue on this planet--he will have only one way to impregnate Dumbo.

This is a good story, well-structured and well-paced and surprising.  In 1977 it appeared in Michael Stapleton's anthology The Best Science Fiction Stories alongside such works as A. E. van Vogt's "Process" and "The First Martian," some of Van's most accessible, least convoluted, material. 

"Stormseeker" (1972)

According to isfdb, the British edition of Tomorrow Lies in Ambush only had 11 stories; "Stormseeker" is one of the two additional stories included in the US edition.  It first appeared in Galaxy, and, besides in Shaw collections like this one, would be reprinted in a German anthology in 1982.

"Stormseeker" is six pages long, a first person narrative that is a little literary and a little opaque.  The first paragraph flings "volant," "crenels" and "corbels" at you, as well as various metaphors and a reference to Debussy preludes.  The narrator is a mutant in a future (post-limited nuclear war) world; he can sense electrical activity and direct it.  A physicist friend of his has had his government funding cut, so he can't afford to pay the power bill for his atom smasher.  The narrator flies some sort of hover sled or something into nearby thunderstorms and directs the lightning to the boffin's lab.  Shaw explains how lightning works: protons, electrons, etc.  The narrator invites his girlfriend to come with him, but when she sees how much he enjoys interacting with the electricity (the word "orgasm" is used), she becomes jealous and breaks up with him.   

Acceptable.

"Repeat Performance" (1971)

"Repeat Performance" was first printed in the same issue of F&SF as the first installment of Jack Vance's Durdane novels.  I'd like to reread the Durdane novels, which I have read only once (I've read the Cugel novels and Kirth Gersen novels twice) but in a fit of generosity like fifteen years ago I gave them away.  "Repeat Performance" would reappear in an Italian collection of Shaw stories in 1980.

This is a competent but minor joke story; it sort of put me in the mind of The Twilight Zone.  A theater owner in the Midwest who shows old movies witnesses odd occurrences at his establishment, and various clues and booze-fueled speculations lead him to believe that a shape-shifting space alien is coming into his theater every Wednesday night and leaving in the form of one of the actors on the screen.  He contrives to capture the creature with the help of the police and we get a not-quite-believable twist ending.

Shaw is a skilled scribbler and the style and pacing and structure and all that are good, but the central premise and plot just don't excite me.  This is acceptable as filler.

"....And Isles Where Good Men Lie" (1965)

"....And Isles Where Good Men Lie" shared an issue of New Worlds with the final installment of the serialized version of Harry Harrison's broad spoof of space opera and military SF Bill, The Galactic Hero. 

"....And Isles Where Good Men Lie" is about a scientist and some military men, a communist spy and some dangerous aliens.  It is the 1980s.  An apparently endless caravan of alien space craft has been entering the solar system, and every day for the last five years one of them has landed someplace on Earth and disgorged a horde of fifteen-foot long insects that exude deadly bacteria.  Scientists have come to realize that these aliens are not hostile invaders, but descendants of refugees from another world, passengers on robotic generation ships.  There is no way to communicate with these alien immigrants, and the ships land them automatically and have forcefields that cannot be penetrated by Earth weapons, so the only solution has been to kill the innocent but catastrophically infectious aliens when they emerge from the ships.  Cold War conflict has been put on the back burner while the nations of Earth work together to keep these uninvited guests from unwittingly spreading a plague that can kill all humanity. 

Our protagonist is Colonel John Fortune, commander of the force defending Iceland, a hero for having figured out how to kill the heavily armored aliens when they first appeared years ago.  He feels guilty about massacring all these innocent aliens, and has been working, on the side without government authorization and in concert with a civilian scientist, on a way to stop the robotic alien ships from landing on Earth at all.  This guy also has personal problems--his wife married him when he was a svelte war hero, and now that he is overweight and war weary she has been cheating on him.  Her latest lover is an agent for some Warsaw Pact nation--this commie has ferreted out that the Colonel has a freelance scheme to redirect the alien ships to some other solar system, and just when the Colonel is about to put the plan into operation, this blasted Red tries to foil his efforts.  Will the Colonel's plan succeed?  What lengths will he have to go to to see it through--will he jeopardize his career, even risk jail time?  Will he and his faithless wife patch things up in the interest of their child, or will she leave him for this Bolshie spook?

This story is moderately good; there is plenty of science stuff and plenty of character stuff--the Colonel, his wife, and the scientist all have interesting little back stories.  This story has only had limited success, however, only ever appearing in New Worlds and here in Tomorrow Lies in Ambush.

**********

So far, so good.  We've put 86 pages of this 281-page collection behind us, and so far nothing boring or irritating has cropped up.  Four more tales in our next episode!