Three 1943 stories by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner

In the comments to my recent blog post about Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's Keeps stories, "Clash By Night" and Fury, George points out that the volume of Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg's The Great Science Fiction Stories covering 1943 includes five stories by Kuttner and Moore.  I had read three of them, "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," "Clash By Night," and "The Proud Robot," and decided to read the other two, "Doorway Into Time" and "The Iron Standard" tout de suite.  To round out this blog post I thought I'd also read another 1943 Kuttner and Moore story, "Open Secret."  I read all three in scans of 1943 magazines available at the internet archive.

"Doorway Into Time" by C. L. Moore

"Doorway Into Time" first appeared in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, and just look at the Virgil Finlay cover illustrating it!  Gorgeous!  A man in a space helmet, a hot chick, and a saurian alien with some kind of energy weapon--three of our favorite things!--in bold colors in what looks like a Mucha composition!  A masterpiece!  In fact, this whole magazine is beautiful, with Finlay illustrations for a 1930 novel by John Taine, Iron Star, and Hannes Bok illos for Robert Chambers' 1895 "The Yellow Sign."  Worth a look if you are a fan of either of these unique, idiosyncratic artists.

On another world, a being with a passion for beauty lives among the vast collection of exquisite things he has acquired on his many journeys through space and time.  Over the centuries of his existence he has acquired something else--a taste for danger!  The more risk incurred in the collection of an item, the more he treasures it, and, old as he is, he has seen much and grown jaded, so that only terrible danger can excite him!

Via a screen he scans the universe for a thing of beauty whose acquisition will present the risk he craves, and he finally discovers it--a human woman!  Never has he seen a human before, and the beauty of the female form has him jumping through his interdimensional tunnel in hot pursuit of this jewel! 

The Earth woman, Alanna, is hanging out in the lab of her boyfriend, scientist Paul, who is working on his lightning weapon.  When the alien snatches Alanna, Paul grabs up his brand new electro blaster and chases them through the dimensional portal.  Paul and Alanna explore the alien's palace, taking in bizarre sights and facing hazards.  They struggle against the alien collector and eventually escape back through the tunnel to Earth; the alien decides not to pursue them further.

"Doorway Into Time" has an odd, sad tone that seems calculated to remind you of the futility of life.  The alien, despite its tremendous power and experience, is dissatisfied with its accomplishments, and the humans prove a disappointment to him; he is immune to their electric weapon, so they do not present the challenge he sought.  As for the humans, Alanna is sort of a feckless ditz, while Paul suffers the dismay of watching the alien shrug off the blasts of the super weapon he just invented.  Alanna and Paul spend much of the story thinking that their trip to the alien palace is just a dream, and Moore's long passages describing Paul's fruitless efforts to gun down the invulnerable alien reminded me of those nightmares in which, no matter how hard I try, I can't open my junior high locker or get the car started or find my way in a labyrinthine university building or run from danger or scream for help.

The most memorable components of the story are perhaps Moore's descriptions of extraterrestrial objets d'art, decorations, and mounted specimens; there are a number of Kuttner and Moore stories, like "Shock," in which cleverly described futuristic or alien artifacts loom large.  These strange items are a part of Moore's admirable effort in "Doorway Into Time" to depict true alienness.  Some of the art installations Paul and Alanna look at are so strange to them, so radically beyond their experiences on Earth, that their minds can't really comprehend them.  Similarly, Moore tells us repeatedly that the alien collector has no idea what the symbols on some artifact mean, or if some beautiful items he has hanging on his wall were once alive or are simply inorganic, or what the people he robbed of a big glowing stone thought of the stone.  The pervasive theme of the impossibility of achieving understanding across cultures adds to the story's air of futility.

While many individual components of the story are good and show inventiveness and effort, I am reluctant to strongly recommend "Doorway Into Time"; as a whole it is just not satisfying.  None of the characters accomplishes anything and none of the characters gets killed or otherwise ruined, so the story lacks any cathartic triumph or tragedy and left me feeling uneasy, like there should have been something more, a second shoe that never dropped.  I can certainly recommend it as a curiosity, valuable to students of Moore's work and 1940s SF in general, but based on conventional criteria (is it a solidly entertaining reading experience?) I'd have to say it is just acceptable.

"Doorway Into Time" may have left me feeling dissatisfied, but SF historian Sam Moskowitz included it in the 1965 anthology Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction (I actually read a few stories from that anthology back in my Iowa days, during this blog's infancy) and it was also included in Gogo Lewis and Seon Manley's anthology of "sinister" stories by women, Ladies of Fantasy. 

"The Iron Standard" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore 

This is one of those SF stories in which smart guys get themselves out of a jam by using their brains.  This is fine in a story, of course, but we all know that in real life people overcome challenges through violence or sex appeal.

Our heroes in "The Iron Standard" are the six-man crew of the first ship to land on Venus, explorers carefully chosen for their intelligence and physical fitness.  This diverse cast includes a Navajo botanist, an Irish engineer ("a Kerry man" with fiery red hair and a fiery temper to match!) and the son of a rich WASP as the supercargo and handyman who, I guess, is on board the ship for kicks.  (Remember when a rich man's son got himself signed on to a space crew for the hell of it in A. E. van Vogt's The Man With a Thousand Names?  Now there was a trip!)  These dudes are in a bind because they traded away their food supplies to the Venusians for native food, and all that Venusian food has spoiled (those preservatives and GMOs aren't looking so bad now, are they, guys?)  Now the Earthers are facing starvation because they can't figure out any way to procure more food.

Kuttner and Moore come up with a long list of obstacles that stand between the Earthmen and the chow they so desperately need.  They surrendered their firearms when the natives proved to be so friendly so they can't just steal food.*  There are no sizable animals or edible plants in Venus's swampy wilderness so hunting, trapping, and gathering are out.  They can't buy food because the Venusians are on the "iron standard" of the title--gold and silver are very common on Venus, rendering the money the explorers brought valueless.  Venusian society is very stable and conservative, and the innumerable customs and institutions set up to prevent innovations or disruptions are the astronaut's biggest obstacle; for example, they can't beg for food or earn money by their labor because they aren't members of the beggar's guild or the laborer's guild, and to join a guild you have to pay some hefty entry fees.

The explorers scramble for ways out of their predicament, in the process realizing that many Venusians are open to change but those guilds have a stranglehold over politics and economics on Venus, suppressing any change because it might threaten their lofty position.  In a gimmicky way our heroes figure out a way to destabilize the Venusian economy while keeping within all those pesky laws; fearful of the first social or economic change in centuries, the guilds cry uncle, bribing the Earthers to cease their undermining ways with enough money to finance their food requirements until they can take off for Earth in a year's time.  It is suggested that the humans have given the static Venusian society a much-needed nudge and a period of dynamism and innovation is about to begin.

This is a mediocre story.  The whole thing feels contrived, it lacks any emotional content, and the characters all feel flat--the fact that one is an American Indian, another a short-tempered Irish-American and another a, as we might say today, "child of privilege," has no effect on the plot, it is just pointless window-dressing.  Maybe Kuttner and Moore simply thought it a good idea to show people from different backgrounds palling around and working together for a common goal?  That's commendable, and I guess understandable during the period of world crisis in which the story was published, but it's not compelling or entertaining writing.  While "Doorway Into Time" had numerous good elements but failed to really work as a whole, "The Iron Standard" is structured and organized in a way that functions but only on the most basic and simple level.  Barely acceptable.

After first appearing in Astounding, "The Iron Standard" was included in Martin Greenberg's Men Against the Stars and the British paperback Best of Kuttner 2.  (You'll remember that I read Best of Kuttner 1 back in 2014.  Good Lord, I've been operating this blog for-fucking-ever.)

*That's right, these high-IQ individuals went to an alien world where no Earthman had ever been before and the first thing they did was give away their weapons and food.

"Open Secret" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

Here's another story from Astounding.  All you dino fans out there will be interested to know this issue of Astounding includes a non-fiction article by Willy Ley that tries to convince you that Tyrannosaurus Rex was not a ferocious killing machine but a lumbering scavenger.  Don't go breaking my heart, science boy!  "Open Secret" was included by Murray Leinster in a 1950s anthology published in the US and the UK, Great Stories of Science Fiction.

Psychiatrist Mike Jerrold is visiting New York City on business.  Instead of going to the museum to look at sculptures, he visits his physician friend at his skyscraper office for a check up.  (Where are this guy's priorities?)  There is an accident with the elevator and Jerrold ends up on the wrong floor, where he sees an amazing sight--many-armed robots are doing something weird with electronic maps of Manhattan!

Shocked and amazed by these robots (this story is set in the early- to mid-20th century, so Mike the shrink isn't seeing robots everyday at the grocery store like you and I do), Jerrold decides to investigate.  First step in his investigation is to get a date with the beautiful redhead sitting at the reception desk in the office with those robots.  (I told you that this is how real people overcome obstacles!)  He learns that there is an office of robots in every big city in the world, that these robots are running human society by subtly, cunningly, altering our minds, crafting our desires and aversions so that our actions, in aggregate, shift society in the direction dictated by their own inscrutable objectives.  "They manipulate stocks, swing business deals, start wars and stop them," that hot receptionist, Betty Andrews, tells Jerrold.  "They want the world different, but I don't know how."

Jerrold switches to Method #1 in his effort to overthrow the robots' rule, but fails utterly--he shoots an automatic pistol into a robot and then pours acid on its elaborate three-dimensional map of Midtown Manhattan, but the robot just ignores him and his fruitless attacks!  Jerrold feels like a "gnat"--he and his best efforts are beneath the invincible robots' notice!  Soon the robots will tinker with his brain and, like his new girlfriend, he will accept that resistance to robot rule is hopeless!

Here we have a story that, like the first we discussed today, suggests life is pointless, that things are out of our control.  Like the humans in Moore's "Doorway Into Time," Mike Jerrold, through an unforeseeable twist of fate, enters a dream-like environment, one characterized by bizarre sights and a deep sense of futility.  Like the alien in "Doorway Into Time," Betty Andrews sadly realizes she is doomed to a life bereft of satisfaction, whether or not her immediate desires are fulfilled.

"I'm very lonely, Mr. Mike Jerrold.  I like you to hold me.  Do you know what may happen to us?"

"What?" he asked softly.

"Marriage," she said, shrugging a little.  "Or not.  It doesn't matter." 

Ouch!

"Open Secret" is the most straightforward and economical of the stories we're reading today, and while not as stylistically ambitious as "Doorway Into Time," I think it is the most satisfying and entertaining of the three.  Kuttner and Moore scholars will notice in the text a reference to the poetry of Lewis Carroll, in this case "The Hunting of the Snark" and recall that in this same year the Carroll-centric "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" was published.

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"The Iron Standard" is a conventional and bland puzzle story, "Open Secret" a more or less conventional sex and violence horror story that is quite ably put together, while the somewhat befuddling "Doorway Into Time" is creative and baroque, with one interesting character (the alien) and a strong sense of mood, but does not feel quite finished.  These were all worth my time, but they do not represent Kuttner and Moore's best work.