"Shape-Up," "The Man from Zodiac" and "Golden Girl" by Jack Vance

In our last episode I talked about "The Plagian Siphon," AKA "The Planet Machine" AKA "The Uninhibited Robot," a Jack Vance story with many versions and titles; I read the version in my hardcover copy of the 1986 collection The Augmented Agent and Other Stories, a book the cover illustration of which made me do a double and then a triple take.  Today let's read three more stories from this volume, 1953's "Shape-Up," 1967's "The Man from Zodiac" AKA "Milton Hack from Zodiac," and 1951's "Golden Girl."  These are what you might call Vance "deep cuts," stories which were published in SF magazines and then never anthologized, only reappearing in Vance collections.

"Shape-Up" (1953)

The first story in The Augmented Agent and Other Stories made its debut in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy.  A glance at the magazine version's first page confirms that the version from 1986 is revised, with the word "copper" being replaced by "coin" in the later version ("he plugged his next-to-last coin into the Pegasus Square Farm and Mining Bulletin dispenser....")

Gilbert Jarvis reads the Pegasus Square Farm and Mining Bulletin as he sits in a cafe, drinking hot anise he has purchased with the last of his coins (or coppers.)  In response to a classified ad, he goes to an inn for a rigorous job interview, which includes a sort of group interview component.  I still recall with dread some group job interviews of my experience, but this group interview that Jarvis finds himself involved in is more dreadful still.  The job applicants are all rough tough adventurer types, and have been called together under false pretenses--according to the man managing the interview process, the gathered men are all suspects in a murder, and have been brought together so that the killer can be identified and then summarily executed!

This is a decent thriller story about violent, dangerous men in a sort of lawless environment.  In true classic SF fashion the mystery is solved, and Jarvis's life is saved, because Jarvis is a quick thinker who knows about science (in this case gravity.)

"The Man from Zodiac" (1967) 

This one appeared first in Amazing, and was apparently the major selling point of the issue.  "JACK VANCE'S GREAT SHORT NOVEL" the cover cries out above a surprisingly bland and busy illustration totally lacking in hot chicks, monsters or spacecraft.  Amazing must have been in some kind of trouble, because, excepting "The Man from Zodiac," all the stories are reprints!  Not that I am knocking the issue--there is every chance that those reprinted stories, pieces by Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester and Neil R. Jones among them, are awesome.  And then there is the fun book column by Harry Harrison in which he says that SF may well be "the last bastion of the short story," praises Brian Aldiss, Keith Laumer and Samuel R. Delany, and takes swipes at widely beloved but also controversial figures Harlan Ellison:

The worst thing about Nine By Laumer by Keith Laumer (Doubleday, $3.95) is the overly long and pretentious introduction by Harlan Ellison.

and Sam Moskowitz:

Moskowitz has yet to understand that literary criticism is more than which parts of which stories resemble other stories.

Yeow, that one hurts!

OK, back to "The Man from Zodiac," which is like 40 pages in the 1986 version I am reading.

Martin Hack is the field representative of Zodiac Control, Inc., and owns an eight percent share of the company.  Zodiac Control is an interstellar contractor that offers services to polities large and small--Zodiac will maintain order, enforce the law, extinguish fires, educate the young, manage the economy, and fight foreign enemies of those entities that sign a contract with them--Zodiac basically sets up and operates governments.  The recent inheritors of 92% of Zodiac Control sign a seven-year contract with the state of Phronus on the planet Ethelrinda Cordas, and give Hack the job of managing this project.

Upon his arrival in Phronus, Hack learns that its people are semi-literate barbarians in a constant state of war (waged primarily at close range with swords and other such low-tech weapons) against their neighbors, the equally belligerent and primitive people of Sabo--the Phrones had hopes that Zodiac would supply them with high tech weapons with which to wipe out the Sabol.  A pack of raiders and pirates, the Phrones would also like to pillage a sort of artists' colony/intellectuals' retreat known as Parnassus that sits nearby and is managed by one Cyril Dibden--the offworlder eggheads at Parnassus are defended by energy fields against which the Phrone cutlasses and poniards are useless.  When Hack, surveying the territory of Phronus, suggests to one of the local lords that a charming seaside area be developed into a resort to cater to the tourist trade, this bloodthirsty campaigner responds, "Why entice strangers into the country?  Far easier to depredate our neighbor Dibden.  But first things first: the Sobols must be destroyed!"

The plot follows Hack's efforts to bring peace and order to the Phronus-Parnassus-Sabo region; through trickery he not only drags Phronus and Sabo into the modern civilized era, but uncovers a conspiracy on the part of Cyril Dibden, who was as interested in acquiring the Phrone and Sabol lands as those marauders were interested in despoiling Parnassus.  In the end Zodiac has not only the Phronus contract, but one with Sabo and Parnassus, and Hack is a hero back on Earth at Zodiac's corporate offices.

"The Man from Zodiac" is a sort of light entertainment; it is smooth and pleasant, and made me laugh several times, and I recommend it.  While it doesn't really engage with ideas (though we might see it as yet another example of SF elitism that dismisses democracy without a thought), there is one somewhat striking, somewhat incongruous, psychological passage:

At his deepest, most essential level, Hack knew himself for an insipid mediocrity, of no intellectual distinction and no particular competence in any direction.  This was an insight so shocking that Hack never allowed it past the threshold of consciousness, and he conducted himself as if the reverse were true.     

At the risk of seeming like Sam Moskowitz, I will point out that carefully planned subterranean explosive charges play an important role in the plot of "The Man from Zodiac," and that just such engineering plays a role in Vance's fourth Demon Princes book, 1979's The Face.  Also of note, the editor's intro to "The Man from Zodiac" in Amazing, and portions of the text that seem to foreshadow a relationship between Hack and a young woman who owns lots of Zodiac stock, suggest that there were plans, which apparently did not come to fruition, for a series of Martin Hack stories.

"Golden Girl" (1951)

This is a first contact story.  A reporter, Bill Baxter, goes to investigate a meteorite that has fallen in rural Iowa and discovers a burning alien space ship!  He pulls out the unconscious occupant, a beautiful woman aged 19 or 20 with golden skin!  Entranced by her beauty, he contrives to stay by her side in the hospital as she recovers, and, while the government and the press and the world wait with bated breath to learn what she is all about, it is Baxter who teaches her English.

The woman, named Lurulu (also the name of Vance's last published book), describes her society to Baxter--it is a standard issue utopia, with no more war, no more racism, no more crime, no need to work, etc.  Lurulu was taking a trip in her space yacht when it malfunctioned and she crashed here on belligerent, racist, crime-ridden, labor-intensive Earth.

Lurulu is shown around New York--her world, she says, has no such skyscrapers or vast bridges, people living in flying houses and not congregating in large groups.  Lurulu finds Earth exhausting.  Baxter worships her and asks her to marry him, but she refuses--their cultures are too different.  Shortly after, Lurulu commits suicide.  Vance hints that "Golden Girl" is based upon an 1839 story in a book by J. G. Lockhart, Strange Tales of the Seven Seas, the diary of an Englishwoman who was shipwrecked on the coast of Africa and taken in by a black tribe--though the natives treated her well, in fact worshiped her, she missed English people and English life and so killed herself.

This story is not very good.  The SF elements feel tired and obvious, and Vance has no success in making us feel Lurulu's homesickness or alienation, nor in making us feel Baxter's love or lust or infatuation or whatever it is, and the scene in which Baxter realizes she will commit suicide feels gimmicky.  This is a filler story, but with no jokes or violence or other entertaining or exploitative components that might hold your interest or give you some kind of thrill.  Gotta give this early Vance story a thumbs down. 

"Golden Girl" was first printed in an issue of Marvel Science Stories featuring a debate about Dianetics between L.Ron Hubbard, Lester del Rey and Theodore Sturgeon.

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In our next exciting episode we'll finish up with The Augmented Agent and Other Stories.  The wraparound illustration on the dust jacket of the hardcover edition of The Augmented Agent and Other Stories features a bust of Lenin and some other communist iconography, plus a female figure that reminds me of African sculpture.  I don't recall any references to the Soviet Union or to sculpture in "Shape-Up," "The Man from Zodiac" or "Golden Girl," so maybe the key to the mystery of what story the cover illustrates will be cleared up in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.  Or maybe we will have to go along with the theory put forward in the comments on our last blog post by Transreal Fiction, that the cover illustrates "The Planet Machine."