1954 stories by Carl Jacobi, Clark Ashton Smith and Evelyn E. Smith

I believe this 1969 paperback
edition includes all twelve of
the stories from the hardcover ed.

Let's read three more stories from Time to Come, a 1954 anthology of all new fiction edited by August Derleth. These stories, Derleth tells us in his introduction, present "visions of the world of the future."  I am reading from a hardcover 1954 edition I borrowed via interlibrary loan; Time to Come has appeared in paperback several times, but many of those paperback editions are abridged.

"The White Pinnacle" by Carl Jacobi

"The White Pinnacle" isn't really a "vision of the world of the future;" it is barely a science fiction story at all, being more like a horror story set on an alien planet, full of odd phenomena for which Jacobi presents no explanation.

The text is a log or testimonial penned by a spaceman, Judson, a member of the crew of a starship that travels around the galaxy seeking new sources of mineral wealth.  The ship lands on an unexplored planet, suffering minor damage in the process that prevents the ship from taking off again until a few days are spent on repairs.  Visible in the distance is a kind of white obelisk, with writing on it, and the sensors detect a source of radiation near the obelisk--this radiation is unusual, and the ship's geologist believes it indicates that a rare form of very valuable ore is present.

Proceeding concurrently with this obelisk and ore plot, but unconnected to it as far as I could tell, is a plot concerning stone-age natives of the planet.  One member of the starship's crew, McKay, is an amateur perfume enthusiast who collects scents from around the galaxy.  When he smells an unusual scent, one which strikes fear into Judson, McKay runs out into the night and disappears.

The next day McKay reappears, slightly injured, claiming he fought and captured a native (he doesn't bring this native to the ship with him, however.)  When the rest of the crew goes to investigate the obelisk later that day, they find a native tied up.  They also notice that, around the obelisk, every blade of grass, every flower, every pebble and stone, has a duplicate.  The crew bring the alien back to the ship, spend some hours trying to communicate with it, then let it go.  Judson has copied the hieroglyphs on the obelisk, and in a few hours back at the ship he manages to decipher them; not only is his ability to read the alien writing unconvincing, but the message the hieroglyphs convey has no effect on the plot.  McKay runs off again, and when he returns he says he caught up to the alien, captured it a second time, and amputated its scent gland.  In the same way that Judson does nothing with the info he gets from the hieroglyphs and the crew learns nothing from bringing the alien to the ship, McKay does nothing with the scent gland.  Jacobi includes these potentially interesting or important events in the story, but does nothing to exploit their possibilities--they don't tell the reader anything that makes him think or feel, and they don't advance the story in any way.

The resolution of "The White Pinnacle" comes when a duplicate of McKay shows up.  The duplicate touches the original McKay, they fuse together into a single McKay, and the new McKay walks to the obelisk and drops dead.  This sort of thing happens to more crewmembers, until all are dead or missing.  The last lines of Judson's log relate how he, the only surviving spaceman, sees a duplicate of himself coming towards the ship.

This story is just a bunch of bizarre events jumbled together semi-coherently; Jacobi fails to present a unifying theme or to make any kind of point or generate any feeling in the reader beyond mystification as to what he is getting at.  He tries to make "The White Pinnacle" feel like a science fiction story by having the characters uses phrases like "Gantzen rays" and "Planck's Quantum Theory" and "deflector auricles," but it is just extraneous window-dressing.  Thumbs down for this one.

You may recall that I had very similar complaints about Jacobi's 1936 story "The Face in the Wind" back in July when I read it.  My patience with Jacobi is running thin.

"The White Pinnacle" would be reprinted in 1972 in the Jacobi collection Disclosures in Scarlet.

"Phoenix" by Clark Ashton Smith

Since its initial appearance in Time to Come, "Phoenix" has been reprinted in the expected Smith collections as well as an anthology edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh called Catastrophes! and one by edited by Richard Hurley for Scholastic Book Services titled Beyond Belief.

It is the far future!  The sun has turned black, the surface of the Earth is frozen, and the remnants of mankind, mere thousands, live in underground caverns, heated and lit by nuclear power.  For many centuries the human race, and its attendant agriculture and livestock, has lived thus, but of late the surviving flora and fauna have begun to degenerate--presumably there is something vital in sunlight that the atomic lights cannot reproduce, and so life on Earth is doomed.

A desperate plan is conceived--for thousands of years spacecraft and nuclear weapons have lay in storage, and a plan is hatched to detonate the nuclear warheads on the surface of the sun and thereby reactivate Sol and thaw Mother Earth--perhaps men and women will again walk in the sunlight among the flowers and trees!

"Phoenix" is written in a poetic and romantic style that is very effective, even moving.  Smith gives us all that background and describes the farewell to his lover of the man charged with operating the nuclear bombs on the spaceship and the tragic course of his voyage to the sun.  I quite like this one--the science is probably all totally bogus, but Smith provides in "Phoenix" many of things I hope to find when I start reading a piece of fiction: well-crafted sentences, human feeling, and striking images.  Thumbs up!

If you want a story about a suicidal mission to reignite the sun written by an actual scientist instead of a poet you can try Ted Thomas's 1970 piece "The Weather on the Sun," but be forewarned: when I read it in early 2019 I bitterly denounced it as a mind-numbing government-worshiping piece of junk and implied it only got published in Orbit 8 because Thomas was friends with Damon Knight's wife.

"DAXBR/BAXBR" by Evelyn E. Smith

Evelyn E. Smith and Farrar, Straus and Young conduct a little experiment in graphic design with the title to this story, which appears in Time to Come as a cross, with the two words sharing the "X."  In the little biographical sketch appearing before the story we learn that Smith not only writes fiction, but "carries on an appreciable program of crossword puzzle work."  Wikipedia says she "compiled" crosswords--I don't know if that means she created crossword puzzles entire or if somebody else wrote the clues.

(In the days before cable TV, my mother and maternal grandmother would do lots of crossword puzzles.  There was a period during my employment by the New York government when some of the women in the office and I would spend hours doing the Monday and Tuesday New York Times crossword puzzles--your tax dollars at work!)

Like Smith's 1961 vampire story, "Softly While You're Sleeping," which I quite liked, "DAXBR/BAXBR" is a New York story, but, unfortunately, it is a silly joke story.  A man who makes crossword puzzles boards the subway and sits next to a short little guy in dark glasses.  The short guy is reading his correspondence, and over the little guy's shoulder the crossword maker spots an unusual word in one of his letters, "baxbr."  Such an odd word would be useful in designing crossword puzzles, so the protagonist asks the shorty about it.  As it turns out, the diminutive individual is a Martian spy, and, his cover now blown, he has to advance the timetable for extermination of the human race.  As the story ends, Manhattan is under bombardment and the crossword maker is killed.

I'm tempted to call this story pointless filler, though maybe crossword puzzle fans will like it, as much of the text is taken up with discussion and examples of the creation of grids of letters suitable for use in constructing a crossword puzzle; numerous names famous in 1954 crop up because the newspapers who buy crosswords like having topical answers and clues.  If I want to be generous I can say it is a curious oddity, I guess.

"DAXBR/BAXBR" reappeared in F&SF in 1956, and has been anthologized four or five times, including in Edmund Crispin's Best SF Four.  We humorless bastards just have to accept that there is a big market for joke stories.

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Unsurprisingly, Clark Ashton Smith offers us something quite fine and Carl Jacobi tries to lay an incompetent half-finished piece of dreck on us.  Maybe August Derleth was just doing his friend in dire straits a solid when he accepted Jacobi's story for publication, the way the person who recommended me for that government job back in the '90s was doing me a solid--everywhere you go, dear reader (MPorcius Advice Column is kicking in here), be as nice to everybody as you can, because you never know who will some day have an opportunity to do you a favor or to get revenge on you.  The Evelyn Smith story is disappointing but at least it is competent--she's still in my good books.

I'm afraid that I have to point out that of these three stories only Clark Ashton Smith really tackles the "vision of the world of the future" theme; Derleth obviously wasn't keeping a very tight rein on his contributors.

Followers of my twitter feed know what my favorite Opal song is and also know I got another anthology edited by August Derleth via interlibrary loan along with this one--we'll start reading stories from that anthology in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.