I have already read and blogged about three stories that appear in The Other Side of the Moon, A. E. van Vogt's "Resurrection" AKA "Monster" and "Vault of the Beast," and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "The Cure." All three of these stories are good and have been reprinted numerous times, and I recommend that you rush right out and read them.
Today, let's read four stories from The Other Side of the Moon, the two by Ray Bradbury and the two by Murray Leinster. I'm reading the versions from this seventy-year old hardcover book, but there are magazine versions of all four stories available online.
"Pillar of Fire" by Ray Bradbury (1948)
"Pillar of Fire" made its debut in Planet Stories, where the editors introduce it by saying "We cannot tell you what kind of story this is. We simply cannot present it as we present other stories. It is too tremendous for that."William Lantry, a guy who died in Massachusetts in the early 20th century, wakes up and climbs out of his grave in the 24th century. Bradbury doesn't really explain how this guy manages to get reanimated; he is truly dead--he doesn't breathe, for example--but he is up and walking around and thinking and experiencing emotion. It seems that it is hate that gives Lantry the energy to perform his parody of life.
And hate he does! The 24th century is what you might call a utopia--there is no fear and no crime, everybody is helpful and nobody lies--but Lantry, as a shunned outsider, immediately conceives an overpowering hatred for this sterile paradise! Because no one in this world is suspicious and there are no police, there is nothing to stand in Lantry's way when he launches a spirited campaign of mass murder!
There are many SF stories about the shortcomings of utopias, stories which argue that for man to be at his best, to be truly alive, he must face challenges, and I think "Pillar of Fire" fits into that category, though it is more of an emotion-stirring drama than a satire or political tract. Lantry learns that the people of the 24th century do not fear death or darkness or the unknown because there is no mystery in their lives, no imagination; things that might be scary or disturbing are removed from view or made thoroughly familiar so they lose their power to disturb. When he goes to the library Lantry learns that books by horror writers like Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft have long been burned--Lantry is the only person in the world to have any familiarity at all with their work. Not only are books burned in this utopia to prevent morbid thoughts, but so are the dead: the corpses of the newly deceased are immediately brought to huge incinerators that sit in each town, and school children are regularly brought on field trips to these incinerators so that for them death will have no mystery. Even old cemeteries have been dug up and the remains of the long dead burned; it is digging in the Salem cemetery where Lantry was interred, the last cemetery in the world, that woke up Lantry, who is today the only dead body in the world!
Terribly lonely, Lantry hatches a scheme to murder people in large numbers, destroy the incinerators, and then animate those he has murdered so that he will have friends and an army with which to conquer the Earth. "Pillar of Fire" is fast paced, and Bradbury's prose conveys the tension, the desperate anxiety, felt by a lone outsider at war with an entire world. To describe Lantry's feverish thought processes Bradbury unleashes lines that sound like modern poetry:
He arose in violent moves. His lips were wide and his dark eyes were flared and there was a trembling and burning all through him. He must kill and kill and kill and kill and kill. He must make his enemies into friends, into people like himself who walked but shouldn't walk, who were pale in a land of pinks. He must kill and then kill and then kill again. He must make bodies and dead people and corpses.Lantry's scheme does not come off; the antiseptic world of the future defeats him, cleanses itself of him. As he is pushed into the incinerator he is haunted by lines from Poe and Shakespeare, writers whose works, once expected to be immortal, will in moments be truly dead, lost forever, when Lantry is blasted into cinders. We readers must ask ourselves if living without violence and fear is worth the cost of living without art and literature and imagination.
A great story, the length and pacing and tone all perfect, with plenty of strong images and good sentences. I was particularly thrilled to read "Pillar of Fire" because it is one of those stories which I read as a kid and whose title and plot were promptly forgotten, but which left an indelible mark on my mind; in the case of "Pillar of Fire" I never forgot the idea that people living in a future of honesty and peace would be defenseless against a time traveler from our own violent time, and a particular scene in which some 24th century people are persuaded to pursue Lantry by being told (lied to, by someone who has never lied in his life) that catching Lantry is the object of a new game.
"Pillar of Fire" was included in a number of anthologies of vampire stories as well as Bradbury collections; I am pretty sure I read it in a school library copy of the paperback edition of the Bradbury collection S is for Space with the wraparound Ian Miller cover.
"The Earth Men" by Ray Bradbury (1948)
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| 1959 Yugoslavian edition of The Martian Chronicles |
Four astronauts from Earth land on Mars. They approach native settlements, and find them to be quite like American farm houses and small towns. As the first Earthlings to land on Mars, they expect to be greeted as heroes, but the Martians they meet just try to shoo them away, claiming they are too busy with quotidian matters like housework and business affairs to be bothered. The astronauts' protestations that they have traveled millions of miles across space and achieved something no one has ever achieved before are brushed aside.
Bradbury gives us variations on this joke for like ten pages; the Martians keep passing the Earthers on to some other native they claim will be interested in them. Eventually the astronauts find someone who directs them to a large building. In this building we get the punchline to the joke and our twist ending.
The building is full of Martians who claim to be from Earth, or Jupiter, or wherever--the astronauts realize that many Martians go insane and claim they are aliens, and these mentally ill people are corralled here, in the insane asylum! Every Martian the astronauts met simply assumed that the Earth expedition commander was yet another insane local. Martians communicate via telepathy, and can project visual, auditory, and even tactile illusions, and so when the humans pointed out their rocket ship to the natives, they dismissed this as a hallucination (the yellow-eyed and brown-skinned Martians were similarly unimpressed by the humans' white skins and blue eyes.) The Martians even assumed that the captain's three subordinates were constructions of his mind projected into theirs.
The humans try to convince the doctor who manages the asylum that they are not an insane man and his three illusions, but four honest to goodness visitors from Earth. The Martian shrink is amazed at how committed to his delusions the captain is, and how realistic his illusions are, but he never once considers the possibility that the captain is telling the truth--the captain's efforts merely serve to convince the native doctor that his patient's mental illness is incurable, and that the only treatment is euthanasia. The humans left their guns on the ship (doh!) so have no defense when the shrink shoots down the captain, and then, surprised they didn't vanish upon his patient's death, also slays the three crewmen. When their corpses, and the rocket, don't vanish, the Martin psychologist diagnoses himself as insane, and, prescribing for himself the same treatment he has been meting out to others, commits suicide.
"The Earth Men" first appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, and would go on to be included in The Martian Chronicles, one of the most enduring and widely read classics of SF, and the inspiration for a 1980 miniseries starring Rock Hudson that Bradbury himself (according to wikipedia) called "boring," but about which our friend MonsterHunter has kind things to say.
"The Devil of East Lupton" by Murray Leinster (1948)
Leinster, born William Fitzgerald Jenkins, used lots of pen names, and in Thrilling Wonder this story appeared under the name William Fitzgerald; I'll also note that its original title was "The Devil of East Lupton, Vermont."
Like "The Earth Men," this is a somewhat jocular story of a botched first contact between humans and aliens. Leinster includes some serious science in his story, however.
A Jovian astronaut requires extremely high pressure and low temperature to survive, and when, after landing in the Vermont woods, he is startled by the appearance of hobo named Mr. Tedder and steps back into some barbed wire, the puncturing of his space suit leads to him evaporating! Tedder retrieves two of the man from Jupiter's weapons, a ray gun that can, apparently, disintegrate anything, and what we might call a nonlethal defense mechanism, a helmet that, when activated, throws out a field which renders any living thing within a half mile radius unconscious. Mr. Tedder accidentally activates the helmet and causes no end of trouble to the people and animals of Vermont, and to himself when the Feds send in the military to try to neutralize the mysterious creature that is generating a moving zone of unconsciousness a mile in diameter.
This is a clever and entertaining piece; it is fun to watch as Mr. Tedder figures out what is going on, or just blunders into solutions, the pacing is good, there are a few surprises, and none of the jokes is irritatingly or distractingly bad. Thumbs up!
"Symbiosis" by Murray Leinster (1947)
A European country with fifty million in population, famous for its high taxes and its secret police, conquers in mere hours the most fertile province of a neighboring country of four million, a nation famous for its effective health care system. Our main character is the little healthy country's Surgeon General, who was in a peasant village inoculating people and livestock when the invasion took place. We follow him as he is interviewed by the leader of the invasion force and then put into a concentration camp. During his confinement he is sad, but quietly confident. In the final quarter or so of the story we find out why: the little country knew it could not build up a powerful enough military to resist the larger state's aggression, and that it could not count on the United Nations to save it, so it instituted a radical strategy: a mutant strain of a disease was developed, and all of its citizens were inoculated against it. On the day of the invasion the mutant disease was put into the water supply; while the natives are immune, the invaders quickly catch the disease and within a week tens of thousands of them die, and if the invaders don't surrender the disease will spread back to their homeland and wipe out nearly their entire population.
The title refers not only to the symbiotic relationship between the disease and the people of the small country, but to the Surgeon General's assertion that all members of the human race are in a series of symbiotic relationships with each other, that members of a family help each other and that different nations should similarly help each other.
"Symbiosis" is one of those SF stories which is about an idea rather than about characters or good writing or an exciting or moving narrative, though Leinster does try to inspire emotion by contrasting the pompous and bloody-minded invaders with the decent and unpretentious Surgeon General. This contrast is pretty heavy-handed and one-dimensional, and the "twist" is sort of obvious from the beginning, so this story has no tension or surprises to offer. I'll call it acceptable.
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Four decent stories; we'll read more from The Other Side of the Moon in our next episode.
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