Thrilling Wonder has a fun letters column called "The Reader Speaks," and this issue's installment includes a bunch of letters, including one from Chad Oliver, talking about how awesome they thought Fredric Brown's "Daymare," a story I found merely acceptable, was. It is not unanimous, though--one guy says that if fiction was rationed (as were food, gasoline and other goods in the United States during World War II) he wouldn't spend any points on "Daymare," suggesting that it was cheap of Brown to explain away all the incredible events in the story by declaring them hallucinations caused by the villain's hypnotism.
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| The fun cover illo is not for any of Kuttner's stories |
Kroo is a minor god, a god with only one neglected temple in a tiny Tibetan village and no dedicated worshipers or priests; as such, Kroo is dying. Ten years ago a yak wandered onto the temple grounds, making it, according to immemorial law, Kroo's property; for a decade this sacred beast has been the focus of the godling's attention. When the expedition of an American archaeologist, Dr. Horace Danton, arrives in the village in the early 1940s he ignores the villagers' objections and insists on buying the yak for use as a pack animal. As Danton and his expedition proceed into India, they face various dangers--bandits, for example--and because the yak is with them, Kroo protects the expedition--those bandits get more than they bargained for when they are all killed one by one by lightning bolts. (Crime doesn't pay!)
Kroo begins talking through Danton, whom he designates as his high priest. Kroo figures he can begin rebuilding his power now that he has a high priest, so he flies the archaeologist and the yak over to Burma, looking for a temple to take over. Kroo hasn't been out of Tibet in a long long time, and mistakes a British-built power station, now held by the Japanese army, for a temple. Danton hasn't been out of Tibet for two years, and doesn't know that the United States and the British Empire are at war with Japan, and is surprised when, after Kroo drops him and the yak off at the "temple," he is seized by Japanese soldiers. While Kroo is searching the surrounding countryside for the "temple"'s apparently absent god, Danton is dragged to the "Jap" commander's office, where he meets another prisoner, Deborah Hadley, an American woman who speaks Gaelic--luckily, Danton also speaks Gaelic. (Kuttner has a thing for Celtic-Americans who are in touch with their roots; vide "The Crystal Circe.")
The main plot of the story revolves around Danton and Hadley trying to trick and manipulate Kroo and the Japanese officer, both of whom are ruthless and either of whom can kill them in an instant, into fighting each other so the power station, which the "Nippies," as Hadley calls them, are using to make a secret weapon, is knocked out of commission and so they can escape the control of these cruel figures.
The beginning of the story, during which we see things from Kroo's point of view, is clever (and evoked fond memories of Fritz Leiber's wonderful "Lean Times in Lankhmar"), but Danton, Hadley, and the Japanese officer aren't terribly interesting, and the Burma plot moves sort of slowly. Merely acceptable.
"A God Named Kroo" would be reprinted in 1954 in Fantastic Story magazine.
"Trophy" (as by Scott Morgan)
Here's another story about Americans facing the Japanese during WWII. Intelligent and good-looking, trained in surgery in Vienna and New York, Major Satura is one of Imperial Japan's finest medical men--and finest spies! When he finds himself marooned on a small hibiscus-flower covered island along with an American soldier, he outwits and outfights the Yank. But then he is confronted by another, more eerie, foe: a space alien hunter! The alien lays traps for the humans: an illusory pile of coins, the image of a beautiful woman, what appears to be a pistol dropped by a US serviceman. The money and the woman are obviously out of place on this deserted island, but Satura falls for the illusion of the gun and wakes up inside the alien's spaceship, in a cell.
Satura is a genius, and is able to pick the lock of his cell and explore the ship--luckily, the hunter is absent. He finds an operating room and a trophy room that contains body parts from creatures from all over the galaxy. The alien hunter seems to be collecting the most characteristic, the most evolutionarily significant, aspect of the creatures it encounters; there is an elephant's trunk, for example. Satura figures that a human's most significant organ is his head, which houses the brain that distinguishes man from the beasts, and comes up with a scheme to save his own head when the hunter returns. He finds the American soldier he defeated--the man is still alive! He does field surgery on G. I. Joe, saving his life. Then, Satura scars and mutilates his own face, figuring the alien will choose the undamaged American's face over his own, now hideous, visage.
But Satura has made a mistake. The American soldier's hands have been scarred in battle--he lost a finger in one scrap--while Satura's beautiful hands, the skilled hands of a master surgeon and expert lockpick, are immaculate. When the alien hunter returns it becomes evident that it is not a human head he is looking for, but a pair of human hands! It is our opposable thumbs that are our most significant physical attribute! The alien painlessly severs Satura's perfect hands, cauterizes the stumps and flies off in his ship, leaving Satura helpless to defend himself from the vengeful American soldier.
"Trophy" is a pretty good story, with a high level of gruesomeness and a twist which is foreshadowed in such a was that it feels legit. A perhaps noteworthy fact about the story is how we follow it from the point of view of the villain; Kuttner's famous story "The Graveyard Rats" is similarly structured so that the villain is the main character and the story ends with him on the brink of a horrible death.
"Trophy" would be reprinted just a year later under Kuttner's real name in The Saint's Choice of Impossible Crime, along with Fredric Brown's "Daymare," which we just read.
"Swing Your Lady" (as by Kelvin Kent)
Looking at isfdb, it appears that "Swing Your Lady" is the twelfth and final Pete Manx story; the Manx series ran from 1939, all the stories appearing under the pen name Kelvin Kent; half were written solely by Kuttner, two written by Kuttner in collaboration with Arthur K. Barnes, and four the solo work of Barnes. These stories have jokey titles ("Grief of Baghdad," "Comedy of Eras") and I guess are meant to be amusing.
Manx (in the body of a guy named Zeno--maybe this is a joke about Stoicism?) is captured and enslaved by the Amazons. Paralleling his problem back in the 20th century, the Amazons' Queen takes a shine to him and he is ordered to marry her. Manx decides he must overthrow the Amazon social order in which women rule men, and uses his knowledge of chemistry and engineering and psychology to make the Amazons believe that their goddess, Artemis, is angry at them and wants them to become housewives. (Many of this story's jokes are role reversal references to feminist movements, and anachronistic references to 20th century colloquialisms and 1940s current events--Manx has the Amazons' male slaves march for their rights, carrying signs demanding "Suffrage for men!" and "We want the four freedoms!" and "We'll wear the greaves in our families!")
Somehow, Manx, in a matter of days, makes batteries and wire and a searchlight to create the illusion that the moon has come close to the Earth's surface, and then uses ventriloquism to imitate Artemis, who issues commands to the Amazon Queen. When this scheme comes a cropper, and it looks like the angry women are going to kill him, Manx fixes up a way to shock the Amazons with electricity, thus enabling him to outfight them, and convincing them that he is Zeus in disguise.
When his consciousness is returned to his 20th-century body he uses the same electricity gag to subdue Margie.
This is just a silly filler story in which the priority is not plot or emotion but gags and jokes, though I suppose we can see it as following the tradition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Barely acceptable. "Swing Your Lady" was reprinted in 1955 in Fantastic Story.
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I liked "Trophy" because it generated some feeling and had an efficient plot, but "A God Named Kroo" was too long and flat and "Swing Your Lady" was just a bunch of gags strung together. It is likely these stories have never been printed in a book because they are seen as mediocre, but maybe publishers have shied away from them in part because two of them portray Asian people in a less than positive light, and the third is an unrelenting series of jokes of which women are the butts.
In our next episode we'll read some science fiction by a man who seems to specialize in strong female characters and who has won praise from women SF authors.
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