Stories by F B Long, R Cummings, A Derleth and C Simak & C Jacobi handpicked by Donald A Wollheim

At the time of writing, the wikipedia page on Frank Belknap Long includes an image of the sexalicious cover of the 13th issue of Donald A. Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader, a periodical that reprinted old stories and ran for 18 issues from 1947 to 1952.  Those blonde bombshells are hard to resist, and seeing as the MPorcius Fiction Log staff has been investigating the writing of Long anyway, we have the perfect excuse to give in to their charms.  With the help of everybody's favorite website, the internet archive, let's flip through this 1950 magazine and read stories Wollheim thought worth reprinting by people whose names we recognize.

(Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 also reprints Donald Wandrei's 1932 "Raiders of the Universes," which we talked about back in 2017.)  

"The Body-Masters" AKA "The Love Slave and the Scientists" by Frank Belknap Long (1935) 

"The Love Slave and the Scientists" first appeared under its less salacious original title, "The Body-Masters," in Weird Tales, alongside stories by Robert E. Howard (one I've written about), Edmond Hamilton and August Derleth.  Wollheim here in Avon Fantasy Reader suggests it is a serious science fiction story, asking the question of how science might help solve the problems of loneliness and stale marriages, and how people might react to a scientific resolution to their sexual relationship problems.  Sounds good--I've got my fingers crossed! 

Long sets his tale in the 57th century, a time when high divorce rates are a major cause of concern for the authorities.  The "Dictator of Emotional Arts" diagnoses the problem: men want variety in sex partners, but when a man cheats on his wife, she gets jealous.  So a means is found to allow men to experience novelty in their sexual relations that will not arouse their wives' jealousy--sex robots!  No sensible woman would be jealous over a machine, the men of the world reason.

The plot of the story follows a surgeon, V67, who embraces the idea of the "Mechanical Companions," and spends his free time with one, relieving tension and introducing variety into his love life.  As we follow him from the "garden" where the Mechanical Companions are to be enjoyed to work and then  home, we learn a little about life in the 57th century, like the mass transit system of the future and the way the government uses eugenic breeding and surgery on the glands of excitable people to keep the population docile.  Back home V67 gets a surprise and we get our predictable twist ending--V67's wife is being visited by one of the newest line of sex robots, Mechanical Companions built in the form of men with the purpose of improving the lives of women who are bored with or ignored by their husbands!  V67's liberal attitude about Mechanical Companions goes right out the window and he destroys the masculine robot in a fit of rage!

The "points" of the story seem to be that both men and women are responsible for relationship problems and that no government, no matter how invasive and tyrannical, can do much to change human nature.  As my father learned that time he suggested to my mother that they watch a Gloria Estefan concert on TV, and I learned when I suggested to my wife that we watch a Sophia Loren movie, women really will get jealous over a machine, and men are probably no better.  I can't argue with Long's themes, but I can't say that they are surprising or exciting, either, and I also can't say his prose style, pacing or atmosphere are anything better than serviceable. 

We'll judge this story, which isn't doesn't quite wear out its welcome, to be merely acceptable filler.  For some reason Leo Margolies chose "The Body-Masters" for his 1964 anthology of stories from Weird Tales, which was also printed in a (truncated) German edition.

"The Curious Case of Norton Hoorne" by Ray Cummings (1921)

In August of 2018 I read three novels and eleven stories by Ray Cummings--damn, I was productive in those days!  Let's get another Cummings piece under our belts, one Wollheim suggests is one of the "unusual off-trail stories" that (according to Wollheim) characterized Cummings's early work.  (Click the "Ray Cummings" link above to learn how Frederick Pohl characterized Cummings's late work.)     

Norton Hoorne was one of the world's great concert pianists.  In this story our narrator, music lover Dr. William Manning (a medical doctor, not an Ed.D. or whatever) and one of Hoorne's best friends, tells us the heretofore secret truth about Hoorne's death!

The year is 1900!  Manning and another of Hoorne's closest friends, Dr. Johns (also a medical doctor and not a doctor of education or something), are called to Hoorne's beautiful Manhattan flat on Riverside Drive by his distraught housekeeper to find their buddy in a cataleptic state!  The musician doesn't seem to be breathing, and he has no pulse, but there is no positive sign he is dead, either.  Johns has an inkling of what is going on.  You see, just a week ago, Hoorne told Johns that he (Hoorne) had developed a new kind of music that could facilitate the departure of his soul from his body so he could travel in the astral plane!

The two sawbones do some detective work and experiment by playing the piano--by tickling just the right ivories Manning can bring Hoorne's soul closer to his body so he can, haltingly, talk to them--and solve the mystery.  Hoorne was in love with one of his pupils, the beautiful blonde daughter of a rich financier, but said moneybags wanted his little girl to marry some English baron, rendering the dreams of these piano-playing lovebirds null and void.  Just this morning, the docs discover via their sleuthing, that Hoorne's sweetheart was found dead by her family--the docs suspect she is not really most sincerely dead, but just travelling the astral plane hoping to be reunited with Hoorne!  Hoorne tried to join her on the other side, but something went awry and his soul is still anchored to his body.  With Manning's help at the keys, Hoorne completely severs his ties to this mortal realm and joins his beloved in some other universe.

Acceptable filler, I suppose.  "The Curious Case of Norton Hoorne" made its debut in Argosy and was only ever reprinted in the Avon Fantasy Reader.  

"The Thing That Walked on the Wind" by August Derleth (1933)

This one debuted in Strange Tales alongside stories by Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard and has reappeared in several Derleth collections and some odd theme anthologies, like one that collects SF stories by non-Canadians set in the Great White North, another about the Wendigo, and one full of stories about Ithaqua.  (You'll remember I read a story by Brian Lumley about Ithaqua, "Born of the Winds.")  I guess Derleth invented Ithaqua, but based it on Algernon Blackwood's story "The Wendigo."

Wollheim comes right out in his intro to the story in Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 and admits "The Thing That Walked on the Wind" is a pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft and Blackwood, and Derleth lazily mentions these big names in his story, waving his inspirations in our faces.  Derleth's tale, like so many Lovecraftian stories, consists of documents like official statements, testimonials and/or newspaper clippings.  This time out the primary frame is the statement of a Mountie, division chief John Dalhousie; most of Dalhousie's statement is a reproduction of a report from Constable Robert Norris; Norris in turn includes some brief newspaper stories in his report.  Norris, Dalhousie tells us, disappeared soon after submitting that report, and his body was found in a snow bank seven or eight months later.

In February of 1930 the entire population of the little town of Stillwater mysteriously vanished.  Exactly one year later, Constable Norris was near Stillwater and saw something moving in the sky--three bodies then fell to the earth near him, one that of a dead woman, the other two men who still barely clung to life.  The men turned out to be guys who were visiting Stillwater on that day everybody vanished.

By interrogating one of these guys, Allison Wentworth, when he briefly wakes up before dying, as well as the local doctor (of medicine) called upon to examine these three airborne Canadians, Norris learned that the people of Stillwater worshipped an air elemental, Ithaqua, going so far as to dedicate human sacrifices to this monster.  Wentworth and his friend had the bad luck to arrive in Stillwater the night of the big sacrifice; when they tried to rescue the sacrificial victim, a young woman, the monster was so angry it carried away all the inhabitants of Stillwater as well as the two would-be-heroes!  Wentworth and his friend were held captive by Ithaqua up in the stratosphere for an entire year, and accompanied the monster on its journeys around the world, visiting Ithaqua-worshipers in many occult (like R'lyeh or the Plateau of Leng) and mundane (like London or Lebanon) locations.  The year long world tour over, Wentworth and his pal were gently left on the Earth's surface, doomed to die in the warmth because Ithaqua had changed their body chemistry to be more suitable to the cold of the upper air.  (Don't ask why they didn't die in London or R'lyeh--Ithaqua works in mysterious ways!)  Wentworth informed Norris that since he too had glimpsed the air elemental, Ithaqua would no doubt kill him as well.    

After Norris's report, Dalhousie presents the evidence that Norris was also taken around the world by Ithaqua for some months before being left to die in Canada.

The core plot of this story is standard and obvious, but classic stuff that a good writer struck by inspiration and willing to put in some labor can turn into a fun and/or striking piece of fiction.  Derleth unfortunately buries that workable core under layer after layer of dry frame story and does nothing to add emotion or excitement to the traditional framework he is working with--he doesn't tweak or subvert or embroider the standard-issue plot at all, and his style and tone are bland.  None of the characters have personality or motivation, there are no memorable images, Derleth doesn't create any atmosphere or paint a picture of the setting, etc.

"The Thing That Walked on the Wind" is a formulaic, by-the-numbers Lovecraftian story to which the author adds nothing new or special.  Barely acceptable filler. 

"The Street That Wasn't There" AKA "The Lost Street" by Clifford Simak and Carl Jacobi (1941)

The famous coronavirus, the mass looting and rioting, and the increase in violent crime in cities we have witnessed in the last year or so have had me thinking about Clifford D. Simak's foreword to Roger Elwood's 1973 Future City.  (You can read Future City at the indispensable internet archive.)  Simak suggested that the city had outlived its usefulness--it was full of crime, commuting to it was an expensive hassle, and you could do all your work from home via electronic communication anyway--so maybe the city was doomed to extinction as people fled urban life for the suburbs and rural areas.  I have to wonder if Simak's prediction might not be coming true.

But I digress.  Wollheim says that "The Street That Wasn't There," which first appeared in the short-lived magazine Comet under the title "The Lost Street," is a "fascinating mental game" and a "really off-trail story" that is based on the tension between the foundational philosophical concepts of materialism and idealism.  Our man Wollheim is a real salesman!

It is the horrible future world of 1960!  The Old World of Europe, Asia and Africa are wracked by war and plague, and these blights are beginning to afflict South America.  But American Johnathan Chambers knows almost nothing about the world crisis--he's been a recluse who refuses to read newspapers or listen to the radio for like twenty years.  Two decades ago he published a book on metaphysics that was so revolutionary his colleagues and the public hounded him out of the university!  This victim of cancel culture lives alone and talks to nobody; every night he takes a 45-minute walk on the same route at the same time, and all his neighbors have learned to not bother addressing him, even the store clerk who sells him a cigar every night at the exact same time.

But tonight Chambers gets home and looks at his watch to find he has come home 15 minutes early!  How did this happen?  Chambers lives by the clock; for years and years his walks have always begun at precisely 7:00 PM and ended precisely at 7:45!  Also, somehow, he forgot to buy his cigar!  

The next day Chambers figures out the psyche-breaking and world-shattering truth.  That career-ending book he wrote twenty years ago posited that the world is the way it is because our minds force order upon matter--that bunch of molecules over there takes the form of a tree because we all expect it to be a tree, that bunch of molecules over there is an automobile because we expect to see an automobile there, etc.  Pushing this already dumb idea all the way out to la-la land, Chambers suggested that aliens from another dimension who had superior brain power could impose upon our universe their own vision of what our world should be like, and this way take over our dimension.  So the next night when Chambers goes out on his walk and realizes that the block with the cigar store has simply vanished he realizes that his speculation of an alien invasion has come to pass!  The world war and global plague that have yet to reach the United States must have killed off so many people that there are no longer enough human brains to enforce their will on this universe's matter, giving those evil aliens an opportunity to start crafting our matter into a world more suited to them!  (Or maybe twenty years of not talking to another human being has just driven Chambers insane?)

Chambers rushes home as the world around him changes.  There is no hope, smh, soon his house will vanish like all the other houses, and he will vanish like all the other Earth people.  Chambers knows that matter is never destroyed, only changed, so the molecules that are now him will soon be something else and he wonders if in his new form he will have consciousness or be a mere inert object.  

Better written and better structured than the rest of the stories I have talked about today, but still not exactly good; I guess I can give "The Lost Street" a grade of "OK."  "The Lost Street" has appeared in numerous Simak collections as well as a 1940s anthology edited by August Derleth and a 1970s one edited by Terry Carr.

   

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I'm feeling wishy washy today; I'm not comfortable definitively praising any of these stories or consigning them to the junk heap.  I have lost my passion...why should I need to keep it since what is kept must be adulterated?

Let's look for some fun in the back of the magazine!

In the back pages of Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 are some pages of ads, one of them listing dozens of Avon paperback books.  Some of these books are serious literature, what we might even call classics, like D. H. Lawrence's The First Lady Chatterley and A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (we all love "When I Was One and Twenty," don't we?), and many are respectable mainstream fiction, like the works of W. Somerset Maughan or Howard Fast, or respectable genre literature, like the novels of Raymond Chandler or Cornell Woolrich ("William Irish" is one of Woolrich's pen names; I read I Married a Dead Man before I started this blog and I guess I liked it OK, though I remember very little of it; I actually remember the Barbara Stanwyck film of the novel more vividly.)  As you might say of Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 itself, the cover art of many of these publications seems to indicate that Avon saw as its target market those in search of salacious material.  Below I have reproduced some interesting specimens of such art.

As I write this, you can see several pages from the Naughty 90's Joke Book at an ebay auction 
here (scroll down) and judge how many belly laughs it might have provided 

       

Four luscious women and one sinister man sounds like a good recipe;
maybe I'll read the edition of Bloch's The Scarf available at the internet archive soon 

So many questions...