1953 stories by R Bloch, T Sturgeon, M Leinster & M Reynolds

On a table at a flea market in Chambersburg, PA recently, I spotted a plastic bag containing two issues of Universe Science Fiction, a magazine edited by Ray Palmer that endured for ten issues in the 1950s.  There was really no reason to buy them, because you can read every issue of Universe at the internet archive, and when I had finally succeeded in wrestling the two magazines out of that single bag I saw that the cover of the second one was covered in a matte white film, as if it had been accidentally spray-painted.  As I gingerly scraped at this film with a fingernail a tiny white spider crawled around the spine and across the front of the magazine.  I blew the spider away and, after taking a brief look the magazines, tried to get them back into their bag.  This operation proved impossible.  I tried putting them back in together, then one at a time, but the task was beyond me, even with that extra room afforded by the absence of the spider.  The whole time I was struggling with this puzzle the owner of the assorted treasures on the table was watching me, which added to my anxiety.  When it became clear that I was never going to get these 70-year old magazines back into their plastic tomb without further damaging their already mangled corpuses, I decided it would just be easier to buy them.  The seller knocked a dollar off the price scrawled on the green circular sticker affixed to the bag (maybe in recognition that the spider was no longer included) and so I left Chambersburg with two issues of Universe, including the very first, only three bucks the poorer.  So let's read 1953 stories from our old acquaintances Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Murray Leinster, and Mack Reynolds.

"Constant Reader" by Robert Bloch

Bloch of course is famous for writing about psychology, and "Constant Reader," in part, is about the psychological stress of being a spaceman crewing an exploration vessel.  For months at a time five men are cooped up in a small ship together, getting on each others' nerves as they seek out new worlds, then orbit them and send down a drone to take sensor readings and photographs of them.  Bloch does a good job of describing just such an operation and the mental toll it takes on the spacemen, and the feeling of release when the narrator and his four shipmates have the opportunity to land on a dusty desert planet dotted with ruins and finally stretch their legs after two months aboard ship.  The stuff about the spacers' joy at being back on terra firma actually reminded me a little of Ray Bradbury.

That first part, about half the story, is good, but the second half is mediocre, and is not really thematically connected to the first half--all the interesting technology Bloch described, and all the psychological stuff, is abandoned.  The crewman who narrates the story is a bookworm, and has brought three books with him on the trip to help pass the time.  The dead planet of dust and ruins that they land on, he eventually surmises, is home to an intelligence that is divorced from organic matter or conjoined with the planet itself.  This immaterial intelligence tried to read their minds and failed, but somehow managed to read the narrator's books.  The alien intelligence considers the Terran explorers a threat, and seeks to destroy them, and does so by bringing to life characters from the three books, Gulliver's Travels, The Odyssey, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.   

After the rigorously logical and believable beginning, I was pretty disappointed by the story's cheap and nonsensical ending--if the intelligence can just create matter out of thin air, and even give it life, why does it need to read the books at all to kill the astronauts, much less make monsters that resemble Lilliputians and Polyphemus?  In Ray Bradbury stories natives will make Mars look like Earth in order to trick Earthmen, but if the natives just want to kill you they have no reason to make your killer look like something out of an Earth book.

I guess averaging out the entire story leaves us with an acceptable rating for "Constant Reader."  "Constant Reader" would be reprinted in a a number of Bloch collections, including Atoms and Evil, and several anthologies, among them The Space Magicians.   

"The World Well Lost" by Theodore Sturgeon

"Theodore Sturgeon's most daring story" promises the cover of the first issue of Universe Science Fiction.  Well, let's cross our fingers and see if Sturgeon can cash the check Ray Palmer wrote out in his name.

It is the future of interstellar travel in which most Earthpeople spend their time watching TV and using drugs and electronic stimulation to get high.  Two aliens land on Earth, aliens who are in love with each other and who also love the Earth.  Their love is contagious, and they cause a sensation.  Just seeing these two lovebirds on TV who can never take their eyes off each other, who can never keep their hands off each other, makes you feel again the way you felt the first time you kissed a girl, Ted tells us. 

A computer reveals the secret of the lovebirds--they are fugitives from planet Dirbanu!  Dirbanu is a planet of aliens more advanced than Earth that refuses to trade with Earth, and whose force fields are totally impervious to Earth attack.  The rulers of Earth want a chance to acquire Dirbanu's high technology, and the lovebirds present just such an opportunity--the rulers of Dirbanu want the fugitives back, so the Earth elite captures them for shipment home in hopes of buttering up those reclusive Dirbanuans!  

Earth's two best spacemen, an inseparable team, are tasked with crewing the ship that will transport the love-oozing captives back to their home planet.  These men, Rootes and Grunty, are among the very few men of action--"doers"-- in a civilization of "thinkers" and "feelers" given over to opiates.  Rootes, the captain, is a man whose interests lie in enthusiastically sleeping with whores while on shore leave, while Grunty is a reader, his head full of poetry, his bookshelf supporting The Wind in the Willows, The Worm Ouroboros, The Garden of the Plynck, a book of photos of Michelangelo's sculptures, etc.

Sturgeon spends some time explaining how the ship's warp drive operates; the important aspect of the description is that making the jump to warp knocks people unconscious for some time, Rootes for a period somewhat longer than Grunty.  Grunty, it is revealed somewhat obliquely, is a homosexual, and is hopelessly in love with Rootes--while the captain sleeps Grunty sits and stares at him, even lovingly touches him!  Unfortunately for Grunty, Rootes is a homophobe--in fact, the entire human civilization, decadent though it is, is virulently homophobic!  Grunty has to not only keep his love for Rootes a secret, but if anybody finds out he's gay, his whole career as a spaceman will be washed up.

When Grunty realizes the two lovebirds can read minds and know he's gay he is horrified and enraged--maybe they will reveal his terrible secret to the galaxy!  He plots to kill them before they can spill the beans, but then they confide in him--Terrans thought the two lovebirds were a heterosexual couple because one was quite taller than the other, but the reality is they are both male--like Grunty, they are gay.  The couple fled Dirbanu because of pervasive homophobia there, and hoped to find freedom on Earth.  Grunty helps them escape in the ship's life boat while Rootes is asleep.  In ways that are not really all that convincing, Grunty mollifies Rootes' initial anger over letting the prisoners escape, and Rootes convinces the government of Dirbanu that the lovebirds, whom they admit they wanted dead, have been killed.  But Earth's hopes for some kind of lucrative technology transfer from Dirbanu are dashed--Dirbanuan males and females look radically different from each other, and in comparison human men and women look so similar that the Dirbanuans think Earth is a planet of homosexuals and want absolutely nothing to do with us!

Some parts of "The World Well Lost" feel more like a fable written to dramatize the argument that hostility to homosexuality is irrational and that love between two men is as beautiful (at least!) as love between a man and woman than a piece of fiction that strives to be believable.  But the heart of the story, Grunty's feelings for Rootes and his fear of exposure, is totally convincing, even moving, a fine bit of psychology that doesn't resort to using the language of psychology the way Bloch so often does.  This authentic humanity makes the story work.  Thumbs up for "The World Well Lost," a story people interested in the treatment of same-sex sexual relationships in SF should definitely check out.  And we can forgive Palmer for the exuberance of his cover come-on--Sturgeon's story really is daring!    

It looks like "The World Well Lost" appeared in the Sturgeon collection E Pluribus Unicorn the same year it was printed here in Universe.  Groff Conklin included it in the anthology Twisted, another Belmont paperback with an awesome cover (whoever was making decisions about covers at Belmont deserves some kind of award) and Thomas N. Scortia selected it for Strange Bedfellows, the cover of which is just sad.

"An unholy bible" has me laughing out loud, but 
I am laughing with you Belmont, not at you

"The Castaway" by Murray Leinster

This one hasn't been as successful as Bloch's or Sturgeon's contributions to Universe's inaugural issue, having only been reprinted in Leinster collections, but I won't let that discourage me from giving it a look.  

Ben Lyon runs the newspaper in a tiny rural town surrounded by mountains.  Leinster engages in some of the romanticization of small town life we sometimes see, even approvingly remarking on how the town doesn't receive radio signals and nobody in town has a TV.  It is sad to think these poor bastards were denied the opportunity to get acquainted with Jack Benny after a long day feeding pigs or pulling weeds or whatever it is they do to put food on the table of city folk.

A meteor flies over the town the day before Ben the journo leaves town on horseback to meet his old war buddy Tom at Tom's ranch in the mountains.  But Tom isn't home, though Ben is expected.  Instead, at Tom's place Ben meets a space alien!

The alien talks to Ben from the shadows--it has read the mind of a local man, the town drunk, so knows English and all about the human race and its penchant for war and violence.  The alien says it is a castaway and wants to make friends, but when Tom appears with that town drunk stretched across one of his horses, he having been knocked unconscious by the alien's mysterious weapons, the only dimly glimpsed alien sneaks off, discouraging pursuit by demonstrating the power of another of its weapons.

Tom figures the alien is a dangerous menace, that the technologically superior aliens will treat Earthmen the way technologically superior Europeans treated nonwhite people they encountered.  If the alien really is a lone castaway and it can be neutralized before it gets a message back to its civilization then Earth will be spared the experience of becoming a victim of space imperialism!  Tom and Ben take up their shotguns and rifles and go alien hunting, Tom confident in their mission but Ben torn between fear of Earthmen suffering the fate of the natives of the Americas and his conviction that the alien is probably an OK guy who really would like to be friends.  Will they destroy the alien, befriend it, or will it escape?  If it does get away, what will the consequences be for the human race?   

We've seen plenty of SF stories that lament human aggression and European imperialism and plump for the simple life of primitives and rural people over sophisticated modern life, and "The Castaway" is another one.  But while the themes aren't exactly fresh, Leinster handles them with a little ambiguity, and does a good job with the action-adventure and horror elements of the story, making this piece a decent read--"The Castaway" gets a moderate recommendation from me. 

"Stowaway" by Mack Reynolds

As I have discussed before at this blog of mine, Mack Reynolds had an interesting life and at times perplexing writing career, and I actually don't think his fiction as a general rule is particularly good.  Let's see how this cover story compares to Reynolds' larger body of work.

It is the future, a time of intergalactic warfare long after the fall of the United States and the obsolescence of the Gregorian calendar.  It is so far in the future that unnecessary vowels have been expunged and the starship New Taos doesn't have a "doctor," it has a "doctr!"

New Taos also has the finest captain in the space navy.  A captain who won't keep his mouth shut!  You see, Captain Mike Gurloff is opposed to the current administration on Earth, and gives speeches attacking the policies of the government in between going on the dangerous missions that government is always assigning him and his forty-odd crewmen.  He has become quite popular, and is a real thorn in the side of the government.  (Maybe this story was inspired by the career of Douglas MacArthur, a popular general who was sacked in 1951 after publicly disagreeing with the Truman Administration.)  All you Biblical scholars out there who know how King David treated Uriah, and all you classicists who know about Cato being sent to Cyprus by Clodius, won't be surprised to hear that the Earth government keeps sending our dude Gurloff on these difficult missions in hopes he'll screw up and his prestige will be tarnished.  

A big theme of "Stowaway," like the first part of Bloch's "Constant Reader," is the psychological stress of space travel.  Policies are in place to keep spacemen from getting bored and going insane, a contingency considered quite likely, and early in the story there are scenes in which we learn that the spacemen read the same books over and over again, watch the same TV shows repeatedly, play complex versions of darts so much they are all now dart throwing experts, etc.  Well, the Earth government's plan to bring Gurloff down a notch this time is to send his ship on a new mission so fast that there is no time to switch out the books, games and video tapes!  With no fresh entertainment, Doctr Thorndon predicts the crew will go insane six months into this mission which is slated to last over a year!

The New Taos is on the third day of its year-long cruise when a female stowaway is discovered in a storage area.  Women are forbidden from joining space crews, but this young woman, Kathy, has always wanted to be a spaceman and sneaked aboard in order to prove that women do have the right stuff!  Or so she says!  At first, Gurloff and Thornton fear the ship's crew will be totally thrown off kilter psychologically by her presence, but Thornton figures out how to use her in a campaign to ease the crew's boredom.  Basically, Thornton allows the crew to let off steam and find distraction by helping them break the rules and gamble, get in fights, set up a still and get drunk, and so on, but his  important distraction is Kathy, whom he compels to put on shows and even encourages in leading the men on; by the end of the trip every man on New Taos (save doctr and captain themselves) is in love with Kathy and believes she returns his feelings.  Thorndon walks a tight rope, allowing the crew to become just ill-disciplined enough to avoid insanity from boredom, but not so out of control that the mission fails.  Anyway, they make it back to Earth successfully.

This main plot is pretty gimmicky and kind of hard to believe, but it is the twist ending that is totally beyond the pale and means I have to give "Stowaway" a thumbs down.  Immediately after New Taos lands on Earth, before the rest of the crew disembarks, Kathy sneaks off the ship, and Thorndon reveals to everybody that Kathy is a man!  And not just any man, but a famous Robin Hood-type space criminal we've been hearing the crew talk about all through the story!  This interstellar bandito was not only wearing fake breasts, but carrying with him documents proving the corruption of the current administration.  Thornton let him get away in return for the documents, which Gurloff can use to win the next election or get the current office holders impeached or something.  

Reynolds fails to make his silly plot twist fun enough, or believable enough, to swallow, so gotta give this one a negative vote.  It is also annoying that he raises the issue of the eligibility of women crewing spaceships and then drops it altogether without resolving it one way or another.  

It looks like "Stowaway" wasn't reprinted until 2011, when Armchair Fiction put out the fourth volume of its Masters of Science Fiction series, Mack Reynolds: Part One.  The people at Armchair Fiction used the cover illo of this copy of Universe for the cover of their collection, which makes senses as it is a pretty good picture, though those of us who have actually read "Stowaway" know that those luscious lips are the lips of a man!   

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The Sturgeon is the winner here, though I like the Leinster and the Bloch at least starts off well.  Checking out this artifact of 1953 is worth the time of the student of classic SF.