The cover of this issue features a gorgeous blonde accoutered with the sorts of accessories all the gals clamor for, among them high heels and a dagger, and the interior illustrations in this issue are also pretty good-- lively, with robots, people getting blasted, and crashing spaceships. The letters column features a missive from F. M. Busby (we read over 600 pages of small type about his heroine Rissa Kerguelen back in 2017) who praises Ray Bradbury, Leigh Brackett and Margaret St. Clair, and jokes that the blurbs on the cover of Planet Stories and even the story titles often bear little resemblance to the stories' content. Another epistle is from Lin Carter, who jokes that he doesn't have a girlfriend (at least I think that is what he is doing) and complains that the letters column isn't as good as it was when people like Isaac Asimov and Chad Oliver were regularly writing in. Like Busby he offers kudos to Bradbury (though he didn't care for "The Long Rain," which made its debut in Planet Stories as "Death-by-Rain") and Brackett, as well as praising Henry Kuttner and Edmond Hamilton.
"Death-Wish" (AKA "The Blue Bottle") by Ray Bradbury
Bradbury starts off "Death-Wish" with poetic verbiage telling us how dead Mars is, the canals dry, the ancient cities so fragile that beautiful towers collapse into dust at the sound of a man's shout, that kind of thing. Then we meet Albert Steinbeck and Leonard Craig, tramps, who are driving into one of these ancient cities in a rusty old automobile they spent six weeks repairing so they could drive around Mars. Steinbeck is a man on a mission--he is looking for the fabled Blue Bottle, an ancient work of art that is said to contain the very treasure every man most wants. For ten years Steinbeck has searched for this bottle, and the search has given to his life, otherwise bereft of purpose, structure and meaning; at this point he is actually afraid to find the artifact, because when he finds it his life will no longer have any direction. As for Craig, he has no higher ambition than to drink booze, smoke cigarettes, fill his belly and get lots of sleep; he is just along with Steinbeck, whom he has known for two years, for the ride.
They split up in the city and Craig finds the bottle. He doesn't realize what it is, and just drinks from it--bourbon--and then puts it aside among the other detritus of the long lost Martian civilization. Steinbeck realizes what Craig found but right after he gets his hands on it, a fat rich guy appears, gun in hand, and steals the bottle.
Our heroes catch up with the rich guy--he is dead, his body unmarked, and the bottle is gone. Steinbeck jumps in the car and chases after a party of mounted men he suspects looted the bottle from the rich porker's body--Craig, not interested in getting in a fight, stays behind--and when Steinbeck catches up to them they are also dead. And there is the bottle. Steinbeck realizes that the bottle does give everybody what they want, and what most men want is to die, to escape the responsibility and guilt and fear that comes with living! Steinbeck dies, truly happy for the first time in his life. When Craig catches up he finds the bottle and finds it is full of booze.
"Death-Wish" is a good story; I like the philosophy, and Bradbury's poetic flights--which I don't always appreciate--work this time around. Thumbs up!
So, let's read "The Blue Bottle" and see what changes Bradbury made to the story 20 years after it was first published.
The changes are not big; they mostly serve to make the story more compact, and more thin, less detailed and less like an adventure story. Steinbeck is now just "Beck," and he and Craig have known each other only a few weeks, not two years. They don't carry guns or cigarettes. The fat guy is no longer described as rich, and has less dialogue. The "rusted automobile" is now an "ancient landcar," and Beck worked on it all by himself, and for an unspecified time period. The guys who took the bottle off the fat guy are now on foot instead of riding horses. In "Death-Wish" we are told one reason Mars is populated by human tramps is that "resources had petered out forty years ago." In "The Blue Bottle" we are told instead that "the race had moved on to the stars." (I guess that means "human race," but maybe we are also, or instead, to think of it as "the space race.") All the philosophical stuff seems to be about the same, though in "Death-Wish" Bradbury specifically pointed out that rich people also were dissatisfied with life, but in this revised version the fat guy no longer is rich, and Bradbury doesn't say that.
I'm going to say these changes, on net, make the story slightly worse--it has less character, less personality, less texture. The reason behind most of these changes is a mystery to me; it's not like Nolan could have been demanding he cut the story for length--the story is already short and Bradbury's is the biggest name in the book.
"The Blue Bottle" has reappeared in several Bradbury collections, including Long After Midnight.
"The Crowded Colony" by Jerome Bixby
This story appears under the pseudonym "Jay B. Drexel;" according to isfdb, Bixby used the Drexel pen name twice.
"The Crowded Colony" is an anti-imperialist joke story. We meet three characters with the names Burke, Barnes and Randolph hanging out in an old Martian town. A couple of days ago the expedition of which they are part landed on Mars and deciphered an old manuscript found in a temple and learned the Martian language and are now treating the Martians like slaves and servants. The text of the manuscript strongly suggests the Martians were once a vital and creative race but have fallen into decadence and impotence. The three conquerors argue over whether the Martians deserve the respect accorded to people or are just clever animals.
So, we readers are lead to think these conquerors are callous, racist humans who are mistreating the natives of the red planet. Then Bixby makes his gimmick clear. Burke, Barnes and Randolph are octopoid aliens from another star system. By a crazy coincidence they landed on Mars just days after the first human expedition from Earth landed on Mars--the real natives of Mars are extinct and the invaders have mistaken the Earthers for Martians. That "temple" was the Earth space ship; the "Martian manuscript" was an English translation of an authentic Martian manuscript. The extrasolar conquerors took what they thought were native Martian names because their Psych staff theorized that this would help the native "Martians" get acclimatized to being colonized.
Anyway, as the story ends the humans are preparing their energy weapons to massacre the octopoids--they have been playing along with the invaders' mistaken belief that they are the real Martians, whom the octopoids assume, based on the manuscript, have no high technology and are unwarlike, and now that the aliens are complacent, they will take them by surprise.
This lame gimmick story would never be reprinted, for good reason.
"The Sky is Falling" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore
As the story begins we are told the Earth is no more! Holy crap! Johnny Dyson is flying through space in a ship with a robot, God knows where, and he has a flashback to the story of how he survived the destruction of the Earth....
On Earth tensions are high as the nuclear armed nations teeter on the brink of war. The defense industry is monopolizing most economic and human resources, and scientists are scrambling to figure out some way to neutralize atomic weapons. A small amount of taxpayer money is devoted to a long shot--sending a manned space ship to Mars to mine ores there to bring back to Earth; it is hoped that those alien ores might reveal the secret of how to defend against nuclear attack. Piloting a space ship to Mars takes an electronic brain and mining ores takes a vast amount of horsepower, so along with three men (three losers who aren't good enough scientists or technicians to have been drafted into the military industrial complex) goes a giant robot, an ogre-sized thing with many limbs that looks like a monster ant.
One of the three losers is Johnny Dyson. Dyson is a pessimist and a depressive who thinks his generation has been screwed by the last generation, who thinks working hard and following the rules is for suckers. Other people may be sheep, but not Johnny! Most of the text of Kuttner and Moore's story is a tense thriller, as Johnny tries to convince or trick the two other astronauts--one a guy who misses his wife Poochie, even though she divorced him and even has put out a warrant for his arrest for his allegedly having taken some of her property, the other a drunk who is in command of the mission--into helping him to accomplish his plan of sabotaging the ship while it is on Mars so they don't have to return to Earth, which Johnny is sure is going to be wiped out in a nuclear war very soon. There are many compelling scenes of Dyson trying to manipulate or evade these two guys, and we learn all about the psychologies of each of the three of them, as well as all about how the robot works, it being essential to the official mission and Dyson's treacherous scheme. There is also a lot of philosophy, as Johnny rationalizes his traitorous actions and argues with the other men. Are people good or evil? What do we owe our fellow man--do we have to keep our word and fulfill our end of a bargain if we later realize we don't like the bargain we struck?
Johnny Dyson whines like one of those kids who spent eight years enjoying themselves studying something useless while the squares their age were working real jobs in stores or factories or starting businesses, and now demand those squares pay their debts for them, but Kuttner and Moore leave the story a little ambiguous, allowing readers to either identify with Johnny or to condemn him. Are the world's problems the result of the behavior of selfish jerks like Dyson, or the behavior of those who blindly follow the rules like the other two goofs on the Mars mission? Is Johnny Dyson villain or victim?
"The Sky is Falling" also offers plenty of metaphors and clever images and literary references. I have several times noted that SF people love A. E. Housman, and here in "The Sky is Falling" we get a quote from "The Laws of God, The Laws of Man," as well as a quote from Eliot's "The Hollow Men." Kuttner and Moore assume you are educated, just quoting the poems without telling you their titles or who wrote them.
The plot resolves itself in the way a Malzberg story might. (And don't forget, Kuttner and Moore are Malzberg's heroes.) Johnny comes close to succeeding in his aim of marooning himself and his comrades on Mars, but in the end they overpower him and he goes insane. Dyson thinks Earth has been destroyed in a nuclear war, but it has not. He is taken back to Earth and put in a madhouse he thinks is the space ship--he suffers the delusion that his crewmates and the robot are searching for a new world to settle on. The final stinger is that Johnny was right, the ore from the Mars mission does not yield a defense against nuclear attack, and when Johnny dies in the asylum it is not from old age, but because the atomic war he predicted breaks out and all of human life is exterminated.
"The Sky is Falling" is a great story, a good thriller that has cool SF technology ideas (the robot stuff is great) and argues philosophical points and has such traditional literary values as compelling characters and images. I think the story also offers ammunition to those who take sides in SF community controversies. I think some sciency types who love Astounding and and some literary types who love F&SF think of Planet Stories as a magazine full of poorly written escapist nonsense--well, Kuttner and Moore's story here offers all the literary values and speculation about technology and its effect on people you could want.
Another point of contention. Among both his detractors and supporters are people who seem to think New Jersey's own Barry Malzberg was somehow radical, somehow outside the SF mainstream, in his tone of pessimism and his depiction of astronauts going insane. But in 1950's "The Sky is Falling" we have a story by two writers of great popularity who had their fingers in all corners of the SF world, people who had cover stories in both Weird Tales and Astounding, a story suffused with both of those Malzbergian themes, techno-pessimism and astronauts who go insane and put their comrades, and all of humanity, at risk. This story is yet another reason to believe that Malzberg has roots in the center of the SF tradition and that SF before the New Wave was more diverse and well-rounded than many people today seem to think.
(The case for Malzberg's radical or unique nature rests much more strongly on his use of oblique stream of consciousness narratives, his depictions of sexual dysfunction, and his ability to write stories that are supposed to be funny that actually are funny, characteristics we see in his mainstream fiction as well as his SF, along with skepticism of all large institutions that often manifests itself in his SF work as skepticism of the space program.)
An enthusiastic thumbs up for "The Sky is Falling." Somehow, this story has never appeared in a "Year's Best" or "SF Greats" or "Essential Classics" kind of anthology. For shame, editor people! It can be found in the Kuttner/Moore collection Return to Otherness, including in an abridged German translation of that book.
"Star Ship" by Poul Anderson
Anson is a third generation human on Khazak who has been living the life of a pirate; his human height and human muscles (the cat people tend to be short and slender) have given him an advantage in the sort of sword and javelin and archery combat the Khazaki engage in. A handsome and heroic muscleman, Anson has had a lot of luck with the ladies, and Anderson hints that Anson hasn't limited himself to human women--I guess humans can have sex with the furred and tailed and whiskered natives. Oy. But the human woman he truly loves, Ellen, has always eluded his grasp, partly because her bookish brother, Carson, does not approve of Anson.
Carson is like the opposite of Anson; this guy has always struck out with the ladies, and like his sister, has refused to embrace Khazaki culture and tried to stay as Terran as possible.
One day Anson returns from a one-man fishing trip to find the Khazaki city-state where the humans live has been taken over by force by a rebellious aristocrat who was exiled a few years ago for plotting just such a coup. To the shock and amazement of the human community, Carson was this rebel's right hand man! He helped the rebels get a hold of the firearms the humans had made for their buddy the king and now Carson plans to use the recently completed rocket to fly to the space ship that is still orbiting Khazak. With the spaceship, which has atomic weapons, Carson and the rebel aristo can become the invincible rulers of this world!
One wrinkle in Carson's plan: only one person in the world knows enough astrogation to get the rocket to the star ship, and that is his sister Ellen. Ellen is against the rebellion, and is in hiding with humans and cat people loyal to the old king, but Carson's feline thugs are searching the city for her!
Anson brings Ellen along as he leads a force of picked cat men into the castle via a back way while the main force of loyalists assaults the front, and Anderson gives us plenty of bloody battle scenes with flashing swords and sizzling blasters and siege engines and testudos and all that. During the fighting Ellen falls in love with Anson. Anson's party seizes the rocket but suffers heavy casualties. The rocket takes off with Ellen at the controls. Anson, in the engine room with his best friend, a cat man he has been on many pirate adventures with, finds that Carson has stowed aboard the rocket! He has to kill Carson, who has a blaster, and his best friend takes credit for the kill, as if Ellen knew Anson had killed her beloved brother, it would ruin their relationship. With the atomic weapons of the star ship at their disposal, the loyalists now can depose the usurper, and Ellen and Anson can get in touch with the Terran space empire and bring civilization to Khazak.
This is a moderately entertaining sword and planet or planetary romance style adventure. Anderson adds a little emotional and intellectual heft to "Star Ship" with a theme of the drawbacks of change. Both Anson and his native crony realize that their close comradeship will end when he marries Ellen. And this feline fighting man also reflects on how bringing civilization to Khazak will radically alter Khazak society, and maybe he won't feel at home in it any longer.
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Based on what I've read, this is a pretty good issue of Planet Stories. The Bradbury and especially the Kuttner and Moore stories are in particular recommended.
We'll be taking a break from SF for our next blog post, but with luck we'll see be experiencing technology, danger and death.
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