Imagination, December 1950: John Wyndham, Mack Reynolds and Milton Lesser

As readers of my twitter feed may remember, I bought a book of posters of art from pulp magazines in August.  In September I chose four of these posters to tack up here in MPorcius HQ: a Hannes Bok illustration of H. P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model;" Margaret Brundage's cover of the issue of Weird Tales with Clark Ashton Smith's "The Empire of the Necromancers" (one of the best of Brundage's productions;) Virgil Finlay's cover of the July 1942 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries; and Harold McCauley's cover for the December 1950 issue of Imagination.  It seemed appropriate to have actually read something connected to each of the four images, and so today we tackle three stories from that 1950 issue of Imagination, a magazine then edited by Raymond Palmer.  I'm reading these stories, all by people we have talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log before, in the scan of the original issue of Madge (as we fans call Imagination) available at my favorite website and yours, the internet archive.

"Technical Slip" by John Wyndham 

John Wyndham, famous author of Day of the Triffids and Re-Birth AKA The Chrysalids, bore the legal name John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, and "Technical Slip" appears here in Imagination under the name John Beynon.  The story would reappear four years later in the Wyndham collection Jizzle, and the next year after that in a paperback anthology by Groff Conklin which I own, Operation Future, and have already blogged a little about.  I didn't read "Technical Slip" when I sampled the contents of Operation Future back in 2017, maybe because Re-Birth had rubbed me the wrong way, maybe because I didn't recognize Wyndham under that disguise.

"Technical Slip" is one of those stories about a guy selling his soul to the devil, and also a time travel story.  It is well-written, but underwhelming and ends up feeling trifling.

Our dude is a 60-year-old Englishman, on his death bed.  He sadly reflects that all the wisdom he has acquired over a long and successful career is about to vanish.  Then a guy appears whom we are obliquely obliged to understand is a representative of the devil, though the devil in this story seems more like the manager of the bureaucracy that maintains the universe than a malevolent figure.  Having adapted to the rise of the market economy, these bureaucrats no longer barter boons for souls, but sell their wares for money.  After the hero agrees to hand over a large fraction of his wealth he is given a chance to live his live over again, and finds himself seven years old again, back in 1910, but with all his memories intact.  Wyndham does a good job describing the world of 1910 through the hero's eyes, and of depicting the sadness of seeing his little sister, knowing she will soon be crippled for life in an accident, seeing his father and knowing in a few years he will be killed fighting in the war, and seeing his uncle and knowing the financial disaster unk is going to be responsible for.  Wyndham succeeds in painting both a striking visual landscape and a moving emotional landscape here and is to be commended for doing so--all this stuff rang true to me.

The hero wonders if he can use his knowledge of the future to his advantage, and the advantage of the world--could he perhaps prevent or shorten the World Wars?  His test case is his sister, and when he  saves her from the accident which, in his first go round of life crippled her, he has proof that he really can change history!  But then the bureaucrats step in and weaken the protagonist's hold on his memory; their failure to do so initially is the "technical slip" of the title.  Our protagonist forgets he has lived through the tumultuous first half of the 20th century before and his efforts to alter history for the better are quashed.    

I felt like the plot sort of fizzled out, but Wyndham's technique in that middle section of the story when our hero is back in 1910 as a kid and retains his 1960s knowledge, is quite good; "Technical Slip" is better than most deal-with-the-devil stories and does something more literary with the idea of time travel than do most time travel stories.  So, I'll give it a moderate recommendation.

"Tourists to Terra" by Mack Reynolds 

Reynolds had a remarkably strange and diverse career as a radical leftist activist, a travel writer for men's magazines, and a SF writer whose work I generally dislike (check out the links for my past comments on some of these topics.)

"Tourists to Terra" is a brief gimmicky story.  Life on an alien planet has become too easy, too luxurious, driving wealthy individuals to seek new thrills.  One of the extravagant pastimes their advanced technology has made possible is travelling to primitive planets like our Earth to participate in wars among the natives.  The early scenes of "Tourists to Terra" the story depict these aliens--who look just like Earth people and equip themselves with anti-grav devices and special armor and weapons--fighting in the Trojan War, Reynolds rehearsing the scene from Book V of the Iliad in which Diomedes injures Aphrodite.  (This is one of the numerous SF stories that offers a theory of the source of some ancient myth, legend or religious belief.)

The complaints of the beautiful woman who will be the germ of the Greek goddess of love over getting hit by a spear convince the people running the space cruise that it would be safer to get their customers involved not in hand-to-hand combat but in a war fought with firearms in which they can act as snipers, killing natives from a distance from a place of concealment.  (These aliens think of us as no more than game animals.)  These aliens have the ability to not only efficiently travel between the stars, but through time, so the ship's crew crosses the eons to 1945 in search of a war affording opportunities for safe sport.  But our Earth technology has advanced faster than they anticipated, and by chance their ship materializes at an atomic bomb test site just moments before the detonation--the thrill-seeking aliens and their space ship are totally annihilated.

This disposable bit of ephemera would not be reprinted until 2011.

"It's Raining Frogs!" by Milton Lesser

This will be the fourth story by Lesser we have read here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Feel free to feast your glazzies on my scribblings about "'A' as in 'Android'," "The Graveyard of Space" and "Ennui."

"It's Raining Frogs!" begins with an epigraph from Charles Fort's Lo!  Fort apparently loomed large in the minds of SF writers and fans in the middle of the 20th century--Lo! was serialized in Astounding in the early Thirties when F. Orlin Tremaine was editor, Tremaine's successor John W. Campbell, Jr. recommended Fort's collections of questionable reports of unusual phenomena as source material, Eric Frank Russell praised Fort highly, Damon Knight wrote a biography of Fort, and so on.  The epigraph here mentions frogs, Fort arguing that all the universe shares a single existence, so you can study the entire whole from any starting point, be it economics, the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, or frogs.

Myra is a beautiful, intelligent and athletic woman, and an enthusiastic fan of Fort and student of Fortean phenomena.  She is married to George, a mediocrity in the looks and career department, but something special anyway--he is what Myra calls a "catalyst," a man who attracts Fortean phenomena.  When he rolls large numbers of dice the totals do not follow normal bell curve expectations, and sometimes frogs and other small creatures start falling from the sky upon him, spontaneously.  The main plot of this story concerns how George, unwittingly, summons a man from another dimension, and not just any man, but the King of the Fourth Dimension.  Like George, this alien monarch (who looks exactly like an Earth man) is married to a woman who dominates him, something he is quick to tell George and Myra.        

This king from the Fourth Dimension and Myra have a longish conversation about the physics of two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and four-dimensional universes, but eventually His Majesty gets worried his wife will be angry if he isn't home soon, and wants to leave, but he can only return to his universe with the permission of George, who summoned him.  George refuses, Myra insists, and in response to George's intransigence she starts hitting him--it is hinted that this sort of spousal abuse is a normal feature of their married life.  For the first time after years of marriage, George asserts himself; he outwrestles Myra and spanks her, breaking her will and becoming master of his home.  

The Queen of the Fourth dimension arrives, and tries to dominate the situation by seducing George; she also sets about using her alien powers to steal a fortune in jewels from Earth to take back home.  George not only stands up to her but his example inspires the King to stand up for himself and become master of his relationship.  The stolen jewels are returned to their rightful owners and everybody lives happily ever after in both our dimension and the Fourth now that these troublesome hot women know their place.

Obviously a story which suggests that women are selfish and greedy and that specimens of the weaker sex who are intelligent and attractive will use their brains and looks to run roughshod over everybody if a man doesn't firmly assert dominance over them runs counter to the values we in 2022 all hold dear or at least pretend to ascribe to if we know what is good for us.  Putting that hot potato aside, "It's Raining Frogs" is too long and repetitive, and the mechanism of how George summons frogs, beetles, birds, a henpecked king and a sexalicious jewel thief of a queen to our universe is poorly worked out.  George does not voluntarily summon these aliens--in fact, he considers these phenomena a nuisance, they are appearing against his will--but for the plot to work we are expected to believe he can by an act of will send them back or confine them here.  Seems a little contrived.  

Weak filler.  Like Reynolds' "Tourists to Terra," "It's Raining Frogs!" would have to wait until this century to be reprinted.

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Imagination is one of those magazines the critics look down upon, and I didn't exactly find a storehouse of ammunition today with which to challenge their dim assessment, though "Technical Slip" demonstrates Wyndham's considerable writing ability and "It's Raining Frogs!" is a useful document for those interested in the relationship of Charles Fort to SF and those looking for evidence of sexism in SF (spanking fetishists may also want to check it out!)

Speaking of stuff the critics look down upon, we've got a 1973 sword and sorcery novel coming up, so have your square-cut mane and mighty thews ready the next time you surf on over here to MPorcius Fiction Log!