Thrilling Wonder Stories, Feb '51: F Brown, S Merwin and R Z Gallun

Some time ago we read Jack Vance's "Crusade to Maxus" in a 1986 hardcover Vance collection.  That tale was first published in the February 1951 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories under the title "Overlords of Maxus;" obviously, Vance was the big draw in that issue, but maybe there are other things in the ish worth reading--let's hop on over to the internet archive and find out!

The editorial, presumably by Sam Merwin, Jr., is about Charles Fort and the need to maintain a healthy skepticism of scientists' conclusions--scientists are human, after all.  Our friend Lin Carter contributes a jokey letter that looks like a modern poem, with no capitals and odd enjambments, an homage to the work of Don Marquis.  Carter considers who might portray Lazarus Long on the silver screen should a film of Methuselah's Children be made, describes some correspondence with Leigh Brackett, and says that he is a fan of  Edgar Rice Burroughs but ERB's' Synthetic Men of Mars and The Eternal Lover were "stinkeroos."  I haven't read The Eternal Lover, but I remember liking Synthetic Men, though that was decades ago.

Let's read the stories in the February '51 issue of Thrilling Wonder by the much beloved Fredric Brown, editor of the magazine Merwin (writing under the pen name Matt Lee) and Raymond Z. Gallun, many of whose 1930s Astounding stories we have read in the last year or so.

"Man of Distinction" by Fredric Brown

        

This is a joke story that finds humor in the antics of an alcoholic.  There are also lots of puns.  The jokes are obvious but not bad, and Brown's chatty folksy style is easy to read, and even though the story is a goof, Brown furnishes us readers some interesting aliens.  We'll mark this one "Acceptable."

Two scouts from a vast space empire that controls thousands of planets and has explored millions more have come to investigate Earth.  These guys are fifteen-foot long worms who can levitate and exhibit an unusual symmetry--both ends of the worm have sense organs and can manipulate objects.  The drunk sees them and assumes they are hallucinations, the product of the D. T.'s which he suffers almost perpetually and is basically accustomed to.  The aliens bring him back to their home planet for study--if he demonstrates intelligence or strength the aliens will raid Earth for a few billion slaves.  Studying his blood, they figure his diet consists entirely of alcohol, so they synthesize some for him.  As a result he is constantly drunk, and demonstrates neither cognitive ability nor physical stamina.  The aliens decide Earth is not worth raiding.  The drunk they put in a zoo with a pool of synthetic alcohol after rendering him essentially immortal with their advanced medical technology.  The drunk has found paradise.

"Man of Distinction" has been reprinted many times in several languages in Brown collections like Honeymoon in Hell and in anthologies.

"Final Haven" by Sam Merwin, Jr.

"Final Haven" has never been reprinted anywhere, and I didn't care for Merwin's novel The House of Many Worlds when I read it back when we were young, in 2017, but let's give this story a try anyway.

Three months ago Earth civilization was destroyed by nuclear war.  A brilliant banker had been expecting the war, and worked in concert with another millionaire as well as a genius M.I.T. scientist to construct a bunker fifty feet below the surface stocked with all the supplies and machinery necessary to survive down there indefinitely while monitoring the surface.  So on the day of the cataclysm seven people fled to the bunker--the two millionaires, the banker's wife (a sexy ballerina), the scientist, the banker's two servants--a married couple--and the servants' daughter.  Today, three months into their subterranean tenancy, something shows up on the radar!  What can it be?

The radar blip disappears behind a hill, and then a man in a strange space suit comes calling to pay the bunker a visit.  It turns out that long ago there was a big planet between Mars and Jupiter, and the people living there destroyed their world in a nuclear war--the asteroids are the wreckage of that planet.  The survivors colonized the asteroids, Mars and Earth.  The asteroid people developed a society based on cooperation that eschewed competition and have thus survived--this visitor is from that lovey dovey asteroid civilization.  The Martians maintained a competitive society and eventually started a war that wrecked their civilization, just like their ancestors did and just like the descendants of the people who colonized Earth just did three months ago.

This guy from the asteroids is here to test the seven bunker inhabitants to see who among them is suitable to join the asteroid society and who will have to be left to grow old and die in the bunker.  The asteroid man admits that the banker is very intelligent and industrious, but since he used his abilities to make money and to protect himself and not to help other people free of charge, he'll be living out his life in the bunker with the other millionaire.  The man from the asteroids even quotes that old Biblical saw about how a rich man won't be permitted to enter heaven.  The other five people are allowed to come to the asteroids.

This is like a Christian socialist propaganda story--ugh.  Merwin foreshadows the climax early on when he tells us that the banker has an "ingrained fear of Russia;" like my college professors back in the '80s and '90s, does Merwin think hostility to the Soviet Union is irrational and the West is to blame for the Cold War?  

Well, let's look on the bright side--"Final Haven" is not as bad as The House of Many Worlds.  Merwin offers up his bog-standard we've-seen-them-a-hundred-times-already SF plot elements (post-apocalyptic survival and pinko peacenik aliens judging us) and his lame anti-individualism message in a compact package, so we'll let him off with a "barely acceptable" rating, but it might be another five years before we read any fiction by him again.  (Don't worry, Sam, I still love Thrilling Wonder and Startling and will continue to read your editorials and your responses in the letters column.)

"Brother Worlds" by Raymond Z. Gallun 

Skip Hanlon is a hobo of the spacefaring future!  Apparently a happy-go-lucky slacker with no ambition, he takes odd jobs here and there on the moon, swabbing out taverns, washing dishes, unloading cargo, playing guide to tourists, or even panhandling if it comes to that.  But Skip is a poet at heart, and carries with him a sadness: one of a pair of twins, his brother died at age five, and Skip has always keenly felt this loss.  As a little kid he obsessively tried to sneak away from his parents' home in the remote reaches of Alaska to search the forest for his lost brother.  As a tour guide on Luna, he offers the tourists an analogy--the Earth and the Moon are like a tragic pair of twins, one vibrant and healthy, but the other inert and dead!

Skip and our narrator, Skip's friend Don, a credentialed mining engineer, are still on the moon when mankind's first ever interstellar expedition returns to Luna from its mission to Proxima Centauri.  When Skip learns that in the Proxima Centauri system are two planets that are a binary pair, kinda like Earth and Luna but both fertile and teeming with life, he becomes determined to finagle a way to get on the second mission to PC, leaving in a few months.  Don gets a spot on the ship thanks to his engineering degree and work experience, but Skip has no such credentials or references;  how is a nobody like him going to secure a berth on the human race's one and only star ship?  He tries to leverage his good looks and make time with the captain's niece, the mission's biologist, but that doesn't quite work.  So, just hours before lift off, he gets the ship's least skilled crewman (scullion in the galley) drunk and then punches his lights out; when said scullion doesn't show up during roll call, Skip is right there to volunteer, Don attesting to his buddy's extensive experience in kitchens.

Hyperspace is perilous, and the "recorder" dies en route to PC, and Skip is given the job because he has a way with words and an idiosyncratic point of view.  (Who is now going to clean the galley we never learn.)  The crew explores one of the binary planets, and it is one hazard after another, and many people are killed as they study the many ruined cities and the clever, aggressive native flora and fauna.  As the casualties mount, Skip acquires more and more authority.  (That biologist also falls in love with him.)  He pursues his theory that civilizations on a binary planet whose partner is vibrantly alive advance more quickly than those on a planet like Earth whose twin is dead.  He makes contact with the super advanced natives, beings of pure energy who transitioned to that form after making the transition from flesh and blood people to people with robot bodies.  Skip's relationship with these aliens saves the expedition when they help repair the hyperdrive, the mechanics and engineers who were responsible for the drive having been killed.  

Back in our solar system, Skip marries the biologist and becomes a famous hero with an honorary degree and plans to explore more alien worlds.

Gallun does a good job depicting the trip through hyperspace and with all the various artifacts and creatures on the alien planet, and Skip is an interesting sort of character.  Thumbs up!  

Our freunds over in Deutschland reprinted "Brother Worlds" in an original Gallun collection in the 1980s, and in our own wild and crazy 21st century the good folks at Ramble House included it in their collection of Gallun tales. 

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Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log for more coverage of SF magazines from before I was born.