"As You Were" by Henry Kuttner
Kuttner--friend of H. P. Lovecraft, husband of C. L. Moore, hero of Barry N. Malzberg--was born and died in Los Angeles, so I guess I should not be surprised that this is yet another story that revolves around Hollywood. Our protagonist Peter Owen left his "managerial job with a Hollywood commercial-film company" to become assistant to his uncle, the famous and comically short-tempered writer C. Edmund Stumm, author of the hit play Lady Pantagruel. Owen is dating actress Claire Bishop, and striving to convince his uncle to sell film rights to Lady Pantagruel to her so she can appear on the silver screen as the title character, a job she desperately needs to steady her career, which is floundering after her appearance in a series of duds. Unfortunately, Claire is almost as volatile as Stumm and things are not going too smoothly between them--a recent disagreement with her over who is the better composer, Shostakovich or Prokofieff, has Stumm smashing his record collection. Also in the mix is a scientist, Sigmund Krafft, who spends his time trying to cast his mind beyond the barriers of time by concentrating on a model of a tesseract (defined here as "a cube exploded into four dimensions, symbolically.") Stumm has invited this oddball to stay with him and Owen in his big house overlooking the Pacific Ocean because Krafft's ideas were an integral part of Lady Pantagruel, a play about time travel, and Stumm is currently writing the sequel and needs some more ideas.
"As You Were" is supposed to be funny, and most of the humor stems from the fact that the characters are all stressed out, constantly yelling, banging the table, throwing things, obsessively worried over something absurd and trying to worm their way out of jams through subterfuge. The plot is intricate and complicated, and I admire how Kuttner put it all together, but the fact is the story comes off as tedious and repetitive. I guess the style and plot are kind of like those of a P. G. Wodehouse story except that a Wodehouse story is actually funny and doesn't include a lot of paragraphs speculating about the nature of time. Lin Carter in his letter in the December issue of TWS says "As You Were" reminds him of Thorne Smith, with whose work I am not familiar.
One noteworthy thing about "As You Were" that is reminiscent of Wodehouse is how Kuttner fills it with oblique learned references; examples: Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break" and J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time. Kuttner just uses the men's last names, not their first names or the titles of the works he is alluding to, assuming the reader is a fellow smart guy and will easily recognize what he is referring to. Of course, we 2022 readers can easily cheat by typing keywords into our search engine of choice.
The plot of this long (35 pages!) and boring story concerns how the three male leads have odd, and oddly similar, dreams and how, from out of nowhere, Owen finds a blue enamel clock in his room that he can use to turn back time. Owen likens the clock to a "backspacer" on a typewriter: by setting the clock back, say, 15 minutes, the universe reverts to how it was a quarter hour ago, with the difference that he himself retains his memories of the 15 minutes he just lived. Owen can act differently from his first go round and change history, though this turns out to be difficult, as many events turn out to be overdetermined. After some long boring scenes in which Owen figures out how to use the blue enamel clock, he employs it in an effort to make sure his reprehensible uncle signs a contract selling the film rights to his play to Claire. A major parallel plot thread revolves around the fact that Krafft needs his good luck charm--a stone frog named Maxl--to pursue his tesseract concentration experiments and he has lost it; it was apparently stolen by burglars, and we eventually learn Stumm faked the burglary for his own nefarious reasons.
In the end Stumm the villain suffers and Owen and Claire marry and live happily ever after. Who cares?
"New Bodies for Old" by Jack Vance
Five unmarried middle-class professionals are kicking back in the city of the future, where life is easy--too easy! With little danger or challenge, life is a bore, and people turn to drink. But maybe something new has appeared...the characters know of a mysterious business enterprise, The Chateau d'If, whose allusive and vague adverts promise adventure. Curious, but a little scared, the five guys decide to randomly select one of their number to investigate the Chateau. The youngest, Zaer, loses the dice throw, and heads over to the secretive place, promising to meet his friends at an appointed time to describe his experience. He does not return!
Some time later one of the remaining four friends spots Zaer--Zaer is now one of the richest of the rich, living in great luxury. The four men confront Zaer for having failed to live up to his end of the agreement and tell them all about the Chateau, but he acts like he doesn't know them.
The title of the story here in Thrilling Wonder gives away what is going on, of course. A second member of the group, Mario, goes to the Chateau and is drugged; when he wakes he is no longer in the healthy 29-year-old body he had when he fell unconscious--he is now in the wretched hulk of a weak middle-aged fatso! A note in his pocket briefs him on the identity associated with his new body, that of a quite successful businessman, the owner of an aircar manufacturing firm, and urges him to run the business competently, as, if he can pay the Chateau ten million dollars, he can purchase from them a perfect body!
The rest of the story is about how Mario launches several operations that get him his body back, punish the villains, win him a beautiful wife (that is her on the cover, wearing no facial expression even though she just shot down the lead villain), and even solve the problem of human boredom in a classic sense-of-wonder ending--Mario sets in motion the creation of a star drive that will open the universe to human exploration and endless adventure!
An interesting note: In 2015 we read Vance's novel Bad Ronald, about a creep who lives hidden in a family's house and spies on them. A similar circumstance prevails in the last few chapters of "New Bodies for Old." The owner of the Chateau is assuaging his own boredom by building the world's tallest building--three miles high! Mario is an architect, and ingeniously gets himself on the staff of the firm that is working on the tower. He has secret passages installed in the top floor of the 900-story building, the floor into which the owner of the Chateau moves his living quarters and the operating theater where people's personalities are moved from body to body; from within these passages Mario spies on his enemy.
"New Bodies for Old"/"Chateau d'If" is a very entertaining story, Vance expertly using all sorts of SF and detective-genre literary devices to great effect. The plot moves along quickly and always holds your interest, Vance offering evocative but economical descriptions of settings and people as well as sharp little philosophical and psychological insights. Vance's description of what it is like to be fat and unhealthy, from the point of view of somebody who is used to being fit, for example, is great. He employs fun metaphors. The characters all behave in ways that feel totally natural and believable, to the point that they are all easy to identify with. Strongly recommended.
"Battling Bolto" by L. Ron Hubbard
First Person Narrator 2 is a seven-foot-tall blacksmith from Urgo Major, a decent sort of bloke who goes to church and otherwise behaves himself and contributes to his community, forging shoes for the local six-footed beasts and repairing people's frying pans and so forth. A girl talks him into getting engaged. Then a professor who hawks robots comes to their backwoods planet and gives a sales presentation to a crowd (this guy seems more like a carnival barker or snake oil salesman than a professor, but, on second thought, those are pretty fine distinctions, aren't they?); in the crowd, a pickpocket from the prof's ship steals Narrator 2's watch, a family heirloom. In the ensuing fight, Narrator 2 displays his terrific strength and agility, impressing the professor. Soon our hero is aboard the prof's ship, making robot shells, his pay being beamed back to his fiancé, even though Narrator 2 was content living on his quiet little planet--smooth talkers have outwitted him again!
The prof is a scammer and our hero is slow to realize it. After having a guy dressed up in a robot suit demonstrate his wares to the citizens of unsophisticated planets, he sells them empty shells as if they are real robots that haven't been booted up yet. The duplicitous prof takes advantage of our narrator's heroic pugilistic ability by conning him into donning a robot suit he himself forged and fighting all comers, these contestants enticed by the promise of a cash prize if they can stay in the ring with the "boxing robot" for two rounds. The climax of the story comes when the prof manipulates our hero into having to fight a real robot, and then a robotic tracked pile driver; then follows the twist ending in which we learn the true nature of the prof, how the narrator achieves his revenge, and how his experiences have corrupted him.
"Battling Bolto" would reappear in a 1971 reprint magazine and in a 21st century Hubbard collection.
"A Walk in the Dark" by Arthur C. Clarke
A fun little horror story; Clarke does a great job portraying the stream of consciousness of a person in this sort of situation, and "A Walk in the Dark" is a compelling and smooth read, focused and tight. When I think of the novels by Clarke I read years and years ago, I think of them as long, slow, unfocused, full of digressions and advocacy of ideas with which I am not in tune, but when I have read Clarke's short stories during the life of this blog (e.g., "The Fires Within," "Transit of Earth," "Sunjammer," and "The Deep Range") I have often thought them quite good.
Clarke being widely acknowledged as one of the top three SF writers of his day, this story has been reprinted many times in multiple languages in Clarke collections and anthologies, including a "best of" collection, The Nine Billion Names of God.
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