Weird Tales Aug '39: M W Wellman, E H Price, P S Miller, F B Long & R Bloch

The long eldritch march continues!  I've made it my quest to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales, the magazine associated with H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and many others, printed in the 1930s, and only a handful of issues remain!  Today: August, 1939!  This issue is packed with work by authors I read, including poetry by Lovecraft, part of a serial by Howard, and a letter from Bloch, none of which I will talk about because I'll be busy talking about five stories from the issue.  Let's get to it!

"The Valley Was Still" by Manly Wade Wellman

Wellman was an expert on Southern history and wrote multiple books about the Confederacy and the American Civil War and here we have a fantasy story about the War Between the States.  "The Valley Was Still" is an acceptable filler piece; some might be annoyed by the fact that it seems to serve as a bit of Southern apologia, a wish fulfillment fantasy that offers Lost Cause enthusiasts an explanation for the Confederacy's defeat that valorizes Southerners.

It is the early Civil War, and Southern soldiers are full of confidence, having won several battles against the Union Army.  A Confederate cavalryman scouts out a small village in a valley and discovers a Union detachment in an eerie condition--the men are all asleep, a deep sleep much like death!  A local civilian with a long beard appears--he claims that he cast a spell upon the Union troops, using this here spell book.  A glance at the spell book convinces the cavalryman that this wizard gets his power from the Devil!  Wellman has been emphasizing how pious Southern gentlemen are, and so this does not sit well with the scout.  The wizard further disturbs our guy by suggesting that he will use his magic power to become ruler of America.  When the cavalryman objects to all this ungentlemanly warfare business, the witch-man warns that having been summoned, old Scratch can't be put back in his box safely--if his aid is refused, Satan will side with the Union as a means of punishing the people who scorned him!  The protagonist kills the wizard anyway and reads the spell that wakes up the Union troops, this being the gentlemanly way to fight the war.  The South of course goes on to lose the war, which the scout knows is because Lucifer himself backed the Stars and Stripes!

This story has been a hit for Wellman, and was even turned into an episode of The Twilight Zone which I guess I forgot about.  Leo Margulies included "The Valley Was Still" in his 1961 anthology The Unexpected, Frank McSherry, Jr. reprinted it in The Fantastic Civil War, and the story has reappeared in numerous other places.

"Apprentice Magician" by E. Hoffman Price

The narrator of "Apprentice Magician" is a poorly-educated Georgia farm boy with the odd first name of "Panther," and Price does a good job of giving this kid's voice a convincing personality without burdening us with a lot of annoying phonetic spelling.  Panther has a great uncle in California who is reputedly rich, so after he graduates from high school his family sends Panther out to stay with "Uncle Simon" in hopes the wealthy old geezer will remember his East Coast relatives in his will instead of just endowing all his moolah to some damn college.

Uncle Simon is a wizard with a library of books in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and takes on Panther as his apprentice!  Soon Panther is walking on red hot coals and casting spells.  Wow!  Even more exciting, he has enticing visions of a beautiful woman who sometimes wears a lioness's head instead of her own human head--Sekhmet, the Egyptian fire goddess!  Ninety-year-old Simon has been trying to get in touch with Sekhmet for decades, without success, but here our boy Panther is already getting the eye from her!  Will Panther consummate a relationship with the beautiful goddess, maybe even become her consort in the World of Fire?  Or will Uncle Simon use his grandnephew as a means to getting his own ancient claws on the luscious Sekhmet?  Who will live and who will die?  And what about all that money Uncle Simon has conjured up?

A good black magic story, written in a smooth style and full of subtle natural jokes that don't undermine the sex and horror elements of the story--thumbs up!         

"Apprentice Magician" was included in that 1945 British pamphlet with the nude cover photo that reprinted Edmond Hamilton's "The Six Sleepers" under the title Tiger Girl.  Hubba hubba!  "Apprentice Magician" has also been reprinted in the 1967 Price collection Strange Gateways and Vic Ghidalia's 1972 anthology Wizards and Warlocks.

"Spawn" by P. Schuyler Miller

If you can tear your eyes away from Tiger Girl for a few minutes let's talk about P. Schuyler Miller and his off-the-wall monster and gore epic "Spawn."  Miller produced quite a volume of short stories in the Thirties and Forties and then in the Fifties, Sixties and early Seventies he was the book reviewer for Astounding (after 1960 titled Analog.)  In 2018 I gave a mixed review to his story "As Never Was," saying it was well-written but was frustrating because it boldly and intentionally made no sense, and in 2023 I read his "Bird Walk" and enjoyed it, suggesting it shared many characteristics with the work of Jack Vance.  Seeing as this guy was an important member of  John W. Campbell, Jr.'s crew and I have liked his writing style thus far, I should read more of his work, and here today I have an opportunity to do so.

After a little prologue that is half comedic and half profound about the odds against the appearance of life and of human beings in particular, "Spawn" introduces us to a pilot of an aircraft who is inebriated.  Yikes!  He looks down at the Andes and sees something mind-blowing--is that a mountain melting, exposing veins of gold?  A few days later some people aboard a ship, among them a German zoologist, themselves see something mind-blowing on the surface of the Atlantic--is that a giant blob monster devouring a pod of whales?  

The scene shifts to the politics of this future world, a world which has been split into five major powers.  The most important is the Central European bloc, ruled until recently by genius benevolent dictator Svadin, who just died during some kind of major international conference.  Svadin is laying in state as dignitaries from the Asian bloc, the Hispanic bloc, the North American bloc and the Anglo-Scandinavian bloc are paying their respects when he inexplicably comes back to life, even though he's already been embalmed!  The world surrenders all authority to this zombie, whose genius has only been enhanced by death and resurrection!

The scene shifts to Miami, where that zoologist witnesses the kaiju-sized blob monster ooze up onto the beach and eat scores of beachgoers, spitting out their clothes and bones after absorbing their flesh and ignoring the gunfire and bombs of government forces.

These various scenes all sound exciting in summary, but actually reading them in the magazine is a chore because Miller inflicts upon us readers overly long, repetitive, vague and cryptic descriptions that I guess he thinks are poetic but which are in fact mind-numbing sludge that obstruct the ability of these  melodramatic episodes to generate any interest or thrills in the reader.

Wave after wave, rising and falling and rising higher with the flooding tide. Waves rising to lap the sea-green tumulus, to bathe its redveined monstrousness whose crimson rills were fading to pink, to gray, to lucent white. Waves laving it, tickling its monstrous palate, pleasing it mightily; waves into which it subsided and left Miami’s white beaches naked for a league save for the windrows of heaped bones and the moist, bright rags that had been men’s condescension to the morality of men.

More politics follows.  In Latin America, a bloody revolution that Miller characterizes in racial terms erupts, inspired in part by the city-stomping of a giant humanoid monster made of gold and crystal whom primitive Indians worship as a god.  For all you gluttons for punishment out there, here's another sample of Miller's exhaustingly repetitive and vacuous prose:

Revolution stalking the upthrusting spine of a continent like a pestilence, sucking in crazed brown warriors from the montes, from the pampas, from barren deserts and steaming jungles. Blood of brown ancestors rising beneath white skins, behind blue eyes. Revolution like a flame sweeping through brown man and white and mostly-white and half-white and very-little-white and back to the brown blood of ancient, feathered kings! Guns against machetes. Bayonets against razorwhetted knives. Poison gas against poison darts. 

The revolutionaries massacre the white elite of their countries and take over Latin America but are stopped at the northern border by a multinational army from the "white nations" plus everyone's favorite white-adjacent nation Japan (first Pocky and now this--how can we ever repay the sons and daughters of Nihon for all the good turns they have done us?)  Then that drunken pilot and the German zoologist, who have become Svadin's intimate advisors, and the benevolent living dead dictator himself, direct the construction of an apparatus that attracts the giant of gold and crystal so they can destroy the god through the use of special methods I won't describe here.  The Svadin team lays a similarly elaborate trap for the aquatic blob monster and destroy it in another long and tedious scene.

More tedium as the plot shifts from giant monsters to a conspiracy to overthrow Svadin.  Miller tells us that Svadin is an effective ruler, his computer-like calculations crafting policies that provide peace and prosperity, but, as the years go by, many grow to hate him as he becomes progressively less and less human--more and more like a cold-hearted machine in his role as ruler of Earth and more and more like a decadent pervert in his not-quite secret private life.  A small cadre of smarty smarts infiltrates and explores the dungeons under his Budapest castle, seeking a secret door through which to invade his sanctum and learns his secrets.  A worldwide revolt breaks out and the global civil war climaxes with Svadin and the ten little Svadins that have budded off of his bloated undead carcass being burned by a mob.

In the final pages of the story we get the explanation for all these bizarre events--spores of life from outer space that landed in the Andes, the ocean and on Svadin.  Oh, brother.    

There is a lot of disgusting horror stuff in "Spawn" (the most compelling parts of the story are Miller's repeated descriptions of the risen Svadin's animated corpse, its sagging flesh and blue skin and smell of formaldehyde and so on) but that can't save Miller's story from its many weaknesses in style, pacing, and characterization.  "Spawn" would work better as a Japanese movie, what with all its Brobdingnagian monsters attacking cities and being attacked in turn by aircraft and all the sickening body horror, than it does in the medium of the written word.  As I copyedit this blog post, 24 hours after reading "Spawn" and drafting this attack on it, my memory of the insane events the story depicts endures while my memory of how bad Miller's writing was fades, so I am feeling more warmly towards the story than I was while I was reading it.  Still thumbs down, though.     

Somewhat to my surprise, "Spawn" has been reprinted quite a few times.  It is available in the 1952 Miller collection The Titan, a 1976 issue of the US edition of Perry Rhodan (editor Forrest J. Ackerman calls "Spawn" "a masterpiece"), Michel Parry's 1978 anthology The Rivals of King Kong: A Rampage of Beasts and still more places.

"Giants in the Sky" by Frank Belknap Long

Here's another story with a wild and crazy narrative that is marred by bad writing.  Long in "Giants in the Sky" describes every little breath and eye movement of his characters, and includes all sorts of other superfluous dross in his text which does not move the plot or add to atmosphere, making his story much longer and less compelling than it might be.

A young couple, both of them meteorologists, are atop a Swiss mountain.  Suddenly the world turns dark!  When light returns, the sun is not a sphere but a cube!  And then the female member of the pair is snatched up and away by some bright form!

Planet Icurus is billions of miles in circumference; Earth is only like 25,000 miles in circumference.  (One of the many hiccups in Long's spotty prose is that he compares the circumference of Icurus with the "semi-diameter" of Earth; why would you do this as a writer, and why would you not fix it as an editor?)  The Earth is like the size of a pebble to the natives of Icurus, who are more or less humanoid but whose eyes are on the end of long stalks, a fact which Virgil Finlay illustrates in the pages of the magazine, if not on the cover of Worlds of the Weird, alas. The Icuruns are highly advanced and have all manner of starships and super microscopes and devices that can halt time within a prescribed area and so forth.  These jokers have captured our Solar System in an energy net and dragged it to Icurus; on the way something went wrong with the sun so they replaced old Sol with a radiating cube.  Then they threw a small net down to scoop up an Earthling and put her on a slide so they could observe her.

There are three Icurun characters in Long's story: the oldest and wisest individual of their race, plus a young man and a young woman who are a married couple.  In the same way that Ross Rocklynne in "Into Darkness" gave us what at first appeared to be incomprehensibly foreign aliens and then put them in a love/sex plot that mirrored ordinary life for everybody here on Earth, Long gives us these otherworldly aliens and then runs them through a standard love triangle scenario.  As we Earthmen are all too aware, Earthwomen are irresistible and the young male alien, through the lens of his microscope, falls in love with the meteorologist, exciting the jealousy of his wife.  But then the Icuruns spot an odd light, an explosion, on the surface of Earth.  The aliens use their net to collect a sample from the outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere and deposit it on the slide next to the lady meteorologist--it is Earth's first space ship, and out of it emerges the male meteorologist!  The two weather experts embrace and the male alien is broken hearted, laying down in the dirt in despair likes he's in Horace's eleventh Epode or a fan of The Cure or something.  But then his forgiving wife comforts him.  Both couples, the humans stranded on a giant microscope slide and the gargantuan aliens whose relationship has been shaken by exposure to an exotic lady, realize that the universe can throw a lot of crazy stuff at you, but what really matters is love, and with love you can weather any storm.

I'm going to call this one acceptable filler; it is shorter and tighter than Miller's story and its "love is the thing that matters" theme is a little more congenial, more human. than Miller's "even the most improbable things will happen because space and time are so vast" theme.

Not a hit, it looks like "Giants in the Sky" has only been reprinted in Leo Margulies' 1965 anthology Worlds of Weird.  As of today we've read five of the seven stories in Worlds of Weird: Robert E. Howard's "The Valley of the Worm," Edmond Hamilton's "He That Hath Wings," Clark Ashton Smith's "Mother of Toads," and David H. Keller's "The Thing in the Cellar."    

"The Totem-Pole" by Robert Bloch 

Wow, it's another story immortalized in one of those strange British pamphlets of "American Fiction" with a nude woman on the cover.  (Don't worry, though, Tiger Girl--you're still #1 with us.)  "The Totem-Pole" was first reprinted in this odd artifact of a world in which pornography was not ubiquitous, Sea Kissed, which collected four Bloch stories, including three we've already read (some under alternate titles): "The Black Kiss," "Beetles," and "Waxworks."  "The Totem-Pole" would later reappear in the 1987 hardcover collection Midnight Pleasures and its 1991 paperback edition, a high quality scan of the cover of which has eluded me.  

Bloch starts his story with a peroration about how the uniformed attendants at museums never talk to you and so remain totally nondescript and totally forgettable.  I found this amusing because for two years or so, every time I went to the National Gallery of Art, and I was going often, one of the attendants would rush over to me to ask me if I had any questions about the pieces on display, a sort of creepy look on his face, and this guy made me so uncomfortable that I started going to the museum less often.  

Anyway, this is one of those stories in which the bulk of the story doesn't happen to the narrator, but is related to the narrator by another character.  Our narrator is at a bar and a museum attendant in obvious distress runs in, drinks heavily, and then tells our narrator his story.  This guy works on that floor of the museum which displays American Indian artifacts, and a new artifact recently came in, a totem pole depicting six human heads looking the same direction, one atop the other, and decorated with arms along its sides.  This is a newly constructed totem pole; the junior member of the expedition that collected it, a fat guy, explained that it was built for him as a gift by the medicine man of the Alaskan tribe the expedition was staying with.  The leader of the expedition died up there, you know, of natural causes, said fatso.

By the simplest of methods, the museum attendant has figured out that the fat guy murdered the head of the expedition so he could take credit for the expedition's success and then murdered a bunch of the Alaskan natives who were witnesses.  The totem pole began talking, and the attendant came to realize that the faces on it were representations of the five native murder victims and the white expedition leader, whose head is on top.  It seems the medicine man knew fatso slew those six men and then imbued this totem pole with the souls of fatso's victims so they could achieve revenge.

Fatso decided to destroy the totem pole with fire, but when he went into the room with the pole, carrying matches and kerosene, the attendant, keeping out of the way in another part of the museum, heard fatso's screams and fled in terror.  Having calmed himself down by drinking and unburdening himself to our narrator, he and the narrator find a policeman and the three of them go into the museum to find the totem pole has grabbed the fat murderer with its arms and bitten him to death with its six sets of teeth.

This is an acceptable filler story, too long and pretty obvious but not obnoxiously bad.

**********

The Price story is quite good, and of the rest only Miller's is actually bad, and its wild plot is at least memorably strange instead of forgettably rote or derivative.  So a decent issue of Farnsworth Wright's magazine.  Stay tuned for a look at some of the fiction in the September 1939 issue!

Merril-approved 1958 stories by D Knight and C M Kornbluth

As you know, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are cherry picking stories from the alphabetical Honorable Mentions list at the back of Judith Merril's 1959 anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume.  In our last episode we started the "K"s and today we finish them with two big names, Damon Knight and C. M. Kornbluth.  I have mixed feelings about Knight, who of course is very important as an editor and penned some good stories like "I See You" and "Masks" but who can also come off as a snobby self-important jerk and produce some overrated lame stories like "To Serve Man" and garbage joke stories like "God's Nose." and "Maid to Measure."  As for Kornbluth, I tend to avoid him because I wasn't crazy about his celebrated story "The Marching Morons" and I always assume his stories are going to be over-the-top left-wing satires of business and a twenty-year career as a subaltern in academia has exposed me to a lifetime's worth of leftist dogma and would-be anti-capitalist humor.  

But, in a spirit of adventure, today I read two stories by both of these SF icons, confident that no matter how irritating or downright bad they might be, they will contribute something to the haphazard syllabus of my life-long SF education.

"The Enemy" by Damon Knight

A. E. van Vogt's many detractors love to talk about how a hostile review by Knight of our favorite Canadian's work allegedly ruined van Vogt's career, so in my mind Knight and van Vogt are inextricably linked.  So when I read "The Enemy" I kept thinking of some of van Vogt's best stories, the original magazine versions of "The Rull" and "Black Destroyer," with which "The Enemy" bears many similarities.       

I may sometimes say crappy things about Knight and his work, but not this time; "The Enemy" is a very good classic science fiction story with space suits and other futuristic technology, hostile aliens, danger and violence, and sense of wonder elements including an ambiguous ending that leaves you unsure what wonderful or horrible fate awaits mankind.  I can enthusiastically endorse this one.

It is the future and the Solar System has been colonized--many people even live their whole lives in space stations, it seems.  Our protagonist is a sixteen-year-old girl, a member of what seems to be a marginalized religious or ethnic group who have had to live separate from the rest of humanity, maybe meant to remind you of the Jews or the Roma or Mormons or something.  These people have become resourceful in their struggle to survive, and as the story begins the girl is left alone on a planetoid, charged with the task of surveying it and mining it of the metal her people require.

Knight does a great job describing the planetoid and the equipment and techniques the girl uses to accomplish her mission, bringing everything vividly to life with economy so readers can visualize what is going on and share the girl's emotions without having to process or wade through a lot of trivia or unnecessary dialogue and exposition.  For example, Knight lets us know in an understated way that the human race has again and again uncovered evidence that the Solar System thousands of years ago was inhabited by intelligent spacefaring beings--Knight doesn't have to tell us how awesome this is or even emphasize that it is mind-blowing because it is essentially awesome, and going on and on about it would only cheapen it.

The girl makes first contact with one of the ancient aliens--or one of their self-motivated life-like artifacts--which has been in hibernation on this planetoid for millennia.  The creature gives off an aura of absolute evil, and our heroine feels dutybound to warn the human race about it and to try to prevent its escape from the planetoid.  But circumstances arise such that human and ancient monster can only survive if they cooperate!  Knight does just a good a job describing the alien and its and the human teen's struggles against each other and against the environment as he did describing the earlier mining and exploring scenes, and keeps the reader in suspense the whole time.  Can these two products of radically different civilizations really work together, or will one double cross the other?  Who will live and who will die?  Is the very future of humanity in peril?

Thumbs up for "The Enemy," a great piece of science fiction.  "The Enemy" first appeared in Venture (that is where I read it) and in 1961 was included in the French edition of F&SF (Venture was a sister publication of F&SF) and has been reprinted in the many editions of the Knight collections Far Out and The Best of Damon Knight.

Both Fiction #88 and the British 1978 edition of Far Out feature illustrations 
inspired by "The Enemy" on their covers

"Idiot Stick" by Damon Knight

"Idiot Stick" debuted in the fourth volume of Frederik Pohl's famous anthology series, Star Science Fiction.  I'm reading it from a scan of the aforementioned collection Far Out.

This story is mediocre; I guess it is a parable about European imperialism and Cold War foreign policy or something, but long stretches of it are boring and as a whole it is neither particularly interesting nor exciting.  Knight doesn't bother to build characters or suspense or offer any other literary or entertainment values, and the most crucial component of the plot happens off screen; "Idiot Stick" is sort of like a bland history article from the near future.  Though I guess the message of the story, that it takes guts and self-sacrifice for a society to succeed, is not a bad one.

An alien space ship lands in the greatest state in the union.  Its occupants are apparently friendly (and able to neutralize all our weapons) and pay native labor in drugs so addictive that even rich people are soon clamoring to join the aliens' work crews.  The aliens issue tools to their drug-addicted workforce that, through inexplicable instrumentalities, move earth or erect walls or whatever; these tools resemble rods or sticks and what feat a given tool performs at any given moment is determined by what tab has been inserted in its butt.  By changing tabs, a tool's function can be changed, and while the E.T.s hand out the tools liberally and don't seem to care that many are stolen, they are more discriminating about the tabs.

At the direction of the aliens, who don't like to get their hands dirty, the human labor force constructs a huge building and then assembles from an array of parts a lot of mysterious machinery within it.  (Knight describes this construction in some detail, and these passages are sort of tedious; Knight's speculative technology in "The Enemy" is comprehensible and believable, but the point of the advanced technology in "Idiot Stick" is that it is so beyond human experience that it is practically magic, so it is boring.)  What is the purpose of this building?  One of the aliens gets drunk and the truth slips out--E.T. is here to blow up our home!  The aliens have a galaxy-spanning empire, and fear attack from extragalactic aliens.  Blowing up the Earth will create a cloud of dust that will serve as a sort of fortification or obstacle to extragalactic attack, forcing potential invaders to fly more slowly through this region of space.  

The alien authorities deny the story, and the human race is divided on whether or not they believe it; fewer people show up to work on the aliens' construction site but the aliens just increase their rate of pay and the ranks of the alien-employed swell again.

Some humans want to attack the aliens, who after all are not very numerous, but of course our weapons don't work on them--the aliens' own tools can probably be used as a weapon with the correct tab, but whenever a human scientist has tried to alter a tab and insert it into a tool, the tool has exploded, blowing up an area the size of twenty or thirty city blocks.

You might consider it a plot hole that no human thinks of suicide bombing the alien ship and construction site thusly.  Knight comes up with a different way for human guts and a willingness to sacrifice the self for the community to save the day.  Thousands of heroic volunteers around the world risk jamming altered tabs into tool butts--and explode--until one of the tabs, at random, turns out to be safe and to turn the tool into a powerful weapon.  This sort of tab is duplicated and then a human assault squad attacks the aliens and wipes them out, preventing Earth's demolition.

A story that casts the people of Earth in a role analogous to that of African or Asian natives manipulated as pawns in wars between European powers from the Age of Discovery up through World War II, or between the liberal West and Communist East in the Cold War era, is not a bad idea, and neither is a story about how the human race triumphs over adversity thanks to the self sacrifice of a small group of heroes.  (I guess we might see "Idiot Stick" as a sort of leftist wish fulfillment fantasy in which non-Westerners kill off Western interlopers by turning their superior technology against them.  Hopefully this story isn't foreshadowing the detonation of an Iranian atomic bomb in Tel Aviv, London or New York.)  But this story does not succeed as a piece of entertainment.  We'll call "Idiot Stick" barely acceptable filler.  The tale has been reprinted in anthologies like Lee Harding's Beyond Tomorrow and Invaders!, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.

"Theory of Rocketry" by C. M. Kornbluth

Merril lists the source of "Theory of Rocketry" as The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: 8th Series so I am reading it there.  Kornbluth, who wasn't known for taking care of his health (e. g., his pal Fred Pohl alleges he never brushed his teeth) had recently died at the age of 34 and the story in BF&SF8 is preceded by a page-long encomium in which F&SF editor Anthony Boucher tells us Kornbluth's work was "a perfect fusion" of "rousing adventurous storytelling," "scientific and sociological extrapolation, perceptive character study [and] highly literate prose."  If you say so, friend.

"Theory of Rocketry" has a satiric setting, depicting a near future United States characterized by conformism, hypocritical religiosity, militarism and television-watching.  Our main character is Edel, a high-school English teacher (Kornbluth flings lots of literary references at readers in this story, in particular references to Shakespeare's Henry V) who instructs classes of 70-odd students by reading to them from the Bible and turning on the television for them.  The students are all obedient empty-headed dolts, save one student, Foster, a hard-working genius who is determined to get excellent grades and actually understand the material--not just memorize so he can get a pass--so he can fulfill his dream of becoming a space man.  He sometimes talks about his father, giving the impression that Dad is a hero, an engineer who just narrowly missed becoming an astronaut himself.  When the genius kid is the first student in years to request a special college-level one-on-one course with our protagonist, Edel envisions himself as an Aristotle tutoring an Alexander, suffering the grand delusion that if Foster becomes the first man to conquer the moons of Jupiter it will be in part because he was molded by classic English literature wielded in the expert hands of Edel. 

Edel's grandiose dreams of being the teacher who helps mankind conquer outer space are disappointed.  For one thing, Foster's paper analyzing Henry V doesn't consider the play as a work of literature but rather as a work of propaganda, a device for maintaining order in Elizabeth's England, and Foster fully approves of this cold practical application of the arts.

For another: "Theory of Rocketry"'s theme of (false, hypocritical) conformity is put across early in the story when one of Edel's fellow teachers loses his job because he fills out his regular psychological survey honestly, exposing his true feelings, instead of checking all the boxes next to the approved, socially-acceptable, answers.  Edel has been corresponding with this poor sap, who is now working as an assistant tech at a factory.  Foster, to curry favor with the powers that be who can help him get into the space academy, swipes one of these letters, which exposes that Edel himself lies on the psychology surveys, and shows it to the authorities.  Edel is thus doomed to lose his job; however, his discovery that Foster's father is no hero engineer but a former bus driver living on disability who drinks and hits his genius son leavens the teacher's bitterness towards his single-minded and treacherous student.

The foundation and decorative facade of this story are sneering contempt for the American people, religious belief and economic life in a market society.  But the core of "Theory of Rocketry" is a well-structured and ably-written tale of human ambitions, relationships, and disappointments in which the characters all behave realistically and sympathetically, so I guess I have to admit it is good.  If even I think "Theory of Rocketry" is good, Kornbluth's cronies and fellow commies like Judith Merril must love it.  

"Theory of Rocketry" has been reprinted in Kornbluth collections and in Laurence M. Janifer's 1966 Masters' Choice, an anthology the contents of which were based on the answers of twenty SF professionals whom Janifer asked to list the five best SF stories of all time.  (At the back of the book Janifer lists all the stories that got votes and adds up how many votes each writer got--Heinlein got the most, Sturgeon and Lieber tie for second, and Kuttner and Moore tie for third; this is a pretty cool resource and maybe someday I'll use it the way I have been using these Merril Honorable Mention lists, to guide my reading and inspire me to read a little outside my comfort zone.)

"Reap the Dark Tide" AKA "Shark Ship" by C. M. Kornbluth

Merril cites the Kornbluth collection A Mile Beyond the Moon as the source of this story, so I am reading it there, even though in that collection it is titled "Shark Ship."  The story bears the title "Reap the Dark Tide" in the magazine Vanguard, in an issue with a surprisingly gruesome Ed Emshwiller cover.  Under whatever title, the story has been reprinted many times, including in Robert Silverberg's anthology Dark Stars.

It is the future!  In response to overpopulation, millions of people live on huge ships of metal that have no electricity, are driven by huge sails, and get all of their food and oil by capturing ton after ton of brit (swarms of tiny little fish and crustaceans) in huge nets.  (The future will be huge!)  Our story begins among a convoy of such ships which launched over a century ago, a convoy of seventy-five vessels with a collective population of 1.25 million--yes, each ship has close to 20,000 people aboard.  (I said "huge," didn't I?)

The crews of these ships pay obeisance weekly to a brief charter that exhorts them to never set foot on land; most of the crewmembers consider this an inviolable divine command.  So the ships have no access to new metal; as a result, women of the ships ceaselessly search for any slight spot of rust or tarnish, and if a ship loses the metal net with which it collects the essential brit, that ship and everybody on it is doomed.  (There is absolutely no slack in these ships' economies, so other ships in the convoy can't take on new passengers or sell net components or anything.)

The ship of which our main character is captain loses its net in a storm, apocalyptic news for the 20K people aboard.  But an attractive woman who has some book-learnin' offers hope!  She's an archivist and a former sex partner of the captain (officers aren't allowed to have wives or children, to prevent nepotism.)  She reports that in the oldest records of the ship she has found evidence that the the crew ignored the charter and did in fact send expeditions ashore!  This, I guess, gives the people who run the ship psychological permission to break the charter themselves.  So the captain, the woman archivist, and four other people who represent their demographics take a boat to Manhattan, which they find apparently deserted.  They uncover evidence that a stifling racist and overly religious society lived on the mainland and then collapsed.

Kornbluth abandons his characters and main narrative to deliver a history lesson on what happened to America after the convoy left, indulging in a broad satire that not only tells you ordinary people are stupid and religion is stupid but pointing out a thing you have already heard people point out a million times--popular literature, the cinema and TV are full of depictions of violence but people don't complain about that and instead try to suppress sexual expression.

This digression describes how an anti-sex and anti-natalist activist made money selling BDSM photos (no nudity) via mail and then began publication of DEATH magazine--the magazine was a hit and under this guy's influence America became a sex-hating death cult and almost everybody was murdered or committed suicide, depopulating the continent.

The narrative returns to the present and the six people from the ship are attacked by one of the few surviving bands of land people.  These people are fanatically devoted to the anti-sex BDSM death cult, and the archivist scares them off by stripping naked--so anti-sex are they that the sight of an attractive woman's bare body routs them.  The captain decides to lead his 20,000 people in an effort to colonize the land.  The End.

Kornbluth does an OK job developing a speculative alternate society of people who live at sea with no electricity, their entire economy based on catching tiny aquatic creatures.  But otherwise this story is a failure.  The plot is not great, just kind of droning on and lacking a climax.  The human elements of the story--the characters and their relationships--are weak.  The main action scene (the storm) feels long and is boring.  The satirical history lesson is lame (parodying LIFE magazine by coming up with DEATH magazine is the kind of joke a child makes.)  Kornbluth's points about religion (it is stupid, survival lies in disobeying its tenets, and all religious people are hypocrites) and the media (too violent and too restrictive of sexual content) are banal and one-dimensional.  Gotta give "Shark Ship" AKA "Reap the Dark Tide" a thumbs down, but I guess readers angry at religion who hate the American people might enjoy it.  

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As followers of my twitter feed are aware, this recent weekend I went to the DC Big Flea in Chantilly, Virginia, a big antiques and collectibles show.  At a table of art books I picked up a volume on Alphonse Mucha, and the owner came over to sing the book's virtues in an effort to convince me to buy it.  I was  already a fan of Mucha and I already liked the book, and so this guy's earnest but hollow and even misleading pitches got on my nerves, actually making me feel worse about buying it than I had before he opened his yap, like I would be a sap if I actually bought the book.  (I did actually purchase it, after all.)  Similarly, I am an atheist, but the anti-religious arguments, if you can call them that, I find in SF stories are often so lame and mean-spirited that they make me feel more sympathetic to religious people than before I read them, and I am feeling some of that from Kornbluth today.

Still, these stories are better than I expected them to be, so this stretch of our tour of 1958 with Judith Merril as our guide has not been a bad one.

We'll get cracking on the 1958 "L"s soon enough, but I think we'll be visiting the World War II years for a few blog posts before we return to Merril and her Honorable Mentions list.

Merril-endorsed 1958 tales by S Jackson, D Keyes and J Kippax

If you buy a copy of Judith Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume for $2.00, a course I certainly recommend, you will find in the back of the 256-page book an alphabetical-by-author list of stories printed in 1958 and headed "Honorable Mentions."  Today we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are reading the lone "J" story, and two of the "K" stories. 

"The Omen" by Shirley Jackson   

I generally avoid Shirley Jackson because mainstream critics are always breathlessly telling you how great she is so I assume they are overdoing it out of some ulterior motive, and because when people tell me about "The Lottery," a story they make schoolkids read, my only response can be "Is that it?" But today we'll read "The Omen" in an effort to see what all the fuss is about. For some reason Merril cites the source of the story as The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Series 8, not the actual magazine issue in which it first appeared (the same issue of F&SF that printed Poul Anderson's "Backwardness" and reprinted Robert Bloch's "How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster," stories we read earlier this year) so I am dutifully reading "The Omen" in that anthology in case that version is updated or something.

"The Omen" is a cutesy humor story about a lovable grandmother and her adorable family and a nice young woman and her domineering, selfish, stifling, manipulative mother, so you know there is at least one realistic character is this story.  There is however, in my humble opinion, no actual SF content in the story, just a long series of purportedly funny coincidences.  What "The Omen" really is is a mundane mainstream story that looks at female relationships.

A sweet granny lives with her daughter, daughter's husband, and their two lovable kids.  Granny falls into some money unexpectedly and decides to go out and buy everybody in the family a gift.  She writes a vague shopping list which she loses on the bus the instant she sits down.

Then we have the pretty young woman who lives alone with her mother.  She has a steady boyfriend who has wanted to marry her for three years--she hasn't consented because her monstrous mother refuses to give her blessing; Mom doesn't want to live alone and goes on and on about how she will starve if the daughter leaves.  The attractive young lady has had it up to here with her mother and hurries out one day, exasperated, wishing she had the courage to disobey her mother and marry her guy.  She wishes she would find an omen that would give her the strength to pursue her own life and build her own family.  She gets on the wrong bus, finds the granny's cryptic list, and ends up in a part of town she has never been to before.  She has a series of adventures that seem to correspond to the brief notes on the list she has found, and the upshot of these adventures is that she finds the willpower to call up her boyfriend at his work and say she will marry him and Mom will just have to live with it.  These adventures involve encounters with other women and the highlight of these capers is her being mistaken for another woman.

Granny returns home with different gifts than her family asked for, but the kids still like their gifts.

I may be using the word "adventures" in describing Jackson's story here but this is not a thriller--"The Omen" is light-hearted and life-affirming, portraying no risk and no danger; for example, strangers all try to help granny--there are no Mike Tyson or George Floyd types in the story who try to rob her.

This is a competent, professionally put-together mainstream story that has very little provocative or surprising to say.  Why F&SF editor Anthony Boucher and Judith Merril think it is a big deal--or an SF story--is a little mysterious, but I guess Boucher thought Jackson's name on the cover might move copies and Merril hoped some of the high status of a New Yorker writer would rub off on SF--Merril is famous for shoehorning stories by prestigious mainstream figures into her anthologies and for striving to convince people that SF is just as good as the mainstream and distinctions between genres are bogus and so on.  Well, "The Omen" is not a bad story, so I guess I can't be too annoyed.

"The Trouble with Elmo" by Daniel Keyes

Like "The Lottery," "Flowers for Algernon" is one of those stories kids read in school--at least my class read it.  Having put up my first blog entry about the famous Shirley Jackson today we are also posting my first ever blog content about the famous Daniel Keyes!  It's a day of wonders!

Here we have another humor story, but whereas Jackson's "The Omen" was more or less realistic and set in the mundane real world, Keyes' "The Trouble With Elmo" is broad and silly and an actual science fiction story about the future, technology and ideas.

The story begins with an obese Senator haranguing the world's top expert on the computer that is running the world, a man whose failure to deactivate the computer (nicknamed Elmo) has led to him being demoted all the way to private.  Though a lowly private, our hero talks back to the senator, his unique skills being a sort of insurance policy, I guess.

Elmo was built and activated to solve a major world problem, but the solution the supercomputer instituted to that problem caused a new problem, and by solving that second problem Elmo triggered the arrival of a third problem, etc.  This has been going on for years.  The Senator is sure the computer is deliberately causing each of this succession of world-threatening problems in order to guarantee its own survival--after all, if Earth's problems are solved, Elmo will be deactivated.

Elmo solves the latest problem he has created by initiating first contact with space aliens and acquiring from them some valuable gas.  In exchange, the aliens want the landmass of Asia--Earth can keep the people.  Elmo foresees that Earth will need his services to manage the migration of the population of Asia to the rest of the world.

We get some run-of-the-mill political satire in the scenes of politicians in Washington responding to this deal.  Then the private solves everybody's problems by convincing the aliens to accept Elmo and himself as payment instead of Asia.  The private, in civilian life, was a fix-it man, and so likes the idea of solving the problems of alien civilizations in concert with Elmo, whom he considers a friend and is a good chess partner.

Lame filler.

"The Trouble with Elmo" has not been reprinted in America as far as I can tell, though it was included in foreign editions of Galaxy and in a Japanese collection of Keyes stories.  I am getting the impression that there has never been a Keyes collection printed in English, but maybe isfdb and wikipedia are steering me wrong (it wouldn't be the first time!)      

"Me, Myself and I" by John Kippax

Well, here's another guy I've never blogged about before.  Three excursions into virgin territory in one day!  John Kippax is the pen name of British writer and musician John Charles Hynam and he has quite a few short fiction credits at isfdb.  "Me, Myself and I" has a jokey title and I certainly hope it is not an absurdist humor story because it takes up 26 pages in the place I am reading it, Science Fantasy.

Thankfully, this is not an over-the-top joke piece, and Kippax turns out to have a smooth comfortable style, so that, while the plot is just OK and the ending something of a letdown, the story never feels boring or long.

Gordon Beale is one of those middle-class guys who rides the train in to the office everyday to work.  I was once one of those guys, though I lived in New York and Beale lives someplace in England and of course I was employed by the government so there wasn't really much work going on.  Also, at home I had a steady girlfriend who became my wife (that's "partner" to you kids) and Beale has nobody and is quite lonely.  

Beale is shy and standoffish and lacking in social skills so can't make friends or meet girls and spends his evenings alone at home--he's living alone but he neither likes it nor loves it.  But then one day on the train he finds a book he assumes somebody left by mistake.  He almost hands it over to the lost and found, but then he decides to take it home and read it.  It turns out to be a self help book with no author's name on it and no publication data on any page.  And like the note in Jackson's "The Omen," this strange document changes our protagonist's life--but this is a horror story so the change is not for the better!

The book encourages and guides Beale in an examination of his early life and uncovering of why he is a failure socially and then in the conception of a new version of himself that is a superior version of himself, similar but more bold, more assertive.  Visualizing a better Beale makes a better Beale actually appear!  A man who looks like Beale but is more confident, better able to focus and plan ahead, good at interacting with others, charming and persuasive.  This new Beale is christened "Harry," and goes from being a faint image to a solidly real man!  Gordon Beale starts staying home during the day while Harry Beale gets on the train and works in the office.  On the train Harry makes friends with a neighbor who is able to offer valuable connections and stock market advice.  At the office Harry bests Gordon's rival for the affections of a pretty young secretary (like 15 years younger than Gordon and Harry) and in the eyes of the boss, saving the company a stack of money by reexamining some figures.  Gordon thinks that after Harry has secured a promotion and had sex with the secretary and gotten her to agree to marry him he can dematerialize Harry and enjoy the newly salubrious and happy life Harry has secured for him.  But Harry has become too powerful to be dismissed!  And when it turns out Harry has stolen money from the company to buy jewelry for the secretary, Gordon has to go on the lam, staying in crappy hotels and hiding from the police!  But before the bobbies can drag him off to gaol with a "g," Gordon Beale keels over--Harry has found the book and has used it to create another Beale--Sam--and this has stretched the original's soul too thin.  At least I think that is what happened.

This story gets a passing grade but there are serious holes in the plot.  Where does the book come from?  If the book was instrumental in creating Harry, how come Harry doesn't know about it and also falls into its trap?  Gordon Beale is a fastidious rule-follower, bashful and lacking in initiative, so why does Harry turn into a brazen thief?  And since the theft was discovered, doesn't Harry also lose his job and his girl?  How does it help a now jobless and womanless Harry to create an additional duplicate who will also have to hide from the police?  I'm afraid Kippax didn't put enough energy into coming up with an ending for his story.

Besides the original magazine, you can find "Me, Myself and I" in a 2014 anthology of stories from Science Fantasy entitled The Daymakers.

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I don't consider any of today's stories good, but only Keyes' is actually bad.  Jackson's is the best because, while Kippax also has a good style, Jackson's plot is internally consistent and her characters all act in a believable way, while Kippax's plot goes off the rails a bit at the end.

More Merril-approved "K" stories from 1958 when next we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Merril-recommended '58 stories: Harrison, Herbert & High

In 1959 the fourth volume of Judith Merril's critically adored anthology series, SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy, was published, and in the back of the book was included a list three pages long of Honorable Mentions--stories from 1958 Merril thought good but which were not reprinted in the book.  We here at MPorcius Fiction Log been looking through this alphabetical list and investigating listed stories by authors who interest us, and today we'll read some of the "H" stories.

"Trainee for Mars" by Harry Harrison

Science fiction writers love the idea of super-realistic simulations, as we have seen so often on TV (space battleship Yamato has that recreation room where stressed out space crew can relive happy times back on Earth, and I hear that the ship in the new Star Trek has a "holodeck" where robots can play Sherlock Holmes and have sex) and in the cinema (I actually saw The Matrix when it was new and I have heard about The Truman Show.)  Here in "Trainee for Mars," Harrison envisions the government preparing in large pressure tanks elaborate mechanical simulations of conditions on Mars for use in immersive trainings of the first men who will land on Mars.

After the opening scene in which we witness a guy commit a blunder and get killed on Mars, only to learn it is just a simulation and he'll be OK, we learn that the military men running the space program are having a hell of a time finding anybody conscientious enough to send to Mars.  The first team to land on the red planet will consist of two astronauts, and they have run simulations of the Mars mission again and again and every time at least one member of each two-man team gets himself "killed."

The head of the Mars landing program tells our main character, one of the few trainees who has survived every simulated expedition he has been on, that the government shrinks have a theory--men are negligent during the simulations because they know it is a simulation and that their errors won't really kill them.  So it has been decided that the next simulation, in which our hero will participate, will be truly deadly--if a guy's space suit is ruptured the boffins won't open up the chamber to rescue him but instead let him freeze or asphyxiate to death!

The twist ending of Harrison's story is perhaps obvious.  Our hero and his partner--another man who has always survived the simulated missions--face many new challenges on the expedition they think is a deadly simulation, but overcome them.  The mission is almost over on its twenty-fourth day when the men realize this is no training exercise--they are really on Mars!  In the concluding scenes back on Earth, Harrison engages in psychological and sociological speculation about the ability of human beings to face the stresses of space flight and exploring other planets.

Thumbs up for "Trainee for Mars."  The adventure stuff works, the characters all behave realistically and sympathetically, and the psychological themes as well as the perhaps controversial theme of how individuals have to take risks and make sacrifices--and leaders perhaps have to treat their subordinates shabbily--for civilization to progress, are compelling.  A good selection by Merril.

In the same year it debuted in Fantastic Universe, "Trainee for Mars" was published in New Worlds, the British magazine then edited by John Carnell, and it would be included in multiple later Harrison collections, including War with the Robots.  I read the story in its original magazine version in a scan at the internet archive of FU.  

"Cease Fire" by Frank Herbert 

Here we have a story from Astounding by the author of Dune that would go on to be reprinted by famous editor and critic Damon Knight in A Century of Science Fiction and appear in The Best of Frank Herbert, so I guess it is fair to say this story represents Herbert in top form and has been embraced by SF tastemakers.  I hope I too can embrace it.  I'm reading the original Astounding version today.

"Cease Fire" is a well-written story in the classic mold of an Astounding story--it romanticizes science and the scientist, has some adventure elements, and also takes a provocative and perhaps counterintuitive stance that challenges conventional thinking.  John W. Campbell, Jr. strove in his own writing, and as editor of Astounding, to present to his readers stories that would "shake 'em up," as he put it to Barry Malzberg when they met in 1969, a meeting Malzberg chronicled in his 1982 essay on Campbell which you can read in Engines of the Night. 

"Cease Fire" takes place in the early Seventies, when the "Allies" are at war with some dangerous unnamed enemy in the Arctic--I'm guessing it's the god-damned commies, but there are really no clues.  Our main character was a chemist in civilian life who today is a corporal in the Army, manning a solo observation post; both the Allies and the enemy have detectors that can sense life, but luckily the Allies have a shield that can keep life forms like our hero from being detected by them.  

There is an engaging action scene in which the protagonist has to figure out if some life forms he has detected are enemy soldiers or just wild animals.  But the meat of the story is how he suddenly, in the middle of an engagement with the enemy, extrapolating from the principles of the life detector and shield, has an idea for a new device that can win the war for the Allies.  The middle part of the story consists of him trying to convince skeptical superiors his idea is legit and not the product of combat stress-induced madness or a shirker's plot to get off the front line.  The final part of the story covers the experiments that prove his idea is a workable one--he has invented a device that can remotely detonate any explosive, and not just the shells in an arms depot or the cartridges in a rifle magazine but even the gasoline in a motor car or the matches in a matchbook.  Our hero thinks this invention can not only win the current war, but will prevent all future war.  His superiors are not so sanguine--these cynical professional fighting men figure war will continue but take different forms, with a return to swords and archery and/or new and horrible poison gasses and bacteriological weapons.

In his 1930s stories like "Machine" and "Invaders" Campbell tried to get readers to consider that maybe even prima facie horrible things like being enslaved or conquered by space aliens could have a long term positive effect, and here in "Cease Fire" in Campbell's magazine, Herbert tries to get readers to consider that what would strike many as obviously beneficial development, the abolition of atomic bombs, heavy artillery and machine guns, might have a negative effect.  This adds a level of interest and sophistication to an already entertaining story that could have simply ended with victory over the foe and the dawning of an age of peace.   

Pretty good.

"Risk Economy" by Philip High 

Back in 2016 I read High's novel The Mad Metropolis and thought it merely acceptable.  "Risk Economy" will be only the second thing by High I have ever read, but since Merril liked it and since it was included in a 2002 "best of" collection we have reason to hope it will be better than the first thing I read by him.

Well, "Risk Economy" is a mediocre thing, the style bland and the ideas OK but not developed very far nor serving as the springboard for a compelling human story.  Another merely acceptable production from High.

Our protagonist is a spaceman, the first human to leave the Solar System!  For five years he has been travelling via hyperspace, passing by various stars and planets, his computer scanning them and cataloging data about them.  Today he returns to Earth.  He is well aware that while five years have passed for him, nine hundred years have passed on Earth, and his friend, the inventor of the hyperspace ship, and his sexy girlfriend, must be long dead.

Earth is not at all like what he expected.  Nobody cares about the data his computer has collected.  And his buddy the inventor and his sexy girlfriend are alive, and don't look that much older--but they don't remember him!  Ten years after he left, an immortality drug was discovered and everybody took it.  Even more amazing, this drug changes your genetic makeup so your kids are also immortal.  Quickly the world became overcrowded and there were food shortages and tremendous wars took place.  Eventually it was discovered that the human brain can only hold about 150 years worth of memories.  Bummer!  Luckily the inventor kept a diary back in the 20th century and has preserved it, so he knew to meet our protagonist, even if he doesn't remember him or even how he invented and built the star ship.

After the wars ended, the new government instituted a new economy which rendered the world relatively crime-free and war-free but also led to social and technological stagnation.  Robots and computers do all the work, and people get money that is keyed to their unique biological identifiers so nobody else can use it.  To receive money, people have to risk their lives, performing feats like walking a tightrope over a canyon or participating in a dangerous rocket car race or whatever.  A computer rates how risky the feat is; if you only have a small risk of getting killed (being a spectator in the stands at the rocket car race, for example) you only get a little money.  Taking a big risk (like driving one of the crash-prone rocket-propelled automobiles at the race) yields more money--if you live, of course.  People who choose to perform low-risk feats, of course, have to risk their lives relatively often.  Those who live through actions that were predicted to almost certainly kill them are permitted to live risk-free forever.

This system has caused widespread mental illness, as people are always on edge, plotting what life-threatening feat to essay next, obsessively weighing the ratio of risk to reward.  Even people who have earned risk-free immortality are not happy, having suffered physical or mental scars from their near-death experiences and being surrounded by unhappy people in a world where there is no productive work.  The hero of the story decides to return to outer space to hunt for a planet to live on, and he convinces his girlfriend to come with him.

With its focus on risk vs reward calculations and a planned economy in which nobody has to work, I would have expected this story to be a pointed attack or absurdist satire on capitalism and/or socialism but High doesn't really go there, that I can tell.  Similarly, unexpectedly being reunited with your genius friend and your sexy girlfriend and having them not even remember you offers the possibility of a powerfully tragic human story, but High doesn't fulfill the possibilities of this facet of his story, either.  It's like he came up with these ideas that have potential and then did nothing with them.  An acceptable but forgettable filler story is what we end up with here in "Risk Economy."

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The Harrison and Herbert stories are actually good, both authors exhibiting good writing style as well delivering scientific and adventure content, believable characters, some human emotion, and some thought-provoking ideas; Harrison and Herbert here offer good examples of what can be achieved in the traditional science fiction format.  High's story falls short on every metric, but not so short that it is irritating or boring, so he gets a pass.  All in all, Merril's 1958 "H"s have treated us pretty well.  On to "J" and "K"!  (Merril didn't give the nod to any "I" authors this year.)

SF Classics selected by T Carr: Rocklynne, Brackett, Kuttner & Moore, and Wollheim

When last we met, we noted that Terry Carr (remember when we read his novel Cirque?) included Lester del Rey's odd story "The Smallest God" in his 1978 anthology Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age.  Let's check out some other stories Carr reprinted in that book, after of course pointing out that we have already blogged about some of his selections: A. E. van Vogt's "The Vault of the Beast,"  Eric Frank Russell and Maurice G. Hugi's "The Mechanical Mice," and Robert A. Heinlein's "--And He Built a Crooked House--."  (And that, before this blog was conjured up from the black labyrinth of my mind and began to lurk the intertubes, I read still more of them, like Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps.")

"Into Darkness" by Ross Rocklynne (1940)

I have a poor memory, and so I wasn't sure if I had read "Into Darkness" before or not, so I dug through the archives to make certain and uncovered sobering evidence of how bad my memory really is--in 2018 I read and blogged about Rocklynne's story "Quietus," and then in 2023 I read and blogged about "Quietus" again, having totally forgotten I'd read it five years earlier.  Embarrassing!  (Is Nancy Pelosi going to engineer a campaign to have me deposed as head of this blog?)

Well, I'm pretty confident I haven't read Rocklynne's "Into Darkness" before (no, really), even though I own it in the collection Sun Destroyers (which is the other half of the Ace Double that reprinted Edmond Hamilton's A Yank at Valhalla), so let's have at it.  "Into Darkness" first saw print in Astonishing, edited by Fred Pohl.  I am reading the story, like all of today's stories, in the internet archive's scan of Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age, though of course I took a quick look at the magazine to see the (below average for him) Hannes Bok illo for "Into Darkness."

In his intro to the story, Carr suggests "Into Darkness" is "far out," and it definitely is an effort to blow your mind and inspire the famous "sense of wonder."  The universe is inhabited by creatures of pure energy, creatures millions of miles across, creatures that live for billions of years, creatures that absorb energy from stars, move planets about for fun, and can shift between any of the forty-seven different levels of hyperspace, each of which obeys different laws of physics.  Rocklynne's story is a sort of biography of one such creature, and we witness its early millennia, its adolescence and its growth to maturity.  Named "Darkness" by its mother, Sparkle, our main character is different than its fellows--smarter, more inquisitive, abandoning childish play earlier than others in its cohort and seeking to fulfill some purpose in its life.  (Presumably the kinds of smart kids who are thought to be the audience for science fiction, kids who love science and want to learn about the world around them and to accomplish something with their lives, are expected to identify with Darkness.)  Darkness yearns to resolve the riddle of what constitutes the meaning of life, to learn what is beyond the edge of the universe, and is not discouraged when one of the oldest of the energy beings, known as Oldster, warns such investigations lead to sadness and death! 

Darkness was named by Sparkle after the darkness at the edge of the universe, and insists on living up to its name and exploring that mysterious void.  Darkness devours a star bigger than any star it has ever seen, and with that energy breaches the edge of the universe and travels through the emptiness for millions of years.  Finally, Darkness comes to another universe much like the one it left.  There it meets another energy creature, but whereas Darkness has a purple core, this being has a green core.  Darkness falls in love, and proposes passing a life of exploration with its new acquaintance, but this creature would rather lead Darkness to a forty-eighth level of hyperspace Darkness has never heard about before and there take possession of our hero's purple core.  Darkness learns that the purpose of life is to create more life, which green-core energy creatures do by accepting into themselves purple cores...of course, without their cores, purple-core energy creatures wither and die.  (Woah, is this a story about how women will steal your life force and you should avoid having sex with them?)  Before it expires, Darkness creates a planet and seeds it with life-giving protoplasm, which I guess we are supposed to think is Earth.

I sort of expected Darkness to create the human race, but the revelation that these energy creatures reproduce sexually and that the male can only do the deed once--and that it is fatal!--was a surprise.  I'm not sure it is a good surprise, though, as the fact that they reproduce through sex makes the aliens in this story less alien and thus less mind-blowing.

"Into Darkness" is just alright; besides the somewhat disappointing ending, it feels a little long and repetitive, as we hear again and again that Darkness lives for millions of years and is millions of miles across and travels millions of miles and so on--stuff that is supposed to fill you with wonder ceases to be mind blowing with familiarity.  More conventional sense-of-wonder stories start out more or less mundane and then grow steadily more strange until the final page tries to blow you away with the idea that the universe is open to exploration and contains infinite adventure; "Into Darkness" starts out strange and by depicting life on an epic scale and actually becomes more mundane at the end (just like so many ordinary guys. the alien creature loses his heart to a girl.) 

"Into Darkness" has been reprinted in a few anthologies besides Carr's here, and was followed by three sequels, all of which can be found in that Ace Double collection I mentioned, The Sun Destroyers.

"Child of the Green Light" by Leigh Brackett (1942)

We've read a lot of science fiction and crime fiction by Leigh Brackett, wife of Edmond Hamilton and crony of Bogie and The Duke, but I don't think we've read this one before.  "Child of the Green Light" made its debut in Super Science Stories (this issue also has illustrations by Bok, images more characteristic of his work that are worth checking out) and was reprinted in a 1951 ish of Super Science and in a book I have owned since 2013, Martian Quest.  (Why do you buy these books if you don't read them?, asks my financial advisor.)   

"Child of the Green Light" is a somewhat confusing story as it depicts a crazy scenario that Brackett sketches out in a pithy style and doesn't really explain until the end, leaving me struggling at times to visualize what is going on.  Of course, the real meat of the story isn't its questionable science but themes of loyalty and sacrifice and one's relationship to his people--do you owe something to people you haven't met just because you share their blood or culture?  

A young man, naked, is living in or on a conglomeration of wrecked space ships (in Warhammer 40,000 we'd call this a "space hulk"), somehow surviving in the vacuum of space!  The space hulk is in the form of a disk or wheel, with a green light at its center.  The young man, who goes by the name of Son, is in communication telepathically with a being he calls Aona, who lives on the other side of a "Veil" with a capital "V," which is growing thinner all the time; I guess the Veil and the light are one and the same or closely related.  Aona is a female being whom he loves; though she calls him "Son" and could be said to have raised him, I guess their relationship has an erotic character or erotic potential, and they look forward to the time the Veil falls and they can be together.

Another ship appears and lands on the hulk, and from it emerges a multicultural expedition of men in space suits; some of them are Earth humans, other hail from Mars or one of the moons of Saturn. Through their dialogue we learn that that green light passed through the Solar System, attracting to it and carrying off space ships as it went and finally settling here near Mercury.  The green light is bathing the System in radiation that is radically accelerating the aging process in humans--soon civilization will collapse because nobody lives long enough to learn the science and engineering required to maintain a modern high-tech society.  This team, among whom is the last living physicist, constitutes humanity's last hope of destroying the green light before it is too late.

Son and Aona want to preserve the light, so Son stops the physicist from approaching it, killing the man in the process.  The ray guns of the humans have no effect on Son, but they are able to tie him up, however.  Through more dialogue we learn that Son is the only survivor among the passengers and crew of all the many ships brought here by the green light; he has an adult body now, but he was just a baby when his parents' ship was captured and his parents were killed five years ago.

Aona then explains more of what is going on.  She is native to another universe, where people are immortal.  Her universe suffered a cosmic cataclysm, and the resultant explosion destroyed most of her universe and threw a tiny surviving sliver of it (a sliver still big enough to include multiple planets) through the dark barrier between universes so it intersected with our universe.  Son has become a superman because his atoms are changing, starting to vibrate at the frequency of Aona's universe--currently, a fraction of his atoms are still in our dimension, while most are vibrating at the frequency of Aona's dimension.  Eventually he will join Aona's universe, I guess when all his atoms are vibrating on Aona's frequency, or maybe because the Veil has finally eroded.  This story is a bit confusing, as I said; sometimes I think we are meant to visualize universes are physically distinct with dark empty space--the "Between" with a capital "B"--separating them, like they are raisins in a cake, but other times it is suggested the different universe are parallel, inhabiting the same space but at different vibrations.

To save human civilization, the green light must be destroyed, which will separate the two universes.  The only way to destroy the green light is for Son to enter the light before he has fully transformed; the presence of alien atoms will cause the green light to expire and the universes to be separated; Son will, however, fall into the Between, forever barred from entering either our or Aona's universes.  Son, only now realizing that other living things beside he and Aona exist, and that he is the product (the "son") of a race and civilization distinct from Aona's, has to decide if he is going to destroy himself to save his people (about whom he knows almost nothing), or allow his people to expire so he can live in eternal bliss with Aona.

There is also a subplot about how a member of the expedition tries to murder all his comrades, become a superman, destroy the green light, and then become dictator of the Solar System.

"Child of the Green Light" features many themes we've seen before in Brackett's work and that of her husband--many Hamilton stories are about a planet or star whose people suffered a cosmic catastrophe and so they are moving their heavenly body into some other system, and many Hamilton stories depict radiation changing people, and I think that Brackett's novel The Big Jump, which I read before founding this blog, involved a guy stabbing people on his expedition in the back so he could bathe himself in radiation and become a superman.

This story is not bad, but I found it a little challenging to follow--Brackett provides a minimum of information, so I had to really pay attention to get what was going on, and I still am not sure it all makes sense.

"The Twonky" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (1942/1975)

I've read stacks of stuff by married couple Kuttner and Moore, things they produced individually as well as collaborations, but I haven't read this one; I kind of think I have been avoiding it because its title makes it sound like a joke story, and Kuttner's (many) humor pieces generally fall flat with me (sample MPorcius pans of Kuttner humor pieces: "Or Else," "The Ego Machine," and "See You Later.")  But let's give "The Twonky" a shot today.  

The publication history of "The Twonky," at least as described by Carr in his intro to the story here and by isfdb, presents a few mysteries.  Carr says "The Twonky" has always been attributed to Kuttner, but isfdb credits both Kuttner and Moore.  Carr points out that here in his book a line obliquely referring to World War II that has been left out of reprintings of the story in Kuttner collections has been restored, but isfdb lists the version here as a 1975 version first seen in the American book The Best of Henry Kuttner.  (The British book The Best of Kuttner 2, according to isfdb, reprints the 1942 version.)  I'm just going to read the version here in Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age and leave these mysteries to other investigators.

People in Kuttner and Moore stories are always popping in and out of different times and universes, and the first section of "The Twonky" finds us at a factory in our world that manufactures "console radio-phonograph combinations" and introduces us to a factory worker from the future who has somehow been transported to it.  Disoriented and suffering from amnesia, the man goes to a workbench and, using advanced techniques he knows instinctively, he builds a device from his native time, "The Twonky," but camouflages it so it looks exactly like the other radio-phonographs being pumped out of this mid-20th century factory.  When his mind is fully clear and he realizes how he got here, the workman travels back to the future.

A lot of Kuttner and Moore stories depict people interacting with the technology of a more advanced civilization (e. g., "Juke-Box," and "Shock,") and the second part of "The Twonky" is about a college professor who has just had a new radio-record player console delivered and is alone with it because his wife is off visiting relatives.  The console is a robot that, after scanning the prof and assessing his psychology, performs as a perfect servant, walking around the house washing dishes and lighting the prof's cigarettes and so forth.  But Carr in his intro told us that "The Twonky" is a warning about dictatorship, and, as those of us who follow the Cato Institute on Twitter are aware, a powerful entity which seems eager to help you can quickly become a tyrannical master, and the robot uses physical force to forbid the prof from listening to music or reading books or consuming food and drink of which it does not approve--the Twonky is the embodiment of the Nanny State!  And worse--it begins tinkering with people's minds so that they behave, and, if they try to dismantle it, killing them with a death ray!  

Thumbs up for "The Twonky."  The murders at the climax are a chilling surprise--because most of the story comes off as light-hearted and the characters are all likable, you don't expect them to be massacred but to have the plot resolved for them peacefully.  A good horror story.

When it first appeared in Astounding, "The Twonky" was printed under the penname often used by Kuttner and Moore, Lewis Padgett, and among the many collections and anthologies in which it has been reprinted is the 1954 Padgett collection Line to Tomorrow, which has a great Mitchell Hooks cover.

"Storm Warning" by Donald A. Wollheim (1942)

"Storm Warning," by major SF editor Donald A. Wollheim (who made a recent appearance on my twitter feed), made its first appearance in Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, where it was illustrated by another important SF editor, Damon Knight.  Editors seem to have liked the story--Groff Conklin and Robert Silverberg both included it in invasion-themed anthologies.

Today I am not on board with all these editors; "Storm Warning" is a kind of boring story full of descriptions of air movements and the movements of clouds and odd smells and temperatures.  Have to give this one a thumbs down.

Our narrator is a meteorologist living in Wyoming.  A meteor is seen landing a few miles away in the desert.  He and a fellow weatherman ride horses into the desert to see if they can find the meteorites.  The temperatures they encounter and the smells they experience feel a little off.  Also, an unusual storm seems to be brewing.  They find some hollow crystalline spheres taller than a man; no doubt that are the meteorites, and they are cracked open.  The storm hits, and the men witness what appears to be bodies of air pressing violently against each other, as if they were alive and fighting.  The meteorologists surmise that in Earth's atmosphere live invisible creatures whose bodies are akin to water vapor, and that somewhat similar alien creatures arrived on Earth in the glass globes, and that the native air creatures are fighting the invaders, who seek to remake our home planet's atmosphere in their own image.

I've told you many times that I don't like stories in which the characters are spectators instead of participants, and today I am telling you that I am not interested in descriptions of weather, either.  Another knock against "Storm Warning" is that it is repetitive--we hear about the smells and get descriptions of clouds again and again.  A weak choice from Carr; though Conklin and Silverberg disagree with me.

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The Kuttner and Moore story is the stand out, with Brackett in second place; these stories are about human beings and human relationships and the life choices we have to make, the way we have to balance our desires with our responsibilities.  Rocklynne's story is OK, but Wollheim's is like a filler story that lacks the sex and violence or twist ending that might make a filler story entertaining.  

Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age seems like a pretty good book.  Each story is preceded by an introduction of five or six pages which includes a list of references and not only covers biographical info on the author of the following story but tries to put his or her work in some kind of historical context and includes anecdotes about important SF people whose stories are not reproduced here, like John W. Campbell, Jr. and Hugo Gernsback; taken together these intros are like a history of SF in the period covered.  Pretty cool.