Lester del Rey: "Whom the Gods Love," "Though Dreamers Die," and "Fool's Errand"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading Early del Rey, a thick hardcover collection published in 1975, when I was four years old, that includes stories first published from 1938 to 1951 along with del Rey's memoirs of his career and his relationships with other SF figures.  We are making our way through this volume at a leisurely pace; in fact, I think it has been like four months since our last installment in this series of posts.  Let's blame it on a road trip to the Middle West and the always taxing holiday season and just welcome the fact that we are back on track today with our fifth blog post about Early del Rey, during which we will tackle three stories from the period 1943-1951.

Oh yeah, links to the first four episodes in this series:

"The Faithful," "Anything" and "Habit"

"The Smallest God," "The Stars Look Down," "Doubled in Brass," and "Reincarnate"
"Carillon of Skulls," "Done Without Eagles," and "My Name is Legion"
"Though Poppies Grow," "Lunar Landing," and "Fifth Freedom"

"Whom the Gods Love" (1943)

This is a sort of power and revenge fantasy.  Some kind of alien consciousness or immaterial being wakes up with amnesia in the body of a dead American pilot on a Pacific island, next to a crashed two-seater warplane in which lies another dead American.  The alien animates the body it occupies, and uses its ability to create matter out of ambient cosmic energy and manipulate it telekinetically to partially heal the body and to repair the aircraft.  Inspired by a bird flying by, the alien ignores the plane's damaged propeller and internal combustion engine and gives the plane's wings the ability to flap before climbing in and taking off.  When its occupied body gets hungry it makes food pop into existence, guided by memories of food found in the American airman's brain.  Similarly prompted by the airman's memories, it recognizes Allied aircraft as friendly and Japanese aircraft as hostile--the alien also can read minds, so knows the Japanese wish him ill.  (I told you this was a power fantasy--this alien can do anything.)  The alien gives the aircraft's guns, which are out of ammo, the ability to shoot energy bolts it can unerringly aim with its mind and wipes out an entire Japanese naval task force. 

Eventually the alien decides to finish repairing the body it is occupying, removing a bullet from the brain.  When the bullet is removed the airman comes back to life and the alien consciousness is forced out.  Without the alien's telekinesis to keep the motorless plane aloft, it goes down, but the resurrected American flyer bails out safely into American-held territory.

"Whom the Gods Love" is a merely acceptable action story that lacks suspense or characterization, but offers some entertainment through the astounding events it depicts and the way it portrays a high intelligence grappling with a totally novel milieu.  The story has not been reprinted outside the various editions of Early del Rey.

In the text following "Whom the Gods Love," del Rey talks a little about the rage felt by Americans towards the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, saying "Given the right provocation, we are all racist bigots, I fear," and admitting he shared some of that animosity, but also mentioning that he made one of the heroes in "Nerves" a Japanese as a way of combatting such racism.  Then he talks about his own experiences doing war work, manufacturing parts of DC-3s, bragging about how his employers were amazed by how good he was with tools.

"Though Dreamers Die" (1944)

After telling us how he excelled as a sheet metal worker and how he enjoys such work as much as he does writing, del Rey talks a little about his relationship with Robert Moore Williams.  Williams, as del Rey tells it, wrote some very good stories for Astounding, including "Robots' Return," which we read back in 2018, but then decided to churn out "routine stories" for Amazing instead of expending the effort required to meet Astounding and Unknown editor John W. Campbell, Jr's exacting standards.  (We've read good stories by Williams, like the aforementioned robot story and "The Counterfeiter" and "Death Sentence," but also a bunch of things of his that are mediocre or bad, like "Jongor of Lost Land," "The Return of Jongor," "Red Death of Mars" and "Zanthar at Trip's End.")  Del Rey was so impressed by "Robots' Return" that he got permission from Williams to write a prequel to it; entitled "Though Dreamers Die," Campbell printed in Astounding and it has reappeared in several robot-themed anthologies since then.

"Though Dreamers Die" is sentimental and to my mind somewhat silly, but then I don't anthropomorphize robots the way many people do.

Just when humanity was about to conquer the galaxy, when the first star ship was just weeks from completion, a Plague with a capital "P" struck Earth, killing almost everybody.  A small group of people were put into suspended animation on the star ship, which was operated by five of the latest, most advanced robots.

Our hero is one of the guys in suspended animation.  He is awoken by the robots after ninety years--they have found an Earth-like planet!  Unfortunately all the other people in suspended animation have died of the Plague--our protagonist, a man, is the last member of the human race!  There is a lot of melodramatic talk about how mankind's dreams have gone unfulfilled and how it is a cosmic joke that they found a planet suitable for colonization only after colonization was impossible.  But then the protagonist realizes that the robots can fulfill mankind's dream by reproducing themselves and building cities all across the galaxy.  The dream is independent of those who initially dreamed it!

This story is quite long for what it accomplishes, with lots of descriptions of the new planet--in particular a natural harbor that would be an ideal location for a beautiful city--and of the star ship as well as lots of flashbacks and exposition in which del Rey describes characters now dead.  But the real problem with the story is the whole premise--it makes no sense for robots to colonize the galaxy and build cities if no humans are left alive.  Why would human beings explore and colonize the galaxy?  To make their lives better, to satisfy the human desire to overcome obstacles and win renown.  Do machines have lives?  Do machines have desires?  Of course they don't.  What would the city built by robots be like?  Human cities are full of places to sleep, to conduct business and maintain order, to pursue pleasure, full of infrastructure to distribute food and water.  Robots don't need to sleep, they don't trade or commit crimes, they don't experience pleasure and they don't need food or water.  The romanticization of robots is one of the commonplaces of science fiction that I don't get.

We'll call it acceptable.

"Fool's Errand" (1951)

Between "Though Dreamers Die" and "Fool's Errand," del Rey talks about moving to New York and about writing the story "Kindness."   

"Fool's Errand" is a gimmicky joke story--the gimmick is actually much like that in the 1980s horror novel we just read, Late at Night by William Schoell, in which a person writes a book about an adventure she was in and then contrives to transport the book back in time so some of the other participants in the adventure have access to it before and during the adventure it describes, so they come to believe the book is prophetic.  (Oh, yeah, spoiler alert.)

In "Fool's Errand," people in 1989 discover an early manuscript of Nostradamus, one which lists all his prophecies but in less ambiguous verbiage.  All of these predictions prove accurate.  In the 23rd century, people want to make sure this manuscript is really Nostradamus' and not some kind of forgery, so they build a time machine and send a guy back to 14th-century Paris to try to find Nostradamus and confirm the pedigree of the manuscript.  The scientists estimate that the time traveler has only a week to accomplish his mission before he is brought back home automatically.  The time traveler is accidentally sent back in time too early, the time of Nostradamus' college days in Montpelier.  He rushes down to the university town, and by the time he gets there ten dats have already passed--he could disappear back to the future any moment!  He does manage to get to Nostradamus just in time.  The twist ending of the story is that N has not taken up the career of prophet yet--he only embarks on such a project because he acquires the copy of the manuscript the time traveler brought back with him to have authenticated when the time traveler is jerked back to the 23rd century before he can take the manuscript back.

Barely acceptable.  In the Forties, Campbell rejected "Fool's Errand," which del Rey admits is too obvious, but a few years later Robert A. W. Lowndes bought it for Science Fiction Quarterly.  In 1953 it was reprinted in an Australian magazine, and in 2009 in the del Rey collection War & Space.

**********

None of these stories is actually bad, but they aren't great either, relying on gimmicks and the exploitation of attitudes I just don't have--I don't care about Nostradamus, I don't romanticize robots, and I'm not particularly fired up about the Japanese imperialism, as horrible as it was, of 85 years ago.  These stories are not "timeless" and have a specific rather than a broad appeal.  They are competent, though, which we can't take for granted here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and read in conjunction with del Rey's memoirs, the stories are valuable for the student of SF as they offer insight into the world of the time and the workings of the professional SF community, so I'm still finding Early del Rey a quite worthwhile read.

Late at Night by William Schoell

In this state, the necromancer could do whatever it chose.  It could manipulate the island's forces to its own ends.  It could tap into the vast psychic buildup which was even now surrounding all of them.  

It could kill.

William Schoell has his own entry in Grady Hendrix and Will Errikson's Paperbacks from Hell, so I feel that Schoell's 1986 novel Late at Night qualifies as one of the famed Ps from H.  As followers of my account at the social media platform formerly known as Twitter--the world's most dangerous app!--may recall, I recently purchased for one single solitary dollar a copy of Late at Night at an antiques mall in Hagerstown, Maryland, a 1986 copy complete with embossed drops of blood on its cover and an ad for other "blood-chillers from Leisure Books" on its final page.  Our friends Grady and Will* describe Schoell's six novels for Leisure Books as "C-grade," which doesn't sound good, but Late at Night appears to be popular--it has been reprinted multiple times in our present 21st century (to which "C-grade" might also be applicable) and copies of the 1986 printing as well as the recent editions are not cheap on ebay.  Well, let's crack open my little blood-encrusted bargain and see what Late at Night is all about.

*UPDATE FEB 3, 2025: Will Errickson in the comments clarifies--it must have been Grady Hendrix who made this assessment, as Errickson himself has not read any Schoell.

Late at Night has an introduction that details the geography and history of Lammerty Island, which lies off the coast of Maine; this intro, somewhat jocular in tone ("Lammerty Island had it all!...many people would like to go to Lammerty Island....God help them when they get there!") is mostly a catalog of pirates, Indians, colonists, gangsters and feuding families killing each other in the good ol' days and residents in more recent days committing suicide.  Today the island is deserted, but students of the occult believe its history of bloodshed has left it awash in psychic energy and worthy of exploration. 

After the Introduction we've got a Prologue.  In a Boston restaurant a guy dumps his girlfriend because she is weird; he can't get over how much time she spends on her hobby--the occult--and her belief she has arcane powers.  Back in her apartment she decides to distract herself from her sadness by casting the most dangerous spell she has ever attempted!  As far as we readers can tell, she summons a dimly seen figure and an object which she seizes before it disappears.  The text is intentionally opaque--we don't learn the woman's name nor the specific purpose of the spell, and both the figure and the object are described in only the vaguest of terms.

Then come our 55 numbered chapters, followed by an Epilogue.  (My copy of Late at Night has like 360 pages of text, but the print is big so it is not terribly long.)  The book as a whole is divided into six Parts, "Arrival," "Reverberations," "Morning," "Afternoon," "Night" and "Late at Night."

Part One: Arrival

Young Lynn Overman has inherited Lammerty Island and all the property on it.  Schoell's clumsily written novel is full of contradictions--in the Introduction we are told people want to visit the island because of or in spite of its reputation as a center of psychic energy, but then in the very first chapter Lynn is told that nobody wants to buy it so it is valueless.  Not for the last time readers have to say "whatever" and just read on.  

Lynn is dating her wealthy lawyer, middle-aged John Evergreen and the two of them decide to spend a weekend on the island checking it out, and they bring with then a dozen of their colleagues and friends, so we end up with a cast of fourteen suspects/victims.  We've got the lawyer's domestic staff:  Eric the chauffer, Hans the handyman, Mrs. Plushing the cook, and two slim attractive servant girls.  And we've got the middle-class goofballs and their hangers-on: Lynn's aunt Gloria, a fat middle-aged gossip columnist and her young boyfriend, failed actor Jerry; John's cousin magazine writer Ernie; Lynn's best friend, the shy and overweight Betty, and her college friends, Andrea the psychic and Cynthia the soap opera star; and Lynn's former boyfriend, Anton the Rumanian concert pianist.  We have to hear about everybody's looks and personality; I guess trying to be funny, Schoell gives the characters silly personalities and reminds us again and again how fat the fat women are (one has "fingers thick as sausages" and "chunky arms and legs" and we witness another squeezing into tight clothes in front of a mirror) and how ugly the pianist is.  The characters all make lame obvious jokes.  More significantly, Schoell gives us reason to suspect that any of several of the educated young women could be the woman from the Prologue.

There is a lot of fat in Parts One and Two, before the real bloodshed begins.  Schoell describes the rooms and furniture of the guest house in which they are staying, and who is assigned what room by John the lawyer and where each is in geographical relation to the others.  None of this figures in the plot.  Schoell does little to make the island or guest house seem scary besides having the characters think cliched things like "This place gives me the creeps" until the seventh chapter when one of the pretty young servant girls hallucinates blood in a bathroom and has a kind of mental breakdown and runs around the house naked.  For some reason Schoell puts distance between this event and the reader--instead of witnessing it from the point of view of the servant girl herself or someone watching the girl, we hear about the episode in dialogue, that of Mrs. P the cook as she tells the other characters about it.  After dinner and drinks, quotidian events which Schoell describes in boring detail (who is sitting where, why the main course is late, blah blah blah) Ernie the writer and Andrea the psychic go outside to look for the remains of a shipwreck reputed to be nearby.

Part Two: Reverberations

More unnecessary descriptions of people's faces, more people experiencing creeping feelings, more clues as to which of the young female characters might be the girl who got dumped in the Prologue.  On their nighttime beach walk, Andrea tells Ernie about how the servant's hallucination of blood was probably the result of psychic echoes of a suicide attempt in the 19th century in the very same bathroom.  This idea, that the island is haunted, is soon abandoned by Schoell in favor of the idea that an evil wizard is the cause of all gruesome supernatural events. 

Back at the guest house, Ernie finds a horror paperback on a bookshelf--the novel is entitled Late at Night and is about a writer who goes to a haunted island with 13 other people--the people in this book within a book look like and do the same things as the people in Schoell's actual book.  Oh, brother.  The second servant girl hears voices and cannot sleep--she pees herself in terror (several characters urinate on themselves in this book) and then sees the ghost of a mutilated naked young woman.

Most importantly, Schoell indicates that one member of the party of 14 believes himself or herself to be an evil wizard--this individual feels he or she has transcended sex and become something like a god and Schoell refers to this individual with the pronoun "it" and the title "the necromancer."  (Like in that Van Der Graaf Generator song, "necromancer" is used as just a synonym for a generic magician here--this character's sorcery is not specifically concerned with or limited to communicating with or animating the dead.)

Part Three: Morning

Ernie can't find that paperback--did he dream it?  Most of the 14 decide to explore a decaying 19th- century mansion on the other side of a woods--Schoell puts some effort into making this place seem scary, describing how the facade looks like a face, how it smells, how hot air seems to move in and out of the house, like it is a breathing beast.  Gloria the middle-aged gossip columnist has remained at the guest house and Cynthia the actress leads the gossip columnist's young lover Jerry up to a remote room on the mansion's fourth floor and seduces him; their sexual congress is interrupted by the ugly pianist, Anton.  The two servant girls explore an underground passage that leads to the mansion's cellar and the necromancer uses its powers to direct thousands of vermin to attack them.  A legion of spiders devour one of the girls, reducing her to a skeleton (I don't think spiders actually eat that way, but whatever) while the other girl is skeletonized by white worms.  Schoell informs us that the spiders will then devour the worms, and then the rats will eat all the spiders, and then bats will eat all the rats.  Do bats in Maine eat rats?  When the rest of the party can't find the servant girls, Ernie, remembering how in the now-missing book the girls died in the basement, enters the basement to look for them--he finds the skeletons, and Schoell makes clear that the spiders and worms not only ate the girl's flesh, but their clothes.  (Ernie sees some rats, so I guess the bats didn't get them all.)

Part Four: Afternoon

Ernie doesn't tell the others about the skeletons, so search parties are formed and head out to look for the missing girls.  Anton the pianist tells Gloria about Jerry's tryst with Cynthia, leading to a scene--the gossip columnist slaps the actress in the face.  One example of Schoell's clumsy writing is the omniscient narrator's report that "The strike was so hard and so well-executed that it nearly took the younger woman's head off;" Cynthia doesn't act like she was nearly decapitated--on the next page we are told that the actress has "already chosen to ignore the whole thing" and is at the bar mixing herself a drink.  What is the point of the absurd exaggeration?  Is it a joke?  A similar example comes when the necromancer goes to a shed to transform in private (into what, is left unsaid) and Eric the chauffer catches it in the act--the nonbinary wizard assaults and kills Eric with an axe:

Suddenly his hand wasn't there any more.  Just a bleeding stump, discharging gallons of his precious bodily fluids.

Gallons?

Gloria runs out of the guest house alone and Jerry, whom we are told really really loves her even though he cheats on her all the time, goes after her but can't find her.  Gloria decides to climb to the top of the lighthouse, and a demon summoned by the necromancer follows her up there and pushes her out a window, down to her death.  Meanwhile, Cynthia has caught up to Jerry and they look for Gloria at the wrecked ship--they are eaten by red-eyed zombies.  While all this is happening Ernie is searching for the book and Angela the psychic is beginning to sense the presence of the necromancer, coming to realize the danger the party is in.

Part Five: Night     

The middle-aged lawyer John goes out into the dark alone to look for the servant girls; he gets lost and ends up at the ruins of an earlier, "original" mansion that burned down in the 18th century.  Mrs. Plushing the cook is bedridden with delirium and fever and Betty the fat girl is having a nervous breakdown.  Andrea endures a psychic attack from the necromancer, and senses that the necromancer has the power to create anything out of thin air and has used that power to kill the servant girls, Gloria, Jerry, and Cynthia.  Andrea also senses where the book is, so Ernie, Andrea and Anton bust into Lynn's room and recover the book from where it is hidden under the bed.  While the four are squabbling over the significance of the book and we readers are wondering if Lynn is the necromancer, the lights go out because the necromancer is "draining away the electrical energy" and in the dark the necromancer seizes the book out of the writer's hands.  When the lights come back on the four people in the bedroom try to figure out which of them, or who among the other members of the party, must have snatched the book and is probably the necromancer.

John the lawyer is dragged down into the gaping hole that was the original mansion's basement by a vine and his blood is sucked out by carnivorous plants which then tear his dead body to pieces.  This death scene is the most effective in the book; it is the least ridiculous, most importantly, and also the most moving because Schoell makes an effort to portray John responding to his imminent death in a way that reflects his personality.  The demise of the cook is perhaps the most absurd and overwritten death in the novel.  Mrs. Plushing's face swells up to double size while invisible blades cut through her limbs at the joints, and through her neck, dividing her body into individual parts.  These parts take on independent lives of their own, the limbs crawling around and the head rolling around, and attack Hans the handyman, scratching and biting.  There is a long scene of Hans fighting the animated body parts until they--and his injuries--disappear.  It was all an illusion!  Groan!  But then the invisible blades start cutting the handyman into parts, so he commits suicide.  The death of Hans brings to the fore the way how Schoell leaves ambiguous to what extent his silly monsters and outlandish psychic attacks are physical manifestations conjured by the necromancer and to what extent they are illusions that scare people to death or drive them to suicide. 

Having neglected Betty the fat girl, Schoell suddenly gives her some background and personality and we get a scene in which Anton the pianist, drunk, humiliates her--he has been flirting with her and built up her hopes to the point that she expects to marry him, but now he insults Betty to her face and even unzips his fly and waves his genitals at her.  Ernie punches the pianist's lights out. 

With fewer than 100 pages to go we learn that Lynn is the woman from the Prologue; she has mostly been offscreen, which weakens the potential impact of this revelation.  The spell Lynn cast in her Boston apartment was intended to give her a vision of one year into the future--she wanted to see if she would get another boyfriend!  ("I know that's silly, pre-feminist thinking," she admits while confessing to Andrea, Ernie and Anton.  Even the minds of psychic sorceresses are vulnerable to the ubiquitous oppressive influence of the patriarchy!)  In the future she found that book, Late at Night, on her night table, and she had brought it back with her to the present.  The identity of the shadowy figure remains a mystery.

Part Six: Late at Night

Andrea uses her powers to, again, determine the location of the book--it is at the 19th-century mansion.  Ernie ventures into the dark alone (why are all the characters in this book doing that?) to retrieve it; as he makes his way across the island, he wonders which of the survivors is the necromancer--Lynn, an admitted psychic?  Anton, who is always treating people like shit?  Andrea, another psychic and the woman he has decided he wants to spend the rest of his life with?  Anton appears and a tree falls on him, crushing his hands; this is supposed to be a big deal because he is a pianist, who creates his art and makes his money with his talented fingers, but the fact that Schoell never has Anton express or demonstrate a love for music or preoccupation with his career undermines this.  And seconds later another tree falls on him, crushing his head, besides.

Ernie gets his hands on the book, but seconds later the necromancer shows up and chops his head off with an axe--and the necromancer is revealed to be Betty the fat girl!  She is on a campaign of revenge against the world for being mean to her!  Andrea senses Ernie's death and goes to the mansion for the final showdown.  Betty takes on a demon form, all fangs and talons, but somehow Andrea outfights her with a pair of scissors, some matches, and lighter fluid.  Seeing the necromancer, in reptilian alien form, who killed two men by hacking them with an axe, and slew nine other people by summoning monsters or projecting mind-bending illusions, bested by a girl who doesn't even have a gun or a knife, was pretty deflating and anticlimactic.  As she lays dying, Betty the necromancer causes the mansion to explode in hopes of killing the psychic as well as herself.

The Epilogue takes place some 18 months later in Lynn's Boston apartment.  It is the second anniversary of her trip forward in time to collect the book.  Andrea, whom Lynn and the authorities have believed was killed in the explosion, shows up at her door.  Angela has the book with her--she wrote it and got it published.  Lynn's time travel spell, cast two years ago, was meant to send her forward in time one year, but in fact sent her forward two years, to today!  She'll be showing up any minute now!  After leaving the copy of Late at Night on the night table for past Lynn to collect in a few minutes, Andrea murders current Lynn with scissors to avenge Ernie--after all, it was Lynn's meddling with sorcery that ultimately got him and the others killed.

"C-grade" is too kind!  Late at Night is bad in almost every conceivable way.  None of the characters is likable or interesting, in particular the most important character, the necromancer, whose motives are a cipher and whose magic or psychic powers amount to the ability to do just any damn thing the author thinks of, meaning there is no consistent theme to the supernatural elements of the story.  Schoell also sloppily conflates psychic powers and magic--sometimes the psykers are just using their natural born powers to manipulate matter, other times they are casting spells they learned through much study--as if they are the same thing.  The book-that-is-coming-true gimmick is lame, and the book plays multiple roles in the story, none of them very well--the characters are all running around trying to find or hide or steal the book, for example, as if it is a powerful weapon or shield, but nobody ever uses the book to protect themselves or harm their enemies; people talk about how mystical or powerful or whatever the book is, but it is not like the necromancer needs any more power--she is already powerful enough to do whatever she feels like, including blowing up buildings and killing anybody she wants with trivial effort (except when the plot requires her not killing someone--then that person can just kill her with a pair of scissors.  And what is up with the scissors?  Schoell should have made the scissors significant, like a gift from Ernie or something Andrea or Ernie used in a hobby or at work, cutting out newspaper stories or typescripts or something.)  The mysteries of the identity of the woman in the Prologue and of the necromancer, and the big reveals, are not compelling, in part because Lynn and Betty get little screen time compared to Ernie, Angela and Anton.   And the gore scenes and sex scenes are more silly than scary, disturbing, or titillating. 

So the way the story is put together is not good.  And neither is the actual writing!  The writing is lacking in style and full of cliches; the later parts of the novel move at a decent pace, but the first two Parts are larded with extraneous detail about stuff that is boring.  Throughout the book we find sentences that seem to contradict earlier ones--for example, the handyman decides to take "the boat" off the island for help, as if he has seen one, and on the next page he is merely hoping that there is such a boat.  Many sentences feature distractingly bad word choices that should have been fixed by somebody at Leisure Books; here are a few I noted:  

They gathered outside the entrance to the house, and shook off the dust and smell of the mansion like dogs expelling water.

The comma is unnecessary, shaking off a smell makes no sense, a dog shaking off water moves its torso while a person removing dust moves his limbs, and "expel" is the wrong word.  Argh.  

The weeds were really high in the rear of the house, long green stalks the size of a small man's body.

Obviously this should be something like "the height of a short man" or just "four or five feet high."

He opened the door.  Two rats came hurling up a staircase behind it.

Maybe this is a typo for "hurtling"?  Not that "hurtling" is very good; "darting" is better for something small--we usually see "hurtling" for something large like a locomotive or a truck.

Pretty faces were, quite literally, a dime a dozen. 

Abuse of "literally" is not new.

Thumbs down!

**********

It's back to science fiction short stories from before I was born for our next episode.  Stay tuned, space cadets!

My Best Science Fiction Story: F Brown, M Leinster, F B Long, & T Sturgeon

In our last thrilling episode, we read a story by Sam Merwin, Jr. that appears in Oscar J. Friend and Leo Margulies' 1949 anthology My Best Science Fiction Story.  This hardcover volume contains 25 stories by "outstanding authors," and over the course of this blog's apocalyptic life we have talked about seven of them.  Roll out the links, MPorcius helots!

Robert Bloch: "Almost Human"

John W. Campbell, Jr.: "Blindness"

Edmond Hamilton: "The Inn Outside the World"

Henry Kuttner: "Don't Look Now"

A. E. van Vogt: "Project Spaceship"

Clark Ashton Smith: "The Uncharted Isle"

Sam Merwin, Jr. "The Carriers"

Let's read four more stories from My Best Science Fiction Story, those from titan of crime fiction Fredric Brown (I fear it is a joke story, but let's soldier on regardless), reliable pro Murray Leinster, the often disappointing Frank Belknap Long, and Grand Master Theodore Sturgeon.

"Nothing Sirius" by Fredric Brown (1944)

The most recent things we have read by Fredric Brown include a short story that I interpreted as a "satire" that suggests "modern life, the era of the radio and the motor car, is driving us crazy" and that I reported "unleashes a lot of speculative economics on us," a novel I called a "page-turner" but which I lamented included lots of "Psych 101 goop" and "pop psychology," and a World War II-era detective yarn in which an Axis agent disguises a baby as a monkey.  Let's see what wild stuff Brown has in store for readers in a story he was, apparently, quite proud of--as the title indicates, the stories in My Best Science Fiction Story were selected by the authors themselves.  "Nothing Sirius" debuted in Captain Future magazine, alongside the 17th Captain Future adventure, this one penned by William Morrison, and has been reprinted in many Brown collections.  I am reading it in the scan of 1977's Best of Fredric Brown at the internet archive.

Oy, "Nothing Sirius" is a yawn-inducing humor piece full of boring and obvious jokes that as you are trudging through it feels like it will never end.  Thumbs down!

Our narrator is a middle-aged married man; he and the wife are small business people.  They fly from planet to planet, setting up a tent full of coin-operated entertainment devices at each stop and then moving on.  In the space ship with them is their sexy daughter Ellen and the pilot of their ship, Johnny.  Johnny graduated from the space academy just two years ago, and one of the foundational jokes of the story is that Johnny is serious to a fault, a rule-follower who has no social skills and won't let his hair down to drink, smoke or chew the fat with the narrator and doesn't notice that Ellen has a crush on him.

One day the Johnny unexpectedly spots a new planet, and the narrator decides they should explore it on foot.  They come upon disconcerting evidence that Earth people have already been there.  They meet an old friend who tells them this planet has been kept a secret by the film production company that is renting it.  They also meet a beautiful movie star with whom Johnny falls in love at first sight, upsetting poor Ellen.  But then the narrator realizes that everything seems wrong, and proves that all the people and buildings on the planet, including their old pal and the actress, are just illusions, making them vanish.

The natives of the planet, people almost identical to little cockroaches, admit what is going on.  Like so many of the aliens in these old stories, they can read human minds, and they have been projecting those illusions, basing them on the memories of the narrator and his companions.  The bug people assert that their civilization and human civilization are totally incompatible--humans are concerned with material things, while the insect people are concerned with thought.  This planet has no mineral wealth and the soil is not fit for agriculture, so there is no reason for humans to ever come here.  

The four humans return to the ship.  Johnny has been shaken up by the experience of falling in love with an illusion projected by a telepathic bug, and for the first time in his life gets drunk.  This triggers or presages a welcome evolution of his personality--he becomes less stiff and serious and it is not long before he and Ellen are engaged.  

Though celebrated, "Nothing Serious" is totally lame filler with no drama or excitement.  All the SF stuff and all the jokes are banal.  Sad!

"The Lost Race" by Murray Leinster (1949)

Almost ten years ago we read an Edmond Hamilton story about an insane French botanist who wanted to reduce the speed of his life down to one-percent normal, "Alien Earth."  Five years ago we read a story by Leigh Brackett about a ruthless trapper who finds an anti-grav device factory in an abandoned Martian city, "Quest of the Starhope."  Three years ago we read a Ray Bradbury story attacking American culture and suggesting women manipulate men with their tears*, "The Concrete Mixer."   All three of these stories debuted in the same issue of Sam Merwin's Thrilling Wonder Stories, and today we (virtually) open the ish up again to read a fourth story offered therein, Murray Leinster's "The Lost Race."

*Like Charles Schulz, Ray Bradbury is a wholesome American institution whose brilliant work has broad appeal but which attentive readers may find surprisingly misogynistic.   

"The Lost Race" hasn't been reprinted much (though if you read German you can catch it in a 1966 issue of Utopia, and if Croatian is more your speed an issue of Sirius from 1985 has you covered), but it was one of the dozen stories that was included in the paperback version of My Best Science Fiction Story, so I can read Leinster's intro to it in the scan of that paperback at the internet archive.  Leinster talks about why he is particularly proud of the story and spoils all the min themes, telling us "The Lost Race" deals with the issue of the value of rocket fuel on the market, and that high value might impede the development of space travel, with psychic powers, and with how spacers will have to deal with the problem of boredom.

The first page of "The Lost Race" is more like a soap opera than a space opera.  Spaceman Jimmy Briggs is engaged to Sally; to amass enough money to marry her, he has signed up on a year-long space voyage.  The crew of the vessel is made up of eight men.  One of them is Danton, who is pathologically jealous about his wife Jane, who is Sally's best friend.  Another is Ken Howell.  Howell was engaged to Jane, but then while he was away on a voyage, Danton married Jane.  According to Sally, Danton employed some underhanded methods to achieve this feat.  Both Jimmy and Ken regret signing up for a voyage with the difficult Danton.

Mankind has explored and colonized many planets, and many more have been charted but await examination.  So commercial ships like the one Jimmy, Ken and Danton are aboard are obliged to make little stops along the way to investigate planets that might be viable for colonization.  On scores of planets, human explorers have discovered the remains of a highly sophisticated star-faring civilization.  This "Lost Race" raised hundreds of magnificent cities, but all have been thoroughly destroyed, apparently deliberately, as if the entire culture, a space empire spanning hundreds of light years, had committed suicide.  Many space men have seen these ruins, and many of them, as a little hobby, theorize as to why the Lost Race destroyed itself.  Ken Howell's theory is that the members of the lost race were able to see into the future and saw something so horrible they would rather die than live through it--he suggests that if Earth's people had foreseen the horrors of the, now long past, Third World War, they also might have opted to commit suicide rather than suffer through that tragedy.

Ken and Jimmy make an unprecedented find--a Lost Race installation that miraculously escaped destruction (it seems it was sheltered by a hill from the blast that flattened the nearby city.)  Their discovery is an amphitheater with a seat at one end--when Jimmy sits there, a holographic projection fills the amphitheater--the moving image is of Sally back on Earth, thinking longingly of Jimmy!  Jimmy figures that the amphitheater is a kind of televising remote viewer, and shows the places and people you are thinking about in real time.  

All the crewmen use the amphitheater and see images of their people back home living happily--this is a relief, as under ordinary circumstances the spacers would have no news from home for a year, their ship moving much faster than light.  Danton is an exception, however--he sees Jane cheating on him!  Danton goes berserk, and there is a whole drama involving ray pistol fire, stolen fuel, and hijacked life boats as Danton pursues a scheme of stranding the ship here and escaping on his own to get revenge on Jane and her lover.  Ken Howell foils the plot by diagnosing Danton's psychology.  Howell is one canny figure; he also realizes the Lost Race's projection device is not a real-time televiewer but simply projects images of a person's thoughts and expectations--Danton only saw Jane cheating because of his own paranoia.  Even more astoundingly, Howell solves the mystery of the Lost Race after finding some bones--the Lost Race were a people who had tails and other particular features, but their use of atomic energy was mutating them so that they were going to lose their tails and other characteristics--they would become what they saw as hideous monsters!  So they all killed themselves.  The shocking ending is the revelation that the people of the Lost Race were going to evolve so that they looked just like we Earth people do!  Could it be that we are the degenerate descendants of a Lost Race colony that didn't commit suicide?

This is a fun classic-style science fiction story with lots of technical, sociological, and psychological speculation, plus decent action and adventure elements and human drama elements.  Thumbs up for "The Lost Race!"

"The House of Rising Winds" by Frank Belknap Long (1948)

"The House of Rising Winds" debuted in an issue of Startling Stories alongside Henry Kuttner's "The Mask of Circe," which we read in 2022, and is illustrated by fan favorite Virgil Finlay.  It would reappear in the Long collection The Rim of the Unknown. 

A young orphan boy, Jimmy, is living with his aunt and uncle--who keep arranging accidents in hopes of killing the kid so they can enjoy his inheritance!  Long does a good job at describing the cruelty and the schemes of the aunt and uncle--it is actually kind of creepy and at times shocking.

Jimmy is hiding in the woods when he is approached by a space alien who calls himself Lacula!  Long, something of a poet, comes up with a long list of metaphors to describe Lacula and how he makes Jimmy feel.  

Lacula was like many things at once--things that Jimmy had seen and imagined and dreamed about.  A big twisted tree trunk....the gold and russet splendor of the autumn woods....the sea, wide and boundless....a mountain, rising pale and purple....a maze of complicated machinery....

Lacula is a kindly gent...and also a big game hunter!  He has with him cages full of vicious beasts from Mars, Venus, and other worlds.  With a little device, Lacula makes these cages float hither and thither.  I guess the cages are like intersections between different points in space or something--when Jimmy looks into one cage he sees the broad expanse of a Martian desert leading to mountains in the far distance, but he can also see through the cage to the mundane surface of the Earth neighborhood with which he is familiar.  Long relishes describing two of the ravenous monsters.  Lacula gives Jimmy a little pipe, and instructions on how to use it.  Later that day, when aunt and uncle contrive yet another attempt on Jimmy's life (they make the kid take a bath and arrange an electric hair curler--still plugged in--to fall into the bath to electrocute him), Jimmy blows the pipe and a ferocious wind hurls aunt and uncle out of the house and into one of Lacula's cages.  Lacula leaves Earth with his latest specimens of vicious beasts, and Jimmy can look forward to living his own life, inheriting the house and turning it from a place of fear and misery to one of joy by marrying and building a happy family within it.

The parts with the aunt and uncle are chilling, and the alien monsters are fun; the stuff with Lacula is maybe a little fey and a little too verbose, but I can still mildly recommend "The House of the Rising Winds" as a weird horror story that mixes fairy tale and science fiction elements.           

"Thunder and Roses" by Theodore Sturgeon (1947)

Here we have a very popular story by Ted "Killdozer" Sturgeon, one that has been reprinted a billion times in Sturgeon collections, Astounding anthologies edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison, and by Tony Lewis, surveys of the SF field published by DAW, Prentice-Hall, Wesleyan University, and Harper and Row, an anthology of stories about nuclear war and one of horror stories about the mind.  The first edition of that last anthology, edited by a British computer scientist who was a technical advisor on The Tomorrow People, a TV show I loved as a kid, has a striking woman-in-bondage/violence against women cover that I am finding mesmerizing.

"Thunder and Roses" is a well-written melodrama that counsels turning the other cheek, unilaterally disarming yourself in the face of your enemies.  It is set in the near future at a remote military base after a sneak attack has nuked the United States--the attack was so successful that the US didn't even fire back at the unnamed enemies, and the land of the free and home of the brave is practically wiped out, save for this remote base, where people are despondent and suffering radiation sickness that dooms them to early graves.  Sturgeon does a good job describing the struggles of the men not to commit suicide under these dire conditions.  

The second half of the story expands on the don't-commit-suicide angle.  A beautiful woman singer, apparently the most popular celebrity in America, who regularly broadcast performances weekly to military bases, is still alive, and arrives at the base, her terrible wounds concealed by cosmetics.  Her final performance has the object of convincing the survivors not to retaliate against the enemies who just murdered the entire United States, as this will result in the total destruction of all humanity.  She argues that a decent civilization might arise someday from the rest of the world, but if the United States launches its weapons then all life on Earth--even lizards!--will be killed so no new intelligent life can arise.  In the same way individuals struggled in the first half of the story to resist the inclination to commit suicide, in the second half of the story the handful of surviving Americans characters struggle against each other to resist the temptation to launch a retaliatory strike, which would amount to the suicide of the human race and all life on Earth.

"Thunder and Roses" is well structured and well written, so I must, albeit grudgingly, judge it a good story.  Some may think it over the top, that Sturgeon's depiction of the singer's martyrdom, for example, goes so far as to become comical, or that many individual scenes are too long or that some scenes are superfluous and repetitive (how many guys do we have to hear have committed suicide?) but it all works in my opinion.  My gripe is with the story's ideology--Sturgeon seems to think you shouldn't resist or deter aggressors and so he contrives an unlikely scenario in which resistance and deterrence are somehow unjustifiable.  This is the kind of thing the science fiction that aspires to be a literature of ideas does, and that Sturgeon and Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. in particular, do--question conventional wisdom, like that slavery and incest are bad, by coming up with crazy scenarios and counterintuitive theories that demonstrate that slavery and incest might actually be good.  I obviously think it is the duty of decent people to resist and deter those who would trespass against others and so I recoil from Sturgeon's ideas here, but I guess that is part of the point of the story and "serious" science fiction, to get a rise out of you.  ("Don't worry about it son," Campbell told a young Barry Malzberg after a long argument in the year 1969, "I just like to shake 'em up."*)

*As reported in Malzberg's 1980 essay on Campbell, available in Engines of the Night and Breakfast in the Ruins.

An important story in SF history, likely of value to those interested in science fiction written in response to the use of atomic weapons in World War II and to the Cold War, and science fiction influenced by Christian thought--though Sturgeon never directly mentions Hiroshima, the Soviet Union, or any religious figure or establishment--and science fiction that depicts stress and psychological trauma.

[UPDATE JANUARY 30, 2025: Tarbandu in the comments points out that a 1971 printing
of a 1968 horror anthology, Splinters, has the same cover as the 1970 Mind in Chains.
  Tarbandu blogged about Splinters back in 2015--check out his assessment at the link.]

**********

With the exception of Brown's sterile filler piece, all of today's stories are pretty grim in tone but well-executed and worth reading.  While Long's succeeds in depicting human personalities under stress, Leinster's and Sturgeon's do the same as well as offering compelling speculations on the effect on human personality and society of new technologies, offering good examples of SF that is both emotionally engaging and thought provoking.  

Sam Merwin, Jr: "The Carriers," "Exit Line," "Judas Ram," and "Star Tracks"

A week or so ago I wrote about some stories in the February, 1956 issue of Manhunt and I had some unkind things to say about Sam Merwin, Jr.'s "Block Party."  Way back in 2017 I wrote about Merwin's novel The House of Many Worlds and was even less generous.  In the comments to that recent Manhunt blog post, a well-read SF fan with a good memory listed four stories by Merwin that he or she felt were "pretty good."  Lett us today scour the internet archive, the world's finest website, and read those four stories in hopes we can agree that they are good and that they will provide us an opportunity to say some nice things about Merwin.

"The Carriers" (1949)

"The Carriers" appeared in a magazine Merwin himself edited, Thrilling Wonder Stories, in an issue that we've already blogged about.  That issue features a component of A. E. van Vogt's Isher saga, the story by James Blish and Damon Knight that would be expanded into the novel VOR, and short stories by Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon--click the links for the MPorcius take on these works, and read on for the MPorcius take on "The Carriers," which Merwin must have been proud of, because it is included in the 1949 hardcover anthology My Best Science Fiction Story.  (It didn't make the cut when an abridged paperback edition of My Best Science Fiction Story came out five years later--ouch!)

(Note that I am reading "The Carriers" in its original magazine version, and I am doing the same for all four of today's stories.)

The thing you note almost immediately when reading "The Carriers," and the most or second most memorable thing about it, is that it is a feminist story.  Our protagonist is a spacefaring woman physicist who conducts experiments, designs a new hyperdrive, orders subordinates around, and takes the lead in forming a sexual relationship (albeit with a man--this story doesn't quite achieve feminist escape velocity and make it all the way to Planet Lesbos.)  On the first full page of the story the names of "Susan Anthony" and "Carrie Nation" are invoked heroically, and we are told that women make better spacers than men! 

...women adjusted better and more rapidly than men to the varied conditions of interplanetary exploration. Men—more limited in physical and biological function—were for the most part more brittle.  Those who survived were not rugged Vikings of the Nansen-Amundsen type but, for the most part, smaller, softer, more feminine types.... 

The man our lead character pursues a relationship with is specifically described as one of those soft feminine type men--is this story a wish fulfillment fantasy for feminist women or for short unassertive men?

I'll also note that our heroine is constantly smoking cigarettes--maybe this represents her liberation and/or her tough can-do attitude, or maybe Merwin, like T. S. Eliot*, finds women smoking to be sexually exciting? 

*See Eliot's April 24, 1915 letter to Eleanor Hinkley.

The problem with this feminist theme of "The Carriers" is that it is wholly unconnected to the plot--all the characters could be straight men and the plot would work exactly the same (the sexual relationship I mentioned doesn't get very far and is also wholly independent of the plot, though at the end of this blog post I will suggest it serves a narrative function.)  In fact, I think that the plot might even be said to undermine the feminist theme, as the plot doesn't present the characters or the gynocentric space program depicted as achieving any kind of triumph.

OK, let's describe the plot.  Earth has developed a hyperspace drive and our multi-ethnic cast, most prominent of whom is our protagonist Dr. Lydia Gray, is the crew of Earth's first star ship, a huge sphere that Merwin describes in some detail.  The planets of the Solar System all proved to lack living animal life, though some had plant life and upon some were found the dead remains of animate life forms now extinct.  The crew of the ship finds the same sad reality on all the extrasolar planets they explore.  Among several of these dead planets are high tech cities, now in ruins--these cities bear evidence that they fell only recently, that their people were exterminated by a disease and then their nuclear power plants, unattended, caused all-engulfing fires.

Gray's study of some alien artifacts offers her the insights she needs to improve the ship's hyperdrive so they can get to the next planet more quickly.  When she and her comrades land on the next planet they find the intelligent population dead, but only just--much of their infrastructure hasn't burned down yet, and what amounts to a TV set or automatic film projector is still operating!  Watching TV provides the info Gray needs to come to a horrible conclusion--the disease killing all these alien species is coming from the Earth space ship! (Something we readers may have guessed from the title of the story, unless we somehow thought it was a reference to aircraft carriers.)  How does a disease precede a star ship through the vacuum of space?  Merwin and Gray can only lamely theorize that "beams" are involved.  The story ends on this down note, though Gray does express confidence the human race will figure out and solve the issue.

"The Carriers" is acceptable.  It is probably longer than it needs to be, Merwin offering copious details and multiple scenes which do nothing to set up the twist ending, and I am finding the idea that your germs or autonomic disease beams or whatever can precede you and kill everybody in front of you before you get to them--even though you are in a ship going faster than the speed of light--hard to credit.  But the story is not actually bad.  I wonder if Merwin's "the human race is the disease!" gimmick was at all inspired or influenced by Edmond Hamilton's 1930s stories "The Accursed Galaxy" and "Devolution."

"The Carriers" was reprinted in some magazines in the 1950s, including the first issue of Australian magazine Future Science Fiction.

"Exit Line" (1950)

Here's another story from a magazine Merwin himself edited, Startling Stories.  (One reason I am reading these four Merwin stories even though I was lukewarm at best about stuff I read by him in the past is that I like Thrilling Wonder and Startling, so am kindly disposed to the guy.)  This issue of Startling features the magazine version of Raymond F. Jones' The Cybernetic Brains, the book version of which we read in 2017, as well as a version of Jack Vance's "To B or Not to C or to D" entitled "Cosmic Hotfoot," a story by Mack Reynolds, a Captain Future caper by Edmond Hamilton, and a reprinted collab between Arthur K. Barnes and Henry Kuttner.  This looks like a good issue of the magazine!  Probably I should reread the Vance and blog about it someday, and cover as well the Reynolds and the Barnes/Kuttner pieces, which I have yet to read.  Well, who knows, maybe soon.  (I like Hamilton, of course, but here we have the 23rd Captain Future adventure and I'll want to read more of the earlier ones first*.)

*Of the 27 Captain Future adventures I have read the 11th, The Comet Kings, the 19th, Outlaw World, and the 9th, Quest Beyond the Stars.  

Today we are focusing on Merwin's story in the mag, which appears under a pen name.  "Exit Line" was reprinted in 1951 in Groff Conklin's Possible Worlds of Science Fiction, where Conklin in his little four-line intro tells us that the alien in the story, which he categorizes as a "BEM," is one of the rare likable BEMs in science fiction.  I shouldn't read these little intros, as they are often spoily and/or guide the reader's interpretation of the story in a way that diminishes or perverts its impact, but I am weak-willed, and my relationship with these intros is like my relationship with all the chocolate ice cream I shouldn't eat--I see them, I devour them, and regret follows.

"Exit Line" is a trifling twist ending story that is an homage to fairy tales; the characters not only mention "The Emperor's New Clothes," The Hunting of the Snark, and Davy and the Goblin but these fables actually play a role in the structure and plot of the story.

A dozen or so humans have landed on a planet and have been trying to set up a viable colony there.  They are friends with a sort of blob creature with many eyes and pseudopods that can read their minds and communicate telepathically.  The blob is not native to the world, but also an alien colonist.  The humans and the blob work together to stave off attacks from giant hostile natives as well as invisible monsters--humans can't see these beasts but the blob can detect them with his telepathy right before they attack; when an attack is imminent the blob warns the humies and they shelter behind a forcefield the blob generates.  The blob also directs the Terrans in how to erect fortifications against the attackers--the humans spend so much time constructing these defenses to the blob's exacting specifications that they have to neglect their crops and as the story begins the humans have decided to abandon the colony after six years of effort.  They invite the blob to come with them off the planet (its vaguely described means of arriving on the planet was strictly single use) but it declines to accompany them.  After the humans have left they realize the blob was tricking them into building it a dwelling--there are no invisible monsters, the blob was just lying and play acting their attacks.  

This story seems needlessly complicated, what with the two types of monsters, one of which is not real, and with two explanations for why the blob wanted the Earthers to build it a large series of walls, neither of which is very convincing.  As for Conklin, why does he assume I am going to like the blob?  this duplicitous and manipulative monster wasted six years of my fellow humans' lives and a significant volume of other resources by sabotaging their colonization effort, and it's not like the blob is a native I might be expected to feel bad for like I am supposed to feel bad for native Americans confronted by European settlers--the blob is a rival colonial power.  I guess I am supposed to see the blob as a puckish trickster, but I am not buying it.

Barely acceptable.

"Judas Ram" (1950)

Here we have a story that appeared in H. L. Gold's Galaxy.  Gold also included it in 1952's Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction.

"Judas Ram" is, in part, one of those switcheroo stories, like the EC comic in which a guy who kills spiders by an astonishing coincidence finds himself the prey of an elephant-sized spider or the Twilight Zone episodes in which German WWII service men find themselves the victims of submarine warfare or genocide instead of the perpetrators.  You know how humans kill animals and mount them as trophies, capture animals and run experiments on them and train them to do tricks and breed them--well, in this story, aliens do that stuff to humans!  "Judas Ram" also has strong fetishistic sex undertones, and lots of descriptions of women's bodies and clothing.  Most importantly for our purposes, "Judas Ram" is better written than "The Carriers" and "Exit Line," with a good action scene as well as smoother and more compelling sentences and a better overall structure--there's less extraneous detail, less fluff, and a stronger sense of rising tensions and climax.

OK, the plot.  Extradimensional aliens have opened up an invisible doorway in a particular spot on Earth and seized three young women and one man.  The aliens have also brought back to their universe the heads of some men--we later learn that it is easier, for unexplained reasons, for the aliens to capture women alive than men; our hero, Rog, was only captured because he had wrecked his car and was unconscious when the aliens came upon him.  In the alien universe, Rog has to impregnate the three women--like most aliens in the stories we read, these jokers have telepathy and they can manipulate the minds of Rog and the ladies so they get sexually aroused, even against their will.  After 18 months or so in captivity, Rog has several kids; the aliens make giving birth a snap and the kids grow at an artificially rapid rate.  Rog and the women live in a house and wear clothes and eat food the aliens conjure up based on their captive's thoughts, so the humans have some ability to determine their own living conditions, but everything is subtly wrong and unsatisfying--food, booze and cigarettes don't have a smell, for example, the aliens apparently not having a sense of smell, and/or smell not working in this universe, where the laws of physics are different than in our own universe and Rog experiences what we might call non-Euclidian geometric effects.

One wall looked normal for perhaps a third of its length, then it simply wasn't for a bit.  It came back farther on at an impossible angle.  Yet, walking along it, touching it, it felt perfectly smooth and continuously straight.

The aliens have been training Rog to teleport, and once he has learned this new skill they take him back to Earth with the idea that he will help them trick other men into walking through the dimensional portal and into their clutches--Rog is the Judas ram of the title, a play on "Judas goat."  (We've seen SF writers use this Judas goat idea before--Jack Vance in 1949's "The Sub-Standard Sardines" and Thomas N. Scortia in 1980's "Judas Fish.")  Can Rog outwit the aliens and reunite with his wife?  Can he shut down the portal and maybe save the Earth from further kidnappings and murders?  What if it turns out his wife is already banging some other guy who has more money than Rog ever had and this love triangle quickly becomes murderous like in some hard-boiled detective story?  Could it be that Rog is better off as a guinea pig with a harem in another universe than on an Earth where all the people who know him want to get rid of him?

I like this one.  Frederik Pohl has suggested that Gold's role as editor was often to essentially rewrite people's stories* so maybe we have Gold to credit for the fact that "Judas Ram" seems better than Merwin's average.  Pohl certainly credits Gold with the ability to improve people's stories.

*See Pohl's The Way the Future Was, page 213 of the 1979 paperback.

"Star Tracks" (1952)

It is the dawn of the space age!  Mankind has put a big space station in orbit around the Earth, and the rockets that will take men to Mars have been built and tested, and soon will land on the red planet.  One of the men who will con those rockets is our hero Bob Marny, hot shot pilot!  Bob loves speed and excitement, but today he is bored.  His current mission has him stuck on that space station--he ferried three astronomers here over a week ago, so they could study Mars through a telescope unhindered by Earth's atmosphere.  They were only supposed to be on the station three days, but it seems like they found something interesting on Mars and they, and thus Bob, have been sticking around so they could take a better look at it.  What they found is top secret, but Bob is curious, and decides to see what he can learn from one of the three astronomers--the female one!  Carol Lee may be old--35!--but she looks like a teenager!  Hubba hubba!

These two fall in love over cigarettes and fruit juice, alcohol being forbidden on the station, but more important to us readers than Dr. Lee's revelation that she left an acting career to become a scientist is her revelation of the discovery the astronomers have made that has kept them tied up on the space station.  Outer space is some kind of scam!  Mars is a prop!  Not far beyond it is some kind of black barrier--the stars are also artificial props, machines moving slowly along barely visible tracks!  The Earth and the human race, as Charles Fort* suggested, are somebody's property!  Bob's dreams of landing on alien planets, the dreams of the human race of expanding out into space and relieving population pressure, are shattered!

*Carol Lee mentions Fort by name; Fort was very familiar to long time readers of Astounding, his book Lo! having been serialized in Astounding in 1931, during the editorship of F. Orlin Tremaine.  Another indication of how important Fort was to SF readers in the 20th century is that Damon Knight published a biography of Fort in 1970. 

Like "The Carriers," "Star Tracks" ends on a down note; in both stories our hopes of exploring the galaxy are dashed by a twist ending revelation that is difficult to take seriously, though in both cases Merwin softens the blow by having the cigarette-smoking lady scientist express confidence that the human race will get around this obstacle somehow.  And I guess we are supposed to be soothed by knowledge that the tobacco-loving female genius is about to embark on a happy marriage.

Acceptable.  "Star Tracks" debuted in John W. Campbell's Astounding, and no editor seems to have been jazzed enough by "Star Tracks" to want to publish it a second time.

**********

These four stories are noteworthy for several reasons.  First of all, their pessimism: at the end of each the main characters have been foiled, are stuck in some kind of trap and/or have seen their dreams melt away almost to nothing--the experience of encountering alien intelligences has been disappointing at best, a horror at worst.  These stories remind one of horror tales which climax with a terrible revelation and in tone are quite unlike the standard science fiction story which celebrates the man of knowledge who triumphs over adversity via quick thinking.  Secondly, the prominence of women in the stories, and the role played by sexual relationships in three of them in softening the blow of realizing your adventure beyond has been a bust; we might argue that this reflects an ancient wisdom the slide rule boys are liable to forget about, that love is more essential to happiness than achieving your ambitions for knowledge and power.

These stories are not bad, and perhaps provide insight into the SF of the immediate post war period, so reading them was worthwhile.  But I didn't love them and it might be a while before we read anything by Sam Merwin, Jr. again.     

A Trace of Memory by Keith Laumer

"I seek only one thing here, my friend," Foster said; "my past."

Recently, blogger George in the comments to a blog post of mine about Theodore Sturgeon, talked about how, in the Sixties, "Killdozer" Ted was displaced as his favorite SF author by Keith Laumer.  The work that George suggests catapulted Laumer into the pole position was A Trace of Memory, a novel serialized in 1962 in Cele Goldsmith's Amazing, and then printed in expanded book form in 1963 with a cover by Richard Powers.  A Trace of Memory has been reprinted many times since, in at least four different languages, in books with noteworthy covers by Jack Gaughan, Karel Thole, and unnamed others, several of which are available for reading in electronic form to us cheapos at the internet archive.  There is also an audio version of the novel at the internet archive, and it looks like for each time somebody has looked at one of the scanned book versions of A Trace of Memory, thirty people have accessed the audio file--a striking sign of the evolution in how people experience the written word?  Anyway, I read a scan of a 1972 printing of A Trace of Memory from Paperback Library/Warner that has a wild surrealist cover--was this absorbing but uncredited painting created specifically for the novel, or is it some 1930s or 1940s canvas that represents the artist's response to war in an age of mass media?

A Trace of Memory is a pretty good fast-paced adventure story in which a guy travels around the Earth and then an alien planet, doing the usual adventure story things, like getting into fights, crawling through air ducts, meeting unusual people, getting captured again and again and each time managing to escape.  Adventure stories often have a sexual or "romantic" element--the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his imitators generally feature the hero meeting a princess, becoming a major supporter of her faction in some revolution or war and eventually marrying her after she wins the war, while guys like Tarzan and Conan are always being released from prison or spared from the sacrificial altar by women who are attracted to them; there is only a little of that in A Trace of Memory--Laumer's focus is instead on male friendship and camaraderie.  In fact, instead of meeting a girl and discovering she is a princess and helping her maintain her position, in this novel the protagonist makes a male friend and later discovers his new bud is a deposed king and helps put him back on his rightful throne. 

The ad read: Soldier of fortune seeks companion in arms to share an unusual adventure.  Foster, Box 19, Mayport.

Another theme of the novel is a sort of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, never-say-die optimism, the idea that you can make it in this universe if you don't give up, if you give it your all, and even if you don't succeed, at least you can be proud that you tried your best.  

A Trace of Memory also has lots of fun science fiction elements, like longevity/immortality treatments, consciousness downloads and uploads, interstellar travel, strange creatures, a modern high-tech society that collapses into feudalism, and a guy using his science knowledge to get out of jams.  Plus something else: I often point out here at the blog that SF people love cats, and one of the times our hero is imprisoned it is his pet cat who rescues him.  Meow!

A Trace of Memory begins with a prologue in the third person in which a guy wakes up aboard a large space ship that is full of dead bodies and haunted by monsters!  He records a guy's brain, and his own, and takes a boat down to the surface of a planet we readers figure is Earth.  On Earth he encounters primitive natives--this must be long ago--and these ignorant savages accidentally send the boat back up to the main ship, stranding the lone spaceman on Earth.

The novel proper is a first-person narrative in the voice of a man who identifies himself as "Legion," an odd Biblical name that I guess relates to some of the themes of the novel.  Legion is a US Army Intelligence veteran, a former music student, and former private investigator who has fallen on hard times; currently he is a homeless bum, seriously considering robbing a store!  But then he winds up in the company of a rich guy going by the name of Foster; Foster has been putting ads in the papers hoping to hire a brave adventurer, and he thinks Legion fits the bill!  

Foster wants somebody like Legion to help him solve the mystery of his life; he doesn't know a thing about his own existence before he woke up in a military hospital back during World War I.  The various clues Foster shares with Legion indicate to us readers that Foster is the alien spaceman from the prologue, that he has been stranded on Earth for thousands of years and every few centuries goes through a rejuvenating transformation, becoming young again; unfortunately, he loses much of his memory during these transformations, and today doesn't even remember he is from another planet!  Foster's previous incarnations kept an indestructible diary, but much of the diary is in a language nobody on Earth has been able to identify or decode, and the later entries, dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, may be in English, but are cryptic and fragmentary.  Also significant is the fact that several times over the last few decades Foster has been pursued by mysterious hovering lights, which has driven him to relocate cross country and build himself a fortified mansion.

Legion thinks this guy is wacko and doesn't want the job, but events force him to stick to Foster like glue.  The hostile lights appear and the two men flee, and the police start investigating the disappearance of Foster and suspecting Legion murdered him.  Legion would like Foster to reveal himself as alive to the cops and set the record straight, but Foster goes through one of his transformations so doesn't look the same and doesn't even remember meeting Legion.  Thus, Legion and Foster are both on the run, and figure they might as well try to solve the mystery of Foster's past while they avoid the cops and those glowing monsters.  

Clues from the diary and additional detective work lead the two men to England and Stonehenge, where they discover an alien transmitter that summons another boat from the spaceship that brought Foster here so long ago and has been orbiting the Earth since before the birth of Christ! 

On the ship they discover information storage units, rods or cylinders that you can hold up to your head so they will inject immersive stories or useful technical data (like how to repair something on the ship that is malfunctioning) right into your brain.  More elaborate such devices fill Foster's brain with general knowledge about his home planet and culture, like how to read and speak his native tongue--now able to read the diary, he solves some, but not all, facets of the mystery of his life.

At this point the novel is only like two-fifths over and I expected Legion to accompany Foster out into the universe on the big space ship.  But the narrator instead decides to remain on Earth!  Foster departs in the big vessel, headed for his home planet, Vallon, capital of a space empire, after Legion takes a boat back to the Earth surface.  Legion makes himself rich selling consumer goods he "invents" by applying insights he learns from studying some Vallonian items (like a super efficient film projector and its accompanying film) Foster let him take off the star ship.

With his new wealth, Legion buys his own private island off Latin America and builds his own fortified mansion on it, but after a few years the US government figures out he has access to invaluable alien technology and comes a calling.  The Feds are not interested in taking "no" for an answer from Legion, and neither are the Soviet agents who have also figured out that Legion has knowledge they'd like to have.  A battle erupts on Legion's island between Soviet troops and US Marines, and there are extensive chase and fight scenes as Legion struggles to keep himself alive and free of the clutches of both governments; his eventual success is owed to the help of a girlfriend and his new mental abilities, gained by using the Vallonian memory rods--in time of dire need, Legion can now take conscious control over his muscles and organs and give himself an extra burst of strength or endurance.

Earth being too hot for him, Legion, accompanied by his new pet cat, takes his space boat all the way to Vallon, where the final two fifths of the novel take place and where Legion hopes to hook up again with his pal Foster.  Using those memory rods, Legion downloads intro his noggin all the knowledge a native of Vallon would have, but of course all this knowledge is that of the Vallon of over three thousand years ago.  When Legion gets to Vallon it is no longer the bustling center of a vast space empire but merely the locale of a bunch of medieval fiefs!  People live on feudal estates outside the cities, which are taboo, and the knowledge of how to use the most impressive of Vallonian technology has been lost.  The nobles still make use of surface automobiles and air cars--Vallonian equipment and infrastructure are indestructible, so the vehicles still work fine and the roads are still in perfect condition--but space craft and the memory recording devices are strictly verboten.  As an outsider, Legion is immediately put on the bottom rung of the social ladder and find himself a slave.  Luckily he is a skilled musician and is made a piper in the court of the local noble.

Neofeudal Vallon differs from the typical Earth feudal model in that there is plenty of social mobility.  Like among a pirate crew in a piece of pirate fiction, where anybody can be captain if he challenges the captain to a sword fight and bests him, on this degraded Vallon you can take a guy's job by challenging him to a competition and outdoing him.  Legion challenges the head piper to a piping match and the result is Legion's promotion to head piper and his opponent's demotion to court jester.  Legion becomes buddies with the lord, in part because his expert driving skill gets them out of a fix when they are ambushed by motorized bandits during a road trip.  A lot of people, Legion learns as he mixes with the various social classes of feudal Vallon, would like to see Vallon return to the conditions of its high-tech past and get back to using the now taboo memory devices, and Legion has a series of adventures as he becomes the leader of the restoration movement, wins a title of nobility by challenging a noble, learns the truth of Foster's whereabouts and past, and plays a critical role in putting Foster, king of the whole planet before he was treacherously deposed over three thousand years ago, back on the throne.  Along the way the consciousness of the man who deposed Foster invades Legion's brain and Legion has to struggle to regain control of his own body--this is perhaps the most obvious of the novel's nods to that line from the Book of Mark, "My name is Legion."  Legion loses his life in the fight to return Vallon to its golden age, but before he expires, Foster downloads his Terran buddy's consciousness into one of those rods and when a healthy Vallonian body becomes available the king uploads Legion into it--Legion now has the immortality enjoyed by all his new friends.

A Trace of Memory is a competent adventure story--all the fighting and chasing and escaping is entertaining--and Laumer handles the SF stuff--the high tech equipment and the ramifications of a society of people who are basically immortal but who lose their memories every 100 years or so--pretty well.  I enjoyed it.  But I'm afraid I'm not going to remember A Trace of Memory for very long.  I've read the contents of the collections The Best of Keith Laumer and Nine by Laumer and even though I enjoyed quite a few of those fifteen stories I didn't remember a thing about them until I reread my blog posts about them.  Laumer's style is marked by a worldly cynicism but is otherwise quite bland, cold and emotionless.  There aren't vivid images or beautiful sentences or laugh-out-loud jokes or stirring human relationships in A Trace of Memory, nor does Laumer here make bold arguments about how you should live your life or run your society--the masculine virtue stuff I mentioned above is pretty subtle and pretty commonsensical, quite unlike the wild and crazy in-your-face stuff we often get from SF writers.  I didn't really feel the lack of these things while I was reading A Trace of Memory, but their absence I suspect lessens the impact the book will have made on me.  Still, a decent read.