Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore: "Deadlock," "Nothing But Gingerbread Left," and "Endowment Policy"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we have been reading stories from John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding.  We had three stories by Hal Clement, then three stories by Clifford D. Simak, then five stories by divers hands selected by Groff Conklin.  Today let's read three stories by married couple writing team Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore that debuted in issues of Astounding alongside the very stories we've been talking about.  I'll be reading all three in scans of the original World War II era magazines in which they debuted under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett.

"Deadlock" (1942)

This is a jokey story about what we today would call "A.I." with a surprise ending that, I suppose, a reader just might be able to predict.  Kuttner and Moore include a bunch of learned references (to Oscar Wilde--"Reading Gaol," the Old Testament--"Balaam's ass," and Max Planck) but these are just window dressing and have nothing to do with the actual plot.

It is the future of megacorporations that are as powerful or more powerful than governments.  Our main characters work at one of the corps, in a big complex which integrates both the factory floor and the skyscraper where the execs have their offices and which is defended by anti-aircraft weapons and attack helicopters--the other corps are not above sending bombers on missions over the protagonists' corporation.  The corp at the center of the story is in the early phases of developing robots, and still has a monopoly on them.  In this story robots are humanoid machines that are intelligent--they not only understand English but make independent decisions--that you operate by giving them a problem to solve.  The recent and current model robots are made of a practically indestructible alloy which no known weapon can penetrate; this is because the earliest models were all sabotaged by rival corps.  The indestructible nature of the current robots has proved a problem because all of them go insane after a few weeks or months and have to be disposed of by interring them in concrete.

The plot of "Deadlock" is set in motion by the latest robot to come on line, a robot which has gone the longest yet without going insane and has solved plenty of problems for the company.  The robot starts doing what looks like independent research, looking in file cabinets, collecting materials, busying itself in the lab.  There is an explosion, and when our protagonists rush to the site of the blast they find the robot has actually been destroyed!  Hovering over the wreckage is a "gadget"--Kuttner and Moore are very clear this thing does not count as a robot.

The gadget flies all over the factory and the office building, apparently at random, performing all sorts of incredible feats--temporarily making people's skin turn purple or disappear and reappear, nullifying the effect of gravity on objects so they float around, turning the milk in the commissary sour, etc.  This gadget has tremendous power--it can bore through steel and manipulate items on the molecular level and so forth--but it doesn't actually seriously harm any humans.  The protagonists run around, witnessing these astonishing behaviors or their results (which I guess are supposed to be funny to us readers.)  The protagonists come to realize the last robot must have created this superpowerful gadget to solve some problem, but what problem?  They figure a human brain can't follow the super logic of a robot brain, so they bring another robot of the same model on line and ask it to solve the problem of figuring out what the gadget was built for.  Eventually this robot is also destroyed, and we learn that all the robots made of the impenetrable alloy, on their own initiative, tried to figure out the solution to the problem of destroying their indestructible selves.  The robots now sealed in concrete went insane because they couldn't find a solution.  The latest robots were advanced enough to come up with a solution, the gadget.  The protagonists destroy the gadget and face the dismaying truth that it makes no sense to build more robots because they will also be suicidal.

I'm calling this one merely acceptable.  "Deadlock" feels like a bunch of bizarre events just strung together, not convincingly leading one to to another, like Kuttner and Moore came up with material they thought was funny but got the story printed before they had come up with good ways to integrate their gags into a sensical, logical plot in which gag A believably caused the appearance of gag B.  The robots don't just solve the problems posed to them, but are so eager to solve problems that they come up with problems to solve on their own?  The robots don't have any sense of self preservation?  Why does the gadget, after destroying the robot that created it, travel around the complex messing with everything?  Is it also insane?  Why?  And if it is insane, why is the gadget so careful to not kill anybody as it bores holes through walls and floors and alters the atomic structure of people and everything else?  "Deadlock" doesn't really hold together, but it is not boring or annoying, so I am not going to go so far as to say it is bad.

In 1953, "Deadlock" reappeared in the Kuttner collection Ahead of Time.  In the same year, Martin Greenberg, a different man from the anthologist Martin H. Greenberg who gets mentioned in so many of my blogposts, included "Deadlock" in his anthology The Robot and the Man.

I believe I have blogged about two stories that were reprinted in 
The Robot and the Man, Lester del Rey's "Though Dreamers Die" and
Robert Moore Williams' "Robot's Return"

"Nothing But Gingerbread Left" (1943) 

Here we have a story based on some psychological phenomena with which we are all familiar.  The way a tune or phrase can get stuck in the mind and become distracting or annoying.  (This is a fact of which I am reminded every time I am in a store, restaurant or office.)  And the way trying to avoid thinking about something or saying something, or being forbidden to think or say something, makes you more likely to think about it or say it.  (Nothing is more likely to make me laugh than being told by my mother or my wife, "If you laugh at me again I'll....")

"Nothing But Gingerbread Left" takes place during the Second World War, after the launching of Operation Barbarossa.  An American semanticist wishes he could join the war effort but is not medically fit to do so.  His teenage son is always singing some nonsense phrase, and it distracts the college professor from grading papers.  This gives him an idea.  Prof and his star pupil, who knows German and has an uncle who is a senator, compose a catchy jingle in German made up of phrases that are not quite nonsense, but pregnant with meaning and inviting interpretation.  They manage to get the jingle broadcast allover Europe, and, as a result, the entire German population gets the jingle stuck in their heads.  The rhythm, and an obsessive need to extrapolate the significance of the words (among which is the phrase that is the title of the story), distracts individual Germans so severely that it cripples the German war effort.  Men searching a Polish village for weapons fail to find heavy machine guns that are later used by partisans in a deadly ambush of German soldiers.  Luftwaffe crew are so distracted by the song that they are easy prey for RAF Hurricanes.  A German anti-aircraft gunner is so busy singing the song he lets British bombers pass overhead unmolested.  A German scientist working on secret weapons is so distracted he damages expensive lab equipment.  And on and on--Kuttner and Moore offer many examples.  The final example is Adolf Hitler himself flubbing a major speech.

This story is OK.  It is too long, lacks suspense and character, and is really just a bunch of related episodes rather than a narrative with a climax.  Of course, Astounding readers in 1943 probably relished hearing about Nazis getting humiliated by Yankee ingenuity and getting killed by Polish guerillas and British pilots and perhaps found the psychological bits interesting.  "Nothing But Gingerbread Left," as a piece of fiction written and published during the war that portrays Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels as characters, and refers to the RAF, the Luftwaffe, Josef Stalin, and the German invasion of Eastern Europe, is perhaps more valuable to cultural historians curious about the attitudes of ordinary Americans during World War II than to regular readers looking for entertainment.

"Nothing But Gingerbread Left," after its debut in Astounding, has reappeared in a bunch of Kuttner and Moore collections, but has not, it seems, ever been anthologized.

"Endowment Policy" (1943)

Of today's three stories, this one is the best plotted and the most serious, or at least the one I can take the most seriously, and also the most exciting and the one that actually has interesting human characters whose personalities drive the plot.  Thumbs up for "Endowment Policy!"  

Our protagonist is an uneducated and somewhat irresponsible young man in New York in 1943.  His latest job is as a taxi driver, and he doesn't take his job too seriously.  What this guy is really interested in is booze.

An old man with a strange accent offers to pay the taxi driver a thousand bucks to do him a big favor.  We readers pick up on clues that indicate this wrinkled old dude is a time traveler from the future!  We get detective fiction type chase and action scenes as the taxi driver helps this old geezer escape from those pursuing him, and then finally attempt a desperate raid on a Brooklyn house, home of a scientist.  This scientist, the old geez from the future and the time travelers hot on his trail know, is about to discover a superior--a revolutionary!--power source.  The Brooklyn brainiac is going to write down the formula for the power source, and moments later be killed in an accidental explosion resulting from his own error; his notes will be destroyed in the ensuing fire.  The old geez wants the taxi driver to save the notes, while old geez's pursuers want to make sure the notes are destroyed.  In the end, after fights that feature the time travelers' paralyzer guns and the brass knuckles which the taxi driver brings to the party, the old geez and taxi driver fail and the notes goes up in smoke.

In the denouement of "Endowment Policy" we get a little lecture on the old alternative-time-lines-that-branch-forth-from-critical-moments bit we see in so much SF.  The night of the Brooklyn explosion is just one such key moment when a new time line can be created--if the taxi driver had saved the notes he would have used them to become the evil dictator of the Earth.  The old geez was bored with his humdrum life at a routine job in 2016 and stole a time machine and went back in time to shift history to the cabbie-becomes-dictator timeline to spice his own life up.  The authorities of 2016 convict him of these crimes, and the old geez demands the death penalty.  But the future people sentence him to live out his boring career to its natural conclusion.  The ironic ending of the story is that the old geezer's desperate effort to liberate himself from boring work has instead liberated the 1943 taxi driver, a guy who hates boring routine work just like the time machine hijacker, by providing the man the thousand dollars the old geez stole from a museum.  Maybe we readers are supposed to wonder if putting so much moolah in the hands of an unscrupulous slacker is going to lead to a third, heretofore, unsuspected time line, or if the guy is just going to waste the money and end up where he started (as do so many irresponsible people who enjoy a sudden windfall.)

Besides various Kuttner and Moore collections, "Endowment Policy" has been reprinted in Groff Conklin's Science Fiction Adventures in Dimension.

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In my opinion, "Endowment Policy" is the most successful of today's selections by far, but, to be fair, all three stories have different objectives, and we might consider that all three achieve their goals.  "Endowment Policy" is a traditional adventure/crime story that seeks to entertain the reader with violence and suspense and characters whose goals are determined by their personalities and whose behavior is determined by these goals and the obstacles placed before them.  "Deadlock" is a joke story in which personality and a sensible plot take a back seat--the characters and events exist to set up opportunities for jokes.  In "Nothing But Gingerbread Left," character and plot are again subordinated, this time to exploring a psychological theory and to satisfying readers' desire to see their enemies in the current war diminished.  "Nothing But Gingerbread Left" is the most science-fictiony of the stories, its science speculations actually driving the plot, though "Deadlock" and "Endowment Policy" speculate on what the future will be like and use standard science fiction devices--robots in one, time travel and the idea of branching timelines in the other--as a foundation for jokes in the one case and car chases and fights in the case of the other.

More 1940s SF magazine stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

Crossroads in Time: C Simak, F Leiber, K MacLean, P S Miller & G O Smith

Groff Conklin's 1953 paperback anthology Crossroads in Time recently came to my attention when we read from it Hal Clement's story "Assumption Unjustified."  This volume of 312 pages is full of stories by writers we are interested in that, for one reason or another, we haven't read yet.  (I will here note that we have, in fact, already read the included story by Margaret St. Clair, "Thirsty God" as well as Clement's story.)  Today let's read from this book five stories that debuted in Astounding.  I will be reading them in a scan of this 1953 paperback with the awesome Richard Powers cover, though I may consult other versions if I suspect a typo or printing error.

"Courtesy" by Clifford D. Simak (1951)

In our last thrilling expedition into the world of magazines printed before we were born we read three stories printed in Astounding that were penned by Clifford D. Simak, the newspaperman famed for writing "pastoral" science fiction, and here's a fourth.  One of those three stories stole my heart and one of them had me tearing out my hair, so as I begin "Courtesy" I have no idea how I will react to it.

This is one of those SF stories that condemns the human race and presents goody goody aliens who are better than us to serve as a contrast to our vileness.  I'm going to call it acceptable because it is well-written and suspenseful, but the ending is a groaner.  Simak has produced a lot of fiction like this, with ants, dogs, robots all proving better than humans, and Native Americans proving better than white people, and I don't find the theme persuasive or entertaining.

"Courtesy" tells the tale of an expedition to a barren alien planet.  The expedition has twenty-five members, and we meet a few of them and Simak does a good job sketching out their personalities and relationships--like I said, this story, the theme of which and the plot resolution of which I think are crummy, is pretty well-written.  We learn that humans have explored many habitable alien planets, but everywhere they go, the natives hate the humans.  Most of the text of the story involves a guy who stupidly leaves the camp and gets lost, and then how everybody in the expedition, which won't be able to contact any other humans for two years, catches the lethal local plague because the medical officer stupidly didn't check the expedition's drugs before or soon after landing and it turns out the drugs are expired, useless.

Only one man of the 25 survives the plague, and the reason he survives reveals why all aliens hate us humies.  We humies are all arrogant and think we are better than aliens!  The aliens on this planet, naked savages with no technology or literature, have the power to cure people, and they cured the one guy who will survive the plague because he was the only human to show any common courtesy to any of the natives.

The idea that all humans would be arrogant all over the galaxy and all natives resent the humans is silly, because, as Simak seemed to know when he wrote "Ogre" in 1944, interactions between advanced colonial and imperial societies and less advanced indigenes are complex and diverse--sure, plenty of ancient Romans and early modern Europeans who went out to the provinces and colonies looked down on the natives and plenty of natives hated them in return, but significant numbers of the colonizers liked and admired the natives and even "went native" and significant numbers of natives were eager to collaborate or emulate or imitate the colonizers.

You can find this professionally produced but ultimately frustrating and sterile exercise in several anthologies as well as multiple Simak collections.

"The Mutant's Brother" by Fritz Leiber (1943)

"The Mutant's Brother" appeared in the issue of Astounding which had as its cover story C. L. Moore's Judgment Night, a book version of which we read back in 2018; the issue also includes one of A. E. van Vogt's Space Beagle stories, "M33 in Andromeda," as well as a Moore-Kuttner collab--"Endowment Policy"--and an Anthony Boucher story-- "One-Way Trip" I don't think I have read yet.  I feel like I have read lots of old SF stories, but I look at these old SF magazines and still find tons of stories I haven't read yet and want to, as well as stories I have read, like "M33 in Andromeda," and want to reread.  Even if I get a robot to do the dishes and the laundry and to help my wife with the Christmas decorations, I am never going to read all the stories I want to, am I?

"The Mutant's Brother" is a quite good hard-boiled crime story about psychic powers.  Leiber handles quite well the psychological aspects, the action scenes, and the speculative elements about how guys with psychic powers might use them, and there are horror elements as well, and the pacing and the style are just right.  Thumbs up for "The Mutant's Brother!"

It is the high tech future of the early 1970s!  Our protagonist is a mutant, a man who can work other people like puppets via hypnotic telepathy.  Or maybe it is telepathic hypnotism.  Either way, if you are within a hundred or so feet he can make you do anything, and when he stops doing it you have no memory of what happened while you were under his control.

The hero grew up an orphan, raised by good foster parents.  He has been contacted by a twin brother he has never met.  He goes to meet his twin but soon learns his twin has been using his ability to control others to commit heinous crimes.  Overconfident, evil twin has been identified and the entire police force of his city is after him.  Evil twin has lured the protagonist into the town in hopes the cops will mistake our hero for the villain and gun him down and then relax their search for the real malefactor.  Much of the length of the story consists of the hero using his power to survive in a city in which every hand is turned against him and then in a head-to-head battle of hypnotic puppet master vs hypnotic puppet master.  

The tone of the story is sad, depressing, oppressive, and nerve-wracking, with many people, including innocents and people trying to do the right thing, suffering indignities, torture, and horrible deaths.  Conklin here in Crossroads in Time spoils the ending in his intro, which is too bad because "The Mutant's Brother" is the kind of story in which you don't know who will win in the end until you actually get to the end.  

A real success.  Sometimes Leiber goes on too long, or introduces some of his boring or annoying or creepy hobbyhorses and thus weakens his stories*, but "The Mutant's Brother" is perfectly proportioned and every component is appropriate and contributes to the literary and entertainment value of the piece.

*(If you want to hear me attack Leiber stories on these grounds, check out my blog posts on "Nice Girl with Five Husbands," "A Deskful of Girls," The Night of the Wolf, and "Black Glass."  Of course, you might prefer to hear me unreservedly praise Leiber stories like "The Button Molder," "The Dreams of Albert Moreland," "Stardock," and "Ship of Shadows."  If you click the link to the blog post on "Ship of Shadows" you will also have a chance to witness me sarcastically mocking SF royalty Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon.)

To my mind it is odd that "The Mutant's Brother" has been reprinted less often than Leiber stories that are less exciting and less well-put together; in the 20th century "The Mutant's Brother" reappeared only in Crossroads in Time (and the Spanish translation of Conklin's anthology.), You can find it in two 21st-century Leiber collections, Day Dark, Night Bright and Masters of Science Fiction: Fritz Leiber, fortunately.

"Feedback" by Katherine MacLean (1951)

I enjoyed MacLean's "Unhuman Sacrifice" and "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" so I have hopes I'll enjoy this one.

Argh, this is a long tedious didactic story about how the common people are conformists who will join a witch-hunting mob on the slightest pretext, set in the America of 1991 in which democracy means conformity and posses of vigilantes regularly set upon free thinkers and lynch them.  "Feedback" features a school teacher who suffers just such a fate after encouraging his students to not conform.  MacLean describes the mob's torture of the teacher in considerable detail, and we get lots of oratory from the heroic school teacher.  There is a sort of twist ending which involves the teacher and his comrades in the secret resistance of middle-class professionals faking his death with their high technology, and a sort of joke reference to Nathan Hale's quote "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country;" I guess the joke being that the school teacher in the story has multiple "lives" to lose for anti-conformism, he being able to survive multiple lynchings by faking his death.

Seventeen pages of hectoring self-righteousness, an exercise in over-the-top manipulation and extravagant flattery of the audience, Astounding readers of course thinking themselves smarter than everybody else and dreaming of outwitting their inferiors with superior technology.  Thumbs down!

"Feedback" was reprinted in the MacLean collection The Diploids and it has also reappeared in Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph Olander's Science Fiction of the Fifties and the German anthology Der metallene Traum.

"The Cave" by P. Schuyler Miller (1943)

"The Cave" starts out like a science article describing how caves are formed and used by animals.  The cave in this story is, however, on Mars.  After three pages of geology we hear how a native Martian, a barbarian hunter in touch with nature with a sense of smell and ability to detect vibrations that allow him to navigate with ease in total dark and interpret the moods and emotions of all the critters that live in the cave, arrives at the cave to wait out a storm.  The monsters in the cave and he silently agree to a truce for the duration of the storm.

After hearing how awesome this Martian is, even though his people don't have a written language any more, their high civilization having fallen thousands of years ago, we meet a human colonist, a working-class moron who is greedy, loves alcohol, and is racist towards the noble native Martians.  This guy, a miner, uses his free time to explore the deserts of Mars in hopes of finding some kind of treasure, even though the managers of the mining company, you know, middle-class people with book-larning, are sure the valuable minerals of Mars were all used up by the high-tech ancestors of the currently barbaric native Martians.  The storm drives him into the cave (he finds it by sheer luck) and he encounters the Martian and all the monsters in the cave.  Of course the man acts like a selfish jerk, unlike the Martian and the monsters with whom the hunter shares a code of honor, and gets killed by the noble Martian.   

This story is well-written; the plot is suspenseful and all the stuff about the cave and the native Martian ecosystem is believable and engaging, so I enjoyed this story even though it is yet another allegory about the evil white man abusing the noble indigenes who live in concert with the natural world.  (In 200 years, when the Chinese communists have conquered the Earth, will their creative class be writing stories that romanticize the English-speaking people they have crushed under their heels, the Anglo's bizarre individualism and incomprehensible notions of free speech and private property?)  So, thumbs up, even though I wish the human had come out of the cave alive, maybe gripping a fistful of jewels.

"The Cave" debuted in an issue of Astounding which also prints one of Jack Williamson's Seetee stories--one of my widely-read commentors recently recommended the Seetee stories to us.  Also in this issue, A. E. van Vogt's "The Search," which was integrated into the novel Quest for the Future and which I read in 2016, one of Anthony Boucher's Fergus O'Breen stories (we just read one of those), one of Henry Kuttner's Gallegher stories (we read one of those in 2014) and a Kuttner/Moore collaboration.  Probably we'll be coming back to this issue of Astounding.       

"The Cave" was reprinted in anthologies by Brian Aldiss, Martin H. Greenberg, and Jane Hipolito and Willis E. McNelly.

"Vocation" by George O. Smith (1945)

It looks like "Vocation" has never reappeared in physical print beyond Crossroads in Time.  Are we about to uncover a forgotten gem?  

No, we are not.  "Vocation" is merely acceptable.  

"Vocation" is full of science, but science I am having trouble taking too seriously.  The whole story is based around the idea that humans use only 10% of their brains, which I think is a myth.  Also, there is a lot of talk about evolution that anthropomorphizes nature, suggesting that nature is designing and improving the design of the human race over time, aiming to achieve some final perfect form, the way engineers design equipment and steadily improve succeeding models of the equipment.

"Nature causes many sports to be sterile because they interfere with her proper plan."

"Nature expects the brain to be called on, one hundred percent, and she intends to keep increasing that ability as it is needed."

This kind of stuff would be fine in a fantasy story or horror story, where we accept gods and the supernatural and so on, but this story feels like it is supposed to be hard SF, and this undermines that feel, and these brain and evolution issues are not a casual aside, but the entire foundation of the story.  

Another issue with "Vocation" is that it consists almost entirely of conversations, which is not that exciting.

It is the future of aircars and other such high technology.  Humans have yet to reach the stars.  The starfaring galactic civilization has made itself known to Terra, and there are two alien ambassadors on Earth, a really charming good-looking guy and his very charming and good-looking wife.  They are here to offer advice to humans, but they refuse to give away the technological secrets that will enable travel between the stars.

The plot of "Vocation" follows a few smart humans--a scientist and a journalist--who are a little skeptical of the aliens.  Why won't they give us the star drive?  Are they afraid of us because we are so aggressive and ambitious?  These guys come up with the theory that we humies only use 10% of our brains because the aliens are emitting a field upon Earth that limits our brain usage.  They start working on a device to cancel out that field, or increase the amount we can use our brains so we get closer to 100%.  The device works.  The scientist has the machine hooked up to his skull, and after a few minutes of writing supergenius-level equations on paper, he dies.  The brain is like a motor, if you run it at 100% too long it burns out.  Oops.  The journalist is just standing near the machine, and the fraction of the field that leaks out of the connections is enough to make him the smartest human on Earth, as smart as the alien ambassadors.  The best part of Smith's story is the description of the powers having a 260 IQ gives the journalist.

The journalist goes to meet the ambassador.  The journalist is smart enough now to realize the aliens are the goody goodies they present themselves as--they aren't scared of us, they aren't retarding our development, and they really are refusing to offer us the technology needed to travel between the stars on a silver platter for our own good--we haven't developed the ability to use the technology responsibly yet.  The human race will have to achieve a star drive on its own; by the time we are smart enough to invent it we'll also have naturally grown to a level of responsibility to enable us to use the tech without blowing up the sun or something.  The journalist resolves to destroy the brain-improving machine.

Smith includes a twist and sense-of-wonder ending that I think is unnecessary.  In one of those coincidences we so often find in fiction, one of the ambassadors' direct superiors happens to be visiting on the very day the journalist increases his intelligence.  The ambassador introduces the journalist to this alien if the next level up, and this guy is so intelligent it blows the journalist's mind--among their own people, the ambassadors, at 260 IQ, are morons, and are sent on this kind of mission because it is impossible for humans of a mere 100 or so IQ to communicate with an alien of average IQ.      

"Vocation" is like a filler piece, not bad, but no big deal.

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We think of old science fiction, in particular science fiction associated with Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr., as optimistic about science and technology and as being a celebration of the ability of man to master the environment and solve problems.  But today's five stories are all about human limitations and human evil.  I guess Astounding was serving up a pretty varied diet to readers.

More samples from that diet next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Clifford D. Simak: "Ogre," "Lobby," and "Eternity Lost"

As was foretold, today we read "Ogre," Clifford Simak's contribution to the January 1944 issue of Astounding.  (We've already read the A. E. van Vogt, Frank Belknap Long, Hal Clement and P. Schuyler Miller fiction in this issue of John W. Campbell's genre-defining magazine.)  We'll also take a look at two other Astounding pieces by Simak, "Lobby," another 1944 story, and 1949's "Eternity Lost."  I'm reading all of these stories in scans of the issues of Astounding in which they debuted.

"Ogre" (1944)

Here we have a story full of great science fiction ideas, ideas that exploit and reflect our fears of loneliness as well as of loss of individuality, our fascination with art and our vulnerability to dangerous addictions, our dreams of perfect health and concerns over who and what determines our true identities--does our blood or the place we were born determine who we are, or can we adopt piecemeal or in toto the culture of people of other races and civilizations?  "Ogre" also reminds us of all those Somerset Maugham stories about Westerners out in the colonies, trying to make a buck, dealing with the inscrutable natives and running the risk of--or embracing the thrill of--going native.  Well-written and fun at the same time it tackles these issues of identity and imperialism, with "Ogre" we are starting off this blog post with a hit--thumbs up!

"Ogre" has many characters but almost all of them have personalities and strong motivations so they aren't hard to tell apart and most of them provide drama or entertainment and/or offer illustrations of the story's themes.  "Ogre" is set on a planet where plants developed intelligence and animal-like mobility.  Native to this world are plants like sheets or cloaks that can crawl around and can tap into the brain activity of any other living thing they touch.  When humans arrived on the planet these things, called "blankets" throughout the story, were thrilled to develop a symbiotic relationship with Earthers, because these blankets have naturally dim wits and dull lives, but connected to a man they suddenly had deep feelings and the ability for complex thought.  Humans embraced these relationships because the blankets have super-efficient physiologies and can absorb energy directly from the environment, heal quickly and fend of disease with ease, and when touching a human they can share these abilities with him--a man with a blanket need not eat, and can quickly recover from any kind of injury or infection, beyond having a constant companion who shares his attitudes and goals.

The blankets are kind of like non-white individuals during the ages of exploration and imperialism who take on the culture of white colonists, subalterns who embrace service to their technological superiors.  Simak in "Ogre" also dramatizes the opposite sort of relationship, the colonist who goes native.  Among the many other types of sentient plants on this vegetable-dominated planet are trees that produce music of staggering beauty.  Much money can be made by human merchants who can record this music and sell it to Earthers living around the galaxy.  But there is a risk to this music--it is so beautiful that humans can become addicted to it and neglect their health and abandon all social norms as they become obsessed with it.  A major component of the plot of the story is the behavior of a man who becomes obsessed in this way, and another plot strand involves one of the intelligent ambulatory plants--probably the most intelligent of them--who hatches a scheme to use the trees to become master of the human race.

With all these plants who want to become like men and men who fall under the sway of plants we have , multiple examples of entities of one culture or species who desire to, or risk being forced to, take on elements of the identities of another culture or race.  And there's more!  We also have an iteration of a characteristic Simak character--the sympathetic robot who is probably "better" than humans but who yearns to be considered human.  This robot is at the Earth trading post at the behest of the interstellar business enterprise that owns the post, charged with the mission of making sure the humans working for the corporation do not steal or otherwise misuse and waste the corporation's resources and ensuring compliance with the many company rules and government regulations that govern the company and its employees.  This robot plays the role of a comic relief character--it even has bad grammar--but is also the hero of the story, being more honest, more brave, better at fighting, etc., than the rest of the cast.  This character brings a lot to the story, but I will warn my 21st-century readers that this character may be modelled on and intended to remind readers of stereotypes of nagging women and African-American subalterns, and the robot does use the dreaded "N-word," the word people of my ancestry use nowadays only at great risk, in the cliche "n----- in the woodpile."

Looking beyond the numerous humans and the various types of plants, plus the robot, this planet is also the site of a rival trading post to that of the Earthers, an outpost of evil insectoids from another space faring civilization.  This story offers multiple examples of what some of the characters consider treason to the race, and one of them is provided by a human who joins the insect people in an operation against the interests of the Earth station.

As for the plot of "Ogre," I won't get too far into it except to say it is full of incident--dangerous journeys, gun fights, hand-to-hand combat, monster attacks, double crosses, schemes that offer tremendous wealth and threaten entire civilizations.  Simak handles all this material ably--the fighting and scheming is entertaining and exciting and the comic relief and serious themes of the story work in concert with the action-adventure material instead of undermining or sidelining it.        

I can't think of anything bad to say about "Ogre."  A very fine piece of work.  Highly recommended to anybody with any interest in popular fiction.  

After its debut in this terrific issue of Astounding, "Ogre" reappeared in Donald Wollheim's Adventures on Other Planets, multiple European anthologies, multiple "Best of Astounding /Analog" volumes, and several Simak collections.  

"Lobby" (1944)

"Ogre" was about universal, timeless, concerns, like imperialism and identity, that are inherently interesting.  "Lobby" is about particular, timely, concerns, like atomic power, that are sort of interesting, and things that I guess are sort of universal and timeless, like industrial espionage and government corruption, but are sort of boring.  "Lobby"'s characters are a bore, mere cardboard cutouts.  Its plot is resolved by a deus ex machina device--lame!  Plus, it is one of those stories that craps on the traditions of Anglo-American liberalism, like jury trials and elected government and private enterprise, in favor of technocratic world government--gross!  A big step down from "Ogre."

It is the post-World War II world.  World government is trying to take control, but its hands are full in the ruins of Europe and Asia so the United States still has its independence.  Cobb is a businessman based in New York and Butler is the world's greatest scientist, out in Montana.  Butler is on the brink of bringing the world's first atomic power plant on line; Cobb is his partner, handling the business and political end.  Atomic power has the potential to revolutionize the world economy--the arrival of cheap and abundant energy will end poverty.  But the people who own and manage and work for and have invested in the fossil fuel and hydroelectric power industries (in this story they are lumped together as "the power lobby") will lose their livelihoods, or so they think, and so they oppose the development of atomic reactors, telling the world atomic power is dangerous, setting up a bogus religious sect to preach against messing with the atom, buying off senators, etc.

The atomic reactor in Montana is almost ready to go online and prove that atomic power is safe and efficient, so the power lobby sabotages it; the resulting catastrophic explosion kills 100 people.  Luckily, Butler and all his files survive.  But isn't this the kind of PR blow that will end all public support for atomic power?

Here comes the deus ex machina!  A genius lawyer from the world government (somehow) has all the evidence necessary to prove that the power lobby blew up the reactor.  The power lobby says that his evidence won't be enough to convince a jury, but the man from the world government says ha ha, there will be no jury--at the world court in Switzerland expert judges decide cases, not juries of gullible and emotional proles!  The world government lawyer proceeds to blackmail the power lobby--in return for not being put on trial, the lobby's ringleaders agree to work in concert with Butler and Cobb under the direction of the world government to bring atomic power to the masses without too much economic dislocation.  The legal eagle gloats that, once the world government has control of atomic power, individual governments like that in the U.S. will lose all power and there will be no more elections decided by easily swayed commoners and no more private business run by greedy money grubber, just scientists running the world scientifically. 

Disgusting!  Thumbs down!

(For the record, I think nuclear power is great, but I wouldn't abandon elected government, private property, and trial by jury to get it.)

The issue of Astounding that includes "Lobby" also features A. E. van Vogt's "The Changeling," various forms of which I have read and blogged about, and Fritz Leiber's "Sanity," the version of which known as "Crazy Wolf" I have read and blogged about.  "Lobby" resurfaced to preach its gospel of atomic power and rule by unelected eggheads in Groff Conklin's The Best of Science Fiction in 1946.  In 2023 it reappeared in the Simak collection Buckets of Diamonds and Other Stories, the thirteenth volume of The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak.  I guess The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak isn't presenting Simak's work in chronological order.

"Eternity Lost" (1949)

The July 1949 issue of Astounding in which we find "Eternity Lost" includes James H. Schmitz's "Agent of Vega," a book version of which we read in 2016, when we were young.  The cover story is nonfiction, about a nuclear reactor.

"Eternity Lost" shares a lot with "Lobby;" we've got a world government and a new form of technology being suppressed by a conspiracy.  But, thankfully, this story also has a decent plot, an effort to create a human character, and a surprise twist ending.  We'll call it mildly recommendable.

After the world government based in Geneva took over, longevity treatments were developed--when a person gets old, like around 90 or so, such a treatment can rejuvenate him, give him another approximately 100 years.  The government decided that it wouldn't fair if people could buy this boon, and giving it to everybody wouldn't be practicable, so it was decided that only a tiny number of people should be able to get rejuvenated, people chosen by the government, ostensibly because they are providing a service to humanity.  Simak includes dialogue from the government hearings that led to this decision, including testimony from various people attacking the rejuvenation program, as flashbacks throughout the story.

The main story takes place like 500 years after those hearings.  The man who chaired those hearings, Senator Leonard, is almost 600 years old and has had five of the rare treatments.  But as the story begins he learns that he won't be getting another!  Why?  It looks like he will lose the next election, and his party isn't going to pull the strings necessary for him to get a sixth treatment.  Already old and starting to forget things, Leonard only has a few years to live!

Simak does a decent job describing Leonard's emotions and philosophical reflections upon facing death as well as speculating about how individuals and society might respond to the fact that a tiny elite minority gets to live indefinitely.  Simak also presents a pretty good plot as Leonard scrambles to figure out a way to get a rejuvenation treatment illegally.  Leonard learns that advancements have been made in longevity science--actual immortality has been achieved!  But kept secret from the public and even top legislators like himself because the news might cause economic and political upheaval.  Leonard also learns that the cabal that controls the immortality technique will release the technique to the public when a viable extrasolar space program has been developed and discovered alien planets suitable for colonization.

Leonard fails to figure out how to get a treatment through unconventional channels.  So he decides to go out with a bang, to do the George Costanza "I am breaking up with you!" thing.  Before the public finds out that he has been denied a rejuvenation treatment, he announces to the world that he is refusing his next treatment to show solidarity with the common people.  He figures this will blacken the reputation of all the other people who have been getting the treatments, the people who turned their backs on him--revenge!

Leonard becomes wildly popular!  But then comes the twist ending!  The cabal that controls the immortality technique has secretly developed space craft that can reach hospitable alien planets and is secretly organizing recon expeditions to them.  They sent Leonard a letter inviting him to get immortality and join just such an expedition a week ago, but because he is getting forgetful on his senescence, he forgot to look at his mail.  Now that he has turned against the elite of which he is a part they, of course, are rescinding the offer, and Leonard will soon die, knowing he was so so close to living forever and spending that life as a vigorous and respected man, exploring the universe.

There are plot holes in this story, and elements that don't make a lot of sense, and of course it advocates elite manipulation of the public, but still it isn't actually bad, the main character, pacing, and twist ending offering entertainment.

"Eternity Lost" would reappear in Everett F. Blieler and T. E. Dikty's The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1950 and in Campbell's big (like 600 pages!) The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology and its little  abridged paperback version (fewer than 200 pages.)  Martin H. Greenberg included it in three different anthologies, and the story would be reproduced in the tenth volume of The Collected Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, The Shipshape Miracle and other stories.

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It's a roller coaster ride!  We've got "Ogre," a five-neurotic-robots-out-of-five story, "Lobby," a story that sucks and even made me angry, and then "Eternity Lost," a decent twist ending story.  "Ogre" and "Eternity Lost" have merit as entertainment and have good science fiction ideas and of course I am recommending them.  But let's play devil's advocate--I can even make a case for reading the execrable "Lobby" to those of you who are students of popular literature.

Science fiction is the literature of ideas, the literature that speculates on technology and its effect on society, the literature of the paradigm shift, the literature that considers alternate ways of organizing society and living your life.  Well, that is what "Lobby" is all about...all about, it totally lacking any kind of literary or entertainment value.  "Lobby" represents a type of science fiction, the story that offers ideas and advocates for their adoption to the exclusion of all else, and it represents a large segment of the science fiction community that sees science and technology as the key to a better future, and prioritizes science and technology over traditional American values like democracy and the market economy, that in the period of the Depression, the Second World War, and the early Cold War, advocated for atomic power, technocracy, and world government as solutions to the crises facing the world in the 1930-1960 era.  So I guess I am sort of telling you to read "Lobby," even though I am suggesting you likely won't enjoy it.

More Astounding stories in our next episode--science fiction fans, stay tuned! 

Hal Clement: "Impediment," "Technical Error" and "Assumption Unjustified"

It's time to put the science back in science fiction!  On November 8, as I reported on X, I spotted a copy of the Hal Clement collection Natives of Space at the Seneca Cannery Antique Mall in Havre de Grace, Maryland.  I passed on buying the book, instead spending my money on the filthy old HO scale electric locomotives I have spent the last week refurbishing and a ray-pistol-packing female astronaut.  But Clement has been on my mind; after all, I read his story "A Question of Guilt" just a few days ago and "Proof" just a week before that, and Clement wrote the intro to the Jack Williamson collection from which we just read The Green Girl.  So today let's read the three longish stories that were reprinted in Natives of Space, all three of which debuted in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding in the 1940s.  After being reprinted in Natives in Space in 1965 with a Richard Powers cover and in 1970 with a Dean Ellis cover, these three tales appeared in print yet again in the 1979 collection The Best of Hal Clement.  I'll be reading them in a scan of that 1979 collection, in chronological order.

"Impediment" (1942)

"Impediment" debuted alongside Robert Heinlein's "Waldo" and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "Deadlock," both of which were credited to pseudonyms, and Ross Rocklynne's "Jackdaw."  There's also an article by Willy Ley about various types of bombs and bombing techniques.  Kaboom!

Writing about "A Question of Guilt" in 2020, the great tarbandu told us he thinks Hal Clement "one of science fiction’s more boring authors" and "Impediment" is undeniably long and slow, its pace is very deliberate, its subject matter largely lacking the violence and totally lacking the sex that adds thrills to so much of our science fiction reading.  Williamson in his The Green Girl includes a long sequence in which a guy, all on his lonesome, out in a jungle, painstakingly takes months to devise a bomb from locally-sourced all-natural materials, but that story was also about a love affair and a war against monsters and zombies in which thousands of people were killed.  Clement here in "Impediment" spends page after page describing how telepathic aliens with no spoken language spend months trying to learn how to communicate with a human being and then try to persuade him to provide them the poison gas they need to kill other aliens; Clement's project is to dramatize not only the language barriers but also the cultural barriers that lie between alien societies, and "Impediment" consists essentially of people thinking and talking.

Skinny insectoid aliens land their star ship in Alaska and find Earth's gravity, four times the gravity back home, causes them terrible health issues.  But they can't just leave--they have landed in search of what they consider essential supplies, and their communications officer is given the task of negotiating with the only human within miles, a 20-year-old academic, to get the supplies.  As the story progresses we gradually learn that these moth-people have a totally selfish society lacking in empathy and sympathy in which the polities are like a bunch of squabbling feudal barons.  The captain of the ship has mutinied against his monarch and taken up a career as a renegade pirate, so every hand in the galaxy is turned against them; we are led to believe this is a normal situation in the bug people's civilization, that their race has no moral qualms over murdering people for money and does not hold loyalty in very high regard.  This revelation is the dramatic, literary component of the story--at first the human is eager to help the aliens, who seem friendly, but when he realizes they are murderous pirates he struggles with the question of whether it would be just to offer them aid.

The sciency component of "Impediment" is the long descriptions of how the alien communications expert figures out how to communicate with the human.  This all seems totally legit, Clement apparently having thought long and hard about such a challenge and how one might try to solve it.  Clement also puts effort into developing--successfully--a believable alien society and individual and class relations within it, giving his two lead aliens personalities that determine their behavior.

The twist ending is that, unlike the insect people whose brains all run along the same channels, every human's brain is unique, like our fingerprints, and so the months the aliens have spent learning to communicate with one guy provide almost no help in communicating with another.  That 20-something student does not have the knowledge to identify the poison they need, and because the active duty list is rapidly being reduced by casualties from exposure to Earth's gravity, the moth men will have to leave the Earth before they can learn to talk to anybody who can provide them the poison.  No humans will be complicit in the space pirates' crimes.  

"Impediment" is a story that is easy to admire and respect, the author having achieved his ambitious goals, but it lacks gusto or real excitement and doesn't really engage the reader's emotions.  Mild recommendation. 

"Technical Error" (1944)   

"Technical Error" is the cover story of the January '44 ish of Astounding.  This issue also includes A. E. van Vogt's "Far Centaurus," which I have read multiple times and wrote about in 2016, a rare Frank Belknap Long story, "Alias the Living," which I read in 2022, and P. Schuyler Miller's "As Never Was," which I read in 2018.  There's also a story by Clifford Simak, "Ogre," which maybe I should read soon.

"Technical Error" is all about technology, with Clement coming up with ideas about alternative ways to lock doors and seal pieces of machinery together and then depicting men unfamiliar with these novel techniques trying to figure them out in order to preserve their lives in a race against time.  This story has more tension and is a little quicker paced than "Impediment," but "Impediment" has personalities and depicts relationships which are important to the plot while "Technical Error"'s human elements are pretty mechanical--each of the characters is much like the others and their relationships have no bearing on the story.

A space crew's ship makes an emergency landing on an asteroid of our solar system and bails out to watch their ship melt from engine overheating.  They have only a few days of oxygen left.  Luckily, they find an abandoned ship, one that must have been made by aliens heretofore unknown to mankind, maybe many thousands of years ago.  The astronauts explore the ship and try to figure out if they can use it or its components to escape or signal for help.  Clement's focus is on the alien technology and the human spacemen's process of exploring the ship and manipulating doohickeys and we get detailed descriptions of guys walking down this corridor, opening that door, walking down a different corridor, opening another door, discussing how magnets might be used to distort metal to make a superior lock, etc.  We readers also are presented clues as to why the aliens abandoned the ship so long ago--Clement does not come out and say it, but it seems like the civilized alien space crew captured a monster, the monster severed its bonds and got out of its cell, the aliens welded shut the section of the ship the monster was in, but then it managed to escape out a rocket motor exhaust tube, in the process rendering the rocket unable to operate safely.  

Clement's story comes full circle, or you might say ends with a rhyme--the Terran spacemen cause the engine of this alien ship to overheat and they watch this ship melt.  Thankfully, another ship sees the bright light from the alien rocket firing and rescues our guys before they run out of O2.

"Technical Error" is a success, and being tighter than "Impediment" is probably more enjoyable on a page for page basis.  I personally enjoy stories in which people are in spacesuits exploring old wrecks, so this one struck more of a chord with me on a surface level than did "Impediment," though I recognize "Impediment," with its moral dilemmas and creation of an alien society, is more ambitious and perhaps more sophisticated.   

Both "Impediment" and "Technical Error" were reprinted in Volume 2 of The Essential Hal Clement, Music of Many Spheres.

"Assumption Unjustified" (1946)

"Assumption Unjustified" first saw print in an issue of Astounding alongside the first of two installments of van Vogt's serial "The Chronicler," another production of the Canadian mad man which I have read multiple times and recall with fondness.  Groff Conklin in 1953 reprinted "Assumption Unjustified" in Crossroads in Time, which reappeared in Spanish in 1968.

Thrykar the chemist and Tes the musician are a married couple on their honeymoon.  Members of a race of dark serpentine creatures with many little legs, long thin tentacles, big fins and big eyes (take a gander at Thrykar on the cover of The Best of Hal Clement) they have landed their space ship on Earth for a "refreshing."  We observe as Thrykar sneaks around the woods and a quarry near a small town, investigating the possibility of hiding their space ship in a pit that has fallen out of use.

It is a little while before Clement reveals to us what this "refreshing" is all about, and when he does we realize that, as in his "A Question of Guilt," published decades later, is a vampire story, one of those SF stories that seeks to provide a rational explanation for some bit of mythology or folklore.  (C. L. Moore's "Shambleu" did this for Medusa the Gorgon, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End did this for the Devil, Star Trek did this for the Greek gods, etc.)  A bunch of schoolboys take a swim in one of the flooded quarry pits and after the rest have left there is a lone straggler and Thrykar knocks the kid out with an elaborate sleep gas gun, the operation of which Clement describes in some detail, the way he describes every person's every move in each and every one of today's three stories.  Thrykar then uses a hypodermic needle to steal ten cubic centimeters of blood from the child.  A few minutes later, the boy wakes up, none the worse for wear, and Thrykar and Tes are in their hidden space ship in the lab and we get the expository dialogue that explains why these serpents from the stars are stealing some human kid's blood.  It seems T and T's snake people figured out a way to supercharge their white blood cells so they will never get ill and enjoy something close to immortality, but this has a dangerous side effect that periodically has to be rectified by injections of blood from somebody with a different blood type.  Tes has the same blood type as Thrykar so he can't just use her blood.  (Doh!)  It is implied that these serpent people have been stopping on Earth to steal blood for decades or centuries when en route to some other star system and these aliens are the source of the vampire legend.

(Fiction is replete with explanations and justifications, sometimes elaborate like this one, that allow  characters to do the sorts of things we all want to do but we all know we aren't supposed to do, like killing people, blowing stuff up, stealing, cheating on our spouses, insulting people right to their faces, etc.)

Thrykar steals blood from a second boy the next day, but for various reasons this kid doesn't just get back up and walk off, so the kindly snake people take the human kid to their space ship to try to help him.  But they can't, so they return him to the town, where Thrykar is briefly spotted, leading the person who spotted him to think vampires are on the loose.

The sense of wonder ending of "Assumption Unjustified" is that Thrykar decides that the Earth is now advanced enough to join galactic society and he will advise the authorities to end the policy of hiding the existence of galactic civilization from humans--soon the human race will be in contact with a dizzying array of intelligent alien life forms.

In some ways, "Assumption Unjustified" is better than "Impediment" and "Technical Error"--Thrykar and Tes, and the human boys, are more likable and fun than the space pirates and college kid of "Impediment" and the flat personality-deprived astronauts in "Technical Error"--but the 1948 story's plot and science ideas are less dramatic and compelling.  The ending of "Assumption Unjustified" disappointed me--I thought the aliens were going to donate blood to the human kid and the kid was going to become super strong, or the kid was going to be taken aboard to see the galaxy or something cool like that.  I don't find the standard SF gag in which myths and legends are explained as garbled accounts of encounters with aliens very engaging.  And the story seemed uneconomical--we have to hear all this rigamarole about bringing the second victim to the space ship and examining him, and then they just take him back out of the space ship?  As for the science, the reason the aliens have to steal blood felt more contrived and less plausible than the science in the earlier two stories.

"Assumption Unjustified" is not a bad story, and for like half or two-thirds of its length I liked it more than "Impediment" and maybe even "Technical Error," but the ending puts it into third place.  We'll call "Assumption Unjustified" high on the acceptable spectrum, on the border line of mildly recommendable.  

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These are stories full of science that, besides promoting technology and the scientific method, dramatize efforts of educated and intelligent people to understand alien races while under time pressure. I like them, but I can't say I love them. Certainly worth my time, though.

More stories from 1940s issues of Astounding in our next episode.

    

The Green Girl by Jack Williamson

Again, I had to admit that Sam had advanced a most plausible explanation for an amazing thing, but still I prefer my plants fastened to the ground.

I recently bought a copy of Jane and Howard Frank's The Frank Collection, which is about the authors' collection of SF-related art.  Early in the book there is a reproduction of the cover of the 1950 Avon paperback edition of Jack Williamson's The Green Girl, the illustration of which shows some kind of flying plant monster carrying off the sexalicious title character.  I like Williamson, and this wild and alluring cover was enough to push me over the edge into wanting to read this novel, which debuted in Amazing in 1930 as a serial that stretched across two issues.  I'll be reading The Green Girl in a scan of 1999's The Metal Man and Others, Volume One of the Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, where it takes up fewer than 100 pages.

The Green Girl's plot has the structure of one of those Edgar Rice Burroughs stories in which a modern man is transported to another world where he meets a princess whose people are in some war; he becomes a leader of her people's army and wins the war and wins her hand in marriage.  But Williamson's narrator and male lead is not the confident, self-starting, astoundingly capable man these stories generally have as their heroes; instead, he is the junior partner in a male relationship much like that of a father and son.  Through most of the story, the senior partner, the world's greatest scientist, makes all the decisions and performs all the feats, and The Green Girl feels like some kind of wish fulfillment fantasy in which everything is just handed to the protagonist--a hot girl just falls into his lap without him having to do anything to win her love and his friend the super genius whips up elaborate scientific inventions on the fly that protect the narrator and propel him through awesome adventures of which he is more spectator than participant.  The narrator isn't particularly brave or handy or even ambitious--when humanity is under alien threat of extinction, he figures he will be fine if civilization collapses as long as he can live out his life on an oasis with his dream girl.  He's selfish!  But in the final quarter or so of the novel the genius scientist father figure appears to have been killed and the narrator steps up to fill "Dad"'s shoes and save the world, the father figure has successfully trained his surrogate son to do the right thing and use his gifts to serve society.

Stylistically, one of the most prominent characteristics of The Green Girl is all the long descriptions of unique and dramatic phenomena the narrator observes (but often doesn't really interact with), descriptions that focus in particular on color.  Rays or vibrations of opposing wavelengths or valences or whatever collide and an "etheric storm" of brilliant pulsating lights fills the sky.  Our heroes approach and then penetrate an alien jungle of flowering plants of a hundred riotous colors.  The red ambient light of a subterranean world casts a crimson gloom on everything, while its human inhabitants have green skin.  And so on.  Williamson advances speculative explanations of these phenomena--the red light is from radium gas (or something, I didn't quite get it) and the red light makes people's skin tan green--under the light of Sol they would tan like we surface people do (I didn't get this, either.)  Williamson buttresses his speculations with real-life science; in the course of explaining the monsters that are central to the story--mobile intelligent plants--Williamson provides a description of euglena viridis, a single-celled creature that, we are told, straddles the boundary between plant and animal.  Williamson also offers lots of science trivia; e.g., the Pacific Ocean, we are told, is 2.7% solid matter, and escape velocity from Earth is seven miles a second.  Like so much early science fiction, The Green Girl glamorizes science and technology, expresses tremendous optimism about what man can achieve, and even tries to teach you some science.

“What can’t we do? We have the Omnimobile. We have machines and tools. We have knowledge, and our hands. We can go anywhere, and do anything! But the first thing is to study, to find out what we have to deal with, and how to fight it.”

The Green Girl is not bad, though the fact that for three-quarters of the narrative the protagonist is constantly playing second fiddle to his friend and doesn't really have to do anything to win the love of the female lead perhaps makes it less thrilling than tales of such heroes as John Carter, Tarzan, and Conan--those guys are always making the decisions that drive the narrative, using their abilities to defeat enemies and overcome obstacles, and attracting women with their good looks and dashing deeds.  But maybe a narrative arc in which a father figure teaches a selfish kid to become a better person is more sophisticated, more realistic and more elevating?  

I can mildly recommend The Green Girl.  To us students of the history of speculative fiction, any story by a Grand Master that appeared in Hugo Gernsback's flagship magazine (though by this time Gernsback had lost control of the magazine and this issue was edited by scientist T. O'Conor Sloane) is valuable reading, and it is fun to know the story behind those wild book covers.  But I think The Green Girl may have entertainment value even for general readers.  The vivid images of strange phenomena and of the equipment the scientist cooks up are actually fun, even if I found much of the science material to be opaque, and the war stuff in the end is engagingly melodramatic, with mass destruction and all the named characters suffering injury and/or risking their lives in the effort to save their fellows.  

For a more detailed synopsis and a little more analysis of The Green Girl, read on!  

It is the high tech future of 1999!  Machines do all the work so people have lots of free time!  There is no poverty or inequality!  Because all problems have been solved, there is no scientific advancement, and almost no scientists.  Our narrator, 25-year-old Melvin Dane, is best friends with the last scientist, a man of 70 years, Sam, inventor of nuclear power plants and many of the other devices that helped create this utopia.  These two occupy their days by sitting on the beach or doing extensive travelling, including lots of off the beaten path exploring.

You see, our narrator Mel has a vivid imagination and spends a lot of time day dreaming about his fantasy girlfriend, a beautiful woman with greenish skin.  Mel actually prefers being alone with his own thoughts to spending time with other people so he can focus all his mind on this dream girl of his.  Of course, Williamson makes clear to us that this green woman is real and that our guy is in telepathic contact with a real woman in some other world; genius Sam recognizes this truth, and the reason he takes Mel on so many trips to exotic locales is in hopes Mel will recognize the alien environment the Green Girl describes to Mel in his "dreams."  Their travels have not yielded success, however, and as an adult the narrator has more or less abandoned the idea that his dream girl is real, even as he spends all his free time daydreaming about her.

One day, the sky turns red and the sun's light is diminished.  The color of the sun, as perceived by those on Earth, runs through a spectrum of color changes and then all turns black as the sun's light is totally extinguished!  Sam explains that some hostile alien force has filled "the ether" with "interfering waves" that are blocking the rays of the sun, apparently in an effort to freeze the surface temperature of the Earth down to "absolute zero," which will of course destroy human civilization.  Sam has expected something like this would happen eventually, and secretly been working on a machine to cancel out such enemy waves.  He throws considerations of work-life balance into the crapper and throws his productivity into high gear in an effort to finish his machine in time to save our civilization.  Williamson shovels on the science talk:

"With these instruments I can pick up and analyze any disturbance in the ether, whether it be Hertzian or wireless wave two miles long, or any of the shorter waves that extend down to heat or infra-red, through the visible and ultra-violet spectrums, and even below, to the Cosmic Rays."

Sam finally activates his machine and Mel observes the sky as the conflict of Sam's and the enemy's waves produces a "pulsating" and "coruscating" display of colors, an "etheric storm."  Sam's waves triumph over the enemy's and the daytime sky is again blue and the good old sun is back after thirty hours of frigid cold that have left thousands across the globe dead.

Sam and the narrator figure another attack on Earth's relationship with the sun is imminent, and prepare.  One of Sam's long term public projects has been a space ship with tank treads and propellors to allow it to travel with ease both over land and under the sea, the Omnimobile, and Sam and the narrator rush to finish this thing before the sun is again blocked out.  The vehicle is stocked full of food, equipped with a library of science fiction magazines and a nuclear power plant and armed with a rapid-fire two-inch automatic gun and electric bolt projectors, and Mel figures he and Sam can survive indefinitely within the Omnimobile no matter what threats arise; Mel thinks he can happily live out his life, enjoying his dreams of the Green Girl and rereading all those old SF stories, even if all of humanity is extinguished.

Sam puts his many inventions and his vast expertise to work trying to figure out where the solar-radiation-obstructing rays originated, and it turns out the human race's unseen enemy is trying to figure out where Sam's jamming device is located!  A flying silver sphere appears and Sam and Mel escape their house on the beach shortly before its atoms are separated into their component protons, neutrons and electrons by the globe's disintegrator ray attack.  Luckily Sam has determined the location of the source of the enemy waves, and he and Mel climb into the Omnimobile and set out for the Pacific--the enemy attack is emanating from a spot some miles below the surface of the ocean.

Our heroes descend deep into a natural trench and emerge in a bizarre world within the hollow Earth, a world illuminated by the red glow of radioactive gas.  I guess this gas also produces the pressure needed to keep the Pacific Ocean from falling down on this inner world--the "roof" of this subterranean universe is the waters of the Pacific.  (This is one of the things in the story I found confusing.)

Sam and Mel spot something flying above a dense jungle--the monsters from the cover of the 1950 American paperback and the 1966 German printing, flowers larger than a man with wings of leaves and grasping tentacles.  One seems to carry a human figure, so they shoot it down with the 2-inch gun.  When they investigate the plant-monster carcass they find its victim is a gorgeous nude girl with green skin--she is in a coma but Mel would recognize his dream girl in any condition!  Sam isn't just an inventor of vehicles and wave projectors but also a medical doctor and he treats the odd burns on the Green Girl's back and revives her.  They also put clothes on the Green Girl, whose name we learn is Xenora.

Xenora recognizes Mel from their telepathic communications, and explains that she is a princess of a dying race.  Ages ago her people dominated this world, but then appeared a monster god, a Lord of Flame in the form of a huge serpent of green fire that has hypnotic powers and gathered to it worshippers that soon outnumbered those who resisted its telepathic seductions.  Only a small number of Xenora's people are independent today, living in the woods and in the ruins of their formerly magnificent cities, always at risk of capture; if taken, the Lord of Flame's worshippers attach an apparatus to the backs of Xenora's countrymen that makes zombie slaves of them.  Xenora herself was captured recently and impressed into the Lord of Flame's flying navy of silver globes; the apparatus fell off when the globe ship she was on was destroyed in a battle against the flying flower monsters.  No doubt the Lord of Flame is the entity trying to freeze the surface of the Earth.  (Why?  Sam later theorizes that freezing the Pacific will make it a more sturdy roof.)

In the body of the monster they shot down, Sam finds a baby flying flower monster, a thing less than a foot long,  and decides to keep it and study it.  He and Sam leave Xenora with the Omnimobile to hunt for food for Sam's new pet, and proceed to get lost in the jungle.  The Lord of Flame tries to hypnotize them, but Xenora sends a psychic message to our heroes, clearing their minds just as they were about to fall into the clutches of the monster god's minions.   

   

Over the next two weeks, Sam develops helmets that protect the wearer from the Lord of Flame's hypnotic rays and trains his rapidly growing pet flying flower monster to act as a servant who can help wash the dishes.  The trio takes off in the Omnimobile, and wins a gun battle with a flying globe crewed by the Lord of Flame's slaves; from the wreck Sam recovers interesting artifacts.  Months go by, the pet monster growing larger than a man and Sam learning more and more about the Lord of Flame.  Williamson stresses how, while the pet monster disturbs the narrator, Sam and the monster come to love each other--Sam is the picture not only of human ingenuity but of the ability of love to overcome prejudice; he is the kind of father who knows how important and awesome weapons, vehicles and nuclear energy are, but also knows that what matters in life are relationships based on love.

Sam and his pet go off hunting and don't return, and Mel figures the worst and decides to attack the Lord of Flame himself, leaving Xenora behind.  The Lord of Flame turns out to be a giant metal tower in a deep crater, apparently a metallic life form--the green snake of fire is a projection of its power.  Mel flies the Omnimobile into the crater and pits its 2-inch gun and the electric arc projectors against the flying globes and other firepower of the Lord of Flame.  Our guy scores some hits but the Omnimobile crash lands and Mel's helmet falls off so he falls under the control of the Lord of Flame's telepathic hypnotism.  A few days later Xenora shows up--an expert hiker and woodsman, she climbed down into the crater to save her boyfriend.  She takes off her helmet and gives it to Mel; Mel flees on foot and now Xenora is once again a zombie slave of the Lord of Flame.

Mel is now committed to destroying the Lord of Flame.  Williamson describes over multiple pages how Mel, using his chemistry knowledge, makes nitroglycerine from naturally occurring materials, a process that takes months.  He plants a huge mine where, upon exploding, it should open a channel from a sea into the crater and drown the Lord of Flame and its worshippers.  Just after he has placed the mine and is lighting the fuse, Xenora climbs out of the crater--thanks to their psychic connection with him she knows what he is up to and as a slave of the Lord of Flame she has come to kill him with a spear!  Will Mel have to fight his beloved hand-to-hand to save the human race from freezing to death?

Nope.  In another of those coincidences we are always finding in our genre literature reading, from the sky appears Sam, riding his pet flower monster, at the head of an air fleet of hundreds of the monsters.  Sam was captured by the monsters months ago but soon made himself their leader.  Xenora is carried off in the tentacles of Sam's pet and Mel sets off the mine while Sam's botanical air force battles the silver globe slave air force.  The explosion of the mine not only floods the crater but changes the air pressure down here so that the Pacific Ocean starts leaking down into the inner world.  (At least I think that is what is happening.)  Our three heroes get to the Omnimobile and escape to the surface of the Pacific--Sam's pet is left behind, killed saving the Omnimobile from a sneak attack by one of the globes.  Under the light of the sun, Xenora's tan changes from green to a healthy brown and everybody lives happily ever after.