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.

DAW The Year's Best Horror Stories IV: A Davidson, H Clement, R Campbell, C L Grant and R A Lafferty

The first DAW The Year's Best Horror Stories, from which we read four stories in our last installment, was a reprint of a British anthology edited by Richard Davis.  The next two volumes in the DAW series consist of stories drawn from other Davis publications.  But The Year's Best Horror Stories IV, printed in 1976, is a US original edited by Gerald W. Page.  It looks like we have already assimilated four stories Page selected for the book, "Something Had to Be Done" by David Drake, "Cottage Tenant" by Frank Belknap Long, "No Way Home" by Brian Lumley and "The Glove" by Fritz Leiber, but its pages contain five as yet unread stories by people we are interested in: Avram Davidson, last seen flummoxing me with a story about a famous American crime I rarely think about; Hal Clement, whose science-heavy story "Proof" I recently enjoyed; Ramsey Campbell, author of "The Scar," among the many facets of which are incest, jewel thieves and doppelgangers; Charles L. Grant, famous as the writer of "quiet" horror (shhh!), and R. A. Lafferty, one of those wild and crazy sui generis SF authors like A. E. van Vogt and Barry Malzberg.  Let's investigate these five tales and take a stab at figuring out why Page included them in the first of his four outings as editor of The Year's Best Horror Stories.  (From VIII to XXII, the series was helmed by Karl Edward Wagner, author of the Kane stories and "The Picture of Johnathan Collins," which I in 2016 called "explicit" and tarbandu at PorPorBooks just recently called "unabashed gay porn.")

Oh, yeah, the great tarbandu back in 2020 reviewed The Year's Best Horror Stories IV, so after I have drafted my own assessments of today's tales I will reacquaint myself with what he had to say about the book and see if we are on the same page when it comes to the nine stories from the volume I will have read.

"And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" by Avram Davidson (1975)

"And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" debuted in Playboy alongside a Flashman piece by George MacDonald Fraser, an interview with Erica Jong ("I frequently go without any underwear at all"), and a goofy pictorial in which comic book heroines are depicted in compromising positions.  If you ever imagined Little Orphan Annie receiving oral sex from her dog or Lois Lane masturbating in a phone booth, well, you could have gotten a job at Playboy in the Seventies, I guess.  I'm reading "And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" in a scan of 1978's Getting Even: Gripping Tales of Revenge, where Davidson's story is accompanied by Robert Bloch's quite good "Animal Fair," and Robert E. Howard's "The Man on the Ground," among other stories by SF luminaries.  "And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" would also be reprinted in The Avram Davidson Treasury.

This is a joke story, but it is a sort of sophisticated joke story and is actually amusing.  I can't really convey the effectiveness of the jokes, which are mostly based on hyperbolic and absurd language, without actually telling them to you, which I won't do, but I will tell you I am giving this story a thumbs up and provide you the outlines of the brief plot (the story takes up just seven pages of Getting Even.)

Charley is an uneducated working-class dope who works alone in a shop reconditioning old gas stoves for resale.  Actual sales are handled by the shop owner, a fat jerk who has another business somewhere else in the area and only comes by on occasion to insult Charley and invade his space.  One day Charley makes the acquaintance of a mysterious Asian man, and is invited into the immigrant's home and place of business.  This refugee from the mysterious and perilous East sells elaborate ancient books and scrolls, one-of-a-kind masterpieces printed on the finest paper with the most exotic inks, full of esoteric knowledge and striking illustrations that Westerners would probably consider pornographic.  The prices of these books are not mere money; each can only be exchanged for a very specific collection of artifacts as rare and bizarre as the books themselves.  One of the books strikes Charley's fancy, and by a strange coincidence, if you look at things in just the right way, it seems Charley may be able to acquire the items for which he can trade the book, and, in so doing, pay back his boss for all the abuse the man has heaped upon him.

"A Question of Guilt" by Hal Clement (1976)

According to Page's intro to the story, "A Question of Guilt" was written for a vampire anthology that never saw print, and so its appearance in The Year's Best Horror Stories IV was its debut.  I am reading the story in The Best of Hal Clement, edited by Lester del Rey.

This longish story (like 40 pages here in The Best of Hal Clement) is not really a horror or a science fiction story, but a bit of historical fiction that celebrates science and the scientific method and criticizes religion and superstition.  Clement also tries to produce a human drama that will pull the old heart strings.

It is the 2nd century AD (I think.)  An intelligent slave from the provinces by chance escaped bondage and became a prosperous citizen of the Roman Empire.  He visited Rome multiple times, and there found himself a wife, but decided he'd rather live in a cave in the wilderness with his family: wife, kids, his wife's female slave.  

Tragedy struck!  All four of the sons the couple produced have had hemophilia, and three have died.  The father has dedicated his life to figuring out how to cure or treat the disease, and as the story begins he is returning to the cave after a long visit to healers in cities, including Galen of Pergamon.

Clement serves us up lots of dialogue scenes in which the man argues with his wife, who fears the disease represents a curse or a punishment from the gods or some such thing and that trying to treat the disease is pointless or even sacrilegious.  Similarly, there are scenes in which the wife's slave worries his scientific investigations are black magic.  But Clement also tries to win some points from the feminists, having the wife demonstrate intelligence and help her husband in his efforts to invent transfusion techniques.  Another of Clement's recurring themes is the pointlessness of people blaming themselves for misfortunes and being hard on themselves when they make mistakes--guilt is a waste of time, gets in the way of solving problems.  

The horror aspects of the story take up very little of the text.  Offscreen, the father kidnaps a stranger's kid and experiments on him.  When the fourth son dies (Clement has spent a lot of time describing this kid playing and expressing and receiving affection and so forth, in hopes we readers will be emotionally affected by his death) the mother disappears.  The father and the slave girl search the labyrinthine caves for weeks looking for mom; dad is sort of insane with grief and continues searching even when it is clear there is no hope of finding her alive.  Eventually the slave girl convinces dad that mom committed suicide by jumping down a deep pit.  Clement seems to be hinting that the slave girl is lying, trying to snap the man out of his funk.  Also of note, Clement earlier raised the possibility of the man having sex with the slave girl to see if their kids were also hemophiliacs; maybe we are meant to expect that the slave girl will end up as the man's second wife.  

The slave girl stops the grieving father from jumping down the pit himself after his wife.  She convinces him to continue his research into a treatment for hemophilia--it will be a boon to humanity, spare future women the loss of their children.  She suggests they travel the world, kidnapping kids and experimenting on them and then moving on to a new neighborhood before anybody catches on.  I guess the idea is that this behavior is how the legend of the vampire began, and Clement is trying to get us to think about the moral propriety of trespassing against social mores and the rights of others in the pursuit of the greater good, like all those Peter Cushing movies in which Dr. Frankenstein is committing all kinds of crimes in the name of advancing medical science.  "Sure, I'm torturing and murdering this person today, but I'm only doing it to lay the groundwork for saving countless lives in the future!"

"A Question of Guilt" feels long and slow and a little flat.  Clement spends a lot of time describing boring activities like making a bowl out of clay and a tube out of gold and so forth, while exciting activities like kidnapping a child and experimenting on him--to death!--are covered in a few lines of dialogue.  Still, the story is not actually bad.  Grade: Acceptable.     

"The Christmas Present" by Ramsey Campbell (1975 with an asterisk)

It looks like "The Christmas Present" debuted in an anthology of new stories published by Arkham House and edited by Page himself, Nameless Places.  "The Christmas Present" slightly stretches the concept of "new," as a version of it was performed on the BBC in 1969, but the story did not appear in print until this '75 book.  I am reading the story in a scan of Nameless Places, which I may return to because it has stories by David Drake, Brian Lumley, Lin Carter, Stephen Goldin, Carl Jacobi and Robert Aickman that I don't think I have read.

In this story Campbell tries to conjure up a mood and throw images at you, but keeps the actual matter of what is going sort of vague and mysterious.  At times it seems there may be an intellectual, I guess sociological, theory behind the story, but I'm not sure if we readers are to take the theory seriously or consider it pretentious and silly.

Our narrator is, I guess, a grad student or college professor, and it is late on Christmas Eve and the pubs and streets are crowded with revelers, mostly students who talk about cinema and Marx.  Our narrator has a party of like eight or nine people at his table at the pub.  A student they don't really know joins the group, and offers a present--it seems he has been looking for someone to give the present to, and settles on the narrator, who is the de facto leader of his crowd.

The party moves to the narrator's apartment on the upper floor of a house near an Anglican church and a graveyard that has recently been cleared, I guess the bodies taken away so the land can be put to other uses.  There are clues suggesting the mystery man with the mystery gift may be a ghost.  On the walk to the apartment he points out that the shadows on the front of the church make it look like a scary face.  As the group walks past street lights they go out, and there are no cars on the road, rendering the street very dark and spooking the partiers.

At the apartment, the mystery man refuses to dance and says quasi-Hegelian stuff like "A war is a clash between a myth and its antithesis" and then argues that "...there's nothing more frightening than people gathering round a belief....if a belief exists it must have an opposite.  That exists too but they try to ignore it.  That's why people in a group are dangerous."  This argument seems pretty incoherent--is Campbell intentionally putting semi-educated gobbledygook in this guy's mouth as a way of goofing on academics or at least faddish and pretentious college kids?  Or is this a set of beliefs Campbell takes seriously and is illustrating with his story here?

Anyway, the church bell rings at midnight, but it sounds odd, and then carolers singing a song nobody can recognize approach the house, enter, start up the steps.  The street is so dark the carolers cannot be seen.  I guess they are the souls of the dead who were evicted from their graves.  These weird carolers instill fear in the partygoers, who somehow make a connection between the carolers and the unopened mystery gift.  The narrator's girlfriend throws the gift in the fire, and the carolers vanish.  The mystery man won't say what was in the now destroyed box save that it was "Just something to give form to a belief....a sort of anti-Christmas present....The antithesis of a Christmas present.... An experiment, mate, you know."  I guess the box contained a bone or something else the dead souls would have wanted.

The narrator punches out the mystery man and efforts to arouse him are useless; as the story ends we have no idea if he will ever be revived.

I guess this story is OK...these stories in which you can't tell what the hell is going on can be frustrating; is the mystery man an actual ghost, or just a kid who, like an overconfident scientist who builds a super weapon or sacrifices people to advance medical knowledge, is foolishly putting the community at risk by meddling with phenomena he knows only a little about?  Difficult stories like this are easier to take from writers like Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty because their stories are generally full of virtues--shocking surprises or ancient wisdom or beautiful sentences or deep human feelings or funny jokes--you can appreciate without really grokking what is going on under the surface.  Probably there are people who love Campbell's style and can appreciate a difficult story by him because they enjoy how he describes the light or the fog or a room's decor or whatever, but I find much of Campbell's verbose descriptions to be a little much, a thicket that obstructs my appreciation of the story rather than an adornment.

"The Christmas Present" reappeared in a short-lived Italian magazine, Psyco, that had characteristically awesome covers by Dutch master Karel Thole, a few Campbell collections, and Richard Dalby's Ghosts for Christmas. 

Whoa, that ghost has a good body.  Come right in and celebrate the Yuletide with me,
Miss Ghost, I'll even open the French doors for you, though I see you walking right through
 my fence, you know, just to be friendly like.

"White Wolf Calling" by Charles L. Grant (1975)

This one debuted in an issue of F&SF with a cool volcanic cover and the first installment of the serialized version of Robert Silverberg's The Stochastic Man.  I read The Stochastic Man in 2007 and thought it boring because too much of it was just horserace politics; I also felt the characters' behavior a little unbelievable.  A below average Silverberg.  This ish also has a letter from our hero Barry Malzberg in which he jousts not only with Alexei Panshin over Panshin's whole attitude about the history of SF and his assessment of the influence of John W. Campbell, Jr. but also with Joanna Russ over Russ's hostile review of Silverberg's Born with the Dead, a Silverberg I have read twice and after the second read found to be quite above average.  And there are two letters from Kurt Vonnegut in the letters column that all you Vonnegut fanatics will want to read.  

OK, on to the fiction that brought me to look into the April 1975 F&SF.  Oy vey, Grant here in "White Wolf Calling"'s first sentence makes Campbell look succinct.

Snow: suspended white water humping over hidden rocks, slashed by a slick black road that edged around the stumped mountains and swept deserted between a pair of low, peaked houses that served as unassuming sentinels at the mouth of the valley; drifting, not diving to sheathe needled green arms that bent and held in multiples of thousands, spotting indifferently the tarmac walk that tongued from the half-moon porch of the house on the right.

I was tempted to give this story a thumbs down then and there and move on with my life, but "White Wolf Calling" is only 12 pages long so I continued plowing through.

Grant's writing here isn't just too long and full of superfluous goop; I also question his word choices:

...as he took a frustrated poke at the soiled snow the village plow had left to harass his cleaning.

"Harass" is no good--you harass a concrete entity, in particular one with a psychology, not an abstraction like a process.  This kind of thing is like a speed bump or a pothole when I am trying to read a story--it totally takes me out of the mood the author is trying to generate and the plot he is trying to communicate.

Oh yeah, plot.  "White Wolf Calling" consists largely of an old married couple with the nicknames Mars and Venus talking about the various gossip and tragedies in their rural community.  This guy and that guy are drunks, an unfaithful husband was murdered by his wife, this woman had a skiing accident, there are no job opportunities in the area, the couple's twin sons both lost their greedy wives in some kind of railway accident, etc.  Reading this story is depressing and annoying, like talking to your parents whose only news is the medical problems their friends and relatives and neighbors, people whose names you don't even remember, are suffering.  

The protagonists' sons are losers and Mars and Venus blame themselves for being poor parents.  (A reflection of the story's being produced in the Vietnam era is the fact that they consider one of their sons' being a captain in the Army an element of his failure.)  A few years ago a Slavic immigrant, perhaps Czech, and his crippled wife and their young blonde son moved in across the street, and Mars has been acting like a surrogate father to the kid, whose own father is often away, ostensibly working in "the city."  Mars loves this foreign kid more than his own sons.  

The kid tells stories about a huge white wolf with green eyes--people who see the wolf soon die.  Mars and the kid are in the woods collecting firewood when Mars sees the wolf.  He embraces the kid and shifts as the wolf walks by so that the kid won't see the wolf.  Sure enough, later that day the kid is nearly--but not quite--struck by the car of one of Mars' reckless sons.  Has the protagonist saved the kid he loves?  No, this is a depressing story, not one about self sacrifice or heroism.  Mars is killed in a stupid accident, and as he dies it becomes apparent that the three Eastern European immigrants are werewolves who "feed on failure."  I guess in some occult way they are causing all these accidents.

The plot is OK, though its depiction of family life and career life is pretty dismal, like that we might expect of a piece of despairing mainstream literary fiction.  It is the style I am not crazy about.  Low end of acceptable.

"White Wolf Calling" has been reprinted in three different Grant collections.  

Am I reading this right?  Stephen King thinks Charles L. Grant is the 
greatest horror writer of all time?  Good grief.

"The Man with the Aura" by R. A. Lafferty (1974)

"The Man with the Aura" debuted in the final issue of Gerald Page's small press magazine Witchcraft & Sorcery, the successor title to his Coven 13.  All told, ten issues of Coven 13/Witchcraft & Sorcery were printed between 1969 and 1974; Page got some good art for this magazine from people like William Stout and Stephen Fabian, and this tenth issue has a cover by Jeff Jones and an interior Jones picture of a cat all you Jones fans and feline fanciers will want to see.  Oh yeah, this magazine has so many typos I can barely believe it.  Meow!

In "The Man with the Aura" we have an absurd joke story that is pretty amusing.  Lafferty's story here actually has quite a bit in common with the Davidson story in tone and in the type of its humor; I bitch all the time about how I hate joke stories but here today we have two good ones--glory be.  

A man describes to a friend his rise from poverty to the position of the most trusted and admired person in the world.  He was born a vulpine-faced sneak whom all suspected, and with good reason, as he was an inveterate though incompetent fraudster and thief.  But then he invented a complex apparatus, a battery of complementary high-tech devices integrated into his own flesh, that changed his "aura."  Thanks to the invention, people now trusted him implicitly, made excuses for him when anything went wrong, literally refused to believe their own eyes and ears when they were confronted with stark evidence he had committed blunders or transgressions.  Now unassailable, he committed the most heinous crimes, crimes so blatant that a child could solve them, and profited hugely from them financially and socially.  Much of the humor of the story is the catalog of these atrocities and the public's response to them, Lafferty exaggerating outrageously for comic effect.

Plenty of fun, and an example of Lafferty's use of blood and gore for comedic purposes and perhaps of a jaded view of human nature that recognizes the way in which people judge by appearances, which can be so deceiving, and make allowances for the physically attractive and the charismatic they wouldn't make for plain janes and the awkward.  Thumbs up!

In 1991, small Canadian outfit United Mythologies Press included "The Man with the Aura" in a little 69-page collection titled Mischief Malicious (And Murder Most Strange) and in 2015 Centipede Press reprinted it in the 316-page second volume of their Collected Short Fiction of R. A Lafferty series, for which "The Man with the Aura" served as title story.

**********

OK, now time to check in with tarbandu and see if there are major divergences between our opinions of the stories in The Year's Best Horror Stories IV that we have both read, all nine of them.

Hmm, no real fireworks, I'm afraid; we seem to basically agree about the stories.  I may be a little more generous; for one thing, tarbandu finds fault with Clement's entire career while I like much of Clement's work.  I also think I found Grant's "White Wolf Calling" less "oblique" than tarbandu did--I think Grant's story in the anthology is easier to understand than Campbell's.  For his part, tarbandu quotes a passage from Campbell's "The Christmas Present" that effectively illustrates the man's "purple prose."

If you are interested in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories volumes you should check out tarbandu's blog, as he has read and blogged about a dozen of them; here are links to his assessments:

The PorPor Books Blog on DAW The Year's Best Horror 

I     II     III     IV     V    IX    X    XII     XIII     XIV    XV     XX     

While I don't usually read entire anthologies the way tarbandu does, I did read every story in the second DAW The Year's Best Horror series over three blog posts:

ONE  TWO  THREE 

and the eighth over four posts:

Un  Duex  Trois   Quartre

Well, that's a long blog post, five stories and a million links.  Congrats for reaching the end.  Next time we'll be returning to the 1930s.  See you then!