Weird Tales, Nov 1941: E Hamilton, M W Wellman, H Kuttner, and A Derleth

It is time to set our feet back on the sacred path, to resume our holy mission of reading at least one story from each 1940s issue of Weird Tales.  Today we reach a milestone as we finish up 1941 by reading four stories from the November '41 number, stories by Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, Henry Kuttner and August Derleth.  This issue has a pretty famous cover, an image by the great Hannes Bok that has been used on the covers of several later books, both anthologies of stories culled from Weird Tales and collections of stories by Weird Tales authors.  However, I have to say that this painting lacks the distinct character that marks most of Bok's most recognizable work; I suppose the subject matter--dead bones, the straight vertical lines of a column and a lectern, and the distant silhouettes of soldiers--didn't provide Bok the opportunity to exhibit his peculiar style, which generally finds its expression in curves and living forms.  Thankfully, within the magazine there are Bok productions more characteristic of the man's work that feature human and humanoid figures in various states of undress.

"Dreamer's Worlds" by Edmond Hamilton

One has to wonder if Hamilton in this story means to remind us of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," which bears as a subtitle "or a vision in dream.  A Fragment" and contains such lines as "A damsel with a dulcimer/In a vision once I saw."  The protagonist of "Dreamer's Worlds" is a prince named Khal Kan who lives on some alien planet inhabited by monsters and green-skinned barbarians as well as humans.  Khal Kan has been sent by his father, accompanied by two other fighting men, to scout an area for those greenies, but our guy decides to take a detour in hopes of catching a glimpse of a princess of the nomadic tribes of the desert who is famous for her beauty.  They infiltrate the camp of the desert people and lay eyes on this beauty, but the princess is a real she-cat, and when Khal Kan is recognized she has him bound and whipped.  Excited to find a woman of spirit, Khal Kan falls in love with her as she orders him whipped again and again.

We then learn an even more remarkable thing about Khal Kan--when he falls asleep at night he lives the life of a 20th-century paper pusher with a fat wife, American insurance company employee Henry Stevens!  When Stevens falls asleep, he lives the sword-swinging, monster-fighting life of Khal Kan!  All their lives these guys have had these recurring dreams that follow day by day the life of a man with a radically different personality in a radically different milieu.  Khal Kan assumes the dreary middle-class life of Stevens is just a dream, but Stevens isn't sure which life is the dream, and which the reality.  The insurance company functionary starts spending so much time thinking about Khal Kan's adventures that it has started distracting him from his work and damaging his relationship with his wife ("Henry Stevens, you haven't been listening to one word!...you're getting more dopey every day!....You go to bed earlier every night") that he goes to see a shrink.

When Stevens retires the night of the day he first sees the therapist, Khal Kan's comrades free the prince and he kidnaps the princess and carries her across the desert, kissing her against her will.  She very quickly goes from telling Khal Kan how he will be tortured when her people catch up to them to agreeing to marry him.  His new wife is at his side when just days later Khal Kan leads the defense of the kingdom against those green-skinned barbarians, who are led by Khal Kan's traitorous uncle.  The barbarians use poisoned arrows, and are winning the war, but Henry Stevens looks up in the encyclopedia how to make gunpowder and transmits this info to Khal Kan.  This innovation wins the war and saves Khal Kan's kingdom, but in the final fight against his uncle the prince is slain.  When the prince dies, Henry Stevens briefly wakes up and then dies himself, leaving both a beautiful sword-wielding desert princess and an obese housewife bereaved.  The shrink wonders if Henry died from some kind of "mental suggestion" when his fictional alter ego died, or if Henry was really in mental rapport with a man on another planet somewhere outside our solar system.

A decent filler piece, routine stuff but competent.  A mild rec, I suppose, for "Dreamer's Worlds."  It should probably be titled "Dreamers' Worlds." though.

In 1974, "Dreamer's Worlds" was reprinted in the Hamilton collection What's It Like Out There?, and in 2021 in the collection The Avenger from Atlantis. 

Left: USA, 1974  Right: Netherlands, 1975

"The Liers in Wait" by Manly Wade Wellman 

The narrator of this story is none other than Charles II, King of England!  Defeated by Cromwell's forces, the Royalist army is scattered and on the run, Charles himself in disguise as a wood cutter, making his way through a damp forest during a rainstorm.  He comes to a wretched little house inhabited by three odd characters, one of them the most beautiful girl he has ever seen, one of them a horribly diseased young servant, and the last a creepy tall man, father to the woman and master of the boy.  It turns out these three are witches and have used their black sorcery to trick Charles into coming to their disgusting domicile to cure the sick young man of his scrofula.  (As my well-educated readers all know, it was a common belief in the early modern period that the touch of a king could heal that disease.)  Charles heals the boy, who starts dancing around, so happy to be healthy for the first time in his life.  The witches then explain that they used their Satanic powers to make sure the Royalists were defeated by the Parliamentarians.  But these devil worshippers are not committed to the republican cause--they won the battle for Cromwell because of Parliament's backers purchased their infernal services!  And they are just as willing to turn their black magic to the cause of the King as that of the Roundheads!  The witches offer to put Charles back on the throne via sorcery in return for positions in his government; the gorgeous girl offers Charles her body.  Hubba hubba!  But Charles is a Christian and rejects the aid of the devil!

The father and daughter start casting spells to compel Charles, but the boy, grateful to the king for healing him, and considering how the Devil never lifted a finger to cure him of the scrofula which a follower of Christ liberated him from, renounces witchcraft and rescues his majesty; the two unrepentant conjurers and their spell book are destroyed.  The story ends with the suggestion that Charles II's commitment to religious tolerance later in his career stems from this weird encounter.

In some ways, "The Liers in Wait" is like a Conan story--Charles is a big strong guy, a leader of men, who finds himself on his own after a misfortune and beset by diabolical sorcerers and an evil seductress, to which Wellman adds some Christian and historical elements.  These real-life components are integral to the plot and atmosphere, and they, as well as the old timey vocabulary Wellman puts in the mouths of his characters, give the story a unique texture and make it more compelling.  The king is likable, and all four characters behave in ways that make sense, and Wellman does a good job describing the creepy setting and the mechanics and effects of the black magic.  An entertaining piece of work.  Thumbs up for "The Liers in Wait!"

Peter Haining included "The Liers in Wait" in his Black Magic Omnibus; when that volume appeared in paperback it was split into two volumes, with Wellman's story in the first.

"Chameleon Man" by Henry Kuttner 

This looks like a Kuttner story that has never been reprinted.  We love exploring the deep tracks here at MPorcius Fiction Log!  Unfortunately, "Chameleon Man" is an overly long humor piece, page after page of moderately ribald absurdity featuring a few recursive elements and an omniscient narrator who acts as a Greek chorus, commenting on the action of the plot.  The style and some plot elements of "Chameleon Man" are perhaps an imitation of P. G. Wodehouse.  The story's central gimmick is totally inconsistent, giving the story an "anything goes" flavor I did not appreciate; the jokes are weak, and the whole thing is long and repetitive.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

Vanderhoff is a guy who works in New York's most expensive women's clothier, a place where rich women and their hen-pecked men come to see fancy dresses and lingerie modelled by young ladies prior to selecting what to purchase.  Many of the gowns on offer are one-of-a-kind.

Vanderhoff is kind of a loser, a reader of science fiction magazines (Kuttner lists such authors as Verne, Wells, and himself, one of his little jokes) who has no personality of his own and so takes on the personality of those around him, as well as a man with no willpower who can't help but obey those who possess willpower, like his boss, manager of the store.

An irate customer, a red-faced colonel who served in Burma, chews out the manager and, after the colonel leaves, the manager takes out his frustrations on Vanderhoff.  I guess because of all the stress, or because the plot requires it, Vanderhoff's chameleon and yes-man traits manifest themselves in extreme and literal fashion.  Vanderhoff starts expertly mimicking the manager's every angry word and gesture--not voluntarily, mind you, but against his own will.  This apparent mockery further enrages the manager.  Then, after an extended period of precisely repeating the manager's words, when the manager says "I wish you would go drown yourself," Vanderhoff doesn't simply repeat this phrase, but is instead compelled as if by hypnotism to go to the subway station and take the long ride from Manhattan to Coney Island to jump in the ocean and destroy himself.  (Wait, this is Manhattan--couldn't this nut just have walked a few blocks east or west to the river?)

Out on Coney Island, Vanderhoff is diverted from his quest to drown himself by the command of another strong willed individual--a carnival barker--and Vanderhoff gets mixed up in wacky shenanigans at the peep show arcade and the boardwalk freak show.  His chameleon ability becomes even more extreme--when he looks into a coin-operated peep show machine and sees a gorilla abducting a native girl, his body takes on the form of a gorilla!  When he looks at a bearded man he takes on the man's appearance and is assaulted by the man's domineering wife!  At the freak show he takes on the shape of one freak after another.  A drunk attacks Vanderhoff, and our hero learns to control his ability to change his shape and uses this new skill to outfight the drunk.  

Somehow, Vanderhoff attains the power to create duplicates of himself.  Back in Manhattan, his yes-man persona shed, he uses this ability to humiliate his manager.  At a fashion show, the manager tells the assembled potential customers that the next dress they will see is a one-of-a-kind exclusive.  So Vanderhoff dons the dress, changes into a pretty girl, and creates dozens of versions of himself who stride out onto the stage in the purportedly unique dress, making his boss look a liar.  (One of Kuttner's blunders in the story is the inconsistent fashion with which he deals with whether Vanderhoff's powers to change himself can change or create his attire.)  A bunch of robbers bust in, keen to relieve the wealthy audience members of their jewels and cash, but Vanderhoff and his duplicates (whom he controls as easily as he does his own original body) revert to his natural shape and their overwhelming numbers allow them to outfight and capture the crooks.  Vanderhoff is now a hero!  He gets promoted by the owner of the store, taking the position of the manager who for years dominated him!  The angry colonel reappears and Vanderhoff uses his powers to manipulate the colonel into assaulting the former manager and achieving additional vengeance.

Fifteen pages of poor filler.

"Compliments of Spectro" by August Derleth 

Here we have a story inspired by such proto-superheroes as The Shadow and Doc Savage and the people who produced them.  Ashwell is an English author (why Midwesterner Derleth set his tale in England I have no idea) who created and writes novels weekly about Spectro, a guy in a cape who goes around retrieving stolen property and slaying archcriminals, leaving behind his trademark, an inscription of the phrase "Compliments of Spectro."  Sales of the Spectro novels have made Ashwell fabulously wealthy.

Ashwell is also a jerk, petty and snobbish and so forth.  A fan, Weedle, sent him a story of his own; unlike most of the unsolicited manuscripts Ashwell receives, the Weedle story is pretty good, and Ashwell plagiarizes it.  When Ashwell's and Weedle's stories, each using the same central gimmick, appear in print the same month, a court case results and Weedle is the loser.  The man commits suicide, leaving behind an impoverished widow.  

One of the character Spectro's signature gags is sending three warnings to a malefactor--the criminal thus has a chance to make amends or turn himself in or whatever and avoid the death Spectro inevitably deals out to those whose evil comes to his attention, should they refuse to repent.  Ashwell starts getting such warnings, but he doesn't take them seriously enough to forthrightly confesses his plagiarism and pay restitution and so doesn't live to the end of the story.

The ideas behind this story are good, but the resolution is a little lackluster.  For one thing, Ashwell dies in an unsatisfying fashion.  Worse, Derleth seems to leave open both the possibility that Ashwell's guilt led him to subconsciously give himself the three warnings and then kill himself and the possibility that it was some supernatural agency that warned and then slew him, but clues render both explanations unlikely, leaving the reader disconcerted as the story ends.

We'll call "Compliments of Spectro" acceptable.  Kurt Singer included the story in his anthology Tales of the Macabre, which enjoys some good living-dead-centric covers, and of course you can find it in Derleth collections. 

Left: UK, 1969.   Right: Norway, 1975

**********

Wellman's story is the winner here, though Hamilton's is a professional pedestrian piece of work.  I am against Kuttner's whole project here, and the story's execution is full of missteps besides.  Derleth's story represents a lost opportunity, Derleth having come up with a good idea but apparently lacked the time to bring it to fruition.

Wellman's only real competition for memorability comes from Hannes Bok's illustrations for a poem and two stories I didn't even read, plus his headings for the fan club and coming attractions columns.  Bok really makes this issue worth checking out.

With 1941 behind us, we can look forward to exploring stories from the six issues of Dorothy McIlwraith's magazine printed in 1942.  I have glanced at the tables of content of these issues and they are full of familiar names, so there is a lot of weird excitement ahead of us. 

Detail of Hannes Bok's illustration to the poem
"Haunted Hour" by Leah Bodine Drake

The Lustful Ape by Bruno Fischer

Probably she was telling the truth, Dirk reflected. But how could he be sure? Or it might be a half-truth, with information still withheld. It seemed as if every woman he spoke to these days lied to him.

It's been two months since we read a perverted piece of crime fiction, so after a multitude of blog posts about stories from science fiction magazines that people take seriously like Astounding and F&SF as well as some on the pulpier end like Thrilling Wonder Stories, let's descend back into the gutter!  In an antique mall in Verona, Virginia--purportedly the biggest in the United States!--I spotted an old paperback with a suitably nasty title and back cover description, The Lustful Ape by Bruno Fischer, published by Gold Medal in 1959.  This book has been reprinted multiple times since its initial appearance in 1950 under the pseudonym Russell Gray, so it was not difficult for me to find a digital version (full of typos, of course) for free online.  Wikipedia and Robert Kenneth Jones' The Shudder Pulps tell us Fischer is a German-born socialist and journalist who produced many stories for magazines like Dime Mystery Magazine and Terror Tales characterized by their lurid violence-against-women covers, so, if The Lustful Ape tickles our fancy, there is plenty more Fischer-penned depravity for us to explore.

Dirk Hart, protagonist of The Lustful Ape, was a police detective when he married Narda, a beautiful girl with a voracious appetite for sex and for money!  She convinced Dirk to quit the force and become a private eye!  This doubled his income, but it wasn't enough--Narda was so horny and greedy she started banging other guys and accepting fancy gifts from them.  As if that wasn't trouble enough, living in the same small house with Dirk and his whore of a wife was Dirk's Narda-hating younger sister, sexy 20-year old Lucy.

A couple of years ago Dirk finally threw Narda out.  But tonight she comes right into the house, right into the bedroom, half naked, and tries to seduce Dirk with that awesome bod of hers.  Dirk throws her out again, but a few hours later his old comrades at the police station call Dirk up--someone has shot Narda full of holes!  Hmm, didn't Lucy go out at like 1:15 in the morning, right after Dirk tossed Narda out on her ear?  So ends the first sex and violence-soaked chapter of The Lustful Ape, which consists of  twenty-three such chapters.  

The Lustful Ape is a story about honesty and mendacity.  Early on we are told Dirk is honest to a fault, and his reputation for honesty is referred to by other characters over the course of the book.  Throughout the narrative almost every one of the multitude of characters Dirk has to contend with lies and deceives, and we learn all kinds of facts about each character that each has been trying to conceal.  

“Why does every damn woman have to lie to me?”

The selling point of The Lustful Ape, as we can see from the cover illustrations and text, is sex--creepy sex!--and the novel's pervasive theme is of perverted, abusive, fetishistic sex--rape, voyeurism, sexualized torture, and sexualized violence against women.  Dirk slaps Narda in the face in the very first chapter, and he is supposed to be our hero, though the man called Ape performs most of the sexual abuse.

His head was so low over her that all she could see of him was his shaggy hair. She felt his fingers on the buttons of her pajamas. There was nothing she could do to stop him now, nothing she could say. She wondered if it would be a terrible beating or the thing that would be even worse. Her eyes closed.

Though a recurring motif, the sex in The Lustful Ape is not terribly explicit, more suggestive.  And the rape and sexual torture scenes don't go "all the way"--the title character, again and again, is about to rape somebody but then is stopped just short of doing so, leaving the victim merely groped, though grievously psychologically scarred.  Similarly, there is gruesome violence, but only rarely do we see anybody actually killed or maimed; multiple times the Ape has somebody in his clutches, having outfought a man or tied up a woman, but is prevented from killing him or crippling her.  As for the fights, these are probably better described as "beatings" or "assassinations."

The Lustful Ape is also about degradation and decay; all the characters in the story become worse over the course of the story, suffering physical and psychological and reputational damage as the tale proceeds.  Dirk is not only beaten up and tortured, but reduced to attempting suicide and, when that fails, begging another character to kill him!  More than one minor character succeeds in killing himself.  Many people are humiliated, lose their jobs, see their relationships sour--this is a depressing book! 

Another theme of Fischer's novel is the unreliability of women--women just won't come through for you when you need them most--and the terrible trouble women put men to, directly or indirectly.  Women deceive men (as well as other women) in pursuit of their petty goals, generally money, and men take terrible risks and make sacrifices out of a sense of duty to a woman, or because of love or lust for a woman, even when those women are less than deserving.  Dirk late in the story is confronted by an apparent dilemma, thinking he has to choose between his duplicitous sister and his faithless lover, forced by the villains to preserve one by sacrificing the other, though like so much of the drama in the novel this bit of excitement peters out and both dames are gonna survive, though hardly unscathed.

Ape said: “Boss, you’re smart, but it’s my neck too. Why’d you make me take her down? Jees, if we’re gonna whip — ”

“Because I’m smart,” Sheridan snapped. “I know my man. The only way to break him is through a woman." 

The plot of The Lustful Ape is kind of what you expect.  There is the murder of Narda, and then Dirk interacts with a huge cast of characters, almost all of them treacherous to one degree or another--each has something he is keeping from Dirk and many are likely to have loyalties to one or another of Dirk's adversaries.  Each of these persons is a suspect in Narda's murder and/or some other misdeed, and each of them runs the risk of becoming the murderer's next victim.  Dirk and his questionable allies run around town hunting up clues by interviewing people and looking through the archives.  Along the way, sometimes in chapters not featuring Dirk himself, we gain insight into various ongoing sexual relationships and witness the inauguration of fresh new sexual relationships; none of these relationships is life-affirming or joyful--at best they are tragic.  Additional crimes and perpetrators are uncovered and dealt with; Dirk gets beaten up, and in the final third or so of the novel Dirk and one of the story's many beautiful women spends a lot of time bound and tortured, eventually being rescued by one of Dirk's friends.

Then, as in so many mystery-type stories, after the climax in which the protagonist escapes death and the villains are brought to justice, we get an overly long talky section that wraps things up, in which the detective explains how he solved the case, the author ties up loose ends, and we readers get an idea of what the future holds for the surviving characters.  (The original King Kong and the first Star Wars movie wisely end very soon after the big climax in which the oversized menace is laid low, but detective stories often inflict upon the audience a long denouement sequence after the climax--Hitchcock's Psycho is notorious for this.)

Did I enjoy The Lustful Ape?  Can I recommend it?  Fischer's novel is reasonably well written; the pace is fast and there is no real fat, no extraneous descriptions of sunlight or ripples on the water or anything like that.  So the style is fine.

But The Lustful Ape is not fun.  It is sordid, cynical and sad, all the characters wounded, depraved or diabolical--the best of them commit blunders that get themselves and others in serious trouble, and everybody is scarred in some way, with many turning to the bottle or suicide.  Perhaps we should expect material like this from a socialist, who presumably sees the world through the lens of exploitation, and a journalist, who has probably been exposed to all kinds of crime, corruption and disaster.  Burt Fischer also fails to render any of his characters likable or easy to identify with, and it is hard for the reader to care who lives or dies or who is banging who.

So The Lustful Ape is not fun, and neither is it satisfying--it signally fails to provide the reader catharsis.  I've mentioned how the sex crimes and the fights are often cut off before a conclusion, either triumphant or tragic, and how the fights lack the dramatic thrust, parry and riposte of the fights you see in movies.  Our protagonist Dirk does not perform feats of derring-do; instead, he gets tricked by people and outfought by the Ape--repeatedly!  The Ape is incapacitated not by Dirk but by a minor character we have been primed to detest, a pretty boy who slapped Lucy early in the book, this guy with a peaches-and-cream complexion shoots Ape in the back from a place of concealment.  Ape doesn't see who got him, and we haven't actually seen Ape rape or kill anybody, so the whole thing lacks power--we can't cheer on the slayer or really rejoice in the death of the slain, and all the conflicts in the novel conclude this way.  Dirk doesn't dispose of the man behind the Ape, the brute's boss, either; Dirk's friend shoots that criminal mastermind while Dirk is literally tied up.  It is true that Dirk does overpower Narda's killer, but through the whole book this guy has been described as feminine and childlike, so big whoop.

Perhaps my biggest complaints about The Lustful Ape have to do with a major component of the plot, compromising photos taken by Narda and co-conspirators for use in blackmail.  For one thing, many of the blackmail victims react to the blackmailing in a way I found a little hard to credit.  But worse is the nature of the pictures.  When the pictures are introduced in the third chapter, a character who should know tells Dirk that the photos are not the product of trick photography but represent a real event and indicate real psychological facts about the people depicted.  But then, in Chapter Fourteen, over half way through the novel, we are told the pictures are, after all, special effects photos "any amateur" could have produced and the people in them aren't interesting eccentrics with weird fetishes but just normal people.  On this score, I felt Fischer wasn't playing fair with us, and I found this plot twist, which rendered the characters and plot less interesting than we had been led to believe, pretty galling.  Discovering that a person we thought was a normie is in fact a freak is compelling, but finding the opposite is deflating.  

“You’re a newspaperman. You’ve had lots of experience with montages and superimposed photos.”

“I can tell you right off that these aren’t. Notice how Ape and the girl blend with the background and with each other. Notice their positions — how their attitudes and faces and expressions are aware of each other. This is real stuff, Dirkie." 

I think I have to give the disappointing The Lustful Ape a thumbs down.  Sad!

Thrilling Wonder Stories, Fall 1946: H Kuttner & C L Moore, R Rocklynne, E Hamilton and M Leinster

A few days ago I was looking at the contents page of Bypass to Otherness, the 1961 Henry Kuttner (and C. L. Moore) collection.  Of its contents, it seems I have read seven stories: "Cold War," "Call Him Demon," "The Dark Angel," "The Piper's Son," "Absalom," "Nothing But Gingerbread Left," and "Housing Problem."  That leaves only one story to go, "The Little Things."  Let's read "The Little Things" today, in its inaugural appearance in the Fall 1946 Thrilling Wonder Stories, and three other stories in that issue of Sam Merwin's magazine.  We've already read the cover story of this ish of TWS, Kuttner and Moore's "Call Him Demon."   Looking back at my 2014 (the very dawn of time!) blog post on "Call Him Demon," my plot summary makes the story sound absolutely awesome, and of course then there are the illustrations of the story by Earle Bergey on the cover of the magazine and by Virgil Finlay inside that make the story appear to be a bondage sex extravaganza.  But in my blog post I go on to attack the story's characters, style, and length and to give it a negative vote.  I'm a tough grader!  

"The Little Things" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

"The Little Things" is credited to Kuttner alone in the magazine, and I am not sure on what basis isfdb also credits Moore.  The story has not been reprinted much, just in the aforementioned Bypass to Otherness and in a 2010 Haffner Press collection of Kuttner and Moore stories, Detour to Otherness.

This is an idea story, weak in plot and character--the protagonist doesn't know what is going on and doesn't have any decisions to make or obstacles to overcome.  He isn't likable and is hard to sympathize with.  The story is also about a revolution, but the motives and policies of the revolutionaries are pretty vague and elicit no intellectual or emotional response in the reader.  I suppose the drama of the story is meant to be generated by how the reader is led to believe the protagonist is a hero who is going to join the resistance and overthrow the government only to be told by the authors that the protagonist is no hero and will not be doing any such thing; Kuttner and Moore "subvert our expectations," something the critics always like to see, but maybe us readers aren't always crazy about.

Our guy was a gossip columnist of the second or third rank during World War II, a guy whose column was not nationally influential but was widely read in a medium-sized town.  As the war was ending he was seized and put in a prison by the people who were secretly taking over during the period of post-war chaos.  You see, the aftermath of the war was going to provide the opportunity for radical changes to occur, and, to make sure civilization was going to transition smoothly to its new form, people who had some level of ambition and influence, like our gossip columnist, but who were not smart enough to recognize the ideal form of society the secret masters were guiding us to and so might cause disruptions, were imprisoned and impersonated by doppelgangers.   These doppelgangers would use the positions of influence formerly occupied by the prisoners to smooth the transition, urging the public to support the correct policies, policies which the prisoners, if free, likely would oppose.  The prisoners, meanwhile, would live in relative luxury, with access to good health care and lots of books and music and so forth, even pets, but no contact whatsoever with the outside world--all those books and all that music is material published before they were imprisoned.  One reason the prisoners are well-treated is that, at least for a while, the doppelgangers share the prisoner's soul or life force and will die if the prisoner dies; eventually the duplicate develops its own soul.

The gossip columnist has lost track of how long he has been in his gilded cage with his pet cat.  He sees an opportunity to escape, and gets out of the prison.  (Kuttner and Moore refer to the prison as Chateau D'If and make some allusions to Dumas as well as to Tennyson's Enoch Arden.)  The outside world does not seem to have changed radically--just "little things" seem to have changed, like the names of the months and days of the week, and the fact that vehicles are now self-driving and people no longer smoke tobacco.

The gossip columnist tries to make contact with people he knew when he was a free man, and finds that the secret masters of the world have given him plastic surgery so he looks totally different (I guess there was no mirror or other reflective surface in his comfortable cell.)  It will be impossible for him to renew his old friendships--everybody who knew him before he was seized is sure that the doppelganger is the real him.  The gossip columnist meets a woman who has not been able to change with the times, but rather than oppose the quiet, creeping revolution, she just sits around and gets drunk.  It becomes clear the gossip columnist will be equally unable to put up any resistance to the changes.  While his doppelganger is living a fulfilling life and career promoting the policies of the secret masters, the original gossip columnist, after a brief period of fruitless resistance, will live a pointless existence of drunkenness punctuated by bouts of sterile nostalgia--Kuttner and Moore offer us the metaphor that this woman and the gossip columnist are essentially dead because they can't evolve with society.  We even get a scene in which we meet the secret masters and Kuttner and Moore try to convince us that they are swell guys, not dictators at all, but doing civilization a great service.

"The Little Things"' ideology is lame and unconvincing elitism, the day dream of people who want to have their lives regulated by their betters because they associate individual freedom with the rough days of the Depression and the cataclysmic upheavals of the Second World War.  And of course I, a man who only reads books or watches movies made over 25 years ago and groans in agony when in a store and his ears are assaulted by music recorded this century, finds the "move with the times or you are as good as dead" theme a little annoying.  As for the plot, it is limp and deflating.  Writers who are bloodthirsty commies might depict changing the world in an exciting way, with the middle classes getting murdered and suffering their property to be expropriated in the name of justice and commissars and activists of the vanguard dying martyrs' deaths as the bourgeois hoarders and wreckers, in their death throes, use their wealth to deploy weapons of mass destruction.  But Kuttner and Moore don't give us those kinds of thrills and horrors--the revolution in "The Little Things" is comfortable, with the masses not even knowing a revolution is taking place, while those who might oppose the revolution are imprisoned in luxury or just sadly drink themselves into oblivion.

Thumbs down!

Left: US edition, 1961     Right: UK edition, 1963

"The Good Egg" by Ross Rocklynne 

According to isfdb, this story has never been reprinted--not a good sign.

"The Good Egg" is a cynical story about how bad parenting leads to evil children, how attractive women use sex to manipulate naive men, how attractive men use their looks to manipulate romantic women, how crooks abuse government programs meant to aid favored constituencies, and how men join the armed services and run terrible risks for civilians who do not appreciate their sacrifices.  This may sound like a clear and accurate picture of real life, not SF at all, don't worry, Rocklynne also includes in "The Good Egg" wacky science fiction elements that function essentially as fantasy elements, like the doppelgangers in Kuttner and Moore's "The Little Things," though Rocklynne's tale otherwise has the plot and themes of a crime story.  "The Good Egg" is also one of those stories that explains that you have to have a firm hand when dealing with women because members of the fair sex are naturally both duplicitous and gullible and will generally benefit from--and most of them actually crave!--the tutelage of a take-charge kind of man.

Doc Ferris is some kind of magician.  He has long employed his pretty daughter Bernice as part of his "stage-setting," and her early recognition of how false the world is and how you can profit by tricking people has had a negative effect on Bernice's morals.  Now, at the end of the Second World War, Bernice is a young adult with a boyfriend, Hugh Grant, a recently discharged veteran of combat in North Africa and Italy.  Grant is sort of naive, and Bernice has him "wound around her little finger," as she puts it.

Doc Ferris has been showing Grant a magic trick.  Some time ago, in a bunch of eggs, Ferris discovered one egg with strange properties; the thing has little glowering sparkles running across its surface, and when you rotate it in your hand, at particular angles it seems to change shape and even vanish from view.  

Grant is interested in science and becomes obsessed with the egg and steals it.  The egg, we readers learn long before Grant does, was laid by a member of an alien race from another dimension.  Inside it is growing, and about to hatch, a telepathic little humanoid being, one fully mature and equipped with racial memory so it has full info about its home dimension and whose telepathy has allowed it to gather full info on our Earth.  This little guy can with trivial ease move between our dimension and that of its people, but if it returns "home" it will be killed by its fellows for having been contaminated by Earth ideas.  (Is this element of the story a satire of the Soviet Union?)

Faithless Bernice has fallen in love with a handsome man, Morrow, a cunning con artist.  Many materials are rationed due to wartime conditions, and are hard to acquire and thus can be sold at high prices on the black market.  Businesses owned by veterans get priority from the government rationing board, and Morrow's SOP is to set up a fake business, seduce a girl with a boyfriend who is a veteran, partner with the vet and thus acquire materials, and then abandon his partner and sell the materials to unscrupulous businessmen.  Bernice uses her sexual wiles to get a skeptical Grant to partner with Morrow; Morrow gets a big shipment of raw leather thanks to Grant's veteran status.  Bernice severs relations with Grant, stupidly thinking that suave Morrow will marry her now that he can make some money, but Morrow has no interest in Bernice, who is far from the first hot chick he has pulled this scam on.

The egg hatches and the alien appears and explains to Grant what is going on.  Grant goes after Bernice, and he and Bernice end up bound in the back of a truck of Morrow's, headed for a watery grave--Morrow has decided he has to murder Grant and Bernice because they are witnesses to his crimes.  Before our dopey and ethically challenged protagonists can be thrown in the river, the alien teleports back to its home dimension where it battles its fellows and seizes a ray gun that it uses to free Grant upon its return; Grant uses the ray gun to outfight Morrow and his thugs.  Morrow and crew end up in prison, and on the advice of the telepathic alien, Grant beats Bernice, turning her into suitable wife material.  The ending joke of the story is that Doc Ferris has found another egg from the alien dimension.

"The Good Egg" is acceptable filler.  The big problem with it is the inconsistent personalities of Hugh Grant and Bernice Ferris, which seem to change to suit the plot instead of being believably consistent and driving the plot.  For example, Grant is obsessed enough with the egg to steal it from the father of the woman he loves, even though he is supposed to be naive and innocent, and then he just forgets about the egg, leaving it alone in his fridge for days.  Sometimes Grant acts like a dope, sometimes like a hard-bitten combat veteran, other times like a science-loving nerd.  As for Bernice, her behavior is such that it is hard to sympathize with her and to hope she and Grant get together, though I guess it is implied that women's psyches are mere clay that have to be molded by the men in their lives so we need not sympathize with her for the story to achieve its goals.  The plot and SF content of "The Good Egg" is serviceable, and if Rocklynne or Sam Merwin had taken the time to polish the story and fix these character issues it would probably rise to good status, but life is short and writers and editors face deadlines and we've all got to pay the mortgage and get the dishes washed and the vases dusted and the lawn mowed and so can't always publish the best possible product.  Even so, historians might find "The Good Egg" useful for its 1946 depictions of the wartime economy and attitudes about women. 

"Never the Twain Shall Meet" by Edmond Hamilton

This tale appears under the byline "Brett Sterling," a pseudonym used several times by Hamilton and other people, including once by Ray Bradbury.  Like Rocklynne's "The Good Egg," it doesn't look like this story was ever reprinted. 

"Never the Twain Shall Meet" is a traditional science fiction story full of space suits, airlocks, little lectures about positrons that refer to Carl David Anderson and brainwaves that refer to Hans Berger, and speculations about where the planets and asteroids came from and how the Sun generates energy.  "Never the Twain Shall Meet" is also a melodramatic love story, perhaps based on the Hans Christian Anderson tale of The Little Mermaid.  Hamilton's style is simple and straightforward and the emotions of his characters, however over the top, ring true.  Thumbs up!

Farrel is the 30-year old captain of a space ship that has broken down near the asteroid belt.  For like 40 years, the human race has been exploring and colonizing the Solar System, but Venus and Mars are off limits, so humans are focusing their efforts on the moons of Jupiter and Uranus.  You see, half the matter of the universe is "positive," and half "negative," and Venus and Mars are negative, and if a piece of positive matter from Earth touches anything from V or M both will be annihilated in a blinding flash!

The crew of Farrel's ship are in serious trouble, but they can maybe fabricate the parts they need to fix the ship if they can drift close enough to an asteroid with the metal they need.  Unfortunately, half the asteroids are negative, making searching the belt very dangerous.

Amazingly, the crew spots another crippled space ship in the belt!  It has an odd shape--an experimental model?  Farrel goes out to investigate in his space suit--he can propel himself with a little hand-held rocket device.  Similarly equipped people come out of the other ship to meet him, one of them a beautiful woman.  Everybody is astonished when they realize they are from different worlds, represent different races--the beautiful girl and her ship are from Mars!  The two groups and their equipment can't touch each other, but Martians have developed devices that operationalize everybody's dormant telepathic ability, so Farrel can communicate with them.

Despite the obstacles facing them, Farrel and the Martian woman fall in love during a crazy adventure in which they get lost in the asteroid belt and have to use logic and science knowledge to reunite with their people, who, in their absence, have repaired their ships.  The Martian makes Farrel promise to meet her in this same spot in a year's time.  He does so, and they have a joyful reunion and start a happy life together because the Martians have figured out a way to change negative matter into positive, and the Martian woman volunteered to be the first human test subject of this technology so she could move to Earth and marry Farrel!

I like it.  The somewhat schmaltzy ending doesn't feel too saccharine because I didn't quite expect it; maybe I am dim, but repeatedly Hamilton had me thinking one of the lovers might die, sacrificing him or herself for the other, or maybe both could die, committing suicide because they prefer death to life without each other.  And, as I have told you again and again, I have a weakness for SF stories that are about people in space suits out there facing death in the void between the worlds.  "Never the Twain Shall Meet" deserves to be reprinted, in my humble opinion.

"Pocket Universes" by Murray Leinster

Yet another story that has not been reprinted, if we are to believe isfdb.  I have found Leinster to be a solid performer, so I have reason to hope I'll enjoy this piece as much as Hamilton's.

"Pocket Universes" is perhaps an illuminating sample of popular beliefs among Americans of people from Latin America, with our narrator, an American, saying stuff like

He was Latin-American—pure Spanish as far as I could tell—and you don’t expect Latin-Americans, somehow, to be scientists....You think of them and of revolutions and politicians, and if you know a few of them you think of poetry and literary effusions and highly intellectual and not very meaty talk. But science, no. Facts seem to hamper most of them.

Our narrator is buddies with a brilliant Latin American scientist, an emigre to the United States living and working in New York.  As the story begins, the scientist has just invented an amazing device.  When powered up, the apparatus, a bunch of copper and crystal pieces and wires, vanishes, and the space it previously occupied has odd effects on light that passes through it, and on objects which intrude into it.  It is as if the space no longer exists--if you reach into the queer blurry area occupied by the device before it was switched on, your hand will vanish inch by inch from your arm while immediately reappearing on the other side of the blurry space, still fully under your control.  Turning off the power causes the device to reappear, and, if anything is occupying the area, that intruding object is destroyed.  Leinster spends a lot of time trying to explain how all this works, both practically and theoretically, but I can't say he succeeds in making it very clear.  (Again, maybe I'm dim.)

The scientist and the narrator take a break from the lab and the sight of a newspaper headline prompts the inventor to tell his tragic life story.  Back home, he had an attractive wife whom his nation's dictator took a liking to.  The dictator's flunkies kidnapped her and she ended up getting killed.  The scientist fomented a revolution against the dictator, but his uprising was crushed.  The scientist fled to America, where he has had a successful career in academia, culminating in today's invention, which the narrator expects will revolutionize the economy and human life by, for example, allowing instantaneous travel between two points, regardless of what might be between them.  With a small portable device you can reach through walls and floors, a larger device walk through such obstacles, and if one is built on an industrial scale, like a highway, one could travel between cities as easily as one walks between two rooms.   

The newspaper story which inspired the inventor to spill his guts tells how the dictator is abdicating under the pressure of the accumulated threats of all his enemies, foreign and domestic, and coming to the United States, to New York, presumably bringing with him all kinds of money and valuables looted from his people and received from Nazis who fled to his country after the war.  To make sure we know the dictator is a bad guy, Leinster tells us he is fat and swarthy!  

The scientist uses upgraded versions of his device to sneak into the dictator's hotel room and seize the loot, which he has sent to the new government of his native country.  Then he murders the dictator.  The narrator upbraids him for risking his life on this adventure when only he can build the device which is going to radically improve human life by making trade and travel so inexpensive.  But the true tragedy of the story is that the scientist decides to experiment with a battery-powered version of his device, and somehow gets stuck inside the warped space--because the device is battery powered, the narrator cannot turn it off from our universe.  The narrator theorizes that, inside the warped space, time passes very slowly, so the batteries may not run out for what we here experience as centuries, even if the inventor only experiences it as a brief period.

(I have to admit I don't understand how the inventor got stuck inside the warped space, as earlier when a guy put his hand in the warped space his hand immediately reappeared on the other side of the warp--his arm wasn't in the warped space, the warped space is like space that is no longer existent.)

"Pocket Universes" is merely acceptable.  Leinster spends lots of energy explaining the device, but his explanations are not very clear and his speculations are wholly fanciful, unlike Hamilton's, which refer to real scientists and real phenomena like electrons and protons.  Leinster also spends a lot of time on the dictator, on describing how ugly and evil he is, but we readers can't get too enthused about the dictator because the narrator never meets him or sees him--he just reads about him in the paper or hears the inventor talk about him; the drama of the dictator's crimes and punishment all happens "off screen."  Unlike with Hamilton's "Never the Twain Shall Meet," I can see why "Pocket Universes" has never been reprinted.

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Only Hamilton's story here is a real winner, though Rocklynne's and Leinster's are not bad.  But none of these stories was a waste of my time, even Kuttner and Moore's, as I have a particular interest in the careers of Kuttner, Moore and Hamilton, and hope to read all of their work before I shuffle off this mortal coil (and I may be developing a similar attachment to Leinster.)  And as a grad school dropout who served time in a History and then a Poli Sci department, all the references to World War II are interesting.

The beautiful header to Thrilling Wonder Stories' letters column

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.