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!
     

   

DAW The Year's Best Horror Stories I: R Bloch, B Lumley, E C Tubb & R Campbell

At one of the Hagerstown, MD, antique malls I frequent I recently spotted a paperback copy of the first of The Year's Best Horror Stories anthologies published by DAW.  Printed in 1972, this thing had a Karel Thole cover with a cool lizard and some enigmatic human figures on it.  (This image actually appeared first on Urania 561 in 1971 and has nothing to do with the stories in the DAW book.)  isfdb is telling me that The Year's Best Horror Stories numero uno is actually one of many reprints of a British horror anthology edited by Richard Davis and printed in 1971, and the stories in it debuted in three different years.  Well, let's ignore all that confusion and read four of the stories from the book, those by Robert Bloch, Brian Lumley, E. C. Tubb and Ramsey Campbell.  (Davis also selected for his book "Prey" by Richard Matheson, a great story I have already read that I recommend to you all.)  The copy of The Year's Best Horror Stories I saw was too dear, fifteen bucks, so I will be reading the stories in scans from divers sources.

"Double Whammy" by Robert Bloch (1970)

I'm reading this one in a scan of the issue of Ted White's Fantastic in which it first appeared.  I took a quick look at the Jeff Jones illo on page 33 and at the letters column and Fritz Leiber's book reviews--there seemed to be a lot of typos and printing errors.  Leiber talks about some works of criticism of Tolkien, and offers his own tentative theory as to why Tolkien is popular--"I’d guess it’s because he winningly presents high-minded, self-sacrificing heroes to a generation weaned on cynicism, protest, and sex."  This isn't a bad theory, but it is funny to hear it from Leiber, whose own work seems to be full of cynicism, attacks on traditional values and outré sex--I feel like only last week we read a story by Fritz in which we learn that Jesus Christ was the product of Mary being raped by a snake-millipede from outer space, and of course the Grey Mouser is a serial rapist and burglar.

OK, let's get to Bloch and "Double Whammy."  Genre fiction writers love the idea of the travelling carnival or circus and we genre fiction readers often find ourselves exploring such milieus; looking through the archives of my own blog I see I have read a stack of novels and stories that involve a circus or carnival--if you dare, check out some links to blog posts from just the last few years!

Earthblood by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown
"On a Vacant Face a Bruise" by Gene Wolfe
"The Girl from Mars" by Robert Bloch
"The Recognition" by J. G. Ballard
"Another Burnt-Out Case" by Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini
"Death is an Elephant" by Robert Bloch
"The Queen of Pig Island" by Gerald Kersh
"The Fangs of Vengeance" by Robert Bloch
"The Sword Game" by H. H. Hollis
"Murder in the Grave" by Edmond Hamilton
"The Freak Show Murders" by Fredric Brown

Today we add "Double Whammy" to the stack.  And it is a fine addition, an entertaining black magic and psychological horror and disastrous sexual relationship story that uses the setting of the carnival as well as readers' discomforts and prejudices around race, ethnicity and class to great effect.  Thumbs up!

Rod is the barker at the carnival, and he is good at it, and enjoys tricking the local rednecks into parting with their dough to see the freaks.  Rod is also secretly having sex with teenager Cora, the hot and horny granddaughter of the gypsy lady who runs the fortune telling scam.  Rod should be happy, but he has a psychological problem.  The freakiest of the freaks is the geek, a 50-something white drunk who, in order to finance his booze habit, has taken the job of putting on a "wooly wig" and burnt cork to make himself look like a monstrous African wildman.  The geek capers and gyrates in a pit while Rod talks him up, and then Rod throws a live chicken into the pit and as the audience watches the geek bites off the living bird's head!  Rod has developed the irrational fear that he somehow might become a geek himself, maybe if he starts hitting the sauce himself.

Things become very difficult for Rod when Cora reveals she is pregnant and wants to get married.  Rod has contempt for Cora--he considers her of low intelligence, and he has a racist attitude towards gypsies (whom he conflates with "spicks") besides--so he obviously is not going to marry her, even if he told her he would the first time he banged her.  He hits her to snap her out of a crying fit, and tells her to have an abortion.

When Cora turns up dead after trying to remove with a knitting needle the clump of cells which is Rod's child, the Basket Case, a man with no arms or legs, warns Rod to run for the hills, as the grandmother has, according to the Basket Case, black magic powers that she has used to devastating effect before on those who have trespassed against the honor of that hot little dish that was her granddaughter.  Because of other poor decisions Rod has made, Rod can't get away quite yet, and is thus ripe for grandma's effort to achieve vengeance on him.  What horrible fate does she have in store for Rod, and does he have any chance to escape it?

Bloch sometimes ruins his stories by explicitly explaining the psychology of his characters and  y tiresomely hammering away at his social commentary, but in "Double Whammy" he shows rather than tells and the story totally works.  For example, because he doesn't get too preachy or over the top, in "Double Whammy" Bloch is able to exploit liberals' contempt for Southern hicks, white people's fear of exotic ethnic minorities, and squeamish people's unease with the deformed, making the story disturbing on multiple levels or from multiple vectors.  A high spot in Bloch's long career.

(Oh yeah, and no jokes!)

I recently said that Robert Silverberg's "To the Dark Star" was like the model of a modal science fiction story, and I think maybe Bloch's  "Double Whammy" is a similar exemplar for horror stories.  Both "To the Dark Star" and "Double Whammy" put a big helping of SF content up front (astronomy in Silverberg's case, deformity, gore and black magic in Bloch's) alongside an equally large serving of human relationship drama, and include a noticeable but subtle social commentary element, while leaving out distracting unnecessary fripperies like jokes and psychedelia.

Besides the Bloch collections Cold Chills and Last Rites, you can find "Double Whammy" in multiple English and foreign language anthologies.     

"The Sister City" by Brian Lumley (1969)       

In 2008 or '09 I borrowed a bunch of Brian Lumley collections from the NYPL, including Haggopian and Other Stories which reprinted "The Sister City," and so I may have read this one before.  We'll see.

Well, I don't specifically recognize "The Sister City," but it is a pretty pedestrian, derivative, and imitative piece of work full of references to Lovecraft stories.  We might even call it a shaggy dog story, as the narrator travels around a lot but doesn't actually get very far, ending up almost where he began, and he doesn't really face obstacles or deal with problems along the way, and there is not really much of a surprise ending or any suspense.

"The Sister City," like so many Lovecraftian stories, consists of a memoir or testimonial and a bunch of supporting documents, reports by and correspondence among the authorities.  As a youth, the narrator was injured during the war, apparently by the explosion of a German bomb which hit his house and killed his parents.  Our narrator has odd hairless skin and webbing between his digits, so we know from page one this guy is the product of miscegenation between man and beast or has aliens among his ancestors or is some kind of monster or something.

After two years in the hospital our guy, whose reading during his recovery has inspired in him a fascination with lost cities, travels the world, visiting such sites as the pyramids at Giza and ruined cities mentioned in Lovecraft stories.  He discovers ancient artifacts and reads prehistoric inscriptions and so forth.  These travels are, I guess, meant to build atmosphere, as they don't have any bearing on the plot, though they offer the narrator opportunity to exercise his special powers, like his ability to swim like a fish and understand, in spoken or written form, just about any language. 

Back home in England he is presented with a sealed envelope, left him by his parents to be opened when he is 21; if he had just stayed home he would have gotten this envelope.  The letter in the envelope explains that he is the member of an ancient race of aquatic reptile people who live in an underground city beneath the Yorkshire moors.  These lizard men have a convoluted life cycle, and in early life look almost like boring old homo sapiens like you and me, and so their reptile parents leave them on English doorsteps or at English churches or wherever to be raised by humans--you see, the underground city's conditions are difficult and not healthy for lizard people until they transform from mammal-looking kids into full scaly adults.  As if that isn't contrived and silly enough, the narrator's parents decided to break the laws of their race and live among humans themselves with sonny boy instead of just leaving the narrator to be raised as an orphan or by adoptive human parents or whatever, but then they started looking too squamous to pass as Englishmen and so faked their own deaths by blowing up their house during a Luftwaffe air raid and retreated to the underground city.  In dreams they beckon the narrator join them in their subterranean colony now that he is an adult, and it is suggested the narrator isn't just a joe-six pack lizard man, but lizard man royalty or even some kind of lizard god.

The supporting documents provide clues about how the narrator got back to the underground city and also hint that the British economy's tireless need for fossil fuels is going to result in the accidental and likely genocidal uncovering of the subterranean city of the narrator's people.

Merely tolerable.

I read "The Sister City" in a scan of Haggopian and Other Stories which had more typos than I expected.  The story debuted in the oft-reprinted (in varying forms) Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by August Derleth.

"Lucifer!" by E. C. Tubb (1969)

This is a good Twilight Zone-style story.  Tubb employs a brisk non-nonsense style that is quite effective.  It is noteworthy that Tubb doesn't explicitly explain the title of the story, but expects you to be familiar with the Bible or Milton or Doré.

A man with an extraordinarily attractive face but a clubbed foot is working at a morgue.  This guy is totally unscrupulous, and a sadist besides.  He steals a ring from a dead body--unknown to him, the body is that of a visiting space alien, a sort of incognito tourist.  

The sadist soon figures out that by pressing the button on the ring he can turn back time 57 seconds.  This is a terrific boon--he can easily get rich by cheating at gambling games, and makes enough money to have his foot repaired.

The ring opens up other means of piling up the moolah--like by being a gigolo!  The sadist becomes the world's greatest lover because he can touch a woman a certain way and if she doesn't respond well, he can just go back 57 seconds and touch her a different way, and keep it up until he touches her in all the ways she most desires--from her perspective, he is caressing and kissing and otherwise pleasuring her in all the ways she wants, saying all the words and playing all the little games that most excite her, without her having to tell him what to do!

The former morgue attendant doesn't just use the ring to make money, but to satisfy his perverted, most diabolical desires.  Obviously he can grope strange women and then go back in time when they scream or strike him or whatever.  But this guy isn't just a horndog--he's a sadist!  He can punch a woman's teeth out or poke her eyes out and enjoy her agony for 50 or so seconds and then go back in time to before he struck her.    

This all sets the scene for the horror climax.  The sadist is on a transatlantic flight.  The plane suffers a catastrophic failure in a storm and he is sucked out a hole in the fuselage and falls towards the ocean as the stricken plane falls beside him.  He can't figure out a way to prevent the accident only 57 seconds before it occurs, so he is doomed to experience his fall towards the ocean again and again and again.

I like it.  "Lucifer!" debuted in a magazine I don't know I have ever thought much about before, Vision of Tomorrow.  Vision of Tomorrow, published in Australia, lasted only a dozen issues across '69 and '70.  "Lucifer!" has been reprinted in a Russian anthology, an anthology on the theme of scary airplane flights edited by Stephen King (yeah, sure) and Bev Vincent (some kind of Stephen King superfan), and in the 2024 issue of Cemetery Dance's annual Weird Fiction Review.

Jeder Damon hat seinen Preis Horror Stories is a German anthology of stories
drawn from multiple books edited by Richard Davis

"The Scar" by Ramsey Campbell (1969)

This is a somewhat complicated story largely about difficult family relationships and other ordinary life challenges, like running a business.  As the story proceeds, Campbell gives the reader reason to consider several different possibilities as to what is going on and question the sanity of several of the characters, and he also devotes quite a lot of ink to describing street scenes, fog, garbage under foot, the state of rooms and their decor, and so on, I guess to set the mood and to give the reader clues about class issues.

We've got three main characters and two minor but important named characters.  Harriet is married to Jack the jewelry store owner, and they have two kids.  Harriet has always had a pretty good life, but she has a brother who has had bad luck and is kind of a loser, Rice.  Rice has trouble communicating with people and making friends, and Harriet has sort of pressured Jack into acting like he is Rice's friend, hanging out with him regularly in a pub in the crummy part of town where Rice lives in a dilapidated apartment and having Rice weekly come over to their middle-class house.  For his part, scatterbrained ineffectual Rice would like to do something to help Harriet and Jack, earn their friendship and affection, be more than the beneficiary of their pity. 

Rice one evening tells Jack in his clumsy halting way that on the bus he saw a man who looked just like Jack save that he had a scar on his face, and mentions the doppelganger legend that suggests that if you see your double you will soon die.  Jack is in no mood for such depressing talk because he is already stressed out over the recent rash of robberies of stores--will his store be next?  

The next time Jack walks to the slum to hang out with Rice, which he doesn't even want to do but does out of duty, he is attacked in an alley and suffers a wound on his face.  The mysterious attacker brags that he is going to rob Jack's store and abuse his children.  As the story continues, Harriet and Rice find that Jack is acting kind of crazy, bitter and even cruel, presumably driven unstable by the attack and by the robbery of his store, which has occurred as predicted.  Rice even comes to fear that the two kids are being abused by Jack, and begins considering ways to save the kids and his sister from Jack, inspired in part by a book he read in which a guy sacrifices himself to save his friends.  

We readers get clues and red herrings suggesting a number of possible explanations for what is going on.  Could Rice be lying about the doppelganger, or only believe in it because he is insane, and have attacked Jack himself because he is jealous over Harriet (Campbell hints that Rice is sexually attracted to his sister) and the kids and envious of Jack's success?  Or maybe it is Jack who is insane and/or evil (Campbell hints that we are not supposed to like Jack by having Jack think callously about the poor and show contempt for The Lord of the Rings) and actually faked the robbery of his store to get sympathy or insurance money or something.  Or maybe the doppelganger is real, and has killed Jack and taken his place, first giving Jack the scar that matches its own so it could better infiltrate Jack's home and abuse his family.

In the last violent and bloody sequence of the story, Rice tries to solve the problem that is Jack or the imposter and we get a better sense of whether either or both of the two male main characters is a hero, a villain, or simply a victim.

This is the most sophisticated and challenging of today's four stories, though it is less fun than Bloch's and Tubb's more easily digested tales.  I have to admit I don't really understand the monsters' operations--why is the monster who imitates Jack walking around with Jack's face before killing or displacing Jack?  And why does the monster include in its imitation of Jack a scar Jack doesn't have yet?  I briefly thought that maybe the "monster" was just a criminal who happened to look like Jack, but in the end of the story it becomes clear that there is a whole race of these doppelgangers and one of them is planning to impersonate Rice.  Some scenes seemed to be suggesting that the doppelgangers cut off people's skin and wear it as a disguise, but that doesn't jive with other scenes, like, again, Rice seeing Jack's double while Jack is alive.  Maybe the monsters can achieve a look a bit like that of an individual human and then don their targets' skin to complete the disguise?  There is also the possibility that the monsters are just the depraved inner desires of Jack the grasping businessman and Rice the incompetent pervert come to life and "The Scar" is more like an allegory or fable about the evils fathered by capitalist and classbound English society and not an actual science fiction story that is supposed to make logical sense.   

I can moderately recommend "The Scar;" the family dynamics and the descriptions are all good, if a little long-winded and tricky--the mechanisms of how the monsters behave is the only real problem, and maybe I am just too dumb and lazy to figure out just what is going on.  I read the story in its original typo-ridden form in a scan of issue #13 of Startling Mystery Stories.  Besides in the various forms of Richard Davis anthologies out there and Campbell collections, you can find it in Lost Souls: A Collection of English Ghost Stories and Doubles, Dummies and Dolls: 21 Terror Tales of Replication.  

**********

The Lumley just sits there, but the stories we read today from Davis' first Year's Best Horror Stories volume are all emotionally and/or intellectually engaging, and are all full of gore and death and creepy sex.  

         

More horror stories from anthologies in the next gruesome episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

         

Best SF: 1968: B Aldiss, M Reynolds, F Leiber, & R Silverberg

A couple of weeks ago we read three stories from Best SF: 1968, an anthology edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss.  Today we read four more stories from the book by people in whom we are interested: Brian Aldiss himself, Mack Reynolds, Fritz Leiber, and Robert Silverberg.  I almost said "five more stories," but then I checked the archives and found that the story in Best SF: 1968 by Stephen Goldin, "Sweet Dreams Melissa," has already been covered here at MPorcius Fiction Log, way back in 2014.  (I liked it.)

"The Serpent of Kundalini" by Brian Aldiss

isfdb is telling me that "The Serpent of Kundalini" is the fifth of eight stories in a Colin Charteris series.  Harry Harrison in his intro to the story here in Best SF 1968 tells us that the Charteris stories are "acid-head stories of a future where psychedelic drugs have been used in warfare," hints that the chronology of the story may be "awry," and warns us that the Charteris stories "are not to everyone's taste, because they sometimes require a certain effort on the part of the reader."  Good grief, Harry, are you trying to convince me to skip this story?  Or just prophylactically heading off people who might say they don't like it by suggesting readers who don't care for "The Serpent of Kundalini" just aren't smart enough to get it? Well, let's see if I'm smart enough to get it.

Colin Charteris is a Montenegrin soldier, veteran of a war in which psychedelic drugs were spread throughout Europe and disrupted minds and societies far and wide.  Our guy CC has an image of England in his mind drawn from the stories of The Saint written by Leslie Charteris, and today he is making his first landfall on the sceptered isle, having taken a ferry from France to Dover along with is car.  The first third or so of this 15-or-so-page-long story is a dream or delusion or vision of CC's arrival in and first explorations of England full of surreal images that I guess are symbols and metaphors; the text is laced with lame philosophical and paradoxical reflections:  

"...attachment to things keeps alive a thousand useless I's in a man; these I's must die so that the big I can be born."

"...motion must be an expression of stillness."

"To what extent was a vision an illusion, to what extent a clearer sort of truth?"

Ugh.  The second part of the story describes Charteris' "real" arrival and explorations of England; he keeps comparing this England to his earlier delusions and visions of the green and pleasant land--this "real" England is different and I suppose a little more believable.  CC keeps seeing versions of himself going off in different directions--these are the aforementioned "I''s" that must be discarded.

In the final third or so of the story we get some class analysis.  Before he was a mystic who followed the teachings of "Gurdjieff," CC was a communist and when he comes upon stereotypes or parodies of suburban English middle-class homes and individuals he angrily denounces them.  An Englishman who is even more familiar with the work of Gurdjieff than CC shows our hero around and plans to introduce the Montenegrin to his sexy daughter.  CC fears this man is plying him with tea and his daughter in order to divert CC from his true mission, and as the story ends, sure enough, we are given reason to believe that the Colin Charteris we have been following is one of the useless "I's" that is being discarded by the true CC.

A sterile and annoying waste of time.  In the same way that modern paintings by people who know nothing of perspective and anatomy are billed as experimental, but all too often come across as merely sophomoric and lazy, all too often stories that, in an effort to be psychedelic or surreal, eschew chronological narrative and a structure in which events in one scene follow logically from that before, come across as shoddy and pointless, and "The Serpent of Kundalini" is one of those.  Thumbs down!   

"The Serpent of Kundalini" debuted in an issue of Michael Moorcock's New Worlds with a Barbarella cover and Moorcock included it in the anthology Best SF Stories from New Worlds 5.

"Criminal in Utopia" by Mack Reynolds

I've read a number of things by Reynolds over the years, and in general I think he is a poor writer whose ideas don't deserve to be taken very seriously, but he had a wild and strange--almost mind-bloggingly so--career, and so I read him on occasion.  "Criminal in Utopia" first appeared in Galaxy, the readers of which (in league with the readers of If) we are told voted Reynolds "the most popular science fiction author."  The story was reprinted in an anthology of stories about big business and an anthology of stories about computers, and was integrated with other Reynolds stories about the "Police Patrol" to form the 1977 novel Police Patrol: 2000 AD.  In his intro to "Criminal in Utopia" here in the book in which we are reading it, Harrison tells us Reynolds has lived in or visited over 50 countries, and this story is about credit cards.

Sounds horrible.  But here we go. 

OK, this is better than expected, though not actually good.  "Criminal in Utopia" is a very straightforward, quite pedestrian story that methodically describes a person's travelling hither and thither within a city and his quotidian conversations and actions, like buying goods and services.  "Criminal in Utopia" is a real legit science fiction story--Reynolds is speculating about future economic systems and police operations--that comes in the form of a crime story, whatever you call a story much like a police procedural but that has its focus the operations of the criminal rather than those of the cops.  Do mystery fans call these types of stories "capers?"  

It is the future of the "Ultra-welfare State" where, it is implied, most people are Zoroastrians.  Everybody has a credit card (which acts more like a debit card in the story than an actual credit card, as far as I can see) and computer access to a network like the internet which allows you to read newspapers on a screen and order consumer goods for same-day delivery through vacuum tubes.  Our protagonist has used up all the money in his account.  First he requests an advance but he has already gotten two months of advances, and is refused.  Then he buys a toy gun over the internet and rides the subway to an apartment building where rich people live.  He tricks his way inside a rich single man's apartment and uses the gun to convince the rich guy to order him a real gun, jewelry, clothes, and camping equipment, all of which are delivered within minutes.

Our guy leaves with his victim's credit card and sells the jewelry at a little store, of whose owner he thinks "here was the last of the kulaks, the last of the small businessmen."  The money he gets for the jewelry is put onto his account when he inserts his credit card into a slot.

It is not much later that the cops are on to our guy, broadcasting his photo on everybody's wrist TV.  The thief uses his gun to convince a man on the street to call and pay for a flying taxi for him to escape in.  Our protagonist pulls a few more such scams and spends time in a swanky hotel room drinking expensive booze and eating expensive food.  Then the police come to apprehend him.

Then comes our twist ending.  Our main character is not really a thief but a government employee testing the system, looking for weaknesses that could be exploited by real criminals. 

"Criminal in Utopia" is competent if bland, and I'm grading it as acceptable, though there are some problems.  The biggest is that using your credit card requires that you press your thumb to a screen that reads your thumbprint, and the main character circumvents this security measure so he can use another person's card simply by photographing the image of the legitimate owner's fingerprint which is printed on his card and then holding that photo up to the screens.  Why would a representation of your fingerprint be on your card?  Oh, well.

Martin H. Greenberg and John D. Olander included this story in Tomorrow, Inc., which is billed as a collection of stories about big business, but isn't "Criminal in Utopia" really about government?  Almost all of the story's activity is conducted by police in the course of their duties and though there are class distinctions it is implied that in this society the means of production is in public hands, and it is explicitly stated that it is the government that handles the cards that are at the center of the story.  Harrison in his intro to the story says it is about credit cards, but as I have already noted, the cards in the story don't give you access to easy credit--don't facilitate the borrowing of money--but just deduct or add funds to your bank account; to actually borrow money you have to call up a person on the phone.  The real scary part of the story is that in the absence of physical money the government can follow all your purchases and learn all about you.  I kind of feel like Greenberg, Olander and Harrison are promoting Reynolds' story as being about what they want it to be about, when it is actually about something slightly different.

"One Station of the Way" by Fritz Leiber

I hate the holidays.  I hate taking down all the pictures and decor I actually like and dragging that stuff to the basement and then lugging back up images of pumpkins to replace it, and then turkeys, and then snowflakes.  I hate participating in activities, eating food, and listening to music I don't like just because the calendar says it is time to do so.  I hate the stress of picking out gifts for people and worrying the gift will disappoint or even insult them, and I hate putting on an act when I receive a gift that I have no interest in.  And it is not like the holidays are four or five discrete days with rest periods in between that you can get through individually like you can a doctor's appointment or regular maintenance on the Toyota--nowadays the holidays are like a solid three and a half months artillery bombardment without respite.  

Anyway, in his intro to "One Station of the Way" here in Best SF: 1968, Harrison tells us this is "the only science fiction story of value ever written" about Christmas.  An interesting claim, as Arthur C. Clarke's "Star" was published in 1956 and Michael Moorcock's "Behold the Man" in 1966; is Harrison bashing those guys or suggesting their stories are not really about Christmas?  Also noteworthy: according to isfdb, "One Station of the Way" has never appeared in a Leiber collection--was Fritz unhappy with it?

Like Aldiss, Leiber is a talented writer with a lot of ideas and a willingness to push the envelope and experiment when it comes to topics, themes and narrative strategies.  Sometimes these experiments strike me as failures, and so I never know when I start a Leiber (or Aldiss) story what to expect and whether I will like it.   

Our story begins in a desert on planet Finiswar as we observe three "hominids," people with three eyes each, riding "camleoids;" they see a bright light in the sky and ride towards it.  Obviously, these three figures are supposed to remind us of the Three Wise Men or Three Kings--these guys even talk of bringing gifts to somebody.

We then shift the scene to a group of four hominids, a "Husband" and a "Wife" and their two kids.  They are close to the bright light, which turns out to be a landing space ship.  From the vessel emerge its crew, two snake-like millipedes like 50 feet long, one white, one black.  The white serpent licks the Wife; this touch not only fills her with a powerful feeling of love, but impregnates her.  The three wise men catch up to the party, and attack--they have been following the family in hopes of raping the Wife.  (The "gifts" they sardonically referred to were their sperm.  Everybody is a comedian.)  The many-legged aliens have energy weapons and destroy the spear-wielding "wise men" and then leave.

Through the dialogue between the two serpents we get a clear explanation of what is going on.  (Most of the meat of this story is in the dialogue.)  The white serpent is travelling around the galaxy impregnating women of intelligent races; the women he impregnates give birth to special children who preach a religion of love--the white serpent's mission in life is to bring love and peace to the galaxy this way.  The black serpent is along for the ride and plays a sort of devil's advocate role.  While the white serpent is all about love, the black serpent admires the strength and speed, the intelligence and technological progress, that are the result of conflict, of the relationship between predator and prey and between combatants in war.  He and the white serpent have bitter philosophical debates on these themes and over whether the white serpent's impregnations lead to peace or actually foment conflict.  In their dialogue we also learn, as if we couldn't figure it out ourselves, that the white serpent impregnated Mary on Terra and is the father of Jesus Christ.

Through the serpents' conversation we also learn about the crazy facts of reproduction on Finiswar, and this is the most interesting part of the story.  On Finiswar, every male living creature can impregnate every female living creature no matter how disparate their species, so females have tightly closed and heavily armored genitals and mostly reproduce by cloning themselves because if they open their genitals to have sex with males of their own species all kinds of spores and seeds floating in the air will enter them and they will give birth to hybrids.  Husband and Wife were in the desert because they wanted to reproduce sexually, and only in a sparsely populated place where there are few other living things could they have sex without risking Wife being impregnated by some other creature.  (The white serpent's hypnotic love powers overcame the Wife's many biological and psychological defenses against cross-species fertilization.)          

This story is OK...there is no actual human feeling or suspense.  I guess the story is supposed to generate excitement in the reader in the form of shock or outrage or titillation in reaction to the religious, philosophical and sexual content.  But in the post-Christian, pornified America of 2025 the ideas in the story are no longer thrilling, just faintly interesting.

Like "Criminal in Utopia," "One Station of the Way" debuted in Fred Pohl's Galaxy.  Pohl included it in The Eleventh Galaxy Reader and editors in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands also liked it enough to reprint it.

"To the Dark Star" by Robert Silverberg

"To the Dark Star" debuted in the anthology The Farthest Reaches, the French edition of which has a cool Moebius cover I think all you fans of European comics (like our man tarbandu) will appreciate.  "To the Dark Star" has reappeared in many Silverberg collections and is the title story of the second volume of The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg.

"To the Dark Star" has the form of a traditional science fiction story--a diverse team of scientists travels a great distance and spends a long time studying an astronomical phenomena (Silverberg tries to teach us stuff about the life cycle of stars) and the scientists find themselves trying to solve a life-threatening problem using their wits.  But Silverberg adds in some cynical revisionist or even New Wave elements that drive most of the drama.  We might interpret "To the Dark Star" as one of those SF stories in which the goody goody aliens by contrast illuminate how violent, envious and uncooperative we humans are, and even as an allegory about tribalism or racism, but luckily for those of us who read fiction for enjoyment and not to hear the same boring complaints about us from our supposed betters again and again, "To the Dark Star" is more hard-boiled or noirish than preachy, and is written economically and from the point of view of one of the flawed humans, not the point of view of a wise man or superior being or omniscient narrator.  Thumbs up!

It is like 1000 years in the future and three scientists have been sent to witness the collapse into a singularity of a large star that has already gone supernova.  Our narrator is the normal human on the team.  One of his companions is a woman altered to live in a high gravity environment, a hugely muscled and squarish woman whose body and voice are absolutely unattractive to a 100% organic and all natural non-GMO man like our narrator.  The third member of the research ship's crew is a representative of the only other intelligent species humans have ever met, a people with three legs and almost no head, the brain being in the torso.

The two humans are very competitive and hate each other; one of the themes of the story is that scientists are not necessarily noble seekers after truth but are sometimes selfish careerists who are always trying to one up each other.  The alien is relatively calm and responsible and plays the role of mediator between the two humans.

After a few months orbiting the collapsing star, the crew have to make a big decision.  When total collapse is imminent, they will send a drone machine to the surface of the dying star and one of them has to connect his brain via radio (or equivalent) to the drone so he can experience first hand what happens when the dying cinder of a star "breaks through the walls of the universe and disappears" as it "undergoes a violent collapse to zero volume" and at the same time achieves "infinite density."  Such an experience could very well kill or drive a man insane, so our narrator and the woman are loathe to take on this task.  Each uses dirty tricks to try to get the other to "volunteer" for this risky mission, drugs and hypnosis among them.  When the crucial time comes they fight hand to hand, but come to a stalemate, the narrator's combat training neutralizing the woman's super strength.  So, the humans gang up on the alien and force it to undergo the dangerous experience.  

A solid piece of work, a fine performance by Silverberg and a very good example of SF that is full of science, human drama and social commentary and is still briskly entertaining.  "To the Dark Star" is like a model of what a modal science fiction story should be.

**********

We can see why Harrison and Aldiss would include these four stories in a "Best of" book.  Silverberg's story is actually quite good, and with its sexual elements and misanthropy suits the 1968 zeitgeist.  Aldiss' is very experimental and topical, with its drug theme and general rebellious attitude, its hero being committed to left-wing politics and Eastern mysticism.  Reynolds' story is all about current events, the threats posed by credit cards, computer surveillance and government surveillance.  And Leiber's story is in-your-face provocative, a bizarre interpretation of the origins of Christianity plus weird sex.  The Aldiss aside, these stories are worth reading for their ideas and as entertainment; the Aldiss is only valuable as some kind of historical or biographical document to those interested in the SF field and/or Aldiss in particular.