Lester del Rey: "The One-Eyed Man," "And the Darkness," and "Shadows of Empire"

Let's read three more stories and another series of autobiographical passages from the 1975 Lester del Rey collection The Early del Rey.  Feel free to refresh your memory of previous installments of this ongoing series here at MPorcius Fiction Log by clicking the following links:

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

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

"Whom the Gods Love," "Though Dreamers Die," and "Fool's Errand"

"The One-Eyed Man" (1945)

In the short passage between "Fool's Errand" and "The One-Eyed Man," del Rey tells us he based this story on some press accounts of the work of Felix Ehrenhaft on magnetism and of Aleksander Bogolomets on life extension.   John W. Campbell, Jr. published "The One-Eyed Man" in Astounding under the Philip St. John pseudonym.

This is a very fast-paced story of palace intrigue and brain science--and peeps getting blown away by ray guns--with a somewhat convoluted plot that reminded me of A. E. van Vogt's work.  I think I can marginally recommend it, but it has not, it appears, ever been anthologized.

It is the 42nd century.  The New World is ruled by a dictatorship, though the Dictator has to contend with a Senate full of ambitious conniving creeps.  The form of the current society is determined by the inventions of the current dictator's ancestor, a genius scientist, Aaron Bard, who came up with startling, game-changing, innovations in the disparate fields of medicine, psychology, atomic energy, electronics, and  beyond.  A world war erupted and Bard's son used his father's inventions to win the war and make himself Dictator; the inventor Bard died in some kind of accident.  Today, nobody knows the science that makes many of Bard's inventions work, though technicians can still operate them.  The secrets of some other of Bard's inventions, like atomic ray guns and techniques to render matter permeable and then impermeable again, are totally lost.

The most important invention in use today is the machine that feeds info right into your brain.  When you are twelve, government lackeys hook you up to this device and it fills your noggin with all you need to know and you thereafter are an adult and are given an adult job.  The process is a little stressful, and turns like ten percent of people into zombies, who now form a slave class of manual laborers and house servants.  Even worse, the current education system has degraded society.  Twelve-year-old kids, as del Rey tells it, are like self-obsessed savages with no sense of morality or decency.  This machine system of education gives people no chance to mature, and so nearly everybody in the society is a selfish jerk, just like a 12-year-old brat, but with the knowledge and positions of responsibility that enable them to make life for everyone around them a nightmare!

Our protagonist is the current Dictator's son, Jim, who I guess is like 20.  The Dictator had a hunch that Jimmy would be zombified by the education process, and because he is the Dictator, he had his kid exempted from the normal education process.  Jim thus has grown up more or less normally, and has a sense of decency and justice.  He has also managed to figure out how to use his ancestor's permeable matter technique, which gives him access to the labyrinth of secret passages and spyholes which riddles the castle where live and work the Dictator and the Senate.  Thus, Jim knows all the dirty secrets of the various Senators, most of whom are plotting to overthrow his Dad and/or are in league with Eurasia, the enemy of the New World.

The Dictator knows that a war with Eurasia is brewing and that some Senators are trying to do him in, so he decides that to maintain any credibility with the public he has to finally let Jim go under the learning machine.  The very day that Jim is to risk zombification, he unexpectedly runs into an old man in the secret passages Jim thought nobody else alive knew about--amazingly, it is Aaron Bard, revived from the dead by a cabal of Senators who tried to force the inventor to divulge to them some of his science secrets!  The undead Bard escaped those traitors and makes common cause with his young descendent Jim.  Most of the story follows these two as they outwit the conspirators and make Jim Dictator so the New World can defeat or deter the Eurasians, achieve stability in government and usher in a new golden age by restricting use of the teaching machine to people in their 20s.

This is like a novel's worth of plot that is conveyed to the reader in the space of a short story by leaving out any kind of fancy writing or character personality or emotional content--it feels like it is moving at breakneck speed.  The plot and setting are cool enough that the story works. 

"And the Darkness" (1950)

Between "The One-Eyed Man," and "And the Darkness," del Rey talks about his career life and love life in 1945 and 1946, when he took time off writing and managed a location of the chain restaurant White Tower, a chain which I had never heard of that I am told was an imitator of White Castle.  There's a level of braggadocio to del Rey's memoirs, and he explains how he did a stellar job managing this restaurant.  But its not all happy memories--he broke up with his girlfriend, perhaps because  she as a office worker looked down on the work he was doing.  But shed no tears for del Rey, who eventually racked up four marriages--he got a new girlfriend, a waitress, and married her.  Then he was unjustly dismissed by White Tower and took up writing again.  Among the first of his new products was "And the Darkness."

Three centuries ago an anti-matter meteor blew up the moon and the Earth was showered with radioactive fragments, killing all of humanity but a thousand people in such places as a mine in Alaska in a valley.  Today there are like a dozen human beings left alive, and thanks to all the radiation, they have evolved superpowers.  But these superpowers can't stave off the inevitable doom of our noble race--there are no more young women and only one young man!

Del Rey spends like half the story on an abortive period of hope, triggered by somebody thinking he saw a young woman living among some wolves.  This is a false alarm--the creature is a mutant wolf who has intelligence comparable to a human and a body sort of like a human female.  Some of the twelve surviving humans, having lost hope, decide to commit suicide.  But then an aircraft appears.  On the ship are furry six-limbed people--Martians!  And they have a tale to tell!

Right before the Earth was wrecked, an Earth rocket was sent to Mars crewed by a married couple.  On Mars they met the relatively primitive natives and the Martians treated them as gods.  The human astronauts' knowledge, leadership and the equipment they brought led to a technological revolution on Mars, and today the Martians have their own space ships and other high technology.  As for the astronauts, the man suffered some kind of genetic damage from the radiation from the meteor that hit the moon and could only father girls.  So all his children and grandchildren et al have been female.  The Martians preserved his semen and used to impregnate his children, grandchildren, etc., (Gross!) but the supply today has run out.  Today there are eight young women on Mars.  The last young man on Earth is given the job of going to Mars to have sex with these eight women and perpetuate the human race.  Nice work if you can get it!  

This story is alright; a major problem is that the wolf story and the Mars story are pretty divorced from each other, are practically separate stories.  I also feel like we have a lot of superfluous characters.  Campbell rejected "And the Darkness" and in the autobiographical text after the story del Rey discusses the flaws in the story and points out some ways he could have improved the tale.  "And the Darkness" was eventually published in Donald Wollheim's Out of this World, a short-lived periodical that included behind its women-in-peril covers not only SF stories but 32 pages of comics, including work by major comics creators Joe Kubert, John Giunta and Gardner Fox.  Like "The One-Eyed Man," "And the Darkness" was never anthologized.  (The stories in The Early del Rey are mostly ones that had not been anthologized or collected before 1975 and are thus not his most popular or critically acclaimed work.)

"Shadows of Empire" (1950)           

This one reminds me of Poul Anderson, with its musings on the cycles of history and focus on national character-- "Shadows of Empire" prominently features a Slavic character, and del Rey suggests Slavs are "gloomy." 

It is the future of space empire, with Earth having colonized much of the solar system.  This empire is ruled by an Emperor and a bunch of nobles.  Our narrator is a noncommissioned officer in a garrison on Mars.  Mars is covered with the ruins of the mighty native race whose advanced civilization fell before Earth people arrived; the red planet is still inhabited by nomadic desert barbarians--the civilized Martian race may have died out, but the barbarians they were always fighting have endured and fought many battles with the Terrans.

We get many clues that the Earth empire is in severe decline.  The narrator's unit, I guess we would call them mechanized infantry, leaves the frontier of human settlement on Mars and drives across the desert to the more thickly settled areas and finally to the spaceport.  The Terran army on Mars is returning to Earth, leaving the human settlers to the tender mercies of the Martian barbarians, because there is some kind of civil war brewing on Earth, one which may be cataclysmic.  

One of men in the narrator's unit is a Slav who is always quoting Ecclesiastes and sometimes Kipling and is known to be a pessimist.  This guy is also working on a book.  Just before the narrator's unit and the rest of the army on Mars blast off for Earth this Slav gives his book to the narrator and then disappears.  The next day the general of the narrator's outfit reveals that the Slav was in fact a previous emperor, travelling in disguise after faking his own assassination.  The book is a major work of historical importance that will have to be hidden from the current Imperial authorities.  The story ends on a note of optimism as well as pessimism--the incognito emperor asserts that empires and civilizations inevitably fall, but civilization always rises up from the wreckage, like a phoenix.

Del Rey reports that Campbell rejected "Shadow of Empire" because it was a mood piece, and he had run some mood pieces recently and readers had not been crazy about them.  I have to sympathize with Campbell--Shadow of Empire" has little plot and I would judge it merely acceptable.  There are lots of images that are meant to convey feeling to the reader--the ruins of the high Martian race, the barbarians in the distance, the soldiers singing as they ride their tracked vehicles across the desert, the response to the rolling army of the civilians they pass, etc.--but the narrator doesn't face challenges or make decisions.  And the story feels repetitive, del Rey and the characters banging on about the same stuff over and over, words like "gloomy" and "pessimism" and "phoenix" popping up again and again. 

Damon Knight took a look at "Shadows of Empire" and was even more dismissive than Campbell, but Robert Lowndes printed it in Future; the story has not been anthologized. 

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Not exactly blockbusters, but not bad, either.  When we finish The Early del Rey we'll read some of del Rey's more celebrated work, maybe in a "best of" collection of some kind.  But we've got a lot of other projects here at MPorcius Fiction Log, so that might be pretty far in the future. 

Mythmaster by Leo P. Kelley

"I know your name is Shannon," she told him, "and I know other things about you as well.  I know they call you the Mythmaster and that you are the prize fly that the spider Oxon Kaedler covets."

Well, folks, in today's blogpost we've got something for the ladies!  You see, in our last episode, we read a paperback I bought because I liked the cover.  That worked out OK, so I decided to do that again, and the Robert Foster cover of today's topic, Leo P. Kelley's 1973 novel Mythmaster, features not only a hot woman in a minimalist strappy outfit, but a similarly attired hunk with a face that is reminding me of the classic good looks of the beloved Peter Cushing! Awesome!

I have only read one short story by Leo P. Kelley, "Cold, The Fire of the Phoenix," and I didn't like it.  According to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Kelley focused on Westerns later in his career, and it looks like Mythmaster was his tenth and last SF novel.  Well, let's hope Kelley left the SF world with a bang and that Mythmaster, 224 pages (of reassuringly large type, 32 lines on a page, much larger than the type in J. T. McIntosh's The Rule of the Pagbeasts, where we get 44 lines on a page) is a good read.

I'm afraid I must report that Mythmaster is not a good read.  At all.  I didn't like the style--the text is overwritten and wordy, with unnecessarily long descriptions and pointless metaphors, and pretentious, with references to luminaries like Shakespeare and Sophocles and symbolism Kelley explicitly explains to you, and none of this succeeds in having any emotional impact on the reader.  The concrete science and adventure components of the Mythmaster's plot are silly and difficult to credit, and the "real" character-based plot isn't great, either.  Our protagonist is a space pirate who has lost all connection to humanity and morality because he was raised by robots and while an officer in the space navy was party to a tragedy and was court martialed for disobeying orders.  Now he flies around the universe, stealing biological material from hundreds of people to sell on the black market.  He runs afoul of an evil businessman, and chases and battles with this guy provide much of the lame action-adventure plot, a plot which lacks much by way of resolution.  The soap opera plot about how the pirate needs to learn to love is propelled by the pirate's relationships with a male prostitute (a gay man who is also a navigator and a forger and a paragon of humanist values, the exemplary character of this novel who sacrifices himself for others and gives wise advice based on his knowledge of psychology) and the male prostitute's former wife, also a prostitute.  The pirate has at times creepy and fetishistic sex with these characters and they rekindle his connection to humanity and morality.  We get plenty of weird sex material in Mythmaster, as well as uninspiring philosophical discussions and psychological discourses.           

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  Mythmaster appeared in 1974 in Britain with a serviceable but generic cover by Colin Hay.

That will be enough for some of you, but those of you who want a spoilertastic plot summary and some evidence to back up my condemnation of Mythmaster, read on!

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It is the future in which the human race has colonized many star systems across multiple galaxies.  John Shannon is a space pirate and the Mythmaster of the title.  In Chapter One his ship hovers over the megalopolis of North New England and drops "pellets" that emit a hallucinogenic mist, rendering the populace helpless.  He and some of his crew descend in boats ("pods") to seize women who are newly pregnant and surgically remove their fertilized eggs.  The authorities don't intervene because they are scared of the mist (apparently the government of this spacefaring civilization lacks gas masks, vacuum suits, etc.)  Back aboard the ship, Shannon's people implant the fertilized eggs in mice for safekeeping and head to planet Ra to sell the human embryos.  Kelley offers us this melodramatic material, but without any passion or excitement; lacking the feel of a horror story or adventure story, this episode of danger, crime and weird science comes off as a cold and boring spoof of horror/adventure fiction rather than the genuine thrill-and-chill article, a satire without bite and without humor. 

In the second of Mythmaster's sixteen chapters, Shannon's vessel docks with Seventh Heaven, a space station that is a brothel ("pleasure palace"); the docking process is described in boring detail, and in case we missed it Kelley comes right out and tells us the docking symbolizes the sex act.  We also get some background on Shannon and his career, including descriptions of his current ship and his previous ship, which was wrecked by a meteor, perhaps because the navigator on that trip was a man Shannon kidnapped and pressed into service and then beat up.  I'll quote from that passage in order to provide an example of the overwriting and the burdensome metaphors I mentioned before; these lines also serve as an example of the less than credible behavior of people in this novel:

For days afterward, the man had raved and stormed about the ship, threatening to foul the navigation system with sugar crystals.  Shannon fought him finally, fist to fist, and afterward the man performed his duties in a silence that was a cool pool of hatred.

Kelley also talks quite a bit about Shannon's looks and attire, and his relationship with one of his officers, Starson--these guys seem to have a relationship with homoerotic undertones, with Starson, for example, giving Shannon very detailed and specific fashion advice.  The gay material in Mythmaster sort of creeps up on you, starting as mere hints and growing to eventually become a main theme of the narrative, reaching its peak in Chapter Ten when it turns out being date raped by a gay man is the key to learning how to love.  

Chapter Three is a series of erotic vignettes in the space brothel.  One of the few clever bits of the novel has Shannon perusing a sort of menu of the pleasures on offer on a series of screens and finding a video of himself having sex with a beautiful woman--this is what the media might call "a deep fake;"  Shannon was photographed and by way of advertisement a computer has generated this film of him sporting with the pleasure palace's top whore, Reba Charlo.  Reba, it turns out, knows all about Shannon and Starson, and makes explicit to Shannon that Starson, who is currently visiting the homosexual level of the brother, is in love with him.

The space navy raids the space brothel after our hero has banged Reba (a nasty sort of sex scene in which each participant tries to humiliate the other), so Shannon, Starson and the rest of the pirates have to fight their way back to the ship in Chapter Four.  The servicemen have laser pistols, but Shannon, Starson (who we now learn has an emerald decoratively imbedded in one of his front teeth) outfight them with their fists and pellets of the hallucinogen.  We readers have to put up with long descriptions of the navy mens' and prostitutes' allegedly amusing delusional behavior.  (I say "allegedly amusing" but fear that Kelley meant these manifestations of the inner minds of government flunkies and whores not merely as jokes but as valuable meditations on the human condition.)  Starson reveals that he and Reba were once married and we readers realize we have a love triangle on our hands.

In Chapter Five we learn that members of Shannon's crew are drug addicts and he is their supplier and one of his management strategies is to deny drugs to crewmen who make mistakes.  A subplot in which a guy goes through withdrawal symptoms and then commits suicide results.  Another of Shannon's management strategies--spying on his crew via surveillance cameras and microphones.  Spying on Starson, he hears the man sing a song about Shannon, and watches him scrawl "S S" in blood on a pane of glass.  In case we don't get it, Kelley tells us the two "S"s stand for "Shannon" and "Starson."  (At times Mythmaster comes across as a gay romance novel.)  We also learn how Shannon became the Mythmaster--he purchased the secret formula for the hallucinogen he puts in his pellets from an alcoholic pedophile chemist, paying the mad scientist in booze and girls under the age of fifteen.  And about Shannon's youth in a communal nursery, where he suckled at the plastic breast of a robot mother-surrogate.

Chapter Six is on inhospitable ice planet Ra, where Shannon and company deliver the 1000 fertilized human eggs to the illegal human settlement there.  (A thousand?  Shannon's band of pirates, which we later learn numbers less than 25, did surgery in makeshift conditions on a thousand women during that New England raid?  Or was that raid just the final of many?)  There is also more foreshadowing about Oxon Kaedler, whom Reba mentioned.  Chapter Seven gives us more backstory on Starson, who has training as an astrogator but was working as a male prostitute on Seventh Heaven when Shannon met him.  In Seven we also return to Seventh Heaven, where Shannon has a sexual experience with tiny alien monsters.  You see, these little polyps have suckers, and you join them in a pool after covering yourself with an oil which, to the polyps, is an aphrodisiac, and they suck at you like crazy.  Kelley makes sure to tell us with great specificity that Shannon has a lot of this oil on his crotch and his ass.  A male attendant is at the pool and observes Shannon's space monster-induced erection and ejaculation and suggests the pirate captain visit the level of the brothel where he can have sex with a telekinetic alien feline.

In the same way that the atrocious criminal raid in the first chapter has elements of an adventure or horror story but Kelley's cold flat style and uninteresting characters defuse any possible thrills, this bestiality business could be titillating or disgusting, but just comes off as silly.

Chapter Eight furthers the love triangle plot as Shannon (forgoing the chance to play with the psychic cat monster) pays for another session with Reba and she says she still loves Starson.  We get some pretentious psychology-of-relationship talk ("Seventh Heaven is a state of mind," for example, and "You come...to lose yourself, not to find someone....I was about to reach out to you and you made yourself unreachable") and a rough sex scene in which Reba tells Shannon she hates him while he is having intercourse with her.  Then they talk about Shannon's abortive career in the space navy--he was dishonorably discharged after disobeying orders in an unsuccessful attempt to preserve the lives of some criminals by steering his ship around the convicts' orbiting cells and into a meteor storm (the criminals and his ship ended up suffering.)  Shannon works into the conversation his belief that wars are started by bankers and arms manufacturers in their pursuit of profit.  (What with its avant-garde sex and leftist politics, maybe we'll see Mythmaster on New York City public school curricula soon.) 

In Chapter Nine, Oxon Kaedler floats on stage, and we find, as we so often find in genre fiction, that in Mythmaster the villain is more interesting than the protagonists.  (Unfortunately, Oxon has very little screen time in this book and there is no climactic showdown between Oxon and Shannon--did Kelley write this book as he went along?)  Oxon is a corrupt businessman who was burned almost to death in a fire at his mansion on Venus; it is likely the blaze was no accident but a murder attempt, a sort of parallel to the meteor events in Shannon's life.  (If Kelley had put some more effort into this novel, the way Oxon and Shannon represent similar phenomena could have been interesting.)  Oxon is a blackened husk of a man, almost unable to move due to his burns, and absolutely unable to talk.  Oxon's nude skeletal form hovers on a column of air projected upwards by a motorized machine, and he is accompanied by a squad of telepathic dwarves--one of these dwarves reads Oxon's mind and acts as the businessman's mouthpiece, speaking Oxon's dialogue.

Through the alien psyker, Oxon explains that he is immune from prosecution because he is legally dead.  You see, he had a clone and the clone died in the fire, and because the clone had the same genetic identity as Oxon, Oxon was declared dead.  So now nobody can sue him and the government can't prosecute him.  This book is pretty ridiculous; maybe Kelley is joking, but it does not feel the least but funny. 

Oxon tells Shannon that he wants to be Shannon's partner in the business of stealing and selling fertilized eggs, and offers a stack of cash to join the Mythmaster operation.  Also, he wants to buy a cell from Shannon's body in order to grow a clone of Shannon's body into which to implant his brain.  Shannon is not particularly healthy or good-looking, so I thought this came out of left field, except as a way of saying Shannon and Oxon are one and the same, both monsters of capitalism or essentially dead because they cannot love or whatever.  As for Reba, Oxon explains that, while he can't have sex with his current body, it being too painful to touch anybody or anything, he would like to watch her have sex with her clients, and cherishes hopes that in time she could learn to manipulate the air jets that are holding him up to provide him sexual pleasure.  (Have I mentioned this book is pretty ridiculous?  This guy's vocal cords are burned so badly he can't talk, but his genitals would still be stimulated by having air blown on them?)

Shannon and Reba emphatically reject these business proposals, and Oxon orders his alien dwarves to attack with them their talons.  Shannon and Reba escape through a secret passage, while over the PA system (he has bought Seventh Heaven and is now in charge of the space whorehouse) Oxon pledges to pursue them across the universe.

Chapter Ten covers the trip back to Earth and we get material about Shannon's feelings about Reba and witness Starson and Reba flirting.  The three go to Underdenver, the subterranean half of Denver to which criminals are limited.  (The government can't prevent Shannon from performing nonconsensual operations on a thousand women but they can confine all other criminals to an underground city.)  Our three space adventurers reject the solicitations of prostitutes of all ages and disperse beggars with an electric stun weapon and proceed to a store where an effeminate salesman outfits Reba with some clothes.  In Chapter Eleven we get a description of her new attire, glowing alien worms or something.  Our three principals go out to dinner (python is on the menu) and dancing and engage in verbal jousting regarding their love triangle--Reba urges Shannon to have sex with Starson, telling him it won't hurt.  (Don't believe her, Shannon!)  Reba and Starson conspire to drug Shannon with his own hallucinogen and there follows a psychedelic homosexual sex scene ("...there was only the stormy harbor of his thighs in which the ship that was Starson had chosen to anchor.")  Starson suggests in a soliloquy that he has opened up a door to a new world for Shannon.

In Chapter Twelve the landlord of the establishment where Shannon was date raped complains about the stains S and S left on the sheets.  Kelley defuses any of the tension that the gay sex scene might have generated by telling us, after the fact, that Shannon, who can't remember what happened in bed with Starson, doesn't find gay sex problematic and that homosexual relationships are normal--even encouraged--in the space navy of which he is a veteran.  What Shannon is angry about is that he can't remember what happened--Starson has robbed him of his memories.  Or so he says to himself.  Reba accuses Shannon of fearing he is falling in love with Starson.  The pirate captain forces himself on Reba, and this time while he is banging her she expresses not hatred by pity--I'm not gay or into having sex with monsters or children, so I found this sex scene the most conventionally effective in the book.  

The malign influence of evil businessman Oxon is felt when Reba, at a government office, finds she has lost her legal status and must stay in the undercity (or aboard Shannon's ship) unless she agrees to Oxon's demands.  So she is aboard when Shannon, Starson and crew raid an Upperdenver hotel that caters to obese sybarites.  The pirates steal cells from the fat voluptuaries; Shannon has signed a contract with a colony of cannibal humans who will use the cell samples to grow clones to eat.  When Reba finds out, she objects that this is murder, and in Chapter Thirteen Shannon's crew, "nearly a week out from Earth and almost a day into Garth's Galaxy," discovers she has destroyed the cells.  Shannon confronts Reba and Starson joins the verbal jousting, and we readers must endure a lot of relationship dialogue, soap opera pop psychology stuff, Reba and Starson saying they love Shannon and are trying to revive his lost humanity and get him out of the prison in which he has locked himself to keep out the world and Shannon saying he will leave Reba with the cannibals and Starson saying he'll join Reba at the cannibal colony, etc.  Shannon talks about how a captain's word is law aboard ship, maybe a reference to Heinlein?

Oxon's ship catches up and locks Shannon's inside a "fieldfix" and Oxon repeats his demands over the radio.  Oxon's vessel has three times as many weapons ("nuclearods") as Shannon's so Shannon will lose a straight fight, so he comes up with a ruse and manages to escape, his ship crippled, to an unexplored world.  The naval battle scene is poorly handled by Kelley (the science and technology stuff in Mythmaster doesn't make any sense, which would be forgivable if, like the science and technology in the first two Star Wars movies, the laser swords and psychic powers and emotional robots and dogfighting in space and all that, it made no sense but was fun) and Oxon's arrival renders all the talk of giving Reba's cells or Reba entire to the cannibals moot.  Kelley's book is full of passages which don't advance the plot or themes and which are not entertaining or interesting either.

Only five people survive the crash landing, the members of the love triangle and two others.  In Chapter Fourteen Kelley indulges in the traditional SF exercise of describing an alien planet's topography and ecology, and he kind of botches it, telling us when the cast walks away from the ship that because the gravity is low they are flying off in all directions at high speed and then a few pages later when they are returning to the ship that they have trouble walking because the ground is wet and sucking at their feet.  Shannon and Reba admit their love to each other and have nice sex instead of hate sex or pity sex or roofied sex ("They lay down together on the lower deck, unable to see each other, able only to touch and taste the rich messages that their subsequent union proclaimed.")  Then monsters attack and eat the crewman whose name we just learned in this chapter, and Starson gets to demonstrate yet again that he is more admirable than every other character in the book.

In Chapter 15 the four survivors march around, looking for a place that is safe from the monsters.  Finding himself alone with Shannon, Starson gives Shannon advice on how to be a good boyfriend to Reba, offering his psychoanalysis of her ("She ran from life by running into the arms of men, and getting paid for the running, and believing all the while that no one could ever touch her again") and then of Shannon and himself.  Oxon's ship appears above and drops pellets of the hallucinogen, which Oxon has figured out how to produce.  We get a tedious surreal sequence in which Shannon confronts what on a TV documentary would be called "his demons."  Being delusional leaves our four survivors vulnerable to the monsters, but luckily Starson, who we just learned this chapter has a habit of absentmindedly stuffing miscellaneous things into his pockets, has two doses of antidote in his pocket.  Of course he gives them to Reba and Shannon, sacrificing himself.  

In Chapter 16, Oxon's ship flies away instead of capturing or finishing off Reba and Shannon, even though Oxon crossed from one galaxy to another in order to seize their bodies for his own twisted ambitions or at least achieve vengeance on them.  Witnessing the horrific death of Starson, the husband who left her because he decided or realized or whatever he was gay, has driven Reba insane, so that she now lives in a happy fantasy world.  She renames herself "Star" and Shannon "King" and Kelley offers us a happy ending--Shannon, I mean King, has learned to love and he and Reba, I mean Star, will share love in this isolated planet whose monsters the former space pirate will no doubt figure out how to neutralize.

Mythmaster is shoddy and poor in every possible way, though its sexual content does embody one of the defining characteristics of SF, the presentation of transgressive ideas.  The novel may be of interest to students of depictions of homosexuality in speculative fiction, particularly of glowingly positive portrayals of gay men, and of SF that depicts alternative sexual practices in general, what with the (condemnatory) mentions of sex with children and the (sympathetic) depictions of prostitution and bestiality.

The Rule of the Pagbeasts (AKA The Fittest) by J T McIntosh

I am not exactly a fan of J. T. McIntosh, having denounced several of his productions here at this blog.  But when I saw Crest Book's 1956 paperback edition of 1955's The Fittest, retitled The Rule of the Pagbeasts, going for $1.25 at an antiques mall, I could not resist its fascinating cover with its wild female figure and its over-the-top come-on text ("impossible to put the book down"; "THE MOST STARTLING STORY YOU EVER READ.")  Alright, we'll give it a shot.

You'll notice there is no animal on the cover of the copy of this book I purchased, just a woman with long blonde hair, a narrow waist, an impressive torso and powerful limbs.  Pity about that skull-like physiognomy, which is mesmerizing in its own way.)  I thought blondie here with the deep set eyes was a pagbeast, some kind of android or alien or something.  But looking at other editions of the novel online I see they have images of dogs and mice on them and make it clear The Rule of the Pagbeasts is a story about quadrupeds challenging human rule of the Earth!  I would not have bought any of those editions; I am not interested in stories about canines and vermin taking over the Earth--I am interested in stories about hot chicks taking over the Earth!  But following the sunk cost fallacy, having bought the book and scanned the cover and looked up publication dates and so forth, we are going forward with reading it.

The Rule of the Pagbeasts comes to us in 24 chapters.  Chapter 1 is an exercise in misogyny and exploitative horror and also reminded me of hard-boiled detective fiction.  The narrator indicates that he found his wife dead and then, sadistically and/or masochistically, theorized about her last moments, the physical and psychological agony she suffered, and then he shares his detailed imaginings with us readers!

Gloria was an American-born beauty with a perfect body and great fashion sense, but she lacked "guts" and the healthy human instinct to desire children.  Left alone in a French farm house, she was attacked by an intelligent dog, intelligent mice and an intelligent cat, and her husband and McIntosh describe her frenzied fear and her physical wounds as the animals toyed with her and eventually drove her to jump out a window to her death.  (I've noticed exploitative violence, particularly against women, in McIntosh's work before.)  This chapter might be seen as kind of gross, but it is actually pretty well-written and effective in achieving its apparent goals--if you want to read about a vapid beautiful woman being tortured and killed, well, here is a good example of the genre.

Chapter 1 introduces us to, and succeeding chapters dole out in dribs and drabs the details about, the setting of the novel--a midcentury world sinking into postapocalypticism because an American scientist, Paget, increased the intelligence of dogs, cats, rats and mice to about the human level and these uplifted quadrupeds aren't using their smarts to listen to Tchaikovsky and read T. S. Eliot but to wage war and inflict torture on the human race:

They're animals whose brains have been forced a few million years further along the evolutionary highway....But they're animals, with animal motivations, savagery, tradition, and temperament.  As such they're automatically enemies of any other creatures which threaten their own survival, particularly men.

Our narrator identifies himself, and here we have the sole joke McIntosh offers in this blood-and-guts serious novel, as Don Page-Turner, and he tells us he is unsentimental, and then demonstrates his lack of sentimentality. Don leaves Gloria's body behind, unburied, and walks to the nearest village.  The village police arrest him on suspicion of murdering his wife, but a competent Englishwoman who needs his help gets him out of jail and steals one of the few cars still running (the rats and mice have been sabotaging automobiles and locomotives the world over as part of their war against us bipeds.)  This Englishwoman is an expert at jailbreaks and car theft but she can't drive--that is why she needs Page-Turner to help her get back to Albion.

All through the book, Page-Turner compares women to the dead Gloria, for example, stressing how his sister Mil and this new woman, Ginette, have guts and can get things done, unlike Gloria, who was a one in a million beauty but couldn't look after herself.  Though she is dead on the first page of this 185 or so page novel, she is actually one of the book's main characters.   And Exhibit A in the prosecution of the novel's central theme that certain people are the fittest to survive and certain people, should the shit hit the fan, are ngmi.     

Ginette is one prickly individual, very independent-minded and sarcastic, a woman who keeps saying she doesn't want to stay with Page-Turner and wants instead to be dropped off here or there.  This hard-to-get routine inspires in Page-Turner a desire to control her.  On the ferry to the green and pleasant land she vomits, either because of sea sickness or because of expository dialogue about the development of the pagbeasts, including the narrator's description of them swarming over a human victim.  Upon arriving in England, Ginette leaves Page-Turner and the car she stole and he immediately starts searching for her, fantasizing about using physical force to make her stay with him.  He soon finds her; she has been injured in a fight with a pagdog, giving our hero a chance to take off her bra and apply iodine to her wounds.  This book is full of women suffering indignities.

A tall man, Dave, formerly an editor at a newspaper, joins Don and Ginette as the third wheel of the crew of the stolen French car.  Our three heroes stay the night with a friend of Dave's in London; they find Londontown almost without electricity as well as automobiles.  The gas lines are also being cut by the pagmice and pagrats.  Page-Turner flirts with Ginette and when she comments that he doesn't seem to miss his wife, who died like two days ago, Page-Turner slaps her so hard it sounds like a "whipcrack" and makes the sarcastic bitch stagger.

Ginette again leaves behind the car and the two men, this time in the environs of Cambridge, despite Page-Turner's efforts to convince her to stay, which include grabbing her and kissing her.  McIntosh again and again reminds you of how the narrator can just manhandle Ginette if he chooses to.  Maybe this is a reminder that in society the law, customs, and norms, keep the strong from dominating the weak, and in a postapocalyptic situation those laws and norms go right out the window and the strong do what they will while the weak suffer what they must.  

Alone with him now, Dave says he thinks the narrator's real name is Paget and that he is connected to the Paget who created the monsters who are destroying society.  Our narrator tells his story.  He is the son of the scientist who created the pagbeasts and hails from Chicago, scion of a wealthy family.  Dad died coincidentally in a car wreck before the monsters he had created escaped and began their war on humanity.  When the scope of the pagbeast menace became apparent, mobs of disgruntled citizens came after Dan the narrator and his brother Stan and his sister Carol.  (Sister Mil was in England with her English husband, who is now dead.)  Carol was gangraped, but survived, but some weeks later Don witnessed Stanley shot dead by a mob which murdered Carol in a gruesome fashion that perhaps symbolizes the Pagets' elite status and their distinction from the common masses.  The police helped Don and Gloria sneak away to France, where the pagbeasts hadn't spread in volume yet, though soon enough the monsters had.

Halfway through the novel Don and Dave arrive at Mil's country estate.  Mil is a no-nonsense capable sort, and she has a sort of fortified manor house and a band of comrades who are able to defend themselves from the pagbeasts and in the short term from a local human menace, a multi-ethnic band of gypsies and circus performers, thieves and expert knife throwers.  This element of the story comes across as pretty racist, at least by today's standards.  Mil's crew is less than a dozen people, four attractive middle-class women and a bunch of dimwitted, unattractive, proletarian men, so the fifty gypsies could overwhelm Mil's estate if they were willing to suffer heavy losses.  (Mil's group has conventional low-intelligence dogs who help keep out the pagbeasts.)

A substantial part of the second half of the novel consists of Dan and Dave, who kind of take over management of Mil's operations, trying to recruit additional young and middle-aged people to join Mil's settlement, expanding the estate's agricultural output, and then dealing with the gypsies.  We get plenty of psychology-of-leadership material as Don decides who to recruit and how to manage them.  But we also get a large helping of sexual politics psychology as Don and Dave interact with the women of the settlement, deciding who to take as a wife and then convincing them to succumb.  Of course Ginette reappears and becomes Don's wife, but there is another woman, Eva, who is in love with Don and this causes complications--in true male wish-fulfillment fashion, Don decides Eva is the girl for him because Ginette is so difficult, and Don and Eva have sex right before the big battle with the gypsies, and then during the battle Eva's morale fails and she panics and gets herself captured by the enemy, tortured and murdered, so Don ends up with suitable wife Ginette after having sexually conquered and enjoyed the unsuitable Eva.  (All you pervs will be glad to hear that Don has his hands all over Eva's "beautiful supple body" in her last moments as he struggles to revive her via artificial respiration.)

Women cause all manner of trouble in this novel, as well as suffering the blackest fates imaginable.--one of the bourgeois women in Mil's group wants to try diplomacy with the gypsies even though Don and Mil have intelligence indicating the gypsies are planning an attack; this peacenik runs off by herself to try to treat with the gypsies but is attacked and eaten alive--reduced to a skeleton!--by a horde of rodents before she reaches the gypsy position.  And during the battle Don grapples with a "slim, lithe, young" gypsy girl before slaying her with his clasp knife.

Once the gypsies are wiped out, the community started by Mil grows and we learn that other such communities around England are similarly growing as men and women become expert at defeating the pagbeasts.  Human civilization will endure!  The last line of the novel even suggests the pagbeast catastrophe was good because it cut in half the human population, which was too large (we saw this attitude in McIntosh's The Million Cities many years ago.)

The plot and structure of The Fittest AKA The Rule of the Pagbeasts have the appeal of the zombie apocalypse fiction that is so popular nowadays, the inhuman menace that has people banding together to rebuild society while squabbling amongst themselves and the disgusting violence and gore.  McIntosh throws in a pile of other stuff: all the sex and gender business, of which there is plenty, plus some class and race/ethnicity material; we might also consider national culture material--is McIntosh, by setting the story in France and England but having the mad scientist and monsters originate in the USA, trying to say something about those three nations and their people?  A final thing we might consider is the novel's attitude about government--the American and British taxpayers in the 1950s were shelling out plenty of moolah for military and intelligence establishments to deal with the threat posed by international communism, and just ten years before had successfully engaged in a titanic struggle with Germany, Italy and Japan, so the US and UK governments had vast amounts of trained and experienced manpower and equipment at their disposal tailor-made for providing people protection and emergency medical care, but McIntosh never portrays those governments doing anything to kill pagbeasts or maintain order or provide succor to the people.         

The most remarkable thing about The Fittest AKA The Rule of the Pagbeasts is that the writing style and all the other elements--structure, pacing, characters, themes, images--are acceptably done or well done; so much of McIntosh's work which I have read is so bad that I was surprised that this thing was competently executed and before I opened it I had no expectation of telling you I can mildly recommend it.  But I am telling you just that.

Another SF novel I bought for its cover the next time I can tear myself away from the quest for money and from family obligations and produce a post of the quixotic enterprise we call MPorcius Fiction Log.

Strange Ports of Call: N S Bond, P S Miller, R A Heinlein and R Bradbury

We recently read stories from the 1948 anthology edited by August Derleth, Strange Ports of Call, that were written by three men I associate with Weird Tales, Clark Ashton Smith, David H. Keller, and Howard Wandrei.  Strange Ports of Call is billed as a book of "20 Science Fiction Masterpieces" and today let's read from it stories by four men I believe are thought of more as science fiction writers than weird or horror writers, Nelson S. Bond, P. Schuyler Miller, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury.  I of course recognize that such distinctions are kind of bogus--one piece of evidence casting doubt on the validity of any divide between fantasy and science fiction is the fact that all four of the men we are reading today published at least one story in Weird Tales, and Bond and Bradbury published many.  We all insist on making this distinction anyway.  

"The Cunning of the Beast" by Nelson S. Bond (1942)

I've read four stories by Bond over the course of this blog's improbable life, "Magic City," "Prescience," "To People a New World," and "Pipeline to Paradise" and here comes number five, even though of those four I only really liked one.  

"To People a New World" debuted in an issue of the magazine Blue Book, and was a story of the founding of our civilization which offered a science fictional explanation for the stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel which we find in the Bible.  Holy crap, "The Cunning of the Beast" is also a story that debuted in Blue Book and provides a SF explanation for the Biblical story of Adam and Eve.  What the....

On planet Kios lives a high tech race of people who are like electrified gas or pure energy, fragile forms that die if exposed to water.  (I think Bond hopes to remind us of the pillar of fire that is a manifestation of God in the Bible.)  Kios has rainy weather that can kill these puny people in seconds, so they spend a lot of time in their "Domes" and when they go outside they ride around in bipedal metal machines I guess kind of like the mecha in so many manga and anime.  Our narrator is a scientist who is working on developing space ships that will, it is hoped, carry these fragile people to a more hospitable planet.

(This story already has me scratching my head--if these pathetic jokers can't even go outside naked how did they mine and refine the materials to create the Domes they need to shelter in and the mecha they need to wear when outside?  This is one of those chicken and egg problems, I guess.)

The narrator has a colleague, a scientist named Yawa.  (Oh, brother.)  Yawa has a bright idea--to develop via what we today might call genetic engineering and selective breeding a new race of people that can survive naked outside the Domes; these hardy creatures could be the servants of the weak energy people, go outside to do whatever work is necessary.  Inside his Dome, Yawa creates a beautiful garden, a paradise, and populates it with a bipedal person, a man.  The man says he is lonely, and so Yawa takes a piece out of him and creates with it a woman.  This first woman is sort of a bad influence on the man, so Yawa comes up with a second woman who manipulates the man into becoming a productive worker.  This second woman also makes it her goal to get into Yawa's locked lab and acquire the knowledge Yawa has forbidden the man and woman--in this breaking and entering she is aided by her little buddy the serpent.  With that knowledge, she builds mecha and she and the man then begin attacking the energy people, breaking open their Domes and exposing them to the deadly rain.

The energy people capture the man and woman and stick them and Yawa into the prototype space ship the narrator has just completed and blast them off to exile.  In case you didn't get it yet, on the nineteenth and final page of this story the narrator tells you the first man and second woman are named Adam and Eve.  Mind blown?      

This story is pretty well-written on a sentence by sentence basis; I like the descriptions of the planet and of Yawa's lab.  But there is no tension, no drama, no surprise or suspense, because we immediately recognize that it is a retelling of the Adam and Eve story that we are already very familiar with.  Reading the story is a big "meta" game, as we read it we wonder how Bond is going to fit in this or that Biblical element, strain to remember if Lilith is actually in the Bible, that sort of thing, we don't care about the characters or get "immersed" in the story.  Even worse, because we know what is going to happen the story feels very long and slow.  Thumbs down for "The Cunning of the Beast."

This lame gimmick story appeared in Blue Book under the title "Another World Begins" but it was reprinted as "The Cunning of the Beast" here in Strange Ports of Call and elsewhere, such as the Bond collection No Time Like the Future (which has an awesome Richard Powers cover that just might depict Eve or Lilith and one of the energy people in its metal body, with the domes and rocket in the background) and the anthology Other Worlds, Other Gods.  

Other Worlds, Other Gods reprints Damon Knight's "Shall the Dust Praise Thee?",
a short-short I read in 2014 and graded "F."

"Forgotten" by P. Schuyler Miller (1933)

Miller is closely associated with Astounding/Analog, writing the book review column for John W. Campbell, Jr.'s magazine for over 20 years.  I believe I have read three short stories by Miller, "As Never Was," "Spawn," and "Bird Walk," two of which I liked.

"Forgotten," which debuted in Wonder Stories as "The Forgotten Man of Space" (perhaps a reference to a phrase appropriated by FDR in 1932 and after that saw wide use in popular culture) and then was reprinted in Startling in 1948 as a "Hall of Fame Story" is a decent adventure story about a guy who goes native, which is nice, as we can say Miller has a 75% pass rate here at MPorcius Fiction Log and not a 50% which is what he would have if I disliked this piece.  I am always rooting for the authors here at MPorcius Fiction Log--I want to like everything.

The main character of "Forgotten" is the youngest member of a team of three Terran prospectors on Mars.  It takes them six years, but eventually they mine enough uranium to make themselves rich.  The two older prospectors are ruthless knaves, and maroon the main character in the deserts of the Red Planet, flying off without him so they can keep his share of the uranium.

The three men had subsisted on Martian water and vegetation they gathered from a cave some miles away--they ferried the water and food back to base camp in the rocket when necessary.  There is no closer food source on this dying world, so the protagonist strikes out for the cave on foot, even though it will be like a ten day march--can he survive ten days without food or drink?

Some heretofore undiscovered natives provide succor to the man when he has only made it halfway to the cave.  Not only do they feed him, they basically adopt him into their tribe.  These Martians are like intelligent rabbits, and their culture is not very sophisticated; they have agriculture but very little by way of tools and no books or art or anything like that.  Their language has few words.

The man abandoned by his own race lives among these natives for twenty years.  Finally, he is found by some Terran prospectors.  These guys are as greedy as the men who marooned him--even though he tries to explain that the Martians are people, the prospectors plan to use them as a food source as they mine a rich vein near the natives' current settlement, so the main character sabotages the prospector's ship while he is aboard, killing them and himself.        

I am mildly recommending "Forgotten."  The remarkable thing about it is not the going-native theme, which is pretty common, but Miller's style, which is verbose.  Miller includes lots of images and lots of descriptions of the main character's psychological state, describing at length stuff the main character sees, hears and feels, when he is lucid and when he is half-dead and hallucinatory from thirst; probably Miller overdoes it a little--the pace of the story is slow--but I thought these dense descriptions effective in conveying to the reader what the abandoned miner was going through.  Somewhat less compelling is the long description of the rabbit-like natives' agricultural system.     

As for the plot and characters, they are pretty good; everything that happens in "Forgotten" makes sense, all the people's actions are believable, follow naturally from their personalities and the circumstances they find themselves in.  The story works so deserves commendation if not love.

We read Edmond Hamilton's Outlaw World back in 2014

 

"The Green Hills of Earth" by Robert A. Heinlein (1947)

This is a very famous story that I think I must have read years ago, before I started this blog.  "The Green Hills of Earth" debuted in the mainstream magazine Saturday Evening Post and has appeared in quite a few anthologies, including one edited by Orson Welles and one titled My Best Science Fiction Story and is one of Heinlein's famous Future History stories collected in the massive volume The Past Through Tomorrow.

"The Green Hills of Earth" presents itself as a sort of revisionist history; a recurring theme of Heinlein's work, and of a lot of SF, is people living in ignorance and then learning some truth about the universe.  (Heinlein's generation ship story "Universe" is a canonical example.)  It is the fictional readers of this story, the people of a future in which space travel is routine, who have been fed a sanitized image of a hero of the early days of space travel, Rhysling, who get a more accurate picture of their universe and in particular of Rhysling; along the way we real life readers get a sort of history lesson about Heinlein's imagined setting of Terran expansion into the solar system, which is inhabited by various native cultures.

Rhysling is an irascible sort of character, a lovable rascal who works in engine rooms of rocket ships, a guy who takes risks for the thrill of it and doesn't necessarily take norms and customs seriously but at the same time is the backbone of society, a competent man who again and again sacrifices himself for others.  One of the tensions in Heinlein's work as a whole is how he has a strong libertarian individualist streak but at the same time is an elitist who tells you a captain's word aboard ship must be law--Heinlein is into the liberty of the individual but also into hierarchy, which can be a little baffling.  Rhysling, the rebellious man who it turns out will do anything to protect his fellow man, and has the superior skill needed to get other people out of the scrapes their incompetence has dropped them and others into, sort of embodies that tension.  The reader has to decide if Heinlein is cleverly saying something about how complicated people and societies are, how they are riven with conflicting impulses and contain multitudes, or is just having his cake and eating it to, constructing superheroes who have all the attributes we love about the self-motivated rebel and about the dutiful self-sacrificing martyr.

The plot of "The Green Hills of Earth" is the Rhysling life story.  The guy flies on rockets, gets blinded saving one space flight which is in trouble because some dolt did a bad job in the engine room, and so becomes a wandering troubadour, hitching rides hither and yon across the solar system, paying his way by singing the songs he has composed.  Rhysling isn't only a genius engineer and a self-sacrificing hero, he is a bestselling poet!  We are told that he only became famous after his death, when his safe-for-work songs were published--his naughty ditties languish in obscurity.

After a long period of being a sort of traveling minstrel Rhysling is in the engine room of a ship when its motor malfunctions; he fixes the machine, saving everybody else, but dies from the radiation released by the accident.

"The Green Hills of Earth" is well-written and well-paced, an enjoyable read; both the life story of Rhysling and the glimpses of Heinlein's future history components are compelling, and the latter element leaves you wanting to read more of the Future History stories.  The story is vulnerable to the superhero and have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too criticisms I have already voiced, and maybe some people won't be crazy about how the story is full of Rhysling's poetry.  Personally, I think the poetry actually works as a way of indirectly telling you about the future milieu Heinlein has created--one of the strengths of this story is that readers learn about its future world from the inside, from its inhabitants, as if they themselves are among its inhabitants, not from a remove.

So, thumbs up for this famous story by the Dean of Science Fiction--I'm not playing iconoclast today, I guess. 

I've read a bunch of stories that appear in My Best Science Fiction Story, including
Henry Kuttner's "Don't Look Now," 
Edmond Hamilton's "The Inn Outside the World"
John W. Campbell, Jr.'s "Blindness"
Robert Bloch's "Almost Human"
A. E. van Vogt's "Project Spaceship"
Clark Ashton Smith's "The Uncharted Isle"
Sam Merwin, Jr.'s "The Carriers"
Frank Belknap Long's "The House of Rising Winds"
Fredric Brown's "Nothing Sirius"
Murray Leinster's "The Lost Race" 
and Theodore Sturgeon's "Thunder and Roses"

"The Million Year Picnic" by Ray Bradbury (1946)

Here's another story I think I must have read ages ago, one of the stories that was reprinted in The Martian Chronicles as well as other Bradbury collections and numerous anthologies.  The central gimmick of the story, that a human colonist on Mars tells his kids he is going to show them Martians and then, in the end of the story, points at their reflection in the water and everyone realizes they are the Martians, was sharp in my mind when I started the story, but I had forgotten the more grim, sad, even cynical elements.

The father of the family is a politician and has used his influence to secure for his family the opportunity to be among the first families permitted to colonize Mars.  He did so because he predicted what happens over the course of the story--a cataclysmic war erupts on Earth which, it seems, kills everyone there, and spreads to kill people here on Mars, though our protagonists escape.  The family travels by boat down a canal, past one dead Martian city after another, another grim note.

At the same time we get these depressing and apocalyptic story elements, the father and Bradbury seem confident that the human race is going to rebuild itself on Mars.  While Bradbury suggests that the destruction of Earth is a result of science getting of hand, outgrowing mankind's ability to control it, he also points out how science in the form of terraforming has made Mars habitable by humans.  As in the end of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury suggests that the human race's bellicosity and instinct for tyranny may cause a catastrophe, but that some wise and hardy segment of humanity will survive and continue the race, maybe even build a better civilization than that which preceded it.

A good story, though vulnerable to the charge that it is sappy and sentimental, a criticism that can be leveled at many Bradbury stories.

**********

The stories I read in June from Strange Ports of Call by men I think of as weirdies, Clark Ashton Smith, David H. Keller, and Howard Wandrei, are essentially horror stories in which men try to figure out the universe, to master it, and get defeated.  Today's stories from the same anthology, by people I think of as science fiction writers, Bond, Miller, Heinlein and Bradbury, have their share of trespass, tragedy and trouble, but are essentially about man's progress, his spreading out throughout the universe as a conqueror.  Miller and Heinlein present men who engage in self-sacrifice for their fellows, Bond focuses on (alien, it is true) scientists who produce universe-altering inventions, and while Bradbury's tale has apocalyptic images and content, it portrays the birth of a new human civilization as well as the extinction of one human civilization and the ruins of an alien civilization, and shows how science can foster life as well as destroy it.  The science fiction guys don't shy away from human evil and the tragic cost of progress, but are pretty confident people can master the universe, learn its secrets and bend it to their will, unlike the weirdies, who depict people totally overwhelmed by the complexity of the natural world.  This of course reminds us of the definition of science fiction that John W. Campbell, Jr. presented to Barry Malzberg, as reported in Malzberg's 1982 essay on Campbell*: a literature of "heroes," "a problem-solving medium" that deals with "success or the road to success" and argues that "man is a curious animal who wants to know how things work and given enough time can find out." 

*"John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971," written in 1980, published in The Engines of the Night

We may read some more stories that appear in Strange Ports of Call in the future--I'm sure we'll read Fritz Leiber's "Mr. Bauer and the Atoms," but probably when we extend our Weird Tales project to 1946 (currently we are toiling in 1941.)  And until that time I'm sure we'll conduct many other explorations into the adjacent and overlapping realms of weird fantasy and science fiction here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Howard Wandrei: "The 15th Pocket," "For No Ransom," and "Don't Do It, Mister!"

Just days ago we read four gruesome and titillating crime stories by Howard Wandrei that featured science fiction or sorcerous elements.  Those stories debuted in the 1930s in the magazine Spicy Mystery, and we read them in the 1990s Wandrei collection Time Burial.  H. Wandrei produced a long list of stories for crime magazines and yesterday I scoured the internet archive for scans of old magazines offering stories published under the H. Wandrei pseudonym Robert Garron, and now let's check out three of the short ones.

"The 15th Pocket" (1936)    

"The 15th Pocket" debuted in Spicy Detective, and would be reprinted in a 1938 issue of Private Detective as "Death's Passenger" under a different penname, and then (again as "Death's Passenger") in 2 Book Mystery Magazine in 1946.

Lord's is a manufacturer and seller of high-end lingerie, and business is good--Lord's 50-something Vice-President Bannon is rich.  Was rich--he turns up dead in an abandoned cab, shot full of holes and covered in bruises from a ferocious fight.  He wasn't robbed--his pockets are full of expensive watches and money--or was he?  One pocket is empty!  The cops figure the key to the mystery is what was in that pocket.

Police Lieutenant Hanrahan investigates.  The driver of the cab is cleared--somebody beat him up and stole his cab.  Hanrahan heads to the Bannon mansion looking for Mrs. Bannon; on the way somebody shoots at him, but misses.  At the mansion, Hanrahan finds the missus isn't home and badgers the sexy maid into admitting Bannon was having an affair with his secretary and Mrs. Bannon was having an affair with some young rich idler and that she (the maid) was plotting to blackmail them both.  The maid tries to seduce Hanrahan but he brushes her aside.

Hanrahan pays a visit to the home of Mrs. Bannon's lover and finds the two of them there; he decides they are too drunk to have been involved in the murder.  So he proceeds to the residence of Bannon's secretary, a third floor apartment.  Hanrahan becomes certain she and an accomplice are behind her boss's untimely death, and searches her apartment while she tries to distract him with her body.  The accomplice tries to sneak up on Hanrahan but Hanrahan's partner shows up just in time to gun the murderer down.  Then Hanrahan finds the item the murderer took from that empty pocket--a pair of banknotes worth ten thousand bucks each, Bannon's bonus from the owner of Lord's, which the secretary must have known he had received and coveted for herself.

I don't really get this story's central gimmicks.  Is it so remarkable that a guy who has fifteen pockets has one empty pocket?  In the summer I have like four pockets and half of them are empty.  And then there is the elaborate way the banknotes were hidden by the secretary and the murderer--they folded them up to the size of postage stamps and put them inside an empty watch case and sealed it with candle wax and tied a fishing line to it and threw the watch into a pond in the courtyard of the secretary's apartment complex but left one end of the fishing line in her apartment so they could pull the treasure up through her window.  Wouldn't the super or the gardener blunder into the fishing line?  Couldn't someone on the first or second floors see the line hanging in front of his window?

The interesting thing about this bland story is perhaps its misogyny.  "Murders are like women; they’re all the same’’ says one cop, and all the women in the story are monsters:

There were three women in this case, and none of them reacted to Bannon’s murder with any grief. The maid was disappointed because the neat fabric of her blackmail scheme was blown sky-high. Mrs. Bannon responded with hysterical gratification. And this Haworth dame [the secretary] was strictly indifferent. Damn their scheming, selfish, hard little hearts!

This story is obviously not good, but, with its fast pace and a car crash, a shooting, somebody getting punched or slapped or showing off her legs every page or so, it is not boring or annoying, so I guess we'll call it barely acceptable.

"For No Ransom" (1940)

"For No Ransom" is the cover story of the issue of Spicy Detective in which is appears.  I'm not finding any evidence it was ever reprinted.  

Edith is a junior executive at a Manhattan department store who aspires to work in the fashion industry.  And a gorgeous babe!  (One of the characters considers her "yum-yum.")  Edith is more or less engaged to her boyfriend Phil, a sculptor who works in wood who was born into a wealthy family.  Their wedding is on hold because they disagree about her work--he wants her to quit and be a housewife and she wants to keep working.  

Otto the retired surgeon has seen the yum-yum Edith walking about town and hired an unscrupulous private investigator to uncover where she lives and works and so forth.  When he has a thick enough dossier on Edith, Otto moves into an apartment in the same building as Edith's and contrives a way to get into her apartment and then to get her into his--his methods reminded me of the way children are warned not to help strangers who say they have lost a puppy or whatever and came off as a little unbelievable.  Otto chloroforms Edith and then injects her with some kind of tranquilizer and drives off with her unconscious form in the passenger seat after instructing the PI to stay in the Big Apple to keep his private eye on Phil.  

It's a 1200 mile drive west to Orto's destination, and he enlivens the trip by playing with the inert Edith with one hand while driving with the other.  Cripes!  When she wakes up in a hospital bed, Otto tells Edith she has been in shock.  Phil dumped her, he explains, which triggered a catatonic event!  After recovering in the hospital she married Otto, one of her doctors.  But then she had a relapse and when she awoke she had forgotten all about her marriage to Otto.  Weeks go by, and Edith starts to believe Otto's crazy story.  Back in New York, Phil and the police try to find Edith, but get nowhere.

Three months after Edith's disappearance, a sad Phil is listening to a live radio broadcast of a famous orchestra performing at a club in the Midwest.  Somehow, the mic picks up chatter in the audience and Phil recognizes Edith's voice!  (This story is pretty ridiculous.)  Phil flies to the town with the club.  The PI follows him, but Phil is big and strong from carving iron-hard wood and has noticed this jerk following him and gets the jump on him and beats him up.  Then he does a little detective work, figuring out what is going on, finally confronts Otto and beats him up and reunites with Edith.

This story is rather half baked.  The individual plot elements are not only silly but often clunky (for example, minor characters who don't contribute much to the drama) and the way they are put together poor (there isn't a sense of mounting tension or much of a climax, for example.)  Edith, Phil and Otto have personalities that have little or no effect on the plot, or lack personality altogether so you don't care what happens to them.  In a good story of this sort the author would convey the overpowering lust of Otto, the paralyzing fear and then deadening despair and finally mind-numbing resignation of Edith, and the maddening frustration and then tremendous relief of Phil, but Wandrei doesn't do any of that here.

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

"Don't Do It, Mister!" (1943)

 

This story does all the things I just told you "For No Ransom" didn't do but should have.  The characters have personality, exhibit emotions you can identify with, and the tension in the story grows as the story proceeds.  Thumbs up for "Don't Do It, Mister!"

Lewis likes beautiful things.  He likes stamps, and collects them.  He has a book of them, all the rare and lovely stamps he spends most of his income on--he hasn't bought a new suit or new shoes in two years--carefully arranged.

Or he had such a collection.  Lewis is married to a gorgeous brunette with a terrific body, Eleanor.  He thought he'd like to have such a beautiful creature around, but he didn't want a woman who would interfere with him, bother him, so he didn't just marry Eleanor for her looks--he married her because she was an ignorant dimwit.  

This decision today has bit Lewis in the ass.  While he was in his Manhattan office, Eleanor, back home in Brooklyn, decided she would go on a shopping spree, get an expensive dress.  I guess in the 1940s you could at some stores use uncancelled postage stamps like cash, just buy things with them as if they were money worth the value printed on them.  (What with the banknotes in "The 15th Pocket" Wandrei is giving me an education in Depression and World War II-era microeconomics.)  So Eleanor took a bunch of stamps out of Lewis's book, like 70 or whatever dollars worth face value, but worth thousands and thousands of dollars to a collector, to buy her dress.  Eleanor is not only a pea-brained ignoramus who has no idea the old stamps are worth more than the value printed on them and thinks Lewis can just get more at the post office any time, but also a resentful and bull-headed harpy who thinks his spending time every day looking at the book of stamps and using tweezers to add new stamps to it to be embarrassing childishness (we might charge this story with misogyny like we did "For No Ransom") and they have a fierce argument.

Wandrei's description of Lewis's shock and dismay, and the dialogue between him and Eleanor about the stamps and the dress, are totally convincing and very effective.  My heart sank along with Lewis's when he realized his wonderful rare valuable stamps were gone, and my blood temperature rose when Eleanor insisted he must be lying in telling her the stamps were worth more than what was printed on them.

Wandrei also does a good job with the murder scene and Lewis' psychological response to killing someone with his own hands, killing his own wife!  And the ending, which leaves us unsure whether Lewis has got away with the crime or not, but confident the sight of his wife's dead face will haunt him forever, is not bad.

"Don't Do It, Mister!" appeared in Super-Detective and as with "For No Ransom" I find no evidence it has ever been reprinted. 

**********   

"The 15th Pocket" and "For No Ransom" are just filler that are full of flaws, but "Don't Do It, Mister!" is a powerful crime story and psychological horror story about a man who makes terrible life choices but with whom we can sort of identify.  So this exploration into disreputable pulp detective magazines has paid off, even if we didn't find the mad scientists and evil wizards we met in the Spicy Mystery batch.