My Best Science Fiction Story: F Brown, M Leinster, F B Long, & T Sturgeon

In our last thrilling episode, we read a story by Sam Merwin, Jr. that appears in Oscar J. Friend and Leo Margulies' 1949 anthology My Best Science Fiction Story.  This hardcover volume contains 25 stories by "outstanding authors," and over the course of this blog's apocalyptic life we have talked about seven of them.  Roll out the links, MPorcius helots!

Robert Bloch: "Almost Human"

John W. Campbell, Jr.: "Blindness"

Edmond Hamilton: "The Inn Outside the World"

Henry Kuttner: "Don't Look Now"

A. E. van Vogt: "Project Spaceship"

Clark Ashton Smith: "The Uncharted Isle"

Sam Merwin, Jr. "The Carriers"

Let's read four more stories from My Best Science Fiction Story, those from titan of crime fiction Fredric Brown (I fear it is a joke story, but let's soldier on regardless), reliable pro Murray Leinster, the often disappointing Frank Belknap Long, and Grand Master Theodore Sturgeon.

"Nothing Sirius" by Fredric Brown (1944)

The most recent things we have read by Fredric Brown include a short story that I interpreted as a "satire" that suggests "modern life, the era of the radio and the motor car, is driving us crazy" and that I reported "unleashes a lot of speculative economics on us," a novel I called a "page-turner" but which I lamented included lots of "Psych 101 goop" and "pop psychology," and a World War II-era detective yarn in which an Axis agent disguises a baby as a monkey.  Let's see what wild stuff Brown has in store for readers in a story he was, apparently, quite proud of--as the title indicates, the stories in My Best Science Fiction Story were selected by the authors themselves.  "Nothing Sirius" debuted in Captain Future magazine, alongside the 17th Captain Future adventure, this one penned by William Morrison, and has been reprinted in many Brown collections.  I am reading it in the scan of 1977's Best of Fredric Brown at the internet archive.

Oy, "Nothing Sirius" is a yawn-inducing humor piece full of boring and obvious jokes that as you are trudging through it feels like it will never end.  Thumbs down!

Our narrator is a middle-aged married man; he and the wife are small business people.  They fly from planet to planet, setting up a tent full of coin-operated entertainment devices at each stop and then moving on.  In the space ship with them is their sexy daughter Ellen and the pilot of their ship, Johnny.  Johnny graduated from the space academy just two years ago, and one of the foundational jokes of the story is that Johnny is serious to a fault, a rule-follower who has no social skills and won't let his hair down to drink, smoke or chew the fat with the narrator and doesn't notice that Ellen has a crush on him.

One day the Johnny unexpectedly spots a new planet, and the narrator decides they should explore it on foot.  They come upon disconcerting evidence that Earth people have already been there.  They meet an old friend who tells them this planet has been kept a secret by the film production company that is renting it.  They also meet a beautiful movie star with whom Johnny falls in love at first sight, upsetting poor Ellen.  But then the narrator realizes that everything seems wrong, and proves that all the people and buildings on the planet, including their old pal and the actress, are just illusions, making them vanish.

The natives of the planet, people almost identical to little cockroaches, admit what is going on.  Like so many of the aliens in these old stories, they can read human minds, and they have been projecting those illusions, basing them on the memories of the narrator and his companions.  The bug people assert that their civilization and human civilization are totally incompatible--humans are concerned with material things, while the insect people are concerned with thought.  This planet has no mineral wealth and the soil is not fit for agriculture, so there is no reason for humans to ever come here.  

The four humans return to the ship.  Johnny has been shaken up by the experience of falling in love with an illusion projected by a telepathic bug, and for the first time in his life gets drunk.  This triggers or presages a welcome evolution of his personality--he becomes less stiff and serious and it is not long before he and Ellen are engaged.  

Though celebrated, "Nothing Serious" is totally lame filler with no drama or excitement.  All the SF stuff and all the jokes are banal.  Sad!

"The Lost Race" by Murray Leinster (1949)

Almost ten years ago we read an Edmond Hamilton story about an insane French botanist who wanted to reduce the speed of his life down to one-percent normal, "Alien Earth."  Five years ago we read a story by Leigh Brackett about a ruthless trapper who finds an anti-grav device factory in an abandoned Martian city, "Quest of the Starhope."  Three years ago we read a Ray Bradbury story attacking American culture and suggesting women manipulate men with their tears*, "The Concrete Mixer."   All three of these stories debuted in the same issue of Sam Merwin's Thrilling Wonder Stories, and today we (virtually) open the ish up again to read a fourth story offered therein, Murray Leinster's "The Lost Race."

*Like Charles Schulz, Ray Bradbury is a wholesome American institution whose brilliant work has broad appeal but which attentive readers may find surprisingly misogynistic.   

"The Lost Race" hasn't been reprinted much (though if you read German you can catch it in a 1966 issue of Utopia, and if Croatian is more your speed an issue of Sirius from 1985 has you covered), but it was one of the dozen stories that was included in the paperback version of My Best Science Fiction Story, so I can read Leinster's intro to it in the scan of that paperback at the internet archive.  Leinster talks about why he is particularly proud of the story and spoils all the min themes, telling us "The Lost Race" deals with the issue of the value of rocket fuel on the market, and that high value might impede the development of space travel, with psychic powers, and with how spacers will have to deal with the problem of boredom.

The first page of "The Lost Race" is more like a soap opera than a space opera.  Spaceman Jimmy Briggs is engaged to Sally; to amass enough money to marry her, he has signed up on a year-long space voyage.  The crew of the vessel is made up of eight men.  One of them is Danton, who is pathologically jealous about his wife Jane, who is Sally's best friend.  Another is Ken Howell.  Howell was engaged to Jane, but then while he was away on a voyage, Danton married Jane.  According to Sally, Danton employed some underhanded methods to achieve this feat.  Both Jimmy and Ken regret signing up for a voyage with the difficult Danton.

Mankind has explored and colonized many planets, and many more have been charted but await examination.  So commercial ships like the one Jimmy, Ken and Danton are aboard are obliged to make little stops along the way to investigate planets that might be viable for colonization.  On scores of planets, human explorers have discovered the remains of a highly sophisticated star-faring civilization.  This "Lost Race" raised hundreds of magnificent cities, but all have been thoroughly destroyed, apparently deliberately, as if the entire culture, a space empire spanning hundreds of light years, had committed suicide.  Many space men have seen these ruins, and many of them, as a little hobby, theorize as to why the Lost Race destroyed itself.  Ken Howell's theory is that the members of the lost race were able to see into the future and saw something so horrible they would rather die than live through it--he suggests that if Earth's people had foreseen the horrors of the, now long past, Third World War, they also might have opted to commit suicide rather than suffer through that tragedy.

Ken and Jimmy make an unprecedented find--a Lost Race installation that miraculously escaped destruction (it seems it was sheltered by a hill from the blast that flattened the nearby city.)  Their discovery is an amphitheater with a seat at one end--when Jimmy sits there, a holographic projection fills the amphitheater--the moving image is of Sally back on Earth, thinking longingly of Jimmy!  Jimmy figures that the amphitheater is a kind of televising remote viewer, and shows the places and people you are thinking about in real time.  

All the crewmen use the amphitheater and see images of their people back home living happily--this is a relief, as under ordinary circumstances the spacers would have no news from home for a year, their ship moving much faster than light.  Danton is an exception, however--he sees Jane cheating on him!  Danton goes berserk, and there is a whole drama involving ray pistol fire, stolen fuel, and hijacked life boats as Danton pursues a scheme of stranding the ship here and escaping on his own to get revenge on Jane and her lover.  Ken Howell foils the plot by diagnosing Danton's psychology.  Howell is one canny figure; he also realizes the Lost Race's projection device is not a real-time televiewer but simply projects images of a person's thoughts and expectations--Danton only saw Jane cheating because of his own paranoia.  Even more astoundingly, Howell solves the mystery of the Lost Race after finding some bones--the Lost Race were a people who had tails and other particular features, but their use of atomic energy was mutating them so that they were going to lose their tails and other characteristics--they would become what they saw as hideous monsters!  So they all killed themselves.  The shocking ending is the revelation that the people of the Lost Race were going to evolve so that they looked just like we Earth people do!  Could it be that we are the degenerate descendants of a Lost Race colony that didn't commit suicide?

This is a fun classic-style science fiction story with lots of technical, sociological, and psychological speculation, plus decent action and adventure elements and human drama elements.  Thumbs up for "The Lost Race!"

"The House of Rising Winds" by Frank Belknap Long (1948)

"The House of Rising Winds" debuted in an issue of Startling Stories alongside Henry Kuttner's "The Mask of Circe," which we read in 2022, and is illustrated by fan favorite Virgil Finlay.  It would reappear in the Long collection The Rim of the Unknown. 

A young orphan boy, Jimmy, is living with his aunt and uncle--who keep arranging accidents in hopes of killing the kid so they can enjoy his inheritance!  Long does a good job at describing the cruelty and the schemes of the aunt and uncle--it is actually kind of creepy and at times shocking.

Jimmy is hiding in the woods when he is approached by a space alien who calls himself Lacula!  Long, something of a poet, comes up with a long list of metaphors to describe Lacula and how he makes Jimmy feel.  

Lacula was like many things at once--things that Jimmy had seen and imagined and dreamed about.  A big twisted tree trunk....the gold and russet splendor of the autumn woods....the sea, wide and boundless....a mountain, rising pale and purple....a maze of complicated machinery....

Lacula is a kindly gent...and also a big game hunter!  He has with him cages full of vicious beasts from Mars, Venus, and other worlds.  With a little device, Lacula makes these cages float hither and thither.  I guess the cages are like intersections between different points in space or something--when Jimmy looks into one cage he sees the broad expanse of a Martian desert leading to mountains in the far distance, but he can also see through the cage to the mundane surface of the Earth neighborhood with which he is familiar.  Long relishes describing two of the ravenous monsters.  Lacula gives Jimmy a little pipe, and instructions on how to use it.  Later that day, when aunt and uncle contrive yet another attempt on Jimmy's life (they make the kid take a bath and arrange an electric hair curler--still plugged in--to fall into the bath to electrocute him), Jimmy blows the pipe and a ferocious wind hurls aunt and uncle out of the house and into one of Lacula's cages.  Lacula leaves Earth with his latest specimens of vicious beasts, and Jimmy can look forward to living his own life, inheriting the house and turning it from a place of fear and misery to one of joy by marrying and building a happy family within it.

The parts with the aunt and uncle are chilling, and the alien monsters are fun; the stuff with Lacula is maybe a little fey and a little too verbose, but I can still mildly recommend "The House of the Rising Winds" as a weird horror story that mixes fairy tale and science fiction elements.           

"Thunder and Roses" by Theodore Sturgeon (1947)

Here we have a very popular story by Ted "Killdozer" Sturgeon, one that has been reprinted a billion times in Sturgeon collections, Astounding anthologies edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison, and by Tony Lewis, surveys of the SF field published by DAW, Prentice-Hall, Wesleyan University, and Harper and Row, an anthology of stories about nuclear war and one of horror stories about the mind.  The first edition of that last anthology, edited by a British computer scientist who was a technical advisor on The Tomorrow People, a TV show I loved as a kid, has a striking woman-in-bondage/violence against women cover that I am finding mesmerizing.

"Thunder and Roses" is a well-written melodrama that counsels turning the other cheek, unilaterally disarming yourself in the face of your enemies.  It is set in the near future at a remote military base after a sneak attack has nuked the United States--the attack was so successful that the US didn't even fire back at the unnamed enemies, and the land of the free and home of the brave is practically wiped out, save for this remote base, where people are despondent and suffering radiation sickness that dooms them to early graves.  Sturgeon does a good job describing the struggles of the men not to commit suicide under these dire conditions.  

The second half of the story expands on the don't-commit-suicide angle.  A beautiful woman singer, apparently the most popular celebrity in America, who regularly broadcast performances weekly to military bases, is still alive, and arrives at the base, her terrible wounds concealed by cosmetics.  Her final performance has the object of convincing the survivors not to retaliate against the enemies who just murdered the entire United States, as this will result in the total destruction of all humanity.  She argues that a decent civilization might arise someday from the rest of the world, but if the United States launches its weapons then all life on Earth--even lizards!--will be killed so no new intelligent life can arise.  In the same way individuals struggled in the first half of the story to resist the inclination to commit suicide, in the second half of the story the handful of surviving Americans characters struggle against each other to resist the temptation to launch a retaliatory strike, which would amount to the suicide of the human race and all life on Earth.

"Thunder and Roses" is well structured and well written, so I must, albeit grudgingly, judge it a good story.  Some may think it over the top, that Sturgeon's depiction of the singer's martyrdom, for example, goes so far as to become comical, or that many individual scenes are too long or that some scenes are superfluous and repetitive (how many guys do we have to hear have committed suicide?) but it all works in my opinion.  My gripe is with the story's ideology--Sturgeon seems to think you shouldn't resist or deter aggressors and so he contrives an unlikely scenario in which resistance and deterrence are somehow unjustifiable.  This is the kind of thing the science fiction that aspires to be a literature of ideas does, and that Sturgeon and Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. in particular, do--question conventional wisdom, like that slavery and incest are bad, by coming up with crazy scenarios and counterintuitive theories that demonstrate that slavery and incest might actually be good.  I obviously think it is the duty of decent people to resist and deter those who would trespass against others and so I recoil from Sturgeon's ideas here, but I guess that is part of the point of the story and "serious" science fiction, to get a rise out of you.  ("Don't worry about it son," Campbell told a young Barry Malzberg after a long argument in the year 1969, "I just like to shake 'em up."*)

*As reported in Malzberg's 1980 essay on Campbell, available in Engines of the Night and Breakfast in the Ruins.

An important story in SF history, likely of value to those interested in science fiction written in response to the use of atomic weapons in World War II and to the Cold War, and science fiction influenced by Christian thought--though Sturgeon never directly mentions Hiroshima, the Soviet Union, or any religious figure or establishment--and science fiction that depicts stress and psychological trauma.

[UPDATE JANUARY 30, 2025: Tarbandu in the comments points out that a 1971 printing
of a 1968 horror anthology, Splinters, has the same cover as the 1970 Mind in Chains.
  Tarbandu blogged about Splinters back in 2015--check out his assessment at the link.]

**********

With the exception of Brown's sterile filler piece, all of today's stories are pretty grim in tone but well-executed and worth reading.  While Long's succeeds in depicting human personalities under stress, Leinster's and Sturgeon's do the same as well as offering compelling speculations on the effect on human personality and society of new technologies, offering good examples of SF that is both emotionally engaging and thought provoking.  

Sam Merwin, Jr: "The Carriers," "Exit Line," "Judas Ram," and "Star Tracks"

A week or so ago I wrote about some stories in the February, 1956 issue of Manhunt and I had some unkind things to say about Sam Merwin, Jr.'s "Block Party."  Way back in 2017 I wrote about Merwin's novel The House of Many Worlds and was even less generous.  In the comments to that recent Manhunt blog post, a well-read SF fan with a good memory listed four stories by Merwin that he or she felt were "pretty good."  Lett us today scour the internet archive, the world's finest website, and read those four stories in hopes we can agree that they are good and that they will provide us an opportunity to say some nice things about Merwin.

"The Carriers" (1949)

"The Carriers" appeared in a magazine Merwin himself edited, Thrilling Wonder Stories, in an issue that we've already blogged about.  That issue features a component of A. E. van Vogt's Isher saga, the story by James Blish and Damon Knight that would be expanded into the novel VOR, and short stories by Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon--click the links for the MPorcius take on these works, and read on for the MPorcius take on "The Carriers," which Merwin must have been proud of, because it is included in the 1949 hardcover anthology My Best Science Fiction Story.  (It didn't make the cut when an abridged paperback edition of My Best Science Fiction Story came out five years later--ouch!)

(Note that I am reading "The Carriers" in its original magazine version, and I am doing the same for all four of today's stories.)

The thing you note almost immediately when reading "The Carriers," and the most or second most memorable thing about it, is that it is a feminist story.  Our protagonist is a spacefaring woman physicist who conducts experiments, designs a new hyperdrive, orders subordinates around, and takes the lead in forming a sexual relationship (albeit with a man--this story doesn't quite achieve feminist escape velocity and make it all the way to Planet Lesbos.)  On the first full page of the story the names of "Susan Anthony" and "Carrie Nation" are invoked heroically, and we are told that women make better spacers than men! 

...women adjusted better and more rapidly than men to the varied conditions of interplanetary exploration. Men—more limited in physical and biological function—were for the most part more brittle.  Those who survived were not rugged Vikings of the Nansen-Amundsen type but, for the most part, smaller, softer, more feminine types.... 

The man our lead character pursues a relationship with is specifically described as one of those soft feminine type men--is this story a wish fulfillment fantasy for feminist women or for short unassertive men?

I'll also note that our heroine is constantly smoking cigarettes--maybe this represents her liberation and/or her tough can-do attitude, or maybe Merwin, like T. S. Eliot*, finds women smoking to be sexually exciting? 

*See Eliot's April 24, 1915 letter to Eleanor Hinkley.

The problem with this feminist theme of "The Carriers" is that it is wholly unconnected to the plot--all the characters could be straight men and the plot would work exactly the same (the sexual relationship I mentioned doesn't get very far and is also wholly independent of the plot, though at the end of this blog post I will suggest it serves a narrative function.)  In fact, I think that the plot might even be said to undermine the feminist theme, as the plot doesn't present the characters or the gynocentric space program depicted as achieving any kind of triumph.

OK, let's describe the plot.  Earth has developed a hyperspace drive and our multi-ethnic cast, most prominent of whom is our protagonist Dr. Lydia Gray, is the crew of Earth's first star ship, a huge sphere that Merwin describes in some detail.  The planets of the Solar System all proved to lack living animal life, though some had plant life and upon some were found the dead remains of animate life forms now extinct.  The crew of the ship finds the same sad reality on all the extrasolar planets they explore.  Among several of these dead planets are high tech cities, now in ruins--these cities bear evidence that they fell only recently, that their people were exterminated by a disease and then their nuclear power plants, unattended, caused all-engulfing fires.

Gray's study of some alien artifacts offers her the insights she needs to improve the ship's hyperdrive so they can get to the next planet more quickly.  When she and her comrades land on the next planet they find the intelligent population dead, but only just--much of their infrastructure hasn't burned down yet, and what amounts to a TV set or automatic film projector is still operating!  Watching TV provides the info Gray needs to come to a horrible conclusion--the disease killing all these alien species is coming from the Earth space ship! (Something we readers may have guessed from the title of the story, unless we somehow thought it was a reference to aircraft carriers.)  How does a disease precede a star ship through the vacuum of space?  Merwin and Gray can only lamely theorize that "beams" are involved.  The story ends on this down note, though Gray does express confidence the human race will figure out and solve the issue.

"The Carriers" is acceptable.  It is probably longer than it needs to be, Merwin offering copious details and multiple scenes which do nothing to set up the twist ending, and I am finding the idea that your germs or autonomic disease beams or whatever can precede you and kill everybody in front of you before you get to them--even though you are in a ship going faster than the speed of light--hard to credit.  But the story is not actually bad.  I wonder if Merwin's "the human race is the disease!" gimmick was at all inspired or influenced by Edmond Hamilton's 1930s stories "The Accursed Galaxy" and "Devolution."

"The Carriers" was reprinted in some magazines in the 1950s, including the first issue of Australian magazine Future Science Fiction.

"Exit Line" (1950)

Here's another story from a magazine Merwin himself edited, Startling Stories.  (One reason I am reading these four Merwin stories even though I was lukewarm at best about stuff I read by him in the past is that I like Thrilling Wonder and Startling, so am kindly disposed to the guy.)  This issue of Startling features the magazine version of Raymond F. Jones' The Cybernetic Brains, the book version of which we read in 2017, as well as a version of Jack Vance's "To B or Not to C or to D" entitled "Cosmic Hotfoot," a story by Mack Reynolds, a Captain Future caper by Edmond Hamilton, and a reprinted collab between Arthur K. Barnes and Henry Kuttner.  This looks like a good issue of the magazine!  Probably I should reread the Vance and blog about it someday, and cover as well the Reynolds and the Barnes/Kuttner pieces, which I have yet to read.  Well, who knows, maybe soon.  (I like Hamilton, of course, but here we have the 23rd Captain Future adventure and I'll want to read more of the earlier ones first*.)

*Of the 27 Captain Future adventures I have read the 11th, The Comet Kings, the 19th, Outlaw World, and the 9th, Quest Beyond the Stars.  

Today we are focusing on Merwin's story in the mag, which appears under a pen name.  "Exit Line" was reprinted in 1951 in Groff Conklin's Possible Worlds of Science Fiction, where Conklin in his little four-line intro tells us that the alien in the story, which he categorizes as a "BEM," is one of the rare likable BEMs in science fiction.  I shouldn't read these little intros, as they are often spoily and/or guide the reader's interpretation of the story in a way that diminishes or perverts its impact, but I am weak-willed, and my relationship with these intros is like my relationship with all the chocolate ice cream I shouldn't eat--I see them, I devour them, and regret follows.

"Exit Line" is a trifling twist ending story that is an homage to fairy tales; the characters not only mention "The Emperor's New Clothes," The Hunting of the Snark, and Davy and the Goblin but these fables actually play a role in the structure and plot of the story.

A dozen or so humans have landed on a planet and have been trying to set up a viable colony there.  They are friends with a sort of blob creature with many eyes and pseudopods that can read their minds and communicate telepathically.  The blob is not native to the world, but also an alien colonist.  The humans and the blob work together to stave off attacks from giant hostile natives as well as invisible monsters--humans can't see these beasts but the blob can detect them with his telepathy right before they attack; when an attack is imminent the blob warns the humies and they shelter behind a forcefield the blob generates.  The blob also directs the Terrans in how to erect fortifications against the attackers--the humans spend so much time constructing these defenses to the blob's exacting specifications that they have to neglect their crops and as the story begins the humans have decided to abandon the colony after six years of effort.  They invite the blob to come with them off the planet (its vaguely described means of arriving on the planet was strictly single use) but it declines to accompany them.  After the humans have left they realize the blob was tricking them into building it a dwelling--there are no invisible monsters, the blob was just lying and play acting their attacks.  

This story seems needlessly complicated, what with the two types of monsters, one of which is not real, and with two explanations for why the blob wanted the Earthers to build it a large series of walls, neither of which is very convincing.  As for Conklin, why does he assume I am going to like the blob?  this duplicitous and manipulative monster wasted six years of my fellow humans' lives and a significant volume of other resources by sabotaging their colonization effort, and it's not like the blob is a native I might be expected to feel bad for like I am supposed to feel bad for native Americans confronted by European settlers--the blob is a rival colonial power.  I guess I am supposed to see the blob as a puckish trickster, but I am not buying it.

Barely acceptable.

"Judas Ram" (1950)

Here we have a story that appeared in H. L. Gold's Galaxy.  Gold also included it in 1952's Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction.

"Judas Ram" is, in part, one of those switcheroo stories, like the EC comic in which a guy who kills spiders by an astonishing coincidence finds himself the prey of an elephant-sized spider or the Twilight Zone episodes in which German WWII service men find themselves the victims of submarine warfare or genocide instead of the perpetrators.  You know how humans kill animals and mount them as trophies, capture animals and run experiments on them and train them to do tricks and breed them--well, in this story, aliens do that stuff to humans!  "Judas Ram" also has strong fetishistic sex undertones, and lots of descriptions of women's bodies and clothing.  Most importantly for our purposes, "Judas Ram" is better written than "The Carriers" and "Exit Line," with a good action scene as well as smoother and more compelling sentences and a better overall structure--there's less extraneous detail, less fluff, and a stronger sense of rising tensions and climax.

OK, the plot.  Extradimensional aliens have opened up an invisible doorway in a particular spot on Earth and seized three young women and one man.  The aliens have also brought back to their universe the heads of some men--we later learn that it is easier, for unexplained reasons, for the aliens to capture women alive than men; our hero, Rog, was only captured because he had wrecked his car and was unconscious when the aliens came upon him.  In the alien universe, Rog has to impregnate the three women--like most aliens in the stories we read, these jokers have telepathy and they can manipulate the minds of Rog and the ladies so they get sexually aroused, even against their will.  After 18 months or so in captivity, Rog has several kids; the aliens make giving birth a snap and the kids grow at an artificially rapid rate.  Rog and the women live in a house and wear clothes and eat food the aliens conjure up based on their captive's thoughts, so the humans have some ability to determine their own living conditions, but everything is subtly wrong and unsatisfying--food, booze and cigarettes don't have a smell, for example, the aliens apparently not having a sense of smell, and/or smell not working in this universe, where the laws of physics are different than in our own universe and Rog experiences what we might call non-Euclidian geometric effects.

One wall looked normal for perhaps a third of its length, then it simply wasn't for a bit.  It came back farther on at an impossible angle.  Yet, walking along it, touching it, it felt perfectly smooth and continuously straight.

The aliens have been training Rog to teleport, and once he has learned this new skill they take him back to Earth with the idea that he will help them trick other men into walking through the dimensional portal and into their clutches--Rog is the Judas ram of the title, a play on "Judas goat."  (We've seen SF writers use this Judas goat idea before--Jack Vance in 1949's "The Sub-Standard Sardines" and Thomas N. Scortia in 1980's "Judas Fish.")  Can Rog outwit the aliens and reunite with his wife?  Can he shut down the portal and maybe save the Earth from further kidnappings and murders?  What if it turns out his wife is already banging some other guy who has more money than Rog ever had and this love triangle quickly becomes murderous like in some hard-boiled detective story?  Could it be that Rog is better off as a guinea pig with a harem in another universe than on an Earth where all the people who know him want to get rid of him?

I like this one.  Frederik Pohl has suggested that Gold's role as editor was often to essentially rewrite people's stories* so maybe we have Gold to credit for the fact that "Judas Ram" seems better than Merwin's average.  Pohl certainly credits Gold with the ability to improve people's stories.

*See Pohl's The Way the Future Was, page 213 of the 1979 paperback.

"Star Tracks" (1952)

It is the dawn of the space age!  Mankind has put a big space station in orbit around the Earth, and the rockets that will take men to Mars have been built and tested, and soon will land on the red planet.  One of the men who will con those rockets is our hero Bob Marny, hot shot pilot!  Bob loves speed and excitement, but today he is bored.  His current mission has him stuck on that space station--he ferried three astronomers here over a week ago, so they could study Mars through a telescope unhindered by Earth's atmosphere.  They were only supposed to be on the station three days, but it seems like they found something interesting on Mars and they, and thus Bob, have been sticking around so they could take a better look at it.  What they found is top secret, but Bob is curious, and decides to see what he can learn from one of the three astronomers--the female one!  Carol Lee may be old--35!--but she looks like a teenager!  Hubba hubba!

These two fall in love over cigarettes and fruit juice, alcohol being forbidden on the station, but more important to us readers than Dr. Lee's revelation that she left an acting career to become a scientist is her revelation of the discovery the astronomers have made that has kept them tied up on the space station.  Outer space is some kind of scam!  Mars is a prop!  Not far beyond it is some kind of black barrier--the stars are also artificial props, machines moving slowly along barely visible tracks!  The Earth and the human race, as Charles Fort* suggested, are somebody's property!  Bob's dreams of landing on alien planets, the dreams of the human race of expanding out into space and relieving population pressure, are shattered!

*Carol Lee mentions Fort by name; Fort was very familiar to long time readers of Astounding, his book Lo! having been serialized in Astounding in 1931, during the editorship of F. Orlin Tremaine.  Another indication of how important Fort was to SF readers in the 20th century is that Damon Knight published a biography of Fort in 1970. 

Like "The Carriers," "Star Tracks" ends on a down note; in both stories our hopes of exploring the galaxy are dashed by a twist ending revelation that is difficult to take seriously, though in both cases Merwin softens the blow by having the cigarette-smoking lady scientist express confidence that the human race will get around this obstacle somehow.  And I guess we are supposed to be soothed by knowledge that the tobacco-loving female genius is about to embark on a happy marriage.

Acceptable.  "Star Tracks" debuted in John W. Campbell's Astounding, and no editor seems to have been jazzed enough by "Star Tracks" to want to publish it a second time.

**********

These four stories are noteworthy for several reasons.  First of all, their pessimism: at the end of each the main characters have been foiled, are stuck in some kind of trap and/or have seen their dreams melt away almost to nothing--the experience of encountering alien intelligences has been disappointing at best, a horror at worst.  These stories remind one of horror tales which climax with a terrible revelation and in tone are quite unlike the standard science fiction story which celebrates the man of knowledge who triumphs over adversity via quick thinking.  Secondly, the prominence of women in the stories, and the role played by sexual relationships in three of them in softening the blow of realizing your adventure beyond has been a bust; we might argue that this reflects an ancient wisdom the slide rule boys are liable to forget about, that love is more essential to happiness than achieving your ambitions for knowledge and power.

These stories are not bad, and perhaps provide insight into the SF of the immediate post war period, so reading them was worthwhile.  But I didn't love them and it might be a while before we read anything by Sam Merwin, Jr. again.     

A Trace of Memory by Keith Laumer

"I seek only one thing here, my friend," Foster said; "my past."

Recently, blogger George in the comments to a blog post of mine about Theodore Sturgeon, talked about how, in the Sixties, "Killdozer" Ted was displaced as his favorite SF author by Keith Laumer.  The work that George suggests catapulted Laumer into the pole position was A Trace of Memory, a novel serialized in 1962 in Cele Goldsmith's Amazing, and then printed in expanded book form in 1963 with a cover by Richard Powers.  A Trace of Memory has been reprinted many times since, in at least four different languages, in books with noteworthy covers by Jack Gaughan, Karel Thole, and unnamed others, several of which are available for reading in electronic form to us cheapos at the internet archive.  There is also an audio version of the novel at the internet archive, and it looks like for each time somebody has looked at one of the scanned book versions of A Trace of Memory, thirty people have accessed the audio file--a striking sign of the evolution in how people experience the written word?  Anyway, I read a scan of a 1972 printing of A Trace of Memory from Paperback Library/Warner that has a wild surrealist cover--was this absorbing but uncredited painting created specifically for the novel, or is it some 1930s or 1940s canvas that represents the artist's response to war in an age of mass media?

A Trace of Memory is a pretty good fast-paced adventure story in which a guy travels around the Earth and then an alien planet, doing the usual adventure story things, like getting into fights, crawling through air ducts, meeting unusual people, getting captured again and again and each time managing to escape.  Adventure stories often have a sexual or "romantic" element--the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his imitators generally feature the hero meeting a princess, becoming a major supporter of her faction in some revolution or war and eventually marrying her after she wins the war, while guys like Tarzan and Conan are always being released from prison or spared from the sacrificial altar by women who are attracted to them; there is only a little of that in A Trace of Memory--Laumer's focus is instead on male friendship and camaraderie.  In fact, instead of meeting a girl and discovering she is a princess and helping her maintain her position, in this novel the protagonist makes a male friend and later discovers his new bud is a deposed king and helps put him back on his rightful throne. 

The ad read: Soldier of fortune seeks companion in arms to share an unusual adventure.  Foster, Box 19, Mayport.

Another theme of the novel is a sort of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, never-say-die optimism, the idea that you can make it in this universe if you don't give up, if you give it your all, and even if you don't succeed, at least you can be proud that you tried your best.  

A Trace of Memory also has lots of fun science fiction elements, like longevity/immortality treatments, consciousness downloads and uploads, interstellar travel, strange creatures, a modern high-tech society that collapses into feudalism, and a guy using his science knowledge to get out of jams.  Plus something else: I often point out here at the blog that SF people love cats, and one of the times our hero is imprisoned it is his pet cat who rescues him.  Meow!

A Trace of Memory begins with a prologue in the third person in which a guy wakes up aboard a large space ship that is full of dead bodies and haunted by monsters!  He records a guy's brain, and his own, and takes a boat down to the surface of a planet we readers figure is Earth.  On Earth he encounters primitive natives--this must be long ago--and these ignorant savages accidentally send the boat back up to the main ship, stranding the lone spaceman on Earth.

The novel proper is a first-person narrative in the voice of a man who identifies himself as "Legion," an odd Biblical name that I guess relates to some of the themes of the novel.  Legion is a US Army Intelligence veteran, a former music student, and former private investigator who has fallen on hard times; currently he is a homeless bum, seriously considering robbing a store!  But then he winds up in the company of a rich guy going by the name of Foster; Foster has been putting ads in the papers hoping to hire a brave adventurer, and he thinks Legion fits the bill!  

Foster wants somebody like Legion to help him solve the mystery of his life; he doesn't know a thing about his own existence before he woke up in a military hospital back during World War I.  The various clues Foster shares with Legion indicate to us readers that Foster is the alien spaceman from the prologue, that he has been stranded on Earth for thousands of years and every few centuries goes through a rejuvenating transformation, becoming young again; unfortunately, he loses much of his memory during these transformations, and today doesn't even remember he is from another planet!  Foster's previous incarnations kept an indestructible diary, but much of the diary is in a language nobody on Earth has been able to identify or decode, and the later entries, dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, may be in English, but are cryptic and fragmentary.  Also significant is the fact that several times over the last few decades Foster has been pursued by mysterious hovering lights, which has driven him to relocate cross country and build himself a fortified mansion.

Legion thinks this guy is wacko and doesn't want the job, but events force him to stick to Foster like glue.  The hostile lights appear and the two men flee, and the police start investigating the disappearance of Foster and suspecting Legion murdered him.  Legion would like Foster to reveal himself as alive to the cops and set the record straight, but Foster goes through one of his transformations so doesn't look the same and doesn't even remember meeting Legion.  Thus, Legion and Foster are both on the run, and figure they might as well try to solve the mystery of Foster's past while they avoid the cops and those glowing monsters.  

Clues from the diary and additional detective work lead the two men to England and Stonehenge, where they discover an alien transmitter that summons another boat from the spaceship that brought Foster here so long ago and has been orbiting the Earth since before the birth of Christ! 

On the ship they discover information storage units, rods or cylinders that you can hold up to your head so they will inject immersive stories or useful technical data (like how to repair something on the ship that is malfunctioning) right into your brain.  More elaborate such devices fill Foster's brain with general knowledge about his home planet and culture, like how to read and speak his native tongue--now able to read the diary, he solves some, but not all, facets of the mystery of his life.

At this point the novel is only like two-fifths over and I expected Legion to accompany Foster out into the universe on the big space ship.  But the narrator instead decides to remain on Earth!  Foster departs in the big vessel, headed for his home planet, Vallon, capital of a space empire, after Legion takes a boat back to the Earth surface.  Legion makes himself rich selling consumer goods he "invents" by applying insights he learns from studying some Vallonian items (like a super efficient film projector and its accompanying film) Foster let him take off the star ship.

With his new wealth, Legion buys his own private island off Latin America and builds his own fortified mansion on it, but after a few years the US government figures out he has access to invaluable alien technology and comes a calling.  The Feds are not interested in taking "no" for an answer from Legion, and neither are the Soviet agents who have also figured out that Legion has knowledge they'd like to have.  A battle erupts on Legion's island between Soviet troops and US Marines, and there are extensive chase and fight scenes as Legion struggles to keep himself alive and free of the clutches of both governments; his eventual success is owed to the help of a girlfriend and his new mental abilities, gained by using the Vallonian memory rods--in time of dire need, Legion can now take conscious control over his muscles and organs and give himself an extra burst of strength or endurance.

Earth being too hot for him, Legion, accompanied by his new pet cat, takes his space boat all the way to Vallon, where the final two fifths of the novel take place and where Legion hopes to hook up again with his pal Foster.  Using those memory rods, Legion downloads intro his noggin all the knowledge a native of Vallon would have, but of course all this knowledge is that of the Vallon of over three thousand years ago.  When Legion gets to Vallon it is no longer the bustling center of a vast space empire but merely the locale of a bunch of medieval fiefs!  People live on feudal estates outside the cities, which are taboo, and the knowledge of how to use the most impressive of Vallonian technology has been lost.  The nobles still make use of surface automobiles and air cars--Vallonian equipment and infrastructure are indestructible, so the vehicles still work fine and the roads are still in perfect condition--but space craft and the memory recording devices are strictly verboten.  As an outsider, Legion is immediately put on the bottom rung of the social ladder and find himself a slave.  Luckily he is a skilled musician and is made a piper in the court of the local noble.

Neofeudal Vallon differs from the typical Earth feudal model in that there is plenty of social mobility.  Like among a pirate crew in a piece of pirate fiction, where anybody can be captain if he challenges the captain to a sword fight and bests him, on this degraded Vallon you can take a guy's job by challenging him to a competition and outdoing him.  Legion challenges the head piper to a piping match and the result is Legion's promotion to head piper and his opponent's demotion to court jester.  Legion becomes buddies with the lord, in part because his expert driving skill gets them out of a fix when they are ambushed by motorized bandits during a road trip.  A lot of people, Legion learns as he mixes with the various social classes of feudal Vallon, would like to see Vallon return to the conditions of its high-tech past and get back to using the now taboo memory devices, and Legion has a series of adventures as he becomes the leader of the restoration movement, wins a title of nobility by challenging a noble, learns the truth of Foster's whereabouts and past, and plays a critical role in putting Foster, king of the whole planet before he was treacherously deposed over three thousand years ago, back on the throne.  Along the way the consciousness of the man who deposed Foster invades Legion's brain and Legion has to struggle to regain control of his own body--this is perhaps the most obvious of the novel's nods to that line from the Book of Mark, "My name is Legion."  Legion loses his life in the fight to return Vallon to its golden age, but before he expires, Foster downloads his Terran buddy's consciousness into one of those rods and when a healthy Vallonian body becomes available the king uploads Legion into it--Legion now has the immortality enjoyed by all his new friends.

A Trace of Memory is a competent adventure story--all the fighting and chasing and escaping is entertaining--and Laumer handles the SF stuff--the high tech equipment and the ramifications of a society of people who are basically immortal but who lose their memories every 100 years or so--pretty well.  I enjoyed it.  But I'm afraid I'm not going to remember A Trace of Memory for very long.  I've read the contents of the collections The Best of Keith Laumer and Nine by Laumer and even though I enjoyed quite a few of those fifteen stories I didn't remember a thing about them until I reread my blog posts about them.  Laumer's style is marked by a worldly cynicism but is otherwise quite bland, cold and emotionless.  There aren't vivid images or beautiful sentences or laugh-out-loud jokes or stirring human relationships in A Trace of Memory, nor does Laumer here make bold arguments about how you should live your life or run your society--the masculine virtue stuff I mentioned above is pretty subtle and pretty commonsensical, quite unlike the wild and crazy in-your-face stuff we often get from SF writers.  I didn't really feel the lack of these things while I was reading A Trace of Memory, but their absence I suspect lessens the impact the book will have made on me.  Still, a decent read.

Dangerous Visions from F Leiber, J G Ballard and S R Delany

Let's get dangerous!  Today we read three more stories from my First Edition of Harlan Ellison's famous 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions.  We have various reasons to believe these are among the best or most important stories in DV, so maybe this will be an exciting adventure for us.

"Gonna Roll the Bones" by Fritz Leiber

Here's a story that won a Hugo and a Nebula--kaboom!  "Gonna Roll the Bones," which has been reprinted a million times, is also the inspiration of the cover illustration of the edition of The Best of Fritz Leiber that I own, and, to my surprise, of a 2004 children's book.  

From line one, "Gonna Roll the Bones" certainly feels like a story that would win awards.  It is stuffed full of long sentences filled to the brim with metaphors and similes that paint vivid pictures not of charm and beauty but of squalor and decadence. Immediately we are presented intimations of catastrophe to come, predictions of mass death.

In his intro to "Gonna Roll the Bones," Ellison tells us SF writers tend to be specialists--Edmond Hamilton and A. E. van Vogt specializing in world destruction, Ray Bradbury in poetic imagery, etc.  But Leiber, your old pal Harlan opines, is a master of all forms, from fantasy to science-oriented "hard" science fiction.  "Gonna Roll the Bones" demonstrates this.  The story has a sort of Olde World fairy land setting, but is full of references to space ships and alien life forms and astronomical phenomena and is set in the spacefaring future--many of the metaphors and similes are references to space craft:

While among the trees the red-green vampire lights pulsed faintly and irregularly, like sick fireflies or a plague-stricken space fleet.

These metaphors and similes don't necessarily make a lot of literal sense, but strike a mood or fashion an image. 

Joe Slattermill works in a mine and lives with his mother and wife and cat (SF people love cats and we hear plenty about the cat.)  Mom and wifey make additional money as bakers and the house has a huge fireplace and series of ovens and Joe expects someday the place will burn down, killing all inside.

Stir crazy, Joe, known to gamble and get drunk and beat his wife, heads out to raise hell.  There is a new gambling hall on the dark side of town full of sexy girls and craps tables--presiding over the "Number One Crap Table" are the fattest man Joe has ever seen and a pale woman who is alarmingly tall and skinny whose role is to collect the dice once they are thrown.  But even more prominent, and obviously in charge de facto if not de jure, is a mysterious figure in black, his face partially obscured, a perfectly poised gentleman gambler.  Leiber describes all these people, and the dice and the table, in great detail.  As I read of topless girls, the excitement in Joe's crotch, the man in black groping a girl's ass and then killing a guy with a karate chop to the throat, and Joe's and the gentleman in black's use of derogatory terms for people of African descent, I kept wondering what the hell was in that 2004 kid's book.  (It turns out the text in that book has been abridged down almost to nothing by Sarah L. Thomson--the main point of the volume is the pictures by three-time Caldecott winner David Wiesner, which are very bland and unfinished and do absolutely nothing to convey the apocalyptic tone, dark power and rococo intricacy of Leiber's baroque images--Joe the wife-beating drunk has a face with zero personality!  Thumbs down for that colorless and lifeless thing!)  

Joe is kind of a superhero, or a tall-tale figure like Paul Bunyon, when it comes to throwing things, and he can roll dice and make them come up on the sides he wishes.  He makes a stack of dough and then passes the dice on after deliberately rolling boxcars, as he wants to see the man in black, who is psychologically dominating all the assembled gamblers and hangers on, throw.  The sinister gentleman  can also roll whatever he wants, but while Joe makes his throws look natural, making the dice bounce around and going through the rigamarole of rolling the dice and getting a point and then rolling several times before hitting his point, the gambler in black just arrogantly rolls seven after seven after seven, flaunting his power.

The gambler in black, as Ellison hinted in his intro, is of course the devil.  He wants to gamble with Joe--the stakes Joe's life and soul!  Joe can back out, but he doesn't want to seem a coward.  In the end, Joe wins, thanks to his own courage and his wife's love for him and faith in Jesus Christ--at least that is what I think happened; it is a little confusing.  As the story ends, Joe is about to enjoy his winnings--when he put up his life and soul, the devil put up "the world," and Joe, a working-class schlub stuck in a mining town up to now, is going to see the world.

A good story that is written elaborately and can be examined from various angles--religion-based, class-based, sex- and race-based.  In his afterword, Leiber explains some of what he is doing, suggesting, for example, that the story is in part about how men resent the control over them wielded by women but should recognize that mothers and wives are in fact often a critical support for men.  Manifesting the spirit of old time science fiction, even here in this monument to the New Wave, Leiber urges readers to understand that the limits we see in our lives and the universe are in fact bogeymen we can brush aside if we arm ourselves with knowledge--mankind really can cure cancer and conquer the stars the way mankind has already achieved flight and embraced sexual freedom, and science and technology are the key to these overcoming these obstacles and building better lives and a better society.  As Ellison suggested it would, "Gonna Roll the Bones," with its poetic style, hope for the future, sympathy for the working class, Christian themes, horror tone and embrace both of psychic powers and space-age tech, cunningly appeals to many factions of the SF community.

Both Leiber's "Gonna Roll the Bones" and Delany's "Aye, and Gomorah" appear in 
both Zelazny's Nebula Award Stories: Number Three and Bova's The Best of the Nebulas

"The Recognition" by J. G. Ballard

Our friend tarbandu of The PorPor Books Blog, in a December post titled "The Most Overrated Science Fiction Writers of the Postwar Era," in the section of the blogpost devoted to slagging Theodore Sturgeon, praises "The Recognition," so let's check it out.

This here is an enigmatic weird story which I guess dramatizes sad facts and ambiguities about human life, that we are all truly alone and require psychological and sometimes physical protection from each other and that society and its rules are like both a cage that restrains us and a fence which protects us.

The narrator witnesses a small circus--a mysterious and oddly compelling woman and a dwarf are the only staff and six wagons drawn by exhausted horses the extent of the entertainment offered--roll into a small English town.  On the wagons are cages, but in the same way the narrator can't discern the age of the woman, who at times seems young ("her robe revealed a small childlike breast") and other times middle-aged, he can't tell what sort of animals are in the cages--he just has glimpses of pale figures and detects a familiar scent from the cages.  Some boisterous sailors come along and terrorize the dwarf, shake up the wagons, and excite the horses--in the excitement our narrator is accidentally knocked out.  When he wakes up he realizes there are people in the cages--I guess the sailors.

In his intro Ellison talks about how this story is perhaps a fantasy or an allegory and how Ballard's work is often surreal, and in his afterword Ballard says the story "expresses a cordial distaste for the human race" and complains that people nowadays are narcissistic ("the temper of the times seems to be one of self-love") but a few lines later assures us that "The Recognition" is not "a piece of hard won misanthropy."  In fact the story, he tells us, is a comment on "unusual perspectives that separate us."  Also, he suggests that the key to the story is figuring out the motivations of the woman and dwarf.

Personally, I'm finding "The Recognition" a little too opaque and obscure--it feels like a put-on, a story that could mean nothing or anything, depending on what the reader decides.  We'll call it merely acceptable...maybe barely acceptable.  Ballard ably describes the setting and characters and the story isn't boring, but the sum total of it is underwhelming because it is too coy about what the point is.

"The Recognition" has not been anthologized much since its debut in Dangerous Visions, but of course it has been reprinted in Ballard collections.

"Aye, and Gomorrah" by Samuel R. Delany

Ellison starts his intro to "Aye, and Gomorrah" with talk of how meeting writers whose work you like is often a disappointment ("The writer of swashbuckling adventures is a pathetic little homosexual who still lives with his invalid mother"--is this supposed to refer to a real person?  Robert E. Howard lived with his unhealthy mother most of his life, didn't he?)  But this doesn't apply to Delany, one of the most impressive people Ellison has ever met, a man with a talent like that of Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut or Theodore Sturgeon who is similarly bound to become prominent in the mainstream.  (Did Sturgeon really achieve mainstream prominence?)  Ellison also makes much of the fact that while Delany has sold a stack of SF novels already, this is the guy's first short story.

"Aye, and Gomorrah" is like Ballard's "The Recognition" in that it is kind of opaque and mysterious but while Ballard writes in long detailed paragraphs and his narrator is almost as deep in the dark as us readers, Delany's story is written in fragments and jump cuts and snatches of dialogue and the narrator knows exactly what is going but we readers are kept in the dark for a while.  Perhaps ironically, while Ballard's text paints detailed images of locations and characters but renders the thematic substance or point of the story quite vaguely, Delany provides very little by way of physical descriptions, but eventually makes the bizarre speculative content of the story quite clear.  

It is the spacefaring future.  The only people who can safely leave Earth's atmosphere for any amount of time are people whose gonads have been removed.  Among the populace there develops a sizable population of people who fetishize astronauts, who are fascinated by and sexually attracted to the sexless neutered people who have the exciting job of exploring and exploiting other planets.  Many of these fetishists, known as frelks (short for "free-fall-sexual-displacement complex") are willing, even eager, to pay astronauts good money to have some kind of sexual encounter with them.  

I guess the "real" dramatic arc of the story is us readers discovering the facts about this future world.  The plot of "Aye, and Gomorrah" concerns an astronaut, a neutered man, and his time on leave in various places on Earth and his encounters (and the encounters of his fellow spacers) with civilians; the astronauts always wear their uniforms so they are easily identifiable by the public.  Some astronauts are happy to get paid for whatever limited forms of sex they can provide frelks, others are not so sanguine.  Our narrator seems to be looking for something more, a human connection, but such connections are hard to come by, maybe because frelks see him as primarily or only a sex object (even though he no longer has any sex organs) while ordinary people see him as sexless--to nobody is he a whole human being.

This story is alright; by the end, it is more clear and compelling that Ballard's, and certainly more economical.  Maybe these two stories share a theme, the idea that human beings are hopelessly separated from each other.

In his Afterword, Delany lists the source material of the story--he has been to the locations that are the settings of the scenes in the story, and he once overheard two women talking about an astronaut in the news, one of them finding the astronaut asexual, the other finding him very attractive.  Of course, we readers wonder if the fact that Delany is a black man and a gay man has also informed the story.

"Aye, and Gomorrah" won a Nebula and has been included in many anthologies, including those that appear to be efforts to document a history of SF or to create a SF canon that is "diverse"--the SF cognoscenti are unanimous in their belief that this story is important, and it is not bad, so I can't really take them to task for this belief.     

    

**********

   

Of the three stories, the Ballard is the least satisfying and the least "dangerous," though it is not bad by any means.  Delany's is the most "dangerous," seeing as it is about creepy sex fetishes and seems to be a rumination on how minorities of different kinds are viewed by majorities and also suggests that the government and society are willing to mutilate young people in order to achieve their goals.  But the most entertaining and satisfying of the stories in Leiber's--it is full of evocative images and phrases and handles effectively a host of themes.

An enlightening expedition into the anthology we are always hearing about.  Next time a SF novel from the early Sixties!

Manhunt, Feb '56: S Merwin Jr, G Brewer and R Bloch

Let's take a gander at the February 1956 issue of Manhunt, the famous crime fiction magazine.  This issue has four stories by people we have some interest in, one each by Sam Merwin, Jr., perhaps most famous for editing Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, and Robert Bloch, probably most famous for penning Psycho, and two by Gil Brewer, one under a pseudonym. 

"Block Party" by Sam Merwin, Jr. 

Way back in 2017 I read Merwin's science fiction novel The House of Many Worlds and judged it harshly.  When I read his story "Final Haven" five years later I was a little more kind, but still not happy.  Well, today we give Merwin another shot.

Almost immediately upon starting "Block Party" I was regretting my decision to give Merwin another chance, as the first few paragraphs are full of sentences meant to be evocative and literary but which are in fact embarrassingly stupid.

Where gaudy booths and loud music and spicy, hot Italian foods had lent gaiety, only litter and squalid emptiness remained, mercifully softened by the East River darkness.

Is the river causing the darkness?  What does "soften emptiness" really mean?  Horrible.

Carl, a Nordic rarity in that overwhelmingly Mediterranean district, was fair and short, with a pear-shaped Teutonic build.  His outward stolidity concealed intricate inner meshworks of fears and rashnesses.

I never heard the stereotype that Germans are shaped like pears before, and "meshworks" and "rashnesses" are pretty bad--they are not euphonious, and what the hell do they mean in this context?  Metaphors are supposed to make things more clear, not less, and this metaphor adds confusion instead of enhancing clarity.  Does Merwin think "meshworks" refers to the gears in a machine; is he suggesting Carl's actions are driven by fear and rashness?  (Does he think gears move themselves?  Shouldn't he say that fear and rashness are the motor or the fuel, not the gears?)  

After those glaring eyesores, either the text got better as it focused on plot and gave up trying to sound poetic or I became immune to such offenses.  The plot of "Block Party" is actually not bad.  Carl and his friend Tony are small time crooks who have been hired to pull a robbery.  A rich guy is in trouble with his sixth wife, and knows she has blackmail material in a safe at the hotel where they are living.  Rich guy hires a medium-sized crook, Dixon, who in turn hires Carl and Tony to stick up the hotel night manager and get the envelope from the hotel safe.  Carl and Tony get the envelope, but Carl accidentally kills the night manager.  After Dixon receives the envelope from them, he tries to kill the two men--legally, Dixon is just as responsible for the murder of the night manager as are Carl and Tony, so he considers permitting them, dangerous witnesses who might lead the police to him and even testify against him, to remain in circulation to be too dangerous.  But Carl turns the tables on Dixon and kills him.

Tony and Carl begin the long trip to Mexico.  Tony worries that the rich guy will hire thugs to find and kill him and Carl in hopes of retrieving the blackmail material, which he has retained.  Two men travelling together, a tall dark Italian and a short fair German, will be easy to spot, so Tony decides to kill his friend.  As the story ends, Tony wonders what life will be like alone.

"The Fog" by Gil Brewer

This, the story illustrated on the cover, is a brief little trifle, but well written.  A guy drives into a new suburban development next to a big field--his old pal has moved here with his new wife, whom the protagonist has yet to meet.  His friend isn't home, but the wife is, and she is very, very, flirty.  She also hints that her husband is a nervous wreck, isn't paying her any attention.  Our guy eventually leaves, goes to his hotel.  After midnight the woman calls him, begs him to come help her--his friend, her husband, is in trouble!  It's a foggy night.  He gets over there and she asks him to help her look for hubby in that field; she seduces him and after they bang out in the wet field she admits she murdered her husband today, right before she called the protagonist.

Acceptable.

"Shot" by Gil Brewer

This story appears under the pen name Roy Carroll.  Here we have another treacherous, murderous, woman, though we only know a woman is to blame at the end.  A guy is walking on the city street, headed to a rendezvous with his wife.  Suddenly he is shot!  The gun had a silencer on it, and the bleeding injury is hidden by the man's jacket, so other people on the street don't really know what is going on, wonder if the victim is drunk or having a stroke as he staggers around.  A man arrives and takes charge of the victim, leading him away--oh no, he's not trying to help, this is the shooter, come to finish the protagonist off with a knife in an alley!  Our guy tries to fight, but it is hopeless--he expires.  The end of the story makes clear that his wife hired or is sleeping with the shooter--perfidious female!  

This one is pretty good, suspenseful (I didn't know how it would turn out, who would live and who would die, and I didn't predict the wife was in on it) and more economical than "The Fog," the flirting scenes of which are perhaps too long, too repetitive.             

"Terror in the Night" by Robert Bloch

"Terror in the Night" would go on to be the title story of a Bloch collection, one half of an Ace Double which also features the novel Shooting Star, which we read back in 2022.  You can also find it in other Bloch collections.  

"Terror in the Night" is a mediocre filler piece.  

Our narrator, named Bob, answers the door one night to find a woman in a bedraggled nightgown--it is Marjorie, a friend of his and his wife Barbara's!  She has escaped from the asylum!  Marjorie tells a wild story, of how her husband had her put in the asylum under false pretenses so he could spend more time with his mistress (Marjorie refused to go along with a divorce), of how the asylum staff are totally corrupt and evil--murdering the patients for money and raping the female patients--of how she escaped tonight by allowing one of the staff to use her body.  Marjorie fights her way out of their house when she senses Bob and Barbara don't take her story seriously and fears they are going to try to detain her and call the asylum to have her picked up.  The final lines of the story indicate that Marjorie's story of conspiracy, murder and rape is true, and Bob, though probably not his wife, is somehow complicit in the atrocities taking place at the asylum--he is at least aware of them.

**********

These stories are forgettable little entertainments, like potato chips or something.  I have to admit, and I have said this before, that crime/detective stories often feel a little hollow compared to the science fiction and fantasy stories I generally read.  Even very entertainment-oriented SF, like Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan stories or Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, seem to be making some argument about how you should live your life or how society should be organized, and of course major science fiction writers who have stacks of awards like Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon and Frederik Pohl suffuse their work with their criticisms of our society and suggestions on how to improve it.  

But maybe I am being unfair; maybe today's stories have something to tell us about life and society?  Perhaps it is interesting that all four paint a bleak portrait of marriage--spouses are unfaithful, will demand a divorce, will try to blackmail you, will try to kill you.  Also, in each story evil triumphs--people betray their friends or spouses, innocent people get killed and/or killers escape punishment.  A grim vision, offering as the only solution solitude and celibacy!

It's back to critically acclaimed science fiction writers next time around; until then, keep an eye on your spouse!