Frederik Pohl: "Survival Kit," "The Knights of Arthur," and "My Lady Greensleeves"

Last month we declared our intention to read all the stories in Frederik Pohl's 1959 collection Tomorrow Times Seven, a decaying paperback edition of which I own.  Today we make good on this promise!  We've already read five of the pieces in this volume, and we'll read the remaining two, "Survival Kit" and "The Knights of Arthur," today.  Because two stories doesn't really feel like a full blog post, we'll supplement the post with a story from the same period, "My Lady Greensleeves."  All three of these stories made their debuts in Galaxy, the magazine of which Pohl would in 1961 be officially named as editor, though apparently he was doing editorial work at the magazine for years before that, aiding the mentally ill H. L. Gold.  On page 220 of my paperback copy of The Way the Future Was: A Memoir, Pohl writes:

In the late 1950s Horace began to go beyond that [i.e., having Pohl and others do his preliminary reading for him.]  At times he had me "ghost" the magazine for him: do all the reading, all the buying and bouncing, all the preparation of the magazine for the printer, all the writing of blurbs and house ads and editorials.

So it is possible that some or all of today's three stories were not only penned by Pohl but also purchased and edited by him.

"Survival Kit" (1957)

Here we have a quite effective crime story apparently based around the idea that American airmen serving in the Pacific War were issued survival kits full of items which would prove useful should they be shot down over some island and have to make their way through a jungle and/or among natives to a pickup point.  In Pohl's story here, a time traveler from the future gets lost in mid-20th century New York and has to use the devices in his kit to survive and reach at just the right moment a recovery point in Prospect Park in Brooklyn--the story is told from the point of view of the 20th-century man (an "aboriginal") of dubious morality who gets mixed up with the time traveler. You might call this a noirish story; none of the characters is very likable or good, and the main character is always trying to take advantage of others and as the story proceeds behaves more and more reprehensibly until he is finally hoist by his own petard. The ending does pull the punch a little, and after you have read "Survival Kit" you realize it is something of a joke story, but while you are reading it it feels somewhat brutal and scary.

Penniless loser Howard Mooney is spending the winter alone on the Jersey Shore in a relative's house, barely surviving on the meager supplies left there by the owner.  A time traveler knocks at the door--this guy requires a guide to a "nexus point" in Brooklyn where he must be at a specific time in a few days in order to get back to his own time period.  The time traveler has with him a box or case that is full of devices and artifacts of tremendous value and spectacular utility.  The promise of a fabulous reward leads Mooney to accept the job as guide.  As the story advances we learn that Mooney is a small time crook and a con-man who in the past sold (I guess fraudulently) freezers to suburban housewives.  (Young Communist League alumnus Pohl of course sees all sales and advertising as a kind of criminal conspiracy.)  Mooney is not content to accept a generous reward for helping the traveler get from the greatest state in the nation over to Crooklyn, and schemes to get the entire survival kit, which has the potential to make him the richest and/or most powerful man in the world; he commits ever graver sins as he tries to secure this boon, and we find he is not even above murdering his own uncle in his efforts to strike it rich.

A good story.  Pohl handles all the numerous future gadgets quite well, and the plot also operates admirably--all the various complications that pop up and Mooney's reactions to them are entertaining.  Thumbs up for "Survival Kit!"

"Survival Kit" has popped up again in several Pohl collections and is even the title story of one such British collection.  You can also find the story in the 1999 anthology Technohorror, though Fred's name isn't on the cover--come on, Grand Master Fred has gots to be more famous than Greg Egan!  

"The Knights of Arthur" (1958)

If you look at "The Knights of Arthur" in Galaxy you are immediately clued in to the fact it is a joke story--it is illustrated by Don Martin and so looks like something out of Mad magazine.  (I don't "get" Mad and have never been interested in it--it is too broad, too childish, and too topical for me, and I don't find Martin's boring and generic art at all appealing.  Life would be sweeter if I did appreciate Martin and Mad because the antique malls and used books stores I haunt are choked with mountainous piles of Mad and Don Martin books and it would be child's play to amass a huge collection.  Anyway, everybody and his brother loves Mad, so I generally keep this against-the-grain opinion to myself.)  "The Knights of Arthur" isn't quite as silly as Martin's illustrations suggest, but it isn't a very good adventure story or a fascinating speculation about future life, either.  I think we'll call this one barely acceptable.    

It is the post-apocalyptic future!  The population of New York City stands at 15,000, and this is considered a huge and unwieldy number in an America whose population is probably around 100,000.  Our narrator Sam and his friends Vern and Arthur were on the crew of a submarine nine or ten years ago when the nuclear war that killed almost everybody broke out, and so they survived.  The weapons employed by America's enemies produced very little blast, but very deadly waves of short term radiation, so America's infrastructure is more or less intact, though there are skeletons everywhere you go, and people today face little or no risk of radiation sickness.  Sam and Vern are hale and hearty, but Arthur's health status is unusual--he is a disembodied brain in a can!  A camera on a sort of tentacle affords Arthur vision, and he has mikes so he can hear, but to "talk" he has to be wired into an electric typewriter and hammer out his "speech."

These three amigos have left the country house where they have been living since coming ashore soon after the war and come to NYC to pull off some kind of scheme which Pohl keeps from us for much of the story.  The Big Apple is run by a strongman based in the Empire State Building; one of the few Army officers to survive the war, he is known as "the Major" and has a harem of over one hundred women.  An attractive woman named Amy approaches Sam and his friends; she is in the employ of the Major (and scheduled to soon marry him and join his harem) and has come to negotiate the purchase of Arthur!  Arthur, you see, can be plugged right into a computer system and handle the NYC power grid or a robotic factory or whatever, thus easing the Major's manpower shortages by doing the work currently done by dozens of men.  Arthur, Vern and Sam become important members of the Major's HQ staff, and behind the Major's back they pursue the plan that brought them to Gotham--they want to seize an ocean liner and sail out to sea.  Arthur joined the Navy to sail the open sea but only ever served on submarines, and since he lost his body in an accident he has dreamed being plugged into a modern ocean liner and controlling it the way you or I control our natural bodies.  Our guys get the help of Amy and other of the Major's staff by claiming they want to refurbish a liner to serve as the Major's yacht.  One thing they have to do is find enough fuel to power an ocean liner, and, and one of this story's big jokes is when Vern blows up fifty tankers by dropping a lit cigarette into a hold full of gasoline.

The protagonists' plan goes off with nary a hitch; they sail out to sea with Arthur in charge and Sam married to Amy, and even the Major, the putative villain of the story but an ineffectual and almost inoffensive dingbat, willingly surrendering authority over NYC to enjoy the open-ended cruise as a cabin boy.  Very little of consequence or interest happens in this forgettable story.   

Compared to "Survival Kit," "The Knights of Arthur" feels long and clunky.  "Survival Kit" flows smoothly and maintains a consistent tone, all the scenes being fun or important to the plot, the character's personalities and objectives driving the plot in a clear direction.  "The Knights of Arthur" in contrast stumbles along jerkily.  There are superfluous scenes that feel like dead ends and are seemingly there just to offer humor--Pohl spends a long time describing the search for fuel among the fifty tankers, a search which fails because Vern blows up the fifty ships, and then in just a few lines Pohl wraps up the issue of the need for fuel by just telling us Vern found some someplace else.  Another problem with "The Knights of Arthur" is that there are three main characters but usually only two of them are on screen at any one time while the third is off at some other location.  As for the jokes, most of those I can recall consist of one character getting spluttering mad at the dialogue or behavior of another, the most elementary of humor.

I may consider "The Knights of Arthur" a waste of time and borderline bad, but you'll find it in Platinum Pohl, the 2006 collection of Pohl's "best" stories that Connie Willis says is "wonderful," so take my dismissal with a grain of salt--I guess I'm going against the grain again. 

"My Lady Greensleeves" (1957)

Having finished up Tomorrow Times Seven, we now turn to our special bonus feature, which I will be reading in a scan of the issue of Galaxy in which it debuted.  (We've already read something from this issue, Thomas N. Scortia's "The Bomb in the Bathtub," which I declared "a dud" in 2019.)  

No mixing.  That was the prescription that kept the city-state alive.

It is the class-bound, segregated future!  The various social classes are kept apart, with professionals living in one neighborhood, clerks in another, laborers in another, government employees in another, etc.  The different classes are forbidden to interbreed, and if you try to pass yourself off as a member of a different class or conduct political activism advocating for the mixing of classes, you get a prison sentence.  All these repressive policies are justified by the idea that specialization is the key to civilization.

"My Lady Greensleeves" takes place in a prison and we follow lots of characters and never get to know any of them very well or care about any of them.  A young woman from the Civil Service class--daughter of a Senator no less--is in the prison for committing vandalism as part of a campaign in support of ending the policy of segregation and gets into trouble because she can't really understand what members of other classes are trying to tell her to do; each class has its own dialect.  She gets moved to the uncomfortable maximum security wing (called "Greensleeves" because of the uniforms worn there) just when some of the hardened inmates there use a shiv to take some guards hostage.  This act of rebellion inspires other cons throughout the complex, leading to mounting chaos in the prison and an escalating response from the authorities.  The Governor comes by to take command and gets captured by the rioters.

Race relations is a theme of Pohl's story here.  At the same time he reminds us repeatedly that in this future world there is no more racism and there are no longer any distinct racial categories (the senator's daughter has never heard the word "Jew") he portrays class conflict in ways that mirror real-life racial tensions.  The different social classes in "My Lady Greensleeves" ascribe to each other various, generally unattractive, character traits the way real life racists stereotype blacks as lazy and Jews as greedy or whatever.  There are also derogatory nicknames--clerks are known as "figgers," mechanics as "greasers," and laborers as "wipes."  Pohl further reminds us of real-life racial distinctions by offering an ethnically diverse cast.  One of the most prominent inmates--an architect imprisoned for repairing his own car and thus trespassing on the territory of mechanics--is black, another is Asian.  

Pohl stresses how strong class divisions are, how hard they are to overcome.  The prison is a dangerous institution to this segregated society, because the classes inevitably mix there, but mixing doesn't end prejudice and suspicion--people voluntarily embrace class distinctions even when not forced to do so, even when it is counterproductive to do so.  The senator's daughter is a liberal who wants to overcome such divisions in theory, but meeting laborers leads her to realize how different they really are from her and her fellow Civil Service members, and when push comes to shove she sides with a Civil Service man who is in a fight, saving him from a violent and dangerous laborer.  The black architect, a professional, becomes leader of the rebellion but has contempt for the laborers and mechanics.  Even though they have to work together to succeed in changing society, the different classes can't overcome their differences to fight in concert for social change.

The riot defeated in a way that is totally boring, the Governor gives a little speech to the Senator's daughter and another major character about how the division of society into classes has led to stability and Pohl drives this idea home in a final scene of some minor characters.  Pohl's portrayal of the segregated society is pretty ambiguous--the governor, the ultimate upholder of the system, is shown to act selflessly and wisely, almost as if Pohl thinks such a class-ridden society has something to recommend it.   

Pohl's takes on the division of labor, class/race relations and the role of prisons in society has the potential to be interesting, but he doesn't do much novel or compelling with these themes.  Worse, the story feels long, none of the characters is interesting, and the action scenes and efforts to generate suspense fall flat.  I couldn't bring myself to care who lived or died, and whether this society endured or was revolutionized.  Pohl in writing this story demonstrates a greater interest in social and economic theories than in entertainment and literary merit, and since his theories are not that clearly or compellingly argued the story is bland and drags.  Another barely acceptable piece from Pohl.

"My Lady Greensleeves" shows up in the Pohl collection The Case Against Tomorrow and in the anthology Human and Other Beings, which bills itself as being about "man's inhumanity to man."  These books present themselves as so misanthropic and pessimistic you have to wonder how they sold--were mid-century SF readers champing at the bit to devour these downers?  Still, "My Lady Greensleeves," like "The Knights of Arthur," would be included in Platinum Pohl, so I guess the sort of Pohl stories I find a drag are just the sort of stories of which Pohl is most proud.

**********

That's enough Pohl for a while; I'm thinking of reading a wild and crazy novel for our next foray into the speculative fiction world.

Super-Science Fiction, Dec '58: R Silverberg & H Ellison

In our last episode we read a story by Charles Runyon from the December 1958 issue of Super-Science Fiction.  This issue, edited by W. W. Scott and with an Ed Emshwiller woman-in-bondage cover, includes three stories by Robert Silverberg (two printed under pen names) and an apparently rare story by Harlan Ellison.  Let's supplement our reading of 1958 stories recommended by anthologist Judith Merril, the critics' favorite, with these four less acclaimed science fiction tales, though the Silverbergs can't be all that terrible, as Silverberg himself was happy to include them in 21st-century anthologies.  I'll note here that I am reading all of today's stories in a scan of an original copy of Super-Science Fiction I found at luminist.org, not in any book.

"The Aliens Were Haters" by Robert Silverberg 

The year is 2190.  Mankind has discovered and explored dozens of extrasolar planets, but never yet met intelligent aliens.  Our protagonist is a spaceman on foot, crossing the killer jungle of Kothgir II, carrying back to the US base a bag full of valuable plants that back on Earth will be processed into pain-killing drugs, when he makes first contact!

Spaceman Massi, of St. Louis, Missouri, comes upon a wrecked spacecraft in the jungle, and moments later four people from the Brazilian base on Kothgir II arrive.  The American and the Brazilians each claim the invaluable alien artifact for their nations.  The leader of the Brazilians is a mannish six-foot-tall woman; she and Massi enter the alien ship and discover two injured beings, people three feet tall, green and scaly.  Silverberg talks about women in this story in a way that perhaps wouldn't fly today among the enlightened; Massi reflects on how, while she has an ugly face, the Brazilian captain looks pretty good from behind in those tight shorts of hers, and while she is a real hard ass while bossing around her subordinates, her maternal instinct kicks in when she sees the injured diminutive aliens.  

That maternal instinct vanishes without a trace when the aliens wake up and gun down the three male Brazilians--she guns down the aliens and makes Massi her captive.  She forces him to accompany her in the march to the distant Brazilian base.  Before they get there, Massi employs a ruse to distract his captor and pounces on her, and we get some sexualized violence as he overpowers her.  They split up, she vowing revenge.  But before either of them can reach his or her nation's base, a second alien ship arrives and bombs both bases into oblivion, slaying thousands of Earthers.  As the story ends, Massi decides he has to hook up with that ruthless Brazilian woman--they are the only two humans left on the planet, and it will be a year before a ship arrives from Earth!  We readers are left to speculate whether she and Massi will fight to the death or become lovers.

This is an acceptable entertainment.  "The Aliens Were Haters" would be reprinted in the 2016 Silverberg collection Early Days: More Tales from the Pulp Era. 

"The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" by Robert Silverberg (as by Calvin W. Knox) 

It is the early 25th century.  The human race has trade relations with hundreds of other civilizations all over the galaxy, and in fact has a monopoly on the carrying trade, as, of all the intelligent races in the galaxy, only the human has developed a FTL drive.  Our protagonist, Garth, is a young employee of the Interstellar Merchant Service, a private company, and as the story begins he goes to the home office in Buenos Aries (today's Silverberg stories suggest Silverberg expected Latin America to come into its own as a rival of Northern Hemisphere countries in the future) to receive an important assignment.  Another of the IMS's employees, a Lidman, runs the one-man trading post on Murchison IV, planet Danneroi, a source of thorium, and he is suspected of selling drugs to the stone age natives!  Allowing aliens access to alien booze or drugs is strictly forbidden!  Garth is given the job of investigating--he will go to Murchison IV on the pretext of acting as Lidman's assistant, but his real job will be to investigate the allegations, and take the guy's job if he has to be sacked.   

On the planet we learn about how the trading post operates, and Garth sees that Lidman is doing a superior job and has great relations with the natives--this dude teaches English classes and has even learned how to perform surgeries so he can save the lives of natives who fall ill!  The allegations that he is supplying the aliens narcotics turn out to be accurate--at some point a native got sick and Lidman administered some medicine to the guy and it gave him "good dreams."  That alien was the first of many of the natives of Danneroi to became addicted to the medicine, and instead of trying to cure them of addiction, Lidman is handing the drugs out to them regularly.  

Garth confronts Lidman, who dramatically declares he had no choice but to provide the natives the drugs, and then kills himself.  Soon Garth, now in charge of the station, learns how the natives forced Lidman into supplying the narcotics they craved--these alien addicts threaten to commit suicide if Garth won't fork over the "dream-stuff," and Garth does their bidding after two of them disembowel themselves right in front of him!  Garth begins to lose his sanity and transmits a message to Earth, begging to be relieved of his duty.

I guess I say this a lot, but this story about two humans from a galaxy-spanning culture who occupy a position of authority among large populations of primitive aliens and suffer psychological and moral crises as a result reminded me of Somerset Maugham's stories of white men in a similar positions in 19th and 20th-century colonies.  Garth even expresses a sentiment apparently common among Western colonizers when he says to himself that the natives are like children.      

Silverberg in this story also addresses numerous aspects of economic theory--monopoly, the subjective theory of value, the role of honesty in a market society, the idea of a just price, etc.  Silverberg does a decent job of speculating on what interstellar trade might be like, and I thought this stuff was all pretty interesting. 

Silverberg's style here in "The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" is kind of pedestrian, flat and simple, but not bad.  The problem with the story is that the natives' means of compelling Lidman and then Garth to supply narcotics is not foreshadowed--the aliens' culture and society are not described in any detail at all, so when we learn they are willing to casually destroy themselves if denied a high, it comes out of nowhere.  In this story Silverberg does an entertaining job of speculating about interstellar trade, but the plot of his story isn't really about that, but about addiction and suicide, and what his plot calls for is speculations on the kind of society that would produce people who are quite pacific but nonetheless have little compunction about killing themselves in order to secure for their surviving fellows the hallucinogenics to which they are addicted.

I can mildly recommend this one.  If you are interested in SF depictions of imperialism/colonialism, interstellar trade and drug addiction, I would more strongly commend it to you.  "The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" appears in Early Days under the title "The Traders."

"Exiled from Earth" by Robert Silverberg (as by Richard F. Watson)

If "The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" suggests Silverberg had been reading some economics book, "Exiled from Earth" seems drawn from Silverberg's delving into English history and classic English literature--the thing is full of direct references to Shakespeare, at least one veiled reference to Coleridge, and its whole scenario is based on the period of the English republic under Cromwell.

Our narrator is a director in the legitimate theatre, the human head of a human troupe of actors on an alien planet who put on performances of highlights from Shakespeare and Euripides for the natives.  You see, a few decades ago, the Earth electorate voted in a Neopuritan administration that outlawed dancing, stripping, and acting.  Those in the performing arts who didn't want to change their professions were given a free space flight into exile.  

The plot concerns a septuagenarian actor who has gone insane.  He thinks the drama is again permissible on Earth, and that he has a shot at portraying Hamlet in New York.  He askes the narrator to help him get to Earth, and our hero tries to bribe Neopuritan officials into letting the guy return to Earth--even if there is no chance he'll be able to perform, the director figures his colleague would at least be pleased to die on Earth.  The Neopuritans, however, are true to their strict code, and no offer of bribe is going to get them to allow an exiled sinner to get to Earth.  So, the narrator hires some alien hypnotists to make the aged actor believe he has travelled back to Earth--this enables him to die happy.

Acceptable.  "Exiled from Earth" can be found in the 2006 collection In the Beginning: Tales from the Pulp Era.

"Creature from Space" by Harlan Ellison 

If isfdb is to be believed, "Creature from Space" has never been reprinted, and I can't even find a reference to the story at the Harlan Ellison website.  Ellison completists take note!

The star freighter Ionian Trollop is manned by the most hell-raising, womanizing, trouble-making crew in the galaxies, but they run a profitable enterprise because when it comes to getting a cargo from Point A to Point B they are the most reliable in all the known universe.  The story opens with joke descriptions of each of these hellions, and humor scenes in which the bald and overweight super-cargo's six-legged pet bird who recites Dante defecates on the star charts, to the frustration of the captain, who throws his cap on the deck in rage.  There are also multiple scenes in which the men physically fight each other.

(Like the Shakespeare and Coleridge references in Silverberg's "Exiled from Earth," the quotes from Dante here in "Creature from Space" strike me as the writers trying to convince readers or maybe just themselves that SF isn't just drivel written for childish dolts by hacks but something worthwhile, produced by thoughtful educated people for thoughtful educated people.)

The plot of the story concerns the last voyage of Ionian Trollop.  We watch as a meteor busts into the ship and turns out to be a shape-shifting alien who can imitate robots, people, writing implements, etc.  It starts killing the crew one by one.  It is apparently immune to ray pistol fire, or at least able to dodge the rays, and by taking the form of tools, men, or the pet six-legged bird, it is able to hide from the humans it hasn't yet murdered.  In the end it triumphs over the crew and it is hinted the monster will soon arrive on a human-inhabited planet and reproduce and conquer that world and maybe all of human civilization.

A merely acceptable entertainment.  All the comedy stuff about the crew is more or less competent, and the monster-on-the-loose material is OK--the robot scenes are actually quite good, the most entertaining and most productively speculative passages in the story--but these two aspects of "Creature from Space" don't jell or jive; the comic spacemen's idiosyncrasies don't help them overcome adversity nor do they prove to be their downfall, and the men don't grow or change as people over the course of the story, becoming more responsible due to their ordeal or whatever.  The men's personalities and back stories have zero effect on the plot, and thus feel superfluous once you have finished the story. 

**********

Silverberg and Ellison are skilled professionals and these stories maintain your interest and have fun parts, but they are sort of forgettable and at least two of them have some real structural flaws.  Not award winners, but worth your time if you are curious about 1950s SF or the careers of Silverberg and/or Ellison.

More late 1950s science fiction from a big name writer in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

    

Merril-endorsed '58 tales: Phillifent, Reed, Reynolds, Runyon

Today's blog post is brought to you by the letter "R."  Yes, we're reading four more stories from Judith Merril's alphabetical list of honorable mentions at the back of the fourth of her critically-adored SF: The Year's Greatest anthology series, the volume covering stories published in 1958.  Today's authors are John T. Phillifent (working undercover as Arthur Rackham), Kit Reed, Mack Reynolds, and Charles W. Runyon.  (I'd like to read the story by Joel Townsley Rogers that Merril recommends, "Night of Horror," but I can't find a scan of the issue of Saturday Evening Post in which it appears.)  With the exception of Reynolds, these are people I rarely read, so today is a day on which anything can happen.  Let's just hope "R" stands for "really good."

"One-Eye" by "Arthur Rackham" (John T. Phillifent) 

Already I'm questioning the itinerary our tour guide Judith Merril has prepared for us.  When I read Phillifent's novel Genius Unlimited ten years ago I said, on this very blog, that

The writing is bad, one of the characters is silly and all the rest are without any personality, the jokes are bad, the action scenes are boring, much of the detective stuff and the science stuff feels perfunctory.

And yet, there is a glimmer of hope.  When I read Phillifent's short story "Advantage" I liked it, and even defended it from the criticisms of influential blogger Joachim Boaz.  Maybe "One-Eye," published in John W. Campbell Jr.'s Astounding, will emulate "Advantage" and win my admiration.

It is the future of hover cars.  Tom Garbutt is a big muscular guy, a hover car mechanic with autism or a  low IQ or a speech impediment or something, which is kind of annoying as much of this story consists of his halting dialogue and Phillifent's tortured descriptions of his thought processes.  As the story begins, Garbutt is in jail.  A shrink comes to talk to him.  This smooth-talking smart guy is the first person ever to be kind to the hulking dimwitted mechanic, and for him Garbutt is willing to tell his tale of woe.

This morning Garbutt suddenly found that he could see accidents and tragedies in the future, but only a few seconds before they occur.  Each of these prophetic visions is heralded by a terrible headache, then Garbutt sees his boss get injured on the job, or sees a cook slip and burn somebody with grease from the pan, or whatever.  After the vision, Garbutt quickly tries to warn people, but there is no time, and the accidents still take place.  Because of Garbutt's fruitless attempted interventions people begin to suspect Garbutt is somehow to blame for the misfortunes; his boss even fires him for being a jinx.  (I guess jinxes aren't a protected class any more.)  Garbutt has some more crazy adventures involving people being hurt or killed seconds after he had visions of the tragedy, and then he gets into a fight in a bar as part of his ill-conceived experiment to test whether he is himself causing the tragedies.  (Maybe one of the things Campbell liked about this story is how Garbutt tries to use the scientific method to figure out the extent of his powers and his responsibilities for the disasters.)  This fight is what landed him in jail.

After the shrink leaves, Garbutt has a vision of committing suicide and then he commits suicide.

This story is not a smooth read, and while the idea of a guy grappling with the unwelcome ability to see accidents and disasters seconds before they occur is sort of interesting, Phillifent doesn't really come up with a good plot based on this idea or a plot that exploits this idea.  Phillifent doesn't substantially extrapolate on what this power could mean for an individual or a society and the mechanic doesn't do anything constructive with the power or overcome the challenge it presents--his life and then he are just destroyed by it in short order.  I'm afraid the point of this story, the effect Phillifent seeks to have on readers, is to elicit sympathy for Tom Garbutt, a man who, because of his intellectual or physiological disability, is shunned by society and who then is overwhelmed by bizarre circumstance.  (We smart readers of Astounding are expected to identify with the shrink, a compassionate man who uses his brains and knowledge to help others, so that he stands head and shoulders above the rest of society.)  I'm not crazy about stories about helpless victims of fate or gentle giants who are abused by society, nor those in which nice liberals demonstrate their virtue by condescending to help their inferiors.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down. 

It looks like "One-Eye" has never been reprinted.  Understandable.          

"Devotion" by Kit Reed  

College professor Kit Reed, according to wikipedia, is a Guggenheim Fellow and got a "five-year grant literary from the Abraham Woursell Foundation"--Kit Reed is the science fiction writer the intellectual elite in their ivory towers want you to read.  Well, let's do what we are told by our betters for once and eat our vegetables.

We find "Devotion" in an issue of F&SF that includes a reprint of one of Leslie Charteris' The Saint stories, a Damon Knight short-short I bitterly denounced when I read it many moons ago, and Anthony Boucher's own backhanded smart-alecky denunciations of Robert E. Howard and Charles Eric Maine.  

To the relief of all involved, I don't have to denounce Reed's "Devotion."  (I know my kind-hearted readers don't flock to MPorcius Fiction Log lusting to read negative reviews--we're all softies, on the inside!)  "Devotion" is actually a pretty good little story, creative and uninhibited by left-wing pieties (Reed includes an underhanded and jealous woman in the story as well as a vain and ridiculous man.)

Harry Farmer, all his life, has had a perfect and beautiful mouthful of teeth, the envy and/or wonder of all who see them.  He maintains them with punctilious care, and he makes it to his seventies with them fully intact, no fillings, no blemishes on their dazzling whiteness.  He loves the teeth more than anything, spending an inordinate amount of time admiring them in the mirror and showing them off to people.

At his Florida retirement home, Harry has a particular friend, almost a girlfriend, perhaps, a Mrs. Granstrom, who is his regular partner at shuffleboard and croquet.  Mrs. Granstrom is very supportive when Harry faces the worst day in his life and is told by a doctor that he has to have his teeth all removed.  She even provides him a beautiful velvet box in which to store and admire his--still perfect!--natural teeth like they are the family jewels or something.  But she begins to get jealous when Harry starts spending less time at shuffleboard and croquet and more time in his room adoring--ne even caresses them!--his old teeth.

Harry's other problem is his replacement false teeth.  They are animate and emotional, and express their jealousy towards Harry's old teeth, pinching Harry when he brags about the previous occupants of his mouth, moving around the room in an effort to get attention, etc.  The clever ending of the story resolves both of Harry's issues--Mrs. Granstrom sneaks into Harry's room with a hammer, intent on smashing Harry's old teeth.  Harry's new teeth attack her, preserving their rivals in a display of devotion that softens Harry's heart to them.  Harry and his new fake teeth live happily ever after, the old teeth who abandoned him forgotten.

Thumbs up for "Devotion."  The intellectual elite up in their ivory towers aren't always wrong.

"Devotion" has been reprinted a few times here and over in Europe, including in the Reed collection Mister Da V. and Other Stories.  Joachim Boaz read the entire collection and blogged about it--check his assessments out!  Oh yeah, and check out my middling review of Reed's story "The Visible Partner," which appeared in a 1980 issue of F&SF.  If you are in the market for MPorcius negative reviews, at that same link you will find my long-winded explanation of why Harlan Ellison's story "All the Lies that Are My Life," the cover story of that same issue of F&SF, is no good and why Barry N. Malzberg, our hero, has all the virtues and none of the vices of the overrated Ellison.  At MPorcius Fiction Log we court controversy!

"Pieces of the Game" by Mack Reynolds

I have written quite a bit about committed leftist and world traveler Mack Reynolds even though I think his writing is poor, I guess because I find his career fascinating and stupefying, and because his brand of left-wingery is unpredictable and defies easy categorization; he was thrown out of a hard core leftist organization because he was not averse to bucking his masters and trying to make a buc behind their backs.  Reynolds is more of a maverick adventurer type than a commissar or toady, and it is fun to reflect on the fact that famously right-wing John W. Campbell, Jr. published so many of his stories in Astounding, Merril's 1958 pick "Pieces of the Game" among them.  It looks like Astounding is the only place it has ever appeared--Reynolds aficionados and collectors take note!

This story is so bland, so nondescript, and at the same time rather subtle and oblique, that I almost feel like I am missing something.  As far as I can tell there is no twist ending, no character growth, no substantial or surprising ideological or philosophical point that Reynolds is trying to make.  Maybe the point is to depict a future world in which international politics are cold and rational (you know, like chess) instead of ideological, with limited wars and little concern for human rights and forms of government--pure power politics, the pursuit of the national interest, with nobody caring about democracy or socialism or any of that jazz.  References to the Hapsburgs are sort of giving me the idea that international conflict in the near future world depicted is modelled on the limited warfare of the 18th century, the period of the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War, wars often felt to be dispassionate and nonideological in comparison to the religious wars that preceded them and the ideological and nationalistic wars that followed them, wars in which elites at least pretended to be fighting for some sort of religious or political principle or for justice for their ethnic or cultural group.

"Pieces of the Game" is set in a future world in which the Soviet Union has apparently won a war, maybe a nuclear war, against the West, and even has military bases on the Moon, but the West does not seem to have been conquered entire nor its ;populations wiped out.  Switzerland is still neutral, and the main character arrives in Switzerland, I guess from Britain or America, and makes his way into Austria, a "People's State" with lots of secret police--I guess Austria has been taken over directly or indirectly by the Soviet Union.  I don't think the USA, USSR, or UK are ever specifically mentioned in the story, which is why I am guessing about all this stuff.  Our protagonist is just five feet two inches tall, and it seems there are lots of diminutive people in this world, as well as deformed people and monstrously obese people, and these people are not regarded as freaks, but populate the elite--our guy attends a diplomatic function in Vienna and all the diplomats and dignitaries have one of these, to our minds, unusual body types.  We have to assume they are mutants.

The main character is a sort of James Bondian super spy with lots of high tech equipment.  He meets his contact, a doctor who injects him with a drug that gives him super strength, and then he spends several pages sneaking in and out of windows, climbing walls, swimming the Danube, breaking into offices, assassinating guards and cops and witnesses (well, maybe he just beats the witness unconscious), making a clandestine copy of some important document, and then sneaking back to Switzerland.  

I guess we can call this odd thing merely acceptable.

"First Man in a Satellite" by Charles W. Runyon

Charles W. Runyon has four novels and 18 short story credits at isfdb.  Apparently he is more famous for his stories and novels in the crime genre, though his true love was science fiction--see this interview of Runyon by Ed Gorman.  "First Man in a Satellite" was his first published SF story, and will be the first Runyon I have ever read.  "First Man in a Satellite" appeared in Super-Science Fiction after being rejected by Campbell--Runyon talks about Campbell's rejection letter in the linked interview above.  Robert Silverberg included "First Man in a Satellite" in his anthology of stories from Super-Science Fiction; it's a Campbell vs Merril and Silverberg throwdown--let's see who we side with!  

The covers of Super-Science Fiction and of Runyon's novels (again, see the linked interview) are bubbling over with delicious sex and violence, and this story is absolutely about love and death, but it is more of a sentimental tearjerker than something sensationalistic and exploitative.  Max is a dwarf and an acrobat.  He's in love with the co-star of his act, Marie.  They want to get married, and Max wishes he could set them up with some way to support themselves after they are too old to safely do their act.  Then a solution falls right into his lap!  

The government needs a dwarf who is in top physical condition for a top secret mission--to be the first man in space!  A man his size weighs less, uses less food and oxygen, etc., an essential savings in this early phase of the space race, and his pay for three months work will set him up for life!  The world must not know a human being is in the capsule, so Max can't tell Marie why he is leaving her for three months, which leads to her threatening to dump him. 

After two and a half months of training, Max blasts off on his ten day mission, orbiting the Earth again and again while the many machines he is hooked into record his physical reactions and, when he is in line-of-sight radio range, the scientists interview him.  Runyon focuses on Max's psychological stress while the operation is going as planned and then when a one-in-a-million piece of bad luck puts Max's life in jeopardy.  A meteor pierces the sphere, and Max's air supply is diminished, so they have to try to bring him down earlier than scheduled.  Uh oh, the remote control receiver on the jets is also down.  Damn that meteor!  The people on the ground go through a whole rigamarole, trying to direct Max in how to manually fire the jets at just the right time by exposing wires and stripping them and touching the right ones to each other at just the right moment but it is hopeless.  When all hope is lost the world is apprised of Max's heroism and doom, and the story ends with Max and Marie spending Max's last hours talking over the radio, and Runyon's speculations on how knowledge of inevitable death affects a person.

This is a story about a man's psychology and relationships under stress, and Runyon does a pretty entertaining job of describing Max's struggles and his feelings about Marie, the head government shrink, and the military officer in charge of the whole operation.  I couldn't tell if Max was going to make it or not, which was good.  So I am siding with Merril and Silverberg over Campbell--"First Man in a Satellite" is a good story.  In Campbell's defense, in his letter to Runyon rejecting the tale Campbell suggests Lester del Rey already did a story about a dwarf in space and maybe Runyon's was too similar to that earlier one to comfortably be included in the magazine.       

**********

Well, of this batch, the Reed is the best and the Runyon is pretty good; Reynolds' story is lacking but it is not actually bad--the bad one is Phillifent's, which shares some of Reynolds' deficiencies and is also a drag to get through.  

1958 stories from big names you'll recognize, but not necessarily titles you will be familiar with, in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  We'll leave you with links to the earlier blog posts in our Merril-guided tour of 1958.

Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin
Pauline Ashwell, Don Berry and Robert Bloch
John Brunner, Algis Budrys and Arthur C. Clarke
"Helen Clarkson" (Helen McCoy), Mark Clifton, Mildred Clingerman and Theodore R. Cogswell
John Bernard Daley, Avram Davidson and Chan Davis
Gordon R. Dickson 
Charles Einstein, George P. Elliot, and Harlan Ellison
Charles G. Finney, Charles L. Fontenay, Donald Franson, and Charles E Fritch
Randall Garret and James E. Gunn 
Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert and Philip High
Shirley Jackson, Daniel Keyes and John Kippax
Damon Knight and C. M. Kornbluth
Fritz Leiber, Jack Lewis and Victoria Lincoln
Katherine MacLean, "T. H. Mathieu" (Les Cole) and Dean MacLaughlin 
A. E. Nourse
"Finn O'Donnevan" (Robert Sheckley) and Chad Oliver
Avis Pabel, Frederik Pohl, and Robert Presslie

More 1974 "Dazzlers": J J Russ, E Pangborn, S Goldin

In the last exciting installment of MPorcius Fiction Log we read three stories from the fifth volume of Terry Carr's critically acclaimed Universe series of all-new anthologies, those from Fritz Leiber, George Alec Effinger and F. M. Busby.  We weren't too happy with those three tales, but there are twelve stories in the 1974 book (we own the 1975 paperback with a surreal feline and statuary focused cover) and maybe some of them really are "dazzling"?  Let's give Terry Carr a chance to win us back and try three more, those by J. J. Russ, Edgar Pangborn and Stephen Goldin.

(I forgot to mention last time that Universe 5 also includes a Kris Neville story we read some years ago, "Survival Problems.")

"M is for the Many" by J. J. Russ

As Carr tells us in his little intro to this piece, J. J. Russ is not Joanna Russ but Jon Russ, California psychiatrist.  We read Russ's "The Interview" back in 2014, and his "Aurelia" in 2015, and I found both to be acceptable.  Gazing at Russ the shrink's page at isfdb, we see he has six credits and that it looks like "M is for the Many" has never been reprinted.  

"M is for the Many" takes place in one of those overcrowded socialistic futures where the government assigns you living space and decides who can and can't reproduce.  Every couple can have only two kids, and the government seizes your kid on his or her fifth birthday.  People stay in their apartments all day; kids watch TV, but if you are five or older you are supplied a big "bag" that hangs from the ceiling like a hammock--you zip yourself in, the bag fills with goop, wires connect to your noggin, and you have wonderful dreams all day.  If you ever tire of the bag, maybe want some social interaction, you can make friends via what we might call the internet in holographic chat rooms.

Some people, it appears, don't take to the bag--at all.  Nyta is one of these--she has nightmares in the bag, so can't stay in it all day like her husband.  What Nyta enjoys is being pregnant and raising her children.  Most of the text of "M is for Many" is about how she tries to deal with the fact that her child, Lery, whom she dotes on, is approaching his fifth birthday and will soon be taken out the door to the apartment--the door hasn't opened since Nyta's first child was taken away years and years ago.  Nyta keeps thinking back on that first child.  Nyta calls up the government robot on the video phone to beg it to allow her to keep Lery or to have another child after Lery is dragged off.  Nyta tries to get Lery to pay attention to her, to say sweet things to her, like he did when he was two and three, but he just wants to watch TV and talk about how much he is looking forward to leaving mom  and getting his own dream bag.  Nyta buys pet animals but they don't fulfill her needs.  (The interactions between women desperately seeking an outlet for their maternal feelings and the various weird animals they buy are blackly comic.)  Nyta tries to use the bag to live out her fantasies of having another baby, but she just has nightmares.

The chilling twist ending.  You are permitted up to two children, and if your child dies before its fifth birthday, it doesn't count.  It is also permissible to throw your child into the disposal chute--this is termed abortion.  Nyta throws Lery down the chute and her husband programs his bag to start collecting his ejaculate during his sex dreams so it Nyta can be impregnated yet again--Lery is her third abortion.

This is a good story that really makes you feel for Nyta and then shocks you with her murderous behavior, though that behavior is foreshadowed and, on reflection, sympathy perhaps returns, as Nyta's homicidal tendencies are perhaps entirely the result of tyrannical government policy (which the government says is necessary because of overpopulation.)  Russ's descriptions of this future world are economical and effective.  The treatment of infanticide and abortion, of what amount to virtual reality entertainment and internet relationships, of pets as surrogate children, of men's preference for imaginary women over real women, of women's desires to be mothers, and of violence committed by women, make "M is for the Many" very thought-provoking for a 21st-century audience.  Thumbs up!

"The Night Wind" by Edgar Pangborn

Carr in  his little intro tells us that "The Night Wind" is set in the same post-apocalyptic world as Pangborn's famous Davy, which I read ten years ago and don't really remember much of.  

"The Night Wind" is a somewhat ponderous and pretentious story that tells you religion is a scam and celebrates teenage homosexual sex.  The fifteen-year-old narrator is caught having sex with a younger boy and it looks like he might be stoned to death by the religious villagers--homosexuality is a sin and gays are treated similarly to mutants in this post-apocalyptic world--so he runs away.  He comes upon a wolf, some kind of monster mutant wolf, I suppose, eating a dead man.  The narrator recognizes the victim, a sort of craftsman who lived with his invalided female lover, a fallen aristocratic lady, at a remote homestead, and goes to the homestead to give the woman the bad news.  The woman endorses the narrator's sex life and gives him a pile of dough she has stashed, and then dies of a broken heart.  This little memoir, which is full of nature imagery (leaves blowing in the wind, domesticated animals having sex, hawks circling high above, lots of talk about the sound of the wind) and what I guess we can call countercultural anything-goes and if-it-feels-good-do-it wisdom (e.g., "any manner of love is good if there's kindness in it" and "I've just lain here wondering what goodness is, and if anybody knows") was written by our protagonist as he sat in the neat and tidy house of the dead couple.  Now he will head to the big city to look for one of his earlier gay lovers, an older boy whose family moved out of the village a while ago.

Maybe a story denouncing religion and celebrating teenagers having gay sex seemed shocking in 1974, but in today's world the story is pretty ho hum--Christianity has been in terminal decline my entire life and everywhere I go there are flags celebrating homosexuality; affirming the dignity and beauty of gay sex is one of the rituals you have to perform to maintain a respectable position in mainstream life.  Maybe the way "The Night Wind" suggests homosexuality and aristocracy go hand in hand and are inevitably set against religion and the close-mindedness of village life is sort of interesting?  We'll call "The Night Wind" barely acceptable--it is a competent wish-fulfillment fantasy for the LGBetc community.  Genre fiction is full of wish-fulfillment fantasies, and there is no reason gay people shouldn't get their share.

Terry Carr thought "The Night Wind" one of the best stories to appear in the first dozen or so Universe anthologies and reprinted it in the 1984 volume The Best from Universe.  You can also find it in a few Pangborn collections and the anthology Kindred Spirits.

"But as a Soldier, For His Country" by Stephen Goldin

This is a pretty good military SF story with lots of action scenes and talk of weapons and equipment.  The plot and character interactions and the twist ending are not bad.  Mild recommendation for "But as a Soldier, For His Country."

Our protagonist and a friend, veteran soldiers, have no steady girlfriends or families or anything, and so volunteer for a new high tech military program.  The government freezes you and thaws you out in the future when they need experienced soldiers.  Our guys go through this a few times, fighting in wars in various hot spots.  Each time they are thawed, technology has advanced.  Pretty soon the government doesn't freeze and thaw you--they just record your mind and, when they need you, they build a new body to download your mind into.  Human civilization extends to the Moon and then to other planets and stars, and war goes with it, so our protagonists--or new iterations of their consciousnesses, at least--get to fight against and alongside aliens all over the galaxy.  The twists in the story involve the fact that our guy ends up fighting copies of his friend and even of himself.  I guess this symbolizes the self-destructive nature of war.

Entertaining.  "But as a Soldier, For His Country" has reappeared in the Stephen Goldin collection The Last Ghost and Other Stories and in anthologies of military SF.

**********

With two good stories and one acceptable one, this batch of tales from Universe 5 is far better than the first batch we sampled.  Maybe we'll read more from this assembly of alleged dazzlers, but first we'll be returning to the 1950s, so darn your bobby socks and get your grey flannel suit pressed.

1974 "Dazzling" stories: Busby, Effinger, Leiber

Back in 2015 I bought a stack of books in Mankato, MN, and among them was the 1975 paperback edition of Terry Carr's 1974 Universe 5, an anthology of new stories.  This paperback printing has an awesome wraparound cover by Patrick Woodruffe featuring so many of our favorite things--a cat, a bug, boobs, lichen, muscles, they are all there.  (Do the disparate elements of the cover reflect the contents of the stories inside?  Maybe!)  I've never actually read anything from this book, so, ten years after acquiring it, fifty years after it was printed, let's read three of the included stories, which were promoted on the back cover as "dazzling" "storytelling triumphs."

But first, you can check out my dumb twitter joke about this cover.

And tarbandu's blog post about Patrick Woodruffe.

"If This is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" by F. M. Busby

Years ago I read Busby's To Cage a Man and thought it alright and two Rissa Kerguelen books and found them "competent" but "long and flat."  All three of those novels, at least as I recall them, spent a lot of ink describing people suffering abuse and trauma, and the Rissa books in particular were full of fetishistic sex.  Well, let's see if Busby crams this approximately 25-page story full of torture and perversion.  

"If This is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" feels a lot like boring mainstream fiction about a writer guy who keeps getting married and divorced and who has trouble keeping his attractive wife of whom he is fond from finding out about his attractive mistress of whom he is also fond and doesn't really know what he wants or how to get it, etc.  We get lots of conversations with women about relationships, lots of assessment and comparison of women's personalities and bodies, lots of sexual encounters, etc.

Our narrator is Larry Garth, a writer who gets married at least three times and divorced at least twice.  He doesn't live his life in linear order, from birth to death--instead, he hops around, backward and forward, often waking up in the morning in a different period of his life, able to recall some chronologically later parts of his life, which he has already experienced, and only some, but not all, chronologically earlier parts.  This, as you would expect, causes problems because he may not remember what happened yesterday, but knows that the woman he finds in his house, wife number two, say, is attractive and fun today but is going to be an obese drunk in a few years and he is going to divorce her, and has to pretend he knows the past and doesn't know the future.  To help himself he leaves little notes in his wallet and a safe deposit box at the bank, and tries to memorize things.  There are also advantages--when experiencing a middle-aged period of his life he reads some of his early novels and then when he is experiencing that younger portion of his life it is easy to compose the novels from memory.

I seem to recall reading stories about people with telepathy, about how they feel alone, and then the big moment of the story is when they finally meet another telepath.  Ed Bryant's "The Silent World" is one such story, and I am sure there are others.  I read Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside in my New York days, long before this blog emerged soft and vulnerable from its chrysalis, and I suspect meeting another telepath is a major event in that book.  Anyway, Larry Garth realizes his third and favorite wife is also a person who lives her life out of sequence when he sees her before they have chronologically met and recognizes her, and she recognizes him in turn.  This is a period during which he is living with, but has not yet married, wife #2.  To spend time with wife #3 requires a little sneaking around.  More importantly for us SF fans, as in a lot of time travel stories, the time travelers grapple with whether or not they can change history.  In this happy ending story the protagonists can change history--Garth figures out how to avoid marrying wife #2 and hook up with wife #3 early; wife #2 never gets fat or becomes a drunk and has a happy marriage with some other guy, and wife #3 escapes dying of breast cancer by taking that lump more seriously than she did in the previous, no longer operative, time line.

We'll call this one barely acceptable.  I think it is kind of boring, but Lester del Rey, Jacques Chambon, and Leigh Ronald Grossman all included "If This is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" in anthologies.  Maybe we should see it as a typical example of New Wave writing, a sort of conventional mainstream fiction narrative with some science fiction trappings.

Two years ago we read the Lafferty story from del Rey's fourth Best Science Fiction
Stories of  the Year, "And Name My Name," and I really liked it.  The included story
by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, "Mute Inglorious Tam," I read two months ago
and called an "acceptable" "gimmick story." 

"How It Felt" by George Alec Effinger

      

This baby has only ever resurfaced in the Effinger collection Irrational Numbers, which our kameraden over in Deutschland know as Endzeit.  Endzeit uses a flopped version of the cover image to be found on a British edition of Kate Wilhelm's riff on the Frankenstein story, The Killer Thing.

Less than ten pages long, "How It Felt" is one of those stories about people in the far future whose technology is so efficient and so powerful they can do almost anything, making life so easy they have fallen into decadence and spend all their time searching for new diversions to ease their ennui.  Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time series is I guess the most prominent example.

Vivi is one of the handful of these godlike decadents.  She is special in that while the others lack emotion, she still feels loneliness and fear and so forth--this makes her entertaining to the others.  It also helps her entertain herself--at night the stars scare her, and it is one of her few real pleasures to look up into the night sky and feel this fear.

Despite the fact that it makes her special, over the course of this story Vivi strives to deaden her emotions, to become cold--we are given the impression that she regularly tries to reinvent herself, to put on a new personality, and this time the character she is trying to assume is "studied indifference."  Moa, a woman with whom she regularly shares extended lesbian sexual encounters, comes by with a man, Tagea--they have something to show Vivi.  They have discovered a new planet with primitive native inhabitants.  They teleport to the planet, and Moa watches Vivi to see her reaction--Vivi's reactions are usually entertaining, because she is the only person left alive with emotion.  But Vivi is stifling her emotions, so even when Moa causes an earthquake and shifts this planet's largest ocean and blows up a native village, killing all the villagers, Vivi shows no reaction.  Moa even kills Tagea.  Still, Vivi does not respond--she has lost all emotion herself, is no longer even scared of the stars, and Moa loses her will to live--Vivi's emotion was her only pleasure.  

A story in which people can do anything and have no emotion is not going to inspire much excitement in the reader.  We'll call "How it Felt" barely acceptable.

"Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" by Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber is a fascinating character with a broad and diverse career, and many are the times I have fulsomely praised his work, as with "Lean Times in Lankhmar" and "The Button Molder," but I have also criticized what I have considered his weaker work, like "The Wolf Pack" AKA "Let Freedom Ring" and "The Good New Days."  And again and again I have pointed out potentially uncomfortable elements in Leiber stories, in particular sexual content that leans in the direction of incest, underage sex and rape (see "The Princess in the Tower 250,000 miles High," and "The Glove.")  Well, today I must bring you some unwelcome tidings: "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" is an absolute waste of time, an annoying and unfunny joke story in which Leiber seems to be likening Jewish people to cockroaches!  Say it ain't so, Fritz, say it ain't so.

Beetles from all over the world are congregating in New York City, in a plot of grass in Central Park next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for their biennial convention.  Leiber tries to slot various types of beetles into human ethnic categories, one of the story's many sterile jokes:  

...not just U.S. beetles, but coleopts from all over the world--slant-eyed Asian beetles in golden robes, North African beetles in burnished burnooses, South African beetles wild as fire ants with great Afro hairdos, smug English beetles.... 

I'm not against ethnic jokes per se, but just saying "Asians have slant eyes, black people are wild and English people are smug" isn't actually a joke--it's more like a list of ungenerous observations and questionable stereotypes.

Cockroaches are not actual beetles, but they still resent not being admitted to the convention and launch a protest.

...the New York City cockroaches were out in force, picketing the convention....Round and round the sacred grass plot they tramped, chanting labor-slogans in thick Semitic accents and hurling coarse working-class epithets.

Via the sorcery of the world's finest website, the internet archive, I looked at this passage in later printings of "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum."  In a scan of The Worlds of Fritz Leiber (1976), I found that "Semitic" had been struck, but in a scan of Space Odyssey (a 1989 printing), I found "Semitic" remained intact.

One of the beetles says of the protesting roaches,

"...many of them are mere German (German-Jewish, maybe?) Croton bugs, dwarfish in stature compared to American cockroaches, who all once belonged to the Confederate Army." 

There isn't much plot to this story--mostly it consists of these kinds of anemic jokes.  Leiber manages to work in a few references to rape--studying an English word, the beetles think "B" and "R" are drawings of a snake raping another snake.

What little plot "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" offers comes in the later portions of the story when some of the beetles go to visit the Egyptian section of the museum and come to think the scarabs there are real beetles that have been drugged or hypnotized.  In a satirical reference to Middle East turmoil and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, one Egyptian beetle thinks that these beetles are the victims of some facet of the cockroaches' plan to take over the world:

...part of a World Cockroach Plot carried out by commando Israeli beetles....His wild mouthings were not believed.

The beetles figure out a way to carry off the scarabs, puzzling the museum staff and police.

Whether or not you find this story offensively racist, "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" is definitely not funny or engaging.  Thumbs down!  Find it in Horrible Imaginings or the previously mentioned Leiber collection or anthology, if you must.

**********

These stories are not dazzling!  They are not even good!  How could Terry Carr, Dallas News, Kirkus Reviews and the Chicago Sun-Times do us dirty this way?  Maybe these three stories are an unrepresentative sample and we should read some more...well, we'll see.