If, May 1966: A E van Vogt, R M Williams & R A Lafferty

In our last episode we read a Gene Wolfe story from the May 1966 issue of If, a magazine then edited by Frederik Pohl.  There seems to be a lot of interesting material in this issue, so let's check some of it out!

From 1966 to '68, If carried Lin Carter's regular column on fandom.  Carter's column this time around is about amateur press associations, and mentions H. P. Lovecraft, an enthusiastic amateur press participant, and Ted White, among other people.  The column is a jokey light-hearted thing, and kind of boring--it feels frivolous, trivial.      

More meaty (or maybe it just offers the kind of trivia I prefer) is the guest editorial by Lester del Rey.  Del Rey courts controversy, complaining that the science fiction writers of the mid-1960s do not incorporate current scientific developments into their work the way the science fiction writers of the mid-1930s did theirs.  Rather than being inspired by the hard sciences and technology, current SF writers, if they care about science at all, write about psychology and sociology, and they don't even use recent developments or discoveries in those fields as grist for their stories, but tired old cliches that shrinks and sociologists have been saying since the turn of the century.  Del Rey also suggests that SF writers have fallen under the influence of academics in the humanities, and replaced the bold, optimistic and exciting can-do heroes of past SF with worriers and pessimists who are a drag.  Ouch!

I wish del Rey had offered examples of the writers and stories he is attacking; I always find these kinds of 50- or 60-year-old blind items frustrating.  One of this blog's early posts, issued back in 2013, consisted of me pondering the identities of the targets of bitter attacks on fellow SF writers by Harlan Ellison and Jack Vance.  Del Rey does single out H. G. Wells and Raymond Z. Gallun for praise as people who integrated about both science and human characters in their work.  Del Rey is a big Gallun fan--I noticed a week or so ago when reading Robert Silverberg's "When We Went to See the End of the World" and William Rotsler's "Patron of the Arts" that del Rey had dedicated The Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Volume 2 to Gallun.

Enough with the features; now let's investigate three stories from the ish, those by our favorite Canadian A. E. van Vogt, the questionable Robert Moore Williams and the one-of-a-kind R. A. Lafferty.

"Silkies in Space" by A. E. van Vogt

There have been periods when the work of A. E. van Vogt was at the center of this blog's activities, but it has been a while since we have read anything by ol' Van.  Well, let's get back aboard the sevagram steam train with this story.

isfdb lists three Silkie stories, published from 1964 to 1967; "Silkies in Space" is the second.  In 1969 the three stories served as the raw material for the novel The Silkie.  In the past I have found that van Vogt stories are often better in their original magazine form than after being altered for publication in a fix-up novel, and that the experiences of reading the novel version and magazine version of a van Vogt story are quite different, so reading this story is not going to discourage me from reading the novel someday.   

Van Vogt's fiction often concerns a man with special mental powers, powers that are in the process of expanding, who discovers the hidden reality behind his world and becomes acquainted with secret elites who are influencing everything from behind the scenes and are likely in conflict with each other, and "Silkies in Space" follows this pattern.  We also find here van Vogt's familiar clunky style, and his fascination with people's thoughts and thought processes--in "Silkies in Space" we face many lines flatly telling us the main character's emotional response to this or that fantastic event, often simply that he finds it fantastic, and many sentences relating to us the hero's deductions and how he comes to his weighty decisions, decisions that will affect the course of history of not only the Earth but the universe!  There is also quite a bit of incomprehensible pseudo-scientific gobbledygook that serves as a rationalization of all the amazing phenomena that take place in the story.  Here's a passage, the three sentences that make up two paragraphs, that I think exhibit these traits of the van Vogt style:

The hard fight had driven him down to a special logic of levels. He felt an automatic outflow of hatred.

Yet, after a little, another realization penetrated: "I won!" he thought.  

It is of course not van Vogt's style that we fans of the mad Canadian like, but his crazy plots and crazy ideas, and "Silkies in Space" delivers on that score.

It is hundreds of years in the future.  Our hero is Cemp, one of the couple thousand Silkies living on Earth.  Silkies are men who have all manner of powers: by manipulation of gravity, energy fields, electricity, and the like, a Silkie can fly, detect and analyze all manner of natural phenomena (down to the atomic level!), and defend himself with crackling energy; via telepathy he can communicate with other Silkies, and with a superior subset of the human race; with his super brain he can memorize vast amounts of data; and there is more.  To make the fullest use of his powers, a Silkie must change into one of multiple Silkie shapes; van Vogt doesn't describe these in detail here, but suggests they have a shape something like that of a slug or fish--at one point we are told a Silkie's natural shape is "bullet-like" and twice that it in this form a Silkie is covered in "steel-hard" chitin.  Silkies, however, usually take the form of handsome human males.  Our guy Cemp is the most powerful of all Silkies, he having learned additional ways of using his powers from some aliens recently (I guess in the first Silkie story, 1964's "The Silkie.")

The conventional beliefs about Silkies, what Cemp calls "the official story" and today we might call the mainstream narrative pushed by the elites, are that the first generation of these super beings was created in a lab like 220 years ago, that there are only male Silkies, and that all of them are registered with a government bureau and work together to further the interests of Earth's inhabitants, both human and Silkie.  Silkies marry human women who are of the superior type, members of a minority of humans who have some limited form of telepathy.  (A subtheme of the story is the political, social and sexual relations between ethnic majorities and more talented ethnic minorities, a dynamic we see all the time in SF, presumably a reflection of how SF readers are both alienated from others and feel they are smarter than others.)  This entire view of Silkie history and of the place of Silkies in the world and the universe is subjected to questioning and radical revision over the course of the story.

As the story begins, Cemp is confronted by a Silkie who is not registered and who issues an ultimatum: he, and all the Silkies, are to abandon relations with the human race and join "the Silkie nation" on pain of death!  What can that mean?  The loyal Cemp reports this encounter to the federal agency that manages Silkie affairs, and is sent to do some investigating.  He discovers that there is a secret underground of unregistered Silkies--their numbers even include Silkie women!  Then he discovers that these unregistered Silkies came from an asteroid that has an orbit that stretches from the environs of Neptune to the region of Mercury, that within this 10-mile-wide rock resides an independent society of Silkies!  This planetoid approaches Earth every 110 years, and is about at its nearest point to Terra now!  Silkies are not the product of a human lab experiment, but natives of an alien world!

The government sends Cemp to this asteroid and he explores the subterranean world of the space Silkies and eventually meets them.  The space Silkies, like the Silkies of Earth, have a warped view of their own history and milieu, and after our hero learns from them what they believe to be the true history of their race, he finally gets the full truth from the being of pure energy that secretly lives in the center of the planetoid.  This creature, the Glis, controls the space Silkies but has managed to remain absolutely unknown--the space Silkies have no idea the Glis exists and that they are under its control.  (One of the first clues that points to this is how nice all the space Silkies are, in contrast to the way the space Silkie who issued Cemp the ultimatum on Earth behaved when they first met--that space Silkie was temporarily under the direct influence of the Glis and acting against his nature.)  The Glis' paranoid desire for secrecy leads it to try to destroy Cemp, the only being in the universe to know of its existence, but Cemp survives these attacks (thanks to his unique alien knowledge) and opens negotiations.

The Glis has the power to alter and even destroy entire star systems, and over millions of years has travelled from system to system, manipulating them to foster intelligent life.  When the Glis discovers or develops intelligent life, it sends some of the shape-shifting Silkies down to the inhabited planet to integrate into the local civilization.  At first this all seems like a campaign of benevolence, but then the truth is revealed.  The Glis is like a gardener and a collector!  Having molded or discovered a successful planetary civilization, the Glis shrinks the planet, inhabitants more or less intact, down to one hundred feet across and stores it within its planetoid!  The Glis has thusly collected over a thousand planets over the course of history!  Cemp narrowly escapes when the alien collector subjects our own planet Earth to this humiliation! 

In a way I didn't quite understand, Cemp exploits the fact that the Glis' molecules are so old they come from a period of history when the laws of physics were different than they are today, triggering an evolution in those molecules that turns the Glis into a sun a hundred or a thousand times larger than Sol and releases the 1800 planets, Earth among them, from captivity to grow back to their normal sizes.  The planets all begin orbiting this new sun, their civilizations are only mildly affected by the processes of shrinkage, preservation and now restoration.  (For one thing, they were in a time stasis, only a single second passing for each day experienced by the rest of the universe.)  Our sense of wonder ending foresees Cemp and the Silkies of all planets taking a leading role in building relationships among these 1800 civilizations--endless adventure and discovery awaits!

The process of actually reading "Silkies in Space" the first time was sort of a slog, as the sentences are not good and there are definitely points at which I was thinking, "What the hell is Van talking about?"  But the ending is kind of mind-blowing, and looking back upon it having read it, the plot is pretty cool, and reading it a second time made clear to my easily distracted mind how everything in the story made sense internally and was connected, with minor details in the beginning of the story, for example, serving as foreshadowing of what happens later on.  "Silkies in Space" is one of those stories that I can easily understand why others might not like it (especially since at 40 pages it represents a real investment of our brief time here among the living) even though I myself do like it.

"Silkies in Space" was reprinted in the French version of Galaxy, and in a British collection titled The Best of A. E. van Vogt, which is distinct from the American book of the same title which has an intro by Barry N. Malzberg and a terrifying white cover.

"The Hide Hunters" by Robert Moore Williams

Here we have a story that has never seen print, as far as isfdb knows, outside the pages of If.  Back in September when we read his story "Death Sentence" in John W. Campbell, Jr's magazine Unknown, I offered links to my blog posts about Robert Moore Williams and pointed out how in my experience his work is a mixed bag, so I won't go into that again, except to say that I have no idea if I will enjoy this story of about 19 pages.

"The Hide Hunters" is an acceptable monster/horror story, kind of like something out of Weird Tales but with a little more science to it.  Williams, for some reason, adds extraneous themes to the story, maybe just to pad out the length of the story (these guys get paid by the word, don't they?) with more or less interesting science and history material.  For example, at the beginning of the story there is a lot of blah blah blah about psychoanalysis and psychedelic drugs, and passages that are informed by psychological theory like

...it would be only a step away from the latent hostility found by the psychoanalysts to exist at the unconscious mind levels among civilized people, in which the father either killed the son or drove him away from home.

and 

Something about the fetid jungle, the hot, steaming wetness of the place, the gross sexuality of it, troubled him deep in his mind where the old fears of the race still lived.

but this stuff goes nowhere; Williams does not link it to the monster or to the fate of the main characters by having the monster be a manifestation of one of their neuroses or having a man use Freudian theory to solve a puzzle or anything like that.

Grayson and MacPherson are chemists in the Amazon rainforest hunting for roots that can be used to make psychedelic drugs.  An aged Indian, a local chief, comes by with a wild story--a demon has stolen his grandson's skin and is wearing and he wants to borrow a rifle to slay the demon and rescue his grandson's hide.  Obviously the white men think this is a load of crap and the man's request for the rifle is refused.  But later Grayson comes upon the chief and sees he is skinning what looks to be a man, having killed "him "via an ambush.  When the chief is done skinning the figure, Grayson sees it is not a human, but a sort of blob monster covered in cilia that had put on the young Indian man's skin!  

The chief figures he has killed the monster, but it was only stunned, and it wakes up after the chief has separated it from his grandson's hide and runs off.

The middle part of the story is kind of clunky, with a poor action scene (it is too long, too slow and too confusing, so it is not thrilling or even interesting, just frustrating and annoying) and a contrived series of events that Williams needs, or thinks he needs, to set up his climax.  For some reason, natives attack with poison blow darts at the very moment the helicopter that brings supplies to Grayson and MacPherson arrives.  The helicopter pilot is killed, but the white men escape, taking cover in the chopper.  MacPherson thinks he can fly the thing, but he doesn't know what he is doing, and so his maiden flight ends abruptly with a crash landing on a hill.  Right there on the hill are ruins of an Egyptian temple or city or something that no white person has ever seen before.  G & MacP are amazed to find this evidence of an Egyptian colony or trading post or whatever in the new world, and we readers are irritated because this potentially engaging element of the story, just like the talk of psychoanalysis and psychedelic drugs, has no bearing whatsoever on the plot.  In the same way that the Westerners need not have been chemists for the plot to work, but could have been police officers or communist rebels or gold prospectors or mercenaries or anything, these ruins could have been those of Incas or Mayans or space aliens or a previously undiscovered race or civilization or anything--the blob monster is not from Egyptian mythology or anything like that.  A truly satisfying story is like a gem whose facets are all connected smoothly, not just a jumble of disparate things that have been piled together because they are each individually fun or interesting.

Our guys find a bottomless pit by an altar, and the chemists figure the blob monster came from there, and ancient people must have tossed sacrifices down the pit to appease it.  The blob monster, they theorize, is an immortal creature from a bazillion years ago that envies more evolved creatures that have a solid shape, and so it skins people and dons their skins in an effort to emulate their solidity.  The monster shows up clad in the chopper pilot's skin, and they fight it.  It escapes.  Grayson was injured in the crash, so MacPherson explores the bottomless pit alone.  The monster comes back in MacPherson's hide, and Grayson destroys it in its final battle.

The downbeat twist ending sees the Indian chief kill Grayson because he assumes Grayson is dead, and the creature he sees approaching him is not his pal Grayson but the blob monster in Grayson's skin.  Oops!  The Indians throw Grayson's body down the bottomless pit, for some reason.

I like this kind of story, and there are some good horrific passages, but because of the problems I have enumerated at perhaps unnecessary length above, "The Hide Hunters" is merely acceptable.

"Golden Trabant" by R. A. Lafferty

Here we have a fun little story, relatively simple and straightforward, that brought a smile to my face, though it is full of brutality and ends with true gruesomeness.  (The ending brought H. P. Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep" to mind.)  

It is the near future in which private individuals can buy space ships and prospect around the solar system.  The story follows some tough customers--cold businessmen and ruthless thieves--who bring on to the world market a vast quantity of gold that they mine from an asteroid.  Lafferty offers an amusing account of how the thieves, who have zero compunctions about committing murder, try to double cross each other, and how a massive influx of gold shakes the world economy, and how the establishment finally stabilizes the situation.  Lafferty succeeds in getting you to admire the ingenuity and sangfroid of at least some of these greedy bastards.

The humor works, the gore works, and there is real speculation here about the economy and politics of the future if you want to entertain it.  Thumbs up!  

"Golden Trabant" was reprinted in the various editions in English, Dutch and French of Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? and then in our own 21st century (in which ingenuity and sangfroid will serve you well) in Mad Man, the seventh volume of Centipede Press's series collecting Lafferty's short fiction.

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A good issue of If, so kudos to Fred Pohl.  This issue also features an installment of the serialized version of Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown's Earthblood (with fun monster and sexy lady illustrations by Wallace Wood), a novel I might get around to reading some day--you'll recall I enjoyed Brown's "David's Daddy" and Sibyl Sue Blue.

More short SF in our next episode.  Until next time, keep an eye out for shape shifters and opportunities to prospect for gold, world economy be damned!