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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Forgotten" by P. Schuyler Miller (1933)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We read Edmond Hamilton's Outlaw World back in 2014

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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