Weird Tales, Sept '41: R Bloch, T McClusky, D Quick and M W Wellman

The September 1941 issue of Weird Tales is full of material of interest to us here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  We've got multiple great illustrations by Hannes Bok as well as good ones from Boris Dolgov and Andrew Brosnatch.  In the letters column we find that a guy, prompted by Robert Bloch's story "Beauty's Beast," wrote in to explain aspects of Hindu philosophy; Bloch responds in warm-hearted but jocular fashion.  And we've got the fiction.  Highlighted on the cover is August Derleth's "Beyond the Threshold," which we read back in 2023, and thought was not bad.  But there's also work by Bloch, Thorp McClusky, Manly Wade Wellman, and Dorothy Quick which we haven't read yet, stories which after today will be woven into the fabric of the long winding history of MPorcius Fiction Log.

(We're skipping the Nelson S. Bond story, which I think is part of a long series of joke stories.  For my health I need to limit my intake of joke stories and I'm already running considerable risk by reading the Bloch story.)

"A Sorcerer Runs for Sheriff" by Robert Bloch

We might consider this a minor Bloch story; it looks like it has not been anthologized in English, and has only appeared in one Bloch collection, 1974's Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies.  You can find "A Sorcerer Runs for Sheriff" in the 1974 German anthology Exklusive Alpträume alongside works by, among others, H. G. Wells, Richard Matheson, and Dorothy Quick, whose "The Lost Gods," which we will soon read, appeared in both the September 1941 ish of WT and that German volume.

"A Sorcerer Runs for Sheriff" appeals to the reader's supposed disgust at obese people and envy of businesspeople.  Our narrator, a writer named Bob, hates Allan Wando, a factory owner who is fat and pays his workers low wages but is nevertheless "one of the most popular men in town."  I guess Bloch also means to appeal to WT readers' supposed alienation from society as a whole.  And their alienation from politics--Wando is going to run for public office and asks the narrator to write some speeches for him.  Bob refuses.

In a recursive inside-joke bit, Wando has a copy of the May 1941 issue of Weird Tales, and it has apparently inspired him to practice, or play at practicing, black magic.  One reason Wando is popular despite his obesity and sharp business practices is that he throws unusual, memorable, parties.  The narrator attends a party where Wando provides the dozen attendees wax voodoo dolls (he calls them "poppets" and ties them to European, not African, tradition) and paper and fabric with which to fashion hair and clothes so the dolls resemble Adolf Hitler--the party-goers will try to kill Hitler from the safety of this side of the Atlantic Ocean via black magic!  At once Wando and his twelve guests stab their dolls in the head, but it isn't der Fuehrer who dies, but one of the party goers, a sort of vapid and vain woman.  A doctor among the attendees declares it a cerebral hemorrhage, but our narrator notices one of the woman's hairs is stuck in the wax of the doll that their host Wando stabbed!  Hmmm...Wando doesn't seem to have made much effort to make his doll look like Hitler!  Is Wando a real sorcerer using black magic to destroy his enemies?

Sure enough, as the election gets going--Bob is writing speeches for a rival candidate of Wando's and the incumbent in this three man race--Wando is often seen in the company of three dark hook-nosed foreigners (Bob compares them to "mulattoes" and "Cab Calloway's orchestra"), and Bob discovers evidence that Wando has been trying to acquire some of the incumbent's hair!  

After the incumbent keels over, Wando begins making dolls of Bob and the candidate Bob is working for.  In a way I didn't quite find credible, Bob manages to switch the doll of himself made by Wando with a doll of Wando made by him (Bob), so when fat Wando, who I guess doesn't look at the doll closely, stabs it he himself, not thin Bob, dies.  Then Bob tosses the Wando doll in the fire and Wando's body melts as if it itself is wax.

This story is OK; maybe I would like it more if it was told from the point of view of the fat wizard or one of the dark hook-nosed foreigners and not a wisecracking scribbler who tells us ahead of time that we should hate Wando--in a better story we readers would learn to hate Wando by observing his actions.  (I'll note here that Bloch in real life in 1939 worked on a mayoral campaign in Milwaukee.) 

"The Music from Infinity" by Thorp McClusky

In September of 1777, after Boswell had explained to him how "musick" "agitate[s] my nerves painfully, producing in my mind alternate sensations of pathetick dejection...and of daring resolution," Dr. Johnson responded that "I should never hear it, if it made me such a fool."  I feel like we have read quite a few stories here at MPorcius Fiction Log that attest to the power of music to affect people, among them Carl Jacobi's "The Satanic Piano," Maria Moravsky's "The Soul of the Cello,"  Bloch's "The Fiddler's Fee," Charles Beaumont's "Night Ride," Barry Malzberg's "Concerto Academico," and no doubt a stack of others I am forgetting.  Well, here's another one, this one by Thorp McClusky.

Among anthologists, only Kurt Singer seems to have favored "The Music from Infinity," but he got it into a British book in 1974 and a German one in 1975, so he seems to have been doing his level best to expose McClusky's tale to the SF world.  And understandably so; "The Music from Infinity" is a moderately good story, McClusky successfully developing settings and moods and the story moving along at a good pace, presenting situations which are compelling to the reader.  The ending is likely an overreach, but the bulk of the piece is solid.

We've got a bunch of interlocking frame stories, which often bothers me but isn't so bad here.  Our narrator is a musician who visits a friend who lives in a boarding house occupied by middle-class bachelors, junior executives and guys like that.  The friend tells a story of a man who recently died, a nervous man he met here in the boarding house with whom he was briefly chummy.  This nervous dude hated hearing live piano music, and eventually explained why.  You see, he was married to a famous pianist who died suddenly, and she was haunting him!  Whenever he was within earshot of a piano, but couldn't actually see the instrument, he heard his wife's most famous song being performed in her signature style.  Nobody else could hear the ghost music, even though the music assumed the idiosyncratic nature of the instrument upon which it was being played (if the piano was out of tune, for example, the music he heard was out of tune in just that way.)  The city is full of bars and hotels and private homes with pianos, and the widower was hard pressed to find a place where he was far enough from a piano to escape this haunting.  Eventually this nervous wreck was confronted by a piano in a place he was not expecting to find one, and cracked up, admitting he murdered his wife because he was envious of her fame and shamed by her ability to make more money than he.

McClusky does a good job with all this material, but pushes a little too far, trying to add some additional supernatural oomph to his story, an effort that, in my opinion, actually weakens the story, undermining some of its best elements.  The narrator, a musician, and his friend, who has some minor psychic ability, are able to hear the music of the ghost at the moment when the murderer is executed, either because the ghost is celebrating her revenge or because at the moment of death the murderer's brain emits a psychic eruption.  Personally I think having other people hear the ghost music undermines the eeriness of the music element, and the idea that the wife is gloating to men she never met over her husband's execution makes little sense and renders her less sympathetic.

Still, a commendable effort.

"The Lost Gods" by Dorothy Quick

I've already mentioned that "The Lost Gods" was reprinted in the German anthology Exklusive Alpträume; Quick's story saw print again in its original language in the 2024 collection edited by S. T. Joshi, The Witch's Mark and Others.  

I feel like we've read quite a few stories about ancient lovers trying to reincarnate in the bodies of modern people and reunite,* and "The Lost Gods" is another of those.  Luckily, Quick's style is good, the emotions of the narrator feel real, there are cool images, the plot doesn't have any glaring holes, and the heroine is more than a victim of fate or destiny, making decisions and pursuing her own goals,  goals founded on natural human desires--this is a legitimately good story, so thumbs up for "The Lost Gods."

*Robert E. Howard's "People of the Dark," Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Eternal Lover, and C. L. Moore's "Tryst in Time" are the ones I can think of on short notice.   

Our narrator is a woman writer, Irene, interested in Cortez and the conquest of Mexico and related topics.  She gets engaged to Harvey, a handsome rich guy, but he is kind of a weirdo, and all Irene's family and social set are doubtful they should marry.  You see, this joker has dreams, all the time, of an impossibly beautiful woman, and is more or less in love with this dream woman.  Can he really love Irene if he has this mystery woman on his mind all the time?   Irene and Harvey do wed, but Irene has many a rough moment of doubt, in particular when she sees her husband's face one night while he dreams of the dream woman--his mug bears an expression of happiness that Irene has never seen before, a level of happiness she is not able to inspire in him!  Ouch!

The newlyweds go on their honeymoon to the jungles of Mexico to look at remote and ancient temples very few white people have ever seen.  In a sudden downpour they take refuge in a cave.  A landslide traps them in there, compelling them to explore deeper, and they discover a subterranean chamber with an altar built by a race of redheaded white people who predate the Mayans and Aztecs and have been almost entirety forgotten.  A painting of a handsome man and a beautiful woman adorns the wall--these are ancient gods and Harvey recognizes the goddess as the woman from his dreams!

Another landslide destroys the wall that bears this painting but offers our main characters a way out, and the visages of the lost gods are permanently etched in Irene and Harvey's minds, anyway.  The cave-in also exposes ancient jewelry of astronomical value.  Our heroes don this jewelry, putting Harvey in psychic contact with the lost god!  Back in America, the lost god directs Harvey to build in the Hamptons a modernistic mansion with glass walls and roof, and then coaches him on how to summon the god and goddess back to Earth!  What will be the outcome of the ancient ceremony Harvey and Irene perform in the mansion under the stars and above the sea?  Will the gods rise to the stars after thanking our heroes?  Or possess their bodies and exploit them?  Can our heroes survive the direct contact of mortal and divine?  And if they can, will their love endure?

A solid story I can definitely recommend.  One might see it as a traditional pre- or un-feminist women's romance story, with a plot centered on a woman's pursuit of a man's true love in the face of a battery of obstacles, but feminists might appreciate that the villain is male, the sympathetic lead male is a dupe, and a woman saves the day and achieves happiness through her own willpower and courage.  Also, because all the characters' actions seem totally logical based on their personalities and goals, "The Lost Gods" doesn't feel like it is trying to make an argument about sex roles or gender roles or any of that, but merely depicting how real people might act in an unlikely situation.  Contrast this with the Bloch and McClusky stories, which I like but are full of characters whose actions I found questionable--why did the fat businessman in Bloch's story kill the woman at the party, and why did he ask Bob to be his speech writer even though Bob hated him?  Why did the pianist in McClusky's story want the narrator, a man she had never met, to hear her celebrating her husband's execution?  We already have a hundred reasons to disbelieve stories that are full of ghosts and psychic powers and other ridiculous nonsense, so it is incumbent on the author of such stories to portray people acting in a natural manner if he or she wants us to take his or her story seriously at all, and Quick succeeds here where Bloch and McClusky come up a little short.

"The Half-Haunted" by Manly Wade Wellman 

"The Half-Haunted" is one of Wellman's stories about Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant, and appears here in Weird Tales under the Gans. T. Fields penname.  I wasn't crazy about the Pursuivant tale "The Dreadful Rabbits," but heyeah come da judge to MPorcius a second time regardless.

This is a pretty good supernatural terror story that seeks to take advantage of readers' interest in early American history (Wellman is of course a history buff and published historian) and, perhaps, early 1940s hostility to Germany.  And it takes place in the state where I was born, grew up, and attended university!  

Judge Pursuivant (whom Wellman reminds us is friends with Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin and Dr. Troubridge) wants to visit a purportedly haunted colonial house in New Jersey, greatest state in the Union.  He arrives at the house's remote address in early evening to find it has been demolished and sitting on the site is a modern home.  It is starting to snow, so the owner, a retired country newspaper editor, suggests the Judge stay the night.

The house owner and Pursuivant discuss the haunt and its origin.  During the War of Independence, one particularly ferocious Hessian mercenary, one of the most skilled of German hunters, served in the area.  According to legend, this psycho stripped naked and fought the colonists like a guerilla, murdering civilians as well as ambushing and sneak attacking uniformed rebel soldiers.  Two women who owned the house then sitting on this site conspired to destroy this Teutonic menace; posing as Loyalists, they invited the Hessian to dinner one day and stabbed him in the back as he sat at their table.  But the Hessian's ghost terrorized them, scaring one of the women into jumping out a window to her death; the other just died of fright on the spot.  Ever since, the ghost of the Hessian has haunted the place.  Destroying the house hasn't exorcized the spirit--most recently it has scared the retired newspaperman's servants away.

The Judge, using his wits and muscles and knowledge of exorcism spells you can say in English (convenient for those of us who lack Latin, Aramaic, and all those languages from before the sinking of Atlantis), battles the Hessian, whose spirit lives in the basement and can only haunt the half of the 20th-century house that lies over the colonial cellar.  (Hence the title.)  Wellman does a good job with all the supernatural images and the fighting--the ghost of the Hessian and the ghosts of the two women all behave appropriately and exhibit real emotion the reader can identify with.  Thumbs up for "The Half-Haunted." 

Kurt Singer, apparently a big fan of this issue of WT, included "The Half-Haunted" in his Ghost Omnibus, and you can also find it in the 2001 Wellman collection Fearful Rock and Other Precarious Locales.

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An issue with at least five stories worth reading and lots of memorable illustrations--kudos to Dorothy Stevens McIlwraith and all the contributors.  

Only one more issue stands between us and our goal of reading at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales with a 1941 cover date.  Stay tuned as we approach another milestone in our ambitious speculative fiction project!  And feel free to reminisce about all the years of Weird Tales we have already explored at the links below!  

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939   1940  

The Copulation Explosion by Gardner F. Fox

It looked like a cross between a man and a grizzly bear.  There was keen intelligence behind those grey eyes that stared at me so steadily.

I held out my hand, palm up. 

"Wait, please, I must talk to you, it's very important."

He ignored me, turning to run lightly off toward the woods.  I ran after him, slipping and sliding in my Palizzio pumps. 

Recently our man tarbandu pointed us to a 2024 interview of Betsy Wollheim by Darrell Schweitzer.  One of the many individuals subjected to withering assault in the course of the interview is Gardner F. Fox, a man perhaps most famous for his work at DC comics but also a prolific writer of unprestigious paperbacks.  This brought Fox back to mind; you may recall I read one of his science fiction paperbacks, Escape Across the Cosmos, back in 2015, and one of his sword and sorcery books, Kothar and the Wizard Slayer, in 2018.

Then, just a few days ago, bopping around twitter (AKA X, the everything app) looking at posts (I call them tweets) by people of whom Betsy Wollheim would no doubt disapprove, I saw the cover of a Fox novel written under the penname Rod Gray that featured a half-naked girl brandishing some kind of futuristic pistol.  This intriguing artifact was one of the two dozen or so The Lady from L.U.S.T titles, which I guessed was a series of sleaze paperbacks spoofing The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and James Bond and The Avengers and Danger Man and Secret Agent and all those hip fun 1960s espionage properties.  I decided to sample one of these silly-looking things, curious as to what extent their pages consisted of broad humor, hard core pornography, and actual SF or thriller content, and wondering how much much effort Fox put into them, where they fell on the range from terribly shoddy to somewhat credible.  Most of the Lady from L.U.S.T novels seemed to have as their foundational material stuff I find boring, like cops chasing drug dealers or motorcycle gangs, so I settled on volume 14, The Copulation Explosion, which promised to deal with the kinds of science fiction and horror themes I find engaging.

I read a scan of an edition of The Copulation Explosion printed in 1974 by Belmont Tower that bears number 50678 and a blonde model gripping a long-barreled pistol.  The cover that enticed me to read The Copulation Explosion, however, is that of what I believe is the first edition, printed by Belmont in 1970 and featuring a man in a gorilla costume and a blonde model wearing a revolver.  I found my free scan of the real life '74 BT paperback at the Gardner F. Fox website, where they sell electronic versions of all the The Lady from L.U.S.T. titles and piles of other Fox fiction besides.

The Copulation Explosion begins as legit science fiction with a prologue in the third person about a guy waking up in a dark room, his memory almost entirely gone, his body very unfamiliar.  He realizes his body has been radically altered, and we readers realize the red cover edition of The Lady from L.U.S.T. #14 that convinced me to read this thing was selling us a bill of goods.  The scientists didn't turn this guy into a gorilla, but gave him the powers of a multitude of animals, like superior sight, hearing and smell as well as great strength and agility, and he doesn't think about rape even once, just uses his animal abilities to escape the facility he is in without seriously harming anybody.

The text of The Copulation Explosion is punctuated by several short chapters like the prologue in which we see things more or less from the point of view of the altered man.  But most of the text is a first-person narrative delivered by Eve Drum, secret agent of the US government agency known as the League of Underground Spies and Terrorists.  The childishly silly name of the spy agency is, like the lame pun title of the book, one of the rare pieces of broad humor in the novel.  The Copulation Explosion is light-hearted and silly, but there are relatively few jokes and Fox's book doesn't feel like a satire or a spoof, but a poorly constructed but sincere science fiction story, one with both a Frankenstein theme and an alien invasion theme, to which long gratuitous sex scenes have been bolted on.  When Fox engages in social criticism, it is not with sarcasm or irony or righteous passion but with straightforward lectures or statements about how pollution is a problem, overpopulation is a problem, a modern society should embrace homosexuality, and religion is hypocrisy.  We also get weak but sincere science lectures.

As for the sex scenes, they depict casual sexual encounters meant to be sweet and life affirming; the sex in The Copulation Explosion is not edgy or perverse or fetishistic, but tame and even wholesome--there is no rape and the only bestiality is in a dream.  Fox gets into a lot of sex philosophy, referring with specificity to the erotic techniques of the East and suggesting sex represents healthy human efforts to achieve spiritual connection.  The sex scenes are also totally gratuitous, being totally divorced from the plot--Eve doesn't seduce a guy to get the secret plans or anything like that, and none of the characters' actions are determined by their desire for love or sex or reaction to a sexual encounter.

The Copulation Explosion is poorly constructed and the pacing is not good; there is little tension, the narrative doesn't build up to much of a climax, and in addition to the gratuitous sex scenes we get a lot of superfluous visual description of clothes, landscapes, rooms; maybe Fox is trying to emulate or gently spoof the high fashion and high-class and exotic locales of cool spy fiction like the James Bond novels and films.  Of course, endless images of women's curves, expensive attire, autumn foliage, a muscular monster and a shiny spaceship work better in a visual medium like a film or a comic book than in a novel.  

The action scenes are perfunctory.  The sex scenes are OK, though sweet vanilla rather than nasty or raunchy.  The plot is full of holes and reminiscent of a comic book or children's TV show--when a monster is on the loose or aliens attack, the government and society just kind of look on as two or three main characters handle the situation.  The plot doesn't feel like it was outlined beforehand, doesn't feel like a coherent whole that pursues some theme or makes some argument, but just a bunch of stuff cobbled together.  Characters  are introduced in the beginning and disappear without having played any role in the plot and new characters arrive near the end to occupy necessary roles as required.  

I can't recommend The Copulation Explosion, but it is not terrible; I didn't find it annoying, just bland.  I found the novel's idiosyncrasies, like all the references to brand name clothes and to women's bodies, faintly amusing rather than irritating, though perhaps anti-consumerism and feminist types might find this exasperating.  I certainly don't regret exploring another cranny of the vast field of genre literature.  We'll call The Copulation Explosion barely acceptable--I didn't find the experience of reading a The Lady from L.U.S.T. novel painful, but I doubt I'm not going to read any others.

For a blow by blow summary and additional criticism of this tepid and forgettable sex and spy and sci-fi novel, read on.

**********     

Eve's case officer is apparently her boyfriend, and in Chapter One he briefs her on the next phase of her career at L.U.S.T. while they are on a date at a fancy restaurant and then at her place having sex in at times unusual positions ("el keuruchi" of the "Arab erotologists" and "love glove...a position we'd stumbled into quite by accident.")  Eve is being transferred from International to Science because some researchers have lost their prize specimen, a man named Kenneth Frost, AKA the Un-human, and asked the head of L.U.S.T., a guy called "The General," for the aid of their best agent--Eve is of course the General's top operative.

(Even though we are given the idea that Eve and the case officer are going steady and in love, we never see him again--when Eve interacts with HQ in the future, it is directly with The General, and when she celebrates the salvation of Earth from space aliens and mourns the self-sacrificing death of Frost it is with some other guy with a joke name whom she just met.  A conventional novel would provide some kind of resolution for such a relationship after devoting several pages to setting it up.)  

Frost had been given only six months to live by the doctors, so he consented to being a guinea pig for experiments involving injecting humans with the glands and hormones of animals, an exploration of the possibilities of providing astronauts with abilities that might facilitate their survival on other planets.  When Frost died they put him in cold storage, but it seems he was only in a coma--one benefit conferred upon him by the injections was great durability and he woke up after some kind of transformation and escaped into the nearby wilderness.

As perhaps we might expect of a comic book guy, Copulation Explosion is a very visual novel, with many descriptions of people's bodies and attire, and not just all the sexy women but also the men and Frost the Un-human, his golden fur and pointy ears and so forth.  In Chapter Two, when Eve starts her investigations up in Pennsylvania at the Bionics Research Institute, we get full descriptions of fall foliage and 18th-century buildings as well as of female scientist Rhea and a mysterious woman who claims to be Mrs. Frost.  We get science lectures as Rhea and the male scientists explain to Eve and Mrs. Frost, whom Eve and Rhea suspect is some kind of imposter and spy, the Institute's work and what they did to Ken Frost.  All through the lectures "Mrs. Frost" is flirting and showing off her body, trying to manipulate the men, who suspect she is just a gold digger trying to get her hands on the Frost estate, which is worth a pretty sum, Frost himself having been a successful scientist.           

One of the male scientists is a thirty-something virgin, and Chapter Three is devoted to Eve and this guy having what amounts to a pleasant date; they eat a nice meal and then Eve introduces him to physical love, basing their activities on a Chinese pillow book.  (I recall a pillow book playing a prominent role in You Only Live Twice, and wonder if Fox was inspired by Ian Fleming to include so much pillow book material here.)

The morning after his first exposures to the joys of sex, that scientist is murdered--Eve suspects the mysterious "Mrs. Frost."  There is a car chase, Rhea behind the wheel of her Mustang (this book is full of fashionable brand names) with Eve in the passenger seat and the purported wife of Frost and suspected killer in her Camaro.  The bogus Mrs. Frost tries to shoot our heroines but Frost the Un-human himself bursts out of the woods and joins the car chase--he can run 80mph on clear ground.  Frost kills the imposter in the brief fourth chapter, one of those written in the third person.

(Later it is revealed that this Mrs. Frost was an alien spy.)

Eve tries to communicate with Frost and the seven-foot tall man-beast, whom Eve describes as being like a giant teddy bear, grabs her and carries her off to a cabin.  Then to a nuclear power plant, which he sabotages with a ray gun.  Frost can't speak, but through gestures he tries to tell Eve something important, apparently that space aliens or a meteor shower are threatening the Earth.  They go to a cave.  Fox describes the cave, as he did the cabin, in superfluous detail, and Eve works at teaching Frost how to speak.  But then hunters catch up to the couple (the text suggests that Fox and his editor think a rifle and a shotgun are one and the same thing, tsk, tsk) and Frost flees, leaving Eve behind.  

In Chapter Six, Eve hitches a ride from a hunter back to where she is staying, at Rhea's house, where she has lesbian sex with Rhea.  As with the male scientist, the tone or theme of this sex scene is Eve generously educating and comforting a sex starved individual, and Fox again throws around italicized foreign terms for body parts and sexual techniques.  Fox takes the opportunity of a lesbian tryst to tell us that due to its familiarity with science and greater intelligence, today's society is more sympathetic to homosexuality, and also to take a cursory swipe at religion.  

Having telephoned him before getting busy with Rhea, Eve returns to New York to talk to The General face to face.  While she is in his office the biggest news event in history occurs--an alien spaceship approaches Earth!  Fox namechecks "Hugo Gernsbach" and Thomas More as Eve wonders if the aliens will create a utopia on Earth.  But then she remembers that Frost the Un-human was trying to warn her that the aliens were dangerous!  The chapter ends with the huge silver cube that is the alien craft landing in Washington D.C., with Eve and the boss of L.U.S.T. among the teeming crowds gathered to witness the event.

In Chapter Seven the aliens emerge to meet the President and they are just like humans, the men looking like Hollywood actors and the women looking like Playboy bunnies.  Frost, who after all can run at 80mph, bursts onto the scene, mauls one of the male aliens and is shot by the Secret Service but manages to run off.  Brief Chapter Eight is one of those the third person chapters, and in it we learn that the Un-human wrecked the nuclear power station because the aliens were drawing energy from it to their cube ship because the cube's power source was temporarily down.  

In Chapter Nine, Eve finds Frost in his hideaway in the Pennsylvania mountains near the Bionics Research Institute, wounded.  Through pantomime, somehow, the Un-human explains to Eve everything she needs to know about the aliens of the silver cube.  These jokers are are not in fact human at all, but able to manipulate their "molecular structure" so they look human.  Their home planet is overcrowded ("same as Earth," thinks Eve), so they plan to colonize ours.  The silver cube includes the equipment to alter Earth's atmosphere so it will kill us and more comfortably suit them.  

Frost's injuries fester and he lapses into delirium and then a coma, but not before the sight of Eve undressing gives him a colossal erection, the biggest Eve has ever seen--and she's seen quite a few!  Eve resists the powerful urge to relieve the Un-human's sexual tension, but having sex with the seven-foot tall, six-hundred-pound hairy hunk of muscle is certainly on her mind--she dreams about just such a coupling at night.

Eve gets the unconscious beast-man to the Institute and she watches as they operate on him.  Then she saves him by shooting down with her Belgian Bulldog revolver an alien, disguised as a human doctor, who is trying to poison Frost.  Dead, the imposter reverts to BEM form.

Chapter Ten is another Frost chapter, a longer one.  Frost, inspired by the sight of Eve's naked body, remembers his last sexual encounter and we get a flashback sex scene featuring a lonely five-foot-three scientist and a lonely overweight waitress, a sex scene into which Fox integrates musings about "the Eternal Plan" of which we are all part, how all men and women are lonely and seek through love and sex to reunite with a missing part of themselves, and how the sex act represents the male desire to return to the womb.      

In Chapter Eleven, Eve convinces her boss to assign to her a man to test the air around the spaceship.  Sure enough, after some misleading readings and a lot of time spent flirting, the technician, who bears the name Ted White (one of Fox's little jokes), discovers the aliens are trying to poison us.  The alien command team is staying not in the cube but in a fancy hotel, and Eve goes there and shoots them down with her revolver.  Eve also figures out the mystery of how Frost learned about the aliens' plans--his injections somehow conferred upon him telepathic powers and he fortuitously picked up the aliens' own psychic transmissions.

In Chapter Twelve the military tries to destroy the poison-spewing silver cube, but it is impervious to all Earth weapons.  Frost the Un-human appears and with the alien ray gun boards the cube.  He proceeds to fly off with it and dive right into the sun.  The novel ends with Ted White and Eve eating a meal at a fancy restaurant and then having sex, but we readers are denied an explicit sex scene with Ted.

Weird Tales, July 1941: R Cummings, R M Farley and M W Wellman

As you know too well, I am trying to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales printed in the 1940s, having already read at least one story from each 1930s ish of the unique magazine.  Today we look at the July 1941 issue.  I praised the last issue we looked at, May '41, for the many fine Hannes Bok illustrations it contained, and this July issue has a Bok cover with two masterly human figures--I love their faces and hair, their long necks and wacky futuristic attire--but the robot, I am afraid, looks kind of silly.  Students of Weird Tales illustration may also be interested to see this issue's interior illos by Margaret Brundage, famous for the female nudes and near-nudes that graced WT's covers so often during the period of Farnsworth Wright's editorship--D. McIlwraith's reign saw a decline in the blatant use of sexuality to appeal to readers, at least in the illustrations.     

Almost six years ago I read the Clark Ashton Smith story from this number of McIlwraith's magazine, "The Enchantress of Sylaire," but there are three more stories from this July 1941 issue that I have my beady little eyes on.  Let's check them out!

"The Robot God" by Ray Cummings

The last time we saw Cummings he was regaling us with the exploitation tale of a Canadian driven to rape and murder by a head injury.  (Insert hockey joke here.)  Maybe today's Cummings production, the menace of which appears not to be one of A. E. van Vogt and Norm MacDonald's countrymen but the cousins of your constant companions and indispensable helpmeets Alexa, Siri and Grok, is a little more respectable.

Ouch.  Frederik Pohl in his memoir The Way the Future Was said Cummings was a nice guy but trashed the man's writing, and ugh, "The Robot God" is a strong piece of evidence that backs Pohl's harsh criticism, Cumming's style here being irritatingly bad.  One of Cumming's tricks is to fill the story with sentence fragments, just nouns with adjectives, no verbs, I guess to add drama and paint images, but these fragments are just annoying.

Carter stared at the group of buildings. A dozen of them, one or two as large as a hundred feet, others smaller. Weird metal structures. Some were unfinished; others seemingly hastily or inexpertly put together. Crazy, drunken structures.

Cummings also repeats the same words again and again and piles on superfluous visual details.

The style is probably the worst aspect of "The Robot God," but the characters, action scenes, pacing, and structure also leave much to be desired, being poor at best.  The plot, while acceptable in outline, is banal.  A weak start to this issue of Weird Tales!  Thumbs down!

Oh yeah, the plot.  It is the 25th century, the human race has colonized Mars and Venus, and recently a great scientist has perfected robots that seem to have real intelligence and feeling.  That scientist, Dynne, and his daughter, Dierdre the beautiful blue-eyed blonde, are flying to Mars from Earth to meet with a manufacturer of robots on the red planet.  Also on the commercial passenger ship is a good-looking blond guy, chemist Carter, who is being transferred by his employer, a mining company, to Mars.  Carter is courting Dierdre.  We've also got Carter's assistant and Dynne's head subordinate, a brilliant hunchbacked engineer, a genius who lives like a recluse because he is so ugly. 

These passenger ships have been disappearing lately, and on this voyage Carter and Dierdre find out why--the new emotional robots are hijacking the ships and taking them to their asteroid base, where they are ruled by a robot they worship as a god and where the ships' human passengers and crew work as slaves.  Their vessel suffers this very fate.  The god robot takes a liking to Dierdre, adding a note of bizarre eroticism to the story, giving it some faint stirrings of life, you might say.  The robot god puts Dierdre in a robot body with various controls for her to manually operate--she is to be the goddess of the robots, but only the god will know she is a flesh and blood human.

The robot god holds a big ceremony where he introduces the robots' new goddess to his metal worshipers, but Dierdre flubs the controls and the machine falls over and a hatch opens, revealing to the robot hordes that their purported goddess is a sham, one of the humans they have been taught to hate!  The robots go berserk, murdering human women and children in their rage, Cummings giving us some real exploitation gore.  Of course, none of the robots tries to murder Dierdre, even though that would be the reaction you would expect--she's the female lead, after all. 

The robot god grabs up Dierdre and runs off.  Somehow Carter and his assistant catch up to the robot god and outfight it with their bare hands without hurting Dierdre.  None of the action scenes in "The Robot God" make any sense, the robots being invincible when the plot requires it and vulnerable when the plot requires that, humans being casually killed if they are nobodies and spared if Carter or Dierdre.  

Anyway, Carter opens up the god and finds the hunchback inside--like the goddess, the god was not an autonomous robot but a sort of vehicle.  Carter kills the lonely and horny deformed genius and he, Dierdre, and his assistant hop in a space ship and escape to Earth.  All the other humans on the asteroid are massacred.  Carter and Dierdre get married and become luddites, living a 20th-century lifestyle in tropical seclusion.

This hunk of junk, though a cover story of one of the most important genre magazines in history, has never been reprinted.

"I Killed Hitler" by Ralph Milne Farley

Remember when we read that story by Farley which Isaac Asimov condemned in the pages of Amazing because it was insufficiently respectful of the Soviet Union?  Well, this time Farley takes up Nazi Germany as his subject.  I wonder if Asimov read "I Killed Hitler;" in Before the Golden Age, Asimov denounces Weird Tales and its imitators, so probably not.

"I Killed Hitler" is a somewhat silly piece of work, but it excited my curiosity and held my interest, so I guess I have to give it a mildly positive review.

Our narrator is a self-important jerk, an artist in Provincetown, Mass.  His fellow Americans, a bunch of "money-grubbers," have not recognized his genius, but he has a fan in a Hindu swami who lives nearby.

Our narrator is a distant cousin of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany, and is full of hate for the warmongering tyrant--why is that talentless hack famous and powerful while our skilled and sensitive narrator is unknown?  And now our guy has to put his career as a painter on hold because the war Hitler has started has led our guy being drafted!  He tells the swami that all the diplomats who tried to make deals with Hitler should have just murdered the man during a meeting and spared the world this crisis--our narrator would have done it, he claims!

The Hindu uses his Eastern sorcery to send the narrator back in time to 1899, to Europe, so he can murder the boy Hitler.  Of course, the swami warns our guy that you can't really change history, but who listens to such warnings?  The narrator tracks down ten-year-old Hitler and after winning the lonely little boy's confidence takes him out to the woods to strangle him.  But when the narrator returns to the present day he finds that he is the dictator of Germany and is on the eve of launching an invasion of the United States!  The Hitler regime and World War II are inevitable--even a time traveler cannot prevent major events, just slightly alter the circumstances that give rise to them.

I have a weakness for the unreliable narrator thing and for narrators who are villains, when an author sort of dares the reader to sympathize with a misbehaving character, creating a sort of tantalizing tension.  All the swami and time travel stuff is shoddy, but time travel stuff generally is.  The murder of a child is gross exploitation material, of course, but unlike in Cummings' story, when a robot bashes out the brains of a nameless little girl, here in Farley's story the murder of a child has some dramatic and psychological weight, as the murderer is the main character and the victim is a person we know all about--the murder is a challenge to the reader, not merely an appeal to sadism or the childish joy of being shocked, and generates some of that tension I mentioned earlier.       

"I Killed Hitler" was included in the 1950 Farley collection Omnibus of Time.

"It All Came True in the Woods" by Manly Wade Wellman

Of the three writers we are reading today, I'm pretty sure Wellman has the best critical reputation, so maybe we are in for a treat here.  "It All Came True in the Woods" had to wait until our own wild and crazy 21st century to be reprinted, however.

Well, of today's three stories, "It All Came True in the Woods" is the best written, its style perfectly suited to its author's goals.  But the plot is a little banal, and the story as a whole sappy and sentimental--"It All Came True in the Woods" is largely about the beautiful relationship between a father and daughter and the power of imagination and the nobility of Native Americans and that sort of jazz, though it has some real horror moments.

Dad and six-year-old girl are taking a walk in the woods.  These woods, according to Indian lore, are magical--anything you say in them will come true.  The daughter asks about giants and Dad describes giants, but to make sure his daughter doesn't get scared, he tells her giants hate tobacco smoke so his pipe smoking will drive them off should any appear.  (Ugh, pipe smoking also drives me off.)  Sure enough, giants appear.  Dad, stunned, drops his pipe.  He tells his daughter to hide and he attracts the monsters' attention and runs off.  The giants follow, catch him, and start a fire with which to cook Dad.  Dad is just about to be spitted when daughter appears to save the day, smoking Dad's pipe and blowing smoke at the giants, causing them to flee.

This story is a success, even if it is not really to my taste, so we'll call it acceptable but admit that, by an objective measure, it is probably the best of today's three tales.  And how many stories feature a six-year-old girl smoking a pipe?  🤮

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Our campaign to sample every 1940s issue of Weird Tales advances another step!  I also feel like each of these three stories serves as a piece in the sprawling jigsaw puzzle that is the history of science fiction and fantasy--we're doing more than just putting one foot in front of the other here, we are putting flesh on the bones of the grand story of speculative literature in the English-speaking world.  (I offer these lofty assessments of this blog post and its fellows because next time we convene we are probably going to be reading absolute garbage.)

Weird Tales, May 1941: Counselman, Jacobi, Bloch & Derleth

The May 1941 issue of Weird Tales is like a monument to the genius of Hannes Bok, with a Bok cover and an interior chockablock with Bok illustrations of horrible monsters and alluring ladies.  So this issue of D. McIlwraith's magazine is already getting the MPorcius Seal of Approval even before I read any of the fiction.  This issue is important historically because it marks the first appearance of H. P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, a good piece of work I have read multiple times but don't feel like reading again.  In the letters column, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei provide an essay about Lovecraft's working methods and the story of how Charles Dexter Ward came to see print here in WT--this essay is pretty interesting.  In the Weird Tales Club column we find a missive from a pseudonymous Forrest J. Ackerman promoting the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society; advertising in WT works!--the LASFS is, we are told at wikipedia, "the oldest continuously operating science fiction club in the world."  Plus--a poem by Robert Heinlein's second wife!  An exciting issue of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual!

Now our focus, four pieces of fiction by people we have been reading here at MPorcius Fiction Log for some time.

"Drifting Atoms" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

This will be our eighth Counselman story.  Of the seven we have already read (links below), I think I only liked one-- again we are witnesses to the triumph of hope over experience.

"The Unwanted"
"The Black Stone Statue"
"Twister"
"The Girl with the Green Eyes"
"The Cat-Woman"
"Mommy" 
"The Web of Silence"

"Drifting Atoms" is an acceptable cosmic horror story; to be specific, by "cosmic horror" I mean the characters learn the true nature of the universe and it drives them insane.  There is also some ancillary racism in the story, which adds some kind of historical value, I guess.

Five childhood friends, now middle-class professionals, regularly meet to play poker and shoot the shit.  They are all kind of interested in the supernatural and esoteric.  Tonight, one of them talks about how all the universe is nothing but atoms, that different materials are just the same atoms arranged differently.  He suggests that the power of the mind is what keeps a chair a chair, a stone a stone, a man a man, implying that he means the mind of God or some similar creator figure, but also suggesting that we mere mortals ourselves have a tiny spark of that divine mind and thus a modest ability to arrange atoms.

Counselman's story is long and the action takes place over a succession of meetings with lots of dialogue full of speculations and lots of descriptions of how the men are sweating or jittery and so forth as they investigate the nature of the universe.  One of the guy's uncles, who ended up in an asylum, had a collection of occult books and guy produces one such volume one night and reading it inspires the men to hold something like a seance in which they sit at a table and concentrate in an effort to make a gold watch materialize on the table.  Their first effort succeeds in making a spot on the table warm.  Then they decide to have a witness for their second attempt and summon a black delivery boy to the apartment.  Behind his back they call this young man a "darky" and a "nig" and say that black people are "very sensitive, like dogs."  Sure enough, the "Negro" sees a gold watch on the table after the men concentrate on trying to conjure one up, though it vanishes soon after they cease concentrating.

The idea that we are mere atoms that, should God's mind wander, could fly apart into nothing at any moment, has a negative effect on the men's psychology and one ends up in the loony bin and another commits suicide by jumping into traffic.  The survivors continue the experiments, and the fear that they might succeed, that soon people the world over will be creating out of thin air ersatz objects and even people (of course men will use this power to conjure their dream girls) with their minds, drives one of them to murder the others to save the world from a nightmare paradigm shift. 

Long and slow, but not actually bad.  "Drifting Atoms" would be reprinted in 1990 in the anthology When the Black Lotus Blooms.  For that edition, like it was a John Lennon boxed set, "Drifting Atoms" was edited to remove slurs used to describe black people, as well as the word "Negro," and the men suggest that "some kids are very sensitive, like dogs."  This is your reminder to consult primary sources if you truly want to learn about the past.  Armchair Press reprinted the story in 2022 in their collection of Counselman stories, Hostess of Horror and Fantasy, which I do not have access to, so I don't know if in this 21st-century appearance "Drifting Atoms" has been sanitized for your protection.    

"The Phantom Pistol" by Carl Jacobi

I think I've read fourteen Jacobi stories; oh, that's a lot of links.    

"The Face in the Wind" 
"The Elcar Special"
"The Chadwick Pit"
"The White Pinnacle" 
"The Street That Wasn't There" (with Clifford Simak) 
"Revelations in Black" 
"A Pair of Swords"  
"The Cane" 
"The Satanic Piano" 
"The Gentleman is an Epwa" 
"Spawn of Blackness"

"The Devil Deals"

"Death Rides the Plateau"

"Made in Tanganyika"

"The Phantom Pistol" is an OK werewolf story, straightforward and more or less competent.  It would be reprinted in the 20th century in the Jacobi collection Revelations in Black as well as a few European anthologies; in our own 21st century it has reappeared in Jacobi collections put out by Weird House Press and Centipede Press.

Our narrator is a British guy who collects old books.  He makes a new friend, a guy who collects old pistols.  I'm afraid Jacobi's writing suggests he doesn't know much about firearms, using the words "revolver" and "pistol" interchangeably and offering a description of a guy loading a 1712 pistol that feels all mixed up.  Anyway, pistol guy buys a decrepit old house in a decayed part of the country and book guy goes to visit him.  The narrator finds the villagers all agitated because a wolf or dog has been killing their kids.

The pistol collector is excited to show his bookish friend that he has recently purchased a fancy early 18th-century pistol.  Amazingly, this very pistol is described in the gift that book guy has brought his pal, an old book on firearms.  The pistol in question, according to the old book, was crafted specifically to destroy werewolves for a continental who had been the victim of a werewolf attack.  The firearms expert should have figured this out himself, seeing as the pistol has silver bullets in its case and "Death to the werewolf" inscribed on its barrel, but I guess the print is small and in German besides--give pistol guy a break, he's a Latinist, not a Germanist!  The realization that this gun was built to exterminate lycanthropes seems to upset the firearms collector.

Soon after, book guy finds a bunch of books in the house, all of them about the occult.  One volume is about how to become a werewolf, and includes notes in English and Latin indicating the firearms collector has indulged in Satanic rituals and become a werewolf.  People in these stories always commit some monstrous deed and then explicitly make a record of their crimes right where some other guy can find it.

In my opinion, a strong way of ending the story would be for the book collector to realize he has a duty to God and society to destroy his friend and pursue that weighty task, overcoming or failing to overcome his attachment to his buddy; maybe he does the right thing, maybe he joins his friend in becoming a monster, maybe he gets killed by his friend.  Instead, Jacobi has unseen forces, presumably God or maybe the spirit of the man who had the pistol made, compel the narrator against his will to load the special gun and blast his friend as he comes home, mouth dripping with the blood of children.  The narrator even succeeds in convincing the authorities that the firearms collector accidentally shot himself while cleaning the pistol, so the book collector doesn't have to pay any price for killing his friend.  Taking away a character's agency and liberating him from responsibility for his actions is not good drama, Carl!         

The more I think about "The Phantom Pistol" the less I like it.  Still, it remains within the broad range of "acceptable."

"Beauty's Beast" by Robert Bloch 

I've read over one hundred stories by Robert Bloch.  One day I should do a post on Bloch with a list of links to all my now many posts about his work and maybe a list of my top ten favorite Bloch stories, but today is not that day.

"Beauty's Beast" starts off with a reference to the Smith Brothers, which might not land today, and a series of jokes that work because they are about human relationships and not the lame puns I associate with Bloch's sense of humor.  Our narrator is going steady with Peg, a vapid woman who dominates him.  Walking down the street with our narrator, Peg is enticed into a pet shop by the sight of a puppy; once inside, the "Hindu" proprietor, who tells them that all the animals he sells are sacred in one Eastern religion or other, convinces Peg, perhaps by hypnotism, to buy a monkey (with the narrator's money, of course.)  At a party it comes out that numerous women in their circle have recently purchased pets suggested by this Hindu.

The story progresses and we and Peg and the narrator realize that the Hindu is an evil wizard whose pets steal the souls of the women he sells them to--the women fall dead and the comes around to collect the snake or dog or monkey or bird, which is now inhabited by the woman's consciousness.  Is Peg doomed to be trapped in the body of a monkey?  Can the wizard be defeated?  Will Peg's friend, a woman whose soul has apparently been imprisoned in the body of a cobra, achieve revenge on the diabolical subcontinental?  We get a somewhat apocalyptic climax, the final confrontation taking place during a torrential downpour and flood that destroys the pet shop and all evidence of these incredible goings-on.

I can mildly recommend this one--you know I like stories about difficult sexual relationships and about black magic, and "Beauty's Beast" is pretty well put together stylistically and structurally.  "Beauty's Beast" would be reprinted in the several editions of The Living Demons and in a 1970s French collection of Bloch stories, Parlez-moi d'horreur....

"Altimer's Amulet" by August Derleth 

"Altimer's Amulet" appeared in the Derleth collection Someone in the Dark in the same year it was printed here in Weirds Tales, and would go on to be the title story of a 1985 French collection of Derleth stories.

We had a dangerous Hindu in Bloch's tale and here Derleth delivers more weird menace from the mysterious East.  But while Counselman portrays a nonwhite as an inferior to be dismissed and Bloch offers a devilish nonwhite figure, and in both stories whites are essentially innocent, Derleth's depiction of nonwhites and whites in "Altimer's Amulet" is more of the exploitative-white-imperialist-gets-an-eerie-comeuppance-at-the-hands-of-the-inexplicable-other variety.

Altimer, the well-known explorer, a man of curiosity and ambition, returns to London with an amulet he stole from a Tibetan temple.  To get the artifact, he bribed some priests and sneaked in clad in a disguise and armed with some kind of dagger or sword, I suppose.  When the Tibetan charged with protecting the amulet tried to stop Altimer, the Englishman outfought this guardian, cutting off both of the man's hands at the wrist before escaping with the treasure.

Altimer hopes to be knighted for his exploit and for gifting the amulet to the British Museum.  But he hasn't gotten out of his Oriental adventure scot-free, it turns out.  A package comes in the mail--the head of one of the priests he bribed!  The protectors of the amulet are on to him!  Another Englishman, an expert on the mysterious East, warns Altimer repeatedly to return the amulet.  Altimer refuses, and, sure enough, the severed hands of the man Altimer outfought come after him, retrieving the amulet and strangling the explorer.  The punchline of the story is the suggestion that the king had never even noticed Altimer nor heard about the amulet until after Altimer's mysterious death and the amulet's disappearance--Altimer ran the risks that ultimately led him to an early grave pointlessly.

A competent piece of work, maybe we can call it a mildly good filler piece?

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None of today's four stories is a failure, but none is spectacular, either.  Bloch's is probably the best, with Derleth's in second place; Bloch and Derleth commit no blunders and Bloch's humor, relationships and images are pretty good, actually generating some feeling in the reader.  Jacobi makes what I would consider a bunch of mistakes as well as poor choices in his story, and Counselman's tale is too long and slow.  I think I enjoyed Jacobi's more than Counselman's while I was reading it, as it moves at a good pace, but, looking back, Counselman's plot holds together better--the characters behave logically and people's fates are determined by their personalities and decisions, so the ending is satisfying, and Counselman is ambitious, putting forth a whole philosophy of how the universe works and speculating on how learning how the universe operates might affect human society and individual people.  So we've got Counselman in third place.

An above average issue of Weird Tales.  How will the July 1941 issue compare?  Stay tuned to find out!

The Empty People by Barry N. Malzberg

"There is no science in it at all, merely cheap jargon, cheap tricks, old shuffling; a wink here, a dance there, all of it shaped only toward one end and that the most drastic of all because we give it no name.  But enough.  Enough of this."

I've owned my copy of Lancer's 1969 The Empty People, one of Barry Malzberg's earlier novels, published under the transparent pseudonym "K. M. O'Donnell," for over two years, having purchased it in Rockville, MD in early June of 2023, as chronicled on X, the everything app!  Today we crack open this decaying volume to see that it is dedicated to Malzberg's daughter and parents, and to science fiction editors Edward L. Ferman, Harry Harrison, Robert P. Hoskins and Frederik Pohl, and to read its 159 pages.  Should you want to read along, feel free to surf over to ebay and acquire your own 56-year-old paperback by forking over four or five times as many shekels as I put into the palms of the hipsters and nerds of Rockville, but you can just hunt around online--I think you'll find a copy you can read on the same screen you are looking at right now for the same amount you pay me to explore the glories of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Joachim Boaz blogged about The Empty People back in 2014 but I promise I don't remember what he said; after I've drafted my own take here I'll read his and respond to it at the end of this post.

Malzberg, of course, is a failed literary writer who, initially at least, wanted a career more like Saul Bellow's or Vladimir Nabokov's than Robert Heinlein's or Isaac Asimov's, and chapter one of The Empty People is all about typical mainstream mid-century literary concerns--we've got unfaithful childless suburban housewife Della Archer who feels unfulfilled; everybody tells her she is very smart, so she could have had some big career, but didn't, and maybe if she had children they would give her life meaning, but she is sterile.  Malzberg is also a critic of science fiction with a broad and deep knowledge of the field, and chapter one is very "meta," with our housewife being captured by saucer-flying aliens during their invasion (which leaves New York City in flaming ruins) and thrust into a cell stocked with a fulsome supply of sleaze and science fiction paperbacks.  The captive Della has nothing to do but read the books, giving Malzberg a chance to voice the opinion (his own or a parody of critics'?) that science fiction is a bunch of nonsense.

At least one other person has been put in solitary confinement with stacks of books by the invaders, whom one prisoner believes are called "Keepers" because they are keeping all the human race imprisoned, or because they are the most clever and advanced of the many races throughout the galaxy and are dedicated to keeping the peace.  (And don't overlook the possible Biblical reference.)  Others come to believe that the invaders are known as the X'Ching (Malzberg spoofing the I'Ching?), sadistic natives of our solar system who mercilessly crush any other rising civilization in the system.  

The guy who calls the invaders "the Keepers" Malzberg calls "the Poet;" his memory has almost entirely been erased by the aliens.  His cell is chock full of poetry books, so he figures E.T. wants him to write a poem.  The man struggles to come up with some good verses, but the Keepers don't care--what they want is for him to terrorize a human woman, to pursue her and let her escape again and again before finally murdering and perhaps raping her--I suspect this is Malzberg parodying crime and horror fiction.  When the poet refuses, the aliens torture him until he agrees.

We get entertaining flashback chapters about Della's husband William...or is it James?  William/James is found to have an inoperable brain tumor by family doctor Perkins, one of the men Della is having an affair with.  Della contacts a sort of mad scientist figure, an American scientist who fled to Switzerland when the authorities felt his techniques too radical (like our beloved Peter Cushing in a Frankenstein movie, this mad doctor and Perkins bitch and moan that the medical establishment is reactionary and blocks progress) and he arrives to try experimental treatment on Della's comatose husband.    

As we expect in a Malzberg story, there are many suggestions the science fiction elements of the story are not real but the products of the characters' dreaming or suffering mental illness or brain damage.  The different chapters seem like they are from different universes or timelines, or different dreams or delusions--why is Della's spouse sometimes called William and other times James?  In one chapter we are told Della is sterile--in another, that her husband is the sterile one.  Is the mad scientist of chapter six the same guy as the gynecologist in chapter seven?--both these jokers lack an ear and have some kind of robotic leg, after all.  

The story (stories?) of Della and William (James?) Archer's difficult marriage and sexual and medical problems is interesting and entertaining, and Malzberg uses a style that is ambiguous and equivocal, but still smooth and easy to digest.  Less compelling is the story of Rogers, a man who thinks himself some kind of messiah who gets placed (or thinks he has been placed) on a rubble-strewn alien world (for some reason he calls it a sun) where short aliens with stubby limbs mill about, mostly avoiding him.  When the stubby aliens begin talking to him he becomes more sane, stops thinking of himself as a messiah figure.  (Much of The Empty People feels like an allegory of psychotherapy.)  The stubby aliens tell Rogers they are on a tour and waiting for something exciting to happen, something involving him that the entrepreneurs who sold them tour tickets promised.  Nothing happens and after he has come to rely on the aliens' company to maintain his mental health the aliens leave the planet for the next leg of the tour.  They will return in the end of the novel for the big event.  This Rogers business is the weakest part of The Empty People and could be eliminated without loss, in my opinion.         

The tone and themes of The Empty People are hopelessness and disappointment; again and again it is brought home to us that life is inexplicable and without meaning and your plans and desires will be frustrated and any reliance on others is a mistake, that those with authority and influence manipulate you for their own impossible-to-comprehend purposes.  You are alone and nothing will work out for you.  Even the Keepers/X'Ching, who at times seem capable, both technologically and morally, of anything, hint that they are at the mercy of forces beyond their control.

"Despite its ambiguity to you, the energetic way in which we have forced purposes on you has a meaning.  But you would not have the patience.  You want easy answers, easy turns.  There are no easy answers, you see."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"No one ever does.  But what can you do?"

In the second half of The Empty People (besides the resolution of the Rogers bit) we learn the poet's name is James after the Keepers release him into a simulacrum of beautiful New York City with an automatic pistol and instructions to chase down the woman, who of course is Della.  Della, for her part, has been told by the X'Ching that she is to be released into NYC to find and help (or destroy?) one man while avoiding the interference of a second man, an enemy.  Malzberg's descriptions of Coney Island and Manhattan struck a chord with your humble blogger, who every day regrets leaving Manhattan, and Malzberg's portrayal of the thoughts and feelings of James and Della, at odds for no reason they can discern, is also very effective.  Malzberg really is capable of writing crime and horror material, getting into the minds of people obsessed and despairing.  

In what we might call the climax, James the poet throws away the weapon provided him by the Keepers and tries to make a human connection with Della, with only brief and limited success--Della has lost all hope and wants to die.  We get some imagery that reminded me of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway that suggests all human beings are one, but then comes the resolution in the final chapter which is only half a page--all the business we have seen involving aliens is merely dreams suffered by Della's husband as he lays in the hospital dying of his brain tumor--James the poet and Della have the same face because they are just aspects of the cancer victim's own personality, not because we are all one in the eyes of God or share a destiny because of our common humanity or anything nice and uplifting like that.

I think The Empty People is fun and interesting so thumbs up.  I've already suggested it is well-written stylistically and that it entertainingly addresses mainstream literary themes like the banality of modern middle-class life and the challenges of sexual relationships as well as presenting and commenting on traditional science fiction and detective fiction scenarios.  I found Malzberg's little jokes here and there funny, and his little psychological insights, for example, the way captives come to like their captors (sometimes people call this Stockholm syndrome though Malzberg doesn't use the term) and the related way things initially disgusting or frightening can become comfortable, resonated with me.  And of course I have a soft spot for New York, mad scientists, and disastrous sexual relationships, as I have told you a hundred times or more.

Before we check to see what Joachim thought of The Empty People lo eleven years ago, let's play a little devil's advocate and see what gripes people might have about the book.  The superfluous Rogers section is the weak link of the novel--Rogers is essentially alone and so there is little human drama; the Della and James/William Archer sequences are good because they are about Della's relationships with her husband, with her captors, with the mad doctor and with her lover.  I guess we might see the Rogers chapters as an attack on religious people but Malzberg only gestures in that direction, doesn't do much with that theme.  I'm not saying the Rogers material is bad, as it is kind of funny, but while reading it I wanted to get back to Della and the men in her life.

Others might find the "it was all a dream" ending frustrating.

Another possible complaint is that the novel is misogynistic or at least not feminist.  It is hinted that Della is an everywoman--the final line of one chapter is "She was a normal woman"-- and compared to James/William and the mad scientist she is selfish and also weak, crumbling under pressure rather than energetically pursuing a goal.  This doesn't faze me, but you know what it is like out there, my droogs.   

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I think Joachim and I are essentially on the same page when it comes to The Empty People, though I probably enjoyed it more than he did; he also focuses more on the novel as a vehicle for hostile criticism of SF than I have.  It is likely these differences are the result of the fact that I genuinely like pulpy old ideas like alien invasion and mad scientists.  But I can't really disagree with anything Joachim has to say, so no fireworks.

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I think we'll be headed back to the early 1940s and Weird Tales next time we convene, so if that is your bag, see you then!