Best from F&SF 3: P J Farmer, M W Wellman and A Boucher

I've owned my copy of Ace G-712, The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Third Series, for some years, and the day on which we read from it has finally arrived.  My copy of the 1968 paperback, a reprint of a hardcover published in 1954 and then in paperback first in 1960, was originally owned by a Private Charles E. Harris; you may recall that back in 2018 we read stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, Damon Knight, Avram Davidson and Fredric Brown from Private Harris's copy of The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifth Series.   

Today, from this third of the Best From F&SF anthologies, edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, we'll read tales by Philip José Farmer, Manly Wade Wellman, and Boucher himself.  I'll note here that I am reading the versions in my crumbling 1968 paperback, which may or may not be different from their original versions or versions appearing in later collections or anthologies.  Also, that my paperback has quite a volume of annoying typos.  Sad! 

"Attitudes" by Philip José Farmer (1953)

In my youth I read multiple Riverworld and Dayworld books, in my early adulthood one World of Tiers book and Dare, and since the apocalyptic life of this blog began I've read Farmer's novels The Green Odyssey, The Stone God Awakes, and Tongues of the Moon as well as the stories "Down in the Black Gang," "The Shadow of Space," "A Bowl Bigger than Earth," "J. C. on the Dude Ranch," "The Henry Miller Dawn Patrol," "The Leaser of Two Evils," and "The King of the Beasts."  So says the video tape.  Now I will try to stop singing the first track from the Kinks' eighteenth studio album ("doo, doo, doo") and read this 1953 piece by Farmer, which debuted in F&SF alongside a reprint of a 1939 story by Raymond Chandler that debuted in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown.  According to isfdb, "Attitudes" is the first of five stories about a Father Carmody.

The protagonist of "Attitudes" is a professional gambler of the star-hopping future, currently travelling on a star liner.  This guy has telekinetic and ESP powers, and uses his powers to cheat at cards and other games.  He's also an atheist and early in this story, which occupies about 22 pages of The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Third Series, he sneeringly criticizes the five men with whom he is playing a friendly game of pinochle, among them Father Carmody and the ship's captain, because they are believers.  The gambler says the other men are all afraid to take the chance that there is no God, and that really enjoying life requires taking chances.  (Farmer doesn't use the phrase "Pascal's wager," but that seems to be what he is riffing on here.)

The ship lands on a planet of barbarians to take on water.  The captain forbids any passenger from contacting the natives during the four-hour watering process, but the gambler's favorite thing in life is to defy authority, so he leaves the valley in which the liner landed to spy on the locals.  He finds they are playing a game much like a combo of craps and roulette; the human gambler joins the game and uses his psychic powers to start winning most of the natives' money.  Or so he thinks!  Father Carmody appears on the scene to save the day, he having read a scholarly article on these natives.  Reminding us of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and perhaps the Aztecs, this native game is to determine who is to be sacrificed to the natives' god--if the human gambler had been crowned "winner," as his psy powers made almost inevitable, he would have been crucified.  The Father convinces the natives to let the psyker leave the game and so one of the natives is sacrificed instead.  The final scenes of the story explore whether Carmody was right to rescue one man and consign another to death, and suggest God had a hand in this adventure.

This is a competent but mundane sort of story--we judge it acceptable.  Perhaps it is significant in that it doesn't remind you, as so many science fiction stories do, that religion is a scam and that instead of expressing and encouraging admiration of the rebel, as is the norm in science fiction, which so often depicts welcome paradigm shifts, Farmer portrays a man who has contempt for tradition and defies authority as a knave and a fool.  Some readers might find Farmer's treatment of psychic powers innovative and interesting.

"Attitudes" has been reprinted in many languages and was the final story in the 1982 Father Carmody collection Father to the Stars.

Always with the cat people....

"Vandy, Vandy" by Manly Wade Wellman (1953)

Here we have one of Wellman's John the Balladeer stories.  "Vandy, Vandy" has been a big success, with David G. Hartwell including it in his huge 1987 anthology Dark Descent (our British friends split that 1000-page monster into three volumes and "Vandy, Vandy" appears in Volume 1, The Colour of Evil) and Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh reprinting it in their 1996 Supernatural Sleuths.  And of course you can find it in multiple Wellman collections.  "Vandy, Vandy" debuted in an issue of F&SF with a story by Richard Matheson I really liked when I read it ten years ago, "Disappearing Act," and stories by Anthony Boucher and Margaret St. Clair that I will probably read some day.

"Vandy, Vandy" is a very good black magic story into which Wellman smoothly integrates his interests in American history and in folk music.  John and his silver-stringed guitar come to a remote valley, drawn by clues in folk songs he has heard.  Talking to a family of hillbillies, he unravels a crazy story about a devil-worshipping sorcerer centuries old who tried to subvert the American Revolution, to seduce George Washington himself and make the new republic of The United States of America a kingdom devoted to Satanism!  (Wellman's 1939 story "For Love of a Witch" treated similar themes in a far less impressive fashion.)  This witch man desired a blonde violet-eyed girl named Vandy, but was foiled, and over the centuries has been pursuing her even more beautiful descendants.  The evil wizard appears--can John rescue the current Vandy from this devil-worshipper and preserve his own life by exploiting his own knowledge of the occult and summoning the spirit of the Father of Our Country?

The magic scenes in "Vandy, Vandy" are very good, and Wellman handles all the themes--folk beliefs about George Washington, the question at its founding of what would be the nature of the culture and government of the United States, devil worship, and sex--economically but powerfully.  Wellman's style suits his material, and he quickly and clearly paints images and draws characters for the reader that we can see and feel.  Thumbs up for "Vandy, Vandy." 

"Snulbug" by Anthony Boucher (1941)

Here we have a mundane and boring joke story about time paradoxes that tells you that knowing the future is pointless because you can't change the future, a story that goes on way too long and is full of repetition and bargain basement jokes.  Thumbs down!

The most interesting thing about "Snulbug" is that it takes as one of its themes a sort of cynical skepticism of Man's ability to understand and master the universe, making the story a counterpoint to the general attitude of old timey science fiction stories that suggest that man is a problem-solving animal who can master his environment.  Perhaps ironically, one of the leading exponents of the "man is a problem-solving animal" theory, John W. Campbell, Jr., was the first, but far from the last, man to publish "Snulbug," printing it in 1941 in his magazine Unknown.  Boucher himself reprinted "Snulbug" in F&SF in 1953 and then here in The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Third Series.  I'm always a little uncomfortable with editors who buy stories from themselves--it feels like self-dealing--but they all seem to do it so I guess it is like part of your compensation as editor?  And of course it is worse when, as here, the story feels like filler, though I will note that other people don't appear to see "Snulbug" as mere filler but as some kind of classic--Martin H. Greenberg and D. R. Benson included it in anthologies that purport to print "the best" or "hall of fame" stories.  Maybe my opinion is the minority one--it wouldn't be the first time.

A scientist thinks he has figured out a way to detect embolisms early and thus save thousands of lives a year.  But he needs a lab to develop his idea, and nobody wants to finance him.  So he summons a demon to help him get the money.  One of Boucher's little jokes is that the scientist is not a very good wizard and so he can only summon a demon one-inch tall who has a bad attitude.  The demon is actually ancillary to the story, just a sort of comic relief figure and Greek chorus, as the actual plot of "Snulbug" concerns using time travel to get a newspaper from the future; Boucher could have had the scientist use a time travel device or a future viewing device or something of that nature.

The scientist hopes to exploit the info in tomorrow's newspaper to collect the money he needs to develop his life-saving embolism detection technique.  He is foiled again and again because you can't change the future--if you read about a crime in tomorrow's paper and rush to the scene of the crime before it happens with the laudable aim of preventing the atrocity, time will snap back like if you lifted the needle off a record and put the needle back down again a few seconds earlier.  As he tries to change the future, our protagonist repeatedly relives the same moments right before an event he is trying to alter, and Boucher inflicts upon us many repetitive scenes (I find this repetition in stories very annoying.)  Eventually the scientist just tricks some rich fat guy (in fiction if a guy is rich it is a signal to the reader that it is OK to steal from him and if a guy is fat he is fair game for any kind of abuse) into giving him the money.  Boucher seems to leave it ambiguous whether the scientist is going to succeed in starting his own lab and bringing his embolism-detection technique into general use or not.

Not for me.

**********

Wellman's story is by far the best of these three, and let's talk about why.  I like sincerity and economy in stories, and Wellman's story exhibits these traits in every paragraph.  Wellman's endorsement of Christianity and hero-worship of George Washington may seen corny to our 2025 ears, when smart people all know religion is a scam (though those who want to get ahead pay lip service to socialism and Islam as the religions of the future) and that George Washington's statues should be torn down because he owned slaves, but Wellman's straightforward faith and conviction bowls over any objection that might come to the reader's mind and serves as a strong backbone for his story.  Every other element of "Vandy, Vandy" serves as the muscle and sinew that flesh out that backbone and propel the story in such a way that it vigorously achieves its goals--every one of Wellman's lines furthers the story's plot or adds to the atmosphere that serves that plot.  There are no extraneous elements that get in the way of the plot or muddle the atmosphere, and there is no fat--Wellman doesn't needlessly and counterproductively hammer away at his points again and again.  This is in strong contrast to Boucher's story, which is a jumble of lame jokes slathered on mind-numbingly repetitive scenes that promote his cynical and banal themes.  Farmer's story is not actually bad, but compared to Wellman's strong piece it meanders and it feels pretty routine beyond its sympathy for religion.

More short stories in today's vein in the next exciting (we hope!) episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe

"The rich are his clients.  Rich people, governments—they're all rich, never let anybody tell you different—and rich corporations.  Nobody else can afford his fees.  He takes the money and does what they want.  Sometimes it's good.  Sometimes it isn't.  He's a wizard.  I'll give him that."

Back when it was pretty new, I read 2008's An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe, a man whose knowledge of genre literature, high literature, and science and technology, as well as his deep philosophical, emotional and intellectual commitments, prolificity and abilities as a wordsmith probably make him the greatest or the ultimate speculative fiction writer, and I have to admit it didn't make much of an impression on me.  As I recall, its relatively simple style (compared to something like The Book of the New Sun, which is full of hard words and elaborate images and difficult to follow passages) underwhelmed me and the fact that much of it was set in the world of the Broadway-style musical theatre and dealt with detective genre goop didn't grab me. But today I am a more mature and more patient reader and somewhat less dismissive of mystery writing conventions and a little less dismissive of Broadway, so this month, a month in which a lot of my time has been taken up with the pursuit of the almighty dollar and dealing with my family, I gave An Evil Guest another shot.  I read a scan of a first edition.    

An Evil Guest is set in an alternate/future Earth where mind-reading and necromancy are real, cancer was cured a year and a half ago, and the human race has developed a warp drive, with the result that rich people own private "hoppers" the size of automobiles and can explore the universe on their own and the United States is in diplomatic contact with an alien civilization on planet Woldercan.  We readers don't learn all this stuff immediately from the omniscient third-person narrator or in blocks of exposition, but in dribs and drabs in the conversation of our characters.  The text of An Evil Guest consists largely of dialogue, snappy repartee made up of brief and clever sentences in which characters offer the reader and each other info in an ofttimes oblique manner, and often involuntarily--again and again characters do that Sherlock Holmes thing in which they intuit something from clues within another character's speech.  

An Evil Guest has three principal characters, and they form a love triangle.  As with the setting, we learn about these people's personalities and lives through dialogue, in bits and pieces, sometimes learning very important things about them quite late in the game, and, since our info comes from the spoken words of people who are all experts in art of deception who are trying to manipulate each other we have every reason to doubt the truth of everything we learn.  We've got our protagonist, Cassie Casey, an attractive stage actress based in some northern American city.  (We eventually learn it is the New England town of Kingsport from H. P. Lovecraft's oeuvre.)  We've got Gideon Chase, a famous college professor, a philosopher who is also known among the elite as "a wizard" who can solve almost any problem for those willing to pay his astronomical prices.  In the first of An Evil Guest's chapters the President of the United States hires Chase to help the Feds deal with our third lead character, Bill Reis.  The President considers Reis terribly evil, and so elusive that the federal government can't seem to keep track of him or figure out just what he is up to.  Or so the Commander-in-Chief and his chief lackey say.  Reis is like the richest man in the world and owns many businesses of all types--banks, restaurants, you name it--often under assumed names, and he is in close contact with the aliens on Woldercan, people who have a large supply of gold, which they can apparently create via molecular manipulation.  (This novel is all about taking something and changing it into something else, or at least making it look like something else.)  Cassie is almost always "on screen," but Chase and Reis just show up occasionally, though their actions drive the plot more than Cassie's, and Cassie and minor characters are always talking about and acting in response to these two mega-rich operators.

What unites Cassie, Chase and Reis is that they are all famous important people whose names, identities, and appearances are constantly changing, Cassie must mundanely, she being an actress whose assumption of other names and identities is (initially, at least) overt and expected by those around her.  False names, shape shifting and people assuming multiple identities are a major theme of An Evil Guest, with even the many minor characters often pulling such shenanigans--a cop looks like one of Cassie's two ex-husbands; two people with the same name show up, one impersonating the other; people whom we have been led to believe are good turn out to be evil or vice versa; and on and on.  A werewolf even makes an appearance.   

I won't go into all the twists and turns of the plot, which includes in its first two thirds lots of detective story elements like minor characters getting kidnapped and murdered, leaving Cassie and us readers wondering who committed these foul deeds and why, and then science fiction stuff like hyperdrive travel and interaction with alien; in the final third the scene shifts into Weird Tales territory and Cassie finds herself on a tropical island near R'lyeh where she must contend with worshippers of Cthulhu.

Early in the book, Chase, wanting to use Cassie to help him get a hold of Reis, takes the actress to the top of a mountain and performs some manner of eldritch ceremony there--afterwards Cassie is irresistibly beautiful and charismatic, and attracts Reis to her like a moth to a flame.  Both Chase and Reis quickly fall in love with Cassie, and compete for her at the same time they are trying to use her to learn about each other and perhaps control or destroy each other.  Though the Lovecraftian elements of An Evil Guest are in-your-face obvious, we might also see Wolfe's novel as having a plot much like an A. E. van Vogt production--the main character gains special powers and becomes embroiled in the conflicts and machinations of the superpowered elites who run the world behind the scenes and things get crazier and crazier as the story proceeds.  But as I have already suggested, Cassie, in contrast to many of the Canadian madman's heroes, is closer to a puppet or a victim than to a genius who masters the omni-science of Nexialism or prepares mankind to rule the sevagram or otherwise willfully launches a paradigm shift.   

In the second third of the novel Cassie is the star of a musical financed by Reis to be a vehicle for her--thanks to Chase's sorcery, Cassie is a brilliant singer and a top-class dancer and makes a success of the show, which I think Wolfe intends us to think is silly and stupid, though at the same time its tropical island and volcano god content foreshadows the final third of the novel.  New players, significantly government entities, stride on to the scene and themselves try to manipulate Cassie--the aforementioned kidnapping and murdering are part of this manipulation.  This portion of the novel makes explicit that this America is one in which federal agencies are totally corrupt, ignoring the elected political leadership and acting independently as they compete with each other for power; these agencies are not above murdering innocent people.  Gideon Chase and Bill Reis, fabulously wealthy and ultracompetent businessmen, swim with the government entities in this same pool of jockeying elites who ignore the law, where alliances are ever-shifting and the economy of which is based on exchanging favors.  A local police official tells Cassie, referring to Chase, that 

"Our friend helps me out sometimes, and I repay him whenever I can. There's a lot of that in my business."

Another of the players among these corrupt elites is the news media.  One of the things that makes Wolfe an exciting and unusual writer is that in a genre full of atheists who are libertarians and atheists who are commies, Wolfe is a committed Catholic and a conservative, and in An Evil Guest Wolfe takes some swipes at that perennial punching bag of all right wingers, the mainstream media.  Cassie has a friend who is a reporter who (like just about everybody) seems more interested in using Cassie to further her career or other desires than being her friend.  Early in the book Gideon Chase remarks that "Newspapers are not notorious for their painstaking accuracy."  One of the starkest but also subtle ways in which Wolfe suggests the world he is depicting, in particular its government and the media, is corrupt and reprehensible is through a TV news report that indicates that in this alternate USA women who regret their pregnancies are allowed to kill their children up to one year after birth and left-wing activists are pushing for the right to kill children up to age five.  A TV news reader presents this little tidbit this way:

"In an unrelated story, the Supreme Court has extended the period for post-parturition terminations to one year. Civil rights organizations continue to press for five for defectives."

This news story comes after a commercial in which a bottle of ketchup uncaps itself and pours out its own contents in a "crimson fountain," perhaps Wolfe priming us to think of blood and perhaps even self-destruction (a society that murders its children is one that is killing itself) and a report about the collision of a train and a school bus.  (Putting "In an unrelated story" between two different stories about dead children is one of Wolfe's little jokes.)  This news program, delivered dead pan and casually by the talking head but gruesome to us readers, also includes notice that famous philosopher Gideon Chase was injured in an assassination attempt.  (One of An Evil Guest's many instances of shape-changing is Chase having to have a limb amputated after he is shot and getting a battery of prostheses for use in different circumstances.) 

The euphemistic references to the murder of children is one of the grimmer examples of wordplay in An Evil Guest, which includes some lame puns and plenty of jokes and clues within people's names.  Cassie's agent has the last name "Youmans;" one woman's first name is "India," a source of jokes, and her assistant's full name is "Ebony White;" Cassie calls Gideon Chase "Gid" which of course looks a lot like "God," and another man is named "Gil" which is only one letter away from "Gid"--is it Chase in disguise?  One of the more clever pieces of wordplay is an adage Cassie whips out during a one-sided discussion of religion and good and evil with her perplexed journalist friend: "add nothing to God and you get good."  Did Wolfe come up with this or is it famous?  Are we supposed to think Cassie, who is often portrayed as ignorant, came up with this, or that she got it from Chase, the philosopher who has proclaimed that good and evil do not exist?

The final third An Evil Guest is more fantastical and has more of the flavor of horror fiction than detective fiction, and is less dialogue-oriented, with more images and more action.  Reis has Cassie brought to a Polynesian archipelago of which he is king--Cassie is considered queen by the inhabitants, Reis's subjects, whom we hear again and again are tall and fat.  Also among these islands we find that among the secret elites always negotiating or fighting a shadow war with each other behind the scenes and determining Earth's fate are various monster gods, including a shape-shifting shark god and Great Cthulhu himself, whose sunken city R'lyeh rests nearby.  Wolfe delivers a good horror sequence involving a woman killed by a shark and two very good horror sequences involving, first, a female Cthulhu worshipper who tries to get Cassie to betray Reis, and, second, a female private investigator hired by Reis to infiltrate the Cthulhu cult.  This poor P.I. becomes a living dead tool of Cthulhu and has horrifying experiences down in R'lyeh and back on the surface; her adventures are probably the most immediately effective scenes/or in the novel.

Who will live and who will die in the cataclysmic battle that erupts when Reis manipulates the US Navy into attacking R'lyeh?  Who is a Cthulhu worshipper and who is willing to die to save humanity?  Will Cassie end up with either of the two powerful men who love her?  Will the reader be able to figure out the significance of all the vague complicated hints in the Afterword about time travel and cloning?  Can it be that people who have died are going to reappear, and/or that some of the characters we have met are in fact clones or younger or older versions of other characters?  

What else can we say about An Evil Guest?  Well, there is a theme that wealth and gold are perhaps more trouble than they are worth (the quote from which the novel's title is taken and which serves as its epigraph suggests as much) but then there is also the suggestion that businesspeople are more honest and better stewards of society than politicians and other government bastards.  Is the world depicted in the novel, one in which infanticide is the norm and, apparently, Cthulhu is the real ruler of the Earth, some kind of satire of our real world where abortion is common and dictatorship and terrorism are rife? 

Then we have the fact that our main character is an attractive woman who has been victimized and exploited her entire life and who has two failed marriages behind her.  Like all the novel's characters, our feelings about Cassie must be ambiguous.  Is she a heroine, or just a pawn, a victim, of others?  Does Cassie ever really make a decision, ever accomplish a goal, or is she just pushed hither and thither by others, used by others and rescued by others?  The difficult experiences she endures after the battle between Cthulhu and the US Navy change her looks, but do they teach her how to be self-sufficient?  At the end of the novel Cassie is about to start a new phase of life; can we safely hope she will be happy and/or the mistress of her own fate, or is this new phase of life just the product of her being rescued by others yet again and should we expect Cassie to pull another blunder and enter into a third unhappy marriage?

An Evil Guest is a novel about dangerous space aliens, dangerous technologies and dangerous supernatural powers, but at its core it is a story about sexual relationships (and, after all, what could be more dangerous than sex?)  Wolfe offers theories of sexual relationships that I assume are pretty mainstream among regular people but perhaps not the kinds of theories that would be voiced among the educated, as Cassie and Wolfe acknowledge.  Why do Reis and Chase fall in love with Cassie?  Because she is good looking!  And what inspires Cassie's love for them in return?  It seems like she likes them because they are wealthy, successful, big and strong, and offer her gifts and attention.  Cassie seems fascinated by Chase's hi-tech automobile, and as for Reis, Cassie says to another character (referring to Reis by using one of the man's numerous aliases, "Wallace")

"Wally's strong, really strong.  We're not supposed to like strong men, but we do.  Or most of us do.  I do.  I know too many wimps already.  Wally says he loves me, and he means it.  I can tell.  It's hard not to like somebody who loves you."

An Evil Guest is a (take your pick) realistic or cynical book that tells you the world and people are the way you fear they are, not the way you hope they are.  Yikes!

Finally, can I recommend An Evil Guest?  Well, I like it, but I don't love it.  The style is smooth and easy to enjoy even if you have trouble keeping track of what is going on with all the detective parts in the first half or so and with all the time distortion and clone elements in the ending.  The horror stuff in the islands section is remarkably good.  And Wolfe gives us quite a bit to think over on the level of philosophy and when it comes to what actually happens in the story--some will embrace all the mystery and ambiguity, while others will complain that there is no real resolution of some of the plot elements and that we don't really find out what happens to many of the characters.  We don't even know if Cthulhu is OK! 

The Killing Ground by Elleston Trevor

With some of the men, Lieutenant Pope had lost his authority; with others, his claim to their loyalty.  Among the N.C.O.s he had lost respect.  It had come about in small ways, with a word or an action, most of them forgotten until another came, reminding them.  No one disliked him; to be disliked, a man must have a character of a kind; in Pope, even that was lacking.

As followers of my twitter feed are aware, the wife and I go to many antique malls, flea markets and thrift shops.  At just such a place years ago I picked up a copy of Bantam A1835, The Killing Ground by Elleston Trevor, who, wikipedia is telling me, was a prolific writer of mystery, espionage and children's books under various noms de plume.  One of my on-again-off-again interests is British military history, so the purported topic of the novel, British tank crewmen fighting in Northwest Europe, appealed to me.  It looks like Trevor served in the Second World War, but in the Royal Air Force, not the British Army, so does he know a lot about tank warfare and the Normandy campaign?  Who knows?  Let's check it out regardless as a break from the voodoo and space alien stories that make up so much of our diet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  If we like this thing, Trevor has plenty of books for us to read including what look like crime/horror stories about an evil brother and sister and an evil nun praised by Robert Bloch and a gothic romance lauded by Mary Higgins Clark.

The Killing Ground has nine unnumbered chapters; this novel is episodic, and each chapter is almost like a complete short story that can stand its own.  The first, The Sea, introduces us to the crews of two troops of C Squadron as they ride a landing craft to the beach at Normandy.  (Each troop consists of three Churchill Mark 7 tanks; the entire Squadron totals eighteen tanks.  Each tank has a crew of five.)  Each of the soldiers has his own particular character trait; this guy is religious and prays, that guy is thinking about his wife, this one is thinking about a system for betting on the horses, that one loves to play cards, this officer feels inadequate because he hasn't seen action yet and other members of his troop fought in the Mediterranean, etc.  This novel doesn't really have a central character, but rather a large ensemble cast, and depicts human relationships but little--each character seems very self-contained.  War stories are often about camaraderie (the relationships of fighting men to each other) and/or the weight of command (the relationship between an officer and his subordinates) but the men in The Killing Ground are isolated, and we spend a lot of time in their heads examining their inner lives rather than observing conversations between them.  This is a result of, or symbolized by, how often the soldiers in the book are told to be quiet lest they reveal their positions to Jerry or clog up the radio network with pointless chatter, how often the sound of gunfire makes conversation impossible, and how often dust and smoke and the dark of night obscure vision.

A main theme of this first chapter is how rough the Channel is and how over half the tankers are sea sick.  I found the best part of the chapter to be the description of the bombardment by Royal Navy warships of the French coast as perceived by the tankers, the sound, the smoke; also good is the description of the fire from the German 88mm guns ashore and the fate of some of the smaller British craft, hit by mines or enemy fire, or stuck on obstacles.  Trevor is good at visual details, throughout the novel painting vivid pictures of the movement of dust and smoke and all the little detritus on the surface of the water and littering the battlefield.

In The Beach, our guys are on the shore exchanging fire with German anti-tank guns in concrete emplacements, with machine gun nests, with a lone M. E. 109; they even blast an enemy artillery observer in a ruined villa.  All around them MPs, sappers and infantry men are subject to a rain of bullets and mortar rounds.  The tank commanders keep jumping out of their vehicles to grenade an enemy position or retrieve some item, and we get lots of descriptions of wreckage and dead bodies and people trying to aid the wounded.

The Land, our third chapter, has the tankers advancing through a little town, then trading shots with Germans who are deployed on a ridge, and then immobile and inactive as they endure an artillery barrage.  This chapter is the least satisfying in the novel, as I was skeptical about many details of the German artillery barrage.  For example, a German shell lands every six minutes, like clockwork, and the tank crewmen can not only predict when it will arrive by looking at their watches but hear it coming.  One round every six minutes seems like a pretty low rate of fire, especially if the gun firing on them is an 88mm as they suspect, and I had thought artillery shells (not mortar bombs, which move relatively slowly) traveled too fast for you to hear them before they got to you.  Also, the officers decide the men should leave their tanks and take cover nearby, even though they haven't dug any trenches--wouldn't you be safer from blast and from shell fragments if you were inside a heavily armored vehicle like the Churchill?  There's also a lot of business with the men griping that HQ won't let them move their tanks or shoot back, even though they were shooting back earlier, and anyway, how could they shoot back if this is indirect fire from behind the ridge?  Maybe they want to drive up the ridge?  The drama of this chapter works, but it is a little hard to tell what is going on and easy to doubt the chapter's realism.  

Singing Drunk takes place a week later, at night, as C squadron rests a half mile away from German positions.  The men hear someone, obviously drunk, singing loudly between them and the enemy.  Thinking the drunk one of their fellows, some of the British soldiers go out to try to rescue this guy, only to find he is a German willing to be taken prisoner.  The drunk German doesn't make it back to British lines alive, as a British lieutenant, Pope, mows him down with a Bren gun.  There isn't a lot of plot that carries over from episode to episode in The Killing Ground, but one plot strand is how Pope is changed by the experience of battle--his subordinates thought him a "right sort" back in Blighty, but here in France they lose respect for him as he grows corrupt and unsteady under stress.

The Start-line begins with a veteran noncom (in his own mind) assessing Pope, suggesting that the lieutenant killed the German prisoner in a panic and that courage is a finite resource and Lieutenant Pope is expending his and will soon suffer a total collapse.  It is a month since the landings and the British are going to launch a carefully prepared Corps-level assault on hardened German veterans; the first part of this chapter is a briefing given by a major to the tank commanders about the coming operation.  The second part is the start of the attack, a British artillery barrage followed by the advance of the British tanks into a German barrage.

Not Far to Where? picks up immediately after the previous chapter as C Squadron's Churchill tanks drive forward, negotiating mine fields, enduring fire from Nebelwerfers, and facing ambush by self-propelled guns.  Flail tanks and flamethrowing tanks of another squadron lead the way, blasting open a path for our characters to follow.  Our cast gets bogged down and here, half way through the book, we get some flashbacks to some of the characters' earlier lives that flesh out their personalities and help explain their behavior here on the battlefield.  For example, Pope had a distant relationship with his father and he feels he has no roots and so all through his academic and military careers he has been trying, without success, to build a stable identity for himself.  Pope, taking a walk outside his tank, encounters an injured man and helps him--this event has a remarkable, perhaps beneficial, effect on Pope's character.

Moonrise is a long chapter that focuses on one of the tank crews we've been following since the first chapter; these guys have gotten themselves lost behind enemy lines and now their tank has broken down.  Trevor does a good job describing their efforts to remain concealed at night and deal with the German armored vehicles that eventually show up.  An entertaining action chapter, more focused and less impressionistic than the earlier battle scenes and with a more traditional plot in which the characters face obstacles and strive to overcome them and in which Trevor provides a climax.

Three weeks later, in Peace, C squadron is resting some miles from the front lines, the men sleeping and banging French chicks.  One of the men who survived the against-overwhelming-odds engagement in Moonrise returns to the squadron from hospital--he survived because he ran away from the fight, and was in hospital for psychiatric reasons.  He lies about what he did in the fight--will he be found out?  A theme of this chapter is guilt, that felt by this liar and by the entire squadron as they rest, aware that their comrades in other units are fighting and dying while they are enjoying themselves, as well as the guilt felt by one of the tankers who has been having sex with a local teenaged girl--she has fallen in love with him and is heartbroken when the squadron has to return to the front line, and she makes him promise to return and take her away with him to England, something he has no intention of doing.

The final chapter is The Battering-ram.  C Squadron participates in the attack on the town of Falaise, taking part in the assault on a village that is a suburb of that town.  In the fighting between the British Churchills and the German armored vehicles and machine guns emplacements all of the squadron's tanks are knocked out but several of our characters survive, and live to hear that Falaise has fallen.  There is a measure of triumph in this chapter, as we see B Squadron and infantry exploit the opening made by the now devastated C Squadron and the surviving C Squadron tankers cheering them on and then participating in mopping up operations (in particular hunting snipers.)  The final paragraphs of the chapter and the book suggest Pope has learned how to be a good officer and has regained the respect of those of his subordinates who have survived and he will soon be issued a new tank and continue fighting the Germans.

But this final chapter also has lots of man's-inhumanity-to-man business.  There is a lot of talk of "taking no prisoners."  Some of the more fanatical Nazis refuse to surrender, and some wounded Germans even reject medical aid so the British leave them to die or even finish them off.  The British troops discover some Germans hanging from nooses--they obviously died by hanging and have not hanged themselves, so must have been murdered, hanged at gunpoint in an act of vengeance.  It is strongly implied that a Jewish member of C Squadron, a refugee from Germany, has committed these murders.

The Killing Ground is well-written on a sentence by sentence basis, with many striking and memorable images, and some good action scenes.  As I have described, there are limitations when it comes to the plot and characters, but this seems like an artistic choice rather than a blunder, Trevor sacrificing the narrative tools of conventional entertainment in an effort to portray the haphazard nature and isolation of our real lives, characteristics of life more starkly evident in wartime.  If you are looking for a novel in which you get to care about a main character who appears on every page as he determines the curse of the plot and faces and overcomes obstacles you may be disappointed--several characters in The Killing Ground have little arcs in which they grow over time, but each of them only appears here and there, every so often, and their personalities are too flawed and their adventures are too distressing for you to really enjoy spending time with them.

The Killing Ground is good enough that I probably will read something else by Trevor; stay tuned.

Edmond Hamilton: "The Moon Menace," "The Dimension Terror," and "The Invisible Master"

Though it feels like just yesterday, it was back in June that George of the popular GeorgeKelley.org blog provided us the table of contents of Armchair Fiction's Masters of Science Fiction Volume 17: Edmond Hamilton, Golden Age Wizard.  We've read quite a bit of Hamilton's vast body of work here at MPorcius Fiction Log, so let's look at the list of stories in this 2025 collection and see which of them we've already digested and then try to fill in some of the gaps!

"Under the White Star"

"When the World Slept"

"Liline, The Moon Girl"

"The Moon Menace"

"The Free-Lance of Space"

"Short-Wave Madness"

"The Man Who Lived Twice"

"The Might-Have-Been"

"The Conqueror's Voice"

"Intelligence Undying"

"The Dimension Terror"

"The Man Who Solved Death"

"No-Man's-Land of Time"

"The Invisible Master"

Wow, of these 14 stories, I think I have only read three, "When the World Slept," "The Man Who Lived Twice" and "The Might-Have-Been"!  (Links to my posts about them above in the list.)  It looks like Armchair Fiction was going for the deep cuts!  Well, let's get started filling in those gaps by reading three of the earlier Hamilton stories represented in Golden Age Wizard, "The Moon Menace," "The Dimension Terror," and "The Invisible Master."

"The Moon Menace" (1927)

Here we have a story from our beloved Weird Tales, printed during a period not yet covered by our ambitious Weird Tales project.  This issue of Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine includes a story by August Derleth that I will perhaps read some day, "The Turret Room," and a note in the letters column from Derleth praising illustrator Hugh Rankin.  Rankin is no Virgil Finlay or Hannes Bok, but, you know, tastes differ.    

"The Moon Menace" is one of Hamilton's disaster stories that feels like a popular history article from a book or magazine of the future.  Other examples include "A Conquest of Two Worlds," "The Polar Doom," and "The Life-Masters."  Our tale begins with a description of the world famous scientist and inventor Gilbert, a recluse who has kept out of academia and based his career on developing marketable products, thereby amassing huge profits, and sinking those profits into further private research.  In mid-career, he claims from his Adirondack lab to have, in the course of developing television, accidentally made contact with people on the Moon!  Gilbert schedules a dramatic presentation of his astonishing discoveries at a New York City forum, but when the date rolls around Gilbert does not appear and the world denounces the scientist as a fraud.

Soon after, a weird and terrible disaster strikes our world!  The entire planet Earth goes dark--nobody can see anything but blackness, even though the heat from the sun's rays or from a fire can still be felt, and such devices as radios still operate normally.  Hamilton proffers us a catalog of disasters that result from universal blindness, car crashes and lootings and so forth, and a solid adventure/horror sequence about a man who walks several blocks in Manhattan, feeling his way home to his apartment.

We learn the answer to the mystery of why the inventor ghosted the public and why Earth is shrouded in darkness via a scene of expository dialogue featuring Gilbert and his friend Manning, who was on his way to see the great man and just miles away when fell the black veil of endless night.  You see, via television, Gilbert made friends with the ugly people who live in caves under the lunar surface, members of an ancient race whose technology is far beyond ours.  The moon men taught him how to build a teleportation receiver.  When he had achieved this feat, the loonies teleported over and took over the lab, murdering the scientist's servants and assistant with ray guns.  When Gilbert opened a door to escape, one of the moon men was killed by sunlight.  The scientist has been hiding in the woods, observing the loonies as, clad in anti-sun armor, they built a big machine and finally activated it, dampening all light in the spectrum we humans can see.  (The moon bastards can see via ultra-violet light the machine does not smother.)  Now the moon men are constructing a deluxe teleportation receiver so they can import undocumented migrants wholesale and conquer this big blue marble we call home!

  

Gilbert has two pairs of spectacles that confer on the human wearer the ability to see in the ultraviolet spectrum, so he and Manning are able to approach the machinery with the aim of sabotaging it.  Here's an example of Hamilton's fun adventure/horror story writing.

They were the moon men, as Gilbert had described them, dark, plump, like overripe fungi near to bursting, monstrous flipper-people whose appearance was rendered even more ghastly by the thin violet light by which he saw them.

The human sneak attack does not work out; Manning gets captured and tied up, though Gilbert manages to flee.  Manning watches as millions of the flipper-people teleport in and build pre-fab aircraft and walking tanks with which to take over a defenseless Earth.  But then Gilbert launches a second attempt and gets in a fire fight with the guards of the light-dampener machine.  Gilbert's legs are disintegrated by a ray gun, but, as he lies on the ground dying, with his last breath he shoots the light-neutralizing machine, wrecking it.  All the millions of loonies are killed by sunlight (should have kept that armor on, dummies) and the Earth is saved. 

A fun story with the science lectures we expect from old timey science fiction and the mayhem we expect from Weird Tales.  In 1967 Robert Lowndes reprinted "The Moon Menace" in his magazine Famous Science Fiction, and you can also find it in Haffner Press' 2009 The Metal Giants and Others, the first volume of their Collected Edmond Hamilton series.

"The Dimension Terror" (1928)

Numerous times in his correspondence, H. P. Lovecraft complained that Hamilton used the same plots again and again, and we find that "The Dimension Terror" is quite like "The Moon Menace" in structure, form and content; I do think, however, that this summer '28 take is slightly better than the earlier story.

As "The Dimension Terror" begins we are introduced to a sort of renegade scientist who abandons academia, a man brilliant but afflicted with a temper and a tendency to make extravagant claims; this guy, Graham, is like a variation on the Gilbert of "The Moon Menace."  Graham posits that other worlds or universes must coexist with ours, in much the same space as ours but separated from ours across a fifth dimension.  This concept can be found in lots of SF stories, but I think Hamilton comes up with a better way of explaining the phenomena than we see in most of them.  Imagine a shelf or a pedestal; you put Item A on it, then take it off, and put on the shelf Item B.  These two items occupy the same space three dimensionally, but are separated by a fourth dimension, time.  Graham not only theorizes that other worlds occupy the same first four dimensions as ours and are only distinct from ours across a fifth dimension, but claims that he knows how to get to one of them!  Then he disappears.

Soon after his Gilbert's disappearance, a disaster strikes Earth that kills millions of people.  In "The Moon Menace," Hamilton introduced an ancillary character to serve as the protagonist during the description of the disaster, and then had Gilbert's friend Manning take over the main character role for the narrative of how the disaster was resolved.  In "The Dimension Terror," Hamilton has Graham's assistant and only friend, Harron, fulfill both roles.  This economy in use of characters is one reason that "The Dimension Terror" is superior to "The Moon Menace."

Harron is on the southern tip of Manhattan when all the steel and iron in the world abruptly vanishes!  All of Gotham's skyscrapers collapse, ships in the harbor sink, aircraft fall from the sky and automobiles fall apart.  Hamilton goes to town describing the piles of rubble that are all that is left of the greatest city in the world and how people go insane in response to the sudden unheralded cataclysm.  Harron decides to march north across Manhattan, a treacherous journey over hills of stones and bricks, and, by a remarkable coincidence, the one guy he runs into in the ruins of a city that was home to millions is Graham.

Graham describes how he caused the disaster which has destroyed our civilization.  Some weeks ago he discovered that our universe touches a neighboring universe at one point, like two spheres touching.  (Does this metaphor jive with the metaphor of the items on a shelf?  Um, I don't know.)  That point is in a remote swamp on Long Island.  Graham took a lot of apparatus there and tried to detect precisely where the two worlds met and see if he could send electrical signals or sound waves to the other world.  Amazingly, he made contact with people in that other universe! 

The aliens explained to Graham how to build a ray projector that would allow movement between the universes.  (To work, such a projector had to be activated on both sides of the contact point at the same time.  Plotwise, this is a lot like the teleporter system in "The Moon Menace," and of course thematically both remind us of the idea that a vampire cannot cross your threshold uninvited.)  Graham built and activated the projector at the time appointed and a dozen hideous insect-men marched onto Long Island, tying Graham up and immediately putting into action their plans to conquer our planet and colonize it, theirs being overpopulated.  The bugmen built the machine that would transform all iron on Earth into hydrogen; their occupation with this job provided Graham a chance to escape.

Graham and Harron make their way back to the contact point in the marshes of Long Island and manage to sabotage the ray projector, causing an explosion that shuts down all travel between the two worlds and also kills all the insect men and Graham.  Harron survives, and so does the machine that turned all of the iron in the world to hydrogen gas.  Reminding us 21st-century readers of Rahm Emmanuel, who told us to never let a serious crisis go to waste but use it to reshape society in ways people would resist in stable times, Graham told Harron that the machine used by the insect men to change iron to hydrogen could be used to create more iron or any other element and give man the ability to "build up a new and fairer world."  So you see, Graham's renegade meddling may have killed hundreds of millions of people, but we should thank him as we have less income inequality!  Gotta break some eggs to make an omelette, right?

A variation on the themes of "The Moon Menace," but the beetle-like aliens are cooler, the scientist who causes the cataclysm and then dies in the process of saving the day has a little more personality--and then there is the questionable political angle--making this a meatier and more flavorful story.  

Like "The Moon Menace," "The Dimension Terror" was reprinted in the Hafner volume The Metal Giants and Others.

"The Invisible Master" (1930)

We're taking our leave of Weird Tales for a little while to read a story from a Hugo Gernsback magazine, Scientific Detective Monthly.  It looks like "The Invisible Master"'s reappearance in Armchair Fiction's Edmond Hamilton, Golden Age Wizard--almost a century after its initial publication!--is its first ever reprint.

They say one should write what he knows, and I guess that is why so many of the stories we read have as their protagonists a writer.  The main character of "The Invisible Master"'s third-person narrative is Carston, a reporter with a New York newspaper, who is sent by his editor to a university in Manhattan to meet a physicist, Grantham, who claims to have achieved invisibility.  Carston himself doesn't do a hell of a lot, mostly just observes.  "The Invisible Master," as we might have guessed considering the venue it debuted in, is structured like a detective mystery story, with lots of suspects and victims and crimes and a final scene in which a police detective explains how he figured out whodunit.  There is also a bunch of science lectures (as I've told you a hundred times, old timey science fiction editors and writers really wanted to use fiction as a tool for teaching people science and getting people excited about how science could improve the life of the individual and of society, though you should feel free to object that half the stories we read seem to be about how science is going to kill everybody), and an ambitious and (to me at least) surprising twist ending.     

Grantham the scientist and his assistant Gray demonstrate to Carston and other assembled journalos  their invisibility device by making a paperweight invisible and then visible again.  That evening the reporters and the university president and the police assemble because Grantham was knocked out by some person unknown and both Gray and a backpack-sized invisibility device that can render a man invisible have disappeared!  A note is found, addressed to the recovering Grantham--it seems to be in Gray's handwriting and is signed "The Invisible Master" and its text suggests the person who stole the invisibility device is going to use it to terrorize New York City.  

Hamilton describes the three sensational crimes that follow in some detail--a bank and two different businesses suffer robberies, and several people are murdered with firearms.  We learn about these crimes from the point of view of Carston; they are not "on screen."  Physicist Grantham, police dick Wade (who chews gum) and the university president all get screen time; unfortunately, none of these characters is very interesting.  It is theorized that Gray is the Invisible Master and is trying to collect money to conduct research, he being, apparently, some kind of technocrat leftist who thinks the money society spends on luxuries should instead be devoted to the kind of life-improving scientific research he himself wants to perform.  Sure enough, after the third murderous robbery a letter from the Invisible Master arrives at the mayor's office, demanding five million dollars be left in a specific spot in Long Island.  

In fiction, private citizens always end up being at the center of police operations and Grantham and Carston are there out on the Island when the money is dropped off on top of a boulder near a tree near a mile marker.  Elaborate efforts to catch the Invisible Master fail and the money is lost.

Then Wade solves the case and we find Hamilton has sprung upon us an audacious surprise ending and that "The Invisible Master" is not only a science fiction story that speculates about optics and sight, but about human psychology!  You see, there is no Invisible Master, and there is no invisibility device!  Grantham and Gray hoaxed the entire thing!  Those three robberies were committed by unscrupulous people who then blamed them on the Invisible Master, in whom they, like everybody else, believed!  Grantham and Gray knew enough psychology to know people would believe them because of their credentials, and knew evil people would take advantage of the Invisible Master scare to commit crimes that would, in a vicious cycle, generate more fear, and that that fear would lead the government and business leaders to knuckle under to threats and demands for money.  (Gray didn't know Grantham well enough to predict the physicist would murder his assistant and dissolve his body in acid.)  

This is a pretty cynical story, portraying both elites and the masses as evil or cowardly (though recent events around coronavirus, George Floyd mania and transsexual mania seem to bear out this bleak assessment) but has a sort of soft spot for the police and delivers a message about the value of systematic routine.  Though he was facing extraordinary circumstances, Wade followed the routine procedures used in ordinary police work, and this mundane practice produced the facts that cracked the case and brought the villain to justice and liberated the Big Apple from a reign of terror.  I guess it is in the spirit of old-fashioned science fiction and detective fiction to remind readers that you achieve success by plodding away, dotting all the "i"s and crossing all the "t"s, methodically following all the rules and best practices.  

While reading this story I mostly found it kind of dull, but the twist ending is so surprising I have to admire it, and the story's ideology is sort of interesting if not romantic or life-affirming.  We'll call "The Invisible Master" mildly recommendable.

**********

Three stories on the theme of scientific breakthroughs causing disasters, though the third story's breakthrough is a hoax and the scientist in question is not unwittingly putting the populace in danger but deliberately doing so.  While about science, and trying to teach you science, the story encourages skepticism of actual scientists and suggests that scientific advances can come at a terrible cost.

Lots more Edmond Hamilton and Weird Tales lie in the future for MPorcius Fiction Log, but we'll be taking a break from speculative fiction for our next blog post.