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.
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| 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.
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