F&SF, Dec 58: A Budrys, A Boucher, & F Leiber

Mel Hunter

Let's read three stories from the December 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, an issue edited by Robert P. Mills.  This ish has a fun damsel-in-distress cover by Emsh, Anthony Boucher's mixed review of Theodore Sturgeon's novel The Cosmic Rape and his enthusiastic praise for both Sturgeon's collection A Touch of Strange and for a publication edited by Karen Anderson that celebrates the recently dead Henry Kuttner, Henry Kuttner: A Memorial Symposium.  (In January of this year I wrote about A Touch of Strange myself across three blog posts, one, two, three.)  On the back cover is an ad for a print of a painting by Mel Hunter three feet wide depicting a lunar crater--just send 75 cents to Geek Systems, Inc. in New York City.

Lots of valuable material, but our main interest is the fiction, so on to stories by Algis Budrys, Boucher, and Fritz Leiber.  I almost read the Cornell Woolrich contribution, but then realized it is not a story but a play, and bailed.  

"The Eye and the Lightning" by Algis Budrys (1958)

It kind of looks like "The Eye and the Lightning" was a flash in the pan, promoted on the cover of this issue of F&SF but never reprinted in a book, just in a French magazine and a British magazine.

"The Eye and the Lightning" is a pretty confusing and somewhat convoluted story, all the basic elements of which strain the reader's credulity, and perhaps must be interpreted as merely metaphorical or allegorical; it is easy to see why it was not popular.

It is the bizarre super-individualistic, super-suspicious future!  Everybody lives alone in an underground bunker he builds for himself, the location of which he keeps hidden.  Everybody has a homemade high tech "rig" that consists of a scanner, a teleporter, and a burner.  The rig can home in on and provide a televised view of places and people it is keyed to--you key your scanner to a location by taking a bit of the soil of the place and putting it in the scanner, or key it to a person by securing a lock of his hair or a fragment of his clothes or whatever.  I guess this is like the way you get a bloodhound on the trail by letting it sniff a guy's clothes or how you make a voodoo doll using a lock of your enemy's hair or his fingernail paring.  Once the scanner is keyed to a location you can teleport to that place as well as observe it, and teleport back home from that spot.  And once your rig is keyed to a person you can watch that person and kill him with the burner.  

People need to go out and buy stuff, like replacement parts for their scanner rigs, so they regularly teleport to towns to buy and sell.  In town, everybody wears elaborate disguises--concealing masks, padded suits meant to obscure your body weight and shape, and so forth, and people even put on fake voices--I guess it is implied that the scanners can home in on the timbre of a voice and even your personality.

Such is the background.  As for the main character, we meet a guy who, in this paranoid world in which most people spend every waking moment working on their rigs and disguises to ensure their security, is remarkably chill, spending his time making castles out of playing cards and carving elaborate marionettes and stage sets for them.  Again and again Budrys tells us this guy doesn't understand why all other people are so scared and suspicious and waste their time spying on others and building defenses against others.  We are also privy to his metaphorical dreams.

As for the plot, our protagonist teleports out to buy more parts for his rig, even though he has the bare minimum of a rig.  He is confronted by angry mobs and suspicious individuals--the already crazy world is getting crazier because of rumors that somebody has developed an even more advanced rig, one that can detect when another rig is watching you.  Our guy manages to escape various episodes of danger by using different types of grenades and teleporting.  In the course of the day's adventures he develops relationships with a young male electronics expert and an attractive young woman and the three end up in the protagonist's bunker.  The three are very suspicious of each other, and the woman tries to use her sexual attractiveness to get in good with one and then the other of the men, as she thinks one of them has one of the new advanced rigs and is thus able to protect her.  At least I think that is what is going on.

In the end it turns out that both of the male characters have innovative rigs, but the protagonist's is by far the better.  Our twist ending is that the chill protagonist has a split personality--he can be chill because his other personality is the world's top electronics expert and has devised the best rig in the world, even though his chill personality thinks it is the lamest rig in the world.  The story ends on a happy note--our hero is going to spread the innovations of his advanced rig around the world, with the result that everybody will meet on a plane of equality and people will be less suspicious and build friendships and communities again.  Again, that is what I think is what is going on, though I am not quite sure.  As the world gets safer, our hero can spend less time as his defensive personality and more time as his chill personality until his defensive personality eventually expires.

I had trouble wrapping my head around how the rigs work and why people were acting the way they were and how such a society could develop and maintain itself; the hard science, sociology and psychology of "The Eye and the Lightning" seem to have been arbitrarily and unconvincingly thrown  together by Budrys merely to allow him to make some kind of metaphorical point.  What might that point be?  That we all desire friends and love and recognize that a community can accomplish things that isolated individuals cannot, but at the same time we all fear others because other people can break our hearts if we open them and physically kill us if we let our guard down in proximity to them?  I also am considering if this story is influenced by sad realities made obvious by World War and Cold War conditions--liberal polities like the United States that value freedom and the rule of law may have to develop split personalities to survive in the same world as such monstrous polities as those that made up the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis and the Warsaw Pact, may need a second personality devoted to defense and able to engage in ruthless behavior, a second personality that the primary, liberal, personality barely even knows about.  If we extend that metaphor, is Budrys suggesting that if the United States develops a super defense we should share it with our rivals?  Are the conventional rigs like nuclear missiles and the new rigs like an anti-missile system?  Or maybe the rigs are like a conventional army and the advanced rigs are like nuclear weapons, which put competitors on an equal footing?

This story is not entertaining enough, and its philosophy not lucid enough, for me to endorse, but it isn't terrible, so maybe people who like a puzzle will enjoy it?  I'll call it acceptable.

Oh la la!

"The Pink Caterpillar" by Anthony Boucher (1945)

This story first appeared in an issue of the magazine Adventure and was reprinted by Donald Wollheim in the seventeenth issue of Avon Fantasy Reader in 1951.  It would go on to be included in Boucher collections and the David Alexander anthology Tales for the Rainy Night.

Like Budrys' story, Boucher's "The Pink Caterpillar" is sort of convoluted and has a central gimmick that doesn't make sense, or at least one which I can't understand.  The tale takes the form of a detective story, and is apparently one of a series of novels and stories starring a red-headed Irish-American gumshoe who here in "The Pink Caterpillar" is called Fergus O'Brien but who in other tales apparently bears the name "Fergus O'Breen."

Note that I am reading this 1958 version of the story, which is different in at least one way from the 1945 version--in the '45 version, on the first page, Hitler is mentioned in passing, and, in the '58 version, Khrushchev's name has been substituted for Der Fuhrer's.

O'Brien is hanging around with his fellow servicemen.  Our narrator is some other Navy man, but O'Brien's dialogue takes up most of the text of the story.  The topic of native witch doctors comes up, in particular their power to snatch one item from 100 years in the future and bring it to the present.  O'Brien contributes a story that illustrates the use of this power, a case he dealt with in Mexico before he joined the Navy when he was a detective working for an insurance company.

O'Brien was sent to Mexico by the insurance company to investigate the death of a gringo whose sister sought the insurance money; the company was suspicious because some evidence had arisen that the deceased was referred to by Mexicans with the title of "Dr." even though he was not in fact a doctor.  O'Brien describes all kinds of clues and interviews with people he conducted, giving his comrades (and I guess readers) a chance to solve the case themselves.  In the end the story's outlandish and macabre gimmick is revealed to us.  

The gringo had an enemy.  Gringo got a witch doctor to summon from 100 years in the future the skeleton of the enemy.  Somehow, this meant that the enemy no longer existed in this time, I guess because two of any one item cannot exist in the same time.  Should the skeleton be destroyed, the enemy would reappear.  So, the gringo took care to preserve the skeleton.  (He convinced the Mexicans he lived among that he was a doctor to explain why he had a skeleton mounted in his house.)  This guy was not as careful about his skeleton as I would have been, for example, letting the cleaning woman near enough to the skeleton that she knocked one of its fingers off.  (My wife would like to hire some stranger to come into our house to clean, but I flatly refuse, positive such a person would break one of the Rookwood vases or knock over one of the Art Deco statues.)  The enemy's finger, fully fleshed, thus appeared and crawled around, menacing the gringo.  (This is the pink caterpillar of the title.)  You'd think after this mishap that the gringo would really take care of this skeleton, but somehow he permitted some high-spirited young American engineers working for the local mining company to steal the skeleton on Halloween and throw the skeleton on a bonfire.  As a result, the enemy reappeared in toto  and came after the gringo, who died of a heart attack upon seeing his foe.

"The Pink Caterpillar" moves along at a decent clip and the various horror images in the story are good, but Boucher has to come up with so many absurd and contrived situations to provide a basis for those images that the story's plot is a ridiculous mess.  And I'm not a fan of stories that consist of "Here's a bunch of clues, reader, try to figure this out--ha ha, the answer is something totally impossible that doesn't make sense, you lose."  I guess I'm issuing another rueful "acceptable " grade. 

"Little Old Miss Macbeth" by Fritz Leiber (1958)

Mills, in his introduction to "Little Old Miss Macbeth," which he calls "a nocturne," promotes Leiber's earlier F&SF contributions "The Big Trek" (which I feel like I've read, but I guess that was before I started this blog) and "A Deskful of Girls" (which I read in 2024), and suggests Leiber is a "vividly visual" writer and all three of these stories have "distinctively evoked" and unforgettable images.  Well, let's see.

Actually, images are all that "Little Old Miss Macbeth" has going for it--besides verbose descriptions of surreal images, all we get are a lame joke and a lame surprise ending.  An old woman gets out of bed, sleep walks through a dark deserted city full of strange (but harmless) mutants and broken windows, to some other building where she silences a leaky faucet, then walks back home.  The surprise ending is the revelation that, after some kind of apocalyptic war, there are so few people alive that each person can have an entire ruined city to him- or herself.  

Gotta give this waste of time a thumbs down.  SF pros seem to love this sterile literary exercise, however.  (At MPorcius Fiction Log, we go against the grain!)  Rod Serling chose it for Rod Serling's Other Worlds, which bears the tag line "Fourteen amazing tales of galactic terror and suspense," even though "Little Old Miss Macbeth" features no terror or suspense.  It also appears in Marvin Kaye's Witches and Warlocks: Tales of Black Magic Old and New even though it is not about black magic and Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Weinberg's 100 Twisted Little Tales of Torment even though it is not about torment.  You can perhaps find "Little Old Miss Macbeth" most readily in the oft-reprinted The Best of Fritz Leiber, even though...well, you get the picture.

**********

Ouch, three stories I cannot recommend.  Leiber's is probably the most successful in terms of the author achieving his goals--it has no blunders, and I am rejecting it because I am not an admirer of the goals Leiber set himself with the story.  I can get on board with what Budrys and Boucher are trying to do with their stories, but I think they pursue their goals in an unsatisfactory fashion, their plots convoluted and their science-fictional and supernatural devices contrived and unconvincing.  

Too bad!