Legacy AKA A Tale of Two Clocks by James H. Schmitz

"Hard to believe," Trigger observed, "that a sort of leech-looking thing could distinguish between people."

"This one can.  Do you get any sensations while holding it?"

"Sensations?"  She considered.  "Nothing particular.  It's just like I said the other time--little Repulsive is rather nice to feel."

"For you," he said.  "I didn't tell you everything."

"You rarely do," Trigger remarked.

James H. Schmitz came to mind when we read his OK piece "We Don't Want Any Trouble" for the last installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.   In late June, at D. J. Ernst Books in Selinsgrove, PA, I picked up at a bargain price a 1979 Ace paperback copy of Schmitz's 1962 novel A Tale of Two Clocks that bears the new title Legacy and a mediocre sex and violence cover (the foreshortening and perspective on the pistol are distractingly wrong) that suggested the book is one of Schmitz's famous female-cop-of-the-future works.  isfdb tells us that A Tale of Two Clocks is the first book in the Hub series; we've already read the third Hub book, The Demon Breed, and three Schmitz stories about alien monsters that take place in the Hub setting, "Lion Loose," "Goblin Night" and "Grandpa."  (The collection Agent of Vega, which is all about girl space cops, apparently is not set in the same universe as the Hub.)  I spent the last week or so slowly grinding through this 346-page typo-ridden Ace edition and I am afraid I have to tell you I did not enjoy it very much.     

The typeface of this edition might be large (33 lines per page) but A Tale of Two Clocks feels quite long.  The story moves slowly, and in disjointed fashion, with most of the events that make up the plot presented not directly to the reader but in expository dialogue after the fact--as in a mystery novel, the goals of many of the characters consist of figuring out who did what and why in the past.  Quite a few chapters feel circular, like they don't advance the plot.  For example, in the first half of the novel our heroine, 24-year-old Trigger Argee of the interstellar Federation's  FBI/CIA, wants to abandon the position she has been assigned on the University planet and return to planet Manon, where her boyfriend is, so she uses her spy skills to go AWOL.  She gets captured by her superiors but not punished.  She goes AWOL again and gets recaptured again.  Again she is not punished, and then her superiors just assign her to Manon, so she ends up going where she wants to go anyway.  We don't really know why she was sent to the Uni planet, nor back to Manon, nor why she really wanted to return to Manon, until quite a bit later in the book.

For multiple reasons, the novel lacks tension and urgency.  As the AWOL chapters described above suggest, for the named characters in A Tale of Two Clocks risks seem slight and the stakes feel low; people misbehave or make mistakes but don't get punished, they lose fights and break laws but suffer no physical injury or serious legal ramifications.  Not only are the novel's characters exempt from risk, they are exempt from responsibility--again and again people are hypnotized or mind-controlled and thus not responsible for their own actions; almost every prominent character in the book is not in control of his or her body and/or mind at at least one point, and this happens to several of them multiple times.   

A Tale of Two Clocks reminded me of the juvenile mysteries I read as a kid, like The Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators, in that it has a light-hearted vibe and our putative protagonist Trigger Argee runs little risk and is a minor player in things, not the motor or brain that drives the plot.  Trigger is treated by everyone like an adorable mischievous child, always praised, always forgiven, no matter what she does--even though she serially disobeys orders and even knocks her superiors unconscious and steals from them they keep on loving her, even praising her for her ingenuity.  Even though this novel is about spies and criminals and naval battles and human civilization at risk of erupting into total human vs human war or enslavement or extermination by aliens, Schmitz does very little to instill fear or suspense in the reader; most of the alien monsters look grotesque but prove to be admirable or harmless; the alien at the center of the plot, which Trigger compares to a leech, is soothing to the touch of our heroine, and when Trigger guns down one monster in a fight she feels bad about it.  Schmitz's purpose in this novel isn't to produce thrills and chills, to generate tension by suggesting the protagonist might suffer and then relieving that tension in a catharsis by portraying the heroine triumphing thanks to her abilities or personality; I think he hopes readers will enjoy seeing a bunch of admirable and likable people act all chummy and have little comic interludes.  As we often see in crime and espionage fiction, many of the bad guys are likable and switch sides to join up with the good guys, and many of the good guys are former bad guys or do things not dissimilar to what bad guys do, but do it to protect society.  

Another of the value propositions of A Tale of Two Clocks is its depiction of a high tech future with lots of gadgets and with different social mores than our own--most of these mores revolve around gender roles and sex.  Trigger and her comrades interact quite often with what we might call internet terminals, and there is plenty of other futuristic gear, like clothes that distort light waves to change your body silhouette in order to augment your disguise.  Schmitz actually describes people's clothes and hair quite a lot; this is perhaps a facet of the feminist aspect of Schmitz's work, which helped endear Schmitz to Mercedes Lackey, who reports in the intro to a Baen edition of Agent of Vega that Schmitz was the first science fiction author she ever read.  Schmitz here in A Tale of Two Clocks portrays a society of sexual equality in which half the spies, half the scientists, and half the criminals are women, and he goes the extra mile, trying to get into women's heads, though whether feminists would be thrilled by the fact that Trigger spends a lot of time thinking about her clothes and her hair is up for debate.

Another aspect of the novel that might engender ambiguous reactions from feminists are all the hints at fetishistic sexuality; women in the novel are bound in various high tech and low tech ways, and there are multiple scenes of women being ogled by men.  The cover of the first hardcover edition hints at this aspect of the novel, depicting Trigger in what amounts to a bikini, perhaps a reference to the outfit she dons in Chapter 13. 

Long, boring and confusing, with hordes of uninteresting characters, as I read and took notes on A Tale of Two Clocks AKA Legacy I kept wavering between an expectation that in this blog post I would judge it merely acceptable and a sad realization that I had to condemn it as poor.  The final two chapters are actually good hard science fiction, with a good action climax and a satisfying denouement which helped soothe the frustration of the previous 320 pages, so I guess our final verdict is that A Tale of Two Clocks is tolerable.  The plot outline, the alien monsters, the high tech equipment and even the social world which are the basic building blocks of Schmitz's novel are good, but the tone and the structure of the book are weak and the characters bland so that there is no passion or narrative drive, nothing to stir up the reader's emotions.  I didn't care what happened next, and it was easy to put the book aside, with the result that I was reading only two or three chapters a day.  

Oh, the plot.  In brief, A Tale of Two Clocks is the story of how young Trigger, the high-IQ marksman and famous government security agent, is manipulated by criminals and her employers as various revisionist governments and greedy entities compete with each other and the status quo powers of the Federation for possession of the recently discovered plasmoids, the biomechanical creatures that apparently served as the industrial base of the aliens who ruled the galaxy thousands and thousands of years ago.  The plasmoids, who are very reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft's shoggoths, in this novel play the McGuffin role that the One Ring plays in Tolkien or a nuclear weapon formula might play in an extravagant spy story--bad guys from all over the galaxy want the plasmoids and the wiser people among the good guys wish the plasmoids could be kept out of the hands of any humans as they represent a technology that has the potential to cause a terrible war between humans or a monster army that could take over the galaxy.  The novel's events include lots of espionage/detective business--people in disguise, a long list of suspects to sift through, people getting interrogated--plus plenty of monsters and lots of psychology jazz.  At the end we finally get space naval battles and people in space suits on a dangerous mission in vacuum.  And a twist ending in which we learn the astonishing identity of the aliens who used to rule the galaxy and their enduring influence.

If you want more plot details, and examples to back up all my many complaints (and limited praise), read on below.   

**********

Our heroine is Trigger Argee, already at age 24 a famous agent of the security services of the human Federation of over a thousand planets.  She has been summoned to the "University World of the Hub" on a mission about which she has been told little.  Chapter 1 gives us a little exposition, plus scenes demonstrating that Trigger is a badass and popular with everybody, for example friends with the butch head of the university's women's athletics department and the uni's comic relief principal, an absent-minded fat guy who is a bad driver.  Ha ha.

Schmitz doesn't limit our experience of his story to scenes with Trigger; in Chapter 2 we observe the athletics director, a security agent herself, on a phone call with a senior security officer, talking about how Trigger has a high IQ and is difficult to manage.  And get more exposition.  On planet Manon, where Trigger was previously working, were discovered some of the "plasmoids" of the "Old Galactics," artificial life created by the lost race that ruled the galaxy before the rise of humanity.  These blobs of various sizes apparently served the ancient ones as machines--kind of like H. P. Lovecraft's shoggoths--but today, thousands of years later, while alive, they are dormant.  Specimens are being studied all over the Federation, including here on the University planet, but many extra-Federation governments and institutions that would like plasmids have been forbidden by the Federation from access to any, and so criminals and agents of unknown identity, we learn in Chapter 3, have been trying to seize plasmoids.  People have also been trying to kidnap Trigger, though her masters haven't apprised Trigger of this fact.

Chapter 3 also introduces a love triangle.  Via an interstellar phone call, Trigger learns that her boyfriend back on Manon is being pursued by a sexy nineteen-year-old, the daughter of a shipping magnate.  Schmitz does a sort of gender switcheroo on us and has Trigger worried that this girl's wealth, not her youth and beauty, might tempt her boyfriend--I feel like in real life men tend to worry women will be tempted by money while women worry men will be tempted by youth, physical beauty and sexual availability.  Schmitz doesn't do much of anything with this love triangle and in Chapters 18 and 20 we learn Trigger didn't really want to go back to Manon because of jealousy but because she had been hypnotized into wanting to go back to Manon; concern over her boyfriend was just an excuse her hypnotized brain grabbed on to. 

Chapter 4 describes in some detail Trigger's effort to get off the University planet and to Manon without her bosses knowing it, Schmitz giving us all the espionage/crime fiction slosh: Trigger buying tickets under an assumed name, exploiting her local contacts, changing her clothes, etc.  But her security masters capture her before she can get off world and bring her before a security big wig for some exposition on the plasmoids and current operations in Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8.  (Most of the plot of this novel is described to us at a remove, in the conversations of the characters or while the characters are watching a screen or something like that.)  Somebody has stolen one of the plasmoids, perhaps the most important one, one that is like the manager of the others, able to direct them and even generate replacements for failed lesser plasmoids.  Trigger is also informed that people have been trying to kidnap her, but her superiors are not sure why; could the fact that she may be attuned to plasmoids--we see one before more active in her presence--be the reason?  

In Chapter 9, in an effort to evade any future kidnapping attempts, Trigger and the women's athletic director, whom Trigger now knows is also a government agent, are in disguise on a hunting preserve while another woman impersonates Trigger back at the university.  In Chapter 10, knocks out her short-haired friend and we get more spy business with disguises and false names; Trigger this time makes it aboard a liner to Manon.  In Chapter 11 Schmitz describes what a trip on a space liner is like; the fact that hyperspace travel induces hallucinations and that part of the liner's entertainment system consists of illusions add a surreal note to the proceedings--is that little yellow devil Trigger sees a hologram, an hallucination, or an alien?  

At the liner's first stop, a Federation Security agent, Quillan, boards and Trigger finds herself again under the control of her government employers.  Quillan offers exposition in Chapter 12 and A Tale of Two Clocks takes on some of the character of a murder mystery.  Some nameless crewmen have been killed by a monster, but it is not clear if the monster is still aboard and it is totally unknown who employed the monster or who it was really sent to kill.  I have to admit that as I write this I have actually forgotten the monster's owner and target--the answer doesn't really mean much in the greater scheme of things, perhaps.

Anyway, we get a roster of suspects, which essentially overlaps with the list of people suspected of masterminding the efforts to kidnap Trigger and capture plasmoids.  Of the multiple groups of people who have been restricted by the Federation from access to plasmoids and are trying to get plasmoids by underhanded means, the most important to Schmitz's novel are the people of aristocratic planet Tranest, ruled by a woman named Lyad, which is easy to remember because it is an anagram of "lady."  Lyad is in league with the obese shipping magnate whose daughter is after Trigger's boyfriend.  Second in importance are the totalitarians of planet Devagas.  Lyad, the shipping magnate, and the top Devagas scientist, Balmordan, are on the liner and headed to Manon.

Quillan and some other Federation agents present incognito on the liner move in the high social circles of Lyad and the shipper and Trigger gets invited along with the other Feds to a dinner party with the big three criminals.  Chapter 13 is primarily concerned with a revealing party dress which Quillan gives Trigger to wear to the shindig, while in Chapter 14 we learn via a flashback about the party at which the Federation agents and the various suspects all try to get info out of each other.  Why Schmitz structures the chapter as Trigger looking back on the party rather than just describing the party start to finish, I don't know, as it short circuits suspense and tension.

Chapter 15 covers Trigger and her superiors watching on a TV screen as the murderous monster is killed by a trap--again we readers view the action of the plot through a mediating individual or institution instead of being right there, which saps that action of immediacy and excitement.  Then Trigger's bosses drug her so she won't make any more trouble during the voyage to Manon--one of the reasons A Tale of Two Clocks lacks excitement is that Trigger, whom we keep being told is a high-IQ badass, doesn't drive the plot with her decisions or desires, but is herself propelled by the decisions and goals of a multitude of characters so numerous and boring it is hard to keep track of them all.        

Chapter 16, halfway through the book, we are finally on Manon with Trigger and that big cast of boring characters, a bunch of spooks who do unscrupulous things in service to the government and a bunch of rich people who do unscrupulous things to get more rich and who are suspects in the series of crimes that has been accumulating in the novel's many expository dialogue passages.  Trigger has a long talk with one of her superiors about what other characters are up to; she is also given custody of the little plasmoid that seemed to like her.  She is provided a special handbag in which she can carry "Repulsive;" the handbag is a door into hyperspace--should trouble arise, Trigger can say the magic words and teleport Repulsive into hyperspace to hide; when the danger has passed, another set of words can bring him back into the bag.  In Chapter 17 she and we learn something what has been only hinted at before, that while she was working on Manon some unknown forces knocked her out and hypnotized her, implanting valuable information deep in her brain.  The Federation's elite psych apparatus rendered her unconscious seven times so they could hypnotically probe her brain, looking for the info.  Trigger of course remembers none of these criminal or government hypno sessions, and I myself have forgotten who committed the initial crime against Trigger and what the info was.  I do remember that the security people sent Trigger to the University planet so she would be closer to a top government shrink, however.       

In Chapter 18, Trigger's masters maneuver her into discovering what they already know--her boyfriend is one of the people stealing plasmoids.  They don't just tell her straight out because they want her to resent her boyfriend, not them.  Boyfriend has been gaining weight and not practicing his hand-to-hand combat skills in Trigger's absence so Trigger is able to outfight him when he attacks her rather than surrender the valuable little monsters he has collected.  Reflecting the low stakes that characterize the interactions of named characters in this book, the boyfriend isn't imprisoned or anything for stealing the creatures, just given the opportunity to resign from the spy service.  (He later marries the magnate's daughter and becomes very rich.)  Reflecting one of the shortcomings of this book, we readers don't care that Trigger has broken up with her boyfriend after he tried to kill her because Schmitz never put any effort into building up a relationship between these two people; Schmitz doesn't bother building up a relationship between Trigger and Repulsive, either, even though that relationship, in the final chapters, is the key to the survival of the human race.

Chapter 19 provides exposition on a subplot involving a guy who faked his death months ago, and the start of a hypnotic psychoanalysis session Trigger undergoes--we learn all about Trigger's youth.  Chapter 20 continues the psychoanalysis session, including dream analysis (one of the Trigger's dreams features the images of two clocks--at the very end of the book we learn this is a clue from Repulsive that was incomprehensible to both Trigger and myself) and hints at why Trigger has been acting the way she has.  This whole book is about Trigger being manipulated by others, and Chapter 20 ends with her being kidnapped by the Tranest faction of plasmoid thieves and hauled into the magnate's ship where waits Lyda.

In Chapter 21, Lyda tries to get Trigger to join her criminal gang; Trigger refuses and escapes, but gets captured by Lyda's people again in Chapter 22 even though she manages to kill Lyda's guard monster.  Trigger is bound (one of the numerous guarded erotic elements in the book) and has her brain read (many people in this novel have stuff read from their brains, written in their brains, and erased from their brains) and then the Federation Security people rescue her.  This chapter also offers the scene that inspired the cover of the Belmont edition of A Tale of Two Clocks and of the Spanish edition of the novel, Plasmoides--Quillan and Trigger make her way into the shipping magnate's office, where he keeps the members of his harem suspended in crystal pillars, asleep and on display, when they are not working.   

In Chapter 23, we learn through expository dialogue how the Transet peeps kidnapped Trigger from under the noses of the Federation Security department (some Security people got hypnotized by the criminals, others got replaced by imposters) and some boring details of the various criminals' long term conspiracies to seize plasmoids.  Everyone on the roster of suspects is guilty of something or other, but some were working in concert, others individually, sometimes at odds with each other.  This is all pretty confusing and not interesting enough to remember.  

In Chapter 24, the Security people and Lyad, whose punishment will be losing her position as queen of Tranest* but is otherwise treated almost like one of the ship's crew (at the end of the novel she joins the Federation security service) go to some planet where more plasmoids have been found.  There, in Chapter 25, Trigger's relationship with one of the male Security people begins to blossom in "meet cute" style.  A monster appears while Trigger is bathing nude, we get a section break, and then Trigger and her new boyfriend talk about how the sight of the monster led her to run into his arms.  Why does Schmitz do this thing where he has the characters talk to each other about an action scene after the fact instead of presenting us with the action scene?  Maybe in this case because the monster turned out to be harmless--this monster encounter was not an action scene at all, but a joke scene.  Trigger in this chapter is also told about a space naval battle taking place between the Federation government and the Devagas. 

*The shipping magnate loses some of his business empire but like Lyad isn't imprisoned or anything.  Lots of no-name characters get killed in the course of the many crimes in this novel but somehow nobody is brought to justice for those untimely deaths.

     

Trigger gets periodic reports about the naval engagements in Chapter 26.  She also takes Lyad offscreen to interrogate her, then tells other Security personnel about the interrogation; I guess as a joke and for titillation purposes it sounds like Trigger bent the lady over a stump and swatted her on the ass with sticks.  What Trigger learned from Lyad sends the cast out into deep space, to a region where warp storms make hyperspace travel hazardous.  Their destination is a space station built by the Devagas and watched over by a Tranest warship.  On the way there, into Chapter 27, the security people hear all about what Lyad learned about plasmoids from reading the brain of Balmordan after he was found dead; much of what Balmordan learned about plasmoids he knew from reading the brain of another dead scientist the Devagas found in the wreck of a spaceship.  When they arrive at the station's vicinity they find both the Tranest ship and the Devagas station have been taken over by a renegade plasmoid of great intelligence and psychic power, the one that was stolen some months ago.

The Federation ship Trigger is aboard outfights the zombie Tranest ship, but the station is too tough a nut for this frigate-sized vessel to crack.  (Let me take a second here to complain that the edition of Legacy I read does not italicize ship names, annoying in a book already chock full of goofy character and place names.)  Luckily, Repulsive can out psyker the renegade plasmoid.  In Chapter 28, the best chapter in A Tale of Two Clocks by a long distance, Trigger gets in a space suit and invades the station--as in the first Star Wars movie, the station's guns can't track a target as small as a person.  The station is writhing with plasmoids like a dead body writhing with maggots, the absolute most compelling thing in this entire book, but when Trigger gets close enough to the renegade monster plasmoid, Repulsive silences the whole lot of them, saving the galaxy.  

In the final chapter, set months later when most of the characters are relaxing at the country estate of one of the scientists, we learn that Repulsive is able to go in and out of Trigger's body to commune with her.  Also, Repulsive is not really a plasmoid but one very few surviving of the Old Galactics--his people were almost wiped out in a genocidal war with extra-galactic aliens.  Reminding us of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness again, Repulsive suggests the extra-galactic menace may return someday to threaten the galaxy.  Repulsive is going to secretly control the brains of top Federation scientists and politicians so they hunt down and destroy any additional dangerous plasmoids as well as bring back to Repulsive a female member of his own species to be his girlfriend.

Assignment in Tomorrow: J H Schmitz, H L Gold & F Brown

Let's read from another science fiction anthology courtesy of the magic of the internet archive.  I guess Frederik Pohl's 1954 Assignment in Tomorrow first came to my attention in January, when I read Theodore Sturgeon's "Mr. Costello, Hero" in my 1978 DAW edition of the 1958 Sturgeon collection A Touch of Strange. Assignment in Tomorrow reprints "Mr. Costello, Hero" and fifteen other stories, many of which are by people in whom we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are interested.  Today let's check out three, those by that guy who writes adventure stories about the ray-gun-toting heroines of the future, James H. Schmitz, the agoraphobic editor of Galaxy, H. L. Gold, and detective writer Fredric Brown.

"We Don't Want Any Trouble" by James H. Schmitz (1953)

Pohl in his intro to "We Don't Want Any Trouble" here in Assignment in Tomorrow says that the title story of Agent of Vega, a collection I read back in 2016, is "brilliant as a nova."  (I concluded my own analysis of "Agent of Vega" with the declaration that it was "not bad, not great.")  Pohl then assures us that this story here, which debuted in Gold's Galaxy, is "brighter still."  Well, let's see.

OK, this is an acceptable horror story.  More brilliant than a nova?  Not in my book.

A zoologist comes home to his wife to tell her the astounding news--he has been among the important men who interviewed a space alien!  This alien was like a frog man or lizard man, and a government intelligence officer and a bunch of scientists and politicians interrogated it.  All these important representatives of the American establishment were consumed by irrational negative feelings towards the alien, irresistible fear and undeniable detestation.  So disturbed was the zoologist that he could barely look at the alien and certainly couldn't come up with rational questions to ask it.  Our guy almost fainted when the alien's eyes fell upon him--only his fear of embarrassment in front of a blonde woman, the intelligence man's fiancé, there to take notes, kept him from swooning.

The eggheads were at a loss, but the intelligence man was a man of action and when the alien refused to answer questions he threatened the reptilian creature with torture and death.  The alien explained that his people are immune to pain and even death, and will do whatever they want on Earth, probably just act as tourists.  The E.T. was haughty and contemptuous of our civilization.

The intelligence man, hysterical, whipped out his pistol and gunned the alien down; his comrades wrested his gun from him.  Then the spook's hot fiancée stood up from where she was taking notes to strip naked!  The aliens are immune from death because they can move their consciousness from one body to another with trivial ease!  The intelligence man snatches another pistol, but is immediately shot dead himself by one of his fellows--no one can ever know if he intended to fire upon his fiancée's possessed body, or commit suicide.

As the story ends the zoologist speculates on how much human society will be altered by the alien tourists.  How many of these invasive tourists will there be?  And how long will they want to occupy a human body?  Will they be a minor inconvenience, or ruin lives and revolutionize society?

"We Don't Want Any Trouble" may remind readers of John D. MacDonald's The Wine of the Dreamers (1951) and Robert Silverberg's "Passengers" (1967) and probably some other things not coming to mind at the moment in which aliens take vacations (our English friends might say "'olidays") in our bodies. 

After first being reprinted here in Pohl's anthology, "We Don't Want Any Trouble," would go on to reappear in multiple American and foreign anthologies and in the Schmitz collection Eternal Frontier.

"A Matter of Form" by H. L. Gold (1938)

Some of the editors of the big SF magazines are as wacky as any of the big name SF writers, are writers in the own right, and should perhaps be seen as collaborators with the most honored SF writers, having workshopped ideas with them and guided them in developing plots, styles and themes.  At least that is the nice way of putting it--others who are less charitable have seen the big SF editors in question as self-important dictators who arrogantly interfered with the work of the writers whose fiction filled their magazines.  Either way, H. L. Gold of Galaxy and John W. Campbell, Jr. of Astounding are odd, perhaps tragic, perhaps reprehensible, characters who, for better or worse depending on your point of view, worked closely with the most prominent SF writers and played a pivotal role in shaping their work and the entire SF field.  Here in "A Matter of Form" we have a story by Gold that debuted in Campbell's essential magazine over ten years before Galaxy appeared on the scene, a story that has been reprinted many times in anthologies edited by such men as Isaac Asimov (with the help of Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh, of course) and Groff Conklin and in our own wacky 21st century in the Gold collection Perfect Murders: Detective Mysteries.

"Detective Mysteries?", you ask?  Yes, indeed.  "A Matter of Form" has the tone and atmosphere of a noirish hard-boiled detective story.  Set in New York City during the Depression, Gold's story is populated by educated people who are either down and out and suffering or living high on the hog through the proceeds of their diabolical criminal enterprises.  Our initial protagonist is a brilliant newsman, tall and skinny Gilroy, who, when he isn't bitching about how much he hates the septuagenarian rich guy, Talbot, who is half-owner of the newspaper, and relishing Talbot's imminent demise, is investigating the mysterious appearance on the streets of men, apparently unidentifiable bums with no local connections, who are catatonic and/or paralyzed.  What happened to these jokers?  Well, all of them have surgical wounds on the backs of their necks--could some mad scientist be experimenting on these poor bastards?  And why is the top surgeon at the hospital where the latest catatonic/paralytic ended up, Moss, famously a ruthless jerk, quitting his job of hospital director?

The narrative focus shifts to the adventures of Wood, formerly employed "in a stock-broker's office" as a "code expert" or "code translator," now spending his time on the streets, clad in rags, unable to find work.  Wood gets bamboozled by a bogus job offer and falls into the clutches of Moss and Talbot; Moss, it turns out, is experimenting on vulnerable men who lack families and connections in his quest to develop a means of moving people's consciousnesses from one body to another!  His research is supported by Talbot, who hopes Moss will fit him out with a fresh young body, his cis-body having a weak heart and scheduled to expire at any moment!  Moss has learned that to accomplish these identity shifts you don't have to move the entire brain, just a tiny little bit near where the brain meets the spine--this is where identity resides.  (Who knew?)  The unsuspecting Wood soon finds himself in the body of a dog!  In the same room is his old human body crawling around on all fours, it being animated by the consciousness of the dog.  

Gold's journalist and criminal scenes are pretty conventional, but the scenes of the man in a dog's body, fighting his way out of Moss's lab and evading capture by Talbot's flunkies and by the police, are pretty good--Gold's description of a human being's response to living the life of a carnivorous quadruped, of experiencing firsthand a dog's instinctive reactions to stimuli, are good speculative fiction.  It would be easy to give these portions of the book a thumbs up.  The sequences in which Wood, the code expert in a dog's body, strives to contact Gilroy the crusading journalo are not bad, and are fully in the tradition of science fiction that teaches you cool stuff (in this case, cryptography) and portrays people using logic and knowledge to overcome problems; unfortunately these scenes are repetitive and feel pretty long.  In fact, the entire story, which is like 60 pages in Assignment in Tomorrow, feels kind of long and repetitive, the characters doing and saying the same kinds of things again and again.

Another problem with "A Matter of Form" is the weak ending.  We follow Wood (in a dog's body) and Gilroy, accompanied by Gilroy's editor, a sort of superfluous but ever-present sidekick character, through a long sequence of climbing buildings and sneaking around which ends with a confrontation with Talbot and Moss.  Talbot dies of a heart attack in the excitement and, after long scenes of Moss showing contempt for his captors, Wood uses his dog body to just kill the defenseless mad scientist.

With Moss, the only man able to perform the identity transplant operation he pioneered, dead, Wood is  stuck in the dog body.  He and Gilroy get rich performing on stage and in Hollywood.  Gold talks about how Wood is sad and defeated, wishing he could live as a man again, which I think would have been a good moody ending for a hard-boiled detective story that is also an attack on our bourgeois capitalist society--all the money in the world can't make you happy if you are a second class citizen, if you have lost your humanity!  But Gold cops out and has Wood, in a way that is totally inexplicable and Gold does not even try to explain, return to his human body after a year as a pooch.  Lame!  

The plot of Gold's "A Matter of Form" is about as obvious and familiar as that of Schmitz's "We Don't Want Any Trouble," but Gold's story has a style, an atmosphere and an ideology, making it more engaging, even if I'm not impressed by the ideology--the story is suffused with the hatred of the middle-class smarty pants for the upper-middle class as well as that of the self-important creative type for those who work for money; presumably this endeared the story to Fred Pohl, alumnus of the Young Communist League.  Gold lays the atmosphere and ideology on pretty thick, having the reporter denounce Talbot again and again, and telling us again and again about Wood's worn shoes and unshaven face, contrasting his down and out mug with Moss's perfect shave, but a loud personality is better than no personality.  And the story does come to life in the action scenes in which the code expert has to learn how to operate a dog's body tout suite.  So we'll judge "A Matter of Form" marginally good, a notch above Schmitz's story; you commies out there will probably want to crank that up a few more notches.  

For more H. L. Gold coverage here at MPorcius Fiction Log, check out my blogpost on "No Medals,"  another story about poverty and a mad scientist practicing weird medicine, and "Trouble with Water," which is full of ethnic and sex stereotypes.

"Hall of Mirrors" by Fredric Brown (1953)

Here's another story from Gold's Galaxy--it's H. L. Gold day here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Fredric Brown's "Hall of Mirrors" debuted in an issue of Galaxy with a Christmas joke cover--Christmas covers and joke covers always make me groan.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we like blood and guts, sex and violence, thrills and chills, not Santa Claus and yukking it up. 

This is a brief gimmicky story that can serve as an example of the elitism of the science fiction community, its skepticism of the common people and its belief in technocracy and the rule of the cognitive elite.

"Hall of Mirrors" is written in the second person, addressed directly to the reader, who is the protagonist.  "You," a young math professor, wake up in a small room, wondering where you are, having just moments ago been hanging out with your sexy fiancé by the pool in Beverly Hills.  You step into a larger room with furniture of an odd style; you are naked, and put on weird clothes of a cut and fabric you don't recognize.

You find a note that explains your predicament.  You, a college professor about to get married in 1954, have been transported to the future of 2004.  Well, sort of.  The note explains that the inventor of the time machine is you of 2004, age 74.  Time travel in this story isn't really what I would consider time travel; at least I don't think it is--this story's science jazz is a little hard for me to make sense of.  When 2004 you put a manufactured cube into the time machine and set the cube to travel ten years back, when you opened up the machine you found the cube a pile of raw dust--the matter of the cube had returned to its state of ten years ago, before it was compressed into a cube.  Similarly, putting a six-week old guinea pig into the machine and setting the device to go back five weeks produced a baby rodent.  You believed that putting a human being in the machine would de-age the person; with the machine, people sick or old or otherwise on the brink of death could be given a new lease on life, made young again--the price of this longevity would be to erase all memories of the intervening period (if 60-year-old you was de-aged to 20, you would forget everything that happened for the last 40 years, but would be exactly as healthy as you were 40 years ago.)

Seventy-four-year-old you of 2004 figured people would use the machine to extend their lives, thus causing overpopulation.  In a world run by the cognitive elite, both the machine's use and people's ability to reproduce would be highly regulated to keep the population balanced, but, alas, we don't live in such an "enlightened" world yet.  You decided to lower your age, to rejuvenate yourself, and to keep doing so, providing yourself immortality so you could keep an eye on the time machine and make sure nobody learned of it until you were confident the government and populace were ready to use the time machine responsibly.

An acceptable filler story that, with its circular nature (different versions of the hero manipulating each other) and elite hero working behind the scenes to manipulate civilization and bring about an eventual paradigm shift, reminds us a little of A. E. van Vogt's work.  "Hall of Mirrors" has been reprinted in multiple Brown collections and anthologies, including one edited by our hero, Barry N. Malzberg.

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These are not bad examples of the kind of SF Fred Pohl likes, stories that tell you our society sucks and we should put college professors and journalists in charge of everything.  We'll probably read some more from Assignment in Tomorrow, but first a novel that is perhaps a little more action-adventure oriented. 

Lester del Rey: "The One-Eyed Man," "And the Darkness," and "Shadows of Empire"

Let's read three more stories and another series of autobiographical passages from the 1975 Lester del Rey collection The Early del Rey.  Feel free to refresh your memory of previous installments of this ongoing series here at MPorcius Fiction Log by clicking the following links:

"The Faithful," "Anything" and "Habit"

"The Smallest God," "The Stars Look Down," "Doubled in Brass," and "Reincarnate"
"Carillon of Skulls," "Done Without Eagles," and "My Name is Legion"
"Though Poppies Grow," "Lunar Landing," and "Fifth Freedom"

"Whom the Gods Love," "Though Dreamers Die," and "Fool's Errand"

"The One-Eyed Man" (1945)

In the short passage between "Fool's Errand" and "The One-Eyed Man," del Rey tells us he based this story on some press accounts of the work of Felix Ehrenhaft on magnetism and of Aleksander Bogolomets on life extension.   John W. Campbell, Jr. published "The One-Eyed Man" in Astounding under the Philip St. John pseudonym.

This is a very fast-paced story of palace intrigue and brain science--and peeps getting blown away by ray guns--with a somewhat convoluted plot that reminded me of A. E. van Vogt's work.  I think I can marginally recommend it, but it has not, it appears, ever been anthologized.

It is the 42nd century.  The New World is ruled by a dictatorship, though the Dictator has to contend with a Senate full of ambitious conniving creeps.  The form of the current society is determined by the inventions of the current dictator's ancestor, a genius scientist, Aaron Bard, who came up with startling, game-changing, innovations in the disparate fields of medicine, psychology, atomic energy, electronics, and  beyond.  A world war erupted and Bard's son used his father's inventions to win the war and make himself Dictator; the inventor Bard died in some kind of accident.  Today, nobody knows the science that makes many of Bard's inventions work, though technicians can still operate them.  The secrets of some other of Bard's inventions, like atomic ray guns and techniques to render matter permeable and then impermeable again, are totally lost.

The most important invention in use today is the machine that feeds info right into your brain.  When you are twelve, government lackeys hook you up to this device and it fills your noggin with all you need to know and you thereafter are an adult and are given an adult job.  The process is a little stressful, and turns like ten percent of people into zombies, who now form a slave class of manual laborers and house servants.  Even worse, the current education system has degraded society.  Twelve-year-old kids, as del Rey tells it, are like self-obsessed savages with no sense of morality or decency.  This machine system of education gives people no chance to mature, and so nearly everybody in the society is a selfish jerk, just like a 12-year-old brat, but with the knowledge and positions of responsibility that enable them to make life for everyone around them a nightmare!

Our protagonist is the current Dictator's son, Jim, who I guess is like 20.  The Dictator had a hunch that Jimmy would be zombified by the education process, and because he is the Dictator, he had his kid exempted from the normal education process.  Jim thus has grown up more or less normally, and has a sense of decency and justice.  He has also managed to figure out how to use his ancestor's permeable matter technique, which gives him access to the labyrinth of secret passages and spyholes which riddles the castle where live and work the Dictator and the Senate.  Thus, Jim knows all the dirty secrets of the various Senators, most of whom are plotting to overthrow his Dad and/or are in league with Eurasia, the enemy of the New World.

The Dictator knows that a war with Eurasia is brewing and that some Senators are trying to do him in, so he decides that to maintain any credibility with the public he has to finally let Jim go under the learning machine.  The very day that Jim is to risk zombification, he unexpectedly runs into an old man in the secret passages Jim thought nobody else alive knew about--amazingly, it is Aaron Bard, revived from the dead by a cabal of Senators who tried to force the inventor to divulge to them some of his science secrets!  The undead Bard escaped those traitors and makes common cause with his young descendent Jim.  Most of the story follows these two as they outwit the conspirators and make Jim Dictator so the New World can defeat or deter the Eurasians, achieve stability in government and usher in a new golden age by restricting use of the teaching machine to people in their 20s.

This is like a novel's worth of plot that is conveyed to the reader in the space of a short story by leaving out any kind of fancy writing or character personality or emotional content--it feels like it is moving at breakneck speed.  The plot and setting are cool enough that the story works. 

"And the Darkness" (1950)

Between "The One-Eyed Man," and "And the Darkness," del Rey talks about his career life and love life in 1945 and 1946, when he took time off writing and managed a location of the chain restaurant White Tower, a chain which I had never heard of that I am told was an imitator of White Castle.  There's a level of braggadocio to del Rey's memoirs, and he explains how he did a stellar job managing this restaurant.  But its not all happy memories--he broke up with his girlfriend, perhaps because  she as a office worker looked down on the work he was doing.  But shed no tears for del Rey, who eventually racked up four marriages--he got a new girlfriend, a waitress, and married her.  Then he was unjustly dismissed by White Tower and took up writing again.  Among the first of his new products was "And the Darkness."

Three centuries ago an anti-matter meteor blew up the moon and the Earth was showered with radioactive fragments, killing all of humanity but a thousand people in such places as a mine in Alaska in a valley.  Today there are like a dozen human beings left alive, and thanks to all the radiation, they have evolved superpowers.  But these superpowers can't stave off the inevitable doom of our noble race--there are no more young women and only one young man!

Del Rey spends like half the story on an abortive period of hope, triggered by somebody thinking he saw a young woman living among some wolves.  This is a false alarm--the creature is a mutant wolf who has intelligence comparable to a human and a body sort of like a human female.  Some of the twelve surviving humans, having lost hope, decide to commit suicide.  But then an aircraft appears.  On the ship are furry six-limbed people--Martians!  And they have a tale to tell!

Right before the Earth was wrecked, an Earth rocket was sent to Mars crewed by a married couple.  On Mars they met the relatively primitive natives and the Martians treated them as gods.  The human astronauts' knowledge, leadership and the equipment they brought led to a technological revolution on Mars, and today the Martians have their own space ships and other high technology.  As for the astronauts, the man suffered some kind of genetic damage from the radiation from the meteor that hit the moon and could only father girls.  So all his children and grandchildren et al have been female.  The Martians preserved his semen and used to impregnate his children, grandchildren, etc., (Gross!) but the supply today has run out.  Today there are eight young women on Mars.  The last young man on Earth is given the job of going to Mars to have sex with these eight women and perpetuate the human race.  Nice work if you can get it!  

This story is alright; a major problem is that the wolf story and the Mars story are pretty divorced from each other, are practically separate stories.  I also feel like we have a lot of superfluous characters.  Campbell rejected "And the Darkness" and in the autobiographical text after the story del Rey discusses the flaws in the story and points out some ways he could have improved the tale.  "And the Darkness" was eventually published in Donald Wollheim's Out of this World, a short-lived periodical that included behind its women-in-peril covers not only SF stories but 32 pages of comics, including work by major comics creators Joe Kubert, John Giunta and Gardner Fox.  Like "The One-Eyed Man," "And the Darkness" was never anthologized.  (The stories in The Early del Rey are mostly ones that had not been anthologized or collected before 1975 and are thus not his most popular or critically acclaimed work.)

"Shadows of Empire" (1950)           

This one reminds me of Poul Anderson, with its musings on the cycles of history and focus on national character-- "Shadows of Empire" prominently features a Slavic character, and del Rey suggests Slavs are "gloomy." 

It is the future of space empire, with Earth having colonized much of the solar system.  This empire is ruled by an Emperor and a bunch of nobles.  Our narrator is a noncommissioned officer in a garrison on Mars.  Mars is covered with the ruins of the mighty native race whose advanced civilization fell before Earth people arrived; the red planet is still inhabited by nomadic desert barbarians--the civilized Martian race may have died out, but the barbarians they were always fighting have endured and fought many battles with the Terrans.

We get many clues that the Earth empire is in severe decline.  The narrator's unit, I guess we would call them mechanized infantry, leaves the frontier of human settlement on Mars and drives across the desert to the more thickly settled areas and finally to the spaceport.  The Terran army on Mars is returning to Earth, leaving the human settlers to the tender mercies of the Martian barbarians, because there is some kind of civil war brewing on Earth, one which may be cataclysmic.  

One of men in the narrator's unit is a Slav who is always quoting Ecclesiastes and sometimes Kipling and is known to be a pessimist.  This guy is also working on a book.  Just before the narrator's unit and the rest of the army on Mars blast off for Earth this Slav gives his book to the narrator and then disappears.  The next day the general of the narrator's outfit reveals that the Slav was in fact a previous emperor, travelling in disguise after faking his own assassination.  The book is a major work of historical importance that will have to be hidden from the current Imperial authorities.  The story ends on a note of optimism as well as pessimism--the incognito emperor asserts that empires and civilizations inevitably fall, but civilization always rises up from the wreckage, like a phoenix.

Del Rey reports that Campbell rejected "Shadow of Empire" because it was a mood piece, and he had run some mood pieces recently and readers had not been crazy about them.  I have to sympathize with Campbell--Shadow of Empire" has little plot and I would judge it merely acceptable.  There are lots of images that are meant to convey feeling to the reader--the ruins of the high Martian race, the barbarians in the distance, the soldiers singing as they ride their tracked vehicles across the desert, the response to the rolling army of the civilians they pass, etc.--but the narrator doesn't face challenges or make decisions.  And the story feels repetitive, del Rey and the characters banging on about the same stuff over and over, words like "gloomy" and "pessimism" and "phoenix" popping up again and again. 

Damon Knight took a look at "Shadows of Empire" and was even more dismissive than Campbell, but Robert Lowndes printed it in Future; the story has not been anthologized. 

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Not exactly blockbusters, but not bad, either.  When we finish The Early del Rey we'll read some of del Rey's more celebrated work, maybe in a "best of" collection of some kind.  But we've got a lot of other projects here at MPorcius Fiction Log, so that might be pretty far in the future. 

Mythmaster by Leo P. Kelley

"I know your name is Shannon," she told him, "and I know other things about you as well.  I know they call you the Mythmaster and that you are the prize fly that the spider Oxon Kaedler covets."

Well, folks, in today's blogpost we've got something for the ladies!  You see, in our last episode, we read a paperback I bought because I liked the cover.  That worked out OK, so I decided to do that again, and the Robert Foster cover of today's topic, Leo P. Kelley's 1973 novel Mythmaster, features not only a hot woman in a minimalist strappy outfit, but a similarly attired hunk with a face that is reminding me of the classic good looks of the beloved Peter Cushing! Awesome!

I have only read one short story by Leo P. Kelley, "Cold, The Fire of the Phoenix," and I didn't like it.  According to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Kelley focused on Westerns later in his career, and it looks like Mythmaster was his tenth and last SF novel.  Well, let's hope Kelley left the SF world with a bang and that Mythmaster, 224 pages (of reassuringly large type, 32 lines on a page, much larger than the type in J. T. McIntosh's The Rule of the Pagbeasts, where we get 44 lines on a page) is a good read.

I'm afraid I must report that Mythmaster is not a good read.  At all.  I didn't like the style--the text is overwritten and wordy, with unnecessarily long descriptions and pointless metaphors, and pretentious, with references to luminaries like Shakespeare and Sophocles and symbolism Kelley explicitly explains to you, and none of this succeeds in having any emotional impact on the reader.  The concrete science and adventure components of the Mythmaster's plot are silly and difficult to credit, and the "real" character-based plot isn't great, either.  Our protagonist is a space pirate who has lost all connection to humanity and morality because he was raised by robots and while an officer in the space navy was party to a tragedy and was court martialed for disobeying orders.  Now he flies around the universe, stealing biological material from hundreds of people to sell on the black market.  He runs afoul of an evil businessman, and chases and battles with this guy provide much of the lame action-adventure plot, a plot which lacks much by way of resolution.  The soap opera plot about how the pirate needs to learn to love is propelled by the pirate's relationships with a male prostitute (a gay man who is also a navigator and a forger and a paragon of humanist values, the exemplary character of this novel who sacrifices himself for others and gives wise advice based on his knowledge of psychology) and the male prostitute's former wife, also a prostitute.  The pirate has at times creepy and fetishistic sex with these characters and they rekindle his connection to humanity and morality.  We get plenty of weird sex material in Mythmaster, as well as uninspiring philosophical discussions and psychological discourses.           

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  Mythmaster appeared in 1974 in Britain with a serviceable but generic cover by Colin Hay.

That will be enough for some of you, but those of you who want a spoilertastic plot summary and some evidence to back up my condemnation of Mythmaster, read on!

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It is the future in which the human race has colonized many star systems across multiple galaxies.  John Shannon is a space pirate and the Mythmaster of the title.  In Chapter One his ship hovers over the megalopolis of North New England and drops "pellets" that emit a hallucinogenic mist, rendering the populace helpless.  He and some of his crew descend in boats ("pods") to seize women who are newly pregnant and surgically remove their fertilized eggs.  The authorities don't intervene because they are scared of the mist (apparently the government of this spacefaring civilization lacks gas masks, vacuum suits, etc.)  Back aboard the ship, Shannon's people implant the fertilized eggs in mice for safekeeping and head to planet Ra to sell the human embryos.  Kelley offers us this melodramatic material, but without any passion or excitement; lacking the feel of a horror story or adventure story, this episode of danger, crime and weird science comes off as a cold and boring spoof of horror/adventure fiction rather than the genuine thrill-and-chill article, a satire without bite and without humor. 

In the second of Mythmaster's sixteen chapters, Shannon's vessel docks with Seventh Heaven, a space station that is a brothel ("pleasure palace"); the docking process is described in boring detail, and in case we missed it Kelley comes right out and tells us the docking symbolizes the sex act.  We also get some background on Shannon and his career, including descriptions of his current ship and his previous ship, which was wrecked by a meteor, perhaps because the navigator on that trip was a man Shannon kidnapped and pressed into service and then beat up.  I'll quote from that passage in order to provide an example of the overwriting and the burdensome metaphors I mentioned before; these lines also serve as an example of the less than credible behavior of people in this novel:

For days afterward, the man had raved and stormed about the ship, threatening to foul the navigation system with sugar crystals.  Shannon fought him finally, fist to fist, and afterward the man performed his duties in a silence that was a cool pool of hatred.

Kelley also talks quite a bit about Shannon's looks and attire, and his relationship with one of his officers, Starson--these guys seem to have a relationship with homoerotic undertones, with Starson, for example, giving Shannon very detailed and specific fashion advice.  The gay material in Mythmaster sort of creeps up on you, starting as mere hints and growing to eventually become a main theme of the narrative, reaching its peak in Chapter Ten when it turns out being date raped by a gay man is the key to learning how to love.  

Chapter Three is a series of erotic vignettes in the space brothel.  One of the few clever bits of the novel has Shannon perusing a sort of menu of the pleasures on offer on a series of screens and finding a video of himself having sex with a beautiful woman--this is what the media might call "a deep fake;"  Shannon was photographed and by way of advertisement a computer has generated this film of him sporting with the pleasure palace's top whore, Reba Charlo.  Reba, it turns out, knows all about Shannon and Starson, and makes explicit to Shannon that Starson, who is currently visiting the homosexual level of the brother, is in love with him.

The space navy raids the space brothel after our hero has banged Reba (a nasty sort of sex scene in which each participant tries to humiliate the other), so Shannon, Starson and the rest of the pirates have to fight their way back to the ship in Chapter Four.  The servicemen have laser pistols, but Shannon, Starson (who we now learn has an emerald decoratively imbedded in one of his front teeth) outfight them with their fists and pellets of the hallucinogen.  We readers have to put up with long descriptions of the navy mens' and prostitutes' allegedly amusing delusional behavior.  (I say "allegedly amusing" but fear that Kelley meant these manifestations of the inner minds of government flunkies and whores not merely as jokes but as valuable meditations on the human condition.)  Starson reveals that he and Reba were once married and we readers realize we have a love triangle on our hands.

In Chapter Five we learn that members of Shannon's crew are drug addicts and he is their supplier and one of his management strategies is to deny drugs to crewmen who make mistakes.  A subplot in which a guy goes through withdrawal symptoms and then commits suicide results.  Another of Shannon's management strategies--spying on his crew via surveillance cameras and microphones.  Spying on Starson, he hears the man sing a song about Shannon, and watches him scrawl "S S" in blood on a pane of glass.  In case we don't get it, Kelley tells us the two "S"s stand for "Shannon" and "Starson."  (At times Mythmaster comes across as a gay romance novel.)  We also learn how Shannon became the Mythmaster--he purchased the secret formula for the hallucinogen he puts in his pellets from an alcoholic pedophile chemist, paying the mad scientist in booze and girls under the age of fifteen.  And about Shannon's youth in a communal nursery, where he suckled at the plastic breast of a robot mother-surrogate.

Chapter Six is on inhospitable ice planet Ra, where Shannon and company deliver the 1000 fertilized human eggs to the illegal human settlement there.  (A thousand?  Shannon's band of pirates, which we later learn numbers less than 25, did surgery in makeshift conditions on a thousand women during that New England raid?  Or was that raid just the final of many?)  There is also more foreshadowing about Oxon Kaedler, whom Reba mentioned.  Chapter Seven gives us more backstory on Starson, who has training as an astrogator but was working as a male prostitute on Seventh Heaven when Shannon met him.  In Seven we also return to Seventh Heaven, where Shannon has a sexual experience with tiny alien monsters.  You see, these little polyps have suckers, and you join them in a pool after covering yourself with an oil which, to the polyps, is an aphrodisiac, and they suck at you like crazy.  Kelley makes sure to tell us with great specificity that Shannon has a lot of this oil on his crotch and his ass.  A male attendant is at the pool and observes Shannon's space monster-induced erection and ejaculation and suggests the pirate captain visit the level of the brothel where he can have sex with a telekinetic alien feline.

In the same way that the atrocious criminal raid in the first chapter has elements of an adventure or horror story but Kelley's cold flat style and uninteresting characters defuse any possible thrills, this bestiality business could be titillating or disgusting, but just comes off as silly.

Chapter Eight furthers the love triangle plot as Shannon (forgoing the chance to play with the psychic cat monster) pays for another session with Reba and she says she still loves Starson.  We get some pretentious psychology-of-relationship talk ("Seventh Heaven is a state of mind," for example, and "You come...to lose yourself, not to find someone....I was about to reach out to you and you made yourself unreachable") and a rough sex scene in which Reba tells Shannon she hates him while he is having intercourse with her.  Then they talk about Shannon's abortive career in the space navy--he was dishonorably discharged after disobeying orders in an unsuccessful attempt to preserve the lives of some criminals by steering his ship around the convicts' orbiting cells and into a meteor storm (the criminals and his ship ended up suffering.)  Shannon works into the conversation his belief that wars are started by bankers and arms manufacturers in their pursuit of profit.  (What with its avant-garde sex and leftist politics, maybe we'll see Mythmaster on New York City public school curricula soon.) 

In Chapter Nine, Oxon Kaedler floats on stage, and we find, as we so often find in genre fiction, that in Mythmaster the villain is more interesting than the protagonists.  (Unfortunately, Oxon has very little screen time in this book and there is no climactic showdown between Oxon and Shannon--did Kelley write this book as he went along?)  Oxon is a corrupt businessman who was burned almost to death in a fire at his mansion on Venus; it is likely the blaze was no accident but a murder attempt, a sort of parallel to the meteor events in Shannon's life.  (If Kelley had put some more effort into this novel, the way Oxon and Shannon represent similar phenomena could have been interesting.)  Oxon is a blackened husk of a man, almost unable to move due to his burns, and absolutely unable to talk.  Oxon's nude skeletal form hovers on a column of air projected upwards by a motorized machine, and he is accompanied by a squad of telepathic dwarves--one of these dwarves reads Oxon's mind and acts as the businessman's mouthpiece, speaking Oxon's dialogue.

Through the alien psyker, Oxon explains that he is immune from prosecution because he is legally dead.  You see, he had a clone and the clone died in the fire, and because the clone had the same genetic identity as Oxon, Oxon was declared dead.  So now nobody can sue him and the government can't prosecute him.  This book is pretty ridiculous; maybe Kelley is joking, but it does not feel the least but funny. 

Oxon tells Shannon that he wants to be Shannon's partner in the business of stealing and selling fertilized eggs, and offers a stack of cash to join the Mythmaster operation.  Also, he wants to buy a cell from Shannon's body in order to grow a clone of Shannon's body into which to implant his brain.  Shannon is not particularly healthy or good-looking, so I thought this came out of left field, except as a way of saying Shannon and Oxon are one and the same, both monsters of capitalism or essentially dead because they cannot love or whatever.  As for Reba, Oxon explains that, while he can't have sex with his current body, it being too painful to touch anybody or anything, he would like to watch her have sex with her clients, and cherishes hopes that in time she could learn to manipulate the air jets that are holding him up to provide him sexual pleasure.  (Have I mentioned this book is pretty ridiculous?  This guy's vocal cords are burned so badly he can't talk, but his genitals would still be stimulated by having air blown on them?)

Shannon and Reba emphatically reject these business proposals, and Oxon orders his alien dwarves to attack with them their talons.  Shannon and Reba escape through a secret passage, while over the PA system (he has bought Seventh Heaven and is now in charge of the space whorehouse) Oxon pledges to pursue them across the universe.

Chapter Ten covers the trip back to Earth and we get material about Shannon's feelings about Reba and witness Starson and Reba flirting.  The three go to Underdenver, the subterranean half of Denver to which criminals are limited.  (The government can't prevent Shannon from performing nonconsensual operations on a thousand women but they can confine all other criminals to an underground city.)  Our three space adventurers reject the solicitations of prostitutes of all ages and disperse beggars with an electric stun weapon and proceed to a store where an effeminate salesman outfits Reba with some clothes.  In Chapter Eleven we get a description of her new attire, glowing alien worms or something.  Our three principals go out to dinner (python is on the menu) and dancing and engage in verbal jousting regarding their love triangle--Reba urges Shannon to have sex with Starson, telling him it won't hurt.  (Don't believe her, Shannon!)  Reba and Starson conspire to drug Shannon with his own hallucinogen and there follows a psychedelic homosexual sex scene ("...there was only the stormy harbor of his thighs in which the ship that was Starson had chosen to anchor.")  Starson suggests in a soliloquy that he has opened up a door to a new world for Shannon.

In Chapter Twelve the landlord of the establishment where Shannon was date raped complains about the stains S and S left on the sheets.  Kelley defuses any of the tension that the gay sex scene might have generated by telling us, after the fact, that Shannon, who can't remember what happened in bed with Starson, doesn't find gay sex problematic and that homosexual relationships are normal--even encouraged--in the space navy of which he is a veteran.  What Shannon is angry about is that he can't remember what happened--Starson has robbed him of his memories.  Or so he says to himself.  Reba accuses Shannon of fearing he is falling in love with Starson.  The pirate captain forces himself on Reba, and this time while he is banging her she expresses not hatred by pity--I'm not gay or into having sex with monsters or children, so I found this sex scene the most conventionally effective in the book.  

The malign influence of evil businessman Oxon is felt when Reba, at a government office, finds she has lost her legal status and must stay in the undercity (or aboard Shannon's ship) unless she agrees to Oxon's demands.  So she is aboard when Shannon, Starson and crew raid an Upperdenver hotel that caters to obese sybarites.  The pirates steal cells from the fat voluptuaries; Shannon has signed a contract with a colony of cannibal humans who will use the cell samples to grow clones to eat.  When Reba finds out, she objects that this is murder, and in Chapter Thirteen Shannon's crew, "nearly a week out from Earth and almost a day into Garth's Galaxy," discovers she has destroyed the cells.  Shannon confronts Reba and Starson joins the verbal jousting, and we readers must endure a lot of relationship dialogue, soap opera pop psychology stuff, Reba and Starson saying they love Shannon and are trying to revive his lost humanity and get him out of the prison in which he has locked himself to keep out the world and Shannon saying he will leave Reba with the cannibals and Starson saying he'll join Reba at the cannibal colony, etc.  Shannon talks about how a captain's word is law aboard ship, maybe a reference to Heinlein?

Oxon's ship catches up and locks Shannon's inside a "fieldfix" and Oxon repeats his demands over the radio.  Oxon's vessel has three times as many weapons ("nuclearods") as Shannon's so Shannon will lose a straight fight, so he comes up with a ruse and manages to escape, his ship crippled, to an unexplored world.  The naval battle scene is poorly handled by Kelley (the science and technology stuff in Mythmaster doesn't make any sense, which would be forgivable if, like the science and technology in the first two Star Wars movies, the laser swords and psychic powers and emotional robots and dogfighting in space and all that, it made no sense but was fun) and Oxon's arrival renders all the talk of giving Reba's cells or Reba entire to the cannibals moot.  Kelley's book is full of passages which don't advance the plot or themes and which are not entertaining or interesting either.

Only five people survive the crash landing, the members of the love triangle and two others.  In Chapter Fourteen Kelley indulges in the traditional SF exercise of describing an alien planet's topography and ecology, and he kind of botches it, telling us when the cast walks away from the ship that because the gravity is low they are flying off in all directions at high speed and then a few pages later when they are returning to the ship that they have trouble walking because the ground is wet and sucking at their feet.  Shannon and Reba admit their love to each other and have nice sex instead of hate sex or pity sex or roofied sex ("They lay down together on the lower deck, unable to see each other, able only to touch and taste the rich messages that their subsequent union proclaimed.")  Then monsters attack and eat the crewman whose name we just learned in this chapter, and Starson gets to demonstrate yet again that he is more admirable than every other character in the book.

In Chapter 15 the four survivors march around, looking for a place that is safe from the monsters.  Finding himself alone with Shannon, Starson gives Shannon advice on how to be a good boyfriend to Reba, offering his psychoanalysis of her ("She ran from life by running into the arms of men, and getting paid for the running, and believing all the while that no one could ever touch her again") and then of Shannon and himself.  Oxon's ship appears above and drops pellets of the hallucinogen, which Oxon has figured out how to produce.  We get a tedious surreal sequence in which Shannon confronts what on a TV documentary would be called "his demons."  Being delusional leaves our four survivors vulnerable to the monsters, but luckily Starson, who we just learned this chapter has a habit of absentmindedly stuffing miscellaneous things into his pockets, has two doses of antidote in his pocket.  Of course he gives them to Reba and Shannon, sacrificing himself.  

In Chapter 16, Oxon's ship flies away instead of capturing or finishing off Reba and Shannon, even though Oxon crossed from one galaxy to another in order to seize their bodies for his own twisted ambitions or at least achieve vengeance on them.  Witnessing the horrific death of Starson, the husband who left her because he decided or realized or whatever he was gay, has driven Reba insane, so that she now lives in a happy fantasy world.  She renames herself "Star" and Shannon "King" and Kelley offers us a happy ending--Shannon, I mean King, has learned to love and he and Reba, I mean Star, will share love in this isolated planet whose monsters the former space pirate will no doubt figure out how to neutralize.

Mythmaster is shoddy and poor in every possible way, though its sexual content does embody one of the defining characteristics of SF, the presentation of transgressive ideas.  The novel may be of interest to students of depictions of homosexuality in speculative fiction, particularly of glowingly positive portrayals of gay men, and of SF that depicts alternative sexual practices in general, what with the (condemnatory) mentions of sex with children and the (sympathetic) depictions of prostitution and bestiality.

The Rule of the Pagbeasts (AKA The Fittest) by J T McIntosh

I am not exactly a fan of J. T. McIntosh, having denounced several of his productions here at this blog.  But when I saw Crest Book's 1956 paperback edition of 1955's The Fittest, retitled The Rule of the Pagbeasts, going for $1.25 at an antiques mall, I could not resist its fascinating cover with its wild female figure and its over-the-top come-on text ("impossible to put the book down"; "THE MOST STARTLING STORY YOU EVER READ.")  Alright, we'll give it a shot.

You'll notice there is no animal on the cover of the copy of this book I purchased, just a woman with long blonde hair, a narrow waist, an impressive torso and powerful limbs.  Pity about that skull-like physiognomy, which is mesmerizing in its own way.)  I thought blondie here with the deep set eyes was a pagbeast, some kind of android or alien or something.  But looking at other editions of the novel online I see they have images of dogs and mice on them and make it clear The Rule of the Pagbeasts is a story about quadrupeds challenging human rule of the Earth!  I would not have bought any of those editions; I am not interested in stories about canines and vermin taking over the Earth--I am interested in stories about hot chicks taking over the Earth!  But following the sunk cost fallacy, having bought the book and scanned the cover and looked up publication dates and so forth, we are going forward with reading it.

The Rule of the Pagbeasts comes to us in 24 chapters.  Chapter 1 is an exercise in misogyny and exploitative horror and also reminded me of hard-boiled detective fiction.  The narrator indicates that he found his wife dead and then, sadistically and/or masochistically, theorized about her last moments, the physical and psychological agony she suffered, and then he shares his detailed imaginings with us readers!

Gloria was an American-born beauty with a perfect body and great fashion sense, but she lacked "guts" and the healthy human instinct to desire children.  Left alone in a French farm house, she was attacked by an intelligent dog, intelligent mice and an intelligent cat, and her husband and McIntosh describe her frenzied fear and her physical wounds as the animals toyed with her and eventually drove her to jump out a window to her death.  (I've noticed exploitative violence, particularly against women, in McIntosh's work before.)  This chapter might be seen as kind of gross, but it is actually pretty well-written and effective in achieving its apparent goals--if you want to read about a vapid beautiful woman being tortured and killed, well, here is a good example of the genre.

Chapter 1 introduces us to, and succeeding chapters dole out in dribs and drabs the details about, the setting of the novel--a midcentury world sinking into postapocalypticism because an American scientist, Paget, increased the intelligence of dogs, cats, rats and mice to about the human level and these uplifted quadrupeds aren't using their smarts to listen to Tchaikovsky and read T. S. Eliot but to wage war and inflict torture on the human race:

They're animals whose brains have been forced a few million years further along the evolutionary highway....But they're animals, with animal motivations, savagery, tradition, and temperament.  As such they're automatically enemies of any other creatures which threaten their own survival, particularly men.

Our narrator identifies himself, and here we have the sole joke McIntosh offers in this blood-and-guts serious novel, as Don Page-Turner, and he tells us he is unsentimental, and then demonstrates his lack of sentimentality. Don leaves Gloria's body behind, unburied, and walks to the nearest village.  The village police arrest him on suspicion of murdering his wife, but a competent Englishwoman who needs his help gets him out of jail and steals one of the few cars still running (the rats and mice have been sabotaging automobiles and locomotives the world over as part of their war against us bipeds.)  This Englishwoman is an expert at jailbreaks and car theft but she can't drive--that is why she needs Page-Turner to help her get back to Albion.

All through the book, Page-Turner compares women to the dead Gloria, for example, stressing how his sister Mil and this new woman, Ginette, have guts and can get things done, unlike Gloria, who was a one in a million beauty but couldn't look after herself.  Though she is dead on the first page of this 185 or so page novel, she is actually one of the book's main characters.   And Exhibit A in the prosecution of the novel's central theme that certain people are the fittest to survive and certain people, should the shit hit the fan, are ngmi.     

Ginette is one prickly individual, very independent-minded and sarcastic, a woman who keeps saying she doesn't want to stay with Page-Turner and wants instead to be dropped off here or there.  This hard-to-get routine inspires in Page-Turner a desire to control her.  On the ferry to the green and pleasant land she vomits, either because of sea sickness or because of expository dialogue about the development of the pagbeasts, including the narrator's description of them swarming over a human victim.  Upon arriving in England, Ginette leaves Page-Turner and the car she stole and he immediately starts searching for her, fantasizing about using physical force to make her stay with him.  He soon finds her; she has been injured in a fight with a pagdog, giving our hero a chance to take off her bra and apply iodine to her wounds.  This book is full of women suffering indignities.

A tall man, Dave, formerly an editor at a newspaper, joins Don and Ginette as the third wheel of the crew of the stolen French car.  Our three heroes stay the night with a friend of Dave's in London; they find Londontown almost without electricity as well as automobiles.  The gas lines are also being cut by the pagmice and pagrats.  Page-Turner flirts with Ginette and when she comments that he doesn't seem to miss his wife, who died like two days ago, Page-Turner slaps her so hard it sounds like a "whipcrack" and makes the sarcastic bitch stagger.

Ginette again leaves behind the car and the two men, this time in the environs of Cambridge, despite Page-Turner's efforts to convince her to stay, which include grabbing her and kissing her.  McIntosh again and again reminds you of how the narrator can just manhandle Ginette if he chooses to.  Maybe this is a reminder that in society the law, customs, and norms, keep the strong from dominating the weak, and in a postapocalyptic situation those laws and norms go right out the window and the strong do what they will while the weak suffer what they must.  

Alone with him now, Dave says he thinks the narrator's real name is Paget and that he is connected to the Paget who created the monsters who are destroying society.  Our narrator tells his story.  He is the son of the scientist who created the pagbeasts and hails from Chicago, scion of a wealthy family.  Dad died coincidentally in a car wreck before the monsters he had created escaped and began their war on humanity.  When the scope of the pagbeast menace became apparent, mobs of disgruntled citizens came after Dan the narrator and his brother Stan and his sister Carol.  (Sister Mil was in England with her English husband, who is now dead.)  Carol was gangraped, but survived, but some weeks later Don witnessed Stanley shot dead by a mob which murdered Carol in a gruesome fashion that perhaps symbolizes the Pagets' elite status and their distinction from the common masses.  The police helped Don and Gloria sneak away to France, where the pagbeasts hadn't spread in volume yet, though soon enough the monsters had.

Halfway through the novel Don and Dave arrive at Mil's country estate.  Mil is a no-nonsense capable sort, and she has a sort of fortified manor house and a band of comrades who are able to defend themselves from the pagbeasts and in the short term from a local human menace, a multi-ethnic band of gypsies and circus performers, thieves and expert knife throwers.  This element of the story comes across as pretty racist, at least by today's standards.  Mil's crew is less than a dozen people, four attractive middle-class women and a bunch of dimwitted, unattractive, proletarian men, so the fifty gypsies could overwhelm Mil's estate if they were willing to suffer heavy losses.  (Mil's group has conventional low-intelligence dogs who help keep out the pagbeasts.)

A substantial part of the second half of the novel consists of Dan and Dave, who kind of take over management of Mil's operations, trying to recruit additional young and middle-aged people to join Mil's settlement, expanding the estate's agricultural output, and then dealing with the gypsies.  We get plenty of psychology-of-leadership material as Don decides who to recruit and how to manage them.  But we also get a large helping of sexual politics psychology as Don and Dave interact with the women of the settlement, deciding who to take as a wife and then convincing them to succumb.  Of course Ginette reappears and becomes Don's wife, but there is another woman, Eva, who is in love with Don and this causes complications--in true male wish-fulfillment fashion, Don decides Eva is the girl for him because Ginette is so difficult, and Don and Eva have sex right before the big battle with the gypsies, and then during the battle Eva's morale fails and she panics and gets herself captured by the enemy, tortured and murdered, so Don ends up with suitable wife Ginette after having sexually conquered and enjoyed the unsuitable Eva.  (All you pervs will be glad to hear that Don has his hands all over Eva's "beautiful supple body" in her last moments as he struggles to revive her via artificial respiration.)

Women cause all manner of trouble in this novel, as well as suffering the blackest fates imaginable.--one of the bourgeois women in Mil's group wants to try diplomacy with the gypsies even though Don and Mil have intelligence indicating the gypsies are planning an attack; this peacenik runs off by herself to try to treat with the gypsies but is attacked and eaten alive--reduced to a skeleton!--by a horde of rodents before she reaches the gypsy position.  And during the battle Don grapples with a "slim, lithe, young" gypsy girl before slaying her with his clasp knife.

Once the gypsies are wiped out, the community started by Mil grows and we learn that other such communities around England are similarly growing as men and women become expert at defeating the pagbeasts.  Human civilization will endure!  The last line of the novel even suggests the pagbeast catastrophe was good because it cut in half the human population, which was too large (we saw this attitude in McIntosh's The Million Cities many years ago.)

The plot and structure of The Fittest AKA The Rule of the Pagbeasts have the appeal of the zombie apocalypse fiction that is so popular nowadays, the inhuman menace that has people banding together to rebuild society while squabbling amongst themselves and the disgusting violence and gore.  McIntosh throws in a pile of other stuff: all the sex and gender business, of which there is plenty, plus some class and race/ethnicity material; we might also consider national culture material--is McIntosh, by setting the story in France and England but having the mad scientist and monsters originate in the USA, trying to say something about those three nations and their people?  A final thing we might consider is the novel's attitude about government--the American and British taxpayers in the 1950s were shelling out plenty of moolah for military and intelligence establishments to deal with the threat posed by international communism, and just ten years before had successfully engaged in a titanic struggle with Germany, Italy and Japan, so the US and UK governments had vast amounts of trained and experienced manpower and equipment at their disposal tailor-made for providing people protection and emergency medical care, but McIntosh never portrays those governments doing anything to kill pagbeasts or maintain order or provide succor to the people.         

The most remarkable thing about The Fittest AKA The Rule of the Pagbeasts is that the writing style and all the other elements--structure, pacing, characters, themes, images--are acceptably done or well done; so much of McIntosh's work which I have read is so bad that I was surprised that this thing was competently executed and before I opened it I had no expectation of telling you I can mildly recommend it.  But I am telling you just that.

Another SF novel I bought for its cover the next time I can tear myself away from the quest for money and from family obligations and produce a post of the quixotic enterprise we call MPorcius Fiction Log.