In our last episode, we read a stack of stories from an issue of
F&SF because the ish included a work of fiction by John Ciardi, famous American man of letters, and today we are doing the same thing. The Ciardi story we read last time was about a robot who was tired of "living" and so committed suicide, but today's Ciardi story, if the cover illustration for it by Emsh is anything to go by, is going to be life affirming, or at least low key sexalicious! Let's check out Ciardi's pseudonymous "The Hypnoglyph" along with three other stories from this issue of
F&SF edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, one penned by Margaret St. Clair, whose "Change the Sky" we trashed in that last blog post, and two collabs, one by the team of August Derleth and Mack Reynolds and one the team of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt.
"The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" by August Derleth and Mack Reynolds
This is a Solar Pons story. Solar Pons is a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes concocted by that one-man mass production fiction machine August Derleth, the subject of a vast catalog of stories produced not only by Derleth but an array of other Holmes-loving scribblers. Personally, I don't really like Sherlock Holmes, but I find Derleth a likable individual and his career curious, and I find even more bewildering the career of the coauthor of "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time," Mack Reynolds, so decided to read this story even if I don't expect to enjoy it.
isfdb lists Lovecraft-correspondent Derleth as first author of "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" while F&SF lists former teenaged-Socialist-Labor-Party demagogue and expert on beer-drinking Reynolds as first author. The intro to the story in the Derleth collection A Praed Street Dossier indicates that Reynolds came up with the plot and submitted to F&SF a story based on his idea, but Boucher and McComas felt Reynolds' manuscript didn't feel very Holmesian, so Derleth was enlisted to punch the thing up. The thing was a big enough success that Reynolds and Derleth collaborated on further Solar Pons stories with a science fiction angle.
I find "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" to be a silly joke story full shopworn SF concepts and meta-jokes about genre literature. Reynolds is renowned as one of the few SF writers to take as one of his main topics political economy, and this is reflected in the fact that the plot of "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" is resolved by tariff legislation.
A guy in wacky clothes from the 26th century comes to visit Solar Pons and our narrator, Doctor Parker. He turns out to be a cop from another dimension, and a lot of the story's limp wit relies on the contrast between Pons' acceptance of the man's increasingly incredible assertions and the doctor's bullheaded incredulity.
Future Cop explains that there are an infinite number of universes so everything that could happen has or will happen. The Moriarty of his dimension has taken to travelling between universes and stealing art treasures, among them Pogo strips. (Pogo, like Sherlock Holmes, is one of those cultural artifacts that is widely beloved but which leaves me cold.) So, this cop has come to this dimension to consult with Solar Pons, who in the cop's dimension is merely a fictional character, in hopes that Pons can produce a solution to the problem of inter-dimensional theft. Pons asks the traveller if there are taxes in his universe, and is told that yes, there are, and the tax laws are punctiliously followed by everybody, even criminals like Moriarty. So Solar Pons suggests that prohibitive tariffs be levied that will discourage all inter-dimensional commerce.
Additional jokes involve Moriarty and this cop enlisting fictional attorneys like Perry Mason to champion their causes in court and references to whether Solar Pons knows Parker is writing up Pons' adventures or whether Parker has actually begun doing so yet.
To me, this story is a waste of time, but it wasn't painful and I can see that, for what it is, it is competently produced, so that people who love Sherlock Holmes and want to see him and Dr. Watson in outré situations like fighting Count Dracula or Jack the Ripper will enjoy "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time;" the dialogue and atmosphere and all that feels like the Sherlock Holmes stories I read so long ago, and those seeking such an experience will find it here, and I guess in all the Solar Pons stories.
This story that to me seems tolerable and forgettable has been quite successful, appearing in at least three anthologies as well as Derleth and Reynolds collections.
"The Hypnoglyph" by John Ciardi (as by John Anthony)
Anthologists like August Derleth, Robert P. Mills and Tom Boardman have seen fit to reprint "The Hypnoglyph," and, having read it myself, I agree with their decisions to do so; "The Hypnoglyph" is full of cool SF and horror ideas and I strongly recommend it.
A veteran spaceman invites a younger man to see his collection of valuables brought back from his adventures in deep space. The most fascinating specimen in the collection is a little item wrought from a wood-like substance; the item features a depression into which fits comfortably the younger man's thumb. He finds stroking the little item with his thumb pleasurable, even addictive, and the adventurer talks to him about "tropism" and theories about how certain parts of the body enjoy certain types of stimuli and can, in effect, be hypnotized into behaving in certain ways by such stimulation.
The spaceman describes one of his greatest adventures, in which he discovered a quite human-like race, a matriarchy in which women use hypnotic powers, including the "tropism" techniques the spaceman has just hinted at, to dominate their men folk. Ciardi does a good job of titillating the (male) reader's desire for and fear of women by suggesting these alien women have extreme control over their bodies that makes them capable of providing men with terrific sexual pleasure and our eager to have sex with human men but at the same time indicating that these women are obese, hairless, lazy, callous and cruel manipulators who treat the native men like disposable slaves--in fact, these alien women are champing at the bit to breed with human males because their ill treatment of the men of their own race has sapped those men's will to live and resulted in a radical numerical imbalance between the sexes.
The veteran space man and the younger man engage in a sort of psychological duel; will the younger man be able to blackmail the wealthy older man because the adventurer has broken laws that require the discovery of alien civilizations be reported to the authorities?, or will the older man, who it turns out has gone native, trick the young man into becoming a sexual slave of the obese and hairless alien matriarchs?
A great story that, with its mix of sexual fascination with the exotic and fear of the special powers and monstrous practices attributed to natives sort of reminds you of stories of European sailors interacting with tribes of primitive islanders who may be beautiful and sexually open but also might be engaged in voodoo, human sacrifice, head hunting, cannibalism, and God knows what. "The Hypnoglyph" is a success that makes you wish Ciardi had written more SF and horror stories.
"The Untimely Toper" by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
Way back in 2014 we read a Gavagan's Bar story, of which there are like 29 or 30, and today we read a second Gavagan's Bar story. At this rate we'll finish up with the Gavagan's Bar series during our rice break in the Chinese Communist Party labor camp orbiting Ganymede.
"The Untimely Toper" is a tedious and silly joke story that is a little confusing. It seems an obnoxious guy, Pearce, comes to Gavagan's but rarely, when he has pissed off the people at his regular hang out. Pearce is at Gavagan's one night when a bat appears inside the establishment; Pearce kills the bat. Another habitue of the bar, maybe a vampire or a wizard or something, is offended by the killing of the bat, perhaps his pet or friend or something, and afflicts Pearce with a ridiculous curse the workings of which I didn't quite understand. When Pearce goes into the men's room, he goes to another dimension or is trapped in time or something; other people go in and out of the men's room and do not see Pearce in there, but hours or days later Pearce emerges from the rest room thinking only a few minutes have passed. The bartender figures out that the duration of Pearce's disappearances is correlated with his level of intoxication, and so tricks the man into drinking a hangover cure, which sobers him and, I guess, keeps him from returning to Gavagan's from wherever it is he goes after he goes to the bathroom to vomit.
I don't get it, and I don't want it; the jokes are not funny, the characters' motivations are mysterious, and the mechanics of the magic don't make sense to me. Thumbs down!
As with the Derleth Solar Pons stories, I suspect the appeal of the Gavagan's Bar stories for their fans is the style and atmosphere. Such fans are numerous enough that Gavagan's Bar collections have been published in multiple editions, and "The Untimely Toper" is a good enough example of the species that Boucher and McComas included it in a Best from F&SF volume.
"Judgment Planet" by Margaret St. Clair (as by Idris Seabright)
This is a far better story than the last St. Clair thing we read, the annoying and pointless "Change the Sky." The images to be found in "Judgment Planet" constitute a contribution to the story rather than a distraction, the pace is quick, the psychology is believable and the travails of the character have some emotional effect on the reader. As for the plot, it is just OK--"Judgment Planet" is one of those stories like Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" or William Golding's
Pincher Martin in which a dying man hallucinates salvation as well as yet another story in which goody goody aliens make us humans look bad by contrast.
You know those guys who fall in love with some foreign culture or society, Japan or Ancient Rome or the Soviet Union or whatever, and don't want to hear criticism of or think about apparent misdeeds of their beloved, like the Rape of Nanking or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or whatever? (I knew a multitude of these guys in grad school--hell, I maybe was one of these guys.) The protagonist of "Judgment Planet" is one of those guys. He is a scholar of the future of interstellar human civilization, and St. Clair hints that this civilization punishes dissent. Before the rise of Earth's space empire, another race colonized multiple planets, the Elea; Elean civilization collapsed long ago, but left behind artifacts of great beauty that suggest the Elea were a people who loved freedom.
As the story begins, our hero is all alone on a pretty desolate planet far from his ship and has just been injured and dropped his food supplies down an unscalable cliff. Oops. Why is he in this sticky situation? Some other scholar has claimed that this here planet was the planet where the Elea exiled their dissenters, suggesting the Elea are not the goody goodies our guy thinks they were, so he came to explode this theory. Unfortunately, it kind of looks like that theory was accurate.
Our guy suddenly finds a door into an underground complex where he discovers preserved food and evidence that this planet was not a place of exile for dissenters but actually a comfortable quarantine for individuals afflicted with a plague. The Elea were as good as he had hoped! He spends weeks exploring the place, but then comes our twist ending. The complex is just a dream, but the Elea really were goody goodies--this planet has a powerful hypno apparatus that detects when you are going to die and fills your brain with dreams that ease the pain of your last moments, dreams that validate your life and beliefs. The scholar can die knowing that the people he worships are beyond reproach and worthy of that worship--only the best sort of people would ease the pain of the dying in this way.
The plot sounds a little lame, like childish wish fulfillment goop (is this story supposed to hearten F&SF's leftist readership by implying that all the crummy things people say about the USSR aren't true?) when you just describe it baldly as I have, but the style and pacing and all that are good, with real suspense and a believable psychology at the center of the story, so I enjoyed it.
Seeing as "Judgment Planet" is legitimately effective, it is odd to learn it has never appeared in an actual book, just been reprinted in various foreign editions of F&SF, especially when you know an aggravating bore like "Change the Sky" was the title story of a St. Clair collection. Again we see I'm not on the same wavelength as the people who edit SF books.
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The Derleth and Reynolds collaboration, and the de Camp and Pratt as well, don't scratch any itch I happen to have, but their authors have probably succeeded in their goals and pleased their fans. I was much more impressed with the Ciardi and the St. Clair, which, instead of showcasing lame jokes, use interesting science fiction concepts, generate suspense, and portray real human emotions.
More 1950s magazine stories when next we meet!
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