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Alongside Emsh's disturbingly grisly but also edgily sexy image is text announcing the magazine offers three complete novels by Ellison, Algis Budrys and Calvin M. Knox, a pen name for Robert Silverberg (isfdb calls two of these novellas and the other a novelette.) There's also a short story by Charles N. Fontenay.
We'll be reading all four of these pieces of fiction today, but first let's glance over the departments. Shaw's editorial is just boilerplate stuff about how the magazine is doing well and 95% of letter writers like that it includes three short novels and the art is improving, etc. The fan column includes a little memorial to the recently deceased Ray Cummings, about whom I have blogged numerous times, and discussion of numerous fanzines, including a review of a Swedish fanzine--we are told Sweden has a remarkably high per capita population of SF fans. Andrew J. Offutt, another guy I have blogged about quite a few times, also makes an appearance in the fan column. Mr. Offutt, we learn, has an extensive collection of old SF magazines and novels, and is interested in trading with other collectors--the paragraph devoted to Offutt describes his collection and what he is interested in acquiring. Finally we have the letters column, in which people praise the magazine and discuss why they like science fiction; this letters column is pretty tame compared to some I've seen in the past.
OK, on to the three "novels" and the "bonus short story."
"Yesterday's Man" by Algis Budrys
It is the post-apocalyptic future! Forty or fifty years ago a plague killed 90% of the human race! American society collapsed, but a guy name of Wheelwright built a new American Republic in the MidWest, its capital Chicago. After ten years he was overthrown, but the succeeding republics were each in turn toppled after even shorter tenures, and now many people miss ol' Wheelwright and the semblance of order he was able to maintain. Today the rulers of the Seventh American Republic have hired a mercenary, Custis, who owns a big AFV bristling with guns, to help them look for Wheelwright, whom it is suspected may still be alive. Accompanying Custis and his loyal crew of seasoned mercs as they drive out into the wilderness on their search is a Seventh Republic commissar, Henley.
The cliche analysis of Budrys' work is it is about what constitutes a man, and "Yesterday's Man" fits the cliche. The story compares Custis, the cool tough leader of soldiers who earns the respect of others; Henley, the excitable conniver who lacks both originality and loyalty; and several other men, like Custis' father, who sacrificed himself to save his son, a bandit leader out in the wilderness whom our protagonists encounter, and of course the famous Wheelwright. Custis wonders:
Some men stood taller than the rest, and it wasn't a thing of inches....Why? What was a man born with, that made people turn themselves over to him?
Custis and Henley spend time in the bandit leader's camp and we observe opportunities each man in the story has to demonstrate what kind of man he is--attractive and calm and brave, like Custis? Or repellant, paranoid and treacherous, like Henley? A bunch of men get killed, most at the hands of the heroic Custis; Custis picks up a girl who helps him survive dangerous trials; there is a lot of talk about whether Wheelwright is alive or not and whether he would even return to Chi-town if he was alive. Eventually Custis and his AFV, his crew intact and augmented by the girl--and sans Henley--head back to Chicago, Custis planning to become a leader in the mold of Wheelwright, hoping he has the leadership ability to create order out of chaos and bring peace and prosperity to the Midwest.
Not a bad story but no big deal; mild recommendation, I guess. Budrys' focus on his perennial theme, all the ambiguity about the status of Wheelwright, and the cool vehicle with its twin 75 mm guns and all its machine guns make this story more engaging than mere filler.
"Run for the Stars" by Harlan Ellison
The editor's intro to "Yesterday's Man" asserted that Budrys was "muscularly handsome," which I thought an odd thing to bring up, and also suggests Budrys is "self-effacing." The intro to Ellison's "Run for the Stars" makes clear that Ellison is not the self-effacing type; Shaw reports that at a recent convention Ellison gave a speech in which the Ohio native regaled listeners with his claims that he wrote "from his guts," and not for money--heaven forbid!--but because he "had" to. Oh, brother.
Anyway, let's get to the story.
Already, in the first two paragraphs, Ellison's florid prose is getting on my nerves.
The scream of the Kyben ships scorching the city's streets mingled too loudly with the screams of the dying.Is it the scream that is scorching the streets, or the ships?
Bills and change tinkled from his hands, scattered across the rubble-strewn floor.I get that Ellison, who doesn't care about money (no sir, not him) is likening money to human waste, but saying that "bills" tinkle is not good at all--should have just stuck to the coins, Harlan.
After these, and one or two additional bad sentences, either Ellison stopped writing bad sentences or I stopped noticing them; after the first page or so I was able to enjoy "Run for the Stars" as a melodrama with reasonably well-drawn characters and an exciting and cynical plot. Budrys' "Yesterday's Man" is better written and more believable and more profound, but Ellison's over-the-top material and delivery make "Run for the Stars" more fun.
An outlying planet of the human space civilization has been seized by the alien Kyben after they bombed the place into rubble, killing over 99% of the two million inhabitants. Our protagonist is a drug addict, caught in the act of looting a store by agents of human Resistance. This joker wasn't stealing food, but money with which to try to buy drugs, I guess in hopes some drug dealers were among the 1% of those who have survived the alien bombardment. Ellison does a good job pointing out again and again that this drug addict thinks more about drugs than about how his planet is being destroyed and his entire race is facing extinction. Ellison's skepticism of/hostility to drugs and alcohol is one of the ways in which Ellison, of whom I am often very critical, and I are on the same wavelength.
The Resistance is looking for a cowardly jerk just like this druggie. They implant a super bomb, one that can blow up the entire planet and anything in its orbit, into his body. They radio the occupying Kyben force, tell them about the super bomb, and promise to not detonate the bomb if the Kyben let the last few thousand humans on the planet escape. It is essential to these patriotic sons of Earth that they get away because they have to warn Earth that the borders of its empire have been penetrated--they didn't manage to get a radio message off to Terra before the Kyben bombed the long-range transmitters. All the Resistance guys have little back stories and personalities and react to the druggie in slightly different ways--they feel like real people. One of my complaints about Ellison's work is that he always writes like he is yelling, that he always turns things up to 11, but that extreme volume totally works for a drug addict and for people who have seen 99% of their society murdered and are desperate to prevent the same fate befalling the rest of the human race.
The human survivors depart for Earth, leaving the druggie behind. The Kyben don't pursue them because the Resistance warned the aliens that if they detect any Kyben departures from the planet or its orbit that they will detonate the superbomb. Instead, the Kyben hunt for the bomb and the druggie flees across the countryside--the aliens can detect the bomb's neutrino signature or something and so have a general idea where he is. The druggie, stiffened at first by doses of his drug of choice (he discovered a healthy supply in medical stores), and then by a lust for blood and eventually by a hatred of all life, becomes an efficient guerilla soldier, killing dozens of Kyben from ambush. He loses an arm, but fights on, killing one alien by driving the fingers of his remaining hand through the Kyben's eyes--this story has quite a bit of what we might call "body horror."
The druggie manages to sneak and fight his way onto the command ship of the Kyben force. He finds a doctor who speaks English; he tortures the medico, and gets him addicted to drugs, so that the guy will perform surgery on him, taking the superbomb out of his stomach and grafting it to the stump of his lost arm! He demands that the surgeon give him the ability to detonate the planet-busting bomb at will, and also set it to detonate if he should die. Now everybody in a 5,000 mile radius has to do whatever he says! As the story ends, the druggie becomes commander of the Kyben squadron, and declares he will lead it to Earth to achieve revenge! He is cured of his drug addiction--being some kind of evil pirate dictator is enough of a rush for him now!
A crazy and fun story. Thumbs up for "Run for the Stars."
(Within the pages of this ish of Science Fiction Adventures, Emsh provides drawings of specific events in "Run for the Stars," but I guess the cover painting is just a generalized illustration of the story's cynical, apocalyptic, and horrific themes, a depiction of mass murder.)
"Run for the Stars" can be found in the oft-reprinted The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World and a few other Ellison collections. The story was also anthologized in a 1992 Tor Double with an embarrassingly lame cover by Barclay Shaw. Shaw is some kind of favorite of Ellison's, and he has done covers for many Ellison publications. I have to say Shaw is a dismayingly large step down from the Dillons, Ellison's other favorite artists; Leo and Diane Dillon have a distinct and evocative style, while Shaw's work is marginally competent banality, like Michael Whelan if Michael Whelan was less technically skilled. (Bob Pepper, who did the cover of a Signet paperback edition of The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, would have been a better choice than Shaw for a uniform edition of Ellison's work.)
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| I have not yet read many stories that appear in The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, but I did tackle "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" like ten years ago. |
"Chalice of Death" by Robert Silverberg (as by Calvin M. Knox)
Normally it is the wise Navarre who passes Solomonic judgement on the petitioners, but he was out all night partying with the chicks ("Chalice of Death" is one of those stories in which humans are sexually attracted to and can even breed with non-humans) and so he gets to court late today and another advisor, a Vegan, has taken over Navarre's role. When the king asks why Navarre is late, Navarre comes up with an outlandish excuse, claiming he was busy this morning tracking down clues as to the whereabouts of a legendary chalice somehow associated with Earth that has the power to give people immortality! That Vegan then gets himself a promotion to head advisor by suggesting to the king that Navarre be sent on a quest around the universe for this chalice, which of course Navarre doesn't even believe in. (Remember when Clodius got Cato assigned to Cyprus?)
Navarre and a half-human friend go off on this totally bogus taxpayer-funded quest across the universe and decide to use it as a pretense to find Earth. The king doesn't provide Navarre a ship of his own, so our heroes have to take a commercial liner to the next system, and that damned Vegan puts assassins on the liner and on the first planet our guys land on we get detective/spy action with a chase and a shootout. Navarre and his pal land in a local government dungeon, but the human advisor to this planet's ruler springs them--amazingly, the human advisor here is a hot chick! She joins the quest for Earth and provides Navarre and his companion access to the royal library. Again and again in this story Navarre achieves his goals by resorting to violence, and it is by force that he acquires from the librarian, a snake man, a book published 30,000 years ago that clues them in to what galaxy Earth is in.
The woman has a personal starship, and after a billion light-year trip that takes them seven days the three questors land on a planet where another search of another library turns up an even older book that contains a map of our solar system. (I guess these books are made of acid free paper.) So our three heroes end up on Earth, where they find that the inhabitants have degenerated into twisted dwarves who reside in pathetic huts. Sad! But wait! The dwarves direct the extragalactics to a cave where, in vats full of fluid, sleep tall good-looking humans! These heroes and geniuses, carefully selected from among the human population right before the aliens conquered Earth at the climax of the fall of the Earth empire, are in suspended animation and can be aroused to rebuild Earth's superior civilization. On a plaque Navarre reads, the machine that has preserved these ten thousand superior individuals is metaphorically referred to as a chalice.
The story ends here--"The Chalice of Death" is only the first of three stories in this sequence which was published in book form as Lest We Forget Thee, Earth in 1958 and then with the Chalice of Death title in 2012.
This is a pretty entertaining story, and I am curious to see if Silverberg paints the rebuilding of a human space empire favorably or goes the white guilt route and has the humans' revival be some kind of crime or mistake, so we'll be reading the next two episodes in the near future.
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| Left: Ace Double publication, 1958 Right: A German 1966 printing |
"Moths" by Charles L. Fontenay
This is a pretty good classic-style science fiction story in which a deadly problem arises and engineer/spaceman types prove their superiority to a fat businessmen by using logic and science knowledge to solve the problem. They only manage to solve the problem after the overweight bourgeois has been killed by it, mind you. The crewmen also get to shoot off energy pistols and kill lots of monsters.
A space boat has crashed during its descent from a space ship in Venus orbit to the Venerian surface. The crew and the sole passenger survived the crash, but they are some miles from the city that is their destination, their ship disabled in a dangerous wilderness. Venus is inhabited by flying monster plants, like leaves ten or fifteen feet across, that seek water. If it isn't raining and there are no pools close by, these huge "moths" will envelop a human being and suck him or her dry. After trying a few abortive means of getting to the city, one of the smart crewmen figures out how to neutralize the monsters so the survivors can march to the city.
A filler story which uses characters in a pretty obvious and uninspired way, I guess, but I kinda like it anyway based on how good the monster and the setting are. Marginal recommendation.
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Four hard-boiled high-body-count stories full of weaponry, alien environments and dangerous journeys among weirdos, none of them bad. Shaw, Budrys, Ellison, Silverberg and Fontenay gave 1957 readers value for their 35 pennies and lived up to the promises made on the issue's cover--these really are science fiction adventures full of violence and death.
Expect similar material next time we meet, tough guys!
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