Let's read four stories from the January 1959 issue of
Fantastic, sister magazine to
Amazing, both of which at this time were edited by Cele Goldsmith. This issue has a memorable but somewhat mysterious cover by Phil Berry and, inside, two solid interior illustrations by the great Virgil Finlay, one of a woman being murdered in fetishistic fashion, the other of men in spacesuits in serious distress. The editorial is by editorial director Norman Lobsenz, and in it he laments the death of
Weird Tales and
Unknown and the apparent lack of respect currently afforded fantasy--all the good authors today, he fears, seem to be focusing on science fiction, so that there is no heir to Lovecraft, Poe or Machen. Lobsenz thinks there is still a market for good fantasy and suggests
Fantastic will include more fantasy in coming issues.
Check out all this exciting content, and today's four stories, in their original magazine form, at the internet archive here, which is where I will be reading them.
"The Screaming People" by Robert Bloch
The title of Bloch's story is promoted on the cover, but not Bob's name, for some reason. Remember when we read Bloch's
cover story from the January 1960 issue of Fantastic and I found it to be "one nihilistic story...[in which] Bloch suggests that the human race is so crummy that its destruction is not a tragedy but a consummation devoutly to be wished"? And then there was Bloch's
cover story to the August 1960 issue of Fantastic, which I considered "twenty-four (24) pointless pages" consisting of a "bunch of bad jokes and then a bunch of superficial alternate history goop" and finally "a long and absolutely unconvincing utopian tract" proposing the theory that "the institution of the family is the cause of all our problems." Hopefully Bob has a better attitude this time around! (Or could it be that
I am the one who needs an attitude adjustment?)
"The Screaming People" starts with a very good sequence of like half a dozen pages (this thing is like 35 pages long in toto), the depiction of a man committing terrible crimes at the direction of a mysterious voice in his head. Our narrator, Steve, works in broadcast advertising, in sales, in Los Angeles, and has a lot of psychological trauma after a terrible car accident. Has this trauma opened him up to control by some demon or alien or something? Whatever the voice is, it wakes him up at night and directs him to dress, walk to a mansion, sneak in, murder an old man in his bed and steal some item from the mansion before returning home. Our guy thinks it's all a terrible dream, but after his lovely red-headed wife wakes him in the morning he finds the box that once held the item he stole in the supposed dream right there in his jacket pocket!
Skipping work, he rides the bus to his shrink, neurosurgeon Dr. Wagram--along the way he passes many Los Angeles landmarks and Bloch takes this opportunity to rag on L. A., to compare its denizens to vampires and suggest LA is a world of fakery. (Bloch attacks the City of Angels and Hollyweird in lots of his stories, something that surprised me when I first started reading him.) Steve has a kind of breakdown as he arrives at his doctor's house, but recovers in the special room the good doctor has prepared for him--a room that reminds him of the security of the womb!
We learn more about that traumatic automobile accident. Our guy was thirty years old when he was in the one-car crash in the desert between L. A. and Las Vegas, suffering injuries that put him into a coma. The doctor was the first to come upon the accident, and took our guy on as a patient, shepherding him back to health. The narrator physically recovered under the care of this immigrant from Germany, but Steve has amnesia and can remember nothing that occurred before the accident. The generous doctor helped him get a job, where he met his wife. Bloch gives us a flashback to the conversation in which Steve convinced Roxie the aspiring but talent-deficient singer to marry him.
We learn about Wagram's medical practice. The good doctor takes on the brain injury and psychiatric cases that other doctors believe are hopeless, and employs innovative and controversial techniques. These techniques are morally questionable--Wagram is a mad scientist! For example, if a patient has sadistic or masochistic tendencies, or sexual problems, Wagram provides the sufferer life-like mechanical dummies to act out his or her perverse fantasies with! Yikes! As for patients whose insanity is caused by horrible memories, Wagram administers shock treatment that removes those pesky memories to reduce their personalities to that of a baby still in the womb--then he can build their personalities up again, in effect creating new people!
Steve realizes, largely through coincidences but also through the kind of detective work that involves threatening and torturing people to get them to tell their secrets (you know, the detective methods that work in real life, unlike that Sherlock Holmes "the lint on your lapel proves it was you who dun it" nonsense), that Wagram is using his memory erasing and personality crafting skills to build a sort of criminal army, and Steve himself is one of Wagram's top soldiers! And Wagram isn't working alone--other people, people who represent Hollywood and how corrupt, mercenary, and deceptive Tinsel Town really is, are in league with Wagram, and Steve has to confront each of these backstabbing lying pieces of human garbage one by one--who will live and who will die as the successive gory climaxes hit and then hit again? And of the survivors, who, if anybody, will be sane at the end of the story?
Robert Bloch and Cele Goldsmith have foisted some real clunkers on us (have I mentioned Bloch's cover story for the November '58 issue of Fantastic, a story that I called "an unconnected jumble of dumb puns, winking references to science fiction cliches, and gory images"?) but "The Screaming People" is a winner. The hypnosis scenes are good, the gore is good, and the one gruesome-catastrophe-after-another ending is good. Bloch's negative portrayals of psychiatry/psychology and Hollywood here ring true, or at least feel appropriate to me, a skeptic of those institutions. I don't deny that "The Screaming People" suffers from some of the usual shortcomings of detective fiction, like the convoluted conspiracy and the long scene in which the (amateur, in this case) detective explains the criminals' scheme and how he figured it out, but these elements don't sink the story. So, thumbs up for "The Screaming People."
"The Screaming People" would be reprinted in the Bloch collection Chamber of Horrors and in a Finnish collection with a particularly gruesome cover.
"The Troons of Space: Mars A.D. 2094" by John Wyndham (1958)
The editor's intro to "The Troons of Space: Mars A.D. 2094" reads "In this third part of his novel-length saga written especially for
Fantastic, famed British author John Wyndham ('The Day of the Triffids') writes a deeply penetrating story of man in far space." But isfdb says that this story had already appeared in
New Worlds over in Albion in 1958 under the title "The Thin Gnat-Voices." I'm not going to expend any energy trying to figure out who was trying to trick who here. Instead, I'll remind you I've already read some Troons stories:
"The Asteroids, 2194," and
"Idiot's Delight." I think there are five Troons stories, so we still have a way to go until we are fully Trooned out here at MPorcius Fiction Log; seeing as I didn't give either of those two stories a positive review, we may never fully Troon out.
Our narrator is a Troon on Mars, one of the first people to land on the red planet, a descendent of a long line of Troons who each played a major role in the early stages of the exploration of space. Wyndham uses the Troon family as a way to tell a fictional history of the future, and we get a long history lesson about the war that destroyed the northern hemisphere and left Brazil and Australia the leaders of civilization. As is usual in these stories, nobody can be blamed for starting the nuclear war, the implication being that the liberal West is no better than the Soviet Union. The narrator is British by ethnicity, a citizen of Brazil, one of his ancestors a British officer who was on vacation in Jamaica when the Northern hemisphere was wiped out and who was made head of the Brazilian space agency.
Then the narrator's own biography. He was chosen to be one of three crewmen on the first ship to Mars, a ship designed and built by his father's team. The ship lands on its tail as according to plan, but the surface of Mars turns out to be unstable, in many places a thin crust over a vacuity, and one of the ship's three legs breaks through the surfsce into a cavern and the ship falls on its side. One of the crewmen dies, and another is hit in the head and becomes insane. The radio is also wrecked. The insane man at first suspects that the narrator is a Martian, and then that there are Martians outside plotting an attack on the stricken ship, and finally that the narrator is in league with the Martians. I took this to be a satire of people in the West who feared communist spies or an attack from the USSR--Mars is a totally barren desert, as the narrator saw while the madman was unconscious--there are no Martians. I don't read the current SF magazines, and I wonder if they are full of stories that imply that people who worry that Muslims will attack Christians and Jews or that Russia will try to conquer Eastern Europe are insane.
Much of the plot of this story consists of the narrator trying to get the maniac to come to his senses about the nonexistent Martians and to help get the radio fixed and the ship back into operation, efforts that come to nothing. The madman tricks the narrator into leaving the ship, then the madman makes a desperate attempt to get the ship to take off from its horizontal position. The attempt fails and the madman dies, stranding the narrator on Mars, where he drifts in and out of sanity. We get a little lecture on how man cannot accomplish anything alone, how important "corporate strength" is, not only to conquering space, but to maintaining sanity:
We need numbers to sustain us; in numbers we can dispel the terrors; alone, we are weak, mutilated. Taken from our pool of corporate strength we gasp, we wriggle defenselessly while the terrors circle round, slowly closing in . . .
I guess this is a plea that we make friends with the Soviet Union? Or just temper our individualistic culture with a hearty does of collectivism?
The actual science and technology stuff in "The Troons of Space: Mars A.D. 2094," the space suits and space ship and the little aircraft the narrator constructs and all that, is good, and Wyndham's writing is very smooth and professional. But the fictional history parts of the story (which is 28 pages total; like 8 or so are the history lesson) drag, and as I have suggested, I am not impressed with the story's ideology. The story also lacks passion, feels slow. I'm calling it acceptable; people who think the space program is a mistake or who blame the West for the world's problems may like it more than I did.
You can find "The Troons of Space: Mars A.D. 2094" AKA "The Thin Gnat-Voices" (the latter title a reference to Rupert Brooke's
"The Jolly Company," which is quoted in the story) in the Troon collection
The Outward Urge. I'm a Wyndham skeptic, but he is very popular, and
The Outward Urge, sometimes credited as a collaboration between Wyndham and his pen name Lucas Parkes, has been reprinted many times. One Italian edition has a cover featuring a hot babe smoking a cigarette, which is kind of funny. Is there a hot babe in a Troon story I haven't read yet? I wouldn't associate Troons with hot babes based on my experience with Troons thus far, but I guess anything is possible.
"Passage to Gomorrah" by Robert F. Young
Lady Berenice, the blonde-haired and blue-eyed "lady of the stars" (groan) is being exiled to Polaris 2 aboard a one-crew, one-passenger star ship. She flirts with the pilot, Cross, and Cross gets sexually frustrated because he doesn't have enough money to afford the services of such an expensive prostitute. He is so discombobulated that, when he gets a message form HQ that a time storm is up ahead, instead of coming out of hyperspace he pushes the wrong buttons and dives right into the storm!
Hyperspace travel in this story exploits a "separation of pure space and pure time from the thing-in-itself, or from basic reality," contracting a parsec to half a kilometer, allowing interstellar trips to take place in hours or days instead of years. In a time storm a ship is likely to find itself in pure time, and its passengers and crew to relive past experiences. Because "in pure time, individuality does not exist," people on a ship that enters a time storm will experience each other's pasts as well as their own. Could it be that Cross' subconscious caused him to push the wrong buttons out of a desire to experience the sexy sexy past of the Lady Berenice?
We get a bunch of flashbacks to the two characters' childhoods, learn why Cross became a space pilot (he was ashamed as a child because he proved too scared to climb a tree all the way up and the other kids taunted him) and why Berenice became a whore (her father and mother fought all the time and Dad was often away on business and then left for good when she was ten.)
“I’ll show them! Space is a tree, in a way. Space is a tremendous tree reaching up into infinity, and I’ll climb as high into it as I can get and I’ll laugh back down at them in their silly suburban houses...."
The anti-suburban theme, common in 20th-century literature, in this story manifests itself in odd ways:
“Think about it, Nate,” his father went on, puffing self-righteously on his suburban pipe. “You’re still young. You’re only 19. Why don’t you wait for a while...."
"Suburban pipe"? Good grief! Young never presents an urban milieu or sensibility to contrasts with the suburban milieu and beliefs his characters rail against; in "Passage to Gomorrah," "suburban" is just a euphemism for "conservative" or "religious."
Considering the social geography Young concocts for his story, "provincial" or "Earthbound" might have been a better word for him to use than "suburban" to describe the villains of his story. Through the flashbacks of our two characters, we learn that, in Young's fictional universe, society on Earth and society beyond its atmosphere are totally separate. People who opt to go to space surrender their rights as Earthers, including the right to marry and have kids, because the radiation in space means that the children of people who spend time in space are mutants--even "monsters." Because spacemen can't get married, to relieve their horniness the world's oldest profession, still looked down upon on Earth because of religious prejudice, is in space a noble calling--one minor character calls it "The Galaxy's Noblest Profession." Whenever a woman does get pregnant with a mutant child she is exiled to Polaris 2, AKA Gomorrah, the world of mutants. That is why Berenice is headed for Polaris 2--she apparently neglected to use her Farbes and Donniger contraceptor-field and got preggers, though she insists the device malfunctioned.
(One of the interesting things about "Passage to Gomorrah" to a 21st-century audience is how it suggests that abortion is so unspeakably horrible to 1959 people that it isn't even mentioned in the story, even though you have to imagine the kind of adventurous or desperate women who would abandon their families and friends on Earth to become prostitutes would be quite willing to have an abortion to avoid exile to some planet purportedly full of monsters.)
We follow the careers of these two spacers, the eager male tryhard adventurer who quickly rises in the ranks and the resigned whore who hates her clients. Young's story at one and the same time seems to be trying to convince the reader that objections to prostitution are silly, the result of the irrationality of religion, and to portray being a prostitute as terrible. I guess he explains in a half-assed way that prostitution in outer space is gross because it is controlled by corporations--I guess goofy attacks on big business go hand in hand with goofy attacks on religion and on the suburbs.
Then comes our first twist ending. Berenice is preggers not because her contraceptive device failed--she is carrying Cross's child because they have sex in the time storm and being in a time storm sometimes causes things to happen out of sequence--she had sex with Cross today, and this lead to a pregnancy that began a few weeks ago.
Because Cross and Berenice in the time storm are reliving their lives, and each other's lives, Young has the audacity to reprint in the second half of the story an entire page of dialogue between them from earlier in the story, so we can relive that conversation along with them--annoying.
Anyway, after going through the time storm together, and having sex that has resulted in pregnancy, Cross and Berenice are like the platonic ideal of a married couple, though legal or religious marriage is denied them--they know each other better than any married couple on Earth could, having lived each other's lives. Berenice is radiant:
...her face, bereft now of all the hardness and the cynicism civilization had imposed upon it, was like a little girl’s.
Our other twist is that the mutants on Polaris 2 are not hideous monsters but beautiful angels with wings and everything! Space radiation is not bad for people, but turns them into the incubators of homo superior! How ironic that the whores the religious establishment denounces are the source of the angels those religious dopes glorify on their stained glass windows! The corporations have kept this astounding fact secret from the Earth. Cross and Berenice take up residence on Polaris 2 AKA Gomorrah, where people don't live in suburbs but on farms.
If you read 20th-century fiction you encounter plenty of attacks on religion and big business and the suburbs, and some of them are silly, and "Passage to Gomorrah" is one of the sillier ones. The story isn't very well-written or exciting, either. The plot is crazy, audacious, so I guess that makes it kind of interesting, but it is not a good read, the science makes no sense but is merely a contrivance to set up the anti-religion plot, and its arguments are asserted rather than argued. Gotta give Young's story here a moderate thumbs down; it not terrible like Laurence M. Janifer's
"Expatriate," but still bad.
This strange artifact reappeared in a 1966 reprint magazine,
The Most Thrilling Science Fiction Ever Told and is also in a 21st-century Young collection from Ramble House.
I think I've read eleven Young stories now. Zoinks, it is links time.
Probably I should do an analysis of these almost-dozen stories and see how many of them bitch about the suburbs and religion. Maybe next time I read a Young story...if there is a next time.
"Replace the Horse" by Laurence M. Janifer
"Replace the Horse" was reprinted in the 1968 Janifer collection
Impossible? In the intro to that collection, besides bragging about how thin he is ("People who diet hate me,") Janifer tries to give the impression that he is a special guy and a special writer, a rebel who wants to do new things, wants to break the rules. More endearingly, Janifer is also generous to those who helped him, among them Cele Goldsmith (he says "Cele Lalli," using her married name) whom he singles out as perhaps the editor most willing to let him experiment (in contrast to Horace Gold and John W. Campbell, Jr., who each made him rewrite a story eight times.) I wonder if Lalli gave the writers at
Modern Bride, where Lalli worked for three decades, over ten of those years as Editor-in-Chief, as much opportunity to experiment as she gave SF writers during her six or seven years at
Amazing and
Fantastic.
I've read enough stories that could have used some additional editing from Goldsmith's Amazings and Fantastics that I am skeptical of her laissez-faire editing style,* but I have to congratulate her and Janifer on "Replace the Horse," which is a kind of P. G. Wodehouse style story that is quite fun.
Our narrator is a horse trainer who gets mixed up in the schemes of a scientist. This egghead has invented anti-grav and wireless energy transmission. The scientist thinks he can make more money through cheating at horse races than selling his paradigm-shifting technology to the government or private industry, and wants our narrator to act as his trainer to make his scam look more legit, and to be his guide through the world of horse racing. The scientist buys a pathetic old horse that anybody with any experience at the track can tell is a loser and puts a saddle on it that has, concealed within it, an anti-grav "printed circuit." Given enough power, the anti-grave device reduces the weight of saddle and jockey to zero, so the horse can race totally unencumbered. The scientist has built power generators and transmitters into a pair of binoculars--as long as somebody is training the binoculars on the saddle, even this old worn out nag can outrun a good horse.
As we expect, things eventually go down the tubes, but for a while there our protagonists are really making money running this specially equipped horse.
Good jokes, a good style, an entertaining story, thumbs up. I'm surprised "Replace the Horse" hasn't been printed more often--aren't there a stack of anthologies of allegedly humorous SF stories? This story of Janifer's deserves to be in those. Well, just this summer "Replace the Horse" appeared in a webzine called
Black Cat Weekly and edited by John Gregory Betancourt, so maybe now it will get the attention it deserves. (The same e-issue of
Black Cat Weekly also includes Young's "Passage to Gomorrah," so I guess Betancourt just read this issue of
Fantastic.)
**********
The Bloch and Janifer are winners, the Wyndham is respectable, and while it is not good, the Young at least is crazy. So, a good, memorable, issue of Fantastic. Goldsmith edited over 70 issues of Fantastic and I am sure we will be reading from more of them, so stay tuned.
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