This May '57 ish of Dream World has an editorial by Fairman in which he argues that the original purpose of fiction was to provide entertainment and escape, and tells us that Dream World's stories represent a return to that role, a role which has been neglected in our modern world in which fiction is supposed to be realistic and educational and prepare people for "the grim struggle ahead" that is life, which is full of "frustrations and limitations." I thought this an odd thing for a SF editor to say, as the people who founded SF magazines like Amazing--which Fairman was editing when he wrote this Dream World editorial--and populated fandom in science fiction's early days thought the point of science fiction was to teach people about science, prepare them for the future, and/or propagandize them into embracing socialism and world government. Or at least claimed that was the point. Presumably, if you spoke to the guy, Fairman would say that there is room in the SF world for both fun adventure and sex stories and stories that critique society and speculate on the future, but he doesn't say that in this editorial.
There are five pages of weak cartoons in the back of Dream World Vol. 1 No. 2, and a joke quiz consisting of ten pretty stupid questions that is said to have been devised by some egghead to help you choose what kind of person to marry.
...if you checked more brackets than circles, it is imperative — according to our psychologist friend — that your intended be a person of strong moral fiber....if you checked more circles than squares you should marry a person who doesn’t take life too seriously....We personally feel there’s a much better basis for selecting a bride or groom for yourself. A little thing called love.
Groan.
The highlight of this ish of DW as far as I can tell is a full page illustration by the great Virgil Finlay depicting a devil girl tempting a man in a suit; this illustration is appended to the second of today's stories, "So You Want to be President." None of today's three stories was ever reprinted, it seems, so I'll decorate this blog post with that illo and with some of the quiz questions. To read these rare stories yourself--and take the full quiz!-- head over to the internet archive here or luminist.org here. But don't blame me if you feel you wasted your time--I am warning you right now that none of Lesser's stories is good.
"The Man Who Made His Dreams Come True"
Alex is at his bachelor party--tomorrow he marries Janey. His old college chum, who is still carrying the torch for Janey, is drunk and claims Alex is only marrying Janey because Janey's dad will get Alex a nice cushy job! A fight breaks out. But is Alex's drunken pal right? Janey is far from Alex's dream girl--she's just OK.
At night, after drinking still more while alone in his apartment, Alex, in bed in his PJs, is visited by a gorgeous woman who appears in a cloud of incense. After some rigamarole in which this woman teases and then pushes Alex away, multiple times, she explains that she is a creature of the subconscious--Janey's subconscious! She is the woman Janey wishes she (Janey) could be. This being of the dream world hates Janey for bottling her up, and tells Alex to not marry Janey, but to instead stay single and frolic with her (the dream girl)--she promises that if Alex agrees, she (the dream girl) can bring all kinds of wonderful things and experiences from the dream world for him to enjoy, the same way he can enjoy her.
The next day Alex marries Janey, even though the dream girl is there, haunting him, distracting him, trying to get him to jilt Janey. This idealized version of Janey also shows up in Paris, where Alex and Janey are honeymooning, and she keeps trying to separate Alex from his newlywedded wife. One night, after having sex with Janey, Alex is persuaded by the dream girl to go with her into the dream world, an Orientalist city where the women walk around topless and he is given the job of managing the sultan's harem.
In this dream world the friend he had that fight with is the sultan and Janey is a newly acquired slave girl. The sultan demands Janey for the night and Alex doesn't want to hand her over, so he leads her on a daring escape through the city out into the desert. Then we get a deus ex machine ending in which Alex gets three wishes and the last of them is wishing that Janey take on the admirable attributes of the dream girl, who after all is Janey's own vision of herself but better, sexier.
This story starts off mediocre and gets worse and worse as it goes, each page less sensical and less entertaining than the last. The rules of how the dream world works and interacts with the real world keep changing and many scenes are repetitive or superfluous, making for a long and boring and irritating story. Thumbs down!
"So You Want to be President"
His friends being out of town, our narrator, a bookkeeper, is all alone in the District, as those of us who spend time there call the swamp, and he gets to talking to an attractive woman in a bar. He loves to talk about how he thinks the President could do a better job, how he, the narrator, could do better at some aspects of the job. The woman invites him back to her apartment, but when he tries to kiss her she hits him with an umbrella and tells him she didn't bring him here for the obvious form of entertainment, that was just a ruse, but to give him his chance to be President. She uses her special powers to cast this dope's mind into the body of the President, presumably (but maybe not really!) replacing the mind of the man chosen by the people to lead our glorious republic.
Our guy panics and stays locked in the Presidential bedroom for days, saying he is sick but refusing any doctor entry. Then he finally emerges and tries to enact all his policies, like handing out more food. His advisors explain why that policy, and all his other ideas, would be a disaster. (Too many handouts would lower the price of food and cause the collapse of food producers, they say.) None of the bookkepper's ideas is put into practice. Then comes a big meeting in Switzerland with the leader of the Soviet Union and two other unnamed nations. It turns out all the leaders of big countries are ordinary goofballs occupying the bodies of the men who formally came to power. When he gets back to the White House, the narrator is confronted by that woman again. She explains that he is being returned to his normal body and the next goof is being put into the President's body--it seems the world is ruled by an endless series of average joes manipulated by beings like this woman, who only has the Angus Young Highway to Hell horns and tail in Finlay's picture, not the text.
Bad filler. Maybe a little better than "The Man Who Made His Dreams Come True," because it is shorter and less boring, but only a little better.
"He Fired His Boss"
Anderson works at an ad agency with a sort of joke name--this story is full of feeble jokes. The boss, Smedley, is a tyrant who likes to humiliate the employees. Here's one of Lesser's jokes: the boss has "bovine eyes" that "looked as out-of place on his craggy-lined catastrophe of a face as lavender and old lace on an elephant's rump." What?Anderson has failed to get the contract with a big client, a perfume manufacturer, renewed. The boss calls him in to yell at him; also in the office is the boss's daughter, who also has cow eyes. The boss insists Anderson make another stab at getting that perfume contract again, implying the sexy woman who represents the perfume company will sign if Anderson makes a pass at her. If he fails to get the contract renewed, he will be fired.
His attempt at making a pass at the perfume executive is a disaster--she slaps Anderson's face. That same night Anderson attends the reading of the will of an aunt he didn't know he had until she keeled over. It turns out this aunt owned more than half the stock of the advertising agency. So, Anderson gets fired but inherits enough common stock to seize control of the firm from which he has been fired. He fires his former boss, and, when the perfume exec hears about Anderson's new position as head of the advertising firm, she runs over to Anderson's apartment and throws her clothes off. But before Anderson can bang this chick, the boss's daughter comes to the apartment to throw herself in his arms, offering her body in exchange for Anderson giving her Dad his job back. Or any job. Anderson realizes those bovine eyes look pretty nice.
When the two women realize they are both in Anderson's apartment to have sex with him they get pretty angry with him, but Anderson realizes the way to deal with women is to be firm, and he lays down the law. The women admire the "iron" and "fire" they see he has "in his blood" and so Anderson is able to have sex with cow-eyes in the living room after promising her father a job as office manager and then go to the bedroom to have sex with the perfume company executive, who, apparently, always found him cute but couldn't get aroused by a man unless he had high status. It is implied Anderson is going to be banging these mercenary chicks regularly in the future.
I'm going to call this story barely acceptable filler. "He Fired His Boss" is cynical, but at least resembles the kind of dream of incredible power that enables a man to have sex with multiple women that this magazine promises--"So You Want to be President" is a bait and switch with no sex and instead a lame moral lesson. And "He Fired His Boss" isn't shoddy or overly long and boring and full of superfluous repetitive scenes like "The Man Who Made His Dreams Come True;" there isn't a lot of fat in this third story, every paragraph of the story advances the admittedly lame plot or is exploitative or is an admittedly weak joke. "He Fired His Boss" succeeds in achieving its meagre goals and deserves a "C-", a passing grade that nobody should be bragging about.
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Based on today's experience I have to tentatively conclude that Lesser is not a very good writer and Dream World is not a very good magazine. Of course, I'm the kind of person who puts his hand in the fire a second time to make sure it burns, so we'll be checking out the third and final issue of Dream World soon.
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