SF: Authors' Choice 2: A B Chandler, H Clement, & H L Gold

Digging through the paperback anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library, I came upon Harry Harrison's 1970 volume SF: Authors' Choice 2.  As the title suggests,  this is one of those compilations of stories of which their authors are particularly fond or proud.  Of the twelve stories in the book I think I have only read Algis Budrys' "Contact Between Equals;" that was back in 2019, and I liked it.  That leaves a lot of virgin territory in this paperback; today we'll explore the stories chosen by world-travelling sailor A. Bertram Chandler, hard science fiction icon Hal Clement and the agoraphobic editor of Galaxy, H. L. Gold.

"Late" by A. Bertram Chandler (1955)

In the period before the inexplicable birth of this blog, I read a bunch of stories and some novels by A. Bertram Chandler, most of them about space naval officer John Grimes.  I liked them well enough, but was hardly blown away by them, and I don't think I've read anything by Chandler during the era of this blog...until today!

"Late" is well-written and seems quite sober, but turns out to be a joke story with an unexpectedly unscientific ending.  I think I can mildly recommend it.

Jelks is a British scientist, a man very thorough and very calm, but also very slow.  Everybody jokes to him, and of him, that he will be late for his own funeral, and we hear this phrase multiple times over the course of the story.  

"Late" takes place in a Cold War world in which the United Kingdom has its own independent space program.  Thanks to his stolid reliability and thoroughness, Jelks is selected for the job of staying alone in an orbiting rocket for months, conducting experiments and taking readings.  Many men would crack up all alone in a tin can for such a long period, but those in authority feel they can rely on the steady and unexcitable Jelks.

After a few weeks up there, Jelks sees some kind of cataclysm take place on the Earth below; he is familiar with all the types of nuclear weapons and all the various weather phenomena, and the character of what he sees baffles him, as the disaster is unlike what he would expect from any weapon or meteorological event.  He pilots his rocket back to Earth, back to England.  There are no people around.  He makes his way to a village church and the opened and empty graves indicate that he missed the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgement. 

All the dead pan and believable hard science stuff that occupies 90% of the story, about the way the rockets and space suits operate and so forth, made the Christian resolution of "Late" a surprise, though Chandler does foreshadow the ending with the repeated intoning of the "late for his own funeral" joke and by having Jelk scoff at some prophet mentioned in the newspaper who wins notoriety by claiming the end of the world is nigh.

This unusual story first appeared in Science Fantasy and, besides here in SF: Authors' Choice 2, it has only been reprinted in the Australian anthology Beyond Tomorrow, which was published to coincide with the World Science Fiction Convention of 1975, held in Melbourne.  In his afterward to the story here in Harrison's anthology, Chandler says that his first choice for inclusion in this book was his story "Giant Killer," but that one was too long, and talks about the circumstances under which he wrote "Late" and a little about his move from Britain to Australia.

"Proof" by Hal Clement

As with Chandler, I read some Clement before I started the blog but have not read anything by him since the founding of the quixotic venture that is MPorcius Fiction Log; as with Chandler, I liked what I read but didn't feel much urge to read more by him.

"Proof" is Clement's first published story, and, in his foreword to it here in SF: Authors' Choice 2, he talks about how he first got into SF, about how he is a stickler for scientific accuracy in SF, and a little about John W. Campbell, Jr. and Jack Williamson and their influence on his early career.  

"Proof" is a serious hardcore hard SF story, full of phrases like "...the viscosity of a gas does increase directly as the square root of its temperature..." and "We found that electromagnetic radiations of wavelengths in the octave above H-alpha would penetrate the interference...."  Our main characters are two adventurous types, one a native of the Sun, the other a native of the star Sirius.  These two people are elite members of civilizations that evolved inside stars, beings whose bodies consist of magnetic fields and neutrons and whose "food" is neutronium.  They are aboard a ship travelling from the outer regions of the Sun towards the solar core--Solarians live in cities suspended in the outer regions of Sol, but need more neutronium than is available out there, and so send ships down to the core to collect this essential element.  The reason the Solarians reside far from their food supply is that the inner regions of the Sun are inhabited by monsters, dangerous beasts the ship's crew will likely have to fight to secure the neutronium the cities need.

The actual plot of the story does not involve the monsters or the collection of neutronium.  The Sirian visitor is a scientist who has a theory that, if artificially compressed, elements like iron and carbon that in a star are in an ionized plasma form might take on a solid form.  This theoretical phenomena is difficult for the Solarians and Sirians to visualize, and their senses are ill-equipped to detect such solid matter should they encounter it.  At least that is what I think the Sirian is saying; in my youth, when I should have been memorizing the Periodic Table of Elements and chemical formulas, I was clogging my brain with dialogue from The Flintstones and how many hit dice First Edition AD&D monsters have, so this material is a challenge for me. 

Our Solarian character, the captain of the sun diving ship, upon hearing this theory, describes a tragic and mysterious event he witnessed while commanding a ship on a journey between stars another interstellar craft that was accompanying his own collided with some kind of invisible object and was destroyed--perhaps it was a specimen of the solid iron, silicon, carbon, etc., the Sirian is theorizing?  Clement breaks free from the setting of the Solarian sun diving ship to describe the spectacular crash and cataclysmic explosion of the Solarian interstellar ship in a remote area of Earth from the point of view of a human being.  Then comes the little joke at the end of the story--the Sirian scientist doesn't think solid iron and carbon could exist in the natural world and accuses the Solarian of making the story up.

"Proof" is a good example of a science fiction story that is really about science and not just an adventure or detective story or political satire set in space or the future.  Clement concocts an alternate, speculative, milieu that is very strange but is actually based on the hard sciences and stretches your brain in the way that surreal or psychedelic settings that make zero sense fail to.  Even though there is a minimum of sex and violence, and little plot or character, "Proof" still manages to be entertaining--the setting alone is enough for you to chew on.  So, thumbs up for "Proof."

Since its debut in Campbell's Astounding, "Proof" has been reprinted in numerous anthologies, including several edited by Isaac Asimov and/or Martin H. Greenberg, as well as the Clement collection Music of Many Spheres.          

The cover of Music of Many Spheres is illustrated by a painting by Clement himself

"Love in the Dark" by H. L. Gold

In his intro here in SF: Authors' Choice 2 to "Love in the Dark," which first appeared in the short-lived magazine Suspense as "Love Ethereal," Gold brags about how brilliant his characterization of the protagonist of the story is and makes fun of the woman upon whom he based his character.  Gold comes off as kind of a jerk, frankly.

The character of which Gold is so proud is the unhappily married Livy, a not-very-attractive thirty-something whose husband is Mark Random, a "pudgy" sales manager who wears glasses and a neatnik who is the picture of dull sangfroid; Livy tries to get a rise out of him by loudly kicking her shoes around and scuffing up the walls but Mark just ignores these provocations.  Gold makes it clear that Livy's unhappiness is largely due to Mark's inability to have sex or lack of sexual interest in her.

One night Livy is undressing for bed and feels lustful eyes staring at her.  Of course, those eyes are not Mark's--he has his back to her.  When Livy closes her eyes she can "see" the "man" who is ogling her, muscular hunk of a space alien with blue feathers and pointy ears.  The invisible alien puts the moves on Livy--during the day she can feel this creature kissing her as she does the housework.  The bird man cannot speak to her--his race and ours hear on different frequencies or something--but Livy is thrilled by the sexual attention.

Livy's strange behavior leads Mark to call a friend for help.  Ben is another successful professional who is overweight and unattractive, a guy who has read lots of books on business psychology.  The presence of Ben allows Livy a chance to insult Mark--as she lists off her husband's faults and calls him names, Ben encourages her, telling Mark that it is healthy psychologically for Livy to get this stuff off her chest and, besides, she doesn't mean it.

Of course, she does mean it.  Livy's relationship with the bird man only she can see, and only when she closes her eyes, progresses and she gets pregnant.  Ben figures that she is having an affair and is so guilty over it that her brain is hiding the truth from her by giving her this bird man delusion, and urges Mark to have his wife admitted to an institution.  Livy runs away, but sneaks back to watch the collapse of Ben and Mark's friendship when the invisible bird man hits Mark and Mark blames Ben for the attack.

Livy and the bird man have an invisible baby.  Livy gets a job with a private detective agency; the bird man, being invisible, can gather all kinds of information with ease that Livy tells her employer she has collected.  (Livy and the alien communicate by typing--he has learned English.)      

"Love in the Dark" is an acceptable filler joke story about sex that isn't funny or sexy.  It feels kind of mean-spirited, with its contempt for fat people and its apparent glee in the punishment meted out to Mark and Ben, who don't really seem villainous, just boring and sexually dysfunctional, but maybe we are supposed to feel they deserve punishment because they are business people and not scientists or artists or communist revolutionaries or whatever sort of people Gold himself admires?  "Love in the Dark" is a sort of forgettable routine thing, so it is a little odd that Gold took the opportunity provided by SF: Authors' Choice 2 of this book to make a big deal out of it.

"Love in the Dark" is included in at least three Gold collections as well as some anthologies, including Fred Pohl's Beyond the End of Time, the cover illo of which manages to cram in a multitude of our favorite things: a hunk, a babe, poison gas, a saucer, a space man, and an urban apocalypse, and Basil Davenport's Invisible Men, which has a characteristically awesome Richard Powers cover. 

The 1966 printing of Invisible Men above has the lens on the right side of the illo
blacked out, but that lens on the 1960 edition shows a woman's nude torso,
a reminder that the master of abstract art Richard Powers can also produce 
very fine renderings of the human form

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It is always interesting to hear these writer guys talk about their work and their relationships with each other, and the Chandler and Clement stories are actually good as well as strange or surprising, so I'm definitely enjoying SF: Authors' Choice 2.  And the Gold isn't bad, just mundane, though perhaps it offers insight into the psychology of Gold, an important SF editor and himself mentally ill.

We'll read some more from SF: Authors' Choice 2, but I think first it is back to 1968 for stories selected by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss. 

Destinies, Fall 1980: F Saberhagen, G Benford & D Drake

A while ago I bought a copy of the Fall 1980 issue of Destinies for a dollar.  Destinies was a quarterly magazine in the form of a paperback book edited by Jim Baen; the Fall 1980 issue is the ninth of eleven published issues.  This one has a space war cover by Vincent DiFate and includes a bunch of essays by SF luminaries like Robert Heinlein, Frederik Pohl, Jerry Pournelle, and Joe Haldeman that speculate on the future of war and space colonization and stuff like that; there are also book reviews by Norman Spinrad.  But it is the fiction I will be looking at, stories by Fred Saberhagen of Berserker fame, Gregory Benford-- an actual scientist--and David "Hammer's Slammers" Drake.  James Gunn's name is on the cover but I don't see it on the table of contents.

"Recessional" by Fred Saberhagen 

"Recessional" here in Destinies is illustrated by Stephen Fabian, who contributes two female nudes reminiscent in composition of something from a detective magazine and an effective if traditionally composed mad scientist drawing.  I am a Fabian fan, so these are welcome.  "Recessional" was reprinted first in an anthology edited by Saberhagen himself, and went on to be included in two different Saberhagen collections.

"Recessional" is an allusive and somewhat surreal story, a sort of science fiction crime tale with meta, perhaps autobiographical, elements.  It works, and is pretty economical, so I can mildly recommend it.

Our nameless main character is a science fiction writer who is fascinated by the hard sciences and reads the legitimate academic science journals; he loves jargon and includes lots of science jargon in his fiction.  The story follows him as he leaves a science fiction convention on the east coast and drives west.  We readers get lots of clues that, one, he is passing in and out of alternate universes, places where the United States and his own life are slightly different, and two, that he murdered his wife and threw her into the ocean or (in some other universes) maybe a major river, either years ago or (in some other universes) very recently.  As he travels from coast to coast he sees TV shows and hears radio reports about a new scientific technique that allows scientists to scan dead skulls and pick up images from the bone of scenes the dead person witnessed while alive.  There is some suspicion among the scientific community that the images thus collected may not be quite accurate representations of reality, that what the scientists are seeing may be warped by the expectations and biases of the original, now dead, viewer and by the current viewer who is gathering the images today.  Also, some experts fear that the technique of gleaning the images from the skulls, which involves radiation that alters subatomic particles, may warp reality, may be creating or exposing alternate universes.  The writer also keeps hearing news reports about the police finding dead bodies of women on shores and river banks.  We readers have to assume that it is likely in one or another universe that the cops are going to scan the dead skull of the writer's wife and discover who she is and who murdered her.

"Pick an Orifice" by Gregory Benford

The title makes us expect this is a sex joke story, and that is what we get.  It is the near future and some eleven-year-olds whose fathers are computer engineers get their hands on some powerful new software.  They use it to create wild and crazy pornography, people having sex with vacuum cleaners and animals and monsters and so forth.  Benford goes, a little, into some of the theory of how a computer might model three dimensional objects, and into the social implications of computer-generated cinema--in this story actors and directors become a thing of the past, as a computer can do their jobs, and the kids own copyright to the porn they create and so they make a lot of money when their porn becomes famous.  

Weak (though not actually boring or repulsive) as a piece of fiction, but perhaps prescient when we consider how today AI threatens the work of so many middle-class professionals and people in the entertainment industry as computers increasingly demonstrate the ability to manipulate words and images into coherent documents that consumers will accept as readily as that fashioned by human minds.  We'll call "Pick an Orifice" acceptable.

isfdb suggests "Pick an Orifice" has never been reprinted, making Destinies Volume 2 Number 4 essential for all you Benford completists out there.     

"The Automatic Rifleman" by David Drake

Here we have a story which has reappeared in three different Drake collections.  "The Automatic Rifleman" is too long, moves slowly, and is a little overwritten and silly, with lots of superfluous detail and over-the-top characters, but it isn't actually bad.  We'll judge it acceptable filler.

We've got four characters.  Setting things in motion is a big black dude who is educated and very concerned about pollution and injustice and all that.  He has decided to strike a blow for justice by murdering a Japanese politician who is visiting the United States.  He has two henchman, a short angry "swarthy" veteran and an angry blonde woman, I guess the black guy's girlfriend.  As the story begins these three terrorists arrive at an unscheduled meeting with a fourth individual, a man who claims to have the skills and equipment to ensure they succeed in assassinating the politician.  This guy has an unusual automatic rifle which never leaves his hand.

We get a lot of scenes in which these four macho characters demonstrate how much they dislike each other and try to one-up each other and prove to each other and themselves how tough they are.  The science fiction content consists of the repeated hints that the guy with the strange rifle has participated in many famous assassinations, such as those of JFK and MLK, and that the rifle is alive or a robot, the representative of space aliens who are manipulating Earth history and society through targeted killings of influential Earthers.  There's a long sequence about ranging in weapons, then the scene of the actual assassination attempt, and then the resolution of the conflict between the mysterious man with the advanced rifle and the swarthy guy who has been suspicious of him the entire story.

**********

Of today's three stories, Saberhagen's is the most ambitious and literary, the one that actually succeeds in depicting a human character and generating some kind of human feeling.  Benford's succeeds in the realistic-speculations-about-the-future game, even though it is a dirty joke story and a get-rich-quick wish fulfillment fantasy.  Drake's tale is a sort of men's adventure version of a Twilight Zone story with its obvious twist and all the padding consisting of macho men trying to psychologically dominate each other with their tough talk and by brandishing guns and knives.  

These stories are not great, but they aren't bad, either, so we shouldn't complain.  One thing that perhaps links the stories together is a sense of 1970s pessimism; Saberhagen suggests SF cons aren't fun anymore and has a broken marriage at its core, Benford's story features broken homes, high energy prices and lonely suburban latchkey kids with nothing to do, and Drake's is all about social unrest and urban terrorism.  

So, an underwhelming and perhaps slightly depressing foray into the anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library.  But we've seen much worse.  Who knows what we'll turn up next among my purchases of the last ten years?  Stay tuned to find out.

Merrill-approved '58 stories by T Sturgeon, W Tenn & W Tevis

Was it really early July when we last read stories included on Judith Merrill's Honorable Mentions list in 1959's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume?  Merrill's list is alphabetical by author, and in the previous installment of this tour of 1958 SF stories we started the "S"s; today let's forge ahead, finishing the "S"s and taking on the "T"s.

"The Graveyard Reader" by Theodore Sturgeon

Merrill includes two stories by Sturgeon on her Honorable Mentions list for 1958, "A Touch of Strange," which we read back in January, and "The Graveyard Reader," the title story of the Groff Conklin anthology in which it debuted.  I'm reading "The Graveyard Reader" in a scan of that anthology, which has a creepy, even disturbing, Richard Powers cover. 

There are several Peter Hammill lyrics in which Hammill presents the idea of inanimate objects or natural processes like the ocean tide striking the sand on a beach somehow "writing" messages which human beings might be able to read (see "The Emperor in His War Room," "Darkness (11,11)" and "The Wave").  The central gimmick in "The Graveyard Reader" reminded me of this recurring theme in the Van Der Graaf Generator discography.

Our narrator stands before the fresh grave of his wife.  His wife and he had trouble communicating; she refused to vocalize her complaints and desires, I guess expecting her husband to know what to do and say without being told.  It also seems she was unfaithful to him.  She left him one day and three days later turned up dead in a wrecked car with a strange man at the wheel.  The narrator decides it is appropriate to refrain from having anything inscribed on his wife's headstone.

Another man appears.  Our narrator learns that this guy can look at a grave and from various apparently random signs, like the color and shape of vegetation on the grave and the path over the grave traced by insects, learn everything that happened during the deceased's life, even his or her thoughts.  The narrator asks this joker to teach him to read graves, and over the course of a year our narrator becomes a grave reader himself.  Sturgeon's theme is "to know all is to forgive all," and our narrator's ability to learn all about people by reading their graves gives him the life changing fortitude to forgive his wife her trespasses, and forgive himself, and move on to a happier life.  Sturgeon emphasizes that we can all take the healthy course taken by the narrator--gaining peace of mind by forgiving others and ourselves--without engaging in a year-long study of an esoteric pseudo-science by having his main character embrace forgiveness without taking the step of reading his wife's grave, and having a quotidian but sincere inscription engraved on her tombstone.

Thumbs up for "The Graveyard Reader," a well-written piece of work with an interesting argument to make, an argument that has appeal for traditional Christian types as well as progressives who wonder why we even have police and prisons.  Even if you think Sturgeon's attitude is naive and unworkable, he puts it across in a compelling and affecting way in this enjoyable story.

"The Graveyard Reader" has been reprinted many times in Sturgeon collections as well as fantasy and horror anthologies, even though the story is life-affirming rather than horrifying.  The many editions of The Boris Karloff Horror Anthology, I find, have particularly memorable covers.

"Eastward Ho!" by William Tenn 

I avoid the work college professor Philip Klass' published under the name William Tenn because my impression is that he writes satires and my interest in satire has reached a pretty low ebb.  (I elaborate on my attitude towards humor in fiction at the two links that follow.)  Now, it is true that in 2018 I read Tenn's "Project Hush" and had to admit it was pretty good.  However, in 2024 I read Tenn's "Null-P" and it confirmed all my fears about the man's fiction.  That means that today's Tenn story, the third I will have ever read, is a kind of tie-breaker and will likely determine whether or not you ever see Tenn's name here at MPorcius Fictin Log in the future.

"Eastward Ho!" debuted in an anniversary issue of F&SF and has since been reprinted a billion times, in multiple "The Best from F&SF" volumes, in several Tenn collections, and in a stack of anthologies that includes volumes edited by Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg, Martin H. Greenberg (one printing of which reuses a Games Workshop image of Mad-Max/Car Wars-style automobiles) among others.  In "Eastward Ho!" we have a story welcomed and monumentalized by the professional SF community.  I am going to read "Eastward Ho!" in my copy of the Silverberg anthology, Alpha 4, which served up the story to SF readers yet again in 1973 after they had already have a chance to experience it in one of the F&SF "Best Froms," three editions of the Aldiss, and one of the Tenn collections.        

You know those switcheroo stories in which a German U-boat captain finds himself in hell aboard a merchant vessel as it gets torpedoed, or a guy who kills a spider finds himself in a giant spider web, or Wilma goes down to the quarry to operate a dinosaur while Fred dons an apron and does the housework?  Well, here we go again.  In "Eastward Ho!" it is the post-nuclear war future, and Native Americans have better technology than white people (oil lamps and firearms!) and push white people around.

Our protagonist is an ambassador from the impoverished United States of America, which has been reduced in scope by Indian expansion to New England, New York and New Jersey; he is on a mission to the Garden State to negotiate with the Seminole, but upon arrival finds that the Sioux have taken over the area.  The various Indian tribes are seizing land inhabited by the technologically inferior white people at the same time they are aggressively competing with each other, you know, just like the Spanish and British and French fought each other while conquering the New World.  As the story ends it becomes clear that the United States is going to be entirely extinguished very soon by one or multiple Native American empires--our protagonist is probably the highest-ranking official of the US government still alive and not in captivity.  So he takes command of the last vestiges of the US defense apparatus--three ships--and the last free white people in America sail off to colonize Europe; it is funny because in real life white people left Europe to colonize America, and, in the story, white people leave America to colonize Europe!  Get it?  It is the opposite!  Hilarious!

"Eastward Ho!" is a total waste of time.  There is no real plot and very little by way of character, and we can't accept this story as a serious speculation about the future, like we might a story about communists or China conquering the United States.  The backbone and the meat of the story consists entirely in the  switcheroo jokes.  (By the way, if you think the switcheroo technique is a brilliant one, as Robert Silverberg apparently does, you call it "an inversion," as SilverBob does in his intro to "Eastward Ho!" here in Alpha 4.)  Additional switcheroo, er, inverted, elements I haven't already covered include how, while in real life Native Americans are vulnerable to alcoholism, in this story it is white people who can't handle booze--our protagonist's deputy is humiliated by Sioux who give him a bottle of tequila.  The Sioux leaders also say stereotypical stuff that white people in authority might say at the time the story was written, variations on "you are a credit to your race" and "he is a hotheaded young man" and "I judge people as individuals" and so forth.

As for the purpose of the story, I guess it offers self-hating whites an opportunity to do penance in an effort to assuage their liberal guilt, and perhaps enjoyment to lefties of whatever ethnic or racial background who love to see white people humiliated.  Besides the humiliations I have already mentioned, there's a black person in the story who is smarter and more decent than the white characters and condescends to help them, and a white woman who prefers sex with Indians over white men but is kicked to the curb by the Sioux after enjoying her body and consigned to a dreadful life among palefaces.

(If memory serves, Clifford Simak wrote stories in which nuclear war or some other Caucasian misbehavior left Indians (and robots and animals) in charge of the world, but Simak's stories were heartfelt and sincere, not absurdist jokes, so had more value than this junk.  There's also Michael Moorcock's Oswald Bastable novels in which Chinese people or Africans defeat Europeans and Americans, Warlord of the Air and The Land Leviathan, which similarly serve as leftist revenge fantasies but are also serviceable adventure stories.)

"Far From Home" by Walter Tevis

Not long ago we read three disappointing stories from the December 1958 issue of F&SF.  Well, Walter Tevis had a story in that issue that caught Judith Merrill's eye, so let's take a stab at it.  I don't think I have read anything before by Tevis, a successful author several of whose works, both mainstream and SF, were adapted for the silver screen and the idiot box.

"Far From Home" is a well-written trifle, just three pages.  I guess we can recommend it.  Maybe it is meant to illustrate the contrast between youth and old age, and perhaps we should see it as an expression of distaste for life in the American interior away from the coasts.

An old guy who works as a janitor at a public pool in some Arizona town comes to work in the morning to discover a huge blue whale in the pool.  There's a lot about how this guy acts the way he does because he is old, and also some stuff about how he is reminded of the excitement he enjoyed as a child when he saw the ocean while on a trip to San Francisco.  

Hanging around the pool is a little boy with a paper bag.  After being humiliated by the whale, which splashes water on him, the janitor runs for help from the town government, and then it is revealed that the boy has a wee little leprechaun in his bag--the appearance of the whale must be one of his three wishes.  When the janitor returns the whale and the boy are gone and I guess we are expected to believe the boy has left the desert for some more salubrious locale, it having been implied that life in Arizona is not good.

I have to admit the revelation that a leprechaun and magical wishes explained the surreal circumstances encountered by the janitor was a little disappointing--I expected there to be no explanation, or for the explanation to be less prosaic.  Still, Tevis succeeds in producing a sort of sense of wonder as well as recognizable portraits of people stuck in a boring place who have either memories or hopes of life in a more interesting, more vibrant, place.

"Far From Home" has been reprinted many times in anthologies and Tevis collections, and is even the title story of one such collection.

**********

Sometimes Merrill on her Honorable Mentions list recommends stories that received little notice and have been all but forgotten, or stories that lie on the periphery of the porous SF envelope.  But today's three stories not only represent Merrill's own taste but a consensus among the professional SF class.  And we don't have to wonder why Merrill and her fellow anthologists liked them; the Sturgeon and Tevis stories are skillfully written and full of real human psychology and real human feeling, while the Tenn is outlandish fan service for pinkos, an influential demographic among SF professionals as they are seemingly everywhere.

Next time, science fiction from 1980, the year your humble blogger turned 11 years of age.  

F&SF, Dec 58: A Budrys, A Boucher, & F Leiber

Mel Hunter

Let's read three stories from the December 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, an issue edited by Robert P. Mills.  This ish has a fun damsel-in-distress cover by Emsh, Anthony Boucher's mixed review of Theodore Sturgeon's novel The Cosmic Rape and his enthusiastic praise for both Sturgeon's collection A Touch of Strange and for a publication edited by Karen Anderson that celebrates the recently dead Henry Kuttner, Henry Kuttner: A Memorial Symposium.  (In January of this year I wrote about A Touch of Strange myself across three blog posts, one, two, three.)  On the back cover is an ad for a print of a painting by Mel Hunter three feet wide depicting a lunar crater--just send 75 cents to Geek Systems, Inc. in New York City.

Lots of valuable material, but our main interest is the fiction, so on to stories by Algis Budrys, Boucher, and Fritz Leiber.  I almost read the Cornell Woolrich contribution, but then realized it is not a story but a play, and bailed.  

"The Eye and the Lightning" by Algis Budrys (1958)

It kind of looks like "The Eye and the Lightning" was a flash in the pan, promoted on the cover of this issue of F&SF but never reprinted in a book, just in a French magazine and a British magazine.

"The Eye and the Lightning" is a pretty confusing and somewhat convoluted story, all the basic elements of which strain the reader's credulity, and perhaps must be interpreted as merely metaphorical or allegorical; it is easy to see why it was not popular.

It is the bizarre super-individualistic, super-suspicious future!  Everybody lives alone in an underground bunker he builds for himself, the location of which he keeps hidden.  Everybody has a homemade high tech "rig" that consists of a scanner, a teleporter, and a burner.  The rig can home in on and provide a televised view of places and people it is keyed to--you key your scanner to a location by taking a bit of the soil of the place and putting it in the scanner, or key it to a person by securing a lock of his hair or a fragment of his clothes or whatever.  I guess this is like the way you get a bloodhound on the trail by letting it sniff a guy's clothes or how you make a voodoo doll using a lock of your enemy's hair or his fingernail paring.  Once the scanner is keyed to a location you can teleport to that place as well as observe it, and teleport back home from that spot.  And once your rig is keyed to a person you can watch that person and kill him with the burner.  

People need to go out and buy stuff, like replacement parts for their scanner rigs, so they regularly teleport to towns to buy and sell.  In town, everybody wears elaborate disguises--concealing masks, padded suits meant to obscure your body weight and shape, and so forth, and people even put on fake voices--I guess it is implied that the scanners can home in on the timbre of a voice and even your personality.

Such is the background.  As for the main character, we meet a guy who, in this paranoid world in which most people spend every waking moment working on their rigs and disguises to ensure their security, is remarkably chill, spending his time making castles out of playing cards and carving elaborate marionettes and stage sets for them.  Again and again Budrys tells us this guy doesn't understand why all other people are so scared and suspicious and waste their time spying on others and building defenses against others.  We are also privy to his metaphorical dreams.

As for the plot, our protagonist teleports out to buy more parts for his rig, even though he has the bare minimum of a rig.  He is confronted by angry mobs and suspicious individuals--the already crazy world is getting crazier because of rumors that somebody has developed an even more advanced rig, one that can detect when another rig is watching you.  Our guy manages to escape various episodes of danger by using different types of grenades and teleporting.  In the course of the day's adventures he develops relationships with a young male electronics expert and an attractive young woman and the three end up in the protagonist's bunker.  The three are very suspicious of each other, and the woman tries to use her sexual attractiveness to get in good with one and then the other of the men, as she thinks one of them has one of the new advanced rigs and is thus able to protect her.  At least I think that is what is going on.

In the end it turns out that both of the male characters have innovative rigs, but the protagonist's is by far the better.  Our twist ending is that the chill protagonist has a split personality--he can be chill because his other personality is the world's top electronics expert and has devised the best rig in the world, even though his chill personality thinks it is the lamest rig in the world.  The story ends on a happy note--our hero is going to spread the innovations of his advanced rig around the world, with the result that everybody will meet on a plane of equality and people will be less suspicious and build friendships and communities again.  Again, that is what I think is what is going on, though I am not quite sure.  As the world gets safer, our hero can spend less time as his defensive personality and more time as his chill personality until his defensive personality eventually expires.

I had trouble wrapping my head around how the rigs work and why people were acting the way they were and how such a society could develop and maintain itself; the hard science, sociology and psychology of "The Eye and the Lightning" seem to have been arbitrarily and unconvincingly thrown  together by Budrys merely to allow him to make some kind of metaphorical point.  What might that point be?  That we all desire friends and love and recognize that a community can accomplish things that isolated individuals cannot, but at the same time we all fear others because other people can break our hearts if we open them and physically kill us if we let our guard down in proximity to them?  I also am considering if this story is influenced by sad realities made obvious by World War and Cold War conditions--liberal polities like the United States that value freedom and the rule of law may have to develop split personalities to survive in the same world as such monstrous polities as those that made up the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis and the Warsaw Pact, may need a second personality devoted to defense and able to engage in ruthless behavior, a second personality that the primary, liberal, personality barely even knows about.  If we extend that metaphor, is Budrys suggesting that if the United States develops a super defense we should share it with our rivals?  Are the conventional rigs like nuclear missiles and the new rigs like an anti-missile system?  Or maybe the rigs are like a conventional army and the advanced rigs are like nuclear weapons, which put competitors on an equal footing?

This story is not entertaining enough, and its philosophy not lucid enough, for me to endorse, but it isn't terrible, so maybe people who like a puzzle will enjoy it?  I'll call it acceptable.

Oh la la!

"The Pink Caterpillar" by Anthony Boucher (1945)

This story first appeared in an issue of the magazine Adventure and was reprinted by Donald Wollheim in the seventeenth issue of Avon Fantasy Reader in 1951.  It would go on to be included in Boucher collections and the David Alexander anthology Tales for the Rainy Night.

Like Budrys' story, Boucher's "The Pink Caterpillar" is sort of convoluted and has a central gimmick that doesn't make sense, or at least one which I can't understand.  The tale takes the form of a detective story, and is apparently one of a series of novels and stories starring a red-headed Irish-American gumshoe who here in "The Pink Caterpillar" is called Fergus O'Brien but who in other tales apparently bears the name "Fergus O'Breen."

Note that I am reading this 1958 version of the story, which is different in at least one way from the 1945 version--in the '45 version, on the first page, Hitler is mentioned in passing, and, in the '58 version, Khrushchev's name has been substituted for Der Fuhrer's.

O'Brien is hanging around with his fellow servicemen.  Our narrator is some other Navy man, but O'Brien's dialogue takes up most of the text of the story.  The topic of native witch doctors comes up, in particular their power to snatch one item from 100 years in the future and bring it to the present.  O'Brien contributes a story that illustrates the use of this power, a case he dealt with in Mexico before he joined the Navy when he was a detective working for an insurance company.

O'Brien was sent to Mexico by the insurance company to investigate the death of a gringo whose sister sought the insurance money; the company was suspicious because some evidence had arisen that the deceased was referred to by Mexicans with the title of "Dr." even though he was not in fact a doctor.  O'Brien describes all kinds of clues and interviews with people he conducted, giving his comrades (and I guess readers) a chance to solve the case themselves.  In the end the story's outlandish and macabre gimmick is revealed to us.  

The gringo had an enemy.  Gringo got a witch doctor to summon from 100 years in the future the skeleton of the enemy.  Somehow, this meant that the enemy no longer existed in this time, I guess because two of any one item cannot exist in the same time.  Should the skeleton be destroyed, the enemy would reappear.  So, the gringo took care to preserve the skeleton.  (He convinced the Mexicans he lived among that he was a doctor to explain why he had a skeleton mounted in his house.)  This guy was not as careful about his skeleton as I would have been, for example, letting the cleaning woman near enough to the skeleton that she knocked one of its fingers off.  (My wife would like to hire some stranger to come into our house to clean, but I flatly refuse, positive such a person would break one of the Rookwood vases or knock over one of the Art Deco statues.)  The enemy's finger, fully fleshed, thus appeared and crawled around, menacing the gringo.  (This is the pink caterpillar of the title.)  You'd think after this mishap that the gringo would really take care of this skeleton, but somehow he permitted some high-spirited young American engineers working for the local mining company to steal the skeleton on Halloween and throw the skeleton on a bonfire.  As a result, the enemy reappeared in toto  and came after the gringo, who died of a heart attack upon seeing his foe.

"The Pink Caterpillar" moves along at a decent clip and the various horror images in the story are good, but Boucher has to come up with so many absurd and contrived situations to provide a basis for those images that the story's plot is a ridiculous mess.  And I'm not a fan of stories that consist of "Here's a bunch of clues, reader, try to figure this out--ha ha, the answer is something totally impossible that doesn't make sense, you lose."  I guess I'm issuing another rueful "acceptable " grade. 

"Little Old Miss Macbeth" by Fritz Leiber (1958)

Mills, in his introduction to "Little Old Miss Macbeth," which he calls "a nocturne," promotes Leiber's earlier F&SF contributions "The Big Trek" (which I feel like I've read, but I guess that was before I started this blog) and "A Deskful of Girls" (which I read in 2024), and suggests Leiber is a "vividly visual" writer and all three of these stories have "distinctively evoked" and unforgettable images.  Well, let's see.

Actually, images are all that "Little Old Miss Macbeth" has going for it--besides verbose descriptions of surreal images, all we get are a lame joke and a lame surprise ending.  An old woman gets out of bed, sleep walks through a dark deserted city full of strange (but harmless) mutants and broken windows, to some other building where she silences a leaky faucet, then walks back home.  The surprise ending is the revelation that, after some kind of apocalyptic war, there are so few people alive that each person can have an entire ruined city to him- or herself.  

Gotta give this waste of time a thumbs down.  SF pros seem to love this sterile literary exercise, however.  (At MPorcius Fiction Log, we go against the grain!)  Rod Serling chose it for Rod Serling's Other Worlds, which bears the tag line "Fourteen amazing tales of galactic terror and suspense," even though "Little Old Miss Macbeth" features no terror or suspense.  It also appears in Marvin Kaye's Witches and Warlocks: Tales of Black Magic Old and New even though it is not about black magic and Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Weinberg's 100 Twisted Little Tales of Torment even though it is not about torment.  You can perhaps find "Little Old Miss Macbeth" most readily in the oft-reprinted The Best of Fritz Leiber, even though...well, you get the picture.

[UPDATE OCTOBER 28, 2025: Prompted by a commentor, I talk more about "Little Old Miss Macbeth" below in the comments; specifically, what it might have to do with Shakespeare's famous play.]

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Ouch, three stories I cannot recommend.  Leiber's is probably the most successful in terms of the author achieving his goals--it has no blunders, and I am rejecting it because I am not an admirer of the goals Leiber set himself with the story.  I can get on board with what Budrys and Boucher are trying to do with their stories, but I think they pursue their goals in an unsatisfactory fashion, their plots convoluted and their science-fictional and supernatural devices contrived and unconvincing.  

Too bad!

Robert Bloch: "The Chaney Legacy," "The Yougoslaves," and "Pranks"

In the last thrilling episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, we read a story by Avram Davidson that appeared in a 1986 issue of Night Cry, the horror magazine full of J. K. Potter illustrations put out by the people who produced the Twilight Zone magazine.  That same issue printed a story by Robert Bloch, so let's read it, and two other stories published by the creator of Norman Bates in that year.

"The Chaney Legacy"

Bloch's career is all wrapped up in Hollywood, even if he often portrays Hollywood as a den of iniquity and American popular culture in general as deplorable.  "The Chaney Legacy" is set in Tinseltown, and in the story Bloch unleashes a barrage of silent era movie biz trivia at us, as well as demonstrating his familiarity with Los Angeles geography.  Some of this material is kind of interesting, and the rest is not annoying, so it doesn't hamper the plot and atmosphere and I can moderately recommend "The Chaney Legacy" as a conventional and perhaps obvious but competently put together horror story.

Dale is fascinated by cinema, obsessed, even.  He teaches a film history course at a college and aspires to write books on the movies of early Hollywood.  And when he has the opportunity to rent an ugly little house purportedly once occupied by silent film legend Lon Chaney (father of the today more famous Lon Chaney, Jr.) he jumps at the chance, even though his girlfriend, Debbie the radio newscaster, dumps him rather than move into the remote and uncomfortable "dump."

The Latina Dale hires to clean the Chaney house discovers an old box and Dale's mind is blown when he realizes it is Lon Chaney's make up kit!  Dale sees strange faces looking back at him from the mirror on the inside lid of the kit, and, to make a long story short, Dale runs a terrible risk and learns the secret of how Chaney and other horror greats were able to so effectively portray characters physically and psychologically deformed.  You see, guys like Chaney, Peter Lorre and Bela Lugosi would conceive the monstrous personas upon which they built their careers and then project those psychic constructions into a magical mirror.  Then, when it can time to perform on stage or screen, they could download the required persona from the mirror back into their own brains.  Dale has made an amazing discovery, but is also in horrible danger--the monsters Chaney created (and Bloch offers a long list of them, from the one-eyed whoremaster of The Road to Mandalay to the armless knife thrower of The Unknown) are still alive in the mirror and they seek another chance to inhabit a human body and the world beyond the make up kit and try to take over Dale.

I enjoyed it.  After its debut in Night Cry, "The Chaney Legacy" was included in the 1989 Bloch collection Fear and Trembling (along with our next story, "The Yougoslaves,") and a bunch of anthologies, among them and Marvin Kaye's Witches and Warlocks and John Betancourt's New Masterpieces of Horror, on the cover of which Bloch gets top billing, above even Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and Joyce Carol Oates.  

(I'll note here that I am reading both "The Chaney Legacy" and "The Yougoslaves" in scans of the issues of Night Cry in which they debuted.)

"The Yougoslaves"

Another story that first saw print in Night Cry and is boldly trumpeted on the cover.  "The Yougoslaves," "a novelette" that you should feel free to call "The Yougo-Enslaved Persons" if you must, seems to have been a hit; Stephen Jones, Martin H. Greenberg and Karl Edward Wagner all included it in anthologies over the next ten years. 

Remember in 2015 when we read Bloch's 1989 novel Lori and I told you one of its themes was of an America in decline?  Well, it's not only the U S of A that is in decline in Bloch's eyes--France is also going down the tubes!  At least that is what our narrator thinks, based on his current visit to Paris.  Things get still worse when a pack of swarthy kids younger than ten years old swarm him and pick his pocket.  The gendarmes tell our narrator that his assailants were "gypsies" (whom you should feel free to call "the Roma" if you must) and our hero learns from the clerk at his hotel that in recent years these little Eastern-European scamps have, apparently trained and directed by organized crime, become a real scourge on the streets of the City of Light, one which the police are unable--or is it unwilling?--to mitigate.  

Our guy doesn't care about money, but there is something in his wallet he desperately needs back.  So he undertakes a solo mission to secure this unspecified bit of property, capturing one of the little gypsies and using violence to get the address of yougoslave HQ out of him.  The thief offers our narrator drugs, little girls, even his own nine-year-old body (gross!) in an effort to dissuade his captor from contacting "Le Boss" and revealing his own failure, to no avail--our guy is determined to get the contents of his wallet back.

Le Boss's lair is a disused sewer lit by candles; Le Boss is a huge fatso with "fingers thick as sausages."  Le Boss summons his pack of kids away from their playtime raping a five-year-old girl (yikes!) to kill the narrator, but then comes our twist--the narrator is a vampire and summons his own pack--of voracious rats!--to dispose of the kids.  Le Boss's revolver has little effect on the narrator, and soon our protagonist is feasting on the obese criminal mastermind.  Oh yeah, the thing the vampire sought from his wallet was the key to his tomb.  

A pretty good adventure/horror story; for a long time I figured Le Boss and/or the kids were vampires--after all, Bloch tells us one of the kids has old eyes and that Le Boss is pale--not the narrator.  The theme of disgusting sex involving children and the horrible deaths suffered by all the children in the story gives "The Yougoslaves" an exploitative edge.

"Pranks" 

"Pranks" debuted in Alan Ryan's anthology Halloween Horrors.  "Pranks" seems to have had a fraught publication history; according to isfdb, at least one edition of Halloween Horrors was heavily edited by some freelancer without authorization from the publisher and then destroyed, and when "Pranks" appeared in Chills and Thrills: The Ultimate Anthology of the Mystical, Magical, Eerie and Uncanny some kind of error left the last two lines of the story missing.  Well, don't worry kids, I am reading "Pranks" in a recent electronic edition of the 1987 Bloch collection Midnight Pleasures.

Instead of introducing us to a character and then relating to us his or her adventure or series of challenges or whatever, "Pranks" is one of those stories which consists of a series of scenes or vignettes each starring a different group of characters.  I find this kind of thing irritating.

The little vignettes that make up "Pranks" take place on the evening of Halloween and Bloch makes sure to tell us what time it is in each scene.  First we've got a couple with no children who make a big deal of the holiday, putting on elaborate costumes and relishing a chance to offer candy to the kids who come to the door.  Then we have a married couple with two kids; Dad is cranky and hates Halloween and complains that Mom spent too much on the kids' outfits.  Then a married couple with twins--they send the little girls off to trick or treat and then jump into bed to have sex, which they rarely do because the twins are always around.  Then we've got a priest who is visiting a couple whose kids are out trick-or-treating--the priest implies that Halloween is serious business, that it is a day on which Satan's power waxes and maybe his parishioners shouldn't have sent their kids out alone.  Then a couple who return home from a party to find their lax babysitter let their little boy leave the house like an hour ago and the boy has not yet returned.  

The finale is a one-two punch.  All the kids in the story, and others besides to a total of thirteen, have vanished, and we readers learn they were seized and killed by the couple in the first vignette when they came to collect their candy; the Halloween-loving couple are apparently cannibals and are going to eat the kids.  (Trick-or-treaters whose parents accompanied them were allowed to leave the house of death unmolested.)  The second punch is that, after midnight, the spot where the cannibals' house was standing has reverted to a vacant lot--I guess the killers are ghosts or demons or whatever whose house appears only on Halloween, in a different town each year.

"Pranks" is more of an idea than an actual story, and I'm not crazy about its apparent message--that you should be a helicopter parent.  It is short, so doesn't have enough time to really get on your nerves, but I was certainly glad when I got to the end of it.  We'll be nice and call it barely acceptable.

1987 and 1991 editions of Midnight Pleasures

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"Pranks" is bordering on being a waste of time, but "The Chaney Legacy" and "The Yougoslaves" are entertaining horror stories, the Hollywood story a pretty traditional one buoyed by references to largely forgotten movies and the Paris one energized by graphic violence, twisted sexual elements and a pretty good twist ending.  (Are the sex elements and the killing of children in "The Yougoslaves" and "Pranks" Bloch's response to the splatterpunk movement?)  Bloch also keeps the social commentary and the jokes to a manageable level in the two Night Cry stories, which is welcome.

We'll probably get around to reading all the stories in Fear and Trembling and Midnight Pleasures some day, but it will be stories by other authors culled from old magazines when next we convene here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Avram Davidson: "The Patient Cup," "Body Man" and "The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon"

At a West Virginia antique mall I recently picked up for one dollar an issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, purportedly "The World's Leading Mystery Magazine."  Apparently this thing is still a going concern!  The issue I purchased is the July 1986 number, and I bought it because it contains "The Patient Cup," a story by Avram Davidson that, according to the Avram Davidson Website, has never been published elsewhere!  Let's check out this story and two other stories Davidson published in magazines in 1986, "Body Man" and "The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon."

"The Patient Cup"

Back in March we read a story by Davidson that suggested that the government and other establishment institutions of Mexico are less than exemplary.  "The Patient Cup" similarly takes a swipe at our neighbors to the south.  You see, a gringo gigolo living down there during the postwar era has found that relieving American and European women he has seduced of their moolah sometimes necessitates his sending them to an early grave, and his customary method of disposing of these wealthy ladies has been to poison them with arsenic.  Conveniently for our lethal Lothario, the Mexican police don't bother to test ex-pats who keel over for arsenic poisoning, instead just marking the cause of death down as "dysentery" or "heart failure" or some such thing for which nobody can be blamed.

"The Patient Cup" is written in a humorous style, with the murderous gigolo as the protagonist, and the reader has to wonder if we are perhaps meant to like the killer.  The plot revolves around the seduction and murder of a poor confused woman and the complication that arises after her burial under the cellar of a house--the killer can't find the money that recently fell into his victim's hands!  Oops!  Later it comes to his attention that the woman's wealth, converted into jewels, must be on her body.  Luckily, the house is owned by a single woman and the gigolo figures he need only seduce her to get to the corpse and the treasure.  He manages to insinuate himself into her household but he can't find the time alone to dig up that body--this chick won't leave him alone!  So he starts poisoning her, but things don't work out for him and he ends up doing hard labor in the hot sun at a prison camp--Davidson has stressed throughout the story that the gigolo hates the sun and hates manual labor.  The story's second punchline is that the second woman wasn't felled by the arsenic because her Mexican doctor has been giving her arsenic as a medicine for years and she has built up a tolerance for it.

A slight but entertaining story that I can mildly recommend, the style being smooth and pleasant and the plot and characters sort of fun and Davidson getting a lot of mileage out of the period and setting.

"Body Man"

This story debuted in Asimov's and was reprinted in the 1993 anthology of humor stories Isaac Asimov's SF-Lite, so I guess we have another meant-to-be-funny story on our hands.     

"Body Man" is very short, a joke story about Jewish small businessmen and craftsmen and their relationships with customers and with women.  The manner of speech of all the characters certainly reminds you of Jewish-American comedians and actors you've seen on TV or heard on the radio.  The story works, but it is slight.

It is the future, and, it seems, people of means can put on new bodies; these bodies are made by salt-of-the-earth men who own small shops--I guess we are supposed to be reminded of tailors.  A customer complains to the shop owner who is our protagonist that his new body has warts when he specifically requested no warts.  The shop owner upbraids the "dumb kid assistant" who made up that body, and this kid insists he is an artist and he puts the warts on where they belong artistically.  The kid also complains about his girlfriend, who, apparently, thinks the kid only likes her for her body.  The punchline of the story comes when the girlfriend appears at the shop boiling mad--it is implied that the young "artist" put unwanted warts (in some out of view place) on the (outwardly flawless) body she is currently inhabiting.

Acceptable.

"Body Man" also appeared in 1987 in the Croat magazine Sirius.  I wonder how they translated the characteristically Jewish-American flavor of the dialogue; maybe Yugoslavian Jews had distinctive mannerisms and turns of phrase?

"The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon"

All three of today's stories have a strong foundation in geography and/or ethnicity.  We've had Mexicans dealing with Anglos who live in Mexico.  We just did the Jewish tailor bit.  And now we've got a 19th-century Chinese laundry guy living far from his hometown, where he was some kind of fighting man, in a European quarter among white people, whom he considers savages with ugly blue eyes who fail to bind women's feet like civilized people do.  This story doesn't exactly portray Chinese people in the best possible light.

The laundry guy had a daughter, called by the whites Lily, who helped him in the shop by folding the shirts.  Lily weekly attended Sunday school at a Christian church, and when she got sick one of the white teachers started coming over to the shop to minister to Lily and get her a white doctor and so forth.  This generosity is to no avail; Lily died.

The story ends with the laundry man, driven insane by grief and the heat or maybe having died of fever himself and become some kind of avenging ghost, creeping into the house where the white teacher lives--his mission, to assassinate the teacher's evil stepmother who is trying to manipulate the teacher's aged father into disinheriting the teacher and leaving her in penury in a foreign land.  [UPDATE October 21, 2025: The teacher is not in fact the one in a foreign land; a commentor below explains where the story takes place--hey, I was only 8,000 miles off--and who the white people in the story are.]

(Didn't we just have an evil stepmother only yesterday?)

Like the other two stories we are talking about today, "The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon" feels minor but it is well put together.  I guess marginally good.

"The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon" has been reprinted in Davidson collections.

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These three stories are entertaining, more for their milieus and characters than their plots; Davidson seems to expend more energy on setting and personality than what the characters actually do.  "Body Man" is the least impressive, its setting being sort of familiar and its plot the slightest, and "The Patient Cup" probably my favorite, it having the most fully realized plot in which the fates of the characters are most closely aligned with their actions and personalities.  I have a simple and conventional mind that likes to see all the puzzle pieces smoothly and securely fit into place and finds untidy loose ends and red herrings irritating.

Next time, more stories from the year I had my fifteenth birthday--1986!