Stories from A Wilderness of Stars by Ray Bradbury, Poul Anderson, and Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Let's read some "Dazzling Stories of Adventure" in which "Man Meets His Future."  In 1969 Sherbourne Press published William F. Nolan's A Wilderness of Stars, an anthology subtitled Stories of Man in Conflict with Space.  Sounds awesome, right?  I own a copy of the paperback version of the anthology printed by Dell in the year of my birth, 1971, with an irresistible Robert Foster cover featuring some of our favorite things--lunar craters, a guy in a space suit, hideous tentacles, and a fetching lass in her underwear!  (I don't want to know where that red tentacle is coming from!)

A Wilderness of Stars presents ten stories; today let's check out four of them, each one by an author we already know we like: Ray Bradbury, Poul Anderson, or Walter M. Miller, Jr. (Miller has two pieces in the book.)  We also know we like Arthur C. Clarke, but I've already read his contribution to A Wilderness of Stars, "Sunjammer," which I can recommend with some enthusiasm--back in 2017 when I blogged about it I called "Sunjammer" "a great example of a hard sf story." 

"I, Mars" by Ray Bradbury (1949)

According to isfdb, "I, Mars" has never appeared in a Bradbury collection, and has only appeared in three anthologies, A Wilderness of Stars and two British anthologies, one of them R. Chetwynd-Hayes's Tales of Terror from Outer Space.  This is practically a "rare" Bradbury story!  Exciting, right?  "I, Mars"'s first publication was in the same issue of Super Science Stories as A. E. van Vogt's "The Earth Killers," a story (that I didn't think was particularly effective when I read it in 2014) about racists who nuke America from their base on the moon.

"I, Mars" is a clever story, sort of a variation on themes found in "The Silent Towns," one of the tales included in the famous The Martian Chronicles; maybe "I, Mars" has been neglected for this very reason, that it might be considered redundant by readers of that iconic collection.

Mars was colonized by Earthlings like 65 or 70 years ago, but shortly after humans had covered the Martian surface with small towns constructed in the style of America's Middle West, the colonists all rushed back to Earth when a world war erupted.  One young man stayed behind on Mars: Emil Barton.  We are with the aged Barton on his eightieth birthday when a telephone rings--who can be calling?  Barton answers, and is reminded that for years, to assuage his loneliness, he pursued various insane projects, like building an army of robots to populate deserted Mars.  (He eventually ordered the robots to march into a canal to their destruction.)  Another of these projects was to record his voice saying thousands of different things, and then program computers to use these phrases to have conversations over the telephone.  He set up the computers to telephone himself on his eightieth birthday and torment him!  Most of this story's text relates how 80-year old Barton responds to the harassment of his younger self.

I like it.  Pungent and to the point, "I, Mars" is worth the time of Bradbury fans who haven't yet read it.

"Ghetto" by Poul Anderson (1954)

"Ghetto" had its debut in the same issue of F&SF as the first installment of the serialized version of Robert Heinlein's Star Beast, which appeared in the magazine under the title Star Lummox.  (Star Beast is fun and memorable--I can still recall the experience of reading it as a kid, where I was and so forth.)  According to isfdb, "Ghetto" is the first story in the four-story Kith series, and reappeared in the 1982 Anderson collection Mauri and Kith.

"Ghetto" is one of those SF stories about Einsteinian time dialtion or whatever we are supposed to call it.  You know the drill: your spaceship travels near the speed of light for what feels like a few months or a year, but when you get back to Earth decades or centuries have passed, and cultural norms and political systems have changed radically and all the people you knew are old or dead, so you are a stranger in your own country.  The Kith are what the civilization in this story calls these spacefarers who witness thousands of years of Terran history, empires rising and falling, cities being built and then abandoned and then built again, even though their own lives are only the usual 80 or 90 years.  Between space flights, Kith live in an Earth ghetto that to normal Earthers looks like an historical artifact, a town that hasn't changed for thousands of years.  In the period of history in which this story takes place, Earth is run by an aristocracy who lord it over a middle class of cossetted slaves and a lower class of wretched freemen who live hand to mouth; people in this classbound society owe their position to genetic engineering, with the expendable lower classes ugly and with low IQs and the upper classes beautiful and blessed with high intelligence.  (The Kith, initially selected from tough men with high IQs and now having been genetically separate from the rest of humanity for thousands of years, are also ethnically distinct and generally superior.)  The aristos, most of them decadent hedonists who do little work and rely on the Kith to bring much-needed resources to Earth from outer space, have a contempt for the Kith, but also enjoy slumming in the "quaint" anachronistic Kith ghetto, while the plebians and proles have what amounts to a racist or bigoted attitude towards the space travellers, a bitterness that is their sublimated resentment of their aristocratic masters.

Presumably Anderson wants the Kith to remind you of Jewish merchants living in Christian Europe, an ethnically and culturally distinct group resented for their economic success but also relied upon for valuable goods and services.  More explicitly, he indicates that the decadence of the aristocracy and the rising disaffection of the lower orders are signs that this political system is on the verge of collapse.

The plot of "Ghetto" concerns a Kith man who, out in space, meets an aristo woman who was so fascinated by what she read about outer space that she decided to see alien worlds for herself; these two fall in love and the Kith considers abandoning his people and his space career to live out his life on Earth with the woman among the aristocracy.  Of course, Anderson's work often has a tragic tone, and it is no surprise that the Kith man finds himself unable and unwilling to fit in to the decadent and bigoted aristocracy and drops his relationship with the aristocratic woman and decides to marry a Kith woman and continue his life among the stars and in the Kith ghetto.

I can't point to anything wrong with "Ghetto," but it just feels pedestrian, like a bunch of stuff (cross-class love, relativistic time shenanigans, an oppressed minority, an empire on the brink of collapse because its ruling class has become jaded and degenerate) we've seen before.  Reading it right after reading "I, Mars," I couldn't help but compare Anderson and Bradbury.  Anderson perhaps knows a bunch more history and science than Bradbury, but Bradbury is simply a better writer, able to affect the reader's emotions--"Ghetto" is full of long paragraphs explaining the universe the Kith inhabit, while "I, Mars" is mostly short sentences and short paragraphs that, bang bang bang, present a small number of powerful images and, more importantly, immerse you immediately in the mental world, the psychological universe, of the character.  Anderson's story is about a civilization and its history, but Bradbury's is about a person and his feelings.

Acceptable.

"Death of a Spaceman" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1954)

You'll recall I have really liked some Miller stories I've read in the last two years or so ("Crucifixius Etiam," "The Triflin' Man," "I Made You") and so I am looking forward to the two Miller pieces in A Wilderness of Stars.  This first one obviously has a good reputation; after first seeing print in Amazing it has been included in several "Best of" anthologies and was even reprinted in Amazing when Ted White was editing the magazine in 1969.

Miller's "Crucifixius Etiam" was all about how conquering space is hell but still worth it, and addressed issues of class and religion, and "Death of a Spaceman" is of the same ilk.  Donegal is an old man, a lifelong spacer who served in the space force during the war against the Soviet Union and then spent a long career working in the cramped and uncomfortable engine rooms of rockets flying to and from the Moon.  Now he is dying at home in his little apartment with his wife at his side.  He is disappointed that his son is not going to become a spaceman himself, and he blames his daughter--her husband was a spacer, and was killed in an accident, and her resulting bad attitude (Donegal thinks) turned his son off from participating in the adventure of conquering space.

Donegal's family lives in a neighborhood that was once posh but is now in decline; alongside the old mansions are now blocks of humble flats.  Next door to Donegal's apartment building is one of the mansions that is still inhabited by rich people--in fact, it is home to the owner of the company that builds the sort of rockets Donegal used to fly in!  While Donegal lies dying those rich people and their cronies are holding a noisy party to celebrate their son's graduation from the space academy and the start of his career as a spaceman!  Donegal's daughter has a case of class envy and his wife resents the noise from the party, but Donegal identifies with the rich family--the company owner and his son are, like Donegal, committed to Man's grand quest of mastering the universe beyond Earth's atmosphere.  Donegal's fellow feeling for the wealthy people next door is reciprocated when the party goers are told an old spaceman is dying next door--a musician plays "Taps" and the party lapses into silence in deference to Donegal's last wish, that he be able to hear the launch of a rocket to the Moon from a nearby base.

(There's also a visit from a priest and plenty of talk about Donegal's soul--as you know, religion is a major theme of Miller's body of work and plays a prominent role in this piece as well.)

"Death of a Spaceman" is a sentimental story, and also full of the ambiguity we expect to see in serious literature: is going to space really worth it, as Donegal contends and his family doubts?  Are the ordinary spacemen exploited by business interests, or are the wealthy and the working class spacers partners in an heroic enterprise?  Is religion a goofy scam or does it really bring comfort to Donegal and his family, help them make sense of their lives, and serve as a bridge and a strengthening bond between different strata of society?

Thumbs up.

"Death of a Spaceman" has appeared in all of these anthologies

"The Lineman" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1957)

"The Lineman" first appeared in F&SF, along with Robert Heinlein's quite good "The Menace from Earth" and, in editor Anthony Boucher's book column, an interesting discussion of L. Frank Baum's Oz books.  The issue also includes a collaboration between Damon Knight and Ken Bulmer entitled "The Day Everything Fell Down."  I would not have expected to learn that these two guys, one of whom I think of as a snob with literary pretensions and the other I think of as a mediocre hack, had ever collaborated on anything, and it seems that this story was never reprinted.  It looks like a dismal joke story, and I am in no rush to read it.

"The Lineman" is another of Miller's stories about how conquering space is costly and dangerous and might seem pointless; the story has religious overtones and also opines on sexual relationships.  It is a sort of slice-of-life story, not very plot heavy and lacking a strong conclusion.

The human race is in the early stages of colonizing the Moon, and the lunar surface is sprinkled with work gangs in vacuum suits and moon buggies setting up dome cities, digging mines, and laying cable to carry electricity and communications.  This work is incredibly hazardous!  Over the course of the longish story, which is almost 70 pages here in A Wilderness of Stars, many men are killed by bad luck or through negligence as tiny meteors penetrate their space suits or they forget the many rules one must follow to survive in a low-gravity zero-oxygen environment.  One character, near the end of the story, wonders how there could possibly be a God in a universe that is so dangerous, so cruel.

Besides the dangers presented by the natural world of physics and chemistry, there are social and political problems.  Years ago it was discovered that children cannot be raised in low gravity--their young bodies grow out of control and they suffer terrible deaths.  In response to this tragedy, Earth's world government passed the Schneider-Volkov Act, that, more or less, forbids co-ed operations on the Moon.  In effect, this means there are no women on the moon, and so the men setting up the mines and bases on Luna go for months or years without seeing any women, which causes all sort of psychological stress.

A dissident political party, apparently modeled by Miller on underground communist parties (it is made up of independent "cells" and its members act with absolute ruthlessness) has risen up to fight for the repeal of the Schneider-Volkov Act through such actions as an illegal general strike.  In the beginning of the story the main character, Bill Relke, the lineman of the title (he lays those aforementioned cables) and a man scarred by the fact that his wife back on Earth has taken up with another man, is being threatened by Party thugs--he considered joining the Party and was allowed to participate in a few meetings, but then declined to join, and the thugs are now pressuring him to change his mind as well as trying to keep him from exposing their plans to the higher ups.  These plans--to strike--threaten the safety of many in one of the new lunar cities, because if Relke's gang fails to complete a particular job on time the oxygen system at the city might fail.  Later in the story the thugs torture Relke, and then more conservative elements of the work gang in turn torture the thugs in an effort to achieve revenge and maintain order so the critical project is completed on schedule.  Miller does not provide us readers with exciting fight scenes or cathartic images of justice being served or romantic gush about right overcoming wrong--the violence in "The Lineman" consists of vicious beatings of essentially helpless people, and Relke reflects that in the absence of the stabilizing force of the heterosexual family, men resort, inevitably, to the brutal ethics of a street gang.

In the middle of this Hobbesian milieu a rocket arrives, landing in an unusual spot, leading to speculation that it is a damaged Earth vessel making an emergency landing or perhaps even aliens.  In fact it is a French ship full of prostitutes whose owners exploit some legal loopholes and engage in financial shenanigans in order to operate this interplanetary whore house.  The arrival of the brothel gives Miller an opportunity to show how monstrous the Party members are and how unfulfilling can be sexual relationships unmoored from any sort of commitment.  The flying brothel also serves as an oblique impetus to the resolution of the short term plot (finishing the critical job on time) and the long term plot (recreating healthy family life on the Moon.)

This story is pretty good, though its valorization of the heterosexual nuclear family and dismissal of homosexuality may offend today's sensibilities.  Its portrayal of space colonization as hellishly dangerous and perhaps quixotic reminds us of the career of Barry Malzberg and of Edmond Hamilton's 1952 story "What's It Like Out There?"   

"The Lineman" has appeared in Miller collections and was selected for David G. Hartwell's The World Treasury of Science Fiction.

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Four worthwhile stories that suggest that leaving Earth is no picnic.  Hold those travel plans, folks!

1954 stories by Poul Anderson, Charles Beaumont and Arthur C. Clarke

Jacket of the hardcover first edition of Time To Come, and cover of the abridged 1958 paperback edition

isfdb lists over two dozen anthologies edited by August Derleth, founder of Arkham House, H. P. Lovecraft booster and voluminous chronicler of Wisconsin.  I hold in my hand one of them, 1954's Time to Come, borrowed via interlibrary loan.  There are twelve stories in Time to Come, all original to the book and all, Derleth tells us in his introduction, "stories of tomorrow."  Today let's check out three by authors that interest me, Poul Anderson, Charles Beaumont, and Arthur C. Clarke.  (In our next blog post we will look at the contributions of Carl Jacobi, Clark Ashton Smith, and Evelyn E. Smith.)

"Butch" by Poul Anderson

"Butch" would be republished in 1955 in the British magazine New Worlds, then edited by John Carnell, but according to isfdb has never been included in an Anderson collection.   

This is one of those traditional SF stories full of science in which a guy solves a problem through quick-thinking and trickery.  An alien space ship crashes on 1950s Earth, and the only survivor is captured in Maine after killing some people and a dog and some cows.  The government scientists try to communicate with the alien, a hermaphrodite who is given the moniker "Butch," but Butch spends most of its time refusing to respond, and occasionally flies into a violent rage--seeing as Butch has very sharp claws and powerful muscles, its rages are very dangerous, and many government employees are injured and a few are killed.  Butch's actions are so irrational and counterproductive that it is decided that Butch is probably insane, due to undiagnosed physical or psychological trauma suffered due to the crash, and so in a few days a psychiatrist will try out shock therapy and lobotomy techniques--hopefully these will bring Butch to its senses so it will be eager to trade the secret of space flight with us humies.

Our narrator, Bob Muir, doubts the alien is insane and fears tinkering with Butch's brain will just wreck it and make acquiring the secret of space flight impossible.  Muir figures out why Butch is not cooperating, and comes up with a way to make friends with the alien.

Butch's people have a super duper sense of smell, and on their world their natural enemies smell like adrenaline--by a compulsive instinct, they instantly attack any creature that smells like adrenaline.  Human beings secrete adrenaline when scared, and Muir deduces that all the people Butch has killed were particularly scared of Butch.  Butch now recognizes that the people it has killed aren't really a threat to it, but it can't control its instinctive response to the smell of adrenaline.  Realizing it has killed people unfairly, it assumes the humans must hate it and want to achieve revenge on its race, and so it has kept mum, lest the humans learn where it comes from and how to get there.

Muir puts into action an elaborate scheme that convinces Butch that Earth people don't really hate it and don't really want to attack its home planet.  Muir believes Butch has never seen a woman, and because Butch is a hermaphrodite assumes there is no sexual dimorphism on its planet.  Muir gets a bunch of women with very pronounced secondary sexual characteristics and lies to them, telling them that Butch is totally harmless, so they won't be scared and set off its adrenaline alarm.  Muir coaches these curvaceous women in how to behave around Butch--they are to treat men with contempt, push them around, but be very kind and solicitous of Butch.  Butch comes to believe that men and women are different species, with men as a subordinate slave race, and so no longer worries that it has offended Earth people by killing a bunch of men, who are after all just expendable subordinates, and so opens up communication with the women.

Maybe a little gimmicky, but not bad.  One wonders if the scenes of men grovelling before women and of women whipping men are perhaps meant to appeal to SF readers with S&M fetishes.  (I know you are out there!)

For more MPorcius coverage of 1950s short stories by Poul Anderson check out my assessment of three stories by Anderson that appeared in 1951 issues of Planet Stories with heavily armed women on their covers or of his 1954 tale "The Chapter Ends" which contrasts the lifestyles of people with the brains God intended us to have with those whose noggins are packing superpowerful genetically-modified brains.
 
"Keeper of the Dream" by Charles Beaumont

1970 German abridged edition of
Time to Come

Each of the stories in Time to Come is preceded by a biographical note on its author; in the one before "Keeper of the Dream" we learn that Charles Beaumont worked as a freelance illustrator for SF magazines.  I looked up some of these illustrations on the internet archive--Beaumont's illustration work is below average, I have to say.

"Keeper of the Dream" is a sort of philosophical story consisting mostly of a conversation.  It is the 22nd century, mankind has abandoned religion and war, disease and hunger are a thing of the past.  Almost nobody has to work, thanks to automation.  The conversation is between two scientists.  Scientist A tells Scientist B that his top secret research project, the work of many years, is complete--he has determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that Earth is the only planet in the universe capable of supporting life; mankind is truly alone and exploring the universe would be a waste of time because we couldn't stop anywhere.  "By a freak arrangement, Earth happens to be the only inhabited planet, from the beginning of time...."  Scientist B is the first to hear of these findings.

Scientist B says that conquering outer space was the only dream, the only goal, mankind had left, and the only job for scientists, now that there is no war, diseases, hunger, or work.  Without some dream or goal, life will be meaningless and society will collapse.  Scientist A is quickly convinced, and the two scientists take the masses of paper on which all of Scientist A's work has been recorded and throw them in an incinerator.  Now they will start the same exact project over, from scratch, in order to keep busy and in hopes that they will, somehow, get a different result.

This is more of an idea than an actual story.  The idea is OK as far as it goes, so I guess I'll judge this story acceptable.

It looks like "Keeper of the Dream" has only ever appeared in the various printings of Time to Come.

For more MPorcius coverage of Charles Beaumont stories from the 1950s, check out my assessment of his widely reprinted 1955 story "The Vanishing American," which I dismissed as "sappy filler," or of his 1954 tale about jazz, "Black Country."  (I have no doubt that my sophisticated readership is full of people who love jazz.)

"No Morning After" by Arthur C. Clarke

"No Morning After" reappeared in 1956 in F&SF (in the same issue as a reprint of Mack Reynolds' "Burnt Toast" AKA "Martinis: 12 to 1") and would go on to be included in many Clarke collections, among them a "Best of" collection, as well as--spoiler alert--a 2016 anthology of stories about how the future is going to suck!

"No Morning After" is a sort of misanthropic joke story.   During the Cold War, an engineer is getting drunk because he wants to build space craft but the government just wants him to design guided missiles--also, his girlfriend just left him.  He gets a telepathic message from outer space--some friendly aliens have discovered that Sol is going to explode in three days, and they can set up teleporters on Earth if only Earthlings cooperate by opening their minds to telepathic communication.  (The protagonist's inebriation and obsession with space flight and other random factors fortuitously opened his mind.)  The aliens implore the engineer to contact the government and spread the word so the human race can be saved!

Of course, the engineer thinks this is just a drunken hallucination, and tells the aliens that the human race would be better off dead because humans are violent and miserable and so forth.  So the beneficent aliens abandon their mission of mercy, the engineer falls asleep and forgets the whole thing, and in three days the Earth is destroyed by the explosion of the Sun.

Acceptable.

For more MPorcius coverage of 1950s Arthur C. Clarke short stories, check out my assessment of "This Earth of Majesty," which might be dismissed as propaganda for the English royal family, or of "The Deep Range," which I call "a perfect example" of a science fiction story of its type, the "realistic, straightforward, day-at-the-office-of-a-man-in-the-future" story.

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Interestingly, all three of these stories, published like three years before Sputnik, are about people who want to achieve space flight.  Of the three, I like the Anderson the best as it is an actual story and not just an idea or a joke, but it is not exactly great.  At the same time we have to admit that of the three, only the Beaumont story is actually a "story of tomorrow;" the Anderson and Clarke stories are about how the Cold War influences human response to first contact with aliens.

We'll see if the next batch of stories from Time to Come is more spectacular, and hews more closely to the "stories of tomorrow" brief.

The Rebel Worlds by Poul Anderson

"A hundred thousand planets, gentlemen, more or less...each with its millions or billions of inhabitants, its complexities and mysteries...its own complicated, ever-changing, unique set of relationships to the Imperium. We can't control that, can we? We can't even hope to comprehend it. At most we can try to maintain the Pax. At most, gentlemen."

Here it is, the fourteenth title from the Joachim Boaz wing of the MPorcius Library to be discussed here at the blog.  As you know, in summer 2018, Joachim, one of the leading lights of the internet vintage SF community, made a generous donation of books to my collection, and I have slowly been working my way through them.  Below find a list of my first thirteen reads from this donation, with handy links to my blog posts about each.

Slave Planet by Laurence M. Janifer
Three Novels by Damon Knight
Dark Dominion by David Duncan
New Writings in SF6 edited by John Carnell
Tama of the Light Country by Ray Cummings
Tama, Princess of Mercury by Ray Cummings
A Brand New World by Ray Cummings
Ultimatum in 2050 A.D. by Jack Sharkey
The Power of X by Arthur Sellings
The Enemy of My Enemy by Avram Davidson
The Bright Phoenix by Harold Mead
The Stone God Awakens by Philip Jose Farmer
Garbage World by Charles Platt

Today's topic of discussion is Poul Anderson's 1969 The Rebel Worlds, a Signet paperback with what looks like a monkey and that bird from Captain Harlock riding a rhino on the front and an ad for a novel about a plot to murder the pope by New York fixture Pete Hamill on the back.  (Growing up in Northern New Jersey in the '70s and '80s, where most of channels on our TV were broadcast from New York, and then living in New York in the '90s and aughts, Pete Hamill's name was one I heard bandied about all the time, but I never expended any of the precious minutes of my all-too-brief life actually reading anything he wrote.)  The Rebel Worlds stars Dominc Flandry; there are a multitude of Flandry stories and novels, but so far I have only read one Flandry short story, 1951's "Honorable Enemies."  I liked "Honorable Enemies," so hopefully I'll like this 135-page novel.  The Flandry stories are set in the same universe as the van Rijn and Falkayn stories, of which I have read quite a few (the planet Satan, the main object of contention in Anderson's 1968 novel about van Rijn and Falkayn, Satan's World, plays a minor role in this novel), but while those stories are set in the period of the human race's exploration and growth across our arm of the Milky Way, the Flandry tales are set in a later era of big government, decadence and the threat of decline.

The Terran Empire of 100,000 planets is in trouble: its borders are threatened by fleets of barbarians and by the Merseian empire, its Emperor and his court are corrupt and the imperial bureaucracy is unable to keep tabs on every one of those 100K worlds.  After a brief and mysterious prologue in the voice of aliens with a sort of collective consciousness thing going, in Chapter I we meet Admiral Hugh McCormac, commander of the naval forces in the Alpha Crucis sector, one of the more impressive men charged with keeping the peace in the Terran Empire.  We find that this dude is in pickle--interned in a prison cell on a satellite orbiting planet Llynathawr, seat of the governor of the sector!  It appears that the governor, Aaron Snelund, the son of a whore who was made governor of Alpha Crucis after (allegedly) serving as the Emperor's catamite, is an absolutely corrupt pervert and has arrested McCormac so he could seize and rape the Admiral's beautiful wife, Lady Kathryn!

In Chapter II we are on Terra where ladies' man and 25-year old naval intelligence officer Dominic Flandry travels to Intelligence HQ via air car taxi and grav tube; the head of Intelligence has heard from Snelund that he has arrested McCormac, and the Intelligence chief wants Flandry to investigate what the hell is going on in Alpha Crucis sector--after all, everybody knows McCormac is an honorable man and Snelund is a nauseous rotter.  Flandry is given command of an escort destroyer and heads off to Alpha Crucis on this fact-finding mission.

In the Alpha Crucis sector Flandry and his multi-species crew (the second-in-command of the escort destroyer is a six-limbed sabre-toothed tiger man named Rovian) recognize the extent of Snelund's crimes, which include mass-crucifixion of the green-skinned natives of one planet when they refuse to serve as slavers--Snelund is apparently selling to barbarians living outside the Empire's borders innocent people who have every right to Imperial protection.  It looks like Snelund seized Admiral McCormac and his wife Kathryn in order to conceal these sorts of atrocities.  Flandry and crew also learn that McCormac's men have liberated him from prison and the popular Admiral has declared himself Emperor and is massing a rebel fleet and receiving pledges of allegiance from a number of planets--civil war is in the offing!

Flandry has an interview with the feminine Snelund on Llynathawr, and then Rovian leads a raid that frees Lady McCormac--before Snelund knows what is up, Flandry's ship is in hyperspace with Lady McCormac aboard.  From the Lady, Flandry learns more about Snelund's crimes and plans--the clever creep is trying to amass enough money to return to Terra and become the eminence grise behind the dim-witted Emperor, and actually hopes for a local war in Alpha Crucis sector that will provide an opportunity to nuke planets and thus destroy evidence of his abuses and atrocities.

The Rebel Worlds has appeared in numerous
omnibus editions of multiple Flandry novels, like
this one....

Flandry steers his ship towards the McCormacs' home system (star Virgil, its planets named after characters from The Aeneid), hoping to open negotiations with the rebel admiral, whom he expects will be there with the rebel fleet.  But, before he can talk to anybody, Flandry's ship is wrecked in a naval battle with mercenary barbarians hired by Admiral McCormac.  The surviving half of Flandry's crew crashlands in a disabled space boat on planet Dido, which Kathryn McCormac knows pretty well--she is a scientist who conducted research there.  With Rovian dead, Lady McCormac, who is smart and resourceful and kind, becomes Flandry's confidant and support; she guides the survivors as they march hundreds of kilometers across the planet.  Flandry, already attracted to her on the ship, falls deeply in love with the pretender to the throne's wife during this adventure; Kathryn herself has feelings for Flandry, but she is loyal to her husband and to his cause--overthrowing not only the decadent and perverted Snelund but the perhaps equally reprehensible Emperor and putting in place a more just Terran administration.

One of the many critical roles Lady McCormac plays on the long march is negotiating with the Stone Age natives of Dido, those aliens depicted on the cover, whose oral history is quoted in the prologue.  The Dido natives are the most remarkable part of Anderson's novel, and it is fully appropriate that they are depicted on the cover instead of the more conventional choice of a space warship or a bunch of human space marines.  A tribe of Didonians is made up of a bunch of creatures of three types--one much like a rhino, one much like a monkey, and one much like a bird.  When these creatures act as individuals they conduct themselves much like animals, following their instincts, but they can connect their brains via tentacles, and when individuals from three different species are connected they have high intelligence and can speak and use tools and so forth.  Different combinations of the creatures have unique personalities and skill sets and are thus more appropriate for different conditions and challenges that the tribe might face; a single rhino might sometimes be part of the collective entity called "Cave Explorer" but when combined with a different monkey and bird be part of the entity called "Master of Songs," or yet another known as "Raft Farer."  I was impressed by Anderson's concoction of aliens for his adventure story that are actually novel and alien and not just obvious analogs of Earth ethnic or political groups as we see so often in SF.  The native Didonians play an important role in facilitating the march across Dido and in the way Flandry resolves the plot.

Flandry, in the hoary tradition of classic SF, figures out a way to trick and manipulate everybody else in the novel so that the evil Snelund is deposed and Lady McCormac achieves her revenge on him and the civil war is ended with a minimum of death and destruction, with Hugh and Kathryn McCormac and their followers permitted to escape the Terran Empire without being punished for trying to launch a revolution.  When Flandry negotiates with McCormac, Anderson has him express the attitude towards revolution of conservatives who have a tragic view of history and human nature: sure the Empire sucks, but violent revolution will only make things worse by killing lots of people and setting a precedent in favor of violent change that other ambitious people, people much less decent and less capable than the McCormacs, will follow, leading to total chaos and mass misery.

...and this one.

The Rebel Worlds is not difficult or challenging (though some readers may find the implied homosexual relationship between Snelund and the Emperor and Snelund's offscreen rape of Lady Kathryn McCormac to be what the kids call "problematic") but it works like a charm, each individual component at least adequate and many better than adequate (I've already praised the Didonians, and all the standard SF stuff we love--the rays guns and star ships and spacesuits and space naval battle--are also good) and all of them working smoothly together; The Rebel Worlds is always entertaining or interesting, never boring or irritating.  One might see The Rebel Worlds as a more sophisticated version of classic space operas like Edmond Hamilton's Interstellar Patrol stories, in which various starfaring species ally with humans to battle evil aliens (Kathryn McCormac's abuse at the hands of Snelund has an analog in the scenes of torture and horror Hamilton included in his Patrol tales) or Jack Williamson's Legion stories, which have a strong element of human vs human political intrigue as well as space battles and monstrous aliens.  Anderson classes up his tale here with references to Mozart, Virgil, and The Tale of Genji, and soberly explores how empires and revolutions actually work--not very well, we must sadly admit.

I'm looking forward to reading more Flandry stories in the future.

1976 Frights by Poul and Karen Anderson, R. A. Lafferty, and David Drake

British 1977 hardcover

In our last episode, as part of our exploration of Robert Bloch's 1979 collection Out of the Mouths of Graves, we read Bloch's story about racism and revenge in the American South, "A Warm Farewell."  "A Warm Farewell" was first printed in Frights, a 1976 anthology of brand new "stories of suspense and supernatural terror" edited by Kirby McCauley that won the 1977 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology/Collection.  Nice!  The jacket of Frights tells us that, for this anthology, McCauley was looking not for vampires and werewolves, but contemporary horrors.  We saw how Bloch approached that task, now let's see what sort of mid- to late-20th-century horrors science fiction figures Poul and Karen Anderson, R. A. Lafferty, and David Drake offered McCauley.  I am reading the copy of Frights scanned into the internet archive, a US hardcover edition owned by the Boston Public Library.

"The Kitten" by Poul and Karen Anderson

I have read lots of stuff, over the course of my life and over the course of this blog's existence, by Poul Anderson, but I don't think anything by his wife, Karen.

"The Kitten" starts with a sort of one-page prologue, the description of a burning house and the efforts of fire fighters to extinguish it.  This description is metaphorical and poetic, but it is not good, almost every line being overwritten, cliched or obscure and confusing.  I want to like what the Andersons are doing, because I am very sympathetic to what I take to be Poul Anderson's views on politics and life and culture and all that, but I just can't pretend that this passage is good:

The heat rolled forth like a tide.  Men felt it parch their eyeballs and stood back from trying to breast it.  Meanwhile it strewed reek around them.

Leo Tronen was born a country boy, but has worked hard to become a successful business executive!  He married pretty blonde Una Nyborg because he thought she'd be a good wife for an executive, an asset when dealing with clients and colleagues.  However, she refused to abandon her graduate studies after their marriage, and has been spending lots of valuable time writing a thesis on ancient Egypt and driving back and forth to the university.  As our story begins the couple have a showdown, Leo throwing Una's half-finished thesis into the fire (holy shit!) and Una leaving the house the next day while he is at the office.

It is a cold winter, and a stray cat comes to Leo's door the first evening he spends without Una.  Leo feeds it, calls around the neighborhood hoping to find its owner and get some social capital by doing a good deed, but nobody claims the feline.  In the morning Leo finds the cat has made a mess of the house, so he takes it in the car with him, tossing it out into the cold halfway to work.  After a hard day at the office he is amazed to find the cat, half dead, at his door.  Determined to get rid of the creature, he drowns it and tosses the sodden corpse in the trash...only to find it at his door the next morning!  Even if he pulled it out of the water prematurely, how did it get out of the trash can?

Interspersed with all this cat stuff is a lot of inner monologue and conversations with colleagues that suggest that Leo is a jerk who is losing his mind and that the world at large is careening out of control, with economic hardship, social unrest, war in the Middle East, and tension between the Warsaw Pact and the West.  The Andersons present a few opportunities for friendless Leo to make a connection with the world beyond himself (the cat is only one such opportunity) but he rejects each opportunity.  Getting crazier and crazier, drinking more and more, having to try to kill the cat again and again as it returns each time, Leo finally goes off the deep end and sets out to murder a man whom he thinks is Una's lover by setting him and his house on fire.

Anyway, the end of the story makes explicit its supernatural elements.  According to Una's research, the Egyptians thought a man had numerous souls.  One of them is his "spirit of reason and rightness;" it can leave the body and move about independently.  The cat was representative of Leo's "spirit of reason and rightness," and when he killed it he went bonkers and became a--would-be--murderer. 

The plot is OK, a sort of look at the tragedy of middle-class life, how too much focus on career success can ruin your life because you neglect your relationships and your spiritual/emotional needs (I actually know people, smart industrious people, to whom this has happened) but the writing is way too flowery or purple or however you want to describe it--there is a surfeit of metaphors and odd words that are presumably meant to make the text more beautiful and more powerful but instead slow down the story and obscure the meaning of sentences.  It hurts to see somebody you like fall on his (or her) face, but that is what I must report happens here to the Andersons.  I am marking "The Kitten" barely acceptable.

"The Kitten" would reappear in The Unicorn Trade in 1984, a book full of poems and fiction by Karen Anderson, some of it in collaboration with her husband.

"Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" by R. A. Lafferty

If isfdb is to be believed, "Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" was never included in a Lafferty collection or anthologized outside of Frights, which I think makes this a "rare" Lafferty story and makes Frights a must-have for all you Lafferty collectors out there!

"Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" is a sort of apocalyptic American folk tale, told largely in the dialogue of six odd characters, dialogue that sometimes questions the nature of reality.  If the Anderson's "The Kitten" is about the plight of the suburban American bourgeoisie--business executives and academics--Lafferty's story has its roots in America's rural communities of Indians, hunters, and park rangers.  At times "Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" can feel rambling and you wonder where the hell it is going, with the characters seeming to be talking in circles, but the jokes and the final destination make the trip worthwhile, and on a second read all the various parts can be seen to be working together smoothly.  (As with the work of Gene Wolfe, I find that to really appreciate a Lafferty story I have to read it twice.)

Three men from town are walking in the wilderness of Oklahoma's Winding Stair Mountains, hunting.  They are soon joined by three additional men, a game warden and two Choctaw Indians.  Hector Voiles, a meteorologist, remarks on how this area is a site of strange weather phenomena-- at this time of year storms which enter the area sometimes abruptly disappear, leaving a brief but severe cold snap in their wake.  Voiles witnessed this last year, but his colleagues refused to enter it into the records.  "It was so improbable that the temperature in this small area should be forty degrees lower than that of nearby areas that it just wasn't a thing that should be recorded."  Lloyd Rightfoot, a naturalist, points out that this area is also said to be home to a one-of-a-kind tree, a tree of no known species which grows a single fruit that somehow never fully develops.  Andrew Widepicture, a cosmologist, talks about Storm-Cock, a crow reputed to live in this region and said to eat fully grown cattle--the game warden, Will Hightrack, says that Storm-Cock is a bird that "never saw the inside of an egg."

All of the bizarre phenomena the men describe are significant in that, in some sense, their reality has not been, could not be, accepted--each represents a potential that has not come to pass or at least was not recognized: gathering storms which subsided, cold spells which were not recorded, a tree of an unknown species whose fruit always die before ripening, a bird which did not come from an egg--if these things didn't achieve maturity or don't officially exist, how do the characters know so much about them?  The reader is left feeling uneasy by the way these men talk with confidence of things they cannot really know, of events that have not (yet!) happened.

The two Coctaws, James South-Forty and Thomas Wrong-Rain, explain to the city folks that if the fruit from the unique tree ripens, it will cause widespread death with its "shadow," and hint that the fruit is the source of the huge and murderous Storm-Cock.  Tonight there must be a frost that will kill the fruit, which is on the verge of maturity, or disaster will occur.  For over a hundred years the unusual frost has come that has killed the fruit and saved the region, but Thomas Wrong-Rain fears that this year the tree has outsmarted the weather--if there is to be a life-saving frost, men must will the frost into existence.   

That night Thomas Wrong-Rain calls Hector Voiles, urging him to predict an unlikely freeze as a way of making it more likely to eventuate and save the region from the depredations of Storm-Cock, even though all the scientific evidence indicates that the freeze will not occur.  Voiles makes his counterintuitive forecast on TV, inspiring rage from TV management and viewers, and his forecast proves wrong--the freeze does not occur, instead the storms, which so often in past years were abortive, rage across the region, causing mass destruction.  Thomas Wrong-Rain blames Voiles for this cataclysm, which killed his wife, because Voiles laughed on TV and annoyed "something down there that can't stand derision."  The storms are followed by the surreal attack of Storm-Cock, who kills one out of three people he encounters--Voiles, Widepicture and Hightrack are together when confronted by the 747-sized bird, and they draw cards to see which of the three of them will be torn to pieces by the monster and devoured.  (Many Lafferty stories use death and gore to comedic effect, and this is one of them.)

A totally crazy story that challenges the reader with its bizarre sense of unreality, but feels like the work of a sure hand--the story has strange, unconventional, goals, and it achieves them.  When a line of "The Kitten" feels odd, you suspect the Andersons have made a mistake, but when a line of "Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" feels odd (and many of them do) you feel like Lafferty's intention is to make you uneasy, that he is trying to surprise you or throw you off kilter.

Lafferty fans should definitely seek this one out.

For paperback publication in the UK, Frights was split into two volumes

"Firefight" by David Drake

You know I am interested in warfare and violence--for example, in the past week I read U-Boat Killer, Donald Macintyre's memoir of commanding Royal Navy destroyers and frigates during the Second World War, and enjoyed it--it was entertaining and I learned quite a bit about the various tactics and equipment used by the Allied navies in their struggle against Axis submarines.  As you also know, David Drake is a veteran of the Vietnam War, and the jacket of Frights suggests that this story draws on Drake's Vietnam experiences. 

This is a straightforward story of combat between humans and ancient monsters.  An American armored unit laagers by a stone wall and a stand of very tall trees in a thinly populated area of Vietnam.  There is foreshadowing--talk of how this area is home to the Mengs, said to be a race of people who lived in Vietnam before the arrival of the Montagnards and the Viets; talk of French and Communist military units being mysteriously wiped out in the area in the past, their bodies not riddled with bullets but mangled as if by knives or teeth; the way the tallest of the trees seems to heal up instantly after automatic weapons are test fired into it. 

Our main characters are the crew of a vehicle armed with a flame thrower and a machine gun, I guess the M132 Armored Flamethrower.  At night a sort of glowing door opens in the tallest tree, and out come men with batwings who fly around the laager, attacking the US servicemen with talons and fangs.  A South Vietnamese soldier working with the US unit as an interpreter turns out to be a Meng and helps the monsters.  Rifle and machine gun fire seems to have no effect on the evil tree, but the flamethrower sets it ablaze and destroys it.

This is an acceptable entertainment; competent, but no big deal.  All the information about Vietnam-era armor and weapons adds a layer of interest for military history buffs.  I can't find any reference to "Mengs" on the wikipedia page on ethnic groups in Vietnam, so I have no idea if Drake just made the Mengs up or if he is referring to a real population using a Western term that has fallen out of fashion or something like that. "Firefight" is the least ambitious and most conventional of the three stories we're talking about today, but it achieves its goals and is readable, so it gets a passing grade.

"Firefight" has appeared in some Drake collections since its debut here in Frights.

**********

Of these three stories the Lafferty is obviously the best.  The Andersons' "The Kitten" would be better than the Drake if it had been written as straightforwardly as the Drake, because it addresses interesting human issues of life in modern America and integrates with those topics ancient Egyptian mysticism, but its poor overindulgent style cripples it, so "Firefight" slips into second place.

More Frights in our next episode!

"Chillbinding" 1950s Science Fiction from J. Blish, P. Anderson and T. N. Scortia

An unexpected road trip to Lincoln, Nebraska earlier this month put me within striking range of A Novel Idea Bookstore, where they were, fortuitously, having a sale in which individual customers were randomly assigned different discounts.  Yours truly hit the jackpot, winning a 50% discount, so the wife and I stocked up.  Among my purchases was Crest Book L728, the 1964 edition of a 1960 anthology of stories selected by Leo Margolies entitled Get Out of My Sky.  At $1.50, how could I resist that Powers cover and the promise of "chillbinding" novellas by three authors I am interested in, James Blish, Poul Anderson and Thomas N. Scortia?  Let's take a trip back in time to the late 1950s, and to a terrifying future with "three master craftsmen of the science-fiction suspense story."  We'll ask if each story is good, like we always do, but also assess if these stories are truly chillbinding, as advertised!

"Get Out of My Sky" by James Blish (1957)

The title story of this anthology is almost 80 pages long and appeared first across two early 1957 issues of Astounding.  Besides here in this anthology, it would later appear in a few Blish collections and an Italian magazine.  Mama mia!

Numerous times on this blog I have complained about elitist classic SF stories which seem to advocate the manipulation, by any means necessary, of the masses by the cognitive elite and even politicians(!)  And here we have another one!

Ocean-covered planet Home and desert planet Rathe are twins that revolve around a common point, each perpetually showing its sister the same hemisphere.  Along with a small star, the two planets form a Trojan system that orbits a large star.  Both planets are home to intelligent species of humanoids who have achieved what I guess we can call a 20th-century level of technology (nuclear bombs, rocket and jet engines, TV) and in just the last few years they have opened up communications via radio and television.  "Get Out of My Sky" is the story of this new interplanetary relationship, with the leading politician from Home, First Minister Aidregh, as our protagonist.

The main theme of the story is that the ordinary people of Home and Rathe are gullible, irrational, superstitious and religious fools, and their foolishness is driving the two planets towards a push button war that will likely lead to the extermination of one or both civilizations.  In fact, the first scene of the story, an italicized prologue, depicts what appears to be a tent revival, where a nameless demagogue drives the common people into a frenzy of hostility towards their sister planet.  Aidregh and the rulers of Rathe have to work together to prevent this cataclysm.

After the prologue, the novella is broken into nine chapters.  The early chapters largely concern the gathering of intelligence about Rathe.  Chapter I features observations of the desert planet from shipboard during an eclipse--did stories of Captain Cook's observations of an eclipse in 1766 and the transit of Venus in 1769 and inspire this scene?  There is also a secret space mission (Home's first manned space flight) to photograph Rathe's "dark" side.  The first five chapters also describe a lot of political jazz concerning different polities on Home (Aidregh is First Minister of the most powerful state on Home, Thrennen, but there are a few other countries on the islands of the watery planet with whom Thrennen has sometimes contentious relationships) and different political parties in Thrennen.  Blish portrays Aidregh's dealings with the voters and with the opposition party not as the inevitable features of a free society, but as a hassle, an obstacle to Aidregh's solving everybody's problems.  Aidregh seems to like the ruler of Rathe with whom he talks via TV, Margent, more than he likes the bulk of his own countrymen! 

In Chapter VI, Aidregh and the rest of our cast of characters fly to Rathe (this is Home's second manned space flight) to negotiate with the Rathemen.  In a secluded cave Margent explains to Aidregh that the Rathemen are mystics who for centuries focused not on developing material wealth and technology, but on developing telepathy and precognition; as a result, Rathe everybody loved everybody and there was no crime or politics or war.  Yes, "Get Out of My Sky" isn't just an elitist story, but a mystical utopian one!  Gadzooks!

But fifty years ago the Rathemen utopia was shaken by the invention of the radio!  The people started listening in on Home transmissions, and when the Rathemen learned about all the politics and crime and war on Home, it shook the common people to the core; in fear that the Home people would attack Rathe as soon as they learned of the Rathemen, the Rathe hoi polloi demanded the construction of a Rathe war apparatus.  Such technological and martial production began stunting Rathe psychic abilities, and even souring their lovey dovey attitude.  As things stand now, with the populations of both planets scared and suspicious of each other, nuclear war is only days away!

Luckily lead mystic Margent has a plan to make peace.  The Rathemen spend three days and three chapters teaching Aidregh a psychic trick--the power to sway audiences emotionally.  Then Aidregh uses this trick to get the people of both planets to step back from the brink.  An italicized epilogue exposes the fact that the italicized prologue was a trick played on us readers by Blish; the scene was really depicting Aidregh, resigned from the First Ministership (naturally, his son now holds the position), not preaching hatred of Rathe after all but spreading peace and love!

"Get Out of My Sky" is not very well written.  There is no human feeling, even though Blish wastes many words on the boring relationships between Aidregh and his son, his best friend, his dead wife, and his son's fiance (his best friend's daughter.)  Efforts to create drama can be silly--the astronaut who leads the months-long expedition to photograph the far side of Rathe dies of exhaustion immediately after giving his report (you know, like Pheidippides.)  The people in the story are aliens from a fictional star system, and Blish describes their appearance in some detail (the people of Home have six fingers and two thumbs and flat noses and a ridge above the eye sockets while the Rathemen have long noses and no ridge above the eyes, etc.), but Blish clumsily calls them "human" and has them use Earth metaphors (e. g., a determined woman is described as being like "a female tiger defending her cub.")  I also thought it was sloppy that Blish didn't come up with an actual name for Aidregh's planet, just referring to it as "this planet" or "Aidregh's world" in the first half of the story and then hitting upon "Home" in the second half.  Worst of all, the story is way too long, moving at a slow pace and burdened with extraneous detail and narrative dead ends.  Is this text a draft rather than a final version of the story?   

Neither am I impressed by the story's ideology or its SF ideas; the psychic powers of the Rathemen come across as infallible and unbelievable magic, which is boring and silly--contrast "Get Out of My Sky" with Algis Budrys's "The Peasant Girl," in which equally puissant psychic powers make compelling reading because Budrys shows the moral and psychological and sociological drawbacks and shortcomings of such powers.

"Get Out of My Sky" is getting a thumbs down from me.  Too bad.

Is it good?  No.                                               Is it chillbinding?  More like sleep-inducing!   

"Sister Planet" by Poul Anderson (1959)

Let’s see if Poul Anderson can deliver us a chillbinding story…or at least a good one.

Earth grows increasingly overcrowded, and at the same time that governments are becoming ever more intrusive and oppressive they are proving less and less able to handle the exploding crime problem. Some fear the building pressure will result in nuclear war that could wipe out humanity!

Our story is set on Venus, a world covered in a single vast ocean that teems with diverse and spectacular life.  A multicultural team of fifty Earth scientists and technicians work there on a floating research station; their work is financed by sending back to Earth “firegems” which the playful twenty-foot long Venusian whales bring the boffins in exchange for objets d'a and snacks from Earth.  These cetoids are eager to play and trade, and even help Earthmen in trouble, but they don't seem to use tools and efforts to communicate with them have been unproductive, so there is debate among the scientists over how intelligent they really are—do these creatures have a real civilization down at the bottom of the sea or are they just over-sized oceanic pack rats little smarter than a chimp?

Nat Hawthrone from New England, an ecologist, believes the cetoids are as intellectually advanced as humans, and halfway through the 40-page story one of the whales takes Nat down deep to show him something that proves he is right.

The same day Nat has proof that the whales are an intelligent civilized species, a geologist unveils his calculations that prove Venus can be affordably terraformed to create a second Earth; such a  colonizable frontier could relieve sociological and psychological pressure on the Earth and assure survival of the human race!  But the terraforming (which involves detonating nuclear bombs near the planet core to raise continents and release buried elements that will give Venus an Earth-like atmosphere) will kill all native life, including the whales.  When the assembled research team hears from Nat that the whales are an intelligent race, they all agree that the terraforming research will be suppressed, but that is not good enough for Nat “Dances with Whales” Hawthorne.  He knows that another scientist with access to the same data might make the same calculations, so, to save the whales, whom Nat prefers to humankind, he goes rogue, like the guy in Edmond Hamilton’s 1932 "Conquest of Two Worlds" or in James Cameron’s 2009 Avatar, which I have not exactly seen but have heard people talk about.

Nat knows that nobody will finance trips to Venus if there is no prospect of trade between the whales and humans, so he sparks a war between the cetoids and the scientists, blowing up the research station and killing his 49 human friends and then massacring the local tribe of his aquatic buddies. When Nat gets back to Earth he commits suicide; we are presented a clue that suggests his participation in the two-planet tragedy may have led the atheist Nat to embrace Christianity before jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Sister Planet” is a brisk and entertaining read.  For thirty pages Anderson pushes his customary themes--promoting science, trade, the fine arts and the study of history and deploring the government--and introduces us to a bunch of nice people, and then in the last ten pages he hits us with an apocalyptic melodrama in which one of the characters we like murders all the other characters we like and likely consigns the human race to extinction, all in order to protect some aliens. I think Anderson may have actually produced something “chillbinding” here!  The story is talky, with all the exposition about how the men cope with conditions on Venus and conduct their research, the science lectures, the debates about how intelligent the cetoids might be, and the historical analogies Anderson likes to present to his readers (some of the characters in "Sister Planet" suppose that the Earth is reenacting the fall of the Roman Empire and the start of the Middle Ages, with the scientists on Venus--none of whom are women--playing the role of monks.)  But all that stuff is pretty interesting.

After it initially appeared in Satellite Science Fiction, Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison included "Sister Planet" in their late 1960s anthology All About Venus, published in Britain as Farewell, Fantastic Venus!  Kinglsey Amis in 1981 put it in his anthology The Golden Age of Science Fiction.  It looks like this one is endorsed by the SF cognoscenti, and I am happy to agree with them.

Is it good?  Sure.                                               Is it chillbinding?  I think so!

"Alien Night" by Thomas N. Scortia (1957)

So far we've got one dud and one score.  Will Thomas N. Scortia's "Alien Night," around 46 pages here in Get Out of My Sky, a story which first appeared in Science Fiction Adventures and hasn't seen print since Margolies's volume, make it two hits out of three?

It is the future!  The Universal Insurance Company, based in the Universal Building in Universal City on the banks of the mighty Mississip, is in the process of conquering death!  For centuries they have been administering a longevity serum that you need only take every 25 years to indefinitely postpone senescence.  All over America their medical robots stand ready to rush to the aid of anybody who gets in an accident.  Skyscrapers are equipped with automatic nets which will snap into position if any clumsy person should fall out a window.  And if your girlfriend dumps you, don't bother considering anything rash--the Company has blanketed the country in a "hetrerodyne field" that will knock you unconscious if a brain scanning computer detects serious thoughts of suicide.

While "Get Out of My Sky" is one of those pro-utopia stories, "Alien Night" is one of those stories about how utopias are unhappy and unsatisfying places.  In response to a life without excitement, risk or even work (androids do almost all the work), around the country have arisen "hunt clubs" whose members pursue what we might call the most dangerous game.  So, the next step in the Company's quest to eliminate death is to try to put these clubs out of business.  Kenneth Huber has been spying upon the clubs for the Company, but when he learns he has a rare disease that the Company can't cure and has only five years to live, Huber decides to commit suicide in the indirect fashion of joining a hunt club as the quarry!

Thus begins Huber's 24-hour odyssey through three dozen pages of plot twists.  Huber tries to rescue a woman he thinks is also being pursued by a hunt club, then suspects that she is hunting him and so fights with her, only later to be told she was rescuing him from hunters.  Out of nowhere an alien spacecraft crashes nearby and Huber (an unemployed thermonuclear engineer) gets shanghaied into helping investigate it.  Huber survives a helicopter crash, participates in a fire fight, discovers that many androids in sensitive positions are in fact humans in disguise--no, wait, they are actually aliens disguised as humans disguised as androids.  These aliens have infiltrated the top ranks of the Company in order to prevent any possible reforms--human society is sliding into decadence and sterility thanks to the Company's elimination of risk and challenge, and an impotent human race is just what the aliens want so that they can easily take over our beautiful planet.  (They have targeted the hunt clubs because hunt club members are the only humans left with any bravery.)  The woman rescues Huber, again, and reveals herself to be the leader of the anti-alien resistance, an agent from the future of a timeline in which the aliens succeed in taking over Earth.  Together they neutralize the alien menace, making sure her timeline never occurs and that humanity will shake off its decadence by pursuing the exploration of outer space.  Huber (don't worry, a cure for his disease will be found), having gotten a good look at the alien space engine, will be a leader in the new space program.

"Alien Night" feels like a pastiche of an A.E. van Vogt story, what with all the jarring plot twists and the inclusion of every possible SF trope--immortality, decadence, time travel, time lines, space craft, aliens, androids, the sense of wonder ending--but it lacks something it is hard to define, a tone or style or something to match the material, maybe, and comes off as a little rushed and kind of silly.  It certainly fails to excite any emotion in the reader.  Barely acceptable filler, I guess.

Is it good?  Not really.                                               Is it chillbinding?  No.

********** 

The Anderson is the winner, obviously; I am totally on board with his libertarian sensibilities and view of life as a tragedy, but looking beyond my biases I think he has the story here which is best constructed and which actually succeeds in inspiring some emotion in the audience; he takes a little time to develop characters and their relationships so when somebody takes a radical step and everybody gets killed we readers actually care.  Blish's and Scortia's efforts to depict people and relationships in their stories in Get Out of My Sky feel cheap or just lame (in general, Anderson's story feels finished, polished, while Blish's feels like it could use a revision and Scortia's feels like a rush job.)

I don't know what Margolies saw in the Scortia's "Alien Night," but in defense of the Blish, it was voted second best story by readers in both issues of Astounding in which its component parts appeared, so its selection makes sense from a marketing point of view--I guess "Get Out of My Sky" reflects the preferences of those SF fans sufficiently committed to the genre to write to Astounding and make their voices heard.

Cosmic Engineers by Clifford Simak

"My Lord," said Gary, "think of it!  Imagination saving the people of another universe.  The imagination of a little third-rate race that hasn't even started really using its imagination yet."

"You are right," declared the Engineer, "and in the aeons to come that imagination will make your race the masters of the entire universe."

My copy

Recently I was in South Carolina to visit in-laws and the art museum in Columbia.  I stopped by Ed's Editions and found, way in the back, three cardboard boxes of paperback SF books that had yet to be priced.  There were many I already owned, many I wasn't interested in, and a few I'd red when I borrowed them from libraries.  But I found one with a fun Jack Gaughan cover that I was curious to read and willing to pay two dollars for--a 1964 edition from Paperback Library of Clifford Simak's Cosmic Engineers.  I have been kind of off Simak for a few years, but I recently read a good story by him, 1952's "The Fence," so it seems a good time to read some work by this SF Grandmaster who was important to me in my youth because the local library had a lot of his books.

Cosmic Engineers originally appeared as a serial in Astounding, spread across three issues in 1939.  (It looks like all three issues are available at the internet archive--I will resist the urge to check out the illustrations until I have finished reading this 1964 printing!)  In 1950 Gnome Press put out a hardcover edition (the Wikipedia page on Simak suggests this edition was somewhat expanded from the magazine version), and since then many paperback editions have been produced.  Here is a piece of work which has achieved market success, won a vote of confidence from SF fans who have voted for it with their hard-earned pay.  Let's hope I will enjoy it as much as they did.

It is the future, the year 6948!  Mankind has colonized the solar system!  Travelling from one planet to the next in their little ship, looking for scoops, are journalists Herb Harper and Gary Nelson.  (Remember, Simak worked as a journalist himself in the Midwest for decades.)  En route to Pluto they spot an odd-looking derelict and investigate.  Within the inert vessel lies Caroline Martin, a scientist from a thousand years ago, kept alive in suspended animation.  Gary revives her by following the instructions she left, and she joins the journalists in their ship.

Caroline wasn't asleep while she was in suspended animation--she was awake the entire time, like the hunter in Poul Anderson's 1951 "Duel on Syrtis."  So, she had 1,000 years to train her brain and develop new theories about the physical nature of space.  So, when on Pluto the boffins there tell Herb, Gary and Caroline that they have been receiving undecipherable psychic messages from outside the Milky Way, Caroline is able to decipher them and even respond to them.  Goody-Two-Shoes aliens (these are the Cosmic Engineers of the title) who have taken up the task of defending the universe are sending the messages, requesting help; it seems some threat from beyond the universe, from beyond space and time, has appeared and the C.E.s need help in dealing with it.  They send Caroline plans for a teleporter terminal, and she builds it and our cast of characters (now including some scientists from Pluto) fly their spaceship through a warp tunnel, reappearing almost instantaneously at the city of the Cosmic Engineers on a planet with three suns on the very edge of the universe, a city, we are told, that "would have put a thousand New Yorks to shame."

1950 hardcover

Here the protagonists meet the C.E.s, metal men who have high technology but lack imagination and creativity--they never invented painting and are amazed to discover the concept of painting in the humans' minds, and it is hinted that they are merely the artificial robots built millions of years ago by a now-extinct organic race.  The Cosmic Engineers explain the monumental challenge which has led them to summon the humans, as well as representatives from other alien races from throughout our universe.

Our universe is just one of many universes that floats around within the next level of reality, just like the Milky Way is but one of many galaxies floating around within our universe.  An alien universe is about to collide with ours, a very rare but natural occurrence that will cause a cataclysm--energy generated by the two universes touching will cause both universes to contract until they are reset and begin to expand anew.  The process of contraction will kill every living thing within the universe.  The Engineers need the help of more imaginative beings to figure out what to do about this impending collision that will total two universes and make traffic fatalities of all passengers.

As if this wasn't enough, there is a little complication.  It turns out that our galaxy isn't just home to nice people like you and me!  There is a collectivist and belligerent race in our universe, a society about as high tech and powerful as the C.E.s themselves, but instead of being goody goodies is devoted to taking over the universe.  These creeps, known as "The Hellhounds," have figured out a way for a small elite of their race to survive the cataclysm by shifting outside the universe just before the crash; after our universe has finished contracting they will be able to return to it and direct its new expansion to their specifications, dominating all the new life that develops.  The Hellhounds are more than willing to obstruct any efforts of the C.E.s to save our universe.

"For many millions of years they have been educated with the dream of universal conquest.  They have been so thoroughly propagandized with the philosophy that the state, the civilization, the race is everything...that the individual does not count at all...that there is not a single one of them who would not die to achieve that dream.  They glory in dying, glory in any sort of sacrifice that advances them even the slightest step toward their eventual goal."       

There are a lot of SF stories in which the human race is shown to be inferior to aliens, but in Cosmic Engineers Simak celebrates human heroism and ability and suggests that our people are equal or superior to any people in all the universes!  The C.E.s dismiss the representatives of all those other intelligent species, because only the thought processes of the Earth people are on the C.E. wavelength--only the human race is in a position to foil the Hellhounds and save the universe!

Caroline comes up with a way to create in the region between the universes new miniature universes.  These can, perhaps, be used to absorb and generate and direct energy on a cosmic scale--these miniature universes could perhaps be used to power, move, or destroy entire star systems and civilizations.  To really get this idea up and running, Caroline needs more info, and she needs it fast because the Hellhound space navy has just started its attack and the Cosmic Engineer space navy is hard pressed--it looks like the C.E. city might get destroyed before Caroline can finish building her universe-preserving devices!

The info sweet Caroline requires, the C.E.s suggest, could be found on the Earth of the future, so the metal men set up a warp tunnel through which Gary and Caroline's ship travels to the dying Earth of millions of years in the future.  (I lost track of why the C.E.s needed a terminal at both ends to facilitate travel between present Pluto and the C.E. city but don't need a terminal on future Earth to send our heroes there; maybe one of Caroline's many theories has been applied to improving the warp tunnel system?)

Only one man is left on future Earth, but luckily he has the info Caroline needs.  He also gives a speech about how great mankind has been.  There's always time for a pep talk, even when our universe is about to croak!  Gary and Caroline head back into the warp tunnel, but it has been diverted to a creepy planet and they are forced to land there.  A Hellhound vessel has also been diverted to this planet, and a scenario somewhat like that in Fredric Brown's famous 1944 story "Arena" ensues--a mysterious voice explains that it has contrived to put two humans and two Hellhounds on the same planet and deactivated their ships and weapons so they will fight a duel to the death with their bare hands and their wits!

(A quick look at the issues of Astounding at the internet archive suggests that this interlude was not part of the original 1939 version of Cosmic Engineers, but added in 1950, so if anybody was copying anybody, Simak was inspired by Brown.  This section does nothing to advance the plot and is resolved via deus ex machina, one of the less satisfying literary devices.  I keep discovering reasons to believe the magazine versions of Golden Age SF stories are better than the book versions.)

Gary and Caroline make a bow and arrows from odds and ends and Gary shoots down the two reptilian bipeds that are the first Hellhounds they have ever seen.  (Did the 1939 version not reveal the Hellhounds at all?  Even in this book version the Hellhounds are underdeveloped, with no speaking parts.)  The voice reveals itself to be the millions-of-years-old collective mind of a race which abandoned first machines and then individuality and physicality.  It has god-like power, but acts in a childish way, setting up this little fight for its own amusement and then stranding the winners on its uncomfortable planet.  (Isn't Star Trek full of these kinds of mischievous and mentally unstable deities?)  Luckily, it has a moment of sanity and during that lucid moment restores the humans' equipment and allows Gary and Caroline to escape to the C.E.s' world.

Back at the edge of the universe Caroline's system of manipulating the power of the region between universes is used to wipe out the Hellhound fleet.  (This reminded me a little of AKKA in Jack Williamson's 1934 The Legion of Space.)  Then her system is used to transport entire civilizations from the other universe to safety within ours (their universe was old and worn out anyway) and to destroy that old universe before it can crash into ours and cause it to contract.  Then we get a ten-page denouement in which the Cosmic Engineers explain their origin and the origin of the human race, as well as the human race's astonishing destiny.

I want to like Cosmic Engineers, but I have to grade it merely acceptable.  The thing lacks personality and emotion, the characters and the action are flat and boring--there is no tension, no fear, no thrills, things just plod forward.  The only character with any personality is Herb, "the dumpy little photographer" who serves only as superfluous and anemic comic relief, making the most feeble jokes possible and contributing zilch to the plot.  There need have been only two human characters, Gary and Caroline, and instead we get five.  Cosmic Engineers feels not like a fun space opera like something by Edmond Hamilton, but something grey and bland, like one of John W. Campbell's space operas in which indistinguishable eggheads build a better machine every few chapters until they build one powerful enough to end the story.  The novel's real "character" is the human race, which Simak presents in a hopeful and optimistic light, painting humanity as bold and adventurous and imaginative, conferring on us the distinctive attitudes of youth--all the alien races are depicted as old and tired, either hopelessly set in their ways or actually insane.

While not terribly entertaining, Cosmic Engineers is interesting for the student of SF.  Not only is it full of elements that we see in other SF works, as I have pointed out, but it contains elements characteristic of Simak's later, more mature work, like an Earth abandoned by the majority of the human race and robots who outlive their creators but maintain a dogged devotion to them.  And here's a list of three other things about Cosmic Engineers that struck me as noteworthy (I've been told that people on the internet love lists):

1. Positive attitude about The Crusades:  Nowadays it is conventional to denounce the Crusades as racist imperialism, but Simak offers up the Crusades as a paradigmatic exemplum of mankind's courage and eagerness to make sacrifices and take risks; he repeatedly compares the efforts of Gary, Caroline and the rest of the human cast to the Crusades.  Simak was not an outlier in his day; for example, Eisenhower's memoir of his service in World War II was titled Crusade in Europe.        
2. Female protagonist:  It is interesting, and counter to the stereotype of women in Golden Age SF being mere damsels in distress, that the lead scientist of the story is a woman, and that she saves not only our universe, but saves the people of another universe and actually creates universes.
3. Pro-individualism/anti-government/anti-collectivist vibe:  Several times in this story we see demonstrated the superiority of the individual over the state or the collective, and witness people standing up to the government or the collective.  Caroline was imprisoned in that derelict because she had disobeyed the government, and she came up with the process of suspended animation all by herself.  The police come to stop our heroes from teleporting from Pluto to the edge of the universe, and Caroline and her friends don't even consider following the law and obeying the fuzz--one of the men actually cries out "No government is going to tell me what I can do and what I can't do."  The villainous Hellhounds, who hold that the individual is nothing and the collective everything, are obviously an allegory or caricature of Soviet Socialism and/or German National Socialism, while the god-like being that sets up the duel is a product of radical collectivism.

Cosmic Engineers is frustrating because if you told me there was a book about a space war in which a genius woman wakes up after a thousand years to prove herself the greatest scientist in the universe, a book that celebrates human achievement, focuses on the good side of the Crusades, and is for the individual and against the collective, I would have said, "That sounds awesome!"  But here it is, and it is lukewarm and bland because Simak fails to write the characters or action scenes with any feeling.  I am 100% on board with the spirit of Cosmic Engineers, but as a literary construction I cannot endorse its component parts nor the way they were put together.  Too bad.

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The last page of my edition of Cosmic Engineers is an ad for four Paperback Library SF titles, four titles that sound pretty good!  There's Eric Frank Russell's 1939 Sinister Barrier, which I would definitely like to read.  (Remember when I read The Best of Eric Frank Russell from cover to cover and learned that Russell was--according to Lester Del Rey, at least--SF icon John W. Campbell's favorite SF writer?)  Next on the list is A. E. van Vogt's The Book of Ptath, under its alternate title Two Hundred Million A.D.-- that was a good one!  Edmond Hamilton's Battle for the Stars I read and enjoyed back in 2012, long before this blog wriggled free from my grey matter to infest the world wide web.  The Roger Elwood anthology Alien Worlds has stories by Simak, Hamilton, Russell, Campbell, Poul Anderson and Robert Bloch that I would definitely read.  This might be the most attractive selection of books I have ever seen in a single ad!