I Will Fear No Evil by Robert A. Heinlein

I find I like being female.  But it's different.  Now what shall we wear?

My copy; purchased at a Goodwill in
Indianola, Iowa in 2014

For almost two months I have been occupied by the move of MPorcius HQ from a moldy basement in Ohio to a smelly second-story apartment in Maryland, by holiday travel, and with reading 1970s biographies of Samuel Johnson by John Wain and Christopher Hibbert.*  But today I am back in the science fiction ghetto, dealing with one of that ghetto's most prominent citizens, Robert A. Heinlein, one of the foremost practitioners of the hard SF that promotes science and engineering, the libertarian SF that argues for the primacy of the individual against the government and the collective, and the taboo-challenging SF that depicts new or unconventional sexual and marital relationships.  The topic at hand: 1970's I Will Fear No Evil, which I read over 30 years ago in my youth, and reread in fits and starts over the past few busy weeks of driving cross country, celebrating the holidays with my in-laws, waiting at government offices and lugging my belongings to a storage unit.

Johann Sebastian Bach Smith (again with the "Smith!") is one of the world's most successful businessmen, the head of Smith Enterprises Ltd, a vast business empire which includes "sea ranches" where unlucky workers get eaten by sharks, a textbook publishing division and a machine tools division.  A self-made man and World War II veteran, Smith is over ninety and at death's door, monitored by nurses and computers 24-7!  But he is not ready to shuffle off this mortal coil just yet--his mind is still sharp as a tack, and he brags that he can remember yesterday's stock prices and "do logarithmic calculations without tables" (your humble blogger can't remember what he ate yesterday and doesn't know what a logarithmic calculation is!)  Smith's solution: becoming the world's first brain transplant beneficiary!  Smith orders his staff to find a young healthy body whose brain is legally dead and which shares his rare blood type, and through a tragic set of circumstances his brain ends up in the body of his beautiful twenty-something secretary, Eunice Barca!  A woman!  Even more incredibly, Eunice's consciousness has somehow survived death and the operation, and it shares Johann's brain with him!  (Heinlein leaves open the possibility that Eunice's presence is not "real," but a product of brain damage or mental illness, and Johann doesn't tell anyone that he is in constant communication with Eunice's "ghost" for fear he will be immediately diagnosed as insane.)

As you perhaps know from reading my blog posts about Leigh Brackett's Sword of Rhiannon, Edmond Hamilton's "The Avenger from Atlantis," Tanith Lee's Volkhavaar, and other works, I love any story in which people's brains or souls or consciousnesses are moved from one body to another, and/or in which different consciousnesses inhabit the same body and struggle for control or learn to live in harmony.  No doubt this fascination of mine springs from my fear of death and experience of loneliness and alienation from my fellow man.  But while the aforementioned Brackett, Hamilton and Lee stories are fast-paced adventure capers with horror elements, I Will Fear No Evil is a slow-paced philosophical novel about love and sex with very little dramatic tension.  The topic of a man unexpectedly finding himself in a woman's body could serve as fertile ground for a story of body horror, or a tale of identity crisis, or a feminist satire, but Heinlein does not take any of these tacks.

Instead of finding his new new body repulsive or even disconcerting, Johann embraces womanhood, taking the name "Joan" and immediately demanding cosmetics and nightgowns and an appointment with a hairdresser!  Within days Joan is going on extravagant shopping trips and enthusiastically throwing herself at every man who crosses her path!  In the second half of the novel Joan has sex with Johann's best friend, septuagenarian lawyer Jacob Salomon, her doctor, and various other of her employees, both male and female.  (Like Tiresias, star of Greek mythology and English art rock, Johann/Joan finds that sex is far more enjoyable as a woman than a man.)  With equal gusto Joan makes a beeline to the sperm bank and has herself impregnated with Johann's sperm, so that she becomes, more or less, both father and mother of the child she carries.

The novel briefly touches on legal issues surrounding the need of the courts to figure out if the person with Johann's brain and Eunice's body is legally Johann, Eunice, neither or both, because some of Johann's legal (though not biological) descendants hope to get their hands on his fortune through legal maneuvers, but these ineffectual antagonists never have a chance.  Heinlein devotes far more energy to following Joan's efforts to seduce and then wed Jacob, and to comfort Eunice's many friends and lovers who miss her and might find the presence of her body still walking around (with a ninety-year old dude's brain in it!) unnerving.

The lion's share of the novel's text, which weighs in at 500 pages, consists of conversations between the witty, impeccably decent and supercompetent characters (Johann is the world's greatest businessman, Eunice is the best possible secretary and kindest and most giving of individuals, Jacob is the world's greatest lawyer and great in the sack, the guy who performs the brain transplant is the world's finest surgeon, Eunice's husband Joe is a genius artist and a noble soul who doesn't care about money, etc.) and these conversations consist mostly of these paragons expressing their love for each other but sometimes expressing their (and presumably the author's) opinions.  There are also lots of descriptions of people's, especially women's, attire.  Conflicts or setbacks are few and far between.

One of the ecstatic blurbs on the back cover of my edition of the novel refers to the book's "frightening vision of the future" and the likelihood that it might be come true.  We learn about this "future world" of the early 21st-century in dribs and drabs, in characters' dialogue and in brief satirical segments that describe current events.  The world is overpopulated (overpopulation, Johann asserts, is the wellspring of all the other problems) and polluted, and the government is corrupt and incompetent, a welfare state that hands out generous benefits to the poor but whose efforts to control population (through a eugenics system of licenses that tries to limit who can reproduce) and crime (large swathes of urban landscape are no-go zones called "Abandoned Areas" which the police refuse to enter) and even educate children (many adults are illiterate) are an absolute failure.  Rich people like Johann and Jacob are driven around by thuggish guards in over-sized armored limos equipped with gun turrets, and Eunice's untimely (but opportune!) death is at the hands of a mugger in an elevator.

Sexy!  And patriotic?

Obviously Heinlein is vehemently opposed to all this socialism and laments the mass crime and pollution, but the novel's setting also features developments Heinlein (I presume) would have welcomed, like acceptance of public nudity and a looser attitude about sex--Eunice's marriage was an open one, and I think all the main characters have homosexual affairs.  Johann and Eunice describe to each other their early sex lives, and Heinlein uses Johann's reminiscences to suggest that the Victorians and the people of the early 20th-century were just about as sex-crazed as the college kids of the swinging Sixties, but were less open and more hypocritical about it.  Some readers may look askance at some of the sexual relationships described; for example, Johann was seduced by a thirty-five-year-old married woman when he was fourteen, and when he was twenty he had sex with a sixteen-year-old who would become his first wife.  (If there is any tension in this novel it is the tension between the author's and the reader's beliefs.)

I Will Fear No Evil presents a less than rosy image of what people in 1970 would have considered a traditional marriage: all the marriages in the story are either "open" or failed--all feature enthusiastic "swinging" or surreptitious adultery.  Johann was married four times, and all four of his wives cheated on him and gave birth to children fathered by other men.  Johann has no biological children, and his legal heirs--four granddaughters--are the story's rarely invoked and totally ineffectual villains.  One way of looking at the novel is to see the union of Johann's brain and Eunice's body, which unexpectedly renders their consciousnesses inseparable, as a sort of allegory of a perfect marriage--they are a til-death-do-us-part corporate entity who share their lives in the most direct and intimate way possible, help each other learn and grow and need never again fear loneliness.

I'm scratching my head over the
cover to this British edition

Another way of looking at I Will Fear No Evil is as a novel celebrating self-creation, the fact that you can be who you want to be, you fashion your own identity and need not accept what your parents and society have made you via genetics and culture.  Johann changed his name from Schmidt to Smith when he enlisted in the army in 1941, and the book includes multiple conversations with lawyers about how your legal name in the USA is whatever you say it is.  Johann wasn't born rich, but turned himself into the world's preeminent businessman, while Eunice's husband Joe, the sensitive and honorable artist, came from a family of worthless, dishonest, grasping scum.  The happening young people of the novel's early 21st-century believe there are six sexes, and people in the book decide what "sex" (the word incorporates what we today call "sexual orientation") they are; while today's conventional wisdom is that homosexuals are "born that way," Heinlein in the novel seems to suggest gay sex is a practice any open-minded person might simply opt to indulge in.  Late in the novel, discussing the parentage of the child she bears,  Johann/Joan brags "I did this on my own.  I alone am parent to this child."  It is also perhaps significant that Johann dismisses out of hand behaviorist psychological theories.

While I Will Fear No Evil is a celebration of individualism and tells you that you don't have to respect old taboos or follow in your parents' footsteps or take the authority of the government seriously, it is not a book that advocates being a hermit and ignoring everybody else.  Everybody in the novel is constantly complimenting and hugging and kissing each other, so you never forget that the main point of the book is that we should all love each other and that sex is an expression of love that should not inspire jealousy or be subject to restrictive rules.  The book also shows the deference to the cognitive elite (and contempt for the common masses) that we often see in classic SF; obvious examples are Asimov's Foundation stories and Sturgeon's award-winning "Slow Sculpture," fiction in which the authors advocate that shadowy unaccountable geniuses manipulate human civilization for its own good.  Public-spirited Johann tries to use his wealth to help humanity; most prominent in the novel is his subtle attempt to mold the gene pool by financing a eugenics foundation that collects the sperm of above-average men and uses it impregnate above-average female volunteers.  On the flip side we see the other end of the cognitive and moral spectra in action, as Heinlein depicts how the venal news media whips up riotous mobs with ease with misleading and salacious news reports.

Jack Gaughan goes literal for the magazine edition,
showing ancient Johann's withered mug
and Eunice in one of her boob-baring outfits

(A related theme we see in much of former naval officer Heinlein's work is the need for the crew of a ship to obey their captain without question, and this shows up in I Will Fear No Evil, with Johann demanding similar obedience from his employees.)

Heinlein's novels often include anti-bigotry messages, messages both explicit (characters deliver speeches denouncing racism, for example) and implicit (such as the inclusion of admirable characters who are not white, not male, and/or not human) and I Will Fear No Evil does the same.  Johann, whose grandparents were immigrants from Catholic southern Germany, grew up in what he calls variously "the Bible Belt" and "the Middle West" is best friends with the Jewish Jacob, and offhand I can recall admirable minor characters who are black, Polish and gay.  Probably most significantly, Heinlein leaves Eunice's ethnicity a mystery; we learn she was born an Iowa farm girl (like my mother-in-law!) but there is never a direct declaration of her racial background and I didn't notice any details about her skin or hair or whatever that might provide a clue to her ethnicity.  Heinlein seems to be telling us that what mattered about Eunice was not her ethnic identity, but that she loved everyone (as one minor character puts it, she treated everyone "like a human being.")

(If we want to nitpick, it is true that these "diverse" characters are perhaps stereotypes: the Jewish lawyer, the religious black man, and the sexy female secretary.)

I think it may also be worth considering what relationship I Will Fear No Evil might have to the famous "New Wave" movement in SF; some of the gushing blurbs on the back of my copy seem to be raising the issue by claiming "Those who have thought of science fiction as only child's play will see how wrong they are" and that the novel is "a sign of the changing nature of science fiction."  Most important in this context is I Will Fear No Evil's subject matter, which includes a minimum of high technology and adventure and instead focuses on gender roles and sex, and to a lesser extent psychology and the aforementioned dystopic society.  Perhaps more remarkable, however, is a passage early in the book, a page-long stream-of-consciousness section full of homophonic wordplay that depicts Johann Smith's state of mind just after his operation; this struck me as "New Wavey" in its technique.  And maybe the prominent role of yoga and meditation in the novel is New Wavey? 

I am in broad sympathy with Heinlein's beliefs and admire much of his work, but I know he has many detractors, and it is easy to see how a hostile reviewer could make hay out of this novel.  Through a feminist lens, Johann is a man exploiting a woman's body, and one might see the process of a man putting one of his organs into a woman's body and thereby gaining control of her as a sort of allegory of rape or symbolic depiction of marriage as a patriarchal institution.  And of course the book suggests that the characteristic role of the woman is to comfort people, give birth to children, and look good, not run businesses or wage wars or create art, as the men in the book do.  Through a Marxist lens, Johann is a member of the upper-middle class, exploiting one of his proletarian employees.  Eunice never expresses any resentment or envy about the treatment of women or the lower classes in the society that Jacob and Johann have fought their way to the top of.  Conservatives might argue that Heinlein's advocacy of free love fails to adequately address the risks and responsibilities of sexual activity--you can perhaps dismiss pregnancy and disease by referring to high tech medicine, but what about the jealousy and possessiveness that characterize most people's sexual feelings?     

To return to the plot, after Joan has comforted all of Eunice's old friends and straightened out Johann's legal affairs, Heinlein wraps up the book with a pair of deaths.  Jacob dies (he's an elderly gent, after all) and somehow his consciousness ends up in Johann's brain along with Eunice's, so their ideal marriage is now a threesome.  This appears, to me, to be conclusive proof that Eunice's presence in Johann's brain is the product of mental illness and not some kind of biological phenomenon resulting from his brain being connected to her body.  With her elderly husband dead, Joan volunteers for the Moon colony--one of the recurring themes of Heinlein's work is that you can leave the oppression and corruption of a decadent civilization by moving to the frontier (we see this in Between Planets, The Rolling Stones, Friday, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, etc.)  Joan dies while giving birth to her child, just after arriving on Luna.

Karel Thole delivers a pleasant and
appropriate cover for this German edition

Heinlein is an important author in the field so if you are interested in the history of SF or the depiction of gender roles or sex changes or brain transplants in SF you should probably read I Will Fear No Evil.  But can I recommend it is a piece of entertainment or literature?  That is a little trickier.  The novel presents many opportunities for thought on various issues, and Heinlein's style is smooth, but these 500 pages can feel long and repetitious, even tedious, and there is almost no conflict--it really can feel like page after page of people saying they love each other and describing their clothes and make up.  As a story about love and sex instead of a story about a dangerous journey, or an episode in a war, or people trying to solve a mystery, we can't expect a bunch of action scenes, but I Will Fear No Evil has none of the tension you find in a compelling love story--there's no fear of rejection, no unrequited desire, no jealousy, no star-crossed lovers kept apart by social mores or family feuds; everybody adores each other and is attracted to each other from the word "go," and they are all libertarians or libertines living in a libidinous society so there are no inhibitions to be overcome.  (Maybe I should also point out that there are no actual sex scenes; this book is by no means titillating or pornographic in the way a Piers Anthony novel might be.)  It is easy to see why fans of Heinlein's earlier work like adventure writer E. C. Tubb, who said in his 1979 interview with Charles Platt that he used to like Heinlein but that Stranger in a Strange Land and Heinlein's later work were no good and even hinted that any positive critical attention they received was somehow dishonest, would be disappointed in this long, slow, rambling testimonial in favor of free love.  I'll say that I Will Fear No Evil is acceptable for the initiated, but it is not the kind of thrill ride or barrel of laughs I can recommend to a wide audience.

**********
*In his introduction to his 1974 biography of the Great Cham of Literature, novelist and poet John Wain tells us that part of his project in writing the book is to make Johnson, famous as a Tory and an essentially Christian and conservative character, palatable to lefties, and Wain does throw around such verbiage as "eternal tug of war between labor and capital" and "plutocracy" that, I guess, will appeal to Marxists.  Wain, however, expends a lot more ink comparing the physically and culturally beautiful England of the 18th century with the industrial and technological England of the late 20th century, which Wain bemoans has become a cultural "ruin" in which every material thing is "hideous."  Wain is also the kind of biographer who makes wild guesses about long dead people's states of mind and reconstructs relationships and conversations based on no evidence whatsoever.  (There are no footnotes in the book, which is based entirely on published sources.)  Wain's book is entertaining, but a veteran reader of Johnsoniana and Boswelliana will probably learn more about the writer of this biography than the subject--Wain fills its 380 pages not only with his emphatic opinions about Johnson's century and his (and my) own, but with extracts from the poetry and criticism of 20th-century figures like T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Seymour Krim, extracts that have nothing to do with Johnson, and anecdotes from his own (Wain's own) life as an academic and a public intellectual.  One assumes Wain feels comfortable including all these digressions because Johnson himself used such scholarly work as the Dictionary and The Lives of the Poets as vehicles for expressing his own opinions and relating little personal anecdotes.

Popular historian Hibbert, in his 1971 biography of Johnson, which is also based on [now] published material and not original research, refrains from making himself and his opinions a central part of his book.  While Wain extols Johnson as a singular hero, denounces the 20th century, and addresses such scholarly topics as Johnson's adherence to the panEuropean culture of neoLatin scholars and resistance to Romanticism, Hibbert serves up the kind of stuff that actually arouses the interest of ordinary people in Johnson.  With a minimum of analysis or editorializing Hibbert showcases Johnson as a big-hearted guy and a pretty good comedian, the oddest and most interesting member of a large circle of odd and interesting characters.  Hibbert's book consists primarily of quoted and paraphrased anecdotes drawn from Boswell, Thrale-Piozzi and other sources, over 300 pages of amusing stories about Johnson's bon mots, idiosyncrasies and interactions with his many memorable friends and acquaintances and moving episodes in which Johnson expresses his love for others, his unhappiness, and his fear of death. 

City at World's End by Edmond Hamilton

"But the main problem will be morale, Hubble."  He thought of Carol, as he added, "I don't believe these people can take it, if they find out they're the last humans left."

When I recently saw the Fawcett Crest 1974 paperback edition of City at World's End on the shelf at a used bookstore, buying it was what the kids call a "no-brainer."  First of all, it's by MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton. Second, there's the beautiful Paul Lehr cover.  I even like the lowercase aesthetic they are pulling here--this theme is continued on the inside, with the chapter headings printed in a fun lowercase font.  I'm always tickled when it looks like the publisher made an effort to produce a book with some kind of design vision in mind. (The chapter headings in City At World's End seem to be in the same font I enjoyed when it was used by our friends at Belmont for their volume containing Kris Neville's Special Delivery and Dave Van Arnam's Star Gladiator.)

Fawcett really goes the extra mile in selling this book--the first page tries to convince you that City At World's End is a serious examination, even a prediction, of a possible future for the human race!  They go so far as to quote "eminent biologist N. J. Berrill," whom Wikipedia is leading me to believe was like a British version of Jacques Cousteau!  Awesome!

It is the middle of the 20th century, in America's Middle West, where, in Middletown, home to 50,000, Kenniston, a scientist, is walking to his job at an industrial laboratory.  Almost nobody who lives in Middletown knows that the lab is an important component of America's defense establishment!  But somebody knows, and that somebody (the identity of whom Hamilton leaves mysterious, but I'm guessing this somebody has a name like "Josef" or "Zedong") detonates one of those new super-atomic missiles that everybody has been talking about right over Middletown!  But instead of vaporizing the town, the explosion shatters the very fabric of space and time and transports Middletown and all its inhabitants millions of years into the future, to when the sun is weak and red and the land is dry, desolate and cold!

City at World's End is one of those books in which a crisis leaves the common people, at best, at a loss, and more often ready to panic or riot, and, since the leadership they need is not forthcoming from the political class (the mayor of Middletown is short and "pudgy" and at one point described as "a crushed, frightened little man"), real men have to take charge.  Kenniston and his boss Hubble are just such men, as is a local businessman who owns a big trucking company and was some kind of logistics guy during "the last war," which I assume must be World War II.  The eggheads explore the creepy landscape beyond the newly transported town and discover a deserted domed city.  With no source of coal, everybody will freeze to death if they stay in their houses, so the scientists and the trucking magnate organize and lead an exodus out of Middletown and into the domed city--the dome will (they say) help retain heat.  This domed city also has hydroponics tanks the scientists will be able to get running again so nobody will starve, and a shaft leading to the Earth's core, presumably built by the original inhabitants hundreds of thousands of years ago to tap its heat; unfortunately today the core is quite cool.

In hopes that there are people elsewhere on the Earth, Kenniston figures out how to transmit messages with some equipment found in "New Middletown," and eventually some people who have heard the transmissions arrive.  But these people aren't Earthers--they are the descendants of humans who left Earth millennia ago to colonize the galaxy; these people now rule the entire Milky Way from their capital in the Vega system, and they have brought some of their alien friends with them! One of these alien races looks (as you can see on the cover of the issue of Startling Stories in which City at World's End first appeared) like over-sized teddy bears!  And another like humanoid cats!  The human Vegans, representatives of the Governors of the Federation of Stars, study old Middletown and do administrative work while the ursine Capellans and feline Spicans--these furry people are technical adjuncts attached to the mission--help get the atomic power and plumbing and so forth in New Middletown running again.

City At World's End is dated in a way that 21st-century readers may find interesting, amusing or aggravating.  For example, the Earthwomen characters, when they are on-screen (which is not too often), are always going hysterical, weeping, or complaining and just generally getting in the way.  The leader of the Vegan expedition, Varn Allan, is a woman, a slim and cold-hearted blue-eyed blonde (sexy!), who eventually crumbles under the strain and admits she wishes she had been a party girl instead of volunteering for the Federation space navy.  And if the mayor formerly known as Warren Wilhelm Jr. is right, and most people want a mayor and wider government with dictatorial powers, they won't be happy to see the mayor of Middletown portrayed as an ineffectual boob who outsources all leadership duties to scientists and businessmen and the Vegan Federation governors depicted as imperious, contemptuous and callous jerkoffs.  On the other hand, the novel has a hopeful anti-racist message--the adults of Middletown are initially suspicious of, even repulsed by, the non-human aliens, but their children immediately embrace them, and of course in the end they turn out to be very nice and helpful.

The big, furry Capellan sounded like a blood brother to every repair technician on old Earth.

He [Kenniston] discovered one day that he was working beside the humanoids as naturally as though he had always done it.  It no longer seemed strange that Magro, the handsome white-furred Spican, was an electronics expert whose easy unerring work left Kenniston staring.

Under their fur, these freaks from other solar systems are just like us!  (Like getting stuck on a far-future worn-out Earth that has been abandoned by humanity, humans working and fighting side by side with aliens is a recurring theme in Hamilton's work.) In fact, the 20th-century humans have more in common with these furry weirdos than with the humans of the far future, because the furries, as relatively young races, still have a passionate independent streak and a love of their home planets, while the future humans, who have had atomic power and space travel for millions of years, are a bunch of cold and obedient drones who do whatever the government tells them and have no feeling whatsoever for the Earth!

This comes out when it is revealed that the Governors of the Federation of Stars are ordering the Middletowners to move from the dying Earth (a phrase Hamilton uses repeatedly, inevitably reminding one of Jack Vance's famous stories, the first of which were published the same year as the magazine version of City at World's End) to some more economically viable planet for their own good, whether they like it or not.  The people of Middletown resist, but Varn Allan and her conniving male subordinate, who wants her to fail so he can take her job, insist that Federation word is law and the Earthlings must move. In contrast, the furries share the Middletowners' "provincial patriotism" and would like to loosen the hold of the Federation on their own peoples (they themselves have been forcibly evacuated from beloved homeworlds in the past.)  So the Cappellans and Spicans give Kenniston some legal advice--he has the right to go to Vega to argue Earth's case.  What gives the Earth a legal leg to stand on is the fact that a new process has been proposed by which the cool inner core of a dying planet like Earth can be ignited so the planet can flourish again, even with a weak red sun.  So Kenniston rides the ship to Vega with his furry pals and the haughty hotty Varn Allan, on a quest to get permission to have the process tested on the dying Earth's core.  (I know, this now sounds a little like Gene Wolfe's 1980s Book of the New Sun and its fifth volume, The Urth of the New Sun, doesn't it?)

On Vega Four we get one of those Earth-on-trial scenes that we encounter in SF pretty regularly; Robert Heinlein's 1958 Have Space Suit--Will Travel and James Blish's 1961 The Star Dwellers, books I have read, come to mind at once, but I know there are plenty of others--among those I haven't read is a Jack Williamson fix-up called The Trial of Terra which Joachim Boaz wrote about back in 2011.  The rulers of the galaxy decide that the violent and rebellious 20th-century Earth people must be taught to obey, and that the core ignition process is too dangerous anyway, so Kenniston's request is denied.  Luckily, the scientist who developed this planetary core ignition theory has his ship and staff all juiced up and ready to go, because Kenniston convinces him to defy the Federation Governors and take him and his furry friends to Earth and try the process anyway!  Varn Allan tries to stop them but Kenniston just kidnaps her and drags her to Earth, where everything turns out great for everybody, except Allan's scheming lieutenant, I guess.  Even Kenniston's fiance Carol, relieved she can move out of the dome city and back to her old house, is willing to free our hero from their engagement so he can explore the galaxy (and space babe Varn Allan's pants!)    

I like the plot of this one, and Hamilton seems to be putting some extra literary effort into it; compared to much of his other writing, there is more human psychology (how people respond to the story's bizarre events--resorting to prayer or to the booze, threatening to riot or blaming scientific progress, etc) and relationship material (among her many complaints, Carol is angry that Kenniston kept his real job at the lab a secret from her, and fears their future together is doomed because she loves stability and the old comfortable things while he is fascinated by the new), more fancy images and turns of phrase, and more literary devices like personification and metaphor ("...past the playground that looked as forlorn as though it knew the children were going, never to return.")  The stuff about how government is incompetent and callous and full of selfish self-important jerks, the distinction between young passionate societies and old staid ones, and the anti-racist stuff, add additional layers.

A good novel.  City at World's End brought to mind the much longer and apparently (I haven't read either of them) much more ambitious / pretentious novels of Samuel R. Delany (1974's Dhalgren) and Stephen King (2009's Under the Dome) which, I think, have similar premises.  Might those novelists have been familiar with City at World's End and influenced by it?

City at World's End seems tohave been a hit with readers and has been reprinted again and again since its first publication in 1950 in Startling Stories; you can read the original printing complete with 1950 illustrations at the internet archive.  (This is a pretty impressive issue of Startling, with work by Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, Doc Smith, Virgil Finlay and Frank Belknap Long, and letters from Robert Silverberg--who praises Norman Daniels' "The Lady is a Witch"--and Isaac Asimov--who jocularly complains that in a recent issue his name was misspelled and makes a tepid joke about the tame sexual content of van Vogt's "The Shadow Men," an early version of The Universe Maker, a British publication about which I said nice things on Amazon in 2012.)

Three early 1930s stories by Donald Wandrei

It feels like just last month we were talking about stories from 1930s magazines like Weird Tales, Wonder Stories and Astounding.  Well, the good times of last month do not have to end!  Those 1930s tales were by Edmond Hamilton, and in the comments to one of those posts Guy of the cool A Jagged Orbit blog mentioned Donald Wandrei, a writer who sold stories to some of the same markets that published Hamilton.  I don't think I've ever read anything by Wandrei, so I'm starting July 2017 by filling in this lacuna in my SF knowledge, reading three Wandrei stories, two from the Astounding of the pre-Campbell era and one that appeared in Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales.

Cover artist Wesso gave Phobar some nice
shoes and stockings

"Raiders of the Universes" (1932)

Normally, if you look at a star which is four light years away, you are seeing light that is four years old, and thus events that happened four years ago.  But in the 34th century the Mercia nullifier has been invented, so that the most advanced astronomers of the Five World Federation (Earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) can witness events thousands of light years away as they happen.  Phobar of Earth is just such an astronomer, and when he gazes off into the interstellar void he discovers an unprecedented phenomenon: new stars abruptly appearing, one after the other over a series of days, each one closer to our solar system.  And then the cataclysm: a dark body enters our solar system, sets Neptune on fire, and hurls it out into deep space, a new sun!  The ejection of Neptune throws the other planets of the solar system into new orbits, and as if that wasn't bad enough, the dark star starts sucking the energy out of our own life-giving sun!

Phobar finds himself  teleported onto the dark star, which is a space ship as big as a planet, inhabited by 100-foot-tall aliens made of liquid metal, the refugees of another universe.  Their universe, immeasurably older than ours, ran out of energy and so they have been travelling from one universe to the next, plundering each.  The leader of the aliens, Garboreggg, when he is not comparing humans to gnats and giving long history lessons about his own superior race and the history of the universes, tells Phobar he has been selected to act as a liaison between the aliens and the Earth authorities.

"There is no vegetable life in our universe.  There is only the scale of elements ranging from 842 to 966 on the extension of your own scale.  At this high range, metals of complex kinds exist.  There is none of what you call water, no vegetable world, no animal kingdom.  Instead there are energies, forces, rays, and waves, which are food to us and nourish our life-stream just as pigs, potatoes and bread are food to you."

Earthmen are to mine all the radium from the Earth to present the aliens, or else.  To demonstrate to Phobar the price of disobedience, Garboreggg casually triggers an electric weapon and melts, in its entirety, my old stomping grounds of Manhattan! (Nooooooooooo!)  After a few more pages of science lectures, Garboreggg has a guard take Phobar back to the lab to be teleported back to Earth.  But the alien generalissimo gave Phobar one too many science lectures!  Phobar distracts the guard and manages to throw switches that cause the particles of the atoms of the space ship to move closer together, causing it and the aliens to shrink to almost nothing.  Phobar, being from a different universe, is exempt from the effects, and teleports himself back to Earth, the savior of our race.

"Raiders of the Universes" is very reminiscent of those 1920s and early '30s Interstellar Patrol stories by Edmond Hamilton we read in Crashing Suns, capers in which aliens need a new star or something and propel a star towards the Earth in order to steal our sun or whatever.  But while Hamilton's tales were adventure stories full of battles and people getting captured and tortured and then escaping, "Raiders of the Universes" is almost all science lectures--speculative astronomy, physics and technology--with a little of what you might call cosmic horror--humans are so inferior to the aliens that we can't fight them, we can't even comprehend them, and the common people of the Five Planets go crazy in response to the aliens' dismantling of our solar system.  The power of the story is supposed to come from our amazement at vast intergalactic distances and mind-boggling speeds ("By the time we left our universe, we were hurtling at a speed which we estimated to be 1,600,00,000 miles per second"), incomprehensibly alien environments and forms of life, and the manipulation of entire planets and stars.  I think it works, and it is a definitely interesting to read a SF story which is single-mindedly focused on the hard sciences and is not, like so much of the SF published in my lifetime and so much of the SF I read, primarily a drama about crime or warfare or an argument for or against socialism, religion, traditional gender roles, etc.  (Though Wandrei does get some digs in at religious and superstitious people in this story.)  I couldn't take a steady diet of this sciency material myself; violence, sex, government and religion are the stuff of our very lives and thus inherently exciting, while how many elements are on the periodic table and how fast a photon moves are abstruse trivia to most of us, including me, but "Raiders of the Universes" is a good reminder of an earlier period of SF history and what you might even call SF's roots.

  
"Raiders of the Universes" first appeared in Astounding, as the cover story, and was included in a 1950 issue of the Avon Fantasy Reader (helmed by editor extraordinaire Donald A. Wollheim) with a sextastic cover.  (Poor Wandrei isn't even mentioned on the cover of that later magazine.)  "Raiders of the Universe" was also included in the 1989 collection Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei.  I read the Astounding version at the internet archive.

"The Fire Vampires" (1933)

"The Fire Vampires" first appeared, not in Astounding, but in Weird Tales, and its first line is, "This is a tale of war, and terror, and tyranny, and flaming death."  Now we are talking MPorcius's language!

Like "Raiders of the Universes," "The Fire Vampires" begins with an astronomer (this guy's name is Norby, and he lives in the year 2341) spotting something strange with his telescope.  It is a comet heading toward Earth that, when it gets close enough, orbits our innocent planet and starts electrocuting individuals from space, burning them to a pile of "calcined" bones!  After murdering fifteen thousand people, the comet flies off into deep space, only to return six years later to burn up more people!  A message appears in the sky, its letters crackling electric bolts: Earth is now the property of the people of the comet Kytnga, who demand a "payment" of fifteen thousand human lives every six Earth years!  Even more shocking (for Norby, at least) is the demand that Norby make sure he is outside next time Kytngan tax day rolls around, so he can be one of the fifteen thousand victims! The signature at the bottom of the electric message is the Lovecraftian/Clark Ashton Smithian name "Fthaggua, Lord of Ktynga."

Norby figures out the nature of the enemy--Fthaggua is in fact the only Kytngan, a single corporate being of pure electricity able to split into many parts and able to learn all the knowledge of any human it immolates--and uses this knowledge to lay a trap for it, saving the human race.

This story is pretty crazy.  I liked the audacity of some of the concepts and scenes (like when Norby refuses to surrender himself to Fthaggua and the alien punishes the Earth by slaying over a hundred thousand people!), but I'd be hard pressed to call it "good."  An entertaining oddity, let's say.  "The Fire Vampires" was reprinted in a 1965 collection, Strange Harvest, and a 1997 collection, Don't Dream: The Collected Fantasy and Horror of Donald Wandrei.  I read this tale of killer electricity and an heroic astronomer at the internet archive.

"Colossus" (1934)

"Colossus" appears in my hardcover copy of Isaac Asimov's 1974 anthology Before the Golden Age, and I read it there.  It was first printed in Astounding, as the cover story, and was included by August Derleth in his 1950 anthology Beyond Time and Space.  Seeing that it is the title story of that 1989 collection mentioned above, and was recognized for its merit by both Derleth and Asimov, I am going to assume "Colossus" is Wandrei's most honored, most influential, perhaps "best," story.

It is the late 20th century, and the World League for the Advancement of Science has built the world's finest telescope up on Mount Everest. Astronomer Dowell has made a strange discovery--the universe is, apparently, smaller than theorized.  He explains this to a visitor, Duane Sharon, a pilot who, in a few months time, will be flying off in Earth's first interstellar spaceship, the White Bird.  Maybe Sharon can test Dowell's theory that our universe is analogous to a single atom, merely one of innumerable constituent parts of a much larger universe!

Sharon makes a test flight to the moon with his scientist girlfriend, Anne, and then makes final adjustments to the White Bird.  Anne and Sharon plan to get married and that same day set off on their intergalactic flight, but, horror of horrors, that is the day Japan launches a sneak attack on Communist Russia and Rusia's ally, the USA--America, the land I love, the home of the free and the brave, in this story is run by a communist dictator!  Anne (along with the government officiate!) is killed minutes before the wedding in the Japanese bombing of New York City, and Sharon takes off for the outer limits in the White Bird alone, a bitter and misanthropic man who barely cares whether he lives or dies!

The White Bird, powered by cosmic rays and other types of radiation it absorbs and then redirects as propulsive force, achieves speeds thousands of times the speed of light.  Under these Einstenian conditions the ship, and its contents, become attenuated, gaseous, their individual molecules so far apart that Sharon and his vessel can pass through obstacles unimpeded.  Sharon reaches the end of our universe, a place of total blackness because no light has yet reached it.  Then he bursts through into another universe!

The British 1978 paperback edition of
Before the Golden Age was printed in
three volumes, each with a cover designed
to make Joachim Boaz groan!

Dowell's theory is proven correct: our universe is a single atom of a vastly larger universe.  The White Bird appears on a glass microscope slide in a lab--even though he is now larger than our entire universe, in this universe Sharon is tiny, and from his perspective the scientists in this alien lab are three miles tall!

These Titans, as Wandrei calls them, communicate with Sharon via telepathy. One Titan astronomer has just discovered a planet, Valadom, where people are the same size Sharon is.  (Lucky coincidence!) Sharon offers to go meet and study these little people, Margaret Mead-style, and bring back the kind of data these Brobdingnagian boffins would love to have, including a dead body for dissection.  An impatient Titan biologist itches to just dissect Sharon now, but the astronomer wins the argument and soon Sharon is flying off to Valadom, where he meets a beautiful green-haired girl and, we readers assume, enjoys a happy life.

I can easily believe this is Wandrei's best story.  Not only is the idea of growing larger than the universe and breaking into another, still larger, universe, mind-expanding, but leavening all the science lectures and descriptions of astronomical phenomena with the inclusion of the love stories and the dystopian political jazz adds additional interest to "Colossus."

**********

These stories are not bad, but they are a little short of human feeling and literary style, and Wandrei presents us with the same kind of elements again and again: heroic astronomers, molecules moving closer together or further apart, killer electricity, and so on.

In his comments after "Colossus" in Before the Golden Age, Asimov (besides pointing out science errors in the story) calls Wandrei an "unjustly neglected author."  In a world with so many authors better able to elicit human emotion than Wandrei, I can't say I'm certain that neglect of him is "unjustified," but I like his willingness to think big and his desire to blow the reader's mind.  I do not regret having read these mildly entertaining stories and expanding my knowledge of SF's early days.

Four stories by Edmond Hamilton from the 1920s and '30s

In the past I've mentioned Del Rey's cool Best of series of paperback collections of stories by classic SF authors; in fact, back in early 2016, I read 1978's The Best of Eric Frank Russell, which has an introduction by Alan Dean Foster, cover to cover.  In 1977 Del Rey put out a volume dedicated to MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton, edited by Hamilton's wife, Leigh Brackett, as well as a book of Brackett stories edited by Hamilton.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we'll be reading both of these collections of classic adventure SF.  First up, four stories from The Best of Edmond Hamilton that first appeared in genre magazines in the 1920s and early 1930s.

"The Monster-God of Mamurth" (1926)

On its second appearance in Weird 
Tales, "Monster-God" didn't get
a cover mention; I hope Hamilton 
didn't feel like he'd got demoted!

This is Hamilton's first published story, and it is actually mentioned on the cover of the issue of Weird Tales in which it appeared, which must have been very exciting for a writer early in his career.  The Best of Edmond Hamilton is actually dedicated to the editor who bought the story, Farnsworth Wright, who edited Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940. "The Monster-God of Mamurth" has seen quite a few reprintings, including a second Weird Tales appearance in 1935.

"The Monster-God of Mamurth" is a solid Lovecraftian-type story, complete with lost city, alien and/or prehistoric god, and invisible monster.  (Though I label these elements "Lovecraftian," they were not invented by Lovecraft, and Hamilton didn't necessarily get them from Lovecraft stories; in fact, I think Lovecraft's big lost city and invisible monster stories, like "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Dunwich Horror" and "At The Mountains of Madness" were published after "Monster-God of Mamurth."  Lovecraft's "The Nameless City" was published in an amateur periodical in 1921, but was not widely available until the 1930s.)  Hamilton includes a (mercifully brief) frame story--our narrator is a white trader in the North African desert, and one night an American archaeologist who is near death crawls into his camp.  The archaeologist luckily has the strength to take up the narration for fourteen of the story's sixteen pages, telling us how he stumbled on written evidence (an inscription on stone in Phoenician) of a previously unrecorded ancient city, and went there by himself, even though the people who wrote the inscription and all the Arabs he talked to strongly advised him to stay away.  At the ruined city he explored an invisible temple and had to fight for his life against an invisible monster, much like a spider the size of a horse, presumably the god worshiped by the city's long dead citizens.

Hamilton paces the story well, and the descriptions of dealing with an invisible building and an invisible enemy are good.  More action-oriented and less extravagantly written than your typical Lovecraft story; maybe we should call this one "Howard-like"--after all, the archaeologist escapes the multi-limbed god, and it is via an adrenaline-powered feat of desperate strength, not by using his noggin or some dusty old book!

"The Man Who Evolved" (1931)

I've already written about the second story in The Best of Edmond Hamilton, "The Man Who Evolved," so I'll be skipping it here.  I read it in Isaac Asimov's fun and interesting 1974 anthology Before the Golden Age.

"A Conquest of Two Worlds" (1932)

First appearing in Wonder Stories, "A Conquest of Two Worlds" would be reprinted 16 years later by Startling Stories, whose editors heralded it as a "Hall of Fame Classic"!  Then Donald Wollheim, the hero behind DAW books and so many other laudable (and a few questionable) SF projects, selected it in 1951 for his Every Boy's Book of Science Fiction.  Sounds like a must read!

"A Conquest of Two Worlds" is a sort of "future history" in 32 pages of Earth's expansion into the rest of the solar system, a history which, as Brackett tells us in her spoiler-rich introduction to the volume, is surprisingly "downbeat" and "realistic."  This story, Brackett relates, is a response to SF stories in which the Earthman is portrayed as having the right to take over other planets, which are universally inhabited by evil monsters.  In this story the people of Earth are portrayed as driven largely by emotionalism and greed, while the aliens are largely sympathetic.

The plot: Some egghead invents an atomic power source--atomic propulsion systems and energy weapons soon follow. The boffin takes a single trip to scout out the inner planets and Jupiter, then dies in a crash upon landing on Earth.  The people of Earth quickly form a sort of world government, build a fleet of atomic rockets, and send out expeditions to exploit the vast natural resources of Mars and Jupiter; in a series of episodes that recall events in the history of British exploration and imperialism in North America, Africa and elsewhere, the Earthmen trigger and prosecute tremendous wars against the stone-age Martian and Jovian natives!  Like American Indians, the Martian and Jovian populations are seriously diminished and the survivors end up on reservations!

Besides depicting Earth settlement of Mars and Jupiter as resulting in immoral wars, Hamilton keeps reminding us how dangerous space travel and exploration are with many mentions of rocket ship crashes and illness due to cosmic rays and extraterrestrial environmental conditions.  This is a story drenched in pessimism, and unrelieved by the idea that challenges excite humanity to noble deeds of heroism, and in this it reminds me of Hamilton's 1952 story "What's It Like Out There?", which I read four or five years ago, during the Iowa period of my life, having borrowed from a university library via interlibrary loan a number of books of Hamilton stories.  "What's It Like Out There?" appears in The Best of Edmond Hamilton and I will be rereading it as part of this series of posts on Hamilton and Brackett.    

Most of "A Conquest of Two Worlds" reads like an encyclopedia entry about a military campaign, but there are dimly realized characters whose careers are pegged to the campaigns to conquer Mars and Jupiter.  In the last dozen pages of the story one of these characters, 60 years before Kevin Costner would do it, 70 years before Tom Cruise would do it, and almost 80 years before whoever the hell is in Avatar would do it, turns against his modern and imperialistic people and culture to join the primitive Jovians and aid them in their doomed struggle against the Earth!

While it is interesting as a pioneering example of a revisionist anti-Western-imperialism story, "A Conquest of Two Worlds," because it is dry and the characters are flat, is not very entertaining, so I'm awarding it merely a passing grade of "Acceptable."

A PDF scan of the issue of Wonder Stories in which "A Conquest of Two Worlds" appeared is viewable at the internet archive.  There you can see the included illustration by Frank Paul (depicting a major spoiler), a portrait of Hamilton, and an editorial introduction that tells you the story is about the crimes of the white race and greedy businessmen (everywhere I look I'm finding spoilers for this story.)  But that's not all!  The owner of the magazine hand wrote one-line reviews on each story's first page, and while he or she gushes about Jack Williamson's "The Moon Era" (and check out Williamson's slick hairdo and cool spectacles!), "A Conquest of Two Worlds" gets panned as "timeworn" and "hackneyed."  Ouch!

"The Island of Unreason" (1933)

Another piece that appeared in Wonder Stories and was accorded "Hall of Fame" status by the people at Startling, who only waited twelve years to reprint this baby.  As I learned at isfdb, "The Island of Unreason" also appeared in a mysterious 1946 publication along with another Hamilton story, "Murder in the Clinic."  This odd little book, published in Ireland by London outfit Utopian Publications, was part of a British series of books and magazines of short fiction by American authors whose covers were adorned with drawings or photos of naked women.  While many of the stories are by legitimately popular and important SF authors like Robert Bloch, Jack Williamson, Clark Ashton Smith and Ray Bradbury, it is hard not to suspect that the real selling point of the books was their covers, most of which you can see at isfdb, should you be curious.

"The Island of Unreason" takes place in a socialistic technocratic future that fetishizes "reason," efficiency and cooperation, and condemns emotion and individuality.  When Allan Mann, Serial Number 2473R6, an engineer in City 72 (the future name of New York City--what kind of media bias is this?--NYC should be Number 1!) questions handing over the atomic motor plans he has been working on for two years to another engineer because he wants to finish the designs himself, he is charged with a breach of reason.  The authorities exile him for an undisclosed period to the Island of Unreason, where there is no government.  Now, I know all you Kmele Foster fans out there are thinking an island without government would be a paradise ("please don't throw me in that brier patch!"), but the inhabitants of this technocratic society, including Mann see a place without government as some kind of living hell!  The director of City 72 thinks by exposing Mann to life outside the paternal state will teach him how essential government really is ("cure" him of "unreasonable tendencies.")

Mann is dropped off on the island and, while initially horrified, quickly learns to cope without all-powerful government with the help of the "unreasonables" already there, who have a primitive village and a rough and ready sort of social order.  When his sentence is up and the government agents arrive to bring him back to City 72, he decides he'd rather stay on the island.

This is a better story than "A Conquest of Two Worlds" not just because I like anti-big government stories, but because it focuses more strongly on individual characters and presents more vivid pictures of societies.  It is actually amusing to watch Mann, a member of "the world's fiftieth generation of vegetarians" who is used to eating the "mushy pre-digested foods" rationed out by the government, sleeping in a government dormitory and having sex with women whom the "Eugenics Board" orders him to impregnate, respond and adapt to a world in which he has to eat fresh meat, sleep on the ground, and compete for sex partners because people get to choose who they have sex with based on their own far-from-logical preferences.

While I am contrasting them from a literary and entertainment point of view, I think we can see strong thematic similarities between "The Island of Unreason" and "A Conquest of Two Worlds."  Both feature a character deeply embedded in his society, an elite member of that society, in fact, who changes his mind about that society after being exposed to a different, less technologically advanced, society.  Both also evince a level of skepticism about modernity and progress and make an argument that a concern for material well-being can lead a society to abandon traditional morality and compromise people's freedom to an atrocious degree.

Good.

"Thundering Worlds" (1934)

Back in March we read the story from this issue
attributed to Heald, a collaboration with
H. P. Lovecraft

Over the course of this blog's life we've seen a range of types of stories from Edmond Hamilton: mad scientist stories, stories about evolution, today a weird lost city story and two nakedly political stories expressing views about Western imperialism and the role of the state in our lives.  But Hamilton is perhaps most famous for his epics about interstellar warfare conceived on the grandest possible scale with the highest possible stakes, wars in which civilizations maneuver the very planets and stars like so many aircraft carriers and battering rams as they seek to avert or inflict genocide. "Thundering Worlds," first seen in Weird Tales, is just such a story.  I read "Thundering Worlds" during the same period in which I read "What's It Like Out There?", but I have no compunctions about reading it again.

It is the far future, and the human race has colonized all nine planets, and the system is ruled by a council consisting of the leaders of each of the nine worlds.  Our narrator is the top official of Mercury, and as the story begins he describes how mankind is under a terrible threat--Sol is cooling off and the nine planets will soon be uninhabitable! The solution to this crisis is to construct atomic thrusters of mind-boggling size on each of the nine planets and then drive them like huge ships across the black void of interstellar space to a new sun!

The Mercurian's narrative relates how the nine planets go from one star to another, looking for a home.  One star produces radiation that is deadly to human life (radiation looms large in Hamilton's oeuvre), while another star system is inhabited by hostile aliens, and a terrible space naval battle between swarms of human and alien craft results.  By some terrible coincidence, these aliens (amoeba people) live in a star system whose sun is about to go nova, so they have the idea of hijacking the solar planets to escape certain doom.  When the Solar space navy repels their invasion, the amoeba people construct their own colossal atomic engines and the nine solar planets are soon pursued by four amoeba planets!

When the human migrants finally find a suitable star to orbit their worlds around, a showdown with the amoeba people is inevitable.  The narrator decides that Mercury will make the ultimate sacrifice--all the Mercurians evacuate their little world and then the narrator rams it into the lead amoeba planet, causing a five-planet pileup that wipes out the amoeba race and leaves us humans masters of all we survey!  Go Earth!

This is a fun story.  The first-person narration and a sort of rivalry between the narrator and the rulers of Pluto and Jupiter means it doesn't fall into the trap of sounding like a dry encyclopedia article that "A Conquest of Two Worlds" does.  I'm a little surprised "Thundering Worlds" hasn't been reprinted more often; maybe its lack of social or political commentary made it less attractive to editors.

**********

All worthwhile reads by World Wrecker Hamilton, and pleasantly diverse in their subject matter and tone.  In our next episode we start The Best of Leigh Brackett with three of her stories from the 1940s.

Four stories by Ross Rocklynne

In our last episode I read James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Milk of Paradise" from my copy of Harlan Ellison's 1972 anthology Again, Dangerous Visions.  I noticed a story in the volume by Ross Rocklynne, a writer I'd not yet read anything by, and decided to give him a whirl.  A quick look through my bookshelves and online yielded three additional stories by Rocklynne to serve as my introduction to his oeuvre.

"Escape Through Space" (1938)

Every story scientifically accurate

"Escape Through Space" was published in Amazing Stories; like I did, you can read it for free at the SFFaudio PDF page, which archives a scan of the original magazine's pages, including an illustration and a brief autobiography of Ohio-native Rocklynne.

This is a brief and sciency tale, but it also has political content, exhibiting the old level-headed American attitude that monarchy is stupid and socialism is evil.  Mankind has colonized the solar system, and such is man's hubris that the first pioneers on each planet and moon set themselves up as kings and queens!  As time has gone by, though, these monarchies have been getting overthrown and replaced with republics.  The latest revolution has been on Mars, where the revolutionaries are socialists and have killed all the aristocrats and royals with one exception, the Princess Helen.

American Larry Sharon is a young man of business, the youngest buyer at an import-export firm.  He is sent by his boss to the new Martian republic to negotiate a deal for some "tritonite."  On Mars, where Sharon witnesses signs that the socialists have been committing atrocities, he meets a high level official, who offers him a special job: ferrying the Princess Helen to Earth!  The revolutionaries can't just kill her in cold blood for fear of causing an interplanetary diplomatic outcry, but of course having her hanging around just encourages counter revolutionaries, so she has got to go.

Sharon doesn't trust the commies, especially when they stipulate that he not fly his own ship back to Earth but a clunky old rocket--they say it will be less likely to attract notice from bitter extremists eager to murder the Princess!  Of course, the new Martian government is giving him a slow ship so they can catch up to him and blow him and the Princess away far from any witnesses in the black void between the planets.

But Sharon has an ace up his sleeve.  He steals a march on the pursuing Reds by flying very close to the sun, within the "Boiling Zone" that, in normal circumstances, would destroy a ship.  He pulls this off by hitching a ride on a passing comet, using it as a parasol against the sun's rays!  Sharon gets to Earth with the cash money paid to him by the Martian bolshies, and the icing on the cake is that the gorgeous Princess has fallen in love with him--after a lifetime spent among effete aristos and diabolical commies, how could she fail to fall in love with an honest-to-goodness blue-eyed Irish-American hunk?  Another triumph for democracy!

Entertaining.

"The Men and the Mirror" (1938)

This story was first published in Astounding; I read it in my copy of Isaac Asimov's Before the Golden Age--it is the last story in that anthology. "The Men and the Mirror" is the third of Rocklynne's series of three stories about Lieutenant John Colbie of the Interplanetary Police Force and his pursuit across the solar system of a clever criminal, Edward Deverel.  In each story the 23rd-century gumshoe finds himself in what Asimov calls a "dilemma involving the laws of physics," and Asimov assures us that this tale is the best of them.

Using a disguise, Deverel has escaped the Terran base on Jupiter and Colbie pursues him to a rogue planet that has entered the solar system near the orbit of Neptune (these old stories are full of rogue stars and planets wandering into our precious solar system; we need to build a wall or something.)  On the surface of this interloping heavenly body is a huge circular mirror, like 3,500 miles in circumference, with an albedo approaching 1!  No doubt this was built by a vanished race far in advance of our own, a race of people determined to put our domestic mirror industry out of business!  The Terran Federation of Glaziers is sure to demand protective tariffs after it hears about this!

Deverel, though a pirate and a thief, fucking loves science as much as the next guy, so Colbie knows to search for him near the mysterious mirror, an engineering feat unique in the experience of humankind.  When he catches up to the pirate the two become friends (!) and decide to examine the mirror together.  They accidentally fall onto the frictionless concave surface of the alien mirror, and for 14 (fourteen!) pages slide back and forth within the bowl, trying to figure out how to get out!  Then comes the explanation of how they escaped, with sentences like this: "At the Earth's pole the plane of vibration of a pendulum turns around once every twenty-four hours, in a direction opposite to that at which the Earth rotates."

(I love to go to science museums to look at the dinosaurs, but I've never been able to really grok the pendulums they often have at these museums that, I guess, prove that the Earth rotates or something.)

Because they are now friends, Colbie lets Deverel get away, which gives me a chance to fling out one of my favorite public policy cliches: "mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."

"The Men and the Mirror" is an extreme example of the classic science fiction story which is about science and which shows the protagonist resolving the plot by using his knowledge of science and his ability to do complicated math (even without paper or slide rule, in this case).  I have to say that I am considering this story more a curious artifact than an entertaining--much less compelling--piece of fiction.  

"Cosmic Yo-Yo" (1945)

Here's another story I read at the SFFaudio PDF page, in a facsimile of its original appearance in the pages of Planet Stories.

Bob Parker and Quentin Zuyler are in the business of delivering asteroids to the estates of wealthy Earthlings for use as colossal lawn ornaments.  They have been hired to bring back a particular asteroid, but when they find it they face a problem: It is already in the hands of a beautiful young woman spacefarer, Starre Lowenthal, a rich girl with a spaceship shaped like a dumbbell. This problem is solved when a rival asteroid hauling firm attacks them, leaving all three of them for dead and seizing the valuable asteroid for themselves.

Starre has the presence of mind necessary to save them from death in the utterly cold darkness of space, and then Bob uses his knowledge of science to get their asteroid back.  It is illegal for asteroid hauling ships to mount heavy weapons, but Bob has Quentin attach Starre's ship to their hauler with a chain so the dumbbell-shaped vessel can be propelled and retrieved like a yo-yo.  Our heroes smash the rival firm's ship with the yo-yo and retrieve the asteroid.

An equally contrived bit of scientific shenanigans overcomes the objections of Starre's family to Bob and Starre getting hitched.

Like that of "Escape Through Space," the plot of "Cosmic Yo-Yo" relies on some pretty unlikely coincidences to work, but feels even more contrived and gimmicky. Merely acceptable.        

"Ching-Witch" (1972)

Finally we get to the story from Again, Dangerous Visions.  In his intro, Ellison laments the feud between the "old and new waves," which he thinks is ridiculous. One of the problems caused by this nonsensical dispute is that it has discouraged some older writers from producing new work; Ellison suggests these skittish scribblers look upon Rocklynne as an encouraging example of a writer from SF's formative years who is up to the task of producing valuable new work in the post-New Wave environment.

I found "Ching-Witch" difficult to get into; it feels long and tedious, listless and quite dated, and my eyes kept glazing over as I read it.  It is, I guess, a sort of sarcastic homage or gentle satire of youth culture and those SF stories that contrast a utopia with our crummy and violent Earth society--in his afterword Rocklynne informs us that the story was inspired by a ten-day visit to Haight-Ashbury in 1966.

For over a century, the war torn Earth has prevented travel and communication with the human colony on Zephyrus, where everybody is noble and peaceful.  Captain Ratch Chug, a product of genetic engineering (he's 80% human and 20% feline) realizes the wars on Earth are about to blow up the planet, and escapes just in time, to Zephyrus.  He finds himself worshipped by the teenagers there, and teaches them Earth dances and Earth slang.  After a few years the Zephyruans realize Earth has been destroyed and Chug has been lying to them, and they reveal their true nature, which is almost as hateful and violent as that of Earthlings.  Chug has to move to yet another planet to avoid being lynched.

Bad.

**********

These stories are quite characteristic of the type or sub-genres of SF they represent (the hard SF adventure in which the hero uses his engineering and science knowledge to overcome danger and get the girl; the science puzzle story; and the jocular New Wave story situated within the youth culture), but they are far from the most entertaining or most well-crafted specimens of those sub-genres.  They aren't well-paced or well-plotted and they lack human feeling or engaging characters.

I own the Ace Double which includes Rocklynne's collection The Sun Destroyers, but, even though Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison have praised its stories, my experience reading these four pieces today has not inspired much enthusiasm for cracking it open.

The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess

'What I was told made me very unwell.  I don't get my promotion.  My father's philoprogenitiveness disqualifies me.  And my own heterosexuality.'

My copy, front. Focus: cannibalism, 
terror, mind control (?)

Well, we just reread Barry Malzberg's "Culture Lock," a 1973 story about an authoritarian government which promotes homosexuality, now let's take a look at Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel The Wanting Seed, which also features an overbearing government determined to limit heterosexual sex.  I own a paperback copy from Ballantine, printed in 1970.

Beatrice-Joanna Foxe is a romantic, an atavist, an Anglo-Saxon heterosexual in a multi-ethnic future London of hundred-story tall skyscrapers, capital of a socialistic Britain dominated by gay men and eunuchs.  Beatrice-Joanna has a voluptuous body, even though skinny girls are in fashion.  She wants to be a mother even though reproduction is considered declasse by most members of her (middle) class ("Leave motherhood to the lower orders," she is told by a government bureaucrat, "like nature intended.")  She believes in God even though she has never seen a Bible and religion has been largely suppressed.  And despite all the government propaganda pushing homosexuality, she has an insatiable desire for men, while such common sights as that of lesbians kissing and of perfumed men applying lipstick make her retch.

Part One of the 223-page novel chronicles a single, terrible day in the rocky marriage of Beatrice-Joanna and her husband, Tristram.  Tristram is a teacher of history, who, after completing the day's lecturing (Burgess uses the lecture to key us in to the novel's background and themes) is told that a gay man has been given a promotion Tristram himself was in line for because of Tristram's disfavored sexual orientation and because research indicated Tristram's parents had a shockingly large number of children (four.)  For ages all government policy has been aimed at discouraging reproduction, but as the level of population threatens to overwhelm the ability of the Ministry of Agriculture to produce enough food to feed everyone, even on short rations, the authorities are cracking down harder than ever.

That very same day Beatrice-Joanna learns their infant son has died--public officials assure her it is for the best: "Think of this in national terms, in global terms.  One mouth less to feed."  While Tristram takes to a bar to look for comfort for the loss of his promotion in the bottom of a glass, his wife is comforted by Tristram's brother Derek.  Derek, in reality a virile heterosexual who has been cuckolding Tristram behind his back, has for many years been putting on an extravagant and convincing imitation of a gay man in order to get ahead.  And get ahead he does!  When, as part of the crackdown, a new police force (the "Population Police") is formed, Derek is made its Commissioner!

First edition, focus: skyscrapers
 and/or bar charts (?) 

People who talk about politics often use the metaphor of a pendulum to describe how one political faction or ideology's rule is inevitably followed by rule by its opposite.  The topic of Tristram's lecture to his uncomprehending students is the similar idea that history works in a cycle of three stages, a "Pelagian Phase," an "Intermediate Phase," and then an "Augustinian Phase."  Poor Tristram and Beatrice-Joanna are living through an Intermediate Phase, when the Pelagian government, which believed in the perfectibility of man, is disappointed to find man is not as tractable as supposed, and turns to harsh measures (like the Population Police) to get the populace to behave.

(I'm not sure if we are supposed to take this cyclical theory seriously, or Burgess means it as a satire of mechanical Marxist and Whiggish theories that argue history is a kind of inevitable journey through various stages to a particular end point.)

In Part Two Beatrice-Joanna flees London for the countryside after discovering that she was impregnated (by Derek or Tristram, she is not sure) on the day her first child and Tristram's career hopes died.  At State Farm NW313 she reunites with her sister Mavis and Mavis's husband Shonny, a man of unshakeable (or so it seems!) religious faith.  For his part, Tristram gets mixed up in a street fight between striking workers (their gripe: rations have been cut again!) and the grey clad regular police and is tossed in prison.

In Part Three we briefly meet the Prime Minister, Robert Starling, and his catamite, Abdul Wahab.  Starling is under terrible stress because a worldwide famine is leading to starvation and even cannibalism, and there seems to be no solution to the problem.  Little Wahab is a Muslim and his naive (or is it cunning?) talk about the efficacy of prayer starts a chain of events in the government that leads to a lifting of prohibitions on religion.  While Beatrice-Joanna is secretly giving birth to twins in an abandoned outbuilding on State Farm NW313 and underground clergymen are emerging from obscurity, Tristram, with the help of a Nigerian murderer and cannibal, escapes from prison.

An earlier Ballantine, focus:
reproduction

Part Four follows Tristram as he leaves London and heads for State Farm NW313, he having learned his wife is there.  The Starling government has collapsed (political and social changes happen with bewildering speed in this book, which is more of a satire than a realistic "what if" scenario) and rail service has ended, making Tristram's journey a slow one.  The police have been driven from the countryside by the populace, many of them killed and eaten!  The resulting anarchy is not depicted by Burgess as a dangerous chaos but as a rebirth of freedom and human decency: after centuries of anti-pregnancy and pro-homosexual propaganda and policy, the English people have fervently returned to their natural inclinations and engage in unashamed public heterosexual sex.  Private enterprise is starting up again, and, with the cessation of television broadcasts, people are creating their own entertainment--amateur theatricals, parades, music made with old-fashioned instruments.  (Where the old government TV shows glamorized gay relationships and denigrated reproduction, these new amateur productions unabashedly take heterosexual sex as their theme.)  Everyone is eager to help Tristram reach his wife and he is provided food and lifts from town to town. "When the State withers," a musician explains to Tristram, "humanity flowers."  Tristram interprets these changes as the end of the "Interphase" and start of the "Augustinian Phase."  

Another aspect of an Augustinian Phase is militarism, and before he can get to his wife, Tristram finds himself shanghaied into the newly reactivated British Army!  Part Five of The Wanting Seed is set a year into the new regime, that of George Ockham--all that anarchy only lasted a few days.  While Beatrice-Joanna and the twins live in luxury (the new capitalist economy has improved living standards) with Derek (who has cast off his old nancy boy pose with the change in regime), Tristram, a sergeant, acts as an instructor to low-I.Q. privates, and then finds himself sailing off on a campaign.  But, as the back cover blurbs of my copy warn you, the war is a sham: there is no war, and Tristram's platoon of dolts is simply murdered--this is the Augustinian government's solution to the overpopulation problem, to recruit the criminal and stupid and execute them, claiming they died defending their country.

In an epilogue, having survived the murder of his comrades, Tristram makes his way back to England and is reunited with Beatrice-Joanna.  He also theorizes that the Augustinian period will not last long; soon the inevitable historical cycle will begin again.

My copy, back

There is a lot of stuff going on in The Wanting Seed; Burgess addresses many topics.  The text on the covers of my copy proclaim the book a "NOVEL OF THE POPULATION BOMB," that is "TERRIFYING," "SHOCKING,"and "HAIR-RAISING."  I am going to have to disagree with Saturday Review and Newsweek; except for a few scenes, the tone of The Wanting Seed is jocular, and ofttimes feels broad and farcical.  As a satire rather than something realistic the book's characters and situations do not feel "real" and do not inspire deep feelings.  The potentially terrifying scenes, like the cannibalism and the massacre of Tristram's platoon, are heavily foreshadowed, so they are not "shocking," and are accompanied with absurd jokes, so they are not "hair-raising."

As for being a novel about overpopulation, I didn't feel that Burgess was putting a whole lot of effort into developing an atmosphere of claustrophobia or impending doom, of describing how horribly overcrowded London was.  It seemed to me that he was using overpopulation as an excuse to present his caricatures of Pelagian (leftist) and Augustinian (right wing) government, the former stifling people's freedom and natural inclinations and the latter indulging in gross violence and weeding society's losers out of the gene pool.

What I found more compelling than the overpopulation and strictly political themes was the novel's focus on love; as I read it, The Wanting Seed struck me as a celebration of heterosexual love, the kind of love that leads to the creation of children, the kind of love sanctioned and promoted by Christianity.  I suppose I was primed to find such a theme in The Wanting Seed by my memories of A Clockwork Orange, published the same year as The Wanting Seed.  In the final chapter of the original version of A Clockwork Orange (not the truncated American edition upon which Kubrick's film was based), Alex, after efforts of an overbearing and intrusive government have failed to reform him, is reformed by his own desire to have a child.

A recent printing, focus: comedy

The names of the The Wanting Seed's two main characters, taken from those two great medieval stories of love, the carnal tale of Tristan and Isolde and Dante's autobiographical descriptions of his chaste love for Beatrice in La Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy, point us in the direction of seeing the novel as primarily about Christian heterosexual love.  The novel's plot is driven by Beatrice-Joanna's sexual lust and her desire for children, and Tristram's jealous and then forgiving love for his wife.  Children play a prominent role throughout the story.  Burgess also contrasts heterosexuals and homosexuals, exhibiting plenty of sympathy for the straight characters and their desires, and no sympathy at all for the gay characters, who are portrayed as disgusting and are repudiated, violently, by the common people.

While many of the religious characters in the book were silly or flawed, I still felt like Burgess was trying to put across a positive view of religion.  Tristram, for example, follows a sort of Christian journey, learning to forgive his wife and to resist the (initially powerful) temptation to pursue revenge against his brother.  The atheist characters in the story are not confident in their lack of faith, falling back into religiosity on slight pretexts, while, given the chance, the mass of people quickly reassert their belief in God, in the same way they enthusiastically embrace straight sex as soon as the Pelagian government falls.  Burgess seems to suggest that a belief in God is as natural and irrepressible as physical desire for the opposite sex, that both are healthy urges that centuries of propaganda cannot extirpate.    

The Wanting Seed apparently got good reviews when it first appeared, but if it was published in our 21st century I suspect the author would be at risk of being dragged before a court for the Michel Houellebecq / Mark Steyn treatment, not only for its portrayal of gays but for its attitudes about race.  In the first dozen pages, as Beatrice-Joanna looks at a multiracial crowd, she reflects thusly:

Was it, she thought in an instant almost of prophetic power, to be left to her and the few indisputable Anglo-Saxons like her to restore sanity and dignity to the mongrel world?  Her race, she seemed to remember, had done it before.

As the novel presents heterosexuality as superior to homosexuality, and the pervasiveness of "homos" in Pelagian Britain as a source of disgust or horror, so too, I think, it presents the "native" British people as superior to the Africans and Asians who now make up the lion's share of London's population, and, as with gays and lesbians, suggests that the prevalence of nonwhites is a sign of an unnatural, unhealthy, cultural deviation.  The widespread, government-sanctioned cannibalism of the Augustinian period, for example, is closely associated with non-white people--a cross-eyed "Mongol" at the labor strike voices his desire to have the police put in a stew pot, there is the aforementioned murderous Nigerian whom Tristram meets in prison, and when Tristram is in the army the soldiers' rations, he finds, are human flesh imported from China.  While white British people and the government do embrace cannibalism, Burgess seems to be trying to suggest that it is a fundamentally alien practice, a foreign perversion which has infected the people of the sceptred isle.

I would expect many people nowadays to find The Wanting Seed's points of view reprehensible, and I have already suggested that it is too satirical for my tastes, that it did not elicit an emotional response from me.  But the novel has its virtues and I am still happy to give it the old thumbs up--it is amusing and interesting.

The final page of my copy
advertises three Burgess novels, all of
which I have read and can recommend

Burgess's style is smooth and easy to follow, and the jokes, particularly the dialogue of minor characters like school-age children and Tristram's guard at prison, are actually funny.  At the same time, Burgess rewards the educated reader (and the reader willing to educate himself by typing things into google.)  Burgess challenges you to figure out exactly what he is getting at with his cyclical theory of history, either expects you to know or to look up such esoteric words as "bathycolpous," "strabismus," and "flavicomous," and fills his text with copious literary and historical allusions of varying degrees of subtlety.  I doubtlessly missed many of them, but it is fun when you do catch such references, when Burgess's erudition overlaps your own; as a reader of Boswell and Johnson, my ears perked up when Tristram entered Lichfield, for example.  A few times I felt that Burgess was giving a shout out to science fiction readers: The Wanting Seed has many minor characters, characters who are only mentioned once, and Burgess seems to have deliberately named some of these individuals after important SF writers--an Aldiss, an Asimov, and a Heinlein all show up.
   
Not a great novel, and not the shocking horror show advertised, but a good novel, readable, thought-provoking and entertaining.