1968 stories by Burt Filer, E. G. Von Wald, Colin Kapp, Sydney Van Scyoc & Laurence Yep

Let's continue to explore World's Best Science Fiction 1969, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and adorned with a terrific cover by John Schoenherr and 21 fun illustrations by Jack Gaughan.  Today we're reading stories by authors whose work I have never read before!

"Backtracked" by Burt Filer

This is a solid story that first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  isfdb lists a dozen stories by Filer, but this is the first story by him I have read.

The premise of the story is a little gimmicky, but it works.  In the near future people can travel back in time and "replace" their earlier selves--you go to sleep in, say, 1968 as a 20-year old, and wake up the next morning in the body of yourself as a 25-year old--in 1973 you must have decided to backtrack to this date.  The big catch is that you lose all the memories you accumulated in those five years.  Why would anybody do this?  To prevent (and/or to forget) some terrible event.

The character in the story is a weak cripple (he was born with polio) with a beautiful wife.  He wakes up one morning in a body ten years older, but very strong, very athletic--he must have spent ten years exercising before backtracking!  Later that day his wife is threatened with death in an accident--our protagonist requires all his  newfound strength and agility to save her life.  He sacrificed ten years of his life to save his wife's, but was it worth it?

An effective and entertaining story, even though the premise probably doesn't make much sense if you think about it.

"HEMEAC" by E. G. Von Wald

Von Wald has eleven stories listed on isfdb.  This one first appeared in Galaxy.

In a post-apocalyptic future order is maintained within the walls of a university by the robots and computers who run the institution.  These machines rigidly control every aspect of the lives of the "students" who have lived within the university for decades and are horrified of the chaos that they are told reigns outside the university grounds. We follow a day in the life of one of these students as he struggles to follow the exact and multifarious dictates of the machines.  But this is no ordinary day--satisfying the machines and avoiding punishment (banishment outside the campus) has become increasingly difficult as the machines deteriorate and malfunction and issue increasingly contradictory and arbitrary commands.  As the story progresses we learn how this bizarre milieu came about, and witness its final collapse.  Will the students welcome the deactivation of their computer masters as a liberation and embrace their freedom, or have they been turned into Big Brother-loving flesh robots fit only to obey?

I'm going to have to give this story a borderline thumbs down.  It is more like the description of a setting than an actual story, and feels longer than it need be to achieve its modest goals.  The ending is more anticlimactic than surprising, and I didn't feel for the characters or laugh at the jokes.  It is possible the story is a satire of academia, a complaint that colleges don't teach kids how to think but instead enforce an intellectual orthodoxy, but if this was Von Wald's intention he or she was too subtle.    

"The Cloudbuilders" by Colin Kapp  

There is a long tradition of science fiction stories which glorify scientists and engineers, and which try to teach you some kind of science stuff.  There are also plenty of science fiction stories which advocate that a small elite of smart people manipulate society so it evolves in the "right" direction.  In "The Cloudbuilders" we get both of these elements.

Europe, many years after some apocalypse, has a sort of Medieval/Renaissance level society, with no electricity or petroleum products or gunpowder.  The hot air balloon powered by methane is cutting edge technology.  (The great monotheistic religions have also been forgotten, and people in the story invoke Zeus, Aphrodite, and other classical deities.)

Jacobi is a member of a Guild with access to artifacts of "the age of miracles," radios for example, which they keep secret from the ordinary populace.  He travels from Guild HQ in a large city to a remote village where lives one of the most intelligent and ambitious of balloon makers, Timor.  Jacobi's mission is to help Timor develop the hydrogen balloon--the Guild's long term objective is to reintroduce high technology to the world, but at a measured pace which they control.  Timor's beautiful daughter becomes Jacobi's lover; she acts as a spy, hoping to get Guild secrets she can pass on to her father.

A major obstacle to Jacobi and Timor's objectives are raiders who have over a hundred balloon vessels and periodically attack Timor's settlement.  Jacobi uses his superior technical knowledge and trickery to sabotage the sky pirates' ships and exterminate them.  This reminded me of one of the early stories of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, in which the Foundation sells faulty space warships to some barbarians.  The Guild in "The Cloudbuilders"is really quite similar to Asimov's Foundation.

I'm afraid this story is getting a marginal negative vote.  It feels long and boring, with a bland style and lots of superfluous description of technical matters and other extraneous topics.  Kapp tries to make a tragic figure out of Jacobi, telling us that he is lonely because he is two centuries of education above everybody else and melodramatically showing us how he is selflessly devoting his life to the good of humanity by making himself the dictator of Europe, but it didn't work on me.  One of my pet peeves is having to listen to mothers and school teachers moan about how they are doing the most important job in the world but not getting the recognition and remuneration they deserve ("I give and I give!")--they chose jobs which essentially consist of dominating vulnerable people, but are always trying to convince you they are the victims, not the people they are ordering around and yelling at all day.  "The Cloudbuilders" gave me that same feeling whenever Kapp took a break from teaching me how to manufacture hydrogen or methane or coke and tried to do a little characterization.

Kapp has quite a few books and stories to his credit.  Maybe I'll buy the DAW editions of his Cageworld series if I ever see them; apparently they co-star a sexy girl with grey skin.  "The Cloudbuilders" first appeared in the anthology New Writings in SF 12 and is the title story of an anthology produced by the fun people at Ramble House in 2013.  

"A Visit to Cleveland General" by Sydney Van Scyoc

This story is about maternalistic tyranny--now here is something I can sink my teeth into!

Albin Johns is a young journalist. His mother is constantly nagging and guilt-tripping him via the video phone which covers one wall of his home--in this dystopian future you can't refuse or ignore calls!  Of course Mom thinks she is helping him by constantly telling him what to do, and of course she thinks she is the injured party.  ("'I'm doing everything a mother can,' his mother moaned.")

Every morning John takes pills; he thinks the pills are to aid his memory because he suffered injuries in a vehicular accident which killed his brother, but in reality the pills inhibit his memories of the traumatic accident--sometimes he not only forgets he was hurt in the accident, or that there was an accident, but even that he had a brother!

Johns's first big journalistic assignment is today; he has been put on the hospital beat. (His paper has a regular column about the local hospitals.)  At the hospital he is given a tour by the assertive veteran "senior social worker," Miss Kling, who "remembers vividly the day when doctors maintained private practices...."  Johns finds that this woman unilaterally runs the lives of the patients who come into her care.  In the maternity ward, for example, Kling decides which pregnant women will give birth, which will get abortions, which will put their offspring up for adoption and which will be sterilized.  She takes babies from women she judges unworthy and gives them to other more respectable women.  The patients have no say in the matter, and Kling uses drugs which blot out memory and her own skills of persuasion to give patients illusions that comfort them and conceal Kling's shenanigans.  Mothers whose children have been seized believe their babies have died, while those who suffered miscarriages are fooled into thinking the babies they leave with are their own biological offspring.

One of Johns's colleagues at the paper tells him today's medical system is an improvement over the old days, when people suffered fear and uncertainty.  At the end of the story we realize that the hospital staff (Kling herself, perhaps) writes the newspaper's regular column, which always lionizes the hospital, and uses memory drugs to make journalists think they wrote it.  A lucky mistake made by Kling briefly clears Johns's memory and we learn the truth of his and his brother's air car accident and their recovery in this very hospital.

A fairly good story about how people with power have contempt for you and love telling you how to live your life, and have little trouble convincing themselves they are controlling you for your own good.  "A Visit to Cleveland General" also has a pretty good horror story structure and horror elements.  "A Visit to Cleveland General" first appeared in Galaxy. Van Scyoc has a pretty extensive oeuvre; maybe I should check out more of her work.

"The Selchey Kids" by Laurence Yep

I think this is Yep's first published story; it appeared in Worlds of If. Yep seems to have achieved considerable success as a writer of fantasy trilogies for teens later in his career.

Our narrator Deucalion ("Duke"), ostensibly the son of marine scientists, is one of the few survivors of the cataclysm that saw California sink beneath the waves. After growing into maturity and getting an English degree in flyover country, where he misses the ocean ("I hated every moment of it....I grew up among the corn and wheat fields like a strong weed") he returned to the West Coast to work with a team of marine biologists who knew his parents.  Their leader is a Noe Selchey, and one prominent member is Pryn, an attractive young woman who can read minds.  These scientists have been training two dolphins, Ossie and Ollie, to speak English--they already have vocabularies of ten words!

Duke, Pryn, Ossie and Ollie go on a salvage mission, diving into the submerged city where Duke's parents had their lab.  Examining records from a water tight compartment, Duke realizes his parents were not his parents at all--he is the result of a genetic experiment in which a human sperm (Noe Selchey's!) fertilized a dolphin ovum (Ossie and Ollie's mother's!)  Things get crazier still when Duke has to fight a monster to the death to save Pryn, and it turns out the monster is another one of his half-brothers, the product of Selchey's sperm fertilizing the egg of a giant octopus!

I like the plot and structure of this story, but I think Yep overdoes the angst a little bit (Duke is always trying to commit suicide, for example) and the metaphors and similes; on the first page we get  "Sand grips my back like a myriad of stars moving down my spine.  The sun comes up on tiptoe beneath the sun-burnt clouds and wine-stained sky."  Yep's excuse is that Duke is an English major and failed writer, but I don't think the depression stuff or the purple prose adds to the story.  Still, I give "The Selchey Kids" a lukewarm recommendation.

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None of these stories is abysmal; even the ones I gave a thumbs down to are worth reading and have some good elements.  World's Best Science Fiction 1969 seems like a strong collection so far, and I still haven't read the stories by big league writers Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, Brian Aldiss and Fritz Leiber.

Three 1970s stories by Gene Wolfe: "Civis Laputus Sum," "The Recording" & "Morning-Glory"

I've said before that Gene Wolfe is my favorite writer, but there is a large proportion of his vast body of work which I have yet to read.   This weekend I flipped through my 1995 Orb edition of the 1988 collection Storeys from the Old Hotel and read three stories that were new to me; I read them in random order, but all turned out to have been published in the 1970s.

"Civis Laputus Sum" (1975)

This is a terrific story full of striking images, literary allusions (to Swift, Pound, Bradbury and Melville), science fiction ideas, human feeling and surprises.  It may also be a criticism of 20th century colleges and universities where, far too often, the tail (athletics) wags the dog (academics.)  Awesome!

British edition of Dystopian Visions

As with many Wolfe stories, this is a first-person narrative that is difficult or impossible to understand until we've read most or all of it, as Wolfe doles out the clues slowly instead of just describing the setting and background at the beginning.  Here is what (I think) is going on (remember MPorcius Fiction Log's spoiler policy!):  A scientific project to solve the problem of air pollution backfired fifteen years ago, covering the Earth in impenetrable cloud that eventually wrecked human civilization.  Recently developed anti-gravity machines were used to send aloft a number of flying islands (the title of the story refers to the flying island in Gulliver's Travels) upon which people could live above the clouds.  The flying island on which this eight-page story takes place is, or was, a university, with both a library and a stadium and a population of both academics and athletes.

Some time ago the athletes, who effortlessly bully the professors and grad students, burned the books in the fiction section of the library so they could use that room as a basketball court.  The bookish types have preserved the great American novel, Moby Dick, by memorizing it.

Like their island, which is listing dangerously as the anti-grav devices begin to fail, the people of the island are slowly becoming decrepit with age.  The plot of the story concerns an athlete who is becoming too old to pull his weight on the sports field.  He wants to start participating in the academics' readings and dramatic productions.  Will the booklovers accept him, or see this as an opportunity to achieve their revenge on one of the book burners?

Very, very good.  "Civis Laputus Sum" first appeared in Roger Elwood's anthology Dystopian Visions as "Civis Lapvtvs Svm," which all you classicists out there know is better classical Latin (our heroes Cato and Cicero had to struggle through their tragic lives without a "u.")

"The Recording" (1972)

This is a quite short (four pages in this edition) story about, I think, human greed and indifference, in the form of an old man's reminiscence of an event in his childhood "in those dear, dead days of Model A Ford touring cars, horse-drawn milk trucks, and hand-cranked ice cream freezers."  The narrator was fascinated by his parents' phonograph, but his parents would not allow him to handle the fragile records, so he wanted his own.  A fat uncle walks him downtown to buy such a record on a hot day, but this uncle falls ill and sits down to rest, telling the narrator to go get his doctor. The nephew agrees to get the doctor only if his uncle will first give him the money promised for the phonograph record!  Our narrator buys the record, and when he gets back to his uncle (without bothering to bring the doctor!), his uncle has died.  The child hides the record, and it is not until fifty years later, after his parents have died and he has long forgotten the title of the record, that he recovers the disk from its hiding place and listens to it.

The song on the record, Rudy Vallee's "My Time is Your Time," which I listened to on youtube, is presumably some kind of punchline.  I'm guessing that the punchline is that the narrator, who admits to having medical problems, is going to die soon, perhaps from the effort of retrieving the record (his doctor told him not to climb stairs, but he had to do so to get the record, and the climb lead to chest pains), perhaps at the same age his uncle died.

I enjoyed the story for Wolfe's vivid economical descriptions, and the dreadful central surprise, but wonder if perhaps I am missing something.  I tracked down one clue: As a little boy the narrator wore a French sailor suit including a cap with the word Indomptable emblazoned on it; one ship of that name was repeatedly defeated by the British during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and then was wrecked in a storm, while a later Indomptable was scuttled during the Second World War.  Presumably this is linked to the fact that our narrator admits to being a failure in life, and perhaps indicates he is bound for an unhappy death.

The fact that the word "time" is prominent in the song title, and that we are told the narrator, his father, and his uncles, all strongly resemble the narrator's grandfather, put me on the lookout for clues that the story was somehow about time travel (maybe that they were all the same guy like in a Heinlein story), but I couldn't find any further time travel clues.

"The Recording" was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

"Morning-Glory" (1970)

This one first appeared in Alchemy & Academe, apparently an anthology of stories about the relationships between wizards and their apprentices edited by Anne McCaffery of Pern fame.

Of the three Wolfe stories I read this weekend this was the least interesting and most conventional.  In the pessimistic world of the 1970s, a world of air pollution and nuclear proliferation, a college professor is conducting experiments on the "paraintelligence" of plants.  He has a bunch of vines, and encloess them inside plastic mazes; as the plants grow the vines come to intersections in the maze and have to "choose" which way to go; "smarter" vines will learn to devote growth to more brightly lit paths and let shoots in dim tunnels wither.  A student suggests that the plants are analogous to entire societies, and the scientist has a brainwave--maybe he can figure out a way to convince the human race to stop going down metaphorical dark tunnels, like polluting and risking nuclear war.  He decides to devote the rest of his life to this effort, enlisting in this quest the help of grad students looking for a thesis topic.

The story seems longer than necessary, with scenes about the scientist's psychology including descriptions of his dreams, a visit to the shrink, and anecdotes about his father.  This makes sense because the main character is a psychologist (a Watsonian behaviorist, we are told) but I didn't find it added much to the story.  Maybe all this additional information is supposed to make us skeptical of the protagonist's motives, because it reminds us of the callous "Little Albert" experiment and exposes the main character as deceitful (he habitually lies to his shrink.)  Maybe Wolfe is trying to tell us that some lone egghead manipulating our society is not necessarily the best way to solve our problems.  (I'd like to think "Morning-Glory" is a clever refutation of, or comment on, Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories and other SF in which some genius or cabal of geniuses molds society--Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is another example.)

I called "Morning-Glory" "conventional" because, like so many SF stories, at its heart is a scientist and science, and a banal criticism of our society.  It lacks the kind of images, human feeling, surprises and mysteries that characterize Wolfe's body of work as a whole.  This story is acceptable, but below average for Wolfe, who so often pulls off something unique or beautiful or shocking,    

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"Civis Laputus Sum" is obviously the standout here, but all three of these stories, even the somewhat disappointing "Morning-Glory," are worth reading.  Storeys From the Old Hotel won the 1989 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection (it tied with Harlan Ellison's Angry Candy) so it's not just me recommending it--the full weight of the speculative fiction community is behind it!  Buy yours today!

Four stories by Mack Reynolds from the early 1960s

When I read Mack Reynolds' Commune: 2000 A.D. in 2011 I thought it was kind of lame.  In the same year Joachim Boaz reviewed Reynolds' Rolltown and thought it deserved 2 of 5 stars and "isn't worth the effort of procuring" due to an "average plot," a "silly final twist" and "endless info-dump lectures...."  But you hear good things about Reynolds now and again (famous SF historian and critic Barry Malzberg praises him, and Reynolds at one point won a readers' poll and was thus proclaimed SF's most popular writer), so when I saw the thick (370 pages!) 1976 collection The Best of Mack Reynolds for sale for one dollar at Half Price Books, I bought it.  Maybe, I reasoned, Reynolds shines in the short form. Besides, Reynolds's own introduction to the book, about his life as a professional writer and his travels around the world, was charming.

What kind of exotic system of voting did they use that allowed Reynolds to beat Asimov and Heinlein?
  Ranked Choice?  Instant Runoff?  Range Voting?  Limiting the franchise to the Reynolds family?    

Last week I read four stories from the collection, which I chose based on their provocative one-word titles.  By chance, all turned out to have been published first in the early 1960s.

"Revolution" (1960)

A lot of SF stories ask you to accept things which don't make much logical sense and for which there really isn't much evidence, like hyperspace, psychic powers, and time travel.  Mack Reynolds' "Revolution" asks you to accept that the central planning and dictatorial rule of the kind of psychos who ran the Soviet Union could produce an economy that by 1985 was surpassing the economy of the United States.  Our hero in this story is Russian-born American agent Paul Koslov, who is sneaked into Communist Russia in hopes he will be able to spark a revolution, in the same way Lenin was sent to Czarist Russia back in 1917.

In the introduction to the volume (remember a minute ago when I told you it was charming?) Reynolds compares himself to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, major science fiction writers whose work focuses on the hard sciences.  Reynolds tells us he knows little of "the physical sciences," but has a background in "the social sciences...especially socioeconomics...." The impression I get from "Revolution" is that, in the same way Asimov or Clarke might use a SF story to talk about robotics or astronomy or oceanography (remember Imperial Earth?), Reynolds uses SF to talk about forms of government and different models of society, based on his readings in theory and history and his own travels around the world (in the intro he says he spent ten years travelling among over 75 countries.)    

So, "Revolution" starts out with discussions of MPorcius fave Somerset Maugham and anti-Soviet leftist intellectual Milovan Djilas, author of The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System with Koslov's boss in Washington.  Later, in Russia, we get a lecture from one anti-Soviet activist on the "three bases of government evolved by man": the family (example: Native Americans); property (example, European slave, feudal, and capitalist societies); and "your method of making your livelihood," (the activist hopes to replace Communist Party rule with just such a system, one in which each sector of the economy would elect representatives.)  Another Russian rebel gives Koslov (and us readers) a lecture on revolutions--we are told revolutions come from the people when they need them, not from leaders--great leaders are created by the desperate times they live in, and often struggle to stay ahead of the popular tide.
    
The story ends with the anti-communist revolutionaries, thanks to Western aid, in position to overthrow the Soviet Union.  But since these revolutionaries have chosen to maintain the USSR's nuclear arsenal and have not embraced British- or American-style democracy and capitalism, Koslov wonders if the new Russia he is playing midwife to might be an even greater threat to the West than the Soviet Union--maybe he should report his friends to the KGB and put the kibosh on the whole thing!

Reynolds tries to create an interesting character in Koslov, who, over the course of the story, realizes, despite his Russian blood and 15 years of single-minded dedication to liberating Russia from communism, that his upbringing in the USA has made a true American out of him.  Reynolds also tries to create an interesting relationship--Koslov and one of the Russian anti-communist rebels fall in love, but their love founders on their different loyalties (hers to Russia, his to the West) and political attitudes.  But these facets of the story are not very effective; most of the story is all those lectures and historical references.

Acceptable, but I wouldn't urge anybody to rush out and find it.  "Revolution" first appeared in Astounding-- the Galactic Journey blog earlier this year analyzed that entire issue.  Worth checking out.

"Freedom" (1961)

Each of the 22 tales in The Best of Mack Reynolds has a little introduction by the author himself.  In the intro to "Freedom," which was first published in Analog, Reynolds tells us that he has spent considerable time in Moscow and Prague, and that he has not heard from Czech friends since the 1968 invasion by a Soviet army which crushed Czech efforts to secure liberal reforms.

"Freedom," like "Revolution," is set in a hypothetical future in which socialist economics has worked and the Soviet Union and its satellites have achieved the world's highest GDP and standard of living.  Our main character, Ilya Simonov, is a security officer whose job is to kill and imprison Soviet citizens (without a trial, of course!) who oppose the rule of the Communist Party.  His superiors want to know why there are so many such people--aren't they grateful for the economic health created by the Communist Party and its policies?  The Kremlin assumes malign Western influence is the cause of their problems, and sends Simonov to Czechoslovakia to ferret out any possible Western sources of this inexplicable hostility to the Soviet regime.

In Prague, Simonov finds that government controls over speech and the press have loosened--people openly criticize the Communist Party, read Western books, even meet American journalists.  At first he is outraged, but over a period of months he not only realizes that the people he is investigating are not dupes of the West, but spontaneous seekers of personal liberty--he even comes to share their dreams of a free Eastern Europe.  Simonov returns to Moscow and shoots his boss and burns the official records of his mission (in order to protect his new friends back in Prague) but is then killed himself while trying to escape.

Obviously, I'm behind this story's ideological content--even if, in some fanciful way, the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and the countries it had conquered had produced economic plenty, their murderous, arbitrary and unaccountable rule could in no way be morally justified.  But does this make "Freedom" a good story?  No.  The story is full of political lectures, even a page-long extract from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited, and the plot and characters fail to generate any real feeling.

Reynolds addresses interesting and important ideas here, which is presumably why John Campbell published it in his famous and important magazine Analog and Judith Merril included it in one of her famous and important The Year's Best S-F anthologies, but as a story I'll have to judge it as merely acceptable; it does the job you'd expect of an article in an opinion magazine, not what you hope a piece of fiction does.  

"Subversive" (1962)

This one, which also first saw light of day in Analog, is even more lecture-heavy than "Revolution" and "Freedom."  The foundation of those stories was the dubious assertion that the command economy of the Soviet Union could outproduce the market economy of the United States.  In "Subversive" Reynolds presents what he perhaps considers one of the advantages of the command economy over the free economy--the money and manpower devoted to such things as advertising and TV shows in a market economy.  We get long lectures on how one bar (or "cake," as I guess people said in 1962) of soap is much like another, and is manufactured very cheaply.  Likewise for electric razors and loaves of bread (!).  These products sell dearly to the consumer because of all the advertising costs and middlemen.  (This reminds me of Bernie Sanders' apparent belief that it is immoral for there to be several brands and types of deodorant on the market.)

A company is formed that can sell soap and razors and bread cheaper than the other middlemen because it eschews advertising.  Such competition will make the American economy more efficient, so Soviet agents attack the new company, killing everybody involved.

This story is like 19 pages of lectures with 2 pages of plot.  There is no effort at presenting a human story, and Reynolds even dispenses with the historical anecdotes and quotes from intellectuals with which he peppered "Revolution" and "Freedom." I'm going to have to give this one a thumbs down.

"Pacifist" (1964)

"Pacifist" was a cover story for The Magazine of Fantasy of Science Fiction, even though the cover illustration apparently depicts a scene from the magazine version of Damon Knight's Beyond the Barrier, the paperback edition of which I read, more or less on a dare from Joachim Boaz, back in the summer of 2014.  "Pacifist" takes place in an alternate universe much like our own but in which the Cold War is between the Northern and Southern hemispheres.  The brainiacs of this world have determined, Hari Seldon-style, that, unless government policies change, nuclear war will break out in three years.  Instead of working through the media and the democratic process, presenting their ideas and hoping the voters and their representatives are swayed by them, these elitists form a secret society called The Pacifists and engage in terrorism designed to change government policies.  They eschew no tactic in their quest for peace, no matter how outrageous: they kidnap a Senator's son and threaten to murder his friends and family if he refuses to resign, they strafe a military academy graduation ceremony with a hijacked jet fighter, and more.

The point of the story, I guess, is to examine this paradoxical strategy for achieving peace; does the noble end justify the murderous means?  Would such a campaign hope to succeed?  Reynolds may also have hoped to shock the reader with characters who suggest that strategic bombing (like the British and Americans inflicted on the Axis countries less than 20 years before the story was published) is no different than the cold-blooded murder of children and that in modern war conscientious objectors are more brave than volunteer soldiers.

The plot follows the lead "hatchetman" of the Pacifists, Warren Casey, the guy who actually gets his hands dirty threatening, beating, kidnapping, and killing people whom I (and who could be more reasonable than me?) would consider innocent.  Casey joined the Pacifists after his experience as a bomber pilot in this universe's equivalent of World War II, which led him to the conviction that war should be outlawed at any cost.  Over the course of the story he becomes skeptical of the Pacifists' strategy of using violence to end violence.  Casey is killed while trying to escape from police officers because he didn't take an opportunity to shoot the police in the back, an ambiguous ending.

The audacity of this story, and the effort put into the psychology of its main character, makes it probably the best Reynolds story I am discussing today.  Mild recommendation.

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These stories are not appallingly bad, but they lack literary value; their value is in the ideas they present.  (I'll leave aside the fact that the more you think about their ideas, the goofier the ideas appear.)  Reading four of them over the space of three days in the 21st century probably doesn't present them in the best light; for one thing, you easily notice a sameness about them (e.g., all four stories are about agents and include meetings between the agent and his boss; Koslov and Simonov are almost the same character: both had little time for women before the story begins because they were busy fighting for or against communism, and during the story they fall in love with a woman with a different political point of view; Simonov and Casey have almost the same fates and their stories the same ending: both are shot dead while trying to escape government forces and then subjected to musings on their psychologies by their killers.)  SF fans who read only one of them a month or so, during the height of the Cold War, decades before we knew how the Soviet empire would collapse, perhaps found them very thought-provoking.

In our next episode more science fiction short stories, but I hope and expect these stories will have (what I consider) literary value: a distinctive style, human feeling, vivid images.  I highly doubt they will have much to say about the Soviet Union or economics, but you never know!

Pessimistic Science Fiction Stories from 1949-50 by John D. MacDonald and Damon Knight

There is this idea that science fiction as a genre is optimistic, or was optimistic before some particular date.  For example, we often hear Barry Malzberg described as an outlier or rebel because his work is so pessimistic, and hear that the SF "establishment" was upset when Malzberg won the first Campbell award.  So it is fun to discover old stories, stories from before events like the Kennedy assassination or the Vietnam War, which we are sometimes told "signalled the loss of America's innocence" or whatever, which are pessimistic.  Here are three voyages aboard the S. S. Pessimismo with blast off dates in 1949 or 1950, which I read in Isaac Asimov Presents The Golden Years of Science Fiction Sixth Series, published in 1988, an omnibus edition of Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories, Volumes 11 and 12, which appeared in 1984.

"Flaw" by John D. MacDonald (1949)

We've experienced some of famous detective novelist MacDonald's pessimistic science fiction before, in the novel Wine of the Dreamers and in some 1948 short stories.  "Flaw" first unleashed its negative vibes in Startling Stories.

You've probably heard of the phenomenon of "red shift," and how the fact that light from other stars is red shifted is strong evidence that the universe is expanding. (But have you heard the great Peter Hammill's song "Red Shift," in which he uses the fact that the universe is expanding as a kind of metaphor of the expanding psychological distance between people in the modern age?)  In "Flaw" MacDonald suggests an alternate, and quite wacky, theory to explain the red shift phenomenon.

"Flaw" is the brief memoir of Carol Adlar, a woman in the "future" of ten years after MacDonald wrote this story.  An atomic rocket motor has been developed, and Carol, who is a clerk at a space agency rocket station, and her colleagues were initially eager to explore the universe!  Our narrator's fiance Johnny was one of the first handful of astronauts to fly in an atomic rocket ship, but a disaster occurred, killing him and all hope that man can travel beyond the solar system, something our narrator figured out long before the eggheads did!

You see, over a month before Johnny's rocket was expected to return, a colossal meteor crashed near the space base.  Our narrator watched the excavations of the crater with binoculars, and something she saw proved her premonitions of her fiance's death to have been accurate--from the crater was hoisted a jeweled ring, a ring the size of a house!  Carol recognizes the ring as one she gave Johnny!  She realizes that the red shift phenomenon is caused by the fact that our solar system is shrinking, that the rocket ceased shrinking when it got far enough from the Sun!  ""If Johnny had landed safely, I would be able to walk about on the palm of his hand....It is a good thing that he died."

This story is drenched in pessimism.  Carol describes her own physical ("My fingernails are cracked and broken...") and psychological ("I rather imagine I am quite mad") deterioration since Johnny's death and the death of the human race's dreams of visiting the stars, and hopes she will die soon.  She repeatedly refers to how mankind has trashed the Earth, and points out that the ring she gave Johnny was that of her father, who was killed in the Pacific theater during World War II.  "We have made a mess of this planet, and it is something that we cannot leave behind us."

However silly the story's gimmick is, MacDonald is a good writer and there is a measure of human feeling to the tale, so I'd judge it moderately enjoyable.

"Spectator Sport" by John D. MacDonald (1950)

In the introduction to this story Martin H. Greenberg claims that MacDonald "still has great affection for sf and the people who write and read it."  Somehow I seem to recall MacDonald singing a different tune in the afterword to my edition of Wine of the Dreamers, but since my copy of Wine of the Dreamers is in storage I will just have to take Greenberg's word for it.

This cautionary tale about advances in entertainment technology first threatened the livelihood of Hollywood TV producers and electronics manufacturers in Thrilling Wonder Stories.

"Spectator Sport" is about a time traveller from 1950 who projects himself 400 years into the future.  He is astonished to find that there has been very little societal progress or change--there are no new buildings, and in fact things look unmaintained, decrepit.  A park bench the scientist recognizes from the 20th century is in place but decayed, as if nobody ever visits the park and the government never services it.

What has happened?  Everybody in the world is so addicted to what we would now call "virtual reality" (MacDonald references Huxley and "the feelies" by name) that few people have sex (population has diminished significantly) or even leave the house unnecessarily, and other forms of entertainment, like books and periodicals, are extinct.

There are two forms of virtual reality, "temps" and "perms."  Temps are like TV sets that have a knob you touch; through the knob is transmitted the emotional content of the show.  Wealthy people opt for more immersive (and expensive) perm treatment--they have their eyes removed and a feeding tube implanted, wires connected to their nerve endings and brain stem, and then live out the rest of their lives in fantasy worlds devised by the 24th century equivalent of TV executives and producers.

With its omniscient narrator, flat characters, and a central gimmick that doesn't feel fresh anymore (though MacDonald did use it five years before it appeared in Kuttner and Moore's "Two-Handed Engine"), I didn't enjoy "Spectator Sport" as much as "Flaw."  I'm more interested in drama and literary virtues than heavy-handed polemics, and "Spectator Sport" seems to rely for its impact on the reader's supposed anti-television prejudice and on its gore scene, in which we observe a person's body being mutilated in preparation for receiving "perm" service.  This story is merely OK.

"Not With a Bang" by Damon Knight (1950)

In his intro Asimov suggests the title of this story may refer not only to T. S. Eliot, but also to the sex act.  Asimov does not worry about spoiling the audience of his anthologies!  This condemnation of our species and civilization first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

"Not With a Bang" is an exercise in misanthropy.  Nuclear and biological warfare has destroyed civilization.  Only two people survive, one man and one woman. The man is desperate to have sex with the woman, willing to employ any means, but he is too weak to rape her, because he suffers from a wasting disease.  The woman is addle-brained from the shock of something she saw during the brief war, and, as a devoted Christian, refuses to have sex outside of marriage.  The man is so angry at her that he often feels like murdering her, but he needs her to give him life-saving shots when his disease causes him paralysis attacks.

Finally, he convinces the shell-shocked woman to agree to marry him.  He imagines not only the pleasure of having sex with her, but with a daughter they may have(!) Before the wedding he goes to a public restroom, and, as the door closes behind him, he has an attack of paralysis.  He will die of thirst standing there, and with him the human race, a race of murderers and rapists.

Knight is famous for the pun in his 1950 story "To Serve Man," and in the last paragraph of this story he gives us some misanthropic word play, declaring that the word on the door of the lavatory, "MEN," is a warning!

The audacity of the story, the way Knight goes to the limit, makes it fun, regardless of how seriously you might take his attitude.  Moderately enjoyable.

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I hope you've enjoyed these trips to classic SF's dark side.  Don't do anything rash!          

1949 Stories from Kuttner & Moore and Edmond Hamilton

I recently found myself with time to kill before an appointment in Urbandale, Iowa, so I looked into the public library there.  On the science fiction shelves I saw a hardcover 1988 printing of one of the volumes of the Isaac Asimov Presents the Golden Years of Science Fiction series edited by Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg, the volume covering 1949 and 1950.  I noticed on the contents page some stories I had yet to read by authors I am interested in, so the book found its way back to headquarters where it joined the pile of library books.  This weekend I read three stories that first appeared in science fiction magazines in 1949: two credited to "Lewis Padgett," one of the pen names used by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore; and a story by Edmond Hamilton.

"Private Eye" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

The editors suggest that this story, which first appeared in Astounding, was probably written by Kuttner.  It seems to be universally loved; not only was it the cover story at Astounding, but it has been widely anthologized in such books as The Mirror of Infinity: A Critics' Anthology of Science Fiction and Astounding Stories: The 60th Anniversary Collection (Vol. 3).  On the negative side I now can't get that Hall and Oates song out of my head.

It is easy to see why this story would be popular with critics and editors.  There are hundreds or thousands of stories speculating about space travel, robots, time travel, nuclear power, and so forth, and "Private Eye" speculates about something that in 1949 maybe hadn't been done to death already, extensive government surveillance, but in the context of an individualistic market society with a limited government, more like early 20th-century America than the kind of totalitarian society we see in 1984 and so many other books.  According to the story, light waves and sound waves leave a semi-permanent impression on materials, impressions that can be translated into audio and video by a device employed by law enforcement.  Thus anything that has happened within sight of a wall or floor in the last fifty years has essentially been recorded for viewing by the government, making getting away with a major crime a difficult proposition!

The plot of the story follows Sam Clay, murderer.  Clay's girlfriend has been stolen by a more successful man, and Clay crafts and pursues an elaborate scheme over the course of 18 months, manipulating people and contriving situations so he can stab his rival to death in full view of the watching government and jury and get off on a plea of self-defense. As Golden Age SF fans probably already know, Kuttner was fascinated by psychology and studied the field in college, and "Private Eye" is full of psychological theories spouted by government scientists and descriptions of Clay's state of mind, a mind warped by childhood experiences, driven by a lust for revenge and oppressed by the knowledge that his every move is being recorded as if by cameras for viewing by law enforcement.  Over the course of the story we observe Clay's psychology, and to a certain extent that of other characters, evolve.

This is a good story, well paced and structured, achieving genuine tension and presenting interesting characters and situations.  Even the little throwaway details about life in the future (like a restaurant where a computer analyzes your face and lights your table to your best advantage like a Hollywood director) are good.  Maybe some 21st-century readers will be put off by the 1940s-era psychology theories and the less than flattering portrayal of women in the story, but to me that stuff just adds a layer of historical interest.        

"Prisoner in the Skull" by Kuttner and Moore

Each of the stories in Isaac Asimov Presents the Golden Years of Science Fiction has two introductions, one by each of the editors.  In his intro to "Prisoner in the Skull" Greenberg thanks important SF writer, critic and historian, and Kuttner and Moore superfan, Barry Malzberg for pointing out this story to the editors.  Asimov takes the opportunity to sneer at "woman's romance" and "the typical Western," and suggest SF is superior to these genres.

A recurring element in Kuttner and Moore's work is artifacts or individuals from the future appearing and befuddling people.  We see this in some of Kuttner and Moore's most acclaimed work, like "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" and "Vintage Season," and we see it in "Prisoner in the Skull."  "Prisoner in the Skull," which also appeared in Astounding, also feels like a companion piece to "Private Eye," in that it is about the evolving psychologies of an unsympathetic main character and the less than admirable woman with whom he is obsessed.

John Fowler is a successful commercial artist.  He is courting a beautiful model, Veronica, a shallow and greedy woman.  One day a mysterious man, a man lacking will and individuality, a man with a "blank" face who is almost unable to talk, appears at Fowler's door.  Fowler takes this "blank man," whom he dubs "Norman," into his home, and discovers that he is easy to dominate, and has terrific mechanical and engineering ability.  At Fowler's direction, Norman improves various household items (like a light switch) and invents radical new consumer products, like a window upon which one can project images via telepathy.  (This story also includes the device I admired in "Private Eye," a system of artificial indoor lighting that can be calibrated to flatter individuals.) By marketing these inventions, over the course of a few years Fowler becomes rich.

Having a virtual slave to dominate, and vast wealth, corrupts Fowler. Kuttner and Moore describe the excuses and other psychological devices used by Fowler to justify his exploitation of Norman.  When Veronica marries a stock broker, Fowler bends his wealth and Norman's amazing abilities to the task of concocting and executing a complicated conspiracy to break up the model and the broker, and get Veronica back under his control. As in "Private Eye," the female lead is not so easily outmaneuvered.  In the end it is revealed that Norman created himself by inventing a device that altered Fowler's brain; Norman thus turns Fowler into a proto-Norman and sends him (himself) back in time to meet his earlier self.

This is a good story, though I don't think it is as well put together as "Private Eye," and the time loop ending is not, to me, as satisfying as "Private Eye"'s resolution.  For one thing, I often find time loops and that sort of thing unsatisfying (my brain bridles at such explanations as "he became a genius inventor when his later self, a genius inventor, went back in time to make him a genius inventor.")  For another, the end of "Private Eye" is a conclusive one, with the immoral male and female leads suffering final, punishing fates.  In "Prisoner in the Skull" I felt like the stories of Fowler and Veronica weren't quite over, and I wasn't sure if they had been punished for their sins. What happens to Norman after he liberates himself from Fowler by sending Fowler (his earlier self) back in time?  Is he still obsessed with Veronica?  Is he still rich?  Is he still a genius inventor?

Leftist readers may appreciate what appears to be a Marxist subtext to the story. Fowler, I guess representing the capitalist, exploits Norman to become wealthy, but wealth corrupts him and Norman rises up against him, and it turns out Fowler was hurting himself by exploiting Norman.  An offhand comment about economics early in the story (it is suggested that in the future there is no shortage of raw materials, so businesses create artificial scarcities in order to make customers more willing to make purchases) is perhaps a clue that Kuttner and Moore want readers to view the story as some kind of allegory about economics.

"Alien Earth" by Edmond Hamilton

I've read quite a few stories by Hamilton during this blog's life.  The last time we encountered Hamilton was when I was praising his story "The Legion of Lazarus," which I read in a crumbling old magazine I found in an antique store.  As he does in the collection Before the Golden Age, in this volume of Isaac Asimov Presents the Golden Years of Science Fiction Asimov expresses his admiration for Hamilton.  For his part Greenberg calls "Alien Earth" "a wonderful, moody story that is science fiction at its finest."  

Hugh Farris is an American in the teak business, travelling here and there through the jungles of French Indo-China searching for teak trees. (Apparently American wood isn't good enough for some people!  Do Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump know about this?  It may be time for a tariff on these foreign woods!)  In the forest Farris discovers a weird native cult of people who inject themselves with some green goop that slows them down so that they "live a hundred times slower."  Hamilton gives us numerous descriptions of how they breathe slower, walk slower, blink slower, etc.

You don't care what these goofy natives are up to?  Why doesn't Farris just leave them to their goofy drugs and religion and get back to collecting that teak which is putting perfectly good American oak and pine out of work?  A woman, of course!  In the jungle Farris meets Lys Berreau, a French blonde (ooh la la) whose brother Andre has gone native and is using the green drug so that he can spend weeks at a time living at a speed one hundredth of the speed most of us are living at.  The French girl begs Farris's help, and can we blame him for not refusing?

Under ordinary fictional circumstances, I'd expect an evil priest and/or evil god to be at fault, and for Farris to have to read a spell from an old book and/or hit some people with a sword to resolve the plot.  This is what I would expect in a Weird Tales-style story.  But "Alien Earth" is endorsed by Isaac Asimov, and we all know from Before the Golden Age that Asimov has contempt for the Weird Tales crowd.  The Asimov seal of approval means this story must be about science!  Farris carries the almost motionless Andre into a house and keeps him there for weeks until the green goop injection wears off.   When the Frenchie is back at normal speed he explains that he is a botanist and wanted to live at one percent speed because it helped him get in tune with the life of plants!

Farris and the mademoiselle try to get Andre to give up on his obsession with what he calls "a botanist's heaven" and get back to France, but he refuses to budge.  In fact, he drugs their food so Farris and Lys are tricked into entering the world of plants themselves!  Perfidious Gaul!        

So, what is so awesome about the world of plants?  As far as I can tell plants can't have sex or read books or go to art museums or listen to old Blondie albums, the kinds of things that make life as a human being barely tolerable.  Why is the botanist so keen to live out his life in that vegetative world?

Farris and Lys venture into the rain forest to find out!  Living at one hundredth normal speed, they experience the sun crossing the sky in like seven or eight minutes, while the growth of grass and the budding of leaves on trees moves at an apparent speed much like that of the stalking of animals.  Hamilton compares the engulfing of trees by vines and fungus as being much like the attacks of wolves on quadruped herbivores.

More significant is the revelation that plants have thoughts and emotions just like animals, and project these telepathically.  Moving at one hundredth normal speed our heroes can pick up these transmissions!  It turns out that the French botanist worships the oldest trees of the forest, whom he believes have great wisdom to impart!  So, even though this is a sciencey story, Hamilton manages to shoehorn in an evil priest and god.  When Andre orders the plants to kill Farris and his own sister(!), we even get something like a traditional Robert Howard hero-interrupting-virgin-sacrifice scene.  Farris even has a big bolo knife, a good stand in for a sword, that he and Lys use to chop away at the vines, which move like snakes when you are living at one hundredth speed!  

This story is pretty ridiculous.  It is hard to accept the idea that plants have thoughts, much less "wisdom."  The idea of thinking, breathing, and moving at one hundredth speed is also a little suspect.  Farris and Lys run at this speed, which would seem to be impossible--wouldn't you just lose balance and collapse when your second foot left the surface?  What about insects and germs--if you are in the middle of a damn jungle and you can't swat bugs and your white blood cells are moving at one hundredth normal speed, aren't you going to be devoured?

I'll grade "Alien Earth" acceptable, but Greenberg is really exaggerating when he suggests it represents "science fiction at its finest"--the sciency stuff is mediocre, and the story is not redeemed by being a good adventure with memorable images (like Hamilton's better work such as "The Legion of Lazarus") or by having traditional literary values like a good style or characters or the ability to evoke emotion in the reader.  I suspect Asimov and Greenberg thought Hamilton deserved to be included in their series, which he does, being a major writer of the Golden Age, and hit upon this one because it is sciency and not Weird Talesy, and because Hamilton published no other stories in 1949.  I do have to say it is a little odd that Asimov felt comfortable presenting a story in which the scientist is the villain and the violent businessman-adventurer is the hero.

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The Kuttner and Moore stories are solid; classic SF fans should definitely check them out.  I guess the Hamilton story is interesting if you are interested in Hamilton's long and productive career, or are trying to read every SF story about botany!

I'll probably read some more stories from this volume before it ends up back on the library shelves--stay tuned.

At The Narrow Passage by Richard C. Meredith

"I have only your word," I said, "and I'm sick and tired of taking other people's word for things.  I'm going to find out for myself."  

I think I bought At The Narrow Passage, Berkley N2730, a 1975 edition of the 1973 novel, over a year ago.  I bought it because I loved the cover painting by Richard Powers.  I like Powers, but often his work seems flat, physically and emotionally. Here was a Powers that had a strong sense of physical depth, and a terrible emotional power: it looked like the landscape that would confront you if you were assigned to explore a planet inhabited by feral vampires or sentenced to Hell by a merciless God. I had no idea who the hell Richard C. Meredith was, and the alternate universe soldier plot described on the back cover didn't particularly interest me, so I just put the book on my shelf and admired the cover occassionaly.

Then, back in June, Joachim Boaz reviewed Meredith's 1969 novel We All Died at Breakaway Station.  He only gave it a middling review, and complained about the book's characterizations and gender politics, but it sounded to me like it had some pretty cool ideas, and, if done well, the kind of bleak tone that would go along with the Powers painting on At The Narrow Passage.  This put At The Narrow Passage onto my radar screen, and I even kept it out of the moving cartons when I packed up my books for storage.  This weekend I finally read the novel.

Revised edition

(Tarbandu wrote about At The Narrow Passage and its sequels in January of 2014, but somehow I didn't make the connection until I had started reading this volume. Maybe because he read a revised edition put out in 1979 with a different cover.)

There are many different "timelines" in the universe, visualized as branches on a two-dimensional tree.  When the universe began there was just the one trunk, but when points of uncertainty are reached, decisive moments when something of consequence may occur (will the Roman Empire embrace Christianity or not?) the line will split into two lines.  By the 20th Century there are a "near infinite" number of lines.  In relation to each other, these lines are described as being to the East or West.  Far to the East of our own line are lines in which the Earth is inhabited by the Krith, an inhuman intelligent species that can't or won't manipulate tools or machines (they don't even wear clothes), but which can travel between the timelines (this is called "skudding") thanks to a special nervous organ.  The Krith become friendly with humans while exploring West, and warn them that in the 40th century or so hostile aliens are going to come to Earth, threatening the extermination of the Krith and human races.  So the Krith, Hari Seldon style, go to many human-inhabited timelines and scientifically predict what courses of history are most likely to produce a unified human civilization with the technological level to defeat the aliens. Then they try to push and prod the human race, more or less secretly, in order to get history to move in that world-peace/high-tech direction.

Our narrator is a human, known in his current timeline as Eric Mathers.  Mathers is a mercenary soldier, paid by the Krith to fight in the wars of various timelines on the side the Krith think more likely to lay the foundations of a civilization that will be able to resist those aliens in 2000 years.  ("Timeliner" mercenaries like Mathers can tip the balance of battles and wars because they bring with them special equipment, like rayguns and biological augmentations that provide them better eyesight and faster reflexes.)  In this timeline he is playing the role of a British Army officer; here the British Empire is in a war of attrition in Europe against the German Empire, a war roughly similar to World War One in our timeline.  Very few natives of this timeline know about the Krith and the timeliners, just people like the King of England and Britain's highest commanders.

Hardcover first edition

In the first 100 pages of the book Mathers is a member of a commando team trying to capture a German aristocrat who is in charge of an effort to develop atomic weapons.  Things go wrong and Mathers gets captured by mysterious allies of the Germans who turn out to be timeliners (they call themselves "Paratimers") from the West side of the Temporal Spectrum, lines the Krith have not yet visited.  These people claim the future alien invasion is a Krith fabrication, and that the Krith are manipulating people like Mathers and the British of this timeline for their own unknown purposes.

Mathers spends the middle third of the book as a prisoner in a secret underground city in Florida, where American revolutionaries are plotting to overthrow the British Empire (which in this timeline still rules all English-speaking parts of North America.)  The Paratimers try to get Mathers to switch sides.  This section of the book reminded me of bits and pieces from Robert Heinlein's work (Mathers has sex with lots of women, reminding me of parts of Glory Road, and witnesses pro-independence political meetings, like those portrayed in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Between Planets and Red Planet) and from George Orwell's 1984 (Mathers reads books purporting to be the true history of mankind's relationship with the Krith, like how Winston Smith reads The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.)  Unlike Heinlein and Orwell, however, Meredith doesn't discuss any kind of political philosophy or seem to have any particular political axe to grind. (Tarbandu suggests that he gets philosophical later, in the sequels.)

Meredith's treatment of minorities and women also reminded me of Heinlein's; there are non-whites and women in leadership positions, Mathers specifically condemns racial prejudice, and there are inter-racial sexual relationships--Mathers, who is white, thinks a black woman is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.  It is also made clear that there are timelines in which sub-Saharan Africans developed modern industrial civilizations and colonized Europe instead of the other way around.

(While I'm talking about possible connections to other works, I should note that Meredith's dedication to this book, and tarbandu's discussion of the series, make clear that Meredith owes a lot of this timeline business to H. Beam Piper, but that I personally haven't read any of Piper's own work in this vein.)

Mathers escapes from the secret base and in the final seventy or so pages of the 250-page novel tries to figure out the truth behind both the Krith and the Paratimers.  He learns that both of these groups have been lying to and manipulating humanity--the alien invasion scare is a hoax, while the Paratimers' leaders are ruthless inhuman killers in disguise.  After a climactic ray guns and machine guns blazing confrontation in a desolate timeline where the Earth has been sterilized by Paratimer nuclear weapons, Mathers escapes both his Krith masters and the blue-skinned Paratimers. Safe in our own timeline, Mathers resolves to do something to protect humankind from these two sinister groups.  What the inhumans are ultimately up to, and what Mathers can do about it, I guess we learn in the sequels.

At The Narrow Passage seems to be designed to appeal to history buffs, particularly military history buffs.  There is a lot of talk about firearms and lots of long expository passages in which one character or another describes how his or her timeline got to be how it is.  (For example, in the timeline in which most of the book takes place the British were able to quash the American Revolution in the 1770s and make France a British satellite during the 1790s Revolutionary crisis there thanks to widespread adoption by the British Army of the Ferguson rifle.)  On the intellectual history side, the guy who is credited with figuring out the Krith are lying about the aliens and writing one of the Paratimer propaganda books is an analogue of Martin Luther named Martin Latham, while many of the Paratimers come from a timeline in which the Cathars came to dominate Europe.

There are lots of action and battle sequences: firefights, ambushes, artillery and aerial bombardments, burning towns and so forth.  As we almost always see in these adventure stories, plenty of people get captured and plenty of people escape capture--sometimes I feel like every book I read has multiple scenes in which people get tied up and at least one scene in which somebody gets knocked out with a blow to the head, only to wake up just fine a few hours later.  There is also a strong lascivious element to the book: Mathers meets lots of beautiful women and we receive descriptions of all their breast sizes; the topic of rape comes up several times; and it is normal for characters of both sexes to be naked, because they come from nudist societies or because they have been caught in dishabille during a sneak attack or because somebody needs to use their clothes as makeshift bonds to tie somebody up.

I like sex and violence as much as the next guy, and Meredith handles that material well enough, and all the science fiction stuff, while not believable, is adequately explained for an adventure caper.  And I'm a history buff myself, so all the references to Ferguson rifles and Albigensians were interesting.  On the negative side, the characterizations are pretty thin, and the book feels a little long and slow.

The best thing Meredith does is keep you in the dark as to whether you are supposed to sympathize with the Krith and the British or the Paratimers and the rebellious Americans; both sides put forward arguments that don't hold water, and both count among their members some admirable figures and some creepy suspicious figures. This is more interesting than those stories in which one side is racist or exploiting the environment and so you know right away they are the villains, and have to trudge through half the story to the "surprise" of the main character switching sides to join the multicultural tree-hugging side.  Meredith kept me guessing and wondering through the entire novel.

I enjoyed At The Narrow Passage enough that I plan to read the sequels; I am genuinely curious as to where Meredith is going to go with these ideas.  So call this one a positive review!  It is not for everybody, but it does what it sets out to do creditably.

Classic SF Mysteries: Harry Harrison's 1971 introduction to Thomas Disch's One Hundred and Two H-Bombs

In his intro to the 1971 Berkley edition (S2044) of Thomas Disch's collection One Hundred and Two H-Bombs, Harry Harrison makes a number of provocative claims.  For one thing he says that the New Wave writers "brought a breath of fresh air into the dusty SF establishment at that time [the early 1960s] that still has the fossil saurians shivering."  Who are these dusty dinosaurs? Arthur C. Clarke?  Robert Heinlein?  Poul Anderson?  Isaac Asimov?  I wish Harrison would name names instead of just making these vague allegations.  I suppose Harrison had his career to worry about, but now I am going to be wondering who exactly Harrison is contemptuously condemning here in the same way I am still wondering who Jack Vance denounced to that New York Times reporter and who Harlan Ellison was sneering at in the intro to The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.

In praising Disch and the New Wave writers Harrison also asserts that they enjoy writing, that readers can sense the pleasure experienced by New Wave writers as they compose their work.  This sounds like boilerplate ad copy that the reader is free to accept or reject as he sees fit, but Harrison goes a step further, claiming that lots of SF stories are hack work produced by people who don't even like what they are doing:

There is also more than a touch of authorial pleasure in their [the New Wave writers'] writing, an ingredient that is missing from all too much of science fiction.  If a writer is not writing for his own pleasure or interest the fact is immediately obvious to all except the most cynical of editors and dimmest of readers.  The vacant interstellar spaces of SF contain far too much of this; less than an atom of interest per cubic meter.    

Who is Harrison talking about here?  What SF writers (and he seems to think there are many of them) were active in the '60s and early '70s who could be credibly accused of not enjoying their work?  Is Harrison talking about big name writers whose politics he didn't like, like (I'm guessing) Heinlein, Anderson, and E. E. Smith, who glorified businesspeople and fighting men?  Or prolific writers of straightforward adventure stories like Edmond Hamilton, E. C. Tubb, Ken Bulmer and Lin Carter?  I've read all those writers, and even when I didn't like something they did, I felt they were doing it with enthusiasm.  (Maybe I am one of the "dimmest of readers.")  If Harrison is talking about minor figures, people almost forgotten today, like John Glasby and Lionel Fanthorpe, then I think he may have been overstating his case.

Readers are invited to nominate candidates for Harrison's rogues gallery of dusty dinosaurs and uninterested hacks in the comments, based on knowledge of Harrison's other criticism or pure conjecture, in the comments.

"The Fate of the Poseidonia" and "The Miracle of the Lily" by Clare Winger Harris

Via twitter, internet science fiction gadfly Joachim Boaz pointed out to me the recent reprint of Clare Winger Harris's 1947 collection Away From the Here and Now and urged me to sample her work.  Being an inveterate cheapo I googled around and found two stories by Harris that are available as free e-texts, both from issues of Amazing Stories that hit newsstands in the late 1920s, and I read them this recent holiday weekend in those periods when I wasn't watching small town parades and fireworks displays, or making a pilgrimage to a statue of Godzilla.

"The Fate of the Poseidonia" (1927)

Clare Winger Harris had a story in Weird Tales in 1926, but "The Fate of the Poseidonia" is celebrated for being the first story published by a woman under her own name in a "real" science fiction magazine (I guess Weird Tales is considered more of a fantasy or horror magazine.)  Besides getting diversity points, "The Fate of the Poseidonia" has a cool origin story: editor Hugo Gernsback ran a contest for the best story based on the pretty insane cover illustration of Amazing Stories' December 1926 issue, and Harris won third place.  Her story was included in the following June issue, along with the first and second place winners.

December '26 on the left, June '27 on the right; click to get a closer look at these beauties

"The Fate of the Poseidonia" was reprinted not only in Away From the Here and Now in 1947 and 2011, but in The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy in 2000 and Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century in 2006.  My fellow tightwads will be happy to know they can read a scan of the original 1926 magazine version (including the original R. Frank Paul illustration) of the story at the Internet Archive, and a somewhat easier to read version at the Amazing Stories website, which includes a new (CGI?) illustration as well as a charming 1929 hand drawn portrait of Harris that first appeared in Science Wonder Quarterly, another Gernsback publication.

At a lecture about Mars our first-person narrator, George Gregory, meets a man named Martell, to whom he takes an immediate and irrational dislike.  Martell has an unusual physique, as well as skin of a strange hue and texture (Gregory notices when they shake hands.)  During the slide show (about how Mars is running out of water and so if people live there they are in a hell of a lot of trouble) our narrator notices that Martell's eyes glow in the dark!

Things gets curiouser and curiouser when Martell moves into the apartment next to the narrator's, and then starts dating Margaret Landon, Gregory's girlfriend!  Our hero sneaks into Martell's flat and discovers a device sort of like a two-way holographic TV.  Gregory's experiments with the communications device leave no doubt that Martell is a Martian spy, one of a group of alien agents here on Earth!

I liked the first half of the story; big emotions make for powerful drama, and I had hopes that Gregory's hatred of the alien and jealousy over Landon would lead to some dramatic scenes.  Unfortunately, in the second half of "The Fate of the Poseidonia," Gregory is more of a spectator to the plot than the driver of the action, and his hatred and jealousy have no role in the story.  Harris spends lots of time describing what Gregory views on Martel's communications device.  Gregory is captured by the cops for trespassing and put in a mental hospital.

Of course nobody believes his story of Martian spies until it is too late.  In the funny farm he reads newspapers that describe how mysterious space ships steal water from Earth (sea level drops "by several feet"!) and attack the ocean liner Posiedonia, on which Martell and Landon are passengers.  Martell (I think, though maybe Landon contrived to do it) has the communications device mailed to the narrator at the booby hatch.  Gregory fires it up, and receives a final message from his lost love Landon, now a captive on Mars, where the Martians have taken the Posiedonia as a sort of trophy.  I guess Landon is also a sort of trophy; the Martians let the rest of the Earthlings on the cruise liner perish in the cold of interplanetary space.  So ends the story--Mars has gotten away with grand theft, kidnapping and mass murder, and only one Earthman knows the truth!

As an early SF story, appearing a decade before the first publications of such giants of the Golden Age as Heinlein, Asimov, and Van Vogt, "The Fate of the Poseidonia" deserves some examination. One thing that Harris does that is interesting, and fits very much into the SF mold, is try to depict a future, hi-tech, high science society in which people have private aircraft, ocean liners travel 100 mph, and our calendar has been replaced by an allegedly more rational system with 13 months of 28 days each.

I mentioned above that Harris had a story in Weird Tales before getting this one into Amazing, and I think in many ways "The Fate of the Poseidonia" resembles weird fiction (exemplified by somebody like H. P. Lovecraft) more than a traditional SF story of the adventure variety (say by Edgar Rice Burroughs) or of the sciency/engineering type (by somebody like the aforementioned Heinlein or Asimov.)  The protagonist does not drive the plot and determine its outcome by using bravery, martial prowess or intelligence to defeat the enemy and/or solve a problem; instead, like in so many Lovecraftian stories, our hero learns something horrible is going on, is powerless to stop it, and ends up in an asylum.  At one point Gregory actually uses the phrase "weird tale;" perhaps Harris winking at the audience?

Making Margaret Langdon a viewpoint character in addition to, or instead of, Gregory would have improved the story, as we could have witnessed the Martian attack and the trip to Mars firsthand, and Harris could have written about Langdon's evolving feelings about Gregory and Martell.  Maybe Harris and/or Gernsback doubted the readers of Amazing would like a female lead or care about the kind of relationship drama I would be interested in.  

"The Fate of the Poseidonia" isn't a particularly poor story, if you can accept the fact that the hero doesn't do much besides listen to lectures, read newspapers, and watch TV.  Unfortunately, it has some problems that should have been fixed (or were perhaps introduced) during the editing phase by Gernsback or one of his employees.  For example, it is unclear when the story takes place.  At one point we are told it is 1945, but at another that it is "the winter of 1894-1895."  Presumably the latter is just a typo for "1944-1945," but a character later states that there has been no war for "many generations."  How many generations passed from 1918 to 1945?  Could "many" be a typo for "a" or "two?"  (There is also a sentence in which the word "insignificant" appears, when I think "significant" is probably what Harris intended.)

Another problem that stuck out for me was how Harris includes in the text a transcription of a radio message from the doomed Poseidonia, but makes no effort to make the message sound like it came from a professional sailor calling for aid--it is wordy and emotional (like the last page of a Lovecraftian narrative) instead of concisely informative, and the sailor reports speed in "miles per hour" instead of "knots."
      
An interesting document in the history of SF, but as a story "The Fate of the Poseidonia" is merely acceptable.

"The Miracle of the Lily" (1928)

This one appeared in Amazing Stories' April 1928 edition.  Besides Away From the Here and Now it has been published in anthology books and magazines like 1968's Science Fiction Classics and 1980's Bug-Eyed Monsters, as well as female-centric 21st century books like Womanthology and The Dreaming Sex: Early Tales of Scientific Imagination by Women.  I read a free e-text; you can check out a scan of the original magazine, which includes a full-page illustration that spoils "The Miracle of the Lily"'s twist ending, at the Internet Archive.

(There are also fun ads: "Play the Hawaiian Guitar Just Like the Natives Do...You'll never be lonesome with this beautiful Hawaiian Guitar," page 88.)  

"The Miracle of the Lily" is a sort of history of the future in which a guy, Nathano, in the period 3928-3938, goes through the archives, reading old documents relating Earth history since the 20th century, and then describes to us his role in a revolutionary change.  The story doesn't have much emotional impact or characterization, and there are no human relationships, though it has some good ideas.

A main theme of the story is the idea that, just as the reptiles once ruled the Earth and were then overthrown by the mammals, that mankind's rule of the world will come to be threatened by the insects!  In the 30th century insects and the human race battle to the death!  Humankind triumphs by burning all of the world's vegetation and abandoning agriculture for good (food is produced by factories, while oxygen-producing machinery maintains a breathable atmosphere.)  With no plants to eat, the insects follow the plants into extinction.  

Another theme of the story is the boredom of life in the technocratic utopia run on scientific lines for maximum efficiency that reigns after the extermination of the insects.  In what we would now call a post-scarcity economy, with no enemies to fight or goals to achieve, human life lacks excitement or satisfaction, and people stop reproducing, leading to a population decline.  Sensitive people like our narrator Nathano lament that a world whose landmass is covered 100% in concrete lacks beauty.

In the year 3928 new avenues of excitement appear, however.  For one thing, Nathano finds some seeds put into storage by an ancestor and grows a lily.  The flower is so beautiful that romantic types across the world begin planting gardens of their own for pleasure, and are soon followed by foodies who insist that natural food tastes better than factory food.  For another thing, the Earth is in radio communication with people on Venus. The Venerians ask for help in a dreadful war to the death with insects, a war that apparently mirrors the conflict won by humans on Earth a thousand years ago!

Then comes the Twilight-Zone-style twist ending.  In 3938 somebody finally invents interplanetary TV, and it is discovered that the Venerians are giant beetles and ants while the pests they want to exterminate are little humanoids!  And Nathano discovers a beetle in his garden!  The war between mammals and insects is back on, and going interplanetary!

I don't have to tell you that this story's science is crazy and the plot is full of holes (the Earthlings and Venerians learn each other's languages and exchange technical information for years without revealing fundamental physical characteristics like how many limbs their people have?)  I don't let these kinds of things distract me very much from a good drama, but there really isn't much drama in the story.

"The Miracle of the Lily" is a little more sciency than "The Fate of the Poseidonia," with all the ecosystem/evolution stuff, but I think it still has a lot in common with weird fiction: people investigate the past and other planets, and in the final pages of the story discover mind-shattering horrors that are likely ineluctable.  On the good side, I like anti-utopian stories, and how Harris looks at the psychological and sociological effects on people of living on a planet wholly covered by man-made structures.  Harris also includes in the story pocket radios that the characters use as we use cell phones.

Like "The Fate of the Poseidonia," "The Miracle of the Lily" is interesting as a historical document, but mediocre as a piece of entertainment or literature.

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These stories are worth reading, but they aren't great.  I'm toying with the idea of reading more stories from the April 1928 issue of Amazing; this will provide context for the Harris stories I just read as well as insight into a world in which a Hawaiian guitar is considered a surefire cure for loneliness.