Stories from Playboy by Matheson, Beaumont, Clarke and Niven

Back in 2016 I purchased the 1971 paperback anthology Last Train to Limbo at a church sale in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  (I get around!)  This volume of stories that were originally published in Playboy includes several stories I have already read in other books, like William F. Nolan's "Papa's Planet," Arthur C. Clarke's "Dial 'F' for Frankenstein," (zoinks, this must be the story that Fredric Brown's "Answer" reminded me of a little while ago) and Fredric Brown's "Puppet Show."  But between its covers are a number of stories by authors who interest me which I have yet to read, and today we'll cover four that span the middle of the 1950s to the dawn of the 1970s.

"The Splendid Source" by Richard Matheson (1956)

This is a joke story, a spoof (I guess) of detective fiction and those SF stories in which a conspiracy of supermen who run the world behind the scenes is uncovered.  A somewhat silly rich guy becomes obsessed with finding out who writes all the dirty jokes men tell each other, and he travels all over the country, talking to bartenders and bellboys and salesmen, listening to dirty jokes and trying to figure out where they came from.  He eventually is ushered in to the secret headquarters of the centuries-old secret society of men who write the dirty jokes that are circulated by word of mouth around the world.

This story is a waste of time; it is like 20 damn pages long and my eyes were glazing over as I tried to read it.  Maybe I should note that, like an orange soda that contains no juice, this story about dirty jokes contains no dirty jokes, but just reminds you of them.  There are jokes, but they are tame.  For example, we get a list of the protagonist's earlier quixotic cultural ventures, like his unfinished contrarian books The Slums: A Positive View and Horatio Alger: Misunderstood Satirist.  Those two titles are the best jokes in the entire story, and appear on its fourth and fifth pages.     

"The Splendid Source" was reprinted in F&SF in 1957 and has since appeared in anthologies of humorous stories and in Matheson collections.  It is included in my copy of Collected Stories: Volume Two, and in the little commentary there after the story Matheson tells us that he wrote a sequel in which the hero gets into the adult film business but, for some reason, Playboy didn't buy it.

Whoa, looks familiar

"The Monster Show" by Charles Beaumont (1956)

"The Monster Show" appeared in the same issue of Playboy as Matheson's "The Splendid Source," and was also reprinted in F&SF.  

This is another joke story and another attack on television and consumerism.  I'm tripping over a lot of these lately.  Do I read SF to hear bad jokes and endless moaning from snobby smarty-pantses about how the average person is a TV-worshiping knuckledragger?  I'm suffering an acute shortage of tense stories in which a guy in a space suit uses his engineering knowledge to fight a robot!

In "The Monster Show," Beaumont takes us behind the scenes of the TV business in the consumerist future of 1976 where the TV execs use wacky slang and take drugs to endure the pressure of trying to get high ratings.  After two pages I was turning back to the table of contents to see how long this thing was--sweet relief, only eight pages.  Anyway, the bulk of this story consists of a conversation between TV execs in which one guy describes an evening's programming to another, the biggest evening of programming of all time!  The jokes Beaumont serves up consist of the kinds of exaggeration gags a dim 3rd-grader could compose--"We begin with a two-hour commercial roundup, advertising the products of our fifty-seven sponsors," and funny name jokes--one of the fifty-seven sponsors is "Chewey-Flakes."   The twist ending is that this special evening of programming is an alien plot--one of the execs is an alien spy and the night's TV shows will be putting everyone on Earth asleep so we won't be able to resist the alien invasion.  Did a child write this?

"The Monster Show" has been reprinted in Beaumont collections, and not many other places.

"The Food of the Gods" by Arthur C. Clarke (1964)

This story comes to us as an historical document, the six-page transcript of a speech given to Congress several hundred years in the future!  From this document we learn that, in the 21st century, scientists figured out how to synthesize food of all sorts from rocks and water!  Any food, from broccoli to hamburger, can be identically duplicated in a lab and mass-produced in a factory, which ends hunger and puts farms and ranches out of business.  Most people in the future depicted in this story don't even know their ancestors ate dead animals, and being appraised of this fact makes some of the Congressmen at the hearing physically ill!

The shock ending of the story comes when the person giving the speech, a spokesman for a food manufacturer, reveals that he is before Congress to complain that one of his firm's competitors is playing dirty pool.  The new food they have introduced, which is universally popular and is putting all the other food manufacturers out of business, is a duplicate of human flesh!

I'm going to call this one acceptable--it is sort of interesting and not boring or irritating, and the jokes are inoffensive.  It has been reprinted many times in Clarke collections, not much elsewhere.

 

"Leviathan!" by Larry Niven (1970)

According to isfdb "Leviathan!" is the second in a series of six or seven stories about a character named Svetz.  On the cover of a Niven collection that includes many of the Svetz stories we are told Svetz is a "Time Retrieval Expert."  The Dean Ellis cover of this collection has a pretty sincere and "sensawunda" vibe, so maybe Niven is going to break us out of our humor story rut.

In the Clarke story it is so far in the future that even the educated have forgotten that people used to eat meat from dead animals, which is hard to believe, because classic literature that the college professors of the future will read, like Virgil's Aeneid and Proust's In Search of Lost Time, include references to people slaughtering beasts and cooking them up and eating them up.  (Who could forget that scene of Francoise and the killing of the chicken?)  Well, in "Leviathan!" the people of 1,000 years in the future, when the world is ruled from the UN palace, don't have any records or knowledge of what a gila monster or a sperm whale look like.  So when the ruler of the world, the UN secretary general, wants a gila monster and a sperm whale for his zoo, and Svetz goes back in time to find them, he has no idea what precisely he is looking for!

This story focuses on the sperm whale; at the start of the story the UN apparatus already has a forty-foot fire-breathing dragon in custody which everybody calls a gila monster.  Svetz takes a sort of aircraft back in time to the mid-nineteenth century and flies over the Atlantic, hunting for a whale.  His equipment first detects a sea serpent, and Svetz, at the controls of the anti-grave devices and stun rays at his disposal, struggles with the tremendous monster, which we are told is four times the size of a sperm whale.  In the end of the story we get a literary joke (after vanquishing the serpent Svetz captures Moby Dick and brings the albino cetacean back to the future) and a hint that the reason Svetz keeps finding dragons and sea serpents and other fantastical beasts when he goes back in time is that the time machine itself is fucking up the universe.

Another joke story, but not bad.

"Leviathan!" has reappeared in Niven collections and in anthologies of time travel stories and sea serpent stories.  (Some of these anthologies get pretty specific.)

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Four joke stories, though the ones that integrated a little science into the drollery were not repellent.  I am going to be stacking the deck in an effort of avoid joke stories in our next episode, however!

1955 stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Charles Beaumont, and Richard Matheson

1955 was a big year for culture!  Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was first published in 1955, the first McDonald's opened in 1955, and Elvis Presley made his (local) television debut in 1955.  Was 1955 as big a year for SF as for literary fiction, gastronomy, and music?  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we have been looking at SF which Anthony Boucher considered among the best of 1955 and included in 1956's The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifth Series.  (I own a 1968 printing of the paperback edition.)  In our last episode we looked at three joke stories; today we look at three stories that Boucher, in his spoily intros, tells us he finds "moving" or "pointed."

"This Earth of Majesty" by Arthur C. Clarke

The story printed in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifth Series under the title "This Earth of Majesty" appeared in F&SF under a big question mark!  You see, the magazine was running a $200 contest to see which reader could come up with the best title!  (See the contest rules and MPorcius Fiction Log's 63-year-late entry below!)  According to isfdb, "This Earth of Majesty" was the name Clarke used, while the winner of the contest came up with "Refugee."  When the story was printed in the British magazine New Worlds in 1957 it was titled "Royal Prerogative."

It is the nearish future, when mankind has colonized Mars and Venus and ships carry cargoes between Earth and those worlds.  Rockets have just recently been replaced with ships propelled by "Field Compensation Drive generators" and a space port has been set up in England, not far from Stonehenge.  (England had no suitable sites from which rockets could take off, being too densely populated.)

Captain Saunders is a Texan in command of a space ship about to carry cargo from England to Mars; both members of his two-man crew are British.  The Prince of Wales comes to visit the ship after it lands; Prince Henry is a space buff and knows all about space ships and the history of space travel but has never been on a real space voyage because the government thinks it too risky.  Clarke here takes the line that being a member of the royal family is more a burdensome responsibility than a privilege, that the position is constricting and going to all those openings of schools and lame parties is soul-drainingly boring.  "This Earth of Majesty" is a sort of patriotic pro-Albion story; when Saunders visits London we are told that the Underground is "still the best transport system in the world," for example, and the story has the famous "this sceptred isle" quote from Shakespeare as its epigraph ("this Earth of majesty" is a phrase from this quote.)

The plot of this story is sort of obvious--American Saunders tosses aside his republican sentiments and quickly develops a soft spot for the prince, so when his crew finagle things behind his back so that the prince can stow away on the trip to Mars, he doesn't mind.  People who have it in for the English and fierce adherents to democratic ideals will groan!

Acceptable sappy filler.  Maybe an interesting historical document as a presentation of an Englishman's view of what Britain and the US are all about, or maybe the image of Britain a particular Englishman wanted to project to Americans.

My idea for the title is a nod to William IV.  Cross your fingers because I could use those 200 bucks.

"The Vanishing American" by Charles Beaumont

This story is about a 47-year-old who failed in his ambitions to become a college professor.  Wait, I’m 47 years old!  And...well, at least this guy still lives in the big city!  Count your blessings, bro!

Mr. Minchell works in an office at an adding machine.  His colleagues hardly ever talk to him--they hardly even look at him!  At home are his wife who never stops complaining and his kid who watches TV and never reads books—Minchell can’t identify with that little brat!  When he was a kid he read Edgar Rice Burroughs and L. Frank Baum!

On his 47th birthday Minchell looks in the mirror and realizes that the metaphorical process of vanishing has culminated in the literal condition of becoming invisible--nobody can see him! Shocking, a fate not unlike death...but perhaps also liberating?  When he wasn’t following the adventures of Tarzan or Dorothy and the Scarecrow, as a kid Minchell fantasized that the huge lion statue in front of the library was a mighty beast lying in wait, a creature that only he, young Minchell, could ride.  Now that nobody can see him Minchell decides to fulfill his childhood dream and climb up on the lion.  The act of living one of his dreams cures his invisibility—children and an adult man who himself was a dreamer in his youth see Minchell up there and cheer him.

Acceptable sappy filler. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, you'll recall, accused Boucher of having a “love of the precious;” maybe this is the kind of thing that august publication was warning us about?

“The Vanishing American” has been reprinted many times. To me it felt like the story of an individual guy’s problems, but I’m an individualistic sort; in fact the story’s title suggests Beaumont meant Minchell to represent “Everyman” and the city in the story, though at times it feels like the greatest city in the world and the tomb of my hopes and dreams, is a sort of "Everytown, USA,"* and so I guess Beaumont is casting Minchell's unsatisfying job and unsatisfying family life as a universal problem, perhaps the result of something wrong with the larger culture of the United States.  Serious anthologists putting together serious tomes (for sale in bulk to government schools, one presumes) took that ball and ran with it, including “The Vanishing American” in such books as 1975's Social Problems through Science Fiction and 1976's The City 2000 A.D.: Urban Life Through Science Fiction. (What are the chances that today’s college professors would assign their victims--I mean students--a book that suggests a nagging wife is a social problem?  And are the editors of The City 2000 A.D. using “urban life” as a synonym for “modern life?”  I’m sure there are plenty of people in farm country and suburbia who failed to achieve their dreams and are alienated from their irritating spouses and dimwitted offspring.)

If crummy wives and TV-obsessed brats are your cup of tea, check out Robert F. Young's 1957 story "Thirty Days Had September," discussed just days ago here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

*The subway Minchell rides and the huge lion before the library are of course reminiscent of New York City, but Beaumont never names the town and while there are two white lions before the NYPL at Fifth and 42nd, where in a different phase of my life I spent many hours, the lion in this tale is black and solitary.  I personally think Beaumont made an artistic mistake in leaving his story bereft of a sense of place by setting it in some vague neverland.  The best thing about Damon Knight's "You're Another," which also appears in this anthology and which I was slagging in our last episode, is the real New York locations.      

"Pattern for Survival" by Richard Matheson

I'm wishing I could tell you that the author of "Duel" and "Prey" was going to break this streak of sappiness we're going through, but I cannot; this brief tale, while not bad, is pretty sappy.

The story begins with a fragment in italics, the end of a SF love story in which the happy lovers look across their beautiful glittering city of mirrored towers.  Then we follow the love story's writer as he seals up this manuscript and takes it to the mail box, then the mail man (I know, "mail carrier") as he takes the manuscript from the mail box, then the editor at the magazine as he reads the manuscript, etc.  There are hints that something weird is going on, for example, the fact that the story is written in the morning and the magazine featuring it is published that very afternoon, and there there are all the references to the decrepitude of the magazine's offices and damage to the streets.  By the end of the story we realize that there has been a nuclear war and the writer is the last man on Earth and, in his despair, he is playacting all the roles of writer, postal worker, editor, newsagent, et al.

This story is not bad, and it is less than four pages long so it doesn't waste you time, but I'm kind of sick of these sentimental stories.  "Pattern for Survival" has not been anthologized much in English, but has appeared in many Matheson collections, including Collected Stories: Volume Two, a withdrawn library copy of which I own.  Collected Stories: Volume Two includes comments by Matheson himself after each story, and, contra Boucher and me, who took "Pattern for Survival" seriously as a portrait of a man whose mind has been destroyed by a cataclysm, Matheson says it is a "humor story" and a gentle satire of Robert Sheckley whom, Matheson suggests, would get his stories published under even the worst possible conditions!  "Pattern for Survival" has also been included in several European publications.

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These stories are all fine; I guess I am just too cynical and jaded or simply not in the mood for this kind of sentimentality.  I wish I would come across more stories like Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "I Made You," to be honest.

More SF stories from the MPorcius Library's anthology shelf in our next installment!

Science Fiction and Fantasy from Playboy: Beaumont and Clarke

In some of the introductory matter in A Sea of Stars, which I was looking over this recent weekend, editor William F. Nolan talks about how Ray Russell brought SF into Playboy.  So now seems an appropriate time to check out some SF from the world famous men's magazine via my copy of 1966's The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy.  I own the 1968 paperback edition, which is a little over 400 pages.

The Preface and editorial duties for The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy are credited to "the editors of Playboy," but according to isfdb it was Ray Russell who was responsible for putting the book together.  In the Preface Russell brags that Playboy changed the SF landscape by being the first "slick" to consistently publish SF, and because Playboy paid much higher rates than the genre magazines.  Russell really sticks it to the SF magazines, claiming they were too "solemn" and "sober" to publish light-hearted stories like "Blood Brother" by Charles Beaumont and too obsessed with realistic science to publish Ray Bradbury's "The Vacation."

Today we'll take a look at four stories from this anthology, two each from Charles Beaumont and Arthur C. Clarke.

"Blood Brother" by Charles Beaumont (1961)

Ugh, a five-page joke story about a vampire who goes to the psychiatrist.  And these are the kind of jokes we get:

"I've been meaning to ask you about that.  Why do you wear it?"

"You ever hear of a vampire without a cape?  It's part of the whole schmear, that's all.  I don't know why!"

It's barely a joke at all!  This dud is followed by complaints about the high price of coffins and replacing white shirts (the blood stains, you know) and then the twist ending in which the head shrinker kills the vampire with a wooden letter opener and then reveals that he too is a vampire.

Back in 2014 when I read Ramsey Campbell's "Sunshine Club" and Michael Bishop's "Gravid Babies" I issued my jeremiad against vampire psychiatrist and werewolf psychiatrist stories, horror joke stories in general, and humor based on references to pop culture.  My aversion to these excrescences has not eased in the years that have passed!  You know how the government compels Breyers to label those of its products that lack a certain amount of milk fat "Frozen Dairy Dessert" instead of "Ice Cream" so picky consumers can avoid them?  Well, I am slapping the "Tepid Derivative Genre Fiction" label on "Blood Brother" so picky readers can avoid it!

Bad!

"The Crooked Man" by Charles Beaumont (1955)

Russell writes a little intro to each story, and in the intro to this one brags that the (unnamed) top men's magazine before the arrival of Playboy refused to publish "The Crooked Man," but Playboy eagerly presented it to the world.

It is the 27th Century.  There are no families and no private homes...and everybody is born in a test tube and lives in a dorm...and everybody is a homosexual!  Well, almost everybody.  The tiny number of heterosexuals are pursued by the police, and if caught given surgery to alter their hormonal balances and brain functions so they cease feeling all those unnatural urges regarding the opposite sex!

This is a switcheroo story, centered on an idea meant to shock you or force you to think in a different way, though Beaumont does try to generate some human drama with a plot-based narrative and lots of verbiage about how scared and confused the main characters are.  The entire story takes place in a bar where men are all hitting on each other and hooking up--or rejecting men's advances, as is the case with our protagonist, Jesse, a straight man who has to pretend to be gay.  Jesse is at the bar to meet his girlfriend, Mina--sounds ridiculous, but  there is so much surveillance in this oppressive society that there is no place else to meet.  "There were no more parks, no country lanes.  There was no place to hide at all...."  Mina comes in disguised as a man, a disguise that is not very convincing.  By the tenth of the story's eleven pages Jesse and Mina are on their way to having their heterosexual brains repaired.

"The Crooked Man"  is the kind of story which was perhaps a big deal at the time it was written, but is now an historical artifact that feels gimmicky.  Just acceptable. 

"I Remember Babylon" by Arthur C. Clarke (1960)

"I Remember Babylon" begins like a memoir, with Clarke reminding us how he came up with the idea for the geostationary communications satellite in 1945.  (A few pages later he plugs his 1951 book The Exploration of Space and his undersea films.)  Clarke then describes his encounter with a man at an official reception at the Soviet Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka (Clarke moved to Sri Lanka in 1956 and spent the remainder of his life there.)  This guy, a failed US TV exec, is now in the employ of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China!  The commies are planning to put a TV satellite over the Pacific and transmit programming to Americans--they'll get American eyeballs by broadcasting pornography (using the Kinsey reports as market research!) and then slip in some propaganda material!  (As an example of the high-brow stuff that will protect the spaceborne network from moral opprobrium, the renegade broadcaster shows Clarke an expertly made film of the 13th-century erotic sculptures on the Konark Sun Temple.)

And that's it; this is more of an idea than a plot-driven story.  Even though it is over fifty years old some of the issues "I Remember Babylon" raises--the pervasiveness and effect on people of pornography and how much influence biased media and inaccurate reporting, particularly those generated by foreign entities, has on the political beliefs and activities of Americans--are at the center of public debate today  Smoothly written, brief, and thought-provoking, I thought this one worth my time.

"Dial 'F' For Frankenstein" by Arthur C. Clarke (1965)

Like "I Remember Babylon," "Dial 'F' For Frankenstein" is more about playing with a provocative idea than telling a story.  A bunch of engineers sit around and talk about the strange events that have been taking place since the new communications-satellite-based worldwide telephone network was switched on at midnight.  It seems that connecting enough computers and electronic devices together has generated a consciousness, and this artificial intelligence, like a newborn baby, is clumsily exploring its surroundings.  American guided missiles have been launched, traffic is snarled because of the erratic behavior of traffic lights, banks and factories have had to suspend operations because machinery and electronics records are going haywire.  Mankind is at the mercy of an amoral child it has unwittingly birthed!

This one feels like a trifle.

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Tossing the inimical "Blood Brother" aside, we see that the three other stories from Playboy we've looked at are more about showcasing ideas than portraying human drama or drawing compelling characters.  And so they feel pretty bland. Well, we'll sample some more of the offerings from The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy in our next installment; maybe they will provide some excitement.

Stories by Simmons, Beaumont, Nolan and Bloch from across A Sea of Space

Welcome to Technicolor-Dreamcoat Land

We've been digging through our collection of classic SF paperback anthologies here at the MPorcius Library, and today we explore William F. Nolan's 1970 effort, A Sea of Space.  No doubt you'll recall that time we read Nolan's anthology 3 to the Highest Power.  You've probably forgotten that time I read four stories by Nolan; don't be embarrassed--I forget about them myself!  As I did, you can refresh your memory at the link.

I'm not groking A Sea of Space's cover; the picture of a woman in an extravagant outfit holding an over-sized eyeball (and, on the margins, three men's heads and a landed flying saucer projecting colorful rays) is pleasant enough, but I don't feel it conveys the book's announced theme of travels through space.  Maybe it illustrates a specific story?

Nolan's dedication is also mysterious.  It lists ten first names, all, I suspect, of women.  In contrast we have the table of contents, which lists fourteen names, all, I believe, of men.  Our 2018 sensibilities cry out, "That just ain't woke!"

Today we'll be looking at four of those fourteen stories, those written by Herbert A. Simmons, Charles Beaumont, Nolan himself, and Robert Bloch.

"One Night Stand" by Herbert A. Simmons (1963)

As Nolan tells us in the intro to the story, Simmons is the acclaimed African-American author of two novels about urban black life and jazz, Corner Boy and Man Walking on Eggshells.  "One Night Stand" is his only SF story, and first appeared in Gamma, a short-lived (5 issues) magazine for which Nolan served as managing editor.

"One Night Stand" is a first-person narrative in the voice of a jazz musician of the future, when the Earth is in contact with aliens, like the blue people of Mercury.  It is full of slang and metaphors, lots of sentences like these:

See, man, you start out trying to conquer a horn and because it's a bitch and hard to control, if you ain't careful that damn horn ends up conquering you.

Oh, we got hot man, we got wild.  Right from the beginning we were a burning bitch, and that's no jive, giving out like an old-time preacher on a Sunday morning, giving out so hard it was like no smoke, man, no smoke at all.

The story is only five and a half pages long, and I found this kind of writing in a dose of that size to be amusing.

One of the narrator's bandmates is Maury, perhaps the best trumpet player on Earth.  Maury is not happy.  For one thing, him being twenty years ahead of his time, very few people appreciate his genius trumpet playing.  For another, because he's not very good-looking and spends all his energy trying to tame his trumpet and none learning how to woo women, he can't get any "dames."  When Maury gets the idea that the blue people of Mercury may be capable of appreciating his playing, he insists the band accept the offer of a gig there.  While they are there he meets a native girl who loves him for his playing, and decides to stay.

"One Night Stand" is entertaining, largely because of its distinctive voice.  It is a fun change of pace from most SF stories, and Simmons has fun defying the expectations of SF readers: regarding the band's space flight to Mercury, the narrator tells us, "Now, man, if you're waiting for me to tell you about the moon and the stars and the milky way and all that jazz, that ain't what's happening....I'm a musician.  I ain't no astronaut."

"Elegy" by Charles Beaumont (1953)

Beaumont, like Nolan, was friends with Ray Bradbury, and Bradbury, we are told in Nolan's intro to the story, "worked over" "Elegy" in one of its early drafts.  We are also told that "Elegy" formed the basis of an episode of The Twilight Zone written by Beaumont (a quick look at Wikipedia indicates that this was Episode 20, also called "Elegy.")

The nations of Earth were about to embark on a cataclysmic war (one featuring the use of the "X-bomb") so a bunch of spacemen fled in their ship.  They went to Mars, but they didn't get along with the Martians.  So they searched the galaxy for a suitable place to settle.  Just as they were about to run out of fuel, by chance they came upon Asteroid K7.

K7, they learn, is a secret installation, offering services to the very rich!  When your loved one dies, you can have him preserved in a custom built setting, where he can (to outward appearances) enjoy his favorite activity for all eternity.  It's the galaxy's most elaborate cemetery!  A kid who loved rollerskating is frozen in his skates on a sidewalk.  A businessman who loved his work is frozen in a replica of his firm's office building, and kept company by artificial statues of all his colleagues!  And on and on (we get plenty of examples.)

The refugees are eager to settle on the cemetery asteroid, the soil and climate of which are suitable for agriculture.  But the cyborg caretaker of the cemetery has been given the mission of maintaining peace on K7, and human beings are so fractious that you can only be sure they will be peaceful if they are dead!  So the cyborg poisons the spacemen and preserves them at the controls of their now inert ship.

Merely acceptable.  "Elegy" first appeared in Imagination.

"Lap of the Primitive" by William F. Nolan (1958)

Many years ago, on my birthday, my wife (then my girlfriend) had me board a train with her, not telling me its destination.  We got off in New Haven and she guided me to the Peabody Museum of Natural History to look at dinosaurs and then the Yale Center for British Art to look at prints and paintings.  As "Lap of the Primitive" begins, Phineas Perchall is trying to give his new wife, Tildy, the same sort of surprise on their honeymoon; they are on a rocket she thinks is going to Luna, but is really bound for Venus!  But is Tildy as appreciative as I was back in my New York City days when my wife gave me an unexpected opportunity to deepen my relationship with Rudolph F. Zallinger and Sir Joshua Reynolds?  No!  In fact, as she sits in the passenger rocket she is lamenting that she got hitched to a man who is a bore with a long nose and a weak chin!  Why did Tildy marry a man whom she finds so unattractive?  Because she's a big fatso and doesn't think she could do any better!

I recently rewatched the 1975 TV movie Trilogy of Terror, on which Nolan worked and which features the famous adaptation of Richard Matheson's "Prey."  (You can still find illegally pirated movies on YouTube among all the videos from Russian bots providing advice on how to vote.)   Back in the very dawn of this blog's life I wrote that Matheson's "Prey" was a great horror story because it wasn't just about blood and violence but the everyday horrors of our human relationships.  When I started the story and saw it was about an unhappy marriage I thought that "Lap of the Primitive" would perhaps take this course.  Unfortunately, it is a goofy joke story taking, I suppose, Tarzan, King Kong and Ray Bradbury's "The Long Rain" as its inspiration.

Once on Venus, Phineas, inspired by his reading of books by an heroic anthropologist, wants to explore the jungles and uncover the truth about a "White God" who lives in the wilderness.  A safari is organized, with porters who carry stuff on their heads and a native guide and everything.  As they march through the jungle, Phineas, so excited about this trip earlier, finds the adventure fatiguing and even dangerous as he is stung by insects and blunders into pitfalls, while Tildy, at first scared of the jungle, begins to enjoy it.  She even begins losing weight thanks to the days of marching and eating native food.  The final twist joke is that the "White God" is the anthropologist Phineas admires, a big handsome blue-eyed blond, and he steals Tildy away from her husband, knowing that soon she will be thin and beautiful.  (The anthropologist and the native guide had this whole thing planned out when they first got wind that an Earth woman had landed on Venus.)

Weak.  This story first appeared in Fantastic Universe, and in his intro Nolan suggests that he is particularly proud of this one, that it is among his best works, in a way that left me bewildered.  For example, he talks about "Tildy's eventual triumph," when Tildy never does anything--she marries a guy she isn't attracted to, is tricked into going to Venus, is tricked into going on a safari she doesn't want to go on, and then submits to the desires of a man she does find attractive.  Tildy never makes any real decisions, she is subjected to the manipulation of others again and again.  Lame!

"The Old College Try" by Robert Bloch (1963)

It's Robert Bloch, he of Psycho fame!  Three years ago I read his 1989 novel about murder and voodoo in Los Angeles, Lori.  I think Bloch's reputation is a little inflated, but we'll see what he comes up with here.

"The Old College Try," which first appeared in Gamma, is about colonialism, and actually reminded me a little of the kinds of stories Somerset Maugham wrote about colonial administrators going native.  Bloch loves puns and jokes, and there is a certain amount of humor in this story, but the humor doesn't stop it from being a more or less realistic SF story--"The Old College Try" isn't an absurd parody like "Lap of the Primitive," thank heavens.

The Yorl of planet Yorla are violent savages with a stone-age level of technology.  These little blue-skinned hooligans enjoy fighting and are devoted to publicly displaying as trophies the heads of fallen opponents.  Yorla has valuable mineral resources, and humans are eager to trade with the natives for the minerals; as the Yorl are equally eager to acquire human trade goods there is no trouble convincing the Yorl to work in the mines.  Being too busy in the mines to fight their vicious wars, the Yorla have sublimated their lust for blood and craving for dangerous competition in a way that makes the mining operation more efficient--slackers who don't pull their weight in the mine or otherwise fail to meet their daily quota of ore are decapitated by their fellows!

The current colonial administrator, Raymond, has not made much effort in his five-year term on Yorla to civilize the natives.  In fact, he has a score of dutiful Yorl servants at his beck and call and spends most of the day drinking "Aspergin," a bit of wordplay from Bloch which I quite like.  (The first few lines of the story relate how a Yorl waits at Raymond's bedside every morning to hand him a glass of Aspergin as soon as he wakes up to alleviate his customary morning headache.)  Raymond's five years are up, and his replacement, Phillips, arrives.  Phillips is disgusted by Raymond's lax administration and the Yorls' taking and displaying of heads and other "exotic" customs, and, brushing aside Raymond's efforts to dissuade him, sets about trying to reform the Yorl.  This brief campaign ends in tragedy; unfortunately for this reader, the nature of the tragedy is a little too obvious and too easy to predict.

Despite the somewhat disappointing ending, I'll give this one a marginal positive vote; Bloch's style is smooth, and he structures and paces the story well, so it is enjoyable enough.

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For some reason I thought A Sea of Space would be full of stories about guys jettisoning cargo to escape gravity wells and calculating orbits while running low on oxygen, stuff like that.  Well, maybe those stories are in there; we'll keep our scanners tuned for them in our next episode.

Post-War American Tales of the Fantastic: Beaumont, Ligotti & Wolfe

The college library that is within walking distance of the dilapidated and spider-infested house the wife and I rent has a copy of Volume II of The Library of America's American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub and published in 2009.  Volume I, which I read three stories from last week, covers the period before 1940; this one presents work from 1940 to 2007.  A few days ago I borrowed the volume, and early this week read three of the stories therein.

"Black Country" by Charles Beaumont (1954)

Beaumont is one of those writers I have often thought I should read, but whom I have not gotten around to.  So here is my chance.

"Black Country" first appeared in Playboy. The story is about jazz.  It's my understanding that Playboy, at least in its early incarnations, was marketed as the magazine for the sophisticated man, and one of the things the Platonic ideal of the sophisticated man of the '50s and '60s cared about and knew about was jazz, and Playboy covered jazz within its pages quite extensively.  (Personally, I know nothing about jazz.)  The cover of the issue in which Beaumont's story appeared is actually adorned not with some hot chick, as has been the norm for decades, but a cartoon depiction of jazz musicians.

"Black Country" is a first person narrative by a member of an African-American jazz band whose talented and charismatic leader, Spoof Collins, plays the trumpet.  The group has a dedicated white fan, Sonny, who takes over for the saxophonist when he is killed in some kind of fracas.  The band later decides to take on a female singer, Rose-Ann.  Rose-Ann falls in love with Spoof, but Spoof loves his trumpet more than anything, and when she gets a little too cloying, Spoof hits her.  Sonny rushes to her aid, staring down Spoof; Sonny is in love with Rose-Ann, and they become an item. Spoof dies soon after (committing suicide because he has cancer) and Sonny becomes leader of the band, shifting from saxophone to trumpet.  The story's climax is when Sonny digs up Spoof's horn from the grave and Spoof's spirit plays through Sonny; the two men, of two different races, who butted heads earlier, are reconciled in their quest to achieve the ultimate, purest jazz.  

This story is just OK.  Maybe I would enjoy it more if I was a jazz aficionado--the numerous scenes describing musical performances ("Spoof lifted his horn and climbed up two-and-a-half and let out his trademark...Jimmy kanoodling the great headwork that only Jimmy knows how to do...Henry did that counterpoint business that you're not supposed to be able to do unless you have two right arms and four extra fingers...." etc.) left me cold.  Maybe others will find the story's racial and sexual politics interesting; presumably Beaumont is arguing for racial harmony here, but some readers might find the way a white man takes over the black band, or even the way Beaumont speaks in the voices of black men, condescending or offensive.

"The Last Feast of Harlequin" by Thomas Ligotti (1990)

A year ago (gadzooks, has it really been that long?) I announced to the world my deep and abiding love for Thomas Ligotti's story "Vastarien."  Can I experience such a love again?  I started this story, which first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, with hopes that I could.

Ligotti dedicated "The Last Feast of Harlequin" to "the memory of H. P. Lovecraft," and in the introduction to American Fantastic Tales' second volume Straub calls the story "a loving and exacting tribute" to Lovecraft.  Straub's description is perfectly apt; this is a finely crafted Lovecraftian story, carefully emulating the plot structure and themes and tone of Lovecraft's own works.

The story is a memoir or testament, written by an academic anthropologist, describing his investigation of an odd festival in a Midwestern town, a town founded by New Englanders in the nineteenth century.  Like the characters in various Lovecraft stories, our narrator travels around town meeting creepy characters, delves into old newspapers and other old documents for clues, and then learns a horrifying truth before escaping with his life, but not without dreadful psychological scars and the knowledge that something catastrophically terrible awaits him in his future.  In the climactic scene we even get the subterranean ritual of human sacrifice led by an evil wizard or priest which we expect to find in a Weird Tales-style story.

Maybe because I was exposed to so much Marxism in college, and maybe because in my twenties and thirties I spent so much time reading books in which social class is important (like Proust and various 18th-century things like Casanova and Boswell), I am always finding these SF stories to be worthy of some kind of class analysis. "The Last Feast of Harlequin" is perhaps a more appropriate subject of a class-based analysis than most.  The town at the center of the story is split into "desirable sections" of "normal residents" and a darker, uglier, poorer side, "the south end," which the narrator calls a "slum" or "ghetto" and which is home to "lethargic," "gaunt" and "nauseatingly passive" people.  The slum dwellers keep to themselves, and are, in fact, monsters of some type.  Every winter they have a dark, creepy, sinister celebration, and the loud and brightly lit festival in the "normal" part of town is (our narrator theorizes) devised to drown out or distract from the evil celebration of the monstrous freaks.  The narrator, as a professional scientist and college professor, is of course solidly middle-class, but, by putting on a disguise of old shoes, blue jeans and a coat whose pockets he tears and to which he applies stains, he has little trouble infiltrating the dark side of town.

The surprise at the end of the story, which is not really a surprise to careful readers because Ligotti foreshadows it quite clearly, is that the anthropologist is, previously unknown to himself, one of the freaks.  "He is one of us....He has always been one of us" says the wizard/priest, who turns out to be the narrator's mentor back from his days at his New England university.  This kind of class anxiety strikes a chord with me because of similarities to my own life.  My parents are working class, and my mother expresses hostility to white collar workers and complains when she sees me in my J. Crew outfits ("Why don't you wear jeans and sneakers?  Does Joe College think he is better than the rest of us?")  Does my own college degree, my intellectual hobbies and time spent working in universities and offices make me middle-class, or does my blood and the time I've spent working in machine shops, warehouses, and the stock rooms of stores make me working-class?

"The Last Feast of Harlequin" is like a smoothly running clock, each of its glittering gears rotating in harmony with every other.  Every paragraph serves a purpose and serves that purpose well.  I can enthusiastically recommend this story to Lovecraft fans, who may enjoy picking out all the little Lovecraftian elements and themes.   Because it is so good, I would also strongly recommend the story to people curious about Lovecraft's influence on later "weird" writers.  

I didn't like "The Last Feast of Harlequin" as much as "Vastarien," however.  It is so like a finely polished, exquisitely constructed exemplar of a Lovecraft story (dare I use the phrase "Platonic ideal" twice in one blog post?) that it is a little lacking in the surprise and novelty department.  Ligotti here has put together a masterpiece of an homage; it feels like the best possible version of something we've seen before, rather than something original or new.  I thought "Vastarien," while definitely Lovecraftian in feel, had something new to say and was more challenging, more mysterious, making for a more powerful reading experience.

"The Little Stranger" by Gene Wolfe (2004)

I'm one of those people who thinks of Gene Wolfe as his favorite writer and who thinks Wolfe is a strong candidate for "best" or "greatest" or "ultimate" SF writer of all time, so for me reading a Wolfe story that is new to me is always a significant event in my intellectual life.

This is actually the second time I've read "The Little Stranger;" when I checked out the book I thought it was new to me, having forgotten the title, but by the second page I realized I had read it before.  Perhaps I read it in Jonathan Strahan and Karen Haber's Fantasy: The Best of 2004; I used to get those anthologies at the New York Public Library all the time.  I'm sure I didn't read it in its first place of publication, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  

The story begins on a heartbreaking note: the tale is a series of letters written by a terribly lonely old woman, Ivy, to a dead cousin.  "Please forgive me for troubling you with another letter....You are the only family I have, and as you are dead you probably do not mind."  The story quickly becomes light-hearted, however.  The conceit of the story is that everybody thinks Ivy is a witch, and various coincidences, like a black cat joining her household and two little kids named Hank and Greta coming to visit her "gingerbread house," reinforce this idea and provide an opportunity for Wolfe to make jokes (of Hank and Greta our narrator says, "[they] are such sweet little strangers.  I could just eat them up!")  It is strongly suggested that Ivy's house is haunted or somehow alive, and also lonely, and manipulates events to relieve its own loneliness as well as Ivy's.  There are also hints that Ivy is hundreds of years old.

While I have suggested the story is light-hearted, at the same time we are constantly reminded that the world is full of evil.  Ivy often worries about thieves and burglars, and is very concerned that business people will cheat her.  There are gypsies in the story (our narrator doesn't use that word, but I think all the clues point to them being gypsies) and they have a contentious relationship with the authorities: one of the female gypsies opens a fortune telling business and is investigated by the police bunco squad, while the others flee into the woods at the very sight of the police. Readers may recall that I had the same attitude about Wolfe's 1990 novel Pandora by Holly Hollander; that it was outwardly fun, but full of reminders of war, crime, and broken families.

As usual with Wolfe, an economical and dense story worth rereading, with an odd, novel premise.

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I'm not the audience for the Beaumont story, but these three stories are all worthwhile reads.  While I, an inveterate cheapo, have borrowed the two volumes of American Fantastic Tales from libraries, I hope other people who care about genre literature have been purchasing them.  We certainly want to encourage The Library of America and other organizations to continue producing books like this, books full of stories about ghosts, witches, and evil cults but composed of fine paper and fine bindings, with attractive and easy-to-read typefaces and no typographical errors.  (Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick have volumes of The Library of America dedicated to them--if I eat my broccoli maybe I'll live to see similarly handsome volumes of Gene Wolfe's work.)