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

Mel Hunter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh la la!

"The Pink Caterpillar" by Anthony Boucher (1945)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too bad!

F&SF, March 1953: A Boucher, W Tucker, and M St Clair

When last we met, we read a story by Manly Wade Wellman we quite liked, "Vandy, Vandy," that debuted in an issue of F&SF. Let's further explore that issue, the March 1953 number.  Now, many years ago, we read Richard Matheson's contribution, "Disappearing Act" (another story I liked) but this issue with the Chesley Bonestell Mars cover also includes new tales for us to investigate by editor Anthony Boucher, Wilson Tucker (who apparently coined the term "space opera") and Margaret St. Clair, critic of Edmond Hamilton and Seabury Quinn and fan of Clark Ashton Smith and C. L. Moore.  Their three stories have all reappeared in collections and anthologies, but keep in mind I am reading them in a scan of the original 1953 ish of F&SF in which they first saw print.

"The Other Inauguration" by Anthony Boucher 

In our last episode I quite harshly criticized Boucher's 1941 story "Snulbug" but it is unto the breach once more my friends as we tackle another Boucher piece which I fear is a joke story occasioned by the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower.  "The Other Inauguration" would be included in the 1955 Boucher collection Far and Away (I love the stark white spire on Richard Powers' cover) and Groff Conklin's Science Fiction Terror Tales reprinted it in that same year.

The year: 1984.  Our protagonist: a college professor at a government university in the poli sci dept.  His obsession: politics.  This guy even broke up with a girlfriend over the '72 election and so never got married.  And he thinks the '84 election is an even bigger deal--when a senator whom he considers a combination of Huey Long and Joe McCarthy wins the presidential race, beating our hero's candidate, a judge, in a landslide, our bachelor considers suicide!  This would save us readers having to read the remaining nine pages of the story, but instead poli sci boy goes to visit a fellow professor saddened by the prospect of a future in which the senator will curtail their latitude to indoctrinate their students.  This second egghead is in the Psi Dept and has the idea of using time travel to change the election results.  (Or shifting to another time stream. to a universe in which the judge won the election--the story seems to conflate the two concepts in a way I found sloppy, or maybe just so boring I lost track of the distinction.)  Yes, just like in "Snulbug," the Boucher story I condemned mere hours ago, we have in "The Other Inauguration" a scientist who wants to use time travel to "make a better world"...and fails!  

The two profs train their psi technique and develop equipment to the point that they can move in time and/or shift to alternate time streams.  (Why Boucher includes mechanical as well as psychic means of manipulating time in his story I don't know, it just makes the story longer.)  The pro-judge activists shift to a time stream where the judge won the election.  But, as in "Snulbug," you can't really change history.  The judge and his party quickly becomes as totalitarian as our protagonists feared the senator and his faction would have.  When our guys are suspected of being subversives, a mob destroys their psi equipment and hits each of them in the head, destroying their psi ability and preventing them from further meddling with history.  I guess the lesson of the story is not only that you can't change history, but that it is counterproductive for elites to try to meddle with the popular will by breaking the rules, that you just have ride the wave of public opinion, which, in the long run, is more to be trusted than that of elites.

More streamlined and with fewer jokes, this is a better story than "Snulbug," but still banal and kind of boring.  We'll judge it acceptable. 

"Able to Zebra" by Wilson Tucker

Way back in 2016 we read Wilson Tucker's 1981 Resurrection Days and I found it disappointing and so have avoided the man ever since.  But today the Tucker-drought ends.

One of the things I noted about Resurrection Days was its jocular tone; another was the meta elements, like its protagonist's fondness for SF and his references to Robert Heinlein. Well, "Able to Zebra" shares these characteristics. (Also, the ability to induce disappointment in yours truly.)

Our hero is an alien secret agent here on Earth in the 1950s.  The galactic federation or whatever it is that he represents has deployed such agents to each of the 26 inhabited planets of the galaxy to keep an eye out for, and remedy, anachronisms introduced by irresponsible time-travelling tricksters.  So when our hero, one of the most junior agents in the service, hears tell that a 400-year old Indian burial mound has been excavated and within it has been discovered 20th-century coins, he contacts HQ and they send a sexy blonde agent, an individual quite senior to him, to take charge of Earth operations.

The junior agent has an idea--he is an avid reader of Earth SF magazines, and thinks he and blondie can somehow make people ignore the anachronistic coins by planting stories about time machines in the magazines.  (The universe Tucker depicts is an alternate to our own, in which, among other things, the idea of time machines has not been broached in fiction yet.)  Tucker puts in the junior agent's mouth a long speech about the history of science fiction and the field's ability to predict widespread use of atomic power and geostationary satellites.  Tucker also includes as a minor character in his story real-life SF editor Beatrice Mahaffey, a woman apparently popular in SF circles because she was pretty.  

The hot blonde agrees to a scheme in which they travel back in time to convince H. G. Wells to write Time Machine and thus alter the history of SF and make it easier to explain away the coins to 1950s people.  The plan works and as the story ends it looks like the blonde is going to reward the junior agent by having sex with him.  (In a jokey wink-and-nod fashion, sex is a pervasive theme of the story.)

Lame filler--thumbs down.  The plot is convoluted and unconvincing, and the self-indulgent in-jokes about Mahaffey and other SF figures are silly.  Probably Mahaffey and Heinlein and all the rest liked Tucker and thought his references to them fun but that fun does not translate to this reader.  

I don't think this limp production has been anthologized in English, though our paisans over in Italia reprinted it in Urania.  It does show up in Tucker collections.

(The Tucker-drought resumes.)

"Thirsty God" by Margaret St. Clair 

"Thirsty God," like much of St. Clair's work, appeared under the Idris Seabright pen name.  I guess I've read three stories by St. Clair so far, "Horror Howce," "Squee," and "Mrs. Hawk."  The fact that "Thirsty God" was reprinted in Groff Conklin's Crossroads in Time (our amigos in Spain perhaps know the anthology as Encrucijadas del tiempo) is making me think this story will be our third today about travelling through time to change the future.  Enough already, guys.

"Thirsty God" reminds us immediately of the work of C. L. Moore and Leigh Brackett.  A roguish Terran adventurer is on Venus, riding a beast, pursued by the primitive natives because of his sexual dalliance with one of their females.  He takes refuge in what he takes to be some kind of sacred shrine--the natives do not follow him within.  In fact, this is an ancient facility, left over from when Martians colonized Venus; the building's role was to radically alter the body chemistry and structure of the natives of dry Mars to facilitate survival on humid Venus.  Robotic apparatus transform the Terran adventurer and he is forced against his will to become a vital part of the current Venusian ecosystem.  St. Clair suggests this is poetic justice, his punishment for raping the Venusian girl is to have his body used by alien beings in a way he finds both disgusting and irresistible.

This is a good science fiction horror story--it's central gimmick is clever and St. Clair describes the human's physical transformation and psychological response to it in a way that is convincing and entertaining.  And there is nothing to do with time travel in "Thirsty God," thank heavens.  Thumbs up! 

  

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So Margaret St. Clair, operating undercover as Idris Seabright, is our big winner today with a story that has a good science fiction concept attached to a traditional adventure setting and is well-written and unencumbered by jokes or other superfluities.  I'm glad I read her story last and can thus bid this blogpost on its way with a light heart.

Next time, something I expect will be evil and disgusting, so stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log if that is your bag, you sicko.

Best from F&SF 3: P J Farmer, M W Wellman and A Boucher

I've owned my copy of Ace G-712, The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Third Series, for some years, and the day on which we read from it has finally arrived.  My copy of the 1968 paperback, a reprint of a hardcover published in 1954 and then in paperback first in 1960, was originally owned by a Private Charles E. Harris; you may recall that back in 2018 we read stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, Damon Knight, Avram Davidson and Fredric Brown from Private Harris's copy of The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifth Series.   

Today, from this third of the Best From F&SF anthologies, edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, we'll read tales by Philip José Farmer, Manly Wade Wellman, and Boucher himself.  I'll note here that I am reading the versions in my crumbling 1968 paperback, which may or may not be different from their original versions or versions appearing in later collections or anthologies.  Also, that my paperback has quite a volume of annoying typos.  Sad! 

"Attitudes" by Philip José Farmer (1953)

In my youth I read multiple Riverworld and Dayworld books, in my early adulthood one World of Tiers book and Dare, and since the apocalyptic life of this blog began I've read Farmer's novels The Green Odyssey, The Stone God Awakes, and Tongues of the Moon as well as the stories "Down in the Black Gang," "The Shadow of Space," "A Bowl Bigger than Earth," "J. C. on the Dude Ranch," "The Henry Miller Dawn Patrol," "The Leaser of Two Evils," and "The King of the Beasts."  So says the video tape.  Now I will try to stop singing the first track from the Kinks' eighteenth studio album ("doo, doo, doo") and read this 1953 piece by Farmer, which debuted in F&SF alongside a reprint of a 1939 story by Raymond Chandler that debuted in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown.  According to isfdb, "Attitudes" is the first of five stories about a Father Carmody.

The protagonist of "Attitudes" is a professional gambler of the star-hopping future, currently travelling on a star liner.  This guy has telekinetic and ESP powers, and uses his powers to cheat at cards and other games.  He's also an atheist and early in this story, which occupies about 22 pages of The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Third Series, he sneeringly criticizes the five men with whom he is playing a friendly game of pinochle, among them Father Carmody and the ship's captain, because they are believers.  The gambler says the other men are all afraid to take the chance that there is no God, and that really enjoying life requires taking chances.  (Farmer doesn't use the phrase "Pascal's wager," but that seems to be what he is riffing on here.)

The ship lands on a planet of barbarians to take on water.  The captain forbids any passenger from contacting the natives during the four-hour watering process, but the gambler's favorite thing in life is to defy authority, so he leaves the valley in which the liner landed to spy on the locals.  He finds they are playing a game much like a combo of craps and roulette; the human gambler joins the game and uses his psychic powers to start winning most of the natives' money.  Or so he thinks!  Father Carmody appears on the scene to save the day, he having read a scholarly article on these natives.  Reminding us of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and perhaps the Aztecs, this native game is to determine who is to be sacrificed to the natives' god--if the human gambler had been crowned "winner," as his psy powers made almost inevitable, he would have been crucified.  The Father convinces the natives to let the psyker leave the game and so one of the natives is sacrificed instead.  The final scenes of the story explore whether Carmody was right to rescue one man and consign another to death, and suggest God had a hand in this adventure.

This is a competent but mundane sort of story--we judge it acceptable.  Perhaps it is significant in that it doesn't remind you, as so many science fiction stories do, that religion is a scam and that instead of expressing and encouraging admiration of the rebel, as is the norm in science fiction, which so often depicts welcome paradigm shifts, Farmer portrays a man who has contempt for tradition and defies authority as a knave and a fool.  Some readers might find Farmer's treatment of psychic powers innovative and interesting.

"Attitudes" has been reprinted in many languages and was the final story in the 1982 Father Carmody collection Father to the Stars.

Always with the cat people....

"Vandy, Vandy" by Manly Wade Wellman (1953)

Here we have one of Wellman's John the Balladeer stories.  "Vandy, Vandy" has been a big success, with David G. Hartwell including it in his huge 1987 anthology Dark Descent (our British friends split that 1000-page monster into three volumes and "Vandy, Vandy" appears in Volume 1, The Colour of Evil) and Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh reprinting it in their 1996 Supernatural Sleuths.  And of course you can find it in multiple Wellman collections.  "Vandy, Vandy" debuted in an issue of F&SF with a story by Richard Matheson I really liked when I read it ten years ago, "Disappearing Act," and stories by Anthony Boucher and Margaret St. Clair that I will probably read some day.

"Vandy, Vandy" is a very good black magic story into which Wellman smoothly integrates his interests in American history and in folk music.  John and his silver-stringed guitar come to a remote valley, drawn by clues in folk songs he has heard.  Talking to a family of hillbillies, he unravels a crazy story about a devil-worshipping sorcerer centuries old who tried to subvert the American Revolution, to seduce George Washington himself and make the new republic of The United States of America a kingdom devoted to Satanism!  (Wellman's 1939 story "For Love of a Witch" treated similar themes in a far less impressive fashion.)  This witch man desired a blonde violet-eyed girl named Vandy, but was foiled, and over the centuries has been pursuing her even more beautiful descendants.  The evil wizard appears--can John rescue the current Vandy from this devil-worshipper and preserve his own life by exploiting his own knowledge of the occult and summoning the spirit of the Father of Our Country?

The magic scenes in "Vandy, Vandy" are very good, and Wellman handles all the themes--folk beliefs about George Washington, the question at its founding of what would be the nature of the culture and government of the United States, devil worship, and sex--economically but powerfully.  Wellman's style suits his material, and he quickly and clearly paints images and draws characters for the reader that we can see and feel.  Thumbs up for "Vandy, Vandy." 

"Snulbug" by Anthony Boucher (1941)

Here we have a mundane and boring joke story about time paradoxes that tells you that knowing the future is pointless because you can't change the future, a story that goes on way too long and is full of repetition and bargain basement jokes.  Thumbs down!

The most interesting thing about "Snulbug" is that it takes as one of its themes a sort of cynical skepticism of Man's ability to understand and master the universe, making the story a counterpoint to the general attitude of old timey science fiction stories that suggest that man is a problem-solving animal who can master his environment.  Perhaps ironically, one of the leading exponents of the "man is a problem-solving animal" theory, John W. Campbell, Jr., was the first, but far from the last, man to publish "Snulbug," printing it in 1941 in his magazine Unknown.  Boucher himself reprinted "Snulbug" in F&SF in 1953 and then here in The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Third Series.  I'm always a little uncomfortable with editors who buy stories from themselves--it feels like self-dealing--but they all seem to do it so I guess it is like part of your compensation as editor?  And of course it is worse when, as here, the story feels like filler, though I will note that other people don't appear to see "Snulbug" as mere filler but as some kind of classic--Martin H. Greenberg and D. R. Benson included it in anthologies that purport to print "the best" or "hall of fame" stories.  Maybe my opinion is the minority one--it wouldn't be the first time.

A scientist thinks he has figured out a way to detect embolisms early and thus save thousands of lives a year.  But he needs a lab to develop his idea, and nobody wants to finance him.  So he summons a demon to help him get the money.  One of Boucher's little jokes is that the scientist is not a very good wizard and so he can only summon a demon one-inch tall who has a bad attitude.  The demon is actually ancillary to the story, just a sort of comic relief figure and Greek chorus, as the actual plot of "Snulbug" concerns using time travel to get a newspaper from the future; Boucher could have had the scientist use a time travel device or a future viewing device or something of that nature.

The scientist hopes to exploit the info in tomorrow's newspaper to collect the money he needs to develop his life-saving embolism detection technique.  He is foiled again and again because you can't change the future--if you read about a crime in tomorrow's paper and rush to the scene of the crime before it happens with the laudable aim of preventing the atrocity, time will snap back like if you lifted the needle off a record and put the needle back down again a few seconds earlier.  As he tries to change the future, our protagonist repeatedly relives the same moments right before an event he is trying to alter, and Boucher inflicts upon us many repetitive scenes (I find this repetition in stories very annoying.)  Eventually the scientist just tricks some rich fat guy (in fiction if a guy is rich it is a signal to the reader that it is OK to steal from him and if a guy is fat he is fair game for any kind of abuse) into giving him the money.  Boucher seems to leave it ambiguous whether the scientist is going to succeed in starting his own lab and bringing his embolism-detection technique into general use or not.

Not for me.

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Wellman's story is by far the best of these three, and let's talk about why.  I like sincerity and economy in stories, and Wellman's story exhibits these traits in every paragraph.  Wellman's endorsement of Christianity and hero-worship of George Washington may seen corny to our 2025 ears, when smart people all know religion is a scam (though those who want to get ahead pay lip service to socialism and Islam as the religions of the future) and that George Washington's statues should be torn down because he owned slaves, but Wellman's straightforward faith and conviction bowls over any objection that might come to the reader's mind and serves as a strong backbone for his story.  Every other element of "Vandy, Vandy" serves as the muscle and sinew that flesh out that backbone and propel the story in such a way that it vigorously achieves its goals--every one of Wellman's lines furthers the story's plot or adds to the atmosphere that serves that plot.  There are no extraneous elements that get in the way of the plot or muddle the atmosphere, and there is no fat--Wellman doesn't needlessly and counterproductively hammer away at his points again and again.  This is in strong contrast to Boucher's story, which is a jumble of lame jokes slathered on mind-numbingly repetitive scenes that promote his cynical and banal themes.  Farmer's story is not actually bad, but compared to Wellman's strong piece it meanders and it feels pretty routine beyond its sympathy for religion.

More short stories in today's vein in the next exciting (we hope!) episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

The Unexpected: A Boucher, F Brown & E F Russell

In the last installment of MPorcius Fiction Log we read three stories from McIlwraith-era Weird Tales that Leo Margulies reprinted in his 1961 anthology The Unexpected, the cover of which promises "strange" and "hair-raising" stories that will transport you to a "nightmarish world."  Let's do the same today, but whereas last time our writers were Margaret St. Clair, Mary Elizabeth Counselman and Fritz Leiber, today we've got Anthony Boucher, Fredric Brown and Eric Frank Russell.  Somehow, all three of these stories debuted in WT in 1949.

Before we begin, I remind you that I don't own a copy of The Unexpected and so I'll be reading these stories in scans of the original 1949 magazines.

"The Scrawny One" by Anthony Boucher (1949)

This is a two-page twist story on those perennial topics, being tricked by the Devil or some similar stygian entity and screwing up the magic wish a genie or whoever gives you.  A California man in the 20th century exhaustively researches the fringe characters for which the Golden State is famous and eventually hooks up with a real wizard.  He convinces the sorcerer to summon a demon for him, and then murders the magician.  The demon begrudgingly offers the murderer a wish, as he is obligated, and the killer wishes to be the richest man in the world.  So the demon puts him in the body of the richest man in the world, some kind of Hindu feudal ruler or something who is suffering some horrendous decaying disease and is moments from death.  Every year this lord or whatever he is holds a ritual which involves being laid upon a giant scale and having a pile of precious stones heaped on the other end of the scale until the pile is his own weight, and her spends his last moments in the middle of this bizarre local custom.  Boucher's gruesome touch is that the murderer watches one of his new body's digits fall off its hand before he expires.  The demon, meanwhile, formerly a noncorporeal form jealous of the flesh of human beings, is now in the murderer's body and is about to enjoy all the pleasures in which a material body can indulge.

We'll declare this gimmicky and contrived thing acceptable filler, I guess.  The beginning, when the murderer kills the wizard, before we know this is yet another deal-with-the-devil and magic-wish-backfires story, is good, and what comes after is a big disappointment.  "The Scrawny One" would be reprinted in the men's magazine Cavalier in the same year it reappeared in The Unexpected, and would later see print in anthologies of stories from Weird Tales as swell as NESFA's The Compleat Boucher.

"Come and Go Mad" by Fredric Brown (1949)

The way Bloch and Quinn's names
appear on this cover reminds me of
feminist artist Barbara Kruger's
derivative and gimmicky work

Like Leiber's "The Automatic Pistol," Brown's "Come and Go Mad" is famous and the title was so familiar to me that I kind of thought I had already read it when I first started looking into The Unexpected.  But it turned out I hadn't.  You can find this story in many Brown collections and many anthologies.   

"Come and Go Mad" is one of those stories with a protagonist who has amnesia.  Read enough fiction and the same gimmicks come up again and again.  Maybe I need a new obsessive hobby.  Anyway, newspaper reporter George Vine, apparently, lost his memory in a car accident three years ago, and can recall nothing of his life before he woke up in the hospital after the wreck.  In the first of "Come and Go Mad"'s eight chapters, his editor convinces Vine to go undercover as a mental case into an asylum to investigate something odd detected by the asylum's director, Randolph.  What unusual phenomena did the director notice?  The editor doesn't provide Vine any details about Randolph's suspicions, so the reporter will go into this assignment with an open and unbiased mind.

In Chapter II we get a plot twist--reporter George Vine has been lying about the amnesia for three years, he in fact does have extensive memories of life before the accident--and the life he remembers is not that of 20th-century journalist G. Vine, but that of the young Napoleon Bonaparte!  Vine has hidden this fact from everyone for three long years, and it is true he has no Vine memories of the pre-crash period.  We readers are led to believe that George Vine is insane or that the soul or consciousness or whatever of the Corsican ogre is cohabiting this 20th-century American body with that of the reporter.  

Brown in this story strives is to keep everything uncertain, to keep the reader in suspense, always wondering which of the possibilities presented, some of them quite hard to believe, might be the truth.  The final punchline is that none of the characters' or reader's speculations matter, because life is meaningless and to know the truth is impossible because the truth is so horrible it will drive the truth-knower insane.

Chapters III and IV introduce more mystery--are Vine's friends and colleagues colluding with Randolph to get Vine committed against his will?  Do they think he is insane and so, with the best intentions, are tricking him into getting treatment?  A man can only be admitted to the asylum on the recommendation of two shrinks, so Vine has to go see a second doctor and fool him into thinking he is insane.  When he tells this second psychiatrist in Chapter V that he thinks he is somehow Napoleon Bonaparte, transported at age 29 to the 20th century, is he doing it to further his undercover journalism mission, or to sincerely get psychiatric treatment?

In the asylum we get various compelling scenes in which we meet the madmen and the guards; these scenes are the most conventionally entertaining in the story.  Then we get the finale, a sort of distillation or parody of Lovecraftian themes.  Napoleon Bonaparte/George Vine is informed by aliens that mankind is a parasitic race created by the immense alien intelligences that rule Earth to serve as entertainment--our evolutions and wars and so forth are games that different aspects of this intelligence play against each to stave off boredom.  As part of the game, the consciousness of Bonaparte was shifted across space and time from one body to another.  This knowledge threatens to drive the protagonist insane, so it is blotted from his mind and he eventually is released from the asylum and lives what amounts to a normal life.  The author tells us that the question of who among Vine's friends were acting for the aliens is immaterial, and in fact everything is immaterial.  The last sentence of the story is the assertion that "Nothing matters!"  

"Come and Go Mad" succeeds in embodying its theme that life and the universe are complicated and trying to figure them out is a waste of time because you can't and it wouldn't help you if you could, so I guess, based on the fact that it achieves its objectives, you have to call it a good story.  But is it entertaining?  The asylum scenes are certainly enjoyable and the in-your-face Lovecraftian there-is-no-God and you-can't-understand-the-universe-so-life-is-without-meaning ending suits Weird Tales, but the first half is kind of weak.  Those early chapters feel long and slow, with lots of characters who don't appear later and lots of talk about the protagonist looking out the window, looking at pigeons, wiping sweat off his forehead, lighting a cigarette, stubbing out a cigarette, etc.  I guess all the distant gaze and cigarette business is supposed to set the mood, to give readers insight into Vine's emotions and state of mind, but it all feels kind of like chaff you have to get through to get to the actual story.  On the other hand, this stuff makes the story feel "sophisticated," like a mainstream story and not a story you find in a magazine full of vampires and zombies and scantily clad ladies.

We'll end up at a mild recommendation.

Two of the many editions of Space on My Hands;
left is 1980 USA, right is 1995 Romania

"The Big Shot" by Eric Frank Russell (1949)

Remember when we read an entire book of "weird" material from Eric Frank Russell over four blog posts?  (ONE TWO THREE FOUR)  Good times, good times.  Well, here is a weird Russell story that didn't get reprinted in that 1962 book, Dark Tides.  Why wasn't it included in that volume?  Maybe because it is a weak filler piece?

"The Big Shot" is one of those stories in which the author speculates on the afterlife, another well worn topic of SF writers.  (If you go to those websites where you can read manga for free, you'll find that half the comics in Japan are about some 21st-century goof who gets his ass killed in an accident and wakes up in a Dungeons and Dragons world.)  In "The Big Shot" a big hulking organized crime figure gets blasted by some joker who owes him money and can't pay and then the crook wakes up to find himself on a white road, marching inexorably towards a shining city below a rainbow-colored mountain range.  The brief story covers his realization of what is going on, his bluster and anxiety upon recognition that he is about to be judged, his claims that if he did bad things it was because he had no choice, and the assertion of the great powers that judge human souls that he did have a choice, that he could have been a decent person.

Merely acceptable filler, pedestrian and forgettable.  In 2006 Midnight House put out a volume of Russell weird stories that includes "The Big Shot," Darker Tides.

**********

I have to say that I am not that impressed with Margulies' choices for The Unexpected, the covers of which promise some kind of hellish nightmare experience, stories that are original and disturbing.  Too many of these stories are typical and routine, not scary at all and/or mediocre.  Bloch's story is lame jokes and lame social commentary, while Counselman's is tedious sappy sentimentality about a loving mother. St. Clair, Boucher and Russell offer obvious, even trite, filler pieces.  Leiber's is well done, but the plot is still a little obvious.  Brown's is the most disturbing of the ones we've read recently, seeing as it comes right out and tells you that life is meaningless and you are a fool to try to figure it out, after demonstrating this fact with its plot of pointless unsolvable mysteries.  Looking back over the years, recalling the stories in the book by Manly Wade Wellman, Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon, I think we can say Wellman's is in the banal filler category, Bradbury's is sort of disturbing though not great, while Sturgeon's is likely the best in the book, well written as well as actually disturbing and somewhat original. Well, hats off to 'ol Ted.

More Weird Tales next time, folks.

Suspense from F Brown, H Ellison, B Pronzini, R Silverberg & R Bloch

This weekend I was looking at the books at a church sale and came upon 2001's A Century of Great Suspense Stories.  There were four stories in there by writers who are associated with SF and about whom I am interested, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, Anthony Boucher and Fredric Brown, so I thought I'd track the stories down at the internet archive back home and see how great they really were.  Back at MPorcius Fiction Log's Mid-Atlantic HQ, I realized I'd already read Bloch's "Life in Our Time" and Boucher's "The Girl Who Married a Monster," leaving me with only Ellison's "Killing Bernstein" and Brown's "The Wench is Dead."  I didn't think two stories was really enough for a blog post, so I started hunting around the internet archive and soon discovered Great Tales of Mystery and Suspense, a 1985 edition of 1981's The Arbor House Treasury of Mystery and Suspense, edited by Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg and Martin H. Greenberg, and 1993's Blood Threat and Fears (oy, with the puns) edited by Cynthia Manson, the subtitle of which is Thirty-Three Great Tales of Psychological Suspense.  The Arbor House volume includes stories I've already read by Malzberg ("Agony Column") and Mickey Spillane ("I'll Die Tomorrow" AKA "Tomorrow I Die") but also stories new to me by Pronzini ("A Craving for Originality") and Robert Silverberg ("Many Mansions"), while the Manson book had one by Bloch ("See How They Run"), bringing us to five--count them, five--allegedly great suspense (and/or mystery?) stories.

"The Wench is Dead" by Fredric Brown (1953)

This one debuted in Manhunt, and in 1961 would reappear in Bloodhound, a British magazine that reprinted stories from Manhunt.  Brown expanded "The Wench is Dead" and it appeared as a novel with the same title in 1955.  I'm reading the 1953 Manhunt version.

A few months ago our narrator, Howie, who has a BA in Sociology, was sitting at a desk in his father's Chicago investment firm wearing a white shirt and a tie.  But then he became a drifter and today he's in L.A. washing dishes (TIL that slang for a dishwasher is "pearl-diver") and getting drunk every day.  And it gets better--he has also charmed a whore, Billie the Kid, who wears her "sleek" black hair in a "page-boy bob" and has breasts the "size and shape of half-grapefruits" so he can bang her for free!  He might even be in love with her!

Uh oh, things just got worse!  The overweight heroin-addicted whore upstairs was just murdered!  Who cares, you ask?  Well, Howie and Billie care!  Howie was the last person to see her before she got shivved, Billie having sent Howie upstairs to ask the lady of the night with all the tracks on her arms if she could spare some booze!  The milkman saw Howie go into the heroin-addict's apartment and he told the fuzz, making Howie suspect Number 1!  And Howie can't just tell the cops the truth because while Howie was at work Billie had to talk to the boys in blue and she lied to them about her and Howie's whereabouts at the time of the murder!

Howie goes on the lam with the idea that he will make his way back to Chicago and resume the life of a respectable office worker from a prominent family who only drinks socially.  A series of coincidences and chance occurrences ensue that end up with Howie figuring out who the murderer is and at the same time getting himself even deeper in trouble.  Finally we have a twist ending that gives us every reason to believe Howie is never going to return to responsible middle-class life, that he has found a way to live like a drunken bum the rest of his days, and all he has to do is abandon all sense of decency, all his inhibitions, any reluctance to commit the most heinous of sins!

This is a good, fun story about underworld scum whose lives revolve around drugs, booze, prostitution and petty crime, and the risk and opportunities that arise when by chance they get mixed up with serious big time criminals.  Is it a horror story about the dangers of hitting the sauce and associating with human trash, or a wish fulfillment fantasy for people sick of living within the straitjacket of bourgeois norms?  Brown's writing is economical, smooth, and fast-paced, but still atmospheric and full of psychological insight.  Thumbs up for "The Wench is Dead."

"Killing Bernstein" by Harlan Ellison (1976)

The last time we talked about Ellison I was explaining the many ways that his cover story for the November 1980 issue of F&SF was terrible.  But I'm not an Ellison hater on a jihad against this successful son of Ohio and his horde of worshipful fanboys--I always start these stories hoping I will like them, and maybe I'll like this June 1976 cover story for the first issue of the short-lived magazine Mystery Monthly, which I am reading in a scan of the 1978 collection Strange Wine, which has a great cover by the Dillons perhaps meant to entice fans of Lord of the Rings.  (Is there a story about an elf maiden in this collection?)

"Killing Bernstein" is OK, kind of slight.  The narrator is a big executive at a big toy company, and Ellison indulges in his love of lists and his love of famous names, listing off all the big toy company names, nine of them.  He also has a riff on Jaws, a theory of why a movie about sharks might be so successful at scaring people.

The narrator is having an affair with a beautiful woman executive, last name Bernstein, but her behavior towards him is erratic.  One night she'll have sex with him and say she loves him, then the next day she'll be cold, or even, at the big meeting, shoot down all his ideas for new toys, basing her blackball on the results of her test research.  (This meeting is the central scene of the story, and the longest, and, in the intro to "Killing Bernstein" in Strange Wine, Ellison claims the toys and the reasons they were rejected are all based on toys proposed and abandoned in real life.)  The narrator comes to think Bernstein is out to destroy his career (he compares her to a shark--this is where the Spielberg movie comes in.)  So he kills her in her apartment, but the next day she is back at work.  Is he going insane?  Did he just knock her out so that she could recover and return to the office to play mind games with him?  He kills her again, but she reappears at the office again!

Eventually the narrator figures out what is going on.  Bernstein has multiple clones, and different ones come into the office at different times.  One of the clones fell in love with him, but the others didn't, which explains why the narrator has been treated erratically.  Broken hearted, in a daze, the narrator abandons his career and stays in the research facility where the clones are hiding out, hoping one of them will fall in love with him like that one he murdered.

Acceptable.  One of the problems of the story is that the ending sort of requires you to think the narrator was really in love with Bernstein, but you get the impression throughout the story that he killed Bernstein not out of passion over his rejected love but because she was threatening his career; it is like Ellison wanted this story to not only be a tale of rage over rejection or unrequited love, but also an attack on middle-class money-grubbing careerists.  I also have to wonder if that whole Jaws-related passage about our racial memory going back to the time our ancestors were aquatic animals adds something worthwhile to the story or just pads the word count.  In an interview in the December 1981 issue of Twilight Zone magazine, Ellison seems to be suggesting he doesn't revise his work, that as a "professional" he can produce copy on a first go that is salable (or as he puts it, "not just readable...but...a hell of a story") but maybe "Killing Bernstein" would have benefited from some polishing so its disparate ideas--clones, selling toys, ancestral memories of sharks, rejection by a woman, and competition between executives--were more united into a coherent whole. 

"A Craving for Originality" by Bill Pronzini (1979)

The intro to this story in Great Tales of Mystery and Suspense warns us it is a satire about a hack writer.  Can a satire be suspenseful?  What is it with this false advertising?

Charlie Hackman churns out a dozen or so derivative and imitative novels every year, riding the coattails of trends and fads, making enough money to pay the mortgage on his suburban house and support his obese wife who doesn't like to have sex as well as his three pack a day cigarette habit.  After doing this for fifteen years, on his 40th birthday, he suddenly decides he is dissatisfied with his unoriginal writing and his unoriginal life, and wracks his brain trying to think of something original to write, and when this fails, something original to do.  This part of Pronzini's story is a little annoying, because it is so repetitive--a short paragraph describing Charlie's hopefully original idea, followed by a one-word rejection of it as "hackneyed" or "trite" or whatever, again and again.  The ideas are supposed to be funny, but they are not.

Hackman finally comes up with an original idea while in Manhattan and puts it into action, and Pronzini's story is entertaining for a page or two.  Charlie gets a hatchet and bursts into a bookstore and chops up his many pseudonymously written paperbacks, crying out stuff like "I'm doing hack work!"  Then he runs around town, pursued by a crowd and a cop, to be run over by an automobile, ending the story on another pun on "hack," the car that ends his sad suburban life being a taxi cab.

This story is neither suspenseful nor mysterious, and it is not great, either, but seeing as the chase in my old stomping grounds of Midtown Manhattan made me smile, I'll judge it acceptable.

"Craving for Originality" debuted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and would be included in Graveyard Plots: The Best Short Stories of Bill Pronzini.

"Many Mansions" by Robert Silverberg (1973)

"Many Mansions" first appeared in the third of Terry Carr's Universe anthologies, and has since reappeared in many Silverberg collections and several anthologies.

"Many Mansions" is a randy time travel joke story--I thought this book was called Great Tales of Mystery and Suspense, not Black Humor Cavalcade or Broken Marriages and Broken Minds.  Good grief.

This thing is like 24 pages and manifests itself as like sixty or seventy paragraphs with double spaces between them; each para represents the thoughts and/or narrates the actions of one of the three characters.  We've got Ted, who is sick of his wife, Alice, and day dreams of her getting killed in an accident so he can bang other chicks; when he despairs because that is unlikely, he daydreams of committing suicide.  We've got Alice, who dreams of Ted keeling over.  And we've got Martin, Ted's grandfather, who is over 80 and has sex fantasies about Alice; he gets so excited thinking about her and telephoning her so he can breathe heavily at her over the line that a medical robot has to administer drugs lest he have a heart attack.

This is the future, 2006, when the government controls the weather and Alice's cooking consists of pressing keys on a console.  (The government manages to screw up the weather and Alice still manages to screw up dinner sometimes--this is a joke story, after all.)  Time machines have been developed, and all three of our unsavory characters day dream of using a time machine to have sex with and/or murder one or both of the other two characters, and some of them even, I think, put their ideas into practice--I think the alleged mystery and alleged suspense of this allegedly great story have to do with whether individual little paragraphs are "reality" in this or that alternate time stream or just day dreams.  The little paragraphs get a little repetitive as we see alternate outcomes of the characters' little expeditions to the past.

"Many Mansions" isn't funny, and the story generates no human feeling not only because it is ridiculous but also since it portrays multiple realities, so nobody's death or love or fear or regret feels real--infinite possibilities means nothing matters.  I'm finding this story particularly disappointing because the whole point of today's exercise is to read suspense stories; if I wanted a sex-oriented comedy I would just read Henjo--Hen na Joshi Kousei Amaguri Senko again.  If Malzberg and Pronzini wanted to throw money at their buddy Silverbob I expect they could have found a more suspenseful story in his vast oeuvre than this.

Thumbs down!  

"See How They Run" by Robert Bloch (1973)

This story from the author of Psycho comes to us in the form of a journal that a comedy writer for TV is keeping at the urging of his shrink.  (More Hollywood, more shrinks.  Somehow, we read a lot of stories about Hollywood and psychiatrists/psychoanalysts here at MPorcius Fiction Log.)  Via the diary entries we learn about the writer's life--his father entertained his pals by telling them stuff the narrator as a child said, his mother had him drinking formula from a bottle for a peculiarly long time and was otherwise abusive, there was an episode in which as a kid the narrator killed a mouse with a kitchen knife, he has lost his TV writing job because he was giving the TV star material that was not family-friendly enough, his wife has become a successful singing star, and now he is hitting the sauce pretty hard--and the shrink's diagnosis of his neuroses and uncovering of the subconscious reasons for his various career decisions.  The [unreliable] narrator thinks psychology is a scam, but the text bears out the doctor's diagnosis.  The shock ending is that the narrator has a "hebephrenic schizoid" episode, in which he "revert[s] to childhood or infant behavior levels" and the final journal entry is written in the spelling and grammar of a child.  This child-like passage, somewhat obliquely, indicates that the narrator murdered his wife in much the same way he killed that mouse long ago.   

Rather weak...maybe barely acceptable.

"See How They Run" first appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and would resurface in Bloch collections and an Alfred Hitchcock anthology.

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So, of our five stories, only one, Fredric Brown's, could conceivably be considered "great," and it is the only one that is truly suspenseful.  The Ellison and Pronzini stories have endings that are surprising, but the surprise was not preceded by the kind of curiosity and uncertainty and anxiety that I think constitutes suspense.  The Silverberg story instilled apathy (and annoyance) in this reader, and the Bloch story wasn't much more engaging (though it was considerably less annoying than the Silverberg.)

Even though today's best story was the most realistic and least speculative, the one that relies least on futuristic technology, abnormal psychology, or absurdist satire, expect the next batch of blog posts here at MPorcius Fiction Log to inhabit our customary milieu of the supernatural and the spacefaring future.