I, J, L, M: Stories from ABC by Washington Irving, Laurence M. Janifer, Fritz Leiber and Walter M. Miller, Jr.

It's four more stories from An ABC of Science Fiction, the 1966 anthology of SF stories edited by Tom Boardman, Jr.  I have the 1968 US paperback from Avon.  Because I read it in 2014, I'm skipping the K story, Damon Knight's "Maid to Measure," a brief joke story vulnerable to charges of sexism, of perpetuating the dumb blonde stereotype, and (worst of all) of not being funny.

"The Conquest By the Moon" by Washington Irving (1809--this version 1955)

Remember when people were taking public domain works by iconic writers from the Georgian and Victorian past like Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte and filling them with zombies and other faddish genre elements?  (Are they still doing that?)  Well here's an "updated" version of a work by an early 19th-century literary icon in which the included genre elements were part and parcel of the author's original version!

In 1955 Anthony Boucher included in F&SF a condensed selection from Washington Irving's satire A History of New York From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty entitled "The Conquest By the Moon."  Boucher credits leftist folk-singer Lee Hays with alerting him to this pioneering example of invasion-from-space speculation.  This adapted fragment of Irving's book hasn't been reprinted very often; maybe Boardman resorted to it because there are not many SF writers whose names start with an "I," or perhaps Boardman just likes stories that try to be funny while denouncing white racism and the human propensity for violence.  Whatever the case, it's time for me to get edjumakated because everything I know about Washington Irving up to now I learned from cartoons.

"The Conquest By the Moon" is more like a sarcastic essay than a story with a plot or characters.  First, Irving points out, in ironic parody, the weakness of the moral claim of European colonists to the New World.  Then he pulls the old switcheroo on us: how would the people of England, France and the United States like it if the inhabitants of the Moon, green cyclopes who find our white skin and lack of tails disgusting, came to Earth and used their "concentrated sunbeam" weapons to force us to renounce Christianity and abandon our cities to live on reservations in inhospitable Arabian deserts or icy Lapland?

Like Samuel Johnson's Idler No. 81, from 1759, this is an interesting historical artifact that documents Georgian era criticism of British and French imperialism in the Americas, but it is not really a work of fiction.  For SF fans "The Conquest By the Moon" is perhaps interesting for its depiction of extraterrestrials whose biology differs radically from our own and their high tech weaponry--"concentrated sunbeams" sounds a lot like the ray weapons that are a staple of SF.

I guess we'll call this acceptable.

"In the Bag" by Laurence M. Janifer (1964)

I recently read Janifer's Slave Planet, and here he is again. Unfortunately, "In the Bag" is one of those short shorts that is supposed to be funny.  This one employs the same gag used by Phillip Jose Farmer in his short short "The King of the Beasts," letting us think, until the end of the tale, that alien characters are humans.

Through an unlikely mix-up an alien emigre and rebel who is running a laundry service on Earth reveals himself to a customer whom he believes to be a human; the customer turns out to be an agent of the secret police of the government the disguised launderer is rebelling against.  This story may be a spoof of the strange phenomena we see in Edgar Rice Burroughs-type lost race stories in which the lost race consists of brutish men but sophisticated and sexy ladies--here Janifer posits a race of aliens the male members of which effortlessly pass as Earthmen while the women have five arms and three breasts and a foot like a slug or snail's.  "In the Bag" may also suggest that those who rebel against tyranny often turn out to be little or no better than the tyrants they oppose--the launderer is willing to kill the customer before the customer reveals he is also an alien.

Barely acceptable filler.  After seeing print first in F&SF, "In the Bag" reappeared in a collection of Janifer stories put out by our friends at Belmont as well as in several foreign magazines and anthologies.

"X Marks the Pedwalk" by Fritz Leiber (1963)

When I was in academia there was a lot of complaining among my leftie colleagues about suburban sprawl and white flight.  (Many of these carpers, of course, indulged in all the sins they deplored when committed by those of their fellow white Americans who had the misfortune to work in the private sector instead of within the taxpayer-funded walls of the academy, like owning houses in the suburbs, evading NYC taxes by claiming their summer home in the Hamptons was their primary residence, sending their offspring to private and/or suburban schools, etc.)  "X Marks the Pedwalk" by Fafhrd and Grey Mouser chronicler and Grandmaster Fritz Leiber is about the suburban-urban divide, though set in Los Angeles, that center of American car culture, instead of my own old stomping grounds of New York, because in Leiber's story that social divide is manifested in the conflict between motorists and pedestrians.     

"X Marks the Pedwalk" is also one of the joke/satire stories with which An ABC of Science Fiction seems to be infested, and as such its plot is a little absurd and the story full of absurdist jokes.  La-La Land, an environment characterized by a steadily decreasing level of sanity, is divided between the hoity-toity suburban Wheels and the slum-dwelling Feet--the Government tries to maintain order and avoid taking sides.  Leiber hints that the situation of LA is like that of Paris during the French Revolution, and it is apparently normal for drivers to run over pedestrians who can't scurry off the street in time, and for pedestrians to heave bricks at or lay spike traps for cars.  At the start of the story one clash between pedestrians and motorists leads to four fatalities, and sparks a heightening of hostilities.  Luckily, the leaders of Wheels, Feet and Government get together to hash out a deal which limits the sorts of weapons that can be used and defuses the tense situation, diminishing if not eliminating the violence of the long-running low-intensity conflict.

Leiber is a good writer, and this is a good story; the action scenes are good and the jokes (like the suburbanites' posh hyphenated names) add to the story, conveying informationand setting tone, instead of distracting you from it.  I had some deja vu reading this piece; I think I may have read it, or part of it, before.  "X Marks the Pedwalk" is an acknowledged inspiration for the Car Wars game, the early editions of which I played back in my school days, and maybe I encountered it in connection with that?

"X Marks the Pedwalk" made its debut in the first issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, an irregularly published magazine edited by Frederik Pohl for most of its run.  That first issue looks pretty good, with lots of big names--besides Leiber and Pohl there's Keith Laumer and Arthur C. Clarke on the writing side and Virgil Finlay, Wallace Wood and Jack Gaughan on the illustration side.  The story has been reprinted quite a bit, including in some anthologies marketed to fans of mysteries and horror, which I thought was interesting, as it is by no means a traditional mystery or horror story.

"No Moon for Me" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1952)

Here's the first story in An ABC of Science Fiction from Astounding.  "No Moon for Me" doesn't seem to have been as successful as many of the stories we've already looked at from this anthology, only having been reprinted in one other anthology, William Sloane's 1953 Space, Space, Space, which has a nice wraparound cover.

Colonel Denin has spent his career trying to convince the Congress to finance manned space exploration, and Congress has always refused to make the long-suffering taxpayers shoulder the extraordinary expense.  After all, what is the point of going to space?  There's nothing up there we don't already have down here!

But today, September 9, 1990, Denin and two other men are boarding a rocket to the Moon!  You see, a few years ago an indecipherable transmission, obviously artificial, started coming from the Moon, and Denin, a pilot, and an academic linguist are going to Luna to investigate!

I admit that I have read so much Malzberg that I have Malzberg on the brain, but I think I am perfectly justified in seeing Malzbergian elements and themes in "No Moon for Me."  These elements and themes:

1) The lack of public support for the space program.

2) The rocket ship carries nuclear weapons in case of trouble with aliens.

3) An astronaut (the fat college professor) goes insane on the trip to Luna, and Denin has arguably been insane for years: the transmissions from the Moon are not from aliens, but from a transmitter Denin himself secretly sent up there in an unmanned drone rocket, a scheme to trick the US government into financing his trip!  If that doesn't make you question his sanity, there's this: Denin plans to detonate the nuclear weapons so he and all the evidence of his scam (and two innocent people!) are destroyed, and the people of Earth will think a battle took place and be inspired to set up a permanent military base on the Moon and explore the universe in the interest of security!

How Denin and company's trip to the Moon is resolved is reminiscent of traditional adventure fiction, with people holding guns on each other and tying each other up, etc.

I like this one; I don't know why it isn't included in any of the Miller collections that have appeared over the years.  Maybe it is unrepresentative of Miller's work?  (I have read very little of Miller's oeuvre, so I can't judge such things.)  Maybe people think the plot twists are too obvious or too unbelievable?

**********

I'm halfway through An ABC of Science Fiction and I think I can detect some trends.  First, there are lots of brief joke stories--maybe a page limit forced Boardman to include many such stories if he wanted to present 26 total.  Second, the general tenor of the stories chosen by Boardman is very pessimistic, quite misanthropic.  There are plenty of stories denouncing white racism and the human propensity for violence; stories in which humans make bad choices, get outwitted or get defeated; stories that predict things will get worse in the future; and stories whose protagonists are criminals or fraudsters or the agents of tyrants.  There is a dearth of stories that exhibit hope for the future or celebrate man's ability to overcome adversity or anything like that.  Boardman seems to have deliberately constructed a book that is a downer!

Well, at least none of the stories in this batch (because we skipped Knight's contribution) were actually bad.  Hopefully the next batch will be at least as good--and maybe we can hope there will be at least a gleam of optimism among them?     

Four tales of Mars by Leigh Brackett

Let's explore yet another of my Fifty Cent Second Story Books finds, my copy of Ace's 1970s edition of The Coming of the Terrans by Leigh Brackett.  There is some mystery over exactly when this edition was published and who produced its cover illustration, but we know that the first edition of The Coming of the Terrans was published in 1967 and had a cover by Gray Morrow.  The collection includes five stories, and we've already read one, "The Last Days of Shandakor," as it also appears in The Best of Leigh Brackett, which we read in its entirety in the summer of last year.  Today we'll tackle the remaining four stories it contains by the celebrated writer of SF adventures, detective stories, and screenplays.

"The Beast-Jewel of Mars" (1948)

"The Beast-Jewel of Mars" was the cover story of the Winter 1948 edition of Planet Stories, where it is advertised as a story of "lost worlds" where beautiful women try to bewitch tall men (how different is that, really, from our own world?)  I like the cover illustration--the principal figures wear suitably and convincingly desperate expressions and the female lead sports a charming little blue number--and the inside pages boast not only the Brackett tale but contributions from two other beloved writers on the fantastical end of the SF spectrum, Ray Bradbury and Frank Belknap Long. 

Captain Burk Winters is a broken man!  He chain smokes Venusian cigarettes!  His hands shake so severely he drops coins all over the place when he pays a cabbie.  What happened to this dude, who was once one of our best space pilots?  He lost his girl to alien drug pushers, that's what!

Jill Leland was a wealthy member of the thrill-seeking classes who spend their leisure time in the solar system's Trade Cities, where the decadent rich of Earth gamble and indulge in elaborate vices!  Such pastimes are sought to relieve the pressure of life in the go go future--here are the kinds of people one sees in the Trade Cities:

Their faces were pallid and effeminate, scored with the marks of life lived under the driving tension of a super-modern age.

Leland's particular vice was the Martian "Shanga."  The Martians are the heirs of the wreckage of an heroic high-tech civilization that collapsed many centuries ago due to nuclear war; even though they can't reproduce much of that old time technology, the Martians can still operate some of the artifacts, and the Shanga crystals are among such artifacts.  In the Shanga parlors in the Trade Cities, Earth people can expose themselves to the Shanga rays, and temporarily feel physically and mentally younger, and live carefree for a few hours.

Brackett explicitly compares the treatment to drug use, and depicts exposure to the rays as a direct stimulant to the human brain's pleasure centers and as quite addictive.  Hard core addicts like Leland soon hear rumors that the Shanga treatment in the Trade Cities is mere kid's stuff compared to the real deal, the Shanga rays available in the desert in the crumbling half-deserted cities of Mars's heyday.  Winters tried to get the Shanga monkey off Jill's back, but to no avail; she disappeared in the Martian desert without a trace, presumed dead!

We learn all this stuff I just told you over the course of the 60-page story, which is structured sort of like a hard-boiled mystery.  The plot of "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" follows Winters as he goes to the Trade City on Mars, Kahora, and then out into the desert in search of his junkie girlfriend.  Winters is a manly man who isn't really interested in Shanga or any of the twisted allures of the Trade Cities, but to pursue his lost love he patronizes their evil trade, posing as a hopeless Shanga addict.  The Martian pushers take him out to the desert, to a lost city on the shore of a dry ocean basin, where they hold him captive and Winters learns the terrible truth.

The Shanga rays, at full power, after repeated doses, don't just roll your biological clock back to childhood, but back down the evolutionary ladder!  One strong dose of the rays turns Winters into a brutish cave man!  Winters recovers from this treatment, but he sees other Earthlings who have received many doses and been turned back to Neanderthals, to "missing links," even to god-damned reptiles and amphibians!  Winters worries that, if he doesn't escape, he'll eventually get turned into an amoeba!

The Martians, who see themselves as a superior race of great wisdom who were building skyscrapers when humans were still living in caves, resent human control of their ancient red planet.  The tribe of Martians in this story, those who run the Shanga parlors, turn Earthers into these evolutionary throwbacks in order to put them into an old amphitheater to torment them and laugh at them, a way of getting a little of their own back and assuaging their humiliation at the hands of us humies.

Our French friends included "Beast-Jewel of
Mars" in this 1975 anthology of stories from
Planet Stories.

Winters finds Jill Leland reduced to the condition of a cave woman--she can't even talk any more!  At night he escapes captivity and sneaks into the room of the leader of this tribe of vengeful Martians, a beautiful woman named Fand who has catlike grace and walks around with her high breasts bare.  (Brackett generally writes stories in which aliens are so biologically similar to Earth people that they are sexually compatible.)  Winters treats Fand the way a New York state prosecutor might treat one of his girlfriends, knocking her unconscious while she sleeps by bashing her in the head and then tying her up and carrying her back to the amphitheater.  When the Martians turn on the Shanga rays as they do every day, Fand gets exposed just like the Earth-creatures, and, because the Martians are an old race with tired genes, she gets devolved way way back, becoming into a disgusting vermiculate monster.  When her tribe realizes what has happened to Fand, chaos ensues, with the Martians fighting hand-to-hand with the Earth creatures in the arena, and Winters escapes with his mute and illiterate girlfriend to alert the human authorities about the menace of the Shanga parlors.       

(The crazy evolution stuff in "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" reminded me of the numerous stories by Brackett's husband, Edmond Hamilton, that feature wild speculations about evolution, and of course the whole plot and theme of the story reminds you of Chinese opium dens and Chinese resentment of Western imperialism.)

When we read two Poul Anderson novels recently we saw they were full of signs of his libertarian attitude--celebrations of private trade, the individual, and rational reason, and denunciations of big government and mysticism.  In "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" we see signs of an old-fashioned conservatism on the part of Brackett.  Modern life, we are told, is too fast and too complicated and drives people batty, and we see that modern wealth and leisure just leave hands idle to do the devil's work.  Interstellar trade hasn't made the life of Terran or Martian better, but corrupted and demeaned them both, giving rise to bitter hatreds as each race abuses or exploits the other at every opportunity.   Brackett also evinces a traditional skepticism of the city and city life:

Winters hated the Trade Cities.  He was used to the elemental honesty of space.  Here the speech, the dress, even the air one breathed, were artificial.

As you might guess, the Trade City on Earth is New York, a famous target for criticism from country folk and conservatives (and not always without reason.)

Not Brackett's best work, but entertaining and interesting.

Scanned from my copy, a brief introductory essay by Brackett and a list of "othe" Ace books
by her, including Alpha Centauri or Die! and Sword of Rhiannon, which I own and have read,
  and Big Jump, another publisher's edition of which I own and have read.

"Mars Minus Bisha" (1954)

Another cover for Brackett, and another Planet Stories in which Brackett shares an issue with Ray Bradbury; this time Bradbury is represented by one of the all-time most famous dinosaur stories and stories about time travel, "A Sound of Thunder."  In "Mars Minus Bisha" Brackett again invites comparisons between the people of Mars and East Asians, this time very directly:

She sat up, a dark and shaggy-haired young person, with eyes the color of topaz, and the customary look of premature age and wisdom that the children of Mars share with the children of the Earthly East.

This is the kind of thing you'd probably think twice about committing to paper today.

Fraser is a scientist living alone in a Quonset hut in the Martian desert, studying Martian diseases.  A woman from a tribe of reptile-riding nomads brings her daughter to him and flees--the shamans of her tribe had declared the seven-year old girl, Bisha, to be cursed, scapegoating her for a plague, and sentenced her to death.  Fraser examines her and finds Bisha to be perfectly healthy, and she moves in with him; soon the little girl is the light of his life, and he plans on bringing her home with him to Earth when his project is complete in a few months.

But it is not to be--this story is a tragedy!  From an ancient race of Martians with tremendous psychic powers Bisha has inherited a recessive genetic trait, an ability to drain the life force of those around her over which she has no control!  If they continue to live alone together, Bisha's autonomic vampiric powers will eventually kill Fraser, but if Fraser lets any Martians see her they will recognize her condition and destroy her.  Fraser's life force is fading--can he get to a human settlement three hundred miles away before he expires and before any natives spot Bisha?  And if not, who will live and who will die?

An effective story, more economical (just 30 pages) and better structured than "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" and with more human feeling, including a sad ending like something out of Somerset Maugham which took me by surprise.

"Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" (1964)

Brackett's name sits at the top of the list on the cover of the 15th Anniversary "All Star" issue of F&SF, right above her husband's.  (We read Hamilton's contribution to this issue, "The Pro," back in June of last year.)  Preceding "Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" is a page long bio of Brackett and a description of this story's genesis--it seems that Anthony Boucher, writing about Brackett in F&SF in 1955, made up the slightly goofy name od this story as a sort of parody of the titles of the type of planetary romances she excelled at writing, but some readers didn't realize it was a joke and began asking Brackett where they could find the story.  So, when the opportunity presented itself almost ten years later, Brackett wrote a story to match the title, making real this once fabulous component of her oeuvre.

Harvey Selden (!) has always wanted to go to Mars.  As he looks at the red planet from the observation dome of the starship as it comes in for a landing, Third Officer Bentham, an alcoholic whose career has been stunted by his love for the bottle, invites Selden to have dinner with him on the surface with some Martian friends of his.

Selden is staying at the Kahora Hilton.  Kahora has changed since the days when Jill Leland and Burk Winters frequented the Shanga parlor there; now that "the bad old days of laissez-faire," as Selden calls them, are over, Kahora and the other Trade Cities are under strict government control and all those sinful amusements are just a memory.  Kahora now has seven domes--Bentham takes Selden to the original dome, now a residential district, to meet his friends, including a Martian called Firsa Mak, Firsa Mak's sister and her human husband Altman, and a gorgeous Martian girl who walks around topless and serves the drinks, Lella.

Though this is his first trip to Mars, Selden is an academic expert on Martian culture and history; he came to Mars to take up a position at the Bureau of Interworld Cultural Relations.  He is also one of those liberals who identifies more with the colonized Martians than with his own people, the colonizers, and denigrates the actions of the first human explorers of the red planet, calling them "piratical exploiters."   

...Firsa Mak said with honest curiosity, "Why is it that all you young Earthmen are so ready to cry down the things your own people have done?"

Selden dismisses as nonsense the stories told by those first Earthmen to visit Mars about Martian cults who worshiped evil gods and practiced human sacrifice, but he's in for a surprise, because Bentham the drunk has just delivered him into the hands of people who know how very true those stories are!  Lella has served him a drugged drink and when he wakes up he's bound and gagged in the cold wilderness beyond the domed cities.  Brackett presents starkly the contrast between bookish know-it-all Selden, who in the wilderness proves weak and ineffectual, and adventurous manly men Firsa Mak and Altman, who are perfectly comfortable in harsh conditions and dangerous situations.

This German collection of
Brackett stories includes
"Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon"

Firsa Mak and Altman disguise Selden and drag him to a ritual where cultists pay obeisance to a slumbering Godzilla-sized monster.  The experience is so horrifying that Selden faints.  When he wakes up, Firsa Mak and Altman try to convince Selden to alert the Terran authorities about this cult which sacrifices people twice a year and its dangerous monster, which, they fear, if roused could destroy an entire city.  The government does not believe scruffy adventurers like them, but maybe they will believe a trained academic and member of the establishment like Selden?   

Selden, however, begins to doubt his own senses--Lella drugged him, after all--and worries that spreading rumors about Martian cults and Brobdingnagian monsters will wreck his career.  Instead of reporting the menace to the authorities he abandons his new job with the Bureau and flees to Earth where he undergoes psychotherapy and is relieved to be told he hallucinated the ritual and the monster, the result of drugs working on his unresolved feelings about his mother and his repressed homosexuality.  (We see evidence of Bracket's adherence to traditional ideas about gender roles and sexual mores here as well as in the quote I extracted from "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" above and in her novel Alpha-Centauri or Die!)

"Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" is well-written and I liked it, but at the same time I have to admit I thought the end was a little disappointing, anti-climactic.  A traditional adventure or horror story with a plot like this would end with the protagonist killing the monster and/or the priestess or making a narrow escape.  Instead, this story is a satire of inept intellectual types who look down on the brave men who defend and expand society, and so the main character is a kind of spectator lead around by the nose and kept from danger by the manly adventurer characters.  He is never in real danger and because he is incompetent outside a classroom he never makes any real decisions of consequence, just takes the path of least resistance.  I'm all for goofing on effete liberals and psychoanalytic quacks, but to achieve its full potential I think a story that follows the kind of adventure/horror template that this one follows needs real tension and a real climax--as "Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" stands, it is unsatisfying.  (I was hoping all along that Selden himself was going to be sacrificed--this would accomplish the goal of ridiculing the willfully-blind academic types who dismiss the reports of men in the field while at the same time providing a satisfying horror story conclusion.  Of course, then Brackett couldn't work the psychoanalytic angle.)

Another problem I have with the story is the equivocal role of Lella.  We have every reason to believe that the masked woman who leads the ritual, the Purple Priestess, is Lella herself, but at the same time Lella seems to be allied with Firsa Mak and Altman, who are trying to get the government to do away with the cult.  A nagging mystery.

"The Road to Sinharat" (1963)

"The Road to Sinharat" was an Amazing cover story.  isfdb lists it as part of the Eric John Stark series, but Brackett's famous hero does not appear in the tale.  Maybe it is considered part of the Stark series because the city of Sinharat also appears in a Stark story "Queen of the Martian Catacombs," later expanded into the novel The Secret of Sinharat? 

Long ago Mars was a world of oceans and forests; today it is an arid desert.  The men of Earth think they have the technology to restore part of the red planet to its former verdant glory, but the Martians resist the renewal project; they have made peace with their old and tired planet, and don't want to see their canals messed with and their settlements moved.  In fact, the renewal effort is leading to unrest among the natives and even violence against Earthmen.

In 1932 Edmond Hamilton published the short story "Conquest of Two Worlds," a story about Earth imperialism and an Earthman who joined with the natives of Jupiter to oppose Earth oppression.  Brackett considered this one of her husband's best stories--at least she chose it for The Best of Edmond Hamilton, a volume she edited.  I bring this up because "The Road to Sinharat" also features a Terran, Dr. Matthew Carey, who goes against his superiors and risks his life to stand against Earth interference with aliens.

Carey is an archaeologist currently working with the organization planning the renewal project--because the natives oppose the project, so does Carey.  Carey has lived so long among Martians, exploring tombs and even participating in barbarian raids, that he can pass for a Martian desert dweller and capably wield Martian weapons (by which I mean things like axes and daggers--I guess automatic rifles and heat ray pistols aren't among the ancient Martian technologies which have survived.)  He ditches his job to help the natives, and the plot of "The Road to Sinharat" follows Carey and some Martians--the trader Derech, an old friend who accompanied him on his archaeological expeditions years ago, and Arrin, a sexy Martian girl--as they travel via canal barge and then on reptile-back to the forbidden city of Sinharat, to look for some ancient documents which may convince the Terran authorities to abandon their renewal scheme.  They face various obstacles, among them pursuit by a Terran police detective, Howard Wales, and his Martian cops, who is tasked with bringing in the renegade archaeologist on suspicion of fomenting native violence.

Eventually Carey and his friends and Wales and his cops end up trapped together inside Sinharat, under siege by some barbarians who are reluctant to enter the ancient city, which is taboo because it was once the HQ of a tribe of Martian scientists who achieved longevity by kidnapping young people and shifting their consciousnesses into the youth's bodies.  Just as an aircraft comes to rescue the besieged humans and their Martian comrades, Carey finds the records he needs.  They show that the body snatchers of Sinharat, ages ago, launched their own renewal effort, and the memory of its eventual failure lingers in the Martians' cultural consciousness, rendering all such efforts anathema.  These records convince the authorities to abandon their plans.

"The Road to Sinharat" was among the
stories from Amazing and Fantastic
included in this 1968 reprint magazine.

Like "The Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon," "The Road to Sinharat" contrasts academic experts who think they know it all with the men of action in the field who actually do know what's going on, and like "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" doles out some harsh conservative medicine--change is bad, progress is a scam, history is a tragedy, and you shouldn't interfere in other people's business, even if you have the best of intentions.  "The Road to Sinharat" is also reminiscent of Brackett's "Citadel of Lost Ships;" both feature government projects that relocate towns and tinker with water sources, allegedly for the greater good.  (Public policies that destroyed American communities to create reservoirs and dams, like those chronicled here, seem to have struck a chord with Brackett.)

While not bad, this story is another disappointment.  Brackett overstuffs "The Road to Sinharat" with lots of cool material, but because it is confined to a paltry 50 pages the story feels rushed and cramped, almost like a condensed version of a longer piece of work.  All Brackett's ideas and all the many relationships she sets up are dealt with in cursory fashion--she has no room to explore any of them with any depth, so they lack dramatic power.  Derech, Arrin, Wales, and Alan Woodthorpe, head of the renewal project, all have potentially fun and interesting relationships with Carey, in particular Wales and Woodthorpe, because all three of the Earthmen have a strong sense of duty and a determination to do the right thing for the people of Mars, but Carey's thinking is at odds with those of his fellow Earthers, and over the course of the story Carey wins them to see his side.  Unfortunately, Brackett doesn't have room to develop these relationships and chart their evolution in a compelling way.  Arrin is also a lost opportunity--she could have been a sexual interest for Carey, part of a love triangle with Carey and Derech, or given voice to one of the numerous Martian factions (Brackett's Martians are not monolithic, but split into distinct and often competing cultural and political groups who react to the colonizers differently, just like colonized peoples in real life) or all three, but as the story appears, she does very little.

(I often moan that a piece of fiction is too long, but here we have the rare case in which I think a story would have been better at two or even three times the length.)

Another problem with "The Road to Sinharat" is that it lacks the thrilling danger and cathartic (and sexualized) violence of many of Brackett's stories--often in Brackett stories men kill each other with their bare hands and women get beaten or killed (when Fand in "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" got transformed into a 100 lb. slug her lieutenant euthanized her with a sword.)  I don't think anybody gets killed in "The Road to Sinharat"--when the barbarians charge Wales and his men they repel the charge with stun guns.  To be satisfying, an adventure story has to have believable physical or psychological dangers, and "The Road to Sinharat" comes up short in this department. 

**********

"Mars Minus Bisha" is a quite good story of human feeling, while the other pieces we've looked at today are just marginally good or merely acceptable.  "Beast-Jewel of Mars" has some of the violence and passion that bring to life Brackett's best work, like Sword of Rhiannon or "Enchantress of Venus," but lacks their strong characterizations and relationships, while "The Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" and "The Road to Sinharat" follow an adventure template but lack the danger and violence of a good adventure story and the latter feels underdeveloped.  Fortunately, there are still Brackett stories out there I haven't read, and I can live in the hope that there is another Brackett masterpiece awaiting me.

The Future is Now part two: Boucher, Etchison, Nolan and Purdom

Here's the second of the three installments of our study of the 1970 all-new SF anthology edited by William F. Nolan, The Future is Now.  I own the paperback edition offered to the public by Playboy Press in 1971 with its remarkably unattractive cover illustration, an assemblage by artist Don Baum photographed by Bill Arsenault.

"A Shape in Time" by Anthony Boucher

Go get 'em, John Carter!

In the intro to this two-page story Nolan lists Boucher's many accomplishments in all spheres of life.  Boucher died in 1968, but Nolan tells us that his widow found this story in his unpublished papers.

"A Shape in Time" is a convoluted and nonsensical and unfunny joke about a female secret agent who travels through time seducing men in order to prevent dysgenic marriages.  She has the ability to alter her body shape, and does so on assignments so that her figure will match the prevailing taste of whatever period she is working in.  The punchline of the story (I believe) is that while on a mission in 1880 she thought the large bustles worn by women of the time indicated that men desired women with huge hindquarters, a mistake which resulted in mission failure.

Lame.

I may think it is feeble, but "A Shape in Time" has been reprinted numerous times in several languages, including in Croatian in Sirius.

"Damechild" by Dennis Etchison

Back in 2015 I read Etchison's Hollywood-centric story "The Dog Park" and his quite effective "The Dead Line."  In his intro here Nolan talks a little about his first meeting with Etchison at a guest lecture Nolan gave at UCLA.

"Damechild" is a little opaque and overwritten, with long sentences full of details that somehow didn't paint clear pictures for me, but I think I have a grasp of its setting and plot.

Five thousand years ago the Earth was going down the tubes.  A transmission of some kind was received from the Horsehead Nebula, so, to preserve the species, the people of Earth constructed a space ship and stocked it with frozen eggs and sperm and launched it at the source of the friendly message.  After fifty centuries, as the ship finally approached the Horsehead Nebula, the vessel's machinery thawed some of the eggs and sperm and fertilized some eggs, producing a handful of people--they are the only conscious humans in all the universe!  Damechild, fertilized and birthed ten years before the others, was to be their leader, and spends the story acting like their mother, coaxing and nagging and cuddling them.

Damechild received a final message from the Horsehead people--due to a war and some kind of environmental catastrophe the Horsehead civilization was about to be wiped out and would not be able to shelter the human race.  So she redirected the ship to the next closest potential refuge, which is like 500,000 years' travel away.  Damechild doesn't tell the other thawed people of this disaster.  These others become addicted to sensory machines--"The sexual stimulator, the sleep stimulator, the visual stimulator, the auditory stimulator, the hunger-satiety stimulator"--and spend all their time huddled against a wall with electrodes attached to their heads.  Their minds degrade, so that they become lethargic and mentally ill ignoramuses.  At least one tries to commit suicide over the course of the story.

Etchison doesn't tell the story in strict chronological order, focusing first on the demented addicts and then telling us the jazz about Earth and the Horsehead civilization in flashbacks, with the sad final message from the aliens as a kind of climax.  Etchison tries to shock or sadden us with the suicide attempt and the bathetic message, but the characters are so flat and the style so foggy I was not moved.

   
Maybe this story would work for someone who is less cold-hearted than I am?  The plot isn't bad, it's the execution which isn't working for me--neither the emotional landscape of the people nor the physical landscape of the ship is sharp or interesting.  (Chad Oliver, whom I usually think is not very good, did a far better job of conjuring up human feeling and vivid images with his own disastrous-colony-ship-from-a-doomed-Earth story "The Wind Blows Free," which we read recently in another Nolan anthology.)   I'll rate "Damechild" barely acceptable.  "Damechild" was translated into German for a 1977 publication.

"Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe, Pip-Pop As You Go" by William F. Nolan

In the intro to his own story Nolan uses the lame gimmick of a conversation with himself, Nolan the writer pitching his "nutso" and "wild" story idea to Nolan the editor.  Ugh.

This story is pretty bad, a sort of surreal or psychedelic series of boring jokes following a sort of parody of a traditional SF plot.  It is the future (I think the 21st century) and everywhere you go robots and machines, including the furniture, talk to you and give you nagging medical and psychological advice.  Recreational sex is with a machine; sex with another person is a seldom-practiced religious rite whose purpose is procreation.  The world is run by an industry that sells (or just gives away?) drugs, and most people are addicted to the drugs.  Our hero is in the advertising department of the ruling drug company.  Nobody who actually works for the drug company actually uses the drugs--if you use them, you are thrown "outside."  Our hero is kidnapped by rebels and taken outside; at first he thinks the rebels are all drug addicts, but the opposite is the case--the rebels want to end the drug company's rule and they never get high.  They also believe in recreational sex between human beings.  Our hero enthusiastically joins the rebels.  The end.

A total waste of time.  A bad story that results from a sincere effort can be funny or interesting, but this story is lazy and frivolous; it is almost a show of contempt to the SF fans who spent money on this book.

Like "Jenny Among the Zeebs" and "Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!," "Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe, Pip-Pop As You Go" would be republished in both Alien Horizons and Wild Galaxy.  I guess somebody must like these stories if they keep getting reprinted.

"A War of Passion" by Tom Purdom

I don't think I've ever even heard of Purdom before.  He seems to have made his living as a kind of technical writer, but, over the decades since the late 1950s, produced quite a few SF stories.  In Nolan's intro here he lists Purdom's interests: "urban planning, arms control, wines, politics and the city of Philadelphia."  It sounds like a Temple University professor's dating profile.

"A War of Passion" is kind of ridiculous.  In the future, mankind has colonized many planets, and people can live for centuries via brain transplants, and can have their brains augmented, though brain augmentation leads to oversized skulls.  As people get along in years (like when they are 700 or so), most lose interest in sex, and even order bodies which lack sex glands so they can focus on other things.  Some people think the abandonment of sex is the abandonment of humanity, and so there is an espionage war between the sexless people known as "elders" and the "normals" who retain interest in sex.

Our hero Vostok is 1200 years old and working for the sex-loving normals.  He is on a mission, the object of which is to have sex with Makaze, a young (268 years old) woman who has lost interest in sex because the elders were using her to seduce normals and get them to have scandalous S&M sex with her.  (I think.)  All that violent painful sex has conditioned Makaze to fear sex.  Vostok is desperate to have sex with her because if he doesn't the normal leadership may wrongly suspect that he himself has lost interest in sex and is a spy for the elders--the normals would quickly move to eliminate such a spy.  Vostok's mission is particularly difficult because he has had seven brain augmentations and his head is grotesquely oversized, so Makaze finds him repulsive.

Anyway, there is an explicit sex scene which readers nowadays would likely consider rapey, a sex scene which is several pages long.  While he is having sex with Makaze, Vostok worries that the normals are about to launch an attack on him, and he must decide whether he should climb off Makaze and take control of his robotic defenses or keep banging away at her.

I guess this story is supposed to be funny, like Nolan's "Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe, Pip-Pop As You Go" a parody of all those SF stories (like van Vogt's) about secret organizations of geniuses fighting a twilight war behind the scenes or about revolutionaries fighting an oppressive state, but Purdom's prose is pretty deadpan.  I'm very reluctant to call "A War of Passion" good, but because it is so crazy and feels original I'm going to judge it acceptable.

"A War of Passion" would later appear in Sirius.     

**********

Ouch, four weak entries.   Well, we still have four stories to go.  Maybe The Future is Now can redeem itself?

Shadows of Tomorrow cast by Leiber, Boucher, Shaara and Gunn

Here's another of my 50 cent finds from the carts outside Second Story Books in our nation's capital, 1953's Shadow of Tomorrow, edited by Frederick Pohl, alumnus of the Young Communist League and author of the classic Gateway.  My copy of the 379-page book is in pretty good shape if you ignore the water spots.  An earlier owner appears to have used the inner front cover as scratch paper while working on his algebra homework or trying to crack a KGB cipher.  I hope he passed the class or caught the Rosenbergs' controller or whatever.

The description of Michael Shaara's Orphans of the Void
sounds like it is for a different story.

In our last episode we looked at four stories from Astounding from the period 1938 to 1944.  Today's crop of SF capers are all from Galaxy, from the early 1950s.  Let's see if they are really "more vivid than anything you have ever read" and "possible," as the back cover promises.

"A Bad Day For Sales" by Fritz Leiber (1953)

In his intro to this volume Frederick Pohl says something that I don't expect to hear pinkos say: that the world and society are in pretty good shape!  The salutary state of the world in the early 1950s, Pohl continues, presents a problem to the SF writer who would play social critic: if things are so good, it is not easy to come up with a compelling story on how they should be improved.  One solution available to the able writer, Pohl tells us, is to write a story that points out not what course our society should pursue, but what course to avoid, and Pohl includes "A Bad Day For Sales" on the list of stories from Shadow of Tomorrow that take this tack.  In his intro to the individual story itself, Pohl offers his opinion that "A Bad Day For Sales" is the best story ever written by Fritz Leiber.

So, what world does Leiber suggest we should avoid in this brief tale?  A consumerist world in which popular culture is suffused with sex and violence and America is involved in mass war in the Muslim East!  (I have the feeling we haven't exactly been heeding Fritz's warning!)  The plot consists of a robot on the streets of Manhattan, trying to sell various items to the city dwellers, like lolly-pops, soda pop, booze, copies of comic books (Junior Space Killers to a boy, Gee Gee Jones, Space Stripper to a girl) and cosmetics (Mars Blood, a "savage new glamor-tint"), the last to a woman in six-inch heels and skin-tight pants who flaunts her body at the robot.  Nearby, a fifty-foot-tall animatronic mannequin dresses and undresses, advertising the latest fashions, while news about the Pakistan crisis flashes by on the Times Square news ticker.  Then a stealth missile lands in Times Square, killing scores of people; the robot salesman survives, but is confused by this turn of events.

This is a sort of trifling joke story, but some of the jokes are funny (I definitely laughed at Gee Gee Jones, Space Stripper.)  I thought it a little incongruous to find the author of the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, which feature light-hearted depictions of swordfights, thievery and rape*, apparently lecturing us on the issue of sex and violence in entertainment.  ("A Bad Day For Sales," by the way, features explicit depictions of people being maimed and killed by the missile attack--I expect these are meant to be disturbing, not amusing.)  I'm guessing Pohl loved "A Bad Day For Sales" because it feels like an attack on advertising and the sale and purchase of frivolous things like sugary sweets and cosmetics, and perhaps hints that all act as "the opiates of the people," distracting them and keeping them from changing the government which is getting mixed up in all the wars (Orwell and numerous other lefties make this sort of argument.)

I love Coca-Cola and Oreos and Goldenberg's Peanut Chews, and if I had seen Gee Gee Jones, Space Stripper on the shelf during one of my regular visits to Jim Hanley's Universe back in my Manhattan days I would have eagerly snatched it up, so I am looking at this story as an affectionate send up, a knowingly ironic homage, to our consumerist culture and giving it a thumbs up!  (Just call me Mr. False Consciousness.)  So there!

The immortal Charles Schulz was also mining the anti-social comic book title vein
in the early 1950s.  This panel is from the June 22, 1952 Peanuts strip.

"A Bad Day For Sales" has been reprinted many times in such books as the volume of Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories that covers 1953 and The Arbor House Treasure of Science Fiction Masterpieces.  (While the former is "headlined" by Asimov and the latter by Robert Silverberg, Martin H. Greenberg is second editor on both...perhaps it is Greenberg who was so very keen on this piece.)

Is it vivid?  Yes!

Is it possible?  Yes!

*Not wanting to unfairly #metoo the Grey Mouser, one of the heroes of my youth, I took my 1986 copy of Swords and Ice Magic off the shelf and reread 1973's "The Sadness of the Executioner" and I can confirm that therein the Grey Mouser rapes a teen-aged girl assassin and that the scene is played for laughs.   

"Transfer Point" by Anthony Boucher (1950)

Boucher is another well-known figure in SF with whose work I have little familiarity.  Because he also wrote mystery stories and his name starts with a "B," I sometimes mix him up with Frederic Brown, who once wrote a story about a man-eating armadillo.  I have a terrible memory!

Like Leiber's "A Bad Day for Sales," "Transfer Point" is a joke story, but whereas Leiber's story is brisk and brief and includes some funny jokes, Boucher's tale is long and tedious and not at all funny.

It is two thousand years in the future!  Modern medicine has advanced to the point that nobody suffers from allergies.  Well, this one guy does--he's got eczema!  The eczema-sufferer is a genius scientist, and constructs himself a "retreat" with super air-conditioning so he won't have to itch anymore.  (This guy joins the pantheon of literary characters who suffer from eczema that is headed by Jewish authority on Vermeer and man-about-town Charles Swann, who treated his eczema with pain d'epices, air-conditioning not having been invented yet.)  So when hostile aliens introduce a new element, an inert gas, into the atmosphere that causes everybody to cough and sneeze to death, this guy is safe!

Holed up with the genius scientist, safe in the retreat while the rest of humanity dies of the sniffles, is his vapid but sexy daughter and a young writer who is composing an epic poem about the history of the human race.  Sexy daughter flirts outrageously with the versifier (e.g., she eats fruits and sucks the juices off her fingers right in front of him!) but he is not interested because she is so dull-witted.  Bored, the poet kills time by reading some 20th-century science-fiction magazines he finds in the archives.  (Meta!)  He is amazed to discover that one of the stories describes his own time and plight--in fact, the story he is reading is the story we readers are reading.  He doesn't find it funny, either!

The scientist constructs a time machine and the poet ends up in 1948 where he becomes a SF writer and tries to romance a well-educated female editor and publish that story about himself and a human race menaced by alien chemical warfare.  Boucher piles on the meta with characters directly referring to Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros.  Then, after 20 pages of lame jokes, Boucher tries to switch gears and pull our heartstrings by having the romance with the editor fail and the poet's manuscript thrown into the fire instead of published, which means the time loop we've all been reading about is broken and the human race is exterminated in the year 3950 or whatever. 

Weak!

Despite my dismissal of this overly long and self-indulgent piece, Robert Silverberg included "Transfer Point" in the seventh volume of his Alpha series (promoted as a collection of "the greatest contemporary masterpieces") and it appeared multiple times in translation in Europe.

Is it vivid?  No!

Is it possible?  No!

"Orphans of the Void" by Michael Shaara (1952)

It's the guy who writes those novels about the religious beliefs of American Civil War generals!  Oh wait, he just wrote one of those--his son wrote the other ones.  Forgive me; everything I know about The Killer Angels I learned watching a two-minute review of the movie on the TV 25 years ago.

This is another sentimental robot story, one not as effective as the sentimental robot story we read in our last episode, Robert Moore William's "Robot's Return."  For three hundred years humanity has lived in peace and been capable of interstellar flight, but after centuries of exploration has yet to discover evidence of an alien race which has also achieved space travel.  (Planetbound alien civilizations have been discovered, but there is a strict rule that forbids contact with them.)  In this story, space explorers uncover the first ever sign of alien spacefarers, and track the clues to a planet covered in ruined cities, cities destroyed in a cataclysmic war.  All life on the planet was exterminated in the war, but the aliens' self replicating robots survived!

Here comes the sentiment.  To ensure obedience, the robots were programmed with a desire to serve their flesh creature masters, and suffer a sort of psychological pain when they are not serving.  Because their masters have been dead for millennia, the robots have suffered this pain for a long long time.  They even built space ships and went on a fruitless search for "the Makers," whom the robots, it is suggested, view in much the same way humans view God.  The happy ending of the story is that the human race will become these robots' masters; they will help us explore the universe, and need never feel that pain again.  (Shaara doesn't seem to explore the idea that humanity, by becoming these robots' masters, may be hubristically taking on the role of gods.)

The idea behind this story is OK, but Shaara failed to elicit any feeling in me; I just didn't care about these robots' psychological problems.  For one thing, the author fails to create any characters, human or robot, worthy of my sympathy.  He also breaks the "show me don't tell me" rules pretty severely.  Instead of us readers accompanying a human character as he uncovers this whole robotic psychology sob story, the truth of the robots' mental problems is revealed in a scene in which the captain of the space ship reads a report from his anthropology team.  Instead of using some literary techniques to inspire sadness in us readers, or convincingly display the captain's sadness, Shaara just tells is this whole thing is sad with lines like "Not since he [the space captain] was very young had he been so deeply moved."

There are lots of SF stories in which we are supposed to feel sad about robots who have problems, but such stories are a tough sell to me because I can never forget that a robot is just a machine.  When the Toyota Corolla has a flat tire I don't feel bad for the automobile--it's just a machine, with no feelings, and I am inclined to feel the same way about a robot.  Longtime readers of MPorcius Fiction Log may remember how much I gushed about Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover, which features a robot that, apparently, develops feelings and then gets destroyed, but that novel worked because Lee placed at its center a believable human character who loved the robot, and the robot served as a catalyst for emotion and change in that human character.

I tend to like stories about dudes in space suits exploring alien artifacts, but I gotta give this one a thumbs down... however, it is not so bad that I won't give some of Shaara's other short SF a try.

Like "Transfer Point," "Orphans of the Void" showed up in Alpha 7.  Silverberg and I are really not on the same page today.

Is it vivid?  Moderately vivid.

Is it possible?  I don't think so.

"The Misogynist" by James E. Gunn (1952)

Back in 2011 I read a novel James E. Gunn coauthored with Jack Williamson in 1955, Star Bridge, and gave it a middling, mildly positive review at Amazon.  Gunn is an important figure in the SF world as a writer, editor, historian and critic, but I don't think I have read anything by him since this blog set sail.     

Whoa, this is another of those stories which wouldn't fly today, full of assessments of women that men nowadays deny they believe if they know what is good for them.  We'll let "Their minds work in devious ways; they win what they want by guile and subtlety" serve as our example of many such lines of dialogue in this story.

Gunn's story is structured as a written account of a conversation between the narrator and the smartest guy in his office, Harry, who has a reputation as a storyteller.  Harry has been married for a month, and has noticed that his wife acts much differently now than she did before they were married.  He expounds to the narrator his theory that most or all women are members of an alien species, left on Earth long ago--this is the only way, he believes, to explain the radical difference between men, who are practical and creative and able to grasp abstract ideas, and women, who are none of these things, but parasites who manipulate men.  No doubt the feminine fiends will eventually figure out how to do without men, and then exterminate them.  Harry warns that men who catch wind of the female conspiracy end up in the asylum or the morgue, but the narrator just thinks he's kidding and blithely tells his own wife, and Harry's, all about Harry's theory.  Two or three days later both Harry and the narrator are out of commission.

An obvious sort of story, but Gunn doesn't let it go on too long, and enlivens it with lots of sexist quotes from famous thinkers and the Bible.  An acceptable entertainment.

"The Misogynist" seems to have struck a chord with the SF community, appearing in numerous anthologies, including SF: Author's Choice 4, one of those anthologies in which writers tell you which of their literary productions they are most proud of--apparently "The Misogynist" represents what Gunn considers his finest work!

Is it vivid?  It is entirely set in some guy's living room, so, who cares?

Is it possible?  That women are different than men?  Yes.  That women are from outer space?  No.

**********

Ouch, these stories are kind of a disappointment.  The Leiber and Gunn stories are reasonably well-written and brief, but their ideas (boilerplate Marxism and boilerplate sexism) are banal.  The Boucher is long and tedious, and the Shaara has a decent idea but is poorly delivered.  Better luck next time, I guess.

More science fiction short stories published before I was born in our next episode!

From A Treasury of Great SF: stories by Malcolm Jameson, Nelson S. Bond and Mildred Clingerman

I had a good experience reading three stories by people I had never heard of in Volume 1 of Anthony Boucher's 1959 A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, so here are three stories from Volume 2 by authors with whom I was totally unfamiliar, Malcolm Jameson, Nelson S. Bond and Mildred Clingerman.

"Bullard Reflects" by Malcolm Jameson (1941)

The first line of this story is "'Whee! Yippee!  Yow!'"  The second sentence is "The crowd went crazy." This is a story about sports!  Despite the best efforts of my in-laws, I have no interest in sports and know nothing about sports, so when its topic was revealed to me I gave a little groan and checked to see how long this tale was.  Eleven pages.  As the kids would say, "Doable."

I was surprised at how contrived, gimmicky, and silly this story was.  It reads like a parody of SF written by somebody who has contempt for SF, and I am a little surprised it made it into this Treasury.

The first few pages describe the sport of Dazzle Dart, in which one team, whose quarterback has a "superflashlight," tries to illuminate the opposing team's goal.  All the players wear little mirrors on their wrists, heads, etc., and can thus reflect the beam away from their own goal and/or at the opposing goal.  The best Dazzle Dart team in the space navy is that of Captain Bullard's space ship Pollux.  Bullard is the star of a series of stories by Jameson which first saw light in Astounding and would later be collected in a volume edited by Andre Norton; a more complete collection appeared in 2013, published by Thunderchild Publishing, who are producing a whole line of classic SF reprints that classic SF fans should check out.

Right after its team wins the Dazzle Dart championship, the Pollux is sent off to capture some war criminals who have seized a weapons research base on Titania.  Their leader is Egon Ziffler ("the Torturer"), the former head of the secret police of the recently dismantled Jovian Empire, which I am guessing is a stand-in for Nazi Germany.  Soon after arriving at Titania, Bullard and his crew are outwitted and captured by Ziffler and his band of human rights abusers. Instead of just murdering and crucifying the Pollux's crew, like they did the techs and eggheads they found on Titania, Ziffler takes a page from "The Most Dangerous Game" and releases his captives.  Bullard and company have a 24-hour head start, after which Ziffler and his murderers will hunt them down.

Luckily, Bullard finds some fragments from a meteor with reflective properties.  His Dazzle Dart team straps the fragments to themselves, and when the Jovian fugitives catch up to them and try to massacre them with ray guns, Bullard's people reflect the rays back at them, slicing them to bits.

This is like a story a 12-year-old would write!  It even ends with a lame pun on the word "reflection!"

I'm going to have to give a thumbs down to "Bullard Reflects," though I think it qualifies for "so bad it is good" status, as it did make me laugh, and has an uneven tone that can take you by surprise as it careens up and down.  One moment it reads like something written for kids, and in the next we are reading about severed limbs and crucified innocents!

"Magic City" by Nelson S. Bond (1941)

This is one of those post-apocalyptic stories in which mankind, reduced to primitivism, lives among the ruins of technological society and has a bunch of superstitions based on misunderstandings of 20th century artifacts.  "Magic City" takes place in the year 3485 A.D., and its star is Meg, the leader of a matriarchal tribe. Bond wrote three stories about Meg that appeared in three different magazines in the period 1939-41; "Magic City" is the third.  (I am told that a fourth Meg story from '49 is a revision of the first.)  Passages in this story indicate that, in an earlier story, Meg caused a social revolution, convincing men and women to live together in the same village, and preaching that men are as good as women.  (Women triumphed over men in a civil war long ago that left women in charge of population centers while men lived as nomadic Wild Ones.)

Meg and her mate Daiv leave their tribe on a quest--to go to New York City (or as they, and I think some of my in-laws, call it, "the forbidden City of Death") to destroy the Evil One who causes young healthy people to die of disease (the germ theory of disease is long forgotten.)  In the ruins of Manhattan they encounter friendly tribes of women who live in subway stations, and Wild Ones, male bandits, who stalk the surface, looking for women to kidnap and rape.

Continuing today's theme of unexpected dismemberment, one of the Wild Ones has his fingers sliced off in a fight: "The edge bit deep, grotesque-angled fingers fell to the ground like bloodworms crawling, bright ribbons of blood spurted from severed palms."  Can I call "Magic City" proto-splatterpunk?

Meg and Daiv get the idea that Death is headquartered at St. Luke's hospital.  There they find medical books that will help them learn to conquer disease.  There they also run into the leaders of the Manhattan branch of the Wild Ones.  The Wild Ones worship the Statue of Liberty, and when they see Meg holding a book they think she is their goddess.  Her wish is their command!  She orders them to make peace and form one co-ed community with the women in the subway stations.  The End.

"Magic City" is full of garbled or corrupted English words, and I guess the reader is supposed to laugh at the obvious ones and enjoy figuring out the obscure ones.  The characters drink "cawfee" and eat "maters," follow a "creet" road, call steel "god-metal" and rust "water-hurt."  Zardoz-style, decrepit signs at the Holland Tunnel entrance in "Joysy" appear to read "O Left Tur" and "O Parki," St. Lukes hospital is "Slukes," and Pennsylvania Station is "Ylvania Stat." This is a gimmick that gets old fast, though sports fans may enjoy "Sinnaty, where once had ruled a great people known as the Reds."

Besides the prevalent wordplay, "Magic City," with its female protagonist, civilized matriarchal societies and violent male tribes, stands out as a candidate for status as a feminist work, a satire of sexism and sex stereotypes.  As Harry Harrison does in his Eden books about matriarchal reptile people, Bond pulls the old switcheroo on us, turning gender stereotypes on their heads:

Sometimes Meg grew a little impatient with Daiv.  He was, like all men, such a hard creature to convince.  He couldn't reason things out in the cold, clear logical fashion of a woman; he kept insisting that his 'masculine intuition' told him otherwise.

I think it is interesting to note that this story was the cover story of Astounding, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., whom everybody is always denouncing as some kind of reactionary.  Likewise, the prominent publication of "Magic City" goes against the common assertion that SF before this or that date was sexist and only represented women as weaklings in need of rescuing.

The dozens of little word puzzles, and the feminist angle, are noteworthy, but "Magic City" is essentially a standard quest story in which some people travel some place to fight some other people.  I like a good quest story, but since Bond fails to generate any suspense, make me care about the characters, or imbue the action scenes with any feeling, "Magic City" is just a mediocre quest story.  The aforementioned gender stuff adds historical value, and shifts my assessment from "merely acceptable" to "marginally positive."

"Letters from Laura" by Mildred Clingerman (1954)

Boucher, in his introduction to A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, thanks Mildred Clingerman  for help with the anthology (along with a bunch of others, like Poul and Karen Anderson and John W. Campbell, Jr.), and adds parenthetically after Clingerman's name "chiefly just for existing."  This is the kind of slosh I used to say to girls I had crushes on in junior high...and high school...and in college...and while working at a New Jersey bookstore. This kind of goop never got me anywhere with a woman--not that I'm bitter or anything--but maybe it is more alluring in print.

"Letters from Laura" first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Boucher tells us it is "a charming, sexy, malicious caprice."  Does Mr. Clingerman know about all this?

"Letters from Laura" is a five-page long epistolary piece, meant to be amusing.  Isaac Asimov seems to have liked it; it has appeared in three anthologies with his name on the cover.  (Maybe it is Martin H. Greenberg who likes it.)

It is the future, and Laura is a boy-crazy young woman who has booked a time travel trip.  She flirts and (we learn in the last line of the story) has sex with the salesman at the time travel agency.  Then she is transported to ancient Crete where she meets the Minotaur in his labyrinth.  When the Minotaur chases her, she thinks it is because he wants to have sex with her, so she lets him catch her (she is on this trip in hopes of getting laid, and is wearing an outfit she made herself that bares her breasts).  But when he catches her he is not interested in her, saying, "I only gobble virgins."  Laura tries to seduce him, I guess not realizing that the Minotaur doesn't rape the women, but eats them.  When all the Minotaur wants to do with Laura is talk politics, Laura storms out, back to the future.  Back home she writes an angry letter to the time travel agency salesman, whom she blames for her failure to get laid on her trip.  In an effort to hurt his feelings she euphemistically asserts that he is a poor performer in bed and/or has a small penis (the last line of the story finishes "you, Mr. Barnes, are no Minotaur!")

I'm sure there were and are people who find this story hilarious; I am not one of them. I guess Boucher was one of them, and thought including a risque jocular piece in the Treasury added variety.  I suppose I'll grade this one "acceptable."

*************

Well, despite the title of the anthology, these ones were not so great.  I am always glad to have expanded my knowledge of the SF field, however, so, no regrets!