Stories by Miller, Bradbury, Oliver & Beaumont from Man Against Tomorrow

You say you're looking to get a "sneak preview of horror and glories in worlds to come?"  Well, William F. Nolan has a book for you, his 1965 anthology Man Against Tomorrow.  We've cracked this one open before, when we read Kris Neville's "Special Delivery," but I think the rest of the stories in this volume are new to me.  So let's read a bunch of stories selected by Nolan to "open the door to the future," skipping (for the nonce, at least) people I've never heard of as well as Ron Goulart, Ray Russell and Robert Sheckley because I have had it up to here with broad satires, farces, and joke stories.

"I, Dreamer" by Walter Miller, Jr.  (1953)

In Nolan's little intro to "I, Dreamer," he tells us that Miller began writing while hospitalized after a terrible car crash.  Holy crap, didn't we just read that Ray Palmer, editor of Amazing, was hospitalized after a terrible car crash?  Stay out of those cars, people!  Move to New York, ride the subway--that is the safe way to live!

We've read a number of Miller stories about men being integrated with machines and the sacrifices men will have to make to conquer the stars, and this story is in the same vein.  An italicized prologue describes the experiences of an infant as it is born, meets its mother, and then is torn from her.  The bulk of the story is a first-person narrative in the voice of a computer being trained to pilot a space warship--this computer has integrated into it the brain of a human being, and so has consciousness, creativity, emotion, etc.  The computer doesn't realize it is part organic, but it is tormented by a desire for love and a fear of pain, just like you and me, and when it sleeps, it dreams of being human.  The plot of the story concerns the computer falling in love with a female technician and witnessing her being sexually harassed by the guy who is training the computer--this guy's behavior is emblematic of the society in which the story takes place, a militaristic space empire run by a dictator where men can have multiple wives and which is plotting to conquer the Earth.  When the woman refuses to join his harem the man tries to take her by force and by guile and threats.  The computer contrives to kill the man, which of course puts the computer at risk of destruction, and the woman as well.

The climax of the story is something you might see in a Barry Malzberg story if sad sack Barry had a slightly sunnier or more romantic disposition.  The woman, who may actually be the mother of the 12-year-old boy whose brain is integrated into the computer, is a member of a resistance movement that is trying to overthrow the government.  With nothing left to lose, she convinces the computer to crash the space warship into the palace of the dictator of the space empire--she leads the computer to believe that death will be a long dream of being human, and we readers are lead to believe this sacrifice will protect Earth from conquest. 

Pretty good.  "I, Dreamer" was first printed in an issue of Amazing (when it was edited by Howard Browne, who took over after Palmer, his boss, left) with a cover seemingly depicting some kind of sex dream.  It has appeared in many Miller collections, and two other anthologies listed at isfdb, one American, one Belgian.

 
"Payment in Full" by Ray Bradbury (1950)

Here's a Mars story by Ray Bradbury that is sort of rare--Nolan stresses its rarity in his little intro.  "Payment in Full" first appeared in Thrilling Wonder alongside stories by Leigh Brackett, Henry Kuttner, John D. MacDonald and Raymond F. Jones--this issue is full of stuff I'd be interested in reading.  There's even a letter from Marion Zimmer Bradley in which she engages in some literary theorizing about the role of the sword in fiction!  "Payment in Full" has only been reprinted in an English language book one other time, in a $300.00 Subterranean Press hardcover from 2009, The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition.

You can see why this story hasn't been all that popular; this story is not Ray at his best, and it is a downer, but not a downer in an interesting way.

There are three Earthmen on Mars when the Earth is destroyed by nuclear war--the Earth becomes a "new small sun" that can be seen burning in the Martian sky.  The astronauts are depressed, and drink, and list off the various things they will miss about Earth, their friends' and family members' names and so forth.  One of the three men, making a dark joke about the end of the human race or perhaps just insane, keeps talking about how he will marry one of the other astronauts and have children with him.

A Martian appears, to the surprise of the astronauts, who hadn't thought Mars was populated.  The Martian telepathically invites the three last Earthmen to join the last thousand Martians in their beautiful city.  The Martians learned wisdom long ago, turning away from atomic power before it was too late.  No Martian has used a weapon in ten thousand years!  The Martian gives a long list of all the beautiful things in the city, fountains and minarets and all that.  And now that the Earth and all the violent Earthmen are gone, they don't have to hide anymore, they can turn on all the lights!

The Earthmen respond to the invitation not gratefully, but angrily, as if the Martian is bragging and pointing out Earth's inferiority.  They shoot down the Martian, then take off in their rocket to find the once-hidden, now illuminated city, where they land.  We get a list of all the wonderful things about the city, people reading books and children laughing and people dancing and so on.  "Everybody was happy."  Then the Earthmen emerge from their rocket and destroy the entire city with their machine guns, murdering everybody.

With its lists and its repetition...

The Martian named the places.  They must visit the deep fount pools where colored inks mixed into patterns every second, they must see the flame pictures in the walls, burning and changing.  They must climb the crystal minarets where flowers ten centuries old bloomed forever and forever as delicate as white children, as warm, as tender.  They must hear the music....   

"Now," said Comfort, with his machine gun.
"Now," said Jones.
"Now," cried Williams.
They pressed the triggers of their three guns.

..."Payment in Full" has the poetic elements we associate with Bradbury, but the whole thing is over-the-top and obvious, a monotonous misanthropic cri de coeur rather than anything sophisticated or clever.  I have to give this one a thumbs down, but stories that use aliens as props to show how crummy humans are almost always rub me the wrong way, and maybe others might find this sort of thing moving or validating.

"Transformer" by Chad Oliver (1954)

Chad Oliver is a guy who, in my experience, writes stories about how our modern life of eating ice cream and watching Laurel and Hardy on youtube (that's my modern life, at least) sucks and it would be awesome to live a stone age existence, hunting wildebeest with a javelin or something.  (Check out MPorcius coverage of Chad Oliver stories here, here, here, here, and here.  These links are what I am calling "blind boxes;" one of them is to a post on a Chad Oliver story that is actually good--that one is "the chaser.")

"Transformer" first appeared in F&SF, and a year later was included in the collection of Oliver stories entitled Another Kind.  Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg saw fit to include it in their DAW anthology The Great SF Stories #16: 1954.

"Transformer" is a gimmicky joke story that has as its basis that tired conceit that has made Pixar, the guy from Bosom Buddies and the guy from Tool Time a bazillion dollars--your toys are really alive and move around when you aren't looking and resent it when you break them during your experiments and get sad when you stop playing with them.  Most of the story has a first-person narrator, a tiny toy woman who is part of the scenery of a kid's electric train set.  (The magazine version has a joke about first-person narration that was excised for the book version.)  She describes all the parts of the train set at great length.  She has lots of boring complaints (e. g., the kid doesn't dust the set) and there are lots of obvious jokes (e. g., the little toy people in the toy town are tired of eating bacon and eggs, bacon and eggs being the only food items modeled in the toy diner.)  These are the kind of jokes an actual kid makes while playing with his toys.

The kid who owns the set is now thirteen and no longer plays with the set very often, and when he does he causes the trains to crash into each other, damaging some of the toy people.  So the little toy people try to assassinate the boy by tinkering with the transformer, but the malfunctioning transformer merely gives him a little shock.  Then he sells the set, separating the narrator from her friends, and she ends up in an even worse situation, with a kid who has an even lamer electric train set up.  (Oliver tries to make the story sad as well as funny.)

I know people eat up this kind of goop, but it is not for me.  I think I have to give it a thumbs down because I didn't like it, but recognize its essential competence (the author succeeds in his goals) and market appeal, so maybe the "real" score is "acceptable."

(By the way, this story has nothing to do with the future or man battling tomorrow or anything like that, Nolan's ostensible theme for this anthology, even though he tells us in the introduction to the book that "A worthwhile anthology...should project a comprehensive viewpoint.  The stories in this volume display Man's essential strength in facing complex futuristic problems."  I personally don't think an anthology needs a theme beyond "these are a stories worth reading," so I don't care, but it is odd to see Nolan set out a program and then just blithely divert from it.)

I sure hope somebody out there has that crazy mask from
 the Powers cover of Another Kind as his or her twitter avatar

"Mass for Mixed Voices" by Charles Beaumont (1954)

In his intro to "Mass for Mixed Voices," which first appeared in Science Fiction Quarterly, Nolan mentions Beaumont's famous story from Playboy, "Black Country," which I read in 2015 in Volume II of The Library of America's American Fantastic Tales along with stories by Thomas Ligotti and Gene Wolfe.  He also refers to Beaumont's association with The Twilight Zone.  "Mass for Mixed Voices" is the title story of a 2013 collection of Beaumont stories published by Centipede Press that sold for $125.00.

I guess this story is trying to be profound, but I have to admit I don't quite grok it.  It is the future, in a highly regimented and militaristic society.  Disease has been conquered, and people live very long lives--in fact, people die so rarely (it seems decades go by between deaths) that the government schedules everybody's euthanasia, making a big public event out of each person's passing, a "World Festival" with visits from diplomats from other planets, performances by dancing girls, etc.  People live so long that they grow tired of life, and welcome death, so there is no resistance to the government-scheduled euthanasia regime.

Until today.  Johnmartin has lived a long and full life, fighting with distinction in many wars, having had a successful marriage and produced many offspring.  Since retirement he has cultivated a big diverse garden full of alien plants which have emotions and wills and can move about almost like animals.  Johnmartin's day to die has come, but he tells the authorities that he does not want to die, that he is still fascinated by life, in particular his plants.  It appears he developed this love of life and desire to enjoy immortality from reading some ancient books he found (it seems there are no books in this society, though there is reading and writing--we learn that the government sends people letters and it is a felony to ignore them.)  

The government cannot permit anybody to refuse to die on his death day, and Johnmartin reluctantly submits.  But he first eats a bunch of seeds from his garden, and requests that he be buried in his garden and the government make sure somebody waters and weeds the garden forever.  The authorities agree, and as he dies Johnmartin has a vision, of a new flower in his garden, a flower of which he believes "there was something in it of every other blossom," and as he dies he welcomes the darkness.

Obviously this is a sappy and sentimental story that is supposed to pull your heartstrings, but what is its "message?"  That the kind of scientific and regimented society that could conquer death would, ironically and paradoxically, also forget the value of life?  That death is what makes life feel worthwhile?   Are we supposed to agree with the Johnmartin of the start of the story, the Johnmartin who wants to go on living, or with the Johnmartin who welcomes death in the last line of the story because he is going to live on in his plants?  (It is a little odd that the idea of living on in his plants makes him content but he never considers that he is going to live on in any of his "hundreds of descendants--none mutants.")  There are plenty of references to war and religion and intrusive laws in the story, but if the story is a satire of the military-industrial complex or big government or religious institutions it is a very subtle one, because there is no evidence offered that the wars were unjust or that people are groaning under tyranny or the victims of manipulation by priests--people are unhappy because they are "tired, bored, satiated."  If the story is making the commonly-made-in-SF point that utopias are boring because there are no challenge or goals, why include all that talk of wars--this society, and Johnmartin in particular, has faced many challenges and achieved many goals.  

I'm finding this story frustrating--thumbs down. 

**********

The Miller is pretty good, but it was downhill from there.  Well, they can't all be winners, can they?  Nolan seems to have chosen these stories on the basis that they pack some kind of emotional punch, that each tries to break our hearts, which is fine, but only the Miller has a plot that is interesting and well-constructed and makes sense as a SF story.  (The Oliver's plot is alright as a sort of silly fantasy.)  

More 1950s SF short stories in the next exciting (we hope) episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Stories from the Sept. 1948 Weird Tales by A Derleth, R Bradbury, S A Coblentz, E Hamilton and E F Russell

Let's surf on over to the internet archive and take a look at the September 1948 issue of Weird Tales, edited by Dorothy McIlwraith.  In the list of new members of the Weird Tales Club we see the name of Jack Gaughan, who was then just beginning his successful career as a SF illustrator, and on the table of contents page we see the names of five writers we have already opined about here at MPorcius Fiction Log: August Derleth, Ray Bradbury, Stanton A. Coblentz, Edmond Hamilton, and Eric Frank Russell.  Let's read those five stories and get a taste of what Jack Gaughan and other readers of Weird Tales in 1948 were getting for their 20 cents.

"The Whippoorwills in the Hills" by August Derleth

1958 hardcover

Dan Harrop, narrator of "The Whippoorwills in the Hills," tells us that when his oddball cousin Abel Harrop, who had had almost no intercourse with Dan and the rest of the family, vanished, the authorities were of no help, so he decided to investigate the disappearance himself.  Dan moved into Abel's isolated house, finding there a bunch of weird books.  Abel's phone is on a party line, and Dan is able to listen in on the local women gossiping about him and about his lost cousin--it seems they feared Abel, and are glad he is gone.

At night, a huge flock of whippoorwills settles in the valley where lies the Harrop house, and make so much noise with their cries that the narrator cannot sleep.  The next day when he eavesdrops on the neighbors' phone convos, Dan finds that they are all talking about the whippoorwills--they could hear their racket, even though their homes are quite distant, and fear the bird's activity foreshadows an imminent death.

Sure enough, cattle and even people in the area start getting killed in the dark of night.  During the day Dan conducts his investigations, looking into Abel's strange old books and talking to the locals, who refuse to help him, some quite angrily.  Whenever he is near Abel's queer library Dan has visions, like unbidden memories, of weird landscapes and creatures.  During the night Dan does his best to sleep while the whippoorwills alight on and around the house and make their interminable racket, and when he does sleep he dreams of monolithic towers and fungoid trees and the amoeba-like beings that live among them.  As the story progresses we are given clear clues that Abel was casting spells from the books in order to "open a Gate" through which to contact or summon monsters from that other dimension, ansd that he himself was sucked bodily into that alien plane.  Dan himself, by reading aloud a passage of one of Abel's books, got the attention of alien creatures and the murders of animals and people are being conducted by him in a state of stupefaction or alien possession, their blood a sacrifice to the extradimensional monsters that perhaps appeases them and saves him from being taken away as was his cousin. 

We learn at the story's end that Dan is writing this memoir in captivity, having been captured by the local police in the vicinity of the dead body of a murdered woman--Dan refuses to admit he is the culprit, instead blaming the whippoorwills.

Derleth fills this story with direct references to people, places and things in Mythos stories by H. P. Lovecraft and in at least once instance Robert E. Howard.  The towns of Dunwich and Arkham are mentioned, minor characters have names like Whateley, Abel's books bear titles like Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and the creatures in Dan's dreams have names like Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.

"The Whippoorwills in the Hills" starts out alright; the pacing and tone and style are good.  But Derleth fails to tie everything up together in the end; at least I didn't quite understand the role of the whippoorwills in the story.  All the stuff with the books and monsters from another dimension and the murders works as a discrete unit, it all makes internal sense, so the whippoorwills feel like a superfluous element just added on top of the story instead of integrated with the rest of it.  I guess the birds are a manifestation of the aliens (whom we are told can take any shape) and it is they that drink the blood that Dan spills, or somehow direct him to spill the blood.  It is possible that the whippoorwills seemed out of place to me because I was not very familiar with the folklore about them, and had forgotten that these birds played a role in Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror."

Another problem with the story is that it doesn't build up to a striking climax, it just sort of sails along and then ends, the tone and pace, which were perfectly adequate at the start, never changing, so it feels like the story just abruptly ends.

Merely acceptable. "The Whippoorwills in the Hills" would be included in the oft-reprinted Derleth collection, The Mask of Cthulhu.

British paperback editions, 1951 and 1976

"Fever Dream" by Ray Bradbury

In the days when a doctor would make house calls in his horse-drawn carriage, a fifteen-year-old boy lies in bed suffering what the sawbones thinks is scarlet fever.  But the boy knows that his body is being taken over, bit by bit, by germs, that he will die and his body be animated by a new creature, a creature of unfathomable evil!  Sure enough, at the end of the brief tale the doctor is astonished to find the boy fully recovered and eager to go to school and touch all the other kids and their clothes--no doubt to spread disease and death!

Bradbury's dialogue is chilling, his metaphors powerful and illuminating (as metaphors, which so often are showy cliches that waste your time, should be), and the story is a perfect length, short and to the point.  Quite good.

"Fever Dream" was first reprinted in 1959, in the collection A Medicine for Melancholy, and has since been widely anthologized.

           
"The Daughter of Urzun" by Stanton A. Coblentz

Most of the stories in this 1964 magazine were
written by Coblentz, though many appear under
pseudonyms

Remember when we read Stanton A. Coblentz's broad satire The Hidden World (AKA In Caverns Below), or when we read his anti-war poem "On A Weird Planet?"  Damn, that was long ago.  Well, let's get reacquainted with old Stanton.

Out of the starting gate, Stanton gets me on his side by reminding me of my New York days and relating a horror-story version of a typical New York experience--being mesmerized by an attractive woman on the subway!  Our narrator and his blue-eyed wife Marjorie are riding the world's most famous mass-transit system when a "swarthy" "Oriental" woman with big hypnotic black eyes and a "cynical" mouth sits down across from them, and the narrator is disturbingly captivated by her--he can't stop looking at her, and her presence fills him with a weird dread.  Later in the day, he and Marjorie get on a different train and the "Oriental" sits across from them again!  After the sinister figure gets off, Marjorie tells the narrator that she was also fascinated and horrified by the woman, the sight of whom conjured up unaccountably bad feelings, like those associated with a terrible experience in the past.

That night our hero has a vivid dream, like a vision, in which he and Marjorie are dark-skinned people themselves, living in an ancient exotic city where animal-headed gods are worshiped.  (At the end of the story we learn it is a city in "ancient Babylonia.")  He and Marjorie are workers, he a brick mason and she a tender of the fires in a bakery, but a seductive noblewoman has taken notice of him--she has been summoning him to her palace to engage in a torrid affair that is ruining the narrator's marriage!  As you have already guessed, this aristocratic lady, this homewrecker who "throbs" in the narrator's embrace, who is "lithe, sinuous, panther-like, a thing of curves and fire" is the woman from the subway, and this dream is a recovered memory of one of the narrator's past lives which was intimately associated with the past lives of Marjorie and the subway woman!

The main plot of the story is how the ancient incarnation of the narrator was forced to choose between his work-worn wife--the mother of his child--and the rich sexy lady who offered him a life of luxury, and the crimes and tragedies that are the product of this love triangle.

I am a sucker for stories about femmes fatale and stories about dangerous sexual relationships, about men being carried away by desire and doing things that are stupid or immoral, and so I found "The Daughter of Urzun" entertaining.  Judged with cold objectivity, it is probably just average.

I sometimes wonder what value my blog provides when I praise universally acknowledged geniuses like Ray Bradbury--everybody and his brother can tell you Ray Bradbury's early stories are good, so I'm not adding much to the discourse by agreeing.  I feel more confident that I am doing something worthwhile when I talk about stories and writers who have been forgotten or who are controversial, and "The Daughter of Urzun" falls into that forgotten category--isfdb indicates that it has never appeared in book form, and was only ever reprinted in an odd magazine in 1964--it is practically a lost relic from our literary past!

"The Watcher of the Ages" by Edmond Hamilton

Dutch edition of What's It Like Out There?

In a March 16, 1934 letter to Duane W. Rimel, H. P. Lovecraft wrote "Hamilton is very brilliant, but has allowed popular magazine taste to injure his writing," and Lovecraft's correspondence is full of complaints that Hamilton uses the same plots again and again; HPL, like Bertie Wooster and George W. Bush, loved giving nicknames to people, and in his letters he calls Hamilton "Hectograph Eddie" and "Single-Plot Hamilton."  In a September 12, 1934 letter to Rimel he even blames Hamilton for an alleged decline in the quality of Jack Williamson's work: "Williamson started out well, but his close friendship with Hamilton has caused him to adopt cheap pulp standards & fall into the usual trivial rut."  Ouch!

(I recently bought Volumes 7, 9 and 10 of Hippocampus Press's Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and highly recommend them to those interested in speculative fiction of the 1930s--among the letters in these three volumes are those to Robert Bloch, Donald A. Wollheim, Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber, and C. L. Moore, as well as letters written by Moore to Lovecraft.  Each of these three books is over 400 pages long and full of personality, insight, gossip, and helpful notes by editors David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi--I paid $25.00 for each and they are totally worth it.)

As regular readers of MPorcius Fiction Log know, I consider Edmond Hamilton a favorite--though I have panned some of his productions and Lovecraft certainly has a point about his reusing plots--and am curious to read this tale, one which Lovecraft, who died eleven years before it was published, never had a chance to pass judgement on.

The narrator of "The Watcher of the Ages" is Lane Adams, a geologist, a member of a team of eggheads accompanied by a mining executive exploring an ancient city in the "Matto Grosso" region of Brazil--rumor has it this city, lost in the jungle for centuries, is the site of valuable radioactive elements and other minerals.  Adams is familiar with this part of Brazil and can communicate to the Indian porters and read the inscriptions on the ruined walls of the thousands-years-old metropolis.  Both the native porters and the ancient inscriptions say the city is hellishly dangerous because it is guarded by an inhuman being and you should get out while you still can, but you don't think a bunch of American scientists and businessmen are going to believe that mumbo jumbo, do you?   

At night, somebody sabotages the expedition's Geiger counters, but luckily the mining executive has kept one Geiger counter separate from the others and it is still serviceable.  Using it, the expedition discovers a source of radiation deep in a mountain.  Clad in protective suits, the men descend an ancient stairway to find a pit full of radioactive material--on the edge of this pit is a sort of laboratory where the scientists of six thousand years ago created an artificial man, the inhuman guardian the inscriptions and Indians warned them of!  The mining exec comes up with the scheme of selling the golem-making apparatus to the highest bidder--Hamilton doesn't name names but I'm betting Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao would be in the market for a process that could build an invincible army with which to put those paper tigers and running dogs in their place!   Of course, the businessman will first have to murder the do-gooder scientists who came on this expedition not to get rich but to expand the frontier of knowledge.

This is when Lane Adams reveals the astounding truth--he is the inhuman guardian, in disguise as an American geologist!  For six thousand years he has guarded the city and the ancient lab, sabotaging and diverting expeditions hunting for it because he feared the human race was not yet ready to shoulder the responsibility that comes with the ability to create life.  The mining exec and his henchmen try to kill him but the guardian has super strength and is practically invulnerable to bullets and blows, and the fight ends with the unscrupulous business people being thrown down into the radioactive pit to die a horrible death.

"Adams" lets the scientists go after they promise to keep the ancient lab and radioactive pit a secret.  Then, weary of life, in despair of mankind ever developing to the point that he can safely hand over to them the secret of creating synthetic people, the immortal guardian sets a bomb to collapse the mountain, thus burying the lab and pit for the foreseeable future, and commits suicide by jumping into the radioactive pit from which he sprang sixty centuries ago.

This story feels underdeveloped; its numerous fertile ideas--exploring a jungle and ancient city, how would people react to learning that they could create synthetic people, the psychology of a superior inhuman being living in disguise among humans for thousands of years--could form the basis for all kinds of adventures and thought-provoking discussions and dramatic scenes, but in this short story they amount to little.  A lost opportunity.  I'm judging "The Watcher of the Ages" barely acceptable.

"The Watcher of the Ages" would go on to be reprinted in the 1974 collection What's It Like Out There?  

"Displaced Person" by Eric Frank Russell

This one has been reprinted many times in Russell collections and in anthologies edited by people like Terry Carr, Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg.  "Displaced Person" is one of those "short shorts" and takes up less than two pages in Weird Tales.

Ohhh, another New York story, this one set in Central Park!  I know I don't have to tell you how much I miss Central Park...Bethesda Fountain, the Ramble, Turtle Pond...those were the days....

Anyway, this is a silly gimmicky story, as these short shorts tend to be.  The narrator is sitting on a park bench when a well-dressed man sits next to him.  The narrator gets the impression that this is some refugee from Europe, a political dissident driven out of his country, and in conversation the man relates that he led a failed revolt against a "leader" who had "delusions of grandeur" and "posed as the final arbiter on everything from birth to death." The man expresses his frustration over the fact that his enemy controls all the propaganda and has suppressed all his attempts for to make his case before the public.  When the narrator assures him that in America we have free speech and the dissident can say what he likes, the defeated rebel murmurs, "My name is Lucifer."

Oh, brother!

Is this story just a goofy joke?  Or an attack on Christianity and Christian institutions?  Does it make sense to equate God and/or Christian churches with Hitler and Lenin and Stalin, and Satan (and Satanists?) with people who opposed or fled totalitarian regimes?  The story is so brief, Russell can't make a case for his strange argument (if it is an argument), so it just comes across as a sort of cheap thumbing of the nose at religious people.

Or maybe I am so used to SF writers goofing on religion that I am missing Russell's point--maybe the story is supposed to be an example of the Devil's audacity and trickery, maybe we are expected to bristle at the rank presumption of Lucifer playing the victim and the effrontery of his assumption of the mantle of real victims of real tyranny and oppression.

Whatever Russell is trying to do here I don't get it and I don't enjoy it--have to give this thing a thumbs down. 

I have now read sixteen stories by Eric Frank Russell over the course of this blog's unlikely life, and here are handy links to my blog posts that address the other fifteen (I liked some of them):

"Mana," "Jay Score," and "Homo Saps"
"Metamorphosite," "Hobbyist," "Late Night Final," and "Dear Devil"
"Fast Falls the Eventide," "I Am Nothing," and "Weak Spot"
"Allamagoosa," "Into Your Tent I'll Creep," and "Study in Still Life"
"Exposure"
"Love Story"

**********

I guess we shouldn't be surprised that Ray Bradbury's story is, by a wide margin, the best of this lot.  The conventional wisdom wins again!

In our next episode a 1970s novel about travel in outer space.

Stories from A Wilderness of Stars by Ray Bradbury, Poul Anderson, and Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Let's read some "Dazzling Stories of Adventure" in which "Man Meets His Future."  In 1969 Sherbourne Press published William F. Nolan's A Wilderness of Stars, an anthology subtitled Stories of Man in Conflict with Space.  Sounds awesome, right?  I own a copy of the paperback version of the anthology printed by Dell in the year of my birth, 1971, with an irresistible Robert Foster cover featuring some of our favorite things--lunar craters, a guy in a space suit, hideous tentacles, and a fetching lass in her underwear!  (I don't want to know where that red tentacle is coming from!)

A Wilderness of Stars presents ten stories; today let's check out four of them, each one by an author we already know we like: Ray Bradbury, Poul Anderson, or Walter M. Miller, Jr. (Miller has two pieces in the book.)  We also know we like Arthur C. Clarke, but I've already read his contribution to A Wilderness of Stars, "Sunjammer," which I can recommend with some enthusiasm--back in 2017 when I blogged about it I called "Sunjammer" "a great example of a hard sf story." 

"I, Mars" by Ray Bradbury (1949)

According to isfdb, "I, Mars" has never appeared in a Bradbury collection, and has only appeared in three anthologies, A Wilderness of Stars and two British anthologies, one of them R. Chetwynd-Hayes's Tales of Terror from Outer Space.  This is practically a "rare" Bradbury story!  Exciting, right?  "I, Mars"'s first publication was in the same issue of Super Science Stories as A. E. van Vogt's "The Earth Killers," a story (that I didn't think was particularly effective when I read it in 2014) about racists who nuke America from their base on the moon.

"I, Mars" is a clever story, sort of a variation on themes found in "The Silent Towns," one of the tales included in the famous The Martian Chronicles; maybe "I, Mars" has been neglected for this very reason, that it might be considered redundant by readers of that iconic collection.

Mars was colonized by Earthlings like 65 or 70 years ago, but shortly after humans had covered the Martian surface with small towns constructed in the style of America's Middle West, the colonists all rushed back to Earth when a world war erupted.  One young man stayed behind on Mars: Emil Barton.  We are with the aged Barton on his eightieth birthday when a telephone rings--who can be calling?  Barton answers, and is reminded that for years, to assuage his loneliness, he pursued various insane projects, like building an army of robots to populate deserted Mars.  (He eventually ordered the robots to march into a canal to their destruction.)  Another of these projects was to record his voice saying thousands of different things, and then program computers to use these phrases to have conversations over the telephone.  He set up the computers to telephone himself on his eightieth birthday and torment him!  Most of this story's text relates how 80-year old Barton responds to the harassment of his younger self.

I like it.  Pungent and to the point, "I, Mars" is worth the time of Bradbury fans who haven't yet read it.

"Ghetto" by Poul Anderson (1954)

"Ghetto" had its debut in the same issue of F&SF as the first installment of the serialized version of Robert Heinlein's Star Beast, which appeared in the magazine under the title Star Lummox.  (Star Beast is fun and memorable--I can still recall the experience of reading it as a kid, where I was and so forth.)  According to isfdb, "Ghetto" is the first story in the four-story Kith series, and reappeared in the 1982 Anderson collection Mauri and Kith.

"Ghetto" is one of those SF stories about Einsteinian time dialtion or whatever we are supposed to call it.  You know the drill: your spaceship travels near the speed of light for what feels like a few months or a year, but when you get back to Earth decades or centuries have passed, and cultural norms and political systems have changed radically and all the people you knew are old or dead, so you are a stranger in your own country.  The Kith are what the civilization in this story calls these spacefarers who witness thousands of years of Terran history, empires rising and falling, cities being built and then abandoned and then built again, even though their own lives are only the usual 80 or 90 years.  Between space flights, Kith live in an Earth ghetto that to normal Earthers looks like an historical artifact, a town that hasn't changed for thousands of years.  In the period of history in which this story takes place, Earth is run by an aristocracy who lord it over a middle class of cossetted slaves and a lower class of wretched freemen who live hand to mouth; people in this classbound society owe their position to genetic engineering, with the expendable lower classes ugly and with low IQs and the upper classes beautiful and blessed with high intelligence.  (The Kith, initially selected from tough men with high IQs and now having been genetically separate from the rest of humanity for thousands of years, are also ethnically distinct and generally superior.)  The aristos, most of them decadent hedonists who do little work and rely on the Kith to bring much-needed resources to Earth from outer space, have a contempt for the Kith, but also enjoy slumming in the "quaint" anachronistic Kith ghetto, while the plebians and proles have what amounts to a racist or bigoted attitude towards the space travellers, a bitterness that is their sublimated resentment of their aristocratic masters.

Presumably Anderson wants the Kith to remind you of Jewish merchants living in Christian Europe, an ethnically and culturally distinct group resented for their economic success but also relied upon for valuable goods and services.  More explicitly, he indicates that the decadence of the aristocracy and the rising disaffection of the lower orders are signs that this political system is on the verge of collapse.

The plot of "Ghetto" concerns a Kith man who, out in space, meets an aristo woman who was so fascinated by what she read about outer space that she decided to see alien worlds for herself; these two fall in love and the Kith considers abandoning his people and his space career to live out his life on Earth with the woman among the aristocracy.  Of course, Anderson's work often has a tragic tone, and it is no surprise that the Kith man finds himself unable and unwilling to fit in to the decadent and bigoted aristocracy and drops his relationship with the aristocratic woman and decides to marry a Kith woman and continue his life among the stars and in the Kith ghetto.

I can't point to anything wrong with "Ghetto," but it just feels pedestrian, like a bunch of stuff (cross-class love, relativistic time shenanigans, an oppressed minority, an empire on the brink of collapse because its ruling class has become jaded and degenerate) we've seen before.  Reading it right after reading "I, Mars," I couldn't help but compare Anderson and Bradbury.  Anderson perhaps knows a bunch more history and science than Bradbury, but Bradbury is simply a better writer, able to affect the reader's emotions--"Ghetto" is full of long paragraphs explaining the universe the Kith inhabit, while "I, Mars" is mostly short sentences and short paragraphs that, bang bang bang, present a small number of powerful images and, more importantly, immerse you immediately in the mental world, the psychological universe, of the character.  Anderson's story is about a civilization and its history, but Bradbury's is about a person and his feelings.

Acceptable.

"Death of a Spaceman" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1954)

You'll recall I have really liked some Miller stories I've read in the last two years or so ("Crucifixius Etiam," "The Triflin' Man," "I Made You") and so I am looking forward to the two Miller pieces in A Wilderness of Stars.  This first one obviously has a good reputation; after first seeing print in Amazing it has been included in several "Best of" anthologies and was even reprinted in Amazing when Ted White was editing the magazine in 1969.

Miller's "Crucifixius Etiam" was all about how conquering space is hell but still worth it, and addressed issues of class and religion, and "Death of a Spaceman" is of the same ilk.  Donegal is an old man, a lifelong spacer who served in the space force during the war against the Soviet Union and then spent a long career working in the cramped and uncomfortable engine rooms of rockets flying to and from the Moon.  Now he is dying at home in his little apartment with his wife at his side.  He is disappointed that his son is not going to become a spaceman himself, and he blames his daughter--her husband was a spacer, and was killed in an accident, and her resulting bad attitude (Donegal thinks) turned his son off from participating in the adventure of conquering space.

Donegal's family lives in a neighborhood that was once posh but is now in decline; alongside the old mansions are now blocks of humble flats.  Next door to Donegal's apartment building is one of the mansions that is still inhabited by rich people--in fact, it is home to the owner of the company that builds the sort of rockets Donegal used to fly in!  While Donegal lies dying those rich people and their cronies are holding a noisy party to celebrate their son's graduation from the space academy and the start of his career as a spaceman!  Donegal's daughter has a case of class envy and his wife resents the noise from the party, but Donegal identifies with the rich family--the company owner and his son are, like Donegal, committed to Man's grand quest of mastering the universe beyond Earth's atmosphere.  Donegal's fellow feeling for the wealthy people next door is reciprocated when the party goers are told an old spaceman is dying next door--a musician plays "Taps" and the party lapses into silence in deference to Donegal's last wish, that he be able to hear the launch of a rocket to the Moon from a nearby base.

(There's also a visit from a priest and plenty of talk about Donegal's soul--as you know, religion is a major theme of Miller's body of work and plays a prominent role in this piece as well.)

"Death of a Spaceman" is a sentimental story, and also full of the ambiguity we expect to see in serious literature: is going to space really worth it, as Donegal contends and his family doubts?  Are the ordinary spacemen exploited by business interests, or are the wealthy and the working class spacers partners in an heroic enterprise?  Is religion a goofy scam or does it really bring comfort to Donegal and his family, help them make sense of their lives, and serve as a bridge and a strengthening bond between different strata of society?

Thumbs up.

"Death of a Spaceman" has appeared in all of these anthologies

"The Lineman" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1957)

"The Lineman" first appeared in F&SF, along with Robert Heinlein's quite good "The Menace from Earth" and, in editor Anthony Boucher's book column, an interesting discussion of L. Frank Baum's Oz books.  The issue also includes a collaboration between Damon Knight and Ken Bulmer entitled "The Day Everything Fell Down."  I would not have expected to learn that these two guys, one of whom I think of as a snob with literary pretensions and the other I think of as a mediocre hack, had ever collaborated on anything, and it seems that this story was never reprinted.  It looks like a dismal joke story, and I am in no rush to read it.

"The Lineman" is another of Miller's stories about how conquering space is costly and dangerous and might seem pointless; the story has religious overtones and also opines on sexual relationships.  It is a sort of slice-of-life story, not very plot heavy and lacking a strong conclusion.

The human race is in the early stages of colonizing the Moon, and the lunar surface is sprinkled with work gangs in vacuum suits and moon buggies setting up dome cities, digging mines, and laying cable to carry electricity and communications.  This work is incredibly hazardous!  Over the course of the longish story, which is almost 70 pages here in A Wilderness of Stars, many men are killed by bad luck or through negligence as tiny meteors penetrate their space suits or they forget the many rules one must follow to survive in a low-gravity zero-oxygen environment.  One character, near the end of the story, wonders how there could possibly be a God in a universe that is so dangerous, so cruel.

Besides the dangers presented by the natural world of physics and chemistry, there are social and political problems.  Years ago it was discovered that children cannot be raised in low gravity--their young bodies grow out of control and they suffer terrible deaths.  In response to this tragedy, Earth's world government passed the Schneider-Volkov Act, that, more or less, forbids co-ed operations on the Moon.  In effect, this means there are no women on the moon, and so the men setting up the mines and bases on Luna go for months or years without seeing any women, which causes all sort of psychological stress.

A dissident political party, apparently modeled by Miller on underground communist parties (it is made up of independent "cells" and its members act with absolute ruthlessness) has risen up to fight for the repeal of the Schneider-Volkov Act through such actions as an illegal general strike.  In the beginning of the story the main character, Bill Relke, the lineman of the title (he lays those aforementioned cables) and a man scarred by the fact that his wife back on Earth has taken up with another man, is being threatened by Party thugs--he considered joining the Party and was allowed to participate in a few meetings, but then declined to join, and the thugs are now pressuring him to change his mind as well as trying to keep him from exposing their plans to the higher ups.  These plans--to strike--threaten the safety of many in one of the new lunar cities, because if Relke's gang fails to complete a particular job on time the oxygen system at the city might fail.  Later in the story the thugs torture Relke, and then more conservative elements of the work gang in turn torture the thugs in an effort to achieve revenge and maintain order so the critical project is completed on schedule.  Miller does not provide us readers with exciting fight scenes or cathartic images of justice being served or romantic gush about right overcoming wrong--the violence in "The Lineman" consists of vicious beatings of essentially helpless people, and Relke reflects that in the absence of the stabilizing force of the heterosexual family, men resort, inevitably, to the brutal ethics of a street gang.

In the middle of this Hobbesian milieu a rocket arrives, landing in an unusual spot, leading to speculation that it is a damaged Earth vessel making an emergency landing or perhaps even aliens.  In fact it is a French ship full of prostitutes whose owners exploit some legal loopholes and engage in financial shenanigans in order to operate this interplanetary whore house.  The arrival of the brothel gives Miller an opportunity to show how monstrous the Party members are and how unfulfilling can be sexual relationships unmoored from any sort of commitment.  The flying brothel also serves as an oblique impetus to the resolution of the short term plot (finishing the critical job on time) and the long term plot (recreating healthy family life on the Moon.)

This story is pretty good, though its valorization of the heterosexual nuclear family and dismissal of homosexuality may offend today's sensibilities.  Its portrayal of space colonization as hellishly dangerous and perhaps quixotic reminds us of the career of Barry Malzberg and of Edmond Hamilton's 1952 story "What's It Like Out There?"   

"The Lineman" has appeared in Miller collections and was selected for David G. Hartwell's The World Treasury of Science Fiction.

**********

Four worthwhile stories that suggest that leaving Earth is no picnic.  Hold those travel plans, folks!

Stories by Ray Bradbury and Murray Leinster from August Derleth's The Other Side of the Moon

In 1949, Pellegrini & Cudahy published The Other Side of the Moon, a hardcover anthology of 20 science fiction stories selected by Wisconsin's August Derleth.  In 2020, I borrowed a copy of the anthology from the Enoch Pratt Free Library of Baltimore via interlibrary loan.  This book has appeared in paperback editions in both the United States and Great Britain, but isfdb warns us that all of those have been severely abridged.

I have already read and blogged about three stories that appear in The Other Side of the Moon, A. E. van Vogt's   "Resurrection" AKA "Monster" and "Vault of the Beast," and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "The Cure."  All three of these stories are good and have been reprinted numerous times, and I recommend that you rush right out and read them.

Today, let's read four stories from The Other Side of the Moon, the two by Ray Bradbury and the two by Murray Leinster.  I'm reading the versions from this seventy-year old hardcover book, but there are magazine versions of all four stories available online.

"Pillar of Fire" by Ray Bradbury (1948)

"Pillar of Fire" made its debut in Planet Stories, where the editors introduce it by saying "We cannot tell you what kind of story this is.  We simply cannot present it as we present other stories.  It is too tremendous for that."

William Lantry, a guy who died in Massachusetts in the early 20th century, wakes up and climbs out of his grave in the 24th century.  Bradbury doesn't really explain how this guy manages to get reanimated; he is truly dead--he doesn't breathe, for example--but he is up and walking around and thinking and experiencing emotion.  It seems that it is hate that gives Lantry the energy to perform his parody of life.

And hate he does!  The 24th century is what you might call a utopia--there is no fear and no crime, everybody is helpful and nobody lies--but Lantry, as a shunned outsider, immediately conceives an overpowering hatred for this sterile paradise!  Because no one in this world is suspicious and there are no police, there is nothing to stand in Lantry's way when he launches a spirited campaign of mass murder!

There are many SF stories about the shortcomings of utopias, stories which argue that for man to be at his best, to be truly alive, he must face challenges, and I think "Pillar of Fire" fits into that category, though it is more of an emotion-stirring drama than a satire or political tract.  Lantry learns that the people of the 24th century do not fear death or darkness or the unknown because there is no mystery in their lives, no imagination; things that might be scary or disturbing are removed from view or made thoroughly familiar so they lose their power to disturb.  When he goes to the library Lantry learns that books by horror writers like Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft have long been burned--Lantry is the only person in the world to have any familiarity at all with their work.  Not only are books burned in this utopia to prevent morbid thoughts, but so are the dead: the corpses of the newly deceased are immediately brought to huge incinerators that sit in each town, and school children are regularly brought on field trips to these incinerators so that for them death will have no mystery.  Even old cemeteries have been dug up and the remains of the long dead burned; it is digging in the Salem cemetery where Lantry was interred, the last cemetery in the world, that woke up Lantry, who is today the only dead body in the world!

Terribly lonely, Lantry hatches a scheme to murder people in large numbers, destroy the incinerators, and then animate those he has murdered so that he will have friends and an army with which to conquer the Earth.  "Pillar of Fire" is fast paced, and Bradbury's prose conveys the tension, the desperate anxiety, felt by a lone outsider at war with an entire world. To describe Lantry's feverish thought processes Bradbury unleashes lines that sound like modern poetry:

He arose in violent moves.  His lips were wide and his dark eyes were flared and there was a trembling and burning all through him.  He must kill and kill and kill and kill and kill.  He must make his enemies into friends, into people like himself who walked but shouldn't walk, who were pale in a land of pinks.  He must kill and then kill and then kill again.  He must make bodies and dead people and corpses.

Lantry's scheme does not come off; the antiseptic world of the future defeats him, cleanses itself of him.  As he is pushed into the incinerator he is haunted by lines from Poe and Shakespeare, writers whose works, once expected to be immortal, will in moments be truly dead, lost forever, when Lantry is blasted into cinders.  We readers must ask ourselves if living without violence and fear is worth the cost of living without art and literature and imagination.

A great story, the length and pacing and tone all perfect, with plenty of strong images and good sentences.  I was particularly thrilled to read "Pillar of Fire" because it is one of those stories which I read as a kid and whose title and plot were promptly forgotten, but which left an indelible mark on my mind; in the case of "Pillar of Fire" I never forgot the idea that people living in a future of honesty and peace would be defenseless against a time traveler from our own violent time, and a particular scene in which some 24th century people are persuaded to pursue Lantry by being told (lied to, by someone who has never lied in his life) that catching Lantry is the object of a new game.

"Pillar of Fire" was included in a number of anthologies of vampire stories as well as Bradbury collections; I am pretty sure I read it in a school library copy of the paperback edition of the Bradbury collection S is for Space with the wraparound Ian Miller cover.

"The Earth Men" by Ray Bradbury (1948)

1959 Yugoslavian edition of
The Martian Chronicles

This is kind of a joke story; as I have expressed on this blog many times, I am generally uninterested in joke stories, but Bradbury manages to make the story work, partly because it turns out to not be as absurd as it first appears and finishes with some true human drama.

Four astronauts from Earth land on Mars.  They approach native settlements, and find them to be quite like American farm houses and small towns.  As the first Earthlings to land on Mars, they expect to be greeted as heroes, but the Martians they meet just try to shoo them away, claiming they are too busy with quotidian matters like housework and business affairs to be bothered.  The astronauts' protestations that they have traveled millions of miles across space and achieved something no one has ever achieved before are brushed aside.

Bradbury gives us variations on this joke for like ten pages; the Martians keep passing the Earthers on to some other native they claim will be interested in them.  Eventually the astronauts find someone who directs them to a large building.  In this building we get the punchline to the joke and our twist ending.

The building is full of Martians who claim to be from Earth, or Jupiter, or wherever--the astronauts realize that many Martians go insane and claim they are aliens, and these mentally ill people are corralled here, in the insane asylum!  Every Martian the astronauts met simply assumed that the Earth expedition commander was yet another insane local.  Martians communicate via telepathy, and can project visual, auditory, and even tactile illusions, and so when the humans pointed out their rocket ship to the natives, they dismissed this as a hallucination (the yellow-eyed and brown-skinned Martians were similarly unimpressed by the humans' white skins and blue eyes.)  The Martians even assumed that the captain's three subordinates were constructions of his mind projected into theirs.

The humans try to convince the doctor who manages the asylum that they are not an insane man and his three illusions, but four honest to goodness visitors from Earth.  The Martian shrink is amazed at how committed to his delusions the captain is, and how realistic his illusions are, but he never once considers the possibility that the captain is telling the truth--the captain's efforts merely serve to convince the native doctor that his patient's mental illness is incurable, and that the only treatment is euthanasia.  The humans left their guns on the ship (doh!) so have no defense when the shrink shoots down the captain, and then, surprised they didn't vanish upon his patient's death, also slays the three crewmen.  When their corpses, and the rocket, don't vanish, the Martin psychologist diagnoses himself as insane, and, prescribing for himself the same treatment he has been meting out to others, commits suicide.

"The Earth Men" first appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, and would go on to be included in The Martian Chronicles, one of the most enduring and widely read classics of SF, and the inspiration for a 1980 miniseries starring Rock Hudson that Bradbury himself (according to wikipedia) called "boring," but about which our friend MonsterHunter has kind things to say.

"The Devil of East Lupton" by Murray Leinster (1948)

"The Devil of East Lupton" first was printed in the same issue of Thrilling Wonder as Bradbury's "The Earth Men" and Henry Kuttner's "Happy Ending," which I enjoyed when I read it in June.  I generally like the covers of Thrilling Wonder, most of which are bursting with energy--sexual energy or kinetic energy, or both--but the cover of this issue is one of the worst ever offered by the magazine, static and flat, with silly, uninspiring monsters.  Interior illustrations by Virgil Finlay serve to up the issue's sex appeal, however.

Leinster, born William Fitzgerald Jenkins, used lots of pen names, and in Thrilling Wonder this story appeared under the name William Fitzgerald; I'll also note that its original title was "The Devil of East Lupton, Vermont."

Like "The Earth Men," this is a somewhat jocular story of a botched first contact between humans and aliens.  Leinster includes some serious science in his story, however.

A Jovian astronaut requires extremely high pressure and low temperature to survive, and when, after landing in the Vermont woods, he is startled by the appearance of hobo named Mr. Tedder and steps back into some barbed wire, the puncturing of his space suit leads to him evaporating!  Tedder retrieves two of the man from Jupiter's weapons, a ray gun that can, apparently, disintegrate anything, and what we might call a nonlethal defense mechanism, a helmet that, when activated, throws out a field which renders any living thing within a half mile radius unconscious.  Mr. Tedder accidentally activates the helmet and causes no end of trouble to the people and animals of Vermont, and to himself when the Feds send in the military to try to neutralize the mysterious creature that is generating a moving zone of unconsciousness a mile in diameter.

This is a clever and entertaining piece; it is fun to watch as Mr. Tedder figures out what is going on, or just blunders into solutions, the pacing is good, there are a few surprises, and none of the jokes is irritatingly or distractingly bad.  Thumbs up!

"Symbiosis" by Murray Leinster (1947)

"Symbiosis" first appeared in Collier's, the major mainstream magazine founded in 1888, under the Will F. Jenkins byline.  Leinster included it in an anthology he edited himself entitled Great Stories of Science Fiction and Brian Davis selected it for inclusion in The Best of Murray Leinster.

A European country with fifty million in population, famous for its high taxes and its secret police, conquers in mere hours the most fertile province of a neighboring country of four million, a nation famous for its effective health care system.  Our main character is the little healthy country's Surgeon General, who was in a peasant village inoculating people and livestock when the invasion took place.  We follow him as he is interviewed by the leader of the invasion force and then put into a concentration camp.  During his confinement he is sad, but quietly confident.  In the final quarter or so of the story we find out why: the little country knew it could not build up a powerful enough military to resist the larger state's aggression, and that it could not count on the United Nations to save it, so it instituted a radical strategy: a mutant strain of a disease was developed, and all of its citizens were inoculated against it.  On the day of the invasion the mutant disease was put into the water supply; while the natives are immune, the invaders quickly catch the disease and within a week tens of thousands of them die, and if the invaders don't surrender the disease will spread back to their homeland and wipe out nearly their entire population.

The title refers not only to the symbiotic relationship between the disease and the people of the small country, but to the Surgeon General's assertion that all members of the human race are in a series of symbiotic relationships with each other, that members of a family help each other and that different nations should similarly help each other.

"Symbiosis" is one of those SF stories which is about an idea rather than about characters or good writing or an exciting or moving narrative, though Leinster does try to inspire emotion by contrasting the pompous and bloody-minded invaders with the decent and unpretentious Surgeon General.  This contrast is pretty heavy-handed and one-dimensional, and the "twist" is sort of obvious from the beginning, so this story has no tension or surprises to offer.  I'll call it acceptable.

**********

Four decent stories; we'll read more from The Other Side of the Moon in our next episode.

Weird Tales Winners by H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Henry Kuttner

I recently mentioned how French novelist Michel Houllebecq found H. P. Lovecraft's work compelling in part because Lovecraft gave little attention to the topics of sex and money, topics central to so much of our lives and our literature.  This comment of Houllebecq's always makes me think of Lovecraft's story "The Thing on the Doorstep" (published in 1937, but apparently written in 1933) because that story actually is about a sexual relationship.  Similarly, a comment of Clark Ashton Smith's recently brought to mind Robert E. Howard's Conan story, "The Scarlet Citadel" (published in 1933, but apparently written in 1931.)  So I decided to reread these stories by the two towering giants of the Weird Tales crowd.

I have already talked on this blog about how Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright kept track of what stories came in for praise in readers' letters to the magazine, and thus--scientifically!--determined which stories and authors were the readership's favorites.  SF historian Sam Moskowitz obtained the note cards on which Wright kept these tallies, and in 1983 published an article including a chart showing the most popular story in each issue of Weird Tales from November 1924 to January 1940.  "The Thing on the Doorstep" and "The Scarlet Citadel" were both the most popular stories in the issues in which they appeared.  I decided to round out this blog post with a third Weird Tales winner, and settled on Henry Kuttner's "Towers of Death," from 1939, which I have never read.

"The Thing on the Doorstep" by H. P. Lovecraft (published 1937)

"The Thing on the Doorstep," after making its debut in Weird Tales, has been reprinted many times; I am reading it in my "Corrected Eleventh Printing" of Arkham House's The Dunwich Horror and Others, printed in the year 2000.

"The Thing on the Doorstep" is the story of the relationship of architect Daniel Upton, our narrator, and poet Edward Pickman Derby; these men shared an interest in the weird and fantastic.  In the first paragraph of the story (which comes to about 27 total pages in my book here) Upton admits that he shot Derby in the head six times when he last met him in Arkham Sanitarium, but our narrator insists he did not murder Derby thereby, but rather avenged him!  How to explain this bizarre claim?  Well, Derby's soul was already dead when Upton shot up his body, and that body was inhabited by an evil wizard who sought to achieve immortality by shifting from body to body over the centuries as each body grew old and wore out!

Upton and Derby had been friends for like thirty years when Derby, a shy and retiring sort of gent, the son of overprotective parents, finally, at age thirty-eight, developed some kind of a relationship with a woman.  Derby would come over to Upton's place all the time; Upton could even recognize Derby's distinctive knock on his door--three brisk strokes followed, after a pause, by two more.  The woman in question was twenty-three-year-old Asenath Waite, a pretty thing, but odd, with protuberant eyes and strange manners--Asentah was one of the Innsmouth Waites, and we all know what that means--Asenath's mother wasn't entirely human, but part fishperson!  Upton gives us a description of rumors and stories about Asenath and her father Ephraim that make it clear to us readers that Ephraim Waite of Innsmouth knew how to transfer his consciousness into other bodies, and that Asenath's young body is inhabited by Ephraim's wicked soul.  (Presumably the merciless Ephraim murdered his daughter's soul after trapping it in his own senescent body.)  Some of "Asenath"'s many unaccountable comments suggest that Ephraim hates being in a female body because the female brain is inferior to the male brain and being stuck in a woman's physical form is limiting his arcane powers.  "Asenath" is, no doubt, cultivating a relationship with Derby because Ephraim covets the poet's body--Derby is a child prodigy, after all, with a superior brain, and his lack of willpower (a result of coddling by his smothering parents!) makes him relatively easy prey.

To his father's dismay, Derby marries the strange girl, and Upton and the elder Derby see less and less of the poet as time passes.  The local people love to gossip about the oddball Derby menage, though, and from clues Upton provides us we know that Ephraim is regularly switching bodies with Derby, trapping the poet in Asenath's inferior girlish body and using Derby's own male body to go on expeditions to Innsmouth and elsewhere (e. g., "Cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases lead down to abysses of nighted secrets....") in pursuit of otherworldy information and artifacts, knowledge and apparatus from other dimensions and other planets.  Sometimes these expeditions go awry, and Derby wakes up in his own body, far from his Arkham, Massachusetts home, in some remote forest or desolate ruin.  Over three years after Derby's fateful wedding, Upton has to drive up to Maine to collect the poet when he staggers out of the woods, apparently insane, babbling about alien monsters and diabolical rites.  The drive back is shocking for Upton, as Derby, at first depressed and then raving about his incredible and sinister experiences, suddenly gets a hold of himself and becomes smooth, confident, charismatic, a master of the situation who even succeeds in convincing Upton to let him drive the motor car himself, even though Upton knows Derby never learned to drive--Ephraim has regained control of Derby's body before Upton's unbelieving eyes!

The climax of the story comes after a desperate Derby finally asserts himself, bludgeoning "Asenath" and apparently killing her.  One can only imagine the catharsis the inoffensive versifier must have felt seeing that fish-eyed freak fall to the floor with a nice big dent in her pate after three and a half years of "her" tyranny.  Derby buries his not-quite-human wife's cadaver in the basement of their large house and tells everybody she is on a long research trip and that they are soon going to be divorced.  But Derby isn't out of the woods yet!  The body in which it is housed may be inert, but the wizard Ephraim's malign soul endures!  Ephraim keeps trying to take over Derby's body, sending Derby into seizures that land him in Arkham Sanitarium.  Finally, three months after Derby murdered Asenath's body, Ephraim succeeds, and Derby wakes up under the dirt of his basement, in his wife's rotting corpse!  Determined to put the kibosh on Ephraim's plans to live forever--and use his foully acquired extra centuries to collaborate with the monstrous aliens who want to take over the Earth--the poet digs himself out of the grave in which he himself interred Asenath.  Unable to talk because wifey's face and throat have decayed (the best he can come up with is a "sort of half-liquid bubbling noise--"glub...glub...glub"), Derby writes a note to Upton and staggers to Upton's house, giving his distinctive knock so Upton knows it must be his friend.  When he sees the rotting corpse on his doorstep Upton faints, but not before he has taken the note in hand.  When he revives, Derby's soul has expired and Asenath's putrid corpse has collapsed, but after reading the note Upton takes up a firearm and goes to the sanitarium to blast Derby's head, which houses Ephraim's satanic consciousness, to pieces.

But there is a hitch.  If Derby's body isn't quickly cremated, Ephraim's powerful malevolent soul may be able to invade another body and continue its campaign of evil!  Upton insists on a rapid cremation, but of course who is going to listen to a murderer's advice on how to dispose of his victim's body?  The doctors at the sanitarium are eager to preserve the cadaver of this patient and conduct a careful autopsy...as the story ends we have no idea if Ephraim Waite has been truly exorcised or if his soul will soon be abroad, menacing an unsuspecting world.  Will Derby's superhuman efforts and Upton's sacrifice be in vain?

I love this story.  It not only foregrounds some of my favorite SF themes--immortality and the switching of brains or souls between bodies--but some of my favorite literary themes--unhappy relationships between parents and children and unhappy sexual relationships.  "The Thing on the Doorstep" also exploits heterosexual men's horror and disgust at women's bodies (Ephraim and Derby both find being trapped in a woman's body to be a nightmare) and at homosexual relationships.  And of course the brilliantly horrible final image of a shrouded half-rotten corpse thrusting forward a sheet of paper to his only real friend, a doomed man's final act, an effort to redeem his wasted and miserable life!

A weird classic that pushes a multitude of buttons!

Here are two anthologies that feature "The Thing on the Doorstep" which I thought had interesting covers.

"The Scarlet Citadel" by Robert E. Howard (published 1933)

I am reading "The Scarlet Citadel" in my trade paperback copy of the 2003 collection The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian edited by Patrice Louinet and published by Del Rey.

"The Scarlet Citadel" takes place during the period of Conan's life in which he is King of Aquilonia, and through Conan's dialogue Howard gives us a brief sort of treatise on his theory of what constitutes legitimate government and what constitutes good government.  Conan became ruler of Aquilonia by taking the place over by force from a tyrannical king whose family had ruled for a thousand years--Conan's rule stems from ability, legitimizing it; Howard and Conan do not consider inheritance to confer legitimacy on a ruler.  Once in charge, Conan lowered tax rates so that Aquilonians enjoyed the lowest taxes in the civilized world, and in turn Aquilonians thrived and were loyal to Conan.

Conan may be a good king whose rule is, in Howard's opinion at least, legitimate, but as the story begins Conan and Aquilonia are in serious trouble.  Tricked by two treacherous neighboring monarchs, our hero has marched five thousand Aquilonain knights into a trap and they all have been massacred by enemy archers and pikemen, and Conan himself has been taken captive by the wizard who is the power behind the two tricksy kings--Howard underscores the impotence and illegitimacy of these hereditary kings by showing how the wizard, Tsotha, pushes them around and humiliates them.  Compared to the self-made man of brawn (Conan) and self-made man of brain (Tsotha), these two hereditary kings are contemptible.

Tsotha and his pet kings offer Conan a pile of money to repudiate his throne, and when Conan refuses he is tossed in the dungeons under Tsotha's tower.  These subterranean corridors are thousands of years old, and full of alien monsters as well as the products of Tsotha's experiments in necromancy and other sorceries.  Conan, by luck, escapes his cell and the eighty-foot long snake that sought to devour him there, and stumbles upon the cell of the wizard Pelias, a rival of Tsotha's.  Conan liberates Pelias from the noxious monster flora that has been holding him in a sort of coma for ten years, and then Pelias uses his magic to spring the two of them from the dungeon.

The monsters in the dungeon and Pelias's magic are fun and creepy--this is the best part of the story.  In this printing, "The Scarlet Citadel" is like 33 pages, and about half of them consist of this fun dungeon stuff.

Pelias summons a flying monster from outer space (I guess) that carries Conan to the capital of Aquilonia, which is in chaos after news of his death; the commoners are rioting, the aristocrats are overtaxing the merchants and fighting each other, etc.  Meanwhile, Tsotha's pet kings' armies are trying to take a fortified border town on a river.  We get page after page of fictional military history stuff: orders of battle, Conan arriving at the head of his hastily-assembled relief force, archers and siege engines shooting, a bridge of boats across the river, cavalry charges, etc.  I am a military history buff--this month I read a lot about RAF Wellington bomber operations in the Mediterranean in Martin Bowman's Wellington: The Geodetic Giant and about the RAF's bombing campaign directed against Berlin in Martin Middlebrook's The Berlin Raids--but I often find blow by blow descriptions of fictional battles tiresome, and the battle at the end of "The Scarlet Citadel" is pretty boring.  Fortunately it ends on a good note, the confrontation of Tsotha and Pelias.           

An acceptable Conan story--the part comparing Conan the barbarian usurper king to the hereditary monarchs and the part following Conan's adventures in the ancient dungeon were good--but "The Scarlet Citadel" would have been better if the big battle at the end had happened off screen.  Who cares about a bunch of minor characters and extras tolchocking each other?  A Conan story should be about Conan fighting monsters and wizards and city folk, thus contrasting the barbarian with the civilized man, the man of action with the man of contemplation, the straightforward man with the subtle man, etc.

"The Scarlet Citadel" has appeared in a profusion of Howard collections, of course, but not many anthologies.  Jacques Sadoul did see fit to include it in a French anthology of selections from Weird Tales, however.

"Towers of Death" by Henry Kuttner (1939)

"Towers of Death" was a favorite of Weird Tales readers, but apparently not of editors and critics--it would not be reprinted for fifty years, finally reappearing in the fanzine Revelations from Yuggoth in 1989.  "Towers of Death" would be included in two 21st-century hardcover publications, the very expensive ($295.00!) Centipede Press volume on Kuttner from their Masters of the Weird Tale series, and the more affordable ($45.00) Haffner Press book The Watcher at the Door: The Early Henry Kuttner, Volume Two.

Besides Kuttner's story, which got the cover, the November 1939 issue of Weird Tales includes a fun letter from Ray Bradbury in which he praises H. P. Lovecraft's "Cool Air," a 1928 story reprinted in the September 1939 issue of Weird Tales, and Clark Ashton Smith's 1933 "A Night in Malneat," a reprint of which also was included in that September issue.

Kuttner is a good writer, and I have enjoyed many of his stories and many of his collaborations with his wife C. L. Moore, but "Towers of Death" is not a good story.  The plot and pacing and style are pedestrian and clunky.  The plot actually has much in common with Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep," but while that story is evocative, rich with dimly glimpsed background and written in a distinctive style, Kuttner's piece here is leaden and flat, written like a bland detective story.  And while the plot of "The Thing on the Doorstep" flows naturally from the characters' personalities and is driven by their decisions, a lot of "Towers of Death"'s narrative is driven by coincidences and dumb luck.  Kuttner maybe just threw this one together to get some much-needed cash.

Simeon Gerard is a rich old dude who got involved with the occult and has spent a lot of time in the Orient, especially Tehran, learning about magic and the worship of "the dark god Ahriman" and so forth.  When his American physician, Stone, tells him he only has a month to live he puts into action his plan to move his soul into the body of his big healthy young nephew Steven.  All this is written in the third person, and we get boring scenes of conversations between Gerard and Stone the sawbones, Gerard and his Persian accomplice Dagh Ziaret, Gerard and his lawyer Morton (Gerard has to make sure all his property is legally handed over to Steven before he dies so he can have his hands on it after he switches bodies) and of course Gerard and Steven and Steven's hot girlfriend Jean Sloane.

Gerard tricks Steven into the temple to Ahriman he has in his basement, and there Dagh Ziaret swaps out their souls.  (If there is one thing you learn from reading Weird Tales, it is that you should never go into some dude's basement--nothing good ever happens underground.)  Gerard, now in Steven's healthy body, cuts the tongue out of his old body so Steven can't talk, and has his criminal contacts put Steven on a ship to the Persian Gulf.  Dagh Ziaret warns that the operation isn't final, that Gerard has to take a drug periodically for a year or his soul might get switched back into his feeble (and now mute) body.  Ziaret demands a high price for the drug, but cheapo Gerard tries to murder Ziaret and steal it; in the ensuing fracas a fire starts in which Ziaret is killed and most of the supply of the drug is destroyed.  When the drug runs out in a few weeks Gerard returns to his decrepit body and Steven returns to his healthy body.  In a contrived bit of irony, while Steven was in Gerard's body, some Ahriman worshipers put it up on one of those towers where they leave dead people to be eaten by vultures--Gerard suffers terribly as the birds devour him.  In a contrived bit of lameness, Steven, back in his own healthy body, doesn't remember anything that happened while he was in Gerard's body and so can just happily go on with his life, enjoying his uncle's wealth and his charming wife, thinking that he just forgot a few weeks due to a bout of amnesia right after his terminally ill uncle left to spend his last days in his beloved Middle East.

It pains me to do it, but I have to give a thumbs down to this story.  No wonder nobody wanted to reprint "Towers of Death"--this is a weak piece of work that only Kuttner completists and weird specialists will want to read for scholarly purposes.

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It was great to revisit a classic like "The Thing on the Doorstep" and find it as good as I had remembered--Lovecraft deserves his high reputation.  And it was interesting to reread "The Scarlet Citadel," which I know I must have read in the "oughts" but which I had totally forgotten.  And it was worth my time reading a little-known Kuttner story, even if it was a real disappointment, as I am very interested in Kuttner's career.

More short horror tales from authors that interest me in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.