Merril-approved '59 stories: R G Brown, A Budrys and A B Chandler

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading selected stories printed in 1959 (more or less) that critically-lauded anthologist Judith Merril saw fit to include in the list of honorable mentions in the back of the 1960 edition of her annual Year's Best S-F series.  Today we'll finish up the "B"s and start the "C"s.  One of Merril's missions in life was to dissolve or at least point out the fatuity of distinctions between genre and mainstream fiction, and so she liked to include in her anthologies and honorable mentions lists stories that appeared in mainstream outlets that shared aspects with the material appearing in category SF magazines, and among her 1960 honorables we find a story by a William Chamberlain entitled "The Flying Jeep" that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post.  Chamberlain, a distinguished U. S. Army officer, was apparently also a prolific writer of fiction.  (It is amazing to the lazy among us how productive some people are.)  I can't find the text of "The Flying Jeep" anywhere online, so we'll have to skip Chamberlain and go right to A. Bertram Chandler after digesting Rosel George Brown and Algis Budrys.

"Lost in Translation" by Rosel George Brown

Editor of F&SF, where we are reading Brown's "Lost in Translation," Robert P. Mills, tells us that Brown is good-looking and that she majored in Ancient Greek.  Sounds awesome.  Then he hints that "Lost in Translation" is a joke story.  Not awesome.  Well, the story takes up only nine pages, so we can probably hack it.  

Brown immediately clues us in to the fact that her main character, Mercedes, is a contemptible poseur.  She is a virgin of the sex-positive future who reads ancient Greek texts in translation but doesn't understand them as well as a devotee of the current neo-Victorian fad.  Why does Brown think we will want to spend nine pages with someone whom she keeps telling us is contemptible?  So we can enjoy looking down on her?  As I keep telling you, SF is full of elitism.

Mercedes, who keeps affecting Victorian mannerisms, is visited by a man she has never met before.  Mercedes' father is a college professor and this is one of Dad's grad students.  Dad and this joker have invented a time machine and they want to test it out on Mercedes.

You may remember that Brown's novels Sibyl Sue Blue and The Waters of Centaurus were about a hip happening chick who was sexually promiscuous--how could you forget Sibyl Sue Blue having casual sex with lizard people from another planet?  Well, Mercedes here in "Lost in Translation" is the opposite of Sibyl Sue Blue, a square and a prude.  Our gal gets sent back to ancient Greece equipped with a translation device and finds the Greek literature and lifestyle she has been pretending to understand and revere is, in fact, to her neo-Victorian mind, vulgar and offensive, full of talk about sex, populated by  women who wear revealing attire and extravagant make up.  Mercedes falls in with some prostitutes who teach her how to apply cosmetics; now all dolled up, men are attracted to her.  (Brown here in this story illustrates the fact that women are positive that men prefer women with lots of cosmetics slathered on, no matter how often men tell them different.)  Never before have men desired her, and Mercedes finds she likes the feeling.  At a party she gets drunk and loses her virginity to a rich guy, though she barely remembers the actual intercourse.  Transported back to her time of origin, it is clear Mercedes has become a normal woman who will abandon prudery and start troweling her visage with artificial goop and have lots of sex.

A weak filler story that goofs on prudery and advocates sexual promiscuity and cosmetics.  Maybe "Lost in Translation," while failing to entertain us, serves to enlighten us denizens of the 21st century, is valuable as a primary document of 1959 feminism and progressive thought, offering insight into how the feminist line on stuff like sexual activity and the use of cosmetics has evolved over time.  I am going to judge "Lost in Translation" barely acceptable--it is not fun or funny and its attitude is banal and off-putting, but it isn't terrible.

Our mates over on Airstrip One reprinted "Lost in Translation" in a 1965 issue of Venture, and the story also reappeared in the 1963 Brown collection A Handful of Time.  

"The Stoker and the Stars" by Algis Budrys

Merril uses her honorable mentions list to promote two stories by Algis Budrys, but we've already read "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" so we're just addressing "The Stoker and the Stars" today, a tale that debuted in Astounding under a penname and would not be reprinted until 2011 in Leigh Ronald Grossman's Sense of Wonder. 

The cliched analysis of Budrys' work is that it is about what it means to be a man, and in "The Stoker and the Stars" Budrys almost comes right out and says this, in a passage that reminded me of Seneca's 86th letter to Lucilius (like Mercedes I read the classics in translation, and the trans. of Seneca's letters I read is Robin Campbell's.)

I couldn’t really describe him to you. He had a duffelbag in his hand and a packed airsuit on his back. The skin of his face had been dried out by ship’s air, burned by ultraviolet and broiled by infra red. The pupils of his eyes had little cloudy specks in them where the cosmic rays had shot through them. But his eyes were steady and his body was hard. What did he look like? He looked like a man.

"The Stoker and the Stars" suggests that being a man means taking risks to help others, and being a leader who supports his society.  The story comes to us as the memoir of a space man, a crew member on a Terran space ship who rose in rank to become captain of such a ship.  His career began in a difficult, humiliating time for the human race.  You see, after developing an interstellar drive, the human race tried to conquer other planets and races, and the alien races defeated us, chasing us back to Terra and then sort of quarantining our solar system, allowing only a small number of trading vessels to leave our system every year.  Our narrator is on the crew of one of those few trading ships.

A guy joins the crew to be a "stoker"--this man is the actual protagonist of the story, not our narrator.  The interstellar drives on ships during and just after the wars are temperamental and dangerous; a person--the stoker--has to stay in the engine room and constantly tend to the drive, clad in uncomfortable armor because the drive can arc and kill unprotected individuals.  The new stoker is obviously a veteran of the wars, but doesn't talk about his service.  By chance, the narrator learns that he was a Marine, one of that hardy crew of men who fought the most heroically during the wars, took the most risks, participated in the most savage fighting, etc.  Our narrator and others fear that, when the ship arrives at the trading post, that this Marine will launch some kind of kamikaze revenge terrorist attack on the aliens and ruin Earth's trade relations with the aliens, maybe even lead the aliens to wipe out humanity once and for all.

On the trip to the trading post, the stoker becomes a hero, suffering injury while saving the ship when the drive goes haywire.  Even though he is an enlisted man, his behavior while aboard, singing songs and so forth, raises morale and makes the ship operate more efficiently--he is obviously a talented leader of men.  This makes it hard for the narrator and his fellows to do anything about the man whom they fear is going to cause a diplomatic disaster once they arrive at the trading post; they just leave him be and hope for the best. 

When the day comes, the former Marine puts on his wartime uniform and walks right over to the aliens he fought with earlier in his career.  Instead of a disaster erupting, the Marine signs on to be a stoker on the aliens' ship.  In the denouement, we learn that this Marine, no mere grunt but a ship commander during the war, becomes a good will ambassador to multiple alien races, working as stoker on one ship after another, and is so charismatic and makes Earth look so good that the aliens allow more and more trade ships to leave our system and Earth eventually becomes integrated peacefully into the multi-racial galactic civilization.

A smoothly written and entertaining story with suspense, characters you can identify with who act in a believable manner, and a nuanced view of humanity and of what it means to be a man and a leader.  Thumbs up for "The Stoker and the Stars"!             

 

"The Man Who Could Not Stop" by A. Bertram Chandler 

Merril included two stories by Australian sailor A. Bertram Chandler on her list.  "The Man Who Could Not Stop" is classified at isfdb as a component of Chandler's famous series of stories and novels about space navy officer John Grimes, and it is set in the same universe as the Grimes stories, but Grimes himself does not appear.  Which is perhaps for the best as the Grimes stories I read in the dark age before I started the blog were kind of underwhelming. 

"The Man Who Could Not Stop" is an entertaining sort of slice-of-life story, set in the furthest reaches of the Milky Way, among the Rim Worlds.  Chandler sketches out effectively what life is like on these unattractive worlds, so far from Earth and the well-populated planets, and then introduces us to a pretty despicable fellow, a highly intelligent master thief who has pulled some major heists and killed at least one person in a fight.  He has fled from planet to planet through the galaxy, and ended up at one of the Rim Worlds because they are under a different jurisdiction and will not punish immigrants for crimes committed back among the Inner Worlds.  Chandler then chronicles this master criminal's life on the Rim in sort of jocular style, but the jokes are not absurd or based on puns or otherwise annoying or offensive.

In brief, Chandler depicts how the protagonist is an inveterate breaker of rules and exploiter of others--he is unreformable and essentially addicted to stealing from others.  Chandler also contrasts the law enforcement systems of the Inner Worlds, where criminals are coddled and prisons are comfortable places it is hoped will reform malefactors, and the law enforcement systems on the Rim, where criminals are punished with hard labor and poor food.  At times "The Man Who Could Not Stop" feels like a law and order conservative's satire of liberal "soft on crime" policies.

Again and again the protagonist robs somebody and is then thrown in prison for some months, only to get out and steal again and be captured and imprisoned again.  Chandler's descriptions of the man's crimes and his time in stir are entertaining.  Then comes the twist ending.  You see, while in prison the protagonist gets training as a mechanic.  After his third infraction he, along with many other irredeemable crooks, are impressed onto the crew of a starship about to embark on a dangerous mission--to leave the galaxy and attempt to reach an alien galaxy.  Few people would volunteer for such an arduous journey, so men who have been given a chance to straighten out and fly right but have proven unable to respect the law and the rights of others will crew the ship and in that way, finally, contribute to society.

Thumbs up for "The Man Who Could Not Stop," which I certainly enjoyed more than the John Grimes stories I read in the period before this blog came into operation.

"The Man Who Could Not Stop" debuted in the same issue of F&SF as Brown's "Lost in Translation" and would go on to be included in the collection Beyond the Galactic Rim.

"Familiar Pattern" by A. Bertram Chandler

"Familiar Pattern" was printed in Astounding under a pen name--Chandler had another story under his own name in this issue of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s magazine.

Chandler makes extensive use of his experience as a seaman here in "Familiar Pattern."  Our protagonist is the Australian captain of a merchant ship.  By chance--or so it seems!--an alien craft lands in the ocean near his ship, and he meets the aliens, who are more or less human-like.  They are pretty friendly, say they came to our planet because they were low on water and Earth, which they had no idea was inhabited, was the closest source of that oh-so-essential H2O.  The aliens and the humans trade small items, mostly booze and cigarettes (the aliens love to smoke, and Earth tobacco is more powerful than theirs, apparently) and then leave.

The aliens return and request to deal again with the protagonist.  Soon Earth is receiving regular trading delegations from alien space ships.  Interstellar trade remains based in Australia, and Chandler spends a lot of time detailing the logistics of moving stuff from the starships to the surface and the Earth goods to the starships and so forth.  Among the aliens who spend a lot of time on Earth are not only a trade commissioner and merchants but also alien missionaries.  Their religion, which preaches frequent use of alcohol and sexual indulgence, starts getting popular.

Throughout the story Chandler and his human characters point out parallels between European contact with Pacific natives and these aliens' new relationship with Earth humans.  In particular, there is a "pure-blooded Polynesian" bosun among the protagonist's crew who plays a sort of Magic negro role in the story, he being a better sailor and more phlegmatic and more wise than all the white people in the story.  This guy predicts, though in vague terms, what happens by the end of the story.

The provision of alcohol by the alien church serves as competition to local breweries.  And the sexual license promoted by the alien church offends the local prudes.  These conservative forces conspire to generate a mob that destroys the alien church.  This gives the aliens a pretext to bomb Earth ("gunboat diplomacy") and eventually take over our planet.  Has their entire series of visits, even the first, been a scam to provide the aliens a chance to conquer our world?

This story is OK.  The satire is a little too obvious and the description of trade negotiations and logistics a little too lengthy.  We're calling this one solidly acceptable, an uninspired but professional piece of work.  It doesn't seem to have been reprinted if you don't count British editions of Astounding or an appearance in Ellen Datlow's internet magazine in 2005. 

**********

In these Merril-approved posts I often try to figure out why Merril chose to include these specific stories on her list.  It is easy to see what Merril liked about today's stories by Rosel George Brown and Algis Budrys--they can readily be seen as attacks on the civilizations of Great Britain and the United States that lefties like Merril thought so reprehensible.  Brown's joke story is an attack on the bourgeois attitudes about sex of the English-speaking world, an attitude that liberals and leftists throughout the 20th century labeled "Puritanism" and blamed for a host of psychological and social problems.  As for Budrys, he may not himself be a liberal or leftist, but his story can be seen as, in part, a condemnation of the violence and imperialism of the British Empire and the Cold War USA (the Earth playing the allegorical role of the English-speaking world in the story) as well as a dramatization of the left-wing aspirational dream of seeing the First World humiliated by the socialistic Second World and/or the non-white Third World.  Of course, Budrys' story (unlike Brown's silly piece) also has literary merit--its characters have personality and behave realistically and face moral dilemmas--as well as entertainment value, and can be seen by us free-market types as arguing that trade is the key to productive international relations, making it a choice by Merril that is easy for me to endorse.

The second of Chandler's stories is even more of an anti-Western text than Brown's or Budrys', so we can see how it must have warmed Merril's heart.  Chandler's first story, however, with what it seems to say about recidivism and the foolishness of leniency towards criminals, would seem to go against what I would have expected Merril to believe, but it is a pretty fun and well put together light-hearted crime story, so maybe Merril promoted it purely based on her recognition of its merit as a piece of entertainment.  Or maybe she thought it a very subtle dig at punitive crime policies because the criminal was portrayed with sympathy and society eventually found a use for him instead of executing him or condemning him to a lifetime of incarceration?

These stories, whether I loved them or merely tolerated them, all provide food for thought.  So, a good batch.  More "C" stories next time we hop on the Merril tour bus and further explore exotic 1959.

Science Fiction Adventures, June 1957: A Budrys, H Ellison, R Silverberg & C Fontenay

Let's check out the June 1957 issue of Larry T. Shaw's Science Fiction Adventures, a magazine whose twelve-issue run lasted from late 1956 to the summer of 1958.  Back in 2018 we read the first ish of Science Fiction Adventures; the topic of today's discussion, the fourth, is graced with a well-painted but pretty crazy cover by Ed Emshwiller.  Sure, the woman is beautiful with that big head of red hair and that tight white suit, hubba hubba, but what is she doing?  Suffering some kind of fit?  Taking a hit from long range fire from the man in the lower left of the frame?  And what is up with the pile of corpses that is reminding me of Gustav Adolf-Mossa's 1905(6?) canvas Elle?  Maybe we'll find out when we read Harlan Ellison's contribution to the issue, which this cover illustrates.     

Alongside Emsh's disturbingly grisly but also edgily sexy image is text announcing the magazine offers three complete novels by Ellison, Algis Budrys and Calvin M. Knox, a pen name for Robert Silverberg (isfdb calls two of these novellas and the other a novelette.)  There's also a short story by Charles N. Fontenay.  

We'll be reading all four of these pieces of fiction today, but first let's glance over the departments.  Shaw's editorial is just boilerplate stuff about how the magazine is doing well and 95% of letter writers like that it includes three short novels and the art is improving, etc.  The fan column includes a little memorial to the recently deceased Ray Cummings, about whom I have blogged numerous times, and discussion of numerous fanzines, including a review of a Swedish fanzine--we are told Sweden has a remarkably high per capita population of SF fans.  Andrew J. Offutt, another guy I have blogged about quite a few times, also makes an appearance in the fan column.  Mr. Offutt, we learn, has an extensive collection of old SF magazines and novels, and is interested in trading with other collectors--the paragraph devoted to Offutt describes his collection and what he is interested in acquiring.  Finally we have the letters column, in which people praise the magazine and discuss why they like science fiction; this letters column is pretty tame compared to some I've seen in the past.

OK, on to the three "novels" and the "bonus short story."         

"Yesterday's Man" by Algis Budrys

"Yesterday's Man" is something of a rare work by Budrys that has  never seen reprint in book form (according to isfdb, at least.)  Apparently the only place "Yesterday's Man" has ever resurfaced is in a 1958 issue of the British edition of Science Fiction Adventures, where it appeared alongside the Robert Silverberg story we'll be reading today, "The Chalice of Death," and C. M. Kornbluth's "The Slave," soon to be retitled "The Enslaved Person."

It is the post-apocalyptic future!  Forty or fifty years ago a plague killed 90% of the human race!  American society collapsed, but a guy name of Wheelwright built a new American Republic in the MidWest, its capital Chicago.  After ten years he was overthrown, but the succeeding republics were each in turn toppled after even shorter tenures, and now many people miss ol' Wheelwright and the semblance of order he was able to maintain.  Today the rulers of the Seventh American Republic have hired a mercenary, Custis, who owns a big AFV bristling with guns, to help them look for Wheelwright, whom it is suspected may still be alive.  Accompanying Custis and his loyal crew of seasoned mercs as they drive out into the wilderness on their search is a Seventh Republic commissar, Henley.

The cliche analysis of Budrys' work is it is about what constitutes a man, and "Yesterday's Man" fits the cliche.  The story compares Custis, the cool tough leader of soldiers who earns the respect of others; Henley, the excitable conniver who lacks both originality and loyalty; and several other men, like Custis' father, who sacrificed himself to save his son, a bandit leader out in the wilderness whom our protagonists encounter, and of course the famous Wheelwright.  Custis wonders:

Some men stood taller than the rest, and it wasn't a thing of inches....Why?  What was a man born with, that made people turn themselves over to him? 

Custis and Henley spend time in the bandit leader's camp and we observe opportunities each man in the story has to demonstrate what kind of man he is--attractive and calm and brave, like Custis?  Or repellant, paranoid and treacherous, like Henley?  A bunch of men get killed, most at the hands of the heroic Custis; Custis picks up a girl who helps him survive dangerous trials; there is a lot of talk about whether Wheelwright is alive or not and whether he would even return to Chi-town if he was alive.  Eventually Custis and his AFV, his crew intact and augmented by the girl--and sans Henley--head back to Chicago, Custis planning to become a leader in the mold of Wheelwright, hoping he has the leadership ability to create order out of chaos and bring peace and prosperity to the Midwest.

Not a bad story but no big deal; mild recommendation, I guess.  Budrys' focus on his perennial theme, all the ambiguity about the status of Wheelwright, and the cool vehicle with its twin 75 mm guns and all its machine guns make this story more engaging than mere filler.       

"Run for the Stars" by Harlan Ellison

"Run for the Stars" is a component of Ellison's Earth-Kyba war series.  I gave a thumbs down to a 1956 Earth-Kyba story, "The Crackpots," back in 2022, but Judith Merril liked it, so rest assured that you are supposed to like it despite anything I might say.  I praised what I guess is the first Earth-Kyba story, "Life Hutch," also from 1956, when I read that one in 2024; that same year I read "Trojan Hearse" (yet again '56) and called it a "barely acceptable" "rush job."  There is no predicting whether I today come to praise Ellison or to bury him.

The editor's intro to "Yesterday's Man" asserted that Budrys was "muscularly handsome," which I thought an odd thing to bring up, and also suggests Budrys is "self-effacing."  The intro to Ellison's "Run for the Stars" makes clear that Ellison is not the self-effacing type; Shaw reports that at a recent convention Ellison gave a speech in which the Ohio native regaled listeners with his claims that he wrote "from his guts," and not for money--heaven forbid!--but because he "had" to.  Oh, brother.  

Anyway, let's get to the story.

Already, in the first two paragraphs, Ellison's florid prose is getting on my nerves.  

The scream of the Kyben ships scorching the city's streets mingled too loudly with the screams of the dying.

Is it the scream that is scorching the streets, or the ships?

Bills and change tinkled from his hands, scattered across the rubble-strewn floor.

I get that Ellison, who doesn't care about money (no sir, not him) is likening money to human waste, but saying that "bills" tinkle is not good at all--should have just stuck to the coins, Harlan.

After these, and one or two additional bad sentences, either Ellison stopped writing bad sentences or I stopped noticing them; after the first page or so I was able to enjoy "Run for the Stars" as a melodrama with reasonably well-drawn characters and an exciting and cynical plot.  Budrys' "Yesterday's Man" is better written and more believable and more profound, but Ellison's over-the-top material and delivery make "Run for the Stars" more fun.

An outlying planet of the human space civilization has been seized by the alien Kyben after they bombed the place into rubble, killing over 99% of the two million inhabitants.  Our protagonist is a drug addict, caught in the act of looting a store by agents of human Resistance.  This joker wasn't stealing food, but money with which to try to buy drugs, I guess in hopes some drug dealers were among the 1% of those who have survived the alien bombardment.  Ellison does a good job pointing out again and again that this drug addict thinks more about drugs than about how his planet is being destroyed and his entire race is facing extinction.  Ellison's skepticism of/hostility to drugs and alcohol is one of the ways in which Ellison, of whom I am often very critical, and I are on the same wavelength.

The Resistance is looking for a cowardly jerk just like this druggie.  They implant a super bomb, one that can blow up the entire planet and anything in its orbit, into his body.  They radio the occupying Kyben force, tell them about the super bomb, and promise to not detonate the bomb if the Kyben let the last few thousand humans on the planet escape.  It is essential to these patriotic sons of Earth that they get away because they have to warn Earth that the borders of its empire have been penetrated--they didn't manage to get a radio message off to Terra before the Kyben bombed the long-range transmitters.  All the Resistance guys have little back stories and personalities and react to the druggie in slightly different ways--they feel like real people.  One of my complaints about Ellison's work is that he always writes like he is yelling, that he always turns things up to 11, but that extreme volume totally works for a drug addict and for people who have seen 99% of their society murdered and are desperate to prevent the same fate befalling the rest of the human race.

The human survivors depart for Earth, leaving the druggie behind.  The Kyben don't pursue them because the Resistance warned the aliens that if they detect any Kyben departures from the planet or its orbit that they will detonate the superbomb.  Instead, the Kyben hunt for the bomb and the druggie flees across the countryside--the aliens can detect the bomb's neutrino signature or something and so have a general idea where he is.  The druggie, stiffened at first by doses of his drug of choice (he discovered a healthy supply in medical stores), and then by a lust for blood and eventually by a hatred of all life, becomes an efficient guerilla soldier, killing dozens of Kyben from ambush.  He loses an arm, but fights on, killing one alien by driving the fingers of his remaining hand through the Kyben's eyes--this story has quite a bit of what we might call "body horror."

The druggie manages to sneak and fight his way onto the command ship of the Kyben force.  He finds a doctor who speaks English; he tortures the medico, and gets him addicted to drugs, so that the guy will perform surgery on him, taking the superbomb out of his stomach and grafting it to the stump of his lost arm!  He demands that the surgeon give him the ability to detonate the planet-busting bomb at will, and also set it to detonate if he should die.  Now everybody in a 5,000 mile radius has to do whatever he says!  As the story ends, the druggie becomes commander of the Kyben squadron, and declares he will lead it to Earth to achieve revenge!  He is cured of his drug addiction--being some kind of evil pirate dictator is enough of a rush for him now!

A crazy and fun story.  Thumbs up for "Run for the Stars."

(Within the pages of this ish of Science Fiction Adventures, Emsh provides drawings of specific events in "Run for the Stars," but I guess the cover painting is just a generalized illustration of the story's cynical, apocalyptic, and horrific themes, a depiction of mass murder.)

"Run for the Stars" can be found in the oft-reprinted The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World and a few other Ellison collections.  The story was also anthologized in a 1992 Tor Double with an embarrassingly lame cover by Barclay Shaw.  Shaw is some kind of favorite of Ellison's, and he has done covers for many Ellison publications.  I have to say Shaw is a dismayingly large step down from the Dillons, Ellison's other favorite artists; Leo and Diane Dillon have a distinct and evocative style, while Shaw's work is marginally competent banality, like Michael Whelan if Michael Whelan was less technically skilled.  (Bob Pepper, who did the cover of a Signet paperback edition of The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, would have been a better choice than Shaw for a uniform edition of Ellison's work.) 

I have not yet read many stories that appear in The Beast That Shouted Love at the
Heart of the World, but I did tackle "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" like ten years ago.

"Chalice of Death" by Robert Silverberg (as by Calvin M. Knox)

It is the far future of intergalactic civilization!  Millions of planets harbor multicultural societies composed of a vast array of diverse intelligent species.  Humankind is one of these species, but the sons and daughters of Earth have fallen on hard times!  Only a million or two humans are left alive, and they live in ones and twos on a multitude of different planets!  A hundred thousand years ago the human space empire centered on Earth ruled the universe, but then the nonhumans united and, outnumbering the Earthpeople a bazillion to one, destroyed the Empire.  The Empire was so thoroughly scrapped, and it happened so long ago, that no human today even knows where Earth is, not even which galaxy it is in!  But human superiority is still recognized; among non-humans, humans have a reputation for wisdom, and many non-human potentates have human advisors.  (Is Silverberg in this story influenced by the history of the Jews, and/or speculating on what might happen to white people in a future in which Third-Worlders take over Europe and North America?)  Our main character, Navarre, is one such advisor to a non-human king on some sort of feudalistic planet where the king resides in a palace but most people live in huts and the king once a week hears petitioners.

Normally it is the wise Navarre who passes Solomonic judgement on the petitioners, but he was out all night partying with the chicks ("Chalice of Death" is one of those stories in which humans are sexually attracted to and can even breed with non-humans) and so he gets to court late today and another advisor, a Vegan, has taken over Navarre's role.  When the king asks why Navarre is late, Navarre comes up with an outlandish excuse, claiming he was busy this morning tracking down clues as to the whereabouts of a legendary chalice somehow associated with Earth that has the power to give people immortality!  That Vegan then gets himself a promotion to head advisor by suggesting to the king that Navarre be sent on a quest around the universe for this chalice, which of course Navarre doesn't even believe in.  (Remember when Clodius got Cato assigned to Cyprus?)  

Navarre and a half-human friend go off on this totally bogus taxpayer-funded quest across the universe and decide to use it as a pretense to find Earth.  The king doesn't provide Navarre a ship of his own, so our heroes have to take a commercial liner to the next system, and that damned Vegan puts assassins on the liner and on the first planet our guys land on we get detective/spy action with a chase and a shootout.  Navarre and his pal land in a local government dungeon, but the human advisor to this planet's ruler springs them--amazingly, the human advisor here is a hot chick!  She joins the quest for Earth and provides Navarre and his companion access to the royal library.  Again and again in this story Navarre achieves his goals by resorting to violence, and it is by force that he acquires from the librarian, a snake man, a book published 30,000 years ago that clues them in to what galaxy Earth is in.  

The woman has a personal starship, and after a billion light-year trip that takes them seven days the three questors land on a planet where another search of another library turns up an even older book that contains a map of our solar system.  (I guess these books are made of acid free paper.)  So our three heroes end up on Earth, where they find that the inhabitants have degenerated into twisted dwarves who reside in pathetic huts.  Sad!  But wait!  The dwarves direct the extragalactics to a cave where, in vats full of fluid, sleep tall good-looking humans!  These heroes and geniuses, carefully selected from among the human population right before the aliens conquered Earth at the climax of the fall of the Earth empire, are in suspended animation and can be aroused to rebuild Earth's superior civilization.  On a plaque Navarre reads, the machine that has preserved these ten thousand superior individuals is metaphorically referred to as a chalice.

The story ends here--"The Chalice of Death" is only the first of three stories in this sequence which was published in book form as Lest We Forget Thee, Earth in 1958 and then with the Chalice of Death title in 2012.

This is a pretty entertaining story, and I am curious to see if Silverberg paints the rebuilding of a human space empire favorably or goes the white guilt route and has the humans' revival be some kind of crime or mistake, so we'll be reading the next two episodes in the near future. 

Left: Ace Double publication, 1958     Right: A German 1966 printing

 

"Moths" by Charles L. Fontenay       

In the 1500-post history of this crazy blog, I have read two stories by Charles Fontenay, both because Judith Merril recommended them, "The Silk and the Song" and "A Summer Afternoon," and I liked them.  Let's hope I also like "Moths," which has only been reprinted in the British version of Science Fiction Adventures.

This is a pretty good classic-style science fiction story in which a deadly problem arises and engineer/spaceman types prove their superiority to a fat businessmen by using logic and science knowledge to solve the problem.  They only manage to solve the problem after the overweight bourgeois has been killed by it, mind you.  The crewmen also get to shoot off energy pistols and kill lots of monsters.

A space boat has crashed during its descent from a space ship in Venus orbit to the Venerian surface.  The crew and the sole passenger survived the crash, but they are some miles from the city that is their destination, their ship disabled in a dangerous wilderness.  Venus is inhabited by flying monster plants, like leaves ten or fifteen feet across, that seek water.  If it isn't raining and there are no pools close by, these huge "moths" will envelop a human being and suck him or her dry.  After trying a few abortive means of getting to the city, one of the smart crewmen figures out how to neutralize the monsters so the survivors can march to the city.

A filler story which uses characters in a pretty obvious and uninspired way, I guess, but I kinda like it anyway based on how good the monster and the setting are.  Marginal recommendation.

**********

Four hard-boiled high-body-count stories full of weaponry, alien environments and dangerous journeys among weirdos, none of them bad.  Shaw, Budrys, Ellison, Silverberg and Fontenay gave 1957 readers value for their 35 pennies and lived up to the promises made on the issue's cover--these really are science fiction adventures full of violence and death.      

Expect similar material next time we meet, tough guys!

Scream Along with B Copper, M St Clair and A Budrys

Followers of my twitter feed are all too aware that I spend a lot of time digging through piles of old paperbacks and magazines at antique stores.  Just a few days ago I took a look at a copy of Dell's 1970 Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Scream Along With Me, a paperback selection of stories from the 1967 hardcover anthology edited by Robert Arthur, Stories That Scared Even Me.  I balked at spending six bucks on this artifact, but decided to read three stories included in it by people we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have some interest in.  The stories: Basil Copper's "Camera Obscura," Margaret St. Clair's "The Estuary" AKA "The Last Three Ships" and Algis Budrys' "The Master of the Hounds."

Before we get to the main event, investigating these allegedly scary stories that are said to induce screams, I'll point out that I've already read and blogged about two stories from Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Scream Along With Me by major SF writers, Theodore Sturgeon's "It" and Thomas Disch's "Casablanca."  Also, note that I am reading today's three stories in a scan of Stories That Scared Even Me, not original printings or later reprints.  Plus, if you enjoy gazing upon Alfred Hitchcock's beautiful face, check out our last blog post, in which we read four stories from late 1970s issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

And, finally, note that the estimable tarbandu at The PorPor Books Blog is a fan of these Alfred Hitchcock anthologies and has read and blogged about all 25 stories in Stories That Scared Even Me, and talks about collecting Alfred Hitchcock anthologies and reading Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in the comments to the recent blog post of mine I linked to above.   Make sure to check out what tarbandu has to say!       

"Camera Obscura" by Basil Copper (1966)

Here we have a long and somewhat tedious story that you might say constitutes a Christian story, or an anti-Semitic story, or a story that exploits readers' bitterness at their creditors, or perhaps all three.  "Camera Obscura" also bears some similarities to "A Christmas Carol," and is one of those "horror" stories that, instead of disturbing you by telling you the universe is horrible, seeks to comfort the reader with a wish fulfillment fantasy in which the universe is in fact just and punishes people the reader doesn't like.  Not a scary story.   

The individual sentences of "Camera Obscura" are all well written and there are plenty of interesting images, but the narrative moves very slowly and is repetitive, and the story is thuddingly manipulative--we know from the get go that we are not supposed to like the protagonist, so there is little suspense, as we expect all along that something bad is going to happen to this guy and that we are not supposed to sympathize with him when it does.    

Mordecai Sharsted is a moneylender.  He has a client, Gingold, an apparently wealthy man who has not been paying his debts on time, so Sharsted walks to Gingold's place in order to give the man a final warning before seizing some of his assets.  Instead of letting us make up our own minds about Sharsted, Copper just comes out and tells us that Sharsted has a "sinister, decayed look" and a "mean soul" and so forth, laying it on thick, making sure we know he is no good.  Much is also made of his poor eyesight, I guess a metaphor for how he can't see right from wrong or refuses to open his eyes to the light of Jesus or whatever, and his green lensed spectacles, a sort of cliched way of telling us he is careful with money.  Talk of eyes and eye glasses that limit light and restrict vision also constitute foreshadowing of what Sharsted is going to encounter in Gingold's house.  

Gingold lives high up on a hill in a crummy section of town with twisty labyrinthine streets; he wears white and I guess is supposed to remind us of God.  More than once the view from this house is compared to the view God must have of the Earth.  In Gingold's presence, Sharsted get a little tongue-tied and has trouble bringing the conversation to the point of his visit.  Way upstairs in his house full of valuable paintings and other artifacts, Gingold has an elaborate camera obscura that projects upon a table a bird's eye view of the town.  He shows this to Sharsted, and points out the home of a woman who owes Sharsted money; this woman can't pay her debts and will soon be evicted.  Gingold asks repeatedly if Sharsted will forgive this woman her debts; Sharsted will not.

Gingold has a second camera obscura that projects a weird altered vision of the town, all red and showing buildings still standing which have long since been destroyed and replaced.  Gingold directs Sharsted into this world.  Sharsted desperately tries to find his way home in this maze-like hell version of the town, running into animated corpses wriggling with worms who turn out to be thieves and confidence men of Sharsted's acquaintance, men and women long dead, his steps always bringing him back to a Christian chapel.  Sharsted then tries to make his way back to Gingold's to tell the man he will forgive the woman her debts, but it is too late, Sharsted has been consigned to hell forever.

Too long, too slow, too repetitive, too obvious; seeing as the actual writing style is accomplished, if you are the type of person who figures he shouldn't have to pay his debts and that the people who loaned you money should be tortured everlastingly, maybe you'll enjoy "Camera Obscura," but I am giving it a thumbs down.

"Camera Obscura" seems to have first seen print in The Sixth Pan Book of Horror Stories and people seem to love it.  Everybody resents his creditors!  Besides in Copper collections, "Camera Obscura" has appeared in multiple anthologies that compile favorite contributions to the long-running series of Pan Books of Horror Stories and Copper's story was even made into a short for the TV show Night Gallery.  According to imdb, the TV version of Mordecai Sharsted is played by the guy who portrayed the villainous WASP on Benson, and the moneylender has been rechristened "William Sharsted."  Hmm.

"The Estuary" by Margaret St. Clair (1950)

When it first appeared in Weird Tales, this story was titled "The Last Three Ships."  "The Estuary" is a merely tolerable filler story, and it is a little odd to see it in an anthology like this, as there is not a single special thing about it.  Was Robert Arthur friends with St. Clair or something?

There are a bunch of old Liberty ships rusting away in the harbor.  Pickard sneaks aboard them at night and steals components from them to sell--his faithless and acquisitive wife uses the money to buy a fur coat.  Pickard hires other petty thieves to aid him in his illegal scavenging of this government property.  These other men tell him that, while working in the decaying vessels, that they sometimes hear strange noises.  One of the assistant thieves vanishes, then another quits because he is so spooked by the sounds.  Pickard also has a weird dream one day.  Anyway, it turns out that people who die on these Liberty ships become zombies, and one night one of them, the accomplice who disappeared, kills Pickard and Pickard becomes one of the zombies.  Don't worry about Pickard's wife--she has to return the fur coat, but she gets another man pretty quick. 

A competent trifle composed of commonplace genre fiction elements.  St. Clair does the bare minimum in the relationship and personality departments, and chooses to make her story more jokey than scary and apparently feels no need to come up with an explanation of why the Liberty ships are turning those who die in them into the living dead.  Not actually bad, but unambitious and not scary.  

After the wholly unremarkable "The Last Three Ships" was included in Stories That Scared Even Me and the abridged paperback version of that volume it went dormant for some four decades, inexplicably rising from the dead in a 2013 anthology titled Horror Gems.

"The Master of the Hounds" by Algis Budrys (1966)

Budrys' work is usually about what it means to be a man, and "The Master of the Hounds" is devoted to comparing before us two different men who have gone through, or are going through, some kind of life-changing trial.  Which of them is a real man who gets shit done and appeals to women?  Is a real man a guy who dominates others and his environment by any means that comes to hand?  Is your manhood inherent in your physique, or in your will?  Do you have to be good to be a real man?

Our first contender in the who-is-a-man battle royale is Malcolm Lawrence, the New York artist.  He has an attractive wife whom we are told was a little plump ten years ago when they married, but now is lean with a long face and high cheek bones.  I guess the implication is that Malcolm is not bringing in enough groceries, even though this kind of sounds like he has upgraded his wife into a fashion model.

Malcolm has been working at an ad agency, but aspires to be a fine artist, and has quit the agency to spend a summer in a rented house on a quiet stretch of the Jersey shore, to get away from it all and see if he can come up with some real meritorious paintings.  We witness the Lawrences interacting and the wife seems to always kind of be nudging Malcolm, not-so-subtly pushing him around, trying to manipulate him because she is disappointed in him. 

To save money, the Lawrences took a house in what we'd have to call a failed development.  The developers only finished two of the seaside houses, and only one of them is well-maintained--the two completed houses are surrounded by half finished houses that are falling apart in the seaside air.  The Lawrences take the poorly maintained house, across the street from the well-maintained one, which they learn is occupied by a famous British Army officer, Colonel Richey, a veteran of the Second World War who was the senior British officer in a POW camp where he and other British officers were held year after year.  Richey's exploits were the subject of a fictionalized film which the Lawrences have seen.  (Budrys' story here was perhaps inspired by the 1963 film The Great Escape and the books which inspired it.)

Budrys does a good job making the first part of the story sort of creepy--the sad, abortive, rundown development, the Lawrences' first intimations about Richey's Dobermans, dogs Budrys tries to make seem scary which they see long before they actually meet Richey and learn they are living next to a celebrity.  In the second part of the story the Lawrences and Richey sit down and get cozy, drinking tea, and Mrs. Lawrence and Colonel Richey seem to be flirting right in front of Malcolm!  

Richey talks about his experiences in the German camp.  The British prisoners were digging an escape tunnel, a tunnel Richey didn't really want to see used, as it would be risky to do so and perhaps pointless besides--by the time the British soldiers would be usable to leave the camp via the camp the war would be over or nearly so.  The point of the tunnel in Richey's eyes was to serve as something for the prisoners to do, a goal to inspire teamwork and promote discipline.  A cave in that occurred while Richey was working in the tunnel crippled him--among other things, his genitals were rendered inoperative.  After the war, a journalist wrote about Richey's adventures, leading to the film and a trip to Hollywood for Richey top work on the film as a technical advisor.  British taxes being so onerous, Richey decided to stay in the US and got this house and acquired and trained the two Dobermans, a breed of dog he knew something about because the Germans used them as guards in the camp.

Richey makes it clear that he will use his Dobermans to make the Lawrences his prisoners, even his slaves, all summer.  Also clear is that Malcolm's wife thinks Malcolm is a loser and Colonel Richey some kind of evil genius whom Malcolm can never outwit--even though Richey the ruthless leader of men literally has no balls, he is more of a man than Malcolm the failed artist!  Wifey even discourages Malcolm from resisting the colonel's attempt to confine and control them, and when things come to a dangerous climax she blames her husband more than the psycho who is tormenting them (she may even be appreciating the torment!)

(The Alfred Hitchcock-related stories we've been reading today and last time seem to paint women in a pretty poor light, don't they?)

Who will live and who will die?  Will Malcolm come out on top and prove to himself and to his doubting wife that he is a man, or will the crippled Richey prove his superiority even though he cannot achieve an erection and is some kind of sadistic maniac?

A good thriller that is full of surprises but not cheap surprises--everything is foreshadowed and set up skillfully by Budrys.  Budrys is almost as good at details and images and sentence construction as Copper, but while Copper overdoes it and his fine sentences become burdensome and many only provide information that is extraneous or superfluous, Budrys' sentences all contribute to the story's effect.  Budrys' story also has believable and nuanced characters we can identify with, not just lame manipulative archetypes, and real suspense--we are not sure what will happen to the characters or how we are expected to feel about them.  Thumbs up for "Master of the Hounds," easily the best story we are reading today and the only one that is legitimately scary.

"The Master of the Hounds" debuted in an issue of The Saturday Evening Post with the Beatles on its cover, and has reappeared in Budrys collections and many anthologies, including Dennis Etchison's Masters of Darkness III and Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois' Dogtales!

We've blogged about the L. Sprague de Camp story in Masters of Darkness III and
the Harlan Ellison and Fritz Leiber stories in Dogtales! 

**********

So there they are, three stories selected by Robert Arthur to be reprinted under the prestigious aegis of the director of Psycho.  Algis Budrys' story is very good and absolutely deserves to be widely disseminated, Copper's is pretentious and ambitious and tells people what they want to hear and so it makes sense to reprint it, but the inclusion of St. Clair's banal piece constitutes a mystery.  Well, life is one mystery after another, I suppose.

I love dipping into these anthologies, but next time we'll be reading a novel.  See you then!

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

Mel Hunter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh la la!

"The Pink Caterpillar" by Anthony Boucher (1945)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**********

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

Too bad!

The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn by Algis Budrys

"Ah, when I am an Honor,/And go for my game,/The people of dirt will report my new name./The Eld he will shave me/And name my new name/And the people of iron will feast on my game./The beasts of the sand/Will grow fearful and tame./The Honor of iron/will have a new name!"

Reading Larry Niven Known Space stories in 1967 issues of If, I became interested in Algis Budrys' The Iron Thorn via Gray Morrow's illustrations of nude humans and pteranodon-people for the serialized version of the novel.  Is this some kind of Almuric or Eric John Stark planetary romance or sword and planet thing?  Via the sorcery of the internet archive, let's check out the 1967 American paperback edition of the novel, which has a Frank Frazetta cover and goes by the title The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn.

Our protagonist is a young hunter-warrior guy with javelins and an atlatl living in a primitive sort of society in which most people are farmers--farmers the fighting men like our hero, White Jackson, look down upon.   He is on his first hunt as the story begins, and we watch as he chases an Amsir--one of those pterosaur-men from the Morrow and Frazetta illos--through a desert at dusk.  Humans can only breathe within a certain distance of the Iron Thorn that sits in the center of the village, or if they are wearing special helmets and are in sight of the Thorn; the Thorn, we readers quickly realize, is an immobilized space ship.  Jackson steps in front of a big rock that blocks line of sight to the Thorn and finds he is suffering oxygen starvation, giving his quarry an opportunity to turn on him.  To Jackson's amazement, the creature speaks, telling him to surrender, and then attacks with a metal spear--Jackson had been led to believe the Amsirs were mere animals, not intelligent tool- and language-using people.

Jackson kills the Amsir and drags it back home.  On the way he meets his older brother, Black Jackson, a fellow fighting man, who takes the metal spear and tries to get White Jackson to promise not to tell anybody the truth about the Amsirs.

These first two chapters have a good plot, but Budrys' style doesn't make them an easy read.  The early pages of The Iron Thorn are overwritten, with lots of long sentences and long paragraphs full of extraneous details of geography and biology, descriptions that don't pack an emotional punch or paint a beautiful image or further the plot, as far as I could tell.  The action scene feels slow because Budrys describes in tedious detail everything White Jackson sees, everything White Jackson feels, and everything White Jackson thinks.

Back at the village, Jackson goes through the ceremonies that certify that he is now an Honor, a blooded fighting man (what constitutes a man is the theme of much of Budrys' work) which include getting a hair cut and having his title changed from White to Secon.  But Jackson isn't happy--instead he broods about life and death and why he and all the other people in the village have been lied to about the real nature of the Amsir.

As an Honor, Jackson is now permitted to enter the Thorn.  Inside, he has a serious convo with the Elder who is the ruler of the village.  Like his fight with the Asmir, Jackson's conversations with people tend to be overly long and overwritten, so reading them can be something of a slog.

Secon Jackson studied him [the Elder] the way he always studied things.  The grin was a lot less now, but it was still there.  Secon Jackson tried to think what he'd be thinking if he had that grin; that didn't often do much good, but this time it worked.  It had the feel of truth all over it.  The old man was thinking what a fool Secon Jackson would make of himself and how easy he'd be to handle if he went ahead and did what looked like a perfectly sensible thing to him.  All right, Secon Jackson thought, then I won't do it, and the next move is yours. 

I feel like the paragraph above is a lot of words that are not fun to read and which convey very little of intellectual or entertainment value.  Besides, I have stressful conversations in real life and don't read SF in hopes of finding my own boring and depressing real life experiences recreated on the page.  (Long time readers of MPorcius Fiction Log may recall I had similar complaints about Budrys' magnum opus, Rogue Moon.)

The meat of the conversation is the Elder's description of how the small elite of Honors runs the human village through control of information--for the people's own good, of course: the Honor's system maintains the Thorn that distills safe water and otherwise makes life possible and facilitates progress.  The Elder recognizes that Jackson is particularly clever and wants him to be part of this elite. 

Jackson, however, is not interested in joining the elite that has lied to him and everybody else.  As the middle third of the novel begins, Jackson leaves the village to surrender to the Amsirs, and he has to fight his fellow humans to make it over to where the Amsirs, it turns out, have a village and a Thorn of their own.  Inside the Amsir Thorn, Jackson is interrogated by the Amsir Elder, who conscripts him into the job of investigating a third, smaller, Thorn which the Amsirs call "the Object."  The door to this third machine is locked, and any Amsir who has tried to open it has been been grievously or fatally injured while doing so.  So far, the Object has not killed any human captives (they starve because humans can't eat the lichen Amsirs subsist on) but none of them have figured out how to get inside the Object, either.  

The Elder of the Amsirs speculates that the Object contains superweapons, and so he sets a watchman on Jackson, a hideously deformed and mentally retarded half-human, half-Amsir named Ahmuls; being almost human, the Object's automatic defense systems won't kill Ahmuls, and if Jackson gets inside this freak will kill our hero if he misbehaves.

(I don't need to tell you that this investigate-an-alien-object business bears similarities to the interesting portion of Rogue Moon.)   

The Object is operated by a computer, and Jackson figures out how to convince it to open the door and let him and his dimwitted shadow in.  With the exploration of the small spacecraft that is the Object,  The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn comes to life.  The Object computer, the robot doctor who treats Jackson, and Ahmuls, are all somewhat interesting and amusing characters, and in this part of the novel Budrys drops his long-winded superfluous style.  The Object computer crowns Jackson commander of the ship, and injects into his brain all the education that is the prerequisite for such a position, including a Liberal Arts BA and an MA in Command Psych.  

As the final third of the novel begins, Jackson and a chastened Ahmuls fly to Earth on the Object.  Now able to read, Jackson passes the time reading stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter and Tarzan as well as Robert J. Hogan's G-8 and His Battle Aces.  When Ahmuls gets out of the doctor's office, Jackson explains to him (and to us readers) that the planet they were born on is Mars and the Amsirs are genetically modified humans.  (Ahmuls is a genetic throwback, a sport.)

Jackson expects to find the high tech Earth of skyscrapers and factories that produced the Thorns and the Amsirs and his recently acquired education, but his people have lived on Mars for many generations and the data that has been pumped into his noggin hasn't been current for centuries.  The Ohio Jackson lands in is now a prairie inhabited by nudist hippies who are coddled by the supercomputer that runs the Earth--the computer immediately reduces the Object to its component elements in the interest of environmental efficiency (I guess today we'd say "sustainability.")  What doesn't promote efficiency or the sustainability of reader interest is the return of Budrys' long conversations and overly detailed descriptions of everything.   

The hippies turn out to be decadent jerks, and Jackson finds that the computer runs the Earth and its inhabitants for their own good by controlling information, quantitatively different but not qualitatively unlike how the Honors run the human settlement on the red planet.  The men bully Ahmuls and resent Jackson as a possible rival for the attentions of the women, while the women jealously compete over him.  The computer, which can manipulate matter with trivial ease, builds a simulacrum of an Amsir and Jackson has to fight it for everybody's entertainment; the people of Earth become fascinated by life on Mars and we readers have to machete our way through a jungle of words describing how the computer builds for the Earthers an amusement park version of the Thorn and its surrounding area.

Through the translucent walls of the Thorn came light; from here the walls of the Thorn burst with all colors--green and gold, red and violent, blue and rust.  The colors swirled and swept around each other in a pattern different from the not-quite-random swirlings of the inner webwork, which in turn took what it pleased of them and threw it back to Jackson and [Earth girl] Durstine in a shower of shifting pinpoints.

Zzzzzzzzzzz....

There is a party in the imitation Thorn that maybe is supposed to be a parody of beatnik culture--pretentious poetry about death and resentment of authority is recited and people snap their fingers in response, and a woman vacuously blabs about the need to express one's self.  People dress up in what they think is the way Jackson's people on Mars dress; perhaps this is Budrys commenting on the foolish reverence of 18th- and 19th-century romantics for the noble savage and 20th-century leftists' adoration of Third Worlders.  One guy presents a painting of the human Thorn on Mars.  Jackson, who in the first third of the novel produced some drawings, draws something for the assembled Earthers himself--these scenes, I guess, are Budrys telling us that art can both deceive and serve oppressors and reveal truths and promote freedom (back on Mars one of Jackson's drawings revealed the truth that the Amsirs were an intelligent tool-using species.)

Jackson wants to return to Mars, and Budrys somewhat obliquely suggests we readers think of him as Tarzan in Europe, wanting to return to Africa.  The computer, however, refuses to make Jackson a space ship, so he sets off to live alone with one of the Earthwomen who has taken a shine to him; the computer compares them to Adam and Eve.

When Jackson was aboard the space ship I was thinking I could give The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn a mixed review and say it was acceptable, but the last third is even more annoying than the first third so I have to give the novel a thumbs down.  The plot--even though it is lacking much in the way of climax--is not bad, and the theme of elites who oppress us while ostensibly protecting us from reality is fine, but Budrys' style renders most of the book very slow and tedious.  Too bad.