Nightmare Stories by Brian Lumley, Tanith Lee, and Ramsey Campbell

I hate living in the suburbs, and yet I reside in the suburban no man's land between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.  I hate driving, and yet every day I find myself behind the wheel weaving between the yawning potholes and the suicidal deer, the reckless pedestrians and insouciant cyclists.  I hate going to the mall and yet...well, you get the picture.

At a mall bookstore where they play hideous music and apparently make all their money selling Hogwarts paraphernalia and tricking people into joining their 10% discount club (annual membership fee, $25), among the thirty-five telephone-directory-sized copies of It on the horror shelves, I spotted a newish anthology by Stephen Jones, The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories.  Seeing quite a few familiar names on the contents page, I resolved to read those tales from the anthology by those writers who interest me that I could find at the indispensable internet archive.  By chance, all three of the suitable stories are by Britons; sadly the Denis Etchison and Poppy Z. Brite stories from the volume are not available at the internet archive, while I have already read the included story by Harlan Ellison, "In the Fourth Year of the War," which I blogged about when we read DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series VIII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner.)

"The Viaduct" by Brian Lumley (1976)

I have mixed feelings about Lumley, and over the years this blog has seen me praise some of his work and slag other specimens of his writing.  Here I am rolling the dice again; call it research into the legacy of Lovecraft and Arkham House if any explanation is necessary.  "The Viaduct" first appeared in Ramsey Campbell's anthology Superhorror, which is kind of a funny name, and was later included in the 1993 Lumley collection Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi; I am reading it in a scan of the Tor hardcover edition of that collection.  (Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi also includes the long story "Born of the Winds," which I declared "an acceptable Lovecraft pastiche" when I read it back in 2016.)  "The Viaduct" was chosen by David Drake and Martin H. Greenberg for the 1996 volume A Century of Horror: 1970-79: The Greatest Stories of the Decade, so how bad can it be?

Two boys are messing around at the beach near a massive viaduct, a bridge that carries trains one hundred and fifty feet above a river.  The boys have been practicing at the playground at their school, carrying themselves hand over hand on the overhead bars of a "climbing-frame," what we in America call "monkey bars" or a "jungle gym"--their object is to swing hand over hand across the viaduct via the one hundred and sixty rungs under the viaduct's walkway.  (These are brave kids!)

The boys spot the "village idiot," Wiley Smiley, a mentally retarded nineteen-year-old, fishing on the other side of the river.  They throw stones in the water next to him, the splashes getting him wet and enraging him.  Their victim being on the other side of the river, the boys think they are safe.

These boys may be brave, but they are also stupid, because they decide that today is the day to swing Tarzan-style across the river on those metal rungs far above the river.  Most of Lumley's story (like 21 pages total here) is a tense adventure/chase sequence, as the boys hang under the railway and Wiley Smiley takes advantage of this period of vulnerability to exact his revenge.

isfdb categorizes "The Viaduct" as "non-genre," and there are no speculative elements to it; it is a mainstream story about the psychologies of three not very likable characters who are under terrible stress and do things that no decent or sensible person would do--"The Viaduct" is also a quite effective tale of terror and gore.  Thumbs up!

"These Beasts" by Tanith Lee (1995)

"These Beasts" made its debut in F&SF, in an issue in which Charles de Lint uses his book review column to promote an anthology of stories about child abuse that includes a story of his own (he explains that he is donating any money he makes from the book to charity and that the book is really really important to the cause of dealing with the problem of child abuse.)  In the intro to the story in F&SF editor Kristine Kathyrn Rusch quotes Lee's explanation that the idea for the piece came from her husband John Kaiine.  "These Beasts" would reappear, ten years before the publication of The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories, in the 2009 Lee collection Tempting the Gods.

"These Beasts" is a clever entertainment, a jewel-like exercise in mood and style that reminded me of Clark Ashton Smith. Carem, the son of a whore in a sort of Arabic setting, has made his fortune robbing tombs.  He learns the location of a desert tomb more closely guarded and more richly appointed than any other, and leaves his two wives behind to undertake the perilous operation of looting it.  Lee fills her story with intriguing sorceries and magic devices as well as sharp images, but as in Lumley's story, there are also some pretty foul crimes and some pretty gruesome bloodshed.  While Lumley's "The Viaduct" is disturbing thanks to its realism, Lee's story, set in a kind of never never land and written in the style of a dark fairy tale or "Oriental" fable, is more lighthearted and fun, but equally absorbing.   A sober assessment might consider it a trifle, but "These Beasts" is a well-crafted and satisfying story I really enjoyed.  Thumbs up!

"Needing Ghosts" by Ramsey Campbell (1990)

I was a little dismayed when I realized how long this story was--"Needing Ghosts" first appeared as an 80-page chap book in 1990, and it is like 90 pages in the scan of  the 1993 Campbell collection Strange Things and Stranger Places in which I was to read it.  This volume has a dumb cover illustration, an off center image of a kitchen knife penetrating the spine of a book.  (This image is based on an image from "Needing Ghosts," but in the story the book is pinned open by a knife, face up so it can be read.)  I'm skeptical of Campbell's work, and 90 god-damned pages would be a slog if "Needing Ghosts" was tedious, as I have found several of Campbell's stories to be.  I was rolling the dice again...and this time they came up snake eyes!

In keeping with the title of Jones's anthology, "Needing Ghosts" is like one of those bad dreams in which every single thing you try to do, no matter how simple, is a complete disaster.  You forget your name, you forget where your big meeting is, you have trouble opening a door, you lose a piece of paper with info you needed, you go into a store to buy something and the clerk ignores you, you have a bill for which a cabbie can't make change, your credit card breaks in half, etc.  All these things, and more, happen to the protagonist of "Needing Ghosts," Simon Mottershead.

"Needing Ghosts" begins with middle-aged Mottershead, who suffers some pretty severe memory loss, waking up in the predawn, slowly becoming aware of his surroundings, and the story consists of Campbell describing in voluminous detail his every move over the course of a day.  We learn more and more about this guy's character and life as the day proceeds, as Mottershead remembers things about himself.  At the same time the story becomes increasingly surreal and absurd.  I enjoyed the first 25 or so pages of "Needing Ghosts," all the detailed descriptions of this guy's looking around his house as if he'd never been there before, riding a ferry and then riding a bus full of disabled people, his confused memories and poor vision and all that, and Campbell's many weird metaphors and similes:

Shoving his copy of the voucher into his pocket together with the pointed blades which are the halves of the [broken credit] card, he pokes his arms through the straps of the rucksack and flounces out, his book bumping his s;pine as if it's trying to climb the bony ladder and reinsert its tale into his brain.

But after the protagonist got off the bus the story became more and more dreamlike and surreal and ridiculous, with one striking but nonsensical image (an army of half-assembled mannequins on the street beckoning to him) after another (a table with a single chair set for a speaker, on the table a glass and a carafe--the carafe contains not water, but a film of dust), all of them piling up one on the other but adding up to nothing significant.  The more we learn about the mysterious protagonist the less interesting he is--Mottershead is a novelist who has abandoned his writing career and wants to open his own used bookstore and is scheduled to speak at a library today, where, unable to remember the titles or plots of his own books, he offers banal anecdotes and self-indulgent observations about being a writer ("Writing's a compulsion.  By the time you're any good at it you no longer have the choice of giving it up.")  Campbell fails to inspire any emotion in the reader--Mottershead is totally boring and you don't care about his unbelievable interactions with the bizarre characters he meets.  Much of the middle third of the story consists of the protagonist getting into arguments and fights and chases with the staff of the library and various bookstores as he tries, and fails, to find his own books on their shelves.  This gets repetitive and irritating.

In the last third of this interminable story the protagonist remembers he has a family, and spends page after page trudging through a forest amid thorn bushes and trees with whole sentences and paragraphs carved into them, trying to get to his family's house.  When he gets to the house he finds it is now the "Wild Rest Home," inhabited by senile pensioners and burly nurses.  The nurses want to admit him, but after a chase through the countryside, Mottershead gets on a bus that takes him back to the ferry, which takes him back home.  We long-suffering readers finally learn that Mottershead has either murdered his wife and kids and suffers delusions they are still alive, or that they are still alive and he has delusions that he has murdered them--the former seems more likely.  Presumably most or all of the 60- or 70-page long story of his trip from the island to the library and bookstores and rest home was also a delusion.       

I guess "Needing Home" is about the burdens of being a writer, how your mind can be taken over by your fictional creations and how frustrating and sad it is to know how few people admire or even know about the work you have poured your heart into and all that.  A realistic story on this theme could be effective, but a surreal dream-story about a disappointed writer just comes across as tedious--all the weird images of libraries as big as shopping malls and bookstore clerks dressed as frogs put distance between the reader and the character, making it harder rather than easier to identify with his feelings.  Campbell absolutely fails to move the reader--who cares if this boring guy is nuts or a murderer or whatever?--and no part of this long story is sad or scary or exciting.  The long passages and many scenes about being a writer frustrated that nobody knows his work have no connection to the plot element of being a murderer--Campbell gives only the barest hints that Mottershead might be a killer until the very end, and the protagonist's family receives almost no attention until like 60 pages in.  Rather than being a natural conclusion to the rest of the story, a satisfying climax that grows organically out of the first 60 or 70 pages, the "this guy murdered his family" part of "Needing Ghosts" comes out of nowhere, like it was just tacked on to an unrelated story that was lacking an ending.

Thumbs down!

**********

After the Lumley and the Lee, which were well-paced and well-proportioned and written in styles suited to the material they presented and atmospheres they sought to generate, the Campbell felt like an unwieldy leviathan, blundering ponderously in no clear direction before finally beaching itself in an inappropriate place where it unceremoniously expired.  Sad!

1976 Frights by Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison and Robert Aickman

The frights continue, with three more tales from Kirby McCauley's 1976 anthology of all new stories of "what goes bump in the contemporary night," Frights.  Today's terror scribes are Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, and Robert Aickman; Campbell and Etchison we have read before, but I think Aickman is new to MPorcius Fiction Log.  Let's hope he will wow us and become a new favorite!

"The Companion" by Ramsey Campbell

"The Companion" has appeared in many anthologies since its first appearance here in Frights, including an anthology of scary stories about trains and an anthology of horror stories selected by "celebrities," The Arbor House Celebrity Book of Horror Stories.  The celebrity who chose "The Companion" was none other than Stephen King.  King says "The Companion" was the first Campbell story he ever read, and that he doesn't quite understand what is going on in the story.  The other two stories which King nominates as the scariest he has ever read are "Sweets for the Sweet" by Robert Bloch and "The Colour Out of Space" by H. P. Lovecraft.  Many critics agree with King that "The Colour Out of Space" is one of Lovecraft's best stories, but I find it to be one of his least interesting, slow and boring and mundane.  (Celebrity Robert Silverberg chose Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time" for this book, in my opinion a much better choice.)

Well, hopefully my taste will be closer to King's when it comes to "The Companion."

Stone is a middle-aged man, some kind of accountant or something, who loves amusement parks and always goes to a bunch of them--by himself--on his yearly vacation.  (Of course, he's British, so he says "fairgrounds" and "holiday.")  He goes to a particularly old and decrepit sort of fairground, where he has hallucinations of his dead parents, and unhappy memories of his childhood and early adulthood come unbidden to his mind.  He rides a carousel ("roundabout") and sees rambunctious kids trying to steal plays at a pinball machine by using a coin with a string attached to it.

The guy running the roundabout tells him that "the old fairground" is a few blocks away, so Stone walks to it, on the way getting scared by a bunch of kids.  He enters the "old fairground" via a hole in a fence; the place seems to be deserted, but when he sits down in the sole car of the Ghost Train ride it moves, carrying him through the darkened building full of scary props, among them a stuffed animal faintly lit and a mirror that dimly shows his own face.  The story abruptly ends when a sort of stuffed doll of a child appears in the car next to Stone and takes his hand.

With lots of descriptions of garbage on the streets and Stone's out-of-control thoughts, this story feels long and slow, and because Stone's character and what is happening to him are so vague and inexplicable, they don't arouse any feeling in the reader.  Maybe I am supposed to piece together something about how Stone, who has a heart like a stone, is lonely and has no friends or women because his parents blah blah blah and he obsessively goes to fairgrounds to recreate for himself the childhood he never had and in the abandoned ride he finds the companion he has always needed but it is stuffed and fake just like he is stuffed and fake zzzzzzzzzzzzz... but what is my prize for doing all this work?  Campbell's story is not fun or scary or interesting and there is little incentive to turn over all those stones in hopes something noteworthy will wriggle out.

Again I have to disagree with Stephen King and give "The Companion" a thumbs down.  Mr. King and I are obviously not on the same wavelength.

Hans-Ake Lilja is like the world's biggest Stephen King fan, or something

"It Only Comes Out At Night" by Dennis Etchison

On the jacket of Frights we find the passage "No more vampires, werewolves, and cobwebbed castles.  Instead, here is an abundance of tingling, terrifying tales that transpire in our times...."  And yet I see on isfdb that "It Only Comes Out At Night" was included in Stephen Jones' The Mammoth Book of Vampires.  Well, let's see what Etchison's story is all about.

McClay is driving across the desert of the SouthWest, his exhausted wife asleep in the back seat, driving at night because it is cooler.  While Campbell in "The Companion" shovels a lot of details at you that you chop through in search of some kind of feeling or meaning like an explorer, machete in hand, scouring a jungle for signs of a lost civilization, Etchison's details of what it is like for a tired man to drive for hour after hour across the desert at night all paint sharp images or convey some emotional import.

Plotwise, the story is simple: McClay, after all that driving, comes to a rest stop that he slowly realizes is a place where some kind of murderer ambushes weary travelers as they sit in their cars.  He realizes this too late to save his wife.  If I hadn't known the story appeared in The Mammoth Book of Vampires I would not have interpreted the clues as pointing to a vampire, but just to some bloodthirsty insaniac, or maybe a Native American shaman.

Quite good.  I think I have read six stories by Etchison now, and three of them ("Wet Season," "The Dead Line," and here "It Only Come Out at Night") have really impressed me, so one of these days I should probably get my hands on an Etchison collection.

"It Only Comes Out at Night" has actually appeared in several anthologies beyond The Mammoth Book of Vampires, including some purporting to present the "best" or "top" fiction in the horror field, and I suspect it belongs in them.

"Compulsory Games" by Robert Aickman

"Compulsory Games" is the title story of a recent collection of Aickman's work--hopefully that is a sign that it is a good one!

This is a literary story, written in a style that feels a little old-fashioned, like something Victorian or Edwardian, perhaps.  The style is smooth and pleasant; the plot is alright; the ending is a little bewildering, I guess symbolic or surreal or whatever.

Colin Trenwith lives with his wife Grace in Kensington, which wikipedia is telling me is an affluent part of London.  Colin likes books and is sort of a homebody, withdrawn from others.  (This doesn't sound like anybody I know, really.)

The story is about the Trenwiths' relationship with a neighbor, middle-aged widow Eileen McGrath, a woman who works long hours in the civil service and lives in a huge house the rooms of which she tries, with limited success, to rent out.  Eileen tries to be friends with Grace and Colin, but they find her boring.

Grace's mother is in India, studying or joining cults or something (I guess the way the Beatles got involved with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Pete Townshend became fascinated with Meher Baba) and she gets sick, so Grace travels to India to be with her mother in her last days.  Eileen invites Colin to her house, perhaps to seduce him.  Instead of trying to have sex with her, Colin, seeing how unhappy she is, suggests she take up a hobby.

After her return from India, Grace goes to see Eileen without Colin, and returns to tell Colin that Eileen has taken up a hobby--not books, as he suggested, but flying!  And Grace is going to learn to fly with her!  Even though, earlier, Grace didn't even like Eileen, the two women quickly become the best of friends, and Colin almost never sees his wife--she no longer makes his meals or goes on his annual holiday with him.  When he does see her she talks about Eileen.  Eventually Eileen and Grace buy a Moth together, and move out of Kensington without leaving Colin their address!

On his own, Colin goes (it appears) somewhat insane, and/or maybe dies and goes to hell.  He often sees, and almost always hears, a Moth flying overhead--it seems to buzz him, and he has a terrible fear of its shadow falling upon him, leading him to run and dodge down the street, to the laughter of the local children.  The story ends with Colin on holiday by himself, touring the unkempt garden of a decrepit country house--he sees three figures in the distance, and as he approaches them he realizes one is he himself, and then the Moth comes down and, I guess, kills some or all of them.

"Compulsory Games" is well-written enough and interesting enough that I am giving it a positive vote, but the ending feels limp--there is no climax or satisfying resolution, the story just seems to wither and expire.  We readers are also moved to ask: What is the point of this story, what are its themes?  Is it a feminist thing, about how women are better off without men stifling them, about how, liberated from men, women can soar if they work together?  Are we to sympathize with the women or with Colin?  Or none of them (the story is quite cool, emotionally detached)?  There are some hints that the story is somehow about how machines are taking over human life ("Only machines are entirely real for children today....The machines cost enormous sums to maintain; and every day there are more of them, and huger, more intricate, more bossy") and how life is changing for the worse in general, what with the many references to old houses in poor repair and untended gardens and all that.  Children seem to be mixed up in all this dissatisfaction with modern life business; on the first page of the story we read that "Children have come to symbolize such an unprecedented demand upon their parents (conflictual also), while being increasingly unpredictable almost from their first toddlings, as to be best eschewed...."

Its mysteries leave it a little unsatisfying, perhaps, but a worthwhile read, over all.

**********

I'll definitely be exploring more of Dennis Etchison's and Robert Aickman's work in the future; Ramsey Campbell's?  Maybe not.

I think we'll put Frights aside now, but we'll have more speculative fiction short stories in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Three 1950s stories by Jack Vance: "The Miracle Workers," "The Men Return" and "The Planet Machine"

Flipping through the scan at the internet archive of the October 1958 issue of Astounding, seeking the illustrations for Pauline Ashwell's "Big Sword," which we read in our last blog post, I noticed that Astounding readers had voted Jack Vance's "The Miracle Workers" the best story in the July issue.  I'm pretty sure I read "The Miracle Workers" years ago, long before this blog's spontaneous and incomprehensible generation, but I didn't remember much specifically and so I decided to give it another read, along with two other 1950s Vance stories which have yet to be subjected to the MPorcius treatment, "The Men Return" and "The Plagian Siphon" AKA "The Planet Machine" AKA "The Uninhibited Robot."

"The Miracle Workers" (1958)

In the Preface to the 2006 volume, The Jack Vance Treasury, Vance says that he wrote "The Miracle Workers" with the specific aim of appealing to Astounding's famous editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., who, Vance says, "had a predilection for unusual ideas."  It speaks to Vance's ability to write for a market, and perhaps to Campbell's own ability to figure out what his readers wanted and transmit that info to writers, that "The Miracle Workers" was the most popular story in the issue in which it appeared.

I'm reading the version of "The Miracle Workers" that appears in The Jack Vance Treasury, via a scan at the internet archive; I believe the texts in The Jack Vance Treasury are derived from those prepared by the Vance Integral Edition project, and thus the text I am reading is as close as possible to Vance's original vision.

"The Miracle Workers" is set on Pangborn, a planet which was colonized by humans, the war-weary crews of space warships, over 1000 years ago.  Pangborn's current human inhabitants have access to very little of their spacefaring ancestors' hi-tech equipment or technical know-how--these people ride around on animals or in animal-drawn wagons, their soldiers lug around spears and crossbows.  But the Pangbornians of today do not pine for the conveniences of the modern industrial past--instead, they consider the few remaining hover cars and the energy weapons to be relics of an uncouth age, and consider empiricism and the experimental method to be mere superstition and mysticism!  In place of what you and I might call science and technology, dear reader, the intellectuals of the story's topsy turvy milieu embrace voodoo and fortune telling!  When Lord Faide's army marches off to war on Lord Ballant, behind his mounted knights and foot sore infantry roll the wagons of his cadre of wizards with their cabinets full of voodoo dolls!

The plot of "The Miracle Workers" largely concerns the esoteric work of, and rivalries among, Lord Faide's "jinxmen," "cabalmen" and "spellbinders," each of whom has different ambitions, attitudes and ideas; one young apprentice even suspects the scientific ancients' books and artifacts worth studying.  During the battle below the towers of Ballant Keep we witness the sorcery of the jinxmen and cabalmen of both sides--we learn the nature of their spell casting, which consists in part of telepathy and in part of very clever psychological manipulation.

Another major plot element of "The Miracle Workers" is the relationship of the humans to the planet's natives, called by the humans "the First Folk."  After Lord Fainde takes Lord Ballant's keep, wipes out the Ballant family and receives oaths of allegiance from Ballant's retainers, he is master of all humanity on Pangborn.  This is when the natives, still resentful after being driven out of their ancestral lands and into the forests by human beings many centuries ago, begin their anti-human guerrilla war in earnest--for a long time they have been breeding and training an army of arthropods of all sizes for this campaign of revenge and reconquest.  When Lord Faide finds that the conventional warfare methods of his knights and crossbowmen is of limited use in crushing the native uprising, he turns to his jinxmen, but since the jinxmen's sorcery relies on "getting into the heads" of their enemies, will it be of any use against the First Folk, whose mental processes, psychology and culture are radically different from that of humans?

This is a fun story, full of violence and understated jokes, but also a story about imperialism/colonialism and about ways of looking at the world, ways of thinking.  Presumably the fact that the story chronicles a renaissance of scientific thinking (the formerly laid back First Folk have seized upon the experimental methods and mass production practices of the early human colonists in their drive to build a war machine with which to take back their homelands, while the quasi-medieval humans, in response, begin to consider a return to such methods themselves--the miracle workers of the title are not the jinxmen but their ancestors who flew spaceships between the stars) appealed to the science-loving audience of Astounding.  The siege and bioweapon aspects of the story are obviously reminiscent of Vance's famous award-winning 1966 "The Last Castle" and his 1965 "The Dragon Masters."  I feel like I just recently read "The Last Castle" and "The Dragon Masters," but I guess it was over four years ago because I don't see that I have produced any blog posts about them.  Maybe it is time for a reread of those classics?

Quite good.  "The Miracle Workers" has appeared in many Vance collections and many anthologies, including some purporting to offer some of SF's greatest short novels and some devoted to tales of warfare or magic.

"The Men Return" (1957)
 
The Earth has drifted into a field of chaos, and logic no longer functions, the laws of cause and effect having been repealed.  The Earth's surface changes color and texture at random, the sun is absent from the sky and time is meaningless, the plants you ate "yesterday" may poison you "today."  Humanity has almost been wiped out, and only a small number of men survive: insane people, whose disordered minds somehow sync with the disorder of the landscape, and the Relicts, men whose grip on sanity is so firm, whose belief in logic so steady, that they generate a field of order around their own bodies.  But to survive, the Relicts must eat and drink from the world of disorder that surrounds them, a perilous endeavor.

Less than ten pages long ("The Miracle Workers" is like 65), "The Men Return" is more a catalog of absurd and insane visions and ideas (cannibalism is a given among the Relicts) than a plot-driven story.  We observe the desperate day-to-day existence of a few Relicts, their scrabbling and scheming to find food and avoid becoming food.  Then the Earth drifts out of the area of randomness, the sun returns and with it logic and causality--the insane people quickly die from trying to repeat the feats of daily life under chaos (e. g., stepping over a twenty-foot chasm or eating rocks) and the Relicts can begin building civilization anew.

"The Men Return" is well-written, featuring Vance's customary clever dialogue, but to my taste it lacks substance; you might call it experimental if you were being kind, a little gimmicky if you were being callous.  Maybe we should see this as a pioneering work of psychedelia.  (Remember when I pointed out the psychedelic nature of some passages in Clark Ashton Smith's 1932 story "The Monster of the Prophecy?"  Well, elsewhere in The Jack Vance Treasury--on page 384, in the author's afterword to "The Overworld"--Vance admits to being influenced by Smith, whom he read as a child.)

An acceptable strange entertainment.  I read "The Men Return" in The Jack Vance Treasury; it first appeared in Infinity Science Fiction, where its experimental nature is heralded on the cover: "A New Kind of Story by Jack Vance."  You may recall that we recently read the Algis Budrys story in this issue of Infinity, "The Burning World."  "The Men Return" has been widely anthologized, including  in Robert Silverberg's Alpha Two (alongside Vance's friend Poul Anderson's quite good "Call Me Joe") and in Brian Aldiss's Evil Earths (alongside Henry Kuttner's fun adventure novelette "The Time Trap.")

"The Planet Machine" (1951/1986)

In contrast to "The Miracle Workers" and "The Men Return," stories anthologized far and wide and beloved by multitudes for their memorable ideas, "The Plagian Siphon" has never been anthologized, only reappearing in Vance collections following its initial airing in Thrilling Wonder Stories.  The title used for the tale in the Vance Integral Edition, where it appears in the Gadget Stories volume, is "The Uninhibited Robot."  I am going to read the version in my hardcover copy of the 1986 collection The Augmented Agent and Other Stories, which I acquired at a book sale at an Ohio public library--in this book the story appears as "The Planet Machine."

The Augmented Agent and Other Stories is apparently somewhat rare, only 798 pages of this edition having been printed.  When I got it, it was in pretty good shape, but here in Maryland I live in the upper story of a 100-year-old house whose landlady considers maintenance optional, and is thus subject to strange and unpleasant variations in temperature, humidity, and odor; as a result, the condition of my books has deteriorated to some degree.  Ned Dameron provided The Augmented Agent and Other Stories with a mind-boggling wraparound cover in hideous colors that seems to integrate Soviet iconography and African-influenced modern sculpture.  I have not read the story "The Augmented Agent" (original title, "I-C-a-BeM"); when I do, maybe it will provide some insight into this outre vision.

Scans of my copy; feel free to click to zoom and get more intimately
 acquainted with this Pepto Bismal Socialist nightmare

(Curious caterpillar that I am, I read the first dozen paragraphs of "The Planet Machine" in my hardcover copy of The Augmented Agent and Other Stories and then the same paragraphs in "The Plagian Siphon" in the October 1951 Thrilling Wonder Stories and found quite a few additional words and phrases in the 1986 version.  There are also typos in the 1986 version that do not appear in the 1951 version.  The universe is in a state of entropy.)

Remember how in Heinlein's 1955 Tunnel in the Sky, Biggle's 1963 All the Colors of Darkness, and J. T. McIntosh's 1962  "One Into Two" there is a network of teleporters connecting different parts of the world and/or the galaxy?  Here in "The Planet Machine" there is a similar system connecting many different Earth locations as well as different planets, facilitating trade and travel.  Marvin "Scotty" Allixter is a technician whose job uis to maintain and repair these teleporters.  One day a slight irregularity is discovered with transmission to and from Rhetus--maybe the Rhetus machine just needs some fine tuning, but maybe some criminals have acquired their own teleporter machine and are rerouting transmissions of goods to themselves, stealing them.  So Allixter puts on an armored suit and straps on a disrupter pistol and steps into the "tube," bound for Rhetus to investigate.

He materializes not on Rhetus but some world unknown to man; he has walked out of an alien teleporter reception machine, but he sees no accompanying transmission machine.  How can he get back to Earth?  Using a computer translator, Allixter haltingly communicates with some natives of this world.  These little weirdos lead him through a landscape of ruins to a machine--it turns out that this machine runs the entire planet in the interest not of the natives but of some aliens, the Plags, mining and refining resources and teleporting them to the Plag home world.  The machine is supposed to run itself, and no Plags live on this planet.  The machine's security apparatus is currently malfunctioning, blowing up the mining and refining installations at random, and killing all the Plags sent to repair it.  With the aid of the natives and his translation device, Allixter figures out how to avoid getting killed by this security system himself, how to repair the machine, and how to get back to Earth.  He also figures out that his arrival here was no accident--he was deliberately sent as a kind of cat's paw by a clandestine Plag agent on Earth.  Allixter returns to Earth and neutralizes the Plag agent.  Then, in the kind of denouement you find in detective stories, he explains to everybody (including readers like me who couldn't figure it out ourselves) how he figured that stuff out.

"The Planet Machine" is not bad, maybe a little long.  Vance spends a lot of time exploring how a computer might go about learning an alien language so it can act as an interpreter between an English speaker and a heretofore undiscovered alien civilization, and on speculations on how a complex computer might work, how one might program it and distract it if need be. 

A version of "The Planet Machine" appears in this 1980 Dutch collection of Vance stories,
while the VIE edition of the story, "The Uninhibited Robot," appears in the 2013 collection Magic Highways. 

     
**********

When I think of Jack Vance I first think of things like the two Cugel books, which are so hilarious, the Demon Princes books, with their complicated villains and violent detective/secret agent plots, or the Alastor and Cadwel books, which touch on politics and social issues in the context of an adventure story.  But these three 1950s stories have at their centers science (in particular the scientific method itself and circumstances which seem to call it into question) and technology.  All three are worth your time, if only for Vance's charming style and clever little jokes, which always bring a smile to my face.

Expect to see more Jack Vance short stories in the near future here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Whispers II: Leiber, Campbell, Drake, and Campton

Let's finish up Whispers II, the hardcover anthology of "stories of horror, supernatural horror, the macabre, and the generally weird" from 1979 put together by Stuart Schiff.  Only four stories to go, three of them by people pretty famous in the speculative fiction world.

"The Bait" by Fritz Leiber (1973)

I read the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories in the 1980s in Ace editions, five with Jeff Jones covers and one with a Michael Whelan cover, and I had definite opinions about which stories were good and which were not very good.  Looking at the contents pages of my six dog-eared Ace volumes and wracking my brain, I will say that the F&GM novel, The Swords of Lankhmar, and the short stories "The Seven Black Priests," "Bazaar of the Bizarre," "Lean Times in Lankhmar," and "Stardock" are among the definitely good.  Two long stories, "Adept's Gambit" and "Lords of Quarmall" I felt had the wrong tone and atmosphere, and a bunch of other stories were merely acceptable, and another group pointless trifles.  Among the pointless trifles was "The Bait," whose three pages I reread for this blog post.

(I often think about rereading all the F&GM stories...maybe some of the stories teen-aged MPorcius found mediocre or odd will appeal to a forty-something MPorcius?  But that is only one of many reading projects that I have conceived that have not yet blossomed into reality.)

Fafhrd and the Mouser are sleeping, dreaming of money.  They suddenly awake to find a naked teen-aged girl ("looked thirteen, but the lips smiled a cool self-infatuated seventeen") in their room.  They both want to have sex with her, and even propose to fight over her.  But then nine-foot tall demons appear in the little room, attack our heroes, and are quickly defeated.  The girl and the demon bodies then vanish.  F&GM speculate that Death, who appears as a character in a number of F&GM stories, sent the three beings to destroy them.

Leiber is a skilled writer and the style here, ironic and clever, is pleasant to read, but plotwise it is a big nothing and doesn't even really make sense.  The girl is not "bait," because she didn't lead the heroes to the demons, or even distract them so the demons could sneak up on them.  There was no reason for Death to send the girl there before he sent the demons; she is just included in the story to titillate the reader and set up jokes about Fafhrd and the Mouser's taste for girls in their early teens.

(One might also complain that "The Bait" has the exact same plot as 1974's "Beauty and the Beasts," and that both "Beauty and the Beasts" and "The Bait" are mere pendants to 1973's "The Sadness of the Executioner.")

"The Bait" was first printed in Whispers #2, and later included in the sixth Fafhrd and Grey Mouser book, Swords and Ice Magic (the one with the Michael Whelan cover), as well as a few other Leiber collections and anthologies.  I find the inclusion of "The Bait" in so many venues puzzling, because I consider it weaker than most Fafhrd and Grey Mouser tales; maybe it was a convenient buy for anthologists because it was so short and could fill in a last few vacant pages that needed filling?  Or maybe editors liked that it was silly and seemed to be a parody of sword and sorcery, a sort of goof on Conan-style stories? 

"Above the World" by Ramsey Campbell (1979)

Here we have what I am calling a meditation on loneliness and alienation.  A divorced guy, Knox, whose ex-wife Wendy and her second husband Tooley recently got killed in a mountain climbing accident, goes to the touristy town where he and his ex-wife had their honeymoon, and where she and her new husband recently stayed--I think this town is also where they were staying when they got killed.  Knox walks around the town, and again and again we get images and mundane events which speak of inability to achieve a connection, to communicate, with others--he hears voices but can't discern the words; the wind blows a postcard along the street--he tries to read it but it falls down a storm grate before he can snatch it; he goes to a book store to get something to read but the store is closed.  And, of course, seeing so many places where he spent time with his wife triggers plenty of recollections of her.  Knox is even staying in the same hotel room they stayed in on their honeymoon!

Knox hikes up a somewhat treacherous path, up a mountain, and finds it exhausting.  On the summit he weeps, and on the way down, encroaching fog hindering visibility, his attention distracted by something he thinks he sees carved into a tree trunk, he gets lost in a forest.  He begins to panic as the mist thickens and the sun begins to set.  As the story ends Knox comes upon two people, no doubt meant to remind us of Wendy and Tooley, who themselves died on a mountain climb, just Knox fears will now, and we readers have no idea if these mysterious figures are going to help him or if they are monsters who will kill him or ghosts who signify that he is already dead, or what.  (Early in his climb Knox had a severe chest pain that struck and then passed; maybe he died then and during the the rest of the story he has been a ghost.  Metaphorically, he has been dead for a while, because he has "a hollow at the center of himself" that began growing during his marriage.)

This story is OK; if you want to read page after page about a guy slipping on rocks and grasping at tree branches and tripping over roots, and semi-poetic ways of describing stuff that is far away ("A few dots, too distant to have limbs, crept along that ridge"), well, "Above the World" is for you.  Also, Campbell uses the word "cagoule," which I don't think I've ever encountered before.  Always learning...always learning. 

"Above the World" had its premiere here in Whispers II and has been reprinted in numerous anthologies and Campbell collections, including Dark Companions.  You'll remember that early last year we conducted an ideological analysis of a story from Dark Companions, "Napier Court."

"The Red Leer" by David Drake (1979)

David Drake is an important figure in the history of Whispers.  As he describes at his website, for much of the period in which the zine was published, Drake read the slush pile of manuscripts sent to Whispers, forwarding along to Stuart Schiff the small percentage in which he saw any value for Schiff to choose from among.  (Don't credit me with figuring this out--I got the link to Drake's interesting account of his tenure as assistant editor of Whispers from tarbandu's blog post on Whispers II.)

Old John Deehalter willed his 600-acre farm jointly to his son George and his daughter Alice, so now his son has to work the farm with his annoying brother-in-law Tom Kernes.  On the farm is an Indian burial mound, and Kernes wants to dig it up in hopes of finding a skull to display in his house.  Yuck!

The farmers bust open the mound and find what we readers immediately recognize as an alien high tech artifact.  Not long after that farm animals start turning up dead and people start seeing a strange figure in the night!  Deehalter and the Kernes are in the fight of their lives against a voracious alien creature--will they figure out its nature and weaknesses in time to defeat it, or will America's Great Plains soon be at the mercy of a slavering space monster?

This is sort of a standard horror story, but it is entertaining; Drake paces it well and is good at setting the scene and describing what goes on in the action sequences.  There are mystery elements around the powers and characteristics of the monster, but you can tell what the hell is going on, unlike the Grant and Campbell contributions to Whispers II, which leave you wondering whether the protagonist is dead or alive.

I liked it--thumbs up.  "The Red Leer" saw print first here in Whispers II and has resurfaced in several Drake collections and an anthology edited by Drake.

"At the Bottom of the Garden" by David Campton (1975)

Campton is a playwright and this story first appeared in a British juvenile anthology; like "Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole," I would have skipped such a thing under normal circumstances.  But while Ken Wisman's satiric folk song about marriage appeared in Whispers II and nowhere else, "At the Bottom of the Garden" appeared first in Armada Sci-Fi 1 and was included later in Whispers #9 and DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VI; maybe the wisdom of crowds indicates this story is actually good?

Mrs. Williams is a sad case: scatterbrained, shy and insecure, not very pretty, and a bad cook.  The first few pages of the story are largely taken up by a comic description of her disastrous efforts in the kitchen.  Mrs. Williams is so overwhelmed by her housework that she barely pays any attention to her equally unattractive and dim-witted daughter, Geraldine, who is I guess six or seven.  So Mom doesn't really take notice when Geraldine talks about her new friend; this new friend, according to Geraldine, removed the little girl's crooked and yellow teeth and straightened and whitened them and reinstalled them.

Having demonstrated prowess in the realm of dentistry, Geraldine figures her new friend might be able to cure her headaches and fix her terrible eyesight.  The friend disassembles the little girl, removing head from body and eyes from skull, to work on them.  When Mr. and Mrs. Williams see this shocking operation  underway in the distance, they sally forth in a state of panic, scaring off the little surgeon, who is some kind of alien or monster.  Geraldine, though in pieces, is still alive, and the uncanny medico could have put her back together again better than new, but the creature is too scared of the parents to return, so Geraldine, alive but immobile, is buried in pieces.

Because it first appeared in a SF anthology I thought we were going to learn all about the alien or whatever it is and how it can take people apart without shedding their blood or killing them, and I expected a warm and ironic happy ending in which Geraldine became smart and pretty and her parents never understood how this transformation took place, or, in their stupidity, took credit for their daughter's improvement .  But "At the Bottom of the Garden" is a surreal black humor horror story, not a science fiction story, so we learn nothing about the creature's origin or how it performs its medical miracles; the point of the story is to make us laugh at the antics of the members of the Williams family, three foolish and selfish dingbats, and/or make us imagine the mind-churning horror we would feel at finding one of our loved ones disassembled by a weird-looking creature.  And maybe consider the anguish of the helpful creature, whose efforts to do good were misunderstood and ended in tragedy.

Merely acceptable.

**********

So there it is, Whispers II.  I'm considering this a worthwhile exploration.  I enjoyed the very good Lafferty story and the solid Drake story, and the Davidson, Jacobi and Wellman stories deepened my quite limited knowledge of those writers and made me think better of them than I did before I cracked open Whispers II.  And next time I play Scrabble with the wife, maybe I can flummox her by whipping out "cagoule."   

Three 1950s stories by Algis Budrys from The Unexpected Dimension

In 1979 Ace Books published The End of Summer: Science Fiction of the Fifties, an anthology edited by MPorcius fave Barry N. Malzberg and his frequent collaborator Bill Pronzini.  In his long (thirteen pages!) introduction to the volume, Malzberg picks out Algis Budrys for special praise, saying Budrys "might have been the best of them; he certainly had the most profound, subtle mind, the best insight, the deepest perspective."  Wow!

That 1979 anthology takes its title from the Budrys story it reprints, 1954's "The End of Summer."  I recently purchased the 1960 Ballantine collection The Unexpected Dimension, which also includes "The End of Summer;" let's check out that story and two others from The Unexpected Dimension and get a deeper acquaintance with the writer Malzberg saw fit to laud with such vigor.

"The End of Summer" (1954)

In a "Prefatory Note" at the start of The End of Summer: Science Fiction of the Fifties, Malzberg and Pronzini argue that the merit of Astounding in the 1950s is underrated; the critics, they say, feel John W. Campbell's magazine peaked in the 1940s, but Malzberg and Pronzini feel this was "not quite so," and present the stories in their anthology as evidence of Astounding's quality enduring into the Fifties.  "The End of Summer" was an Astounding cover story, and would go on to be selected for 1961's Penguin Science Fiction by Brian Aldiss, by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg for the Great Science Fiction Stories volume dedicated to 1954, and by Budrys himself for 1984's Writer's Choice II ("More Top Writers' Own Favorites.") 

It is the year 11958!  Mankind has achieved immortality, and all the people walking around in the 120th century were alive in 1973--in fact, they look about the same as they did back in 1973, with the five-year-olds of 1973 still physically and mentally five years old!  Women who were pregnant in 1973 are still pregnant 10,000 years later!  Nobody ever grows or gets older, and, if they are careful not to fall off a cliff or drink anti-freeze or something, they never die!

Budrys gives us a sort of tour of this strange future world, exposing us to its various weird cliques and classes of people, each of which responds to immortality and its side effects in different ways, and in the end of the story explains the genesis of this bizarre milieu.  In 1973 a guy set up a generator that promulgated a radiation across the entire Earth; this radiation gives everybody a sort of super healing ability; under the influence of the radiation, cells quickly reverse any changes they experience, so people don't get sick or get old.  But one troublesome side effect of this absolute resistance to alteration is that the changes in your brain that are the physical basis of memory are "healed," so everybody loses every new memory after eight hours or so--when people wake up in the morning, they think it is still 1973!  The solution to this problem is that every evening people have their brains scanned and a record of their memories recorded into a computer, and then this record is rewritten on to their brains in the morning.  A side "benefit" of this system is that if something crappy happens to you, like say your dog gets run over by a car, you can edit the record of your memory to remove any reference to the dog and thus the heartache its absence may cause you--you won't even remember ever having had a dog!  Many people's memories are a carefully crafted fiction that bears little resemblance to what other people remember about them!

The plot of the story follows one Kester Fay, a man whom we eventually learn is the guy who invented that generator. Fay runs over a kid's dog and this traumatic event triggers a thought process that culminates in his decision to turn off the generator and put an end to this stagnant, sterile, artificial society of immortals who can customize their memories and never grow or have children.

In "The End of Summer" Budrys addresses his typical themes of the lonely man somehow alienated from his surroundings and the question of what constitutes a real man--is a real man somebody who refuses to just take it easy but instead embraces risk, makes decisions, and then lives with the consequences of those decisions?  As the story begins, Kester Fay is returning to America from Europe, and it is made clear to the reader that he doesn't really belong in either place.  For example, he finds that his old American friends have forgotten him, for example.  Fay is also a member of one of the minority social groups, the Dillies (short for "dilettantes"), who use their long lives to travel and experiment, who drive cars and fly aircraft manually, when most people prefer to use much safer automatic guidance systems or to just stay home (there is a whole demographic of people called "Homebodies.")  Fay is also one of the few people who refuses to edit his memories. 

I like immortality stories, and I usually like these sorts of stories in which utopian conditions turn out to be more of a curse than a blessing because to be at his best man must face challenges and for societies to be worthwhile they must evolve, and this is a solid example of those SF subgenres.

"The Distant Sound of Engines" (1959)

"The Distant Sound of Engines" first saw print in an "All Star/Every Story New" issue of F&SF.  The very next year it was reprinted in a magazine I have to admit I had never heard of before, Harvey Kurtzman's Help!, in the same issue in which was also reprinted Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 "The Yellow Wallpaper," which I read in 2015.

This is a brief, clever little story.  Our narrator is in the hospital because his legs were severed in a highway accident.  Damn!  In the bed next to him is a guy covered in bandages who apparently fell from a burning plane, though they never found the plane.  This guy will not live much longer, and is kept under sedation most of the time, but when he is lucid he tells our narrator all kinds of important formulas for stuff like superalloys and how to overcome the speed of light.  Presumably he is an alien or time traveler come to give us this valuable information, but our narrator, of course, can't understand or remember all the formulae so the outsider dies thinking, erroneously, that he has succeeded in giving 20th century Earthman a boost when, in fact, all his efforts have been in vain.

"The Distant Sound of Engines" is well-written, with lots of ancillary stuff, like the narrator's descriptions of his careers as a truck driver and as a waiter at a diner, that holds the reader's interest the way such stuff would in a good mainstream story.

"Never Meet Again" (1958)

"Never Meet Again" was first printed in Infinity, and would later appear in an anthology of stories that speculate about what would happen if the Axis powers had won WWII.  The title is presumably a reference to the famous 1939 song, "We'll Meet Again."

It is 1958 in a Europe ruled by Germany, and old Professor Jochim Kempfer eats his lunch on a park bench in Berlin as he does almost every day, watching the happy young people and thinking.  He thinks about the war--the Germans conquered Britain in 1940 and ended the war by conquering the USSR in 1942; Canada and Australia are hopelessly blockaded by the Kreigsmarine and the current Chancellor seems able to maintain peace with the USA (Hitler died in a car wreck shortly after victory in Europe.)  He thinks about his scientific work on radar for the Hitler government, a major contribution to German victory in the war.  He thinks about his wife, who died of tuberculosis in a concentration camp.  And he thinks about the machine he has been secretly building in his basement for fifteen years!

Later that day Kempfer activates his secret machine and is transported to an alternate time line, one where the Allies won the war.  Kempfer emerges from his basement to find to his dismay that he is in the drab and depressing, ugly and oppressive, Soviet-occupied zone of Berlin!  (It sounds like this universe is the one you and I live in, dear reader.)  Kempfer by chance meets his wife on the street--in this universe she survived the war and he was killed in a U.S.A.A.F. bombing raid.  The lovers are reunited!  But Kempfer's sense of relief doesn't last--his wife runs to the communist authorities to tell them about his machine, and the Bolshies immediately place an order for another such machine,  which they feel will be useful in their project of achieving worldwide revolution.  Whatever universe Kempfer finds himself in, tyrants use his genius to enlarge the scope of their evil!

This story is alright, no big deal; its ideas feel less fresh than those in "The End of Summer" and it isn't as engagingly written as "The Distant Sound of Engines."

**********

Three decent stories.  "The End of Summer" is a story in the classic SF mold, all about paradigm shifts and how technology changes society and people's lives.  It is also fundamentally optimistic--mankind may have got off on the wrong course, but a single intelligent and moral man has the ability to set things to rights.  "The Distant Sound of Engines" and "Never Meet Again," on the other hand, are a little more literary (especially by John W. Campbell, Jr.'s definition of "mainstream literature," which he called "a literature of defeat"); they are smaller in scope, and fundamentally pessimistic, their protagonists unable to figure out a way to escape or overcome the terrible fates that confront them, their efforts to improve their own lives or the lives of others coming to nothing.

We'll read more from The Unexpected Dimension next time.

From James H. Schmitz, Henry Kuttner, and Harlan Ellison: stories about being hunted!

In 1988 Baen Books published an anthology edited by David Drake, Things Hunting Men (a companion to another anthology, Men Hunting Things.)  Let's check out stories from this volume by three writers whose work we have talked about in the past here at MPorcius Fiction Log, James H. Schmitz (remember his stories about the female secret police of the future?), Henry Kuttner (remember his novel of a dangerous criminal who masterminds revolutionary change on Venus?) and Harlan Ellison (remember when he physically attacked Charles Platt?)

Things Hunting Men and the three magazines these stories first appeared in are all available for free at the internet archive; being a fan of classic SF is an inexpensive hobby.

"Greenface" by James H. Schmitz (1943)

In his intro to the story in Things Hunting Men, Drake reminds us that this is Schmitz's first published story, and suggests that he prefers it to Schmitz's interstellar espionage and psychic powers capers.  "Greenface" was printed originally in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown, and has appeared in numerous anthologies and collections, including ones edited by Ray Bradbury and Martin H. Greenberg, as well three different books from Baen--the people at Baen must really think it is a winner!

Hogan Masters is a small businessman just trying to make it in this world of ours!  It is the first season of his venture, Hogan Fishing Camp, a collection of cabins on Thursday Lake he rents to anglers and an ice house in which to store the fish they catch.  Hogan hopes that this inaugural season will be successful enough that he'll be able to get together enough money to marry his girlfriend, Julia Allison.  But one day (by coincidence, the day he decided to drink a few beers in the early afternoon--oh, Hogan, you know that's not good business!) he sees a sort of green blob of protoplasm with tentacles devour a garter snake.  A few weeks later the creature reappears, larger and more menacing, and Hogan is not the only one to see it, proving it's not just the booze messing with him!

"Greenface" is a solid and fun horror/thriller story.  We follow the course of Hogan's Ahab-like weeks-long effort to hunt down the steadily-growing monster, a duel which turns Hogan into a drunk, ruins his business, and wrecks his relationships with Julia and Julia's father.  (Damn you, Greenface!)  Schmitz does a good job with the SF monster stuff (as we expect in an old SF story, Hogan learns all about the monster's idiosyncratic biology and tries to use that knowledge to defeat the creature), the action scenes, and the more psychological character-based guy-who-ruins-his-life stuff.  (Spoiler: John W. Campbell, Jr. told Barry Malzberg that "mainstream literature is about failure" but science fiction is about heroes, success and discovery,* and "Greenface" has an un-Ahab-like happy ending.)

Thumbs up!

*See Malzberg's essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971."

"Happy Ending" by Henry Kuttner (1948)

Here in Things Hunting Men, and when it first appeared in Thrilling Wonder, "Happy Ending" was credited solely to Kuttner, but isfdb credits Kuttner's wife C. L. Moore as a co-author.  "Happy Ending" seems to have been well-received by the SF community--it was included in Bleir and Dikty's The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949 and by Damon Knight in the oft-republished anthology Beyond Tomorrow, as well as other publications.  In his intro to "Happy Ending" in Things Hunting Men, Drake laments that many SF writers fail to grow--their late work is no better than their early work.  Drake says that Kuttner, whose early work was "crude," grew better and better over the course of his career; as a case in point, he notes the structure of "Happy Ending," which is a little unconventional, starting with the ending and then filling us in on how the protagonist got there via flashbacks that ultimately turn upside down our beliefs about what was going on.

(Drake also praises C. L. Moore's Jirel stories, and admits that his own first published story, 1967's "Denkirch," a Lovecraftian thing, was not good.)

"Happy Ending" is a story that, like so many old SF tales, romanticizes science and logic and quick thinking, presents a world-shaking paradigm shift, and strives to give us that old sense of wonder at the boundless possibilities of technology and the future.  And it works!

It is 1949 and James Kelvin is a Chicago journalist spending some time in the warm air of California in an effort to relieve his sinus problems.  He meets a time-travelling robot who tells an unbelieving Kelvin that it needs gold to repair its time travel mechanism--the robot wanted to travel to 1970 but accidentally ended up in 1949.  In exchange for the gold plate from his watch, the robot gives Kelvin a device that can enable him to establish a rapport with the mind of a man in the far far future; people in the future have evolved super intelligence, so by transmitting his problems into a future man's mind Kelvin can receive answers to them.  If he can pose just the right questions to this future brain, Kelvin can become a rich man!  Unfortunately, on his first try the device malfunctions (user error!) and a being called Tharn becomes alerted to Kelvin's temporal mental probing.  The robot warns Kelvin that Tharn is a dangerous android and will now hunt the journalist down!

Much of the story follows Kelvin's use of the device to escape Tharn, who has seven fingers on each hand and wears a turban.  The device works as advertised, allowing Kelvin to read the mind of some guy in the far future and learn how to, for example, teleport or breathe while underwater, very useful skills when you are trying to escape from a relentless android!  As the story proceeds to its mind-blowing conclusion we are forced to revise our assumptions about the motives and even identities of all the characters in this crazy drama.

"Happy Ending" is a fun story, chalk up another success for Kuttner (and Moore?)

"Blind Lightning" by Harlan Ellison (1956)

Iowa-native Drake uses his intro to "Blind Lightning" to brag about how awesome Iowa is and to tell us how he first became acquainted with Harlan Ellison's writing--when a high school English teacher shared with him a copy of Ellison's 1961 collection Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-up Generation, which Drake calls "a stunning volume."

"Blind Lightning" was first published in Fantastic Universe.  When I looked briefly at the scan of the June 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe it was obvious that the version of "Blind Lightning" there was different than the version in Things Hunting Men, with paragraphs in different order, some different word choices, etc.  Hmm....  "Blind Lightning" was included in Robert Silverberg's 1966 anthology Earthmen and Strangers and the 1971 Ellison collection Alone Against Tomorrow; I own paperback editions of both (my 1979 copy of Alone Against Tomorrow is signed by Ellison--envy me, Ellison collectors!) and decided to read the version in Alone Against Tomorrow on the theory that that is the version in my possession most likely to be the one preferred by the author.

Xenoecologist Ben Kettridge, an old man (he's in his fifties!) is alone, exploring a jungle on planet Blestone; his comrades from star ship Jeremy Bentham will pick him up in six hours.  He gets captured by Lad-nar, a nine-foot-tall native barbarian--this monster's species is intelligent, with a language and a religion, but no tools or clothes or buildings.  Blestone is plagued by periodic electrical storms of terrible ferocity, and the natives must hide in their caves during these storms or be killed by lightning.  The storms are of long duration, so the natives typically capture some game to bring into their caves with them, and Kettridge is brought to Lad-nar's cave to serve just this purpose.  Kettridge learns all this because Kettridge and the native can communicate telepathically, to the surprise of both.

While waiting to be eaten Kettridge thinks back to earlier in his career, when he was on a research team which developed some chemical.  The chemical got loose or something and killed 25,000 people.  Kettridge feels guilty about this, and decides to earn some kind of redemption by helping Lad-nar's race, which Kettridge believes to be in terminal decline.  Kettridge is killed by lightning because he gives Lad-nar his elastic lightning-proof space suit so Lad-nar can walk outside the cave.  As he dies Kettridge instructs Lad-nar in how to contact the human exploration team and we readers are led to believe that Lad-nar's race will get help from the humans and not go extinct after all.

This story is just OK.  It is sentimental and melodramatic and the verbiage is a little extravagant, a bit loud and long-winded.  In my experience Ellison doesn't create characters in his fiction; it is always Ellison telling some story that is meant to hammer some idea into you or wring some emotion out of you, and when I read an Ellison story I always hear Ellison's voice in my head, and he is always yelling or snarling sarcastically or putting on some maudlin voice.  (This is where I confess that I don't really like Ellison as a person, and I am afraid it is an obstacle to my appreciating his work.)

I guess the interesting thing about "Blind Lightning" is the prominence of religion; Lad-nar considers the lightning to come from one god and is convinced that the human explorers are even greater gods, while Kettridge prays for help, and is himself a sort of Christ-figure--his walking in the deadly storm (providing a demonstration of the utility of his space suit to Lad-nar) is kind of like Jesus walking on water, and Kettridge dies while showing a race of people how to live without fear and how to get to the heavens.  In the scene in which Lad-nar and Kettridge inexplicably communicate telepathically, we are told that "To Kettridge it seemed there was a third being in the cave.  The hideous beast before him, himself...and a third" and I couldn't help but think the third might be God, trying to build a bridge between these two alien races and give Kettridge a chance to redeem himself.  Of course, I just recently read Gene Wolfe's 1,100 page The Wizard Knight and was just yesterday talking to my wife about U2's October and so have gotten into the habit of turning over every sentence to look for Christian messages, even where you wouldn't expect them, like in Ellison's writing.

**********

Three worthwhile stories.  More old SF tales in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

21st century horror stories by Tanith Lee, Steve Rasnic Tem and Ramsey Campbell

Judging by the contents of my blog you might suspect I am boycotting the 21st century, or perhaps am actually at war with the 21st century.  Well, today we call a truce and read three stories first published in the last ten years!  Today we expose ourselves to three tales of terror from the 2018 anthology edited by Ellen Datlow, The Best of the Best Horror of the Year, a copy of which I borrowed from the Baltimore County Library.  The two dozen or so stories in The Best of the Best Horror of the Year appeared in volumes of Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year, which was published between 2009 and 2018, and I have selected the included stories by MPorcius fave Tanith Lee, Steve Rasnic Tem, a few of whose stories I have read in the past, and Ramsey Campbell, in whose work I am sporadically interested.

"Black and White Sky" by Tanith Lee (2010)

"Black and White Sky" first appeared in the souvenir book of the 2010 World Horror Convention, Brighton Shock!; besides in this anthology and the third volume of The Best Horror of the Year, Datlow has included it in an issue of Nightmare Magazine she guest edited.

"Black and White Sky" incorporates a lot of magpie folklore with which I was totally unfamiliar (I don't think we get magpies in the Eastern USA.)  I didn't even know what a magpie looked like until I looked the creature up on wikipedia.  Anyway, in the story, all over Great Britain, an unusual volume of magpies start appearing, individual birds seemingly popping into existence near the ground or in trees and immediately shooting straight up into the sky, disappearing from view.  These sudden appearances interrupt the flights of aircraft and the operation of railways, and then electric power as the birds start knocking lines off of poles.

We observe this weird crisis alongside a writer, an ex-Londoner who lives in a cottage in the countryside.  There are lots of scenes of him talking to people in the village, watching TV, reading newspapers, etc., discussing and learning about the magpie phenomenon.  We sort of get to know this guy, his writing career, his history with women, that kind of stuff.  Interspersed with the sections about the writer are sections in present tense describing the sky and wildlife and the avian crisis from an omniscient point of view.  Eventually the larger of the British Isles (Eire is spared) lies under a shadow cast by a bazillion magpies just hanging around in the stratosphere--the English, Welsh and Scottish people must endure an endless rain of bird feathers and bird poo, and, lacking any electricity, have no means to communicate with the larger world.

The sexy woman who cleans the writer's cottage twice a month comes over after her husband hits her and she has sex with the writer.  Then the magpies all fall, burying Great Britain in a carpet of dead birds several feet deep, knocking down trees and buildings and presumably killing many people.

I don't know what to make of this thing, frankly.  Is it about the environment, comparing the way humanity treats the natural world to the callous way men treat women and the way women betray men?  Is it somehow a reflection of the stereotype that English people love animals?  Could it be some kind of religious allegory (a longish paragraph describes folklore about how the magpie's distinctive coloration either does or does not symbolize reverence for Jesus Christ), with the magpies a sort of British version of the plagues of Egypt?  Or is it just Lee toying with a wacky and disgusting idea (a postscript suggests the basic idea of the story came from Lee's husband John Kaiine.)  "Black and White Sky" is well written enough, so it gets a passing grade, but it is kind of leaving me shrugging my shoulders.   

"The Monster Makers" by Steve Rasnic Tem (2013)

The narrator of In Search Of Lost Time, as a child, would look at train schedules and imagine what towns he had never seen were like based on their names.  I have the bad habit of guessing what a story is like based solely on its title, and I guessed that "The Monster Makers" would be about how bullies turn kids into school shooters or microagressions turn those microaggressed into terrorists.  The story is not like that at all, of course.

Tem's story, at least in part, is about the horror of getting old: losing your memory and ability to focus, getting clumsy and weak, losing your eyesight and hearing, knowing that after you die you will be forgotten.  The actual plot, which is largely submerged beneath bizarre images and sad musings, is about an old man, our narrator, who, somehow, apparently, by telling his grandchildren fairy stories of monsters, gives these little tykes the ability to distort innocent people's bodies, turning them into deformed freaks (these transformations are fatal.)  Grandpa and his senile and/or demented wife live with their adult son and his wife and kids.  It is hinted that the family in this story is a family of witches or demons, like a less cute and more scary version of the Addams family or Bradbury's Elliott family, but that the son, by luck or design, has grown up to be an essentially normal guy.  The long-suffering son tries to manage the horrible hand fate has dealt him, siting the family domicile on a secluded farm, away from people.  Despite his efforts, the family does sometimes come into contact with people, and these people suffer horrendous and life-ending physical transformations.  His entreaties that his father stop telling those stories proving futile ("Telling stories, that's what grandfathers do," insists Grandpa), the son takes up an axe and pursues desperate measures, with disastrous results.

The style of the story, with its matter-of-fact first-person narration of surreally horrible events and its philosophy of resigned recognition of the futility and misery of our lives, reminded me a bit of Barry Malzberg.

Maybe "The Monster Makers" is arguing that parents' and grandparents' efforts to educate their descendants, to mold them and try to ensure they remember and honor their ancestors, just screw them up and cause trouble for them and society at large.  ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad....")  As I recall, Tem's story "Blood Knots" was also about a disastrous family in which a man's influence on his descendants caused mayhem among the populace.
     
Datlow included this one in her anthology Monstrous as well as the sixth Best Horror of the Year; it first appeared in the magazine Black Static.

"The Callers" by Ramsey Campbell (2012)

This is a story about how disturbing, disgusting, and dangerous women are!

Thirteen-year-old Mark and his parents are staying with Mark's grandparents in a dirty and depressing northern English town, a place where half the stores are boarded up and the old theater has had its seats removed and been turned into a bingo parlor.  Mom and Grandma have a stupid fight and Mark's parents leave early, leaving Mark behind with a train ticket so he can follow them on schedule.  In the evening Grandma goes to the bingo parlor and Grandpa goes to the pub, so Mark goes to the cinema to see what sounds like a pornographic horror movie: "Mark's schoolmates had shown him the scene from Facecream on their phones, where the girl gets cream squirted all over her face."

Though he claims to be fifteen, Mark is refused admittance to the show, as are four other kids--two couples--who blame Mark for keeping them from seeing Facecream and threaten to beat him up.  The girls are more cruel and aggressive than the boys--it is the female members of the couples who do most of the verbal threatening.  These four disgruntled movie fans chase Mark through the town, past sinister nightclubs and streetlamps covered in spiderwebs full of dead bugs.  Mark takes refuge in the bingo hall, where he sits at the same table with his withered old granny and a bunch of ugly ancient women--Campbell really pours on the descriptions of these women's jiggling fat and facial hair, and while they play bingo the old women make various disturbing gestures and jokes of a salacious nature.

That night, back at his grandparents' house, Mark is laying in bed when he hears the bingo women outside, calling out numbers as during the bingo game.  They call the number of the house Mark is in, and it is strongly implied that these women are witches or a serial killer cult or something like that who periodically choose a house in the town from which to seize a male upon whom they will inflict some unspeakably horrible fate!  The women demand either Mark or his grandfather, and I wouldn't trust Grandpa to sacrifice himself for Mark!

As with Tem's "The Monster Makers," in which people get transformed into monsters and killed in front of witnesses but the police never seem to catch on, you really have to suspend disbelief for this story.  Is the government of a First World city, even a city in severe decline, going to look the other way when a mob periodically drags a guy out of his house and he is never seen again?  (Weren't British people under 24-hour video surveillance by the time this story was printed?)  Are the local men going to let frail and obese old women overpower them and kill them?  Even a thirteen-year-old boy should be able to outfight these septuagenarians!  (Paradoxically, while Lee's story has an even more outlandish premise, it is more "believable" than Tem's and Campbell's because society at large in Lee's story responds to the impossible premise more realistically than it does in "The Monster Makers" and "The Callers.")

Of the three stories we're talking about today, "The Callers" is the most direct and conventional, and the least literary (I didn't mention it above, but Lee flings uncited T. S. Eliot and Matthew Arnold quotes at us in "Black and White Sky"), though Campbell writes it in the present tense, for some reason.  Fear of women on the part of young men, and the disgust felt by the young for the old, are good themes for a visceral horror story, though, and I think this story is a success--it may not be as ambitious as the Lee and Tem stories, but I think Campbell certainly achieves his goals here.

"The Callers" was first printed in Four for Fear, an anthology of stories commissioned for a literature festival in Hull, England; besides in The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Five it has been included in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24.

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These three stories are fine, but not great.  Certainly not good enough for me to renounce my allegiance to the century of my birth!  It's back to the 1970s (the decade of my birth!) in our next episode.