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.

SF: Authors' Choice 2: A B Chandler, H Clement, & H L Gold

Digging through the paperback anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library, I came upon Harry Harrison's 1970 volume SF: Authors' Choice 2.  As the title suggests,  this is one of those compilations of stories of which their authors are particularly fond or proud.  Of the twelve stories in the book I think I have only read Algis Budrys' "Contact Between Equals;" that was back in 2019, and I liked it.  That leaves a lot of virgin territory in this paperback; today we'll explore the stories chosen by world-travelling sailor A. Bertram Chandler, hard science fiction icon Hal Clement and the agoraphobic editor of Galaxy, H. L. Gold.

"Late" by A. Bertram Chandler (1955)

In the period before the inexplicable birth of this blog, I read a bunch of stories and some novels by A. Bertram Chandler, most of them about space naval officer John Grimes.  I liked them well enough, but was hardly blown away by them, and I don't think I've read anything by Chandler during the era of this blog...until today!

"Late" is well-written and seems quite sober, but turns out to be a joke story with an unexpectedly unscientific ending.  I think I can mildly recommend it.

Jelks is a British scientist, a man very thorough and very calm, but also very slow.  Everybody jokes to him, and of him, that he will be late for his own funeral, and we hear this phrase multiple times over the course of the story.  

"Late" takes place in a Cold War world in which the United Kingdom has its own independent space program.  Thanks to his stolid reliability and thoroughness, Jelks is selected for the job of staying alone in an orbiting rocket for months, conducting experiments and taking readings.  Many men would crack up all alone in a tin can for such a long period, but those in authority feel they can rely on the steady and unexcitable Jelks.

After a few weeks up there, Jelks sees some kind of cataclysm take place on the Earth below; he is familiar with all the types of nuclear weapons and all the various weather phenomena, and the character of what he sees baffles him, as the disaster is unlike what he would expect from any weapon or meteorological event.  He pilots his rocket back to Earth, back to England.  There are no people around.  He makes his way to a village church and the opened and empty graves indicate that he missed the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgement. 

All the dead pan and believable hard science stuff that occupies 90% of the story, about the way the rockets and space suits operate and so forth, made the Christian resolution of "Late" a surprise, though Chandler does foreshadow the ending with the repeated intoning of the "late for his own funeral" joke and by having Jelk scoff at some prophet mentioned in the newspaper who wins notoriety by claiming the end of the world is nigh.

This unusual story first appeared in Science Fantasy and, besides here in SF: Authors' Choice 2, it has only been reprinted in the Australian anthology Beyond Tomorrow, which was published to coincide with the World Science Fiction Convention of 1975, held in Melbourne.  In his afterward to the story here in Harrison's anthology, Chandler says that his first choice for inclusion in this book was his story "Giant Killer," but that one was too long, and talks about the circumstances under which he wrote "Late" and a little about his move from Britain to Australia.

"Proof" by Hal Clement

As with Chandler, I read some Clement before I started the blog but have not read anything by him since the founding of the quixotic venture that is MPorcius Fiction Log; as with Chandler, I liked what I read but didn't feel much urge to read more by him.

"Proof" is Clement's first published story, and, in his foreword to it here in SF: Authors' Choice 2, he talks about how he first got into SF, about how he is a stickler for scientific accuracy in SF, and a little about John W. Campbell, Jr. and Jack Williamson and their influence on his early career.  

"Proof" is a serious hardcore hard SF story, full of phrases like "...the viscosity of a gas does increase directly as the square root of its temperature..." and "We found that electromagnetic radiations of wavelengths in the octave above H-alpha would penetrate the interference...."  Our main characters are two adventurous types, one a native of the Sun, the other a native of the star Sirius.  These two people are elite members of civilizations that evolved inside stars, beings whose bodies consist of magnetic fields and neutrons and whose "food" is neutronium.  They are aboard a ship travelling from the outer regions of the Sun towards the solar core--Solarians live in cities suspended in the outer regions of Sol, but need more neutronium than is available out there, and so send ships down to the core to collect this essential element.  The reason the Solarians reside far from their food supply is that the inner regions of the Sun are inhabited by monsters, dangerous beasts the ship's crew will likely have to fight to secure the neutronium the cities need.

The actual plot of the story does not involve the monsters or the collection of neutronium.  The Sirian visitor is a scientist who has a theory that, if artificially compressed, elements like iron and carbon that in a star are in an ionized plasma form might take on a solid form.  This theoretical phenomena is difficult for the Solarians and Sirians to visualize, and their senses are ill-equipped to detect such solid matter should they encounter it.  At least that is what I think the Sirian is saying; in my youth, when I should have been memorizing the Periodic Table of Elements and chemical formulas, I was clogging my brain with dialogue from The Flintstones and how many hit dice First Edition AD&D monsters have, so this material is a challenge for me. 

Our Solarian character, the captain of the sun diving ship, upon hearing this theory, describes a tragic and mysterious event he witnessed while commanding a ship on a journey between stars another interstellar craft that was accompanying his own collided with some kind of invisible object and was destroyed--perhaps it was a specimen of the solid iron, silicon, carbon, etc., the Sirian is theorizing?  Clement breaks free from the setting of the Solarian sun diving ship to describe the spectacular crash and cataclysmic explosion of the Solarian interstellar ship in a remote area of Earth from the point of view of a human being.  Then comes the little joke at the end of the story--the Sirian scientist doesn't think solid iron and carbon could exist in the natural world and accuses the Solarian of making the story up.

"Proof" is a good example of a science fiction story that is really about science and not just an adventure or detective story or political satire set in space or the future.  Clement concocts an alternate, speculative, milieu that is very strange but is actually based on the hard sciences and stretches your brain in the way that surreal or psychedelic settings that make zero sense fail to.  Even though there is a minimum of sex and violence, and little plot or character, "Proof" still manages to be entertaining--the setting alone is enough for you to chew on.  So, thumbs up for "Proof."

Since its debut in Campbell's Astounding, "Proof" has been reprinted in numerous anthologies, including several edited by Isaac Asimov and/or Martin H. Greenberg, as well as the Clement collection Music of Many Spheres.          

The cover of Music of Many Spheres is illustrated by a painting by Clement himself

"Love in the Dark" by H. L. Gold

In his intro here in SF: Authors' Choice 2 to "Love in the Dark," which first appeared in the short-lived magazine Suspense as "Love Ethereal," Gold brags about how brilliant his characterization of the protagonist of the story is and makes fun of the woman upon whom he based his character.  Gold comes off as kind of a jerk, frankly.

The character of which Gold is so proud is the unhappily married Livy, a not-very-attractive thirty-something whose husband is Mark Random, a "pudgy" sales manager who wears glasses and a neatnik who is the picture of dull sangfroid; Livy tries to get a rise out of him by loudly kicking her shoes around and scuffing up the walls but Mark just ignores these provocations.  Gold makes it clear that Livy's unhappiness is largely due to Mark's inability to have sex or lack of sexual interest in her.

One night Livy is undressing for bed and feels lustful eyes staring at her.  Of course, those eyes are not Mark's--he has his back to her.  When Livy closes her eyes she can "see" the "man" who is ogling her, muscular hunk of a space alien with blue feathers and pointy ears.  The invisible alien puts the moves on Livy--during the day she can feel this creature kissing her as she does the housework.  The bird man cannot speak to her--his race and ours hear on different frequencies or something--but Livy is thrilled by the sexual attention.

Livy's strange behavior leads Mark to call a friend for help.  Ben is another successful professional who is overweight and unattractive, a guy who has read lots of books on business psychology.  The presence of Ben allows Livy a chance to insult Mark--as she lists off her husband's faults and calls him names, Ben encourages her, telling Mark that it is healthy psychologically for Livy to get this stuff off her chest and, besides, she doesn't mean it.

Of course, she does mean it.  Livy's relationship with the bird man only she can see, and only when she closes her eyes, progresses and she gets pregnant.  Ben figures that she is having an affair and is so guilty over it that her brain is hiding the truth from her by giving her this bird man delusion, and urges Mark to have his wife admitted to an institution.  Livy runs away, but sneaks back to watch the collapse of Ben and Mark's friendship when the invisible bird man hits Mark and Mark blames Ben for the attack.

Livy and the bird man have an invisible baby.  Livy gets a job with a private detective agency; the bird man, being invisible, can gather all kinds of information with ease that Livy tells her employer she has collected.  (Livy and the alien communicate by typing--he has learned English.)      

"Love in the Dark" is an acceptable filler joke story about sex that isn't funny or sexy.  It feels kind of mean-spirited, with its contempt for fat people and its apparent glee in the punishment meted out to Mark and Ben, who don't really seem villainous, just boring and sexually dysfunctional, but maybe we are supposed to feel they deserve punishment because they are business people and not scientists or artists or communist revolutionaries or whatever sort of people Gold himself admires?  "Love in the Dark" is a sort of forgettable routine thing, so it is a little odd that Gold took the opportunity provided by SF: Authors' Choice 2 of this book to make a big deal out of it.

"Love in the Dark" is included in at least three Gold collections as well as some anthologies, including Fred Pohl's Beyond the End of Time, the cover illo of which manages to cram in a multitude of our favorite things: a hunk, a babe, poison gas, a saucer, a space man, and an urban apocalypse, and Basil Davenport's Invisible Men, which has a characteristically awesome Richard Powers cover. 

The 1966 printing of Invisible Men above has the lens on the right side of the illo
blacked out, but that lens on the 1960 edition shows a woman's nude torso,
a reminder that the master of abstract art Richard Powers can also produce 
very fine renderings of the human form

**********

It is always interesting to hear these writer guys talk about their work and their relationships with each other, and the Chandler and Clement stories are actually good as well as strange or surprising, so I'm definitely enjoying SF: Authors' Choice 2.  And the Gold isn't bad, just mundane, though perhaps it offers insight into the psychology of Gold, an important SF editor and himself mentally ill.

We'll read some more from SF: Authors' Choice 2, but I think first it is back to 1968 for stories selected by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss. 

The Land Across by Gene Wolfe

"Papa Iason isn't a good man.  I told Naala that already, and it's true.  He's a bad one trying to be good, like a lot of us."

I feel like I have been away from this blog for a long time.  This absence is due to several factors, some good (spending more time with the wife; additional work coming in; going through the closet and the basement preparing my old wargames to sell on ebay; seeing a nephew who is on leave from the USMC) and some not so good (mopping out the flooded basement of the house we rent.)  Another big reason I have not been blogging about the fiction I have read is that for over a week I have been reading Gene Wolfe's 2013 novel The Land Across.  I read it once, and then, in hopes of comprehending it better, I read it a second time.

The Land Across is the story of Grafton, an American travel writer who goes to some unnamed post-communist country in south east Europe, where he gets mixed up with the secret police (the JAKA) and their struggle against a coven of devil-worshiping magicians (the Unholy Way.)  To keep things complicated, also involved in Grafton's saga are a subversive religious group that is neither satanic nor magical (the Legion of Light), some magicians who are rivals of the Unholy Way, and the church.

The Land Across is about the struggle between good and evil, but it is as much (or more) about the struggle between good and evil within ourselves as it is about a fight between a bunch of establishment good guys and a bunch of renegade villains.  Almost all the characters are morally ambiguous, and it is not clear how far we are supposed to sympathize with Grafton, who is our narrator, or most of the other characters.  Grafton, and his closest associate in the JAKA, a female operative named Naala, do some things which are pretty terrible, and are not really in pursuance of their witch-fighting duties.  Wolfe subverts our expectations, trying to surprise us by having characters who at first seem to be villains turn out to be "good guys," and vice versa, and by showing the utility of institutions we are presupposed to have a bad opinion of (like a dictatorship and its secret police) and suggesting that institutions we tend to revere, like Western democracy, can fall into decadence and fail.  Several times characters voice the belief that human beings are made up of both good and evil, and most of the characters demonstrate this assessment, acting foully at some points in the book and nobly at other points.   

Structurally, the book is a kind of police detective-centered mystery.  People break into places looking for clues, search the city for fugitives, get imprisoned and escape, interrogate prisoners, and sit around in cafes, explaining to each other how they pieced together one facet of the mystery and then planning their next step in cracking the case.  There are fistfights with thugs and a climactic gun battle that reminded me of the memorable climax of Mickey Spillane's One Lonely Night.  The Land Across also reminded me of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, which I found quite difficult to follow.  The second time I read The Land Across I kept notes to make it easier to remember who is who, how they are related, and why they are doing what they are doing, and I realized that if you can focus and have a good memory (skills I don't really have), Wolfe gives you all the clues you need to follow what is going on.  Maybe that is true of The Big Sleep (which I read only once) as well.

Wolfe includes lots of horror and ghost story elements, including a haunted house wherein lies hidden treasure, a mummified hand that sneaks around and tries to strangle people, a lonely castle sitting on an island in the middle of a lake, voodoo dolls, and references to werewolves and Dracula.

Related to the horror elements, and central to the book, are its Christian elements.  Three characters are clerics, and of course there is the Unholy Way, who in the action climax try to sacrifice one of Grafton's love interests to the Devil.  Several times over the course of the book, particularly when Grafton is in a difficult situation, a character appears who reminds Grafton strongly of his father.  Grafton first sees this man in chapter one, and believes he is a member of a trio of border guards; this man takes custody of Grafton's passport.  This figure never speaks, and other characters don't seem to see him, but he offers Grafton moral support and, via gestures, provides our narrator with guidance that helps defeat the Unholy Way.  At the end of the book this man (or one who looks exactly like him) turns out to be the charismatic dictator of the country.  The dictator gives Grafton back his passport, calling it "a little gift."  All the clues (he is one of a trinity, he is like a father, and he provides salvation at the end of the adventure) indicate this character is a symbolic representation of God.

Similarly, there is a man in black who sometimes appears to Grafton.  This figure also never speaks, is not noticed by other characters, and guides Grafton via gestures, but he scares Grafton rather than buoying him.  The man in black also appears after one of the wizards who is not a member of the Unholy Way casts a spell.  Presumably, the man in black is the Devil.

There are several motifs that pop up in the novel repeatedly.  Hands are an important image in the book; not only is there the animated dead hand (which is much more than a monster; it is actually a character with a personality and motives), but people often shake hands and hold hands in significant ways.  Another motif is the decline of the United States; Wolfe really seems pessimistic about the current condition of the USA. One character laments the end of the gold standard, Naala tells Grafton, "We do not seek the destruction of Amerika, which you yourselves have too much destroyed already....", and Grafton at one point wonders if the country he is in, which is ruled by a dictator and his ruthless secret police, and where only members of the government have access to telephones, automobiles or computers, is really any crazier than the US.

Of course, Wolfe is writing in the voice of Grafton, who at times seems like a shallow sort (he is always talking about clubs and clubbing, for example) and Wolfe is famous for employing unreliable and not quite sympathetic narrators.  (Hopefully women will keep this in mind when Grafton spends half a page complaining that women talk too much and are always telling you extraneous and distracting details instead of getting to the point.)

Wolfe writes The Land Across in a spare and economical style; dialogue makes up the lion's share of the text, and there aren't many fancy descriptions or clever turns of phrase.  (We do get at least one groan-inducing pun: the chapter in which some guy gets decapitated is titled "Getting Ahead.")  I liked the book, but I have to admit I didn't think the characters were particularly interesting, there were few exciting images, and I wasn't affected emotionally.  As an intellectual puzzle The Land Across excels, but I didn't really care whether this person got killed, or whether that person got back to America, or who fell in love with who, etc.  This is a marked contrast to Wolfe's monumental masterpieces, like the four volume Book of the New Sun or the three volume Book of the Short Sun, which are chock full of awe-inspiring visions, fascinating people, and heartbreaking tragedies, as well as puzzles that had me breaking my brain.

It falls short of the lofty heights Wolfe has achieved with his finest work, but by any normal standard The Land Across is a major success, with an intricate and surprising plot and a generous sprinkling of thought-provoking passages.  Worth your time, even if you are a dolt like me and have to read it twice.          

Three 1978 stories by A. E. Van Vogt

Via Twitter, Joachim Boaz reminds us that A. E. Van Vogt's birthday is this month.  To celebrate, I read three stories by my man Van which I had never read, from the collection Pendulum, DAW 316.  These stories all appeared for the first time in Pendulum.

Pendulum, published in 1978, provides insight into the powerful influence the first Star Wars film had on the people at DAW.  Besides the dreamlike (that's a nice way of saying "insane," right?) cover by Jordi Penavla, in which helmeted topless men use laser swords in their fight against cave men, we have the advertising pages in the back of the book, one of which is pitched directly at Star Wars fans.  The good people at DAW recommend to "Star Warriors" four of their series: Gordon Dickson's Dorsai novels; A. Bertram Chandler's space navy stories starring John Grimes; the Dumarest novels by E. C. Tubb; and Brian Stableford's Daedalus novels.  I can't assess how good these recommendations are because I'm not familiar with any of the listed books.  I have read four or five John Grimes books, and liked them OK, but none of those listed.  I've read one (non-Dorsai) book by Dickson and two books by Stableford in his Hooded Swan series, and didn't think them bad, but found them uninspiring and forgettable.  I've never read any Tubb, but Michael Moorcock considers Tubb's Dumarest of Terra books excellent, or so he says in a year 2000 article about Leigh Brackett entitled "Queen of the Martian Mysteries."      


"Pendulum"

The title story of the collection depicts a near future Earth facing a food shortage.  Our main character Hudman is a Dutch sailor working on a civilian ship employed by the U. S. Navy, lowering machinery to the ocean floor which will warm up the cold water there and make these areas of the ocean more hospitable for life and thus more productive as fishing waters.  In a bizarre turn of events (are there any other in these van Vogt stories?) these activities awaken a civilization of thirty billion people who have been in cryogenic sleep on the ocean floor for millenia.  Hudman is chosen to be the emissary between the surface people and this revived race, which it turns out has the technology to easily take over the planet.

The people from under the sea declare that their benevolent rule will improve everybody's life.  One of the first things on their agenda is to eliminate all the disparate and confusing human languages and replace them with a single logical language, which will be easy enough with their "mind-to-mind" teaching methods.  Hudman is then deluged with exhortations, threats, and bribes from people who try every possible means to preserve their own dialects from extinction.  "Pendulum" is a story about ethnic pride and what van Vogt calls "race consciousness," and the lengths individuals will go to to honor and preserve the culture and memory of their peoples.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the violence people are willing to employ to protect their own dialects and honor their ancestors is a sign that van Vogt was skeptical of ethnic pride and sympathetic to the "melting pot" view of American race/ethnic relations which, nowadays, has been abandoned.  In the end of the story, in order to protect him, the submarine people transport Hudman to a city in a distant time period - Hudman eagerly embraces the culture of his new home, "determined to fit in with no thought at all about his past."  

"The Male Condition"

From racial and cultural diversity issues to gender and sexual issues!

I think of van Vogt as a guy who often writes stuff that is kind of crazy.  "The Male Condition" definitely fits in the crazy category.  It also seems to be in part or whole a kind of joke, one which some may find in poor taste.  I cannot deny that the audacity of the story, its twisted surprises, the lengths van Vogt was willing to go, made me laugh.

We open in a government office where two academics, psychologists, are talking.  We are immediately alerted to the fact that this is a strange world when we learn that 30 is considered an old age and that the male psychologist, Jolo, is smoking a "kolo," a product introduced by aliens.

Crazier still, Jolo tells the junior psychologist, a woman 23.25 years old named Lasia, that there have been no cases of rape in 38 years.  Sounds good, right?  But this phenomenon presents the researcher with a problem: Jolo is directing work on an encyclopedia of human nature, and how can the book be complete without a rapist to study in the flesh?

The rapist shortage, apparently, is the result of an additive in drinking water that makes people unable to feel anger.  Jolo proposes injecting himself with something that will make him a rapist(?) and having Lasia act as observer, which is to say, rape victim(!).  Lasia needs the money, so she signs onto the project!

This 13 page story is stuffed with wacky elements: aliens only women can see, psychologists whose whole therapy technique consists of having sex with their patients, a computer database put together by a feminist government agency which lists men with whom women are forbidden to have sex (if this story had been written after 2001 presumably this would be called the "no-fuck list.")  Lasia turns to a male psychologist for help, but he takes advantage of her, so she then fools Jolo's wife into taking her place as rape victim.  The intervention of aliens into this demented slapstick leads to murder, necrophilia, and a jury trial at which the aliens save the surviving characters from going to prison.

Crazy man, crazy.

"Living with Jane"

This story, with its convoluted plot and characteristically van Vogtian sentences, was a little hard to follow.

The year is 2288.  Androids are on the market which are almost impossible to distinguish from real humans.  Parents of young children who get divorced routinely buy an android replica of their former spouses, so that their children will not suffer the psychological problems that result from living in a single parent home.  In a way that van Vogt explains but which I didn't understand, living with androids has given our heroine, teenaged Jane, what amount to psychic powers.

A new type of android has been built, a model even more human-like.  Unfortunately, these super-androids have decided to take over the world.  Jane's father, a scientist, is the natural leader of the resistance to the android takeover, and a natural target of the androids, who contrive to enter Jane's home and hold her and her mother hostage.  The androids threaten to kill his family if Jane's dad doesn't cease working against their takeover.

Fortunately, Jane's high intelligence and mental powers mean she is up to the task of neutralizing her captors.  Jane saves the day, not through any kind of violence, but through charm, persuasion, and logic.  Having lived her entire life with androids, Jane likes them and understands them, and is able to manipulate and even befriend them.  The story has a happy ending; Jane will be able to assure peace and freedom for everybody, human and android, and now she has an android duplicate of herself who will be the twin sister she has always wanted.        

***********

It is hard to recommend such strange stories to other people, but I enjoyed them. 

Pendulum contains three more pieces of fiction which I have not read before, so I will be grappling with Van Vogt's weird plots and clunky verbiage in the near future.

How many of these "great" science fiction stories have you read?

This is what the last page of my copy of Edmund Cooper's The Last Continent, Dell 4655, printed in 1969, looks like.  I love these kinds of ads, with just the title and author; your mind is filled with wonder at the possibilities of what each book could be about.  Like young Marcel in Proust, looking at the train schedule and fantasizing what a town is like based only on its name, you can construct characters and a plot in your mind for each book that, who knows?, may be more exciting than what the book truly contains.

I also like to wonder why the titles are presented in the order they are, and why one book is more expensive than another.  Did A. Bertram Chandler piss somebody off?  Were his books poorer sellers than Emil Pataja's?  I've never even heard of Emil Pataja!

<UPDATE JAN 30 2014: I read a book by Emil Petaja, who doesn't necessarily spell his name the way Dell does in its advertising.>

I have read five of the listed books, but I'm not willing to say any of them are great; I'm counting three OK/averages and two lame/Idon'tgetits.  Opinions do differ, though, as we shall see.

Deathworld 3 by Harry Harrison
I've read this twice and enjoyed it both times, but damned if I can remember anything about it.  It's an adventure story in which guys on horses kill astronauts that land on a planet, then an agent goes to the planet to make peace with the horse riders, or something like that.

The Cosmic Rape by Theodore Sturgeon
Earth people are cursed with individualism, but luckily an alien entity, the Medusa, comes to Earth and connects all our minds together.  There are lots of these collective consciousness stories out there, like Clarke's Childhood's End, Holly's The Green Planet, the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, and so on.  The Cosmic Rape was later published under the title To Marry Medusa.  Joachim Boaz liked this a little more than me, and gave it 4 stars out of 5; I think it deserves an "acceptable/average" score of 3.   

The Killer Thing by Kate Wilhelm
Earth people are cursed with a lust to exploit the environment and primitive natives, but luckily some aliens with a powerful space navy come along and force us to behave.  There are lots of these "we are a bunch of jerks and would be better off if there were nice aliens to tell us what to do" stories out there, like Robert Crane's Hero's Walk and the film "The Day the Earth Stood Still."  Back in 2008 I wrote a hostile review of Killer Thing on Amazon.

The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley
I read this many years ago and remember thinking it was a boring bunch of cliches: the tyrannical Earth government sends a guy to a prison planet where he fights a robot in the arena and then leads the resistance, or something.  Joachim Boaz at sfruminations read it years after I did and thought it a brilliant satire.  What can I say?  Maybe I'm dense.

Spartan Planet by A. Bertram Chandler
This is one of the many books chronicling the career of space navy officer John Grimes.  I've read a bunch of these, totally out of order, and liked most of them.  As I recall, this is the one in which Grimes comes upon a planet where all the women are hidden in a secret lab, and an entire civilization has developed consisting solely of men who, not even knowing women exist, turn to homosexual behavior for love and sexual satisfaction.  Grimes's ship includes female crew members, and the whole society undergoes a revolution when they show up.  This would be a good book to read if you were writing a dissertation about attitudes towards gays in SF.   

*******

Five out of 19 doesn't sound like a lot, but the page says if you ordered five or more of the listed books from Dell then shipping was free, so I am considering five to be a passing grade.  And until I hear differently, I am considering myself king of the science fiction mountain for having read five of the books from this list - feel free to report how many of these books you have read in the comments, especially if you have read six or more and are in a position to dethrone me, or think I'm out of my mind and some of these books really are great.