"After a Judgment Day," "The Pro," and "Castaway" by Edmond Hamilton

It's the final installment of our look at The Best of Edmond Hamilton, a collection of stories published in 1977 and edited by the author's wife, Leigh Brackett.

"After a Judgment Day" (1963)

Throughout his career, Hamilton wrote stories about evolution and the related topics of radiation and mutation, and stories about the plight of somebody who finds himself the last man on Earth. We've read a bunch of such stories here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and Hamilton also dealt with such themes in his comic book work; for example, in "Superman Under the Red Sun," a story appearing in Action Comics # 300 (May 1963), Superman is tricked by the "Superman Revenge Squad" into travelling a million years into the future, where he encounters land-whales (the descendants of whales who have adapted to an Earth without oceans) and eagles which, due to radioactive fallout, have acquired the ability to shoot lighting bolts from their eyes.  Kal-El also finds that the human race has vacated the planet, making him The Last Man On Earth!  (Luckily, there is a robot version of Perry White available to keep the Man of Steel company.)

"Superman Under the Red Sun" was the cover story of Action Comics #300 (the other story in that issue was about Supergirl's horse...zzzzzzzzzz...) and one of Hamilton's other cover stories that very same year was "After a Judgment Day" for Fantastic, a story which is like a more adult, more apocalyptic remix of the same elements from that Superman story.

Martinsen is a scientist on a lunar research base; from this base robots designed to mimic humans travel to distant planets to collect data and then return.  Because their bodies resemble human tissue and organs, any effects suffered by the robots while walking around on the alien worlds serve as a good predictor of how real humans would react to those alien environments.

During Martinsen's tenure at the moon base a plague strikes the Earth--a previously-harmless bacteria, mutated by radioactive fallout, wipes out the human race in short order.  Most of Martinsen's comrades return to Earth, leaving Martinsen alone on the moon with a single colleague who has turned to popping sleeping pills for comfort (there is no booze on the base.)  And the robots, of course, though they have not been programmed to make conversation (unlike the Perry White robot in Action Comics #300.)  Martinsen, in a last romantic gesture, prepares a recording describing highlights of Earth history and culture, gives a copy to each of the robots, and then programs them to search the universe for intelligent life to present the recording to.  With luck, Earth's memory will thus be preserved.  After the robots have departed, fanning out across the galaxy, Martinsen and the pill-popper return to Earth to die.

This story is alright; it tries to pull the old heart-strings but didn't really do it for me; in that respect I think Hamilton's "Requiem," for example, is more successful.  The title "After a Judgment Day" comes from a poem by G. K. Chesterton, an epic of over 2,500 lines about 9th-century hero King Alfred called The Ballad of the White Horse. Chesterton is one of those important writers (he is one of Gene Wolfe's favorites, I hear) I haven't gotten around to reading yet.  Maybe someday.

"After a Judgment Day" has not been one of Hamilton's more popular pieces; besides The Best of Edmond Hamilton the only place it has reappeared has been in a 1972 magazine, Thrilling Science Fiction, that consisted of reprints of 1960s SF stories.

"The Pro" (1964)

If you are reading MPorcius Fiction Log, you probably already know that Barry N. Malzberg is one of the great historians and critics of SF, and that Malzberg considers his own career and the entire SF field to be a disappointment, a sort of failure or missed opportunity.  In his 1980 essay "The Science Fiction of Science Fiction," included in The Engines of the Night, Malzberg talks about two Robert Silverberg stories from the early '70s ("Science Fiction Hall of Fame" and "Schwartz Between the Galaxies") that, according to sad sack Barry, are a message from Silverberg telling us that "science fiction is doomed by its own nature and devices to be a second-rate form of literature." Malzberg goes on to discuss the hopes of the Futurians (that SF could "save the world") and those of "the field's best writers--Kornbluth, Clifton, Budrys, Heinlein" (that SF could "change society" and "alter institutions and personal lives") hopes that were, he suggests, unrealized.

Malzberg points out other SF stories and novels that, he believes, posit that "science fiction is junk" or "contemptible" or mere "comfort," including his own Herovit's World (1973) and Galaxies (1975), Samuel R. Delany's 1967 "Aye, and Gomorrah" and Edmond Hamilton's "The Pro."

(NB:  I think you should buy and read The Engines of the Night, but I have to warn you that my 1984 Bluejay edition, at least, was not properly fact-checked or copy-edited.  In the essay at hand Malzberg tells us Silverberg's "Science Fiction Hall of Fame" appeared in Infinity Three, when in fact it appeared in Infinity Five, and he refers to Silverberg's story "Our Lady of the Sauropods" by the name "Our Lady of the Stegosaurs."  Maybe such errors are rectified in the later enlarged edition from Baen which bears the title Breakfast in the Ruins?)

"The Pro" is a psychological study, its subject Jim Burnett, who, like Hamilton himself, is a science fiction writer with decades of work and a multitude of stories in pulps, paperbacks, and hardcovers behind him.  His son Dan is a member of the two-man crew of the first manned mission to the Moon.  Our story covers the day of the launch and the day preceding, as Burnett wrestles with his emotional responses to his son's participating in this historic, but dangerous, mission: the fear that his son may be killed and guilt that, through his writing, he may be responsible in some way for inspiring the whole space program and encouraging his own son's risky role in it, as well as envy that it is his son, and not he himself, who will be among the first to step on the Moon.  An interesting subtheme is the idea that the writer is a spectator of life, rather than a participant--Henry Miller said something to this effect in that thrilling, shocking, first chapter of Sexus, and it has always stuck with me.

Dan's the pro, not me.  All we writers who daydreamed and babbled and wrote about space, we were just amateurs, but now the real pros have come, the tanned, placid young men who don't babble about space but who go up and take hold of it...

Burnett's powerful but ambivalent feelings--he jocularly brags that he "invented" space travel one minute, then is vigorously denying that his writing and science fiction in general deserve any credit for inspiring the space program the next--feel very authentic.  This is what a real person is like: unsure if he has done the right thing, unsure even what the right thing is, almost always rationalizing, sometimes breaking down from regret or guilt or fear.  An effective story.  "The Pro" first appeared in F&SF (in the 15th Anniversary "All Star Issue") and then in various venues, including T. E. Dikty's Great Science Fiction Stories About the Moon (1967) and Mike Resnick's Inside the Funhouse: 17 SF Stories About SF (1992).

(I feel like I have to put in my two cents here and assert that I certainly do not consider science fiction a failure.  Most importantly, I don't think providing comfort or escape or entertainment is bad, or pointless; why shouldn't people have a little comfort or pleasure in this brief life full of trouble?  Beyond that, I think it obvious now (and almost as obvious in 1980) that SF has been influential, has made a mark on society. Dr. Frankenstein and his monster and Tarzan of the Apes are as central to our culture as Robinson Crusoe and Romeo and Juliet.  King Kong and 2001: A Space Odyssey are considered among the greatest works of cinema.  Popular TV and movie franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Alien are essentially the themes and visions of Edgar Rice Burroughs, E. E. Smith, Edmond Hamilton, A. E. van Vogt and Leigh Brackett projected on a screen, and I think half the TV shows my wife watches are about people with special powers or people living in a post-apocalyptic world. Lovecraft, Burroughs, Blish, Brackett and Bester are enshrined in the Library of America, and Jack Vance gets a glowing write up in the New York Times.  We are told that the people who were responsible for putting a man on the moon were inspired by SF, while libertarian intellectuals like David Friedman report being inspired by Robert Heinlein and statist intellectuals like Paul Krugman announce they were inspired by Isaac Asimov.  This all sounds like success to me.  What would sound like success to the Futurians, to "the field's best writers," to Malzberg himself?  Science fiction triggering the development of a communist utopia?  An anarcho-capitalist utopia?  A culture in which people like Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore and Barry Malzberg get the critical attention Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow get, or an economy in which they get the kind of money Mick Jagger and Johnny Depp get?  Such absurd and extravagant hopes are bound to be dashed.  I think Thomas Disch is much closer to the truth when he claims science fiction has conquered the world than is Malzberg with his lamentations.)

"The Castaway" (1969)

"The Castaway" appeared in SF historian and editor Sam Moskowitz's anthology The Man Who Called Himself Poe, apparently a collection of stories about Edgar Allan Poe or written in his style. Most of the included pieces seem to be reprints, but a few, including Hamilton's contribution, were specifically written for the collection.  "The Castaway" would reappear in the collection What's It Like Out There? as well as The Best of Edmond Hamilton.

"The Castaway" stars Edgar Allan Poe himself.  A woman comes to his office, tries to convince him that she is a traveler from an idyllic far future, inhabiting the body of a 19th-century woman.  She informs Poe that another such far future traveler's mind inhabits his body, but, because he has greater than average intelligence and will, his native mind has dominated the interloping mind instead of vice versa.  The submerged future personality's memories have, however, expressed themselves in his fantastical stories--"The Domain of Arnheim," "The Tale of the Ragged Mountains," and "William Wilson" are specifically mentioned.  The mind supposedly submerged within Poe's brain is that of the future woman's lover, and she tries, through conversation, to get it to emerge so it can return to the future with her, but she is frustrated by Poe's powerful personality, and returns to the future alone, leaving the 19th-century woman she was dominating to wake up in horror in Poe's office, from which she precipitously flees.

Not bad.  I could not muster the energy to read The Ballad of the White Horse, but maybe this week I will read the three Poe stories Hamilton invokes in "The Castaway."

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And so we bid a fond farewell to The Best of Edmond Hamilton and The Best of Leigh Brackett.  I feel like this has been a very enjoyable and profitable project, and I'm happy I have more Brackett and Hamilton stories available to me both on my own bookshelves and at the internet archive.  For a personal look at these two giants of the SF community, their careers and their relationships with people like Ray Bradbury and John W. Campbell, Jr., check out an interview of Hamilton and Brackett conducted in 1976 by Dave Truesdale and Paul McGuire III pointed out to us a few days ago by commenter marzaat, available at the link.

Berserker by Fred Saberhagen (Part 1)

Years ago, while living in New York, the wife and I drove out west to visit in-laws, and in Minnesota I purchased the 1967 paperback edition of Berserker, the first volume in what is perhaps Fred Saberhagen's most famous series.  I read a few of the stories and, not particularly impressed, put the book aside for years.  Recently I have mentioned my decision to give Saberhagen another look, and this week took Berserker off the shelf with the plan of reading it in its entirety and assessing it anew. Today we'll cover the first five of the eleven stories in the 190 page volume.

For Ballantine's Berserker (U5063) Saberhagen added brief introductions to each of the stories that serve to link them together and provide a little background on humanity's colonization of the galaxy and relationship with the peaceful Carmpan, a cerebral race unprepared for the berserker onslaught.

"Without a Thought" (1963)

Originally published with the title "Fortress Ship" in If, "Without a Thought"'s first paragraphs tell us what we need to know about the berserkers: they are huge robots programmed to exterminate all life and equipped with enough firepower to destroy the entire surface of a planet in 48 Earth hours, built by the score a bazillion years ago by now-forgotten warring space empires.  The berzerkers act unpredictably, and thus are difficult for humanity's space navies to outfight.

Two human starships confront a berserker we are told is the size of my home state of New Jersey! If the robot gets past them it will destroy a human-inhabited star system! But it takes three human ships to defeat a berserker, and the third ship is four hours away! Can they stall the berserker until help arrives?

Yes! The berserker is testing out its mind-paralyzing ray! To assess the effectiveness of the ray, it challenges a human pilot to a game of checkers!  But the human figures out how it can fool the berserker into thinking the mind ray is not working--he develops a logical system much like a computer program that teaches his semi-intelligent alien pet how to play checkers!  This buys enough time for the third ship to arrive!

This story is OK, but it feels contrived and gimmicky, like Saberhagen came up with the cool idea of how to teach the pet checkers, and then built a story around this idea. (Can't the berserker just talk to the human to figure out how well the mind ray is working?)  The way the berserker toys with the humans instead of just shooting them down, even though Saberhagen explains that this is research and an effort on the part of the berserker to remain unpredictable, feels like the irrational behavior of a Bond villain who decides to let 007 live after capturing him.  Of course, "Without a Thought" fits well into the SF tradition of stories in which an engineer-type uses science and logic on the fly against the clock to save the day.

"Goodlife" (1963)

This story is much more successful as a human drama and an adventure tale than "Without a Thought."  Two people, a man and a woman, are captured by a berserker when it destroys the ship on which they are passengers.  Inside the berserker they encounter a young man who has lived his entire life inside the genocidal robot!  A test tube baby, created from the DNA of earlier captives, he has never seen a human in the flesh before, and habitually obeys the berserker, who calls him "Goodlife."  (All other life is "badlife.")  While the robot studies his two new captives and plots to breed the female with Goodlife, the man and woman plot to disable the berserker from within and win Goodlife over to their side.

"Goodlife" works as a sort of horror story, as it gives us glimpses of the psychological effect the berserker war has on people and thrusts them into the bizarre environment of the berserker's interior.

"Goodlife" first appeared in Worlds of Tomorrow, which, like If, was edited by Frederick Pohl.  In fact, I think all the stories in Berserker appeared in Pohl-edited magazines published by the Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

"Patron of the Arts" (1965)

This one appeared in If.  A space ship full of famous art works flees the Earth because the berserkers are approaching.  The ship is captured by a berserker and the crew is killed while resisting.  Two passengers who do not resist survive, including a depressed artist whom we are told is weary of life.

The artist tries to paint an abstract representation of the berserker's "essence," a canvas "of discordant and brutal line...aflame with a sense of engulfing menace!"  The artist laments that the berserker will destroy all the famous paintings and sculptures on the ship.  He is then surprised to learn that the berserker is not going to destroy the art--the art is already dead, he is told, and thus destroying it is not part of the berserker mission.  The berserker is not going to kill the artist, either; the robot, detecting the artist's own unhappiness with life and interpreting his painting as praise for the berserkers, sets the artist and the art ship free so that "other life-units can learn from you...."  Shocked, the artist, as soon as he is out of the robot's clutches, rips up the painting of the berserker's essence and announces his intention to become a better person: "I can change.  I am alive." 

Titian - Man with a Glove

The most memorable scene in the story is probably when the artist, thinking the robot is going to destroy the artworks, has to decide whether to let the other human survivor, an ugly young woman, get away in a one-man life boat, or fill up the escape pod with Titian's Man with a Glove, which Wikipedia is telling me takes up about nine square feet.  I always find references to traditional high culture in classic SF, like the Chinese bowl in "--We Also Walk Dogs" by Robert Heinlein or all the references to classical music in Poul Anderson's Avatar interesting.  What is their agenda in mentioning these works of art?  To signal to the reader that "I am sophisticated, even if my work appears in these goofy pulp magazines!"?  To stand against the trend towards abstract art and rock music?  Saberhagen in  "Patron of the Arts" has the artist compare his abstract painting to Titian and feel ashamed of his own work, which he later destroys.  Who appreciates the abstract canvas?  The murderous robot!  Maybe we should see "Patron of the Arts" as a denunciation of modern art as inhuman and an insult to the high tradition of Western art.  

Saberhagen's choice, and the character's choice, of Man with a Glove also prods us to play such parlor games as "If you were on a desert island with one work of art..." or "If only one work of art would survive the apocalypse, what would it be?"

"The Peacemaker" (1964)

"The Peacemaker" appeared in If under the title "The Life Hater."  Like "Without a Thought," it is a story that portrays a single human outwitting a berserker to buy time.  "The Peacemaker" also tries to trick readers and hit us with a surprise ending.

A berserker is bearing down on a human planet on the edge of the galaxy!  The government is scrambling to build warships, but will they have time?  A lone man, "something of a pacifist," goes off in a one-man ship to "talk of peace and love" with the genocide machine!  The berserker and the pacifist have a little debate, in which the human tries to convince the machine that it should not destroy life, but serve it, and serve humanity in particular, humanity being the highest form of life, as evidenced by the complexity of human cells.

The berserker asks for a cell sample, ostensibly to see if human cells really are so complex.  In reality it uses the information from the cell sample to develop a biological warfare agent!  The berserker says it is convinced, and will now serve humankind, and sends the pacifist back to his planet infected with the biowarfare agent, expecting the human to land and infect the entire planet.  But the joke is on the berserker!  The pacifist has cancer, and provided the robot with a cancer-stricken sample, so the infection is curing him instead of killing him!  And his proximity to the berserker allowed him to gather valuable recon that will help the hastily assembled defense destroy the mechanical menace!

This one feels a little contrived, but is OK.

"Stone Place" (1965)       

"Stone Place" was published in If, and is the first berserker story promoted on the magazine's cover.

"Stone Place" is long (40 pages) and at times drags.  For me there is too much political jockeying stuff between various human factions; I generally find court intrigue to be boring.  There is also a prophecy based on mathematical calculations (shades of Asimov's psychohistory); I find that kind of thing tiresome.  This prophecy is pronounced by the first Carmpan to appear in an actual berserker story (the Carmpans have been mentioned in the intros, which are written in the voice of a Carmpan.  So far these intros have been superfluous.)

A large portion of this story was inspired by the Battle of Lepanto of 1571.  In "Stone Place" a dude named Johann, whose brother is the ruler of the Esteel Empire, is given command of a coalition space fleet.  In the 16th century a guy named Don John whose brother was King of Spain was given command of the fleet of the Holy League.  In "Stone Place" one of the space marines is a poet named Mitchell Spain; he loses an arm in the battle.  In the 16th century the great novelist Miguel Cervantes served as a marine at Lepanto, where he lost an arm.  And there are other clear parallels evident to the reader of "Stone Place" who is familiar with the Wikipedia articles on Lepanto and Cervantes.

Some people may enjoy picking out all the elements in the story inspired by the real-life naval campaign, but I find this kind of thing irritating.

There were things I liked about "Stone Place," however.  I liked the scenes in which Mitch Spain and his marines invade berserkers and fight battle droids, and I liked how the berserkers, in an elaborate piece of psychological warfare, brainwash Johann's beautiful fiance Christina de Dulcin (you heard that right, Don Quixote fans) so she will hate Johann and fall in love with Mitch Spain.  

Also noteworthy are the story's religious and philosophical overtones.  The all-seeing, all-knowing Wikipedia tells us Saberhagen was a practicing Catholic. (Has some English prof out there written his or her dissertation on 20th century American Catholic SF writers? It seems a fertile field of inquiry; for one thing you could compare people like Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty, and Saberhagen to the famous British religious writers of speculative fiction like Tolkein, Lewis and G. K. Chesterton, about whom I assume much has already been written.)  Johann is religious, and he is a hero and a decent sincere guy.  His brother the Emperor of Esteel believes in mechanistic determinism, that "everything [is] determined by the random swirls of condensing gasses," and he is a ruthless and decadent sex pervert who finds life empty and contemplates suicide.

Which brings us to determinism (and free will) as a major theme of the story.  There's the aforementioned Carmpan prophecy, and Christina's love for Mitch-- is her love "legit" even if it is the result of the enemy's tinkering with her brain?

The good parts of this story are good, but I think it could have been streamlined a little.

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These stories are all worth reading; though they do have weaknesses, I'm not quite sure why I was so disappointed in them years ago.  Well, tastes and moods change-- now I am looking forward to finishing Berserker and finding the next two or three volumes of these stories in used bookstores.