F&SF July '53: A Derleth & M Reynolds, L Sprague de Camp & F Pratt, J Ciardi, and M St. Clair

In our last episode, we read a stack of stories from an issue of F&SF because the ish included a work of fiction by John Ciardi, famous American man of letters, and today we are doing the same thing.  The Ciardi story we read last time was about a robot who was tired of "living" and so committed suicide, but today's Ciardi story, if the cover illustration for it by Emsh is anything to go by, is going to be life affirming, or at least low key sexalicious!  Let's check out Ciardi's pseudonymous "The Hypnoglyph" along with three other stories from this issue of F&SF edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, one penned by Margaret St. Clair, whose "Change the Sky" we trashed in that last blog post, and two collabs, one by the team of August Derleth and Mack Reynolds and one the team of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt.

"The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" by August Derleth and Mack Reynolds

This is a Solar Pons story.  Solar Pons is a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes concocted by that one-man mass production fiction machine August Derleth, the subject of a vast catalog of stories produced not only by Derleth but an array of other Holmes-loving scribblers.  Personally, I don't really like Sherlock Holmes, but I find Derleth a likable individual and his career curious, and I find even more bewildering the career of the coauthor of "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time," Mack Reynolds, so decided to read this story even if I don't expect to enjoy it.

isfdb lists Lovecraft-correspondent Derleth as first author of "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" while F&SF lists former teenaged-Socialist-Labor-Party demagogue and expert on beer-drinking Reynolds as first author.  The intro to the story in the Derleth collection A Praed Street Dossier indicates that Reynolds came up with the plot and submitted to F&SF a story based on his idea, but Boucher and McComas felt Reynolds' manuscript didn't feel very Holmesian, so Derleth was enlisted to punch the thing up.  The thing was a big enough success that Reynolds and Derleth collaborated on further Solar Pons stories with a science fiction angle.

I find "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" to be a silly joke story full shopworn SF concepts and meta-jokes about genre literature.  Reynolds is renowned as one of the few SF writers to take as one of his main topics political economy, and this is reflected in the fact that the plot of "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" is resolved by tariff legislation.  

A guy in wacky clothes from the 26th century comes to visit Solar Pons and our narrator, Doctor Parker.  He turns out to be a cop from another dimension, and a lot of the story's limp wit relies on the contrast between Pons' acceptance of the man's increasingly incredible assertions and the doctor's bullheaded incredulity.

Future Cop explains that there are an infinite number of universes so everything that could happen has or will happen.  The Moriarty of his dimension has taken to travelling between universes and stealing art treasures, among them Pogo strips.  (Pogo, like Sherlock Holmes, is one of those cultural artifacts that is widely beloved but which leaves me cold.)  So, this cop has come to this dimension to consult with Solar Pons, who in the cop's dimension is merely a fictional character, in hopes that Pons can produce a solution to the problem of inter-dimensional theft.  Pons asks the traveller if there are taxes in his universe, and is told that yes, there are, and the tax laws are punctiliously followed by everybody, even criminals like Moriarty.  So Solar Pons suggests that prohibitive tariffs be levied that will discourage all inter-dimensional commerce.

Additional jokes involve Moriarty and this cop enlisting fictional attorneys like Perry Mason to champion their causes in court and references to whether Solar Pons knows Parker is writing up Pons' adventures or whether Parker has actually begun doing so yet.

To me, this story is a waste of time, but it wasn't painful and I can see that, for what it is, it is competently produced, so that people who love Sherlock Holmes and want to see him and Dr. Watson in outré situations like fighting Count Dracula or Jack the Ripper will enjoy "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time;" the dialogue and atmosphere and all that feels like the Sherlock Holmes stories I read so long ago, and those seeking such an experience will find it here, and I guess in all the Solar Pons stories.

This story that to me seems tolerable and forgettable has been quite successful, appearing in at least three anthologies as well as Derleth and Reynolds collections. 

"The Hypnoglyph" by John Ciardi (as by John Anthony)

Anthologists like August Derleth, Robert P. Mills and Tom Boardman have seen fit to reprint "The Hypnoglyph," and, having read it myself, I agree with their decisions to do so; "The Hypnoglyph" is full of cool SF and horror ideas and I strongly recommend it.

A veteran spaceman invites a younger man to see his collection of valuables brought back from his adventures in deep space.  The most fascinating specimen in the collection is a little item wrought from a wood-like substance; the item features a depression into which fits comfortably the younger man's thumb.  He finds stroking the little item with his thumb pleasurable, even addictive, and the adventurer talks to him about "tropism" and theories about how certain parts of the body enjoy certain types of stimuli and can, in effect, be hypnotized into behaving in certain ways by such stimulation.

The spaceman describes one of his greatest adventures, in which he discovered a quite human-like race, a matriarchy in which women use hypnotic powers, including the "tropism" techniques the spaceman has just hinted at, to dominate their men folk.  Ciardi does a good job of titillating the (male) reader's desire for and fear of women by suggesting these alien women have extreme control over their bodies that makes them capable of providing men with terrific sexual pleasure and our eager to have sex with human men but at the same time indicating that these women are obese, hairless, lazy, callous and cruel manipulators who treat the native men like disposable slaves--in fact, these alien women are champing at the bit to breed with human males because their ill treatment of the men of their own race has sapped those men's will to live and resulted in a radical numerical imbalance between the sexes.

The veteran space man and the younger man engage in a sort of psychological duel; will the younger man be able to blackmail the wealthy older man because the adventurer has broken laws that require the discovery of alien civilizations be reported to the authorities?, or will the older man, who it turns out has gone native, trick the young man into becoming a sexual slave of the obese and hairless alien matriarchs?

A great story that, with its mix of sexual fascination with the exotic and fear of the special powers and monstrous practices attributed to natives sort of reminds you of stories of European sailors interacting with tribes of primitive islanders who may be beautiful and sexually open but also might be engaged in voodoo, human sacrifice, head hunting, cannibalism, and God knows what.  "The Hypnoglyph" is a success that makes you wish Ciardi had written more SF and horror stories.

"The Untimely Toper" by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

Way back in 2014 we read a Gavagan's Bar story, of which there are like 29 or 30, and today we read a second Gavagan's Bar story.  At this rate we'll finish up with the Gavagan's Bar series during our rice break in the Chinese Communist Party labor camp orbiting Ganymede.

"The Untimely Toper" is a tedious and silly joke story that is a little confusing.  It seems an obnoxious guy, Pearce, comes to Gavagan's but rarely, when he has pissed off the people at his regular hang out.  Pearce is at Gavagan's one night when a bat appears inside the establishment; Pearce kills the bat.  Another habitue of the bar, maybe a vampire or a wizard or something, is offended by the killing of the bat, perhaps his pet or friend or something, and afflicts Pearce with a ridiculous curse the workings of which I didn't quite understand.  When Pearce goes into the men's room, he goes to another dimension or is trapped in time or something; other people go in and out of the men's room and do not see Pearce in there, but hours or days later Pearce emerges from the rest room thinking only a few minutes have passed.  The bartender figures out that the duration of Pearce's disappearances is correlated with his level of intoxication, and so tricks the man into drinking a hangover cure, which sobers him and, I guess, keeps him from returning to Gavagan's from wherever it is he goes after he goes to the bathroom to vomit.

I don't get it, and I don't want it; the jokes are not funny, the characters' motivations are mysterious, and the mechanics of the magic don't make sense to me.  Thumbs down!

As with the Derleth Solar Pons stories, I suspect the appeal of the Gavagan's Bar stories for their fans is the style and atmosphere.  Such fans are numerous enough that Gavagan's Bar collections have been published in multiple editions, and "The Untimely Toper" is a good enough example of the species that Boucher and McComas included it in a Best from F&SF volume.

"Judgment Planet" by Margaret St. Clair (as by Idris Seabright)

This is a far better story than the last St. Clair thing we read, the annoying and pointless "Change the Sky."  The images to be found in "Judgment Planet" constitute a contribution to the story rather than a distraction, the pace is quick, the psychology is believable and the travails of the character have some emotional effect on the reader.  As for the plot, it is just OK--"Judgment Planet" is one of those stories like Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" or William Golding's Pincher Martin in which a dying man hallucinates salvation as well as yet another story in which goody goody aliens make us humans look bad by contrast.

You know those guys who fall in love with some foreign culture or society, Japan or Ancient Rome or the Soviet Union or whatever, and don't want to hear criticism of or think about apparent misdeeds of their beloved, like the Rape of Nanking or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or whatever?  (I knew a multitude of these guys in grad school--hell, I maybe was one of these guys.)  The protagonist of "Judgment Planet" is one of those guys.  He is a scholar of the future of interstellar human civilization, and St. Clair hints that this civilization punishes dissent.  Before the rise of Earth's space empire, another race colonized multiple planets, the Elea; Elean civilization collapsed long ago, but left behind artifacts of great beauty that suggest the Elea were a people who loved freedom.

As the story begins, our hero is all alone on a pretty desolate planet far from his ship and has just been injured and dropped his food supplies down an unscalable cliff.  Oops.  Why is he in this sticky situation?  Some other scholar has claimed that this here planet was the planet where the Elea exiled their dissenters, suggesting the Elea are not the goody goodies our guy thinks they were, so he came to explode this theory.  Unfortunately, it kind of looks like that theory was accurate.

Our guy suddenly finds a door into an underground complex where he discovers preserved food and evidence that this planet was not a place of exile for dissenters but actually a comfortable quarantine for individuals afflicted with a plague.  The Elea were as good as he had hoped!  He spends weeks exploring the place, but then comes our twist ending.  The complex is just a dream, but the Elea really were goody goodies--this planet has a powerful hypno apparatus that detects when you are going to die and fills your brain with dreams that ease the pain of your last moments, dreams that validate your life and beliefs.  The scholar can die knowing that the people he worships are beyond reproach and worthy of that worship--only the best sort of people would ease the pain of the dying in this way.

The plot sounds a little lame, like childish wish fulfillment goop (is this story supposed to hearten F&SF's leftist readership by implying that all the crummy things people say about the USSR aren't true?) when you just describe it baldly as I have, but the style and pacing and all that are good, with real suspense and a believable psychology at the center of the story, so I enjoyed it.        
 

Seeing as "Judgment Planet" is legitimately effective, it is odd to learn it has never appeared in an actual book, just been reprinted in various foreign editions of F&SF, especially when you know an aggravating bore like "Change the Sky" was the title story of a St. Clair collection.  Again we see I'm not on the same wavelength as the people who edit SF books.    

Left: UK     Right: Australia

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The Derleth and Reynolds collaboration, and the de Camp and Pratt as well, don't scratch any itch I happen to have, but their authors have probably succeeded in their goals and pleased their fans.  I was much more impressed with the Ciardi and the St. Clair, which, instead of showcasing lame jokes, use interesting science fiction concepts, generate suspense, and portray real human emotions.

More 1950s magazine stories when next we meet!

F&SF March '55: M St. Clair, J Blish, F Brown & J Ciardi

On December 22nd, one of my clever and helpful commentors reminded us that John Ciardi, likely best known for translating Dante, published some science fiction stories.  One of these appeared in the March 1955 issue of F&SF, edited by Anthony Boucher.  We are already familiar with some of the contents of this ish, including Robert Bloch's "I Do Not Love Thee, Dr. Fell" and Avram Davidson's "The Golem,"  but there is a ton of stuff in the issue new to us worth looking at besides Ciardi's contribution, so today we'll also be checking out stories by Margaret St. Clair, James Blish, and Fredric Brown as well as the Ciardi.  I'm reading all these stories in a scan of the original magazine. 

"Change the Sky" by Margaret St. Clair

Much of St. Clair's work appeared under the pen name Idris Seabright, and "Change the Sky" does so here.  Boucher's intro to "Change the Sky" quotes Judith Merril, who praises "Seabright" for "undercutting the pretensions of her fellow humans, and for silhouetting against an alien background the most human of our weaknesses."  Is this story going to be some kind misanthropic indulgence in rank snobbery?  Well, let's not reject this story before we have even read it--maybe Boucher and Merril are mischaracterizing or exaggerating.  (I keep telling myself to not read an intro until after I have read the story, the way I don't read the tendentious label next to a painting at the art museum until I have looked at the picture and formed my own opinion of it, but I keep reading these damned intros anyway.)

"Change the Sky" is a long tedious story of 12 or 13 pages, but at least it doesn't actually strike me as a hammer blow against the human race and people's pretensions or weaknesses.  I would describe "Chaneg the Sky" as the record of a course of the psychotherapy of the interstellar future, neither particularly snobby nor misanthropic, but a total bore.

Much of St. Clair's text is given over to pointless surreal or psychedelic images, descriptions of things the protagonist sees but doesn't really interact with.  One reason this story is a drag is that the main character doesn't perform many actions or make many decisions; he just kind of witnesses natural phenomena and elaborate but sterile artifacts, and has emotional reactions to them that are quite subdued. 

That bland and flat main character is Pendleton, the son of a rich family of loners.  Our guy was born on a space ship and has never had a real home, spent his life as a traveler crisscrossing the galaxy, seeking something, he is not quite sure what, his entire life.  His father before him was on a similar quixotic quest, and boy and teen Pendleton accompanied Dad on his useless explorations, learning all the ins and ourts of being a space man along the way.  As the story begins, Pendleton, now I guess middle-aged, knows his health is such that he won't be able to participate in space travel any more, so he has come seeking the services of an artist, a man who makes artificial worlds which his clients can visit or even, perhaps, inhabit.  These artificial worlds are kind of like hypnosis, I guess--St. Clair doesn't bother to make them logically comprehensible to the reader, so they function in the story like magic or hallucinations or drug dreams.

Pendleton wants the artist to make him an artificial world that will satisfy him, the kind of world he has been seeking, even though he isn't really sure what he wants the world to be like.

"What I’m hunting is a place that’s so beautiful, or so winning, or so right, that I’ll feel, ‘This is the place in the whole universe that I love best. This is home.’ ”

The artist asks Pendleton to describe the most beautiful and most interesting and most etc. planets he has seen, and Pendleton complies; one planet had lots of lightning, another had lots of aromatic flowers, and so forth.  The descriptions of these planets are mind-numbingly boring, a list of vapid and vague attributes, an absolute snoozefest.

"Genlis is the most beautiful, by far,” Pendleton answered. “It’s a water world, with deep green, swelling, foam-laden seas, and a sky so intensely blue that it’s almost purple. On the islands — there are a few islands — tall graceful trees like palms lean into the wind, and the perfume of the flowers is so sweet it makes you dizzy. There are flowers everywhere. They say that no matter how far you get from land on Genlis, you can always smell the flowers. The air is soft and yet fresh, and when the wind blows against your face or body, you feel your skin tingle with delight....Nothing could be more beautiful than Genlis."      

Most of the story is like this, sterile descriptions of places where nobody does anything or experiences or expresses any deep emotions.

The artist makes the artificial world, and Pendleton enters it, and it is just a series of boring bubbles in which, his brain addled, Pendleton moves from bubble to bubble to bubble until he turns around and travels back through all the bubbles to real life.  He complains to the artist, who sends him to a different artist.  This second artist creates an artificial world in which Pendleton is a child again, flying around the galaxy with his father, who is teaching his son how to be a space man while searching for evidence to substantiate his absurd theory about a probably fictional alien race.  Pendleton seems to forget he is an adult whose parents have died, so it looks like he is going to disappear into this fantasy world for the rest of his life.

I guess the twist ending or point of the story is that the most beautiful things in life are the processes of education and exploration and the place you feel most at home is wherever your attentive family is.  Or that the artificial worlds are a trap?  Is Pendleton going to survive in this artificial world--can he eat and drink there?    

Slow and boring, an aimless narrative punctuated by long lifeless scenes that add nothing to the plot and nothing valuable to the atmosphere, a story with no emotion for a dozen pages and then sappiness on the final page--thumbs down for "Change the Sky."  Maybe this story is supposed to be boring, maybe it really is an attack on the human race's pretensions and weaknesses, depicting how bogus psychoanalysis is, how the people who seek psychoanalysis are empty souls who want other people to fill them and how these other people are in fact not real healers but just exploiters.

"Change the Sky" is actually the title story of a 1974 St. Clair collection, so I guess there are those who find it to be an above average story of St. Clair's, or at least one that is representative of her virtues as a writer.  A 1968 French anthology included the story, as does a 2022 US anthology of mid-1950s SF by women.

"The Book of Your Life" by James Blish

Here we have a horror story about two of our favorite things--books and creepy sex!  

Petrie Mapes is a publisher who lives with his attractive wife on Long Island.  He is obsessed with sex, but has a sad perversion or dysfunction or maybe just a kink, whatever you want to call it: he finds real sex disappointing, and much of his sexual life revolves around pornography and erotica.  "The Book of Your Life" is full of literary references, and Blish mentions Henry Miller, Frank Harris, Ben Hecht and Jack Woodford and talks about how Mapes hires writers and artists to craft him unique one-of-a-kind fiction and drawings of an erotic nature.*  (Blish also engages in some literary criticism of Ellery Queen, which some may find interesting.)

*This whole story may be inspired by Henry Miller.  Miller and his circle, Anais Nin among them, wrote little one-of-a-kind porno stories for money for a perverted guy in the book biz--see the preface to Nin's Delta of Venus--and the theme of "The Book of Your Life," that reading and writing are not life but an escape from life or an obstacle to living life, is a theme of Miller's work--see Sexus, Chapter 1: "No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in."

Mapes comes into Manhattan on business with some frequency and has an odd, tense, relationship with a bookseller there, who may perhaps be the Devil.  The plot of "The Book of Your Life" revolves around how this bookseller has a huge book, something the size of an unabridged dictionary, that has magical powers.  Over a thousand pages of tiny type, the book is comprehensive, including, for every possible reader, a scene that perfectly manifests the deepest desire or foremost obsessions of that reader, and when you open the book at random for the very first time, the scene tailored to your peculiar overriding interest will be what you find and it will shake you to your core!  You can read the entire rest of the book, but never will you be so stirred.  The bookseller rents out this colossal sui generis tome to people, and Mapes has possession of it over the course of Blish's story, and we observe as the book has a malign effect on Mapes and those in Mapes' orbit.  

A good story that addresses the theme that life is a journey about pursuing goals and if you achieve your goals, if your desires are fulfilled, you life will lose its savor.  The idea that pornography is more exciting than actual sex, and consumption of pornography can damage your real-life relationships, feels topical in 2025, when I am writing this, and maybe will continue to feel topical in 2026, when you are reading it.  But perhaps the most striking thing about "The Book of Your Life" is its suggestion that reading books (or watching TV or otherwise consuming media) is not really living, but just a substitute for living, and people who devote their time to books are throwing their lives away, that media is consuming them rather than vice versa.  Ouch! 

It looks like "The Book of Your Life" has not been reprinted beyond a translation in the French edition of F&SF, which is strange, as the story is compelling and very meta, being about genre literature and the people who produce and consume it.  An overlooked gem!

"Millennium" by Fredric Brown

This is one of Brown's one page stories, what fans of the genre, of which many consider Brown the master, call "short shorts" or "vignettes" or "vinnies."  I have read a bunch of these Brown vinnies (among them, "Too Far," "Expedition," "Abominable," "Blood" "Sentence," "Daisies" and "Politeness") and in general I find them a waste of time.

In this one, Satan is sitting in his office, one by one interviewing people who want to sell their souls for a wish, as he does every day.  As Satan has feared for so long, one of the soul sellers makes a wish that puts Satan out of business, the wish that ends, or reduces substantially, the amount of evil and unhappiness on Earth.  The way the wish is worded is a little oblique and I had to ponder it before I really understood it; maybe this suggests this vinny is more sophisticated than are many others of its ilk?  (Or just reminds us how dim I am?)  I'll call this vignette "acceptable."

"Millennium" has appeared in several Brown collections in four or five different languages, as well as one of those anthologies that has Isaac Asimov's name on it above those of hard-working anthologists, in this case Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh.

"The Bone that Seeks" by John Ciardi 

Here's the thing that brought us to the March 1955 F&SF, a story attributed to "John Anthony," though Boucher in his intro tells you it is a pen name and offers clues as to the real name of the author.  As with Blish's "The Book of Your Life," isfdb suggests that the only place "The Bone that Seeks" was ever reprinted was in the French edition of F&SF.  When they aren't suppressing the free speech of their hottest actresses or sautéing slugs and toads, maybe the Frenchies know what they are about?

Maybe, maybe not.  "The Bone that Seeks" is an OK story, sentimental and histrionic, that relies for much of its oomph on a poem by Archibald MacLeish (the title is a line from the poem.)  

It is over a million years in the future.  The human race has endured, and many of the features of life we are familiar with, desks, government, reports, etc., are still important components of Earth society.  The current form of government approaches its one millionth anniversary, and as part of the celebration the government wants the oldest robot, a robot that was built and operational before the current government was founded, to play a major role in the festivities.  But looking through its old memory banks has inspired the million-year-old robot to feel tired and desire death.  A government bureaucrat tries to badger the robot into following orders, but it has developed an independent intelligence over the millennia and it plays sad music, recites the MacLeish poem "What Riddle Asked the Sphinx?", looks at the sunset, and turns itself off. 

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Brown's story is about a guy who risks his soul to make the universe a better place, but all the other stories we read from this magazine today are absolute downers.  A robot who wants to commit suicide?  A pervert who risks his soul using a magic book to destroy other people?  A guy who feels like he has no home and, in his search for the place where he belongs, loses himself in an artificial world?  Happy New Year, everybody!