Way Out stories from the early '50s by Alfred Coppel, Dave Dreyfoos and Poul Anderson

We're going Way Out!  (That's where the fun is!)  In our last episode we read the first four stories from Belmont's 1963 anthology of early 1950s stories, Way Out, and today we finish up with the last three stories, contributed by Alfred Coppel, Dave Dreyfoos, and Grand Master Poul Anderson.

"Blood Lands" by Alfred Coppel (1952)

Back in late 2015 I read a short story by Coppel about which I had both good and bad things to say.  That story's tone also reminded me of the movie Gremlins. Let's see if this story reminds me of anything.

The galaxy is full of planets colonized by Earthlings centuries ago which were then lost, so that the colonists' descendants have fallen into savagery or barbarism.  When these planets are rediscovered by the space empire their inhabitants are ferried back to civilized worlds to work in factories!  

Kenyon and two other men are on just such a mission, and have landed their starship on an island on a planet covered by ocean to collect the human tribe there, by force if necessary.  This island is covered with "trees" that look like giant feathers or plumes, and when Kenyon is taken back into the deepest part of this "forest" by a beautiful woman, he learns the horrible truth: the island is a kaiju-sized monster and the primitive humans live as its parasites!  After the monster devours the starship and its three-man crew, the primitives will feed off their Earthling blood by sucking at the "ground."  

Like H. B. Fyfe's story in Way Out, this is an anti-imperialist or anti-colonialist story (it sounds like the Earthling space empire abandoned the colonists 400 years ago and the monster came from another world to support them), but mostly it is a pedestrian horror story.  It lacks the Fyfe story's engaging character and at-times surprising plot.  "Blood Lands" also doesn't make any sense.  There is no hunting or agriculture on the island, so the humans have to suck the blood of the giant monster to live, but what does the monster eat?  Starships don't come by every day, do they?

Barely acceptable.

"Blood Lands" is one of the many stories in Way Out to first appear in Dynamic Science Fiction--in fact, the cover illustration of the December 1952 magazine depicts Elyra and the plume forest, though it makes no sense for her to have a space helmet on. "Blood Lands" is also one of the few stories in Way Out to be reprinted after 1963--Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg selected it for 1993's 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories.

Is it good?  No.                                                     Is it way out?  A little.

"Blunder Enlightening" by Dave Dreyfoos (1952)

Dreyfoos's name joins Coppel's, del Rey's and Fyfe's on the cover of Dynamic's December '52 issue, but who is Dreyfoos?  It seems that he was a California lawyer and hospital administrator who wrote a score of SF stories in the 1950s after serving in the Pacific in the Second World War.  Let's sample this gentleman's work.

Sam and his pregnant wife Sally are sociologists left alone on Altair 3 to study and make friends with the natives.  The natives are three-foot tall people with four legs and two arms who make elaborate abstract cliff-paintings.  This bland and inoffensive 23-page story is all about how the natives don't realize the humans are intelligent beings and so ignore them, and how Sam, through his blunderings, changes their minds and even gets them to help him when an accident destroys the humans' food supply.

The intellectual core of the story is the question: how would you distinguish between social insects like ants, who work together and build things but have no intelligence or will and merely act on instinct and primitive drives, and intelligent willful beings like humans, if you were from another planet?  The humans can tell the Altairians are intelligent because they create art, and the Altairians eventually learn the humans are intelligent when Sam makes stupid mistakes.

Competent.

Is it good?  Marginally.                                              Is it way out?  No.

"Honorable Enemies" by Poul Anderson (1951)

"Honorable Enemies" first appeared in an issue of Future Science Fiction; we've already read a story from that issue, Milton Lesser's "A as in Android."

"Honorable Enemies" is one of Anderson's Dominic Flandry stories; Flandry lives in the same universe as those businesspeople with whom we are familiar, Nicholas Van Rijn and David Falkayn, but in a later time period, and he's not a merchant, but a public employee!

The Terran Empire of four million suns is old, unambitious, decadent, just trying to maintain the comfortable status quo.  The Terrans are currently in a cold war with the young and ambitious empire of the green and scaly people of Merseia, who hope to bring the entire galaxy under their rule.  Lying between these two great space empires is the small empire of the blue-skinned people of Betelgeuse; the Betelgeusians are wealthy and have a powerful space navy, and if the Merseians can win them to their side, the Merseians will feel free to turn the cold war hot and launch a direct attack on the human empire. So, the Betelgeuse system is crawling with Terran and Merseian diplomats and spies, trying to sway the locals to see things their way.

Among the Terran delegation at court are two ace intelligent agents, Flandry and a beautiful woman, Aline Chang-Lei.  Their primary foe is Aycharaych, one of the bird-people of the Chereion system (the Chereionites are members of the Merseian empire--all three of the empires in the story are multi-species polities.)  Flandry, who comes across as amoral and ruthless, tries to burgle the birdman's rooms, and then tries to murder him when no witnesses are around, but his schemes are foiled, because Aycharaych can read minds!

Things are looking bleak for the humies--the birdman is bribing and blackmailing so many people at the Betelgeuse court that it looks like the locals will ally with the Merseians any day now.  But Aline Chang-Lei figures out how to save the day for humanity--she tricks Flandry into drinking a drug that makes him believe everything he hears, then tells him of a desperate Terran plan to conquer the Betelgeuse system by force.  This is a ruse, but because Flandry believes it, when the birdman reads it in Flandry's mind the Merseians believe it, and act in such a way that it looks like they are trying to take over Betelgeuse by force.  This, of course, inspires the Betelgeuse government to side with Earth and send all the Merseians packing.

An entertaining story, with traditional SF elements like strange aliens and monsters, telepathy, various types of ray guns, violence (the courtiers go hunting flying dragons in little jets and there is also a sword fight), and a plot resolved via outsmarting people and using fancy technology.  Anderson's characters are also interesting.  The villain (as the title hints) is not only more competent but more honorable than our hero, and Chang-Lei is a sort of tragic figure--she is in love with Flandry, and when she gives him the drug she not only tricks him into believing the misinformation meant to fool the Merseians, but tricks him into thinking he is in love with her so he will act like her boyfriend for a few days, including having sex with her.

I'm now looking forward to reading more Flandry stories.    

Anderson's Flandry tales have been enduringly popular, and "Honorable Enemies" has been reprinted many times, usually behind covers which emphasize the idea that Flandry is pretty handy with the ladies!

Is it good?  Yes.                                              Is it way out?  No.

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So we bid a fond farewell to Way Out.  Only one of the stories is actually "way out," the very first, Milton Lesser's "Ennui"--the rest are pretty traditional SF fare.  However, I quite enjoyed the Anderson and the Fyfe, two solid humans-at-odds-with-aliens stories, and the Bailey future detective story and the Dryfoos future-social-scientist-meeting-aliens story had their high points.  Not a bad anthology at all.  Whatever their idiosyncrasies, the Belmont people are still on my good side!

My Lord Barbarian by Andrew J. Offutt

"Sword-armed men...barbarians indeed!  But all of us, not just we of Branarius, so long called the Barbarian World.  Sword-armed men, Jheru, concerned with their mail-coats, counseled by so-called wise men called Elders--for we are really stupid men indeed--living under ages-old lights and riding from world to world in ships built in the mists of pasts. Ships whose mechanisms we understand not at all."

Followers of my thrilling twitter feed may recall that I have been buying up Andrew J. Offutt paperbacks.  Well, here's one with a title that makes you wonder why Fabio isn't on the cover: My Lord Barbarian, from 1977.  Maybe my copy has suffered sun damage, or maybe it's because I'm sitting under a fluorescent light, but it looks, to me, like our hero has a green face and purple hair.  Maybe he's some kind of human-alien hybrid?  We see those from time to time in our science-fiction wanderings, don't we?

Our tale takes place in the future, in a region of space colonized by Earth in a distant age.  For centuries now the planets here, forming the Empire of Seven Worlds, have been cut off from the rest of the universe, and while the spaceships of the Ancients and a small number of other artifacts still operate, for generations people have been reduced to writing with quill pens, fighting with swords and riding horses around.

As our story begins, Valeron of planet Brasarius has just pacified and united that previously war torn and anarchic world, most primitive of the Seven, making himself King of Brasarius.  The Emperor of the Seven Worlds invites Valeron to the capital planet, Carmeis; he thinks Valeron, a fellow fighting man, would make a great husband for his daughter, Princess Aleysha, and a great heir to the imperial throne. The bookish prime minister, Darcus Cannu, however, begs to differ, and when Valeron arrives at the palace the PM murders the Emperor and has Valeron framed for the crime!

The slender and sexy princess, now Empress (though merely a figurehead under the thumb of Darcus Cannu, who even has the temerity to start planning their wedding!), met barbaric hunk Valeron when she was 13 and has been nursing a crush on that heroic slab of beefcake for the six years he's been away unifying Brasarius by cracking skulls, so she helps Valeron escape the dungeon.  Then Aleysha's curvaceous and sexy slave girl, Jheru, helps sneak Valeron into Aleysha's bedroom (where he relieves Aleysha of the burden of her virginity) and then helps him steal a spaceship and get the hell off Carmeis.  While elegant Aleysha's aid came in the form of her slipping him a dagger through the bars of his cell, lusty Jheru gets her hands dirty in hand-to-hand fights at Valeron's side.

Valeron and Jheru travel to one of the other of the seven planets, where a council of the kings of all the lesser planets is convened.  Our heroes convince the council of Darcus Cannu's guilt, and Valeron and Jheru then lead them and their armies to Carmeis to overthrow and punish Darcus.  All you due process types out there will be happy to know Darcus is afforded a trial before the council, where he gets a chance to use his silver tongue to explain all his good selfless reasons for murdering the Emperor and putting the blame on war hero Valeron.

This is an entertaining adventure story with all the elements we've seen a million times: guys (and Jheru) swordfighting, getting captured, escaping, putting on the uniforms of the enemy to sneak around the palace, plotting sneak attacks and pincer moves, etc.  One way Offutt adds some interest is by introducing some superficial but colorful characters, like the Elders who worship the god "Siense" and try to figure out the lost technology of the Ancients, the hairless savages known as the Sungoli who formerly terrorized Brasarius but now follow Valeron, and the various Kings of the Seven planets, one fat, one a religious fanatic, one a tested fighting man who earned his throne on the battlefield much as Valeron did, etc.  Offutt tries to create the impression of a vast and diverse world with a small number of short strokes.

As the title and cover illustration hint will be the case, and the ad copy on the first page promises (for some reason Del Rey decided to forgo inclusion of glowing blurbs from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times on this page), love and sex ("ROMANCE!") play a prominent part in My Lord Barbarian.  We learn early on that Valeron has had multitudes of women and has left a trail of illegitimate children (fifteen according to rumor) behind him during his campaigns across Brasarius. Offutt expends lots of ink describing Aleyasha's and Jheru's bodies, how their breasts move when they brush their hair and so forth, and while there are no explicit sex scenes, there is a lot of aggressive, flirtatious, S&M-tinged play between Valeron and Jheru; the barbarian warlord smacks her bottom, twists her arm painfully while they act out a kidnapping, and jovially talks about raping her, treatment Jheru seems to relish.  (Could Offutt have been inspired by, or be catering to the fans of, John Norman's Gor series?)  One of the plot's threads is how Valeron is torn by the choice between Empress Alyesha, who represents ultimate power and civilization, and Jheru, who, like him, is boisterous and lusty, and more than willing to slip into a suit of mail, slap on a helmet and fight the Empire's enemies up close and personal.  In the last pages of the book Valeron passes up the chance to marry Aleyasha and become Emperor and instead returns to Bresarius with Jheru as his bride.

The contrast between barbarism and civilization and the uneasy relationship between the barbaric and the civilized are the main themes of the book.  Valeron, like Tarzan, was raised in an alien and savage environment (by the Sungoli), and after mastering that environment left it for a more sophisticated milieu, where he again emerged as a leader, in part because of the skills he learned from his adoptive barbaric culture. Valeron is motivated by a need to prove to sophisticated people, and to himself, that, despite his upbringing among the lowest savages on the most primitive of the seven planets, he is as good as any civilized man.  One of the novel's plot threads concerns the attitude of the Empire's leaders towards Valeron; Darcus Cannu commits the crimes he does because he thinks a barbarian unfit for the role of Emperor, and while Valeron wins over the kings of the five civilized planets and they accept his leadership of the army that overthrows Darcus Cannu, there is always an undercurrent of skepticism and fear about the unsophisticated, almost alien, Valeron, and the other kings are relieved when he declines the Imperial throne.

Paralleling how he contrasts barbarism and civilization is how Offutt presents a contrast between the low technology of the Empire of Seven Worlds and the high technology of their ancestors.  Some of the most memorable scenes of the novel concern Valeron and Darcus Cannu's explorations of the robot- and computer-inhabited elevators and control rooms that lie beneath the palace on Carmeis; they are the first to tread those corridors since the Days of Wrath that led to the collapse of the ancient technological civilization centuries ago.  Offutt paints a mixed picture of high technology; the characters all marvel at it and many covet the advantages of mastering more of the Ancients' knowledge and equipment, but most are aware that it was just this technology that destroyed the Ancient civilization, and when Darcus Cannu attempts to defeat Valeron with advanced weaponry he has found beneath the palace, it backfires on him.  As the novel ends it is clear that under Empress Aleyasha (who seems slated to marry a king who is uniquely knowledgeable and enthusiastic about Ancient technology) that the Empire will embark on a campaign of major technological and societal change.

My Lord Barbarian is a diverting sword and planet story I can recommend to fans of the genre.  In his dedication Offutt invokes the names of Poul Anderson (remember when I detected similarities to Anderson's work in Offutt's Chieftain of Andor?), Leigh Brackett and Alfred Coppel.  My Lord Barbarian actually reminded me quite a bit of Philip Jose Farmer's The Green Odyssey: both are "swashbuckling" tales set on planets littered with mysterious high-tech artifacts and both feature capable female characters who save the hero's life as well as themes of sexual dominance.

Finally, I know all of you are wondering about Valeron's hair.  Well, on page 72, Offutt does refer to  Valeron's "mass of long purple-red hair"!  It looks like Boris Vallejo actually read the book!  (I still can't figure out the green face, though.)

Four Stories from the Sept 1951 Planet Stories

Back on November 11 of 2015, SFFAudio tweeted about four stories from the famous SF magazine Planet Stories that have fallen into the public domain and are available as PDFs at the SFFAudio website.  I read this tweet as I sat in the Toyota Corolla, in a dark parking lot, waiting for the wife, and all four of these stories actually sounded pretty good.  So this week I directed the ol' browser to SFFAudio and read these four tales that first appeared in the fall of 1951, those unhappy and happy days when UN forces were defending South Korea from the commies and I Love Lucy first hit the airwaves.

"Last Night Out" by "Lee Gregor"

Lee Gregor is a pseudonym used by Milton A. Rothman, a physicist and active SF fan who wrote a number of SF stories as well as books on science.

"Last Night Out" is about prejudice and race relations.  In the future the human race is in contact with dozens of intelligent alien species, and relations are more or less cordial.  But when a war erupts with a new and mysterious alien civilization, relations have to get a whole lot closer in a hurry.

The best part about "Last Night Out" is how our Terran hero, Grey, and our furry Canopan hero, 647-B-43C (AKA "Joe"), work together.  Joe's people have powerful psychic abilities, but their tentacles are not very good at using tools.  Together, Joe and Grey make a perfect technician: when a piece of machinery malfunctions, Joe can look "inside" the machine and immediately see what is wrong, and guide Grey in quickly and efficiently repairing it.  Obviously, fixing your space battleship fast can be the difference between life and death in a space war, and human-Canopan teams like Grey and Joe's are a vital component of the war effort.

Being in constant telepathic rapport, and holding hands all the time, Grey describes his relationship with Joe as much like that of a husband and wife.  Joe's powers even enable Grey to better enjoy music.  But most humans find Canopans disgusting and/or scary, making downtime on Earth stressful or even dangerous as Grey and Joe are confronted by racist slurs and angry mobs.

Anti-racist stories and stories about the value of cooperation can be sappy or schmaltzy, but Rothman manages to give his story an edge and a layer of ambiguity. At the end of the story we learn that the Canopans can use their psychic powers to instantly kill humans, and perhaps even control them like puppets, and we are left to consider the possibility that the Canopans are stealthily making us their slaves!

Pretty good!

"Tydore's Gift" by Alfred Coppel

I don't think I've read anything by Coppel before, but he appears to have been a prolific writer of short stories as well as a successful novelist inside and outside SF, with quite a few dramatic love stories and espionage thrillers to his credit.

"Tydore's Gift" has a good atmosphere and good images, but the ending is too gimmicky and silly.

The last few Martians are decadent sophisticates, living alone in towers, reading their esoteric books, admiring their intricate art, playing their subtle unharmonic music. Tydore is just such a Martian.  Morely is an Earthman, a spy, drawn by rumors that Tydore has built an atomic rifle that will give Morely's (unspecified) country an edge in the current war on Earth.  Morely pretends to be a student come seeking Tydore's vast and ancient wisdom.  For his part Tydore is elaborately polite and welcoming, while at the same time feeling utter contempt for Morely and all Earthmen, who to his eyes are interloping barbarians.  I guess Coppel is evoking the relationship between the tricky and sophisticated Byzantines and the rude Crusaders, or between calm mystical Asians and impulsive materialistic Westerners.  (We see this in pop culture from time to time--Dante and Spielberg's Gremlins comes to mind.  Earlier this year I saw Gremlins for the first time in decades and was surprised at how naked and relentless was its attack on American culture and society.)

The short (less than four pages) story works well until the end.  Morley gets his hands on the atomic rifle but when he tries to murder Tydore with it he learns, too late, that Tydore crafted it so the muzzle looks like the stock and vice versa.  Morley shoots himself to death.  

Good in a lot of ways, but a disappointment at the end.

"The Watchers" by Roger Dee

Dee only has one novel listed at isfdb, but many short stories, most in the 1950s.

This one is even shorter and more gimmicky than the Coppel, and lacks the Coppel's rich atmosphere and settings.

A writer/researcher has figured out that the Earth has been infiltrated by aliens in disguise, and that these aliens have been manipulating human history.  That is why the Earth has such a history of war and crime, he thinks.  But when, gun in hand, he confronts one of the aliens, he learns the unhappy truth: the aliens are here trying to manipulate us into being good.  Thousands of races throughout the galaxy have been guided by the agents of the Kha Niish, been turned away from violence and set on the societal course to a "benign culture."  Humans, however, are far too violent and have signally rejected the urgings of the Kha Niish agents, and so they are on their way back into space.  Incorrigible humankind will no doubt exterminate itself in a short time.  After the alien missionaries leave, the researcher uses his gun to commit suicide.

Feels like filler--thumbs down.

"Vengeance on Mars!" by "D. B. Lewis"

"D. B. Lewis" is a pseudonym used by Jerome Bixby.  Bixby is the author of the famous story "It's a Good Life," immortalized in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame and as an episode of The Twilight Zone TV series.  He also contributed to the Star Trek TV show and the film Fantastic Voyage, which features much-beloved stars Raquel Welch and Donald Pleasance.

I thought the Mars in "Tydore's Gift" was based on the Near or Far East; I think the Mars in "Vengeance on Mars" is based on the American West and colonial Africa in the late 19th century.  Enterprising Earthmen have come to Mars and set up farms, with the natives (whom they call "redboys") as their field hands.  Earthers more interested in a fast buck than the hard work of building up a farm make money by looting Martian temples.  This pisses off the redboys, and, because the colonial government won't solve the problem (they are regularly bribed by the looters!) the human ranchers have banded together to exact some frontier justice from one looter. The looter is holed up in a temple, a veritable fortress, and if the farmers don't get him out of there and "take care" of him before morning, the redboys will "go on the warpath," likely killing scores or hundreds of human settlers!

The farmers send into the temple to negotiate one of their number who, years ago, was friends with the looter.  Will the looter come out peacefully?  Or come out blasting? Will he escape or pay for his crimes?  Who will live and who will die?

This story is an acceptable entertainment; the Martian setting is well done.  There's no twist or redemption at the end--the looter tricks his friend, steals his friend's blaster, tries to shoot his way out,  and dies in a hail of blaster fire.  I guess this story is about how the frontier can bring out the worst in people.

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These stories, taken as a group, are pretty good.  Maybe I'll read more from Planet Stories' September 1951 issue later this week.