1961 stories by Avram Davidson, Jay Williams, Evelyn Smith & Jody Scott

My eyes are always open, my antennae always quivering, my feelers always...feeling?  Thrift stores, antique malls, the sale shelf of a tiny library in a tiny town I never heard of...classic SF is out there, and it is cheap!  Recently, while in a Fairmont, Minnesota shopping mall on a mission totally unrelated to old books, the wife and I stumbled upon a charity book sale presented by the Rotary.  They didn't even have a cashier or price list, just a box for goodwill donations.  I gave one dollar each for two paperbacks I bought, one of them the 1966 printing of the eleventh The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Robert P. Mills. This collection first appeared in hardcover in 1962, and all the included stories appeared in the magazine in 1961.  Let's check out four of those 15 stories!

"The Sources of the Nile" by Avram Davidson

I feel like it was just last week that I was telling you Avram Davidson was a "C" student and was scrawling a big red "F" on one of his productions.  Luckily this submission merits something in the "C+" or "B-" range.

"The Sources of the Nile" includes the kind of erudite and esoteric references and "word play" that Davidson apparently enjoys indulging in, but, unlike in "The Singular Events Which Occurred in the Hovel on the Alley Off Eye Street," here his schtick is clever and interesting.  I like "One of those tall, cool buildings on Lexington with the tall, cool office girls..." and the references to the Jackson Whites, the Lost Colony of Roanoke, Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens and Kate Greenaway are intriguing or at least entertaining.

This is one of those stories about a writer who is having trouble making ends meet because the professional publishers and reading public don't appreciate (read: are not willing to pay for) his art.  After a convoluted series of encounters with various characters in the publishing biz and the advertising biz he discovers a family that, in an inexplicable fashion, can predict fads and trends; somehow, they know what clothes will be in style and what sort of books will be bestsellers in the near future.  Such information is extremely valuable, and our hero would love to capitalize on it.  But he is not the only one, and of those seeking to get rich from exploiting this uncanny family's weird ability, he is not the cleverest.

Not bad.            

"Somebody to Play With" by Jay Williams

I don't think I have ever read anything by Jay Williams as an adult, but isfdb is telling me Williams was the primary contributor to the Danny Dunn series of juveniles, and I know I owned and read some of those as a kid.  As a child (I was born in 1971) I was very strongly influenced by Star Wars, and I remember being very disappointed that Danny used the laser in Danny Dunn and the Heat Ray to dry up a puddle in the yard instead of to kill people.

As I might have expected after making the Danny Dunn connection, this is a didactic story about precocious kids!  It actually reminded me of something Heinlein might do: there is a wise teacher who is a little skeptical of the government and argues that liberty should be prioritized over security (talk about hot topics what with all the talk of gun control and Muslim immigration this week, right, kids?), and his bravest student who takes a risk and breaks the rules.

It seems humanity ruined the Earth (wise teacher gives a lecture on ecology), and only a small number of humans have survived and set up a colony under a dome on an alien planet.  The oldest of the kids born under the dome is independent minded, even rebellious, and likes to sneak out of the dome without his filtering mask!  While out exploring the kid meets an alien creature that is perhaps intelligent.  While he is trying to make friends, Dad appears and shoots down the native, explaining that just such a creature recently poisoned another colonist.  Not believing him, the son feels hatred for his father, and identifies with the now dead alien--the son is going native!

The reader is left to wonder about the future of the colony.  Will the humans make friends with the natives and live in harmony with this new planet, or wreck the place like they did the Earth?  Will there be war between settler and native or even among the humans over how to deal with this new world?

Not bad.

"Softly While You're Sleeping" by Evelyn E. Smith  

Evelyn E. Smith has a pretty long list of credits at isfdb, and the fun people at Ramble House sell a 300 page collection of her 1950s short SF stories, but I don't think I've ever read anything by her or even heard of her.

Did Nico or Andy Warhol have anything
to do with this cover?

Like the Davidson story, this one is set in New York City.  Don't get me started reminiscing! This is a real New York story, about an ethnic neighborhood full of poor immigrants, how their kids grow up and want to be more American, and how people we now might call hipsters--artists and actors, musicians and professionals--move into the neighborhood, changing its character.

Anna, who insists people call her the more "American" "Ann," is the daughter of now dead Albanian immigrants.  After returning from college she moved into her old Albanian neighborhood on the East Side, but she identifies with the aforementioned hipsters more than her co-ethnics, who nag her to marry a nice Albanian boy.  She is unhappy, unable to keep a boyfriend because she won't put out.

Then arrives the love of her life, a young man, dressed all in white, who sleeps all day and spends the nights on the street, whistling, singing, keeping Anna awake.  She is told he is a recent arrival from the old country, a Mr. Varri, but how could he be--the Iron Curtain has kept any Albanians from coming to America for years.  At first she fears Varri, but eventually she succumbs to the vampire's blandishments, and finds in his cold attentions an ecstasy she could never experience from the hot sweaty gropings of a living man!  She has never been so happy before, but everybody at the office begins wondering why she has become so thin and pale.  She worries about what will happen when she runs out of blood and becomes a parasitic monster herself, an immortal preying on the innocent and no longer the sole recipient of Varri's attentions.

When she voices these fears to Varri she realizes that he is as selfish a lover as any living man, and flees him, moving to a better apartment on the West Side.  At the end of the story it is hinted that her experience with Varri (and other men before him?) has made her selfish and corrupt--in order to afford the wide necklaces she wears to cover up the wounds on her neck she dates a jeweler who can give her a discount.

A pretty good story, and one ripe for feminist and class analysis--how do relationships with men change women?  How does life in America change immigrants' values?  Etc.

"Go for Baroque" by Jody Scott

Scott only has two novels and eight short stories listed at isfdb, but her first novel, Passing for Human, seems to have received extravagant praise, or at least superlative cover blurbs, from Barry Malzberg and the website io9.  "Go for Baroque" appears to be her first published story.

As the pun title and the fact that Malzberg called Passing for Human a "satire" in his ecstatic blurb had led me to suspect, "Go For Baroque" is a bunch of jokes.  Sample joke: "Anyway, we lived in Penury, a well-known subsection of Chicago."

The plot:  A guy visits a psychiatrist.  The patient tells the story of his life, claiming to be thousands of years old, of having lived for a time on the funny pages where he confronted Dr. Zarkov and had a love affair with Brenda Starr, etc.  The psychiatrist turns out to be as nutty as the patient, claiming he is from outer space and misses the exciting life out there. The patient, perhaps some kind of telepath and hypnotist, fast talks his way to becoming head of the office and it is implied that he has fast talked his way to becoming head of hospitals and other institutions in the past, and will soon use his power to take over the world and bring peace to the Earth.

This story reminded me of an animated cartoon, in particular "Symphony in Slang" with all its goofy puns and any number of Bug Bunny shorts with its fast talkery and slapstick antics, but not in a good way.  What works in one medium doesn't necessarily work in another.

Lame.

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The last page of my copy of The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Eleventh Series is an ad for two anthologies of horror stories edited by super-editor Donald Wollheim, the hero of genre literature behind DAW books. These books sound pretty good: one includes H. P. Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep," which I love, and the other features Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," which I really enjoyed back in October when I was reading all those horror stories.  Looking them up on isfdb indicates that their covers (Emsh and Schoenherr) are absolutely gorgeous.  Is there any hope I will stumble into these one day on sale for a buck apiece?

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There are at least four more stories in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Eleventh Series I want to read, so we'll be taking a look at this one again.
  

1962 stories from J. G. Ballard, Avram Davidson, J. T. McIntosh, & Ward Moore

Because I found the cover illustration by Emsh irresistible, at Jay's CD and Hobby in a strip mall in southern Des Moines, I purchased a crumbling copy of the February 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  The beautiful blue-eyed blonde, the twisting curling thorns, the disparate ill-disciplined crowd of soldiers...I kept looking at the picture, looking away, then looking at it again.  I knew I'd want to look at it yet again after I'd left the store, so I forked over the cash and took the magazine home.

This issue of the magazine includes the novella by Edgar Pangborn, "The Golden Horn," which makes up part of his novel Davy, which I read back in June.  It also includes a reprinted 1954 story by Richard Matheson, "The Traveller," which I read in June of 2013, shortly before this blog arose from its vat and began its march across the landscape, sowing amazement and indifference throughout an unsuspecting land.  (Joachim Boaz read the story, along with ten other Matheson stories, early this year, and proclaimed it "Bad."  My notes on "The Traveller" say "Eh.")

Even though I already had 40 or 50 pages of this one under my belt, so to speak, there were still attractive items I hadn't read yet.  This weekend I read them.

"The Garden of Time" by J. G. Ballard

This symbolist fantasy has been reprinted numerous times in collections of Ballard's work and in various anthologies.  I read a bunch of poems by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot a few weeks ago, and "The Garden of Time" reminded me of one of the more easily digested of these verses, Pound's "The Garden."

Image from the Internet Archive 

"The Garden of Time" is about two good-looking sophisticated people who live in a beautiful Palladian villa full of rare books, fine paintings, busts and vases. Within the outer walls of the estate there is a pool and a fine garden, outside the walls an empty plain as far as the eye can see.  The Countess at her harpsichord fills the house with the sound of Bach and Mozart (my own wife at the TV fills our house with the sound of The Gilmore Girls, which is not the same thing at all.)  Every evening before a stroll around the grounds the Count looks out across the naked featureless landscape; sometimes he sees, miles away, a vast horde approaching, a rabble which stretches from one horizon to the other.  If this sea of filthy unkillable infantry is in sight he plucks one of the "time flowers" from his garden, and as the blossom expires time is shifted and the invincible ill-disciplined mob recedes back out of sight.  But there are almost no flowers left; soon the horde will batter down the walls, destroy the cultural treasures they are unable to appreciate.

Presumably this is a lament that the modern age, the age of mass capitalism and democracy, socialism and the welfare state, overpopulation and mass media, etc (pick your bogeyman), is an age in which nobody will appreciate the finer things, an age in which society will fail to preserve the finer things.  On the one hand there may be something to this, but on the other hand, technological advances in transportation and communication in my lifetime have made high culture more easily accessible, while the elite have been able to manipulate the political class in such a way that the taxpayers subsidize things like opera and poetry festivals, things very few taxpayers actually care about.  For the time being, high culture is available to those who still care about it.  

Vivid and thought-provoking.

"The Singular Events Which Occurred in the Hovel on the Alley Off Eye Street" by Avram Davidson

Years ago I read Avram Davidson's 1960s novels Rork! and Mutiny in Space--I still remember the girl at the checkout counter of the antique mall laughing at the title of Mutiny in Space.  These novels were OK, no big deal.  Tarbandu at the great PorPor Books Blog has reviewed quite a few of Davidson's works--click here to read a tarbandu review of two Davidson novels in which I make an appearance in the comments.  While he praises "The New Zombies," a story Davidson wrote with his wife, tarbandu mostly seems to award Davidson 2 or 3 stars out of 5.  Let's see if this six page story with the 14 word title meets or exceeds these expectations.

This is an elaborate joke story, set in an alternate universe 1961 USA in which there are dragons and magic, with magic spells a sort of consumer good produced by rival firms who commit industrial espionage against each other.  It is full of Shakespearean speech, outrageous puns, and topical jokes about things like Ed Sullivan and the JFK inauguration (occurring a year before this issue of F&SF was on the newsstands,)  No plot, no character, no emotion, just the kind of wordplay that may be fun to write but is a drag to read.

Horrible.

"One Into Two" by J. T. McIntosh

Speaking of horrible, it's once more unto the breach of a piece of J. T. McIntosh fiction.  (Dare I read such a piece?)

It is the future!  Millions of people commute everyday between Terra, Luna, Marsa and Venusa via matta transmittuh.  These are the kind of teleporters that read your atoms, vaporize you, transmit the data to your destination, and build a replica of you at your destination, the kind of teleporters that make every person reading the story say, "Wait, they are killing the person," and vow never to be matter transmitted regardless of whether a Kirk or a Spock or a Scotty tells them it is perfectly safe.  The government carefully regulates the teleporters to make sure what goes into the booth is completely annihilated, otherwise some smart guy would use the booth to duplicate money or hot chicks, and that would cause undesirable inflation.

The main character of the story is Willie Ross, a crook who works for the teleporter company.  Regardless of all that government regulation he duplicates himself so he can be on two planets at once.  While one version of Ross is setting up an alibi on Luna, the other version is on Mars murdering a man he's never met before, a guy who is married to a former partner in crime of Ross's.   I don't think McIntosh makes it very clear why Ross kills this innocent man, vengeance, I guess, or so he can pressure his former associate for money or something.  "One Into Two" is a mystery in multiple senses of the word.

The police very quickly catch both Rosses, either because they betray each other, or because they are able to trick the Rosses and have experience dealing with other assholes who have tried to exploit the teleporter system.  "You never had a chance, Ross....You don't think you're the first to try this, do you?"  Like numerous things in this story, it wasn't quite clear to me.

At the end of the story the police teleport Mars-assassin-Ross and Luna-alibi-Ross to New York, at the same time, to the same booth.  This means there is only one Ross again, but he has the memories of both Rosses--McIntosh even tells us that the food each ate separately is now together in his one stomach!  I don't think this makes any sense.

Bad.

"Rebel" by Ward Moore

I read a story by Ward Moore earlier this year, and liked it.  Can he get me out of this bad story rut?

This is a gimmicky story which reminds you that attitudes, tastes, mores are just faddish opinion and change over time.  In 1962 parents wanted their kids to play outside and sit up straight at the dinner table and conservative people had short hair and rebellious kids wore long hair.  In this story young Caludo's parents have long hair and tell Caludo to recline and lament that he played outside as a kid instead of staying inside to read books and that he now wears his hair short.  Those are just a few examples--the entire story, eight pages, is a conversation between Caludo and his parents that is one obvious switcheroo joke after another--Mom and Dad smoke and drink and think it impolite their son abstains, Mom and Dad are artists and think son is wasting his time becoming a businessman, blah blah blah.

Lame.

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Alfred Bester, who wrote the famous The Stars My Destination wrote the "Books" column in this issue of F&SF, and addresses three books.  The Theodore Sturgeon collection A Way Home he tells us is great because Sturgeon is great--the word "genius" appears.  The novels Battle for the Stars by Edmond Hamilton and Time is the Simplest Thing by Clifford Simak he admits are doing things that have already been done ("space-opera" the former, "conventional persecution" story the latter) but that Hamilton and Simak do these familiar things well.  I have read both Battle for the Stars and Time is the Simplest Thing myself, and those interested can find my Amazon reviews at the links in this paragraph.

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One hit and three misses?  Damn!  Well, you pays your money and you takes your chances, as they say.  Besides, I read these things, in part, to learn about the SF field and the intellectual milieu of the past, so my time reading these stories, no matter how groaningly bad some were, was not wasted.  And I still have that gorgeous Emsh cover to comfort me.