Science Fiction and Fantasy from Playboy: Pohl, Sturgeon, Davidson and Ballard

Here's our third (and final) installment of our exploration of 1966's The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy.  Today's stories are all by authors about whose work I have mixed feelings, or, as I like to put it, authors whose work is uneven.  If pressed, I will admit my mixed feelings for some of these authors may be partly a result of my skepticism or hostility to their politics or philosophies.

"The Fiend" by Frederik Pohl (1964)

It has been years since I read any fiction by Frederik Pohl, largely because I read Drunkard's Walk in 2011 and it pushed all my buttons (and I don't mean the good buttons that LeRoy Neiman's male fantasy "the femlin" is trying to push) though I have read lots of stories from books or magazines he edited over the course of this blog's life.  In my youth I read many of Pohl's novels, though the only ones I really remember are the Heechee books (I love the first, the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Gateway) and Man Plus.  It is an odd feeling to look at the covers of Jem, Starburst, Black Star Rising, and The World at the End of Time on isfdb and vividly recall having library copies of them in my New Jersey bedroom and even carrying them around to Nana's house or high school (the feel of the protective plastic jackets on library hardcovers, and the annoying sounds they made, is very distinctive in my mind) and not recall anything about their contents.  Why do I read all these books if I don't remember anything about them?  Am I throwing my life away?

Let's put aside nostalgia and angst and read one of the two stories by Pohl that Ray Russell, anonymous editor of The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, selected for inclusion, "The Fiend."  (I read the other one, "Punch," back in 2014.) 

I am happy to report that, to my tastes, "The Fiend" is a perfect little classic SF story.  It's about a space voyage, which is nice, because I'm getting a little tired of oppressive dystopias and post-apocalyptic scenarios.  "The Fiend" is also a bunch of speculations about the technology and society of the future, and develops characters and human drama.  And it has a surprise ending which works, because it makes sense and is foreshadowed but still came as a surprise.  The story is also "edgy" because of its hints of sexual mistreatment of a teenage girl and its not exactly flattering depiction of homosexuality.

A space ship carrying hundreds of frozen colonists is crossing the void!  A 16-year-old girl is unfrozen while the ship is only like halfway to its destination.  Angrily, she jumps out of the freezing capsule and starts yelling; she has been warned that the captains of these ships, who pilot them all alone for decades, will sometimes break the rules and unfreeze colonists for sex or companionship.  We readers, of course, expect the captain to rape her or seduce her or something of the kind, but he only watches her, and as the story unfolds we learn why: 1) he is a repressed homosexual and all his life he has dreamed of enslaving women--not to have sex with them, but to treat them as dolls, to, through them, vicariously live a life as a woman!  2) he is a disembodied brain, integrated with the ship and tasked with managing it as punishment for some crime!

Pohl does a fine job in only seven pages of constructing a compelling milieu and fascinating characters and setting up and detonating a surprise for the reader.  Very good.  Five out of five disembodied brains!

"The Nail and the Oracle" by Theodore Sturgeon (1965)

I like a good proportion of Sturgeon's work and think he is an interesting writer, though sometimes his elitist and collectivist attitudes, and the more tedious of his utopias, can get on my nerves.  "The Nail and the Oracle" doesn't have those problems, but is a little oblique and I found it a little hard to understand at first, and then when I did (I think) decipher it I was disappointed that it was, in the end, a kind of pun story aspiring to portentousness.

It is the future of 1970, and our setting is the Pentagon.  The supercomputer called ORACLE that helps guide so many Defense Department decisions is on the fritz, and our protagonist is Jones, the head of the team sent by the manufacturer to repair it.  The way this computer works is that you type out a question on a typewriter and then hold the paper in front of a camera so the 'puter can read it.  ORACLE has read a vast quantity of books and periodicals in many languages in just this fashion ("It's the greatest repository of human thought and thought-directed action the world has ever known") and it uses this base of knowledge to answer your question.

Anyway, our hero and his all-star team of nerds overhaul and test the computer and it seems to be working just fine.  But three very important men who have very important questions for ORACLE report that the machine still refuses to answer their queries.  These men are an admiral, a colonel and a famous and influential adviser who sits on the Presidential Cabinet; Sturgeon doesn't name them, but I thought of them as caricatures or amalgamations of people like Douglas MacArthur and Henry Kissinger, people of great influence and stature with supporters among both the elite and the general public.  It seems likely Sturgeon had specific people in mind, but I'm just not familiar enough with the world of 1965, the world of six years before my birth, to be able to puzzle out who.

Jones tells the three titans that maybe he can fix the computer if they tell him their questions.  They are reluctant to do so, but eventually they each individually and privately reveal their queries to the computer man.  Both military men have been asking a question that reveals they are considering murdering the President or somebody else in order to take power themselves, while the civilian adviser wants to know if throwing his support behind a radical demagogue who advocates disarmament and isolationism will ensure peace.  One of the things I found confusing about the story is the fact that the servicemen would admit to Jones their illegal and prima facie immoral plans--aren't they afraid Jones will immediately expose them to the FBI or White House?  Sturgeon seems to suggest that the admiral and/or the colonel sincerely love the United States and are only contemplating such extreme measures because they think only they can save the country from disaster, and are willing to risk their careers to make sure the essential computer is working.  Anyway, Jones asks ORACLE how to convince the admiral and colonel to refrain from launching their coups and how to convince the adviser to refrain from lending his support to the demagogue, and then follows the machine's advice, saving the USA from domestic strife.

But why didn't the computer answer the three questions when the admiral, colonel and cabinet member presented them?  Jones realizes that the field of view of ORACLE's camera takes in not only the papers people show it, but the wall beyond.  On the wall is a sign bearing the single word "THINK."  Such signs, apparently, were common in IBM offices for decades, "THINK" being a sort of IBM slogan.  It looks like Sturgeon's surprise ending is that the computer was following this exhortation to think as if it were one of its instructions, and couldn't answer the three questions because the result of the admiral, colonel or demagogue taking over the USA was unthinkable.

Image from ebay

This story feels kind of contrived and the ending is a bit of a letdown, and I even think it could have been structured a little better to explain the motivations of the three questioners and the demagogue.  Sturgeon doesn't set a tone of urgency in the beginning of the story, so the revelation that the three bigwigs are all considering such radical expedients seems to come out of left field, as sports fans say.  A few lines about riots or impending war in Europe or something in the beginning of the story, and a mention of the demagogue (who isn't brought up until the middle of the story) would have made the story more effective, in my opinion?  It feels like maybe Sturgeon is relying on the reader's knowledge of current events to set the tone, in the same way he seems to assume we all know about THINK signs, but this doesn't necessarily work on those of us reading the story fifty years later.

I'll call it acceptable.     

"The Sensible Man" by Avram Davidson (1959)

I read Davidson's Mutiny in Space and Rork! years ago and just kind of shrugged.  During this blog's life I have read a couple Davidson stories, including "The Singular Events Which Occurred in the Hovel on the Alley Off Eye Street" which I denounced as "horrible," and "The Sources of the Nile" which I judged "not bad."  I'm kind of planning to read the magazine version of Ursus of Ultima Thule as part of my exploration of Ted White's Fantastic, but I haven't gotten to it yet.  Anyway, "The Sensible Man" has a chance to really change my opinion of Avram Davidson, which is not yet fully formed.

An American scientist, an important member of the team developing the USA's first spacecraft, murders one of his fellow scientists and defects to the Soviet Union!  When the commies ask him if he is a sincere Leninist he tells them he is a practical, sensible man, that he is joining the socialist East because he thinks they have pulled ahead of the democratic West and he wants to be on the winning side!  The traitor is given all the resources he needs to develop the first manned spacecraft, a tiny satellite.  He succeeds, but the bolshies don't trust him.  When the Soviets build the satellite from his designs they leave out any means of the craft--and its one-man crew--returning safely to Earth; the Yankee traitor himself is impressed into service as this one-man crew and blasts off on a one-way trip into orbit!  The satellite will be his grave, and if he wants to prolong his existence a remote-controlled IV will provide him sustenance every time he radios a useful report on conditions up in space back to Moscow.

This is a very short story, but it is solid.  I not only appreciate its dim view of the USSR and of treachery, but also like a little noirish touch Davidson (who won an Edgar award for his work writing mystery stories as well a Hugo and a World Fantasy Award) includes: the traitor's final resting place in his satellite/tomb is much like that of his colleague whom he murdered and then put in the trunk of his car, which now lies at the bottom of a lake.

I like it!

"Souvenir" by J. G. Ballard (1964)

I thought Ballard's novel The Drowned World was too long and tedious and its basic conceit silly, and things like "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" a gimmicky waste of time, but I liked "Billenium" quite a lot and thought "The Garden of Time" to be very thought-provoking.  ("You : Coma : Marilyn Monroe" gave me a chance to put my favorite photo of Norma Jean Mortenson on the blog.)  My reactions to Ballard are all over the place, so let's see what happens with this one.

I really thought that all the stories in The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy first appeared in Playboy, but it seems that "Souvenir" first was published in the collection The Terminal Beach under the title "The Drowned Giant," in 1964.  I guess the appearance in Playboy was the tale's first US appearance.

Our narrator in "Souvenir" is a member of a team conducting research at a library when a dead giant's carcass washes up on a nearby pebbly beach.  He goes to look at the titanic corpse, and returns to the scene over several days, witnessing people's reaction to the tremendous carcass, its decay and dismembered by the locals until only a few monstrous bones remain. 

When I read "Garden of Time" I thought it was about the inability of modern people to appreciate the finest achievements of our civilization, their actual propensity to wreck such things, that Ballard was lamenting that in our age, the age of democracy, capitalism and socialism in which the common man calls the tune, high culture was dying.  I think we see the same theme in "Souvenir" as well.   Ballard repeatedly likens the dead giant to a Greek sculpture, in particular a Roman copy of a Praxiteles, and to an heroic Argonaut or one of the fallen warriors about whom Homer sang, while parts of the giant's body are often metaphorically labelled after elements of classical architecture, columns and the like.  The dead giant is (or was) something beautiful and noble, a bigger and better version of ourselves, but the common people show it no respect--they climb over it like "flies" and perch on it like a "flock of gulls" on a big dead fish; children play games on it, marking it with their dirty footprints.  In the middle of the process of decay someone builds a sand castle on the giant's chest (like a medieval fortification built on ancient Roman foundations?) and late in the process business enterprises ("a fertilizer company and a cattle-food manufacturer") cart away pieces of the giant in pursuit of profit; we later learn that people are using some of the giant's bones as architectural elements, as medievals might use stone blocks from classical ruins to build their own homes, and that parts of the giant's body are attractions at circuses and museums, like ancient art and artifacts.  Months later, when the giant's carcass has been taken apart and almost totally consumed, people have largely forgotten the giant ever existed, in the way most people know nothing of the West's classical heritage.

Another theme of "Souvenir," I believe, is our inability to really understand the world around us.  The narrator is, apparently, some kind of professional researcher, a person whose job is to figure things out, to acquire knowledge, but he is consistently deceived or befuddled by the giant.  The corpse looks no bigger than "a basking shark" when he first sees it from a distance, but when he gets closer he realizes it is the size of "the largest sperm whale."  In one scene he looks at the giant's palm in hopes of learning about his character via the lines, but this is impossible because of "the distention of the tissues."  Of course, palm reading is a scam under any circumstances--perhaps Ballard is hinting that the methods of respectable intellectuals are no more reliable than those of mercenary and mendacious soothsayers in trying to comprehend the world around us.  Scientists come to look at the corpse but we learn nothing of their conclusions.

A good story of the ruminative, surreal (the event is obviously very surreal, but Ballard writes about it in a very realistic, matter-of-fact manner) type.

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Nowadays our popular culture is suffused with sex and professionally photographed color pictures of topless women are trivially easy to come by, but this wasn't really the case in 1953 when Playboy debuted, and I think many of Playboy's fans and detractors would argue that Hugh Hefner's magazine played a major role in propelling America down the road to today's more open attitude about sex in general and in the media in particular.  Ray Russell similarly tries to put over the idea that Playboy revolutionized the SF world, giving SF writers more money and more freedom and, in return, getting the best possible SF stories.  I've read the eleven the stories in The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy by authors in whom I have a particular interest, and I have to admit that, taken as a group (especially if we leave out the one clunker) they are pretty good, and perhaps the topics they address were sort of pushing the envelope when they appeared in the 1950s and 1960s.

I also think quite a few of these stories may reflect the brand Playboy was developing for itself, one of sex and sophistication.  (Check out the covers of the various Playboy's Party Jokes volumes that foreground the secondary sexual characteristics of the "femlin" and claim that Playboy is "America's Most Sophisticated Magazine.")  Pohl's "The Fiend," Beaumont's "The Crooked Man," and Clarke's "I Remember Babylon"  incorporate or even revolve around sexual elements.  "I Remember Babylon" betrays a contempt for the ordinary masses (porn will trick the gullible dopes into becoming commies) while Bloch's "Word of Honor" and Sturgeon's "The Nail and Oracle" showcase a sort of sophisticate's cynicism about America's institutions and leaders as well as the common people, who need to be lied to and who will follow any demagogue who comes along.  Ballard's "Souvenir" is a monument to snobbery.  Perhaps most interestingly, the writers who take religion seriously, the Christian Bradbury in "The Vacation" and Talmudic scholar Avram Davidson in "The Sensible Man," subvert such misanthropic snobbery and cynical sophistication, showing them to be hollow and self-destructive.

I feel that my look at The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy has been a worthwhile enterprise.  More SF published by Playboy in our next episode!

Fantastic Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories, August 1972

Well, we just read Andrew Offutt and Richard Lyon's sword and sorcery trilogy War of the Wizards, the second volume of which was dedicated to L. Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber.  So it seems an appropriate time to read some fantasy-related work by those two influential writers.  One publication to which both de Camp and Leiber contributed was the August 1972 issue of Fantastic.  Over the years, via ebay and visits to flea markets, I have accumulated a bunch of issues of Fantastic, and this issue is in my collection.  Let's take a look at this "All-Star 20th Anniversary Issue" of the magazine--you can read along without having to scour the tables of flea markets or the listings at ebay by visiting the internet archive.

Jeff Jones provides the cover art, a sort of cthonic, primordial, monumental image of Conan--the Cimmerian looks like he is emerging out of a mass of stone, maybe like one of Michelangelo's famous unfinished sculptures of slaves.  Appropriate for an unvarnished, uncivilized, self-made man who owes his success and survival to his own native cunning and physical strength.  Among the listed contributors, besides de Camp and Leiber, we see two MPorcius faves, Bob Shaw and Barry Malzberg, as well as critical darling James Tiptree, Jr.  This is an exciting issue!

First we have Ted White's seven-page editorial.  (No doubt you remember Ted White as author of Spawn of the Death Machine and Harlan Ellison's long-suffering friend.)  Ted presents an interesting history of Fantastic, its many editors and its ups and downs and its relationships with other SF magazines, and gives us insight into his own editorial philosophy (he thinks a SF magazine should reflect its editor's personality, and include features like editorials and letters columns that generate a conversation and a community among SF professionals and fans.)  He finishes by bragging that Fantastic has received its first ever Hugo nomination!  Good work, Ted!

Next is the first half of Avram Davidson's The Forges of Nainland Are Cold.  I have decided to put off reading this novel, which appeared in book form under the title Ursus of Ultima Thule.  I will say that I like the illustration by Mike Kaluta, a stark female nude in front of a massive gnarled tree, that accompanies the piece.

"The Witch of the Mists" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

There's Conan and Conn, fighting some
crazy monster (could that be
Nenaunir on the flying beast?)  I feel like
Conn is facing the wrong direction.

I guess nowadays it is conventional to think de Camp and Carter are poor writers and their Conan stories are crummy, and I myself consider de Camp and Carter to be pretty mediocre, but let's give this story a fair and open-minded look.

"Witch of the Mists" would later appear in the 1977 book of four Conan stories by de Camp and Carter, Conan of Aquilonia.  Here in Fantastic the story is illustrated by Harry Roland, who, following the text, gives Conan a mustache!  This is an older Conan, whose mustache and famous "square-cut mane" are "touched with gray!"

Conan is King of Aquilonia, richest kingdom of the West, and is out hunting with some of his courtiers and his twelve-year-old son, Conn.  Conn gets lost chasing a white stag; the stag turns out to be an illusion, conjured by the witch Louhi to trap him!  Having captured the king's son, the witch and her tall skinny henchmen use him as bait to draw Conan away from his companions.  Conan follows the kidnappers' trail through a swamp and across the border of Aquilonia.  Along the way he is robbed by a pack of inbred degenerates (the descendants of criminals who have hidden in the swamp for generations--I thought this a Lovecraftian touch) who steal his horse, armor and weapons, so that Conan has to proceed practically naked, reduced to fighting off wild beasts with a stick!  When he gets to Louhi's castle, the HQ of her death cult, he is imprisoned with his son.

Louhi calls a meeting of the world's greatest wizards, and three other evil weirdos--Thoth-Amon of the West; Nenaunir, a huge muscular black shaman from the South; and an effeminate little sorcerer from the Far East, Pra-Eun-- teleport in to discuss what to do with Conan.  When Louhi tries to prove to Thoth-Amon that the King of Aquilonia is not the hot stuff he's been telling her he is by having one of her cultists humiliatingly cudgel the Cimmerian, Conan turns the tables on his tormentors and he and Conn fight all four wizards, plus Louhi's coven of death worshipers, with whatever furniture they can snatch up and throw.  During the fracas the Aquilonian knights finally catch up to their sovereign.  Louhi and her entire cult, along with Pra-Eun, are killed, while Thoth-Amon and Nenaunir teleport away.

This is a pretty routine and underwhelming story.  Nothing in "Witch of the Mists" feels fresh, and de Camp and Carter are incapable of elevating the pedestrian material with any literary style and fail to imbue it with a sense of drama or horror or fun.  The battle between the barbarian king of the most sophisticated nation of Caucasians and a multi-ethnic mixed-gender cabal of the planet's four most powerful wizards should feel grand and momentous, and come at the end of a long build up, but, shoehorned into this brief story about a kid lost in the woods, it feels small and petty, like a bar brawl.  Too bad; I'm judging this one merely acceptable--it feels like filler.

"Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket" by James Tiptree, Jr.

Alice Sheldon, the woman who wrote under the male pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr., is one of those SF writers the critics and college professors are always gushing about.  Early last year I read and liked a few stories by Tiptree; let's see if she continues to live up to the hype.

It is the 21st century!  The east and west coasts of the United States are vast megalopolises, Boswash and San Frangeles!  But our story takes placed in sparsely populated Alberta, where our protagonist, Dov Rapelle, young geo-ecologist, has a cabin in the snowy wilderness.

One day Rapelle is just hanging around in his cabin when a helicopter drops off a naked teen-aged girl ("sixteen at the oldest") nearby.  When he gets her inside he wraps her in his Hudson Bay blanket (wikipedia is telling me that the Hudson's Bay point blanket is an iconic article associated with Canada, and Tiptree tells us that this blanket has been an element of Dov's youthful erotic fantasies.)  The mysterious girl proclaims she loves him and starts grabbing at his pants, initiating a graphic sex scene in which she loses her virginity.  It turns out that the girl, Eulalia Aerovulpa, is a "time jumper;" her 75-year-old self, sixty years in the future, has switched consciousnesses with her 16-year-old self.  In one of those time paradox thingies which always hurts my brain, elderly Eulalia remembered how her marriage to Dov started, and has come back in time to make sure she meets Dov and kindles their love.  In an additional SF twist, teenage Eulalia's wealthy parents have had her conditioned to find men and sex disgusting so she won't get mixed up with males who are after her money, but elderly Eulalia knows the secret to undoing the conditioning: "The man whose toe she bites...she will love that man and that man only so long as she lives."  She bites Dov's toe after their second bout of intercourse, so, when 75-year-old Eulalie's visit to 16-year-old Eulalia's body ends after a few hours, young Eulalia is as madly in love with Dov as senior citizen Eulalia was.  (This presents the sort of philosophical conundrum presented by the love potion in the story of Tristan and Isolde: is Dov and Eulalia's love "real," or just the artificial product of psychological manipulation?)

Dov and Eulalia get married and briefly enjoy a happy life together, but Eulalia isn't content to let things be.  A few months after their wedding, Eve-like, Eulalia convinces Dov that they should use the time-jumping apparatus to learn about the future (and to give their elderly future selves a little vacation from senescence.)  Disaster occurs, and Dov is killed.  Now Eulalia will have to endure 59 years without the man she is hopelessly in love with, her only comfort the knowledge that she will spend a few torrid hours with him when she is 75.

Perhaps it is noteworthy, this story having been written by a woman masquerading as a man, that the tragic victim of the tale for whom our hearts are meant to go out is the woman, even though the story is written more or less from the point of view of the man, and he dies because of the woman's recklessness.  Also, Tiptree has Dov surprised by Eulalia's taking the sexual initiative, telling us that in his sex fantasies Dov is the aggressive partner.

This story isn't bad, but I'm not crazy about it.  The somewhat complicated structure works (though I'm not quite sure I like that the psychological trigger of toe-biting works on the teenage consciousness even though that consciousness is absent from the body when the toe-biting occurs) but the whole story is too jokey and silly for the tragic ending to affect me.  Acceptable.

"Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket" would later appear in the oft-reprinted and oft-translated collection of Tiptree stories entitled Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home and was chosen by Barry Malzberg for inclusion in the volume he edited for ibooks in 2003 entitled The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time.

"Allowances" by Barry Malzberg

Speak of the devil!  "Allowances" was reprinted in 1974 in Malzberg's collection Out From Ganymede.  I own Out From Ganymede, but haven't read "Allowances" yet.

The text of the story consists of the written testimony of eight employees of a race track and one customer, testimony presumably elicited by the management of the track or the police or some other government representatives.  (Malzberg usually writes in the first person and often writes about horse racing.)  Taken all together, these various reports tell the story of the day an insane and violent man came to the race track and made a serious nuisance of himself.  This man wears odd clothes and insists he is an alien.  His mental illness is, apparently, the result of his recognition that the universe is unpredictable (as symbolized by the unpredictability of the horse races) and general feeling that society is going downhill--machines dehumanizing life, the government becoming less trustworthy, etc.  (The testimony of the witnesses indicates they also feel life is getting worse, many phrases like "nuts now being all over the place" and "unless the Racing Commission severely tightens its rules and regulations I see no future for the sport" crop up in their testimony.)  The "alien" begs people for advice on who will win the races, even accusing them of fixing the races.  He believes that if he can't win a bet, his alien civilization will suffer, and in desperation he threatens dire consequences if he should fail in his mission of placing a winning bet today.

"Give me a tip or I'll blow up your planet!"  

(Malzberg stories usually include an insane person, and this person is often preoccupied with alien or supernatural beings and catastrophic events like the alien conquest of the Earth or the coming of the Messiah or the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, events for which they feel some level of responsibility.  There's a story in which a guy has to win a chess game or aliens will win a space war, for example, and another in which an employee of the New York City government has to fulfill one of his quotidian job tasks in order to impress alien overlords.)

As a coward, a cheapo, and someone who admires asceticism and fears he has a genetic predisposition to addiction, I avoid gambling and know almost nothing about betting on horse races.  So I had to google around to figure out what the hell this story's title referred to.  It appears that the second level of races a horse can participate in are "allowance" races, in which, based on their records, some horses have to carry more weight than others, to make the race more competitive.  A horse that has lost a bunch of races will be "allowed" to carry a few pounds less weight than a more successful horse, is how I am understanding it.

This is Malzberg doing what Mazlberg does, and if you are hip to Malzberg's jive, you will appreciate it (I rather like it), but if you are sick of Malzberg treading the same ground again and again, or never liked Malzberg in the first place, this story is not going to change your mind.

"The Brink" by Bob Shaw

I like Shaw and was looking forward to this one.  Unfortunately, it is a very short and gimmicky story that goes nowhere.

"The Brink" is a Cold War story and the title refers to "brinksmanship," the kind of thing we talked a lot about in history and political science courses when I was at Rutgers in the last years of the '80s and the first years of the '90s.  An American aircrew is transporting a superweapon ("a nuclear device which yielded its energy over a period of years instead of microseconds") to the Far East, where it will be used to interdict Communist traffic on the future equivalent of the Ho Chi Min Trail in some unspecified jungle.  The aircrew's huge cargo plane (which one character compares to the flying machines seen in the old film Shape of Things to Come,) is called Icarus, and the superweapon is repeatedly compared to the Sun.  The tone of the story is gloomy and foreboding, and it is implied that participation in the Cold War has wrecked the economy of the United States but not that of Great Britain.  (The UK is like Daedalus, the clever and creative father, with America as the reckless son.)

The cheap ending of the story is that, while the rest of the plane's crew is napping or in the cargo hold, the pilot sees a man with wings on his back flying through the air.  This birdman gets in the way of the Icarus and is struck and plummets to the surface, and, presumably, to his death.  No doubt the point of the story (besides being a sort of wish fulfillment story for Englishmen in which sophisticated and wise Britain is shown to be vastly superior to the upstart USA) is that the American use of technology to oppose Communism is self-destructive hubris, just like Icarus' flight in ancient myth.

Stories which portray the United States as the villain in the Cold War always stick in my craw anyway, and the in-your-face sophomoric and pedantic use of classical symbolism in this one had me groaning.  A waste of time, even at only three pages.   

"The Brink" was later republished in the 1976 collection Cosmic Kaleidoscope.

**********

I'm skipping "Agony and Remorse on Rhesus IX" by "Ova Hamlet."  The Ova Hamlet stories are parodies written by Richard Lupoff, each written in imitation of a different SF writer.  I have an aversion to this kind of broad and obvious humor and "Agony and Remorse on Rhesus IX," Ted tells us in the intro, is a parody of Phillip K. Dick.  I am not familiar with Dick's oeuvre, so I probably wouldn't even get the joke if I read it.

After the Lupoff piece comes an installment of Alexei and Cory Panshin's critical history of SF, "SF in Dimension," these 12 pages covering 1926 to 1935.  This article, for the SF fan interested in the period, is very engaging and very fun--it includes a long description of and excerpt from E. E. Smith's Skylark of Space, which the Panshins regard as extremely influential, a longish discussion of Stanley Weinbaum, covers the development of sword and sorcery as well as space opera and alien exploration-type SF,  and places changes in SF in the larger context of changes in mainstream popular culture.  Very cool!

Next up is Fritz Leiber's seven page feature of three book reviews, "Fantasy Books."  First Fritz talks about Robert Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil, which we at MPorcius Fiction Log just read!  Fritz starts off by telling us that Heinlein is his favorite SF writer, and that his favorite Heinleins are probably Double Star, Spaceman Jones, and Time for the Stars, and then proceeds to discuss Heinlein's entire body of work in a provocative way that includes comparing it to his own writing.  Very good.

Leiber's second review is of an anthology edited by Lin Carter, New Worlds for Old, which provides him an occasion to discuss fantasy literature in general and E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros in particular.  Finally, Leiber heaps praise on an odd book, Songs and Sonnets Atlantean, by Donald S. Fryer.  According to Fritz, this collection of poems, ostensibly translations of verse written by inhabitants of lost Atlantis accompanied by notes from 20th-century scholars, presents "a total picture of a fabulous Atlantis...more convincing and touching than that of a novel might be."

In the back of this issue of Fantastic are thirteen pages of letters (and Ted's detailed responses to the correspondents.)  Half of these pages are devoted to arguments about the TV show Star Trek; it seems Ted slagged the show in an earlier issue, inspiring a legion of Trekkies (Trekkers?) to rise to the program's defense.  There are also letters complaining that the magazine includes too many novels that are published in book form soon after, or even before, the magazine hits the newsstands.  And there is quite a bit of talk about how difficult it can be to find Fantastic, as the staff of some drug stores never even put the magazine on display.  Ted's responses are an eye-opening look into the life of a magazine editor and his surprisingly limited authority; again and again Ted explains that there are parts of the magazine over which he has little control, like the Table of Contents, use of some illustrations, and even the "typographical makeup of the title page of the stories--which I do not see until I have an actual copy of the issue in hand." 

The last two pages of Fantastic's 20th Anniversary issue consist of classified ads.  These ads are pretty fun, including as they do an ad for an anti-gravity device, an ad for a free book on how to hypnotize people, and an ad from the "School of Wicca" in Missouri.  "Obtain serenity and fulfillment," the ad promises, and offers a "serenity guide" and "protective pentacle" for only one dollar!  One hopes that reading about the less than serene and fulfilling conclusion to Louhi's career as a witch (screeching in agony as she burned to death, a barbarian monarch having heaved a brazier-full of hot coals on her) didn't discourage serenity seekers from sending their dollar to the witches of Missouri.

The School of Wicca (now the Church and School of Wicca, a wise
 tax move!) is apparently still in the business of selling 
protective pentacles, though this institution of higher learning (they offer doctorates!)
 has moved from Missouri to West Virginia.

**********

In his editorial Ted White argues that nonfiction "features" are an important component of a SF magazine, and his own magazine proves him right.  This SF fan found White's, the Panshins', and Leiber's nonfiction contributions to Fantastic's August 1972 issue more entertaining than much of the fiction! This magazine is full of info and educated opinions about 20th-century SF, and I recommend it unreservedly to people who care about that sort of thing.  The Shaw and Tiptree pieces seem below average for those writers, and the Conan story is a weak example of the genre, but the Malzberg is a good specimen of that idiosyncratic scribbler's output.  (And I do plan to read the Davidson novel someday!)

More Conan, Fritz Leiber, and Hugo news from a 1970s Fantastic in our next episode!

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.

********

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?

*********

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.

***********

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.

***********

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.