Stories from the Sept. 1948 Weird Tales by A Derleth, R Bradbury, S A Coblentz, E Hamilton and E F Russell

Let's surf on over to the internet archive and take a look at the September 1948 issue of Weird Tales, edited by Dorothy McIlwraith.  In the list of new members of the Weird Tales Club we see the name of Jack Gaughan, who was then just beginning his successful career as a SF illustrator, and on the table of contents page we see the names of five writers we have already opined about here at MPorcius Fiction Log: August Derleth, Ray Bradbury, Stanton A. Coblentz, Edmond Hamilton, and Eric Frank Russell.  Let's read those five stories and get a taste of what Jack Gaughan and other readers of Weird Tales in 1948 were getting for their 20 cents.

"The Whippoorwills in the Hills" by August Derleth

1958 hardcover

Dan Harrop, narrator of "The Whippoorwills in the Hills," tells us that when his oddball cousin Abel Harrop, who had had almost no intercourse with Dan and the rest of the family, vanished, the authorities were of no help, so he decided to investigate the disappearance himself.  Dan moved into Abel's isolated house, finding there a bunch of weird books.  Abel's phone is on a party line, and Dan is able to listen in on the local women gossiping about him and about his lost cousin--it seems they feared Abel, and are glad he is gone.

At night, a huge flock of whippoorwills settles in the valley where lies the Harrop house, and make so much noise with their cries that the narrator cannot sleep.  The next day when he eavesdrops on the neighbors' phone convos, Dan finds that they are all talking about the whippoorwills--they could hear their racket, even though their homes are quite distant, and fear the bird's activity foreshadows an imminent death.

Sure enough, cattle and even people in the area start getting killed in the dark of night.  During the day Dan conducts his investigations, looking into Abel's strange old books and talking to the locals, who refuse to help him, some quite angrily.  Whenever he is near Abel's queer library Dan has visions, like unbidden memories, of weird landscapes and creatures.  During the night Dan does his best to sleep while the whippoorwills alight on and around the house and make their interminable racket, and when he does sleep he dreams of monolithic towers and fungoid trees and the amoeba-like beings that live among them.  As the story progresses we are given clear clues that Abel was casting spells from the books in order to "open a Gate" through which to contact or summon monsters from that other dimension, ansd that he himself was sucked bodily into that alien plane.  Dan himself, by reading aloud a passage of one of Abel's books, got the attention of alien creatures and the murders of animals and people are being conducted by him in a state of stupefaction or alien possession, their blood a sacrifice to the extradimensional monsters that perhaps appeases them and saves him from being taken away as was his cousin. 

We learn at the story's end that Dan is writing this memoir in captivity, having been captured by the local police in the vicinity of the dead body of a murdered woman--Dan refuses to admit he is the culprit, instead blaming the whippoorwills.

Derleth fills this story with direct references to people, places and things in Mythos stories by H. P. Lovecraft and in at least once instance Robert E. Howard.  The towns of Dunwich and Arkham are mentioned, minor characters have names like Whateley, Abel's books bear titles like Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and the creatures in Dan's dreams have names like Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.

"The Whippoorwills in the Hills" starts out alright; the pacing and tone and style are good.  But Derleth fails to tie everything up together in the end; at least I didn't quite understand the role of the whippoorwills in the story.  All the stuff with the books and monsters from another dimension and the murders works as a discrete unit, it all makes internal sense, so the whippoorwills feel like a superfluous element just added on top of the story instead of integrated with the rest of it.  I guess the birds are a manifestation of the aliens (whom we are told can take any shape) and it is they that drink the blood that Dan spills, or somehow direct him to spill the blood.  It is possible that the whippoorwills seemed out of place to me because I was not very familiar with the folklore about them, and had forgotten that these birds played a role in Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror."

Another problem with the story is that it doesn't build up to a striking climax, it just sort of sails along and then ends, the tone and pace, which were perfectly adequate at the start, never changing, so it feels like the story just abruptly ends.

Merely acceptable. "The Whippoorwills in the Hills" would be included in the oft-reprinted Derleth collection, The Mask of Cthulhu.

British paperback editions, 1951 and 1976

"Fever Dream" by Ray Bradbury

In the days when a doctor would make house calls in his horse-drawn carriage, a fifteen-year-old boy lies in bed suffering what the sawbones thinks is scarlet fever.  But the boy knows that his body is being taken over, bit by bit, by germs, that he will die and his body be animated by a new creature, a creature of unfathomable evil!  Sure enough, at the end of the brief tale the doctor is astonished to find the boy fully recovered and eager to go to school and touch all the other kids and their clothes--no doubt to spread disease and death!

Bradbury's dialogue is chilling, his metaphors powerful and illuminating (as metaphors, which so often are showy cliches that waste your time, should be), and the story is a perfect length, short and to the point.  Quite good.

"Fever Dream" was first reprinted in 1959, in the collection A Medicine for Melancholy, and has since been widely anthologized.

           
"The Daughter of Urzun" by Stanton A. Coblentz

Most of the stories in this 1964 magazine were
written by Coblentz, though many appear under
pseudonyms

Remember when we read Stanton A. Coblentz's broad satire The Hidden World (AKA In Caverns Below), or when we read his anti-war poem "On A Weird Planet?"  Damn, that was long ago.  Well, let's get reacquainted with old Stanton.

Out of the starting gate, Stanton gets me on his side by reminding me of my New York days and relating a horror-story version of a typical New York experience--being mesmerized by an attractive woman on the subway!  Our narrator and his blue-eyed wife Marjorie are riding the world's most famous mass-transit system when a "swarthy" "Oriental" woman with big hypnotic black eyes and a "cynical" mouth sits down across from them, and the narrator is disturbingly captivated by her--he can't stop looking at her, and her presence fills him with a weird dread.  Later in the day, he and Marjorie get on a different train and the "Oriental" sits across from them again!  After the sinister figure gets off, Marjorie tells the narrator that she was also fascinated and horrified by the woman, the sight of whom conjured up unaccountably bad feelings, like those associated with a terrible experience in the past.

That night our hero has a vivid dream, like a vision, in which he and Marjorie are dark-skinned people themselves, living in an ancient exotic city where animal-headed gods are worshiped.  (At the end of the story we learn it is a city in "ancient Babylonia.")  He and Marjorie are workers, he a brick mason and she a tender of the fires in a bakery, but a seductive noblewoman has taken notice of him--she has been summoning him to her palace to engage in a torrid affair that is ruining the narrator's marriage!  As you have already guessed, this aristocratic lady, this homewrecker who "throbs" in the narrator's embrace, who is "lithe, sinuous, panther-like, a thing of curves and fire" is the woman from the subway, and this dream is a recovered memory of one of the narrator's past lives which was intimately associated with the past lives of Marjorie and the subway woman!

The main plot of the story is how the ancient incarnation of the narrator was forced to choose between his work-worn wife--the mother of his child--and the rich sexy lady who offered him a life of luxury, and the crimes and tragedies that are the product of this love triangle.

I am a sucker for stories about femmes fatale and stories about dangerous sexual relationships, about men being carried away by desire and doing things that are stupid or immoral, and so I found "The Daughter of Urzun" entertaining.  Judged with cold objectivity, it is probably just average.

I sometimes wonder what value my blog provides when I praise universally acknowledged geniuses like Ray Bradbury--everybody and his brother can tell you Ray Bradbury's early stories are good, so I'm not adding much to the discourse by agreeing.  I feel more confident that I am doing something worthwhile when I talk about stories and writers who have been forgotten or who are controversial, and "The Daughter of Urzun" falls into that forgotten category--isfdb indicates that it has never appeared in book form, and was only ever reprinted in an odd magazine in 1964--it is practically a lost relic from our literary past!

"The Watcher of the Ages" by Edmond Hamilton

Dutch edition of What's It Like Out There?

In a March 16, 1934 letter to Duane W. Rimel, H. P. Lovecraft wrote "Hamilton is very brilliant, but has allowed popular magazine taste to injure his writing," and Lovecraft's correspondence is full of complaints that Hamilton uses the same plots again and again; HPL, like Bertie Wooster and George W. Bush, loved giving nicknames to people, and in his letters he calls Hamilton "Hectograph Eddie" and "Single-Plot Hamilton."  In a September 12, 1934 letter to Rimel he even blames Hamilton for an alleged decline in the quality of Jack Williamson's work: "Williamson started out well, but his close friendship with Hamilton has caused him to adopt cheap pulp standards & fall into the usual trivial rut."  Ouch!

(I recently bought Volumes 7, 9 and 10 of Hippocampus Press's Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and highly recommend them to those interested in speculative fiction of the 1930s--among the letters in these three volumes are those to Robert Bloch, Donald A. Wollheim, Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber, and C. L. Moore, as well as letters written by Moore to Lovecraft.  Each of these three books is over 400 pages long and full of personality, insight, gossip, and helpful notes by editors David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi--I paid $25.00 for each and they are totally worth it.)

As regular readers of MPorcius Fiction Log know, I consider Edmond Hamilton a favorite--though I have panned some of his productions and Lovecraft certainly has a point about his reusing plots--and am curious to read this tale, one which Lovecraft, who died eleven years before it was published, never had a chance to pass judgement on.

The narrator of "The Watcher of the Ages" is Lane Adams, a geologist, a member of a team of eggheads accompanied by a mining executive exploring an ancient city in the "Matto Grosso" region of Brazil--rumor has it this city, lost in the jungle for centuries, is the site of valuable radioactive elements and other minerals.  Adams is familiar with this part of Brazil and can communicate to the Indian porters and read the inscriptions on the ruined walls of the thousands-years-old metropolis.  Both the native porters and the ancient inscriptions say the city is hellishly dangerous because it is guarded by an inhuman being and you should get out while you still can, but you don't think a bunch of American scientists and businessmen are going to believe that mumbo jumbo, do you?   

At night, somebody sabotages the expedition's Geiger counters, but luckily the mining executive has kept one Geiger counter separate from the others and it is still serviceable.  Using it, the expedition discovers a source of radiation deep in a mountain.  Clad in protective suits, the men descend an ancient stairway to find a pit full of radioactive material--on the edge of this pit is a sort of laboratory where the scientists of six thousand years ago created an artificial man, the inhuman guardian the inscriptions and Indians warned them of!  The mining exec comes up with the scheme of selling the golem-making apparatus to the highest bidder--Hamilton doesn't name names but I'm betting Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao would be in the market for a process that could build an invincible army with which to put those paper tigers and running dogs in their place!   Of course, the businessman will first have to murder the do-gooder scientists who came on this expedition not to get rich but to expand the frontier of knowledge.

This is when Lane Adams reveals the astounding truth--he is the inhuman guardian, in disguise as an American geologist!  For six thousand years he has guarded the city and the ancient lab, sabotaging and diverting expeditions hunting for it because he feared the human race was not yet ready to shoulder the responsibility that comes with the ability to create life.  The mining exec and his henchmen try to kill him but the guardian has super strength and is practically invulnerable to bullets and blows, and the fight ends with the unscrupulous business people being thrown down into the radioactive pit to die a horrible death.

"Adams" lets the scientists go after they promise to keep the ancient lab and radioactive pit a secret.  Then, weary of life, in despair of mankind ever developing to the point that he can safely hand over to them the secret of creating synthetic people, the immortal guardian sets a bomb to collapse the mountain, thus burying the lab and pit for the foreseeable future, and commits suicide by jumping into the radioactive pit from which he sprang sixty centuries ago.

This story feels underdeveloped; its numerous fertile ideas--exploring a jungle and ancient city, how would people react to learning that they could create synthetic people, the psychology of a superior inhuman being living in disguise among humans for thousands of years--could form the basis for all kinds of adventures and thought-provoking discussions and dramatic scenes, but in this short story they amount to little.  A lost opportunity.  I'm judging "The Watcher of the Ages" barely acceptable.

"The Watcher of the Ages" would go on to be reprinted in the 1974 collection What's It Like Out There?  

"Displaced Person" by Eric Frank Russell

This one has been reprinted many times in Russell collections and in anthologies edited by people like Terry Carr, Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg.  "Displaced Person" is one of those "short shorts" and takes up less than two pages in Weird Tales.

Ohhh, another New York story, this one set in Central Park!  I know I don't have to tell you how much I miss Central Park...Bethesda Fountain, the Ramble, Turtle Pond...those were the days....

Anyway, this is a silly gimmicky story, as these short shorts tend to be.  The narrator is sitting on a park bench when a well-dressed man sits next to him.  The narrator gets the impression that this is some refugee from Europe, a political dissident driven out of his country, and in conversation the man relates that he led a failed revolt against a "leader" who had "delusions of grandeur" and "posed as the final arbiter on everything from birth to death." The man expresses his frustration over the fact that his enemy controls all the propaganda and has suppressed all his attempts for to make his case before the public.  When the narrator assures him that in America we have free speech and the dissident can say what he likes, the defeated rebel murmurs, "My name is Lucifer."

Oh, brother!

Is this story just a goofy joke?  Or an attack on Christianity and Christian institutions?  Does it make sense to equate God and/or Christian churches with Hitler and Lenin and Stalin, and Satan (and Satanists?) with people who opposed or fled totalitarian regimes?  The story is so brief, Russell can't make a case for his strange argument (if it is an argument), so it just comes across as a sort of cheap thumbing of the nose at religious people.

Or maybe I am so used to SF writers goofing on religion that I am missing Russell's point--maybe the story is supposed to be an example of the Devil's audacity and trickery, maybe we are expected to bristle at the rank presumption of Lucifer playing the victim and the effrontery of his assumption of the mantle of real victims of real tyranny and oppression.

Whatever Russell is trying to do here I don't get it and I don't enjoy it--have to give this thing a thumbs down. 

I have now read sixteen stories by Eric Frank Russell over the course of this blog's unlikely life, and here are handy links to my blog posts that address the other fifteen (I liked some of them):

"Mana," "Jay Score," and "Homo Saps"
"Metamorphosite," "Hobbyist," "Late Night Final," and "Dear Devil"
"Fast Falls the Eventide," "I Am Nothing," and "Weak Spot"
"Allamagoosa," "Into Your Tent I'll Creep," and "Study in Still Life"
"Exposure"
"Love Story"

**********

I guess we shouldn't be surprised that Ray Bradbury's story is, by a wide margin, the best of this lot.  The conventional wisdom wins again!

In our next episode a 1970s novel about travel in outer space.

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by C H Thompson, R Campbell & T Ligotti selected by S T Joshi for 2017's The Red Brain

If you have been following my blogging career closely, you know I purchased from Dark Regions Press an electronic copy of 2017's The Red Brain: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by S. T. Joshi, in an effort to secure the best possible text of Donald Wandrei's 1927 story, "The Red Brain."  Today I will be taking advantage of this $7.00 investment and reading three more stories selected by Joshi, one each by people I have a little familiarity with, Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Ligotti, and one by C. Hall Thompson, about whom I have to say I know almost nothing.

"The Will of Claude Ashur" by C. Hall Thompson (1947)

S. T. Joshi is an opinionated guy, and he never seems to pass up an opportunity to slag August Derleth.  In his intro to this anthology, Joshi says that C. Hall Thompson wrote better Mythos stories than did Derleth himself, and laments that Derleth, ostensibly in an effort to protect Lovecraft's reputation, discouraged Thompson from writing more.  (Thompson only has four stories listed at isfdb.)  "The Will of Claude Ashur" first appeared in Weird Tales.

Like so many Lovecraftian stories, this one is the first-person narrative of a dude in an insane asylum.  Our narrator, Richard Ashur, grew up in a big old house known as the Priory in the greatest state in the Union, New Jersey, at the seaside hamlet of Inneswich.  The Priory was the site of a lynching in the late 18th century, when the pastor living there and his wife, a woman he brought back from Hungary who was reputed to be a witch, were killed by the local villagers, she burned, he hanged.  The narrator's father purchased the Priory like a century later; when the narrator was a little kid the room in which the murders took place was padlocked, entrance forbidden.

Richard's loving mother died giving birth to his little brother, Claude, an ugly little weirdo whom everybody, from servants and tutors to animals, instinctively hates and fears.  That is, except for Dad, who dotes on the unhealthy little freak, indulging Claude's every whim--little Claude is practically the dictator of the Priory!  Claude loves to be alone, and unseals the murder room and makes of it his private sanctuary, the door remains forever locked to others, the key never out of his possession.

In the narrator's early twenties his pet dog, which Claude found annoying, mysteriously dies, and Richard, certain Claude is responsible, picks the lock of the murder room and finds shocking evidence that Claude killed the dog via sorcery.  The next day the narrator leaves home to attend classes at Princeton (what, Rutgers isn't good enough for you?)   

Richard doesn't see Claude for four years, but right after he graduates he meets his sinister brother briefly; Claude is about to start his own college career...at Miskatonic University!  There he studies The Necronomicon and other repositories of forbidden lore.  After only two years at MU, Claude wants to drop out to travel to the Far East, but Dad won't give Claude the money to do so.  Dad keels over soon after, and again Richard discovers evidence that Claude has killed one of Richard's loved ones via sorcery!

With his inheritance Claude goes on his trip to the mysterious East and other black magic hot spots, and Richard doesn't see him for like eight years; the one time he hears of his brother, it is a rumor that Claude is in the West Indies, in the jungle among the blacks, learning voodoo!  When Claude finally returns to the Priory he brings with him a gorgeous wife named Gratia, and Richard is immediately entranced by this beauty, and certain that she is somehow Claude's prisoner!

I was haunted by the feeling that, somehow, the subtle, cancerous evil that had followed Claude Ashur since birth was reaching out its vile, slime-coated tentacles to claim this girl, to destroy her as it had destroyed everything it ever touched. And, quite suddenly, I knew I didn’t want that to happen. I didn’t want anything to happen to Gratia. She was the loveliest woman I had ever known.      

Claude, with his indomitable will (mentioned in the title) and occult powers, becomes tyrant of the Priory once more!  He is so bold as to let Richard know that he is experimenting with methods of shifting his consciousness into Gratia's body--Claude tells Richard that Gratia is so good-looking that, with his brilliant mind installed in her body, he will be able to manipulate any man and maybe even take over the world!

Richard (and the world!) get a lucky break when Claude falls ill with a recurrence of a fever he caught in the tropics; this period of weakness gives Gratia and Richard a moment of freedom, and a struggle ensues that sees Richard's diabolical brother shut up in the loony bin.  But this is merely a temporary triumph for Richard--as we readers have been expecting since page 1, from the insane asylum Claude begins shifting his soul into Richard's body!  As the story ends Richard is in Claude's emaciated and disease-ridden body while Claude is in Richard's hardy frame, inflicting God knows what atrocities on Gratia and no doubt plotting other crimes against humanity!

Joshi is totally right to include this story in his book of "Great Tales" and regret there are not more stories from Thompson extant--this story is good.  I love the plot (I have a soft spot for these brain/soul shifting stories and stories about difficult family and sexual relationships), and the pacing and structure are solid, and Thompson's style--the words he uses, the images and emotions he describes, the way he puts together the sentences--is effective.  Thompson piles up all kinds of cool stuff (I particularly like the way Claude's sorcery involves his artistic abilities as a sculptor, painter and musician) but the narrative moves along at a smooth and easy pace; Thompson's writing is economical, with little fat or filler, every paragraph adding to the tone or atmosphere or plot.

The obvious criticism of "The Will of Claude Ashur," of course, is that it is like a remix or reboot of (Joshi uses the phrase "riff on") Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep."  This doesn't bother me, but the tale is undeniably a derivative and unoriginal homage; Thompson even uses place names that are nods to the titles of Lovecraft stories (besides Inneswich, there is the location of Claude's lodgings while a student at Miskatonic U, Pickham Square.)

A fun story for us fans of the weird.

"The Pattern" by Ramsey Campbell (1976)   

Joshi is crazy about Ramsey Campbell, whom he says in the intro to this volume is "perhaps the most distinguished writer of weird fiction in literary history."  I have found Campbell underwhelming, myself; apparently in an effort to distinguish himself from mere pulp fiction and produce literary stories, he always seems to include in his work a profusion of details, metaphors, and cultural references both direct and indirect, but I often find all that extra clutter to be an obstruction rather than an adornment, an encrustation of barnacles that slows the story down.

Tony is a painter married to Di, a writer of children's books.  Di makes more money than does Tony, which causes some stress in their relationship (Campbell uses the phrase "inevitable castration anxiety"--here is a glimpse of the pre-woke world for all you kids out there!)  Di has been writing a book about the odyssey of dryads who have left their forest because it was burned down by a cigarette-smoking human; she partly chose this topic because it would be a perfect subject for illustrations by Tony, who paints landscapes of trees and flowers and grassy swards and the rest of it, and thus provide a chance for him to increase his exposure and thus income.

(I couldn't tell how we were supposed to feel about Tony and Di's book, which bears the title The Song of the Trees.  Are we to admire their commitment to the English countryside, or snicker at them for being vapid hippies, or shake our heads at their crass commercialism?)

These two rent a cottage in the Cotswalds next to a grassy field full of flowers to finish this book together.  (Writers are always going to some place in the country to finish their work...my wife even went to a place in the country to finish her dissertation.)  Campbell describes the landscape as seen through Tony's eyes at length:

...the sluggish sky parted. Sunlight spilled over an edge of cloud. At once the greens that had merged into green emerged again, separating: a dozen greens, two dozen. Dots of flowers brightened over the field...

As I suggested before, Campbell always seems to have these sorts of long descriptions of buildings and streets and landscapes in his stories, trying hard to show a character's personality by letting us in on how the character sees the world.  This is easy for me to admire in a theoretical way, but I rarely find it amusing or interesting or affecting.  To me, the melodramatic quote from Thompson's story above, an in-your-face effusion about evil and fear and beauty, is much more moving and entertaining.  Maybe I have a simple mind.

Anyway, Tony and Di are distracted by the weather and so forth and don't make much progress on The Song of the Trees.  They periodically hear a scream in the distance, and Tony often feels like he is being watched.  Di suddenly figures out how to finish The Song of the Trees--the dryads will come to rest in a cottage just like this one!  Tony goes into town to research those screams, reading a book of local lore and talking to a local journalist, learning that people have been hearing those screams for decades or centuries, and that murders and deadly accidents have taken place near the cottage throughout history. Something the reporter says suggests that Di is in danger, and Tony rushes back to the cottage where he finds Di, torn to pieces by a murderer, and realizes that he is about to suffer a similar fate--the scream he and people throughout the ages have been hearing is his own scream, echoing backwards from the future, and the future is now!

This story is OK, I guess, even if all the descriptions of the colors of trees and buildings and so on feel like padding and the gore descriptions at the end feel exploitative.  Joshi seems to think the idea of an emotionally laden scream echoing backwards in time so it can be heard before it has been voiced, and that the psychic trauma of an atrocity can similarly ripple back in time to cause earlier tragedies and crimes, is Lovecraftian, but I don't get it.  (And I guess I don't really get Ramsey Campbell, either.)

"The Pattern" was first published in the collection Superhorror, and also appeared in the anthology My Favorite Horror Story, it being Poppy Z. Brite's favorite.

**********

Here's a convenient list of every Ramsey Campbell story I have blogged about, complete with handy links and TL;DR synopses of my assessments.  (MPorcius Fiction Log is "recursive.")

"The Sunshine Club": A joke story.
"Getting it Wrong": Too long, lots of movie references.
"The Plain of Sound": OK.
"The Stone on the Island": I liked it.
"To Wake the Dead": I praised this one's style and atmosphere and gave it a thumbs up.
"Napier Court": I found this vague and confusing, but not bad, and employed Marxist, Freudian and feminist analytical strategies to try to sift through all the details and discover the story's meaning.
"The Old Horns": I found this, I guess an attack on paganism and sexual license, vague and confusing and also bad.
"The Church in High Street": Mild recommendation.
"Raised by the Moon": Plot is OK, but excessive descriptions and verbosity make it a slog.
"The Callers": I thought this tale about men's fears of women and the young's disgust at the old achieved Campbell's goals.
"Above the World": A long piece full of mundane details about a guy on a hike and how difficult it is for people to communicate.
"The Companion": I gave this long and slow story about a guy investigating an old theme park a thumbs down.
"Needing Ghosts": I gave this long and slow story about a failed writer investigating a town full of surreal visions a thumbs down.

"The Sect of the Idiot" by Thomas Ligotti (1988)

I may suspect that Ramsey Campbell is overrated, but I think the critical gushing over Thomas Ligotti (check out Lin Carter's extravagant praise of Ligotti in the December 1987 issue of Crypt of Cthulhu) is entirely justified.  Like Carter (who is one of those guys like Derleth who did heroic work promoting speculative fiction on the publishing and editorial side but whose actual fiction is generally considered mediocre) I thought "Vastarien" a masterpiece.  "The Last Feast of Harlequin" I praised as a perfectly crafted Lovecraft pastiche, and I also quite liked "The Greater Festival of Masks."  So I am totally looking forward to "The Sect of the Idiot," which first appeared in a 1988 issue of Crypt of Cthulhu.

"The Sect of the Idiot" does not disappoint.  I called  Thompson's "The Will of Claude Ashur" an economical Lovecraftian tale, but Ligotti here goes much further, boiling down Yog-Sothery to its essential elements, leaving a powerful tale that feels brief because of its purity, its presentation of Lovecraftian themes and images without any fripperies or embellishments, a producing pure concentrate of weirdness, every sentence potent!

A nameless man moves to a nameless town, a place to which he has long been drawn, his arrival the culmination of long-held hopes and dreams.  He takes a high room that looks down on a city of densely packed buildings whose roofs converge to render the many narrow twisting streets into dim corridors, a town which is characterized by its great age and its ability to inspire both claustrophobia and a sense of oppressively limitless space.  The narrator's fascination for this queer town through which he takes long walks, admiring the ancient architecture, reminds us of Lovecraft's own long walks in Providence and other cities, and the architectural walks of Lovecraft characters, like the guy in "Shadow Over Innsmouth."

In a dream the narrator sees a room like his own but placed still higher, one full of alien beings shrouded in obscuring cloaks, their alienness undeniable but its exact nature impossible to pin down.  He senses these creatures are somehow manipulating him and the world, but are themselves puppets of still more mysterious and irresistible forces.  Again, as in "Shadow Over Innsmouth," by the end of the story the narrator has every reason to doubt his own humanity, and believe he is turning into, or always was, one of these monsters.

Very good.  "The Sect of the Idiot" is a flawless gem of a Lovecraftian story that achieves maximal Yog-Sothery without aping or lampooning Lovecraft's own work, never resorting to little jokes (it takes Lovecraft's themes seriously, which I like) or throwing direct references to Miskatonic U or The Necromicon at you.  Highly recommended.

**********

The Thompson and the Ligotti are very enjoyable examples of Lovecraftian fiction; I will be reading more of their work in the future.

1949's The Other Side of the Moon: Long, Smith, Lovecraft and Wandrei

The cover of the British hardcover edition of The Other Side of the Moon (left)
illustrates Clark Ashton Smith's "The City of Singing Flame"

Let's read four more stories from August Derleth's 1949 anthology, The Other Side of the Moon, these tales penned by Derleth's friends Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei, all writers associated with Weird Tales.  I read the versions of Long's "The World of Wulkins" and Wandrei's "Something From Above" printed here in the 1949 hardcover I borrowed from a Maryland library, but I read versions of Clark Ashton Smith's "Singing Flame" series and of Lovecraft's "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" from other sources.

"The World of Wulkins" by Frank Belknap Long (1948)

It is the future!  Ralph Denham is an antiquarian who has his study decked out to look like he's living in the nineteenth century and spends his free time at antique shops.  He has a flirty wife, Molly, and two precocious kids, seven-year-old Betty Anne and eight-year-old Johnny.  This guy is living the good life!  But the universe is full of cosmic terror, and Ralph and his happy family are not immune!

Betty Anne insists they buy an ugly child-sized antique robot (a "goggle-eyed horror"), a wreck covered in rust, that they see at an antiques store.  The droid is inert, but she wants play with it as if it were a doll, and christens it "Wulkins."  The family takes a ride on a roller coaster, and the rattling and shaking of the machine brings Wulkins back to life!  Immediately, Ralph notices bizarre visual effects all around him and surmises that Wulkins is no Earthly robot, but a scout from another dimension, sent to our world to seize samples and bring them back to its home plane of existence.  Ralph grabs the little spy, pulls out some of its wires, and it is again deactivated.

Instead of simply destroying the alien invader, Ralph puts it in the basement, planning to show it to his scientific buddies.  Betty Anne and Johnny, not realizing the danger their new friend poses, sneak down into the basement and repair Wulkins!  Wulkins snatches up the kids and transports the entire house into another dimension; Molly realizes something is amiss when she looks out the window and the moon and stars and landscape look different than usual.

The Second Amendment must be alive and well in the future because when Betty Anne and Johnny's parents realize that their kids are in peril, Ralph grabs the energy pistol he keeps in his drawer and hoses down Wulkins, who has grown to ogre-size, with radioactive rays, damaging and driving off the alien robot.  In a nearby building Ralph discovers a half-decayed insect creature lying on a slab; he presumes this alien built Wulkins and sent him out exploring the multiverse.  Ralph also pockets some rolls of film he finds.  Wulkins reappears, and after some more shooting, Wulkins dramatically commits suicide, and the Denham house and family somehow return to Earth.  By examining the film Ralph figures out that Wulkins was not a robot; in fact, the bug was a robot built by Wulkins, whose body wasn't really mechanical but just looked mechanical to Earth eyes.   One thing Ralph doesn't figure out is that it was his own kids, those scamps, who reactivated Wulkins and put all their lives in terrible jeopardy.

The premise and plot of "World of Wulkins" are not bad, and, in theory, a person who is actually good at writing could expend a little effort and shape such material into an effective horror and/or action-adventure tale.  Unfortunately, Long doesn't develop the story carefully.  The twist reveal--that the thing that looks like a robot is a scientist and the thing that looks like a bug is a robot--is poorly set up and pointless besides.  (The obvious way to end the story is to reveal that the bug scientist put his soul into the robot body, and then while he was trapped on Earth his body decayed, and he committed suicide because he didn't want to live through eternity in a robot body.)  One also wonders how Wulkins's suicide sent the Denhams back to Earth.  Even worse, Long's poor writing style prevents the story from being told efficiently and mucks up the tone of the piece.  Sentences and passages that should be concise and powerful, so that horror scenes convey terror or dread and fight scenes and chase scenes convey excitement and speed, are instead verbose and full of silly details that distract or confuse the reader.  Long also tries too hard to be cute when describing the kids, which of course undermines all the horror and adventure elements.

Here are some examples of Long sentences that take the reader right out of the story and should have been taken right out of the story by the author or editor during revision or editing:

[Ralph rushes to dress quickly when he realizes the kids are in danger and he had to run outside:]  Few men could have drawn on their shoes in exactly eight seconds.  But Denham did it.

[Johnny, who has no idea what he is doing, starts working on the inert Wulkins in the basement:]  There is a right way of tackling every problem and there is a wrong way.  But there is also a way which is neither right nor wrong, but just--a way.

[Betty Anne has escaped into Molly's arms but Johnny is still in danger:]  It was not only terror that she felt, but shame, that she could have forgotten even for an instant that she had a son.  She hadn't really forgotten, not deep in her mind, but her relief at finding Betty Anne in her arms had spilled over into the warm, bright little compartment reserved for her son.  Now that compartment was as cold as ice.

In an October 11, 1926 letter to August Derleth*, H. P. Lovecraft says of Long that "Fiction is to him only a means of corralling cash--he is a poet and aesthete, & has put his real soul into the thin volume of verse he issued (at a doting aunt's expense) last winter."  I can certainly believe that Long did not put his "real soul" into "The World of Wulkins," but just threw it together for money and sent it off to Thrilling Wonder Stories, where it first appeared.  I'm afraid I have to give this one a negative vote.

After being reprinted in The Other Side of the Moon, "The World of Wulkins" lay dormant until it was revivified for inclusion in the 1972 Long collection The Rim of the Unknown, versions of which appeared in Great Britain in 1978 and in Italy in 1995.

*My source is the excerpts from this letter printed in the 2000 volume Arkham's Masters of Horror edited by Peter Ruber.

"The City of Singing Flame" and "Beyond the Singing Flame" by Clark Ashton Smith (1931)

The Other Side of the Moon includes a long story by Clark Ashton Smith, "The City of the Singing Flame," and I initially planned to read it, but isfdb suggests the version here in Derleth's anthology, a joining of two 1931 stories, was rewritten by a Walter Gillings, so I decided to check out the original versions from Wonder Stories, readily available at the internet archive.

"The City of Singing Flame" is introduced by a beautiful illustration by Frank R. Paul of a city of skyscrapers of diverse architectural styles inhabited by a throng of equally diverse alien beings.  There is a brief prologue, and then comes the main text, the journal of Giles Angarth, who has disappeared along with his friend Felix Ebbonly.  (There is a slight "meta" element to the story: Angarth and the man to whom the journal is addressed, Philip Hastane, are writers of fantasy stories, and Ebbonly an illustrator of such tales.  Maybe these characters are jocular portraits of Derleth, Lovecraft, and Smith himself?)  Angarth relates how, hiking alone at Crater Ridge, within sight of the Nevada Mountains, he stumbled on a hidden gateway and was mysteriously transported to a world of purple and yellow forests, just outside a city of red spires.

This story feels long and slow, with lots of description and little plot.  There is none of the sex and violence, little of the humor or terror that has made so many other Clark Ashton Smith stories so effective.  Another disappointment is the style: many Smith stories are written in a sort of poetic or fairy tale style which is good at generating a fun or creepy "I'm in an alien world" mood, but, I guess because this story is written in the voices of early 20th-century people, the style of "The City of Singing Flame" is sort of flat and boring.

One thing that makes the story feel slow is that Angarth keeps taking the gateway back and forth between Earth and the alien world over a course of some days, on each trip advancing a little further, getting scared, and scurrying back to Earth to write in this journal.

Anyway, Angarth discovers that the red city is a place of pilgrimage, where aliens come from all over the universe to see a huge flame in a vast shrine.  Many of the pilgrims jump into the flame to be incinerated.  A musical vibration with hypnotic effect apparently entices people into this flame; like the many different aliens, Angarth is strongly attracted to the flame, but he puts cotton in his ears and resists the urge to immolate himself.  On his last trip he brings along his friend, Ebbonly.  Ebbonly decides to forgo use of the cotton and he runs into the flame and is annihilated.  In his last journal entry, Angarth tells us that he is going to throw himself into the flame tomorrow--the influence of the musical vibration has apparently convinced him that dying in the flame will be "splendid" and "glorious" in comparison to his "monotonous" and meaningless day-to-day life.

I like the themes and ideas of this story, but it is just too long and Smith doesn't bother to set up the characters of Ebbonly and Angarth ahead of time as people who are depressed or bored with the monotony of life.  If Angarth and Ebbonly had been frustrated in their careers or love affairs or hated society or something, their suicides would make more sense and would represent a culmination and/or catharsis; as it is, Hastane in his prologue says they are successful in their careers; we readers have to assume they only commit suicide because of the vibration's powers, which is less interesting than if their actions were a result of their own psychologies.   

I'd have to say this one is merely acceptable, but maybe it is not fair to judge "City of Singing Flame" on its own, and I should reserve final judgement until I have read "Beyond the Singing Flame."  (Though SF fans in 1931 would have judged "City of Singing Flame" on its own, as it appeared in the July issue of Wonder Stories, with the words "THE END" on its final page, and the sequel would not appear until the November issue, four issues later.) 

"Beyond the Singing Flame" is as boring and plot-lite as its predecessor, and more nonsensical, and throws away all the suicide stuff that made "The City of Singing Flame" sort of interesting.  This entire story is narrated by Philip Hastane, who goes to Crater Ridge to find the gateway.  He is transported to the red city, as were Angarth and Ebbonly, but finds it under attack by another city, a city of towers that walk on mechanical legs and project bolts of energy at the city of the Flame.  Hastane is carried aloft by two friendly aliens, butterfly-people on a pilgrimage to the Flame, who fly him right into the Flame!

To Hastane's relief and my dismay the Flame doesn't burn you up, it "revibrates" your atoms so you are sent to a higher plane of existence, one of "immense joy," "liberation" and "ecstasy."  Here one has new senses and abilities that enable one to experience new forms of beauty and happiness.  Angarth and Ebbonly have been waiting for their friend Hastane, and welcome him to this Eden.  This paradise, however, begins to shiver and shake--it is sustained by the Flame, and the Flame is under attack back in the red city!  The three Earthlings fly (that is one of their new abilities) towards another gateway that will take them to another paradise, but they don't make it; when the Flame expires the paradise expires, and the three men reappear in the ruins of the red city, next to where the Flame once burned.  Poor Ebbonly is crushed to death by a falling column, but Angarth and Hastane live on, haunted by the memories of their time in heaven.  Luckily, the evil city that demolished the red city left intact the gateway that leads back to Earth.

I have to give this exercise in tedium a thumbs down.

MPorcius Fiction Log may have lowered the boom on "The City of Singing Flame" and "Beyond the Singing Flame," but many SF fans over the decades have sung the praises of these tales.  Editor Mort Weisinger reprinted "The City of Singing Flame" in the same 1941 issue of Startling Stories that saw the debut of Edmond Hamilton's A Yank in Valhalla, and alongside it is an essay by Harry Warner, Jr. explaining that "The City of Singing Flame" is his favorite, "one of the finest fantasies ever written."  Robert A. Lowndes reprinted the stories in his 1960s magazine Famous Science Fiction, and they were also included by editor Robert Weinberg in 2009's The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith.  What can I say?  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are iconoclasts!

"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" by H. P. Lovecraft (1919)

The narrator of "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" is a medical professional with some unconventional ideas about sleep and dreams.  "From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know....Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon."  So he is pretty stoked when an inbred and illiterate hillbilly from the Catskills, Joe Slater, who is said to have really crazy dreams, is dragged into the insane asylum where the narrator is working as an "interne."

All his life Slater has disturbed and amazed his fellow hill people (whom the narrator variously describes as "white trash," "primitive," "barbaric," "repellent," "decadent" and "degenerate") with the vivid stories of his dreams, which he himself forgets within an hour of waking.  The police nabbed him after he, in a fit of madness during which he yelled about his need to achieve revenge on an alien "thing," beat a fellow hillbilly to a pulp.  Acquitted by reason of insanity, Slater has been consigned for life to the state mental hospital, where the narrator conducts unauthorized experiments on him. 

These experiments consist of the narrator attaching to Slater's head a sort of transmitter and to his own head a receiver, which he hopes will allow him to experience Slater's thoughts.  It is on the night that Slater dies, his health having precipitously deteriorated in captivity, that the narrator finally gains the insights he seeks, and learns the astonishing truth, that cosmic entities that are chained to our bodies by day explore the universe at night, interacting with alien life forms and waging war against malevolent oppressors. 

Technically, "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" is vulnerable to the kind of complaints I leveled against Smith's "Singing Flame" stories: it is mostly description and has little plot and is kind of nonsensical.  But Lovecraft's story is far superior.  First, it is short, and does not get tedious.  Second, Lovecraft fills the story with uneasiness and tension by including the horrible killing, the constant reminders of how primitive and disgusting the hillbillies are, the obsessive quest for vengeance of the cosmic entity bound to Slater's body, and the fact that the narrator's theories and experiments are not approved by his superiors.  I like this one.

"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" first appeared in an amateur periodical called Pine Cones, and in 1934 was reprinted in the fanzine The Fantasy Fan; in 1938 it was printed in Weird Tales.  In 1943 it was the title story of the Lovecraft collection Beyond the Wall of Sleep, which features Clark Ashton Smith sculptures on its cover, and since then has been reprinted in many anthologies and collections.  I read it in my Corrected Ninth Printing of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (2001.) 

"Something From Above" by Donald Wandrei (1930)

In July of 2017 I read three stories by Donald Wandrei; two of them, "Raiders of the Universes" and "The Fire Vampires," start with astronomers spotting some odd phenomena in the heavens.  "Something From Above" starts similarly, with a detached journalistic account of some astronomers noticing lights in the sky and the occlusions of some stars.  The second part of the story details the horrible adventure suffered by a Norwegian-American farmer, Lars Loberg, and his wife Helga, in western Minnesota.  (Wandrei attributes some of Loberg's character traits to his ethnicity in a way we perhaps would not today.)  To make a long story short, Lars and Helga encounter a number of strange phenomena, like red dust falling from the sky, the discovery of a huge gouge in their field that is occupied by a large invisible object, and then, horrifyingly, Helga's disappearance while Lars isn't looking--she later falls from the sky, frozen and dead.  Lars goes insane and burns Helga on a funeral pyre, and then sets fire to the large invisible object, which we readers of course recognize as an alien space craft.  The space ship explodes, killing Lars.

In the third part of the story the mysteries of the first two parts are explained.  Solo pilot Larry Greene was flying over Minnesota when aliens from Saturn sucked his plane up into space with a tractor beam to ask him to be Saturn's liaison with Earth.  (Poor Helga got sucked up by mistake.)  The Saturnians, people made of gas, are defending our solar system from some hostile extrasolar aliens--the dust and invisible wreck that landed on the Loberg farm were what was left of an invading ship shot down by the Saturn flyboys.  While he visits their ship, the Saturn people explain a lot of sciency stuff and Saturn history to Greene; then they send him back down to Earth.  Unfortunately, Greene's time in space has frozen parts of his body and he dies of these injuries--fortunately he lives long enough to write about his adventure.

"Something From Above" isn't bad.  Maybe the prevalence of collateral damage is sort of unusual?  The story first saw print in Weird Tales, and besides in Wandrei collections and here in The Other Side of the Moon, it would be republished in Donald Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader, in the same issue as reprints of Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner's "The Black Kiss" and Frank Belknap Long's "The Hounds of Tindalos."

**********

It is always fun to dig into what the Weird Tales gang was up to in their heyday, but for our next few blog posts we'll advance forward a few decades and check out some sword-swinging paperbacks from the late '60s and 'early '70s.

Stories by Ray Bradbury and Murray Leinster from August Derleth's The Other Side of the Moon

In 1949, Pellegrini & Cudahy published The Other Side of the Moon, a hardcover anthology of 20 science fiction stories selected by Wisconsin's August Derleth.  In 2020, I borrowed a copy of the anthology from the Enoch Pratt Free Library of Baltimore via interlibrary loan.  This book has appeared in paperback editions in both the United States and Great Britain, but isfdb warns us that all of those have been severely abridged.

I have already read and blogged about three stories that appear in The Other Side of the Moon, A. E. van Vogt's   "Resurrection" AKA "Monster" and "Vault of the Beast," and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "The Cure."  All three of these stories are good and have been reprinted numerous times, and I recommend that you rush right out and read them.

Today, let's read four stories from The Other Side of the Moon, the two by Ray Bradbury and the two by Murray Leinster.  I'm reading the versions from this seventy-year old hardcover book, but there are magazine versions of all four stories available online.

"Pillar of Fire" by Ray Bradbury (1948)

"Pillar of Fire" made its debut in Planet Stories, where the editors introduce it by saying "We cannot tell you what kind of story this is.  We simply cannot present it as we present other stories.  It is too tremendous for that."

William Lantry, a guy who died in Massachusetts in the early 20th century, wakes up and climbs out of his grave in the 24th century.  Bradbury doesn't really explain how this guy manages to get reanimated; he is truly dead--he doesn't breathe, for example--but he is up and walking around and thinking and experiencing emotion.  It seems that it is hate that gives Lantry the energy to perform his parody of life.

And hate he does!  The 24th century is what you might call a utopia--there is no fear and no crime, everybody is helpful and nobody lies--but Lantry, as a shunned outsider, immediately conceives an overpowering hatred for this sterile paradise!  Because no one in this world is suspicious and there are no police, there is nothing to stand in Lantry's way when he launches a spirited campaign of mass murder!

There are many SF stories about the shortcomings of utopias, stories which argue that for man to be at his best, to be truly alive, he must face challenges, and I think "Pillar of Fire" fits into that category, though it is more of an emotion-stirring drama than a satire or political tract.  Lantry learns that the people of the 24th century do not fear death or darkness or the unknown because there is no mystery in their lives, no imagination; things that might be scary or disturbing are removed from view or made thoroughly familiar so they lose their power to disturb.  When he goes to the library Lantry learns that books by horror writers like Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft have long been burned--Lantry is the only person in the world to have any familiarity at all with their work.  Not only are books burned in this utopia to prevent morbid thoughts, but so are the dead: the corpses of the newly deceased are immediately brought to huge incinerators that sit in each town, and school children are regularly brought on field trips to these incinerators so that for them death will have no mystery.  Even old cemeteries have been dug up and the remains of the long dead burned; it is digging in the Salem cemetery where Lantry was interred, the last cemetery in the world, that woke up Lantry, who is today the only dead body in the world!

Terribly lonely, Lantry hatches a scheme to murder people in large numbers, destroy the incinerators, and then animate those he has murdered so that he will have friends and an army with which to conquer the Earth.  "Pillar of Fire" is fast paced, and Bradbury's prose conveys the tension, the desperate anxiety, felt by a lone outsider at war with an entire world. To describe Lantry's feverish thought processes Bradbury unleashes lines that sound like modern poetry:

He arose in violent moves.  His lips were wide and his dark eyes were flared and there was a trembling and burning all through him.  He must kill and kill and kill and kill and kill.  He must make his enemies into friends, into people like himself who walked but shouldn't walk, who were pale in a land of pinks.  He must kill and then kill and then kill again.  He must make bodies and dead people and corpses.

Lantry's scheme does not come off; the antiseptic world of the future defeats him, cleanses itself of him.  As he is pushed into the incinerator he is haunted by lines from Poe and Shakespeare, writers whose works, once expected to be immortal, will in moments be truly dead, lost forever, when Lantry is blasted into cinders.  We readers must ask ourselves if living without violence and fear is worth the cost of living without art and literature and imagination.

A great story, the length and pacing and tone all perfect, with plenty of strong images and good sentences.  I was particularly thrilled to read "Pillar of Fire" because it is one of those stories which I read as a kid and whose title and plot were promptly forgotten, but which left an indelible mark on my mind; in the case of "Pillar of Fire" I never forgot the idea that people living in a future of honesty and peace would be defenseless against a time traveler from our own violent time, and a particular scene in which some 24th century people are persuaded to pursue Lantry by being told (lied to, by someone who has never lied in his life) that catching Lantry is the object of a new game.

"Pillar of Fire" was included in a number of anthologies of vampire stories as well as Bradbury collections; I am pretty sure I read it in a school library copy of the paperback edition of the Bradbury collection S is for Space with the wraparound Ian Miller cover.

"The Earth Men" by Ray Bradbury (1948)

1959 Yugoslavian edition of
The Martian Chronicles

This is kind of a joke story; as I have expressed on this blog many times, I am generally uninterested in joke stories, but Bradbury manages to make the story work, partly because it turns out to not be as absurd as it first appears and finishes with some true human drama.

Four astronauts from Earth land on Mars.  They approach native settlements, and find them to be quite like American farm houses and small towns.  As the first Earthlings to land on Mars, they expect to be greeted as heroes, but the Martians they meet just try to shoo them away, claiming they are too busy with quotidian matters like housework and business affairs to be bothered.  The astronauts' protestations that they have traveled millions of miles across space and achieved something no one has ever achieved before are brushed aside.

Bradbury gives us variations on this joke for like ten pages; the Martians keep passing the Earthers on to some other native they claim will be interested in them.  Eventually the astronauts find someone who directs them to a large building.  In this building we get the punchline to the joke and our twist ending.

The building is full of Martians who claim to be from Earth, or Jupiter, or wherever--the astronauts realize that many Martians go insane and claim they are aliens, and these mentally ill people are corralled here, in the insane asylum!  Every Martian the astronauts met simply assumed that the Earth expedition commander was yet another insane local.  Martians communicate via telepathy, and can project visual, auditory, and even tactile illusions, and so when the humans pointed out their rocket ship to the natives, they dismissed this as a hallucination (the yellow-eyed and brown-skinned Martians were similarly unimpressed by the humans' white skins and blue eyes.)  The Martians even assumed that the captain's three subordinates were constructions of his mind projected into theirs.

The humans try to convince the doctor who manages the asylum that they are not an insane man and his three illusions, but four honest to goodness visitors from Earth.  The Martian shrink is amazed at how committed to his delusions the captain is, and how realistic his illusions are, but he never once considers the possibility that the captain is telling the truth--the captain's efforts merely serve to convince the native doctor that his patient's mental illness is incurable, and that the only treatment is euthanasia.  The humans left their guns on the ship (doh!) so have no defense when the shrink shoots down the captain, and then, surprised they didn't vanish upon his patient's death, also slays the three crewmen.  When their corpses, and the rocket, don't vanish, the Martin psychologist diagnoses himself as insane, and, prescribing for himself the same treatment he has been meting out to others, commits suicide.

"The Earth Men" first appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, and would go on to be included in The Martian Chronicles, one of the most enduring and widely read classics of SF, and the inspiration for a 1980 miniseries starring Rock Hudson that Bradbury himself (according to wikipedia) called "boring," but about which our friend MonsterHunter has kind things to say.

"The Devil of East Lupton" by Murray Leinster (1948)

"The Devil of East Lupton" first was printed in the same issue of Thrilling Wonder as Bradbury's "The Earth Men" and Henry Kuttner's "Happy Ending," which I enjoyed when I read it in June.  I generally like the covers of Thrilling Wonder, most of which are bursting with energy--sexual energy or kinetic energy, or both--but the cover of this issue is one of the worst ever offered by the magazine, static and flat, with silly, uninspiring monsters.  Interior illustrations by Virgil Finlay serve to up the issue's sex appeal, however.

Leinster, born William Fitzgerald Jenkins, used lots of pen names, and in Thrilling Wonder this story appeared under the name William Fitzgerald; I'll also note that its original title was "The Devil of East Lupton, Vermont."

Like "The Earth Men," this is a somewhat jocular story of a botched first contact between humans and aliens.  Leinster includes some serious science in his story, however.

A Jovian astronaut requires extremely high pressure and low temperature to survive, and when, after landing in the Vermont woods, he is startled by the appearance of hobo named Mr. Tedder and steps back into some barbed wire, the puncturing of his space suit leads to him evaporating!  Tedder retrieves two of the man from Jupiter's weapons, a ray gun that can, apparently, disintegrate anything, and what we might call a nonlethal defense mechanism, a helmet that, when activated, throws out a field which renders any living thing within a half mile radius unconscious.  Mr. Tedder accidentally activates the helmet and causes no end of trouble to the people and animals of Vermont, and to himself when the Feds send in the military to try to neutralize the mysterious creature that is generating a moving zone of unconsciousness a mile in diameter.

This is a clever and entertaining piece; it is fun to watch as Mr. Tedder figures out what is going on, or just blunders into solutions, the pacing is good, there are a few surprises, and none of the jokes is irritatingly or distractingly bad.  Thumbs up!

"Symbiosis" by Murray Leinster (1947)

"Symbiosis" first appeared in Collier's, the major mainstream magazine founded in 1888, under the Will F. Jenkins byline.  Leinster included it in an anthology he edited himself entitled Great Stories of Science Fiction and Brian Davis selected it for inclusion in The Best of Murray Leinster.

A European country with fifty million in population, famous for its high taxes and its secret police, conquers in mere hours the most fertile province of a neighboring country of four million, a nation famous for its effective health care system.  Our main character is the little healthy country's Surgeon General, who was in a peasant village inoculating people and livestock when the invasion took place.  We follow him as he is interviewed by the leader of the invasion force and then put into a concentration camp.  During his confinement he is sad, but quietly confident.  In the final quarter or so of the story we find out why: the little country knew it could not build up a powerful enough military to resist the larger state's aggression, and that it could not count on the United Nations to save it, so it instituted a radical strategy: a mutant strain of a disease was developed, and all of its citizens were inoculated against it.  On the day of the invasion the mutant disease was put into the water supply; while the natives are immune, the invaders quickly catch the disease and within a week tens of thousands of them die, and if the invaders don't surrender the disease will spread back to their homeland and wipe out nearly their entire population.

The title refers not only to the symbiotic relationship between the disease and the people of the small country, but to the Surgeon General's assertion that all members of the human race are in a series of symbiotic relationships with each other, that members of a family help each other and that different nations should similarly help each other.

"Symbiosis" is one of those SF stories which is about an idea rather than about characters or good writing or an exciting or moving narrative, though Leinster does try to inspire emotion by contrasting the pompous and bloody-minded invaders with the decent and unpretentious Surgeon General.  This contrast is pretty heavy-handed and one-dimensional, and the "twist" is sort of obvious from the beginning, so this story has no tension or surprises to offer.  I'll call it acceptable.

**********

Four decent stories; we'll read more from The Other Side of the Moon in our next episode.

1954 stories by Carl Jacobi, Clark Ashton Smith and Evelyn E. Smith

I believe this 1969 paperback
edition includes all twelve of
the stories from the hardcover ed.

Let's read three more stories from Time to Come, a 1954 anthology of all new fiction edited by August Derleth. These stories, Derleth tells us in his introduction, present "visions of the world of the future."  I am reading from a hardcover 1954 edition I borrowed via interlibrary loan; Time to Come has appeared in paperback several times, but many of those paperback editions are abridged.

"The White Pinnacle" by Carl Jacobi

"The White Pinnacle" isn't really a "vision of the world of the future;" it is barely a science fiction story at all, being more like a horror story set on an alien planet, full of odd phenomena for which Jacobi presents no explanation.

The text is a log or testimonial penned by a spaceman, Judson, a member of the crew of a starship that travels around the galaxy seeking new sources of mineral wealth.  The ship lands on an unexplored planet, suffering minor damage in the process that prevents the ship from taking off again until a few days are spent on repairs.  Visible in the distance is a kind of white obelisk, with writing on it, and the sensors detect a source of radiation near the obelisk--this radiation is unusual, and the ship's geologist believes it indicates that a rare form of very valuable ore is present.

Proceeding concurrently with this obelisk and ore plot, but unconnected to it as far as I could tell, is a plot concerning stone-age natives of the planet.  One member of the starship's crew, McKay, is an amateur perfume enthusiast who collects scents from around the galaxy.  When he smells an unusual scent, one which strikes fear into Judson, McKay runs out into the night and disappears.

The next day McKay reappears, slightly injured, claiming he fought and captured a native (he doesn't bring this native to the ship with him, however.)  When the rest of the crew goes to investigate the obelisk later that day, they find a native tied up.  They also notice that, around the obelisk, every blade of grass, every flower, every pebble and stone, has a duplicate.  The crew bring the alien back to the ship, spend some hours trying to communicate with it, then let it go.  Judson has copied the hieroglyphs on the obelisk, and in a few hours back at the ship he manages to decipher them; not only is his ability to read the alien writing unconvincing, but the message the hieroglyphs convey has no effect on the plot.  McKay runs off again, and when he returns he says he caught up to the alien, captured it a second time, and amputated its scent gland.  In the same way that Judson does nothing with the info he gets from the hieroglyphs and the crew learns nothing from bringing the alien to the ship, McKay does nothing with the scent gland.  Jacobi includes these potentially interesting or important events in the story, but does nothing to exploit their possibilities--they don't tell the reader anything that makes him think or feel, and they don't advance the story in any way.

The resolution of "The White Pinnacle" comes when a duplicate of McKay shows up.  The duplicate touches the original McKay, they fuse together into a single McKay, and the new McKay walks to the obelisk and drops dead.  This sort of thing happens to more crewmembers, until all are dead or missing.  The last lines of Judson's log relate how he, the only surviving spaceman, sees a duplicate of himself coming towards the ship.

This story is just a bunch of bizarre events jumbled together semi-coherently; Jacobi fails to present a unifying theme or to make any kind of point or generate any feeling in the reader beyond mystification as to what he is getting at.  He tries to make "The White Pinnacle" feel like a science fiction story by having the characters uses phrases like "Gantzen rays" and "Planck's Quantum Theory" and "deflector auricles," but it is just extraneous window-dressing.  Thumbs down for this one.

You may recall that I had very similar complaints about Jacobi's 1936 story "The Face in the Wind" back in July when I read it.  My patience with Jacobi is running thin.

"The White Pinnacle" would be reprinted in 1972 in the Jacobi collection Disclosures in Scarlet.

"Phoenix" by Clark Ashton Smith

Since its initial appearance in Time to Come, "Phoenix" has been reprinted in the expected Smith collections as well as an anthology edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh called Catastrophes! and one by edited by Richard Hurley for Scholastic Book Services titled Beyond Belief.

It is the far future!  The sun has turned black, the surface of the Earth is frozen, and the remnants of mankind, mere thousands, live in underground caverns, heated and lit by nuclear power.  For many centuries the human race, and its attendant agriculture and livestock, has lived thus, but of late the surviving flora and fauna have begun to degenerate--presumably there is something vital in sunlight that the atomic lights cannot reproduce, and so life on Earth is doomed.

A desperate plan is conceived--for thousands of years spacecraft and nuclear weapons have lay in storage, and a plan is hatched to detonate the nuclear warheads on the surface of the sun and thereby reactivate Sol and thaw Mother Earth--perhaps men and women will again walk in the sunlight among the flowers and trees!

"Phoenix" is written in a poetic and romantic style that is very effective, even moving.  Smith gives us all that background and describes the farewell to his lover of the man charged with operating the nuclear bombs on the spaceship and the tragic course of his voyage to the sun.  I quite like this one--the science is probably all totally bogus, but Smith provides in "Phoenix" many of things I hope to find when I start reading a piece of fiction: well-crafted sentences, human feeling, and striking images.  Thumbs up!

If you want a story about a suicidal mission to reignite the sun written by an actual scientist instead of a poet you can try Ted Thomas's 1970 piece "The Weather on the Sun," but be forewarned: when I read it in early 2019 I bitterly denounced it as a mind-numbing government-worshiping piece of junk and implied it only got published in Orbit 8 because Thomas was friends with Damon Knight's wife.

"DAXBR/BAXBR" by Evelyn E. Smith

Evelyn E. Smith and Farrar, Straus and Young conduct a little experiment in graphic design with the title to this story, which appears in Time to Come as a cross, with the two words sharing the "X."  In the little biographical sketch appearing before the story we learn that Smith not only writes fiction, but "carries on an appreciable program of crossword puzzle work."  Wikipedia says she "compiled" crosswords--I don't know if that means she created crossword puzzles entire or if somebody else wrote the clues.

(In the days before cable TV, my mother and maternal grandmother would do lots of crossword puzzles.  There was a period during my employment by the New York government when some of the women in the office and I would spend hours doing the Monday and Tuesday New York Times crossword puzzles--your tax dollars at work!)

Like Smith's 1961 vampire story, "Softly While You're Sleeping," which I quite liked, "DAXBR/BAXBR" is a New York story, but, unfortunately, it is a silly joke story.  A man who makes crossword puzzles boards the subway and sits next to a short little guy in dark glasses.  The short guy is reading his correspondence, and over the little guy's shoulder the crossword maker spots an unusual word in one of his letters, "baxbr."  Such an odd word would be useful in designing crossword puzzles, so the protagonist asks the shorty about it.  As it turns out, the diminutive individual is a Martian spy, and, his cover now blown, he has to advance the timetable for extermination of the human race.  As the story ends, Manhattan is under bombardment and the crossword maker is killed.

I'm tempted to call this story pointless filler, though maybe crossword puzzle fans will like it, as much of the text is taken up with discussion and examples of the creation of grids of letters suitable for use in constructing a crossword puzzle; numerous names famous in 1954 crop up because the newspapers who buy crosswords like having topical answers and clues.  If I want to be generous I can say it is a curious oddity, I guess.

"DAXBR/BAXBR" reappeared in F&SF in 1956, and has been anthologized four or five times, including in Edmund Crispin's Best SF Four.  We humorless bastards just have to accept that there is a big market for joke stories.

**********

Unsurprisingly, Clark Ashton Smith offers us something quite fine and Carl Jacobi tries to lay an incompetent half-finished piece of dreck on us.  Maybe August Derleth was just doing his friend in dire straits a solid when he accepted Jacobi's story for publication, the way the person who recommended me for that government job back in the '90s was doing me a solid--everywhere you go, dear reader (MPorcius Advice Column is kicking in here), be as nice to everybody as you can, because you never know who will some day have an opportunity to do you a favor or to get revenge on you.  The Evelyn Smith story is disappointing but at least it is competent--she's still in my good books.

I'm afraid that I have to point out that of these three stories only Clark Ashton Smith really tackles the "vision of the world of the future" theme; Derleth obviously wasn't keeping a very tight rein on his contributors.

Followers of my twitter feed know what my favorite Opal song is and also know I got another anthology edited by August Derleth via interlibrary loan along with this one--we'll start reading stories from that anthology in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.