Weird Tales by Frank Belknap Long from the 1920s

For decades I have been wondering, "What is up with that Frank Belknap Long?"  He has a good reputation and some nice awards, but when I read his work I am usually astounded by how poor it is.  Maybe what I need to do is go back, back, back to the very beginning, and read some of Long's earliest work, stories that appeared in 1920s issues of Weird Tales, including two stories the isfdb specifically places in the "Cthulhu mythos;" maybe this is the Frank Belknap Long everybody is in love with. 

"Death-Waters" (1924)

"Death-Waters" first appeared in Weird Tales in '24, and was reprinted by that unique magazine in 1933.  Both issues have covers guaranteed to start difficult conversations with your "woke" friends should they see them in your collection.  Maybe keep these babies out of sight, bro!  I read the 1933 reprint version in a PDF file available at the very useful SFFaudio Public Domain PDF page.

(Whether you find Margaret Brundage's sadistic sex-oozing cover entrancing or enraging, the September 1933 issue of Weird Tales looks like an exciting one, with a Robert E. Howard Conan story*, stories by MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton and critical darling Clark Ashton Smith, and letters from Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch.  Nice!)

A guy is travelling in a passenger ship along the coast of Latin America, accompanied by his friend, who lies dead in a coffin.  He tells the other passengers on the ship the story of how his friend got killed, and how he himself got all those nasty snake bites on his arm.

The guy (Long doesn't provide him a name) was in a canoe in the center of a lake fed by a jungle spring with his now dead buddy, Byrne, and "a huge black savage," the "oily skin" of whose "animal-like body" was "hideously tattooed."  Byrne wanted to bottle the water from the spring as a health tonic to sell to gullible people back in New York, but a taste test was required, and both he and the narrator were afraid to imbibe any of it, it being full of "animalcules" and smelling foul.  So Byrne forced the black guy to taste it.  After drinking it down the black dude screamed manically, his shrieks more like the sounds of "a gorilla under torture" than any utterance one might expect to come from a human throat.  Apparently in response to the scream, thousands of snakes rose out of the lake! These serpents, apparently a nonvenomous species, swarmed into the boat to bite Byrne, but not our narrator or the black man.

The black guy rowed them to the shore, then left them.  From over a hill crawled and slunk an army of poisonous toads, venomous snakes, and even horned lizards--a carpet of scaly death!  The white men beat at the swarm of herps, killing hundreds of them, but eventually the cold-blooded creepy-crawlies overwhelmed Byrne, poisoning him to death.  The beasties only bit the narrator when he tried to pull them off Byrne, and once Byrne has expired they squirmed away.

This story is entertaining because it is so crazy in so many ways.  There are the nightmarish and gruesome images of swarming reptiles being smashed by the score.  And there are the racial elements--students of depictions of non-whites in genre literature may find the story a valuable window into 1920s thinking about race; the narrator has a whole theory of the psychology of blacks and how whites should interact with them, and one might say that the point of the story is that Byrne suffered for not treating the black guy in a just and prudent manner.  And then there is Long's strange style which features odd phrases and makes strange little jokes; I'll just give you this one example: "I became as flabby as an arachnid on stilts."  What? 

I'm judging "Death-Waters" acceptable, largely as a curious, strange, artifact.

*It looks like nowadays, even though "The Slithering Shadow" is a fun title and looks great in the typescript chosen for use on the cover of the magazine, we are calling this story "Xuthal of the Dusk."

"The Were-Snake" (1925)

"The Were-Snake" appears in a book I own, the 1979 collection Night Fear.  (You'll remember I read the short story "Night Fear" back in mid 2014 when it was masquerading as a novelet.)  Night Fear has mind-bogglingly effusive praise for Long from Gordon R. Dickson and Richard A. Lupoff printed on its back cover (reproduced above) and on its front cover a painting by Clyde Caldwell of Chaugnar Faugn, star of "The Horror from the Hills," a long story I read back in late 2014.  Caldwell did lots of illustration work for TSR during the years my brother and I played endless hours of AD&D and Star Frontiers and devoured every month's Dragon magazine, and we became very familiar with Caldwell's style.  We called him "the Gemster" because every one of his paintings seemed to include a glittering jewel or gem, no matter how inappropriate its inclusion might be.

Our narrator for "The Were-Snake" is an American adventurer; this guy is visiting some remote ancient ruin, a temple dedicated to Ishtar, a goddess, we learn, whose worship goes back thousands of years before Homer, Stonehenge, and the Egyptian pyramids.  He tells his girlfriend, a Miss Beardsley, that Ishtar's "terrestrial manifestations" were femmes fatale who seduced and destroyed countless men.  He wants to spend the night alone at the temple, investigating, and dismisses Miss Beardsley's fears a native girl will seduce him while she is away.  Our narrator's native guide, in a sort of digression, tells him that the East is superior to the West because Easterners educate the soul and care not for technology--the West, he opines, went down the tubes when Europe chose Sir Isaac Newton over John Dee.

At night two green eyes appear in the darkness and try to mesmerize the narrator.  He shoots at the eyes, with no effect.  Miss Beardsley appears, wanting to help, but she is snatched by the creature and dragged down into the ruin.  When the hero catches up he can see that Ishtar is a thing like a giant snake that oozes slime and has a dog-like head.  Overcoming his fear, he chops off the monster's head with a sharp rock, rescuing Miss Beardsley.  In the morning his guide reports that a woman without a head and a disembodied cobra's head were found in the ruin.

The "Were-Snake" is a turgid mess that moves slowly and tries, with no success, to generate excitement by describing at length, but with little clarity or power, psychological states.  Much of the story is dissonant; the opening hints that Ishtar is sexy, but Ishtar turns out to be a thing like a slug; when bullets had no effect on the creature I thought it must be an illusion or a non-corporeal ghost, but then it grabs Miss Beardsley; the narrator goes from paralyzed by fear one second to galvanized into action in another for reasons that are not made clear; we are expected to believe that bullets don't harm the monster but a sharp stone can decapitate it in one blow; the monster is slimy like a slug at one point, scaly like a snake at another, and goes from having a canine head to a serpentine head.  The story is confusing in a way that is frustrating and irritating, that takes you out of the story, rather than in a way that sucks you in by exciting a desire to see a mystery solved.

Weak.  If I may be allowed to play editor to a World Fantasy Award winner, I would suggest that this simple plot could be made to work if the narrator and/or Miss Beardsley were interesting characters with psychological attributes which gave them the ability to overcome Ishtar.  Maybe their love for each other gave them strength, or their belief in Christianity, or a belief in reason andf familiarity with science that immunizes them to superstition and allows them to see through ancient myths to the reality behind them.  Maybe the hero could kill the monster with a knife his girlfriend gave him or a sword blessed by a priest, a symbol of what makes him and Miss Beardsley special as people.  Anything to make sense of the story and give readers some emotional or intellectual handle to grasp.

"The Space-Eaters" (1928)

isfdb tells us this story is part of "The Cthulhu Mythos;" it seems to be one of the first (maybe the very first) Mythos stories published by someone other than Lovecraft himself.  I read it in a scan of its original appearance made available by the good people at SFFaudio.

Frank, our narrator, and Howard, his friend, a writer of horror stories, are sitting around talking.  Howard engages in some interesting literary criticism, discussing the reason various horror writers' stories are effective and lamenting that he is not able to achieve in his own writing his goal of depicting horrors from outer space that have no earthly analog.  Then one of Frank's friends, Wells, bursts in to tell a story of horror that matches Howard's aspirations--as he was travelling through a foggy wood full of trees shaped like "evil old men," Wells experienced the most horrifying and most bizarre sights and feelings imaginable.  And he has the head wound to prove the truth of his story--a perfectly smooth and bloodless hole has been bored through his skull to his brain!

As the story progresses Frank and Howard must confront, and try to puzzle out the mysterious nature of, a creature which has come to Earth to suck out human brains.  One of the surprising things about this story is its solution to the problem of the aliens.  I think of Lovecraft's stories as being, in part, a refutation of traditional beliefs about the universe held by the faithful of the monotheistic religions--Jews, Christians and Muslims think that God manages the universe and that God loves and protects mankind, while in Lovecraft stories the universe and powerful "gods" are indifferent or even inimical to mankind.  But Long's "The Space-Eaters" suggests that some power, represented by the sign of the cross, has defended Earth from alien invasion in the past, and in this story that power does so again.  (An epigraph to the story, ostensibly from the John Dee translation of The Necronomicon, foreshadows this by attesting to the power of the sign of the cross.)   

This is a story I can recommend.  It is of course fun to see Long writing a story about himself and his buddy H. P. Lovecraft facing alien monsters, and I enjoyed the literary criticism "Howard" delivers in the beginning of the story.  "The Space-Eaters" also has some good images and genuinely disturbing horror elements, like when Frank is asked to hold up a lamp to help a doctor conduct brain surgery on Wells--our narrator is too scared to look at his friend's exposed brain and may not even have the guts to hold the lamp steady!  Long thus exploits not only our visceral disgust at physical gore and our cerebral fears about our place in the universe, but our fears of being too weak to aid our friends should they find themselves in desperate need.

"The Space-Eaters" has been reprinted numerous times, including in a 1988 edition of August Derleth's 1969 anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, which has a striking cover illustration by Tim White.

Hannes Bok appropriately depicts the Hounds as being composed of straight lines and angles
in his cover illo for the 1946 collection of Long stories published by Arkham House

"The Hounds of Tindalos" (1929)

OK, here it is, the (I believe) most famous Frank Belknap Long story, and one of the most famous Cthulhu Mythos stories by somebody other than H. P. Lovecraft, "The Hounds of Tindalos."  "The Hounds of Tindalos" is the title story of a 1946 Arkham House collection of Long stories, and the Tindalos "brand" is so recognizable that a 2008 anthology of stories written by Long and by a number of other writers inspired by his work was entitled The Tindalos Cycle.  Well, let's see what the fuss is all about!  I read "The Hounds of Tindalos" in a scan of the nearly 90-year-old issue of Weird Tales in which it made its debut that is available at the internet archive. 

Halpin Chalmers is a genius who breaks all the rules!  "I have always been a rebel, a champion of originality and lost causes...."  He has disdain for Bertrand Russell and the positivism and materialism of 19th- and 20th-century scientists, admires the alchemists and mystics of the more distant past, and reveres Einstein as "A priest of transcendental mathematics."  Chalmers wants to know the truth about man's origin and man's destiny, and condemns modern biologists for their slow progress in uncovering the secrets of human development.  He believes that, armed with his knowledge of modern mathematics, he can travel through time by using a drug little known in the West but used in the East by such savants as Lao Tze and see man's beginning and man's end!  "Time and motion," he declares, "are both illusions," and through the use of the Far Eastern drug he is going to "strip" from his eyes "the veils of illusion time has thrown over them."

(This story is full of name dropping: Darwin, Haeckel, Plotinus, Aquinas, and John Dee, a guy I never hear about whom Long brings up in three of today's four stories, are among those mentioned.  The story also reflects the fascination of Western intellectuals with Eastern mysticism and philosophy--Chalmers bases much of his thinking on the concept of the Tao.)

Like that of so many Lovecraftian-type stories, the bulk of "The Hounds of Tindalos" is a first-person narrative.  Our narrator is a friend of Chalmers's whose aid he requests in his drug-induced journey back in time.  "...if I go back too far you must recall me to reality.  You can recall me by shaking me violently."  Our narrator thinks the Tao and all this time travel jazz is "rubbish" and tries to dissuade Chalmers from this risky experiment with foreign intoxicants, but he is willing to help his buddy if he can't convince him to just say "no."

Chalmers takes one of his Oriental pills and our narrator sits and with his "pale green Waterman" fountain pen writes down everything his adventurous crony says during his "trip."  Chalmers reports that he can see all of time simultaneously, and reels off a list of incidents from Atlantis and Lemuria, medieval Italy and Elizabethan England, ancient Greece and ancient Rome, the migration of the Neanderthals and the age of the dinosaurs.  He can perceive time as "curves" and "angles," and far back, before the time of multi-cellular life on Earth, the angles become strange and horrifying.  Chalmers throws a fit and crawls around the room like a crazed canine until our hero shakes him and the mystic collapses, stunned.

After recovering with the help of some whiskey, Chalmers tells the narrator that, at the beginning of time, he saw the Hounds of Tindalos, creatures of angles who became the repository of all foulness after a terrible "deed" that is symbolized in our culture by the myth of the Fall.  (Like "The Space-Eaters," "The Hounds of Tindalos" makes use of Christian symbolism, Chalmers saying "The tree, the snake and the apple--these are the vague symbols of a most awful mystery."  As did Eve, Chalmers has taken a tremendous risk in the reckless pursuit of knowledge.)  Evil is represented by angles, and goodness by curves, and the angular Hounds lust to devour human beings, the good part of whom is descended from a curve.  Upon smelling Chalmers, the Hounds pursued him, or so he says--the narrator thinks this all nonsense.

The brief second part of the story tells how Chalmers, with the narrator's aid, used plaster of Paris to fill in all the corners and angles of his room, so that, as far as possible, Chalmer's room resembled the interior of a sphere.  Chalmers thinks this may keep the Hounds from reaching him.  The final part of the story is a series of excerpts from newspapers, a chemist's report, and Chalmers's own published work, providing us clues as to Chalmers's ultimate fate.

This is a good horror story, with strange ideas and memorable images, and it is more economically structured than "The Space-Eaters."  I can see why this would be Long's most renowned and influential story, reprinted not only in Lovecraftian volumes, but in anthologies of stories about drug use and stories representing an overview of 20th-century SF.

*********

"The Space-Eaters" and "The Hounds of Tindalos" are good enough that it makes sense that people still admire Long, even though he also produced a vast quantity of mediocre and poor work later in his career.  These stories have provided a useful addition to my weird education.

More Weird Tales in our next episode!

Four stories by Thomas F. Monteleone

Thomas F. Monteleone's name is one I have seen in anthologies and magazines, and at blogs like tarbandu's and Will Errickson's, for years, but I have never seriously looked into his work.  (I did read a single short short by Monteleone a while ago.)  This week I decided to pull down from my shelves four publications containing stories by Monteleone and check them out in chronological order.

The terrific cover to the Italian
edition of Future City.

"Chicago" (1973)

This one appears in Roger Elwood's anthology Future City.  Both Joachim Boaz and tarbandu have read Future City in its entirety and written about it at their great blogs.  I've actually read most of Future City myself (in Joachim's comments section I gush about the Lafferty story and also praise the Malzberg and the Silverberg) but for whatever reason I didn't read Monteleone's "Chicago" until this week.

"Chicago" is a pretty traditional SF story, but it is well done, so I enjoyed it.  (Who am I kidding?  I love traditional SF stories!)  Millions of years in the future the domed city of Chicago, run by computers and robots, continues to function smoothly, lights coming on at night and going off at dawn, mass transit operating, and so forth.  But there are no human beings in the buildings or on the streets!  The only people in the city are those cryogenically preserved back in the 2nd millennium because of their incurable diseases.  When a malfunction results in one of these individuals being accidentally revived, the 70-foot tall maintenance robot who discovers her becomes curious about the history of mankind.  (He is also fascinated by her breasts and genitalia.)  Through research in the library, and then firsthand when he goes AWOL beyond the dome in search of our descendants, the robot learns that the human race is a bunch of violent, racist, environment-wrecking jerk-offs!

"Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" (1975)

This tale appeared in another Roger Elwood feel-good production, Dystopian Visions, and is in the same Chicago-centered fictional universe as "Chicago."  In 1977 a fix-up of Monteleone's four Chicago stories would be published under the title The Time-Swept City.  I read "Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" in my copy of Nebula Winners Twelve, edited by Gordon Dickson.  The story takes its title from an A. E. Housman poem, "Reveille."  (Dickson had a poor editor; in my copy of Nebula Winners Twelve Housman's name is misspelled and we are told the poem is titled "Rebellion.")  Like everybody, I love "When I Was One-and-Twenty," and so did not hesitate to read "Reveille" in preparation for experiencing Monteleone's story. Housman's poem seems to be telling me that I should have devoted my life to going on adventures instead of reading books and taking naps.  Too late!

"Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" takes place millions of years before "Chicago."  In the interests of efficiency, the computer which runs the authoritarian Chicago society has totally alienated the human race from the physical realities of sex.  People don't have sexual intercourse, but satisfy their natural urges via drugs and what we would call virtual sex in the entertainment quarter or cybersex with their spouses.  We see the protagonist, Benjamin, have sex with his wife by laying next to her in bed, not touching her, each of them hooked up via electrodes to a machine which synchronizes their orgasms!

Physical sex has been outlawed to prevent the birth of "randoms."  As in an insect colony or some kind of factory, the central computer only authorizes the birth of genetically engineered people of specific types for which there is specific need.  (As in Brave New World, every person born is a member of a specific caste with specific functions in society.) People are born in the wombs of huge mutant women who live in vats, host mothers that look like amoebas and can carry thirty children at a time.  These host mothers have no eyes or ears, and communicate with the men who maintain the vats via telepathy.

Benjamin is one of the men who monitors the vats, using a helmet to hold telepathic conversations with one of the host mothers, Feraxya.  Something goes wrong--the thirty fetuses to whom Feraxya is playing host are not going to come out as engineered, but as "randoms."  (Just like you and me, reader!)  The government, of course, orders the fetuses aborted, but Feraxya rebels, insisting that her thirty children "have as much right to live as you or me."  Unbeknownst to anyone, Feraxya has developed telekinetic powers that allow her to attack the abortion team with deadly force!  Who will live and who will die?  Will totalitarian Chicago survive or fall to some kind of revolution?  

It is easy to see both conservative and feminist themes in this story; women relegated to being breeding machines for the totalitarian state, skepticism of abortion and genetic engineering, the dangers of divorcing sex from procreation via medical technology and pornographic entertainment.  The story also has good human relationship and horror elements.  I like it!

"Spare the Child" (1982)

This is a good horror story with disturbing erotic and cross-cultural overtones.  It is also one of those stories in which women cause men nothing but trouble.  I know it is hard to believe, but men used to think that way!  Thank heavens we have people nowadays dedicated to making sure such thinking remains a thing of the past!  I read "Spare the Child" in my copy of the January 1982 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Russell lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife Mitzi and works in Manhattan. Mitzi always has some little project she is working on, and, in response to an ad in the New York Times, her current project is to "be a foster parent" to a child in the Third World.  "Be a foster parent" is a euphemism for sending 15 dollars a month overseas.  Russell is the one who writes out the checks, and so it is to Russell that their foster daughter, a prepubescent girl named Tnen-Ku who lives on a Pacific island, addresses brief letters thanking him and calling him "second papa."  The first letter is accompanied by a surprisingly provocative topless photo of the black-haired, black-eyed girl.  After a few months Mitzi grows tired of being a foster mother to a girl (whom she has come to think of as a "tart") who never uses Mitzi's name in her insultingly short letters, and so asks Russell to cease payment; besides, she wants to use the money on new curtains, her next project.

Russell stops sending the money, and Tnen-Ku, with her eyes that seem "like empty holes in her face" and her "deeply tanned flesh" begins haunting Russell, alternately seductively and terrifyingly.  Monteleone's depictions of the many creative ways the girl terrorizes Russell are effective; I particularly liked the appearance of a box of little animated bones which spell out threatening messages.

Good solid horror.  Social sciences and humanities students could write reams about the way women and foreigners are depicted in the story--they nag you, waste your money, use their bodies to manipulate you, and then when you resist them they threaten you with prison and/or death!

"Triptych di Amore" (1994)

This one I read in my copy of Poppy Z. Brite's anthology Love in Vein, which I acquired recently.  The cover of the book really pushes Brite as an exciting new personality, from text declaring her "America's new bestselling dark fantasy author" on the front to a gushing blurb about her from Dan Simmons, and a photo, on the back. (I have to admit she looks pretty adorable in that photo.)  A little disappointingly, none of Brite's own stories appear in the anthology.  However, I am looking forward to the included Koja/Malzberg story, and the story by the Tems, as I have liked horror stories in the past by Kathe Koja, Malzberg, and Melanie Tem. (There is a Wolfe story in Love in Vein, "Queen of the Night," which I read multiple times before the birth of this blog and definitely recommend.)

But first the Monteleone story, "Triptych di Amore."  I'm afraid this story was a little too goofy for me, goofy and obvious.  I thought Monteleone did things that were creative and thought-provoking in "Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" and "Spare the Child," but "Triptych di Amore" feels like pornographic fanfic.  If you ever wanted an excuse to visualize Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Vincent Van Gogh performing cunnilingus on a blonde with pubic hair as "fine and wispy and soft as the down on a newborn chick," well, here it is!  

As the title suggests, "Triptych di Amore" consists of three related episodes.  Each episode relates an adventure of a beautiful green-eyed blonde named Lyrica who is virtually immortal and seeks out great artists to seduce.  The first episode is a third-person narrative about Lyrica's torrid affair with Mozart.  Sample goofy oral sex line: "He had never imagined a woman could be so clean."   The second episode consists of Van Gogh's secret journal--while sharing a country studio with Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh has an affair with Lyrica.  Sample goofy oral sex line: "A month has passed and I am truly mad for her touch and the lingering smell of her cunt in my beard."

Both Mozart and Van Gogh find that Lyrica is the most beautiful woman they have ever met, and the best lover they have ever had.  Sex with Lyrica energizes them initially and inspires them to produce their greatest work, but after a few months of feverish coupling with Lyrica she tires of them and the artists fall physically and/or mentally ill and die.

In the third section of the story Lyrica falls into the clutches of an Italian exorcist.  She transforms into a giant snake (the exorcist calls her a "lamia") but the priest stuns her with a glowing communion wafer.  Lyrica is entombed under an altar, the priest and his friends hope for eternity, but in a coda Monteleone suggests that an errant bomb dropped from a B-17 in 1944 may liberate the seductress.

The first two sections seem like a sincere but clumsy attempt at writing erotic material, while the last two sections come across as jokes.  However serious or silly Monteleone is being here, I felt like this story was a waste of my time, so I will have to give it the thumbs down.

*********

Looking back on these four stories, I think I can detect some common themes, even though they span a period of over twenty years.  In all of them, woman, in particular woman's sexuality, is a destabilizing force, putting individuals, and sometimes entire societies, in danger.  More generally, these stories strike me as having themes of interest to Christians.  I'm no Biblical scholar, but doesn't a desire for knowledge lead to Adam being cast out of Eden?  And isn't that what happens to the robot in "Chicago?"  "Triptych di Amore" has a juvenile horror movie Christianity, what with the crusading priest who uses the Eucharist to defeat the satanic monster, and "Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" addresses issues that have been important to post-war Christians in America, like abortion, pornography and recreational sex.  "Spare the Child" is about charity; Russell even gives Mitzi a little virtue-is-its-own-reward speech about how they shouldn't expect any kind of benefit for helping Tnen-Ku.  

While I was disappointed with "Triptych di Amore," I thought "Chicago" pretty good and "Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" and "Spare the Child" quite good.  I'll keep my eyes open for more Monteleone in the future.

Five Fates, Part 2: Harlan Ellison and Keith Laumer

An edition from 1975

Five Fates, copyright 1970 by Keith Laumer, is a SF experiment.  The book is a collection of stories by five Hugo-winners, each based on the same one-page prologue in which William Bailey goes to the Euthanasia Center, receives an injection, and is directed to his slab.

In our last episode we read Poul Anderson's, Frank Herbert's, and Gordon Dickson's offerings. All three authors took the experiment as an opportunity to denounce the kind of society that would have Euthanasia Centers and to advocate for individualism.  Unfortunately, of the three only Herbert used the experiment as a chance to tell an entertaining story.

Today we will be reading Harlan Ellison's and Keith Laumer's contributions to Five Fates.  Will either or both of them buck the trend and produce a story as good as Herbert's?  Will either of them come to the concept of the Euthanasia Center with an open mind and provide us a vivid picture of all of its good points?  Let's see!

"The Region Between" by Harlan Ellison

"The Region Between" is a sort of wild New Wave experiment, at least in its form.  The text switches between different font sizes and formats, with a few sections actually rotated 90 degrees, to indicate different speakers and settings.  Some of the chapters have odd headings (there are chapters "1 1/2" and "1 3/4.")  There are numerous sentences that consist of lists ("It was not a force, not a vapor, not a quality, not a potentiality, not a look, not a sense, not a capacity, not anything he could pinpoint,"), one line paragraphs, and repetitive paragraphs.  For the most part Ellison doesn't do these things just to be wacky, but with some kind of mood-setting or story-telling purpose, so they add to the story, rather than detract from it. One section, in which the text is a spiral, did challenge my poor eye sight.

Some printings of the story (though not the one in my copy of  Five Fates) are adorned with numerous decorations and illustrations by Jack Gaughan.  I am lucky enough to own a copy of Angry Candy which includes Gaughan's contributions, and I quite like them.  I'd be curious to see how they looked in the issue of Galaxy in which "The Region Between" first appeared. 

As for the story itself, it includes lots of striking images, some abstract, like souls stretched out to encompass all of space and time or a mind floating in a vast uniform emptiness, others sharp, such as the furry blue cyclops who crew intergalactic bombers on a suicide mission deep into enemy territory, or the half-cat/half-spider scout creature conducting reconnaissance in a sinister forest.  Ellison uses the death of Bailey as a springboard to tell a tale which ranges across all of space and several different universes.  Various alien entities, some known as Thieves, others as soul-recruiters, steal the souls of living creatures.  The foremost soul-recruiter is known as the Succubus; he harvests souls from a small number of planets and is able to sell them at a tremendous profit, for his souls are the finest on the market.  The Earth is one of the planets where he obtains these exquisite souls, and the Euthanasia Centers are the device that facilitates his recruiting.  (On other planets the Succubus employs gladiatorial combat, bogus religions, drugs, trapped teleporters, and similar schemes.)

Bailey is one of the souls captured by the Succubus and put in the bodies of the Succubus's customers, and we follow Bailey's soul from one body to another.  Bailey is a unique personality, unlike any of the souls the Succubus has dealt with before: a rebel, he tries to undermine the rulers of the societies he finds himself in.  "The Region Between" is quite anti-authoritarian; in its 46 pages we encounter multiple bogus religions and exploitative elites.  

The pace is fast, and while I didn't have any emotional connection to the characters or plot I was curious to see what crazy image or event Ellison was going to unveil next; I found the story to be totally unpredictable, though each component part was logical and believable.  "The Region Between" is also the most mystical of the stories in Five Fates; while some of the others deal with identity transfers and noncorporeal beings, they seem pretty materialistic and don't use the word "soul" or appear to take anything supernatural seriously.  "The Region Between" includes a meditation on what God is, and in the final confrontation with the Succubus, Bailey turns out to be God, the First Cause and the creator of the universes, and the story ends when Bailey destroys all of creation.

A good story, leaving us, so far, with two good stories and two not so good ones.

"Of Death What Dreams" by Keith Laumer

I was just saying I should read more Keith Laumer, and so here is my chance.

William Bailey is an independent thinker, a rebellious type in a collectivized, caste-bound, authoritarian world.  Food, housing and clothing are rationed and distributed by the government, and everybody needs to carry around a stack of ID papers and work permits.  People are given ranks that reflect their social class: "Class Three Yellow" is kind of low, like a technician might have, but "Class One Blue" is that of an aristocrat, a "Cruster" who dwells "Topside."  Bailey feels life is hopeless, so he goes to the Euthanasia Center to be put to death, but then he wakes up outside the Center.  How did he escape?  He can't remember!

Bailey sneaks into the underground levels of the city where an entire society of people live "off the grid."  A skilled statistician, Bailey goes into business as a bookie.  In an amusing wrinkle, people in this world don't bet on sports, they bet on government-released economic and social statistics!  Bailey makes enough money (the underground levels are full of rich criminals) to get a fake ID and to have his brain programmed with the education and mannerisms a One Blue would have.  In this disguise he bluffs his way up up up, all the way to the top of the social order, hobnobbing with decadent aristocrats and then confronting a high level magistrate, Micael Drans.

Bailey suddenly realizes why he has engaged in this arduous adventure: he has been programmed to murder Drans.  A genius from the future cast his mind back in time to recruit Bailey for this assassination mission, because Drans is going to bungle First Contact with aliens and start an interstellar war!  Who was this genius who was able to send his thoughts back through time?  Drans himself!

Somewhat diminishing the drama of a man organizing his own murder, Bailey is persuaded that he need not kill Drans, because if Drans is a good enough guy to contract his own murder to stop a war, he must be a good enough guy not to cause the interstellar war.  But wait, didn't he cause the interstellar war?  If he hadn't caused the war, why would he even come up with the idea of hypnotizing a guy in the past to kill him before he can cause the war?  (These time travel stories rarely make sense to me.)

Despite the problem with the time travel ending, this was a competently told and entertaining story, so it gets my recommendation.  I have to admit I also enjoyed that a minor character in the story was named "Lord Monboddo," presumably after the pioneering evolutionary theorist and minor but memorable figure in the writings of James Boswell.  Was Laumer a Boswellian?  I'll never forget finding out in Number of the Beast that Heinlein was in the anti-Boswell/anti-Johnson camp, and secretly cherish the hope that Heinlein was just kidding.       

**********

With three stories I can vouch for, I can feel comfortable recommending Five Fates and proclaiming this literary experiment (presumably set into motion by Laumer) a success.

All five of the stories are basically anti-authoritarian, from Anderson's conventional center-right small-government thinking to Ellison's depiction of God as a deranged madman.  All the stories suggest that power is corrupting, and in each the Euthanasia Center is the symptom of a sick society and/or some kind of trap.  I was hoping one of the stories would take a sympathetic view of the Euthanasia Center.  Pioneering science fiction writer H. G. Wells seems like the kind of guy who might cotton to the idea of Euthanasia Centers, and I'd be surprised if he was alone.  Many SF writers have expressed worries about overpopulation and human impact on the environment--what better solution to these perceived problems than government-sponsored mass suicide?  In the same way that Theodore Sturgeon's story that appears to advocate incest was effective in part because it is so "out there," a story in which a network of Euthanasia Centers is a critical component of a utopia might have been worthwhile due to shock value alone.  No such story appears in Five Fates, however.   

(There also was no explicit "Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey" joke; I was kind of expecting such a joke.)

***********

The last page of my copy of the Paperback Library edition of Five Fates has an ad for "exciting science fiction novels by the most imaginative s-f writers in the world...." Considering the reliability of ad copy everywhere, we shouldn't be surprised that about half the advertised books are collections and anthologies of short stories. 

The line up advertized actually seems like a pretty strong one.  With the possible exception of the de Camp, I would give any of these nineteen books a try.  I own the listed edition of M33 in Andromeda, which includes some of Van Vogt's famous Space Beagle stories, as well as "The Weapon Shop" and "Siege of the Unseen," both of which I liked.  I've not read House That Stood Still but I want to.  The collections Monsters and The Proxy Intelligence also include stories I've enjoyed, and stories I would like to read.

I own all the Jane Gaskell books listed (well, sort of; see below), which together make up the Atlan Saga starring Princess Cija, who has a love affair with a reptile-man in a war-torn fantasy version of the pre-Columbian New World.  I bought them all at once at a used bookstore in Columbia, Missouri when my wife was attending some kind of conference at the college there.  While my wife was at the conference I went to the art museum at the university and sat in the local library reading Gene Wolfe's "King Rat" in the 2010 anthology celebrating Fred Pohl.  (I always enjoy myself when my wife has to attend a conference.) 

My copies of Atlan and The City are Paperback Library editions and have covers I quite like, but my edition of The Serpent is from Pocket and has a cover by Boris Vallejo.  In 2012 I read The Serpent and wrote a pretty hostile review of it at Amazon, claiming it was too slow and full of anachronisms.  Somewhat confusingly, the Pocket edition of The Serpent is apparently only half of the full novel, so I can't read Atlan or The City until I track down a full edition (like the one advertized here in Five Fates) or the DAW or Pocket editions of the second half of The Serpent, published as The Dragon.  (Even though I wasn't crazy about The Serpent, a series of books about weird sex in a dinosaur world deserves a second chance, am I right?)  

It is funny to see that Quark, the title of Delany and Hacker's anthology series focusing on experimental work, was trademarked.  I own and have read the entire contents of Quark/3, as followers of my blogging career may remember.

   

Five Fates, Part 1: Poul Anderson, Frank Herbert, & Gordon Dickson

At the big antiques mall just off Route 80 in Des Moines I spotted Five Fates, a 1971 paperback.  Having a big pile of unread books at home I hesitated before purchasing, but the odd gimmick behind the book was too compelling to resist, and I had never seen, or even heard, of this book before; if I left it behind would I ever see it again? Besides, Five Fates would provide an opportunity to read some important SF authors I had been avoiding due to lukewarm experiences with them, authors I should probably be more familiar with if I want to have a comprehensive view of the field.

I paid $1.50 for my copy of Five Fates, which was previously owned by a Paul Bradly or Blakely or Bealdy or something like that.  The book is 272 pages long.  I think the illustrations on the front and back covers are interesting and eye-catching, if not exactly beautiful.

The clever conceit of Five Fates is that five Hugo-winning SF authors were each given the same one-page prologue, and challenged to write a story from that little kernel.  In this prologue William Bailey goes to the Euthanasia Center where a brusque functionary injects him with something and directs him to his "slab."  First up is Poul Anderson.

"The Fatal Fulfillment" by Poul Anderson

William Bailey is a sociologist living in a world faced with an epidemic of mental illness.  How will the government and society deal with this terrible plague?  (In some ways, the idea behind this story is similar to the basic idea of Anderson's 1953 novel Brain Wave, in which the people and animals on Earth suddenly have greatly increased IQs.  In "The Fatal Fulfillment" the number of people who are insane suddenly increases.)

"The Fatal Fulfillment" is a series of vignettes, exploring various governmental/societal responses to the insanity epidemic.  The vignettes come off largely as conservative or libertarian satires of leftist or welfare-state liberal thinking; one depicts an authoritarian US government which tries to suppress mental instability by taking absolute control of the arts, limiting what books people can read and art they can see, and setting up public televisions which spit out vacuous pro-diversity propaganda.  Another depicts a society of pacifist environmentalist hippies; in another minorities strive to be categorized as victims by the government so they will be eligible for free benefits and exemptions from various taxes and regulations.  Anderson hits lots of the hot button issues you still hear about from small-government advocates today, like how the commerce clause is used to justify government overreach, public schooling stinks, and taxes inhibit economic growth.

In the end it turns out that each of these vignettes (including the prologue at the Euthanasia Center) is a simulation--William Bailey is hooked up to a computer and is examining different theories of how to deal with the mental illness epidemic.  (He's been in "The Matrix!")

I'm sympathetic to Anderson's politics, but as a story "The Fatal Fulfillment" is not very good.  There is no tension as soon as we realize Bailey is just in a dream world, and is not really in danger of being tortured or killed.  The characters are flat stereotypes, props to illustrate Anderson's arguments.  This is a story with no human feeling.  (A good contrast is Jack Vance's Wyst: Alastor 1716, also a satire of left-wing utopianism, but quite funny and a good adventure story.)

Disappointing.        

"Murder Will In" by Frank Herbert

In my youth I started Dune but abandoned it very quickly, and since then have never even tried anything by Herbert.  I tentatively plan to give Dune another try next year.  As I started "Murder Will In" I wondered if it might be so great that I would be inspired to shift Dune to the top of my schedule, and in fact the story is quite entertaining--I may be joining the ranks of Frank Herbert's fans!

William Bailey lives in a world in which man has surrendered much of his individualism to the collective and to machines.  Bailey is also the host of a parasitic non-corporeal extraterrestrial entity; this creature, the Tegas, has been on Earth for thousands of years (it recalls the Roman gladiatorial arena, for example), moving from host to host, leaving a host as it dies.  For untold ages before its arrival on Earth the creature lived in hosts on other planets.

Herbert comes up with various rules that govern the Tegas's ability to move from one host to another; the new host has to be within 20 meters, the Tegas can only survive in a dead host for a certain number of seconds, the new host can only be accessed if it is experiencing a certain level of emotional activity, etc.  Like the rules about sunlight and silver and garlic and running water in a vampire story, these rules introduce danger into the life of a potentially invincible creature, and the Tegas runs into some real trouble in the Euthanasia Center in which William Bailey dies.  The Tegas has still more trouble when it becomes apparent that the technocratic ruling class of Earth suspects its existence, and tries to hunt it down.

"Murder Will In" reminded me of a Van Vogt story, in which secret forces struggle and a guy has weird powers and grows into those powers, though Herbert's writing is more clear and elegant than my man Van's sometimes tortured prose.  Herbert also manages to pull off the "sense of wonder" ending so many classic SF stories strive to achieve; at the end of  "Murder Will In" the Tegas has survived the challenges posed by the Euthanasia Center and Earth's rulers, learned a lot about its abilities, and decided to use its power to change Earth society, to revive individualism.  The story leaves us not with a sense of finality, but of exciting, perhaps endless, future possibilities.

Really good.

"Maverick" by Gordon R. Dickson

Gordon Dickson's version of William Bailey is a kind of trouble-making individualist in a caste-bound, technocratic world.  It is a world in which there is no war, poverty or crime, but also no freedom, and Bailey has "broken the Self-Protection rules, time and again."  He's lost caste and wasted all his money, so the powers that be want to put him in an institution or execute him.  (So far all the stories have been attacks on overbearing government and collectivism--none of these authors seems willing to embrace all the wonderful possibilities of having a local Euthanasia Center!)

The authorities give Bailey one last chance--if he can accomplish a dangerous mission they will restore his caste and give him a sizable pension!  It seems that the New Orleans Euthanasia Center keeps having its dead bodies stolen in some way nobody can figure out.  The government wants Bailey to go to the Center, and be poisoned and put on a slab so everybody will think he is dead.  He will be supplied with an antidote pill, and after he takes it in the privacy of the morgue he can maybe figure out what is happening to the corpses.

Bailey learns that what is happening is that aliens from a planet hundreds of light years away have opened a portal between their planet and Earth, and are taking the cadavers.  These aliens are similar to humans, but have wings and hollow bones and different sized eyes and different numbers of fingers and toes.  Perhaps most important, their society is based on honor and loyalty, not authority and planning like Earth's.  Bailey's consciousness leaves his Earth body and ends up in the body of a birdman gladiator, after a brief stint in the body of a birdman troublemaker who, like Bailey back on Earth, has squandered his resources and been a disappointment to his caste.

This story is pretty boring.  It feels slow and tedious, even during the fight scenes.  There are many scenes consisting of bird people talking, including a long hearing before the avian people's advisory council that is supposed to be the climax of the tale.   At the hearing everybody tries to figure out if Bailey is really from Earth and how his mind has been moving across space and between bodies, and Dickson even includes three charts made of boxes and arrows to illustrate the course and final destination of various people's minds and bodies.  They look like a decision-making flowchart or something from a political science journal article.  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Dickson's writing style is not good.  Dickson spends too much time on boring descriptions of rooms and on how people's facial expressions or eye movements indicate their emotions.  Dickson uses the same words and phrases again and again instead of varying them; for example, every time a character abruptly stops walking or talking, the author uses the verb "to check."  This is distracting, and makes the story feel like a draft that was not revised.

There are a few clever things in the story.  The winged people think life on Earth must be horrible because Earthlings can't fly, so they call Earth "The Planet of the Damned" and christen Bailey "Bill duDamned," which I found amusing.  The scenes in which Bailey learns to fly are not bad.  

Dickson tries to do a Van Vogt "sense of wonder" thing, like Herbert does.  Bailey in a way that is not explained develops super-vision that allows him to detect if a body contains a different identity than it started out with, and he can also see through walls.  In the end of the story he sets on the course of reforming both Earth and bird people societies, tempering the collectivism of the former and the extreme individualism of the latter.  He also reveals that he has the power to travel to any of dozens of planets in the universe.  Unfortunately, the story is so lame that at the end I didn't feel a thrilling sense of limitless possibilities, but rather relief that the story (75 long pages) was finally finished. 

The components and themes of "Maverick"--individualism and freedom, exploring a new world with a different society and a new body that enables you to fly--could definitely be the basis of a good story, but Dickson's sluggish pacing and poor style ruin the whole thing.    

**********

Frank Herbert delivers the goods, but Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson have let the team down.  Hopefully Keith Laumer and Harlan Ellison can put in winning performances and leave use with a score of 3-2.  (And maybe in Ellison or Laumer the under-appreciated Euthanasia Center will find a supporter?)  We'll see in Part 2.

Three 1978 stories by A. E. Van Vogt

Via Twitter, Joachim Boaz reminds us that A. E. Van Vogt's birthday is this month.  To celebrate, I read three stories by my man Van which I had never read, from the collection Pendulum, DAW 316.  These stories all appeared for the first time in Pendulum.

Pendulum, published in 1978, provides insight into the powerful influence the first Star Wars film had on the people at DAW.  Besides the dreamlike (that's a nice way of saying "insane," right?) cover by Jordi Penavla, in which helmeted topless men use laser swords in their fight against cave men, we have the advertising pages in the back of the book, one of which is pitched directly at Star Wars fans.  The good people at DAW recommend to "Star Warriors" four of their series: Gordon Dickson's Dorsai novels; A. Bertram Chandler's space navy stories starring John Grimes; the Dumarest novels by E. C. Tubb; and Brian Stableford's Daedalus novels.  I can't assess how good these recommendations are because I'm not familiar with any of the listed books.  I have read four or five John Grimes books, and liked them OK, but none of those listed.  I've read one (non-Dorsai) book by Dickson and two books by Stableford in his Hooded Swan series, and didn't think them bad, but found them uninspiring and forgettable.  I've never read any Tubb, but Michael Moorcock considers Tubb's Dumarest of Terra books excellent, or so he says in a year 2000 article about Leigh Brackett entitled "Queen of the Martian Mysteries."      


"Pendulum"

The title story of the collection depicts a near future Earth facing a food shortage.  Our main character Hudman is a Dutch sailor working on a civilian ship employed by the U. S. Navy, lowering machinery to the ocean floor which will warm up the cold water there and make these areas of the ocean more hospitable for life and thus more productive as fishing waters.  In a bizarre turn of events (are there any other in these van Vogt stories?) these activities awaken a civilization of thirty billion people who have been in cryogenic sleep on the ocean floor for millenia.  Hudman is chosen to be the emissary between the surface people and this revived race, which it turns out has the technology to easily take over the planet.

The people from under the sea declare that their benevolent rule will improve everybody's life.  One of the first things on their agenda is to eliminate all the disparate and confusing human languages and replace them with a single logical language, which will be easy enough with their "mind-to-mind" teaching methods.  Hudman is then deluged with exhortations, threats, and bribes from people who try every possible means to preserve their own dialects from extinction.  "Pendulum" is a story about ethnic pride and what van Vogt calls "race consciousness," and the lengths individuals will go to to honor and preserve the culture and memory of their peoples.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the violence people are willing to employ to protect their own dialects and honor their ancestors is a sign that van Vogt was skeptical of ethnic pride and sympathetic to the "melting pot" view of American race/ethnic relations which, nowadays, has been abandoned.  In the end of the story, in order to protect him, the submarine people transport Hudman to a city in a distant time period - Hudman eagerly embraces the culture of his new home, "determined to fit in with no thought at all about his past."  

"The Male Condition"

From racial and cultural diversity issues to gender and sexual issues!

I think of van Vogt as a guy who often writes stuff that is kind of crazy.  "The Male Condition" definitely fits in the crazy category.  It also seems to be in part or whole a kind of joke, one which some may find in poor taste.  I cannot deny that the audacity of the story, its twisted surprises, the lengths van Vogt was willing to go, made me laugh.

We open in a government office where two academics, psychologists, are talking.  We are immediately alerted to the fact that this is a strange world when we learn that 30 is considered an old age and that the male psychologist, Jolo, is smoking a "kolo," a product introduced by aliens.

Crazier still, Jolo tells the junior psychologist, a woman 23.25 years old named Lasia, that there have been no cases of rape in 38 years.  Sounds good, right?  But this phenomenon presents the researcher with a problem: Jolo is directing work on an encyclopedia of human nature, and how can the book be complete without a rapist to study in the flesh?

The rapist shortage, apparently, is the result of an additive in drinking water that makes people unable to feel anger.  Jolo proposes injecting himself with something that will make him a rapist(?) and having Lasia act as observer, which is to say, rape victim(!).  Lasia needs the money, so she signs onto the project!

This 13 page story is stuffed with wacky elements: aliens only women can see, psychologists whose whole therapy technique consists of having sex with their patients, a computer database put together by a feminist government agency which lists men with whom women are forbidden to have sex (if this story had been written after 2001 presumably this would be called the "no-fuck list.")  Lasia turns to a male psychologist for help, but he takes advantage of her, so she then fools Jolo's wife into taking her place as rape victim.  The intervention of aliens into this demented slapstick leads to murder, necrophilia, and a jury trial at which the aliens save the surviving characters from going to prison.

Crazy man, crazy.

"Living with Jane"

This story, with its convoluted plot and characteristically van Vogtian sentences, was a little hard to follow.

The year is 2288.  Androids are on the market which are almost impossible to distinguish from real humans.  Parents of young children who get divorced routinely buy an android replica of their former spouses, so that their children will not suffer the psychological problems that result from living in a single parent home.  In a way that van Vogt explains but which I didn't understand, living with androids has given our heroine, teenaged Jane, what amount to psychic powers.

A new type of android has been built, a model even more human-like.  Unfortunately, these super-androids have decided to take over the world.  Jane's father, a scientist, is the natural leader of the resistance to the android takeover, and a natural target of the androids, who contrive to enter Jane's home and hold her and her mother hostage.  The androids threaten to kill his family if Jane's dad doesn't cease working against their takeover.

Fortunately, Jane's high intelligence and mental powers mean she is up to the task of neutralizing her captors.  Jane saves the day, not through any kind of violence, but through charm, persuasion, and logic.  Having lived her entire life with androids, Jane likes them and understands them, and is able to manipulate and even befriend them.  The story has a happy ending; Jane will be able to assure peace and freedom for everybody, human and android, and now she has an android duplicate of herself who will be the twin sister she has always wanted.        

***********

It is hard to recommend such strange stories to other people, but I enjoyed them. 

Pendulum contains three more pieces of fiction which I have not read before, so I will be grappling with Van Vogt's weird plots and clunky verbiage in the near future.

Proscription List #1: Dickson, Lymington, Smith, Chase

As all you classical scholars know, during the crisis of the late Republic, the winners of a Roman civil war would publish a list, a proscription, of all the people they wanted killed, either because those people were seen as opponents of the new regime or because the winners of the civil war wanted their money.

As someone of limited means and with limited bookshelf space, I have decided to sell eight of my SF paperbacks to Half Price Books. These are books which I will never read again; none of them have covers I am in love with, either. Today I will archive here my Amazon reviews for three of them, Dickson’s Mission to Universe, Lymington’s Ten Million Years to Friday, and Smith’s The Galaxy Primes, and a review of Chase’s The Game of Fox and Lion I found on my hard drive but which I never posted anywhere.

In the near future I will post notes as to why the other four victims are getting the axe.

Mission to Universe by Gordon R. Dickson

Gordon R. Dickson's "Mission to Universe" has a good plot, and effectively conveys to the reader a tone of tension and tragedy. The crew of Earth's first interstellar ship consists not of disciplined military men or experienced astronauts, but a bunch of civilian scientists and technicians, and their commander, a scientist himself, not only has to whip them into shape but has to learn, on the job, how to lead. Dickson's focus is on the terrible danger of their mission, to find planets suitable for colonization by the people of an Earth on the brink of nuclear war, and the tragic costs, physical and psychological, paid by the members of the crew.

Unfortunately, the novel doesn't really come alive until the last third or so. Relationships which are so important to the end of the book are barely touched on in the first half, or so it seemed to me. I also didn't care for Dickson's writing style; it reminded me of Poul Anderson's, cold and totally lacking in any kind of distinctive flavor or character. A book with the tragic tone and exciting plot of "Mission to Universe," but written by someone with a good writing style, like a Jack Vance or a Gene Wolfe, could have been a masterpiece.

"Mission to Universe" has problems, but the emotionally grueling final third makes up for them, and I feel able to recommend it to classic SF fans.   

Ten Million Years to Friday by John Lymington

Ten Million Years to Friday has a plot with much in common with an H. P. Lovecraft type story: an eccentric scientist figures out a way to look into the distant past, and discovers an incredibly ancient, incredibly large and incredibly powerful alien being lies dormant deep underground, near an abandoned mine in Cornwall. The alien is waking up, and its psychic emanations can be felt by some human beings.

To this is added the anti-military-industrial complex sensibility we have seen so often, perhaps most famously in movies like "The Day The Earth Stood Still" and "E.T." The reader is expected to sympathize with the peaceful alien and deplore how warlike humanity is, and the last 75 pages or so of the book are centered on the efforts of an enlightened human to protect the alien from the police and military. There is also an evil businesswoman who tries to use her sexual wiles to keep the eccentric scientist from diminishing the value of her stock in computer companies with his inventions, a strong animal rights subtext, and dismissive criticisms of Christianity.

I like Lymington's writing style, and there are some quite effective scenes, for example, when the main character is all alone in an evacuated town, with only a dog. The Cornish setting is also sort of interesting, as are some of the characters. So, I am willing to give Ten Million Years To Friday an unenthusiastic recommendation, but I cannot deny that I was much more enthusiastic during its first 100 pages, when it still seemed possible that the alien (and not humanity) was the villain, and the story generated suspense.

It is unlikely that I will seek out any more of John Lymington's work.  

The Galaxy Primes by E. E. Smith  

Edward E. Smith's Galaxy Primes is farcically bad, like a parody of later Heinlein. I recall enjoying elements of E.E. Smith's Lensman series, as well as his Skylark series, but this is a disaster that readers should avoid.

The two smartest and best-looking men, and the two smartest and best-looking women, all four of them super powerful psychics, go on a journey in the first star ship. Sounds like the set up for a great adventure tale, but it is not. For one thing, Smith spends a lot of time describing the boring relationships between crew members via stretches of dialogue that consist of boring arguments and bizarre compliments ("I think you are the greatest psychic in all the universe!") Even worse, every planet the ship goes to is an Earth-like planet inhabited by humans with a society almost identical to that of 20th century Earth, so Smith can engage in some very weak satire and boring utopianism. (For example, the protagonists disarm some totalitarian countries they encounter, using telekinesis to steal their missiles and warships so the democratic countries on the planet will be safe.) There are some hostile aliens and some fights, but the fights are absolutely lacking in tension because the protagonists' psychic powers make them invincible; with a glance they can generate explosions equivalent to nuclear bombs, but without the messy radiation.

Not recommended for anyone save Smith completists. I read the 1965 Ace paperback, number 27292, with the mediocre red painting on the cover. The cover is better than the book, however hard that may be to believe. 
 
The Game of Fox and Lion by Robert R. Chase

Published in paperback by Del Rey in 1986, The Game of Fox and Lion is one of those novels in which the clever open-minded people outsmart the stupid bigots, presumably in hopes of eliciting cheers from the clever open-minded readers that, the author expects, make up the majority of SF readers.

Chase depicts a universe in which the numerous human colonized star systems are riven by conflict, fierce competition between business firms, between political factions, and between religious factions. Underlying all of this conflict are issues raised by genetic engineering – do people with an altered genetic makeup have the same legal and social rights as unmodified humans, and do such people have souls? War has erupted between unmodified humans and the Bestial Clans, the descendents of humans bioengineered for super strength and endurance and who look like werewolves. Only a few years before a small group of humans bioengineered to be super smart, the Multi-Neural Capacitants, tried to launch a revolution that would have put them in charge of all humanity.

The plot of The Game of Fox and Lion concerns two men, Chiang, the head of a new business firm that is challenging the hegemony of the old firms, and Renard, the last of the Multi-Neural Capacitants, who since the abortive revolution has been living a peaceful life as the monk Brother Benedict, but now is enlisted by Chiang to help him defeat his business and political rivals and end the war between unmodified humans and the Bestials. There are some space battles, but mostly the book consists of chatty scenes in which Chiang, Renard, or their supporters outwit the heads of religious factions, legislatures, trade unions, robber baron families, etc., or discuss philosophical points. Lots of slippery business deals, legal maneuvers, peace negotiations, that sort of thing.

Chase’s writing style is bland, and there is little human interest in the book, the characters and their relationships striking no chords with the reader. And because we know the geniuses will win and because we already agree with the novel’s “message,” there is no suspense or tension in the plot. The Game of Fox and Lion is not painful, but it is not memorable either, and I cannot recommend it.