Vampire stories by R Bloch, R Zelazny, D Drake, K E Wagner & R Matheson

Looking around everybody's favorite online resource, the internet archive, for stories by Tanith Lee, I came upon prolific anthologist Martin H. Greenberg's 1997 Vampires: The Greatest Stories.  I've actually already read and blogged about the Lee story included by Greenberg, "Red as Blood," but Vampires: The Greatest Stories contains quite a few stories by other writers we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log--Robert Bloch of Psycho fame, Amber scribe Roger Zelazny, creator of Hammer's Slammers David Drake, the man who brought us Kane, Karl Edward Wagner, and the guy who wrote Vincent Price's and Steven Spielberg's best movies, Richard Matheson--and I decided to check them out.  Could they really be among the greatest of all the many vampire stories out there?

"The Bat is My Brother" by Robert Bloch (1944)

A title ripped from today's headlines!  Oh, wait, I thought it said "The Bat in My Broth."  Anyway, "The Bat is My Brother" debuted in Weird Tales, and was mentioned by name on the cover.  When I see that this issue includes stories by August Derleth, Manly Wade Wellman and Hannes Bok which I have never read, and a Ray Bradbury story I should reread, I realize that, unless I achieve immortality (you know, like a vampire!) I will never run out of weird fiction to read.

Graham Keene awakens to discover he has been buried alive!  A poor man, he was interred in a cheap unsealed coffin in a shallow pauper's grave, and manages to tear his way out of the casket and up out of the earth.  Back on the surface, in the cemetery, Keene is greeted by a gray-haired wrinkle-faced man who welcomes him to his new life--as a vampire!--and introduces himself as his guardian--this guy is going to show Keene the ropes!

"The Bat is My Brother" is one of those stories that divorces vampirism from religion and the supernatural and tries to explain it scientifically.  I am skeptical that this is really a good idea.  Keene's new friend tells him vampirism is a disease, and spends quite a number of pages explaining to the new recruit to the ranks of the undead what "rules" of vampirism hold in this story: it is true that vampires cast no shadow or reflection, but the idea that they can change into bats or wolves is just superstition; a vampire really can't be killed by weapons, but he is not truly immortal, eventually, he will decay.  And so forth.  If we accept the existence of God and the Devil (or the deities of polytheistic religions), it is easy to accept that a guy might suffer the curse of having no shadow or reflection or be granted the power to survive getting shot full of holes, but it is hard to accept that a mere disease might thusly exempt you from basic physical laws.

Anyway, the old vampire explains to Keene his plan to create an army of vampires to take over the world, and why no vampire over the centuries has ever done this before.  He wants Keene to be his lieutenant, and Keene must decide if he is willing join to this vampire revolution and embrace a position as a high ranking member of the vampire dictatorship.

This story is sort of pedestrian, though not actually bad.  The best scene is when the old vampire explains in detail how to best kill and feed on a young woman, using your left hand to cover her mouth and your right to pinion her arms, etc., because this scene is chillingly cruel and disturbingly erotic while fulfilling the story's theme of applying science and logic and practicality to the essentially supernatural or allegorical idea of vampirism.  Otherwise, "The Bat is My Brpother" is sort of bland.

Acceptable.  "The Bat is My Brother" has been included in several anthologies, including Michael Parry's The Rivals of Dracula.

The contents page of the 1944 issue of Weird Tales in which it appears teases
"The Bat is My Brother" with what we might call a social justice joke

"Dayblood" by Roger Zelazny (1985)

"Dayblood" was first published in Twilight Zone magazine.  It was first reprinted in the 1989 Zelazny collection Frost and Fire, which I own, but which I have yet to read anything from.  Unless I live forever (you know, like a vampire!) I'll never read all the SF books I have accumulated.

"Dayblood" fits the Twilight Zone brand, with a twist ending and a snarky, smart alecky, attitude.  A vampire has turned a local beauty into a vampire, and the woman's fiance forms a three-man posse with a priest and a physician and, armed with garlic and stakes, head to the ruined church where the vampire and his new companion are residing.  Our narrator is a smart ass journalist who complains that the vampire was foolish to let these mundanes (you kids say "muggles") detect his work and track him to his lair.  The reporter is waiting by the church when the three vampire hunters arrive.

The twist ending is that the journalist is a monster who feeds on vampires, so he ambushes the innocent Christians and murders them, preserving the two undead monsters so he can later kill them himself and gain sustenance from them.  The narrator talks of an "underworld ecosystem" that needs to be balanced, explaining that vampires haven't multiplied so much that they could take over the world because if there were too many vampires there would be too few living people for them to feed on.  Again we see scientific concepts applied to the fantastical idea of vampirism.

Acceptable.  This story has been widely anthologized in some of the many vampire books out there.

"Something Had to Be Done" by David Drake (1975)

"Something Had to Be Done" had its debut in F&SF and has reappeared in quite a few anthologies and Drake collections, including the 1976 edition of DAW's Year's Best Horror Stories.  It is short and economical, which I appreciate, is told in a clever and slightly oblique manner, and has a good twist ending that packs a punch.

Captain Richmond has the unenviable task of visiting the families of personnel killed in Vietnam.  He is accompanied on these visits by another officer, and on today's visit, to the Lunkowski family, it is a Sergeant Morzek, who served with the dead Private Lunkowski, who comes with him.  Morzek is old and emaciated and covered in weird moles, and seems to be drunk!

Morzek isn't acting like people usually do on these generally sad and solemn visits, and the three surviving Lunkowskis also act in an odd fashion as Morzek talks to them about their son's service and death.  Morzek's brief narrative and the Lunkowskis' reactions indicate that Private Lunkowski was a vampire, and so are the three people in the house here with Morzek and Richmond!  Lunkowski started murdering his comrades to drink their blood, and when Morzek realized this, he killed Lunkowski (who had proven immune to rifle fire during an attack by "the dinks") with a phosphorus grenade.  The Lunkowskis surround Morzek and Richmond and start closing in for the kill, but Morzek came with the specific purpose of cleansing the world of the Lunkowski menace and has brought another phosphorus grenade with him!  He tells Richmond to jump out the window and then detonates the explosive, incinerating himself and the monsters.

Quite good.  All the little details Drake includes as the story goes along that at first seem like window dressing or to hint at one thing in fact add to the tone or plot and end up hinting at something else--for example, because he is so sick-looking I initially thought Morzek might be a vampire, but in fact he has terminal cancer and the fact that he only has a few weeks to live has made easier his decision to die fighting the undead menace.

"Beyond Any Measure" by Karl Edward Wagner (1982)

"Beyond Any Measure" made its debut in Whispers #15-16, the special Ramsey Campbell issue of the magazine.  It has reappeared in many Wagner collections and vampire anthologies.

Lisette is an American art student studying in London; she shares a room with Danielle, another tall, slender young American artist.  Lisette has been having bad dreams, and Danielle arranges for her to meet a Dr. Magnus at a gallery opening--Magnus, she says, is an expert on dreams.  Lisette begins going to Magnus's office regularly to be hypnotized; Magnus believes that past lives have an influence on our thoughts, through racial memory in our DNA or because of reincarnation of the soul, and he provides "treatment" to Lisette free of charge because he thinks her case can finally settle the questions of the reality of racial memory and the immortality of the soul.  Under hypnosis Lisette relates memories of being a lady in the late 19th century, memories that all seem to have to do with coffins and graveyards and blood!

"Beyond Any Measure" is long, almost 50 pages in Vampires: The Greatest Stories, and it feels long because Wagner fills it with long conversations and long descriptions of people's clothes and bodies that do little to move the plot or generate emotion in the reader.  Wagner seems to be trying to make his story sexually arousing, so in every scene we have to hear all about about what clothes Lisette and Danielle are wearing and how their attire shows off their bodies, and Lisette's dreams and recovered memories always mention that her hair or rain water or blood or whatever is running over her breasts.  One of Wagner's themes in the story is the indulgence and license of the cultural elite, so in a scene at a masked ball where everybody snorts cocaine (which they call "toot") we get verbose descriptions of half a dozen people's BDSM outfits.

Lisette and Danielle are lesbian lovers, though their relationship is not very convincing or interesting--they don't act like any couple I have ever met or like any lesbians I have ever met; in most scenes they just act like casual friends, so when they suddenly started having sex in the shower I was taken by surprise.  "Beyond Any Measure" has three lesbian sex scenes, all of which end in blood.  In the first Lisette performs oral sex on Danielle, who hasn't realized she is on her period, so that when Lisette stands up sees herself in the mirror with blood on her face--you know, like a vampire!--and faints.  In the second a character introduced in the second half of the story, Beth Garrington, a wealthy woman who looks just like Lisette, murders Danielle after tricking her into thinking she is Lisette.

Then comes a long plodding explanation of what Dr. Magnus turned up by hypnotizing Lisette and by scouring old newspapers and public records.  In short, in the 19th century an aristocratic woman became a vampire.  When you become a vampire your soul leaves your body, but the soul is immortal, so the lost soul of this vampire lady--who now goes by the name Beth Garrington-- reincarnated in the body of Lisette when she was born.  Driven by the subconscious desire for justice and revenge that lies buried in her soul, without knowing what she was doing, Lisette came to London and sought out her former, now vampiric, body.  (I think.)

Beth Garrington, intrigued by Lisette's physical similarity to her, lures Lisette to her estate, where she starts having sex with the student and then bites her neck to drain her blood.  But, because they are, in some way, one person, this, for some reason, kills both of them.  Dr. Magnus arrives at the estate to find the two nude bodies, one still young and beautiful, one like a dried up mummy, intertwined in death.

Have to give "Beyond Any Measure" a thumbs down.  The plot is complicated and limp; the characters don't demonstrate drive or motivation, none of them seems to have any ambition or love or hate or fear, they act listlessly, like leaves in a gentle breeze.  The story feels very long and slow; there are repetitive and superfluous scenes and repetitive and superfluous sentences within scenes.  The whole time Wagner seems to be trying too hard, piling on the descriptions of clothes and boobs in an effort to be sexy, describing drug use and punk rock attire in an effort to be edgy, trying to get horror fans on his side with his name-checking of Psycho, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Edgar Allen Poe.

I must be some kind of outlier because this mess won a 1983 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella.  What did people like about it?  Maybe all the talk of people snorting cocaine, dropping acid, wearing black leather S&M outfits, and having lesbian sex was considered "with it," "an update of the vampire for the '80s?" 

Two Karl Edward Wagner collections from Centipede Press.  Left: 2011's Karl Edward Wagner:
Master of the Weird Tale Right: 2012's Where the Summer Ends

"No Such Thing as a Vampire" by Richard Matheson (1959)

"No Such Thing as a Vampire" first appeared in Playboy, our most prestigious skin rag (unless you count National Geographic), and has been reprinted in numerable Matheson collections and horror anthologies.

This is a competent though somewhat pedestrian story in the twist-ending-Twilight-Zone mold, though suited for Playboy with its inclusion of nudity and a sexual element.  In a Romanian town full of superstitious peasants lives a doctor and his beautiful wife in a fancy house with a bunch of servants--the doc and the missus have separate bedrooms.  One morning the wife wakes up with her night dress pulled down, her bare breasts covered in blood!  The doctor finds two tiny holes in her neck!  Obviously a vampire has attacked!

The doctor and the brave butler (the other servants flee) do all they can with garlic and crosses to fortify the house, but to no avail--every morning, even when the sawbones stays in his wife's bedroom all night long, she wakes up having been further drained.  The doctor writes to their friend in another town, and he comes to help.  When he joins the doc to sit up all night with the wife we get our twist ending--the doc has been faking the vampire attacks by drawing his wife's blood with a syringe (don't worry, folks, she will recover...physically, at least.)  His wife having cheated on him with this friend when they went to visit him last summer, the doctor has been plotting a terrible revenge!  He drugs the friend, puts him in a coffin in the basement, and arranges it so that the heroic butler finds the "vampire" and kills it with a stake through the heart.

Acceptable.

**********

The Drake is the big winner here--his story is economical, striking, and "brings the vampire into the modern world" in a way that is interesting.  The Wagner is the polar opposite, long and tedious, and, by sticking a vampire in the middle of a bunch of coke-snorting punk rockers and lesbian art students, "updating" the vampire in a way that is lame and boring.

We'll be orbiting Mother Earth in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, reading an early '80s SF novel by a SFWA Grandmaster.

1976 Frights by Poul and Karen Anderson, R. A. Lafferty, and David Drake

British 1977 hardcover

In our last episode, as part of our exploration of Robert Bloch's 1979 collection Out of the Mouths of Graves, we read Bloch's story about racism and revenge in the American South, "A Warm Farewell."  "A Warm Farewell" was first printed in Frights, a 1976 anthology of brand new "stories of suspense and supernatural terror" edited by Kirby McCauley that won the 1977 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology/Collection.  Nice!  The jacket of Frights tells us that, for this anthology, McCauley was looking not for vampires and werewolves, but contemporary horrors.  We saw how Bloch approached that task, now let's see what sort of mid- to late-20th-century horrors science fiction figures Poul and Karen Anderson, R. A. Lafferty, and David Drake offered McCauley.  I am reading the copy of Frights scanned into the internet archive, a US hardcover edition owned by the Boston Public Library.

"The Kitten" by Poul and Karen Anderson

I have read lots of stuff, over the course of my life and over the course of this blog's existence, by Poul Anderson, but I don't think anything by his wife, Karen.

"The Kitten" starts with a sort of one-page prologue, the description of a burning house and the efforts of fire fighters to extinguish it.  This description is metaphorical and poetic, but it is not good, almost every line being overwritten, cliched or obscure and confusing.  I want to like what the Andersons are doing, because I am very sympathetic to what I take to be Poul Anderson's views on politics and life and culture and all that, but I just can't pretend that this passage is good:

The heat rolled forth like a tide.  Men felt it parch their eyeballs and stood back from trying to breast it.  Meanwhile it strewed reek around them.

Leo Tronen was born a country boy, but has worked hard to become a successful business executive!  He married pretty blonde Una Nyborg because he thought she'd be a good wife for an executive, an asset when dealing with clients and colleagues.  However, she refused to abandon her graduate studies after their marriage, and has been spending lots of valuable time writing a thesis on ancient Egypt and driving back and forth to the university.  As our story begins the couple have a showdown, Leo throwing Una's half-finished thesis into the fire (holy shit!) and Una leaving the house the next day while he is at the office.

It is a cold winter, and a stray cat comes to Leo's door the first evening he spends without Una.  Leo feeds it, calls around the neighborhood hoping to find its owner and get some social capital by doing a good deed, but nobody claims the feline.  In the morning Leo finds the cat has made a mess of the house, so he takes it in the car with him, tossing it out into the cold halfway to work.  After a hard day at the office he is amazed to find the cat, half dead, at his door.  Determined to get rid of the creature, he drowns it and tosses the sodden corpse in the trash...only to find it at his door the next morning!  Even if he pulled it out of the water prematurely, how did it get out of the trash can?

Interspersed with all this cat stuff is a lot of inner monologue and conversations with colleagues that suggest that Leo is a jerk who is losing his mind and that the world at large is careening out of control, with economic hardship, social unrest, war in the Middle East, and tension between the Warsaw Pact and the West.  The Andersons present a few opportunities for friendless Leo to make a connection with the world beyond himself (the cat is only one such opportunity) but he rejects each opportunity.  Getting crazier and crazier, drinking more and more, having to try to kill the cat again and again as it returns each time, Leo finally goes off the deep end and sets out to murder a man whom he thinks is Una's lover by setting him and his house on fire.

Anyway, the end of the story makes explicit its supernatural elements.  According to Una's research, the Egyptians thought a man had numerous souls.  One of them is his "spirit of reason and rightness;" it can leave the body and move about independently.  The cat was representative of Leo's "spirit of reason and rightness," and when he killed it he went bonkers and became a--would-be--murderer. 

The plot is OK, a sort of look at the tragedy of middle-class life, how too much focus on career success can ruin your life because you neglect your relationships and your spiritual/emotional needs (I actually know people, smart industrious people, to whom this has happened) but the writing is way too flowery or purple or however you want to describe it--there is a surfeit of metaphors and odd words that are presumably meant to make the text more beautiful and more powerful but instead slow down the story and obscure the meaning of sentences.  It hurts to see somebody you like fall on his (or her) face, but that is what I must report happens here to the Andersons.  I am marking "The Kitten" barely acceptable.

"The Kitten" would reappear in The Unicorn Trade in 1984, a book full of poems and fiction by Karen Anderson, some of it in collaboration with her husband.

"Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" by R. A. Lafferty

If isfdb is to be believed, "Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" was never included in a Lafferty collection or anthologized outside of Frights, which I think makes this a "rare" Lafferty story and makes Frights a must-have for all you Lafferty collectors out there!

"Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" is a sort of apocalyptic American folk tale, told largely in the dialogue of six odd characters, dialogue that sometimes questions the nature of reality.  If the Anderson's "The Kitten" is about the plight of the suburban American bourgeoisie--business executives and academics--Lafferty's story has its roots in America's rural communities of Indians, hunters, and park rangers.  At times "Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" can feel rambling and you wonder where the hell it is going, with the characters seeming to be talking in circles, but the jokes and the final destination make the trip worthwhile, and on a second read all the various parts can be seen to be working together smoothly.  (As with the work of Gene Wolfe, I find that to really appreciate a Lafferty story I have to read it twice.)

Three men from town are walking in the wilderness of Oklahoma's Winding Stair Mountains, hunting.  They are soon joined by three additional men, a game warden and two Choctaw Indians.  Hector Voiles, a meteorologist, remarks on how this area is a site of strange weather phenomena-- at this time of year storms which enter the area sometimes abruptly disappear, leaving a brief but severe cold snap in their wake.  Voiles witnessed this last year, but his colleagues refused to enter it into the records.  "It was so improbable that the temperature in this small area should be forty degrees lower than that of nearby areas that it just wasn't a thing that should be recorded."  Lloyd Rightfoot, a naturalist, points out that this area is also said to be home to a one-of-a-kind tree, a tree of no known species which grows a single fruit that somehow never fully develops.  Andrew Widepicture, a cosmologist, talks about Storm-Cock, a crow reputed to live in this region and said to eat fully grown cattle--the game warden, Will Hightrack, says that Storm-Cock is a bird that "never saw the inside of an egg."

All of the bizarre phenomena the men describe are significant in that, in some sense, their reality has not been, could not be, accepted--each represents a potential that has not come to pass or at least was not recognized: gathering storms which subsided, cold spells which were not recorded, a tree of an unknown species whose fruit always die before ripening, a bird which did not come from an egg--if these things didn't achieve maturity or don't officially exist, how do the characters know so much about them?  The reader is left feeling uneasy by the way these men talk with confidence of things they cannot really know, of events that have not (yet!) happened.

The two Coctaws, James South-Forty and Thomas Wrong-Rain, explain to the city folks that if the fruit from the unique tree ripens, it will cause widespread death with its "shadow," and hint that the fruit is the source of the huge and murderous Storm-Cock.  Tonight there must be a frost that will kill the fruit, which is on the verge of maturity, or disaster will occur.  For over a hundred years the unusual frost has come that has killed the fruit and saved the region, but Thomas Wrong-Rain fears that this year the tree has outsmarted the weather--if there is to be a life-saving frost, men must will the frost into existence.   

That night Thomas Wrong-Rain calls Hector Voiles, urging him to predict an unlikely freeze as a way of making it more likely to eventuate and save the region from the depredations of Storm-Cock, even though all the scientific evidence indicates that the freeze will not occur.  Voiles makes his counterintuitive forecast on TV, inspiring rage from TV management and viewers, and his forecast proves wrong--the freeze does not occur, instead the storms, which so often in past years were abortive, rage across the region, causing mass destruction.  Thomas Wrong-Rain blames Voiles for this cataclysm, which killed his wife, because Voiles laughed on TV and annoyed "something down there that can't stand derision."  The storms are followed by the surreal attack of Storm-Cock, who kills one out of three people he encounters--Voiles, Widepicture and Hightrack are together when confronted by the 747-sized bird, and they draw cards to see which of the three of them will be torn to pieces by the monster and devoured.  (Many Lafferty stories use death and gore to comedic effect, and this is one of them.)

A totally crazy story that challenges the reader with its bizarre sense of unreality, but feels like the work of a sure hand--the story has strange, unconventional, goals, and it achieves them.  When a line of "The Kitten" feels odd, you suspect the Andersons have made a mistake, but when a line of "Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" feels odd (and many of them do) you feel like Lafferty's intention is to make you uneasy, that he is trying to surprise you or throw you off kilter.

Lafferty fans should definitely seek this one out.

For paperback publication in the UK, Frights was split into two volumes

"Firefight" by David Drake

You know I am interested in warfare and violence--for example, in the past week I read U-Boat Killer, Donald Macintyre's memoir of commanding Royal Navy destroyers and frigates during the Second World War, and enjoyed it--it was entertaining and I learned quite a bit about the various tactics and equipment used by the Allied navies in their struggle against Axis submarines.  As you also know, David Drake is a veteran of the Vietnam War, and the jacket of Frights suggests that this story draws on Drake's Vietnam experiences. 

This is a straightforward story of combat between humans and ancient monsters.  An American armored unit laagers by a stone wall and a stand of very tall trees in a thinly populated area of Vietnam.  There is foreshadowing--talk of how this area is home to the Mengs, said to be a race of people who lived in Vietnam before the arrival of the Montagnards and the Viets; talk of French and Communist military units being mysteriously wiped out in the area in the past, their bodies not riddled with bullets but mangled as if by knives or teeth; the way the tallest of the trees seems to heal up instantly after automatic weapons are test fired into it. 

Our main characters are the crew of a vehicle armed with a flame thrower and a machine gun, I guess the M132 Armored Flamethrower.  At night a sort of glowing door opens in the tallest tree, and out come men with batwings who fly around the laager, attacking the US servicemen with talons and fangs.  A South Vietnamese soldier working with the US unit as an interpreter turns out to be a Meng and helps the monsters.  Rifle and machine gun fire seems to have no effect on the evil tree, but the flamethrower sets it ablaze and destroys it.

This is an acceptable entertainment; competent, but no big deal.  All the information about Vietnam-era armor and weapons adds a layer of interest for military history buffs.  I can't find any reference to "Mengs" on the wikipedia page on ethnic groups in Vietnam, so I have no idea if Drake just made the Mengs up or if he is referring to a real population using a Western term that has fallen out of fashion or something like that. "Firefight" is the least ambitious and most conventional of the three stories we're talking about today, but it achieves its goals and is readable, so it gets a passing grade.

"Firefight" has appeared in some Drake collections since its debut here in Frights.

**********

Of these three stories the Lafferty is obviously the best.  The Andersons' "The Kitten" would be better than the Drake if it had been written as straightforwardly as the Drake, because it addresses interesting human issues of life in modern America and integrates with those topics ancient Egyptian mysticism, but its poor overindulgent style cripples it, so "Firefight" slips into second place.

More Frights in our next episode!

Whispers II: Leiber, Campbell, Drake, and Campton

Let's finish up Whispers II, the hardcover anthology of "stories of horror, supernatural horror, the macabre, and the generally weird" from 1979 put together by Stuart Schiff.  Only four stories to go, three of them by people pretty famous in the speculative fiction world.

"The Bait" by Fritz Leiber (1973)

I read the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories in the 1980s in Ace editions, five with Jeff Jones covers and one with a Michael Whelan cover, and I had definite opinions about which stories were good and which were not very good.  Looking at the contents pages of my six dog-eared Ace volumes and wracking my brain, I will say that the F&GM novel, The Swords of Lankhmar, and the short stories "The Seven Black Priests," "Bazaar of the Bizarre," "Lean Times in Lankhmar," and "Stardock" are among the definitely good.  Two long stories, "Adept's Gambit" and "Lords of Quarmall" I felt had the wrong tone and atmosphere, and a bunch of other stories were merely acceptable, and another group pointless trifles.  Among the pointless trifles was "The Bait," whose three pages I reread for this blog post.

(I often think about rereading all the F&GM stories...maybe some of the stories teen-aged MPorcius found mediocre or odd will appeal to a forty-something MPorcius?  But that is only one of many reading projects that I have conceived that have not yet blossomed into reality.)

Fafhrd and the Mouser are sleeping, dreaming of money.  They suddenly awake to find a naked teen-aged girl ("looked thirteen, but the lips smiled a cool self-infatuated seventeen") in their room.  They both want to have sex with her, and even propose to fight over her.  But then nine-foot tall demons appear in the little room, attack our heroes, and are quickly defeated.  The girl and the demon bodies then vanish.  F&GM speculate that Death, who appears as a character in a number of F&GM stories, sent the three beings to destroy them.

Leiber is a skilled writer and the style here, ironic and clever, is pleasant to read, but plotwise it is a big nothing and doesn't even really make sense.  The girl is not "bait," because she didn't lead the heroes to the demons, or even distract them so the demons could sneak up on them.  There was no reason for Death to send the girl there before he sent the demons; she is just included in the story to titillate the reader and set up jokes about Fafhrd and the Mouser's taste for girls in their early teens.

(One might also complain that "The Bait" has the exact same plot as 1974's "Beauty and the Beasts," and that both "Beauty and the Beasts" and "The Bait" are mere pendants to 1973's "The Sadness of the Executioner.")

"The Bait" was first printed in Whispers #2, and later included in the sixth Fafhrd and Grey Mouser book, Swords and Ice Magic (the one with the Michael Whelan cover), as well as a few other Leiber collections and anthologies.  I find the inclusion of "The Bait" in so many venues puzzling, because I consider it weaker than most Fafhrd and Grey Mouser tales; maybe it was a convenient buy for anthologists because it was so short and could fill in a last few vacant pages that needed filling?  Or maybe editors liked that it was silly and seemed to be a parody of sword and sorcery, a sort of goof on Conan-style stories? 

"Above the World" by Ramsey Campbell (1979)

Here we have what I am calling a meditation on loneliness and alienation.  A divorced guy, Knox, whose ex-wife Wendy and her second husband Tooley recently got killed in a mountain climbing accident, goes to the touristy town where he and his ex-wife had their honeymoon, and where she and her new husband recently stayed--I think this town is also where they were staying when they got killed.  Knox walks around the town, and again and again we get images and mundane events which speak of inability to achieve a connection, to communicate, with others--he hears voices but can't discern the words; the wind blows a postcard along the street--he tries to read it but it falls down a storm grate before he can snatch it; he goes to a book store to get something to read but the store is closed.  And, of course, seeing so many places where he spent time with his wife triggers plenty of recollections of her.  Knox is even staying in the same hotel room they stayed in on their honeymoon!

Knox hikes up a somewhat treacherous path, up a mountain, and finds it exhausting.  On the summit he weeps, and on the way down, encroaching fog hindering visibility, his attention distracted by something he thinks he sees carved into a tree trunk, he gets lost in a forest.  He begins to panic as the mist thickens and the sun begins to set.  As the story ends Knox comes upon two people, no doubt meant to remind us of Wendy and Tooley, who themselves died on a mountain climb, just as Knox fears he will now, and we readers have no idea if these mysterious figures are going to help him or if they are monsters who will kill him or ghosts who signify that he is already dead, or what.  (Early in his climb Knox had a severe chest pain that struck and then passed; maybe he died then and during the the rest of the story he has been a ghost.  Metaphorically, he has been dead for a while, because he has "a hollow at the center of himself" that began growing during his marriage.)

This story is OK; if you want to read page after page about a guy slipping on rocks and grasping at tree branches and tripping over roots, and semi-poetic ways of describing stuff that is far away ("A few dots, too distant to have limbs, crept along that ridge"), well, "Above the World" is for you.  Also, Campbell uses the word "cagoule," which I don't think I've ever encountered before.  Always learning...always learning. 

"Above the World" had its premiere here in Whispers II and has been reprinted in numerous anthologies and Campbell collections, including Dark Companions.  You'll remember that early last year we conducted an ideological analysis of a story from Dark Companions, "Napier Court."

"The Red Leer" by David Drake (1979)

David Drake is an important figure in the history of Whispers.  As he describes at his website, for much of the period in which the zine was published, Drake read the slush pile of manuscripts sent to Whispers, forwarding along to Stuart Schiff the small percentage in which he saw any value for Schiff to choose from among.  (Don't credit me with figuring this out--I got the link to Drake's interesting account of his tenure as assistant editor of Whispers from tarbandu's blog post on Whispers II.)

Old John Deehalter willed his 600-acre farm jointly to his son George and his daughter Alice, so now his son has to work the farm with his annoying brother-in-law Tom Kernes.  On the farm is an Indian burial mound, and Kernes wants to dig it up in hopes of finding a skull to display in his house.  Yuck!

The farmers bust open the mound and find what we readers immediately recognize as an alien high tech artifact.  Not long after that farm animals start turning up dead and people start seeing a strange figure in the night!  Deehalter and the Kernes are in the fight of their lives against a voracious alien creature--will they figure out its nature and weaknesses in time to defeat it, or will America's Great Plains soon be at the mercy of a slavering space monster?

This is sort of a standard horror story, but it is entertaining; Drake paces it well and is good at setting the scene and describing what goes on in the action sequences.  There are mystery elements around the powers and characteristics of the monster, but you can tell what the hell is going on, unlike the Grant and Campbell contributions to Whispers II, which leave you wondering whether the protagonist is dead or alive.

I liked it--thumbs up.  "The Red Leer" saw print first here in Whispers II and has resurfaced in several Drake collections and an anthology edited by Drake.

"At the Bottom of the Garden" by David Campton (1975)

Campton is a playwright and this story first appeared in a British juvenile anthology; like "Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole," I would have skipped such a thing under normal circumstances.  But while Ken Wisman's satiric folk song about marriage appeared in Whispers II and nowhere else, "At the Bottom of the Garden" appeared first in Armada Sci-Fi 1 and was included later in Whispers #9 and DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VI; maybe the wisdom of crowds indicates this story is actually good?

Mrs. Williams is a sad case: scatterbrained, shy and insecure, not very pretty, and a bad cook.  The first few pages of the story are largely taken up by a comic description of her disastrous efforts in the kitchen.  Mrs. Williams is so overwhelmed by her housework that she barely pays any attention to her equally unattractive and dim-witted daughter, Geraldine, who is I guess six or seven.  So Mom doesn't really take notice when Geraldine talks about her new friend; this new friend, according to Geraldine, removed the little girl's crooked and yellow teeth and straightened and whitened them and reinstalled them.

Having demonstrated prowess in the realm of dentistry, Geraldine figures her new friend might be able to cure her headaches and fix her terrible eyesight.  The friend disassembles the little girl, removing head from body and eyes from skull, to work on them.  When Mr. and Mrs. Williams see this shocking operation  underway in the distance, they sally forth in a state of panic, scaring off the little surgeon, who is some kind of alien or monster.  Geraldine, though in pieces, is still alive, and the uncanny medico could have put her back together again better than new, but the creature is too scared of the parents to return, so Geraldine, alive but immobile, is buried in pieces.

Because it first appeared in a SF anthology I thought we were going to learn all about the alien or whatever it is and how it can take people apart without shedding their blood or killing them, and I expected a warm and ironic happy ending in which Geraldine became smart and pretty and her parents never understood how this transformation took place, or, in their stupidity, took credit for their daughter's improvement .  But "At the Bottom of the Garden" is a surreal black humor horror story, not a science fiction story, so we learn nothing about the creature's origin or how it performs its medical miracles; the point of the story is to make us laugh at the antics of the members of the Williams family, three foolish and selfish dingbats, and/or make us imagine the mind-churning horror we would feel at finding one of our loved ones disassembled by a weird-looking creature.  And maybe consider the anguish of the helpful creature, whose efforts to do good were misunderstood and ended in tragedy.

Merely acceptable.

**********

So there it is, Whispers II.  I'm considering this a worthwhile exploration.  I enjoyed the very good Lafferty story and the solid Drake story, and the Davidson, Jacobi and Wellman stories deepened my quite limited knowledge of those writers and made me think better of them than I did before I cracked open Whispers II.  And next time I play Scrabble with the wife, maybe I can flummox her by whipping out "cagoule."   

From James H. Schmitz, Henry Kuttner, and Harlan Ellison: stories about being hunted!

In 1988 Baen Books published an anthology edited by David Drake, Things Hunting Men (a companion to another anthology, Men Hunting Things.)  Let's check out stories from this volume by three writers whose work we have talked about in the past here at MPorcius Fiction Log, James H. Schmitz (remember his stories about the female secret police of the future?), Henry Kuttner (remember his novel of a dangerous criminal who masterminds revolutionary change on Venus?) and Harlan Ellison (remember when he physically attacked Charles Platt?)

Things Hunting Men and the three magazines these stories first appeared in are all available for free at the internet archive; being a fan of classic SF is an inexpensive hobby.

"Greenface" by James H. Schmitz (1943)

In his intro to the story in Things Hunting Men, Drake reminds us that this is Schmitz's first published story, and suggests that he prefers it to Schmitz's interstellar espionage and psychic powers capers.  "Greenface" was printed originally in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown, and has appeared in numerous anthologies and collections, including ones edited by Ray Bradbury and Martin H. Greenberg, as well three different books from Baen--the people at Baen must really think it is a winner!

Hogan Masters is a small businessman just trying to make it in this world of ours!  It is the first season of his venture, Hogan Fishing Camp, a collection of cabins on Thursday Lake he rents to anglers and an ice house in which to store the fish they catch.  Hogan hopes that this inaugural season will be successful enough that he'll be able to get together enough money to marry his girlfriend, Julia Allison.  But one day (by coincidence, the day he decided to drink a few beers in the early afternoon--oh, Hogan, you know that's not good business!) he sees a sort of green blob of protoplasm with tentacles devour a garter snake.  A few weeks later the creature reappears, larger and more menacing, and Hogan is not the only one to see it, proving it's not just the booze messing with him!

"Greenface" is a solid and fun horror/thriller story.  We follow the course of Hogan's Ahab-like weeks-long effort to hunt down the steadily-growing monster, a duel which turns Hogan into a drunk, ruins his business, and wrecks his relationships with Julia and Julia's father.  (Damn you, Greenface!)  Schmitz does a good job with the SF monster stuff (as we expect in an old SF story, Hogan learns all about the monster's idiosyncratic biology and tries to use that knowledge to defeat the creature), the action scenes, and the more psychological character-based guy-who-ruins-his-life stuff.  (Spoiler: John W. Campbell, Jr. told Barry Malzberg that "mainstream literature is about failure" but science fiction is about heroes, success and discovery,* and "Greenface" has an un-Ahab-like happy ending.)

Thumbs up!

*See Malzberg's essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971."

"Happy Ending" by Henry Kuttner (1948)

Here in Things Hunting Men, and when it first appeared in Thrilling Wonder, "Happy Ending" was credited solely to Kuttner, but isfdb credits Kuttner's wife C. L. Moore as a co-author.  "Happy Ending" seems to have been well-received by the SF community--it was included in Bleir and Dikty's The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949 and by Damon Knight in the oft-republished anthology Beyond Tomorrow, as well as other publications.  In his intro to "Happy Ending" in Things Hunting Men, Drake laments that many SF writers fail to grow--their late work is no better than their early work.  Drake says that Kuttner, whose early work was "crude," grew better and better over the course of his career; as a case in point, he notes the structure of "Happy Ending," which is a little unconventional, starting with the ending and then filling us in on how the protagonist got there via flashbacks that ultimately turn upside down our beliefs about what was going on.

(Drake also praises C. L. Moore's Jirel stories, and admits that his own first published story, 1967's "Denkirch," a Lovecraftian thing, was not good.)

"Happy Ending" is a story that, like so many old SF tales, romanticizes science and logic and quick thinking, presents a world-shaking paradigm shift, and strives to give us that old sense of wonder at the boundless possibilities of technology and the future.  And it works!

It is 1949 and James Kelvin is a Chicago journalist spending some time in the warm air of California in an effort to relieve his sinus problems.  He meets a time-travelling robot who tells an unbelieving Kelvin that it needs gold to repair its time travel mechanism--the robot wanted to travel to 1970 but accidentally ended up in 1949.  In exchange for the gold plate from his watch, the robot gives Kelvin a device that can enable him to establish a rapport with the mind of a man in the far far future; people in the future have evolved super intelligence, so by transmitting his problems into a future man's mind Kelvin can receive answers to them.  If he can pose just the right questions to this future brain, Kelvin can become a rich man!  Unfortunately, on his first try the device malfunctions (user error!) and a being called Tharn becomes alerted to Kelvin's temporal mental probing.  The robot warns Kelvin that Tharn is a dangerous android and will now hunt the journalist down!

Much of the story follows Kelvin's use of the device to escape Tharn, who has seven fingers on each hand and wears a turban.  The device works as advertised, allowing Kelvin to read the mind of some guy in the far future and learn how to, for example, teleport or breathe while underwater, very useful skills when you are trying to escape from a relentless android!  As the story proceeds to its mind-blowing conclusion we are forced to revise our assumptions about the motives and even identities of all the characters in this crazy drama.

"Happy Ending" is a fun story, chalk up another success for Kuttner (and Moore?)

"Blind Lightning" by Harlan Ellison (1956)

Iowa-native Drake uses his intro to "Blind Lightning" to brag about how awesome Iowa is and to tell us how he first became acquainted with Harlan Ellison's writing--when a high school English teacher shared with him a copy of Ellison's 1961 collection Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-up Generation, which Drake calls "a stunning volume."

"Blind Lightning" was first published in Fantastic Universe.  When I looked briefly at the scan of the June 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe it was obvious that the version of "Blind Lightning" there was different than the version in Things Hunting Men, with paragraphs in different order, some different word choices, etc.  Hmm....  "Blind Lightning" was included in Robert Silverberg's 1966 anthology Earthmen and Strangers and the 1971 Ellison collection Alone Against Tomorrow; I own paperback editions of both (my 1979 copy of Alone Against Tomorrow is signed by Ellison--envy me, Ellison collectors!) and decided to read the version in Alone Against Tomorrow on the theory that that is the version in my possession most likely to be the one preferred by the author.

Xenoecologist Ben Kettridge, an old man (he's in his fifties!) is alone, exploring a jungle on planet Blestone; his comrades from star ship Jeremy Bentham will pick him up in six hours.  He gets captured by Lad-nar, a nine-foot-tall native barbarian--this monster's species is intelligent, with a language and a religion, but no tools or clothes or buildings.  Blestone is plagued by periodic electrical storms of terrible ferocity, and the natives must hide in their caves during these storms or be killed by lightning.  The storms are of long duration, so the natives typically capture some game to bring into their caves with them, and Kettridge is brought to Lad-nar's cave to serve just this purpose.  Kettridge learns all this because Kettridge and the native can communicate telepathically, to the surprise of both.

While waiting to be eaten Kettridge thinks back to earlier in his career, when he was on a research team which developed some chemical.  The chemical got loose or something and killed 25,000 people.  Kettridge feels guilty about this, and decides to earn some kind of redemption by helping Lad-nar's race, which Kettridge believes to be in terminal decline.  Kettridge is killed by lightning because he gives Lad-nar his elastic lightning-proof space suit so Lad-nar can walk outside the cave.  As he dies Kettridge instructs Lad-nar in how to contact the human exploration team and we readers are led to believe that Lad-nar's race will get help from the humans and not go extinct after all.

This story is just OK.  It is sentimental and melodramatic and the verbiage is a little extravagant, a bit loud and long-winded.  In my experience Ellison doesn't create characters in his fiction; it is always Ellison telling some story that is meant to hammer some idea into you or wring some emotion out of you, and when I read an Ellison story I always hear Ellison's voice in my head, and he is always yelling or snarling sarcastically or putting on some maudlin voice.  (This is where I confess that I don't really like Ellison as a person, and I am afraid it is an obstacle to my appreciating his work.)

I guess the interesting thing about "Blind Lightning" is the prominence of religion; Lad-nar considers the lightning to come from one god and is convinced that the human explorers are even greater gods, while Kettridge prays for help, and is himself a sort of Christ-figure--his walking in the deadly storm (providing a demonstration of the utility of his space suit to Lad-nar) is kind of like Jesus walking on water, and Kettridge dies while showing a race of people how to live without fear and how to get to the heavens.  In the scene in which Lad-nar and Kettridge inexplicably communicate telepathically, we are told that "To Kettridge it seemed there was a third being in the cave.  The hideous beast before him, himself...and a third" and I couldn't help but think the third might be God, trying to build a bridge between these two alien races and give Kettridge a chance to redeem himself.  Of course, I just recently read Gene Wolfe's 1,100 page The Wizard Knight and was just yesterday talking to my wife about U2's October and so have gotten into the habit of turning over every sentence to look for Christian messages, even where you wouldn't expect them, like in Ellison's writing.

**********

Three worthwhile stories.  More old SF tales in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

2015 stories by Gene Wolfe, Cecilia Holland and Barry Malzberg

In 2015 Baen Books published Onward, Drake!, a tribute to David Drake of Hammer's Slammers fame edited by Mark L. Van Name.  Among the twenty all-new tales and essays in the volume are stories by MPorcius faves Gene Wolfe and Barry N. Malzberg, as well as one by Cecelia Holland, whose novel Floating Worlds I recently picked up.  Always interested in Wolfe and Malzberg's work, and curious to get a taste of what Holland is all about, I obtained a hardcover copy of Onward, Drake! via interlibrary loan to read those three stories.

(Nota bene: You can actually read Wolfe's "Incubator" and Holland's "SUM" for free at the Baen website.)

"Incubator" by Gene Wolfe

Each story in this book has an afterword in which the author talks about his relationship with David Drake.  Wolfe points out that he, Drake, and Joe Haldeman are perhaps the only speculative fiction writers to have been under enemy fire in wartime.  Wolfe also says, that, while SF strives to present worlds that are more or less plausible, that "The future will not be plausible.  It never is.  Thus, the story you have just read."

"Incubator," less than four pages long, is directly and indirectly about plausibility, about to what extent we can believe what we read and hear and see.  Set in a future in which people have apparently transcended traditional biological conventions (there are androids, "shemales" and "woe men" and some of the characters seem to have had three biological parents), all the characters express doubts about specific knowledge, and one dismisses even the possibility of knowledge.  "No one can see reality.  The mind processes a pattern of light reported by the optic nerves.  The mind interprets that."

As for plot, I guess a person goes to a remote building in response to a summons; at this place she is shown a valuable , "The Egg," which is said to contain "all the old humankind."  The sight of it causes her to flee.  In keeping with the story's theme, it is difficult to tell precisely what is going on.  (It is hinted that this egg is cracking and whatever is inside it will soon be unleashed...maybe 100% all natural men and women who will threaten this future of androids and shemales?)

Deliberately inscrutable, I guess a demonstration of the adage "the past is another country" as well as a discussion of the possibility of true knowledge.

"SUM" by Cecilia Holland

Holland's story is almost seven pages long and, to my surprise, touches on some of the same epistemological issues that Wolfe addressed in his story--it starts with two characters arguing over the possibility that their lives may just be illusions or hallucinations, that instead of being soldiers in the Dutch army searching for Spanish spies for Prince Maurice, they might simply be dead or insane.

The narrator, an officer in charge of five men, enters a house to hunt for the Spanish "cloaked investigators" but triggers an explosive booby trap and ends up buried alive under the wreckage of the house.  Most of the text concerns his efforts to dig himself out of the wreckage.  Holland includes references to Ovid and Nicole Oresme (Drake is a Latinist and an Ovid aficionado) and clues in the text pile up until even an uneducated goofball like myself can figure out by the end that the narrator is in fact Rene Descrates, the famed philosopher.

This is a competent thriller type of story; the literary and philosophical content providing an additional layer of interest and fun.

"Swimming from Joe" by Barry Malzberg

I've never seen Spalding Grey's Swimming to Cambodia or the film The Killing Fields so I am probably missing elements of Malzberg's nine-chapter story here.  (Those nine chapters take up only three pages, so I can't be missing too much, I guess.)

The protagonist of this story is a guy named Hammer who was serving with the U.S. military in Korea in 1954 when Marilyn Monroe visited the American troops there and became obsessed with the actress.  Today, in 1969, he is serving in Vietnam and imagines he sees a huge balloon of Monroe floating over the "killing fields."  Malzberg compares Monroe, who was "killed by Hollywood," to Hammer's comrades ("the Slammers") killed by "the War."  (Malzberg loves the metaphorical construction in which institutions or abstract entities kill people--in his 1980 essay "Mark Clifton: 1906-1963" he says that "the death certificates of all three [Clifton, Henry Kuttner and Cyril Kornbluth] should have listed science fiction under cause of death.")  More interestingly, Malzberg/Hammer suggest that Monroe's death made her immortal, and that the memory of her is what is keeping Hammer alive "in country."

In the afterword to "Swimming from Joe" Malzberg tells the interesting story of how he first came into contact with Drake--Drake wanted to send a fan letter to Raymond E. Banks and Malzberg's former employers at the Scott Meredith Agency directed Drake to Malzberg.  The two writers became friends--Malzberg says "He may be the closest friend I have."  Malzberg also reminds us that he served in the Army briefly stateside, and plugs "Final War," one of his most famous stories.

**********

Of these three stories the Holland is the most conventional and the most entertaining--it has a plot you can follow, dramatic tension and jokes, and a puzzle for you to figure out, the kind of stuff most people who read fiction are looking for.  "SUM" has made me think Floating Worlds will be a good read.  The Wolfe and Malzberg stories are sort of what we expect from those less conventional writers, though I think "Incubator" is less satisfying than most Wolfe stories, while "Swimming from Joe" is sort of average for Malzberg.

More short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, but we'll be returning to the mid-20th century for them.

Killer by David Drake & Karl Edward Wagner

The lizard-ape bounced to the earth like a cat, as the last two snarling hounds sprang for it together.  Spinning and slashing as it ducked under and away, the thing was literally a blur of motion.  Deadly motion.

I read a library copy of Killer when it was relatively new, in my teens, and parts of it have always stuck with me, maybe because when I read it I knew nothing about Ancient Rome.  Recently I was in South Carolina, and visited 2nd & Charles, a chain of used books/music stores which I guess fills a market niche similar to that filled by Half Price Books out here in the Central Time Zone.  (As a kid growing up in New Jersey I pitied people in the Central Time Zone, who had less time to do their homework and eat dinner before the prime time TV shows came on, and who would have to watch Johnny Carson at the early hour of 10:30.)  2nd & Charles had a copy of the same edition of Killer I had read in my youth, so I brought it back to my Middle West HQ and this weekend read it.

Nota bene: Only one of the book's
twenty-seven chapters is in space

The galaxy is ruled by the methane-breathing Cora, a race of varicolored blobs.  These killjoys have outlawed the blood sports that are such a common feature of SF stories, but oxygen-breathing biped RyRelee isn't going to let that harsh the buzz of fight fans everywhere.  RyRelee is a kind of secret agent or bounty hunter hired now and again by the Cora, but he has a side business supplying monsters to the arenas still in operation on scofflaw planets. Unfortunately, one of his monster transports just crashed on some Class 6 planet the primitive natives call Earth, and a female phile, just about the meanest creature known to interstellar civilization, is now loose in central Italy, the center of the empire ruled by Domitian, the eleventh Roman Emperor.  The phile, which the Earthlings take to calling a "lizard-ape," is almost unkillable, and if RyRelee doesn't capture it quick it will give birth to enough little philes to swamp the planet and exterminate all native life.  The Cora feel a responsibility to protect the peoples of primitive planets like Earth, so if the phile starts reproducing they plan to nuke the Mediterranean region from orbit to protect the rest of the humanity.

Before RyRelee sets foot on Earth (the plastic surgery which will allow him to blend in among the people of Italy takes a little time) Domitian puts Lycon the Greek on the lizard-ape case.  Lycon is a 40-something veteran of the Roman legions, the gladiatorial arena, and a career as a beastcatcher; he hunts tigers, lions, and other animals and brings 'em back alive to Rome.  When RyRelee presents himself to Domitian (in disguise as an Egyptian), the Emperor instructs Lycon and RyRelee to work together to catch the monster.  Part of the tension in the story comes from the fact that while the basically decent Lycon and the Cora are determined to destroy the menace, money-grubbing RyRelee and twisted sicko Domitian want to catch it alive (Domitian wants to watch it massacre animals in the arena.)

Did Baen pay a kid in candy bars for this cover?

Killer is a pretty straightforward adventure story.  There is an omniscient narrator, and we see the story unfold from the point of view of several characters, including the blue-scaled, bird-footed monster itself. There is a lot of action, and quite a bit of gore as the phile eviscerates animals and people and the sadistic Domitian tortures and murders people.  (Killer is one of those stories which on the one hand condemns people's bloodlust while on the other appealing to it.)

The adventure/horror elements work, as do the science fiction elements.  The techniques RyRelee uses to try to fit into Roman society, and the growing suspicions of canny Earthlings like Lycon of this strange man who claims to be an Egyptian but speaks Greek and Latin with weird accents and does odd things like touching sizzling hot metal without flinching, are engaging and add suspense.

All the references to Roman history and culture add another layer of interest to the book, and Drake and Wagner also set up lots of parallelisms between the human and alien characters.  The Cora are kind of like the Romans (arrogant jerks who make wide use of auxiliaries from other races/ethnicities and maintain order across a broad empire), Lycon is like RyRelee (both hunters who go to exotic lands on the periphery of civilization), and like the phile (both are expert killers who have been trained to fight in the arena for the pleasure of their so-called superiors.)

Killer is an entertaining mix of elements exploitative (depravity and gore) and highbrow (mentions of Horace and Euripides, descriptions of life in Ancient Rome.)  I enjoyed it.

*************

There are eight pages of ads at the back of my 1985 printing of Killer.  The final two pages constitute an order form, while each of the other pages is devoted to a single publication.  Unfortunately most of these full page ads, which attempt to reproduce cover illustrations in black and white, look pretty bad.

Readers of any of the eighteen advertised books (and Killer, of course) are invited to comment.  Of all of them I have only read Jack Vance's Cugel's Saga, which I adore, of course.  I have read the title story of Joanna Russ's The Zanzibar Cat; it was thought-provoking, but not entertaining, like something a college professor would assign you to read to get you to think about the place of literature in society or something.

John Willett has only one novel listed at isfdb, but at least it is endorsed by famous scientist Robert Bussard.  Seven issues of Far Frontiers were produced, and then it changed its name to New Destinies, and endured for nine additional issues.  Keith Laumer and Fred Saberhagen are authors I feel like I should like, but whose work often feels kind of pedestrian when I read it.  I do plan on reading some of their signature works in the future.

I didn't think much of the Mack Reynolds I read.  I have the same attitude about Gordon R. Dickson that I have about Laumer and Saberhagen.  

Stories from 1973 by C. S. Claremont, Geo. Alec Effinger and David Drake

In the past I have mentioned that I often am not sure what to read, and will allow myself to be guided by the Fates.  Recently, in an Iowa antique mall, I came upon a copy of the April 1973 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  I was charmed when I saw that a previous owner of the periodical had read and graded each piece of fiction therein.  I willingly parted with two bucks and brought the issue home with me.  This artifact provided me not only the chance to pass judgement on the work of science fiction writers, but the opportunity to pass judgement on the judgement of an unnamed stranger!

This week I read this individual's favorite story from the issue, "Psimed" by C. S. Claremont, his or her least favorite tale, Geo. Alec Effinger's "The City on the Sand," and a story which received the modal grade (look, I'm using math words), David Drake's "Arclight."   Of the eight novelets and short stories in the issue, five, including the Drake piece, received "g"s.  Let's see if MPorcius Fiction Log is on the same page with the SF fan we can know only as "Previous Owner."

"Psimed" by C. S. Claremont

If you look at Previous Owner's handwritten note, I believe we can gain an insight into his or her thought process.  It looks like Previous Owner was going to give "Psimed" a score of "VG," but then realized he/she was shortchanging Claremont, and upgraded "Psimed" to "Excellent."  (I am disregarding the possibility that Previous Owner's grade is the neologism "vexcellent," meaning "having the ability to cause a high degree of vexation.")            

I've never read anything by Claremont before--in fact, I had to do some research to find out if Claremont was a man or a woman.  As people reading this probably already know, Claremont usually goes by "Chris Claremont," and is staggeringly famous for writing about Marvel's X-Men and collaborating with George Lucas on some fantasy novels.  I'm learning every day!

My man tarbandu has written a little about Claremont's comic book work and I think it is fair to say that tarbandu would not use words like "excellent" to describe it.  Torn between the disparate opinions of tarbandu and Previous Owner, I tried to go into "Psimed" with an open mind.

"Psimed" is the story of Petra Hamlyn, a female doctor in a future high tech New York.  I get the impression that Claremont often writes female protagonists.  Hamlyn is a showy individualist, wearing jewelry and short skirts in a society in which fashions are androgynous and conservative.  Male characters stare at her legs, female characters think she looks like a prostitute.  When a new colleague calls her "Doctor," she corrects him: "My name's Petra.  I'm afraid I despise formality...."

The child of a wealthy man collapses of a rare disease, and Hamlyn's team of doctors try to save the kid.  Hamlyn and the kid are both psychics, and, in this universe of Claremont's, psychics tend to lose their powers and get all angsty and then commit suicide.  There is some melodrama as the kid goes berserk upon learning he has lost his psi powers and when Hamlyn has a painful flashback to when she lost her powers while terrorists tortured and murdered her husband.  Hamlyn also has sex with the new colleague.  The story ends when the kid dies, and another one of Hamlyn's colleagues, a psychic who has melded his mind with the kid in an effort to save him, also dies.

I'm no expert on the X-Men, but it seems like the themes of this long, boring, and histrionic story about a small elite of angst-ridden people with special powers who are expected to use those powers to help society, have something in common with the themes of those X-Men comics.

So, what did Previous Owner like about this story?  I guess lots of people are into medical dramas, and into stories about people with special powers who suffer angst and alienation.  I don't find medical stuff interesting, and while I sometimes like the whole alienated mutant thing (I just gave Kuttner and Moore's "The Piper's Son" a positive review), I didn't think this was a good example.

Previous Owner Grade: Excellent

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Not good

"The City on the Sand" by Geo. Alec Effinger

I've already encountered Effinger and his short stories during the course of this blog's life.  My feelings have been mixed.  Let's see if "The City on the Sand" tips the scales one way or the other.  SF blogger extraordinaire Joachim Boaz thinks highly of Effinger, so again we see a blogger I admire at odds with the mysterious Previous Owner, who was at a loss for words to describe his or her unhappiness with "The City on the Sand."  Who will I side with?

"The City on the Sand" is a consciously literary and subtly amusing story about decadence and a life wasted.  It takes place in an alternate early 20th century world (they have electric lights and radios) in which Western Europe is so decadent that its people have not bothered to conquer or even explore the New World or Sub-Saharan Africa.  The main character, Ernst Weinraub, is a would be poet and novelist who has traveled Europe, but found no place truly congenial.  So he has settled in the one city of North Africa, where he sits at an outdoor cafe all day, drinking and watching people walk by.  He has an outline for a trilogy of novels but has made no progress on the novels in years.  When it rains he doesn't even have the energy to move inside or lower the awning.

Weinraub has done nothing with his life, he has no friends, no wife or children.  He doesn't make an effort to get his poetry published; he just hopes some tastemaker will spot him sitting in the cafe and "discover" him.  When people try to develop a relationship with Weinraub or enlist him in their projects (a Polish political activist is trying to raise a volunteer army to free slaves or something like that) he just waves them away.

I have to disagree with Previous Owner again.  Effinger's style here is good, and the setting and tone of the story are good.  I can see why someone wouldn't care for "The City on the Sand," though-- there's not much plot and certainly no action or sex.  This is a literary mood piece, but it is a good one and I quite like it.  My opinion of Effinger has just gone up.

Previous Owner Grade: ugh

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Good

"Arclight" by David Drake

In my youth I read and enjoyed Killer, which is about a space alien murdering people in ancient Rome, and was written by David Drake and Karl Edward Wagner.  I read a couple of Drake's Hammer's Slammers stories, and they just made me shrug.  I quite liked Drake's short story "The Barrow Troll," and in late 2010 I read his novel The Voyage and wrote a three star review of it on Amazon in which I focused on the fact that the protagonists are a bunch of amoral jerks.

So, that is a brief history of my relationship with David Drake, who seems like a competent writer but whose isn't always ideally suited to my temperament.  I was curious to see how I would respond to "Arclight."

Well, for once I am on the same page as Previous Owner; this is a good story.

Drake served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam and Cambodia, and this story draws on his experiences.  A cavalry unit (the main characters operate ACAVs, M113 armored personnel carriers equipped with additional machine guns and armor) accidentally uncovers an ancient Cambodian temple.  There is a hideous idol in the temple which the troops damage in the course of investigating the ruin.  Over the succeeding nights the soldiers dream of this monstrous statue, and some of them are mysteriously killed, their bodies horribly mangled.  Was it communist guerrillas who killed them?  A ravenous tiger?  We readers know it was an invisible demon!  The demon's campaign of vengeance ends when the U. S. Air Force bombs the temple into oblivion, demolishing the idol.

This is a solid entertaining horror story.  We've all probably read lots of stories about monsters from ruins terrorizing people, but Drake's story really benefits from its setting among American soldiers in South East Asia.  For example, I found the military stuff interesting (I was not familiar with the terms "ACAV" and "arclight" before.)  So, thumbs up for this one.

Previous Owner Grade: g

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Good.

**********

Even if Previous Owner and I have different tastes, I enjoyed my exploration of his or her old magazine, which gave me an opportunity to learn more about three authors I have only had a limited exposure to.

The April 1973 F&SF also has a bunch of interesting ads.  On the first page of my copy (which I suspect is in fact the third page--I think the first sheet of my copy was lost) we have an ad for an anthology of SF stories about sex.  Hubba hubba!  Also, an ad for a novel about what would happen if some guy figured out astrology was real.  I'd be curious to read some of the sex stories (despite the embarrassingly dumb font they use in the ad for the title), but the astrology book sounds horrible.

In the back of the mag (we cool people call magazines "mags," you know, to save time) we have the "Market Place," which is full of fun classifieds.  I had no idea there was a town in California called "Brubank."  Not only is there such a town, but the people there love dinosaurs!  There's an ad for Dianetics; these were the days before the Elronners had that John Travolta and Kirstie Alley money and could afford those TV ads we all remember.  A guy in Hawaii is willing to teach you telepathy.  You can mail three questions to a psychic in Illinois and for only ten bucks he will use his powers to answer them.  And if you don't have ten dollars and live in South West Canada, a guy will teach you how to pan for gold right in your own neighborhood!  Awesome!  

Click to read about all the bargains I missed in 1973 when I was two years old