Astounding, February 1936: F B Long, R Z Gallun and J R Fearn

We here at MPorcius Fiction Log have been reading fiction by that iconic Weirdie Frank Belknap Long.  In response to my blog post about Long's 1971 Gothic romance stinker The Witch House, one of my perceptive and well-informed readers suggested giving Long's 1936 story from Astounding, "Cones," a spin, pointing out that important SF anthologist Groff Conklin reprinted "Cones" in his 1951 anthology Possible Worlds of Science Fiction.  We love Astounding here at MPorcius Fiction Log, so let's read "Cones" and two additional stories from the same issue of the leading magazine of science fiction of the World War II era, then edited by F. Orlin Tremaine, one penned by Raymond Z. Gallun, whose work we are pretty fond of, and one by John Russell Fearn, about whom we are somewhat skeptical.  (We've already blogged about this issue's immortal cover story, H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness.")

"Cones" by Frank Belknap Long (plus special bonus: 1951 version!)

"Cones" comes to us as four chapters.  Chapter I is full of science lectures on Mercury, first discussion of climate and orbit and rotation and such, and later descriptions of the horrible dangers of the Mercurian surface, like the electric current that runs through the soil that, in some spots, is powerful enough to reduce a man to ashes in seconds.  We actually witness a man being burned thusly, with Long describing the whole horrific process, the guy's limbless torso jerking around and that sort of thing, but first we meet our heroes.  We've got our male lead, Gibbs Crayley.  On Earth, Crayley was an innovating, risk-taking bacteriologist who aroused public and government animosity, and so left Earth to become an adventurer, exploring Venus, Mars, Luna, Pluto, asteroids, and now Mercury.  He bickers with our female lead, Mona Massin, one of Earth's most beautiful women, a woman who rejected the many men who pursued her on Earth because all she cares about is astronomy.  Oh yeah, she also cared about her cat, which stepped on one of those Mercurian shock patches and was reduced to a cinder.  Along with our leads are six other smarty smarts, each described in a single line, one of whom gets killed as Chapter I ends.  Zap!

Another man dies at the start of Chapter II, this guy being felled by an even more mysterious danger, his body shriveling within his space suit--when Crayley lifts his stricken body it is astonishingly light.  Long spends much of this chapter describing the reactions of the surviving  astronauts to this horror, the fainting and the stunned staring and the agonized groaning and so forth; "Cones" really feels like a horror story.  Long also dwells on the fact that all the men on the team are obsessed with Massin.  

This obsession takes center stage in Chapter III, as men declare their love for Massin, who feels only contempt and pity for their misery.  As we all have heard a thousand times, the way to win a woman is to play hard to get, to ignore her or even "neg" her, and so of course it is the cold and callous Crayley, as obsessed with knowledge as is Massin, who attracts the interest of the frigid astronomer.    

Crayley looked at her.  He had always thought her a rash little fool, but he had to concede that her impersonality matched his own and was really magnificent.

(I can never remember the difference between "psychopath" and "sociopath," and suspect like most psychological jargon that these terms are just sloppy catchphrases that reflect the intellectual bankruptcy of the soft sciences, but if I took psychobabble more seriously I'd say that in Crayley and Massin we have portraits of one or the other or maybe both.)

Crayley experiments on the dead man's shriveled blue body and Massin watches.  It becomes clear that all of the calcium in the man's body has been removed!  We get more science lectures as Crayley tries to figure out what sort of creature did this to his fellow astronaut and how to capture a photograph of an apparently invisible form of native life.  

Crayley prepares a camera that can photograph creatures of energy that move so fast the human eye can but dimly perceive them.  But he slips while climbing a ladder and hurts his ankle so he can't go out onto the Mercurian surface to get the snaps himself.  Two other guys have to go and they are dramatically killed while Crayley and Massin watch; happily, these pioneers didn't die in vain--Crayley and Massin get the pictures back and learn that the natives are 20-foot tall cones of energy and they are massing to attack the ship!  Just then the one non-American member of the crew, "a Latin," goes berserk and launches the ship into space and tries to murder all the other men aboard so he can have Massin all to himself.  As the ship ascends the natives cast one last bolt of energy up at it, killing the trigger-happy Latin.  Crayley and Massin, only survivors of the expedition, admit their love for each other and head back to Earth with some amazing data on Mercury and its native life.

This is a crazy science-fiction horror story and I like it.  I enjoyed all the science and technology stuff, all of which, by accident or design, serves the story's weird horror atmosphere--for example, the space suits don't have radios so outside the ship the astronauts have to communicate via sign language, which adds to their danger and the story's feeling of isolation.  I always like stories about disastrous sexual relationships and Long delivers that kind of material in spades; I also like how their single-minded pursuit of knowledge has turned the main characters into amoral anti-social jerks.  And then there is the gore and the otherworldly nature of the aliens, the sort of stuff we might expect from a Weird Tales alum like Long.  

So, thumbs up for "Cones," a story that doesn't deny that the quest for love and the quest for science are worthwhile, but also tells you that pursuing love or pursuing knowledge can turn you into a monster who puts himself and everybody nearby at terrible psychological and physical risk.  Were truer words ever spoken?

But wait--there's more!  I encountered a typo early in my reading of the version of "Cones" in Astounding and so took a glance at the version in Possible Worlds of Science Fiction and found that the story there was quite different!  Radically different!  In the book version, Crayley isn't a renegade who left Earth because both the establishment and the masses scorned him and feared his risky experiments--instead he's the head of a government expedition!  And the female lead is not some super beautiful woman with whom Crayley has a difficult relationship--it is his wife Helen!  The cat is now a dog!  Most radical of all, the entire business of all the other men competing for the female crewmember's affections has been excised!  In fact, whereas in the magazine version of "Cones" the presence of a gorgeous woman on the ship makes the men go crazy and jeopardizes the mission, in the book version the presence of a woman inspires them to greater heroism!

The 1951 book version of "Cones" is a much more optimistic, pro-woman, pro-humanity, pro-science text than the 1936 magazine version.  Casualties are lower (but still high), and the men all behave much better, both more chummy and more competent.  The plot regarding the aliens is the same, but the character arc subplot of the magazine version--involving the callous and combative male and female leads realizing they love each other--is gone and in its place we get a character arc which has a member of the crew who thinks Crayley's science obsession makes the man inhuman coming to understand that it actually makes Crayley the best kind of human!  

In reading the book version I missed the over-the-top bitterness and melodrama of the magazine version--the astronauts in the book printing are a bunch of pro-social goody goodies and Crayley's singlemindedness is vindicated!  The science is perhaps better in the book version, though--for example, the sign language bit makes more sense, as it is explained that the electrified surface of Mercury interferes with radio reception.

I will say that the book version of "Cones" is just acceptable--I like all the weird horror and sexual tension that leads to internecine violence in the original.  I wonder what's behind these changes to "Cones"--did Conklin demand a less sexist and racist story, or just a less sexy story, or just a more optimistic story, or just a story which focused more on Mercury and less on interpersonal drama?  Did Long pick up the manuscript thinking to update the science and fix some typos and while he was reading it decide to change its tone because he was in a better mood or had changed some of his thinking after 14 or 15 years?  I also wonder what version of the tale was included in the 1972 Long collection Rim of the Unknown.  

"Buried Moon" by Raymond Z. Gallun

With "Buried Moon," a story I think may never have been reprinted, Gallun delivers a solidly entertaining story with striking images, strange ideas, horror elements and a vividly realized psychological experience.  Gallun is becoming a sort of MPorcius favorite!

"Buried Moon," like both versions of Long's "Cones" addresses the idea that science can take away your humanity.  Tod Cram (Dickensian name, I guess) was a brilliant scientist and inventor who married a beautiful woman but neglected her to focus on his work--building a vehicle that could bore through the earth so he could investigate a mysterious crater on the ocean floor!  These two came to hate each other and Cram even struck her.  (New Wave types would complain that "old" science fiction didn't deal with the issue of sex--I note the examples of Barry Malzberg and Harlan Ellison in my blog post on Malzberg's Herovit's World--but today we have 1936 stories by Long and Gallun that are all about sexual relationships.  Today I warn you again that you can't trust what critics say about texts, you have to look at the texts themselves.) 

The mole machine is wrecked during its voyage, but it breaks into a mile-wide hollow meteor that was once a tiny moon of Earth--the interior of this little moon is home to a sophisticated civilization of spider-people, the typical specimen of which is somewhat larger than a tarantula.  The spider people capture Dr. Cram and use their technology to mess with his brain, making him identify with these arachnid aliens as if he is one of them and getting his help in fixing the mole machine so they can use it to travel to the surface and take over!

Gallun starts his story in medias res, with a dazed Cram waking up all confused, both identifying with and finding revolting the spider people--we readers learn about his true identity and earlier life and about the history of the spider moon in fragments as Cram himself recalls things and as data is inserted into his brain by his many-limbed captors.  He is about to launch the mole machine upwards to unleash the intelligent arachnids on the native people of Earth when he stumbles upon a photo of his wife and it jars him into realizing his true duty lies not with the eight-legged freaks, but with the bipeds who are his own kind!  He commits suicide, and the ability to control the mole machine dies with him, saving the human race...for now! 

Gallun has a good writing style, and this story has a pile of elements I always appreciate, like spiders, failed sexual relationships, suicide, and people messing with your brain.  Thumbs up!

In "Buried Moon" we have a forgotten gem I enthusiastically recommend to classic SF readers!  I say again that it pays to look into these old magazines!

"Mathematica" by John Russell Fearn 

It is the future--1980!  Man's first space flight took place five years ago, and there is already a human settlement on Mars.  In 1977 a tiny planet was discovered quite close to the Sun, an artificial planet made of metal!  A sample of the metal has been brought back to Earth, where its astonishing properties are investigated.  When a person in proximity to the fragment thinks of something, those thoughts materialize!  You think of a tiger, a tiger appears!  But the new thing vanishes almost immediately.

Unable to make either heads or tails of the mysterious new element, the fragment is put into storage.  A year later a strange being appears at the lab.  Like so many men of the future in SF, this guy has an emaciated body and a huge skull housing a super brain.  This freak, Pelathon, tells Dr. Farrington and his assistant (our narrator) that Farrington created his (Pelathon's) universe just by thinking it up while near the fragment!  While one year passed in our universe, thousands have passed in Pelathon's, giving humanity there time to evolve into superbrainiacs.  Pelathon built a time-space ship to find his maker, and having found him, proposes that he, Farrington, and the narrator embark on the quest to discover the maker of our own universe!

Chapter II features some jawing about James Jeans and Arthur Eddington and how electrons are waves that exist in multi-dimensional space and how our universe is merely an atom in Pelathon's universe and so on.  Then in Chapter III our three heroes set out to the artificial planet near the Sun, sadly confident they will never return to their native universes.  Inside the metal sphere they find innumerable gigantic wires and cables and a bewildering array of titanic machinery, gears and pistons and what not, all working smoothly.  Pelathon begins shrinking their ship, and they enter another universe that encompasses no more space in our universe than does a single electron.

In Chapter IV, after descending through six or seven levels of universes within universes, Pelathon's ship guides them to a red planet they hope is the world from which emanated the thoughts that generated our universe.  There they meet a man with an even bigger head than Pelathon's--so big he has to wear an appliance to hold it up!  This guy, Si-Lafnor, created our universe to precise specifications, including the potential for human life.  Si-Lafnor delivers a science lecture incomprehensible to me about how all universes and everything in them are just mathematical figures, and the chapter ends with the disclosure that he wants to travel to smaller universes himself in search of the maker of his universe.

In Chapter V, after some additional work which our heroes observe, Si-Lafnor, the man who created Earth, vanishes, seeking his own creator.  Having learned from him, and now with access to Si-Lafnor's vast store of equipment, Pelathon tackles the project of sending our narrator and Farrington back to their native universe and himself back to his.  He doesn't make much headway, and Farrington and the narrator die because there is no food on this red world (Si-Lafnor used his technology to transmit energy directly to their bodies, but Pelathon--who doesn't need to eat himself--didn't figure that technique out quickly enough to nourish them.)  But don't fear--the Earthers live on as a corporate entity of pure thought, unburdened by physical bodies!  After an indeterminate period, maybe thousands of years, in blackness, where living, and knowing, and being have never been heard of, the two scientists find themselves in bodies again, strange alien ones, confronted by a being of everchanging indistinct form--the being that created all mathematics and the first universe from which all others have ultimately sprung!

This First Creator, "the original mathematician," is no pussycat and proposes reducing Farrington and assistant to mere dust, or some other similarly horrible fate, "cancelling them for all time."  But in Chapter VI Si-Lafnor appears--Si-Lafnor knows enough math to have made himself uncancellable, and after a psychic battle of competing math equations with "the original" he confers this immortality on the Earthmen.  In Chapter VII he builds a new universe much like that of the Earth in which Farrington and his assistant were born and sends them there in new--superior and immortal--human bodies.  They are soon joined by Pelathon.  But the Earthmen find this new Earth not much like their own at all, and as unkillable immortals they have nothing in common with its people.  Si-Lafnor goofed, and an endless life of loneliness awaits them as the story ends, though Fearn hints that in a sequel Pelathon may be able to figure something out.  (Indeed, a sequel to "Mathematica" appeared in Astounding a few months later.)

"Mathematica" drags during the lectures, which are largely about abstract mathematical concepts and subatomic physics, stuff I can't even visualize and which carry no emotional weight, unlike Long's lectures about Mercury's geography which paint pictures in the mind and can stir human feelings.  And of course "Mathematica" is one of those stories in which the main characters are passengers and spectators instead of the drivers of the plot.  Still, some of the ideas and some of the images are entertaining, so we'll call the story acceptable.  "Mathematica" would be reprinted in 2001 in The Best of John Russell Fearn.  The cover of this book seems to be illustrating "Mathematica," what with the formulas and the fact that there are three men in the ship and one has an oversized noggin.

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The Long and the Gallun are good, with the Gallun being a real winner, and the Fearn isn't bad--looks like we've got a good issue of Astounding here!  It is nice to see Long acquitting himself well after having read so many misfires from him.  It's more Long next time, something from the 1960s, so place your bets on whether we'll be getting another fun interesting piece or another shoddy heap of sludge.

Unearthly Visions from W M Miller, R Z Gallun and C D Simak

In our last episode we read the 1956 version of Eric Frank Russell's story "Legwork."  "Legwork" would be reprinted in 1965 in the Groff Conklin anthology 5 Unearthly Visions, a copy of which I acquired down in Lexington, Kentucky in April of 2016.  5 Unearthly Visions also reprints Damon Knight's "Dio," a story I read in a Knight collection back in 2018 under the title "The Dying Man."  So, two unearthly visions down, three to go--let's finish out the anthology by spending the day reading the included visions by Walter M. Miller, Jr., Raymond Z. Gallun, and Clifford D. Simak.

Fellow SF fan "Petie," we salute you.

"Conditionally Human" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1952/1980)

Already my plan to read from my paperback copy of 5 Unearthly Visions is going off the rails.  isfdb indicates that the version of "Conditionally Human" in Conklin's 1965 anthology is substantially different from versions in other volumes, including Everett Bleiler and T. E. Dikty's Year's Best Science Fiction Novels: 1953, which purports to print texts speciallh revised by the authors.  I can't find a scan of the Bleiler and Dikty book, so I am going to read the version of "Conditionally Human" in an internet archive scan of 1980's The Best of Walter Miller, Jr., which I can see from the first line deviates from the text of the 1965 Conklin version.

It is the 2060s, the socialistic future in which the government gives you a test and tells you what job you get.  Our hero, Terry Norris, has been assigned a job his new wife Anne finds abhorrent, a job which he describes as being that of an "up-to-date dog catcher."  You see, the government, because of overpopulation concerns, also gives you a test to see if you are worthy of reproducing, and only the most impressive specimens are permitted to have a biological child.  Some of those denied parenthood by the government are permitted to own a genetically engineered artificial life form in a ploy to satisfy their desire to be parents, to experience a simulacrum of the love shared between parents and children.  For example, there are cat-things and dog-things that have the intelligence of a human baby and can understand and speak simple words of baby-talk English.

The most advanced of these artificial creatures are the "neutroids;" as their name suggests, these are sexless beings that look almost like a real human child.  A neutroids' physical development ceases before it reaches what in a sexed being would be puberty; depending on what model you can afford and have a license for, your neutroid might top out at three or five or whatever, with the limit at about ten years of age.  (As for intelligence, the neutroids are what I as a kid would have called "retarded" but now call "developmentally disabled.")  Couples who do well enough on the tests to merit neutroid ownership get special treatment--government doctors shoot the female member of the couple up with drugs to give her some of the experience of being pregnant, like odd cravings, weight gain, and lactation.  One of the story's little jokes is that before a couple receives delivery of their neutroid the wife goes to a hospital and the husband is expected to pretend to be nervous, to smoke cigarettes and pace back and forth in the maternity ward waiting room.  

Norris's job is to manage all these artificial creatures that inhabit his 200-mile-square sector of suburban housing; his most onerous duty is catching and destroying any of the artificial creatures that prove defective or somehow become ownerless.  Because the neutroids have something like an immature human's intelligence and personality, and, except for a little tail and lack of gonads, look kinda like human children, Anne thinks of her new husband, who has to toss neutroids into the handy gas chamber (complete with attached crematorium) in his back yard, not as a dog catcher but a baby-killer!

The various interwoven plot threads of "Conditionally Human" demonstrate the terrible psychological and sociological costs of the severe government limitations on childbirth and pubic policies that aim to fulfill women's maternal desires via Frankensteinian means.  A batch of neutroids is suspected of being defective, and Norris has to wrest them from the arms of their loving "parents," and some put up a fight.  Anne decides she wants to have a real child with Norris even though they are just class C, and doing so would risk separation and demotion to laborer status.  When Anne becomes acquainted with one of the defective neurtroids--its "defect" is that it is almost a normal human girl, with intelligence within typical human parameters and a body with gonads that will go through puberty and be able to bear children--she becomes attached to it and determined to make sure it is not destroyed.  (This story probably deserves a feminist analysis--women are its moral core, but they pursue traditional goals like wanting to care for and give birth to children.)

One theme Miller addresses is complicity.  In one subplot, Norris goes along with a corrupt superior's rule-breaking, and when this misbehavior leads to a broken-hearted woman committing murder, Norris recognizes that he is partly to blame for the carnage and regrets going against the rules.  But Norris also recognizes that he bears guilt for following the rules of the immoral government of which he is an agent.  In the climax of the story Norris tries to sabotage the system, taking a risky first step that he hopes will set off a chain of events that will result in the end of the government's intrusive and oppressive reproductive policies.

Religion is another of Miller's themes, as it often is in his work, and a clergyman plays a role in the story in the end, and in the closing pages of the story Anne reads from the Bible.

Miller is a good writer, and tackles serious, compelling topics in "Conditionally Human," as he did in other stories of his I liked, like "Crucifixius Etiam," "Death of a Spaceman," "I Made You" and "No Moon for Me."  Miller's work feels mature in part because it is ambiguous, it doesn't offer easy answers and doesn't feel like propaganda.  "Crucifixius Etiam" and "Death of a Spaceman" tell you that conquering space is a worthwhile goal, but fully admit it is going to entail horrendous sacrifice.  "Conditionally Human" portrays the government's population control measures as bad, but in Miller's story the population problem is real, not an illusion pushed by goofball activists or exploited as an excuse by government tyrants in their pursuit of greater power.  

Thumbs up, then for "Conditionally Human," another success from a consistently good writer.  I do have some criticisms of the story's structure and length, though.  It does feel a little long, and the climax at the end, when Norris decides to rebel and murders a fellow government employee, is less shocking and less climactic than the murder in the middle of the story.  I have to wonder if maybe the other versions of the story, in Galaxy and/or in 5 Unearthly Visions, might be tighter.

"Stamped Caution" by Raymond Z. Gallun (1953)

"Stamped Caution" debuted in Galaxy, in an issue with a cover story by MPorcius punching bag J. T. McIntosh.  In the lore of MPorcius Fiction Log, Gallun is the opposite of McIntosh (AKA M'Intosh AKA MacIntosh); Gallun is a guy whose work I almost always like.  (See a list of links to Gallun-related blog posts here.)  So I embark on reading "Stamped Caution" with a spring in my step.

"Stamped Caution" is a well-written effort to construct a realistic account of Earth people's reaction to the first landing of Martians here on Earth, and then reaction of Martians to the first landing of Earthers on the Red Planet.  Gallun strives to be optimistic as well as realistic, and perhaps to ignore or subvert some of the commonplaces of adventure fiction--people do get captured and do escape, but both humans and the aliens are trying to avoid war and build a relationship based on trade and friendship rather than conquest, and they actually succeed!

In brief, a Martian ship crashes on Earth and all the crew die except for an egg.  The narrator is given the job of incubating the egg and studying the creature that emerges from it, which turns out to be a tentacled thing with eyestalks, not a mere animal but an intelligent being able to use tools and learn English.  Gallun's descriptions of the alien's form and behavior and the human efforts to study it and educate it are entertaining.

By the time the Martian is an adult the people of Earth have built their own ship capable of going to Mars and the narrator and the Martian he raised form part of the crew that go there.  The humans of the crew are captured by the Martians and their experience is somewhat parallel to that of their Martian friend--they are studied and tested and, eventually, the people of Earth and Mars take some first steps on the road to a mutually profitable relationship characterized by peace.

I like it.  Gallun's good record here at MPorcius Fiction Log endures.        

The Swedish translation of 5 Unearthly Visions, Spionen utifran, contains only the three
stories "Legwork," "Stamped Caution" and "Shadow World."

"Shadow World" by Clifford D. Simak (1957)

Simak seems like a good guy and he's a good writer, but sometimes his sentimentality can get too sappy, and sometimes his anti-urban, anti-modern schtick gets on my nerves, though he's not as bad as Chad Oliver.  So I never know when I start a Simak story if I am going to like it.  Let's roll the dice again, peeps.

Looks like we rolled a 4 or 5*--"Shadow World" is a long and unsatisfying twist-ending joke story.  It has as minor themes imperialism, colonialism and exploitation of the environment, but its major theme is the danger of addictive entertainment.

*We might say 6, 7 and 8 would represent the various ranges of "acceptable;"  9 or more would be good or better, with 11 and 12 Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, Thomas Disch and Tanith Lee territory.

Earth is sort of overcrowded, and so men have been searching the galaxy for Earth-like worlds to colonize.  One such world is Stella IV.  The survey team that discovered it found no evidence of native intelligent life, just some mysterious "cones" that could only be seen from a distance.

The narrator is a member of the outfit building the colony on Stella IV.  He tells us that mankind has learned its lesson and Stella IV will have a carefully planned economy, that there won't be individuals taking risks as they try to strike it rich on a frontier, but rather a systematic and orderly progression that won't waste natural resources.  I couldn't tell if Simak was seriously advocating a planned economy or if he was being sarcastic, employing an unreliable narrator strategy here, i part because this political economy/environmentalist stuff was incidental to the plot. 

When the team of which the narrator is a member arrived on Stella IV they were immediately met by what they took to be native life forms, forms of an inexplicable, even supernatural, type they dubbed "shadows."  Each man found he had a particular shadow who kept close to him at all times.  These beings are humanoids who lack any facial features save for a single eye, have no sexual characteristics, and no clothes save a harness that holds a large jewel on its wearer's chest and a bag near the waist--the bag jingles like it is full of small hard objects.  The shadows do not talk, or breathe, or eat.  If you try to touch a shadow's jewel the creature simply vanishes and returns later.

The shadows do not seem hostile or dangerous, but it appears that, in a mysterious and oblique way, they are slowing down the building of the colony.  Every morning the bulldozers and cranes and things the human engineers and technicians need to build the colony are found to be "gummed up," and they have to be disassembled and cleaned before they can be put to use.  The men are thus able to only put in a half day of productive work each day, slowing progress severely, and there is panic when the colony builders receive a message warning them an inspector is on his way to Stella IV.  If the inspector finds they are behind schedule and have no idea how to resolve the problem caused by the shadows they are all likely to be fired!

The narrator figures out what is going on by employing an illicit device.  Simak portrays some of the men among the builders as jerks, and one of the jerks is the cook, who goes by the name "Greasy."  Greasy has an illegal device called a peeper.  As I said, Simak is a good writer and he uses various clever strategies in constructing "Shadow World" that make it mysterious, generating suspense and conveying a sense of strangeness.  One of these strategies is mentioning peepers on the story's opening page and then not explaining clearly what a peeper is until like page 19.  A peeper is what we might call a virtual reality device that looks like a pair of binoculars that you can strap to your face; it has 39 knobs that can each be set from zero to 39--each knob sets a parameter for the fantasy world in which you can live through the device.  The peeper is extremely addictive, and is illegal.

The shadows are very inquisitive--it appears they are sabotaging the machines at night in some undetectable way to provide themselves an opportunity of observing their disassembly and repair.  The narrator, the only person who knows about Greasy's peeper, steals the contraband device and risks addiction himself to figure out how to set the peeper so that it will take a viewer on such a horrible trip that it will knock him unconscious.  As he expected, his shadow looks into the peeper at the first opportunity and duly collapses.  The shadow then decomposes in short order, leaving behind only a cone--the base of which was its eye--and the jewel and the bag of items.  The jewels are a sort of 3D camera and they have been producing little miniature models of the Earthmen's equipment; these models represent, in exhaustive and precise detail, both the surface and the inner workings of the men's machines and tools.  Among the little models of his equipment in his expired shadow's bag the narrator discovers a little model of himself.

It turns out that the shadows are just mobile platforms for the two super high tech cameras, the cones that transmit video and sound to the hidden lair of their owners and the jewels that create perfect models.  The hidden masters appear soon after the narrator solves the mystery of the cones and shadows.  These highly advanced aliens are addicted to entertainment, and have been enjoying watching the humans through the cones.  They want to pay for the fascinating show the humans have unwittingly been putting on for them, and offer as payment perfect full-sized working duplicates of the Earthmen's machines and supplies those little miniature models serve as blueprints for the aliens' duplicating machines.  It seems these aliens can also duplicate raw materials like steel, which will make building the colony a snap.  But when the humans realize the aliens have also created living duplicates of themselves they are outraged and horrified, and the narrator scrambles to acquire 500 peepers from Earth--it is not clear if he intends to use these as weapons against the aliens or as a radical psychiatric palliative treatment for the stress of living in a maddening new world of duplicate humans.

Simak's writing style is smooth and "Shadow World" is well-structured as a mystery story.  Unfortunately, the story isn't actually fun and doesn't generate human feeling in the reader, and I don't care for mystery stories that are merely a puzzle and lack any human drama or emotion.  "Shadow World" doesn't really work for me as a science fiction story, either, as it lacks compelling ideas--the alien cones and duplicating machines and the human peepers are simply not believable; they are props for use in a satire, not elements of a sincere speculation about life in the future or an alternative milieu; as for the satire and the jokes--I guess about being addicted to TV--they are not insightful or funny.  Marginal thumbs down for "Shadow World," I am afraid, though I can see other people liking it because it is well-put together on a technical level.

"Shadow World" was first printed in Galaxy, where it was illustrated by the Dillons.  (Here's a note for all you fans of Diane and Leo who don't follow me on twitter: recently I stumbled upon a text book with a cover by the Dillons at an antique store.)  "Shadow World" would be reprinted in a few Simak collections, including some British and French ones, and a 21st-century Baen anthology edited by Hank Davis of stories depicting unfortunate first contacts titled Worst Contact.

Off-Planet's cover depicts one of the shadows from "Shadow World"

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The last page of my copy of 5 Unearthly Visions is an ad for Monsters Galore, a paperback anthology of stories about monsters edited by Bernhardt J. Hurwood, a man with a varied career that included not only editing books of horror stories but penning TV and movie tie-ins, non-fiction books about torture and unexplained phenomena, and sex manuals.  The ad claims Monsters Galore is illustrated, but the one review of the book on Amazon casts doubt on this assertion.

Fantastic Story, Fall 1951: Hamilton, Gallun, Oliver, & Reynolds

A few days ago, a knowledgeable SF fan, in a comment to one of my blog posts about Edmond Hamilton, pointed out a bunch of SF stories by important writers which share plot elements with Hamilton's "Fassenden's Worlds," a story we read in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Seventeen.  One of these stories was another Hamilton, 1935's "The Cosmic Pantograph."  Sam Merwin, Jr. reprinted "The Cosmic Pantograph" in 1951 in Fantastic Story, alongside new stories by three men we sometimes read here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Raymond Z. Gallun, Chad Oliver, and Mack Reynolds.  So, let's take a little trip to 1951 and read these four stories.  This is a suspenseful blog post, as I often--but not always!--find Oliver and Reynolds' work to be offensive as ideology and/or deplorable as literature.

"The Cosmic Pantograph" by Edmond Hamilton (1935)

"The Cosmic Pantograph" was the cover story for an issue of Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories, and it is a fun sense-of-wonder speculative piece conceived on the grandest of scales.

A few years ago Felton was a college student; one of his professors, Robine, had a habit of lecturing on the nature of the universe, reminding his students that one day the sun would grow cold, that eventually the entire universe will grow cold as all the stars die, and that mankind would thus be doomed.  Felton, the optimist, insisted that ever-innovative mankind would figure out a way to endure any such challenge.

Today, Robine has summoned Felton to his mansion with the promise that his former will pupil will be able to see the end of the human race!  Robine's huge basement contains a tremendous and complex machine--a machine which can detect the vibrations of every single atom in the universe, catalog them, and then reproduce them in tiny size inside a big metal sphere.  In this sphere, the machine can create another universe identical to the real universe, but much smaller!  Endorsing the determinist philosophies of such men as Spinoza and d'Holbach, Robine says that since the duplicate universe is identical to the real universe, its history will follow exactly the same course as the real universe.  Critically, because it is so much smaller, time moves more quickly in the duplicate universe, millions of years passing in one minute.  This means that Felton and Robine can observe the duplicate universe through electromicroscopes and watch the inevitable future unfold!  Will the natural decay of the stars lead to the extinction of mankind, or will Man triumph over this cosmic adversity and endure? 

Thumbs up for this effort to blow your mind and teach you various philosophical and astronomical principles.  "The Cosmic Pantograph" doesn't seem to have been printed a third time in the language of William Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson, but our friends over in Germany recognized its merit and republished it in a magazine in 1959 and in an anthology with a Frank Frazetta cover in 1974.

"Trail Blazer" by Raymond Z. Gallun (1951)   

We've been reading Raymond Z. Gallun since late 2013, and looking at the archives I see ten blog posts with the tag "Gallun" that cover 14 (or 15, I guess*) stories:

"Davy Jones' Ambassador" and "Old Faithful"*

"Telepathic Piracy"

"The Machine from Ganymede"

"Davey Jones' Ambassador," "Nova Solis" and "Avalanche"*

"N'Goc"

"Space Flotsam," "The World Wrecker" and "Derelict"

"Saturn's Ringmaster"

"Brother Worlds"

"Bluff Play"

"Double Identity"

*Yes, without realizing it I read two slightly different versions of "Dav(e)y Jones' Ambassador," in 2013 the original 1935 magazine version and in 2022 a 1999 anthology version, a testimony to my poor memory.

I liked almost all of these stories, and Andre Norton chose to include "Trail Blazer" in her anthology Space Pioneers, so we have every reason to expect I will like "Trail Blazer."

"Trail Blazer" is a good adventure story, and also provides grist for the mills of all you people out there interested in identity politics, decolonization, subaltern studies, and all that, because at the center of the story Gallun places a sympathetic Native American character.  Joe Whiteskunk is more or less the hero of the story, but his halting English and subordinate status may rankle the sensibilities of the more  advanced 21st-century readers, and I cannot deny that Joe is portrayed as a strange and inscrutable "other" who has access to knowledge and abilities out of reach of white people.

Our narrator is Dave the engineer, a recent college graduate; his twin brother Frank has also recently secured an engineering degree.  Their father has recently died, leaving the twins the family's southwestern ranch, from which they can see the rockets taking off that are carrying adventurous young men to the new lunar colony.  Frank and the narrator are eager to join the space colonization effort, but what to do about Joe Whiteskunk, the beloved farmhand who taught them how to shoot and to ride, but is sixty-five years old and maybe a little dimwitted, or at least perplexed by modern life?  Joe wants to come with the boys into space, but of course that is impossible--or is it?

Like something in a kid's adventure story, or on the news when the United States abandons its friends in Afghanistan to the tender mercies of the Taliban, Joe takes the dangerous expedient of stowing away in the unheated cargo hold of the rocket that carries Dave and Frank to the Moon.  Somehow the Indian survives this ordeal--it is implied that, as a primitive man in touch with the natural world, he has instinctual wisdom that saved him.  Anyway, Joe Whiteskunk, unlettered senior-citizen Indian, is on the moon among all the college grads, scientists and soldiers.  At first the brass wants to send him back home, but when they realize Joe is an expert tracker, they enlist him in the effort to investigate some mysterious marks on the lunar surface that Joe calls "devil tracks."  

Joe leads the brothers and a military officer around the lunar surface, following the tracks, and they discover physical evidence that thousands of years ago the Moon was a battleground fought over by Martians and the natives of the asteroid belt, then an intact planet.  Gallun presents this ancient war which lead to the destruction of the planet between Mars and Jupiter as a cautionary tale for readers living through tensions between the Western democracies and the communist tyrannies of the East.*  

Joe recovers all manner of technological and cultural treasures left on Luna by the Martians and Asteroidians, and then, on a solo mission, disappears.  Months later Dave and Frank are selected for the crew of a joint US-Soviet mission to Mars; there is an accident and it looks like they will die on Mars.  But then Joe Whiteskunk shows up to save them!  The cause of Joe's disappearance was his discovery, and then accidental activation, of a Martian spaceship!  The ship's automatic systems brought him from the Moon to the Red Planet where his fieldcraft, and use of ancient Martian technology, enabled him to survive, and proves to be the salvation of the twins and their comrades.

The story ends on a positive note as the West and the Reds work together to colonize Mars and Dave has hopes Earthmen will succeed in exploring the galaxy peacefully and avoiding the catastrophic fate of the warring Martians and Asteroidians.

Thumbs up! 

*Gallun never uses words like "communism" or "the Soviet Union" but makes it clear who he means.  

"The Reporter" by Chad Oliver

I've read quite a few stories by Oliver over this blog's life, and many times Oliver has made me groan with his denunciations of modern life and romanticizing of life as a stone age savage.  (Links to sample groans: "Rite of Passage;" "The Marginal Man.")  Well, Oliver is making me groan again, this time because "The Reporter" is a lame "meta," "recursive" joke story.  Thumbs down!

George Hartley is a journalist on Mars.  When Terrans first explored and colonized Mars, there were plenty of stories for Hartley to write about, but it turned out that the native Martian civilization was extinct and there is now no excitement, so Hartley hates his job, wishes he was on Venus where there are lots of monsters and intelligent natives to write about, and spends his time in a booze hall smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey.

Another journalist, a photographer, introduces himself to Hartley and they drink and smoke together and moan about how hard it is to be a journalist.  Hartley tells a long story, paraphrasing another reporter's final dispatch before losing his job.  Oliver makes it explicit that the story this third journalist filed and which ruined his career is a parody of a traditional SF adventure story; Hartley suggests the disgraced reporter made up the story, basing it on old SF magazines.  The story was about how the reporter discovered that the Martians were not in fact extinct at all, but, because they are peaceful types unable to kill, were hiding from the human colonizers in an underground city; the reporter was shown around their subterranean metropolis and in his story wrote at length about their technology.

The obvious central joke of "The Reporter" is that the disgraced reporter's story was all true, and the man who introduced himself to Hartley as a photographer is in fact a Martian reporter who has come to the surface to collect material for an article of his own.  

A waste of time--at least Oliver's stories about how we would be happier with no books and no industry push some kind of controversial ethos that readers can engage with; this story is just a feeble in-joke for SF fans.  "The Reporter," understandably, has never been reprinted.    

"Displaced Person" by Mack Reynolds (1951)

Reynolds is a leftist among whose claims to fame are the facts that he based much of his science fiction on speculations about political economy and that he was very widely travelled and wrote travel articles for men's magazines.  To me, his writing generally seems pretty lame, but he was a success, often appearing in Astounding and even coming in first in some kind of survey of readers of Galaxy and If.  (Sample my attacks on Reynolds' work and my jocular commentary on his wild and crazy career at these links: Commune 2000 A.D., "Revolution," "Freedom," "Subversive," and "Pacifist," "Compounded Interest," "The Business, As Usual," "Your Soul Comes C.O.D.," and "Fad.")  Like Oliver's "The Reporter," it seems that "Displaced Person" has never escaped the confines of the Fall 1951 issue of Fantastic Story, so again we find ourselves at MPorcius Fiction Log sampling the deep cuts!

"Displaced Person" doesn't have anything to do with utopias or socialism or economic systems, so is perhaps a rarity in Reynolds' body of work.  Instead, it is a competent filler story with a predictable twist ending.

Four veterans of wartime service in the space navy, pilots, are sitting around drinking.  There are actually only a small number of pilots in the space navy, so it is noteworthy that three of the men have never met the fourth.  The fourth explains why, telling what amounts to a little bit of military fiction.  

Flying a one-man patrol ship, he detected and was pursued into deep space, far from Earth, by the enemy.  He used up all his conventional fuel and all his food in the long chase, so he was basically doomed when the enemy gave up the chase--he had no safe way of getting back to a Terran base before he starved.  The only thing he could do was push the ship's warp drive to forbidden limits, so that he would exceed the speed of light, an act that is practically suicidal.

As was foreshadowed in discussions of this warp drive and the speed of light earlier in the story, the final twist is that this pilot, by exceeding the speed of light, propelled himself into another space-time continuum, the universe of the three other pilots, which is quite similar to his home universe.

Acceptable filler; better than a lot of Reynolds' work!

**********

Hamilton and Gallun deliver good stories that speculate about the nature of human history and are full of science; Oliver and Reynolds just try to produce entertaining stories, and Reynolds at least doesn't embarrass himself.  

I think this is our sixth blog post in a row to focus on SF short stories.  Our next blog post will mix things up a bit, as we read a novel which I suspect will lack such conventional SF elements as space travel, black magic, the living dead, aliens and speculations on what the future will be like.  Stay tuned!

Dynamic Science Fiction, June 1953: R Z Gallun, R E Banks and C M Kornbluth & D A Wollheim

Bopping hither and tither at isfdb and the internet archive, one will often discover little gems.  My latest uncovered treasure is the June 1953 issue of Robert W. Lowndes' Dynamic Science Fiction.  The issue has a terrific red cover, a montage of classic SF elements like a man in a spacesuit, a satellite, a rocket ship ready for launch, an atomic bomb blowing up your town...and a naked woman in chains!  Wow!   

Inside, we find the magazine is full of beautiful little sex and violence spot illustrations and chapter headings that probably have nothing to do with the stories in which they appear.  There's a naked woman expressing dismay with heavy machinery, a naked woman reclining high in the atmosphere, multiple crashed rockets (stop texting while driving, guys!), a man in a space helmet brandishing his ray pistol, a woman using her pistol to disintegrate a man (you've come a long way, baby!), a variety of futuristic artillery and armored vehicles, and on and on.

So this magazine looks gorgeous.  But anybody can just look at an old magazine.  Not everybody will actually read a 70-year-old magazine!  Now, I'm not suggesting that I myself am going to read this magazine from cover to cover, either, but I will read three stories and skim the editorial by Lowndes and letters from Robert Silverberg and James Blish.

Both Lowndes in his editorial and Silberberg in his letter talk at some length about the labels affixed to pieces of magazine fiction to indicate their length; the general idea is that, for advertising purposes, texts bearing such appellations as "novellas," "novelets" and "novels" are getting shorter and shorter, so that what might have been labelled a "short story" back in the Thirties might today be called a "novella" or "novelet."  Silverberg is excited that Dynamic is going to have trimmed edges, complains at length about the typeface on the cover of the last issue of the magazine, and indicates that he hates present-tense narration.  Blish in his letter says he is glad that the covers of Dynamic have been portraying "situations from science-fiction, rather than the burlesque runway" (I wonder what he thought of this June cover) and then complains about the practice of editors commissioning stories from authors based on cover paintings; he suggests Judith Merril once wrote a story based on a cover illustration and instead of writing up a scene based on the painting just had the painting appear in the story as a canvas on a wall--Lowndes corrects him, suggesting the mention of the painting was added to the story after it was written.  (Is that better?)  Dynamic is a new magazine, this June issue being the third, and Blish offers a long list of advice for going forward, including getting rid of the spot illos I was just praising, and by all means keeping Dynamic's pages free of cartoons ("seldom funny, usually painful"), a personals section, gossip, and reviews of fanzines.      

Alright, now the stories, tales by Raymond Z. Gallun, Raymond E. Banks, and C. M. Kornbluth and Donald A. Wollheim writing under the pen name "Wallace Baird Halleck."

"Double Identity" by Raymond Z. Gallun 

If isfdb is to be believed, this story, Dynamic's cover story, was reprinted in an Australian magazine in 1954, and then faded into oblivion, never to be printed again.  I tend to like Gallun's work (most recently "Bluff Play," "Brother Worlds" and "Saturn's Ringmaster" in Thrilling Wonder) so I am not going to let that discourage me.

Unfortunately, "Double Identity" is not very well written, with clunky dialogue and somewhat intrusive exposition.  The plot and themes are OK, but not particularly fresh.

The Verden brothers are young self-educated intelligent farmers in rural Missouri.  One of them is affianced to Mary Koven, the daughter of the farmer whose property abuts theirs.  The brothers have always been interested in astronomy and space travel, avidly watching via the newspapers the career of rich businessman and adventurer Frank Cramm, who is on the brink of launching private space ships to the moon.  So, when a meteor lands near the farm, the three countryfolk go investigate it, only to find it is a small missile from the moon!

Contact with the missile starts changing the nearby landscape, turning Earth plants into the kind of plants that live in a valley on the far side of Luna, a deep valley which has retained an atmosphere and still supports life.  The Verdens and Mary Koven also start changing, growing fur and undergoing many other changes that make them look like monsters!  Eventually their very minds begin to change--they develop memories, and see visions, of a lunar landscape, even a lunar civilization!  

Just as some ignorant locals are hunting them down because they are scary, the consciousnesses of the three farmers shift into the bodies of moon people strapped onto operating tables in the lab of a lunar scientist.  The rest of the plot consists of the three Earthlings trying to act as ambassadors between the human race of Earth and the dying race of lunar people, who have technology superior to our own but number only three hundred.  The big theme of "Double Identity" is that people suffer a fear of the unknown and an inability to identify with what we now call "the other."  In theory, Earth peeps and loonies could through friendship help each other tremendously, but in practice each finds the other scary and is likely to shoot first and ask questions later, and for much of the story it looks like Frank Cramm's space ships, working in coordination with the USAF, are going to nuke the hidden valley.  The Verdens wonder if the natural aggression of the human race towards aliens, which is probably shared by other intelligent races throughout the galaxy, means that space travel will inevitably mean war and imperialism, that peaceful relations between civilizations are impossible.  But the three farmers, and the lunar scientist, through trickery and bold action, manage to forestall a Terra-Luna war and convince Frank Cramm to deal peaceably with the loonies.  So we have a happy ending in which it is proven that different civilizations can peacefully coexist and undertake mutually beneficial relations.

The ending gets even happier when it becomes clear that in a year or so the Verdens and Mary Koven's lunar bodies are going to change into human bodies under the influence of their human consciousnesses.  This, I thought, was sort of a cop out--if the three farmers had to live the rest of their lives in alien bodies it would have better suited the story's themes of getting along with "the other," that beauty is only skin deep, and space exploration is a risky plunge into the unknown but ultimately worthwhile.  It would also be easier to swallow scientifically.

For much of "Double Identity"'s twenty five pages I expected to give it a thumbs down because the writing was irritatingly poor, but either I got used to it or the later parts of the story aren't so bad, so having read the whole thing I guess it deserves a grade of barely acceptable.       

"Never Trust an Intellectual" by Raymond E. Banks

We just read Banks's story about a guild of robot programmers who took extreme measures to defend their monopoly, "The Instigators."  It looks like "Never Trust an Intellectual" was Banks's first science fiction story sale (Lowndes tells us that Banks has already been published in Esquire and has also written a stage drama and radio-plays) and has never been reprinted.  Not a good sign, especially since I couldn't bring myself to recommend "The Instigators."  But let's give it a chance!

"Never Trust an Intellectual" is a joke story about a future in which reading books is frowned upon--everybody gets information and entertainment from electronic devices, and private individuals don't own books--those who like to read go to "bookbars" where the licensed proprietor has permitted books up on a shelf for you to rent on the premises by the hour.  We are subjected to dopey jokes that liken reading to drinking alcohol--the narrator brags he can read anybody "under the table," there is talk of people being "bookdrunk," a college kid who sits at the bar reading a comic book is said to be "underage" and so on.  

This is the "Era of Happiness," the time of the new morality of sexual licentiousness and government-imposed limits to access to information that might make you sad or anxious.  "...reading books is anti-social.  It leads to withdrawal, conflicting ideas and permanent memories."  People are strongly discouraged from reading (signs don't even have words on them, menus have pictures of bills and coins to denote prices instead of numerals) and from refusing sexual advances.  People who follow the old morality of sexual modesty or monogamy are suspected of being intellectuals who read books.    

Our narrator edits a video magazine, a little metal box that can fit in your pocket; you plug it in and it projects TV shows on the wall--no text, just video and narration.  (The sample story from his magazine, Listeners' Digest, that we learn about is a saccharine report on a community which banded together to help a blind canine.)  Our hero is also a bootlegger of books.  A pretty woman catches him trying to move 1,500 copies of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; is she one of the Happiness Police, or a rival seller of illegal books trying to crush a competitor?  We get lame humorous chase scenes and fight scenes as another woman, the head of the Anti-Book squad of the local Happiness Police, enters the fray, and then the story ends abruptly without what I would consider a proper climax.         

"Never Trust an Intellectual" has a lot in common with "The Instigators," in that both take a facet from history--in "The Instigators" the fight of guilds and unions against progress, here the battle of bootleggers against revenuers--and use it as the basis for a future conflict.  Also, neither is very good.  "Never Trust an Intellectual" is the worse of the two, lacking a satisfying build up and conclusion--it is more of an idea upon which are hung some jokes than a narrative with a satisfying beginning, middle and end.

If we are being generous we might say Banks's story prefigures our own era of trigger warnings, cancel culture and political correctness, in which there are social and even legal sanctions for using words that might allegedly hurt other people's feelings, words like that H-bomb of words, the "n-word," or strings like "Bruce Jenner is a man."  But Ray Bradbury had already trod this ground by the time "Never Trust an Intellectual" appeared.

Thumbs down!

"Go Fast on Interplane" by C. M. Kornbluth and Donald A. Wollheim 

I generally avoid Kornbluth because I have a patience for left-wing satires in which ad execs or insurance salesmen or whoever take over the world that was never great and has severely diminished over the years (as you've seen, I don't even have much patience for satires attacking guilds and censorship, even though I am against guilds and censorship.  As a kid I enjoyed irony and parody and satire, but I have had it up to here with that stuff and now seek authenticity and sincerity.)  But I find Wollheim an interesting figure and thought this blog post should probably address three stories as well as slobber over pictures of naked girls and space tanks like I was still thirteen.

"Go Fast on Interplane" is a competent filler story.  The plot is totally ordinary, but the style of the prose is actually good, and the pacing and structure are good, making it superior to today's questionable Gallun and Banks pieces.

A guy who loves to drive and has a top-of-the-line automobile discovers a highway that leads to other dimensions, parallel Earths.  He talks to the natives, who welcome him as a foreign tourist, eats lunch.  Then he returns to our Earth.  When he tries to get back to the alternate world he finds the road he took there has been dismantled.  Following the newspapers, he discovers clues that suggest a power struggle among our nation's elite--some want to have a relationship with the alternate Earths, others do not.  He wants to further explore the alternate worlds, and when he stumbles upon an indication that access may again be possible, he hastens to seek the right highway.

Acceptable.

Translated into Italian, "Go Fast on Interplane" would appear in the 1965 anthology of SF about cars Il grande Dio Auto.  isfdb has a note about Il grande Dio Auto, but no entry for it; those interested can see a contents list at goodreads.com.  Under the title "Interplane Express," "Go Fast on Interplane" would be reprinted in the 1988 Wollheim collection Up There and Other Strange Directions.   

**********

Not a brill selection, but we gotta take the rough with the smooth in the reading old magazines at random game.  Our selection will be a little less random next time, when we read stories recommended by Kornbluth and Wollheim's comrade Judith Merril.      

Thrilling Wonder Stories, Dec 1950: E F Russell, C L Harness, M Reynolds, F B Long and R Z Gallun

Back in 2020 we read Leigh Brackett's tale of racism and sexualized violence in a postapocalyptic world in which a superior race of cat people came from Europe to push us Yankees around, "The Citadel of Lost Ages."  This caper made its debut in the December 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.  Let's revisit that issue of Sam Merwin, Jr.'s magazine, as it is a treasure trove of fiction by people with whom we are familiar here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  (If I don't like the stories, please replace "treasure trove" above with "mine field.")

"MacHinery" by Eric Frank Russell 

We've hit our first mine.  "MacHinery" is a long and tedious joke story about an obese robot.  Thumbs down!  

Automechanisms Incorporated has spent four years designing and building a prototype robot that looks just like a human being.  They had to stuff so many electronics into this machine that they had no choice but to construct it in the form of a fat guy, despite the fact that of course if you'd had your druthers your first robot would look like Buster Crabbe or Sophia Loren.  This robot can talk and read like a lot of people you know, but also like a lot of people you know it can't accomplish any productive tasks like build cars or fight zombies or anything like that.  This robot is expected to contribute to Automechanisms Inc.'s bottom line as a sales assistant and sample; it will accompany the salesmen who travel the nation selling AI's products and serve as an irrefutable example of AI's ingenuity.

We follow the salesman whose territory includes New York, as he goes on a trip to the Big Apple with the robot in tow.  Most of the text of "MacHinery" consists of an authority figure yelling at Ackroyd because the robot has caused a minor disturbance of the peace.  There are also jokes about how the robot doesn't know slang or comprehend metaphor, and initially doesn't realize people lie and break the rules.  

On the train to the city so nice they named it twice (but not too nice to send me packing 😞) the robot reads magazines, and, well, wouldn't you know it, when it enjoys a story this generates heat inside its circuits, causing a noxious smell as its insulation smolder, causing the conductor of the train to yell at Ackroyd.  On the streets of Manhattan the robot hypnotically projects outlandish images from a children's book it read recently, such as the image of a hippo wearing tights; the police yell at Ackroyd because they think he stole the hippo from the zoo.

The robot learns to lie and flout the rules, and tricks Ackroyd and one of AI's customers.  But then it breaks the rule against crossing against a red light and is hit by a truck and totally destroyed.

A waste of time that has never escaped the confines of Thrilling Wonder Stories.

If you want to hear me complain some more about Russell, here are some links:  Earlier this year we read Russell's novel The Mindwarpers (AKA What Strange Device); we've also read an entire Russell collection of stories about the crew of a space ship that some have proclaimed a classic and which the MPorcius staff considers overrated.  In 2016 I read The Best of Eric Frank Russell and wrote four blog posts about its thirteen stories, some of which I awarded a passing grade.

"The New Reality" by Charles L. Harness

While "MacHinery" lay entombed in the 12/50 issue of TWS, "The New Reality" flourished in the glorious afterlife of book publication, selected for reprinting by such famous anthologists as Everett Bleiler and T. E. Ditky, Damon Knight, Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg and Charles Waugh, and still others, including a bunch of editors of non-English anthologies.  Maybe we are beyond the mine field and this is the treasure we have been looking for!  Harness's story is even introduced in TWS by an illustration of a nude couple before a sunrise!  Sounds heavenly (or Edenic!) to me!

"The New Reality" is based on the philosophical question of to what extent our beliefs about the world reflect our perception of reality, and to what extent our expectations of reality create that reality.  People in the distant past believed the Earth was flat--could it be that it truly was flat, and became round when people started believing it to be round?

It is the future!  Adam Prentiss is head of head of the Eastern division of the secret police Bureau that keeps an eye on scientists to make sure they don't make any civilization-threatening discoveries or invent any world-threatening devices.  We observe as he spies on a scientist, Luce, even sneaking into his lab at night to photograph his notes and apparatus.  Prentiss, an expert on ontology and author of the suppressed doctoral dissertation "Involuntary Confirmation of Incoming Sensoria Apperception Mass," becomes convinced that Luce, by use of his apparatus, the world's smoothest Nicol prism mounted on a goniometer, can "blow physical laws straight to smithereens."  Prentiss confronts Luce; Luce invites Prentiss to join him on his grand quest to "know all things" and become a god.  Prentiss tries to shoot Luce down, but Luce has his forcefield ready and escapes.

Prentiss has a meeting with the head of the secret police, a beautiful woman known as "E," and her staff.  E acts like you expect a secret police woman to act, trying to do stuff behind Congress's back, and her staff includes a dude named Speer and a dude named Goring, as if Harness is trying to remind us of the Third Reich.  (Harness picked Prentiss's, E's and Luce's names so carefully it is hard to believe he just chose Speer and Goring at random.)  These Feds have a debate of several pages on the nature of reality; Prentiss, based on the research he has done connected to his investigation of Luce, insisting that the nature of the universe is the product of the imagination of humankind and has been changing--becoming more complex--as people have become more sophisticated and expected to discover greater complexity in the world around them.  For example, in the time of ancient man there were only four elements--the periodic table of 92 elements was populated by the imagination of modern scientists.  (Prentiss gives many more examples, dropping the names of many scientists.  Harness proves he can drop the names of artists, as well as those of scientists, by telling us that E has a body like the Venus of Valasquez, a painting you can find on the ever-expanding list of art masterpieces that have fallen victim to terrorism.)           

The secret police bigwigs vote to kill Luce at once without trial--Prentiss thinks the man could be running his final experiment, the experiment that will alter the universe in such a way it will kill almost everybody, in just a few hours.  Prentiss's people quickly find Luce's fortified hideaway, and it is decided that Prentiss will go in commando-style; if Prentiss doesn't eliminate Luce before a set time, a tactical nuke will be dropped on the hideout.  Prentiss fights his way past Luce's great cats, and is captured.  We get some science lectures relating to photons--Luce is going to capture and destroy a photon, which he and Prentiss are sure will reset the universe to how it was before human imagination started altering it.

The device is activated just as the atomic bomb detonates, and the universe is reborn.  Only three people are smart enough to survive the transition to the simple universe of only four elements and a flat Earth and all that: Adam Prentiss, E (the "E" stands for "Eve") and Luce, who is not a naked person like Adam and Eve, but a serpent!

Yes, "The New Reality," like A. E. van Vogt's 1948 "Ship of Darkness," is one of those stories the predictable surprise ending of which is that the main characters are Adam and Eve.  This is sort of ridiculous, of course, but this story actually isn't bad.  The style is fine, the plot holds together internally, and I have to admire the story's audacious ambition.  The science and philosophy lectures are maybe too long, but they are sort of interesting.  We'll call this one "OK," maybe not exactly "good," but better than "acceptable."

"The Spark" by Mack Reynolds

Reynolds had a strange and varied career, including a youth as a hardcore left-wing activist, expulsion from the radical political party to which he had devoted so much service, extensive world travel and lots of work as a travel writer for men's magazines, and, reportedly, great popularity as a SF writer even though his stories are not very good.  The thing that differentiates Reynolds' SF stories from those of other writers--according to his admirers, at least--is that he speculates about political economy.  "The Spark" has never been reprinted, but we won't let that stop us from probing it with our bayonets to see if it is one of the mines we fear or one of the treasures we covet.

Call the bomb squad, this is another mine.  Luckily it is a small one, just two and a half pages.

The venerable civilization of Mars is in trouble!  The red planet's natural resources are almost used up, and the population is down to like 500,000 people.  The Martians have to emigrate to some other planet, but they haven't invented a stardrive yet, so the only place they can go is Earth.  But they assume because Earth people are so violent, with endless conflict between race, nation, class, religion, etc., that we won't welcome them, but instead kill them.

The twist ending of the story is that the Martians have just enough material to make a single atomic bomb, and they plan to nuke an Earth city in hopes that it will cause a general nuclear war that will wipe out the human race, leaving this big blue marble uninhabited so the Martians can move in.

Banal filler, a total waste of time.  Thumbs down!

"If You Don't Watch Out" by Frank Belknap Long

Frank Belknap Long has dumped many a load of junk on us over the years, but he is capable of good work; case in point: our recent find, "Fuzzy Head," which I was totally into.  "Fuzzy Head" appeared in Thrilling Wonder, so maybe "If You Don't Watch Out" is going to be another Long winner!

Our tale is set in small town America, in the future of jet bikes and visiphones and pneumatic tubes that deliver food and consumer goods from Chicago to the grocer, from the grocer to you.  Living in the town is the famous MacShane, retired space explorer, one of the first men to visit Mars, Venus, and Phobos.  Why is MacShane when he isn't even forty yet?  Why does MacShane live like a hermit, shunning human contact?  The narrator, a boy in his early teens who idolizes MacShane and wants to follow in his footsteps, finds out!

To put it briefly, a series of propitious events leads to the young narrator paying an unexpected visit to the reclusive MacShane's isolated house, where he looks in through a window after hearing an eerie sound and seeing some queer lights.  In a cage right there by MacShane's chair is a fearsome Martian monster!  This beast from the red planet has psychic powers of a special nature--it can read your subconscious and see what your idea of the perfect mate is, and then project an illusion of that creature as a means of attracting you.  In its native habitat it uses this ability to attract mates, but in a cage here in Podunk USA it keeps using its powers in an effort to draw MacShane close enough to the cage that it can reach out and devour him!  Obviously, MacShane should just kill this thing, and he even has a ray pistol sitting right there on the table next to him with which to do the job, but he can't--he is addicted to the superrealistic vision of the perfect woman the monster regularly projects!  It is this addiction that has turned him into a grim man who is unable to marry his childhood sweetheart.

Fiction is full of coincidences, and the one day that the narrator is there to witness MacShane struggle with his addiction is the very day MacShane steps too close to the cage and the monster seizes him and starts rending his Terran flesh with its Martian talons.  The narrator hops inside, snatches the ray pistol, and kills the beast, saving MacShane's life and curing him of his addiction so he can marry his girl-next-door sweetheart.  

If that sounds like a happy ending, don't be so sure!  MacShane knows the narrator well enough to know he wants to become an interplanetary explorer and researcher on alien life forms, and he warns the kid not to go to Mars, thinking him a sensitive soul who would be easy prey for just the sort of monster who almost ruined MacShane's life.  In a sort of epilogue we see that the narrator has ignored this advice and is on the red planet, his ray gun in his fist, searching for one of those monsters.  Will the narrator fall prey to visions of his dream girl like his role model did?  The ending is not clear, but we are given reason to fear the worst!

A good story that mixes C. L. Moore-style eroticized psychic battling with Ray Bradbury-type sappy kid-in-a-small-town goop.  I don't know why this story has never been reprinted, seeing as Long is famous and there have been several Long collections printed since 1950.  "If You Don't Watch Out" is a reminder that it is worthwhile for us fans of 20th-century science fiction and aficionados of the weird to explore these old magazines, even if the path may be littered with mines!

"Bluff Play" by Raymond Z. Gallun 

This is a fun little Cold War espionage story that would have to wait until the 21st century to be reprinted in a small press Gallun collection edited by John Pelan.

It is the near future--1955!  Our narrator is working at the secret installation where America's space fleet of twenty nuclear-powered warships is being constructed.  Just weeks before the fleet will be ready for launch, American scientists and spies confirm that our worst fears have come true--the enemy (for some reason Gallun never specifies the identity of the enemy, but we have to assume it is the Soviet Union) have already launched their own space fleet!  One of our spies sneaks over to the enemy space field in the Arctic Circle, and brings back a lump of mud from their landing zone--mud that must be from Venus!

The boffins and spooks live in fear that the enemy could blackmail us into submission or bomb us into oblivion at any moment, as there is no way to protect the West from attack from space.  But they keep working on finishing up our space fleet so we will eventually be able to present a credible retaliatory threat.  More bad news: evidence that there are foreign spies--cunningly insidious moles who are indistinguishable from loyal Americans--right here in the secret base!

While everybody else is scrambling to put the finishing touches on the USA's first space vessels, one guy on the base is doing pure science work on that lump of alien mud.  The narrator is irritated that this guy is wasting his time on the quest for knowledge when at any moment everybody on the base could be nuked or marched off to the gulag!  But it turns out that that that lump of Venusian goop is the key to saving the world from tyranny!

Ya see, the lump of mud contained spores, seeds and invertebrate eggs, and the scientist manages to grow, in a terrarium, a little collection of Venusian plants and bugs.  The narrator is kept in the dark, but the security personnel at the base have managed to pin down the identity of the enemy spy in their midst.  They let the mole film the terrarium and escape--the narrator actually tries to catch him and he has to be violently prevented from foiling his superiors' master plan.  Knowledge of the existence of the terrarium of Venusian life makes the enemy rulers think that we Americans have also been to Venus and also have a space fleet, deterring them and giving us time to finish our fleet so that we have a real deterrent.  Gallun ends the story on an even more hopeful note--the government of the enemy country is discredited and a revolt breaks out and we are lead to believe that the Cold War will soon be over and a peaceful Earth will soon be exploring the solar system.

Solid entertainment.         

**********

Gallun and Long offer good stories, and Harness a decent one, so I won't complain over much about the annoying pieces from Reynolds and Russell--I only have myself to blame for reading their work, which I have so often been disappointed in in the past.  When we remember that we enjoyed Brackett's story in this ish, we have to admit it is a good issue.

More Thrilling Wonder in the future, but we'll be taking a break from space travelers and scientists for a few days and reading some other genre fiction.  Stay tuned to see what's up!