"Shape-Up," "The Man from Zodiac" and "Golden Girl" by Jack Vance

In our last episode I talked about "The Plagian Siphon," AKA "The Planet Machine" AKA "The Uninhibited Robot," a Jack Vance story with many versions and titles; I read the version in my hardcover copy of the 1986 collection The Augmented Agent and Other Stories, a book the cover illustration of which made me do a double and then a triple take.  Today let's read three more stories from this volume, 1953's "Shape-Up," 1967's "The Man from Zodiac" AKA "Milton Hack from Zodiac," and 1951's "Golden Girl."  These are what you might call Vance "deep cuts," stories which were published in SF magazines and then never anthologized, only reappearing in Vance collections.

"Shape-Up" (1953)

The first story in The Augmented Agent and Other Stories made its debut in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy.  A glance at the magazine version's first page confirms that the version from 1986 is revised, with the word "copper" being replaced by "coin" in the later version ("he plugged his next-to-last coin into the Pegasus Square Farm and Mining Bulletin dispenser....")

Gilbert Jarvis reads the Pegasus Square Farm and Mining Bulletin as he sits in a cafe, drinking hot anise he has purchased with the last of his coins (or coppers.)  In response to a classified ad, he goes to an inn for a rigorous job interview, which includes a sort of group interview component.  I still recall with dread some group job interviews of my experience, but this group interview that Jarvis finds himself involved in is more dreadful still.  The job applicants are all rough tough adventurer types, and have been called together under false pretenses--according to the man managing the interview process, the gathered men are all suspects in a murder, and have been brought together so that the killer can be identified and then summarily executed!

This is a decent thriller story about violent, dangerous men in a sort of lawless environment.  In true classic SF fashion the mystery is solved, and Jarvis's life is saved, because Jarvis is a quick thinker who knows about science (in this case gravity.)

"The Man from Zodiac" (1967) 

This one appeared first in Amazing, and was apparently the major selling point of the issue.  "JACK VANCE'S GREAT SHORT NOVEL" the cover cries out above a surprisingly bland and busy illustration totally lacking in hot chicks, monsters or spacecraft.  Amazing must have been in some kind of trouble, because, excepting "The Man from Zodiac," all the stories are reprints!  Not that I am knocking the issue--there is every chance that those reprinted stories, pieces by Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester and Neil R. Jones among them, are awesome.  And then there is the fun book column by Harry Harrison in which he says that SF may well be "the last bastion of the short story," praises Brian Aldiss, Keith Laumer and Samuel R. Delany, and takes swipes at widely beloved but also controversial figures Harlan Ellison:

The worst thing about Nine By Laumer by Keith Laumer (Doubleday, $3.95) is the overly long and pretentious introduction by Harlan Ellison.

and Sam Moskowitz:

Moskowitz has yet to understand that literary criticism is more than which parts of which stories resemble other stories.

Yeow, that one hurts!

OK, back to "The Man from Zodiac," which is like 40 pages in the 1986 version I am reading.

Martin Hack is the field representative of Zodiac Control, Inc., and owns an eight percent share of the company.  Zodiac Control is an interstellar contractor that offers services to polities large and small--Zodiac will maintain order, enforce the law, extinguish fires, educate the young, manage the economy, and fight foreign enemies of those entities that sign a contract with them--Zodiac basically sets up and operates governments.  The recent inheritors of 92% of Zodiac Control sign a seven-year contract with the state of Phronus on the planet Ethelrinda Cordas, and give Hack the job of managing this project.

Upon his arrival in Phronus, Hack learns that its people are semi-literate barbarians in a constant state of war (waged primarily at close range with swords and other such low-tech weapons) against their neighbors, the equally belligerent and primitive people of Sabo--the Phrones had hopes that Zodiac would supply them with high tech weapons with which to wipe out the Sabol.  A pack of raiders and pirates, the Phrones would also like to pillage a sort of artists' colony/intellectuals' retreat known as Parnassus that sits nearby and is managed by one Cyril Dibden--the offworlder eggheads at Parnassus are defended by energy fields against which the Phrone cutlasses and poniards are useless.  When Hack, surveying the territory of Phronus, suggests to one of the local lords that a charming seaside area be developed into a resort to cater to the tourist trade, this bloodthirsty campaigner responds, "Why entice strangers into the country?  Far easier to depredate our neighbor Dibden.  But first things first: the Sobols must be destroyed!"

The plot follows Hack's efforts to bring peace and order to the Phronus-Parnassus-Sabo region; through trickery he not only drags Phronus and Sabo into the modern civilized era, but uncovers a conspiracy on the part of Cyril Dibden, who was as interested in acquiring the Phrone and Sabol lands as those marauders were interested in despoiling Parnassus.  In the end Zodiac has not only the Phronus contract, but one with Sabo and Parnassus, and Hack is a hero back on Earth at Zodiac's corporate offices.

"The Man from Zodiac" is a sort of light entertainment; it is smooth and pleasant, and made me laugh several times, and I recommend it.  While it doesn't really engage with ideas (though we might see it as yet another example of SF elitism that dismisses democracy without a thought), there is one somewhat striking, somewhat incongruous, psychological passage:

At his deepest, most essential level, Hack knew himself for an insipid mediocrity, of no intellectual distinction and no particular competence in any direction.  This was an insight so shocking that Hack never allowed it past the threshold of consciousness, and he conducted himself as if the reverse were true.     

At the risk of seeming like Sam Moskowitz, I will point out that carefully planned subterranean explosive charges play an important role in the plot of "The Man from Zodiac," and that just such engineering plays a role in Vance's fourth Demon Princes book, 1979's The Face.  Also of note, the editor's intro to "The Man from Zodiac" in Amazing, and portions of the text that seem to foreshadow a relationship between Hack and a young woman who owns lots of Zodiac stock, suggest that there were plans, which apparently did not come to fruition, for a series of Martin Hack stories.

"Golden Girl" (1951)

This is a first contact story.  A reporter, Bill Baxter, goes to investigate a meteorite that has fallen in rural Iowa and discovers a burning alien space ship!  He pulls out the unconscious occupant, a beautiful woman aged 19 or 20 with golden skin!  Entranced by her beauty, he contrives to stay by her side in the hospital as she recovers, and, while the government and the press and the world wait with bated breath to learn what she is all about, it is Baxter who teaches her English.

The woman, named Lurulu (also the name of Vance's last published book), describes her society to Baxter--it is a standard issue utopia, with no more war, no more racism, no more crime, no need to work, etc.  Lurulu was taking a trip in her space yacht when it malfunctioned and she crashed here on belligerent, racist, crime-ridden, labor-intensive Earth.

Lurulu is shown around New York--her world, she says, has no such skyscrapers or vast bridges, people living in flying houses and not congregating in large groups.  Lurulu finds Earth exhausting.  Baxter worships her and asks her to marry him, but she refuses--their cultures are too different.  Shortly after, Lurulu commits suicide.  Vance hints that "Golden Girl" is based upon an 1839 story in a book by J. G. Lockhart, Strange Tales of the Seven Seas, the diary of an Englishwoman who was shipwrecked on the coast of Africa and taken in by a black tribe--though the natives treated her well, in fact worshiped her, she missed English people and English life and so killed herself.

This story is not very good.  The SF elements feel tired and obvious, and Vance has no success in making us feel Lurulu's homesickness or alienation, nor in making us feel Baxter's love or lust or infatuation or whatever it is, and the scene in which Baxter realizes she will commit suicide feels gimmicky.  This is a filler story, but with no jokes or violence or other entertaining or exploitative components that might hold your interest or give you some kind of thrill.  Gotta give this early Vance story a thumbs down. 

"Golden Girl" was first printed in an issue of Marvel Science Stories featuring a debate about Dianetics between L.Ron Hubbard, Lester del Rey and Theodore Sturgeon.

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In our next exciting episode we'll finish up with The Augmented Agent and Other Stories.  The wraparound illustration on the dust jacket of the hardcover edition of The Augmented Agent and Other Stories features a bust of Lenin and some other communist iconography, plus a female figure that reminds me of African sculpture.  I don't recall any references to the Soviet Union or to sculpture in "Shape-Up," "The Man from Zodiac" or "Golden Girl," so maybe the key to the mystery of what story the cover illustrates will be cleared up in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.  Or maybe we will have to go along with the theory put forward in the comments on our last blog post by Transreal Fiction, that the cover illustrates "The Planet Machine."

 




       

1957 stories by Harry Harrison, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, and Robert F. Young

I own eight or nine crumbling issues of Fantastic Universe, a magazine published from 1953 to 1959 by King-Size Publications and then for an additional year or so by Great American Publications.  These SF artifacts were in lots I purchased that consisted mostly of the Ziff-Davis magazines Fantastic Adventures (published from 1939 to 1953) and Fantastic (published from 1952 to 1980); when I bought these lots I didn't realize Fantastic Universe had nothing to do with the Ziff-Davis magazines, partly because over the decades of its life the cover title of Fantastic would evolve back and forth between such variations as Fantastic Stories, Fantastic Science Fiction Stories, Fantastic Stories of Imagination, etc.  I don't feel like this was a regrettable blunder or that I got ripped off or anything (even though the Wikipedia article on Fantastic Universe suggests critics think the magazine a piece of junk)--these magazines have art by people like Virgil Finlay and Emsh and stories by people whose work interests me, like Harry Harrison and Harlan Ellison and Robert Bloch.

Speaking of Finlay, Harrison, Ellison, and Bloch, let's start looking at my copies of Fantastic Universe with the June 1957 issue, which has a Finlay cover featuring an infantile-looking alien who has, apparently, just crashed his flying saucer in small town America.  Is that his mother lying dead by the ship?  Damn, this picture tells a tale of terrible tragedy!

Perhaps one reason the critics are so unfriendly to Fantastic Universe is that (if this issue is representative) it lacks editorials and a letters column; Ted White holds that a magazine should have a personality, a character, and a strong editorial voice and opinionated letters can develop such a personality, as well as creating a sense of community among magazine readers and the pros who put the magazine together.  I have certainly enjoyed the editorials and letters in White's Fantastic.  Well, with no such non-fiction material, let's get right to the stories in the June 1957 Fantastic Universe penned by the four authors whose work I already have at least a little experience with, the "short novels" by Harry Harrison and Robert Bloch, and stories by Harlan Ellison and Robert F. Young.

"World in the Balance" by Harry Harrison

Harrison of course is famous for a number of series (Stainless Steel Rat, Deathworld, Bill the Galactic Hero, and Eden are the ones I have some familiarity with) and influential individual works, like the source material for the Charlton Heston/Edward G. Robinson film Soylent Green.  Harrison's work is diverse in tone and topic, so I can't predict what "World in the Balance" might be like or how I will respond to it.  The fact that, according to isfdb, "World in the Balance" has never been reprinted is not what anybody would call a good sign, however.

Italian-American John Baroni is a grad student in physics at a New England university, and a veteran of house-to-house infantry combat in Italy in World War II.  He and his Japanese-American girlfriend Lucy Kawai and their professor, Dr. Steingrumer, are in the lab conducting experiments on a device that makes things disappear when aliens invade the Earth!  (I'm guessing Harrison deliberately chose the ethnicities of all the characters with an eye to undermining any prejudices readers might have related to WWII.)  John snatches up a bolt-action rifle from the ROTC supply and uses the skills he learned in Italy to sneak into town and see what the hell is going on!

The hideous crustacean-faced aliens are using captured Earth weapons to exterminate police and military personnel (as well as any civilians who resist) and John uncovers why the invaders are able to so effectively achieve surprise on G.I. Joe and the boys in blue--the aliens are masters of cosmetic surgery and have, over the past few years, been replacing people in authority in government with alien impostors!  The chief of police in the town by the school, an alien in disguise, lines up "his" men for a briefing and then mows them down with an automatic weapon!  The Earth has had it, because the aliens have taken control of the world's stockpiles of nuclear weapons before we even knew we were in a fight and they nuke Washington, D.C. and anywhere else human leadership might organize a cohesive defense!

But wait!  All is not (quite) lost!  John realizes that the doohickey he and his fellow physicists are working on is a device that can send you back in time to another time line!  He goes back in time a few weeks and sneaks around the Washington, D.C. area using gruesome means to figure out who in authority is a damned ET and who is a red-blooded Earther and then helps legit government officials to organize a spoiling attack that catches the aliens before they are ready to spring their own surprise attacks.  The Earth in that time line is saved!  Ad for our time line...well, that's the way the cookie crumbles, I guess.

A competent SF adventure story that delivers standard SF fare like malevolent aliens and time-traveling eggheads who get us out of a jam with technology and logical reasoning with a large serving of gore on the side.  You can call it pedestrian, but it went down easy and I liked it.

"Terror Over Hollywood" by Robert Bloch

Psycho-scribe Bloch's story here would be reprinted in the 1965 collection Tales in a Jugular Vein.  The cover of the 1970 British edition of this collection seems to be the culmination of a series of regrettable artistic choices.

According to Wikipedia, Bloch's 1982 novel Psycho II was a harsh critique of Hollywood, and this 1957 story suggests that Bloch's hostility to Hollywood is of long standing.  From the first page of "Terror Over Hollywood" Bloch hammers at the theme that being in Hollywood has a powerfully negative effect on people's morals, that the inhabitants of tinsel town are fake phony frauds, heroin addicts and homosexuals who commit suicide at epidemic rates.  (Makes me glad I have been spending most of my life in such bastions of decorum, decency and mental health as New York City and Washington D.C.!)

Kay Kennedy is determined to be a star, and has been so determined since the age of six!  She convinced her parents to move to California and to work themselves to death financing her acting lessons, and since their demise she has (it is implied) been selling her body to important Hollywood types to advance her career.  She has noticed that the very acme of Hollywood luminaries, the top ten or twelve actors and producers and directors who seem to call the shots in La La Land, don't seem to lose their looks or stamina as they age, and she tries to wheedle the answer out of our narrator, independent producer Ed Stern.  As the story unfolds the tenacious Kennedy discovers the truth--Stern is a founding member of that tiny elite, the first beneficiary of the genius of a German scientist who can build a mechanical replica of a person's body that is almost indistinguishable from the original and then surgically remove that person's brain from its natural body and install it in the robot!  Will Kennedy welcome a chance to sit at the top of the charts for twenty or thirty years and then enjoy a retirement that will last centuries, or react with horror at the prospect of never again sleeping, eating, drinking, or having sex?

This story is OK.  I like that the narrator is the villain and his villainy is only hinted at for much of the story, and I like the brain-transplanting German mad scientist angle, but Bloch needlessly complicates things with a lot of talk of how the robot bodies need to go offline periodically and so during those periods Stern has to blackmail criminals who look like the stars into impersonating them, blah blah blah.  (You'll remember that I also thought Bloch needlessly complicated the process of giving people eternal life in his 1951 story "The Dead Don't Die.")  Bloch should have ditched the impersonation angle and focused on the Frankenstein stuff--ofttimes less is more, Robert, less is more.   

"Commuter's Problem" by Harlan Ellison

I've done a lot of commuting in my life!  (Maybe you have, too?)  Thousands of rides on the New York City subway between the Upper East Side and Midtown, and before my apotheosis and after my exile, thousands of miles in automobiles between suburbs and universities and downtowns and shopping malls.  The commute is one of the defining features of 20th-century middle-class life, the subject of song and story.  And here is one of those stories.

Narrator John Weiler (I guess we're supposed to think "wheels?") uses cliches to describe himself and his life: "I'm a commuter--a man in the grey flannel suit, if you would....We keep up with the Jonses, without too much trouble."  Every weekday, and some Saturdays and Sundays, too, he rides the train into Manhattan from Westchester County to work at his office.  "There's something cold and impersonal about a nine-to-five job and a ride home with total strangers," he tells us.  Then one morning he is walking through Grand Central Terminal, his face buried in a report, and he looks up to find he is lost.  He's never seen this part of Grand Central before!  Not only that, but the posters are in a weird foreign language and when he asks people for directions they speak in a weird foreign language!  He gets caught up in a crowd and ends up on a subway car where he sees his odd neighbor Da Campo, the guy who doesn't watch TV and has a bizarre tentacled plant in his garden.   Da Campo is amazed to see Weiler, and vaguely explains that this subway car goes to another planet!

Weiler gets the inside skinny once they arrive at Da Campo's home world of Drexwill twenty minutes and 60,000 light years later.  Drexwill is an overcrowded urban conglomeration that many find uncomfortable, so middle class professionals like Da Campo (real name: Helgorth Labbula) commute to work in Drexwill and live incognito on less crowded planets like Earth.  (The Drexwillians look just like Earth humans.)  With bitter resignation Helgorth takes Weiler to the authorities, where Helgorth himself gets a stern talking to, as has lazy habits and flouting of rules (like the prohibition on cultivating Drexwillian vegetation on Earth) have played some role in Weiler's accidental one-way trip from Earth.  Yes, one-way; the Drexwill government won't let Weiler go back to Earth!  After talking his hosts out of executing him, Weiler finds a job on Drexwill; he realizes he would rather be on Drexwill than on Earth with his nagging wife and stressful job.

This story is just OK, a piece of filler that feels like something Ellison pounded out and submitted without much planning beforehand or revising after pulling that first draft out of the typewriter.  Ellison neither put much thought into the whole system of aliens commuting between Earth and Drexwill, nor put much effort into setting up Weiler's abandonment of Earth--for example, Weiler's wife and job don't seem really that annoying, and in the beginning of the story Weiler doesn't really complain about them.  Instead of writing a story exploring or explaining or dramatizing how suburban life and commuting suck, Ellison just takes this attitude for granted (note the use of tired cliches as a cheap means of telling the audience what to think) and pretends it is the backbone of his pedestrian story about a guy who inexplicably finds himself in another world.  (Bloch in "Terror Over Hollywood" makes an effort to show us how bad life in Hollywood is, here Ellison just tells us how bad life is in suburbiua.)  The story's tone is uneven; the first half of "Commuter's Problem" focuses on Weiler's suspicion and fear of the Da Campo family inspired by their odd habits and creepy garden and feels like a horror story, but all the horror stuff is jettisoned in the second half, which is a nonsensical fantasy that feels like a wacky humor story, albeit one without any jokes or laughs.

Barely acceptable.  I am totally into stories in which guys hate their wives and jobs (I love Henry Miller's exhilarating Sexus, for example) and SF stories in which a guy struggles to survive in an alien milieu, but Ellison just gestures towards writing those sorts of stories here.

However mediocre I may have found it, "Commuter's Problem" was included in the oft-reprinted collection Ellison Wonderland, AKA Earthman, Go Home!

"Ape's Eye View" by Robert F. Young

In the tiny little intro the editor provides for this story we learn that the cover of this issue was inspired by "Ape's Eye View."  Alright, let's learn what that Virgil Finlay illustration is all about!

"Ape's Eye View" is an explicit homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs's immortal creation, Tarzan.  One day a meteor lands in a small rural town; apparently coincidentally, a local childless couple takes in a foundling soon after.  This kid looks odd and is a terrible student and wretched athlete, and is bullied by the other kids and, as a teen, is disgusted instead of intrigued by the opposite sex.  Shortly after achieving adulthood he vanishes when a large "entity" appears out of the sky and, eye witnesses report, consumes him.  Our narrator, a schoolmate of the weird foundling, his thought processes triggered by coming across a copy of Tarzan of the Apes, surmises that this kid was a shipwrecked alien and that mysterious "entity" was a rescue ship come to bring the kid back to his home planet.

This is a modest but successful story that looks at the Mowgli archetype from a different point of view.  Of the four stories I am talking about today it is the most original and the one that feels least like filler rushed out the door to make a buck.  I like it.  It looks like it was never published elsewhere, however.

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While not great, these stories aren't all that bad.  We'll explore more of Fantastic Universe in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log. 

ABC Part 2: Carol Emshwiller, Philip José Farmer, Daniel F. Galouye, and Harry Harrison

Let's read four more stories from Tom Boardman Jr.'s strange 1966 anthology, An ABC of Science Fiction, which prints 26 stories, each story written by a writer with a different last initial.  This time we've got stories from two Grandmasters with whose work I have some familiarity, Philip José Farmer and Harry Harrison, and two people whose work I don't believe I have read before, Carol Emshwiller and Daniel F. Galouye.

There's Myra and her creepy kid!

"Day at the Beach" by Carol Emshwiller (1959)

In the introduction to An ABC of Science Fiction, editor Boardman apologizes because there are only two women represented in the anthology.  Here's the first of the two, Carol Emshwiller.  Emshwiller's wikipedia article is pretty short, reminding us that her husband was important SF illustrator Ed Emshwiller (AKA "Emsh") and quoting Ursula K. LeGuin who heralds Emshwiller as a "consistent feminist voice."  Hopefully "Day at the Beach" isn't going to be a lecture on how I sit incorrectly on the subway and don't do my fair share of the dusting.

Four years ago there was a nuclear war (I guess) and Myra and Ben, a married couple, were among the survivors.  Neither of them has any hair, not even an eye lash!  What they do have is a three-year old son, the only child in the vicinity, apparently; it is hinted that the kid is a mutant, maybe a cannibal!

Emshwiller gives us vague clues as to the state of the world.  Ben "commutes" on a train during the week, and there is sometimes electricity, so I guess there is some kind of heavy industry and maybe government agencies still in operation, but there are very few cars and it seems like Ben doesn't bring money home after commuting but preserved food, and it sounds like it is common for fights over the food to erupt on the train. 

It is the weekend, and Myra talks about how before the cataclysm they used to go to the beach on the weekend, and now they just hide at home.  So they drive to the beach for the first time since the war.  At the beach they are menaced by bandits, but Ben, who was fat before the war but is now a lean hard fighter, beats the bandits' leader to death with a hammer, which scares off the rest.  Then the family goes home, Myra asserting, repeatedly, that it has been a good day.

This story is a sort of "slice of life" thing, with no flashy twist ending or shocking revelation that I could detect (I was hoping the three-year-old would try to eat the dead bandit, but he just sort of investigates it before Ben swats him away from it--Emshwiller was teasing me!)  Maybe "Day at the Beach" is meant to be a satire of bourgeois people, people who would continue their middle-class routine of commuting and going for weekend drives even after an apocalypse?  Maybe it is supposed to induce a mood, maybe horrify us by showing that a life of fighting for food and confronting child-molesting thugs and raising a monster can come to seem routine, that for Myra to retain any sanity she has to act like it is routine?  (It is perhaps significant that "It was no day at the beach," like "it was no picnic"--and Myra does actually pack a picnic basket--is a cliched euphemism for a dangerous challenge or arduous task.)

Both Judith Merril and Isaac Asimov (or likely Martin H. Greenberg) consider
"Day at the Beach" to be one of the best SF stories of 1959

"Day at the Beach" is OK, no big deal.  It is a commercial and critical success, however, having been reprinted numerous times in four languages after first appearing as a cover story in F&SF.  The effective cover illustration is by Emshwiller's own husband--the picture's composition is reminiscent of a Renaissance Madonna and Child, so maybe the story is supposed to be a hopeful one and I am totally misinterpreting "Day at the Beach" when I am thinking of it as a horror story or a satire of the bourgeoisie.  Maybe Myra's little cannibal child is going to be the redeemer of the fallen world!     

"The King of the Beasts" by Philip José Farmer (1964)

Oy, this is one of those allegedly clever one-page stories that people seem to love but which I consider a gimmicky waste of time.  Two people are in a zoo where extinct species are recreated.  We get a list of resurrected beasts--passenger pigeon, dodo, quagga, etc.  Then comes an animal so diabolical, so monstrous, so sinister, that the scientists needed special permission to resurrect one.  Of course, it's a human man, so we now know that the people talking are aliens who came to Earth after we also went extinct, no doubt because we threw candy wrappers in a creek or something of that nature.

Lame filler.  The most interesting thing about the story is that Farmer has one of the aliens (before we know they are aliens) say "You might say that man struck God in the face every time he wiped out a branch of the animal kingdom."  Is this just a trick to make us think the speakers are human, or, is this Farmer expressing his own religious belief, pushing back against the atheism typical of SF writers?  (Remember that article Farmer wrote for Brian Ash's Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction?)

"The King of the Beasts" was mentioned on the cover of the issue of Galaxy in which it originally appeared, and despite my distaste for it, has been reprinted many times.   

"Homey Atmosphere" by Daniel F. Galouye (1961)

Here's another one from Galaxy.  I don't think I have ever read anything by Galouye, who, wikipedia is telling me, is one of Richard Dawkins's favorite writers.  Hopefully "Homey Atmosphere" isn't going to be a lecture on how religious people are all insane and taking your kid to church is child abuse.

"Homey Atmosphere" is a traditional SF story about space travel and robots, people's reaction to machines which mimic life and whether there is any difference between "true" consciousness like you and I have and very sophisticated artificial simulations of consciousness.

Lorry is a young astronaut, and Burton an older one, on a months-long voyage exploring the galaxy, leaving a string of navigation beacons in their wake.  Their hyperdrive ship is managed by three computers which respond to voice commands; to keep the two spacemen from suffering psychological problems, the three computers have been given personalities, one that of a grumpy and forgetful old man, one an enthusiastic kid, one an attractive young woman.  When the ship starts to malfunction (perhaps because the forgetful computer has forgotten to lay in spare parts!) Burton wants to jump in the lifeboat and get back home, but Lorry is too fond of the "crew" to abandon them!  The astronauts argue over to what extent the personalities of the ship are "real" as the ship's problems increase in severity.  When the apparent risk reaches catastrophic levels Lorry and Burton finally abandon ship with the encouragement of their artificial shipmates.

I say "apparent risk" because on the last page we learn that the three artificial personalities have developed independent desires and curiosity, and their ambition is to explore the galaxy unsupervised!  All the problems with the ship were a sham designed to (humanely) get rid of the human astronauts.

An ordinary but acceptable entertainment.  Over twenty years after its original publication "Homey Atmosphere" would be the cover story of an issue of the Croatian magazine Sirius.

"Mute Milton" by Harry Harrison (1966)

Harrison has a very smooth and readable style and in my youth I read a ton of his books, and as an adult was impressed by the first two Eden books (the third, which I have been more or less planning to read for years now, awaits.)  So I have been looking forward to this one.

Harrison's work is often tendentious, attacking religion or the military or pollution or whatever, and "Mute Milton" is a heavy-handed anti-racism story.  An African-American college student from New York City, down in Mississippi, by chance meets a local college professor, another black man.  The college prof has invented a means of converting gravity into electricity--he can generate power practically for free.  The New Yorker is studying economics, and immediately recognizes that such a device could radically improve human life, but seconds later an overweight cop who is in the Ku Klux Klan murders the college professor and destroys the only working model of the device.

This is the kind of story whose point you can't argue against, but which is too over the top, too obvious and manipulative, to be effective as literature or entertainment.  There is no tension or ambiguity, the characters don't evolve, the villain is a flat caricature, etc.  It is like a homily for a child.  Thumbs down.  "Mute Milton" has been reprinted numerous times in Harrison collections, as well as in an anthology almost as gimmicky as An ABC of Science Fiction, A Treasury of American Horror Stories: 51 Spine-Chilling Tales from Every State in the Union plus Washington, D. C.--I guess there is a shortage of horror stories set in Mississippi?

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It looks like today the Grandmasters gave us limp polemics bitterly denouncing humanity's failings  while the people I never read before made an effort to give us stories imbued with human feeling that press us to speculate on life in strange future circumstances.  Today our Grandmasters let us down!  Well, maybe a Grandmaster will live up to his title in our next episode, when we read another batch of stories from An ABC of Science Fiction?  Until then, Brian Aldiss, himself a Grandmaster, still has the best contribution to this anthology. 

Slave Planet by Laurence M. Janifer

"Marvor," he said, "do you question the masters?"...

"I question all," he said soberly.  "It is good to question all."

Ever since I first saw its spectacular cover by Jack Gaughan (probably at internet science fiction superstar Joachim Boaz's blog), with its lizardmen and explosions and rifle fire, I have wanted to read Laurence Janifer's 1963 novel Slave Planet.  But I never spotted it at my usual haunts--used books stores, thrift stores, flea markets, library sales.  But all things come to those who wait!  As part of a campaign of downsizing, the generous Mr. Boaz sent me a box (weight: 21 pounds!) of science fiction books, and the first one I'm cracking open is Slave Planet.

(If you don't feel like waiting, it looks like you can read the novel at gutenberg.org.)

I have to admit I am already pleased with the volume, even before I've read a line of the text!  The back cover, with its additional illustrations, a cast of characters, and an ad for a book by Robert Bloch, is almost as cool as the front cover!  And then there is the dedication, to skeptic Philip Klass [UPDATE September 9, 2018: or, more likely, science fiction author William Tenn]:

This self-important and self-pitying dedication is followed by two long epigraphs.  The first is a quote from Boswell's Life of Johnson, a famous passage about the value of learning that records a conversation on July 30, 1763.  The second is a quote from H. D. Abel, a guy I've never heard of and whom I suspect is a fictional character invented by Janifer; Abel controverts the conventional wisdom that slavery is inefficient and has no utility in the modern industrial world and suggests that slavery may make a comeback in the future.

I like when publishers go the extra mile to produce an attractive book by including additional illustrations and fun fonts as Pyramid does in Slave Planet, and Janifer's portentous dedication and epigraphs suggest he is aiming to produce here not a pulpy adventure but a philosophical work.  Well, Janifer and Pyramid have got me on their side with all this additional apparatus; let's get to the heart of the matter, the actual text, and hope that this isn't one of those lipstick on a pig scenarios.

For a century the planets of the Terran Confederation have been receiving shipments of essential metals from Fruyling's World.  But the citizens of the Confederation know almost nothing about what goes on at that colony.  Why do the colonists keep them in the dark?  Because if the citizens knew what they were up to, they wouldn't like it!  They really wouldn't like it!  The culture of the Confederation prizes freedom and equality before the law, you see, and to extract and process all that metal the human colonists on Fruyling's World work the primitive natives as slave labor!

Slave Planet is a novel of 142 pages.  There are 22 numbered and untitled narrative chapters which follow the exploits of the characters listed on the back cover, all of them inhabitants of Fruyling's World, plus seven satirical chapters headed "Public Opinion One", "Public Opinion Two," etc., that are interspersed throughout the book. Twenty-nine total chapters, each of which starts a third of the way down a new page, means short chapters with lots of negative space between them and, ultimately, a short book.

Human Johnny Dodd does not find life on Fruyling's World salubrious, and has doubts that it is right for humans to treat the stone age natives, four-foot tall bipedal herbivorous alligators called Alberts (after the character from Pogo), as second class citizens, even if the natives are dim-witted (it seems that most of them can't even count to five, though they speak a simple English) and live longer and safer lives under human control.  His friend tries to cheer him up, telling him the Alberts need human guidance and taking him to a forbidden sex and booze party in Psych Division, where he meets a young woman, Greta Forzane.  The next day, after his shift training some Alberts for work pushing buttons in a remotely-controlled smelting plant, he has a nervous breakdown and is comforted by this same Greta.

Meanwhile, one of the more clever Alberts at the plant, Marvor, has heard that there are wild Alberts living in the jungle without masters, and he plots a rebellion and tries to recruit two other natives, female Dara and male Cadnan, to participate in the dangerous scheme.

In real life, psychology may be an essentially bogus science, but it is de rigueur in SF to present sciences of all types as astoundingly, amazingly, fantastically, effective, and in Slave Planet we are presented with a master practitioner in the psychological arts in the head of Psych Division, the domineering little old lady who goes by the name of Dr. Anna Haenlingen.  Over 100 years old, Haemlingen has been on Fruyling's World a long time.  She has been both covertly promoting and publicly forbidding the sex and booze parties, in order to provide the young colonial workers a safe way to rebel; their skepticism about slavery inspires a need to rebel, and participating in the ostensibly verboten drunken orgies satisfies that need without threatening the system of slavery that keeps the interstellar economy afloat.  Haenlingen's expertise in psychology has also enabled her to intuit from clues that the existence of a system of slavery on Fruyling's World has been leaked to the Confederation public and that soon a Confederation battle fleet will be arriving to liberate the Alberts.

Some of the most critically successful SF writers may be committed Christians (I'm thinking of Ray Bradbury, R. A. Lafferty and Gene Wolfe here, though if you told me that those three were more like "writers of the fantastic" than actual science fiction writers, I would be hard pressed to disagree), but in general in SF, religion is ignored or exposed as a scam, and Janifer here works in that tradition.  In the second half of Slave Planet we learn that Anna Haenlingen, that genius manipulator, has created a whole religion with which to snooker the Alberts into docility; some of the smarter Alberts are co-opted by appointing them priests who memorize a catechism about how humans must be obeyed--if the Alberts don't "break the chain of obedience" in some unspecified future Albert and human will be equals.  Dodd learns this from Norma Fredericks, Anna Haenlingen's assistant, with whomhe has fallen in love (for some reason, Greta drops out of the narrative--if I was Janifer's editor I would have told him to combine the characters of Greta and Norma.)  When Dodd expresses his doubts about slavery, Norma defends the colony's policies, telling him that only force and authority keep society together.  "Did you ever hear of a child who went to school, regularly, eagerly, without some sort of force being applied, physical, mental or moral?"

Cadnan is selected to be one of the priests, and he tries to convert Marvor, who of course is trying to get Cadnan to join the rebellion.  In the end it is the sex drive that determines who wins the debate: female lizardperson Dara, to whom Cadnan is attracted even though there is some kind of incest taboo prohibiting their coupling (they are "from the same tree at the same time") reluctantly joins Marvor and Dara in their flight to the jungle.  (As our pals Ted Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein would tell us, it makes sense to question all orthodoxies, including sexual ones.)  We actually get a weird alien sex scene featuring Cadnan and Dara and the tree they spread their sperm and ova on.

Cadnan's escape is facilitated by the surprise bombardment from the Confederation space navy that signals the start of the Confederation-Fruyling's World War.  Dodd participates in the fighting, though he is wracked by guilt and even a death wish because he is fighting on the pro-slavery side.  (The psychological toll of being a slave master is a major theme of Janifer's novel--at one point he even says "slavery has traditionally been harder on the master than the slave," the kind of thing that could put your career at risk if you said it today!)  In the final narrative chapter Dodd goes insane and shoots down Norma, who represents the slave system.

The seven "Public Opinion" chapters are presented as primary documents--speeches, spoken or epistolary dialogues, an excerpt from a children's text book--that touch upon the issue of the Alberts, whether they should be liberated and what the effect of their liberation might be.  These chapters don't add to the plot, but simply illustrate at length themes indicated briefly in the actual narrative--the argument that servants might prefer a life of service to independence, the idea that citizens of democratic polities choose their policy preferences in a short-sighted way without first ascertaining the facts, the assertion that businesspeople are greedy, etc.  The first four "Public Opinion" chapters are supposed to be funny; one of the busybody Terran  housewives who participates in the "liberate the Alberts" letter-writing campaign is named "Fellacia," and one of the memo-penning businessmen is called "Offutt," which is such an unusual name it makes me think it is a jocular nod to SF writer Andrew Offutt. (One of Offutt's corespondents is a Harrison; "Harrison," of course, is a pretty common name, but maybe this is a reference to Harry Harrison?)

The sixth Public Opinion chapter is a postwar debate between Cadnan and Marvor--Cadnan is unhappy with his new freedom, arguing that the new masters from the Confederation are no better than the old colonial masters--in particular, he finds that classes in the school the new masters force him to attend are more onerous than his work pushing buttons in the smelting plant back in the pre-war days.  "Public Opinion Seven" is an extract from Anna Haenlingen's speech before the High Court back on Earth, in which she says (echoing Norma's assertion about children and school) that advanced civilizations must wield authority over primitive ones, force them to learn in order to raise their cultural level.  Appended to this is an unenumerated eighth primary document, a report from the new Confederation authority on Fruyling's World which indicates that the ending of slavery there is damaging the interstellar economy.

Slave Planet is ambitious; it is admirable that Janifer tries to get into the heads of slaves and slave masters and abolitionists without giving us a simple good vs evil narrative, and his ambiguous attitude towards freedom, slavery, and the role of elite authority in our lives is provocative.  (If you asked me to pin Janifer down, I would suggest that Janifer believes that, while it may be tragic, it is an inevitable necessity that superior people tell ordinary people what to do, because ordinary people don't know what is good for them--ordinary people cannot handle freedom, and Americans prattle on too much about freedom and democracy.  Janifer thinks that primitive tribes, children, and just ordinary plebeians should all be manipulated by their betters.  This is not an attitude that the staff of MPorcius Fiction Log can endorse!)  However, the book has little to raise it above the level of mere acceptability--it is not exciting, it doesn't tug the old heart strings, the jokes aren't funny, the style isn't charming.  I can't condemn this one, but I can only give Slave Planet a mild recommendation.  I would definitely give Janifer another try--The Wonder War looks like it is about human spies or commandos on an alien world, which could be very fun, and You Sane Men / Bloodworld  might be an effective horror story full of creepy sex.  I saw a paperback copy of Final Fear in a Carolina bookstore once, and it interested me, but it was too expensive to buy.  So I'll be looking at the "J"s in used bookstores in hopes of finding these titles at an affordable price.

In our next episode: another volume from the Joachim Boaz Wing of the MPorcius Library!

"The Last Days of Shandakor" and "Shannach--The Last" by Leigh Brackett

It seems that 1952 was a big year for Leigh Brackett, at least in the eyes of her husband, Edmond Hamilton.  For the 1977 volume The Best of Leigh Brackett, Hamilton selected two stories first published in SF magazines that year, "The Last Days of Shandakor" (heralded by the people at Startling Stories as "A Novelet of Ancient Mars") and "Shannach--The Last" (promoted by the editors of Planet Stories as a "Strange World Novel.")  You can read these stories (and check out the Alex Schomburg and Ed Emshwiller illustrations featuring creepy aliens and sexy ladies) for free at the internet archive.  You have no excuses this time for reading my spoilertastic blog post about the stories before actually experiencing them yourself firsthand!  

This cover suggests there are reasons to visit alien worlds
 which have nothing to do with dating up purple-haired
beauties; also, there is a planet very close by
that I don't know about

"The Last Days of Shandakor" 

This moody piece about a doomed race of superior beings living in a lost city is narrated by Jon Ross, Earthborn anthropologist, an expert on the ethnography of Martians.  When Earthlings first got to Mars, the red planet's dominant race was a form of humans only slightly different from Earth humans, and Ross's studies have been of the differences between the various Martian human groups. As the story begins Ross gets a big surprise when he meets a nonhuman Martian, a man with a sort of reptilian cast to his golden skin, pointy ears and "narrow and arched" skull.  When Ross learns that this joker comes from a city the human Martians know about but have kept a secret from Earthers, a city named Shandakor, he realizes that he has stumbled on an opportunity to do original research that will make him an academic star!  If he can get to the city and back to Earth with the data maybe he'll even get his own Chair!

Shandakor is not easy to get to, being on the other side of a desert and a mountain range where water is scarce, but Ross makes it, just barely.  He finds that the people of Shandakor are on the brink of extinction; once these reptile-people were the highest race on Mars, ruling half of the planet with their superior technology and making humans their slaves, but now they number only a few thousand and their fortified town is under siege by barbaric humans who hope to loot the city when the last Shandakorian dies of thirst.  The barbarians don't storm the city because they fear the Shandakor, whom they believe to be wizards.  Buttressing this superstitious belief is the fact that the reptile-people have a sort of holographic projector which makes the city appear to be as vibrant and as densely populated as it was centuries ago.  This device can interperet the record of ancient days etched by photons into the walls and streets of the city and recreate the long dead inhabitants and their daily lives as moving three-dimensional images.  (We saw this same idea in Kuttner and Moore's "Private Eye" of 1949.)

Even though the Shandakorians are inhuman reptile people who arrogantly insist they are better than humans, Ross manages to fall in love with one, a "girl-child with slender thighs and little pointed breasts" named Duani, after Duani, Pocahontas-style, convinces the rulers of the doomed city to let Ross live.  Ross tries to convince Duani to sneak out of town with him instead of participating in the planned mass suicide that is scheduled to begin when Shandakor runs out of water. He even breaks the holographic projector, hoping to force the issue, but the girl refuses, killing herself along with the rest of her people just before the barbarian hordes, emboldened to attack by the disappearance of the "ghosts," descend on the town.  Ross gets that Chair back at his university, but he always regrets his role in the destruction of the people of Shandakor, and wishes he had committed suicide along with his scaly girlfriend.  

One of the interesting things about "The Last Days of Shandakor" is how it is full of elements we see all the time in fantasy stories and romantic adventure-style SF. (Notably, the editor of Startling, Samuel Mines, in his gushing assessment of Brackett in this issue, concedes that this story is not "real" science fiction.)  There's the elf-like race of haughty people who are more sophisticated than us crummy humans but who are in decline and soon to be supplanted by us humies--the elves in Tolkien and the Melniboneans and Eldren in Moorcock are like this.  (Moorcock even has a high tech city of elves under siege by human barbarians and a human who comes to identify with the elves instead of his own people in The Eternal Champion.  And isn't it revealed in The Sailor on the Seas of Fate that the Melniboneans are descended from lizard men?  Hmmm.)  There's the atmosphere of decay and impending calamity, like in Vance's Dying Earth stories, and fading memories of a nobler Mars, like in Burroughs and Bradbury.  (All this sad decay and impending doom stuff is, I guess, also what people like about the tremendously hyped Viriconium books by M. John Harrison, the first of which I found pedestrian and derivative, remarkable mainly for being cloyingly overwritten.)    

Click or squint to read this message from the editor of Startling Stories

While all those connections are interesting, suggesting that Brackett is an influential component of a literary tradition, they don't necessarily make the story entertaining. "The Last Days of Shandakor" isn't bad, but I have to admit I found it disappointing. The way the characters act doesn't feel natural, doesn't make a lot of sense (for example, the people of Shandakor enslave Ross, a human, and put him in charge of maintenance of the holographic projector, which is their main defense from the human barbarian hordes) or at least isn't suitably explained, and you have to overlook problems in the plot (like, how did a city surrounded by a besieging army go unnoticed by Earth spacecraft and aircraft for year after year?)

Despite my lukewarm reaction, "The Last Days of Shandakor" has enjoyed an enduring popularity, evidenced by its inclusion in numerous multi-author anthologies and Brackett collections, including four I own (The Coming of the Terrans, The Best of Leigh Brackett, The Sea-Kings of Mars, and Martian Quest) and a quite recent anthology of SF by women, Women of Futures Past.

"Shannach--The Last"

Trevor is a prospector who has been searching Mercury for sun-stones for years.  A single sun-stone could make him rich--these rare crystals are used back on Earth to make super-electronics because they are unbreakable can resonate to the faintest transmissions, even human thought! His resources nearly exhausted, he sets out on his last trip, and faces total disaster when an earthquake ("Mercury-quake"?) buries his space ship, supplies, and equipment, trapping him in a desolate valley.  Desperately, he crawls through a series of caves under an impassable mountain with the dim hope of getting to the other side and finding a place with food and water. He makes it, just barely, and finds a lost city no Earther has ever heard about!

Most Mercurians are inhuman stone age savages, but in this city live the human Korins, who have a sort of medieval culture and technology.  The Korins keep as hunting dogs vicious flying reptiles, and keep as slaves the descendants of Earth colonists whose space ship crashed in this inaccessible and fertile valley some three hundred years ago.  This is all pretty surprising, but most surprising of all is the fact that the Korins and their hawk-lizards have sun-stones embedded in their skulls!

Trevor hooks up with some escaped slaves living in a cave.  He learns that the Korins are also descendants of Earthlings--their ancestors were exiled convicts who were on the same ship as the colonists and enslaved the colonists after the disaster.  Via the sun-stones the Korins can see and hear through the eyes and ears of the flying lizards and issue them commands.

"Shannach--The Last" is the title story of one
of Haffner Press's volumes of Brackett stories--
if I had any money I would buy every book
the Haffner people put out

When Trevor pulls a boner and accidentally guides the Korins to the refugees' cave (oops) he is captured and taken to the Korin city, where he learns the amazing truth--the Korins themselves are enslaved by a Mercurian monster named Shannach who commands them through the sun-stones. The city is built not to human scale but to the scale of the monster, who is humanoid but twenty feet tall! Shannach is the last of his kind, and Trevor is dragged to the catacombs where he lives among the scores of his mummified fellows!

Shannach has his minions install a sun-stone in Trevor's own forehead, and sends Trevor to the 300-year-old spaceship wreck.  Will Trevor repair the vessel so Shannach can spread his tyranny to the rest of Mercury?  Or is Trevor strong-minded enough to resist Shannach's control and use the old ship's equipment to liberate the human slaves?

(One of the themes of this series of blog posts about Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton has been possible influences from Brackett on Michael Moorcock, and--mein gott!--as tarbandu recently reminded us, one of Moorcock's major characters has a jewel with psychic powers embedded in his skull by the villains!)

"Shannach--The Last" does not seem to have struck the chord with editors and the SF reading public that "The Last Days of Shandakor" did, never appearing in any multiple author anthologies or foreign translations.  (The German edition of The Best of Leigh Brackett is abridged, and "Shannach--The Last" is one of the deleted pieces.) But I think I enjoyed it more than "The Last Days of Shandakor."  (I'm a rebel!) Everybody's motivations make sense, and Brackett provides plausible explanations for things like why no spaceship has ever spotted the Korin city.  And I like ideas like a city built by giants who are now hideous mummies and a monster who psionically dominates a bunch of jerks and flying reptiles more than how sad it is that arrogant elves who used to lord it over us are finally getting their comeuppance.  (I'm a pro-human chauvinist!)

**********

It seems like "The Last Days of Shandakor" is important, but I think you get more for your entertainment dollar from "Shannach--The Last."  Both stories are well worth reading, however.

Stories by Edmond Hamilton in our next episode as our trip through 1977's The Best of Edmond Hamilton and The Best of Leigh Brackett continues!

1968 science fiction stories by Damon Knight, R. A. Lafferty & Samuel R. Delany

Last week I went to one of the many Half Price Books here in central Ohio (land of the mind-blowingly difficult driving test) to sell a stack of 2nd and 3rd edition AD&D rule books I had never used, and while there I took a look at the science fiction and "nostalgia" shelves.  When I saw Ace 91352, World's Best Science Fiction 1969 edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, I was in love.  The cover by John Schoenherr and the interior illustrations by Jack Gaughan were great, and the anthology included many stories by writers I care about.  Here was one I had to have!

The introduction by the editors is fun, with Wollheim and Carr subtly criticizing the other yearly "best of" SF anthologies and pointing out what makes their own series distinctive.  Wollheim and Carr tell us they don't include fantasy stories in World's Best Science Fiction, and they don't include old stories like some of the other anthologists do ("we don't ring in stories by, say, Alfred Jarry or James Thurber that were originally published in 1930 or 1940.")  My research at isfdb indicates that editors Harrison and Aldiss included James Thurber's 1941 story "Interview with a Lemming" in Best SF: 1967, while it was Judith Merrill who included an Alfred Jarry story in 1966's 11th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F, almost 60 years after Jarry's death in 1907.  Wollheim and Carr also claim to try to read every SF story published in the world.  Ambitious!

While I lack the ambition and work ethic of Wollheim and Carr, this weekend I did read three stories from World's Best Science Fiction 1969, the contributions by Damon Knight, R. A. Lafferty, and Samuel R. Delany.

"Masks" by Damon Knight

"Masks" first appeared in Playboy, and has been widely anthologized, and was nominated for a Nebula and a Hugo.  Will I like this popular favorite?

"Masks" is about the psychological issues of the first man to have his brain transplanted from a ruined human body into a robot body.  As I have said before, I love stories about immortality and minds and brains being transplanted; this is perhaps a product of my fear of death.  So I was on this story's side from the get go.

The guy in the robot body, Air Force veteran Jim, isn't too happy.  The scientists and engineers who are running the experimental robot body program think he's unhappy because he doesn't properly dream, or because his robot body doesn't look human enough.  These eggheads strive to help him have dreams that will stabilize his psychology and to construct him a body, a face in particular, that looks as human as possible.

It seems to me that Jim's "problem" is, in fact, that he is now disgusted by, perhaps even feels contempt for, humanity and all other living things, thinking himself beyond them because he is essentially immortal.  Knight drives home Jim's hatred for life by pointing out how he has had his quarters in the lab protected from germs with special ultraviolet lights and air conditioning systems, and by including an episode in which he murders a canine.  There is a also a cool scene in which Jim broods over people's pimples and saliva and the oil of their skin.  And there is the fact that he habitually wears a blank metal mask over his artificial human-like face, and makes visitors wear surgical masks.

Jim doesn't want to fit into human society by wearing an artificial body that looks just like a normal human body--since he doesn't have adrenal glands and all those sorts of organs he no longer experiences human emotions like fear and love, and so he doesn't have any interest in friends or sex partners.  Instead, he wants to be alone, and sketches designs of four-legged exploration and mining vehicles that he hopes his brain will be installed in so he can live in sterile extraterrestrial environments, far from all life.

A good story with some clues to puzzle over.  What does Jim mean when he compares the eggheads maintaining him to cancer patients?  What emotion is Knight referring to when he writes "there was still one emotion he could feel."?  I like it!  If you were in some college literature class you could compare it to Poul Anderson's classic 1957 story "Call Me Joe," in which a crippled guy wants his consciousness installed in a monster body that is used to explore the surface of some inhospitable moon.              

"This Grand Carcass" by R. A. Lafferty

This one was first published in Amazing Stories; at the time our buddy Barry Malzberg was editing that venerable magazine.  "This Grand Carcass" feels more accessible than most of Lafferty's work that I am familiar with, and even has a sort of traditional horror story structure.

In some interstellar civilization of the future one of the galaxy's most successful businessmen, Juniper Tell, is approached by a similarly successful magnate, Mord. Saying he is all "sucked out" and will soon die, Mord sells Juniper Tell a super robot, the first of the level ten robots, a machine vastly superior to the many robots already in Tell's employ.  In a matter of days this superior machine crushes almost all of Tell's business rivals and vastly enriches Tell, utilizing strategies that are so sophisticated that no human could have thought of them, but which are also amazingly efficient, so efficient that after having been developed, these methods seem like the only way the deed could have been accomplished.

Despite the spectacular successes of his partnership with the super machine, Tell finds himself feeling weak.  Investigation of the new robot reveals that it is not powered by batteries or outlets, like conventional robots, but is living off of Tell's life force, sucking him dry.  Like Mord before him, on the brink of death, Tell sells the vampire machine to another robber baron type.

The style of the story is brisk and silly fun, the little jokes and suggestive names of the various human and robot characters amusing.  Should we furrow our brows and seek a deeper meaning to "This Grand Carcass?"  I think we can see a skepticism of mechanization; Tell derives little satisfaction from business successes derived wholly from letting the machine make all the decisions for him.  In fact, the machine "sucks the spirit and juice" out of the businessmen who employ it.  Perhaps this is Lafferty's commentary on our modern world in which few of us raise our own food, do math without a calculator, or walk when we can ride motor cars everywhere, a world in which we are so reliant on machines it seems ridiculous to try to get things done without using them (how would your friends react if you told them you walked to the grocery store three miles away or calculated your taxes longhand?)  Maybe the story is a warning that if we contract out our very thinking to machines, we will lose our souls.

"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" by Samuel R. Delany

This is a revised version of the story originally published in New Worlds, the famous British flagship of the New Wave. "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" won a Hugo and a Nebula, is specially highlighted on the back of this anthology, and has been reprinted a zillion times, so provides another chance for me to see if I am on the same wavelength as the SF community.  

"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" quickly strikes one as a New Wave-ish story, a first person narrative that is full of "word play" ("I hear the breast has been scene [as opposed to obscene] on and off since the seventeenth century"), expresses contempt for "the establishment" (police and businesspeople, for example) and has somewhat absurdist images, like a vast mechanized dairy farm and a gangster who owns and operates an ice cream shop.  In the first few pages the narrative even slips into the present tense, but mostly sticks to past tense.

Our narrator is a young thief and master of disguise who shifts easily from one identity to another, living in a future in which much of the solar system has been colonized and people have constant access to the media via little ear pieces.  In New York City (the Pan Am Building and Grand Central Terminal, buildings I saw every day for years, figure prominently) shortly after getting out of prison on Mars, our hero is approached by a representative of an elite branch of the police force and learns that, through the collection of what we might now call "metadata," the government's computers can predict people's future moves with considerable accuracy.

The narrator is friendly with some of the famous pseudo-bohemian artists known as Singers, and accompanies one to a party in a luxury apartment in upper Manhattan. The Singers and their popularity, we are told, are a response to the alienation from real experience caused by the pervasiveness of mass media; like Homeric bards the Singers are poet-actors whose powerful art can only be experienced at close hand, it being illegal to record their performances.

I guess, with the Singers, Delany is romanticizing the role of the creative performer in pre-mass media days, when art was an intimate personal expression and not (as Delany perhaps sees it) the commodity churned out by organizations as it is today. (Delany wants us to compare the mass-produced milk at the dairy farm where the narrator briefly worked with mass-produced media.)  I don't really take that line myself, and I'm not sure the Singers really work at promoting this sort of democratic, populist idea.  The Singers are like rock stars, adored by the public and catered to wherever they go, but how do they get so popular if it is impossible for ordinary people to access their work via broadcast or recordings?  Delany suggests they are bohemian individualists, but they are in reality creatures of the elite: they benefit from what amounts to a government monopoly or a powerful and exclusive guild system: not only will the government crack down on you if you try to record their performances, but each political division is allowed only a small number of Singers (four for all of New York City) and when a Singer dies a new Singer is selected by the surviving Singers.  (Maybe Delany means to paint the Singers as hypocrites or a sham?)

At the party our narrator sells some stolen goods to a famous gangster known as "The Hawk," the police raid the party, and our narrator escapes because one of his Singer buddies, a disheveled man known as "Hawk" (there's that clever wordplay again, two characters with almost the same name), creates a distraction by giving an impromptu performance that starts a dangerous conflagration and draws a crowd.  The narrator ends up on Triton, where he starts an ice cream shop and pursues illegal activities, becoming a rival to The Hawk.

This story is just OK.  I guess I'm too old or too conservative to find smart alecky thieves and neurotic self-important artists who are members of a tiny elite but pretend to be poor down-and-outers (Hawk wears ratty clothes and walks around barefoot and has some kind of masochistic streak and so is covered in scars and has memorized how he got each scar) inherently interesting or sympathetic, and Delany doesn't do much to make the characters special (are they meant to be archetypes of The Artist, The Cop, etc?)  I couldn't get myself to care whether the cops caught our narrator or that Hawk had sacrificed himself for the narrator.  The story's ideas (mass media is alienating; with statistics you can predict and control society; and politicians, police, gangsters and artists are all part of the establishment and fabric of society and all are equally corrupt and menacing) are OK, I suppose, but not surprising or moving.

***********

None of these stories is bad, and all three say something about man's (potentially dangerous) relationship with high technology.  What do radically improved convenience and efficiency do to the human psyche and human spirit?  But while the Knight has emotional drama and the Lafferty is fun, the Delany reads like a cynical hipster's exercise in style; Delany denounces bourgeois society and romanticizes criminals and creative types, but not in a way that is very entertaining for somebody who doesn't already share the author's sentiments.

In this episode we looked at stories by authors I have had some experience with; next time we'll look at stories in World's Best Science Fiction 1969 by authors with whom I am totally unfamiliar.

Outside the Universe by Edmond Hamilton

I think that never in all space and time could there have been a moment as strange as that one, when the mighty fleet of our galaxy lay prow to prow with this other mighty fleet from the dark, unguessed mysteries of outer space.  

I'm no expert on Weird Tales, and when I think of that "unique magazine" I think of Conan and Cthulhu, of sword and sorcery tales and of horror stories.  But Weird Tales also published space operas by Edmond Hamilton, including today's topic, Outside the Universe, which first appeared as a serial over the course of four issues in 1929.  Last week I bought the 1964 book printing of Outside the Universe by Ace (Ace F-271) at the Jay's CD and Hobby in South Des Moines.  This edition includes an illustration by Jack Gaughan and an introduction by editor Donald Wollheim.  Wollheim points out that A. Merritt adored Outside the Universe and wrote Hamilton fan mail about it. Wollheim, in his promotion (or defense) of the novel also seems to cast aspersions on SF writers who seek to use SF as a way of discussing science, saying that Outside the Universe was a "novel which told a tale of interstellar adventure on the kind of scale that would terrify the slide-rule space engineering storytellers of today....The purpose of the novel was not an exposition of advanced mechanics; it was an entertainment in starry voyaging....And, really, is there anything more anyone could ask from a science-fiction novel?"  

Our narrator is Dur Nal, human captain of one of the Interstellar Patrol's cruisers, a slender warship with a crew of approximately one hundred.  The Milky Way is a united political entity, with a central government in the Canopus system, and Dur Nal's crew is drawn from "a score or more" different intelligent species, including "Octopus-beings from Vega, great planet-men from Capella, [and] spider-shapes from Mizar...."  Dur Nal's lieutenants are an Antarean, Korus Kan, who has three eyes, three arms and three legs and is made of metal, and Jhul Din, a crustacean from Spica.

Dur Nal and company are patrolling the edges of the Milky Way when they detect an alien armada of 5,000 vessels bent on conquering our galaxy.  A running fight with the alien invaders leads to a terrific naval battle between the Milky Way fleet and the enemy, a battle lost by the good guys because the aliens have special "attraction-ships" which can magnetically grab the Milky Way ships and draw them to their destruction.

Dur Nal's ship is one of the few survivors of this debacle, but the craft is crippled, so Dur Nal and his crew (somehow) sneak up on an alien ship and board it.  They find that the extragalactic invaders are like worms or snakes, and Hamilton refers to them as "serpent people."  We are told it is unsafe to fire off ray guns inside a ship, so the fighting during the boarding action is all hand to hand, our people bludgeoning the invaders with metal bars while the snake people seek to constrict the boarders to death.  Sixty percent of the boarders are killed (as are all the serpent beings), but Dur Nal and comrades seize the ship and bring it back to Canopus.

Documents on the captured enemy ship are (somehow) translated, and it is learned that the invaders come from a dying galaxy, where nearly all the suns have gone dark.  The snake people tried to conquer the Andromeda galaxy, but were rebuffed, so attacked the Milky Way, their second choice.  The president of the Milky Way galaxy, "a great black-winged bat-figure from Deneb" gives Dur Nal, Korus Kan and Jhul Din command of the refurbished alien craft (it is faster than our own ships) and the mission of travelling to Andromeda to request aid.

In these adventure stories the protagonists tend to get taken captive, and, sure enough, on their way to Andromeda our heroes are captured by the serpent-people and taken to their dying galaxy of expired and decrepit suns.  The snakemen are masters at using force fields, and have surrounded their entire dark galaxy with one.  The opening to the galaxy is guarded by two colossal cubical space fortresses.  Nur Dal and the survivors of his crew are taken to the capitol planet of the enemy, where they find that the snakemen do not make their buildings of metal or stone, but the same flickering blue force fields that guard their galaxy.  Construction and demolition in the vast city that covers the entire surface of the planet is as easy as flipping a switch.  In the towering central government building our heroes are interred in a glass case in a museum of biology, pumped full of a drug that paralyzes and preserves them, suspending all bodily functions but thought:

Rigid, unmoving, unbreathing, yet with consciousness, mind and senses as clear as ever, living brains cased in bodies that were helpless and motionless, I think that no position of any in all time could have been more terrible than ours.

Of course our heroes make it out of the dark galaxy and to Andromeda.  The Andromedans are people made of gas, and have technology and power that surpasses that of the people of the Milky Way and of the serpent people; in fact, they have rearranged the very stars and planets of their galaxy for maximum efficiency.  In their government chamber they vote to launch a vast fleet to the dark galaxy and exterminate the snake race, and to put our man Dur Nal in charge of the whole shebang!

The last quarter of the novel follows the Andromedan fleet as it attacks the dark galaxy and then races to the Milky Way in hopes of catching up with the serpent fleet before it has made operational its super weapon, a conical ship 20 miles across armed with a death ray that can exterminate all life on a planet with a single shot!  In the very last pages of the book the Andromedans use their star shifting technology to move two suns together, crushing the giant cone between them.

If you are a stickler for scientific accuracy and an airtight plot then this book is not for you.  Hamilton uses the words "universe" and "galaxy" interchangeably, as evidenced by the title.  Space craft routinely travel a thousand times the speed of light, with a minimum of odd or unusual effects.  (However, during the climactic naval battle numerous ships travelling at such alarming speeds within the boundaries of solar systems blunder into planets and stars and are destroyed.) There is lots of talk of ether, the invisible substance that lies between the stars, and it plays a role in the story like that ocean currents and the weather would play in a story about ships at sea.  Ether currents can influence a ship's speed or course, and early in the story our heroes use an ether storm (it is marked by a space buoy) to foil pursuit.

As for plot holes, after numerous scenes in which ships spot each other via equivalents of radar (a "star chart" which shows moving "dots" for ships and "circles" for heavenly bodies) and powerful telescopes ("distance windows" and "telemagnifiers") it was a little difficult to suspend disbelief when Dur Nal's ship sneaked up on an alien ship and his crew of over one hundred spacers broke into it without being detected.  And how (in a matter of hours!) could the Milky Way cryptographers have deciphered the extragalactic documents?  And then there is Dur Nal figuring out, in minutes, how to fly the serpent ship.

As with much fiction involving wars or adventures, we also have to accept that thousands of people all around the hero are always getting killed in battle after battle while he somehow always manages to escape injury. We can (with some effort!) confidently ascribe the survival of Achilles, Aeneas, John Carter, Conan, and Elric on the battlefield to their superior ability to dodge and parry, and/or to divine intervention, but we have to accept that Dur Nal is just lucky that his ship is the one out of thousands that isn't hit by an irresistible death ray.  Even Dur Nal seems a little perplexed by his longevity:

How our own ship escaped, in the van of our fleet, I can not guess, for space about us at that moment was but a single awful mass of shattered and shattering vessels.

Outside the Universe is also remarkable in that there is really no character development, no relationships between the characters, and very little "normal" emotional content--all the emotional content is on the order of over the top terror of getting tortured or awe at the beauty of celestial phenomena and the sight of thousands of space vessels engaging in battles which lead to a fatality rate of 90% or higher.  The descriptions of stars and galaxies and space battles can be a little repetitive; perhaps readers in 1929 were less likely to notice this, taking a month out between reading each of the four installments.

Despite all these issues, the novel still has considerable appeal.  Hamilton tells the tale with gusto--the pace is fast and Hamilton writes in long breathless sentences full of superlatives.  Hamilton also has a wide range of invention, coming up with all sorts of alien races and menacing phenomena and curious settings.  There are plenty of striking images--the book is like a script for a movie you create in your mind, a technicolor epic replete with bizarre and awe-inspiring visions.

As for ideological content, the only thing notable (beyond the implied superiority of representative democracy) is that, while our hero is a human male, all the other characters, including our hero's political superiors, are aliens; Hamilton's novel doesn't suggest that Earth or the human race are in any way special, but just one of dozens of civilizations united E Pluribus Unum style.  We see so many SF stories in which humans in general or Europeans in particular are superior and have some kind of manifest destiny or Kiplingesque burden (I'm thinking of John Carter and Tarzan here, as well the end of Van Vogt's The Weapon Makers) and so many in which humans are assholes and elves or alien collectivists are shown to be our betters, that I think this vision of brotherhood and equality is noteworthy.  (I get the impression that Star Wars and Star Trek are going for this attitude, but perhaps are limited by the fact that they need to cast humans as the main characters.  Wasn't Han Solo supposed to be a frog man or something?)

I thought Outside the Universe was fun.  I think we can also see it as an interesting document in SF history, an early example of the seminal space opera genre which has conquered Hollywood with all those Star Wars and Star Trek movies and an example of what Harry Harrison was satirizing in things like Bill the Galactic Hero and what the New Wave writers were trying to get away from.  After a suitable interval (to catch my breath!) I will definitely be reading more Hamilton space operas.