Fantastic Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories, July 1973

Our look through the August 1972 issue of Fantastic was so worthwhile I decided to similarly examine another issue in my collection, that from July 1973.  If you don't have a copy, and don't feel like spending ten or twenty bucks on ebay for one, you can read along at the internet archive.  No shame!

The cover featuring the mustachioed Conan, King of Aquilonia, by Harry Roland, while not terrific, isn't bad.  Swords and shields, dinosaur skeletons, human skulls, a grim muscleman, these are things we've all seen a billion times but which never lose their appeal.  The first thing we find in the magazine after an ad for the Rosicrucians and the Table of Contents is editor Ted White's editorial.  Ted uses three pages of his editorial to describe in detail the recent vote for the 1972 Hugo for Best Professional SF Magazine at LACon.  The somewhat complicated Australian ballot was used to pick the winner, and F&SF was awarded the Hugo, even though more voters picked Analog as their favorite mag.  (Fantastic came in fifth place out of five nominees, behind F&SF, Analog, Amazing and Galaxy.  Ouch!)

Ted then discusses the recent publication by Manor Books of The Best from Amazing Stories and the forthcoming release by the same publisher of The Best from Fantastic, and we learn that bringing these anthologies to market is a process fraught with peril!  Ted grouses that Manor's typesetting is poor and that they left out the introduction he wrote for The Best from Amazing Stories, and hopes they will do a better job on The Best from Fantastic.  He then spends half a page explaining the relationship of a magazine's cover date with when it will be appearing on newsstands.

Ted finishes up this editorial with some good news: the August 1972 issue of Fantastic, which like this issue contained a Conan story by de Camp and Lin Carter, was a very big seller.  Ted muses that the Conan brand sells magazines, and that fantasy, which for decades has been outsold by science fiction, may be expanding its market share!  This leads Ted to voice what sounds like a mission statement!

...it is my conviction that, under Conan's herald, fantasy is enjoying a great popular resurgence today and that it is the function--indeed, the duty--of this magazine to join forces with the times.

Let's see what the herald of the fantasy renaissance of the early 1970s is up to!

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

King Conan of Aquilonia has just lead his army to victory over an unexpected foreign invasion force.  Conan wonders why the leader of this foreign army would suddenly be so reckless as to attack wealthy Aquilonia and its famously warlike monarch, and his suspicions are confirmed by a white druid who comes by to tell Conan that the attack was inspired by the evil wizard Thoth-Amon.  So Conan leads his army to Stygia, a land of sand dunes and palm trees and the ruined city of Nebthu, which the druid informs Conan is Thoth-Amon's current base of operations.

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" begins a year or so after the events depicted in "Witch of the Mists," the Conan story I talked about in my last blog post.  That tale featured the four greatest evil wizards in the world, including, besides Thoth-Amon, Nenaunir, a huge muscular black jungle shaman, Pra-Eun, an effeminate little Oriental, and the witch of the title, Louhi, a woman in charge of a death cult of skinny mask-wearing weirdos.  Maybe the three diversity wizards were offensive stereotypes, but each of them at least brings an interesting image to mind--Thoth-Amon is totally boring, just some guy.  Why did de Camp and Carter choose to make bland Thoth-Amon the lead villain of this story instead of one of the other, more interesting, sorcerers?  (Maybe I should be asking why de Camp and Carter didn't spend more time making Thoth-Amon more interesting.  And don't tell me Thoth-Amon is really cool in some earlier story, so de Camp and Carter don't need to expend ink making him compelling here--each story should be able to stand on its own!)

The Aquilonian army camps in the desert near Nebthu and a sphinx that looks like a hyena-headed monster.  At night a spy is spotted, and Conan, accompanied by his son and the white druid, shadow the dimly-seen enemy agent into the sphinx and underground, walking right into a trap!  In a huge circular room with seating on its perimeter, like a senate chamber or an arena, await Thoth-Amon and hundreds of evil wizards.  (When I read Andrew Offut and Richard Lyon's The Eyes of Sarsis I wondered how the economy of Tiana's world could support so many pirates, who, like government workers, don't produce wealth, just consume it, and now I'm wondering how the economy of Conan's world can support so many evil magicians, who presumably are not farming, hunting, fishing, mining, or doing anything else productive.) 

Thoth-Amon gives a speech in which he lists all the times Conan has defeated him (it's practically an ad for the Lancer line of Conan paperbacks) and then he and his battalion of wizards try to wipe out Conan's party with green rays, but the white druid ("the greatest white magician alive on Earth in our age") repels all their spells and then shatters their minds, leaving only their leader standing.  Thoth-Amon flees, but not before summoning the monster that serves as the model for the sphinx, the "ghoul-hyena of Chaos!"  This quadruped is "huge as half a hundred lions!"  The ghoul-hyena chases Conan and his friends out of the sphinx, but then the monster is distracted by the Stygian army (which is taking a break from beleaguering the Aquilonian army) and wipes them out.  The sun rises, and the sun-hating ghoul-hyena retreats to its lair before it can molest the Aquilonians.

Foreshadowing the next Conan story, the druid uses his powers to divine that Thoth-Amon is travelling south, to the jungle, so maybe we'll be seeing Nenaunir next time!

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" is certainly better than "Witch of the Mists;" it feels larger and more momentous, and I like all the military stuff, the battle scenes between the Aquilonian force and the Stygian force and seeing how Conan leads his army on its march.   The Egyptian-type setting is also better than the boring woods and swamp of the earlier story.  Of course, the structure of the climax is pretty similar to "Witch of the Mists," with Conan blundering into traps and getting saved from a magic spell by one of his friends.  I'll judge this one on the high end of "acceptable," maybe "marginally good."

A British edition of
Conan of Aquilonia

One of the things about "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" I didn't really like was the implication that Conan's wild career was the result of the "Lords of Creation" impelling Conan "out of wintry Cimmeria...to crush evil in the world's West."  I like to think of Conan as a strong-willed individual, a self-made man, who does whatever he wants in an amoral universe in which the gods are indifferent or parochial or simply selfish; embedding Conan in a Good vs Evil narrative and portraying him as a champion or a pawn of the Lords of Light doesn't seem, to me, like a very good idea.  A Conan who bends the world to his will and, if he does the right thing, does it because he chooses to do so, is more interesting than a Conan who is the obedient servant or cat's paw of some establishment or set of principles.  (I'm not at all opposed to stories about champions of good fighting agents of evil or stories about people manipulated by gods or establishments, I just don't remember the Conan of the Howard stories being that sort of character--my image of Conan is as an icon of rugged individualism and self-reliance who pursues his own course, seizing life with gusto and the hell with everybody else and their rules.)

Another gripe I have with this story as well as "Witch of the Mists" is that the magic is boring.  The stories feature the four top black magicians in the world and the top white magician in the world, but all they do is obvious stuff like shoot rays at each other and teleport.  Offutt and Lyon filled their Tiana books with much stranger and creative magic.

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" would reappear in 1977's Conan of Aquilonia.   Here in Fantastic it is accompanied by an unspecific and embarrassingly silly illustration by Billy Graham.  Graham doesn't even include Conan's mustache!

"Iron Mountain" by Gordon Eklund

It has been years since I read anything by Gordon Eklund, and a glance at old blog posts that mention him indicates I was not very impressed with his work.  Well, here's your chance to get me on your side, Gordon!

Chou Lun Chu served in Manchuria in World War II, made his way to Hong Kong, and then, ten years ago when he was 70, to San Francisco.  Since then San Francisco has been evacuated, but Chou decided to stay and is currently living the life of a scavenger!  Life for a single (the Japs killed his wife 50 years ago!) 80-year-old scavenger in a city full of smog and murderous gangs is no picnic, but Chou has no interest in moving to the countryside.

When he can't find any more canned goods in his residential hotel, Chou ventures out into the abandoned streets for the first time in a month.  He meets a young white woman, who befriends him and shares her food and water with him.  She also shares with him her little pleasures, like "shopping" in an abandoned clothing store, and explains to him (and we readers) why the city was evacuated.

This is a "literary" or "New Wave" story, more a psychological character study and collection of striking images than a plot-driven narrative.  Nothing is clearly resolved, though I guess we are supposed to think that Chou and his new friend are going to die a few hours after they meet and share a beautiful moment.  I thought the explanation of why San Francisco had been evacuated was a little silly, more like something out of a fable than a realistic story, but otherwise the tone is good and Eklund's style is good, and Chou and the young blonde are actually interesting characters.  Thumbs up for this one!   

It seems that "Iron Mountain" has never been reprinted, though the good people at Ramble House are producing a series of collections of Eklund's stories, so maybe it will eventually be back in print. 

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" by Jack C. Haldeman II

Jack C. Haldeman II is the brother of Joe Haldeman, who wrote the classic Forever War and has won a stack of awards.  Jack was a biologist who wrote quite a few SF stories and novels, many co-written with people like his brother, Jack Dann, Harry Harrison and Andrew Offutt.  Jack also won a Phoenix award from the people who put together the DeepSouthCons; this is an award I have to admit I never heard of before, a sort of lifetime achievement award given to those SF professionals who "have done a great deal for Southern fandom."

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" is one of Jack's earliest published stories, and its title has got me worried it is a sophomoric joke.  The story is accompanied by a graphic design style illustration by Don Jones which I like, however.  This is Don Jones' sole credit at isfdb, so who knows what the hell his story is.

Ugh, this thing is so tedious that while reading it I began to feel an urge to go wash the dishes and file our 2017 Columbus, OH local income taxes.  (Yes, residents of Columbus, OH are expected to pay a 2.5% income tax to the city above their federal and state income taxes.)  "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" is a first-person, present-tense, stream-of-consciousness narrative of a guy's dream in which he gets attacked in the shower of his hotel room, then watches a kid vomit after eating cigarette butts, then meets a giant wolverine in a movie theater.  Maybe I am supposed to appreciate this plotless mess as an indictment of U. S. intervention in the Vietnam War and of American TV and cinema, which have scrambled the narrator's mind?  The story is also full of leaden jokes.  Take a gander:

If we look at "Iron Mountain" as an example of literary or New Wave SF that works, I think we can see "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" as an example of literary or New Wave SF that fails utterly, abandoning plot but not replacing plot with human feeling or adept writing or good images, just self indulgent rambling.  Quite bad.

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" has not been republished anyplace.

**********

I'm skipping Part Two of Alexei and Cory Panshin's novel The Son of Black Morca.  If you are curious about it, check out tarbandu's review of the Panshin's novel; he read it in its book form, which bore the title Earth Magic.  Jeff Jones contributes a fine illustration to its appearance here in Fantastic, July 1973, a male figure.  (I tweeted the picture on Jones' birthday back in 2017.)

In the August 1972 issue of Fantastic, editor Ted White explained to a reader that, if the magazine staff finds they don't have enough material to fill up an issue, the publisher (without consulting Ted) will make up the shortage by reprinting a "portfolio" of old art.  After Part Two of The Son of Black Morca we find just such a portfolio, eight pages dedicated to Wesso's illustrations for the 1932 appearance in Amazing of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Invaders From the Infinite.  Some years ago I read the 1961 version of Invaders From the Infinite and wrote a negative review of the novel on Amazon.  These Wesso illos, however, are charming.  (What's not to like about a picture of a single space warship incinerating an entire modern city?)

Next up is the Panshins' SF in Dimension column.  This is the final installment of SF in Dimension to appear in Fantastic, and takes as its topic the period 1968-1972, which the Panshins see as a period of "imbalance and stagnation."  The authors dismiss Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthologies and Michael Moorcock's New Worlds as failed efforts to break out of SF's current doldrums, but are more impressed by recent "introspective" works like R. A. Lafferty's Fourth Mansions, Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, Robert Silverberg's Time of Changes and Joanna Russ' And Chaos Died.  The Panshins in this column get psychological and philosophical, even mystical, suggesting SF's problem is like that of an adolescent faced with the crisis of having to mature into adulthood, a problem for which the experiences of his or her earlier life offer no solution.  "These crises, these critical moments of impasse, continue to occur all throughout a lifetime.  They can only be solved by growth, by rebirth as a larger person.....It is these critical moments of impasse that are symbolized in fiction."  As examples of this symbolism the Panshins present long quotes and analyses of passages from Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea.  The authors finish up on an optimistic note, predicting that this period of stagnation in SF will end in 1973 and that the "speculative fantasy of the next years will be a great literature;" they even suggest that SF of the 1970s might guide our entire society in a much-needed process of rebirth!   

In his book review column, Fritz Leiber looks at an anthology of horror stories about cats, Michael Perry's Beware of the Cat, and a novel by Avram Davidson, The Phoenix and the Mirror.  Fritz comments on each of the cat stories in Perry's volume, praising most but judging Algernon Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries" "by far the best in this book."  In the review of The Phoenix and the Mirror Fritz asserts that the best fantasies are those that are "based on stuff that is half history" that strive for a sort of realism and are "fortified by a deep knowledge of the human condition." He lauds Davidson and his novel for meeting these criteria and presenting many unforgettable scenes.

Then come the letters.  There are two pages on which a postal worker, Ted, a reader, and even a U. S. senator opine on the United States Postal Service in response to an increase (of 100%!) in the cost to publishers of shipping magazines.  I was surprised to learn that the Post Office charges were not determined simply by weight and distance, but in large part based on how much advertising a magazine had; shipping a page of advertising cost almost three times what it cost to ship a page of fiction.  (The postal worker says about 6% of an issue of Amazing is devoted to ads, while Playboy hits 80%.)

In an amusing letter a guy denounces "Witch of the Mists" as "abominable drivel" and even more ferociously slags illustrator Henry Roland, whom he claims plagiarized his illos for that story!.  Given a chance to respond, Roland resorts to ad hominem, saying that the poison that drips from his detractor's pen surely indicates he is a "very unhappy person."  Then Ted gets in an argument with a guy who didn't like Ted's and Harlan Ellison's chapters in All in Color for a Dime, a book of essays about Golden Age comic books.  This guy says Ted and Harlan's writing is "subliterate," and Ted wittily responds by saying that, no, it is your writing that is sub-literate!  The fireworks continue with an underhanded attack on Star Trek from a guy who writes in to share sarcastic plot ideas for the show in the event it is revived.  Then we get a nice helping of SF snobbery, as a letter writer and Ted goof on the TV show UFO and agree that SF is not very popular because normies are scaredy cats--the reader says people are scared of technology and the future, and Ted asserts that "science fiction scares most people--its very precepts scare them."

Lester G. Boutillier, apparently some kind of superfan who attends many SF gatherings, contributes a letter that takes up two and a half pages.  He addresses a number of topics, including the whole postage increase issue (his father works for the USPS), but he is at his most entertaining when criticizing Poul Anderson (whom he admits seemed "a very nice man" when he met him at an Apollo launch party) for including too much "far right" politics in his writing, calling Anderson the "William Buckley (or perhaps I should say Ayn Rand) of science fiction," and complaining that there is too much nudity at SF convention costume events.  (A pinko and a prude?  This guy sounds like a real piece of work!)

Someone writes in to tell Ted that he was tricked into printing as new in the October 1972 Fantastic a story by Eric Frank Russell, "Vampire From the Void," that had already been published back in 1939 in the British magazine Fantasy.  Ted says he hasn't read the '39 story, but he doesn't think Russell would do such a thing.  (The wikipedia article on Fantasy actually addresses this issue, blaming Russell's agent for deceiving our long-suffering Ted.)  Ted finishes the letters with a page-long letter from somebody who thinks Ted has greatly improved the magazine over the last two years, and who likes both Poul Anderson's and Henry Roland's work.  So there, haters!

On the last page of Fantastic of July 1973, in the classifieds, we have some ads from New York witches, no doubt worthy rivals to the Missouri witches from our last blog post, and an ad for a book by the astrologer Solastro that will teach you how to win at the race track--you need merely conduct a simple numerological and alphabetical analysis of each horse's number and name to identify the winning horse 67% of the time!  Read more about Solastro and his system at this website, then get your ass to the Aqueduct and rake in the Benjamins!

There is also a mysterious ad for Richard E. Geis' fanzine Science Fiction Review which draws you in by announcing it is "adult," "outrageous," "uncensored" and "shocking," but doesn't tell you the periodical's title!  (It seems that Geis' zine went through periodic name changes.)  A quick look at isfdb entries on Science Fiction Review certainly makes it look attractive--besides all the great cover illustrations by Stephen Fabian there are many letters from and interviews with famous SF writers.

Shocking and uncensored covers of Richard Geis' Science Fiction Review
by Stephen Fabian--don't show these to Lester Boutillier!

A fun issue.  More Conan and more problems for poor Ted in our next Fantastic episode!

Fantastic Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories, August 1972

Well, we just read Andrew Offutt and Richard Lyon's sword and sorcery trilogy War of the Wizards, the second volume of which was dedicated to L. Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber.  So it seems an appropriate time to read some fantasy-related work by those two influential writers.  One publication to which both de Camp and Leiber contributed was the August 1972 issue of Fantastic.  Over the years, via ebay and visits to flea markets, I have accumulated a bunch of issues of Fantastic, and this issue is in my collection.  Let's take a look at this "All-Star 20th Anniversary Issue" of the magazine--you can read along without having to scour the tables of flea markets or the listings at ebay by visiting the internet archive.

Jeff Jones provides the cover art, a sort of cthonic, primordial, monumental image of Conan--the Cimmerian looks like he is emerging out of a mass of stone, maybe like one of Michelangelo's famous unfinished sculptures of slaves.  Appropriate for an unvarnished, uncivilized, self-made man who owes his success and survival to his own native cunning and physical strength.  Among the listed contributors, besides de Camp and Leiber, we see two MPorcius faves, Bob Shaw and Barry Malzberg, as well as critical darling James Tiptree, Jr.  This is an exciting issue!

First we have Ted White's seven-page editorial.  (No doubt you remember Ted White as author of Spawn of the Death Machine and Harlan Ellison's long-suffering friend.)  Ted presents an interesting history of Fantastic, its many editors and its ups and downs and its relationships with other SF magazines, and gives us insight into his own editorial philosophy (he thinks a SF magazine should reflect its editor's personality, and include features like editorials and letters columns that generate a conversation and a community among SF professionals and fans.)  He finishes by bragging that Fantastic has received its first ever Hugo nomination!  Good work, Ted!

Next is the first half of Avram Davidson's The Forges of Nainland Are Cold.  I have decided to put off reading this novel, which appeared in book form under the title Ursus of Ultima Thule.  I will say that I like the illustration by Mike Kaluta, a stark female nude in front of a massive gnarled tree, that accompanies the piece.

"The Witch of the Mists" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

There's Conan and Conn, fighting some
crazy monster (could that be
Nenaunir on the flying beast?)  I feel like
Conn is facing the wrong direction.

I guess nowadays it is conventional to think de Camp and Carter are poor writers and their Conan stories are crummy, and I myself consider de Camp and Carter to be pretty mediocre, but let's give this story a fair and open-minded look.

"Witch of the Mists" would later appear in the 1977 book of four Conan stories by de Camp and Carter, Conan of Aquilonia.  Here in Fantastic the story is illustrated by Harry Roland, who, following the text, gives Conan a mustache!  This is an older Conan, whose mustache and famous "square-cut mane" are "touched with gray!"

Conan is King of Aquilonia, richest kingdom of the West, and is out hunting with some of his courtiers and his twelve-year-old son, Conn.  Conn gets lost chasing a white stag; the stag turns out to be an illusion, conjured by the witch Louhi to trap him!  Having captured the king's son, the witch and her tall skinny henchmen use him as bait to draw Conan away from his companions.  Conan follows the kidnappers' trail through a swamp and across the border of Aquilonia.  Along the way he is robbed by a pack of inbred degenerates (the descendants of criminals who have hidden in the swamp for generations--I thought this a Lovecraftian touch) who steal his horse, armor and weapons, so that Conan has to proceed practically naked, reduced to fighting off wild beasts with a stick!  When he gets to Louhi's castle, the HQ of her death cult, he is imprisoned with his son.

Louhi calls a meeting of the world's greatest wizards, and three other evil weirdos--Thoth-Amon of the West; Nenaunir, a huge muscular black shaman from the South; and an effeminate little sorcerer from the Far East, Pra-Eun-- teleport in to discuss what to do with Conan.  When Louhi tries to prove to Thoth-Amon that the King of Aquilonia is not the hot stuff he's been telling her he is by having one of her cultists humiliatingly cudgel the Cimmerian, Conan turns the tables on his tormentors and he and Conn fight all four wizards, plus Louhi's coven of death worshipers, with whatever furniture they can snatch up and throw.  During the fracas the Aquilonian knights finally catch up to their sovereign.  Louhi and her entire cult, along with Pra-Eun, are killed, while Thoth-Amon and Nenaunir teleport away.

This is a pretty routine and underwhelming story.  Nothing in "Witch of the Mists" feels fresh, and de Camp and Carter are incapable of elevating the pedestrian material with any literary style and fail to imbue it with a sense of drama or horror or fun.  The battle between the barbarian king of the most sophisticated nation of Caucasians and a multi-ethnic mixed-gender cabal of the planet's four most powerful wizards should feel grand and momentous, and come at the end of a long build up, but, shoehorned into this brief story about a kid lost in the woods, it feels small and petty, like a bar brawl.  Too bad; I'm judging this one merely acceptable--it feels like filler.

"Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket" by James Tiptree, Jr.

Alice Sheldon, the woman who wrote under the male pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr., is one of those SF writers the critics and college professors are always gushing about.  Early last year I read and liked a few stories by Tiptree; let's see if she continues to live up to the hype.

It is the 21st century!  The east and west coasts of the United States are vast megalopolises, Boswash and San Frangeles!  But our story takes placed in sparsely populated Alberta, where our protagonist, Dov Rapelle, young geo-ecologist, has a cabin in the snowy wilderness.

One day Rapelle is just hanging around in his cabin when a helicopter drops off a naked teen-aged girl ("sixteen at the oldest") nearby.  When he gets her inside he wraps her in his Hudson Bay blanket (wikipedia is telling me that the Hudson's Bay point blanket is an iconic article associated with Canada, and Tiptree tells us that this blanket has been an element of Dov's youthful erotic fantasies.)  The mysterious girl proclaims she loves him and starts grabbing at his pants, initiating a graphic sex scene in which she loses her virginity.  It turns out that the girl, Eulalia Aerovulpa, is a "time jumper;" her 75-year-old self, sixty years in the future, has switched consciousnesses with her 16-year-old self.  In one of those time paradox thingies which always hurts my brain, elderly Eulalia remembered how her marriage to Dov started, and has come back in time to make sure she meets Dov and kindles their love.  In an additional SF twist, teenage Eulalia's wealthy parents have had her conditioned to find men and sex disgusting so she won't get mixed up with males who are after her money, but elderly Eulalia knows the secret to undoing the conditioning: "The man whose toe she bites...she will love that man and that man only so long as she lives."  She bites Dov's toe after their second bout of intercourse, so, when 75-year-old Eulalie's visit to 16-year-old Eulalia's body ends after a few hours, young Eulalia is as madly in love with Dov as senior citizen Eulalia was.  (This presents the sort of philosophical conundrum presented by the love potion in the story of Tristan and Isolde: is Dov and Eulalia's love "real," or just the artificial product of psychological manipulation?)

Dov and Eulalia get married and briefly enjoy a happy life together, but Eulalia isn't content to let things be.  A few months after their wedding, Eve-like, Eulalia convinces Dov that they should use the time-jumping apparatus to learn about the future (and to give their elderly future selves a little vacation from senescence.)  Disaster occurs, and Dov is killed.  Now Eulalia will have to endure 59 years without the man she is hopelessly in love with, her only comfort the knowledge that she will spend a few torrid hours with him when she is 75.

Perhaps it is noteworthy, this story having been written by a woman masquerading as a man, that the tragic victim of the tale for whom our hearts are meant to go out is the woman, even though the story is written more or less from the point of view of the man, and he dies because of the woman's recklessness.  Also, Tiptree has Dov surprised by Eulalia's taking the sexual initiative, telling us that in his sex fantasies Dov is the aggressive partner.

This story isn't bad, but I'm not crazy about it.  The somewhat complicated structure works (though I'm not quite sure I like that the psychological trigger of toe-biting works on the teenage consciousness even though that consciousness is absent from the body when the toe-biting occurs) but the whole story is too jokey and silly for the tragic ending to affect me.  Acceptable.

"Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket" would later appear in the oft-reprinted and oft-translated collection of Tiptree stories entitled Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home and was chosen by Barry Malzberg for inclusion in the volume he edited for ibooks in 2003 entitled The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time.

"Allowances" by Barry Malzberg

Speak of the devil!  "Allowances" was reprinted in 1974 in Malzberg's collection Out From Ganymede.  I own Out From Ganymede, but haven't read "Allowances" yet.

The text of the story consists of the written testimony of eight employees of a race track and one customer, testimony presumably elicited by the management of the track or the police or some other government representatives.  (Malzberg usually writes in the first person and often writes about horse racing.)  Taken all together, these various reports tell the story of the day an insane and violent man came to the race track and made a serious nuisance of himself.  This man wears odd clothes and insists he is an alien.  His mental illness is, apparently, the result of his recognition that the universe is unpredictable (as symbolized by the unpredictability of the horse races) and general feeling that society is going downhill--machines dehumanizing life, the government becoming less trustworthy, etc.  (The testimony of the witnesses indicates they also feel life is getting worse, many phrases like "nuts now being all over the place" and "unless the Racing Commission severely tightens its rules and regulations I see no future for the sport" crop up in their testimony.)  The "alien" begs people for advice on who will win the races, even accusing them of fixing the races.  He believes that if he can't win a bet, his alien civilization will suffer, and in desperation he threatens dire consequences if he should fail in his mission of placing a winning bet today.

"Give me a tip or I'll blow up your planet!"  

(Malzberg stories usually include an insane person, and this person is often preoccupied with alien or supernatural beings and catastrophic events like the alien conquest of the Earth or the coming of the Messiah or the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, events for which they feel some level of responsibility.  There's a story in which a guy has to win a chess game or aliens will win a space war, for example, and another in which an employee of the New York City government has to fulfill one of his quotidian job tasks in order to impress alien overlords.)

As a coward, a cheapo, and someone who admires asceticism and fears he has a genetic predisposition to addiction, I avoid gambling and know almost nothing about betting on horse races.  So I had to google around to figure out what the hell this story's title referred to.  It appears that the second level of races a horse can participate in are "allowance" races, in which, based on their records, some horses have to carry more weight than others, to make the race more competitive.  A horse that has lost a bunch of races will be "allowed" to carry a few pounds less weight than a more successful horse, is how I am understanding it.

This is Malzberg doing what Mazlberg does, and if you are hip to Malzberg's jive, you will appreciate it (I rather like it), but if you are sick of Malzberg treading the same ground again and again, or never liked Malzberg in the first place, this story is not going to change your mind.

"The Brink" by Bob Shaw

I like Shaw and was looking forward to this one.  Unfortunately, it is a very short and gimmicky story that goes nowhere.

"The Brink" is a Cold War story and the title refers to "brinksmanship," the kind of thing we talked a lot about in history and political science courses when I was at Rutgers in the last years of the '80s and the first years of the '90s.  An American aircrew is transporting a superweapon ("a nuclear device which yielded its energy over a period of years instead of microseconds") to the Far East, where it will be used to interdict Communist traffic on the future equivalent of the Ho Chi Min Trail in some unspecified jungle.  The aircrew's huge cargo plane (which one character compares to the flying machines seen in the old film Shape of Things to Come,) is called Icarus, and the superweapon is repeatedly compared to the Sun.  The tone of the story is gloomy and foreboding, and it is implied that participation in the Cold War has wrecked the economy of the United States but not that of Great Britain.  (The UK is like Daedalus, the clever and creative father, with America as the reckless son.)

The cheap ending of the story is that, while the rest of the plane's crew is napping or in the cargo hold, the pilot sees a man with wings on his back flying through the air.  This birdman gets in the way of the Icarus and is struck and plummets to the surface, and, presumably, to his death.  No doubt the point of the story (besides being a sort of wish fulfillment story for Englishmen in which sophisticated and wise Britain is shown to be vastly superior to the upstart USA) is that the American use of technology to oppose Communism is self-destructive hubris, just like Icarus' flight in ancient myth.

Stories which portray the United States as the villain in the Cold War always stick in my craw anyway, and the in-your-face sophomoric and pedantic use of classical symbolism in this one had me groaning.  A waste of time, even at only three pages.   

"The Brink" was later republished in the 1976 collection Cosmic Kaleidoscope.

**********

I'm skipping "Agony and Remorse on Rhesus IX" by "Ova Hamlet."  The Ova Hamlet stories are parodies written by Richard Lupoff, each written in imitation of a different SF writer.  I have an aversion to this kind of broad and obvious humor and "Agony and Remorse on Rhesus IX," Ted tells us in the intro, is a parody of Phillip K. Dick.  I am not familiar with Dick's oeuvre, so I probably wouldn't even get the joke if I read it.

After the Lupoff piece comes an installment of Alexei and Cory Panshin's critical history of SF, "SF in Dimension," these 12 pages covering 1926 to 1935.  This article, for the SF fan interested in the period, is very engaging and very fun--it includes a long description of and excerpt from E. E. Smith's Skylark of Space, which the Panshins regard as extremely influential, a longish discussion of Stanley Weinbaum, covers the development of sword and sorcery as well as space opera and alien exploration-type SF,  and places changes in SF in the larger context of changes in mainstream popular culture.  Very cool!

Next up is Fritz Leiber's seven page feature of three book reviews, "Fantasy Books."  First Fritz talks about Robert Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil, which we at MPorcius Fiction Log just read!  Fritz starts off by telling us that Heinlein is his favorite SF writer, and that his favorite Heinleins are probably Double Star, Spaceman Jones, and Time for the Stars, and then proceeds to discuss Heinlein's entire body of work in a provocative way that includes comparing it to his own writing.  Very good.

Leiber's second review is of an anthology edited by Lin Carter, New Worlds for Old, which provides him an occasion to discuss fantasy literature in general and E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros in particular.  Finally, Leiber heaps praise on an odd book, Songs and Sonnets Atlantean, by Donald S. Fryer.  According to Fritz, this collection of poems, ostensibly translations of verse written by inhabitants of lost Atlantis accompanied by notes from 20th-century scholars, presents "a total picture of a fabulous Atlantis...more convincing and touching than that of a novel might be."

In the back of this issue of Fantastic are thirteen pages of letters (and Ted's detailed responses to the correspondents.)  Half of these pages are devoted to arguments about the TV show Star Trek; it seems Ted slagged the show in an earlier issue, inspiring a legion of Trekkies (Trekkers?) to rise to the program's defense.  There are also letters complaining that the magazine includes too many novels that are published in book form soon after, or even before, the magazine hits the newsstands.  And there is quite a bit of talk about how difficult it can be to find Fantastic, as the staff of some drug stores never even put the magazine on display.  Ted's responses are an eye-opening look into the life of a magazine editor and his surprisingly limited authority; again and again Ted explains that there are parts of the magazine over which he has little control, like the Table of Contents, use of some illustrations, and even the "typographical makeup of the title page of the stories--which I do not see until I have an actual copy of the issue in hand." 

The last two pages of Fantastic's 20th Anniversary issue consist of classified ads.  These ads are pretty fun, including as they do an ad for an anti-gravity device, an ad for a free book on how to hypnotize people, and an ad from the "School of Wicca" in Missouri.  "Obtain serenity and fulfillment," the ad promises, and offers a "serenity guide" and "protective pentacle" for only one dollar!  One hopes that reading about the less than serene and fulfilling conclusion to Louhi's career as a witch (screeching in agony as she burned to death, a barbarian monarch having heaved a brazier-full of hot coals on her) didn't discourage serenity seekers from sending their dollar to the witches of Missouri.

The School of Wicca (now the Church and School of Wicca, a wise
 tax move!) is apparently still in the business of selling 
protective pentacles, though this institution of higher learning (they offer doctorates!)
 has moved from Missouri to West Virginia.

**********

In his editorial Ted White argues that nonfiction "features" are an important component of a SF magazine, and his own magazine proves him right.  This SF fan found White's, the Panshins', and Leiber's nonfiction contributions to Fantastic's August 1972 issue more entertaining than much of the fiction! This magazine is full of info and educated opinions about 20th-century SF, and I recommend it unreservedly to people who care about that sort of thing.  The Shaw and Tiptree pieces seem below average for those writers, and the Conan story is a weak example of the genre, but the Malzberg is a good specimen of that idiosyncratic scribbler's output.  (And I do plan to read the Davidson novel someday!)

More Conan, Fritz Leiber, and Hugo news from a 1970s Fantastic in our next episode!

I Will Fear No Evil by Robert A. Heinlein

I find I like being female.  But it's different.  Now what shall we wear?

My copy; purchased at a Goodwill in
Indianola, Iowa in 2014

For almost two months I have been occupied by the move of MPorcius HQ from a moldy basement in Ohio to a smelly second-story apartment in Maryland, by holiday travel, and with reading 1970s biographies of Samuel Johnson by John Wain and Christopher Hibbert.*  But today I am back in the science fiction ghetto, dealing with one of that ghetto's most prominent citizens, Robert A. Heinlein, one of the foremost practitioners of the hard SF that promotes science and engineering, the libertarian SF that argues for the primacy of the individual against the government and the collective, and the taboo-challenging SF that depicts new or unconventional sexual and marital relationships.  The topic at hand: 1970's I Will Fear No Evil, which I read over 30 years ago in my youth, and reread in fits and starts over the past few busy weeks of driving cross country, celebrating the holidays with my in-laws, waiting at government offices and lugging my belongings to a storage unit.

Johann Sebastian Bach Smith (again with the "Smith!") is one of the world's most successful businessmen, the head of Smith Enterprises Ltd, a vast business empire which includes "sea ranches" where unlucky workers get eaten by sharks, a textbook publishing division and a machine tools division.  A self-made man and World War II veteran, Smith is over ninety and at death's door, monitored by nurses and computers 24-7!  But he is not ready to shuffle off this mortal coil just yet--his mind is still sharp as a tack, and he brags that he can remember yesterday's stock prices and "do logarithmic calculations without tables" (your humble blogger can't remember what he ate yesterday and doesn't know what a logarithmic calculation is!)  Smith's solution: becoming the world's first brain transplant beneficiary!  Smith orders his staff to find a young healthy body whose brain is legally dead and which shares his rare blood type, and through a tragic set of circumstances his brain ends up in the body of his beautiful twenty-something secretary, Eunice Barca!  A woman!  Even more incredibly, Eunice's consciousness has somehow survived death and the operation, and it shares Johann's brain with him!  (Heinlein leaves open the possibility that Eunice's presence is not "real," but a product of brain damage or mental illness, and Johann doesn't tell anyone that he is in constant communication with Eunice's "ghost" for fear he will be immediately diagnosed as insane.)

As you perhaps know from reading my blog posts about Leigh Brackett's Sword of Rhiannon, Edmond Hamilton's "The Avenger from Atlantis," Tanith Lee's Volkhavaar, and other works, I love any story in which people's brains or souls or consciousnesses are moved from one body to another, and/or in which different consciousnesses inhabit the same body and struggle for control or learn to live in harmony.  No doubt this fascination of mine springs from my fear of death and experience of loneliness and alienation from my fellow man.  But while the aforementioned Brackett, Hamilton and Lee stories are fast-paced adventure capers with horror elements, I Will Fear No Evil is a slow-paced philosophical novel about love and sex with very little dramatic tension.  The topic of a man unexpectedly finding himself in a woman's body could serve as fertile ground for a story of body horror, or a tale of identity crisis, or a feminist satire, but Heinlein does not take any of these tacks.

Instead of finding his new new body repulsive or even disconcerting, Johann embraces womanhood, taking the name "Joan" and immediately demanding cosmetics and nightgowns and an appointment with a hairdresser!  Within days Joan is going on extravagant shopping trips and enthusiastically throwing herself at every man who crosses her path!  In the second half of the novel Joan has sex with Johann's best friend, septuagenarian lawyer Jacob Salomon, her doctor, and various other of her employees, both male and female.  (Like Tiresias, star of Greek mythology and English art rock, Johann/Joan finds that sex is far more enjoyable as a woman than a man.)  With equal gusto Joan makes a beeline to the sperm bank and has herself impregnated with Johann's sperm, so that she becomes, more or less, both father and mother of the child she carries.

The novel briefly touches on legal issues surrounding the need of the courts to figure out if the person with Johann's brain and Eunice's body is legally Johann, Eunice, neither or both, because some of Johann's legal (though not biological) descendants hope to get their hands on his fortune through legal maneuvers, but these ineffectual antagonists never have a chance.  Heinlein devotes far more energy to following Joan's efforts to seduce and then wed Jacob, and to comfort Eunice's many friends and lovers who miss her and might find the presence of her body still walking around (with a ninety-year old dude's brain in it!) unnerving.

The lion's share of the novel's text, which weighs in at 500 pages, consists of conversations between the witty, impeccably decent and supercompetent characters (Johann is the world's greatest businessman, Eunice is the best possible secretary and kindest and most giving of individuals, Jacob is the world's greatest lawyer and great in the sack, the guy who performs the brain transplant is the world's finest surgeon, Eunice's husband Joe is a genius artist and a noble soul who doesn't care about money, etc.) and these conversations consist mostly of these paragons expressing their love for each other but sometimes expressing their (and presumably the author's) opinions.  There are also lots of descriptions of people's, especially women's, attire.  Conflicts or setbacks are few and far between.

One of the ecstatic blurbs on the back cover of my edition of the novel refers to the book's "frightening vision of the future" and the likelihood that it might be come true.  We learn about this "future world" of the early 21st-century in dribs and drabs, in characters' dialogue and in brief satirical segments that describe current events.  The world is overpopulated (overpopulation, Johann asserts, is the wellspring of all the other problems) and polluted, and the government is corrupt and incompetent, a welfare state that hands out generous benefits to the poor but whose efforts to control population (through a eugenics system of licenses that tries to limit who can reproduce) and crime (large swathes of urban landscape are no-go zones called "Abandoned Areas" which the police refuse to enter) and even educate children (many adults are illiterate) are an absolute failure.  Rich people like Johann and Jacob are driven around by thuggish guards in over-sized armored limos equipped with gun turrets, and Eunice's untimely (but opportune!) death is at the hands of a mugger in an elevator.

Sexy!  And patriotic?

Obviously Heinlein is vehemently opposed to all this socialism and laments the mass crime and pollution, but the novel's setting also features developments Heinlein (I presume) would have welcomed, like acceptance of public nudity and a looser attitude about sex--Eunice's marriage was an open one, and I think all the main characters have homosexual affairs.  Johann and Eunice describe to each other their early sex lives, and Heinlein uses Johann's reminiscences to suggest that the Victorians and the people of the early 20th-century were just about as sex-crazed as the college kids of the swinging Sixties, but were less open and more hypocritical about it.  Some readers may look askance at some of the sexual relationships described; for example, Johann was seduced by a thirty-five-year-old married woman when he was fourteen, and when he was twenty he had sex with a sixteen-year-old who would become his first wife.  (If there is any tension in this novel it is the tension between the author's and the reader's beliefs.)

I Will Fear No Evil presents a less than rosy image of what people in 1970 would have considered a traditional marriage: all the marriages in the story are either "open" or failed--all feature enthusiastic "swinging" or surreptitious adultery.  Johann was married four times, and all four of his wives cheated on him and gave birth to children fathered by other men.  Johann has no biological children, and his legal heirs--four granddaughters--are the story's rarely invoked and totally ineffectual villains.  One way of looking at the novel is to see the union of Johann's brain and Eunice's body, which unexpectedly renders their consciousnesses inseparable, as a sort of allegory of a perfect marriage--they are a til-death-do-us-part corporate entity who share their lives in the most direct and intimate way possible, help each other learn and grow and need never again fear loneliness.

I'm scratching my head over the
cover to this British edition

Another way of looking at I Will Fear No Evil is as a novel celebrating self-creation, the fact that you can be who you want to be, you fashion your own identity and need not accept what your parents and society have made you via genetics and culture.  Johann changed his name from Schmidt to Smith when he enlisted in the army in 1941, and the book includes multiple conversations with lawyers about how your legal name in the USA is whatever you say it is.  Johann wasn't born rich, but turned himself into the world's preeminent businessman, while Eunice's husband Joe, the sensitive and honorable artist, came from a family of worthless, dishonest, grasping scum.  The happening young people of the novel's early 21st-century believe there are six sexes, and people in the book decide what "sex" (the word incorporates what we today call "sexual orientation") they are; while today's conventional wisdom is that homosexuals are "born that way," Heinlein in the novel seems to suggest gay sex is a practice any open-minded person might simply opt to indulge in.  Late in the novel, discussing the parentage of the child she bears,  Johann/Joan brags "I did this on my own.  I alone am parent to this child."  It is also perhaps significant that Johann dismisses out of hand behaviorist psychological theories.

While I Will Fear No Evil is a celebration of individualism and tells you that you don't have to respect old taboos or follow in your parents' footsteps or take the authority of the government seriously, it is not a book that advocates being a hermit and ignoring everybody else.  Everybody in the novel is constantly complimenting and hugging and kissing each other, so you never forget that the main point of the book is that we should all love each other and that sex is an expression of love that should not inspire jealousy or be subject to restrictive rules.  The book also shows the deference to the cognitive elite (and contempt for the common masses) that we often see in classic SF; obvious examples are Asimov's Foundation stories and Sturgeon's award-winning "Slow Sculpture," fiction in which the authors advocate that shadowy unaccountable geniuses manipulate human civilization for its own good.  Public-spirited Johann tries to use his wealth to help humanity; most prominent in the novel is his subtle attempt to mold the gene pool by financing a eugenics foundation that collects the sperm of above-average men and uses it impregnate above-average female volunteers.  On the flip side we see the other end of the cognitive and moral spectra in action, as Heinlein depicts how the venal news media whips up riotous mobs with ease with misleading and salacious news reports.

Jack Gaughan goes literal for the magazine edition,
showing ancient Johann's withered mug
and Eunice in one of her boob-baring outfits

(A related theme we see in much of former naval officer Heinlein's work is the need for the crew of a ship to obey their captain without question, and this shows up in I Will Fear No Evil, with Johann demanding similar obedience from his employees.)

Heinlein's novels often include anti-bigotry messages, messages both explicit (characters deliver speeches denouncing racism, for example) and implicit (such as the inclusion of admirable characters who are not white, not male, and/or not human) and I Will Fear No Evil does the same.  Johann, whose grandparents were immigrants from Catholic southern Germany, grew up in what he calls variously "the Bible Belt" and "the Middle West" is best friends with the Jewish Jacob, and offhand I can recall admirable minor characters who are black, Polish and gay.  Probably most significantly, Heinlein leaves Eunice's ethnicity a mystery; we learn she was born an Iowa farm girl (like my mother-in-law!) but there is never a direct declaration of her racial background and I didn't notice any details about her skin or hair or whatever that might provide a clue to her ethnicity.  Heinlein seems to be telling us that what mattered about Eunice was not her ethnic identity, but that she loved everyone (as one minor character puts it, she treated everyone "like a human being.")

(If we want to nitpick, it is true that these "diverse" characters are perhaps stereotypes: the Jewish lawyer, the religious black man, and the sexy female secretary.)

I think it may also be worth considering what relationship I Will Fear No Evil might have to the famous "New Wave" movement in SF; some of the gushing blurbs on the back of my copy seem to be raising the issue by claiming "Those who have thought of science fiction as only child's play will see how wrong they are" and that the novel is "a sign of the changing nature of science fiction."  Most important in this context is I Will Fear No Evil's subject matter, which includes a minimum of high technology and adventure and instead focuses on gender roles and sex, and to a lesser extent psychology and the aforementioned dystopic society.  Perhaps more remarkable, however, is a passage early in the book, a page-long stream-of-consciousness section full of homophonic wordplay that depicts Johann Smith's state of mind just after his operation; this struck me as "New Wavey" in its technique.  And maybe the prominent role of yoga and meditation in the novel is New Wavey? 

I am in broad sympathy with Heinlein's beliefs and admire much of his work, but I know he has many detractors, and it is easy to see how a hostile reviewer could make hay out of this novel.  Through a feminist lens, Johann is a man exploiting a woman's body, and one might see the process of a man putting one of his organs into a woman's body and thereby gaining control of her as a sort of allegory of rape or symbolic depiction of marriage as a patriarchal institution.  And of course the book suggests that the characteristic role of the woman is to comfort people, give birth to children, and look good, not run businesses or wage wars or create art, as the men in the book do.  Through a Marxist lens, Johann is a member of the upper-middle class, exploiting one of his proletarian employees.  Eunice never expresses any resentment or envy about the treatment of women or the lower classes in the society that Jacob and Johann have fought their way to the top of.  Conservatives might argue that Heinlein's advocacy of free love fails to adequately address the risks and responsibilities of sexual activity--you can perhaps dismiss pregnancy and disease by referring to high tech medicine, but what about the jealousy and possessiveness that characterize most people's sexual feelings?     

To return to the plot, after Joan has comforted all of Eunice's old friends and straightened out Johann's legal affairs, Heinlein wraps up the book with a pair of deaths.  Jacob dies (he's an elderly gent, after all) and somehow his consciousness ends up in Johann's brain along with Eunice's, so their ideal marriage is now a threesome.  This appears, to me, to be conclusive proof that Eunice's presence in Johann's brain is the product of mental illness and not some kind of biological phenomenon resulting from his brain being connected to her body.  With her elderly husband dead, Joan volunteers for the Moon colony--one of the recurring themes of Heinlein's work is that you can leave the oppression and corruption of a decadent civilization by moving to the frontier (we see this in Between Planets, The Rolling Stones, Friday, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, etc.)  Joan dies while giving birth to her child, just after arriving on Luna.

Karel Thole delivers a pleasant and
appropriate cover for this German edition

Heinlein is an important author in the field so if you are interested in the history of SF or the depiction of gender roles or sex changes or brain transplants in SF you should probably read I Will Fear No Evil.  But can I recommend it is a piece of entertainment or literature?  That is a little trickier.  The novel presents many opportunities for thought on various issues, and Heinlein's style is smooth, but these 500 pages can feel long and repetitious, even tedious, and there is almost no conflict--it really can feel like page after page of people saying they love each other and describing their clothes and make up.  As a story about love and sex instead of a story about a dangerous journey, or an episode in a war, or people trying to solve a mystery, we can't expect a bunch of action scenes, but I Will Fear No Evil has none of the tension you find in a compelling love story--there's no fear of rejection, no unrequited desire, no jealousy, no star-crossed lovers kept apart by social mores or family feuds; everybody adores each other and is attracted to each other from the word "go," and they are all libertarians or libertines living in a libidinous society so there are no inhibitions to be overcome.  (Maybe I should also point out that there are no actual sex scenes; this book is by no means titillating or pornographic in the way a Piers Anthony novel might be.)  It is easy to see why fans of Heinlein's earlier work like adventure writer E. C. Tubb, who said in his 1979 interview with Charles Platt that he used to like Heinlein but that Stranger in a Strange Land and Heinlein's later work were no good and even hinted that any positive critical attention they received was somehow dishonest, would be disappointed in this long, slow, rambling testimonial in favor of free love.  I'll say that I Will Fear No Evil is acceptable for the initiated, but it is not the kind of thrill ride or barrel of laughs I can recommend to a wide audience.

**********
*In his introduction to his 1974 biography of the Great Cham of Literature, novelist and poet John Wain tells us that part of his project in writing the book is to make Johnson, famous as a Tory and an essentially Christian and conservative character, palatable to lefties, and Wain does throw around such verbiage as "eternal tug of war between labor and capital" and "plutocracy" that, I guess, will appeal to Marxists.  Wain, however, expends a lot more ink comparing the physically and culturally beautiful England of the 18th century with the industrial and technological England of the late 20th century, which Wain bemoans has become a cultural "ruin" in which every material thing is "hideous."  Wain is also the kind of biographer who makes wild guesses about long dead people's states of mind and reconstructs relationships and conversations based on no evidence whatsoever.  (There are no footnotes in the book, which is based entirely on published sources.)  Wain's book is entertaining, but a veteran reader of Johnsoniana and Boswelliana will probably learn more about the writer of this biography than the subject--Wain fills its 380 pages not only with his emphatic opinions about Johnson's century and his (and my) own, but with extracts from the poetry and criticism of 20th-century figures like T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Seymour Krim, extracts that have nothing to do with Johnson, and anecdotes from his own (Wain's own) life as an academic and a public intellectual.  One assumes Wain feels comfortable including all these digressions because Johnson himself used such scholarly work as the Dictionary and The Lives of the Poets as vehicles for expressing his own opinions and relating little personal anecdotes.

Popular historian Hibbert, in his 1971 biography of Johnson, which is also based on [now] published material and not original research, refrains from making himself and his opinions a central part of his book.  While Wain extols Johnson as a singular hero, denounces the 20th century, and addresses such scholarly topics as Johnson's adherence to the panEuropean culture of neoLatin scholars and resistance to Romanticism, Hibbert serves up the kind of stuff that actually arouses the interest of ordinary people in Johnson.  With a minimum of analysis or editorializing Hibbert showcases Johnson as a big-hearted guy and a pretty good comedian, the oddest and most interesting member of a large circle of odd and interesting characters.  Hibbert's book consists primarily of quoted and paraphrased anecdotes drawn from Boswell, Thrale-Piozzi and other sources, over 300 pages of amusing stories about Johnson's bon mots, idiosyncrasies and interactions with his many memorable friends and acquaintances and moving episodes in which Johnson expresses his love for others, his unhappiness, and his fear of death. 

Rissa Kerguelen (and The Long View) by F. M. Busby

"I shared his quarters, not by my own choice."

Now the other's cheeks flushed; she gripped Rissa's arm.  "You say my brother raped or enslaved you?"

Rissa spoke carefully.  "No. He could not have done so--I was trained, remember, by Erika.  To some extent he did coerce me.  I accepted that coercion because the alternative was to kill him and fight my way off the ship.  And I needed the ride."

"You?  You couldn't kill Tregare!"

"I think I could have."

Front of my copy

Way back in the dark ages before this blog was born I read F. M. Busby's Cage a Man and liked it, so when I saw the 1977 Berkley Medallion omnibus edition of Rissa Kerguelen and The Long View (both published in hardcover in 1976) with its pleasant Richard Powers cover I bought it. Perusing isfdb reveals that the Rissa books have a somewhat confusing publication history: in '76 the "Saga of Rissa," described as a  "Science Fiction Adventure Masterpiece" was put out in two hardcover volumes with Paul Lehr covers.  In '77 came the edition I own, the paperback one-volume version with the Powers cover. Then in the 1980s the saga was republished in three paperback volumes with Barclay Shaw covers.  (Jane Gaskell's Atlan series has a similarly confusing publication history, some editions being in four volumes, some in five.)  Perhaps adding to the confusion, in 1980 a third book in the Rissa universe starring a different protagonist, Zelde M'Tana, was released, followed by four more books featuring various personages in the same milieu.

Looking at the front and back covers of my copy, and the cover images of other editions, I am getting the idea Rissa Kerguelen is a long (630 pages!) space opera in which a teenage girl ("Tomorrow's Ultimate Woman") does that Julius Caesar/Charles Edward Stuart/Napoleon Bonaparte/Francisco Franco thing in which you build up an army out in the provinces and then invade your own (perhaps merely nominal) home country.  In SF, we see Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone and the guy from Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle pull the same gag.  The people who do this are mostly jerks (to put it mildly!), but the triumphalist nature of the back cover text suggests Rissa is fully justified in launching her coup, counter revolution, "Crusade of Vengeance," or whatever it is.  Well, let's stop guessing and start reading about Rissa and her tumultuous youth.

In the one-page prologue we glimpse the history of the decades before Rissa's birth: the struggle between United Energy and Transport, a sort of corporation/political party, and the Hulzein Establishment, a matriarchal organization run first by Heidele Hulzein and then a series of her parthenogenetic clones, first her genetically identical "daughter" Renalle and then Renalle's own genetically identical "daughter" Erika.  Having defeated Synthetic Foods in the North American election, UET gained total control of North America and drove the Hulzein Establishment off the continent.

In Part One of Rissa Kerguelen, "Young Rissa," five-year-old Rissa's parents, TV journalists, are killed in a riot.  The UET government claims they were participating in the riot, and so seizes all their assets and throws Rissa into the local Total Welfare Center, a sort of orphanage/debtors' prison/helot apparatus where people are basically slaves owned by the government and rented out to private entities as menial labor.  Rissa grows up in the Welfare Center, experimenting with lesbianism (she prefers masturbation!) and showing signs that she is a natural leader who has learned compassion from an uncle (who also enjoined her to seek revenge on the military officer who killed her parents in that riot.)  Because she was taught to read at age four (they don't teach literacy at the Welfare Center), in her teens Rissa doesn't have to clean houses--instead she is given the position of office clerk to a corrupt Welfare bureaucrat--part of her daily duties is to be used sexually by the bureaucrat.  (When Rissa is on her period, we are told, "the hard floor hurt her knees.")

To keep the Welfare peeps (30% of the population) docile, there is a periodic lottery, and when she is 16 or so the lottery's winner is Rissa!  She buys her freedom and is contacted by an agent of the Underground, one of her parents' journalist buddies.  Rissa is spirited away to Argentina, to Hulzein Establishment HQ, where she is taught espionage and commando skills.  The Establishment, headed by 70-something Erika Hulzein, rules Argentina ("In this country, if a law annoys Erika, she has it changed") without facing the burden of having to win any elections, and seems almost as tyrannical as UET--surveilling everybody, meting out beatings to people who say the wrong thing, and taking advantage of teenagers sexually--Rissa becomes one of Erika Hulzein's "rotating stable of concubines."

After a year of training, Rissa, in an elaborate disguise, takes a star ship ride in deep freeze that feels like eight months for the passengers on the ship, but is twelve years in the rest of the universe.  UET controls space travel, having stolen the interstellar drive technology from some peaceful aliens known as the Shrakken some fifty years ago, when the Shrakken paid a friendly visit to Earth.  The crews of many UET ships mutiny, however, and there is an entire anti-UET society on the "Hidden Worlds" discovered and colonized by these space pirates.  Rissa gets in touch with a Hulzein operative and books passage on the ship of the meanest of all the space pirates, Tregare; his ship is the most heavily armed of all the mutineers' vessels.  Tregare has a rotating stable of concubines of his own, to which he adds Rissa.  A former member of this stable is the aforementioned Zelde M'Tana, now one of Tregare's officers.

(Rissa Kerguelen is full of non-consensual and not-quite-consensual sex, and Busby's whole book utilizes the strategy we see so often in fiction and journalism of exploiting readers' morbid or prurient fascination with such crimes and grievous misfortunes as sex slavery and mutilation, while at the same time taking care to condemn criminals and sympathize with victims.  Blurring the line between consensual and non-consensual sex is one of his ways of doing this; another is describing in gruesome detail all the scars borne and torture suffered at the hands of UET by people of the Hidden Worlds.  Yet another way is recounting the various crimes attributed to Tregare and later having them explained away as rumors and exaggerations--we get to enjoy the excitement of Rissa having sex with a bad boy, and then any guilt over our titillation is absolved when we learn that he is not so bad after all.  I think of this as "having your cake and eating it, too" or "working both sides of the street.")    

Tregare's ship brings Rissa to the most important of the Hidden Worlds, a planet with the evocative name of "Number One."  Here Rissa meets another of Renalle Hulzein's clones, Liesel, Erika's "sister."  Erika is head of the Hulzein concern on Number One, the Hulzein Lodge, one of the planet's numerous aristocratic houses.  SF writers, and readers, love a setting in which great oligarchic houses with abstruse traditions and elaborate customs compete via political skullduggery, and here we have another one.  Personally, I'm not very keen on this sort of setting--I find political marriages, rumor mongering, and backstabbing among dozens of characters to be confusing and boring. And, while I have noting against escapist entertainment, I think that if SF wants to be "a literature of ideas" it should address the real political controversies of our lifetimes, like the proper role of the state, instead of indulging in rehashes of the power struggles between the Borgias and the Medicis or the houses of York and Lancaster or whoever. I can't get worked up over whether Lord Blahblahblah's incestuous marriage with Duke Sofisto's niece will lead to him drinking arsenic at the feast or building a coalition to defenestrate Baron Epicrano, but I can get intrigued or agitated when an author celebrates the supposed utopian possibilities of an interventionist government made up of experts or issues a dire warning of the dangers of just such a government.

Anyway, Rissa learns that Tregare is Liesel's son, born of a traditional sexual union--Liesel chose old-fashioned procreation  because repeated parthenogenetic cloning was resulting in children with debilitating birth defects.  Liesel had to hide Tregare from the rest of the Hulzein matriarchy, as they would accept no male heir and would kill him if they had the chance.  Rissa becomes deeply integrated into the Hulzein Lodge, meeting lots and lots of minor characters, and at the end of Part One finding herself in an arranged political marriage, more or less without her prior consent, to Tregare.

Back of my copy

Much of the real drama in the second half of Part One concerns Rissa preparing for and engaging in a duel to the death with a member of one of the Number One's other numerous great houses.  This duel is fought with no weapons, and, in fact, no clothes!  (Rissa Kerguelen is one of the numerous SF books that promotes nudism, one of Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeons's hobby horses.)  The duel is described in detail, and is pretty gross, with eye gougings, efforts to rip off genitals, torn fingernails, loosened teeth, etc.

People who think fiction should promote diversity may appreciate the fact that Rissa Kerguelen is not only dominated by ruthless women rulers and expert female killers, but is full of sympathetic black, Asian, albino, gay, lesbian, obese and disabled characters.  More interesting to me, however, was a villainous character who is "almost obscenely graceful" and purportedly became an assassin because of his frustrations over being impotent with women.  (I'm still not sure if with this character if Busby is exploiting disgust with male homosexuals or making fun of men who suffer some kind of sexual dysfunction.) This character is killed by an unnamed representative of Number One's ruling order (the referee at the naked duel) after criticizing the oligarchs ("You frunks!  You all hide behind status, don't you?") and breaking their rules.  I thought it interesting that, in a book that romanticizes being a rebel and opposing "the system," that Busby would include a guy who opposed another undemocratic and elitist system and, instead of romanticizing him, portray him being humiliated without his arguments against that oligarchy even being addressed.  (Another case of Busby working both sides of the street, appealing to both left-wing and right-wing readers?  Or Busby criticizing modern socialistic elitism and endorsing old-fashioned aristocratic elitism?)

Oy, I probably should have covered the 630-page Rissa saga in three blog posts, as if I was reading those 1980s editions in which all three Parts have their own book, but instead I am cramming my whole Rissa experience into one long post.  If you care what I have to say about disguise-and-bare-handed-killing expert Rissa Kerguelen's further career, click below to read on!

"Enchantress of Venus" and "The Woman from Altair" by Leigh Brackett

My copy, cover by Boris Vallejo, depicting a scene from 
"Enchantress of Venus:" In an ancient temple, Eric John Stark confronts
an evil Venerian boat captain--the villain has been beating his own
daughter in order to goad Stark into attacking him.   Boris neglects to make
Stark as dark and the Venerians as pale as the text indicates.  

Let's continue our look at The Best of Leigh Brackett, a 1977 collection edited by Brackett's husband, Edmond Hamilton.

"The Moon That Vanished" (1948)

The fourth story in The Best of Leigh Brackett is "The Moon That Vanished," which I read back in 2014.  Looking back at my blog entry about the story, I see I detected in it the same theme of the superiority of real life and real sexual relationships to masturbatory fantasies that I recently noted in "The Jewel of Bas." I also thought it better than Brackett's "Terror Out of Space" and "Citadel of Lost Ships"--I guess Hamilton did, too, because those stories aren't in this collection.

"Enchantress of Venus" (1949)

This is, I believe, the second of Brackett's Eric John Stark stories.  Stark is a Burroughs-style hero, an Earthman orphaned as a child on Mercury and raised by Mercurian savages.  His time on Mercury gave him superhuman reflexes and senses, as well as very dark skin, thanks to the proximity to the Sun.

This story begins with Stark on Venus, passenger on a boat floating on a sea of red heavier-than-air phosphorescent gas, bound for Shuruun, a town of pirates and drug dealers.  He narrowly escapes being kidnapped by the boat's treacherous crew, but before long ends up in the hands of the decadent aristocrats who rule Shuruun, the Lhari clan, anyway.  The Lhari are a disgusting dysfunctional family, their matriarch a woman so obese she can barely move, her children and grandchildren and their spouses a pack of cripples and backstabbers always at each other's throats.  (There's a lot of relationship violence and domestic violence in this story--the boat captain who initially tried to kidnap Stark beats his teen-aged daughter, for example, and when Stark and a woman kiss Brackett describes their embraces and caresses as "rough and cruel," Stark holding her "as though she were a doll.")  The Lhari put Stark to work on their slave gang, excavating the ancient ruins of the austere ebon city that lies at the bottom of the red gas sea, but Stark is so sexy that one of the Lhari, a beautiful silver-haired young woman named Varra, whom Stark thinks of as a "bold as brass" "hellcat" with a "swagger" which "at once irritated and delighted" him, tries to seduce him.  If Stark can kill off the rest of her family Varra will marry him, making him co-ruler of Shuruun and founder of a new, virile, dynasty.

That must be Varra, who sics her flying monster
on her fiance and other people who inspire
her anger

Brackett does a good job of setting up an oppressive, hopeless, claustrophobic atmosphere.  Venus is a planet of disgusting swamps, a place where you can't see the stars because of the heavy clouds, and Shuruun is a town where everybody is a dangerous criminal, a strung out addict, or some kind of perverted psychopath.  Stark is in this place because he is on the run from the Earth law--like the guy in Edmond Hamilton's "A Conquest of Two Worlds," he opposed Earth's imperialism and lead a native revolt in the region of Jupiter.  (The big difference between Stark and his Burroughsian models, Tarzan and John Carter, is that while Lord Greystoke and the Warlord of Mars are essentially Victorian gentlemen who play out imperialistic roles and aristocrats who support the establishment, Stark is a down-and-outer who works against imperialism and authorities.)  Stark is trapped in a box, and outside that box is just a series of slightly bigger boxes--Brackett is giving us the opposite of the "sense of wonder," the idea of limitless possibilities and fascination at the vast (but reachable) expanses of the universe, that we get from so much SF--this is a noirish SF.  

Brackett's story is also characterized by brutality.  I've mentioned the rough sex and violence between family members, and will add that Stark, who lived practically as an animal on Mercury, fights like an animal--more than once in hand-to-hand combat he bites an enemy bloody.  Yuck!  (In a story in which there are so many sexual overtones, you have to wonder if Stark biting other men has some kind of homoerotic charge.)

Anyway, Stark, with the help of a renegade member of the Lhari clan, a cripple who prophesized Stark's coming and has discovered via cleverness the ancient technology his family is searching for via slave labor, leads a slave rebellion and in the fighting the Lhari are wiped out.

A very good story--I have talked a lot about "Enchantress of Venus"'s atmosphere and mood, but Brackett also does a good job with the characters--the 70-page story features more than I have mentioned here--with even minor characters like the boat captain and his daughter having memorable personalities and following "arcs," with the fight scenes, and with the pacing and style.  Anybody who likes John Carter or Conan or Elric should like this one, and I'm sure the story is ripe for some kind of feminist analysis, an examination of whether and how a woman works with this sort of material in a different way from a man.  "Enchantress of Venus," first appearing as a Planet Stories cover story, has apparently already been the subject of scholarly attention, being included in 1978's Approaches to Science Fiction and 2000's The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as a bunch of other Brackett collections and SF anthologies.

I feel like we have here one of the most awesome and one of the most lameo covers
ever to appear on MPorcius Fiction Log; most of the dinosaurs 
on the Frank Paul cover are transparent copies of famous Charles Knight images

"The Woman from Altair" (1951)

The narrator of "The Woman from Altair" is Rafe McQuarrie, scion of the wealthy McQuarrie clan, a family made rich these last two centuries via interplanetary trade and exploration.  Injured in an accident, Rafe has been unable to live the life of a space explorer (instead he's been working as chief financial officer of the family business), and so when interstellar travel was recently developed it was Rafe's little brother David who became a world famous hero by exploring other star systems and bringing back alien valuables.  As the story opens, David returns from an interstellar trip to uncharted worlds, and the assembled McQuarrie family and a gaggle of officials and journalists are amazed to lay eyes on one of these valuables--a gorgeous purple-haired and purple-eyed alien woman named Ahrian!  Perhaps most surprised when David announces that this alien is his wife is David's human fiance!

The first part of "The Woman from Altair" gave me a Heinlein vibe, reminding me in particular of 1957's "The Menace from Earth." There's the clever and smart-alecky characters with their witty comments and a plot about flirtations and courtships over a background of speculations about what life will be like in a spacefaring future.  But Brackett's story, while doing that stuff, takes a very dark turn, with horror and mystery elements that took me by surprise when they first reared their ugly heads, and an ending that questions the very wisdom of exploring outer space!

Rafe's little sister Bet, and other women, are skeptical of, even hostile to, Ahrian, but that can be dismissed as envy over Ahrian's good looks and sympathy for David's jilted fiance, can't it?  But when the family dog and Bet's favorite horse attack and kill (!) Bet, we readers begin to suspect something is not right with this sexy space lady!  Then Rafe stops calling his girlfriend Marthe, an aggressive news reporter, and having disturbing dreams of Ahrian's planet and obsessive thoughts of suicide!  Marthe storms over to the McQuarrie estate and tells Rafe that women sometimes get "nearer the truth than men because we aren't ashamed to rely on the instincts God gave us."  And what is Marthe's women's intuition telling her about Ahrian?  "She's evil.  She's filled the house with death."

Marthe, using her journalist skills and energized by her love for Rafe, figures out what is going on and puts an end to Ahrian's telepathic reign of terror over the McQuarrie family.  

This is a good story; the characters are well-drawn, the plot and pacing work smoothly and can surprise the reader.  Beyond being entertaining, "The Woman from Altair" is interesting in all sorts of ways.  Like "Enchantress of Venus," it is the story of an outsider disrupting a powerful and wealthy family, but in this one the family is, more or less, the "good guys" and the outsider the villain.  I say "more or less" because Brackett isn't reluctant to show us the stresses of family life and doesn't absolve the McQuarries of responsibility for their tragedies.  Rafe was expected to be another in a long line of McQuarrie space heroes, but he wasn't interested in leaving Earth and his beloved dogs and horses.  When he did reluctantly go up on a trip to Mars  he developed a debilitating fear of space, so he deliberately caused that accident which grounded him in order to get out of space duty!  Even worse, Ahrian didn't seduce David on Altair in order to get to Earth to murder people--sleuthing Marthe learns that Ahrian's family needed some Earth drugs, and David pressured the girl with the amethyst locks into marrying him in return for the medicine, practically buying her! Ahrian is using her mind powers to murder McQuarries to get revenge!  (Cleverly but unobtrusively, Brackett presents Ahrian and Rafe to us as parallels--each loved her or his planet and didn't want to leave it, but had to leave to satisfy filial duty!)

Perhaps I should note that the hero of the story, pushy reporter Marthe, is almost as much an outsider as the villain--in her efforts to get a scoop she injects herself into the McQuarrie milieu the same day Ahrain arrives, only later falling in love with Rafe.

Though Ahrian is killed, the stress of her campaign of vengeance, which killed Bet and drove David and Rafe to the edge of insanity, leaves terrible scars on the McQuarries: they abandon their 200-year-old estate and David's career as a space captain is over.  The final lines of the story have Rafe asking why mankind goes to the stars at all: "Have men ever brought more happiness back from the stars?  Will they ever?"  Again we see Brackett repudiating the forward-looking sense of wonder we so often associate with SF (as well as flouting conventional economic theory by suggesting trade is a waste!)

The leading role of women in the story is of course noteworthy; our narrator may be a man, but the hero (Marthe), the killer (Ahrian) and the murder victim (Bet) are all women.  Appropriately enough, Pamela Sargent included "The Woman from Altair" in her 1995 anthology Women of Wonder: The Classic Years.  I wonder if in her intro or notes Sargent remarked upon the traditional notions about women Brackett fills her story with, like women's intuition, women as manipulators of men, and women jealously competing with each other over men.  Brackett seems to have had essentially conservative politics; Alpha Centauri or Die!, which I read in 2014, has an anti-big government message and a traditional view of gender roles, and in his essay "Queen of the Martian Mysteries," Michael Moorcock says that Brackett's politics were closer to those of John Wayne, with whom she worked in Hollywood, than Moorcock's own. Of course, Brackett cleverly presents us with a male first-person narrator, casting some ambiguity over every comment he makes about women (and about the wisdom of space travel, for that matter): is Rafe always expressing Brackett's own beliefs, or is Rafe merely a product of Brackett's speculation of what a man's interior life might be like?

"The Woman from Altair" first appeared in Startling Stories.  In 1965 it was reprinted in a magazine called Treasury of Great Science Fiction Stories along with pieces by other important SF authors.

**********

Two really good stories, fun and thought-provoking, embracing genre traditions but taking them in unusual directions and mixing them up a bit.  Recommended to all genre fiction fans and students of pop culture created by women and depictions of women in pop culture.