Three more above the night: Herbert, Davidson & Klass, and White

Maybe you'll remember that we recently read three stories from Groff Conklin's 1965 anthology 13 Above the Night, a story questioning monogamy by Fritz Leiber and stories of conflict with aliens by Mack Reynolds and Eric Frank Russell.  Well, today we'll read three more stories from that book, taking advantage of a scan of it at the world's greatest website, the internet archive.  We've got something from Frank Herbert of Dune fame, whose "Cease Fire" and "The Nothing" we read recently.  Also, a collaboration between critically acclaimed Avram Davidson, whom we last saw penning a satire about interstellar undocumented aliens and welfare fraudsters and William Tenn's brother, Morton Klass.  And finally a story by James White, famous for his Sector General series--I liked his novel All Judgement Fled and some stories from his collection Deadly Litter when I read them before the inauguration of this blog; a couple of years ago I did blog about White's "Tableau." 

"Mating Call" by Frank Herbert (1961)

The architect of Arrakis here presents us with a gimmicky filler story that is too long for what it accomplishes.  Barely acceptable.

Two women scientists are on the surface of a planet, there to help the natives, people shaped like eggs who move around with five prehensile members.  These natives don't seem to have much by way of technology.  The women bicker quite a bit,  having different attitudes in general and holding conflicting opinions about the locals and the problem that has led them to seek Terran aid--a recent decline in the birth rate.  The defining characteristic of these aliens is the music they make--they can sing a wide array of sounds, and do so beautifully, at least according to the younger, junior of the two scientists--the older woman is tone deaf.  The women's research is going slowly because the natives don't seem to want the women to attend their big sing along events--the women figure this event will give them a clue to the source of the fertility problem.  There's a lot of dialogue, and eventually the women are permitted to attend one of the natives' huge gatherings and witness and record their singing.  The scientists immediately transmit the music up to the mother ship and it is quickly retransmitted throughout human civilization.

It turns out that these natives, who all look the same, don't reproduce sexually--the music they produce at these big gatherings has the customary effect of triggering reproduction by splitting; those egg people blessed with parenthood break in half, which produces two smaller but otherwise identical egg people.  How likely any individual native is to reproduce at the concert is determined by how beautiful the music is.  Recently, the natives have been fascinated with human music, and have been trying to produce music of their own with some of the virtues of Terran music, but haven't been getting it quite right.  Thus, the low birth rate.  But tonight they put on a performance of breathtaking beauty, and more reproduction takes place than ever before.

The twist ending is that the music also triggers parthenogenetic pregnancy in the two women scientists, who will give birth to sterile clones of themselves in nine months or so.  All the women of the right age up in the mother ship are also pregnant.  And all over the galaxy human women who listened to the music live are in a similar condition.  Human civilization will be rocked by this discovery--it is implied that men may well have just been rendered obsolete, the recorded music being easily available to any woman who wants to have a daughter and isn't interested in a sexual relationship with a man.

"Mating Call" has itself been reproduced quite a few times in Herbert collections and some European anthologies.  It debuted in an issue of Galaxy we looked into back in 2015 when we blogged about Fritz Leiber's "The Beat Cluster" and Cordwainer Smith's "A Planet Called Shayol."

"The Kappa Nu Nexus" by Avram Davidson and Morton Klass (1961)

Avram Davidson is one of those super well-read johnnies and "The Kappa Nu Nexus" begins with a quote or paraphrase from Joseph Addison's Cato, something 18th-century people read ravenously but which I can't imagine many 21st-century people read or have even heard of.  There was a time when I expected I would read lots of Addison and Steele myself, when I harbored plans of becoming some kind of college professor specializing in 18th-century British history, but that was long ago.  Anyway, "The Kappa Nu Nexus" is chockablock with literary, historical and cultural references explicit and oblique, ranging from "Surrey With the Fringe on Top" to the Whig Party and the Spanish-American War, from Revolutions French and Russian to rebellions Jacobite. 

"The Kappa Nu Nexus" is the tale of Hank Gordon's first day at college and how he becomes the Big Man on Campus.  Before arriving at school, Gordon expressed contempt for fraternities, for partying, women, and booze, and declared his determination to study hard, but that was little more than sham.  Upon arrival he is quickly tricked into joining the failing Kappa Nu fraternity, which is desperate for members.  As he lies abed on his first night in his room at the decaying frat house, he is amazed to see a beautiful and scantily-clad woman with a nametag reading "Thais" step out of the closet and proceed to vanish.  (I actually own a reproduction of Demetre Chiparus' Thais, so I thought this was fun.)  Thais is followed by Cleopatra, Madame du Pompadour, and Nell Gwynn.  Eventually Hank learns from an unusually dressed man who similarly materializes inexplicably that this room is a short cut through space and time, and that it is used by an interstellar time travelling prostitution ring--sexually skilled women of beauty from all periods of history regularly pass through the room on their way to meet clients.  Hank swings a deal--the prostitutes and pimps can continue using the passageway as long as the women service the men of the fraternity on their way through.  As a result Hank becomes a hero and Kappa Nu becomes the most popular frat on campus.

I generally dislike these kinds of joke stories, but this one won me over.  For one thing, the plot actually holds together and is not totally absurd.  The many cultural references are interesting.  Our young hapless (but ultimately triumphant) protagonist and the various bits of slang remind me of P. G. Wodehouse, and the long digressions of Laurence Sterne.  So I can give this one a moderate recommendation.  With its sympathetic depiction of prostitution we might also consider it an intriguing example of science fiction that deals with sex and gender roles.   

Interestingly, "The Kappa Nu Nexus" has been avoided by editors and anthologists--according to isfdb, the only time it has been reprinted since its initial appearance in F&SF is here in 13 Above the Night.

"Counter Security" by James White (1963)

Here we have a quite well-written story with much of the structure of a detective story but a traditional science fiction climax in which the protagonist survives first contact with aliens through application of knowledge, logic and quick thinking.  White also includes subtle unobtrusive humor, and plenty of "meta" elements-- there are direct references to H. P. Lovecraft, Theodore Sturgeon and Alfred Bester as well as SF criticism.  White also successfully paints a believable and engaging main character.  A really good story that scores hits when it comes to SF elements and mainstream literary values--thumbs up for "Counter Security"!  

"Counter Security" is set in a large department store.  Our hero is sort of a slacker or underachiever, an intelligent man who has taken the somewhat low status job of night watchman at the store because it gives him time to read SF magazines (though he only likes "serious" science fiction, not supernatural or fantasy stories.)  White describes this guy's job and the operations of the store in an engrossing, entertaining way.

Our guy has a problem to solve--for weeks the women working in the toy department have come in to work in the morning to find that during the night dolls of black girls have been vandalized, always in the same way.  Is there some racist maniac on the staff?  Or somehow breaking in every night?  We observe as the night watchman solves the crime, making a mind-blowing discovery--space aliens have materialized their ship under the store and at night are infiltrating the building!  The night watchman figures out why they are messing with the dolls and how to make friends with the aliens and we get a nice happy ending.

As I say about writers all the time, I should probably read more James White.  I have been sort of avoiding him because so many of his stories are medical-related and that sounds boring to me, but he has a large body of work outside the Sector General series and it would be easy to track some of them down. 

"Counter Security" debuted in F&SF and was the same year reprinted in a German anthology with a cool cover and in some European magazines; in 1977 it was included in the White collection Monsters and Medics.

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I feel pretty good about this batch of stories from 13 Above the Night.  Maybe we'll return to this volume some day.  In any case, expect more stories from mid-century SF magazines next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Eight stories from the June 1957 issue of Fantastic Universe

If my calculations are correct, I paid $2.50 for my rapidly deteriorating copy of Fantastic Universe's June 1957 issue.  In our last episode we read the stories in this magazine by people I knew something about already.  Well, let's really get our money's worth and read the stories (eight of them!) by people about whom I know just about zilch.

"Holiday" by Marcia Kamien

In the little intro to this story the editor of Fantastic Universe tells us Kamien is a copywriter at a New York ad agency, is interested in Egyptian and Etruscan antiquities, and hates cats!  Whoa, is this chick single?  That is one sweet dating profile!

Four kids who have personal aircraft (just like 20th-century American kids had bicycles) tinker with the wires of their flying machines so they can go into "overdrive."  When they are up in the stratosphere and activate the overdrive they warp into another dimension, one that horrifies them.  This is when we realize these are alien kids--the crazy world they have arrived in has green grass and only one sun; it is our own world.  The kids manage to warp back to their own dimension, and we readers are told that it is these sorts of childish hi-jinks that are the cause of UFO sightings on our Earth. 

An acceptable four-page filler story.  Kamien has three stories listed at isfdb, and "Holiday" is the last one.  Maybe the cats got her?

"Day of Reckoning" by Morton Klass

isfdb tells us that Morton Klass is the younger brother of William Tenn (whose birth name is Philip Klass) and here in Fantastic Universe we learn he served in the Merchant Marine and is an anthropologist.  Morton has a dozen credits at isfdb.

In 1966 the alien Rogg conquered the Earth!  There were not very many of them, but the Rogg cunningly exploited the divisions among Earthmen and made us their slaves!

Forty-seven years have passed, and over the course of those long years of oppression the human race has cast aside its political and ethnic differences--finally, all men see each other as brothers!  The Rogg are ejected from Earth, and a bright future of peace and unity awaits us!

I guess this is the kind of story you'd expect an anthropologist to write, utopianism with no foundation in reality or even logic.  Acceptable filler, told in a series of flashbacks by the leader of the Earth rebellion as he presides over the Rogg surrender ceremony.

"First Landing" by Roger Dee

Roger Dee has a long list of story credits, and even a novel, at isfdb.  I actually read a 1951 story by Dee, "The Watchers," back in 2015 and forgot all about it until this moment!  I gave a thumbs down to that one, but maybe I'll like this one?

"First Landing" is a pretty traditional SF story about an astronaut who is sent to Venus to explore.  The Earth is united under a singe government because a war broke out between the West and the commies and the commies got wiped out, and the remaining states united to pick up the pieces of a ravaged world.  Our hero is on Venus looking for evidence of mineral resources the Earth sorely needs.

The astronaut encounters people on Venus he takes to be natives, naked bearded men who stand two-and-a-half feet tall and carry spears.  He crashes his hover car in the Venusian fog and loses his weapons and it looks like he is at the mercy of these perhaps belligerent aliens, but the story has a happy ending--the "natives" are in fact Soviet cosmonauts who were secretly sent to Venus just before the war erupted that destroyed the USSR--the Reds manned their ship with people whom Dee calls "midgets" in order to save on food and fuel.

Even if the ending is a little disappointing I like all the stuff about Venusian ecology and orbits and calculating how much fuel is needed to get back to Earth and all that.  Not bad.   

"God of the Mist" by Evelyn Goldstein

This one has the kind of title you might see on a Conan or Grey Mouser story, and it reads a little like a violent and noirish Brackett planetary romance.  (The MPorcius staff considers those good things.)

Venus has been colonized by the Earth; the primitive natives are like small beautiful children, and more or less at the mercy of the ruthless colonizers.  Seven-foot tall Kohler is a human criminal, a murderer, on the run from the human police.  When a tiny Venusian sees this huge slab of man meat he thinks it must be a god--Kohler looks just like the natural rock formation at his village which represents their god, Zanthu!  Kohler makes his way to the village, looking forward to living the easy life of a local deity among his worshippers.  He makes himself dictator of the village, callously killing those who question him.  But his reign is not a long one--his own hubris and cruelty serve to guide the police to him and he suffers a rough justice.  I was a little surprised that it was other Earthers who overthrew Kohler and not the natives--the Venusians in this story are pathetic victims, impotent to control their own destiny in the face of Earthmen's modern technology and organization and sheer size.

An OK story featuring surprisingly brutal violence against defenseless people.  The editor's intro to "God of the Mist" informs us that Goldstein is a Brooklyn housewife, and isfdb lists nine stories by her--they all have adventurous sort of titles.

"Versus" by Edward D. Hoch

I recognize Hoch's name, but I don't think I have ever read anything by him.  Wikipedia tells me that Hoch is a big wheel in the detective fiction game, but he produced enough SF stories to fill a 2015 collection entitled The Future is Ours. "Versus" appears in that collection, making "Versus" the only story we are reading today that was ever reprinted.

Unfortunately "Versus" is a sterile and gimmicky story with a gimmick so lame it barely qualifies as a gimmick.  Al Zadig is an interstellar organized crime boss who manages illegal gambling operations as well as space piracy all over the galaxy.  He bribes all the politicians and police authorities so his operations are not interfered with.  Suddenly, one day, the government changes its policy and starts seizing Zadig's interstellar casino liners and shutting down his planet-based operations.  A Mr. Snow comes calling; Snow explains that he is an even richer businessman than Zadig, and that after one of Zadig's pirate ships attacked the "space taxi" he was in, killing his wife, Snow devoted his fortune to destroying Zadig's crime empire.  Snow's simple strategy has been to give bigger bribes to all the politicos and cops than Zadig has.  If you were wondering what sort business Snow was in that he got so rich, he tells Zadig that "mine is an empire of good, of schools and hospitals and churches."

The anemic joke ending of this story is that when Zadig, driven to a desperate act of revenge, pulls a gun on Snow, the gun doesn't fire because Snow bribed Zadig's secretary to remove the rounds from the pistol's magazine.

Bewilderingly lame, like something a kid would write but without the gusto a kid might bring to a story about crime and revenge.  Can it be that the most commercially successful writer I am reading today has written the worst story?

"Snakes Alive" by Henry D. Billings

This is Billings's sole credit at isfdb.  This story consists mainly of radio transmissions between Dan Ellerman, best astrogater on the Galaxy Spaceways payroll, and ground control.  Dan is the sole crewman aboard a ship ferrying a cargo of cobras from "space station one" to Luna.  When Dan has to dodge an asteroid, the crate carrying the cobras falls over and breaks open and the motherfucking snakes are loose on the motherfucking rocket ship.  The snakes were stowed in the compartment closest the cockpit, and lies between the cockpit and the compartment with rocket ship's firearms and medical kit.  Not to fear--ground control transmits ultrasonic sound patterns which duplicate the effect of "the weird music" of "ancient Indian fakirs" and this pacifies the cobras so Dan can land safely on the Moon.

A waste of time. 

"Rock and Roll on Pluto" by Hans Stefan Santesson (as by Stephen Bond)

This is one page of text and is not even a story, just a plotless anecdote.  The colony on Pluto bans dancing and pop music, but some people go to the top of a mountain and play music and dance anyway.

This "story" was written by the editor of Fantastic Universe under a pseudonym.  I guess he had a blank page and needed to fill it with something and found himself unable to sell or donate the it as ad space, and so produced this non sequitur.

(Hoch is off the hook--this is the worst story in the magazine.)

"My Martian Cousin" by Mark Reinsberg

Reinsberg has ten stories listed at isfdb and was the book reviewer at Imagination for a little less than a year.  He seems to have been an earnest reviewer--in the December 1953 issue of Imagination he gushes with unabashed love about The Space Merchants and also points out some shady practices of super-editor Donald Wollheim's.  (I think Wollheim is great, but he certainly provides one opportunities to say "tsk, tsk.")

As its title might have led readers to expect, "My Martian Cousin" starts off as a sort of a comedy--I found it reminiscent of a TV sitcom.  Our narrator is Kathy, an attractive Earth-born woman living in one of the domed colonies on Venus with her husband of nine years, Mike, one of the first humans to actually be born on Venus.  Reinsberg, exploring the mysterious depths of female sexuality, has Kathy tell us she likes the way Mike's muscles ripple with energy when he is angry, and the story provides plenty of opportunities for Mike to get angry.  As our narrative begins, the happy couple is at the spaceport waiting for Kathy's cousin, college girl Gerda, to get out of customs.  It is taking forever because Martian-born Gerda, who invited herself like Edwige Fenech did in Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, brought along her pet Martian monster and the beast needs to be thoroughly decontaminated!  Mike snarls that she should have just left the monster in quarantine--she is only going to be on Venus for three days!  But when Mike sees Gerda for the first time (Kathy herself hasn't seen her for twelve years) she is, like Fenech's character in Sergio Martino's fourth giallo, unexpectedly gorgeous, and Kathy's irritable hubby changes his tune!

But not for long!  Gerda is a hardcore Mars patriot who lives in a city of millions back on the Red Planet, and to her this tiny Venusian domed city is provincial, boring, primitive, and unsanitary.  Everything on Mars, she assures everybody she meets, is better!  (Gerda sounds like me when I moved from New York to Iowa!)  Mike, a local big wig (he has one of city's eight aircar licenses and is an atmosphere scientist responsible for the air in the dome, the air that Greda insists is unhygenic), has to stand up for his home town and home planet, of course.  Kathy is not much use at keeping the peace--Mars is currently at war with Earth, and Gerda's complaints of Earth tyranny (and the Martian dump that Gerda's pet monster takes on the carpet!) create just as much tension between the unwanted houseguest and the lady of the house.     

All that stuff is amusing, but things get real (as the kids say) when the monster scratches one of Kathy and Mike's kids, it is discovered that somebody has sabotaged the dome (now who could that be?), and a drunken Gerda lets slip rumors about a Martian secret weapon that could exterminate life on Earth!  How will Kathy and Mike respond to these crises?

This is a good story; the speculations about human life adapting to other planets and how human societies on different planets might interact are interesting, the humor stuff was actually humorous, and the way Kathy resolves the politics and war plot was clever--and it is all believable, the people feel like real people, not caricatures in an over-the-top satire or cartoonish superheroes in an action extravaganza.  The story also includes tons of stuff for you feminists to pick over, with a female hero at odds with a female villain ("Short Essay: To what extent do Kathy and Gerda fulfill or defy stereotypes of women?") and lots about the narrator's relationship with her husband, her kids, and her larger society.  "My Martian Cousin" reminded me of Heinlein's "The Menace From Earth," another 1957 story which combined descriptions of an extraterrestrial colony with a human interest drama (as with the Brackett comparison, we here consider that a compliment.)

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We've suffered through some lame pieces today in Fantastic Universe, but found a solidly good one in the Reinsberg story, while Dee and Goldstein also offer entertaining tales.  I'm judging this exploration of one of SF's lesser periodicals to have been worthwhile.