Weird Tales, August 1925: R E Howard and N Hawthorne

Let's take a look at the August 1925 issue of Weird Tales, one of the most important of the pulps, one of the greatest of the speculative fiction magazines, the place where so many people first encountered H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and the list goes on.  Check it out with me by clicking this link, the click that will take you to a scan of the issue under discussion at the indispensable internet archive.

This August issue has a quota of high brow content, including a reprint of an 1820 poem by John Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," a poem about a guy who is heartbroken because some faerie or elf maiden has won his love and abandoned him--he has become a wretched hermit, hanging around the lake where he last saw her.  At least I think that is what is going on; I think it is safe to assume that "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," like all great literature, is a reminder to not let women drive you crazy.

There's also a poem by our pal Frank Belknap Long, "Stallions of the Moon," that is less plot-focused, and more hopeful--Long describes some flying horses in brief quatrains, three or four words per line, and then tells us they are "Mounts for you and me!"  How often do we get this kind of optimism in Weird Tales?  (I know, we got some optimism from WT last time we read from the magazine, and I bitched about it, but Long here delivers the optimism in like 80 words, while Henry S. Whitehead with his "dream story" "The Wonderful Thing" took seven pages!)  We also find Long in the letters section, where he praises the cover of the June issue, in which a man armed with an axe faces a spider the size of a buffalo ("bison" to you pedants), though Long's praise does come across as kind of a gross-out joke ("I cannot imagine a more gigantic, reddish, loathsome or delicious—but I sputter and go out!")

Near the end of the magazine is a hilarious ad for back copies of the extra-large May-June-July 1924 issue of WT, the one with the story Lovecraft wrote for Houdini and the one the man from Providence co-wrote with C. M. Eddy, Jr.  As if the cartoon four-eyes and his diminutive dog, desperately running to the mailbox to send for the "mammoth" issue of his fave magazine, wasn't risible enough, the text actually says "Your life is not complete until you have read this issue," which is even funnier than Long saying a kaiju spider looks delicious.  I have blogged about five stories from this "3 in 1" issue, and please allow me to say that your life will not be complete until you have clicked on the links below:

H. P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini:  "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"

H. P. Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy, Jr.:  "The Loved Dead"

Galen C. Colin:                                  "Eyes"

H. P. Lovecraft:                                  "Hypnos"

Otis Adelbert Kline:                           "The Malignant Entity"

Enough with the comedy!  Let's get to why we are here, the fiction, and today that means stories by the creator of Conan, Kull and Solomon Kane, Robert E. Howard, and that guy they tried to make you read in school, Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Oh yeah, there's a story in here by science fiction pioneer Murray Leinster that we read back in 2024, "The Oldest Story in the World."  If you expect all my short story blog posts to cover at least three stories, click the link in the previous sentence and count that one!

"In The Forest of Villefere" by Robert E. Howard (1925)

As we expect of a piece of work by a giant of American popular culture like Howard, "In The Forest of Villefere" has been reprinted in many collections and anthologies, the first of which was the collection The Dark Man.  (We read that collection's title story, "The Dark Man," back in 2021, and I judged it "a pretty good sword and sorcery story.")  I'm just going to read "In the Forest of Villefere" here in Weird Tales, though, where it takes up like two and a half pages.

In Early Modern or Renaissance France or whenever it is everybody carries a rapier around, our narrator is hurrying on foot through the night, carrying an important message.  He has been told this woods is inhabited by a werewolf, but his mission is urgent.  He meets an odd character with a mask and asks this mystery man for directions.  Of course it is the werewolf and of course it leads the narrator into a trap and he has to fight for his life.

This has the plot and themes of a filler story but somehow Howard makes it pretty scary and exciting, really elevating the material.  I'm inclined to think Howard is a master who knows exactly how many words to devote to each element of the story so that each component--atmosphere, image, the period of mounting suspense when everybody knows the action scene is coming up but it hasn't come up yet, and then the actual bloody action scene in which somebody gets horribly mutilated--has maximum effect, and that is why the story feels fresh and fun and I really enjoyed it, but it seems possible I am projecting that ability on him, that I am meeting Howard halfway because I knew it was him and like him already and was primed to enjoy the story as long as it met minimum criteria.  Would I have liked the story so much if I had read it not knowing it was him, like a blind taste test?  I'm going to say I would have, because, among other things, Howard gives the werewolf a strange and unnerving personality through its attire, behavior and dialogue, and that is one reason why the story feels fresh and pushes my buttons, even though I've seen so many werewolves.   

Whether this really is a very good werewolf story, or just a decent werewolf story that the magic of Howard's name is making me overrate, thumbs up for "In the Forest of Villefere."  According to isfdb, this is the first of two stories about de Montour of Normandy; the second debuted in Weird Tales in 1926 and we can expect to read it as we continue our advance through the history of the unique magazine.

 

"Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837) 

This piece (a portion of the "high brow material" I mentioned earlier) appears under the simple text heading "Weird Story Reprints"--the beautiful hand drawn mermaid heading by Hugh Rankin (I reproduced it at the bottom of my August 14 post) is still in the future, first appearing in 1928.  This story by the man who brought you Hester Prynne was, according to wikipedia, first printed anonymously under the title "The Fountain of Youth" in 1837 in the magazine The Knickerbocker, and that same year in the Hawthorne collection Twice-Told Tales.  "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" was one of the three stories adapted in the Vincent Price film Twice-Told Tales, and genre fiction anthologists like Peter Haining have presented the story to readers many times.

Elderly Dr. Heidegger is a physician, an amateur scientist, and, reputedly, some kind of wizard, or at least possessor of a book of spells and magic devices like a bust of Apollo that some say can talk and a painting of a lost love that some have said can move.  The doctor invites over four friends, fellow oldsters who are kind of losers--Hawthorne flat out says they would be better off dead.  ("They were all melancholy old creatures, who had been unfortunate in life, and whose greatest misfortune it was that they were not long ago in their graves.")  Among them is a woman, once attractive, now ugly, whom the other three friends, men, all courted at one time; a merchant who lost all his money on a desperate gamble and is now almost a beggar; a politician whose career collapsed after a scandal and who is now forgotten; and an army officer who in his youth wrecked his health pursuing pleasures.

Heidegger has acquired water from the Fountain of Youth, and suggests the four drink it, warning them not to waste their second youths misbehaving, like they did the first time they were young.  Of course, within seconds of becoming young they act like total jerks, insulting Heidegger, fighting amongst themselves, and so forth.  It then becomes apparent that the water only works for a few minutes--they are old again.  The four head to Florida so they can drink from the Fountain all day.

The descriptions of Heidegger's home and magic items are good, and the writing over all is pretty good, but the plot and characters are kind of obvious.  If I am biased for Howard because of my admiration for many of his works, it is possible I am biased against Hawthorne because I associate him with school and a sort of established canon of writers you are supposed to like, but I think this story is merely acceptable, no big deal.

Peter Haining included in Beyond the Curtain of Dark several stories
we've already read, among them Robert Bloch's 
"Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..." and "Return to the Sabbath,"
Fredric Brown's "Come and Go Mad," and
Theodore Sturgeon's "The Other Celia"

**********

I feel like these are competently constructed stories with unexceptional plots and themes that you have to judge on style--is each just adequate, or particularly effective and enjoyable?  Howard and Hawthorne being famous names whose work is important in American culture, it can be hard to judge these stories without letting preconceived notions influence that judgement, but the importance of their authors also makes it all the more easy for me to say that all students of horror and fantasy should read "In The Forest of Villefere" and all students of American literature should read "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment." 

The weird train rolls on to another station next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log; don't lose your ticket.

Thrilling Wonder Stories, Fall 1946: H Kuttner & C L Moore, R Rocklynne, E Hamilton and M Leinster

A few days ago I was looking at the contents page of Bypass to Otherness, the 1961 Henry Kuttner (and C. L. Moore) collection.  Of its contents, it seems I have read seven stories: "Cold War," "Call Him Demon," "The Dark Angel," "The Piper's Son," "Absalom," "Nothing But Gingerbread Left," and "Housing Problem."  That leaves only one story to go, "The Little Things."  Let's read "The Little Things" today, in its inaugural appearance in the Fall 1946 Thrilling Wonder Stories, and three other stories in that issue of Sam Merwin's magazine.  We've already read the cover story of this ish of TWS, Kuttner and Moore's "Call Him Demon."   Looking back at my 2014 (the very dawn of time!) blog post on "Call Him Demon," my plot summary makes the story sound absolutely awesome, and of course then there are the illustrations of the story by Earle Bergey on the cover of the magazine and by Virgil Finlay inside that make the story appear to be a bondage sex extravaganza.  But in my blog post I go on to attack the story's characters, style, and length and to give it a negative vote.  I'm a tough grader!  

"The Little Things" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

"The Little Things" is credited to Kuttner alone in the magazine, and I am not sure on what basis isfdb also credits Moore.  The story has not been reprinted much, just in the aforementioned Bypass to Otherness and in a 2010 Haffner Press collection of Kuttner and Moore stories, Detour to Otherness.

This is an idea story, weak in plot and character--the protagonist doesn't know what is going on and doesn't have any decisions to make or obstacles to overcome.  He isn't likable and is hard to sympathize with.  The story is also about a revolution, but the motives and policies of the revolutionaries are pretty vague and elicit no intellectual or emotional response in the reader.  I suppose the drama of the story is meant to be generated by how the reader is led to believe the protagonist is a hero who is going to join the resistance and overthrow the government only to be told by the authors that the protagonist is no hero and will not be doing any such thing; Kuttner and Moore "subvert our expectations," something the critics always like to see, but maybe us readers aren't always crazy about.

Our guy was a gossip columnist of the second or third rank during World War II, a guy whose column was not nationally influential but was widely read in a medium-sized town.  As the war was ending he was seized and put in a prison by the people who were secretly taking over during the period of post-war chaos.  You see, the aftermath of the war was going to provide the opportunity for radical changes to occur, and, to make sure civilization was going to transition smoothly to its new form, people who had some level of ambition and influence, like our gossip columnist, but who were not smart enough to recognize the ideal form of society the secret masters were guiding us to and so might cause disruptions, were imprisoned and impersonated by doppelgangers.   These doppelgangers would use the positions of influence formerly occupied by the prisoners to smooth the transition, urging the public to support the correct policies, policies which the prisoners, if free, likely would oppose.  The prisoners, meanwhile, would live in relative luxury, with access to good health care and lots of books and music and so forth, even pets, but no contact whatsoever with the outside world--all those books and all that music is material published before they were imprisoned.  One reason the prisoners are well-treated is that, at least for a while, the doppelgangers share the prisoner's soul or life force and will die if the prisoner dies; eventually the duplicate develops its own soul.

The gossip columnist has lost track of how long he has been in his gilded cage with his pet cat.  He sees an opportunity to escape, and gets out of the prison.  (Kuttner and Moore refer to the prison as Chateau D'If and make some allusions to Dumas as well as to Tennyson's Enoch Arden.)  The outside world does not seem to have changed radically--just "little things" seem to have changed, like the names of the months and days of the week, and the fact that vehicles are now self-driving and people no longer smoke tobacco.

The gossip columnist tries to make contact with people he knew when he was a free man, and finds that the secret masters of the world have given him plastic surgery so he looks totally different (I guess there was no mirror or other reflective surface in his comfortable cell.)  It will be impossible for him to renew his old friendships--everybody who knew him before he was seized is sure that the doppelganger is the real him.  The gossip columnist meets a woman who has not been able to change with the times, but rather than oppose the quiet, creeping revolution, she just sits around and gets drunk.  It becomes clear the gossip columnist will be equally unable to put up any resistance to the changes.  While his doppelganger is living a fulfilling life and career promoting the policies of the secret masters, the original gossip columnist, after a brief period of fruitless resistance, will live a pointless existence of drunkenness punctuated by bouts of sterile nostalgia--Kuttner and Moore offer us the metaphor that this woman and the gossip columnist are essentially dead because they can't evolve with society.  We even get a scene in which we meet the secret masters and Kuttner and Moore try to convince us that they are swell guys, not dictators at all, but doing civilization a great service.

"The Little Things"' ideology is lame and unconvincing elitism, the day dream of people who want to have their lives regulated by their betters because they associate individual freedom with the rough days of the Depression and the cataclysmic upheavals of the Second World War.  And of course I, a man who only reads books or watches movies made over 25 years ago and groans in agony when in a store and his ears are assaulted by music recorded this century, finds the "move with the times or you are as good as dead" theme a little annoying.  As for the plot, it is limp and deflating.  Writers who are bloodthirsty commies might depict changing the world in an exciting way, with the middle classes getting murdered and suffering their property to be expropriated in the name of justice and commissars and activists of the vanguard dying martyrs' deaths as the bourgeois hoarders and wreckers, in their death throes, use their wealth to deploy weapons of mass destruction.  But Kuttner and Moore don't give us those kinds of thrills and horrors--the revolution in "The Little Things" is comfortable, with the masses not even knowing a revolution is taking place, while those who might oppose the revolution are imprisoned in luxury or just sadly drink themselves into oblivion.

Thumbs down!

Left: US edition, 1961     Right: UK edition, 1963

"The Good Egg" by Ross Rocklynne 

According to isfdb, this story has never been reprinted--not a good sign.

"The Good Egg" is a cynical story about how bad parenting leads to evil children, how attractive women use sex to manipulate naive men, how attractive men use their looks to manipulate romantic women, how crooks abuse government programs meant to aid favored constituencies, and how men join the armed services and run terrible risks for civilians who do not appreciate their sacrifices.  This may sound like a clear and accurate picture of real life, not SF at all, don't worry, Rocklynne also includes in "The Good Egg" wacky science fiction elements that function essentially as fantasy elements, like the doppelgangers in Kuttner and Moore's "The Little Things," though Rocklynne's tale otherwise has the plot and themes of a crime story.  "The Good Egg" is also one of those stories that explains that you have to have a firm hand when dealing with women because members of the fair sex are naturally both duplicitous and gullible and will generally benefit from--and most of them actually crave!--the tutelage of a take-charge kind of man.

Doc Ferris is some kind of magician.  He has long employed his pretty daughter Bernice as part of his "stage-setting," and her early recognition of how false the world is and how you can profit by tricking people has had a negative effect on Bernice's morals.  Now, at the end of the Second World War, Bernice is a young adult with a boyfriend, Hugh Grant, a recently discharged veteran of combat in North Africa and Italy.  Grant is sort of naive, and Bernice has him "wound around her little finger," as she puts it.

Doc Ferris has been showing Grant a magic trick.  Some time ago, in a bunch of eggs, Ferris discovered one egg with strange properties; the thing has little glowering sparkles running across its surface, and when you rotate it in your hand, at particular angles it seems to change shape and even vanish from view.  

Grant is interested in science and becomes obsessed with the egg and steals it.  The egg, we readers learn long before Grant does, was laid by a member of an alien race from another dimension.  Inside it is growing, and about to hatch, a telepathic little humanoid being, one fully mature and equipped with racial memory so it has full info about its home dimension and whose telepathy has allowed it to gather full info on our Earth.  This little guy can with trivial ease move between our dimension and that of its people, but if it returns "home" it will be killed by its fellows for having been contaminated by Earth ideas.  (Is this element of the story a satire of the Soviet Union?)

Faithless Bernice has fallen in love with a handsome man, Morrow, a cunning con artist.  Many materials are rationed due to wartime conditions, and are hard to acquire and thus can be sold at high prices on the black market.  Businesses owned by veterans get priority from the government rationing board, and Morrow's SOP is to set up a fake business, seduce a girl with a boyfriend who is a veteran, partner with the vet and thus acquire materials, and then abandon his partner and sell the materials to unscrupulous businessmen.  Bernice uses her sexual wiles to get a skeptical Grant to partner with Morrow; Morrow gets a big shipment of raw leather thanks to Grant's veteran status.  Bernice severs relations with Grant, stupidly thinking that suave Morrow will marry her now that he can make some money, but Morrow has no interest in Bernice, who is far from the first hot chick he has pulled this scam on.

The egg hatches and the alien appears and explains to Grant what is going on.  Grant goes after Bernice, and he and Bernice end up bound in the back of a truck of Morrow's, headed for a watery grave--Morrow has decided he has to murder Grant and Bernice because they are witnesses to his crimes.  Before our dopey and ethically challenged protagonists can be thrown in the river, the alien teleports back to its home dimension where it battles its fellows and seizes a ray gun that it uses to free Grant upon its return; Grant uses the ray gun to outfight Morrow and his thugs.  Morrow and crew end up in prison, and on the advice of the telepathic alien, Grant beats Bernice, turning her into suitable wife material.  The ending joke of the story is that Doc Ferris has found another egg from the alien dimension.

"The Good Egg" is acceptable filler.  The big problem with it is the inconsistent personalities of Hugh Grant and Bernice Ferris, which seem to change to suit the plot instead of being believably consistent and driving the plot.  For example, Grant is obsessed enough with the egg to steal it from the father of the woman he loves, even though he is supposed to be naive and innocent, and then he just forgets about the egg, leaving it alone in his fridge for days.  Sometimes Grant acts like a dope, sometimes like a hard-bitten combat veteran, other times like a science-loving nerd.  As for Bernice, her behavior is such that it is hard to sympathize with her and to hope she and Grant get together, though I guess it is implied that women's psyches are mere clay that have to be molded by the men in their lives so we need not sympathize with her for the story to achieve its goals.  The plot and SF content of "The Good Egg" is serviceable, and if Rocklynne or Sam Merwin had taken the time to polish the story and fix these character issues it would probably rise to good status, but life is short and writers and editors face deadlines and we've all got to pay the mortgage and get the dishes washed and the vases dusted and the lawn mowed and so can't always publish the best possible product.  Even so, historians might find "The Good Egg" useful for its 1946 depictions of the wartime economy and attitudes about women. 

"Never the Twain Shall Meet" by Edmond Hamilton

This tale appears under the byline "Brett Sterling," a pseudonym used several times by Hamilton and other people, including once by Ray Bradbury.  Like Rocklynne's "The Good Egg," it doesn't look like this story was ever reprinted. 

"Never the Twain Shall Meet" is a traditional science fiction story full of space suits, airlocks, little lectures about positrons that refer to Carl David Anderson and brainwaves that refer to Hans Berger, and speculations about where the planets and asteroids came from and how the Sun generates energy.  "Never the Twain Shall Meet" is also a melodramatic love story, perhaps based on the Hans Christian Anderson tale of The Little Mermaid.  Hamilton's style is simple and straightforward and the emotions of his characters, however over the top, ring true.  Thumbs up!

Farrel is the 30-year old captain of a space ship that has broken down near the asteroid belt.  For like 40 years, the human race has been exploring and colonizing the Solar System, but Venus and Mars are off limits, so humans are focusing their efforts on the moons of Jupiter and Uranus.  You see, half the matter of the universe is "positive," and half "negative," and Venus and Mars are negative, and if a piece of positive matter from Earth touches anything from V or M both will be annihilated in a blinding flash!

The crew of Farrel's ship are in serious trouble, but they can maybe fabricate the parts they need to fix the ship if they can drift close enough to an asteroid with the metal they need.  Unfortunately, half the asteroids are negative, making searching the belt very dangerous.

Amazingly, the crew spots another crippled space ship in the belt!  It has an odd shape--an experimental model?  Farrel goes out to investigate in his space suit--he can propel himself with a little hand-held rocket device.  Similarly equipped people come out of the other ship to meet him, one of them a beautiful woman.  Everybody is astonished when they realize they are from different worlds, represent different races--the beautiful girl and her ship are from Mars!  The two groups and their equipment can't touch each other, but Martians have developed devices that operationalize everybody's dormant telepathic ability, so Farrel can communicate with them.

Despite the obstacles facing them, Farrel and the Martian woman fall in love during a crazy adventure in which they get lost in the asteroid belt and have to use logic and science knowledge to reunite with their people, who, in their absence, have repaired their ships.  The Martian makes Farrel promise to meet her in this same spot in a year's time.  He does so, and they have a joyful reunion and start a happy life together because the Martians have figured out a way to change negative matter into positive, and the Martian woman volunteered to be the first human test subject of this technology so she could move to Earth and marry Farrel!

I like it.  The somewhat schmaltzy ending doesn't feel too saccharine because I didn't quite expect it; maybe I am dim, but repeatedly Hamilton had me thinking one of the lovers might die, sacrificing him or herself for the other, or maybe both could die, committing suicide because they prefer death to life without each other.  And, as I have told you again and again, I have a weakness for SF stories that are about people in space suits out there facing death in the void between the worlds.  "Never the Twain Shall Meet" deserves to be reprinted, in my humble opinion.

"Pocket Universes" by Murray Leinster

Yet another story that has not been reprinted, if we are to believe isfdb.  I have found Leinster to be a solid performer, so I have reason to hope I'll enjoy this piece as much as Hamilton's.

"Pocket Universes" is perhaps an illuminating sample of popular beliefs among Americans of people from Latin America, with our narrator, an American, saying stuff like

He was Latin-American—pure Spanish as far as I could tell—and you don’t expect Latin-Americans, somehow, to be scientists....You think of them and of revolutions and politicians, and if you know a few of them you think of poetry and literary effusions and highly intellectual and not very meaty talk. But science, no. Facts seem to hamper most of them.

Our narrator is buddies with a brilliant Latin American scientist, an emigre to the United States living and working in New York.  As the story begins, the scientist has just invented an amazing device.  When powered up, the apparatus, a bunch of copper and crystal pieces and wires, vanishes, and the space it previously occupied has odd effects on light that passes through it, and on objects which intrude into it.  It is as if the space no longer exists--if you reach into the queer blurry area occupied by the device before it was switched on, your hand will vanish inch by inch from your arm while immediately reappearing on the other side of the blurry space, still fully under your control.  Turning off the power causes the device to reappear, and, if anything is occupying the area, that intruding object is destroyed.  Leinster spends a lot of time trying to explain how all this works, both practically and theoretically, but I can't say he succeeds in making it very clear.  (Again, maybe I'm dim.)

The scientist and the narrator take a break from the lab and the sight of a newspaper headline prompts the inventor to tell his tragic life story.  Back home, he had an attractive wife whom his nation's dictator took a liking to.  The dictator's flunkies kidnapped her and she ended up getting killed.  The scientist fomented a revolution against the dictator, but his uprising was crushed.  The scientist fled to America, where he has had a successful career in academia, culminating in today's invention, which the narrator expects will revolutionize the economy and human life by, for example, allowing instantaneous travel between two points, regardless of what might be between them.  With a small portable device you can reach through walls and floors, a larger device walk through such obstacles, and if one is built on an industrial scale, like a highway, one could travel between cities as easily as one walks between two rooms.   

The newspaper story which inspired the inventor to spill his guts tells how the dictator is abdicating under the pressure of the accumulated threats of all his enemies, foreign and domestic, and coming to the United States, to New York, presumably bringing with him all kinds of money and valuables looted from his people and received from Nazis who fled to his country after the war.  To make sure we know the dictator is a bad guy, Leinster tells us he is fat and swarthy!  

The scientist uses upgraded versions of his device to sneak into the dictator's hotel room and seize the loot, which he has sent to the new government of his native country.  Then he murders the dictator.  The narrator upbraids him for risking his life on this adventure when only he can build the device which is going to radically improve human life by making trade and travel so inexpensive.  But the true tragedy of the story is that the scientist decides to experiment with a battery-powered version of his device, and somehow gets stuck inside the warped space--because the device is battery powered, the narrator cannot turn it off from our universe.  The narrator theorizes that, inside the warped space, time passes very slowly, so the batteries may not run out for what we here experience as centuries, even if the inventor only experiences it as a brief period.

(I have to admit I don't understand how the inventor got stuck inside the warped space, as earlier when a guy put his hand in the warped space his hand immediately reappeared on the other side of the warp--his arm wasn't in the warped space, the warped space is like space that is no longer existent.)

"Pocket Universes" is merely acceptable.  Leinster spends lots of energy explaining the device, but his explanations are not very clear and his speculations are wholly fanciful, unlike Hamilton's, which refer to real scientists and real phenomena like electrons and protons.  Leinster also spends a lot of time on the dictator, on describing how ugly and evil he is, but we readers can't get too enthused about the dictator because the narrator never meets him or sees him--he just reads about him in the paper or hears the inventor talk about him; the drama of the dictator's crimes and punishment all happens "off screen."  Unlike with Hamilton's "Never the Twain Shall Meet," I can see why "Pocket Universes" has never been reprinted.

**********

Only Hamilton's story here is a real winner, though Rocklynne's and Leinster's are not bad.  But none of these stories was a waste of my time, even Kuttner and Moore's, as I have a particular interest in the careers of Kuttner, Moore and Hamilton, and hope to read all of their work before I shuffle off this mortal coil (and I may be developing a similar attachment to Leinster.)  And as a grad school dropout who served time in a History and then a Poli Sci department, all the references to World War II are interesting.

The beautiful header to Thrilling Wonder Stories' letters column

Seven Come Infinity: R F Jones, M Leinster & E F Russell

Over the years I have acquired a tall stack of paperback anthologies, so let's take off the pile a book I've owned for over a decade and read some of the stories printed therein by people with whose work we already have some familiarity.  Today's subject: Seven Come Infinity, edited by Groff Conklin and published here in the republic in 1966 by Fawcett Gold Medal and reprinted in the United Kingdom a year later by Coronet.  I've already digested two stories that appear in this volume, Chad Oliver's "Rite of Passage" (I read it in 2014 and gave it a thumbs down) and Clifford Simak's "The Golden Bugs" (I read that one in 2018 and concluded it was "acceptable.")  Today we'll read the stories Conklin included in the book by Raymond F. Jones, Murray Leinster, and Eric Frank Russell.  Take note that I am reading these stories in this here paperback, and not in their original magazine appearances or in later books, though if I find a puzzling typo or something like that I may consult other such sources.

"Discontinuity" by Raymond F. Jones (1950)

I think I've covered nine Jones productions here at MPFL, the novels The Cybernetic Brains, Syn and The Alien, and the stories "Noise Level," "Fifty Million Monkeys," "Rat Race," "The Non-Statistical Man," "Starting Point," and "The Gardener."  Today we make it a round ten with "Discontinuity," which debuted in Astounding and has not been reprinted in English other than here in Seven Come Infinity.  German readers can find it in Deutsch in Die neuen Gehirne und andere Stories; "Discontinuity" is actually the title story of that 1971 collection.

In the future of force fields and interstellar travel, David Martell was a scientist and medical man of rare genius!  He figured out how the brain stored information, and even began development of techniques to restore memories and other brain functions to people who had suffered brain damage.  But Dr. Martell's life was not exactly one triumph after another.  For one thing, he married a woman, Alice, whom he loved but who didn't understand him and had no interest in science; Alice came to loathe the Doc and started cheating on him.  Ouch!  Then, his experiments with brain-damaged patients produced results that the general public and the establishment didn't consider to be successes--sure, the head injury patients were still alive, but they lost almost all of their intelligence--the Martell Synthesis was tried on 100 people, and all 100 are now "idiots!"  ("Idiot" is the word Jones uses consistently.)  The Martell Synthesis was outlawed!  Ouch again!  Then there was the car crash that left Martell himself brain damaged and almost dead--a crash that many suspect was no accident, but engineered by Alice and one of her boyfriends!  Ouch to the second power!

Such is the background.  The plot of "Discontinuity" kicks off as Martell's team tries to--illegally--use the process Martell developed to revive Martell's own smashed brain.  Part of the Martell Synthesis is to hook wires into the heads of people the patient knew and shift info from their healthy brains to the patient's damaged brain, to fill in gaps.  Alice has to be convinced to submit to this procedure--she would see greater financial benefits from having a husband who is a dead duck than a husband who is a live idiot--so the boffins threaten to reveal evidence she tried to murder her hubby, blackmailing her into cooperating.

(We later learn that the Synthesis process also writes info from many books into your brain.)

In Chapter II (this is a longish story, over 40 pages) Martell wakes up after the Synthesis process is over--he is OK!  Or so he thinks at first!  After he gets out of bed he finds he can't read English, and when he tries to talk, people don't understand him, and when they speak, it sounds like gibberish to him!  His colleagues think he is an idiot, like all the other brain-damaged peeps who were subjected to the Martell Synthesis, but now Martell knows they are not idiots, they just have aphasia!  Martell escapes the lab and in Chapter III hooks up with other subjects of the Martell Synthesis and finds they can speak to each other.  Among them is Marianne, a woman as pretty as Alice but smarter and more intellectually healthy.  (In this future, people who lie, cheat and commit murder aren't considered bad or evil, just ill or ignorant.)  Marianne was one of Martell's top assistants before her brain was wrecked by an electric shock and Martell used his process to bring her back to (it appeared at the time idiotic) life.  

Chapters III and IV are largely given over to speculative lectures on how the brain works and how the Martell Synthesis works--as we expect from these old time science fiction authors, Jones weaves science lectures in with his adventure plot and power fantasy themes.  It turns out that the Martell Synthesis turns you into a superior being, organizing the data in your brain (the data is compared to the punch cards of early computers) more rationally than mere natural processes can and somehow distinguishing irrational beliefs based on emotion from cold hard facts and prioritizing the latter.  

"The semantic selector, in arranging the pre-punched molecules in precise order with semantically correct cross-indexing, has swept clean the crazy, nonsensical filing system accumulated over the years."         

"We have within our hands the means to make a new kind of man, one which can displace the old and bring reason into the world....I am very certain we are the most completely sane people the world has ever known!"

Communication between people with synthesized brains and the old mundane kinds is impossible because synthesized brains are super-efficient and have naturally developed super-efficient means of communicating to each other.  English is too irrational for the efficient brain to comprehend!  Martell also finds that the synthesized no longer need sleep and have acquired superagility.

Chapter V sees the plot resolved.  Martell and Marianne use the Synthesis equipment to reduce their superiority enough that they can again communicate with us normies saddled with all-natural no-artificial-additives brains via the inefficient and irrational tongue of William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and Pete Townshend.  They try to convince people of the benefits of the Martell Synthesis but everybody is too scared of change, so our superman and superwoman start synthesizing people by force.  Among the first beneficiaries of nonconsensual synthetization is Alice; synthesis cures her of her deceitful and murderous ways as well as giving her super smarts and all those other abilities; the Martell marriage, we can be sure, is going to be a super-happy one from now on, and eventually all humanity will be equally super!  (Marianne is a little jealous, having fallen in love with Dr. Martell, but her rational brain will keep her from getting truly heartbroken.)

I love stories about disastrous sexual relationships and I love stories in which people mess with brains, so Jones has me on his side from the start.  "The Discontinuity" is also a decent homo superior story with sense-of-wonder elements as well as the elitism we see in so much SF that suggests their betters are fully justified in using guile and force to drag the ignorant masses into the glorious future.  This elitist attitude is disgusting, but I can't deny that it is exciting in fiction, and I didn't let the disgusting incest in Elleston Trevor's The Sibling stop me from enjoying and praising that novel and I'm not letting the elitism of Jones' "The Discontinuity" stop me from enjoying this story and giving it a thumbs up.

"The Corianis Disaster" by Murray Leinster (1960) 

"The Corianis Disaster" first saw print in what I believe to be the final issue of The Original Science Fiction Stories, a magazine Robert Lowndes had kept afloat since 1953.  I think I've read like 24 pieces of Leinster's fiction during the period of this blog's life, but my link finger is tired, so click the "Leinster" tag if you want to see what I've had to say about the man.  I will say here that, as with Jones, I've liked most of Leinster's work with which I am familiar.  Hopefully this is another likable one, as it is over 40 pages.

The Corianis is one of the largest and safest starships in the interstellar civilization depicted in Leinster's story, and it is carrying important officials between two planets who are in the midst of major trader negotiations.  By chance, also aboard is a scientist, a physicist, who is very shy.  A one in a million bit of bad luck causes the Corianis to come out of hyperspace abruptly because a huge amount of debris, the remains of a planet destroyed by a nova a million or so years ago, was in its path.  The hyperdrive is wrecked, but ships the size of the Corianis carry two hyperdrives, just in case.  So the ship gets to its destination, just a little late.  Where they find that an exact duplicate of the Corianis has preceded them!  

The Corianis that is already there is populated by a trade delegation identical to that on the second-arriving ship, but several people aboard the second vessel, including our main character, the physicist, are not duplicated on the first ship.  The physicist quickly learns to overcome his shyness and asserts himself to solve the problem posed by the duplicate people, something only he is able to achieve, as everybody else aboard the two vessels, as well as everybody among the populace among whom they have landed, becomes violently irrational in the face of this unprecedented and apparently supernatural phenomena.  The physicist saves the day and even meets a girl and gets married.

The first part of "The Corianis Disaster," all the stuff about space flight and hyperspace and all that, is good.  But the second part, the puzzle of the duplicates, its effect on people, and the scientist's solution to it, is boring, even annoying.  There's the elitism of the story--everybody but the scientist acts like a violent irrational monster--which is bad enough, but worse, Leinster plays a lot of the confusion among the duplicates and the local populace for laughs.  Worst of all, Leinster makes this part of the story way way too long, hitting the same points again and again in the same way.  To show how irrational non-scientific people are, he has angry mobs form, not just once, but again and again.  He describes people's fears and diagnoses them again and again, uses the same metaphors and analogies again and again.  What Leinster is saying is kind of obvious, so he needn't tell us repeatedly, but he does, and it is no fun.  Maybe Lowndes requested a story of a certain length and Leinster stretched this one out by repeating himself?  A mistake!

As we readers figure out pretty quickly, but Leinster really takes his time to come out and say, during its hyperspace jump, the Corianis with the shy scientist aboard accidentally jumped into a different time line, one in which the bashful physicist didn't make the flight and the ship's flight was uneventful.  Our hero figures out how to return his Corianis to its native universe.  As I guess science fiction readers want to hear, our problems are solved when a scientist is given command over the government and the ship.  The the story ends with a limp joke about marriage--a man may make himself an alpha and save the lives of a ship and all its occupants, but his wife will still tell nag him into doing what she wants. 

Far from Leinster's best work.  I'm calling it barely acceptable.

In 2006 "The Corianis Disaster" was presented in a Russian Leinster collection, and in 2015 Armchair Fiction included it in a double novel along with Harry Harrison's famous Deathworld.

"Panic Button" by Eric Frank Russell (1959)

Another Astounding story, this one by the Englishman who is reportedly (see Alan Dean Foster's intro to The Best of Eric Frank Russell) Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.'s favorite writer, a man much of whose work we have read.  "Panic Button" would go on to be reprinted in a 1974 Dutch collection and in NEFSA's 2000 Major Ingredients: The Selected Short Stories of Eric Frank Russell.

Two intelligent races are exploring the galaxy, the humans of our beloved Terra and some alien race from the Antares system.  Each species has quite limited knowledge of the other, and neither wants to risk a war with an enemy of unknown capabilities, so both civilizations have been following a first-come-first-served or finders-keepers rule--any planet belongs to the race that first lands upon it.  This story chronicles what happens when an Antarean star ship with a crew of 600 and a complement of ten boats discovers a valuable planet with only one single Terran on it, a man unaccompanied by any space craft or heavy equipment--should the Antareans honor the tacit finders-keepers rule or kill this guy and disintegrate his hut and claim the planet?

The plot and gimmicks of this story, which is sort of a series of logic puzzles and suggests people act rationally and predictably, are good, and additionally Russell offers readers characters with fun personalities who deliver cleaver jocular dialogue.  I am constantly bitching about joke stores, as you know, but in "Panic Button," in a way that reminds me of Jack Vance, Russell employs subtle and sophisticated humor based not on absurd situations or broad satire but personality and human reaction to stressful situations, humor which complements Russell's plot and themes instead of burying or undermining them.  The story is also no longer than it need be.  Thumbs up for "Panic Button!"

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Two good stories and one story that crawls feebly just barely across the border into "acceptable" territory (but could have been good if a ruthless editor had hacked it down to 60 or 70% of its current size.)  Conklin in Seven Come Infinity seems to have put together a commendable anthology.

Three more short stories penned before I was born in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  We can only hope they will go down as easily as today's selection.

My Best Science Fiction Story: F Brown, M Leinster, F B Long, & T Sturgeon

In our last thrilling episode, we read a story by Sam Merwin, Jr. that appears in Oscar J. Friend and Leo Margulies' 1949 anthology My Best Science Fiction Story.  This hardcover volume contains 25 stories by "outstanding authors," and over the course of this blog's apocalyptic life we have talked about seven of them.  Roll out the links, MPorcius helots!

Robert Bloch: "Almost Human"

John W. Campbell, Jr.: "Blindness"

Edmond Hamilton: "The Inn Outside the World"

Henry Kuttner: "Don't Look Now"

A. E. van Vogt: "Project Spaceship"

Clark Ashton Smith: "The Uncharted Isle"

Sam Merwin, Jr. "The Carriers"

Let's read four more stories from My Best Science Fiction Story, those from titan of crime fiction Fredric Brown (I fear it is a joke story, but let's soldier on regardless), reliable pro Murray Leinster, the often disappointing Frank Belknap Long, and Grand Master Theodore Sturgeon.

"Nothing Sirius" by Fredric Brown (1944)

The most recent things we have read by Fredric Brown include a short story that I interpreted as a "satire" that suggests "modern life, the era of the radio and the motor car, is driving us crazy" and that I reported "unleashes a lot of speculative economics on us," a novel I called a "page-turner" but which I lamented included lots of "Psych 101 goop" and "pop psychology," and a World War II-era detective yarn in which an Axis agent disguises a baby as a monkey.  Let's see what wild stuff Brown has in store for readers in a story he was, apparently, quite proud of--as the title indicates, the stories in My Best Science Fiction Story were selected by the authors themselves.  "Nothing Sirius" debuted in Captain Future magazine, alongside the 17th Captain Future adventure, this one penned by William Morrison, and has been reprinted in many Brown collections.  I am reading it in the scan of 1977's Best of Fredric Brown at the internet archive.

Oy, "Nothing Sirius" is a yawn-inducing humor piece full of boring and obvious jokes that as you are trudging through it feels like it will never end.  Thumbs down!

Our narrator is a middle-aged married man; he and the wife are small business people.  They fly from planet to planet, setting up a tent full of coin-operated entertainment devices at each stop and then moving on.  In the space ship with them is their sexy daughter Ellen and the pilot of their ship, Johnny.  Johnny graduated from the space academy just two years ago, and one of the foundational jokes of the story is that Johnny is serious to a fault, a rule-follower who has no social skills and won't let his hair down to drink, smoke or chew the fat with the narrator and doesn't notice that Ellen has a crush on him.

One day the Johnny unexpectedly spots a new planet, and the narrator decides they should explore it on foot.  They come upon disconcerting evidence that Earth people have already been there.  They meet an old friend who tells them this planet has been kept a secret by the film production company that is renting it.  They also meet a beautiful movie star with whom Johnny falls in love at first sight, upsetting poor Ellen.  But then the narrator realizes that everything seems wrong, and proves that all the people and buildings on the planet, including their old pal and the actress, are just illusions, making them vanish.

The natives of the planet, people almost identical to little cockroaches, admit what is going on.  Like so many of the aliens in these old stories, they can read human minds, and they have been projecting those illusions, basing them on the memories of the narrator and his companions.  The bug people assert that their civilization and human civilization are totally incompatible--humans are concerned with material things, while the insect people are concerned with thought.  This planet has no mineral wealth and the soil is not fit for agriculture, so there is no reason for humans to ever come here.  

The four humans return to the ship.  Johnny has been shaken up by the experience of falling in love with an illusion projected by a telepathic bug, and for the first time in his life gets drunk.  This triggers or presages a welcome evolution of his personality--he becomes less stiff and serious and it is not long before he and Ellen are engaged.  

Though celebrated, "Nothing Serious" is totally lame filler with no drama or excitement.  All the SF stuff and all the jokes are banal.  Sad!

"The Lost Race" by Murray Leinster (1949)

Almost ten years ago we read an Edmond Hamilton story about an insane French botanist who wanted to reduce the speed of his life down to one-percent normal, "Alien Earth."  Five years ago we read a story by Leigh Brackett about a ruthless trapper who finds an anti-grav device factory in an abandoned Martian city, "Quest of the Starhope."  Three years ago we read a Ray Bradbury story attacking American culture and suggesting women manipulate men with their tears*, "The Concrete Mixer."   All three of these stories debuted in the same issue of Sam Merwin's Thrilling Wonder Stories, and today we (virtually) open the ish up again to read a fourth story offered therein, Murray Leinster's "The Lost Race."

*Like Charles Schulz, Ray Bradbury is a wholesome American institution whose brilliant work has broad appeal but which attentive readers may find surprisingly misogynistic.   

"The Lost Race" hasn't been reprinted much (though if you read German you can catch it in a 1966 issue of Utopia, and if Croatian is more your speed an issue of Sirius from 1985 has you covered), but it was one of the dozen stories that was included in the paperback version of My Best Science Fiction Story, so I can read Leinster's intro to it in the scan of that paperback at the internet archive.  Leinster talks about why he is particularly proud of the story and spoils all the main themes, telling us "The Lost Race" deals with the issue of the value of rocket fuel on the market, and that high value might impede the development of space travel, with psychic powers, and with how spacers will have to deal with the problem of boredom.

The first page of "The Lost Race" is more like a soap opera than a space opera.  Spaceman Jimmy Briggs is engaged to Sally; to amass enough money to marry her, he has signed up on a year-long space voyage.  The crew of the vessel is made up of eight men.  One of them is Danton, who is pathologically jealous about his wife Jane, who is Sally's best friend.  Another is Ken Howell.  Howell was engaged to Jane, but then while he was away on a voyage, Danton married Jane.  According to Sally, Danton employed some underhanded methods to achieve this feat.  Both Jimmy and Ken regret signing up for a voyage with the difficult Danton.

Mankind has explored and colonized many planets, and many more have been charted but await examination.  So commercial ships like the one Jimmy, Ken and Danton are aboard are obliged to make little stops along the way to investigate planets that might be viable for colonization.  On scores of planets, human explorers have discovered the remains of a highly sophisticated star-faring civilization.  This "Lost Race" raised hundreds of magnificent cities, but all have been thoroughly destroyed, apparently deliberately, as if the entire culture, a space empire spanning hundreds of light years, had committed suicide.  Many space men have seen these ruins, and many of them, as a little hobby, theorize as to why the Lost Race destroyed itself.  Ken Howell's theory is that the members of the lost race were able to see into the future and saw something so horrible they would rather die than live through it--he suggests that if Earth's people had foreseen the horrors of the, now long past, Third World War, they also might have opted to commit suicide rather than suffer through that tragedy.

Ken and Jimmy make an unprecedented find--a Lost Race installation that miraculously escaped destruction (it seems it was sheltered by a hill from the blast that flattened the nearby city.)  Their discovery is an amphitheater with a seat at one end--when Jimmy sits there, a holographic projection fills the amphitheater--the moving image is of Sally back on Earth, thinking longingly of Jimmy!  Jimmy figures that the amphitheater is a kind of televising remote viewer, and shows the places and people you are thinking about in real time.  

All the crewmen use the amphitheater and see images of their people back home living happily--this is a relief, as under ordinary circumstances the spacers would have no news from home for a year, their ship moving much faster than light.  Danton is an exception, however--he sees Jane cheating on him!  Danton goes berserk, and there is a whole drama involving ray pistol fire, stolen fuel, and hijacked life boats as Danton pursues a scheme of stranding the ship here and escaping on his own to get revenge on Jane and her lover.  Ken Howell foils the plot by diagnosing Danton's psychology.  Howell is one canny figure; he also realizes the Lost Race's projection device is not a real-time televiewer but simply projects images of a person's thoughts and expectations--Danton only saw Jane cheating because of his own paranoia.  Even more astoundingly, Howell solves the mystery of the Lost Race after finding some bones--the Lost Race were a people who had tails and other particular features, but their use of atomic energy was mutating them so that they were going to lose their tails and other characteristics--they would become what they saw as hideous monsters!  So they all killed themselves.  The shocking ending is the revelation that the people of the Lost Race were going to evolve so that they looked just like we Earth people do!  Could it be that we are the degenerate descendants of a Lost Race colony that didn't commit suicide?

This is a fun classic-style science fiction story with lots of technical, sociological, and psychological speculation, plus decent action and adventure elements and human drama elements.  Thumbs up for "The Lost Race!"

"The House of Rising Winds" by Frank Belknap Long (1948)

"The House of Rising Winds" debuted in an issue of Startling Stories alongside Henry Kuttner's "The Mask of Circe," which we read in 2022, and is illustrated by fan favorite Virgil Finlay.  It would reappear in the Long collection The Rim of the Unknown. 

A young orphan boy, Jimmy, is living with his aunt and uncle--who keep arranging accidents in hopes of killing the kid so they can enjoy his inheritance!  Long does a good job at describing the cruelty and the schemes of the aunt and uncle--it is actually kind of creepy and at times shocking.

Jimmy is hiding in the woods when he is approached by a space alien who calls himself Lacula!  Long, something of a poet, comes up with a long list of metaphors to describe Lacula and how he makes Jimmy feel.  

Lacula was like many things at once--things that Jimmy had seen and imagined and dreamed about.  A big twisted tree trunk....the gold and russet splendor of the autumn woods....the sea, wide and boundless....a mountain, rising pale and purple....a maze of complicated machinery....

Lacula is a kindly gent...and also a big game hunter!  He has with him cages full of vicious beasts from Mars, Venus, and other worlds.  With a little device, Lacula makes these cages float hither and thither.  I guess the cages are like intersections between different points in space or something--when Jimmy looks into one cage he sees the broad expanse of a Martian desert leading to mountains in the far distance, but he can also see through the cage to the mundane surface of the Earth neighborhood with which he is familiar.  Long relishes describing two of the ravenous monsters.  Lacula gives Jimmy a little pipe, and instructions on how to use it.  Later that day, when aunt and uncle contrive yet another attempt on Jimmy's life (they make the kid take a bath and arrange an electric hair curler--still plugged in--to fall into the bath to electrocute him), Jimmy blows the pipe and a ferocious wind hurls aunt and uncle out of the house and into one of Lacula's cages.  Lacula leaves Earth with his latest specimens of vicious beasts, and Jimmy can look forward to living his own life, inheriting the house and turning it from a place of fear and misery to one of joy by marrying and building a happy family within it.

The parts with the aunt and uncle are chilling, and the alien monsters are fun; the stuff with Lacula is maybe a little fey and a little too verbose, but I can still mildly recommend "The House of the Rising Winds" as a weird horror story that mixes fairy tale and science fiction elements.           

"Thunder and Roses" by Theodore Sturgeon (1947)

Here we have a very popular story by Ted "Killdozer" Sturgeon, one that has been reprinted a billion times in Sturgeon collections, Astounding anthologies edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison, and by Tony Lewis, surveys of the SF field published by DAW, Prentice-Hall, Wesleyan University, and Harper and Row, an anthology of stories about nuclear war and one of horror stories about the mind.  The first edition of that last anthology, edited by a British computer scientist who was a technical advisor on The Tomorrow People, a TV show I loved as a kid, has a striking woman-in-bondage/violence against women cover that I am finding mesmerizing.

"Thunder and Roses" is a well-written melodrama that counsels turning the other cheek, unilaterally disarming yourself in the face of your enemies.  It is set in the near future at a remote military base after a sneak attack has nuked the United States--the attack was so successful that the US didn't even fire back at the unnamed enemies, and the land of the free and home of the brave is practically wiped out, save for this remote base, where people are despondent and suffering radiation sickness that dooms them to early graves.  Sturgeon does a good job describing the struggles of the men not to commit suicide under these dire conditions.  

The second half of the story expands on the don't-commit-suicide angle.  A beautiful woman singer, apparently the most popular celebrity in America, who regularly broadcast performances weekly to military bases, is still alive, and arrives at the base, her terrible wounds concealed by cosmetics.  Her final performance has the object of convincing the survivors not to retaliate against the enemies who just murdered the entire United States, as this will result in the total destruction of all humanity.  She argues that a decent civilization might arise someday from the rest of the world, but if the United States launches its weapons then all life on Earth--even lizards!--will be killed so no new intelligent life can arise.  In the same way individuals struggled in the first half of the story to resist the inclination to commit suicide, in the second half of the story the handful of surviving Americans characters struggle against each other to resist the temptation to launch a retaliatory strike, which would amount to the suicide of the human race and all life on Earth.

"Thunder and Roses" is well structured and well written, so I must, albeit grudgingly, judge it a good story.  Some may think it over the top, that Sturgeon's depiction of the singer's martyrdom, for example, goes so far as to become comical, or that many individual scenes are too long or that some scenes are superfluous and repetitive (how many guys do we have to hear have committed suicide?) but it all works in my opinion.  My gripe is with the story's ideology--Sturgeon seems to think you shouldn't resist or deter aggressors and so he contrives an unlikely scenario in which resistance and deterrence are somehow unjustifiable.  This is the kind of thing the science fiction that aspires to be a literature of ideas does, and that Sturgeon and Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. in particular, do--question conventional wisdom, like that slavery and incest are bad, by coming up with crazy scenarios and counterintuitive theories that demonstrate that slavery and incest might actually be good.  I obviously think it is the duty of decent people to resist and deter those who would trespass against others and so I recoil from Sturgeon's ideas here, but I guess that is part of the point of the story and "serious" science fiction, to get a rise out of you.  ("Don't worry about it son," Campbell told a young Barry Malzberg after a long argument in the year 1969, "I just like to shake 'em up."*)

*As reported in Malzberg's 1980 essay on Campbell, available in Engines of the Night and Breakfast in the Ruins.

An important story in SF history, likely of value to those interested in science fiction written in response to the use of atomic weapons in World War II and to the Cold War, and science fiction influenced by Christian thought--though Sturgeon never directly mentions Hiroshima, the Soviet Union, or any religious figure or establishment--and science fiction that depicts stress and psychological trauma.

[UPDATE JANUARY 30, 2025: Tarbandu in the comments points out that a 1971 printing
of a 1968 horror anthology, Splinters, has the same cover as the 1970 Mind in Chains.
  Tarbandu blogged about Splinters back in 2015--check out his assessment at the link.]

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With the exception of Brown's sterile filler piece, all of today's stories are pretty grim in tone but well-executed and worth reading.  While Long's succeeds in depicting human personalities under stress, Leinster's and Sturgeon's do the same as well as offering compelling speculations on the effect on human personality and society of new technologies, offering good examples of SF that is both emotionally engaging and thought provoking.  

Aliens from Analog: Leinster, Anderson, Brown

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we just read Eric Frank Russell's 1959 Astounding story "Now Inhale" in a 1965 anthology.  "Now Inhale" reappeared in 1983 in the anthology Aliens from Analog.  (I don't need to tell most people reading MPorcius Fiction Log that in 1960, Astounding, perhaps the most important science fiction magazine for decades, changed its name to Analog.)  Over the course of this blog's life we have now read five stories that appear in Aliens from Analog: Russell's "Now Inhale," "The Children's Hour" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, "Unhuman Sacrifice" by Katherine MacLean, "Big Sword" by Pauline Ashwell, and Russell's second story in the book, "The Hobbyist."  The anthology offers six stories which we have yet to read; let's cut that number down by half and read the stories in the book by three guys we already know, Murray Leinster, Poul Anderson and Fredric Brown.  (Maybe we'll read the stories in the book by people with whom we are not familiar, Alison Tellure, Stanley Schmidt, and Marc Steigler, next time.)

(Nota bene: I am reading the versions of the stories that appear in this 1983 anthology edited by Schmidt, editor of Analog from 1978 to 2013.)

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"First Contact" by Murray Leinster (1945)

Here we have a very famous story, one reprinted innumerable times in many languages, a tale that serves as the title story of a Damon Knight anthology and won a Retro Hugo in 1996.  "First Contact" was the cover story of the issue of Astounding in which it appeared, an issue that also prints a story by Frank Belknap Long which I rather liked, "The Trap."

"First Contact" is full of astronomy.  FTL Earth science ship Llanvabon is on a mission to study the Crab Nebula and the two stars at its center, and our main character is the guy with the job of photographing the nebula from various angles and distances and we hear all about the composition of the nebula and the temperature of the stars and so forth.  There's also quite a bit of description of sensors and space suits and that sort of thing, which I enjoy more than the astronomy stuff.

Though full of science and technology, the actual plot of the story revolves around Llanvabon's encounter with an alien ship--the first time humans have ever met a spacefaring extraterrestrial race!  Earth could benefit greatly from trade with these people, who no doubt have different and complementary knowledge and technology, but what if they are unscrupulous and want to conquer Earth, or just cautious and seek to destroy Llanvabon and then the human race for fear humans are unscrupulous?  Any exchange of useful info is likely to offer clues as to the location of Earth and thus put our entire civilization at terrible risk.  The safest course is to blow up the alien ship, but of course there is no guarantee the Earthers will win a fight they start, and a victory will destroy beyond recovery a tremendous volume of valuable data.

The crews of the two ships tentatively open communications and after a few weeks the main character comes up with a way for the two races to exchange invaluable knowledge without incurring much risk of genocidal interstellar war breaking out.  We are left with every reason to believe the human race is on course to build a mutually beneficial interstellar friendship with the ETs.

A solid traditional science fiction piece--thumbs up!

"Wings of Victory" by Poul Anderson (1972)

"Wings of Victory" takes place in the same universe as Anderson's many stories of Van Rijn, Falkayn and Flandry.  In 1979 it was reprinted in an anthology produced by a Soviet publisher that presents in English, with notes and supplementary material in Russian, stories by some of the most important American and British SF writers.  "Wings of Victory" would be included in multiple Anderson collections, one of which, The Earth Book of Stormgate, I own. 

"Wings of Victory" is a science-heavy story, the main point of which seems to be to describe the procedures of exploring an alien planet and to present all the science--biology, ecology, sociology and psychology--behind a fun alien race Anderson came up with.  Anderson includes a love triangle and a mutiny in an effort to produce some human drama, but this stuff is not particularly engaging, being a little too obvious and predictable.  "Wings of Victory" feels like a bunch of exposition meant to introduce to readers the Iron Age civilization of bird people native to the planet in the story, a society which seems to embody values Anderson admires--bravery, freedom, individualism, etc.  We'll call "Wings of Victory" acceptable.

A space boat with a multi-cultural crew of three humans lands on a planet where there are a substantial number of widely separated homesteads.  How civilized can the natives be if they all live so far apart from each other instead of being packed together in cities where trade and exchange of ideas can thrive?  The explorers encounter some large fearsome birds near one of the houses--are these domesticated guard beasts or the intelligent people who built the house?

One of the three explorers is an attractive woman and the two men compete over her attentions as they try to figure out the answers to these and related questions without getting killed in the process; these guys have radically divergent theories about the natives and have long science debates pushing their individual interpretations of the evidence.  One of Anderson's objectives in "Wings of Victory" seems to be to point out how long-held theories may turn out to be wrong, and people in positions of authority dangerously fallible, when faced with novel conditions--the guy who uses his intuition turns out to be correct and he gets the girl while his superior who relies on theories based on life from other planets and tries to pull rank suffers not only intellectual but physical humiliation.

A characteristic Anderson story which competently advances his ideological commitments and shows off his science knowledge, but not one of the more impressive ones from a literary or entertainment perspective.      

"The Waveries" by Fredric Brown (1945)

Here we have one of those science fiction disaster stories that feels like a history article from the future and tries to teach you about some scientific and technological phenomena (in this case, radio waves and the history of radio transmission and reception); "The Waveries" also serves as social commentary or satire, suggesting modern life, the era of the radio and the motor car, is driving us crazy and making us miserable.  Brown also unleashes a lot of speculative economics on us.  Unfortunately, "The Waveries" lacks much by way of character and human drama. 

It is the near future of 1947 and America is enjoying an economic boom as demobilized servicemen return home and set out spending all their pay.  Suddenly, everybody's radios, worldwide, begin picking up odd transmissions that interfere with legitimate broadcasts of music and news.  The well-informed recognize these puzzling sounds as being much like the first experimental signals sent out by radio pioneers like Marconi over 40 years ago, and in short order bits and pieces of more recent broadcasts are received over the air.  These signals overwhelm the airwaves, rendering radios useless, leading to a sharp rise in newspaper and magazine sales as well as a spike in the popularity of live and cinematic performances.

Scientists theorize that aliens of pure energy, living radio waves, have been attracted to Earth by our transmissions, and as they orbit the globe they are conforming their invisible hundreds-miles-long bodies to the shape of the messages that attracted them--the dots and dashes of morse code, snatches of song and speech less than thirty seconds long.

Things take a turn for what looks like the worse when the aliens start eating or absorbing electricity so that telephones, automobiles, aircraft, light bulbs, etc., cease to operate.  (Doesn't the human nervous system also operate via electrical pulses?  Brown doesn't address this as far as I can remember.)  The government seizes control of all steam locomotives and horses, now the world's primary sources of transport and power, and steam engines are produced en masse to power factories of all sizes.  (Brown displays a surprisingly robust faith in the ability of the government to effectively plan the economy in a time of crisis.)

The twist ending of "The Waveries" is that without electricity and gasoline engines people are healthier and happier!  They get plenty of exercise walking, riding bikes, riding horses, and toiling in the fields.  Denied radio and movies, they create their own entertainment via amateur theatricals and bands.  There is so much less stress that people stop drinking hard liquor.  Now, of course, we can't expect the bookish readers of Astounding to relish the idea of breaking their backs laboring on a farm--the main character of this story runs a small town newspaper, doing all the writing and editing and reporting himself.      

A provocative story that reminds you of those nostalgic reactionary types who try to convince you that medieval peasants had better lives than 21st-century office drones.  I'm not buying its rosy view of a simpler life, but "The Waveries" is OK.     

Among the places you can find "The Waveries" are a Penguin anthology called Connoisseur's Science Fiction and an Italian magazine called Gamma.

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Science fiction boosters call SF "the literature of ideas," and today we've read three stories that really do focus on science and speculation, rather than just using science jargon as window dressing for some kind of traditional adventure or horror story.  Whether this kind of SF is your cup of tea, or you prefer blood and guts, sex and violence, characters you can identify with and striking images, is a matter of taste, and I have to admit I find Brown's story a little dry and Anderson's efforts to incorporate relationship drama and combat action into his story a little flat, though these shortcomings are not fatal.  Leinster's story to my mind has the most compelling characters, relationships and images of today's three stories--it deserves that Retro Hugo.

We'll finish up Aliens in Analog soon, so stay tuned if you are curious about Stanley Schmidt's other picks.