Best SF: 1968: B Shaw, D I Masson, & J D MacDonald

I guess I've had my copy of Best SF:1968, edited by Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat fame with some help from Brian Aldiss, for years now; today I finally get around to reading some of it.  Mine is the US paperback edition of an anthology first printed over on the sceptered isle as The Year's Best Science Fiction, No. 2 and reprinted several times over the years under various titles and with slightly differing contents--my edition includes a story by Aldiss but in some other editions a story by Theodore Sturgeon takes its place.  

Obviously I love the Paul Lehr cover on the American editions-- the color, the little human figures, the crags, the domed ship or building sheltering structures that echo the crags, the little dart-like craft, the mist obscured planet, and the monstrous eyes.  Awesome.  Then we have Harry Harrison's intro, in which he trumpets the success of SF in getting mainstream and academic attention and minimizes the drama surrounding the New Wave, arguing that there "there is no new wave, save in the eye of the beholder"; after all, there have always been experimental SF authors and there have always been writers whose prose is "dense, impressionistic, and bad."  Frustratingly, Harrison doesn't back up his assertions with a lists of SF writers active before and after the heralding of the New Wave who meet the criteria of "experimental," "dense," "impressionistic" and "bad," and goes on to say stuff like "One of the foremost writers in the 'new wave' admitted that my own writing fits into both [new wave and old wave] camps" without telling us who this "foremost" writer is.  I find these kinds of blind items annoying.      

Then come the stories.  Today we'll deal with the contributions by Bob Shaw, whom we have read several things by and whom I like, David I. Masson, with whom I am not at all familiar, and detective writer John D. MacDonald, whose work I think we have encountered five or six times.

 "Appointment on Prila" by Bob Shaw (1968)

When we read Shaw's "A Full Member of the Club" in 2020 and his "The Weapons of Isher II" in 2018, I compared them to the work of beloved Canadian madman A. E. van Vogt, and in his intro to it here in Best SF: 1958, Harrison compares "Appointment on Prila" to the output of good ol' Van.  The comparison is appropriate--as in many of the stories that ended up serving as raw material for Voyage of the Space Beagle and The War Against the Rull, in "Appointment on Prila" humans are confronted by an alien monster with special powers and have to figure out how to survive the encounter.

First we meet the alien monster, witnessing its tremendous abilities and getting a sense it is a callous exploiter of our kind.  Then we meet the humans, who are exploring the inhospitable world on which the monster has been marooned by a third group of enigmatic aliens who sought to exile the dangerous creature.  The human ship has a complement of six ground vehicles; these have sallied forth to map the planet.  But when the mapping is done, it is seven vehicles that approach the mother ship--one is the shape-shifting monster!  Can the Terrans puzzle out which machine is an enemy in disguise before it devours them?

A fun classic-style science fiction tale full of astronomy, high technology and cool aliens that is all about how awesome science, logic and explorers are, has a twist ending, and is well-written and well-structured.  Thumbs up for "Appointment on Prila."   

Having debuted in Analog, "Appointment on Prila" reappeared in two 1969 anthologies by Harrison, this Best of book and Worlds of Wonder.  When our friends in the Netherlands got around to translating Best SF:1968 in 1979 they titled the anthology after this Shaw story.  "Appointment on Prila" seems to be the first in a series of stories about the starship crew it depicts; maybe I should check them all out.  On the other hand, it kind of looks like the stories all served as the source material for a 1979 fix-up novel, Ship of Strangers, so maybe I should read that.

"Lost Ground" by David I. Masson 

In his intro to "Lost Ground," Harrison really talks up Masson, saying, among other things, that "overenthusiasm in the past has discovered too many bright lights of authors--who become darkened cinders after emitting only a handful of protons.  This will not be true of Masson."  isfdb lists ten short stories by Masson, only four of them appearing after "Lost Ground," so maybe Harrison got over his skis a little here.    

It is the surreal future.  The air is full of particles that manipulate human emotion; these particles are pushed around by natural weather patterns, to the point that the feelings and behavior of people can be predicted like the weather, with radio newscasters saying stuff like 

"A system of depressions and associated troughs will follow one another in quick succession over Scotland and the north....Insecure, rather sad feeling today and tomorrow, followed by short-lived griefs, some heavy, some stormy, with cheerful intervals.  By midweek griefs will be dying out...."

"Lost Ground" is full of sentences like "...a squall of rage and grief burst upon him" and "The chilliness was becoming palpable hostility...."  Somewhat muddying the picture of emotion-determining particles behaving like the weather, later in the story we learn that certain areas generate certain emotions in people and that each time of year also has a characteristic effect on people's psychological state.  Maybe this is a satire of how little the "experts" really know about both the weather and human psychology?

People in the third world are at the mercy of this "mood-weather," and it retards their development, while in the developed world (this story is set in England, which when the story was written was still considered developed, ha ha ha please don't take offense at my little joke) people mitigate the effects of the mood-weather by using air purifiers and air conditioners inside and by taking drugs--everybody keeps close at hand a battery of pills and aerosol sprays to stabilize and improve their moods and employ them at the drop of a hat.  Try wrapping your head around a society in which everybody is constantly on drugs, dear reader! 

This crazy world is dramatized for us through the experiences of a middle-class family whose head of household is a TV journalist.  An "unexpected pocket of terror in a dip in the road" causes a driver to crash, killing the journalist's son, and his wife loses her will to live and stops taking all the drugs everybody is on.  The journalist and his wife move to a rural area to get away from it all, leaving their surviving child, a little girl, with relatives.  There is a weird phenomena taking place near the little village where they are staying--the fields of an abandoned farm inexplicably seem to change, with hedges and walls and rocks appearing one day and disappearing the next; animals that venture onto the farm sometimes vanish.  The bereaved mother walks into the fields and disappears, and her husband becomes a member of the team investigating the phenomenon.  It turns out that, with bewildering inconsistency, some sections of the fields are moving forward in time and others backward, and people and animals that move from one section to another can cross the barrier of time and find themselves unable to return.

The journalist searches through time for his wife.  He winds up sixty years in the future, and is collected by scientists who are studying this region of time-chaos, which has been growing over the decades to encompass more and more of England, necessitating migrations of people out of its path.  The journalist is interrogated by future journalists.  He has a conversation with his daughter, who has grown up and become old without her parents.  Then he joins a team trying to map the region of time-distortion; the plot is resolved when the journalist finds himself in some Early Modern era in which the men wear lace and breeches and are religious, and learns that his wife got stuck in that period, became a respected and even beloved member of the community, and died of old age--this was foreshadowed earlier in the story, back in the 20th century, when he saw her old weathered headstone but didn't know it was hers because the inscription was partly worn away.    

"Lost Ground" feels long and slow.  Masson spends a lot of time explaining the story's two uncanny phenomena and providing examples of them in operation, so that the story feels repetitive and the phenomena become boring.  The characters are not compelling and you don't care what happens to them.  The two gimmicks and the plot are not bad in and of themselves, but the delivery is kind of flat and uninspiring.  Also, I'm not sure why the story has two gimmicks--the mood-weather gag doesn't affect the plot, which revolves around the time-travel gag, and both gimmicks make the same point, that the universe is inexplicable and we are at the mercy of outside forces and all that.  

We'll call it acceptable.

"Lost Ground" debuted in 1966 in an issue of New Worlds with a cover like something out of the credits sequence of a James Bond movie.  It was included in Masson's 1968 collection Caltrops of Time, which I guess is how Harrison justifies including it in a best of '68 book.  "Lost Ground" would go on to appear in European anthologies with some pretty cool spacey covers.

"The Annex" by John D. MacDonald (1968)

"The Annex" debuted in an issue of Playboy alongside stories by J. G. Ballard and Isaac Bashevis Singer, a bunch of film stills of a nude Julie Newmar, and an elaborate chart constructed by Len Deighton that tells you what to do, eat and buy in 21 European cities.  In his intro to the story, Harrison talks about how MacDonald is one of the best living American authors but the critics don't recognize it.  It kind of reads like Harrison being some sort of suck up, hoping the famous crime writer will rejoin the ranks of the SF community after a long absence or just say something nice about SF.  Sad.

"The Annex," like Masson's "Lost Ground," has surreal elements, and Harrison in his intro tells you the story is "Kafkaesque."  For example, a guy walks through a labyrinthine building, following a red pipe that vibrates in time with a big thumping machine somewhere in the building--I guess the machine is like a heart and the pipes are like veins or arteries, so that the building is like a body.   The protagonist has to navigate his way through the building to some upper floor room, I guess representing the brain, at the behest of inexplicable authorities. 

The guy meets a woman who acts in an inexplicable manner and complains about arbitrary authorities.  Then she guides him through the maze-like building.  MacDonald wastes our time describing the corridors and stairways, and reminds us this story was first printed in Playboy by describing the woman's ass and the guy's fantasies of feeling her up.  MacDonald fails to imbue these scenes with any kind of emotion or excitement--in real life being guided though a baffling series of corridors and stairways might be scary and studying the movements of a woman's ass might be sexually arousing, but MacDonald, I guess intentionally, to keep the story dreamlike and surreal, makes sure to not ascribe such emotions to his protagonist or to inspire such emotions in the reader.  I find this kind of surrealism that doesn't generate any emotion beyond "wow, this is surreal" to be a waste of time.

The pair gets to the door of the room the guy was assigned to perform some task within, but when the door is opened the room is not there, just a sheer drop, 40 or whatever floors down to the street.  The body the building represents is dying, even actually brain dead, we readers must assume.  The pair then retires to another room, still intact, and undress but do not, I guess, actually have sex.  

Finally comes the scene in which it is made clear this mission in a maze-like skyscraper was all the dream of a dying man and/or a metaphor for a doctor's failed attempt to heal a dying patient or something like that.  The doctor tells the loved one of the dying man that she can hold his hand as he dies and he will know she is there, even though the doctor knows the patient is already technically dead or dead by any practical measure.

A laborious and pretentious waste of time.  Maybe MacDonald really is a once-in-a-generation genius at writing about a guy in a boat unravelling a pyramid scheme or whatever the hell he usually writes about, but this pseudo-literary goop is not providing any evidence of that fact.  Thumbs down!

In 1976, "Annex" reared its ugly head in another anthology, The Late Great Future, and in 1978 appeared in the MacDonald SF collection Other Times, Other Worlds.

Nobody, no way, no how, is ever going to convince me that Beat or
Three of a Perfect Pair is half as good as Islands 

**********

The Masson and MacDonald stories are ambitious and you might call them "New Wave" what with their surrealism and pessimism but they are long and belabor their points and lack human feeling even though they are both about people's loved ones dying.  Shaw's story is a conventional old-fashioned science fiction story that is actually entertaining and easily the best of today's crop.  Score one for the old wave.

We'll probably read more stories from Best SF: 1968 in the near future.  Feel free to tune in for more of my bitter musings about the state of the world.

Super Science Stories Nov '49: F B Long, M Leinster, R Bradbury & J D MacDonald

At Beaver Creek Antiques in Hagerstown, MD, a great stop for the vintage SF and comic book fan, I spotted an alluring copy of Super Science Stories, the November 1949 issue, whose cover depicts comely young ladies escaping four-armed aliens via the medium of transparent bubbles.  This magazine is full of stories by people we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log, so I was moved to look it up at the internet archive and read a bunch of stories from it.  Two major stories that we are skipping are Fredric Brown's "Gateway to Darkness" and Neil R. Jones' "Parasite Planet," the former because it was rewritten to form half of the novel Rogue in Space, which we read in 2016, the latter because it is one of Jones' later Professor Jameson stories and we tentatively plan to try to read them in order (we've already read six of those which were published in the 1930s--"Into the Hydrosphere," "Time's Mausoleum" and "The Sunless World" in 2015, and "Zora of the Zoromes," "Space War" and "Labyrinth" in 2021.)  That still leaves a lot of stories in this issue for us to grapple with, as well as Fred Pohl's book review column, in which he praises L. Ron Hubbard's Triton and dismisses George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 as mere "political tracts," albeit "powerfully effective" ones, that "have no meaning and no substance of [their] own" and don't really qualify as "art," but just "politics."  Is Pohl irritated that a non-SF personage has produced in 1984 one of the most popular and influential SF works of all time, or, that a fellow leftist has unleashed upon the world two extremally popular attacks on socialism and the USSR? 

"The Timeless Man" by Frank Belknap Long

It looks like this story by one of H. P. Lovecraft's closest associates has never been reprinted.  "The Timeless Man" is a paean to the power of art and a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy for creative people; the science fiction gimmick at its center bears some similarity to that in A. E. van Vogt's "The Monster" (AKA "Resurrection,") which appeared in Astounding in August of 1948.

Holden is a painter who loves life, loves doing his work, loves seeing the beauty of the world around him.  A nuclear was has broken out, and even as the deadly radiation is penetrating his flesh, killing him, he is painting his final canvas.

When aliens arrive on Earth, Holden's dedication to his art receives extreme vindication--he put so much of himself into his last painting that the aliens are able to deduce his entire psyche and physical form from the canvas and construct a duplicate of him.  I guess because it is necessary for the plot, the aliens don't stick around until Holden II wakes up, ostensibly because the radiation still enshrouding the Earth is unhealthy for them, which is ridiculous, because if they have a starship they must have some kind of radiation shield technology.  Anyway, the duplicate Holden wakes up and sees their ship receding into the sky, and then his own skeleton, identifiable by the ring on its finger.

Holden II manages to survive in post-atomic war America, finding that breeding populations of fruits and birds and small animals have endured.  The story's climax is when he meets a small tribe of humans--savages, cave people.  The tribe accepts him, and he resumes his career as an artist, using paints he makes from berries and dirt.  

I like this one--Long's argument that art is essential, eternal, and can be a source of joy in any circumstance is a little naïve, self-serving, and saccharine, but I appreciate the sincerity he brings to the story and I can sympathize with, even identify with, his vision.  

"This Star Shall Be Free" by Murray Leinster

More cave people!  The place: Northwest Europe. The time: Over thirty thousand years ago.  The man: Tork.

Tork is a subordinate male in a small tribe of people who have fire and pointed sticks, but no stone or flint blades yet.  One day aquatic aliens--their reflective silver starship and their spacesuits are filled with water--arrive.  These Antareans are telepathic and also have a machine, a box, that sends out hypnotic waves--those close to the box focus their thoughts on a certain type of creature, and that creature is irresistibly attracted to the machine.  With this attractor box they draw Tork to their ship.  As an experiment in ecology, they give Tork stone knives, spears with stone points, a bow, and arrows with flint heads; they also give him the attractor box and explain how to use it.  They even supply him with pictures of local animals to help him use the device to attract animals--it is easier to concentrate your thoughts on an animal if you have a picture of it to look at.  The aliens, who are callous jerks who have overpopulated their own world and are looking for other watery planets to colonize, think that with the weapons and the attractor box the Earthers will exterminate the local wildlife and then starve themselves.  

Tork, using these tools, makes himself chief of the tribe, and earns the envy of many other tribes; people start stealing the weapons.  So Tork figures out how to use the attractor box to attract the Antareans, in hopes the aliens will replenish his weapon supply.  To concentrate strongly enough about the aliens to compel them to come, the cave people draw images of the Antareans--the aliens have not only inspired man to begin using complex tools, but to begin making representational art.  The humans are such a nuisance with their use of the attractor box that the Antareans abandon Earth before seeing how their experiment in ecology works out.  In their absence, the people of Earth learn how to make their own weapons and create increasingly more sophisticated art.

When the Antareans return 30,000 or so years later to colonize Earth they find the humans have a heavily armed interplanetary space fleet.  The Antareans are outfought and the Terran space navy captures a specimen of their interstellar drive--foolishly, the Antareans have twice spurred technological and cultural growth among humans, enabling them to conquer the galaxy.

An acceptable entertainment.  isfdb lists three anthologies in which "This Star Shall Be Free" has been reprinted: Groff Conklin's Invaders of Earth, which saw quite a few editions, Michael Sissons' Asleep in Armageddon, and Thomas E. Sanders' Speculations, which looks like a 600-page textbook that mixes people like James Dickey, W. H. Auden and Graham Greene in among SF Grand Masters like Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt and Fritz Leiber.      

"Impossible" by Ray Bradbury

"Impossible," isfdb tells us, was included in The Martian Chronicles (printed in Britain as The Silver Locusts) under the title "The Martian."  It is an effective story of grief and loss.

Two older people have retired to Mars, to a homestead near a canal; they lack indoor plumbing and bring water in buckets from the canal.  Their son died as a teenager on Earth long ago, but, amazingly, he suddenly shows up, still fourteen years old.  The husband realizes this must be a Martian shape shifter who has read in their minds their memories of their son, but the wife is more susceptible to the weird native's hypnotism.  The Martian seems friendly, to want to be loved as much as the settlers want to love, so maybe it will be OK.

Tragedy strikes!  The wife recalls how much their son enjoyed going into town back on Earth, so she insists they take their boat down the canal to the nearby town.  The "son" is very reluctant to go, but she overcomes his resistance.  In the town, other humans see the shape shifter as some dead person from their own past, and everybody fights over the alien, who can't take the pressure on his not-exactly-voluntary shape-shifting ability and expires.  Sad!

Quite good.

"Appointment for Tomorrow" by John D. MacDonald

Here we have a story by famous detective novelist MacDonald.  We here at MPorcius Fiction Log (feel free to call it "The MFL" for short) have read MacDonald's SF novel Wine of the Dreamers and six of his SF short stories: "Ring Around the Redhead," "A Child is Crying,"  "Flaw," "Spectator Sport," and "A Condition of Beauty."  Here comes lucky seven, which, if isfdb is to be believed, was never reprinted.

You can see why this one wasn't included in anthologies and collections like some other of MacDonald SF stories we have read: the main gimmick is kind of weak and the human story simple and sappy.  Reminding us of Robert Heinlein's "Lifeline" (Astounding, 1939) and Isaac Asimov's sprawling Foundation series (the first of which appeared in Astounding in 1942), in the future the government can use statistics to figure out what day you will (probably) die.  Six months ago, 40-something widower and big business president Samuel Larkin got a notice from the "Future Bureau" that his day was approaching if he didn't make radical changes in his life.  Larkin felt he couldn't leave his job, there being thousands of people relying on him, and so today the feds have come to his office to warn him that tomorrow is the day he will die!  This doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense to the reader, seeing as Larkin is perfectly healthy, but all the characters have trust in the science and believe the Future Bureau's calculations implicitly.

Larkin says farewell to everybody and writes memos to his successor on how to handle all the current projects and otherwise straightens up his affairs.  His gorgeous secretary, 20-something Martha Hood, admits she has been in love with him for seven years.  Then Larkin takes a long walk through the night city (we are to believe he is going to buy the farm tomorrow but he is hale and hearty enough to walk from dusk till dawn), drinking in the atmosphere of the city for the last time.        

The text has been hinting at some "alternative," and the twist ending that greets readers is that the government offers a way to radically change your life so you can beat the statistics and survive.  The most radical change you can make to your life is flying to another planet, right?  So, people who are predicted to die can "volunteer" to join the space colonization effort, a very unpleasant and dangerous enterprise, but better than death while you are still healthy, right?  After his long walk, Larkin boards the star ship and is strapped in.  At the last moment Martha Hood hurries on to the ship, one of the vanishingly small number of people who sign up for these horrifying space missions even though the government stats suggest they have many years to live.  Her love overcame her fear of space, and Larkin can now look forward to the future with hope.

The idea that statisticians can predict a healthy person will die of an accident on a specific day is very hard to take, at least for me.  I am seriously considering that the Future Bureau is a government scam to trick capable people into colonizing space, but MacDonald doesn't seem to leave much room for this interpretation, which would make more sense in a totalitarian society in which the government keeps a tight rein on information and punishes dissent, not the liberal market society he depicts here.   

Weak filler.   

"The Sleepers" by John D. MacDonald

MacDonald gets a second bite at the apple today because he has two stories in this issue of "The Big Book of Science Fiction," this one appearing under the pen name John Wade Farrell.  Maybe "8" is the lucky number today.

In fact, "The Sleepers" is another filler story, but it is more internally consistent and believable than "Appointment for Tomorrow," and its themes, you might say its ethos, are more amenable to my own sensibilities, so I'm judging it as solidly acceptable.

It is the future.  For like 1,300 years the vast majority of the human race, generation after generation, has lived in a sort of induced coma, stacked up in niches in a uniform city of hundreds of identical buildings, fed intravenously, their waste products sucked away by tubes.  People are conceived in a machine, moved to a cold niche where their hearts beat just ten times an hour, then, after a century or so of life, they die and are put in the furnace.

The population of over a billion sleepers are tended to by 8,000 workers.  Workers are men (and only men) who are woken from sleep, indoctrinated hypnotically by machines, and then serve a twenty-year tour of duty at such tasks as handling the conception and birth of new people, maintaining the machines that keep the sleepers alive, and trundling them off to the furnace when they expire.  The indoctrination not only teaches them to speak and read and to fulfill their duties, but stifles all desire for sex or freedom or friendship, deadens all curiosity about the past and about the world beyond the monotonous city of the sleepers.  The workers also can't remember the dreams they had while sleeping, but are told their dreams are wonderful, are of a life in paradise, and so are generally eager to return to sleep after twenty years of service.

Due to various factors, indoctrination is not perfectly reliable in all cases, and sometimes workers in their second decades of service begin to become curious or horny or even to remember the dreams they had while sleeping.  The plot of "The Sleepers" concerns two such men.  One of these men, by chance, is the head of the whole city!  The other is a rank and file worker who found some old books about life before the era of the sleepers, and who has fallen in love with a sleeping woman of great beauty.  This guy remembers the dreams he had before he was awakened to work.  Maybe the first generation of sleepers had wonderful dreams of a paradise, because they went to sleep with brains full of memories of a life of sex and family and food and work and hobbies, but later generations, because they have never had lives, have dreams of absolute sterile blackness!  

These two guys, because one of them can order the workers around and manipulate work schedules and so forth, are able to thaw and wake some people, teach them how to talk and so forth in the old fashioned way, and then lead this small band in a break out from the city of sleep and into the wilderness.

The setting is interesting and I like the theme of people fighting tyranny in pursuit of love and freedom, so "The Sleepers" is an acceptable if not remarkable entertainment.

**********

A tolerable crop of stories.  The best of them, the Bradbury has real human feeling, and the Long and the "Farrell" express sentiments about life I can get behind, while Leinster's story is an interesting bit of "what if" speculation that ends on a sense-of-wonder note.  Only the story that appears under MacDonald's real name has so many problems that it is rendered annoying instead of entertaining.  

More short stories from magazines published before you were born in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Startling Stories, Sept '49: H Kuttner & C L Moore, J D MacDonald and L R Hubbard

In our last thrilling episode we read a story by Arthur C. Clarke that was reprinted in Startling Stories in September 1949.  That issue of SS also features stories by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, John D. MacDonald, and L. Ron Hubbard that I figured I would read, as well as fun illustrations of skyscrapers, monsters, and beautiful women by Virgil Finlay and some less famous artists.  As usual, I'll be reading the magazine at the world's greatest website, the internet archive, where preserved for all of us who have contrived to pay this month's electric bill is all that text and all those illustrations, plus ads for all the products a man needs to convince some dame to marry him, like razor blades, hair tonic, and a correspondence course in Swedish massage (not that we would expect a guy who reads a magazine with a cartoonish dinosaur on its cover to have any trouble with the ladies!) 

Forget her buddy, all you need is your fur baby and your collection
of scientifiction mags!

"The Portal in the Picture" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore 

Here in Startling this novel is credited to Henry Kuttner.  When it was reprinted in an Ace Double in 1954, it was renamed Beyond Earth's Gates and credited to C. L. Moore and Lewis Padgett (Padgett is a pen name Kuttner and Moore generally used for collaborations.)  In 1987 the story was reprinted in a Kuttner collection and attributed solely to him, and in 2012 Gateway/Orion produced an e-book of the tale that they credited solely to Moore.  It seems a little odd how different publishers have attributed the novel differently; I guess these are all marketing decisions and each publisher had a different theory about what would sell.

"The Portal in the Picture" starts with a prologue.  Our narrator, Eddie Burton, is in a Manhattan nightclub where a mesmerizingly beautiful woman, Malesca, is singing.  He tries to keep his eyes off this irresistible goddess as she performs.  After her song she comes to his table--Malesca and Eddie knew each other in the past, and she wants to go out with him after she knocks off work.  Everyone in the club is amazed when Eddie turns down the woman they consider the most beautiful in the world.

The main text, fifteen chapters, is a flashback to the adventure in which Eddie and a selfish and irritating woman, Lorna Maxwell, were accidentally transported to an alternate Earth where Lorna was transformed into the striking beauty Malesca.

It is the 1930s, and Eddie Burton is an up-and-coming Broadway actor with three successful shows behind him.  He has inherited a fancy apartment from his Uncle Jim, a world traveler who, when Eddie was a child, told him Edgar Rice Burroughs-style stories (Tarzan and John Carter are specifically cited) apparently of his own devising set in the fantasy land of Malesco.  In the apartment is a reproduction of Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy, and one night when Eddie is being visited yet again by Lorna Maxwell, a conventionally pretty girl who says she is in love with Eddie and is always nagging him to help her break into show biz, a vision of a crimson city--Malesco!--appears in the picture.  Somehow, to the amazement of both, Lorna is sucked away, through the picture and into Malesco!

Eddie is blamed for Lorna's disappearance, which he cannot explain; this wrecks his career and puts him in terrible legal jeopardy--the cops can't quite pin a murder on him yet, so Eddie is eventually let out of jail, but they are still looking for clues!  Eddie searches for some clues himself--can he figure out how to get through the print to Malesco where maybe he can find Lorna and clear his name?  It turns out he can!

"The Portal in the Picture" is a very "meta" story, a story about person going to another world to have an adventure that expends a lot of verbiage referring directly to other fiction about fantasy worlds and adventures; Barsoom, the Wonderland of Alice, Oz, Erehwon, and Graustark are all mentioned, and Eddie repeatedly compares himself to John Carter and Allan Quartermain.  At times "The Portal in the Picture" seems like a parody or a satire of those sorts of adventure stories, an effort to remind us how unrealistic they are; for example, Eddie often points out, jocularly and at length, that he is not an invincible fighter, that he can't jump up a ten-foot wall, and so on.

"The Portal in the Picture" is also a story which Kuttner and Moore seem to have based on their reading about various historical periods and events, in particular the French Revolution and Ancient Egypt and Ancient Rome, and about psychology and sociology.  (Kuttner studied for an advanced degree in psychology and we see a lot of psychology in Kuttner and Moore's work; I blogged about four examples here in 2015, but there are many more.)  K & M also bang a drum we've heard them bang before, making the argument that utopia isn't all it is cracked up to be.  (Consider: C. L. Moore: "Greater Than Gods" (1939), Henry Kuttner, "The Land of Time to Come" and "Remember Tomorrow" (both 1941), Kuttner and Moore, Fury, (1947), Kuttner and Moore, "The Two-Handed Engine" (1955).)

Eddie lands in Malesco, in a city in which he puts on a disguise and sneaks around and learns that Lorna the ambitious nag, in the months since her disappearance, has become some kind of idol to the people of Malesco, her face up on posters and films of her even projected onto the clouds!  Eddie meets a guy who looks like his Uncle Jim; this guy, Coriole, turns out to be Uncle Jim's son.  Uncle Jim, Eddie learns, was the leader of a rebellion against Malesco's theocracy, but he fled back to New York when the rebellion was on the verge of defeat.  His son Coriole has taken up the anti-theocratic cause, and he gives Eddie, and us readers, a lesson in Malescan history.

Malesco and our Earth are alternate timelines which had identical histories until the death of Caligula.  A different Emperor took over in Malesco than our Earth, and whereas our world witnessed the rise of Christianity in ancient times and the rise of the English-speaking peoples and representative government and capitalism in modern times, in Malesco a caste of priests who have a monopoly on math, science and technology took over and have ruled tyrannically for almost two thousand years.  They maintain their control through such means as outlawing the use of Arabic numerals--ordinary people are forced to use Roman numerals, which makes the math necessary for modern engineering difficult--and fostering a culture which regards curiosity as a sin, thus discouraging people from trying to figure out how the TVs, anti-grav elevators, and electric lights work.  A machine as simple as Eddie's cigarette lighter dumbfounds and fascinates the common people of Malesco.  

We on Earth don't know about Malesco, but the Malescan priesthood knows about our world--in fact, the priests can view our world on their TV screens.  A tenet of the absolutely bogus Malescan religion is that people who behave will go to our Earth upon death--people who are really good will go to the paradise that is New York!  The priests got hold of Lorna when she arrived and used plastic surgery and their mastery of the social sciences to mold her into a Platonic ideal of beauty!  Now she is like a spokesperson for their religion, posing as a messenger from heaven and broadcasting speeches the priests write for her that bolster their rule.  The anti-theocracy forces, led by Eddie's cousin Coriole, want Eddie to use his relationship with Lorna to get her to switch to their side.

Eddie equivocates over which side to join, and whether to join any side at all--all he wants to do is get back to New York with Lorna to save his skin from a murder rap.  He contrives to meet the high priest, who has the power to send him back to New York; this guy is fat, so we know he is the villain and Eddie will eventually join the Coriole crew.

The high priest agrees to send Eddie and Lorna back to New York if they will first give a pacifying pro-priesthood speech to a mob that has been assembled by Coriole's anti-theocratic forces--Coriole and company have been spreading the word that Eddie is going to teach them all the stuff the priests have been keeping form them about science and technology.  During the speech Eddie vacillates, unsure what to do, but his cousin and the other rebels influence Eddie so that Eddie turns the tables on the high priest.  The priest is killed by the very trap he had set for Eddie and Lorna, opening up the opportunity for Coriole and his conspirators to seize the throne and reform Malesco.

In the epilogue we learn that, back in NYC, Lorna is still pursuing Eddie, even though with her looks she doesn't need his help to get into show biz--she must really love him.  As we have seen throughout the story's sixty-five or so pages, Lorna is selfish, vapid, and annoying, so Eddie knows a marriage with her would make him miserable, but his resolve is weakening because she is now almost irresistibly good-looking.  

"The Portal in the Picture" is not very good because it is long, slow, and lacks narrative tension and narrative drive, due to many artistic decisions made by Kuttner and Moore which sap the story of drive and energy.

Eddie and Lorna are indecisive characters, and the plot is largely driven by luck and by the manipulations of Coriole, the high priest, and some other characters who have their own selfish agendas.  Eddie's motives are uninteresting--Kuttner and Moore decided to not make him driven by some kind of ambition, or ideological commitment, or love of a woman, but instead to make him "realistic," to have as his motivation merely self-preservation.  This might work if the authors had striven to portray Eddie as scared and depicted him as being in mortal peril, but Eddie never seems scared and we readers never feel he is in danger of getting killed or maimed or trapped in Malesco forever--we already know he gets back to NYC in one piece and the text includes so many jokes that no horror or suspense could possibly be generated.  As for Lorna, for some reason Kuttner and Moore made the conscious decision that she would be neither a heroine, nor a love interest, nor a villain--her character generates no strong feelings in the reader other than irritation (at times she is despicable and at other times she is pathetic) and she doesn't serve the plot as a goal for Eddie or as an obstacle to him, she is simply dead weight.  The way Eddie thinks about her and treats her is pretty shabby, but both of them are such boring characters we don't care.

"The Portal in the Picture" feels very slow, and very little actually happens.  There are way too many expository scenes of in which Eddie learns about Malesco through lectures from natives or by watching TV.  Kuttner and Moore spend more time on describing the details of history, geography and daily life in Malesco than on the characters' relationships or on adventure elements.  And what passes for "adventure elements" in "The Portal in the Picture?"  Scenes of Eddie walking around the city and having conversations with people.  Eddie does very little and shows very little initiative, but we still have to endure many long paragraphs that describe his thought processes and his speculations on the thought processes of others.  The final scene, in which Eddie and Lorna are to give speeches to the assembled crowd of people skeptical of priestly rule, contains paragraph after paragraph on mob psychology.  The references to other adventure stories are also too numerous; every time Eddie has to do anything he reflects on what the hero of a fictional adventure tale would do in a similar circumstance.  This gets repetitive, and further weighs down the already slow pace of the narrative and further deadens the already limited emotional impact of the decisions and challenges Eddie faces.

Gotta give "The Portal in the Picture" a thumbs down.    

"A Condition of Beauty" by John D. MacDonald

Way back in 2014 I read crime novelist John D. MacDonald's 1951 SF novel Wine of the Dreamers, as well as two of his 1948 short SF stories, "Ring Around the Redhead" and "A Child is Crying."  In 2015 I read MacDonald's 1949 story "Flaw" and his 1950 story "Spectator Sport" in a blog post I billed as devoted to pessimistic SF stories.  After a hiatus of over six years, MPorcius Fiction Log again offers coverage of John D. MacDonald's SF output!

"A Condition of Beauty" takes up like four pages of text here in Startling.  It is a competent filler story with an obvious and predictable twist, but, if we are feeling generous, we can say it is a rumination on to what extent our ideas of beauty are socially constructed and to what extent they are instinctive, hard-wired into our brains by evolution and heredity.

The story starts in a dungeon.  The three prisoners there, a young man, a young woman, and a pessimistic old geezer, have been condemned because they are hideously ugly and terribly strong.  The scene then shifts to a space exploration ship.  The crew scans a star system, finds the planet where the dungeon is, and discovers on its surface a Terran space ship which must have crashed there "a hundred and ten generations ago."  A squad of the spacers investigates and discovers the descendants of the crew of the wrecked vessel, which they use as a place of worship and sacrifice.  The conditions on this planet are only barely suitable for human life, and over the centuries, thanks to selective breeding apparently "guided" by "some sixth sense," the descendents of the shipwrecked Earthers have evolved radically.  MacDonald doesn't describe the evolved humans, but they are so disgusting that at the sight of them many of the spacemen vomit inside their vacuum suits.  The sight of aliens that look like slugs or insects or reptiles has never made these hardy adventurers toss their cookies, but these evolved humans are nauseating because they are a travesty of the human form and trigger disgust at a sub- or unconscious level.

The spacers free the people from the dungeon--as we expect, they are "throwbacks" who look like normal Earth humans.  The old guy keels over from shock, but the spacers will bring the man and woman, both of them lookers, to Earth and hopefully, among other conventional homo sapiens, they will get over their disgust with their own bodies and live normal happy lives.

Acceptable.  The emphasis on the unconscious, the subconscious, and alleged "sixth senses," as well as cultural and social pressures, in guiding human belief and behavior is sort of interesting.  

"A Condition of Beauty" would be reprinted in a 1966 magazine, Great Science Fiction Stories.   

"Beyond the Black Nebula" by L. Ron Hubbard 

People are down on L. Ron Hubbard because of his scam religion, but I enjoyed the parts of Battlefield Earth and Mission Earth I read as a kid when they were new (though I didn't like them enough to finish either of these sprawling sagas), and in 2014 when I read Hubbard's novel To The Stars I liked it; Final Blackout, which I read the same year, I thought merely acceptable, but not actually bad.  So I feel there's a chance I'm going to appreciate this here story, even though it looks like it was never reprinted in English.  According to isfdb, "Beyond the Black Nebula" is part of a series called "The Conquest in Space," and in the 1980s our Italian friends reprinted this entire series in book form.  

It is the spacefaring future.  Mankind has explored many systems, but many remain to be explored.  In his youth, Anthony Twain went on a few of the early interstellar missions, but then he switched careers, gaining fame and fortune as a writer whose beat was chronicling humanity's conquest of space.  

Like so many celebrity authors, Twain employed a squad of ghostwriters to maintain his output.  Somehow one of these ghosts penned and got published--without Twain's knowledge--a book appearing under Twain's name which is full of libelous bullshit.  Twain's reputation and finances were destroyed.  Now an old man, how can he recover his reputation?   

Twain has the crazy idea of getting together some money to go on a dangerous expedition to a part of space everyone is scared to go to, a big patch of blackness.  Nobody wants to finance such an expedition, but some criminals hear about Twain's eagerness to command a ship and they buy a decrepit old vessel and have it put into working order and offer it to Twain--they will be his crew.

The criminals don't want to explore some uncharted black region that everybody is scared of; they pull a gun on Twain and tell him to take them to some planet they have selected for some nefarious purpose which is never disclosed.  Twain tries to trick them, to fly to the black region without them realizing it, but they figure it out and a fight ensues.  Twain comes out on top, but during the fight the ship goes off course and becomes totally lost.  Twain eventually figures out where they are and how to get back to Earth.

Twain thinks his mission was a failure, but it turns out that the ship's black box automatic recording systems tracked the entire voyage and reveal to the technicians on Earth that Twain flew through the black region and now its mystery is solved.  Twain is a hero and his reputation is saved!

The style and basic idea of this story are fine, but the story feels like it was rushed, like it could have been improved with revisions that filled in some blanks (what crime were the criminals going to commit?) and made things more interesting (the black region is just a substanceless shadow?  Boring!) and more convincing (the black boxes keep track of and record the ship's location but the ship's systems can't do the same calculations or access the black boxes' recordings during flight?)  Merely acceptable.

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Kind of disappointing, but they can't all be winners, can they?  And it is always worthwhile to explore the work of famous and/or important contributors to the SF field, so, no regrets!

Next time, we explore four stories by Fritz Leiber.

Early September 2020 Log: H. D., Norm Macdonald, and W. Somerset Maugham

Suffering from a cascade of fashionable, undiagnosed and unfalsifiable maladies ranging from writer's block and stage fright to social media fatigue and carpal tunnel syndrome, the MPorcius staff throughout August abstained from tweeting, blogging, and reading fiction.  During this period I read first hand accounts of service in the British Army and RAF during World War II and read the poetry of T. E. Hulme, Richard Aldington, and H. D.; I also, in biographies of T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound and collections of their letters, investigated the relationships of Hulme, Aldington and H. D. with Eliot, Lewis and Pound. 

I was favorably impressed by Hulme's lamentably small body of poetical work, which I felt combined striking images with human feeling and human drama and also exhibited an admirable economy.  We love economy at MPorcius Fiction Log.  I have to confess to being less impressed by the verses of Aldington and H. D.; their poems are competent, but page after page of rehashing topics that have been picked over for two thousand years or longer, like Helen of Troy and Circe, and gushing about the beauty of flowers and trees, gets a little tiresome.  Still, I enjoyed Aldington and H. D.'s poetry more than most of Pound's, which I continue to find difficult and boring.  (Eliot's poetry, seeing as it addresses topics of interest to me, like alienation, deracination, sexual dysfunction, and the search for meaning in our urbanized, globalized world, I find difficult but very rewarding.)

Bid Me to Live by H. D.  

Aldington and H. D. were novelists as well as poets, however, and this brings us to the first subject of this blog post, the blog post that proves that MPorcius Fiction Log is not really most sincerely dead, but merely in a coma--H. D.'s 1960 novel Bid Me to Live.  In the first week of September I finished reading a 1983 edition of the novel published by Black Swan and available at the internet archive; it has a cover photo of H. D. by Man Ray and includes useful afterwords  by Perdita Schaeffer and John Walsh, as well as a drawing of flowers by H. D. herself.

H. D., as you probably already know if you are still reading this, is an American woman born Hilda Doolittle who in her youth dated Ezra Pound and who later, in England, was one of the pioneering Imagist poets that gathered around Pound; it was Pound who conferred on her the distinctive pen name "H. D."  Between 1913 and 1938 H. D. was married to Aldington, though early on the marriage faced such disasters as the miscarriage of their child, Aldington's World War I service and his infidelities, and the two poets were separated for most of the period they were married, though they remained friends (we can see in the correspondence between Aldington and Eliot how Aldington continued to vigorously promote his wife's poetry.)  Bid Me to Live is an autobiographical roman a clef,  an impressionistic account of the collapse of H.D. and Aldington's marriage during World War I, and the beginning of a new phase in H. D.'s life, as she leaves London for the countryside (one theme of H. D.'s and Aldington's poetry is the superiority of the countryside to the city) and is influenced by other men, particularly D. H. Lawrence and composer Cecil Gray.

Bid Me to Live is a very literary novel, full of ambiguity, flashbacks and classical references.  The first line of the novel is a paraphrase of Cicero's "o tempora o mores," and H. D. doesn't mention Cicero by name--as a reader you are expected to be familiar with this famous, practically cliched, phrase.  The first paragraph also name checks Jocasta and Philoctetes.  I got the Cicero allusion, but no doubt the book is full of stealthy classical references I didn't get.

My favorite classical allusion from Bid Me to Live is when Julia (the H. D. character) watches her husband Rafe Ashton (Aldington), on leave from the battlefields of France, walk about the apartment naked, and thinks that in peacetime his body had been a sort of "Greek image," but now, hardened by his war service, he appears to be a "bronze late-Roman image [that] had got out of the wrong department of the Louvre or the British Museum...."  Of course, all the novel's references aren't classical; the title of the novel is from a poem by 17th-century poet Robert Herrick, and the Ashton marriage is compared to that of Punch and Judy (ouch!), while one wonders if Jocasta there in that first para isn't an allusion to psychoanalysis--H. D. was both a friend and patient of Sigmund Freud's.

I think we can break the novel into three main parts.  In the first part Julia is in an apartment in London, and we witness scenes of her there with the various other characters, mostly importantly her husband Rafe while he is on leave from France--during his leaves he brazenly has sex with a woman who is living upstairs, Elsa.  Elsa is a member of their circle of friends of artists, musicians and writers, and these bohemian types spend a lot of time plotting who should sleep with who, including lining up men to have affairs with Julia.  One of the interesting themes of the novel is the idea that people feed each other energy; Elsa is in a relationship with Frederick, AKA Frederico AKA Rico (one of the novels odd little elements is how several characters have multiple, apparently interchangeable names) and even as Elsa sleeps with Rafe, she (Elsa) is seen as the bedrock that anchors Rico so he can go on his various erotic and intellectual expeditions.  Elsa tries to set up Rico and Julia, because she sees Julia as a woman perhaps capable of inspiring Rico to some new sort of writing, and in fact it is Rico who, via letters full of literary critique and life advice, who inspires Julia to write new things and to make a change in her life.  Rico/Frederico/Frederick, incidentally, represents D. H. Lawrence.

In the second phase of the book Julia and another man proposed as a suitable mate for Julia, the composer Vane or Vanio (modeled on Cecil Gray), go out at night in blacked out London to the cinema.  In the third and final phase of the novel Julia moves to the countryside, into an old ramshackle house with Vanio, and spends lots of time wandering around, examining plants and old walls and so on.

In outline this novel sounds pretty good, but reading it it felt long and tedious.  For one thing, it is emotionally flat--our viewpoint character, Julia, seems to be in a kind of daze, stunned and depressed.  This makes sense--Julia recently suffered a miscarriage, she lives in a city subject to German air raids, and her marriage is collapsing and all her clever (and I guess well-meaning?) friends are manipulating her--but it doesn't make for a thrilling narrative.  Julia doesn't seem to have many strong emotions or drive, and doesn't really take initiative--H. D. doesn't portray her as passionately in love with any other characters, or as animated by anger at them or hate for them, or making big decisions; Julia just seems to drift along, a victim of circumstance, fate, and other people.  This is believable, but it is not page-turning stuff.

Much of the word count of Bid Me To Live is taken up with static descriptions of rooms, furniture, items, and plants, lots and lots of plants.  Julia and Rico love plants.  (Maybe these descriptions are supposed to trigger emotions in the reader, and my reception equipment is just too insensitive to read H. D.'s subtle transmissions.)  In the brief middle phase of the book, when Julia and Vanio go to the cinema, H. D. describes the film they watch in great detail.  In some ways this middle section is the most striking part of the novel, as it relates to the war--first comes the walk in the blacked out city, and then, at the theatre and at a restaurant, Julia sees scores of fighting men on leave, and thinks of how so many of them are doomed to death or maiming on the battlefield--from a balcony in the cinema she looks down and sees the legions of khaki-clad men and thinks of the cinema as a sort of charnel house.

It is hard to recommend this novel to a general audience as it is kind of slow and boring, though of course it is worthwhile for people interested in the literary world of which D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound are among the most prominent members.  There is also good stuff for scholars of gender here--for example, an epistolary discussion between Julia and Rico over the ability of women to write from a male point of view.  (This is one of the few times Julia seems to be taking a stand instead of just passively going with the flow.)  I'll definitely read more of H. D.'s poetry and I am interested in her memoirs of Ezra Pound and Sigmund Freud, but as for H. D.'s novels, well, I don't think I'll be cracking another one open anytime soon.     

Based on a True Story: A Memoir by Norm Macdonald

Like a lot of people, I think Norm Macdonald is the best comedian/stand-up comic.  When his novel, Based on a True Story: A Memoir, came out in 2016 it got lots of positive notice, and not just from comedians--I got the impression people were treating it like a real literary novel.  So in the first week of September I finally borrowed a hardcover copy of Based on a True Story: A Memoir from a Maryland public library via contactless pickup--it is OK for people who work at grocery stores and department stores be exposed to coronavirus, but we have to make sure our aristocratic priestly class of oh-so-precious government employees is safe!--and read it.

I can't deny that I was somewhat disappointed in Norm's book, after all the hype it received.  It is not bad, and I did laugh a few times, but some of the jokes are obvious, some are very familiar (e. g., the famous moth joke) and some are tedious.  The interesting thing about the novel is Norm's efforts to achieve literary value, to instill in the book the kind of ambiguity, unreliable narration, foreshadowing and sudden surprise you might find in a book by Nabokov or Proust or somebody like that.  The novel has a main narrative, a sort of adventure/crime story in which Norm and assistant Adam Eget travel cross country, trying to win money via gambling, a perilous which venture that leads to a dangerous expedient--the borrowing of money from a dangerous loan shark.  This caper story is regularly interrupted by flashbacks to Norm's earlier life, as Norm reminisces or relates to Adam Eget stories from his youth and early career.  These accounts of Norm's childhood in rural Canada and of famous episodes in his life--e.g., working at Saturday Night Live or on the film Dirty Work--seem to be based on a kernel of truth, but include outlandish and absurd elements, including horror elements that are sometimes played for laughs (one example: imprisoned after being convicted of a terrible crime, Norm tries to win status in the big house by raping a fellow inmate, only to have this man turns the tables on our hapless hero.)  These things obviously did not happen in real life, but are we expected to believe they happen in the context of the novel?  It soon becomes clear that this novel was (partly at least) written by a ghostwriter who was hired to listen to Norm tell stories of his life and work them into a salable manuscript.  The ghostwriter is a failed literary writer, and he hates Norm, so we have reason to suspect the many episodes of Norm suffering grievously and demonstrating his own incompetence do not reflect "the truth" of the world depicted in the novel, but have been made up out of whole cloth by the bitter and ultimately suicidal ghostwriter. 

Followers of the comedy scene will no doubt find mentions of Sam Kinnison, Dennis Miller, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, and other comedy luminaries of interest.  In fact, I suspect that readers will require some familiarity with the work of Don Rickles and Rodney Dangerfield to "get" the humor behind extended sequences featuring those comedians.  I'm 49, and I assume people my age are pretty familiar with Rickles and Dangerfield, but maybe younger people are not--I recently met a young woman, the manager of a book store, no less, who, when Robinson Crusoe came up, had to admit she had never even heard of Robinson Crusoe.  Oy! 

"Rain," "The Fall of Edward Barnard" and "Mackintosh" by W. Somerset Maugham

On September 9, I reread the first three stories from my copy of The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, Volume 1: East and West, which I first read years before this blog rose from the depths.  The thirty stories in this 900-page book were all written between 1919 and 1931, Maugham tells us in the introduction.  I find Maugham's well-crafted stories very comfortable and smooth and entertaining, and on a reread I found "Rain," "The Fall of Edward Barnard" and "Mackintosh" all enjoyable.  All three concern Westerners (Americans or Britons) in the South Pacific, and all deal with literal or figurative suicide.  Suicide is a favorite topic here at MPorcius Fiction Log!   

"Rain:"  A devout and energetic missionary is stuck in quarantine with an American prostitute, and he tries to reform her.  Who will win this test of wills? 

"The Fall of Edward Barnard:"  An upper-middle class Chicagoan heads to Tahiti to find out what happened to his best friend, who went to Tahiti two years ago to learn the business with the idea he would return to Chi-town to marry his sweetheart--our dude finds his buddy has gone native!

"Mackintosh:"  Two British guys are administering an island in Samoa.  The second-in-command, a young, skinny, smart sophisticate, hates the old, fat, brutish and ignorant head administrator, but which of them is the better man and the man better suited to the task of maintaining order among the natives and promoting peace and prosperity on the primitive island?   

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For a few weeks there, I really thought MPorcius Fiction Log was kaput, but I find value in keeping a record of my reading and this blog is as convenient a means of keeping such a record as any.  So I guess MPorcius Fiction Log is not licked yet, though I doubt I will be putting as much energy into it as I did during what may come to be seen as MPorcius Fiction Log's "Golden Age."  

Four 1960 stories by R. A. Lafferty

It's been a while since we've read anything by R. A. Lafferty, so let's take my copies of 1970's Nine Hundred Grandmothers, an Ace Science Fiction Special with a cover by Leo and Diane Dillon, and DAW's 1972 collection Strange Doings, which has a Jack Gaughan cover, down from the shelf and read four stories by the Iowa-born Oklahoma resident and recipient of a 1990 World Fantasy Life Achievement Award.

"Through Other Eyes"

This is a story about how our beliefs and perceptions are not simply objective and accurate views of the outside world, but are guided or distorted by our attitudes and interests, so that we all see different, even live in different, worlds.  The first two pages of this fifteen-page story act as a sort of prologue, in which scientists Charles Cogsworth and Gregory Smirnov talk about the experience of using their time machine, which allowed them to view famous people and events of the past.  These viewings were a terrible disappointment--reputedly beautiful Isolde was obese, famously witty Voltaire was in fact a disgusting pervert, Sappho, remembered as a genius poet, turned out to be a tedious cat lady, the fabled hero Lancelot was in fact almost too feeble to mount a horse, etc.

The main plot concerns Cogsworth's new machine, the Cerebral Scanner, which allows one to experience the inner thoughts and view of the world of other people and creatures.  Through the eyes of a skeptical critic he sees a world that is unsavory and mean, through the eyes of an important business executive he sees a world of numberless details and infinite connections that can--and must!--be managed by a pull of a string here or there (the connections are likened to reins, the executive to God and to a general commanding an army), and so on.  Cogsworth is eager to use the machine to observe the world through the eyes of Valery Mok, a beautiful woman whom he thinks an angel, a wit, and a paragon of kindness. (Lafferty makes clear that she is in fact none of these things, just a pleasant but essentially ordinary woman--Cogsworth's love for her has distorted his view of her.)  When Cogsworth sees the world through her eyes he is painfully disillusioned--her world is one of pervasive, overwhelming, sensuality--to Cogsworth the sensations she enjoys as she smells trees, touches a rail, or looks at clouds are shockingly and grossly, filthy, coarsely obscene.  "I had thought Valery was an angel...it is a shock to find that she is a pig."

When Mok uses the Cerebral Scanner to see the world as Cogsworth sees it, she is amazed to find how bloodless, loveless, and lifeless his view of the world is, and compares him to a pig, a pig made of dry dead sticks.  "You live with dead people, Charles.  You make everything dead.  You are abominable."  Lafferty gives us a happy ending, though; Mok, we see, the lively and sensuous woman, is going to open the cold and clinical scientist's eyes to the throbbing vitality and earthy beauty of our world and the two will live happily ever after.

"Through Other Eyes" first appeared in Future Science Fiction and seems to have been well-received, reappearing in Robert Silverberg's Mind to Mind as well as Introductory Psychology Through Science Fiction.

"The Six Fingers of Time"

This is one of those SF stories in which a guy can halt or severely slow down time and then take advantage of people as they stand still as statues or (not quite so anti-socially) get some extra work done.  The most famous of these stories are perhaps John D. MacDonald's The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything from 1962, which I have not read, and Nicholson Baker's 1994 The Fermata, which I read in the 20th century and plan to reread sometime this century.  If Wikipedia and my memory are to be trusted, both those novels focus on sex and the use of the time-retarding power to do things like undress women against their will.  In E. C. Tubb's Dumarest series there are the drugs slow-time and quick-time that speed up or slow down your metabolism forty times--by taking these drugs you can heal forty times faster or do forty times as much work in an hour (in a memorable scene in Lallia Dumarest uses slow-time to produce enough product to meet a crucial deadline) or slow you down so tedious space voyages seem to pass forty times as quickly.  In some Warhammer 40,000 games psykers can invoke the power of the warp to slow or speed up time for particular individuals or small areas and so get more moves than their foes.

In "The Six Fingers of Time," Charles Vincent wakes up and finds that time has slowed so much that each second, to him, feels like a minute, each minute an hour.  After exploring the slow-motion city he goes to the office and catches up on two days worth of work before any of his colleagues even shows up.

The effect wears off and after some months have passed he begins to almost think that crazy day was no more than a dream.  But then he meets a mysterious figure whose face is hidden, who hints that Vincent, who has a deformed thumb that suggests a sixth digit, is a descendant of an ancient race of six-fingered people who inhabited the Earth before mankind.  This strange character teaches Vincent how to switch on and off his time-retarding power, and Vincent proceeds to uses his weird talent to play cruel jokes on people, to take advantage of women sexually, to steal money, to learn scores of foreign languages and to accumulate esoteric knowledge.

Besides adding the Weird Tales-style bloodline-of-an-ancient-lost-race-of-wizards angle to our guy-who-controls-time-and-abuses-people story, Lafferty, one of the SF world's most prominent and most hard core Catholics, adds a moral and Christian dimension.  The faceless figure, it appears, is the Devil, and Vincent risks a horrible fate for using his inhuman ability to harm others and enjoy benefits he has not earned.

"The Six Fingers of Time" was first published in If and later was the title story of an anthology of stories from that magazine which, somewhat bizarrely, pretended to be an anthology of stories from If's sister magazine Galaxy.  Both magazines were edited by Horace L. Gold, so I guess the publishers of the volume felt they would be forgiven this little trespass against the trust of the SF-reading public.  (No respect!)

"The Ugly Sea"

In three of the stories we are talking about today Lafferty uses traditional SF topics and themes ("I'm travelling through time!"; "I'm reading people's minds!"; "I can stop time!"; "I'm on an alien planet fighting a huge monster!") but "The Ugly Sea" is more of a mainstream literary piece, and appropriately enough first appeared in The Literary Review, a journal put out by Fairleigh Dickinson University of the great state of New Jersey.  (I once attended a wedding at Fairleigh Dickinson.  Fascinating, right?)  It takes up a traditional literary theme, the sea and its strange allure.  No doubt you remember the opening passages of Moby Dick, in which the narrator describes his own irresistible attraction to the sea, which he suspects all men share, and Homer's phrase "the wine-dark sea," which has become proverbial.  Rock music aficionados are familiar with Pete Townshend's use of the beach and the sea as recurring motifs in The Who's masterpiece Quadrophenia, while sword and sorcery fans (to bring us back to SF) may recall how, in Swords in the Mist,  Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser spoke of "their mistress, the sea...her rages and caressings, her coolths and unending dancings, sometimes lightly footing a minuet, sometimes furiously a-stamp, and her infinitude of secret parts."

In the frame story of "The Ugly Sea" Lafferty takes a counterintuitive but quite credible tack, having storyteller Sour John declare that the sea is ugly ("It has the aroma of an open sewer...it is perhaps the most untidy thing in the world...it is monotonous, with only four or five faces, and all of them coarse") but wins the love of men, including Sour John himself, just the same.  The main plot of "The Ugly Sea," which Sour John narrates, is about an associate of John's, a Jewish loan shark named Moysha Uferwohner, who falls in love with Bonny, a twelve-year-old crippled girl who plays piano (badly) at the Blue Fish, a bar frequented by seamen.  Bonny is fated to marry a sailor, so Moysha becomes a sailor himself, even though, as Sour John tells us, the Jews, "God's own people," have always "shunned" that "evil grave," the ocean.  Moysha, according to Sour John, is only the third Jewish seaman in all of history! 

Melville's Ishmael equates his desire to go to sea with suicide: "This is my substitute for pistol and ball.  With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship."  Lafferty's story here similarly conjoins seafaring and death.  It is very bad luck, we are told, for a seaman to marry a cripple, but a sailor marries Bonny when she is fifteen years old, anyway.  This tar soon dies of illness at sea, and Bonny remarries at sixteen--this second sailor is killed in a terrible accident in a ship's engine room.  Finally at seventeen she marries Moysha; Moysha leaves his five-year career as a sailor behind, and these two crazy kids live happily together inland for three years.

But the sea has gotten under Moysha's skin!  Those three blissful years end when Moysha is drawn back to the sailor's life.  He joins Sour John's crew, abandoning his wife and children for certain death.

I've had no luck finding an image online of the cover of the Fall 1960 issue of The Literary Review, so all you people who click over to MPorcius Fiction Log for the pictures will have to be satisfied with an image of the second place "The Ugly Sea" appeared, New Worlds of Fantasy #2 with its effective Kelly Freas cover.   

[UPDATE January 2, 2018: Commenter Todd Mason owns a copy of the Autumn 1960 issue of The Literary Review, and points out below that Lafferty's "The Ugly Sea" is in fact in the Autumn 1961 issue.  I was mislead by a typo at isfdb, which still lists "Fall 1960" as the issue in which the story appeared.] 

"Snuffles"

Planet Bellota is one strange world.  Though a mere one hundred miles in circumference, it has a gravity equal to half that of Earth's.  It is home to many insects, but each individual bug seems to be of a different species.  Lightning storms are constant, and the rinds of fruits are edible while the flesh is unpalatable.  And then there is the sole large inhabitant, a friendly beast much like a large bear which, like the insects, seems to have no sex or parents.  A team of six Earthling scientists is carefully studying this mysterious world until, unexpectedly, Snuffles the heretofore friendly pseudo-ursine suddenly attacks and they have to fight and then flee for their lives!

Lafferty wrote quite a few stories that feature horrendous violence, and "Snuffles" is one of them--the Earth expedition suffers heavy casualties in its struggle against Snuffles!  The survivors of the initial surprise attack march day after day, the wounded Snuffles hot on their heels, toying with them.  Lacking any supplies, the Earthers resort to eating native plants, including those with hallucinogenic properties.  Around the time they start eating this stuff, the survivors begin to receive what appear to be telepathic messages from Snuffles.  Lafferty has already given us reason to suspect Snuffles is a God or Devil or, most likely, a Gnostic demiurge figure (if you needed one, reading "Snuffles" provides a reason to read the Wikipedia entry on Gnosticism), and our suspicions are further fueled when Snuffle's messages (or are they merely hallucinations fueled by the scientists' exhaustion and ingestion of narcotic plants?--like "Through Other Eyes," this story is in part about how questionable our perceptions of the world can be) assert that Snuffles created planet Bellota, and maybe the entire universe.

I didn't know until I had finished the story whether any of the humans would get off the planet alive or if any of the planet's mysteries would be solved.

It is normal to read SF stories in which human beings are jerks who despoil the environment and are too quick to resort to violence.  But in "Snuffles" Lafferty makes sure we see the human characters as good people and even seems to be suggesting that we are too gullible, too eager to see the universe as benign when in fact it is inimical.  At the start of the story one character argues that Bellota is the only "fun" planet in the galaxy (when it is in fact the planet where they will be massacred), and during Snuffle's first attack the leader of the expedition chooses to shoot to wound instead of shooting to kill because "He was fond of Snuffles and gambled that it would not be necessary to kill him."  These people are too reluctant to resort to violence!  Another interesting aspect of the story is how Lafferty implies that Bellota, which seems like a topsy-turvy, atypical world, is actually the only sincere or normal planet in the universe, and/or is a mirror which displays reality to those few who have the opportunity to visit it.     
If you want to read another well-written story by a Catholic conservative about people pursued by an intelligent alien bear (I know some of you have very specific interests) I strongly recommend Gene Wolfe's "Try and Kill It" from 1996, a very good adventure/horror story.  I kind of wonder if "Try and Kill It" is a subtle homage to "Snuffles;" Wolfe actually uses the word "snuffling" in it, though that is hardly dispositive.  I'm also wondering if there is any chance "Snuffles" is an homage to A. E. van Vogt's 1939 "Black Destroyer," one of the inaugural stories of science fiction's Golden Age.  As you no doubt already know, in "Black Destroyer" a bunch of scientists make friends with an over-sized alien beast which seems friendly at first but later starts murdering them.

"Snuffles" first appeared in Galaxy and has been pretty successful, being included in anthologies in America, Britain, France, and Germany, including an anthology devoted to stories about religion.

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It is easy to recommend all four of these stories--they are all smooth and entertaining reads with fun little jokes and all feature interesting themes we've seen before but do different things with them.  Being written over 50 years ago by somebody who wasn't exactly taking pains to appeal to current trends in what constituted acceptable thinking, these stories can sometimes surprise--broad-brush assertions about women (they are more sensual than men!) and Jews (they never become sailors!) are good examples.  The stories also invite consideration of whether they have some deep meaning or philosophical point to make, even if Sour John in "The Ugly Sea" responds to a listener who asks, "Is there a moral to this?" with the flat declaration, "No.  It is an immoral story.  And it's a mystery to me."