P. Schuyler Miller: "The Red Plague," "Dust of Destruction," and "'The Man from Mars'"

In our last episode, one full of car wrecks, Hollywood-bashing and dangerous women, we read a good story by the Hugo- and Locus-Award winning P. Schuyler Miller, and thought it good enough that further exploration of the Miller body of work was warranted.  Let's start in Miller's early days with stories he saw printed in Hugo Gernsback's Prophetic Magazine of Mystery, Adventure and Romance, Wonder Stories, in the dawn of that periodical's existence.

(In response to public demand, embedded in the first para of each section below are links to a scan of the early-1930s magazine in which I will be reading the story under discussion so that you can experience the mass destruction, pioneering space journeys and curious social commentary the stories provide with trivial ease.)

"The Red Plague" (1930)

The July 1930 issue of Wonder Stories was only the second issue of the magazine to appear under that title--the magazine was a merger of Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories, periodicals that began publication in 1929.  "The Red Plague" bagged Miller $150 by winning first place in a contest announced in the February 1930 issue of Air Wonder Stories that called for stories based on the cover illustration by pioneering SF artist Frank R. Paul of that issue.  Miller was, allegedly, one of over 500 entrants to the contest--damn, imagine reading 500 amateur stories about men in space suits attacking a space ship.

Miller begins "The Red Plague" with an elaborate description that dwells on light and color of what I thought must be a Martian town but turned out to be Earth's first space port--much of the surface of our beloved planet is a red desert because of the plague that arrived on Earth via a meteor.  Three rockets blast off from the port, carrying with them Earth's hope of finding a cure for the plague.

The meteor deposited in the American South West a radioactive element new to Earth, a catalyst that, spread in tiny amounts by the wind or birds or whatever, turns rock and soil to a red dust; this dust renders water unavailable for use by irrevocably adsorbing it.  (I could probably use some of this new element in my basement.)  That really is a "d" in there, by the way--Miller is teaching me some science today.  In five years, much of the New World is covered in red desert, and the Old World's strict embargo has begun to fail and so soon all of humanity is threatened with death through lack of water.

There is hope, however.  The red of the dust is identical to the red we see on most of the surface of Mars, and astronomers' careful observations reveal that the ice caps of Mars are growing--the inhabitants of Mars must be reclaiming their planet from the red plague that first afflicted their world long ago!  Three space ships are built and man takes his first steps outside Terra's atmosphere!  The 21st-century reader will be thrilled to find that one of the three rockets is commanded by a "burly, spectacled Negro."  Miller's depiction of this African-American hero's personality and speech might not win the author 21st-century plaudits, though, and then there is the fact that only one of the three ships makes it through a meteor swarm (these meteors are a real pain in the you-know-what) and it isn't the black guy's.

The sole-surviving rocket crash lands on Mars; only four of its six-man crew emerge alive.  The four astronauts fly in their helicopter towards the poles, over the ruined cities, over the canals, over the red deserts that are slowly being taken back by green foliage.  At the glacier sheet they meet the native Martians, short little guys who fly around in special suits and who live underground.  The Martians telepathically interrogate the humans, putting Terra's representatives on trial to determine if they deserve to learn the solution to the red plague, or deserve to be killed.

The human race passes the test thanks to the fact that we have developed atomic power, which the Martians have not--they rely on the somewhat less efficient solar power.  The Martians relate to the astronauts the history of their people and their long relationship with the red plague, and share with the Earthers the secret of how to reverse the life-threatening adsorption of the plague and how to render the world green again.  The Martians even build the humans a new space ship!  A new era of interplanetary cooperation is inaugurated--the Martians' scrawny bodies are unfit to explore the universe, but their superior intelligence will help us hardy Terrans accomplish this marvelous adventure, and we will bring back to them the wonders we find out there on Venus, beyond the asteroid belt, and beyond the limits of our solar system.

"The Red Plague" has many elements of those old science fiction stories that read like a popular history article written in the future and focus on science speculations and make very little effort to create characters and portray individual human drama.  At the same time, Miller tries to be poetical, giving us some pretty long and somewhat oblique passages, like in the beginning of the story when he works overtime painting a picture of Mankind's first space port without coming right out and telling us what it is till he's used up half a page.  Instead of just saying "a crowd of men" and "a squadron of aircraft" he employs the conceit of a god-like being watching from afar to whom the crowd is a "restless smudge" and the flying machines "a swarm of gnats."  Another example of this oblique approach is the sentence that informs us that the African American's ship and all its crew have been killed in the meteor swarm:

Swerve, leap swerve again, and then a blur of flame in the screen, a tearing of metal, and blackness!

This stuff shows ambition, but it is harder to read than just bald facts, and I'm afraid it is too clunky to add literary value to the story.

We're judging "The Red Plague" acceptable.  Forrest J. Ackerman reprinted the story in a 2001 anthology whose gimmick is that all the stories have a color in their titles.  Ackerman was a nutty character.

On the left is the issue of Air Wonder Stories whose cover served as the
basis for "The Red Plague"

"Dust of Destruction" (1931)

Miller's name appears prominently on the cover of this issue of Wonder Stories, which also includes stories by Ray Cummings and David H. Keller.  It is likely we'll be coming back to this one.

Our first Miller story today prominently featured red dust that had the power to adsorb water and thus make Earth almost uninhabitable.  Our second story features green dust that is the product of a ray that destroys air and, if allowed to play over the entire Earth's surface, would render Earth uninhabitable by humans.

"Dust of Destruction" has a first-person narrator, Hank, who shares with us the astounding and horrifying adventures he endured in the future of 1967, the year humanity came perilously close to extinction at the hands of malevolent aliens.  As his memoir begins, Hank, a a travelling salesman, and is in the country like ten miles from Norfolk, NE, when a windstorm of apocalyptic power strikes.  Miller goes overboard describing in meticulous detail how the wind knocks over a tree, and then how the narrator's car and then he himself are carried off by the wind.  Our guy Hank gets tangled up in wire and tied to a tree that flies for miles, sometimes flipping end over end, sometimes dragging its base on the ground, at least once smashing through a house, etc.  It's like one of those endless CGI sequences in a recent movie, but also valid SF speculation--what would it be like to experience such winds first hand?

Hank wakes up in Norfolk, next to another man who is still unconscious, a big muscular criminal named Red whom the narrator recognizes from wanted posters.  The narrator seizes Red's firearm before the bank robber wakes up, so when the thief does regain consciousness, our guy has the upper hand.  Red agrees to help look for survivors and Hank promises not to rat him out to the cops, should they meet any.  Part of Miller's literary project with "The Dust of Destruction" is to generate suspense with the character of Red--will Red be reformed and redeemed, or will Hank's tolerance and open-mindedness bite him in the ass?

Hank and Red explore the ruined town of Norfolk, which is covered in a layer of green dust, and find no survivors, but many bodies that have been torn asunder, apparently exploded from within.

A rocket lands nearby--it is mankind's first space ship.  The vessel is manned by Hank's old college pal, Dick, and their physics professor, Jarvis.  Dick's rocket was on a test flight in the upper atmosphere when the disaster struck--low pressure (an "inverted cyclone") in Norfolk which made people explode and vacuumed stuff nearby--including Hank!--into the gore-filled town.  This low pressure event was no natural phenomena, but the work of a ray from the moon!  The four men blast off for Luna on the human race's first interplanetary flight to take care of the source of this ray that destroyed Norfolk and its twenty thousand inhabitants.  Miller does some real science speculation, describing in some detail what Earth might look like from space and how Dick's rocket works and how and why a ray from the Moon might turn the atmosphere into green dust, lowering the Earth's air pressure so our home will be more hospitable to Lunarian colonists.  On the way moonward the men practice maneuvering in their space suits--Red, a natural athlete, turns out to be the most adept.

On Luna we get descriptions of what the Moon's surface is like and the experience of travelling on foot under the lower gravity.  The four humans split up to make their individual ways to the source of the ray.  Eventually, after travelling through the moon people's tunnels, pneumatic subway system, rocket ship factory, and water system, all of which are abandoned and apparently operating automatically, Hank, Red and the professor reunite in a chamber full of voracious insects a foot long.  The swarming insects try to eat them, and the men fight them hand-to-hand and with grenades.  Are these bugs the intelligent aliens who built the ray projector and the rockets, or the vermin who are driving the Lunarians to try to colonize Earth, or a slave race subservient to the true Lunar masters?  Hidden figures fire ray guns at our heroes as they advance upon the giant ray projector that is at that very moment devastating Asia and Europe, killing millions; Red suppresses their ray fire with his conventional slug rifle.

Then Dick appears, he having approached from a different angle in an aircraft he brought to Luna but kept a secret from Hank.  Dick throws himself into the machinery of the ray projector.  All the Loonies' power production systems were patched into this super weapon, so Dick's his self-sacrifice (immortalized on the cover of this issue of Wonder Stories) sets off a chain reaction that destroys all the moon's native inhabitants.  Earth is preserved from lunaforming and lunar colonization.  Hank, Red and Professor Jarvis survive the explosions and get back to Terra, and as the story ends Hank considers what a bounty the next humans to explore the Moon will find, all those rocket ships and the other technology left by the now extinct natives of our natural satellite.

This is a decent adventure story with lots of science speculation onto which Miller grafts a Christian or progressive social message that perhaps reminds us of the canonization of armed robber George Floyd in our own crazy 21st century.  Immediately, to my mind irrationally, middle-class citizens Hank and Professor Jarvis embrace Red, the armed robber who moans that he has always been on the outside looking in and declare he is no worse than they are, despite his bank-robbing ways.  Dick is skeptical at first, but not for long.

“Come on, Dick,” I said, “loosen up a bit. Don’t be such a crab. Red’s just as good as any of us here, and don’t you forget it! Maybe he slipped up a few times — who hasn’t?"

Miller doesn't fully integrate this theme into his story as well as he might have--shouldn't Red have committed suicide to save humanity, thus earning forgiveness for all those armed robberies?  Instead it is scientist Dick who sacrifices himself to save mankind--must he die to repent his sin of doubting Red?  I feel like Miller doesn't really wrap up the Red story line conclusively; I kept expecting Red to cut a deal with the Moon people or try to steal Dick's rocket or something, and Miller certainly doesn't do that, but neither does he have Red turn out to be the key to the mission or anything.  

Despite my uneasiness with the Red plot line, "Dust of Destruction" is quite a bit better a story than "The Red Plague," with more action, more compelling images, and significant improvement when it comes to characters, but it seems it has not been reprinted.  Ackermann could have included this one in his story, just rename it "Red Hitches a Ride."  

"'The Man from Mars'" (1931)

Here we have a story with a title that, like that of David Bowie's "'Heroes,'" contains quote marks, I guess implying that the man in question is not really what he seems.  "'The Man from Mars'" debuted in an issue of Gernsback's Wonder Stories Quarterly; I guess we'll be getting back to this magazine as well, seeing as it contains a story by Clark Ashton Smith that I don't think I've read.  Miller's story in the issue would reappear in 1939 in Startling Stories as a nominee for the Scientifiction Hall of Fame under the title "The Man from Mars," shorn of those annoying quote marks.  In 1949 an anthology of nominees to the aforementioned Hall of Fame was published and "The Man from Mars" was included in that.  All you Virgil Finlay junkies, and I count myself among you, should check out the ish of Startling linked above, as well as the cover of From Off This World, which I actually saw in real life almost ten years ago, as they both showcase some fine Finlay creations.

"'The Man from Mars" is more recognizable as a "modern" science fiction story than "The Red Plague" or "Dust of Destruction," which are all about cataclysms and men of science who save the human race from them.  "'The Man from Mars'" is more character driven and built on a smaller, more intimate, scale.  Like E.T., its center is a sympathetic alien that is both better than human beings but also so weak that it can be exploited by evil humans and so needs aid from good humans.  I find this kind of thing a drag but I guess it sells because it is not a rare plot by any means.

Our narrator goes to a travelling carnival that advertises a man from Mars.  The Martian in question has a bald oversized head and skinny limbs and sits on a throne and plays a theremin-like musical instrument and by some obscure means makes electricity and water dance around in the air.  Miller describes the Martian's venue and its show in great detail, and it is kind of boring--I find fireworks boring to watch in real life, so reading about fireworks, well, you can imagine.  

The Martian's manager is a college chum of the narrator.  From this guy we learn all about the Martian.  The alien has great psychic powers, but its telepathy only works haltingly with us dumb humans.  Still, the two human heroes of the story can sort of communicate with the alien.  Chum bought the Martian from the religious farmer who found the alien after the alien's ship crashed and chum set the Martian's circus act up.  The Martian sits within a shell, a fake body mounted on the throne, while it performs; the audience never sees anything of its true form.  When not performing the Martian appears as a bald head emerging from a crystal cylinder--the Martian doesn't walk around and manipulate things with hands like you and me, but floats around in the air in this cylinder and manipulates items with telekinesis.  

The owner and the manager of the circus know that the Martian has psychic powers.  They want to lay off their manual laborers and have the Martian pitch and strike the tents telekinetically, perform an act in which the alien lifts an elephant off the ground with its mind, and so forth.  Unlike for Yoda, for the Martian size matters, and such feats would wear it out.  The people who run this carnival won't take no for an answer, so chum enlists the aid of the narrator in escaping the circus.

Electrical fields inhibit the Martian's powers, so when our three heroes try to escape the exploitive carnival, the carnival staff try to stop them by firing up a "Wimshurst static machine" with "a dozen big condensers."  (This thing is real--Miller is schooling me yet again.)  Our heroes outwit the carnies and escape.  But then there is a thunderstorm, which builds up a charge in the Martian's cylinder and causes an explosion that destroys the narrator's car.  Its crystal cylinder gone, the Martian's body below the bald head is revealed to be that of a yard-long slug!  With tentacles!  Yuck!  But in a diversity-celebrating moment, the narrator cradles this monster in his arms--this slug-thing is just as human as he is, he realizes!

The alien takes control over the narrator's body by sticking its tentacles into a wound he suffered in the explosion and connecting to his nerves.  The Martian works him like a puppet and he runs, carrying the slug-creature, with speed and agility the narrator could not have himself achieved, to the Martian's chosen destination.  This sounds like something out of a horror story, but the narrator assures us he enjoyed it, even though running at 110% capacity through a forest and through a swamp, leaping over fences and all that, exhausted and damaged his body.

The Martian and its helpless human steed arrive at a buried spaceship--inside is a baby Martian in a vat!  The narrator's enslaved body moves the baby from one vat to another, manipulates controls, and otherwise ensures the baby slug-person's health.  The narrator, released from alien control, collapses, but the Martian puts on a spare cylinder and nurses him back to health before leaving for Mars with its baby.  The last line of the story reveals in italics that the Martian was a woman!  "'The Man from Mars'" is a diversity-celebrapalooza!

This kind of story is not really my thing, and beyond that, I'm not sure the plot really works.  Why is the Martian woman performing at the carnival at all?  Why didn't she direct the farmer or the narrator's chum to take her to her baby?  Or just fly to the baby itself via her cylinder's motive power?  Could the space ship at the end of the story be an additional shipwreck and the baby some other Martian slug's offspring whose incubator sent out a distress signal coincidentally just when our favorite Martian escaped the carnival?  How is she able to just fly away now, but not earlier?  Has Miller's sometimes oblique writing left me confused?  Or is my confusion due to the fact that our narrator can't really understand what is going on himself, not being fluent in Martian?   

We might also want to look at the story's feminist bona fides.  Obviously Miller meant to strike a blow for the fair sex by depicting a female who exhibited special powers and willpower and compassion.  But do our 21st-century feminists want to see a woman honored for caring for a child?  Shouldn't a woman in fiction be judged by how much money she makes or how many men she kills, like men in fiction are judged?    

With the exception of the overly long and tedious music and light show at the carnival, ""The Man from Mars'" is well written and constructed, and the crazy stuff that goes on is provocative, so we're giving it a passing grade.

*********

These three stories have problems, but none is bad and I think they demonstrate that science fiction has long been home to stories that argue either explicitly or implicitly for "tolerance" and for racial and sexual equality.  "'The Man from Mars'" puts the lie to the oft-heard claim that aliens in "old" science fiction stories are always evil monsters while women are always damsels in distress.  (These critics sometimes seem to be basing their attacks on SF on the covers of old magazines, which are so often so much more exciting and sexy than the contents.)  Today's three stories by Miller also demonstrate the commitment of early science fiction writers to teaching science to readers, and to airing speculations on what the future will be like with Miller's presentations of what space travel might be like and what the moon's surface could be like.  I think some of Miller's descriptive passages also demonstrate a commitment to literary achievement on his part, though I am skeptical this commitment bears fruit in any of today's stories.  (Miller's literary efforts are more successful in his 1943 horror story "John Cawder's Wife," with its references to Shakespeare's sonnets, one of the stories we read in our last episode.)

Expect to see more coverage of P. Schuyler Miller in the future, and until then stay tuned for explorations of a diverse selection of SF writers here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  

Weird Tales, May '43: P S Miller, A Derleth, S Coblentz & R Bradbury

In our last episode we read some "proper" science fiction, two stories about space aliens shipwrecked here on Earth and a story about an eight-year-old girl who has psychic powers that threaten all of humanity.  (We also read a story about an upper-middle-class woman who dates a djinni and gets him to expand her real estate holdings and then marry her and father her children, so if that is your bag, check that out.)  But today it is back to the weird!

The May 1943 issue of Weird Tales has an attractive woman on the cover painted by Margaret Brundage.  During Farnsworth Wright's reign as editor of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual, Brundage's sexy girls were a staple of the magazine's covers, but under D. McIlwraith's regime such images have been rare, and while we welcome Ms. Brundage's return, we note this painting is quite tame compared to some of the artist's more famous efforts.  (It is perhaps better composed and painted, though.)  

Inside, a long story by P. Schuyler Miller and shorter pieces by August Derleth, Stanton Coblenz, and Ray Bradbury catch the eye.  Let's get cracking!  If you want to read along, you can probably find a copy of the May 1943 ish of WT on ebay for less than 100 bucks, or you can do like me and read a scan at the internet archive.  (Keep in mind that this is the only facet of your life in which you should "do like" embittered misanthropic middle-aged grad-school-dropout MPorcius.)

"John Cawder's Wife" by P. Schuyler Miller 

It's Miller time!  P. Schuyler Miller's biggest contribution to the speculative fiction world may have been his work as book reviewer for Astounding/Analog from 1945 to 1975, but before performing this service at John W. Campbell, Jr.'s magazine, Miller published a lot of fiction, starting in the early Thirties.  I guess I've read five things by Miller and liked four of them, "As Never Was," "Bird Walk," "Forgotten," and "The Cave."  (The one I didn't like was "Spawn.")  "John Cawder's Wife" was apparently never reprinted, so I guess it doesn't bear the seal of approval of the genre fiction community, but maybe it's an overlooked gem?  It is promoted on the cover of WT here, so McIlwraith must have thought it was alright.

"John Cawder's Wife" is actually a pretty good story with decent writing and images, and good relationship and supernatural drama.  Thumbs up!

John Cawder is a painter, son of a poet, grandson of a biochemist who did his research in scary jungles.  An odd character, young Cawder didn't make many friends in high school and college--his only real pal was Roger Thorne, a mathematician.  Thorne hasn't seen Cawder in years; in the period of their separation, Cawder became a world-famous artist, while Thorne developed mathematical theories so complex only half a dozen people can really understand them, but which are revolutionizing our understanding of atoms and the stars.  After some European travel, Cawder has disappeared into the American mountains where lies his huge family mansion.  The Cawder family estate is surrounded by forbidding fences and armed guards, but Thorne, curious what is up with his old chum, overcomes these obstacles, sneaking on to the grounds and into the mansion to make a surprise visit to his old friend.

Within the mansion, Thorne confronts a bizarre domestic situation.  Cawder has a wife, a dark woman with a magnificent curvaceous body and spectacular black hair, a woman whose face has no beauty but is strangely compelling, a woman who is evidently highly intelligent and highly educated and has an air of great maturity.  Cawder also has a young blonde secretary with spectacles, and it is obvious that Cawder and this girl are having an affair, and that there is terrible tension between Mr. and Mrs. Cawder.  Thorne immediately is drawn to and sympathizes with Mrs. Cawder, especially after she demonstrates some knowledge of his mathematical work.

Eventually Thorne and we readers learn the astonishing truth about the unique Mrs. Cawder--she is an immortal monster, something like a witch, something like a vampire; her husband calls her a lamia.  The captivating dark lady feeds off the life force of men, and the more intelligent a man is, the greater his genius, the finer and more satisfying a meal he provides!  All through history Mrs. Cawder has gravitated towards the great artists and thinkers; she doesn't just take, though--she has been the muse of many a genius!  Mrs. Cawder tries to seduce Thorne, and when he looks into her eyes he sees new mathematical formulae, brilliant solutions to math problems that have stumped him, the keys to astounding new realms of knowledge!  Thus it was that the monster inspired Cawder's recent success as a painter, and in the distant past the greatest successes of Leonardo and Shakespeare!  (Miller includes lots of Shakespeare references in this story, and he does so pretty effectively.)  Cawder's father and grandfather achieved success in their fields thanks to this creature, but they refused to have sex with her--as has Cawder, a bastard and the son of a bastard.

Will our guy Thorne fall under the lamia's spell and lose his health and life but first become the greatest mathematician in history?  Will Cawder and his blonde secretary sacrifice Thorne to the monster so they can escape its clutches?  Who will live?  Who will die?  Will any of these characters enjoy a healthy sexual relationship?

A solid weird story; I should probably check out more of Miller's work.

"A Wig for Miss DeVore" by August Derleth

Here we have a broad satire of the fakery that characterizes Hollywood and that seems to suggest that woman, hear her roar, is also characterized by manipulation and deceit.  "A Wig for Miss DeVore" feels sort of misogynist, but there is also the sense that Derleth has contempt for men who go to the cinema and buy magazines to ogle pretty girls (and not, I guess, experience art.)  Derleth really lays the contempt on thick in "A Wig for Miss DeVore," essentially telling readers how to feel about the characters rather than giving them room to come to their own conclusions, which really diminishes the ability of the story to emotionally or intellectually engage the reader.  At the same time, the man from Sauk City short circuits any suspense his tale might generate by telling us at the start of the story that his vapid characters are doomed.

Sheila DeVore has a voluptuous body, and has used it to become a Hollywood star.  Her publicity guy spreads endless lies about her to obscure the fact that she is a selfish and petty bitch who abandoned her family and has no acting ability.  Claims that she bought her mother a house are one example (mom, in fact, died alone years ago.)  Derleth just comes right out and has the omniscient narrator assert that Sheila has abrogated any right to live.  Maybe this is supposed to be funny?  (After all, the story title and main character's name are puns.)

She was as selfish as an inhibited pack-rat, and had never heard of moral scruples. As for ethics — there was no room for ethics in her profession. She was, in short, one of those people for whom there does not seem to be any excuse for permitting them to continue an existence which is giving them no pleasure, and is burdening others far too much.

A rich playboy whom Derleth tells us is stupid falls in love with Sheila and she strings him along for publicity purposes.  Sheila starts work on a movie about Meg Peyton a famous red-headed woman who murdered multiple men but got away with it by showing off her legs to the male jury.  Sheila insists on acquiring a spectacularly good red wig for her performance; the wig turns out to be an Aztec artifact infused with magic.  The wig comes with instructions on how to avoid suffering the ill effects of the dangerous magic, but Sheila flouts them as deliberately as I do the Ikea instructions that are always telling me to anchor furniture to the wall--how can I bolt that shit to the wall when my wife rearranges the furniture every three months?  There are also clues suggesting that this very wig was worn by Meg Peyton, that it was this very wig that led ole Meg to embark on the career as a serial killer that rendered her life celluloid-worthy.

The wig changes Sheila's personality--most significantly, she starts eating raw meat.  Derleth tells us Sheila acts like an evil bitch even more than before, which is pretty lame--a real horror story would depict a nice person turning evil, not an evil person getting extra evil.  On a whim, Sheila buys an ancient cutting tool at the antiques store.  With this tool she murders the playboy and then her publicity guy; Sheila herself lands in the loony bin.  The police hide some info about the murders from the public, but a fat (350 pounds, says Derleth) gossip columnist unearths the gory details--that blade of Sheila's was another Aztec artifact, a knife designed to remove the heart from the body, and Sheila used it to extract and then eat the hearts of the two most important men in her life.

"A Wig for Miss DeVore" is no good for many reasons.  The mechanism of how the wig comes into Sheila's (and Peyton's, for that matter) possession is hard to accept; if she is such a shitty actress, why does she go to the trouble of getting a special wig to enhance her performance, which suggests she takes her job seriously, and if the owner of the wig knows it made Peyton kill people, why did he still give it to Sheila?  A better story would have some jealous horndog after being rejected or some envious actress with talent but no sex appeal, maybe that fat gossip columnist, give the wig to Sheila after flattering her. 

There is no real horror to "A Wig for Miss DeVore" because Derleth spends the entire story telling us the people who get killed or imprisoned deserve destruction.  And "A Wig for Miss DeVore" is not one of those stories in which the death or incarceration of the villains is cathartic, either, because the villains aren't really that bad--it is not like they are murderers or something.  And it isn't really their sins that lead to their undoing, they just suffer because of mistakes anybody might make.  If I am a bank robber, and I get killed while robbing a bank, that is justice, and me suffering in the course of acting on my evil impulses.  If I am a guy who finds a woman attractive and gets killed because I try to date her up, that is neither justice nor me being undone by my peculiar nature, that is me having bad luck, because being attracted to women is normal mundane behavior.  I guess we readers are supposed to enjoy seeing the playboy and publicity guy murdered and mutilated and Sheila locked away forever because we envy their wealth or look down on Hollywood and advertising and people with below average intelligence or something, but I'm afraid this doesn't speak well of Derleth or of the readers of Weird Tales, should Derleth's suspicions of their attitudes be accurate.

(One of Derleth's biographers, according to wikipedia, claims Derleth had homosexual affairs, and this story does kind of read like a gay man venting.)

Unlike Miller's quite good story of a dangerous woman, which has never been reprinted, Derleth's lame satire about a dangerous woman has been reprinted again and again in Derleth collections and anthologies by important editors.  This really is a fallen world, isn't it?                 

"The Glass Labyrinth" by Stanton Coblentz

Speaking of satires, here we have Stanton Coblentz.  I am a Coblentz skeptic, but somehow here I am giving him a chance.  I'm a softie, as much as I try to deny it.

Skepticism is warranted; "The Glass Labyrinth" is a filler piece almost lacking in plot.  I guess the story's supposed value lies in its faint jokes and its somewhat interesting images.  I have to give this one a thumbs down as being a lifeless waste of time.

Our narrator is a college professor who goes out for a night walk to smoke his pipe.  He is accosted by a short man with skinny arms and an oversized head, a man who is bubbling over with excitement, jumping up and down and waving his stick arms around.  This frenetic freak is a fellow college professor, and has invented a machine he wants to show somebody.  He is thrilled to find the narrator, whom he recognizes from a conference.  

Coblentz takes a long time to describe all this.  And to describe the machine and its operation and the theory behind it.  The inventor has filled a room with hundreds of mirrors of all types, shapes, and sizes, each in a very specific spot and each connected to motors so its angle can be determined with exactitude.  From the ceiling depend many powerful light bulbs that project a newly discovered ray.  Working together precisely, these bulbs and mirrors can provide the viewer a glimpse of the past or future.  The inventor shows the narrator medieval knights and cave men and the teeming cities of the future in which commuters fly via backpack wings.  Etc.  Then a malfunction occurs and the inventor disappears, presumably trapped in some other dimension and/or time.  The End.

This waste of time has itself vanished into the ether and has not been reprinted.

"The Crowd" by Ray Bradbury

This is a famous story that has been reprinted a billion times and which I read as a kid and must have reread later in life, though I guess not during the life of this blog.  I remember being underwhelmed by "The Crowd," thinking it the same tired condemnation of the common people as a mindless horde animated by a lust for blood and ready to explode into mob violence at any moment that we are served up by smart people (and people who think they are smart) on a regular basis.  But maybe as an old man of 55 I will have a different response to the story?  Maybe the book versions I read were different than this magazine version and I will like the magazine version better?  Let's see!

OK, my memory of this story was pretty distorted; maybe I was mixing it up with a different Bradbury story, one in which there is a crowd or a mob that absorbs people so they lose their individual identities.  Anyway, I didn't recognize any portion of this tale.

"The Crowd" is a sort of supernatural detective story.  A guy with an office job who makes enough money to afford a butler, Spallner (hmmm, Dickensian name?) is in a one-car wreck when his tire blows; he hits a wall and suffers a head injury.  A crowd of people comes to look at him, and the faces of some of them and the mannerisms of others are quite distinctive, quite memorable.  Later, thinking about the accident, Spallner realizes the crowd appeared very quickly, almost impossibly quickly considering the time of day and location of his accident.

Spallner does research on accidents with the help of his business partner and his butler, going through tons of old newspapers.  He also witnesses what seems like a preternaturally high number accidents, like he's jinxed or something, and rushes over to examine the crowds that gather around each accident.  Spallner's explorations lead him to a mind-blowing conclusion: within a certain geographic area, the same bunch of unmistakable people arrive with uncanny promptitude at the scene of every accident.  Even in newspaper photos of accident sites from ten years ago the people Spallner saw at his own accident appear, looking to be the same age and to be wearing the same clothes as when Spallner first encountered them.  There is even evidence that these odd individuals are perhaps causing accidents, even exacerbating the injuries of accident victims to ensure they expire.  

Spallner decides to take his file of carefully compiled evidence to the police, but while driving to the police station he is in an accident and the crowd members he recognizes as regulars make sure he is going to die and take custody of his dossier.  Spallner realizes they are the ghosts of people who died in accidents and he is now going to join their ranks.

"The Crowd" is pretty good, well-written and structured and all that.  But I am sort of wracking my brain, wondering if people in real life gather in crowds around accidents, eager to see blood, as this story assumes, trying to recall if I witnessed this behavior in real life when I lived for over a decade in New York City or for 18 months in Columbus, OH, or, if I have seen such goings on during the current swamp-embedded phase of my life in Washington, D.C., or if this behavior is just something I have seen in fiction.

Another thing we might consider is Bradbury's relationship with the automobile.  Bradbury never learned to drive, and should we see this story, in which automobiles are engines of gruesome death that excite and feed people's bloodlust, as a reflection of Bradbury's antipathy to cars?  Also, this story includes descriptions of motor vehicles in operation, and I think it is fair to ask if a man who never drove a car himself can produce descriptions of such operations that ring true.

A huge freight truck just ahead of Spallner, suddenly threw on its air-brakes.

It stopped too suddenly.

Spallner shouted, jammed his brakes. Ramming, his new car crashed into the rear of the truck. The windshield hammered back into Spallner's face. His body was forced back and forth in several lightning jerks.

I don't know, Ray.  Still, a good story.    

*********

The Miller is today's big deal; I'll make it a point to read more stories by the gentleman.  The Bradbury of course is good, and was a surprise to me because I was expecting something quite different, thanks to my bad memory.  Derleth and Coblentz deliver unsuccessful filler stories, Derleth's sort of complicated and heartfelt as he tries to address various issues and express what are (maybe) his own feelings about Hollywood and maybe women, but full of missteps, while Coblentz's simple and banal story is just too long and too boring and suffers a terminal lack of emotional, intellectual, and plot content.

Alright, another issue of Weird Tales under our belts.  Maybe someday we really will have read at least one story from each issue!  At the following links you can marvel at the progress we have already made!

1923  

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939 

1940   1941  1942

F&SF March '55: M St. Clair, J Blish, F Brown & J Ciardi

On December 22nd, one of my clever and helpful commentors reminded us that John Ciardi, likely best known for translating Dante, published some science fiction stories.  One of these appeared in the March 1955 issue of F&SF, edited by Anthony Boucher.  We are already familiar with some of the contents of this ish, including Robert Bloch's "I Do Not Love Thee, Dr. Fell" and Avram Davidson's "The Golem,"  but there is a ton of stuff in the issue new to us worth looking at besides Ciardi's contribution, so today we'll also be checking out stories by Margaret St. Clair, James Blish, and Fredric Brown as well as the Ciardi.  I'm reading all these stories in a scan of the original magazine. 

"Change the Sky" by Margaret St. Clair

Much of St. Clair's work appeared under the pen name Idris Seabright, and "Change the Sky" does so here.  Boucher's intro to "Change the Sky" quotes Judith Merril, who praises "Seabright" for "undercutting the pretensions of her fellow humans, and for silhouetting against an alien background the most human of our weaknesses."  Is this story going to be some kind misanthropic indulgence in rank snobbery?  Well, let's not reject this story before we have even read it--maybe Boucher and Merril are mischaracterizing or exaggerating.  (I keep telling myself to not read an intro until after I have read the story, the way I don't read the tendentious label next to a painting at the art museum until I have looked at the picture and formed my own opinion of it, but I keep reading these damned intros anyway.)

"Change the Sky" is a long tedious story of 12 or 13 pages, but at least it doesn't actually strike me as a hammer blow against the human race and people's pretensions or weaknesses.  I would describe "Chaneg the Sky" as the record of a course of the psychotherapy of the interstellar future, neither particularly snobby nor misanthropic, but a total bore.

Much of St. Clair's text is given over to pointless surreal or psychedelic images, descriptions of things the protagonist sees but doesn't really interact with.  One reason this story is a drag is that the main character doesn't perform many actions or make many decisions; he just kind of witnesses natural phenomena and elaborate but sterile artifacts, and has emotional reactions to them that are quite subdued. 

That bland and flat main character is Pendleton, the son of a rich family of loners.  Our guy was born on a space ship and has never had a real home, spent his life as a traveler crisscrossing the galaxy, seeking something, he is not quite sure what, his entire life.  His father before him was on a similar quixotic quest, and boy and teen Pendleton accompanied Dad on his useless explorations, learning all the ins and ourts of being a space man along the way.  As the story begins, Pendleton, now I guess middle-aged, knows his health is such that he won't be able to participate in space travel any more, so he has come seeking the services of an artist, a man who makes artificial worlds which his clients can visit or even, perhaps, inhabit.  These artificial worlds are kind of like hypnosis, I guess--St. Clair doesn't bother to make them logically comprehensible to the reader, so they function in the story like magic or hallucinations or drug dreams.

Pendleton wants the artist to make him an artificial world that will satisfy him, the kind of world he has been seeking, even though he isn't really sure what he wants the world to be like.

"What I’m hunting is a place that’s so beautiful, or so winning, or so right, that I’ll feel, ‘This is the place in the whole universe that I love best. This is home.’ ”

The artist asks Pendleton to describe the most beautiful and most interesting and most etc. planets he has seen, and Pendleton complies; one planet had lots of lightning, another had lots of aromatic flowers, and so forth.  The descriptions of these planets are mind-numbingly boring, a list of vapid and vague attributes, an absolute snoozefest.

"Genlis is the most beautiful, by far,” Pendleton answered. “It’s a water world, with deep green, swelling, foam-laden seas, and a sky so intensely blue that it’s almost purple. On the islands — there are a few islands — tall graceful trees like palms lean into the wind, and the perfume of the flowers is so sweet it makes you dizzy. There are flowers everywhere. They say that no matter how far you get from land on Genlis, you can always smell the flowers. The air is soft and yet fresh, and when the wind blows against your face or body, you feel your skin tingle with delight....Nothing could be more beautiful than Genlis."      

Most of the story is like this, sterile descriptions of places where nobody does anything or experiences or expresses any deep emotions.

The artist makes the artificial world, and Pendleton enters it, and it is just a series of boring bubbles in which, his brain addled, Pendleton moves from bubble to bubble to bubble until he turns around and travels back through all the bubbles to real life.  He complains to the artist, who sends him to a different artist.  This second artist creates an artificial world in which Pendleton is a child again, flying around the galaxy with his father, who is teaching his son how to be a space man while searching for evidence to substantiate his absurd theory about a probably fictional alien race.  Pendleton seems to forget he is an adult whose parents have died, so it looks like he is going to disappear into this fantasy world for the rest of his life.

I guess the twist ending or point of the story is that the most beautiful things in life are the processes of education and exploration and the place you feel most at home is wherever your attentive family is.  Or that the artificial worlds are a trap?  Is Pendleton going to survive in this artificial world--can he eat and drink there?    

Slow and boring, an aimless narrative punctuated by long lifeless scenes that add nothing to the plot and nothing valuable to the atmosphere, a story with no emotion for a dozen pages and then sappiness on the final page--thumbs down for "Change the Sky."  Maybe this story is supposed to be boring, maybe it really is an attack on the human race's pretensions and weaknesses, depicting how bogus psychoanalysis is, how the people who seek psychoanalysis are empty souls who want other people to fill them and how these other people are in fact not real healers but just exploiters.

"Change the Sky" is actually the title story of a 1974 St. Clair collection, so I guess there are those who find it to be an above average story of St. Clair's, or at least one that is representative of her virtues as a writer.  A 1968 French anthology included the story, as does a 2022 US anthology of mid-1950s SF by women.

"The Book of Your Life" by James Blish

Here we have a horror story about two of our favorite things--books and creepy sex!  

Petrie Mapes is a publisher who lives with his attractive wife on Long Island.  He is obsessed with sex, but has a sad perversion or dysfunction or maybe just a kink, whatever you want to call it: he finds real sex disappointing, and much of his sexual life revolves around pornography and erotica.  "The Book of Your Life" is full of literary references, and Blish mentions Henry Miller, Frank Harris, Ben Hecht and Jack Woodford and talks about how Mapes hires writers and artists to craft him unique one-of-a-kind fiction and drawings of an erotic nature.*  (Blish also engages in some literary criticism of Ellery Queen, which some may find interesting.)

*This whole story may be inspired by Henry Miller.  Miller and his circle, Anais Nin among them, wrote little one-of-a-kind porno stories for money for a perverted guy in the book biz--see the preface to Nin's Delta of Venus--and the theme of "The Book of Your Life," that reading and writing are not life but an escape from life or an obstacle to living life, is a theme of Miller's work--see Sexus, Chapter 1: "No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in."

Mapes comes into Manhattan on business with some frequency and has an odd, tense, relationship with a bookseller there, who may perhaps be the Devil.  The plot of "The Book of Your Life" revolves around how this bookseller has a huge book, something the size of an unabridged dictionary, that has magical powers.  Over a thousand pages of tiny type, the book is comprehensive, including, for every possible reader, a scene that perfectly manifests the deepest desire or foremost obsessions of that reader, and when you open the book at random for the very first time, the scene tailored to your peculiar overriding interest will be what you find and it will shake you to your core!  You can read the entire rest of the book, but never will you be so stirred.  The bookseller rents out this colossal sui generis tome to people, and Mapes has possession of it over the course of Blish's story, and we observe as the book has a malign effect on Mapes and those in Mapes' orbit.  

A good story that addresses the theme that life is a journey about pursuing goals and if you achieve your goals, if your desires are fulfilled, you life will lose its savor.  The idea that pornography is more exciting than actual sex, and consumption of pornography can damage your real-life relationships, feels topical in 2025, when I am writing this, and maybe will continue to feel topical in 2026, when you are reading it.  But perhaps the most striking thing about "The Book of Your Life" is its suggestion that reading books (or watching TV or otherwise consuming media) is not really living, but just a substitute for living, and people who devote their time to books are throwing their lives away, that media is consuming them rather than vice versa.  Ouch! 

It looks like "The Book of Your Life" has not been reprinted beyond a translation in the French edition of F&SF, which is strange, as the story is compelling and very meta, being about genre literature and the people who produce and consume it.  An overlooked gem!

"Millennium" by Fredric Brown

This is one of Brown's one page stories, what fans of the genre, of which many consider Brown the master, call "short shorts" or "vignettes" or "vinnies."  I have read a bunch of these Brown vinnies (among them, "Too Far," "Expedition," "Abominable," "Blood" "Sentence," "Daisies" and "Politeness") and in general I find them a waste of time.

In this one, Satan is sitting in his office, one by one interviewing people who want to sell their souls for a wish, as he does every day.  As Satan has feared for so long, one of the soul sellers makes a wish that puts Satan out of business, the wish that ends, or reduces substantially, the amount of evil and unhappiness on Earth.  The way the wish is worded is a little oblique and I had to ponder it before I really understood it; maybe this suggests this vinny is more sophisticated than are many others of its ilk?  (Or just reminds us how dim I am?)  I'll call this vignette "acceptable."

"Millennium" has appeared in several Brown collections in four or five different languages, as well as one of those anthologies that has Isaac Asimov's name on it above those of hard-working anthologists, in this case Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh.

"The Bone that Seeks" by John Ciardi 

Here's the thing that brought us to the March 1955 F&SF, a story attributed to "John Anthony," though Boucher in his intro tells you it is a pen name and offers clues as to the real name of the author.  As with Blish's "The Book of Your Life," isfdb suggests that the only place "The Bone that Seeks" was ever reprinted was in the French edition of F&SF.  When they aren't suppressing the free speech of their hottest actresses or sautéing slugs and toads, maybe the Frenchies know what they are about?

Maybe, maybe not.  "The Bone that Seeks" is an OK story, sentimental and histrionic, that relies for much of its oomph on a poem by Archibald MacLeish (the title is a line from the poem.)  

It is over a million years in the future.  The human race has endured, and many of the features of life we are familiar with, desks, government, reports, etc., are still important components of Earth society.  The current form of government approaches its one millionth anniversary, and as part of the celebration the government wants the oldest robot, a robot that was built and operational before the current government was founded, to play a major role in the festivities.  But looking through its old memory banks has inspired the million-year-old robot to feel tired and desire death.  A government bureaucrat tries to badger the robot into following orders, but it has developed an independent intelligence over the millennia and it plays sad music, recites the MacLeish poem "What Riddle Asked the Sphinx?", looks at the sunset, and turns itself off. 

**********

Brown's story is about a guy who risks his soul to make the universe a better place, but all the other stories we read from this magazine today are absolute downers.  A robot who wants to commit suicide?  A pervert who risks his soul using a magic book to destroy other people?  A guy who feels like he has no home and, in his search for the place where he belongs, loses himself in an artificial world?  Happy New Year, everybody!

Crossroads in Time: C Simak, F Leiber, K MacLean, P S Miller & G O Smith

Groff Conklin's 1953 paperback anthology Crossroads in Time recently came to my attention when we read from it Hal Clement's story "Assumption Unjustified."  This volume of 312 pages is full of stories by writers we are interested in that, for one reason or another, we haven't read yet.  (I will here note that we have, in fact, already read the included story by Margaret St. Clair, "Thirsty God" as well as Clement's story.)  Today let's read from this book five stories that debuted in Astounding.  I will be reading them in a scan of this 1953 paperback with the awesome Richard Powers cover, though I may consult other versions if I suspect a typo or printing error.

"Courtesy" by Clifford D. Simak (1951)

In our last thrilling expedition into the world of magazines printed before we were born we read three stories printed in Astounding that were penned by Clifford D. Simak, the newspaperman famed for writing "pastoral" science fiction, and here's a fourth.  One of those three stories stole my heart and one of them had me tearing out my hair, so as I begin "Courtesy" I have no idea how I will react to it.

This is one of those SF stories that condemns the human race and presents goody goody aliens who are better than us to serve as a contrast to our vileness.  I'm going to call it acceptable because it is well-written and suspenseful, but the ending is a groaner.  Simak has produced a lot of fiction like this, with ants, dogs, robots all proving better than humans, and Native Americans proving better than white people, and I don't find the theme persuasive or entertaining.

"Courtesy" tells the tale of an expedition to a barren alien planet.  The expedition has twenty-five members, and we meet a few of them and Simak does a good job sketching out their personalities and relationships--like I said, this story, the theme of which and the plot resolution of which I think are crummy, is pretty well-written.  We learn that humans have explored many habitable alien planets, but everywhere they go, the natives hate the humans.  Most of the text of the story involves a guy who stupidly leaves the camp and gets lost, and then how everybody in the expedition, which won't be able to contact any other humans for two years, catches the lethal local plague because the medical officer stupidly didn't check the expedition's drugs before or soon after landing and it turns out the drugs are expired, useless.

Only one man of the 25 survives the plague, and the reason he survives reveals why all aliens hate us humies.  We humies are all arrogant and think we are better than aliens!  The aliens on this planet, naked savages with no technology or literature, have the power to cure people, and they cured the one guy who will survive the plague because he was the only human to show any common courtesy to any of the natives.

The idea that all humans would be arrogant all over the galaxy and all natives resent the humans is silly, because, as Simak seemed to know when he wrote "Ogre" in 1944, interactions between advanced colonial and imperial societies and less advanced indigenes are complex and diverse--sure, plenty of ancient Romans and early modern Europeans who went out to the provinces and colonies looked down on the natives and plenty of natives hated them in return, but significant numbers of the colonizers liked and admired the natives and even "went native" and significant numbers of natives were eager to collaborate or emulate or imitate the colonizers.

You can find this professionally produced but ultimately frustrating and sterile exercise in several anthologies as well as multiple Simak collections.

"The Mutant's Brother" by Fritz Leiber (1943)

"The Mutant's Brother" appeared in the issue of Astounding which had as its cover story C. L. Moore's Judgment Night, a book version of which we read back in 2018; the issue also includes one of A. E. van Vogt's Space Beagle stories, "M33 in Andromeda," as well as a Moore-Kuttner collab--"Endowment Policy"--and an Anthony Boucher story-- "One-Way Trip" I don't think I have read yet.  I feel like I have read lots of old SF stories, but I look at these old SF magazines and still find tons of stories I haven't read yet and want to, as well as stories I have read, like "M33 in Andromeda," and want to reread.  Even if I get a robot to do the dishes and the laundry and to help my wife with the Christmas decorations, I am never going to read all the stories I want to, am I?

"The Mutant's Brother" is a quite good hard-boiled crime story about psychic powers.  Leiber handles quite well the psychological aspects, the action scenes, and the speculative elements about how guys with psychic powers might use them, and there are horror elements as well, and the pacing and the style are just right.  Thumbs up for "The Mutant's Brother!"

It is the high tech future of the early 1970s!  Our protagonist is a mutant, a man who can work other people like puppets via hypnotic telepathy.  Or maybe it is telepathic hypnotism.  Either way, if you are within a hundred or so feet he can make you do anything, and when he stops doing it you have no memory of what happened while you were under his control.

The hero grew up an orphan, raised by good foster parents.  He has been contacted by a twin brother he has never met.  He goes to meet his twin but soon learns his twin has been using his ability to control others to commit heinous crimes.  Overconfident, evil twin has been identified and the entire police force of his city is after him.  Evil twin has lured the protagonist into the town in hopes the cops will mistake our hero for the villain and gun him down and then relax their search for the real malefactor.  Much of the length of the story consists of the hero using his power to survive in a city in which every hand is turned against him and then in a head-to-head battle of hypnotic puppet master vs hypnotic puppet master.  

The tone of the story is sad, depressing, oppressive, and nerve-wracking, with many people, including innocents and people trying to do the right thing, suffering indignities, torture, and horrible deaths.  Conklin here in Crossroads in Time spoils the ending in his intro, which is too bad because "The Mutant's Brother" is the kind of story in which you don't know who will win in the end until you actually get to the end.  

A real success.  Sometimes Leiber goes on too long, or introduces some of his boring or annoying or creepy hobbyhorses and thus weakens his stories*, but "The Mutant's Brother" is perfectly proportioned and every component is appropriate and contributes to the literary and entertainment value of the piece.

*(If you want to hear me attack Leiber stories on these grounds, check out my blog posts on "Nice Girl with Five Husbands," "A Deskful of Girls," The Night of the Wolf, and "Black Glass."  Of course, you might prefer to hear me unreservedly praise Leiber stories like "The Button Molder," "The Dreams of Albert Moreland," "Stardock," and "Ship of Shadows."  If you click the link to the blog post on "Ship of Shadows" you will also have a chance to witness me sarcastically mocking SF royalty Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon.)

To my mind it is odd that "The Mutant's Brother" has been reprinted less often than Leiber stories that are less exciting and less well-put together; in the 20th century "The Mutant's Brother" reappeared only in Crossroads in Time (and the Spanish translation of Conklin's anthology.), You can find it in two 21st-century Leiber collections, Day Dark, Night Bright and Masters of Science Fiction: Fritz Leiber, fortunately.

"Feedback" by Katherine MacLean (1951)

I enjoyed MacLean's "Unhuman Sacrifice" and "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" so I have hopes I'll enjoy this one.

Argh, this is a long tedious didactic story about how the common people are conformists who will join a witch-hunting mob on the slightest pretext, set in the America of 1991 in which democracy means conformity and posses of vigilantes regularly set upon free thinkers and lynch them.  "Feedback" features a school teacher who suffers just such a fate after encouraging his students to not conform.  MacLean describes the mob's torture of the teacher in considerable detail, and we get lots of oratory from the heroic school teacher.  There is a sort of twist ending which involves the teacher and his comrades in the secret resistance of middle-class professionals faking his death with their high technology, and a sort of joke reference to Nathan Hale's quote "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country;" I guess the joke being that the school teacher in the story has multiple "lives" to lose for anti-conformism, he being able to survive multiple lynchings by faking his death.

Seventeen pages of hectoring self-righteousness, an exercise in over-the-top manipulation and extravagant flattery of the audience, Astounding readers of course thinking themselves smarter than everybody else and dreaming of outwitting their inferiors with superior technology.  Thumbs down!

"Feedback" was reprinted in the MacLean collection The Diploids and it has also reappeared in Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph Olander's Science Fiction of the Fifties and the German anthology Der metallene Traum.

"The Cave" by P. Schuyler Miller (1943)

"The Cave" starts out like a science article describing how caves are formed and used by animals.  The cave in this story is, however, on Mars.  After three pages of geology we hear how a native Martian, a barbarian hunter in touch with nature with a sense of smell and ability to detect vibrations that allow him to navigate with ease in total dark and interpret the moods and emotions of all the critters that live in the cave, arrives at the cave to wait out a storm.  The monsters in the cave and he silently agree to a truce for the duration of the storm.

After hearing how awesome this Martian is, even though his people don't have a written language any more, their high civilization having fallen thousands of years ago, we meet a human colonist, a working-class moron who is greedy, loves alcohol, and is racist towards the noble native Martians.  This guy, a miner, uses his free time to explore the deserts of Mars in hopes of finding some kind of treasure, even though the managers of the mining company, you know, middle-class people with book-larning, are sure the valuable minerals of Mars were all used up by the high-tech ancestors of the currently barbaric native Martians.  The storm drives him into the cave (he finds it by sheer luck) and he encounters the Martian and all the monsters in the cave.  Of course the man acts like a selfish jerk, unlike the Martian and the monsters with whom the hunter shares a code of honor, and gets killed by the noble Martian.   

This story is well-written; the plot is suspenseful and all the stuff about the cave and the native Martian ecosystem is believable and engaging, so I enjoyed this story even though it is yet another allegory about the evil white man abusing the noble indigenes who live in concert with the natural world.  (In 200 years, when the Chinese communists have conquered the Earth, will their creative class be writing stories that romanticize the English-speaking people they have crushed under their heels, the Anglo's bizarre individualism and incomprehensible notions of free speech and private property?)  So, thumbs up, even though I wish the human had come out of the cave alive, maybe gripping a fistful of jewels.

"The Cave" debuted in an issue of Astounding which also prints one of Jack Williamson's Seetee stories--one of my widely-read commentors recently recommended the Seetee stories to us.  Also in this issue, A. E. van Vogt's "The Search," which was integrated into the novel Quest for the Future and which I read in 2016, one of Anthony Boucher's Fergus O'Breen stories (we just read one of those), one of Henry Kuttner's Gallegher stories (we read one of those in 2014) and a Kuttner/Moore collaboration.  Probably we'll be coming back to this issue of Astounding.       

"The Cave" was reprinted in anthologies by Brian Aldiss, Martin H. Greenberg, and Jane Hipolito and Willis E. McNelly.

"Vocation" by George O. Smith (1945)

It looks like "Vocation" has never reappeared in physical print beyond Crossroads in Time.  Are we about to uncover a forgotten gem?  

No, we are not.  "Vocation" is merely acceptable.  

"Vocation" is full of science, but science I am having trouble taking too seriously.  The whole story is based around the idea that humans use only 10% of their brains, which I think is a myth.  Also, there is a lot of talk about evolution that anthropomorphizes nature, suggesting that nature is designing and improving the design of the human race over time, aiming to achieve some final perfect form, the way engineers design equipment and steadily improve succeeding models of the equipment.

"Nature causes many sports to be sterile because they interfere with her proper plan."

"Nature expects the brain to be called on, one hundred percent, and she intends to keep increasing that ability as it is needed."

This kind of stuff would be fine in a fantasy story or horror story, where we accept gods and the supernatural and so on, but this story feels like it is supposed to be hard SF, and this undermines that feel, and these brain and evolution issues are not a casual aside, but the entire foundation of the story.  

Another issue with "Vocation" is that it consists almost entirely of conversations, which is not that exciting.

It is the future of aircars and other such high technology.  Humans have yet to reach the stars.  The starfaring galactic civilization has made itself known to Terra, and there are two alien ambassadors on Earth, a really charming good-looking guy and his very charming and good-looking wife.  They are here to offer advice to humans, but they refuse to give away the technological secrets that will enable travel between the stars.

The plot of "Vocation" follows a few smart humans--a scientist and a journalist--who are a little skeptical of the aliens.  Why won't they give us the star drive?  Are they afraid of us because we are so aggressive and ambitious?  These guys come up with the theory that we humies only use 10% of our brains because the aliens are emitting a field upon Earth that limits our brain usage.  They start working on a device to cancel out that field, or increase the amount we can use our brains so we get closer to 100%.  The device works.  The scientist has the machine hooked up to his skull, and after a few minutes of writing supergenius-level equations on paper, he dies.  The brain is like a motor, if you run it at 100% too long it burns out.  Oops.  The journalist is just standing near the machine, and the fraction of the field that leaks out of the connections is enough to make him the smartest human on Earth, as smart as the alien ambassadors.  The best part of Smith's story is the description of the powers having a 260 IQ gives the journalist.

The journalist goes to meet the ambassador.  The journalist is smart enough now to realize the aliens are the goody goodies they present themselves as--they aren't scared of us, they aren't retarding our development, and they really are refusing to offer us the technology needed to travel between the stars on a silver platter for our own good--we haven't developed the ability to use the technology responsibly yet.  The human race will have to achieve a star drive on its own; by the time we are smart enough to invent it we'll also have naturally grown to a level of responsibility to enable us to use the tech without blowing up the sun or something.  The journalist resolves to destroy the brain-improving machine.

Smith includes a twist and sense-of-wonder ending that I think is unnecessary.  In one of those coincidences we so often find in fiction, one of the ambassadors' direct superiors happens to be visiting on the very day the journalist increases his intelligence.  The ambassador introduces the journalist to this alien if the next level up, and this guy is so intelligent it blows the journalist's mind--among their own people, the ambassadors, at 260 IQ, are morons, and are sent on this kind of mission because it is impossible for humans of a mere 100 or so IQ to communicate with an alien of average IQ.      

"Vocation" is like a filler piece, not bad, but no big deal.

**********

We think of old science fiction, in particular science fiction associated with Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr., as optimistic about science and technology and as being a celebration of the ability of man to master the environment and solve problems.  But today's five stories are all about human limitations and human evil.  I guess Astounding was serving up a pretty varied diet to readers.

More samples from that diet next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.