SF Classics selected by T Carr: Rocklynne, Brackett, Kuttner & Moore, and Wollheim

When last we met, we noted that Terry Carr (remember when we read his novel Cirque?) included Lester del Rey's odd story "The Smallest God" in his 1978 anthology Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age.  Let's check out some other stories Carr reprinted in that book, after of course pointing out that we have already blogged about some of his selections: A. E. van Vogt's "The Vault of the Beast,"  Eric Frank Russell and Maurice G. Hugi's "The Mechanical Mice," and Robert A. Heinlein's "--And He Built a Crooked House--."  (And that, before this blog was conjured up from the black labyrinth of my mind and began to lurk the intertubes, I read still more of them, like Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps.")

"Into Darkness" by Ross Rocklynne (1940)

I have a poor memory, and so I wasn't sure if I had read "Into Darkness" before or not, so I dug through the archives to make certain and uncovered sobering evidence of how bad my memory really is--in 2018 I read and blogged about Rocklynne's story "Quietus," and then in 2023 I read and blogged about "Quietus" again, having totally forgotten I'd read it five years earlier.  Embarrassing!  (Is Nancy Pelosi going to engineer a campaign to have me deposed as head of this blog?)

Well, I'm pretty confident I haven't read Rocklynne's "Into Darkness" before (no, really), even though I own it in the collection Sun Destroyers (which is the other half of the Ace Double that reprinted Edmond Hamilton's A Yank at Valhalla), so let's have at it.  "Into Darkness" first saw print in Astonishing, edited by Fred Pohl.  I am reading the story, like all of today's stories, in the internet archive's scan of Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age, though of course I took a quick look at the magazine to see the (below average for him) Hannes Bok illo for "Into Darkness."

In his intro to the story, Carr suggests "Into Darkness" is "far out," and it definitely is an effort to blow your mind and inspire the famous "sense of wonder."  The universe is inhabited by creatures of pure energy, creatures millions of miles across, creatures that live for billions of years, creatures that absorb energy from stars, move planets about for fun, and can shift between any of the forty-seven different levels of hyperspace, each of which obeys different laws of physics.  Rocklynne's story is a sort of biography of one such creature, and we witness its early millennia, its adolescence and its growth to maturity.  Named "Darkness" by its mother, Sparkle, our main character is different than its fellows--smarter, more inquisitive, abandoning childish play earlier than others in its cohort and seeking to fulfill some purpose in its life.  (Presumably the kinds of smart kids who are thought to be the audience for science fiction, kids who love science and want to learn about the world around them and to accomplish something with their lives, are expected to identify with Darkness.)  Darkness yearns to resolve the riddle of what constitutes the meaning of life, to learn what is beyond the edge of the universe, and is not discouraged when one of the oldest of the energy beings, known as Oldster, warns such investigations lead to sadness and death! 

Darkness was named by Sparkle after the darkness at the edge of the universe, and insists on living up to its name and exploring that mysterious void.  Darkness devours a star bigger than any star it has ever seen, and with that energy breaches the edge of the universe and travels through the emptiness for millions of years.  Finally, Darkness comes to another universe much like the one it left.  There it meets another energy creature, but whereas Darkness has a purple core, this being has a green core.  Darkness falls in love, and proposes passing a life of exploration with its new acquaintance, but this creature would rather lead Darkness to a forty-eighth level of hyperspace Darkness has never heard about before and there take possession of our hero's purple core.  Darkness learns that the purpose of life is to create more life, which green-core energy creatures do by accepting into themselves purple cores...of course, without their cores, purple-core energy creatures wither and die.  (Woah, is this a story about how women will steal your life force and you should avoid having sex with them?)  Before it expires, Darkness creates a planet and seeds it with life-giving protoplasm, which I guess we are supposed to think is Earth.

I sort of expected Darkness to create the human race, but the revelation that these energy creatures reproduce sexually and that the male can only do the deed once--and that it is fatal!--was a surprise.  I'm not sure it is a good surprise, though, as the fact that they reproduce through sex makes the aliens in this story less alien and thus less mind-blowing.

"Into Darkness" is just alright; besides the somewhat disappointing ending, it feels a little long and repetitive, as we hear again and again that Darkness lives for millions of years and is millions of miles across and travels millions of miles and so on--stuff that is supposed to fill you with wonder ceases to be mind blowing with familiarity.  More conventional sense-of-wonder stories start out more or less mundane and then grow steadily more strange until the final page tries to blow you away with the idea that the universe is open to exploration and contains infinite adventure; "Into Darkness" starts out strange and by depicting life on an epic scale and actually becomes more mundane at the end (just like so many ordinary guys. the alien creature loses his heart to a girl.) 

"Into Darkness" has been reprinted in a few anthologies besides Carr's here, and was followed by three sequels, all of which can be found in that Ace Double collection I mentioned, The Sun Destroyers.

"Child of the Green Light" by Leigh Brackett (1942)

We've read a lot of science fiction and crime fiction by Leigh Brackett, wife of Edmond Hamilton and crony of Bogie and The Duke, but I don't think we've read this one before.  "Child of the Green Light" made its debut in Super Science Stories (this issue also has illustrations by Bok, images more characteristic of his work that are worth checking out) and was reprinted in a 1951 ish of Super Science and in a book I have owned since 2013, Martian Quest.  (Why do you buy these books if you don't read them?, asks my financial advisor.)   

"Child of the Green Light" is a somewhat confusing story as it depicts a crazy scenario that Brackett sketches out in a pithy style and doesn't really explain until the end, leaving me struggling at times to visualize what is going on.  Of course, the real meat of the story isn't its questionable science but themes of loyalty and sacrifice and one's relationship to his people--do you owe something to people you haven't met just because you share their blood or culture?  

A young man, naked, is living in or on a conglomeration of wrecked space ships (in Warhammer 40,000 we'd call this a "space hulk"), somehow surviving in the vacuum of space!  The space hulk is in the form of a disk or wheel, with a green light at its center.  The young man, who goes by the name of Son, is in communication telepathically with a being he calls Aona, who lives on the other side of a "Veil" with a capital "V," which is growing thinner all the time; I guess the Veil and the light are one and the same or closely related.  Aona is a female being whom he loves; though she calls him "Son" and could be said to have raised him, I guess their relationship has an erotic character or erotic potential, and they look forward to the time the Veil falls and they can be together.

Another ship appears and lands on the hulk, and from it emerges a multicultural expedition of men in space suits; some of them are Earth humans, other hail from Mars or one of the moons of Saturn. Through their dialogue we learn that that green light passed through the Solar System, attracting to it and carrying off space ships as it went and finally settling here near Mercury.  The green light is bathing the System in radiation that is radically accelerating the aging process in humans--soon civilization will collapse because nobody lives long enough to learn the science and engineering required to maintain a modern high-tech society.  This team, among whom is the last living physicist, constitutes humanity's last hope of destroying the green light before it is too late.

Son and Aona want to preserve the light, so Son stops the physicist from approaching it, killing the man in the process.  The ray guns of the humans have no effect on Son, but they are able to tie him up, however.  Through more dialogue we learn that Son is the only survivor among the passengers and crew of all the many ships brought here by the green light; he has an adult body now, but he was just a baby when his parents' ship was captured and his parents were killed five years ago.

Aona then explains more of what is going on.  She is native to another universe, where people are immortal.  Her universe suffered a cosmic cataclysm, and the resultant explosion destroyed most of her universe and threw a tiny surviving sliver of it (a sliver still big enough to include multiple planets) through the dark barrier between universes so it intersected with our universe.  Son has become a superman because his atoms are changing, starting to vibrate at the frequency of Aona's universe--currently, a fraction of his atoms are still in our dimension, while most are vibrating at the frequency of Aona's dimension.  Eventually he will join Aona's universe, I guess when all his atoms are vibrating on Aona's frequency, or maybe because the Veil has finally eroded.  This story is a bit confusing, as I said; sometimes I think we are meant to visualize universes are physically distinct with dark empty space--the "Between" with a capital "B"--separating them, like they are raisins in a cake, but other times it is suggested the different universe are parallel, inhabiting the same space but at different vibrations.

To save human civilization, the green light must be destroyed, which will separate the two universes.  The only way to destroy the green light is for Son to enter the light before he has fully transformed; the presence of alien atoms will cause the green light to expire and the universes to be separated; Son will, however, fall into the Between, forever barred from entering either our or Aona's universes.  Son, only now realizing that other living things beside he and Aona exist, and that he is the product (the "son") of a race and civilization distinct from Aona's, has to decide if he is going to destroy himself to save his people (about whom he knows almost nothing), or allow his people to expire so he can live in eternal bliss with Aona.

There is also a subplot about how a member of the expedition tries to murder all his comrades, become a superman, destroy the green light, and then become dictator of the Solar System.

"Child of the Green Light" features many themes we've seen before in Brackett's work and that of her husband--many Hamilton stories are about a planet or star whose people suffered a cosmic catastrophe and so they are moving their heavenly body into some other system, and many Hamilton stories depict radiation changing people, and I think that Brackett's novel The Big Jump, which I read before founding this blog, involved a guy stabbing people on his expedition in the back so he could bathe himself in radiation and become a superman.

This story is not bad, but I found it a little challenging to follow--Brackett provides a minimum of information, so I had to really pay attention to get what was going on, and I still am not sure it all makes sense.

"The Twonky" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (1942/1975)

I've read stacks of stuff by married couple Kuttner and Moore, things they produced individually as well as collaborations, but I haven't read this one; I kind of think I have been avoiding it because its title makes it sound like a joke story, and Kuttner's (many) humor pieces generally fall flat with me (sample MPorcius pans of Kuttner humor pieces: "Or Else," "The Ego Machine," and "See You Later.")  But let's give "The Twonky" a shot today.  

The publication history of "The Twonky," at least as described by Carr in his intro to the story here and by isfdb, presents a few mysteries.  Carr says "The Twonky" has always been attributed to Kuttner, but isfdb credits both Kuttner and Moore.  Carr points out that here in his book a line obliquely referring to World War II that has been left out of reprintings of the story in Kuttner collections has been restored, but isfdb lists the version here as a 1975 version first seen in the American book The Best of Henry Kuttner.  (The British book The Best of Kuttner 2, according to isfdb, reprints the 1942 version.)  I'm just going to read the version here in Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age and leave these mysteries to other investigators.

People in Kuttner and Moore stories are always popping in and out of different times and universes, and the first section of "The Twonky" finds us at a factory in our world that manufactures "console radio-phonograph combinations" and introduces us to a factory worker from the future who has somehow been transported to it.  Disoriented and suffering from amnesia, the man goes to a workbench and, using advanced techniques he knows instinctively, he builds a device from his native time, "The Twonky," but camouflages it so it looks exactly like the other radio-phonographs being pumped out of this mid-20th century factory.  When his mind is fully clear and he realizes how he got here, the workman travels back to the future.

A lot of Kuttner and Moore stories depict people interacting with the technology of a more advanced civilization (e. g., "Juke-Box," and "Shock,") and the second part of "The Twonky" is about a college professor who has just had a new radio-record player console delivered and is alone with it because his wife is off visiting relatives.  The console is a robot that, after scanning the prof and assessing his psychology, performs as a perfect servant, walking around the house washing dishes and lighting the prof's cigarettes and so forth.  But Carr in his intro told us that "The Twonky" is a warning about dictatorship, and, as those of us who follow the Cato Institute on Twitter are aware, a powerful entity which seems eager to help you can quickly become a tyrannical master, and the robot uses physical force to forbid the prof from listening to music or reading books or consuming food and drink of which it does not approve--the Twonky is the embodiment of the Nanny State!  And worse--it begins tinkering with people's minds so that they behave, and, if they try to dismantle it, killing them with a death ray!  

Thumbs up for "The Twonky."  The murders at the climax are a chilling surprise--because most of the story comes off as light-hearted and the characters are all likable, you don't expect them to be massacred but to have the plot resolved for them peacefully.  A good horror story.

When it first appeared in Astounding, "The Twonky" was printed under the penname often used by Kuttner and Moore, Lewis Padgett, and among the many collections and anthologies in which it has been reprinted is the 1954 Padgett collection Line to Tomorrow, which has a great Mitchell Hooks cover.

"Storm Warning" by Donald A. Wollheim (1942)

"Storm Warning," by major SF editor Donald A. Wollheim (who made a recent appearance on my twitter feed), made its first appearance in Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, where it was illustrated by another important SF editor, Damon Knight.  Editors seem to have liked the story--Groff Conklin and Robert Silverberg both included it in invasion-themed anthologies.

Today I am not on board with all these editors; "Storm Warning" is a kind of boring story full of descriptions of air movements and the movements of clouds and odd smells and temperatures.  Have to give this one a thumbs down.

Our narrator is a meteorologist living in Wyoming.  A meteor is seen landing a few miles away in the desert.  He and a fellow weatherman ride horses into the desert to see if they can find the meteorites.  The temperatures they encounter and the smells they experience feel a little off.  Also, an unusual storm seems to be brewing.  They find some hollow crystalline spheres taller than a man; no doubt that are the meteorites, and they are cracked open.  The storm hits, and the men witness what appears to be bodies of air pressing violently against each other, as if they were alive and fighting.  The meteorologists surmise that in Earth's atmosphere live invisible creatures whose bodies are akin to water vapor, and that somewhat similar alien creatures arrived on Earth in the glass globes, and that the native air creatures are fighting the invaders, who seek to remake our home planet's atmosphere in their own image.

I've told you many times that I don't like stories in which the characters are spectators instead of participants, and today I am telling you that I am not interested in descriptions of weather, either.  Another knock against "Storm Warning" is that it is repetitive--we hear about the smells and get descriptions of clouds again and again.  A weak choice from Carr; though Conklin and Silverberg disagree with me.

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The Kuttner and Moore story is the stand out, with Brackett in second place; these stories are about human beings and human relationships and the life choices we have to make, the way we have to balance our desires with our responsibilities.  Rocklynne's story is OK, but Wollheim's is like a filler story that lacks the sex and violence or twist ending that might make a filler story entertaining.  

Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age seems like a pretty good book.  Each story is preceded by an introduction of five or six pages which includes a list of references and not only covers biographical info on the author of the following story but tries to put his or her work in some kind of historical context and includes anecdotes about important SF people whose stories are not reproduced here, like John W. Campbell, Jr. and Hugo Gernsback; taken together these intros are like a history of SF in the period covered.  Pretty cool.

Weird Tales, April 1939: T McClusky, C L Moore, E Hamilton and R Bloch

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are working our way through Farnsworth Wright's famed magazine of the bizarre and unusual, Weird Tales.  We've already read at least one story from every issue published from 1930 to 1938, as the following links attest, and we are making progress on 1939--today we read four stories from the April 1939 issue, those by Thorp McClusky, C. L. Moore, Edmond Hamilton, and Robert Bloch.  (We've already read this issue's story by Moore's husband Henry Kuttner, "Hydra," and the included reprint, a 1929 collaboration between Zealia Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft, "The Curse of Yig.")

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938 

"The Red God Laughed" by Thorp McClusky 

The time: The final decade of the 21st century.  The place: New York City, home of skyscrapers 4,000 feet high.  But alas, no man, woman or child stirs, and all the machines are stilled, for a poison gas war started by an Asian power has exterminated almost all life on Earth!  Worms, fish and a few amphibians are the largest creatures to endure!

Reminding us of "Watcher of the Skies," a starship lands in this inert metropolis and its sole occupant emerges to investigate.  This tentacled invertebrate explorer is on a quest for a new home for his race, his planet being low on water, and water surprisingly rare throughout the galaxy.  We follow the visitor as he explores the bone strewn city, determines Earth is a perfect environment for his people, but suffers a terrible tragedy before he can bring the good news to his fellows--he finds an unexploded gas bomb on the roof of a skyscraper, and, not knowing what it is, tinkers with it, releasing its deadly payload and killing himself.  The red god who laughs is Mars, the god of war, who has claimed another victim and dashed the hopes of another civilization.

"The Red God Laughed" is pretty good; McClusky's style here is smooth making the story a comfortable read.  In 2001 the story would be reprinted in an anthology of stories with colors in their titles edited by Forrest J. Ackerman.  

"Hellsgarde" by C. L. Moore

Here we have one of Moore's stories of Jirel of Joiry, the sword swinging medieval french noblewoman who is always getting mixed up with wizards and taking trips to other dimensions.  This time around the plot is set in motion by Black Guy of Garlot, an evil wizard in an impregnable fortress.  Black Guy has captured twenty of Jirel's men-at-arms, and the ransom he demands is the fabled treasure kept in the haunted castle known as Hellsgarde, a long-abandoned ruin that sits in the middle of a marsh and can only be found at night!  What is the treasure it holds?  Nobody knows, but Black Guy is confident it must be awesome, so he wants it.

Jirel expects Hellsgarde to be vacant, but when she gets there she finds twenty fresh corpses before its gate, a gate which is opened by a servant to admit her.  The castle has been recently reoccupied by a lord, Alaric, and his court, all of whom Jirel finds have an odd cast to their countenances--they have the faces of people who are deformed, though their bodies are whole; Jirel is sure God stamped this look on their faces because their souls are twisted and evil.  (I guess we aren't supposed to believe this anymore, but it used to be common to believe that a person's face and body reflected his or her character.)

The sinister lord welcomes Jirel and Moore takes her time describing the red-headed beauty's vague and inconclusive, but very very tense, conversations with Alaric and the reactions of his courtiers.  We hear a lot about people meeting or failing to meet each other's eyes, Jirel shifting her cloak to show off her curvaceous mail-clad body, awkward silences, subtle frowns and faint smiles, that sort of thing.  Every word, every expression, seems to bear great significance, but what that significance is is not clear.

After an uncomfortable meal with the lord and courtiers, Jirel is led on a tour of the castle by Alaric.  Moore's stories often feature an undertone of aggressive, predatory, nonconsensual sex, and when a mysterious wind blows out all the torches, Jirel is grabbed by some super strong unknown being and kissed violently, "a more savagely violent, wetly intimate kiss than she had ever known before...."  She tries to push her assailant away, but there is no chest to push against in the dark--her molester seems to consist only of an arm and a mouth with big "wide-set" teeth.  When the fires are reignited, no assailant is in evidence and Alaric is too far from Jirel to have been the culprit--but just who, then, has "ravaged her bruised mouth"?  

Jirel comes to believe she was kissed by the ghost of Andred, the last man to rule the castle, a man whose enemies dismembered him 200 years ago and whose body parts were strewn throughout the swamp.  When Alaric realizes this he is thrilled--he and his entourage have been trying without success to contact Andred's ghost, he says because the ghost of Andred can lead them to the treasure.  Alaric's people seize Jirel and imprison her--they will use her as bait for the ghost.  Jirel escapes the dungeon and summons the horny ghost of Andred--she too wants the treasure, after all.  The ghost kisses her and carries her body to a tiny secret chamber full of bones and her soul to another dimension (of course) where one expects she will be lost forever...but Alaric and his weird courtiers are witches, and by doing a queer dance and playing eldritch music they summon Jirel's soul back to her body.  In the little chamber is the small fungus and rust covered metal-hinged leather box that contains the mysterious treasure.  Luckily for Jirel, Alaric and the witches don't really care about the treasure--that was a lie, what they really wanted was to feast on Andred--these creeps are addicted to the dark energy of the undead, the imbibing of which brings them an incomparable ecstasy.

The witches let Jirel leave with the treasure box, warning her not to open it.  As the story ends Jirel imagines that she will be able to ransom her men with the box and then Black Guy will open it and be killed by whatever horror it contains.

The plot of "Hellsgarde" is good, and I like the themes of predation and deformity, but I often complain that Moore in her Weird Tales work overwrites, making her stories too long and too repetitive, and she does that again here.  The rape-like kiss, the anxious conversation with Alaric and his circle, the disturbing music and dance, the twenty corpses impaled in front of the castle--these are all good fantasy/horror story things, but instead of describing them in a single striking paragraph Moore spends column after column describing them and Jirel's reactions to them, diluting the effect of these images and ideas instead of deepening or heightening them.  There is also a sameness to Moore's Weird Tales stories: Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry are both anti-heroes, bandit-types, and again and again they  find themselves faced with eerie psychic phenomena and end up in abstract battles of will and have to be rescued from them by some friend or ally.  

The readers of Weird Tales voted "Hellsgarde" the top story of the issue; I am willing to say it is marginally good.  

"Hellsgarde" has of course been reprinted in a stack of Moore collections, but you can also find it in L. Sprague de Camp's 1963 anthology Swords and Sorcery and a 1967 issue of The Man from UNCLE Magazine--I see that this issue of The Man From UNCLE includes an apparently uncollected story by Barry N. Malzberg, "No Grace Period."  Oy, am I going to have to spend $35 on a stupid magazine to read this story?  Are there at least pictures of girls in the magazine?

"Armies From the Past" by Edmond Hamilton 

This is a sequel to Hamilton's "Comrades of Time," which we read almost two years ago, and yet another Hamilton story in which a guy is transported to another milieu and there fights with a sword in the wars of some hot chick he has fallen in love with.  

Ethan Drew fell in love with a woman of the future in "Comrades of Time" and has been thinking about her ever since he returned to the 20th century.  As "Armies of the Past" begins he is transported to the future of two million years hence, summoned by his sweetheart's father, the time-machine building scientist.  This genius has also summoned the soldiers from across history we met in that earlier Drew story, a Puritan, a conquistador, a Viking, a crusader, etc.  Each of these guys has a characteristic one-note "voice" or "personality" but they all serve the same superfluous role in the plot, just fighting alongside Drew.

The world of circa 2,000,000 AD is a pretty dreadful one.  Skinny red-skinned aliens conquered the Earth circa 1,900,000 AD and enslaved the human race by spiking the drinking water with a drug that made the humans worship them.  Each Earth city today is inhabited by a small elite of these extraterrestrial "Masters" and mass throngs of worshipful humans.  Life was so easy for the Masters here on Earth that they long ago fell into decadence and have forgotten how to make space craft or just about any other modern device or system--their slave soldiers fight with swords and spears and ride horses around.  

The scientist and his hot daughter arrived in this period of history and set up a house for themselves in the wilderness but were attacked when discovered by the Masters and their slaves.  Instead of just moving to some other time in history themselves, they summoned Drew and their other friends from various periods of history to help them.  A flank attack by the Masters captures the scientist and his daughter while Drew and his comrades are fighting off human slaves, so Drew and company have to do the kind of thing people in adventure stories always do, namely don the clothes of the fallen enemy and sneak into the dungeons under the Masters' city and rescue their friends.  

The liberated scientist uses his time machine (which the Masters didn't sabotage, thank heavens) to summon an army of thousands drawn from different periods of history--he plucks from the past a Roman legion, a battalion of Napoleonic infantry, as well as units of Greek hoplites, mounted Sioux, crusaders, Arabs, etc.  For whatever reason, the scientist doesn't summon any fighting men who might have aircraft or ray guns or anything that would make the war easy.  

With this army our heroes take the city and exterminate the Masters and liberate the hypnotized humans.  The scientist offers to send everybody back to his appropriate time, but, amazingly, the thousands of soldiers decide they prefer this period and want to join a worldwide campaign to liberate all the Earth.  This makes sense for Drew because he is a modern man in love with the scientist's daughter, but many of the other thousands of guys presumably have friends and parents and siblings and wives and girlfriends back in their native times, not to mention the food and music and architecture and religion they grew up with; there are many elements to this story that can't bear analysis.

Barely acceptable.  Like the first Drew story and Hamilton's 1935 "The Six Sleepers," "Armies from the Past" distinguishes itself from Hamilton's other adventure stories with the gimmick of having half a dozen characters who each represent some noteworthy culture from history, but I don't find this gimmick particularly fun or interesting.  The additional five or six bland characters just clutter up the story and occupy column inches that in better stories Hamilton would fill with strange aliens or images of horror or speculations on alternate ways of organizing society or something else I would find entertaining.  To be fair, maybe other people find the dialogue of the time-travelling fighting men (e. g., the Egyptian swearing by Osiris and Bast, the coonskin cap-wearing trapper pronouncing "horses" as "hosses" and "learn" as "larn," and the Puritan wondering if a Christian should put on a pagan's clothes) amusing.  

"Armies of the Past" was been reprinted in small press books in 1977--in Robert Weinberg's anthology Lost Fantasies #6--and in 2021--in DMR Books' Hamilton collection The Avenger from Atlantis.

"The Red Swimmer" by Robert Bloch   

Lucas Treach is an Englishman, a womanizer, and a pirate!  He and his men have seized a Spanish galleon, disposed of its crew, disguised themselves as Spaniards, and sailed right into a port in the Spanish Caribbean to do the profitable business the now dead Spaniards would have done.  And Treach’s good luck just got better!  A Spanish aristocrat books passage back to Spain, and he is bringing with him all his considerable wealth. Also accompanying him is his daughter, the most beautiful woman Treach has ever seen!  Hubba hubba!

Having dinner aboard the ship with Treach, the aristocrat gets a little liquored up and lets slip some clues as to why he has to leave the Caribbean--it turns out this joker is a mad scientist/evil wizard driven out of the colonies by the persnickety local representatives of the Catholic Church!  He studied elemental magic with Moors in Spain!  In the Caribbean he conducted experiments on slaves in pursuit of means to revive the dead and achieve eternal life!  Treach, silently, dismisses this as the superstitious nonsense you expect from a Spaniard.

When he deems the ship far enough from shore, Treach reveals his true identity to the prisoners and proceeds to abuse, torture, murder, mutilate and throw them overboard.  But before they are silenced the aristocrat calls upon the spirits of the air and his beautiful daughter swallows a vial of liquid--she tells Treach it is an elixir of eternal life and promises to wreak a terrible vengeance on him.

Sure enough, a storm wrecks the ship the next day and only a handful of men, led by Treach, manage to scramble aboard a boat with some provisions and live to see the end of the tempest.  One of the survivors is a giant African, a "Krooman" with a "brutal negroid face" and "black ape-arms."  This African tries to steal all the food for himself and is killed by Treach.  This racist action scene seems a little superfluous, but it serves the plot role of limiting the amount of supplies available to the survivors and it does get a rise out of the reader. 

As the days pass the survivors, low on food and water and subjected to the fierce equatorial sun, grow more and more delirious, and men begin vanishing over the side; it becomes clear that a red form is pursuing the boat, a form which whispers to a man and then drags him under with red arms.  Undeniably, it is the Spanish girl, whom Treach blinded and then flayed alive before throwing her  overboard.  Treach is the last to survive, and eventually the mutilated girl climbs aboard the boat and inflicts upon Treach the tortures he inflicted upon her.

This is a good gory horror story, truly shocking, and not just because of the depiction of the African sailor.  Far more economical than Moore's "Hellsgarde," I beg to differ with the judgement of Weird Tales readers and prefer "The Red Swimmer" to her tale.

"The Red Swimmer" was reprinted in 1945 in England along with Hamilton's "The Man with the X-Ray Eyes" and H. O. Dickinson's "The Sex Serum" in an odd little pamphlet with a nude illustration on its cover.  In the 1980s, "The Red Swimmer" would reappear in two anthologies in which Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh had a hand, one collecting stories on the theme of curses, the other on the theme of pirates.  Aaar!

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Hamilton's story is questionable filler, but the rest of these stories are good; McClusky and Bloch offer strong direct shock stories and Moore a (perhaps characteristically) florid and overwritten piece that still delivers--the day after reading "Hellsgarde" I still remember the solid plot and compelling themes and images while my annoyance at the uneconomical prose fades.  A good issue of Weird Tales!       

Merril-approved 1956(?) stories by Ward Moore, Alan E. Nourse and Chad Oliver

If you were going to some place where they eat snails to throw soup on the Giaconda, or some place where they eat sheep's organs cooked in a sheep's stomach to hunt for Nessie, or some place where they eat raw fish in order to buy used panties, you might bring a Fodor's or Frommer's guide with you.  Well, we're going to 1956 and we're bringing with us Judith Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume as our guide.  This installment of Merril's famous anthology series includes a long list of 1956 speculative fiction stories which Merril thought worth recommending but which she didn't include in the book.  We've been doing this for a while, working our way through Merril's alphabetical list, reading selected stories, and today we will tackle an "M," an "N" and an "O."  If you are curious about earlier stops on this tour, check out the links at the bottom of this post, mon cheri.

(Nota bene: Merril recommends Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "And the Light is Risen," but I am skipping it because it would later be incorporated into A Canticle For Leibowitz, which I read ages ago, as a recent Rutgers grad working for minimum wage in a New Jersey bookstore, and may reread one of these days.)

"No Man Pursueth" by Ward Moore (1956)

I almost bought a 1972 Avon edition of Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee because I liked the Jeff Jones cover, but alternate history isn't my thing, and even the endorsement of Ray Bradbury was not enough to entice me into committing to reading it.  Last year I read Moore's 1960 story "The Fellow Who Married the Maxill Girl" and I didn't like it; I called it "sappy" and judged the points it was trying to make "banal."  However, I did like the 1961 Moore story I read in 2015, "It Becomes Necessary."  Maybe today's Moore story, "No Man Pursueth," will be a tiebreaker.

Things got off on the wrong foot when, on page 3 of this 30 page story, Moore indulged in unfunny self-referential "meta" humor aimed at the SF community, with thinly veiled references to Sam Moskowitz and Forrest J. Ackerman and direct references to Galaxy editor H. L. Gold and F&SF editor Anthony Boucher.  I find this kind of thing tiresome.

Our lead is a famous stage actress, age 41, and she is having breakfast in a New York diner, reading the paper, when a balding guy introduces himself to her as the number three science-fiction fan in America, even slinging some SF lingo at her ("egoboo," for example.)  After Moore is done with his in-jokes, the SF fan shares with the actress his theory about the recent spate of disturbing and inexplicable events that are dominating news coverage.  All over the world, airplanes are disappearing and large numbers of ordinary people are reporting incredible experiences, the sensation of having been transported to, and then returned from, alternate worlds where people where unusual clothes.  Number Three claims holes in the time-space continuum are responsible.  Later, the actress finds herself in a church and hears another explanation for the phenomena, that they are the result of the accumulated weight of human evil.

Bad news comes from La La Land via the telephone--the actress's second husband reports that her daughter, age 20, from her first marriage, tried to commit suicide (sleeping pills) and is in the hospital.  Scared to fly, the actress and her black maid (whom Moore gives bad grammar and an accent) hop in the car and strike out west from New York City for the left coast.  In Zanesville, Ohio (the maid says "Uhia") they stop to get out to eat and the actress is transported to the past or an alternate universe or something, to find herself an actress performing at a Nazi extermination camp!  

After hearing a black-clad soldier's racist monologue (he talks up the scientific methods employed by the Nazis, perhaps a dig from Moore at the sort of SF fans who are science-obsessed and read Astounding, in contrast to the more literary-minded readers of F&SF) she is transported back to our world, to backwoods Kentucky, where she gets some help from some poor Christians who don't have electricity and don't read the papers ("Sin enough in the world, without reading about it.")  The maid catches up to her and they are continuing their journey west when they and their car are transported to a city with cobblestoned streets (apparently Vienna, centuries ago) where they witness some guys shoot a cat with an arrow.

In some ways "No Man Pursueth" is like a mainstream story about the guilt of parents who focus on their careers instead of spending time with their kids, thus damaging the kids' psychology.  There's even a "magical Negro" who dispenses wisdom about parenting in "blaccent."  In Vienna, the maid cannot understand the speech of the cat killers, but the actress can comprehend both the Viennese and the Nazi; the actress figures this is because the black maid is good and the actress is herself evil, somehow on the same wavelength as the Jew-killers and feline-killers.  It is also the maid who figures out how to get out of the cat-killing world and back to modern America (not by using logic or science, however, but just by following a hunch, as if Moore is following the tradition that while white men try to master the world through data collection and rational calculation, women and blacks just follow intuition or benefit from being close to nature.)  

As these adventures proceed we are privy to the actress's thoughts.  For one thing, she seems to identify with the fictional characters she has played more than with real people.  More importantly, we learn that her first husband cheated on her with her sister, and that hubby #1 urged her to abort their daughter because being pregnant might ruin her figure; the actress carried the pregnancy to term because the risks of the abortion procedure (septicemia) scared her, not because she loved her unborn child.

The two women have almost reached California when the actress is again transported to another world, this a surreal one, a sort of abstract representation of a court of law and/or a theatre stage where she hears voices reciting, among other things, quotes from and about Sacco and Vanzetti.  (When I was a kid in the '70s and '80s people talked about Sacco and Vanzetti all the time, but I feel like I don't hear so much about them any more.)  The actress suddenly realizes that she has been a bad person because she has withheld love from others:

And what was evil?  Cruelty, self-righteousness, stupidity, insensitivity, yes--but in the end it was essentially lack of love.

Her sins include withholding sex from her first husband--she is not only to blame for her daughter's suicide attempt because she was a distant and cold mother focused on her own career, but is also to blame for her husband's infidelity because of her stinginess in sharing her body.  Significantly, we learn that the maid, the person in the story who represents or exemplifies goodness and wisdom, is very sexually active.  (As so often in white-penned fiction, black people in Moore's story are characterized as overflowing with sexuality.)

The phenomena of people travelling to other times and/or worlds, the actress now realizes, were the universe educating people in how to be good, and she somehow senses that these trips would soon end--enough people who were evil, like her, have now been educated, and the balance between good and evil has been restored.

(I think Moore leaves a huge loose end hanging regarding the disappearing airplanes--the actress feels the planes will stop disappearing, but I don't think Moore addresses whether the lost people and machines will ever come back.  Why did he even include the whole concept of vanishing airplanes?  I guess as a way to force the actress and the maid to drive cross country, but he could have just said the actress was afraid of flying, you know, like Isaac Asimov.)

As an historical document, "No Man Pursueth" is sort of interesting, it being a specimen of the pro-sex SF we generally associate with Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein, and of anti-racism SF that, even though it is all about how awesome black people are, itself feels sort of racist.  The story's apparent low opinion of abortion, nowadays a centerpiece of elite morality, also marks it as being from another era, and we also have the matter of a male writer depicting a female character and passing judgement on her sex life--perhaps a no-no in 2024.  

As a work of entertainment or literature, however, "No Man Pursueth" is lame.  In his intro to the story in F&SF, Anthony Boucher says "No Man Pursueth" is "one of the stories I have been most proud to publish."  I guess Boucher was excited to print a SF story that, instead of trying to teach you science or entertain you with an adventure, tried to treat philosophically real-life relationship issues like marriage, parenting, and race relations.  Unfortunately for all of us, Moore doesn't deal with these issues in a compelling way, and so he's getting a thumbs down from me.  The universe giving people lessons by sending them into the past to witness atrocities is just lazy and childish deus ex machina goop, and Moore isn't even content to let the visions or whatever speak for themselves--after presenting his symbolism and offering his clues, he just tells you exactly what they mean, so his story has no subtlety or nuance or ambiguity, and demands no thought from the reader.  Besides lacking intellectual challenge, "No Man Pursueth" also lacks any real fun or excitement, feels long because of all the extraneous material (like the SF in-jokes in the opening scene) and features a writing style that is merely adequate.  Anthony Boucher, you sold us a lemon.

Boucher included this clunker in the "Best of" F&SF anthology covering this period (I read the Avram Davidson, Theodore Sturgeon and Poul Anderson stories from the volume back in early 2022) and in 1988 our Italian friends shared its pro-sex message with their countrymen (is this really a message they need over there?) in an anthology with a characteristically impressive cover illo by Dutch-born Karel Thole.

      

"Second Sight" by Alan E. Nourse (1956)

I've read two stories by Nourse so far, a lame cat story called "Nize Kitty" and "Family Resemblance," which I condemned as "a ten-page fat joke."  It's been over five years since I read those stories and tempers have cooled, so let's give Nourse a third look, why don't we?  (And let's hope he fares better than Ward Moore has today, and that I can deal with this story in less than 1,500 words.  MPorcius Fiction Log is at risk of blog bloat!)

"Second Sight" is pretty well-written and makes an effort to develop real characters and inspire emotion in the reader, but the actual plot and twist ending are sort of slight.  

The story comes to us in the form of an excerpt from a journal that we are told has only recently been written down but which the journal writer has kept in her mind for years.  The diarist is a young woman who can read minds, and through dialogue and exposition and so forth we learn that she is the world's only psyker, that as a little girl she so scared her parents they willingly surrendered her to government scientists.  At the time covered by the journal excerpt she is in her early twenties and the text largely focuses on how one researcher may be in love with her and is sheltering her from experiments other researchers may want to inflict upon her.  In the end she agrees to do work that consists of using her mind-invading powers to trigger the growth of psychic powers in others ("latents") who have psychic potential but can't seem to blossom on their own.  The surprise reveal at the end is that the psyker is blind and deaf, that her entire relationship with the world is through the medium of her psychic senses.

Acceptable filler.  "Second Sight" would be reprinted in the Nourse collection The Counterfeit Man and in one of those themed anthologies credited to pteromerhanophobic Isaac Asimov and two other guys, in this case Martin Greenberg and Charles Waugh, this one on the theme of mutants.  (I don't know that the woman in the story is really a mutant, though, as her genes, we are told, are normal and if she has kids they are no more likely to have psychic powers than any other person's offspring.  Of course, biochemist Asimov probably knows more about who is and who isn't a mutant than I do.)

The cover of Asimov's Mutants illustrates one of Edmond Hamilton's
more "serious" and critically acclaimed stories, "He That Hath Wings,"
which we read back in 2017

"Let Me Live in a House" by Chad Oliver (1954)

Merril recommends two Oliver stories in the back of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume; we read 1956's "North Wind" ten years ago, back in my Iowa days, and I said it was "acceptable."  But "Let Me Live in a House" is new to us.  According to isfdb this story debuted in 1954 in Universe Science Fiction, and then in 1955 appeared in a Groff Conklin anthology, Science Fiction Terror Tales.  I guess Merril treated it as a '56 story because it was reprinted in a 1956 issue of the British magazine (then edited by E. C. Tubb!) Authentic Science Fiction.  Despite this bending of the parameters, we're going to roll with it, and read "Let Me Live in a House" in Authentic, to make sure we read the precise version Merril was recommending.  (The illustration in Universe--by the great Virgil Finlay--is better, though.)        

I will always think of Oliver as the guy who tells us modern life sucks and we should live like stone-age Plains Indians, and "Let Me Live in a House" does not alter my attitude.  

"Let Me Live in a House" starts with a sort of sarcastic description of two houses ("cottages,") a sort of caricature of stereotypical suburban homes, each with a white picket fence and a refrigerator ("frigidaire") and a knick-knack-laden mantel and all that, reminding us of all those pop songs that goof on suburbanites, like "Little Boxes" and "Pleasant Valley Sunday" and "Shangri-La."*  Again things were off on the wrong foot--I don't read SF to endure the sort of banal and snobbish criticism I can find (and have) in a multitude of other venues.  Of course, part of Judith Merril's project was to emphasize commonalities between SF and the mainstream, so what I see as a bug she very likely saw as a feature.

*I'll note here that the great Dave Davies has asserted that "Shangri-La" is not in fact "a go at the little, common man."

Anyway, I learned on page two that Oliver's title from the story is from a poem I'd never heard of by Sam Walter Foss, apparently a poem about how you should live among humanity instead of living apart or above the community, even if you are some kind of brainiac; Foss describes the geniuses who live like hermits as "souls like stars" and "pioneer souls who blaze a path," and asserts that he is not one of  them, but wants to live in communion with other men.  One of the main themes of Oliver's "Let Me Live in a House" is that (most if not all) human beings are not suited to life in space away from the rest of humanity, and that those who go into space will suffer horribly, probably to no profit or purpose other than to appease their lust for glory--glory they will not receive!  (Like Kris Neville, Chad Oliver prefigures the themes we see in the work of Barry Malzberg.)  

Four people, three of them boring stereotypes--the dutiful housewife, the woman who is addicted to watching TV, and the middle-aged man still obsessed with his youthful football career--live in a tiny colony or outpost under a dome on barren Ganymede; the colony is built to simulate suburban life, complete with artificial sounds of wind and neighborhood children.  The four people are there to keep an eye on the outpost for a year-long tour of duty; the two fake suburban houses are meant to keep them from being driven insane by the pressures of living in space, and the three I have described have been programmed to be drones, conditioned to act more or less robotically at the outpost--they almost believe they really are in a suburban American neighborhood.  Our main character, Gordon, is the man whose mind is not as blinkered and hindered, the man charged with dealing with unexpected problems.

The plot of "Let Me Live in a House" is about Gordon's reaction to just such an unexpected problem--the arrival of an alien!  After some scenes meant to build tension that presage the arrival of the alien, we get many pages of conversation between Gordon and the extrasolar being, who as aliens so often are in stories, is disguised as a human and has telepathy.  Oliver uses these conversations to give us the backstory of the colony I have already summarized above, and to describe the aliens, who are a contrast to modern European humanity, and illustrate the idea that going into space is a waste of resources, as humans are not psychologically prepared for the challenges presented by space and conquering space will not solve human problems like war, only expand their scope, and the common people of democratic polities will realize this and turn against the space program.

The alien explains that his people are nomads, like "the ancient Plains Indians in the area you think of as North America;" they don't produce anything the way settled people do, so to live they prey upon "sedentary" civilizations, their mental powers giving them the power to trick and overwhelm natives whenever necessary.  The human race is next on the menu.  The first time Gordon tries to attack the alien, Oliver spends half a page describing the pain the alien inflicts on the guy via his telepathy.  But in the end Gordon succeeds in defeating the alien.  But his victory is a tragic one.  For one thing, he is permanently mentally scarred.  For another, none will know of his heroism: Gordon covets the dream that man will conquer space, and he knows that if the common people learn that space is inhabited by hostile aliens that the space program will be shut down.  So he keeps the alien attack a secret. 

I'm giving "Let Me Live in a House" a thumbs down.  Obviously I find its satire of the suburbs annoying, I disagree that the Plains Indians are somehow better than civilized cultures, and I think the human race should conquer the stars and is capable of doing so.  But I have reasons to condemn the story beyond my ideological differences with Oliver.  Most importantly, "Let Me Live in a House" is weighed down with too many long and tedious expository passages.  I also found that Gordon's triumph isn't particularly well explained, isn't all that convincing--he can't resist the psychic attack, and then he can?  Maybe I am just prejudiced because I think Gordon's success works at cross purposes with what I think are Oliver's sincere ideological commitments.

**********

Not a stellar batch of stories this time; Merril presumably liked the Moore and the Oliver because they were consonant with her own leftist beliefs.     

Thanks for reading this long blog post consisting of my dumb jokes and semi-coherent musings on 1956 SF stories.  For more of the same, check out the links below to previous posts in our Merril-approved-1956-stories series:

Abernathy and Aldiss
Anderson, Allen and Banks
Barrow, Beaumont and Blish
Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler  
Carter, Clarke and Clifton 
Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen
de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle 

Ellison and Fontenay

Galouye, Garrett, Grimm & Gunn

Hart, Herbert and Jones 

Kuttner & Moore, Lang, Leinster, L'Engle and McClintic

McConnell, McIntosh and Melchior

Merril-approved 1956 stories: Kuttner & Moore, Lang, Leinster, L'Engle and McClintic

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are taking a curated (by unknown me) and guided (by critical darling Judith Merril) tour of the speculative fiction of 1956.  In 1957, Ms. Grossman published the second of her famed series of yearly "Best of" anthologies, SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy Second Annual Volume, and included in its concluding pages a long alphabetical list of 1956 SF stories that she liked but which didn't quite make the final cut.  One of Merril's characteristic projects was trying to blur or erase the boundaries between genre and mainstream literature--or perhaps simply pointing out that such boundaries were already vague or even bogus--and so her list of 1956 Honorable Mentions includes stories not only from flagship SF periodicals like Astounding and If but stories from major mainstream magazines like Harper's Bazaar and The Atlantic as well as men's magazines like Playboy and Escapade.  I have been cherry picking stories from this long list, and have already blogged 30 of them, ranging from the letter A to the letter J, and today we ascend the heights of K, L and start on the "M"s.  

After typing all that stuff about Merril promoting stories from mainstream outlets, I was hoping to read the Calvin Kentfield story she included on her Honorable Mention list, "The Angel and the Sailor," but I couldn't easily find any copies of the issue of Harper's Bazaar (September 1956--an issue with a cover for all you foot fetishists!) or the collection (The Angel and the Sailor: A Novella and Nine Stories) in which it appears.  Rats.  I was however relieved to find a PDF of Winona McClintic's story from the November 1956 issue of The Atlantic, "A Heart of Furious Fancy."  McClintic's will be the final story we deal with today; before we get to it, we'll read "Rite of Passage" by two of our favorite people, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore; a story by a person new to our notice, Varley Lang, "Thereby Hangs;" "Exploration Team" by another person we read all the time, Murray Leinster; and famous author Madeleine L'Engle's "Poor Little Saturday."

(I will also note that Merril's Honorable Mention list includes a story from Playboy by Richard Matheson that we read in a different context, "A Flourish of Strumpets;" follow the link to the blog post in which I opine about it.)

Before we hump this episode's lengthy segment of our journey through 1956, here are links to my blog posts on those thirty 1956 Merril-approved stories we've already grappled with:

Abernathy and Aldiss
Anderson, Allen and Banks
Barrow, Beaumont and Blish
Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler  
Carter, Clarke and Clifton 
Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen
de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle 

Ellison and Fontenay

Galouye, Garrett, Grimm & Gunn

Hart, Herbert and Jones

"Rite of Passage" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore 

"Rite of Passage" made its debut in an issue of F&SF with one of Emsh's charming pretty girl covers, an issue full of stories by people we care about here at MPorcius Fiction Log: not only are Kuttner and Moore represented in its pages, but also Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson and Poul Anderson.  The Matheson story, "Steel," is very famous, having been made into an episode of The Twilight Zone as well as a 21st-century film, and is the sort of thing I would pass on because I already know the plot, similarly the Anderson looks like a pun-filled broad satire of Robert E. Howard and his Conan character, the sort of thing I am likely to give a wide berth because I find puns and broad satires irritating.  Well, let's hope we can embrace "Rite of Passage" as well as Emsh's cover.

It is the future!  Government is weak and corrupt, and real power is held by the monopolistic corporashuns!  Each of the competing corps, also known as "clans," has two chief executives, a White President and a Black President.  In this future, most people believe in magic, and the Presidents are essentially witch doctors, White Presidents masters of healing and protective sorcery, and Black Presidents workers in black magic which inflicts illness on people, triggers accidents, even inflicts death by theft of the soul!  Our narrator is the Black President of the Communications Corporation, and he has a beef with one Jake Haliaia, a big Polynesian, a key member of the Food Corporation.  Black Presidents are forbidden to use their fell wizardry to pursue personal grudges, so our narrator has been waiting for somebody to come to him who has also been wronged by Haliaia with a request for a magical attack on Haliaia.  As the story begins, that day has finally come!

The course of the story follows the Black President as he bends the rules to kill Haliaia (who stole the narrator's wife) even though BP's client (whose inheritance was stolen by Haliaia) can't afford to pay for a murder, only an illness.  Kuttner and Moore bring to life this whole screwy world as well as the mind of the narrator as he performs and resists the magic he doesn't really believe in; one of the wrinkles of the story is that magic is not "real"--it leverages a sort of placebo effect that relies on the belief of those subjected to it, supplemented by dirty tricks and the witch doctors' training in psychological manipulation--and the narrator is one of the very few in this superstitious world who knows the truth.  Does the narrator's skepticism mean he will be immune from attack by other witch doctors who discover any of his various blasphemies or rule breaking?  What if Haliaia or the narrator's ex-wife is also a skeptic?  We also learn how society became so superstitious, how the narrator came to doubt the reality of magic, and why BP's wife left him for Haliaia.  

A solid story about psychology and human relationships; K & M weave together all the different elements with skill.  In her intro to the edition of Fury I own, Moore tells us that the basic theme of her writing has been "The most treacherous thing in life is love" while that of her husband's work was "Authority is dangerous and I will never submit to it" and she and Kuttner handle these powerful themes ably in "Rite of Passage."  An interesting component of the story is how education and social mores shape your mind--can you really believe 2+2=4, and can you actually act upon that belief, if everybody you know, and all the newspapers and TV shows, have been telling you all your life that 2+2=5?

Thumbs up!

"Rite of Passage" reappeared in the 1988 Asimov/Greenberg anthology printed by DAW, The Great SF Stories #18 (1956), and in a 21st-century collection put out by the good people at Haffner Press which has an intro by Robert Silverberg and an afterword by Frederik Pohl.

"Thereby Hangs..." by Varley Lang

Varley Lang has only two entries at isfdb, a 1955 story in If and this 1956 Astounding story.  "Thereby Hangs" is one of those classic-style SF stories in which a smart guy uses high technology and trickery to outwit his adversaries.  Unfortunately, it is pretty bland and boring, with no character, feeling or excitement.

It is the spacefaring future!  Human civilization has spread to many star systems.  A single company, C & S, has a monopoly on space travel, having recently forced their only rival, the people of planet Glencoe, out of the starship business, apparently by inflicting a plague on Glencoe.  The people of Glencoe fled their home planet, and were placed under quarantine, prevented from landing on any human inhabited planet.  So they had to search for a new planet, but the scouts of C & S tried to keep ahead of them, landing on and claiming any suitable planets before the Glencoeans could get to them--currently the Glecoeans are stuck on a barren rock with few natural resources.

After the author lays out this background, we get the main plot, which follows the two-man crew of one of the C & S scout ships as they investigate a world with lots of valuable natural resources.  On the planet they meet what is apparently a native, a man with a tail who says that he is the ambassador of the planet’s people.  The scouts never meet any other people on the planet, but off in the distance see evidence of the presence of other people.  The man with the tail succeeds in convincing them that his people have very advanced technology.  Eventually the scouts sign a treaty with the native, a treaty with terms pretty favorable to the natives, because it has been impressed upon the scouts how powerful the natives are.  Then comes the twist ending.  The man with a tail is a human, a Glencoean--the tail was just a high tech gadget, and the evidence in the distance of intelligent activity was in fact natural phenomena.  Thanks to the treaty the Glencoeans now have a resource rich planet and the right to trade with other planets, despite the efforts of C & S.

Besides being boring, most of the Glencoean tricks are hard to take seriously.  I have to give this story a thumbs down.  We must ask why Merril chose to recommend "Thereby Hangs...."  Maybe because of its anti-business vibe?  (After all, if we are to believe the article at wikipedia on the Futurians, Merril was a Trotskyist.)

"Exploration Team" by Murray Leinster 

Here’s another story from John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Astounding, a cover story, in fact.  Isfdb tells us it is a component of the series “Colonial Survey,” and it was a big hit, winning the Hugo for novelette and getting reprinted time and time again.

"Exploration Team" is vulnerable to the charge that it is too verbose, with long detailed descriptions of, for example, what the landing of a rocket ship looks like, alien flora, fauna, and scenery, and the marching formations of a para-military unit as it crosses hostile territory.  But rocket ships, alien monsters and Earthers traversing dangerous locales are classic SF elements, and I found Leinster’s treatment of them entertaining. The story also has philosophical themes: the bonds that can grow between men and beasts, the superiority of living things to machines and how reliance on machines can make people weak, and the need to stay true to your own nature.

The plot. Huyghens is the sole human on an illegal colony on planet Loren Two; his subordinates are genetically modified Kodak bears and a similarly enhanced bald eagle.  Loren Two is quarantined because of its dangerous animal life, and Huyghens lives in what amounts to a fortress with his bears and eagle.

To Huyghens’ surprise, a rocket boat lands on the planet, drops off a single man, and blasts off.  This man is Roane, an officer of the Colonial Survey, come to assess a legitimate colony consisting of a small number of men and a large force of robots that landed on Loren Two some time ago.  Presumably this colony was wiped out by the ferocious native wildlife; the ship that brough Roane couldn’t detect any sign of it, and Huyghens has never heard of it.

Huyghens jerry-rigs something out of his radio equipment and detects where the lost colony must be, and discovers evidence that some of its human members may still be alive.  So the two men, the four bears, and the eagle march two hundred miles over mountainous monster-infested terrain to effect a rescue.  Along the way we learn why Huyghens got involved in an illegal colonizing effort and how his relationship with the bears and eagle began, and we get a triumphant happy ending that sees the monsters wiped out, our heroes lauded, and their values vindicated.

A solid adventure story--thumbs up!  As noted, you can find it in a multitude of anthologies and Leinster collections.

"Poor Little Saturday" by Madeline L'Engle

Here, from an issue of Fantastic Universe with a cover by Hannes Bok, we have a story from the author of A Wrinkle in Time, a book I recall people talking about a lot when I was a kid in the Seventies and Eighties.

The text of "Poor Little Saturday" is the memoir of the strange relationship a man enjoyed with two female figures when he was a teenager growing up in the American South.  Stricken with malaria, the young narrator was often tormented by fevers, wracked by fits of shivering, and even subject to delusions.  On the outskirts of town sat an abandoned planation house, said to be haunted, with a grove of trees on its grounds, and the narrator would often lay in the ferns in the shade of this grove to get some relief from the ferocious Southern heat.  One day while lying thus he is approached by a pretty teenaged girl, who takes him into the house to meet a witch.  The witch cures the boy’s malaria, and befriends him, and for some months he visits the witch and the girl daily. L’Engle offers various weird and supernatural scenes (the witch dances with a skeleton, mixes potions in test tubes and retorts, introduces the kid to the camel she summoned from the Middle East to act as her steed and to offer her advice in Arabic and Hindustani, etc.) and insight into the character and identities of the girl (apparently the spirit of a 19th-century still-born baby, an evocation summoned by the witch of the young woman that baby might have grown to become) and the witch (who it seems has lived for many centuries and all over the world.)  These women are mercurial, selfish and amoral.  The girl in particular is prone to attacking the narrator with her teeth and nails should he anger or disobey her, so when she offers him a ring as a symbol of their love he has no choice but to accept it. Eventually the townspeople learn he has this ring, which is famous in local legend and worth a fortune, leading to a violent confrontation between the townsfolk and the witch that culminates in the departure of the witch from the plantation house and the dissolution of the ghost girl.

L’Engle has a smooth and comfortable style and her images are strong and clear, which makes this story a pleasant read, but I didn't find it quite satisfying.  The tone is perhaps a little uneven, the sinister parts and silly parts sitting uncomfortably next to each other, and I felt like the plot had loose ends.  My gripes here could be dismissed as a failure to appreciate the story's oh-so-literary ambiguity, but while I commend L'Engle's wise decision to leave ambiguous how we should feel about the witch and the girl, who on the one hand help the kid and suffer grievously in the climax, but on the other are callous and sometimes cruel and it seems in league with the devil, I argue that ambiguity in the plot and tone weaken the impact of the story, leaving frustrating doubts in the mind of the reader instead of the sort of sharp and deep impressions L'Engle succeeds in creating with her images.  

Despite my stated reservations, a good story worth reading.  "Poor Little Saturday" has reappeared in many anthologies of ghost and witch stories.

"A Heart of Furious Fancy" by Winona McClintic 

McClintic was a U. S. Navy veteran of World War II and the Korean War who published a bunch of stories and poems in The Atlantic and in SF magazines, mostly F&SF, between 1945 and 1960.  

This here is one of those stories in which the narrator has the paranoid delusion that the entire world is an elaborate fake put up to trick him or her; The Matrix and Truman Show films leverage this idea, and years ago we read a Heinlein story on this theme.  In "A Heart of Furious Fancy" the narrator is a woman grad student studying languages and literature; she thinks all the people she meets are actors reciting lines, all the rooms she enters hastily assembled sets full of props.  There is sort of a feminist angle to the story, which perhaps attracted Merril's approbation.

The narrator's insanity leads her to murder a man, and then, in the final paragraphs, commit suicide (or so I suspect.)  

A boring gimmick story--thumbs down.

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Another leg of our long journey through 1956 is now behind us.  Our friends Kuttner and Moore and  Leinster didn't let us down, and the famous L'Engle offered something worthwhile, but I can't get on board with Merril's decision to honor Lang and McClintic with spots on her list.  Three out of five is not so bad, though.