1999 Dozois selections: F Pohl, H Clement and T Lee

Usually here at MPorcius Fiction Log we read old stories, but today we're mixing things up and reading some recent speculative fiction.  Last week I was in the District (you might know it as The Swamp) and took a look at the clearance carts at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle.  Among the books available was a copy of the 800-page anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois.  A glance at the table of contents revealed stories by Frederik Pohl, Hal Clement, and Tanith Lee that seemed like they might be worthwhile.

If you are like me, it feels like just yesterday that Monica Lewinsky's boyfriend was president, that Kennedies were falling from the sky (so careless, those Kennedies, smh), and that we were introduced to SpongeBob, Patrick and Squidward.  Let's relive those happy days by reading these three 1999 SF tales that Dozois saw fit to celebrate as the best of that year, a year which sat at the deceptively smooth tail end of a black century of blood and at the dawn of a new century of upheaval and terror.

Of course I'm too cheap to pay four dollars for a huge book with a mush cover illustration that, after I read just three stories from it, will do nothing more than gather dust atop a pile of similarly forgotten books on the floor of MPorcius HQ.  So I'm reading today's stories in scans made available thanks to internet piracy.  Feel free to read along at the links below, me hearties.

Dozois         Pohl (partial)       Clement        Lee 

"Hatching the Phoenix" by Frederik Pohl

This is a long story, serialized over two issues of Amazing, the pioneering science fiction magazine at that time owned by the people who took over TSR and apparently devoted primarily to promoting television shows.  How the mighty.... The Fall 1999 issue of Amazing is right there at the internet archive, but finding a scan of the Winter 2000 ish was a little more challenging and I gave up, though I did come across a scan of the 600th anniversary issue of Amazing, which has a picture of Harlan Ellison's lovely mug on the cover, though SF's bad boy is perhaps upstaged by a painting of a leggy blonde in a metal bra.  Anyway, I'm reading "Hatching the Phoenix" in a scan of Dozois' anthology.

"Hatching the Phoenix" is an OK story composed of three elements that, in my mind at least, are pretty distinct.  We've got the hard SF business--an expedition to study an astronomical phenomenon.  We've got soap opera business--should the protagonist marry this guy, or that guy, or maybe listen to her nagging feminist friend and swear off men and sex once and for all?  Sort of sprinkled over this is left-wing social politics, attacks on Christians and laments over how poorly men treat women and how warlike people (Christians, mostly) are.  I'll deal with these elements one at a time.  

I read Pohl's famous Gateway as a kid and then again as an adult, and "Hatching the Phoenix" is set in that same Heechee universe.  Our narrator, Klara, a character from Gateway, got rich over the course of that novel and its two immediate sequels, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon and Heechee Rendezvous, books I remember very little about, as compensation for her participation in a disastrous expedition.  With her vast wealth, Klara has financed a major research project, the study of a planet which was wiped out in the supernova that created what we call the Crab Nebula.  The team of scientists conducting this research have dubbed the planet the Crabber planet, its native population Crabbers.

I'm not smart, so it was a little confusing, but it seems that by going to a certain spot in space, the scientists Klara is financing can, by using a nearby black hole as a lens, look back through time by observing old light that was generated thousands of years ago by the Crabber star just days before it went nova and bounced off the Crabber planet.  When their equipment is set up, the scientists can record what was happening on the Crabber planet right before it got wiped out.  It is suggested that Klara has the dream of somehow immortalizing the people who lived on this planet before it was destroyed, the existence of whom we cannot doubt because many thousands of years before the sun went nova, the Heechee recorded videos of primitive tool-using carnivores on the planet.  The question is whether these primitive Crabbers evolved to the point they could build a modern civilization; this is the main thing the scientists are trying to figure out.  Pohl tries to generate tension and suspense by having the camera apparatus that can look into the past only half built when Klara arrives, so the pictures of the past are very low resolution.  As the story proceeds, the pictures get more and more clear until the terrible truth is revealed.  Also meant to build suspense is the fact that the various ships which are the setting of the story--Klara's ship, the ship used by her unfaithful boyfriend, and the research ship--can't safely stick around where they are because the radiation from the supernova might hurt them.  Didn't all three ships already fly through that radiation wave to get to a point where they can see light that preceded that wave?  Isn't the first sentence of the story "We were only about half a day out when we crossed the wavefront from the Crab supernova"?  Like I suggested, I am too dim to really understand this story's science component.

The aforementioned terrible truth: Klara's multicultural band of boffins discovers that the Crabbers had developed a 20th-century technology and society just before the supernova exterminated them.  But Klara loses interest in immortalizing them when she finally gets the high quality video that makes clear the Crabbers were engaged in a World War I slash World War II type total war, complete with strategic bombing of cities by aircraft, submarine warfare, and large scale land battles with tanks.  Also, the civilized Crabbers were committing imperialism against the still-primitive Crabbers.

At the end of the story there is also some business about Klara moving people from the research ship to her ship and to her unfaithful boyfriend's ship so they can escape the radiation wave from the supernova--I feel like something similar happened at the end of Gateway.

Now let's consider the human relationship or soap opera elements of "Hatching the Phoenix."  A lot of the story's text is devoted to Klara's relationship with her computer, which she has given a personality and which has a holographic simulacrum with which to express that personality--when Klara is drinking the hologram will sometimes present the illusion that the computer is also drinking.  Much is made of how Klara tries to maintain an illusion of free will and independence when in fact the computer does everything for her, and she almost always takes the computer's advice.  (Gateway, I recall, was largely about a man's relationship with a computer therapist.)  The computer is a man-hating, Christian-hating, feminist, and keeps trying to convince Klara to achieve immortality and escape physical needs and problems by having her consciousness uploaded into a computer.  Of course, Klara herself designed the computer to have this bitchy nag's personality. 

Klara kind of wants children but doesn't know if her current boyfriend, a TV journalist whom Pohl depicts as a total jerk who is terrible at his job, is the right man to have a child with.  In the first half of the story, the chapters in the Fall '99 ish of Amazing (the one with the Star Trek cover), Klara arrives at the research ship and interacts with the sexually and ethnically diverse crew, and then in the final sentences of that installment of the serial we get a soap opera cliff hanger--the journalist is arriving in his TV station's rented ship to interview the scientists, and he has an assistant with him--a hot chick!  Is he cheating on Klara?

It turns out in the second installment of the serial in the Winter 2000 number of Amazing (the one with the Babylon 5 cover) that yes, he is.  Is this a big deal?  After all, are Klara and journalist being exclusive?  Anyway, Pohl spends quite a bit of time on the journalist's efforts to have sex with our narrator and Klara's efforts to put him off and to flirt with one of the scientists, a man who is also going through a difficult relationship, his wife back home cheating on him.  In the end Klara and the journalist stop seeing each other, and Klara starts seeing the scientist, but it doesn't work out--Klara is more like a mother to that guy than wife material.

Finally the left-wing social politics component of "Hatching the Phoenix."  Klara's computer's personality is based on Hypatia, who in this story is presented as the first woman scientist whose accomplishment men failed to erase.  The computer is constantly demeaning Christians, and men, and living human beings in general, apparently even trying to sabotage Klara's relationships with other humans as a means of encouraging Klara into being turned into a digital file.  In the computer's voice, Pohl bangs on repetitively at the anti-Christian stuff and misanthropic stuff about how humans are warlike, which is cagey as the computer isn't necessarily trustworthy, so it doesn't necessarily come off as our narrator Klara or our author Pohl droning on and on misanthropically but perhaps Pohl merely depicting Klara's annoying friend.  Though of course we know Pohl wrote this stuff and Klara designed the computer's personality so it really is Pohl and Klara expressing these opinions.  

Popular fiction, I always say, is wish fulfillment fantasy, and it seems possible one of the things Fred Pohl, like 80 years old when this story was published, wished he could have done was set up vast programs to help single mothers and other underprivileged women and girls, as this is something Klara does with her wealth.  There is a lot of talk about Klara's tropical island where she has a refuge for orphans and single mothers and the implication is that Klara doesn't need a child of her own, shouldn't have to settle for a man, seeing as no man is good enough for her, that her motherly instincts should be devoted to helping all those orphans and single mothers.  I suspect we are supposed to consider that she could have been like a mother to the Crabbers in some way I don't understand, seeing as they died thousands of years ago, but the Crabbers, just like the journalist, proved to be unworthy of Klara, what with their war and imperialism.

Finally on this theme, we might note that the lead scientist on the research ship is a woman, and among the scientists who actually have no bearing on the plot that I can remember is a tall muscular Afro-Briton who says "crikey" and a jealous homosexual.  Even if they don't affect the plot, these people have their own sexual relationships and add to the soap opera atmosphere as well as the story's diversity levels.  

All three of these elements more or less work, though they do not excel, and "Hatching the Phoenix" is never actually boring, but it feels a little long and bland.  There's too much boring everyday stuff that I guess is supposed to humanize Klara, like how she likes coffee and what clothes she wears for this or that occasion and how she feels about her face and what plastic surgery she has had to make it less mannish.  The anti-Christian stuff is a little overboard and the anti-war stuff is repetitive, with every different type of warfare the Crabbers engaged in being presented as some new revelation.  "Hatching the Phoenix" also feels inconclusive--the research study of the supernova and the doomed aliens doesn't come to much, as far as I could tell, and the soap opera elements are also inconclusive, as the narrator dumps one guy with ease and picks up another with ease but then breaks up with him a few months later after the narrator has healed his psychic wounds, which I guess serves Pohl's women-are-so-giving-and-men-don't- deserve-them theme, but doesn't really make for a good conclusion to a story.  isfdb is telling me that "Hatching the Phoenix" would later be integrated into the 2004 novel The Boy Who Would Live Forever so maybe we should think of this thing as a part of a larger narrative and thus can't really blame it for feeling inconclusive.

I'm grading "Hatching the Phoenix" acceptable.  Besides Dozois' yearly best of volume, you can find it in The Hard SF Renaissance. 

"Exchange Rate" by Hal Clement 

"Exchange Rate" debuted in a magazine I perhaps have never heard of before, Absolute Magnitude, and I am reading it there.  This magazine feels pretty cheap--each story gets one or two illustrations, and to fill up dead space the same illustrations appear multiple times.  A picture of a vehicle appears within "Exchange Rate"'s 22 pages eight times, and a picture of a satellite five times.  Maybe they should have just made the print bigger if they had a lot of extra space to fill and couldn't find advertisers--my 55-year old eyes would have appreciated it.

Like "Hatching the Phoenix," "Exchange Rate" was included in The Hard SF Renaissance.  But no, I won't put a picture of that anthology's cover in this blog post two or three more times.      

           

The planet humans call Halfbaked is extremely inhospitable.  Gravity is like seven times that of Earth, air pressure 17 times that of Earth sea level.  The planet's tectonic plates are much smaller and numerous than those on Earth and are always scraping against and pushing into and away from each other, so there are constant earthquakes and fissures and ridges are always appearing and vanishing, creating new and forbidding obstacles to travel.  Clouds above this forever changing landscape obscure the sky, and lightning almost never stops.  Rain and dust storms severely lower visibility, while ceaseless emissions of radiation make radar and radio very unreliable.  Clement is of course famous for conceiving of alien planets where extreme conditions prevail and working out how those conditions would affect life and human operations, and much of "Exchange Rate"'s text is taken up with descriptions and depictions of the crazy geographic, geological, meteorological and biological facts of Halfbaked and how human explorers there keep body and soul together and go about their business.

All this science and technology isn't necessarily easy reading; here is a sample:

The assumption that the world had a nearly equipotential surface, with strength of crustal materials essentially meaningless, was presumed to be even truer here than on any merely one-gee planet. The drivers had not noticed the changes in actual power needed to keep a given speed; they merely knew they were three thousand kilometers closer to where they wanted to be.

The science in "Exchange Rate" is all interesting and it all makes sense--it is both more complex and ironically easier to understand than the science in Pohl's "Hatching the Phoenix."  Unfortunately, Clement's characters and their motivations are boring--the people in the story are forgettable, one almost indistinguishable from another.  People complain about cardboard characters in stories, how an author will give each character one personality trait and push it to the extreme, but the characters in Clement's long story here have no personality traits and it makes reading "Exchange Rate" sleep-inducing.  

The plot of "Exchange Rate" concerns weeks-long journeys taken by humans in heavily armored vehicles across the treacherous surface of Halfbaked.  Halfbaked, it appears, has native inhabitants, and, after radio communications with them that suggest the aliens are interested in trade, two human women drive a tanker truck thousands of miles, a trip of many days across shifting terrain that makes as-the-crow-flies travel impossible, to what they expect will be a native city to deliver some chemicals to the natives.  The women then, apparently, head back to the human base, but cease transmitting messages to the base.  Their nervous husbands hop in another huge heavily armored vehicle and set out to meet their spouses on the way, but turn back when the women's vehicle seems to be responding to advice transmitted by their husbands and by the base personnel, suggesting the wives--and their receiver--are OK, but their transmitter is out of commission.  

Clement presents "Exchange Rate" as a mystery story, so we never get a view inside the women's vehicle or hear anything from their point of view.  Clement instead focuses on the husbands, and everything we learn about the women's mission comes to us second or third hand--it is like those monster movies in which we barely see the monster and instead the camera spends most of its time in a room with military men and eggheads who look at radar screens and talk on the phone, saying stuff like "the blip on the radar screen shows the target is now heading northwards," or like a detective story in which the detective learns about the murderer and victim not from the murderer or victim but from a police officer who spoke to a witness who perhaps saw the murder from a distance through fog a long time ago.  I find stories that put this kind of distance between the reader and the activity kind of frustrating.

I also didn't appreciate reading about the husbands' journey in excruciating detail only for that mission to be aborted and end up being absolutely moot.    

The men do other work back at the base, then are sent out on a job to survey the height of a cliff, seeing as the cliff's height has probably changed since they last saw it.  While they are out there, satellite and other data sources suggest the women's tanker truck is not behaving properly, so the men again set out to intercept their wives.  Why does Clement abort the first intercept mission to only send the men off on an identical mission a second time?  This is not good narrative structure, in my opinion.

After weeks of driving, the husbands finally find the tanker, and their wives are not aboard.  The rest of the story involves figuring out what happened to the women, detective work that takes place over the course of this story's fourth weeks-long drive--another trip to the alien city to deliver more chemicals.  Yes, the humans decide to deliver another shipment to the aliens, even even though the last shipment suffered 100% casualties and the aliens are suspected of murdering the women.

At the alien "city" the astounding truth is revealed.  There is only one alien, a single huge being with many disposable components that get killed all the time without any long term detriment resulting.  It killed the women due to what you might call an accident or misunderstanding; the alien doesn't even have such concepts as individual personality, love, friendship, or sexual reproduction, and of course is extremely robust compared to a fragile human.  The climactic scene of "Exchange Rate" is when one of the husbands contemplates revenge on the alien and his colleagues talk him down from committing this sin--these future humans have evolved past the "War stage."  The alien knows not what it did and must be forgiven.  The briefly vengeful man talks about the need to teach the alien a lesson so it won't misbehave again, an idea his comrades dismiss, and I wondered if Clement was offering criticism of the justice of punishment as a crime prevention measure.

I have very mixed feelings about "Exchange Rate."  The science and technology stuff is all very good, as I have suggested, ands there are multiple cool sciency things I have not mentioned.  But the actual story is poorly structured and the characters are nonentities, so "Exchange Rate" does not engage the emotions and reading it feels like a long slog.  When Clement at the very end tried to depict emotions and present some philosophy, I was not on his wavelength--of course you should kill an alien who kills your wife so it doesn't kill anybody else.      

I guess we'll be generous and call "Exchange Rate" acceptable.

"The Sky-Green Blues" by Tanith Lee

If you judge by who can write a good sentence and who can paint vivid images, Tanith Lee is one of the very top speculative fiction writers.  And "The Sky-Green Blues" is far and away the best of today's three stories.  Of course, it is not about science, but about sex and danger and the craft and life of the writer and a twist ending that is supposed to blow your mind.   

Our narrator is a journalist, a woman who has reported from numerous dangerous regions.  It is some kind of alternate reality future; our heroine has a chip in her arm that allows her to understand foreign languages when spoken, and even read foreign languages; she carries around a computer with which she can watch TV and send messages back and forth with her employers as well as record her notes; to save time, before interviewing an author, she has his books fed into her brain while she sleeps.  

The author lives in a city in a jungle.  "The Sky-Green Blues" is, I think, set on Earth--"Europeans" and "sparrows" and other Earth people and animals are mentioned, but there are also animals and people from other planets around, or at least that is where I think they must have come from.  As our narrator is interviewing the author over the course of days or weeks, she is also conducting a strange affair with the author's manservant; this servant is a humanoid alien, and every night he comes to the narrator's bedroom and they have sex, sex which never leads to an orgasm for either of them.  At the same time, an enemy army is advancing on the city.  

The morning of the day it looks like the enemy is going to take the city, the author commits suicide.  The narrator and the manservant jump in the author's armored vehicle and drive through the jungle--at the coast they hope to be picked up by ships being sent by some authority or other to rescue refugees.

In the jungle, after a day's driving, the alien manservant leaves the vehicle and leads the journalist to a beautiful waterfall by an ancient decaying temple.  Within the temple the narrator is astounded to find the author!  Still alive!  And scribbling away!  The author provides difficult to refute evidence that the journalist and the manservant and even this war-torn world are not quite real, but the product of the author's imagination and pen!  The author and manservant send the narrator on her way, with the prediction that, even though the manservant never ejaculated while they were having sex and their species cannot breed, she will soon give birth to the manservant's child because a hybrid baby like that will be a good plot development.  The narrator makes it to the coast alone on foot and is among the crowds of people taken away in VTOL aircraft by soldiers; the soldiers grope her, but she doesn't take much offense.

I think this story is quite well written, but I'm afraid the resolution of the plot is disappointing me.  The whole this-is-not-real-life-but-a-story-gimmick feels tired and silly.  Admittedly, Lee tries to use the gimmick to talk about life and the profession of writer in a philosophical way, but I'm not convinced this really works all that well.  I'm still recommending the story, but I can't love it like I wish I could.

"The Sky-Green Blues" debuted in the British magazine Interzone.  This magazine suffers a little from the embarrassing expedient of reprinting illustrations in an effort to make sure there are illustrations on most pages, but not as much as the issue of Absolute Magnitude we just looked at.  "The Sky-Green Blues," it appears, has only ever been reprinted in the various editions of Dozois' 17th Year's Best anthology, which include a British edition titled The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 13th Annual Collection.

**********

All three of today's stories leave me feeling uneasy.  Pohl's science I found hard to understand, and while I could grok Clement's science, the story was long and tedious with no human drama, no human feeling.  Lee's story was brilliantly written, but the plot and central gimmick were underwhelming.  Maybe recent SF just isn't for me, even when written by the masters of the field.

Infinity, Feb '56: K Bulmer, D Knight and F Pohl & C M Kornbluth

In the last exciting episode of MPFL I looked at three stories from the February 1956 issue of Infinity and let it be known I didn't like them.  Today, however, I hope to praise this issue of Larry Shaw's magazine.  Well, I can start by lauding Ed Emshwiller's two illustrations for Kenneth Bulmer's contribution, "Quarry," one of which appears on the cover, while the other takes up an entire page on the inside.  But can I say anything nice about Bulmer's story?  And what about the included story by famed critic and editor Damon Knight?  And that by the "famous science fiction team" of C. M. Kornbluth and Frederick Pohl?  Well, let's dig in and find out.

"Quarry" by Ken Bulmer

I want to like Bulmer's work because he writes adventure stories and I like adventure stories, at least when they are good.  As you know, I love Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, and I have praised plenty of adventure capers by people like Edmond Hamilton and E. C. Tubb.  But I have often found Bulmer's work wanting.  Check out my blog posts about Bulmer's novels Cycle of Nemesis, The Diamond Contessa, and Kandar, for the sad details.  It has been like seven years since I have read anything by Bulmer, but today--in the spirit of a new year and new beginnings!--we are going to let bygones be bygones and read "Quarry," which the aforementioned Mr. Tubb reprinted in Authentic Science Fiction when he was serving as editor of that periodical and Francophonic Englishman Maxim Jakubowski included in a 1963 anthology for the French market.

"Quarry" is "The Most Dangerous Game" yet again. People in SF are aways getting thrown into the arena to fight to the death.  Luckily, Bulmer takes the scenario seriously and tries to generate real human emotion and suspense, and as a result "Quarry" is pretty entertaining.

It is the space faring future; mankind has colonized the solar system.  Unfortunately, before we could reach the stars, the extrasolar Rachen arrived and took over; we are at their mercy, second-class citizens on Earth, Mars, and the other heavenly bodies we have spent so much time and effort cultivating.  Patriotic humans are living in poverty--bodies skinny, clothes threadbare, lungs pink because they can't even afford cigarettes--while collaborators with the alien regime, those whom our protagonist calls "Rachentoads" and "Rachen-lovers" are living large!  Our hero is Dirk Gilmore, a man with big emotions and a quick temper, a hardened tough guy who has a racist hatred of the Rachen--when he sees them he wishes he could squash them like bugs!  This isn't nice, but it feels real.  

Gilmore has decided to make a terrible sacrifice to get some money for the kid he has with his faithless wife--Dirk has volunteered to be the prey in a Rachen hunting sport organized by a big fat human Rachen-lover!

The first hunt Gilmore gets involved in is a special one.  A Rachen prince, heir apparent to the throne of Mars, wants to hunt in an Earth city, one whose ten million human inhabitants have been forced to vacate so the metropolis can serve as a play ground for the snooty aliens.  The streets are deserted, but the robot trams and robot taxis and elevators and motion-activated fluorescent lights of the city still operate just fine.  The prince wants to hunt a woman, and Gilmore is paired with a girl--they are not allowed to split up during the hunt, and have devices strapped to their wrists that cause horrible pain if they get more than ten feet apart.  Bulmer here in "Quarry" uses all the most obvious devices to manipulate the reader, and the same way the human collaborator is a grossly obese and Gilmore starts the story dressed in rags and broken shoes, this woman, Trina, is beautiful, with a terrific body and clear eyes and so forth.    

The Rachen aristo and his cronies, armed with bolt-action rifles, have 24 hours to catch Dirk and Trina after the pair use their 15-minute head start to take public transit to get deep into the city.  Mysteriously, one of Fatso's lackeys gives Dirk a small pistol.  Is there a human resistance movement on Earth?  Is someone plotting to use Dirk to murder the prince so some other joker from beyond the solar system can become King of Mars?

Bulmer does a decent job with the development of the Dirk and Trina relationship, and with the action chase stuff in the city--running here, running there, laying traps, throwing a knife at a guy, outwitting the blob monsters that are the Rachen's bloodhounds, etc.  The chasing and shooting in the city does eventually feel a little moot, though, after we learn that the Prince's lackeys won't kill Dirk and Trina, just terrorize them, leaving them for the Prince himself, and, even worse, that the hunt doesn't automatically end at 24 hours if Dirk and Trina aren't killed--rather, at 24 hours, a gate in the electric fence surrounding the city is deactivated for 15 minutes.  Dirk and Trina are only safe if they can leave the city via this gate during that window, but since the Prince and his party know where the gate is and when it will be open, the hunters have no practical reason to hunt for D & T for 23 hours, they can just ambush them at the gate.  Oh, well.

Who will live?  Who will die?  I couldn't be sure until the end, which is good.  I'm giving "Quarry" a moderate recommendation; it is action-adventure filler, but performed competently.  Maybe I need to read more of Bulmer's short work, maybe that is where he shines.

"A Likely Story" by Damon Knight

Over the years, I have banged out on the keys of a succession of computers many hostile reviews of stories by Damon Knight, as well as attacks on the man himself.  But today, let's accentuate the positive.  I liked "Man in the Jar."  I liked "Masks."  I liked "I See You."  I liked "The Enemy." I called "The Beach Where Time Began" acceptable.  I like some of Knight's 1940s work as an illustrator.  I was cheering Knight on when he called Judith Merril's The Tomorrow People an overly feminine "shambles" full of science mistakes.  So, in the same way I reject the label of "Harlan Ellison hater" and consider myself an Ellison skeptic, I believe I give Knight a fair shake and am more than willing to praise him when his work aligns with my own taste and interests; I am just not one of the Knight groupies.        

Accentuating the positive is a worthy goal to reach for, but one which is sometimes beyond human grasp.  "A Likely Story" is a humor story about the SF community.  Ugh.  There are feeble and obvious jokes; for example, we are told that the association of pro SF writers in the story holds three kinds of meetings--meetings devoted to club politics, meetings devoted to drinking, and meetings devoted to lots of drinking.  Ha ha.  Also, the joke every person who has spent time in New York City makes, that it is very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter.  Oh, brother.  There are also smart guy jokes; a guy named Duchamp is smoking a pipe, for example; and more-or-less affectionate caricatures of a few prominent members of the SF community, plus a multitude of groan inducing puns on SF writer's names; "Preacher Flatt," for example.  

Three or four pages of these empty calories would have been enough for me; "A Likely Story" here in Infinity is sixteen god-damned pages.  Interminable and unforgivable. 

The plot.  Our narrator attends the yearly party of the professional SF writer association.  Strange phenomena occur, mostly banal slapstick, like Asa Akimosov's pants falling down to his knees or an unnamed woman's skirt rising up to show her legs, people dropping glasses or tripping and falling, but also inexplicable events like a joke from infallible funny man Bill Plass (I guess a stand in for Bob Bloch) falling flat.  Is this the work of a poltergeist?  No, the answer seems to be that somebody has figured out how to mess with probability, has the ability to make unlikely events occur.  The narrator and another writer try to figure out which of the SF writers is the culprit.  When they do, the man with the improbability device, the bespectacled "Harry Er-Ah," escapes by flying to Mars.

Just dreadful.

This soul-deadening lump of tedium was reprinted in Knight collections like Turning On and The Best of Damon Knight.

"The Engineer" by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

Let's check in on "The Most Famous SF Duo Ever."  Way way back, in 2014, I read Kornbluth's famous Hall-of-Fame story "The Marching Morons," and voiced many criticisms of it.  More recently, I called Kornbluth's collaboration with Donald Wollheim "Go Fast on Interplane" "competent filler" and his collab with Fred Pohl "Mute Inglorious Tam" "an acceptable sort of gimmick piece."  As for Pohl and Kornbluth's "Gift of Garigolli," I owned to actually hating it and described it as a "half-baked dish of garbage."  I have had nicer things to say about some Pohl solo works like "Survival Kit" and "To See Another Mountain," but long time readers of MPorcius Fiction Log will know much of his output has met a lukewarm reception here and others denunciations.

Well, let's see what "The Engineer," which was reprinted in the various English, German and Italian editions of The Wonder Effect as well as in the "Best of" Kornbluth and Pohl collection, Our Best, is all about.

Our protagonist, Muhlenhoff, began his career as a geologist and worker for an oil extraction company of the future, but found he had a talent for politics and leadership and worked his way up in the company until today he is a big wig in racist big business, managing a drilling facility 1800 meters below sea level off the coast of Mexico!  We learn this backstory after seeing Muhlenhoff in action in a meeting room and then in his office 1.118 miles down, responding to some kind of pressure leak that threatens to flood the submarine facility and kill everybody and lose the company a lot of money and give the Mexicans access to the oil.

The third part of the seven-page story has Muhlenhoff taking a break from work to read from a history book.  I had naively thought "The Engineer" a serious story about using science and psychology to resolve a crisis until this wacky joke--a facility manager taking a break during a life-threatening emergency--hit me over the head with the fact that the story was a satire.

By quoting and paraphrasing the book Pohl and Kornbluth tell us the history of the United States between the Second World War and the dawn of the 21st century.  The land of the free and the home of the brave led the defeat of the Warsaw Pact (Pohl and Kornbluth use the term "Cominform" which is one I don't see very often) but then early in the 2000s the US lost a war to Mexico!  The Mexicans, somehow, in the late 20th century developed technology and military tactics and training superior to that of the United States and conquered Texas, Oklahoma and the western states!  (A horror scenario for some, maybe wish-fulfillment for Pohl and Kornbluth?)  The history book suggests that the US lost the war because the US military was subjected to political pressure from many constituencies and its decisions before and during the war were focused on appeasing politicians, journalists, voters and lobbyists instead of defeating the Mexicans.

The final section of the story makes clear that Muhlenhoff and the underwater facility he manages are going to be destroyed because Muhlenhoff has been paying too much attention to career and political considerations and not enough to the science of keeping the facility safe.  

Pretty poor, but not abysmal; let's be generous and call "The Engineer" barely acceptable.

**********

Three pretty slight stories, though at least the Bulmer is a competent specimen of its type; the Knight is a particularly "cringe" example of an already questionable genre (the humorous SF story about a gathering of SF figures) and the Pohl and Kornbluth is a weak satire.

So we bid adieu to the second issue of Infinity.  Our next foray into the 1950s SF world will see us reading stories from a magazine with greater prestige than Infinity.

Frederik Pohl: "Survival Kit," "The Knights of Arthur," and "My Lady Greensleeves"

Last month we declared our intention to read all the stories in Frederik Pohl's 1959 collection Tomorrow Times Seven, a decaying paperback edition of which I own.  Today we make good on this promise!  We've already read five of the pieces in this volume, and we'll read the remaining two, "Survival Kit" and "The Knights of Arthur," today.  Because two stories doesn't really feel like a full blog post, we'll supplement the post with a story from the same period, "My Lady Greensleeves."  All three of these stories made their debuts in Galaxy, the magazine of which Pohl would in 1961 be officially named as editor, though apparently he was doing editorial work at the magazine for years before that, aiding the mentally ill H. L. Gold.  On page 220 of my paperback copy of The Way the Future Was: A Memoir, Pohl writes:

In the late 1950s Horace began to go beyond that [i.e., having Pohl and others do his preliminary reading for him.]  At times he had me "ghost" the magazine for him: do all the reading, all the buying and bouncing, all the preparation of the magazine for the printer, all the writing of blurbs and house ads and editorials.

So it is possible that some or all of today's three stories were not only penned by Pohl but also purchased and edited by him.

"Survival Kit" (1957)

Here we have a quite effective crime story apparently based around the idea that American airmen serving in the Pacific War were issued survival kits full of items which would prove useful should they be shot down over some island and have to make their way through a jungle and/or among natives to a pickup point.  In Pohl's story here, a time traveler from the future gets lost in mid-20th century New York and has to use the devices in his kit to survive and reach at just the right moment a recovery point in Prospect Park in Brooklyn--the story is told from the point of view of the 20th-century man (an "aboriginal") of dubious morality who gets mixed up with the time traveler. You might call this a noirish story; none of the characters is very likable or good, and the main character is always trying to take advantage of others and as the story proceeds behaves more and more reprehensibly until he is finally hoist by his own petard. The ending does pull the punch a little, and after you have read "Survival Kit" you realize it is something of a joke story, but while you are reading it it feels somewhat brutal and scary.

Penniless loser Howard Mooney is spending the winter alone on the Jersey Shore in a relative's house, barely surviving on the meager supplies left there by the owner.  A time traveler knocks at the door--this guy requires a guide to a "nexus point" in Brooklyn where he must be at a specific time in a few days in order to get back to his own time period.  The time traveler has with him a box or case that is full of devices and artifacts of tremendous value and spectacular utility.  The promise of a fabulous reward leads Mooney to accept the job as guide.  As the story advances we learn that Mooney is a small time crook and a con-man who in the past sold (I guess fraudulently) freezers to suburban housewives.  (Young Communist League alumnus Pohl of course sees all sales and advertising as a kind of criminal conspiracy.)  Mooney is not content to accept a generous reward for helping the traveler get from the greatest state in the nation over to Crooklyn, and schemes to get the entire survival kit, which has the potential to make him the richest and/or most powerful man in the world; he commits ever graver sins as he tries to secure this boon, and we find he is not even above murdering his own uncle in his efforts to strike it rich.

A good story.  Pohl handles all the numerous future gadgets quite well, and the plot also operates admirably--all the various complications that pop up and Mooney's reactions to them are entertaining.  Thumbs up for "Survival Kit!"

"Survival Kit" has popped up again in several Pohl collections and is even the title story of one such British collection.  You can also find the story in the 1999 anthology Technohorror, though Fred's name isn't on the cover--come on, Grand Master Fred has gots to be more famous than Greg Egan!  

"The Knights of Arthur" (1958)

If you look at "The Knights of Arthur" in Galaxy you are immediately clued in to the fact it is a joke story--it is illustrated by Don Martin and so looks like something out of Mad magazine.  (I don't "get" Mad and have never been interested in it--it is too broad, too childish, and too topical for me, and I don't find Martin's boring and generic art at all appealing.  Life would be sweeter if I did appreciate Martin and Mad because the antique malls and used books stores I haunt are choked with mountainous piles of Mad and Don Martin books and it would be child's play to amass a huge collection.  Anyway, everybody and his brother loves Mad, so I generally keep this against-the-grain opinion to myself.)  "The Knights of Arthur" isn't quite as silly as Martin's illustrations suggest, but it isn't a very good adventure story or a fascinating speculation about future life, either.  I think we'll call this one barely acceptable.    

It is the post-apocalyptic future!  The population of New York City stands at 15,000, and this is considered a huge and unwieldy number in an America whose population is probably around 100,000.  Our narrator Sam and his friends Vern and Arthur were on the crew of a submarine nine or ten years ago when the nuclear war that killed almost everybody broke out, and so they survived.  The weapons employed by America's enemies produced very little blast, but very deadly waves of short term radiation, so America's infrastructure is more or less intact, though there are skeletons everywhere you go, and people today face little or no risk of radiation sickness.  Sam and Vern are hale and hearty, but Arthur's health status is unusual--he is a disembodied brain in a can!  A camera on a sort of tentacle affords Arthur vision, and he has mikes so he can hear, but to "talk" he has to be wired into an electric typewriter and hammer out his "speech."

These three amigos have left the country house where they have been living since coming ashore soon after the war and come to NYC to pull off some kind of scheme which Pohl keeps from us for much of the story.  The Big Apple is run by a strongman based in the Empire State Building; one of the few Army officers to survive the war, he is known as "the Major" and has a harem of over one hundred women.  An attractive woman named Amy approaches Sam and his friends; she is in the employ of the Major (and scheduled to soon marry him and join his harem) and has come to negotiate the purchase of Arthur!  Arthur, you see, can be plugged right into a computer system and handle the NYC power grid or a robotic factory or whatever, thus easing the Major's manpower shortages by doing the work currently done by dozens of men.  Arthur, Vern and Sam become important members of the Major's HQ staff, and behind the Major's back they pursue the plan that brought them to Gotham--they want to seize an ocean liner and sail out to sea.  Arthur joined the Navy to sail the open sea but only ever served on submarines, and since he lost his body in an accident he has dreamed being plugged into a modern ocean liner and controlling it the way you or I control our natural bodies.  Our guys get the help of Amy and other of the Major's staff by claiming they want to refurbish a liner to serve as the Major's yacht.  One thing they have to do is find enough fuel to power an ocean liner, and, and one of this story's big jokes is when Vern blows up fifty tankers by dropping a lit cigarette into a hold full of gasoline.

The protagonists' plan goes off with nary a hitch; they sail out to sea with Arthur in charge and Sam married to Amy, and even the Major, the putative villain of the story but an ineffectual and almost inoffensive dingbat, willingly surrendering authority over NYC to enjoy the open-ended cruise as a cabin boy.  Very little of consequence or interest happens in this forgettable story.   

Compared to "Survival Kit," "The Knights of Arthur" feels long and clunky.  "Survival Kit" flows smoothly and maintains a consistent tone, all the scenes being fun or important to the plot, the character's personalities and objectives driving the plot in a clear direction.  "The Knights of Arthur" in contrast stumbles along jerkily.  There are superfluous scenes that feel like dead ends and are seemingly there just to offer humor--Pohl spends a long time describing the search for fuel among the fifty tankers, a search which fails because Vern blows up the fifty ships, and then in just a few lines Pohl wraps up the issue of the need for fuel by just telling us Vern found some someplace else.  Another problem with "The Knights of Arthur" is that there are three main characters but usually only two of them are on screen at any one time while the third is off at some other location.  As for the jokes, most of those I can recall consist of one character getting spluttering mad at the dialogue or behavior of another, the most elementary of humor.

I may consider "The Knights of Arthur" a waste of time and borderline bad, but you'll find it in Platinum Pohl, the 2006 collection of Pohl's "best" stories that Connie Willis says is "wonderful," so take my dismissal with a grain of salt--I guess I'm going against the grain again. 

"My Lady Greensleeves" (1957)

Having finished up Tomorrow Times Seven, we now turn to our special bonus feature, which I will be reading in a scan of the issue of Galaxy in which it debuted.  (We've already read something from this issue, Thomas N. Scortia's "The Bomb in the Bathtub," which I declared "a dud" in 2019.)  

No mixing.  That was the prescription that kept the city-state alive.

It is the class-bound, segregated future!  The various social classes are kept apart, with professionals living in one neighborhood, clerks in another, laborers in another, government employees in another, etc.  The different classes are forbidden to interbreed, and if you try to pass yourself off as a member of a different class or conduct political activism advocating for the mixing of classes, you get a prison sentence.  All these repressive policies are justified by the idea that specialization is the key to civilization.

"My Lady Greensleeves" takes place in a prison and we follow lots of characters and never get to know any of them very well or care about any of them.  A young woman from the Civil Service class--daughter of a Senator no less--is in the prison for committing vandalism as part of a campaign in support of ending the policy of segregation and gets into trouble because she can't really understand what members of other classes are trying to tell her to do; each class has its own dialect.  She gets moved to the uncomfortable maximum security wing (called "Greensleeves" because of the uniforms worn there) just when some of the hardened inmates there use a shiv to take some guards hostage.  This act of rebellion inspires other cons throughout the complex, leading to mounting chaos in the prison and an escalating response from the authorities.  The Governor comes by to take command and gets captured by the rioters.

Race relations is a theme of Pohl's story here.  At the same time he reminds us repeatedly that in this future world there is no more racism and there are no longer any distinct racial categories (the senator's daughter has never heard the word "Jew") he portrays class conflict in ways that mirror real-life racial tensions.  The different social classes in "My Lady Greensleeves" ascribe to each other various, generally unattractive, character traits the way real life racists stereotype blacks as lazy and Jews as greedy or whatever.  There are also derogatory nicknames--clerks are known as "figgers," mechanics as "greasers," and laborers as "wipes."  Pohl further reminds us of real-life racial distinctions by offering an ethnically diverse cast.  One of the most prominent inmates--an architect imprisoned for repairing his own car and thus trespassing on the territory of mechanics--is black, another is Asian.  

Pohl stresses how strong class divisions are, how hard they are to overcome.  The prison is a dangerous institution to this segregated society, because the classes inevitably mix there, but mixing doesn't end prejudice and suspicion--people voluntarily embrace class distinctions even when not forced to do so, even when it is counterproductive to do so.  The senator's daughter is a liberal who wants to overcome such divisions in theory, but meeting laborers leads her to realize how different they really are from her and her fellow Civil Service members, and when push comes to shove she sides with a Civil Service man who is in a fight, saving him from a violent and dangerous laborer.  The black architect, a professional, becomes leader of the rebellion but has contempt for the laborers and mechanics.  Even though they have to work together to succeed in changing society, the different classes can't overcome their differences to fight in concert for social change.

The riot defeated in a way that is totally boring, the Governor gives a little speech to the Senator's daughter and another major character about how the division of society into classes has led to stability and Pohl drives this idea home in a final scene of some minor characters.  Pohl's portrayal of the segregated society is pretty ambiguous--the governor, the ultimate upholder of the system, is shown to act selflessly and wisely, almost as if Pohl thinks such a class-ridden society has something to recommend it.   

Pohl's takes on the division of labor, class/race relations and the role of prisons in society has the potential to be interesting, but he doesn't do much novel or compelling with these themes.  Worse, the story feels long, none of the characters is interesting, and the action scenes and efforts to generate suspense fall flat.  I couldn't bring myself to care who lived or died, and whether this society endured or was revolutionized.  Pohl in writing this story demonstrates a greater interest in social and economic theories than in entertainment and literary merit, and since his theories are not that clearly or compellingly argued the story is bland and drags.  Another barely acceptable piece from Pohl.

"My Lady Greensleeves" shows up in the Pohl collection The Case Against Tomorrow and in the anthology Human and Other Beings, which bills itself as being about "man's inhumanity to man."  These books present themselves as so misanthropic and pessimistic you have to wonder how they sold--were mid-century SF readers champing at the bit to devour these downers?  Still, "My Lady Greensleeves," like "The Knights of Arthur," would be included in Platinum Pohl, so I guess the sort of Pohl stories I find a drag are just the sort of stories of which Pohl is most proud.

**********

That's enough Pohl for a while; I'm thinking of reading a wild and crazy novel for our next foray into the speculative fiction world.

Merril-approved 1958 stories: Pabel, Pohl, and Presslie

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are taking a tour of the speculative fiction of 1958 with herald of the New Wave Judith Merril acting as our guide.  This tour has been on hiatus for a few months, but today we are back aboard the Judith Justine Grossman bus and through the windshield we can see some "P" stories up ahead.

As you probably know if you regularly read my scribblings here, Judith Merril in her SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume reprinted a bunch of 1958 stories and in the back of the book provided an alphabetical "Honorable Mentions" list of stories that for whatever reason didn't quite make the cut, but which she thought good, and we have been selecting stories from this list to read.  We've already dealt with a stack of Merril-approved 1958 stories from authors whose names start with the letters "A" through "O"--see the links below:

Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin
Pauline Ashwell, Don Berry and Robert Bloch
John Brunner, Algis Budrys and Arthur C. Clarke
"Helen Clarkson" (Helen McCoy), Mark Clifton, Mildred Clingerman and Theodore R. Cogswell
John Bernard Daley, Avram Davidson and Chan Davis
Gordon R. Dickson 
Charles Einstein, George P. Elliot, and Harlan Ellison
Charles G. Finney, Charles L. Fontenay, Donald Franson, and Charles E Fritch
Randall Garret and James E. Gunn 
Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert and Philip High
Shirley Jackson, Daniel Keyes and John Kippax
Damon Knight and C. M. Kornbluth
Fritz Leiber, Jack Lewis and Victoria Lincoln
Katherine MacLean, "T. H. Mathieu" (Les Cole) and Dean MacLaughlin 
A. E. Nourse
"Finn O'Donnevan" (Robert Sheckley) and Chad Oliver

Whew, gotta whole lotta links.

Today we've got a story by woman of mystery Avis Pabel, one by Grand Master Frederik Pohl, and two by Londoner Robert Presslie.

"Basic Agreement" by Avis Pabel

Avis Pabel only has one credit at isfdb, and a quick look around the interwebs suggests she led an exciting life.  She married an escaped German POW living incognito as a Chicago bookseller, got involved in Objectivism and published articles in an Objectivist magazine under the name Avis Brick, and eventually vanished from sight altogether.  Wild.  Let's try to figure out what John W. Campbell, Jr. and Merril saw in Pabel/Brick's sole SF story, "Basic Agreement," which appeared in Campbell's Astounding and, it seems, never again.

This is a brief trifling story but well-told, a story about family life that rings true.  A little girl keeps seeing a monster in the corner of her bedroom--when she screams, her stressed-out parents get angry at her, insisting she is just having a nightmare.  We learn that the little girl had an older sister, Jill, who died protecting her, and to whom the parents keep comparing her, unfavorably--Jill never had nightmares, Jill was good at math, Jill was popular, etc.  So she has to get used to the creepy sight of the monster just standing in the corner of her room every night.  Then one night, after our little heroine has had a particularly bad day, the monster speaks, and we realize it is a sad little alien girl, a little dolly in one of its tentacles, and it wants to make friends with the protagonist, and maybe it can help her with her math!

Thumbs up!    

"The Wizards of Pung's Corners" by Frederik Pohl

All three of the illustrations to "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" in Galaxy, where it debuted, include a TV set, and I groaned thinking this story of 25 pages by Fred Pohl, alumnus of the Young Communist League, was going to be an attack on television, advertising, and, by extension, our entire market-oriented society.  Twenty-five pages?  Suddenly, firing up my C-64 emulator and playing some more Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (which I hear is in the news again, like 40 years after I first played it) was looking pretty attractive.  When I had satisfied my need to scribble--and ruefully erase--notes on graph paper, I felt a little better about seeing what Fred had to say about the boob tube.

These good feelings didn't survive the first page of the story.  "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" is written in the annoying colloquial style of a tall tale told by some rural yarn spinner around the fire...

You never saw a bag like that! It looked like a kind of electronic tool kit, I swear.

...and takes the form of a popular history written in the far future which describes events in the near future, full of references to memoirs and history books.  The content of "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" constitutes an even more absurd and broad satire than I had feared, with Pohl focusing on telling tired jokes and detailing his social and economic theories and putting no effort into plot or character.

Bad!

Alright, here's the plot summary for all you gluttons for punishment.

Pung's Corners is a New England town in the middle of a desert--it had the good fortune to survive the atomic war that wiped out most of America's northeast.  Pung's Corners has a history of sitting out America's wars, its inhabitants having avoided service in the War of Independence and in the Civil War, and the current inhabitants are not unhappy about being cut off from the rest of the United States by the radioactive wastes--in fact, there is a local law prohibiting TV antennas so they won't get info from the outside world and their anti-aircraft missiles have shot down multiple approaching aircraft.  As the story begins, an old man we are told is wicked on the first page of the story, Coglan, drives into town in a car sheathed in lead.  He takes a room in the hotel; the bellboy watches Coglan through the keyhole as the old man communicates with his colleagues via his two-way TV phone (that is what is in the bag referenced in the quote above.)  

The United States government is under the control of an advertising agency and Coglan is their agent, come to Pung's Corners to reintroduce the isolated town to advertising.  The automated underground factories that survived the atomic war need more markets for their products and Pung's Corners is to be one of those markets.  The people of Pung's Corners have hard wired TV service which runs the same old movies again and again.  Coglan somehow patches into this signal, adding subliminal advertising for mass-produced consumer goods.  He has drugs put in the local water supply to make the townspeople more suggestible.  He uses a subsonic hypnotic device to trick the local banker into giving him money.  He hires the town slut to be his assistant.  These characters disappear from the narrative in the middle of the story to be replaced by other, perhaps even more ridiculous, caricatures.

Living in Pung's Corners is a retired advertising man who can tell what Coglan is up to.  He rallies the people of the town to physically overpower feeble old Coglan and thus foil his scheme.  So the federal government sends the United States Army to attack Pung's Corners.  Pohl gives us a long and tedious  absurdist military campaign in which the war correspondents that accompany the expeditionary force outnumber the riflemen, who don't know how to use their rifles because of planned obsolesce--the subterranean factories put out a new rifle every season and so the privates never have time to adequately train on each new model.  The people of Pung's Corners accept the surrender of the attack force, and then advance on the capital and take over the United States and put an end to advertising.

This story is just a vehicle for Pohl to inflict his lame leftist economic and social theories on readers.  Ordinary people, in Pohl's view, are easy prey for the manipulations of business people, who are all monopolists who overproduce products no sane person would want and use advertising, which is irresistible, to trick people into buying those useless items.  Government is needed to step in to protect the ignorant masses from advertising.  Pohl goes to the trouble of giving "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" a style--the hokey tall tale style I mentioned before--but plot and character have no place.  The plot offers no suspense, as it is made clear in the beginning that the people of Pung's Corners are going to take over the world and we are expected to cheer them on in doing so, and much of the text is unconnected to the plot, taken up by exposition as Pohl lays out his various theories in the form of historical digressions.  The characters are all broad stereotypes or archetypes--the evil old man, the vapid slut, the blundering, glory-seeking, military man, and these characters don't do much of anything--they get introduced, they are the butt of feeble jokes, then the plot resolves itself without them making any decisions.

I repeat: bad.  Merril may have been doing her fellow bolshie a favor by recommending it, but she was doing us readers a disservice!  "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" has reappeared in several Pohl collections, as well as a 1964 Penguin paperback marketed as being for "connoisseurs" and a 1974 Prentice-Hall textbook designed for use in the government schools.  Good grief.

"Another Word for Man" by Robert Presslie

A year ago I read a story by Presslie on Merril's recommendation, "The Creep," and I hated it.  In 2018 I read his story "The Day Before Never" and found it boring.  Yet, somehow, today I have committed to reading two more stories by Presslie.  Now who's the glutton for punishment?

The first blow in this Presslie one-two punch is "Another Word for Man," which debuted in John Carnell's New Worlds and would go on to be included in the second anthology in the Out of this World series edited by Amabel Williams-Ellis and Mably Owen as well as Michael Moorcock's Best of New Worlds.  It seems the SF community, at least over in the green and pleasant land, embraced this story.  Well, let's hope it provides me an opportunity to revise my opinion of Presslie.   

"Another Word for Man" is, thankfully, a competent if pedestrian story in which an alien performs a Christ-like act of sacrifice for a human who doubted it, leading that human to rethink his religious dogmatism.  Presslie, according to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, worked as a "pharmacy manager" and this story's science speculation centers on medicine and biology.

A lobster fisherman from a remote Canadian village pulls up an alien in one of his pots.  This thing, looking like a slug the size of a basketball, has telepathy, as so many aliens in these old stories do.  Its body is flexible and changeable--it can grow gills with which to breathe underwater, if need be, extend tubes with which to breathe air and make sounds, etc.  The lobsterman brings the alien to the little community's de facto leader, the priest.  This man of god decides to keep the alien a secret from the outside world.  Because the alien professes to be a doctor, the priest remands it to the custody of the two physicians at the local doctor's office.  We later learn that the priest and the alien had an argument over religion and the priest holds a grudge.

The alien is an eager beaver and learns all about human physiology from the doctors--soon it is better at diagnosing patients than they are!  The alien laments that human surgery involves cutting people open--among his people, who can change shape with ease, no such cutting is necessary.  When the priest is found to have a massive cancerous growth in his chest that has extended tendrils all through his body (he has been ignoring his chest pain for three years), the alien projects hundreds of cilia into the cleric's body and withdraws all the cancer cells into itself, killing itself but curing the priest, who realizes the alien is one of God's children and the phrase typically translated as "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" should be rendered "Greater love hath no creature of Mine...."

There is a mountain of SF stories out there that show up how crummy humans are by contrasting us with goody goody space aliens, and we can add "Another Word for Man" to the pile, but while there is a passage in which one of the doctors groans that governments spend more on weapons research than cancer research, Presslie in his story here does more showing than telling--he doesn't indulge in tendentious speeches or anything--and the writing is reasonably good.  Acceptable.

"Dial 'O' for Operator" by Robert Presslie

Here we have a good horror story; the horror elements work, and so do the human elements, as the two main characters act in a way that is believable and compelling, and at least one of them actually grows as a person as a result of his ordeal.

A telephone operator answers a call--a prostitute is at the docks, in a phone booth, and claims she is pursued by a blob monster!  All we know of her plight we learn from her dialogue--we are in the same boat as the operator.  Presslie does a good job conveying the tension and fear of both the woman and the operator as he and the police try to help her.  The telephone company employee is initially presented to us as a dull man, but he comes to life as he strives to save this woman.  The police go to the phone booth, but there is no woman, no monster.  A clue convinces the operator that the woman must be calling from the future!  He comes up with a plan to save her, but whether it succeeds or not, whether she escapes or is devoured by the blob, he will never know.

Thumbs up for "Dial 'O' for Operator"--Merril steered us right this time!  The story debuted in John Carnell's Science Fantasy; Carnell reprinted it in an anthology of horror stories by science fiction writers, and it has also reappeared in anthologies on the theme of time.

**********

So we've got three misanthropic stories today in which human beings are shown to be either evil or powerless victims who can only get out of jams through deus ex machina interventions, not their own  initiative.  Pohl's treatment of this theme is tendentious and tedious, lacking an engaging plot or compelling characters and instead filling up two dozen pages with absurd jokes and lame theories.  Presslie's story about a self-sacrificing alien is OK, as, unlike Pohl, his speculative science is somewhat interesting and he makes an effort to construct multiple engaging characters with believable personalities.  Pabel's story might not have the science or can-do hero we expect to see in Astounding, but it nails the human emotion components and is an effective little weird tale I can recommend.  But today's top story is the fourth, Presslie's horror piece about a blob monster and inadvertent communication across time.  This story has a more hopeful theme, depicting ordinary--even fallen--human beings who have a fighting chance when faced with novel and deadly challenges and who grow in response to their terrible adventure; most importantly, it delivers horror thrills and isn't preachy.

We hit a jarring pothole with the Pohl, but otherwise this hasn't been a bad leg in our guided tour through 1958, and I am especially pleased to see a better side of Presslie's work.  Stay tuned for more 1958 SF here at MPorcius Fiction Log.