Showing posts with label Rogers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rogers. Show all posts

Saturday, February 15, 2025

Merril-endorsed '58 tales: Phillifent, Reed, Reynolds, Runyon

Today's blog post is brought to you by the letter "R."  Yes, we're reading four more stories from Judith Merril's alphabetical list of honorable mentions at the back of the fourth of her critically-adored SF: The Year's Greatest anthology series, the volume covering stories published in 1958.  Today's authors are John T. Phillifent (working undercover as Arthur Rackham), Kit Reed, Mack Reynolds, and Charles W. Runyon.  (I'd like to read the story by Joel Townsley Rogers that Merril recommends, "Night of Horror," but I can't find a scan of the issue of Saturday Evening Post in which it appears.)  With the exception of Reynolds, these are people I rarely read, so today is a day on which anything can happen.  Let's just hope "R" stands for "really good."

"One-Eye" by "Arthur Rackham" (John T. Phillifent) 

Already I'm questioning the itinerary our tour guide Judith Merril has prepared for us.  When I read Phillifent's novel Genius Unlimited ten years ago I said, on this very blog, that

The writing is bad, one of the characters is silly and all the rest are without any personality, the jokes are bad, the action scenes are boring, much of the detective stuff and the science stuff feels perfunctory.

And yet, there is a glimmer of hope.  When I read Phillifent's short story "Advantage" I liked it, and even defended it from the criticisms of influential blogger Joachim Boaz.  Maybe "One-Eye," published in John W. Campbell Jr.'s Astounding, will emulate "Advantage" and win my admiration.

It is the future of hover cars.  Tom Garbutt is a big muscular guy, a hover car mechanic with autism or a  low IQ or a speech impediment or something, which is kind of annoying as much of this story consists of his halting dialogue and Phillifent's tortured descriptions of his thought processes.  As the story begins, Garbutt is in jail.  A shrink comes to talk to him.  This smooth-talking smart guy is the first person ever to be kind to the hulking dimwitted mechanic, and for him Garbutt is willing to tell his tale of woe.

This morning Garbutt suddenly found that he could see accidents and tragedies in the future, but only a few seconds before they occur.  Each of these prophetic visions is heralded by a terrible headache, then Garbutt sees his boss get injured on the job, or sees a cook slip and burn somebody with grease from the pan, or whatever.  After the vision, Garbutt quickly tries to warn people, but there is no time, and the accidents still take place.  Because of Garbutt's fruitless attempted interventions people begin to suspect Garbutt is somehow to blame for the misfortunes; his boss even fires him for being a jinx.  (I guess jinxes aren't a protected class any more.)  Garbutt has some more crazy adventures involving people being hurt or killed seconds after he had visions of the tragedy, and then he gets into a fight in a bar as part of his ill-conceived experiment to test whether he is himself causing the tragedies.  (Maybe one of the things Campbell liked about this story is how Garbutt tries to use the scientific method to figure out the extent of his powers and his responsibilities for the disasters.)  This fight is what landed him in jail.

After the shrink leaves, Garbutt has a vision of committing suicide and then he commits suicide.

This story is not a smooth read, and while the idea of a guy grappling with the unwelcome ability to see accidents and disasters seconds before they occur is sort of interesting, Phillifent doesn't really come up with a good plot based on this idea or a plot that exploits this idea.  Phillifent doesn't substantially extrapolate on what this power could mean for an individual or a society and the mechanic doesn't do anything constructive with the power or overcome the challenge it presents--his life and then he are just destroyed by it in short order.  I'm afraid the point of this story, the effect Phillifent seeks to have on readers, is to elicit sympathy for Tom Garbutt, a man who, because of his intellectual or physiological disability, is shunned by society and who then is overwhelmed by bizarre circumstance.  (We smart readers of Astounding are expected to identify with the shrink, a compassionate man who uses his brains and knowledge to help others, so that he stands head and shoulders above the rest of society.)  I'm not crazy about stories about helpless victims of fate or gentle giants who are abused by society, nor those in which nice liberals demonstrate their virtue by condescending to help their inferiors.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down. 

It looks like "One-Eye" has never been reprinted.  Understandable.          

"Devotion" by Kit Reed  

College professor Kit Reed, according to wikipedia, is a Guggenheim Fellow and got a "five-year grant literary from the Abraham Woursell Foundation"--Kit Reed is the science fiction writer the intellectual elite in their ivory towers want you to read.  Well, let's do what we are told by our betters for once and eat our vegetables.

We find "Devotion" in an issue of F&SF that includes a reprint of one of Leslie Charteris' The Saint stories, a Damon Knight short-short I bitterly denounced when I read it many moons ago, and Anthony Boucher's own backhanded smart-alecky denunciations of Robert E. Howard and Charles Eric Maine.  

To the relief of all involved, I don't have to denounce Reed's "Devotion."  (I know my kind-hearted readers don't flock to MPorcius Fiction Log lusting to read negative reviews--we're all softies, on the inside!)  "Devotion" is actually a pretty good little story, creative and uninhibited by left-wing pieties (Reed includes an underhanded and jealous woman in the story as well as a vain and ridiculous man.)

Harry Farmer, all his life, has had a perfect and beautiful mouthful of teeth, the envy and/or wonder of all who see them.  He maintains them with punctilious care, and he makes it to his seventies with them fully intact, no fillings, no blemishes on their dazzling whiteness.  He loves the teeth more than anything, spending an inordinate amount of time admiring them in the mirror and showing them off to people.

At his Florida retirement home, Harry has a particular friend, almost a girlfriend, perhaps, a Mrs. Granstrom, who is his regular partner at shuffleboard and croquet.  Mrs. Granstrom is very supportive when Harry faces the worst day in his life and is told by a doctor that he has to have his teeth all removed.  She even provides him a beautiful velvet box in which to store and admire his--still perfect!--natural teeth like they are the family jewels or something.  But she begins to get jealous when Harry starts spending less time at shuffleboard and croquet and more time in his room adoring--ne even caresses them!--his old teeth.

Harry's other problem is his replacement false teeth.  They are animate and emotional, and express their jealousy towards Harry's old teeth, pinching Harry when he brags about the previous occupants of his mouth, moving around the room in an effort to get attention, etc.  The clever ending of the story resolves both of Harry's issues--Mrs. Granstrom sneaks into Harry's room with a hammer, intent on smashing Harry's old teeth.  Harry's new teeth attack her, preserving their rivals in a display of devotion that softens Harry's heart to them.  Harry and his new fake teeth live happily ever after, the old teeth who abandoned him forgotten.

Thumbs up for "Devotion."  The intellectual elite up in their ivory towers aren't always wrong.

"Devotion" has been reprinted a few times here and over in Europe, including in the Reed collection Mister Da V. and Other Stories.  Joachim Boaz read the entire collection and blogged about it--check his assessments out!  Oh yeah, and check out my middling review of Reed's story "The Visible Partner," which appeared in a 1980 issue of F&SF.  If you are in the market for MPorcius negative reviews, at that same link you will find my long-winded explanation of why Harlan Ellison's story "All the Lies that Are My Life," the cover story of that same issue of F&SF, is no good and why Barry N. Malzberg, our hero, has all the virtues and none of the vices of the overrated Ellison.  At MPorcius Fiction Log we court controversy!


"Pieces of the Game" by Mack Reynolds

I have written quite a bit about committed leftist and world traveler Mack Reynolds even though I think his writing is poor, I guess because I find his career fascinating and stupefying, and because his brand of left-wingery is unpredictable and defies easy categorization; he was thrown out of a hard core leftist organization because he was not averse to bucking his masters and trying to make a buc behind their backs.  Reynolds is more of a maverick adventurer type than a commissar or toady, and it is fun to reflect on the fact that famously right-wing John W. Campbell, Jr. published so many of his stories in Astounding, Merril's 1958 pick "Pieces of the Game" among them.  It looks like Astounding is the only place it has ever appeared--Reynolds aficionados and collectors take note!

This story is so bland, so nondescript, and at the same time rather subtle and oblique, that I almost feel like I am missing something.  As far as I can tell there is no twist ending, no character growth, no substantial or surprising ideological or philosophical point that Reynolds is trying to make.  Maybe the point is to depict a future world in which international politics are cold and rational (you know, like chess) instead of ideological, with limited wars and little concern for human rights and forms of government--pure power politics, the pursuit of the national interest, with nobody caring about democracy or socialism or any of that jazz.  References to the Hapsburgs are sort of giving me the idea that international conflict in the near future world depicted is modelled on the limited warfare of the 18th century, the period of the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War, wars often felt to be dispassionate and nonideological in comparison to the religious wars that preceded them and the ideological and nationalistic wars that followed them, wars in which elites at least pretended to be fighting for some sort of religious or political principle or for justice for their ethnic or cultural group.

"Pieces of the Game" is set in a future world in which the Soviet Union has apparently won a war, maybe a nuclear war, against the West, and even has military bases on the Moon, but the West does not seem to have been conquered entire nor its ;populations wiped out.  Switzerland is still neutral, and the main character arrives in Switzerland, I guess from Britain or America, and makes his way into Austria, a "People's State" with lots of secret police--I guess Austria has been taken over directly or indirectly by the Soviet Union.  I don't think the USA, USSR, or UK are ever specifically mentioned in the story, which is why I am guessing about all this stuff.  Our protagonist is just five feet two inches tall, and it seems there are lots of diminutive people in this world, as well as deformed people and monstrously obese people, and these people are not regarded as freaks, but populate the elite--our guy attends a diplomatic function in Vienna and all the diplomats and dignitaries have one of these, to our minds, unusual body types.  We have to assume they are mutants.

The main character is a sort of James Bondian super spy with lots of high tech equipment.  He meets his contact, a doctor who injects him with a drug that gives him super strength, and then he spends several pages sneaking in and out of windows, climbing walls, swimming the Danube, breaking into offices, assassinating guards and cops and witnesses (well, maybe he just beats the witness unconscious), making a clandestine copy of some important document, and then sneaking back to Switzerland.  

I guess we can call this odd thing merely acceptable.

"First Man in a Satellite" by Charles W. Runyon

Charles W. Runyon has four novels and 18 short story credits at isfdb.  Apparently he is more famous for his stories and novels in the crime genre, though his true love was science fiction--see this interview of Runyon by Ed Gorman.  "First Man in a Satellite" was his first published SF story, and will be the first Runyon I have ever read.  "First Man in a Satellite" appeared in Super-Science Fiction after being rejected by Campbell--Runyon talks about Campbell's rejection letter in the linked interview above.  Robert Silverberg included "First Man in a Satellite" in his anthology of stories from Super-Science Fiction; it's a Campbell vs Merril and Silverberg throwdown--let's see who we side with!  

The covers of Super-Science Fiction and of Runyon's novels (again, see the linked interview) are bubbling over with delicious sex and violence, and this story is absolutely about love and death, but it is more of a sentimental tearjerker than something sensationalistic and exploitative.  Max is a dwarf and an acrobat.  He's in love with the co-star of his act, Marie.  They want to get married, and Max wishes he could set them up with some way to support themselves after they are too old to safely do their act.  Then a solution falls right into his lap!  

The government needs a dwarf who is in top physical condition for a top secret mission--to be the first man in space!  A man his size weighs less, uses less food and oxygen, etc., an essential savings in this early phase of the space race, and his pay for three months work will set him up for life!  The world must not know a human being is in the capsule, so Max can't tell Marie why he is leaving her for three months, which leads to her threatening to dump him. 

After two and a half months of training, Max blasts off on his ten day mission, orbiting the Earth again and again while the many machines he is hooked into record his physical reactions and, when he is in line-of-sight radio range, the scientists interview him.  Runyon focuses on Max's psychological stress while the operation is going as planned and then when a one-in-a-million piece of bad luck puts Max's life in jeopardy.  A meteor pierces the sphere, and Max's air supply is diminished, so they have to try to bring him down earlier than scheduled.  Uh oh, the remote control receiver on the jets is also down.  Damn that meteor!  The people on the ground go through a whole rigamarole, trying to direct Max in how to manually fire the jets at just the right time by exposing wires and stripping them and touching the right ones to each other at just the right moment but it is hopeless.  When all hope is lost the world is apprised of Max's heroism and doom, and the story ends with Max and Marie spending Max's last hours talking over the radio, and Runyon's speculations on how knowledge of inevitable death affects a person.

This is a story about a man's psychology and relationships under stress, and Runyon does a pretty entertaining job of describing Max's struggles and his feelings about Marie, the head government shrink, and the military officer in charge of the whole operation.  I couldn't tell if Max was going to make it or not, which was good.  So I am siding with Merril and Silverberg over Campbell--"First Man in a Satellite" is a good story.  In Campbell's defense, in his letter to Runyon rejecting the tale Campbell suggests Lester del Rey already did a story about a dwarf in space and maybe Runyon's was too similar to that earlier one to comfortably be included in the magazine.       

**********

Well, of this batch, the Reed is the best and the Runyon is pretty good; Reynolds' story is lacking but it is not actually bad--the bad one is Phillifent's, which shares some of Reynolds' deficiencies and is also a drag to get through.  

1958 stories from big names you'll recognize, but not necessarily titles you will be familiar with, in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  We'll leave you with links to the earlier blog posts in our Merril-guided tour of 1958.

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Tuesday, May 5, 2015

From the Treasury of Great SF: stories by Richard Deming, George P. Elliott, & Joel Townsley Rogers

Among the famous names on the back cover of Volume 1 of Anthony Boucher's 1959 A Treasury of Great Science Fiction are to be found names of people I have never heard of before.  In the interests of exploring new frontiers and in hopes of uncovering buried gems, I read three stories by such people, one each by Richard Deming, George P. Elliott, and Joel Townsley Rogers.

"The Shape of Things that Came" by Richard Deming (1951)

Deming has only a few publications listed on isfdb, including a novel he ghost wrote as Ellery Queen and a novelization of a wacky-looking horror movie starring Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters.  He was born in Des Moines, where I have been spending a lot of time since my exile from The Big Apple.

"The Shape of Things that Came" first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and has appeared in a few places since then, including two foreign anthologies.

This story, a mere 5 pages, is a mere trifle; maybe it is supposed to be amusing.  A guy in 1900 travels forward in time to 1950, then, back in 1900, tells a guy how amazing 1950's technology is.  There is no plot to speak of, no conflict or risk or endeavor.  The point of the story seems to be that people take for granted the technology that is around them, not considering how remarkable technological change really is, and that 20th century people don't quite realize how the pace of technological change has accelerated since the industrial revolution.

This isn't an annoyingly bad story, and I can't argue with its banal "point;" I'd judge it acceptable.  But Boucher called his anthology A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, and this is certainly not "great"--it feels like filler.

"Sandra" by George P. Elliott (1957)

George Paul Elliott appears to have been a peripatetic academic who wrote in many genres and died in The Big Apple.  "Sandra" first saw publication in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction alongside stories by Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, and L. Sprague de Camp.

I liked "Sandra" from its first page, because it does the sorts of things I most enjoy in SF and in literature in general; it believably depicts a strange alien world, and not from the point of view of a 20th century Westerner, but from the point of view of one of the aliens, who does not find his world strange, and it tells the story of a difficult human relationship.

"Sandra" is a first person narrative set in an alternate 20th-century California where slavery is common.  Our narrator is a bachelor, an engineer at a factory, and when he inherits a large house he buys a young and pretty white woman, Sandra, at a department store to keep his house, wash his feet, cook his meals, and have sex with him.  The plot of the novel follows their relationship, how it evolves as the narrator falls in love with Sandra, gives her her freedom, and then marries her.  The narrator discovers that Sandra was more attentive and easier to deal with as a slave than as a manumitted wife, and enslaves her again.  But that taste of freedom has made her rebellious, and he resorts to beating her with the whip that came with her when he bought her.

Elliott's style is smooth and even, understated and never manipulative.  He never breaks character; the narrator talks about Sandra the way a person in our world might talk about a difficult pet or high-maintenance automobile, with affection and regret that he didn't properly train the dog or maintain the sports car from the start.  As we see in Nabokov's Lolita, it is more challenging and exciting to learn about people with bizarre or perverted values from their own mouths than from a conventional point of view.

Elliott doesn't show all his cards, doesn't make clear what point he is trying to make--is this a satire of marriage? a meditation on the notion of freedom? a reminder that the customs of people from the past or foreign cultures may seem immoral to us but seem perfectly normal to them (and of course, that things we casually accept may be anathema to people of the future or from foreign cultures)? simply an effort to shock and titillate the reader?

Well-written, entertaining, and provocative--highly recommended.  

"Beyond Space and Time" by Joel Townsley Rogers (1938)

Rogers was an aviator and a prolific writer of genre fiction, praised by the likes of crime writers Ed Gorman and Bill Pronzini, and Edgar Rice Burroughs expert Richard Lupoff.  Recently Ramble House (check out their entertaining website) has made much of his work available to the 21st century public.  "Beyond Space and Time" was first published in All-American Fiction and was reprinted in Super Science Stories in 1950. 

It is the year 1968, and the world's greatest theoretical scientist, Hooker Hartley, and the world's greatest inventor, Helver Gunderson, have built a powerful rocket! Gunderson is our first person narrator, and he seems like a pretty enthusiastic, gung-ho kind of guy; check out this breathless sentence from the first paragraph of the story:
It was our purpose to explore outer space, to investigate the mystery of the cosmos, to solve the riddle of the fourth dimension, Time, and to reach that roof of heaven where, eighteen million light-years or more away, according to the best available data of mathematics, infinity curves and returns upon itself in a parabolic trajectory--to find the answer to the last question, in short, and the solution of the ultimate equation.
The entire story is like this--it is like the polar opposite of the elegant and sophisticated style employed by Elliott in "Sandra."

The plan is for Hartley, "the greatest scientific intelligence who ever lived!", to stay behind while Gunderson, who has Viking blood flowing through his veins (remember when that dude in that 1942 Henry Kuttner story had Viking blood flowing in his veins?), puts on his space helmet and flies to the very edge of the universe to "probe the final mystery!"

Before describing his trip, Gunderson reviews for us his life.  Born to abject poverty, by dint of intelligence and drive (remember that Viking blood!) he became a bazillionaire by inventing devices which revolutionized modern life (e.g., some kind of levitation device which means planes never crash, and a wrist TV.) He was befriended by suave upper-middle class genius Hartley, and got married to a gorgeous, haughty and intellectual Boston Brahmin named Nivea Saltonstall.  Gunderson worshipped Hartley and Nivea, and didn't realize that they only liked him for his money and were having an affair behind his back!

Gunderson's rocket blasts off at the speed of light, taking him to the edge of our universe, and beyond, to a universe which is a mirror image of our own, where time flows backward and Earth is called Thrae.  On Thrae he meets Mara, a woman who loves him for himself, and there he lives for fourteen years, making with Mara a happy family.  Then, in a way I couldn't understand, he looks back on Earth through a telescope ("which looks into the future, which is their past"), and sees Nivea cheating on him with Hartley.

Instead of just shrugging this off, seeing as he hasn't seen Nivea for fourteen years, has been unfaithful to her, and has a fulfilling life on Thrae, Gunderson flies back to Earth.  His flight back to Earth is also a flight back in time (I couldn't grok this part either), and he lands on Earth a millisecond after he took off, in the same exact spot. Hartley and Nivea think he hasn't left yet, and when Gunderson climbs out of the rocket, they ask if he has forgotten something.

Gunderson bashes open Hartley's skull with a wrench, crushing "the greatest brain that ever lived," and then strangles Nivea to death. When the cops come they don't believe Gunderson's story about going to another universe; they think he is off his rocker.  With Hartley dead, and Gunderson imprisoned and deemed insane, we are to believe that there will never be another interstellar rocket, and that the answer to the ultimate mystery will only ever be known to one broken-hearted man.

The science in this story is crazy and incredible, as is the way Gunderson behaves, but the over-the-top plot and style have a sort of garish charm.  Maybe this is what Ed Gorman is talking about when he says that Rogers delivers "the strong heady thrill of genuine pulp."  Numerous passages had me shaking my head or laughing as Rogers veered in and out of "so bad it is good" territory (or is it Gunderson veering in and out of "I'm a maniac" territory?)  Rogers's portrayal of how the decadent upper crust (Nivea and her father disdain work and have run out of money just before meeting Gunderson) and the conniving intelligentsia take advantage of a nouveau riche working-class striver is also interesting.

I'm going to slot "Beyond Space and Time" in the "entertaining curiosity" category and give it a thumbs up.

***********

The Deming was basically a dud, but the Elliott was a mature piece of literature and the Rogers was a gonzo thrill ride.  Reading new authors paid off this time.  I'm planning on reading stories by authors unfamiliar to me in Volume 2 of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction in the near future.
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