Malicious tales by T N Scortia, W F Nolan and A Davidson

Another of the genre fiction anthologies I came across on the disorganized shelves of an antiques mall recently was Men and Malice, published in 1973 for the Ellery Queen Mystery Club and edited by Dean Dickensheet.  The title page, if not the cover, alerts us to the fact that the stories it presents are all by West Coast authors, and a quick look at the contents page indicates quite a few SF writers are represented.  Let's check out the included tales by Thomas N. Scortia, William F. Nolan and Avram Davidson.  I'm reading them in a scan of Men and Malice.

"The Goddess of the Cats" by Thomas N. Scortia (1973)

Most of the stories in Men and Malice are new to this volume.  "The Goddess of the Cats" debuted here, and would be reprinted in the 1975 Scortia collection Caution! Inflammable!  I own a 1976 paperback edition of Caution! Inflammable! and started reading it in 2019, but somehow never got around to reading more than half of it.  More recently I read Scortia's "Someday I'll Find You" and declared it "barely acceptable," his "The Avengers" and called it a "half-baked clunker" and his "Gag Rule" and denounced it as a "total waste of the reader's time."  Well, we won't let our previous experience with Scortia prejudice us against this production here--the best performer can have an off day and the most lackluster shooter can score a lucky hit.  

Miguel is a Mexican living in California.  He hates the English language.  He hates wearing shoes.  He hates Christianity.  He is filled with pride at his talents.  In the first paragraph of the story he has sex with some woman for whom he has contempt.  Miguel sounds like he belongs in the legislature, but in fact he is a guy who makes mosaic murals.

Miguel is living among the metal buildings and white people he detests because he got a job putting up a mural of a sea monster, a creature he dreams about at night, a creature with the head and torso of a stacked chick, but whose underparts are like those of some kind of scaly squid or octopus.  The mosaic mural is above a fountain at a new apartment complex.  The project was begun by an American named Warburg, but Warburg went bankrupt and sold it to a French Canadian.  Miguel hates this Canadian as much as he does the Yanquis--this Quebecois has the temerity to expect Miguel to help with physical labor as well as install the mural, as if he was just some hired hand and not a talented artiste!

Because of the venue I am reading it in, I expected "The Goddess of the Cats," despite the title, to be a straight detective story, while the first few paragraphs of the story led me to suspect "The Goddess of the Cats" was going to be a "liberal" wish-fulfillment fantasy about how mean Americans get their just comeuppance from a noble non-white immigrant.  One can certainly interpret the story along those lines, but there are additional nuances and layers that make "The Goddess of the Cats" more interesting and more challenging.  Scortia's story has strong weird, even Lovecraftian, elements, and Miguel is not necessarily the kind of guy who is going to enjoy the sympathy of college-educated progressives from the start of the story to its gruesome finish.  

Miguel is a sexist who thinks women should be subordinate and that if they get out of hand a good beating is in order who, back in Mexico, lives among worshippers of monster-gods who practice human sacrifice.  When the white woman with whom Miguel is regularly having sex, a sculptress, decides to kick Miguel to the curb and share her bed with the French Canadian instead, Miguel tries to summon monsters (great cats of some kind) to destroy the Quebecois.  Then, in the story's climax, Miguel rapes the sculptress--after Miguel has beaten her down and penetrated her, she begins to enjoy being used this way. 

In the end, the Canadian and the sculptress are both dead, and the cops shoot down their killer, Miguel, as he resists arrest.  Are the monstrous felines who mauled the Canadian, and the aquatic goddess to whom Miguel dedicated the heart he tore from the still-living sculptress' chest, real, or just Miguel's hallucinations, perhaps drug induced?

A good story in which a lot is going on, all of it compelling.  So much fiction is larded with fat and obscured with superfluous frills, but Scortia here only gives us sentences which offer value to the reader.  Fans of Yog-Sothery, nasty sex and genre fiction that is about art and design or tries to say something about class conflict and ethnic conflict in North America (we've got an Hispanic who follows the native religion and tries to break out of his working-class background to achieve middle-class respectability among whites, a culturally sophisticated Jew who somehow screws up his finances, a red-headed slut who loves getting banged by foreigners, and a middle-class French Canadian Christian who has vulgar taste) should certainly check "The Goddess of the Cats" out.  And maybe I should read more from Caution! Inflammable! some day.

"Down the Long Night" by William F. Nolan (1957)

I groaned when I realized "Down the Long Night" was first published under the title "Laugh Till You Die," fearing it might be a joke story.  On the other hand, that debut was in a magazine called Terror Detective Story, a periodical graced by some serious sex and violence covers, and as "Down the Long Night" the tale would be reprinted in 2022 in an issue of Weird Fiction Review, so maybe this story is going to have the sorts of horror and speculative elements that we enjoyed in "The Goddess of the Cats" and that are our bread and butter here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Also noteworthy--"Down the Long Night" is the title story of a 2000 Nolan collection, making you think it must be one Nolan is proud of and/or one editors think is particularly good.

Unfortunately, "Down the Long Night" is one of those less-than-credible psychological stories, rather than an actual weird story, plus one of those stories set in a hall of mirrors and funhouse at an amusement park or carnival.  The whole thing feels banal and overwritten, with too much description of the locale but not enough characterization and emotion, and then in the end comes the confusing twist that you don't feel like bothering to figure out because you could not care less about the characters and the whole story just feels bogus anyway, lifeless and mechanical, like Nolan is just going through the motions.  Thumbs down!  "Down the Long Night" is not a joke story, though, I'll give it that.

Alan is a Hollywood screenwriter who pens detective thriller screenplays.  Yes, this is one of those stories in which a guy who writes genre fiction finds himself in a genre fiction scenario.  To me, this kind of thing (like the chase in the funhouse) feels very tired.  Anyway, Alan is affianced to a hot chick, Jessica, who until recently was dating Alan's pal, Paul.  Paul is the Bohemian intellectual type, neurotic and odd.  Paul has called Alan up, saying he is in trouble, that Alan has to come meet him at the amusement park after dark, in the funhouse where the hall of mirrors is, because he (Paul) is hiding from the cops.  Apparently Paul hangs out at this amusement park all the time.

Once Alan is lost in the funhouse, Paul begins playing with him, getting revenge--Paul knows his way around in the dark, and has access to the control panel and can turn on and off the lights and so forth.  He also has a gun and a big knife.  Alan finds Jess's naked dead body--Paul slew her, and is going to slay Paul next!  There are chase scenes and fight scenes meant to be tense, and Paul accuses Alan of using him, alleging that Alan owes Paul his career and repaid Paul by spreading lies about him that ruined Paul's own career as well as his relationship with Jessica so Alan himself could get his mitts on Jessica.  We also get some suggestive insights into Alan's own perhaps abnormal psychology.  Paul ends up dying and Alan surviving, but when the police show up we can't be sure which of the two is the real villain, or what exactly happened, as Alan is an unreliable narrator who apparently compartmentalizes and forgets unpleasant memories--such as sabotaging other people's reputations--so maybe it was Alan that set up Paul and killed Jessica rather than the other way round.  Bewildering and frustrating.

After reading the story in Men and Malice I took a quick look at a scan of the 2000 Nolan collection Down the Long Night.  Nolan in that volume provides an intro to "Down the Long Night" in which he tells us the plot of the story is a collaboration between him and Charles Beaumont, and that some of the prose is actually Beaumont's.  (There is no mention whatsoever of Beaumont in Men and Malice.)  Nolan also talks about how Beaumont was his best friend and Beaumont was awesome, etc.  So I guess Beaumont fans, whom I am led to believe are legion, should check out this story, no matter how lame and annoying I find it.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we encourage people to make up their own minds after consulting the primary sources.

"Amphora" by Avram Davidson (1973)

We might consider this a rare Davidson story--after its inaugural appearance here in Men and Malice it was not reprinted until 2023 in AD100, a two-volume collection of uncollected and unpublished Davidson stories released on the occasion of the man's 100th birthday.

Scortia's and Nolan's stories are very much California stories, set in the Golden State and featuring California characters (the artsy types with low morals, the cultist, the Mexican, the entrepreneurial Jew, the screenwriter, etc.) but Davidson's is set on the coast of Spanish West Africa and stars an international cast of people who have nothing to do with California.  And while Scortia's and Nolan's stories are pretty damned serious, Davidson's is written in a sort of light jocular style.  Now, you know I hate joke stories as a general rule, but there are some SF writers, like Jack Vance and Barry Malzberg, who can thread the needle and include in stories humor that is actually funny and that doesn't undermine the actual plot, atmosphere or SF content of a story.  Today Davidson proves to be one of those guys.  Here's a good sample of the subdued, character-based humor to be found in "Amphora":

The captain of the chartered boat sat in the shade of the cooktent drinking hot bottled beer, watching his one-man crew (who also acted as cook) play dominoes with the local headman.  As the cook-mate made up his own rules and the headman simply cheated, the game was not without interest.  Of the three natives who had shown up for work today--sometimes none appeared, sometimes the whole tribe--one sat cross-legged, looking at the pictures in a tattered and greasy Spanish comic book, and the others took turns searching one another's hair for lice.

It isn't nice or politically correct, but this humor is legitimately amusing and not absurdist or farcical but founded on real life human foibles and experiences, so it doesn't cause distraction or threaten suspension of disbelief.

The characters.  Thomas Jefferson Northrup is an oil man from Oklahoma as well as an amateur archaeologist who fancies himself the next Heinrich Schliemann.  He thinks the ancient Greeks had a presence here in northwest Africa, and he is here to prove it.  Luigi di Benedictus is a Swiss inventor who is driving his experimental amphibious all-terrain-vehicle all over Africa on a test run.  Gladys Northrup is T. J.'s less than faithful wife (she married him for his money) and she is having an affair with Eddy, T. J.'s assistant.

The plot.  T. J. has spent most of his oil-derived millions on his crazy archaeological expeditions all over Latin America and Africa, and Gladys and Eddy hope the old man keels over sooner rather than later so there will be some money left for them.  A local, Ali, is pissed off at T. J., so Gladys and Eddy come up with the idea of giving Ali a rifle and instructions to hunt them a gazelle or something for dinner, in hopes Ali will take this opportunity to murder T. J.  T. J. has taken a ride with Benedictus in the Swiss engineer's oversized ATV to a site where he hopes to find amphora and thus prove his theory.  Gladys drops the key to the gun rack in the bay, and Eddy pursues it to the bottom of the bay, where it falls into the mouth of an amphora buried in the sand.  Trying to retrieve the key, Eddy gets his hand stuck inside the amphora and drowns and gets eaten by an octopus.  Meanwhile, T. J., while looking for amphora, has found oil and will get rich again.  The excitement of the new oil project leads T. J. to forget all about his theory that the Greeks were active down here, a theory he will never know was proven true by his vanished assistant, whose place will be taken by Benedictus.  Goofy nerds T. J. and Benedictus, it appears, will live happily every after, pursuing their passions and making a stack of money, while villainous Eddy is dead and vile Gladys will have to live with the guilt that her evil led to the death of her lover--it is hinted she will go insane.

A fun little story.  Thumbs up! 

**********

Alright, a decent crop of stories.  Obviously I thought Nolan's story was bad, but it still has value if you are a student of the genre, if only because of the Beaumont connection.  So not a total waste of time.  Scortia's story is a successful effort to marry the weird story, the exploitative sex and gore thriller story, and a sort of racial/class justice story and even manages to be a story about the power of art and the role of aesthetics in our lives.  Wow.  The Davidson is also about human passion and human evil that leads to death, but it has skillfully employed elements of humor and a more conventional, more comforting sense of justice.

More anthologized crime when next we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Merril-approved 1958 stories by M St Clair, T N Scortia and J Shepley

For a while now we've been on a slow-paced tour of the speculative fiction of 1958.  Pointing out the highlights for us is Judith Merril, herald of the New Wave and recipient of a blizzard of critical accolades.  In the 1959 edition of her Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy series of anthologies she included at the very end a list of honorable mentions three pages long in quite small type, and we have been going through it alphabetically, picking out authors who interest us and stories that are easy to access and then judging to what extent we agree with Merril that these are among the best SF stories of 1958.  Today we reach the letter S, and investigate one story each by Margaret St. Clair, Thomas N. Scortia and John Shepley which received Merril's blessing.  There are lots of people whose names start with "S" and so we've got a bunch more "S" stories ahead of us.  Behind us we have 1958 stories by all these worthies:

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
Avis Pabel, Frederik Pohl, and Robert Presslie
John T.Phillifent, Kit Reed, Mack Reynolds, and Charles W. Runyon

"Squee" by Margaret St. Clair

I have avoided St. Clair's work as I acquired the idea she wrote joke stories while perusing the letters columns of Startling (or maybe it was Thrilling Wonder.)  But when on Merril's recommendation I read "Horror Howce" a year ago I liked it, so maybe I am treating her unfairly.  Well, let's see what we think of "Squee," which debuted in Future Science Fiction and was reprinted in 2020 in a St. Clair collection which I believe was published by the Canadian government.

"Squee" is one of those misanthropic stories about how the human race is violent and irrational and will destroy itself, though perhaps it distinguishes itself with its misandry, or, if you prefer, its biting feminist satire.  "Squee" is well-written on a sentence by sentence basis, the pacing and all that are good, and St. Clair produces real characters with legible personalities and relationships, and doesn't go too far into rank absurdity and farce, so "Squee" is better than the general run of these things.  We'll call it mildly good.

St. Clair's story takes place entirely upon a space ship on a desperate mission.  The stress of the years-long trip, in which the crew live packed closely together like men on a submarine, fosters all manner of conflict among the spacemen; luckily among them is a genius mechanic who is also a talented musician and performer who is able to make jokes and sing songs that soothe the spacers' nerves and defuse arguments and fights...so far at least.

Through expository dialogue we learn the horrible predicament the human race finds itself in.  A few years ago ago, a scientist named Neil developed a bacteriological weapon that targeted women; it was hoped the threat of the weapon, or its use, would end an ongoing war, and that the vaccine against the weapon--issued to the enemy immediately upon their surrender--would keep too many women from dying.  But the bioengineered disease mutated and the vaccine lost its effectiveness and soon all the women in the world were pushing up daisies.  Neil was murdered by an angry mob, but his son, also a scientist, survived, and is a prominent figure in the effort to solve the no-female problem by figuring out how to create more people by somehow altering sperm cells.

Neil the Younger is aboard the ship, the mission of which is to collect samples of insects on Ganymede--substances from the alien bugs may be an aid in the process of altering sperm and continuing the human race.  As the story begins, the ship is on it way back to Earth, and Neil the Younger spends all his time in the lab, alone, working on sperms cells with the alien bug goop.  The men of the crew hate Neil for the deeds of his father and because Neil is aloof and even arrogant.

Morale gets worse after Neil reports that he may be able to create new people, but only men, no women.  (St. Clair actually devotes quite a few column inches to describing the science of reproduction and why this is so.)  The genius mechanic invents a robot squirrel to entertain the crew.  St. Clair in this story depicts men not only as violent and irrationally competitive, not only callous and dismissive of women, but also as fool at the mercy of their sex drive, as irrationally attached to the female and driven to act irrationally by their desire to appeal to women.  That genius mechanic puts a skirt on the robot squirrel and gives it a feminine voice, so the men basically fall in love with it.  (One of St. Clair's little jokes is that the robot squirrel keeps saying "I love nuts"; I'm assuming here that "nuts" was already slang for testicles in 1958.  Another is that the mechanic, a talented ventriloquist, not only composes but actually voices the squirrel's lines, so all the flirting between the robot and the crew is homoerotic.)

Neil the Younger feels contempt for the men's simple-minded response to the robot squirrel, and apparently jealousy over how the men hang on every word of the mechanic and his creation, Squee.  So Neil has the robot deactivated, claiming he needs one of its components in his work on saving the human race.  One of the men, I guess the robot squirrel's most dedicated fan, goes to the lab to murder Neil and in the fight both men die and much of the lab is destroyed, setting back the essential work of preserving humanity.

In case we missed the point, St. Clair has some characters explicitly discuss how man's aggression and his rabid competitiveness is putting the survival of the human race in jeopardy, both in the middle and at the end of the story.

These kinds of stories rub me the wrong way because I think the sub rosa purpose of them is to divert responsibility for the Cold War away from the Soviet Union and/or to make the related point that everybody is somehow to blame for crimes and atrocities and not just the individuals who committed those misdeeds.  But "Squee" is not bad, and I suppose Merril is justified in recommending it on its merits, even if she really chose it because it portrayed a guy with a British name and not a Russian name threatening humanity and because of its feminist politics.  The way the story depicts an intersection between international politics and gender politics perhaps makes "Squee" a valuable text for feminist academics in the humanities writing about the Cold War.

"The Avengers" by Thomas N. Scortia

I have used my "Scortia" tag seven times, and I think I have read a dozen Scortia short stories and one novel by the man.  Merril liked "The Avengers," but if isfdb is to be believed, "The Avengers" was never printed outside of the US and UK editions of Science Fiction Stories.  Let's see if Merril was right and the world is all wrong and my thirteenth Thomas N. Scortia short story is a good one.

Scortia's novels, most of them written in collaboration with Frank M. Robinson, seem to be in the disaster genre, and "The Avengers" starts out with a description of a pretty monumental disaster--Earth's cities are "in flames" and the sun has been "murdered"!  A space ship, crewed by aliens who look just like Earth people, lands on the ruined Earth to look for survivors.  These aliens are on a quest for revenge on whoever just destroyed our civilization and set our sun on the path to going nova in a few hours because thousands of years ago this same fiend did the same thing to their home world and has been destroying star systems inhabited by intelligent life on the regular ever since!

(We can't help but be reminded of the Glis, who travelled the galaxy messing with one star system after another in A. E. van Vogt's 1960s Silkie stories.)

The aliens find only one survivor, a man named Joseph.  Joseph doesn't want to leave the Earth, even though the sun is going to explode and destroy the entire solar system in a few short hours.  He escapes protective custody on the alien ship and when the woman sent after him catches up to him, he convinces her to stay on the doomed Earth and share his fate.  The ship leaves, on the trail of the sun destroyer.  

Joseph equates the ship with the Wandering Jew of legend, and himself with Joseph of Arimathea from the Bible.  I guess the monster destroying star systems is God or His representative, and those killed on the planets are not truly annihilated, but transported to Heaven--the destruction of each sun is the local manifestation of The Second Coming.

"The Avengers" reads like a weak Twilight Zone story, one whose hopes to move or entertain an audience rest solely on the effectiveness of its wacky twist-ending gimmick--Scortia's characters are uninteresting while his plot feels contrived and lacks tension and doesn't build to a satisfying climax.  But the gimmick fails to deliver--Scortia does not explore the Christian ideas he mentions nor convincingly connect them to the destruction of the solar system by a nonhuman intelligence.  It is not even clear if Scortia is endorsing Christian ideas or goofing on them, it is like he doesn't take the ideas he is trying to exploit for effect, or his audience, seriously enough to think about them.  Lacking any other qualities, the story lives or dies on its gimmick, and since its gimmick is poorly realized, gotta give "The Avengers" a thumbs down.           

Why did Merril endorse this half-baked clunker?  Maybe as an anti-American leftist she experienced "The Avengers"' lazy and superficial treatment of Christianity as thrilling blasphemy, or liked the way the story portrayed a mission of revenge as sheer folly--if the Soviet Union conquers some place, America should turn the other cheek!       

"Gorilla Suit" by John Shepley 

Shepley has only four credits at isfdb.  A Jewish-American who lived in Rome and New York City, he published literary stories in places like Paris Review and Quixote and translated Italian books like Ferdinando Camon's Conversations with Primo Levi and Roberto Calasso's The Forty-Nine Steps.  As I have told you a hundred times, one of Merril's objectives in her career was to point out how bogus were, or to break down to the extent they were real, the distinctions and barriers between genre literature and mainstream literature, so she loved to reprint and promote what she took be to SF that was written by mainstream writers or appeared in mainstream venues, making Shepley and his work is right up her alley.

"Gorilla Suit" first appeared in F&SF, but for some reason Merril's cite points readers to The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Eighth Series, so I am dutifully reading it there. 

"Gorilla Suit" is a professionally written but bland joke story, "witty" and understated rather than funny or exciting.  The main jokes (I guess) are that people in New York see so much crazy stuff they have become blasé, even immune, to bizarre events, and that Hollywood people, probably people in general, prefer the artificial to the real.

Toto is a gorilla who has human intelligence--he reads the paper and does the crossword puzzle--but cannot speak.  He lives in the zoo; I guess the Central Park Zoo.  When he sees an ad for a one-day job for a man with a gorilla suit or a gorilla promoting the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope film Road to Bali featuring Dorothy Lamour, Toto decides to escape the zoo to apply for the job in hopes of meeting Lamour, of whom he is a fan.  People don't bat an eye as a gorilla walks around Manhattan and rides the elevator to the office where the job interview will take place.  None of the many other applicants for the job notices Toto is a real gorilla.  The job goes to another real gorilla--this ape is canny enough to don a fake gorilla costume in front of the interviewers, who marvel over the high quality of the fake suit's "nylon-acetate." 

We'll call it acceptable.

**********

This batch of "S"s is a little underwhelming, though I suppose these stories, each being satirical on some level, are particularly ill-suited to me--I'm sick of satire.  Still, if my mind and body hold out long enough I will probably be reading St. Clair, Scortia and even Shepley again--in Merril's eighth volume of Year's Best S-F she recommends a 1962 Shepley story.

Odyssey, Spring '76: T N Scortia, R Bloch, F Pohl, J Pournelle & F Saberhagen

In May I visited an antique store in Carlisle, PA and among the SF-related things I saw--but was too cheap to buy--was the Spring 1976 issue of Roger Elwood's magazine Odyssey, a magazine which published a total of two issues (this being the first.)  Let's take a break from the 1930s and check out five (count them--five!) stories from Odyssey.  Our hero Barry N. Malzberg has a story in the issue, but we'll skip it and read it soon in its book appearance in The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady, which we've been reading on and off for a while.

"Someday I'll Find You" by Thomas N. Scortia

Here we have a banal twist ending story about how politics corrupts idealistic men.  Oy, if I wanted to read about a corrupt politician who, scared by his falling poll numbers, contrived to unjustly prosecute his rival in the upcoming election, I would just read the newspaper.

A guy has been chief executive of the planet for twelve years. This civilization has small scale nuclear reactors, hover cars, video phones, 3D TV...and a big problem.  In the last decade, due to radioactive contamination, the population of this world has declined from ten million to 150,000!  The Prime Executive's political party has been pouring all public resources into a desperate project--building a space ship that can reach the presumed home planet of a similar alien race whose space probe landed on this planet some years ago. This probe, we readers are made aware, is a NASA probe from Earth, but it must have been launched so long ago there is no telling if the human race is still even alive.

The rival political party thinks the space ship a waste of scarce resources and the idea that the planet from which came the probe fanciful; they propose devoting public effort to setting up a living place in subterranean caverns.  The big election is tomorrow, and it looks like the cavern faction is going to defeat the space ship faction.  So, the Prime Executive's top guy manufactures evidence that the cavern faction's candidate is a thief, and the Prime Exec meets the pro-cavern candidate secretly to try to blackmail him. But cavern boy wasn't born yesterday and records the Prime Executive threatening him and releases this recording to the media.  The cavern people win the election.

But the unscrupulous starship party isn't licked yet!  The ship is almost finished, so they decide to just steal it before inauguration day and blast off for the location the boffins have theorized is the probe's point of origin, taking with them all the engineers and technicians left in the world.  The lack of technical people will make the cavern project the voters supported impossible, but the pro-starship politicians just shrug that off--as we can see every day in real life, elected officials in general have contempt for the voters.  The Prime Executive's wife refuses to join him in this treacherous voyage so, demonstrating his abandonment of personal as well as political integrity he drugs her and drags her aboard.

Everybody on the ship goes into suspended animation, hoping to wake up in orbit around a healthy planet they can live on.  The twist ending is that the planet they just left is Earth--the culture that created the NASA probe fell so long ago it has been totally forgotten--those scientists who deduced the probe's point of origin as another system made a major miscalculation.

The plot outline isn't terrible, but it isn't great, and the style is a little tedious, with lots of superfluous description of how a 3D TV works and that sort of thing.  Barely acceptable.  "Someday I'll Find You" has not, it appears, ever been reprinted.

"ETFF" by Robert Bloch

This story is advertised as "ROBERT BLOCH'S FIRST S.F. WORK IN YEARS!" on Odyssey Vol. 1 No. 1's table of contents, and while it is sadly lacking in actual speculations or science, it is directly aimed at the market of committed SF fans, and in fact has almost no appeal to the casual reader who has only dabbled in SF or knows SF primarily from 2001: A Space Odyssey and old Flash Gordon material.

"ETFF" is a long and tedious inside joke story, lacking in plot and character and human emotion, basically a forest of puns rooted in a mountain of flattering references to SF personalities and perhaps less flattering satires of various SF fan demographics.  When Malzberg does this sort of thing (consider Dwellers of the Deep and Gather at the Hall of the Planets) he provides real human feeling and a sharp controversial edge, but Bloch's story here is absolutely frivolous fan service.

Aliens are studying the Earth, and one of them has made a particular study of SF and become a SF fan, and so dons human guise and attends a SF convention in Connecticut.  (Bloch was famous for being the life of the party at such conventions.)  One of the more memorable SF-centric puns comes when the alien, who can heal people just by touching them, is alerted that a hemophiliac girl requires medical help--he says “Take me to your bleeder.”  One of the more vulgar gags has the alien, wanting to thank everyone for being so accommodating, using his miraculous powers to create out of thin air a Hugo award for every attendee; as you know, these awards are shaped like rocket ships, and the alien's wording of the spell, that a Hugo appear “under everyone’s seat,” leads the hard metal objects to materialize, dildo-like, in each and every attendant's anal cavity.  (I guess I am reading this story in the appropriate month.)  

Less memorable are the bog standard jokes that we have heard a million times about how people like to drink booze and how readers and writers have disagreements with editors and publishers.

Of historical interest to us SF fans is the use of fannish slang like “egoboo” and “filk” and caricatures of, among others, Forrest Ackerman (Ackerman is such a film fan he passes up a chance to meet a real extraterrestrial in order to screen Metropolis for the hundredth time) and New Wavers (they are obsessed with sex.)  One of the gags of special interest for you students of gender studies is when the alien attends a feminist panel.  The speaker declares she deserves all the privileges enjoyed by men, and the alien is convinced she is right, and helpfully transforms her into a man.

Thumbs down. "ETFF" is of historical value only.  (Bloch seems like a good guy, and I don't begrudge him writing a love letter to the people and institutions which brought joy to his life, but I'm not going to pretend this is good fiction any more than I am going to pretend a child's crayon scrawls hanging on his loving parents' fridge are good drawings.) 

"ETFF" was reprinted in the 1989 Bloch collection Fear and Trembling, even though the cover blurbs promise terror, personality and plot, none of which are to be found in "ETFF."

"The Prisoner of New York Island" by Frederik Pohl

I lived in New York City during the Giuliani and Bloomberg periods, and when I go back, as I had to this weekend (though only to Brooklyn), things look and feel different in a way that is disinctly disappointing--most strikingly, the Manhattan skyline looks different than I remember, quite wrong, to my mind, unbalanced and undistinguished.  "The Prisoner of New York Island" has a little of this kind of energy.

It is the future, 2076!  The America of the Tricentennial looks very different than that of the Bicentennial!  "The Prisoner of New York Island" follows two people from Arizona, one male and one female, members of a group marriage, as they visit Manhattan, which is largely in ruins, in early July (Pohl has a pivotal scene take place on the Fourth--remember that in 1976 there was a lot of excitement over the Bicentennial of American independence; having been born in 1971, I vaguely recall some of this excitement.)  As the story proceeds we learn through dialogue and exposition about life in this strange future.  It seems that people left the cities because of a plague and because city life was conclusively proven to be causing mental illness.  The visitors from Arizona, Sim and Suley, live on a nudist commune (they wear cloaks that can be translucent or can go opaque to fend off the sun or offer privacy when they urinate in public) where horses and bicycles are the primary means of transport.  Arizona seems to be independent of any federal government and to have little or no government of its own.  Conversely, in the East people still practice monogamy and have government.  Middle-class people who work in New York live in places like New Jersey--Manhattan is the anarchic home of creepy weirdos and lower-class people.

The man who pilots the boat that brings Sim and Suley to NYC from the mainland warns them that the guides who will accost them prefer to be paid in drugs and will

"...bore you out of your mind with talk about what New York used to be, a hundred years ago or more.  They have a great sense of history, not much of what's real."

Sure enough, the guide they employ (they pay him with peyote) wears what I am taking to be pimp clothes or maybe just 1970s clothes ("a flat, broad brimmed hat...a red vest with green leather buttons, bellbottomed green slacks with red stripings") and talks a lot about the Empire State Building (you can walk to the top but it is a two-day trip) and tells tales of the New Yorkers of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Some of the stories don't seem to be creditable (for example, we are told Diamond Jim Brady hung out with "Lillian Held," which I guess is a misconstruing of "Lillian Russell" and/or "Lillian Hellman") and a long scene concerns an argument between this guide and a black kid (the Arizonans never see black people out West) about whether or not sharks live in the flooded Lincoln Tunnel.  The Arizonans give the kid some pot so he'll leave them alone.  (The Arizonans themselves use drugs all the time, shooting up hallucinogens as a pastime and, it appears, to enable them to perform feats of clairvoyance.)

Long distance travel across North America is conducted by solar-powered dirigible, and we learn halfway through the story what has been hinted at before, that the plot of "Prisoner of New York Island" concerns a guy named Charley Four Trees.  Charley had pledged to join Sim and Suley's group marriage, but right before the ceremony was killed aboard one of these "blow balloons" when it crashed over New York in a storm--all hands and passengers were lost.  Sim and Suley have come to find his remains, and they bribe the guide and the black kid and others with still more drugs, harder drugs, to get them to help find some of Charley's remains in hopes they can clone him.  A human interest subplot involves Sim being jealous over Charley.

Both these plot threads are suitably resolved.  The Arizonans and their drug-loving hirelings find the cloak Suley gave Charley as a betrothal present.  There isn't enough blood on it to clone Charley, but Sim is able to collect sufficient genetic material that he can use it in some fashion left to the reader's imagination while he and Suley have sex, so that nine months later a child is born to Suley who bears a resemblance to all three of them, Sim, Suley and Charley.  

A third plot thread, if we want to call it that, one perhaps inspired by the spike in interest in American history experienced in 1976, perhaps an ironic joke on the "bore you out of your mind with talk about what New York used to be" theme, is pretty annoying and pretty inconsequential.  I refer to the drug "trips" undertaken by Suley and the guide.  These "trips" consist of vague and semi-cryptic visions of New York through the centuries, which we readers experience as fragmentary images of fighting during the War of Independence, ticker tape parades, and on and on.  These images are like puzzles Pohl has constructed for us readers--is the man with "strangely ill-fitting teeth" George Washington?  Must be!  And what about the "curious spider-like structures at some of the corners, platforms on four long legs, and in little sheds on the platforms uniformed men pulling levers that moved semaphores"?  I'm afraid this is not ringing a bell, some kind of optical telegraph system?  I hate this sort of abstract, impressionistic, psychedelic, surreal, trippy, nonsense, and we get almost a page of it, and it has nothing to do with the plot that I can see.  

I guess I'll call "The Prisoner of New York Island" barely acceptable, and, as with Bloch's piece of junk, tell you it may be of historical interest as a snapshot of the SF world in 1976, what with all the references to urban blight and drugs and worries about energy conservation and the environment.

It looks like "The Prisoner of New York Island" has not appeared in any other venues.  I'm reading some rare stories today, kids! 

"Bind Your Sons to Exile" by Jerry Pournelle

Here we have a serious piece of hard science fiction about travelling through the solar system to work on an asteroid mine, a story that also addresses issues of race and class from a conservative perspective.  The story is also a piece of evangelism for the space program, arguing that the solution to such characteristic 1970s worries as pollution and natural resource scarcity or price inflation is to shift extraction and industry off the Earth and so the government should make a priority of space exploration.    

A guy who is half Native American grows up in a crime-ridden California housing project; intelligent and industrious, he manages to escape the local schools with their "timeserving teachers who cared only for quiet in the classrooms and a minimum of work" to attend a middle-class school across town.  From there he got into engineering programs and graduated with impressive marks.  As a credentialed minority he could get a cushy no-show job thanks to affirmative action and quotas, but he has disdain for such handouts--he wants to succeed by his own merits and his own efforts, to be rich but to have earned every penny.  So he signs up for one of the most dangerous jobs in the solar system--working on the first asteroid mine!  When he gets to the rock after a year-and-a-half-long trip, he finds he is the most qualified person there--most smart and educated people don't even consider applying to work in the asteroid belt because it is hellishly hazardous--when our hero arrives he notices many of the old hands are missing eyes, fingers, and/or limbs.    

Our guy is given the job of chief of staff and the task of making the asteroid's operations more efficient.  Lots of text is given over to how the asteroid operates, but a thread of the plot is about our hero learning to get along with other people and build relationships.  When the US government decides to stop supporting the asteroid mine, the mine's leadership figures out a way for the project to support itself, and the asteroid becomes an independent community, a real home to which the main character can truly belong, a community not based on race or ethnicity but on shared experiences, shared goals and shared sacrifice.

Pournelle does a good job with all the technical stuff, and I sympathize with his negative attitude about government workers and unions and all that, and his belief in the nobility of earning everything you have, building an individual identity--not one based on your genetic heritage--and striking out and building something new on the frontier.  As entertainment, however, "Bind Your Sons to Exile" falls short.  The style is merely OK, and the story lacks suspense, surprise, a real climax, and real human feeling--Pournelle's story like an opinionated science article.  Perhaps ironically, I suspect my agreement with the politics of "Bind Your Sons to Exile" is one of the things that makes it feel bland to me--I don't read SF to have my own beliefs validated, but to be entertained and to encounter stuff that is challenging or disturbing or surprising--sure, I denounce the commies, poke fun at the feminists, roll my eyes at the Freudians, and dismiss out of hand the supernatural claims of religious writers, but the alienness of those writers' ideas--if they are decent writers, at least--makes their work strange and engaging, and thus more entertaining, to me.   

Considering its aims, "Bind Your Sons to Exile" is more successful than Bloch's story, which aims to be funny and is not funny, and probably Pohl's, which includes a lot of annoying extraneous matter, but I can't call Pournelle's story good.  The verdict is acceptable but bland. 

Pournelle would include "Bind Your Sons to Exile" in his anthology of stories about living in space, The Endless Frontier.  You may recall we just read Katherine MacLean's 1975 story from that book, "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl." 

"Beneath the Hills of Azlaroc" by Fred Saberhagen

Well, I just complained that Pournelle's hard SF story was not challenging, and here we have a contrast, a hard SF story which describes phenomena that are totally wild and hard to understand, at least at first.  

Azlaroc is a heavenly body settled upon by quite a few humans, a place where bizarre phenomena are the norm, phenomena Saberhagen describes in cryptic terms for much of the story, though we eventually get a more-or-less comprehensible explanation.  Azlaroc isn't really a planet or star, though it is of planetary size and shape.  Azlaroc is one component of a three-member system that includes a pulsar and a black hole--the weird energies of these bodies has an effect on atoms and radiation such that every year a layer of altered particles that the settlers call a "veil" falls on Azlaroc and clings to its surface and everything on the surface, including the settlers.  Each veil act as permeable but noticeable barrier between a person shrouded in it and matter which is not under that veil.  Two men who have the same number of veils on them look and sound normal to each other, but if you try to look at or talk to a man carrying around a significantly different number of veils than you do, he will appear blurred and his speech will be distorted.  Food and drink covered in more or fewer veils than are you will smell and taste different.  Once a veil has fallen on you, you cannot leave Azlaroc, but people settle on the place because the veils prolong life.

The reader doesn't grok most of the stuff in the previous paragraph until he is like halfway through the story.  The plot concerns an ambitious rich guy who wants to be the first person to escape Azlaroc, and most of the story is narrated by a guy who accompanies him on his daring quest.    

Somewhat to my surprise, because Saberhagen is not a writer I think about very much at all, I am finding "Beneath the Hills of Azlaroc" the most satisfying of the stories I have read in Odyssey's first issue today.  It is satisfying to get clues about Azlaroc's bizarre nature and then later learn what is going on, and the quest to escape the place is an actual adventure with suspense and an unpredictable ending that is satisfying when you get to it.

Good.  According to isfdb, "Beneath the Hills of Azlaroc" has not been reprinted, but when I flipped through Saberhagen's 1978 novel The Veils of Azlaroc I detected signs the text of this story formed a portion of that novel. 

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My view is that the more SF magazines the better, so it is sad that Odyssey only survived two issues, but it is not surprising--this magazine is not great.  Four of the five stories we've read today are not good, and there are additional issues.  Typos are a problem--Fred Pohl's name is actually misspelled on the title page of "Prisoners of New York Island."  The art itself is pretty good, but I guess in order to fill up space the exact same pictures are used multiple times--the full-page illustration for Bloch's story, a young woman in panties and a T-shirt with a Star Trek joke printed on it, appears in red on one page and blue on the page right next to it, and the illustration for Pohl's, a collage of the faces of four of the characters in front of a crumbling New York skyline, is printed three times in the space of five pages.

I don't regret reading these odd and rare stories, but I can only recommend one of them to ordinary readers, though I guess the others all may appeal to various niche audiences.

In our next episode we'll look at something that has had a broader appeal and greater influence than today's selections.

Science Fiction Stories, July 1957: Silverberg, Leiber, Jones and Scortia

Advertising works!  In our last blog post we saw an ad for Science Fiction Stories' July 1957 issue in a copy of Science Fiction Quarterly and here we are reading it just a blink of an eye later.  I guess it helps that the cover of this issue, by Kelly Freas, is great, with a cool space ship, fascinating aliens, a terrific monster, and beautiful colors and composition.  I guess Freas deserves those eleven Hugos.

"Neutral Planet" by Robert Silverberg

The people of Earth and the bear-like people of Rigel are at war.  But new forcefield technology has rendered offensive weapons useless, so there are no space naval battles.  Instead, Rigel and Terra compete over exclusive trade deals and alliances with neutral systems.  As the story begins, a Terran ship crewed by a score of men is approaching a planet in the Antares system, hoping to sign a treaty with the primitive reptilian natives; the sneaky Rigelians must have a spy back on Terra who informed them of the Terran mission to Antares, because a Rigelian ship on a similar mission is right behind the Terran one.

The rival missions conduct cloak and dagger operations against each other, but the focus of the story is their competition to sign an exclusive treaty with the scaly spear-wielding Antareans.  The Rigelians suffer a disaster--after being showered with gifts, the natives kill a bunch of Rigelians with their spears.  The human captain figures out the psychology/sociology of the Antareans--the responded badly to the gifts because they were loathe to be indebted to strangers.  The personnel of the Terran mission contrive a way of putting themselves in debt to the reptile men--they stage a starship crash and allow the natives to rescue them.  Now feeling as if the humans owe them something, the Antareans have no objection to doing them the insignificant favor of signing a treaty with Terra.

I guess this story is influenced by the Cold War, in which the United States and the Soviet Union competed diplomatically and via espionage because direct warfare had been rendered prohibitive by nuclear weapons.    

"Neutral Planet" feels a little contrived with its elaborate rules of indirect warfare that seem to be broken occasionally and its counterintuitive psychology, but it is an entertaining piece of work, Silverberg doing a decent job of sketching what the various fun SF elements (the weapons and electronic equipment, the various aliens) look like and how they perform.

It doesn't look like "Neutral Planet" has been anthologized, but it has appeared in several Silverberg collections, including two German publications.  In its magazine appearance here it suffers from many typos, so I would suggest you read it in a book.   

"Femmequin 973" by Fritz Leiber

We often find unconventional sex in stories by Leiber: underage sex, rape, incest, perversion.  (See "The Sadness of the Executioner," "Beauty and the Beasts," "The Bait," "The Glove," "A Bad Day For Sales," "The Princess in the Tower 250,000 Miles High," "The Mind Spider," "A Rite of Spring," and probably others I am forgetting.)  A title like "Femmequin 973" has me suspecting (hoping?) ol' Fritz has some more unusual sexual material for us; well, let's see.

My suspicions were well-founded--"Femmequin 973" is a story about sex robots built to order by master craftsmen for horny rich men!  At the center of the story are two such crafts...people--the man, Harry Chernik, who does all the precision work building the sexbots and the woman, Rita Bruhl, who styles them, modelling their movements and voices and clothing.  Leiber's descriptions of the psychology and histories of these two damaged creatives and of the whole business of designing, constructing, marketing and selling sex robots is very engaging and entertaining; he brings this whole scenario to vivid life.

Harry is unattractive and afraid of women, and for twenty years has taken his satisfaction in life from building the sex robots.  Rita is a beauty, but while she enjoys flirting with men and inspiring their desire, she finds actual sexual contact sort of repulsive.

These two losers in love bear a resentment towards one John Gottschalk.  Twenty years ago Harry had found a woman willing to date him, sweet and mousy Louise, and hoped to marry her.  Harry and Louise would go on double dates with John and his girlfriend, Rita.  John was attractive, and Rita found him a man she could actually fall in love with and have sex with.  But John was afraid of women, and didn't want to marry a strong-willed beauty, and instead stole Louise from hapless Harry, Louise being the kind of timid girl he need not fear would dominate him or object to him cheating on her.  John thus broke both Harry and Rita's hearts, shortly before they got their jobs in the illegal sex robot factory.

The climax of "Femmequin 973" involves Rita convincing Harry to help her build a sex robot that looks and acts exactly like her and her managing to sell it to John.  The final sentence of the story revels that this Rita simulacrum has a special addition intended to inflict a terrible revenge on John--the vagina dentata.   

Very good--Leiber nails all the technical stuff I sometimes talk about, pacing and images and economy and so forth, as well as doing a great job with the characters and all the speculative stuff.  Five out of five cunningly cut cams!  This is the best story I have read in a while.       

 

This story is not nearly as revered as it might be; maybe people find it disturbing or sexist or something.  "Femmequin 973" was reprinted in 1959 in a French magazine (oh la la!) and languished until being included in two 21st-century Leiber collections.  Horror fans and people interested in attitudes about sexual relationships in SF and portrayals of women by male SF writers are encouraged to check it out. 

"The Gardener" by Raymond F. Jones

"The Gardener" is one of those SF stories about how hard it is being better than everyone else, the isolation suffered by those with superior intelligence and super powers.  I find this sort of thing kind of tiresome, like hearing beautiful women moan about how hard it is to be beautiful, or celebrities whine about the burden of their fame, it feels like hearing life's winners trying to get some of the sympathy generally reserved for life's losers.

Anyway, "The Gardener" is the story of Jimmy Correll, boy prodigy.  Super smart, he is mustered into high school long before puberty sets in, and it looks like he'll be attending university at age ten or eleven!  The fact that he is astoundingly bright is crystal clear to all, and most people's response to Jimmy is fear or repulsion, but they don't even know the half of it!  Jimmy can read minds!  Jimmy has microscopic vision and can see the little one-celled creatures in a drop of pond water!  Jimmy has telescopic vision, and can even cast his mind to Mars and explore the ruins of the red planet's once-great civilization and frolic with the children of that civilization's lingering descendants!  The boy genius keeps these super powers a secret from others, who already regard him as a freak and either avoid, ignore or make fun of him.  Jimmy is lonely and wishes he was like others.

The story takes place in a period of crisis in Jimmy's young life.  Wanting to be like other, ordinary kids and have ordinary friendships, he doesn't want to leave high school early and go to college, as it will be impossible to make friends there, and he finally has made a friend here at the high school, a popular athlete who asked him for help with trigonometry.  Jimmy flees a big assembly put on to celebrate him and his ascension to university.  But one of the few adults who has been truly kind to him, the janitor, finds him.  The janitor reveals that Jimmy is not the only person on Earth with super powers, that the janitor himself has telepathy and can go to Mars and see amoebas and all that.  Jimmy has not been alone at all--the adult members of his superior race are always watching, looking out for him.  (Jimmy is the sprouting plant they are "gardening.")  

Jimmy gets back to the school in time for the assembly being held in his honor and I guess we are expected to think Jimmy has learned how to have fulfilling relationships with the mundanes (I guess we call them "muggles" now) as well as being buoyed by the knowledge that he has a whole secret society of fellow superhumans backing him up, making sure he doesn't get into trouble.

Like one of those old novels (Fielding?) in which a person of humble status is suddenly revealed to be a member of the elite, or all those mangas in which the lonely plain kid in class is inexplicably pursued by the school's most popular girl, "The Gardener" is a wish fulfillment fantasy in which the main character is special because of an accident of birth and his problems are abruptly resolved by the actions of others--he doesn't have to actually do anything to succeed.  Jones' story particularly appeals to the kinds of guys who are smarter than average but not good at making friends (and are perhaps overrepresented among the readers of SF magazines)--it depicts just such an individual making a friend and receiving accolades, the character's intelligence and the praise he receives all cranked up to maximum volume.

This is pedestrian, pandering filler stuff, but Jones writes it competently, so I'll call "The Gardener" acceptable.      

"The Gardener" was reprinted in a bunch of Jones collections in America and Europe with wild surreal covers, including one that looks like an H. R. Giger.

We read the long story "The Non-Statistical Man" in the summer of last year

"Gag Rule" by Thomas N. Scortia

Unlike the three preceding stories, "Gag Rule" has never been reprinted--if you want to read this one you have no refuge from this magazine's rampant typographical errors!

"Gag Rule" is a joke story and a logic puzzle and a total waste of the reader's time.  Thumbs down!

Three salesmen are on the planet of rabbit people.  (Remember those Star Wars comics that had a rabbit man in them?  That was really something, wasn't it?)  The rabbit people have been addicted to practical jokes ever since they were introduced to humor by Earth people.  The three salesmen represent manufacturers of such devices as exploding cigars and those flowers you wear on your lapel that spray fluid in the eyes of those who try to smell the flower.  (See illustration below.)  The three salesmen are meeting a rabbit man trade representative, and after the four enjoy an elaborate meal this big-eared joker presents the three salesmen with a test--he who passes the test will be rewarded a monopoly on access to the rabbit world market.

The rabbit person leaves the three salesmen locked in the room.  He warns through a speaker that one, two or all of them have drunk poisoned wine and that there is a single antidote capsule available in the little box on the table.  They should note, however, that the antidote is poison to anyone who hasn't already ingested the initial poison.  The eyes of those who have drunk the poisoned wine will lose their color, but there is no reflective surface in the room, so no man can diagnose himself.

The rabbit man says the poisons are deadly, but after the main character has solved the puzzle and won the contract, the rabbit admits that the poisons are not in fact deadly.  Wow, hilarious.  The story ends with a pun: "rabbit punch."

Maybe you will like "Gag Rule" if you enjoy logic puzzles, but I wouldn't bet on it.  

Detail of illustration for "Gag Rule" by C. A. Murphy

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The Scortia was painful and the Jones merely competent filler, but the Leiber is great and the Silverberg good, so I have no regrets about investigating this issue.  

More magazine stories next time, but it will be back to the late Thirties for us.  

Four mid-'50s stories from worlds beyond selected by T E Dikty: R F Young, F M Robinson, T Godwin & T N Scortia

For some reason it is hard to tear your eyes away from the cover of 1958's Six From Worlds Beyond.  Is it the representation of an atom in the upper right corner?  No, I don't think it is that.  Is it the crudely imagined laboratory apparatus and the poorly realized veiny brain behind it over  there in the right center?  Naw, can't be that.  Could it be the sexalicious nude blonde reclining there in the lower third of the cover?  Oh yeah, I bet that is it.

The arresting cover of Six From Worlds Beyond came to my attention recently when I read Robert Bloch's "I Do Not Love Thee, Dr. Fell," a story that is included in the anthology.  The pages behind that dreamy young lady and the accompanying collage of cliched science-related images are devoted to six stories extracted from T. E. Dikty's hardcover The Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels: 1956.  We've already read two of the six, the aforementioned piece from Psycho-scribe Bloch just a few days ago, and critical darling Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon" back in 2014.  Those stories are pretty good, so let's read the remaining four.  The internet archive, world's finest website, has a scan of The Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels: 1956 that one can borrow, so we'll be reading them there. 

"Jungle Doctor" by Robert F. Young (1955)

It looks like I have blogged about six stories by Young over the years, "The Ogress," "Thirty Days Had September," "The Dandelion Girl," "Ape's Eye View," "Starscape With Frieze of Dreams," and "When Time Was New" and I liked a majority of them.  

Lindsey is guy who works at a mechanic's, washing cars, and who loves poetry, often quoting Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Milton to himself.  He is also a drunk who drinks all day.

One cold snowy night Lindsey is walking home when he finds a beautiful blonde teenager just laying there unconscious in the snow-filled ditch!  This girl, as we know from the little prologue, is Sarith, a medical professional from a super high-tech galaxy-spanning civilization who has ended up on our little low-tech Earth because she fed the wrong coordinates into the interstellar teleporter device that hangs from her belt.  Oops!*

Lindsey carries Sarith to his home and lays her out on the couch.  (I guess that is Sarith on the cover of Six From Worlds Beyond.)  The drunk falls asleep before she revives; when Sarith comes to, she uses the psychic powers so many aliens in these old SF stories have to learn English from Lindsey's mind, and also become familiar with his biography--Lindsey is drinking himself to death because his significant other died.  Sad!  How exactly she died is buried deep.  Mysterious!

Lindsey figures he has to report this lost teenaged girl to the police, but said girl, name of Sarith, invades his mind and deploys a mental block that will keep him from doing so--she needs some time to figure out where Earth is so she can get back to the Galactic Federation and she doesn't want the native law enforcers interrupting her.  But after she has figured out how to teleport to the nearest Federation system she delves into Lindsey's mind again and gets a better grasp of his tragic fate.  Perhaps inspired by a book by Albert Schweitzer she found in Lindsey's house (with her alien brain she can read an entire book in a few minutes), Sarith decides to stay on Earth and heal Lindsey's mind and the minds of other Earth people.

Young does a good job of describing Sarith's powers and Lindsey's psychology; his descriptions are clear and compelling and he doles out the details, like in a mystery story, in a way that keeps you curious.  And of course, Young's story is a wish fulfillment fantasy which gives form to your impossible but oh so comforting dream that a gorgeous blonde teenager might just fall into your lap from out of nowhere and use her super powers to patch up this life of yours that you have totally FUBARed.  Either way you look at it, thumbs up for "Jungle Doctor."  

"Jungle Doctor" debuted in Startling, in the same issue as James Gunn's "The Naked Sky," which we read in May. "The Naked Sky" was illustrated by Virgil Finlay, and Ed Emshwiller provides illustrations for "Jungle Doctor," as well as for other pieces in the issue, making the issue one all you lovers of SF illustration will want to check out--Medusa, futuristic fishing gear, a winged woman, a nude woman whose brain is attached to a machine via wires, a woman opening a coffin to find within it a body just like her own, a woman running through a ruined city; all these visions are there for you to feast your eyes on.

*Stifle those jokes about woman drivers!

"Dream Street" by Frank M. Robinson (1955)

Back in September I read six stories by Robinson and liked a bunch of them.  "Dream Street" debuted in an issue of Imaginative Tales that has a cheeky cover that illustrates a story by Robert Bloch that is probably supposed to be funny (and probably isn't funny--I am firmly of the belief that in a better world Bloch would have ditched the comedy schtick and focused all his energies on tales of tragedy and blood and guts.)  Robinson actually has two stories in this issue of Imaginative Tales, one under a pen name.  Maybe I'll tackle that pseudonymous one someday, but today we attack "Dream Street," which would be reprinted in a hardcover anthology in 1971, The Days After Tomorrow.

This is a well-written story about a kid of the future, when there are colonies on Mars and Venus and scientific expeditions going to Saturn and so forth.  The kid is an orphan who is obsessed with becoming a spaceman.  He runs away from the orphanage to make his way to the biggest spaceport on Earth with the idea of stowing away on a rocket ship.  As the kid meets all kinds of disgusting characters on his journey, like thieves and prostitutes, and lots of people who tell him that being in space and being on alien planets is either boring or dangerous, Robinson seems to be suggesting that conquering space is some kind of mistake, but in the end it is suggested that, for some people at least, like our main character, the romance of space is justification enough for incurring all those risks and enduring all those hardships--some men are just called to the stars, the way so many men throughout history have been called to the sea.

A solid and smoothly presented story; there isn't a twist ending or an explosive climax or any of that, but "Dream Street" is still a good read, one in which all the emotions and all the decisions of the characters feel authentic.

"You Created Us" by Tom Godwin (1955)

Here we have a story by Tom Godwin, author of the famous "Cold Equations."  We read a novel by Godwin back in 2014, Space Prison, and I gave it a mildly negative review.  But we won't hold that against him.  "You Created Us," which first was printed in Fantastic Universe, doesn't seem to have been printed after it appeared in Six From Worlds Beyond, but we won't hold that against Godwin, either.

The main character of "You Created Us" suffered a head injury while serving in Korea; as the story begins he works as an executive for a firm with a factory in San Francisco and is driving through the deserts of the Southwest, near nuclear weapons testing sites, en route to the plant.  Suddenly, he spots bipedal reptiles taller than a man!  They must be mutants, created by the radiation of the weapons tests!

Over the next few years our protagonist, while still maintaining his job and not saying anything to anybody to make them think he is brain damaged or insane, conducts a low key investigation of the truth behind what he saw on that desert drive.  It turns out that the mutants are more intelligent than us humans and have psychic powers that allow them to hypnotize those humans who see them into forgetting them.  The main character's head injury and the steel plate in his skull offer him some protection from these hypnotic powers, which is why he remembers them.  He learns that the reptile people are using their mutant abilities on the leaders of the Soviet Union and of the United States to make war inevitable and make sure the commies defeat us!  Once the land of the free and the home of the brave is a cratered wasteland, the reptile race--immune to radiation--will inherit the Western Hemisphere and proceed to use similar tactics to bamboozle the human race in the Eastern Hemisphere to exterminate itself; then the scaley psykers will rule the world.  The small number of humans who survive the nuclear wars will be their cattle!     

Can the protagonist warn the human race of its peril, or will the reptile people focus their psychic powers and overwhelm his ability to remember the horrible truth he has learned?  Can he maybe figure out a way to warn himself even if his memory is erased?

This is acceptable filler; not bad, but no big deal.  I guess students of SF stories reflective of Cold War fears of nuclear war and communist domination, and stories about radiation and evolution, may find it has historical value.  "You Created Us" is perhaps noteworthy because it is pessimistic--the main character's efforts to save human civilization fail and the human race is doomed to be conquered by the reptiles, just like, the story says, the dinosaurs were overthrown by the mammals.  (I guess this story also has historical value in its illustration of 1950s theories about the extinction of the dinosaurs.)  Man's science is not going to save him--in fact, as the title of the story, a phrase used by the mutants, indicates, man's own scientific "progress," and his propensity for violence, are what is going to destroy or subjugate him.   

"The Shores of Night" by Thomas N. Scortia (1956)

It looks like I haven't read anything by Thomas N. Scortia since 2019, when I jawed at length (over the course of three blog posts) about nine stories by him: "Alien Night," "Caution!  Inflammable!," "Sea Change," "The Bomb in the Bathtub," "John Robert and the Dragon's Egg," "The Icebox Blonde," "Though a Sparrow Fall," "Morality," and "Judas Fish."  According to notes in The Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels: 1956 and at isfdb, "Sea Change," which I liked and which debuted in Astounding, is a small portion of "The Shores of Night."  So I guess I can expect to appreciate this full novella, which is over 50 pages in The Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels: 1956 and would be reprinted in a French anthology in 1977 and in English in 1981's The Best of Thomas N. Scortia.

"The Shores of Night" is full of learned references: we find indirect references to T. S. Eliot, direct references to Greek literature (the story opens with a reference to Argus of the thousand eyes and one of its chapters is called "Bellerophon" and features a spaceship called Pegasus) and to the Bible, as well as a remark that the landscape of Pluto looks like a "block print...struck in the severest style...."  This is sort of an ambitious story, and I think Scortia pulls it off.

It is also a fundamentally optimistic story; like Robinson's "Dream Street," "The Shores of Night" has as its theme the question of whether conquering space is worth the risk and sacrifice involved, and while admitting that the cost is high, argues that mastering the stars is worth it.

Mankind has spent a century working on a star drive, spending a bazillion dollars and losing many brave spacemen.  The star drive currently under development won't work near a strong gravity field, and so, to escape the reach of the sun, a huge expense has been incurred constructing and maintaining a star-drive construction and testing facility way out on Pluto.  The cost is not merely financial and material, of course--military men and scientists and technicians have devoted their lives to the project for decades, and many have suffered collapsed marriages, been millions of miles away while their kids grew up, etc.  

The boffins and service personnel out on Pluto are just months away from a final test of the Bechtoldt Drive, named after its designer, the top physicist on Pluto, Beth Bechtoldt, when the Earth government pulls the plug on funding for the project--the tax payers and voters have had it with all the expense, especially after colonizing Mars and exploring the gas giants and all that has not yielded anything by way of profits: the whole space program is a drain, nothing actually useful has been found beyond Earth's atmosphere.  Of course, the space program boosters tell them that the real profit will come when we reach other solar systems, but those starry-eyed idealists have been saying that for decades and the stars don't seem any closer than they did fifty years ago.

Beth Bechtoldt is willing to follow orders, but the head of the Pluto base, Major General Matthew Freck, decides they are going rogue, testing the star drive anyway in the next few weeks, before the ship arrives from Earth to bring them home!  Of course, rushing the test will make that perilous enterprise even more risky for the test pilot, Art Sommers.  A lot of the story's drama is in the relationships Freck, Bechtoldt and Sommers have with each other and with the program to conquer the stars, to what extent they are selfish, brave, scared, etc.  Scortia does a pretty good job with all this emotional stuff--for example, the three aren't just archetypes who butt up against each other, but evolve over the course of the story--and of course readers can see it all as an allegory of their own lives.  What gives your life meaning, and what have you sacrificed in pursuit of that meaningful project?  Have you played it too safe?  Have you sacrificed family to your career or some passion in a way you regret?  Should you have done more in service to humanity, or have you been presumptuous in thinking you knew what was best for others and arrogantly telling them what to do?

The test fails and Sommers is blinded.  When the relief ship arrives it has new technology developed on Earth while the Pluto team was away, which is used to integrate Sommers's brain into the controls of the next test craft; more closely attuned to the drive, Sommers is able to make it work!  But the government on Earth, which is determined to stifle the star program, suppresses the details of the test!  Freck, Bechtoldt and Sommers get frozen up there on Pluto in an accident, but their brains are saved; the government, wanting to get rid of Freck but also wanting to keep his valuable knowledge accessible, integrates the general's brain with the semi-organic super computer that runs the Earth's most advanced city.  

This super computer is made up of human brains thought to be dead; in fact, the consciousnesses of the brains' owners still endure, though weakly.  Freck is a man of powerful will, and his consciousness is still strong, and he is able to wrangle the other souls in the machine and take over the whole apparatus!  There is also a series of scenes in which Freck despairs and considers suicide, but his eight-year-old granddaughter, inspiring him with an act of self-sacrifice within hours of him first setting his electronic eyes on her, gives Freck the kick in the pants he needs to get off his duff and foil the government efforts to scotch the star program.           

        

In the final section of the story we are assured that the effort to conquer the stars will succeed, and that Freck, Bechtoldt and Sommer's consciousnesses, operating star ships and in total rapport with each other, will never be lonely and are part of the human race's glorious history.

Thumbs up for this endorsement of mankind's quest to bend the natural universe to its will and its romanticization of mankind as a collective, a sort of immortal being of which we are all components.

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Six From Worlds Beyond turns out to be a quite good anthology, with no bad stories; the mesmerizing picture of Sirath on the cover is not the only reason to pick one up!