An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe

"The rich are his clients.  Rich people, governments—they're all rich, never let anybody tell you different—and rich corporations.  Nobody else can afford his fees.  He takes the money and does what they want.  Sometimes it's good.  Sometimes it isn't.  He's a wizard.  I'll give him that."

Back when it was pretty new, I read 2008's An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe, a man whose knowledge of genre literature, high literature, and science and technology, as well as his deep philosophical, emotional and intellectual commitments, prolificity and abilities as a wordsmith probably make him the greatest or the ultimate speculative fiction writer, and I have to admit it didn't make much of an impression on me.  As I recall, its relatively simple style (compared to something like The Book of the New Sun, which is full of hard words and elaborate images and difficult to follow passages) underwhelmed me and the fact that much of it was set in the world of the Broadway-style musical theatre and dealt with detective genre goop didn't grab me. But today I am a more mature and more patient reader and somewhat less dismissive of mystery writing conventions and a little less dismissive of Broadway, so this month, a month in which a lot of my time has been taken up with the pursuit of the almighty dollar and dealing with my family, I gave An Evil Guest another shot.  I read a scan of a first edition.    

An Evil Guest is set in an alternate/future Earth where mind-reading and necromancy are real, cancer was cured a year and a half ago, and the human race has developed a warp drive, with the result that rich people own private "hoppers" the size of automobiles and can explore the universe on their own and the United States is in diplomatic contact with an alien civilization on planet Woldercan.  We readers don't learn all this stuff immediately from the omniscient third-person narrator or in blocks of exposition, but in dribs and drabs in the conversation of our characters.  The text of An Evil Guest consists largely of dialogue, snappy repartee made up of brief and clever sentences in which characters offer the reader and each other info in an ofttimes oblique manner, and often involuntarily--again and again characters do that Sherlock Holmes thing in which they intuit something from clues within another character's speech.  

An Evil Guest has three principal characters, and they form a love triangle.  As with the setting, we learn about these people's personalities and lives through dialogue, in bits and pieces, sometimes learning very important things about them quite late in the game, and, since our info comes from the spoken words of people who are all experts in art of deception who are trying to manipulate each other we have every reason to doubt the truth of everything we learn.  We've got our protagonist, Cassie Casey, an attractive stage actress based in some northern American city.  (We eventually learn it is the New England town of Kingsport from H. P. Lovecraft's oeuvre.)  We've got Gideon Chase, a famous college professor, a philosopher who is also known among the elite as "a wizard" who can solve almost any problem for those willing to pay his astronomical prices.  In the first of An Evil Guest's chapters the President of the United States hires Chase to help the Feds deal with our third lead character, Bill Reis.  The President considers Reis terribly evil, and so elusive that the federal government can't seem to keep track of him or figure out just what he is up to.  Or so the Commander-in-Chief and his chief lackey say.  Reis is like the richest man in the world and owns many businesses of all types--banks, restaurants, you name it--often under assumed names, and he is in close contact with the aliens on Woldercan, people who have a large supply of gold, which they can apparently create via molecular manipulation.  (This novel is all about taking something and changing it into something else, or at least making it look like something else.)  Cassie is almost always "on screen," but Chase and Reis just show up occasionally, though their actions drive the plot more than Cassie's, and Cassie and minor characters are always talking about and acting in response to these two mega-rich operators.

What unites Cassie, Chase and Reis is that they are all famous important people whose names, identities, and appearances are constantly changing, Cassie must mundanely, she being an actress whose assumption of other names and identities is (initially, at least) overt and expected by those around her.  False names, shape shifting and people assuming multiple identities are a major theme of An Evil Guest, with even the many minor characters often pulling such shenanigans--a cop looks like one of Cassie's two ex-husbands; two people with the same name show up, one impersonating the other; people whom we have been led to believe are good turn out to be evil or vice versa; and on and on.  A werewolf even makes an appearance.   

I won't go into all the twists and turns of the plot, which includes in its first two thirds lots of detective story elements like minor characters getting kidnapped and murdered, leaving Cassie and us readers wondering who committed these foul deeds and why, and then science fiction stuff like hyperdrive travel and interaction with alien; in the final third the scene shifts into Weird Tales territory and Cassie finds herself on a tropical island near R'lyeh where she must contend with worshippers of Cthulhu.

Early in the book, Chase, wanting to use Cassie to help him get a hold of Reis, takes the actress to the top of a mountain and performs some manner of eldritch ceremony there--afterwards Cassie is irresistibly beautiful and charismatic, and attracts Reis to her like a moth to a flame.  Both Chase and Reis quickly fall in love with Cassie, and compete for her at the same time they are trying to use her to learn about each other and perhaps control or destroy each other.  Though the Lovecraftian elements of An Evil Guest are in-your-face obvious, we might also see Wolfe's novel as having a plot much like an A. E. van Vogt production--the main character gains special powers and becomes embroiled in the conflicts and machinations of the superpowered elites who run the world behind the scenes and things get crazier and crazier as the story proceeds.  But as I have already suggested, Cassie, in contrast to many of the Canadian madman's heroes, is closer to a puppet or a victim than to a genius who masters the omni-science of Nexialism or prepares mankind to rule the sevagram or otherwise willfully launches a paradigm shift.   

In the second third of the novel Cassie is the star of a musical financed by Reis to be a vehicle for her--thanks to Chase's sorcery, Cassie is a brilliant singer and a top-class dancer and makes a success of the show, which I think Wolfe intends us to think is silly and stupid, though at the same time its tropical island and volcano god content foreshadows the final third of the novel.  New players, significantly government entities, stride on to the scene and themselves try to manipulate Cassie--the aforementioned kidnapping and murdering are part of this manipulation.  This portion of the novel makes explicit that this America is one in which federal agencies are totally corrupt, ignoring the elected political leadership and acting independently as they compete with each other for power; these agencies are not above murdering innocent people.  Gideon Chase and Bill Reis, fabulously wealthy and ultracompetent businessmen, swim with the government entities in this same pool of jockeying elites who ignore the law, where alliances are ever-shifting and the economy of which is based on exchanging favors.  A local police official tells Cassie, referring to Chase, that 

"Our friend helps me out sometimes, and I repay him whenever I can. There's a lot of that in my business."

Another of the players among these corrupt elites is the news media.  One of the things that makes Wolfe an exciting and unusual writer is that in a genre full of atheists who are libertarians and atheists who are commies, Wolfe is a committed Catholic and a conservative, and in An Evil Guest Wolfe takes some swipes at that perennial punching bag of all right wingers, the mainstream media.  Cassie has a friend who is a reporter who (like just about everybody) seems more interested in using Cassie to further her career or other desires than being her friend.  Early in the book Gideon Chase remarks that "Newspapers are not notorious for their painstaking accuracy."  One of the starkest but also subtle ways in which Wolfe suggests the world he is depicting, in particular its government and the media, is corrupt and reprehensible is through a TV news report that indicates that in this alternate USA women who regret their pregnancies are allowed to kill their children up to one year after birth and left-wing activists are pushing for the right to kill children up to age five.  A TV news reader presents this little tidbit this way:

"In an unrelated story, the Supreme Court has extended the period for post-parturition terminations to one year. Civil rights organizations continue to press for five for defectives."

This news story comes after a commercial in which a bottle of ketchup uncaps itself and pours out its own contents in a "crimson fountain," perhaps Wolfe priming us to think of blood and perhaps even self-destruction (a society that murders its children is one that is killing itself) and a report about the collision of a train and a school bus.  (Putting "In an unrelated story" between two different stories about dead children is one of Wolfe's little jokes.)  This news program, delivered dead pan and casually by the talking head but gruesome to us readers, also includes notice that famous philosopher Gideon Chase was injured in an assassination attempt.  (One of An Evil Guest's many instances of shape-changing is Chase having to have a limb amputated after he is shot and getting a battery of prostheses for use in different circumstances.) 

The euphemistic references to the murder of children is one of the grimmer examples of wordplay in An Evil Guest, which includes some lame puns and plenty of jokes and clues within people's names.  Cassie's agent has the last name "Youmans;" one woman's first name is "India," a source of jokes, and her assistant's full name is "Ebony White;" Cassie calls Gideon Chase "Gid" which of course looks a lot like "God," and another man is named "Gil" which is only one letter away from "Gid"--is it Chase in disguise?  One of the more clever pieces of wordplay is an adage Cassie whips out during a one-sided discussion of religion and good and evil with her perplexed journalist friend: "add nothing to God and you get good."  Did Wolfe come up with this or is it famous?  Are we supposed to think Cassie, who is often portrayed as ignorant, came up with this, or that she got it from Chase, the philosopher who has proclaimed that good and evil do not exist?

The final third An Evil Guest is more fantastical and has more of the flavor of horror fiction than detective fiction, and is less dialogue-oriented, with more images and more action.  Reis has Cassie brought to a Polynesian archipelago of which he is king--Cassie is considered queen by the inhabitants, Reis's subjects, whom we hear again and again are tall and fat.  Also among these islands we find that among the secret elites always negotiating or fighting a shadow war with each other behind the scenes and determining Earth's fate are various monster gods, including a shape-shifting shark god and Great Cthulhu himself, whose sunken city R'lyeh rests nearby.  Wolfe delivers a good horror sequence involving a woman killed by a shark and two very good horror sequences involving, first, a female Cthulhu worshipper who tries to get Cassie to betray Reis, and, second, a female private investigator hired by Reis to infiltrate the Cthulhu cult.  This poor P.I. becomes a living dead tool of Cthulhu and has horrifying experiences down in R'lyeh and back on the surface; her adventures are probably the most immediately effective scenes/or in the novel.

Who will live and who will die in the cataclysmic battle that erupts when Reis manipulates the US Navy into attacking R'lyeh?  Who is a Cthulhu worshipper and who is willing to die to save humanity?  Will Cassie end up with either of the two powerful men who love her?  Will the reader be able to figure out the significance of all the vague complicated hints in the Afterword about time travel and cloning?  Can it be that people who have died are going to reappear, and/or that some of the characters we have met are in fact clones or younger or older versions of other characters?  

What else can we say about An Evil Guest?  Well, there is a theme that wealth and gold are perhaps more trouble than they are worth (the quote from which the novel's title is taken and which serves as its epigraph suggests as much) but then there is also the suggestion that businesspeople are more honest and better stewards of society than politicians and other government bastards.  Is the world depicted in the novel, one in which infanticide is the norm and, apparently, Cthulhu is the real ruler of the Earth, some kind of satire of our real world where abortion is common and dictatorship and terrorism are rife? 

Then we have the fact that our main character is an attractive woman who has been victimized and exploited her entire life and who has two failed marriages behind her.  Like all the novel's characters, our feelings about Cassie must be ambiguous.  Is she a heroine, or just a pawn, a victim, of others?  Does Cassie ever really make a decision, ever accomplish a goal, or is she just pushed hither and thither by others, used by others and rescued by others?  The difficult experiences she endures after the battle between Cthulhu and the US Navy change her looks, but do they teach her how to be self-sufficient?  At the end of the novel Cassie is about to start a new phase of life; can we safely hope she will be happy and/or the mistress of her own fate, or is this new phase of life just the product of her being rescued by others yet again and should we expect Cassie to pull another blunder and enter into a third unhappy marriage?

An Evil Guest is a novel about dangerous space aliens, dangerous technologies and dangerous supernatural powers, but at its core it is a story about sexual relationships (and, after all, what could be more dangerous than sex?)  Wolfe offers theories of sexual relationships that I assume are pretty mainstream among regular people but perhaps not the kinds of theories that would be voiced among the educated, as Cassie and Wolfe acknowledge.  Why do Reis and Chase fall in love with Cassie?  Because she is good looking!  And what inspires Cassie's love for them in return?  It seems like she likes them because they are wealthy, successful, big and strong, and offer her gifts and attention.  Cassie seems fascinated by Chase's hi-tech automobile, and as for Reis, Cassie says to another character (referring to Reis by using one of the man's numerous aliases, "Wallace")

"Wally's strong, really strong.  We're not supposed to like strong men, but we do.  Or most of us do.  I do.  I know too many wimps already.  Wally says he loves me, and he means it.  I can tell.  It's hard not to like somebody who loves you."

An Evil Guest is a (take your pick) realistic or cynical book that tells you the world and people are the way you fear they are, not the way you hope they are.  Yikes!

Finally, can I recommend An Evil Guest?  Well, I like it, but I don't love it.  The style is smooth and easy to enjoy even if you have trouble keeping track of what is going on with all the detective parts in the first half or so and with all the time distortion and clone elements in the ending.  The horror stuff in the islands section is remarkably good.  And Wolfe gives us quite a bit to think over on the level of philosophy and when it comes to what actually happens in the story--some will embrace all the mystery and ambiguity, while others will complain that there is no real resolution of some of the plot elements and that we don't really find out what happens to many of the characters.  We don't even know if Cthulhu is OK! 

If, May 1966: A E van Vogt, R M Williams & R A Lafferty

In our last episode we read a Gene Wolfe story from the May 1966 issue of If, a magazine then edited by Frederik Pohl.  There seems to be a lot of interesting material in this issue, so let's check some of it out!

From 1966 to '68, If carried Lin Carter's regular column on fandom.  Carter's column this time around is about amateur press associations, and mentions H. P. Lovecraft, an enthusiastic amateur press participant, and Ted White, among other people.  The column is a jokey light-hearted thing, and kind of boring--it feels frivolous, trivial.      

More meaty (or maybe it just offers the kind of trivia I prefer) is the guest editorial by Lester del Rey.  Del Rey courts controversy, complaining that the science fiction writers of the mid-1960s do not incorporate current scientific developments into their work the way the science fiction writers of the mid-1930s did theirs.  Rather than being inspired by the hard sciences and technology, current SF writers, if they care about science at all, write about psychology and sociology, and they don't even use recent developments or discoveries in those fields as grist for their stories, but tired old cliches that shrinks and sociologists have been saying since the turn of the century.  Del Rey also suggests that SF writers have fallen under the influence of academics in the humanities, and replaced the bold, optimistic and exciting can-do heroes of past SF with worriers and pessimists who are a drag.  Ouch!

I wish del Rey had offered examples of the writers and stories he is attacking; I always find these kinds of 50- or 60-year-old blind items frustrating.  One of this blog's early posts, issued back in 2013, consisted of me pondering the identities of the targets of bitter attacks on fellow SF writers by Harlan Ellison and Jack Vance.  Del Rey does single out H. G. Wells and Raymond Z. Gallun for praise as people who integrated about both science and human characters in their work.  Del Rey is a big Gallun fan--I noticed a week or so ago when reading Robert Silverberg's "When We Went to See the End of the World" and William Rotsler's "Patron of the Arts" that del Rey had dedicated The Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Volume 2 to Gallun.

Enough with the features; now let's investigate three stories from the ish, those by our favorite Canadian A. E. van Vogt, the questionable Robert Moore Williams and the one-of-a-kind R. A. Lafferty.

"Silkies in Space" by A. E. van Vogt

There have been periods when the work of A. E. van Vogt was at the center of this blog's activities, but it has been a while since we have read anything by ol' Van.  Well, let's get back aboard the sevagram steam train with this story.

isfdb lists three Silkie stories, published from 1964 to 1967; "Silkies in Space" is the second.  In 1969 the three stories served as the raw material for the novel The Silkie.  In the past I have found that van Vogt stories are often better in their original magazine form than after being altered for publication in a fix-up novel, and that the experiences of reading the novel version and magazine version of a van Vogt story are quite different, so reading this story is not going to discourage me from reading the novel someday.   

Van Vogt's fiction often concerns a man with special mental powers, powers that are in the process of expanding, who discovers the hidden reality behind his world and becomes acquainted with secret elites who are influencing everything from behind the scenes and are likely in conflict with each other, and "Silkies in Space" follows this pattern.  We also find here van Vogt's familiar clunky style, and his fascination with people's thoughts and thought processes--in "Silkies in Space" we face many lines flatly telling us the main character's emotional response to this or that fantastic event, often simply that he finds it fantastic, and many sentences relating to us the hero's deductions and how he comes to his weighty decisions, decisions that will affect the course of history of not only the Earth but the universe!  There is also quite a bit of incomprehensible pseudo-scientific gobbledygook that serves as a rationalization of all the amazing phenomena that take place in the story.  Here's a passage, the three sentences that make up two paragraphs, that I think exhibit these traits of the van Vogt style:

The hard fight had driven him down to a special logic of levels. He felt an automatic outflow of hatred.

Yet, after a little, another realization penetrated: "I won!" he thought.  

It is of course not van Vogt's style that we fans of the mad Canadian like, but his crazy plots and crazy ideas, and "Silkies in Space" delivers on that score.

It is hundreds of years in the future.  Our hero is Cemp, one of the couple thousand Silkies living on Earth.  Silkies are men who have all manner of powers: by manipulation of gravity, energy fields, electricity, and the like, a Silkie can fly, detect and analyze all manner of natural phenomena (down to the atomic level!), and defend himself with crackling energy; via telepathy he can communicate with other Silkies, and with a superior subset of the human race; with his super brain he can memorize vast amounts of data; and there is more.  To make the fullest use of his powers, a Silkie must change into one of multiple Silkie shapes; van Vogt doesn't describe these in detail here, but suggests they have a shape something like that of a slug or fish--at one point we are told a Silkie's natural shape is "bullet-like" and twice that it in this form a Silkie is covered in "steel-hard" chitin.  Silkies, however, usually take the form of handsome human males.  Our guy Cemp is the most powerful of all Silkies, he having learned additional ways of using his powers from some aliens recently (I guess in the first Silkie story, 1964's "The Silkie.")

The conventional beliefs about Silkies, what Cemp calls "the official story" and today we might call the mainstream narrative pushed by the elites, are that the first generation of these super beings was created in a lab like 220 years ago, that there are only male Silkies, and that all of them are registered with a government bureau and work together to further the interests of Earth's inhabitants, both human and Silkie.  Silkies marry human women who are of the superior type, members of a minority of humans who have some limited form of telepathy.  (A subtheme of the story is the political, social and sexual relations between ethnic majorities and more talented ethnic minorities, a dynamic we see all the time in SF, presumably a reflection of how SF readers are both alienated from others and feel they are smarter than others.)  This entire view of Silkie history and of the place of Silkies in the world and the universe is subjected to questioning and radical revision over the course of the story.

As the story begins, Cemp is confronted by a Silkie who is not registered and who issues an ultimatum: he, and all the Silkies, are to abandon relations with the human race and join "the Silkie nation" on pain of death!  What can that mean?  The loyal Cemp reports this encounter to the federal agency that manages Silkie affairs, and is sent to do some investigating.  He discovers that there is a secret underground of unregistered Silkies--their numbers even include Silkie women!  Then he discovers that these unregistered Silkies came from an asteroid that has an orbit that stretches from the environs of Neptune to the region of Mercury, that within this 10-mile-wide rock resides an independent society of Silkies!  This planetoid approaches Earth every 110 years, and is about at its nearest point to Terra now!  Silkies are not the product of a human lab experiment, but natives of an alien world!

The government sends Cemp to this asteroid and he explores the subterranean world of the space Silkies and eventually meets them.  The space Silkies, like the Silkies of Earth, have a warped view of their own history and milieu, and after our hero learns from them what they believe to be the true history of their race, he finally gets the full truth from the being of pure energy that secretly lives in the center of the planetoid.  This creature, the Glis, controls the space Silkies but has managed to remain absolutely unknown--the space Silkies have no idea the Glis exists and that they are under its control.  (One of the first clues that points to this is how nice all the space Silkies are, in contrast to the way the space Silkie who issued Cemp the ultimatum on Earth behaved when they first met--that space Silkie was temporarily under the direct influence of the Glis and acting against his nature.)  The Glis' paranoid desire for secrecy leads it to try to destroy Cemp, the only being in the universe to know of its existence, but Cemp survives these attacks (thanks to his unique alien knowledge) and opens negotiations.

The Glis has the power to alter and even destroy entire star systems, and over millions of years has travelled from system to system, manipulating them to foster intelligent life.  When the Glis discovers or develops intelligent life, it sends some of the shape-shifting Silkies down to the inhabited planet to integrate into the local civilization.  At first this all seems like a campaign of benevolence, but then the truth is revealed.  The Glis is like a gardener and a collector!  Having molded or discovered a successful planetary civilization, the Glis shrinks the planet, inhabitants more or less intact, down to one hundred feet across and stores it within its planetoid!  The Glis has thusly collected over a thousand planets over the course of history!  Cemp narrowly escapes when the alien collector subjects our own planet Earth to this humiliation! 

In a way I didn't quite understand, Cemp exploits the fact that the Glis' molecules are so old they come from a period of history when the laws of physics were different than they are today, triggering an evolution in those molecules that turns the Glis into a sun a hundred or a thousand times larger than Sol and releases the 1800 planets, Earth among them, from captivity to grow back to their normal sizes.  The planets all begin orbiting this new sun, their civilizations are only mildly affected by the processes of shrinkage, preservation and now restoration.  (For one thing, they were in a time stasis, only a single second passing for each day experienced by the rest of the universe.)  Our sense of wonder ending foresees Cemp and the Silkies of all planets taking a leading role in building relationships among these 1800 civilizations--endless adventure and discovery awaits!

The process of actually reading "Silkies in Space" the first time was sort of a slog, as the sentences are not good and there are definitely points at which I was thinking, "What the hell is Van talking about?"  But the ending is kind of mind-blowing, and looking back upon it having read it, the plot is pretty cool, and reading it a second time made clear to my easily distracted mind how everything in the story made sense internally and was connected, with minor details in the beginning of the story, for example, serving as foreshadowing of what happens later on.  "Silkies in Space" is one of those stories that I can easily understand why others might not like it (especially since at 40 pages it represents a real investment of our brief time here among the living) even though I myself do like it.

"Silkies in Space" was reprinted in the French version of Galaxy, and in a British collection titled The Best of A. E. van Vogt, which is distinct from the American book of the same title which has an intro by Barry N. Malzberg and a terrifying white cover.

"The Hide Hunters" by Robert Moore Williams

Here we have a story that has never seen print, as far as isfdb knows, outside the pages of If.  Back in September when we read his story "Death Sentence" in John W. Campbell, Jr's magazine Unknown, I offered links to my blog posts about Robert Moore Williams and pointed out how in my experience his work is a mixed bag, so I won't go into that again, except to say that I have no idea if I will enjoy this story of about 19 pages.

"The Hide Hunters" is an acceptable monster/horror story, kind of like something out of Weird Tales but with a little more science to it.  Williams, for some reason, adds extraneous themes to the story, maybe just to pad out the length of the story (these guys get paid by the word, don't they?) with more or less interesting science and history material.  For example, at the beginning of the story there is a lot of blah blah blah about psychoanalysis and psychedelic drugs, and passages that are informed by psychological theory like

...it would be only a step away from the latent hostility found by the psychoanalysts to exist at the unconscious mind levels among civilized people, in which the father either killed the son or drove him away from home.

and 

Something about the fetid jungle, the hot, steaming wetness of the place, the gross sexuality of it, troubled him deep in his mind where the old fears of the race still lived.

but this stuff goes nowhere; Williams does not link it to the monster or to the fate of the main characters by having the monster be a manifestation of one of their neuroses or having a man use Freudian theory to solve a puzzle or anything like that.

Grayson and MacPherson are chemists in the Amazon rainforest hunting for roots that can be used to make psychedelic drugs.  An aged Indian, a local chief, comes by with a wild story--a demon has stolen his grandson's skin and is wearing and he wants to borrow a rifle to slay the demon and rescue his grandson's hide.  Obviously the white men think this is a load of crap and the man's request for the rifle is refused.  But later Grayson comes upon the chief and sees he is skinning what looks to be a man, having killed "him "via an ambush.  When the chief is done skinning the figure, Grayson sees it is not a human, but a sort of blob monster covered in cilia that had put on the young Indian man's skin!  

The chief figures he has killed the monster, but it was only stunned, and it wakes up after the chief has separated it from his grandson's hide and runs off.

The middle part of the story is kind of clunky, with a poor action scene (it is too long, too slow and too confusing, so it is not thrilling or even interesting, just frustrating and annoying) and a contrived series of events that Williams needs, or thinks he needs, to set up his climax.  For some reason, natives attack with poison blow darts at the very moment the helicopter that brings supplies to Grayson and MacPherson arrives.  The helicopter pilot is killed, but the white men escape, taking cover in the chopper.  MacPherson thinks he can fly the thing, but he doesn't know what he is doing, and so his maiden flight ends abruptly with a crash landing on a hill.  Right there on the hill are ruins of an Egyptian temple or city or something that no white person has ever seen before.  G & MacP are amazed to find this evidence of an Egyptian colony or trading post or whatever in the new world, and we readers are irritated because this potentially engaging element of the story, just like the talk of psychoanalysis and psychedelic drugs, has no bearing whatsoever on the plot.  In the same way that the Westerners need not have been chemists for the plot to work, but could have been police officers or communist rebels or gold prospectors or mercenaries or anything, these ruins could have been those of Incas or Mayans or space aliens or a previously undiscovered race or civilization or anything--the blob monster is not from Egyptian mythology or anything like that.  A truly satisfying story is like a gem whose facets are all connected smoothly, not just a jumble of disparate things that have been piled together because they are each individually fun or interesting.

Our guys find a bottomless pit by an altar, and the chemists figure the blob monster came from there, and ancient people must have tossed sacrifices down the pit to appease it.  The blob monster, they theorize, is an immortal creature from a bazillion years ago that envies more evolved creatures that have a solid shape, and so it skins people and dons their skins in an effort to emulate their solidity.  The monster shows up clad in the chopper pilot's skin, and they fight it.  It escapes.  Grayson was injured in the crash, so MacPherson explores the bottomless pit alone.  The monster comes back in MacPherson's hide, and Grayson destroys it in its final battle.

The downbeat twist ending sees the Indian chief kill Grayson because he assumes Grayson is dead, and the creature he sees approaching him is not his pal Grayson but the blob monster in Grayson's skin.  Oops!  The Indians throw Grayson's body down the bottomless pit, for some reason.

I like this kind of story, and there are some good horrific passages, but because of the problems I have enumerated at perhaps unnecessary length above, "The Hide Hunters" is merely acceptable.

"Golden Trabant" by R. A. Lafferty

Here we have a fun little story, relatively simple and straightforward, that brought a smile to my face, though it is full of brutality and ends with true gruesomeness.  (The ending brought H. P. Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep" to mind.)  

It is the near future in which private individuals can buy space ships and prospect around the solar system.  The story follows some tough customers--cold businessmen and ruthless thieves--who bring on to the world market a vast quantity of gold that they mine from an asteroid.  Lafferty offers an amusing account of how the thieves, who have zero compunctions about committing murder, try to double cross each other, and how a massive influx of gold shakes the world economy, and how the establishment finally stabilizes the situation.  Lafferty succeeds in getting you to admire the ingenuity and sangfroid of at least some of these greedy bastards.

The humor works, the gore works, and there is real speculation here about the economy and politics of the future if you want to entertain it.  Thumbs up!  

"Golden Trabant" was reprinted in the various editions in English, Dutch and French of Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? and then in our own 21st century (in which ingenuity and sangfroid will serve you well) in Mad Man, the seventh volume of Centipede Press's series collecting Lafferty's short fiction.

**********

A good issue of If, so kudos to Fred Pohl.  This issue also features an installment of the serialized version of Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown's Earthblood (with fun monster and sexy lady illustrations by Wallace Wood), a novel I might get around to reading some day--you'll recall I enjoyed Brown's "David's Daddy" and Sibyl Sue Blue.

More short SF in our next episode.  Until next time, keep an eye out for shape shifters and opportunities to prospect for gold, world economy be damned!

Beachheads in Space: L del Rey, A E van Vogt, J Wyndham and N Bond

We're going back Jack, and doing it again--reading from a paperback edition of an anthology edited by August Derleth and with a cover illustration by Richard Powers, that is.  I bought Beachheads in Space, Berkley G-77, years ago, I think at one of the Second Story Books locations, maybe Rockville, MD, fabled in story and song, maybe Washington DC, the belly of the beast.  This 1957 edition contains half the stories of the 1952 hardcover edition--who decided what stories would make the cut and based on what criteria?  The SF game is full of heartbreak, I guess.

We've already read two stories that appear in G-77, Donald Wandrei's "The Blinding Shadow," which we liked, and Eric Frank Russell's "Metamorphosite," which I thought merited a "mild to moderate recommendation."  The previous owner of my copy of Beachheads in Space graded the stories in the volume, and he seems to have thought the Russell was excellent and the Wandrei poor.  (Unless "E" is for "evil" and "P" is for "perfect," which I suppose is possible in this crazy world of ours.)  We're going to read four more selections from Beachheads in Space today and see what we think of them and whether our opinions jive with the assessments of my predecessor.

Grades issued by the previous owner of my copy of Beachheads in Space; 
looks like Eric Frank Russell was his fave with A. E. van Vogt coming in second;
we see Donald Wandrei and Nelson S. Bond in the garbage

"'The Years Draw Nigh'" by Lester del Rey (1951)

Here we have a downbeat story that suggests there is nothing in outer space worth finding and mankind is going to go extinct when it no longer has any frontiers to conquer.  Say it ain't so, Lester!

It is the future!  Human life has been extended many centuries, thanks to rejuvenation treatments.  On Mars was discovered the ruins of a high tech civilization that must have expired ten million years ago.  The human race used Mars as a star port from which to launch forty starships carrying forty hardy and optimistic bands of explorers hoping to find new worlds to colonize, hoping to meet other intelligent races.  That was centuries ago.  By fifty years ago, 39 of the star ships had returned--not a single one had found an inhabitable planet or evidence of alien life, after exploring thousands of systems!  Earth's culture went into decline and the Mars star port was closed. 

The plot of our story here is set in motion when the sensors detect the approach of the fortieth star ship.  The Mars star port is reopened and operated by only one man.  When the ship touches down only four men, a fraction of the vessel's original complement, emerge.  The explorers found alien ruins on a distant world, and to everyone's dismay they proved to be ruins easily identified as those of the long dead Martian civilization.  Just like us Terrans, the Martians explored the galaxy, found nothing worth conquering, and then lost all ambition and faded away!  The men of the final ship and the guy managing the Mars port, seeing life is hopeless and civilization has nothing left to achieve, decide to forgo their next rejuvenation treatment!

 

A downer!  We'll call this one acceptable; del Rey does a good job of setting the mood of fatigue, decay and hopelessness, but the characters don't do much and there isn't much plot progression or climax; you might call it a mood piece, the bleak tone of which is maintained from start to finish.  Previous owner calls it fair and I am right there with him.

"'The Years Draw Nigh'" made its debut in Astounding, in the same issue as Eric Frank Russell's "Ultima Thule," which we read two years ago and which I can recommend.  "'The Years Draw Nigh'" has been reprinted in del Rey collections.

"Repetition" by A. E. van Vogt (1940)

It has been a while since we grappled with the bewildering oeuvre of the Canadian madman who is so close to our hearts, A. E. van Vogt.  "Repetition" debuted in Astounding, in the same issue as the first installment of L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout, which we read way back in 2014, and Lester del Rey's "Reincarnate," which we just read in July, and Leigh Brackett's "The Treasure of Ptakuth," which we haven't read yet.  (Maybe soon!)  "Repetition" would become a component of the 1959 fix-up novel The War Against the Rull and would be reprinted in anthologies starting in the 1970s under the title "The Gryb."  

"Repetition" is a traditional science fiction story with space suits, alien monsters, and a hero who saves the day with quick outside-the-box thinking that leverages his knowledge--the title refers to the fact that this guy has had adventures on many planets and learned how to deal with many situations, and so has solutions to the problems he encounters during the course of the story because he has already dealt with similar problems.  At the end of the story he gives a little speech about how if mankind is to unite in peace to conquer the galaxy, people will have to learn techniques to prevent war and use them again and again throughout history the same way he has used tried and true techniques to overcome monsters.

The solar system is on the brink of war!  The Earth-Venus union is at odds with the Mars empire, and one of the points of contention is Europa--the Martians want control of Europa, and the Europans, who have built five cities in the fifty years since the colony on Europa was founded, want to maintain their independence.  As the story begins, our hero Thomas, an important politician from the Earth-Venus union, is flying over the surface of Europa with his guide, the Europan Bartlett.  Bartlett is leading Thomas into a death trap--the Europans are aware that the Earth-Venus union wants to allow Mars control of Europa in order to avoid war, and so these hardy colonists have hatched a wild scheme to murder Thomas and short circuit his appeasement policy.  But Thomas is an expert judge of character and psychology and a seasoned adventurer and survives the murder attempt, and Bartlett is too much of a gentleman to just kill Thomas himself in cold blood.  So, Bartlett sets the controls of their jetpack space suits, energy weapons attached, so they fly off into space, leaving them to die in the barren and monster-haunted Europan wilderness.  But Thomas insists he isn't licked yet, that they can survive the long march to one of the Five Cities.  To the amazement of Bartlett, Thomas figures out how to defeat the native monsters without any high tech weapons, ensuring their survival.  During the march the men argue over interplanetary policy, Thomas eventually convincing Bartlett the appeasement policy is a good one--it is essential to avoid war because all of the solar system's resources must be dedicated to developing star ships, and giving a diplomatic "win" to the current Martian government will enable them to prevail in the coming election against the war party, and then join the Earth-Venus union.  It seems that Thomas' skill in fighting the monsters and his ability to read Bartlett's psychology are as important in convincing Bartlett as are facts and logic.

The adventure portions of the story are pretty good--the equipment, the monsters, the descriptions of perils and landscape and so on.  The means Thomas employs to kill the most dangerous monster, the thirty-foot-long armored gryb, and the political discussions around the fate of Europa and the relationship among Earth, Venus and Mars, are pretty complicated, contrived, and unconvincing, but somewhat entertaining.  "Repetition" is certainly a good example of van Vogt's totally out-of-left field thinking, and perhaps Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.'s dedication to shaking readers up and presenting counterintuitive thinking that bucks conventional wisdom, that our man Van offers a scenario strikingly similar to the crises around Czechoslovakia and then Poland in 1938 and 1939 and makes a go at convincing the reader to side with the appeaser instead of the patriot eager to fight for his country.

I like this sort of thing, and agree with previous owner that "Repetition" is moderately good.

As I read the version of the story in this rapidly decaying copy of Beachheads in Space I consulted a scan of the appropriate issue of Astounding and the only differences I found were in punctuation and in the relationships between paragraphs--the magazine version has section breaks between scenes that are eliminated in the Beachheads version, and at least once two magazine paragraphs were combined into a single paragraph for publication in Beachheads.  Then I took a glance at the version, titled "The Gryb," in my copy of The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders and it seemed this version restored the magazine punctuation and section breaks.  I wanted to see what changes to the story van Vogt wrought to make it fit into the novel The War Against the Rull, but internet archive was down, so while in Frederick, MD I stopped at the WonderBook there and bought a paperback copy of the novel put out by Ace with a John Schoenherr cover.

Chapters VI, VII and VIII of War Against the Rull consist primarily of the revised material from "Repetition" and much of the original story has been excised or altered.  The murderous guide is now a woman, and much of the psychology stuff has been removed or changed to instead reflect female psychology.  The location has been moved to an extrasolar system and all the business about appeasing Mars to influence the Mars election is gone; instead we have political jazz related to the Terran relationship with alien races, the ezwal and the Rull.  The only things that remains unchanged are the barren landscape and the monster fighting elements.  These changes are all for the worse--most of the intellectually challenging stuff is gone--but the scenes are still entertaining in a surface action-adventure way. 

German and Dutch translations of
Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders

"And the Walls Came Tumbling Down..." by John Wyndham (1951)

John Wyndham has a high reputation but, as I never tire of telling people, I wasn't crazy about The Chrysalids AKA Re-Birth.  Maybe I'll like this story, which debuted in an issue of Startling containing a story by Edmond Hamilton I haven't read yet and much discussion in the letters column related to whether or not the magazine should have monsters and sexy girls on its covers--many correspondents seem to think that the magazine will sell better if it switches to astronomical paintings and abandons the traditional "garish" and "lurid" and "oversexed" covers that readers are ashamed to let their relatives at home and strangers on the street see them carrying.  Just tell those judgmental normies "I was born this way" and "I'm just being me," people--let your freak frag fry!

The gag of "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down...," the title of which appears with more or fewer ellipses depending on where it is printed, is that silicone-based aliens arrive on Earth and are amazed and disgusted to find carbon-based life.  You'll be proud to hear that the carbon-based life shoots half the arrogant interlopers' ships right out of the sky and then when the aliens land in the wilderness it is only a days before humans have discovered them and wiped them out.  CBL!  CBL!

The text of the story, which I guess is supposed to be funny, bug has some gruesome horror elements, is a series of reports from an expedition to Earth by the telepathic silicon creatures, crystal people, who approach Earth and are fired upon repeatedly; many of the crystal people are killed before they land.  Later events in the story suggest that the silicon ships were destroyed not intentionally by anti-aircraft weapons but accidentally by radar or radio waves.  

The surviving aliens then land in a desert, which they consider a paradise because of all the silicates just laying around.  Some gorge themselves on all the available silicates and grow to huge size.  Others study the trees and animals and people inhabiting the area, finding it hard to believe that an automobile, which exhibits the hardness and straight lines they associate with intelligent life, is not alive and certainly not intelligent but that soft sacks of tubes are in fact alive and may be intelligent.  One reason for confusion in the interactions between human and alien is that the crystal people and their equipment are totally transparent to visible light, essentially invisible to the human eye.  A pair of people crash their car right into the fortification thrown up by the aliens around their ship.  The aliens can read human minds but humans cannot pick up alien thought transmissions.

The aliens dissect a person and thusly inspire a woman to scream and the frequency of her scream causes one of the aliens to shatter.  The story proceeds from there, with more and more people, including the authorities, arriving to investigate and try to rescue those people captured by the aliens, who are fully in sight behind the invisible but bullet-proof walls of the alien redoubt.  When women see the dissected person they scream, causing more of the aliens to shatter.  Eventually the aliens try to shoot down the humans with their weapons--sonic artillery that can shatter crystal people and equipment, but whose waves merely sound like queer music to humans.  When sound of the aliens' weapons is played back by the humans through a police radio, likely simply accidentally, the alien ship, fortifications and personnel are destroyed.

An acceptable sort of minor thing.  "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down" has reappeared in Wyndham collections, including "Best of" books.  If this is among Wyndham's best work, maybe I'm fated to forever be a Wyndham skeptic.  Previous owner considered it fair.

         

"To People a New World" by Nelson S. Bond (1950)

                 

This one debuted in Blue Book, a magazine that only rarely comes up in my SF explorations.  This story was considered poor by the previous owner of my copy of Beachheads in Space, and has not been reprinted very much; besides Beachheads you can find it in the Bond collection Nightmares and Daydreams.

This is a pretty lame story, obvious and boring; a SF magazine probably would have rejected it for being elementary and banal, and I don't know why Derleth selected it for republication. 

A family--Dad, Mom, two boys--live in a post-nuclear-war world, having set up a productive farm and being able to hunt and fish with bow, sling and spear.  Every year Dad goes away for a month to scavenge in a nuked city.  He avoids touching metal and there is no metal on the farm--metal retains radiation and would make them ill, or so Dad thinks.  They have never met any other people since the cataclysm.

When he is sixteen the narrator, one of the two boys, accompanies Dad to the city.  He finds a book which talks about machines and buildings and so forth, and the narrator likes it and secretly brings it home.  When Dad finds out about it he orders the narrator to destroy it, as books and technological knowledge were what brought on the nuclear war, but the narrator loves the book and loves the idea of rebuilding a technological society and hides the book and studies it closely in secret.  When his brother catches him reading he threatens to tell Dad and the narrator kills him.  The narrator is forced to leave his family and the last word of the story is his name: "Cain."  I guess we are supposed to think that our civilization is built above the ruins of a previous civilization obliterated in a nuclear war and the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel is based on these survivors of that disaster.

Lame twist ending, very little plot, we're giving this one the old thumbs down.  When I read Bond's "Prescience" back in January I liked it enough to say the kind of thing I say all the time, that I should read more by this author, but today's Bond experience is dampening my ardor a little.

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I like the van Vogt, but the other three stories we've looked at today are leaving me feeling like this paperback edition of Beachheads in Space is an underwhelming anthology.  The Bond is lame and feels like it is not aimed at a SF audience but a mainstream audience unfamiliar with SF themes and tropes.  The del Rey and Wyndham are competent, but are not thrilling or heroic or inspiring--you might call them tragic but they lack tragic grandeur, depicting mere blunders and people at the mercy of their environments, and seem to belittle the human race and suggest exploring space is a waste of time.  Do we crave these sorts of flat mopey stories in which people's fates do not reflect their aspirations and abilities?  Not really.

  

A. E. van Vogt: "All the Loving Androids," "Laugh, Clone, Laugh," "Research Alpha" and "Him"

British paperback editions of More Than Superhuman;
the 1980 printing (right) illustrates "The Reflected Men," which we talked about
last time

Today we read the second half of my 1971 Dell printing of the A. E. van Vogt collection More Than Superhuman, striding into the arena to wrestle with four more stories by the Canadian madman, two of them collaborations!  In this tag team match will Forrest J. Ackerman and James Schmitz be on our side, aiding our efforts to grab a hold of our man Van's at times slippery or prickly prose and pin down his unforgettable nova concepts, or will they instead just compound the difficulties faced by those of us bold enough to thrown down with the Slan Man?

"All the Loving Androids" (1971)

It looks like this approximately 35-page story was original to this collection.  "All the Loving Androids" would go on to be included in some European van Vogt collections.

Dan Thaler is a physicist working for the government in the future of visi-phones, aircars, and human-like androids.  He is currently on a secret assignment--the government suspects something odd is going on with the androids, and Dan is discreetly investigating.  As "All the Loving Androids" begins, an opportunity to learn about the cutting edge in grey-market androids falls right into Dan's lap.  Dan's sister Anita is married to busy businessman Peter Copeland, and according to this dude Anita is "the worst neurotic of all time and space"; she calls him up at the office multiple times a day, gives him long lists of errands to run, and if he should hesitate to bow to her every whim, threatens to kill herself.  So, Peter acquired two androids that looked exactly like him to occupy Anita, one running all those errands and the other answering the phone so he had time to get his work done and conduct an extramarital affair.  When Anita takes an overdose of sleeping pills, the cops and Dan meet Peter's android stand-ins and they are amazed by their high quality--most androids are immediately recognizable as robots thanks to their not-quite-lifelike movements, but these two can successfully pass for human!

Dan the man, with the help of a cop, figures out that at the bottom of all this is a conspiracy that reaches into the government bureaucracy and the highest level of the professions--the Establishment is riddled with people who support android civil rights and some of them are willing to commit murder to win equality for androids or even go so far as to actually make the androids our masters!  One such ally of the androids is Anita's shrink--this joker hypnotized Anita into being a terrible wife so the android liberation people could sell three of the new super androids to Peter!  That's right, three androids--the "woman" Peter is conducting an extramarital affair with is a physical duplicate of Anita who is a conscientious homemaker and an eager sex partner!  All proceeds of such superandroid sales go to financing the android uprising!  

Dan gets captured by the android liberation organization; they hypnotize him and he briefly lives an android-like existence, slavishly obedient and unable to do anything for which he has not been programmed.  Luckily the police rescue him and capture the diabolical android-boosting psychiatrist.

The climax of "All the Loving Androids" is not what I expected--I had expected all the androids to be wiped out and humans being forced to get along without them, or, some kind of negotiations which would improve the position of androids in society.  Instead, Van concludes the story with a sort of joke that is perhaps commentary on sexual relationships.  The real Anita, freed from the hypnosis that made her so impossible to get along with, takes the place of the Anita android and has the Anita robot put in the loony bin in her place.  She insists that Dan not tell Peter about the substitutions; presumably Peter and Anita live happily ever after, Anita being such a helpful wife that Peter does not realize she is the human he married and not the robot he recently purchased.  The final punchline is the reflections of the cop who helped Dan--he envies Peter for having an accommodating, even robotic wife because his own wife is such a pain in the neck.  Whether Van's joke is supposed to make a feminist or anti-feminist point here is not clear.  

"All the Loving Androids" is an acceptable filler story, no big deal.  The plot sort of reminds me of the plots we see in Jack Vance stories, but of course van Vogt can't match Vance's superior writing style, which makes Vance's stories founded on such plots so entertaining.

"Laugh, Clone, Laugh" (1969) with Forrest J. Ackerman

Back in late 2021 I read Forrest J. Ackerman's collaboration with C. L. Moore, "Nymph of Darkness," and was astonished and actually angered by how poor it was.  So my hopes of finding "Laugh, Clone, Laugh" palatable are not high.  

This story, five pages, is a sterile waste of time, a lame sort of fairy story punctuated with weak jokes that culminates in a bad pun.  Thumbs down.  It is better than "Nymph of Darkness," because, whereas "Nymph of Darkness" failed to achieve its goals, "Laugh, Clone, Laugh" accomplishes its purpose, having set its sights very very low.

This pointless exercise first saw print in the collection Science Fiction Worlds of Forrest J Ackerman & Friends.  There is a lot of evidence that many members of the SF community found Ackerman to be a fun guy and he seems to have had a boundless enthusiasm for speculative fiction, but in my experience his actual writing is shallow at best, and often quite irritating.

"Research Alpha" (1965) with James H. Schmitz

Schmitz is actually good at writing SF adventure stories with interesting aliens,* so I have been looking forward to reading this one.  "Research Alpha" first appeared in If, and appeared in translation within a year in two different European magazines, including Urania, the Karel Thole cover of which illustrates the opening scene of the story.

Tall and slim Barbara Ellington recently started working as a typist at Research Alpha, one of the world's most important scientific institutions.  She is dating Vincent Strather, a technician in the photo lab, though she seems to have a crush on John Hammond, president of Research Alpha.  Barbara has also caught the eye of the head of the biology department, Dr. Henry Gloge, who selects Barbara and Vincent to be the subjects of his latest experiment!  

My understanding of evolution (and I am admittedly an ignoramus) is that it is an unpredictable process driven by random mutations that, should they not cripple the ability to produce offspring, are passed on to an individual's descendants and will become widespread should they confer some advantage in the struggle to reproduce; over many generations, new species emerge from this process.  But often in SF stories we see evolution portrayed as a predictable process, as if what your descendants will look like is already mapped out in your genes, and if we bathe you in radiation or shoot you full of drugs you can graduate early, skipping a hundred or a thousand or a million generations and taking on an advanced form.†  "Research Alpha" is one of these stories.  Dr. Gloge has been injecting the giant salamanders known as "hellbenders" with a drug that advances their evolution by hundreds of thousands of years, so that they grow armor and better eyesight and so forth.  He wants to figure out what will happen if he uses the drug on human beings, and so he injects Barbara and Vincent--absolutely without their consent or even knowledge, or that of his boss, president Hammond--and rigs up surveillance in their private off-campus apartments so he can keep tabs on them.

A three-sided conflict featuring shifting alliances and a whole panoply of superpowers and high tech equipment ensues among Barbara, who, as we expect of a van Vogt protagonist, gradually acquires and masters mind-boggling mental abilities; the ruthless Dr. Gloge; and Hammond, who, unsurprisingly to us VV fans, is an extraterrestrial, one of those here on Earth pulling strings behind the scenes to manipulate human civilization.  Will Barbara use her superpowers to become leader of Earth, give all of us superpowers, and throw off the influence of the aliens?  Or will she recognize the wisdom of the aliens and leave Earth behind to join the god-like galactics who are Hammond's superiors?

This is a pretty good thriller with a sense-of-wonder ending as Barbara achieves "Point Omega:" "when man becomes one with the ultimate."  I like it.    

*Here are links to my comments on some Schmitz productions I liked: "Planet of Forgetting," "Greenface," "Grandpa," and The Demon Breed.

†My go-to example is Edmond Hamilton's "The Man Who Evolved," but see also Henry Kuttner's "What Hath Me?"  

"Him" (1969)

"Research Alpha" takes up like 60 pages, but "Him" is a short one, just five pages of text.  It debuted in Spaceway, a magazine that, at that time, consisted mostly of reprints of 1950s material; among this issue's new material is a long wordplay-filled letter from Forrest J. Ackerman in which he, among other things, suggests if a movie were to be made of Sibyl Sue Blue, which we read back in November, the lead role should go to Nancy Sinatra.            

"Him" is a merely acceptable filler story.  Most of the Earth is under the control of dictator Josiah Him, but considerable portions of Western North America resist his rule, even repelling a full scale invasion.  One of Him's screwy policies is to have educated people--college professors, scientists, and the like--ground up and fed to students; this is called the "planarian education plan," it being ostensibly based on that famous(ly controversial) scientific finding that planarian worms can acquire memories of their fellows whom they eat.  The plot of this story follows the dictator's top brewer as he is chosen to be ground up and fed to aspiring brewers, and discovers that his death sentence is in fact part of a rebel plot to overthrow Him.

Slight; an unfortunate way to conclude the collection.

"Him" would reappear in the program book of the 1992 MagiCon held in Orlando.

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Another adventure successfully concluded.  Stay tuned for more explorations of mid-century SF here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

A. E. van Vogt: "Humans, Go Home!" and "The Reflected Men"

Let's take a break from reading scans of old magazines found at the internet archive off a screen and read an actual physical book that can be found on one of the overstuffed shelves of the MPorcius Library.  The topic of this and the next transmission from MPorcius HQ will be the 1971 Dell paperback printing of A. E. van Vogt's More Than Superhuman, a collection of five reprinted 1960s stories and one new story.  My copy has an awesome moody cover featuring an heroic muscleman--no doubt a symbol of man's ability to contend with anything the universe can throw at him--over whom looms a more mysterious and abstract figure, one whose face strongly resembles a Pre-Columbian Mexican mask.  (What savant fashioned this terrific illustration is also a mystery.)  More Than Superhuman is a little over 200 pages long, and today we'll handle its first two pieces, novellas from Galaxy which together occupy half the book.

"Humans, Go Home!" (1969)

A. E. van Vogt's bibliography is a labyrinth full of confusion.  Many of his stories have been published under multiple names, many have been revised for integration into novels, and some of those altered versions have then seen reprint as if they are independent stories.  The odd bibliographic fact about "Humans, Go Home!" is that when it debuted in Galaxy it was accompanied by a sort of appendix or introduction that in plain English explained the background and setting of the story, but this valuable text was not included in More Than Superhuman, making the book publication of  "Humans, Go Home!" somewhat harder to understand than the magazine printing.  (It is not as easy as I thought it would be to take a break from reading scans of old magazines.)

That background text (it takes up one page of Galaxy) tells us that four centuries ago the inhabitants of planet Jana consisted of many primitive warring tribes, and then two humans, husband Dav and wife Miliss, arrived and set about civilizing these natives.  Today the Janae have a single world government with an hereditary monarch and a civilization at a more or less 20th-century technological level (we see widespread use of helicopters, motorcycles, and electronics.)  Dav and Miliss's miraculous feat of benignant imperialism is made possible by the fact that by the time of the story mankind has achieved what amounts to immortality through drugs and also mastered puissant mental powers--the Symbols.  How exactly these Symbols work is not clear to me, but it seems that Symbols represent abstract ideas--a prominent example in the main text of the story is the idea of constitutional monarchy--and as these ideas are more widely accepted, the Symbol grows in power, to the point that people are reluctant to oppose the idea, and those who support the idea are protected from its opponents as if by a forcefield.   

The text of the story, about 38 pages in Galaxy, covers a wide array of topics--sexual dimorphism and sexual relationships, gender roles, imperialism, social class, the passage of civilization from a feudal era characterized by the violent and arbitrary rule of men to a period of bourgeois liberalism characterized by the rule of law.  An underlying plot element, as in so many van Vogt stories, is the revelation that superior people are secretly behind the scenes manipulating society.  

As the story begins, Miliss becomes determined to leave Dav, her husband of hundreds and hundreds of years.  Dav believes that this is just her female hormones acting up, but he can't convince Miliss to take the drugs necessary to put her back on an even keel.  The galactic human civilization in the story seems to have drugs as its foundation, and this civilization is, apparently, teetering on the brink of extinction--Dav and Miliss understand that most humans have stopped taking their immortality drugs and started dying; this death wish is contagious, and those who try to help those suffering it catch it themselves, so that only humans who are contemptuous of the sick seem likely to be able to survive the crisis.  So, when, Dav comes to believe that Miliss has caught the death wish, instead of badgering her into taking her drugs, he avoids her. 

Perhaps even more bizarre is native Jana culture.  Jana women are cold and callous, and have no interest in love, sex or children, and for the Jana race to endure, Jana females have to be dominated by men, essentially forced to procreate and raise children.  For their part, Jana men, at least the aristocrats who run society, are arrogant and relish danger and violence--we witness them riding their motorcycles around recklessly and gambling with each other for the right to execute criminals by beheading them with swords.  Jana law is very class-conscious, with nobles able to get away with all manner of crimes if inflicted on inferiors, and the middle classes ranked so that a top engineer can legally murder a working-class person but might suffer a fine for murdering a fellow engineer, the fine scaled to how many more advanced degrees he had than his victim--murdering an engineer of the same academic accomplishment will be punished by death.

The plot of "Humans, Go Home!" involves the current king of the planet and the second most preeminent of the natives.  The king has been away on some mysterious mission for about a year, and when Miliss leaves Dav, native Number 2 seizes her, charging her with being an alien spy who is dominating his race; this charge is more or less the truth, and has been open knowledge for centuries--all social, political and technological developments on Jana have been the work of Dav and Miliss slowly doling out information to the natives of the planet.  Number 2 is easily able to whip up hostility among the common people against their benefactors, who have been treating the Janae as inferiors and refusing to give to the Janae the full benefit of human knowledge on the theory that they are not ready for it yet.  One of the ambiguities of the plot is the extent to which Number 2 is doing all this because he seeks power--to become king himself, or, in a new system of constitutional monarchy, prime minister--and to what extent he just wants to have Miliss in his custody so he can rape her.    

The legitimate king returns, and as the plot proceeds he is in conflict with Number 2 over the fate of the planet, as well that of Miliss and then Dav; clues begin to pile up that during his absence the king was being programmed by other humans, and he gradually learns the nature and extent of the powers he has been given by those humans (van Vogt stories often feature a person who gains mastery over amazing mental powers over the course of the tale.)  Dav seems to catch the death wish he fears his wife is suffering from, Miliss accuses Dav of becoming as arrogant and sexist as the native males and, parallel to our learning about the king's programming, it becomes evident that Dav and Miliss themselves were hypnotically programmed 400 years ago to perform certain duties and believe certain things which may not be true--maybe the human race really isn't nearly extinct because of a death wish!

We expect van Vogt stories to be strange and to fail to provide--to not even try to provide--ordinary literary and entertainment values like well-drawn characters and a strong plot that travels clearly from point A to point B in an easily digestible way, and "Humans, Go Home!" lives up to those expectations.  The story is full of crazy ideas and surprises and by the end of it you have to doubt half the stuff that has been presented to you.  "Humans, Go Home!" is one of numerous pieces by our favorite Canadian that I personally am glad to have wrestled with but which I don't feel comfortable recommending to people who aren't already on Team VV. 

In Galaxy, "Humans, Go Home!" is illustrated by Jack Gaughan, who provides six drawings.  The faces and attire of the Janoe people seem to be based upon Pre-Columbian art, which perhaps explains why the cover illo of my paperback edition prominently features that Mexican mask.

Besides the various printings of More Than Superhuman, "Humans, Go Home!" can be found in the collection The Gryb and some collections in European translation.

"The Reflected Men" (1971)   

Another long piece from Galaxy--45 pages in the magazine.  There are actually multiple books in the MPorcius Library that contain this story, my two copies of More Than Superhuman (I bought a second copy one day because the cover painting was more clearly printed) and my copy of 1974's The Worlds of A. E. van Vogt, a paperback of over 300 pages with a wraparound cover by Bart Forbes.  You can also find "The Reflected Men" in Futures Past: The Best Short Fiction of A. E. van Vogt, a 1999 collection with an introduction by Harlan Ellison; Ellison was a vigorous champion of van Vogt's, which is significant because so many members of the SF community, apparently following the lead of the powerful Damon Knight, were so down on van Vogt.  (Knight may have been right about The Tomorrow People, but he was not infallible!)

"The Reflected Men" is much better and I believe holds more appeal for normies than "Humans, Go Home!," with more human feeling, a triumphant ending, and slightly more conventional SF concepts.

Twenty-five years ago the public library of a small resort town on a lake within driving distance of New York City invited the local kids to donate interesting rocks they found for display in the library's little museum.  Twelve-year-olds Seth Mitchell and Billy Bingham found a particularly impressive specimen, and on a cliff over the lake the boys wrestled over the brilliant crystal, contesting who would have the honor of donating it--Billy vanished, presumably falling off the cliff into the lake, but his body was never found.  Today, twenty-five years later, sad unmarried librarian Edith Price, a woman who left the Big Apple after sort of botching her life by screwing up her relationships (dumping a dependable boyfriend and getting involved with a guy who didn't want to marry her, all the result of her coming under the influence of student radicals who declared that God was dead and all rules and traditions were to be jettisoned), is approached by a man claiming to be Seth Mitchell and asking for the crystal back.  The museum is under renovation, so she can't give it to him, but then on a whim she takes the now dull and drab crystal herself with the idea of mailing it to Mitchell.  

Over the course of the story we learn that the crystal is an artifact from the future, a device of astonishing power that has been dormant in the museum, but which Edith Price unwittingly reactivates.  The device becomes "oriented" on her, giving her access to mind-boggling powers she only slowly begins to understand.  One of these powers is the ability to duplicate people to whom the crystal is oriented--rather than exact duplicates, the copies are variants or alternatives, versions of the oriented person who have slightly different personality traits or have made different life decisions. When the crystal was oriented to 12-year-old Seth he accidentally triggered the creation of scores of alternative Seths, and today all over the world live Seth Mitchells who are pursuing different courses of life--among these Seths are a poor farmer, a tax accountant, a big businessman worth 10 million bucks, and a private detective (this is genre fiction, after all.)  Similarly, Edith, to whom the crystal is now oriented, when she considers all the different things she could have done with her life, unintentionally creates a bunch of alternate versions of herself.  Neither Seth, Edith, nor us readers realize what is happening while it is happening; instead we all have to figure it out after the fact--"The Reflected Men" is one of those stories in which we learn what is going on all out of chronological order, van Vogt offering us lots of twists and surprises as he reveals things.

"The Reflected Men" is also one of those stories in which a bunch of people are all chasing after the same item, and the story has many of the elements of detective fiction--rooms are ransacked, people conduct stakeouts, people are murdered, people are held at gunpoint and made to do things they don't want to do, etc.  A criminal scientist from the future comes to the 20th century to try to seize the crystal so he can become the dictator of the 35th century, and then a super scientist from further in the future appears and explains why the crystal was sent to the 1900s from his own time--the 93rd century--and pursues his own people's goals, at the expense of the Ediths, Seths, and their loved ones.  Edith and Seth, however, prove equal to the challenge of the cold sexless super brains, figuring out how ways to use the crystal and how to take advantage of blind spots in the knowledge of the asexually reproduced men of the 93rd century.  Not only does Edith secure for herself a happy ending (she marries the rich Seth and they start a family, which is what Edith really wanted all along) but provides solutions to all the other characters who deserve a decent life, including little Billy whom Seth accidentally "uncreated" all those years ago and even the scientists of the year 92-whatever.

There is plenty of psychology and human drama in "The Reflected Men," van Vogt depicting people experiencing profound grief, guilt and regret, and exploring people's views of themselves (offering an alternative meaning for the title, at one point Edith looks in the mirror and is disappointed in what she sees) and anxious speculations on how they might better themselves.  The super scientists of the 93rd century are suffering a physical degradation, perhaps because they are not natural beings but carefully crafted artificial men, and so they sent the crystal back in time with the idea it would create ideal 100%-all-natural human specimens for study--the crystal has been creating so many versions of Seth Mitchell and Edith Price in order to develop a "best possible" man and woman, but how do we judge what personality and what life-course is "the best?"  Edith strives to become a better person, and wrestles with the question of what behaviors a good person engages in, and how she should define what a good person is, and how the crystal might define such a person.  (It is a fun scene when Edith, who has been trying to become the "best-possible Edith" out of fear that the inferior Ediths will be "uncreated," suddenly realizes that the best-possible Edith is going to be a guinea pig for cold-hearted scientists.)  Van Vogt also speculates on the role of God--or at least the idea of God--in society and in the universe.

(I don't have to tell you how feminists will respond to the fact that Edith, after achieving god-like power, uses it to get married and start a family!)

I like it, and I think I can recommend "The Reflected Men" to normies, not just to those like myself who have already signed up for lifetime passes on the sevagram steam train.

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Next time we'll read the second half of More Than Superhuman, four shorter stories, including two collaborations.  Stick around!