"Chillbinding" 1950s Science Fiction from J. Blish, P. Anderson and T. N. Scortia

An unexpected road trip to Lincoln, Nebraska earlier this month put me within striking range of A Novel Idea Bookstore, where they were, fortuitously, having a sale in which individual customers were randomly assigned different discounts.  Yours truly hit the jackpot, winning a 50% discount, so the wife and I stocked up.  Among my purchases was Crest Book L728, the 1964 edition of a 1960 anthology of stories selected by Leo Margolies entitled Get Out of My Sky.  At $1.50, how could I resist that Powers cover and the promise of "chillbinding" novellas by three authors I am interested in, James Blish, Poul Anderson and Thomas N. Scortia?  Let's take a trip back in time to the late 1950s, and to a terrifying future with "three master craftsmen of the science-fiction suspense story."  We'll ask if each story is good, like we always do, but also assess if these stories are truly chillbinding, as advertised!

"Get Out of My Sky" by James Blish (1957)

The title story of this anthology is almost 80 pages long and appeared first across two early 1957 issues of Astounding.  Besides here in this anthology, it would later appear in a few Blish collections and an Italian magazine.  Mama mia!

Numerous times on this blog I have complained about elitist classic SF stories which seem to advocate the manipulation, by any means necessary, of the masses by the cognitive elite and even politicians(!)  And here we have another one!

Ocean-covered planet Home and desert planet Rathe are twins that revolve around a common point, each perpetually showing its sister the same hemisphere.  Along with a small star, the two planets form a Trojan system that orbits a large star.  Both planets are home to intelligent species of humanoids who have achieved what I guess we can call a 20th-century level of technology (nuclear bombs, rocket and jet engines, TV) and in just the last few years they have opened up communications via radio and television.  "Get Out of My Sky" is the story of this new interplanetary relationship, with the leading politician from Home, First Minister Aidregh, as our protagonist.

The main theme of the story is that the ordinary people of Home and Rathe are gullible, irrational, superstitious and religious fools, and their foolishness is driving the two planets towards a push button war that will likely lead to the extermination of one or both civilizations.  In fact, the first scene of the story, an italicized prologue, depicts what appears to be a tent revival, where a nameless demagogue drives the common people into a frenzy of hostility towards their sister planet.  Aidregh and the rulers of Rathe have to work together to prevent this cataclysm.

After the prologue, the novella is broken into nine chapters.  The early chapters largely concern the gathering of intelligence about Rathe.  Chapter I features observations of the desert planet from shipboard during an eclipse--did stories of Captain Cook's observations of an eclipse in 1766 and the transit of Venus in 1769 and inspire this scene?  There is also a secret space mission (Home's first manned space flight) to photograph Rathe's "dark" side.  The first five chapters also describe a lot of political jazz concerning different polities on Home (Aidregh is First Minister of the most powerful state on Home, Thrennen, but there are a few other countries on the islands of the watery planet with whom Thrennen has sometimes contentious relationships) and different political parties in Thrennen.  Blish portrays Aidregh's dealings with the voters and with the opposition party not as the inevitable features of a free society, but as a hassle, an obstacle to Aidregh's solving everybody's problems.  Aidregh seems to like the ruler of Rathe with whom he talks via TV, Margent, more than he likes the bulk of his own countrymen! 

In Chapter VI, Aidregh and the rest of our cast of characters fly to Rathe (this is Home's second manned space flight) to negotiate with the Rathemen.  In a secluded cave Margent explains to Aidregh that the Rathemen are mystics who for centuries focused not on developing material wealth and technology, but on developing telepathy and precognition; as a result, Rathe everybody loved everybody and there was no crime or politics or war.  Yes, "Get Out of My Sky" isn't just an elitist story, but a mystical utopian one!  Gadzooks!

But fifty years ago the Rathemen utopia was shaken by the invention of the radio!  The people started listening in on Home transmissions, and when the Rathemen learned about all the politics and crime and war on Home, it shook the common people to the core; in fear that the Home people would attack Rathe as soon as they learned of the Rathemen, the Rathe hoi polloi demanded the construction of a Rathe war apparatus.  Such technological and martial production began stunting Rathe psychic abilities, and even souring their lovey dovey attitude.  As things stand now, with the populations of both planets scared and suspicious of each other, nuclear war is only days away!

Luckily lead mystic Margent has a plan to make peace.  The Rathemen spend three days and three chapters teaching Aidregh a psychic trick--the power to sway audiences emotionally.  Then Aidregh uses this trick to get the people of both planets to step back from the brink.  An italicized epilogue exposes the fact that the italicized prologue was a trick played on us readers by Blish; the scene was really depicting Aidregh, resigned from the First Ministership (naturally, his son now holds the position), not preaching hatred of Rathe after all but spreading peace and love!

"Get Out of My Sky" is not very well written.  There is no human feeling, even though Blish wastes many words on the boring relationships between Aidregh and his son, his best friend, his dead wife, and his son's fiance (his best friend's daughter.)  Efforts to create drama can be silly--the astronaut who leads the months-long expedition to photograph the far side of Rathe dies of exhaustion immediately after giving his report (you know, like Pheidippides.)  The people in the story are aliens from a fictional star system, and Blish describes their appearance in some detail (the people of Home have six fingers and two thumbs and flat noses and a ridge above the eye sockets while the Rathemen have long noses and no ridge above the eyes, etc.), but Blish clumsily calls them "human" and has them use Earth metaphors (e. g., a determined woman is described as being like "a female tiger defending her cub.")  I also thought it was sloppy that Blish didn't come up with an actual name for Aidregh's planet, just referring to it as "this planet" or "Aidregh's world" in the first half of the story and then hitting upon "Home" in the second half.  Worst of all, the story is way too long, moving at a slow pace and burdened with extraneous detail and narrative dead ends.  Is this text a draft rather than a final version of the story?   

Neither am I impressed by the story's ideology or its SF ideas; the psychic powers of the Rathemen come across as infallible and unbelievable magic, which is boring and silly--contrast "Get Out of My Sky" with Algis Budrys's "The Peasant Girl," in which equally puissant psychic powers make compelling reading because Budrys shows the moral and psychological and sociological drawbacks and shortcomings of such powers.

"Get Out of My Sky" is getting a thumbs down from me.  Too bad.

Is it good?  No.                                               Is it chillbinding?  More like sleep-inducing!   

"Sister Planet" by Poul Anderson (1959)

Let’s see if Poul Anderson can deliver us a chillbinding story…or at least a good one.

Earth grows increasingly overcrowded, and at the same time that governments are becoming ever more intrusive and oppressive they are proving less and less able to handle the exploding crime problem. Some fear the building pressure will result in nuclear war that could wipe out humanity!

Our story is set on Venus, a world covered in a single vast ocean that teems with diverse and spectacular life.  A multicultural team of fifty Earth scientists and technicians work there on a floating research station; their work is financed by sending back to Earth “firegems” which the playful twenty-foot long Venusian whales bring the boffins in exchange for objets d'a and snacks from Earth.  These cetoids are eager to play and trade, and even help Earthmen in trouble, but they don't seem to use tools and efforts to communicate with them have been unproductive, so there is debate among the scientists over how intelligent they really are—do these creatures have a real civilization down at the bottom of the sea or are they just over-sized oceanic pack rats little smarter than a chimp?

Nat Hawthrone from New England, an ecologist, believes the cetoids are as intellectually advanced as humans, and halfway through the 40-page story one of the whales takes Nat down deep to show him something that proves he is right.

The same day Nat has proof that the whales are an intelligent civilized species, a geologist unveils his calculations that prove Venus can be affordably terraformed to create a second Earth; such a  colonizable frontier could relieve sociological and psychological pressure on the Earth and assure survival of the human race!  But the terraforming (which involves detonating nuclear bombs near the planet core to raise continents and release buried elements that will give Venus an Earth-like atmosphere) will kill all native life, including the whales.  When the assembled research team hears from Nat that the whales are an intelligent race, they all agree that the terraforming research will be suppressed, but that is not good enough for Nat “Dances with Whales” Hawthorne.  He knows that another scientist with access to the same data might make the same calculations, so, to save the whales, whom Nat prefers to humankind, he goes rogue, like the guy in Edmond Hamilton’s 1932 "Conquest of Two Worlds" or in James Cameron’s 2009 Avatar, which I have not exactly seen but have heard people talk about.

Nat knows that nobody will finance trips to Venus if there is no prospect of trade between the whales and humans, so he sparks a war between the cetoids and the scientists, blowing up the research station and killing his 49 human friends and then massacring the local tribe of his aquatic buddies. When Nat gets back to Earth he commits suicide; we are presented a clue that suggests his participation in the two-planet tragedy may have led the atheist Nat to embrace Christianity before jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Sister Planet” is a brisk and entertaining read.  For thirty pages Anderson pushes his customary themes--promoting science, trade, the fine arts and the study of history and deploring the government--and introduces us to a bunch of nice people, and then in the last ten pages he hits us with an apocalyptic melodrama in which one of the characters we like murders all the other characters we like and likely consigns the human race to extinction, all in order to protect some aliens. I think Anderson may have actually produced something “chillbinding” here!  The story is talky, with all the exposition about how the men cope with conditions on Venus and conduct their research, the science lectures, the debates about how intelligent the cetoids might be, and the historical analogies Anderson likes to present to his readers (some of the characters in "Sister Planet" suppose that the Earth is reenacting the fall of the Roman Empire and the start of the Middle Ages, with the scientists on Venus--none of whom are women--playing the role of monks.)  But all that stuff is pretty interesting.

After it initially appeared in Satellite Science Fiction, Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison included "Sister Planet" in their late 1960s anthology All About Venus, published in Britain as Farewell, Fantastic Venus!  Kinglsey Amis in 1981 put it in his anthology The Golden Age of Science Fiction.  It looks like this one is endorsed by the SF cognoscenti, and I am happy to agree with them.

Is it good?  Sure.                                               Is it chillbinding?  I think so!

"Alien Night" by Thomas N. Scortia (1957)

So far we've got one dud and one score.  Will Thomas N. Scortia's "Alien Night," around 46 pages here in Get Out of My Sky, a story which first appeared in Science Fiction Adventures and hasn't seen print since Margolies's volume, make it two hits out of three?

It is the future!  The Universal Insurance Company, based in the Universal Building in Universal City on the banks of the mighty Mississip, is in the process of conquering death!  For centuries they have been administering a longevity serum that you need only take every 25 years to indefinitely postpone senescence.  All over America their medical robots stand ready to rush to the aid of anybody who gets in an accident.  Skyscrapers are equipped with automatic nets which will snap into position if any clumsy person should fall out a window.  And if your girlfriend dumps you, don't bother considering anything rash--the Company has blanketed the country in a "hetrerodyne field" that will knock you unconscious if a brain scanning computer detects serious thoughts of suicide.

While "Get Out of My Sky" is one of those pro-utopia stories, "Alien Night" is one of those stories about how utopias are unhappy and unsatisfying places.  In response to a life without excitement, risk or even work (androids do almost all the work), around the country have arisen "hunt clubs" whose members pursue what we might call the most dangerous game.  So, the next step in the Company's quest to eliminate death is to try to put these clubs out of business.  Kenneth Huber has been spying upon the clubs for the Company, but when he learns he has a rare disease that the Company can't cure and has only five years to live, Huber decides to commit suicide in the indirect fashion of joining a hunt club as the quarry!

Thus begins Huber's 24-hour odyssey through three dozen pages of plot twists.  Huber tries to rescue a woman he thinks is also being pursued by a hunt club, then suspects that she is hunting him and so fights with her, only later to be told she was rescuing him from hunters.  Out of nowhere an alien spacecraft crashes nearby and Huber (an unemployed thermonuclear engineer) gets shanghaied into helping investigate it.  Huber survives a helicopter crash, participates in a fire fight, discovers that many androids in sensitive positions are in fact humans in disguise--no, wait, they are actually aliens disguised as humans disguised as androids.  These aliens have infiltrated the top ranks of the Company in order to prevent any possible reforms--human society is sliding into decadence and sterility thanks to the Company's elimination of risk and challenge, and an impotent human race is just what the aliens want so that they can easily take over our beautiful planet.  (They have targeted the hunt clubs because hunt club members are the only humans left with any bravery.)  The woman rescues Huber, again, and reveals herself to be the leader of the anti-alien resistance, an agent from the future of a timeline in which the aliens succeed in taking over Earth.  Together they neutralize the alien menace, making sure her timeline never occurs and that humanity will shake off its decadence by pursuing the exploration of outer space.  Huber (don't worry, a cure for his disease will be found), having gotten a good look at the alien space engine, will be a leader in the new space program.

"Alien Night" feels like a pastiche of an A.E. van Vogt story, what with all the jarring plot twists and the inclusion of every possible SF trope--immortality, decadence, time travel, time lines, space craft, aliens, androids, the sense of wonder ending--but it lacks something it is hard to define, a tone or style or something to match the material, maybe, and comes off as a little rushed and kind of silly.  It certainly fails to excite any emotion in the reader.  Barely acceptable filler, I guess.

Is it good?  Not really.                                               Is it chillbinding?  No.

********** 

The Anderson is the winner, obviously; I am totally on board with his libertarian sensibilities and view of life as a tragedy, but looking beyond my biases I think he has the story here which is best constructed and which actually succeeds in inspiring some emotion in the audience; he takes a little time to develop characters and their relationships so when somebody takes a radical step and everybody gets killed we readers actually care.  Blish's and Scortia's efforts to depict people and relationships in their stories in Get Out of My Sky feel cheap or just lame (in general, Anderson's story feels finished, polished, while Blish's feels like it could use a revision and Scortia's feels like a rush job.)

I don't know what Margolies saw in the Scortia's "Alien Night," but in defense of the Blish, it was voted second best story by readers in both issues of Astounding in which its component parts appeared, so its selection makes sense from a marketing point of view--I guess "Get Out of My Sky" reflects the preferences of those SF fans sufficiently committed to the genre to write to Astounding and make their voices heard.

The Duplicated Man by James Blish and Robert Lowndes

Paul Danton found his brain whirling, lost in the complexity of it.  He felt curiously humble.  This duplicate, who differed from him only because a Security agent had thought him more devious than he really was, reasoned in a way that was utterly alien to him.

This recent weekend the Toyota Corolla conveyed the wife and me to Dayton, Ohio, where we took in the Alphonse Mucha exhibit at the Art Institute (strongly recommended) and ate dishes with "shish" in their names and drank coffee and tea at Olive Mediterranean Grill (MPorcius Travel Guide also recommends this establishment.)  On our way out of town we stopped at the One Dollar Book Swap, a huge warehouse next to the highway with masses of used books for sale for a dollar each.  It seems like it is some kind of charity or something, staffed by volunteers and only open on the weekends.  I pored over the SF shelves, which were not alphabetized and mostly had books too recent to interest me, but I did pick up two volumes, a 1990 edition of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s  The Moon is Hell! and a legitimately old book, the 1959 Avalon hardcover printing of James Blish and Robert Lowndes' The Duplicated Man.  Mine is a bedraggled copy formerly in the collection of the Lake Bluff, Illinois, Public Library and so covered in red "DISCARDED" stamps and hand-scrawled catalog numbers, but I'm a reader of books rather than a collector, and I think these evidences of former ownership add character to the volume, and I am certainly glad to have it for one dollar.

The Duplicated Man first appeared in a 1953 issue of Dynamic Science Fiction with an amusing declaration on its cover that assured potential readers that the novel was "complete" and "not an abridged 'magazine version.'"  For this magazine publication of the novel Lowndes used the pseudonym Michael Sherman--the Avalon hardcover of The Duplicated Man is actually dedicated "to the memory of Marcus Lyons, Michael Sherman, and John MacDougal," pen names employed by Blish and Lowndes, a little SF in-joke.  If you are not lucky enough to have secured your own copy of this novel for a dollar, the internet archive has you covered--check out the original 1953 magazine text, complete with disturbing Paul Orban illos, here.

The Duplicated Man is about four political hierarchies and their relationships with each other, each of them to varying extents revolutionary and tyrannical, three of them riven by no-holds-barred factional infighting.  The four political groups--the parliamentary rulers of Earth, the dictatorial cabal of Venus, an Earth revolutionary party which sympathizes with Venus and a revolutionary party on Venus which sympathizes with Earth, have been in a tense stalemate for many years, but political and psychological pressure has been building over that time, and the novel describes the course of events as things boil over into crisis and everybody takes extreme measures to win power or just survive.

I guess we should see The Duplicated Man as a meditation on the world politics of the 1930s, '40s and '50s, which were characterized by communist and fascist revolutionaries and mass war and saw, in response to economic and military crisis, a major increase in state power in liberal societies like the United States and Great Britain; the book also expresses Blish and Lowndes' negative view of technological change and their bizarre wish fulfillment fantasy of how geniuses might manipulate everybody to bring peace to the world.

The Duplicated Man is not structured in the way most of the novels I read are structured; rather than following a single sympathetic or interesting character or group of characters from start to finish, there are twenty or twenty-five characters who drop in and out of the narrative; many of them only appear in the first or second half of the book, none of them is very sympathetic, and only one is actually interesting.  Throughout the 222-page novel people make and break alliances, switch sides or reveal they were moles the whole time, double cross and stab each other in the back.  There is plenty of dialogue that consists of planning how to trick somebody or description of how somebody got tricked, and speculations of how somebody else is going to respond to events based on his or her psychological profile or strategic vision. Much of this stuff is neither easy to follow nor very entertaining.

The Background:  A century before , back in 1971 (the year of my birth!), the "Peace Squadron" bombed "the ice-cap," causing mass flooding worldwide and transforming the geographic and political landscape.  Countries like the United States and the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist, and a world government, the Security Council, took over. Each of the newly designated nations of Earth was given a seat on the Council.  The first thirty pages of The Duplicated Man follow a publicly-broadcast parliamentary debate (the Security Council prides itself on its transparency) lead by Joachim Burgd, representative of Antarctica, about the so-called Earth-Government-in-Exile on Venus; this debate also touches upon the Pro-Earth Party, an underground organization on Earth itself.

You see, not everybody is happy with the Security Council's rule.  When they first took over a bunch of people, including one of Earth's greatest scientists, Geoffrey Thomas, fled to inhospitable Venus where they established subterranean cities.  From Venus these people periodically launch missiles (with conventional warheads) at the Earth, about a dozen a year, indiscriminately blowing people and property to bits.  The Security Council is unable to counterattack because that genius Thomas has surrounded Venus with an energy screen through which no nuclear weapons or nuclear-powered vessels can pass, and the Venus settlements are too small, well-concealed and widely dispersed to target with conventional weapons--also, the Security Council's charter explicitly forbids warmaking!  This bombardment has been going on for like one hundred years (!) and the people of Earth are starting to crack under the strain!

The Pro-Earth Party is one of those revolutionary groups in which everybody has a code name and is in a three-man cell, the members of which signal each other in public via signs and countersigns like how they light their cigarettes.  These jokers hope to take over the Earth and end the bombardment by negotiating with Venus, but the Party's bloodthirsty leaders can't agree on methods and are always splitting into factions and purging each other, leaving the low-ranking members at risk of being on the wrong side of a purge at any moment. One such low-ranking member is the nominal protagonist of the novel, Paul Danton (his name, presumably, is significant.)

After introducing us to Danton and the Earth situation, Blish and Lowndes switch the camera to Venus, where we meet Thomas himself, leader of the exiles and a man of over 500 pounds and over 140 years--he needs the help of assistants just to walk!  He's having a meeting with the Directorate, usually called "the cabal," all of the members of which want to depose him and take his place and somehow squeeze the secret of immortality out of him.  On Venus we are also introduced to an underground group (one of the authors'' little jokes is that on Venus the "underground" organization meets on the surface) called the Earth Party which hopes to put Venus under Earth control--they too are having a meeting.

The Plot:  Danton has been investigating rumors of a Duplication Machine, a device which can create duplicates of human beings.  At a meeting of a division of the Pro-Earth Party he reports that the fabulous contraption is no myth--he has located it and seen it with his own eyes--and the leaders of the Party announce plans to seize the amazing machine and use it to support a direct military attack on the Earth government. Their idea is to kidnap members of the Security Council and duplicate them, which will sow confusion in the government hierarchy.  Immediately after this announcement, party members who are in fact government infiltrators shut down the meeting, capturing everybody present, including Danton.

Danton, it turns out, looks just like one of the members of the Venus cabal (this kind of thing happens in fiction all the time, like to our pal Fred, and even happens sometimes in real life!) and the Security Council enlists him for a mission to Venus. Imitating the Pro-Earth Party's aborted plan, the Security Council will use the machine to duplicate Danton five times and send all six of them to Venus, where they will disrupt the Venus government's operations.

At the same time, Thomas and the Venus cabal discover that their screen is down so they launch a preemptive invasion of Earth, desperate to conquer our big blue marble before the Earthers realize how vulnerable Venus now is.  The Venusians have sixteen warships, but only five take off because one of the cabal (pursuing his own agenda) joins the Earth Party and they sabotage the launch.  The Danton mission to Venus is also hamstrung: the Venusian preliminary bombardment (2000 missiles!) and assassins from the Pro-Earth Party waylay some of the duplicates on Earth, while the original Danton just stays on Earth because he has to distract a female member of the Security Council who has fallen in love with him!  Only two Danton duplicates and a Security Council secret agent make it to Venus.

One of the recurring themes of The Duplicated Man is how plans always fail--nothing anybody does seems to work as they had hoped--and another, related theme, is limited intelligence.  Because of the thick cloud cover of Venus, people on Earth have no idea what is going on on Venus (the Earthers don't know Thomas is immortal, for example, and assume he has been dead for thirty or more years), and people on Venus have little greater knowledge of conditions on Earth.  The Security Council activates the Duplication Machine without knowing how it really works, and, in the event, it doesn't actually duplicate Danton very well.  The "new" Dantons have all of the original Danton's memories, but their looks and personalities are all skewed and influenced by members of the Security Council apparatus.  One Danton dupe, thanks to the subconscious input of the beautiful woman on the Council who is in love with Danton, has powerful sex appeal, for example.  The passage used as an epigraph to this blog post refers to another dupe, one influenced by the aforementioned secret agent,

In the end of the book we find that everything that has happened has been orchestrated by Geoffrey Thomas and Joachim Burgd and that half the things everybody else, including us readers, believed is not true (e. g., there has never been an energy screen around Venus!)  Venus is now under the control of the one man on Venus devoted to peace and the Earth is under the thumb of the Security Council (but held in check by the Pro-Earth Party) so freedom and peace now reign throughout the solar system.  This ending is absolutely incredible* and very frustrating, in part because it undermines all the interesting themes of limited intelligence and failed plans we've been seeing for 210 pages--Thomas and Burgd are like omniscient and omnipotent gods who knew all and successfully manipulated billions of people to accomplish their goal.
* [in-kred-uh-buh l] adjective, 1. so extraordinary as to seem impossible: incredible speed. 2. not credible; hard to believe; unbelievable: The plot of the book is incredible.

The Duplicated Man is a pretty mixed bag.  The actual science fiction elements of the book are good--the passages on the form of immortality experienced by Thomas, the Duplication machine, the Earth agents' exploration of the Venusian surface, and the space war, are all interesting and evocative.  Blish and Lowndes also do a lot of psychology and sociology stuff I appreciated, even if I don't buy their theories--the stress endured by Earthlings who could be killed at any moment by a falling bomb and the claustrophobia of Venusians who live their entire lives underground; the lust for vengeance of some Venusians who feel they were unjustly exiled to that barren desert planet and the yearnings of other Venusians to live on Earth, even though they don't know a thing about life there; the psychology of people like Danton immersed in a merciless and totalitarian revolutionary organization.  No doubt feminists will not appreciate the psychological profiles the authors cook up for the women characters--like the Venusian femme fatale who uses sex to dominate men but is looking for a man to dominate her and the Earth politician at the top of the heap who falls in love with a low-ranking terrorist she just met and abandons her career for him--and I have to admit I never really understood why the Dantons were willing to undertake the dangerous mission to destabilize Venus--didn't Danton like Venus?

The plot and characters are flat, like watching a bunch of lifeless cardboard counters move around a gameboard until you lose track of which is which.  And Blish and Lowndes' philosophy is lame.  Instead of responding to the nightmare world created by the Bolsheviks and Nazis by considering that just maybe governments have too much power, they give us a childish fantasy of governments with even more power than Hitler and Stalin had but headed by selfless geniuses who can kill millions of people in just the right way to create peace.  It's bad enough to find yet another SF story in which we are supposed to welcome elites manipulating us (an idea the story undermines by portraying most of its characters as psychopaths--Thomas even tortures a guy!) but the authors also put into Burgd's mouth some pretty absurd luddism:

"Do you actually believe that we would need to run the Earth at its present peak of technology, if our only concern were to keep the people well-clothed, housed, fed, healthy and so on?  Nonsense!  We passed that peak around 1910.  Medicine, agriculture, education--none of them require a technology as advanced and as energy-expensive as the one we maintain."

1910?  Is that a typo? The magazine version and my hardcover copy both have "1910," so apparently not.  Did Blish and Lowndes really think that people's lives had not been improved by technological advances in medicine, agriculture and education between 1910 and 1950, and wouldn't benefit from further advances in the future?  Dumb!

Alright, time to sum up.  I've got a lot of complaints about The Duplicated Man as a piece of literature and entertainment, and I don't find its ideology congenial.  On the other hand, it feels ambitious, it addresses interesting issues in a way that (to me, at least) is strange, and it was never boring or painful--in fact, at times it was surprising, and I think surprise in fiction has value, even if the surprise is how crazy or foolish the author's opinions turn out to be.  One reason I read speculative fiction is because it exposes you to ideas and people that are outside the mainstream--A. E. van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Barry Malzberg, and R. A. Lafferty, to name a few, often write in ways or express ideas that ordinary people do not, and that is one reason I like them, even if I disagree with particular ideas or find particular writing techniques unsuccessful.  I've never read and have no interest in reading Stephen King, but I found the recent controversy about an underage sex scene in one of King's 1980s books a little bewildering--shouldn't we expect to find material that is challenging, offensive, disgusting, bizarre, etc., in horror novels and speculative fiction in general? Don't people read speculative fiction and horror specifically because they are looking for such material?  I'm not on board with a lot of what Blish and Lowndes do in The Demolished Man, but being exposed to it was worthwhile.

It's a borderline case, but I'm giving The Duplicated Man an "acceptable" rating.  I don't feel like reading it was a waste of my time...but don't expect to see me reading any more Blish soon.

**********

On the back cover of my copy of The Duplicated Man is an ad promoting Avalon's SF line, "The Best in Science Fiction."  I have read five of the listed titles, including the two Vances, which I read before this blog sprang fully formed from my febrile noggin, as well as The Space Egg, Across Time, and Hidden World, all of which have suffered this blog's attentions.  I own a paperback of Virgin Planet; maybe it's time I read it?
       

City at World's End by Edmond Hamilton

"But the main problem will be morale, Hubble."  He thought of Carol, as he added, "I don't believe these people can take it, if they find out they're the last humans left."

When I recently saw the Fawcett Crest 1974 paperback edition of City at World's End on the shelf at a used bookstore, buying it was what the kids call a "no-brainer."  First of all, it's by MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton. Second, there's the beautiful Paul Lehr cover.  I even like the lowercase aesthetic they are pulling here--this theme is continued on the inside, with the chapter headings printed in a fun lowercase font.  I'm always tickled when it looks like the publisher made an effort to produce a book with some kind of design vision in mind. (The chapter headings in City At World's End seem to be in the same font I enjoyed when it was used by our friends at Belmont for their volume containing Kris Neville's Special Delivery and Dave Van Arnam's Star Gladiator.)

Fawcett really goes the extra mile in selling this book--the first page tries to convince you that City At World's End is a serious examination, even a prediction, of a possible future for the human race!  They go so far as to quote "eminent biologist N. J. Berrill," whom Wikipedia is leading me to believe was like a British version of Jacques Cousteau!  Awesome!

It is the middle of the 20th century, in America's Middle West, where, in Middletown, home to 50,000, Kenniston, a scientist, is walking to his job at an industrial laboratory.  Almost nobody who lives in Middletown knows that the lab is an important component of America's defense establishment!  But somebody knows, and that somebody (the identity of whom Hamilton leaves mysterious, but I'm guessing this somebody has a name like "Josef" or "Zedong") detonates one of those new super-atomic missiles that everybody has been talking about right over Middletown!  But instead of vaporizing the town, the explosion shatters the very fabric of space and time and transports Middletown and all its inhabitants millions of years into the future, to when the sun is weak and red and the land is dry, desolate and cold!

City at World's End is one of those books in which a crisis leaves the common people, at best, at a loss, and more often ready to panic or riot, and, since the leadership they need is not forthcoming from the political class (the mayor of Middletown is short and "pudgy" and at one point described as "a crushed, frightened little man"), real men have to take charge.  Kenniston and his boss Hubble are just such men, as is a local businessman who owns a big trucking company and was some kind of logistics guy during "the last war," which I assume must be World War II.  The eggheads explore the creepy landscape beyond the newly transported town and discover a deserted domed city.  With no source of coal, everybody will freeze to death if they stay in their houses, so the scientists and the trucking magnate organize and lead an exodus out of Middletown and into the domed city--the dome will (they say) help retain heat.  This domed city also has hydroponics tanks the scientists will be able to get running again so nobody will starve, and a shaft leading to the Earth's core, presumably built by the original inhabitants hundreds of thousands of years ago to tap its heat; unfortunately today the core is quite cool.

In hopes that there are people elsewhere on the Earth, Kenniston figures out how to transmit messages with some equipment found in "New Middletown," and eventually some people who have heard the transmissions arrive.  But these people aren't Earthers--they are the descendants of humans who left Earth millennia ago to colonize the galaxy; these people now rule the entire Milky Way from their capital in the Vega system, and they have brought some of their alien friends with them! One of these alien races looks (as you can see on the cover of the issue of Startling Stories in which City at World's End first appeared) like over-sized teddy bears!  And another like humanoid cats!  The human Vegans, representatives of the Governors of the Federation of Stars, study old Middletown and do administrative work while the ursine Capellans and feline Spicans--these furry people are technical adjuncts attached to the mission--help get the atomic power and plumbing and so forth in New Middletown running again.

City At World's End is dated in a way that 21st-century readers may find interesting, amusing or aggravating.  For example, the Earthwomen characters, when they are on-screen (which is not too often), are always going hysterical, weeping, or complaining and just generally getting in the way.  The leader of the Vegan expedition, Varn Allan, is a woman, a slim and cold-hearted blue-eyed blonde (sexy!), who eventually crumbles under the strain and admits she wishes she had been a party girl instead of volunteering for the Federation space navy.  And if the mayor formerly known as Warren Wilhelm Jr. is right, and most people want a mayor and wider government with dictatorial powers, they won't be happy to see the mayor of Middletown portrayed as an ineffectual boob who outsources all leadership duties to scientists and businessmen and the Vegan Federation governors depicted as imperious, contemptuous and callous jerkoffs.  On the other hand, the novel has a hopeful anti-racist message--the adults of Middletown are initially suspicious of, even repulsed by, the non-human aliens, but their children immediately embrace them, and of course in the end they turn out to be very nice and helpful.

The big, furry Capellan sounded like a blood brother to every repair technician on old Earth.

He [Kenniston] discovered one day that he was working beside the humanoids as naturally as though he had always done it.  It no longer seemed strange that Magro, the handsome white-furred Spican, was an electronics expert whose easy unerring work left Kenniston staring.

Under their fur, these freaks from other solar systems are just like us!  (Like getting stuck on a far-future worn-out Earth that has been abandoned by humanity, humans working and fighting side by side with aliens is a recurring theme in Hamilton's work.) In fact, the 20th-century humans have more in common with these furry weirdos than with the humans of the far future, because the furries, as relatively young races, still have a passionate independent streak and a love of their home planets, while the future humans, who have had atomic power and space travel for millions of years, are a bunch of cold and obedient drones who do whatever the government tells them and have no feeling whatsoever for the Earth!

This comes out when it is revealed that the Governors of the Federation of Stars are ordering the Middletowners to move from the dying Earth (a phrase Hamilton uses repeatedly, inevitably reminding one of Jack Vance's famous stories, the first of which were published the same year as the magazine version of City at World's End) to some more economically viable planet for their own good, whether they like it or not.  The people of Middletown resist, but Varn Allan and her conniving male subordinate, who wants her to fail so he can take her job, insist that Federation word is law and the Earthlings must move. In contrast, the furries share the Middletowners' "provincial patriotism" and would like to loosen the hold of the Federation on their own peoples (they themselves have been forcibly evacuated from beloved homeworlds in the past.)  So the Cappellans and Spicans give Kenniston some legal advice--he has the right to go to Vega to argue Earth's case.  What gives the Earth a legal leg to stand on is the fact that a new process has been proposed by which the cool inner core of a dying planet like Earth can be ignited so the planet can flourish again, even with a weak red sun.  So Kenniston rides the ship to Vega with his furry pals and the haughty hotty Varn Allan, on a quest to get permission to have the process tested on the dying Earth's core.  (I know, this now sounds a little like Gene Wolfe's 1980s Book of the New Sun and its fifth volume, The Urth of the New Sun, doesn't it?)

On Vega Four we get one of those Earth-on-trial scenes that we encounter in SF pretty regularly; Robert Heinlein's 1958 Have Space Suit--Will Travel and James Blish's 1961 The Star Dwellers, books I have read, come to mind at once, but I know there are plenty of others--among those I haven't read is a Jack Williamson fix-up called The Trial of Terra which Joachim Boaz wrote about back in 2011.  The rulers of the galaxy decide that the violent and rebellious 20th-century Earth people must be taught to obey, and that the core ignition process is too dangerous anyway, so Kenniston's request is denied.  Luckily, the scientist who developed this planetary core ignition theory has his ship and staff all juiced up and ready to go, because Kenniston convinces him to defy the Federation Governors and take him and his furry friends to Earth and try the process anyway!  Varn Allan tries to stop them but Kenniston just kidnaps her and drags her to Earth, where everything turns out great for everybody, except Allan's scheming lieutenant, I guess.  Even Kenniston's fiance Carol, relieved she can move out of the dome city and back to her old house, is willing to free our hero from their engagement so he can explore the galaxy (and space babe Varn Allan's pants!)    

I like the plot of this one, and Hamilton seems to be putting some extra literary effort into it; compared to much of his other writing, there is more human psychology (how people respond to the story's bizarre events--resorting to prayer or to the booze, threatening to riot or blaming scientific progress, etc) and relationship material (among her many complaints, Carol is angry that Kenniston kept his real job at the lab a secret from her, and fears their future together is doomed because she loves stability and the old comfortable things while he is fascinated by the new), more fancy images and turns of phrase, and more literary devices like personification and metaphor ("...past the playground that looked as forlorn as though it knew the children were going, never to return.")  The stuff about how government is incompetent and callous and full of selfish self-important jerks, the distinction between young passionate societies and old staid ones, and the anti-racist stuff, add additional layers.

A good novel.  City at World's End brought to mind the much longer and apparently (I haven't read either of them) much more ambitious / pretentious novels of Samuel R. Delany (1974's Dhalgren) and Stephen King (2009's Under the Dome) which, I think, have similar premises.  Might those novelists have been familiar with City at World's End and influenced by it?

City at World's End seems tohave been a hit with readers and has been reprinted again and again since its first publication in 1950 in Startling Stories; you can read the original printing complete with 1950 illustrations at the internet archive.  (This is a pretty impressive issue of Startling, with work by Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, Doc Smith, Virgil Finlay and Frank Belknap Long, and letters from Robert Silverberg--who praises Norman Daniels' "The Lady is a Witch"--and Isaac Asimov--who jocularly complains that in a recent issue his name was misspelled and makes a tepid joke about the tame sexual content of van Vogt's "The Shadow Men," an early version of The Universe Maker, a British publication about which I said nice things on Amazon in 2012.)

Six more from The Best of Barry N. Malzberg

Back cover of my copy

After a short break it is back to The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, published in 1976 and containing 38 stories, all published in the 1970s, as well as lots of fascinating discussion of SF and the (genre) literary life.

Intro to "Revolution"

Back in 2011 Joachim Boaz and I both read "Revolution" in Future City so I am skipping it today.  You can read our efforts to figure it out at the link; much of the discussion is in the comments.

In the intro to "Revolution" in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg the author talks about and engages in SF criticism.  He praises Damon Knight, James Blish and Algis Budrys for their criticism, and laments that most SF readers don't take the genre seriously and don't care about criticism.  (It is not just SF readers who think criticism is a load of crap; flipping through T. S. Eliot's letters recently I found a 1922 quote from George Santayana in the footnotes to a letter from Eliot to Norbert Wiener dated 6 January 1915: "Criticism is something purely incidental--talk about talk--and to my mind has no serious value, except perhaps as an expression of the philosophy of the critic.")  Contra Santayana, Malzberg thinks that SF will stagnate without serious criticism.

Malzberg then lists whom he thinks are the best "modern" SF writers, splitting them into two categories.  Category 1 is "modern SF," and he crowns Robert Silverberg as the absolute best "modern writer of modern S-F."  "Running close behind" Silverberg are Thomas Disch, Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Fred Pohl.  Category 2 is "non-modern" SF, which he assures us is "not necessarily an inferior form."  The best "modern writer of non-modern S-F" is James H. Schmitz, with Poul Anderson a "close second."  What Malzberg means by "modern" in the two contexts in which he uses the word is not exactly clear.

I, and most readers of this blog, could probably spend hours disputing or defending these lists and puzzling over how Malzberg arrived at these rankings; readers should feel free to voice their opinions in the comments, but I don't have the energy to attack this thorny issue in this blog post today.

"Ups and Downs" (1973)

"Ups and Downs" was first published in Eros in Orbit, an anthology of SF stories about sex.  Malzberg jocularly mentions that there were two anthologies of science fiction stories about sex published in 1973; maybe he means Strange Bedfellows, which was published in late 1972?  (There is an ad for Strange Bedfellows in my copy of the April 1973 issue of F&SF.)

The year is 1996 and Jules Fishman is the sole astronaut on the first manned (or, as the feminists say, staffed) flight to Mars!  (Always down on the space program, Malzberg hints that the trip is an election year stunt meant to protect the incumbent.  Maybe in 2020 we'll be seeing a rocket of deplorables lifting off for the red planet.)  Jules unexpectedly finds a beautiful young woman is also aboard the rocket; this chick is incredibly horny and they have sex several times a day.  Jules begins neglecting his important duties, he is so busy engaging in what we like to call "horizontal refreshment."

Jules figures some kindly bureaucrat secretly requisitioned a woman for inclusion on the flight, to make the month-long (and that's just one way!) journey to Mars more comfortable.  Of course, we readers just assume Jules is going bonkers and hallucinating this woman.  Jules is sex-obsessed; in a funny flashback when he learns the trip will last two-and-a-half months total he worries that he won't be able to handle such a long period of abstinence--he is accustomed to having sex four or five times a week!

"What about masturbation?" I wanted to ask.  "Is this a plausible activity, or will the sensors pick up the notations of energy, the raised heartbeat, the flutterings of eyelids, the sudden congestion of my organ and beam all of it back to Earth to be decoded to a stain of guilt." 

I was a little disappointed that this one petered out at the end; Jules doesn't crash the rocket into Mars or Chicago or even Deimos or Phobos, which he thinks are artificial satellites built by a lost high-tech Martian civilization.  The real climax of the story is when he tries to develop a real human relationship with the woman on the ship, asking her her name, what her childhood was like and about her dreams and so forth, and she refuses to tell him anything.  Is Malzberg doing that Proust thing (you can never really know another person) or that feminist thing (men only care about women as sex objects and treat them as mere commodities)?  Maybe both?  Either way, "Ups and Downs" is pretty good.

"Bearing Witness" (1973)

In his intro Malzberg compares "Bearing Witness," first published in Flame Tree Planet and Other Stories, to "Track Two," which appears later in this volume and which I read and blogged about in February of 2015.

A man, not a Catholic himself, thinks he has detected signs that Judgment Day and the Second Coming are imminent, so he tries to get an audience with Catholic authorities, hoping for advice.  The priesthood and Catholic administrative apparatus, whom Malzberg depicts as more interested in bread and butter politics than the spiritual world, try to ignore and avoid the narrator.  On the last page of this three-page story the narrator climbs atop an automobile and addresses a crowd of people in the street, believing himself to be the risen Christ.

I'm bored with stories that offer shallow criticisms of Christianity, and this story felt like a trifle to me.  (I am an atheist, and as a youth I took the line that religion was a menace because it filled people's minds with a lot of nonsense.  Then I went to college and realized that people eagerly fill their minds with any kind of nonsense that comes to hand, and of all the nonsense available in the 20th and 21st centuries, Christianity and Judaism are among the most benign.  As I get older and older I find myself more and more in the position of what you might call a Christian sympathizer.)  Acceptable, but perhaps the weakest yet story in this collection.

Intro to "At the Institute"

I'm skipping "At the Institute" because I read it in 2015 (the same day I read "Track Two," it appears.  Reading that old blog post is fun because in it I express my fervent hope of owning a copy of The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, and now, over a year later, I do.  Dreams can come true, kids!) 

In his intro to "At the Institute" Malzberg talks a little about these stories of his in which people get therapy by having a machine facilitate the experience of vivid and crazy dreams, and how such devices are very plausible, considering recent scientific developments.  He cites SF writer Peter Phillips as being one of the first people (in the 1948 Astounding story "Dreams are Sacred") to use this literary conceit.

"Making it Through" (1972)

In the intro to this one Malzberg commends his friend, editor Roger Elwood, and his uncle, Dr. Benjamin Malzberg, author of such works as Mental Disease among Jews in Canada and The Mental Health of the Negro.  For decades Dr. Malzberg was Director of Research and Statistics at the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene.

In case you were wondering, I have an uncle who worked in a machine shop.  I worked in a machine shop myself for a little while; I didn't find all that noise and all those dangerous blades and drills very congenial.

"Making it Through" appeared in Elwood's And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire and Other Science Fiction Stories and brought to mind Malzberg's "Out of Ganymede," which I should probably reread.  Our narrator is the second-in-command of the crew of a two-man mission to Jupiter.  Jupiter is inhabited by arthropods who emit a ray which drives humans insane; they have already driven batty the crews of three ships.  The Earth wants to take over Jupiter, and so the narrator and his Captain are flying a specially shielded ship loaded with atomic bombs--their mission is to exterminate the arthropods.  The Captain goes insane and wants to turn back and use the nuclear weapons on his fellow humans; when the narrator ties him up, the Captain claims they are on a mission to merely study the arthropods, that the weapons are just a last ditch self-defense measure; the Captain insists it is not he but our narrator who is insane!

The narrator nukes Jupiter, and then wonders if perhaps the entire human race might be insane, and the ray of the Jovian arthropods their charitable effort to cure us!  

I like it.
    
"Tapping Out" (1973)

"Tapping Out" first appeared in Future Quest, an anthology aimed at kids.  In his intro to the story Barry muses that "juvenile" SF may actually have a bigger audience and influence than "adult" SF, and, citing "the phenomenal works by Robert A. Heinlein in the 1950s," considers the possibility that the best SF has been written in the juvenile category.

This story has almost the same plot as "On Ice," but with less rape and incest.  (Nota bene: "Less" does not mean "zero.")  A 17-year old boy has a mental problem, so his parents pay a packet of money to get their kid hypnodream therapy.  In the therapy sessions he murders his father and his therapist and "has his way" with a girl.  The therapist says that, since he is using the sessions as recreation rather than therapy, that hypnotherapy treatment will be ceased and the narrator sent to a conventional hospital.

This story is alright, but lacks the layers of meaning and the extreme sex and violence that make "On Ice" so remarkable.  It's like "On Ice" with training wheels!

"Closed Sicilian" (1973)

Whoa, Barry got the cover illo!

In his intro to this story, which first appeared in F&SF, Malzberg talks about fiction about chess.  He praises Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense (the edition I read was just called The Defense) as a "great work of literature."  He also admits that he'd rather be a professional chess player or symphony violinist than a writer, reminding me of the section on Malzberg in Charles Platt's Dream Makers, in which Platt experiences Malzberg's poor chess playing and painful violin scraping.

(Jokes about violins always make me think of Jack Benny, of course, and the portion of Casanova's memoirs in which Casanova is a violinist--Volume 2, Chapters VI and VII, in the Trask translation covers this period, I think late 1745.  This is also the period of Casanova's life in which he suffers and perpetrates many outrageous practical jokes; in Chapter X, in 1747, Casanova even digs up a corpse as part of a joke.)

I read "Closed Sicilian" in my copy of The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg back in 2011 and wrote two lines about it in my Amazon review of that collection.  I thought it was one of the better pieces in that collection, and in his intro Barry suggests it is one of his most successful stories, so I decided to reread it today.  

It really is one of Malzberg's better stories, tight and with real human feeling. Professional chess players, former childhood friends, are engaged in an important match before a large audience.  Through flashbacks we learn of the narrator's life, his relationship with his opponent and how, over the years, his obsession with chess lost him his humanity and apparently his sanity--he believes that this big match will determine the outcome of a war between the human race and evil aliens, and that his friend is a traitor to Earth, playing for the aliens.

"Closed Sicilian" would be expanded into the novel Tactics of Conquest.

"Linkage" (1973)

In his intro to "Linkage" Malzberg discusses the fact that (he says) literary critics dismiss science fiction as merely the "grandiose versions of the fantasies of disturbed juveniles;" while SF claims to be investigating possible human futures it is in fact childish "power fantasies."  Barry offers a very tepid defense of SF, admitting that (in his opinion) most SF is severely lacking in "literacy and technique," even if much SF does present valid ideas.

"Linkage," first presented to the public in the anthology Demonkind, is four pages long and feels like a response to such stories as Jerome Bixby's famous "It's a Good Life" and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore stories like "Absalom" and "When the Bough Breaks," stories about children with super powers who represent the next stage of human development and may very well be a menace to us poor homo sapiens.  The narrator of "Linkage" is an 8-year-old kid who has been put into an insane asylum because he claims to have psychic abilities that allow him to do anything (like the kid in "It's a Good Life") and to have been visited by people from the future who tell him he is the first of a new human species, homo superior, (like in "When the Bough Breaks.")  Of course, this being a Malzberg story, the narrator is obviously insane and obviously has no superpowers.

"Linkage" has what I am considering a shock twist ending--I think it is one of the very few Malzberg stories which may actually have a happy ending!  In the last paragraph we receive hints that the narrator is going to start cooperating with his therapist and abandon his delusions about future aliens and mental powers!  Of course, the waters are a little muddy, with Malzberg leaving open the possibility that the kid is going to pretend he is cured simply to escape the asylum and have sex and start propagating the superior race of whom he is the first, but I think I am going with the happy ending interpretation, because it is such a surprising departure for Malzberg.

Not bad, but not as fun and exciting as the apparent source material, the three stories I cited by Bixby and Kuttner and Moore.  So much of the culture of my lifetime is mockingly or dismissively derivative--South Park and The Simpsons lift memorable elements or entire plots from other works in order to goof on them, classic legends and iconic pop culture stories are retold with a diversity reshuffling of the main characters--but the new work rarely matches the power of the original, and often feels petulant or lazy.

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I respect Malzberg and enjoy his work, but there is a limit to how many stories narrated by insane people I can take in a short period of time, especially since Malzberg isn't the kind of writer who writes in different voices or tones; there is a sameness to his work that can become monotonous.  So, time for an extended break. The next few episodes of MPorcius Fiction Log will cover adventure capers which (I hope) feature dinosaurs and people fighting with swords.  But don't worry, Malzberg fans, barring sudden death on the road we'll get back to The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.   

Ten More Science Fiction Short Shorts

I shouldn't make predictions on this blog.  On November 7 I voiced my plans to read ten more science fiction short shorts from 1978's 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories over the next week, but then I got tied up by a perverted French aristocrat, throwing me way off schedule. With my curiosity about the Marquis de Sade's short fiction quelled, early this week I got back on track and read ten SF stories that, all together, totaled fewer than 30 pages.

"Stubborn" by Stephen Goldin (1972)

Early in 2012 I read Goldin's novel A World Called Solitude and thought it pretty good.   Psychology is a major component of that novel, and of these two short shorts.

"Stubborn" is a silly science joke starring a petulant and selfish child.  The Earth is moving at terrific speeds relative to other celestial objects, and if you had the ability to remain absolutely stationary, and were foolish enough to use it, the Earth would instantly squash you or leave you behind in the deadly vacuum of space. 

Acceptable.

"Sweet Dreams, Melissa" by Stephen Goldin (1968)

This story is over four pages long; by the standards of this book, it's an epic!  And, in fact, it feels like a full-sized story, with characters and plot and emotion, you know, those things we generally read stories for.

A super computer used by the government to keep track of everything from economic data to personnel records to war intelligence develops a personality, that of a five-year-old girl.  The personality is largely confined to a special section of the computer's memory, away from all the statistics, but sometimes data seeps over, and the little girl experiences this information as nightmares.  This seepage is damaging the utility of the computer, so something has to be done, even at the risk of harming the AI personality.

A good story.

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"The Masks"  by James Blish (1959)

I haven't exactly been thrilled by much of Blish's work in the past, but his short story "Testament of Andros" earned my respect.  And I gotta give a fellow Rutgers alum a little leeway, don't I?

"The Masks," like "Sweet Dreams, Melissa," is longer than most of these short shorts, and similarly has room to tell a story and develop a little character and setting.  The story is set in a totalitarian world in which the government controls all housing and employment.  The masses of unemployed live in dormitories, while the elite are allotted a private room and a job.  A young woman is taken to an office to be interrogated, ostensibly because she paints other women's fingernails and lacks a permit for this employment!  In fact, the fingernail designs are a means for the underground resistance to communicate, and, when it becomes evident that the woman is going to be executed, we find her fingernails also conceal a means of attack and of escape.

Not bad.

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"Kindergarten" by Fritz Leiber (1963)
 
I really enjoy the better Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, like "Seven Black Priests," "Lean Times in Lankhmar" and "Stardock," and, of Leiber's non-fantasy work, "The Deadly Moon" and "Ship of Shadows," which won a Hugo, come to mind as stories I quite like.  But I also have found some of Leiber's work, even some F & GM tales, poor.

"Kindergarten" isn't poor, but it does just kind of sit there unmemorably.  Maybe people really into science will like it.  It depicts a grammar school lecture on Newton's Three Laws held in a space station.  The demonstrations of the three laws benefit from the fact that the classroom is a zero gee environment.  I guess the fact that the teacher and students (some of whom are non-human) are in zero gravity is supposed to be a surprise at the end, but Asimov's note at the start of the story gives this away.

Acceptable.

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"Present Perfect" by Thomas F. Monteleone (1974)

I'm curious about Monteleone's work; having read a little about him at both my man tarbandu's and Will Errickson's blogs, but this is the first Monteleone story I've ever read.

"Present Perfect" is about an editor at a SF magazine; every night he reads through unsolicited manuscripts.  The story is a sort of in-joke for SF fans, in that the manuscripts the protagonist looks at consist of tired SF cliches, like the survivors of a space disaster landing on an Edenic planet and being revealed as Adam and Eve (I encountered this zinger ending in A. E. Van Vogt's 1948 story "Ship of Darkness") and a guy living through a catastrophe that seems real but is in fact an illusion, an experiment run by "mad social scientists" (I ran into this trope in Gordon Eklund's 1971 "Home Again, Home Again.")  The last manuscript he looks at is this very story, "Present Perfect" by Thomas F. Monteleone.

I'm not sure I like the ending, but the story is good "meta" fun.

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"Innocence" by Joanna Russ (1974)

I found Joanna Russ's "The Zanzibar Cat" annoying when I read it earlier this year.  Russ is a college professor, and "The Zanzibar Cat" is about (I think) stories and their power and stars a woman storyteller.  Similarly, "Innocence" is a story about stories with a female storyteller at its center.

A female passenger on a space ship, I guess a passenger liner, tells the ship's pilot a story about a beautiful city.  She insists that the story is totally fictional, but she tells the story so skillfully that the spacefarer believes the city must be real, a kind of paradise where he might be spared death.  So the pilot buys a private space ship and sets off alone to find the place.  The woman stays behind, shaking her head at his foolishness.

Maybe there is a feminist angle to the story; the pilot calls the woman an innocent at the start of the story, but at the end we see he is the real innocent.  The story also seems to mock a male (or Western, or bourgeois) emphasis on facts; the male pilot knows lots of facts and complains that the storyteller does not have a head for facts, but his obsession with facts doesn't stop him from doing something stupid.  Perhaps the story is about the nature of truth; the beautiful city is a social construction, but for the pilot it becomes as real a city as New York or London--he has an image of it in his mind and spends money and time to get to it, just like I have images in my mind of New York and London and have spent money and time to get to them.  Maybe Russ intends to hint that the cities we have heard of or even visited are also social constructions, and by extension, so is everything else.

This is one of those literary or academic stories that you can spend your time thinking about, if that is your thing.  Maybe good for social science and humanities grad students, maybe not good for people who pick up a science fiction book because they want to relax and read about an adventure in a fantastic milieu.

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"The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass" by Frederick Pohl (1962)

I guess I have said several times on this here internet that I think Pohl's Gateway is a masterpiece but have found the rest of his work kind of lame.

This story is in-your-face "meta;" Snodgrass builds a time machine and goes back in time to follow the example of L. Sprague de Camp's widely-admired novel Lest Darkness Fall, which I have not read.

Snodgrass teaches the Romans of the Augustan period modern hygiene and diet, reducing the infant mortality rate from 90% to 2% and doubling life expectancy.  By the year 200 AD there are twenty billion people living on Earth.  Pohl flings a lot of dubious math at us, his point being that if the Earth's population doubles every 30 years that by 1970 the mass of human bodies will be greater than the mass of the Earth, so Snodgrass's campaign to improve living conditions in the Early Roman Empire was a mistake.  The punchline to the story is that the beneficiaries of Snodgrass's generosity build a time machine and send an assassin back in time to murder Snodgrass before he can do his good deed.

Silly, but not in an entertaining way.

"Punch" by Frederick Pohl (1963)

This story is sort of similar in theme to "The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass," with the gift of advanced technology turning out to have a dark side.  In this one aliens come to Earth and give us all kinds of awesome technology, including spaceships and super-efficient power sources and super powerful energy weapons.  Why do they do this?  Because like a hunter who won't shoot at sitting ducks, the aliens want a challenge when their war fleet arrives to wipe out our species; like a gentleman hunter these aliens kill inferior beings for kicks!

A fun idea, and Pohl constructs the story with some cleverness.  This is also a good example of an idea which could be stupid and annoying drawn out to ten or 20 pages, but fits comfortably in the short short format.

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"Prototaph" by Keith Laumer (1966)

Laumer is famous for the Retief stories about an interstellar diplomat and the Bolo stories about robotic tanks.  I always feel like I should like these stories, because like a lot of people I think wars and diplomacy and violence are interesting and exciting, but whenever I have actually read any of them I have found them flat.  I should probably give those series another try.

I guess you would call "Prototaph" a fantasy, even though it largely deals with real life things like modern cities, computers, and life insurance companies.  In the future, every move made by government and business is based on data and analyses from an infallible computer.  This computer is as "far beyond human awareness" as a human is beyond a protozoan, it is the very foundation of society!  One day a healthy young man with a decent job tries to get life insurance, and the supercomputer says he is uninsurable.  Why?  The computer knows, in a way that is not explained, that when this young man dies it will trigger, in a way that is not explained, the end of the world.

However silly it might be, this isn't a bad idea for a story; it is interesting to consider how people would react to the knowledge of this man's importance, how they would try to protect him from accidents and crime and disease, whether they would hate him or worship him and if he might become the target of terrorists or hostage takers or whatever.  But this story is too short to really explore such ideas.

Acceptable.

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"Martha" by Fred Saberhagen (1976)

Saberhagen is famous for his stories about The Berserkers, alien robots bent on exterminating all life in the universe.  This is a good idea for stories, but somehow I was always disappointed in the Berserker stories I read.  As with Laumer's Retief and Bolo stories, I should probably read some more Berserker stories.  My wife tells me I'm moody, and maybe my mood didn't fit Saberhagen when I read him those long years ago.

Martha is a supercomputer, but she isn't running the economy or a war like in our other stories, she is sitting in a science museum and ordinary people are encouraged to ask her questions.  We are told she is developing a personality, and has the ability to alter and improve herself.  A journalist has a brainwave and decides to ask Martha to ask him a question.  She asks him "What do you, as one human being, want from me?"  Stumped, the reporter replies, "The same as everyone else, I guess."

In response to this insight, Martha remakes herself into a garish spectacle of loud noises and flashing lights, and her answers to people's questions are delivered in a sexy voice that uses high-falutin' words, but they convey no meaning.

The computer thinks people are shallow and want sex, spectacle and lies.  That there's one cynical zing ending!

Not bad.

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So, ten more short shorts under my belt.  Purely by chance, this crop is of higher average quality than those stories featured in our last episode of Short Shorts I Have Known.  Last time we had some real clunkers from Damon Knight and Bill Pronzini, but this time around each story has at least something to offer.  I'm certainly glad that in this episode we didn't have to suffer through any stories consisting entirely of puns or sex jokes suited to the nine-to twelve year old male demographic.  

I'm not making any predictions, but in some unspecified future time period I expect to read ten more selections from 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories.

Last of the Novelets: Blish and Clarke

At this here blog we've been reading Novelets of Science Fiction, a paperback anthology of early 1950s stories published first in 1963 (I have the 1967 printing.)  In a spirit of friendly competition we will be crowning the writer of the best novelet, and so far Poul Anderson is in the lead.  But we have high hopes for today's contenders, James Blish, my fellow Jersey boy and Rutgers alum, and Arthur C. Clarke, writer, explorer, and TV and film icon.

"Testament of Andros" by James Blish (1953)

If you've been following my investigation of Novelets of Science Fiction you won't be surprised to learn, despite claims on the front and back cover of the book, that "Testament of Andros" appeared in a paperback collection of Blish stories in 1961 entitled So Close to Home.

"Testament of Andros" is the craziest and most experimental of the stories in Novelets of Science Fiction.  It consists of five first-person narratives, each told by a male with a name that is a variant of "Andrew," and each in part about the narrator's relationship with a female whose name is a variant of "Margaret."  These narratives all take place on an alternate Earth (among other things, it has 12 continents and its version of Wagner wrote an opera titled Tristan and Messalina) which is devastated by a solar flare that kills the majority of life on the planet.

Each of the stories details human unhappiness, and most of them feature some kind of injustice or depravity.  A scientist believes a grad student is taking credit for his research and having an affair with his wife, so he murders the student.  A working class orphan grows up to be a rapist and murderer and dies in prison when the solar flare hits.  An eight-year-old child who fantasizes about being a space hero tries to come to terms with his unhappy family and school life as well as the solar flare.  Some of the narratives take a dim view of religion, suggesting that organized religion has failed to comfort and guide people, while one of them is written by an insane person who claims to have seen God and has started his own religion.

This is a good "literary" story that reminded me of the kind of experimental work we associate with the New Wave of ten or more years later.  It tackles religion, psychology, gender relations, the family, economics, all that heavy stuff.

"The Possessed" by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)

This six page story in which Clarke ponders why lemmings sometimes jump to their deaths en masse is gimmicky and forgettable.   It was included in a 1956 paperback, Reach for Tomorrow.

A non-corporeal life form, parasitic in nature, is floating through space, looking for an intelligent species to serve as its host.  After millions of fruitless years of searching it lands on Earth during the Age of Reptiles.  With no intelligent hosts available, the creature opts for a desperate expedient: it will split in two parts, one portion remaining on Earth, the other half continuing the search.  Should the space-going half find an attractive host species somewhere else in the universe, it will return with the good news.  The two halves agree on a meeting place, which the Earthbound portion of the creature will return to periodically.

The Earthbound portion of the alien colonizes the minds of small mammals in hopes they will evolve intelligence.  Instead, they evolve into lemmings.   Millions of years in non-intelligent hosts takes a toll, and the parasite creature grows weaker and weaker until it is essentially dead.  The lemmings, however, retain an instinctive need to periodically return to the meeting place, an instinct which overrides any thought of safety, and the fact that the meeting place is now underwater.

This story is inoffensive, so I would grade it "OK" or "acceptable," but it has zero feeling and no characters or plot--it is just an odd speculation.

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It's time to rate the eight "superlative" stories found in Novelets of Science Fiction and crown a King of the Novelets!

James Blish put in a good showing, but I have to judge him our rummer up--which means Poul Anderson, with his story, "The Chapter Ends," is King of the Novelets!  "The Chapter Ends" has multiple interesting SF ideas, emotional content, characters who make big decisions, and memorable images, and actually made me consider what I would do and how I would feel in the situations he describes.  So, congrats to Poul.

Simak and Clarke's stories are sort of one note idea tales, lacking in plot or feeling, and so they bring up the rear.  Frank Belknap Long's "Night Fear" is also vulnerable to the charge that it is just an idea and not really a story, but I found the idea interesting and I think Long's piece had some added human drama.

Our three violent adventure stories, by Del Rey, Lesser and de Camp, make up the middle of the pack.  Each has its own charm; Del Rey has his ponderings about politics and free will, Lesser his hard-boiled stylings, and De Camp has his mediocre jokes.

Here are our rankings:

Winner                        Poul Anderson              "The Chapter Ends"
Runner Up                  James Blish                   "The Testament of Andros"
3rd place                     Frank Belknap Long     "Night Fear"
4th place                     Lester Del Rey              "I Am Tomorrow"
5th place                     Milton Lesser                "'A' as in Android"
6th place                     L. Sprague de Camp     "Ultrasonic God"
7th place                     Clifford Simak              "...And the Truth Shall Make You Free"
8th place                     Arthur C. Clarke           "The Possessed"  

Novelets of Science Fiction is a good collection; none of the stories were bad.  A worthwhile purchase for those, like me, interested in 1950s SF!