F&SF March '55: M St. Clair, J Blish, F Brown & J Ciardi

On December 22nd, one of my clever and helpful commentors reminded us that John Ciardi, likely best known for translating Dante, published some science fiction stories.  One of these appeared in the March 1955 issue of F&SF, edited by Anthony Boucher.  We are already familiar with some of the contents of this ish, including Robert Bloch's "I Do Not Love Thee, Dr. Fell" and Avram Davidson's "The Golem,"  but there is a ton of stuff in the issue new to us worth looking at besides Ciardi's contribution, so today we'll also be checking out stories by Margaret St. Clair, James Blish, and Fredric Brown as well as the Ciardi.  I'm reading all these stories in a scan of the original magazine. 

"Change the Sky" by Margaret St. Clair

Much of St. Clair's work appeared under the pen name Idris Seabright, and "Change the Sky" does so here.  Boucher's intro to "Change the Sky" quotes Judith Merril, who praises "Seabright" for "undercutting the pretensions of her fellow humans, and for silhouetting against an alien background the most human of our weaknesses."  Is this story going to be some kind misanthropic indulgence in rank snobbery?  Well, let's not reject this story before we have even read it--maybe Boucher and Merril are mischaracterizing or exaggerating.  (I keep telling myself to not read an intro until after I have read the story, the way I don't read the tendentious label next to a painting at the art museum until I have looked at the picture and formed my own opinion of it, but I keep reading these damned intros anyway.)

"Change the Sky" is a long tedious story of 12 or 13 pages, but at least it doesn't actually strike me as a hammer blow against the human race and people's pretensions or weaknesses.  I would describe "Chaneg the Sky" as the record of a course of the psychotherapy of the interstellar future, neither particularly snobby nor misanthropic, but a total bore.

Much of St. Clair's text is given over to pointless surreal or psychedelic images, descriptions of things the protagonist sees but doesn't really interact with.  One reason this story is a drag is that the main character doesn't perform many actions or make many decisions; he just kind of witnesses natural phenomena and elaborate but sterile artifacts, and has emotional reactions to them that are quite subdued. 

That bland and flat main character is Pendleton, the son of a rich family of loners.  Our guy was born on a space ship and has never had a real home, spent his life as a traveler crisscrossing the galaxy, seeking something, he is not quite sure what, his entire life.  His father before him was on a similar quixotic quest, and boy and teen Pendleton accompanied Dad on his useless explorations, learning all the ins and ourts of being a space man along the way.  As the story begins, Pendleton, now I guess middle-aged, knows his health is such that he won't be able to participate in space travel any more, so he has come seeking the services of an artist, a man who makes artificial worlds which his clients can visit or even, perhaps, inhabit.  These artificial worlds are kind of like hypnosis, I guess--St. Clair doesn't bother to make them logically comprehensible to the reader, so they function in the story like magic or hallucinations or drug dreams.

Pendleton wants the artist to make him an artificial world that will satisfy him, the kind of world he has been seeking, even though he isn't really sure what he wants the world to be like.

"What I’m hunting is a place that’s so beautiful, or so winning, or so right, that I’ll feel, ‘This is the place in the whole universe that I love best. This is home.’ ”

The artist asks Pendleton to describe the most beautiful and most interesting and most etc. planets he has seen, and Pendleton complies; one planet had lots of lightning, another had lots of aromatic flowers, and so forth.  The descriptions of these planets are mind-numbingly boring, a list of vapid and vague attributes, an absolute snoozefest.

"Genlis is the most beautiful, by far,” Pendleton answered. “It’s a water world, with deep green, swelling, foam-laden seas, and a sky so intensely blue that it’s almost purple. On the islands — there are a few islands — tall graceful trees like palms lean into the wind, and the perfume of the flowers is so sweet it makes you dizzy. There are flowers everywhere. They say that no matter how far you get from land on Genlis, you can always smell the flowers. The air is soft and yet fresh, and when the wind blows against your face or body, you feel your skin tingle with delight....Nothing could be more beautiful than Genlis."      

Most of the story is like this, sterile descriptions of places where nobody does anything or experiences or expresses any deep emotions.

The artist makes the artificial world, and Pendleton enters it, and it is just a series of boring bubbles in which, his brain addled, Pendleton moves from bubble to bubble to bubble until he turns around and travels back through all the bubbles to real life.  He complains to the artist, who sends him to a different artist.  This second artist creates an artificial world in which Pendleton is a child again, flying around the galaxy with his father, who is teaching his son how to be a space man while searching for evidence to substantiate his absurd theory about a probably fictional alien race.  Pendleton seems to forget he is an adult whose parents have died, so it looks like he is going to disappear into this fantasy world for the rest of his life.

I guess the twist ending or point of the story is that the most beautiful things in life are the processes of education and exploration and the place you feel most at home is wherever your attentive family is.  Or that the artificial worlds are a trap?  Is Pendleton going to survive in this artificial world--can he eat and drink there?    

Slow and boring, an aimless narrative punctuated by long lifeless scenes that add nothing to the plot and nothing valuable to the atmosphere, a story with no emotion for a dozen pages and then sappiness on the final page--thumbs down for "Change the Sky."  Maybe this story is supposed to be boring, maybe it really is an attack on the human race's pretensions and weaknesses, depicting how bogus psychoanalysis is, how the people who seek psychoanalysis are empty souls who want other people to fill them and how these other people are in fact not real healers but just exploiters.

"Change the Sky" is actually the title story of a 1974 St. Clair collection, so I guess there are those who find it to be an above average story of St. Clair's, or at least one that is representative of her virtues as a writer.  A 1968 French anthology included the story, as does a 2022 US anthology of mid-1950s SF by women.

"The Book of Your Life" by James Blish

Here we have a horror story about two of our favorite things--books and creepy sex!  

Petrie Mapes is a publisher who lives with his attractive wife on Long Island.  He is obsessed with sex, but has a sad perversion or dysfunction or maybe just a kink, whatever you want to call it: he finds real sex disappointing, and much of his sexual life revolves around pornography and erotica.  "The Book of Your Life" is full of literary references, and Blish mentions Henry Miller, Frank Harris, Ben Hecht and Jack Woodford and talks about how Mapes hires writers and artists to craft him unique one-of-a-kind fiction and drawings of an erotic nature.*  (Blish also engages in some literary criticism of Ellery Queen, which some may find interesting.)

*This whole story may be inspired by Henry Miller.  Miller and his circle, Anais Nin among them, wrote little one-of-a-kind porno stories for money for a perverted guy in the book biz--see the preface to Nin's Delta of Venus--and the theme of "The Book of Your Life," that reading and writing are not life but an escape from life or an obstacle to living life, is a theme of Miller's work--see Sexus, Chapter 1: "No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in."

Mapes comes into Manhattan on business with some frequency and has an odd, tense, relationship with a bookseller there, who may perhaps be the Devil.  The plot of "The Book of Your Life" revolves around how this bookseller has a huge book, something the size of an unabridged dictionary, that has magical powers.  Over a thousand pages of tiny type, the book is comprehensive, including, for every possible reader, a scene that perfectly manifests the deepest desire or foremost obsessions of that reader, and when you open the book at random for the very first time, the scene tailored to your peculiar overriding interest will be what you find and it will shake you to your core!  You can read the entire rest of the book, but never will you be so stirred.  The bookseller rents out this colossal sui generis tome to people, and Mapes has possession of it over the course of Blish's story, and we observe as the book has a malign effect on Mapes and those in Mapes' orbit.  

A good story that addresses the theme that life is a journey about pursuing goals and if you achieve your goals, if your desires are fulfilled, you life will lose its savor.  The idea that pornography is more exciting than actual sex, and consumption of pornography can damage your real-life relationships, feels topical in 2025, when I am writing this, and maybe will continue to feel topical in 2026, when you are reading it.  But perhaps the most striking thing about "The Book of Your Life" is its suggestion that reading books (or watching TV or otherwise consuming media) is not really living, but just a substitute for living, and people who devote their time to books are throwing their lives away, that media is consuming them rather than vice versa.  Ouch! 

It looks like "The Book of Your Life" has not been reprinted beyond a translation in the French edition of F&SF, which is strange, as the story is compelling and very meta, being about genre literature and the people who produce and consume it.  An overlooked gem!

"Millennium" by Fredric Brown

This is one of Brown's one page stories, what fans of the genre, of which many consider Brown the master, call "short shorts" or "vignettes" or "vinnies."  I have read a bunch of these Brown vinnies (among them, "Too Far," "Expedition," "Abominable," "Blood" "Sentence," "Daisies" and "Politeness") and in general I find them a waste of time.

In this one, Satan is sitting in his office, one by one interviewing people who want to sell their souls for a wish, as he does every day.  As Satan has feared for so long, one of the soul sellers makes a wish that puts Satan out of business, the wish that ends, or reduces substantially, the amount of evil and unhappiness on Earth.  The way the wish is worded is a little oblique and I had to ponder it before I really understood it; maybe this suggests this vinny is more sophisticated than are many others of its ilk?  (Or just reminds us how dim I am?)  I'll call this vignette "acceptable."

"Millennium" has appeared in several Brown collections in four or five different languages, as well as one of those anthologies that has Isaac Asimov's name on it above those of hard-working anthologists, in this case Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh.

"The Bone that Seeks" by John Ciardi 

Here's the thing that brought us to the March 1955 F&SF, a story attributed to "John Anthony," though Boucher in his intro tells you it is a pen name and offers clues as to the real name of the author.  As with Blish's "The Book of Your Life," isfdb suggests that the only place "The Bone that Seeks" was ever reprinted was in the French edition of F&SF.  When they aren't suppressing the free speech of their hottest actresses or sautéing slugs and toads, maybe the Frenchies know what they are about?

Maybe, maybe not.  "The Bone that Seeks" is an OK story, sentimental and histrionic, that relies for much of its oomph on a poem by Archibald MacLeish (the title is a line from the poem.)  

It is over a million years in the future.  The human race has endured, and many of the features of life we are familiar with, desks, government, reports, etc., are still important components of Earth society.  The current form of government approaches its one millionth anniversary, and as part of the celebration the government wants the oldest robot, a robot that was built and operational before the current government was founded, to play a major role in the festivities.  But looking through its old memory banks has inspired the million-year-old robot to feel tired and desire death.  A government bureaucrat tries to badger the robot into following orders, but it has developed an independent intelligence over the millennia and it plays sad music, recites the MacLeish poem "What Riddle Asked the Sphinx?", looks at the sunset, and turns itself off. 

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Brown's story is about a guy who risks his soul to make the universe a better place, but all the other stories we read from this magazine today are absolute downers.  A robot who wants to commit suicide?  A pervert who risks his soul using a magic book to destroy other people?  A guy who feels like he has no home and, in his search for the place where he belongs, loses himself in an artificial world?  Happy New Year, everybody!

Merril-approved 1956 stories: J Barrow, C Beaumont & J Blish

At the end of the 1957 volume of her famous Best of series of anthologies, Judith Merril included a list of 1956 stories that didn't quite make it into the book.  We at MPorcius Fiction Log are proceeding through this alphabetical list, reading stories that spark our interest for one reason or another.  It is a long list-- this is the third installment of this series, and we are still in the "B"s. 

Links to episodes 1 and 2 of this series:
Abernathy and Aldiss
Anderson, Allen and Banks

"The Little Giant" by Jackson Barrow

The last episode of MPoricus Fiction Log was all about a 1953 issue of Robert W. Lowndes's Dynamic Science Fiction; well, here we dip into another magazine edited by Lowndes, Science Fiction Quarterly.  Lowndes pens an article commemorating the recently dead Fletcher Pratt, as well as a long editorial responding to an article by Robert Bloch in a fanzine on the question of whether or not bad SF movies and TV shows (Bloch and Lowndes, like Judith Merril, really really hate 1951's The Thing From Another World) have hurt the reputation of SF and the circulation of magazines like Science Fiction Quarterly.

These old debates about the SF biz are fun, but we are here to read Jackson Barrow's "The Little Giant."  Barrow only has two credits at isfdb, and this is the earlier one.  It looks like "The Little Giant" has never been reprinted.  I have to assume few people currently drawing breath have read this one--soon I will join their exclusive ranks!  

"The Little Giant" is kind of like a weird tale, maybe like something Clark Ashton Smith might come up with.  Some time ago, the political map of the world was scrambled by an atomic war, with new nations rising up among the ruins of the old and waging ceaseless war upon each other.  Then a man of unknown origins, a short broad-shouldered guy, arose to take over the world.  He made himself master of the Earth not by leading armies of conquest, but through diplomacy and the sheer force of his personality.  Everyone who comes to meet him is psychologically overwhelmed by him and pledges allegiance to him.  The Little Giant today has control over almost every aspect of human life, a micromanager who works long hours and offloads almost no decisions to others.

Our narrator was selected from among the population of Earth to be the Little Giant's bodyguard--he is the fifth man to hold this job.  Barrow expends a lot of ink having the narrator describe his own psychological state--the stresses of being the dictator's bodyguard, of a monotonous daily schedule (the apparently tireless Little Giant never takes a day off!), of total isolation from all other human beings, of having a fearsome master who almost never talks to you.  The final pages of the story reveal the true nature of the Little Giant and of the narrator's relationship to him: after fourteen months the narrator becomes the next Little Giant as, psychically directed by the supermind of the dictator, his fresh body absorbs the consciousness of the Little Giant, leaving the ruler's exhausted body a sort of robotic husk subject to programming by the new Little Giant.  The narrator's brain now includes the consciousnesses, the memories, of all his predecessors, and his body changes so that he has the same short broad appearance as theirs had--the population of Earth will have no idea he is not the same man.  Now he will select a new bodyguard to be his successor, and conduct the true business of the Little Giant--preparing the Earth for conquest by the aliens whose agent he is, aliens who feed on intelligence!  The end of all the Little Giant's meticulous policy-making is the eugenic breeding of a human race of superior intelligence to serve as food!

This is actually a pretty good story, a solid choice by Merril.

"Traumerei" by Charles Beaumont

Merril included two stories by Beaumont in her list of honorable mentions for 1956; one, "The Dark Music," I have blogged about already.  I called that story "lazy and malicious" and "like a caricature of exactly the kind of story you would expect to find in Playboy."  It seems opinions will differ.  Well, maybe I'll agree with Merril that "Traumerei" is worthy of attention.

"Traumerei" is something of a horror story, with a seriously creepy illustration I can heartily recommend to all you horror fans credited to a Remington--it is Remington's only credit at isfdb.  "Traumerei" is also one of those nature-of-reality stories, like Robert Heinlein's 1941 "They" in which a guy discovers the entire world is a set built to deceive him and Richard Matheson's 1954 "The Man Who Made the World" in which the entire world is the product of an alien's imagination and can be extinguished in a moment.  I guess "Traumerei" also tries to exploit the sympathies of anti-capital punishment liberals.

A newspaperman who decries the bloodlust of the populace who clamor to see a convicted murderer and rapist fry in the chair has visited the killer, and was told by the doomed man that, should he be executed, the world will vanish because the world is just his dream, a dream inflicted on him by the authorities of the real world for some crime he committed in real life. 

The main narrative of "Traumerei" consists of the journalo and the killer's lawyer nervously watching the clock as the time of the murderer's execution approaches, discussing the possibility that the killer is telling the truth and they will vanish upon his execution.  Then the scene shifts to an alien world where we see some alien being executed by the expedient of being fed to monsters--he tells his executioners that this is all a dream.  Presumably this alien criminal suffers a multitude of different dreams in different horrifying artificial locales.  

An acceptable gimmick story.  Beaumont apparently adapted "Traumerei" into the Twilight Zone script "Shadow Play," leaving out the exotic aliens and monsters ending and instead having the criminal dream of an Earth-type trial and execution again and again.  "Traumerei" can be found in the Beaumont collections Yonder and Perchance to Dream.

"Traumerei" debuted in the second issue of Infinity, which is where I read it.  We'll probably come back to this issue someday because it includes stories by Harlan Ellison and Damon Knight I am curious about.  Knight also has a letter in the magazine, praising Arthur C. Clarke's story "The Star," which appeared in Infinity's first issue. and sarcastically attacking Robert Bloch; correspondence from Forrest J. Ackermann is also reprinted--he offers even more extravagant encomiums for Clarke and "The Star."  Maybe I'll also have to look at that first issue of Infinity, which has a cover that gender studies majors have probably written theses about.

"Time to Survive" by James Blish

Merril anointed two Blish stories with membership on her Honorable Mention list, and I haven't read either.  First up, "Time To Survive," which debuted in F&SF, where it was a cover story and appeared alongside Damon Knight's famous "Country of the Kind" and a Beaumont collaboration with Chad Oliver that I will probably read at some point.

"Time to Survive" is pretty long (isfdb calls it a "novelette") but it never drags; it is a good classic-type SF story, full of traditional, almost stereotypical, science fiction elements--space ships, space suits, airlocks, a protagonist who doesn't really know his identity and has to decide whether to side with the government or with the secret rebels, plenty of talk about astronomy, chemistry and biology and a future history based on speculative economics, and a sense of wonder ending in which mankind sets out to conquer the stars.  Blish does a good job deploying all these components as well as giving the characters motivations and personalities that make sense.   

Donald Leverault Sweeney (is this a T. S. Eliot reference?) is a test tube baby, the product of genetic engineering.  His body is totally unsuitable for life on Earth--it was designed to survive comfortably--without a space suit!--on the surface of Ganymede!  Why was he created in that lab on Luna?  To serve the government by infiltrating a colony of renegades, men and women similarly fashioned to live on Ganymede, and capturing their leader, Dr. Jacob Rullman.  Like Pinocchio, Sweeney wants to be a real human, and the government dangles in front of him the hope that they can make him a real man if he accomplishes his mission on Ganymede.

On Ganymede we have a sort of detective/espionage story as Sweeney fears the colonists will figure out he is a government spy who is there under false pretenses, and tries himself to figure out why the government is so hostile to the Ganymedean colonists.  Complications include a storm caused by a conjunction of a spike in sunspot activity and Jupiter's perihelion with the Sun and Sweeney's falling in love with a woman who is technically his niece, she having been grown from cells from one of his mother's siblings--old SF writers don't just shovel a bunch of hard science facts at you, they encourage you to be skeptical and apply logic and the scientific method to even the most settled of beliefs, and one of the standard issue beliefs that Ted Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein and it seems James Blish as well like to poke with a sharp stick to see if it can stand up to scrutiny is the incest taboo.          

Our guy Sweeney was constructed in a lab, with very little contact with newspapers or real books (we are told he has never read fiction) and so he has little grasp of Earth history when he arrives on Ganymede.  There on Jupiter's moon he learns that the Earth in the 20th century was taken over by a league of semi-independent government agencies modeled on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; this consortium gradually took control away from the elected government by mastering the issue of traffic, dominating the transportation sector and charging lots of fees.  This world-bestriding colossus of a Port Authority is opposed to the manipulation of the human genome to custom fashion people able to live on other planets because they favor terraforming as the means to colonize other worlds--terraforming is the kind of big public works project by which they make their money.  The Port Authority is thus determined to make sure the colony on Ganymede fails--if building humans to suit alien planets is a success, the terraforming industry won't take off.    

The Ganymedeans also reveal to Sweeney that the Port Authority actually has a stardrive that they have been keeping secret; Rullman himself has one of these stardrives as well as data about extrasolar planets explored by suppressed interstellar expeditions.  With this data he can bioengineer people suited to live in those other star systems, and with the stardrive he can get people to them--if the Earth authorities are kept away from Ganymede long enough for his starship to get away.  Sweeney figures out how to trick the Port Authority ships into abandoning Ganymede orbit for a sufficient period and into losing interest in the Ganymede colony; having ensured the human race (in altered form!) will colonize the galaxy, he and his "niece," now his wife, settle down to a quiet life together as Ganymedean farmers.

Thumbs up for this successful bit of classic SF.  "Time to Survive" is one of several stories in Blish's "Pantropy" series ("pantropy" is the name of the science of creating bioengineered humans in a lab.)  Under the title "Seeding Program," "Time to Survive" would be included in the oft-reprinted collection of the Pantropy stories, The Seedling Stars.

German translations of The Seedling Stars; check out 
R5-D4 on the 1981 Austrian printing

"The Writing of the Rat" by James Blish

"The Writing of the Rat" appears in an issue of Galaxy that also includes Theodore Sturgeon's "Skills of Xanadu," a collectivist utopia story which I said was "like a three page essay on what Ted thinks the perfect society would be stretched out to 26 pages" when I read it some years ago.  Let's hope Blish's tale is more interesting.

"The Writing of the Rat" is one of those stories in which goody goody aliens make humans look like scum, and, similar to a Lovecraftian tale or one of Edmond Hamilton's 1930s stories like "Devolution" or "Accursed Galaxy," a story that reveals the depressing true origin of humanity.  But it ends hopefully--the human race, despite its evil origins, can be redeemed if we do what the goody goodies tell us to do!  

Unlike "Time To Survive," which had a good plot and decent characters, "The Writing of the Rat" is mostly an idea story; the background is interesting but the actual plot is negligible and the characters are just there to push the ideas.  Twenty-first century readers will appreciate that Blish uses his characters to promote diversity--the good guy human is named "Singh" and has a "lean brown face," while the villain is named Matthews.  Blish includes some linguistics theory in the story, and also refers to poetry a bit.  The title of the story is from the poem Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind by Carl Sandburg, but somehow here in Galaxy the poem is misattributed to Ezra Pound.  I checked the internet archive's scan of the Blish collection Anywhen, in which "The Writing of the Rat" is reprinted, and I can report that for book publication the attribution was corrected.

The human race is exploring the galaxy, and has discovered many habitable planets.  But on each one are found intelligent inhabitants, muscular rodent people between six and seven feet tall.  These rat people demonstrate a bewildering cultural diversity; on some planets they live like barbarians, on others they have high tech cities with more advanced technology than Earth has.  The rat people all speak the same language, but each planet has its own distinct way of representing this language on paper.

The human race wants to expand, but every single colonizable planet is occupied by these apparently superior rat people.  Trying to learn about them, the space navy when able captures one-rat scout ships and their pilots are interrogated, but thus far the aliens tight-lipped.  The rat people also take human prisoners; our protagonist, Captain Jahnke, was held captive for two years by the aliens, and then released.  He found the aliens noble and dignified and so on, and is better acquainted with their language than just about any Earther.

When a new prisoner is brought to Earth, Jahnke acts as interpreter as a Major Matthews tortures the alien to death.  Then another prisoner arrives; this one is in the custody of Jahnke's human friend, a Colonel Singh.  Jahnke commits mutiny to make sure Matthews doesn't get his mitts on this latest rat prisoner, and he and Singh treat with the rat man, a particularly big and impressive one, who turns out to be a diplomat who wanted to be taken so he could tell the Earth people the amazing, astounding, fantastic and weird truth about the galaxy.

The rat people have been exploring the galaxy for many centuries.  Everywhere they go they find civilizations that have been abandoned.  Archaeological evidence indicates that these hundreds of planets have been attacked by slavers who seized the entire populations of the planets and carried them off towards the center of the galaxy, not bothering to occupy the planets or raze their victims' buildings or steal their treasures.  In order to preserve these civilizations, rat people move into the abandoned villages and cities and LARP--for generation after generation!--as the kidnapped peoples; the hope is that some day the rat people will liberate the slaves and the freed peoples can return to their planets and take up the traditions of their long dead ancestors.

The rat people are following the millennias-old trail of the slavers toward the center of the galaxy.  The Earth, they discovered, was an outpost of the slavers--the human race is descended from the slavers!  That is why we are all such jerks!  The rat people, however, see we have made progress, and are not all as jerky as, say, Alexander of Macedon, Napoleon Bonaparte, Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin, all of whom appear on a list intoned by the alien diplomat.  At the end of the list here in Galaxy is the name "MacHinery;" for book publication this was changed to "McCarthy."  The rat people considered exterminating us, as they plan to exterminate the slavers if they ever catch up to them, but the diplomat offers to spare us if we join the anti-slaver crusade.  Singh and Jahnke of course express an eagerness to commit the human race to a close partnership with the rat people.

"The Writing of the Rat" has lots of weaknesses from a literary point of view, but it also has lots of wild ideas, so it is entertaining.  I can moderately recommend it.

The back cover of this British edition spoils much of the story

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I can't fault Merril for any of these choices.  We can only hope we are on a roll and the next time we look at stories from Merril's Honorable Mention list we have as good an experience as we did this time.

Dynamic Science Fiction, June 1953: R Z Gallun, R E Banks and C M Kornbluth & D A Wollheim

Bopping hither and tither at isfdb and the internet archive, one will often discover little gems.  My latest uncovered treasure is the June 1953 issue of Robert W. Lowndes' Dynamic Science Fiction.  The issue has a terrific red cover, a montage of classic SF elements like a man in a spacesuit, a satellite, a rocket ship ready for launch, an atomic bomb blowing up your town...and a naked woman in chains!  Wow!   

Inside, we find the magazine is full of beautiful little sex and violence spot illustrations and chapter headings that probably have nothing to do with the stories in which they appear.  There's a naked woman expressing dismay with heavy machinery, a naked woman reclining high in the atmosphere, multiple crashed rockets (stop texting while driving, guys!), a man in a space helmet brandishing his ray pistol, a woman using her pistol to disintegrate a man (you've come a long way, baby!), a variety of futuristic artillery and armored vehicles, and on and on.

So this magazine looks gorgeous.  But anybody can just look at an old magazine.  Not everybody will actually read a 70-year-old magazine!  Now, I'm not suggesting that I myself am going to read this magazine from cover to cover, either, but I will read three stories and skim the editorial by Lowndes and letters from Robert Silverberg and James Blish.

Both Lowndes in his editorial and Silberberg in his letter talk at some length about the labels affixed to pieces of magazine fiction to indicate their length; the general idea is that, for advertising purposes, texts bearing such appellations as "novellas," "novelets" and "novels" are getting shorter and shorter, so that what might have been labelled a "short story" back in the Thirties might today be called a "novella" or "novelet."  Silverberg is excited that Dynamic is going to have trimmed edges, complains at length about the typeface on the cover of the last issue of the magazine, and indicates that he hates present-tense narration.  Blish in his letter says he is glad that the covers of Dynamic have been portraying "situations from science-fiction, rather than the burlesque runway" (I wonder what he thought of this June cover) and then complains about the practice of editors commissioning stories from authors based on cover paintings; he suggests Judith Merril once wrote a story based on a cover illustration and instead of writing up a scene based on the painting just had the painting appear in the story as a canvas on a wall--Lowndes corrects him, suggesting the mention of the painting was added to the story after it was written.  (Is that better?)  Dynamic is a new magazine, this June issue being the third, and Blish offers a long list of advice for going forward, including getting rid of the spot illos I was just praising, and by all means keeping Dynamic's pages free of cartoons ("seldom funny, usually painful"), a personals section, gossip, and reviews of fanzines.      

Alright, now the stories, tales by Raymond Z. Gallun, Raymond E. Banks, and C. M. Kornbluth and Donald A. Wollheim writing under the pen name "Wallace Baird Halleck."

"Double Identity" by Raymond Z. Gallun 

If isfdb is to be believed, this story, Dynamic's cover story, was reprinted in an Australian magazine in 1954, and then faded into oblivion, never to be printed again.  I tend to like Gallun's work (most recently "Bluff Play," "Brother Worlds" and "Saturn's Ringmaster" in Thrilling Wonder) so I am not going to let that discourage me.

Unfortunately, "Double Identity" is not very well written, with clunky dialogue and somewhat intrusive exposition.  The plot and themes are OK, but not particularly fresh.

The Verden brothers are young self-educated intelligent farmers in rural Missouri.  One of them is affianced to Mary Koven, the daughter of the farmer whose property abuts theirs.  The brothers have always been interested in astronomy and space travel, avidly watching via the newspapers the career of rich businessman and adventurer Frank Cramm, who is on the brink of launching private space ships to the moon.  So, when a meteor lands near the farm, the three countryfolk go investigate it, only to find it is a small missile from the moon!

Contact with the missile starts changing the nearby landscape, turning Earth plants into the kind of plants that live in a valley on the far side of Luna, a deep valley which has retained an atmosphere and still supports life.  The Verdens and Mary Koven also start changing, growing fur and undergoing many other changes that make them look like monsters!  Eventually their very minds begin to change--they develop memories, and see visions, of a lunar landscape, even a lunar civilization!  

Just as some ignorant locals are hunting them down because they are scary, the consciousnesses of the three farmers shift into the bodies of moon people strapped onto operating tables in the lab of a lunar scientist.  The rest of the plot consists of the three Earthlings trying to act as ambassadors between the human race of Earth and the dying race of lunar people, who have technology superior to our own but number only three hundred.  The big theme of "Double Identity" is that people suffer a fear of the unknown and an inability to identify with what we now call "the other."  In theory, Earth peeps and loonies could through friendship help each other tremendously, but in practice each finds the other scary and is likely to shoot first and ask questions later, and for much of the story it looks like Frank Cramm's space ships, working in coordination with the USAF, are going to nuke the hidden valley.  The Verdens wonder if the natural aggression of the human race towards aliens, which is probably shared by other intelligent races throughout the galaxy, means that space travel will inevitably mean war and imperialism, that peaceful relations between civilizations are impossible.  But the three farmers, and the lunar scientist, through trickery and bold action, manage to forestall a Terra-Luna war and convince Frank Cramm to deal peaceably with the loonies.  So we have a happy ending in which it is proven that different civilizations can peacefully coexist and undertake mutually beneficial relations.

The ending gets even happier when it becomes clear that in a year or so the Verdens and Mary Koven's lunar bodies are going to change into human bodies under the influence of their human consciousnesses.  This, I thought, was sort of a cop out--if the three farmers had to live the rest of their lives in alien bodies it would have better suited the story's themes of getting along with "the other," that beauty is only skin deep, and space exploration is a risky plunge into the unknown but ultimately worthwhile.  It would also be easier to swallow scientifically.

For much of "Double Identity"'s twenty five pages I expected to give it a thumbs down because the writing was irritatingly poor, but either I got used to it or the later parts of the story aren't so bad, so having read the whole thing I guess it deserves a grade of barely acceptable.       

"Never Trust an Intellectual" by Raymond E. Banks

We just read Banks's story about a guild of robot programmers who took extreme measures to defend their monopoly, "The Instigators."  It looks like "Never Trust an Intellectual" was Banks's first science fiction story sale (Lowndes tells us that Banks has already been published in Esquire and has also written a stage drama and radio-plays) and has never been reprinted.  Not a good sign, especially since I couldn't bring myself to recommend "The Instigators."  But let's give it a chance!

"Never Trust an Intellectual" is a joke story about a future in which reading books is frowned upon--everybody gets information and entertainment from electronic devices, and private individuals don't own books--those who like to read go to "bookbars" where the licensed proprietor has permitted books up on a shelf for you to rent on the premises by the hour.  We are subjected to dopey jokes that liken reading to drinking alcohol--the narrator brags he can read anybody "under the table," there is talk of people being "bookdrunk," a college kid who sits at the bar reading a comic book is said to be "underage" and so on.  

This is the "Era of Happiness," the time of the new morality of sexual licentiousness and government-imposed limits to access to information that might make you sad or anxious.  "...reading books is anti-social.  It leads to withdrawal, conflicting ideas and permanent memories."  People are strongly discouraged from reading (signs don't even have words on them, menus have pictures of bills and coins to denote prices instead of numerals) and from refusing sexual advances.  People who follow the old morality of sexual modesty or monogamy are suspected of being intellectuals who read books.    

Our narrator edits a video magazine, a little metal box that can fit in your pocket; you plug it in and it projects TV shows on the wall--no text, just video and narration.  (The sample story from his magazine, Listeners' Digest, that we learn about is a saccharine report on a community which banded together to help a blind canine.)  Our hero is also a bootlegger of books.  A pretty woman catches him trying to move 1,500 copies of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; is she one of the Happiness Police, or a rival seller of illegal books trying to crush a competitor?  We get lame humorous chase scenes and fight scenes as another woman, the head of the Anti-Book squad of the local Happiness Police, enters the fray, and then the story ends abruptly without what I would consider a proper climax.         

"Never Trust an Intellectual" has a lot in common with "The Instigators," in that both take a facet from history--in "The Instigators" the fight of guilds and unions against progress, here the battle of bootleggers against revenuers--and use it as the basis for a future conflict.  Also, neither is very good.  "Never Trust an Intellectual" is the worse of the two, lacking a satisfying build up and conclusion--it is more of an idea upon which are hung some jokes than a narrative with a satisfying beginning, middle and end.

If we are being generous we might say Banks's story prefigures our own era of trigger warnings, cancel culture and political correctness, in which there are social and even legal sanctions for using words that might allegedly hurt other people's feelings, words like that H-bomb of words, the "n-word," or strings like "Bruce Jenner is a man."  But Ray Bradbury had already trod this ground by the time "Never Trust an Intellectual" appeared.

Thumbs down!

"Go Fast on Interplane" by C. M. Kornbluth and Donald A. Wollheim 

I generally avoid Kornbluth because I have a patience for left-wing satires in which ad execs or insurance salesmen or whoever take over the world that was never great and has severely diminished over the years (as you've seen, I don't even have much patience for satires attacking guilds and censorship, even though I am against guilds and censorship.  As a kid I enjoyed irony and parody and satire, but I have had it up to here with that stuff and now seek authenticity and sincerity.)  But I find Wollheim an interesting figure and thought this blog post should probably address three stories as well as slobber over pictures of naked girls and space tanks like I was still thirteen.

"Go Fast on Interplane" is a competent filler story.  The plot is totally ordinary, but the style of the prose is actually good, and the pacing and structure are good, making it superior to today's questionable Gallun and Banks pieces.

A guy who loves to drive and has a top-of-the-line automobile discovers a highway that leads to other dimensions, parallel Earths.  He talks to the natives, who welcome him as a foreign tourist, eats lunch.  Then he returns to our Earth.  When he tries to get back to the alternate world he finds the road he took there has been dismantled.  Following the newspapers, he discovers clues that suggest a power struggle among our nation's elite--some want to have a relationship with the alternate Earths, others do not.  He wants to further explore the alternate worlds, and when he stumbles upon an indication that access may again be possible, he hastens to seek the right highway.

Acceptable.

Translated into Italian, "Go Fast on Interplane" would appear in the 1965 anthology of SF about cars Il grande Dio Auto.  isfdb has a note about Il grande Dio Auto, but no entry for it; those interested can see a contents list at goodreads.com.  Under the title "Interplane Express," "Go Fast on Interplane" would be reprinted in the 1988 Wollheim collection Up There and Other Strange Directions.   

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Not a brill selection, but we gotta take the rough with the smooth in the reading old magazines at random game.  Our selection will be a little less random next time, when we read stories recommended by Kornbluth and Wollheim's comrade Judith Merril.      

More Merril-approved 1960 stories: Anderson, Ballard, Blish and Budrys

In the last thrilling episode of MPorcius Fiction Log we read seven stories from Judith Merril's 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F, a 384-page anthology of 1960-related stories, cartoons, essays and commentary (and only really liked two of them, selections by tragically-short-lived American Rosel George Brown and major British literary figure Kingsley Amis.)  The last three pages of 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F are a list of stories published in 1960 under the heading "Honorable Mentions," presumably stories Merril admired but didn't think quite reached the level of excellence of the forty items printed in the book, or could not be included for practical reasons.  Let's read five of these Honorable Mentions by people we care about, Poul Anderson, J. G. Ballard, James Blish and Algis Budrys.  (The HM list is in alphabetical order by author and I'm starting at the top.)  Maybe we'll like these stories more than those from last time which Merril actually printed.

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But first, let's take note of the 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F Honorable Mentions we've already read and offer links to my blog posts that discuss them.

Poul Anderson's "The Burning Bridge": I didn't actually read this, but it is one of the stories upon which Anderson based his novel Orbit Unlimited, which I blogged about in 2018.

Robert Bloch's "The Funnel of God": This epic (or tedious, you know, opinions will differ) attack on our society was subjected to an MPorcius analysis in 2019. 

Algis Budrys's "Rogue Moon": I haven't actually read this short version, but I read the famous novel that goes by this name and delivered a skeptical take on it in 2007 which I reprinted on this blog some years later.

Keith Laumer's "Combat Unit": I read this good story (also known as "Dinochrome") about a robot tank in 2019.

Fritz Leiber's "Night of the Long Knives": Back in 2022, after reading the version that appears in the collection The Night of the Wolf under the title "The Wolf Pair," I offered a moderate recommendation for this at times silly post-apocalyptic story about how we are all addicted to murder and should join Murderers Anonymous.  Like Leiber's very good "The Button Molder," "Night of the Long Knives" feels like a story that  offers insight into Leiber's life and thought and techniques; even though I have a lot of reservations about "Night of the Long Knives" as a work of art/entertainment, it has value for understanding who Leiber was and what he was all about and I strongly recommend it to those curious about Leiber the man and his career.    

Mack Reynolds's "Revolution": This one I read in 2015 in my copy of The Best of Mack Reynolds. 

Cordwainer Smith's "The Lady Who Sailed the Soul":  Back in 2019 I read this very good piece, which I considered a moving love story and an exemplar of the SF that tells you conquering space will be a bitch but it will be worth it, in the Smith collection You Will Never Be the Same.

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"The Martyr" by Poul Anderson 

It is the spacefaring future!  Mankind (currently operating under some kind of authoritarian imperial government with a monarch at its head) has colonized multiple planets, and met multiple intelligent alien species.  Fifty years ago the human race first encountered the Cibarrans, a race of beings with terrific psychic powers.  These jokers can communicate across intergalactic distances via telepathy, travel across similarly vast distances via teleportation, and employ telekinesis.  They have knowledge and power we poor humans can only dream of!  The Cibarrans are very friendly and helpful to other, less psychically adept, races, but they refuse to aid other civilizations in the development of their own psychic powers.  The human race begins to feel confined--one human character thinks "Isn't the Cibarran silence keeping our whole race trapped in our own skulls?"--and to suffer an inferiority complex, seeing the Cibarrans as gods that are keeping from us the key to godhood.  So the authorities take desperate, morally suspect, measures to squeeze the info out of the unwilling Cibarrans!

This story, like 16 pages in F&SF where it first appeared, describes how an arm of the human government seizes some Cibarrans and holds them prisoner (no easy task considering the Cibarrans' ability to teleport and call for aid telepathically) and experiments on them.  "Martyr" is a science-heavy story, Anderson coming up with a whole theory of how psychic powers operate.  (You know what people mean when they say "standing wave," "phase velocity," and "constants of propagation," right?)  The story is also about ethics--what acts are justified, and what acts are wise, in the pursuit of knowledge and power, and what sorts of responsibilities do those with knowledge and power have to those who are lacking?    

The shock ending is that the Cibarrans have endeavored to keep the truth about psychic powers from us and other intelligent beings to spare us a heartbreak that could wreck our societies--the Cibarrans have immortal souls but other races, including us humans, do not!

All the science and philosophy stuff is interesting, and the surprise ending is pretty good.  Thumbs up for "The Martyr."

Numerous editors, including Edmund Crispin, Robert P. Mills, and Anthony Boucher, have included "The Martyr" in anthologies, and, to commemorate Anderson's award of the title of Grand Master by the SFWA in 1998, Connie Willis included "Martyr" in the 1999 Nebula Awards anthology.  

"The Last World of Mr Goddard" by J. G. Ballard

I'm reading this in a scan of the 2009 edition of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard as I can't find a scan of the issue of Science Fantasy in which it first appeared.  

Old man Mr Goddard is a department manager at a big department store.  We learn that he has at home an elaborate scale model of the town in which he lives--this model is a sort of exact analog of the town, and is in fact inhabited by hundreds of tiny people who go about their business every day.  The people in the model are analogs of the real people Goddard works with, and by studying the model every evening he gleans information he can use to his advantage during the workday, though mostly he uses this info to help people.

One day some people seem to realize they are living in a circumscribed world and try to escape, but die accidentally in the attempt.  It also turns out that Goddard had made an assumption about somebody based on his observation of the model that has turned out to be wrong, severely damaging his relationship with the people of the town.  These dismaying events, and others, foreshadow a cataclysm--in the evening Goddard accidentally knocks over the model during a moment of physical weakness and, before he can recover, his pet cat devours all the townspeople, leaving himself the only survivor in an empty town.

"The Last World of Mr Goddard" is well-written and engaging; Ballard's descriptions of Goddard's daily routines are particularly sharp and vivid.  One might complain that the story is gimmicky, that upon reflection it makes no sense and is merely a well-turned out façade with little substance, but it is enjoyable nonetheless.  So, thumbs up.

"The Last World of Mr Goddard" can be found in many Ballard collections.

"The Voices of Time" by J. G. Ballard

I read "The Voices of Time" in that 2009 US edition of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard mentioned above, where it is 26 pages long, and I read it twice in an effort to really figure it out.  This is a dense story in which a lot of stuff going on, a story that is a little oblique and opaque, Ballard waiting until the middle of the story to present us with critical information about the characters that the characters themselves have been aware of the entire time, for example.  All the individual components of "The Voices of Tuime," the images and ideas, and all the individual sentences and paragraphs, are good, but as a while the story is sort of challenging.

I'm saying that the main theme of "The Voices of Time" is that everything comes with an expiration date--from individual creatures to entire species and ecosystems, to civilizations and the universe as a whole. 

Our main character is Powers, a scientist and neurosurgeon who is haphazardly continuing the work of a colleague who committed suicide, a biologist who irradiated animals and plants in order to change their DNA and induce changes in their forms.  Radiation from nuclear weapons tests and/or an atomic war similarly seem to have caused mutations among wild animals and vegetation; the mutations seem largely to be adaptations to a more radioactive environment, animals growing lead carapaces, for example, or developing the ability to "see" via detecting gamma radiation.  I got the impression that, in the milieu of the story, evolution and mutation are not random, but preprogrammed into the DNA of living things; each living thing carries within it a racial memory clock that measures time by absorbing radiation, and when a certain amount of solar radiation has been absorbed by a species, it changes its form according to schedule.  (Clocks and watches and countdowns, measurements of time, are a recurring theme of the story.)  The use of nuclear weapons has increased the amount of radiation in the environment, and advanced the clocks of Earth's species so they are changing prematurely, going disastrously haywire.  The human race is not immune to this effect, and more and more people are developing a disease called narcoma--they sleep more and more hours a day until finally sleeping all day, never waking.  (Those who cease waking up are called "terminals.")  It is suggested that the entire human race might succumb to this malady.  Powers himself suffers this disease, and as the story progresses he sleeps longer and longer each day--it is predicted that in three months he will go totally comatose.  

Powers is also responsible for a radical medical experiment; he performed brain surgery on a mathematician, Kaldren, that rendered him unable to sleep.  Sleepless Kaldren follows the main character around, and, when he isn't haunting Powers, he resides in a bizarre labyrinthine seven-story tall modern architecture building that is a 3D representation of the square root of negative one which houses his collection of artifacts related to the end of the human race and of the universe ("terminal documents," he calls them.)  Among the collection are some chattering ticker tape machines that with a regular periodicity print out numbers with 14 or more digits; each printed number is lower than its predecessor.  Kaldren writes one, 96,668,365,498,721, in the dust on Powers's unwashed car at the start of the story, and a week or so later Powers finds K has scrawled "96,668,365,498,702" on his garden gate.  These numbers are, apparently, transmissions from outer space, a clock broadcast by an alien civilization, a countdown to the end of the universe.

Kaldren is in a relationship with a pretty and slim young woman, I guess a psychology student, whom he calls "Coma" and whom other people call "the girl from Mars."  Her role in the story is to offer Powers someone to explain his research to, facilitating the story's exposition and description of its speculative science.

There is a lot of other stuff in the story I haven't mentioned, most importantly the possibility that Powers, like his suicidal colleague before him, is triggered by instructions written into his DNA into semi-consciously constructing a large mathematical diagram or mandala, a circular ideogram representing a giant clock that can't help but remind readers of the pentagrams common in stories of black magic and sorcery, and transmitting his soul out of his body and into space by committing suicide at the mandala's center.

A story that is a little difficult, but worth the effort of puzzling out.  I wasn't crazy about Ballard's nocvel The Drowned World when I read it long ago, and I have not particularly enjoyed Ballard's experimental items like "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" and "You : Coma : Marilyn Monroe", but I quite enjoy Ballard stories like "Billenium" and today's two stories that have something like a traditional plot and skillfully employ more conventional techniques.  

"The Voices of Time" debuted in New Worlds and would be widely reprinted in Ballard collections and in anthologies.

"The Oath" by James Blish

Here's another tale that debuted in F&SF.  "The Oath" would go on to be included in several Blish collections and in the anthology Beyond Tomorrow.  

It is the post-apocalyptic future!  Dr. Tucci is a member of the largest and most organized group trying to rebuild civilization, a bunch of people who live in a big storage vault with filtered air and a nuclear reactor, and they are recruiting other survivors, in particular skilled people like doctors and technicians, from miles around.  Tucci, an experienced medical man, rides up to the house of a guy, Gottlieb, rumored to be a doctor, but who before the atomic war was a published poet.  The story mostly follows their conversation as Tucci tries to convince this versifier turned amateur sawbones to join the vaulties 200 miles away.  "The Oath"'s content is mostly psychological and philosophical--what might attract Gottlieb to vault life, why might he want to remain in his current community, and what techniques and arguments can Tucci employ to convince the former poet to sign up?

This story is a little boring, and I found I didn't care whether Gottlieb joined the organization or not.  Rather than trying to entertain you, Blish seems to be using the story to raise questions about the relationship of the individual to the collective, and about sacrifice and responsibility.  What responsibility does the individual have to the collective?  How far should a man sacrifice his own ambitions in furtherance of the good of the community?  What rights does the collective have to use trickery or force against individuals who are deemed a drag on the collective?  How far can those in power go in sacrificing individuals for the benefit of the community?

Tucci, it seems, routinely uses trickery to recruit specialists to the vault's civilization restoration project.  For his part, Gottlieb acts like a god over his little community, running roughshod over people's privacy and facilitating the death of people who have genetic disorders (like diabetes) so their inferior genes won't be passed down to future generations and thus weaken the human race in its hour of crisis.  (A lot of classic SF is quite elitist, what with Asimov's Foundation and Heinlein's lunar rebels manipulating people, and tons of other examples, and "The Oath" is another slice of this elitism, putting forward the idea that doctors--members of the cognitive elite--should not be bound by such conventions as the Hippocratic Oath.)  Gottlieb seems to enjoy being a big fish in a small pond, and is reluctant to move to the vault, where he will be subordinate toothers and, as an amateur, in the shadow and under the direction of the trained medical personnel there; on the other hand, in the vault he will also be in a position to do more good for more people.

Acceptable.

"The Price" by Algis Budrys

This is a brief (two and a half pages) self-consciously literary allegorical story about how to survive an ordeal you may have to become a monster, or how war turns you ugly, or war is the devil's work, or evil never dies, or something; I have to admit I'm not sure I'm getting it.

Three men sit at a table, interviewing a hideous hunchback who initially refuses to give a name but then offers "Rumpelstiltskin."  We learn that Hunch has lived over a hundred years, been a prisoner and the subject of study in Czarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and East Germany, but never given up any information.  Hunch made it to Switzerland in the late Sixties and then spent some decades sheltered by monks during a seventy-year-long war, presumably between the West and the Warsaw Pact.

Dramatically the curtains are opened and it is revealed that the world outside has been transformed by war into a sea of fire!  Somehow, Hunch has made it here (presumably the United States) from Europe.  The three men want to know how he survived the fiery holocaust, and express a reluctant willingness to become like him if that is necessary to survive.  Hunch then ecstatically celebrates, dancing around.

"The Price" is a pretentious waste of time, an arty exercise or experiment.  Budrys uses up a lot of ink describing in detail the idiosyncratic way the hunchback, who I guess is the devil, smokes cigarettes, for example.  Long passages describing people manipulating matches and cigarette cases and cigarettes is one of my pet peeves, and another is stories in which the devil tries to trick somebody into making a deal, so Budrys is doing everything to get on my bad side here.  Of course, those are just my prejudices.  Another of my opinions: maybe a story about how you think war is bad is supposed to be provocative or groundbreaking or whatever, but in fact it is banal--everybody says war is bad--and often hypocritical--many people who loudly remonstrate against a war today will in a few years be just as loudly urging support for some other war.  Blish's story, "The Oath," is a useful contrast to Budrys's "The Price."  While I essentially agree with Budrys that war is terrible, his broad and over-the-top denunciation of war is boring and unproductive, while Blish's argument, which appears to be that the cognitive educated elite should be able to run our lives for us, is far more interesting and useful, even though I disagree with it, because Blish's case is based on specific examples and evidence and is in fact truly rebellious in its thinking, not a mere rebellious pose.   

Thumbs down!           

"The Price" first saw print in the same issue of F&SF that included Ward Moore's "The Fellow Who Married the Maxill Girl," one of the stories Merril reprinted in 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F which we read in our last episode.  "The Price" would reappear in the Budrys collection Blood and Burning and a number of American and European anthologies, including James Sallis's The War Book and a German anthology of stories from F&SF.

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Of today's batch of stories, the Ballard pieces are the most accomplished when it comes to traditional literary values, offering striking images and good writing and a compelling narrative.  Anderson's story is solid traditional SF with aliens and science, plus a moral dilemma and a somewhat surprising cosmic horror ending instead of (or in addition to) a sense of wonder ending--the universe is full of endless possibilities, but not for us humans!  (The ultimate in social inequality!)  Blish's story is talky and a little boring, but at least it competently makes a rational argument worth engaging with.  The Budrys is just bogus self-indulgent pseudo-arty goop, like a dreadful off-off-Broadway play.

Today's stories are perhaps united by a bleakness and even misanthropy; our next blog post will cover more 1960 stories recommended by Trotskyist Judith Merril and it will be interesting to see if they are a little cheerier.