Science Fiction and Fantasy from Playboy: Bradbury, Bloch and Brown

Let's continue our look at the 1966 collection The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy.  Today we'll be looking at stories by Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and Fredric Brown that first appeared in Hugh Hefner's iconic magazine.

"The Vacation" by Ray Bradbury (1963)

Word on the street is that Ray Russell edited The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy (for whatever dumb reason the text just credits "the editors of Playboy.")  In his intro to "The Vacation," Russell pours the praise for his fellow Ray on incredibly thick, telling us "The name Ray Bradbury is synonymous with science fiction" and that Bradbury "singlehandedly" lifted SF "out of the shady demimonde of the pulps, into the respectable world of literature."  I think Bradbury is great and think he deserves most of the accolades he has received, but talk about debatable propositions!  (And again we see Russell's hostility to the genre magazines so many of us adore.  Maybe this is a reflection of the snobbery that was part of the Playboy brand?)

An unnamed man and his wife live in an unnamed city with their son Jim.  The father is a professional, every day putting on suit and tie and commuting to his office.  Mom and Dad are sick of city life, of keeping up with the Jonses, of their friends who aren't really friends, and the newspaper headlines reflect news so bad that they wonder if God is going to eliminate the human race and start over.  One evening the couple wish the human race would just disappear (except them and Jim, of course), and when they wake up the next morning their wish has come true!

The last family on Earth acquires a gasoline-powered handcar and the three of them happily set out exploring America by rail, but will they be happy with the world all to themselves, a world that presents no challenges or responsibilities, on what amounts to a thirty-year vacation?

Bradbury is a poetic sort of writer, and the story is full of brief but evocative descriptions of sounds and smells and sights, verse-like lists of cities and plants and animals, you know what I'm talking about:

They had awakened to the soft sounds of an earth that was now no more than a meadow, and the cities of the earth sinking back into seas of saber grass, marigold, marguerite and morning glory.

.... 

"No.  Let Jim be the last.  After he's grown and gone let the horses and cows and ground squirrels and garden spiders have the world."

Bradbury sets most of the story on a stretch of rail on a Pacific beach, giving himself a lot of sights and sounds to work with.

A good piece of work, but this is what we expect of Bradbury, there's nothing really eye-opening or surprising about it.

"Word of Honor" by Robert Bloch (1958)

The head of the University's School of Dentistry invents a truth gas and flies over the city, dumping the gas on the citizens so that everybody is compelled to be frank and truthful.  A journalist figures out why everything is going haywire--marriages are breaking up, politicians are resigning, a labor union leader has committed suicide, etc.--and is on hand when a storm brews up and the dentist's plane crashes.  The inventor is killed, but the journalist recovers all the guy's supplies and documents intact--the journo can, should he decide to, continue the inventor's work!  The reporter confides in his editor, telling him his plan to spray the gas over Washington and Moscow, arguing he can end war this way.  The editor discourages him, arguing that if people never lied and couldn't keep their true opinions to themselves chaos would result and our whole society would collapse.  The editor makes the journalist promise to forget the whole scheme, but the reporter's promise is a lie.

Acceptable.

"Puppet Show" by Fredric Brown (1962)

In his intro to this one Russell says that Brown composes his novels in his head while riding Greyhound buses cross country.  A cool story if true!

Strangers come out of the desert to the tiny town of Cherrybell, Arizona (pop. 42, says the sign), a man leading a burro and, on the burro, a bizarre figure, a "man" blue and red and skinny and nine feet tall.  Brown entertainingly describes these characters, the town and its citizens, and how they all interact.  You see, aliens have been watching Earth for a long time, and are now giving us a final test to see if we are qualified to join the Galactic Union.  The final test concerns the level of Earthly xenophobia--will Earth people be able to deal with aliens, or, like a few of the many intelligent species in the galaxy, will they suffer an irrational hatred or fear of the alien that renders them unable to get along with the other members of the Union?  The aliens' test, as the story's title hints, includes quite a bit of trickery.

I'm a little tired of trick ending stories, but this one isn't bad.  Judith Merril (whom Ray Russell praises in the microaggression-filled Preface to The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy as "a first-rate writer- anthologist," an "exception that proves the rule" that science fiction and fantasy are mostly written and enjoyed by men) included "Puppet Show" in the eighth volume of her famous Year's Best SF series of anthologies.  Merril and Brown both have names I commonly misspell, and Brown's name is actually misspelled on the cover of the British edition of The Year's Best SF 8, which is confusingly titled The Best of Sci-Fi 4.  See, we all make mistakes!

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I feel like there are too many "last man on Earth" stories, and too many "Earth on trial before Galactic Union" stories, but writers like Bradbury and Brown who can actually stick words together to make good sentences and stick sentences together to make good paragraphs can make me enjoy such old ideas and plots.  A good crop today.

More SF from Playboy by famous names in our next episode!

Stories of Contact with aliens by Walton, Leiber, Brown and Phillips

As you can see from this receipt (the true historian knows that truth lies in the documentary evidence!) I purchased Contact, a 1963 anthology edited by Noel Keyes, on June 7 of 2016 at A-1 Bookstore for $1.50.  This book was 50% more expensive than Planet of Peril by John Christopher, which I read in August of 2017.  The vagaries of the market!  Contact is Noel Keyes's only credit at isfdb, and the know-it-alls there pour salt in Mr. Keyes's wounds by claiming that famous SF historian Sam Moskowitz actually did much of the work putting Contact together.  Keyes (real name: David Keightley) was probably too busy studying Chinese history and literature to devote his full attention to Contact.  Priorities, man!

Let's check out four stories from Contact, two from people we are familiar with, Fritz Leiber and Frederic Brown, and two from guys I know little or nothing of, Harry Walton and Peter Phillips.

"Intelligence Test" by Harry Walton (1953)

This is a sort of Twilight Zone-ish story in which, shortly after a UFO is spotted over Everytown, USA, a handful of people find themselves trapped by a forcefield in a roadside diner, the subjects of an alien test of human intelligence!  A journalist among those trapped figures out how to escape, despite the obstructions presented by the presence of two members of the decadent and corrupt bourgeoisie!

This is a good story of its type and I enjoyed it.  "Intelligence Test" originally appeared in Science Fiction Plus, and forty years later was translated into Russian and included in an anthology alongside Clifford Simak's Goblin Reservation and Horacio Quiroga's "Anaconda."

 

"What's He Doing in There?" by Fritz Leiber (1957)

Fritz, the man behind the much-beloved Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, has been showing up on the blog a lot lately, which is good, because he had an interesting career and I like much of his work.  Of course, he doesn't hit it out of the park every at-bat (as you sports fans might say.)  "What's He Doing in There?" is a tepid joke story.  I can't really object to Leiber writing joke stories, because he wrote one of the very best comedy SF/F stories, "Lean Times in Lankhmar," published in 1959, but this one feels like no more than competent filler.

The first Martian to come to Earth makes a beeline to an anthropologist who has a wife, a "coltish" teenage daughter and a "little son."  After a nice chat the alien utters a vague phrase that the humies interpret as a request to use the bathroom.  They direct him, and he locks himself in...for hour after hour.  What could the Martian be doing in there?  In the morning he finally emerges and it becomes apparent that Martians sleep underwater, and the alien took the tub for a comfortable bed.

An acceptable trifle.

First appearing in Galaxy, in 1982 "What's He Doing in There?" was translated into (I think) Croatian and appeared in the Yugoslavian SF magazine Sirius.

"Knock" by Fredric Brown (1949)

Hubba hubba!

Remember when we read a Fredric Brown novel about a homophobic boozer and a god-like rock?  Good times!  Let's hope this short story is equally fun and crazy.

Aliens hose down the Earth with rays that kill all animal (but not plant) life, saving only a few score specimens for their zoo, among them one man and one woman.  These aliens don't die of old age, though they can die by violence, and are dumbfounded and disappointed when their brand new Earth specimens start dying of natural causes.  These E.T.s are also cold-hearted, with no conception of love or affection, and the last man on earth tricks them; he tells them Earth creatures live longer if petted and caressed, and suggests they show such affection to their rattlesnake specimen.  The aliens start keeling over, and somehow don't realize they are dying from snakebites--they think that Earth is the planet of death and they have started dying of old age like Earth creatures do.  So, they leave.

There is also a sort of subplot about whether or not the last man and last woman on Earth will ever have sex; she does not find him attractive.

I can't tell you that this story is bad, but it is leaving me cold.  More filler.

After first appearing in an issue of Thrilling Wonder with a cover that is making my eyes dilate, "Knock" has been reprinted many times; according to isfdb, Sirius presented it twice, the second time as the cover story!  Weird!

"Lost Memory" by Peter Phillips (1952)

Phillips's career seems to have caused some confusion among SF scholars--not only are there multiple SF writers with this name, but it was also used as a pseudonym by Howard Browne.  The Phillips we are acquainting ourselves with today is mentioned by Barry Malzberg in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, Malzberg telling us that Phillips was the first person to write about a machine that facilitates and manipulates dreams.

"Lost Memory" is yet another story about emotional robots who have lost knowledge of who first constructed them, like "Robots Return" and "Orphans of the Void," both of which we read earlier this week.  These here robots reside on a lifeless rock of a planet and have a complex society complete with a division of labor--there are politician robots, for example, and our narrator is a journalist robot.  These individualistic robots feel pride and fear and have differences of opinion, and some make a practice of customizing themselves--one has replaced his legs with wheels, for example.  Another converted himself into an aircraft and tried to escape the planet's gravity, without success.

When what we readers realize is a rocket ship crash lands on the planet, the robots think it is a robot from another world who has successfully converted itself into a space ship.  The injured Earth astronaut in the ship, via radio, tries to explain to the assembled robot politicians and journalists that he needs medical attention, but these robots have no experience with living things and continue thinking it is the rocket itself talking.  (The rocket's airlock was jammed in the crash and there are no windows or anything like that.)  A robot technician cuts open the rocket to conduct repairs, and the heat caused by the friction burns the human to a crisp.  Phillips really pours on the horror elements, with the astronaut repeatedly screaming things like "Dear Jesus!" and "You're burning me alive!" and then with the description of the corpse, which the robots think some sort of insulation.  This is like proto-splatterpunk!

Not only is the astronaut killed by his would-be rescuers, but the robots lose an opportunity to learn from him the secret of their origins.  I'll give this hardcore tragedy a moderately positive vote.   

"Lost Memory" has been reprinted numerous times in anthologies of robot stories and horror stories and translated into several foreign languages, including Japanese.

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I don't feel like any of these was a waste of my time, so a successful mission.  More fifty-plus-year-old SF stories in our next episode when I explore another of my paperback SF anthologies.

Four stories by Jack Vance from the period 1954-1962

It's the final four stories in my copy of When the Five Moons Rise, a 1992 collection of Jack Vance stories from the 1950s and '60s produced by Underwood-Miller.

"When the Five Moons Rise" (1954)

"When the Five Moons Rise" first appeared in Cosmos.  In addition to showing up in various collections of Vance's work, it would be reprinted in 1993 in Lighthouse Horrors, an anthology of stories linked, I guess, by the fact that they prominently feature lighthouses!  If you are wondering why a publisher would bet on a collection of stories centered around lighthouses, just ask a member of the Viennese delegation, as Nabokov calls them.

Perrin is one of two men who live in a remote lighthouse on a rocky seacoast on an alien planet.  Perrin isn't native to this planet--he can barely tell the five moons apart.  The moons orbit the planet at different speeds, and his partner warns Perrin that, on those rare days when all five rise together, "it is not wise to believe anything."

Sure enough, on the day when the moons rise at the same time, strange and dangerous things happen.  His partner disappears, and things that Perrin thinks of suddenly and improbably appear.  When the radio fails, a new radio set washes up on the shore.  When he feels lonely, a beautiful young woman arrives at the lighthouse.  Interrogating this woman provides clues that she is a dangerous being, perhaps analogous to a demon from Hell.  Perrin resists succumbing to his desire for the woman, lest he be dragged down to Hell or suffer some similarly dreadful fate.

This story is not bad, though the plot is a little gimmicky and pedestrian.  The way Perrin resolves the plot reminded me of Frederic Brown's famous 1944 story "Arena." In "Arena," the hero knocks himself unconscious to get through a force field which only permits passage of inanimate objects and unconscious creatures.  In "When the Five Moons Rise," Perrin knocks himself unconscious in order to foil the menacing beings, who apparently need the thoughts of their victims to take on physical form.
    
"Where Hesperus Falls" (1956)

"The Wreck of the Hesperus" is one of those poems people always mention but which I had never read.  Thinking it might be important to truly grokking what Vance was up to in "Where Hesperus Falls," and thinking at age 45 it was about time I got a little edjumacation, I pulled up Longfellow's 1840 poem at The Poetry Foundation website and give it a whirl.  It turned out to be a much easier poem than one of those brain busters like "The Waste Land" or even the relatively easy "Dover Beach."  You don't have to know about ancient Greece or Dante or anything to get "The Wreck of the Hesperus": a guy is given great responsibilities, and in his arrogance and overconfidence takes an unnecessary risk and destroys those for whom he is responsible, including his family and himself.

"Where Hesperus Falls" is set 96,000 years in the future!  Our protagonist is Henry Revere, who was born in the 20th century; when he was young a chemical experiment went awry and somehow made him immune from the aging process, and so he was watched the world and the human race change, empires rising and falling, human culture and human biology evolving, for over nine thousand centuries!  Bored with life, which offers nothing new, he wants to commit suicide, but the authorities of the day consider him a priceless treasure and watch him like a hawk, using all the high tech apparatus at their disposal to stop him from killing himself!

Revere comes up with a crazy scheme of ending his now burdensome existence.  He recalls that back in the 20th century a satellite (christened Hesperus) was launched, and its orbit is scheduled to decay sometime this decade! Revere does all the math and calculates that the Hesperus will crash in the middle of the ocean, and at the appropriate time sails a yacht there to meet his doom!  He doesn't really care that his squad of minders accompanies him--"This is the risk they assume when they guard me."  Obviously Revere's willingness to put others at risk is reminiscent of that of the sea captain in Longfellow's poem.

I thought a theme of "The Wreck of the Hesperus" was responsibility, and we also see this theme in "Where Hesperus Falls."  But while readers have no reason to doubt that the sea captain in Longfellow's poem has a legitimate responsibility to his daughter and fellow mariners, and is acting in the wrong by sailing them into a hurricane, Revere's load of responsibility and the justice of his actions is very much open to dispute.  Revere asserts a right to end his own life, but his "guards" insist he has a responsibility to the human race to survive, to serve as a link to the past.  Vance's story is about the tension between an individual's freedom and his duty to society--the head of the team assigned to preserve Revere's life dismisses Revere's claim of self-ownership and asserts the primacy of duty (and sends me to the dictionary in the process):

"We all must fulfill our existences to the optimum.  Today your function is to serve as vinculum with the past."

Do we live for ourselves, or for others?  And if others infringe on our freedom, are there limits to what we can do to preserve our liberty?  Even if we agree that Revere has a right to kill himself, does he have a right to kill his oppressors in the course of defending that right?

This story has some plot holes (modern civilization never tinkered with the Hesperus for 96,000 years?), but I like its various themes and ideas, and there are nice SF touches, as Vance describes the fashions and technology of the far future.  Good!

"Where Hesperus Falls" first appeared in Fantastic Universe, in an issue with an absolutely genius Hannes Bok cover and stories by plenty of big names.

"Dodkin's Job" (1959)

"Dodkin's Job" first appeared in Astounding, and later was included in Jerry Pournelle's anthology The Survival of Freedom (which includes an essay by anarchist intellectual David Friedman, a Robert Heinlein fan and the son of titan of free-market economics Milton Friedman), so I am expecting a hard core anti-collectivist/anti-government story from Vance.  Let's stick it to the commies, Jack!

Vance's novels often include excerpts from fictional reference books and scholarly works, and, setting up the story's theme, Vance begins "Dodkin's Job" with an extract from a Leslie Penton's First Principles of Organization, an extract in which Penton quotes one of the founders of the "Theory of Organized Society" thus: "When self-willed microunits combine to form and sustain a durable macrounit, certain freedoms of action are curtailed."

It is the future, a time and place in which the Theory of Organized Society has been put into action!  The government assesses all citizens, assigns them a rating, and then allocates to them appropriate jobs, housing, food, sexual relationships, and leisure time.  Our hero is Luke Grogatch, rated "Flunky/Class D/Unskilled," and recently assigned to work as part of a gang digging a new tunnel for the sanitation department.  Grogatch is relatively intelligent, and could have achieved a higher rating and better compensation (like "Class 7 Erotic Processing" instead of the "Class 15" he now enjoys, and a chance to choose which TV channel to watch instead of being stuck with only "Band H" at a communal screen) but he is a "Nonconformist" and refuses to employ "all the tricks and techniques: the beavering, the gregariousness, the smutting, knuckling" that are required to get ahead.  And now that he is in his forties, it is probably too late to start beavering his way to the "High Echelons" and such perquisites as "AAA Nutrition" and "a suite of rooms for his exclusive use."

New regulations come down that add three hours to Grogatch's workday without adding to his compensation.  All the other flunkies just accept this--most everybody but Grogatch in the Organized Society is a docile conformist--but Grogatch marches into the office of the bureaucrat who issued the new regulations in hopes of having the new rules rescinded, beginning an odyssey through the public services apparatus as each functionary and executive he confronts shirks responsibility and directs him to a different office or department--even the Secretary of the Department of Public Affairs and the Chairman of the Board of Directors pass the buck!  (Grogatch's peregrinations among the upper levels of the Organized Society is facilitated by his clothes, which belie his current status as a flunky--"the clothes make the man" is a theme we see elsewhere in Vance's body of work; it was in Son of the Tree, for example.)  In the end, Grogatch discovers where the real power in his society lies, and seizes it--will he use his newfound power to help others, or only himself?  

"Dodkin's Job" reminded me of the Cugel stories with its quixotic hero and in that it is laugh-out-loud hilarious; the style is very funny, and there are great individual jokes.  Here's a two-line paragraph that had me in stitches:

Luke, attempting a persuasive smile, achieved instead a leer of sinister significance.  The girl was frankly startled.  

Its theme of one man standing up against a stultifying and conformist society reminded me of Harlan Ellison's famous story "Repent Harlequin, etc", but where Ellison's story is overwrought and ridiculous, the monochrome wish fulfillment fantasy of a petulant child who sees himself as a victim/hero and any who disagree with him as villains, Vance's story is clever, inventive, morally ambiguous and fun, and it feels real, unlike Ellison's story, which feels like a fable.  All that stuff I sometimes blabber on about when I judge stories, like pacing and tone and images and characters, Vance handles perfectly, and apparently effortlessly, so the story reads smoothly, here.

I strongly recommend "Dodkin's Job."  So, is Vance sticking it to the commies here?  I definitely like to think so, but the docility and conformity themes are probably more pronounced than the government oppression theme, and Vance doesn't have the characters throw around obvious shibboleths like "comrade" and "hoarders and wreckers" that would mark the story as a direct allegory for revolutionary socialism or the Soviet Union--in fact, members of the High Echelon have titles like "Chairman of the Board" and are called "tycoons," not "commissars."  Lefties reading the story can easily interperet it is an attack on the "absurdities of the class system in capitalist America" or an indictment of the Byzantine and inhumane workings of the management of the evil corporations that are always foreclosing on community centers on the TV.  Perhaps we should see "Dodkin's Job" as a story about the way large organizations, be they private or public, embedded in societies relatively free or relatively repressive, take on a life and logic of their own, diluting responsibility and sucking the humanity out of their constituent members, giving them powerful incentives to act in ways they wouldn't in smaller, more natural, settings, to the detriment of themselves and all around them.  (You remember that Peter Gabriel song, don't you?)

"Dust of Far Suns" (1962)

This one has appeared under many names; I read it years ago (long before this blog made its stupifying debut) under the title "Sail 25;" I think "Sail 25" is the title Vance prefers.  The story was first published in Amazing, under the title "Gateway to Strangeness"--this looks like a good issue of Amazing, with an article on C. L. Moore, short stories by Roger Zelazny and James Schmitz, and lots of illustrations by Virgil Finlay.

I liked "Sail 25" when I read it way back when (probably in The SFWA Grand Masters: Volume Three) and, unsurprisingly, I enjoyed it today.  In some ways it is a traditional hard SF story in which clever and disciplined men in space suits who know lots of science and engineering get into a dangerous situation and use their mechanical and technical knowledge to get out of the jam.  (Ignoramuses and those of weak character suffer a black fate.)  But Vance's signature amusing style and witty dialogue, and inclusion of an eccentric and morally questionable character, bring some laughs and ambiguity to the proceedings.

The plot: In a near future era in which ships propelled by the solar wind travel around the solar system, eight space cadets are about to go on their final training cruise, a test to see which of them is cut out to be a spaceman, that most intellectually, psychologically and physically demanding of occupations!  Administering the test is Henry Belt, a legend in the service for his idiosyncrasies.  After a technical test on the ground (the cadets are tasked with building computers out of a pile of spare parts) which only six pass, the class sets sail for Mars.  Belt observes while the cadets deal with one crisis after another that could very well send them to their doom beyond the solar system, judging their performance but not lifting a hand to help--he assures the cadets that he is ready to die.  The superior cadets save the day, and most of the class makes it back to Earth alive, where the capable cadets are graduated and the inferior survivors flunk out.

Entertaining, a good specimen of this type of story.

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The stories included in 1992's When the Five Moons Rise are all worth reading, and some are great, but you should probably seek them out in other collections and anthologies, as this book is full of typos and printing errors.  I'll probably sell my copy on ebay; my PayPal account took a serious hit recently when my sporting blood was aroused and I spent much more money than I had expected to triumphing over a tenacious fellow SF fan in an epic auction struggle over a stack of old issues of Fantastic.  I've already sold a bunch of old Games Workshop models and my copy of Arkham House's The Horror at Oakdeene, which I acquired at the same library sale where I got When The Five Moons Rise, but the financial loss has yet to be made good.

Rogue in Space by Fredric Brown

Maybe gambling would be the answer, if he could find an honest game so he could enjoy it.  But finding an honest gambling game in Mars City--or in most other places in the system--was almost as hard as finding an honest woman.  Maybe there wasn't any such thing.  There was no honesty anywhere, not only not in gambling or women, but not in politics, business or anything else. 

Stalking the aisles of a Des Moines antique mall I spotted this 1971 printing of Fredric Brown's Rogue in Space, a fix-up novel first published in book form in 1957. Even though the last thing I read by Brown, a short story about a man-eating armadillo, was just OK, Brown was championed by big league scribblers Ayn Rand, Mickey Spillane and Robert Heinlein, so I felt like he deserved my attention, and that three and a half dollars wasn't too much to pay (though it was close!)

Rogue in Space is set in a dystopian future in which mankind has colonized the solar system.  How dystopian is it?  For starters, Albuquerque is the capital of the solar system!  Besides that, while democratic forms are preserved as a charade, the solar system is corruptly administered by the leading political party, a bunch of commies called "the Guilds," and the second place party, a bunch of fascists known as "the Gilded."  Not only is this society's politics tyrannical, arbitrary and corrupt, its culture is perverse and decadent.  The music is loud, simple and stupid; TV screens are several feet across and broadcast a wide variety of pornography; and homosexuality, voyeurism, prostitution, and necrophilia are rampant and accepted, even embraced, by the elite.  (Obviously Brown in the 1950s and a reader in the 21st century may have different ideas of what constitutes a perversity.)

What characters do we follow in this twisted world Brown has created for us?  Well, our main characters are a rock and a career criminal.  Yes, I said "a rock!"

Brown starts the novel off well with descriptions of his two main characters, who are compelling because they are so unusual.  On the first page of text we are told that life has appeared in the universe in only two places, on Earth and in a far corner of the galaxy, where a planetoid a mile wide achieved consciousness.  This rock is driven by its curiosity to explore the galaxy, and after billions of years of travel it approaches our solar system.

Brown based Rogue in Space on two of his short stories. The rock, which I was so excited to meet in the two-page introductory chapter, did not appear in the first story, "Gateway to Darkness" (printed in Super Science Stories in 1949), and so doesn't appear in this 163-page novel again until page 83.  Luckily we have our second main character to keep us company, a man called Crag.  Crag is a master thief and murderer who kills people with his robotic left hand.  Crag hates women, Crag hates homosexuals, Crag hates everybody, and over the course of the book we see him insult women, vandalize a gay couple's pornography collection, physically assault a male prostitute, and kill police in cold blood.  Crag is what the kids call "a hater."  Does he love anything?  Well, he loves to get drunk on the most exotic and expensive kinds of booze, and we see him do that as well.

Brown wrote crime stories as well as SF, and the first half of Rogue in Space is a crime caper in which Crag does stuff like pick locks, sneak into buildings, escape a prison, and get double-crossed.  The pace is fast, there are lots of cool SF trappings like space suits, space ships, and ray guns, and Crag, being an absolute jerk, is an interesting character, so I enjoyed this first portion of the novel, even if I was eager to get back to the sentient rock.

In that first half Crag falls into the orbit of the foremost politician of the Gilded, a man known as Olliver.  Olliver serves as a judge in Albuquerque, and has contrived to be the judge in a criminal case in which Crag is the defendant.  Olliver and his gorgeous wife Judeth help Crag escape prison and the "psycher," one of those devices we find in SF crime stories which erases your criminal personality and turns you into a law-abiding citizen.  Olliver and Judeth hire Crag to disguise himself and sneak into a genius's fortified laboratory on Mars to steal a disintegrator.  This device is so powerful it can disintegrate entire planets!  Olliver and Judeth have been telling Crag they want the disintegrator to finance the founding of a new political party, one which is sincerely devoted to democracy.  But when the three of them are on an asteroid, there to test the disintegrator, Olliver reveals that he doesn't really want to restore good government--he plans to use the disintegrator to become dictator of the solar system! Judeth and Crag won't stand for this, and kill Olliver.  Crag and Judeth admit they have a thing for each other, but have no opportunity to consummate their relationship because they are stranded on the asteroid, their ship having drifted away during the excitement.  First Judeth, and then Crag, run out of oxygen and die!

Us law-abiding types are always relieved when murderers and thieves like Crag die at the end of stories.  Justice has been served by the cosmos!  But wait!  My hero the sentient rock appears and brings Crag back to life as the second half of the novel (that corresponding to the second Crag story, "Gateway to Glory" from Amazing in 1950) begins!  Rock, what are you doing?  Maybe, as a rock who has never before encountered life, my hero doesn't know the difference between good and evil yet, and doesn't realize he should be using his godlike powers (he can manipulate any amount of matter at the atomic level) to provide restitution to Crag's victims, not bring Crag back to life?  Or maybe the rock knows that one should, as the kids say, "not hate the player, but hate the game."        

Apparently believing Crag is good on the inside, and has devoted his life to stealing, killing and drinking because of his environment (society made him do it!), the rock wants to be Crag's friend!  But instead of being thrilled by this First Contact, Crag tells the rock to leave him alone and flies back to Mars (the rock has summoned the ship back) to spend the money Olliver paid him on booze!  But Crag doesn't enjoy being rich; Brown does a good job of portraying a man who finds a life without risks or goals to be lacking.  While Crag is moping around bars and hotels, the rock alters the orbits of every asteroid in the asteroid belt so that they coalesce into a new planet! The government tries to investigate the new world, but is prevented by force fields and other phenomena.  The rock has made the planet for Crag, even manipulating the brain of the scientist who names the new heavenly body so that he will christen it "Cragon!"

Crag has made friends with a fellow criminal.  When this joker gets cornered by the fuzz during a jewel heist, Crag rescues him and, along with the jewel thief's cronies, they fly to Cragon, which they find to be a paradise!  No cops, no TV, no booze, no people, just the chance to start a new world, a place to build adobe huts, hunt and fish, sit and watch the fire and the stars.  To misanthrope Crag, disillusioned with the life of luxury that money can buy and disgusted by the pervasive sexual perversity of Earth and Mars, this may sound like a paradise (he realizes he doesn't need booze out here, that he used to get drunk to escape the pressures of human society) but the jewel thief and his hangers on don't want to live a primitive existence.  They take the ship and leave Crag alone, but Crag is not alone for long--the rock is able to recreate Judeth! Crag and Judeth live happily ever after on Cragon, watched over by the rock.  

1957 hardcover

Rogue In Space is pretty good.  Isn't part of the attraction of science fiction crazy characters, crazy settings and crazy capers?  Well, Brown delivers with main characters who are an intelligent rock and a murderous bigot who, we are supposed to believe, is a good person warped by an evil society, their bizarre relationship, and a depiction of (what Brown thinks is) a sick civilization.

Should we think of Rogue in Space as a satire of post-war life and society, or a warning that American society was headed in the wrong direction ?  Did Brown think 1950s pop culture was insipid and potentially a powerful negative influence?  That criminals, as rebels against society, are no worse, and perhaps better, than the rich and powerful, who are selfish and corrupt?  That the post-war boom was making life, which had been so challenging during the Depression and war years, dull, and making people soft, susceptible to decadence?  These kinds of questions add an additional level of interest to the novel, which already is a satisfying crime/adventure story about a man redeemed by friendship.  (Speaking of redemption, should we think of Rogue in Space as a Christian story, with the rock as God or his Son?)

I'd definitely recommend Rogue in Space--Ayn Rand, Mickey Spillane and Robert Heinlein did not steer me wrong!

Three ghoulish stories by science-fiction writers: Malzberg, Brown, and de Camp & Pratt

The final third of Bill Pronzini's Tales of the Dead, also published as The Arbor House Necropolis, is entitled "Ghoul!"  I don't think "Ghoul!" was ever published as a book on its own, as Voodoo! and Mummy! were.

When I was playing 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons the ghoul was always one of the scariest monsters,because it could paralyze you and quickly massacre your entire party.  In fact, if memory serves, in the example of play in the Dungeon Master's Guide a gnome gets sneak attacked by ghouls, and the DM doesn't even bother to roll any dice, just assumes the gnome is torn to bits.  In Pronzini's intro to "Ghoul!" he claims that in the superstitions of Eastern Europe the ghoul is more feared than the werewolf or vampire.  Gary Gygax and I can believe it!

"Indigestion" by Barry Malzberg (1977)

Malzberg got his name on the cover of Fantastic with this one.

Those familiar with Malzberg's work will not be surprised to learn that in "Indigestion" we are confronted with a first-person narrator who is suffering from vivid delusions.  Henry is a lonely man living in New York City.  Perhaps inspired by the misguided theory that planaria gain the knowledge of planaria they eat, Henry believes that the souls of dead people whose flesh he eats become housed in his own body.  (This also reminded me of the alzabo from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, published in the 1980s.)  Henry claims that he is the minister of a congregation of hundreds which he carries inside himself, so that he is never alone.  A side benefit is that raw human flesh is very tasty!

Henry's conscience manifests itself as a green scaly space alien who tries to convince Henry to stop robbing graves and eating from corpses.  At the end of this brief tale Henry realizes what a disaster he has made of his life, and leaps out a window to his death.

I thought this story was effective; beyond the "gross out" elements we have the image of a man who is lonely and feels he has screwed up his life, something many of us can identify with.

"The Spherical Ghoul" by Frederic Brown (1942)

Brown is famous for his novel What Mad Universe and his short story "Arena," both of which I think are worthwhile.  According to Wikipedia, best-selling authors Ayn Rand, Mickey Spillane and Robert Heinlein all were crazy about Brown, which is pretty impressive.

"The Spherical Ghoul" first appeared in Thrilling Mystery, which Pronzini calls a "shudder pulp."  Brown's story is advertised on the cover, but I had trouble finding a decent reproduction online; the picture I did find can be viewed here.

This story stars Jerry, a grad student who works as a night watchman at the morgue of the little college town of Springdale.  He's an anthropology student; yesterday Roger Zelazny reminded me that I know approximately zero about Havelock Ellis, Rainer Maria Rilke and W. H. Auden, and today by mentioning The Golden Bough again and again, Brown reminded me that I know almost nothing about James George Frazer.  I also learned that I don't know much about armadillos; I thought armadillos were herbivores.

The story is constructed as a mystery.  Jerry studies for hours, sitting in front of the only door to the windowless room where the bodies are kept in refrigeration.  When he has occasion to go into the room with the fridges, he is shocked and appalled to find that one of the corpses stored in there has had its face eaten away!  Yuck! How could this have happened while Jerry sat in front of the only door to the room?

There's a lot of jazz with the police, witnesses, using temperature to estimate the time of the crime, all that mystery fiction stuff.  In the end it turns out that one of the characters had access to an armadillo, and lowered the beast through a ventilation hole so it would devour the corpse's face.  This was to hide the cadaver's identity; the armadillo employer murdered the guy because the guy was blackmailing him for embezzling funds, and so on and so forth.  I find it hard to get excited about these mystery plots in which different jerk offs are trying to screw over each other.  When Jerry tells the embezzler/murderer that he has figured out his armadillo scheme, armadillo guy commits suicide before the cops can bring him in.  I guess this spares the armadillo the indignity of being entered into evidence at a trial. 


I don't think Brown tells us what becomes of the armadillo.  It must be hard going back to eating bugs after tasting raw human flesh, which, I have on good authority (that of Henry of Barry Malzberg's "Indigestion"), is delicious.  Maybe somebody should write a sequel to "The Spherical Ghoul," about how a man-eating armadillo terrorizes Springdale, bursting in on the coeds while they are showering and all that.

This story was OK.  I guess I was hoping there would be some kind of supernatural or science-fiction resolution to the mystery, like a guy who could detach his head or something like that.  I'll never laugh at the armadillos in Browning's Dracula again, though.

"Corpus Delectable" by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt (1953)

I get the impression that L. Sprague de Camp is a controversial figure in science fiction and fantasy circles, and that as the years have gone by his detractors have begun to seriously outnumber his supporters.  Fans of Robert Howard and H. P. Lovecraft are angry about de Camp's biographies of those Weird Tales luminaries, and with de Camp's editing and rewriting of some of Howard's work.  I read a bunch of de Camp's Viagens novels years ago and found them mediocre and forgettable, so I guess I'm not exactly in de Camp's camp myself.  Still, I'm willing to give him another chance; De Camp was a prolific writer who devoted his career to science fiction and fantasy, so he probably deserves a measure of respect for that.

"Corpus Delectable," Pronzini tells us in his intro to the story, is one of a series of stories about the habitues of Gavagan's Bar.  I guess these stories are supposed to be funny; the bar serves as a framing device for humorous anecdotes from various wacky characters.  This isn't my thing, but I'll try to be fair....

To be honest, I feel like old Bill Pronzini pulled a fast one on me with this one. This isn’t a bad story, but it has no supernatural, cannibalistic, or grave robbing content; there isn’t even a man-eating armadillo!

A car salesman comes to the bar and tells his sad story. He made friends with an undertaker, and over the course of time found that his new buddy was taking to staring at him. It turns out that the car salesman has a perfectly photogenic face for use in mortuary advertising - he looks like an expertly prepared cadaver! After his friend surreptitiously takes his picture, and it appears in an ad in a trade publication, the car salesman can’t go anywhere without being stared at or even accosted by people in the mortuary business who want to use him in their advertising. The car salesman is not interested in providing his photo, but then he is spotted by a former Chicago gangster who has gotten into the mortician game after going straight. This thug is not used to taking “no” for an answer, and the punchline of the story is that the gangster catches up to the car salesman right there in Gavagan's Bar!

As I said, this story isn’t bad, but I’m scratching my head wondering why it is in this book.

****************

Malzberg delivered the goods with his bleak tale of a mental case who robs graves and eats the recently buried dead. But the stories by Brown and the team of de Camp and Pratt, while competent, don’t really fit the bill. Maybe before I return Tales of the Dead to be interred on the shelves of the library I will give “Ghouls!” one last look.

Three British Horror Stories: Coppard, Lumley, and Campbell

This weekend I was able to drag myself away from Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows long enough to read three horror stories; I didn't specifically set out to read British stories, but after I had read them that was the only thing I could think of that tied them together.

Utamaro print mentioned in "Arabesque"

"Arabesque: The Mouse" by A. E. Coppard (1920)

Science fiction writer Michael Bishop, in the notes section at the back of his collection Brighten to Incandescence, praises "Arabesque: The Mouse," a story by A. E. Coppard. I'd never even heard of Coppard, but a book which includes "Arabesque: The Mouse" is available for free at the Internet Archive, so I decided to check it out.

This story is full of stirring, even shocking images.  A middle-aged man sits alone in an apartment with a Russian novel; an Utamaro print showing a woman nursing a child hangs on the wall.  The man observes a mouse, and then reminisces about his unhappy life.  He recalls coming home as a child to find his mother squeezing her breasts and spraying her milk into the fireplace.  This is one of his last memories of his mother, because the next day she was run over by a horse drawn cart.  The cart crushed her hands, so a surgeon amputated her hands; despite (or because) of this treatment, she died that night.  More unhappy reminiscences and scenes follow.

As the title suggests, this is not a plot-driven story, but a sort of grotesque decoration on the themes of women's breasts, heart beats, and severed hands, and the power of memory to weigh us down, misguide us and make us unhappy.  A strange and effective story.

"Snarker's Son" by Brian Lumley (1980)

S. T. Joshi, the literary scholar and atheist activist who has done so much that fans of weird fiction and literate horror are thankful for, seems to really have it in for Brian Lumley.  I admire Joshi, but I have enjoyed quite a bit (not all) of the Brian Lumley I have read.  Lumley doesn't have a lot of literary pretensions, and doesn't take the philosophical underpinnings of  H. P. Lovecraft's work very seriously.  Often Lumley just uses Lovecraftian images or ideas as furniture or settings for adventure stories.  When those adventure stories are good, they are fun.  So, when I had a chance to buy Screaming Science Fiction for ten cents, I did so.  To my surprise this was a signed edition.

The first story in Screaming Science Fiction is the quite short “Snarker’s Son.” A lost little boy is helped in finding his father by a London police officer. The boy is from an alternate universe (where the British capitol is “Mondon, Eenland”) and in reuniting the child with his father the policeman is transported to this strange world. Confused, the police officer fails to follow the natives' curious advice and gets eaten by a monster.

This is a pedestrian story; there is just not much to it, and nothing new. How the boy and then the bobby travel between universes is not explained, and neither is it explained why in Mondon the lights are shut off at 10:30 PM and everyone hides inside, nor is it explained why or how the underground train tunnels are now home to giant monsters. The alternate universe city with a stringent black out reminds me of the alternate universe New York in Frederic Brown’s What Mad Universe (1949), and the scene with the monster at the end seems to have been inspired by the appearance of the monster in the penultimate chapter of H. P. Lovecraft’s 1936 “At the Mountains of Madness.” (The narrator of the novella and his comrade repeatedly compare the tubular protoplasmic monster that emerges at speed from a cave tunnel to a subway train.)

“Snarker’s Son” is an inoffensive but forgettable trifle.  

"Getting it Wrong" by Ramsey Campbell (2011)

I read this in A Book of Horrors, edited by the indefatigable Stephen Jones, author and editor of over 120 books.  In the intro to the anthology, Jones complains about the current trend of "horror" stories that are really romance novels or detective stories starring vampires, werewolves and zombies.  A Book of Horrors aims to appeal to people who want stories that are truly scary or disturbing.

I have an ambivalent attitude towards Ramsey Campbell; I have liked a few of his stories, but have found many to be uninspiring.  I haven't abandoned hope, though, of becoming a Campbell fan, and with fingers crossed started "Getting it Wrong."

A murderous psycho has kidnapped a woman who works at a movie theater.  He asks her film trivia, and if she gets a question wrong, he tortures her!  Fortunately, the psycho allows his victim to telephone a friend for help answering the questions.  Unfortunately, the colleague she calls thinks it is all a joke and doesn't try to give the correct answers!      

This story is reasonably well-written, and Campbell adds layers of alienation and frustration to it - the colleague is a film nerd with no friends who has been frustrated in his career as well as his social life.  The problem with the story is that it is clear what is going on after like three pages, but the story is 15 pages long, so there aren't really any surprises or shocks for the last 80% of the story.  People who like old films (James Dean, Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, The Three Stooges) may enjoy all the movie references.

"Getting it Wrong" is a little better than the Lumley, but not much.

*****************

Of the three stories, only Coppard's "Arabesque: The Mouse" is really scary or disturbing.  Michael Bishop has not steered me wrong.  The Lumley and Campbell are competent but uninspired; both men have done better work.