Fantastic, Nov '52: M Spillane, C Woolrich & P W Fairman

The cover of the third issue of Fantastic is a wraparound which depicts a scantily-clad woman about to be murdered by goblins, which I think we have to admit is pretty crazy.  We've read two stories that debuted in this issue of Howard Browne's magazine, "Final Exam" by Chad Oliver and "To Fit the Crime" by Richard Matheson.  Today we'll read a story in the issue printed under Mickey Spillane's byline (though isfdb tells us Browne deserves a co-writing credit on this thing) and one by Cornell Woolrich, and, to round things out, a story appearing under the pen name Ivar Jorgensen but apparently written by Paul W. Fairman.  You can scrutinize the horrifying cover and sexually suggestive interior illos as well as join me in reading these three stories at this link to the very scan of the November 1952 issue of Fantastic that I will be reading. 

"The Veiled Woman" by Mickey Spillane and Howard Browne 

The editor's intro to "The Veiled Woman" acknowledges the hostility of critics to Spillane, crediting it, and Spillane's financial success, to Spillane's "emphasis" on "sex and sadism," and promotes "The Veiled Woman" as Spillane's "first science-fiction story."

Having read "The Veiled Woman," I can tell you it is very pulpy and melodramatic, written with gusto, full of crazy elements, and I found it a lot of fun.  Spillane and Brown, by including so many superlatives in the story, like in a superhero comic book, and by making the bad guys self-professed communists and the women sex objects, seem to be challenging the critics to attack the story, but "The Veiled Woman" is irresistibly entertaining.

A few years ago, the handsomest and wealthiest of New York bachelors vanished in Africa while looking for a new source of uranium.  He's our narrator.  Two months ago he reappeared with a new wife--she is reputedly the most beautiful woman in the world, but she wears a veil so nobody can see her face!  They lived shut away from the outside world in a Manhattan penthouse but then moved after a house invasion in which our narrator killed two burglars with his bare hands!  As the story begins, Karl and Lodi Terris are living in a remote cabin in upstate New York, but the world won't leave them alone!  A beautiful woman, a blonde daughter of privilege from Westchester who has betrayed her country and become a foreign agent dedicated to revolutionary socialism, and her gang of thugs bust into Karl and Lodi's love nest!  They think Karl has a device that exploits cosmic rays as an energy source and want to use it to make the USSR ruler of the world!  They don't find any such device, but take Lodi away with them, presumably to pressure Karl into giving up to them the machine Karl says does not exist.

The US government also thinks Karl has a super energy machine and, while he is looking for Lodi, Karl has to evade efforts of the feds to drag him before Congress.  As a rich guy, Karl has a legion of smart employees and they help him do the detective work that involves looking through documents and calling people on the phone to figure out who that blonde commie is.  Karl handles the detective work that involves going to crummy neighborhoods and beating people up all by himself.  He ends up getting captured by the Soviet agents but turns the tables on them and gets the info he needs through torture of a pretty boy sadist.  Then he rescues Lodi, killing many creeps in the process.

The FBI finally catches up to Karl and he and Lodi must testify before Congress.  Karl tells the assembled legislators and political appointees a crazy story.  In Africa, his plane crashed and he was injured and nursed back to health by member of a lost race!  He fell in love with their princess and married her!  Karl relates the history of these kind and generous people.  They lived in luxurious cities back when your ancestors and mine were just cave men!  But then an evil race bombed those fine cities into ruin, and the survivors of this gentle people took refuge underground.  These people have the secret of longevity, and know how to use cosmic rays as a source of power, so their lives are peaceful and easy.  The climax of the story is the revelation that Lodi's people are colonists from Mars, their enemies raiders from Venus, and, to prove it, Karl strips off Lodi's clothes, revealing that the skin of her gorgeous body and beautiful face are green!

(The reason the Feds and the Reds think Karl has some kind of cosmic ray exploitation device is that Lodi temporarily was radioactive and left traces of this radioactivity on the ship she and Karl took home to New York.  This is a weakest and least satisfying part of the whole story.)   

Karl and Lodi return home, only to be ambushed by a top male communist agent and that blonde Westchester girl.  The man, vengeful, murders Lodi right there in front of Karl, and then the Westchester girl kills the foreigner and declares her love for Karl!  She has had an unquenchable desire for Karl ever since she saw him naked the night she busted into this house (the first time.)  She insists they have sex right there, and Karl obliges, banging her in the same house where his green wife lies dead with three bullet holes in her chest!  When he is done enjoying the Westchester traitor's body he shoots her twice in the stomach, killing her.

"The Veiled Woman" is the wild male wish-fulfillment fantasy, the dream of being a rich guy who says fuck you to the government, outfights low-life thugs and effeminate commies, and effortlessly seduces gorgeous young women, has sex with them, and then abandons them to enjoy the next girl in line.  The scenes of violence are pretty exciting, the sexual content is vulgar but has a striking and memorable vitality, and even the detective stuff is not bad.  The science fiction content is goofy, but not terrible, and is a sort of MacGuffin afterthought, anyway.  Everything is over-the-top, but in an exhilarating rather than an exhausting way.  At least in my opinion; if Mao is your hero and violence against women turns your stomach, "The Veiled Woman" is not for you.

"The Veiled Woman" would reappear in a 1979 anthology of science fiction stories by mystery writers, Mysterious Visions--the cover illustration of the Dutch edition of this volume is a still from the 1958 film Colossus of New York.  In 2018, Armchair Press paired "The Veiled Woman" with Edgar Rice Burroughs' second Pellucidar book in one of their series of "Double Novels," giving it a cover that gives away Lodi's skin color.

"The Moon of Montezuma" by Cornell Woolrich

Here's a mystery writer the critics have been kinder to than to Spillane. I also have a sense that while Spillane enjoyed himself with his fame and fortune, Woolrich was a sad sack who lived in squalor even after making a pile of dough.  A study in contrasts, there two guys.

"The Moon of Montezuma" is a real change of pace after "The Veiled Woman," Woolrich's pace is very slow, with lots of descriptions of everything and everybody.  For example, we hear all about the architecture of a house in Mexico and its decor and how the inhabitants have a subtle cruel look to their Aztec faces.  And there is a lot of jazz with the moon and shadows and moonlight.  This is a far more literary story than Spillane's, but like "The Veiled Woman," "The Moon of Montezuma" is about how dangerous women and foreigners are, and Woolrich's story, like Spillane's, is full of sex and of violence against women.

A blonde-haired and blue-eyed American woman uses up all her money chasing her husband down to Mexico, bringing with her their month-old baby, whom Dad has never seen. She ends up at a remote house where live some of the aforementioned cruel-looking women:

There was about her whole beauty, and she was beautiful, a tinge of cruelty, of barbarism. That same mask-like Aztec cast of expression, of age-old racial inheritance.

These women claim they have no idea where the blonde's husband is, but usher blondie in anyway.  Woolrich generates a real sense of menace, describing how these Mexican women look at the little blonde baby in a way that is "mechanical" and "cold."  Is Woolrich exploiting Anglo racism to make his story more effective?  Maybe.

Blondie stumbles upon a clue that suggests her husband has been here--even fathered a child among these Mexican women!  A child who recently died.  We readers wonder if this other child's death foreshadows the death of blondie's child, or if the Mexicans will seize the American baby as a replacement.  Sure enough, at night, the young beautiful Mexican woman, Woolrich reminding us that in her veins flows the blood of the Aztecs, those masters of human sacrifice, whose religion was not the religion of turning the other cheek but the religion of mass murder and the shedding of oceans of blood, creeps towards where the American woman and her baby sleep, moving like a panther, a knife in her teeth. 

The next day the American woman is in a shallow grave near a well and the Mexican woman has a new blonde baby to replace the old.  Weeks later the police arrive.  The killer has sex with the police detective as a means of dampening his enthusiasm for investigating the case of the missing gringa.  Eventually, the father of the ill-fated children, both the American blonde's and her Indian killer's, returns from prospecting far away.  Woolrich suggests that maybe he treats women shabbily because he learned during combat in World War II that life is meaningless.  "The Moon of Montezuma" is a downer!  This guy (also blonde and blue-eyed) has no idea the blonde baby is from his Yankee wife and not his Mexican wife.  

Months go by.  A rose the blonde wore on her lapel gives birth to a rose bush that rises from her secret grave.  To the rage of the Mexican wife, the white man spends a lot of time and energy cultivating and admiring this new rose bush, a rose of a breed not resident of this region.  One night the jealous Indian wife sneaks out to uproot and destroy the rose bush, but slips and falls in the nearby well, her shawl ("reboso") catching in the rose bush so she is hanged to death.

Thumbs up for this pretty disturbing story of a bunch of evil people and the foolish woman who is their victim.  "The Moon of Montezuma"'s racial and sexual politics will blow the minds of today's readers (Mexicans of all colors are cruel, callous and corrupt; women's primary concern is keeping a man; men shouldn't invest too much feeling in women but instead invest in their sons, through whom they will live on) but Woolrich sells these now-declasse philosophies with skill and in the context of the story (and maybe in the context of your life, hey, I don't know) they absolutely ring true.

"The Moon of Montezuma" was reprinted in the Woolrich collections Beyond the Night (1959) and The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich (1981) and the 1987 anthology House Shudders.

"The Missing Symbol" by Paul W. Fairman

This story is about the first trip to the moon, the psychologies of the men on that first trip.  As they wait for blast off, one guy is romantic, thinking about how this is the culmination of man's quest for knowledge, one guy wonders how long his wife will wait to find another man if he dies, one guy is scared and keeps telling himself he's not a coward, another guy is proud as punch, giddy with joy.  We hear these men's thoughts in italicized text.

The trip to Luna will take a week, and on the second day the crew goes insane.  I have to admit, considering that for centuries men went away from Europe on sea voyages of months' and years' duration few of them went totally insane, and the similar lack of debilitating insanity aboard innumerable ships and submarines from many nations during the World Wars, the idea that five specially trained guys couldn't keep it together for 48 hours in a space ship in peacetime is a little hard to credit.  Anyway, on day two one guy is paranoid and hides in his cabin and another guy picks a fight with the captain and knocks him over with a punch and has to be restrained and soon all the men are full of hate for each other and only grudgingly do their jobs so the ship doesn't fail.  We hear their outrageous hatred for each other in their thoughts in italicized text and hear about they fight each other in the corridors should they meet.

The five men get to Luna, and on the moon's surface their psychologies return to normal and they celebrate their success.  I guess we are supposed to think something about being in space makes you insane, and after landing on the moon, even though there is no atmosphere and the gravity is low, that something, whatever it is, is no longer in effect.  The zing ending is that the men know they will go insane on the way home, and who knows if they will all survive on the way back, seeing as some of them almost got killed on the way here.

I'm giving "The Missing Symbol" a thumbs down.  The gimmick does not work--if cosmic rays or distance from Earth or fear of the danger of vacuum or disorientation from lack of gravity makes you crazy, you would also be crazy on Luna.  And there is no real plot; the characters don't solve the problem--they don't even tackle the problem!--and there is no resolution.  "The Missing symbol" is an idea more than a story, a kernel the author didn't bother to build a story around.

I think "The Missing Symbol" is a pointless failure, but Hal Clement, perhaps the platonic ideal of a hard science fiction author, included it in his anthology First Flights to the Moon, so I guess you shouldn't take my word for it.

    

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Two solid thrillers (with little SF content) by famous and important writers and a limp misfire by a minor writer that should never have been published in this form.  Two out of three isn't bad, especially since the good stories are long and the abortion is brief.  

I really enjoyed today's Spillane and Woolrich stories, but I won't be reading anything by these gentlemen again soon--I have a feeling these guys bang away at the same themes again and again, and the effect of their prose will dull with repetition.  Maybe in a few months or years?

Richard Matheson: "SRL Ad," 'Dear Diary," "To Fit the Crime," and "Shipshape Home"

I recently purchased a 1970 paperback edition of Richard Matheson's Third From the Sun because of the eye-popping Gene Szafran cover, so let's take a break from the Jazz Age and read some 1950s stories by the man famous for penning Steven Spielberg's and Vincent Price's best movies. I think there is a scan of this edition at the internet archive here, and an earlier edition here, so you can read along free of charge.

"SRL Ad" (1952) 

I chose today's four stories essentially at random, but maybe I should have done some research first because the fact that "SRL Ad" was first reprinted (after its debut in F&SF) in an anthology edited by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds titled Science-Fiction Carnival, with the subtitle "Fun in Science-Fiction," no less, makes me fear it is a joke story.  Today at MPorcius Fiction Log, and every day, we are looking for sincerity, we are looking for blood and guts, we are looking for sex and violence!  We are not looking for joke stories!  Well, let's give "SRL Ad" a chance anyway.

Alright, this story is a total waste of time.  It comes to us as a series of letters and other correspondence.  Somehow, a female creature on Venus puts a personals ad in an Earth weekly magazine, looking for a boyfriend or husband among Earthmen.  An astronomy student in the Midwest replies as a joke.  Then he receives a box of rocks and things and a letter from the Venus girl that includes all kinds of statistical data on Venus of value to Earth astronomers.  This proves the student's correspondent really is from Venus.  The Venus girl arrives in a space ship and uses her flight belt to fly personally into the student's room, thinking they will fly back to Venus to get married and she will bear him dozens of children.  But the envelope of Venus air she carries with her makes the Terran very ill--she realizes their love is not to be and leaves.  The punchlines are that the student, initially scared of an encounter with an alien, now wishes she would return because she was good-looking, while the Venusian girl, now aware that Earthmen can't handle a Venusian girl, is placing ads in periodicals on Mars.

Annoying to read because the Earther uses lots of slang and jocular spellings and the Venusian has ESL English, plus not funny, so thumbs down.

"Dear Diary" (1954)

It looks like "Dear Diary" was original to the collection from which Third from the Sun's thirteen stories are drawn, Born of Man and Woman.   

Another lame joke story.  The first half is a diary entry penned by a young woman living in New York in 1954, bitching that the subway is crowded and NYC is dirty and there's a drunk across the hall who makes passes at her and the only guy who dates her is fat, etc.  She wishes she lived in the future with rocket ships and free love and no work and meals consisting of pills.

The second part is a diary entry from the year 3954.  This young woman has essentially the same complaints as her 20th-century predecessor; her commute on a space ship is uncomfortable, for example.  

Luckily, this childishly obvious story is only three pages long.  Still, thumbs down.

"To Fit the Crime" (1952)

This one debuted in the same issue of Fantastic as Chad Oliver's "Final Exam," which we read in 2018, and fiction by Mickey Spillane and Cornell Woolrich that maybe I'll read some day.  In 1969, "To Fit the Crime" was reprinted in Fantastic alongside reprints of stories by Robert Bloch and Anthony Boucher and new fiction by Jack Vance and Alexei Panshin.

This is a Twilight-Zone-style twist ending gimmick story.  It's not terrible; we'll judge it barely acceptable.

Iverson Lord is an 89-year-old poet, on his deathbed.  Bitter and angry, an arrogant jerk, he accuses his doctor and family of murdering him.  He berates his son, a man in his fifties, for becoming a businessman instead of some kind of artist.  He calls his daughter ugly, his wife stupid.  He is disgusted that they are Christians.

When the poet dies he finds himself in the afterlife.  There are plenty of people down there, and they all speak only in cliches and empty commonplaces, saying stuff like "Gee Whiz!" and "Nice weather we've been having," and "That's the way it goes."  This man who spent his life trying to use words with precision and creativity is doomed to hear speech that is banal and devoid of meaning for all eternity.

Matheson put a lot of work into "SRL Ad" making the college student's letter full of slang and jokes and the Venus girl's letter full of broken English, and he similarly here in "To Fit the Crime" has the inhabitants of Hell use a long string of cliches and the poet Lord speak in pretentious "poetical" phrases, like "Christianity!  Outmoded bag of long-suffering beans!" and "My wife's capacity of intelligible discourse is about that of primordial gelatine" and "Ah!  That I should have created the barren flesh about this bed of pain."  Maybe some people find this amusing, but I mostly found it annoying.

"Shipshape Home" (1952)

"Shipshape Home" was a big success, appearing in anthologies edited by Groff Conklin and Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr and in a "Best of" Matheson collection after making its debut in Galaxy.  Maybe we can finish off this thus far underwhelming exploration of early '50s SF on a high note?

We are in luck--this is a good story, even though the title gives the game away.  It was a relief to read "Shipshape Home" and have on hand evidence that Matheson deserves his high reputation.

Our narrator is a writer.  He and his wife recently moved into an apartment that is pretty nice and was going for much lower rent than the market standard.  But wife is starting to have misgivings.  The janitor is creepy, she says.  The narrator suspects all the "fantasy pulps" and "science-fiction magazines" she reads are making her suspicious.  But as the story proceeds, wife conducts detective work and convinces her husband that aliens control the building, which evidence suggests is a spaceship!  Are they going to be kidnapped and carried to the stars to be experimented upon?

A solid entertainment, thumbs up.  The style is unobtrusive (not showoffy like the rest of our stories today), the pacing is good, as are the images, there is genuine suspense, and the characters act like real people.  Kudos.  

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It took us a while, but we got a good story today.  All's well that ends well, I suppose.  More 1950s next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Weird Tales, April 1927: M Moravsky, A Rud, & R L Stevenson

In our last thrilling episode we read a science fiction serial by Ray Cummings about travel through space and time whose first installment was printed in the April 1927 issue of Weird Tales.  I wasn't cray about "Explorers into Infinity," but maybe this April issue has some stories that are more to my taste?  Let's read three of them and see what happens.  There's nothing stopping you from clicking this link and reading along with us.

"The Castle of Tamara" by Maria Moravsky (1927)

Last year we read Moravsky's "Beyond the Frame" and "The Soul of a Cello" and I can't say it was a love connection but everybody deserves a third chance.

Wilton was a quiet well-behaved child because everybody told him his mother had a weak heart and if he made noise or misbehaved the excitement could kill Mom stone dead.  As a young adult, when Mom died, Wilton used his inheritance to travel around the world, looking for some of the excitement and adventure he'd missed out on.  As the story begins, he is hiking in the Caucasus mountains, and his guide points out a castle high above a river, telling Wilton it is the home of Tamara, a witch who seduces men and then throws them off a tower into the river below.  Wilton becomes consumed with the idea  of visiting this castle--surely the woman from this old story must be too elderly or too dead to cause any trouble.

A storm comes up, and a fog obscures the path, and the guide wants to halt.  Wilton goes forward on his own with his flashlight and compass, thinking he knows where the village is, and ends up at the castle, where he has a madcap comedy adventure.  The plot of "The Castle of Tamara" is like that of a screwball comedy film, like Jerry Lewis should be playing Wilton.  An old woman, apparently the lady of the castle, eats dinner with Wilton and then the servants show him his room.  In his room he hears feminine singing and looks out his window--below a window opens and he sees what he takes to be a man hanging from the ledge, about to fall.  Thinking this one of the witch's victims, he makes a rope out of the bedsheet and descends to save this poor fellow, only to find it is only a cloak hung out to dry.  He climbs in the window and meets the occupant of the room below, a gorgeous girl whose name is in fact Tamara.  At first Tamara is scared of him, thinking him an invader, then they fall in love, then Wilton is scared of her, thinking she is trying to kill him when she tells him to jump out the window when her angry aunt tries to get in the room.  But the fall from the window is only a few feet, down into a garden, which she demonstrates by jumping herself.  In the garden Wilton and Tamara pledge their love to each other.

I guess this story is supposed to be funny, but there are multiple dark notes that do not exactly contribute to an atmosphere of levity.  Tamara really did push a man to his death from the castle a few years ago when he was drunk and "insulted" her (I guess he was getting fresh with her.)  When Wilton kisses Tamara we are told he kissed "her so long and so hard that her lips bled."  That is not funny or sexy, that's just gross!  And when they jump down to the garden, Wilton hits his head so hard he is knocked unconscious.

I'm not interested in jocular horror stories in any case, and this one's jokes are weak and all the blood and death means any light tone is spoiled, so I'm giving "The Castle of Tamara" a thumbs down.  I don't think this exercise in uneven tone has ever been reprinted.

"The Endocrine Monster" by Anthony M. Rud (as by R. Anthony) (1927)

I chose to read this story because the title is funny, but when I looked it up on isfdb it became apparent that "The Endocrine Monster" is a well-regarded tale that has been reprinted multiple times.  In 1968, Robert A. W. Lowndes brought it back before the eyes of horror fans in his magazine Startling Mystery Stories; in 2015, Ramble House included it in their Anthony M. Rud collection The Place of Hairy Death and Other Stories; and it also appears in Stephen Jones' 2026 Weird Tales Volume One: The Early Years.

Our narrator comes to visit his friend, a 40-year-old scientist, and sees the man has a guinea pig which is preternaturally strong and aggressive.  Then the scientist takes over the narration of the story, relating a tale of adventure down in the Amazon set twenty years ago, when he was one of a party of various white men searching for some unspecified treasure or something.

The adventurers were diverted from their initial goal by mechanical trouble with their ship and stories from the locals about a demon that crushes men's bodies and leaves them laying dead in the jungle, uneaten.  They decide to investigate this demon.  In a village they see a startlingly beautiful woman perform a magnificent dance--this woman is amazingly strong.  She is also forward, aggressive, summons one of the party to her, presumably to have sex.  When the man can't be found the next day, his comrades go looking for him--it turns out the woman lives on the far fringe of the community, out near where the demon's victim's show up all crushed.  Sure enough, in detective-type scenes and action scenes, we learn that the woman has been using her super strength to crush men to death after luring them to her home.  There is a terrible fight and many casualties.  In the end, the scientist explains to our initial narrator that the beautiful woman had cortical disease, which, in this wacky story at least, makes you super strong, super horny and super aggressive before it kills you.

This is a well-written and well-structured story, the images are vivid, and the characters behave in a more or less realistic way and have personality and emotion, and the whole caper moves along at a sprightly pace.  So thumbs up.  I do have a gripe, though.  I don't like deus ex machina resolutions, and the woman's campaign of murder isn't ended by the men gunning her down or by her coming to her senses or any individual's conscious deliberate act, instead, during the fight, she throws a man into a tree, breaking his back, and also disturbing a venomous snake on a limb above her head which then bites her so she expires, thrashing in agony.  It would have been better if one of the men had had to shoot her full of holes and then live with the memory of having slain an unarmed woman.

A smooth and entertaining piece; I'll read more Rud in the future.  The cover story of the very first issue of Weird Tales, "Ooze," is by Rud, so maybe I'll back track a little and read that soon along with some other well-known Rud tales.

The cover of 2015's The Place of Hairy Death is doing a number on my
55-year-old eyes...or maybe it's my 55-year-old brain 

"Markheim" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

Oy, it is time to class up the joint with a story by the author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Treasure Island, the April 1927 "Weird Story Reprint."

"Markheim" feels long and slow, with Stevenson piling on sentence after sentence to build atmosphere and make his points.  There is plenty of symbolism, with mirrors a recurring motif, the mirror representing the pain of truly looking at yourself, warts and all, and clocks another motif, their chiming and ticking a painful reminder that as time passes death approaches, and perhaps justice.  Stevenson also fills "Markheim" with philosophy and theology.  All in all, a story easier to admire than enjoy.  I can recommend it, but it is more interesting than fun. 

It is Christmas Day, and Markheim arrives at an antiques shop, ostensibly to purchase a gift for a woman he is courting, and has a pretty contentious conversation with the shop keeper.  It is implied that Markheim is a thief and this shopkeeper is his fence, and Markheim's odd philosophical asides suggest he has a pessimistic and fatalistic attitude about life, and his odd probing questions about the dealer's own life suggest he is trying to find out if the shopkeeper is a conventionally good person, or just a sharp businessman--later events suggest Markheim is judging whether this man deserves to live, or how guilty he should feel for slaying him by surprise, in cold blood.

Because, sure enough, when the shop keeper is in a vulnerable position, reaching for a bit of merchandise, Markheim stabs him in the back, killing him.  Stevenson spends a lot of time describing Markheim's distress and fear after committing this foul deed, the way sounds and memories and thoughts oppress him so he is in a daze, in a frenzy, as he hunts through the shop and then the victim's residence for money.  Upstairs he encounters a figure, apparently the Devil.  The Devil offers to help Markheim find the money before the antiques dealer's assistant returns, and they spend some time dickering and having a philosophical discussion around whether Markheim is truly bad or only driven to bad deeds by circumstances, whether a deathbed conversion can get a lifelong sinner into Heaven, etc.  Markheim maintains that, though a thief and a murderer, he is not evil, and he refuses the Devil's aid.  When the assistant returns, the Devil gives Markheim advice on how to kill her and escape.  But instead the murderer confesses to her and tells her to alert the police.  Though he has lived a life of evil, of theft and murder, during which time he told himself that he himself was good even if his acts were bad, those acts being a reflection not of his soul but of society, though Markheim has lived that evil life, when face to face with the Devil, Markheim rejected him.  Was the figure the Devil after all, or an angel in disguise, giving Markheim one last chance for salvation?

After first appearing in a Victorian magazine, "Markheim" has been reprinted a multitude of times in periodicals, anthologies and Stevenson collections.

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We've been good boys today.  We read a story by a woman, we read a story by a writer new to us, and we read a story by a "classic" writer, broadening our minds, spreading our wings, stretching our horizons, expanding the envelope, celebrating diversity, all the cliches.  We'll likely see Moravsky again, as she has a story in a 1948 ish of WT, and we'll definitely see Rud again, and as for Robert Louis Stevenson, he'll probably pop up again, I think he has a bunch of supernatural tales that show up in anthologies.  

More weirdness next time, folks.  Until then, don't do anything that will make you reluctant to see yourself in a mirror.

"Explorers into Infinity" by Ray Cummings

The April 1927 issue of Weird Tales has a cover which depicts an ogre about to grind an attractive young woman into paste with a tree.  Total evil!  This bit of devilry illustrates a serialized novella by Ray Cummings, and that work is the topic of our discussion today. 

We've read things by Mr. Cummings before, as well as Fred Pohl's choice words about the fellow.  An actual man of science who worked with Thomas Edison, Cummings penned space adventures and Edgar Rice Burroughs-type planetary romances but also some pretty terrible exploitation stories.  "Explorers into Infinity" and with its sequel "The Giant World" (also serialized in Weird Tales) were combined to form a hardcover science fiction novel in 1956 under the title Explorers into Infinity, so, despite the woman-in-peril cover of the magazine, I expect this novella won't be too exploitative.  I'm reading this caper at the internet archive, in the April, May and June issues of Weird Tales--you can join me by clicking the links in this sentence.

Cummings begins his tale with a preface, in which he suggests "Explorers into Infinity" is a companion to his "Girl in the Golden Atom;" that story was about "infinite smallness," this tale is about the opposite. 

It is the future of aircars, correspondence with Mars and a pneumatic tube system that serves as an international railway system, each passenger in his own individual little sleeper car.  Our narrator is Frank, a man of 25.  His friends the Gryces call him up and he goes to visit them in their mansion.  His closest pal is 28-year-old Brett Gryce, whose 80-year-old father is a wealthy inventor.  Dr. Gryce also has 17-year-old twins, beautiful blonde Francine and her brother Martynn.

Dr. Gryce gives a lecture on how size is relative, not absolute, how within the tiny atomic particles of our universe there are no doubt an infinite number of itty bitty universes, and how our universe is doubtlessly a teeny tiny component of astoundingly larger universes.  Everybody eats breakfast, Frank ogles Frannie, and then comes a lecture on the relationships of Space, Time, Motion and Matter.  Finally we get down to practical matters.  Dr. Gryce a few years ago developed a device, the myrdoscope, that can generate images from myrdal rays, rays that come from the other, larger, universes, rays that move much faster than light, so you can see what is going on a million light years away right now.  Working with the myrdoscope one day, Brett tuned in to a forested world in which an impossibly beautiful brunette is menaced by a huge man with an uprooted tree--like on the cover of the magazine!  It was, apparently, a still image, not one in motion.  A year later, when the Earth is in a similar position vis a vis the sun, he discovered a similar image--the giant's tree is a little closer to the gorgeous woman!  These are motion pictures he is seeing, but each year here on Earth is a fraction of a second up in the larger universe, so to him everything looks static.  So, the Gryces have done the obvious thing and invented a vehicle that, besides flying through space faster than light, can change its size and its time vibration and enter other larger universes, so they can rescue this brunette, with whom Brett has fallen in love.  TheGryces have four models left after constructing six and conducting tests on two of them that sent them to smaller universes (I think.)

We get some incomprehensible lectures that explain how the vehicle works ("...there is no real substance existing. It is all vibration. Motion, in other words. Of what? That we do not know....") and a scene in which the comic relief twins accidentally start making one of the cubic vehicles too big while here on Earth, big enough to knock over trees and almost demolish the Gryce mansion, and then finally Brett and Martynn take off in one of the cubes (it doesn't have rockets, but moves by selectively intensifying or neutralizing or reversing the gravity of nearby heavenly bodies.)  So ends the first serialized portion of "Explorers into Infinity."

The May installment of the serial has Frank, Dr. Gryce, and Frannie anxiously waiting for Brett and Martynn to return.  I have to admit I wondered why Cummings didn't have our narrator go on the trip, why we were going to get this adventure second hand, and I even assumed for a while that Frank and Frannie were going to jump in one of the spare vehicles and go after them.  Anyway, Brett and his little brother eventually return and Cummings spends some time talking about the wacky clothes they now wear and the air of seriousness, of maturity, they have acquired.  I have to say, Cummings puts more time and energy into the least interesting aspects of his story than he does into the potentially compelling aspects.

Brett and Martynn narrate their voyage to the edge of the solar system, including lots of numbers--velocities, distance from this planet or asteroid at this specific time, etc.  Beyond the orbits of the planets, they began to increase their size, and Brett describes at length this novel experience, and then Dr. Gryce gives a lecture on the effect on time and velocity of increasing your size.  It all seemed like nonsense to me.  As the cube grew larger, eventually as large as a star, its velocity increased, and soon it had left the galaxy, then left all stars behind.  As the May installment ends, the boys are describing how they feared they were lost in space and time.  

As the June installment, the final episode, begins, Brett and Martynn make a declaration that will elicit groans from all the hardcore science kids reading.  B & M tried to tune the myrdoscope to the world of the woman under attack by the ogre, but couldn't receive an image, and realized it was because, considering their position in space and time and the rate time was passing for them and for the woman, that they could not see her because they must be with her at the time they were trying to view, and God has forbidden that we see our own individual futures.

By manipulating their own size and the rate of time they are experiencing, the boys land the cube in the forest near the woman being assaulted by the ogre.  They adjust their size so they are even bigger than the ogre.  The ogre flees by shrinking to the size of an insect, using drugs.  This encounter, which I expected to be climactic, is a big letdown.  Brett and Martynn made friends with the beautiful young woman, Leela, and her father, a musician.  These people live in what amounts to paradise, a decadent civilization in which little happens and life is easy, full of music and pageants.  B & M spent almost a year there (that felt like just two weeks to Frank and Frannie on Earth) and learned about the trouble that was afflicting paradise.  People from another, larger, universe are coming to attack them--that giant B & M drove off was their leader.

Having returned Martynn to Earth, Brett the next day heads back to Leela's universe to try to help her people.  He promises to return within a month, but as the story ends, Frank tells us that it has been over two years since he left.  Cummings plays up the pathos of Frank missing his friend and Dr. Gryce missing his son, but the reader just wonders why none of them just get in another vehicle and go after Brett if they are so worried about him.

This story is not good.  It lacks a climax and resolution,  Cummings exciting expectations that he does not satisfy--there is no awesome battle with the giant, and there is no romance between Frank and Frannie after one was foreshadowed.  Cummings misallocates his resources--Frannie gets a personality, so we expect her to play a role in the plot, presumably becoming Brett's fiancé or wife or something, but the woman who actually has an affair of the heart, Leela, has no personality.  Way too much ink is expended on the science lectures when these lectures are neither credible nor interesting.  Edgar Rice Burroughs' means of getting John Carter to Mars is similarly incredible, but Burroughs doesn't spend a lot of time talking about it, he spends his time on what he is good at, the adventure on Mars.  Half the text or more of "Explorers into Infinity" is about how Brett gets to Leela's world, and, once Brett is there, the adventure is totally lame.  We learn more about the clothes on her planet than anything else, and Cummings puts that material at the start of the story instead of while Brett is describing the place.

Maybe the book version of this material, which includes the sequel, "The Giant World," which appeared in serial form in the January, February and March issues of WT in 1928, and presumably includes the resolution of the war with the giants and of the Frank-Frannie love story, is a better read.  But on its own, I have to give this serialized version of "Explorers into Infinity" a thumbs down.  We will still be reading "The Giant World" when we get to the 1928 leg of our journey through the history of Weird Tales, however.                     

A Derleth: "The Sleepers," and, w/ M Schorer, "The River," "The Black Castle," and "The Turret Room"

I haven't been keeping it a secret--I'm trying to read a story from each issue of Weird Tales, the famed magazine that was the vehicle for some of the most famous work of such giants as H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and the early work of breakout successes Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury, as well as the showcase for the writing of many less famous but well-loved members of the speculative fiction community like Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and Manly Wade Wellman.  And the list goes on.  One name that belongs on the list is that of August Derleth.  Today we read four stories that appeared under Derleth's name in 1927 issues of Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual.  The pages of Weird Tales credit one of these four as a collaboration with Marc R. Schorer AKA Mark Schorer, and isfdb suggests that the 2009 Derleth collection The Sleepers and Other Wakeful Things labels two additional stories as Derleth/Schorer collabs, though Schorer is not credited in the 1927 printings.  All four of today's tales would be included in The Sleepers and Other Wakeful Things, but I'll be reading them in scans of the original magazines--here are links to the scans I'll be reading:

Feb     May     Sept     Dec  

Speaking of lists and links, here are links to webpages with lists of Weird Tales stories I have already blogged about, organized by year.

1923   1924    1925   1926

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939  

1940    1941   1942

"The River"

From the February '27 issue we've already grappled with Edmond Hamilton's "The Atomic Conquerors," and now we take a dip in Derleth's contribution.  (It looks like The Sleepers credits Schorer  as a collaborator on this one.)    

"The River" is not very good.  It is a little silly and obvious, and, besides, is too long, even though it is only three pages here in WT.  The first half of the story is a letter.  A British firm is building a dam on the Volga, and the foreman of the project is writing to England to tender his resignation, and he explains why.  The local peasants and a college professor and a hunchback all keep telling the British team that spirits protect the Volga from molestation and somebody will get killed if they build the dam.  Sure enough, somebody disappeared and an inexplicable wave destroyed half of the progress made on the dam, so the writer, and all the workers, quit.  The head engineer is staying on, however.

We then switch to third-person narration, witnessing that stubborn engineer have another interaction with the hunchback, who yells "Death!  Death!  Death!" at the top of his lungs.  Then the engineer watches the ghosts of the boatmen of the Volga rise up to wreck the rest of the dam; these ghosts then wash the engineer downriver, killing him.

Why is there a college professor and a hunchback?  Why is the narration half a letter and half third-person omniscient?  It doesn't seem like much thought went into this thing.  Weak filler, thumbs down.

"The Black Castle"

In the May 1927 issue of Weird Tales, "The Black Castle" is attributed to "Marc R. Schorer and August W. Derleth."

A European count in his high castle above the village feels a strange, irresistible compulsion!  He sits down to write--someone else is controlling his hand, sending him a message!  The message is from some guy he destroyed, a dead man, a man whose widow and child are suffering in poverty because the count coveted the man's wealth!  The count's victim announces that, with his astral body, he is seeking revenge!  The count has a dim-witted son, and the dead man says he will be using his superior intelligence and willpower to try to push the son's low-IQ soul out of his body and take it over and use it to murder the count!

For weeks the count is worried about this, watches his son, judges his behaviors.  The son falls ill, and, when he recovers, the count thinks he is acting like a different person!  When he catches the son taking a stiletto off the wall and taking it to his room, the decides desperate action is called for--the count takes up the other blade of the pair, creeps into his son's room, and murders his son in his sleep.

Then the ghost controls the counts hand again, writes another message!  The ghost tricked the count!  He didn't take over his son's body, the count murdered his son unnecessarily!  But the count is still going to die tonight!  Sure enough, a lightning bolt hits the castle and kills the count, and the villagers below hear a laugh!  

I like the idea of a dead person's restless soul taking over a body to use for vengeance, and the revelation that it was all a bluff was a disappointment.  "The Black Castle" also has way too many loose ends.  The ghost can control the count's hand, even though the count is clever, so why are we expected to believe taking over the son is facilitated by the son's dim wits?  Why did the son act differently after his illness--why did he carry the stiletto to his room?  Is it just a coincidence?  And then the dead man is shown to be able to control the weather?  Why build a story around one creepy supernatural phenomenon, and then have the resolution of the story come through the use of a totally different, less interesting and less creepy, phenomenon?  

Not only are the plot and themes all messed up, Derleth and Schorer pad out the story with a lot of unneeded romantic goop about melting snowbanks and shadows and moonlight and all that.  Another thumbs down, I'm afraid.  

"The Turret Room" 

We've already read Edmond Hamilton's story in this September issue, "The Moon Menace."  "The Turret Room" here in WT is credited solely to Derleth, and to Derleth and Schorer in The Sleepers.    

This one is an acceptable trifle.  A bunch of British aristocrats are hanging out, and, when the Duke of Kent says that talk of ghosts is just balderdash and poppycock, Lord Alving tells a story about his own sight of a ghost.  He was at the Duke of Gloucester's castle with a bunch of people, including the poet Harry Longworth.  When the Duke of Gloucester mentions that the turret room in his central tower is haunted, Lord Alving says he wants to spend the night there, hoping to see a ghost.  Harry jokes that if Alving doesn't see one, he'll have one sent up.  Alving sits in the room hour after hour--no ghost.  He dozes, awakes, sees Harry in the room with him.  Harry is not very communicative, just sort of smiles.  The Lord looks out the window, looks back, and Harry is gone.  He doesn't return.  In the morning, Alving reports to the party that he has seen no ghosts, only Harry.  As we readers expect, Alving is informed that, sadly, Harry passed away in his sleep last night--before Alving saw him.

Not good, but competently and smoothly put together with no unnecessary frills or confusion.

"The Sleepers"

This story from the December issue serves as the title piece of that 2009 collection we've been referring to--hopefully a clue that it is an above average production--and is the only of today's stories that nobody claims is a collab with Schorer.

Well, I can mildly recommend "The Sleepers," which is almost as economically written as "The Turret Room" and feels more original and creepy (to me at least.)

An important writer, a man whose books get made into movies, tells a story to a bunch of people as they sit before a fireplace.  He was in Hollywood, and was suddenly called back to Chicago.  He gets a bed on a midnight train, but it turns out that the Pullman cars are all full up.  Another traveler is in the same predicament, and they make enough of a fuss that the train adds an additional Pullman for the two unhappy customers.

Once in the Pullman, the men find people sound asleep in their beds!  They call the porter, a sort of comic relief "negro," who gets the conductor.  When the conductor touches the man sleeping in the bed the writer paid for, his hand passes through the man like he is an illusion!  

It turns out that this Pullman is a recently repaired car that was wrecked in a disaster that killed all onboard.  These forms are the images of the dead!  Another ghost, the conductor who died on the train that was wrecked, walks through car and the ghosts of the sleepers vanish.

Not bad.  There is an additional plot thread--the ghost conductor comes to the fireplace to hear the story and comment on it--that is superfluous but doesn't sink the story.

**********

These are all quite minor stories, and two of them are pretty bad.  But on a long journey, you gotta take the rough with the smooth.  This little kink in the road is not going to dissuade us from achieving our weird destiny.   

Merril-approved 1959 stories by S Jackson, C Kapp and G Kersh

Let's continue our investigation of 1959 with Judith Merril, reading the sole "J" and two of the "K" stories from her list of Honorable Mentions at the back of the fifth of her famous Year's Best anthologies.  Damon Knight's "What Rough Beast?" is a third "K" story that merited the Merril nod, but we read it way back in 2015.  That leaves us with Shirley Jackson's "Strangers in Town," Colin Kapp's "Breaking Point," and Gerald Kersh's "The Oracle of the Fish."  The titles of the stories in the previous sentence are links to the scans of the stories that I will be reading, so feel free to read along as we enjoy or endure these stories recommended by the critic all the critics adore.

"Strangers in Town" by Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson is one of those writers I, childishly, I know, avoid because people are always telling you to read her.  The more people tell me to do something, the less I want to do it, and I'm not going to grow up now at age 55.  But today we are cosplaying maturity and reading this thing that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post behind a cover that is some kind of joke about traffic jams and alongside an installment of a Perry Mason serial.  I'm reading "Strangers in Town" in an anthology of stories drawn from 1959 issues of The Saturday Evening Post, a book with a cover illo that I guess is making fun of a woman for being a poor singer, a poor dresser, and/or ugly; enough with the punching down, Saturday Evening Post snobs!  It's not like we can all be as blessed as a Peter Gabriel or a Deborah Harry!  One of the stories in this anthology is actually by Hugh B. Cave, a name I didn't expect to find in The Saturday Evening Post.  Jackson's "Strangers in Town" would also be anthologized in one of those Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthologies, Alfred Hitchcock's Witch's Brew.  Damn, spoiler alert.

"Strangers in Town" starts with a traditional obvious joke.  Our narrator, a housewife, tells us she hates gossip, and then proceeds to provide us readers page after page of gossip and descriptions of the many ruses and maneuvers she engages in to facilitate her spying on her new next door neighbors so she can talk about them with her other, long-term, neighbors.  Based on limited evidence, she fears the new neighbors keep a dirty house and drink a lot.  Then she meets the next door people's maid, and it turns out she is a witch who uses magic as a labor-saving device.  I guess the joke is that the witch, and the lady of the house when our narrator meets her, just openly talk about magic instead of being sneaky about it.

The narrator and her fellow gossips are suspicious of the new neighbors, whom they think may be foreigners and/or heathens, but the new neighbors are very kind and sweet, always using their magic to do good deeds about the town, so I guess the banal point of this story is that suburban people are closed-minded and judgmental and mean to new comers and minorities who try to join the community even though the new comers and minorities are generous and helpful and in fact better than the suburbanites, smarter and more sophisticated (this family with the witch for a maid have modern furniture and are vegetarians.)  I guess this story is an allegory of blacks or Jews or Catholics or bohemians or whoever moving into a middle-class WASP neighborhood and being cruelly rejected by the bourgeois WASPs, who are scared by their different (but superior!) cultural practices.   

Anyway, the kids in the little town like the new people because they give them gifts and because their talking cat can tell them stories.  Eventually the women of the town get together in a mob (except for a fat woman who is late to the gathering because she has to put on her corset) and insult the new people and the new people leave.  But the strangers leave something behind--their magical cat impregnated the narrator's cat and the kittens have strange eyes and are quite oversized; the neighborhood kids adore these kittens but they scare the adults.

I can't say there is anything wrong with "Strangers in Town"--the pacing is fine, the characters all act in a more or less believable way, Jackson gives the narrator a personality and a consistent voice, and so forth.  (I won't get into whether or not there is a risk associated with inviting strangers into your town, whether they might rape your daughter or burn down your townhall or defraud your welfare system or start a grenade-throwing gang war with the other immigrants you invited in last month.  Jackson asserts that immigrants and minorities are awesome and we are going with that.)  "Strangers in Town" is professionally written and polished.  But the themes and the plot are boring, like stuff we've seen a hundred times before on TV--this isn't the first time I have been told that suburbanites are unsophisticated jerks and native-born middle-class white Christians should treat non-whites and immigrants and non-Christians better than they do.  I'll call "Strangers in Town" acceptable.  We don't have to wonder why Merril would enjoy and promote this story, as it expresses boilerplate liberal/left ideology and appeared in a mainstream publication, and Merril is always looking for examples of mainstream writers and outlets in the act of employing speculative fiction devices in order to buttress her contention that genre boundaries are bogus.

"Breaking Point" by Colin Kapp

Ten years ago we read Kapp's "The Cloudbuilders" and Patterns of Chaos, and more recently his "Enigma" and "Ambassador to Verdammt."  "Breaking Point" debuted in John Carnell's New Worlds and has never been reprinted.  Maybe we will join Merril in seeing something in this story that other editors and anthologists missed?  Or maybe Merril just liked it because she is the cheerleader of the New Wave and this story is in the vanguard of that movement--Carnell, without using the words "New Wave," firmly places the story in that category in his intro to "Breaking Point":

...the current story which follows, a breakaway from the traditional approach to a psychological story. Colin Kapp now joins Brian Aldiss and Jim Ballard as British writers who are pioneering the new type of science fiction which is rapidly replacing the old.

"Breaking Point" is a quite pretentious but quite weak story full of empty and uninteresting philosophical banter among the various uninteresting characters; all the major characters declare each other insane and unfit to wield authority, though each has some kind of claim to authority, and then it is revealed that all the characters are secretly working together.

Civilization (sometimes spelled "civilisation" in this poorly copyedited story which doesn't maintain fidelity to either US or UK spelling but switches between them) is collapsing and the nation is being shaken by mass rioting.  Our lead character is Lieutenant Penny, an Army officer and a psychologist.  The Army is trying to quell the riots, without success, and we get poorly written action scenes in which the mob attacks the soldiers with bricks and bottles, Army trucks crash while trying to negotiate the barricaded streets, and so forth.  Serving in the same unit as Perry is Major Bannerman.  When Penny's unit is about to be overwhelmed and destroyed by the mob, a tall man among the the crowd, Pandi, stops the attack by emotionally manipulating the mob members using poetry.  Penny and Bannerman compare this man's charisma, his ability to drive men hither and thither with words that seem like nonsense, to Hitler's.  They also discuss the nature of civilization--is it natural or unnatural?  Colonel Foresyte appears on the scene, demands the capture of Pandi and conducts an interrogation of this enigmatic figure.  Here is a sample, from that interrogation, of typical dialogue from this sterile and dog-chasing-its-own-tail story.

"...that which is obvious is frequently not logical, and therefore difficult to justify. I claim that you cannot give me a rational reason why you must save civilisation.”

“That may be true, but the relevance escapes me. Civilization is an illogical entity. It has a different meaning for every man. I intend to save it for what it means to me.”

“Would you believe me,” asked Pandi, "if I said that your kind of civilization is already dead?”

“No,” said Foresyte,“it is going through a period of trial, but it will rise again.”

“Not so!  It should never have existed...."

Foresyte's interrogation becomes extreme, little better than torture, so Penny assaults Foresyte and liberates Pandi.  Bannerman appears--is he trying to capture Penny and Pandi or trying to help them?  Is he trying to run them over with his truck or trying to pick them up?  A theme of this story is that everybody's motives and goals are unknowable and changeable besides.  The Army camp erupts into gunfire, bullets and shells whipping every which way.  Is there an enemy attack under way?  No, like civilization itself, the Army camp is collapsing into violent insanity because modernity--"dogma, advertising, education, politics, brainwashing, and similar invasions of the soul"--have driven every individual and the entire human race insane.  Or sop says Bannerman.

Bannerman, Penny, and Pandi take refuge in a remote cabin.  Pandi leaves with the truck and returns with the injured Foresyte.  Bannerman reveals that Pandi is an actor working for Foresyte.  Foresyte set up the whole complicated business with Pandi in order to test to see if Penny was one of the few sane men left in the world.  And Penny passed the test!  Such men as Penny will be sent to an island like Arthur was sent to Avalon--the few sane men will rebuild civilization after all the insane have killed each other.  Penny in the last sentence of the story weeps.            

Thumbs down for this ridiculous thing.  We might see it as a New Wave story, but at the same time it bears many resemblances to the work of Golden Age SF writers like Asimov, Heinlein, and van Vogt, in which the cognitive elite behind the scenes manipulate people with their superbrains and incredible knowledge of psychology and sociology in hopes of guiding fragile civilization to the conquest of the stars someday.  But while those old stories had a measure of gee whiz fun about them, and felt fresh and exciting, "Breaking Point" is depressing and drab and wears you out.  

"The Oracle of the Fish" by Gerald Kersh

Merril read "The Oracle of the Fish" in an issue of Nugget that has a lovely green cover and trumpets its inclusion of a "guide to amatory literature" for "gentlemen."  Wow!  Lamentably, I can't find a text of this treasure trove of invaluable knowledge, so I'm reading "The Oracle of the Fish" in a scan of the Kersh collection The Terribly Wild Flowers.

"The Oracle of the Fish" is a joke story the beginning of which is full of obvious jokes of the kind with which Jackson tried to entertain us, people saying something and then contradicting it with their actions.  A barkeep says she trusts her customers but always empties the till into her pocket when she leaves the bar, a Welshman says that Welshmen all brag about their ancestors, but he never does, and then proceeds to do so.  Set in Wales, Kersh also makes jokes about how long and unpronounceable Welsh names are.  these jokes are not bad, but feel very tired.  

The narrator, an Englishman, encounters a Welshman with a PhD and has a long conversation with him; the Welshman takes over as first-person narrator and his story is the meat of "The Oracle of the Fish."

The Welshman tells the story (full of digressions and trivia) of how in 1939 he acquired by his cleverness from a talking fish an ancient ring with symbols on it, and then a goat accidentally pointed him to an ancient standing stone carved with identical symbols, so he hired a mute imbecile (mentally damaged by a fall on his head two decades prior) who is also an expert miner to help him dig under the stone.  The two explored a cave, found ancient coins and fossilized bones of cave men and mammoths, and eventually came upon a lost race of troglodytes, descendants of the Picts driven underground by the Romans who have kept up their numbers and diversified their gene pool by kidnapping babies from the surface at night.  The imbecile realizes these are his people, and joins them--the PhD escapes the hideous cannibalistic subterraneans by blinding them with the flash bulb on his camera.  The Welshman planned to explore the caverns further, with a heavily equipped team, but an errant German bomb hit the site and caused a cave-in that destroyed everything.

A jocular version of an H. P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard story.  Parts are engaging, some of the jokes inspire a smile, but portions of "The Oracle of the Fish" are long and tedious.  Adding up the pluses and minuses, we come to zero, the break-even point, and conclude this story is acceptable.

**********
 

These stories are not great.  But I feel like they are a good representation of Merril's characteristic and closely linked projects--dissolving the boundaries between genres and promoting the New Wave.  We've got two professionally written mainstream stories from magazines that are not ostensibly dedicated to speculative fiction, and we've got a story from a science fiction magazine that features no high technology and focuses exclusively on psychology and sociology and is vague, philosophical in a show offy but ultimately empty way, and pessimistic, thus ticking plenty of the boxes of what we think of as New Wave.

A crop of stories that are more interesting from an historical point of view than actually enjoyable to read.  Maybe the 1959 "L" stories picked by Merril will go down more smoothly?  Stay tuned and find out.