More late '70s horror: Davis Grubb, John Tibbetts, Eddy C. Bertin & George Hay

Let's read four horror stories by people I have never heard of!  I liked the first four stories in Karl Edward Wagner's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII; let's hope ol' Karl has picked four more winners for us!

"The Baby-Sitter" by Davis Grubb (1978)

Wagner in his introduction tells us Grubb is "in the front ranks of writers of Southern regionalism." This story, however, is set in my home state of New Jersey (or as Meg of the year 3485 would put it, "Joysy.")  Is there any chance this story is going to celebrate the high culture, productive industry, and world-class agriculture that make the Garden State a wonderful place to grow up, attend university, and build a family?  (No, there is not.)

"The Baby-Sitter" reads like a PSA from a gun-control advocacy group, and is an attack on American (perhaps all modern) society.  There is no particular reason to set the story in New Jersey--Paramus is just a stand in for "AnyTown, USA."  The story is not set in New York or the South so that readers do not mistake it for a denunciation of rednecks or a meditation on urban crime or whatever; Grubb wants to make sure we get that his gripe is with all 50 of the states and every human being, from city slicker to country boy.

A Vietnam vet, Jim, owns an M-16.  (I don't know anything about gun laws; could private residents of New Jersey legally own an M-16 in 1978?  It is not 100% clear if the weapon in the story is capable of full automatic fire.)  He and his wife Jan are going out for the evening, and hire teenage Marion, who is reading Future Shock, to baby-sit their twin five-year-old boys, Joe and Jim Junior, and six-month-old girl, Sally.  While Mom and Dad are away the boys get a hold of the rifle, wrestle over it, and accidentally shoot up the house, shattering Mom's Ming vase and other valuables.  When Marion runs upstairs to see if the baby was hit, the boys take turns shooting at her until she is dead.

A main theme of "The Baby-Sitter" is collective guilt.  Grubb asserts that all of society is to blame for the evil or foolish acts of individuals:

Marion watched their faces watching hers then and she felt her own face flood and she knew suddenly how every guilt in the world is shared.  Because it did not matter who had pulled the trigger....  When Joe pulled it so had Jim Junior.  So had Jan and Jim.  And so, inexorably and most terribly of all, had Marion.    

I'm not impressed with the story's anti-individualistic "society made me do it" politics. Does the story have artistic merit I can admire anyway?  Not really.  There is no suspense, as it is clear from the beginning that the gun is going to be the "villain" of the piece.  On the first page we get this passage:

"Jim has a gun," she [Jan] said cryptically.  "Or did I mention that?"

And for a reason she could not understand then, Marion shivered.  Was it the chill of the November night?  Or some sense of some thing, some unfathomable, unknown thing to come in the night which lay before her.

The story dispenses with moral agency, so there is no drama: how can there be any drama when everyone is to blame for whatever goes wrong and the focus of the story is a quotidian inanimate object?  The story is also too long--there is page after page of the five-year-old boys arguing over and wrestling for the rifle while the baby-sitter watches them impotently.  The characters are symbols rather than real people, so who cares who gets blasted?

People who hate guns and/or modern society may like this one for its politics, but I'm giving it a thumbs down.  It first appeared in Grubb's collection The Siege of 318: Thirteen Mystical Stories.    

"The Well at the Half Cat" by John Tibbetts (1979)

Frank Vincy is a sensitive 29-year-old Englishman who has recently been released from the mental hospital following a painful divorce.  Vincy has decided to get out of the rat race and fix up and run an inn, the Half Cat, out in the countryside at a village which has maintained its Olde World character.

Vincy's first guests are a gruff intimidating working-class man and his beautiful wife; oddly enough, they have no luggage.  The wife flirts with Vincy, and he is immediately obsessed (remember, he's sensitive!)  We readers, but not Vincy, learn that decades ago the Half Cat closed after its owner had an affair with a beautiful woman, which resulted in her being murdered by her husband, who was in turn killed in a fight with the innkeeper.  The innkeeper threw the corpses down the well, and then died himself, either falling or jumping into the well.  Vincy's first guests are the ghosts of the unfaithful wife and her violent husband, and they reenact the deadly drama that ended their lives, this time with Vincy playing the innkeeper role.

This story is long, with lots of descriptions of sights and smells and sounds and of such humdrum activity as the repair work on the inn.  It didn't engage my emotions; I'll rate this one "OK."

"The Well at the Half Cat" first appeared in Eldritch Tales No. 5.  John Tibbetts only has two fiction credits at isfdb, and four art credits.  But don't worry about his career; Renaissance man Tibbetts is a critic who has published extensively on film, music and literature (sample titles from Wikipedia: “Young Berlioz Revealed,” “The Case of the Forgotten Detectives: The Unknown Crime Fiction of G.K. Chesterton,” and “Beyond the Camera: The Untold Story Behind the Making of Hoop Dreams”and is also a professional pianist.

"My Beautiful Darkling" by Eddy C. Bertin (1979)

Belgian Bertin publishes in six languages, and originally wrote "My Beautiful Darkling" (the title of which comes from Baudelaire) in Dutch; it is the title story of the collection Mijn Mooie Duisterlinge.  Wagner informs us that Bertin himself translated the story into English for inclusion in The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII.

The bulk of the story is the transcript of an arrestee's interview with the police. The suspect relates how some time in the past his head was injured in a motor accident, and this gave him the power to sense other people's emotions.  He can't quite read minds, but he can, as he puts it, "taste thought," and, in context, make an educated guess at what people are thinking.

The arrestee likes to attend fairs and amusement parks, to taste the emotions of the crowds of people.  One evening at such a fair his mind touches that of a physically attractive and mentally strange, even inhuman, woman, Cathy, whom, he detects, has the same power he has! They have sex in the shadows, and it is perfect, exhausting, sex because they can feel each other's emotions and need not speak a word to each other.  He and Cathy meet regularly every few nights at different fairs, never speaking but enjoying a wonderful, if exhausting, mental and physical union each time.  But then one evening he can't find her, and is arrested while desperately accosting people at a fair, seeking Cathy (and, it is hinted, masturbating.)

After the transcript comes five pages of conventional third-person omniscient narration starring the arrestee's shrink.  The doctor gets the guy out of jail, explaining that he is a harmless victim of schizophrenia, that his mental abilities are a product of his imagination and Cathy but "an alternative shard of his own personality," a simulacrum of a woman named Catherine who rejected him shortly before his drunken auto accident.  His patient is going through a crisis, beginning to fear Cathy is going to abandon him--a sign sanity is returning with the realization that Cathy is not real.

But then, when the doctor is walking through the fairgrounds to his car, an attractive woman beckons to him from the shadows, physically and telepathically!. He follows the creature his patient calls "Cathy" into the darkness; she is, apparently, some kind of psychic vampire who steals a person's life force, and is dumping the patient to take up with the younger and more vigorous doctor.

This story is not bad.  Moderate recommendation.

"A Serious Call" by George Hay (1979)    

This six-page story is just a trifle, though well-written.  All you intellectual types may enjoy the copious name dropping that goes on: Lytton Strachey, Karl Popper, Carl Jung, and H. M. Tomlinson are among those who are casually mentioned.

The narrator relates why he, while attending a college in an industrial section of northern London, abandoned his thesis on the ghost stories of M. R. James, which sought to debunk James's belief in evil.  A Rev. Paul Tremblett came to give a guest lecture on good and evil--the lecture coincided with the most ferocious thunderstorm the narrator has ever experienced.  The Reverend explained that Satan is real, and very clever, adept at doing his evil work while at the same time convincing people he is merely a myth.  At the end of the lecture the Reverend stepped outside and was immediately killed by a bolt of lightning.

"A Serious Call" first appeared in the first edition of Ghosts & Scholars, a periodical devoted to M. R. James, a famous and important British medievalist and writer of ghost stories whose work I have never read. (Every day I lament my poor education, but I only have myself to blame...and maybe the Atari 2600, the Commodore 64, Gary Gygax, id software, etc....)  So I have no idea if Hay has managed to capture the spirit or style of James's work, which I believe was his intention.

The style is good and I appreciate all the name-dropping and the London details, so marginal to moderate recommendation for this one.  I should try to find out which of M. R. James's stories are considered his "best" or "most representative;" it appears they are easily accessible at gutenberg.org.

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Not up to the standard set in the first batch, alas, but, taken as a group, not too bad. Four more stories, hand picked by Wagner from divers sources, await us in our next episode.

Horror from 1979: Dennis Etchison, Ramsey Campbell, Harlan Ellison & Hugh B. Cave

Let's get horrified!  I recently purchased a paperback copy of DAW's eighth The Year's Best Horror Stories, the first installment edited by Karl Edward Wagner. As I have said on this blog before, Wagner wrote one of my favorite horror stories, "Sticks," and is perhaps most famous for his sword and sorcery tales about Kane, which I found uneven and underwhelming. Wagner also co-wrote with David Drake the entertaining space-alien-in-Ancient-Rome novel, Killer, which I talked about here recently.

I've decided to read every story in this volume, DAW No. 393, UJ1549, which includes numerous stories by people I have never read before, as well as people I have mixed feelings about, so there is no telling what is going to happen.

"The Dead Line" by Dennis Etchison (1979)

We're off to a horrifying start with this one.  On the first page of the story the narrator is in the hospital, visiting his comatose wife.  When nobody is looking he breaks a bottle, grinds the shards under his foot, and then sprinkles the tiny pieces of glass into his wife's eyes.  When I read this I think I made that face I make when I drive by a deer that has been hit by a tractor trailer, a regular event out here in America's heartland.  "Uchhhhhkk...."

At first I thought the narrator some monster who hated his wife, but Etchison quickly overturned my expectations; his story is full of disturbing details of bodily mutilation, but proves to be a brief rumination on medical ethics.  "The Dead Line" is a science-fiction story set in the near future, when the hospital can keep a brain dead person's body alive indefinitely, and harvest the blood and tissues for years, for use in treatments of others and for experiments.  Knowing his wife is not quite dead and is regularly subject to all kinds of invasive procedures causes the narrator tremendous anguish, and he seeks to sabotage her body in order to render it useless, so she can finally die and be buried.  He meets a woman whose husband has recently fallen into a coma, and passionately urges her to refuse to allow him to be admitted to the harvesting program, to bury him and achieve closure as soon as she can.

Disturbing, surprising, and dedicated to raising a moral dilemma; pretty good.

"The Dead Line" first appeared in Whispers 13-14, a semi-professional zine edited by Stuart David Schiff which attracted a lot of top talent.  The story has been reprinted numerous times.

"To Wake the Dead" by Ramsey Campbell (1979)

This is the prologue to Campbell's novel of the same title (well, in the U.S. I guess it was released under the title The Parasite) which won the August Derleth Award in 1981.  I've liked some Campbell stories and disliked others, so let's cross our fingers for this one.

A ten-year old girl accompanies some older kids and teens into an abandoned house, where it is said a person died a few months ago.  The leader of the group has set up a ouija board, and the kids appear to contact a spirit.  When the older kids flee the room the door locks behind them, leaving the ten-year-old trapped dark room, where she is assaulted by who-knows-what.

I found this story to be effective; it generates a sense of unease at its beginning that escalates to truly scary at the end.  It would be easy to criticize Campbell for piling on a surfeit of physical description of settings and objects, for using such a tired device as the ouija board (though maybe it wasn't so tired in '79), and for trying to manipulate us in a cheap way by having the victim be a little girl.  Despite the apparent validity of all these complaints, the story works.  The verbose description, the dialogue with the (purported) spirit, and the vulnerability of a small girl succeed in setting a tone of suspense, fear, and then terror.  I also think Campbell does a good job of channeling the feelings of a young child among adults and older children; the frustration of not quite belonging, of feeling like an inferior, the painful need to both show independence and win approval; the little girl comes off as a real person, which makes her ordeal at the end emotionally affecting.

Thumbs up!

"In the Fourth Year of the War" by Harlan Ellison (1979)

As with Campbell, I've enjoyed some Ellison stories and been unimpressed by others, so let's hope I get lucky again.

"In the Fourth Year of the War" reminded me of a Malzberg story, though more lushly written. A guy argues with a voice in his head (the war in the title is the narrator's struggle against this voice for dominance of his mind and body)--in the fourth year of this struggle the voice insists he murder his Uncle Carl!  The narrator hasn't seen or spoken to Carl in years!  But he has (perhaps dubious) reasons to think Carl ruined his father's life, and the voice triumphs.  So he travels from California to Chicago and disposes of Carl.  Revenge!  But the voice's bloodlust is not satiated!  As the voice's power over the narrator increases, more people who have contributed to the unhappiness of the narrator's life are slated to suffer vengeance for deeds of years long past!

This is a good psychological horror story, maybe more fun, with its clever details (the blue pinstripes on Uncle Carl's night shirt match the veins of his skinny legs) and its little jokes (the murderous voice sometimes does an impression of Humphrey Bogart!) than actually scary, but quite entertaining.  As Etchison does in "The Dead Line," Ellison invites us to identify (maybe just a little!) with the destructive protagonist, to consider to what extent his anti-social acts are justified by psychological trauma and the selfishness of others.

A good story.  "In the Fourth Year of the War" first appeared in Gary Hoppenstand's Midnight Sun Five, like Whispers, a well-regarded semi-pro zine.

"From the Lower Deep" by Hugh B. Cave (1979)

Cave's name comes up all the time in horror anthologies and criticism, and he has a stack of Lifetime Achievement Awards to his credit.  But when I borrowed a copy of a novel by Cave from the New York Public Library at 5th Avenue and 41st Street eight or ten years ago (I think it must have been The Mountains of Madness), I was flabbergasted at how boring it was.  The whole book was a guy walking around a tropical island! (At least that is all I can remember.)

Well, the time has come to give Cave another chance.  I've already read three good stories in The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII--can Cave make it four?

Matthew Greene, professional photographer, owns a home on an island in an East Coast lake.  While he is on assignment in Connecticut he gets word that there has been an earthquake and a flood at the island, so he rushes back.  There he discovers gruesome hints that indicate that the earthquake has opened up a cave and unleashed on the island man-eating frog/blob monsters!  The ultimate horror: Greene's housekeeper goes insane when she sees a pack of the monsters eating a woman, and witnesses her nine-year-old son, believed to have drowned months ago, chowing down right there with them!

This story is OK.  The style is not very good, pedestrian with some sentences I thought clumsy.

"From the Lower Deep" was first published in Whispers II, an anthology published by Doubleday and edited by Stuart David Schiff which included new stories as well as some material from Schiff's Whispers magazine.  Tarbandu read Whispers II in its entirety a few years ago; check out his assessment of its contents here.

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I'm quite happy with The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII so far.  Wagner seems to know how to pick 'em.  The next four stories are by people I have never even heard of, so it will be interesting to see in our next episode if they can maintain the high standards set by famous pros Ellison, Campbell, Cave and Etchison.

From A Treasury of Great SF: stories by Malcolm Jameson, Nelson S. Bond and Mildred Clingerman

I had a good experience reading three stories by people I had never heard of in Volume 1 of Anthony Boucher's 1959 A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, so here are three stories from Volume 2 by authors with whom I was totally unfamiliar, Malcolm Jameson, Nelson S. Bond and Mildred Clingerman.

"Bullard Reflects" by Malcolm Jameson (1941)

The first line of this story is "'Whee! Yippee!  Yow!'"  The second sentence is "The crowd went crazy." This is a story about sports!  Despite the best efforts of my in-laws, I have no interest in sports and know nothing about sports, so when its topic was revealed to me I gave a little groan and checked to see how long this tale was.  Eleven pages.  As the kids would say, "Doable."

I was surprised at how contrived, gimmicky, and silly this story was.  It reads like a parody of SF written by somebody who has contempt for SF, and I am a little surprised it made it into this Treasury.

The first few pages describe the sport of Dazzle Dart, in which one team, whose quarterback has a "superflashlight," tries to illuminate the opposing team's goal.  All the players wear little mirrors on their wrists, heads, etc., and can thus reflect the beam away from their own goal and/or at the opposing goal.  The best Dazzle Dart team in the space navy is that of Captain Bullard's space ship Pollux.  Bullard is the star of a series of stories by Jameson which first saw light in Astounding and would later be collected in a volume edited by Andre Norton; a more complete collection appeared in 2013, published by Thunderchild Publishing, who are producing a whole line of classic SF reprints that classic SF fans should check out.

Right after its team wins the Dazzle Dart championship, the Pollux is sent off to capture some war criminals who have seized a weapons research base on Titania.  Their leader is Egon Ziffler ("the Torturer"), the former head of the secret police of the recently dismantled Jovian Empire, which I am guessing is a stand-in for Nazi Germany.  Soon after arriving at Titania, Bullard and his crew are outwitted and captured by Ziffler and his band of human rights abusers. Instead of just murdering and crucifying the Pollux's crew, like they did the techs and eggheads they found on Titania, Ziffler takes a page from "The Most Dangerous Game" and releases his captives.  Bullard and company have a 24-hour head start, after which Ziffler and his murderers will hunt them down.

Luckily, Bullard finds some fragments from a meteor with reflective properties.  His Dazzle Dart team straps the fragments to themselves, and when the Jovian fugitives catch up to them and try to massacre them with ray guns, Bullard's people reflect the rays back at them, slicing them to bits.

This is like a story a 12-year-old would write!  It even ends with a lame pun on the word "reflection!"

I'm going to have to give a thumbs down to "Bullard Reflects," though I think it qualifies for "so bad it is good" status, as it did make me laugh, and has an uneven tone that can take you by surprise as it careens up and down.  One moment it reads like something written for kids, and in the next we are reading about severed limbs and crucified innocents!

"Magic City" by Nelson S. Bond (1941)

This is one of those post-apocalyptic stories in which mankind, reduced to primitivism, lives among the ruins of technological society and has a bunch of superstitions based on misunderstandings of 20th century artifacts.  "Magic City" takes place in the year 3485 A.D., and its star is Meg, the leader of a matriarchal tribe. Bond wrote three stories about Meg that appeared in three different magazines in the period 1939-41; "Magic City" is the third.  (I am told that a fourth Meg story from '49 is a revision of the first.)  Passages in this story indicate that, in an earlier story, Meg caused a social revolution, convincing men and women to live together in the same village, and preaching that men are as good as women.  (Women triumphed over men in a civil war long ago that left women in charge of population centers while men lived as nomadic Wild Ones.)

Meg and her mate Daiv leave their tribe on a quest--to go to New York City (or as they, and I think some of my in-laws, call it, "the forbidden City of Death") to destroy the Evil One who causes young healthy people to die of disease (the germ theory of disease is long forgotten.)  In the ruins of Manhattan they encounter friendly tribes of women who live in subway stations, and Wild Ones, male bandits, who stalk the surface, looking for women to kidnap and rape.

Continuing today's theme of unexpected dismemberment, one of the Wild Ones has his fingers sliced off in a fight: "The edge bit deep, grotesque-angled fingers fell to the ground like bloodworms crawling, bright ribbons of blood spurted from severed palms."  Can I call "Magic City" proto-splatterpunk?

Meg and Daiv get the idea that Death is headquartered at St. Luke's hospital.  There they find medical books that will help them learn to conquer disease.  There they also run into the leaders of the Manhattan branch of the Wild Ones.  The Wild Ones worship the Statue of Liberty, and when they see Meg holding a book they think she is their goddess.  Her wish is their command!  She orders them to make peace and form one co-ed community with the women in the subway stations.  The End.

"Magic City" is full of garbled or corrupted English words, and I guess the reader is supposed to laugh at the obvious ones and enjoy figuring out the obscure ones.  The characters drink "cawfee" and eat "maters," follow a "creet" road, call steel "god-metal" and rust "water-hurt."  Zardoz-style, decrepit signs at the Holland Tunnel entrance in "Joysy" appear to read "O Left Tur" and "O Parki," St. Lukes hospital is "Slukes," and Pennsylvania Station is "Ylvania Stat." This is a gimmick that gets old fast, though sports fans may enjoy "Sinnaty, where once had ruled a great people known as the Reds."

Besides the prevalent wordplay, "Magic City," with its female protagonist, civilized matriarchal societies and violent male tribes, stands out as a candidate for status as a feminist work, a satire of sexism and sex stereotypes.  As Harry Harrison does in his Eden books about matriarchal reptile people, Bond pulls the old switcheroo on us, turning gender stereotypes on their heads:

Sometimes Meg grew a little impatient with Daiv.  He was, like all men, such a hard creature to convince.  He couldn't reason things out in the cold, clear logical fashion of a woman; he kept insisting that his 'masculine intuition' told him otherwise.

I think it is interesting to note that this story was the cover story of Astounding, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., whom everybody is always denouncing as some kind of reactionary.  Likewise, the prominent publication of "Magic City" goes against the common assertion that SF before this or that date was sexist and only represented women as weaklings in need of rescuing.

The dozens of little word puzzles, and the feminist angle, are noteworthy, but "Magic City" is essentially a standard quest story in which some people travel some place to fight some other people.  I like a good quest story, but since Bond fails to generate any suspense, make me care about the characters, or imbue the action scenes with any feeling, "Magic City" is just a mediocre quest story.  The aforementioned gender stuff adds historical value, and shifts my assessment from "merely acceptable" to "marginally positive."

"Letters from Laura" by Mildred Clingerman (1954)

Boucher, in his introduction to A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, thanks Mildred Clingerman for help with the anthology (along with a bunch of others, like Poul and Karen Anderson and John W. Campbell, Jr.), and adds parenthetically after Clingerman's name "chiefly just for existing."  This is the kind of slosh I used to say to girls I had crushes on in junior high...and high school...and in college...and while working at a New Jersey bookstore. This kind of goop never got me anywhere with a woman--not that I'm bitter or anything--but maybe it is more alluring in print.

"Letters from Laura" first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Boucher tells us it is "a charming, sexy, malicious caprice."  Does Mr. Clingerman know about all this?

"Letters from Laura" is a five-page long epistolary piece, meant to be amusing.  Isaac Asimov seems to have liked it; it has appeared in three anthologies with his name on the cover.  (Maybe it is Martin H. Greenberg who likes it.)

It is the future, and Laura is a boy-crazy young woman who has booked a time travel trip.  She flirts and (we learn in the last line of the story) has sex with the salesman at the time travel agency.  Then she is transported to ancient Crete where she meets the Minotaur in his labyrinth.  When the Minotaur chases her, she thinks it is because he wants to have sex with her, so she lets him catch her (she is on this trip in hopes of getting laid, and is wearing an outfit she made herself that bares her breasts).  But when he catches her he is not interested in her, saying, "I only gobble virgins."  Laura tries to seduce him, I guess not realizing that the Minotaur doesn't rape the women, but eats them.  When all the Minotaur wants to do with Laura is talk politics, Laura storms out, back to the future.  Back home she writes an angry letter to the time travel agency salesman, whom she blames for her failure to get laid on her trip.  In an effort to hurt his feelings she euphemistically asserts that he is a poor performer in bed and/or has a small penis (the last line of the story finishes "you, Mr. Barnes, are no Minotaur!")

I'm sure there were and are people who find this story hilarious; I am not one of them. I guess Boucher was one of them, and thought including a risque jocular piece in the Treasury added variety.  I suppose I'll grade this one "acceptable."

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Well, despite the title of the anthology, these ones were not so great.  I am always glad to have expanded my knowledge of the SF field, however, so, no regrets!

Three stories by Gene Wolfe about mysterious women

I'm not like tarbandu or Joachim Boaz or admiralironbombs, who apparently read entire anthologies, collections, and magazines, cover to cover, as a matter of course.  I treat such material the way I treat a box of chocolates; I try to pick out the ones with nuts or ganache and try to avoid the ones with fruit or jelly, sometimes based on the scantiest information or just my "spider sense."  Which means I own piles of anthologies and collections full of dozens (hundreds?) of stories I haven't read.

This week I got out my 1990 copy of Gene Wolfe's collection Endangered Species (I love the Marco Patrito cover) and read three stories I had never read before, "Sweet Forest Maid," "Suzanne Delage," and "Kevin Malone."

All these stories are well-written in a fairly straightforward style and include interesting tidbits and observations about life and history, and I am recommending that you read them all.  As usual with Wolfe, each sentence feels crafted, each line is entertaining, or serves the plot or mood of the story in some way.

Each story invites speculation about its hidden layers and meanings, and below I will take my wild guess as to what each story's "secret," "point" and/or "message" is.  To make things more challenging, I will post my speculations without first consulting the various websites where people smarter than me and better educated than I am explain what Wolfe's stories are all about.  Let's see if I make a fool of myself!

"Sweet Forest Maid" first appeared
in F&SF

"Sweet Forest Maid" (1971)

Lenor, a woman with no family or friends, hears about a female sasquatch, and decides to go find her, perhaps live among her people in the forest. Lenor knows nothing about camping or living off the land, and, in some of the toughest terrain in North America, she gets lost and suffers a terrible fever.  In the last paragraph of the six-page story she comes face to face with the female Bigfoot...or is it just a hallucination?

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest this story is about the (alleged) decline of community and rise of atomized individualism in our society.  (All you social science types out there will perhaps be familiar with Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, which my boss back in my New York office considered a big deal.)  Wolfe says that "today... women like Lenor no longer have friends; the old ties...having broken down."  Society has failed to offer a place where the protagonist belongs, and, desperate for companionship and community, she takes crazy, suicidal risks, looking for belonging in a dangerous place.

There are also some clues (references to Hollywood special effects and to drinking Coca-Cola through a straw) that suggest our society is shallow and fake, and that Lenor goes to the woods looking for authenticity; also, that technology has spoiled our relationship with the natural world, and Lenor, after seeing how sad and wise a gorilla looks in a zoo, is looking for a closer connection with nature.

Wolfe is famously conservative and religious, so maybe this story is a depiction of the plight of people in post-war society, when institutions like religion and the family have been weakened by feminism, consumerism, careerism, technology, etc.  With fewer safe places to turn to for community, people get mixed up in risky situations, turning to drugs, gangs, cults, communes, terrorist groups, etc.

(For the record, I am skeptical of Putnam's thesis, and I love Coca-Cola.)

"Suzanne Delage" first appeared in
Le Guin and Kidd's Edges; you
can read it for free at Lightspeed,
an e-magazine

"Suzanne Delage" (1980)

This story is the reminiscence of a retired man. Spurred by a passage in a banal novel, he thinks about an odd experience in his life, how he has never met Suzanne Delage, a woman his own age who lives in his own town, is the daughter of his mother's close friend, and attended his high school.  Due to various strange coincidences, he has never seen Suzanne Delage--he's never even seen a photo of her.  A few days before penning this memoir, he saw a pretty teenage girl, slender with shiny black hair, clear skin, and an intelligent, vivacious look on her face; a friend tells him that this is Suzanne Delage's daughter.

This one is a stumper.  Could Suzanne Delage be a vampire?  This would help explain why her photo does not appear in the narrator's high school yearbook.  Also, why a bitter old widow who lived across the street from the narrator hated Suzanne's mother, so much so that the narrator's mother was afraid to invite Mrs. Delage over.  (Mom and Mrs. Delage met elsewhere, and went on excursions together to look for old quilts and embroidery.) There are no mysterious deaths, though, or any other evidence of a vampire preying on the populace.  Maybe there is no traditional SF content to this one.

It's possible I just have the loneliness of post-war American society on the brain, but somewhat like "Sweet Forest Maid," I think "Suzanne Delage" is about how in modern life people don't know each other.  The narrator talks about how in high school many students (including himself) segregated themselves into insular cliques, and, perhaps more importantly, how some students were not in cliques, and were, perhaps, alone.  Instead of getting to know new and different people, we modern Americans stick to our little groups and/or focus on our own limited interests, which leaves many people lonely.

It may also be significant that the narrator has had two failed marriages--both wives "bored" him.  Maybe the crux of the story is that Suzanne Delage was the narrator's "true love," or "soul mate," and a series of unfortunate coincidences kept them apart.

"Kevin Malone" first appeared in
Ramsey Campbell's New Terrors,
and can be found in
  The Best of Gene Wolfe 

"Kevin Malone" (1980)

A young upper-middle class couple has fallen on hard times, the narrator having lost his job at a brokerage firm.  In response to an odd newspaper ad offering vaguely defined employment to an attractive educated couple, they go to a fabulous old estate, The Pines, that is served by a staff of more than a dozen servants.  The "job" is to simply inhabit the mansion, to take the place of the family who once owned the estate; the current owner, Kevin Malone, wants to feel "at home" at The Pines, where, as a boy, he lived and worked alongside his father, the estate's "man-of-all-work" (another character claims he was the stableman), and his mother, the parlor maid.  Malone won't feel at home unless the place is occupied by a young couple, as it was when he was there as a kid.    

Malone was forced to leave the estate for an orphanage at age twelve after his father murdered a maid and then committed suicide. The maid's name was Betty Malone, and it is unclear if she was Malone senior's wife, or daughter, or just some unrelated woman with whom he shared a last name.  It seems likely Betty Malone was Kevin Malone's mother.  Through luck and hard work, Malone became a rich businessman, and he purchased The Pines.  Instead of making himself master of the estate, as you might expect, he decided to live over the stables, as he did in his youth.

When, weeks after moving in, the mystery behind this weird job and weird boss (whom the narrator speculates may be a ghost, or possessed in some way) is revealed to the narrator, Malone relieves him of the job, but, and this is the craziest part of the story, the narrator's wife Marcella stays on, abandoning her husband.  We already know Marcella is not a reliable person or a model wife--we learn early in the story that she is a drunk and was disowned by her family, and throughout the story she is deceptive and petulant with her husband--but it is hinted that there is something more going on than her staying with Malone simply because he has money.  When the narrator asks Malone if he owns the house, Malone replies, "this house owns me," and Marcella quickly chimes in, "It owns me too."  The last time the narrator ever sees his wife, she is doing some dusting--she has become one of the servants!  Is Marcella descended from someone who lived or worked at The Pines?  Could she be possessed by such a person's spirit?

"Kevin Malone" is about people from broken homes trying to recapture their childhood, to "go home again."  Like Malone's father, the narrator's father committed suicide, shooting himself when bankruptcy threatened; in moving into The Pines, perhaps we should see the narrator attempting to return to a childhood of financial ease, a sort of mirror image of the successful Malone who is trying to relive a childhood of servitude.

The efforts to relive one's childhood depicted in the story do not seem very successful or healthy; perhaps the horror of this horror story is how strife in the family at a young age can psychologically cripple a child, stunt his or her growth, keeping one obsessed with the past and hindering efforts to build a happy family and productive career of one's own.

There are also class issues in "Kevin Malone," of course--at one point the narrator suggests that it would be logical for Malone, the son of servants who was educated in an orphanage, to hate Marcella and the narrator, who grew up privileged.  Maybe Malone's employing Marcella as a servant is some kind of revenge?  There is not much evidence of Kevin Malone resenting the rich, however, though it is suggested that Kevin Malone's success in business was heavily reliant on luck and deception.    

This brings us to the gender issues of the story.  If Malone resents anybody, it seems to be his father's victim, Betty Malone, whom Kevin Malone declares "a tramp." He almost seems to condone or excuse his father's act of murder.  I got the impression that the narrator (and Wolfe) were drawing some kind of parallel between Betty Malone and Marcella.  For example  while they are living at The Pines, Marcella and her husband sleep in separate rooms, and the narrator wonders if his wife has been having sex with one of the servants (i.e., is a "tramp," as Betty Malone is accused of being.)

There seem to be lots of clues whose significance I am not picking up on.  The butler is named Priest,  for example, and the narrator refers to Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, writers I am not nearly as familiar with as I should be.

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

So, there is my attempt to figure out three of Gene Wolfe's two hundred or so short stories.  Now to Google around and see how far off base I am.

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This is MPorcius Fiction Log's 300th post.  I can barely believe it myself; half the time I post these things, I wonder why I am really doing it.

Thanks to all the readers and commenters, and to all the people who have supported this quixotic endeavor with links and retweets and in other ways.  Without your encouragement I would never have read some of the things I have read nor thought about them and enjoyed them so deeply.

From the Treasury of Great SF: stories by Richard Deming, George P. Elliott, & Joel Townsley Rogers

Among the famous names on the back cover of Volume 1 of Anthony Boucher's 1959 A Treasury of Great Science Fiction are to be found names of people I have never heard of before.  In the interests of exploring new frontiers and in hopes of uncovering buried gems, I read three stories by such people, one each by Richard Deming, George P. Elliott, and Joel Townsley Rogers.

"The Shape of Things that Came" by Richard Deming (1951)

Deming has only a few publications listed on isfdb, including a novel he ghost wrote as Ellery Queen and a novelization of a wacky-looking horror movie starring Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters.  He was born in Des Moines, where I have been spending a lot of time since my exile from The Big Apple.

"The Shape of Things that Came" first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and has appeared in a few places since then, including two foreign anthologies.

This story, a mere 5 pages, is a mere trifle; maybe it is supposed to be amusing.  A guy in 1900 travels forward in time to 1950, then, back in 1900, tells a guy how amazing 1950's technology is.  There is no plot to speak of, no conflict or risk or endeavor.  The point of the story seems to be that people take for granted the technology that is around them, not considering how remarkable technological change really is, and that 20th century people don't quite realize how the pace of technological change has accelerated since the industrial revolution.

This isn't an annoyingly bad story, and I can't argue with its banal "point;" I'd judge it acceptable.  But Boucher called his anthology A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, and this is certainly not "great"--it feels like filler.

"Sandra" by George P. Elliott (1957)

George Paul Elliott appears to have been a peripatetic academic who wrote in many genres and died in The Big Apple.  "Sandra" first saw publication in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction alongside stories by Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, and L. Sprague de Camp.

I liked "Sandra" from its first page, because it does the sorts of things I most enjoy in SF and in literature in general; it believably depicts a strange alien world, and not from the point of view of a 20th century Westerner, but from the point of view of one of the aliens, who does not find his world strange, and it tells the story of a difficult human relationship.

"Sandra" is a first person narrative set in an alternate 20th-century California where slavery is common.  Our narrator is a bachelor, an engineer at a factory, and when he inherits a large house he buys a young and pretty white woman, Sandra, at a department store to keep his house, wash his feet, cook his meals, and have sex with him.  The plot of the novel follows their relationship, how it evolves as the narrator falls in love with Sandra, gives her her freedom, and then marries her.  The narrator discovers that Sandra was more attentive and easier to deal with as a slave than as a manumitted wife, and enslaves her again.  But that taste of freedom has made her rebellious, and he resorts to beating her with the whip that came with her when he bought her.

Elliott's style is smooth and even, understated and never manipulative.  He never breaks character; the narrator talks about Sandra the way a person in our world might talk about a difficult pet or high-maintenance automobile, with affection and regret that he didn't properly train the dog or maintain the sports car from the start.  As we see in Nabokov's Lolita, it is more challenging and exciting to learn about people with bizarre or perverted values from their own mouths than from a conventional point of view.

Elliott doesn't show all his cards, doesn't make clear what point he is trying to make--is this a satire of marriage? a meditation on the notion of freedom? a reminder that the customs of people from the past or foreign cultures may seem immoral to us but seem perfectly normal to them (and of course, that things we casually accept may be anathema to people of the future or from foreign cultures)? simply an effort to shock and titillate the reader?

Well-written, entertaining, and provocative--highly recommended.  

"Beyond Space and Time" by Joel Townsley Rogers (1938)

Rogers was an aviator and a prolific writer of genre fiction, praised by the likes of crime writers Ed Gorman and Bill Pronzini, and Edgar Rice Burroughs expert Richard Lupoff.  Recently Ramble House (check out their entertaining website) has made much of his work available to the 21st century public.  "Beyond Space and Time" was first published in All-American Fiction and was reprinted in Super Science Stories in 1950. 

It is the year 1968, and the world's greatest theoretical scientist, Hooker Hartley, and the world's greatest inventor, Helver Gunderson, have built a powerful rocket! Gunderson is our first person narrator, and he seems like a pretty enthusiastic, gung-ho kind of guy; check out this breathless sentence from the first paragraph of the story:

It was our purpose to explore outer space, to investigate the mystery of the cosmos, to solve the riddle of the fourth dimension, Time, and to reach that roof of heaven where, eighteen million light-years or more away, according to the best available data of mathematics, infinity curves and returns upon itself in a parabolic trajectory--to find the answer to the last question, in short, and the solution of the ultimate equation.

The entire story is like this--it is like the polar opposite of the elegant and sophisticated style employed by Elliott in "Sandra."

The plan is for Hartley, "the greatest scientific intelligence who ever lived!", to stay behind while Gunderson, who has Viking blood flowing through his veins (remember when that dude in that 1942 Henry Kuttner story had Viking blood flowing in his veins?), puts on his space helmet and flies to the very edge of the universe to "probe the final mystery!"

Before describing his trip, Gunderson reviews for us his life.  Born to abject poverty, by dint of intelligence and drive (remember that Viking blood!) he became a bazillionaire by inventing devices which revolutionized modern life (e.g., some kind of levitation device which means planes never crash, and a wrist TV.) He was befriended by suave upper-middle class genius Hartley, and got married to a gorgeous, haughty and intellectual Boston Brahmin named Nivea Saltonstall.  Gunderson worshipped Hartley and Nivea, and didn't realize that they only liked him for his money and were having an affair behind his back!

Gunderson's rocket blasts off at the speed of light, taking him to the edge of our universe, and beyond, to a universe which is a mirror image of our own, where time flows backward and Earth is called Thrae.  On Thrae he meets Mara, a woman who loves him for himself, and there he lives for fourteen years, making with Mara a happy family.  Then, in a way I couldn't understand, he looks back on Earth through a telescope ("which looks into the future, which is their past"), and sees Nivea cheating on him with Hartley.

Instead of just shrugging this off, seeing as he hasn't seen Nivea for fourteen years, has been unfaithful to her, and has a fulfilling life on Thrae, Gunderson flies back to Earth.  His flight back to Earth is also a flight back in time (I couldn't grok this part either), and he lands on Earth a millisecond after he took off, in the same exact spot. Hartley and Nivea think he hasn't left yet, and when Gunderson climbs out of the rocket, they ask if he has forgotten something.

Gunderson bashes open Hartley's skull with a wrench, crushing "the greatest brain that ever lived," and then strangles Nivea to death. When the cops come they don't believe Gunderson's story about going to another universe; they think he is off his rocker.  With Hartley dead, and Gunderson imprisoned and deemed insane, we are to believe that there will never be another interstellar rocket, and that the answer to the ultimate mystery will only ever be known to one broken-hearted man.

The science in this story is crazy and incredible, as is the way Gunderson behaves, but the over-the-top plot and style have a sort of garish charm.  Maybe this is what Ed Gorman is talking about when he says that Rogers delivers "the strong heady thrill of genuine pulp."  Numerous passages had me shaking my head or laughing as Rogers veered in and out of "so bad it is good" territory (or is it Gunderson veering in and out of "I'm a maniac" territory?)  Rogers's portrayal of how the decadent upper crust (Nivea and her father disdain work and have run out of money just before meeting Gunderson) and the conniving intelligentsia take advantage of a nouveau riche working-class striver is also interesting.

I'm going to slot "Beyond Space and Time" in the "entertaining curiosity" category and give it a thumbs up.

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The Deming was basically a dud, but the Elliott was a mature piece of literature and the Rogers was a gonzo thrill ride.  Reading new authors paid off this time.  I'm planning on reading stories by authors unfamiliar to me in Volume 2 of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction in the near future.

Four stories by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore

As I crisscross America's Middle West, I scour the shelves of used book stores, thrift shops, and library sales, in search of classic SF bargains.  Recent purchases of anthologies brought the number of as-yet-unread Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore stories in my possession to a critical mass, and this weekend I read four Kuttner and Moore stories, first published in the 1940s and '50s, that draw heavily on psychological theories, classical mythology, and Lewis Carroll.

"Piggy Bank" (1942)

"Piggy Bank" first appeared in the same issue of Astounding as A. E. Van Vogt's famous "The Weapon Shop," under the Lewis Padgett pseudonym.  I read it in Volume 2 of Anthony Boucher's 1959 A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, where it is credited to Henry Kuttner.  The isfdb has Moore as a second author.

Fellow SF fan R. R. Nurmi,
we salute you!

My copy of the two-volume A Treasury of Great Science Fiction was once owned by an R. R. Nurmi of Des Moines, Iowa. Mr. or Ms. Nurmi had a cool ink stamp with which to mark his or her books; it depicts a chess piece (a knight) in the center of a spider's web.  Pretty neat!

"Piggy Bank" takes us to New York City at the turn of the 21st century, when corrupt and ruthless robber barons and organized crime dominate society, the perpetual struggles between rival conglomerates throwing the world into economic chaos.  "Science and government were handicapped by the Powers," Kuttner tells us, "which were really industrial empires, completely self-contained if not self-supporting units.  Their semanticists and propagandists worked on the people, ladling out soothing sirup."  We've seen Kuttner's hostility to private enterprise and advertising before, in the 1953 story "Year Day."

Our main characters in this proto-cyberpunk drama include robber baron Ballard and scientist Gunther.  Gunther has figured out a way to manufacture diamonds that are indistinguishable from natural stones, and Ballard sells them.  Or he would sell them, if they didn't always get stolen.  Ballard gets Gunther to build him an invulnerable robot; with its super senses and super speed it can detect and avoid any trap, any attack.  Ballard has the robot ostentatiously plated in gold and studded with all his diamonds.  Ballard, doing a neat bit of self-analysis, admits that he has designed the robot to show off his wealth in order to compensate for a childhood inferiority complex.  (Kuttner aspired to be a clinical psychologist, and both he and his wife had undergraduate degrees in psychology.)

In a sequence like one in a detective thriller, Ballard's thugs pursue and murder Gunther.  Gunther was on Ballard's hit list because the scientist was the only other guy who knew the diamonds were fake, and how to deactivate the robot.  But when Ballard has money troubles and needs some of those diamonds he realizes he made a boo boo in liquidating Gunther--Gunther changed the robot's password.  There follows a long sequence in which Ballard and his boffins try to figure out a way to catch the robot.  In the end, the only way to stop the robot also renders the diamonds worthless by revealing to the world the formula for how they were created; Ballard's business empire collapses and Ballard goes insane.

This story is OK; I liked how Gunther set things up so if he died Ballard would be financially ruined, but nothing in the story engaged me emotionally or intellectually--I didn't care how or if Ballard caught the robot or salvaged his finances.

"The Children's Hour" (1944)

This story also appears in A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, in Volume 1. Originally it was published in Astounding, under the Lawrence O'Donnell pseudonym.  A Treasury of Great Science Fiction credits Moore as second author, but elsewhere Kuttner has received sole credit.

It is World War Two, and Sergeant Lessing is part of an experimental U. S. Army hypnosis program; the brass want to be able to hypnotize the dogfaces so they will be impervious to any hunger or pain they may experience while they are liberating Europe and Asia from the fascists (or preserving markets for American industry, as your college professor may have put it.)  While he is trying to turn Lessing into the latest Captain America, psychiatrist Lieutenant Dyke discovers that many of Lessing's memories of a three month period two years ago have been suppressed.  Dykes and Lessing struggle to uncover these memories, and a story comes to light that could shatter our view of life and the universe!

Back before he started his military service, in beautiful New York City, Lessing met and fell in love with a beautiful black-eyed girl, Clarissa.  Clarissa is a special woman; whenever Lessing is with her, the world seems brighter, clearer, more beautiful. Bizarre events (e.g., it rains, and as Lessing and Clarissa are running for shelter the shelter suddenly vanishes) lead Lessing to believe that Clarissa is being guided (or manipulated) through life by a superior being of infinite power.  Lessing, jealous, conceives of Clarissa being like Danae of the brazen tower, the love interest of a divinity.  (Kuttner and/or Moore must have really been into classical mythology; Danae also got a mention in "Piggy Bank.")  Lessing tries to get Clarissa away from New York and out of this mysterious being's influence, but to no avail--the being can twist reality to make sure that Clarissa is right where it wants her!

Dyke, thinking of the example of his own high I.Q. child, debunks the Danae theory and figures out what is really going on.  Like some other Kuttner and Moore stories ("Absalom" springs immediately to mind), "The Children's Hour" is about child psychology.  Clarissa is an infant member of our successor species, homo superior, and to this race of supermen, who live on alien planets in a universe where "a cube may have many more than six sides," our little old Earth is like a playground or boarding school.  Dyke has a whole speech about how kids can't quite understand adults, and need to spend time with other kids in order to mature in a healthy way, and tells Lessing he had to make his own genius son go out and play with the normal kids so he would be socialized.  The superhumans sent Clarissa to our Earth, with its meagre number of dimensions, to play with us dummies for a while before taking up the mantle of adulthood.

(It is actually more complicated than that, with dozens of Clarissas, each a single facet of the super-Clarissa that will be formed when they have all matured and will be combined.)

"The Children's Hour" is full of connections to other SF literature.  Charles Fort and James Branch Cabell are mentioned, and a scene in Alice in Wonderland  is referred to (Kuttner and Moore's most famous story, "Mimsy were the Borogoves," prominently features Lewis Carroll).  I wondered if the talk of cubes and tesseracts in "The Children's Hour" was influenced by Heinlein's "--And He Built a Crooked House--," which had appeared in Astounding three years earlier, or if Heinlein and Kuttner and Moore were just drawing on the same source material.

Looking back on the story it is easy to like it, but while I was reading it it felt long (it's like 33 pages) and kind of confusing.  There are some scenes in which Lessing is transported to some of the other planets which are hosting facets of Clarissa that I think are not very interesting and could have been left out.  The fact that the protagonists aren't doing very much, but instead are victims of manipulation instead of agents who drive the plot, and that there is no real villain, also makes the story seem long.        

"The Cure" (1946)  

Another Lewis Padgett story from Astounding.  This one I read in my copy of A Science Fiction Argosy, edited by Damon Knight in 1972, where it is credited to Kuttner and Moore.  Like my volumes of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, it was originally owned by R. R. Nurmi.

A middle-aged lawyer whose office is in a New York skyscraper is suffering brief, repetitive hallucinations.  A few visits to a psychiatrist help the lawyer realize the meaning of the vivid, specific hallucinations: he is from the far future, when humans have evolved into a vastly superior race, one with ESP and eight fingers on a hand!

But this sixteen-fingered future is no utopia!  In fact, the human race is going extinct due to a plague of insanity, the result of "the herd instinct" apparently resulting from an over reliance on machines.  Only four thousand people remain sane, but they have hit upon a method of therapy to keep themselves from going bonkers: time travel! They send your psyche back to a body in the rough and tumble individualistic 19th or 20th centuries for a few decades--only six months pass for your "real" future body, and when you return to it you are rejuvenated.

(Thomas Disch had a kind of time-travel-as-therapy thing going in "Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire," didn't he?)

The lawyer's hallucinations are, in fact, clues about how to get back to the future.  But when he goes back he finds that society has collapsed, his 3999 colleagues have all succumbed to the disease, and are scampering around like monkeys.  All he can do is live out a five-fingered existence in the primitive, but relatively sane, 20th century.

There are obvious similarities to "The Children's Hour," though the optimistic sense-of-wonder ending of that story is replaced by a pessimistic conclusion in "The Cure." While there is no Greek mythology this time, "The Cure" does refer to Tweedledum and the Red King from Through the Looking Glass.

I liked "The Cure" quite a bit; it has the virtue of packing as much punch as "The Children's Hour" into a package a quarter the size, and includes several striking, memorable images.      

"Two-Handed Engine" (1955)

This novelette has been widely anthologized, and is actually the title story of a 2005 collection of Kuttner and Moore tales published by Centipede Press.  In some places, like where I read it, a 1976 anthology edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison called Decade: The 1950s, Kuttner receives full credit for the story.  But in some places Moore is listed as a second author, and in still others Moore is listed as the primary author with Kuttner as second author.

In the future, computers and robots will become so powerful and efficient that human beings need do no work, and all people have equal access to sumptuous luxuries.  Everybody spends his or her time playing what we would call virtual reality video games (Kuttner and Moore call them "Escape Machines that fed them joyous, impossible adventure and made the waking world seem too dull to bother with.")  People stop talking to each other, stop living as families and even stop having sex, leading to a collapse of all social institutions and a precipitous population decline.

Before mankind goes extinct some far-sighted individual reprograms the computers that are running the world.  The Escape Machines are shut down and all those free handouts come to an end, forcing people to work again.  The period of anarchic individualism, however, has left humanity with no sense of morality, no conscience.  To enforce the law against murder and spur a regrowth of the human sense of guilt and sin, the machines have their Furies (Orestes is mentioned in the first line of the story.)  The Furies, invincible robots, follow murderers around for days or months, haunting them until finally, unexpectedly, they execute the malefactor.

The plot of the story follows some murderers who thought they had figured out a way to escape the Furies.  Kuttner and Moore do a great job of "getting into the murderers' heads;" there are lots of tense psychological scenes that build character and drama--I prefer this kind of psychology in my stories to scenes in which a character throws around words from a college textbook or expatiates on child-rearing theories.  Of the four stories discussed in this blog post, "Two-Handed Engine" is my favorite.  

Aldiss and Harrison tell us in an introduction that their Decades series reprints the most entertaining and most important SF stories, and I think "Two-Handed Engine" fits the bill.

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All four of these stories are worth reading, but "The Cure" and "Two-Handed Engine" in particular have the kind of economy, emotional impact, and powerful images that I hope to find in a story.

So far all these anthologies I have been buying have proven to be a good investment. I think next I'll sample some stories by writers with whom I am unfamiliar.

Satan's World by Poul Anderson

"You're better off without a lord," said Falkayn.  "Every human being is."

Over a year ago, in the 1964 collection Trader to the Stars, we met Nicholas van Rijn, Poul Anderson's hairy and obese space merchant, the head of Solar Spice & Liquors Company.  In The Trouble Twisters we were introduced to some of Van Rijn's employees, the multi-racial explorer team consisting of handsome human aristocrat David Falkayn, acid-tongued little cat-monkey Chee, and hulking alligator-faced centauroid Buddhist Adzel.  These four heroes of entrepreneurial capitalism get involved in a major interstellar crisis in Satan's World, a 1968 novel first serialized in Analog.  I read the 1977 Berkley Medallion paperback with the pleasant but generic cover by Rick Sternbach and the misspelling of Falkayn's name on the back cover.

Satan's World is unabashed libertarian hard science fiction: there is lots of chemistry, astronomy, and biology; there are lots of force fields, computers, robots, space warships, ray guns, nuclear bombs and brain-scrubbing and -washing techniques; there are innumerable intelligent alien species; and our heroes are businesspeople who love to smoke, drink and make a profit, and who have to outwit interfering government bureaucrats at every turn.

Our adventure starts off on Earth and Luna, at the heart of the Commonwealth. Falkayn is consulting with Serendipity, Inc., the leading clearinghouse of information in the Commonwealth, thanks to their (mysteriously acquired) computers, the best in the human-inhabited sector of the galaxy.  Pooling their information, Falkayn and the Serendipity people discover the location of a very valuable rogue planet. Unfortunately, Serendipity, Inc. is a deep cover spy operation of the ruthless imperialistic slaver aliens known as the Shenna!  The Serendipity staff, victims of a sort of Stockholm Syndrome, send a ship to alert their masters about the rogue planet, and hold Falkayn captive--that is until Adzel, Chee and Van Rijn launch a commando raid and liberate him from Serendipity's fortified moon base.  While Van Rijn and Adzel deal with meddling Earth and Lunar bureaucrats (it turns out those government busybodies frown on private commando raids) Falkayn and Chee blast off for the rogue planet, racing to get their before the Shenna do.

This planet, which Falkayn dubs "Satan" has been passing through interstellar space for eons, just a big frozen rock.  It is currently approaching a spectacularly huge and bright star, and the radiation from the star is thawing the planet, leading to all kinds of dramatic storms and volcanic activity.  Anderson spends a few pages explaining the physics and economics behind how Solar Spice & Liquors Company can make a pile of money by setting up factories on this planet--the same science means that if the Shenna get their hands on Satan they can build a super war fleet that can threaten the Commonwealth.  A Shenna flotilla shows up shortly after our heroes arrive; can Falkayn and Chee escape to warn the Commonwealth before it is too late?

There follows a series of naval battles, gun fights, tense negotiations, people getting captured, people escaping captivity, etc.  (And plenty of science lectures.)  Van Rijn, Falkayn, Chee and Adzel all have to make tough decisions and run risks to preserve peace and freedom.  In the end, the Shenna are pacified (with no help from the Commonwealth government) and integrated into the Commonwealth economy, and Van Rijn and associates make a pretty penny!  A triumph for the bourgeoise!

Satan's World is more streamlined and faster-paced than Anderson's 1978 novel, The Avatar, with fewer characters and briefer descriptions, which I appreciated.  Of course I love all the traditional SF elements Anderson packs into the book--the anti-grav belts, the spherical space battleships bristling with energy cannons and missile launchers, the robots and space suits, et al--and I like the plot.  Anderson's style is not great, but Vin Rijn's many malapropisms, and Anderson's occasional odd literary references that sent me to google and Wikipedia (e.g., an oblique reference to the work of Leslie Charteris, whom I have never read) are entertaining.  Satan's World is a lot of fun.

In addition to the pervasive "business is more efficient and just than government" theme, there are a few elements which may irk all you social justice types out there. There is a lot of biological determinism; the behavior and social structure of each of numerous intelligent species is explained by the environment in which they evolved. The Shenna exhibit extreme sexual dimorphism, with the females basically stupid and useless.  Van Rijn and Falkayn exhibit a sort of cavalier attitude towards women, and while the alien female Chee does more shooting and killing than anybody, the principal human females in the story are all manipulative spies.

Several editions of Satan's World bear the Frederick Pohl blurb "A rattling good space story."  I tend to think of Pohl as some kind of commie, but he always gives those iconic anti-socialist SF writers, Heinlein and Anderson, a fair shake, and I think his five-word assessment hits it on the nose; Satan's World is a fun space adventure that effectively employs a battery of well-worn and well-loved SF tropes.

Recommended.