Three science fiction stories by Ray Cummings from 1940

In our last episode we read five tales of gore, female nudity and inheritance schemes penned by Ray Cummings, who in his youth worked with Thomas Edison and who wrote quite a few SF adventures like Brigands of the Moon, a novel full of energy guns and futuristic vehicles which has the MPorcius Seal of Approval.  In 1940 Frederik Pohl began editing Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, and during his 20-month reign over these periodicals Pohl purchased numerous SF stories from Cummings.  In his fun memoir The Way the Future Was, which I recommend to anybody interested in classic SF, New York intellectual life in the 1930s and '40s, and what it is like to follow a career centered on the printed word, Pohl makes it clear that he thought all of the stories he bought from Cummings sucked--he bought them because he liked Cummings as a guy and wanted to do him a solid.  "[Cummings] was a personally engaging, roguish human being.  What he was not was a source of good stories."

When we think at all here at MPorcius Fiction Log, we think for ourselves, and I'm not going to just take Pohl's word for it that Cummings's 1940 and 1941 stories were bad.  So today we are reading three stories by Cummings that were printed in 1940 in magazines Pohl edited.  I read all of these at the internet archive, a treasure trove for all of us interested in the popular culture of the early 20th century. 

"Arton’s Metal" 

This piece appeared in Super Science Stories.  The cover of this issue is too cramped, crowded, confusing.

In 1939 James Blakinson stole Georg Arton’s wife! Our story is set forty years later, in the futuristic world of 1979, as Blakinson arrives at Arton’s laboratory, where Arton is said to be producing a new material of tremendous value!  Blakinson, who carries a cane and wears a cape, doesn’t just steal wives—he steals money, and has embezzled enough funds from the bank that employs him to end up in the "ghastly Polar Prisons of Antarctica" should the authorities uncover his crime.  So he needs cash, fast, and has come to see Arton for the first time in four decades in hopes of getting it!

After this set up, which has some dramatic potential, Cummings craps out on us. Arton demonstrates to Blakinson the process, which involves glowing electrodes, showers of sparks, and clouds of acerbic fumes, by which he creates or condenses, apparently out of the air or maybe from an almost invisibly thin wire, hunks of gold, platinum and radium. I couldn’t understand this whole system, and think Cummings did a poor job of explaining it, or just didn't bother to do so.  In any case, Arton, who, by the way, is in very poor health, uses his apparatus as a trap for Blakinson, as a means of revenge. Arton sets his machinery up to malfunction in such a way that both men are, I think, killed, perhaps totally annihilated, and the lab is destroyed in an explosion that produces lots of valuable metal.  The last part of the story has a chemist and a journalist examining the rubble; there are no human remains and the chemist suspects Arton’s apparatus led to "two material bodies...trying to occupy the same space art the same time," which of course causes an explosion.  (Cummings, I guess, is presenting this idea of "two bodies in the same space" as linked, poetically and metaphorically, to the way Blakinson had sex with or won the love of Arton's wife, this woman's body or affection being the space they were both trying to occupy.)

I didn’t understand what was going on with the apparatus, and I thought the "occupying the same space" poetic justice angle was weak, so I have to give this one a thumbs down.

"The Thought-Woman" 

Here's another story from Super Science, this one named on the cover.  This cover is better than the last one, with a dynamic and easy to "read" cover with more expressive and interesting faces and slightly less silly monsters.

At the center of "The Thought-Woman" is a strange conceit: that in another parallel dimension are stored all the ideas that people will ever have, put there by God Almighty, and that when an idea pops into our heads, we are withdrawing it from this idea warehouse.  (Cummings compares this to the realm of unborn children from Maurice Maeterlink's 1908 play, The Blue Bird, the basis of numerous movies.)

Stanley Durrant is a young inventor, wracking his brain to complete the big invention that will make his fortune. His childhood friend, Dorothy Livingston, is always hanging around—she has a crush on Stan, but he doesn’t see her as a woman, just a platonic buddy. She brings up the theory of the realm of unthought things, then goes home to pray or hope or something that Stan will receive the ideas he needs from that unearthly realm. And, wouldn’t you know it, after she has departed the inventor has a dream or vision of going to this place, giving Cummings an opportunity to bore us with a rapturous and sentimental (and tedious) celebration of technology and invention. Billions of empty shelves and galleries represent ideas that have already been thought up— Cummings refers to Edison, the Wright brothers, Fulton, blah blah blah. Some niches are filled with vague outlines of objects—inventions that have not yet been thought up, and Stan recognizes his own half conceived invention among them.

The realm of unthought things doesn’t just feature technological advances—a ghostly figure guides Stan among the galleries, and he eventually realizes it is the idea of Dorothy (or, as he calls her, "Dot") seen not merely as a platonic chum, but as a sexually mature, sexually attractive woman. When he wakes up and sees Dot again he immediately recognizes her nubility and embraces her, and we have every reason to expect they will live happily ever after.

A childish, boring, feckless (remember a few weeks ago when that was everybody’s favorite word?) fairy tale with no drama or surprises or compelling ideas, "The Thought-Woman" is no more than a sterile celebration of things (technological advance and erotic love) we all already think are good that gives short shrift to the challenges associated with these good things, which of course cripples the story because and it is those challenges that make good fiction!

"Personality Plus" 

"Personality Plus" appeared in Astonishing, behind a pretty bland cover.  Fortunately, here we have a legitimate SF story with a comedic edge.  There was science in "Arton's Metal," but all the fluorescing bulbs and calipers and sparks were just pointless window dressing, and in "The Thought-Woman" the science was mind-numbing romanticizing of inventors. "Personality Plus," on the other hand, not only addresses interesting science (the perennial nature vs nurture debate) but pokes fun at scientists. Also, the jokes are actually funny!

It is the year 2000 in New York City—I myself was living in NYC in 2000 (good times, good times...) though of course the Gotham of my salad says didn’t have slidewalks and aircars and criminals armed with heat guns.

Our narrator is Jack Rance, a synthetic food salesman. He gets mixed up in the work of Dr. Butterworth, whom I guess we would call a (research?) psychiatrist. Butterworth believes that your personality is determined by your experiences, and is bitterly opposed to the thinking of scientists who argue that personality is determined by genetic inheritance. Butterworth’s niece Dot (that's right, "Dot" again) has married a man Butterworth describes as a real jerk, George Trent, known to one and all as "Georgie," a man who, because of his superior intelligence and good looks, has become arrogant, selfish and totally unlikable.  Butterworth has invented an amnesia machine (Jack tells us it is a "gruesome apparatus" that looks like the “death chair at Sing Sing”) and tricked Georgie into sitting in it (Doc B told him it was a headache cure!) The machine erased Georgie’s memory of the past eight years, when he allegedly evolved into the jerk everyone detests, and fogged up earlier memories, leaving Georgie's character practically a blank slate! Butterworth says that Georgie will now be able to develop a whole new, more agreeable, personality, and asks Jack to observe this development.

In short order Georgie is acting like a dangerously selfish jerk, a man brimming with confidence who fears no personal risks and does not care if he puts others in jeopardy. He runs an insane scam, like something out of a Wodehouse novel or a Desilu production, and our narrator Jack is right there in the middle of it. Georgie, who doesn’t seem to take his marriage vows overly seriously, has attracted the adoration of an heiress who wants to be a famous actress in nude films. She isn’t very good-looking (“got a figure like an ironing board”) so she and Georgie plan a publicity stunt to jump start her career: Georgie is going to pretend to kidnap her, and a corrupt cop friend of his will then rescue her and allow him to escape. (Jack gets pulled into this dangerous ruse because Georgie needs a stooge to hold the ladder steady while he carries the aspiring actress down from the second story window of her suburban mansion.)

This stunt is a total disaster, and leads to the twist ending in which Dr. Butterworth reveals the true nature of his experimental treatment of Georgie!

It was a relief to read this entertaining story after those two inert clunkers "Arton's Metal" and "The Thought-Woman." Why can’t all of Cummings's stories be like this?  Maybe because Cummings needed to mass produce stories to pay the bills and thus didn't have time to carefully craft all of his stories.  Pohl theorizes that this is the case.

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In a letter to Super Science, printed in the February 1943 issue, Chad Oliver, the guy who writes all those SF stories about anthropologists going native among primitive aliens, grouses that Cummings includes a “female” in every story he writes, and it is true that all the Cummings horror stories we read in our last blog post included courtship and/or marriage as a plot element, and it is also true of all the SF stories we read today. I actually think sexual relationships are a very good topic for literature, but, unfortunately, in only one of today’s stories does Cummings do anything actually entertaining with this classic subject. One out of three is not good, but let’s give Cummings another chance—in our next episode we'll look at Cummings stories from Astonishing and Super Science issues printed in 1941!

Five horror stories from 1940 by Ray Cummings

A British edition

In his fascinating memoir, The Way The Future Was, writer, editor, literary agent, Bolshevist and high school dropout Frederik Pohl talks a little about Ray Cummings. Pohl tells us that Cummings, who was born in 1887 and had some success as an SF writer earlier in his career, in the late 1930s was making his living by selling mystery and horror stories to Popular Publications, printers of numerous (at one point, according to wikipedia, 42) pulp magazines.  "Horror stories," according to Pohl, "were the dregs of the pulp market, cheap thrill-and-sadism stuff to a precise formula...."  The formula Pohl describes will remind people my age of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!--what at first appears to be a supernatural menace turns out to be a hoax perpetrated by some mundane ne'er-do-well.  When Pohl came to work at Popular as editor of Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories it was, he says, "a great day for Ray" because Pohl admired Cummings as a person and would buy actual SF stories from him, even if Pohl didn't care for them.  "...for months he would turn up regularly as clockwork and sell me a new story; I hated them all, and bought them all."

"Dregs?"  He "hated" them all?  Ouch!  Were these stories really so bad?  I liked Cummings's 1931 novel of piracy and firefights in the future, Brigands of the Moon, and was pleased to see several Cummings volumes among the 21 pounds of books donated to the MPorcius library recently by Joachim Boaz.  I don’t trust Pohl’s judgement when it comes to the proper role of the state in the economy, so why should I trust his judgement of Cummings's written work?  It’s not like I love every single thing Pohl has written (though I do think very highly of Gateway and "The Fiend," and The Way The Future Was is very readable.)  The only thing to do is to investigate first hand!  Trawling through the internet archive, I have picked out five horror stories by Cummings (some co-written with Gabrielle Cummings, whom I believe was Cumming’s wife) published in magazines in 1940. Let’s see what these stories--and the horror pulps--for which Pohl has such disdain are all about!  (In a later blog post I'll read some of the SF stories by Cummings which appeared in Astonishing and Super Science issues edited by Pohl.)

"Perfume of Dark Desire" (as by Ray King)

Our first three stories all appeared in the same issue of Horror Stories, one with a naked blonde on the cover about to suffer a quadruple dismemberment!  Yikes!

In "Perfume of Dark Desire" New York lawyer John Holden travels from the Big Apple to a tiny village in upstate New York to do some kind of real estate related business with a wealthy hermit guy, Robert Martin.  This of course reminds us of Johnathan Harker's trip to Transylvania in Dracula, one of the foundational texts of our modern culture of horror fiction.  Holden even receives a warning from a local before he reaches Martin's isolated house--the naked corpses of young ladies are being found in the woods around Martin's pad, and it is said they are the victims of some kind of creature that seduces them before murdering them.  Also, mysterious fires are associated with these heinous crimes.

Holden walks to Martin's house, where, through the window, he sees a beautiful brunette putting perfume all over her body--Holden actually saw this hot chick furtively purchasing that perfume back in the village's drug store!  This exhibitionist turns out to be Martin's niece, Barbara Jones, whom Martin calls "Babs."  Holden is pretty good-looking himself, and he and Babs are immediately consumed with lust for each other!

The monster, an apparition wreathed in smoke, murders another beautiful girl just outside Martin's house, and instead of calling the cops, Martin and Babs enlist Holden's aid in concealing the body in the coal bin down in the cellar!  There's also a strange scene in which a scared Babs drops an oil lamp, setting her clothes on fire so Holden has to rip her smoldering duds off and jump on top of her to quench the flames. 

At night Babs comes to Holden's room to strip and offer him her body if he will promise to keep the corpse in the cellar a secret!  She explains that her uncle Robert has a mental illness, a strange and compelling fetish--to him, smoke is a powerful aphrodisiac and if a girl smells of smoke he can hardly resist molesting her!  That is why she wears so much perfume, because the smell of perfume repels him!  One of Martin's enemies has learned of his perversion, and is blackmailing him--this villain has been running around the woods, setting piles of leaves on fire and murdering young women, then threatening to pin these atrocities on Martin if the old perv doesn't cough up the shekels.

Before Holden and Babs can consummate their relationship they hear a scream and rush off to find that the blackmailer has murdered Martin the pervert and put him in a smoke monster costume.  The blackmailer (revealed to be the drug store clerk who sells Babs that special perfume) knocks Holden unconcious, ties him up, and starts molesting Babs--he brags he will rape her and then murder her and the authorities will think Martin is to blame.  But Martin is still alive, just barely!  The old freak pulls the murder weapon, a knife, out of his own chest and uses it to free Holden, so Holden can kill the blackmailer.  After this good deed Babs's sex criminal uncle expires, and she goes on to marry the New York lawyer and they live happily ever after.

"Perfume of Dark Desire" is contrived and ridiculous, and appeals to people's fascination with violence and rough sex.  Again and again in the story people perform actions which are anti-social  but which gratify sexual desires, and are relieved of responsibility for these actions because unlikely circumstances have "forced" them to engage in them.  Ronald Martin's mental illness forces him to grope young women, the fire forces John Holden to rip off Barbara Jones's clothes and climb on top of her, fear of exposure to the police forces Babs to bare her body before Holden, etc.  The perfume the blackmailer invented and with which Babs covers herself (out of the blameless motive of protecting herself from her uncle's irrational lust) turns out to be a powerful aphrodisiac--thus Holden and Babs's animalistic desire for each other is not a reflection of their characters, not a sign they are "easy," but the work of the evil blackmailer!

Fiction allows people to vicariously participate in acts which are objectively pretty terrible and often elides any guilt the consumer might feel over deriving pleasure from such participation by providing in-story justifications for the actions.  Many people have fantasies of killing other people, and the first Star Wars movie and the first Indiana Jones movie--to provide two famous, popular, and critically acclaimed examples--allow people to indulge in fantasies of killing people by the dozens, and viewers never need feel guilty about their enjoyment because it is OK (more than OK--you get a medal for doing it!) to shoot down Nazis and space Nazis.  Similarly, many people have fantasies of denuding and groping young ladies or of disrobing and exciting the lust of strangers and "Perfume of Dark Desire" has characters who indulge in these more or less unacceptable behaviors "against their wills."

I can't call this story good, but it is crazy enough to be entertaining, and it isn't boring. 

"When the Werewolf Howls" (as by Emerson Graves)

Irma Lowe, a beautiful young woman, works at the mountain lodge owned by her blind grandfather (Irma’s parents are dead.) Also working at the lodge, managing the boats that take tourists off on excursions on the big nearby lake, is George Harvey. George and Irma have crushes on each other. Living in a cottage on the estate is another guy who has a crush on Irma, Lester Sands, a big ugly guy who has weird eyes. It is vaguely suggested that Lester is a refugee from "mid-Europe."  Irma is preparing steaks in the lodge kitchen when Lester starts pawing her; George appears and intervenes. On his way out Lester steals a raw bloody steak, and Irma sneaks to his cottage to look in the window--she sees Lester eating the uncooked slab of beef!

Grandpa has Lester thrown off the property. A few weeks later a big seeing-eye dog arrives at the lodge, accompanied by a note saying it is a gift from an old friend of Grandpa’s in Latvia. (Cumming’s choice of Latvia is an interesting one, as the year this story was published Latvia was conquered by the Soviet Union.) Grandpa is thrilled by this gift, but Irma and George don’t trust the beast—it has eyes just like Lester’s!  Eventually a message arrives from Latvia, indicating that Grandpa's old crony sent no such dog, but too late--Grandpa has already gone into the forest for a walk, guided by man’s best friend! The dog returns to the lodge without him, and, Lassie-style, leads Irma into the woods; she hopes the service animal is taking her to Grandpa's side so she can help him, but instead the beast leads her into a pitch black cave! In the dark she hears Lester’s voice! Lester tells her he can see in the dark and has been watching her through her window every night as she stands naked in her unlit room, savoring the caressing touch of the cool night air on her supple young body! (Who does she think she is, Ben Franklin?)  Lester also lets her know he sent the dog and that Grandpa's little stroll ended with a fall from a cliff!

Lester molests Irma, even biting her neck, but before he can go all the way George and a posse arrive, and Lester takes to his heels. Cummings leaves ambiguous the question of whether Lester is a werewolf or just a nut who thinks he is a werewolf, and whether the seeing-eye dog is really a dog trained by Lester or in fact Lester in another form.

"When the Werewolf Howls" feels a little perfunctory, maybe because it is shorter than "Perfume of Dark Desire."  We have here another young woman living with an older male relative who ends up murdered, and another interrupted rape in the story's climax.  Keep your eyes open--we may see these elements again!

"Corpses from Canvas" (with Gabrielle Cummings, as by Gabriel Wilson)

When I was a kid I watched a lot of TV, partly because my mother, who loved mystery novels and TV detective shows, always had the TV on.  One of the reoccurring "tropes" I found silly and annoying, even as a child, was when a detective novelist's story appeared to be "coming true," with murders much like those in his or her book(s) taking place.  I'm also not crazy about all those cartoons and horror stories in which a guy's characters jump off the drawing board and interact with real people.  (Yes, I'm brimming over with pet peeves like these.)  So, the title of this story, which promises to be about a painter whose paintings "come to life," has me shaking my head before I even start it.

Jack Blake is a painter!  He unveils his latest work to a Robert P. Norton, a "slender, dandified little fellow, with sleek grey-black hair and an effeminate waxed mustache," who is a "publisher of art novelties."  The painting is a life-sized portrait of a degenerate criminal in the act of fleeing the scene of the crime, clutching the severed hand of his victim!  Cummings describes this painting in great detail, from the "pig eyes" and "low, retreating forehead" to the "twisted shoulder" and "club foot."  This sinister apparition is lacking one of his own hands, and presumably is collecting other people's hands as a means of achieving psychological compensation as well as revenge on the world.

Norton wants to mass market one-dollar color reproductions of this horrifying image; if they sell as well as he expects them to he and Blake will make a mint, and Blake will have enough money to marry his fiance Elsa Jarrod, a "dark-haired beautiful young girl."  The unveiling of the painting has taken place at the rambling old mansion of Elsa's grandfather, with whom she, and her cousin George, one of Norton's employees, live.  Blake and Norton spend the night in the mansion, and in the venerable edifice's dark halls and humid rooms a gruesome melodrama plays out!  George convinces Norton to dress up as the killer from the painting and scare people--this will be, he asserts, a genius publicity stunt!  But it is a trap!  George murders Grandfather Jarrod and even cuts Gramps's hand off!  George then stabs Norton and leaves him for dead--he hopes to blame Norton for Gramps's murder (this is all in service of a harebrained scheme to get not only Gramps's but also Norton's money.)  But before George can tell his lies to Elsa and Blake, the fatally injured Norton drags himself to the painter and his fiance and, with his dying breath, tells them the truth.  Exposed, George tries to kill Blake, but Blake outfights him, and when George makes a break for it he is panicked by an hallucination of the killer from the painting and goes over a balcony, breaking his neck.

With George gone, Elsa inherits Gramps's entire estate, and Norton's death does not prevent Blake from making money from the sales of reproductions of his macabre painting.  These two lovebirds get married, but sometimes the painting of the killer makes them shudder and Blake no longer paints horror subjects.

The descriptions of the painting and of Norton are good, but the plot is a contrived mess and the effort Cummings puts into portraying Norton as an exploitative, greedy, and effete fairy ends up feeling like a cheap trick; obviously he is setting us up to expect Norton to be the villain, but the actual villain, George, gets no interesting description at all!  Giving both Norton and George equally detailed (preferably equally distasteful) descriptions would have improved the story.

On a sort of "meta" level we have to wonder if Blake represents Cummings himself and Norton his employers at Popular Publications, and if "Corpses from Canvas" reflects Cummings' uneasiness about making his living by appealing to the lust for blood and sex of the public, bitterness at his paymasters, and perhaps a dream of striking it rich through his creative work and retiring from the sex and gore game.

"Forked Horror"

This one actually appeared under Cummings's own name.  Maybe "Forked Horror" is a story he was proud of?  This tale was published in an issue of Terror Tales, the cover of which depicts a blonde bound and confined to a coffin!  Unlike the woman on the cover of the May 1940 issue of Horror Stories, whose situation appears to be hopeless, this blonde has at least some reason to hold on to a glimmer of hope, as a man is reaching for an automatic pistol with which to perforate her tormentors, step one in effecting his rescue of her.  Of course, her savior is himself being perforated by a portcullis, but I'm an optimistic sort; I hope blondie is as well.

"Forked Horror" is a first-persona narrative written in the voice of a woman, Gloria Allen.  When she was 17, Gloria married Dr. Paul Levant, a scientist who was an expert on snakes and the medicinal use of their venom.  Paul's hobby was "oriental occultism," and he believed that the dead could possess the bodies of animals and "come back."  He told Gloria that, should he die, he would try to come back in the body of a snake!

In the very first year of their marriage, Paul was killed (it was believed) by one of his snakes, and Gloria proceeded to marry Paul's best friend, Tom Allen, just a few months later.  As our story begins, Gloria is in the woods taking a stroll and a little garter snake approaches her!  She picks it up and caresses it, calling it "Paul," and brings it home, secreting the reptile in a box where Tom won't see it.  But when Tom wakes up at night and finds his wife on the veranda cuddling with the snake, he kills it with a shoe!

Tom accuses Gloria of not loving him, of still being in love with the dead Paul, and their young marriage collapses.  Gloria is torn psychologically, unsure who she really loves--is her heart devoted to Paul or to Tom--and haunted both by a fear of snakes and an undeniable urge to be reunited with Paul, even if he has taken the form of a snake!  On the brink of madness, she wonders if Paul's shade is trying to drive her to suicide so they can be united in the afterlife--or maybe he will just come to her in the body of a poisonous serpent and murder her so they will be together in the grave! 

Gloria's memoir is a legitimately good horror story, incorporating some of my favorite themes--difficult sexual relationships, immortality, and the movement of minds/souls/consciousnesses between bodies.  Cummings includes psychological theories I guess we aren't supposed to believe today (that women act on their irrational emotions and don't even know their own minds) as well as references to Cleopatra's suicide.

Unfortunately, "Forked Terror" suffers grievously in its last two pages, which consist primarily of a journal written by Tom during his last moments in an asylum.  Tom explains how he murdered Paul, making it look like the scientist died from a snake bite, and then worked deceptions in an effort to drive Gloria insane so he could get her money. (Perhaps it is significant that Gaslight, the play that would hit Broadway in 1941 and be made into an Ingrid Bergman film in 1944, premiered in London in 1938.)  Tom’s writing features clues that lead the reader to believe that he himself is insane, and Tom admits he believes it possible that Paul really has come back in the body of a snake, his object being to kill Tom. The story ends with a brief third person section in which we learn Tom died in the asylum immediately after writing the journal; we are presented with evidence that Tom committed suicide, as well as contrary evidence that suggests he was killed by a snake!

"I Am the Tiger Girl!"  (with Gabrielle Cummings, as by Gabriel Wilson)

"I Am the Tiger Girl!" was published in Horror Stories.  The blonde on the cover of this magazine is rocking the latest in riveted steel haute couture, but it looks like some pitiless fashion critics do not appreciate her look and are mere moments from ripping her to shreds.

Our narrator for "I Am the Tiger Girl!" is Landa Maine, a refugee from “mid-Europe,” where her parents were executed as spies—Landa has grown up in America, raised by two legal guardians, unrelated to her, whom she calls "uncles."  Landa has always known she was different; her finger nails and toe nails grow with preternatural speed and are very hard and sharp, and she feels a close affinity with cats—her pet cat Fluff is her only friend! The sight of blood, especially blood drawn by her own nails, sexually arouses her. When she was 17 she was laying naked in bed with the window open, enjoying the feel of the breeze on her body (one of Cummings's recurring ideas, I guess, maybe one of his own turn-ons?), when a figure in a black hood climbed in through the window to grope her and scratch her thigh. Nobody else saw him, and her uncles assured Landa it was just a vivid dream, during which she had scratched herself.  But after this event Landa suffered a constant feeling of being watched, hungrily, by a black cloaked figure that lurked in shadows.

The plot of "I Am the Tiger Girl!" involves Landa’s relationship with a man, Burt, who falls in love with her. Landa loves him in turn, but fears one day she will be overcome by her weird lusts and kill him with her nails; to be sure, the first time Landa and Burt kiss she scratches him and greedily licks the blood off her nails when he isn't looking!  Cummings also gives us a very gory dream sequence in which Landa claws out Burt’s eyes--blood oozes out of Burt's empty sockets and the eyes roll around the floor like marbles, following Landa with an accusatory gaze!  Landa and Burt do get married in the end, but only after the uncles' efforts to destroy them and get Landa’s inheritance (always with the inheritances) are foiled.

The meanie uncle, who outs himself as that black cloaked groper, murders the softie uncle and makes it look like Landa was the killer.  He then knocks Burt out and ties him up.  Burt must watch as the evil uncle subdues and strips Landa and then molests her—his plan, after he has had his fun with Landa’s body, is to murder Burt and Landa with a special glove made from the claws of a huge wild cat; it will thus appear that Landa clawed Burt to death and then committed suicide. Luckily, Fluff the cat comes to the rescue, killing the uncle and then disappearing forever so Burt and Landa can wed. The story’s last paragraph suggests that while her outre lusts are currently under control, one night Landa’s perversion will overwhelm her and she will murder her husband in his sleep with her bare hands.

This is one of the better of these five horror stories, because, as with "Forked Terror," it involves a person wracked by contradictory impulses, struggling with a bizarre mental illness and involved in a potentially disastrous erotic relationship, and like "Corpses from Canvas" has a disturbing vision of bodily mutilation.

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I don’t think these stories are quite as bad as Pohl seems to have thought them, but they definitely appeal to readers’ baser impulses, show signs of being hastily thrown together, and shamelessly recycle plot structures, plot elements, and salacious scenes.  As far as I can tell, nobody ever saw fit to print them in book form, even though Cummings had many books published over the decades, so I guess Pohl wasn't the only editor to look askance at them. 

Dark Dominion by David Duncan

The air was magnificently clear so that the project buildings and the surrounding hills all seemed to be drawn with knifelike precision, and in the valley the "Black Planet" so dwarfed the men and machines moving about its base that it gave the appearance of a lonely monolith.  If it should remain there, that's all it would ever be--a monument to man's imagination, a derisive reminder of his failure.

David Duncan wrote the screenplay to George Pal's Time Machine, the Raquel Welch/Donald Pleasance epic Fantastic Voyage, and the Willis O'Brien caper The Black Scorpion.  He also penned thriller/mystery novels like The Bramble Bush and The Madrone Tree.  isfdb lists three SF novels under his name, and today's subject, Dark Dominion, was the first, published in 1954.  Joachim Boaz recently shipped to me, along with like 99 other SF books, a paperback edition put out by Ballantine, who also published the hardcover edition.  If isfdb is to be believed, the book appeared in hard cover, paperback, and in a condensed serialized form over four issues of Collier's all in the same year.  (Over its long life Collier's published lots of genre fiction, like Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories and work by Zane Grey and Ray Bradbury.)  Dark Dominion would go on to be translated into Swedish, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.

All four issues of Collier's containing installments of the serialized version
of Dark Dominion were available on ebay when I looked; click to see a larger image

Our narrator for the novel's 206 pages is Philip Ambert, a scientist who is in charge of America's top secret space station project, Project Magellan!  The government has taken over 900 square miles of Big Sur, famed haunt of bohemian creative types, and built a scientific and construction complex there, and a comfortable town for ten thousand people.  These ten thousand people--scientists, engineers, soldiers, and their families--are not permitted to leave, and somehow the government has been fooling the outside world into thinking all these people are at an undisclosed location overseas.  Ambert has been in charge of this project for five years, and as our story begins the massive space station, designed to carry a supply of nuclear weapons with which to maintain order throughout the world, is only two months away from completion!  (There's a similar space station which watches over the Earth with nuclear bombs in Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet, but that is a station run by the UN or some sort of world government; the station here in Duncan's book is explicitly an all-American deal which, it is said, will allow the US to dominate the world.)

Much of Dark Dominion reads like a soap opera.  Slim-waisted Gail Tanager, who operates a "calculating machine" (her fingers "dance over the keys" as though she is "playing a musical instrument") is in love with the man who will command the station once it is in orbit keeping the peace, hunky naval officer Aaron Matthews.  These two can barely keep their hands off each other (we get scenes in which they almost succumb to their physical desires but step back from the brink) and are heartbroken that they will be parted while Matthews is on his long tour of duty out in space, watching for misbehaving commies to nuke--Gail sees the station, officially called Vittoria but known to everyone as "The Black Planet" (shouldn't it be "Black Moon" if it is going to orbit the Earth?) as a sort of rival.  These doomed lovebirds have other problems, like vain and selfish scientist Warren Osborn, a leader in the field of rockets and guided missiles who has the hots for Gail himself (we get a dramatic scene in which Matthews, in a crowded restaurant, punches Osborn.)  Osborn presents other problems for Ambert, as, his main task at Big Sur completed, he wants to bend the unbendable rules and leave the project early to take up a prestigious job back in New York.

There is also the philosophical/political stuff we might expect in a story about a military space station.  Many people on the project, including Gail and Osborn, are skeptical that the station should be under the control of the military and used as a means of achieving hegemony over the world--shouldn't scientists be in charge of it and use it to study the universe?  (Osborn's arguments in this vein are shown to be those of a two-faced hypocritical opportunist--before the start of the project he was an advocate for just such a project, even writing best-selling books urging America to conquer space so it could crush its enemies; presumably he made these arguments not out of patriotism but so he could sell his expertise.)  There's also talk of free will and the constant striving of life and of Man to do more, to reach further.  (It is probably just me, but the themes and even some individual phrases of Dark Dominion kept reminding me of Horace's third ode, from his first book of odes.)

We also get some serious science talk.  One of the boffins, Tom Hernandez, is bombarding uranium with positrons and creates a new superdense element (it weighs three and a half million pounds per cubic foot) that they call Magellanium.  We witness many experiments conducted on the Magellanium and learn all about its many strange properties.  The design of the space station is described, how it will support its crew and what they will see when they get up into space and so forth.  There's a subplot about exploring a system of caves full of bats, fossils, and geologic formations, including a phosphorescent subterranean pool where Ambert's wife Susan swims naked.

In the second half of the novel it becomes apparent that foreign intelligence has located the project and everybody scrambles to finish and launch Vittoria early, before the enemy can bomb it.  Due to a series of unfortunate coincidences (like the fact that Ambert has been sneaking off to explore that cave without telling his security detail--oops!), Ambert is accused of treason and tossed in jail!  Soon after he is cleared, Osborn's treachery--revenge for his wounded pride--and an enemy air attack destroy the station's fuel supplies.  Ambert, Osborn and Hernandez figure out how to launch the station into space using the Magellanium, and it lifts off with Matthews at the helm just as a second enemy attack is blowing up everything at the project site.  But Matthews--that sly devil--has contrived to leave the military personnel behind and take off instead with Gail and a bunch of women and children--including Susan and the Ambert kids!  The Magellanium is an inexhaustible source of propulsion, and Matthews and his harem are not going to orbit the Earth to ensure America's domination of the globe, but explore and colonize the universe!  (Treason and betrayal on a political as well as a personal level are recurring themes in the novel.)  Ambert, left behind, hides in his cave, waiting for the bombing of Big Sur to end and writing the memoir we have been reading. 

It looks like a Swedish dude just made a
condensed copy of Richard Powers's
cover of the American original edition
for the Swedish printing--brazen and weird!

Dark Dominion, in a way that is difficult for me to define, feels more like a mainstream thriller (I guess what they call a "technothriller") than an actual SF novel.  This isn't a criticism so much as an observation; in fact the book is not bad.  Duncan's writing is smooth and readable, the science stuff is more or less interesting, and while I thought Gail's romance with Matthews was kind of silly, the Osborn stuff was kind of entertaining.  The characters are pretty believable and Duncan deals with the various moral issues in a mature and ambiguous way--neither the military men nor the eggheads are portrayed as unquestionably good or evil.  One of the novel's virtues is that I was unsure what would happen--because every character and even apparently the author (the title of the book comes from a George Meredith poem that is reproduced as an epigraph to the novel, and its choice implies that the station is satanic) was skeptical of the space station and its mission, I had no confidence that it would succeed, but did not know to what extent or in what way it would fail.  I was kept wondering if Osborn's vanity would threaten or even ruin the project, or if he would rally round at the end and do the right thing by the team, and I was curious to see how the author would make use of the cave and the Magellanium in the resolution of the plot.

Mild recommendation. 

**********

In my last blog post I lamented that Joachim Boaz and I agreed about Damon Knight's Three Novels, because two guys agreeing is boring.  Luckily, this time around we've got some fireworks!  Back in 2012 Joachim wrote about Dark Dominion and denounced its "poor 1950s sci-fi melodrama," and its "downright preposterous science" and suggested the plot is predictable.  Ouch!  Check out Joachim's critical panning and then maybe you'll want to get a copy of Dark Dominion of your own at ebay in an effort to sort out our differences or take sides in this literary controversy!   

**********

At the end of Dark Dominion, Ballantine Books 56, are several pages of fun ads for Ballantine's many publications.  There's a full-page advertisement for the "Science-Fiction Preview Club," and then a long list of not just major SF works like Fahrenheit 451, More Than Human, and Childhood's End, but also Western novels like Law Man ("twenty-four hours in a sheriff's life") and Silver Rock ("A granite-hard story of the West today") and The Canyon ("A story of a young Cheyenne in the days before the white man"), and mainstream literature like New Poems by American Poets (featuring W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams), The Best American Short Stories 1953 (featuring Tennessee Williams and R. V. Cassill) and Charles Jackson's short stories.  Immerse yourself in this fascinating artifact of the paperback publishing world of 60 years ago by clicking the images below.  (I don't know why the list starts at number 22; maybe a page is missing from this book?)

Three 1950s "novels" by Damon Knight

Ah, Damon Knight, famed editor, critic, and short story writer, for whom the SFWA (which Knight founded in 1965) renamed their Grand Master Award some 25 years after its inauguration.  I've had mixed feelings about Knight's criticism and fiction, which means I have no idea how I am going to react when I set out to read something by him.  Today we'll be taking just such a leap into the dark not once, not twice, but three times!  Before me I hold a Berkley Medallion 1969 paperback edition of Three Novels, a collection which first came out in hardcover in 1967.  I recently received this volume, with its quite effective Richard Powers cover, from internet science fiction gadfly extraordinaire Joachim Boaz, one of something like 100 SF books he sent me recently.  This copy, which a stamp on the inside cover is telling me somebody, maybe Mr. Boaz himself, maybe Chip or Joanna Gaines, maybe David Koresh--hey, you never know!-- purchased at "Book Rack" in a shopping mall in Waco, Texas for 97 cents, has only 184 pages of text, so maybe the three included works, all from the 1950s, should be classified as "novellas" or "novelettes" instead of novels, but, hey, who's counting?  I will be reading the "novels" in the order in which they appear in this book, which is not the order in which they were published.

Rule Golden (1954)

This is a gimmicky story that applies to the personal level the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction deterrence, something we talked about a lot in my history and poli sci classes at Rutgers in the late '80s and early '90s.  Rule Golden is set in the future of the early 1970s, when videophones are widely used, and is a first-person narrative; our narrator is Robert James Dahl, a Midwestern journalist who brags about how great his paper is and acts like a tough guy.  Knight practically tells us the story's gimmick on the first page of the story, and then he writes page after page (this thing is like 75 pages in this edition!) about Dahl investigating this strange phenomenon.  Rule Golden is like a boring detective story, with lots of mundane places and people for the detective to examine or outwit before resolving the mystery to his satisfaction.

In brief, Dahl discovers that the United States government has taken captive a lone space alien named Aza-Kra who has come to Earth to spread an airborne catalyst that changes your genetic code so that you suffer (psychosomatically) any damage you inflict on another creature.  For example, on the first page of Rule Golden an abusive husband kicks his wife in the ass, and suffers pain in his own ass! (Comedy!*)  Knight gives lots of examples of this, including prison staff and butchers feeling unhappy or ill as a result of their work--we eventually learn that the engineering works on animals higher than insects, so carnivores like lions and tigers are going to go extinct.  Dahl meets Aza-Kra in the army base, and the creature tells him he is from the Galactic Federation of peaceful civilizations and they want the Earth to join but right now we humans are too violent so he is here to genetically engineer us so we behave.  Dahl helps the E. T., which can read minds and instantly put people to sleep, to escape to Europe, the Middle East and Asia, where he spreads the catalyst.  (The substance has to be spread wide quickly, or there will be a period, before the catalyst has made its way to Moscow and Peking, during which North America and Western Europe won't be able to defend themselves from an attack by the commies.) 

Knight tries to add tension to the tale by having Dahl wracked by doubts--is Aza-Kra telling the truth or is he just trying to soften us up so the aliens can conquer us--and by describing how Dahl and his alien buddy evade the authorities in country after country.  This stuff serves to make the story longer (have I told you this thing is like 75 pages?) but does little to make it more compelling.

Because there is no way to enforce the law, and no way for private individuals to protect their property, the world falls into anarchy, with people stealing, vandalizing, trespassing, and crossing borders as they see fit.  (Aza-Kra's genetic engineering doesn't make people feel bad about burning down the crops I spent a season growing or the business I spent a lifetime building.)  The cities are deserted and famine develops, but a fleet of spaceships arrives to hand out food and to revive Aza-Kra, who was near death from eating inadequate Earth food.  Aza-Kra is revealed to be not a professional explorer or diplomat, but a sort of artisan ("I am ordinarily a maker of--you have not the word, it is like porcelain....") who volunteered to risk his life amongst us humans.  (I guess carpenter would have been too obvious.)

Rule Golden appeared first in Science Fiction Adventures, and in 1960 was included in Groff Conklin's Six Great Short Science Fiction Novels.  I'm afraid I cannot concur with Conklin's generous assessment!  This story is so long, and uses so many tired elements (like mind reading and a Galactic Federation pacifying us against our will) that the novelty of the newish idea can't carry it, especially since Knight reveals the gimmick on page one.  Knight also doesn't address the moral issues related to making people behave by crippling them, removing their ability to choose between good and evil, as Anthony Burgess does in A Clockwork Orange.

Weak!  Maybe this story should have been like 10 pages?

*This reminded me of the Corsican brothers from The Electric Company.  That was a good show, with Joan Rivers narrating Letterman and Morgan Freeman as Dracula and narrator of those Spiderman shorts that starred a version of Spidey who never talked!   

Natural State (1954)

I guess you could say that this one is about the urban-rural divide.  It is the year 2064, most cities have collapsed, with only a few of the biggest, like New York and Chicago still standing, totally shut off from the countryside.  The cities have what we would recognize as modern societies, with TV shows and hover cars and social hierarchies and people going off to work every day, but things are getting tough economically--most people work multiple jobs and the lack of contact with the world beyond the city limits means there is no supply of essential raw materials, like metal.  Soon even mighty New York may collapse!  Another problem: the urban population is waning, while the rural population, whom the urbanites think of as unsophisticated rubes, grows, and soon the people of the countryside will be able to militarily or culturally take over the world and urban culture will go extinct!

The rulers of New York propose a solution--trade with the rural population, who presumably will be eager to purchase motor vehicles and telephones and TVs and power tools.  This will provide a source of metal and other much-needed resources, and spread urban culture to the ignorant hicks, preserving the sophisticated way of life enjoyed by city people.  They send out into the countryside the most popular actor on NYC TV, Alvah Gustad, with a hovercar load of trade goods to open up trade with the country folk.

What Gustad discovers is that the 150 million people living in the rural landscape are not a bunch of ignorant rubes--they are living in utopia!  Most of their time is spent sitting around working on little hobbies like whittling and needlepoint or putting on theatricals and having dances!  The basis for this life of leisure is genetic engineering; they breed and grow everything they need, a gimmick we would see decades later in Harry Harrison's West of Eden and Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000.  The country people don't need cars and airplanes, because they ride beasts and giant birds around!  They don't need mines or factories or construction equipment because they have plants that grow knife blades, bulbs that grow into houses, and giant turtles whose shells grow in transparent layers that can be easily peeled off to act as a sheet of unbreakable glass!  They don't know how to read because they have bred talking birds that can recite entire books!  (This last is a little reminiscent of one of my favorite Gene Wolfe stories, "The Doctor of Death Island," in which people abandon reading because of the development of talking books.)

That's Gustad in his hover car,
trying to sell power tools to the
country folk

The country folk don't need or want what Gustad is selling, but their intellectual class is interested in examining him, and they employ a creature which cripples his hover car (by eating an element of its power pack) to strand the New Yorker 1,000 miles from Gotham.  The locals (including a pretty lady who can actually read!) want Gustad to join their happy society, and in the same way that Dahl in Rule Golden has to decide whether or not to cleave to the alien Aza-Kra, Gustad here in Natural State has to choose sides.  Fortunately for the reader, this story is better in every respect than Rule Golden--the characters and their relationships are more compelling, the technological stuff is more interesting, the jokes are more amusing.

When it looks like their idea of fostering trade has failed, the rulers of NYC try some serious skullduggery, what the kids call a false flag operation, in an effort to start a shooting war between the rural people and Chicago--the New Yorkers plan to steal all the metal from the Windy City after the country folk depopulate it!  This scheme fails, and instead of attacking Chi-town the country people turn on the city that never sleeps and liberate the citizens of the Big Apple from the tyranny of books, TV shows, and a steady work schedule.     

Competent!

Natural State first appeared in Galaxy, in an issue you can read at the internet archive, in which Knight's story is adorned with some pretty good illustrations by Emsh.  Natural State was included in anthologies edited by Martin Greenberg, Frederick Pohl and Georgess McHargue, and was even expanded into a longer novel, Masters of Evolution, which appeared as half of an Ace Double. 

I love the Emsh cover to All About the Future with its sexy spacesuits
and diagrams of a rocket ship and a heavy pistol --gorgeous!

The Dying Man (1957)

Dio is a planner living in a post-scarcity future in which people are immortal and invulnerable to wounds and disease--they also have the power to levitate, which is pretty good (I have long wanted to float everywhere like the fighters in DragonBall Z.)   Everybody has lived so long that most people have actually forgotten the concept of death!  To keep existence from getting boring, planners like Dio rebuild the cities in different styles every year.

Planners are members of the student class, the intellectuals and scientists who read and keep records and figure things out.  Most people, it appears, are "players," members of a frivolous unproductive leisure class.  Claire is just such a player, and she and Dio are having a love affair when it becomes apparent that Dio's body has somehow lost its invulnerability and immortality.  He falls ill, recovers with the help of an army of students who study him to figure out how to create and administer medicines that have not been needed for centuries.  He begins to grow old, his body changing in ways that the rest of humanity finds alarming.

The story, which at like 40 pages is considerably shorter than Rule Golden and Natural State, largely concerns Dio and Claire's reactions to Dio's body experiencing natural human aging and death.  Dio's creative work evolves, becoming more mature and sophisticated--in fact, too sophisticated for his contemporaries, with the result that the city he is responsible for designing is abandoned.  He also embraces ancient ways of doing things, working with his own hands instead of through machines--he carves a reproduction of Michelangelo's Dusk* from stone with a chisel, for example, and grows his own crops with which to bake his own bread.  (I know this guy's feels--I ground the beans for my wife's coffee yesterday.  Sure, sure, I used the Mr. Coffee 12-cup Electric Coffee Grinder with Multi-Settings--I didn't say I was a luddite!) 

The Dying Man is also considerably better than the "novels" with which it shares this collection.  I'm biased because I like stories about immortality and its effect on individuals and societies (the aforementioned Gene Wolfe story, "The Doctor of Death Island," is about immortality as much as it is about reading), but beyond that, The Dying Man has real human feeling, real human characters, engaging settings, and no goofy jokes.  The science behind immortality was also well done.  This is a piece I can really recommend.

The Dying Man first appeared under the title Dio in Infinity Science Fiction, where it is billed as "Damon Knight's Best Short Novel."  This issue of Infinity is available to read for free at the internet archive, and features not only numerous fetching illustrations by Emsh (these include a generous helping of Claire's chest!) but a story co-written by Harlan Ellison and Algis Budrys and, in the book review section, discussions by Knight of novels by Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke.  This issue of Infinity is full to bursting with stuff by and about some of classic SF's biggest names!

Dio would go on to be reprinted numerous times, including in Groff Cronklin's 5 Unearthly Visions and Robert Silverberg's Alpha 4.  I actually own both 5 Unearthly Visions and Alpha 4 which means I own three copies of this story.

*Knight has Dio call it Evening, but my art books and Wikipedia are calling it Dusk.

**********

Back in 2014 Joachim Boaz read and wrote about this collection, presumably this very same copy.  (His post and the comments, in which people recommend their favorite Knight stories, are worth your time.)  I know it would be more fun to disagree with Joachim or to have my own off-the-wall idiosyncratic take on these stories, but I'm afraid Mr. Boaz and I are in basic agreement about the contents of Three Novels.  Maybe I am a little more forgiving about the two weak pieces?  I was definitely more forgiving than Joachim when I read Beyond the Barrier, a book Joachim thought so poor he dared me to read it! 

(I'm not always so kind to Knight!  I read a collection of five of his short stories entitled Off Center and declared most of them "Bad!," "Weak!" "Lame" or even worse!)

More 1950s SF from the Joachim Boaz wing of the MPorcius Library in our next episode!

Slave Planet by Laurence M. Janifer

"Marvor," he said, "do you question the masters?"...

"I question all," he said soberly.  "It is good to question all."

Ever since I first saw its spectacular cover by Jack Gaughan (probably at internet science fiction superstar Joachim Boaz's blog), with its lizardmen and explosions and rifle fire, I have wanted to read Laurence Janifer's 1963 novel Slave Planet.  But I never spotted it at my usual haunts--used books stores, thrift stores, flea markets, library sales.  But all things come to those who wait!  As part of a campaign of downsizing, the generous Mr. Boaz sent me a box (weight: 21 pounds!) of science fiction books, and the first one I'm cracking open is Slave Planet.

(If you don't feel like waiting, it looks like you can read the novel at gutenberg.org.)

I have to admit I am already pleased with the volume, even before I've read a line of the text!  The back cover, with its additional illustrations, a cast of characters, and an ad for a book by Robert Bloch, is almost as cool as the front cover!  And then there is the dedication, to skeptic Philip Klass [UPDATE September 9, 2018: or, more likely, science fiction author William Tenn]:

This self-important and self-pitying dedication is followed by two long epigraphs.  The first is a quote from Boswell's Life of Johnson, a famous passage about the value of learning that records a conversation on July 30, 1763.  The second is a quote from H. D. Abel, a guy I've never heard of and whom I suspect is a fictional character invented by Janifer; Abel controverts the conventional wisdom that slavery is inefficient and has no utility in the modern industrial world and suggests that slavery may make a comeback in the future.

I like when publishers go the extra mile to produce an attractive book by including additional illustrations and fun fonts as Pyramid does in Slave Planet, and Janifer's portentous dedication and epigraphs suggest he is aiming to produce here not a pulpy adventure but a philosophical work.  Well, Janifer and Pyramid have got me on their side with all this additional apparatus; let's get to the heart of the matter, the actual text, and hope that this isn't one of those lipstick on a pig scenarios.

For a century the planets of the Terran Confederation have been receiving shipments of essential metals from Fruyling's World.  But the citizens of the Confederation know almost nothing about what goes on at that colony.  Why do the colonists keep them in the dark?  Because if the citizens knew what they were up to, they wouldn't like it!  They really wouldn't like it!  The culture of the Confederation prizes freedom and equality before the law, you see, and to extract and process all that metal the human colonists on Fruyling's World work the primitive natives as slave labor!

Slave Planet is a novel of 142 pages.  There are 22 numbered and untitled narrative chapters which follow the exploits of the characters listed on the back cover, all of them inhabitants of Fruyling's World, plus seven satirical chapters headed "Public Opinion One", "Public Opinion Two," etc., that are interspersed throughout the book. Twenty-nine total chapters, each of which starts a third of the way down a new page, means short chapters with lots of negative space between them and, ultimately, a short book.

Human Johnny Dodd does not find life on Fruyling's World salubrious, and has doubts that it is right for humans to treat the stone age natives, four-foot tall bipedal herbivorous alligators called Alberts (after the character from Pogo), as second class citizens, even if the natives are dim-witted (it seems that most of them can't even count to five, though they speak a simple English) and live longer and safer lives under human control.  His friend tries to cheer him up, telling him the Alberts need human guidance and taking him to a forbidden sex and booze party in Psych Division, where he meets a young woman, Greta Forzane.  The next day, after his shift training some Alberts for work pushing buttons in a remotely-controlled smelting plant, he has a nervous breakdown and is comforted by this same Greta.

Meanwhile, one of the more clever Alberts at the plant, Marvor, has heard that there are wild Alberts living in the jungle without masters, and he plots a rebellion and tries to recruit two other natives, female Dara and male Cadnan, to participate in the dangerous scheme.

In real life, psychology may be an essentially bogus science, but it is de rigueur in SF to present sciences of all types as astoundingly, amazingly, fantastically, effective, and in Slave Planet we are presented with a master practitioner in the psychological arts in the head of Psych Division, the domineering little old lady who goes by the name of Dr. Anna Haenlingen.  Over 100 years old, Haemlingen has been on Fruyling's World a long time.  She has been both covertly promoting and publicly forbidding the sex and booze parties, in order to provide the young colonial workers a safe way to rebel; their skepticism about slavery inspires a need to rebel, and participating in the ostensibly verboten drunken orgies satisfies that need without threatening the system of slavery that keeps the interstellar economy afloat.  Haenlingen's expertise in psychology has also enabled her to intuit from clues that the existence of a system of slavery on Fruyling's World has been leaked to the Confederation public and that soon a Confederation battle fleet will be arriving to liberate the Alberts.

Some of the most critically successful SF writers may be committed Christians (I'm thinking of Ray Bradbury, R. A. Lafferty and Gene Wolfe here, though if you told me that those three were more like "writers of the fantastic" than actual science fiction writers, I would be hard pressed to disagree), but in general in SF, religion is ignored or exposed as a scam, and Janifer here works in that tradition.  In the second half of Slave Planet we learn that Anna Haenlingen, that genius manipulator, has created a whole religion with which to snooker the Alberts into docility; some of the smarter Alberts are co-opted by appointing them priests who memorize a catechism about how humans must be obeyed--if the Alberts don't "break the chain of obedience" in some unspecified future, Albert and human will be equals.  Dodd learns this from Norma Fredericks, Anna Haenlingen's assistant, with whom he has fallen in love (for some reason, Greta drops out of the narrative--if I was Janifer's editor I would have told him to combine the characters of Greta and Norma.)  When Dodd expresses his doubts about slavery, Norma defends the colony's policies, telling him that only force and authority keep society together.  "Did you ever hear of a child who went to school, regularly, eagerly, without some sort of force being applied, physical, mental or moral?"

Cadnan is selected to be one of the priests, and he tries to convert Marvor, who of course is trying to get Cadnan to join the rebellion.  In the end it is the sex drive that determines who wins the debate: female lizardperson Dara, to whom Cadnan is attracted even though there is some kind of incest taboo prohibiting their coupling (they are "from the same tree at the same time") reluctantly joins Marvor and Dara in their flight to the jungle.  (As our pals Ted Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein would tell us, it makes sense to question all orthodoxies, including sexual ones.)  We actually get a weird alien sex scene featuring Cadnan and Dara and the tree they spread their sperm and ova on.

Cadnan's escape is facilitated by the surprise bombardment from the Confederation space navy that signals the start of the Confederation-Fruyling's World War.  Dodd participates in the fighting, though he is wracked by guilt and even a death wish because he is fighting on the pro-slavery side.  (The psychological toll of being a slave master is a major theme of Janifer's novel--at one point he even says "slavery has traditionally been harder on the master than the slave," the kind of thing that could put your career at risk if you said it today!)  In the final narrative chapter Dodd goes insane and shoots down Norma, who represents the slave system.

The seven "Public Opinion" chapters are presented as primary documents--speeches, spoken or epistolary dialogues, an excerpt from a children's text book--that touch upon the issue of the Alberts, whether they should be liberated and what the effect of their liberation might be.  These chapters don't add to the plot, but simply illustrate at length themes indicated briefly in the actual narrative--the argument that servants might prefer a life of service to independence, the idea that citizens of democratic polities choose their policy preferences in a short-sighted way without first ascertaining the facts, the assertion that businesspeople are greedy, etc.  The first four "Public Opinion" chapters are supposed to be funny; one of the busybody Terran  housewives who participates in the "liberate the Alberts" letter-writing campaign is named "Fellacia," and one of the memo-penning businessmen is called "Offutt," which is such an unusual name it makes me think it is a jocular nod to SF writer Andrew Offutt. (One of Offutt's correspondents is a Harrison; "Harrison," of course, is a pretty common name, but maybe this is a reference to Harry Harrison?)

The sixth Public Opinion chapter is a postwar debate between Cadnan and Marvor--Cadnan is unhappy with his new freedom, arguing that the new masters from the Confederation are no better than the old colonial masters--in particular, he finds that classes in the school the new masters force him to attend are more onerous than his work pushing buttons in the smelting plant back in the pre-war days.  "Public Opinion Seven" is an extract from Anna Haenlingen's speech before the High Court back on Earth, in which she says (echoing Norma's assertion about children and school) that advanced civilizations must wield authority over primitive ones, force them to learn in order to raise their cultural level.  Appended to this is an unenumerated eighth primary document, a report from the new Confederation authority on Fruyling's World which indicates that the ending of slavery there is damaging the interstellar economy.

Slave Planet is ambitious; it is admirable that Janifer tries to get into the heads of slaves and slave masters and abolitionists without giving us a simple good vs evil narrative, and his ambiguous attitude towards freedom, slavery, and the role of elite authority in our lives is provocative.  (If you asked me to pin Janifer down, I would suggest that Janifer believes that, while it may be tragic, it is an inevitable necessity that superior people tell ordinary people what to do, because ordinary people don't know what is good for them--ordinary people cannot handle freedom, and Americans prattle on too much about freedom and democracy.  Janifer thinks that primitive tribes, children, and just ordinary plebeians should all be manipulated by their betters.  This is not an attitude that the staff of MPorcius Fiction Log can endorse!)  However, the book has little to raise it above the level of mere acceptability--it is not exciting, it doesn't tug the old heart strings, the jokes aren't funny, the style isn't charming.  I can't condemn this one, but I can only give Slave Planet a mild recommendation.  I would definitely give Janifer another try--The Wonder War looks like it is about human spies or commandos on an alien world, which could be very fun, and You Sane Men / Bloodworld  might be an effective horror story full of creepy sex.  I saw a paperback copy of Final Fear in a Carolina bookstore once, and it interested me, but it was too expensive to buy.  So I'll be looking at the "J"s in used bookstores in hopes of finding these titles at an affordable price.

In our next episode: another volume from the Joachim Boaz Wing of the MPorcius Library!