Mysterious, Menacing and Macabre tales from R Bradbury, R Bloch, and A Derleth & H P Lovecraft

Last month we read Murray Leinster's story about a rat, "Side Bet," from Helen Hoke's 1981 anthology Mysterious, Menacing and Macabre.  Triple M has other stories by people we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are interested in, so let's read them.  

"The Tombling Day" by Ray Bradbury (1952)

According to isfdb, "The Tombling Day" first saw print in Shenandoah, a literary journal put out by staff at Washington and Lee University, where it appeared alongside a poem by e. e. cummings and an essay on James Joyce by Ezra Pound.  (I can't find a decent photo of the cover of M,M,M, and I can't find a decent photo of the cover of the Autumn 1952 issue of Shenandoah either, though the text of both is readable at the internet archive.)  A year later "The Tombling Day" was included in Groff and Lucy Conklin's anthology The Supernatural Reader, which has a terrific purple and green cover, and would go on to appear in the oft-reprinted Bradbury collection I Sing the Body Electric!

The government is building a highway through a little Missouri town, right through the cemetery!  So the people are digging up the graves and moving the coffins to the new cemetery.  But an old woman insists on having the coffin of her fiancé, who died before they could be married, like sixty years ago, brought to her house and opened so she could look upon her love, stolen by death so long ago.  Amazingly, his body has been preserved--he looks like he did when he died, like an attractive man in his twenties!  At first, the old woman is depressed, wishing she had died with him so she too would have defied aging and be as handsome as he.  But then the corpse quickly decays, its deterioration mimicking the aging process, and she watches as her beau appears to grow old and then finally suffer reduction to mere bones.  Relieved, the woman does a little dance, thrilled that she now looks younger than her fiancé and happy to be alive.

This story is OK.  Is it a reminder that women are vain and erratic, and/or a reminder that we should cherish life?

"Head Man" by Robert Bloch (1950)

Berlin, 1937.  Our main character is the executioner, who chops convicted criminals' heads off with a giant axe.  He becomes fascinated by the heads of the people he executes, wishes he could keep them!  It won't be easy to steal the heads, and of course he won't be able to steal all of them, he will have to select the choicest.  

One day in his superior's office he meets two convicts, people he will soon be decapitating.  One is a handsome older man; the other is a beautiful young woman, his daughter.  Immediately the executioner becomes determined to retain the heads of these two spectacular specimens!  Hm, what did these two people do to get convicted of a capital crime, anyway?  They were sticking pins in dolls of Adolf Hitler--they are witches!--and when the local "block leader" came over to investigate the rumors that these two were performing black magic, they killed him!  

The executioner plots to steal the heads of these murderous magicians, but a snag in his plans arises--after seeing them and before the date of their execution, the court determines they should be executed by firing squad instead of by decapitation.  The executioner acts quickly, seizing the witches ahead of schedule and chopping off their heads.  Nobody has claimed their bodies, so the executioner figures he can have the bodies destroyed before his superiors know what is up and report that claim the sorcerers were executed by firing squad as ordered, just ahead of schedule.

Our protagonist keeps the heads at his home for a little while, talking to them, and goes a little crazy, thinking they are talking back, and then hallucinating, seeing them outside after he has left them at home.  Then comes another snag--some cousin of the wizards has shown up wanting the bodies, and the executioner's colleagues haven't destroyed them yet, so the corpses have to be handed over.  This cousin will presumably notice the bodies are missing their heads, and if he complains it will become obvious the executioner disobeyed order and broke the rules and will be in deep doo doo.  Grabbing the heads from home, the executioner rushes to the dark storage area where the bodies lie and sews the heads on.  But the next day he is hauled before his superiors.  In the dark he accidentally attached the man's head to the woman's body and vice versa, and the cousin complained, and now the executioner is going to have his own head chopped off by the new executioner.

This story is just OK; the basic ideas and themes are not bad, but there are distracting problems.  Why is the tale set in Nazi Germany?  There isn't any specific 1937 Germany content; in fact, wikipedia is telling me that in 1936 it was ordered that the guillotine be the method of execution of civil criminals in Germany, and that the firing squad was reserved for military offenders.  Oops.  It would have made more sense to set the story in some earlier period--apparently before 1918 people were executed by axe in Germany.  I guess Bloch set the tale in Nazi Germany just to make it more sensational, and maybe because it makes the witches more sympathetic if they are using a voodoo doll to murder or torture Hitler and not somebody less reprehensible.

Another problem is that the executioner's machinations don't really make sense.  The execution of two witches--one a beautiful woman!--who murdered a Nazi Party official is obviously big news in the Berlin law enforcement community and among members of the National Socialist Party--it is suggested Goebbels could use the incident as the topic of a propaganda story.  So surely somebody would have noticed that the gorgeous sorceress didn't show up to be executed as scheduled, if only the members of the firing squad, and why would they keep mum?  It is also a little hard to believe that if there was enough light to sew on the heads that there wasn't enough light for the guy who executed them to tell the old man from the young woman.

"Head Man," after its debut in 15 Mystery Stories, would appear in a number of Bloch collections and horror anthologies, including Hauntings and Horrors: Ten Grisly Tales, which is credited to Alden H. Norton but which was in fact edited by Sam Moskowitz (according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Moskowitz ghost-edited three anthologies for Norton, two for Roger Elwood and four for Leo Margulies.)   

"The Shuttered Room" by August Derleth and H. P. Lovecraft (1959)

Hoke here in 1981's M to the Third Power credits the story to Lovecraft, but isfdb lists August Derleth and H. P. Lovecraft as authors, while the January 1965 issue of The Magazine of Horror lists both men but puts HPL's name first.  Wikipedia says Derleth wrote the story based on "lines of story ideas left by Lovecraft after his death."  "The Shuttered Room" first saw light of day in the Arkham House volume The Shattered Room & Other Pieces, which has a really fine cover illo.  

"The Shunned Room" is very derivative, full of references direct and indirect to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "The Dunwich Horror," but the plotting, pacing, and many of the images are pretty good, so I liked it.

Abner Whatley has been travelling around the world--Paris, London, the Far East--studying the ancient civilizations of the South Pacific.  Abner has to return to Dunwich, to his grandfather's decrepit house attached to a mill on the Miskatonic, where Abner spent some time as a boy, because his grandfather has died and Abner has to deal with his inheritance.  Grandpa left him a written message in the dusty old house, telling him to make sure to destroy the room over the mill wheel where Abner's Aunt Sarah lived--Aunt Sarah, before Abner was born, took a little trip to Innsmouth, and when she got back Grandpa locked her in that room over the wheel, nailing the shutters closed and never letting her out, though decades passed.  In the message, Grandpa insists that if Abner should find anything alive--no matter how small--in that locked room whose shutters are nailed shut, he must kill it.

Abner unlocks Sarah's room, breaks open the shutters, glimpses a frog or toad or something in there but lets it be, and things proceed from there as we might expect.  As is common in these Lovecraftian stories, a lot of time is spent reading old documents and piecing together the clues they contain.  Among the clues in the many documents Abner finds in the old mill house is an indication that the monster that was locked in Aunt Sarah's room was a sort of elastic or plastic thing that could survive on little food at a tiny size, but grow to behemoth size if well fed.  Soon after Abner's arrival and his opening the windows of the shuttered room, something starts killing and eating the local livestock, and then the local people!  

While the least original of today's three horror stories, I found this one the most fun, because I am totally into this whole Lovecraft theme of alien monsters hiding in and preying upon decrepit New England towns and the way it leverages our fears about our identities and our families and about icky sex.  I think I can also offer you an academic hot take on "The Shuttered Room" that you can use in one of your papers at grad school.  You see, Abner's grandpa is a conservative and a disciplinarian, and when his daughter Sarah goes off to Innsmouth to hang out on the beach and have premarital sex--with her cousin!--he locks her up as punishment and to keep it from happening again.  (Bourgeois fear of women's sexuality!)  But too late!  She's already preggers!  Grandpa keeps Sarah locked up to limit the scandal, but the bastard child still manages to cause a lot of trouble for everybody.

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These stories are alright, but no big deal.  Maybe we'll find some stories that can get us a little more excited in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, when we again look at a magazine edited by Sam Merwin, Jr.

Thrilling Wonder Stories, Aug '50: Kuttner, Vance, Hubbard and Clarke

Recently I looked at the December 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.  While I talked about the fiction and the editorial in that issue of Sam Merwin's magazine in my blogposts, I didn't mention the letters column, and there are actually interesting missives therein from Isaac Asimov and his pal Lin Carter, both of whom praise the Henry Kuttner and Jack Vance stories from the August issue of TWS.  This praise inspired me to today check out those long tales, along with the short stories by L. Ron Hubbard and Arthur C. Clarke that appeared alongside them.

"As You Were" by Henry Kuttner

Kuttner--friend of H. P. Lovecraft, husband of C. L. Moore, hero of Barry N. Malzberg--was born and died in Los Angeles, so I guess I should not be surprised that this is yet another story that revolves around Hollywood.  Our protagonist Peter Owen left his "managerial job with a Hollywood commercial-film company" to become assistant to his uncle, the famous and comically short-tempered writer C. Edmund Stumm, author of the hit play Lady Pantagruel.  Owen is dating actress Claire Bishop, and striving to convince his uncle to sell film rights to Lady Pantagruel to her so she can appear on the silver screen as the title character, a job she desperately needs to steady her career, which is floundering after her appearance in a series of duds.  Unfortunately, Claire is almost as volatile as Stumm and things are not going too smoothly between them--a recent disagreement with her over who is the better composer, Shostakovich or Prokofieff, has Stumm smashing his record collection.  Also in the mix is a scientist, Sigmund Krafft, who spends his time trying to cast his mind beyond the barriers of time by concentrating on a model of a tesseract (defined here as "a cube exploded into four dimensions, symbolically.")  Stumm has invited this oddball to stay with him and Owen in his big house overlooking the Pacific Ocean because Krafft's ideas were an integral part of Lady Pantagruel, a play about time travel, and Stumm is currently writing the sequel and needs some more ideas.

"As You Were" is supposed to be funny, and most of the humor stems from the fact that the characters are all stressed out, constantly yelling, banging the table, throwing things, obsessively worried over something absurd and trying to worm their way out of jams through subterfuge.  The plot is intricate and complicated, and I admire how Kuttner put it all together, but the fact is the story comes off as tedious and repetitive.  I guess the style and plot are kind of like those of a P. G. Wodehouse story except that a Wodehouse story is actually funny and doesn't include a lot of paragraphs speculating about the nature of time.  Lin Carter in his letter in the December issue of TWS says "As You Were" reminds him of Thorne Smith, with whose work I am not familiar.

One noteworthy thing about "As You Were" that is reminiscent of Wodehouse is how Kuttner fills it with oblique learned references; examples: Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break" and J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time.  Kuttner just uses the men's last names, not their first names or the titles of the works he is alluding to, assuming the reader is a fellow smart guy and will easily recognize what he is referring to.  Of course, we 2022 readers can easily cheat by typing keywords into our search engine of choice.

The plot of this long (35 pages!) and boring story concerns how the three male leads have odd, and oddly similar, dreams and how, from out of nowhere, Owen finds a blue enamel clock in his room that he can use to turn back time.  Owen likens the clock to a "backspacer" on a typewriter: by setting the clock back, say, 15 minutes, the universe reverts to how it was a quarter hour ago, with the difference that he himself retains his memories of the 15 minutes he just lived.  Owen can act differently from his first go round and change history, though this turns out to be difficult, as many events turn out to be overdetermined.  After some long boring scenes in which Owen figures out how to use the blue enamel clock, he employs it in an effort to make sure his reprehensible uncle signs a contract selling the film rights to his play to Claire.  A major parallel plot thread revolves around the fact that Krafft needs his good luck charm--a stone frog named Maxl--to pursue his tesseract concentration experiments and he has lost it; it was apparently stolen by burglars, and we eventually learn Stumm faked the burglary for his own nefarious reasons.

In the end Stumm the villain suffers and Owen and Claire marry and live happily ever after.  Who cares?  

Kuttner's slapsticky screwball sense of humor doesn't work on me, the plot drags, and the characters are broad and neither interesting nor sympathetic--thumbs down for "As You Were."  Asimov in his letter in the December '50 ish of TWS says "As You Were" is "very entertaining and pleasant to read" while Carter's opines that "As You Were" is "urbane, witty, polished and clever...Kuttner's best for you in quite a long time."  Now, Asimov and Carter are major figures in the history of SF, and I'm a guy who tweets about dinosaur tchotchkes he buys at flea markets, so it is obvious whose opinion you should put more stock in, but in support of my own assessment I will point out that "As You Were" has never appeared in book form and was only ever reprinted on paper in a British magazine with a false advertising cover that suggests it is an awesome space adventure.  The experts may disagree with me, but it looks like the market sides with yours truly!        

"New Bodies for Old" by Jack Vance

"New Bodies for Old" would be renamed "Chateau d'If" for publication in books, and I am pretty sure I read it under that title in a library copy of the 2009 collection Wild Thyme, Green Magic when I was living in New York in that golden age when my life was interesting enough that I didn't feel the need to share my half-baked opinions and dumb jokes with the broader universe.

Five unmarried middle-class professionals are kicking back in the city of the future, where life is easy--too easy!  With little danger or challenge, life is a bore, and people turn to drink.  But maybe something new has appeared...the characters know of a mysterious business enterprise, The Chateau d'If, whose allusive and vague adverts promise adventure.  Curious, but a little scared, the five guys decide to randomly select one of their number to investigate the Chateau.  The youngest, Zaer, loses the dice throw, and heads over to the secretive place, promising to meet his friends at an appointed time to describe his experience.  He does not return! 

Some time later one of the remaining four friends spots Zaer--Zaer is now one of the richest of the rich, living in great luxury.  The four men confront Zaer for having failed to live up to his end of the agreement and tell them all about the Chateau, but he acts like he doesn't know them.

The title of the story here in Thrilling Wonder gives away what is going on, of course.  A second member of the group, Mario, goes to the Chateau and is drugged; when he wakes he is no longer in the healthy 29-year-old body he had when he fell unconscious--he is now in the wretched hulk of a weak middle-aged fatso!  A note in his pocket briefs him on the identity associated with his new body, that of a quite successful businessman, the owner of an aircar manufacturing firm, and urges him to run the business competently, as, if he can pay the Chateau ten million dollars, he can purchase from them a perfect body!  

The rest of the story is about how Mario launches several operations that get him his body back, punish the villains, win him a beautiful wife (that is her on the cover, wearing no facial expression even though she just shot down the lead villain), and even solve the problem of human boredom in a classic sense-of-wonder ending--Mario sets in motion the creation of a star drive that will open the universe to human exploration and endless adventure!   

An interesting note: In 2015 we read Vance's novel Bad Ronald, about a creep who lives hidden in a family's house and spies on them.  A similar circumstance prevails in the last few chapters of "New Bodies for Old."  The owner of the Chateau is assuaging his own boredom by building the world's tallest building--three miles high!  Mario is an architect, and ingeniously gets himself on the staff of the firm that is working on the tower.  He has secret passages installed in the top floor of the 900-story building, the floor into which the owner of the Chateau moves his living quarters and the operating theater where people's personalities are moved from body to body; from within these passages Mario spies on his enemy.    

"New Bodies for Old"/"Chateau d'If" is a very entertaining story, Vance expertly using all sorts of SF and detective-genre literary devices to great effect.  The plot moves along quickly and always holds your interest, Vance offering evocative but economical descriptions of settings and people as well as sharp little philosophical and psychological insights.  Vance's description of what it is like to be fat and unhealthy, from the point of view of somebody who is used to being fit, for example, is great.  He employs fun metaphors.  The characters all behave in ways that feel totally natural and believable, to the point that they are all easy to identify with.  Strongly recommended.

"Battling Bolto" by L. Ron Hubbard

Here we have the story of a decent country boy who is bamboozled by a fast-talking woman and a tricky college professor--set in a vast space empire.  "Battling Bolto" is also one of those stories in which we have First Person Narrator 1 who tells us "I heard a crazy story once from a guy" and then First Person Narrator 2, the guy, takes over the narration.

First Person Narrator 2 is a seven-foot-tall blacksmith from Urgo Major, a decent sort of bloke who goes to church and otherwise behaves himself and contributes to his community, forging shoes for the local six-footed beasts and repairing people's frying pans and so forth.  A girl talks him into getting engaged.  Then a professor who hawks robots comes to their backwoods planet and gives a sales presentation to a crowd (this guy seems more like a carnival barker or snake oil salesman than a professor, but, on second thought, those are pretty fine distinctions, aren't they?); in the crowd, a pickpocket from the prof's ship steals Narrator 2's watch, a family heirloom.  In the ensuing fight, Narrator 2 displays his terrific strength and agility, impressing the professor.  Soon our hero is aboard the prof's ship, making robot shells, his pay being beamed back to his fiancé, even though Narrator 2 was content living on his quiet little planet--smooth talkers have outwitted him again!

The prof is a scammer and our hero is slow to realize it.  After having a guy dressed up in a robot suit demonstrate his wares to the citizens of unsophisticated planets, he sells them empty shells as if they are real robots that haven't been booted up yet.  The duplicitous prof takes advantage of our narrator's heroic pugilistic ability by conning him into donning a robot suit he himself forged and fighting all comers, these contestants enticed by the promise of a cash prize if they can stay in the ring with the "boxing robot" for two rounds.  The climax of the story comes when the prof manipulates our hero into having to fight a real robot, and then a robotic tracked pile driver; then follows the twist ending in which we learn the true nature of the prof, how the narrator achieves his revenge, and how his experiences have corrupted him.   

A standard criticism directed at pulps like Thrilling Wonder is that many of the stories they print aren't science fiction at all--they don't teach science or speculate about the future or whatever--but are simply Westerns or adventure stories or detective stories with ray guns replacing the revolvers, rocket ships in the place of horses, Martians and space pirates instead of Indians and pirates.  "Battling Bolto" is vulnerable to this charge, but should we care?  It is a fun little story, and there is nothing wrong with that.  Mild recommendation.

"Battling Bolto" would reappear in a 1971 reprint magazine and in a 21st century Hubbard collection.

"A Walk in the Dark" by Arthur C. Clarke

Mankind has colonized the galaxy, and Robert Armstrong is a hard-working engineer who has been to dozens of planets, working on various projects.  Today he is on a desolate rock of a world on the edge of the galaxy, so far out that there are only a few stars in the night sky.  His work camp is just a few miles from the landing field where he is scheduled to board a ship in a few hours.  His vehicle breaks down soon after his departure from the work site, so he has to walk through the black night to catch his flight.  Then his flashlight dies.  Keeping to the crude road is not easy in the dark, but he can probably make it.  Then he remembers the story he heard suggesting that the tunnels on this apparently lifeless planet are not volcanic vents at all but the home of a scary monster! 

A fun little horror story; Clarke does a great job portraying the stream of consciousness of a person in this sort of situation, and "A Walk in the Dark" is a compelling and smooth read, focused and tight.  When I think of the novels by Clarke I read years and years ago, I think of them as long, slow, unfocused, full of digressions and advocacy of ideas with which I am not in tune, but when I have read Clarke's short stories during the life of this blog (e.g., "The Fires Within," "Transit of Earth," "Sunjammer," and  "The Deep Range") I have often thought them quite good. 

Clarke being widely acknowledged as one of the top three SF writers of his day, this story has been reprinted many times in multiple languages in Clarke collections and anthologies, including a "best of" collection, The Nine Billion Names of God.   

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The Kuttner was ponderous, but Vance, Hubbard and Clarke provide entertaining stories--a good issue of Sam Merwin, Jr.'s magazine.  Art lovers will appreciate the numerous Virgil Finlay illustrations that celebrate the beauty of the human body and of women's faces.  

In the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log: anthologized horror stories by famous Weird Tales alums.  Stay tuned!    

The Best From Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine: A Boucher, R Bloch and A Davidson

Whether driven by an inexhaustible need for money or an irrepressible urge to express themselves artistically, many of the 20th-century SF writers we care about here at MPorcius Fiction Log published stories in the detective/crime genre.  In 1991 was published Fifty Years of the Best from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, edited by Eleanor Sullivan, who edited Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from 1970 to 1982 and Alfred Hitchcock's Magazine from 1975 to 1981, and it includes stories by three of these guys, Anthony Boucher, Robert Bloch and Avram Davidson.  Let's see what sorts of mysteries these guys were putting out when, in the opinion of one of the big gatekeepers in the mystery world, they were at the top of their game.  I'm reading the stories in a scan of Fifty Years of the Best from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine that is available at the internet archive.  The internet archive also has a scan of the 2004 edition which is deceptively titled 50 Best Mysteries.

"The Girl Who Married a Monster" by Anthony Boucher (1954)

This story is kind of boring, a puzzle story that, maybe, is supposed to be faintly humorous.  The characters and their relationships are all quite bland.  One of the weaknesses of these puzzle stories is that, while in a conventional piece of fiction, if a woman wanted to murder her cousin--who was also her best friend!--for money, the author could write all kinds of scenes about the evil woman's twisted psychology, how and why she in fact hated the cousin but had to hide her hatred, how and why she loved money, and so on, that would develop her personality and compel the interest of and inspire emotion in the reader.  But in one of these puzzle stories in which we are not supposed to know who the villain is, the author can't do that, so the evil woman character is just a boring lump whom you don't even know is evil.

Doreen, a starlet with a flagging career, has her cousin/best friend Marie come to Hollyweird to be the maid of honor at her wedding to some old geezer.  Marie, because of past experience with creeps, can tell the old geez, Peabody, is a monster, and soon a friendly police lieutenant who is at the engagement party confirms Marie's intuition--Peabody is more than a sex perv, he is a bona fide serial killer who marries women and kills them for the insurance money and is clever enough to always get away with it.  

The very useful website philsp.com tells me that "The Girl Who Married a Monster" is one of seven stories about Nick Noble.  Noble, in this story at least, appears to be a broken-hearted drunk, a former police lieutenant who is consulted by the police when they need his super mind to crack the toughest cases.  Suffering from psychological trauma, Noble is taciturn, speaking rarely and in short, sometimes cryptic, phrases, and also suffers hallucinations.  Noble and the younger lieutenant try to convince Doreen to not marry Peabody but she says she wants to marry him even though she knows he probably killed a bunch of his earlier wives.  

Eventually the truth comes out.  Doreen convinces Marie to live with her and Peabody the serial killer after they are married.  Once Maroie is installed in the Peabody household, Doreen tries to kill her and disguise herself as Marie and disguise Marie's corpse as herself.  Doreen's expectation is that Peabody will be blamed for the apparent killing of Doreen and that she, taken for Marie, Doreen's only relative, will get the insurance money.  One of the themes of the story is that Doreen is a fuck up, and this plan is no more successful than her Hollywood career--Marie actually survives Doreen's incompetent assault, which Doreen does not notice as she cuts her unconscious cousin's hair and changes her clothes.

Boucher tries to enliven the story with some erotic undercurrents.  There are hints Marie was sexually abused in her youth, Doreen in a euphemistic way suggests she is marrying Peabody because he is good in the sack, and Peabody's hair fetish plays a role in the plot.  But these sprinklings of humor don't bring this thing to life and more than do the sprinklings of humor.

Boucher, who won an Edgar award and wrote tons of mystery story radio scripts and even has a mystery award named after him is presumably a master of this type of story and maybe "The Girl Who Married a Monster" is a masterpiece (it is in a "Best of" collection of his, Exeunt Murderers), but I am immune to its charms--to me, it feels cold and mechanical.      

"Life in Our Time" by Robert Bloch (1966)

I thought I was taking a break from scientists by reading from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine instead of Thrilling Wonder Stories, but this piece by Psycho scribe Bloch is all about a scientist.  And, like Boucher's "The Girl Who Married a Monster" it starts with Hollywood references.  Monotony pursues you even when you seek a change of pace.

I won't complain though, because this is actually a pretty good story, short and to the point, with one of my favorite topics at its center--the disastrous sexual relationship!

Jill is a simple-minded selfish money-loving slut who has bagged Harry, a genius college professor who happens to be loaded.  But she finds her rich intelligent husband a drag.  Harry doesn't watch TV, he doesn't drink or smoke, he doesn't want to go on a cruise or pay for expensive status symbols like that sable jacket Jill covets.  This guy sounds eminently sensible!  Harry also apparently doesn't like to have sex, which is where I will part ways with him, but to each his own, I suppose.  Jill plots to run off with their lawyer, Rick, who thinks he can use his legal skills to seize half of Harry's wealth even though Jill is the one who will be committing the infidelity.

Harry's university gives him the job of filling up a time capsule.  Harry decides to fill the capsule with stuff that represents ordinary Americans, not sophisticated geniuses like himself, so he asks his wife what she likes.  This is Bloch's chance to spoof rock music and soap operas and modern art and beatniks and so forth, our whole modern milieu, including frozen food and computerization and how we are all being turned into numbers.  (Remember how Charles Schulz introduced a character named "5" in September of 1963 to comment on ZIP codes and other encroachments of numeralization into our lives?  I guess Bloch considered this still a live issue two or three years later.)      

The climax: by chance Harry finds Rick and Jill embracing and he slays Rick and puts the corpse in the time capsule, which won't be opened for 10,000 years.  I was legitimately surprised by the ending, as I had thought it possible any or all of the three characters might end up dead.

Not bad.  I will warn all you sensitive types out there that "Life in Our Time" not only portrays a woman in a negative fashion but would probably be convicted of homophobia in the court of the woke, as Jill refers to their interior decorator as "fagilleh," which I guess is Bloch's idiosyncratic spelling of the Yiddish word that is more commonly styled "feygele" or "faygelah," and Harry calls the members of a rock band "hermaphrodites."

"Life in Our Time," which, if I may opine, is more of a horror story than a mystery, has been reprinted in five or six Bloch collections, including the 1979 Del Rey/Ballantine paperback Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of.  I had never seen the cover of Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of until today and I was taken aback by how embarrassingly lame the little logo used on Del Rey's 1979 Horror line was--it doesn't look at all horrifying; in fact it looks like the logo for a cheeky line of pseudo-sophisticated pornography, like the head of a satyr with a phallic nose and feminine lips.  How many books did this thing appear on?  In a just world, whoever submitted this design and whoever actually OKed it instead of axing it and replacing it with a skull or a bat would both be fired.  

"Revolver" by Avram Davidson (1962)

"Revolver" is about how government intervention distorts the housing market and government handouts sap the moral fiber of the people.  Did this thing debut in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine or National Review?

Edward Mason is an urban landlord who, in order to receive government subsidies, crams as many tenants into his buildings as possible.  He makes sure to rent to people who receive welfare, social security, disability, or whatever checks from the government, because these people will never lose their incomes, and don't have high standards when it comes to building maintenance.  

One of his tenants is a promiscuous woman with many children; she isn't quite sure who fathered some of them, and keeps the name Mrs. Richards even though Mr. Richards abandoned her long ago, as her men always abandon her.  Mason is paying her a visit to collect the rent.  She incompetently tries to avoid paying the rent, but eventually relents.  Her current boyfriend Curtis, who has been thinking of abandoning Mrs. Richards, notices that Mason is wearing a revolver inside his jacket (the neighborhood has become increasingly crime-ridden and he legally purchased the weapon to protect himself), and Curtis assaults Mason and steals the pistol and flees.  Mrs. Richards and her fellow tenants don't leap to aid the unconscious Mason--in fact, they find his blood loss sort of amusing.  

Curtis sells the pistol and negotiates with a man of his acquaintance who owns a convertible and wears mascara (maybe Robert Bloch would call this guy a "fagilleh") about taking a trip together to California.  We follow Curtis's efforts to get to Cali, and, separately, follow the revolver as it changes hands from one person of low morals to another.  Distracted by booze and totally incompetent besides, Curtis never makes it to California, the police catching up to him; they also nab the guy with the convertible, who I guess is a drug dealer.  As the story ends it is made apparent to us that a gang of criminals, among whose members is Mrs. Richards' eldest son, who have acquired the revolver are going to murder Mason with it.

This is a story that depicts the degradation of society and is full of alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, drug use, thievery, violence, and people who shirk all responsibility for themselves and all responsibility to others.  It is a little oblique, but Davidson seems to be blaming this degradation on government policies that are ostensibly meant to help the poor, but which in fact hurt them and end up turning entire neighborhoods into dangerous and violent slums.   

The story is well put together; thought-provoking and emotionally wrenching, it is obviously a success.  But it is not fun, being more sad than entertaining, more gross than engrossing--again and again it offers images you would want to look away from and forget, like when you see a crushed bird or a pool of vomit on the sidewalk.  "Revolver" would be reprinted in the 1998 Avram Davidson Treasury, a book enthusiastically endorsed by a pantheon of SF heroes, from Gene Wolfe and Ray Bradbury to Harlan Ellison and Damon Knight and available for us cheapos at the internet archive.  I checked out the introduction to "Revolver" by Bill Pronzini, which stresses the role of humor in Davidson's body of work--"Revolver" is often sarcastic and cutting--and suggests "Revolver" reminds him of the work of Gerald Kersh.  

**********

I am not the audience for Boucher's story, and didn't enjoy it, but I assume it achieves its goals.  The Bloch and Davidson stories, on the other hand, are not little puzzles whose attraction lies in watching some brainiac unravel them; rather, they are human dramas that grabbed me, exposes of how our society is going down the tubes: Bloch in a way that is somewhat amusing attacks the decadence of an affluent culture while Davidson offers a depressing description of people who have been lead into degradation by those with authority who have stupidly encouraged their baser instead of their higher instincts.  

It is back to straight science fiction in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log--see you then!

The Eternal Savage (AKA The Eternal Lover) by Edgar Rice Burroughs

"To you it has been but a few days since you left your Nat-ul to hunt down the ferocious Oo; but in reality countless ages have rolled by.  By some strange freak of fate you have remained unchanged during all these ages until now you step forth from your long sleep an unspoiled cave man of the stone age into the midst of the twentieth century, while I, doubtless, have been born and reborn a thousand times, merging from one incarnation to another until in this we are again united."

We recently read a letter Lin Carter sent to the February 1951 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories in which he offhandedly attacked Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Eternal Lover.  This spurred me to actually read this lesser known novel by the creator of John Carter and Tarzan, which I own in a water damaged Ace paperback edition sent to me by my brother in early 2019 in a box full of the ERB paperbacks we had both collected over the years.  The Eternal Lover first appeared in book form in 1925, a collection of the story of that name that debuted in All-Story Weekly in 1914 and its 1915 sequel, a serial of four parts entitled "Sweetheart Primeval" that appeared in the same magazine.  My 1972 Ace copy (21802) bears the title The Eternal Savage, which is slightly less appropriate but perhaps more marketable to Ace's target audience. 

In the first chapter of the book we meet Nu, son of Nu, a cave man living in the "Niocene," which is not really a period of prehistory recognized by the scientific community.  Nu, son of the chief, is the biggest and strongest member of his tribe.  Nu and cave maiden Nat-ul are in love, but Nat-ul won't consent to be Nu's mate until he has proven he is the best of the best by killing a saber-toothed tiger.  We accompany Nu as he hunts down just such a beast and decapitates it.  Then he takes cover in a cave during an earthquake and is entombed in there by a landslide.

In the second chapter we are on the African estate of none other than John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, the English aristocrat known to those who raised him as Tarzan!  We meet Victoria Custer, a Nebraskan who is as brave as a man and can hunt and shoot and ride as well as a man.  She and her brother Barney are visiting Tarzan and Jane, shooting down all manner of wildlife in pursuit of adventure and recreation.  Victoria has some idiosyncrasies to her character.  For one thing, the thought of an earthquake, and the sight of canyons and cracks in the earth that remind her of earthquakes, fill her with an irrational fear.  For another, she often dreams of a white savage carrying a stone-headed spear, and is quite in love with this dream man, so much so that she has refused to countenance marrying any of her many suitors.  Her most attractive suitor has been William Curtiss, and when this guy shows up at Tarzan's estate to press his suit anew she is about to finally agree when there is an earthquake and she gets the willies.  

This very same earthquake uncovers the cave wherein Nu has slept for 100,000 years!  He emerges just as young and strong as if he was buried alive just yesterday!  There follow the kinds of tracking and hunting and man vs beast fights we expect to find in a Tarzan story (Burroughs is not really stretching himself into new territory in this book), and a few chapters later Victoria is in the cave nursing a wounded Nu back to health, he having rescued her from a huge lion and been wounded in the process, and she, drawn by love of the naked savage she recognized as the man of her dreams, having tracked him down him with the help of one of Tarzan's wolfhounds.            

While Nu is still recuperating, Victoria is captured by a dozen Arab slavers and their company of black lackeys and carried off.  Tarzan, Barney, Curtiss and the rest catch up to Nu and the cave man recuperates for a few weeks as a prisoner at the Greystoke estate; Curtiss thinks this wild man murdered Victoria and wants to hand him over to the government or just kill him, but Barney, Victoria's confidant, knows all about his sister's dreams and is sure the cave man loves Victoria and may even be able to lead them to her as soon as he learns English.  (This stressful period exposes weaknesses in Curtiss's character--he even calls Nu a "white n*****," using the powerful word people like me are too afraid to say, in fact too afraid to type!)  Nu escapes with the wolfhound, who is now his bosom comrade, and they search for Victoria, the reincarnation of Nat-ul, following the trail of black villages despoiled by the murderous Arab slavers and their cannibal crew.  Nu catches up to Victoria while she is being abused by an Arab, and slays him.

The eternal lovers are together again.  But Victoria/Nat-ul vacillates--could she be happy living in the jungle after growing up in a world of modern conveniences?  Could Nu be happy in a world of motor cars and paved streets, cinemas and stores?  When Nu recognizes that his beloved is considering ending their relationship he puts his spear to his breast and Victoria has to commit herself to abandoning civilization for him to dissuade him from committing suicide on the spot.  Those are some extreme relationship tactics there, cave man!

A party from the Greystoke estate has also been following the Arab slavers, having learned they had Victoria, and Curtiss arrives just as Nu and Victoria are embracing.  Curtiss trains his rifle on the cave man but is killed by the loyal wolfhound before he can pull the trigger.

So ends Part One of The Eternal Savage.  As Part Two begins Nu and Victoria are back in the cave from which Nu emerged, and another earthquake hits, and when she recovers from being knocked out, Victoria finds herself in Nat-ul's body, 100,000 years ago, in Nu's world of mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, pterodactyls and plesiosaurs, among the tribe of Nu's father.  Soon she regards her memories of the 20th century as just a particularly vivid dream!

Nu is away hunting and a scoundrel named Hud carries Nat-ul off, hoping that, separated from the incomparable hunk that is the son of the chief, that he can persuade her to be his mate.  (Hud won't rape Nat-ul--one of Burroughs' themes in this book is that white men, even white cave men, don't rape women or otherwise mistreat them, that that behavior is the province of Arabs and blacks.)

Such reveries made Nu very sad, for he loved Nat-ul just as you or I would love--just as normal white men have always loved--with a devotion that placed the object of his affection upon a pedestal before which he was happy to bow down and worship.  His passion was not of the brute type of the inferior races which oftentimes solemnizes the marriage ceremony with a cudgel and ever places the woman in the position of an inferior and a chattel.

...the men of the tribe of Nu had not taken their mates by force for many generations.  There was a strong belief among them that the children of women who mated through their own choice were more beautiful, better natured and braver than those whose mothers were little better than prisoners and slaves.

When Nu wakes up he is also in the "Niocene" world of 100,000 years ago, just after he first fell into suspended animation, but somehow he doesn't remember that he has already killed a saber-tooth and so continues hunting for one.  While the forward "time travel" elements in Part One were silly, they were at least internally consistent, and they had an element of pathos, so we could accept them the way we accept silly stuff in SF all the time if they facilitate an exciting plot or present opportunities for interesting psychological effects on the characters.  Nu and Victoria's time travel backward in Part Two, however, are just a mess and take you out of the story a little.  Burroughs actually resolves these problems in the last pages of the book, but in a way that throws out the baby with the bathwater.

Nat-ul kills Hud in a sneak attack (Nu and Nat-ul behave absolutely ruthlessly in Part Two of this novel) and heads back to the tribe's caves.  Meanwhile, Nu's father Nu finds Nu and alerts him to the fact that the tribe is moving away from this earthquake prone region, northwards; when he is done hunting Nu will be able to catch up with them, the tribe marching at the speed of its slowest members, the children and the oldsters, after all.  Nu then kills a cave bear and figures that is about as good a kill as a sabre-tooth tiger and heads after the tribe.

Nat-ul was not around to hear about the tribe's decision to move, and when she finds the tribe gone she takes a guess and as to their course and heads off in the wrong direction, southwards.  When Nu reaches the tribe and Nat-ul is not there he follows her trail to the vicinity of a village of fishermen, where it abruptly disappears.  Nat-ul was fleeing from a horny fisherman, Tur, when a flying reptile seized her and took her to an island in the nearby sea, a body of water that will no longer exist in modern times.  Tur paddles off after her in a little boat made from a tree trunk; Nu spies on the village, susses out what is going on, and steals a boat for himself, killing three innocent men in the course of this act of larceny..  On the way to the island Nu has to fight a plesiosaur--Burroughs tells us this sea is full of "ferocious reptilia," that "All around him [Nu] the sea was alive with preying monsters...Titanic duels were in progress upon every hand...."  The ten-year-old who endures inside of me found this to be awesome.

Nat-ul fights her way out of the giant pterodactyl nest, climbs down a spire, climbs down a cliff, escapes some apes, and then is recaptured by Tur, who takes her back to the fisher village on the mainland.  Nu, after fighting his way to the island, then has to fight his way back to the village through all those aquatic reptiles.  (One of the structural issues with The Eternal Savage is that instead of the characters traveling to successive fresh new locations they keep bouncing back and forth between a limited number of locations.)  At the village Nu rescues Nat-ul, who escapes, but is captured himself.

Tur has a mate, Gron, who is enraged that Tur was trying to cheat on her; she wanted to tear Nat-ul's eyes out, but now that Nat-ul is gone, she vents her rage on Nu until she is dragged off our hero.  For this misbehavior, the chief of the fisher village ("Does a woman rule my people?" he demands) orders Tur to beat Gron and abandon her for a new mate.  Nu gives a defiant speech about how the fisher people suck.  The men of the fisher village labor like drudges--building boats and huts--while the men of Nu's cave-dwelling tribe hunt and fight.  The men of Nu's tribe wear the skins of the lions and tigers and bears they have outfought, a sign of their prowess--the fishermen wear the hides of mere herbivores.  And Nu's people don't mistreat women!

Lurking outside the village, Nat-ul sees that Nu is going to be tortured to death by being roasted slowly over many hours.  (Oh yeah, the Nu tribe doesn't torture malefactors, just executes them with dispatch.)  Fortunately, after escaping death at the claws of beasts, she is reunited with her and Nu's tribe--the tribe, soon after Nu left in search of his beloved, decided to delay their trip north and follow Nu.  Nat-ul leads her people to the fisher village, which they take in an assault, only to find that Nu is not there!  

Nu, we learn, was liberated by the vengeful Gron, she seeking to deny Tur and her chief the pleasure of watching Nu be cooked to death.  Gron also cherishes hopes that she will get revenge on Tur for his infidelity by having sex with Nu, who is far hunkier than any of the fishermen.  More spectacularly, before engineering Nu's escape from the roaster, Gron went all Medea on us and killed her and Tur's infant son.           

Nu and Gron have fled via boat, and end up on a different island, where Nu's ability to fight and to climb cliffs and the decent way he treats her lead Gron to fall in love with him.  Meanwhile, Nat-ul, looking for Nu, is captured by Tur, who has escaped the fall of his village alive.  Tur takes her, by coincidence, to the same island Nu and Gron are on, where the tricky Nat-ul gets the jump on him and knocks him unconscious so she can escape.  Nat-ul evades additional hazards on her own until she is captured by the natives of the island, people who herd aurochs, and then rescued by Nu.  The eternal lovers are reunited!  Soon after, Tur and Gron, our worst case scenario couple, are also reunited.  Tur tries to murder our ideal couple by rolling a boulder down on them, but Gron attacks Tur from behind and kills him and then commits suicide.

I would have been happy if the novel ended there with vivid contrasting images of the love that makes life worth living and the love that leads to murder and self-murder, but Burroughs finishes his tale up in a way that is deflating and irritating, fixing a few problems with his narrative but causing new--worse!--ones.  Nu and Nat-ul make it back to their tribe and their caves, but then an earthquake strikes and the entire tribe is wiped out.  Victoria wakes up and we learn that much of this book we have been reading was just a dream!  I guess the adventures in the "Niocene" may have been true facts, Victoria's memories of a past life that were spurred by an earthquake or something, but it seems that the 20th century adventures--Nu's awakening in the 20th century, the march of the Arab slavers, Curtiss being killed by a dog--were just wholly fantastical products of Victoria's subconscious.  This undermines the whole book!

Looks like Lin Carter had a point!    

Well, I enjoyed all the scenes of people tracking, people chasing, people climbing cliffs and people fighting plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, lions, tigers and bears and each other.  The subplot that revolves around Gron the scorned jealous woman is good.  And all the stuff about race and sex will give you a jolt--looks like All-Story Weekly wasn't being policed by the government for misinformation, disinformation and malinformation!  There is also the provocative idea that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is superior to settling down to agriculture and village life, an argument I heard made by Leninists when I was in grad school and more recently by some libertarians on podcasts.  

So I am giving The Eternal Savage a thumbs up.  But there are obviously problems with the book, some of which I have pointed out above, problems that are primarily structural.  The two parts, the first of which I guess corresponds to the original story "The Eternal Lover" and the second to the serial "Sweetheart Primeval," are not well integrated.  The first part of the book gets some energy from the fish-out-of-water aspect of Nu finding himself in the 20th century and from the eeriness of Victoria realizing that she is the reincarnated Nat-ul and the ways that Nat-ul's knowledge enters her modern brain, but Part Two, until the very ending, dispenses with those weird aspects and is just an adventure about cave people that is not at all linked to the 20th century or time travel.  The way Burroughs pulls the rug out from under Part One in Part Two is very frustrating--all the love jazz, all the fighting and death that we invested our interest and emotions in just didn't happen?  

So, not a great Burroughs novel, but the bulk of the text is certainly fun.

Thrilling Wonder Stories, Dec 1950: E F Russell, C L Harness, M Reynolds, F B Long and R Z Gallun

Back in 2020 we read Leigh Brackett's tale of racism and sexualized violence in a postapocalyptic world in which a superior race of cat people came from Europe to push us Yankees around, "The Citadel of Lost Ages."  This caper made its debut in the December 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.  Let's revisit that issue of Sam Merwin, Jr.'s magazine, as it is a treasure trove of fiction by people with whom we are familiar here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  (If I don't like the stories, please replace "treasure trove" above with "mine field.")

"MacHinery" by Eric Frank Russell 

We've hit our first mine.  "MacHinery" is a long and tedious joke story about an obese robot.  Thumbs down!  

Automechanisms Incorporated has spent four years designing and building a prototype robot that looks just like a human being.  They had to stuff so many electronics into this machine that they had no choice but to construct it in the form of a fat guy, despite the fact that of course if you'd had your druthers your first robot would look like Buster Crabbe or Sophia Loren.  This robot can talk and read like a lot of people you know, but also like a lot of people you know it can't accomplish any productive tasks like build cars or fight zombies or anything like that.  This robot is expected to contribute to Automechanisms Inc.'s bottom line as a sales assistant and sample; it will accompany the salesmen who travel the nation selling AI's products and serve as an irrefutable example of AI's ingenuity.

We follow the salesman whose territory includes New York, as he goes on a trip to the Big Apple with the robot in tow.  Most of the text of "MacHinery" consists of an authority figure yelling at Ackroyd because the robot has caused a minor disturbance of the peace.  There are also jokes about how the robot doesn't know slang or comprehend metaphor, and initially doesn't realize people lie and break the rules.  

On the train to the city so nice they named it twice (but not too nice to send me packing 😞) the robot reads magazines, and, well, wouldn't you know it, when it enjoys a story this generates heat inside its circuits, causing a noxious smell as its insulation smolder, causing the conductor of the train to yell at Ackroyd.  On the streets of Manhattan the robot hypnotically projects outlandish images from a children's book it read recently, such as the image of a hippo wearing tights; the police yell at Ackroyd because they think he stole the hippo from the zoo.

The robot learns to lie and flout the rules, and tricks Ackroyd and one of AI's customers.  But then it breaks the rule against crossing against a red light and is hit by a truck and totally destroyed.

A waste of time that has never escaped the confines of Thrilling Wonder Stories.

If you want to hear me complain some more about Russell, here are some links:  Earlier this year we read Russell's novel The Mindwarpers (AKA What Strange Device); we've also read an entire Russell collection of stories about the crew of a space ship that some have proclaimed a classic and which the MPorcius staff considers overrated.  In 2016 I read The Best of Eric Frank Russell and wrote four blog posts about its thirteen stories, some of which I awarded a passing grade.

"The New Reality" by Charles L. Harness

While "MacHinery" lay entombed in the 12/50 issue of TWS, "The New Reality" flourished in the glorious afterlife of book publication, selected for reprinting by such famous anthologists as Everett Bleiler and T. E. Ditky, Damon Knight, Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg and Charles Waugh, and still others, including a bunch of editors of non-English anthologies.  Maybe we are beyond the mine field and this is the treasure we have been looking for!  Harness's story is even introduced in TWS by an illustration of a nude couple before a sunrise!  Sounds heavenly (or Edenic!) to me!

"The New Reality" is based on the philosophical question of to what extent our beliefs about the world reflect our perception of reality, and to what extent our expectations of reality create that reality.  People in the distant past believed the Earth was flat--could it be that it truly was flat, and became round when people started believing it to be round?

It is the future!  Adam Prentiss is head of head of the Eastern division of the secret police Bureau that keeps an eye on scientists to make sure they don't make any civilization-threatening discoveries or invent any world-threatening devices.  We observe as he spies on a scientist, Luce, even sneaking into his lab at night to photograph his notes and apparatus.  Prentiss, an expert on ontology and author of the suppressed doctoral dissertation "Involuntary Confirmation of Incoming Sensoria Apperception Mass," becomes convinced that Luce, by use of his apparatus, the world's smoothest Nicol prism mounted on a goniometer, can "blow physical laws straight to smithereens."  Prentiss confronts Luce; Luce invites Prentiss to join him on his grand quest to "know all things" and become a god.  Prentiss tries to shoot Luce down, but Luce has his forcefield ready and escapes.

Prentiss has a meeting with the head of the secret police, a beautiful woman known as "E," and her staff.  E acts like you expect a secret police woman to act, trying to do stuff behind Congress's back, and her staff includes a dude named Speer and a dude named Goring, as if Harness is trying to remind us of the Third Reich.  (Harness picked Prentiss's, E's and Luce's names so carefully it is hard to believe he just chose Speer and Goring at random.)  These Feds have a debate of several pages on the nature of reality; Prentiss, based on the research he has done connected to his investigation of Luce, insisting that the nature of the universe is the product of the imagination of humankind and has been changing--becoming more complex--as people have become more sophisticated and expected to discover greater complexity in the world around them.  For example, in the time of ancient man there were only four elements--the periodic table of 92 elements was populated by the imagination of modern scientists.  (Prentiss gives many more examples, dropping the names of many scientists.  Harness proves he can drop the names of artists, as well as those of scientists, by telling us that E has a body like the Venus of Valasquez, a painting you can find on the ever-expanding list of art masterpieces that have fallen victim to terrorism.)           

The secret police bigwigs vote to kill Luce at once without trial--Prentiss thinks the man could be running his final experiment, the experiment that will alter the universe in such a way it will kill almost everybody, in just a few hours.  Prentiss's people quickly find Luce's fortified hideaway, and it is decided that Prentiss will go in commando-style; if Prentiss doesn't eliminate Luce before a set time, a tactical nuke will be dropped on the hideout.  Prentiss fights his way past Luce's great cats, and is captured.  We get some science lectures relating to photons--Luce is going to capture and destroy a photon, which he and Prentiss are sure will reset the universe to how it was before human imagination started altering it.

The device is activated just as the atomic bomb detonates, and the universe is reborn.  Only three people are smart enough to survive the transition to the simple universe of only four elements and a flat Earth and all that: Adam Prentiss, E (the "E" stands for "Eve") and Luce, who is not a naked person like Adam and Eve, but a serpent!

Yes, "The New Reality," like A. E. van Vogt's 1948 "Ship of Darkness," is one of those stories the predictable surprise ending of which is that the main characters are Adam and Eve.  This is sort of ridiculous, of course, but this story actually isn't bad.  The style is fine, the plot holds together internally, and I have to admire the story's audacious ambition.  The science and philosophy lectures are maybe too long, but they are sort of interesting.  We'll call this one "OK," maybe not exactly "good," but better than "acceptable."

"The Spark" by Mack Reynolds

Reynolds had a strange and varied career, including a youth as a hardcore left-wing activist, expulsion from the radical political party to which he had devoted so much service, extensive world travel and lots of work as a travel writer for men's magazines, and, reportedly, great popularity as a SF writer even though his stories are not very good.  The thing that differentiates Reynolds' SF stories from those of other writers--according to his admirers, at least--is that he speculates about political economy.  "The Spark" has never been reprinted, but we won't let that stop us from probing it with our bayonets to see if it is one of the mines we fear or one of the treasures we covet.

Call the bomb squad, this is another mine.  Luckily it is a small one, just two and a half pages.

The venerable civilization of Mars is in trouble!  The red planet's natural resources are almost used up, and the population is down to like 500,000 people.  The Martians have to emigrate to some other planet, but they haven't invented a stardrive yet, so the only place they can go is Earth.  But they assume because Earth people are so violent, with endless conflict between race, nation, class, religion, etc., that we won't welcome them, but instead kill them.

The twist ending of the story is that the Martians have just enough material to make a single atomic bomb, and they plan to nuke an Earth city in hopes that it will cause a general nuclear war that will wipe out the human race, leaving this big blue marble uninhabited so the Martians can move in.

Banal filler, a total waste of time.  Thumbs down!

"If You Don't Watch Out" by Frank Belknap Long

Frank Belknap Long has dumped many a load of junk on us over the years, but he is capable of good work; case in point: our recent find, "Fuzzy Head," which I was totally into.  "Fuzzy Head" appeared in Thrilling Wonder, so maybe "If You Don't Watch Out" is going to be another Long winner!

Our tale is set in small town America, in the future of jet bikes and visiphones and pneumatic tubes that deliver food and consumer goods from Chicago to the grocer, from the grocer to you.  Living in the town is the famous MacShane, retired space explorer, one of the first men to visit Mars, Venus, and Phobos.  Why is MacShane when he isn't even forty yet?  Why does MacShane live like a hermit, shunning human contact?  The narrator, a boy in his early teens who idolizes MacShane and wants to follow in his footsteps, finds out!

To put it briefly, a series of propitious events leads to the young narrator paying an unexpected visit to the reclusive MacShane's isolated house, where he looks in through a window after hearing an eerie sound and seeing some queer lights.  In a cage right there by MacShane's chair is a fearsome Martian monster!  This beast from the red planet has psychic powers of a special nature--it can read your subconscious and see what your idea of the perfect mate is, and then project an illusion of that creature as a means of attracting you.  In its native habitat it uses this ability to attract mates, but in a cage here in Podunk USA it keeps using its powers in an effort to draw MacShane close enough to the cage that it can reach out and devour him!  Obviously, MacShane should just kill this thing, and he even has a ray pistol sitting right there on the table next to him with which to do the job, but he can't--he is addicted to the superrealistic vision of the perfect woman the monster regularly projects!  It is this addiction that has turned him into a grim man who is unable to marry his childhood sweetheart.

Fiction is full of coincidences, and the one day that the narrator is there to witness MacShane struggle with his addiction is the very day MacShane steps too close to the cage and the monster seizes him and starts rending his Terran flesh with its Martian talons.  The narrator hops inside, snatches the ray pistol, and kills the beast, saving MacShane's life and curing him of his addiction so he can marry his girl-next-door sweetheart.  

If that sounds like a happy ending, don't be so sure!  MacShane knows the narrator well enough to know he wants to become an interplanetary explorer and researcher on alien life forms, and he warns the kid not to go to Mars, thinking him a sensitive soul who would be easy prey for just the sort of monster who almost ruined MacShane's life.  In a sort of epilogue we see that the narrator has ignored this advice and is on the red planet, his ray gun in his fist, searching for one of those monsters.  Will the narrator fall prey to visions of his dream girl like his role model did?  The ending is not clear, but we are given reason to fear the worst!

A good story that mixes C. L. Moore-style eroticized psychic battling with Ray Bradbury-type sappy kid-in-a-small-town goop.  I don't know why this story has never been reprinted, seeing as Long is famous and there have been several Long collections printed since 1950.  "If You Don't Watch Out" is a reminder that it is worthwhile for us fans of 20th-century science fiction and aficionados of the weird to explore these old magazines, even if the path may be littered with mines!

"Bluff Play" by Raymond Z. Gallun 

This is a fun little Cold War espionage story that would have to wait until the 21st century to be reprinted in a small press Gallun collection edited by John Pelan.

It is the near future--1955!  Our narrator is working at the secret installation where America's space fleet of twenty nuclear-powered warships is being constructed.  Just weeks before the fleet will be ready for launch, American scientists and spies confirm that our worst fears have come true--the enemy (for some reason Gallun never specifies the identity of the enemy, but we have to assume it is the Soviet Union) have already launched their own space fleet!  One of our spies sneaks over to the enemy space field in the Arctic Circle, and brings back a lump of mud from their landing zone--mud that must be from Venus!

The boffins and spooks live in fear that the enemy could blackmail us into submission or bomb us into oblivion at any moment, as there is no way to protect the West from attack from space.  But they keep working on finishing up our space fleet so we will eventually be able to present a credible retaliatory threat.  More bad news: evidence that there are foreign spies--cunningly insidious moles who are indistinguishable from loyal Americans--right here in the secret base!

While everybody else is scrambling to put the finishing touches on the USA's first space vessels, one guy on the base is doing pure science work on that lump of alien mud.  The narrator is irritated that this guy is wasting his time on the quest for knowledge when at any moment everybody on the base could be nuked or marched off to the gulag!  But it turns out that that that lump of Venusian goop is the key to saving the world from tyranny!

Ya see, the lump of mud contained spores, seeds and invertebrate eggs, and the scientist manages to grow, in a terrarium, a little collection of Venusian plants and bugs.  The narrator is kept in the dark, but the security personnel at the base have managed to pin down the identity of the enemy spy in their midst.  They let the mole film the terrarium and escape--the narrator actually tries to catch him and he has to be violently prevented from foiling his superiors' master plan.  Knowledge of the existence of the terrarium of Venusian life makes the enemy rulers think that we Americans have also been to Venus and also have a space fleet, deterring them and giving us time to finish our fleet so that we have a real deterrent.  Gallun ends the story on an even more hopeful note--the government of the enemy country is discredited and a revolt breaks out and we are lead to believe that the Cold War will soon be over and a peaceful Earth will soon be exploring the solar system.

Solid entertainment.         

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Gallun and Long offer good stories, and Harness a decent one, so I won't complain over much about the annoying pieces from Reynolds and Russell--I only have myself to blame for reading their work, which I have so often been disappointed in in the past.  When we remember that we enjoyed Brackett's story in this ish, we have to admit it is a good issue.

More Thrilling Wonder in the future, but we'll be taking a break from space travelers and scientists for a few days and reading some other genre fiction.  Stay tuned to see what's up!