Merril-approved 1956 stories: Frank Riley and Jack Ritchie

Like Johnny Thunder, we are stuck in the 1950s.  Let's read some more 1956 stories recommended by Judith Merril, this time by authors whose names start with the letter "R."  Last time we did this we had to slog through some overly long stories deploring human greed written by people whose names begin with the letter "P," but maybe today will be our day.

"The Executioner" by Frank Riley 

Riley has eight short fiction credits at isfdb, and was co-author with Mark Clifton of the Hugo-winning novel They'd Rather Be Right, which I haven't read but which I hear the conventional wisdom has decreed is not very good.  Riley's main work seems to have been as an L.A.-based journalist; he also wrote detective stories.  It looks like nobody saw fit to reprint "The Executioner" after its debut in If, so maybe Judith Merril is this story's biggest fan.  

(Though the story is not named on the cover, the Kelly Freas painting on the cover of this issue of If illustrates "The Executioner," the jewelry, lace, fingernail paint and absurdly elaborate hairstyle of the main character bringing to life the story's theme that a utopian life is going to feminize men. 

It is the 22nd century, the future of air cars and pushbutton jobs, a neofeudal future complete with lords and ladies and public executions in the form of gladiatorial pistol duels in the arena.  Life is so easy and boring in this high-tech low-work world that the execution duels are essential to maintaining public order by providing a safety valve for the masses' natural desires for excitement and cathartic violence.

The Lord High Executioner, Sir Jacques de Carougne, has twenty years of gunning down convicted felons in the arena behind him, but it hasn't always been smooth sailing--for one thing, he has an inhibition about shooting women and will often get an understudy to fight malefactors who lack a Y chromosome.  Today he gets some bad news--the convicted felon he is supposed to duel is a woman, and not just any woman--it's Lady Ann of Coberly, the woman he was in love with before he started his execution career, the sole woman he has ever loved over the course of a life of having sex with dozens of executioner groupies!  And Jacques isn't given enough time to get somebody to fill in for him!  

Before the actual execution, the high court, installed on a moving dais in the center of the arena in full view of the crowd, has to vote on whether to veto the convicted's sentence.  Ann takes this opportunity to give a speech saying that the men of her day are not men at all!  (The text implies that 22nd century men have lost the ability to sexually satisfy women.)   

Ann having been denied a stay of execution, Ann and Jacques face each other in the arena.  Ann is smart, brave, and a good shot, and proves to Jacques that she could kill him and save her own life, but instead she misses on purpose, giving Jacques a chance to prove that he is the only true man left in the world--will he gun her down or spare her?  What would a real man do?

This is a pretty good story; the writing is good, and it forces the reader to try to figure out what Ann considers a true man to be, and consider whether or not he agrees with her.  We see the utopia-will-suck theme a lot, but I actually like that theme so I don't mind it the way I mind the tired themes that got on my nerves in our last episode.  When it comes to "The Executioner" I'm right there with Merril--thumbs up!

"Project Hi-Psi" by Frank Riley

That's right, Merril chose two stories by Riley for her list of honorable mentions, and this one also appeared in If.  Like "The Executioner," it looks like "Project Hi-Psi" was forgotten by everybody with clout who wasn't born Judith Josephine Grossman after its publication in 1956, but if it is as good as "The Executioner" I will join Merril in championing it!

The early sections of "Project Hi-Psi" have a jocular tone, and our main character, Dr. Lucifer Brill, professor of Parapsychology at a university in California, son of a New England minister and descendant of Puritans, is an eccentric character.  He has eccentric clothes, eccentric facial hair, eccentric pets, etc.  This stuff isn't exactly funny, but fortunately for us readers it isn't annoying, either.  (And it is interesting to see an author leveraging what he perceives to be readers' expectations and opinions of New Englanders--we saw Robert E. Howard do this recently in his famous horror story "Pigeons from Hell.")

With the help of his fellow researchers into ESP and PK around the country, Brill has been compiling a comprehensive list of peeps in the USA who took Zener card (Riley calls them "Rhine card") tests and following up on them.  He stumbled upon an astonishing fact--over the last eight years over 3000 people who did well on the tests (suggesting they had psychic powers) have disappeared!  We learn all this in expository dialogue as Brill meets with the head of the FBI office in L.A.

The federal government does some investigating, but it is Brill who puts his own life on the line to find out the truth.  He spreads the rumor that he himself has taken a Zener card test and got a great score, and gets himself kidnapped like those 3000+ missing psykers.

Brill wakes up to find himself on an alien planet, an outpost of the space empire of the Capellans, where he and the 3000+ are subjected to long term experiments, including selective breeding experiments, by the aliens.  The set up is a little like that TV show The Prisoner, where everybody has nice little quarters in a pleasant environment but you can't escape and you have to attend classes and you get manipulated and so forth.  Brill does what investigating he can, and the fact that Brill actually doesn't have any psychic powers adds additional tension to the story--what will the aliens do when they realize he is a dud?  

Brill is paired with a woman with psychic powers, and he is manipulated into impregnating her.  (As with Ann in "The Executioner," this woman, Nina, offers her theory on what constitutes a real man and judgment of whether our main character is one.)  Brill, as a scientist, has convos with the aliens about scientific methods, which are an opportunity for Riley to discuss some criticisms of the scientific establishment.  One of Riley's themes is the way specialization retards progress, the way researchers in individual disciplines and fields will ensconce themselves in "cubicles" and fail to accept insights from other fields (when I knew scientists, well, "scientists," seeing as they were profs and students in the political science department, they would sometimes talk about getting out of their "silos" and going "interdisciplinary," and we also have the example of the guy in the novel version of A. E. van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle, who synthesizes knowledge drawn from all fields of science.)  Another of Riley's themes is how the followers of innovators like Freud and Einstein, instead of innovating themselves, will stifle innovation by defending an orthodoxy based on a rigid version of their heroes' ideas.   

The aliens explain that psi powers were relatively common in Earth's medieval period, but the ideology of the industrial era stifled their development--those with psychic abilities hid them and refused to develop them, and the human race's psychic potential atrophied.  The aliens' society followed a similar path, and the small cadre of Capellans at this outpost are trying to jump start a revival of psychic powers, which they feel will open up new vistas of learning and experience.  They want Brill, whose career proves he is as passionate about psychic powers as are they, to work with them, and offer him facilities with a thousand times more potential than those Brill had back in Cali.  And there are no restrictions on what methods they can employ--as Brill sees when he learns that one of the aliens' lines of research is to subject people to radical gene editing and extreme radiation experiments that produce mutants, many with psychic powers, but almost all of whom are wretched and pathetic monsters, hideous misshapen freaks (Virgil Finlay illustrates some of these sad beings on the title page of the story.)

Will Brill work with the ruthless and amoral aliens who can give him a chance to make strides in knowledge about which he could only dream back on Earth?  His decision is complicated by the fact that among the 3000+ is a secret underground of Earthers, many of them war veterans who know how to lead, fight and sneak around, who have figured out how to disable the aliens' surveillance and security apparatus and aim to try to take over the facility--they certainly don't want to continue to be the guinea pigs of the aliens, and would perhaps prefer to die fighting.  Which side will Brill, who has skills and knowledge that would be of great value to both the alien scientists and to the human freedom fighters, join?

After some plot twists, character developments and action scenes we get our sense of wonder ending-- the course of galactic history is changed and the human race stands on the precipice of a future of infinite challenge and opportunity.

"Project Hi-Psi" is a good story with many elements familiar to van Vogt fans--the expanding mental powers that lead to a radical paradigm shift, the competing secret groups, the sense of wonder ending--but Riley's writing is more clear than Van's and he is better at depicting personalities and relationships.  I also like that Riley addresses the tension between the goals of progress and freedom.  Thumbs up for "Project Hi-Psi;" in introducing us to Riley, Merril has steered us on a profitable course. 

"Sim" by Jack Ritchie

Ritchie seems to be known not as a SF writer but a mystery writer, and while he has a decent-sized list of credits at isfdb, most of them seem to be stories that appeared in those anthologies with Alfred Hitchcock's name on them.  "Sim" is not listed at isfdb, and first appeared in Sir!, which bears the subtitle "A Magazine for Males."  At the internet archive there is a collection of what purports to be Ritchie's entire body of work, and it is there that I am reading a photocopy of the pages of Sir! that contain "Sim" as well as ads for pornographic cartoons, photos of women wrestling, a guide to how to win over women, and aphrodisiac perfume.  

"Sim" is a competent filler story that is sort of like an episode of The Twilight Zone, the obvious foreshadowing and the obvious twist ending.  The narrator visits his sister and brother-in-law after a long period of separation and meets their sons for the first time, a ten-year-old and an eight-month old.  The ten-year-old talks about flying saucers and the narrator assures him no aliens will ever invade the Earth.  The eight-month-old is some kind of super-strong genius, already able to walk with ease.  They call him "Sim," short for "Simon."  Sim loves to eat meat.        

Two years later the narrator visits again.  Sim is now like a teenager, brooding and sinister, and has weird yellow hair and yellow eyes.  The narrator takes Sim to the zoo and realizes he has some mannerisms and physical attributes much like the lions!  Sim even hints that "Sim" is in fact short for "Simba!"  Then he notices some other weird-looking leonine kids hanging around.  The narrator, now knowing too much, meets a grisly fate.

This story is merely acceptable.  Presumably Merril recommended it as part of her project of rubbing out the already blurry boundaries between genres.  

**********

I really enjoyed the Riley stories, and the Ritchie was not painful.  So, a good start to the "R" leg of this journey through 1956.  More 1956 "R"s next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log. 

Merril-approved 1956 SF stories: Arthur Porges and Robert Presslie

You probably remember that the MPorcius Fiction Log staff is picking stories to read from the list headed HONORABLE MENTION at the back of Judith Merril's 1957 anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume.  These are stories printed in 1956 that Merril liked but which for whatever reason didn't end up among the 18 pieces actually reprinted in the book.  The list is alphabetical by author, and we today look at the two P entries, "Masterpiece" by Arthur Porges and "The Creep" by Robert Presslie.  If you wonder what A through O stories we've selected from Merril's list, click click click to your heart's content on the links below.

Abernathy and Aldiss

Anderson, Allen and Banks
Barrow, Beaumont and Blish
Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler  
Carter, Clarke and Clifton 
Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen
de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle 

Ellison and Fontenay

Galouye, Garrett, Grimm & Gunn

Hart, Herbert and Jones 

Kuttner & Moore, Lang, Leinster, L'Engle and McClintic

McConnell, McIntosh and Melchior

Moore, Norse and Oliver

"Masterpiece" by Arthur Porges 

"Masterpiece" debuted in the hubba hubba men's magazine Escapade alongside pictures of topless ladies and full-page cartoons that slyly hint at bestiality, pedophilia, incest and white slavery.  (There is also a sort of Easter Egg, a little photo of Bettie Page's face.)  One of Merril's projects is to question the boundaries between genre and mainstream fiction and the distinctions between genres, and "Masterpiece" is not listed at isfdb, suggesting that few people recognized "Masterpiece" as SF, or at least SF notable enough to reprint in some anthology or collection.  Well, let's surf on over to the scan of the September 1956 issue of Escapade at the internet archive, world's greatest website, flip past the report on fall fashion, the wine quiz, the profile of a pre-Ginger Tina Louise, and the "blow-by-blow account of what goes on" at a progressive jazz recording session, and read "Masterpiece" and then take a guess as to why Merril recommended it.

"Masterpiece" is mediocre filler, but I guess, as a satire of advertising and people's greed and acquisitiveness, it appealed to Merril's leftist sensibilities.  

One of America's top ad men (he makes $80,000 a year) comes to a dive bar and talks to the the bar tender and the overweight blonde hanging around at the bar, telling them about some of his most successful publicity stunts, like painting a slogan promoting cigarettes in colossal print on the White Cliffs of Dover.  The climax of the story is that he has arranged to have an advertising slogan written on the moon, the same gag we see in Robert Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" and in Arthur C. Clarke's "Watch This Space."  

The text of the story is overly long, adding in multiple little sub plots in which people reveal their avarice.  And then there is the fact that the ad text is so long the letters of which it would be composed would be impossible to read with the naked eye (Clarke had just eight characters reproduced on the moon in his story, and one of Heinlein's ideas was that the commies might reproduce the hammer and sickle log up there.)

Barely acceptable.

"The Creep" by Robert Presslie 

It looks like "The Creep" was serialized over two issues of Authentic Science Fiction Monthly and then never reprinted.  It is pretty long--over 60 pages--so let's hope it is good.

"The Creep" is about how the capitalists have been lying to the public in order to manipulate the stock market but a lone hero, a journalist, was willing to tell the people the truth, only to find that the common people preferred to be lied to!  These same capitalists are going to kill us all with their silly competition with the Reds, but luckily some space aliens come along to save us with the help of the journalist and a woman.  Obviously this goop is right up the alley of a pinko like Judith Merril.  

Like some kind of crappy stage play, the first half of "The Creep" takes place in a single location, a bar, and has a small cast, each member of which represents a class of people. 

World famous journalist Sam Garnet is drowning his sorrows.  Garnet was working for the TV news program owned by Grossen Electronics Industries but got fired today because he told the apocalyptic truth on his broadcast.  For one thing, he predicted a nuclear war in the next few days.  (The story never uses specific place names or political identifiers like "USSR" or "the West" or "communist," just allusions, like "our side" and "the other side.")  For another, he revealed that one of Grossen's consumer products, the Creepmeter that measures radiation, is calibrated to underreport how much the radiation of Western and Soviet weapons testing (people call this radiation "the Creep") is poisoning the environment, hiding from the people the fact that even if the impending nuclear war is averted then most people are going to die in a few days anyway from radiation sickness.  And finally, Sam exposed on air the fact that the spheres that recently appeared in Earth orbit are not new Western defense satellites, as the Grossen suits want him to say, but vessels of totally unknown, presumably extraterrestrial, origin!  A woman in the bar in fancy clothes some man bought her, Lena, expresses her anger at Sam for disabusing everybody of their illusions, of puncturing their blissful ignorance.

Presslie pads the length of his childishly tendentious story with lots of filler text about people drinking booze and smoking cigarettes and so on; I don't know, maybe he thinks that builds tension.  When the bar's roof caves in, presumably from a bomb blast as the nuclear war starts, we get detailed descriptions of everybody's physical injuries and psychological symptoms, and then we get Presslie's idea of a suspense scene, a blow-by-blow account of the lifting of a beam off the body of a fallen man that lasts an entire page; sample text below:

With the shifting of the beam his grip was now all wrong.  One arm was bent more than the other.  Max slid his left knee further forward until it pressed beneath his lowermost hand.  He sucked in an enormous gulp of air....

Sam is the truth telling member of the cognitive elite, I guess a stand in for SF readers who, of course, think they are smarter and better educated and more rational than everybody else.  The man who gets killed by the beam represents the good members of the populace, the victim of the capitalist establishment's pursuit of profit.  Lena represents the less savory aspects of the common masses (but don't worry, feminists, she'll redeem herself!)  The owner of the bar turns out to be a communist spy, and represents the USSR and the revolutionary left, and to represent the capitalist bourgeoisie we have Max, a senior financier from Grossen Electronics, come to the bar try to get Sam to go on TV again to take back his predictions that everybody who isn't already in a deep bunker has like 48 hours to live.  The pressure of being trapped in the ruined bar, which everybody is too scared to leave because its lead-lined walls are believed to be providing some protection against the Creep and the radiation from the bomb that (apparently) hit the town, leads to the bourgeois and the commie being exposed as just two sides of the same coin of selfishness and exploitative elitism (as opposed to Sam's and the space aliens' paternalistic elitism.)  Both Max and the Red barkeep want to have sex with Lena in their last hours, and fight over her, and it is we readers who suffer through Presslie's tedious description of the hand-to-hand fight that ensues.  The capitalist is the first to die, and then Sam helps Lena fight the commie, who is also killed.

The first episode of the serial thus ends with only two characters in the lead-shielded bar, Sam the journalist man and Lena, who under the influence of Sam instead of the capitalist or the Bolshevik starts to wisen up. 

The 31 pages of the second and final installment of this dreadful borefest starts with the observation that humans are like cats in that both species have a tenacious will to live.  (SF people love cats.)  Sam and Lena wake up when a space suited figure busts through the rubble blocking the entrance to the ruined bar.  The figure collapses, and behind it Sam can see that one of the alien spheres has crashed across the street, flattening those buildings--it was this alien crash, not a Soviet bomb, that hit the neighborhood, and the man in the space suit is the only alien survivor of the crash. 

It turns out that Sam and Lena are still alive because the crashed sphere is projecting a radiation-damping field that has neutralized the Creep within a radius of like 40 yards.  We get a meticulous description of how Sam figures out how to get into the alien sphere; inside he finds the rest of the crew has died.  Then he and Lena split up to search the radiation-free 80-yard diameter section of city for a medical professional who can keep the alien alive so he can explain how to extend that 80-yards to all of Earth and save the world from the pollution caused by the Cold War arms race.  I could barely believe how much detail Presslie offered us readers in his description of the brass sign in front of the doctor's office, but I wasn't surprised by the play by play account of the surgery the doctor performed on the alien, a scene of five pages.  (The doctor is a drunk who hasn't operated in years, but his contact with Sam and the alien revives him and redeems him, just like they are going to revive the entire human race!)

The alien recovers from open heart surgery in a few hours and then teaches Sam and Lena his language in thirty minutes--this is how efficient the alien language is!  Even though Sam played the role of truth-loving bleeding-heart liberal earlier and Lena was a selfish deluded dope, for a few pages in the closing pages of the story they switch roles; Sam is skeptical, even hostile, to the alien, but Lena, who reveals she was a school teacher before she decided to live off rich men by exploiting her sex appeal, insists that to earn the alien's aid they must bare their souls to E.T.  Explicitly comparing the alien to a parent and implicitly to a priest or god, she confesses the sins of the Earthman (sample sins: "greed for profit, greed for property, greed for territory, and the foulest greed of all--the desire to possess the very souls of other human beings...") to the alien, who agrees to clean the Earth of the radiation.  It is implied that Sam and the alien will teach the human race how to behave in the future.

Bad!  I am against these stories that offer goody goody aliens as foils for evil humanity, and I am against these stories that suggest the liberal West is no better than Lenin and Stalin's Soviet Union.  Even worse, this story is very slow and very boring, and is structured poorly, with the sudden switch from "we got bombed" to "it was really an alien crash landing" and the unbelievable evolutions of Sam's and Leda's characters being pretty annoying.  Merril set a trap for us this time, and I fell right into it. 

(I probably wouldn't have fallen into this spiked pit if I had remembered that I read a story by Presslie in 2018 and said it was tedious despite being full of weird sex, violence against women and body horror.  Having a bad memory sometimes leads to suffering!)

**********

Not a good batch of Merril-approved stories this time around, but no knowledge is wasted, and maybe by lifting up a rock and discovering these obscurities I have done a favor to all of you out there who are maintaining a list of anti-capitalist satires.

Amazing Stories, July 1968: Edmond Hamilton, Milton Lesser and Paul Fairman

In our last episode we read a 1926 Weird Tales serial by Edmond Hamilton, "Across Space," and it came to our attention that in 2015 "Across Space" was reprinted in an Italian paperback omnibus along with another Hamilton tale, 1929's "Locked Worlds."  "Locked Worlds" debuted in Amazing Stories Quarterly and was reprinted in Amazing Stories almost forty years later.  Let's take a look at that 1968 issue of Amazing, an issue produced in the brief period when that magazine was edited by Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld fame.

Despite Harrison's protests, publisher Sol Cohen's policy during this difficult time in Amazing's long life was to devote most of Amazing's page count to reprints of stories that had appeared earlier in the magazine (or its sister publication Fantastic) and it looks like this attitude extended even to the covers--the cover illo of this July 1968 issue is a mediocrity that had appeared first on the cover of a German magazine four years earlier!  Is this the behavior of the "World's Leading Science-Fiction Magazine"?  Sad!

Harrison starts the issue off with an editorial about developments in the SF field that I confess I found to be a little vague and all over the place; he tackles many ideas and provides a minimum of supporting evidence (but throws in various personal notes) when I would have preferred he address a small number of ideas directly and clearly.  Harrison suggests the avant garde of SF (he offers his drinking buddy J. G. Ballard as its exemplar) can be described as "subjective," in contrast to old-fashioned SF which is "objective."  A subjective "new wave" story emphasizes not what the story is "objectively" about--what physically happens in the story--but rather what is going on in the "inner space" that is the minds of the story's characters, or the mind of the author writing the story.  He argues that what such Ballard stories as "Terminal Beach" and "End-Game" are truly about is guilt.

Harrison's editorial is not only descriptive, but proscriptive, and he warns against two trends in SF that he does not like: 1) the "vacuous" and "cliched" adventure story full of "standard props" like "blasters" and "starships" that has no plot other than violence and no meaning or wit; and 2) the overly complex or opaque story that uses experimental methods that inhibit rather than facilitate communication and whose writers import from literary fiction a snobbish "ivory tower" attitude.

Look at the frightening example of James Ballard and see what can happen.  His latest works are almost unreadable and incomprehensible, the direct opposite of his earlier magnificent efforts.

I find these kind of controversial statements provocative and exciting, but their value--especially to those of us reading them 55 years later--is severely diminished by the fact that Harrison didn't offer examples of vacuous adventure stories full of violence and didn't specify which Ballard stories are allegedly "unreadable."

More controversy is to be found in the book review column, in which Leroy Tanner attacks Algis Budrys, and in the letters column, in which Ted White attacks Tanner in response to Tanner's earlier attack on Roger Zelazny.  (If you are looking in the pages of Amazing for some brotherly love, Poul Anderson gushes about an Isaac Asimov collection, Asimov's Mysteries.  If you are looking for boredom, there is Brian Aldiss' two pages about a trip to Oslo--Aldiss met a bunch of fun and interesting guys in Norway, but doesn't tell us anything fun or interesting about them.)

Alright, let's look at some of the fiction in this issue of Amazing.  There is actually a new story, one by by "Samuel R. Delaney," a man better known as "Samuel R. Delany," but I think it is a portion of the novel Nova, a novel I read in the period before the birth of this blog and so I am passing it by.  We'll turn our eye to three of the reprints: Hamilton's 1929 "Locked Worlds" and one story each by Milton Lesser and Paul Fairman first published in the 1950s.  (Note that I am reading all three in their 1968 printings--this may have been a mistake, as I ran into quite a lot of typos.)

"Locked Worlds" by Edmond Hamilton (1929)

"Locked Worlds" is the account of Harker, an English professor employed by Northeastern University.  As the story begins, the most famous academic at NEU is the 30-something physicist Adams, a man universally recognized by those in his field as a top innovator, an actual revolutionary, but unpopular for his bitter sarcastic tongue and arrogant nature.  After explaining to us what atoms and electrons are, Harker describes the controversial theory put forward by Adams that sets the story's plot in motion in more ways than one.  These long repetitive science lectures may have some readers longing for the "standard props" and violence that Harrison was complaining about in his editorial (such readers' patience will be rewarded.)

In brief, Adams has discovered that the atoms in our universe all have two sets of electrons that move in opposite directions around the same nucleus and are dissimilar in number.  This means (he says) that all the matter in our universe exists simultaneously in two different worlds that occupy the same space but are invisible to each other, and that atoms of one element in one world are a different element in the other world.  If we can manipulate these electrons and reverse their courses we can travel between these two parallel worlds--the matter that is a person in this world can be sent to the other world, and in its place will appear in this world an equal number of atoms that are rocks or trees or whatever from the other world.

The matter that is the scientists of this world find Adam's theory, known colloquially as the "interlocking atoms" theory, so ludicrous that Adams' formerly high reputation is dashed and he becomes the target of ridicule, so much so that his position as head of the NEU physics dept is threatened.  Adams then disappears, leaving behind a cryptic note.  Weeks later, Adams' assistant Rawlins, the narrator's friend, reveals that he has been examining the apparatus found in Adams' lab and believes Adams transposed himself into the parallel world described in his theory...and probably is planning to inflict a monstrous vengeance on this world whose inhabitants ridiculed him!  Newspaper stories about people in remote areas like Iowa and Suriname reporting the disappearance of geographical features and the appearance in their place of some never-before-seen soil add meat to Rawlins' suspicions.  Rawlins and Harker decide they must follow Adams into that parallel world in order to stop him from launching some kind of attack on our own.

"Locked Worlds" is like 48 pages long, and after a dozen pages of all that sciency background stuff we get to the adventure portion as R & H find themselves in a world of mobile vegetation grazing low-nutrient blue soil under a blinding blue white sun, a world of spider people armed with disintegrator ray guns and anti-grav sleds that fly by managing the sleds' repulsion from and attraction to the planet's magnetic poles.  The college professors don't get to explore on their own much, but are rather provided a tightly controlled guided tour by the spider men who immediately capture them and take them to a city of thousand-foot high conical buildings connected by a highway of cables so the city resembles a huge spider web.  Adams the vengeful scientist has allied himself to the spider people, promised to transport them to Earth--a more fertile world than this infertile blue world--where they can conquer us.  Adams has Rawlins imprisoned in the city's central building, intent on forcing him to act here as on Earth as his assistant, and leaves Harker to the tender mercies of the spider people, who imprison him in a nearby tower, in the same cell as a bird man.

This bird man, Nor-Kan, teaches Harker his speech, and schools him in the history of this world.  The bird people built a high-tech civilization, but generations ago became lazy and so bred from mindless natural spiders a servant race of giant intelligent spider people to do all their work for them.  In due course, the spider people overthrew their masters and took over most of the world--a small remnant of the bird people still holds out in a fortress on the south pole.  (As did the slave race in that last Hamilton story we read, "Across Space," the spider people in "Locked Worlds" remind us of the shoggoths of Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness and are perhaps a warning against becoming reliant on machines and/or the labor of other ethnic groups that might have reason to resent you or covet your position.)

Nor-Kan and Harker escape their cell and climb up the side of the conical skyscraper in which is located the prison and then go hand over hand to the HQ building where are to be found Adams and Rawlins.  While Harker frees Rawlins and makes an abortive effort to capture Adams, Nor-Kan retrieves the flying machine he was piloting when he got captured.  The three barely escape after a bloody fight and fly south to the bird city at the pole, narrowly evading pursuit by spider-creature aircraft.

The bird-people are easily convinced to launch an attack on the spider-city where Adams is almost finished creating the machines to transport spider cities and spider armies to our Earth, because if the eight-legged fiends conquer Earth, they can just go to Earth's South Pole and Adams can transport them behind the impregnable walls of the bird-city.  The last ten pages or so of "Locked Worlds" concern the bird attack on the spider capital, a long naval battle in the air between two air fleets of over a thousand vessels each that climaxes with a hand to hand struggle between Adams and Rawlins on the apex of a conical tower over the controls of a machine that will either transport the spider horde to our Earth or exterminate the entire spider race.  After the two-legs-good, eight-legs-bad ending, Harker and Rawlins return to an Earth that has no idea how close it came to being conquered by ray gun wielding arachnids.

Though it gets off to a slow start with its repetitive lectures about electrons, I'm giving "Locked Worlds" a grade of moderately good.  It has many similarities to "Across Space," which I judged as simply acceptable, but has many advantages over that 1926 story.  It has an interesting villain, for one thing, and he spider city is also better than the subterranean city of "Across Space"'s Martian colonists.  I enjoyed the long sequence covering the escape from the prison and then the aerial chase to the polar city, as well as all the different fun types of high-tech artillery and defense measures with which Hamilton armed the two alien war fleets.  

Like "Across Space," "Locked Worlds" would be reprinted by Haffner Press and by the Italian publisher Edizioni Della Vigna in our own 21st century.

"The Impossible Weapon" by Milton Lesser (1952)

It looks like we've covered four short stories by Lesser on ye olde blogge, "'A' as in Android," "The Graveyard of Space," "Ennui," and "It's Raining Frogs!"; I read his fix-up novel Secret of the Black Planet before I started this blog. According to my notes I thought Secret of the Black Planet "bland and forgettable" and the links above attest to the fact that I was not terribly enthusiastic about those four stories, but maybe this one, "The Impossible Weapon" will be more exciting.  Hope springs eternal, people.

The writing style Lesser employs for "The Impossible Weapon" reminded me of that we find in hard-boiled or noirish detective fiction, bitterly, cynically jokey in a way that exposes human frailty.  You science nerds don't have to worry, though--Lesser manages to integrate some science lectures about atoms and the behavior of light into his text. 

Earth is at war with the Venus-Mars-Ganymede League, a war which started with a nuclear sneak attack on this big blue marble of ours.  Earth's fleet was defeating the enemy fleet when the Leaguers whipped out a new weapon, one that could penetrate any Earth forcefield.  Now that Earth's ships and surface are defenseless, it looks like we may have to sue for peace with the villains of the League.

Stanley Stokes is a "quantum technician," and he thinks he knows how to nullify the League's new weapon.  His fiancé is the daughter of the United Nations' Assistant Secretary of Defense Weapons, Spatial Division, and he gets an interview with this bureaucrat, but the paper pusher considers Stokes' idea to be crazy.  When Stokes gets drunk and complains about her father to his fiancé, she calls off their engagement. 

Stokes goes to a bar frequented by spacemen, meets a big hulking brute of a spacer, a guy who fights in bar brawls on the regular and even rumbles with the cops.  This veteran sailor of the void between the planets, O'Hanrohan (of course this dude is Irish), wants to take the fight to the League, and so is willing to join forces with Stokes in a desperate effort to illegally acquire a space ship and the necessary supplies to test Stokes' theory out beyond Earth orbit, in the teeth of the enemy.  Our heroes hold off the police, get their stolen ship into orbit, and prove that Stokes has developed a way to counteract the League ray weapon, making them heroes and getting Stokes' girl to agree to marry him after all.

A little slight, but a fun story; Lesser's jokes actually work, and the humor and the science lectures don't overwhelm or distract from the plot but actually support it.  Thumbs up for "The Impossible Weapon."  Besides in its two appearances in Amazing, you can find "The Impossible Weapon" in the 2013 collection 'A' as in Android.

"This is My Son" by Paul W. Fairman (1955)

I have little familiarity with Fairman's work; looking at the regular sources on line (isfdb, wikipedia, the internet archive) it seems Fairman was a prolific writer who had his hand in many genres, including science fiction, westerns, detective stories, novelizations of TV sitcoms I have never seen like Bridget Loves Bernie and That Girl and even soft core porn spoofs--isfdb credits Fairman with five titles in the series The Man from S.T.U.D.; two sample titles: The Orgy at Madam Dracula's and Rape is a No-No.  Much of Fairman's work appeared under pen names, including the only thing I think I have read by him, the novel Whom the Gods Would Slay which debuted in Amazing and would be published as a paperback with a Jeff Jones cover.  I liked Whom the Gods Would Slay so maybe I'll like "This is My Son," which debuted in Fantastic, as well. 

It is the 2030s.  John Temple is a young American physicist working on a major contract down in Latin America--this super duper important job requires that he spend six continuous years on the job site and not return home to the USA even once.  He can talk to his wife and kid on the video phone, but that doesn't seem like enough, and again and again his colleagues have to talk him out of breaking the contract and rushing back to his family and thus ruining his career.

Temple, as a college student and early post-grad, wanted more than anything to have a son.  After marrying an attractive woman, Jill, he was very disappointed to find the two of them couldn't seem to have a child, even after two years of trying.  When the Latin American opportunity came up--a six-year job which would yield enough money on completion of the contract to set them up for life--he only took it because he had no child--if he'd had a child he would have been unable to part from it.  Poor Jill realized this and was broken-hearted because she loved her husband for himself, and it was now clear  he primarily saw her as a potential mother.

Amazingly, only a few months after he has arrived in South America, Jill tells Temple she is pregnant.  It is a hard six years, but eventually Temple gets back home to live with his family.  Everybody is happy until by chance Temple learns the truth--John, Jr. is not his biological son!  Wanting Temple to love her, Jill purchased a bespoke artificial baby--an android--designed and conceived in a lab and has been passing it off as their natural son!  Temple calls the kid a monster to his innocent little face and John and Jill immediately separate.  For years Temple lives a life of gambling and womanizing, all the while sending to his estranged family all the money they might need.  Then one day he sees in the paper that his son at private school has been severely injured while rescuing his classmates during a fire.  John, Jr. is a hero, hovering on the brink of death!  Temple rushes to the hospital and gives his son a blood transfusion, so that, in a way, he becomes his true flesh and blood, and we are led to believe that John, Jill, and John, Jr. will live together happily ever after.

A pleasant little human interest story that explores how new technology might affect family life; we might even call this a pro-diversity story that argues that there are all different kinds of families and the traditional way of creating a family is no better than other less typical ways.  Naysayers might argue this is not really a SF story, but a redecorated mainstream story about adoption, the way those same naysayers will tell you space operas and planetary romances and Jack Vance's revenge drama The Demon Princes are just redecorated westerns or detective stories or adventure tales about Western adventurers in the mysterious East.  These analyses are appropriate, but do nothing to detract from a story's literary or entertainment value, and do not stop me from giving "This is My Son" a thumbs up.

I like it, but it seems that after its second appearance here in Amazing that "This is My Son" has never been reprinted.

**********

It is understandable that members of the SF community in 1968, especially professionals like Harry Harrison, would want to read or work for a magazine that printed brand new stories and not a bunch of reprints.  But the three reprints we read today are pretty good!  The Hamilton and Lesser stories are solid classic SF about scientists who invent paradigm-shifting devices and get mixed up in wars in which people discharge a dizzying array of energy weapons at each other.  And the Fairman actually has mainstream literary elements like those we expect a New Wave "inner space" story to have--it is about the psychology and relationships of three people, and about how new technology shifts paradigms not in the realms of war or transportation, but the world of the family.  To me, this seems like a pretty rewarding issue of Amazing.

More 1950s SF in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

  

Across Space by Edmond Hamilton

"They experimented upon me as on a guinea pig, turning different rays on arms and legs to observe their action.  They would not kill me outright for I was too valuable a specimen.  And God, how I prayed for death!"

As you know, Bob, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have taken up a sacred quest--to read at least one story from each issue of the seminal speculative fiction magazine Weird Tales that was printed in the 1930s.  And we have made some progress, as these links below attest:

 1930  1931 1932 1933  1934  1935  1936  1937 

Of course, Weird Tales didn't begin publishing in the 1930s, but in the 1920s.  Let's take a break from the '30s and embark on a brief trip to 1926 and read a serial from Weird Tales that appeared over three different issues behind three different women-in-peril covers, a serial penned by our pal Edmond Hamilton.  Weird Tales is most famous for horror stories and sword and sorcery stories, but the Unique Magazine did offer readers some science fiction stories, like Hamilton's space opera "Crashing Suns" and its sequels and Hamilton's post-apocalyptic tale "Day of Judgement", stories full of mad scientists, space naval battles, aliens, mutants, and so on, and I'm guessing the topic of today's discussion, "Across Space," will be a science fiction tale of some type.  Let's dig in and see!

"Across Space" consists of 15 teeny little chapters, plus prologue and epilogue.  The prologue describes a fat little astronomer in a mountain top observatory who is the first to notice that Mars has stopped orbiting the sun; he then goes home to eat some pie.  This guy has a good perspective on life-work balance.

The story proper, we learn in Chapter 1, is a first-person narrative delivered by an assistant professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley.  The first three chapters foreshadow (for example, the narrator has a dream of being tied to railroad tracks as a train bears down on him) and then announce the disaster Earth is in for--Mars is heading for Earth, certain to destroy us all! 

Hamilton was a working writer who churned out copy in mass quantities to make a living, and as a result rehearsed the same themes and plots again and again.  (H. P. Lovecraft, who saw himself as an artist, often complained that prolific writers like Hamilton and Jack Williamson were wasting or even ruining their talent via such practices.  While Hamilton won the famous nickname of "World Wrecker Hamilton," in his correspondence Lovecraft would call Hamilton such things as "Hectograph Eddie" and "Single-Plot Hamilton.")  And here in "Across Space" we see plot elements and themes we've seen in Hamilton's work before.  Hamilton's space opera stories often entail intelligent agencies moving planets and stars around like so many ocean liners or aircraft carriers--see the aforementioned "Crashing Suns" tales as well as "Thundering Worlds."  These space operas often also include a scene of torture, and "Across Space" includes just such a scene (see epigraph above.)  Hamilton also provided Weird Tales readers a steady diet of stories in which all life on Earth is threatened, including "The Life-Masters," "The Plant Revolt," "The Death Lord" and  "When the World Slept."

In Chapter 4 the narrator talks to a physicist who is a sort of mentor of his; this guy has pieced together clues derived from the newspaper, the behavior of his compass, and knowledge of his disappeared friend, and come up with the theory that the answer to this Mars disaster can be found on Easter Island!  You see, the physicist's pal, an anthropologist, thought the statues on Easter Island were the work of a nonhuman race, and went to the island two years ago to investigate, only to disappear without trace.  And just yesterday a ship reported that there was a volcanic eruption on Easter Island, which the physicist regards as unlikely.  

In Chapter 5 the physicist and the chemist are on the U. S. Navy's most advanced bomber seaplane, flying to Easter Island in hopes of figuring out what is going on and saving the world!  On the radio they listen to reports to how the common man is responding to knowledge that the world is about to be destroyed.  He's not responding well!  In India they are resorting to human sacrifice!  In Africa the blacks are massacring the whites and each other!  Chicago is in flames, and New York is one big party, the people having given themselves over to "unbridled license."

In Chapter 6 our heroes investigate Easter Island at night; what the sailors thought was a volcanic eruption is in fact a red beam of light a half-mile across that for a few minutes each night shoots up from the island's extinct volcano towards Mars--this must be what is drawing Mars to Earth!  As the shaft of crimson energy glows, a sort of chanting can be heard from the volcano crater!  In Chapter 7, twenty-four hours later, the chemist and physicist have scaled the volcano to get a closer look at the nightly fireworks, and are captured by skinny pale-skinned men with bat wings who carry them down into the volcano.  This cliffhanger concludes the September installment of "Across Space."

Chapters 8 through 13 grace the October issue.  In chapters 8 and 9 we get a sort of travelogue as the two captive scientists are conducted down a huge elevator to a largely deserted subterranean city and put into a cell by the white bat-people, to be guarded by members of their slave race of slimy headless tentacle-armed beastmen.  Already in the cell is the aforementioned MIA anthropologist, and in Chapters 10 through 12 this broken man, three of whose limbs the bat-fiends have burned off in their ray gun experiments, explains his torturers' origin (they are the descendants of Martian colonists who fled tyranny on a high-tech Mars when humans were mere apemen), history (they lived on a Pacific continent until it sank beneath the waves--only Easter Island, the mountain where they had erected statues of their kings, remained above the surface--and then retired to this city that they had built in a huge cavern) and current operations (over the centuries, life underground lead to low fertility, so now the colonists want to return to the surface, and have made friends with their brothers on Mars and figured out how to channel the Earth's magnetism and use it to draw Mars here so they will the necessary numbers to overwhelm us natives.)  In his copious free time the anthropologist has been puzzling out a way to save the Earth, and Chapter 13 foreshadows the way the characters will pull our bacon out of the fire in the third and final installment in November.

That November issue's chapters 14 and 15 deliver readers the tragedy and triumph of the story's climax.  The Martian colonists' slave race are the products of what we might call genetic engineering--they are totally artificial life, almost mindless and controlled by telepathy, reminding us of the shoggoths of Lovecraft's 1931 At The Mountains of Madness.  The anthropologist has over his months of captivity been experimenting with mentally influencing the slaves himself, and when all three men focus their thoughts on their guards they find themselves able to direct the slimy robotic creatures to set them free.  The three scientists (the legless anthropologist has to be carried) sneak back through the empty city--all the Martians, save two guarding the ray projector, are attending services at their temple--to the surface and the magnetic ray control center.  The one-armed anthropologist is killed in the fight, but our heroes take the control center.  The physicist sends the chemist ahead, out of the volcano, ostensibly to get help from the pilot of the U. S. Navy bomber, and then he activates--at full power!--the green ray that pushes Mars away from Earth (the bat people were going to use this ray to slow the descent of Mars once it got close.)  The bat-people come after him, but the physicist then activates both red and green rays--crossing the streams!--causing an explosion that kills him and every one of the Martian colonists.  Earth is now Martian-free!

In the epilogue we learn that Mars is now a moon of Jupiter, and that there is a colossal statue of the physicist at the mouth of San Francisco Bay.  One presumes that in the woke future, this statue, a monument to the man who committed genocide against the people of Mars in an act of human supremacy, will be torn down after the San Francisco city council has called for a retroactive ceasefire between Earth and Mars.  This is your reminder to take time out to cherish any work of art you care about, because there is no telling when it will be unexpectedly destroyed. 

"Across Space" is an acceptable entertainment spiced up with generous portions of speculative science and of gruesome horror.  "Across Space" was reprinted in the first volume of Haffner Press's The Collected Edmond Hamilton in 2009 and in 2015 our Italian friends published it in a trade paperback with a lamentable cover along with Hamilton's 1929 story "Locked Worlds."

**********

Stick around for more Edmond Hamilton and more Weird Tales here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Weird Tales, Aug 1938: H T Rich, M W Wellman and A Derleth

Our exploration of 1930s Weird Tales slithers onwards.  Today, the August 1938 issue.  This number includes a reprint of a 1921 H. P. Lovecraft story we've already read, "The Tree," and installments of serials by Edmond Hamilton and Manly Wade Wellman we will probably read some day.  Today we look into an included short story by Wellman that, unlike the serial, appears under his real name (the serial is credited to a pseudonym) and one by Lovecraft correspondent and co-founder of Arkham House August Derleth,  But first, a story by H. Thompson Rich, a writer with whom we are not familiar who has 17 short story credits at isfdb; today's story, "Green Horror," seems to have come late in his writing career, being the second to last story listed.  Rich, like Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, and your humble blogger, was born in New Jersey, but let's not hold that against him.

"Green Horror" by H. Thompson Rich 

New York lawyer Herbert Ames is in love with slim brunette Joan Kendall, so when he gets an urgent letter from her he rushes down to southern Georgia, to the edge of the "Okifenokee" swamp, where she and her father, a biologist experimenting with mutations, have been staying.  He finds Joan and the "negro" servant Peter on edge, and the once robust Dr. Kendall frail and gray.  Joan thinks the ghost of the previous resident of the house, Miles Denniston, a man with a bad reputation, is to blame, that this ghost has a malign influence on pops.  Of course, Ames doesn't believe in ghosts.  At dinner Kendall describes his work; he is trying to discover "the common denominator between life and death" and believes he has succeeded!  First, he studied the protoplasm of slime molds, plentiful in this swamp, and then he studied the ectoplasm of "spirit emanation," plentiful in this house!  Having isolated the "single basic principle" that protoplasm and ectoplasm share, Kendall then combined them to create "a mutation that is a being neither alive nor dead!"  Of course, Ames just thinks the father of the woman he loves is insane.

In the evening, Ames spies on the scientist in his greenhouse and actually sees the ghost of Denniston!  At night everyone hears a scream and in the morning Peter has vanished.  The police are summoned, and remark that servants are always disappearing from this house.  

Ames spies some more the next evening, and gets a real eyeful this time as the ghost hypnotizes Joan and tries to feed her to the giant blob monster living in the chamber under the greenhouse.  By sheer force of will, Ames snaps Joan and her dad out of the ghost's spell and drags them back to the house; for some reason neither the ghost nor the blob monster chases them, and behind them they hear the greenhouse collapse.  

The next day they learn that the ghost has somehow been laid to rest and the blob monster has died in the swamp.  I think we are expected to think the souls of the people whose bodies went into the creation of the blob monster directed the monster to drag the ghost down to hell with them.  (This plot, thus, has similarities to Clark Ashton Smith's "The Garden of Adompha," which appeared in the April 1938 issue of Weird Tales.) 

This story is terrible.  The writing is bad on the level of the individual sentence and the individual paragraph, the plot structure and pacing stink, the heroes do little to resolve the plot, there are loose ends and plot holes, and the story's foundational gimmicks--the search for a common denominator between life and death and a ghost who wants to create a blob monster--are weak on their own and even weaker when paired together.  

Very bad!  New Jersey has another crime to answer for!

You won't be surprised to hear that isfdb has no record of "Green Horror" being reprinted.

"Dead Dog" by Manly Wade Wellman 

We recently read a story by E. Hoffman Price that appealed to Westerners' fascination with the Islamic world; well here we have a story that exploits white people's interest in and fear of black Africa.  "Dead Dog" is set in Portuguese West Africa, where Wellman was born and spent his early childhood, and has an epigraph that purports to be an Umbundu proverb.

Father Lassiter is a Belgian missionary.  An African chief whose tribe has rebelled against the Portuguese comes to Lassiter to report that he will surrender to Captain Rodriguez, a famously ruthless rules-bending guy who is in charge of crushing the rebellion.  The chief leaves with Lassiter his huge black dog, whose name is the Umbundu word for revenge.   Lassiter tries to get Rodriguez to go easy on the chief, but as the rebel leader predicted, Rodriguez's idea of justice is a harsh one--he chops off the chief's head and has it delivered to Lassiter!  The outwardly healthy dog dies a few hours later.

A few months later Lassiter gets a desperate summons from Rodriguez, and rushes through the night to the fort.  The distressed captain tells of how for three nights running he has been haunted by a huge black dog, woken to find it at the window the first night, then on the second in his locked room, and finally on the third right beside him!  Is it a dream, or black magic?  What will happen tonight, the fourth night?  Lassiter stays in the fort that night, and is thus on the scene when Captain Rodriguez meets his horrible fate.

A sort of obvious story, but well-told.  I like it.  Like Price's "Saladin's Throne Rug," "Dead Dog" characterizes the culture of the non-white alien "other" as steeped in esoteric knowledge and reprehensible practices, but their foulest deeds are a reaction to mistreatment at the hands of whites.  "Dead Dog" can be found in Wellman collections and the various editions of Michel Parry's The Hounds of Hell.

"Three Gentlemen in Black" by August Derleth

August Derleth's body of work is quite uneven, and here at MPorcius Fiction Log we have read quite a few mediocrities and annoying failures birthed from his pen.  Fortunately, "Three Gentlemen in Black" is actually a pretty good crime/ghost story with an interesting character at its center.  

Orto Harper has just moved into a house in the English countryside; the place is oddly familiar, as if he has been there before, but he can't quite place it.  Orto had a special reason to move to the country--to have a good alibi for when his uncle, Alexander, takes the poison pill Orto has hidden among Unc's supply of heart pills to be taken daily!  Orto expects to thusly inherit Alexander's great wealth as well as exact revenge for the abuse he suffered from Alexander, the man who raised him after his father committed suicide.  As we get to know Orto better, we learn why Alexander treated him so roughly: Orto is an evil man, and the son of an evil man, one who savors his own evil, takes pleasure in contemplating and committing foul deeds.  

Through dreams, the appearance of ghosts, and Orto's inquiries in the nearby village, we readers learn more about Orto's past and Orto recalls his connection to this country estate--it is the scene of a murder his father committed, a murder with some resemblance to the murder Orto himself is committing.  Dad didn't enjoy the fruits of his crime, and the same supernatural agency that wrought a rough justice on his father will do the same to Orto before the story is over.

Derleth does a creditable job with his depiction of the evil Orto and with all the story's supernatural elements.  Thumbs up for "Three Gentlemen in Black."

"Three Gentlemen in Black" would be reprinted in several Derleth collections, starting with the 1941 Arkham House collection Someone in the Dark, and some anthologies, including Vic Ghidalia's 1974 Gooseflesh! and 1993's 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg.

**********

Mad scientists, blob monsters, scary black people getting revenge on villainous white people, ferocious canines, murderers, and more ghosts than you can shake a copy of the Necronomicon at--this is what Weird Tales is all about.  And there is more where that came from; just stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log.

  

Weird Tales, July 1938: D H Keller, C A Smith and E H Price

We've already read two stories from the July 1938 issue of Weird Tales, "He That Hath Wings" by Edmond Hamilton and "Return to the Sabbath" by Robert Bloch, and the issue includes work by Henry Kuttner (an Elak story) and Manly Wade Wellman (an episode of a serial) that we plan to read someday.  But there are still more stories I believe worth our attention in this issue, tales by David H. Keller, Clark Ashton Smith, and E. Hoffman Price, and today we come to grips with them.

"Dust in the House" by David H. Keller (1938)  

This is one of those stories about a person who has to spend a night in a haunted house in order to gain an inheritance.  Our hero has been living in Europe, where he knew some woman named Lilith Lameraux--Lameraux repeatedly tried to murder him, but he was witty enough to escape injury.  Today he is back in New York because he is the only heir of his great-grandfather whom the family's lawyers could find.  Exactly one hundred years ago, great-grandpa locked up the big family house, filled out a will, and then killed himself.  The will directs that for one hundred years the house will remain sealed; when that period has passed, his descendants must spend a night in the house--those who fulfill this requirement must then destroy the house and all its furniture, then sell the land and divide the proceeds.  The lawyer in charge of executing these ridiculous strictures tells our dude that he thinks it likely there is another living descendant of great-grandpa, a cousin of the male lead whom he can't find, a woman named Lilith Lameraux!

The main character is guided by the lawyer through the house to the dining room in which the will demands he spend the twelve hours spanning from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM.  Most of the house buried under inches of dust (the lawyer has anticipated this and wears "rubbers") but the dining room is spic and span, bereft of the dust Keller compares to the dunes of the Sahara.  What it lacks in dust it makes up for in dead bodies and ealaborate weaponry--seated at the table are two skeletal mummies, one of a man, one of a woman, and buried in the male corpse is a dagger with a bright steel blade and an ivory handle carved into the shape of a nude woman!

The lawyer leaves and the heir waits, eating sandwiches and drinking whisky in the same room with the century-old corpses.  Eventually Lilith Lameraux appears and uses hypnotism, or something, to get him to commit suicide with the dagger.  The final scenes of the story depict LL talking to the lawyer, explaining that she used a secret passage originating in the house next door to tidy up the dining room and then confront her cousin, who, she implies, broke her heart over in Europe.  (In Europe people are always having love affairs with their cousins.)  

This story is pretty bad.  For one thing it is clumsily written.  More importantly, almost everything in "Dust in the House" is hard to believe, and there are lots of what I am considering loose ends (who are the two dead bodies?  Why did great-grandpa set up this elaborate will?)  The main character lacks personality (the male heir and the lead lawyer also lack names) and the behavior and motivations of all the characters are often inexplicable.  The story also feels long and tedious; for example, many words are expended describing the male lead's thoughts as he considers or is beguiled into suicide, and it is not suspenseful, but rather mind-numbingly boring.

It is possible the story is meant partially or primarily to be a joke--Lilith Lameraux is a neat freak who uses her womanly charms to convince the lawyer not to sic the cops on her and the lawyer is a nervous wreck who keeps taking nitroglycerine pills because his heart might not be able to take all the shocks of this adventure--but the jokes are not funny and of course they undermine any thrills and chills we might hope to get from a story about a woman scorned who turns murderous and that features gruesome dead bodies.    

Thumbs down for "Dust in the House."  The story would be reprinted in the Keller collections The Folsom Flint and Other Curious Tales and Keller Memento.  For more MPorcius coverage of Keller's work, click these links:

"The Thing in the Cellar" 

"The Seeds of Death"  

"The Dead Woman"

"The Golden Bough"

"The Typewriter"   

"The Last Magician"

"Tiger Cat"

"Valley of Bones"

"Mother of Toads" by Clark Ashton Smith (1938)

A note at isfdb tells us that the first publication of "Mother of Toads" here in Weird Tales had some sexual content removed, but we cheapos are in luck because the internet archive has a scan of the 1988 chapbook that prints a restored version of the story.  Today's Keller and Price stories we are reading in the scan of the July '38 ish of WT, but we'll read "Mother of Toads" in that Reagan-era chapbook because we want maximum sex--I mean a text as close as possible to the intentions of esteemed top weirdie Clark Ashton Smith.  

"Mother of Toads" is a monument to fatphobia!  And a sex-swapped depiction of date rape!  Ripped from today's headlines, right?

Set in Smith's fictional French province, Averoigne, what we have here is the sad tale of Pierre, an apprentice to an apothecary.  Pierre has been sent to collect a vial of some substance or other for his master from the obese witch who lives by the swamp outside the village.  This witch, whose monstrously fat body Smith describes at some length, is known as The Mother of Toads among the local people because an unusually large number of unusually large toads are always hanging around her hut and because she sort of looks a little like a big toad, what with her bulging eyes and sickly white flesh and so forth.  It is also known that she has a crush on the apprentice, and as the story begins she is trying to seduce Pierre.  Pierre resists her aggressive approaches, but accepts some wine.  Of course the wine has a potion in it that arouses Pierre sexually and affects his sight and brain so that he is attracted to the witch and has sex with her.

In the morning the potion has worn off and Pierre tries to sneak off while the witch sleeps, but the thickest fog he has ever seen and an army of toads that are capable of attacking him like "a monstrous hail" and even "a surging solid wave that towered over his [Pierre's] head" drives him back to the hut.  When he rejects the witch's offer of another dose of aphrodisiac wine and tries to flee the scene, the toads, and the witch, apparently a giant toad herself, drown Pierre under their disgusting bodies.

This story isn't bad, but feels a little simple and slight compared to many of Smith's other stories, and it is not particularly well-constructed.  For example, the climactic scene of Pierre running through the foggy swamp, pursued and attacked by thousands of toads, isn't that different than the scene in the middle of the story about him being chased through a foggy swamp pursued and attacked by thousands of toads.  I'm judging "Mother of Toads" just "OK."  

"Mother of Toads" is of course available in a host of Smith collections and horror anthologies in English and several other tongues, with or without sexually provocative/kind of gross cover art.

(We've been reading lots of women-force-themselves-on-men stories lately, haven't we?  There was Richard Matheson's "Lover When You're Near Me," then Robert Bloch's "I Kiss Your Shadow" and now this one, and even Charles L. Grant's execrable "The Last and Dreadful Hour" has that childish seduction scene.  And, you know, if we expand our criteria a little we'll find that almost everything we've read this month has been about how women are a menace to men.  Sorry, ladies!)

"Saladin's Throne Rug" by E. Hoffman Price (1927)

The July '38 issue's Weird Story Reprint is E. Hoffman Price's "Saladin's Throne Rug," which first appeared in Weird Tales in 1927.  Wasn't our last Price story about oriental rugs?  This guy loves oriental rugs!  A sophisticated man of taste!  Johnathan Maberry and Kaye Lynne Booth included "Saladin's Throne Rug" in a recent volume entitled Weird Tales: Best of the Early Years: 1926-27 so maybe we can cherish hopes of appending the "positive reviews" tag to this blog post after all!

     
Our narrator begins his story with a discussion of the lengths true lovers of oriental rugs will go in pursuit of their passion, and then describes his discovery of a fragment of a particularly ancient and magnificent rug in a Chicago auction house and his desperate, and ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to secure it at the auction.  This part of the story is very fun and engaging--Price's writing succeeds in transmitting to the reader the passion of the collector and the excitement of the auction.

Ilderim Shirkuh bin Ayyub is the "Moslem" who wins the rug out from under the narrator, a man who looks like "a Kurd whom civilization had not robbed of his alert predatory air and desert gauntness."  He befriends the narrator and invites him over to his mansion to talk to him about how he has been searching the Near East, Europe and America for this half of a rug for years.  Bin Ayyub is a descendent of Saladin himself, and the fragment he has finally secured is the missing piece of the rug that adorned his esteemed ancestor's throne.  Finally the rug can be restored to its former glory!

Our narrator spends quite an afternoon at the mansion.  He is served coffee by bin Ayyub's "negro" servant, the bitter black brew spiced with a powerful concoction of "countless myriads of blossoms and herbs, spices and gums...."  He catches a glimpse of bin Ayyub's mistress, "a Transcaucasian, a Gurjestani, the most flawlessly lovely of all Oriental women."  And he receives an awesome gift from bin Ayyub, a rug of such value he could never have afforded to buy it himself, a sort of consolation prize.

That evening the narrator tells a friend about his adventure at bin Ayyub's mansion, and two weeks later he learns that his unscrupulous pal has contrived to acquire through subterfuge the now-restored rug which covered Saladin's throne!  This jerk off took advantage of the ignorance and poor taste of the beautiful Gurjestani girl, trading her a flashier but far inferior rug for the throne rug.  (Bin Ayyub never told her how important the throne rug was--she's just a woman, after all, you don't keep them around for conversation purposes!)  The narrator seizes the throne rug and rushes to the mansion with it, but not fast enough to avert a tragedy!

Thumbs up for this orientalist tale that convincingly depicts the experience of being an avid collector and exploits the fascination of Westerners with the exotic culture of the Muslim Near East, its decadence and its barbarisms, its beauties and its cruelties.  If you are writing your master's thesis on orientalism in American pulp fiction this is a story you gotta check out, bucko.  

**********

 

The Keller is an embarrassment, and the Smith is a weaker sample of his generally fine work, but the Price is quite good.  This is a good issue of Farnsworth Wright's magazine, which even includes in the letters column a missive from Henry Kuttner, bragging that he had a chance to visit Clark Ashton Smith's house and see Smith's sculpture, paintings, and his scary cat!