Merril-approved 1958 stories by "Helen Clarkson," Mark Clifton, Mildred Clingerman and Theodore R. Cogswell

As you know, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are reading stories that Judith Merril included on a list at the end of 1959's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction And Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume headed "Honorable Mentions."  These stories, which were published in 1958, are listed alphabetically by author, and today we are finishing up the "C"s, though one of those "C"s turns out out be an "M" travelling incognito.

"The Last Day" by Helen McCoy (as by "Helen Clarkson")

Helen McCoy was a successful mystery writer who published this SF story under a pen name in the same issue of Satellite that hosted the original version of Murray Leinster's War with the Gizmos, which itself appeared under a different name, "The Strange Invasion."  "The Last Day" would be reprinted in 1994 in New Eves: Science Fiction About the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow; when that anthology was republished in a shortened version in 2010, "The Last Day" was one of the survivors.  (There must be some kind of story behind this shortened edition, as the first edition has three credited editors but only one of those people is listed on the short edition.)  It looks like "The Last Day" was expanded into a novel of the same name printed in 1959; a lot of expansion must have been required, as this thing is only five pages here in Satellite, and those five pages are more than sufficient.

"The Last Day" is like a mainstream story, with lots of descriptions of the wind and the clouds and birds and flowers, as well as several Biblical references.  (Merril is always working to blur the distinctions between mainstream and genre literature, and/or point out how arbitrary those boundaries are.)  The narrator is a woman in some coastal New England fishing town.  Near the town is a hollow which, by some freak of geography, is never windy.  A nuclear war breaks out, apparently destroying civilization, but this somewhat secluded town survives the initial cataclysm.  Of course the story doesn't blame the war on the Soviet Union, but on all of mankind, the way sophisticated people don't condemn burglars and muggers for their trespasses, but blame "society."  The people of the little town gradually die of radiation poisoning; the local animals precede them.  The narrator is the last to die, and before she expires she visits the windless hollow, where a bird has survived because the windborne radiation has not reached it yet.

This feels like the kind of story you are supposed to take seriously because of the subject matter, but the thing is bland and unremarkable.  The characters don't do anything, nobody has any personality, and the author doesn't say anything new or interesting--she knows you know you are expected to like birds and flowers and dislike atomic bombs, and expects you to feel the appropriate sadness when she tells you the atomic bombs have killed all the birds and the flowers.  "The Last Day" comes off as pretentious, lazy and obvious.   

Thumbs down.

"Remembrance and Reflection" by Mark Clifton  

Last year, based on Merril's recommendation, I read Clifton's "Clerical Error" and liked it, and of course Barry Malzberg, our hero, is always telling people that Clifton is awesome, so we have reason to hope we'll like "Remembrance and Reflection."

isfdb tells us that "Remembrance and Reflection" is the fourth in a series, and this story is indeed full of references to and summaries of the earlier three stories; probably I should have skipped this one with the idea of perhaps reading all these stories in order some day, as my ignorance of the earlier installments almost certainly diminishes my appreciation of this one; e. g., in this piece, two characters from the earlier stories declare their intention to wed, and I had little idea if I should be happy for them or surprised or  take their relationship as a joke or predict it would fail or whatever.

Ralph Kennedy is the personnel director at some manufacturing company that sells electronic to the government.  The first few pages of the story are a jocular dialogue between Ralphie boy and his secretary that set the story's tone and expose us to its pro-risk, anti-overregulation ethos.  Government and big business are too bureaucratic and, by over-emphasizing safety and discipline, stifle the creativity of employees and the development of new ideas.  Ralph is the kind of guy who likes to bend the rules, to think outside the box.  It seems that his adventurous and skillful management of employees who have psychic powers has, in those three previous stories, led to the development of an anti-grav device as well as joining the minds of five different guys into a collective consciousness; this collective has proven be be a singularly efficient manager of production, empowering the firm to increase output without lowering quality or harming worker morale.

The plot of this story involves a Colonel Logart of the Pentagon.  He swings by the factory and tries to hire the psykers essential to Ralph's successes at the company away from the firm and into direct government employment on a big new project.  There is a lot of verbal sparring between Logart and Ralph, who is our narrator, that features Ralph's analysis of the colonel's psychology and of the colonel's strategies in trying to manipulate Ralph and Ralph's colleagues.  When Logart has no luck stealing the psykers away, the Pentagon decides that instead of the government directly running the project, the taxpayers will hire Ralph's company to take on the critical operation.  This major public work is the design, construction and launch of Earth's first manned spacecraft, a feat the Pentagon feels can only succeed if the ship is propelled by those anti-grav devices only Ralph's psykers can build and crewed by those five guys who share a collective consciousness.  To keep the project on track, Logart resigns his commission and becomes a project manager at Ralph's firm.

The third part of the story covers the space ship project, how Logart and Ralph get the whole thing up and running.  The twist ending, of which Clifton provides plenty of foreshadowing throughout the story, is that Logart himself is a psyker whose mental powers make it easy for him to manipulate people--that is how he got the Pentagon, Congress, Ralph and Ralph's colleagues to sign on to the costly spaceship scheme--and that Logart never had any intention of leaving the space ship under the control of the United States government.  Logart and the various psychics steal the ship and, bringing their wives along with them, escape off into space to start a new society somewhere out there.

While "Remembrance and Reflection" is heavy on exposition and philosophical discussion, I still kind of like it.  The philosophical stuff is interesting and I am more or less in sympathy with Clifton's apparent ideology--besides the skepticism of government and the stuff about too much regulation and an obsession with safety stifling innovation, there is also talk of how liberal societies like the United States, under the pressure of conflict with tyrannical societies like the Soviet Union, run the risk of coming to resemble those societies, plus a pervasive theme of how the thinking of individuals is severely circumscribed by their education, by the milieu in which they were brought up (their "framework") and it is difficult for a person to understand people whose minds inhabit a different "framework."  The parts of the story actually dealing with the things Logart and Ralph have to do to get the space ship built are entertaining and illustrate this "framework" theme.  I also like that Ralph, whom we readers expect to be the hero, and is an outside the box thinker who is supposedly an expert in understanding and managing people, is outwitted by Logart, who is even an even more independent, framework-busting thinker and even better at figuring people out and controlling them.

Not bad.  "Remembrance and Reflection," along with the earlier Ralph Kennedy short stories, would be reprinted in a 1980 Clifton collection edited by our beloved Barry Malzberg and workaholic anthologist Martin H. Greenberg as well as a Clifton collection printed forty years later in 2020.     

"The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak" by Mildred Clingerman

We often say that SF stories are wish fulfillment fantasies--we just said it about Raymond F. Jones' "The Gardener," in which a shy nerd not only makes friends with a big-man-on-campus jock but then learns he is a member of a superior race and his fellow supermen are always there watching over him.  Today we are saying that "The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak" is a wish fulfillment fantasy not for friendless nerds, but for women--in Mildred Clingerman's story a woman succeeds in love and in life because she smokes cigarettes and spent her savings on fancy clothes.

Mavis O'Hanlon has been engaged to bank owner Hubert Lotzenheiser for six years.  Mavis isn't crazy about Hubert, who is always trying to get her to stop smoking and to teach her self-discipline--Mavis is "chicken-hearted" and Hubert thinks she needs "fibering up."  Ironically, the reason Mavis is still engaged to Hubert is because she is timid--if she was brave she would call off the engagement.

A week before the wedding Mavis blows most of her savings on the purchase of an expensive green cloak of Victorian style that she admits to herself she is too shy to wear in public.  Then she looks for her favorite used bookstore.  Mavis loves late nineteenth-century travelogues and journals written by women--she thinks the late Victorian period was a happier time than today, when everybody is in a hurry and expected to work hard; Mavis thinks that she would fit in better in the 1860s or 1870s, that back then "there was room enough in the world for all kinds of people--the inefficient, the chicken-hearted...."  (I'm not sure if Clingerman believes this herself, or is just providing further evidence that Mavis is a person who has some faults.)  Mavis' favorite bookstore is a little place that she sometimes can't find, and, when she does find it, seems to have a different clerk behind the counter every time she visits.

Today she finds the store, and on the shelves the journal of an American woman describing her travels with friends in Germany in 1877.  When the clerk sees the book he has an amazing story to tell--he was travelling with the journal writer on the very trip described in the book when he looked into a German bookstore and was transported to this 20th-century American bookstore while reading a book of fiction about the future!  He has been stuck here in this little store for three days, and is getting cold and hungry, as he has no money and finds the city beyond the bookstore's front door terrifying.  He thinks that maybe he can return to his own time by reading this journal Mavis has found, in which he himself is mentioned.

The 19th-century man is grateful when Mavis gives him her new green cloak to wear in hopes it will warm him up.  Furthermore, when he sees Mavis whip out her cigs and start puffing away, he is astounded by her bravery.  She must be one of the bold "New Women" he reads about in those stories of the future of which he is so fond!  Her even suggests Mavis come back to the 19th century with him and marry him.  Mavis refuses, and runs off to get some food for the time traveler, but when she returns he, and her green cloak, are gone.

This adventure has fibered her up, and she plans to dump Hubert.  But before she can do so, a man who looks like the time traveller shows up at her place.  He says he is that Victorian guy's great-grandson, and in his great-grandfather's will were instructions to find Mavis and meet her on this date and give her back the green cloak.  Mavis and this guy run off to get married without even telling Hubert.  (I think the kids would call this "ghosting.")

Now, maybe you aren't so sure the late Victorian era was a paradise for women compared to the middle of the 20th century, and perhaps you even doubt that smoking cigarettes and throwing your money around recklessly is a capital idea.  Still, "The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak" is a pretty well-constructed and well-written filler story.  Maybe 2024 SF readers will love it for having a female protagonist, or maybe they will condemn it because it portrays a woman whose primary goals in life are bagging a husband and spending money.  Either way, this story is a bazillion times better than McCoy's "The Last Day," because the characters have personalities and the protagonist makes decisions and overcomes obstacles and changes as a person.       

In the 1950s and '60s, "The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak" would be reprinted in European editions of F&SF and Venture, F&SF's sister publication, as well as in the Clingerman collection A Cupful of Space, which has a sort of scary Powers cover.  (This story is a sort of light entertainment, but maybe other stories in the book are disturbing?)  In the 21st century "The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak" would reappear in the Hank Davis anthology As Time Goes By and a big (and apparently comprehensive) Clingerman collection, The Clingerman Files.  

"Thimgs" by Theodore R. Cogswell

Uh oh.  As I've told you many times, I generally avoid absurdist and satirical stories, and it looks like the only time "Thimgs" has been anthologized in English is in the Alan Dean Foster and Martin H. Greenberg volume Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves, which is promoted as "A Very Silly Collection of Funny Fantasies."  Well, we're trying this one on for size anyway...after all, it is only like ten pages.

The story stars a fat jerk, Blotz, who runs a fraudulent mail-order private eye business.  People hire him to help them find lost family members or whatever, and he takes their money and claims to be doing the investigating for which he has been paid, when really he is just sitting around his office listening to horror stories on the radio and drinking heavily.  To handle the correspondence he has as a secretary a woman who is crippled by numerous birth defects.

In a sort of meta SF joke about the often-seen trope in fiction of an odd little shop that disappears (like the book shops in the Clingerman story we just read), a radio program about just such a shop inspires Blotz to send his hunchbacked near-sighted secretary out on her crutches to buy something at a curio shop to send to one of his clients.  She comes back with an odd little doodad with a knob.  When the secretary twists the knob she vanishes but soon returns, transformed into a beautiful, healthy woman!

Blotz starts groping the secretary and she pushes him away.  He starts to have a heart attack and grabs the thingmajig and turns the knob, and is transported to a room full of computers and recording devices manned (or staffed, you know, in feminist) by a mad scientist type guy.  This guy implies that his facility is one component of the secret control apparatus of the universe that does what, in conventional conceptions of religion, God does, judge people upon death and reward the good and punish the wicked, for example.  This guy's name is "Guardian" and his specific job is to record people's lives on tapes, or I guess to run the tapes, since it seems like people's lives are predetermined and already on the tapes--whatever; Cogswell's story doesn't make a lot of internal sense.  The gizmo the secretary found is a key that allows a mortal to request edits to the rest of his or her tape.  The secretary had hers edited to make her body healthy.  

Blotz wants his tape edited so he is rich and healthy and good looking.  The Guardian says that doing so would be pointless as only the future can be edited, not the past, and Blotz's fatal heart attack has already begun and he only has like 90 seconds of future ahead of him.  Blotz somehow convinces the Guardian to start splicing the Blotz tape onto other tapes, so he can continue living indefinitely, and to make sure all of the tapes spliced onto his life be those of rich men.  But the joke is on Blotz, because the Guardian keeps splicing onto Botz's tape brief lengths of tape from the final terrifying and/or painful moments of men of wealth who got killed in fights, accidents, etc.

"Thimgs" is contrived and nonsensical, and is neither funny nor interesting.  Thumbs down!

If you want to read this clunker yourself (it seems that Anthony Boucher, Judith Merril, and Fred Pohl like it, and I can't think of any reason why you should listen to me instead of them) you can find it in the 1962 Cogswell collection The Wall Around the World, which has a "double introduction" from Messrs. Boucher and Pohl.  I suggest getting the 1974 edition, which has an awesome cover painting by John Schoenherr that was also used for multiple editions of Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night.

**********

It is easy to find fault with the Clifton and Clingerman stories, but they more or less succeed in what they are trying to accomplish and I don't feel like I wasted my time reading them.  I certainly feel I wasted my time with McCloy's lame effort at a tearjerker and Cogswell's wacky fat-fraud-goes-to-hell joke story, but I have to acknowledge that my main objection to them is to their authors' chosen goals--maybe people who crack open SF magazines looking for maudlin misanthropic stories about how humanity has doomed the flowers and birdies and madcap absurdist parodies of genre literature will think that McCloy and Cogswell have hit the nail on the head.

When next we meet, more 1950s SF.

Weird Tales Project: 1938

 

How it started: I decided to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales published in the 1930s.  How it's going: I can now report I have read a story in each issue from the years 1930 through 1938!  See the list of stories from 1938 I read below, complete with links to my commentary about each!  Nota bene: If I go back to read an additional piece of 1938 Weird Tales fiction I will add it to the list with a parenthetical note.  Finally: Preceding the list proper are links to the other nine blog posts chronicling this adventure among the pages of one of the most important of the beloved pulps.   

1930  1931 1932 1933  1934  1935  1936  1937  ----  1939  

January

"The Witch's Mark" by Dorothy Quick

"The House of Living Music" by Edmond Hamilton

"Valley of Bones" by David H. Keller 

February

"The Diary of Alonzo Typer" by H. P. Lovecraft

"World's End" by Henry Kuttner

"The Goddess Awakes" by Clifford Ball

"The Strangling Hands" by M. G. Moretti

"From Beyond" by H. P. Lovecraft

March

"The Shadow on the Screen" by Henry Kuttner

"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" by H. P. Lovecraft 

"The Thing on the Floor" by Thorp McClusky

"The Head in the Window" by Wilhelm von Scholz

"The Girl from Samarcand" by E. Hoffmann Price

"Guarded" by Merle Prout

April

"The Eyes of the Mummy" by Robert Bloch

"The Devil Deals" by Carl Jacobi

"The Garden of Adompha" by Clark Ashton Smith

"The House of Ecstasy" by Ralph Milne Farley

May

"Pigeons from Hell" by Robert E. Howard

"The Isle of the Sleeper" by Edmond Hamilton

"The Secret of the Vault" by J. Wesley Rosenquest

June

"Slave of the Flames" by Robert Bloch

July

"He That Hath Wings" by Edmond Hamilton 

"Return to the Sabbath" by Robert Bloch

"Dust in the House" by David H. Keller

"Mother of Toads" by Clark Ashton Smith

"Saladin's Throne Rug" by E. Hoffman Price

"Spawn of Dagon" by Henry Kuttner

August

"The Tree" by H. P. Lovecraft

"Green Horror" by H. Thompson Rich

"Dead Dog" by Manly Wade Wellman

"Three Gentlemen in Black" by August Derleth

"The Fire Princess" by Edmond Hamilton

September

"The Mandarin's Canaries" by Robert Bloch

"The Magic Mirror" by Algernon Blackwood

"A Thunder of Trumpets" by Robert E. Howard and Frank Thurston Torbett

"The Cavern" by Gertrude Gordon and Manly Wade Wellman

October

"Up Under the Roof" by Manly Wade Wellman

"The Maze of Maal Dweb" by Clark Ashton Smith

"The Other Gods" by H. P. Lovecraft

"The Oldest Story in the World" by Murray Leinster

"Beyond the Phoenix" by Henry Kuttner

November

"The Hound of Pedro" by Robert Bloch

"Fothergill's Jug" by Thorp McClusky

December

"Beetles" by Robert Bloch

Henry Kuttner: "Spawn of Dagon" and "Beyond the Phoenix"

On March 25 we read Henry Kuttner's longish first story about Elak, sword-swinging Atlantean prince and wandering adventurer.  Let's read the second and third Elak tales, which are pretty short and appeared in the July and October issues of Weird Tales in 1938.  I am reading them in scans of those 85-year-old magazines, but you can find all of Kuttner's Elak stories in book form, for example, in a 1985 book entitleed Elak of Atlantis, illustrated by Brad Foster, and a 2007 book bearing the same title with an introduction by Joe R. Lansdale.

"Spawn of Dagon" 

"Spawn of Dagon" is the cover story of an issue of Weird Tales from which we have already read numerous stories: "He That Hath Wings" by Edmond Hamilton, "Return to the Sabbath" by Robert Bloch, "Dust in the House" by David H. Keller, "Mother of Toads" by Clark Ashton Smith, and "Saladin's Throne Rug" by E. Hoffman Price.  This is an issue perfectly tuned to appeal to the MPorcius staff!  Well, except maybe for the mediocre cover.

The "extremely slender" Elak and the "remarkably simian" Lycon are drunk and placing bets on which of two trails of blood oozing from the guy they just killed will reach a crack between floorboards as the story begins.  The Elak stories are supposed to be funny, you see.  

The bet resolved (comic relief sidekick Lycon cheats), our heroes flee the city guards, and are directed to safety by a mysterious figure.  This weirdo then offers them a pile of money if they will murder a sinister wizard and shatter the wizard's red globe, purportedly the source of his power.  Lycon is too drunk to go on this mission, but Elak volunteers and is guided through a secret tunnel and sneaks into the wizard's tower.

The absence of Lycon means there is a lot less comic relief in the meaty middle section of the story, to the story's benefit.  Besides the dwarfish wizard, within the tower Elak encounters the animated corpse of a huge executed criminal who is serving the wizard and the beautiful woman the wizard plans to separate from her soul as part of the process of communicating with magicians in another star system.  Elak neutralizes the red globe, and finds the weirdo has double crossed him--Elak's client is a monstrous gelatinous tentacled creature, a worshipper of Dagon, and he and an army of his fellows burst into the tower.  It turns out the diminutive wizard's red globe was the only thing keeping the Dagon worshippers from taking over and then sinking Atlantis!  Elak and the wizard have to join forces to save Atlantis; in the end Lycon arrives and saves the day.  Elak ends up with the girl.

This is a pretty good sword and sorcery story, though maybe it could have benefited from another round of polishing--most glaringly, the disguised agent of Dagon gives Elak some kind of super weapon to use on the wizard, but Kuttner seems to forget about it, and it never plays any role in the plot that I can remember.  Still, thumbs up!

"Spawn of Dagon" has been anthologized numerous times, in books of sword and sorcery stories, horror stories and stories centered around Atlantis.

"Beyond the Phoenix"

"Beyond the Phoenix" was also a Weird Tales cover story, and this cover is even more boring--is that Lycon?  Isn't he supposed to look like a fat monkey and not like Elak's equally hunkalicious brother?  This third Elak adventure hasn't been as widely anthologized as "Spawn of Dagon,"  though it does appear in Peter Haining's 1976 anthology of stories from Weird Tales, which has gone through several editions, as well as an elaborate 2023 German boxed set of five hardcover anthologies of material from Weird Tales which looks pretty awesome.  Uber alles indeed.

Elak and Lycon are serving as soldiers in the royal guard of a remote Atlantean nation.  The kingdom's high priest, Xander, a huge muscular hunchback, leads faithless members of the guard in a coup attempt; Elak, Lycon and the Princess Esarra manage to outfight the traitors, but the king has been mortally wounded, and Xander escapes.

As he dies, the king explains that Xander has summoned the evil god of dark lust, Baal-Yagoth, to the Earth, and this god now inhabits Xander's twisted body.  The only way to defeat Baal-Yagoth is to visit the land of the gods and enlist the aid of the god Assurah, also known as the Phoenix.  Traditionally, the dead monarchs of this kingdom have been put on a barge and sent to the land of the gods via an underground river, so Elak, Lycon and the princess take the king's corpse with them on the waiting barge and head to the land of the gods.

The trip to the subterranean country of the gods, whose inhabitants call it "Nyrvana," includes some needlessly dreamy sequences.  Nyrvana is ruled by two beings, a man, Ithron, who is striving to obey the instructions left by the long dormant Assurah the Phoenix, and a woman, Tyrala, who is revealed to be in cahoots with Xander and the evil god Assurah imprisoned so long ago, Baal-Yagoth!  Tyrala is bored with Nyrvana, where the men are soft--she wants to rule Atlantis, which is full of real men, men  like Elak!  Ithron saves Elak from being seduced by Tyrala, who has a chalice she carries around with her--men who drink from the chalice become her slaves and she them vampirically absorbs their life energy.  

Ithron summons Assurah to deal with Baal-Yagoth, but before the Phoenix is aroused Tyrala has launched a coup of her own and (off screen) Ithron somehow falls prey to her chalice and (on screen) has his life force drawn from his body to augment the witch's own power.  Not that she is able to enjoy her triumph for very long.  Assurah inhabits Elak's body so that our hero can fly and wield a flaming sword that shoots lightning, and quick work is made of Tyrala in Nyrvana and then of Xander up on the surface.  Princess Esarra is installed on the throne and I guess we are expected to think she and Elak will, temporarily, become an item.  

(The WT printing of "Beyond the Phoenix" includes a pretty good Art Deco type illustration by future DC comics artist, and personal friend of Henry Kuttner, Jim Mooney depicting Tyrala and the ensorcelled Ithron dancing nude to the music of batrachian flutists in their last moments.)

"Beyond the Phoenix" feels underdeveloped--it is almost like an outline, or a condensation, of a novel.  Kuttner crams too many characters and too much back story into the space he has to work with, so he doesn't have any room to build excitement or suspense, to make us interested in the characters, or even to give Elak much to do.  The deformed priest who likes to torture women and wants to get his hands on Princess Esarra and the immortal witch who seeks power and manly men to seduce are potentially compelling villains, but we don't spend enough time with them.  As for Elak, he does what the king told him to do, then what Ithron tells him to do, and then what Assurah the Phoenix tells him to do.  

Merely acceptable.

**********

So now we have read all three Elak stories published in 1938.  "Spawn of Dagon" is the best of these, it having by far the best realized villains--the disguised Dagon worshipper, the evil wizard who it turns out is instrumental in keeping Atlantis above the waves, and the hulking undead criminal--and by far the most entertaining plot twists, as well as the best fights and magic; Kuttner also correctly paced "Spawn of Dagon," giving us just the right amount of material to comfortably inhabit its page count.

A fourth Elak story was published in Weird Tales in 1941, and I expect we'll read it someday, but we will probably explore a lot of other Weird Tales content before we get to it.

Science Fiction Stories, July 1957: Silverberg, Leiber, Jones and Scortia

Advertising works!  In our last blog post we saw an ad for Science Fiction Stories' July 1957 issue in a copy of Science Fiction Quarterly and here we are reading it just a blink of an eye later.  I guess it helps that the cover of this issue, by Kelly Freas, is great, with a cool space ship, fascinating aliens, a terrific monster, and beautiful colors and composition.  I guess Freas deserves those eleven Hugos.

"Neutral Planet" by Robert Silverberg

The people of Earth and the bear-like people of Rigel are at war.  But new forcefield technology has rendered offensive weapons useless, so there are no space naval battles.  Instead, Rigel and Terra compete over exclusive trade deals and alliances with neutral systems.  As the story begins, a Terran ship crewed by a score of men is approaching a planet in the Antares system, hoping to sign a treaty with the primitive reptilian natives; the sneaky Rigelians must have a spy back on Terra who informed them of the Terran mission to Antares, because a Rigelian ship on a similar mission is right behind the Terran one.

The rival missions conduct cloak and dagger operations against each other, but the focus of the story is their competition to sign an exclusive treaty with the scaly spear-wielding Antareans.  The Rigelians suffer a disaster--after being showered with gifts, the natives kill a bunch of Rigelians with their spears.  The human captain figures out the psychology/sociology of the Antareans--the responded badly to the gifts because they were loathe to be indebted to strangers.  The personnel of the Terran mission contrive a way of putting themselves in debt to the reptile men--they stage a starship crash and allow the natives to rescue them.  Now feeling as if the humans owe them something, the Antareans have no objection to doing them the insignificant favor of signing a treaty with Terra.

I guess this story is influenced by the Cold War, in which the United States and the Soviet Union competed diplomatically and via espionage because direct warfare had been rendered prohibitive by nuclear weapons.    

"Neutral Planet" feels a little contrived with its elaborate rules of indirect warfare that seem to be broken occasionally and its counterintuitive psychology, but it is an entertaining piece of work, Silverberg doing a decent job of sketching what the various fun SF elements (the weapons and electronic equipment, the various aliens) look like and how they perform.

It doesn't look like "Neutral Planet" has been anthologized, but it has appeared in several Silverberg collections, including two German publications.  In its magazine appearance here it suffers from many typos, so I would suggest you read it in a book.   

"Femmequin 973" by Fritz Leiber

We often find unconventional sex in stories by Leiber: underage sex, rape, incest, perversion.  (See "The Sadness of the Executioner," "Beauty and the Beasts," "The Bait," "The Glove," "A Bad Day For Sales," "The Princess in the Tower 250,000 Miles High," "The Mind Spider," "A Rite of Spring," and probably others I am forgetting.)  A title like "Femmequin 973" has me suspecting (hoping?) ol' Fritz has some more unusual sexual material for us; well, let's see.

My suspicions were well-founded--"Femmequin 973" is a story about sex robots built to order by master craftsmen for horny rich men!  At the center of the story are two such crafts...people--the man, Harry Chernik, who does all the precision work building the sexbots and the woman, Rita Bruhl, who styles them, modelling their movements and voices and clothing.  Leiber's descriptions of the psychology and histories of these two damaged creatives and of the whole business of designing, constructing, marketing and selling sex robots is very engaging and entertaining; he brings this whole scenario to vivid life.

Harry is unattractive and afraid of women, and for twenty years has taken his satisfaction in life from building the sex robots.  Rita is a beauty, but while she enjoys flirting with men and inspiring their desire, she finds actual sexual contact sort of repulsive.

These two losers in love bear a resentment towards one John Gottschalk.  Twenty years ago Harry had found a woman willing to date him, sweet and mousy Louise, and hoped to marry her.  Harry and Louise would go on double dates with John and his girlfriend, Rita.  John was attractive, and Rita found him a man she could actually fall in love with and have sex with.  But John was afraid of women, and didn't want to marry a strong-willed beauty, and instead stole Louise from hapless Harry, Louise being the kind of timid girl he need not fear would dominate him or object to him cheating on her.  John thus broke both Harry and Rita's hearts, shortly before they got their jobs in the illegal sex robot factory.

The climax of "Femmequin 973" involves Rita convincing Harry to help her build a sex robot that looks and acts exactly like her and her managing to sell it to John.  The final sentence of the story revels that this Rita simulacrum has a special addition intended to inflict a terrible revenge on John--the vagina dentata.   

Very good--Leiber nails all the technical stuff I sometimes talk about, pacing and images and economy and so forth, as well as doing a great job with the characters and all the speculative stuff.  Five out of five cunningly cut cams!  This is the best story I have read in a while.       

 

This story is not nearly as revered as it might be; maybe people find it disturbing or sexist or something.  "Femmequin 973" was reprinted in 1959 in a French magazine (oh la la!) and languished until being included in two 21st-century Leiber collections.  Horror fans and people interested in attitudes about sexual relationships in SF and portrayals of women by male SF writers are encouraged to check it out. 

"The Gardener" by Raymond F. Jones

"The Gardener" is one of those SF stories about how hard it is being better than everyone else, the isolation suffered by those with superior intelligence and super powers.  I find this sort of thing kind of tiresome, like hearing beautiful women moan about how hard it is to be beautiful, or celebrities whine about the burden of their fame, it feels like hearing life's winners trying to get some of the sympathy generally reserved for life's losers.

Anyway, "The Gardener" is the story of Jimmy Correll, boy prodigy.  Super smart, he is mustered into high school long before puberty sets in, and it looks like he'll be attending university at age ten or eleven!  The fact that he is astoundingly bright is crystal clear to all, and most people's response to Jimmy is fear or repulsion, but they don't even know the half of it!  Jimmy can read minds!  Jimmy has microscopic vision and can see the little one-celled creatures in a drop of pond water!  Jimmy has telescopic vision, and can even cast his mind to Mars and explore the ruins of the red planet's once-great civilization and frolic with the children of that civilization's lingering descendants!  The boy genius keeps these super powers a secret from others, who already regard him as a freak and either avoid, ignore or make fun of him.  Jimmy is lonely and wishes he was like others.

The story takes place in a period of crisis in Jimmy's young life.  Wanting to be like other, ordinary kids and have ordinary friendships, he doesn't want to leave high school early and go to college, as it will be impossible to make friends there, and he finally has made a friend here at the high school, a popular athlete who asked him for help with trigonometry.  Jimmy flees a big assembly put on to celebrate him and his ascension to university.  But one of the few adults who has been truly kind to him, the janitor, finds him.  The janitor reveals that Jimmy is not the only person on Earth with super powers, that the janitor himself has telepathy and can go to Mars and see amoebas and all that.  Jimmy has not been alone at all--the adult members of his superior race are always watching, looking out for him.  (Jimmy is the sprouting plant they are "gardening.")  

Jimmy gets back to the school in time for the assembly being held in his honor and I guess we are expected to think Jimmy has learned how to have fulfilling relationships with the mundanes (I guess we call them "muggles" now) as well as being buoyed by the knowledge that he has a whole secret society of fellow superhumans backing him up, making sure he doesn't get into trouble.

Like one of those old novels (Fielding?) in which a person of humble status is suddenly revealed to be a member of the elite, or all those mangas in which the lonely plain kid in class is inexplicably pursued by the school's most popular girl, "The Gardener" is a wish fulfillment fantasy in which the main character is special because of an accident of birth and his problems are abruptly resolved by the actions of others--he doesn't have to actually do anything to succeed.  Jones' story particularly appeals to the kinds of guys who are smarter than average but not good at making friends (and are perhaps overrepresented among the readers of SF magazines)--it depicts just such an individual making a friend and receiving accolades, the character's intelligence and the praise he receives all cranked up to maximum volume.

This is pedestrian, pandering filler stuff, but Jones writes it competently, so I'll call "The Gardener" acceptable.      

"The Gardener" was reprinted in a bunch of Jones collections in America and Europe with wild surreal covers, including one that looks like an H. R. Giger.

We read the long story "The Non-Statistical Man" in the summer of last year

"Gag Rule" by Thomas N. Scortia

Unlike the three preceding stories, "Gag Rule" has never been reprinted--if you want to read this one you have no refuge from this magazine's rampant typographical errors!

"Gag Rule" is a joke story and a logic puzzle and a total waste of the reader's time.  Thumbs down!

Three salesmen are on the planet of rabbit people.  (Remember those Star Wars comics that had a rabbit man in them?  That was really something, wasn't it?)  The rabbit people have been addicted to practical jokes ever since they were introduced to humor by Earth people.  The three salesmen represent manufacturers of such devices as exploding cigars and those flowers you wear on your lapel that spray fluid in the eyes of those who try to smell the flower.  (See illustration below.)  The three salesmen are meeting a rabbit man trade representative, and after the four enjoy an elaborate meal this big-eared joker presents the three salesmen with a test--he who passes the test will be rewarded a monopoly on access to the rabbit world market.

The rabbit person leaves the three salesmen locked in the room.  He warns through a speaker that one, two or all of them have drunk poisoned wine and that there is a single antidote capsule available in the little box on the table.  They should note, however, that the antidote is poison to anyone who hasn't already ingested the initial poison.  The eyes of those who have drunk the poisoned wine will lose their color, but there is no reflective surface in the room, so no man can diagnose himself.

The rabbit man says the poisons are deadly, but after the main character has solved the puzzle and won the contract, the rabbit admits that the poisons are not in fact deadly.  Wow, hilarious.  The story ends with a pun: "rabbit punch."

Maybe you will like "Gag Rule" if you enjoy logic puzzles, but I wouldn't bet on it.  

Detail of illustration for "Gag Rule" by C. A. Murphy

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The Scortia was painful and the Jones merely competent filler, but the Leiber is great and the Silverberg good, so I have no regrets about investigating this issue.  

More magazine stories next time, but it will be back to the late Thirties for us.  

Robert Silverberg: "Warm Man," "World of a Thousand Colors," and "En Route to Earth"

We recently read a story by Robert Silverberg that debuted in Venture in 1958 and was reprinted in the 1969 Silverberg collection Dimension Thirteen and thought it was pretty good.  So let's look at the table of contents of Dimension Thirteen and pick out three more late Fifties tales by Silverberg...OK, lets see what these three 1957 stories, "Warm Man," "World of a Thousand Colors," and "En Route to Earth" are all about.  We'll read them not in book form, but in their original published versions in scans of magazines that try to use sex appeal to get you to part with that hard-earned 35 cents in your pocket; you can find these scans at the internet archive and/or luminist.org.

"Warm Man" (1957)

This story, which premiered in an issue of F&SF that has what I think may be a caricature of Lucille Ball on its cover, might qualify as a weird or horror story, and has the kind of structure that an episode of The Twilight Zone would have.  

"Warm Man" is set in an upper-middle class suburb of New York full of gossips, bored housewives who sleep around, college profs and stock brokers.  A new guy, a bachelor by the name of Hallinan, moves in, and the woman who is sort of the neighborhood busybody and who is always hosting parties invites him to a shindig where he meets everyone.  The locals find themselves unburdening themselves of all their woes to the kind and understanding Hallinan, and afterwards feeling relieved, even though Hallinan himself had but little to say.  For some weeks this goes on, with everybody feeling better from the opportunity to talk to Hallinan and divulge to him their secret sorrows.

The revelatory ending of the story indicates that Hallinan is a "receiver empath" who absorbs people's emotions and derives some kind of satisfaction or sustenance from them.  He meets an untimely end when he speaks to a young child, a shy kid who is the perennial victim of bullies--the boy is a bashful introverted outcast because he is a telepath who can read minds and project his thoughts into the minds of others; using his powers disturbs people, so he rarely uses them.  When he realizes Hallinan is receptive to his emotions, the boy transmits his sorrow to the man, but because the pent up feelings of years constitute a more powerful volume of emotion that Hallinan can handle, the man dies of an overdose. 

A satisfactory piece of entertainment.  "Warm Man" has been included in multiple Silverberg collections, including The Best of Robert Silverberg, and Ellen Datlow reprinted it in her vampire anthology A Whisper of Blood.

"World of a Thousand Colors"  (1957)

"World of A Thousand Colors" first saw print in Super-Science Fiction; Silverberg's contribution is trumpeted on the cover but that blonde being disrobed by a murderous alien is not in the story.  "World of a Thousand Colors" has been reprinted in Silverberg collections--in fact is the title story of one--and in anthologies like Asimov and Greenberg's The Great SF Stories #19 and one called A Century of Science Fiction: 1950-1959: The Greatest Stories of the Decade, a volume edited by none other than the humble Robert Silverberg himself. 

"World of A Thousand Colors" reminded me at first of something Jack Vance might write, it being a story of a criminal in a galaxy-spanning future civilization.  The style is weaker than a typical Vance, though, and the theme and philosophy less complex and interesting.

Every five years or so a Test is held on the World of a Thousand Colors; the location of the planet is a secret, as is the reward given those who pass the Test--these winners are never seen again, and those losers who return safely have had their brains wiped of whatever happened on the mystery planet.  Everybody assumes the prize is something wonderful, however, and millions of people apply for a chance to take the Test, though only a handful each year make it through the preliminary tests.

  

Jolvar Hollinrede is a jewel merchant who wanders around the galaxy.  All his life he has wanted to take the Test, but he has always failed those preliminary weeding out tests.  By chance he meets a man who has earned a place among those selected to take the Test.  Hollinrede murders the man and impersonates him, taking his seat aboard the ship going to the barren World of a Thousand Colors for the current Test.  On the planet he meets the six other contestants, men and women of various human and nonhuman races--and those who administer the Test, flashes of color that float around.  The flashes explain that those who pass the Test are liberated from their physical forms, granted immortality and transformed into flashes of color themselves and join the perfectly harmonious society of these immaterial color people.  

The Test involves the contestants standing in a circle.  Colors flow out of them, a different one for each contestant, and the contestants must harmonize them so they become all the same color, fuse into white, the color that contains all colors.  Hollinrede the murderer's color is black, the color that is the absence of color, and he can't seem to change it--all the other six manage to harmonize, so their red, green, orange, etc., merge together to form a gray, but because Hollinrede's color stubbornly remains black they can't achieve whiteness.  The six decent people who passed all the tests designed to screen out jerk offs work together to break the bones of Hollinrede, the villain who got to the World of a Thousand Colors through murder and deception, and as he dies Hollinrede sees them harmonize and receive their reward.

(I guess we can all imagine how a 2024 college type would assess a story in which white symbolizes harmony and a diverse cast of people joins together to assimilate their individual representative colors into a universal whiteness.)

The crime parts of the story are entertaining, but the color harmonizing scene is a little boring, and the point or ideology of the story is a little too obvious and so is not thought provoking or challenging.  That Hollinrede is a bad person who deserves punishment instead of a reward is undeniable, so there is no dramatic tension there.  The question of whether it is desirable to lose your physical body and individuality and live in perfect harmony forever is one that is not so easily answered, but the characters just take as a given that this reward is awesome, so there is no tension there, either.

Acceptable, but not great.  

"En Route to Earth" (1957)

"En Route to Earth" appeared under the pen name Calvin M. Knox in Science Fiction Quarterly.  The cover illo, by Emsh, featuring a three-headed white man and a red-headed blue flight attendant, illustrates Silverberg's story, even though neither it nor its author are named.

The stewardess on the cover is Milissa, a Vegan, and after a year of serving on ships that only travelled locally, today for the first time she is working on a vessel that will travel via warpspace, taking her, the Vegan crewmen and the fifty passengers on a three-and-a-half day trip from her native Vega II to Earth.

"En Route to Earth" is a joke story.  There is no plot, really, just a series of gags.  I expected there to be a pro-diversity message, Milissa learning that people of all types are worthy of respect or all the different races on the flight working together to save the ship or something, but we don't even get that--Milissa doesn't make any decisions, overcome any obstacles, or change in any way.

I'll list half or so of the gags.  The three-headed Terran on the cover is a product of genetic engineering, and the three heads have conflicting personalities and fight each other--one flirts with Milissa.  The pink alien in the lower right corner of the cover has bought a 300-year old Terran SF magazine and is enraged that the heavies in the violent space opera in it look just like his people--he sells the magazine to a collector who happens to also be a passenger on the ship.  A pair of siblings from the Deneb system suddenly go into heat, one shifting from neuter to male and the other from neuter to female, and have to be rushed to the restroom so they can mate in private--they promise to name their offspring after Milissa.  A member of a worm-like species that reproduces by ejecting a cloud of spores suddenly can't stop herself from doing so.  (Many of the story's jokes have to do with sex, which I guess we sort of expect from Silverberg.) 

Silverberg keeps this one short, and the jokes aren't bad, just bland, so we won't condemn this one--we'll call "En Route to Earth" barely acceptable.

"En Route to Earth" would be reprinted in a Dutch collection of Silverberg stories named for the story we read a few blog post ago, "Eve and Twenty-Three Adams," as well as the World of a Thousand Colors collection. 

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The issue of Science Fiction Quarterly with Silverberg's "En Route to Earth" has intriguing ads for other magazines that tout SF and detective stories by Silverberg (under his real name and the Calvin M. Knox pseudonym), Harlan Ellison, A. Bertram Chandler, Carol Emshwiller, and others.  Maybe we'll check some of these advertised stories out soon.

"Scum Town" appears to be a rare Ellison story only reprinted in our own
21st century in a book now out of print

Merril-approved 1956 and 1958 stories by Brunner, Budrys and Clarke

We here at MPorcius Fiction Log are reading stories from 1958 that famous SF writer and anthologist Judith Merril recommended in the back pages of the fourth of her acclaimed SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy anthologies.  Merril's list is organized alphabetically by author, and we are cherry picking stories that pique our interest, starting from the "A"s and making our way to the "W"s and the "Y" (Robert F. Young.)  Today we finish the "B"s and start on the "C"s with three pretty big names in the speculative fiction world.

"Substitute God" by John Brunner (1956)

According to isfdb, John Brunner's "Substitute God," printed in a 1958 issue of Fantastic Universe, is a version of the story "By the Name of Man," that was published two years earlier in a 1956 issue of Nebula.  Somewhat amusingly, Merril actually recommended "By the Name of Man" in her list of 1956 stories in the second edition of her yearly Greatest anthology.  Whether this is a mistake (I certainly don't recall the plots of every story I read two years ago) or intentional, Merril thinking this story is so awesome that she embraced an opportunity to spread the good news about it a second time, I don't know.

I don't actually read Brunner much.  What work of his I read before starting this blog didn't impress me much, the stuff people say about his big famous novel, Stand on Zanzibar, makes it sound like a book that would annoy me, and when I read a 1960 story of Brunner's a year ago I found it to be a total waste of time.  But today, in a spirit of exploration and reconciliation, I'm going to read "Substitute God" in Fantastic Universe.  I actually own a copy of this magazine, and have blogged about three of the stories in it, those by Harry Harrison, L. Sprague de Camp and Edmund Cooper.   

"Substitute God" is one of those SF stories that reminds me of Somerset Maugham tales that describe British guys spending long years far from England and other white people, administering native villages, and how differently different Britons respond to exposure to and responsibility over the locals.  Lattimer is on Venus, managing a village of the primitive natives.  The villagers consider him a god, practically infallible, and Lattimer lives under the stress of trying to appear perfect before them; he has made progress in this village, among other things guiding the natives in the building of levees and use of crop rotation to enhance the efficiency of their agriculture, and if they realize that he is fallible, that he is not absolutely wise and divinely just, not a god but just another person, all his achievements will be jeopardized and his own life, and even the position of all Earthmen on Venus, will be put at risk.

Another human appears within Lattimer's territory.  This guy, Tomson, must be a fugitive, a criminal, fled to the swamps of Venus to hide from the Terran government.  The Venusians think all humans are gods, and if the natives see this guy committing blunders or acting immorally they may realize that humans are no more divine than they, which will be a disaster.  Sure enough, Tomson makes trouble but some good luck and some quick thinking on the part of Lattimer save the day.

"Substitute God" has a good twist ending.  In this future, criminals are "psyched," which presumably means after conviction their brains are tampered with to make them more honest and law-abiding.  Tomson is sent off to be psyched after the climax of the story, and in the denouement, some months later, he returns to Lattimer's village to take Lattimer's place as the villagers' god.  Having been psyched, Tomson is now a responsible individual.  On the last page of the story we learn that Lattimer himself is a murderer, that he killed a woman some years ago and was psyched and then sent to this village to manage it as the villagers' god. 

This is a good story; the pacing and all that stuff is good, and Brunner does a good job of instilling in the reader the tension suffered by Lattimer as he tries to appear perfect in front of the natives and then finds another Earther has arrived to throw a monkey wrench into the carefully calibrated works.  "Substitute God" also addresses the fascinating topic of the utility and ethics of religion and government--tricking savages into thinking you are a god, and messing around in a man's brain to radically change his personality, seem prima facie like immoral intrusions, but maybe in some circumstances these extreme measures are justified by the good that can be realized for those intruded upon as well as for third parties.

So it looks like I am giving Brunner an enthusiastic thumbs up here and may be revising my opinion of him.  It is nice to have some good news.        

In 1963 this story reappeared in Donald A. Wollheim's More Adventures on Other Planets under the "By the Name of Man" title.

"A World Named Mary" by Algis Budrys (1958)

Merril actually has two Budrys stories on her list here in SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume.  We read one of them, "The End of Winter" AKA "Go and Behold Them," a few years ago.  The one we are reading today, "A World Named Mary," first appeared in Venture, in the same issue as Theodore Sturgeon's "The Comedian's Children," a story Merril reprinted in SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume and which I read and gave a thumbs down to as being too long and too silly.

"A World Named Mary" is about selfish greedy women and the men foolish enough to get mixed up with them.  Budrys here expresses the sort of attitude that is out of favor with the architects of today's ways of thinking, that women and men are different and that the nature of healthy and decent woman is to generously give and nurture life.

As the story begins, a starship lands on a beautiful planet much like Earth, where the ship's two occupants, Mary and Bill, are greeted by blue skies, green trees, and glittering bodies of water.  Mary, an attractive woman, heard about this remote jewel of a world from a guy, Roy, who discovered it by chance, and ever since has wanted to make it her own.  Roy couldn't take Mary to the planet to move in just then, so Mary got another guy, Bill, to marry her, leave his job, and spend his money on a ship so he could bring her to the planet.  Bill names the planet Mary, after his wife.  It is obvious from Page 1 that Bill is infatuated with Mary and Mary only sees him as a means to an end.

Bill and Mary realize that planet Mary has no animal life on it, not even bugs.  On their first day there it becomes clear that the planet does not want them there--the wind seems to attack them, flinging sticks at them and threatening to damage the ship.  Planet Mary doesn't want to create, nurture or host life--like Mary the selfish bitch, Mary the planet wants to keep everything of herself to herself.  Because of foolish negligence on the part of human Mary, the couple's ship is damaged and they are stuck on the planet that hates them; planet Mary then kills Mary the selfish jerk.

This story works, but Budrys is too obvious, lays everything on a little too thick.  Mary is a little too self-aware and brazen in her selfishness; it would be more believable if she rationalized her selfishness, camouflaged it.  Also, the symbolism of naming the selfish planet after the selfish woman is so obvious it is remarked upon by the characters themselves.  

We'll call this one solidly acceptable.  "A World Named Mary" was reprinted in 1965 in the British version of Venture, and in '71 in a German anthology of stories ostensibly from F&SF (Venture was a sister publication of F&SF, published by the same company and edited by the same man, Robert P. Mills.)  

"Songs of Distant Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke (1958)

In the Eighties, Clarke published a novel with this title, and I think I may have read it, or started reading it, back in those days.  The novel was based on the 1958 story from If that we will be reading today, a cover story heralded as "A New Adventure in Science and Space!"  

Five or six centuries ago robotic probes discovered planet Thalassa, and three hundred years ago the world was colonized by Earth people who arrived in suspended animation after a trip of many decades.  Thalassa is mostly covered in ocean, with only a single island upon which to build farms and homes, so no more colonization ships have ever come to the place, and Thalassa has been out of contact with Earth for all 300 of those years.

Clyde is a fisherman; his fiance Lena is the daughter of the Mayor of the Thalassan village where they live.  Their simple lives are thrown for a loop when a colony ship, still over a hundred years from its destination, takes up an orbit around Thalassa and a space boat lands engineers and officers near Lena and Clyde's village to collect the supplies they need to repair the malfunctioning colony ship.  Lena falls in love at first sight with one of the engineers, Leon, and they consummate their relationship after Lena is powerfully moved by the sound of Earth music that nobody on Thalassa has ever heard.

After a few weeks Leon and his comrades get all they need from the planet, and prepare to return to the colony ship and leave Thalassa.  Lena is heartbroken and begs Leon to stay, and then to let her join him in the effort to colonize the far distant planet to which he is headed.  Leon, as we expect of a sailor, isn't too hung up on Lena and to show her how impossible it would be for them to remain together he takes her up to the colony ship, a thing two miles long.  Leon takes Lena to the vast chamber where the corpsicles of the two thousand colonists are stored, and shows Lena his pregnant wife.  Clyde gets Lena back, but we have reason to believe she will always think of Leon as the love of her life.

The love triangle works, and all the speculative technology and society stuff Clarke comes up with (e.g., the colony ship propels a huge icebergs before its bow to absorb stray atoms and meteors that, when it is travelling at near-light velocities, could wreck it, and Leon and his colleagues have landed on Thalassa to use anti-grav technology to direct a huge volume of water up into space to their mother ship; and Earth people, Leon tells Lena, no longer live in cities because telecommunications technology has rendered living in close proximity pointless) is interesting.  A solid classic-style science fiction story--thumbs up for "Songs of Distant Earth."

"Songs of Distant Earth" was included in the oft-reprinted Clarke collection The Other Side of the Sky, some of the American editions of which have a creepy cover by Fernando Fernandez, the creator of the awesome NSFW graphic novel Zora, which goes for over $100 on ebay but which you can read/ogle for free online if you look around a little.

Left: Fernando Fernandez     Right: Ralph Brillhart

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Three successful stories about human relationships in the space faring future; Merril guided us ably on this leg of our trip through 1958.