Barry N. Malzberg: "September 1958," "Into the Breach," "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty," "The Trials of Sigmund" and "The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady"

For like a year we've been sporadically reading the 1980 Barry Malzberg collection The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady.  Today let's finish it up with the final five pieces of fiction in the book, all of them from the period 1977-1980.  But first, links to my blog posts on the previous 23 stories in the volume.  

“On the Air”
“Here, for Just a While”
“In the Stocks”

“The Man Who Married a Beagle”
“Big Ernie, the Royal Russian and the Big Trapdoor”
“Ring, the Brass Ring, the Royal Russian, and I”
“Of Ladies' Night Out and Otherwise”
“The Annual Once-a-Year Bash and Circumstance Party”
“The Appeal”
“Yahrzeit”
“Another Burnt-Out Case”
“I'm Going Through the Door”
“Cornell”
“On Account of Darkness”
“Impasse”
“Varieties of Technological Experience”
“Varieties of Religious Experience”
“Inside Out”
“Line of Succession”
“Reaction-Formation”
“Indigestion”
“A Clone at Last”
“Backing Up”

Damn, I hate typing.  I am really looking forward to when we finally conquer Mars and enslave the natives and I can have a whole steno pool of those little green bastards.

"September 1958" (1980)

It looks like "September 1958" is a The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady exclusive, debuting in this hardcover book and never being reprinted.

"September 1958" is about failure, about letting yourself down, and about the impossibility of people understanding each other.  It may be autobiographical.  There are two plots, both about men who find themselves unable to understand "the other" and screw up and feel terrible shame, and we switch back and forth between these two plots several times over the course of the story's four pages.

One plot follows a male college student who spends a lot of time looking at magazines; he musters the courage to ask an attractive woman with small well-formed breasts out on a date, and they go out for coffee and then kiss and hold hands afterwards.  This date is a major event in the male student's life, but that evening he brokenheartedly fears he has done something wrong because he can't understand the way women think, and when he encounters her in class later his fears are proven justified--she has absolutely no interest in a second date.

The other plot is about a spaceman on Mars who discovers the records of a long extinct native race of great sophistication and wisdom and how he realizes that he has no ability to comprehend even a fraction of what the Martians could teach him.  Simulacra of the Martians, like ghosts, ask him to protect the ruins and records of the great Martian civilization from the deprivations of avaricious Earthmen, and he promises to do so, but does nothing of the kind, and Mars is conquered and despoiled by Terra.

Presumably the magazines are SF magazines and the college student is based on Malzberg and/or meant to be similar to the kinds of people who read SF hardcover collections, and the story about Mars is a sort of allegory of his shameful failure with thew woman cooked up by the college student.  Is it an appropriate allegory, though?  The college student is courageous enough to ask the woman out, and then she refuses him a second date, he knows not why--it is not a lack of courage that undoes him, but his failure to know how to deal with women.  In contrast, while the spaceman is unable to understand the Martians, his shameful failure is a result of his lacking enough courage to rebel against Earth, not ignorance--he knows what the right thing to do is, but he doesn't do it.  Another contrast: the college student's failure only harms himself, while the failure of the spaceman in the Mars story hurts the Martians (if only in some abstract way, they being dead.)   

In his afterward to "September 1958" Barry suggests this story is unsalable, either in SF markets or to the "quarterlies/New Yorker circuit" and seems a little bitter about it.  "They can go, in the words of the sainted John Brunner about another facet of the market, to hell."  I can't remember, if I ever knew, who John Brunner told to go to hell.  Malzberg's writing is full of these kinds of references that go over the heads of the uninitiated.

"Into the Breach" (1980)   

Another story that, it seems, has only seen light of day here in The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady.  In his afterward, Malzberg tells us that Ted White bought it for Fantastic but then there was a change in Fantastic's ownership, White's tenure came to a close and "Into the Breach" was sent back to Malzberg unpublished.  Malzberg praises Ted White as an editor willing to publish new things, and the owner of Fantastic during White's editorship, Sol Cohen, for being the kind of owner who gave White editorial freedom.

"Into the Breach" depicts life in 2147, a time by which the government has achieved the ability to turn back your physical age if you feel like you have screwed up your life, so you can get a fresh start.  Much of the story seems to draw upon Malzberg's own period of employment in a government welfare department--there is a lot about going to a government office and having to prostrate yourself before the government functionaries, waiting long hours and filling out forms with dubious honesty and telling pathetic stories about your failures and your pathetic need, as well as how the citizens who come for help and the public employees paid to help them inevitably hate each other.  It is a little hard to understand how "Timeback" works, but we are assured it is very very painful and humiliating.  

The narrator, as far as I can tell, blames his failure at age 47 on a woman, and has his age reset to 46, when he still had hope and confidence.  It is implied that people Timebacked are moved to a different part of the country and are expected to get new jobs and build up new social networks, but after getting out of the Timeback machine our narrator dashes out of the government office and before the authorities catch up to him he murders the woman he holds responsible for his woes.  Then the government Timebacks him a second time, all the way to infancy.

(If he is just going to kill that woman and not try to elude capture by the cops, why does he bother getting Timebacked one year?  Maybe he was so depressed over her that he needed to regain his self-confidence to go through with the crime.)

An acceptable Malzbergian short story.  One Malzbergian touch is the suggestion that in 2147 there is a regular commemoration of political murders, an actual "Assassination Festival," which is held regularly, maybe even daily.   

"Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" (1976)

So often when writing this blog I am lukewarm about stories and feel compelled to point out flaws even in stories that I enjoy that it is gratifying to be able to enthusiastically praise a piece of fiction unreservedly, as I can today.  "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" is a fun, challenging, and complex story full of literate but legible references to modern and ancient, Western and Eastern culture, a space adventure processed through the Malzberg sensibility that emphasizes despair, difficult sexual relationships and psychological disorder and conveys plot and theme via the characteristically Malzbergian narrative techniques of characters whose perceptions are totally unreliable and an anti-chronological story structure.

In "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" we have Gene Wolfe-level work!  Five out of five mummified Martians!

I don't have to tell my sophisticated and sensitive audience that this story's title and structure (36 teeny little chapters that take up 18 pages of The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady) are an homage to the 19th-century prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige, Japanese works of art that rival in popularity and influence even Godzilla and Hen na Joshi Kousei Amaguri Senko.  The story these somewhat disjointed and fragmentary chapters relate unchronologically is that of a sexually dysfunctional spaceman who suffers delusions, which won't surprise my sensitive and sophisticated audience, its members being familiar with Malzberg's body of work as they are.  Interestingly, this story seems to be set in the same universe as that of the Mars portions of "September 1958," a universe in which the human race discovered on Mars the ruins of an advanced civilization millions of years old and found that Deimos and Phobos, the moons of Mars, are artificial satellites thrown up by that lost race; some of the same plot elements, like ghost Martians imploring a guy to deter human exploration and expansion, and themes, like shame, are also present.

"Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" is more plot-driven than we are used to with Malzberg, and the plot is a surprisingly traditional one, reminiscent of the plots of the kinds of stories Leigh Brackett or C. L. Moore would sell to Thrilling Wonder Stories or Weird Tales decades before, though of course Malzberg tells his story radically out of chronological order (something he makes a joke about, having a wise alien say that time is not linear and "strict chronology" is "only a symptom of psychosis") and much of what is described may merely be dreams or hallucinations.  I read this one twice to make sure I knew what was going on, and on the second read it really feels like a moody adventure story.

The protagonist of "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" was born on Earth in a decadent period of human history.  Centuries ago Earth first colonized many of the planets and moons in our solar system, but has not ventured far beyond the system's limits.  Perhaps the most technologically advanced human settlement was the thriving human colony on Neptune, but like 200 years ago it became aggressive, warring on the other human colonies, and had to be destroyed. 

Our guy moved to Mars as a youth, where he became fascinated by the ruins of the long-expired, highly sophisticated Martian civilization.  He broke the rules and touched a mummified Martian on display in a museum, and as he walked the red planet's sands in his pressure suit, imagined that he was speaking to the last of the Martians, imbibing the alien sage's cryptic wisdom.  Asked why the Martians, when they ran out of resources, embraced death, the Martian wise man tells the child that death came to the people of Mars "like a bride."  Could this be the source of our protagonist's sexual dysfunction?  Since then, he has had visions of the last Martian, who offers advice and psychological support--our guy even thinks about the last Martian when he is having sex with his wife (ewww.)

A skilled technician, whom his Martian mentor has told has a high destiny ahead of him, our hero is chosen to fly a mission to Neptune, to search the ruins of the human colony there for technology that will enable interstellar travel, technology the human race, in its decadence, is incompetent to deveop from scratch.  (I wonder if we are to see here a parallel between the way the Earth needs the technology of the defeated aggressor state of Neptune to conquer the stars and the way the United States used German technology after World War II to jump start the American space program.)  In the course of his training on Ganymede for this mission the narrator's marriage collapses.  On Neptune he meets a beautiful woman, The Maiden of the Sea, perhaps a computer simulation left by the exterminated Neptunian warmongers to serve as a guide to those who might come after them, perhaps an hallucination.  The Maiden has conversations with the last Martian--does this make us more likely to believe that our guy really is in regular contact with a Martian ghost, or more likely to believe the Maiden is an hallucination?  The spaceman has sex with the Maiden, achieving his first ever orgasm without the aid of the dead Martian, and falls in love with her.  He finds the blueprints and artifacts that will enable the human race to travel to other star systems, and the last Martian advises him to not share this info with his superiors back on Ganymede--he seems to think the humans of Earth should emulate the people of Mars and expire rather than preserve their race by engaging in space exploration and imperialism.  Our guy does not take this advice, and Malzberg leaves the reader room to judge for himself whether either or both are acting selfishly or judiciously.  The leaders of the human race are thrilled with the success of the mission, and offer our guy any reward he can think of, but all he wants is to be with the Maiden of the Sea again, which of course his superiors consider impossible, they thinking she was merely an illusion of one kind or another.

When the human colony on Neptune is rebuilt it features a cyclopean statue of our protagonist, and he is practically worshipped as a god, and the Maiden of the Sea is one component of the stories told of him.  Considering the title of the story, we can suspect that this statue holds a place in the hearts and minds of the citizens of the revitalized Neptune colony that Mount Fuji held in the hearts of 19th-century Japanese.  Malzberg also cleverly points out the way our protagonist and his statue are like the Martian mummy and the Maiden of the Sea--a sort of message from the past in the shape of a person.  Malzberg makes reference to the sons of Levi in the story, and I likely don't know enough about the Bible or Jewish history and literature to get what Malzberg is trying to say, but maybe the idea is that our hero is like a priest and leader who has done a great deed for his people but who is denied a certain type of property or wealth that is afforded others--in the case of the story's hero, I guess this means love and/or sex, or maybe just the chance to travel to another star.

It is always a pleasant surprise when a Malzberg story has an actual traditional plot, and in "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" Malzberg does a great job of integrating his typical techniques and concerns with the kind of traditional "we're gonna explore the lost cities of ancient races and then conquer the stars" SF plot that I love.  Here we have an excellent Malzberg production that is true to Malzberg's essential nature, that shows him stretching himself while remaining true to himself, a story that celebrates and also reworks traditional SF ideas and elements.  "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" would be a good story with which to introduce Malzberg to SF fans who haven't yet tackled the work of the Sage of Teaneck.

      

"Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" first saw print in Chrysalis 6, an anthology edited by Roy Torgeson, and in his afterword to the story here Malzberg thanks Torgeson for publishing the story, which it seems was rejected by other editors and only just barely accepted by Torgeson.  Barry also takes another swipe at the mainstream publishing world and "Quality Lit." in particular.  Chrysalis 6 was translated into German and our Teutonic friends' efforts to market the anthology are interesting--the cover includes an illustration originally affixed to Robert Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold that I guess is meant to convey a sense of dangerous dimension-hopping adventure, and the name of only one of the thirteen authors whose work is included in the book, R. A. Lafferty, is mentioned on the cover, and his in huge type.  Maybe Lafferty was a big draw in Germany (the David Hasselhoff of SF?)

"The Trials of Sigmund" (1980)  

Another story original to this volume, which according to isfdb would be recycled as part of the 1985 fix-up novel The Remaking of Sigmund Freud, a book I bought some years ago for two bucks at Half Price Books but which have yet to read.

One of my least favorite gimmicks is the attempted recreation of a real person in fiction.  In this three-page trifle Malzberg tries to bring to life alternate universe versions of Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler, and a newspaper publisher I never heard of, Robert McCormick.  (Wikipedia makes McCormick sound like the kind of exciting character who was in the news every day for his wacky hijinks, idiosyncratic opinions and innovative business practices and then was memory holed as soon as he died because nobody in the establishment had either sufficient sympathy or animus to keep knowledge of him alive for use as a sainted exemplar or a defenseless whipping boy or strawman.)  Freud smokes cigars and thinks about how he will die in ten years or so from cancer.  A young Hitler comes to Freud for a consultation and Freud dismisses him.  McCormick comes by, offering Freud a newspaper advice column and when Freud turns down the lucrative offer the Chicagoan shoots Freud dead.  Besides these three major characters, Malzberg through Freud offers capsule diagnoses of many other famous people, among them Carl Jung, William Randolph Hearst, Alice B. Toklas, and quite a few more.  

In his afterword, Malzberg speculates on what Marianne Moore might have thought of science fiction, tells us he was not able to sell "The Trials of Sigmund," and airs his fear that The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady is going to sit unread in the basements of libraries.  Barry, if you wrote more stories like "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" and fewer like "The Trials of Sigmund," maybe you could worry less? 

Feels like a waste of time; maybe if you've read biographies of Freud and McCormick and are familiar with the poetry of Marianne Moore this will do more for you than it did me.  

"The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady" (1977)

This is a series of little episodes, somewhat absurd little adventures on passenger trains, episodes that seem to represent cliched plot elements of fiction in which passenger trains figure.  A New York City subway car stops and there is a burning smell--our narrator reassures an old woman that this is a minor incident, not a deadly accident.  Our narrator is on the Orient Express, threatened by a turban-wearing,  knife wielding smuggler--the Kiev police board the train and rescue our guy.  The narrator meets a beautiful blonde on the train and they fall in love--alas, she is a ghost who haunts this train because she committed suicide by jumping off it and she falls in love with many men who board the train and then vanishes on them.  Our narrator is a famous detective, and when a murder occurs on the train on which he is a passenger he is enlisted by the train crew to solve the crime.

These four incidents are training simulations a grad student of the future is undergoing as part of his final exams.  He is unenthusiastic about taking up an academic career as an expert on passenger trains, but this is a future of scarcity and (it appears) of government control of the economy, and when he passes the test and is shown the quarters he has been assigned he is very excited--this six foot by eleven foot cell is apparently luxurious by the standards of this future high tech/low freedom society.  The sting in the tail of the story, however, is that the narrator is going to be haunted for the rest of his life by his memory of the kiss of the midnight lady, even though she is a fictional character and a ghost even within her fictional world.  (Compare to "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty.")

Let's consider that "The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady" is a commentary on male sexuality, how real life women never measure up to a man's dreams or something like that, and the possibility that this sad reality is merely one representative facet of a broader phenomenon Malzberg wants to talk about: how nothing in real life lives up to our fantasy version of it--after all, real life train rides almost never involve murder mysteries, tragic love stories or confrontations with exotic criminals, and so it is strange that modern people associate mundane businesslike activities like riding a train with such thrilling and unlikely adventures.  Do we moderns suffer this disconnect because of our easy access to a wealth of cinema, television and written fiction?  Are we all living in dream worlds and failing to embrace all that the real world has to offer because we are addicted to fiction?  Could I be projecting a 2020s problem linked to the internet and video games back on to the 1970s? 

This is an OK sort of Malzbergian filler story with his typical despair and depiction of a narrator having interactions with people who are not real, this time through the medium of a hypno helmet (we've read a lot of Malzberg hypno helmet stories over the years.*)  "The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady" was first printed in Midnight Specials: An Anthology for Train Buffs and Suspense Aficianados (or Addicts, you know, whatevs) edited by Malzberg crony Bill Pronzini.  To my surprise John Pelan included "The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady" in his book The Century's Best Horror Fiction: 1951-2000.  This is barely a horror story, and it is hard to believe it is the best horror story of 1977. 

*"Battered-Earth Syndrome," "At the Institute," "Tapping Out," "Going Down," "On Ice," "The Wonderful All-Purpose Transmorgifier" and maybe others I am forgetting. 

**********

Alright, another collection behind us.  And "Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty" alone makes this one well worth it.  Thumbs up for The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady, which even has a good cover by Michael Flanagan.  If you are cheap, read it on internet archive!  If you are a collector, pick it up on ebay for less than twenty dollars!  And if you want to support Malzberg and small press publishers who make available physical books of classic SF and crime fiction, buy a copy from Stark House, who offer an omnibus edition of The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady and another Malzberg collection we've read here at MPorcius Fiction Log, In the Stone House!    

  

Weird Tales, Dec '39: T McClusky, D H Keller and R Bloch

After spending four blog posts in the Harlanverse, let's get back to World War II-era Weird Tales and read from the December 1939 issue of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual edited by Farnsworth Wright.  We've already read two stories from this issue, an inferior Northwest Smith piece by C. L. Moore and Forrest J. Ackerman, "Nymph of Darkness," and a better than average Frank Belknap Long story, "Escape from Tomorrow."  That leaves us with stories by Thorp McClusky, David H. Keller and Robert Bloch to read today.  This issue also has good  illustrations by Hannes Bok and Virgil Finlay and a letter from Willis Conover, Jr. imploring people to order from August Derleth and Donald Wandrei's Arkham House the upcoming book The Outsider and Others, a collection of the late H. P. Lovecraft's stories.  This is a pretty manipulative letter, with Conover insulting in extravagant terms those who have not already ordered the book and offering an incentive--a chance to win a hand written autograph of Lovecraft's--to do the right thing.

"The Considerate Hosts" by Thorp McClusky

Here we have a barely acceptable ghost story.  Our guy is driving home in a once-in-a-lifetime rainstorm and has to take a detour on a rarely used country road because a bridge is out.  His car stalls due to the damp and he has to pull over--luckily he sees a nearby house, one with another car sitting in front of it.  He goes into the house and meets a couple who seem odd.  Soon they are telling him they are ghosts, that this house is actually a dark ruin and only looks lit and furnished and tenanted because of their haunting.  They are haunting the house tonight because they have a scheme of revenge.  Twenty years ago the husband was wrongly convicted of a murder by a young prosecutor and executed; his wife committed suicide soon after.  Tonight, because of the storm, they believed the prosecutor, now a big wig, would have to take this road and that the forces of Fate or Justice or whatever would force him to stop, giving the couple the opportunity to scare him to death.  Sure enough, our protagonist finds the unconscious body of the prosecutor in another room--the couple has scared him into a faint, but not slain him yet.  Our guy convinces them to not kill the man, and carries the unconscious attorney to his car.  Our guy's car now starts and he drives off, finds a phone and calls the cops to tell them about the unconscious guy in a stalled car back on the country road.  The next morning he returns to the house and indeed, it is a ruin with no lights or furniture.  A few days later he reads in the paper that the prosecutor died of heart disease, and he is glad that he died of natural causes and was not murdered by the ghosts.

This story is not very engaging.  The main character is not in any danger and is sort of superfluous--it is the three other characters who have to make decisions with moral weight and are emotionally invested in what happens.  As I've told you in many blog posts, I don't like stories in which the main character is a spectator.  Why not write this story from the point of view of the prosecutor, show how he decides to frame an innocent man in order to advance his career, and then his horror at suffering a supernatural comeuppance?  Also, the tone of the story is uneven; at times I thought it was supposed to be funny, what with the way the main character doesn't believe the two people are really ghosts, but it is not funny, and it isn't scary, either.  "The Considerate Hosts" also shares the problem of so many ghost stories, the incoherence of the "rules" concerning what abilities and powers the ghosts have, for example, under what circumstances the ghosts can touch material objects.  Such rules generally are totally illogical and exist merely to facilitate the progress of the plot or allow for a powerful image.  In this story the protagonist actually picks up a telephone in the haunted house but there is no ringtone*, and the next day finds no furniture whatsoever in the house.  So I guess these ghosts generate furniture that living people can interact with?  But they can't themselves touch the prosecutor?  Ay, carumba.

*[UPDATE 10/3/24: Obviously this is the wrong word, and anachronistic, a blunder on my part as a commentor points out below; the text says "No answer from Central. He tried again, several times, but the line remained dead."]

The first page or two of the story I liked, the description of the night drive in the rain, but the actual plot and tone once the ghosts appear is not to my taste. My opinion may be the minority one, though, as "The Considerate Hosts" has been reprinted in a multitude of books including one called Famous Ghost Stories, edited by Bennet Cerf, co-founder of Random House and a guy you can watch on TV in many episodes of What's My Line?                

"Lords of the Ice" by David H. Keller 

Here's the big cover story of this issue of WT, a story promoted as a depiction of "a war-mad world" (ripped from today's headlines, eh?), a story which has not been reprinted very often; the only reappearance listed by isfdb is in 1978's The Last Magician, a collection of Keller stories from Weird Tales.  

An unnamed European nation (clues suggest Germany) has run out of fossil fuels and raw metals, and lacks the cash to buy these essential commodities from foreigners, which is really putting a kink in the dictator's plans to build a powerful military establishment.  He calls together the nation's top scientist, top industrialist and wealthiest individual and they come up with the idea of exploiting the rich store of natural resources under Antarctica!    

In Chapter 2 we witness a delegation of guys meet with American businessmen and purchase a massive quantity of raw materials with gold.  In Chapter 3 we learn how the dictatorship got all this gold--by using a mole machine of the kind we find in SF rather commonly to discover the world's greatest gold deposit down in Antarctica.  There is so much gold the scientist we met in Chapter 1 worries that gold will lose its value and cause an international economic disruption.  This guy also remarks on the foolishness of the United States and other nations of selling stuff to the dictatorship that the dictator will use to launch a war against them.  

In Chapter 4 the scientist begins to suspect somebody else is tunnelling through the rock near the vein of gold.  In Chapter 5 a digging machine busts into the gold mine and the scientist meets representatives of a secret civilization known as The Lords of Ice, a nation of five hundred descendants of Moors and Jews who fled Spain during the Reconquista.  These people have psychic powers and are thus able to observe and influence the rest of the world from their city two hundred miles from the coast of Antarctica.  It was these jokers, not brilliance or dumb luck, that put into the scientist's brain the idea of coming to Antarctica and guided him to the vein of gold, an experiment to see how the human race beyond Antarctica would respond to a sudden increase in the supply of gold.  Chapter 6 describes the utopia of these emigre Iberian psykers, a city high on a mountain under a dome powered by a nuclear reactor, Chapter 7 their attitude towards religion (they make a big deal of tolerating religion even though they know it is all a scam.)  In Chapter 8 the scientist is told that some traitor to the dictatorship has exposed the location of the gold mine and so soon a war will erupt over the mine as several nations send fleets to Antarctica to secure it.  The scientist is given the job of warning the world that if they don't behave the Antarcticans will use their high technology to set off volcanoes which will cause the ocean to rise 50 or 100 feet, destroying London, New York, etc.

The world does not listen (Chapter 9) and war erupts so the world is flooded (Chapter 10.)  Our final Chapter is 11, in which the Antarcticans ask the scientist to join their space program.

"Lords of the Ice" is a quite weak story.  The style is simple, even childish, but the story is not direct and smooth--there are all kinds of extraneous scenes and characters (e. g., the scientist briefly speculates that the sounds he hears are a huge worm is burrowing through the Earth near the goldmine.)  It is ideas, not character, drama, suspense, or human relationships (there are none) that animate "Lords of Ice," and these ideas are banal misanthropy.  The plot is arrogant elitist wish fulfillment, I guess designed to appeal to kids who think of themselves as bright and who are bullied or shunned--a small cadre of smarty smarts plays a trick on humanity and then punishes humanity for its violent ways by inflicting even greater violence upon them--and the Earth!--from the safety of their secret fortress, then plots how to leave the ruined Earth behind.  

Thumbs down!

"Mannikins of Horror" by Robert Bloch      

Edgar Colin was one of the world's great surgeons and an expert on human anatomy; he suffered psychological trauma on the battlefields of the World War and wound up in a mental hospital.  He feels dissociated from his own body, feels like his organs are distinct entities, feels he is losing his identity, as if he were thousands of different men!

To maintain his sanity he needs serious absorbing work, and he starts sculpting human figures in clay, six or so inches tall.  Colin isn't satisfied to just sculpt the outsides, the surface, of his little figures.  It takes years of study and practice, but eventually he is sculpting skeletons, attaching organs and muscles and nerves and blood vessels and finally skin and hair until he has the world's most realistic representations of human beings' insides and outsides!  When he finds he can control the movements of the mannikins with his mind, he begins to think of himself as a Dr. Frankenstein, even as a God!  

Disaster!  Colin's shrink thinks his patient's obsession with the clay dolls is inhibiting his recovery!  Tomorrow the clay dolls will be taken away!  Colin resorts to desperate and violent measures, imbuing dolls with fragments of his consciousness, sculpting dolls for the specific roles of spy...and assassin!  Gruesome horror is the result!  Who will live?  Who will die?

A good horror story from Bloch which features Bloch's hobbyhorse of mental illness but, thank Azathoth, none of his characteristic puns.  Elements of the tale, including one of the climactic visual gimmicks, are slightly similar to Harlan Ellison's "All the Sounds of Fear," which we just read; I wonder if "Mannikins of Horror" might have influenced our old pal Harlan?  Ellison would have to had seen it in this issue of WT, as while it has been reprinted many times, isfdb suggests "Mannikins of Horror" was not reprinted until 1966, when it was included in Kurt Singer's Weird Tales of the Supernatural, and "All the Sounds of Fear" appeared in 1962.  "Mannikins of Horror" was later included in the many editions of a collection of stories by Bloch and Ray Bradbury, and multiple anthologies on the theme of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.

**********

Well, Bloch saves the day with a solid tale about a mad scientist who creates life that features dreadful and shocking mental and physical injuries--it would have been sad if we had ended our examination of the 1930s run of Weird Takes with McClusky's mediocre piece and Keller's boring and lame science fiction complaint that people are too greedy and too violent.  If you are going to be the millionth person to bitch about human greed and violence you'd better have something interesting to say or say it in an entertaining way, and Keller fails; thankfully, when Bloch invokes the immortal name of Frankenstein he delivers an engaging piece with some human feeling and some disturbing horror images.

Yes, it is true, the MPorcius Fiction Log Weird Tales Project is complete--my pledge to read at least one story from each issue of WT with a 1930s cover date has been fulfilled!  Below find links to year by year lists of stories read with handy links to my blog post about each story.

And don't be sad, weirdies!  There is every possibility the Weird Tales Project will be extended back to the Roaring Twenties and the editorship of Edwin Baird and forward to the period of American participation in the Second World War and the Cold War and the editorship of Dorothy McIlwraith.  So stay tuned!

                    1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939

Weird Tales Project: 1939

 

You didn't think this day would ever come, did you?  But here it is!  Our quest to read a story from every issue of Weird Tales published in the 1930s has been accomplished!  And below is the proof!  A list of all the 1939 stories from Farnsworth Wright's magazine of strange and fascinating fiction that I have read along with links to my blog posts about these stories.  And, preceding that, links to similar lists for each of the other nine years in the decade.

It is exciting to have completed this mission, and to consider what our next project might be.

  1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    ----  

January

H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop: "Medusa's Coil"

Robert Bloch:                                  "Waxworks"

Edmond Hamilton:                          "Bride of Lightning"

Manly Wade Wellman:                    "These Doth the Lord Hate"

February

Henry Kuttner:      "The Transgressor"

Robert Bloch:        "Death is an Elephant"

August Derleth:     "The Drifting Snow"

Donald Wandrei:   "Giant-Plasm"

March

Duane W. Rimel:       "The Metal Chamber"

August Derleth:         "The Return of Hastur"

Edmond Hamilton:    "Comrades of Time"

H. P. Lovecraft:          "The Quest of Iranon"

Ralph Milne Farley:   "The Stratosphere Menace"

April

Zealia Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft:       "The Curse of Yig" 

Henry Kuttner:                                      "Hydra"

Thorp McClusky:                                  "The Red God Laughed"

C. L. Moore:                                          "Hellsgarde" 

Edmond Hamilton:                                "Armies From the Past"

Robert Bloch:                                        "The Red Swimmer"

Mary Elizabeth Counselman:               "Mommy"

May

Henry Kuttner:  "The Watcher at the Door"

Robert Bloch:    "The Dark Isle" 

Merle Prout:      "Witch's Hair"

Lester del Rey:  "Cross of Fire" 

June-July

Clark Ashton Smith:                          "The Willow Landscape"

Hugh B. Cave:                                   "The Death Watch"

H. P. Lovecraft:                                  "Celephais"

H. P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini:   "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" 

August

Manly Wade Wellman:    "The Valley Was Still"

E. Hoffmann Price:          "The Apprentice Magician" 

P. Schulyer Miller:           "Spawn"

Frank Belknap Long:       "Giants in the Sky"

Robert Bloch:                   "The Totem-Pole"

September

Thorp McClusky:                              "While Zombies Walked"

E. Hoffmann Price:                           "The Spanish Vampire"

August Derleth and Mark Schorer:   "Spawn of the Maelstrom"

Clark Ashton Smith:                          "A Night in Malneant"

October

Robert E. Howard:                               "Worms of the Earth"

Ralph Milne Farley:                             "The Mystery of the Missing Magnate"

Manly Wade Wellman:                         "The Witch's Cat"

H. P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling: "In the Walls of Eryx"

November

Henry Kuttner:                        "Towers of Death"

Mary Elizabeth Counselman:  "The Web of Silence" 

December

C. L. Moore and Forrest J. Ackerman: "Nymph of Darkness"

Frank Belknap Long:                            "Escape from Tomorrow"

Thorp McClusky:                                  "The Considerate Hosts"

David H. Keller:                                    "Lords of Ice"

Robert Bloch:                                        "Mannikins of Horror"

Swank Apr '74: The Sci-Fi Special Issue: H Ellison, R Bradbury et al

Swank, a men's magazine that has been published on and off since the 1940s, in April 1974 put out an issue with a sizable special SF section that included a reprint of a story by Harlan Ellison, a profile of Ellison, an interview with Ray Bradbury, and articles about SF conventions and Forrest J. Ackerman.  All this along with an interview with Raquel Welch ("I think if the Women's Liberationists get their way the women of the future will be machines, zombies...."), book and music reviews (enthusiastic praise for The Princess Bride and Band on the Run), and page after page of topless young ladies.  Let's look at the nonfiction SF content of this issue of the magazine "for men and women in touch" and then the included Ellison story, 1972's "Kiss of Fire."

Near the front of the mag is a column and teeny photo describing The Science Fiction Shop at 56 Eighth Avenue in Greenwich Village--they have some great Lovecraft and Tolkien material!  (This store closed in 1986, like ten years before I moved to Manhattan under the guise of a graduate student in History.)  In the middle of the magazine is an article about SF conventions in general and the recent Toronto convention in particular.  There are a lot of black and white photos, including two of Larry Niven, one with a Hugo and one of him dressed up in a costume consisting of a sort of robe and a very tall square hat.  Another convention goer (her photo is much larger than the Niven photos) is dressed as "La Reine Noire"; it seems the Black Queen's customary attire leaves her breasts bare.  The article about Ackerman consists of two pages, almost entirely photos; the brief text is gushing praise.

The profile of Ellison is also characterized by gushing praise, but also some skepticism of such anecdotes as Ellison's claim of having helped black terrorists shoot at police in Newark.  The profile chronicles several incidents of Ellison getting into other people's spaces--asking a high school teacher in front of her students if she puts out, "throttling" Gardner Dozois (as a joke, presumably), spoiling panel discussions with a joke about Tinkerbell putting out.  (It is a little funny to find the phrase "puts out" twice in an article like this; I guess this was an Ellison stock phrase at the time.)  Ellison appears as a prima donna who always wants to be the center of attention and is willing to disrupt other people's comfort to do so.  And then there is the embarrassing promotion of The Last Dangerous Visions, envisioned as a two-volume boxed set due out in late 1974, and other abortive projects.  The profile is almost entirely about Ellison the personality, with no discussion I can recall of the topics of his stories or his narrative techniques...well, I guess he is called "a master of emotion."  "Master of emotion" is an interesting turn of phrase, because one of the themes of the profile is the extent to which Ellison's wild antics are an act and to what extent they are Ellison being "authentic." 

The preamble to the Ray Bradbury interview is still more effusive praise, but this article is much more substantive and powerful than any of the other SF-related non-fiction in the magazine.  Bradbury talks about his poverty as a youth, about finally making money and blowing it on a tour of Europe, and about his relationship with his father, offering the traditional advice that is so hard to follow, that human relationships are more important than things like politics and should be your main concern to which everything else is subordinated.

Alright, let's tackle the Ellison story that was reprinted in this issue of Swank.

"Kiss of Fire" (1972)

"Kiss of Fire" first saw print in Halcyon, a quarterly magazine put out by college students.  Like Swank's April 1974 issue, you can find the Spring 1972 issue of Halcyon at the internet archive, the world's greatest website.  Neither isfdb nor the Harlan Ellison website lists the Swank appearance of "Kiss of Fire," so if you have a Harlan Ellison collector in your life, let them know about it.  

"Kiss of Fire" is accompanied in Swank by an illustration by the Dillons that takes up more than a page; it is a good example of their work, and I have no idea if it ever appeared elsewhere, so check it out of you are a fan.

"Kiss of Fire" is a portrait of a future of extreme decadence, when there is almost no work to do and everyone is constantly on drugs and people are so jaded, so sated, that prostitutes have trouble getting customers and men have vaginas surgically implanted into their armpits in an effort to experience sexual stimulation.  Our main character is an artist who has the sorts of problems Ellison himself presumably had working in cinema and television--he comes up with dramatic productions and the business people he has to work for and work with don't appreciate his work and don't do what the artist considers a good job presenting his productions to the public.  These productions (reminding us a little of "Deeper Than the Darkness") consist of triggering suns into going nova so entire solar systems, once the homes of sophisticated civilizations now extinct, are destroyed.  He does this from a space liner, and so desensitized are the people who paid to be passengers on the liner that many of them sleep through the nova or play cards while the solar system on the other side of the portholes is being destroyed.  Before the planets of the systems are annihilated, the ruins of the dead civilizations are scanned so people can experience their essence through empathy machines as a form of entertainment.   

The artist is bored of life and talks about wanting to die, using the same metaphor, the same phrase, that summer is ending, again and again.  Similarly, a computer simulation of his long-dead wife repeats phrases again and again, reminding us of how the creative classes of decadent societies rehash the same plots and themes again and again.  

A beautiful alien woman comes to the artist, a woman with very small breasts, perhaps symbolizing youth and vitality.  The artist is sexually attracted for the first time in ages, and after they have sex this woman brings him what he truly wants--death.  The artist has just destroyed the native planet of her people--reminding us of "The Discarded," her ancestors were exiled because among her winged people they lacked wings, so while the planet was vacant, her civilization was not quite extinct, and, besides, her people's religion suggests that, like the phoenix, the dead would be reborn from their remains, which the artist has just annihilated.  She condemns the human race for destroying the records and remains of every other race as it dies, for, having conquered the universe and now expiring, there being nothing left to do, taking everyone else down into oblivion with them, and then gently murders the man who wants to die, his death symbolizing the coming death of the entire human race which similarly wants to die.

This is not a smooth read, especially the first quarter or so, Ellison using lots of metaphors and neologisms, and I had to reread some passages to get what was going on, but it is not too bad, and this style of overwriting--using words more oblique and esoteric than necessary, and in greater volume than necessary, to make a point--suits a story about a society which is very complex and sophisticated but at its core heartless, soulless, and weak, like a house with rotten foundations covered in garish gingerbread and rococo fripperies.  The ideas and plot are good, and I liked it once I focused and got a handle on it, so thumbs up for "Kiss of Fire."

"Kiss of Fire" in 1973 was included in the anthology edited by Thomas N. Scortia and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro entitled Two Views of Wonder, and was reprinted in the many editions of Ellison's Approaching Oblivion.  Joachim Boaz blogged about Approaching Oblivion back in 2013 (when we were young!) so go check out what he had to say about "Kiss of Fire" and the whole shebang.

**********

Well, the non-fiction stuff was kind of disappointing, leaving aside the Bradbury interview, which had some good anecdotes, but the Ellison story and Dillons illo are good, so it looks like I am recommending this issue of Swank, which I just stumbled upon by putting Ellison's name in the internet archive search field.  Keep exploring, kids!

Harlan Ellison: "The Discarded," "Deeper than the Darkness," and "All the Sounds of Fear"

As I have bragged before, some years ago in America's Middle West I purchased for $2.00 at Half Price Books a copy of the Collier paperback edition of Alone Against Tomorrow that is signed by author Harlan Ellison himself, a Fifth Printing produced in 1979.  After reading some uncollected stories by Saint Harlan, and then stories collected in From the Land of Fear, let's today read three stories from this holy relic touched by the man's own hand.  The first story in Alone Against Tomorrow is "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," which I am not reading again, and the fourth is "Blind Lightning," which I read back in 2019 when we took a look at an anthology on the theme of people being hunted.  So let's read the second, third and fifth stories from this collection of "stories of alienation in speculative fiction" by a "vigorous" man whose "writing deserves nothing but praise," "a first-rate novelist" and "major voice" whose "stories are written with a feverish intensity."  Get a room!

"The Discarded" (1959)

This piece debuted in an All-Star Issue of Fantastic, where it bore the title "The Abnormals."  Bizarrely to my mind, "The Abnormals" is the cover story but Ellison's name doesn't appear on the cover.  Inside we find a Virgil Finlay illustration of a bikini babe, but it is for Rog Phillips' story, not Harlan's.  (Rog Phillips is a star?)  In the letters column, readers praise Fantastic's policy of printing fantasy stories and reminisce about the good old days of Weird Tales and H. P. Lovecraft and express appreciation of the appearance of WT alum Robert Bloch in Fantastic's pages.  The Associate Editor of The American Rationalist writes in to attack religious people (a "dense pall of ignorance and superstition...still shrouds too large an area of our culture") and complain that too many fantasy stories get merchandised as science fiction.  Editor Cele Goldsmith has put together a lively issue!

In "Battles Without Banners" (see our last blog post) Ellison made a distinction between members of marginalized populations who violently lash out of the mainstream population and would rather die than surrender, and those who try to assimilate and/or cut deals for their personal benefit, and here in "The Discarded" he does a similar thing.  Does Ellison's romanticization of vengeful hard liners jive with his anti-war stance?  If you don't want war, don't you have to cut deals with others or knuckle under to the culture of others?  If blacks and Jews shouldn't assimilate to white gentile culture or cut a deal with the white gentile establishment because the white gentile establishment can't be trusted, why should the West cut deals with or put trust in Moscow or Peking or Hamas or Hezbollah?  We've got two choices--fight or submit--and Ellison thinks both are wrong?  You have to wonder if Ellison's ideas are thought out logically or are just emotional outbursts or romantic poses.  (It is perhaps significant that stories like "Battles Without Banners" and "The Discarded" don't offer solutions, just depict lost causes, that they appeal to emotion and not reason.)

Mankind has colonized the Solar System, with human settlements on moons like Io and Callisto and planets like Mars and Venus.  Our protagonists are on a space ship, hoping to be permitted to land on one of these settlements, but nobody wants them because they are hideous freaks!  Use of weapons of mass destruction over the years has polluted the Earth, and as a result a susceptible minority of people suffers horrible mutations, and these mutants have been exiled from Earth.  The ship which is the setting of "The Discarded" is home to hundreds of the mutants--fish men who have no choice but to wear helmets full of water; a guy with two heads, one an imbecile; people with spines growing out of their backs; people with feathers instead of hair, etc.  These people tend to be violent and suicidal, and many dead mutants have been tossed out the air lock after their successful suicide attempts.

One day a ship approaches this ship of the exiled.  It bears news--more and more people on Earth are getting sick and exhibiting horrendous symptoms as a second wave of the plague washes over the world; this new strain, apparently triggered by attempts to kill the germs causing the plague, is more virulent and more people are vulnerable.  There is a theory abroad that the blood of victims of the first wave can be used to inoculate those as yet unaffected, and Earth wants to make a deal with the abnormals on the ship.  Are the Earthers sincere in offers to let the Discarded live on reservations on Earth in return for their blood?  Should the abnormals dismiss the Terran offer out of hand or give it a try?  There is a fight among the leaders of the ship of exiles, and the accommodationists win.  Blood is donated to Earth, and the Terran population is inoculated.  But the Earth doesn't hold to its side of the deal--in fact, it sends all the people who have been deformed by the second wave of the plague and adds them to the population of the ship of exiles!  The leader of the accommodationists commits suicide.

Whatever you think of the story's misanthropic ideology, which maybe appeals to angsty kids who like to play act feeling rejected by society, "The Discarded" is well-written and some will enjoy hearing about the many different mutations Ellison comes up with, so while similar in theme it is far better than the somewhat ridiculous "Battle Without Banners."  I can mildly recommend this one.

"The Discarded" is included in Paingod and Other Delusions as well as Alone Against Tomorrow, and is one of the stories in The Illustrated Harlan Ellison, a book our man tarbandu wrote about back in 2012.  The cover illustration of one edition of The Illustrated Harlan Ellison is by Michael Whelan, who effectively renders the inmates of the ship of abnormals.  The interior illustrations for "The Discarded" were done by Tom Sutton, and if you look around online you can find a bunch of Sutton's illustrations, and they are pretty elaborate--Sutton took this job really seriously and gave it his all.

"Deeper than the Darkness" (1957)

"Deeper than the Darkness" first saw print in an issue of Infinity Science Fiction that looks awesome, with stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Fritz Leiber, E. C. Tubb and John Christopher, and art by Emsh and Jack Gaughan.  I will have to look into this one further.  But today we focus on "Deeper than the Darkness," another story that would appear in Paingod and Other Delusions and The Illustrated Harlan Ellison.

Even in the era of intergalactic colonization, commerce and war, there are still in North America rural backwaters, little hick towns, and it is in just such a place that the Feds catch up to Alf Gunnderson, a psyker--a very special psyker who can start fires with his mind, though he can't control them.  Alf has been bumming around the galaxy, "a tortured and unhappy man," and in Chapter I he is taken to a federal facility by government mind readers for study; the climax of Chapter I is Alf's declaration that he wants to die.

In Chapter II, Alf is on one of the latest government space ships, on a dreadful mission--to use his powers to turn the sun of the home system of one of Earth's enemies into a supernova!

In Chapter III, Alf realizes he has additional psychic powers, and can shield his mind from intrusion by the mind reader and his body from destruction by the brain blaster who have been assigned to make sure he completes the apocalyptic mission assigned to him.  Alf is the greatest most powerful psyker in the universe!  Alf looks out the port into hyperspace--"That darkness deeper than the darkness"--and considers whether he should embrace his role as a super weapon and thereby enjoy a life of purpose and meaning instead of that of a shunned loser, even if it means exterminating a bunch of people--billions of them--he knows nothing about.  He decides to steal a lifeboat and abandon the Earth vessel.

In the final chapter, IV, we find Alf has become "the Minstrel," a guy who travels the galaxies, bumming rides from system to system, playing music on a theremin so profound that it makes people cry in one scene and in another lifts the spirits and eases their anxieties of passengers and crew on a star ship so they all independently think, "this is going to be a good trip."  

All the psychic space empire stuff in this story is good, and very reminiscent of Warhammer 40,000, what with the renegade psykers, sanctioned psykers, scary hyperspace that special psykers have to navigate the ships through, the vast number and diversity of planets and the endless wars with a multiplicity of enemies.  The sentimental and sappy resolution isn't bad, and is perhaps more interesting than Alf joining the enemy or even blowing up Earth the way Elric blew up Melnibone, which I suspected might happen, or Alf becoming benevolent dictator of the universe, like might happen in a van Vogt story.  Maybe a small personal ending is a nice change of pace, a contrast to the paradigm-shifting sense-of-wonder endings we expect from old SF stories.  I can recommend "Deeper than Darkness."

It seems our mates over in Blighty split Alone Against Tomorrow into two volumes
for paperback publication; I guess all those extra "u"s in "colour" and "armour"
take up a lot of extra space.  All three of today's stories appeared in the half
entitled All the Sounds of Fear; the other half bears the moniker The Time of the Eye

"All the Sounds of Fear" (1962)

This one seems to have made its debut in the collection Ellison Wonderland, which has also been printed under the title Earthman, Go Home!, or in a British edition of The Saint Mystery Magazine; the US book and the UK magazine seem to have been printed within a month of each other.  Judith Merril reprinted "All the Sounds of Fear" in the eighth of her famous anthology series, and it would also show up in one of those Alfred Hitchcock anthologies.  

"All the Sounds of Fear" is gimmicky and feels long and slow.  In the past I have complained of writers' efforts to convey through print the experience of listening to powerful music, and of course it is a cliche to make fun of written descriptions of sexual ecstasy.  It is difficult to replicate some experiences through text, and efforts to do so will end up being boring or irritating or ludicrous, and one of the problems of "All the Sounds of Fear" is that in the first half of the story Ellison tries gamely to convey through print the effect of witnessing an excellent dramatic performance and I found it eye-glazingly tedious.

A young stage actor gets into his parts by living them before hand, and we get a long description of a handsome 22-year-old buying worn clothes to transform himself into a homeless derelict and then living on the streets for six weeks.  He does similar things again and again (e. g., working in a foundry for almost two months so he can convincingly portray a guy who works in a foundry) and over two decades builds up the greatest career in the history of the legitimate theatre.  Ellison fills the story with direct and slightly oblique references to important plays and playwrights and of course "the Method" and Stanislavski that maybe drama aficionados will appreciate.

Halfway through the story, while preparing for a part as a murderous religious fanatic, the world's greatest thespian murders a young woman and ends up in an insane asylum.  In the loony bin he inhabits one character after another, living for some weeks as one of his roles, then as the one previous, then the one previous to that, and we get some psychobabble ("induced hallucinatory regression") and snooze-inducing scenes in which the actor talks to a shrink in the voice and with the mannerisms of fictional characters, imparting his fictional biography.  

Finally we get our Twilight-Zone-style ending, when, having already relived all his roles, the actor becomes nobody, his face a smooth blankness. 

One of the things I kind of thought Ellison was trying to do, and maybe he was but too subtly for my taste, was to suggest that the Platonic ideal of THE ACTOR would have no actual character of his own, but merely reflect the world around him, and this actor in the story became a religious fanatic killer because our society is too religious and too violent--in the view of Harlan Ellison, like that of the guy from the American Rationalist, the religious murderer is the figure characteristic of our society.  That is silly, but at least it would be an argument, at least the story would have a point--as it is, this story is pointless, just 12 pages of flavorless goop.  

I like Moby Dick, and when people say, "Isn't a lot of it just about the tools and techniques of killing and processing a whale in the 19th century?" I say, "Kind of, but I am really curious as to how guys in the 19th century killed and processed whales."  And maybe people who are really interested in early 1960s drama and pop psychology will like "All the Sounds of Fear" more than I do.  But to me the story is a drag, a long series of pointless details and sterile references culminating in a lame visual sting that has no sting because I couldn't begin to care about the lead character because he has no personality, no identity, no motivation, no goals.  Thumbs down.

**********

Two good science fiction stories plus one mundane story that deals entirely with topics I don't care about and climaxes in absurd fantasy.  Two out of three is not bad, so this was time well spent.  Rest assured we'll get back to Alone Against Tomorrow, though we've got plenty of other projects under way here at MPorcius Fiction Log that we'll be attending to for a little while.