Beachheads in Space: L del Rey, A E van Vogt, J Wyndham and N Bond

We're going back Jack, and doing it again--reading from a paperback edition of an anthology edited by August Derleth and with a cover illustration by Richard Powers, that is.  I bought Beachheads in Space, Berkley G-77, years ago, I think at one of the Second Story Books locations, maybe Rockville, MD, fabled in story and song, maybe Washington DC, the belly of the beast.  This 1957 edition contains half the stories of the 1952 hardcover edition--who decided what stories would make the cut and based on what criteria?  The SF game is full of heartbreak, I guess.

We've already read two stories that appear in G-77, Donald Wandrei's "The Blinding Shadow," which we liked, and Eric Frank Russell's "Metamorphosite," which I thought merited a "mild to moderate recommendation."  The previous owner of my copy of Beachheads in Space graded the stories in the volume, and he seems to have thought the Russell was excellent and the Wandrei poor.  (Unless "E" is for "evil" and "P" is for "perfect," which I suppose is possible in this crazy world of ours.)  We're going to read four more selections from Beachheads in Space today and see what we think of them and whether our opinions jive with the assessments of my predecessor.

Grades issued by the previous owner of my copy of Beachheads in Space; 
looks like Eric Frank Russell was his fave with A. E. van Vogt coming in second;
we see Donald Wandrei and Nelson S. Bond in the garbage

"'The Years Draw Nigh'" by Lester del Rey (1951)

Here we have a downbeat story that suggests there is nothing in outer space worth finding and mankind is going to go extinct when it no longer has any frontiers to conquer.  Say it ain't so, Lester!

It is the future!  Human life has been extended many centuries, thanks to rejuvenation treatments.  On Mars was discovered the ruins of a high tech civilization that must have expired ten million years ago.  The human race used Mars as a star port from which to launch forty starships carrying forty hardy and optimistic bands of explorers hoping to find new worlds to colonize, hoping to meet other intelligent races.  That was centuries ago.  By fifty years ago, 39 of the star ships had returned--not a single one had found an inhabitable planet or evidence of alien life, after exploring thousands of systems!  Earth's culture went into decline and the Mars star port was closed. 

The plot of our story here is set in motion when the sensors detect the approach of the fortieth star ship.  The Mars star port is reopened and operated by only one man.  When the ship touches down only four men, a fraction of the vessel's original complement, emerge.  The explorers found alien ruins on a distant world, and to everyone's dismay they proved to be ruins easily identified as those of the long dead Martian civilization.  Just like us Terrans, the Martians explored the galaxy, found nothing worth conquering, and then lost all ambition and faded away!  The men of the final ship and the guy managing the Mars port, seeing life is hopeless and civilization has nothing left to achieve, decide to forgo their next rejuvenation treatment!

 

A downer!  We'll call this one acceptable; del Rey does a good job of setting the mood of fatigue, decay and hopelessness, but the characters don't do much and there isn't much plot progression or climax; you might call it a mood piece, the bleak tone of which is maintained from start to finish.  Previous owner calls it fair and I am right there with him.

"'The Years Draw Nigh'" made its debut in Astounding, in the same issue as Eric Frank Russell's "Ultima Thule," which we read two years ago and which I can recommend.  "'The Years Draw Nigh'" has been reprinted in del Rey collections.

"Repetition" by A. E. van Vogt (1940)

It has been a while since we grappled with the bewildering oeuvre of the Canadian madman who is so close to our hearts, A. E. van Vogt.  "Repetition" debuted in Astounding, in the same issue as the first installment of L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout, which we read way back in 2014, and Lester del Rey's "Reincarnate," which we just read in July, and Leigh Brackett's "The Treasure of Ptakuth," which we haven't read yet.  (Maybe soon!)  "Repetition" would become a component of the 1959 fix-up novel The War Against the Rull and would be reprinted in anthologies starting in the 1970s under the title "The Gryb."  

"Repetition" is a traditional science fiction story with space suits, alien monsters, and a hero who saves the day with quick outside-the-box thinking that leverages his knowledge--the title refers to the fact that this guy has had adventures on many planets and learned how to deal with many situations, and so has solutions to the problems he encounters during the course of the story because he has already dealt with similar problems.  At the end of the story he gives a little speech about how if mankind is to unite in peace to conquer the galaxy, people will have to learn techniques to prevent war and use them again and again throughout history the same way he has used tried and true techniques to overcome monsters.

The solar system is on the brink of war!  The Earth-Venus union is at odds with the Mars empire, and one of the points of contention is Europa--the Martians want control of Europa, and the Europans, who have built five cities in the fifty years since the colony on Europa was founded, want to maintain their independence.  As the story begins, our hero Thomas, an important politician from the Earth-Venus union, is flying over the surface of Europa with his guide, the Europan Bartlett.  Bartlett is leading Thomas into a death trap--the Europans are aware that the Earth-Venus union wants to allow Mars control of Europa in order to avoid war, and so these hardy colonists have hatched a wild scheme to murder Thomas and short circuit his appeasement policy.  But Thomas is an expert judge of character and psychology and a seasoned adventurer and survives the murder attempt, and Bartlett is too much of a gentleman to just kill Thomas himself in cold blood.  So, Bartlett sets the controls of their jetpack space suits, energy weapons attached, so they fly off into space, leaving them to die in the barren and monster-haunted Europan wilderness.  But Thomas insists he isn't licked yet, that they can survive the long march to one of the Five Cities.  To the amazement of Bartlett, Thomas figures out how to defeat the native monsters without any high tech weapons, ensuring their survival.  During the march the men argue over interplanetary policy, Thomas eventually convincing Bartlett the appeasement policy is a good one--it is essential to avoid war because all of the solar system's resources must be dedicated to developing star ships, and giving a diplomatic "win" to the current Martian government will enable them to prevail in the coming election against the war party, and then join the Earth-Venus union.  It seems that Thomas' skill in fighting the monsters and his ability to read Bartlett's psychology are as important in convincing Bartlett as are facts and logic.

The adventure portions of the story are pretty good--the equipment, the monsters, the descriptions of perils and landscape and so on.  The means Thomas employs to kill the most dangerous monster, the thirty-foot-long armored gryb, and the political discussions around the fate of Europa and the relationship among Earth, Venus and Mars, are pretty complicated, contrived, and unconvincing, but somewhat entertaining.  "Repetition" is certainly a good example of van Vogt's totally out-of-left field thinking, and perhaps Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.'s dedication to shaking readers up and presenting counterintuitive thinking that bucks conventional wisdom, that our man Van offers a scenario strikingly similar to the crises around Czechoslovakia and then Poland in 1938 and 1939 and makes a go at convincing the reader to side with the appeaser instead of the patriot eager to fight for his country.

I like this sort of thing, and agree with previous owner that "Repetition" is moderately good.

As I read the version of the story in this rapidly decaying copy of Beachheads in Space I consulted a scan of the appropriate issue of Astounding and the only differences I found were in punctuation and in the relationships between paragraphs--the magazine version has section breaks between scenes that are eliminated in the Beachheads version, and at least once two magazine paragraphs were combined into a single paragraph for publication in Beachheads.  Then I took a glance at the version, titled "The Gryb," in my copy of The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders and it seemed this version restored the magazine punctuation and section breaks.  I wanted to see what changes to the story van Vogt wrought to make it fit into the novel The War Against the Rull, but internet archive was down, so while in Frederick, MD I stopped at the WonderBook there and bought a paperback copy of the novel put out by Ace with a John Schoenherr cover.

Chapters VI, VII and VIII of War Against the Rull consist primarily of the revised material from "Repetition" and much of the original story has been excised or altered.  The murderous guide is now a woman, and much of the psychology stuff has been removed or changed to instead reflect female psychology.  The location has been moved to an extrasolar system and all the business about appeasing Mars to influence the Mars election is gone; instead we have political jazz related to the Terran relationship with alien races, the ezwal and the Rull.  The only things that remains unchanged are the barren landscape and the monster fighting elements.  These changes are all for the worse--most of the intellectually challenging stuff is gone--but the scenes are still entertaining in a surface action-adventure way. 

German and Dutch translations of
Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders

"And the Walls Came Tumbling Down..." by John Wyndham (1951)

John Wyndham has a high reputation but, as I never tire of telling people, I wasn't crazy about The Chrysalids AKA Re-Birth.  Maybe I'll like this story, which debuted in an issue of Startling containing a story by Edmond Hamilton I haven't read yet and much discussion in the letters column related to whether or not the magazine should have monsters and sexy girls on its covers--many correspondents seem to think that the magazine will sell better if it switches to astronomical paintings and abandons the traditional "garish" and "lurid" and "oversexed" covers that readers are ashamed to let their relatives at home and strangers on the street see them carrying.  Just tell those judgmental normies "I was born this way" and "I'm just being me," people--let your freak frag fry!

The gag of "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down...," the title of which appears with more or fewer ellipses depending on where it is printed, is that silicone-based aliens arrive on Earth and are amazed and disgusted to find carbon-based life.  You'll be proud to hear that the carbon-based life shoots half the arrogant interlopers' ships right out of the sky and then when the aliens land in the wilderness it is only a days before humans have discovered them and wiped them out.  CBL!  CBL!

The text of the story, which I guess is supposed to be funny, bug has some gruesome horror elements, is a series of reports from an expedition to Earth by the telepathic silicon creatures, crystal people, who approach Earth and are fired upon repeatedly; many of the crystal people are killed before they land.  Later events in the story suggest that the silicon ships were destroyed not intentionally by anti-aircraft weapons but accidentally by radar or radio waves.  

The surviving aliens then land in a desert, which they consider a paradise because of all the silicates just laying around.  Some gorge themselves on all the available silicates and grow to huge size.  Others study the trees and animals and people inhabiting the area, finding it hard to believe that an automobile, which exhibits the hardness and straight lines they associate with intelligent life, is not alive and certainly not intelligent but that soft sacks of tubes are in fact alive and may be intelligent.  One reason for confusion in the interactions between human and alien is that the crystal people and their equipment are totally transparent to visible light, essentially invisible to the human eye.  A pair of people crash their car right into the fortification thrown up by the aliens around their ship.  The aliens can read human minds but humans cannot pick up alien thought transmissions.

The aliens dissect a person and thusly inspire a woman to scream and the frequency of her scream causes one of the aliens to shatter.  The story proceeds from there, with more and more people, including the authorities, arriving to investigate and try to rescue those people captured by the aliens, who are fully in sight behind the invisible but bullet-proof walls of the alien redoubt.  When women see the dissected person they scream, causing more of the aliens to shatter.  Eventually the aliens try to shoot down the humans with their weapons--sonic artillery that can shatter crystal people and equipment, but whose waves merely sound like queer music to humans.  When sound of the aliens' weapons is played back by the humans through a police radio, likely simply accidentally, the alien ship, fortifications and personnel are destroyed.

An acceptable sort of minor thing.  "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down" has reappeared in Wyndham collections, including "Best of" books.  If this is among Wyndham's best work, maybe I'm fated to forever be a Wyndham skeptic.  Previous owner considered it fair.

         

"To People a New World" by Nelson S. Bond (1950)

                 

This one debuted in Blue Book, a magazine that only rarely comes up in my SF explorations.  This story was considered poor by the previous owner of my copy of Beachheads in Space, and has not been reprinted very much; besides Beachheads you can find it in the Bond collection Nightmares and Daydreams.

This is a pretty lame story, obvious and boring; a SF magazine probably would have rejected it for being elementary and banal, and I don't know why Derleth selected it for republication. 

A family--Dad, Mom, two boys--live in a post-nuclear-war world, having set up a productive farm and being able to hunt and fish with bow, sling and spear.  Every year Dad goes away for a month to scavenge in a nuked city.  He avoids touching metal and there is no metal on the farm--metal retains radiation and would make them ill, or so Dad thinks.  They have never met any other people since the cataclysm.

When he is sixteen the narrator, one of the two boys, accompanies Dad to the city.  He finds a book which talks about machines and buildings and so forth, and the narrator likes it and secretly brings it home.  When Dad finds out about it he orders the narrator to destroy it, as books and technological knowledge were what brought on the nuclear war, but the narrator loves the book and loves the idea of rebuilding a technological society and hides the book and studies it closely in secret.  When his brother catches him reading he threatens to tell Dad and the narrator kills him.  The narrator is forced to leave his family and the last word of the story is his name: "Cain."  I guess we are supposed to think that our civilization is built above the ruins of a previous civilization obliterated in a nuclear war and the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel is based on these survivors of that disaster.

Lame twist ending, very little plot, we're giving this one the old thumbs down.  When I read Bond's "Prescience" back in January I liked it enough to say the kind of thing I say all the time, that I should read more by this author, but today's Bond experience is dampening my ardor a little.

**********

I like the van Vogt, but the other three stories we've looked at today are leaving me feeling like this paperback edition of Beachheads in Space is an underwhelming anthology.  The Bond is lame and feels like it is not aimed at a SF audience but a mainstream audience unfamiliar with SF themes and tropes.  The del Rey and Wyndham are competent, but are not thrilling or heroic or inspiring--you might call them tragic but they lack tragic grandeur, depicting mere blunders and people at the mercy of their environments, and seem to belittle the human race and suggest exploring space is a waste of time.  Do we crave these sorts of flat mopey stories in which people's fates do not reflect their aspirations and abilities?  Not really.

  

1974 stories by W Macfarlane, D Picard, M D Toman and M Bishop

Let's read the second half of David Gerrold's 1974 anthology of all new stories, Science Fiction Emphasis 1.  The first half was interesting and entertaining, with three sex stories and a good story about the life of the artist; hopefully this second half will be at least as rewarding.

"The Rubaiyat of Ambrose Bagley" by W. Macfarlane

I haven't actually read The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam so maybe this is going to go right over my head.  We'll soldier on regardless.

This is a shaggy dog story written in a silly jokey style; it is perhaps somewhat like an R. A, Lafferty story.  A Midwestern salesman, the Bagley of the title, is an expert at sales, can sell anything to anybody, but he is unfulfilled.  He has heard stories of luxurious cruises out of Hong Kong, and so goes to Hong Kong and boards a cruise liner.  The cruise is everything he might have hoped, the food and the accommodations impossibly delicious and comfortable, and he has an affair with a British aristocrat who has amazing erotic abilities.  Then he gets back to America, refreshed.  I guess the point is that as a salesman he sells things to people and they actually believe his sales pitch and so enjoy the products he offers as if his pitch was true, and now he has had the same experience, enjoying the cruise as much as he has been told he would, and this has made him feel better about his own work.

This one feels like a waste of time.  It doesn't seem like "The Rubaiyat of Ambrose Bagley" has been reprinted. 

"Gate-O" by Don Picard   

Here we have a well-written adventure/horror story that addresses issues of class conflict, racism and the role of the United States in the world.  It is pretty good, but does not seem to have been reprinted anywhere.  Don Picard only has this one citation at isfdb; is it possible he had a career in mainstream or detective fiction?  Or that this is a pen name?  The story is totally professional, entertaining as well as serious and ambitious, as if this guy has a lot of writing under his belt and in his future.  

It is the near future--the 1990s!  In the 1980s there was a nuclear war and the USA, the Soviet Union, and China were all wiped out, and most of Europe as well.  The Third World blames the US for the cataclysm, and the Americans who were living in Africa and Latin America at the time of the war today feel the full force of Hispanic resentment of the gringo and black resentment of the white man!

Our narrator's father was an American working in finance in Mexico City when the First and Second Worlds blew each other up and the narrator grew up in the walled ghetto to which Americans are confined; when they venture out of the ghetto they have to go through security, wear a "G" on their clothes and sit in the back of the bus.  Picard, in the voice of the narrator's father, directly and explicitly likens the living conditions of Americans in post-cataclysm Mexico to that of Jews in Nazi Germany, while with the back of the bus business indirectly comparing the fate of the last Americans to that of blacks in the Jim Crow South.  Picard doesn't seem to be picking out Americans or Mexicans for particular criticism in this story, as there are sympathetic and honorable gringos and Mexicans as well as racist gringos and murderous Mexicans; I guess he is just commenting on racism and destructive class envy in general and trying to get his white American readers to look at the universe through the eyes of marginalized and oppressed people.

As I suggested above, most of the story's text consists of adventure and horror stuff.  The narrator is 14 years old when the assassination of a hardline anti-American Mexican politician triggers a pogrom against Americans, and he is the only survivor among his family, his life preserved by an obese Mexican maid and a beautiful Mexican prostitute.  Our narrator runs here and there on the torchlit streets, climbs walls, hides inches from discovery, sees the mutilated corpses of his mother and sister, and that of the maid, who sacrificed herself for her white employers.  As the adult author of this memoir, he works on a ship crewed by Americans and Australians, and likens the ship to a ghetto; in the final passages of the story he describes his gratitude to the maid who lost her life at the hands of her countrymen while standing up for him and other Americans.

A good choice by Gerrold.  At isfdb and on the contents page of Science Fiction Emphasis 1 this story is listed as "Gato-O" but the title page of the story has "Gate-O" and the text of the story makes clear that it should be "Gate-O," as this is a phonetic spelling of how a Mexican character pronounces "ghetto."  Gerrold or somebody at Ballantine should have caught this typo on the contents page during copyediting or proofreading.

"Shards of Divinity" by Michael D. Toman

Here's our third story of the day that has never been reprinted.  We are really venturing into rarely trod regions today, comrades.  We love to don the pith helmet and swing the machete here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

This is an experimental thing--I guess you'd call it very "New Wave"--that mocks Christianity and American pop culture and illustrates the way different cultural products influence each other over time (the word "syncretism," which I've heard people smarter than me use, is coming to mind) and the limited ability of the academics of an advanced society to figure out the culture of a less advanced and/or extinct one.  "Shards of Divinity"'s text of 13 pages consists of academic writing and reproductions of primary sources, apparently put together by space aliens who have visited Earth in the future, after a nuclear war or some such catastrophe.  The work of these extraterrestrial college professors is focused on unravelling the apparent links between action and adventure films and the Gospels.  John Wayne and Clint Eastwood are mentioned in passing, H. P. Lovecraft is quoted, and even Doc Savage is thrown in there, I think (one fragment seems to be an advertisement for a film retelling of the story of the temptation of Jesus by Satan, Damnation Desert, in which Jesus is recast as "Doc Messiah.")  Much of the story's page count is taken up by what come across as fragments of screenplays, full of italicized stage directions.  In one, Jesus is the "Sarge" in a war movie; in another, the crucifixion is reimagined as an episode of Mission: Impossible in which Jesus has to free Barabbas from Pontius Pilate's maximum security prison.  We also get Jesus as a zombie or vampire rising from the grave and Jesus as King Kong breaking out of bondage on stage.

I think of this sort of thing as sterile, as an example of cultural decadence, the mere rehashing of stuff that has already been done, but "Shards of Divinity" isn't very long (there is a lot of extra space between lines of dialogue in the screenplays) and some of the jokes and references are faintly amusing, so we'll say it is acceptable.

"On the Street of the Serpents" by Michael Bishop

Science Fiction Emphasis 1 is billed as a book of stories by unknown writers, but the story the back cover text pushes most fervently is this one, by Michael Bishop, who had already published over half a dozen stories when this anthology appeared.  This thing is like 70 pages long, and has a long subtitle, "or, The Assassination of Chairman Mao as Effected by the Author in Seville, Spain, in the Spring of 1992, a Year of No Certain Historicity," so I'm afraid it is going to be a chore to read, but Bishop is a decent stylist so maybe it won't be so bad.

The first part of the story, a sort of nostalgic look at the youth in Spain of the narrator, an American who has the same name as the author of the story, and his relationship with a little girl whose father is a Japanese-American and whose mother is a German, reminds us of Proust in its tone and with its theme of jealousy and its literary descriptions of locales.  The second part describes Bishop's young adulthood, his fathering of a son and his work as a teacher; there are passages about classical music and snow.  A theme of both of these sections is East Asia and its relationship with America; besides the little girl in Part I being the son of an ethnic Japanese who grew up in the US and doesn't speak Japanese, in Part II Bishop repeatedly describes his infant son as looking Asian ("like a small clown from Cathy" and "a pale-blue Buddha, swaddled in terrycloth") and talks about Richard Nixon's famous trip to China.

Part III takes up fifty pages of "On the Street of Serpents," and begins with Bishop, a man in his forties, returning to Seville, Spain, where he grew up as the son of an enlisted man in the United States Air Force.  There's an italicized page of somewhat confusing business about how Bishop is writing Part III from the vantage point of 2000, from prison, but it really isn't 2000 or 1992 yet, suggesting Part III is a fantasy or a delusion or something.  Anyway, he is in prison in 2000 typing away because in 1992 he went back to Spain to murder Mao Zedong, who had come to Spain to celebrate an alliance between Communist China and Franco's Spain.  In 1992 in this universe Mao and Franco are both alive and kicking; in fact, Mao has led the development of a union between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union!  Yikes!  In this bizarro world, socialism is thriving, and all the nations of the world are uniting to form a world government, except for the increasingly isolated United States, which is in decline, suffering increasing divorce rates and racial strife--Bishop's is among the families that have collapsed.  

With its focus on assassination of politicians, alternate history plot, unreliable narrator, and undercurrent of grim humor, Part III of "On the Street of Serpents" reminded me of Barry Malzberg's work.  The narrator's scheme to murder Chairman Mao involves him impersonating a blind man; before he kills him, Bishop has long conversations with the blind man and learns that the Chinese Communist Party, as part of its diplomatic overtures to Europe, hired an American doctor to put the brain of the aged Pablo Picasso into a robot body so Picasso might live on and continue creating art.  The robot Picasso cannot speak, which I guess symbolizes something, maybe the censorship regimes of Red China and Fascist Spain?  (There is a lot of censorship in the United States of this alternate future as well--Americans have no idea what is going on around the world.)  With no money for a room, the narrator spends the night in the abandoned ruin of the apartment building in which he lived in his teens--the body of the blind man he has murdered reposes a few floors above.  The next day he encounters the Japanese-American girl, now a grown married woman, who lived on the floor above him in this very building in his youth.

The woman describes how her family fell apart and then was reformed, her parents remarrying in Germany.  And how she married a blue-eyed blonde German, an expert on Asian languages.  Her husband was committed to the Chinese-led project of unifying the world and became a diplomat, representing Germany at the court of Chairman Mao.  So charming was this guy, that he became friends with Mao.  When her husband got inoperable brain cancer, he agreed to have Chairman Mao's brain installed in his still-healthy young body!  Mao Zedong, a Chinese brain in a European body, has come to physically embody his political objective of a world united under Chinese leadership!

Our narrator, Bishop, goes through with his plan to kill Mao during an event in which Franco and Mao walk down a Saville street, greeting the various local merchants--the blind guy was one of these small business people, a seller of lottery tickets.  When the now blue-eyed and blonde-haired Chinese tyrant sees Bishop he talks about how nowadays there need be no blind people, but our narrator kills him anyway.  Bishop is imprisoned, and while he is allowed to write, all news of the outside world is kept from him.

"On the Street of Serpents" is a big success, justifying the claim the story is "brilliant" on the back of the book.  Bishop handles the human characters and their relationships very well, and the literary touches--the descriptions of light and shadow and all that--are good.  The science fiction elements--the alternate history jazz and the brain transplants--are also intriguing and entertaining.  So, thumbs up.

What are we to take from the story besides admiration for Bishop's literary skill?  Obviously the theme of China reaching out to the rest of the world and uniting the world under its influence is inspired by the Nixon trip to China, though Bishop sort of reverses the polarity of this event--in real life the United States became closely enmeshed with Communist China, while in this story the US becomes very isolated and China builds close alliances with the USSR and Europe.  Is Bishop in this story trashing the United States, blaming America for international conflict?--after all, Mao is proposing to cure Bishop's supposed blindness a second before Bishop kills him.  The Japanese-American woman and her family, in their sexual relationships and in their relationship with Mao, represent intimate interactions among different cultures and ethnicities, but are these rocky relationships in the end healthy and beneficial, or do they lead to unhappiness and deracination?--the woman and her father are depicted as being cut off from their Asian roots, and other Asians deplore this abnegation of their cultural identity. Francisco Franco and Mao Zedong are essential figures in the story, but it is not clear how Bishop wants us to see them--while the narrator calls Mao a monster and kills him, the narrator isn't exactly sane or admirable, and Bishop doesn't spend any time describing the crimes of the Chinese Communist Party or of Franco, does little to change the opinion of these dictators that the reader held before he started reading the story.  Is the alliance between the anti-communist Franco and the icon of socialism Mao supposed to demonstrate that one authoritarian or totalitarian ideology is much like another, or that tyrants are essentially non-ideological and pragmatically and selfishly pursue their own power?  What do we make of the fact that the medical technology Chairman Mao deploys in his efforts to court Westerners seems to all come from the United States?--I'm not even sure if we are supposed to marvel at the transplants as medical miracles or recoil from them as Dr. Frankenstein atrocities.  The ambiguity with which Bishop treats all these themes is one of the strengths of the story, making it more engaging and thought provoking.

In response to the great merit of this story I am thinking I should read more Bishop.

"On the Street of the Serpents" would go on to be included in the Bishop collection Blooded on Arachne and at least two European anthologies.

**********

These stories seem to share themes, to present visions of America and Americans that reflect 1970s pessimism; three of them are about Americans abroad and the two serious stories are about relationships between Americans and foreigners that might be considered disastrous.  Did 1970s readers consider these horror stories, or savor seeing the white bourgeoisie getting it in the neck?  Either way, Picard's "Gate-O" and Bishop's "On the Street of the Serpents" are well-written and entertaining and I recommend them and recommend Science Fiction Emphasis 1 as a whole as an engaging and fun anthology; bravo to Gerrold and associate editor Stephen Goldin.    

Worlds of Tomorrow: P W Fairman, T Sturgeon and W Tenn

As I draft this blog post, the internet archive, world's greatest website, is still down, so my reading plans have been temporarily suspended and I am resorting to reading books the way our ancestors read them.  From the anthology shelf of the MPorcius Library, located in a dusty attic full of Frazetta posters, Burne-Jones prints, Rookwood vases, Glinsky sculptures and my father's HO-scale electric trains, we take down my paperback edition of Worlds of Tomorrow, Berkley G-163, which sports a Richard Powers cover featuring Jupiter, a naked man, a rocket ship a futuristic city in the desert, and starring an indescribable hovering object.  This 1958 paperback reprints 10 of the 19 stories in the original hardcover edition of Worlds of Tomorrow, edited by August Derleth and published in 1953 with the phrase "science fiction 'with a difference'" emblazoned on its cover.  We've already read seven of these ten tales--yes, it's links time!

Edmond Hamilton       "The Dead Planet"
August Derleth            "McIlvaine's Star"
Frank Belknap Long    "The Great Cold"
Arthur C. Clarke          "The Fires Within"
Carl Jacobi                   "The Gentleman is an Epwa"
Fritz Leiber                  "The Enchanted Forest"
Mack Reynolds            "The Business as Usual"

That leaves three stories unread, those by Paul W. Fairman, Theodore Sturgeon, and William Tenn--let's tackle them today and then bask in the pride of having read an entire paperback anthology's contents.

"Brothers Beyond the Void" by Paul W. Fairman (1952)

"Brothers Beyond the Void" debuted in an issue of Fantastic Adventures with Josef Stalin on the cover.  We've already read a story from this ish of FA, Mack Reynolds' "Your Soul Comes C.O.D.," a story I denounced as contrived and ridiculous as it relied for its punch on a surprise twist ending that made no sense.  Hopefully I'll find Fairman's Derleth-approved story from the issue more palatable--it seems Rod Serling also approved of "Brothers Beyond the Void," basing a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone on the story.  (My wife, an admirer and perpetrator of absurdist jokes, says "Rod 'the Bod' Serling" every time Serling or his work comes up, and I have to admit I laugh every time.)

"Brothers Beyond the Void" is a misanthropic twist ending story; the thing feels cliched, though maybe its central gimmick wasn't cliched when the story first appeared in 1952?  Our hero is an astronaut--he is going to be the first man to land on Mars!  The night before blast off, he talks to a philosophical friend--friend assumes there will be people on Mars and assures the astronaut that people are the same everywhere.  When the astronaut gets to the red planet, sure enough, there are people there.  The astronaut has been comforted by his friend's assurances that people are the same everywhere, thinking his friend meant to suggest that the Martians would be nice to him.  And the Martians don't immediately gun him down--in fact, they seem to cater to him, provide shelter and food and so on.  But then on the last page of the story it becomes clear that the Earthman is not an honored guest but on exhibit in a zoo!  People are the same everywhere--jerks!

We'll grade this story barely acceptable.  "Brothers Beyond the Void" would be reprinted in anthologies of stories which became Twilight Zone episodes, as well as in a 1970 reprint magazine.

Back in 2018 we read Fairman's pseudonymous novel Whom the Gods Would Slay and earlier this year we read his "This is My Son."  I think I liked them better than I like this.

"The Martian and the Moron" by Theodore Sturgeon (1949)

I think Sturgeon is a good writer, but find his scolding elitism, his suggestion that the cognitive elite should collar and corral the common masses, and his affection for the idea of collective consciousness to be tiresome.  Probably I haven't read this story yet because the title made me think it would be an exercise in dismissively attacking the human race by contrasting us with good goody Martians.  But today we'll overcome our inhibitions and see what's up with this thing, a Weird Tales cover story that would go on to appear in Leo Margulies' The Ghoul Keepers and various Sturgeon collections.

Woah, I'm glad I read this one.  The style is charming and witty and smooth, and the content integrates characters with real personality and human feeling, rumination on how life should be lived, and a plot that is elaborate but fun and easy to read and full of legitimate surprise--surprises that are actually surprising and not cheap trickery, surprises that follow logically from what has come before.  Thumbs up!

In brief, our narrator is a child of middle-class parents in (I guess) New York City in the first half of the story and we observe his father's obsessive behavior as he pursues a secretive hobby, chases a mysterious goal.  Dad does not fulfill his quest.  In the second half of the story our narrator is a young adult, a veteran of the Second World War, his mother is dead, and he lives with his father.  He finds himself on an obsessive quest of his own--he falls in love with a beautiful, fascinating, frustratingly elusive woman!  Dad offers sage advice, and our narrator is shattered to find Dad's suspicions that this goddess was a phony, an empty suit whose air of mystery is mere pretense masking a vacant mind and stunted personality, were fully justified.  But a bizarre event occurs that unexpectedly links son and father's unconnected obsessions!  Dad's secretive labors in the basement back before the war were an effort to pick up radio signals from Mars!  And son's beloved vapid beauty turns out to be an unwitting receiver of psychic signals from the red planet!  Will father and son work together to make history and get in touch with the civilization on Mars?  No!  Some of Dad's wisdom backfires and the opportunity to make humanity's greatest discovery and revolutionize life in our solar system slips through their fingers!

If you look hard at the plot you will see it relies on an extremely unlikely coincidence, but otherwise this is a great story.  I can recommend "The Martian and the Moron" wholeheartedly.

"Null-P" by William Tenn (1951)

I've sort of avoided English professor Philip Klass's work because I have a sense he writes satires attacking capitalism or Western imperialism and that sort of thing, and I have limited patience for satire--you aren't going to convince me of the value of your theory of the ideal relationship between the state and the economy with your bitter caricature of people who disagree with you.  But back in 2018 I liked his "Project Hush" so maybe I am being unfair to the guy.  Maybe August Derleth today is going to midwife a new relationship between Tenn and me.

Ugh, "Null-P" is just what I feared, a 15-page joke story, a monument to the sort of hatred and fear of religious people and contempt for ordinary people--conformists who watch TV and at every moment are about engage in a riot--that you'd expect from a college professor in the 1950s.  (College professors now love TV and they seem to like riots as well.)  There is no character or drama on offer here, just a goofy joke history lesson that I guess at times is supposed to remind you of Swift, what with the talking dogs who build a superior civilization and enslave and selectively breed mankind on the last page.

After a nuclear-biological war wipes out the east and west coasts of the United States and much of the rest of the world, the American cult of the common man (Klass in this story argues that American culture lionizes mediocrity and suppresses excellence and idiosyncrasy) achieves its apotheosis when a man who is the statistical average in height, weight, age he got married, and everything else, is elected president.  American culture becomes pacific and stagnant as nobody strives to stand out or compete, and everybody pursues the statistical mean in all facets of life.  There are no new technological developments, there is no economic growth, and the human race goes into decline as fossil fuels run out.  Dogs isolated on some island develop intelligence and civilization and take over the world and treat humans the way humans have treated dogs, breeding them for particular tasks and attributes.  When the dogs lose interest in humans with the invention of robots the human race goes extinct. 

Thumbs down!

There are lots of people who love satire and so the flat and boring sneerfest that is "Null-P" has been reprinted in many anthologies since it first appeared in Damon Knight's short-lived magazine Worlds Beyond.   

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These three stories illustrate the potential of SF as well as some of its regrettable tendencies.  The Sturgeon is fresh and exciting, full of human feeling, a good example of compelling SF with real literary value.  The Fairman is run-of-the-mill twist-ending slosh, mere filler that flatters the elitism and cynicism of so many SF readers, while the Tenn represents maximum elitism, an expression of the disgust and bitterness of the smarty smarts over having to share the world with ordinary schlubs and dismay that in a market society said schlubs actually have influence over the culture and the government.

More SF short stories from a paperback anthology in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

1974 stories by J F Pumilia, F C Gotschalk, R Cain and R Borski

The current tribulations suffered by the internet archive having put a kink in my reading plans, I am resorting to going old school and reading a physical book I actually paid good money for--let's hope this works out better than the last time I read a paperback bargain!

Remember when we read David Gerrold's Alternities, billed as "All New Electrifying Stories of Original Science Fiction"?  And then when we read Gerrold's Generation, promoted as "24 Great New Voices"?  And who could forget Protostars, Gerrold's anthology of stories by "The New Stars of Science Fiction"?  Good times, good times.  Well, thank your lucky stars, because we have a chance to relive those happy days!  Today we take down from the anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library a copy of 1974's Science Fiction Emphasis 1, an anthology edited by Gerrold that is touted as "Eight All-New Stories by Tomorrow's Stars."  (Despite the "#1" on cover and spine, and the stated hope on the back cover that Emphasis would become an annual series, Science Fiction Emphasis #2 has proven even more elusive than The Last Dangerous Visions.)  I bought Science Fiction Emphasis 1 in the last year or so, I forget where, for $3.50; my copy was owned by an Elaine (or maybe "Eline?") and on the title page we see that Stephen Goldin performed the role of Associate Editor in the production of this anthology.  My experience in academia suggests that the lower your name is on the list of contributors the more labor you actually put into the publication, and while I wouldn't want to compare David Gerrold, whose writing I have enjoyed, to a college professor in one of those disciplines whose findings are unfalsifiable and unreplicable, if we like anything in Science Fiction Emphasis 1, let's remember to give some credit to Goldin, whose Assault on the Gods and A World Called Solitude I enjoyed back in the 20-teens. 

Gerrold starts the book with a two-page introduction that is sort of all over the place.  We get a knock on science fiction--science fiction, Gerrold says, has to grow up, no longer be space operas about Anglo Saxon heroes fighting aliens, not that Gerrold dislikes such stories.  But Gerrold also knocks "mainstream literature," saying it "is merely gossip about people you don't know," while science fiction is about ideas.  Of course, science fiction also has to be about people, as well as ideas.  Gerrold adds that, in fact, mainstream fiction is coming to resemble science fiction, and notes that many science fiction ideas have become mundane reality.  This is not what I would consider a strong essay with a clear point and plenty of supportive evidence, though I guess you can't really disagree with the individual things Gerrold says.

Anyway, Gerrold tells us that the eight stories in this book, chosen from among over one hundred submissions, are mature and moving.  We'll see.

"Willowisp" by Joseph F. Pumilia

Back in 2016 we read a story Pumilia co-wrote with Steven Utley about a guy who wakes up to find his gonads have been replaced by the head of a miniature elephant.  (It takes two guys to write such a story, it seems.)  In 2017 we read a story by Pumilia about an energy creature.  In 2022 I read another Pumilia-Utley co-production, a tragic tale about time travel and the environment.  None of those stories was great, but maybe 2024 is Pumilia's year, maybe "Willowisp" is where Pumiulia is going to shine!

Stories about Anglo Saxon heroes fighting aliens are escapist wish-fulfillment fantasies, no doubt, but so are stories in which the kid who was always chosen last for sports and who was never invited to parties has grown into a guitar-carrying drifter who hitchhikes around the country composing poems and songs and meets a pretty bookish girl who lives in a dilapidated country house and is invited into her bed for a little bit of the old in-out.  Like this one.  

Our singing narrator moves into the house with no electricity with the long-legged philosophy major.  In a woods nearby they often see a mysterious drifting light.  Eventually our narrator insists they investigate the light, even though the young woman is scared.  He figures out that it is a lost space alien, a translucent tentacled creature that carries around a swarm of fire flies in an invisible container, I guess a forcefield or something.  Our guitar-picking hero identifies with this creature, as he too is lost, his first girlfriend being dead and he being estranged from his abusive father.  

The alien coaxes our hero and the college girl into a particular spot in the woods, within a circle of trees, and then persuades an army of spiders to build a circular wall of webs stretching from tree to tree around our young couple.  The alien then places his lightning bugs on the web wall in specific spots.  The narrator figures out this is like an all-natural and organic network of circuits.  He and the girl have sex--the best sex they have ever had!--within the web circle, and this activates the device and somehow facilitates the alien's departure from Earth.

Loneliness is a pervasive theme of the story and having accomplished this good deed the narrator leaves the college girl.

"Willowisp" is on the high end of acceptable.  The style and pacing, stuff that you take for granted when it is fine and only really notice when it is bad, is good here, and of course I am all for having sex with long-legged bookish girls.  Doesn't look like "Willowisp" has ever been reprinted, though.  

"Bonus Baby" by Felix C. Gotschalk

Another sexy college girl story.  Hubba hubba.  Gotschalk's story has a mundane wish-fulfillment plot, that he is sort of poking fun at, I guess, and he places it in a far future post-nuclear-war setting in which there are all kinds of robots and forcefields and mutants and the government has assessed everybody on multiple attributes and assigned them scores on a 100 point scale and categorized them as "alphas" and "betas" and so forth; those with high scores are granted all kinds of prostheses that give them special powers, but also laid upon these aristocrats of the cybernetic future grave responsibilities.  Gotschalk renders his story something of a challenge to understand with a high volume of semi-opaque neologisms and by keeping the basic facts of this world a mystery to us until the end so their revelation serves the role of a plot twist.  I'm not sure if we are supposed to think all the characters are essentially robots just playacting in a cartoonish simulacrum of 20th-century life, but maybe we are.  

Jonas is a college student with scores in the 80s, a beta.  Some jealous and mischievous girls he is dating play a trick on him, spreading the false rumor that the hottest girl on campus has a crush on him so he will approach her.  Jonas does approach this beauty and she actually welcomes his advances, agreeing to go on a date with him; they dance and have sex.  It turns out she is one of the "supra-humanoid alpha pluses" and has scores exceeding 99 and all manner of body modifications that allow her to fly and teleport and make sex with her a mind-blowing experience.  As a supra she has obligations and must formally date people closer to her rank, but she finds people in her strata tiresome and Jonas' innocence charming and so will continue to teleport to him on occasion for some clandestine sex.  There is an element of class-conscious cuckold fetishism to Gotschalk's story--the supra girl is enjoined to wear the frat pin of her public boyfriend, and she puts some of Jonas' ejaculate on the pin before donning it.  "Bonus Baby" is like a women's romance novel or a pornographic story in which a peasant has an affair with a lord or lady or an ordinary citizen has an affair with a Hollywood star, a story that both romanticizes the people at the top of the hierarchy and encourages readers to covet the notion that common people are, secretly, better than their social superiors and might get some kind of revenge on them (You may be rich, but I'm banging your spouse behind your back!)

This story is alright; again the nuts and bolts are good, at least if you don't mind having to unravel all the futuristic lingo.  And of course I am all for having sex with your social superiors.  Are all the stories in Science Fiction Emphasis 1 going to be erotica?  Is that what constitutes maturity to Gerrold?

"Bonus Baby" has not been reprinted according to isfdb.  It is the fifth story by Gotchsalk I have read, following "The Day of the Big Test," "The Wishes of Maidens," "Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon" and "And Parity For All."

"Telepathos" by Ronald Cain    

Cain only has two entries at isfdb, but "Telepathos" was included in Thomas F. Monteleone's 1977 anthology The Arts and Beyond: Visions of Man's Aesthetic Future, so there is that.

Kunst is an American of the middle of the 21st century, living in a small German town, in a neighborhood inhabited by artists.  He is the practitioner of a new form of art, telepathos.  Not long ago a new substance was discovered, one that absorbs and then radiates human emotion, and artists like Kunst take a blob of this goop and by focusing and concentrating imbue it with a particular feeling, and then other people experience this art simply by being near it and having the emotions of the artist wash over them.  Cain explores all the facets and ramifications of this new art form--how the blobs are stored prior to and after being molded by the artist, for example--and uses Kunst and this new art form to comment on the life of the artist and the experience of creating and consuming art, for instance, how artists feel misunderstood, how viewers of art bring their own attitudes and preconceptions with them when they experience a work of art and make their own interpretations of the piece which are often at odds with the artist's intent, but which, regardless, serve to influence the interpretations of later viewers to the point that over time a work of art may come to mean, in the public mind, something very different from what the creator intended.  To produce good telepathic sculptures the artist must became an expert in the particular emotion he is trying to instill in the goop, and Cain discusses how by studying an emotion the artist can become immune to it, can observe it clinically without being affected by it, can know he is scared or lonely but prevent his conscious mind and his actions from being influenced by his own fear or loneliness. 

"Telepathos" is a lot closer to my idea of "maturity" than "help E.T. phone home by banging a hot chick in the woods" or "the princess with the magic vulva has sex with you and then leaves you alone and has some other guy shoulder the burden of all the boring time-consuming non-erotic boyfriend duties."  Cain's story explores ideas for page after page ("Telepathos" is like 37 pages long) and it includes literary images, the effect of changing light on furniture in a spartan room and that sort of business.  I am willing to give the story a mild recommendation, but it is perhaps one of those stories easier to admire than to actually enjoy--for one thing, it is not very plot-heavy.

The plot.  Kunst is ill and coughs and vomits and eats little and looks older than his age and so forth, and as we read we wonder if he is going to keel over before he finishes the book he is drafting in longhand; Kunst has the self-importance we expect of an artist and thinks, though his work is not popular or critically acclaimed, that he is far better than the telepathic artists who are rich and have their work on display in museums, and so is writing a book on telepathic art that truly captures the essence of the field, which nobody has yet done.  He spends his days in his little apartment and in a cafe, where he talks to a woman artist, an American with whom he is simpatico--like he, she has the dedication of the true artist, "the fervent desire to devote himself whole-heartedly to his work without a thought for personal welfare"--and to a sort of dilettante who serves as a contrast to Kunst, a Canadian who is an able artist but a shallow one who flits from one medium to another.  Kunst uses the telepathic powers he has developed to help the Canadian become a better artist and to help the American woman become better able to face the sadness of life.  In the climax of the story Kunst masters the emotion "the Fear of Death" and creates a sculpture which projects this fear--having mastered his fear of death, he can live the rest of his life, doomed to end within the year, calmly.

Ambitious and novel; it is too bad Cain didn't write more in the SF field.

"In the Crowded Part of Heaven" by Robert Borski 

Yet another story about a guy who gets to bang a hot chick and then move on with his life.  What is going on with this anthology?  Was Gerrold soliciting manuscripts that had been rejected by Playboy?    

It is the near future.  A few decades ago, young women who insisted they were virgins were somehow winding up pregnant.  Their kids have super powers--they can see in the dark, are immune to disease, are probably going to live for centuries, etc.  The authorities figure space aliens are somehow secretly impregnating these girls.  Governments encourage breeding between these hybrids and mundanes in order to strengthen the gene pool and improve the health of the human race.  For one thing, the superpeople are compelled to donate eggs or sperm twice yearly to the government gamete banks.

Our narrator is one of the half-alien supermen; he travels the world, performing like a prostitute or gigolo or something of that nature, regularly being hired by women for two-month contracts as their live-in lover.  If one of his clients gets pregnant the government will pay for all her health care costs during the pregnancy.  

The plot of this brief story follows how our narrator is hired by an attractive woman and they fall in love but he has to leave her because he is committed to the mission of spreading his seed widely, to his duty to improve the human race.  Also, since he will live for hundreds of years, he knows a marriage will not work--he will be broken hearted to outlive his wife and his quadroon kids by centuries, and she and the kids will grow to resent his superior health and longevity.  A brief passage describes how the narrator is opposed to hybrid rebels who are trying to either build a separate hybrid-only society or disguise themselves and live among pure-strain humans.  "In the Crowded Part of Heaven" is yet another of the many "sad life of homo-superior" stories we SF readers encounter regularly.  

An acceptable trifle.  Compared to our other two male sex fantasy stories, this one is the weakest.  The sex scenes in Borski's "In the Crowded Part of Heaven" are not as sexy as those in Pumilia's "Willowisp" or Gotschalk's "Bonus Baby," the human drama elements are better developed in the other two stories, the central gimmick is less novel than that in Pumilia's piece, and the prose is less ambitious and challenging than in Gotschalk's semi-opaque story.  Still, the story is not bad. 

Maybe because the narrator's human mother was French, maybe because the theme of the story (your mission: impregnate as many women as possible) appealed to French sensibilities, the only time this story has been reprinted (according to isfdb, at least) was in a 1975 French anthology with a topless woman (and Winnie the Pooh?) on the cover.  Oh la la, indeed.

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None of these stories is bad, and Cain's is actually good, so we have to commend Gerrold and Goldin thus far.  We've plowed through like 95 pages of Science Fiction Emphasis 1, hopefully the remainder, like 120 pages, will be as good--it may even be better!  Cross your fingers, fellow explorers of SF roads less travelled.

Stage Fright by Garrett Boatman

He considered himself part scientist.  After all, he had designed many of the modifications on his own machine.  But, first and foremost, he was a dreamer--the King of the Dreamies, bar none--and his mind grabbed gladly for the impossible like some kid grabbing for the brass ring on some long-ago carousel.

To create!  To birth matter from thought!

His head swelled to godlike proportions.  

The wife and I recently took a road trip from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (we road trippers call it "the You Pee") through Ottawa and Montreal to New England, stopping at antique stores and art museums along the way.  In one junkshop in Canuckistan I spotted one of the fabled Paperbacks from Hell immortalized at Will Errickson's great blog Too Much Horror Fiction and in the book he cowrote with Grady Hendrix, 2017's Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction.  Garrett Boatman's Stage Fright goes for 60 or more American dollars on the ole e-bay, but the friendly man behind the counter there in the Great White North asked only one dollar Canadian for his copy, so I took him up on it and brought this artifact of 1988 back home.  Valancourt Books in 2020 put out a new edition with an intro by Errickson that you can pick up for like 18 dollars, so the glories of its text are within your reach, dear reader, even if you don't enjoy the kind of treasure-hunter's luck that I have.

To be honest, I'm skeptical about the "glories of its text" bit.  The come-on verbiage on the front and back covers of Stage Fright make the novel sound like a 380-page joke consisting of disjointed absurdist episodes rather than a sincere thriller with a coherent narrative, and last year when I read Dana Reed's Demon Within, another 1988 paperback horror with one of these textured covers, it was pretty bad.  But I liked another Paperback from Hell, Peter Tonkin's Killer, when I read it in 2016, so you never know. According to the author's bio to be found at the back of the book among the advertisements for novels about Jason Voorhees and something Harlan Ellison endorses called Slob, Boatman is a busdriver and a Renaissance scholar, so maybe he puts his familiarity with CDL Class B vehicles and Ariosto to good use and produces here a masterpiece that will blow my mind.  Let's see.

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OK, this book is terrible.  Strike one: Boatman's prose is mediocre at best.  It has no style and Boatman shovels on the lame metaphors in an effort to add a veneer of variety to his repetitious book in which he describes the same images-- wounds and rotting corpses--and the same emotions--fear, disgust, fear, nausea, more fear, some additional fear--again and again.  Perhaps the worst metaphor comes on page 268 when Boatman tries to describe anger: "Pure, boiling anger, frustrated anger: the kind that had a head on it like a mug of beer."  Are there people out there boiling beer?  Isn't the head on a mug of beer light and insubstantial, the opposite of what Boatman is trying to convey?  Oy.    

I also don't like how Boatman uses the word "implode."

Stage Fright is also way too long, like 75 pages of material puffed up with repetition and a superfluity of description, characters and scenes to a monstrous bloated 370 pages of text!  None of the members of Boatman's horde of characters is particularly engaging--as we so often see in genre fiction, the villain of Stage Fright is the character whose motivations are the most interesting, and here even the killer is bland and boring.  Not that Boatman doesn't spend time talking about his characters; we have to hear all about each character's body type and clothing and mundane life story before he gets killed, but almost none of it registers, and few of the lives or deaths of any of these people has an effect on the novel's plodding plot and even fewer spark any emotion in the reader.  Kill scenes, fight scenes, and hallucinations go on for paragraph after metaphor-laden paragraph, Boatman giving us minute details on the look, sound, smell and feel of the torn flesh of the living and the decaying flesh of the undead but it only uses up ink and paper, producing nothing.  

A major problem with Stage Fright is that it is lazily "meta," a work of fantasy fiction about creators and consumers of fantasy fiction.  Four of the forgettable characters are pop culture obsessives who have what amounts to a science fiction fan club that prints a fanzine and attends SF cons, and Boatman stuffs Stage Fright with both direct and thinly veiled references to fantasy classics like "The Call of Cthulhu," Conan, The Lord of the Rings, Dracula, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  With sad irony these references to compelling fiction full of memorable characters undermine Boatman's own novel by emphasizing how boring his plot is and how forgettable his characters are.

Many of the scenes in Stage Fright are not real in the context of the story itself, but dreams, illusions, hallucinations, or works of fiction--Stage Fright is set in the near future when artists can directly pump sounds, sights, smells, etc., into their audiences' brains wirelessly, via microwaves, and the villain is the most prominent of such artists; besides viewing his productions we witness many of his dreams and, as he gets addicted to a drug that induces schizophrenia, his hallucinations (90% of these dreams and hallucinations are of rotting corpses and injuries.)  Much of the time reading this book is like watching a movie of a guy watching a movie.  Every time you read a work of fiction the author has to overcome your recognition that what you are reading is not real and that caring about what happens in the story is pointless, and in a book like this the author makes his job even harder by planting an additional layer of unreality between you and the scenes depicted--when the dramatic scenes you are witnessing secondhand aren't even real to the unreal people who are experiencing them first hand, so that they have no reason to take them seriously, why should you take them seriously?  

Maybe Boatman doesn't expect us to take any of it seriously.  Often Boatman seems to be playing his scenes of people being slashed, pierced, crushed, and drowning in their own blood for laughs.  Stage Fright feels insincere, at times not a legit horror story but a half-hearted inside joke about horror writers and fans.  One of the strengths of many of the writers to whom Boatman alludes is their sincerity and conviction--Lovecraft really thinks the universe is mysterious and uncaring and Howard really thinks barbarians are better than civilized men and so on.  Stage Fright lacks any sort of ideology, point of view, or argument that I could find; perhaps it is supposed to be about new media or fan cultures or sexual relationships in which women are abused, but I couldn't detect any coherent message.  Speculative fiction stories that argue for or against feminism, or socialism, or imperialism, or Freudianism, or technoptimism, or whatever, engage the reader on an additional level, provide a framework or skeleton that makes a story more comprehensible, more discrete, more challenging (if you disagree) or more comforting (if the story's ideology fits into your "safe space.")  The author's concerns and opinions tie the work to real life and contribute to and fertilize the story, help it fit together like a coherent whole and not come across as a mere jumble of scenes.  Stage Fright seems totally disconnected from real life and real concerns, and its only influences are other (infinitely more human and more creative) works of speculative fiction, leaving it incestuous and sterile, an example of cultural decadence that doesn't even  have the virtue of critiquing or lampooning its source material or the people who create and consume it.     

So, thumbs down for Stage Fright, a book which fails on every level and which was a chore to read.  Maybe The Paperbacks from Hell are not for me?  I feel like Stage Fright has less to offer than even the worst efforts of the men and women whose careers peaked or began in the pages of Weird Tales, Frank Belknap Long's incoherent late work or Robert Bloch's annoying joke stories, for example.   [UPDATE: OCTOBER 16, 2024:  Horror expert and coauthor of Paperbacks from Hell Will Errickson in the comments below assures us that the PfH reprints run the gamut of all horror styles, so I won't judge the line based on this sample alone--and I did like Peter Tonkin's killer whale caper, Killer, after all.]

If you want to know more about the plot and structure of this book that I just told you that I hate, and some bits of evidence backing up my criticisms above, read on below for a chapter by chapter, murder by murder, yawn by yawn summary, but if you have something worthwhile to do, like folding laundry or going to Walmart to buy Ovaltine, don't let me delay you with my complaints.

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Stage Fright consists of 33 chapters, plus an Epilogue, and is split into three parts, Paradiso, Purgatorio and Inferno, you know, like Dante's Divine Comedy, but in reverse--clever!   

In Chapter 1 we meet three cops on a boat in the Hudson River--Stage Fright takes place in Northern New Jersey, mostly within view of the Manhattan skyline, which is one of the novel's recurring motifs.  They are killed when a bloated corpse they drag out of the water comes to life and uses its preternaturally long fingernails with inexplicable dexterity to carve them up.  This turns out to be a fictional scene, part of a "dreamie," the entertainment craze of the near future!  As a two-page italics section in Chapter 2 explains, in the 1990s a Princeton scientist invented a way to transmit sights, sounds, tastes, smells and even physical sensations wirelessly directly into your brain.  When I read the text on the front and back covers of Stage Fright I thought Izzy Stark was a rock star who also had the power to raise the dead, but it turns out that in fact Izzy is the most successful creator of "dreamies"--he sits in his basement in NJ at a "dreamatron" and records his scenarios onto digital memory "bubble paks" which are played in cinemas to audiences; he also gives live performances on a portable dreamatron at live venues.

We become acquainted with much of our totally boring and mundane cast of flesh and blood people in mind-numbingly tedious domestic scenes in Chapters 2 and 3.  Izzy is keeping house with his girlfriend, college student Helen--Izzy spends so much time in the basement concocting his dreamies that he spends less time with Helen and this makes her sad.  (Though Helen and Izzy are not married they have been together a long time and she thinks of Izzy as her husband.)  Then we have four pot-smoking high school boys who make fart jokes and collaborate on their fanzine about dreamies in their clubhouse above one of their family's garage; they are looking forward to the big dreamie convention and to Izzy's Halloween concert!  And we've got freelance writer Quentin Hughes.  Quent's usual customers are audiophile magazines to whom he sells articles about stereo gear, but he knew Izzy in high school and has wangled an interview with "The King of the Dreamies"--maybe he can sell the interview to Rolling Stone or Playboy!  Boatman's prose is flat and lifeless and his characters boring at best and often irritating, and we learn trivia about them that I guess is supposed to bring them to life but is merely a waste of our time--Helen wanted to plant a garden but instead she and Izzy used the yard to play croquet, one of the pot-smoking nerds was fat but then exercised and became thin but now he is getting chubby but not quite fat.  Who cares?

In Chapter 4 Quent has his interview with Izzy and Izzy suggests Quent write Izzy's biography.  Izzy in Chapter 5 gets in touch with one of Helen's professors; this guy is conducting experiments with a drug that is distilled from the blood of schizophrenics and induces short term schizophrenia in those who take it.  Izzy has the idea of producing dreamies while using this drug, and the prof provides him some.  Izzy sits in front of the "dreamatron" in his basement, takes the drug, and composes a dreamie of a monster killing people.  Just like with the aquatic-zombie-kills-cops episode in Chapter 1, we meet (apparently) fictional people, learn about their personalities and lives, and then watch them get carved up by a monster that comes out of nowhere and has no connection whatsoever to the trivia we just learned about the characters.  A horror writer who is making an effort has a guy who is greedy get killed because he takes a risk to get money or get killed by a monster made out of dollar bills or something, has a cowardly character die because he is acting cowardly or, ironically, die the first time he is courageous.  But Izzy/Boatman goes through a lot of blah blah blah about the wife of a guy who has Alzheimer's and then a guy who is out for a walk avoiding his girlfriend and her kid from another relationship because they are annoying and then the walker gets killed by some kind of "demon bird" that comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with Alzheimer's or difficult relationships.  Anyway, this gratuitous scenario is no better, no different in style or tone, from the Chapter 1 scenario--the schizophrenia-inducing drug feels irrelevant.

Chapter 6, the first chapter of the Purgatorio section of Stage Fright, is a throwaway chapter, one of Izzy's dreams, a repeat of the marine zombie scenario from Chapter 1.  In Chapter 7 we get a surprise--Mr. and Mrs. Alzheimer's are real, as was the now-dead guy with the annoying girlfriend!  Mr. and Mrs. Alzheimer's are senior citizens who were jazz musicians in the 1950s, Jason and Lois, and they live next door to Izzy and Helen with Chet, one of the guys from their band back in the day.  Izzy didn't make them up, he was just reading their minds.  So, was the giant "demon bird" a real monster Izzy was also picking up, or did Izzy actually create this monster?  There is no doubt it was real--its footprints are all over Izzy's yard, leading to the crime scene!  We readers of course assume Izzy summoned the feathered killing machine out of thin air with his thoughts, but Izzy isn't sure at first, I guess thinking it more likely that by coincidence he picked up the thoughts of a previously undiscovered six-foot tall bird living in the most densely populated state in the USA at the very moment it decided to reveal itself to the world by tearing some poor bastard limb from limb.

Chapter 8 inches forward the plot--two of the fanzine writers are going on a double date, and Jason we learn thinks he saw a thing like the demon bird on his TV last night while watching a VCR tape.  Chapter 9 sees the college prof realizing there is a connection between his giving Izzy the drug and the murder, and refuses to continue supplying Izzy; also, we get glimmers of a love triangle--Quent is developing a crush on Helen!  In Chapter 10 Izzy steals the drug from the prof's lab and starts dosing himself; this is one of the better chapters, more or less effectively describing the theft, Izzy's anxieties over the drug and his hallucinations after it begins to affect him--I would keep this chapter more or less intact in my projected 75-page version of Stage Fright.

The hallucinations continue and grow tiresome in Chapter 11, the chapter devoted to the dreamie con.  Izzy sees blood bursting out of keyholes, a spider crawling up his arm, etc.  The fanzine nerds make a brief appearance, and Izzy, meeting them for the first and only time in the entire book, thinks the temporary tattoo (a "decal") on one of these guys is alive.  In Chapter 12, Izzy, determined to see the extent of the powers awakened by the drug, comes up with a dream scenario in which living dead motorists and bikers attack one of the nerds; we get a long chase scene which ends with the nerd being propelled into the Hudson to be killed by the aquatic zombies.  If he wants to see if he can create material objects and even life through his dreamatron, why doesn't Izzy try to create something sweet and harmless, like a bunny rabbit or a Japanese schoolgirl or something, instead of murdering one of his most devoted fans?  (My 75-page version of Stage Fright would not include these four kids and their two girlfriends.)

In Chapter 13 we get another Izzy dream about the marine zombies killing him--Boatman must think (wrongly) these water zombie scenes are fascinating.  The prof calls Izzy to demand the drugs back, or he will call the cops.  In Chapter 14, Quent delivers free tickets to Izzy's big Halloween performance to the fanzine stoners' club house and learns of the motorcycle-involved death of one of their number.  When Quent passes this sad news on to Izzy, the King of the Dreamies is thrilled to have confirmation that the dreams he casts when on the drug come true, and in Chapter 15 he materializes a squad of metallic pursuers and a tentacled monster and sends them after the college professor.  In Chapter 16 the student the prof is having an affair with finds the prof's corpse.  Helen touches one of the digital memory "bubble paks" that stores Izzy's dreamies and she has disturbing visions of his horror scenes.  Boatman is inconsistent in describing Helen and Izzy's relationship; she is shocked to see these gruesome scenes, but later we are led to believe she is intimately familiar with all of Izzy's work which  of course consists of nothing but such horror scenes.

(We'll just look past the idea that Izzy taking a drug has somehow changed the performance of digital equipment.)

The sixteenth is a long chapter full of content as well as turgid irrelevancies.  Boardman tells us something he should have told us earlier which makes Izzy's motivations a little clearer.  I didn't notice that the drug-induced dreamies were superior in narrative to the aquatic zombie dreamies, but we are told that while on the drug Izzy can record a dreamie more quickly and efficiently.  Also in Chapter 16, we have to endure a sentimental love scene between Lois and Jason, who sing a little ditty from their hey day 40 years ago to each other.  (Popular music is an occasional theme of the novel; there are references to Pink Floyd and ? and the Mysterians' "96 Tears." ) Jason comes to visit Izzy to ask if perhaps his work on the dreamatron has anything to do with the strange images that appear on his TV when he watches his videotapes of old SF movies like Them! and Invasion of the Body Snatchers--Izzy now realizes what we readers have known for a while, that when Izzy records his drug-fueled dreams, the ones that kill people, some of the signal is picked up by his neighbor's TV!  Jason lets on that Izzy is not the first person to whom he has mentioned this phenomenon--Jason has an appointment to meet with a physicist at Stevens Institute of Technology later today to talk about it!  Chapter 17 follows the Alzheimer's-afflicted Jason as he gets lost in Hoboken after his meeting with the physicist, which he has already forgotten about.

Izzy strikes Helen after she asks him if drugs are the reason he has been acting odd lately, and she leaves him in Chapter 18.  Chapter 19 focuses on the love triangle among the musicians; Chet has been carrying a torch for Lois since the Eisenhower years, and we are provided a scene in which sexagenarians Chet and Lois look deeply into each other's eyes and the treacherous Chet gets an erection while groping Lois' breast; while they are laying together the Creature from the Black Lagoon climbs out of Jason's TV set and crushes Jason's skull so his two eyes appear to be looking into each other.  This whole kill scene is sort of played as a joke, ending with:

Jason Carrugathers died so quickly he had no last thoughts.  Only an extremity of terror and pain...

And then, nada.

(I haven't seen any of the Creature from the Black Lagoon movies since I was a kid--is there a scene in which a character says "nada"?) 

In Chapter 20, Helen is back in the Hoboken neighborhood in which she grew up; her parents still live here, but she is too embarrassed by the black eye Izzy gave her to see them so she wanders the streets, getting lost and then pursued by a monster!  We see how Izzy, sitting at the dreamatron, can look through the monster's eyes as well as Helen's, even sense Helen's fear.  At first the monster is uninspired, the silhouette of a tall man, but then Izzy and Boatman get a little more creative.  Helen is trapped in an alley by a hovering naked teenaged girl--the ghost or wraith of Helen's sister who died when they were teens!  (Too bad Boatman never mentioned this dead sister before.)  A swarm of insects erupts from the girl's mouth and a snake slithers out of her privates, and Helen is about to be submerged under this tide of creepy crawlies when Izzy has a pang of conscience and the monsters vanish.  (This scene, the one genuinely disturbing horror image of the book, would make the 75-page cut of Stage Fright; I would also add a scene early in the story in which Helen, instead of thinking about a garden, would recollect how her now dead sister loved insects and reptiles and kept them in their shared room despite Helen's objections.) 

In Chapter 21 the battered Helen arrives at Quent's to advance the love triangle business and discuss the obvious connection between her nightmarish ordeal and Izzy and his dreamatron.  This chapter also includes what might be an inside joke: in an interview, Quent raises the topic of critics who say Izzy's plots are tired and derivative, and Izzy defends himself; does Boatman identify with Izzy and endorse Izzy's defense, or is the hack Izzy a satire of hack horror writers and maybe even Boatman poking fun at his own derivative hackery?

In Chapter 22 we experience another Izzy dream (no aquatic zombies this time, thank God) and hear all about the physical (constipation, vomit) and psychological (paranoia, hallucinations) effects of his addiction to the schizo drug and his memory of striking Helen.  As the chapter ends he is looking at a book of Hieronymus Bosch paintings for inspiration for his next dreamie.

Chapter 23 is the first chapter of the Inferno section of the novel and starts with a description of the weather on October 29 and 30; heat and humidity become a recurring motif of the remainder of the book.  We are also told in so many words that Izzy, at his Halloween performance, is going to cause some kind of mass casualty event--370 people will die!  In this chapter Izzy suffers many more hallucinations of death, corruption and contamination, so much so that he can't eat and sews himself a mask to hide from himself the reflection of his own face.

In Chapter 24 the physicist, Quent, Chet, and Lois sit and talk and begin putting together the pieces of the puzzle that show that Izzy is the killer.  Paranoid Izzy is watching from his window and assumes they are conspiring against him.  Chapter 25 starts with Quent talking to Helen, relaying the new info from the physicist and the musicians.  Amazingly to Quent, Helen wants to get back with Izzy, to help him--even after he hit her she is standing by her man!  

The second part of the twenty-fifth chapter brings the stoner fanzine nerds back into the story with a description of their feelings after the funeral of their friend.  For some reason, Izzy tries to murder one of them with a gang of black-clad Vietcong types with vampire fangs and fingernails, but the nerd has taken LSD to deal with the grief of losing his friend and this gives him the power to fight the "gooks" with the "leathery yellow faces" (I wonder if the 2020 Valancourt edition keeps this verbiage--remember the differences we found in different printings of Ian Fleming's James Bond thriller Live and Let Die?) in hand-to-hand combat, and Izzy in his basement feels the blows of the tripping young man's fists and combat boots and lets him go.  Izzy suffers further setbacks in Chapter 26 as he attacks Lois and Chet with winged demons and the animated corpse of Jason!  Chet has a .22 rifle and shoots some of the flyers but then has a brainwave and shoots the electrical line into Izzy's house next door--when Izzy loses power, the demons and zombie vanish.

Chapter 27 feels disjointed and gratuitous; it stars Izzy but doesn't mention the attack on Chet and Lois nor any power outage.  Most of it describes, in tedious detail, the hallucinations of decaying of corpses that Izzy sees, material this book already has a surfeit of.  Was this chapter originally someplace else, or written after the rest to raise the page count and then inserted in the wrong place?

In Chapter 28, at the request of Chet, the physicist constructs, in mere hours, a device to jam a dreamatron; Chet plans to use it to sabotage Izzy's big concert in Jersey City at midnight on Halloween.  But when Quent and Chet get to Stevens they find one of Izzy's monsters has killed the scientist and trashed the place.  (I guess Izzy's power is back on?  Maybe the attack on Chet and Izzy is another scene written later and clumsily added to pad the word count of this monster?)

Boatman starts Chapter 29 by telling us the theatre where Izzy's midnight Halloween concert takes place will burn down, the cause of the fire unknown.  Chet and Quent brazen their way past security into the theater.  Chapter 30 describes the start of the performance.  Helen is in the audience, and in a different part of the theatre are two of the fanzine stoners; since one of their cronies is dead and the other has chicken pox, they have been able to bring girlfriends with them.  One of these chicks will live to regret this date, as some of her fingers will be severed in the course of the evening.  Izzy conjures up a squadron of flying monsters the nerds recognize as Nazgul from The Lord of the Rings to attack the audience.  The floor of the theatre collapses, though I think that is just an illusion, part of the dreamie.  The audience members find themselves on a rocky plain obscured by smoke and inhabited by monsters of many types.  The monsters are real, I guess, because many people are killed by them, though it seems the smoke is part of the dreamie.  

In Chapter 31, Quent arrives at this "hellscape" and sees many people being killed by a variety of creatures; Boatman tells us the scenario is derivative of Bosch multiple times--this guy is reluctant to type anything once when he can type it three times.  Quent recognizes the cliffs around the perimeter of the setting as being based on the Palisades.  Like Quent, Helen, from a hiding place, watches and listens to people getting killed.  Driven from her hidey hole, she is attacked by a monster and is about to be killed when Quent spots her and directs at Izzy an image of himself slaying Izzy with a sword, disrupting Izzy's concentration and saving his unrequited love.  

Chapter 32 is a particularly long and boring chapter that starts with Quent trying to convince Helen to help him defeat Izzy by using her imagination in concert with his, and failing because Helen has battered wife syndrome and wants not to harm Izzy but somehow help him.  Then we get two long and drawn out fight scenes that feel interminable; a hand-to-hand fight should feel fast but Boatman gives us paragraph after paragraph describing every sword stroke and each ounce of oozing blood and every permutation of people's feelings as they veer between fear and hope and lards these fights with lots of dopey jokey dialogue.  These fights move at glacial speed, and even if the gore--monster dismemberments and decapitations and girls' legs gashed so they gush blood--was disturbing or the fighting thrilling--which they are not--Boatman's bargain basement jokes would defuse any tension the blood and monster mutilations might generate.  One of the fights involves the nerds and their girlfriends (one of the girls shows her breasts to attract an undead ogre's attention, the other loses a contact lens in the excitement) and the other involves Quent who uses his imagination to turn his pen knife into a fire sword with which to fight minotaurs whose blood is fire.  (Always with the fire.)  Quent and Helen reach Izzy's plateau and Izzy summons a rain of blood, which is neutralized by Quent's sword, which, being powered by imagination, can do anything from healing Helen's leg to acting as an umbrella.  Izzy then triggers an earthquake which sends Q and H tumbling down into a blood-filled chasm.

Rather than some kind of climax, Chapter 33, the final numbered chapter, feels like more of the same, more descriptions of rotting corpses and injuries as the nerds fight monsters and are killed or maimed and Quent and Helen use their imaginations to navigate a labyrinth and fight monsters.  The long labyrinth scene is a total waste of time because Quent and Helen just end up back at Izzy's plateau again.  Izzy hits Helen in the face, knocking her off the plateau, which is sort of interesting because it plays into the whole battered wife thing; the final fight between Izzy and Quent that follows is terribly lame.  When Izzy is incapacitated (whether he is dead or just unconscious is kept from us) the illusions vanish and firefighters arrive to drag the three members of the I-A-Q love triangle out of the burning theatre which is full of burned corpses.    

We jump forward like 18 months for the Epilogue.  Izzy, we learn, has been in a coma since Quent outfought him and for months has been in the custody of the CIA who are conducting experiments on him and developing a new synthetic version of the schizophrenic blood drug in hopes of coming up with a new weapon for use against the Red Army should the god damned commies bust through the Fulda Gap.  Dreamatrons have been outlawed.  Chet and Lois married and retired to Florida where they have started a band at their retirement community.  Helen is still in love with Izzy and has lawyers trying to get the King of the Dreamies out of the hands of the CIA.  Quent is still in love with the unachievable Helen, but he has gotten rich and famous with his book on Izzy.  After wasting our time with the pot-smoking fanzine crew all through the book, Boatman simply neglects to inform us as to how the survivors of their tragic little band are doing.  Maybe these dorks were added to a later draft and Boatman forgot to wrap up their fates in the epilogue he had already written?