Shadows of Tomorrow cast by Leiber, Boucher, Shaara and Gunn

Here's another of my 50 cent finds from the carts outside Second Story Books in our nation's capital, 1953's Shadow of Tomorrow, edited by Frederik Pohl, alumnus of the Young Communist League and author of the classic Gateway.  My copy of the 379-page book is in pretty good shape if you ignore the water spots.  An earlier owner appears to have used the inner front cover as scratch paper while working on his algebra homework or trying to crack a KGB cipher.  I hope he passed the class or caught the Rosenbergs' controller or whatever.

The description of Michael Shaara's Orphans of the Void
sounds like it is for a different story.

In our last episode we looked at four stories from Astounding from the period 1938 to 1944.  Today's crop of SF capers are all from Galaxy, from the early 1950s.  Let's see if they are really "more vivid than anything you have ever read" and "possible," as the back cover promises.

"A Bad Day For Sales" by Fritz Leiber (1953)

In his intro to this volume Frederik Pohl says something that I don't expect to hear pinkos say: that the world and society are in pretty good shape!  The salutary state of the world in the early 1950s, Pohl continues, presents a problem to the SF writer who would play social critic: if things are so good, it is not easy to come up with a compelling story on how they should be improved.  One solution available to the able writer, Pohl tells us, is to write a story that points out not what course our society should pursue, but what course to avoid, and Pohl includes "A Bad Day For Sales" on the list of stories from Shadow of Tomorrow that take this tack.  In his intro to the individual story itself, Pohl offers his opinion that "A Bad Day For Sales" is the best story ever written by Fritz Leiber.

So, what world does Leiber suggest we should avoid in this brief tale?  A consumerist world in which popular culture is suffused with sex and violence and America is involved in mass war in the Muslim East!  (I have the feeling we haven't exactly been heeding Fritz's warning!)  The plot consists of a robot on the streets of Manhattan, trying to sell various items to the city dwellers, like lolly-pops, soda pop, booze, copies of comic books (Junior Space Killers to a boy, Gee Gee Jones, Space Stripper to a girl) and cosmetics (Mars Blood, a "savage new glamor-tint"), the last to a woman in six-inch heels and skin-tight pants who flaunts her body at the robot.  Nearby, a fifty-foot-tall animatronic mannequin dresses and undresses, advertising the latest fashions, while news about the Pakistan crisis flashes by on the Times Square news ticker.  Then a stealth missile lands in Times Square, killing scores of people; the robot salesman survives, but is confused by this turn of events.

This is a sort of trifling joke story, but some of the jokes are funny (I definitely laughed at Gee Gee Jones, Space Stripper.)  I thought it a little incongruous to find the author of the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, which feature light-hearted depictions of swordfights, thievery and rape*, apparently lecturing us on the issue of sex and violence in entertainment.  ("A Bad Day For Sales," by the way, features explicit depictions of people being maimed and killed by the missile attack--I expect these are meant to be disturbing, not amusing.)  I'm guessing Pohl loved "A Bad Day For Sales" because it feels like an attack on advertising and the sale and purchase of frivolous things like sugary sweets and cosmetics, and perhaps hints that all act as "the opiates of the people," distracting them and keeping them from changing the government which is getting mixed up in all the wars (Orwell and numerous other lefties make this sort of argument.)

I love Coca-Cola and Oreos and Goldenberg's Peanut Chews, and if I had seen Gee Gee Jones, Space Stripper on the shelf during one of my regular visits to Jim Hanley's Universe back in my Manhattan days I would have eagerly snatched it up, so I am looking at this story as an affectionate send up, a knowingly ironic homage, to our consumerist culture and giving it a thumbs up!  (Just call me Mr. False Consciousness.)  So there!

The immortal Charles Schulz was also mining the anti-social comic book title vein
in the early 1950s.  This panel is from the June 22, 1952 Peanuts strip.

"A Bad Day For Sales" has been reprinted many times in such books as the volume of Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories that covers 1953 and The Arbor House Treasure of Science Fiction Masterpieces.  (While the former is "headlined" by Asimov and the latter by Robert Silverberg, Martin H. Greenberg is second editor on both...perhaps it is Greenberg who was so very keen on this piece.)

Is it vivid?  Yes!

Is it possible?  Yes!

*Not wanting to unfairly #metoo the Grey Mouser, one of the heroes of my youth, I took my 1986 copy of Swords and Ice Magic off the shelf and reread 1973's "The Sadness of the Executioner" and I can confirm that therein the Grey Mouser rapes a teen-aged girl assassin and that the scene is played for laughs.   

"Transfer Point" by Anthony Boucher (1950)

Boucher is another well-known figure in SF with whose work I have little familiarity.  Because he also wrote mystery stories and his name starts with a "B," I sometimes mix him up with Fredric Brown, who once wrote a story about a man-eating armadillo.  I have a terrible memory!

Like Leiber's "A Bad Day for Sales," "Transfer Point" is a joke story, but whereas Leiber's story is brisk and brief and includes some funny jokes, Boucher's tale is long and tedious and not at all funny.

It is two thousand years in the future!  Modern medicine has advanced to the point that nobody suffers from allergies.  Well, this one guy does--he's got eczema!  The eczema-sufferer is a genius scientist, and constructs himself a "retreat" with super air-conditioning so he won't have to itch anymore.  (This guy joins the pantheon of literary characters who suffer from eczema that is headed by Jewish authority on Vermeer and man-about-town Charles Swann, who treated his eczema with pain d'epices, air-conditioning not having been invented yet.)  So when hostile aliens introduce a new element, an inert gas, into the atmosphere that causes everybody to cough and sneeze to death, this guy is safe!

Holed up with the genius scientist, safe in the retreat while the rest of humanity dies of the sniffles, is his vapid but sexy daughter and a young writer who is composing an epic poem about the history of the human race.  Sexy daughter flirts outrageously with the versifier (e.g., she eats fruits and sucks the juices off her fingers right in front of him!) but he is not interested because she is so dull-witted.  Bored, the poet kills time by reading some 20th-century science-fiction magazines he finds in the archives.  (Meta!)  He is amazed to discover that one of the stories describes his own time and plight--in fact, the story he is reading is the story we readers are reading.  He doesn't find it funny, either!

The scientist constructs a time machine and the poet ends up in 1948 where he becomes a SF writer and tries to romance a well-educated female editor and publish that story about himself and a human race menaced by alien chemical warfare.  Boucher piles on the meta with characters directly referring to Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros.  Then, after 20 pages of lame jokes, Boucher tries to switch gears and pull our heartstrings by having the romance with the editor fail and the poet's manuscript thrown into the fire instead of published, which means the time loop we've all been reading about is broken and the human race is exterminated in the year 3950 or whatever. 

Weak!

Despite my dismissal of this overly long and self-indulgent piece, Robert Silverberg included "Transfer Point" in the seventh volume of his Alpha series (promoted as a collection of "the greatest contemporary masterpieces") and it appeared multiple times in translation in Europe.

Is it vivid?  No!

Is it possible?  No!

"Orphans of the Void" by Michael Shaara (1952)

It's the guy who writes those novels about the religious beliefs of American Civil War generals!  Oh wait, he just wrote one of those--his son wrote the other ones.  Forgive me; everything I know about The Killer Angels I learned watching a two-minute review of the movie on the TV 25 years ago.

This is another sentimental robot story, one not as effective as the sentimental robot story we read in our last episode, Robert Moore William's "Robot's Return."  For three hundred years humanity has lived in peace and been capable of interstellar flight, but after centuries of exploration has yet to discover evidence of an alien race which has also achieved space travel.  (Planetbound alien civilizations have been discovered, but there is a strict rule that forbids contact with them.)  In this story, space explorers uncover the first ever sign of alien spacefarers, and track the clues to a planet covered in ruined cities, cities destroyed in a cataclysmic war.  All life on the planet was exterminated in the war, but the aliens' self replicating robots survived!

Here comes the sentiment.  To ensure obedience, the robots were programmed with a desire to serve their flesh creature masters, and suffer a sort of psychological pain when they are not serving.  Because their masters have been dead for millennia, the robots have suffered this pain for a long long time.  They even built space ships and went on a fruitless search for "the Makers," whom the robots, it is suggested, view in much the same way humans view God.  The happy ending of the story is that the human race will become these robots' masters; they will help us explore the universe, and need never feel that pain again.  (Shaara doesn't seem to explore the idea that humanity, by becoming these robots' masters, may be hubristically taking on the role of gods.)

The idea behind this story is OK, but Shaara failed to elicit any feeling in me; I just didn't care about these robots' psychological problems.  For one thing, the author fails to create any characters, human or robot, worthy of my sympathy.  He also breaks the "show me don't tell me" rules pretty severely.  Instead of us readers accompanying a human character as he uncovers this whole robotic psychology sob story, the truth of the robots' mental problems is revealed in a scene in which the captain of the space ship reads a report from his anthropology team.  Instead of using some literary techniques to inspire sadness in us readers, or convincingly display the captain's sadness, Shaara just tells is this whole thing is sad with lines like "Not since he [the space captain] was very young had he been so deeply moved."

There are lots of SF stories in which we are supposed to feel sad about robots who have problems, but such stories are a tough sell to me because I can never forget that a robot is just a machine.  When the Toyota Corolla has a flat tire I don't feel bad for the automobile--it's just a machine, with no feelings, and I am inclined to feel the same way about a robot.  Longtime readers of MPorcius Fiction Log may remember how much I gushed about Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover, which features a robot that, apparently, develops feelings and then gets destroyed, but that novel worked because Lee placed at its center a believable human character who loved the robot, and the robot served as a catalyst for emotion and change in that human character.

I tend to like stories about dudes in space suits exploring alien artifacts, but I gotta give this one a thumbs down... however, it is not so bad that I won't give some of Shaara's other short SF a try.

Like "Transfer Point," "Orphans of the Void" showed up in Alpha 7.  Silverberg and I are really not on the same page today.

Is it vivid?  Moderately vivid.

Is it possible?  I don't think so.

"The Misogynist" by James E. Gunn (1952)

Back in 2011 I read a novel James E. Gunn coauthored with Jack Williamson in 1955, Star Bridge, and gave it a middling, mildly positive review at Amazon.  Gunn is an important figure in the SF world as a writer, editor, historian and critic, but I don't think I have read anything by him since this blog set sail.     

Whoa, this is another of those stories which wouldn't fly today, full of assessments of women that men nowadays deny they believe if they know what is good for them.  We'll let "Their minds work in devious ways; they win what they want by guile and subtlety" serve as our example of many such lines of dialogue in this story.

Gunn's story is structured as a written account of a conversation between the narrator and the smartest guy in his office, Harry, who has a reputation as a storyteller.  Harry has been married for a month, and has noticed that his wife acts much differently now than she did before they were married.  He expounds to the narrator his theory that most or all women are members of an alien species, left on Earth long ago--this is the only way, he believes, to explain the radical difference between men, who are practical and creative and able to grasp abstract ideas, and women, who are none of these things, but parasites who manipulate men.  No doubt the feminine fiends will eventually figure out how to do without men, and then exterminate them.  Harry warns that men who catch wind of the female conspiracy end up in the asylum or the morgue, but the narrator just thinks he's kidding and blithely tells his own wife, and Harry's, all about Harry's theory.  Two or three days later both Harry and the narrator are out of commission.

An obvious sort of story, but Gunn doesn't let it go on too long, and enlivens it with lots of sexist quotes from famous thinkers and the Bible.  An acceptable entertainment.

"The Misogynist" seems to have struck a chord with the SF community, appearing in numerous anthologies, including SF: Author's Choice 4, one of those anthologies in which writers tell you which of their literary productions they are most proud of--apparently "The Misogynist" represents what Gunn considers his finest work!

Is it vivid?  It is entirely set in some guy's living room, so, who cares?

Is it possible?  That women are different than men?  Yes.  That women are from outer space?  No.

**********

Ouch, these stories are kind of a disappointment.  The Leiber and Gunn stories are reasonably well-written and brief, but their ideas (boilerplate Marxism and boilerplate sexism) are banal.  The Boucher is long and tedious, and the Shaara has a decent idea but is poorly delivered.  Better luck next time, I guess.

More science fiction short stories published before I was born in our next episode!

Adventures in Time and Space by Miller, Rocklynne, Williams and Bates

My copy of Selections from Adventures
in Time and Space, discovered on the
outside carts at Second Story Books

In 1946 Random House put out a huge hardcover anthology of SF stories entitled Adventures in Time and Space.  Edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas, this 1000-page volume has been reprinted numerous times and in 1952 won some kind of "All-Time Best Book" award from Astounding.  In 1954 Pennant Books put out a 200-page paperback selection of stories from the anthology, and in January of 2018 I paid 50 cents for a copy of this sixty-four-year-old paperback.

The first three stories in this book are by famous heroes of early 20th-century SF, Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt and "Lewis Padgett" (a pen name used by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), but today we are going to read stories from the volume by somewhat less famous people: P. Schuyler Miller, Ross Rocklynne, Robert Moore Williams, and Harry Bates.  I didn't plan it this way, but all these stories first appeared in Astounding when the famous John W. Campbell Jr. was editing the magazine.

"As Never Was" by P. Schuyler Miller (1944)

"As Never Was" appeared in 1944, and you can read the issue of Astounding in which it debuted for free at the internet archive.  Robert Silverberg included it in his anthologies Alpha 5 in 1974 and The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces in 1983--I guess we can say the story has the endorsement of the SF community.  Miller wrote a bunch of stories in the '30s and '40s and many essays and reviews for Astounding/Analog up to the '70s, but I don't know that I have ever read anything by him before.

This is one of those time-travel stories about an impossible paradox that hurts my poor brain.  In the 21st century one of the first archaeologists with access to a "time shuttle" travels to the future.  (There is little point in a scientist or historian traveling to the past because if you do so you inevitably change the future, creating and finding yourself in a different time stream so you can no longer return to the future you used to inhabit in order to share your findings.)  He returns with a knife made of a super metal and dies shortly after.  This metal has so much technological and economic potential that practitioners of every science bend every tool and technique at their disposal to duplicating the metal or finding more of it, but decades of such efforts are absolutely fruitless.  Legions of people travel to the future but they can never find a civilization that has even heard of the super metal, much less one able to produce it.  Finally, the grandson of the pioneering archaeologist figures out the mystery, which only reveals a still greater mystery: his grandfather discovered the knife 300 years in the future in the ruins of the museum where it was housed after his death in the 21st century--the knife exists only in a closed loop, it was never actually created.

This story is well-written, Miller injecting some melodrama and character stuff as well as ideas and images that keep it entertaining, and the central conceit is kind of mind-boggling, which makes it memorable.  I like it, and see why anthologists like it, but can't deny that the impossibility of it all has left an uncomfortable, nagging, residue of frustration in my mind, analogous to the feeling I get looking at one of those impossible tuning fork drawings.

"Quietus" by Ross Rocklynne (1940)

Isaac Asimov (or Martin H. Greenberg acting under his aegis) included "Quietus" in the volume of his series The Great Science Fiction Stories that covers 1940.  A year ago I read four stories by Rocklynne and found them to be a mixed bag.

Zoinks!  This is the kind of story that will get you fired from your cushy job at a tech industry giant!  In their introduction, the editors (besides telling you ahead of time it is a tragedy, thus killing the twist ending) say it may be that the "significance of this tale is its brilliant portrayal of the historical struggle of the feminine mind to cope with logic a priori."  NSFW!

Tommy is the last man on Earth!  Extreme seismic activity, triggered by a meteor strike, has exterminated all life on Earth save for that in an area of about 100,000 square miles in North America, where Tommy lives, and that area didn't come through unscathed.  The holocaust occurred during Tommy's childhood, when he had run away from home and was hiding in a cave.  When he emerged from the cave everybody was dead.  (That'll show you, Mom and Dad!)  Since then he has lived by catching rabbits with his bare hands, his loneliness eased by his pet crow, Blacky, who repeats sentences Tommy says and sentences it heard before the cataclysm, phrases like "the price of wheat is going down" which mean nothing to Tommy.

Tommy is 21 now, and has a feeling of "hunger" for you know what!  (Most of us got that feeling around 12 or 13, but Tommy is perhaps a late bloomer.)  Luckily, he chances upon the last woman on Earth.  Skittish, she flees, and he pursues.  She is shy, but also curious, and never goes too far; in fact, when he hits his head on a log while swimming after her, she pulls Tommy's stunned form out of the water before taking flight anew.

Interspersed with this tale of boy meets girl is the story of a married couple of alien explorers.  This pair of bird people fly above the Earth's devastated surface, looking for intelligent life.  When they see Blacky riding on Tommy's shoulder, the female bird person assumes that Blacky is intelligent and Tommy is his beast of burden.  Her husband isn't so sure, and urges her to refrain from jumping to conclusions.  The last woman on Earth is getting over her shyness and she and Tommy are about to properly meet when that chatterbox Blacky starts up with his damn squawking and scares her off.  Tommy, who has never been exposed to all that "bros before hoes" propaganda, is enraged and throws stones at Blacky, and the female alien shoots down the last man on Earth, thinking she is rescuing the last intelligent creature on Earth.  The last woman on Earth weeps over Tommy's body, and that is the end of the human race.

This story is OK, but feels contrived and is the weakest of the four items we are looking at today.

"Robot's Return" by Robert Moore Williams (1938)

I don't think I've read anything by Robert Moore Williams before; looking at isfdb, it seems he produced a lot of adventure novels with cool covers by people like Frazetta, Jones, Gaughan and St. John, stories of musclemen riding dinosaurs and astronauts fighting aliens with ray guns.  Sounds like a fun guy.  "Robot's Return" was first published in Astounding as "Robots Return;" you can read the original printing at the internet archive.  I think the introduction of the apostrophe is a mistake, either an artistic or typographical one, as there is more than one robot in the story.  I also like the 1938 illustration for the story by Charles Schneeman.

This is a sentimental piece with limited plot.  A squad of robots arrives on the far future Earth, a planet of ruined cities.  For thousands of years the citizens of the robot civilization have wondered where and how their people began.  As they search the decayed ruins of a once great metropolis, they debate such topics as the difference between a mere machine and a thinking robot and whether an animal, a creature which needs air and food to survive, could really have created their race of nuclear-powered metal people.  They finally find the answer, text engraved on a sort of memorial that proves that flesh creatures of this planet--men--built them to staff the spaceship that was to take the human race to Mars to escape an incurable disease.  Of course, the fate of the humans on the ship and why their robot servants lost their memories of Earth and humankind is still a mystery.

This tale is well-written, but there is really not much story to it--this one is trying to get by on sensawunda alone.  "Robot's Return" actually reminds me of one of those Lovecraftian stories in which a seeker after knowledge discovers the secret origin of his family or race and is horrified, even psychologically damaged, by his discovery, but Williams here uses the same story structure to achieve the opposite effect.  Instead of his protagonists being disillusioned and his readers disturbed by the revelation that human life is meaningless, Williams's robots are buoyed by the knowledge of their origins, and Williams seems to be trying to celebrate man's ambitions and abilities.  Not bad. 

"Farewell to the Master" by Harry Bates (1940)

Bates is another person whose work I am not familiar with.  He edited Astounding and Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror in the early 1930s, and wrote a bunch of space operas starring the hero Hawk Carse that I have never heard of before.  "Farewell to the Master" was published in Astounding after John W. Campbell Jr. had taken over, and was the basis of the film The Day the Earth Stood Still, one of those productions about how we should welcome alien imperialism because we humans are babies or savages who can't be trusted to behave without adult supervision backed by force.  These kinds of stories usually get on my nerves.  Well, let's see what the source material is like.

It is the future and mankind has colonized the solar system.  Three months ago a time machine constructed of a mysterious green metal suddenly materialized in Washington, D.C.  From out of the machine comes a dude with the face of an angel who radiates goodness and a giant green robot that looks like a naked muscleman with glowing red eyes.  The deific man only has time to say "I am Klaatu and this is Gnut" before some mentally ill guy snipes him dead!  Gnut stands still from that moment on, and a remorseful Earth builds a museum around the robot and the time machine and a tomb for Klaatu.  (We're not so remorseful that we refrain from trying to break into Gnut and the time machine with every drill and ray gun and acid we can come up with, but nothing we do can even scratch that green metal.)

Our hero is Cliff the photojournalist.  Cliff has been taking pictures of Gnut, day after day, and one day he is comparing his photos and realizes Gnut has moved a few centimeters!  The green gargantua must be moving at night when nobody is watyching, so Cliff hides out in the museum after it closes to see what happens.  (The security at this museum sucks!)

After some scenes of suspense and scenes of action, we learn that Gnut has been spending his nights in the time machine, working on an apparatus with which to reproduce Klaatu!  The sound each living thing makes is distinctive, like a fingerprint or DNA, and, with a decent recording of an animal or person's voice, Gnut's new machine can recreate the creature!  After some experiments (Gnut recreates an angry gorilla from a recording, and one of the action scenes is Gnut fighting the belligerent ape) and with some help from Cliff in getting the best possible recording of Klaatu's few words of greeting, Gnut has everything he needs and leaves in the time machine.  The twist ending of the story is the revelation that, while everybody assumed Klaatu was in charge and Gnut was his bodyguard or something, in fact it was Gnut who was the master!

Unless my memory of the movie is very faulty, The Day the Earth Stood Still shares only the rudiments of its basic premise with "Farewell to the Master."  "Farewell to the Master" is a good story, and I like it even if there is a big plot hole (there is a window in the museum through which Gnut and his glowing eyes are visible to those on the city streets outside, so it is impossible that he could have moved around at night unseen) and I don't quite get the real significance of the Gnut-is-the-master surprise ending--is it just a scary prophecy that in the future we will be subordinated to our machines?  Also, why did Gnut come back in time to visit us in the first place?     

**********

Despite their various problems, these stories are all interesting and entertaining, in their own right and as historical artifacts of the world before 1945.  A good purchase!

More 50¢ adventures in our next episode!

By Furies Possessed by Ted White

"You're a fool," Bjonn said.  His face was flushed, and he looked more angry than I'd ever seen him.  "You've lived from infancy on a diet of tasteless, tube-fed pap.  You've never left the teat.  You connect yourself to an 'evacuation unit' and your entire alimentary tract is plugged in, part of the circuit of an obscenely sterile machine.  You're a product of conditioned reflexes, of compulsive habit patterns.  No wonder you're so deeply neurotic!"  

Three dollars!  That's why they call me
"The Big Spender"

In the July 1973 issue of Fantastic, SF critics Alexei and Cory Panshin conclude that SF is in a period of stagnation, but on the brink of achieving "maturity" and producing "a great literature."  They list a bunch of recent "introspective" SF novels which show hints of this coming maturity, and one of them is Fantastic editor Ted White's 1970 novel By Furies Possessed.  By Furies Possessed was first serialized over two issues of Amazing, which White was also editing at the time; I own the Signet paperback edition.  Flipping through my water-stained copy, the print looks quite small and I see that the last page is numbered "192."  This thing is long... it had better be good.

From its first page, By Furies Possessed lays on the traditional technological and sociological SF speculations: what will it be like to travel between the moon and the Earth, to travel in zero gee, to live on the moon?  If the Earth becomes overcrowded, how will government and culture change?  The novel is also full of psychology: in the first of 23 chapters we learn that our first-person narrator, Tad Dameron is claustrophobic, his fellow passengers on the Earth to Luna shuttle envy him because he gets waved through customs without having to deal with any paperwork, he envies his Luna-based colleague who has had more time in space than he has, and witness this colleague play mind games on Tad, criticizing him and trying to exploit his claustrophobia.  When something unfortunate befalls this guy, Tad is torn between sympathy and schadenfreude.

The Earth has built seven interstellar ships in the last forty years, and one has just docked on Luna, bringing with it a passenger from Earth's first extrasolar colony, Farhome.  This emissary, "Bjonn" (he has only the one name) is the first extrasolar colonial to ever visit Earth.  (Farhome is like 15 years travel away, though for passengers it feels like only a few months.)  It's Tad's job as a "Level Seven Investigator" from "the Bureau of Non-Terran affairs" to show Bjonn around the Earth, and, in the process, learn all about him and Farhome.  But already on Luna and on the shuttle back to Earth Tad has begun to dislike this visitor, who is so tall and agile and self-assured.  Envy again! 

Back in New York (or "Megayork," as they are calling it in Tad's day), Tad introduces Bjonn to one of his colleagues, Dian Knight, an attractive woman who has always spurned Tad's advances.  Bjonn and Dian disappear together, and the novel shifts into detective mode as Tad travels around the world, sifting through clues and interrogating people in an effort to find them.

As the story progresses we learn all about this future Earth and how radically different it is from our own.  The world population stands at 37 billion, and is presided over by a socialistic world government which White metaphorically likens to a mother.  There is almost no private sector, with most everybody working for the government or (Tad suggests this group is the "vast majority") living off "Public Care" and spending their time watching the "lulling opiates of public 3-D."  (Professionals like Tad almost never watch 3-D, and if they do it is more serious private broadcasts that are only quasilegal.)

Most strange, and most indicative of the mother-baby relationship people have with the state, is people's attitude towards eating.  People never eat together; in fact, the idea of seeing another eat or being seen eating disgusts them, and when Bjonn first invites Tad and Dian to share a meal with him they become physically ill.  The citizens of the future take their meals in private little "eating cubicles," the same rooms they urinate and evacuate in, seated on a toilet, sucking algae from a tube that projects from the wall.

As we learn about this overcrowded future society, we also learn about Tad's own psychology, and I think to an extent Tad is meant to represent his society--his misfortunes and psychological problems are the result or a small scale version of Earth society's sociological issues.  Family and community ties in this world are weak--Tad was separated from his parents at age six, people walking the crowded streets and riding mass transit never make eye contact (Tad dubs his age "The Age of Anonymity"), marriages are generally short term contracts, and when someone is nice to Tad, he tells us it is a surprise.  Tad is not only claustrophobic, but also alienated from the natural world, finding the feel of sunlight or cool air on his skin uncomfortable and spending as much time as possible inside.  As Tad conducts his investigation he is given the opportunity to see different sectors of society--he visits an artist living on the dole, a busy professional of the private sector who left her child to an orphanage so she'd have time to pursue her career, and attends a wild party of the decadent rich, an orgy where he becomes intimate with a porno actress, and performs in a porno with her!-- and we observe how classbound and divided Earth society is and how dysfunctional people's relationships are.

When Tad finally catches up with Bjonn and Dian they have started a church and their congregation is growing.  Tad realizes that the church members are all carrying an alien parasite from Farhome, and when he discovers that his bosses at the Bureau have also been infected with these parasites the hunter becomes the hunted, and he desperately tries to avoid capture.  But, in the end, he is persuaded that the alien parasite is not a parasite at all, but a symbiote that enhances its human host's perceptions and general health, including his psychological health.  Tad joins Bjonn's group, accepting one of these "parasites" into his own body, and Dian becomes his lover.  As the novel ends we know that Tad's many psychological problems are solved, and that soon, when everybody has taken aboard one of these alien symbiotes, the class conflict and alienation and other problems of Earth society will be solved.

An interesting way to look at By Furies Possessed is as a novel about science fiction, or perhaps as a novel in dialogue with other science fiction works.  White includes quite a few references which feel like little SF community in-jokes.  Early in the book there is a sort of satirical reference to L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics and Richard Sharpe Shaver's claims about a malevolent subterranean civilization of "deros."  A little later we meet a minor female character named Terri Carr--celebrated (male) SF editor Terry Carr co-wrote the novel Invasion from 2500 with White in 1964.   

Most importantly, By Furies Possessed feels like a response to or mutation of one of the most famous SF novels by one of the most important SF writers, Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.  Bjonn does almost the same stuff that the hero of Stranger does--he is a human born on another planet and matured under the beneficent influence of aliens, and he comes alone to an Earth that has a sort of crummy society and sets up a church that has the potential to solve all Mother Terra's problems.  One glaring "tell" is that the important alien ritual in Stranger is "the sharing of water," while the "sacrament" of Bjonn's church is the "sharing of food."

In the introduction of the 1978 edition of his 1967 novel Secret of the Marauder Satellite, White tells us that he first fell in love with SF when he read Heinlein's juvenile novels as a child, and that he took Heinlein's juveniles as a model when he wrote Secret.  So it would be "in character" for White to have based By Furies Possessed in part on Stranger in a Strange Land.  In many ways, of course, By Furies Possessed is very different than Stranger; Stranger is full of philosophical conversations and expressions of love, and it is clear from the start that the Martian is the good guy.  White's novel is like a hard-boiled detective novel full of femmes fatale in which people are all jerks to each other, and White tries to keep us guessing about whether we should welcome Bjonn and his church or fear it.  In fact, while Bjonn's character arc is somewhat like that of Smith from Stranger, it is also quite like that of Dracula in Bram Stoker's classic novel--Bjonn is an alien weirdo who comes to the Earth via a ship, hides out and begins converting people to his alien ways via an invasion of their bodies. 

(There are quite a few SF books that feel like responses to Heinlein's work, like Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage and David Gerrold's A Matter for Men.  Joe Haldeman's The Forever War was widely seen as a response to Heinlein's Starship Troopers, though Haldeman denies any such intent.)

Ugh, I never would have bought the
book if the copy I found had this
cover--it makes the novel
look like it must be a bad comedy

I also thought White might be using By Furies Possessed to strike a subtle blow for the New Wave, or just reflect New Wave influence.  One of Tad's many psychological issues is an obsession with space travel.  As a child he collected model space ships and studied starship blueprints and covered his walls with pictures of astronauts, and as an adult he tries, without success, to get assigned to space missions.  But at the end of the novel it is made explicitly clear that Tad's path to happiness is the exploration and mastery not of outer space, but of inner space, of his own mind.  Tad's interest in outer space is, in fact, an illness!  One of the tenets of the New Wave was that SF should focus less on traditional topics like space travel and more on things like human psychology, and White's book, though it does have space travel and aliens as important components, is primarily concerned with Tad's thoughts, feelings and memories, and the novel's story follows Tad's psychological journey--the uncovering of the reasons why he is so envious and so obsessed with space and his growth from mental illness to mental health--not a physical voyage to another star system.

(With its optimistic paradigm shift ending and straightforward detective-style plot structure and tone, By Furies Possessed is probably more traditional a piece of SF than either Stranger in a Strange Land or your stereotypical depressing and abstruse New Wave piece.)

White's style is good, brisk and clear, so (despite my initial worries) the story never drags or confuses.  All the surprises, changes of scene (which I have not discussed here at all), symbols and SF in-jokes keep the reader interested.  By Furies Possessed is a solid, readable, entertaining, piece of work.

**********

Across from the title page of By Furies Possessed is an ad for other Signet SF we are assured we will enjoy.  Top of the list is Mordecai Roshwold's Level 7, a book much beloved by Joachim Boaz and 2theD.  Heinlein's famous The Door into Summer is represented, as well as a novel by SF giant Poul Anderson which I haven't heard of, A Circus of Hells.  Another thing I've never heard of is Moon Zero Two; the book advertised here is a novelization by a John Burke of a Hammer film.  Burke also did the novelization of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and a bunch of short stories based on such Hammer Films classics as The Reptile and The Gorgon.  Also promoted here in By Furies Possessed is Robert Hoskins's anthology The Stars Around Us.  I own The Stars Around Us, but I don't think I've read anything from it yet.

1975 stories from Fantastic: L. Sprague de Camp & Lin Carter and Juanita Coulson

I don't own a copy of the February 1975 issue of Fantastic Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, but after reading the first three installments in L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's Conan of Aquilonia series and liking each one more than the one before it, I could hardly fail to read the final episode!  So it was off to internet archive to witness Conan's final confrontation with Thoth-Amon!

I'm a fan of Stephen Fabian's work, but I have to say the cover he provides here is kind of weak; I don't like the colors, I don't like the composition (the relationships between the figures is unclear and there is a lot of negative space), the poses of the figures are strange, etc.  They can't all be winners, I guess.

In his editorial, editor Ted White talks about the 1974 World Science Fiction Convention.  He says he has no complaints about the event, and then proceeds to enumerate his complaints.  For example, he points out that the hotel food was bad and overpriced.  More interesting to us SF gossip hounds, he relates that the toastmaster at the Awards Banquet was terrible: his "rambling monologues lacked either wit or punchlines  and seemed to go on forever..." until Harlan Ellison reined him in. Ted doesn't name this long-winded individual, but wikipedia informs us that the toastmaster was none other than Andrew J. Offutt!  Another facet in the portrait of that unusual character!  Hmmm... did Offutt ever appear in Fantastic or Amazing?  I don't think he did...maybe Ted didn't like Offutt's work or didn't like him as a person; whatever the case he is not shy here about alienating a potential contributor to his magazines.

Ted is also unhappy that Kelly Freas keeps winning the Hugo for best artist, that his having "sewn up" the award reduces the award's meaning.  He also suggests that the Hugo voting may have more to do with name recognition and ability to get exposure than with serious assessments of the quality of a writer or artist's work.  Is Ted one of those snobs who has contempt for the voting masses?  And wasn't this "problem" with the Hugos "solved" back in in the 1960s with the introduction of the Nebulas, which are awarded by professional writers? 

Ted apologizes because he has been unable to produce a promised in-depth review of Marvel Comics' Conan comics.  He describes the many obstacles he faced in writing this review; one of the cool things about Ted's editorials and his responses to people's letters is the insight it gives you into the actual life of a person making his living in the pop culture industry.

Ted finishes up the editorial by expressing his outrage at Gerald Ford's pardoning of Richard Nixon,  suggesting that his outrage is shared by such a significant number of the people that something terrible may happen.

"Shadows in the Skull" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

"Shadows in the Skull," the conclusion to the Conan of Aquilonia sequence, is the first story in the magazine.  It is accompanied by a trippy illustration by Michael Nally that seems better suited to a story about pot-smoking bikers at a strip bar than a story about a usurper king hunting down an evil wizard.  When I saw it, the first thing I thought of was Alex and his droogs at the Korova Milk Bar!  A bizarre choice by Ted or the publisher or whoever was responsible.  (Ron Miller, all is forgiven!)

"Shadows in the Skull" picks up not long after where "Red Moon of Zimbabwei" left off.  With Conan's help, Mbega has abolished the Zimbabwean tradition of having priest-elected twins serve as co-kings and founded a unitary monarchy, with himself as monarch.  Conan is eager to go after Thoth-Amon, and one of Mbega's soothsayers goes into a trance and tells the Cimmerian where to find the evil sorcerer.  The Aquilonian army is depleted and fatigued from the fighting and jungle illnesses, so Mbega assigns some of his spearmen and some of his wyvern-riders to serve Conan on his mission.  They are joined by a company of black Amazons from a nearby tribe who were visiting to celebrate Mbega's coronation.  It is suggested that the leader of these Amazons, Princess Nzinga, is Conan's daughter (years ago he spent some quality time with the Queen of that tribe.)

Here's an edition of Conan of
Aquilonia from our escargot-eating
friends that I should have used
to illustrate my blog post on
"Black Sphinx of Nebthu"

King Conan and Prince Conn lead the force south for weeks, the infantry marching through the difficult terrain, the leaders scouting ahead on the wyverns.  When the airborne troops spot the place the soothsayer described--a mountain that looks like a skull--the wyverns suddenly get sick and the adventurers are forced to land.  Down on the surface they find the barren skull mountain is gone, replaced by an elaborate palace surrounded by flowers!  Conan realizes that an illusion is at work, but which was the illusion, the desolate skull mountain or this sophisticated and beautiful estate?  When a bunch of beautiful women emerge from the palace Conan, and all his comrades, put the matter aside and embark on three days of relaxation and partying!  (This is the subject of Nally's illo.)

Conn, when he is just about to have sex with a dancing girl, sees her reflection, which shows her true form--she, like all the women in the illusory palace, is a snake person!  The skull mountain is the last redoubt of the  reptile race that ruled the Earth before the rise of mankind!  With Thoth-Amon's help they hope to reconquer the Earth!

At the same time Conn narrowly escapes death, Conan, drunk and asleep, has a narrow escape of his own; the queen of the snake people is about to stab him while he is helpless when suddenly daughter Nzinga appears and kills the snake queen with a thrown spear.

While the battle between the blacks and the snake people consumes Skull Mountain, Thoth-Amon, using some kind of invisibility spell, drags off the unconscious Conan unseen, to a beach where he plans to sacrifice him to Set.  The Cimmerian wakes up and he and Thoth-Amon engage in a mystical battle of wills--Thoth-Amon calls upon all his magical power and it looks like Conan is going to lose the psychic battle, but then Conn arrives and stabs Thoth-Amon to death.

"Shadows in the Skull" is disappointing; it uses the same structure and devices we just saw in the last three stories.  Conan falls into a trap (and this trap is the goofiest yet,) like he has in all of these stories.  Conan's army appears just in time to pull his fat out of the fire, as it did in two of the other stories.  In "Red Moon over Zambabwei" Conan was in a battle of wills with Set, and was about to expire just when Conn stabbed the wizard who had summoned Set, and almost the same thing happens here.  I've got to grade this one as merely acceptable.

I recognize that de Camp and Carter had busy careers, but it feels like they were just phoning in these Conan of Aquilonia stories.  In their defense, de Camp and Carter do try to bring something new to the Conan game by portraying Conan as a parent; I think all four stories include scenes in which Conan embraces his son Conn, and there is a lot of talk of Conan worrying about Conn and considering the best ways to raise him to be a good king when he takes Conan's place on the throne and so forth, but is Conan: Family Man really what we want when we pick up a Conan story?

The Conan of Aquilonia stories are not terrible, but they are not very good, either, a pedestrian addition to the sword and sorcery canon.

"The Dragon of Tor-Nali" by Juanita Coulson

The February 1975 issue of Fantastic seems to have a high proportion of surreal stories and joke stories (“The Return of Captain Nucleus” is apparently a parody of Edmond Hamilton-style adventure capers that was inspired by a joke in a reader’s letter), so I’m skipping most of the fiction in this issue. But I’m still in a sword and sorcery mood so I’ve decided to give Juanita Coulson, whose work I have never read before, a try.

Immediately, I was impressed by Coulson’s writing style and her efforts to get into the psychology and personality of her main character, and the way she integrated a description of his people's culture with a sort of stream of consciousness narrative, showing how much a product of that culture he was and giving us some exposition in an organic, unobtrusive way.  This is a marked contrast to de Camp and Carter's style, which is quite unambitious and just barely serviceable.  "The Dragon of Tor-Nali" may be vulnerable to the charge that it is overwritten for a story about violence in a fantasy world of sword-fighting pirates, vengeful witches, and fearsome deities, that the style slows down the pace of action scenes and the progression of the plot, but Coulson’s story is about human relationships as much as it is about bloody battles and perilous journeys.

The plot: Two veteran soldiers, the noble officer Branra and a scout from what I took to be a fantasy version of Plains Indians, Danaer, are among the fighting men on a transport ship, on their way to yet another battle in a long war against invaders from across the ocean, when it sinks in a storm. They are rescued by a pirate ship captained by a man named Nadil-Zaa who doesn't give a damn about the war. Another pirate ship is spotted—this one captained by a beautiful woman, Ama. The pirate ships eagerly join battle against each other, and Branra and Danear snatch up swords and fight alongside Nadil-Zaa's crew.  Nadil-Zaa’s men are triumphant, and the pirate captain disarms Ama and rapes her in front of everybody, then has her chained up on his vessel.

In the second half of the story we learn that Nadil-Zaa and Ama were once lovers, and Nadil-Zaa would like to rekindle their relationship.  We also discover that since their breakup Ama has made some sort of pact with wizards—the very foreign wizards Branra and Danaer’s army has been at war with.  In the climax, Ama vengefully summons a monstrous sea dragon (calling it her child) to attack the ship; the dragon threatens to sink them but flees when Nadil-Zaa kills Ama.  As the story ends Nadil-Zaa weeps over Ama's body and we are lead to believe that the pirate will now vengefully join the war on the foreign wizards who, at least as he sees it, took his love from him.

"The Dragon of Tor-Nali" is ripe for some kind of feminist analysis, and not only because of Ama's Medea-like story arc.  Danaer makes repeated references to his people’s goddess and thinks often about his wife (or girlfriend?) back home and a contrast is drawn between religion and sexual relationships among his people and the people he has found himself among.  Coulson includes still more female characters, crew and captives on Nadil-Zaa's ship of different social classes, and charts their reactions to Ama and that witch's radical actions and dreadful fate.  The wisdom and morality of every character in the story is ambiguous, open to interpretation by the reader.

A good story, better than any of the Conan of Aquilonia stories I’ve been reading; it shares the same kind of setting and plot elements used by de Camp and Carter, but Coulson does something more complex and more human with them, and she has a much better writing style.  "The Dragon of Tor-Nali" doesn't seem to have ever been printed elsewhere.

*********

Charles Moll's cover for The Return of
Kavin includes a "quote" from Alphonse
Mucha's poster for Lorenzaccio

In his book review column Fritz Leiber heaps praise on four books.  First he gushes over Poul Anderson's Hrolf Kraki's Saga (take that Lester G. Boutillier!)  Then Andre Norton's The Crystal Gryphone.  Then, to my surprise, The Return of Kavin, by David Mason.  This is the sequel to Kavin's World, which I read in 2016 and declared "merely adequate."  Fritz reviewed Kavin's World back in 1970, and I found that review and read it--Fritz asserts that Kavin's World is "a damn good sword-and-sorcery story."  Fritz is a softie!  In this 1975 review, Fritz mostly talks about David Mason the person, his many unusual life experiences, rather than the book.  And he spent half the 1970 review of Kavin's World quoting some other guy's poem.  (In contrast, when he talks about the Anderson and Norton books he discusses their style and content with great specificity.  I have a feeling Fritz is being kind to his friend Mason in putting out these positive but content-lite reviews of his acceptable but unspectacular novels.)

Finally, Fritz discusses Ursula K. LeGuin's essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," apparently an examination of style in fantasy writing.  It sounds like LeGuin's main point is that the language a fantasy story is written in should sound like the language of a fantasy world, not like the language of the 20th century.  LeGuin praises Tolkien, E. R. Eddison, and a writer I'm not familiar with, Kenneth Morris, and denounces people Leiber does not name, but a little googling indicates Katherine Kurtz was one prominent target.  Leiber calls "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" "the best essay I know of on the language of modern fantasy" and uses the opportunity it presents to talk about writers like Robert Graves and Lord Dunsany, as well as Tolkien and Eddison.

In a sort of postscript, Leiber recommends strongly the small press Lovecraftian magazine Whispers.

Ted knows it, I know it, and you know it: sometimes the most fun part of Fantastic is the letters, and the February '75 issue produces a fertile crop of correspondence!

The writer of the first letter offers a long list of criticisms and suggestions for Fantastic and Amazing.  Most humorous criticism: Brian Aldiss's highly praised Frankenstein Unbound is a "rancid little bit of trivia...hastily written in a vein that smacks of A. E. Van Vogt at his least logical."  Ouch!  Most humorous suggestion: if "Conan" in huge type on the cover increases sales, why not include Lovecraftian material and put "Cthulhu" in huge type on the cover?  Ted ignores both of these chestnuts in his response, but does manage to work in a quote from Barry Malzberg praising Fantastic as "the best s-f magazine today."

Writer Darrell Schweitzer (remember we liked his novel The Shattered Goddess?) writes in to talk about the fiction of William Morris, one of the towering cultural figures of the Victorian era (my wife and I love his wallpaper designs.)  This is a response to an article in Fantastic about Morris by L. Sprague de Camp.  Another SF writer, R. Faraday Nelson, writes in to criticize some aspects of de Camp's essay, namely his characterization of the Pre-Raphaelites (I love the Pre-Raphaelites) and of Morris's socialism (well, here's something I don't love.)  Nelson wisely points out that one of the reasons that creative types are attracted to socialism is that they see the people's lives as a medium, just like their canvases and brushes, and society as an appropriate subject to be molded in the hands of the self-appointed superior intellect.

William Morris's wreath wallpaper and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Veronica Veronese

(R. A. Lafferty memorably satirized Morris's socialism in his 1973 story, "The World as Will and Wallpaper."  Joachim Boaz and I wrote about it with love in our hearts at his blog in 2011, and the inimitable tarbandu in 2013 compared it to Thomas Pynchon and dismissed it as "contrived."  Spurred by the William Morris talk in Fantastic, I reread "The World as Will and Wallpaper" today and fell in love all over again!  Five out of five severed heads!)

A woman writes in who agrees with me that M. John Harrison's The Pastel City is overrated, and who (like me) likes Jack Vance, but I have to part ways with her when she says she doesn't like Barry Malzberg!  (Sigh...we almost had a love connection there!)  The letters wrap up with still more Star Trek letters, these about the cartoon version of the voyages of the USS Enterprise.  Somebody calls Ted the "founding member of STING--Star Trek Is No Good."

The last page is the classifieds, with an offer all of you aspiring writers will find irresistible!

Specify type of story!

Well, that's four blog posts about Fantastic and nine posts about sword and sorcery stories.  The MPorcius Fiction Log staff is demanding a break from square-cut manes, flashing swords and the iron grip of massive thews, so no Fantastic and no sword and sorcery for a little while.  But don't think we are done with Ted White!  We'll be reading a piece of White's fiction in our next episode! 

From Fantastic: 1974 stories from L. Sprague de Camp & Lin Carter and Mark Geston

Reading Ted White's editorials and responses to letters from the August 1972 and July 1973 issues of Fantastic gives one the impression that, as editor of Amazing and Fantastic, Ted was beset by one threat after another and that the magazines were perpetually on the brink of expiration.  July 1974's editorial is no different.  Ted has to squash rumors that the magazines were about to be sold, and has to deliver the news that Fantastic's cover price has risen from 60 cents to 75 cents.  This price increase is a response to the current "inflationary spiral," which Ted blames on Richard Nixon's "prejudicial policies."  Ted believes that the economy will improve after the president is removed via impeachment.  The rest of the editorial is devoted to giving advice to new writers; among the interesting historical tidbits that surface is the claim that John W. Campbell, Jr. actually read the entire slush pile at Astounding/Analog himself.

Of course, most people who bought this issue of Fantastic weren't doing so out of an interest in Ted White's economic theories or because they were wondering what proportion of submissions to F&SF by new writers were published by the magazine (the answer is one out of 600 during Ted's five-year tenure at F&SF), but because they wanted to see what Conan, Cimmerian barbarian and King of Aquilonia, got up to in the jungles of Zembabwei!

"Red Moon of Zembabwei" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

In producing the magazine cover and the interior illustration for "Red Moon of Zembabwei," Ron Miller employs some unusual techniques and styles, and I can't say I like what he came up with, but at least he included Conan's mustache.  (Miller has created lots of astronomical, science fiction and fantasy art over the course of his career, and much of it is idiosyncratic and not to my taste--many of the pictures look like collages of photographs or CGI images, his compositions often feel cluttered, and to my eye most of his work looks flat.  He does seem to have boundless energy and a willingness to take risks and try his hand at different things, however, and to have won some nice awards and attracted plenty of clients.)

The army of Aquilonia is marching south through jungles and savannas, Conan at its head, their destination Zembabwei, where Conan expects to find Thoth-Amon, living under the protection of his fellow evil wizard and the ruler of Zembabwei, Nenaunir.  From the sky attack black fighting men riding wyverns (as depicted on Boris Vallejo's cover to Conan of Aquilonia and Miller's cover of the July '74 issue of Fantastic.)  King Conan and Prince Conn are carried away to Zembabwei, to where Nenaunir, from his throne of human skulls, holds court.  After a brief interview,  Conan and his son are thrown in the ancient dungeons under the city--in ten days there will be an eclipse, and at that time the "white devils" will be sacrificed to Set, the Serpent God of Entropy!

In the dungeon Conan meets Nenaunir's twin brother, Mbega, who relates to the Cimmerian the tumultuous history of Zembabwei.  For generations, the Zembabweans have been ruled by pairs of twins who are selected by the priests (should a twin die, the survivor is deposed and is expected to commit suicide, at which time another pair of twins is selected by the priests.)  A crisis erupted in the last few years when Nenaunir abandoned his people's traditional gods and started worshiping the Slithering God, Set, and seized total control!  The elite and the young were swayed by Nenaunir's preaching about Set, and so, when they tried to launch a counterrevolution, Mbega's conservative faction was defeated.  But as the years have gone by, Set has demanded so many human sacrifices that the people of Zembabwei are growing disillusioned with Nenaunir's rule; if only Mbega can get out of the clink, he thinks he can gather up a rebel force that will overthrow his evil brother and restore the old order.

A spy from the Aquilonian army sneaks into the dungeon via the city sewers, freeing Mbega and providing Conan a dagger--the lock on Conan's cell has a spell on it making it impossible to pick, so Conan and son cannot be released.  Curse you, Thoth-Amon!  Come the night of the eclipse, Conan and Conn are dragged to the altar of Set, and the Snake God himself crosses the cold interstellar void to feast on their souls!  But thanks to Conan's strength and the work of that spy and Mbega's traditionalist faction, the sacrifice is interrupted, Nenaunir is killed, and Thoth-Amon has to flee even further south.

This is the best story yet in the sequence of stories by de Camp and Carter that would go on to form the 1977 book Conan of Aquilonia.  The setting of Zembabwei is more fully realized and more interesting than the locales of those earlier tales (the current city is built on the ruins of a city constructed by the snake people who ruled the jungle before the rise of mankind, for example), and de Camp and Carter do more than they have in the previous two installments to bring the villains and secondary characters like Thoth-Amon, Nenaunir, Mbega, and that Aquilonian spy, to life.  Of course, the story is constructed of adventure and weird fiction cliches--people locked in a dungeon, sacrifices to an evil god, infighting among royal families, giant snakes--but the authors use them in an entertaining way.  Moderately good.

If seeing the word "Negro" in print or finding that Conan says stuff like "damn their black hides" is going to hurt your feelings, you probably shouldn't read "Red Moon of Zembabwei," but if you are interested in the portrayal of black people and Africa in genre fiction you may find lots of stuff to think about in the story.  I personally wondered how much the political and military components of the plot (a "European" army intervenes in a civil war slash revolutionary crisis in an "African" country) owed to de Camp's and Carter's knowledge of Western imperialism in Africa or attitudes about the Cold War politics of Africa.  (I similarly thought the battle scenes in "Black Sphinx of Nebthu," the second story in this sequence, might be based on the Battle of Dorylaeum (1097) and the Battle of Abukir (1799.))

**********   

Ted White and John W. Campbell Jr. may be game for reading hundreds of unpublished writers' stories, but I am not!  I seriously considered reading Richard Snead's story "The Kozmic Kid or The Quest for the Inestimable Silver Ball," but this thing set my spidey sense tingling like crazy.  For one thing, it is Snead's only credit at isfdb.  For another, there is Ted's intro to the story, which calls it "a trip into the surreal" and "a blending of the drug culture of the last decade and the metaphor of the Pinball Machine."  Finally, it is fifty God-damned pages long!  Jack C. Haldeman II's five pages of dream sequences and bad jokes from Fantastic July '73, "What I Did On My Summer Vacation," almost unhorsed me--I would surely choke on a helping of such fare ten times as generous.

I'm also skipping Barry Malzberg's "Track Two" and David R. Bunch's "At Bugs Complete" because I read them and blogged about them years ago.  There is another piece of fiction in this issue of Fantastic I have yet to read, and am willing to read, however.

"The Stronghold" by Mark S. Geston

"The Stronghold" is adorned with a terrific illustration by the great Jeff Jones which features beautiful lines and shading; this is one of my favorite Jones images.  (I tweeted this illo last year.)

I've never read any of Geston's work before.  In 2011, tarbandu wrote about Geston's novel The Day Star (check out the comments there for a little MPorcius humor), and, in 2012, Joachim Boaz blogged about Lords of the Starship.  Soon I can join them among the ranks of Geston veterans!

Tarbandu and Joachim's reviews suggest that Geston's stock in trade is people and places in decay and/or ravaged by interminable warfare, and this is what "The Stronghold" is all about.  For centuries a cyborg (almost entirely machine, basically a robot with a few small human brain components) has commanded the defense of a strategically critical city that was abandoned by its human inhabitants.  The city is a total wreck, almost all its surfaces burned black, and it is surrounded by the wrecked vehicles of the enemy attackers, but active fighting ended hundreds of years ago.  The cyborg has nowhere to go, however, it having almost no knowledge of life before the war or the world outside the city, and for those hundreds of years of peace has maintained the city's many sensors and weapons in working order should another attack ever come.

After hundreds of years of solitude, small groups of human beings begin to enter the city.  These people are like the stock characters of a fantasy novel, wizards and priests in robes and knights in armor, accompanied by unicorns and griffons and basilisks.  What little plot Geston includes in "The Stronghold"'s ten pages concerns the cyborg's response to and interaction with these mysterious people.

Geston is very good at creating a mood and painting powerful images of the wrecked buildings and half sunken warships in the harbor and the still functioning defense mechanisms of the nameless city and that sort of thing, but there isn't much story here, and there is no resolution--the relationship between the cyborg and the new people comes to nothing.  Maybe Geston is pulling a Malzberg here and the cyborg is insane and about to expire?

Moderately good.  "The Stronghold" was translated into French and appeared in two different French books in 1982, both of which feature scantily clad women.  Vive la France! 

*********

Instead of Fritz Leiber we have Bruce Burton doing the book reviews in Fantastic July 1974.  Burton talks about two 1973 books of art by icon of weird literature Clark Ashton Smith, The Fantastic Art of Clark Ashton Smith by Dennis Rickard, and Grotesques and Fantastiques: A Selection of Previously Unpublished Drawings and Poems put out by Gerry de la Ree.  Burton obviously loves Smith to death, and has a wealth of knowledge about Smith's career and the careers of related writers like Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, de Camp and Carter, and shares that love and knowledge with Fantastic readers.
       

The last feature of the magazine is the letters section, this time inhabited by a high proportion of SF professionals.  Harlan Ellison, in a long-winded and rodomontade fashion, explains that if it looked like he said anything foolish in his interview in The Washington Post, it was the Post's fault.  (Fake news!)  Nicola Cuti at Charlton Comics writes in to thank Ted for printing a letter about his and Joe Staton's comic book, E-Man.  Barry Malzberg moans that the writing in the SF field is bad without naming any particular offenders, and praises Brian Stableford, author of the recent essay "Science Fiction: A Sociological Perspective," to the skies.  (The essay appeared in the March 1974 issue of Fantastic.  Stableford's 1979 doctoral thesis was titled "The Sociology of Science Fiction.")  Christopher Priest writes in to dispute some points in Stableford's essay, though he agrees with its main thesis, as he sees it--that "good" SF uses the future as a metaphor for the present, while poor SF writers actually try to write about the future.  I just read Stableford's essay myself, and have to agree with Malzberg that Stableford's main point is that SF is so low in quality that applying literary criticism to it is practically a waste of time, that what smarties should examine about SF is how and why SF readers "use" SF, especially since well-written SF seems to be as useful to SF consumers as what Stableford calls "trash."  Priest, perhaps, is willfully ignoring Stableford's thesis because it reduces SF to a commodity and suggests that working hard to produce high-quality SF is a pointless exercise.

(When she was earning her doctorate, my wife read some Alvin Toffler, and so it was fun for me to see that Stableford got his main theory of exactly what purpose SF serves, what SF consumers "use" it for, from Toffler: the 20th century saw a tremendous acceleration in the pace of change, and SF, by talking about the future and how different it might be, helps readers to more comfortably face such change.)

Letters from SF non-professionals express amazement that Ted was able to get for Fantastic a novel by a writer as important and talented as Brian Aldiss (Aldiss's Frankenstein Unbound, which one correspondent suggests is full of sex, appeared in the March and May '74 issues) while one guy takes Harlan Ellison to task for those misstatements in the Post which Harlan has already explained away as misquotes.

The last page, of course, is the classifieds.  Not to be outdone by the Missouri witches and the New York witches, somebody advertises his (or her?) book on Brazilian magic!  The most diverting ad refers to a record from the future discovered on a New York City elevator--for three bucks you can get a copy of your own!  For more info on this record, check out the SFFaudio website!   

More sword and sorcery from Fantastic in our next episode!