Worlds of Tomorrow: E Hamilton, A Derleth, A C Clarke and C Jacobi

In 1953, Pellegrini & Cudahy published Worlds of Tomorrow, a hardcover anthology of nineteen stories edited by August Derleth; recently, at Wonder Book in Hagerstown, MD, a place I strongly recommend to all fans of 20th-century SF, I purchased the 1958 Berkley Books abridged paperback edition of the volume.  The Richard Powers cover, with its asymmetrical rocket ship passing by Jupiter, and its male nude figure contemplating a city in the desert and a bizarre flying machine (?) may have served as the book's primary attraction, but this edition of Worlds of Tomorrow does include stories by people we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log, so let's check some of them out.  Today, we'll read tales by Edmond Hamilton, Derleth himself, Arthur C. Clarke, and Carl Jacobi.

Nota Bene: We've already read two stories that are printed in this paperback edition of Worlds of Tomorrow, Frank Belknap Long's "The Big Cold" and Mack Reynolds's "The Business, As Usual."  

"The Dead Planet" by Edmond Hamilton (1946)

This is a traditional space exploration story with a twist ending that must have appealed to editors, because it has been reprinted numerous times since its first appearance in Startling Stories, and has been translated into several languages, including Romanian, Croatian and Serbian.  

Our narrator is one of the three astronauts crewing an exploration ship of the Star Service, the organization whose duty it is to map the galaxy.  Out on the edge of the galaxy their ship malfunctions and they have to crash land on a planet that is orbiting a dying star, a frozen world whose atmosphere has long been drifts of snow under an airless sky.  They search for the metal needed to repair their ship, and come upon a domed city that is buried under a hundred feet of ice.  Their sensors indicate the material they need can be found in this dead metropolis.

In the city they are confronted by hideous monsters and assailed by psychic attacks which sap their morale, filling them with terror.  They figure out that the monsters are just harmless illusions and make their way to the towering building where their sensors indicate the needed metals are to be found.  In the building they receive a telepathic message, a recording from eons ago.  The people who once inhabited this planet were of a race that conquered the galaxy but then were attacked by extragalactic invaders, malevolent beings of pure energy.  They were almost entirely wiped out, but cached records of their accumulated knowledge in this city, and then caused their sun to emit a type of radiation that killed all the invaders but also the last survivors of their own people.  Their wisdom they left behind to help out the people of the future, the race that would succeed them--the illusory monsters and mental attacks were a test to make sure the people who inherited their science and technology would be worthy of it.

The three explorers have passed the test, and after repairing their ship leave with the invaluable wisdom of the extinct race.  The twist ending is that the narrator and his comrades are bird people and the planet they have just left is Earth--the race that sacrificed itself to save the galaxy was our own human race.     

I like it.

"McIlvaine's Star" by August Derleth (1952)

"McIlvaine's Star" is apparently one of a series of over a dozen stories written by Derleth about Tex Harrigan and eventually collected in the book Harrigan's File.  A year after its debut in If, it appeared not only in Derleth's Worlds of Tomorrow but also Donald A. Wollheim's Prize Stories of Space and Time AKA Prize Science Fiction Stories.  (The "prize" in question was the Jules Verne Award, isfdb is telling me.)

"McIlvaine's Star" is one of those stories in which there are multiple layers of frame story between us readers and the actual plot and characters.  Our narrator is a friend of Tex Harrigan, who is a reporter.  Harrigan tells the story of McIlvaine to the narrator; which he pieced together by talking to various other people, including McIlvaine.  I guess the power of the story is supposed to come from the tragedy of McIlvaine's psychology and relationships, but all the layers of obscurity between us and McIlvaine make it hard for us to feel for this pathetic guy--this story really should have been narrated by McIlvaine himself or an omniscient third-person narrator.

McIlvaine was a guy who had enough dough to not work.  He spent his time hanging with his buddies at a bar playing cards, and pursuing his other hobbies, like amateur astronomy.  When McIlvaine told his pals that he had discovered a new star, a dark star, they made fun of him, and when he further claimed he was trying to communicate with the people on the star they played a practical joke on him.  Some people, including McIlvaine, disappeared, and Harrigan describes various clues that indicate that either the aliens rejuvenated McIlvaine and as a side effect of rejuvenation he lost his memory, or, McIlvaine wandered off without telling anybody and his nephew who looks like a younger McIlvaine moved into his dwelling.  Presumably we readers are supposed to be moved by the fact that even though McIlvaine and his cardplaying cronies didn't have a very fulfilling network of relationships, now that the "disappearances" have broken up their cohort they are all sad and lonely.  

"McIlvaine's Star" is a boring waste of time, a weak filler story.  Parts of it don't even make sense, or maybe I should say are poorly constructed--we see scenes I don't think Harrigan could possibly have learned about, so it is like the story is switching between first-person and omniscient third-person narration without making it clear it is shifting perspective, but certainly making it clear that the framing devices impede rather than facilitate the transmission of the drama to the reader.  Thumbs down.

I can understand why Derleth would include this story in the book he is editing, because like most of us he felt the need to make money--I have certainly done mediocre work myself, including writing mediocre junk, in pursuit of the filthy lucre.  But I can't understand why whoever was giving out the Jules Verne Awards, whatever they were, gave one to "McIlvaine's Star."         

"The Fires Within" by Arthur C. Clarke (1947)

Here we have a story from one of the "Big Three" of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke.  "The Fires Within" first appeared in the third and final issue of a British magazine I never heard of before, Fantasy, and two years later was printed in Startling alongside stories by beloved married couple Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and detective scribe John D. MacDonald.  The story would go on to be published again and again in Clarke collections and in anthologies.  

"The Fires Within" is the kind of SF story that puts the "science" in science fiction and leaves out the sex and violence we see (and welcome!) in so many of the stories we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  At the same time, Clarke's tale actually has quite a bit in common with the more adventure-oriented Hamilton story we are also talking about today when it comes to its narrative strategies and its appeal.

Two people are sitting around.  One offers the other a report to read.  The report, which makes up most of the text of the story, is from a British scientist and addressed to a government minister.  It describes, in some detail, a sonar device that can scan below the Earth's surface, down to like fifteen miles; this device can identify elements and densities and that sort of thing.  We are told that just a few miles down that the Earth's mass is under tremendous pressure and heated to extremely high temperatures.

Shockingly, the sonar device reveals that there is a civilization of people living miles below the surface of England.  These people's molecular structure, it is theorized, must be such that they can, with trivial ease, pass through or push rock; at least I think that is what Clarke is getting at--I found it pretty vague, to be honest.  In theory, these beings are composed of "matter in which the electron shells are few or altogether missing....To such creatures, even the rock fifteen miles down would offer no more resistance than water...."

The real twist ending of the story is that the people discussing the report are not more British scientists or public employees, but two of the underworld people!  Members of the subterranean race found the report after they came to the surface on a voyage of exploration and accidentally killed us all.  Doh!  The additional sting in the tail of the story comes when these two subterranean people theorize that perhaps living fifteen or twenty miles below them is a race that will someday accidentally exterminate them while exploring. 

Pretty good.  

"The Gentleman is an Epwa" by Carl Jacobi (1953)

It seems that "The Gentleman is an Epwa" made its first appearance in the 1953 hardcover edition of Worlds of Tomorrow, though later that year it was reprinted in the magazine Cosmos.  The story would go on to be included in a book of SF meant to be inflicted on British schoolchildren, and Jacobi collections.

"The Gentleman is an Epwa" is like one of those Somerset Maugham stories about a British guy who mans a lonely post in the jungle in South Asia or someplace and his challenging relationships with the small numbers of Europeans around and with the natives he is responsible for.  Except in this story the guy is an Earther who is in command of a remote post on Venus, where the blue mold is likely to make you sick and the silence is likely to make you crazy.

Grayson's assistant has had to leave due to catching a Venusian disease.  The loneliness of the post is a real threat to human sanity, and so Grayson is eager for the arrival of a new assistant.  When a replacement finally arrives, weeks later, it isn't a man, but a robot who looks like a man that Grayson is supposed to call Rafael.

Rafael, as a robot, is very reliable and good at the work Grayson sets it, but offers no companionship.  In fact, Rafael is annoying.  Grayson plots to make the machine malfunction so he can request a human assistant in its place, but Rafael is very durable and survives all the accidents Grayson steers it into.  Finally, there is trouble with the natives and Grayson gets killed.  

Either this story is poorly put together, or is put together too subtly for my childish mind to comprehend, because I didn't find that the story's plot elements operated smoothly or in concert in a way that was compelling or satisfying.  For example, early in the tale Jacobi takes time to describe in detail certain peculiarities of Grayson (he has insisted on having a primitive veranda affixed to the modern building which is his post) and Venus (there is a blue mold that descends from the sky at a particular time of year) that I expected to pay off later in some way, but they are never mentioned again.  Similarly, dialogue delivered by Grayson's superior early in the story makes clear that Grayson is one of the very best station masters on Venus, but then he spends the rest of the story screwing everything up, undoing a decade of good work in mere weeks and causing a total disaster.  I guess the robot Rafael is radically throwing Grayson off his game, but Jacobi doesn't explain or describe this in a way that is convincing or interesting.  Grayson's final scheme to make Rafael malfunction is to get the robot addicted to playing solitaire and to give the droid a deck of cards that is missing one card; the robot, I believe, realizes a card is missing and acquires a replacement card, but is still, I believe, addicted to playing solitaire.  How Grayson hoped this addiction would help him and whether it actually ended up helping him or harming him, and how, I could not discern from Jacobi's text; similarly left incomprehensible was how the lack of a card was supposed to affect Rafael and how Rafael's supplying a replacement card affected Grayson's plans. 

I couldn't tell what Jacobi was trying to accomplish with this story--many elements of the narrative just sit there and, as far as I could tell, have no influence on the plot and actually work at cross purposes with each other when it comes to setting atmosphere and tone, making for a muddled and disjointed story.  And then there is the fact that in a futuristic space age of aircraft and radios the whole theme of being driven insane by being all alone in the wilderness--on a planet where there are plenty of other humans--doesn't make much sense.  

Thumbs down.          

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The results of today's reading are not particularly surprising, as in the past I have generally enjoyed Hamilton and Clarke's work, and have often been disappointed in how shoddy Derleth and Jacobi's stories can be.  Both Hamilton and Clarke's stories today are crafted in such a way that they make sense and deliver a consistent tone; they both portray humanity in a light that is both tragic and heroic, both have a twist ending and both attempt to blow your mind by offering a large scale vision of the universe that comes from a different perspective than we are used to.  Derleth and Jacobi, on the other hand, instead of embracing big science fiction concepts and using them to affect us intellectually or emotionally, found their stories on tired conventional templates--the journalist who learns about an eccentric person and the stressed out colonial administrator off in the wilderness dealing with a bunch of primitive natives.  Far worse, they construct their stories clumsily out of bits and pieces that don't even fit together to generate a consistent atmosphere or a plot that works logically.  Frustrating!

We may return to Worlds of Tomorrow, but our next episode will cover different--but sort of related--material.  

Sojarr of Titan by Manly Wade Wellman

"Many would welcome the chance to take me for a mate.  Perhaps you think me ugly."

"No, not ugly.   But you are bitter of tongue and proud of spirit, as women seldom are.  Probably you would make a good leader of warriors, but a bad wife.  Anyway, I am a new leader and I must learn my duties."

Last week I was in Washington D.C., the belly of the beast!  At Second Story Books' Dupont Circle location I spotted a 1949 copy of Manly Wade Wellman's Sojarr of Titan, a sort of digest-sized magazine thing.  This inspired me to read the original version of Sojarr of Titan printed in 1941 in an issue of Startling Stories.  Like me, you can read this issue of Startling at the internet archive free of charge, right there on your computer or smart phone screen.

In brief, Sojarr of Titan starts out as an Edgar Rice Burroughs style story in which a fish-out-of-water guy who is superior to the natives, like John Carter or Lord Greystoke, fights monsters, becomes leader of a native polity, and rescues a brave princess who herself is not averse to fighting.  Then some more Terrans arrive and we get sciency space opera stuff as they investigate the alien milieu and act as competitors to our hero and the princess.  In the end the good natives and good Terrans benefit and the evil natives and evil Terrans are laid low, and Sojarr makes a love connection.

Wellman's style is not too bad, though there are some odd word choices and typos which an editor should caught.  Wellman succeeds in coming  up with some entertaining monsters and societies as well as speculations about future science and technology.  The action and horror scenes are also good.  So, I enjoyed Sojarr of Titan and am giving it a thumbs up.

If you are curious about the details, here comes our little plot summary, which will be followed by comments on this issue of Startling's departments.

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It is the 31st century!  The human race has colonized the inner planets, asteroids, and even Jupiter, but Saturn is still virgin territory.  One of our best space pilots, Pitt Rapidan, sets out for Saturn--inexplicably, he brings his three-year old son Stuart with him!  I guess Child Services of the future is pretty lax.  Rapidan's ship goes out of control, and just before it hits Titan, Dad tells little Stuart to be a brave soldier.  Dad is killed in the wreck, but Stuart, secure in a special shock absorbing hammock, survives.  He grows up alone on Titan, in a valley where there is a clear pool from which to drink and plenty of fruit and small game to eat; remembering his father's last words, he thinks of himself as "Sojarr."  His Terran muscles give him the strength to outfight the local monsters and his victories make him brave and confident.

Outside this valley, most of Titan is covered with dense jungle.  Two intelligent races live on Titan, blonde humans and monstrous aliens with multiple eyes and six limbs, the Truag.  These two people have similar technologies and social structures, living as nomads, riding around in convoys of wagons or trucks powered by steam engines.  (Wellman calls them "cars" and "trains;" while each has its own engine the leader's car generally pulls the lot of them.)  The convoys follow highways that have been cut through the dense jungle and kept clear by regular applications of salt.  The people of Titan have swords and single-shot muzzle-loading pistols and the leaders wear mail, though metal is scarce so most of the fighting men wear leather armor or go without.  They don't have books or apparently any written language.  A typical tribe has about 30 to 60 fighting men, and of course a bunch of women and other noncombatants, kids and old geezers.  The different tribes may barter with each other, but often fight.

A smallish human tribe, led by Birok, in flight from a particularly large Truag tribe led by a particularly ambitious Truag, Hekta, arrives in Sojarr's valley.  Sojarr's great strength and ingenuity impresses the blonde tribe, and Sojarr becomes a valued member of the Birok's band, their best fighter, best hunter, best fisherman, etc.  He also has the sharpest and most durable sword, because he makes it out of a piece of space age metal from his father's crashed space ship.  While he is valued, the native humans are also suspicious of poor Sojarr, as he is brunette and tan while they are blonde and fair; Birok is also wary of Sojarr, because, as in so many adventure stories, the leader of a tribe is selected through single combat, and Birok knows that Sojarr, twice as strong as any Titanian, could beat him if he chose to challenge him.

Birok's small tribe tries to avoid Hekta's large tribe but eventually, in the seventh of Sojarr of Titan's twenty-two chapters, Hekta's tribe catches up to them.  Sojarr's strength and ability as a tactician save the day, and he sends Hekta packing after severing one of the creep's four claws.  (Don't worry, alien sympathizers, Truags regrow lost limbs.)  In Hekta's wagon train they find a human woman clad in mail--she is Vara, daughter of a large human tribe's leader; Hekta captured this babe when she was foolishly off alone hunting.  Vara's father had no sons so he taught his daughter to fight and lead and hunt.  

One of the minor themes of Sojarr of Titan is inter-species breeding and mutations, and Hekta had the idea of having children with Vera to father a super race!  (Birok and Sojarr's other detractors have been alleging dark and tall Sojarr must be the product of such a union.)  Fortunately for Vera, she isn't in a Tanith Lee or Jack Vance story, and Hekta hadn't had a chance to put his scheme into operation before she was liberated.  But she's not out of the woods yet!  Birok declares that Vara is his prize; Sojarr demurs and he and Birok fight.  Sojarr wins, of course, but he spares Birok.  According to local tradition, Sojarr should be acclaimed leader of the tribe, but some people object because he is an outsider.  Luckily, just then a monster attacks and Sojarr demonstrates his fighting prowess and his inventive ability (it is a flying gas bag kind of monster and in the course of the fight Sojarr employs a parachute he invented out of huge flower petals) and after that everybody drops any vocal objection to Sojarr's assumption of the role of chief.

Three years pass, during which time Sojarr expands his authority to four more tribes whose warriors he arms with superior weapons and armor made from the hull of his father's space ship.  In Chapter IX the story changes gears, as another Terran space ship lands on Titan, that of John Kaiser, whom we immediately suspect is a villain because he is "plump" (if his name hadn't been enough of a clue.)  Kaiser's ship is crewed by men facing debts and criminal charges back in civilization.  Kaiser himself is a brilliant engineer and scientist, but he loves money, and has come to Titan in order to win a prize offered by the Goddard Foundation to the first person to successfully travel to Saturn.  One reason he wants money is so he can offer to his niece Ursula, the only person in the Solar System he has any fond feelings for, a life of luxury.  Ursula is headstrong and brave, and to Kaiser's dismay has sneaked away from school to stow away on his ship and and thus accompanies her uncle and his band of scoundrels to Titan.

Ursula is a beautiful redhead and the plot of Sojarr of Titan now focuses on not only Kaiser's efforts to make sure he secures the reward which is rightfully Sojarr's, but a Vara-Sojarr-Ursula love triangle.  Vara and Ursula may be strong-willed women who are always ignoring what men tell them to do and jumping at the opportunity to chop somebody with a sword or burn a company of aliens to ashes with a ray gun, but I guess they aren't truly feminist figures because both of them fall in love with hunkalicious Sojarr within moments of laying eyes (blue for Vara, green for Ursula) on him.   

As soon as the doorway of her cabin was closed upon her, she was quite ready to die herself, or to kill others, for the pure purpose of defiant escape.  The sight of the ray thrower--a sovereign oxidizer and cutter of the toughest metal--was all she needed.

Besides the action stuff, Wellman throws us some science and technology content.  Kaiser and Sojarr's groups fight, Soajrr's forces routed by Terran high technology, and Ursula figures out the surprising origin of life and culture on Titan (Titan was colonized by Atlantis--the human Titanians are descendants of Atlanteans) and Kaiser and his fellow disreputable scientists work on exploiting an element unique to Titan that can foster the production of superior weapons and space craft.   

Hekta captures Ursula, and the Titanian and Terran humans make a truce.  Sojarr and Vara rescue Ursula and kill Hekta, and then the Terran debtors and criminals realize Kaiser is plotting to murder them so he can get all the money from the scientific discoveries on Titan.  In the final showdown Kaiser is slain, and Sojarr has to choose between the two beauties.

A fun pulp adventure.

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The March 1941 issue of Startling includes a "Scientific Crossword Puzzle" with clues like "Bacteria that require free oxygen for the maintenance of their vitality" and "Cryptogamous plant growing on the ground, decaying wood, rocks, etc."  In the letters column, known as "The Ether Vibrates," Harry Jenkins, Jerry Datlow and Arthur J. Burks praise Edmond Hamilton's A Yank at Valhalla (I blogged about it back in 2017.)  Datlow also liked Henry Kuttner's A Million Years to Conquer, as did Lee O'Connell, who tells us he is thirteen and has been reading SF since he was eight.  (I also blogged about A Million Years to Conquer AKA The Creature from Beyond Infinity back in 2017.)

The Silver Eggheads by Fritz Leiber

Left: Copy I have; Right: Copy I wish I had

The simple fact was that no professional writer could visualize starting a story except in terms of pressing the Go button of a wordmill, and marvelous as Space Age man might be, he still hadn't sprouted buttons; he could only gnash his teeth in envy of the robots, who were in this feature much more advanced.

In January I read Fritz Leiber's "The Button Molder," a semi-autobiographical story of city life, and totally loved it.  Today we read another work that I thought just might have autobiographical elements, the 1962* novel The Silver Eggheads.  Last month I bought the 1969 Ballantine paperback, 01634, though I wish I had found the 1962* printing with the way out Richard Powers cover.  A shorter (I assume) form of "The Silver Eggheads" was the cover story of an issue of a 1959 issue of F&SF in which Anthony Boucher recommends Robert Heinlein's Have Space Suit--Will Travel, Poul Anderson's War of the Wing-Men and collections of cartoons and also talks about people who study UFOs.

*Nota bene: According to isfdb, there is some dispute about whether the first edition of The Silver Eggheads came out in late '61 or early '62.

You have perhaps heard me many times express my skepticism of satires.  If you hate our bourgeois market society and want to found upon its ruins a radical egalitarian civilization with an economy planned by experts, or, if you conversely fear that having a bunch of elite strivers run our lives for us will mire us in poverty and slavery, I'd rather read your sober 1,000 word essay briefly explaining your position's moral and practical bases and providing the hard evidence that lead you to your conclusions than your grievance-fueled 50,000 word novel full of lame puns, broad caricatures and childish slapstick.  But here I am, overcoming my prejudices, about to tackle a 190-page book that August Derleth, writing in The Capital Times ("Wisconsin's Progressive Newspaper"), called "a riotous satire."  Why oh why?

First off, Fritz wrote one of the funniest stories I have ever read, "Lean Times in Lankhmar," which is not only hilarious but also a great fantasy story about life in world of multifarious gods and sword swinging barbarians.  Secondly, the come-on text on the back cover and first page of my copy of The Silver Eggheads suggests it is a satire of the publishing industry and the SF world in particular, so maybe it will be interesting from a historical standpoint, providing insight on the SF community of the '50s from the point of vantage of a Grandmaster.  So, I have hopes this won't be a suicide mission I will regret embarking upon; maybe I will even come out the other side of this caper with an enhanced respect for good old Fritz!

It is the future!  Man has colonized the solar system!  Life on Terra is easy, because robots and computers do everything.  Computers even write the novels!  

Our hero is Gaspard de la Nuit, journeyman writer living and working in New Angeles, California, on Readership Row, the center of the Solar System's publishing industry.  Fiction is produced by a computer called a wordmill; those who operate them may be called "writers," but they mostly just polish and lubricate these large computers.  Writers are members of a powerful union that closely regulates their careers and lives; Gaspard has to wear specific clothes and even smoke a specific pipe in order to maintain the appearance the public expects of a writer, and different levels of seniority within the writing profession have to affect a particular look, with apprentices required to dress like Greeks or Romans or in Elizabethan hose, you know, like Homer or Virgil or the Bard of Avon, while master writers are obliged to wear blue jeans and sweatshirts.  Gaspard is also under orders required to spend two hours a day having sex with his current squeeze, master writer Heloise Ibsen.  Heloise is a regular firebrand, and Leiber starts his novel off with a sort of parody of the terror campaign of the Luddites as Heloise leads a mass attack on the wordmills by union activists, destroying them utterly with bombs and flamethrowers.  Gaspard is the rare writer who actually likes the wordmill which he tends, and he is proud of the erotic book which bears his name and he--impotently--opposes this violent labor action; his reactionary tendencies scuttle his relationship with the overbearing and sexually voracious Heloise.

Another bone of contention between Gaspard and Heloise has been Gaspard's fondness for robots.  In Leiber's satire, robots are truly alive, with personalities and emotions, and they make up a sort of marginalized servant class, Leiber offering them up, I assume, as an analog of blacks and perhaps Hispanics and Asians in real life 20th-century California.  Most humans fear and despise robots, even calling them "dirty tin n******s" (here's a trigger warning for you 21st-century kids--there are no asterisks in the original!) but Gaspard likes them, so that Heloise calls him "a dirty-robot lover." 

With the destruction of the wordmills, the Solar System faces a crisis.  The human race is addicted to the cheap and easy-to-read fiction produced by the mills, and now there is no way to manufacture it.  (The cheap books of the future disintegrate after one reading so rereads are impossible, and almost nobody in the future has the intellectual ability to read books penned in the era before the wordmill.)  The "writers" of the day are just semi-literate figureheads, and no new wordmills can be built, because the now-destroyed wordmills' circuitry was based on scans of actual human writers from a long dead generation.  If these wordmills were so rare and valuable, you may wonder why the government or the businesspeople who own the wordmills didn't protect them from Heloise and her fellow union thugs.  Well, the leftwing government is in the pocket of the unions, and the robot security hired by the publishers is also unionized, and these union creeps stick together!

Things get even more conspiratorial when Gaspard and his robot friend Zane Gort (a robot who writes adventure stories for the robot market--humans may have lost the ability to write creatively but robots have not!) learn that the executives at their publisher actually welcomed the destruction of the wordmills, they having an ingenious plan.  You see, one hundred years ago, at the dawn of the wordmill era, there was a genius scientist who figured out how to remove people's brains and preserve them, alive, in metal cases shaped much like large eggs.  Such bodiless people are more or less immortal.  Gaspard and Zane Gort's publishers have control of thirty such brains, all of them the brains of writers!  In theory, they have a monopoly on fiction writing!  But theory and practice are different things--the thirty brains refuse to write!

The refusal of the brains ends what we might think of as the first half of the book.  I had sort of expected that the second half of the book would focus on the brains and the efforts of the publishers to get them to produce popular fiction, but that plot thread is just one of many.  The Silver Eggheads has forty-four chapters, and many of them are devoted to the five or six different relationship dramas (e.g., Gaspard and Heloise; Heloise and another union leader; Heloise and one of the publishing execs; Gaspard and the Nurse who tends the thirty brains; Zane Gort and a government censor robot; and a sort of love triangle involving another publishing exec, a robot whore he hired, and Gaspard who finds the mechanical sex worker intriguing) and three or four espionage plots (union vs publishers; a rival robot writer vs Zane Gort; and some spies vs the publishers) Leiber has going.  All of these subplots are pretty silly, and some are presented as brief gags that are not very deeply explored.  The profusion of these subplots makes the novel feel unfocused and, paradoxically, both frenetic as we are constantly flitting hither and thither to meet new characters and slow, as many of the subplots don't seem to advance any element of the story we care about and thus feel like unnecessary detours.    

All these plot threads are resolved in a way that is not satisfying or even interesting.  All the main characters find sex partners with whom they can live happily ever after, but none of the characters was actually likable and none of them had compelling emotional lives so who cares?  Heloise is never punished for her terrorism that not only destroyed irreplaceable property by slew multiple people.  The thirty brains do start writing salable books, but Gaspard and Zane Gort's bosses don't gain a market advantage, as all the other publishers have brought to fruition equally unlikely schemes to produce new fiction, like finding a lost colony of humans on Venus who have maintained the culture of 150 years ago.

This thing is marketed as a satire, so does it make some point?  Leiber's points are inoffensive but banal.  1) Racism is bad--the robots have feelings just like natural people, some are good and some are bad just like flesh people, and Zane Gort is the actual hero of the story, inventing devices and saving people who got kidnapped.  2) Sex is good.  3) To be a good writer you have to have life experience--the brains don't start composing salable copy until after one of them has an adventure (being kidnapped.)

Satires are also supposed to be funny, but I didn't find anything in here particularly amusing.  Maybe when the book appeared the many sex jokes, which I found weak, were somehow shocking.  Heloise is not only sexually insatiable but into BDSM, Zane Gort spanks one of the union leaders, that female robot who works for the government as a censor is always worried people are sneaking a peek at her open sockets or her oil ports, etc.  Sex might be considered the main topic of The Silver Eggheads, as the covers above attest; robots' sexual relationships with each other are described in some detail, and there are brothels where robot ladies, specially constructed to appeal to fetishes and fantasies (including incest fantasies), service human men.  More trigger warnings: the novel's attitude about gender roles and biological differences between men and women, and its depiction of women's sexual strategies and proclivities, are not going to please feminists.    

One of the novel's odd wrinkles is the presence of dead children; one little boy gets blown up by a bomb detonated by Heloise, and a fiction-addicted 13-year-old commits suicide when he learns there may be no new adventure stories produced.      

Probably the most appealing and interesting element of the novel, at least for me and the kind of people I suspect read this blog o' mine, is its recursive commenting on the SF world.  There are plenty of affectionate references to famous SF writers, among them Heinlein, Asimov, Sturgeon and Lovecraft.  One of the sex robots is described as having hair like that of Shambleau, C. L. Moore's famous alien temptress.  Late in the novel there is a two-page spoof of space opera adventure stories and the sorts of SF stories that celebrate humanity's perseverance; I suppose Leiber is trying to paint such stories as silly and boring, but he has just inflicted upon us a seven-page history of robot sexuality that was mind-numbingly tedious, so the punch doesn't quite land--the space opera spoof actually comes off as a brief glimmer of excitement.  A more appropriate and provocative commentary on the SF world is the recurring idea, put in the mouths of the publishing execs, that editors are as responsible--or more responsible--as the credited writers for the shape of popular literature and individual works of fiction; I am taking this as a comment on the tremendous influence and controversial editing practices of major SF editors like John W. Campbell, Jr., Horace L. Gold, Donald A. Wollheim and Farnsworth Wright.  

The Silver Eggheads is way too long and I found the second half a chore to read.  So, thumbs down.  Other opinions have differed, or so it seems.  A scene from Heloise's attack was included in Isaac Asimov and J. O. Jeppson's Laughing Space: An Anthology of Science Fiction Humor, and the novel has been translated into Italian, German and the language of love, francais.  

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The back cover of my copy of The Silver Eggheads advertises five SF books.  One of them is John Wyndham's Re-Birth, AKA The Chrysalids, giving me an opportunity to remind you that back in 2015 I read Re-Birth in my copy of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction and explained at length why I didn't care for it. 

Barry N. Malzberg: "The Interceptor," "Agony Column" and "The Sense of the Fire"

Today we'll bid our farewell to Out from Ganymede.  Malzberg provides an introduction to the collection, dated "11 May 1973: New Jersey," in which he thanks a long list of editors, indicates he would love to write plays but there is no market for drama so his favorite medium by default is the short story, makes a joke about how writers love to drink, and admits that "Years ago I thought of myself as a writer disguised as a science-fiction writer....Now it is quite clear that I am an s-f writer."  As I told you last time, I often find Malzberg's "mainstream," non-SF, work more enjoyable than his stories full of astronauts going crazy and crazy people donning hypnohelmets, so I am ambivalent about that last statement, and harbor hopes that today's four stories will go light on the SF elements.

Squint or click to read gushing blurbs from
Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Silverberg

"Beyond Sleep" (1970)

I absentmindedly reread this one, which I blogged about in 2013 when I read it in the copy of Marvin Kaye's Masterpieces of the Unknown that I bought at BookOff, the Japanese store in midtown Manhattan.  Then I absentmindedly wrote the following superfluous description and assessment of the story.  Then I realized I had already blogged about this one, then I marveled at how succinct my blog posts used to be, then I indulged in sad memories of the days when my errands would have me walking past Japanese stores instead of driving past herds of cows and sheep, and then I selfishly decided to not delete the two paragraphs below.  Please enjoy. 

Two pages that originally appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.  Our narrator dreams that he kills his nagging wife with a shiny knife, then he dreams that he used the knife to commit (or attempt?) suicide, then there is a dream that they are just getting a divorce (I think); in some scenes he is in prison dreaming, in others in the hospital, or just at home.  What is real and what is strictly a dream?  Who knows?

The descriptions of blood and of the knife glittering in the light, as well as the narrator's frenzied dialogue in which he explains his horrifying actions to his wife, are good, so, I'm giving this one a thumbs up, though, yeah, it is basically filler.

"The Interceptor" (1972)

A man is hiding from the police in an uncomfortable hotel room in a drug-ridden slum part of town.  He has been here for weeks.  Malzberg splits the story into four main sections, each presenting a different scenario that explains why the man is hiding from the cops.  In one, his business partner was having an affair with his wife, and when she killed the partner, she framed the protagonist.  In another scenario, the wife has been killed by the business partner, etc.  In the end of the story we realize that these scenarios are all fantasies of the main character, who has murdered his wife, his business partner, his doctor, and a police inspector, and enjoys concocting these mystery fiction plots in his mind, each time slotting different characters in the various roles of victim, perpetrator, and friend.  Now he feels he needs some new characters for his little dramas, and plots to kill an employee of the seedy hotel.

Acceptable.  "The Interceptor" first appeared in an issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and this time Malzberg's name appears on the cover.  In 1979 the story was reprinted in a hardcover anthology of stories allegedly selected by Alfred Hitchcock himself as one of the director's faves.  

"Agony Column" (1971)

"Agony Column" debuted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and in 2013 was included in the famously typo-ridden The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg--Barry or somebody at Nonstop Press must have really thought it was good.

In New York City I worked for a government entity, and as such I had a lot of time on my hands, my office being unaccountable and unproductive, my direct superior rarely coming in and, when she did have something for me to do, it was usually something involving not the people's business but her personal business.  One day, having heard that there was some proposal to have additional public funds directed to the institution where I was "working," I spent time in the otherwise untenanted office writing a letter to my local government representative, saying that by no means should additional money be sent to this institution, as I knew from first hand experience that the money was not needed and would be wasted.  The response to my letter was a thank you for my support of the initiative to direct additional public funds to the entity which I had, in fact, denounced in my letter.  Obviously the people in my representative's office did not actually read the letters they received, just mechanically sent form letters in response.

I tell you this boring true life story because "Agony Column" depicts a series of just such events.  The entire story consists of correspondence, a New Yorker's letters to politicians and to magazines and the responses he receives, all of which indicate he has been ignored or misunderstood, just as happened to me.  In his later letters, the letter writer expresses the belief that the bureaucratization of our society has lead to ordinary people being unheard and losing their identity; his final letter is to the President of the United States, declaring his intention to kill him. 

OK, I guess.    

"The Sense of the Fire" (1967(?))

isfdb and Wikipedia indicate this story debuted in the January 1967 issue of the men's magazine Escapade.  But a note in my copy of Out from Ganymede says it debuted in the January 1968 issue of Escapade.  Probably that is just a typo, but, just in case, I'll illustrate my musings here about "The Sense of the Fire" with the covers of both issues of Escapade; I'm definitely not including the '68 issue with Elke Summer because it is so elegant and modern and charming in contrast to the '67 issue which is so garish and cluttered and stupid. 

"The Sense of the Fire" would later be printed in The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg (under the title "The Wooden Grenade") and rightly so--it is a better than average Malzberg story, more vivid, more psychologically authentic, more carefully crafted and more believable than most of Malzberg's often broad, farcical, and fantastical work.

"The Sense of the Fire" is about Stein, a government worker who goes into slum apartment buildings to talk to people about their government benefits and remind them of their obligations.  Stein carries with him a wooden practice grenade, which he caresses for comfort while on the job and stares at obsessively on his off hours.  We are there as he does his work, talking to people with dreadful lives, and in flashbacks to Stein's disastrous stint in the Army we witness the disturbing events that have made him obsessed with hand grenades.  The theme of the story is that all of our lives are terrible, that all of us, even the pretty office girls Stein saw from the Army recruiting station and even the contemptuous college kids Stein saw from the Army base where he is being trained, even the noncoms and officers who bossed Private Stein around, live lives of fear and suffering.  While we are equal in our suffering, we are far from united--in fact, the behavior of the characters in the story--Stein perhaps most of all--demonstrates that most people shirk responsibility and manipulate and take advantage of others. 

A good story with which to finish Out from Ganymede, and a story which buttresses my thesis that Malzberg's non-SF work is better than his SF work.  Thumbs up! 

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There are four pages of ads in the back of Out From Ganymede. First comes a full page ad for All the President's Men complete with blurb from Dan Rather.  Then we get two pages of ads for SF books, though there are only three books plugged on the left hand page and two of them, Ron Goulart's The Gadget Man and Keith Laumer's A Trace of Memory, both appear on the right hand page as well.  I always avoid Goulart because I suspect his work consists of unfunny satires; in 2019 I read a bunch of Laumer's short stories, including some Bolo stories, and I have to admit I don't remember much about them.  The right hand page, oddly, lists Donald Wollheim's The Secret of the Ninth Planet twice; this is a book I own but have not yet read.  At the top of the list of that right hand page is Poul Anderson's The Virgin Planet, which I reviewed positively in 2017, and in the middle, between the duplicative Wollheim entries, is John Jakes' On Wheels, which Joachim Boaz awarded three of five stars in a 2017 review of his own.  Also advertised is The Best Science Fiction Stories of Clifford D. Simak, which includes "All the Traps of Earth," which I enjoyed back in 2021. 

The final page of Out From Ganymede advertises four mainstream books that appeal to your lust for sex and your fear of death: a "now-novel" about sex in New York; a novel about a journalist questioning his own manhood as he examines the life of an astronaut who was killed while on mankind's heroic quest for knowledge, as John W. Campbell, Jr., might put it, or wasting his time and the public dime sublimating his sexual frustration, as Barry N. Malzberg might put it; a novel about a New York Jew who becomes a titan of the organized crime world ("certain to take its place next to The Godfather"); and a book about how diet affects your psychology that tells you something about coffee that Juan Valdez won't tell you.  Hopefully your "local dealer" has these in stock, because you might start having fits if you have to wait four weeks for these blockbusters.

  

Barry N. Malzberg: "Causation," "The Art of Fiction," "A Short Religious Novel," "Report of the Defense" and "Notes for a Novel About the First Ship Ever to Venus"

We here at MPorcius Fiction Log are reading Out From Ganymede, a 1974 collection of 21 or 22 stories by Barry N. Malzberg that bears the dedication "For Robert Silverberg: the best one."  Today we take on five stories; three...two...one...blast off!

"Causation" (1971)

In our last foray into Out From Ganymede we read two stories which were first printed in F&SF, and here's another one (the first of several today--F&SF has been a good market for Malzberg.)  "Causation" is one of those brief little stories that is really just an idea, with dialogue scenes that dramatize the idea and then a gonzo finish that, I guess, is supposed to amaze or amuse you.  The idea this time around, unfortunately, isn't all that great.  

Most of the tale's four pages depict a pitch meeting at a TV network.  The guy selling his idea for a TV show says that all the wars plaguing the world and the youth riots plaguing America are the result of people's sexual desires being stifled by social mores and psychological issues.  When the network execs protest that social science data indicates that people are having more sex than ever, the guy responds that the truth is that "Five percent of them are getting ninety-five percent of the sex," which sounds like one of the hypotheses of those incel guys.  Anyway, the guy's proposal for a TV show is to broadcast a couple having sex.  The execs approve the idea, the show is put on the air, and the broadcast garners a world-shattering response: a flight of USAF bombers goes rogue and bombs America into oblivion.

It is not clear if Malzberg means to endorse the cliched and banal ideas that all our problems are due to sexual repression and America has a puritanical anti-sex culture, or to lampoon those tired and boring propositions; either way, he doesn't present a persuasive case.  Neither does "Causation" have any compelling characters or surprises or arresting images or funny jokes, so thumbs down.

The same year that "Causation" was published, Malzberg also published "The Idea," another story that is about a TV network airing a groundbreaking program which it is hinted is a recording of a couple having sex.  Reduce, reuse, recycle.       

"The Art of Fiction" (1972)

"The Art of Fiction" comes to us as a series of letters that pass between an aspiring writer of crime fiction and the editors of a crime magazine, Slaughterhouse.  The plot and jokes are sort of obvious, but I still laughed, so I am giving the story a thumbs up.

In brief, a guy sells Slaughterhouse his first story, "Tear Her Open."  The main joke of "The Art of Fiction" is that the author is obviously a murderer and "Tear Her Open" is a description of a monstrous atrocity he has himself committed.  Subsidiary jokes of Malzberg's story are recursive "meta" reflections on what it is like to be a professional writer who sells stories to genre magazines, what it is like to be an editor at such magazines, and what those editors think of their readers.  The final joke, which I guess is a twist ending but is too predictable to really constitute a twist, are indications that, because the editors won't buy the murderer's second and third stories, the murderer is going to show up at the offices of Slaughterhouse and exact a horrific revenge.

Somewhat edgy black humor, told with gusto--"The Art of Fiction" is a keeper!  It first appeared in the Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Annual for 1972.  

"A Short Religious Novel" (1972)

This one doesn't even fill up two pages.  A spaceman travels all the way to the other side of the Universe to consult a giant computer called "the Answerer."  When he asks the machine if there is a God, it says no, and the man has something of a nervous breakdown.  But we readers are privy to the machine's thoughts, and learn the machine lied out of pique--there is a God, but the Answerer is sick of people asking it if there is a God and so vented his irritation on the spaceman by deceiving him.  Regretting its lie, the machine tells the man the truth, but of course the man now has no trust in the machine.  The Answerer then commits suicide, shutting itself off.

The man makes to leave, but his space ship won't start.  He thinks to ask the Answerer for some technical advice, but finds it silent, and is now stranded.

An inoffensive but sterile piece of filler.  Acceptable.  Other people seem to have admired it more than I did.  After its initial appearance, in 1972 in F&SF, in 1975 Wulf Bergner included it in a German anthology of stories from F&SF, and in 2003 it was reprinted in a special Barry Malzberg issue of F&SF.   

"Report of the Defense" (1972)

Another two-pager.  This one is very New Wavey and very absurd.  I guess its "point" is similar to that of "Causation," the idea that American participation in the war in Vietnam is the result of some kind of sublimated American sexual desire.  The story also serves as a spoof of the social sciences.  

The story's text is a report of the result of an experiment conducted on a dozen people who were shown various photographs and works of art as well as tortured; they were asked their opinions of the things shown to them, and then asked their opinions of American involvement in the war in Vietnam.  At the end of the story the scientists request more grant money in order to pursue such important areas of further study as "The relationship of the highway motel to anal fixation." 

A waste of time.  "Report for the Defense" first appeared in a fanzine, Eternity.

"Notes for a Novel About the First Ship Ever to Venus" (1971) 

Six pages, eleven chapters, that debuted in Terry Carr's Universe I.  This piece covers a lot of territory we have already seen explored in Malzberg's work multiple times--the space program is an unpopular mistake, the government is incompetent, your sex life is humiliating, technology will let you down.

In 1972 the space agency was the target of very destructive riots.  Since then the agency has launched a successful political and PR campaign and by 2119 it basically controls the entire government, and is the center of a sort of religion, with the masses of people believing that their lives are bound up in the success of its explorations and colonizations.  A small proportion of the elite class think this PR campaign has gone too far, fearing that if the space program faces a setback, many people will suffer a catastrophic psychological blow that will destabilize society.  They are ignored.

Having colonized near-Earth orbit and the moon, the next mission is an elaborate mission to Venus--hundreds of people will be on the ship, including many celebrities and politicians.  The chief engineer of the ship doesn't really get along with the captain, as he and the captain's wife had an affair and the engineer proved a much more able lover than her husband (the captain has had a premature ejaculation problem.)  Also on the ship is a famous musician, who also has had an affair with the captain's wife.

The chief engineer predicts the trip to Venus will fail, that the ship will go off course and fly into the sun.  He is ignored.

The entire mission is broadcast to everybody on Earth and in those colonies, so when the ship does fly into the sun, as we knew it would, every member of the human race has a front row seat to the holocaust.

Acceptable. 

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A mixed bag.  Of the group, "Notes for a Novel About the First Ship Ever to Venus" is perhaps most representative of the work for which Malzberg is famous, while "Report of the Defense" fits most snugly into our ideas of a New Wave story is, but the best piece, or at least the most fun, is the non-SF story, "The Art of Fiction."  As I have said in the past, I suspect that Malzberg's best work is his non-SF work, the sex novels like Everything Happened to Susan, Confessions of Westchester County and Horizontal Woman, and the more or less mainstream novels like Screen and Underlay, and today's batch of stories perhaps buttresses this suspicion.

In our next episode we'll finish up with Out From Ganymede.   

Barry N. Malzberg: "November 22, 1963," "Still-Life," "Yearbook," "Inter Alia," "The Helmet" & "Breaking In"

I've owned a copy of the 1974 Barry Malzberg collection Out From Ganymede for many years, since before I started this blog, but have not blogged about many of the stories in it, in fact, I think I haven't even read many of them.  So today, let's explore six of them.

But first!  A list--with links!--of stories in Out From Ganymede about which I have already written here at MPorcius Fiction Log:

"Out From Ganymede" 
"Linkage"
"Pater Familias"
"Allowances"

"Beyond Sleep"

"The Union Forever"

"November 22, 1963" (1974)

It seems this story has only ever appeared here in Out from Ganymede.  The title of course refers to the date JFK was murdered, but the celebrity the story's text seems to invoke without specifically naming is Sharon Tate, described as "a film starlet who was sensationally murdered some years ago."

A guy is living in a little Manhattan apartment; apparently he is a writer and hard at work on some book.  He is haunted by a hallucination or ghost of the starlet mentioned in the first line of the five-page story, and her constant chatter distracts him from his writing.  She suggests she is supernaturally conjoined with his apartment, and he destroys his manuscript, abandons his home, and wanders around the city thinking of suicide.  There are scenes I, as a native of New Jersey and former Manhattan resident, found interesting, the guy looking across the river to Jersey and hanging around on a fire escape, dropping paperclips down to the street.  The story ends with him on that fire escape and we are left to wonder if he really does kill himself; in the last line of the story it is revealed that before leaving his apartment for good he struck down the haunting image of the starlet, as if murdering her a second time.

This offers plenty of Malzbergian themes (famous people getting murdered; the difficult life of the writer; difficult sexual relationships; insanity and hallucinations) and I like the style and individual images and scenes, but I'm not sure it coalesces into a substantial whole.  What is that book that he is writing actually about?  Are there any connections between the Sharon Tate figure, Kennedy, and New Jersey and New York?  I'll call it acceptable.    

"Still-Life" (1972)

"Still-Life" appeared in Again, Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison's follow up to his famous anthology Dangerous Visions.  Curious to read Ellison's intro to "Still-Life," I cracked open my copy of ADV (as Ellison calls it—the never published third volume of the Dangerous Visions trilogy, which Ellison advertises here in this intro, is "TLDV.")  In his two-page introduction, Ellison explains that "Still-Life"  was going to be a chapter in Universe Day, which we read back in 2018, but Malzberg agreed to leave it out of what maybe Ellison would call UD so that all of the stories in ADV would be “never before published.”  He thanks Malzberg for this, and also tells us that “in its own special way it ["Still-Life"] is the most dangerous vision in this book.”

“Still-Life” is one of Malzberg’s stories about an astronaut who goes insane while on a mission and ends up killing people, integrating general themes we see in Malzberg’s work again and again, like sexual frustration, skepticism of technology, and the inability of the government to accomplish anything, and more space-program-specific themes like Malzberg’s belief that exploring space is pointless and that ordinary people don’t care about the space program.

“Still-Life” is essentially written in the third person, though at the end, after the climax, Malzberg pulls that gag in which the author admits the story is fiction and the main character senses that he is a fictional character and confronts his creator and author and character have a little philosophical convo.

The main character of "Still-Life" is an astronaut and as the story begins he is a few days away from a mission on which he will be piloting a rocket from Earth into Lunar orbit; while he is orbiting the moon, two other astronauts will descend from the rocket in a "module;" this is a practice mission, and the module will not actually land on Luna, just approach it.  (Malzberg is trying to make space exploration seem as tentative and unproductive as possible.)  We get scenes in which we witness how alienated the astronaut is from his comrades and his superiors and his family; to me, the scenes with the family are more interesting that the scenes with his fellow astronauts and military men.  The main character's wife doesn’t want to have sex; she thinks the space program is a waste of time and energy; she has no respect for the stresses and dangers her husband is facing—in fact, she thinks her job of managing the home and trying to keep their two boys under control is much more challenging than flying to the moon and back, even though her husband explains that on many previous missions things have gone wrong and men in his position have had to exhibit quick thinking to survive.

In the climax of the story, as we have been primed to expect, the protagonist abandons his two colleagues, leaving them to die in the detached module, flying home in the rocket without them.

I this story is good, even though I take Malzberg’s tragic view of sexual life and family life much more seriously than I do his unwarranted skepticism of mankind’s ability to accomplish great things and his somewhat tiresome fear of technology.  One problem with the story is that the action of abandoning the two other astronauts isn't really all that closely linked to the main character's problems.  If we think back to Malzberg's JFK story "All Assassins," which we read recently, we see that the protagonist f that story, JFK's appointment secretary, loses his mind and commits his crime--killing Kennedy--because he feels betrayed by Kennedy.  It is insane, but it makes some logical sense.  In "Still-Life" the main character's gripe is more with his family and the American public than with his fellow astronauts, or so it seems to me.  

Another problem with "Still-Life" that applies to me and maybe not to other people is that I have already read several astronaut-goes-crazy-and-kills-people Malzberg stories, so it does not feel fresh; if this was the very first Malzberg story I had read, no doubt it would have had a bigger impact on me. 

On the right, British edition

“Yearbook” (1971)

This is a story about unrequited love and how our lives are a meaningless jumble of events and we will never be satisfied with them.  The narrator is a college student, attending a protest because there are lots of hot girls there.  The students are protesting policies that limit their ability to drink and have sex in the dorms.

The narrator has a series of daydreams or visions or whatever about what his life will be like in ten years, when he is married to some woman who bores him.  As a married man he tries to engineer events that will fulfill the desires he had as a student, like taking his wife, who is flabbergasted by such behavior, to the college make out spot instead of just having sex with her in bed at home.  While in bed or at home with this boring wife he has dreams and fantasies of a woman he fell I love with in college, but with whom he was totally unable to develop a relationship.  But even in his fantasies the girl of his dreams rejects his clumsy advances.

At the end of the story the protest has turned apocalyptic, with the students burning down many campus buildings and dramatically murdering the Dean of Men and the chancellor.  Is this revolutionary violence really happening, or just another dream, perhaps even a dream within a dream?

Acceptable.  "Yearbook" debuted in F&SF.

"Inter Alia" (1972)

Handler is in an insane asylum.  He was perhaps a Colonel in military intelligence, though that may merely be a delusion.  He delusions that the Earth was visited by powerful aliens who wanted to disarm the United States, and that he was chosen to help them by pointing out the location of missile sites.  He suspects that these aliens are not real, but a trick of the Soviet Union to disarm the US, but his efforts to protect America’s defense capabilities are not successful.

This one feels like mere filler—there is no poignant human relationship element, as there is in “Still-Life” and “Yearbook.”  Maybe this is supposed to be a satire of “Cold War paranoia,” a catchphrase people who apparently think the Soviet Union was harmless or admirable throw around all the time.  I'm giving the one-dimensional "Inter Alia," which first appeared in Infinity Three, a copy of which I own (I read the included Simak story some time ago), a thumbs down. 

"The Helmet" (1973)

"The Helmet" has been something of a success, translated into several European languages and reprinted in an anthology edited by Poul and Karen Anderson after its debut in F&SF.  

Aliens have taken over Earth and they run it as some sort of dictatorship; humans are obligated to obey the orders of any alien who addresses them, no matter how arbitrary.  Our narrator finds the aliens themselves and the new society they have built on Earth disgustingly ugly and depressing.  The aliens provide him a helmet to wear around that affects his brain, making things appear less ugly to him and easing his unhappiness.  But the helmet taxes his nervous system, and he has to take it off periodically to rest, at least until his body has become fully acclimated to it.  But one day an alien scolds him for having the helmet off, not realizing or not caring about the prescription that he rest a few hours every day, and this alien issues a horrible punishment—the narrator may never wear the helmet again. 

Like "Inter Alia," "The Helmet" feels like filler, but it is closer to being a fully developed story, with an actual plot with a beginning, middle and end, and with a human relationship subplot--the narrator has a friend, a guy who actually likes the circumscribed (but apparently comfortable in a cradle-to-grave welfare state way) world the aliens have constructed for mankind, and this guy tries to help our narrator, to his peril.  Acceptable.

"Breaking In" (1972)

"Breaking In" has a central plot gimmick that bears some similarity to the one in "The Helmet."  The narrator is a kind of emissary or diplomat or scout, alone in a city on an alien planet.  His mission is to make contact with the natives and explain to them that they have to learn to love, to "care for one another," to "bind yourselves to the planet" and other hippie goop.  I guess we are supposed to wonder if the narrator is a Terran on some other planet or if he is an alien come to Earth to tell us how to live--maybe we are supposed to think he is like Jesus...or like some European missionary in some colony, spreading Christianity.  Whatever the case, whether we are supposed to sympathize with or deplore the narrator of this three-page story and his mission, he finds the natives so shocking that being among them threatens to drive him insane.

The natives in turn find him scary, and have little if any interest in his warnings.  They capture him and pump him full of drugs; this treatment alters his mind, making the natives and their behavior appear normal, even beautiful to him--he is going to become one with them and abandon his mission.

I kind of like this one.  "Breaking In" debuted in Fantastic.

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Well, I thought most of these were enjoyable.  More stories from Out From Ganymede in our next episode!