Thrilling Wonder Stories, Fall 1946: H Kuttner & C L Moore, R Rocklynne, E Hamilton and M Leinster

A few days ago I was looking at the contents page of Bypass to Otherness, the 1961 Henry Kuttner (and C. L. Moore) collection.  Of its contents, it seems I have read seven stories: "Cold War," "Call Him Demon," "The Dark Angel," "The Piper's Son," "Absalom," "Nothing But Gingerbread Left," and "Housing Problem."  That leaves only one story to go, "The Little Things."  Let's read "The Little Things" today, in its inaugural appearance in the Fall 1946 Thrilling Wonder Stories, and three other stories in that issue of Sam Merwin's magazine.  We've already read the cover story of this ish of TWS, Kuttner and Moore's "Call Him Demon."   Looking back at my 2014 (the very dawn of time!) blog post on "Call Him Demon," my plot summary makes the story sound absolutely awesome, and of course then there are the illustrations of the story by Earle Bergey on the cover of the magazine and by Virgil Finlay inside that make the story appear to be a bondage sex extravaganza.  But in my blog post I go on to attack the story's characters, style, and length and to give it a negative vote.  I'm a tough grader!  

"The Little Things" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

"The Little Things" is credited to Kuttner alone in the magazine, and I am not sure on what basis isfdb also credits Moore.  The story has not been reprinted much, just in the aforementioned Bypass to Otherness and in a 2010 Haffner Press collection of Kuttner and Moore stories, Detour to Otherness.

This is an idea story, weak in plot and character--the protagonist doesn't know what is going on and doesn't have any decisions to make or obstacles to overcome.  He isn't likable and is hard to sympathize with.  The story is also about a revolution, but the motives and policies of the revolutionaries are pretty vague and elicit no intellectual or emotional response in the reader.  I suppose the drama of the story is meant to be generated by how the reader is led to believe the protagonist is a hero who is going to join the resistance and overthrow the government only to be told by the authors that the protagonist is no hero and will not be doing any such thing; Kuttner and Moore "subvert our expectations," something the critics always like to see, but maybe us readers aren't always crazy about.

Our guy was a gossip columnist of the second or third rank during World War II, a guy whose column was not nationally influential but was widely read in a medium-sized town.  As the war was ending he was seized and put in a prison by the people who were secretly taking over during the period of post-war chaos.  You see, the aftermath of the war was going to provide the opportunity for radical changes to occur, and, to make sure civilization was going to transition smoothly to its new form, people who had some level of ambition and influence, like our gossip columnist, but who were not smart enough to recognize the ideal form of society the secret masters were guiding us to and so might cause disruptions, were imprisoned and impersonated by doppelgangers.   These doppelgangers would use the positions of influence formerly occupied by the prisoners to smooth the transition, urging the public to support the correct policies, policies which the prisoners, if free, likely would oppose.  The prisoners, meanwhile, would live in relative luxury, with access to good health care and lots of books and music and so forth, even pets, but no contact whatsoever with the outside world--all those books and all that music is material published before they were imprisoned.  One reason the prisoners are well-treated is that, at least for a while, the doppelgangers share the prisoner's soul or life force and will die if the prisoner dies; eventually the duplicate develops its own soul.

The gossip columnist has lost track of how long he has been in his gilded cage with his pet cat.  He sees an opportunity to escape, and gets out of the prison.  (Kuttner and Moore refer to the prison as Chateau D'If and make some allusions to Dumas as well as to Tennyson's Enoch Arden.)  The outside world does not seem to have changed radically--just "little things" seem to have changed, like the names of the months and days of the week, and the fact that vehicles are now self-driving and people no longer smoke tobacco.

The gossip columnist tries to make contact with people he knew when he was a free man, and finds that the secret masters of the world have given him plastic surgery so he looks totally different (I guess there was no mirror or other reflective surface in his comfortable cell.)  It will be impossible for him to renew his old friendships--everybody who knew him before he was seized is sure that the doppelganger is the real him.  The gossip columnist meets a woman who has not been able to change with the times, but rather than oppose the quiet, creeping revolution, she just sits around and gets drunk.  It becomes clear the gossip columnist will be equally unable to put up any resistance to the changes.  While his doppelganger is living a fulfilling life and career promoting the policies of the secret masters, the original gossip columnist, after a brief period of fruitless resistance, will live a pointless existence of drunkenness punctuated by bouts of sterile nostalgia--Kuttner and Moore offer us the metaphor that this woman and the gossip columnist are essentially dead because they can't evolve with society.  We even get a scene in which we meet the secret masters and Kuttner and Moore try to convince us that they are swell guys, not dictators at all, but doing civilization a great service.

"The Little Things"' ideology is lame and unconvincing elitism, the day dream of people who want to have their lives regulated by their betters because they associate individual freedom with the rough days of the Depression and the cataclysmic upheavals of the Second World War.  And of course I, a man who only reads books or watches movies made over 25 years ago and groans in agony when in a store and his ears are assaulted by music recorded this century, finds the "move with the times or you are as good as dead" theme a little annoying.  As for the plot, it is limp and deflating.  Writers who are bloodthirsty commies might depict changing the world in an exciting way, with the middle classes getting murdered and suffering their property to be expropriated in the name of justice and commissars and activists of the vanguard dying martyrs' deaths as the bourgeois hoarders and wreckers, in their death throes, use their wealth to deploy weapons of mass destruction.  But Kuttner and Moore don't give us those kinds of thrills and horrors--the revolution in "The Little Things" is comfortable, with the masses not even knowing a revolution is taking place, while those who might oppose the revolution are imprisoned in luxury or just sadly drink themselves into oblivion.

Thumbs down!

Left: US edition, 1961     Right: UK edition, 1963

"The Good Egg" by Ross Rocklynne 

According to isfdb, this story has never been reprinted--not a good sign.

"The Good Egg" is a cynical story about how bad parenting leads to evil children, how attractive women use sex to manipulate naive men, how attractive men use their looks to manipulate romantic women, how crooks abuse government programs meant to aid favored constituencies, and how men join the armed services and run terrible risks for civilians who do not appreciate their sacrifices.  This may sound like a clear and accurate picture of real life, not SF at all, don't worry, Rocklynne also includes in "The Good Egg" wacky science fiction elements that function essentially as fantasy elements, like the doppelgangers in Kuttner and Moore's "The Little Things," though Rocklynne's tale otherwise has the plot and themes of a crime story.  "The Good Egg" is also one of those stories that explains that you have to have a firm hand when dealing with women because members of the fair sex are naturally both duplicitous and gullible and will generally benefit from--and most of them actually crave!--the tutelage of a take-charge kind of man.

Doc Ferris is some kind of magician.  He has long employed his pretty daughter Bernice as part of his "stage-setting," and her early recognition of how false the world is and how you can profit by tricking people has had a negative effect on Bernice's morals.  Now, at the end of the Second World War, Bernice is a young adult with a boyfriend, Hugh Grant, a recently discharged veteran of combat in North Africa and Italy.  Grant is sort of naive, and Bernice has him "wound around her little finger," as she puts it.

Doc Ferris has been showing Grant a magic trick.  Some time ago, in a bunch of eggs, Ferris discovered one egg with strange properties; the thing has little glowering sparkles running across its surface, and when you rotate it in your hand, at particular angles it seems to change shape and even vanish from view.  

Grant is interested in science and becomes obsessed with the egg and steals it.  The egg, we readers learn long before Grant does, was laid by a member of an alien race from another dimension.  Inside it is growing, and about to hatch, a telepathic little humanoid being, one fully mature and equipped with racial memory so it has full info about its home dimension and whose telepathy has allowed it to gather full info on our Earth.  This little guy can with trivial ease move between our dimension and that of its people, but if it returns "home" it will be killed by its fellows for having been contaminated by Earth ideas.  (Is this element of the story a satire of the Soviet Union?)

Faithless Bernice has fallen in love with a handsome man, Morrow, a cunning con artist.  Many materials are rationed due to wartime conditions, and are hard to acquire and thus can be sold at high prices on the black market.  Businesses owned by veterans get priority from the government rationing board, and Morrow's SOP is to set up a fake business, seduce a girl with a boyfriend who is a veteran, partner with the vet and thus acquire materials, and then abandon his partner and sell the materials to unscrupulous businessmen.  Bernice uses her sexual wiles to get a skeptical Grant to partner with Morrow; Morrow gets a big shipment of raw leather thanks to Grant's veteran status.  Bernice severs relations with Grant, stupidly thinking that suave Morrow will marry her now that he can make some money, but Morrow has no interest in Bernice, who is far from the first hot chick he has pulled this scam on.

The egg hatches and the alien appears and explains to Grant what is going on.  Grant goes after Bernice, and he and Bernice end up bound in the back of a truck of Morrow's, headed for a watery grave--Morrow has decided he has to murder Grant and Bernice because they are witnesses to his crimes.  Before our dopey and ethically challenged protagonists can be thrown in the river, the alien teleports back to its home dimension where it battles its fellows and seizes a ray gun that it uses to free Grant upon its return; Grant uses the ray gun to outfight Morrow and his thugs.  Morrow and crew end up in prison, and on the advice of the telepathic alien, Grant beats Bernice, turning her into suitable wife material.  The ending joke of the story is that Doc Ferris has found another egg from the alien dimension.

"The Good Egg" is acceptable filler.  The big problem with it is the inconsistent personalities of Hugh Grant and Bernice Ferris, which seem to change to suit the plot instead of being believably consistent and driving the plot.  For example, Grant is obsessed enough with the egg to steal it from the father of the woman he loves, even though he is supposed to be naive and innocent, and then he just forgets about the egg, leaving it alone in his fridge for days.  Sometimes Grant acts like a dope, sometimes like a hard-bitten combat veteran, other times like a science-loving nerd.  As for Bernice, her behavior is such that it is hard to sympathize with her and to hope she and Grant get together, though I guess it is implied that women's psyches are mere clay that have to be molded by the men in their lives so we need not sympathize with her for the story to achieve its goals.  The plot and SF content of "The Good Egg" is serviceable, and if Rocklynne or Sam Merwin had taken the time to polish the story and fix these character issues it would probably rise to good status, but life is short and writers and editors face deadlines and we've all got to pay the mortgage and get the dishes washed and the vases dusted and the lawn mowed and so can't always publish the best possible product.  Even so, historians might find "The Good Egg" useful for its 1946 depictions of the wartime economy and attitudes about women. 

"Never the Twain Shall Meet" by Edmond Hamilton

This tale appears under the byline "Brett Sterling," a pseudonym used several times by Hamilton and other people, including once by Ray Bradbury.  Like Rocklynne's "The Good Egg," it doesn't look like this story was ever reprinted. 

"Never the Twain Shall Meet" is a traditional science fiction story full of space suits, airlocks, little lectures about positrons that refer to Carl David Anderson and brainwaves that refer to Hans Berger, and speculations about where the planets and asteroids came from and how the Sun generates energy.  "Never the Twain Shall Meet" is also a melodramatic love story, perhaps based on the Hans Christian Anderson tale of The Little Mermaid.  Hamilton's style is simple and straightforward and the emotions of his characters, however over the top, ring true.  Thumbs up!

Farrel is the 30-year old captain of a space ship that has broken down near the asteroid belt.  For like 40 years, the human race has been exploring and colonizing the Solar System, but Venus and Mars are off limits, so humans are focusing their efforts on the moons of Jupiter and Uranus.  You see, half the matter of the universe is "positive," and half "negative," and Venus and Mars are negative, and if a piece of positive matter from Earth touches anything from V or M both will be annihilated in a blinding flash!

The crew of Farrel's ship are in serious trouble, but they can maybe fabricate the parts they need to fix the ship if they can drift close enough to an asteroid with the metal they need.  Unfortunately, half the asteroids are negative, making searching the belt very dangerous.

Amazingly, the crew spots another crippled space ship in the belt!  It has an odd shape--an experimental model?  Farrel goes out to investigate in his space suit--he can propel himself with a little hand-held rocket device.  Similarly equipped people come out of the other ship to meet him, one of them a beautiful woman.  Everybody is astonished when they realize they are from different worlds, represent different races--the beautiful girl and her ship are from Mars!  The two groups and their equipment can't touch each other, but Martians have developed devices that operationalize everybody's dormant telepathic ability, so Farrel can communicate with them.

Despite the obstacles facing them, Farrel and the Martian woman fall in love during a crazy adventure in which they get lost in the asteroid belt and have to use logic and science knowledge to reunite with their people, who, in their absence, have repaired their ships.  The Martian makes Farrel promise to meet her in this same spot in a year's time.  He does so, and they have a joyful reunion and start a happy life together because the Martians have figured out a way to change negative matter into positive, and the Martian woman volunteered to be the first human test subject of this technology so she could move to Earth and marry Farrel!

I like it.  The somewhat schmaltzy ending doesn't feel too saccharine because I didn't quite expect it; maybe I am dim, but repeatedly Hamilton had me thinking one of the lovers might die, sacrificing him or herself for the other, or maybe both could die, committing suicide because they prefer death to life without each other.  And, as I have told you again and again, I have a weakness for SF stories that are about people in space suits out there facing death in the void between the worlds.  "Never the Twain Shall Meet" deserves to be reprinted, in my humble opinion.

"Pocket Universes" by Murray Leinster

Yet another story that has not been reprinted, if we are to believe isfdb.  I have found Leinster to be a solid performer, so I have reason to hope I'll enjoy this piece as much as Hamilton's.

"Pocket Universes" is perhaps an illuminating sample of popular beliefs among Americans of people from Latin America, with our narrator, an American, saying stuff like

He was Latin-American—pure Spanish as far as I could tell—and you don’t expect Latin-Americans, somehow, to be scientists....You think of them and of revolutions and politicians, and if you know a few of them you think of poetry and literary effusions and highly intellectual and not very meaty talk. But science, no. Facts seem to hamper most of them.

Our narrator is buddies with a brilliant Latin American scientist, an emigre to the United States living and working in New York.  As the story begins, the scientist has just invented an amazing device.  When powered up, the apparatus, a bunch of copper and crystal pieces and wires, vanishes, and the space it previously occupied has odd effects on light that passes through it, and on objects which intrude into it.  It is as if the space no longer exists--if you reach into the queer blurry area occupied by the device before it was switched on, your hand will vanish inch by inch from your arm while immediately reappearing on the other side of the blurry space, still fully under your control.  Turning off the power causes the device to reappear, and, if anything is occupying the area, that intruding object is destroyed.  Leinster spends a lot of time trying to explain how all this works, both practically and theoretically, but I can't say he succeeds in making it very clear.  (Again, maybe I'm dim.)

The scientist and the narrator take a break from the lab and the sight of a newspaper headline prompts the inventor to tell his tragic life story.  Back home, he had an attractive wife whom his nation's dictator took a liking to.  The dictator's flunkies kidnapped her and she ended up getting killed.  The scientist fomented a revolution against the dictator, but his uprising was crushed.  The scientist fled to America, where he has had a successful career in academia, culminating in today's invention, which the narrator expects will revolutionize the economy and human life by, for example, allowing instantaneous travel between two points, regardless of what might be between them.  With a small portable device you can reach through walls and floors, a larger device walk through such obstacles, and if one is built on an industrial scale, like a highway, one could travel between cities as easily as one walks between two rooms.   

The newspaper story which inspired the inventor to spill his guts tells how the dictator is abdicating under the pressure of the accumulated threats of all his enemies, foreign and domestic, and coming to the United States, to New York, presumably bringing with him all kinds of money and valuables looted from his people and received from Nazis who fled to his country after the war.  To make sure we know the dictator is a bad guy, Leinster tells us he is fat and swarthy!  

The scientist uses upgraded versions of his device to sneak into the dictator's hotel room and seize the loot, which he has sent to the new government of his native country.  Then he murders the dictator.  The narrator upbraids him for risking his life on this adventure when only he can build the device which is going to radically improve human life by making trade and travel so inexpensive.  But the true tragedy of the story is that the scientist decides to experiment with a battery-powered version of his device, and somehow gets stuck inside the warped space--because the device is battery powered, the narrator cannot turn it off from our universe.  The narrator theorizes that, inside the warped space, time passes very slowly, so the batteries may not run out for what we here experience as centuries, even if the inventor only experiences it as a brief period.

(I have to admit I don't understand how the inventor got stuck inside the warped space, as earlier when a guy put his hand in the warped space his hand immediately reappeared on the other side of the warp--his arm wasn't in the warped space, the warped space is like space that is no longer existent.)

"Pocket Universes" is merely acceptable.  Leinster spends lots of energy explaining the device, but his explanations are not very clear and his speculations are wholly fanciful, unlike Hamilton's, which refer to real scientists and real phenomena like electrons and protons.  Leinster also spends a lot of time on the dictator, on describing how ugly and evil he is, but we readers can't get too enthused about the dictator because the narrator never meets him or sees him--he just reads about him in the paper or hears the inventor talk about him; the drama of the dictator's crimes and punishment all happens "off screen."  Unlike with Hamilton's "Never the Twain Shall Meet," I can see why "Pocket Universes" has never been reprinted.

**********

Only Hamilton's story here is a real winner, though Rocklynne's and Leinster's are not bad.  But none of these stories was a waste of my time, even Kuttner and Moore's, as I have a particular interest in the careers of Kuttner, Moore and Hamilton, and hope to read all of their work before I shuffle off this mortal coil (and I may be developing a similar attachment to Leinster.)  And as a grad school dropout who served time in a History and then a Poli Sci department, all the references to World War II are interesting.

The beautiful header to Thrilling Wonder Stories' letters column

SF Classics selected by T Carr: Rocklynne, Brackett, Kuttner & Moore, and Wollheim

When last we met, we noted that Terry Carr (remember when we read his novel Cirque?) included Lester del Rey's odd story "The Smallest God" in his 1978 anthology Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age.  Let's check out some other stories Carr reprinted in that book, after of course pointing out that we have already blogged about some of his selections: A. E. van Vogt's "The Vault of the Beast,"  Eric Frank Russell and Maurice G. Hugi's "The Mechanical Mice," and Robert A. Heinlein's "--And He Built a Crooked House--."  (And that, before this blog was conjured up from the black labyrinth of my mind and began to lurk the intertubes, I read still more of them, like Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps.")

"Into Darkness" by Ross Rocklynne (1940)

I have a poor memory, and so I wasn't sure if I had read "Into Darkness" before or not, so I dug through the archives to make certain and uncovered sobering evidence of how bad my memory really is--in 2018 I read and blogged about Rocklynne's story "Quietus," and then in 2023 I read and blogged about "Quietus" again, having totally forgotten I'd read it five years earlier.  Embarrassing!  (Is Nancy Pelosi going to engineer a campaign to have me deposed as head of this blog?)

Well, I'm pretty confident I haven't read Rocklynne's "Into Darkness" before (no, really), even though I own it in the collection Sun Destroyers (which is the other half of the Ace Double that reprinted Edmond Hamilton's A Yank at Valhalla), so let's have at it.  "Into Darkness" first saw print in Astonishing, edited by Fred Pohl.  I am reading the story, like all of today's stories, in the internet archive's scan of Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age, though of course I took a quick look at the magazine to see the (below average for him) Hannes Bok illo for "Into Darkness."

In his intro to the story, Carr suggests "Into Darkness" is "far out," and it definitely is an effort to blow your mind and inspire the famous "sense of wonder."  The universe is inhabited by creatures of pure energy, creatures millions of miles across, creatures that live for billions of years, creatures that absorb energy from stars, move planets about for fun, and can shift between any of the forty-seven different levels of hyperspace, each of which obeys different laws of physics.  Rocklynne's story is a sort of biography of one such creature, and we witness its early millennia, its adolescence and its growth to maturity.  Named "Darkness" by its mother, Sparkle, our main character is different than its fellows--smarter, more inquisitive, abandoning childish play earlier than others in its cohort and seeking to fulfill some purpose in its life.  (Presumably the kinds of smart kids who are thought to be the audience for science fiction, kids who love science and want to learn about the world around them and to accomplish something with their lives, are expected to identify with Darkness.)  Darkness yearns to resolve the riddle of what constitutes the meaning of life, to learn what is beyond the edge of the universe, and is not discouraged when one of the oldest of the energy beings, known as Oldster, warns such investigations lead to sadness and death! 

Darkness was named by Sparkle after the darkness at the edge of the universe, and insists on living up to its name and exploring that mysterious void.  Darkness devours a star bigger than any star it has ever seen, and with that energy breaches the edge of the universe and travels through the emptiness for millions of years.  Finally, Darkness comes to another universe much like the one it left.  There it meets another energy creature, but whereas Darkness has a purple core, this being has a green core.  Darkness falls in love, and proposes passing a life of exploration with its new acquaintance, but this creature would rather lead Darkness to a forty-eighth level of hyperspace Darkness has never heard about before and there take possession of our hero's purple core.  Darkness learns that the purpose of life is to create more life, which green-core energy creatures do by accepting into themselves purple cores...of course, without their cores, purple-core energy creatures wither and die.  (Woah, is this a story about how women will steal your life force and you should avoid having sex with them?)  Before it expires, Darkness creates a planet and seeds it with life-giving protoplasm, which I guess we are supposed to think is Earth.

I sort of expected Darkness to create the human race, but the revelation that these energy creatures reproduce sexually and that the male can only do the deed once--and that it is fatal!--was a surprise.  I'm not sure it is a good surprise, though, as the fact that they reproduce through sex makes the aliens in this story less alien and thus less mind-blowing.

"Into Darkness" is just alright; besides the somewhat disappointing ending, it feels a little long and repetitive, as we hear again and again that Darkness lives for millions of years and is millions of miles across and travels millions of miles and so on--stuff that is supposed to fill you with wonder ceases to be mind blowing with familiarity.  More conventional sense-of-wonder stories start out more or less mundane and then grow steadily more strange until the final page tries to blow you away with the idea that the universe is open to exploration and contains infinite adventure; "Into Darkness" starts out strange and by depicting life on an epic scale and actually becomes more mundane at the end (just like so many ordinary guys. the alien creature loses his heart to a girl.) 

"Into Darkness" has been reprinted in a few anthologies besides Carr's here, and was followed by three sequels, all of which can be found in that Ace Double collection I mentioned, The Sun Destroyers.

"Child of the Green Light" by Leigh Brackett (1942)

We've read a lot of science fiction and crime fiction by Leigh Brackett, wife of Edmond Hamilton and crony of Bogie and The Duke, but I don't think we've read this one before.  "Child of the Green Light" made its debut in Super Science Stories (this issue also has illustrations by Bok, images more characteristic of his work that are worth checking out) and was reprinted in a 1951 ish of Super Science and in a book I have owned since 2013, Martian Quest.  (Why do you buy these books if you don't read them?, asks my financial advisor.)   

"Child of the Green Light" is a somewhat confusing story as it depicts a crazy scenario that Brackett sketches out in a pithy style and doesn't really explain until the end, leaving me struggling at times to visualize what is going on.  Of course, the real meat of the story isn't its questionable science but themes of loyalty and sacrifice and one's relationship to his people--do you owe something to people you haven't met just because you share their blood or culture?  

A young man, naked, is living in or on a conglomeration of wrecked space ships (in Warhammer 40,000 we'd call this a "space hulk"), somehow surviving in the vacuum of space!  The space hulk is in the form of a disk or wheel, with a green light at its center.  The young man, who goes by the name of Son, is in communication telepathically with a being he calls Aona, who lives on the other side of a "Veil" with a capital "V," which is growing thinner all the time; I guess the Veil and the light are one and the same or closely related.  Aona is a female being whom he loves; though she calls him "Son" and could be said to have raised him, I guess their relationship has an erotic character or erotic potential, and they look forward to the time the Veil falls and they can be together.

Another ship appears and lands on the hulk, and from it emerges a multicultural expedition of men in space suits; some of them are Earth humans, other hail from Mars or one of the moons of Saturn. Through their dialogue we learn that that green light passed through the Solar System, attracting to it and carrying off space ships as it went and finally settling here near Mercury.  The green light is bathing the System in radiation that is radically accelerating the aging process in humans--soon civilization will collapse because nobody lives long enough to learn the science and engineering required to maintain a modern high-tech society.  This team, among whom is the last living physicist, constitutes humanity's last hope of destroying the green light before it is too late.

Son and Aona want to preserve the light, so Son stops the physicist from approaching it, killing the man in the process.  The ray guns of the humans have no effect on Son, but they are able to tie him up, however.  Through more dialogue we learn that Son is the only survivor among the passengers and crew of all the many ships brought here by the green light; he has an adult body now, but he was just a baby when his parents' ship was captured and his parents were killed five years ago.

Aona then explains more of what is going on.  She is native to another universe, where people are immortal.  Her universe suffered a cosmic cataclysm, and the resultant explosion destroyed most of her universe and threw a tiny surviving sliver of it (a sliver still big enough to include multiple planets) through the dark barrier between universes so it intersected with our universe.  Son has become a superman because his atoms are changing, starting to vibrate at the frequency of Aona's universe--currently, a fraction of his atoms are still in our dimension, while most are vibrating at the frequency of Aona's dimension.  Eventually he will join Aona's universe, I guess when all his atoms are vibrating on Aona's frequency, or maybe because the Veil has finally eroded.  This story is a bit confusing, as I said; sometimes I think we are meant to visualize universes are physically distinct with dark empty space--the "Between" with a capital "B"--separating them, like they are raisins in a cake, but other times it is suggested the different universe are parallel, inhabiting the same space but at different vibrations.

To save human civilization, the green light must be destroyed, which will separate the two universes.  The only way to destroy the green light is for Son to enter the light before he has fully transformed; the presence of alien atoms will cause the green light to expire and the universes to be separated; Son will, however, fall into the Between, forever barred from entering either our or Aona's universes.  Son, only now realizing that other living things beside he and Aona exist, and that he is the product (the "son") of a race and civilization distinct from Aona's, has to decide if he is going to destroy himself to save his people (about whom he knows almost nothing), or allow his people to expire so he can live in eternal bliss with Aona.

There is also a subplot about how a member of the expedition tries to murder all his comrades, become a superman, destroy the green light, and then become dictator of the Solar System.

"Child of the Green Light" features many themes we've seen before in Brackett's work and that of her husband--many Hamilton stories are about a planet or star whose people suffered a cosmic catastrophe and so they are moving their heavenly body into some other system, and many Hamilton stories depict radiation changing people, and I think that Brackett's novel The Big Jump, which I read before founding this blog, involved a guy stabbing people on his expedition in the back so he could bathe himself in radiation and become a superman.

This story is not bad, but I found it a little challenging to follow--Brackett provides a minimum of information, so I had to really pay attention to get what was going on, and I still am not sure it all makes sense.

"The Twonky" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (1942/1975)

I've read stacks of stuff by married couple Kuttner and Moore, things they produced individually as well as collaborations, but I haven't read this one; I kind of think I have been avoiding it because its title makes it sound like a joke story, and Kuttner's (many) humor pieces generally fall flat with me (sample MPorcius pans of Kuttner humor pieces: "Or Else," "The Ego Machine," and "See You Later.")  But let's give "The Twonky" a shot today.  

The publication history of "The Twonky," at least as described by Carr in his intro to the story here and by isfdb, presents a few mysteries.  Carr says "The Twonky" has always been attributed to Kuttner, but isfdb credits both Kuttner and Moore.  Carr points out that here in his book a line obliquely referring to World War II that has been left out of reprintings of the story in Kuttner collections has been restored, but isfdb lists the version here as a 1975 version first seen in the American book The Best of Henry Kuttner.  (The British book The Best of Kuttner 2, according to isfdb, reprints the 1942 version.)  I'm just going to read the version here in Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age and leave these mysteries to other investigators.

People in Kuttner and Moore stories are always popping in and out of different times and universes, and the first section of "The Twonky" finds us at a factory in our world that manufactures "console radio-phonograph combinations" and introduces us to a factory worker from the future who has somehow been transported to it.  Disoriented and suffering from amnesia, the man goes to a workbench and, using advanced techniques he knows instinctively, he builds a device from his native time, "The Twonky," but camouflages it so it looks exactly like the other radio-phonographs being pumped out of this mid-20th century factory.  When his mind is fully clear and he realizes how he got here, the workman travels back to the future.

A lot of Kuttner and Moore stories depict people interacting with the technology of a more advanced civilization (e. g., "Juke-Box," and "Shock,") and the second part of "The Twonky" is about a college professor who has just had a new radio-record player console delivered and is alone with it because his wife is off visiting relatives.  The console is a robot that, after scanning the prof and assessing his psychology, performs as a perfect servant, walking around the house washing dishes and lighting the prof's cigarettes and so forth.  But Carr in his intro told us that "The Twonky" is a warning about dictatorship, and, as those of us who follow the Cato Institute on Twitter are aware, a powerful entity which seems eager to help you can quickly become a tyrannical master, and the robot uses physical force to forbid the prof from listening to music or reading books or consuming food and drink of which it does not approve--the Twonky is the embodiment of the Nanny State!  And worse--it begins tinkering with people's minds so that they behave, and, if they try to dismantle it, killing them with a death ray!  

Thumbs up for "The Twonky."  The murders at the climax are a chilling surprise--because most of the story comes off as light-hearted and the characters are all likable, you don't expect them to be massacred but to have the plot resolved for them peacefully.  A good horror story.

When it first appeared in Astounding, "The Twonky" was printed under the penname often used by Kuttner and Moore, Lewis Padgett, and among the many collections and anthologies in which it has been reprinted is the 1954 Padgett collection Line to Tomorrow, which has a great Mitchell Hooks cover.

"Storm Warning" by Donald A. Wollheim (1942)

"Storm Warning," by major SF editor Donald A. Wollheim (who made a recent appearance on my twitter feed), made its first appearance in Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, where it was illustrated by another important SF editor, Damon Knight.  Editors seem to have liked the story--Groff Conklin and Robert Silverberg both included it in invasion-themed anthologies.

Today I am not on board with all these editors; "Storm Warning" is a kind of boring story full of descriptions of air movements and the movements of clouds and odd smells and temperatures.  Have to give this one a thumbs down.

Our narrator is a meteorologist living in Wyoming.  A meteor is seen landing a few miles away in the desert.  He and a fellow weatherman ride horses into the desert to see if they can find the meteorites.  The temperatures they encounter and the smells they experience feel a little off.  Also, an unusual storm seems to be brewing.  They find some hollow crystalline spheres taller than a man; no doubt that are the meteorites, and they are cracked open.  The storm hits, and the men witness what appears to be bodies of air pressing violently against each other, as if they were alive and fighting.  The meteorologists surmise that in Earth's atmosphere live invisible creatures whose bodies are akin to water vapor, and that somewhat similar alien creatures arrived on Earth in the glass globes, and that the native air creatures are fighting the invaders, who seek to remake our home planet's atmosphere in their own image.

I've told you many times that I don't like stories in which the characters are spectators instead of participants, and today I am telling you that I am not interested in descriptions of weather, either.  Another knock against "Storm Warning" is that it is repetitive--we hear about the smells and get descriptions of clouds again and again.  A weak choice from Carr; though Conklin and Silverberg disagree with me.

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The Kuttner and Moore story is the stand out, with Brackett in second place; these stories are about human beings and human relationships and the life choices we have to make, the way we have to balance our desires with our responsibilities.  Rocklynne's story is OK, but Wollheim's is like a filler story that lacks the sex and violence or twist ending that might make a filler story entertaining.  

Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age seems like a pretty good book.  Each story is preceded by an introduction of five or six pages which includes a list of references and not only covers biographical info on the author of the following story but tries to put his or her work in some kind of historical context and includes anecdotes about important SF people whose stories are not reproduced here, like John W. Campbell, Jr. and Hugo Gernsback; taken together these intros are like a history of SF in the period covered.  Pretty cool.

Astounding Sept '40: L R Hubbard, R Rocklynne and V Phillips

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories from the issues of Astounding in which L. Ron Hubbard's Kilkenny Cats stories debuted.  Today we've got the September 1940 issue, from the pages of which we will read not only Hubbard's contribution but a piece by Ross Rocklynne, even though the last time we read a Rocklynne story I denounced it as a "repetitive" and "tedious" "waste of time" consisting of "anemic jokes" (ouch) and a story by Vic Phillips, about whom I know nothing. 

(This important issue of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s magazine also features the first installment of the serialized version of A. E. van Vogt's famous Slan, and a story from Robert A. Heinlein's Future History, "Blowups Happen."  I read a book version of Slan many years ago, and may read this magazine version someday.  "Blowups Happen" I blogged about way back in 2014.  I reread "Blowups Happen" yesterday, and can't think of anything additional to say that is any more interesting than what I said back then.)

"The Kilkenny Cats" by L. Ron Hubbard

Like the first Kilkenny Cats story, "The Idealist," "The Kilkenny Cats" appears under the pseudonym Kurt von Rachen.  According to isfdb, this story has never been reprinted on its own, just in the 1980 Italian Kilkenny Cats collection I ribelli dell'universo and the 1992 small press hardcover Kilkenny Cats collection.  

At the end of "The Idealist," the leaders of the Anarchist party were captive on a starship headed for planet Sereon, having been sentenced by the newly installed communist government of Earth to exile on that mysterious planet.  (The naive anarchists had been the commies' allies in the revolution against Earth's aristocratic rulers, only to find the Reds turning on them as soon as the aristos were out of the way.)  Hubbard spends the first few pages of "The Kilkenny Cats" demonstrating somewhat comically how the starship, run efficiently when manned by the men of the old Royal Space Navy, is now being run haphazardly and lackadasically by the uneducated communist dopes who have succeeded the deposed aristocrats.  We also learn that the dictator of Earth, Fagar, has given the commander of the starship, Lars Tavish, instructions to set up the penal colony on Sereon in such a way that will foster a self-destructive fight between the disparate groups of anarchist exiles.  The two main factions are the seventeen middle-class scientists led by Jean Maucahrd and the longshoremen (375 in number) led by Dave Blacker; also in the mix are our two main characters, Colonel Stephen Gailbraith, a space navy veteran and hero of the revolution who now heartily regrets his support of the revolution and Fredericka Stalton, master propagandist and former poster child for the communist party who has been exiled along with the anarchists because Fagar worried her popularity threatened his rule, especially after she expressed misgivings about communist policy.

Lars Tavish sets up the scientists in one camp and the laborers in another, the former with all the food and high tech equipment, except for the rifles, which go to the longshoremen.  Almost immediately following the departure of the ship, the two groups are at each other's throats.  Meanwhile, Gailbraith, accompanied by Stalton, who don't get along with either Mauchard or Blacker, march off into the wilderness.  Demonstrating an iron will, a talent for command and endless resourcefulness, Gailbraith succeeds in getting Mauchard's boffins and Blacker's laborers to stop fighting each other and work together by introducing an external threat--packs of native carnivores.  Stalton, a tough and cynical girl whose ability to manipulate others carried her out of the tenements and into the top ranks of the revolution, constantly bickers with Galbraith, but as he proves his abilities and saves her life she begins to respect him.

An acceptably entertaining SF story in the classic mold, showing one clever man overcoming obstacles using logic and trickery and demonstrating how diverse social demographics need to work together to make a thriving society, though it will probably take elite manipulation to get them to do so.  Again Gailbraith's future--as the man who will overthrown the communist government--is foreshadowed.  Presumably we will see this feat in a future installment of Hubbard's Kilkenny Cats series.

"Quietus" by Ross Rocklynne

Two bird-like aliens arrive on Earth in their spherical spaceship to discover that your home planet and mine is a total wreck, having been hit by an asteroid 15 or so years ago.  Except for a few thousand square miles in North America, the Earth's surface is a barren waste punctuated by ferociously active volcanoes; but in that green strip in the Western Hemisphere lives 21-year-old Tommy and his pet crow Blacky.  Blacky can talk, and parrots things Tommy says and occasionally repeats things people said when Tommy was just a little kid, before the cataclysm that killed everyone Tommy knew, phrases Tommy can't quite understand.  (Impulsive Tommy survived the asteroid strike because he had run away from home and was hiding in a cave the night of the disaster.)

Tommy is crying because of a hunger he cannot define--we readers of course instantly recognize that Tommy's hunger is for a woman.  Tommy stumbles upon evidence that he is not the only human left on Earth, and that the other survivor is a girl!  He starts tracking her, and she, shy and skittish, evades him, but as time goes by she becomes more and more curious about him.

All the worlds love a lover, and I'd like to tell you that Tommy and whatshername live happily ever after, but, as the title of his story suggests, "Quietus" is a tragedy and Rocklynne lays a depressing twist ending on us.  The two avian aliens watch Tommy, and one of them assumes that Blacky, who rides on Tommy's shoulder and is always jabbering, is the intelligent being and Tommy a beast of burden.  Again and again, Blacky's cries and chatter startle and scare off the young woman, and eventually the emotional Tommy vents his frustration with his black-feathered friend by throwing pebbles at him.  Thinking she is saving a fellow bird-person from a mere animal, one of the aliens shoots Tommy down; the last Earthwoman emerges from cover to stand sobbing over the corpse of the last Earthman.

Not bad.

Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas saw fit to reprint "Quietus" in Adventures in Time and Space (one of the most famous s-f collections of all time!) and Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg included it in the volume of their series The Great Science Fiction Stories covering 1940, which was later reprinted under the moniker Isaac Asimov Presents the Golden Years of Science Fiction.  (Don't let me hear you say life's taking you nowhere, angel.)

"Emergency" by Vic Phillips

It is the future!  Mankind has colonized the solar system, and operates under a single central government on Earth.  Human civilization relies on powerplants that can transmit energy safely and efficiently through air or vacuum to where ever it may be required.

"Emergency" begins in the chamber where the Earth's ruling council of seven men are confronting an unprecedented and bewildering crisis.  Over the last few hours, all contact with the other planets and moons of the solar system has been lost, one after the other, suggesting some alien force is travelling through the system, deactivating the power transmission infrastructure in each colony as it proceeds.  Earth's rulers have no idea what to do as whatever it was that has just silenced Mars approaches our home planet!

All machinery on Earth ceases functioning, and the capitol city goes dark.  But wait, out the window, is that a single light?  Yes, the centuries' old electric bulb on display at the museum!  The eighth man in the council chamber, the "chief liaison officer," who seems like a sort of secretary and office manager, leads the councilmembers to the museum, where he has a brain wave:

Whimhurst, Farraday, Franklin, Hertz, the ghosts of these and a dozen others of the ancient pioneers seemed to be with him at that moment....

Gathering together tools and materials from the museum, and recruiting hobbyists who have obsolete skills that have not been remunerative for hundreds of years, they labor to build a last ditch defense against the invader.

We learn what this defense is in the climax.  At the direction of the secretary, amateur technicians have generated a powerful static electricity charge using hand-cranked generators ("Taupler Haltz machines"), and stored the charge in a human "condenser," a line of thousands of hand-holding volunteers.  When the alien, a six-foot wide sphere that is absorbing all of the power generated by human civilization's powerplants and transmitting it back home, hovers close enough, the head of the line of volunteers touches it, discharging the static charge.  Fifty of the Earth's heroes are killed in the explosive discharge, but it interrupts the alien's energy piracy long enough to bring Earth's defense weapons back online so they can blast the alien.

A decent enough science gimmick story.  "Emergency" has, it seems, never been reprinted.  Sometimes we dig up the deep cuts here at MPorcius Fiction Log!

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Readers, I presume, were happy with this issue of Astounding; not only does it include the major van Vogt and Heinlein stories, but even these three lesser pieces are pretty entertaining and full of daring deeds, tragedy, life advice (don't get mixed up with commies!) and science.

More Kilkenny Cats, and more Astounding, in our next episode.

Fantastic, Apr '75: B N Malzberg, R Rocklynne, D R Bunch, J Shirley

It came to my attention while reading stories from Denis Etchison's anthology Masters of Darkness II that the April 1975 issue of Fantastic is the only place (according to isfdb, at least) where you can read Barry Malzberg's story "Dance."  Today we check out that uncollected piece from the sage of Teaneck, and while we have the internet archive scan of that issue of Ted White's magazine open, let's also read the short stories included therein by Ross Rocklynne, David R. Bunch, and John Shirley.

After glancing at the editorial and the letters column, of course!  Ted in his editorial talks about how fantasy fiction (as a distinct category from science fiction) is growing in popularity, perhaps in response to The Lord of the Rings and recent Conan comics.  Seizing upon this market opportunity, Fantastic is adding "Sword & Sorcery" to its subtitle and publishing less science fiction.  Ted also reviews novels by Ursula K. LeGuin and Lolah Burford, and has nice things to say about Georgette Heyer.  

The letters column sees Ted in spirited dialogue with readers about Star Trek and about the homosexual community.  Ted has sword and sorcery on the brain and suggests a Conan-style show would be more suitable for broadcast on the boob tube than "sophisticated  stf has turned out to be."  A readers slings slur terms for gay men and Ted pushes back against these utterances, and it is not quite clear how serious and how jocular it all is.  On a more elevated level, there is some dispute over how responsible gay men are for the phenomenon of "camp."  A self-described gay man participates in these discussions, and we might consider this letters column a primary source in the history of LGBTQ+ members of the SF community that presents views from both gay and straight perspectives.  If the history of African-Americans in the SF and comics worlds is your beat, there is also disagreement about work done for Fantastic by artist Billy Graham. 

(Ted is opinionated and is far from averse to directly arguing with readers and so his editorials and the letter columns of his magazines are pretty lively.)   

"Dance" by Barry N. Malzberg

Malzberg in this rare story offers us a female first-person narrator, an eighteen-year-old woman living in a future world.  She is confident in her physical charms--in particular, she thinks her breasts have an irresistible effect on men.  She is horny, and full to bursting with love that she wants to give to others, but her fiancé is away at the wars, and so she throws herself at a robot and, when the robot rejects her, at an old man, who also rejects her.  Our narrator, it seems, is in some kind of medical institution, and the old geezer she brazenly tries to seduce indicates in somewhat vague terms that she is suffering some kind of mental and/or physical debility.  Earlier, in trying to calm the narrator down, he talked earnestly about the wars and the terrible effect the absence of the men is having upon women, but when this fails to pacify the narrator he admits that there is no war--the messages the narrator receives from her fiancé at the front are bogus, as are her very memories, counterfeits implanted into her brain.  All these deceptions are components of a program of therapy.  The narrator gets increasingly berserk, and succeeds in enflaming the old man's desire against his will, and even dismantling the robot with her bare hands.

Before succumbing to his lust for the narrator, the old man told her that "The truth of your condition would be so painful that the knowledge would destroy you," and Malzberg doesn't let us readers know what is wrong with the narrator, either--at least I couldn't figure it out.  After the narrator is pulled off the old man, the authorities seem to just resume the earlier program of therapy, and the narrator receives news about the war which we have been given reason to believe is not real, including communications from her fiancé.  I toyed with the idea that the narrator is in fact ugly and future societies are so shallow they consider ugly people to be cripples and go to extravagant lengths to "cure" them, with the possibility that the narrator is a robot, and with the idea that the story is a satire in which Malzberg is arguing that our society is sick in that it considers war normal and the desire to love an illness.  But I could come to no conclusions--the old man's claims are so contradictory that he offers both evidence and refutation of all of my theories.  Maybe the point of the story is that in matters of love and war it is normal for the authorities to lie to us and for us to lie to each other and ourselves, so that we can never learn the truth, not even of our own minds.

Acceptable.

"Emptying the Plate" by Ross Rocklynne

It looks like this may be the last published story by Rocklynne, whose earliest work appeared in the 1930s in the pre-Campbell Astounding.  Back in 2017 I read four stories by Rocklynne, two late 1930s tales (one each from Astounding and Amazing,) a 1945 piece from Planet Stories, and the story Harlan Ellison got Rocklynne to write for 1972's Again, Dangerous Visions.  In 2018 I read a 1940 Rocklynne story endorsed by Raymond J. Healy, J. Francis McComas and Isaac Asimov.  In 2021 I read a Rocklynne story printed in Astounding in 1946.   

And today in 2023 I read "Emptying the Plate," a boring and repetitive story which I guess is supposed to be funny; the foundation of the story is a silly gimmick that kind of reminds me of something you might see on The Twilight Zone.  

"Emptying the Plate" is about sportscaster Joel Bravura Del Tona, who comes to realize that all his life his actions have resembled a liberal interpretation of a version of the nursery rhyme "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe," which his mother concocted to serve as a mnemonic device; Mom's version of the old standard ends "nine, ten, start again."  This morning he put on shoes with buckles, then the owner of the shop where he buys coffee every morning asks him to close the shop door, then he retrieves some boards left laying in the street.  We go through several pages of shenanigans because the boards' owners accidentally left them in the street and when Joel manhandles them they get angry and the police arrive, blah blah blah.  This is not very interesting or entertaining.  After this tedious adventure Joel recalls that all through his life, at pivotal moments, he has picked up things that might be defined as sticks and done other things reminiscent of this rhyme's lyrics.

A lawyer appears and gets Joel out of jail.  This diffident and ineffectual little worm of a man turns out to be an agent of extraterrestrials, and he introduces Joel to the mysterious aliens, who are somehow involved in Joel's life being so strongly influenced by the nursery rhyme.  Then follows a long goofy parody of a sense-of-wonder passage, a look at how the universe works that explains to us readers everything that is going on in the story.  You see, a god-like figure rules the universe, which is divided into many individual sectors, each of which is home to a multitude of intelligent races.  This god figure tests each sector periodically, and when a representative of a sector passes a test, the people of his sector graduate to a new, higher, state of being.  A test is underway in our sector, and our champion is Joel--if he passes, all of us humans and all the other intelligent species in our sector can achieve a higher level of being.

Back to Joel.  Our unwitting champion is experiencing again and again ("nine, ten, start again") the day featuring his arrest and his meeting with the aliens, but as he lives that day some fifty additional times he is aware it is a rerun--Joel "view[s] this situation as if he were a second person inside his own head," one who does not seem to be able to control his body, to make different decisions, and so the fifty duplicate iterations of the day are all pretty much the same as the first.  To pass the test (which Joel doesn't really know about), Joel has to figure out how to break out of this time loop.  Driven by desperation, he finally exerts his will and is able to change his actions on the 51st go around  He telephones his mother, from her learns the original text of "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe" ("nine, ten, big fat hen") and uses this knowledge in a complicated and boring way to pass the test. 

Putting the sense of wonder passage in the middle of the story instead of the end was a mistake that makes Joel's Rube Goldberg solution to the test even more boring--if, like Joel, we didn't know why all this was happening we might have been spurred on to finish the story by a desire to learn the answer to the mystery--as "Emptying the Plate" is written, there is no reward for reading the third part of the story.

Too long (22 pages!), with no human feeling or interesting speculations, just anemic jokes, this is a tedious waste of time.  Unsurprisingly, "Emptying the Plate" has never been reprinted.  

"End of a Singer" by David R. Bunch 

The critics love David R. Bunch and so I expected to find that "End of a Singer" had been reprinted, but according to isfdb it has not been.

This is a short (like three pages of text) poetic and surreal story about Ironland, a future Earth (I guess) in which people have had most of their body parts replaced with machinery and in which even the birds and flowers are now mechanical.  It is a time of plenty and progress, in which people keep getting their body parts upgraded, and also a time of exploration of the galaxy and high-tech war.  The story seems to be a satire of the idea of progress, an expression of skepticism of technological and scientific advance, and a reminder that human beings are too belligerent.  These are complaints we have all heard a billion times and so Bunch is wise to keep his story short, as it offers nothing new in plot or theme.  

The main character is old and can recall when he had a 100% natural body and how his various body parts were replaced.  He cannot deny that his current robotic limbs work much better than did his old flesh and blood arthritic arms and legs, but he believes that perhaps the medical advances went too far, that replacing so much of his body, in particular his interior organs, with machinery has diminished his soul, his ability to experience authentic emotions.  This guy was a poet, and with the loss of his ability to feel he has also lost his ability to versify.  But he holds out hope that an upgrade to his "changer"--an emotion-regulating accessory attached to his artificial heart that allows him to manually induce various emotional states--might bring back his poetic ability.  After all, upgrades are always happening; this guy has gone through "ten different changers" already.  The poet waits eagerly for the nightly news, which is projected onto the sky in letters many miles high, hoping that among the announcements will be a notice that a new model of changer is available.  After various stories about new weapons and new discoveries by the galactic probes comes an announcement that has a profound effect on the poet--new machinery has been developed that can create artificial literature and music at a much faster rate than previously; this news causes the poet to drop dead.

This story is a little hard to read with its long flowery sentences, and the ironic plot twist is sort of what you might expect.  "End of a Singer" does enjoy the virtue of brevity, though.  I guess we can call this one acceptable.  Maybe people reading it today could claim it is sort of predicting stuff like Chat-GPT and those Japanese holographic singers or whatever they are.     

"Silent Crickets" by John Shirley 

I didn't really know who John Shirley was, but decided to read this because it is just three pages long.  Then I looked at Shirley's isfdb page and immediately recognized the title of a novel tarbandu reviewed in 2017 and Joachim Boaz reviewed three years later, City Come A-Walkin'.  Will Errickson has also written about Shirley.  Looks like I'm late to the party.  

"Silent Crickets" is a gimmick story, but the gimmick is pretty good and the story doesn't overstay its welcome.  Artists have been disappearing, and modern works of art are being destroyed.  It turns out that modern painters like Du Champ and Modigliani didn't really paint distorted and abstracted versions of Earth people, but accurate representations of what people from other worlds or universes look like!  Their stealing of images from those other universes has summoned aliens to Earth, and the aliens are inflicting a terror campaign on the art community!  The plot of this little story concerns a guy who has realized what is going on and tries to resist the alien invasion but is defeated and finds his own body becoming distorted so it resembles something in a modern painting.

It works; I have to call "Silent Crickets" the most successful and most satisfying story covered in today's post.  It would reappear in multiple Shirley collections and in one of those Martin H. Greenberg et al Barnes and Noble anthologies.

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Here ends our little trip to 1975.  Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log for more such excursions into the nearly forgotten past.    

Astounding, January 1946: George O. Smith, Ross Rocklynne and Murray Leinster

We just read Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's The Fairy Chessmen, a two-part serial that appeared in the January and February issues of Astounding in 1946.  Let's see what else was in the Jan. '46 issue of John W. Campbell, Jr's formidable magazine.

Campbell's editorial is about how nuclear proliferation will change foreign policy and foreign relations; he assumes that every advanced nation, including places like Belgium and Czechoslovakia, will soon have its own arsenal of atomic weapons and the U. S. had better develop some kind of defense tout suite.  George O. Smith has a one-page article about the proximity fuse.  Earl Welch has a long article about devices that measure electricity, complete with equations and circuit diagrams that I couldn't understand if my life depended on it.  There is a Listerine ad in which two attractive young ladies decide not to invite Chuck to the party because he has bad breath.  (Being rejected by pretty girls I can understand.)  There are stories by "Philip Latham" and Emmet McDowell that I am skipping.  It is the stories by George O. Smith, Ross Rocklynne, and Murray Leinster that I am reading.

"Fine Feathers" by George O. Smith

According to isfdb, "Fine Feathers" is a novelette and has never appeared any place else.  

Smith appends to the start of his tale an italicized epigraph of three paragraphs he attributes to Aesop, the story of a crow smarter than the other crows who wishes he was a pheasant and starts wearing pheasant feathers and "lord[ing] it over the rest of the crows...."  Wikipedia calls this story "The Bird in Borrowed Feathers."  Smith's story here is a fable itself that warns you against being selfish and against trying to be something that you are not.

It is the future!  Earth has a relationship with aliens who are smarter and more advanced than we, people known as the Galactic Ones.  There are Galactic emissaries on Earth, but they don't interfere very much with what goes on here.

Our main character is a very clever human financier, Wanniston.  He is so smart that he is constantly tricking and outmaneuvering the other local business people, always operating within the bounds of the law, to the point that other business people, humiliated and impoverished, are committing suicide.

Wanniston is anti-social and ambitious, not caring if he has friends or if he has children.  He figures out how to make an electrical device that will increase his intelligence; he has to do so gradually, as large doses are dangerous, and just jolts himself a few seconds a day, raising his IQ by a few points with each treatment.  These treatments cause sterility, which would dissuade many men, but not Wanniston.

Wanniston is friendly with the local Galactic emissary, Gerd Lel Rayne, and Rayne warns him against increasing his intelligence, but Wanniston does not listen.  As they become more and more frustrated by him, the other middle-class people in the area plot to get rid of Wanniston, finally hitting on the scheme of framing him for murder, claiming one of the suicides was no suicide at all.  Wanniston is innocent, but realizing a jury will be made up of people who hate him and will convict him regardless of the paucity of evidence, Wanniston steals Rayne's space ship and flies off to a planet of Galactics.

His machine has made him as smart as a Galactic, and so Wanniston feels at home in a beautiful Galactic city, and the Galactics welcome him.  The Galactics have a socialistic society in which no work is necessary and there is no money--everybody's needs and desires are automatically fulfilled.  (This is a fable, remember, not a serious exploration of economic systems.)  Government officials among the Galactics are selected by a computer ("aptitude machine"), and Wanniston keeps using his intelligence-raising device and gets so smart that the computer assigns him to work in the office of the Governor of the entire galaxy. 

Because his IQ is so tremendously high, Wanniston is in line to become ruler of the galaxy.  But intelligence is not enough--he needs wisdom and experience as well.  It will take him approximately 500 years of working in the governor's office to acquire that experience; the Galactics think this is reasonable because Wanniston has about 600 years of life left--when you become super intelligent your brain subconsciously repairs your cells so you age very slowly and just shrug off disease and injury.  But Wanniston is impatient.  He tries to build a machine that can transfer other men's experience into his own brain, but this turns out to be impossible.  Unable to prove he is better than everybody else as quickly as he wants to, Wanniston cracks and commits suicide in a scene that is a direct duplicate of the first scene of the story, in which one of Wanniston's business contacts, who had lost everything in a failed venture, killed himself.

This is a merely competent filler story, inoffensive but unimpressive and forgettable.  As a fable, none of the details of the story ring true (couldn't a decent lawyer or an honest judge protect him from being convicted of murder on Earth?; nobody cares he stole a space ship?; do business people really commit suicide that readily?) so there is no tension or human feeling.  No wonder anthologists never snapped it up.

"A Matter of Length" by Ross Rocklynne 

Like Smith's "Fine Feathers," Rocklynne's "A Matter of Length" is categorized by isfdb as a novelette and has never been reprinted.  We dig deep here at MPorcius Fiction Log.   

This is a story about racism or bigotry or whatever you want to call it.  In form it is an adventure story, with people being captured, escaping captivity, fighting other humans and dangerous aliens, rescuing women, all that adventure caper jazz.

The human race's space empire is home to three types of people.  There are the Ordinaries, people like you and me.  Then there are the Hypnos, a tiny minority of people who have psychic powers and can make others see illusions.  The Hypnos are the future of the human race, the next stage of human evolution.  Many Ordinaries fear and hate the Hypnos, accusing them of crimes and atrocities, and currently a Galactic Civil War is raging between those Ordinaries who are on a crusade to exterminate the Hypnos and the Hypnos and sympathetic Ordinaries.  The third type of people are Sensitives, people who can't influence other people with their psychic powers but who can detect Hypnos.  Anti-Hypno crusaders have Sensitives in their military units to help them track down Hypnos--Hypnos claim that as soon as they are exterminated the Ordinaries will turn on the Sensitives and exterminate them as well.

The plot of the story concerns Joe Henderson, a Hypno who has been captured by anti-Hypno forces after a battle.  He is held captive on the space ship of Captain MacDougall, who hates Hypnos because his daughter died while under the care of a doctor who turned out to be a Hypno.  As if we didn't already know he was the bad guy, MacDougall is also fat.  In the fighting, Joe killed MacDougall's navigator, and so the ship went off course and passed through a dust cloud which damaged many of its systems.  The ship is now lost, and has landed on a planet to make repairs; this planet has turned out to be pretty dangerous.  On this planet time moves slowly, so that the natives seem like statues, trees don't move in the wind, and MacDougall's people can't easily breathe the native air, because chemical reactions are slow or something.  But while the ship is there the space crew gradually begins to move more slowly, getting more in line with the local pace.  Joe, in his cell, stays moving at Earth speed because the energy field around his cell that blocks his psychic powers also blocks the radiation (or whatever) that makes everything on this world move slowly.

Other characters on the ship include an Ordinary who is an undercover intelligence officer with the pro-Hypno forces--he finds an opportunity to release Joe from the cell--and MacDougall's Sensitive, a beautiful woman.  When the crew's speed matches that of the natives, the natives attack.  The ship's heavy weapons were rendered inoperative by passage through that dust cloud, and the natives are huge monsters who do not easily succumb to small arms fire, so the ship's crew gets massacred.  Joe, making use of his high speed relative to everybody else, saves the secret agent and the woman.  They find a place to take cover and wait for help from a pro-Hypno ship, and Joe and the secret agent convince the woman to join the pro-Hypno cause.  We are lead to assume that Joe and the woman will become lovers.  

"A Matter of Length" is one of many SF stories in which a small minority of superior people is oppressed by the mundane majority.  These stories have a broad appeal because they exploit people's natural love of aristocracy and natural bent towards elitism, while at the same time ostensibly being about sympathy for the downtrodden--the reader who thinks he is better than others because he is smarter or knows more science or whatever (and it is a safe bet that many Astounding readers thought this of themselves) identifies with Joe the superman and at the same time can feel like a good liberal because Joe also represents blacks, Jews, homosexuals, immigrants, or whatever marginalized group the reader has sympathy for.

"A Matter of Length" is an entertaining action-adventure story; it is filler, but a notch above "Fine Feathers" because the pace is fast, there is violence and a hint of sex, and things happen besides men having sedate conversations with each other--there are direct confrontations, danger, and death, and all the people are passionate, driven to pursue goals by deeply held beliefs and/or fighting for their lives.

"The Plants" by Murray Leinster

Compared to Smith's and Rocklynne's stories, which never extended their reach beyond the confines of Astounding's covers, Leinster's "The Plants" was a big success, being reprinted in Martin Greenberg's 1950 Men Against the Stars as well as a 1952 British magazine, the first issue of Famous American Science Fiction, where it appeared alongside Robert Moore Williams' "Red Death of Mars."

Planet Ailolo is one big featureless globe, entirely covered by a single species of flowers, each flower the same height, each flower occupying the same amount of ground.  There are no animals or other plants on the planet, it is just a sea of these identical plants from horizon to horizon.

A space freighter crash lands on Ailolo and four men emerge.  The ship had a crew of forty-eight, and only they and one other man survived the disaster.  That fifth survivor is a saboteur who planted bombs in the ship that crippled it and killed most of the crew--this piece of human garbage escaped in a life boat before the explosions.  The four innocent men, now marooned on Ailolo, figure their treacherous crewmate is going to meet up with a space pirate ship and then come to Ailolo to loot the valuable cargo of the wrecked vessel.  The pirates, no doubt, will be armed to the teeth, and the four survivors of the crash landing have no weapons at all.

The story describes how the four shipwrecked men develop a relationship with the flowers, which turn out to be intelligent, and work with the flowers to try to fight the pirates and then use the pirates' ship to escape back to civilization.

This is a decent adventure story in which there are blasters, space suits, pirates, telepathy, and a hero who uses his wits to overcome obstacles, save himself and his friends, and punish evil-doers.  Leinster tosses in a healthy but not distracting helping of science, like speculative ecology and biology and more grounded stuff about how the conditions of the atmosphere affect the boiling point of water and about the effect of its angle of approach on a space craft's entry into an atmosphere and ability to safely land on a planet. "The Plants" is also the right length (it is much shorter than the other two pieces we are looking at today.)  I like it.

If you compare New Jerseyan Edd Cartier's cover for the hardback edition of Men Against the Stars
with Australian Stan Pitt's cover for the first issue of Famous American Science Fiction, I think 
you can see Pitt based his cover on Cartier's, but added a beautiful woman to 
liven things up. 

**********

None of these stories is boring or irritating, and one of them is borderline good, and another actually good, and we even learned some science and some ethics (that we probably should have known already.)  I think we can chalk up a win today for Astounding and for SF readers.

In our next episode we'll be reading stories that were actually published during my lifetime, so stay tuned!