Seven Come Infinity: R F Jones, M Leinster & E F Russell

Over the years I have acquired a tall stack of paperback anthologies, so let's take off the pile a book I've owned for over a decade and read some of the stories printed therein by people with whose work we already have some familiarity.  Today's subject: Seven Come Infinity, edited by Groff Conklin and published here in the republic in 1966 by Fawcett Gold Medal and reprinted in the United Kingdom a year later by Coronet.  I've already digested two stories that appear in this volume, Chad Oliver's "Rite of Passage" (I read it in 2014 and gave it a thumbs down) and Clifford Simak's "The Golden Bugs" (I read that one in 2018 and concluded it was "acceptable.")  Today we'll read the stories Conklin included in the book by Raymond F. Jones, Murray Leinster, and Eric Frank Russell.  Take note that I am reading these stories in this here paperback, and not in their original magazine appearances or in later books, though if I find a puzzling typo or something like that I may consult other such sources.

"Discontinuity" by Raymond F. Jones (1950)

I think I've covered nine Jones productions here at MPFL, the novels The Cybernetic Brains, Syn and The Alien, and the stories "Noise Level," "Fifty Million Monkeys," "Rat Race," "The Non-Statistical Man," "Starting Point," and "The Gardener."  Today we make it a round ten with "Discontinuity," which debuted in Astounding and has not been reprinted in English other than here in Seven Come Infinity.  German readers can find it in Deutsch in Die neuen Gehirne und andere Stories; "Discontinuity" is actually the title story of that 1971 collection.

In the future of force fields and interstellar travel, David Martell was a scientist and medical man of rare genius!  He figured out how the brain stored information, and even began development of techniques to restore memories and other brain functions to people who had suffered brain damage.  But Dr. Martell's life was not exactly one triumph after another.  For one thing, he married a woman, Alice, whom he loved but who didn't understand him and had no interest in science; Alice came to loathe the Doc and started cheating on him.  Ouch!  Then, his experiments with brain-damaged patients produced results that the general public and the establishment didn't consider to be successes--sure, the head injury patients were still alive, but they lost almost all of their intelligence--the Martell Synthesis was tried on 100 people, and all 100 are now "idiots!"  ("Idiot" is the word Jones uses consistently.)  The Martell Synthesis was outlawed!  Ouch again!  Then there was the car crash that left Martell himself brain damaged and almost dead--a crash that many suspect was no accident, but engineered by Alice and one of her boyfriends!  Ouch to the second power!

Such is the background.  The plot of "Discontinuity" kicks off as Martell's team tries to--illegally--use the process Martell developed to revive Martell's own smashed brain.  Part of the Martell Synthesis is to hook wires into the heads of people the patient knew and shift info from their healthy brains to the patient's damaged brain, to fill in gaps.  Alice has to be convinced to submit to this procedure--she would see greater financial benefits from having a husband who is a dead duck than a husband who is a live idiot--so the boffins threaten to reveal evidence she tried to murder her hubby, blackmailing her into cooperating.

(We later learn that the Synthesis process also writes info from many books into your brain.)

In Chapter II (this is a longish story, over 40 pages) Martell wakes up after the Synthesis process is over--he is OK!  Or so he thinks at first!  After he gets out of bed he finds he can't read English, and when he tries to talk, people don't understand him, and when they speak, it sounds like gibberish to him!  His colleagues think he is an idiot, like all the other brain-damaged peeps who were subjected to the Martell Synthesis, but now Martell knows they are not idiots, they just have aphasia!  Martell escapes the lab and in Chapter III hooks up with other subjects of the Martell Synthesis and finds they can speak to each other.  Among them is Marianne, a woman as pretty as Alice but smarter and more intellectually healthy.  (In this future, people who lie, cheat and commit murder aren't considered bad or evil, just ill or ignorant.)  Marianne was one of Martell's top assistants before her brain was wrecked by an electric shock and Martell used his process to bring her back to (it appeared at the time idiotic) life.  

Chapters III and IV are largely given over to speculative lectures on how the brain works and how the Martell Synthesis works--as we expect from these old time science fiction authors, Jones weaves science lectures in with his adventure plot and power fantasy themes.  It turns out that the Martell Synthesis turns you into a superior being, organizing the data in your brain (the data is compared to the punch cards of early computers) more rationally than mere natural processes can and somehow distinguishing irrational beliefs based on emotion from cold hard facts and prioritizing the latter.  

"The semantic selector, in arranging the pre-punched molecules in precise order with semantically correct cross-indexing, has swept clean the crazy, nonsensical filing system accumulated over the years."         

"We have within our hands the means to make a new kind of man, one which can displace the old and bring reason into the world....I am very certain we are the most completely sane people the world has ever known!"

Communication between people with synthesized brains and the old mundane kinds is impossible because synthesized brains are super-efficient and have naturally developed super-efficient means of communicating to each other.  English is too irrational for the efficient brain to comprehend!  Martell also finds that the synthesized no longer need sleep and have acquired superagility.

Chapter V sees the plot resolved.  Martell and Marianne use the Synthesis equipment to reduce their superiority enough that they can again communicate with us normies saddled with all-natural no-artificial-additives brains via the inefficient and irrational tongue of William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and Pete Townshend.  They try to convince people of the benefits of the Martell Synthesis but everybody is too scared of change, so our superman and superwoman start synthesizing people by force.  Among the first beneficiaries of nonconsensual synthetization is Alice; synthesis cures her of her deceitful and murderous ways as well as giving her super smarts and all those other abilities; the Martell marriage, we can be sure, is going to be a super-happy one from now on, and eventually all humanity will be equally super!  (Marianne is a little jealous, having fallen in love with Dr. Martell, but her rational brain will keep her from getting truly heartbroken.)

I love stories about disastrous sexual relationships and I love stories in which people mess with brains, so Jones has me on his side from the start.  "The Discontinuity" is also a decent homo superior story with sense-of-wonder elements as well as the elitism we see in so much SF that suggests their betters are fully justified in using guile and force to drag the ignorant masses into the glorious future.  This elitist attitude is disgusting, but I can't deny that it is exciting in fiction, and I didn't let the disgusting incest in Elleston Trevor's The Sibling stop me from enjoying and praising that novel and I'm not letting the elitism of Jones' "The Discontinuity" stop me from enjoying this story and giving it a thumbs up.

"The Corianis Disaster" by Murray Leinster (1960) 

"The Corianis Disaster" first saw print in what I believe to be the final issue of The Original Science Fiction Stories, a magazine Robert Lowndes had kept afloat since 1953.  I think I've read like 24 pieces of Leinster's fiction during the period of this blog's life, but my link finger is tired, so click the "Leinster" tag if you want to see what I've had to say about the man.  I will say here that, as with Jones, I've liked most of Leinster's work with which I am familiar.  Hopefully this is another likable one, as it is over 40 pages.

The Corianis is one of the largest and safest starships in the interstellar civilization depicted in Leinster's story, and it is carrying important officials between two planets who are in the midst of major trader negotiations.  By chance, also aboard is a scientist, a physicist, who is very shy.  A one in a million bit of bad luck causes the Corianis to come out of hyperspace abruptly because a huge amount of debris, the remains of a planet destroyed by a nova a million or so years ago, was in its path.  The hyperdrive is wrecked, but ships the size of the Corianis carry two hyperdrives, just in case.  So the ship gets to its destination, just a little late.  Where they find that an exact duplicate of the Corianis has preceded them!  

The Corianis that is already there is populated by a trade delegation identical to that on the second-arriving ship, but several people aboard the second vessel, including our main character, the physicist, are not duplicated on the first ship.  The physicist quickly learns to overcome his shyness and asserts himself to solve the problem posed by the duplicate people, something only he is able to achieve, as everybody else aboard the two vessels, as well as everybody among the populace among whom they have landed, becomes violently irrational in the face of this unprecedented and apparently supernatural phenomena.  The physicist saves the day and even meets a girl and gets married.

The first part of "The Corianis Disaster," all the stuff about space flight and hyperspace and all that, is good.  But the second part, the puzzle of the duplicates, its effect on people, and the scientist's solution to it, is boring, even annoying.  There's the elitism of the story--everybody but the scientist acts like a violent irrational monster--which is bad enough, but worse, Leinster plays a lot of the confusion among the duplicates and the local populace for laughs.  Worst of all, Leinster makes this part of the story way way too long, hitting the same points again and again in the same way.  To show how irrational non-scientific people are, he has angry mobs form, not just once, but again and again.  He describes people's fears and diagnoses them again and again, uses the same metaphors and analogies again and again.  What Leinster is saying is kind of obvious, so he needn't tell us repeatedly, but he does, and it is no fun.  Maybe Lowndes requested a story of a certain length and Leinster stretched this one out by repeating himself?  A mistake!

As we readers figure out pretty quickly, but Leinster really takes his time to come out and say, during its hyperspace jump, the Corianis with the shy scientist aboard accidentally jumped into a different time line, one in which the bashful physicist didn't make the flight and the ship's flight was uneventful.  Our hero figures out how to return his Corianis to its native universe.  As I guess science fiction readers want to hear, our problems are solved when a scientist is given command over the government and the ship.  The the story ends with a limp joke about marriage--a man may make himself an alpha and save the lives of a ship and all its occupants, but his wife will still tell nag him into doing what she wants. 

Far from Leinster's best work.  I'm calling it barely acceptable.

In 2006 "The Corianis Disaster" was presented in a Russian Leinster collection, and in 2015 Armchair Fiction included it in a double novel along with Harry Harrison's famous Deathworld.

"Panic Button" by Eric Frank Russell (1959)

Another Astounding story, this one by the Englishman who is reportedly (see Alan Dean Foster's intro to The Best of Eric Frank Russell) Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.'s favorite writer, a man much of whose work we have read.  "Panic Button" would go on to be reprinted in a 1974 Dutch collection and in NEFSA's 2000 Major Ingredients: The Selected Short Stories of Eric Frank Russell.

Two intelligent races are exploring the galaxy, the humans of our beloved Terra and some alien race from the Antares system.  Each species has quite limited knowledge of the other, and neither wants to risk a war with an enemy of unknown capabilities, so both civilizations have been following a first-come-first-served or finders-keepers rule--any planet belongs to the race that first lands upon it.  This story chronicles what happens when an Antarean star ship with a crew of 600 and a complement of ten boats discovers a valuable planet with only one single Terran on it, a man unaccompanied by any space craft or heavy equipment--should the Antareans honor the tacit finders-keepers rule or kill this guy and disintegrate his hut and claim the planet?

The plot and gimmicks of this story, which is sort of a series of logic puzzles and suggests people act rationally and predictably, are good, and additionally Russell offers readers characters with fun personalities who deliver cleaver jocular dialogue.  I am constantly bitching about joke stores, as you know, but in "Panic Button," in a way that reminds me of Jack Vance, Russell employs subtle and sophisticated humor based not on absurd situations or broad satire but personality and human reaction to stressful situations, humor which complements Russell's plot and themes instead of burying or undermining them.  The story is also no longer than it need be.  Thumbs up for "Panic Button!"

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Two good stories and one story that crawls feebly just barely across the border into "acceptable" territory (but could have been good if a ruthless editor had hacked it down to 60 or 70% of its current size.)  Conklin in Seven Come Infinity seems to have put together a commendable anthology.

Three more short stories penned before I was born in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  We can only hope they will go down as easily as today's selection.

The Unexpected: A Boucher, F Brown & E F Russell

In the last installment of MPorcius Fiction Log we read three stories from McIlwraith-era Weird Tales that Leo Margulies reprinted in his 1961 anthology The Unexpected, the cover of which promises "strange" and "hair-raising" stories that will transport you to a "nightmarish world."  Let's do the same today, but whereas last time our writers were Margaret St. Clair, Mary Elizabeth Counselman and Fritz Leiber, today we've got Anthony Boucher, Fredric Brown and Eric Frank Russell.  Somehow, all three of these stories debuted in WT in 1949.

Before we begin, I remind you that I don't own a copy of The Unexpected and so I'll be reading these stories in scans of the original 1949 magazines.

"The Scrawny One" by Anthony Boucher (1949)

This is a two-page twist story on those perennial topics, being tricked by the Devil or some similar stygian entity and screwing up the magic wish a genie or whoever gives you.  A California man in the 20th century exhaustively researches the fringe characters for which the Golden State is famous and eventually hooks up with a real wizard.  He convinces the sorcerer to summon a demon for him, and then murders the magician.  The demon begrudgingly offers the murderer a wish, as he is obligated, and the killer wishes to be the richest man in the world.  So the demon puts him in the body of the richest man in the world, some kind of Hindu feudal ruler or something who is suffering some horrendous decaying disease and is moments from death.  Every year this lord or whatever he is holds a ritual which involves being laid upon a giant scale and having a pile of precious stones heaped on the other end of the scale until the pile is his own weight, and her spends his last moments in the middle of this bizarre local custom.  Boucher's gruesome touch is that the murderer watches one of his new body's digits fall off its hand before he expires.  The demon, meanwhile, formerly a noncorporeal form jealous of the flesh of human beings, is now in the murderer's body and is about to enjoy all the pleasures in which a material body can indulge.

We'll declare this gimmicky and contrived thing acceptable filler, I guess.  The beginning, when the murderer kills the wizard, before we know this is yet another deal-with-the-devil and magic-wish-backfires story, is good, and what comes after is a big disappointment.  "The Scrawny One" would be reprinted in the men's magazine Cavalier in the same year it reappeared in The Unexpected, and would later see print in anthologies of stories from Weird Tales as swell as NESFA's The Compleat Boucher.

"Come and Go Mad" by Fredric Brown (1949)

The way Bloch and Quinn's names
appear on this cover reminds me of
feminist artist Barbara Kruger's
derivative and gimmicky work

Like Leiber's "The Automatic Pistol," Brown's "Come and Go Mad" is famous and the title was so familiar to me that I kind of thought I had already read it when I first started looking into The Unexpected.  But it turned out I hadn't.  You can find this story in many Brown collections and many anthologies.   

"Come and Go Mad" is one of those stories with a protagonist who has amnesia.  Read enough fiction and the same gimmicks come up again and again.  Maybe I need a new obsessive hobby.  Anyway, newspaper reporter George Vine, apparently, lost his memory in a car accident three years ago, and can recall nothing of his life before he woke up in the hospital after the wreck.  In the first of "Come and Go Mad"'s eight chapters, his editor convinces Vine to go undercover as a mental case into an asylum to investigate something odd detected by the asylum's director, Randolph.  What unusual phenomena did the director notice?  The editor doesn't provide Vine any details about Randolph's suspicions, so the reporter will go into this assignment with an open and unbiased mind.

In Chapter II we get a plot twist--reporter George Vine has been lying about the amnesia for three years, he in fact does have extensive memories of life before the accident--and the life he remembers is not that of 20th-century journalist G. Vine, but that of the young Napoleon Bonaparte!  Vine has hidden this fact from everyone for three long years, and it is true he has no Vine memories of the pre-crash period.  We readers are led to believe that George Vine is insane or that the soul or consciousness or whatever of the Corsican ogre is cohabiting this 20th-century American body with that of the reporter.  

Brown in this story strives is to keep everything uncertain, to keep the reader in suspense, always wondering which of the possibilities presented, some of them quite hard to believe, might be the truth.  The final punchline is that none of the characters' or reader's speculations matter, because life is meaningless and to know the truth is impossible because the truth is so horrible it will drive the truth-knower insane.

Chapters III and IV introduce more mystery--are Vine's friends and colleagues colluding with Randolph to get Vine committed against his will?  Do they think he is insane and so, with the best intentions, are tricking him into getting treatment?  A man can only be admitted to the asylum on the recommendation of two shrinks, so Vine has to go see a second doctor and fool him into thinking he is insane.  When he tells this second psychiatrist in Chapter V that he thinks he is somehow Napoleon Bonaparte, transported at age 29 to the 20th century, is he doing it to further his undercover journalism mission, or to sincerely get psychiatric treatment?

In the asylum we get various compelling scenes in which we meet the madmen and the guards; these scenes are the most conventionally entertaining in the story.  Then we get the finale, a sort of distillation or parody of Lovecraftian themes.  Napoleon Bonaparte/George Vine is informed by aliens that mankind is a parasitic race created by the immense alien intelligences that rule Earth to serve as entertainment--our evolutions and wars and so forth are games that different aspects of this intelligence play against each to stave off boredom.  As part of the game, the consciousness of Bonaparte was shifted across space and time from one body to another.  This knowledge threatens to drive the protagonist insane, so it is blotted from his mind and he eventually is released from the asylum and lives what amounts to a normal life.  The author tells us that the question of who among Vine's friends were acting for the aliens is immaterial, and in fact everything is immaterial.  The last sentence of the story is the assertion that "Nothing matters!"  

"Come and Go Mad" succeeds in embodying its theme that life and the universe are complicated and trying to figure them out is a waste of time because you can't and it wouldn't help you if you could, so I guess, based on the fact that it achieves its objectives, you have to call it a good story.  But is it entertaining?  The asylum scenes are certainly enjoyable and the in-your-face Lovecraftian there-is-no-God and you-can't-understand-the-universe-so-life-is-without-meaning ending suits Weird Tales, but the first half is kind of weak.  Those early chapters feel long and slow, with lots of characters who don't appear later and lots of talk about the protagonist looking out the window, looking at pigeons, wiping sweat off his forehead, lighting a cigarette, stubbing out a cigarette, etc.  I guess all the distant gaze and cigarette business is supposed to set the mood, to give readers insight into Vine's emotions and state of mind, but it all feels kind of like chaff you have to get through to get to the actual story.  On the other hand, this stuff makes the story feel "sophisticated," like a mainstream story and not a story you find in a magazine full of vampires and zombies and scantily clad ladies.

We'll end up at a mild recommendation.

Two of the many editions of Space on My Hands;
left is 1980 USA, right is 1995 Romania

"The Big Shot" by Eric Frank Russell (1949)

Remember when we read an entire book of "weird" material from Eric Frank Russell over four blog posts?  (ONE TWO THREE FOUR)  Good times, good times.  Well, here is a weird Russell story that didn't get reprinted in that 1962 book, Dark Tides.  Why wasn't it included in that volume?  Maybe because it is a weak filler piece?

"The Big Shot" is one of those stories in which the author speculates on the afterlife, another well worn topic of SF writers.  (If you go to those websites where you can read manga for free, you'll find that half the comics in Japan are about some 21st-century goof who gets his ass killed in an accident and wakes up in a Dungeons and Dragons world.)  In "The Big Shot" a big hulking organized crime figure gets blasted by some joker who owes him money and can't pay and then the crook wakes up to find himself on a white road, marching inexorably towards a shining city below a rainbow-colored mountain range.  The brief story covers his realization of what is going on, his bluster and anxiety upon recognition that he is about to be judged, his claims that if he did bad things it was because he had no choice, and the assertion of the great powers that judge human souls that he did have a choice, that he could have been a decent person.

Merely acceptable filler, pedestrian and forgettable.  In 2006 Midnight House put out a volume of Russell weird stories that includes "The Big Shot," Darker Tides.

**********

I have to say that I am not that impressed with Margulies' choices for The Unexpected, the covers of which promise some kind of hellish nightmare experience, stories that are original and disturbing.  Too many of these stories are typical and routine, not scary at all and/or mediocre.  Bloch's story is lame jokes and lame social commentary, while Counselman's is tedious sappy sentimentality about a loving mother. St. Clair, Boucher and Russell offer obvious, even trite, filler pieces.  Leiber's is well done, but the plot is still a little obvious.  Brown's is the most disturbing of the ones we've read recently, seeing as it comes right out and tells you that life is meaningless and you are a fool to try to figure it out, after demonstrating this fact with its plot of pointless unsolvable mysteries.  Looking back over the years, recalling the stories in the book by Manly Wade Wellman, Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon, I think we can say Wellman's is in the banal filler category, Bradbury's is sort of disturbing though not great, while Sturgeon's is likely the best in the book, well written as well as actually disturbing and somewhat original. Well, hats off to 'ol Ted.

More Weird Tales next time, folks.

Three above the night: Leiber, Reynolds and Russell

Let's crack open another SF anthology available at the internet archive, world's greatest website.  Today we've got Groff Conklin's 1965 13 Above the Night, Dell 8741, which would be reprinted in 1969 with a more exciting cover depicting the Death Star blowing up a skull...hey, why not?  isfdb doesn't credit an artist for this compelling and anachronistic image, which is reminding me of George Ziel's cover for Damon Knight's World Without Children and The Earth Quarter.  Today we'll check out three of the thirteen stories reprinted in this cryptically-titled volume (what does "above the night" even mean?), those by Fritz "Grey Mouser" Leiber, Mack "Socialist Labor Party" Reynolds, and Eric "John W. Campbell, Jr.'s favorite author" Frank Russell.

(We'll be reading these stories in the first edition of 13 Above the Night which cost SF fans 60 cents.  The cover upgrade is worth the 15 pennies, believe me.)

"Nice Girl with Five Husbands" by Fritz Leiber (1951) 

Here we have another Fritz Leiber story about unusual sexual relationships.  This one is not all that titillating, and seems mainly to have been written to promote Leiber's apparent "free love" anti-monogamy beliefs (see "The Ship Sails at Midnight") with its depiction of a future in which people run around naked and have group marriages, an optimistic future of world peace and travel to Mars, of cheap energy and high IQs.  Leiber seems to be trying to suggest that nudity and the abandonment of monogamy are of a piece with solar panels and rocket ships, that monogamy and the nudity taboo are like technologies that will soon be rendered obsolete.

Leiber starts the story by positing that there are temporal winds that frequent specific spots on the globe, and if you are at such a spot at just the right time you will be carried to the future or the past.  Then we meet a guy, an artist, who gets swept into the future by one of these winds; he is in the desert so at first he doesn't know he is in the future of 2050, the landscape not having changed so much over a century.

The artist meets a hot girl and she introduces him to her group marriage and our guy learns about this utopian future.  Leiber's story is mostly just slightly oblique description of this utopian future; there is very little plot, the tepid "drama" of the plot consisting of whether or not the artist will realize he is in the future and whether or not the future people will realize the artist is from the past and not just a conservative or reactionary who has an eccentric taste for monogamy, but since we knew from page one the story was about time travel there is no suspense or surprise--and no drama--for the reader.  Leiber tries to add some tragedy to the story--the artist has the opportunity to join the group marriage and this peaceful world but that opportunity is lost when he gets blown back to the inferior monogamous Cold War world of 1950.     

I'm going to have to give "Nice Girl with Five Husbands" a thumbs down, even though it is well-written on a sentence by sentence basis, because it lacks plot and doesn't argue for group marriage and nudism in a logical way, just sort of asserts they are awesome.  Fritz Leiber is in good company when I criticize him here, as his fellow Grandmasters Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon are also good writers who sometimes foist these earnest utopian stories on us.  Portraying alternative societies animated by different (purportedly "better") sexual mores and inhabited by superior individuals is a great SF idea, but these elements can't build an engaging story on their own--to provide the reader some entertainment they should be integrated into a story in which the characters grow or at least change and/or face obstacles as they pursue goals; if the utopia is all there is to the story it can be pretty boring.

Following its debut in the same issue of Galaxy as C. M. Kornbluth's famous "Marching Morons" (another tendentious story I panned), "Nice Girl with Five Husbands" has appeared in time travel anthologies and Leiber collections.  

"Prone" by Mack Reynolds (1954)

Let's take another gander at the odd career of Mack Reynolds, whom we have written about before, a leftist often published by the famously conservative John W. Campbell, Jr., a world traveler who published articles about booze in men's magazines like Mr. and Playboy, a guy whose SF writing I find mediocre but who somehow won some kind of reader's poll at Galaxy and If.

"Prone" is an absolutely lame joke story; the big central joke and all the little jokes over its short duration are all obvious, like jokes a kid could make.  Thumbs down!

      

It is the spacefaring future, and Earth has been at war with Mars for over a century; neither planet has been able to get a decisive edge over the other, leading to decade after decade of stalemate.  The story takes place in the office of Terra's supreme commander.  There is a lot of dialogue about a young service man who is what they call "an accident prone."  (All my life I have encountered "accident-prone" the adjective, but this story introduces me to "accident prone" the noun.  Always learning!)  Wherever this guy goes people trip and computers fail and buildings spontaneously catch fire and on and on, Reynolds giving many examples which I guess are meant to be funny.  A scientist says that most accident prones suffer injury themselves again and again, but this guy is one of the freaks who is never harmed himself but triggers catastrophic accidents to those nearby.  The Supreme Commander has a brainwave--they'll send the accident prone on a secret mission to Mars in hopes he causes the havoc there he has been causing on Earth.

This bargain basement filler piece debuted in F&SF and has been anthologized a fair number of times, somewhat to my surprise.  

"Now Inhale" by Eric Frank Russell (1959)    

Two losers in a row?  Ouch!  Maybe Eric Frank Russell can pull us out of this slump?

As we might expect of a story that debuted in Astounding, "Now Inhale" is a classic-style science fiction story in which a spacefarer uses his intelligence to survive an encounter with hostile aliens.  Russell's "Now Inhale" is reminding me a little of something Jack Vance might do, but unfortunately isn't as amusing or emotionally engaging as a Vance story--Russell fills the story with mild jokes and tries to generate tension with the fact the protagonist is imprisoned and could be killed at any moment, but somehow the story doesn't give you the legitimate laughs and chills a Vance story might.  Still, at least acceptable, maybe mildly recommendable--I kinda like it.  Maybe this counts as good filler.

 

Terra has colonized a hundred planets, and scouts search for still more.  This future human society is at peace with itself and others--criminal humans are given surgery to fix their anti-social personalities, and there is no point in going to war with nonhumans because there are so many valuable uninhabited planets that it makes no sense to waste resources fighting over an inhabited planet.  Of course, Earth still has a powerful space navy, just in case.

Our hero is a scout who operates a one-man craft.  He has to make an emergency landing on a planet inhabited by aliens capable of space flight--they have settled all three planets of this system.  They condemn our guy to execution as a spy.  These natives have a strange custom--as a form of public entertainment, all people on death row have to play a game of their choice (one like a board game or a card game that can be played in a small room) against an opponent chosen by the state before they are killed; the condemned get executed whether or not they win or lose, so they seek not so much to win as to drag out the game.  Invited to introduce the native TV audience to an Earth game, our hero opts to play a game that grinds on for day after day.  (Russell bases this game on what wikipedia is calling "The Tower of Hanoi;" the space scout attributes the game to the priests of the "Temple of Benares."  Wikipedia suggests this is a very famous puzzle but I have never heard of it.  Always learning.)  Over a year passes, by which time a Terran warship arrives to negotiate our guy's liberation.

"Now Inhale" was included in several anthologies, including one on the theme of television and another dedicated to aliens.  I'm not surprised editors wanted to reprint "Now Inhale," because Russell has a good reputation and this story isn't bad, but television broadcast plays very little role in the story, and the aliens aren't appreciably different from standard human villains from a standard adventure story in which the hero gets thrown in the arena or has to play cards for his life or something, so I am a little quizzical.

**********

These don't feel like stellar picks by Conklin, but maybe we'll return to the pages of 13 Above the Night to sample some more of his selections and be more impressed by those.  Stay tuned, time and space travel fans.

Merril-approved 1956 stories: Roberts, Russell and St. Clair

Our curated tour of 1956 SF stories continues.  Who is doing the curating?  Judith Merril, who included in her 1957 anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume a long alphabetical list of "honorable mention" stories printed in 1956, and your humble blogger, who has been selecting stories from this list.  I have been skipping many authors I already know I don't like, but giving some new to me a shot, a strategy which paid off in our last episode, when I enjoyed two stories by Frank Riley.  Today we've got two stories by people--women, in fact!--I don't think I've read before, and two by a guy we have read a lot, Eric Frank Russell.

(See the bottom of this post for a list of links to previous posts on Merril-approved 1956 stories that sparked my interest.)

"When Jack Smith Fought Old Satan" by Mary-Carter Roberts

Mary-Carter Roberts has four credits art isfdb.  "When Jack Smith Fought Old Satan" first appeared in Collier's, but I am reading the version that appeared in F&SF in 1957, as it is easier to find.  I generally find tiresome stories in which some mortal cuts a deal with the devil, so I am sort of inclined to skip this one (especially since it is like 22 pages long), but let's give it a try anyway.

"When Jack Smith Fought Old Satan" isn't really one of those deal-with-the-devil stories, but a sort of tall tale that incidentally or obliquely dramatizes a sort of generalized left-wing anti-establishment/anti-rich/anti-law-and-order attitude.

Her story is set in Delaware in 1769, and as Roberts starts it she hints that she should be considered an unreliable narrator and foreshadows that her tale will be essentially incredible by telling us the story has been passed down by word of mouth generation after generation, and by asserting in what feels like a sarcastic way that it must be true because all who have told it before her were "godly folk."  Roberts also introduces the theme that people from Delaware are "exclusive," though I'm not 100% sure what that means or what it really has to do with the story and to what extent she is being ironic.  (Frank Riley in "Project Hi-Psi" suggests some of the behavior of that  story's main character reflects his New England heritage and upbringing, and maybe what Jack Smith does in this story is supposed to reflect the characteristic personality of people from Delaware in a way that I am not getting because Delaware is one of those states I don't know much of anything about, like Maryland--oh, wait, having lived in Maryland I now know they put that stupid seasoning on everything.)  

Jack Smith is a big strong farmer, a twenty-year-old orphan who has served in the wars against the Indians and is a free thinker, an atheist who refuses to show respect to his social superiors or acknowledge the truth of the Christian religion.  As a result he is ridiculed by the community when he comes into the village to drink at the tavern.  Unnoticed by Smith, the "bound girl" Oma, a fellow orphan who works at the tavern, has fallen in love with him.

The villagers have just finished building the area's first church, but are dismayed to find someone they can never catch has been vandalizing the church physically and supernaturally--not only do the parishioners often find the furniture in disorder, but the bell refuses to ring.

The people figure Satan himself must be to blame--the Devil must be hiding out in the nearby dark woods.  This accords with the old story that the "baronet" who owned the woods in the 17th century refused to donate some portions of the woods upon which to build a school for the poor, saying that he'd rather the Devil had the land than the poor--Satan must have finally taken that mean old rich guy up on his offer a hundred years later.  One guy suggests that Satan's strength comes from the evil of the people of the community, and to drive Satan off they have to punish malefactors more severely--he brings up the case of a bound girl (a different one than Oma) who was caught stealing sugar and who received only a mere six lashes.

Jack Smith the atheist scoffs at the idea that the Devil exists at all, much less is terrorizing the community--he suspects the culprit it is some bound man (lots of bound people in Delaware, apparently) venting his rage against the hypocritical religious person to whom he is bound.  Jack Smith the champion of the poor, after considering catching this hypothetical vengeful bound man in order to disprove the Devil theory, decides against doing so because if caught the bound man will suffer some harsh punishment for his crimes.  Smith also criticizes the idea of punishing criminals more severely.

One thing leads to another and Smith ends up vowing to walk through the woods that very night and fight the Devil if he should encounter him.  Sure enough, on the dark lonely trail, Smith meets Satan and Roberts provides a long and tedious and quite gory description of their fight.  (This story is full of graphic violence.)  In the end, of course, the Devil proves to be essentially unkillable--he only allowed the fight to go on so long because he was testing how tough a guy Smith was.  Impressed by Smith's strength and determination, he tries to recruit Smith to his diabolical cause.  Smith realizes that if Satan is real, so must God be, begs God for aid, acquires the strength to pull the biggest tree in the woods, a 500-year-old oak, out of the earth, and uses it to strike Satan and drive him back to Hell, liberating the community.  Smith marries Oma and when a grateful populace gives them some money they use it to free from bondage that sugar thief.

(I wonder if we are supposed to think that Smith found the vandal and convinced him or her to knock it off and then made up the devil story to tell the gullible Christians when he got back to the tavern.) 

This story isn't bad, and Roberts' writing style is pretty good, but "When Jack Smith Fought Old Satan" is kind of long and it doesn't present any interesting ideas (we've all heard a million times that religion is a scam and that you shouldn't punish criminals) and because it is so unbelievable what happens to the characters doesn't have any effect on the reader's emotions.  I'll call it acceptable.

isfdb doesn't list any appearances for this story besides Collier's and F&SF.  

"Legwork" by Eric Frank Russell

Merril includes two stories by Russell on her honorable mention list, both of them printed in Astounding.  (Alan Dean Foster told us that Russell was Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.'s favorite author, you'll remember.)  "Legwork" was a publishing success, getting reprinted in multiple Russell collections, a 1965 anthology by Groff Conklin which I actually own, 5 Unearthly Visions, a recent British anthology about crime in the future, and two different Italian publications with Karel Thole covers.  (NB: I am reading "Legwork" in a scan of the April 1956 Astounding, not my copy of 5 Unearthly Visions.)

We encounter quite a few SF stories that use aliens as foils for humans in an effort to point out how humans suck--peaceful aliens who are a contrast to violent Earthers, communistic aliens with a collective consciousness that highlight the selfish individualism of humans, aliens who are at one with nature in contrast to us humans who bend the natural world to our will.  You'll be glad to hear that here in "Legwork" Russell uses an alien foil to say something nice about human beings.  

Russell's big theme is that the galaxy is full of intelligent races, and most advance through what he calls "flashes of inspiration" or "touches of genius."  But Earth and the human race are outliers--sure, humans have had those unpredictable "flashes," but our civilizations also advance by simple determined hard work, what we today might call "grinding" and what Russell calls "slogging along," and "plain, lousy legwork."

The Andromedans have conquered many planets, defeated and enslaved scores of intelligent species.  The first step in taking over some new planet is recon, and Andromedan Harasha Vanash is a scout who has investigated fifty planets which the Andromedans have subsequently taken over.  Vanash has tremendous hypnotic powers, and with these powers he can almost perfectly camouflage himself, by projecting into your mind what he wants you to see and remember.  This way he can walk among the natives of a planet, appearing to be one of them, interacting with them and collecting all the info about their culture and capacities required to make conquering them a snap.

The first part of "Legwork" follows Vanash as he lands in the USA and begins his reconnaissance.  Russell makes of Vanash a compelling character and it is entertaining to watch him go about his business.  The next part of the story has as its focus a big fat GF-man, a detective from the Treasury Department, sent to a small town to investigate a bank robbery we readers know Vanash pulled using his hypnotic powers.  This part of the story is very much like a police procedural, with the obese fed Eddie Rider and local police captain Harrison talking about clues and hashing out theories and directing underlings and so forth--dozens of men around the country talk to people and follow possible leads and hunt through files, doing the exhaustive and exhausting legwork of the story's title.  Russell actually makes all this detective stuff sort of interesting, and his style is smooth enough that it goes down easy; even though this story is 40 pages, it never feels long.

When it becomes apparent that an alien being with the ability to masquerade as any man is the culprit, the entire apparatus of the Federal government, including the armed forces, gets involved.  In the end mankind triumphs, and not only is Vanash vanquished, but we get a sense of wonder ending that promises that the human race has taken its first step to seizing the stars and laying low those Andromedans!               

Solid classic SF--thumbs up!

The Urania cover illustrates "Legwork"

"Top Secret" by Eric Frank Russell

After enjoying "Legwork" so much, "Top Secret" is a real letdown, a gimmicky joke story based on puns that tries to get on your good side by appealing to your perfectly natural distaste for government bureaucrats.  (Russell often lampoons government and bureaucrats so maybe "Legwork," in which government people at all levels work hard and do a good job and receive eager support from the populace, is an outlier in his body of work.) 

The Terran space empire and the Zeng space empire are on good terms and have been for ages, but the Terran officer in charge of defending the sector where they are adjacent still worries about how he and his men must act should there be a Zeng sneak attack.  So he sends a message to the commander of forces at planet Motan offering direction on priorities should war break out.  The way interstellar communications technology works in this story, people have to read messages aloud into machines, and because the message has to pass through many stations, eighteen different guys from all different cultures with all different accents have to listen to it and repeat it to pass it on, so that, like in the game of telephone,* the message received by Motan is nonsense.  This gag isn't the springboard for the story's plot--the entire story is just a succession of such jokes as Terran HQ and the Motan base transmit messages back and forth multiple times seeking clarity, only to receive nonsensical messages that only add to the confusion.

Waste of time, thumbs down.  

My denunciation comes too late to prevent Ace and The Dial Press from reprinting "Top Secret" in a 1958 Russell collection (Six Worlds Yonder) and a 1984 anthology (From Mind to Mind.) 

*Today I learned that British people call this "Chinese whispers," which is funnier than this story.

"Horrer Howce" by Margaret St. Clair

St. Clair produced a lot of stories under her real name and under the pen name Idris Seabright, but I have avoided her work because I had the impression she wrote joke stories.  The title of this story leads me to suspect it is a joke story, but I'm giving it a shot anyway in a duplicitous effort to make people think I am open-minded.  

"Horrer Howce" made its debut in the same issue of Galaxy as Theodore Sturgeon's "Skills of Xanadu," which I penned a negative review of back in 2014 ("like a three page essay on what Ted thinks the perfect society would be stretched out to 26 pages....")  People love "Horrer Howce;" it was included in multiple anthologies of stories from Galaxy as well as books edited by Peter Haining and Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg.  Could I be one of those people?  Could I love "Horrer Howce?"

My heart sank when I turned away from the Virgil Finlay illustrations to "Skills of Xanadu" (I'd never seen them before, having read Ted's utopian tedium in the paperback anthology 13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction) and saw the editor's intro to "Horrer Howce" on the first page of St. Clair's story:

Oh no, was this another pun story?

Luckily, St. Clair's story has more to it than bad spelling.  We have two characters, a guy who builds equipment for amusement park haunted houses--mechanical monsters and the like--and a guy who buys such equipment for a national chain of amusement facilities.  After some foreshadowing that suggests artist guy is some kind of intellectual and maybe a political radical, he shows the buyer guy a conventional horror room, one that offers the illusion you are outside by a well--inside the well is an elaborate clockwork monster.

The meat of the story comes in a second room.  Various clues suggest this is not so much a room as a portal to another world inhabited by dangerous alien entities, and St. Clair offers a quite good action/horror scene in which artist guy drives a car on a congested highway--buyer guy comes as passenger--seeking to escape a black car driven by a monster with three arms; the pair witness a similar car catch up to another vehicle and tear apart a (simulated?) human driver.  The pair make it off the highway and back to the office alive, but then the monster busts into the office and kills the buyer.  

It is strongly implied that the man just killed was the third such buyer to be shown the horror highway, and the other two were driven insane by the experience and are no longer in the horror house business.  So the artist guy comes up with a new scheme--he will open portals to worlds where live even more horrible alien entities and use them to build horror houses for the three-armed monsters.

This is an acceptable horror story, and I guess it is also a sort of joke story about how scary was driving on the new highway system?  (I suppose the highways were in the news when the story was written and published, as in 1954 Ike appointed a committee to propose a plan for an interstate highway system, in 1955 Congress received a proposal from the administration, and by June 1956 the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 had been passed and signed.)  Bad spelling and puns don't actually seem to play that big a role in the story--"Horrer Howce" is some graffiti the monsters have left outside the highway room, foreshadowing that they are able to leave the room.  The name applied to the monsters, "Voom," is I guess just a reference to the onomatopoeia "vroom" commonly used to describe or imitate the sound of an automobile; maybe that counts as a pun?

I guess I can mildly recommend this one.  

**********

One of Russell's stories was lame (presumably Merril admired it for its attack on the minds of military men), but one was good and the Roberts and St. Clair stories had their moments and were thought-provoking.  So, a decent batch of '56 stories.

If you want to check out other stories in this series of Merril-inspired blog posts, the links below will facilitate your journey.

Abernathy and Aldiss

Anderson, Allen and Banks
Barrow, Beaumont and Blish
Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler  
Carter, Clarke and Clifton 
Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen
de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle 

Ellison and Fontenay

Galouye, Garrett, Grimm & Gunn

Hart, Herbert and Jones 

Kuttner & Moore, Lang, Leinster, L'Engle and McClintic

McConnell, McIntosh and Melchior

Moore, Norse and Oliver

Porges and Presslie   

Riley and Ritchie

Astounding Jan 1941: L R Hubbard, M W Wellman and M G Hugi and E F Russell

Let's twiddle the knobs and tune in the pre-Dianetics L. Ron Hubbard and read the third installment of Hubbard's Kilkenny Cats series in its January 1941 incarnation in an issue of Astounding, the leading science fiction magazine, at that time edited by the towering figure of John W. Campbell, Jr.  Also in this issue is the first part of Robert Heinlein's serialized Sixth Column, a novel I haven't read yet and won't be starting today.  What we will be reading today from the 1/41 Astounding besides Hubbard's contribution is a story by Manly Wade Wellman, author of many weird stories and space operas, and a collaboration between Eric Frank Russell, reportedly Campbell's favorite author, and Maurice G. Hugi, a guy I don't know anything about.  

(Here are links to my blog posts about the first two Kilkenny Cats stories, "The Idealist" and "The Kilkenny Cats.")

"The Traitor" by L. Ron Hubbard

The colony of exiles on Sereon is in trouble.  Not only are the tensions between the small cadre of educated professionals and the large group of laborers erupting into violence again--perhaps even worse, a green plague has started infecting the colonists.  Fortunately, former royalist space naval officer Steve Gailbraith, who turned revolutionary and once the revolution was won and had  turned on him turned reactionary, a man who doesn't really get along well with the eggheads or the working class thugs, is on the scene to patch things up. 

Steve pretends to be a traitor to his fellow exiles, commandeering the colony's communications apparatus by force and transmitting a cock and bull story to the communist government that exiled them about how the colonists have dug up a space worthy warship abandoned on Sereon long ago and are now preparing it to harass government shipping.  This call brings back to Sereon the space battleship that brought the exiles to the planet.  The ship's officers are untrained and uncharismatic incompetents whom the ordinary spacers and marines don't respect, so Gailbraith is able to seize control of the ship through trickery and personal magnetism.

"The Traitor"'s chase scenes and military scenes, involving various ray guns and force fields and people getting gruesomely blasted, are pretty entertaining.  Hubbard also provides the pay off for the scenes in the last installment that showed how unfit for command were the revolutionary officers of the battleship, and advances Gailbraith's relationship with beautiful propaganda officer Frerdericka Stalton.

Pretty good.  Now that Gailbraith has a space ship, I guess we'll see what he does with it in the next installment of the Kilkenny Cats series.

"Lost Rocket" by Manly Wade Wellman

Here we have a murder mystery in space with not only a cast of suspects/potential victims and a bunch of clues for the cast to cogitate over and argue about, but also the space suits, ray guns, and zero-G physics we SF fans crave.  Wellman handles all this material pretty well, so I enjoyed "Lost Rocket." 

It is the spacefaring future; mankind's furthest flung colonies are among the Jovian moons.  Some robber barons are making more money out there under the Great Red Spot than the government on Earth likes, so in the mail on the latest supply ship is a written order to the current colonial governor, whom the Terran officials have deemed too friendly to the robber barons--he is to stand down and make way for his second-in-command.  But the supply ship doesn't make it to Jupiter intact!  The vessel's engines explode, killing some thirty men!  The bow of the vessel and a limited supply of oxygen remains intact, and the five spacemen who were there when the motor went boom survive: the captain, his lieutenant, a squid-like Martian mechanic, and two ordinary spacers, one young and enthusiastic, the other gruff and "beefy."  The five men figure that one of their number must have sabotaged the ship at the behest of the Jovian robber barons, making sure he was in the bow so he would survive the blast and live to get his reward from the Jovian monopolists.  No doubt a ship working for the robber barons will collect them, rescuing the robber barons' agent and killing the other four men.  Do the innocent spacemen have time to figure out who the villain is before they are picked up by the criminals and murdered?  Could they somehow alter the course of their unpowered coasting rump of a ship?  And what will the canny saboteur do to protect his identity and make sure he hooks up with his payday? 

I liked the space walk scene and the fight scenes, but the mystery is pretty good as well.  Thumbs up for "Lost Rocket!"  

Wellman is a pretty well-known and well-liked writer, and I recommend "Lost Rocket," but according to isfdb it has never been reprinted.  The publishing world can be as cruel and inexplicable as the void between the stars!

"The Mechanical Mice" by Maurice G. Hugi and Eric Frank Russell

Anthologists may have given "The Traitor" and "Lost Rocket" the cold shoulder, but not "The Mechanical Mice," which appears in multiple US and European anthologies.  The story was printed under Hugi's name here in Astounding and in the 1957 edition of Healy and McComas' Adventures in Time and Space I consulted at isfdb; Terry Carr, however, in his 1978 anthology Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age, credits it to Russell, and explains in his intro to the tale.  It seems that Russell wrote the story based on the germ of an idea that was included in a story Hugi wrote but which was rejected by editors some twenty times; Carr tells us Hugi was a good friend of Russell's, but "a dreadful writer."

(Carr's intro is pretty colorful, describing Russell typing the story in Liverpool during a Luftwaffe raid and letting Hugi take credit for it as a favor to a sick friend close to death who would be cheered up by seeing his name in Astounding.  Like a real scholar, Carr provides a long citation list of his sources for his intro, which also touches on the history of SF in Britain in the early 20th century, so if Russell or British SF generally is one of your interests, check it out.)

"The Mechanical Mice" is a pretty good SF horror story, with gore and some sense of wonder elements that perhaps inch into cosmic horror territory.  One of my complaints about "The Mechanical Mice" is that while Russell employs first-person narration, he also includes long passages describing in detail events to which the narrator was not a witness; Russell should have just composed the entire thing in the third person.  

The narrator is a writer, and he has a friend who is an inventor.  Friend some years ago invented a super efficient battery.  In the beginning of this story the narrator learns how his pal came up with that impressive invention.  You see, this brainiac also has, secretly, invented the "psychophone," a thing you attach to your noggin that allows you to look into the future!  What you witness is largely random, but the inventor was lucky enough to peer through the mists of time and watch a person of the future manufacturing a battery; he was then able to reproduce that process in his own 20th-century lab and thus made a mint marketing to consumers the superior technology of the far future.

(As in so many time travel stories, in "The Mechanical Mice" Russell addresses time paradoxes and the possibility of changing history; Russell asserts that you cannot change history.)

The narrator dons the apparatus and takes a crack at observing the future and witnesses scenes of violence and grue in a totalitarian dystopia in which people are controlled via headsets they are obligated to wear.  The tone of "The Mechanical Mice" is that of a weird horror tale, and the futures it depicts are strange and disturbing.

The inventor has another mind-blowing revelation for the narrator.  For years now, based on his glimpses of the future, he has been building a machine, but he doesn't actually know what the machine does.  It appears that the inventor, gazing into the future, laid eyes upon an advanced machine, a robot, that was capable of detecting the inventor's prying eyes and even look back, implanting into his mind blueprints and hypnotizing him into making a replica of itself in the 20th century.  The inventor shows the resulting mystery machine to his friend; it is is a sort of refrigerator-sized box on casters adorned with camera eyes as well as antennae that remind the narrator of a devil's horns.  In keeping with the story's horror tone, the narrator repeatedly describes the machine as being the size and shape of a coffin, and both our main characters uneasily recognize a sinister "air" about it.

The second half of "The Mechanical Mice"'s 18 pages concern how this future machine proves to be a terrible menace and our heroes and some minor characters fight it.  Russell uses animal analogies to explain how the machine operates.  The machine, it turns out, is like a queen bee that gives birth to swarms of smaller robots; these robots are likened to rodents, being mouse- or rat-sized, and capable of scurrying along with terrific dexterity at astonishing speed.  So like rodents are they that cats who see them instantly attack them, but these little droids are armed with wickedly sharp blades, and over the course of the story many felines are killed, Russell describing in some detail their bloody wounds.  The mechanical mice steal watches and clocks and bring them back to the mother robot, and anybody who tries to stop them gets cut.

Our two guys wreck the mother robot, and we have a sort of climax and denouement in which the inventor muses on the robot-dominated future of Earth (offering a crumb of optimism by raising the possibility that the robots only take over the world because mankind has graduated from an Earthbound existence and emigrated to the stars.)  But then for some reason the story keeps going, with another mother robot discovered (built by mice from the first one) and the mechanical mice's reign of terror continuing.  So our heroes have to find and destroy this one as well.  This final part has some good gore scenes and a fun idea on how to defeat the robots, but Russell should have somehow integrated that material into the struggle with the first robot queen--two climaxes is one too many; after the defeat of the first robot queen I couldn't muster up sufficient interest in a second queen to make lengthening the story in this way worthwhile.

As I have suggested, I have some gripes about the construction of this story, but the plot and themes are good and individual sections are all well-written.  So, thumbs up.

**********

Three entertaining stories that make good use of so many beloved standard-issue SF components: inventors, space warships, forcefields, space suits, ray guns, malevolent robots, and time travel.  A solid issue of Astounding.

More Astounding and L. Ron Hubbard next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.   

Eric Frank Russell: "Somewhere A Voice," "U-Turn," "Seat of Oblivion," and "Tieline"

When I read John D. MacDonald's "Appointment for Tomorrow" in a 1949 issue of Super Science Stories recently, a commenter pointed out its similarities to Eric Frank Russell's "U-Turn," which first appeared in a 1950 issue of Astounding.  I looked up "U-Turn" at isfdb and saw it was reprinted in a 1966 collection with Frank Kelly Freas cover and interior illustrations, Somewhere A Voice.  The collection presents seven stories by Russell, three of which, "Displaced Person,"  "Dear Devil" and "I Am Nothing," we have already read, and four we have not.  Let's experience that quartet today as SF fans first experienced them, in scans of the magazines that hosted their original appearances.  Should you be curious to see Freas's illos (crashed rocket, caped creep, tentacled monster, child with automatic weapon, etc.) there's a link to a scan of the 1966 Dell paperback (F-398) at the isfdb page for Somewhere A Voice.  Also, nota bene, there is reason to believe Russell revised the stories for book publication--a look at the first paragraph of "Somewhere A Voice" indicates at least some changes were made to that story--so my comments below may not apply to the stories as they appear in the numerous editions of the collection.  

"Somewhere A Voice" (1953)

"Somewhere A Voice" made its first appearance in Other Worlds; this issue boasts not only a front cover that appeals to lovers of both birds and felines, but a fun back cover by Hannes Bok and a pointless autobiographical sketch by Russell in which he talks about how he doesn't like to write autobiographical sketches.  In 1957 "Somewhere A Voice" was reprinted in the British magazine Nebula.  In addition to the numerous different editions of the collection of which it is the title story, the story can be found in a big 1992 Russian anthology.

You'll be thrilled to learn that "Somewhere A Voice" is a story that celebrates diversity and debunks prejudice and bigotry, teaching us that, among other things, not every Chinese man is an opium addict and not every Jewish person carries diamonds around with him.  Keep a copy of this one in your back pocket to whip out when you hear someone bemoaning how old science fiction is white supremacy projected upon the stars.  

The Star Queen was hit by a meteor and wrecked, and almost everybody among her hundred-plus crew and passengers was killed.  A handful of people (and one dog) made it to the lifeboat in time and as the story begins they disembark onto a planet bathed in dangerous solar radiation whose toxic atmosphere gives life to endless jungles within which writhe carnivorous plants and skulk ambush-laying monsters.  One survivor is big and strong space sailor Bill Mallet, deputy engineer; another is First Officer Alex Symes; a third is Max Kessler, head of the third watch.  Mallet is dismayed to see that they are the only white crewmen to have survived the disaster--the remainder of the survivors consists of two elderly obese Russians, a Jewish passenger, an Asian who was a cook's assistant or something, and an unskilled "Negro" mechanic.  How are they going to survive the march to the nearest settlement--a trek of 2,000 miles!--with these losers slowing them down?  

For like thirty pages the party hacks its way through the jungle, regularly fighting the voracious native life.  One by one the human survivors of the shipwreck get killed, but before he is broken, torn or poisoned to death, each of the minorities has an opportunity to demonstrate courage, strength of character and unexpected capabilities, and before Bill Mallet himself expires he learns that people are all the same and tolerance is the most important virtue.  In the end Mallet, the last to die, also gets religion--delirious, he hears a voice reciting Matthew 11:28 in his head.  This is a surprise not only because science fiction stories are generally dismissive or even hostile to religion, but because it isn't foreshadowed at all, but seems to come out of nowhere.

Mallet keels over just as a rescue helicopter spots him and the dog--the dog is the only survivor of the Star Queen disaster.  The role of the dog is one aspect of "Somewhere A Voice" that sticks out, Russell suggesting this canine is an equal member of the party, that tolerance shouldn't be limited to human beings, but should be extended to our four-legged friends as well.  (I guess this is a data point in support of the cliché stereotype that English people love animals.)

"Somewhere A Voice" feels long.  Did we really need to see five different representatives of marginalized communities--two fat old foreigners, an African, a Chinese and a Jew--perform prodigies of self-sacrifice?  It gets a little monotonous; maybe one or two such characters would have driven the point home.  Individual scenes are also pretty long--Russell describes in great detail Mallet's provision of first aid to a number of his stricken companions, which I guess is meant to illustrate his burgeoning human connection to them (and maybe his massaging of somebody's feet is supposed to remind us of John 13), but again, it gets a little repetitive.  There is also little suspense in the story--once the first marginalized person sacrifices himself, you sort of know that they are all going to do it, and you can guess pretty early that the real journey Russell's story describes is Mallet's journey from racist xenophobe to diversity advocate, so whether he makes it to the settlement doesn't matter.

Merely acceptable.  Obviously a story to read if you are interested in depictions of racism and anti-Semitism and xenophobia in SF, and sympathetic depictions of Christianity in science fiction.

"U-Turn" (1950)

Lester Del Rey (in the intro to The Best of Eric Frank Russell) reports that Russell was John W. Campbell, Jr.'s favorite SF author, and here we have one of several stories from Somewhere A Voice that was first printed in Campbell's towering magazine, Astounding.  There the story was credited to Duncan H. Munro, a pen name Russell used three or four times, and appeared alongside tales by A. E. van Vogt, L. Ron Hubbard and L. Sprague de Camp.  It would later show up in the 1974 Dutch collection Welkom Op Aarde... and the 2000 American collection Major Ingredients.  

"U-Turn" showcases themes we see in lots of these old SF stories--the idea that utopia is overrated and to thrive people need challenge and even hardship; the cognitive elite who manipulate the masses for their own good; and the smart guy who uses logic and his science knowledge to figure everything out.

Our protagonist is a big success in the future of freedom and plenty that has been built by high technology, and Russell gives us lots of examples of how easy life has been made for the human race, and also lets us know that mankind seems to have reached its limit.  Rockets routinely carry people between Earth, the Moon, Venus and Mars, and Mars and Venus have been completely civilized.  However, rockets can't reach the planets beyond the asteroid belt, much less those of other star systems, and the matter transmitters in use that can transport things further than a rocket are not that reliable, so are only used to move inanimate objects.  Progress has ended--life on the inner planets can't be made any more luxurious and men can't venture further out--so our super rich protagonist, after over 200 years of productive life (he's on his third rejuvenation treatment) finds life a bore.  So he heads to the suicide facility, where a series of clerks try to gently dissuade him from destroying himself.  He is determined, however, and so steps into what is ostensibly an elevator to the upper floors where he will be euthanized, but which is in fact one of those unreliable matter transmitters.  Our guy reappears on the primitive Callisto colony, one of the lucky few whose atoms get correctly rearranged upon arrival.  Life is dangerous on Callisto (everybody wears a side arm) and everybody works hard using hand tools under the beautiful view of Jupiter, which is just the kind of life and work our hero is looking for!

In the last section of the story we learn that the protagonist had predicted that the suicide facility was actually a teleporter to a distant colony, and in the dialogue between him and the colonists who greet him, Russell explores some speculative sociology and political economy.  The utopian society is a bewilderingly complex machine, and a radical change might lead it to collapse.  If the general public knew there was even a slim chance of moving to a colony where life consists of real productive work with their hands and exciting fights with monsters, there would be a huge wave of volunteers to take that chance, which would put dangerous stress on the delicate economy and social order, so the authorities have kept the colonization program a secret, and just left a few clues for the smarty smarts to figure out how to volunteer and erected obstacles to deter all but those truly determined to leave their lives on Earth behind.

This story is more compact than "Somewhere A Voice" and the little details of the future world are more interesting than the details of the jungle in that story, and the themes of "U-Turn" are more challenging than the "don't be a bigot" preaching of "Somewhere A Voice."  I'm giving this one a mild recommendation.      

"Seat of Oblivion" (1941)

Here we have an entertaining sort of weird crime story, my favorite so far today.

Wade is an inventor, and he has built a working prototype of a device that bathes you in radiation that increases your spiritual power.  With all that extra spiritual power, your soul can free itself from your body.  This isn't as awesome as it sounds initially, as your body dies immediately upon you vacating it, and the extra spiritual power you have absorbed dissipates pretty quickly, so you have to take over another person's body quite soon after vacating your own, and doing so casts the other's soul into oblivion.  

A big fat investor financed this invention, and he isn't too crazy about the result--how can he make money on what amounts to a suicide-murder machine?  Scientist and humanitarian Wade isn't interested in money--he has the idea that his machine can be used to aid mankind by ensuring the longevity of people like himself.  Instead of executing heinous criminals in the electric chair, with the new machine geniuses who are elderly or terminally ill could migrate into the healthy bodies of convicted felons.  (Russell, in this story, dismisses materialist explanations of intelligence, personality and memory--your memories are not engraved on your brain physically or chemically, but are a component of your soul, so if you take over some other guy's body you don't take on any of his psychological attributes or gain access to any of his memories, or lose any of your own intellectual attributes.  This sort of thing makes "Seat of Oblivion" feel more like a weird tale than an actual science fiction story, but when I say that I am just describing, not complaining--you know I love Weird Tales as much as I do Astounding.)

The obese moneybags may not see possibilities for this machine, but Jensen the professional thief and three-time murderer does!  Jensen recently escaped from death row and is eavesdropping on Wade's conversation with his overweight backer.  Jensen murders the fat guy, forces Wade to teach him how to use the machine, and then takes possession of the machine and embarks on a crime spree; again and again he takes over some innocent person's body, robs a bank, and then takes over some other guy's body.  The public and the authorities are flabbergasted by the series of robberies committed by previously upstanding citizens who are then found dead, their bodies unmarred by any injury.

Wade works with law enforcement and they figure out a way to catch Jensen; Wade then destroys his invention, convinced the human race is not ready for it.

The 1979 German trans. of Somewhere A Voice (right) is abridged, including only
the title story, "U-Turn," "Seat of Oblivion" and "Dear Devil"

"Tieline" (1955)

Here's another Astounding piece that appears under the pseudonym Duncan H. Munro.  It would go on to be included in an Ace Double first published in 1958 and then reprinted in 1971 with different covers, Six Worlds Yonder.  

"Tieline" addresses a topic I associate with Barry Malzberg--the worry that participation in the effort to conquer space will drive people insane.  Our protagonist is the only man on a little island on a planet almost entirely covered in calm waveless oceans; his job is to maintain a transmitter that acts as a beacon, and he will be here all alone for ten years.  There are no large land animals, just fish and utterly silent insects, and the boredom and loneliness and silence threatens to drive the guy insane.

There are many such beacons across the galaxy tended by lone individuals, and the authorities are always trying to figure out new ways to stave off the plague of insanity that threatens to afflict their interstellar lighthouse keepers.  This brief story details a few of the methods they come up with to try to keep our particular guy sane; the idea is to create a connection ("tieline") to life on Earth.  A supply ship delivers recordings of Earth sounds, but they grow boring once they are too familiar.  Then a praying mantis is delivered, but the protagonist finds it too quiet and too alien--he's never seen one before, the mantis was never part of his life on Earth, so cannot serve as a tieline for him.  The story ends when something that really reminds him of his youth on the Outer Hebrides is delivered--hundreds of sea gulls.

Acceptable.

**********

'Seat of Oblivion" is actually a good thriller, and the other three stories, while not as entertaining, represent efforts by Russell to address interesting or important issues, issues where the lives of individuals and societies intersect, and he more or less succeeds in saying something intellectually or emotionally arousing.  Four stories worth the time of the classic SF fan.