Merril-approved 1958 stories by P Ustinov, J Vance, J Vatsek and K Vonnegut, Jr.

The year: 1958.  Our mission: To explore the SF of that year.  Our guide: critical darling Judith Merril.  On the last leg of our journey through the year the Hope Diamond made its way to the Smithsonian Institution, the first communications satellite reached orbit, and the Fifth French Republic was founded, we finished off the "T" authors included on the Honorable Mentions list in the back of Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume, and today we'll tackle the sole "U" on the list and the three "V"s, reading two stories by people considered important outside our beloved SF ghetto that debuted in mainstream publications, as well as a story by one of the giants of SF that debuted in a lesser pulp and a story by some woman I've never heard of that first saw print in one of the most pretentious SF periodicals.  Today we are celebrating diversity here at MPorcius Fiction Log--when the revolution comes, tell them to spare me!

But first!  A list of links to the twenty-two (!) previous stages of this epic journey!

Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin
Pauline Ashwell, Don Berry, and Robert Bloch
John Brunner, Algis Budrys, and Arthur C. Clarke
"Helen Clarkson" (Helen McCoy), Mark Clifton, Mildred Clingerman and Theodore R. Cogswell
John Bernard Daley, Avram Davidson and Chan Davis
Gordon R. Dickson 
Charles Einstein, George P. Elliot, and Harlan Ellison
Charles G. Finney, Charles L. Fontenay, Donald Franson, and Charles E Fritch
Randall Garret and James E. Gunn 
Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert, and Philip High
Shirley Jackson, Daniel Keyes, and John Kippax

Damon Knight and C. M. Kornbluth
Fritz Leiber, Jack Lewis and Victoria Lincoln
Katherine MacLean, "T. H. Mathieu" (Les Cole) and Dean MacLaughlin 
A. E. Nourse
"Finn O'Donnevan" (Robert Sheckley) and Chad Oliver
Avis Pabel, Frederik Pohl, and Robert Presslie

John T.Phillifent, Kit Reed, Mack Reynolds, and Charles W. Runyon 

Margaret St. Clair, Thomas N. Scortia and John Shepley

Robert Silverberg and Clifford Simak

Cordwainer Smith, Will Stanton, and Job Stopa

Theodore Sturgeon, William Tenn, and Walter Tevis

"The Man in the Moon" by Peter Ustinov

Ustinov is one of those guys who people say is some kind of genius, and who am I to disagree?  I barely know anything about him!  I recognize his name and face, though, I guess from Spartacus and all those Agatha Christie things my mother would watch.  

"The Man in the Moon" debuted in The Atlantic Monthly, one of those magazines smart people are always talking about, alongside a poem by John Ciardi, whose translation of the Divine Comedy I read back when I thought there was a chance I might amount to something and figured I should read real books and not just stuff about monsters and adventures to improbable locales.  You can read "The Man in the Moon" at The Atlantic's website, which is what I did; PDF scans of the original magazine are also out there in the Wild West that, for the time being, is still the internet.  The story was collected in Ustinov's Add a Dash of Pity.

Ustinov was an Englishman, though of Russian ethnicity, and some kind of activist who worked to confer upon the world the dubious blessings of world government, and "The Man in the Moon" is a tepid satire full of lame and obvious jokes the point of which is to attack British imperialism and promote world government.  Good grief!  

A British scientist with a Swiss friend develops a means of reaching other planets.  He hopes to go to America to discuss his success with other scientists.  The British government stops him from going to the US because they want to keep the ability to explore other planets in British hands with the hope of regaining the leading position in the world that Great Britain had in the 18th and 19th centuries.  In response, the scientist gives speeches in which he decries fear of the Soviet Union, insists he is not a patriotic Briton but a man of the world, makes disparaging remarks about Rudyard Kipling, denounces European imperialism and racism, compares the current British government to that of Nazi Germany, and laments that if mankind reaches other planets the result will be racism against and exploitation of aliens and war between humans, a replay of the colonialism and world wars of the period 1492-1945.

The story ends with the revelation that the English scientist has managed to get his innovation to Switzerland and so the Swiss are the first to land on the moon.

Banal politics plus tired jokes about the scientist's relationship with his wife and kids equals a story that feels like filler and offers neither entertainment nor intellectual stimulation.  "The Man in the Moon" is like a Socratic dialogue you've already heard bolted onto a hunk of bare bones sitcom humor you've already seen.  Thumbs down!  (You've probably already figured out on your own why leftist Merril, who is always trying to shoehorn mainstream figures and mainstream publications inside the SF tent as part of her project of dissolving the barriers between the literary mainstream and genre literature, felt the need to promote this mediocrity with a snooty pedigree.)

"Worlds of Origin" AKA "Coup de Grace" by Jack Vance

From one of our most reputable publications to a pulp magazine that wikipedia and the Science Fiction Encyclopedia suggest is a piece of garbage, Super-Science Fiction.  "Worlds of Origin" is one of the ten Magnus Ridolph stories and has been reprinted many times in Vance collections as well as in a few Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg anthologies under the title "Coup de Grace."  I own a copy of the issue of Super-Science Fiction in which the story debuted, and actually have already read the issue's Robert Silverberg, Robert F. Young and Koller Ernst stories, and it is in its pages that I will read "Worlds of Origin" today.  I'll also note that the Emsh illustration to the tale, featuring an old bearded skinny guy and an old fat balding guy and a slender elfish young lady, is quite good.

This is a fun detective story full of clever and amusing science fiction elements.  Vance with admirable economy sets a scene and describes characters and alien societies in a way that is interesting and his charming dialogue brings a smile to the face of the reader again and again.  The story also seems to push (perhaps ironically and insincerely?) what we might call a liberal or left-wing commonplace--moral relativism, the idea that each culture has its own theory of right and wrong and it is pointless to judge one theory as better than any other.  

Magnus Ridolph is on holiday in a space station hanging in interstellar space that serves the role of a resort.  There are a bunch of people in the station, among them an anthropologist who has with him three "palaeolithics" or "cavemen" he has restrained with various high tech devices.  He approaches Ridolph, saying he needs help because he is being pursued by a woman.  Ridolph, being on vacation, is not very interested in helping, and their interview is interrupted besides.

The next morning the anthropologist is found dead.  The resort space station is floating out in a region of space claimed by no government, so there are no police to solve the crime, so the resort owner enlists Ridolph the famous detective.  Lacking the scanners and analyzers that an official police force would employ to solve the crime lickety-split, Ridolph must rely on his knowledge of the cultures of the many suspects to determine who must be the killer.  Each suspect is interviewed, and Ridolph solves the case.  Because Vance comes up with a strange and fun (and by 20th-century standards, amoral or evil) culture for each of the suspects, and because the relationship between Ridolph and the resort owner is amusing, the interviews are actually fun, not the tedious blah blah blah of red herrings we get in so much detective fiction.

Thumbs up for "Worlds of Origin," a successful detective story which is also a successful humor story and which includes many entertaining science fiction elements and is, perhaps, a tricky philosophical story about moral relativism.

         

"The Duel" by Joan Vatsek

On her website, Joan Vaczek Kouwenhoven's daughter, Elizabeth Arthur, includes a bio of her mother, whose "The Duel" appeared in F&SF under the name Joan Vatsek.  Vatsek was born in the United States during World War One, the daughter of a Hungarian diplomat, and lived in Europe, Canada, Ohio and Egypt before making her career and getting married twice in the environs of New York and Washington, D.C.  Vatsek has only three credits at isfdb, but produced quite a number of mainstream (maybe some of them are thrillers?) stories, novels and plays.  As for "The Duel," it was included in one of those anthologies with Alfred Hitchcock's name on the cover that has been reprinted in numerous formats.

Laurence, a writer, grew up in a 17th-century house in Virginia, the remains of a slave plantation.  He has returned to the now lonely and remote house with his wife, Janine, who is graceful and not conventionally beautiful, but like a Durer drawing, arresting and unforgettable.  Janine doesn't like the house.  She is a superstitious sort; for example, she doesn't like it when moonlight lands on the bed.  (This is a superstition I never heard of before.)  One day, Laurence finds Janine using a makeshift ouija board; Janine's mother taught her this technique of communicating with the dead.

Janine acts as if she has developed a relationship with a soldier who died during the War of Independence and is buried on this property.  This Major Jamieson brags about his martial and sexual successes, and is jealous when Janine is intimate with her husband Laurence.  Laurence of course thinks his wife is loony, and considers taking her to a shrink, even though she seems happier than she ever has been.  But he holds off, and we get the horrible climax--Janine, in love with the ghost, helps the Major slay Laurence, but too late Janine realizes that the Major does not love her, only enjoys killing men and seducing women, he seeing other people as no more than opponents to be manipulated and defeated.  Janine goes insane.   

Of course I think Merril chose to promote this story because it was written by a woman whose work had appeared many times in mainstream venues, but "The Duel" is pretty good so I can't fault her for the choice.  The story moves along at a decent clip and has various memorable images; in particular, a fetishistic erotic scene in which Janine, who uses a wine glass as the ouija board's pointer or planchette, grasps the stem of the wine glass and touches her mouth to its rim as if she is stimulating a phallus, all while her poor husband watches. 

We might see "The Duel" as a story about gender roles.  Janine's mother worked hard to provide Janine a good education, and had hopes Janine would be a writer or painter or actress or something.  Janine took a stab at these vocations, including doing actual remunerative work at an ad agency, but was never much good at them, or at least lacked the drive to succeed at them.  This sort of broke her morale.  Major Jamieson, the 18th-century womanizer, tells Janine a woman need not be useful, merely ornamental, and this assuages her guilt--embodying pre-feminist or anti-feminist views of a woman's role makes her happier than feminist career-oriented ones have, at least on the short term.  The story not only contrasts the frustrated career-oriented Janine of New England with the ornamental Janine of Virginia, but middle-class 20th-century Laurence and 18th-century aristocratic Major Jamieson--Laurence is committed to his wife and works for money, while the ghost is a guy whose life (and afterlife) are occupied with seducing women and killing men in duels.  The differences between the way Laurence manifests manhood and the Major does seems to advantage the Major--while Laurence, working hard on his books to pay the bills, cannot spend much time with Janine, the Major, a decadent and amoral aristocrat, is with her all the time and makes her happy.  Of course, the Major ultimately cannot satisfy Janine, he being totally selfish; "The Duel" may also be about how, for women, sexual relationships with men are always unsatisfactory.  

"The Manned Missiles" by Kurt Vonnegut 

Kurt Vonnegut is one of those writers of science fiction like J. G. Ballard and Doris Lessing who has a sparkling reputation among mainstream critics, and "The Manned Missiles" debuted in the mainstream women's magazine Cosmopolitan.  (Before TV took over the culture, magazines like Cosmopolitan included lots of fiction; I will also note that it appears that, before the 1960s, Cosmopolitan was geared towards wives and mothers, not sexually-active single career women, as it has been in my lifetime.)  It is easy to see why Merril liked the story, why it is in a women's magazine, and why the mainstream critics like Vonnegut--"The Manned Missiles" is a reasonably well-written sentimental and manipulative tear jerker (the characters actually cry) and it is also one of those stories that tries to get you to believe that the Soviet Union is no worse--hell, it's better!--than the United States.  A lot of educated people seem to believe this of the USSR, like a lot of educated people purport to believe that a man who cuts off his testicles (or says he plans to someday maybe cut off his testicles) is a woman, and it is hard to tell to what extent they really believe this stuff and to what extent they say it to advance and protect their relationships and careers.  "The Manned Missiles" is also one of those stories that tells you space travel is a total waste of time, that individuals probably can't handle it and the human race probably won't benefit from it.  (Remember that Camille Paglia quote about how if women were in charge we'd all still be living in grass huts?)

"The Manned Missiles" comes to us in the form of two letters, one from a citizen of the Soviet Union and one from an American, both working-class men who had ambitious sons who became astronauts and died when their space craft, the first manned Soviet and the first manned American space craft, collided out in space.  There is a lot of room for interpretation because both writers may be considered unreliable narrators, people deceived by their governments, but on the surface it seems like the Communists put up a manned satellite to study the Earth for peaceful purposes (or maybe spy on us?) and the untrusting Americans sent a rocket up to destroy the Soviet satellite (or maybe just spy on it?)  Vonnegut makes the Russian (though maybe he is Ukrainian) sympathetic and admirable, all high-minded and wise and cute (he calls satellites "baby moons"), with a son who was some kind of genius and suffered terribly in space from nausea and so forth.  The Yankee Vonnegut makes sympathetic but pathetic, a religious rube whose son was a single-minded and selfish square who was ambitious because of psychological problems.

Like Ustinov's story, "The Manned Missiles" is what you expect a story that employs science fiction devices but appears in a mainstream outlet to be, a rehash of lame left-wing politics married to family dynamics drama.  Vonnegut at least makes a go at writing in the voices of diverse characters and showing why space travel is stupid and the commies in the East are no worse than the hypocritical liberal market societies of the West instead of just speechifying about it like Ustinov, and Vonnegut tries to make you cry by portraying parents talking about their sons who were killed by the hubris, venality and paranoia of the ruling class instead of trying to make you laugh at bargain basement jokes about marriage like Ustinov does.  We'll call "The Manned Missiles" acceptable.

I read "The Manned Missiles" in a scan of 2017's Complete Stories and you can find it in other Vonnegut collections as well.

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The Vance is the most fun and entertaining and the most science-fictiony story of today's group, Vance coming up with wild settings and cultures, perhaps as a means to illustrate and maybe undermine the idea of cultural relativism.  The Vatsek is also a success as an entertainment and it is probably the most sophisticated of today's stories; she takes a traditional ghost story format and hooks it up effectively with a love triangle element with some powerful if sneaky sexual components, and uses this material to talk in an undogmatic way about gender roles.  Vonnegut and Ustinov's stories are just tendentious anti-Western Cold War dogmatism, Ustinov bludgeoning you while Vonnegut uses tried and true literary devices in an effort to pull your heart strings.  Taken as a group, not a bad illustration of the variety of what could be accomplished in 1958 with fantasy and science fiction techniques.

Final ABC: Vonnegut, Wyndham and Young

The day has arrived!  Finally, we will finish up Tom Boardman Jr.'s 1966 anthology An ABC of Science Fiction, a book which presents a story for each letter of the alphabet, each letter represented by a writer whose last name begins with that letter.   There are only three stories remaining, because we are skipping "X" (lame limericks written under a pseudonym) and "Z," Roger Zelazny's "The Great Slow Kings," which I read back in 2014--it totally fits in with the recurring theme of this anthology that human beings are terrible and with the general jocular or satiric tone of the book's stories. 

"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1961)

In grammar school we read "Harrison Bergeron" and at the time I was a little surprised to be reading a story in a school textbook that seemed to be either making fun of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution or criticizing the doctrine of equality or both.  "Harrison Bergeron" first appeared in F&SF and has been reprinted many times and even filmed several times.

It is the year 2081 and thanks to constitutional amendments (of which there are over 200,) the government ruthlessly enforces equality by mandating various handicaps.  Smart people have to wear ear pieces that disrupt their thoughts with piercing noises, strong and agile people have to wear weights that slow them down and wear them out, attractive people must don hideous masks, etc.  The plot concerns George and Hazel Bergeron, whose son, Harrison, is the strongest and smartest man ever born and who has been arrested.  G and H are watching ballerinas on TV--the ballerinas, weighted down and distracted, are fumbling all over the place.  Suddenly Harrison, having escaped, bursts into the TV studio, declares himself Emperor, throws off his handicaps and those of the most gifted of the ballerinas and demonstrates how beautifully two talented people can dance.  Then the government official in charge of the handicapping agency, a woman, arrives and shoots down the self-proclaimed Emperor and his lovely Empress.

On its face, "Harrison Bergeron" appears to be a ferocious, over-the-top attack on radical egalitarianism and government efforts to achieve equality.  But when we look at the wikipedia page on Vonnegut we see that he was a socialist who thought Americans too quick to denounce communism.  I think we have to entertain the strong possibility that "Harrison Bergeron" is not a warning against government interventionism but a lampoon of such warnings, that Vonnegut here, like the New Yorker with its controversial cover illustration in which Barack Hussein Obama is burning the Stars and Stripes and his wife is carrying a Kalashnikov, is painting opposition to government that actively pursues "social justice" as ridiculous.

The outlandish nature of some elements of the story--Harrison is a seven-foot tall fourteen-year old who breaks chains with his bare hands, and he and his Empress discover the ability to fly--seems to support such a reading, as does the name of the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers; while her first and middle names obviously reference the hunter goddess who shoots people as a means of punishing hubris, her last name reminds one of labor leader Samuel Gompers.  Maybe Vonnegut is presenting to readers a satiric view of how he believes supporters of limited government see themselves (as god-like individualists) and their opponents (nagging, autocratic and irrational people, especially women.)  It may be notable that Harrison Bergeron, the super-strong genius, tries to use his superior abilities to overthrow our republican society and make himself Emperor, like the kid in Pohl's "The Bitterest Pill;" lefties think we need a powerful public sector to keep private individuals with superior resources from lording it over others. 

Obviously this story suits the themes of An ABC of Science Fiction that people are jerks and the future is going to suck, and like so many stories picked by Boardman it is some kind of satire.  But unlike many of the other pieces in this book it is actually funny and offers hope, whether we take it at face value (Bergeron and his Empress win a brief victory over the government and give voice to the greatness of which a free humanity is capable) or as a satire of anti-socialist beliefs (by showing that opposition to government is so silly that socialism, as Marx would insist, is bound to succeed in the end.)

Well-written, fun and thought-provoking, maybe the best story in the book.  (I like to be the guy who goes against the conventional wisdom, the guy who prefers Gilligan's Island to A Night at the Opera and Led Zeppelin to the Beatles, but "Harrison Bergeron" is irresistible.)

"Close Behind Him" by John Wyndham (1953)

John Wyndham is widely admired, though you may recall that I dumped on his 1955 novel The Chrysalids, AKA Re-Birth, when I read it in long ago 2015.  Let's see if this story, first seen in Fantastic, and since reprinted in many Wyndham collections and horror anthologies, is more to my taste.

"Close Behind Him" is not a science fiction story at all, but a supernatural horror story, more or less a vampire story.  It is good, though, so thumbs up.

Our protagonists are a pair of burglars, Smudger and Spotty, who bust into a big old house whose owner lives alone, but periodically holds some kind of well-attended, sinister occult meetings.  The owner attacks them like an animal, biting and clawing instead of defending his life and property with a weapon, and Spotty kills him with the pipe he carries to deal with homeowners who give trouble.  When they abscond from the house the thieves find that Spotty is being "pursued" by red bloody footprints which match his own footfalls, each appearing a few yards behind him as he takes a step.  Smudger murders his colleague, hoping to escape this paranormal pursuit, but then the steps start following him.

Wyndham's story is mysterious enough that for a while we readers can suspect that justice is being served, that the burglars, as punishment for committing murder, are being harried by something akin to the Greek Furies (I've kind of got the Furies on the brain because of my recent reading of T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion and still more recent reading of Lyndall Gordon's discussion of that play in her book T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life.)  Back at Smudger's home this theory is exploded.  The bloody footprints gradually appear closer and closer, and, after two days of suffering a life-sapping anemia and dreams of a black hovering manlike form, Smudger dies.  The doctor who looks in on the burglar is present when Smudger expires, and, as he leaves, Smudger's wife sees that the footprints are now following the medical man.  Why is the monster chasing the doctor?  Presumably it is just a hungry beast, not any sort of avenger of wrongs.

This story is well-written and has a good basic concept, but I think the confusion over the monster's character--what exactly is it and what "rules" does it follow?--is a weakness.  There are early clues that the homeowner is some kind of male witch or maybe a werewolf, but then the importance of blood and Smudger's dreams and anemia put you in mind of a vampire.  The doctor thinks Smudger is just suffering hallucinations born of a guilty conscience and knowledge of lines from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but we know he is wrong because Spotty and Liz (Smudger's wife) also see the footprints, and that they are real because Liz wipes up the blood.  None of these classic templates--Greek Fury, witch, lycanthrope, vampire, hallucination--really fits what is going on and Wyndham doesn't supply any clear explanation of what is going on.  I guess the monster is just a "ghost" that does whatever would be scary at the moment?           

Still, a decent piece of work.

"Thirty Days Had September" by Robert F. Young (1957)

Early this year I read Young's "The Ogress" and found it to be an entertaining enough adventure story with a sort of high-concept premise ("what if the gods and monsters of ancient myth were real, super-beings created by the collective psychic energy of primitive superstitious people, and on other planets there are primitive villagers who unwittingly create these dangerous creatures and the Terran government needs to send out hunters to destroy them?")  Hopefully this story will be at least as good.

It's the early Sixties--the early 2060s!  When salaryman George Danby was a kid he was one of the last people to be taught in a school building by a robot teacher because his little rural town couldn't get TV reception; his own nine-year-old is taught over the television like all the kids nowadays.  But George doesn't think it is quite the same, and when he sees a refurbished fourth-grade robot teacher in the window of an antique shop, he is moved to buy it.  He's buying it to help his kid study, and to help his wife Laura with the cooking and sewing, of course--he's definitely not buying Miss Jones because of those blue eyes and that hair that "made him think of September sunlight..."! 

Some SF stories speculate about future societies which are radically different from the society in which the writer lives; Heinlein has people on the moon with new marriage practices, Delany and Lee have societies in which getting a sex change is trivially easy, Sturgeon has the planet where incest is the norm, Wolfe has his future of illiterate immortals, and on and on.  And then there is the SF that just depicts the society in which the writer lives but with futuristic trappings.  In "Thirty Days Had September" Young depicts a caricature of the 1950s with robots thrown in so he can air his rather conventional gripes about postwar America.

Miss Jones is not a hit at the Danby household because it criticizes the TV shows Laura and the brat watch all day--the siege of Troy, the aftermath of the war of Eteocles and Polynices, and the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, all reimagined as Westerns--and because the private companies who operate the tele-education system have filled viewers' heads with anti-robot-teacher propaganda.  The brat even kicks Miss Jones, damaging it so it limps.  Late one night, after he's had a few beers, George sits with his arm around Miss Jones while the machine recites some original lines from Romeo and Juliet--it's one of the happiest moments in George's life!  But Laura comes out of the bedroom and catches them, and insists George return Miss Jones to the antique store.

But this story has a happy ending!  Laura's dream is to replace their Buick with a Cadillac, so she does not complain when George starts working nights at a hot dog stand to make some extra money.  Laura will probably never find out that the owner of the hot dog stand has purchased Miss Jones to perform as a member of his wait staff!

Young in "Thirty Days Had September" calls out the citizens of the land of the free and the home of the brave for their obsession with automobiles and TV Westerns, their consumerism, and, I guess, the fact that most of them aren't kicking back after a long day working at the office or cooking, cleaning and raising the kids at home with volumes of Homer, Sophocles and Shakespeare.  Young suggests that postwar America is a society in which life is meaningless.  One of the problems of his story is that Young doesn't suggest where people should find meaning or where they found meaning before the rise of America's car- and TV- oriented consumer culture.  The average person is not going to find meaning in life reading ancient Greek and Renaissance English literature, and Young doesn't mention some of the obvious things that have given meaning to the lives of ordinary people in the past, things like religion or working with their hands.  Miss Jones obviously represents the more meaningful rural life of George's past (half a dozen times we are told she reminds him of "September"), but how that life was more meaningful is left unsaid; maybe Young thinks it is obvious?

One way people imbue their lives with meaning is through loving relationships with their family members, and Young does address this, perhaps obliquely.  Laura and the brat, avatars of consumerist TV and car culture, are obviously not going to offer opportunities for meaningful love relationships, but perhaps Miss Jones, a robot, is.  Young includes many descriptions of Laura and Miss Jones's physical appearance, and while both are described as attractive, Laura is described primarily in sexual terms (she's had her breasts augmented, for example), while Miss Jones is more wholesome--we do hear about the rise and fall of her breasts as she mimics human breathing, but mostly we are told that her face and hair and so on remind George of "September."  In one weird metaphor George looks at Laura in her pajamas, which have images of automobiles printed on them, and imagines she is allowing the cars to "run rampant over her body, letting them defile her breasts and her belly and her legs...."  Are we supposed to think consumer culture has ruined sex, made sex disgusting?  Maybe we are supposed to see Laura as a shallow, materialistic and status-obsessed creature who is only good for (debased) sex, and Miss Jones as a sort of Beatrice figure, a beautiful but chaste woman who will lead George to a spiritually fulfilling life?  (That's Lyndall Gordon's influence on me again--Gordon has a whole riff on how, after his disastrous marriage to the unstable Vivien Haigh-Wood, whom he married because he wanted to lose his virginity, Eliot sees the respectable and even-tempered Emily Hale as his own Beatrice figure.)  My Beatrice theory would be stronger if Young actually mentioned Dante or Virgil, which he does not do.   

If we strip away the sex stuff, the tone and theme of this story is reminiscent of Ray Bradbury's work--the hostility to TV and cars, fear that books will vanish, nostalgia about small town America, sentimental depiction of a relationship with a robot, etc.

Not bad; like Helen Urban's "The Finer Breed," "Thirty Days Had September" is perhaps an  interesting historical document that reflects the complaints of intellectual types about 1950s America, and it is perhaps also worthy of the attention of students of SF for its depictions of women and sex (feminists could easily do a whole madonna-whore analysis of this story) and for its invocation of "serious" literature.

First printed in F&SF, "Thirty Days Had September" has been reprinted in numerous American and foreign anthologies, many with a robot theme.

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It is good to leave An ABC of Science Fiction on a high note after some of the rough patches we had to go through there in the middle.

So, can I recommend An ABC of Science Fiction?  Well, it looks like I judged eight stories "good," ten stories "acceptable" and eight stories "bad."  That sounds like a pretty good average, to be honest.  People considering purchasing a copy have to also take into account the type of stories Boardman favors; despite the advertising text on the first page, An ABC of Science Fiction is not really representative of the whole range of SF, much of which is optimistic and fun.  This anthology has a high proportion of joke stories and satires--there are few realistic stories or hard SF engineering-based stories or adventure-type stories or utopias--and a high proportion of pessimistic stories--there are lots of stories with criminals as protagonists and lots of stories in which human society is outwitted, defeated, or actually collapses, and few stories in which people solve problems or triumph over obstacles.  Sometimes in SF we find stories that criticize our society by providing a contrasting example, or that show that people can grow and societies can change--there are quite a few SF stories in which the agent of the evil corporation joins the noble rebels or in which the soldier of the racist military joins the aliens to war against his own people or in which goody good aliens teach or force us naughty naughty humans to behave.  Most of the stories here in An ABC of Science Fiction, however, present no such hope--we are bad and doomed, and maybe on our way to hell we will infect other races with our evil--this thing is all Goofus and no Gallant.

OK, let's rank order the stories.  I am confident in my judgement of in which of the three categories each story belongs, and less confident of the proper rank of each story within its category.  Life is short, and I am not going to devote a lot of time to figuring out if the lameness of the limericks of "B. T. H. Xerxes" outweighs the odiousness of Damon Knight's "Maid to Measure" and should pull it down to the very bottom of the heap.

GOOD

"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut
"The Fence" by Clifford Simak
"Let's Be Frank" by Brian Aldiss
"No Moon for Me" by Walter M. Miller
"Project Hush" by William Tenn
"X Marks the Pedwalk" by Fritz Leiber
"Thirty Days Had September" by Robert F. Young
"Close Behind Him" by John Wyndham

ACCEPTABLE

"Homey Atmosphere" by Daniel F. Galouye
"Day at the Beach" by Carol Emshwiller
"Love Story" by Eric Frank Russell
"The Awakening" by Arthur C. Clarke
"The Conquest by the Moon" by Washington Irving
"He Had a Big Heart" by Frank Quattrocchi
"In the Bag" by Laurence M. Janifer
"The Finer Breed" by Helen M. Urban
"The Great Slow Kings" by Roger Zelazny
"Pattern" by Fredric Brown

BAD

"Family Resemblance" by Alan E. Nourse
"Final Exam" by Chad Oliver
"Mute Milton" by Harry Harrison
"The Bitterest Pill" by Frederik Pohl
"I Do Not Hear You, Sir" by Avram Davidson
"The King of the Beasts" by Philip Jose Farmer
Three Limericks by B. T. H. Xerxes
"Maid to Measure" by Damon Knight

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More short science fiction stories from my shelf of anthologies in our next episode!

Half Price Books' List of 100 SF Novels: 51 to 100

Here we are as in olden days, considering Half Price Books' List of 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy books worthy of "geeking out" over.  Oh those kids and their wacky slang.  Today we are cutting a rug with selections 51 to 100, chosen by 3,000 "bibliomaniacs."  That's right, over the objections of the union, we are doubling production for this post.

51, 52 & 53) The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, Dies the Fire by S. M. Stirling, and Old Man' s War by John Scalzi
These are all books I have not read by authors whose books I have not read.  I remember people on the SF newsgroups praising Anubis Gates, and I have considered reading Stirling's books about people going to Venus and Mars, and John Scalzi gets a lot of attention in what the kids are calling "the blogosphere," but somehow I have not read any of their books yet.

54 & 56) The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers and The Electric Church by Jeff Somers
I haven't heard of these books or authors before.  Am I getting a magic realism vibe?

55) The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson  
This gets good press, but I'm not moved.

57) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I might read this some day.  It is my understanding that it is a condemnation of the Allied policy of raining bombs on Nazi Germany.  Maybe we've found something on which Vonnegut and John Ringo of Watch on the Rhine fame can agree.

58) Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
I own the very edition chosen by the bibliomaniacs to illustrate their list.  This is Volume II of the Gormenghast Trilogy.  I own all three of the books, and have read Volume I, Titus Groan. I wanted to like it, and I finished it, but it seemed very long and slow - its over 500 pages of tiny little print, like 38 lines to a page!  There wasn't much plot that I can remember.  A bunch of weirdos live in a huge castle and have difficult conversations with each other, then there is some kind of climactic one on one fight, then a funeral.  I must be forgetting something; I am told this is one of the greatest classics of 20th century British literature.

Gormenghast looks to be even longer than Titus Groan. 

I like Peake's illustrations to the book; will that protect me from charges of philistinism?

59) Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
People are always hailing this as a masterpiece, so I am not surprised it is on the list.  I don't find overpopulation and ecological scare books very interesting, though, and the only John Brunner book I have read (Maze of Stars) was very weak.  Also, this thing is over 500 pages long.

Add another charge of philistinism to my record.

60) Mort by Terry Prachett
I read the first Discworld book when it came out, and it didn't make me laugh, so I have never read any more Terry Prachett books.  I'm not crazy about SF books whose main goal is to be funny or to be a parody of other SF books. 

In a brush with fame, on June 30, 2003, I posted something banal on the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup, and Terry Prachett, or someone using the name, agreed with me.

61) Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
I remember women in the office reading this during the Harry Potter craze, and my wife read it as well.  Wizards during the Napoleonic Wars?  Not for me.

62) Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
I've enjoyed some Zelazny, like This Immortal and Damnation Alley and some short stories, and disliked some, including the first Amber book which I read as a kid, disliked, and then tried as an adult, and disliked again.  Lord of Light I have not attempted.  Maybe someday.

63) Ladyhawke by Joan Vinge
Ladyhawke?  I laughed when I saw this on here.  Joan Vinge is a respected writer, but a movie tie-in for a B movie?  Are the bibliomaniacs just recommending it because Michelle Pfeiffer is so good looking?   The cover image of the paperback is an arresting portrait of Pfeiffer, no doubt.

I hate going to the movie theater, smelling other people and listening to them eat.  I can recall all the films I have seen in a theater, because the number is so small.  Ladyhawke is one of the movies I saw in a theater with other kids when it came out.  We thought it was silly - we were cynical kids.  There is a scene in which we see the interior of a castle from the point of view of a fighting man in a visored helmet; we laughed because looking through the slots of the visor as the soldier advanced looked like the view from inside a TIE fighter.  The double crossbow also made me groan.  I was a real killjoy.     

Seeing the Ladyhawke tie-in here makes me wonder why there are no Star Wars or Star Trek books on this list.  If those movie/TV tie-ins were excluded, why not this one?  Half Price Books' bibliomaniacs work in ways mysterious.

64) I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
I read at least some of these stories as a kid, and of course like everybody I know the Three Laws of Robotics.  I can't recall anything about these stories, though.  I'm guessing they are puzzle stories, in which a robot behaves oddly and the human characters sit around and figure out the peculiar way the robot interpreted the Three Laws of Robotics.  Very droll.

65) Armor by John Steakly
I've already described my thinking about MilSF.

There's quite a bit of MilSF on this list, but not the series I thought was famous, one I have actually read a little of, David Drake's "Hammer's Slammers."   

66, 67 & 75) The Lathe of Heaven, The Wizard of Earthsea, and the Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
I've never read any LeGuin.  I've always assumed these books would be some kind of feminist polemic.  I got my fill of feminist polemic at Rutgers and CUNY. Maybe I am missing out.  My wife has read some LeGuin, but I think they were "mainstream" books, not any of these.

68) The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey
I might have read this when I was reading those Pern books, or maybe I just read about it.  The idea of imbedding a human intelligence in a machine is of course a good idea.  Probably I wouldn't read this today.

69 & 71) Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell and Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
I must be out of touch; these I have never heard of.

70) War with the Newts by Karl Kapek
Here we go with the esoterica, a book written in Czech in 1936.  Maybe people are reading this in college?

According to Wikipedia this is an attack on racism, fascism, nationalism, consumerism, and scientism that lacks a central character.  Sounds like fun.  The film was scheduled to be released in 2013, and is still in production.  Don't pulp all those extra copies just yet, Half Price Books people! 

72 & 76) To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
I've never read anything by Willis.

73 & 99) Stardust and Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
I've not read anything by Neil Gaiman. This is magical realism, right?  My wife, Gene Wolfe, and Tori Amos all like Gaiman, but so far I have resisted their blandishments.

74) Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link  
You're not going to be shocked to hear I haven't encountered this one before.  The cover is a "reimagining" of my favorite painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, "Lady with an Ermine."  I think Leonardo is a little overrated; I like Leonardo, but I think Michelangelo, Rafael, and Botticelli are all superior.  One mark of their superiority is that the secret codes embedded in their paintings have yet to be deciphered.

77) Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
I remember the women in the office back in New York lugging this around.  This is a romance novel about a woman who goes back in time to fight in some sexy Anglo-Scottish war, right?  I can't really poke fun at this after gushing about Princess of Mars, can I?

Wasn't it annoying when every time Scotland came up in conversation somebody had to perform that "we got colonized by wankers" soliloquy?  I don't miss those days.  

78 & 79) Mockingbird by Walter Tevis and This is the Way the World Ends by James Morrow
These are books I've never heard of.  I've been living under a rock!

Mockingbird sounds like it might be interesting, and would give me excuses to reminisce about New York.

Morrow is one of those guys who makes sure his pets are mentioned in his Author's Bio.  Woof!  This is the Way the World Ends takes an audaciously bold stand and tries to awaken the public to the possible negative effects of a nuclear war.

80) Robotech: Battlecry by Jack McKinney
Ladyhawke doesn't look so crazy now, does it?

When it was first on U.S. TV I loved loved loved the Macross sequence of Robotech.  I thought the mecha designs and the Zentraedi space ship designs were brilliant, and I even thought the soap opera story of the Rick Hunter/Lynn Minmay/Lisa Hayes love triangle and the Romeo and Juliet story of Max and Miriya Stirling worked.  (On the inside I am a sentimental sap.)  I loved the background music and the funny subplot about the three alien spies (it's like Ninotchka, isn't it?). I bought Macross comic books and role playing game books, I drew Zentraedi battle pods in my notebooks during boring college classes. I was hooked.

When I first saw these Jack McKinney novels I was past my Robotech phase.  The story of how they came about, which I just read on Wikipedia, is pretty interesting.  Jack McKinney is a pen name for two writers, one of them Brian Daley.  As a kid I read Brian Daley's Han Solo's Revenge.  The other kids in school saw me carrying it around, and so, one day, when they were trying to start a fight between me and some other kid, one of these little bastards told me, "You need to get revenge on him, like Han Solo!" 

81 & 82) Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marrillier and Resurrection by Arwen Elys Dayton
These must have been published while I was in that coma.

83 & 84) Parable of the Sower and Kindred by Octavia Butler
I haven't read any Octavia Butler.  We were supposed to read a Butler book in my Science Fiction class at Rutgers, but either we didn't get to it, or I just neglected to read it.  I wasn't a very conscientious student.

85 & 86) The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass by Phillip Pullman
Covered these already.

87 & 88) Grass by Sheri Tepper and Three Days to Never by Tim Powers
Nothing is coming up on the scanner.

89) Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
Often, at the New York Public Library's Mid-Manhattan Branch, I would pick up their hulking copy of this book, feel I should read it, then put it back as appearing too forbidding.  I had read Delany's Nova and The Ballad of Beta-2, both of which I thought were just OK.  Today I can remember almost nothing about either.  

The Wikipedia page for Dhalgren makes the book sound very exciting, with titans of SF ranged on both sides, ecstatically for or against the book.  800 pages full of typos, however, is an investment I am not currently willing to commit myself to. 

90) That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis
I was disappointed in Out of the Silent Planet, so didn't get to this one.

91) Logan's Run by William Nolan and George Clayton Johnson
I've seen this movie, and never considered reading the novel. 

92) The White Mountains by John Christopher
I read the three Tripods books as an adult, and enjoyed them.

93) Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov
I thought this movie was fun because of the art direction, special effects and cast, but I never thought to read the book Asimov came up with based on the screenplay.

94) Mister Monday by Garth Nix
I see this guy's name in the anthologies I take out of the library.  Is this a kid's book?

"Tuesday Afternoon" by the Moody Blues and "Drive In Saturday" by David Bowie are great songs.  When I was a kid I went through a U2 phase, and loved "Sunday, Bloody Sunday."  

95) Ringworld by Larry Niven
This is a good novel, but has a bunch of nagging problems.  The characters are too much like caricatures, you can't take them seriously and you can't care about them.  The book's tone is too silly and light.  Also, Niven's idea that "luck" is not only real, but hereditary, is irritatingly stupid.

96) The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans   
I kind of want to read this.  When I was young I read Watt-Evans' Cyborg and the Sorcerers and really enjoyed it.  I'd like to read that again.  

On a side note, I like many of the realistic cover paintings Darrell K. Sweet and Michael Whelan have done over the years.

97) Robopacalypse by Daniel H. Wilson
I feel like I just failed a spelling test. 

98) The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor
Looking Glass War is my favorite novel by John Le Carre.  Is this the sequel?

100) The Giver by Lois Lowry
This is SF?  Who knew?

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Final notes on omissions
  
There is no Frankenstein, no Dracula, no I Am Legend, and no H. P. Lovecraft.  Maybe the Half Price Books bibliomaniacs consider that those popular and important books belong in the horror category.

There's also no H. G. Wells or Jules Verne, which is odd, especially when we see Karl Kapek on there.

Gene Wolfe and Jack Vance are not represented. Wolfe and Vance have devoted followings in the SF community, and are the kind of SF writers who receive praise from prestigious mainstream institutions like The New York Times, so it is noteworthy that the bibliomaniacs left them off but put a cartoon tie-in and a movie tie-in on there.

There are fantasies I've never heard of on the list, and fantasies the critics frown on as Tolkein clones, like Sword of Shannara, but no Conan or Elric.  Robert Howard and Michael Moorcock have been very influential, have critical defenders, and Conan and Elric are very popular, so it is a little strange.

If Lord of the Rings and the Pullman thing had been considered as a single book there would have been space for representative works of famous authors like Arthur C. Clarke or Harlan Ellison, writers important to the history of the SF field like Poul Anderson or A. E. Van Vogt, or acknowledged classics like Pohl's Gateway and Haldeman's Forever War.

Still, this is a fun list of SF books, and I encourage everyone to rush to the library to seek them out.  I mean to Half Price Books.  And keep an eye out for the faithful adaptation of War with the Newts starring Will Smith coming soon to a theatre near you.

Half Price Books thinks I should read these "classics"

I got a free calendar at Half Price Books, but this wasn’t a sign of unconditional love. Half Price Books includes on the page for August (I still got time!) a reading list. A reading list! Is this what I have to do to show I am worthy of Half Price Books and their free calendar? Let’s see, maybe I’ve got a head start on my assignment.

1) To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
I read this in school, and thought it was pretty good. And of course I saw the movie. All you science fiction fans out there already know that Scout was the model for the young woman in Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage, a decent SF novel in the style of a Heinlein juvenile.

While I think To Kill A Mockingbird is good, I always suspect it is on these kinds of lists (and on the top of this list) because it advocates for the values the people who make these lists want us all to have and fear we don’t have. Is To Kill A Mockingbird really the best book of all time, or the book you most should have already read or whatever? I am skeptical.

2) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Everyone is constantly talking about how great this book is, but somehow they have yet to overcome my sales resistance. Part of the problem is that I feel like I know all the ins and outs of the plot from seeing it on TV three hundred times, mostly the long version starring the pretty girl from “Absolutely Fabulous” and the pretty girl from “House of Cards.” The lead actress is also pretty, but I’ve never seen her in any other show, so I call her “the pretty girl from ‘Pride and Prejudice.’”

Maybe someday I’ll read Pride and Prejudice and be amazed at how great it is. But not before August.

3) Lord of the Flies by William Golding
We read this in school, and I read it once as an adult as well, and it is pretty good. We were all saying “Sucks to your assmar” for months afterwards. I mean as a kid, not when I read it as an adult. Well, not as much.

4) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Like Lord of the Flies we read this in school, and then I read it as an adult. Somehow it didn’t make the impression on me that it makes on a lot of people; I thought it was just OK. The thing I always remember about it is that it was the first time I saw the word “holocaust” outside the context of the German program to exterminate the Jews, without a capital letter.

Anyway, I think the “Great American Novel” is Moby Dick.

5) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
I read this once as an adult, and it is pretty good, due to the plot and ideas. I don’t remember thinking the style was very good.

6) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I haven’t read this one. I read Cat’s Cradle at Rutgers, and I read at least one other Vonnegut book as an adult, but I wasn’t blown away by them, and have not read any more Vonnegut. (Well, we read “Harrison Bergeron” in high school, which was not bad.) Someday I may read Slaughterhouse-Five, but probably not before August.

7) The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
I have not read this, and am quite unlikely to. I read The Three Musketeers as an adult, and was amazed at how lame it was. A boring adventure story full of lame jokes? I couldn’t believe it. Not only was the alleged adventure boring and the alleged jokes not funny, but after spending my whole life being sympathetic to the Huguenots, in The Three Musketeers I am supposed to think of them as the enemy? I kept hoping a Huguenot sharpshooter would kill Balthazar, Melchior and/or whatever the other guy’s name was.

I think maybe Half Price Books is going to break up with me.

8) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Like Pride and Prejudice, this one has lots of good PR, but I have yet to be sold on it. Like Pride and Prejudice I have seen more than one version on TV, and the plot seems OK. Maybe I’ll read this one day.

Or maybe not. In college (on the banks of the old Raritan, as we say) I read Hard Times, and didn’t think it was very fun. (I had a hard time reading it, ha ha.) My other exposure to Charles Dickens, like everybody else with a pulse, is from seeing three million versions of "A Christmas Carol," three million times each. As a kid I always thought Grand Moff Tarkin, Darth Vader, and Boba Fett were cooler than Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, and I had the same thing going with Scrooge and all those nags trying to get him to stop saving his money. When the Death Star explodes, or Boba Fett gets eaten by that, uh, well, we all know what it looks like, I feel a little deflated, and I always feel a little deflated when Scrooge gives in to the nags and starts throwing his money around, trying to buy their love or maybe their silence. I don’t know if Great Expectations is a celebration of nags and a denunciation of frugality, but I fear it could be.

9) Animal Farm by George Orwell
Orwell is a good writer with a very good style, and this is a good book. Of course, I may be vulnerable to the charge that I like this book because I am hostile to the Soviet Union. Maybe there are Bolshevists out there who think Animal Farm sucks, and suspect it is on these kinds of lists because the people who write these lists are members of the bourgeoisie and are trying to brainwash the proletariat. Maybe it is on this list at number 9 as a sop to those of us who are going to roll our eyes when we get to number 10 and it is The Grapes of Wrath.

10) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
I haven’t read this, and I doubt I will. I saw the movie and it seemed about as subtle as a sledge hammer and sickle. If I want to hear somebody’s extravagant moaning about being poor, I’ll call up my mother.

And as I’ve already said, I think Moby Dick is the “Great American Novel.” Captain Ahab uber alles!

*********

Alright, let’s look at the totals. I’ve read half the books Half Price Books thinks I’m supposed to read. But I’ve read some of those twice, so maybe Half Price Books will cut me some slack. And maybe I’ll get some bonus points if I’ve read some of the 30 additional books on the list at the website. (A reading list of 40 books! Half Price Books is high maintenance!) I haven’t looked at this full list of 40 books yet, and I sure hope Homer, Virgil, Dante, Nabokov, Boswell, Proust, and Melville are Half Price Book’s idea of “classics”; if J. K. Rowling and that The Life of Pi guy are on the list, I may be in trouble.