Milton Lesser: "The Man Who Made His Dreams Come True," "So You Want to be President," & "He Fired His Boss"

The first issue of Dream World, the magazine edited by Paul W. Fairman that promised "A New Kind of Fiction" and "Stories of Incredible Powers," printed two stories by Milton Lesser; we read one of them recently, skipping the one that looked like it was about the gorillas of the gridiron.  The second issue of Dream World boasts three stories by Lesser, each under a different pen name.  Let's flip through this second issue of this odd 1957 magazine, apparently designed to appeal to readers' fascination with sex, that only endured for three issues, and then read Lesser's three contributions.  

This May '57 ish of Dream World has an editorial by Fairman in which he argues that the original purpose of fiction was to provide entertainment and escape, and tells us that Dream World's stories represent a return to that role, a role which has been neglected in our modern world in which fiction is supposed to be realistic and educational and prepare people for "the grim struggle ahead" that is life, which is full of "frustrations and limitations."  I thought this an odd thing for a SF editor to say, as the people who founded SF magazines like Amazing--which Fairman was editing when he wrote this Dream World editorial--and populated fandom in science fiction's early days thought the point of science fiction was to teach people about science, prepare them for the future, and/or propagandize them into embracing socialism and world government.  Or at least claimed that was the point.  Presumably, if you spoke to the guy, Fairman would say that there is room in the SF world for both fun adventure and sex stories and stories that critique society and speculate on the future, but he doesn't say that in this editorial. 

There are five pages of weak cartoons in the back of Dream World Vol. 1 No. 2, and a joke quiz consisting of ten pretty stupid questions that is said to have been devised by some egghead to help you choose what kind of person to marry. 

...if you checked more brackets than circles, it is imperative — according to our psychologist friend — that your intended be a person of strong moral fiber....if you checked more circles than squares you should marry a person who doesn’t take life too seriously....We personally feel there’s a much better basis for selecting a bride or groom for yourself. A little thing called love.

Groan.

The highlight of this ish of DW as far as I can tell is a full page illustration by the great Virgil Finlay depicting a devil girl tempting a man in a suit; this illustration is appended to the second of today's stories, "So You Want to be President."  None of today's three stories was ever reprinted, it seems, so I'll decorate this blog post with that illo and with some of the quiz questions.  To read these rare stories yourself--and take the full quiz!-- head over to the internet archive here or luminist.org here.  But don't blame me if you feel you wasted your time--I am warning you right now that none of Lesser's stories is good.

"The Man Who Made His Dreams Come True" 

Alex is at his bachelor party--tomorrow he marries Janey.  His old college chum, who is still carrying the torch for Janey, is drunk and claims Alex is only marrying Janey because Janey's dad will get Alex a nice cushy job!  A fight breaks out.  But is Alex's drunken pal right? Janey is far from Alex's dream girl--she's just OK.  

At night, after drinking still more while alone in his apartment, Alex, in bed in his PJs, is visited by a gorgeous woman who appears in a cloud of incense.  After some rigamarole in which this woman teases and then pushes Alex away, multiple times, she explains that she is a creature of the subconscious--Janey's subconscious!  She is the woman Janey wishes she (Janey) could be.  This being of the dream world hates Janey for bottling her up, and tells Alex to not marry Janey, but to instead stay single and frolic with her (the dream girl)--she promises that if Alex agrees, she (the dream girl) can bring all kinds of wonderful things and experiences from the dream world for him to enjoy, the same way he can enjoy her.

The next day Alex marries Janey, even though the dream girl is there, haunting him, distracting him, trying to get him to jilt Janey.  This idealized version of Janey also shows up in Paris, where Alex and Janey are honeymooning, and she keeps trying to separate Alex from his newlywedded wife.  One night, after having sex with Janey, Alex is persuaded by the dream girl to go with her into the dream world, an Orientalist city where the women walk around topless and he is given the job of managing the sultan's harem. 

In this dream world the friend he had that fight with is the sultan and Janey is a newly acquired slave girl.  The sultan demands Janey for the night and Alex doesn't want to hand her over, so he leads her on a daring escape through the city out into the desert.  Then we get a deus ex machine ending in which Alex gets three wishes and the last of them is wishing that Janey take on the admirable attributes of the dream girl, who after all is Janey's own vision of herself but better, sexier.

This story starts off mediocre and gets worse and worse as it goes, each page less sensical and less entertaining than the last.  The rules of how the dream world works and interacts with the real world keep changing and many scenes are repetitive or superfluous, making for a long and boring and  irritating story.  Thumbs down! 

"So You Want to be President" 

The basic idea of this story is like something you'd expect to see on a kid's TV show that intends to offer the kiddos valuable moral instruction.  An ordinary guy thinks the President is making mistakes, has his own ideas for the policies the President should pursue (like giving away lots of food--wait, doesn't the government already give away lots of food; maybe not in '57?) and then through supernatural agency he comes to realize the President's job is not so easy as he thought it was.  Good grief!  This is not the sex the cover promised me or the escape Fairman promised me in his editorial!  Thumbs down!

His friends being out of town, our narrator, a bookkeeper, is all alone in the District, as those of us who spend time there call the swamp, and he gets to talking to an attractive woman in a bar.  He loves to talk about how he thinks the President could do a better job, how he, the narrator, could do better at some aspects of the job.  The woman invites him back to her apartment, but when he tries to kiss her she hits him with an umbrella and tells him she didn't bring him here for the obvious form of entertainment, that was just a ruse, but to give him his chance to be President.  She uses her special powers to cast this dope's mind into the body of the President, presumably (but maybe not really!) replacing the mind of the man chosen by the people to lead our glorious republic.

Our guy panics and stays locked in the Presidential bedroom for days, saying he is sick but refusing any doctor entry.  Then he finally emerges and tries to enact all his policies, like handing out more food.  His advisors explain why that policy, and all his other ideas, would be a disaster.  (Too many handouts would lower the price of food and cause the collapse of food producers, they say.)  None of the bookkeeper's ideas is put into practice.  Then comes a big meeting in Switzerland with the leader of the Soviet Union and two other unnamed nations.  It turns out all the leaders of big countries are ordinary goofballs occupying the bodies of the men who formally came to power.  When he gets back to the White House, the narrator is confronted by that woman again.  She explains that he is being returned to his normal body and the next goof is being put into the President's body--it seems the world is ruled by an endless series of average joes manipulated by beings like this woman, who only has the Angus Young Highway to Hell horns and tail in Finlay's picture, not the text.

Bad filler.  Maybe a little better than "The Man Who Made His Dreams Come True," because it is shorter and less boring, but only a little better.

"He Fired His Boss" 

Anderson works at an ad agency with a sort of joke name--this story is full of feeble jokes.  The boss, Smedley, is a tyrant who likes to humiliate the employees.  Here's one of Lesser's jokes: the boss has "bovine eyes" that "looked as out-of place on his craggy-lined catastrophe of a face as lavender and old lace on an elephant's rump."  What?  

Anderson has failed to get the contract with a big client, a perfume manufacturer, renewed.  The boss calls him in to yell at him; also in the office is the boss's daughter, who also has cow eyes.  The boss insists Anderson make another stab at getting that perfume contract again, implying the sexy woman who represents the perfume company will sign if Anderson makes a pass at her.  If he fails to get the contract renewed, he will be fired.  

His attempt at making a pass at the perfume executive is a disaster--she slaps Anderson's face.  That same night Anderson attends the reading of the will of an aunt he didn't know he had until she keeled over.  It turns out this aunt owned more than half the stock of the advertising agency.  So, Anderson gets fired but inherits enough common stock to seize control of the firm from which he has been fired.  He fires his former boss, and, when the perfume exec hears about Anderson's new position as head of the advertising firm, she runs over to Anderson's apartment and throws her clothes off.  But before Anderson can bang this chick, the boss's daughter comes to the apartment to throw herself in his arms, offering her body in exchange for Anderson giving her Dad his job back.  Or any job.  Anderson realizes those bovine eyes look pretty nice.

When the two women realize they are both in Anderson's apartment to have sex with him they get pretty angry with him, but Anderson realizes the way to deal with women is to be firm, and he lays down the law.  The women admire the "iron" and "fire" they see he has "in his blood" and so Anderson is able to have sex with cow-eyes in the living room after promising her father a job as office manager and then go to the bedroom to have sex with the perfume company executive, who, apparently, always found him cute but couldn't get aroused by a man unless he had high status.  It is implied Anderson is going to be banging these mercenary chicks regularly in the future.

I'm going to call this story barely acceptable filler.  "He Fired His Boss" is cynical, but at least resembles the kind of dream of incredible power that enables a man to have sex with multiple women that this magazine promises--"So You Want to be President" is a bait and switch with no sex and instead a lame moral lesson.  And "He Fired His Boss" isn't shoddy or overly long and boring and full of superfluous repetitive scenes like "The Man Who Made His Dreams Come True;" there isn't a lot of fat in this third story, every paragraph of the story advances the admittedly lame plot or is exploitative or is an admittedly weak joke.  "He Fired His Boss" succeeds in achieving its meagre goals and deserves a "C-", a passing grade that nobody should be bragging about.

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Based on today's experience I have to tentatively conclude that Lesser is not a very good writer and Dream World is not a very good magazine.  Of course, I'm the kind of person who puts his hand in the fire a second time to make sure it burns, so we'll be checking out the third and final issue of Dream World soon.  

   

Dream World, Feb '57: M Lesser, P G Wodehouse, & H Ellison

Advertising works!  We just took a look at the May 1957 issue of Amazing, and saw within it an ad for Dream World, another magazine edited by Paul W. Fairman.  Dream World endured for three issues, all appearing in 1957, and the value proposition of the magazine, though promoted as "A New Kind of Fiction...Stories of Incredible Powers," seems to have been that it carries stories about sex.  I guess this was in the wheelhouse of Fairman, author of several volumes of The Man from S.T.U.D. series, including 1968's The Orgy at Madame Dracula's and 1969's Rape is a No-No. These S.T.U.D. books appeared under a pen name, and it seems lots of Fairman's work appeared under false names or other people's names; we read his novel Whom the Gods Would Slay, credited to Ivar Jorgensen, way back in 2018, and according to isfdb, Fairman ghostwrote juveniles for Lester del Rey (del Rey provided extensive plot outlines), among them The Runaway Robot, a book I see all the time in antique stores and used book stores.

Let's look at the first issue of Dream World, and read some of the included stories, one by Milton Lesser (under his pen name Adam Chase), one by P. G. Wodehouse (wow!), and one by Harlan Ellison.  Thorne Smith, a famous guy I have never read, Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett also make contributions (Smith's an excerpt from a 1930s novel) to this new venture, but we'll be skipping those today.  I'm also skipping the Milton Lesser story that appears under the Darius John Granger pseudonym because it is twelve pages long and is apparently about football and ain't nobody got time for dat. 

"Legs on Olympus" by Milton Lesser (as by Adam Chase)

Like 66% of today's stories, "Legs on Olympus" has apparently never appeared in any form in any other venue.  This is a jocular retelling of the famous Judgement of Paris which you no doubt know all about from your readings in classical literature and study of art history.  Hollywood columnist Abner Paris is in Atlantic City in the greatest state in the union to judge a beauty contest.  A naked girl appears in his room at the Troy Hotel and asks him to judge a "celestial" beauty contest.  Lesser engages in lame puns and jokes of that nature; this woman doesn't know about air conditioning, for example, and doesn't know that "gag" is a synonym for "joke" or "gimmick," even though she uses other corny colloquial English like "The heck you say!" and "drat the luck."  Anyway, Abner thinks it's all a gag and agrees to judge the contest as a way of calling the girl's bluff and getting rid of her, but after he agrees she jumps on his lap and they (it is strongly implied) have sex.

When Abner wakes up he and the girl, who reveals herself to be Eris, the Goddess of Discord, are on a sheep-infested hillside and he is wearing a wool cloak.  Eris takes him to where he is to judge which is the fairest, Hera, Athena or Aphrodite.  The three goddesses, all haughty and self-important, show off their looks to Abner and offer him extravagant bribes, but in the end he gives the golden apple marked "FOR THE FAIREST" to Eris, with whom he has fallen in love.  This story has a pretty wholesome ending, a guy bangs one chick and then immediately gets engaged to her.

"Legs on Olympus" is a bland and mediocre filler piece, but never actually boring or irritating, so we're judging it barely acceptable.  I was actually curious what Lesser was going to do with the material as I read it, so reading it was no chore.

"Ways to Get a Gal" by P. G. Wodehouse

The cover of Dream World Vol. 1 No. 1 advertises "Ways to Get a Gal" as a "Brand New Story" by the world famous and universally beloved Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, but an elaborate and extensive website about Wodehouse's early work suggests "Ways to Get a Gal" is a version of "Ahead of Schedule," a story that appeared in 1910 in the British magazine Grand and was revised for publication in this republic of ours in 1911 in Colliers.  I decided to read the Dream World story and then read a version of the story found in a 1980 printing of the oft-reprinted 1914 Wodehouse collection The Man Upstairs and Other Stories and see what differences there might be.

As the world knows, Wodehouse writes in a charming and fun style, filling his texts with amusing phrases and little jokes based on the shortcomings of his characters, jokes which are lighthearted and affectionate rather than cruel or superior, and he goes in for fun silly little plots with happy endings; somehow, Woodhouse writes stories in which everything works out for everybody but at the same time acknowledges the reality that life is characterized by failure and the world is awash in evil, so that his stories don't bring you down but also don't come across as squeaky clean or saccharine lies.  The man is some kind of hero and genius.  He does all this characteristic stuff here in "Ways to Get a Gal," so of course I enjoyed it and am giving it a thumbs up.

The plot:  An Englishman with a title but little sense is in love with a blue-eyed blonde woman who works in a department store and has set out to marry her, following a scientific plan of campaign devised by himself.  Being totally incompetent, this guy's income consists of an allowance from a fat uncle who owns a very lucrative chain of restaurants over in the land of plenty, the U S of A.  Said allowance is sufficient to keep his Jaguar running and his valet on staff.  Trouble appears when fat uncle comes to visit Blighty and fat uncle falls in love with the very same blue-eyed blonde woman at the glove counter at the department store and embarks on his own campaign to make her his wife.  If our hero marries this chick, uncle may well stop sending the allowance.  If old fat uncle marries the chick, our hero will probably no longer be in line to get his full inheritance when old fat uncle dies, this woman being young and healthy.

The resolution of the plot comes when the blonde falls in love with our hero's valet--she seems to think the flowers the valet has been personally delivering for some days are from the valet himself, not some goofy lord.  Also, she is apparently more susceptible to the naive wooing methods the valet learned in his rural village than to the latest scientific methods current in London.  Our hero's finances are safe, and Wodehouse makes it clear that both he and his obese uncle (215 pounds!) are shallow twits who are falling in and out of love all the time and will forget the blonde woman in days if not hours, so no hard feelings.

OK, now the version of the story from The Man Upstairs and Other Stories, entitled "Ahead of Schedule."  (The hero's scientific method of pursuing women operates on a careful schedule.)  This version feels longer, and has longer sentences, with more details and more jokes, but the jokes are good so we don't mind.  The protagonist has a different name, and the obese uncle (sixteen stone five!) does not own restaurants, but a company that makes braces (I call them "suspenders") and is an American himself, a native of "Pittsburg," as the town was apparently commonly styled in 1910.  (Pittsburgh comes in for some ribbing in "Ahead of Schedule.")  The characters in this version of the tale all have more personality, more complex back stories.  The woman in question is a chorus girl, not a department store employee, for example, and she actually has some dialogue.  This version of the story also has more learned references, like a military history joke ("He hated to abandon the schedule. To do so meant changing a well-ordered advance into a forlorn hope") and more big or rare words ("The advent of an unbidden guest rarely fails to produce a certain gêne.") 

The plot is also a little more complex, with the hero accelerating the schedule of his scientific method in hopes of beating out his uncle in winning the hand of the fair maiden, and the chorus girl and the valet hooking up because they knew each other back in their village, were engaged but broke up and upon meeting again realized they had made a mistake.  

The '57 version of the story is more streamlined, but the additional, perhaps superfluous, material, in the 1910 version is actually entertaining, so I prefer the earlier version.

A fun little experiment, reading both versions of this story, both of which again and again brought a smile to my face.  The Dream World story "Ways to Get a Gal" would be reprinted in the 1990s in First Impressions, Mature Reflections, the fifth volume of Plum Stones, a small press series that reprinted rare Wodehouse stories that had previously been uncollected.

Left: 1958     Right: 1980

"A Bucketful of Diamonds" by Harlan Ellison 

Here we have a Harlan Ellison story that has never been reprinted.  Harlan completists, perk up!  

Davey the second-story man is in jail.  A djinni (Ellison insists on calling it an "Estrian" after telling us it looks just like a djinni) appears and offers Davey a deal.  The djinni can't touch anything in our universe, being from a "another time-line" and thus "immaterial," so he wants Davey to steal something for him at some unspecified future time.  In exchange, he will give Davey the ability to walk up vertical walls and use his djinni powers to make any possible witness look the other way while Davey is committing crimes.  Davey agrees--my twitter feed is full of stories of people getting arrested dozens of times and still being set free to massacre people, but this is the 1950s and fiction besides, and Davey has been arrested more than four times and it looks like this time they will really throw the book at him, so he has no reason not to agree to the deal with the djinni.

Davey's trial is in two days, so he hustles to use his new powers to escape confinement.  Then he commits one brazen robbery after another--the powers the djinni promised him are real!  Davey buys a nice house and enjoys a comfortable lifestyle, slows down his pace of robberies, only committing really lucrative ones once or twice a month.  For example, he climbs a skyscraper and infiltrates a party attended by movie and TV stars and a famous lady novelist and, Ellison going for some kind of obvious tried-and-true comedy, a "British-colonel type, complete to flowing white mustache" who says stuff like "By Jove!" and "I say!"  Nobody can see Davey, so he gropes women's asses or kisses them if they are trim and kicks them in the ass if they are fat, and his victims blame innocent men and a brawl erupts.  The sexiest and most famous woman at the party, I guess a Marilyn Monroe caricature, Davey robs of her necklace and strips of her clothes so everybody can see her naked.  This scene has no effect on the plot and I guess is just here to appeal to the desire of readers to sexually abuse women and to humiliate those they envy for their wealth and status.

The djinni finally calls upon Davey to steal that item for him.  Davey launches the operation, but comes to a bad end.  The item the djinni wants is the magical key that will set him (the djinni) free from the prison that is used by his race to confine criminals--this Earth.  The guardian of the magical key is another djinni, an agent of the djinni establishment that imprisoned Davey's benefactor, and thus can see Davey just fine--this djinni is also on this time-line and thus material and can kill Davey with ease, and does so.  This story is less wholesome than Lesser's, but in the end the people who misbehave are punished.

The start of the story, Davey and the djinn's relationship and Davey's escape from prison and his amassing great wealth, are entertaining.  But the Marilyn-Monroe scene is just OK, and the ending is sort of perfunctory and disappointing.  It feels like Ellison was making an effort in the first half of the story, then included the exploitation material he felt was called for by the venue in which the story would appear, and then just quickly wrapped things up with little thought.  I'm calling "A Bucketful of Diamonds" acceptable--the first half or so is better than Lesser's "Legs on Olympus."  

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The Wodehouse of course is quite good, and the Lesser and Ellison get passing grades--they are exploitation filler, but I didn't find them repulsive or snooze-inducing.  I can't truly recommend the first issue of Dream World unless you are a student or collector of Wodehouse or Ellison, but I'm not denouncing it, either.  I find these odd little corners of the SF world intriguing and so we will probably be reading from the second and the third and final issues of Dream World. 

      

    

  

                 

     

           

Amazing Stories, May '57: H B Piper, M Lesser & C E Fritch

We just read Harlan Ellison's story "Night Vigil," which debuted in a fanzine but was reprinted (with a new title) not long after in one of the most famous of SF magazines, Amazing.  That issue of Amazing, May 1957, has an intriguing cover, so let's see what that swimsuit girl and robotic falconer are up to, and investigate the claim that the issue prints a story that is "Too Hot To Handle."  I'm going to read these stories in a scan of the original magazine, and you can do the same at this link.

If it's Ellison content you crave, the May 1957 issue of Amazing has an ad for the May Fantastic, highlighting Ellison's "Satan is My Ally," which we blogged about back in 2017 when I read four 1957 stories by your pal Harlan.  If you are looking for jokes and gripes, the editorial to this issue is a lame joke that serves to notify readers about former Amazing editor Howard Browne's Hollywood career is going, and, as a joke, this month's letter column is mostly people writing in to complain about Amazing.  The letters column is legitimately funny, so check it out, laff-lovers.  

"The Edge of the Knife" by H. Beam Piper

The editor's intro to "The Edge of the Knife" asserts that "This story was rejected by two top-flight science-fiction editors for the same reason: 'Too hot to handle.' 'Too dangerous for our book.'"  If we choose to believe this claim, who could Amazing editor Paul W.  Fairman mean?  Campbell at Astounding?  Gold at Galaxy?  Boucher at F&SF?  Who am I missing?  Thrilling Wonder and Weird Tales were defunct in 1957.  Is James Quinn of If "top-flight"?  Well, there's a mystery for us.

"The Edge of the Knife" is quite long, like 40 pages here in Amazing, so it had better be good, or I am going to be bitter.  I definitely want to see why it might have been considered "too hot to handle," though.

World War II veteran Ed Chalmers teaches modern history at a college in California in the year 1973.  Chalmers has a secret special power--every so often he spontaneously develops "memories" of things that will happen in the future.  Chalmers knows all about wars and revolutions and other political developments that will occur decades and centuries in the future, but his info is not systematic or comprehensive; for example, he will rarely know the dates or even years of the future events he "remembers."  These memories of the future are so vivid and real that Chalmers will sometimes casually mention some such event, absentmindedly forgetting that the event has not happened yet, leading others to think he is joking or mentally unbalanced.  As our story begins, he is telling his class about the assassination of some contemporary Middle-Eastern potentate--"the greatest Moslem since Saladin"--an assassination that has not yet occurred.  Students and faculty have witnessed such queer comments from Chalmers before, and this is the last straw--enough people are now convinced that Chalmers is insane that they fear he will harm the rep of the school and want him removed, and the president of the college asks Chalmers for his resignation.  But Chalmers has all kinds of tenure protections, and resists being let go, and contacts his lawyer.

Things cool down for a month, but then that Muslim politician gets murdered in the very way Chalmers described and people start believing Chalmers can predict the future--including academics whose specialty is parapsychology and want to pump Chalmers for data--while the president thinks it is all some kind of scam or hoax and redoubles his efforts to fire Chalmers.  A big meeting is held in the president's office with many attendees from multiple stake-holding groups, and much of the story reads like a courtroom drama, with Chalmers' lawyer there trying to protect our guy.  

I wasn't thrilled to be reading scenes of tense meetings among academics and between a guy and his lawyer like Amazing was printing some mainstream novel that was blowing the lid off what goes on in the shadow of the ivory tower.  Am I opening up SF mags to read stuff like “As faculty members, any controversy involving establishment of standards of fitness to teach under a tenure-contract concerns all of us, because any action taken in this case may establish a precedent which could affect the validity of our own contracts.”  Did I accidentally pick up a copy of The Chronicle of Higher Education?  Zzzzzzzz....  

The most important result of the meeting is that everybody agrees that Chalmers submit to a psychological exam by a top government shrink.  The president of the college expects Chalmers to be declared insane and committed to a mental institution, so he can fire him, and most everybody else involved thinks Chalmers will be given a clean bill of mental health and that this will serve his interests.  But during the exam Chalmers gets new "memories" that indicate that California is going to be hit by multiple nuclear weapons during the brief war that will result from the assassination in just a few days.  The insane asylum is in a safe place beyond the mountains, so Chalmers deliberately fails the exam so he will be out of the blast radius and fall out zone of the enemy rocket detonations.  He also arranges it so two friends of his will to move to the town where the booby hatch is sited and bring with them his papers so he can continue his work.  

I like the final twist of the story.  I wish Piper had maybe spent more time on Chalmers' relationships with the two friends he preserves--they seem to be sort of tacked on to the story, and we spend much more time with the lawyer and the president who are doomed to be annihilated.  The meat of "The Edge of the Knife" is not bad, but feels slow.  We'll judge "The Edge of the Knife," the title of which refers to the thin separation between past and future and the narrow difference between sanity and insanity, to be acceptable.

But what do we make of the claims the story was "too hot to handle"?  There's no sex in the story.  The academic business--professors fighting the administration--seems like the typical stuff of fiction, and knowing the future but Cassandra-like being unable to change it feels like standard SF fare.  Maybe this story is a hot potato (if we choose to believe the sensational claims) because, while the Soviet Union is not named, the story depicts the commies unsympathetically; they are to blame for the nuclear war, and they lose, getting wiped out thanks to American ingenuity--the Pentagon has stocked America's moon base with an arsenal of missiles and our boys rain them down on the Reds.  Maybe other magazines were scared of offending their left-wing readers with this kind of anti-communist triumphalism, the idea that a nuclear war is winnable, and what amounts to an endorsement of the militarization of space? 

"The Edge of the Knife," isfdb is telling me, is part of Piper's Federation series, a series to which other people have apparently contributed fiction, and has been reprinted in Piper collections and Federation-centric anthologies.  This story's style is competent, and Piper seems skeptical of or hostile to the commies, so maybe some day I'll read other Federation stories; I have always avoided Piper's famous Fuzzy stories because I figured they were allegories/wish fulfillment fantasies of primitive natives outwitting the evil white capitalists, but maybe my guess is off.   

"Winged Planet" by Milton Lesser (as by Adam Chase)

We've read I guess five things by Lesser in the benighted era of this blog's bewildering existence, "'A' as in Android," "The Graveyard of Space," "Ennui," "The Impossible Weapon," and "It's Raining Frogs!"  Let's see what this caper, which is illustrated on the cover of the mag and appears under a pen name, is all about.  I've been lukewarm about Lesser, but maybe I will love this one?  C-3PO, I mean, isfdb, reports that "Winged Planet" has never been reprinted--hey, never tell me the odds!

It is the future of interstellar civilization, the 30th century.  Ann is one of the galaxy's greatest dancers, and she travels from star system to star system, entertaining the men of the frontier worlds.  Recently she was on Earth, which, to the alarm of us patriotic readers, is now some minor planet in the vast human space empire.  Some things change with the forward march of technology and history...but some things don't--the men of the future are still hornier than women can handle!  Everywhere Ann goes, men make passes at her, and she always rejects them.  

Ann is currently a passenger aboard a ship about to transition from hyperspace to real space, and she is in the observation lounge to watch the change--she never gets tired of seeing these dramatic transitions.  Also there is Cliff, an officer of the ship, and he keeps trying to make time with Ann, to the point she slaps the man.  Also present is a newlywed couple, Garry and Joyce; watching them, Ann pities the young woman because her new husband, Ann can tell by how he acts in anticipation of the transition, is a coward, and Joyce will soon fall out of love with this loser.

Immediately after the transition the ship crashes into a planet and almost the entire ship is wrecked, and almost everyone killed--it is only the observation deck that is spared, and our four cardboard characters.  Fire is spreading to the observation lounge, and Cliff the spaceman is unconscious and almost dead, and Joyce paralyzed with pain.  Ann has to badger and insult Garry to get the coward to help her carry the other two people off the wreck before they burn up.  

On the apparently barren planet, the injured Cliff and Joyce are immediately carried off by a huge bird.  Garry and Ann chase after the feathered kidnapper, so all four shipwreck survivors end up in the custody of a robot who strips them naked to experiment on them!  You see, the robot and its 100+ fellows, many centuries ago, crashed on this planet and all the humans with them were killed.  The robots feel a terrible need to serve humanity, so started experimenting on the local fauna, which consists entirely of avians and bugs, to figure out if they could create new masters.  Their researches have fostered the development of techniques that can heal animals and people almost instantly and, through genetic engineering, the ability to make animals smarter, bigger, stronger, etc., than normal.

All those centuries have degraded the robots' intellectual capacity, so they have to be convinced that they don't need to carve up the four shipwrecked travelers because they are human and can serve as masters to the robots; luckily the robots are convinced before anybody gets vivisected.  Goody-Two-Shoes Ann wants to hand these robots over to the government so the government can figure out the best way to use the healing and genetic engineering techniques they have developed.  Cliff, the kind of guy who aggressively pursues women, is also the kind of guy who likes the idea of getting rich and powerful by making the robots his personal army and using their groundbreaking methods to make himself dictator of the galaxy. 

Initially Cliff wins the allegiance of the robots, and starts plotting an ambush of the rescue ship that must be on the way and initial experiments on Garry and Joyce, but Ann figures out how to get the robots to switch their loyalty to her.  When Cliff kisses Ann against her will and tells her he wants her to rule at his side, she resists violently and declares her intention to kill Cliff.  The robots, having been ordered to protect Cliff, kill Ann.  But then their "serve mankind" programming kicks in and they prioritize serving the fallen Ann, bringing her back to life, and restrain Cliff, who instigated the violence that killed Ann.  The expected rescue ship arrives and the robots and their technology are placed in the beneficent hands of the government.  As the story ends we are reminded that Ann not only saved the galaxy from Cliff but taught Garry to be brave.

Barely acceptable; "The Winged Planet" is a sort of bottom-of-the-barrel standard SF story, even with its theme of multiple contrasting (but mostly wrong) ways of being a man and its self-sacrificing girl-boss central character who sees her job as teaching men how to behave and helping the government accrue as much power as possible.  (Ann obviously never heard Muswell Hillbillies.)  It is interesting seeing Lesser deploy these progressive values alongside exploitation material, like the women being subjected to losing their clothes and facing the threat of sexual violence and being cut to pieces while still alive.          

"No World for the Timid" by Charles E. Fritch

In 2024 I read Fritch's "The Big Wide Wonderful World" on the recommendation of one Judith Merrill and I liked it, so there is a chance this will be today's best story, though written by today's least well-known author. 

You know, I think this probably is today's best story.  For one thing, it is economical--short and to the point.  For another, it has real human feeling, something Piper's story, with its unsympathetic academics and attorneys, and Lesser's story, with its flat one-note characters, lack.  "No World for the Timid" is also sort of shocking, or at least makes a respectable effort at being shocking.

Our narrator is perhaps the last man in the world after the nuclear war.  Yes, this is yet another post-apocalyptic story.  He survived because he hid in a cave and a landslide sealed him in, far from the radiation.  In the cave system he met another survivor, perhaps the only woman left in the world.  Somehow, they survived down there, eating bugs and fungus and whatever, emaciated and covered in sores but alive.  Alive for years!  So long, that the woman gave birth to three kids!  Kids old enough to talk by the time they find an exit back to the sunlight!

This story is over-the-top grim; the editor introduces it with an over-the-top warning: "This is a story for readers who like their meat raw, their facts plain and unvarnished, their fiction tough and realistic."  "Realistic" may be pushing it--how do they see in the dark to catch food?  Still, "tough" is appropriate,  with the woman talking about eating her own children, the kids talking about one day getting big enough to overpower Dad and eat him, and Dad contemplating killing the kids before they are too big to overpower him.  And then there is the fact that the woman has grown so accustomed to living underground that she is reluctant, pathologically so, to stepping out into the sunlight again.  The story ends on a down note; they don't meet other survivors or helpful aliens or a cache of tools that will make life easier or anything.

Worthy of a mild recommendation.  "No World for the Timid" was reprinted in the Fritch collection Crazy Mixed-Up Planet (advertised as "spine-chilling"), a reprint magazine the main attraction of which is John Wyndham's "The Troons of Space" (I've read two of Wyndham's Troons stories, "Asteroids, 2194" AKA "The Emptiness of Space" and "The Moon AD 2044" AKA "Idiot's Delight" but not that one) and the ninth of Richard Davis' Space anthologies. 

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Well, we've wrung a lot of content out of this issue of Amazing, self-described as "The World's Leading Science-Fiction Magazine."  Let's spend some more time in 1957,  shall we?

Amazing Stories, July 1968: Edmond Hamilton, Milton Lesser and Paul Fairman

In our last episode we read a 1926 Weird Tales serial by Edmond Hamilton, "Across Space," and it came to our attention that in 2015 "Across Space" was reprinted in an Italian paperback omnibus along with another Hamilton tale, 1929's "Locked Worlds."  "Locked Worlds" debuted in Amazing Stories Quarterly and was reprinted in Amazing Stories almost forty years later.  Let's take a look at that 1968 issue of Amazing, an issue produced in the brief period when that magazine was edited by Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld fame.

Despite Harrison's protests, publisher Sol Cohen's policy during this difficult time in Amazing's long life was to devote most of Amazing's page count to reprints of stories that had appeared earlier in the magazine (or its sister publication Fantastic) and it looks like this attitude extended even to the covers--the cover illo of this July 1968 issue is a mediocrity that had appeared first on the cover of a German magazine four years earlier!  Is this the behavior of the "World's Leading Science-Fiction Magazine"?  Sad!

Harrison starts the issue off with an editorial about developments in the SF field that I confess I found to be a little vague and all over the place; he tackles many ideas and provides a minimum of supporting evidence (but throws in various personal notes) when I would have preferred he address a small number of ideas directly and clearly.  Harrison suggests the avant garde of SF (he offers his drinking buddy J. G. Ballard as its exemplar) can be described as "subjective," in contrast to old-fashioned SF which is "objective."  A subjective "new wave" story emphasizes not what the story is "objectively" about--what physically happens in the story--but rather what is going on in the "inner space" that is the minds of the story's characters, or the mind of the author writing the story.  He argues that what such Ballard stories as "Terminal Beach" and "End-Game" are truly about is guilt.

Harrison's editorial is not only descriptive, but proscriptive, and he warns against two trends in SF that he does not like: 1) the "vacuous" and "cliched" adventure story full of "standard props" like "blasters" and "starships" that has no plot other than violence and no meaning or wit; and 2) the overly complex or opaque story that uses experimental methods that inhibit rather than facilitate communication and whose writers import from literary fiction a snobbish "ivory tower" attitude.

Look at the frightening example of James Ballard and see what can happen.  His latest works are almost unreadable and incomprehensible, the direct opposite of his earlier magnificent efforts.

I find these kind of controversial statements provocative and exciting, but their value--especially to those of us reading them 55 years later--is severely diminished by the fact that Harrison didn't offer examples of vacuous adventure stories full of violence and didn't specify which Ballard stories are allegedly "unreadable."

More controversy is to be found in the book review column, in which Leroy Tanner attacks Algis Budrys, and in the letters column, in which Ted White attacks Tanner in response to Tanner's earlier attack on Roger Zelazny.  (If you are looking in the pages of Amazing for some brotherly love, Poul Anderson gushes about an Isaac Asimov collection, Asimov's Mysteries.  If you are looking for boredom, there is Brian Aldiss' two pages about a trip to Oslo--Aldiss met a bunch of fun and interesting guys in Norway, but doesn't tell us anything fun or interesting about them.)

Alright, let's look at some of the fiction in this issue of Amazing.  There is actually a new story, one by by "Samuel R. Delaney," a man better known as "Samuel R. Delany," but I think it is a portion of the novel Nova, a novel I read in the period before the birth of this blog and so I am passing it by.  We'll turn our eye to three of the reprints: Hamilton's 1929 "Locked Worlds" and one story each by Milton Lesser and Paul Fairman first published in the 1950s.  (Note that I am reading all three in their 1968 printings--this may have been a mistake, as I ran into quite a lot of typos.)

"Locked Worlds" by Edmond Hamilton (1929)

"Locked Worlds" is the account of Harker, an English professor employed by Northeastern University.  As the story begins, the most famous academic at NEU is the 30-something physicist Adams, a man universally recognized by those in his field as a top innovator, an actual revolutionary, but unpopular for his bitter sarcastic tongue and arrogant nature.  After explaining to us what atoms and electrons are, Harker describes the controversial theory put forward by Adams that sets the story's plot in motion in more ways than one.  These long repetitive science lectures may have some readers longing for the "standard props" and violence that Harrison was complaining about in his editorial (such readers' patience will be rewarded.)

In brief, Adams has discovered that the atoms in our universe all have two sets of electrons that move in opposite directions around the same nucleus and are dissimilar in number.  This means (he says) that all the matter in our universe exists simultaneously in two different worlds that occupy the same space but are invisible to each other, and that atoms of one element in one world are a different element in the other world.  If we can manipulate these electrons and reverse their courses we can travel between these two parallel worlds--the matter that is a person in this world can be sent to the other world, and in its place will appear in this world an equal number of atoms that are rocks or trees or whatever from the other world.

The matter that is the scientists of this world find Adam's theory, known colloquially as the "interlocking atoms" theory, so ludicrous that Adams' formerly high reputation is dashed and he becomes the target of ridicule, so much so that his position as head of the NEU physics dept is threatened.  Adams then disappears, leaving behind a cryptic note.  Weeks later, Adams' assistant Rawlins, the narrator's friend, reveals that he has been examining the apparatus found in Adams' lab and believes Adams transposed himself into the parallel world described in his theory...and probably is planning to inflict a monstrous vengeance on this world whose inhabitants ridiculed him!  Newspaper stories about people in remote areas like Iowa and Suriname reporting the disappearance of geographical features and the appearance in their place of some never-before-seen soil add meat to Rawlins' suspicions.  Rawlins and Harker decide they must follow Adams into that parallel world in order to stop him from launching some kind of attack on our own.

"Locked Worlds" is like 48 pages long, and after a dozen pages of all that sciency background stuff we get to the adventure portion as R & H find themselves in a world of mobile vegetation grazing low-nutrient blue soil under a blinding blue white sun, a world of spider people armed with disintegrator ray guns and anti-grav sleds that fly by managing the sleds' repulsion from and attraction to the planet's magnetic poles.  The college professors don't get to explore on their own much, but are rather provided a tightly controlled guided tour by the spider men who immediately capture them and take them to a city of thousand-foot high conical buildings connected by a highway of cables so the city resembles a huge spider web.  Adams the vengeful scientist has allied himself to the spider people, promised to transport them to Earth--a more fertile world than this infertile blue world--where they can conquer us.  Adams has Rawlins imprisoned in the city's central building, intent on forcing him to act as his here as on Earth, assistant, and leaves Harker to the tender mercies of the spider people, who imprison him in a nearby tower, in the same cell as a bird man.

This bird man, Nor-Kan, teaches Harker his speech, and schools him in the history of this world.  The bird people built a high-tech civilization, but generations ago became lazy and so bred from mindless natural spiders a servant race of giant intelligent spider people to do all their work for them.  In due course, the spider people overthrew their masters and took over most of the world--a small remnant of the bird people still holds out in a fortress on the south pole.  (As did the slave race in that last Hamilton story we read, "Across Space," the spider people in "Locked Worlds" remind us of the shoggoths of Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness and are perhaps a warning against becoming reliant on machines and/or the labor of other ethnic groups that might have reason to resent you or ovet your position.)

Nor-Kan and Harker escape their cell and climb up the side of the conical skyscraper in which is located the prison and then go hand over hand to the HQ building where are to be found Adams and Rawlins.  While Harker frees Rawlins and makes an abortive effort to capture Adams, Nor-Kan retrieves the flying machine he was piloting when he got captured.  The three barely escape after a bloody fight and fly south to the bird city at the pole, narrowly evading pursuit by spider-creature aircraft.

The bird-people are easily convinced to launch an attack on the spider-city where Adams is almost finished creating the machines to transport spider cities and spider armies to our Earth, because if the eight-legged fiends conquer Earth, they can just go to Earth's South Pole and Adams can transport them behind the impregnable walls of the bird-city.  The last ten pages or so of "Locked Worlds" concern the bird attack on the spider capital, a long naval battle in the air between two air fleets of over a thousand vessels each that climaxes with a hand to hand struggle between Adams and Rawlins on the apex of a conical tower over the controls of a machine that will either transport the spider horde to our Earth or exterminate the entire spider race.  After the two-legs-good, eight-legs-bad ending, Harker and Rawlins return to an Earth that has no idea how close it came to being conquered by ray gun wielding arachnids.

Though it gets off to a slow start with its repetitive lectures about electrons, I'm giving "Locked Worlds" a grade of moderately good.  It has many similarities to "Across Space," which I judged as simply acceptable, but has many advantages over that 1926 story.  It has an interesting villain, for one thing, and he spider city is also better than the subterranean city of "Across Space"'s Martian colonists.  I enjoyed the long sequence covering the escape from the prison and then the aerial chase to the polar city, as well as all the different fun types of high-tech artillery and defense measures with which Hamilton armed the two alien war fleets.  

Like "Across Space," "Locked Worlds" would be reprinted by Haffner Press and by the Italian publisher Edizioni Della Vigna in our own 21st century.

"The Impossible Weapon" by Milton Lesser (1952)

It looks like we've covered four short stories by Lesser on ye olde blogge, "'A' as in Android," "The Graveyard of Space," "Ennui," and "It's Raining Frogs!"; I read his fix-up novel Secret of the Black Planet before I started this blog. According to my notes I thought Secret of the Black Planet "bland and forgettable" and the links above attest to the fact that I was not terribly enthusiastic about those four stories, but maybe this one, "The Impossible Weapon" will be more exciting.  Hope springs eternal, people.

The writing style Lesser employs for "The Impossible Weapon" reminded me of that we find in hard-boiled or noirish detective fiction, bitterly, cynically jokey in a way that exposes human frailty.  You science nerds don't have to worry, though--Lesser manages to integrate some science lectures about atoms and the behavior of light into his text. 

Earth is at war with the Venus-Mars-Ganymede League, a war which started with a nuclear sneak attack on this big blue marble of ours.  Earth's fleet was defeating the enemy fleet when the Leaguers whipped out a new weapon, one that could penetrate any Earth forcefield.  Now that Earth's ships and surface are defenseless, it looks like we may have to sue for peace with the villains of the League.

Stanley Stokes is a "quantum technician," and he thinks he knows how to nullify the League's new weapon.  His fiancé is the daughter of the United Nations' Assistant Secretary of Defense Weapons, Spatial Division, and he gets an interview with this bureaucrat, but the paper pusher considers Stokes' idea to be crazy.  When Stokes gets drunk and complains about her father to his fiancé, she calls off their engagement. 

Stokes goes to a bar frequented by spacemen, meets a big hulking brute of a spacer, a guy who fights in bar brawls on the regular and even rumbles with the cops.  This veteran sailor of the void between the planets, O'Hanrohan (of course this dude is Irish), wants to take the fight to the League, and so is willing to join forces with Stokes in a desperate effort to illegally acquire a space ship and the necessary supplies to test Stokes' theory out beyond Earth orbit, in the teeth of the enemy.  Our heroes hold off the police, get their stolen ship into orbit, and prove that Stokes has developed a way to counteract the League ray weapon, making them heroes and getting Stokes' girl to agree to marry him after all.

A little slight, but a fun story; Lesser's jokes actually work, and the humor and the science lectures don't overwhelm or distract from the plot but actually support it.  Thumbs up for "The Impossible Weapon."  Besides in its two appearances in Amazing, you can find "The Impossible Weapon" in the 2013 collection 'A' as in Android.

"This is My Son" by Paul W. Fairman (1955)

I have little familiarity with Fairman's work; looking at the regular sources on line (isfdb, wikipedia, the internet archive) it seems Fairman was a prolific writer who had his hand in many genres, including science fiction, westerns, detective stories, novelizations of TV sitcoms I have never seen like Bridget Loves Bernie and That Girl and even soft core porn spoofs--isfdb credits Fairman with five titles in the series The Man from S.T.U.D.; two sample titles: The Orgy at Madam Dracula's and Rape is a No-No.  Much of Fairman's work appeared under pen names, including the only thing I think I have read by him, the novel Whom the Gods Would Slay which debuted in Amazing and would be published as a paperback with a Jeff Jones cover.  I liked Whom the Gods Would Slay so maybe I'll like "This is My Son," which debuted in Fantastic, as well. 

It is the 2030s.  John Temple is a young American physicist working on a major contract down in Latin America--this super duper important job requires that he spend six continuous years on the job site and not return home to the USA even once.  He can talk to his wife and kid on the video phone, but that doesn't seem like enough, and again and again his colleagues have to talk him out of breaking the contract and rushing back to his family and thus ruining his career.

Temple, as a college student and early post-grad, wanted more than anything to have a son.  After marrying an attractive woman, Jill, he was very disappointed to find the two of them couldn't seem to have a child, even after two years of trying.  When the Latin American opportunity came up--a six-year job which would yield enough money on completion of the contract to set them up for life--he only took it because he had no child--if he'd had a child he would have been unable to part from it.  Poor Jill realized this and was broken-hearted because she loved her husband for himself, and it was now clear  he primarily saw her as a potential mother.

Amazingly, only a few months after he has arrived in South America, Jill tells Temple she is pregnant.  It is a hard six years, but eventually Temple gets back home to live with his family.  Everybody is happy until by chance Temple learns the truth--John, Jr. is not his biological son!  Wanting Temple to love her, Jill purchased a bespoke artificial baby--an android--designed and conceived in a lab and has been passing it off as their natural son!  Temple calls the kid a monster to his innocent little face and John and Jill immediately separate.  For years Temple lives a life of gambling and womanizing, all the while sending to his estranged family all the money they might need.  Then one day he sees in the paper that his son at private school has been severely injured while rescuing his classmates during a fire.  John, Jr. is a hero, hovering on the brink of death!  Temple rushes to the hospital and gives his son a blood transfusion, so that, in a way, he becomes his true flesh and blood, and we are led to believe that John, Jill, and John, Jr. will live together happily ever after.

A pleasant little human interest story that explores how new technology might affect family life; we might even call this a pro-diversity story that argues that there are all different kinds of families and the traditional way of creating a family is no better than other less typical ways.  Naysayers might argue this is not really a SF story, but a redecorated mainstream story about adoption, the way those same naysayers will tell you space operas and planetary romances and Jack Vance's revenge drama The Demon Princes are just redecorated westerns or detective stories or adventure tales about Western adventurers in the mysterious East.  These analyses are appropriate, but do nothing to detract from a story's literary or entertainment value, and do not stop me from giving "This is My Son" a thumbs up.

I like it, but it seems that after its second appearance here in Amazing that "This is My Son" has never been reprinted.

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It is understandable that members of the SF community in 1968, especially professionals like Harry Harrison, would want to read or work for a magazine that printed brand new stories and not a bunch of reprints.  But the three reprints we read today are pretty good!  The Hamilton and Lesser stories are solid classic SF about scientists who invent paradigm-shifting devices and get mixed up in wars in which people discharge a dizzying array of energy weapons at each other.  And the Fairman actually has mainstream literary elements like those we expect a New Wave "inner space" story to have--it is about the psychology and relationships of three people, and about how new technology shifts paradigms not in the realms of war or transportation, but the world of the family.  To me, this seems like a pretty rewarding issue of Amazing.

More 1950s SF in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

  

Imagination, December 1950: John Wyndham, Mack Reynolds and Milton Lesser

As readers of my twitter feed may remember, I bought a book of posters of art from pulp magazines in August.  In September I chose four of these posters to tack up here in MPorcius HQ: a Hannes Bok illustration of H. P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model;" Margaret Brundage's cover of the issue of Weird Tales with Clark Ashton Smith's "The Empire of the Necromancers" (one of the best of Brundage's productions;) Virgil Finlay's cover of the July 1942 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries; and Harold McCauley's cover for the December 1950 issue of Imagination.  It seemed appropriate to have actually read something connected to each of the four images, and so today we tackle three stories from that 1950 issue of Imagination, a magazine then edited by Raymond Palmer.  I'm reading these stories, all by people we have talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log before, in the scan of the original issue of Madge (as we fans call Imagination) available at my favorite website and yours, the internet archive.

"Technical Slip" by John Wyndham 

John Wyndham, famous author of Day of the Triffids and Re-Birth AKA The Chrysalids, bore the legal name John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, and "Technical Slip" appears here in Imagination under the name John Beynon.  The story would reappear four years later in the Wyndham collection Jizzle, and the next year after that in a paperback anthology by Groff Conklin which I own, Operation Future, and have already blogged a little about.  I didn't read "Technical Slip" when I sampled the contents of Operation Future back in 2017, maybe because Re-Birth had rubbed me the wrong way, maybe because I didn't recognize Wyndham under that disguise.

"Technical Slip" is one of those stories about a guy selling his soul to the devil, and also a time travel story.  It is well-written, but underwhelming and ends up feeling trifling.

Our dude is a 60-year-old Englishman, on his death bed.  He sadly reflects that all the wisdom he has acquired over a long and successful career is about to vanish.  Then a guy appears whom we are obliquely obliged to understand is a representative of the devil, though the devil in this story seems more like the manager of the bureaucracy that maintains the universe than a malevolent figure.  Having adapted to the rise of the market economy, these bureaucrats no longer barter boons for souls, but sell their wares for money.  After the hero agrees to hand over a large fraction of his wealth he is given a chance to live his live over again, and finds himself seven years old again, back in 1910, but with all his memories intact.  Wyndham does a good job describing the world of 1910 through the hero's eyes, and of depicting the sadness of seeing his little sister, knowing she will soon be crippled for life in an accident, seeing his father and knowing in a few years he will be killed fighting in the war, and seeing his uncle and knowing the financial disaster unk is going to be responsible for.  Wyndham succeeds in painting both a striking visual landscape and a moving emotional landscape here and is to be commended for doing so--all this stuff rang true to me.

The hero wonders if he can use his knowledge of the future to his advantage, and the advantage of the world--could he perhaps prevent or shorten the World Wars?  His test case is his sister, and when he  saves her from the accident which, in his first go round of life crippled her, he has proof that he really can change history!  But then the bureaucrats step in and weaken the protagonist's hold on his memory; their failure to do so initially is the "technical slip" of the title.  Our protagonist forgets he has lived through the tumultuous first half of the 20th century before and his efforts to alter history for the better are quashed.    

I felt like the plot sort of fizzled out, but Wyndham's technique in that middle section of the story when our hero is back in 1910 as a kid and retains his 1960s knowledge, is quite good; "Technical Slip" is better than most deal-with-the-devil stories and does something more literary with the idea of time travel than do most time travel stories.  So, I'll give it a moderate recommendation.

"Tourists to Terra" by Mack Reynolds 

Reynolds had a remarkably strange and diverse career as a radical leftist activist, a travel writer for men's magazines, and a SF writer whose work I generally dislike (check out the links for my past comments on some of these topics.)

"Tourists to Terra" is a brief gimmicky story.  Life on an alien planet has become too easy, too luxurious, driving wealthy individuals to seek new thrills.  One of the extravagant pastimes their advanced technology has made possible is travelling to primitive planets like our Earth to participate in wars among the natives.  The early scenes of "Tourists to Terra" the story depict these aliens--who look just like Earth people and equip themselves with anti-grav devices and special armor and weapons--fighting in the Trojan War, Reynolds rehearsing the scene from Book V of the Iliad in which Diomedes injures Aphrodite.  (This is one of the numerous SF stories that offers a theory of the source of some ancient myth, legend or religious belief.)

The complaints of the beautiful woman who will be the germ of the Greek goddess of love over getting hit by a spear convince the people running the space cruise that it would be safer to get their customers involved not in hand-to-hand combat but in a war fought with firearms in which they can act as snipers, killing natives from a distance from a place of concealment.  (These aliens think of us as no more than game animals.)  These aliens have the ability to not only efficiently travel between the stars, but through time, so the ship's crew crosses the eons to 1945 in search of a war affording opportunities for safe sport.  But our Earth technology has advanced faster than they anticipated, and by chance their ship materializes at an atomic bomb test site just moments before the detonation--the thrill-seeking aliens and their space ship are totally annihilated.

This disposable bit of ephemera would not be reprinted until 2011.

"It's Raining Frogs!" by Milton Lesser

This will be the fourth story by Lesser we have read here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Feel free to feast your glazzies on my scribblings about "'A' as in 'Android'," "The Graveyard of Space" and "Ennui."

"It's Raining Frogs!" begins with an epigraph from Charles Fort's Lo!  Fort apparently loomed large in the minds of SF writers and fans in the middle of the 20th century--Lo! was serialized in Astounding in the early Thirties when F. Orlin Tremaine was editor, Tremaine's successor John W. Campbell, Jr. recommended Fort's collections of questionable reports of unusual phenomena as source material, Eric Frank Russell praised Fort highly, Damon Knight wrote a biography of Fort, and so on.  The epigraph here mentions frogs, Fort arguing that all the universe shares a single existence, so you can study the entire whole from any starting point, be it economics, the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, or frogs.

Myra is a beautiful, intelligent and athletic woman, and an enthusiastic fan of Fort and student of Fortean phenomena.  She is married to George, a mediocrity in the looks and career department, but something special anyway--he is what Myra calls a "catalyst," a man who attracts Fortean phenomena.  When he rolls large numbers of dice the totals do not follow normal bell curve expectations, and sometimes frogs and other small creatures start falling from the sky upon him, spontaneously.  The main plot of this story concerns how George, unwittingly, summons a man from another dimension, and not just any man, but the King of the Fourth Dimension.  Like George, this alien monarch (who looks exactly like an Earth man) is married to a woman who dominates him, something he is quick to tell George and Myra.        

This king from the Fourth Dimension and Myra have a longish conversation about the physics of two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and four-dimensional universes, but eventually His Majesty gets worried his wife will be angry if he isn't home soon, and wants to leave, but he can only return to his universe with the permission of George, who summoned him.  George refuses, Myra insists, and in response to George's intransigence she starts hitting him--it is hinted that this sort of spousal abuse is a normal feature of their married life.  For the first time after years of marriage, George asserts himself; he outwrestles Myra and spanks her, breaking her will and becoming master of his home.  

The Queen of the Fourth dimension arrives, and tries to dominate the situation by seducing George; she also sets about using her alien powers to steal a fortune in jewels from Earth to take back home.  George not only stands up to her but his example inspires the King to stand up for himself and become master of his relationship.  The stolen jewels are returned to their rightful owners and everybody lives happily ever after in both our dimension and the Fourth now that these troublesome hot women know their place.

Obviously a story which suggests that women are selfish and greedy and that specimens of the weaker sex who are intelligent and attractive will use their brains and looks to run roughshod over everybody if a man doesn't firmly assert dominance over them runs counter to the values we in 2022 all hold dear or at least pretend to ascribe to if we know what is good for us.  Putting that hot potato aside, "It's Raining Frogs" is too long and repetitive, and the mechanism of how George summons frogs, beetles, birds, a henpecked king and a sexalicious jewel thief of a queen to our universe is poorly worked out.  George does not voluntarily summon these aliens--in fact, he considers these phenomena a nuisance, they are appearing against his will--but for the plot to work we are expected to believe he can by an act of will send them back or confine them here.  Seems a little contrived.  

Weak filler.  Like Reynolds' "Tourists to Terra," "It's Raining Frogs!" would have to wait until this century to be reprinted.

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Imagination is one of those magazines the critics look down upon, and I didn't exactly find a storehouse of ammunition today with which to challenge their dim assessment, though "Technical Slip" demonstrates Wyndham's considerable writing ability and "It's Raining Frogs!" is a useful document for those interested in the relationship of Charles Fort to SF and those looking for evidence of sexism in SF (spanking fetishists may also want to check it out!)

Speaking of stuff the critics look down upon, we've got a 1973 sword and sorcery novel coming up, so have your square-cut mane and mighty thews ready the next time you surf on over here to MPorcius Fiction Log!

Way Out stories from the early 1950s by Milton Lesser, H. B. Fyfe, Algis Budrys & John Berryman

I already have more books and magazines than I know what to do with, but there is a limit to how many slices of pizza I can eat at Whole Foods while waiting for my wife's hair appointment to finish up.  When that limit is reached, I walk a block or two to Half Price Books and sort through the spinner racks of vintage paperbacks and the shelves of 40-, 50-, and 60-year old hardcover SF books. On one such recent trip, I resisted a hardcover Orbit 10, and an anthology of stories about cavemen and dinosaurs, but on the spinner racks my eyes beheld a 2-dollar beauty I could not leave behind.  This find was a paperback whose cover was totally detached from its pages, a volume stained by water and bearing, like a badge of honor, a "CLOSE-OUT .35" sticker, Way Out, an anthology edited by Ivan Howard and put out in 1963 by our friends at Belmont, the people responsible for so many remarkable productions, my love for which I have unabashedly chronicled on this here blog.  I adore the weird Powers cover illo, its starker monochrome reproduction on the back cover, and the book's bold black and yellow spine.  The cover text's convoluted diction elicits a chuckle rather than a sneer.  Let's hope Way Out's seven stories, each "designed to appeal to the far out fiend" also merit my love! Today we'll tackle the first four stories in this charming artifact, the contributions from Milton Lesser, H. B. Fyfe, Algis Budrys and "William C. Bailey."  Just for fun, besides judging whether these stories are any good, like we always do, we'll assess how "way out" they are.

"Ennui" by Milton Lesser (1952)

The cover of this 1963 paperback promises us "seven new and frightful tales," and the first page of Way Out declares: "Seven Science Fiction Stories never before published." But if you know Belmont like I know Belmont, you won't be surprised to learn all the included stories first appeared in the early 1950s.  The surprise is that of the seven stories, six first appeared in Dynamic Science Fiction, and five of them all appeared in the same December 1952 issue of that magazine!   "Ennui" is one of those December 1952 Dynamic stories.

(You probably remember that we read a story from Dynamic's December 1952 issue, Lester Del Rey's "I Am Tomorrow," back in 2014 when we worked our way through Belmont's Novelets of Science Fiction.  It seems like that issue was the Belmont crew's very favorite SF magazine!  The magazine is actually available at the internet archive should you be interested in taking a look at the original texts and the numerous illustrations.)

"Ennui" is a sort of experimental story that is supposed to blow your mind, and it uses the words "quiddity"  and "solipsism" repeatedly in its nine pages, as well as mentioning David Hume.  Our unnamed narrator believes that he is the center of the universe, that the rest of the universe doesn't really exist, is merely a figment of his own imagination.  He finds he can make people and things vanish merely be willing them to do so.  However, he cannot create anything new.  Out of anger and boredom he begins willing everything out of existence, eventually making the solar system and his own body vanish, so he is a lone spirit floating in the void.  Searching for diversion he travels the galaxy, then other galaxies, but each new phenomenon he discovers eventually bores him and he reacts to this boredom by destroying it.  Finally, he erases the entire universe and, then, himself.

Ultimately sterile and gimmicky, perhaps, but not bad.  I wrote a little about Lesser back in 2015, when I read a story by him that reminded me of Games Workshop's classic game Space Hulk.

Is it good?  Marginally.                                            Is it Way Out?  Yes!

"Knowledge is Power" by H. B. Fyfe (1952)

I recognize Fyfe's name, but I don't think I've read anything by him before.  isfdb lists many stories by him, appearing in many magazines, including Astounding, Amazing, and F&SF. Fyfe was born in New Jersey, so I'm already rooting for him!  "Knowledge is Power" appeared in that December 1952 issue of Dynamic Science Fiction, and Fyfe's name appears on the cover.

"Knowledge is Power" stars Myru e Chib, an alien with four eyes and six limbs who lives in a sort of tyrannical medieval-type society.  A former captain in the army, Myru now lives a down-and-out existence as a thief because he complained when the local ruler stole his girlfriend (she has gorgeous scales!)  The despot also had two of our hero's four hands chopped off and two of his four eyes burned away!  When Earthmen--an advance survey team--land on the planet, Myru makes friends with them, helping them find specimens in return for trinkets and tools. Then he tricks them into helping him overthrow the despot and make himself ruler.  Myru then orders the humans executed, a move he (and Fyfe, more or less) justifies by suggesting the humans were going to exploit or enslave the natives after establishing a substantial colony.

A traditional SF story with elements we've often seen before: pre-industrial aliens, explorers from Earth, anti-imperialism, trickery.  But it is entertaining; Myru is a surprisingly well-developed character, and I wasn't sure who was going to outwit who until the end--Myru is not entirely sympathetic (he murders defenseless people of his own species throughout the story) and he commits some mistakes, so it seemed possible he was going to be hoist by his own petard or simply overwhelmed by the Earthmen's modern weapons.  It is often very easy to predict how an adventure story will turn out, so a genuinely unpredictable ending is welcome.  

Is it good?  Yes.                                            Is it Way Out?  Not really.

"Snail's Pace" by Algis Budrys (1953)

"Snail's Pace" was the cover story of the October 1953 issue of Dynamic Science Fiction.  You probably remember that we've already read a story from that October issue, Frank Belknap Long's "Night Fear," when we read Belmont's Novelets.

Budrys has a high reputation (Gene Wolfe is crazy about him) and seems like an interesting guy (check out the interview of him in Charles Platt's Dream Makers), but I think he is a bit overrated, as I have said before on this here blog.  Well, let's see what he is up to this time.

It is the 1960s (I think) and the United States is about to start building the first artificial satellite.  And the world is about to erupt in a Third World War!  The main character, General Post of the Air Force and the US space agency, uses all his influence to make sure the rocket with the parts for the space station takes off, despite the distractions of the coming war--the space station is essential to human progress!  He commands and pilots the flight himself, and leads the effort to build the space station.  When the war starts he even deactivates the communications equipment so none of the astronauts will be distracted by news that their homes and loved ones have been nuked!

After a few weeks the half-built station is running out of food and water, and the scheduled supply rockets from America have not been arriving.  Presumably the USA is kaput.  One of the astronauts mutinies, reactivating the communications equipment to contact the Earth and extort or beg supplies out of whoever won or just survived the war down there.  The mutineer thinks the station, as a symbol of progress or whatever, is more important than mere politics, and if the only help forthcoming is from the people who vaporized all the astronauts' friends and family, well, so be it.  Post, however, orders the evacuation of the station, saying that the radio message will just allow the enemy to target the station and blow it up.  Though the effort to construct the space station was a failure, Post is confident that mankind will eventually reach the stars.

I'm giving this one a thumbs down.  Budrys tries to convey to the reader the tremendous stress everybody is under by having them "shout," "bark" and "bellow" their dialogue and otherwise emote all the time.  On the third page of the story we are told that "Post raked the man's face with his eyes."  Three brief paragraphs later, on the very same page, Budrys writes, "Post bored into him with his eyes."  Give those eyes a rest, General Post!  The story thus comes off as overwrought, and there are lots of typos and weird grammatical constructions, as if the story was not edited.  (Shouldn't an editor have suggested Budrys delete one of those repetitive eye metaphors?)

"Snail's Pace" features too much boring and facile philosophizing about how history works in cycles or on a twisted path or whatever, an annoying reminder of silly Marxist and Whiggish theories that argue that history has an inevitable end point.  The plot is also unsatisfying, feeling like it goes nowhere--a guy works hard to get a thing built because he believes in progress, but he fails to build the thing, and then says it doesn't matter anyway because progress is inevitable.  A story in which a guy builds a thing is a story of triumph, which can be moving.  A story in which a guy tries and fails to build a thing is a tragedy, which can also be moving.  A story in which a guy tries to build a thing, fails to build it, then decides it doesn't matter if he built it or not is a drag.

Presumably the "real" plot of the story is how the hero learned something, how he built something spiritually or psychologically and how that is more important than building a physical thing--we've all heard those quotes about how the greatest conquest is over the self or whatever.  I could accept that if Budrys had made the General's intellectual or emotional journey interesting, but he didn't.  This story is weak, and it is not surprising that it was never printed again after its appearance in Way Out.        

Is it good?  No.                                            Is it Way Out?  No.

"'X' for 'Expendable'" by "William C. Bailey" (John Berryman) (1952)

John Berryman has quite a few stories listed at isfdb, most under the William C. Bailey or Walter Bupp pseudonyms.  Berryman is another son of the great state of New Jersey, so let's help he will make us Garden Staters proud--according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction he was an economist and business executive, so maybe he'll provide us a different perspective than those of the engineers, scientists, and professional genre writers we usually get our SF from.

So much for new perspectives--"'X' for 'Expendable'" is like a mash-up (the kids still say that, right?) of genre conventions.  Berryman writes his story, a first-person narrative, in the style of a hard-boiled detective tale.  Here's a para from the first page:

The cashier had a sharp, knifey eye, keen enough for a big-shot in the System's biggest bank.  He slashed a glance at my badge and at me.  "How much do you want?" he asked in a tone as cold as a frog's belly.

It is the post-nuclear war future, in which the surface of Manhattan, the center of my world and the setting of my nightly dreams, is a  "drab" and "glassy" "atomic slag" and the Earth has colonized the solar system.  Our hero is a detective working for the IPO, which I guess is like the future's FBI or CIA.  The current iteration of New York City is an underground "warren," and the narrator spends the first half of the 47-page story in subterranean nightclubs and offices, interrogating people involved in the black market sale of cadmium.  He isn't afraid to use a little muscle to get the info he needs, and when he gathers clues that direct him to the colonies on the Jovian moons he uses the IPO's authority to requisition a space navy vessel and blast off for Jupiter to look for the illegal nuclear reactor that is using that unregistered cadmium to develop nuclear weapons.

Out Jupiter way he and the local IPO guys figure out which moons to investigate, and our shamus of the future requisitions a "rocket-plane" armed with a "proton gun" to do the investigating.  The second half of the story is like a James Bond movie (though "'X' for 'Expendable'" was published before the first James Bond novel was released in 1953.)  The narrator is captured while investigating the criminals' base, escapes in one rocket plane and is pursued by another. The extended chase scene is where we get all the hard SF stuff--Berryman unleashes a lot of science and engineering on us during the chase, as the narrator calculates orbits and manipulates all the technical aspects of his rocket plane to keep ahead of his pursuers and send a message to IPO via unconventional means because his radio has been knocked out by enemy fire.

The writing style of the story was tiresome, and the detective stuff in the first half bored me, but I liked the violent adventure and space race business of the second half.  I guess I'm giving "'X' for 'Expendable'" a grade of "Acceptable."

"'X' for 'Expendable'" appeared in that December '52 issue of Dynamic.

Is it good?  Half of it is.                                           Is it Way Out?  No.

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So far, so good, I guess.  In our next installment we finish up with Way Out.