Strange Ports of Call: N S Bond, P S Miller, R A Heinlein and R Bradbury

We recently read stories from the 1948 anthology edited by August Derleth, Strange Ports of Call, that were written by three men I associate with Weird Tales, Clark Ashton Smith, David H. Keller, and Howard Wandrei.  Strange Ports of Call is billed as a book of "20 Science Fiction Masterpieces" and today let's read from it stories by four men I believe are thought of more as science fiction writers than weird or horror writers, Nelson S. Bond, P. Schuyler Miller, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury.  I of course recognize that such distinctions are kind of bogus--one piece of evidence casting doubt on the validity of any divide between fantasy and science fiction is the fact that all four of the men we are reading today published at least one story in Weird Tales, and Bond and Bradbury published many.  We all insist on making this distinction anyway.  

"The Cunning of the Beast" by Nelson S. Bond (1942)

I've read four stories by Bond over the course of this blog's improbable life, "Magic City," "Prescience," "To People a New World," and "Pipeline to Paradise" and here comes number five, even though of those four I only really liked one.  

"To People a New World" debuted in an issue of the magazine Blue Book, and was a story of the founding of our civilization which offered a science fictional explanation for the stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel which we find in the Bible.  Holy crap, "The Cunning of the Beast" is also a story that debuted in Blue Book and provides a SF explanation for the Biblical story of Adam and Eve.  What the....

On planet Kios lives a high tech race of people who are like electrified gas or pure energy, fragile forms that die if exposed to water.  (I think Bond hopes to remind us of the pillar of fire that is a manifestation of God in the Bible.)  Kios has rainy weather that can kill these puny people in seconds, so they spend a lot of time in their "Domes" and when they go outside they ride around in bipedal metal machines I guess kind of like the mecha in so many manga and anime.  Our narrator is a scientist who is working on developing space ships that will, it is hoped, carry these fragile people to a more hospitable planet.

(This story already has me scratching my head--if these pathetic jokers can't even go outside naked how did they mine and refine the materials to create the Domes they need to shelter in and the mecha they need to wear when outside?  This is one of those chicken and egg problems, I guess.)

The narrator has a colleague, a scientist named Yawa.  (Oh, brother.)  Yawa has a bright idea--to develop via what we today might call genetic engineering and selective breeding a new race of people that can survive naked outside the Domes; these hardy creatures could be the servants of the weak energy people, go outside to do whatever work is necessary.  Inside his Dome, Yawa creates a beautiful garden, a paradise, and populates it with a bipedal person, a man.  The man says he is lonely, and so Yawa takes a piece out of him and creates with it a woman.  This first woman is sort of a bad influence on the man, so Yawa comes up with a second woman who manipulates the man into becoming a productive worker.  This second woman also makes it her goal to get into Yawa's locked lab and acquire the knowledge Yawa has forbidden the man and woman--in this breaking and entering she is aided by her little buddy the serpent.  With that knowledge, she builds mecha and she and the man then begin attacking the energy people, breaking open their Domes and exposing them to the deadly rain.

The energy people capture the man and woman and stick them and Yawa into the prototype space ship the narrator has just completed and blast them off to exile.  In case you didn't get it yet, on the nineteenth and final page of this story the narrator tells you the first man and second woman are named Adam and Eve.  Mind blown?      

This story is pretty well-written on a sentence by sentence basis; I like the descriptions of the planet and of Yawa's lab.  But there is no tension, no drama, no surprise or suspense, because we immediately recognize that it is a retelling of the Adam and Eve story that we are already very familiar with.  Reading the story is a big "meta" game, as we read it we wonder how Bond is going to fit in this or that Biblical element, strain to remember if Lilith is actually in the Bible, that sort of thing, we don't care about the characters or get "immersed" in the story.  Even worse, because we know what is going to happen the story feels very long and slow.  Thumbs down for "The Cunning of the Beast."

This lame gimmick story appeared in Blue Book under the title "Another World Begins" but it was reprinted as "The Cunning of the Beast" here in Strange Ports of Call and elsewhere, such as the Bond collection No Time Like the Future (which has an awesome Richard Powers cover that just might depict Eve or Lilith and one of the energy people in its metal body, with the domes and rocket in the background) and the anthology Other Worlds, Other Gods.  

Other Worlds, Other Gods reprints Damon Knight's "Shall the Dust Praise Thee?",
a short-short I read in 2014 and graded "F."

"Forgotten" by P. Schuyler Miller (1933)

Miller is closely associated with Astounding/Analog, writing the book review column for John W. Campbell, Jr.'s magazine for over 20 years.  I believe I have read three short stories by Miller, "As Never Was," "Spawn," and "Bird Walk," two of which I liked.

"Forgotten," which debuted in Wonder Stories as "The Forgotten Man of Space" (perhaps a reference to a phrase appropriated by FDR in 1932 and after that saw wide use in popular culture) and then was reprinted in Startling in 1948 as a "Hall of Fame Story" is a decent adventure story about a guy who goes native, which is nice, as we can say Miller has a 75% pass rate here at MPorcius Fiction Log and not a 50% which is what he would have if I disliked this piece.  I am always rooting for the authors here at MPorcius Fiction Log--I want to like everything.

The main character of "Forgotten" is the youngest member of a team of three Terran prospectors on Mars.  It takes them six years, but eventually they mine enough uranium to make themselves rich.  The two older prospectors are ruthless knaves, and maroon the main character in the deserts of the Red Planet, flying off without him so they can keep his share of the uranium.

The three men had subsisted on Martian water and vegetation they gathered from a cave some miles away--they ferried the water and food back to base camp in the rocket when necessary.  There is no closer food source on this dying world, so the protagonist strikes out for the cave on foot, even though it will be like a ten day march--can he survive ten days without food or drink?

Some heretofore undiscovered natives provide succor to the man when he has only made it halfway to the cave.  Not only do they feed him, they basically adopt him into their tribe.  These Martians are like intelligent rabbits, and their culture is not very sophisticated; they have agriculture but very little by way of tools and no books or art or anything like that.  Their language has few words.

The man abandoned by his own race lives among these natives for twenty years.  Finally, he is found by some Terran prospectors.  These guys are as greedy as the men who marooned him--even though he tries to explain that the Martians are people, the prospectors plan to use them as a food source as they mine a rich vein near the natives' current settlement, so the main character sabotages the prospector's ship while he is aboard, killing them and himself.        

I am mildly recommending "Forgotten."  The remarkable thing about it is not the going-native theme, which is pretty common, but Miller's style, which is verbose.  Miller includes lots of images and lots of descriptions of the main character's psychological state, describing at length stuff the main character sees, hears and feels, when he is lucid and when he is half-dead and hallucinatory from thirst; probably Miller overdoes it a little--the pace of the story is slow--but I thought these dense descriptions effective in conveying to the reader what the abandoned miner was going through.  Somewhat less compelling is the long description of the rabbit-like natives' agricultural system.     

As for the plot and characters, they are pretty good; everything that happens in "Forgotten" makes sense, all the people's actions are believable, follow naturally from their personalities and the circumstances they find themselves in.  The story works so deserves commendation if not love.

We read Edmond Hamilton's Outlaw World back in 2014

 

"The Green Hills of Earth" by Robert A. Heinlein (1947)

This is a very famous story that I think I must have read years ago, before I started this blog.  "The Green Hills of Earth" debuted in the mainstream magazine Saturday Evening Post and has appeared in quite a few anthologies, including one edited by Orson Welles and one titled My Best Science Fiction Story and is one of Heinlein's famous Future History stories collected in the massive volume The Past Through Tomorrow.

"The Green Hills of Earth" presents itself as a sort of revisionist history; a recurring theme of Heinlein's work, and of a lot of SF, is people living in ignorance and then learning some truth about the universe.  (Heinlein's generation ship story "Universe" is a canonical example.)  It is the fictional readers of this story, the people of a future in which space travel is routine, who have been fed a sanitized image of a hero of the early days of space travel, Rhysling, who get a more accurate picture of their universe and in particular of Rhysling; along the way we real life readers get a sort of history lesson about Heinlein's imagined setting of Terran expansion into the solar system, which is inhabited by various native cultures.

Rhysling is an irascible sort of character, a lovable rascal who works in engine rooms of rocket ships, a guy who takes risks for the thrill of it and doesn't necessarily take norms and customs seriously but at the same time is the backbone of society, a competent man who again and again sacrifices himself for others.  One of the tensions in Heinlein's work as a whole is how he has a strong libertarian individualist streak but at the same time is an elitist who tells you a captain's word aboard ship must be law--Heinlein is into the liberty of the individual but also into hierarchy, which can be a little baffling.  Rhysling, the rebellious man who it turns out will do anything to protect his fellow man, and has the superior skill needed to get other people out of the scrapes their incompetence has dropped them and others into, sort of embodies that tension.  The reader has to decide if Heinlein is cleverly saying something about how complicated people and societies are, how they are riven with conflicting impulses and contain multitudes, or is just having his cake and eating it to, constructing superheroes who have all the attributes we love about the self-motivated rebel and about the dutiful self-sacrificing martyr.

The plot of "The Green Hills of Earth" is the Rhysling life story.  The guy flies on rockets, gets blinded saving one space flight which is in trouble because some dolt did a bad job in the engine room, and so becomes a wandering troubadour, hitching rides hither and yon across the solar system, paying his way by singing the songs he has composed.  Rhysling isn't only a genius engineer and a self-sacrificing hero, he is a bestselling poet!  We are told that he only became famous after his death, when his safe-for-work songs were published--his naughty ditties languish in obscurity.

After a long period of being a sort of traveling minstrel Rhysling is in the engine room of a ship when its motor malfunctions; he fixes the machine, saving everybody else, but dies from the radiation released by the accident.

"The Green Hills of Earth" is well-written and well-paced, an enjoyable read; both the life story of Rhysling and the glimpses of Heinlein's future history components are compelling, and the latter element leaves you wanting to read more of the Future History stories.  The story is vulnerable to the superhero and have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too criticisms I have already voiced, and maybe some people won't be crazy about how the story is full of Rhysling's poetry.  Personally, I think the poetry actually works as a way of indirectly telling you about the future milieu Heinlein has created--one of the strengths of this story is that readers learn about its future world from the inside, from its inhabitants, as if they themselves are among its inhabitants, not from a remove.

So, thumbs up for this famous story by the Dean of Science Fiction--I'm not playing iconoclast today, I guess. 

I've read a bunch of stories that appear in My Best Science Fiction Story, including
Henry Kuttner's "Don't Look Now," 
Edmond Hamilton's "The Inn Outside the World"
John W. Campbell, Jr.'s "Blindness"
Robert Bloch's "Almost Human"
A. E. van Vogt's "Project Spaceship"
Clark Ashton Smith's "The Uncharted Isle"
Sam Merwin, Jr.'s "The Carriers"
Frank Belknap Long's "The House of Rising Winds"
Fredric Brown's "Nothing Sirius"
Murray Leinster's "The Lost Race" 
and Theodore Sturgeon's "Thunder and Roses"

"The Million Year Picnic" by Ray Bradbury (1946)

Here's another story I think I must have read ages ago, one of the stories that was reprinted in The Martian Chronicles as well as other Bradbury collections and numerous anthologies.  The central gimmick of the story, that a human colonist on Mars tells his kids he is going to show them Martians and then, in the end of the story, points at their reflection in the water and everyone realizes they are the Martians, was sharp in my mind when I started the story, but I had forgotten the more grim, sad, even cynical elements.

The father of the family is a politician and has used his influence to secure for his family the opportunity to be among the first families permitted to colonize Mars.  He did so because he predicted what happens over the course of the story--a cataclysmic war erupts on Earth which, it seems, kills everyone there, and spreads to kill people here on Mars, though our protagonists escape.  The family travels by boat down a canal, past one dead Martian city after another, another grim note.

At the same time we get these depressing and apocalyptic story elements, the father and Bradbury seem confident that the human race is going to rebuild itself on Mars.  While Bradbury suggests that the destruction of Earth is a result of science getting of hand, outgrowing mankind's ability to control it, he also points out how science in the form of terraforming has made Mars habitable by humans.  As in the end of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury suggests that the human race's bellicosity and instinct for tyranny may cause a catastrophe, but that some wise and hardy segment of humanity will survive and continue the race, maybe even build a better civilization than that which preceded it.

A good story, though vulnerable to the charge that it is sappy and sentimental, a criticism that can be leveled at many Bradbury stories.

**********

The stories I read in June from Strange Ports of Call by men I think of as weirdies, Clark Ashton Smith, David H. Keller, and Howard Wandrei, are essentially horror stories in which men try to figure out the universe, to master it, and get defeated.  Today's stories from the same anthology, by people I think of as science fiction writers, Bond, Miller, Heinlein and Bradbury, have their share of trespass, tragedy and trouble, but are essentially about man's progress, his spreading out throughout the universe as a conqueror.  Miller and Heinlein present men who engage in self-sacrifice for their fellows, Bond focuses on (alien, it is true) scientists who produce universe-altering inventions, and while Bradbury's tale has apocalyptic images and content, it portrays the birth of a new human civilization as well as the extinction of one human civilization and the ruins of an alien civilization, and shows how science can foster life as well as destroy it.  The science fiction guys don't shy away from human evil and the tragic cost of progress, but are pretty confident people can master the universe, learn its secrets and bend it to their will, unlike the weirdies, who depict people totally overwhelmed by the complexity of the natural world.  This of course reminds us of the definition of science fiction that John W. Campbell, Jr. presented to Barry Malzberg, as reported in Malzberg's 1982 essay on Campbell*: a literature of "heroes," "a problem-solving medium" that deals with "success or the road to success" and argues that "man is a curious animal who wants to know how things work and given enough time can find out." 

*"John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971," written in 1980, published in The Engines of the Night

We may read some more stories that appear in Strange Ports of Call in the future--I'm sure we'll read Fritz Leiber's "Mr. Bauer and the Atoms," but probably when we extend our Weird Tales project to 1946 (currently we are toiling in 1941.)  And until that time I'm sure we'll conduct many other explorations into the adjacent and overlapping realms of weird fantasy and science fiction here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Weird Tales, Jan 1941: H Kuttner, D H Keller, R Bloch and R M Farley

Last year we read Henry Kuttner's first three Elak stories, "Thunder in the Dawn," "Spawn of Dagon" and "Beyond the Phoenix."  Today we will read Kuttner's fourth and final story of Elak of Atlantis, "Dragon Moon," which appears in the January 1941 issue of Weird Tales.  (Adrian Cole, whose Dream Lords trilogy I read in 2016 and tarbandu started last year, took up the saga of Elak in our own 21st century.)  We'll also tackle the stories in this ish by David H. Keller, Robert Bloch and Ralph M. Finley.  Hopefully these stories will he better than those we read last time we cracked open an issue of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual.  At least thid go round we have a cover with a muscleman, a monster and a damsel in distress.

(I considered reading Nelson S. Bond's story from this issue, but it is advertised as a joke story so I am abstaining--I know you don't want to hear me yet again groan about how little I appreciate joke stories.)

"Dragon Moon" by Henry Kuttner

"Dragon Moon" has ten chapters, and each is preceded by an epigraph.  Most of these are from poems by G. K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, or William Rose Benet--or the Bible, but Kuttner does quote his own 1936 poem "The Sunken Towers" before Chapter 6.  ("The Sunken Towers" appeared in the December 1936 issue of Donald Wollheim's zine The Phantagraph and was reprinted in 1967 in Operation Phantasy: The Best from The Phantagraph.  The poem is easy to find if you search around a bit.)  

Chapter 1 finds errant prince Elak and obese comic relief sidekick Lycon in a harborside tavern in southern Atlantis.  Elak gets into a fight over a wench and is about to be killed when the Druid from "Thunder in the Dawn" busts into the room and uses sorcery to save Elak's life.  In Chapter 2 the Druid delivers astonishing news--an alien entity known as Karkora is taking over the bodies of the monarchs of Atlantis!  When Elak's brother, Orander, king of the northern land of Cyrena, realized he was being possessed by a being from another universe, he killed himself!  The Druids want Elak to take the throne of Cyrena, but Elak refuses, thinking himself unfit!  

In Chapter 3, Elak has a dream in which he has a vision of Karkora the Pallid One and finds it so loathsome he decides to travel to Cyrena to seize control of the kingdom after all.  The Druid is nowhere to be found, so Elak and Lycon try to get passage on a ship, only to find it is captained by the guy Elak had that bar brawl with!  Elak and Lycon are chained at the oars among the galley slaves and help propel the ship northward with their own muscles.  In Chapter 4, Elak and Lycon lead a revolt of the galley slaves and take over the ship.  Kuttner includes lots of gruesome details in the fight that might appeal to gorehounds, but the sequence feels a little shoddy, with a metaphor used twice in as many pages and some confusion as to what is going on.  Chapter 4 would have benefited from some additional polishing and editing.

In Chapter 5 the Druid speaks to Elak in a dream--he must go to the red delta!  Whatever that is!  The next day is spotted a castle on an island in a delta; the sand here is red.  Ah!  Elak and Lycon bid farewell to the mutineers and disembark.  They meet a local potentate, Aynger, one of the last of a dispersed people, the Amenalk.  He tells Elak that within the castle lives a woman, Mayana, one of the few survivors of a pre-human race of sea people, a race of puissant wizards.  She was married to the human king of the nation just south of Cyrena, Kiriath, but left him when Karkora the Pallid One took over his body.  In Chapter 6, Elak, alone, ventures across a scary bridge, through a creepy tunnel, across a haunted underground lake, to the island under the island, where sits among a ruined city the temple under the castle, where he meets Mayana.  Mayana is incredibly tall and thin, and Hannes Bok provides an absorbing illustration of her kneeling before an idol of some kind of bird god. 

Chapter 7 is an expository chapter in which Mayana tells her own sad story and of the coming of Karkora the Pallid One.  You see, Mayana loved her human husband, king of Kiriath, and wanted to bear him a son, but as a nonhuman was unable.  A wizard in her husband's court offered to aid her with his sorcery, and she took him up on the offer, but the child she bore thereby was a stillborn misshapen mutant.  The wizard offered to revive it, and Mayana again accepted the sorcerer's aid; the wizard brought the baby back to feeble life and took it under his tutelage.  Eventually it was revealed that the sorcerer had summoned from another universe a horrible immaterial being to inhabit the embryo in Mayana's womb!  Having brought the deformed baby back to some semblance of life, along with the powerful alien spirit dwelling within it, the wizard put the child into what amounts to a sensory deprivation tank, denying it its natural five senses in order to strengthen an alien sixth sense!  This malformed human inhabited by an extradimensional spirit is now Karkora, and it seeks to conquer this world and others with the array of astounding powers this sixth sense confers upon him!

Mayana knows a talisman that can destroy Karkora, the monster whose earthly form came from her own womb, even if its alien soul did not, and Elak convinces her to provide it to him--she agrees to do so at the right moment.  Mayana even enchants Elak's blade, and gifts him some of her own magical strength, so he will be able to succeed in battle against Karkora and the Pallid One's unwitting human servants.  Kuttner doesn't say that impossibly tall, creepily skinny, shockingly pale and disturbingly scaly Mayana of the sea-folk has sex with Elak in order to give him this strength, but it is sort of metaphorically or euphemistically implied. 

"Stay with me for a moon--drinking the sea-power and Poseidon’s magic.”

“A moon—”

"Time will not exist. You will sleep, and while you sleep strength will pour into you."

(There's a lot of bestiality in the world of Lovecraftian and Lovecraftian-adjacent fiction.)

All the business with Mayana is good because it is about disturbing and heart-breaking human relationships and at the same time about the evil wizards, extradimensional aliens, lost races and lost cities, and undertone of perverse sex that we are looking for when we open up an issue of Weird Tales.

In Chapter 8, Elak makes his way to the capital of Cyrena and with the help of the Druid's magic wins the throne and raises an army.  In Chapter 9, Elak's army of Cyrena and Aynger's army of the reassembled Amenalk diaspora battle the army of Kiriath, led by Mayana's husband, who is controlled by her alien son.  Kuttner dwells on blood and wounds, on the writhing bodies of dying horses and men in the dirt and mud underfoot.  Elak kills the possessed king of Kiriath with the blade ensorcelled by the king's own wife, and then comes Chapter 10, the surreal psychic battle in a parallel dimension between Elak, supported by the Druid and Mayana, and the alien Karkora the Pallid One.  Stories by Kuttner and his wife C. L. Moore often feature these sorts of psychic battles as a climax (see Kuttner's "Where the World Is Quiet," and "The Time Axis," Moore's "The Tree of Life" and "Black God's Shadow," the Moore/Kuttner collab "Quest for the Starstone," and numerous others I am too lazy to link to.)  Uniting the two themes that make "Dragon Moon" noteworthy, the Mayana tragedy and the gore Kuttner fills the story with, our surprise ending is that the talisman Mayana gives to Elak at the moment he requires it is her own beating heart!  The heart, oozing blood, cast upon the hidden body of her son, makes the body disappear and sends the alien entity inhabiting it packing, saving the Earth.

While not as good as one of the better Conan, Elric, or Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, "Dragon Moon" is a solid sword and sorcery caper, maybe the best Elak story, thanks primarily to the Mayana material, though Kuttner's use of the Aynger character, which I have not gone into in this already too long blog post, is also interesting.     

"Dragon Moon" has been reprinted in various Elak collections and, among other anthologies, L. Sprague de Camp's The Fantastic Swordsmen, an abridged version of which was published by our Teutonic pals as Science Fiction Stories 20 and then in full as Drachenmond.

"The Goddess of Zion" by David H. Keller

Let's see, in the history of MPorcius Fiction Log we've read eleven stories by Keller.  OMG it is links time.

"The Thing in the Cellar" 

"The Seeds of Death"

"The Dead Woman"

"The Golden Bough"

"The Typewriter"

"The Last Magician"

"Tiger Cat"

"Valley of Bones"

"Dust in the House"

"A Piece of Linoleum"

"Lords of the Ice"

Today with "The Goddess of Zion" we make it a round dozen!  Maybe this is a good one--Jacques Sadoul and Messrs. Greenberg, McSherry and Waugh thought it worthy of reprinting in anthologies, and it also appears in the first volume of the David H. Keller Memorial Library.

This is a pretty good one, actually, well-written and exhibiting a higher tone than much of the sex and violence exploitation stuff we often read, but the sex and violence are still there!  "The Goddess of Zion" also offers plenty for intellectual types interested in issues of race and gender to chew on.

Out narrator relates to us the uncanny experience he had while visiting Zion National Park back in 1938.  At a far corner of the park, where there are no other tourists, he comes upon a sort of white mountain, shaped a little like a throne, with a hole in its crest through which he could see the sky.  Then another man appears, a handsome blue-eyed blonde.  Blonde invites the narrator to accompany him in a hike up the white mountain.  The mountain looks unscalable, but Blue-Eyes knows a path.  Along the way they discover sophisticated wall paintings featuring a mammoth and a beautiful blonde woman.

At the summit Blonde tells his crazy story.  His soul is that of a Viking ancestor who explored America centuries ago--his soul has shifted from father to son over many generations.  He forgets many intervening events, but recalls perfectly his adventure here on the mountain.

He was the last survivor of his Viking band, which had marched far across the continent, fighting Indians and facing other hardships for years.  He was taken prisoner by a race of brown pygmies who lived around and on this white mountain.  These pygmies regularly captured Indians and sacrificed them to their gods--a wooly mammoth who lived with them on top of the mountain and a gorgeous blonde woman with blue eyes who was their queen.  The mammoth would lift the Indians in its trunk one at a time and hurl them down through that hole in the mountain.  When the blonde queen showed signs of losing her looks with age, a new blonde queen, a teenager, would then appear and the older queen would be thrown down the hole to her death.

The current queen and the Viking became lovers.  The mammoth was somehow affected by their love, and, when the new queen arrived because the current queen got sick, the mammoth flipped the script by throwing the teenager down the hole, casting pygmy society into disarray.  The queen, near death from her illness, told the Viking that after she died he would live for many centuries but eventually return here to follow her so they could be together forever.  Then at her request the Viking threw the queen down through the hole.  

The day after hearing this story, the narrator descends the mountain, leaving the reincarnated Viking on the mountain top; that night he watches from below as the man jumps down through the hole so he can rejoin his beloved.

I like it.

"House of the Hatchet" by Robert Bloch
 

Here we have one of Bloch's Hollywood writer stories that references the fact that California is full of freaks and conmen, but, unlike the totally lame "Wine of the Sabbat" that I told you sucks earlier this month, "House of the Hatchet" is a good one with real human feeling and real human personalities.  Our third good story in a row today, and our third story with a strange sexual relationship at its core.

(This story also has a good Hannes Bok illustration.  This is shaping up to be a superior issue of Weird Tales.) 

Our narrator has been married for three years to Daisy, a pretty girl who has a sadistic streak and loves reading horror and murder stories, following the crime news in the paper, and watching detective and monster movies.  (Bloch's work is full of evidence that he suspected the line of work he himself was in was somehow bad for individuals and/or society, or reflected deficiencies in its fans or society at large.)  Their marriage is rocky; the narrator has a crush on another woman and Daisy has detected it, and for quite a while now the narrator's expenses have been exceeding the proceeds he gets from selling scripts, leading Daisy to moan about their finances.  

On their third anniversary they drive up to the region where they spent their honeymoon after eloping.  On the way they come upon a tourist attraction that advertises itself as a haunted house.  Daisy loves this kind of thing and so they go in.  The owner, a guy like W. C. Fields (this story has quite a few Hollywood references), describes how a Russian emigre, a failed film director, owned the house and murdered his wife before disappearing, and how since then hoboes and burglars who have invaded the house have been found killed in the same way the director's wife was killed--with a hatchet on a Satanic altar--and how people have seen the wife's ghost. 

The writer and Daisy are shown to the room in which the murders took place, which is complete with hatchet and altar.  The room has a powerful effect on both the narrator and on his wife.  Will one of them kill the other, possessed by the ghost or perhaps with the alleged ghost merely providing an excuse?

Bloch does a good job imagining the thoughts of both a murderer and his victim, and the twist ending isn't bad--the narrator murders his wife and then the ghost of his wife starts killing people, blossoming into reality the bogus story cooked up by the owner of the macabre tourist trap.  One of Bloch's better efforts, he keeping the jokes and the Kal-if-OR-NIGH-AYYY local color to a manageable level and delivering a powerful dose of "look into the mind of a killer" and "explore the psychology of a vengeful ghost" material.  Thumbs up!  

Among the numerous Bloch collections in which "House of the Hatchet" has been reprinted are two different British collections for which it serves as title story and a French volume with a cool mummy cover. 

"Test Tube Twin" by Ralph Milne Farley  

Last year we read six stories by Farley, a soldier, lawyer, politician and writer who is said by some to have sometimes collaborated with his daughter.  Of the six stories, I liked "House of Ecstasy," "Liquid Life," and "Horror's Head," and thought "Time for Sale," "Mystery of the Missing Magnate" and "Stratosphere Menace" were OK.  As things go here at MPorcius Fiction Log, that is a pretty good record!  Hopefully Farley's run of luck here at MPFL will continue today as we read "Test Tube Twin," which it seems has never been reprinted.  (Uh oh.)

Happily, "Test Tube Twin" is a diverting crime/science fiction story about a ruthless murderous gangster who tries to use cloning techniques to get revenge on people and escape justice.  Public Enemy Number One is our main character, and Farley succeeds in making him sort of interesting, and pretty evil, equally willing to kill with his own hand those who have been loyal to him and those who have betrayed him, providing the reader plenty of shocking thrills.

To be brief, the mobster through bribes and threats gets a scientist to develop a means of cloning a person by taking samples of his tissue and growing a genetically identical twin of him in a test tube.  He also has the egghead come up with techniques to make the clone grow at a super fast rate--it will appear to be 30 years old when it is only six or seven months old.  When a clone of the mobster has been produced that looks just like him, as if it is his age (though its mind is that of a child), the gangster murders the clone.  Now the police will think he is dead and stop looking for him.  He plants the gun on a rival gangster so that guy will be tried for murder.  Then, to cover his tracks, he tries to kill a woman who loves him (a trained nurse, she worked with the scientist in raising the clone), his most loyal associate (a dim-witted thug), and the scientist.  Who will live?  Who will die?  Who will end up in prison?  Will the scientist prove to have an ace in the hole that will preserve his highly educated hide and dump the gangster in the clink for his various murders?

An entertaining crime story.  

**********

Four good stories?  Amazing!  Bravo to all involved, McIlwraith, Kuttner, Keller, Bloch, and Farley, and let's not forget Bok who has multiple fine illustrations in the issue.  Weird Tales lives up to its reputation today and gets 1941 off to a good start.

Wheel of Fortune: N S Bond, K Koja & B N Malzberg and R A Lupoff

I've been hunting down Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg collaborations at the internet archive, and came upon one that has, it appears, only ever been printed in a Roger Zelazny anthology I'd never heard of before, Wheel of Fortune, published in 1995.  From this book let's also read a story by Nelson S. Bond and one by Richard A. Lupoff.  (Hopefully the joke cover of the anthology is not reflective of the tone of its contents.)

"Pipeline to Paradise" by Nelson S. Bond

Bond was in his eighties when Wheel of Fortune was published, and isfdb suggests this story was originally written for Harlan Ellison's The Last Dangerous Visions, which was originally slated to be published in the 1970s.  "Pipeline to Paradise" certainly feels kind of old with its references to switchboard operators at hotels and the death penalty in New York state (the last execution in New York state took place in 1963.)  I recently read Bond's 1950 story "To People a New World" and found it pretty poor; way back in 2015 I read Bond's strong-female-protagonist post-apocalyptic quest story "Magic City" and deemed it marginally recommendable.  Maybe this story here, which would be reprinted in the 2002 Bond collection The Far Side of Nowhere, will be something I can get really excited about?

Well, not really.  "Pipeline to Paradise" is an acceptable filler story with an ending that I fear makes little sense.

New Yorker Blake has been having terrible blackout headaches--he wakes up from them not remembering what he has been up to.  He starts getting telephone calls--from a man he thinks is dead, Marcus Kane, an old war buddy!  Kane claims to be calling from Heaven!  Blake suspects Kane is actually calling from Hell, and when Blake's girlfriend disappears and Kane keeps telling him to go here and go there to look for her, and instead of finding her at these locales he instead finds murder scenes where young women have been killed, Blake is sure his fears are well-founded.  Kane, no doubt, is enacting a terrible revenge on Blake from beyond the grave, from the pit of Hell!  You see, back in 'Nam, Blake and Kane were alone together and when the Viet Cong attacked them Blake fled and left Kane to die.  (Bond tells us that Blake was carrying an M-30 machine gun, a machine gun I never heard of before.  Maybe this is a typo for M-60.  Or maybe Bond meant to say Blake was lugging around a Browning .30 caliber machine gun, which I suppose is not impossible.  Or maybe this is a clue that Blake's memories of Vietnam are hallucinations.)

Blake's girlfriend turns up dead and Blake is arrested, tried, and convicted for the murders of all those young women.  It appears that Blake is insane--he must have slain his gf and the other innocent women during his blackouts, and all this business about a Kane must be false memories and hallucinations--Blake's court-appointed defense attorney can find no records of a serviceman named Marcus Kane serving in Vietnam.  Like the two novels we just read, Slob by Rex Miller and Knock Three-One-Two by Fredric Brown, "Pipeline to Paradise" is a story about a serial killer and abnormal psychology.  Or is it?  After Blake gets the electric chair the staff at the prison receive a phone call from a laughing man identifying himself as Marcus Kane.  So was Blake's Vietnam story real?  Was he really innocent of the murders?  This ending is meant to be shocking or funny, but it doesn't jive with the fact that nobody can find evidence that Kane was real, so instead of leaving the reader amazed or amused the ending leaves him with a nagging sense this story just doesn't hold together.

"The Unbolted" by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg

It looks like "The Unbolted" has never appeared in any other venue--Koja and Malzberg completists take note: as I draft this blog post there are copies of Wheel of Fortune for sale on ebay for less than $20.00.

Malzberg's body of work is replete with novels and stories about the race track; for the Sage of Teaneck, betting on the horses is a metaphor for Man's effort to understand and to master life and the universe, an enterprise Malzberg suggests is doomed to failure.  Another Malzberg theme is the fear that technology is taking over our lives, stealing our humanity, that machines are becoming our masters.  "The Unbolted" combines these two Malzbergian hobbyhorses.  Zelazny in his intro calls the story "surreal" and "The Unbolted" is kind of hard to read, but I think I get it.

In the future people will be able to plug themselves into a computer system and essentially take on the persona of a jockey and racehorse in a virtual world and run a race upon which people lay wagers.  This is a risky business; the practice is addictive, and some riders lose their minds.  Our narrator is one of the top riders oof these virtual races, and has a sexual relationship with a female rider, Gilda, one of his closest competitors.  These two lay down in the room where they will be plugged into the simulation yet again and have a conversation before the next race.  Gilda is pretty pessimistic about the whole thing, suggesting they didn't freely chose to participate in this dangerous career but were rather manipulated into it by the system.

These two and the other racers enter the simulation; it is implied that plugging into the system involves being anally penetrated.  While waiting for the race to start, the narrator recalls a past conversation in which another rider asserted that only "losers"--people who are "empty"--are chosen to enter the simulation, are able to enter the simulation.  The narrator is the favorite to win the race, but suffers a disaster--he doesn't even finish because a fall kills his virtual horse.  Gilda seems to hint that she is part of the system that manipulates the riders and races, calling the narrator a loser and saying "this is what they do, what we do now to the losers...."  

Acceptable; "The Unbolted" is tough sledding and there is little in it that is new to Malzberg fans and it offers no real jokes or surprises, making it even less likely to please people who aren't already big Malzberg fans than most of Malzberg's productions.  I'm not sure what Koja contributed here--everything in it feels like pure Malzberg.  

"The Tootsie Roll Factor" by Richard A. Lupoff

I didn't think Sandworld was very good, I thought Crack in the Sky was poor, and I found reading the ambitious "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" and "The Bentfin Boomer Girl Comes Thru" to be a chore.  The thing is, while I didn't find reading those works of Lupoff's a pleasure, they have all stuck in my mind because they were all odd and surprising.  So here I am, years later, giving this quite long story by Lupoff with an obvious joke title a shot.

"The Tootsie Roll Factor" is a trifling humor story, not annoying but not good, either.  Almost every paragraph contains or is built around some kind of joke which is not actually amusing but fortunately is not actually irritating, either.  As for the plot, it is weak and serves mainly as a mere skeleton upon which Lupoff can hang little joke anecdotes and indulgent nostalgia talk.  (You'll remember how much of Crack in the Sky was devoted to singing the praises of underground comix and Edgar Rice Burroughs--I guess this is just how Lupoff operates, padding out his work with expressions of love for his favorite pop culture artifacts.)

Israel Cohen is addicted to gambling, and this story describes how he became hooked on games of chance and how that addiction has brought him to a terrible crisis, and how he escapes the crisis.  As the story begins, Israel is in Vegas in a casino and is in real trouble because he owes the house a pile of dough and can't pay it back.  It seems possible he may be beaten up or even murdered.  So from his hotel room in the casino Israel calls his three ex-wives for help, one after the other--no help is forthcoming.  He reminisces about how he fell in love with gambling at a Jewish summer camp when he won a giant Tootsie Roll in a raffle.  (In the afterword to the story the author tells us this element of the tale is based on a real-life experience of his--based on my listening to feel like I've heard lots of prominent Jewish people talk about their summer camp experiences.)  Then he sends a fax begging for aid to a randomly dialed number.  

An eleven-year-old girl comes to his hotel room in answer to the fax--she is Lady Luck!  She has the power to take any guise; to demonstrate her powers, she appears as Gene Tierney and then John Wayne.  (This story has lots of references to golden age Hollywood.)  What this power has to do with being Lady Luck, and how her ability to change her appearance furthers the plot, I don't know; I suspect it just offers Lupoff another chance to talk about old movie stars.  I also wonder why Lady Luck's normal appearance is as a child; maybe this is a reference to an old book or film which I am missing.

Lady Luck helps Israel at the craps table, where he wins money sufficient to pay his debt to the casino and leave.  Will he quit gambling?  Probably not.

Barely acceptable.  

"The Tootsie Roll Factor" would be reprinted in the 2001 collection Claremont Tales.

**********

Though none of them actually stink, I am not crazy about these stories.  You can't expect to roll boxcars every throw, genre fiction readers.  The only people I can really recommend hie over to ebay or internet archive to access Wheel of Fortune are the most devoted of Zelazny's, Bond's, Koja's, Malzberg's and Lupoff's fans.  

Beachheads in Space: L del Rey, A E van Vogt, J Wyndham and N Bond

We're going back Jack, and doing it again--reading from a paperback edition of an anthology edited by August Derleth and with a cover illustration by Richard Powers, that is.  I bought Beachheads in Space, Berkley G-77, years ago, I think at one of the Second Story Books locations, maybe Rockville, MD, fabled in story and song, maybe Washington DC, the belly of the beast.  This 1957 edition contains half the stories of the 1952 hardcover edition--who decided what stories would make the cut and based on what criteria?  The SF game is full of heartbreak, I guess.

We've already read two stories that appear in G-77, Donald Wandrei's "The Blinding Shadow," which we liked, and Eric Frank Russell's "Metamorphosite," which I thought merited a "mild to moderate recommendation."  The previous owner of my copy of Beachheads in Space graded the stories in the volume, and he seems to have thought the Russell was excellent and the Wandrei poor.  (Unless "E" is for "evil" and "P" is for "perfect," which I suppose is possible in this crazy world of ours.)  We're going to read four more selections from Beachheads in Space today and see what we think of them and whether our opinions jive with the assessments of my predecessor.

Grades issued by the previous owner of my copy of Beachheads in Space; 
looks like Eric Frank Russell was his fave with A. E. van Vogt coming in second;
we see Donald Wandrei and Nelson S. Bond in the garbage

"'The Years Draw Nigh'" by Lester del Rey (1951)

Here we have a downbeat story that suggests there is nothing in outer space worth finding and mankind is going to go extinct when it no longer has any frontiers to conquer.  Say it ain't so, Lester!

It is the future!  Human life has been extended many centuries, thanks to rejuvenation treatments.  On Mars was discovered the ruins of a high tech civilization that must have expired ten million years ago.  The human race used Mars as a star port from which to launch forty starships carrying forty hardy and optimistic bands of explorers hoping to find new worlds to colonize, hoping to meet other intelligent races.  That was centuries ago.  By fifty years ago, 39 of the star ships had returned--not a single one had found an inhabitable planet or evidence of alien life, after exploring thousands of systems!  Earth's culture went into decline and the Mars star port was closed. 

The plot of our story here is set in motion when the sensors detect the approach of the fortieth star ship.  The Mars star port is reopened and operated by only one man.  When the ship touches down only four men, a fraction of the vessel's original complement, emerge.  The explorers found alien ruins on a distant world, and to everyone's dismay they proved to be ruins easily identified as those of the long dead Martian civilization.  Just like us Terrans, the Martians explored the galaxy, found nothing worth conquering, and then lost all ambition and faded away!  The men of the final ship and the guy managing the Mars port, seeing life is hopeless and civilization has nothing left to achieve, decide to forgo their next rejuvenation treatment!

 

A downer!  We'll call this one acceptable; del Rey does a good job of setting the mood of fatigue, decay and hopelessness, but the characters don't do much and there isn't much plot progression or climax; you might call it a mood piece, the bleak tone of which is maintained from start to finish.  Previous owner calls it fair and I am right there with him.

"'The Years Draw Nigh'" made its debut in Astounding, in the same issue as Eric Frank Russell's "Ultima Thule," which we read two years ago and which I can recommend.  "'The Years Draw Nigh'" has been reprinted in del Rey collections.

"Repetition" by A. E. van Vogt (1940)

It has been a while since we grappled with the bewildering oeuvre of the Canadian madman who is so close to our hearts, A. E. van Vogt.  "Repetition" debuted in Astounding, in the same issue as the first installment of L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout, which we read way back in 2014, and Lester del Rey's "Reincarnate," which we just read in July, and Leigh Brackett's "The Treasure of Ptakuth," which we haven't read yet.  (Maybe soon!)  "Repetition" would become a component of the 1959 fix-up novel The War Against the Rull and would be reprinted in anthologies starting in the 1970s under the title "The Gryb."  

"Repetition" is a traditional science fiction story with space suits, alien monsters, and a hero who saves the day with quick outside-the-box thinking that leverages his knowledge--the title refers to the fact that this guy has had adventures on many planets and learned how to deal with many situations, and so has solutions to the problems he encounters during the course of the story because he has already dealt with similar problems.  At the end of the story he gives a little speech about how if mankind is to unite in peace to conquer the galaxy, people will have to learn techniques to prevent war and use them again and again throughout history the same way he has used tried and true techniques to overcome monsters.

The solar system is on the brink of war!  The Earth-Venus union is at odds with the Mars empire, and one of the points of contention is Europa--the Martians want control of Europa, and the Europans, who have built five cities in the fifty years since the colony on Europa was founded, want to maintain their independence.  As the story begins, our hero Thomas, an important politician from the Earth-Venus union, is flying over the surface of Europa with his guide, the Europan Bartlett.  Bartlett is leading Thomas into a death trap--the Europans are aware that the Earth-Venus union wants to allow Mars control of Europa in order to avoid war, and so these hardy colonists have hatched a wild scheme to murder Thomas and short circuit his appeasement policy.  But Thomas is an expert judge of character and psychology and a seasoned adventurer and survives the murder attempt, and Bartlett is too much of a gentleman to just kill Thomas himself in cold blood.  So, Bartlett sets the controls of their jetpack space suits, energy weapons attached, so they fly off into space, leaving them to die in the barren and monster-haunted Europan wilderness.  But Thomas insists he isn't licked yet, that they can survive the long march to one of the Five Cities.  To the amazement of Bartlett, Thomas figures out how to defeat the native monsters without any high tech weapons, ensuring their survival.  During the march the men argue over interplanetary policy, Thomas eventually convincing Bartlett the appeasement policy is a good one--it is essential to avoid war because all of the solar system's resources must be dedicated to developing star ships, and giving a diplomatic "win" to the current Martian government will enable them to prevail in the coming election against the war party, and then join the Earth-Venus union.  It seems that Thomas' skill in fighting the monsters and his ability to read Bartlett's psychology are as important in convincing Bartlett as are facts and logic.

The adventure portions of the story are pretty good--the equipment, the monsters, the descriptions of perils and landscape and so on.  The means Thomas employs to kill the most dangerous monster, the thirty-foot-long armored gryb, and the political discussions around the fate of Europa and the relationship among Earth, Venus and Mars, are pretty complicated, contrived, and unconvincing, but somewhat entertaining.  "Repetition" is certainly a good example of van Vogt's totally out-of-left field thinking, and perhaps Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.'s dedication to shaking readers up and presenting counterintuitive thinking that bucks conventional wisdom, that our man Van offers a scenario strikingly similar to the crises around Czechoslovakia and then Poland in 1938 and 1939 and makes a go at convincing the reader to side with the appeaser instead of the patriot eager to fight for his country.

I like this sort of thing, and agree with previous owner that "Repetition" is moderately good.

As I read the version of the story in this rapidly decaying copy of Beachheads in Space I consulted a scan of the appropriate issue of Astounding and the only differences I found were in punctuation and in the relationships between paragraphs--the magazine version has section breaks between scenes that are eliminated in the Beachheads version, and at least once two magazine paragraphs were combined into a single paragraph for publication in Beachheads.  Then I took a glance at the version, titled "The Gryb," in my copy of The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders and it seemed this version restored the magazine punctuation and section breaks.  I wanted to see what changes to the story van Vogt wrought to make it fit into the novel The War Against the Rull, but internet archive was down, so while in Frederick, MD I stopped at the WonderBook there and bought a paperback copy of the novel put out by Ace with a John Schoenherr cover.

Chapters VI, VII and VIII of War Against the Rull consist primarily of the revised material from "Repetition" and much of the original story has been excised or altered.  The murderous guide is now a woman, and much of the psychology stuff has been removed or changed to instead reflect female psychology.  The location has been moved to an extrasolar system and all the business about appeasing Mars to influence the Mars election is gone; instead we have political jazz related to the Terran relationship with alien races, the ezwal and the Rull.  The only things that remains unchanged are the barren landscape and the monster fighting elements.  These changes are all for the worse--most of the intellectually challenging stuff is gone--but the scenes are still entertaining in a surface action-adventure way. 

German and Dutch translations of
Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders

"And the Walls Came Tumbling Down..." by John Wyndham (1951)

John Wyndham has a high reputation but, as I never tire of telling people, I wasn't crazy about The Chrysalids AKA Re-Birth.  Maybe I'll like this story, which debuted in an issue of Startling containing a story by Edmond Hamilton I haven't read yet and much discussion in the letters column related to whether or not the magazine should have monsters and sexy girls on its covers--many correspondents seem to think that the magazine will sell better if it switches to astronomical paintings and abandons the traditional "garish" and "lurid" and "oversexed" covers that readers are ashamed to let their relatives at home and strangers on the street see them carrying.  Just tell those judgmental normies "I was born this way" and "I'm just being me," people--let your freak frag fry!

The gag of "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down...," the title of which appears with more or fewer ellipses depending on where it is printed, is that silicone-based aliens arrive on Earth and are amazed and disgusted to find carbon-based life.  You'll be proud to hear that the carbon-based life shoots half the arrogant interlopers' ships right out of the sky and then when the aliens land in the wilderness it is only a days before humans have discovered them and wiped them out.  CBL!  CBL!

The text of the story, which I guess is supposed to be funny, bug has some gruesome horror elements, is a series of reports from an expedition to Earth by the telepathic silicon creatures, crystal people, who approach Earth and are fired upon repeatedly; many of the crystal people are killed before they land.  Later events in the story suggest that the silicon ships were destroyed not intentionally by anti-aircraft weapons but accidentally by radar or radio waves.  

The surviving aliens then land in a desert, which they consider a paradise because of all the silicates just laying around.  Some gorge themselves on all the available silicates and grow to huge size.  Others study the trees and animals and people inhabiting the area, finding it hard to believe that an automobile, which exhibits the hardness and straight lines they associate with intelligent life, is not alive and certainly not intelligent but that soft sacks of tubes are in fact alive and may be intelligent.  One reason for confusion in the interactions between human and alien is that the crystal people and their equipment are totally transparent to visible light, essentially invisible to the human eye.  A pair of people crash their car right into the fortification thrown up by the aliens around their ship.  The aliens can read human minds but humans cannot pick up alien thought transmissions.

The aliens dissect a person and thusly inspire a woman to scream and the frequency of her scream causes one of the aliens to shatter.  The story proceeds from there, with more and more people, including the authorities, arriving to investigate and try to rescue those people captured by the aliens, who are fully in sight behind the invisible but bullet-proof walls of the alien redoubt.  When women see the dissected person they scream, causing more of the aliens to shatter.  Eventually the aliens try to shoot down the humans with their weapons--sonic artillery that can shatter crystal people and equipment, but whose waves merely sound like queer music to humans.  When sound of the aliens' weapons is played back by the humans through a police radio, likely simply accidentally, the alien ship, fortifications and personnel are destroyed.

An acceptable sort of minor thing.  "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down" has reappeared in Wyndham collections, including "Best of" books.  If this is among Wyndham's best work, maybe I'm fated to forever be a Wyndham skeptic.  Previous owner considered it fair.

         

"To People a New World" by Nelson S. Bond (1950)

                 

This one debuted in Blue Book, a magazine that only rarely comes up in my SF explorations.  This story was considered poor by the previous owner of my copy of Beachheads in Space, and has not been reprinted very much; besides Beachheads you can find it in the Bond collection Nightmares and Daydreams.

This is a pretty lame story, obvious and boring; a SF magazine probably would have rejected it for being elementary and banal, and I don't know why Derleth selected it for republication. 

A family--Dad, Mom, two boys--live in a post-nuclear-war world, having set up a productive farm and being able to hunt and fish with bow, sling and spear.  Every year Dad goes away for a month to scavenge in a nuked city.  He avoids touching metal and there is no metal on the farm--metal retains radiation and would make them ill, or so Dad thinks.  They have never met any other people since the cataclysm.

When he is sixteen the narrator, one of the two boys, accompanies Dad to the city.  He finds a book which talks about machines and buildings and so forth, and the narrator likes it and secretly brings it home.  When Dad finds out about it he orders the narrator to destroy it, as books and technological knowledge were what brought on the nuclear war, but the narrator loves the book and loves the idea of rebuilding a technological society and hides the book and studies it closely in secret.  When his brother catches him reading he threatens to tell Dad and the narrator kills him.  The narrator is forced to leave his family and the last word of the story is his name: "Cain."  I guess we are supposed to think that our civilization is built above the ruins of a previous civilization obliterated in a nuclear war and the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel is based on these survivors of that disaster.

Lame twist ending, very little plot, we're giving this one the old thumbs down.  When I read Bond's "Prescience" back in January I liked it enough to say the kind of thing I say all the time, that I should read more by this author, but today's Bond experience is dampening my ardor a little.

**********

I like the van Vogt, but the other three stories we've looked at today are leaving me feeling like this paperback edition of Beachheads in Space is an underwhelming anthology.  The Bond is lame and feels like it is not aimed at a SF audience but a mainstream audience unfamiliar with SF themes and tropes.  The del Rey and Wyndham are competent, but are not thrilling or heroic or inspiring--you might call them tragic but they lack tragic grandeur, depicting mere blunders and people at the mercy of their environments, and seem to belittle the human race and suggest exploring space is a waste of time.  Do we crave these sorts of flat mopey stories in which people's fates do not reflect their aspirations and abilities?  Not really.

  

Nightmare stories by B. Stoker, H. B. Cave, D. Wandrei and N. S. Bond

In the last thrilling episode of MPorcius Fiction Log we talked about a story by Edmond Hamilton from a 1938 issue of Weird Tales that would be reprinted in the 1993 anthology edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Weinberg entitled To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare.  This volume is available for us cheapos at the internet archive, so let's borrow it and check out some more stories that won the favor of Messrs. D, G and W. 

We've actually already read a bunch of things Dziemianowicz and company selected for To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare, and here are the linkerinos to prove it:

"The Black Stone" by Robert E. Howard     
"Ubbo-Sathla" by Clark Ashton Smith
"Scarlet Dream" by C. L. Moore
"The Dreams in the Witch-House" by H. P. Lovecraft 
"The Isle of the Sleeper" by Edmond Hamilton
"The Unspeakable Betrothal" by Robert Bloch  
"Perchance to Dream" by Charles Beaumont

(Does anybody ever click these links?  The interns are always bitching about how long it takes them to copy and paste these links sections together, and I assure them that they are doing God's work, but maybe their time would be better spent out in the yard pulling weeds and stomping on spotted lanternflies or something.  Hell, probably my time would be better spent doing such things.)

At like 500 pages, To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare is full of stories new to me that look like they are worth reading, and today we'll explore four of them, tales by the inventor of the immortal Count Dracula, Bram Stoker; a guy I suspect is overrated, Hugh B. Cave; intimate associate of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, Donald Wandrei; and finally a guy I think I have only ever read one story by, but who has a long list of published SF stories, Nelson S. Bond.

"A Dream of Red Hands" by Bram Stoker (1894)

Like everybody, I love Dracula, and I actually think about Dracula all the time, having read it multiple times.  I can still remember sitting in the New York Public Library periodical room as a grad student, reading Dracula when I was supposed to be absorbing some bloodless, impotent and sleep-inducing academic garbage from some sterile mind-numbing scholarly journal.  My poor parents, tricked by my standardized test scores into thinking I was some kind of genius, financed my residence in Manhattan, where, instead of laying the foundations of a career in academia, I spent my time playing vanilla Angband, sitting by the river watching ships and birds go by, and eating the world's finest pizza, bagels and hot dogs.  Time well spent!

(We read a short story by Stoker, "The Judge's House," back in 2021 when we talked about the March 1935 issue of Weird Tales.)

Here in "A Dream of Red Hands" we have a Christian story of redemption.  Stoker's narrator is a gentleman and a writer who develops a friendship with a kind and generous working man who lives alone in a hut on the moor.  One day the narrator comes calling to find the worker quite ill.  The sick man says he can't sleep because God is punishing him with a terrible dream!  Eventually the narrator learns the dream and its genesis.  Years ago the worker was in love with some chick, and some scoundrel of a gentleman seduced her and ruined her life, and, in a sort of fit triggered by the rascal speaking disparagingly of the woman he had taken advantage of, the worker killed the gentleman and hid the body.  Now the worker knows he is barred from heaven; in the dream that has been plaguing him, angels keep him from entering paradise because his bloody hands make filthy the white raiment worn by those permitted to pass through the pearly gates.

The narrator assures the man that God is merciful and if he truly repents and does good deeds he will, after all, be permitted to enter heaven.  The murderer moves away, and years later, by coincidence, the narrator is close to the scene when the worker sacrifices himself to save a fellow worker during an industrial accident.  The narrator sees the murderer's corpse; the circumstances of the accident have bleached the man's hands white, and the narrator is sure the man has been forgiven by God.

A well-written story, and one ripe for class and gender analysis at the hands of historians and social scientists for its depiction of Victorian attitudes about class (among other things, we see one gentleman outrageously abuse members of the working class and another act as a wise guide to them) and religion.

It looks like "A Dream of Red Hands" made its debut in the weekly newspaper The Sketch and has seen book publication in the oft-reprinted collection Dracula's Guest and other Stoker collections.

"The Watcher in the Green Room" by Hugh B. Cave (1933) 

It looks like I've read nine stories by Cave over the course of this blog's hideous life.  (JFC with the links again.)  

"From the Lower Deep"

"The City of Crawling Death" ↓

"The Crawling Curse" ↑

"The Black Gargoyle"

"Brotherhood of Blood" ↑    

"The Cult of the White Ape" 

"The Isle of Dark Magic" 

"The Door Below" 

"Ladies in Waiting" 

Of these nine stories I only gave two positive reviews, but only one received a clear cut condemnation; running the numbers shows Cave's record to be better than I recalled; I guess my recollection is still dominated by my bad experience with a late novel of Cave's which I read before this blog sprang from my pate like Athena from the head of Zeus.  We'll see how today's Cave story, "The Watcher in the Green Room," which made its debut in an issue of Weird Tales with a Margaret Brundage BDSM cover and a Conan story with a good setting and good villains, affects my opinion of Cave's body of work. 

Well, on the first page of the story I am reminded that I don't like Cave's writing style; in this story he tries to be fancy and elaborate but sentences like this one end ups being clunky:

"He stood staring, apparently unaware that the hour was midnight and that the rain which had fallen steadily since early evening had made of him a drenched, disheveled street-walker."

(Rain doesn't make you a street-walker, for one thing, and how would this guy's lack of awareness of the time be made apparent to others by the fact that he is staring?  Is it abnormal to stare at certain times of the day?  Are there certain behaviors we expect of people at midnight?  Cave would be better off just straightforwardly telling us what he wants us to know instead of adding in superfluous phrases and concepts.)

On the other hand, the plot of "The Watcher in the Green Room" is not bad, and there are some good images.  Our "plump, stumpy" protagonist, Anthony Kolitt, lives in a city in an upstairs apartment--through the window over his bed comes green light from a neon sign on a nearby roof; this green light illuminates and casts shadows from Kolitt's oversized bureau, which we quickly learn is where Kollit has hidden the body of the complaining wife he murdered five days ago.  He thinks of the bureau, and/or the shadows it casts at night, as a "beast" which has swallowed up his annoying spouse and even as a friend.

The narrative describes Kollit's psychological state as he plots to escape the apartment with the body and has to deal with visits from his concerned neighbors--he told them that his wife left him and they are worried about his heavy drinking.  Most of these neighbors Cave makes ethnic stereotypes, I guess some kind of reflection of life in the melting pots/glorious mosaics that are American cities (perhaps a  sarcastic or derisive one--I don't know much about Cave, but we know that his more famous Lovecraft was no fan of ethnic diversity.)  The most significant neighbor is a "Latin" "psychopathist" whom it is hinted may be a homosexual.  This guy, Bellini, foreshadows the story's gory climax by cautioning Kollit not to imagine that the bureau is an animal, as one's imagination, he warns, can bring to life dangerous monsters.

Also noteworthy are slight "meta" elements of "The Watcher in the Green Room"; Kolitt goes out and sees a movie about a wizard or mad scientist who summons a monster which destroys him, Kollit listens to a scary drama on the radio and reads a "weird detective" story.  This consumption of genre fiction, in concert with the effects of booze and Kollit's fears of being found out by the cops, energizes his imagination to summon his own doom.

IMHO, Cave messes up the ending of the story a little.  We know from early on that Mrs. Kolitt's body is in the bureau, so the real shock ending is that a monster appears, eats half of Kolitt and then climbs out Kollit's window.  But instead of making this incredible event the focus of the final scene, Cave extends the story further to include a scene of Bellini and the cops discovering the wife's dismembered corpse, and the story's final line is "It is his wife," as if this is a shocking revelation, when it is not at all a surprise to us readers.  (If I was Cave's editor, I would have told him to make the Bellini-and-police  scene a foreword, so the story would end with the discovery of Kollit's half-eaten body and the trail of green slime leading out the window.)  

I'll call this one acceptable.  "The Watcher in the Green Room" would go on to be included in Cave collections as well as Christine Campbell Thomson's 1934 hardcover anthology Terror by Night and a 1952 issue of Donald Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader.        

You might know "The Witch from Hell's Kitchen" as "The House of Arabu"

"The Lady in Gray" by Donald Wandrei (1933)

The records suggest I have read 23 stories (kaboom!) by Donald Wandrei, and I may be courting a labor dispute here, but, hey, behold these links!

"Raiders of the Universes" ↑

"Fire Vampires" ↑

"Colossus" ↑

"Something from Above" ↑

"The Red Brain" ↑

"The Painted Mirror" ↑

"The Tree-Men of M'Bwa" ↑

"The Lives of Alfred Kramer" ↑

"Spawn of the Sea" ↑

"The Destroying Horde" ↑

"Infinity Zero" ↓

"Black Fog"

"Earth Minus"

"Life Current" ↑

"The Rod and the Staff" ↑

"Come Clean"

"Dramatic Touch"

"The Man Who Never Lived" ↓

"The Atom Smasher" 

"The Blinding Shadows" ↑

"The Whisperers" ↓

"Colossus Eternal" ↑

"Uneasy Lie the Drowned" ↑ 

Look at all those upwards-facing arrows!  I guess I'm a big Wandrei fan!  Figures don't lie!  

Whereas I found Cave's "The Watcher in the Green Room" poorly written but supplied with a good plot, I'm afraid "The Lady in Gray" is well-written, with many terrific images, but has a slight plot.  

The narrator tells us he is about to commit suicide.  He relates how all his life he has had terrible terrible dreams, and how he has tried a multitude of drugs and therapies and consulted shrinks all over America and Europe in an effort to free himself from these nightmares, to no avail.  Wandrei does a good job succinctly summarizing these dreams--with a minimum of verbiage, he summons up exciting, vivid visions.  (It is noteworthy that Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian staples figure in the dreams--I guess this story is set in the "Cthulhu Mythos.")  

The narrator fell in love with and became engaged to a woman with a gray personality and gray eyes named Miriam (you know, like Felix's adorable girlfriend, who always seems so much more suitable a life partner than the somewhat annoying Gloria.)  Miriam was killed in a plane crash the day before their wedding was to be held, and then the narrator started having dreams about her in which he and she travel in impossible ways to horrible alien environments, even interacting with a sort of monstrous slug or worm.  When the narrator awakes he is greeted by physical evidence that these dreams have been in some sense real, that he really has been to slimy seas and met a huge disgusting worm with a sort of face.  Upon awakening from the most recent of these dreams, the narrator found Miriam's animated corpse sitting beside his bed, which triggers his determination to slay himself.  I guess he and Miriam will now spend eternity together, exploring the universe via esoteric means.

I guess in the end I'm giving this one a marginal "good" grade, seeing as it is full of so many good sentences and striking images.  I kind of wish more was going on, however, or that whatever is going ono was more clear to my dim understanding.    

"The Lady in Gray" first saw print in an issue of Weird Tales with one of my favorite Brundage covers; a masterpiece of Yellow Peril drama with better composition and use of color that Brundage's average.  The story would go on to be included in, among other places, the Donald Wandrei collection The Eye and the Finger and Ramsey Campbell's Uncanny Banquet.

"Prescience" by Nelson S. Bond (1941)

I think of Bond, Nelson S. Bond, when people offhandedly assert that before such and such a date SF lacked strong female characters, because, during World War II, Bond published a series of three stories starring an admirable woman who is leader of her tribe in a post-apocalyptic America; I read one of these stories, "Magic City," an Astounding cover story, back in the early days of this here blog.  "Magic City" is in fact the only Bond story I've ever read--until today, when we read a Bond tale from John W. Campbell, Jr.'s other famous and important magazine, Unknown. "Prescience" debuted alongside Kuttner and Moore's "A Gnome There Was," and would be reprinted in an anthology collecting "the greatest stories" from Unknown.

Dr. Barton, psychiatrist, is having a case of the Mondays!  He is sick of his job, sick of dealing with neurotics all day, every day.  "They're fools--the whole lot of them!" he vents to his nurse.  You see, Barton knows that all neuroses stem from fear--specifically, fear of the afterlife, and that this is foolishness, because there is no need to fear the afterlife.

At the end of the day, a working-class woman comes to see Dr. Barton; nearly all of Barton's patients are middle-class, and in his tirade to his nurse he even made the claim that "the laboring classes of our race," like "'backward' or 'pagan' people" rarely suffer neuroses because they have no fear of the afterlife, so this housekeeper, Mrs. Williams, is an unusual case.  Williams tells the shrink that she often has prescient dreams, that during the course of her days she often realizes that the quite ordinary event she is living through is proceeding exactly as something experienced in a recent dream.  As the events are occurring in real life, she can't change her course of action, but feels compelled to do precisely what she did in the predictive dream. 

Barton doesn't take this woman too seriously, thinking she is just experiencing the very common phenomenon of deja vu.  However, he decides to conduct a little experiment on Williams, feeling free to take unusual measures with her because she lacks social standing and the ability to damage his reputation.  He hypnotizes her, making her think she is asleep, and she has one of her prescient dreams, and in her trance describes it to him.  The dream, however, presages no quotidian event, but a devastating fire at the house where she works.  As she describes climbing out onto the fire escape, Barton orders her to return into the burning house, insisting the fire is a mere illusion and harmless.  Under his hypnotic influence, Williams, in her dream, climbs back into the burning building and chillingly describes the agony of burning to death and then the behavior of the demons and the damned in Hell!  

Barton finds Williams' description of death and the afterlife curious, but unimportant.  He releases the woman from her trance; as usual, she remembers none of what she dreamed.  Barton sends her home, figuring he has cured her.  But the next day he reads a story in the newspaper--Williams has died in a house fire!  Witnesses report seeing her escape the conflagration and then climb back into the burning house to be killed!  Barton realizes that Hell is real and he goes insane!

This is a pretty good story; maybe Bond deserves more screen time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

**********

It looks like Dziemianowicz, Weinberg and Greenberg made good selections for this anthology, performing a service for their clients at Barnes & Noble and SF fans everywhere.  We'll read more stories from To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare soon.

(But before we part, one final link!  To the trailer for the mediocre 1968 giallo Nude... si muore, a movie that is pretty disappointing as a whole, but has a good sex-and-violence opening and perhaps my favorite giallo vocal theme, a fast-paced song (perhaps inspired by the theme of the Batman TV show) with English lyrics all about nightmares.  I highly recommend the first five minutes of Nude... si muore, but after the opening credits have rolled it's a whole lotta zzzzzzzzzz....)