F&SF July '53: A Derleth & M Reynolds, L Sprague de Camp & F Pratt, J Ciardi, and M St. Clair

In our last episode, we read a stack of stories from an issue of F&SF because the ish included a work of fiction by John Ciardi, famous American man of letters, and today we are doing the same thing.  The Ciardi story we read last time was about a robot who was tired of "living" and so committed suicide, but today's Ciardi story, if the cover illustration for it by Emsh is anything to go by, is going to be life affirming, or at least low key sexalicious!  Let's check out Ciardi's pseudonymous "The Hypnoglyph" along with three other stories from this issue of F&SF edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, one penned by Margaret St. Clair, whose "Change the Sky" we trashed in that last blog post, and two collabs, one by the team of August Derleth and Mack Reynolds and one the team of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt.

"The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" by August Derleth and Mack Reynolds

This is a Solar Pons story.  Solar Pons is a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes concocted by that one-man mass production fiction machine August Derleth, the subject of a vast catalog of stories produced not only by Derleth but an array of other Holmes-loving scribblers.  Personally, I don't really like Sherlock Holmes, but I find Derleth a likable individual and his career curious, and I find even more bewildering the career of the coauthor of "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time," Mack Reynolds, so decided to read this story even if I don't expect to enjoy it.

isfdb lists Lovecraft-correspondent Derleth as first author of "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" while F&SF lists former teenaged-Socialist-Labor-Party demagogue and expert on beer-drinking Reynolds as first author.  The intro to the story in the Derleth collection A Praed Street Dossier indicates that Reynolds came up with the plot and submitted to F&SF a story based on his idea, but Boucher and McComas felt Reynolds' manuscript didn't feel very Holmesian, so Derleth was enlisted to punch the thing up.  The thing was a big enough success that Reynolds and Derleth collaborated on further Solar Pons stories with a science fiction angle.

I find "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" to be a silly joke story full shopworn SF concepts and meta-jokes about genre literature.  Reynolds is renowned as one of the few SF writers to take as one of his main topics political economy, and this is reflected in the fact that the plot of "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" is resolved by tariff legislation.  

A guy in wacky clothes from the 26th century comes to visit Solar Pons and our narrator, Doctor Parker.  He turns out to be a cop from another dimension, and a lot of the story's limp wit relies on the contrast between Pons' acceptance of the man's increasingly incredible assertions and the doctor's bullheaded incredulity.

Future Cop explains that there are an infinite number of universes so everything that could happen has or will happen.  The Moriarty of his dimension has taken to travelling between universes and stealing art treasures, among them Pogo strips.  (Pogo, like Sherlock Holmes, is one of those cultural artifacts that is widely beloved but which leaves me cold.)  So, this cop has come to this dimension to consult with Solar Pons, who in the cop's dimension is merely a fictional character, in hopes that Pons can produce a solution to the problem of inter-dimensional theft.  Pons asks the traveller if there are taxes in his universe, and is told that yes, there are, and the tax laws are punctiliously followed by everybody, even criminals like Moriarty.  So Solar Pons suggests that prohibitive tariffs be levied that will discourage all inter-dimensional commerce.

Additional jokes involve Moriarty and this cop enlisting fictional attorneys like Perry Mason to champion their causes in court and references to whether Solar Pons knows Parker is writing up Pons' adventures or whether Parker has actually begun doing so yet.

To me, this story is a waste of time, but it wasn't painful and I can see that, for what it is, it is competently produced, so that people who love Sherlock Holmes and want to see him and Dr. Watson in outré situations like fighting Count Dracula or Jack the Ripper will enjoy "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time;" the dialogue and atmosphere and all that feels like the Sherlock Holmes stories I read so long ago, and those seeking such an experience will find it here, and I guess in all the Solar Pons stories.

This story that to me seems tolerable and forgettable has been quite successful, appearing in at least three anthologies as well as Derleth and Reynolds collections. 

"The Hypnoglyph" by John Ciardi (as by John Anthony)

Anthologists like August Derleth, Robert P. Mills and Tom Boardman have seen fit to reprint "The Hypnoglyph," and, having read it myself, I agree with their decisions to do so; "The Hypnoglyph" is full of cool SF and horror ideas and I strongly recommend it.

A veteran spaceman invites a younger man to see his collection of valuables brought back from his adventures in deep space.  The most fascinating specimen in the collection is a little item wrought from a wood-like substance; the item features a depression into which fits comfortably the younger man's thumb.  He finds stroking the little item with his thumb pleasurable, even addictive, and the adventurer talks to him about "tropism" and theories about how certain parts of the body enjoy certain types of stimuli and can, in effect, be hypnotized into behaving in certain ways by such stimulation.

The spaceman describes one of his greatest adventures, in which he discovered a quite human-like race, a matriarchy in which women use hypnotic powers, including the "tropism" techniques the spaceman has just hinted at, to dominate their men folk.  Ciardi does a good job of titillating the (male) reader's desire for and fear of women by suggesting these alien women have extreme control over their bodies that makes them capable of providing men with terrific sexual pleasure and our eager to have sex with human men but at the same time indicating that these women are obese, hairless, lazy, callous and cruel manipulators who treat the native men like disposable slaves--in fact, these alien women are champing at the bit to breed with human males because their ill treatment of the men of their own race has sapped those men's will to live and resulted in a radical numerical imbalance between the sexes.

The veteran space man and the younger man engage in a sort of psychological duel; will the younger man be able to blackmail the wealthy older man because the adventurer has broken laws that require the discovery of alien civilizations be reported to the authorities?, or will the older man, who it turns out has gone native, trick the young man into becoming a sexual slave of the obese and hairless alien matriarchs?

A great story that, with its mix of sexual fascination with the exotic and fear of the special powers and monstrous practices attributed to natives sort of reminds you of stories of European sailors interacting with tribes of primitive islanders who may be beautiful and sexually open but also might be engaged in voodoo, human sacrifice, head hunting, cannibalism, and God knows what.  "The Hypnoglyph" is a success that makes you wish Ciardi had written more SF and horror stories.

"The Untimely Toper" by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

Way back in 2014 we read a Gavagan's Bar story, of which there are like 29 or 30, and today we read a second Gavagan's Bar story.  At this rate we'll finish up with the Gavagan's Bar series during our rice break in the Chinese Communist Party labor camp orbiting Ganymede.

"The Untimely Toper" is a tedious and silly joke story that is a little confusing.  It seems an obnoxious guy, Pearce, comes to Gavagan's but rarely, when he has pissed off the people at his regular hang out.  Pearce is at Gavagan's one night when a bat appears inside the establishment; Pearce kills the bat.  Another habitue of the bar, maybe a vampire or a wizard or something, is offended by the killing of the bat, perhaps his pet or friend or something, and afflicts Pearce with a ridiculous curse the workings of which I didn't quite understand.  When Pearce goes into the men's room, he goes to another dimension or is trapped in time or something; other people go in and out of the men's room and do not see Pearce in there, but hours or days later Pearce emerges from the rest room thinking only a few minutes have passed.  The bartender figures out that the duration of Pearce's disappearances is correlated with his level of intoxication, and so tricks the man into drinking a hangover cure, which sobers him and, I guess, keeps him from returning to Gavagan's from wherever it is he goes after he goes to the bathroom to vomit.

I don't get it, and I don't want it; the jokes are not funny, the characters' motivations are mysterious, and the mechanics of the magic don't make sense to me.  Thumbs down!

As with the Derleth Solar Pons stories, I suspect the appeal of the Gavagan's Bar stories for their fans is the style and atmosphere.  Such fans are numerous enough that Gavagan's Bar collections have been published in multiple editions, and "The Untimely Toper" is a good enough example of the species that Boucher and McComas included it in a Best from F&SF volume.

"Judgment Planet" by Margaret St. Clair (as by Idris Seabright)

This is a far better story than the last St. Clair thing we read, the annoying and pointless "Change the Sky."  The images to be found in "Judgment Planet" constitute a contribution to the story rather than a distraction, the pace is quick, the psychology is believable and the travails of the character have some emotional effect on the reader.  As for the plot, it is just OK--"Judgment Planet" is one of those stories like Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" or William Golding's Pincher Martin in which a dying man hallucinates salvation as well as yet another story in which goody goody aliens make us humans look bad by contrast.

You know those guys who fall in love with some foreign culture or society, Japan or Ancient Rome or the Soviet Union or whatever, and don't want to hear criticism of or think about apparent misdeeds of their beloved, like the Rape of Nanking or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or whatever?  (I knew a multitude of these guys in grad school--hell, I maybe was one of these guys.)  The protagonist of "Judgment Planet" is one of those guys.  He is a scholar of the future of interstellar human civilization, and St. Clair hints that this civilization punishes dissent.  Before the rise of Earth's space empire, another race colonized multiple planets, the Elea; Elean civilization collapsed long ago, but left behind artifacts of great beauty that suggest the Elea were a people who loved freedom.

As the story begins, our hero is all alone on a pretty desolate planet far from his ship and has just been injured and dropped his food supplies down an unscalable cliff.  Oops.  Why is he in this sticky situation?  Some other scholar has claimed that this here planet was the planet where the Elea exiled their dissenters, suggesting the Elea are not the goody goodies our guy thinks they were, so he came to explode this theory.  Unfortunately, it kind of looks like that theory was accurate.

Our guy suddenly finds a door into an underground complex where he discovers preserved food and evidence that this planet was not a place of exile for dissenters but actually a comfortable quarantine for individuals afflicted with a plague.  The Elea were as good as he had hoped!  He spends weeks exploring the place, but then comes our twist ending.  The complex is just a dream, but the Elea really were goody goodies--this planet has a powerful hypno apparatus that detects when you are going to die and fills your brain with dreams that ease the pain of your last moments, dreams that validate your life and beliefs.  The scholar can die knowing that the people he worships are beyond reproach and worthy of that worship--only the best sort of people would ease the pain of the dying in this way.

The plot sounds a little lame, like childish wish fulfillment goop (is this story supposed to hearten F&SF's leftist readership by implying that all the crummy things people say about the USSR aren't true?) when you just describe it baldly as I have, but the style and pacing and all that are good, with real suspense and a believable psychology at the center of the story, so I enjoyed it.        
 

Seeing as "Judgment Planet" is legitimately effective, it is odd to learn it has never appeared in an actual book, just been reprinted in various foreign editions of F&SF, especially when you know an aggravating bore like "Change the Sky" was the title story of a St. Clair collection.  Again we see I'm not on the same wavelength as the people who edit SF books.    

Left: UK     Right: Australia

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The Derleth and Reynolds collaboration, and the de Camp and Pratt as well, don't scratch any itch I happen to have, but their authors have probably succeeded in their goals and pleased their fans.  I was much more impressed with the Ciardi and the St. Clair, which, instead of showcasing lame jokes, use interesting science fiction concepts, generate suspense, and portray real human emotions.

More 1950s magazine stories when next we meet!

Best SF: 1968: B Aldiss, M Reynolds, F Leiber, & R Silverberg

A couple of weeks ago we read three stories from Best SF: 1968, an anthology edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss.  Today we read four more stories from the book by people in whom we are interested: Brian Aldiss himself, Mack Reynolds, Fritz Leiber, and Robert Silverberg.  I almost said "five more stories," but then I checked the archives and found that the story in Best SF: 1968 by Stephen Goldin, "Sweet Dreams Melissa," has already been covered here at MPorcius Fiction Log, way back in 2014.  (I liked it.)

"The Serpent of Kundalini" by Brian Aldiss

isfdb is telling me that "The Serpent of Kundalini" is the fifth of eight stories in a Colin Charteris series.  Harry Harrison in his intro to the story here in Best SF 1968 tells us that the Charteris stories are "acid-head stories of a future where psychedelic drugs have been used in warfare," hints that the chronology of the story may be "awry," and warns us that the Charteris stories "are not to everyone's taste, because they sometimes require a certain effort on the part of the reader."  Good grief, Harry, are you trying to convince me to skip this story?  Or just prophylactically heading off people who might say they don't like it by suggesting readers who don't care for "The Serpent of Kundalini" just aren't smart enough to get it? Well, let's see if I'm smart enough to get it.

Colin Charteris is a Montenegrin soldier, veteran of a war in which psychedelic drugs were spread throughout Europe and disrupted minds and societies far and wide.  Our guy CC has an image of England in his mind drawn from the stories of The Saint written by Leslie Charteris, and today he is making his first landfall on the sceptered isle, having taken a ferry from France to Dover along with is car.  The first third or so of this 15-or-so-page-long story is a dream or delusion or vision of CC's arrival in and first explorations of England full of surreal images that I guess are symbols and metaphors; the text is laced with lame philosophical and paradoxical reflections:  

"...attachment to things keeps alive a thousand useless I's in a man; these I's must die so that the big I can be born."

"...motion must be an expression of stillness."

"To what extent was a vision an illusion, to what extent a clearer sort of truth?"

Ugh.  The second part of the story describes Charteris' "real" arrival and explorations of England; he keeps comparing this England to his earlier delusions and visions of the green and pleasant land--this "real" England is different and I suppose a little more believable.  CC keeps seeing versions of himself going off in different directions--these are the aforementioned "I''s" that must be discarded.

In the final third or so of the story we get some class analysis.  Before he was a mystic who followed the teachings of "Gurdjieff," CC was a communist and when he comes upon stereotypes or parodies of suburban English middle-class homes and individuals he angrily denounces them.  An Englishman who is even more familiar with the work of Gurdjieff than CC shows our hero around and plans to introduce the Montenegrin to his sexy daughter.  CC fears this man is plying him with tea and his daughter in order to divert CC from his true mission, and as the story ends, sure enough, we are given reason to believe that the Colin Charteris we have been following is one of the useless "I's" that is being discarded by the true CC.

A sterile and annoying waste of time.  In the same way that modern paintings by people who know nothing of perspective and anatomy are billed as experimental, but all too often come across as merely sophomoric and lazy, all too often stories that, in an effort to be psychedelic or surreal, eschew chronological narrative and a structure in which events in one scene follow logically from that before, come across as shoddy and pointless, and "The Serpent of Kundalini" is one of those.  Thumbs down!   

"The Serpent of Kundalini" debuted in an issue of Michael Moorcock's New Worlds with a Barbarella cover and Moorcock included it in the anthology Best SF Stories from New Worlds 5.

"Criminal in Utopia" by Mack Reynolds

I've read a number of things by Reynolds over the years, and in general I think he is a poor writer whose ideas don't deserve to be taken very seriously, but he had a wild and strange--almost mind-bloggingly so--career, and so I read him on occasion.  "Criminal in Utopia" first appeared in Galaxy, the readers of which (in league with the readers of If) we are told voted Reynolds "the most popular science fiction author."  The story was reprinted in an anthology of stories about big business and an anthology of stories about computers, and was integrated with other Reynolds stories about the "Police Patrol" to form the 1977 novel Police Patrol: 2000 AD.  In his intro to "Criminal in Utopia" here in the book in which we are reading it, Harrison tells us Reynolds has lived in or visited over 50 countries, and this story is about credit cards.

Sounds horrible.  But here we go. 

OK, this is better than expected, though not actually good.  "Criminal in Utopia" is a very straightforward, quite pedestrian story that methodically describes a person's travelling hither and thither within a city and his quotidian conversations and actions, like buying goods and services.  "Criminal in Utopia" is a real legit science fiction story--Reynolds is speculating about future economic systems and police operations--that comes in the form of a crime story, whatever you call a story much like a police procedural but that has its focus the operations of the criminal rather than those of the cops.  Do mystery fans call these types of stories "capers?"  

It is the future of the "Ultra-welfare State" where, it is implied, most people are Zoroastrians.  Everybody has a credit card (which acts more like a debit card in the story than an actual credit card, as far as I can see) and computer access to a network like the internet which allows you to read newspapers on a screen and order consumer goods for same-day delivery through vacuum tubes.  Our protagonist has used up all the money in his account.  First he requests an advance but he has already gotten two months of advances, and is refused.  Then he buys a toy gun over the internet and rides the subway to an apartment building where rich people live.  He tricks his way inside a rich single man's apartment and uses the gun to convince the rich guy to order him a real gun, jewelry, clothes, and camping equipment, all of which are delivered within minutes.

Our guy leaves with his victim's credit card and sells the jewelry at a little store, of whose owner he thinks "here was the last of the kulaks, the last of the small businessmen."  The money he gets for the jewelry is put onto his account when he inserts his credit card into a slot.

It is not much later that the cops are on to our guy, broadcasting his photo on everybody's wrist TV.  The thief uses his gun to convince a man on the street to call and pay for a flying taxi for him to escape in.  Our protagonist pulls a few more such scams and spends time in a swanky hotel room drinking expensive booze and eating expensive food.  Then the police come to apprehend him.

Then comes our twist ending.  Our main character is not really a thief but a government employee testing the system, looking for weaknesses that could be exploited by real criminals. 

"Criminal in Utopia" is competent if bland, and I'm grading it as acceptable, though there are some problems.  The biggest is that using your credit card requires that you press your thumb to a screen that reads your thumbprint, and the main character circumvents this security measure so he can use another person's card simply by photographing the image of the legitimate owner's fingerprint which is printed on his card and then holding that photo up to the screens.  Why would a representation of your fingerprint be on your card?  Oh, well.

Martin H. Greenberg and John D. Olander included this story in Tomorrow, Inc., which is billed as a collection of stories about big business, but isn't "Criminal in Utopia" really about government?  Almost all of the story's activity is conducted by police in the course of their duties and though there are class distinctions it is implied that in this society the means of production is in public hands, and it is explicitly stated that it is the government that handles the cards that are at the center of the story.  Harrison in his intro to the story says it is about credit cards, but as I have already noted, the cards in the story don't give you access to easy credit--don't facilitate the borrowing of money--but just deduct or add funds to your bank account; to actually borrow money you have to call up a person on the phone.  The real scary part of the story is that in the absence of physical money the government can follow all your purchases and learn all about you.  I kind of feel like Greenberg, Olander and Harrison are promoting Reynolds' story as being about what they want it to be about, when it is actually about something slightly different.

"One Station of the Way" by Fritz Leiber

I hate the holidays.  I hate taking down all the pictures and decor I actually like and dragging that stuff to the basement and then lugging back up images of pumpkins to replace it, and then turkeys, and then snowflakes.  I hate participating in activities, eating food, and listening to music I don't like just because the calendar says it is time to do so.  I hate the stress of picking out gifts for people and worrying the gift will disappoint or even insult them, and I hate putting on an act when I receive a gift that I have no interest in.  And it is not like the holidays are four or five discrete days with rest periods in between that you can get through individually like you can a doctor's appointment or regular maintenance on the Toyota--nowadays the holidays are like a solid three and a half months artillery bombardment without respite.  

Anyway, in his intro to "One Station of the Way" here in Best SF: 1968, Harrison tells us this is "the only science fiction story of value ever written" about Christmas.  An interesting claim, as Arthur C. Clarke's "Star" was published in 1956 and Michael Moorcock's "Behold the Man" in 1966; is Harrison bashing those guys or suggesting their stories are not really about Christmas?  Also noteworthy: according to isfdb, "One Station of the Way" has never appeared in a Leiber collection--was Fritz unhappy with it?

Like Aldiss, Leiber is a talented writer with a lot of ideas and a willingness to push the envelope and experiment when it comes to topics, themes and narrative strategies.  Sometimes these experiments strike me as failures, and so I never know when I start a Leiber (or Aldiss) story what to expect and whether I will like it.   

Our story begins in a desert on planet Finiswar as we observe three "hominids," people with three eyes each, riding "camleoids;" they see a bright light in the sky and ride towards it.  Obviously, these three figures are supposed to remind us of the Three Wise Men or Three Kings--these guys even talk of bringing gifts to somebody.

We then shift the scene to a group of four hominids, a "Husband" and a "Wife" and their two kids.  They are close to the bright light, which turns out to be a landing space ship.  From the vessel emerge its crew, two snake-like millipedes like 50 feet long, one white, one black.  The white serpent licks the Wife; this touch not only fills her with a powerful feeling of love, but impregnates her.  The three wise men catch up to the party, and attack--they have been following the family in hopes of raping the Wife.  (The "gifts" they sardonically referred to were their sperm.  Everybody is a comedian.)  The many-legged aliens have energy weapons and destroy the spear-wielding "wise men" and then leave.

Through the dialogue between the two serpents we get a clear explanation of what is going on.  (Most of the meat of this story is in the dialogue.)  The white serpent is travelling around the galaxy impregnating women of intelligent races; the women he impregnates give birth to special children who preach a religion of love--the white serpent's mission in life is to bring love and peace to the galaxy this way.  The black serpent is along for the ride and plays a sort of devil's advocate role.  While the white serpent is all about love, the black serpent admires the strength and speed, the intelligence and technological progress, that are the result of conflict, of the relationship between predator and prey and between combatants in war.  He and the white serpent have bitter philosophical debates on these themes and over whether the white serpent's impregnations lead to peace or actually foment conflict.  In their dialogue we also learn, as if we couldn't figure it out ourselves, that the white serpent impregnated Mary on Terra and is the father of Jesus Christ.

Through the serpents' conversation we also learn about the crazy facts of reproduction on Finiswar, and this is the most interesting part of the story.  On Finiswar, every male living creature can impregnate every female living creature no matter how disparate their species, so females have tightly closed and heavily armored genitals and mostly reproduce by cloning themselves because if they open their genitals to have sex with males of their own species all kinds of spores and seeds floating in the air will enter them and they will give birth to hybrids.  Husband and Wife were in the desert because they wanted to reproduce sexually, and only in a sparsely populated place where there are few other living things could they have sex without risking Wife being impregnated by some other creature.  (The white serpent's hypnotic love powers overcame the Wife's many biological and psychological defenses against cross-species fertilization.)          

This story is OK...there is no actual human feeling or suspense.  I guess the story is supposed to generate excitement in the reader in the form of shock or outrage or titillation in reaction to the religious, philosophical and sexual content.  But in the post-Christian, pornified America of 2025 the ideas in the story are no longer thrilling, just faintly interesting.

Like "Criminal in Utopia," "One Station of the Way" debuted in Fred Pohl's Galaxy.  Pohl included it in The Eleventh Galaxy Reader and editors in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands also liked it enough to reprint it.

"To the Dark Star" by Robert Silverberg

"To the Dark Star" debuted in the anthology The Farthest Reaches, the French edition of which has a cool Moebius cover I think all you fans of European comics (like our man tarbandu) will appreciate.  "To the Dark Star" has reappeared in many Silverberg collections and is the title story of the second volume of The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg.

"To the Dark Star" has the form of a traditional science fiction story--a diverse team of scientists travels a great distance and spends a long time studying an astronomical phenomena (Silverberg tries to teach us stuff about the life cycle of stars) and the scientists find themselves trying to solve a life-threatening problem using their wits.  But Silverberg adds in some cynical revisionist or even New Wave elements that drive most of the drama.  We might interpret "To the Dark Star" as one of those SF stories in which the goody goody aliens by contrast illuminate how violent, envious and uncooperative we humans are, and even as an allegory about tribalism or racism, but luckily for those of us who read fiction for enjoyment and not to hear the same boring complaints about us from our supposed betters again and again, "To the Dark Star" is more hard-boiled or noirish than preachy, and is written economically and from the point of view of one of the flawed humans, not the point of view of a wise man or superior being or omniscient narrator.  Thumbs up!

It is like 1000 years in the future and three scientists have been sent to witness the collapse into a singularity of a large star that has already gone supernova.  Our narrator is the normal human on the team.  One of his companions is a woman altered to live in a high gravity environment, a hugely muscled and squarish woman whose body and voice are absolutely unattractive to a 100% organic and all natural non-GMO man like our narrator.  The third member of the research ship's crew is a representative of the only other intelligent species humans have ever met, a people with three legs and almost no head, the brain being in the torso.

The two humans are very competitive and hate each other; one of the themes of the story is that scientists are not necessarily noble seekers after truth but are sometimes selfish careerists who are always trying to one up each other.  The alien is relatively calm and responsible and plays the role of mediator between the two humans.

After a few months orbiting the collapsing star, the crew have to make a big decision.  When total collapse is imminent, they will send a drone machine to the surface of the dying star and one of them has to connect his brain via radio (or equivalent) to the drone so he can experience first hand what happens when the dying cinder of a star "breaks through the walls of the universe and disappears" as it "undergoes a violent collapse to zero volume" and at the same time achieves "infinite density."  Such an experience could very well kill or drive a man insane, so our narrator and the woman are loathe to take on this task.  Each uses dirty tricks to try to get the other to "volunteer" for this risky mission, drugs and hypnosis among them.  When the crucial time comes they fight hand to hand, but come to a stalemate, the narrator's combat training neutralizing the woman's super strength.  So, the humans gang up on the alien and force it to undergo the dangerous experience.  

A solid piece of work, a fine performance by Silverberg and a very good example of SF that is full of science, human drama and social commentary and is still briskly entertaining.  "To the Dark Star" is like a model of what a modal science fiction story should be.

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We can see why Harrison and Aldiss would include these four stories in a "Best of" book.  Silverberg's story is actually quite good, and with its sexual elements and misanthropy suits the 1968 zeitgeist.  Aldiss' is very experimental and topical, with its drug theme and general rebellious attitude, its hero being committed to left-wing politics and Eastern mysticism.  Reynolds' story is all about current events, the threats posed by credit cards, computer surveillance and government surveillance.  And Leiber's story is in-your-face provocative, a bizarre interpretation of the origins of Christianity plus weird sex.  The Aldiss aside, these stories are worth reading for their ideas and as entertainment; the Aldiss is only valuable as some kind of historical or biographical document to those interested in the SF field and/or Aldiss in particular.

Merril-endorsed '58 tales: Phillifent, Reed, Reynolds, Runyon

Today's blog post is brought to you by the letter "R."  Yes, we're reading four more stories from Judith Merril's alphabetical list of honorable mentions at the back of the fourth of her critically-adored SF: The Year's Greatest anthology series, the volume covering stories published in 1958.  Today's authors are John T. Phillifent (working undercover as Arthur Rackham), Kit Reed, Mack Reynolds, and Charles W. Runyon.  (I'd like to read the story by Joel Townsley Rogers that Merril recommends, "Night of Horror," but I can't find a scan of the issue of Saturday Evening Post in which it appears.)  With the exception of Reynolds, these are people I rarely read, so today is a day on which anything can happen.  Let's just hope "R" stands for "really good."

"One-Eye" by "Arthur Rackham" (John T. Phillifent) 

Already I'm questioning the itinerary our tour guide Judith Merril has prepared for us.  When I read Phillifent's novel Genius Unlimited ten years ago I said, on this very blog, that

The writing is bad, one of the characters is silly and all the rest are without any personality, the jokes are bad, the action scenes are boring, much of the detective stuff and the science stuff feels perfunctory.

And yet, there is a glimmer of hope.  When I read Phillifent's short story "Advantage" I liked it, and even defended it from the criticisms of influential blogger Joachim Boaz.  Maybe "One-Eye," published in John W. Campbell Jr.'s Astounding, will emulate "Advantage" and win my admiration.

It is the future of hover cars.  Tom Garbutt is a big muscular guy, a hover car mechanic with autism or a  low IQ or a speech impediment or something, which is kind of annoying as much of this story consists of his halting dialogue and Phillifent's tortured descriptions of his thought processes.  As the story begins, Garbutt is in jail.  A shrink comes to talk to him.  This smooth-talking smart guy is the first person ever to be kind to the hulking dimwitted mechanic, and for him Garbutt is willing to tell his tale of woe.

This morning Garbutt suddenly found that he could see accidents and tragedies in the future, but only a few seconds before they occur.  Each of these prophetic visions is heralded by a terrible headache, then Garbutt sees his boss get injured on the job, or sees a cook slip and burn somebody with grease from the pan, or whatever.  After the vision, Garbutt quickly tries to warn people, but there is no time, and the accidents still take place.  Because of Garbutt's fruitless attempted interventions people begin to suspect Garbutt is somehow to blame for the misfortunes; his boss even fires him for being a jinx.  (I guess jinxes aren't a protected class any more.)  Garbutt has some more crazy adventures involving people being hurt or killed seconds after he had visions of the tragedy, and then he gets into a fight in a bar as part of his ill-conceived experiment to test whether he is himself causing the tragedies.  (Maybe one of the things Campbell liked about this story is how Garbutt tries to use the scientific method to figure out the extent of his powers and his responsibilities for the disasters.)  This fight is what landed him in jail.

After the shrink leaves, Garbutt has a vision of committing suicide and then he commits suicide.

This story is not a smooth read, and while the idea of a guy grappling with the unwelcome ability to see accidents and disasters seconds before they occur is sort of interesting, Phillifent doesn't really come up with a good plot based on this idea or a plot that exploits this idea.  Phillifent doesn't substantially extrapolate on what this power could mean for an individual or a society and the mechanic doesn't do anything constructive with the power or overcome the challenge it presents--his life and then he are just destroyed by it in short order.  I'm afraid the point of this story, the effect Phillifent seeks to have on readers, is to elicit sympathy for Tom Garbutt, a man who, because of his intellectual or physiological disability, is shunned by society and who then is overwhelmed by bizarre circumstance.  (We smart readers of Astounding are expected to identify with the shrink, a compassionate man who uses his brains and knowledge to help others, so that he stands head and shoulders above the rest of society.)  I'm not crazy about stories about helpless victims of fate or gentle giants who are abused by society, nor those in which nice liberals demonstrate their virtue by condescending to help their inferiors.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down. 

It looks like "One-Eye" has never been reprinted.  Understandable.          

"Devotion" by Kit Reed  

College professor Kit Reed, according to wikipedia, is a Guggenheim Fellow and got a "five-year grant literary from the Abraham Woursell Foundation"--Kit Reed is the science fiction writer the intellectual elite in their ivory towers want you to read.  Well, let's do what we are told by our betters for once and eat our vegetables.

We find "Devotion" in an issue of F&SF that includes a reprint of one of Leslie Charteris' The Saint stories, a Damon Knight short-short I bitterly denounced when I read it many moons ago, and Anthony Boucher's own backhanded smart-alecky denunciations of Robert E. Howard and Charles Eric Maine.  

To the relief of all involved, I don't have to denounce Reed's "Devotion."  (I know my kind-hearted readers don't flock to MPorcius Fiction Log lusting to read negative reviews--we're all softies, on the inside!)  "Devotion" is actually a pretty good little story, creative and uninhibited by left-wing pieties (Reed includes an underhanded and jealous woman in the story as well as a vain and ridiculous man.)

Harry Farmer, all his life, has had a perfect and beautiful mouthful of teeth, the envy and/or wonder of all who see them.  He maintains them with punctilious care, and he makes it to his seventies with them fully intact, no fillings, no blemishes on their dazzling whiteness.  He loves the teeth more than anything, spending an inordinate amount of time admiring them in the mirror and showing them off to people.

At his Florida retirement home, Harry has a particular friend, almost a girlfriend, perhaps, a Mrs. Granstrom, who is his regular partner at shuffleboard and croquet.  Mrs. Granstrom is very supportive when Harry faces the worst day in his life and is told by a doctor that he has to have his teeth all removed.  She even provides him a beautiful velvet box in which to store and admire his--still perfect!--natural teeth like they are the family jewels or something.  But she begins to get jealous when Harry starts spending less time at shuffleboard and croquet and more time in his room adoring--ne even caresses them!--his old teeth.

Harry's other problem is his replacement false teeth.  They are animate and emotional, and express their jealousy towards Harry's old teeth, pinching Harry when he brags about the previous occupants of his mouth, moving around the room in an effort to get attention, etc.  The clever ending of the story resolves both of Harry's issues--Mrs. Granstrom sneaks into Harry's room with a hammer, intent on smashing Harry's old teeth.  Harry's new teeth attack her, preserving their rivals in a display of devotion that softens Harry's heart to them.  Harry and his new fake teeth live happily ever after, the old teeth who abandoned him forgotten.

Thumbs up for "Devotion."  The intellectual elite up in their ivory towers aren't always wrong.

"Devotion" has been reprinted a few times here and over in Europe, including in the Reed collection Mister Da V. and Other Stories.  Joachim Boaz read the entire collection and blogged about it--check his assessments out!  Oh yeah, and check out my middling review of Reed's story "The Visible Partner," which appeared in a 1980 issue of F&SF.  If you are in the market for MPorcius negative reviews, at that same link you will find my long-winded explanation of why Harlan Ellison's story "All the Lies that Are My Life," the cover story of that same issue of F&SF, is no good and why Barry N. Malzberg, our hero, has all the virtues and none of the vices of the overrated Ellison.  At MPorcius Fiction Log we court controversy!

"Pieces of the Game" by Mack Reynolds

I have written quite a bit about committed leftist and world traveler Mack Reynolds even though I think his writing is poor, I guess because I find his career fascinating and stupefying, and because his brand of left-wingery is unpredictable and defies easy categorization; he was thrown out of a hard core leftist organization because he was not averse to bucking his masters and trying to make a buc behind their backs.  Reynolds is more of a maverick adventurer type than a commissar or toady, and it is fun to reflect on the fact that famously right-wing John W. Campbell, Jr. published so many of his stories in Astounding, Merril's 1958 pick "Pieces of the Game" among them.  It looks like Astounding is the only place it has ever appeared--Reynolds aficionados and collectors take note!

This story is so bland, so nondescript, and at the same time rather subtle and oblique, that I almost feel like I am missing something.  As far as I can tell there is no twist ending, no character growth, no substantial or surprising ideological or philosophical point that Reynolds is trying to make.  Maybe the point is to depict a future world in which international politics are cold and rational (you know, like chess) instead of ideological, with limited wars and little concern for human rights and forms of government--pure power politics, the pursuit of the national interest, with nobody caring about democracy or socialism or any of that jazz.  References to the Hapsburgs are sort of giving me the idea that international conflict in the near future world depicted is modelled on the limited warfare of the 18th century, the period of the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War, wars often felt to be dispassionate and nonideological in comparison to the religious wars that preceded them and the ideological and nationalistic wars that followed them, wars in which elites at least pretended to be fighting for some sort of religious or political principle or for justice for their ethnic or cultural group.

"Pieces of the Game" is set in a future world in which the Soviet Union has apparently won a war, maybe a nuclear war, against the West, and even has military bases on the Moon, but the West does not seem to have been conquered entire nor its ;populations wiped out.  Switzerland is still neutral, and the main character arrives in Switzerland, I guess from Britain or America, and makes his way into Austria, a "People's State" with lots of secret police--I guess Austria has been taken over directly or indirectly by the Soviet Union.  I don't think the USA, USSR, or UK are ever specifically mentioned in the story, which is why I am guessing about all this stuff.  Our protagonist is just five feet two inches tall, and it seems there are lots of diminutive people in this world, as well as deformed people and monstrously obese people, and these people are not regarded as freaks, but populate the elite--our guy attends a diplomatic function in Vienna and all the diplomats and dignitaries have one of these, to our minds, unusual body types.  We have to assume they are mutants.

The main character is a sort of James Bondian super spy with lots of high tech equipment.  He meets his contact, a doctor who injects him with a drug that gives him super strength, and then he spends several pages sneaking in and out of windows, climbing walls, swimming the Danube, breaking into offices, assassinating guards and cops and witnesses (well, maybe he just beats the witness unconscious), making a clandestine copy of some important document, and then sneaking back to Switzerland.  

I guess we can call this odd thing merely acceptable.

"First Man in a Satellite" by Charles W. Runyon

Charles W. Runyon has four novels and 18 short story credits at isfdb.  Apparently he is more famous for his stories and novels in the crime genre, though his true love was science fiction--see this interview of Runyon by Ed Gorman.  "First Man in a Satellite" was his first published SF story, and will be the first Runyon I have ever read.  "First Man in a Satellite" appeared in Super-Science Fiction after being rejected by Campbell--Runyon talks about Campbell's rejection letter in the linked interview above.  Robert Silverberg included "First Man in a Satellite" in his anthology of stories from Super-Science Fiction; it's a Campbell vs Merril and Silverberg throwdown--let's see who we side with!  

The covers of Super-Science Fiction and of Runyon's novels (again, see the linked interview) are bubbling over with delicious sex and violence, and this story is absolutely about love and death, but it is more of a sentimental tearjerker than something sensationalistic and exploitative.  Max is a dwarf and an acrobat.  He's in love with the co-star of his act, Marie.  They want to get married, and Max wishes he could set them up with some way to support themselves after they are too old to safely do their act.  Then a solution falls right into his lap!  

The government needs a dwarf who is in top physical condition for a top secret mission--to be the first man in space!  A man his size weighs less, uses less food and oxygen, etc., an essential savings in this early phase of the space race, and his pay for three months work will set him up for life!  The world must not know a human being is in the capsule, so Max can't tell Marie why he is leaving her for three months, which leads to her threatening to dump him. 

After two and a half months of training, Max blasts off on his ten day mission, orbiting the Earth again and again while the many machines he is hooked into record his physical reactions and, when he is in line-of-sight radio range, the scientists interview him.  Runyon focuses on Max's psychological stress while the operation is going as planned and then when a one-in-a-million piece of bad luck puts Max's life in jeopardy.  A meteor pierces the sphere, and Max's air supply is diminished, so they have to try to bring him down earlier than scheduled.  Uh oh, the remote control receiver on the jets is also down.  Damn that meteor!  The people on the ground go through a whole rigamarole, trying to direct Max in how to manually fire the jets at just the right time by exposing wires and stripping them and touching the right ones to each other at just the right moment but it is hopeless.  When all hope is lost the world is apprised of Max's heroism and doom, and the story ends with Max and Marie spending Max's last hours talking over the radio, and Runyon's speculations on how knowledge of inevitable death affects a person.

This is a story about a man's psychology and relationships under stress, and Runyon does a pretty entertaining job of describing Max's struggles and his feelings about Marie, the head government shrink, and the military officer in charge of the whole operation.  I couldn't tell if Max was going to make it or not, which was good.  So I am siding with Merril and Silverberg over Campbell--"First Man in a Satellite" is a good story.  In Campbell's defense, in his letter to Runyon rejecting the tale Campbell suggests Lester del Rey already did a story about a dwarf in space and maybe Runyon's was too similar to that earlier one to comfortably be included in the magazine.       

**********

Well, of this batch, the Reed is the best and the Runyon is pretty good; Reynolds' story is lacking but it is not actually bad--the bad one is Phillifent's, which shares some of Reynolds' deficiencies and is also a drag to get through.  

1958 stories from big names you'll recognize, but not necessarily titles you will be familiar with, in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  We'll leave you with links to the earlier blog posts in our Merril-guided tour of 1958.

Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin
Pauline Ashwell, Don Berry and Robert Bloch
John Brunner, Algis Budrys and Arthur C. Clarke
"Helen Clarkson" (Helen McCoy), Mark Clifton, Mildred Clingerman and Theodore R. Cogswell
John Bernard Daley, Avram Davidson and Chan Davis
Gordon R. Dickson 
Charles Einstein, George P. Elliot, and Harlan Ellison
Charles G. Finney, Charles L. Fontenay, Donald Franson, and Charles E Fritch
Randall Garret and James E. Gunn 
Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert and Philip High
Shirley Jackson, Daniel Keyes and John Kippax
Damon Knight and C. M. Kornbluth
Fritz Leiber, Jack Lewis and Victoria Lincoln
Katherine MacLean, "T. H. Mathieu" (Les Cole) and Dean MacLaughlin 
A. E. Nourse
"Finn O'Donnevan" (Robert Sheckley) and Chad Oliver
Avis Pabel, Frederik Pohl, and Robert Presslie

Three above the night: Leiber, Reynolds and Russell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Prone" by Mack Reynolds (1954)

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

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

      

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

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

"Now Inhale" by Eric Frank Russell (1959)    

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

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

 

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

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

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

**********

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

Fantastic Story, Fall 1951: Hamilton, Gallun, Oliver, & Reynolds

A few days ago, a knowledgeable SF fan, in a comment to one of my blog posts about Edmond Hamilton, pointed out a bunch of SF stories by important writers which share plot elements with Hamilton's "Fassenden's Worlds," a story we read in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Seventeen.  One of these stories was another Hamilton, 1935's "The Cosmic Pantograph."  Sam Merwin, Jr. reprinted "The Cosmic Pantograph" in 1951 in Fantastic Story, alongside new stories by three men we sometimes read here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Raymond Z. Gallun, Chad Oliver, and Mack Reynolds.  So, let's take a little trip to 1951 and read these four stories.  This is a suspenseful blog post, as I often--but not always!--find Oliver and Reynolds' work to be offensive as ideology and/or deplorable as literature.

"The Cosmic Pantograph" by Edmond Hamilton (1935)

"The Cosmic Pantograph" was the cover story for an issue of Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories, and it is a fun sense-of-wonder speculative piece conceived on the grandest of scales.

A few years ago Felton was a college student; one of his professors, Robine, had a habit of lecturing on the nature of the universe, reminding his students that one day the sun would grow cold, that eventually the entire universe will grow cold as all the stars die, and that mankind would thus be doomed.  Felton, the optimist, insisted that ever-innovative mankind would figure out a way to endure any such challenge.

Today, Robine has summoned Felton to his mansion with the promise that his former will pupil will be able to see the end of the human race!  Robine's huge basement contains a tremendous and complex machine--a machine which can detect the vibrations of every single atom in the universe, catalog them, and then reproduce them in tiny size inside a big metal sphere.  In this sphere, the machine can create another universe identical to the real universe, but much smaller!  Endorsing the determinist philosophies of such men as Spinoza and d'Holbach, Robine says that since the duplicate universe is identical to the real universe, its history will follow exactly the same course as the real universe.  Critically, because it is so much smaller, time moves more quickly in the duplicate universe, millions of years passing in one minute.  This means that Felton and Robine can observe the duplicate universe through electromicroscopes and watch the inevitable future unfold!  Will the natural decay of the stars lead to the extinction of mankind, or will Man triumph over this cosmic adversity and endure? 

Thumbs up for this effort to blow your mind and teach you various philosophical and astronomical principles.  "The Cosmic Pantograph" doesn't seem to have been printed a third time in the language of William Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson, but our friends over in Germany recognized its merit and republished it in a magazine in 1959 and in an anthology with a Frank Frazetta cover in 1974.

"Trail Blazer" by Raymond Z. Gallun (1951)   

We've been reading Raymond Z. Gallun since late 2013, and looking at the archives I see ten blog posts with the tag "Gallun" that cover 14 (or 15, I guess*) stories:

"Davy Jones' Ambassador" and "Old Faithful"*

"Telepathic Piracy"

"The Machine from Ganymede"

"Davey Jones' Ambassador," "Nova Solis" and "Avalanche"*

"N'Goc"

"Space Flotsam," "The World Wrecker" and "Derelict"

"Saturn's Ringmaster"

"Brother Worlds"

"Bluff Play"

"Double Identity"

*Yes, without realizing it I read two slightly different versions of "Dav(e)y Jones' Ambassador," in 2013 the original 1935 magazine version and in 2022 a 1999 anthology version, a testimony to my poor memory.

I liked almost all of these stories, and Andre Norton chose to include "Trail Blazer" in her anthology Space Pioneers, so we have every reason to expect I will like "Trail Blazer."

"Trail Blazer" is a good adventure story, and also provides grist for the mills of all you people out there interested in identity politics, decolonization, subaltern studies, and all that, because at the center of the story Gallun places a sympathetic Native American character.  Joe Whiteskunk is more or less the hero of the story, but his halting English and subordinate status may rankle the sensibilities of the more  advanced 21st-century readers, and I cannot deny that Joe is portrayed as a strange and inscrutable "other" who has access to knowledge and abilities out of reach of white people.

Our narrator is Dave the engineer, a recent college graduate; his twin brother Frank has also recently secured an engineering degree.  Their father has recently died, leaving the twins the family's southwestern ranch, from which they can see the rockets taking off that are carrying adventurous young men to the new lunar colony.  Frank and the narrator are eager to join the space colonization effort, but what to do about Joe Whiteskunk, the beloved farmhand who taught them how to shoot and to ride, but is sixty-five years old and maybe a little dimwitted, or at least perplexed by modern life?  Joe wants to come with the boys into space, but of course that is impossible--or is it?

Like something in a kid's adventure story, or on the news when the United States abandons its friends in Afghanistan to the tender mercies of the Taliban, Joe takes the dangerous expedient of stowing away in the unheated cargo hold of the rocket that carries Dave and Frank to the Moon.  Somehow the Indian survives this ordeal--it is implied that, as a primitive man in touch with the natural world, he has instinctual wisdom that saved him.  Anyway, Joe Whiteskunk, unlettered senior-citizen Indian, is on the moon among all the college grads, scientists and soldiers.  At first the brass wants to send him back home, but when they realize Joe is an expert tracker, they enlist him in the effort to investigate some mysterious marks on the lunar surface that Joe calls "devil tracks."  

Joe leads the brothers and a military officer around the lunar surface, following the tracks, and they discover physical evidence that thousands of years ago the Moon was a battleground fought over by Martians and the natives of the asteroid belt, then an intact planet.  Gallun presents this ancient war which lead to the destruction of the planet between Mars and Jupiter as a cautionary tale for readers living through tensions between the Western democracies and the communist tyrannies of the East.*  

Joe recovers all manner of technological and cultural treasures left on Luna by the Martians and Asteroidians, and then, on a solo mission, disappears.  Months later Dave and Frank are selected for the crew of a joint US-Soviet mission to Mars; there is an accident and it looks like they will die on Mars.  But then Joe Whiteskunk shows up to save them!  The cause of Joe's disappearance was his discovery, and then accidental activation, of a Martian spaceship!  The ship's automatic systems brought him from the Moon to the Red Planet where his fieldcraft, and use of ancient Martian technology, enabled him to survive, and proves to be the salvation of the twins and their comrades.

The story ends on a positive note as the West and the Reds work together to colonize Mars and Dave has hopes Earthmen will succeed in exploring the galaxy peacefully and avoiding the catastrophic fate of the warring Martians and Asteroidians.

Thumbs up! 

*Gallun never uses words like "communism" or "the Soviet Union" but makes it clear who he means.  

"The Reporter" by Chad Oliver

I've read quite a few stories by Oliver over this blog's life, and many times Oliver has made me groan with his denunciations of modern life and romanticizing of life as a stone age savage.  (Links to sample groans: "Rite of Passage;" "The Marginal Man.")  Well, Oliver is making me groan again, this time because "The Reporter" is a lame "meta," "recursive" joke story.  Thumbs down!

George Hartley is a journalist on Mars.  When Terrans first explored and colonized Mars, there were plenty of stories for Hartley to write about, but it turned out that the native Martian civilization was extinct and there is now no excitement, so Hartley hates his job, wishes he was on Venus where there are lots of monsters and intelligent natives to write about, and spends his time in a booze hall smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey.

Another journalist, a photographer, introduces himself to Hartley and they drink and smoke together and moan about how hard it is to be a journalist.  Hartley tells a long story, paraphrasing another reporter's final dispatch before losing his job.  Oliver makes it explicit that the story this third journalist filed and which ruined his career is a parody of a traditional SF adventure story; Hartley suggests the disgraced reporter made up the story, basing it on old SF magazines.  The story was about how the reporter discovered that the Martians were not in fact extinct at all, but, because they are peaceful types unable to kill, were hiding from the human colonizers in an underground city; the reporter was shown around their subterranean metropolis and in his story wrote at length about their technology.

The obvious central joke of "The Reporter" is that the disgraced reporter's story was all true, and the man who introduced himself to Hartley as a photographer is in fact a Martian reporter who has come to the surface to collect material for an article of his own.  

A waste of time--at least Oliver's stories about how we would be happier with no books and no industry push some kind of controversial ethos that readers can engage with; this story is just a feeble in-joke for SF fans.  "The Reporter," understandably, has never been reprinted.    

"Displaced Person" by Mack Reynolds (1951)

Reynolds is a leftist among whose claims to fame are the facts that he based much of his science fiction on speculations about political economy and that he was very widely travelled and wrote travel articles for men's magazines.  To me, his writing generally seems pretty lame, but he was a success, often appearing in Astounding and even coming in first in some kind of survey of readers of Galaxy and If.  (Sample my attacks on Reynolds' work and my jocular commentary on his wild and crazy career at these links: Commune 2000 A.D., "Revolution," "Freedom," "Subversive," and "Pacifist," "Compounded Interest," "The Business, As Usual," "Your Soul Comes C.O.D.," and "Fad.")  Like Oliver's "The Reporter," it seems that "Displaced Person" has never escaped the confines of the Fall 1951 issue of Fantastic Story, so again we find ourselves at MPorcius Fiction Log sampling the deep cuts!

"Displaced Person" doesn't have anything to do with utopias or socialism or economic systems, so is perhaps a rarity in Reynolds' body of work.  Instead, it is a competent filler story with a predictable twist ending.

Four veterans of wartime service in the space navy, pilots, are sitting around drinking.  There are actually only a small number of pilots in the space navy, so it is noteworthy that three of the men have never met the fourth.  The fourth explains why, telling what amounts to a little bit of military fiction.  

Flying a one-man patrol ship, he detected and was pursued into deep space, far from Earth, by the enemy.  He used up all his conventional fuel and all his food in the long chase, so he was basically doomed when the enemy gave up the chase--he had no safe way of getting back to a Terran base before he starved.  The only thing he could do was push the ship's warp drive to forbidden limits, so that he would exceed the speed of light, an act that is practically suicidal.

As was foreshadowed in discussions of this warp drive and the speed of light earlier in the story, the final twist is that this pilot, by exceeding the speed of light, propelled himself into another space-time continuum, the universe of the three other pilots, which is quite similar to his home universe.

Acceptable filler; better than a lot of Reynolds' work!

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Hamilton and Gallun deliver good stories that speculate about the nature of human history and are full of science; Oliver and Reynolds just try to produce entertaining stories, and Reynolds at least doesn't embarrass himself.  

I think this is our sixth blog post in a row to focus on SF short stories.  Our next blog post will mix things up a bit, as we read a novel which I suspect will lack such conventional SF elements as space travel, black magic, the living dead, aliens and speculations on what the future will be like.  Stay tuned!