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!

Merril-approved 1956 stories: de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle

I love the spires (or whatever they are) that appear in Richard Powers' illustrations
for the front and back covers of 
SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume

As you know, Bob, here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are exploring 1956 speculative fiction by going through the list headed "Honorable Mention" at the back of famed anthologist Judith Merril's 1957 volume SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume and reading in scans of old magazines stories recommended by Merril whose authors or titles strike our fancy.  Today we'll read stories by "D" authors Merril anointed with her approval to the number of four.  But first I will point out that I read and wrote about the Avram Davidson story Merril included on her '56 Honorable Mention list, "King's Evil," about a year ago, and present a list of links to the A, B and C stories on Merril's list which we've already discussed.

            Abernathy and Aldiss
            Anderson, Allen and Banks 

            Barrow, Beaumont and Blish

            Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler    

            Carter, Clarke and Clifton

            Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen

"Internal Combustion" by L. Sprague de Camp 

I read quite a few de Camp things before starting this blog and my reaction to them was lukewarm, so I haven't read a lot of his work since MPorcius Fiction Log slouched onto the scene.  But let's give "Internal Combustion," which debuted in the same issue of Infinity Science Fiction that included Charles Beaumont's "Traumerai," which we read just a month ago, a shot.

"Internal Combustion" is a sort of misanthropic black humor story that portrays (middle-class) people as violent racists who oppress the less fortunate, so we can guess why leftist Merril liked it.  It is actually pretty well-written; some of the jokes, based on character and personality and not puns (thank heavens), are good and the plot is alright, so I can give it a moderate recommendation.

The main cast of the story consists of a bunch of robots who are wearing out and have been abandoned by their owners, the MacDonalds.  Old MacDonald got rich publishing a xenophobic newspaper, but his offspring had no interest in living in his mansion so they abandoned it and its staff of robots.  Over the years these robots, receiving no maintenance, have fallen into disrepair; one symptom of this neglect is the fact that they have lost many of their inhibitions against harming human beings.  In fact, their leader, nuclear-powered Napoleon, after poring over the "N" volume of the encyclopedia, has decided to emulate his namesake and launch a merciless scheme to make himself ruler of the world.  Napoleon can't leave the mansion because of a malfunctioning leg and so has come up with the idea of kidnapping a human and grooming him to become the figurehead of his robot dictatorship.  The opening scene of the story clues us in to how dark "Internal Combustion" is--one of Napoleon's subordinate robots, Hercules, has kidnapped a homeless person to serve as this figurehead, but accidentally slain him, so Napoleon instructs his mechanical minions to hide the body.  He then directs them to try to kidnap a child whom Napoleon can raise into a world conqueror.

There is a lot of comedy around how the subordinate robots are powered by liquid fuel and prefer gasoline because it makes them drunk, and a lot of business with the child the robots kidnap, a kid who loves violence and acts like a terrible brat, and that kid's father, who is a portrait of middle-class angst, a guy who feels unfulfilled because he inherited wealth and doesn't have to work and his nagging wife won't let him pursue his hobbies or take the kind of working-class job he might enjoy because it is low status; this guy is an irresponsible father, lazy, and has a therapist.  There is also quite a bit of talk (from the robots, which we perhaps are not meant to take seriously) about how the robots are just as deserving of love and civil rights as the humans, but are treated shabbily by their creators.  (The misbehavior of the robots is clearly shown to be the fault of humans--when they are drunk or violent the robots are emulating their neglectful creators and sinful masters.)    

The story's hero is the one robot among the decaying MacDonald crew whose "serve humans" programming is still largely intact.  Named Homer, this robot has also been programmed to recite poetry, and in his voice de Camp unleashes plenty of popular verses from such poets as Dorothy Parker ("Resume"), Omar Khayyam ("The Rubaiyat") and Oliver Wendell Holmes ("One-Hoss Shay.")  Homer works odd jobs to get money to buy fuel--the other robots steal--and when a disaster occurs Homer sacrifices his own mechanical life to save the child kidnapped by Napoleon.

"Internal Combustion" is like 16 pages of text that move at a brisk pace and are always engaging--a respectable choice by Merril, and a better story than I had expected it to be.  Among other places, "Internal Combustion" can be found in the oft-reprinted de Camp collection A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales and Mike Ashley's robot-themed anthology Souls in Metal.   

"The Margenes" by Miriam Allen deFord 

I don't think I've ever read anything by deFord, whose name sometimes appears as "de Ford," as it does in connection to this story, which first saw print in If and was included in an If anthology published a year later, as well as the 1971 deFord collection Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow and the 1978 Helen Hoke anthology Demons Within and Other Disturbing Tales.

"The Margenes" is a twist-ending idea story with no real characters and precious little plot, one of those stories that is presented as a popular history written in the far future.  DeFord's tale is almost 100% speculation, and its field is political economy; it reminds me a little of Edmond Hamilton's early work depicting scientific disasters that befall the Earth (see "The Truth Gas," "The Life-Masters" and "The Death Lord") and Mack Reynolds' 1960s stories that speculate on economics and Cold War "what ifs" (like "Freedom," "Revolution" and "Subversive,") but those guys generally include in those stories horror and adventure elements (in Hamilton's case) or detective or spy shenanigans (Reynolds) in an effort to pad the page count and/or up the entertainment value; deFord's story is brief and its human element is a sort of cursory portrait of a couple that dramatizes the vacuity of relationships under industrial capitalism. 

All of a sudden strange little creatures, in the millions, start washing up on the beaches of California.  Neither animal nor plant, but packed with healthy proteins and every nutrient imaginable, these things are the perfect food, and they are breathtakingly abundant!  These creatures are named "margenes" because the first people to see them bore the first names Marge and Gene.  

The human race is suffering widespread hunger due to overpopulation, so the government moves quickly to subsidize the exploitation of this new resource and distribute the superfood around the world.  Beautiful California beaches and forests quickly become industrial eyesores, but the world economy is buoyed and relations between the liberal West and the communist East improve markedly.  But nine years later the supply of margenes suddenly runs out and the economy tanks and world war erupts and the human race is almost wiped out.

(Marge and Gene serve as archetypes of the futility of middle-class life--they abandon their dreams of fulfilling intellectual careers and take soulless office jobs pushing margene, get married, get divorced, then separately get killed in the wars that erupt after the supply of margenes runs out.)

The twist ending is that the margenes were members of a race of extraterrestrials who have overpopulated their own planet and have been spreading throughout the galaxy, planet to planet, seeking living space.  After expending all her imagination on describing the economic and political effects of a cheap and abundant food source, deFord does not bother to explain how there aliens got into the Pacific Ocean without being seen falling from the sky or something and why they have no visible culture or technology and didn't resist being eaten, just handwaving away all details of margene life as incomprehensible to the human mind.  Coming out of nowhere and making little sense, the twist ending of "The Margenes" sort of undermines the plausibility of the story as a whole.

Merely acceptable.  Presumably Merril appreciated the story's focus on overpopulation, criticisms of industrialism, economic explanations for social phenomena like war, and the "meta" gag at the end in which the future author says science fiction writers wrote many stories speculating about what first contact with aliens might be like but never guessed that it would consist of us eating the delicious aliens.

"Flat Tiger" by Gordon R. Dickson

Here's another famous guy whose work I have only found OK upon my early introduction to it and so have not really sought out since.  But I liked the de Camp from '56 that Merril chose, so maybe I'll like Gordon Dickson's "Flat Tiger," which first came under the eyes of SF fans in an issue of Galaxy that also features de Camp's famous "A Gun for Dinosaur" and the first episode of Frederik Pohl's "Slave Ship."

Ugh, this is a joke story based on puns and childish fantasies that tried my patience.  The Galactic civilization of thousands of distinct intelligent species is holding a race and the speed star ship of one of the contestants breaks down because one of the tigers that manages one of its four warp engines runs out of the essential gas it has to inhale to perform its function.  (This is the kind of wordplay that Dickson founds his story on, the fact that "gas" is short for "gasoline" and "tiger" sounds like "tire."  Oy.)  This fanged and tentacled contestant, named Captain Bligh, lands on the lawn of the White House in mid-century America to ask the President for help getting more of the gas required to fill his flat tiger.  We learn that, secretly, within the White House, lives a guy who is the president's special adviser--this is an hereditary position occupied by thr same family since the days of George Washington, and it has analogs in the offices of other great powers, among them the Soviet Union.  These secret eminence grises are the real masters of the world.  A conference is held in the White House that gathers Captain Bligh and the chief executives of the top four nations of the world--the US, USSR, Great Britain and France (those were the days!) and the Earthers open negotiations with Captain Blight on a deal to allow Earth membership in the Galactic Federation.  Should we join, the aliens will cure all our diseases, set up a teleporter so we can explore the universe, install clean energy sources, etc.  In return, we need only offer the aliens our love--in the post-scarcity society of the Galactic civilization, the only thing of real value is love. 

The twist ending is that members of the Galactic Federation must be physically reengineered to live directly off energy--humans won't be permitted to eat animals or plants or even drink water, as the Federation members love all living things, even the microorganisms we humans kill by the billions in the process of preparing drinking water.  So the representatives of the four leading nations agree to forgo membership in the Galactic Federation, and the Earth becomes united in peace behind a shared love of food and drink and opposition to the aliens who would take our food and drink from us.

Thumbs down for this dopey waste of time.  Maybe Merril liked its irreverent attitude towards the Cold War and American pretensions to being a democracy, and the idea it floats that people so covet the sensual pleasure of eating and drinking that they would pass up a chance to end all illness and poverty and lift all limits to human knowledge in order to keep on chowing down. 

"Flat Tiger" would be reprinted in the Dickson collection Danger--Human, the paperback edition of which bears the title The Book of Gordon R. Dickson. 

"The Lover of the Coral Glades" by Adrian Conan Doyle

As you have probably guessed if you didn't already know, Adrian Conan Doyle is one of the sons of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame.  "The Lover of the Coral Glades" appeared in the same issue of Playboy as Richard Matheson's "A Flourish of Strumpets," which we read pretty recently.  

"The Lover of the Coral Glades" is the story of the tragic love affair of a 200-year old sperm whale.  Never has this bull whale met a cow whale he could truly love, though he has of course impregnated some and then abandoned them.  (This is Playboy you are reading, remember.)  But finally he meets her, his dream cow!  They fall deeply in love, and spend months together, swimming all over the world eating squid.  One day when the she-whale is pregnant and they are in a part of the ocean with few squid near the surface the male whale ventures alone to the darkest deep to kill a giant squid and bring back a chunk of it to feed his bride.  But, alas, his wife has been mortally wounded by thresher sharks working in concert with a swordfish--there is also a whaling ship stalking her!  (I read this section multiple times, the idea of thresher sharks and a swordfish teaming up to murder a whale with their tails and bill being so outlandish that I thought maybe I was misunderstanding what was going on.)  The pregnant whale expires and sinks, and then the crew of the whaling ship kills the grieving male whale with one shot from their harpoon gun; the beast immediately sinks so they can't harvest its sperm and blubber.  The whalers figure a merciful God made sure the whale would sink so it need not suffer further indignities in its time of sorrow and can lie forever on the bottom of the ocean besides its wife and the mass of cells it thinks of as its unborn child.

This story is histrionic and boring when it isn't being eye-poppingly ridiculous; it begs to be taken super seriously, but everything that happens in it is absurd.  Thumbs down.  I think here Merril fell victim to her desire to expand the definition of SF to include mainstream fiction that appeared in mainstream outlets but engaged in what we might in a generous mood call "speculation."

"The Lover of the Coral Glades" would be reprinted in the Doyle collection Tales of Love and Hate.

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There is a tradition in SF of stories that glorify and romanticize science and technology and their ability to make human life better as well as the scientist and the man of intelligence who solves problems by quick thinking and knowledge of logic and scietific laws.  Today's four stories are not in that tradition.  Today's stories are examples of the tradition of misanthropic elitism in SF and stories that employ non-human characters to illustrate human pettiness, callousness, short-sightedness and propensity for violence.  The de Camp is a good example, as it offers characters with personality and an entertaining narrative.  The deFord is not terrible, but it lacks human feeling and the gimmicky ending is a little hard to take.  Dickson's story is based on irritatingly childish jokes, and the Doyle story is embarrassingly melodramatic slosh that is also full of elements that beggar belief.  

So, today Merril served up to us a heaping plate of downer stories.  Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log to see how many more of Merril's favorite 1956 stories are designed to make you hate the human race.

The Return of Conan by Bjorn Nyberg and L. Sprague de Camp

"Man of Cimmeria!  You are a son of Crom, and he will not let you suffer eternal damnation!  You have always been true to him in your heart, and the black arts of the East shall not have your soul!"

Recently I spent quite a bit of my limited time on this Earth looking at many different images online of the Frank Frazetta painting that appears on the oft-reprinted paperback Conan the Avenger, which first appeared in 1968.  There are serious differences in color tone and cropping among different reproductions of the 1968 painting, and in 1980 Frazetta revised the work, making radical changes to the hero figure and the female figure (the revised painting was used as the cover of the 1981 Italian translation of Conan the Liberator.)  I have to admit I have always been skeptical of this particular Frazetta painting.  I love the wizard, and the crocodile and the octopus and the overturned bowl, and either version of the young woman is good (though I think I prefer the earlier one, as you can see the woman's face and her color fits in better with the rest of the colors in the painting.)  My gripe is with the hero--what is he standing on?  Why does he look so large?--his size is such that he looks like he should be closer to the viewer than the wizard and the woman, but he is obviously further away than they are.  I'm compelled to consider that the painting would be better without the hero.

Having spent so much time looking at this picture, I was inspired to read from the paperback upon which it appears.  Conan the Avenger prints two documents; part of Conan creator Robert E. Howard's 1930s history of Conan's world, "The Hyborian Age," and a 1957 novel by Bjorn Nyberg and L. Sprague de Camp, The Return of Conan.  So let's read that 1957 novel; there are three different printings of Conan the Avenger available at the internet archive, so the text from the paperback is not hard to find.  (The 1957 hardcover from Gnome Press is a little harder to come by, and goes for over $150 on ebay.)  

The Return of Conan takes place not long after the events of The Hour of the Dragon, and refers many times to earlier Conan adventures, and includes many secondary characters from Howard's stories.  Conan is king of Aquilonia, the leading Western nation, and his policies have brought it peace and prosperity.  In the first chapter of the novel he is holding a big party in the palace, and, when his wife (Conan almost always refers to her as his "mate" or "woman") Zenobia goes out on the balcony to get some fresh air after a dance, a flying demon snatches her and flies off with her.  (Conan met Zenobia in The Hour of the Dragon: a brave slave girl familiar with horses and weapons, she helped Conan escape captivity and at the end of that novel he freed her from a rival monarch's seraglio and declared his intention to marry her.)

Conan puts some other guy in charge of the kingdom and rides off at a furious pace, exhausting multiple horses.  His destination is the golden tower of Pelias, a wizard he met in "The Scarlet Citadel" when both men were captives in a dungeon full of wells leading to hell and worked together to escape.  Conan hopes Pelias can use his magical abilities to divine Zenobia's whereabouts and the identity of her kidnapper.  Pelias's tower is in a city, and in the city a disguised Conan is quickly distracted from his mission by a hot chick.

A spy in his palace has alerted some of Conan's innumerable enemies of the Cimmerian's solo departure, and some of them have laid an ambush for our hero, using a gorgeous woman as bait.  She comes to Conan for help, saying some brutes in a tavern tried to take advantage of her.  Conan may be a pirate and a bandit and a thief and a torturer, but he won't stand for mistreatment of women; at least that is what we hear at this juncture in the plot.  So he goes into the tavern, where the trap is sprung  but without success, Conan killing all his attackers.  The woman has disappeared, to the disappointment of Conan, who "had meant to take a kiss at the very least as a reward for helping her" even though he is married and actually on a mission to rescue his wife.  

At the tower of Pelias, Conan gets plenty of intelligence from the friendly wizard, and the novel takes on some of the aspects of a "Yellow Peril" story.  The wizards of the East, Pelias tells the Cimmerian, are more powerful than the wizards of the West, and the most powerful of all, Yah Chieng of the city of Paikang in the land of Khitai, has the ambition of ruling the world.  Conan is an obstacle to Yah Chieng's conquest of the world, even though the Cimmerian doesn't know it!  You see, the world is evolving away from magic and towards "enlightenment and reason," and magic spells are becoming less powerful all the time.  Conan and his rule of Aquilonia are, somehow, one of the main drivers of this evolution.  If Yah Chieng wants to cast the spell that will give him power over the world, he will first have to kill Conan, and so he has abducted Zenobia in hopes of luring the barbaric Cimmerian king of civilized Aquilonia into undertaking a perilous journey that will lead to his death.

Pelias gives Conan a magic ring that he says should protect him from summoned monsters, and Conan hurries off, bound for the purple tower of Yah Chieng in far Paikang.

In Chapter 3 Conan gets distracted again when he learns that the civilized Turanians have wiped out a band of nomadic Zuagirs and captured their chief.  Conan in "A Witch Shall Be Born" led a band of Zuagirs against the Turanians and he still has a soft spot for the Zuagirs and so he decides he will rescue this chief.  He disguises a party of Zuagirs as merchants and they enter the walled city where this chief is held, and at night open the gates and allow in the rest of a big Zuagir war party.  Despite all that goop about Conan's "barbaric code of chivalry" in Chapter 2, he doesn't seem to mind how the Zuagirs round up all the town's women while sacking the place.

In the quarters of the governor of the town (after killing the governor, naturally), Conan runs into that woman again, the one who lured him into the ambush in the tavern back west.  In Chapter 3 we get to know this woman pretty well in scenes in which Conan does not directly appear; she is Thanara, a spy working for Yah Chieng but ostensibly in the employ of King Yezdigerd of Turan (a figure from "The People of the Black Circle.")  She has been given some special equipment by a shaman who is acting as an intermediary between her and Yah Chieng ("He who is not to be named") and when Conan, instead of just killing her or avoiding her, lowers his guard because she is so sexalicious ("Conan felt the hot urge of his racing blood"), Thanara tosses into his face "pollen of the yellow lotus of Khitai" and Conan is rendered unconscious.

Conan wakes up in Chapter 4 in chains in a dungeon under King Yezdigerd's palace, which overlooks the sea from high atop a cliff.  Soon he is dragged before Yezdigerd's court; with the help of another Western barbarian who is present at court, Rolf, Conan escapes, jumping out a window to the sea below after first humiliating Yezdigerd and Thanara.

Again and again in The Return of Conan, Conan meets an old enemy like Yezdigerd or an old friend like Rolf, and in Chapter 5 he and Rolf climb aboard a pirate ship among the crew of which number many of Conan's comrades from his pirate days and whose captain is an old rival of Conan's.  Conan makes himself captain lickety-split and then leads the pirates to victory over two Turanian vessels, including one commanded by Yezdigerd, who is killed.  

Chapter 6 sees Conan in Vendhya, which is ruled by Queen Yasmina, whom we met when we read "The People of the Black Circle."  Yasmina summons Conan to her bedroom and they have sex.  Between bouts of lovemaking, some assassins sneak into the queen's bed chamber and Conan and Yasmina kill them; they then have sex again while Conan still has their blood on him.

Chapter 7 has a little introductory prologue like those we often see in horror literature in which a minor character is killed by a mysterious monster.  The main portion of this brief chapter has Conan hanging out with some hill tribesmen, then climbing the snowy Himelias, where he is attacked by a snow demon; the ring Pelias gave Conan (and which Yezdigerd's subordinates apparently neglected to seize from him when they stripped him naked) protects Conan from this alien creature.

In Chapter 8 Conan has crossed the Himelias and is in Khitai, where he climbs over the Great Wall of Khitai and meets "saffron-skinned" people, including a beautiful girl whose "slant-eyed face was of startling oriental beauty."  We are reminded that Khitai is an old civilization, that the people of Khitai had vast rich cities when the men of the West had yet to invent fire.  Conan rescues the woman from two of Yah Chieng's top soldiers who are tying her to a tree as a sacrifice to a dragon.  Moments after he kills the two guys the dragon shows up and Conan kills it as well with a lance he makes out of bamboo.

The "oriental beauty" has sex with Conan and then leads him to her hidden village, a colony of dissidents.  In Chapter 9 the girl's father describes to Conan how Yah Chieng took over Paikang twenty years ago, driving him and his surviving relatives and friends into the jungle.  His wife, a sort of seer, died during the Yah Chieng takeover, but her dying words were a prophecy, that a white king from the West would overthrow Yah Chieng within twenty years.  Conan has shown up just in time to make the prophecy come true!

Conan and these counter revolutionaries hatch a scheme to get into the palace during the big annual celebration that is taking place next week--Conan, who is of course taller than all these people, hides under one of those big dancing dragon costumes we've all seen on TV during Chinese New Year.  Once inside the town he sneaks off in the confusion if the drunken celebration. Down in the dungeons Yah Chieng has imprisoned an entire company of white mercenary soldiers; Conan frees them, and, as luck would have it, one of them is an old friend, Lyco of Khorshemish.  These mercenaries join the anti-Yah Chieng locals in attacking Yah Chieng's troops.

Yah Chieng is not participating in the celebration.  In Chapter 10 Conan makes his way to the chamber in which Yah Chieng has Zenobia chained to an altar and is about to sacrifice her, on the way overcoming the flying demon who abducted Zenobia back in Chapter 1 and rescued Thanara from Conan in Chapter 5.  After a trip of some months, the King of Aquilonia has arrived on the very day, at the very hour, when Yah Chieng has decided to murder Zenobia.  If this sacrifice is part of the spell that will allow Yah Chieng to take over the world, Nyberg and de Camp didn't make it clear to me, and, anyway, I thought the Khitan wizard couldn't cast that spell while Conan was stull alive.  Anyway, the magic ring and direct intervention by Crom, Conan's god, save Conan from the wizard's magic, and then he kills Yah Chieng with his bare hands a second before the sorcerer kills Zenobia.

(The text makes clear that Frazetta's painting means to depict Conan leaping over the altar to tackle Yah Chieng.  I would never have guessed that the central male figure was airborne; he looks like he is running, not jumping.  Also, and I know I am not supposed to say stuff like this, the facial features of the wizard in the painting do not in the least look like those of an East Asian.)    

In an Epilogue Conan and Zenobia are almost home when they are attacked by an army lead by Thanara; just in time an Aquilonian army arrives to save the day.  Zenobia, a skilled archer, shoots down Thanara just as she is about to shoot down Conan.  (This is the one time Conan uses the word "wife" to describe Zenobia, as he praises her after she saves his life.)

I don't want to say The Return of Conan is bad, but I can't say it is good, because it has a lot of problems.  A big issue is its lack of direction and unity of theme and a related flagging of narrative drive.  Nyberg and de Camp start off the novel with two big ideas that serve as the foundation for the story and which should supply Conan and the other characters with their motivations--Conan's queen has been kidnapped and Yah Chieng is trying to take over the world.  But Zenobia's liberation and Yah Chieng's campaign for world conquest, instead of being the source of everything that goes on, are almost forgotten for six or seven chapters as Conan flits from one self-contained episode to the next.  In those chapters--the bulk of the book!--Conan almost never thinks of Zenobia or Yah Chieng, and he is always getting distracted from what should be his unwavering goal, getting to Paikang.  The King of Aquilonia never pines for his queen or worries she is dead or has been tortured or raped or whatever, and the fact that he is the one thing standing between the world and an Eastern tyranny never seems to cross his mind; as a result, the novel lacks tension--why should I care about Zenobia and Yah Chieng if Conan doesn't?  Conan is far more passionate about helping friends from his past like the Zuagirs or getting vengeance on enemies from his past like Yezdigerd than he is about the here and now problems of saving his queen and saving the world.  Now, maybe you could argue that this jives with Conan's personality, that Conan is a womanizer and a selfish sort of individualist, but if Nyberg and de Camp are choosing to portray Conan in this way, why did they build the structure of the novel around two quests that Conan is going to be indifferent to?

Some of the early self-contained episodes work reasonably well, and Chapters 9 and 10 are not bad, though the excitement of sneaking a disguised army into a walled town at the end of the novel is somewhat undermined by the fact that Conan has already sneaked a disguised army into a walled town in this book, just 75 pages ago.  Some of the fight scenes are good.  But too many of the capers in the middle of the novel are weak and/or needlessly encumber the narrative, and a few--the episodes of Yasmina and the snow demon are good examples--are pretty perfunctory.  Some of the secondary characters from Conan's past contribute nothing to the narrative; Rolf and Yasmina, for example, appear and disappear without adding anything to the story.  It would have been better if the authors had spent those pages developing Yah Chieng and Thanara, giving them more screen time.  I even think shortening the novel--say, eliminating the Yasmina and snow demon chapters altogether--would have been an improvement.

I have my own vision of what Conan should be, and a lot of the things Nyberg and de Camp do here are contrary to my conception of Conan and thus I found they detracted from my enjoyment of the story.  I like to think of Conan as the embodiment of the individual who triumphs over adversity in pursuit of his own chosen goals, a man who bends the universe to his will.  But all that jazz in Pelias's tower about Conan (in some vague and abstract and involuntary or autonomic way) personifying the rise of reason and actually causing the decline of magic, and then the prophecy business among the Khitans, turn Conan into an instrument of fate or just a man blown by the winds of fate.  Maybe this would be fine in a Michael Moorcock story in which the protagonist is a tragic figure, but to my mind, Conan should represent the man who is master of his own destiny and the master of his environment.   

Curious about Pelias, I reread "The Scarlet Citadel" and its virtues cast into sharp relief the shortcomings of The Return of Conan.  The characters, even the minor ones, all have powerful emotions and strong motivations that bring them to life--Howard transmits to the reader the genuine anger and fear of Conan and the various wizards and kings, and the actions of everybody in the story stem from their emotions and their personalities.  The magic and monsters are strange and scary and feel fresh and original.  Howard describes the settings vividly, offering not only a picture you can see in your mind but also an atmosphere you can feel.  "The Scarlet Citadel" is engrossing.  Nyberg and de Camp in The Return of Conan don't achieve any of this--the characters lack personality and seem to do what they do not out of inner drives but because it is what the plot demands of them, and the magic (e.g., magic ring) and monsters (e.g., dragon) and settings are pedestrian, banal, and vague.  

We're grading The Return of Conan barely acceptable.

L. Sprague de Camp: "Proposal," "Judgment Day," and "The Lamp from Atlantis"

In El Paso, Illinois, I recently picked up a 1978 issue of Galileo, a magazine that ran for 15 issues between 1976 and 1980. I seized this one, #9, because of its great Jeff Jones cover.  On the last page of the magazine is a brief article about L. Sprague de Camp's productivity, and the inside back cover is a full page photo of the man.  I haven't read much de Camp since I started this blog, though in my New York days I read a bunch of his Viagens Interplanetarias stories and novels, which I found sort of mediocre.  Spurred by this photo, I dug through my anthologies and found three de Camp stories--and a poem!-- and now set out to read them.

"Proposal" (1952)

On the same road trip on which I purchased Galileo #9, I also bought six SF paperbacks in an Ohio antiques mall.  Among these six is Harry Harrison's SF: Author's Choice from 1968.  (This anthology appeared in Britain in hardcover as Backdrop of Stars.)  SF: Author's Choice consists of stories which their authors were proud of and which Harrison liked but had not been anthologized before, and also includes personal reflections on the stories.

De Camp in his intro to "Proposal," which made its debut in Startling, talks about the theory of humor (a joke must contain surprise and incongruity or irrationality, but will not be funny to those who hold dear something the joke exposes to scorn or ridicule) and says that this story was inspired by the experience of sitting through his nine-year-old son's school play, a performance of Engelbert Humperdink's Hansel and Gretel. 

"Proposal" is like a sitcom episode.  Alice Wernecke is a twenty-something school teacher in suburban Pennsylvania, a virgin who is looking for Mr. Right.  Men--including a jerk who tries to use his superior position in the public school hierarchy to get her to succumb to his desires--pursue her, but she fends them off, preserving herself for a man she really wants to marry.  Alice diets so she too won't get fat like her roommate, fellow schoolteacher Inez Rogell, a woman no man wants to date, and Alice also has an immigrant mother with an accent who gives advice on how to get a man. 

Friendly space aliens land in Africa and seek to learn all about the human race.  Individual aliens go to different parts of the world to live among us natives and learn our ways.  One alien, Kstaho (Alice pronounces it "Stanko") is chaperoned by a young State Department employee, Byron Matthews, around the Philadelphia area.  Matthews is friends with the family of one of Alice's students, and Alice thus meets the diplomat and the alien.  Alice and the attractive Byron hit it off and want to start dating, but Stanko, as an anthropologist, wants not only to sit in on Alice's classes and Inez's Rogell's students' performance of Hansel and Gretel, but to accompany Alice and Byron on their dates!  This guy is in the way of their budding love connection, but Alice and Byron can't give this creature from the stars the brush off because his race is very sensitive and likely to commit suicide if insulted.  Stanko even starts dating Alice himself, and then, not realizing the realities of human sex and reproduction, offers Alice a proposal of marriage!

When sexual reproduction among humans is explained to him, Stanko is embarrassed and begins the process of committing suicide.  Inez Rogell, who has given up all hope of a sex life, and, like Alice, does not actually enjoy being a teacher, saves the day when she offers to marry Stanko.  A sexless life seeing new things in outer space is preferable to her than a sexless life as a school teacher in PA.  Byron proposes to Alice, she accepts, and then he tells her he is getting a promotion and they will soon be moving to Stanko's planet!  

"Proposal" is merely acceptable in my opinion, though I expect today's woke audiences may be offended by it, as much of its humor (which doesn't actually make you laugh, but maybe smile a little) relies on stereotypes about women and African-Americans (there is a "colored" kid in Inez Rogell's class who is so scared of Stanko he can't sing his part of Hansel and Gretel) and a blasé attitude about what today we would consider career-as-governor-and-senior-citizen-exterminator-ending sexual harassment.

It is interesting that de Camp took the opportunity of SF: Author's Choice to highlight a story full of sitcom jokes instead of one that taught science or offered adventure thrills or had something to say about the human condition, but maybe "Proposal" does have something to say about the human condition--that no matter the circumstances, people will pursue love and sex.  People in Europe in the early 1940s, living under the threat of having the Luftwaffe or RAF drop a bomb on their heads or being drafted into a rifle squad or thrown into a death camp, people surrounded by death and destruction and conscious that their whole way of life was threatened, fell in love and pursued their sexual desires, so why wouldn't suburban Pennsylvanians do the same in the presence of a friendly alien?  Life goes on!

"Judgment Day" (1955)

I'm reading "Judgment Day" in my hardcover edition of Damon Knight's A Science Fiction Argosy, which I purchased at an Iowa library sale in 2015.  The story first appeared in Astounding, and has been well-received, getting reprinted in such volumes as Tony Licata's Great Science Fiction, Dennis Etchison's Masters of Darkness III, and multiple de Camp collections.   

"Judgment Day" is barely a science fiction story; mostly it is a mainstream literary story, the autobiography of an alienated misanthrope, an intelligent man who has no social skills and is a failure with women (a significant proportion of SF fans have viewed themselves this way, and wikipedia is telling me this story is semi-autobiographical.)

Wade Ormont describes in some detail how, as a child, he was very smart but lacking in tact, and also thin, weak and clumsy.  We get page after page relating how the other boys bullied him; because he was too feeble to fight them, and because reporting them to the adults or crying only invited more torment, he learned to just endure the abuse heaped upon him, resisting in no way and showing no emotion.  Years of this lead to an inability to express any feelings, to "put himself out there," and so he didn't date any women until his thirties, after he had become a respected physicist and had even worked on the Manhattan Project.  His incapacity to display any human warmth lead to the collapse of his brief marriage.  

What makes this a science fiction story is the fact that, at age 53, Dr. Ormont has discovered a relatively simple way to cause a chain reaction that can blow up the Earth; any nation with access to nuclear material can accomplish it.  Ormont assumes that if he writes up this discovery it will eventually leak to communist and third world dictatorships and within a few years some psycho will, perhaps after trying to blackmail the world and setting off a cataclysmic war, trigger the chain reaction and exterminate the human race.  Ormont has spent some days considering whether to write up a report or to destroy his findings and keep his discovery a secret, but last night was Mischief Night (like Bon Jovi, a lamentable New Jersey phenomena some of my readers may not be familiar with) and the neighborhood boys vandalized his home and automobile, so he decides to write the report.

A competent story, maybe marginally good?   

"The Lamp from Atlantis" (1975)

This story originally appeared as "The Lamp" in F&SF; I am reading it in Lin Carter's The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 2.  Both Ed Ferman's intro in F&SF and Carter's intro here point out that de Camp got the idea of a lamp from Atlantis from Lovecraft, who toyed with the idea but didn't ever write a story based on it, and that de Camp takes the idea in a direction Lovecraft would not have.

Alfred Ten Eyck is a loser.  He had to leave Princeton and return home to the Adirondacks of upstate New York when his father died.  His father left him some land, including an island with a sort of resort camp for summer visitors, but he can't seem to make it profitable.  When America entered WW2 he volunteered but caught TB in training camp.  He married a woman who quickly left him when it became apparent he couldn't satisfy her sexually.  The people in the village consider him a wealthy outsider and dislike him, and his money is running out as all his business ventures, a bowling alley among them, fail.

Alfred's friend and our narrator, W. Wilson Newbury, was in Europe during and just after the war, and Alfred contacted him, asking him to bring across the Atlantic to him an ancient oil lamp he had bought via wire in Paris.  The seller claims it is from fabled Atlantis.  While bringing it over from the Old World, Newbury had crazy dreams, and after he is in possession of it Alfred has the same dreams, of a tentacled monster on a throne.  The monster, a sort of monster-god, requests a sacrifice, and tells Alfred  it will turn him from a loser into a winner in return for the sacrifice.  Alfred is willing to make a sacrifice, but bad weather keeps him from leaving the island to buy a pig or something else suitable, and his efforts to capture a snapping turtle comically fail.  Then the island sinks (just like Atlantis, right?) and Alfred is drowned.  Newbury escapes, however.

I guess this is supposed to be funny, but it is only faintly amusing, and the jocular tone short circuits any thrills or chills we might get from the weird elements.  Merely acceptable.

(The more I think about this story the worse it seems.  Why does Alfred, who is low on funds, invest in an ancient lamp?  Does he know it will put him in touch with a monster god who can change his luck?  And why is it a lamp?  Why isn't it a dagger or an incense burner or a cup that catches blood or something, something that is linked to a sacrifice?  A lamp is something you use to light your way--shouldn't a Lovecraftian story about an ancient lamp be about using the lamp to help you see into other dimensions or see the future or something like that?  Also, Alfred never puts oil in the lamp or uses it as a light source--any Atlantean object would have served the purpose the lamp serves in this story.  Lazy!)  

"The Lamp" was the first published of a series of stories about W. Wilson Newbury which would be collected in 1980 in The Purple Pterodactyls.  I wonder if all these stories involve Newbury's friends getting killed--sounds like a laugh riot!  

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Looking back I see a theme running through all these stories: life is a nightmare because it is so hard to engineer a fulfilling career and a fulfilling sex life.  I did not expect reading these stories to be so depressing!  

Our final de Camp item today is a poem I am reading from my copy of The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifth Series, edited by Anthony Boucher, published in 1956, previously owned by Private Charles E. Harris.  (We read stories from this book by Damon Knight, Avram Davidson and Fredric Brown back in 2018.)  This poem, "Lament by a Maker," is also about career and social failure! 

"Lament by a Maker" is written in the voice of a hack SF author whose published stories are denounced by letter writers.  The poem is in three stanzas, and each is a parody of a type of SF story; the narrator has tried his hand successively at each as it came into vogue, but never achieved popularity.  The first stanza is about planetary romance like the Mars stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Leigh Brackett, the second gadget-heavy space operas like those of Edmond Hamilton or E. E. Smith, the third SF stories about psychology and mental powers, like those of A. E. van Vogt and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.  I guess this verse is a fun in-joke for people knowledgeable about the history of SF before the end of the Second World War, but it is not a particularly good poem.  For one thing there is no climax or resolution; through all three stanzas the writer says he doesn't know why readers claim his tales are boring, and the poem would be improved if in a fourth stanza he seized on an answer (perhaps a comically wrong one) of why his work was frowned upon or came up with a new tack to try, like switching to westerns or confession-type stories or something.  

These four items are all OK, but no big deal.  De Camp seems like a capable professional writer, but nothing here is inspired or excellent.  Maybe these pieces are useful as reflections of the SF community, and the wider world, of their day, with the World War II and Cold War references and the depictions of (what a man supposes about) women's yearnings and so on.

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More short stories by a Golden Age SF writer pulled from my anthology shelves in our next episode!  

MPoricus Library: Paperback SF anthologies

   

MPorcius Library: Hardcover SF anthologies

From the August 1958 Fantastic Universe: de Camp, Harrison and Cooper

Let's look at another magazine sitting on the SF magazine shelves here at MPorcius HQ, one in such bad shape I will probably end up reading the scan of the issue at the internet archive for fear of my hard copy crumbling to dust in my hands, the August 1958 issue of Fantastic Universe, which features a cover by Virgil Finlay.  Now, we've already read one story that debuted in this issue, Harlan Ellison's "Back to the Drawing Boards," which I read in 2016 in the Belmont collection From the Land of Fear.  The other three stories in this magazine that are piquing my interest are those by L. Sprague de Camp, Harry Harrison, and Edmund Cooper; let's take a trip to the year Nikita Khruschev took over Communist Russia, Charles DeGaulle took over France, and Gigi took over the silver screen by checking them out!

"Ka the Appalling" by L. Sprague de Camp

I read a bunch of de Camp's Viagens Interplanetarias stories years before I started this blog, and found them mediocre, but I am still willing to read the guy--you know, every few years.  "Ka the Appalling," isfdb is telling me, is the seventh of nine stories in the Pusadian series, and would later be reprinted in a few anthologies and de Camp collections.

It seems the Pusadian series is set in one of those Conan-like prehistoric fantasy milieus in which civilizations now forgotten erected big cities and built empires inhabited by wizards and priests and the men who confronted them with swords; Pusadia is the native name for Poseidonis, which is a region of Atlantis.  The theme of this story is that religion is a scam, though told sort of metaphorically--in the world depicted magic and demons are truly real, but gods are merely the product of people's belief in them.  (Fritz Leiber uses the same idea, that gods rely on their worshipers' adherence to maintain their own strength, in his Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, in particular 1959's brilliant "Lean Times in Lankhmar.")  

Gezun is a young, tall, strong, good-looking Pusadian whose adventures have brought him to the city of Typhon.  He didn't realize Typhonians consider cats sacred, so when he sat down to eat at a tavern and a cat jumped up and stole his main course, he struck the felonious feline dead with his staff and retrieved his entrée.  So our story begins with Gezun being chased through the labyrinthine Typhonian streets by a murderous lynch mob.  He is rescued via a secret door in an alley by Ugaph; Ugaph is a minor wizard, a thief, and a skeptic who doubts the existence of the gods.  Ugaph blackmails Gezun into becoming his assistant.

Ugaph regularly summons a small demon that looks a little like a fox; the demon knows what goes on in all the temples in Typhon and gives Ugaph advice on what jewels and gold decorations and so forth in the local houses of worship are ripe for theft.  To summon the demon, Ugaph requires copious supplies of bats' blood, and Gezun's primary task is to hunt for bats in the neglected pyramidal tombs of forgotten Typhonian royal dynasties, a labor heretofore underttaken by Ugaph's attractive daughter Ro--Ugaph wants Ro spending her time hunting for a rich husband, not for bats.

Searching the tombs for bats is risky because the tombs are full of traps, and robbing temples obviously carries its own risks, so Gezun and Ugaph come up with a safer scheme for making money--starting their own bogus religion and taking in donations.  

The rest of the story is about how Gezun's lust for Ro, the demon's lust for bat's blood, and Ugaph's lust for money interact and lead to backstabbing, death, and the spectacular rise of the god Ugaph and Gezun make up out of whole cloth, Ka the Appalling.

In contrast to Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard, de Camp doesn't write his sword-swinging adventure stories in a romantic, epic, or poetic fashion, with larger than life heroes who can fight off a dozen enemies at once, are driven by powerful passions and shake the foundations of nations.  Instead de Camp strives to make his stories realistic and mildly comic, and maybe a little cynical.  For example, Gezun is not deeply in love with Ro, he is just at the mercy of his hormones, and Ro isn't deeply in love with Gezun--she resists Gezun's ardent advances and after he takes her virginity she cries; Gezun doesn't hear her weeping because he fell asleep after deflowering her.  De Camp describes people's decisions and actions in a rational, business-like manner which feels a little cold and emotionless.

Still, I enjoyed "Ka the Appalling" more than I expected to.  The plot is good and it runs smoothly, like a clock; everything makes sense and there is a minimum of unnecessary verbiage.  So, thumbs up for "Ka the Appalling."

"Arm of the Law" by Harry Harrison

It is the future, in which mankind has colonized the solar system.  Nineport is a tiny little mining town and spaceport on Mars with a corrupt government; organized crime runs the whole town, from the gambling dens and bars that cater to the miners and spaceship crews to the police station, which has a complement of four cops.  The chief and the two beat cops are basically incompetent, but our narrator, the serjeant, was a big city cop on Earth for ten years before he was sent to Mars as punishment and he more or less knows what he is doing.

One day a robot cop arrives and joins the little force.  Chaos and hilarity ensue when the robot insists on enforcing the law, enraging the local organized crime boss, who tries to destroy the robot with a shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon.  The robot and our narrator triumph over the criminals and make an honest town out of Nineport.

This story is perhaps a little slight, but it is entertaining and the jokes are actually amusing.  Thumbs up for "Arm of the Law."

"Arm of the Law" would reappear in Harrison's oft-reprinted collection War with the Robots and the 2001 career-spanning collection 50 in 50.

"The Lizard of Woz" by Edmund Cooper

"The Lizard of Woz" was reprinted in the 1963 collection Tomorrow Came and the 1968 collection News From Elsewhere, among other places.  I actually own a copy of the 1969 US edition of News From Elsewhere, and will read "The Lizard of Woz" from it in recognition of the possibility the story was revised for book publication.  "The Lizard of Woz" appears to have been considered a big selling point of the book, it being mentioned on the back cover and the very first page.  These come-ons make clear that "The Lizard of Woz" is a joke story, if the title hadn't already clued you in.

Despite its prominence in the advertising material for the collection, "Lizard of Woz" is a silly filler story.  Ynky (short for Ynkwysytyv) is a lone scout from a powerful intergalactic empire of lizard people that regularly exterminates or enslaves the intelligent species it encounters.  As punishment for trying to seduce a superior's daughter, Ynky has been sent to Earth to assess what should be done to the human race.  First he talks to an American who owns a lonely diner; this guy reads SF magazines and so is psychologically prepared to deal with an alien.  When Ynky lets this Yank know that he is all alone and is going to recommend that the human race be exterminated the Earthman tries to prevent the delivdery of this report by shooting Ynky with a shotgun; Ynky escapes with flesh wounds.

Yhnky proceeds to the USSR where he talks to a minor Communist functionary who manages a lonely train station.  Initially this Bolshie thinks Ynky is a commissar in disguise come to test his loyalty to the socialist project, and so is on his best behavior.  When he realizes Ynky is a real live alien from what he takes to be a capitalist society he cunningly sabotages the lizard's flying saucer.  Forced to crash land on an island in the South China Sea, Ynky meets a female Komodo dragon and falls madly in love, and the Earth lizard kills and eats him.     

"The Lizard of Woz" is not exactly bad, and of course I'm always happy to see somebody slag the Soviet Union and communism, but I consider this sort of story to be a waste of time unless it is very funny, and this piece is just barely entertaining.  The de Camp and Harrison stories we have read today are also meant to be funny, but they are also servicable adventure stories with plots that make sense, and their humor is based more on human personality and less on dumb puns.  Barely acceptable. 

Despite my dim view of this one, I am tentatively planning to read more stories from News From Elsewhere.  Until then, if you want more MPorcius coverage of Edmund Cooper, click these links for my blog posts on novels by Cooper that tackle such topics as race relations and relations between the sexes: 

Gender Genocide

A Far Sunset, Five to Twelve, and The Last Continent  

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Not a bad crop of stories.  Expect to see more discussion of stories by L. Sprague de Camp, Harry Harrison and Edmund Cooper in future installments of MPorcius Fiction Log.