I am not exactly a fan of J. T. McIntosh, having denounced several of his productions here at this blog.  But when I saw Crest Book's 1956 paperback edition of 1955's The Fittest, retitled The Rule of the Pagbeasts, going for $1.25 at an antiques mall, I could not resist its fascinating cover with its wild female figure and its over-the-top come-on text ("impossible to put the book down"; "THE MOST STARTLING STORY YOU EVER READ.")  Alright, we'll give it a shot.

You'll notice there is no animal on the cover of the copy of this book I purchased, just a woman with long blonde hair, a narrow waist, an impressive torso and powerful limbs.  Pity about that skull-like physiognomy, which is mesmerizing in its own way.)  I thought blondie here with the deep set eyes was a pagbeast, some kind of android or alien or something.  But looking at other editions of the novel online I see they have images of dogs and mice on them and make it clear The Rule of the Pagbeasts is a story about quadrupeds challenging human rule of the Earth!  I would not have bought any of those editions; I am not interested in stories about canines and vermin taking over the Earth--I am interested in stories about hot chicks taking over the Earth!  But following the sunk cost fallacy, having bought the book and scanned the cover and looked up publication dates and so forth, we are going forward with reading it.

The Rule of the Pagbeasts comes to us in 24 chapters.  Chapter 1 is an exercise in misogyny and exploitative horror and also reminded me of hard-boiled detective fiction.  The narrator indicates that he found his wife dead and then, sadistically and/or masochistically, theorized about her last moments, the physical and psychological agony she suffered, and then he shares his detailed imaginings with us readers!

Gloria was an American-born beauty with a perfect body and great fashion sense, but she lacked "guts" and the healthy human instinct to desire children.  Left alone in a French farm house, she was attacked by an intelligent dog, intelligent mice and an intelligent cat, and her husband and McIntosh describe her frenzied fear and her physical wounds as the animals toyed with her and eventually drove her to jump out a window to her death.  (I've noticed exploitative violence, particularly against women, in McIntosh's work before.)  This chapter might be seen as kind of gross, but it is actually pretty well-written and effective in achieving its apparent goals--if you want to read about a vapid beautiful woman being tortured and killed, well, here is a good example of the genre.

Chapter 1 introduces us to, and succeeding chapters dole out in dribs and drabs the details about, the setting of the novel--a midcentury world sinking into postapocalypticism because an American scientist, Paget, increased the intelligence of dogs, cats, rats and mice to about the human level and these uplifted quadrupeds aren't using their smarts to listen to Tchaikovsky and read T. S. Eliot but to wage war and inflict torture on the human race:

They're animals whose brains have been forced a few million years further along the evolutionary highway....But they're animals, with animal motivations, savagery, tradition, and temperament.  As such they're automatically enemies of any other creatures which threaten their own survival, particularly men.

Our narrator identifies himself, and here we have the sole joke McIntosh offers in this blood-and-guts serious novel, as Don Page-Turner, and he tells us he is unsentimental, and then demonstrates his lack of sentimentality. Don leaves Gloria's body behind, unburied, and walks to the nearest village.  The village police arrest him on suspicion of murdering his wife, but a competent Englishwoman who needs his help gets him out of jail and steals one of the few cars still running (the rats and mice have been sabotaging automobiles and locomotives the world over as part of their war against us bipeds.)  This Englishwoman is an expert at jailbreaks and car theft but she can't drive--that is why she needs Page-Turner to help her get back to Albion.

All through the book, Page-Turner compares women to the dead Gloria, for example, stressing how his sister Mil and this new woman, Ginette, have guts and can get things done, unlike Gloria, who was a one in a million beauty but couldn't look after herself.  Though she is dead on the first page of this 185 or so page novel, she is actually one of the book's main characters.   And Exhibit A in the prosecution of the novel's central theme that certain people are the fittest to survive and certain people, should the shit hit the fan, are ngmi.     

Ginette is one prickly individual, very independent-minded and sarcastic, a woman who keeps saying she doesn't want to stay with Page-Turner and wants instead to be dropped off here or there.  This hard-to-get routine inspires in Page-Turner a desire to control her.  On the ferry to the green and pleasant land she vomits, either because of sea sickness or because of expository dialogue about the development of the pagbeasts, including the narrator's description of them swarming over a human victim.  Upon arriving in England, Ginette leaves Page-Turner and the car she stole and he immediately starts searching for her, fantasizing about using physical force to make her stay with him.  He soon finds her; she has been injured in a fight with a pagdog, giving our hero a chance to take off her bra and apply iodine to her wounds.  This book is full of women suffering indignities.

A tall man, Dave, formerly an editor at a newspaper, joins Don and Ginette as the third wheel of the crew of the stolen French car.  Our three heroes stay the night with a friend of Dave's in London; they find Londontown almost without electricity as well as automobiles.  The gas lines are also being cut by the pagmice and pagrats.  Page-Turner flirts with Ginette and when she comments that he doesn't seem to miss his wife, who died like two days ago, Page-Turner slaps her so hard it sounds like a "whipcrack" and makes the sarcastic bitch stagger.

Ginette again leaves behind the car and the two men, this time in the environs of Cambridge, despite Page-Turner's efforts to convince her to stay, which include grabbing her and kissing her.  McIntosh again and again reminds you of how the narrator can just manhandle Ginette if he chooses to.  Maybe this is a reminder that in society the law, customs, and norms, keep the strong from dominating the weak, and in a postapocalyptic situation those laws and norms go right out the window and the strong do what they will while the weak suffer what they must.  

Alone with him now, Dave says he thinks the narrator's real name is Paget and that he is connected to the Paget who created the monsters who are destroying society.  Our narrator tells his story.  He is the son of the scientist who created the pagbeasts and hails from Chicago, scion of a wealthy family.  Dad died coincidentally in a car wreck before the monsters he had created escaped and began their war on humanity.  When the scope of the pagbeast menace became apparent, mobs of disgruntled citizens came after Dan the narrator and his brother Stan and his sister Carol.  (Sister Mil was in England with her English husband, who is now dead.)  Carol was gangraped, but survived, but some weeks later Don witnessed Stanley shot dead by a mob which murdered Carol in a gruesome fashion that perhaps symbolizes the Pagets' elite status and their distinction from the common masses.  The police helped Don and Gloria sneak away to France, where the pagbeasts hadn't spread in volume yet, though soon enough the monsters had.

Halfway through the novel Don and Dave arrive at Mil's country estate.  Mil is a no-nonsense capable sort, and she has a sort of fortified manor house and a band of comrades who are able to defend themselves from the pagbeasts and in the short term from a local human menace, a multi-ethnic band of gypsies and circus performers, thieves and expert knife throwers.  This element of the story comes across as pretty racist, at least by today's standards.  Mil's crew is less than a dozen people, four attractive middle-class women and a bunch of dimwitted, unattractive, proletarian men, so the fifty gypsies could overwhelm Mil's estate if they were willing to suffer heavy losses.  (Mil's group has conventional low-intelligence dogs who help keep out the pagbeasts.)

A substantial part of the second half of the novel consists of Dan and Dave, who kind of take over management of Mil's operations, trying to recruit additional young and middle-aged people to join Mil's settlement, expanding the estate's agricultural output, and then dealing with the gypsies.  We get plenty of psychology-of-leadership material as Don decides who to recruit and how to manage them.  But we also get a large helping of sexual politics psychology as Don and Dave interact with the women of the settlement, deciding who to take as a wife and then convincing them to succumb.  Of course Ginette reappears and becomes Don's wife, but there is another woman, Eva, who is in love with Don and this causes complications--in true male wish-fulfillment fashion, Don decides Eva is the girl for him because Ginette is so difficult, and Don and Eva have sex right before the big battle with the gypsies, and then during the battle Eva's morale fails and she panics and gets herself captured by the enemy, tortured and murdered, so Don ends up with suitable wife Ginette after having sexually conquered and enjoyed the unsuitable Eva.  (All you pervs will be glad to hear that Don has his hands all over Eva's "beautiful supple body" in her last moments as he struggles to revive her via artificial respiration.)

Women cause all manner of trouble in this novel, as well as suffering the blackest fates imaginable.--one of the bourgeois women in Mil's group wants to try diplomacy with the gypsies even though Don and Mil have intelligence indicating the gypsies are planning an attack; this peacenik runs off by herself to try to treat with the gypsies but is attacked and eaten alive--reduced to a skeleton!--by a horde of rodents before she reaches the gypsy position.  And during the battle Don grapples with a "slim, lithe, young" gypsy girl before slaying her with his clasp knife.

Once the gypsies are wiped out, the community started by Mil grows and we learn that other such communities around England are similarly growing as men and women become expert at defeating the pagbeasts.  Human civilization will endure!  The last line of the novel even suggests the pagbeast catastrophe was good because it cut in half the human population, which was too large (we saw this attitude in McIntosh's The Million Cities many years ago.)

The plot and structure of The Fittest AKA The Rule of the Pagbeasts have the appeal of the zombie apocalypse fiction that is so popular nowadays, the inhuman menace that has people banding together to rebuild society while squabbling amongst themselves and the disgusting violence and gore.  McIntosh throws in a pile of other stuff: all the sex and gender business, of which there is plenty, plus some class and race/ethnicity material; we might also consider national culture material--is McIntosh, by setting the story in France and England but having the mad scientist and monsters originate in the USA, trying to say something about those three nations and their people?  A final thing we might consider is the novel's attitude about government--the American and British taxpayers in the 1950s were shelling out plenty of moolah for military and intelligence establishments to deal with the threat posed by international communism, and just ten years before had successfully engaged in a titanic struggle with Germany, Italy and Japan, so the US and UK governments had vast amounts of trained and experienced manpower and equipment at their disposal tailor-made for providing people protection and emergency medical care, but McIntosh never portrays those governments doing anything to kill pagbeasts or maintain order or provide succor to the people.         

The most remarkable thing about The Fittest AKA The Rule of the Pagbeasts is that the writing style and all the other elements--structure, pacing, characters, themes, images--are acceptably done or well done; so much of McIntosh's work which I have read is so bad that I was surprised that this thing was competently executed and before I opened it I had no expectation of telling you I can mildly recommend it.  But I am telling you just that.

Another SF novel I bought for its cover the next time I can tear myself away from the quest for money and from family obligations and produce a post of the quixotic enterprise we call MPorcius Fiction Log.

One of our long term projects here at MPorcius Fiction Log is the tour we are taking of 1956 speculative fiction under the guidance of famous and influential critic Judith Merril, who had an expansive view of what constituted SF.  In the back of her anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume is a long alphabetical list of stories she considered for inclusion in the volume but which didn't quite make the cut, and we have been going through the list, reading selected stories.  Currently we are on the "M"s, and today will look at three stories by authors I am considering minor, including one guy I think is a pretty bad writer, but about whom I retain some curiosity.

But first--links to earlier stops on our Merril-guided tour of 1956.

Abernathy and Aldiss
Anderson, Allen and Banks
Barrow, Beaumont and Blish
Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler  
Carter, Clarke and Clifton 
Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen
de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle 

"Avoidance Situation" was a cover story for If, promoted as "A New Space Thriller."  This issue of If includes a column by Forrest J. Ackerman, the lion's share of which is a report from a convention in Cleveland; students of the role of women in SF fandom should check out this column, as Ackerman talks at some length about how exciting it was to have some good-looking girls at the convention, seeing as how in his youth SF fans were few to none, and he names names of the 1956 SF hotties.  Ackerman also offers a solipsistic look at the origins of the abbreviation "stf" for "scientifiction," and a little piece of trivia: that Frankenstein by Mary Shelly is banned in South Africa.

Now, to "Avoidance Station."  A century ago mankind first travelled into space, and today huge starships that can "jump" in and out of "subspace" are exploring the universe.  The human race has searched many star systems, but not yet encountered intelligent aliens.  The first scenes of McConnell's tale see the captain of the Sunward, Hawkins, and the ship's psychologist, Broussard, in the ship's observatory, looking out at the stark empty blackness that is subspace as the vessel nears the end of a jump, discussing the psychological effect a universe empty of matter has on spacemen.

McIntosh is a prolific writer with a long record at isfdb, but usually when I read his work I am not happy with it: at these links witness my attacks on the novels The Million Cities and Norman Conquest 2066 and on the short stories "One into Two" and "At the Top of the World."  So as I prepare to read it, I am questioning Merril's wisdom in promoting "Empath."  It kind of looks like Merril may not be on the same page as the larger SF community on the topic of McIntosh, as, according to isfdb, after its appearance in New Worlds over on Terf Island, "Empath" was never reprinted.  Seeing that "Empath" is almost forty pages long, I am sort of wondering what the hell I am doing as I start it. 

Through the magic of the internet archive, the world's greatest website, let's explore the December 1964 issue of If, AKA Worlds of If Science Fiction, edited by Frederik Pohl.  What kind of experience were SF fans getting for their 50¢ the month that saw the American debut of those immortal classics Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Goldfinger?

Past the dinosaur-centric cover, an ad for a free camera ("you pay only for film and processing!"), and the table of contents, we come to Fred Pohl's editorial, which which eloquently bears witness to the vagaries of the publishing world.  After making tepid jokes about how Jack Vance's house is high atop a San Francisco hill, Fred promotes the appearance of Vance's The Killing Machine in the pages of If starting next month--but it seems that The Killing Machine was never printed in magazine form anywhere.  Fred also touts the appearance in this number of new author L. D. Ogle's "The Heat Racers"--in fact, "The Heat Racers" would be printed in the coming January issue of If.  Fred also urges us to start attending SF conventions, saying that the recent convention in Berkeley, where guests of honor Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett, as well as Harlan Ellison and Forrest J. Ackerman, spoke, was a "first-rate affair"--on this matter, at least, I am sure Fred is not mistaken.

This issue of If is full of embarrassing mistakes, printing errors, and typos

"When Time Was New" by Robert F. Young 

The first story in the issue, and the subject of Gray Morrow's cover illustration, is Robert F. Young's "When Time Was New."  Consulting the records, it looks like I have blogged about five Robert F. Young stories here at MPorcius Fiction Log:  

I liked four out of five of those stories; maybe "When Time Was New" can make it five out of six.

If memory serves, "Thirty Days Had September," "The Dandelion Girl," and "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" were about things like failing sexual relationships and baleful changes in society, while "The Ogress" (like Starscape...") had as one of its themes terrible violence.  These were, for lack of a better term, "adult" or "mature" stories.  In contrast, "When Time Was New" reads like a juvenile.  The story can be saccharine sweet, is full of squeaky clean G-rated jokes, and when the main characters have to fight monsters or bad guys they never directly threaten their lives--they employ force fields, stun guns or luck out when the villains kill each other or blunder into a deadly accident.

The main character of "When Time Was New" is Carpenter, a guy who works for a 22nd-centrury institution that sends people back in time in robotic dinosaurs to investigate anomalies in the fossil record.  While plodding about the Cretaceous landscape in his robotic triceratops (the horns of which are powerful stun charge projectors) he spots two kids hiding from an aggro stegosaur!  He rescues them and learns they are from Mars, where, 79 million years ago, there was an advanced spacefaring human civilization.

These kids, Marcy (11) and Skip (9), were kidnapped and brought to Earth, and recently escaped their captors.  While he drives them around, giving their pursuers (who fly robot pterosaurs) the slip, the kids tell Carpenter all about Mars and its totalitarian society in which the government raises all children and in your teens you have to take drugs that suppress your emotions so you will behave like a good logical citizen.  Marcy and Skip are geniuses (Marcy can multiply two nine-digit numbers in her head faster than Carpenter can type them into his calculator and Skip is a whiz with machines) and so are very valuable to the bolshies that rule Mars with an iron fist. 

Carpenter then camps out with the kids, and Young describes in detail how he tells them all about American history and how they eat hot dogs and roasted marshmallows and so on.  Skip falls asleep and Carpenter tells Marcy all about the woman he has a crush on, one of his colleagues back at the North American Paleontological Society.  Carpenter is shy and afraid to talk to his crush (he calls her a  "goddess" whom he "worships from afar") and Marcy urges him to be brave and tell her of his love. 

The kidnappers are defeated (by the prepubescent geniuses as much as by Carpenter) and Martian government goons arrive to take Marcy and Skip back to perform their duty to the state on the red planet.  The triceratops robot got damaged in the struggle with the kidnappers, so Carpenter can't get back to the 22nd century, and the Martians don't want a guy with emotions mucking up their logical world so he is left behind to be menaced by a tyrannosaur.  

The tyrannosaur, luckily, is a robot driven by Carpenter's colleagues, including the woman he has a crush on.  He is rescued!  And, Young using a similar plot device to the one he used in "The Dandelion Girl"--and reminding us of some of the shenanigans we see in Heinlein novels--Carpenter's crush turns out to be a grown-up Marcy, who so fell in love with him on their camping trip that she and Skip built a time machine under the noses of the Martian commissars so she could come to the 22nd century to marry Carpenter! 

Young's heart is in the right place--of course I like dinosaurs and of course I hate Martian commies--but this story, which takes up over 30 pages of the magazine, is long and slow and sappy.  At first, seeing as the female lead is a math genius who saves the day, I thought I might be able to recommend this story to the feminist community, but since Marcy performs her arithmetical wizardry and demonstrates her heroic perseverance in pursuit of a man (and is the only female character in the story, besides) I guess "When Time Was New" fails the Baldanders test and must be categorized as patriarchal propaganda.  

Maybe I would have given "When Time Was New" a thumbs up as a kid, but I'm afraid today I have to give it a regretful marginal negative vote.  In 1983 an expanded version of the story was released as the novel Eridahn. 

(On a side note, the story references the 1869 poem "Darius Green and His Flying Machine" by John T. Trowbridge, a poem I had never heard of before but was perhaps (?) famous in 1964.) 

"The Coldest Place" by Larry Niven

Here we have one of Niven's Known Space tales.  In fact, it is the first published Known Space story.  In fact--again!--it is Larry Niven's first published story!  Just recently here at MPorcius Fiction Log we read the Known Space novel Protector, and in 2017 we read the 1965 Known Space piece "Becalmed in Hell;" back in the forgotten days of 2014 I read the Known Space story that debuted in Harlan Ellison's famous anthology Dangerous Visions, "The Jigsaw Man." 

The copy of December '64's If that was scanned and uploaded to internet archive is actually signed by Niven, which is fun.  (Is this an opportunity for me to remind you that I own a copy of Alone Against Tomorrow signed by Harlan Ellison?)

"The Coldest Place" is more like an anecdote than a full story.  The narrator, an astronaut, and Eric, the disembodied brain that runs the spaceship, go to Pluto to investigate the possibility that there is life there.  They take a sample of a big mobile blob, unsure whether it is an amoeba monster or just helium reacting to the temperature conditions that prevail on Pluto in a way that surprises Earthers.  The End.  I guess the "arc" and surprise of the story are supposed to be provided by the hinting and then revelation that Eric is a disembodied brain, but Eric appears in "Becalmed in Hell," which I've already read, so I knew what to expect.

Acceptable.

"At the Top of the World" by J. T. McIntosh 

Multiple times on this blog, and elsewhere online, I have subjected J. T. McIntosh to derision.  (Is this an opportunity for me to remind you that many years ago The Onion quoted some of my withering attacks on McIntosh's The Million Cities?)  In 2016, in my hostile review of Norman Conquest 2066, I even declared that I was through with McIntosh.  And yet here I am about to read 16 pages of his prose.  Why?  I wonder myself.

Gallery 71 is an underground city housing 53,000 people, a place which has no contact with the outside world and where the government strictly controls population and forbids all inheritance.  The founding documents of the 200-year-old settlement instruct that at the two-century mark the inhabitants should dig straight up for five thousand feet.  We readers know this is to discover if the radiation on the surface has abated enough that the people of Gallery 71 can leave their subterranean authoritarian state, but, like the passengers in a generation ship in so many SF stories who don't know they are in a spacecraft, the inhabitants of Gallery 71 don't realize there is a surface.  To them, "Gallery 71" is synonymous with "the world" or "the universe."

Some people are willing to follow the inscrutably mysterious instructions of the Founders, others think the vertical tunneling too risky or a simple waste of time and want to ignore this inexplicable decree from the forgotten past.  The debate gets so heated a riot erupts, and McIntosh gets to indulge in his penchant for sexualized violence by describing the bloody beatings and fighting that takes place; the beautiful daughter of the head of government has her blouse stripped off by an attacker and then her constricting skirt ripped off by a friend so she can run away to Daddy's flat.  

The head of government authorizes the digging of the new 5,000 foot vertical shaft, revealing the surface and sky, to the amazement of everybody.  Thirty young people, including the government head's sexy daughter, explore the surface for a few hours--they love the feeling of the sun on their skin and take off their clothes!  They return inside as the sun sets and temperatures drop.  The next day these troglodytes have painful sunburns and the government thinks that sunlight is the dangerous radiation the Founders warned of, and collapse the tunnel, much to the consternation of the young explorers, who try to convince the old people in government, without success, that you can protect yourself from sunburn just by keeping your clothes on.  The final paragraph, however, vindicates the caution of the olds--an enemy aircraft spotted the kids yesterday, and today this unidentified enemy, still at war with the people of the Gallery 200 years after driving them underground, drops a radiation bomb where the shaft was opened yesterday, making the surface above Gallery 71 deadly to all life again.

J. T. McIntosh doesn't seem to know what he is doing when he writes these things.  The sex and violence that so many writers use to add tension and excitement to their stories and to emphasize their points he just tacks on in a way that feels inorganic and encumbers rather than strengthens the story.  For a while I thought J. T.'s objective with the story was to make more or less legitimate but totally banal observations about politics that everybody already knows or at least pretends to believe while they are burning down the police station or looting the department store: that mob violence is wrong, that old people tend to be cautious and young people tend to be adventurous, that a society needs both conservatives and risk takers because sometimes it makes sense to be prudent and careful and other times it makes sense to strike out across frontiers and do risky new things, that tradition can be a useful guide but some traditions eventually outlive their usefulness when circumstances change, etc.  But what are we to make of the two twist endings that have the old people making a mistake that inadvertently preserves the Gallery from the commies or aliens or whoever operates the bombers?  That we should always be super duper cautious?  Or that life is a random chaos and whether we survive or expire is down to luck?

Perhaps a bigger sin than bungling whatever argument McIntosh might be trying to make is that his writing is lacking in feeling and personality.  There is no fun or fear in his work because his writing style is so lame--even a scene of a young woman having her clothes torn off generates no emotion in the reader.  

Thumbs down!   

Our Italian friends were brazen enough (or negligent enough) to print a translation of "At the Top of the World" in a magazine with a characteristically terrific cover illo by Karel Thole.  The issue is headlined by James H. Schmitz and A. E. van Vogt, whom I daresay are much better emissaries of English language genre literature than ol' J. T.  

"Pig in a Pokey" by R. A. Lafferty 

Here's a pretty straightforward, even traditional, SF story from R. A. Lafferty, a guy whose work is generally unconventional and often challenging to grasp.  "Pig in a Pokey" does include the sort of gruesome violence and references to the American West we often find in Lafferty's work, however.

Two people, a pig-like space alien and a human, have staked claims to an asteroid.  The alien has secured his claim by killing an earlier human claimant via a cunning trick that leaves him safe from prosecution.  The current human claimant also falls afoul of the trap, but figures a way out of it and turns the tables on the porcine alien.

The alien trap, which I won't describe here, is fun and interesting, and Lafferty's breezy pleasant style is enjoyable to read.  "Pig in a Pokey" is the only story in this issue of If that I can recommend without reservation.  Maybe it is slight compared to Lafferty's more crazy, more ambitious productions, but it works like a charm--I can't think of anything about it that should be removed and I can't think of anything that should be added, it is entertaining from start to finish.

"Pig in a Pokey" was included in the 1974 collection Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?

In the middle of "Pig in a Pokey," in the center of the magazine, is an envelope and order form for those interested in taking advantage of holiday subscription rates for If, Galaxy, and Worlds of Tomorrow.  These ephemera feature some pretty adorable science-fiction images of Santa Claus.

After the Lafferty story comes the conclusion of the Keith Laumer serial Hounds of Hell, which I am skipping, even though Emsh provided it with some pretty thrilling illustrations of monsters and office block-sized battle tanks.  Hounds of Hell would be printed in book form under the title Plague of Demons, and maybe I'll read that version some day.   

'Tell me, Conan, what are we?  Who are we?'

'Something special,' said Conan soberly. 'Perhaps freaks.  They're special.'

'There must be a purpose.'

'Of course there's a purpose.'

WARNING: This novel contains no spacecraft

I'm not sure why I am reading another book by J. T. McIntosh, whose Million Cities I thought was incredibly bad. Probably I should take Voltaire's attitude of "Once a philosopher, twice a pervert," but I guess I am more curious than cautious, and so I resolved to tackle Norman Conquest 2066 when I spotted it on a bookstore shelf recently.  I purchased the 1977 Corgi paperback edition of the novel, with its fun Chris Foss painting and charming typeface. This is apparently the only physical edition ever printed, though two electronic versions came on the market in 2012, so everybody with internet access can sample the pleasures of this literary work.

The year is 2066 and England has fallen on hard times!  Population is in decline, houses and office buildings sit vacant, factories are idle, and the few remaining automobile enthusiasts have to scavenge at scrap heaps for tires and spare parts. Locomotives and aeroplanes (I usually call them "airplanes," but when in Rome...) are rarely seen, there are no TV broadcasts or national newspapers, and public services are limited--the police don't even investigate accusations of rape!  Luckily, rape is rare because the British populace is so psychologically depressed that most men have lost their "virility."  One character says "Many people these days have the death wish. Sometimes it's conscious, sometimes unconscious."  These dreadful conditions prevail all over the Earth.

Among our numerous characters is Sally Wells, a beautiful blonde shopkeeper and one of the few people in this broken society with any get-up-and-go.  Her two shops are located in the same town as the world's last semi-efficient factory ("There was purpose in the factory, purpose lacking almost everywhere else"), which is owned and managed by Arthur Gardner.  Gardner is a sado-masochist who enjoys being whipped and whipping and otherwise torturing others.  One of our many subplots involves Gardner's flunky Vince Hobley's efforts to rape Wells and kidnap her for Gardner's use in the torture chamber.  Sally knows judo and tosses the Hobley into a river, but Gardner doesn't get too hung up over this failure; his attention has shifted to the project of getting his hands on and torturing the seven children of one of his employees, Frank Seymour. ("...the terror of a girl of eight would be something for a connoisseur.")

Who are these individuals like Wells, Gardner, Hobley and Seymour, who still have a sex drive and the ability to accomplish things, like successfully running a business? Wells discovers that two new genetic strains of homo sapiens appeared at the start of the 21st century and live in secret among the apathetic general run of humanity.  The Sexons can be identified by the fact that they are very hairy, while the Newmen have no body hair whatsoever.  Both groups have modest psychic powers.  But what really distinguishes the Sexons and Newmen (who, inspired by the approach of the thousand year anniversary of William the Conqueror's invasion, take the names "Saxon" and "Norman") from the "peasants" is their tremendous sex drive and ability to effortlessly have five or six orgasms in the space of an hour!  Sally Wells (like we readers) learns most of this information from Conan Hersholt, a Norman, who, in his efforts to increase the Norman population (currently less than half a percent of the total human population) has had sex with over 500 women (nice work if you can get it!) and has his eye on our Sally.  Sally is a hot commodity, and several of our subplots include men trying to get into her pants.

There are plenty of unusual sex scenes, attempted rapes, and scenes of torture in the book.  When Gardner, who is a Saxon, goes a little overboard during a whipping session and kills somebody, he fears the police will finally come after him, and so decides to organize all the Saxons into a revolutionary army and take over the town, the country, maybe even the world.  "From now on no Saxon conceals himself....We march!"

In the streets the Gardner's mob battles a coalition of Normans and the more stable of the Saxons battle for world supremacy.  This fracas lacks urgency for the reader largely because each "army" has only dozens of members and the Normans, it turns out, are psychologically inhibited from committing violence and get martyred instead of fighting back.  I guess the "battle" is supposed to remind the reader of 20th-century street protests and riots between rival political factions like in late Republican Rome or Weimar Germany.  (Or maybe the 1964 fights between Mods and Rockers; wikipedia is telling me that the biggest Mod vs Rocker fight was dubbed "The Second Battle of Hastings.")  In the end it is Wells, with the aid of that Norman with seven kids, Seymour, who kills Gardner in a struggle in Gardner's torture chamber.

Besides the pervasive themes of outre sex (did I mention that Saxons and Normans don't get all their powers until they lose their virginity?) and nudity (people are taking their clothes off all the time to prove they are or are not Saxons or Normans) one of the themes of the book is a sort of personification of "nature"; everybody talks about how the appearance of the Saxons and Normans must have some kind of "purpose," that these new races must be the result of decisions made by "nature" who is at times assigned a female pronoun of "she" or called "the old girl."  McIntosh doesn't expand on this idea or do anything interesting with it; it just sits there, irritating my sense of scientific propriety without adding any religious, moral or spiritual dimension to the book.  In the end of the novel we learn that Wells, who has a normal distribution of body hair but nevertheless is ambitious and resourceful, is one of the first specimens of nature's latest and most promising attempt to put the human race to rights, a fourth, as yet unnamed, race that will inherit the Earth from the pathetic peasants, unstable Saxons and ineffectual Normans.

I can't think of much nice to say about Norman Conquest 2066.  The ideas and style are pedestrian at best, and the writing sometimes shoddy--Normans, including Conan Hersholt the womanizer, die at the battle because they are unable to strike blows at their assailants, but then Seymour the Norman gets a knife and tries to stab Gardner in the back, with no explanation.  There are lots of characters, but few of them are interesting or sympathetic, and the high volume of characters (and McIntosh's poor ability to structure the plot) means that the story is diffuse, just a bunch of thinly connected episodes.  Characters will appear and then disappear for long periods of time, and a high proportion of characters are killed.  It feels like the characters and ideas are an excuse for the gratuitous and exploitative sex and violence, but the sex scenes and action scenes are not thrilling--most feel long and slow and clunky.

The best subplot of the novel follows a Norman who, thanks to the intervention of Hersholt and Wells, escapes the smothering domination of his mother (and her dozens of cats!) and his dull grey life and learns how to use his superb Norman body and his psychic powers.  This material could have made for a decent short story, but as part of Norman Conquest 2066 it is submerged and nearly lost in a 156-page mess.

Another J. T. McIntosh failure, characterized by a shaky plot and weird, often eroticized, violence.  Two bad novels and two bad stories are enough; this time we are through J. T.!

Because I found the cover illustration by Emsh irresistible, at Jay's CD and Hobby in a strip mall in southern Des Moines, I purchased a crumbling copy of the February 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  The beautiful blue-eyed blonde, the twisting curling thorns, the disparate ill-disciplined crowd of soldiers...I kept looking at the picture, looking away, then looking at it again.  I knew I'd want to look at it yet again after I'd left the store, so I forked over the cash and took the magazine home.

This issue of the magazine includes the novella by Edgar Pangborn, "The Golden Horn," which makes up part of his novel Davy, which I read back in June.  It also includes a reprinted 1954 story by Richard Matheson, "The Traveller," which I read in June of 2013, shortly before this blog arose from its vat and began its march across the landscape, sowing amazement and indifference throughout an unsuspecting land.  (Joachim Boaz read the story, along with ten other Matheson stories, early this year, and proclaimed it "Bad."  My notes on "The Traveller" say "Eh.")

Even though I already had 40 or 50 pages of this one under my belt, so to speak, there were still attractive items I hadn't read yet.  This weekend I read them.

"The Garden of Time" by J. G. Ballard

This symbolist fantasy has been reprinted numerous times in collections of Ballard's work and in various anthologies.  I read a bunch of poems by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot a few weeks ago, and "The Garden of Time" reminded me of one of the more easily digested of these verses, Pound's "The Garden."

Image from the Internet Archive

"The Garden of Time" is about two good-looking sophisticated people who live in a beautiful Palladian villa full of rare books, fine paintings, busts and vases. Within the outer walls of the estate there is a pool and a fine garden, outside the walls an empty plain as far as the eye can see.  The Countess at her harpsichord fills the house with the sound of Bach and Mozart (my own wife at the TV fills our house with the sound of The Gilmore Girls, which is not the same thing at all.)  Every evening before a stroll around the grounds the Count looks out across the naked featureless landscape; sometimes he sees, miles away, a vast horde approaching, a rabble which stretches from one horizon to the other.  If this sea of filthy unkillable infantry is in sight he plucks one of the "time flowers" from his garden, and as the blossom expires time is shifted and the invincible ill-disciplined mob recedes back out of sight.  But there are almost no flowers left; soon the horde will batter down the walls, destroy the cultural treasures they are unable to appreciate.

Presumably this is a lament that the modern age, the age of mass capitalism and democracy, socialism and the welfare state, overpopulation and mass media, etc (pick your bogeyman), is an age in which nobody will appreciate the finer things, an age in which society will fail to preserve the finer things.  On the one hand there may be something to this, but on the other hand, technological advances in transportation and communication in my lifetime have made high culture more easily accessible, while the elite have been able to manipulate the political class in such a way that the taxpayers subsidize things like opera and poetry festivals, things very few taxpayers actually care about.  For the time being, high culture is available to those who still care about it.  

Vivid and thought-provoking.

"The Singular Events Which Occurred in the Hovel on the Alley Off Eye Street" by Avram Davidson

Years ago I read Avram Davidson's 1960s novels Rork! and Mutiny in Space--I still remember the girl at the checkout counter of the antique mall laughing at the title of Mutiny in Space.  These novels were OK, no big deal.  Tarbandu at the great PorPor Books Blog has reviewed quite a few of Davidson's works--click here to read a tarbandu review of two Davidson novels in which I make an appearance in the comments.  While he praises "The New Zombies," a story Davidson wrote with his wife, tarbandu mostly seems to award Davidson 2 or 3 stars out of 5.  Let's see if this six page story with the 14 word title meets or exceeds these expectations.

This is an elaborate joke story, set in an alternate universe 1961 USA in which there are dragons and magic, with magic spells a sort of consumer good produced by rival firms who commit industrial espionage against each other.  It is full of Shakespearean speech, outrageous puns, and topical jokes about things like Ed Sullivan and the JFK inauguration (occurring a year before this issue of F&SF was on the newsstands,)  No plot, no character, no emotion, just the kind of wordplay that may be fun to write but is a drag to read.

Horrible.

"One Into Two" by J. T. McIntosh

Speaking of horrible, it's once more unto the breach of a piece of J. T. McIntosh fiction.  (Dare I read such a piece?)

It is the future!  Millions of people commute everyday between Terra, Luna, Marsa and Venusa via matta transmittuh.  These are the kind of teleporters that read your atoms, vaporize you, transmit the data to your destination, and build a replica of you at your destination, the kind of teleporters that make every person reading the story say, "Wait, they are killing the person," and vow never to be matter transmitted regardless of whether a Kirk or a Spock or a Scotty tells them it is perfectly safe.  The government carefully regulates the teleporters to make sure what goes into the booth is completely annihilated, otherwise some smart guy would use the booth to duplicate money or hot chicks, and that would cause undesirable inflation.

The main character of the story is Willie Ross, a crook who works for the teleporter company.  Regardless of all that government regulation he duplicates himself so he can be on two planets at once.  While one version of Ross is setting up an alibi on Luna, the other version is on Mars murdering a man he's never met before, a guy who is married to a former partner in crime of Ross's.   I don't think McIntosh makes it very clear why Ross kills this innocent man, vengeance, I guess, or so he can pressure his former associate for money or something.  "One Into Two" is a mystery in multiple senses of the word.

The police very quickly catch both Rosses, either because they betray each other, or because they are able to trick the Rosses and have experience dealing with other assholes who have tried to exploit the teleporter system.  "You never had a chance, Ross....You don't think you're the first to try this, do you?"  Like numerous things in this story, it wasn't quite clear to me.

At the end of the story the police teleport Mars-assassin-Ross and Luna-alibi-Ross to New York, at the same time, to the same booth.  This means there is only one Ross again, but he has the memories of both Rosses--McIntosh even tells us that the food each ate separately is now together in his one stomach!  I don't think this makes any sense.

Bad.

"Rebel" by Ward Moore

I read a story by Ward Moore earlier this year, and liked it.  Can he get me out of this bad story rut?

This is a gimmicky story which reminds you that attitudes, tastes, mores are just faddish opinion and change over time.  In 1962 parents wanted their kids to play outside and sit up straight at the dinner table and conservative people had short hair and rebellious kids wore long hair.  In this story young Caludo's parents have long hair and tell Caludo to recline and lament that he played outside as a kid instead of staying inside to read books and that he now wears his hair short.  Those are just a few examples--the entire story, eight pages, is a conversation between Caludo and his parents that is one obvious switcheroo joke after another--Mom and Dad smoke and drink and think it impolite their son abstains, Mom and Dad are artists and think son is wasting his time becoming a businessman, blah blah blah.

Lame.

***********

Alfred Bester, who wrote the famous The Stars My Destination wrote the "Books" column in this issue of F&SF, and addresses three books.  The Theodore Sturgeon collection A Way Home he tells us is great because Sturgeon is great--the word "genius" appears.  The novels Battle for the Stars by Edmond Hamilton and Time is the Simplest Thing by Clifford Simak he admits are doing things that have already been done ("space-opera" the former, "conventional persecution" story the latter) but that Hamilton and Simak do these familiar things well.  I have read both Battle for the Stars and Time is the Simplest Thing myself, and those interested can find my Amazon reviews at the links in this paragraph.

***********

One hit and three misses?  Damn!  Well, you pays your money and you takes your chances, as they say.  Besides, I read these things, in part, to learn about the SF field and the intellectual milieu of the past, so my time reading these stories, no matter how groaningly bad some were, was not wasted.  And I still have that gorgeous Emsh cover to comfort me.    

Let's read four more selections from the September 1951 issue of Planet Stories! Three are in the public domain and readily accessible at the PDF page at the SFFaudio website, while one I draw from a volume recently added to my personal collection!

"The Incubi of Parallel X" by Theodore Sturgeon

I don't think member of The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame Theodore Sturgeon requires any introduction.  Just this week I bought, at Half Price Books, a 1978 paperback edition of the 1964 collection Sturgeon in Orbit, specifically to read this story, featured so prominently on the cover of Planet Stories' 1951 September issue.

In a little intro to the story the author himself says that "The Incubi of Parallel X" is "the most horrible title ever to appear over my byline."  He uses the rest of the intro to say nice things about Ray Bradbury and editor Malcolm Reiss.

"The Incubi of Parallel X" is a complicated and goofy story, and has as a main topic Sturgeon's oft-addressed issues of love and sex.  There is also plenty of "sciency" stuff: gates to other dimensions, plenty of scientists, lots of talk of super strong materials and chemical interactions, some engineering, and the contempt for religion we often see in SF.  Today's socially conscious readers may be pleased by the way women characters solve intellectual problems and repeatedly physically rescue the hero from death.

The opening scenes are a complicated description of two guys, Garth Gesell and Bronze, using a super strong rope and an atlatl spear thrower to get into a sort of fortified house by a cliff.  Then we get the complicated backstory.  Twenty-two years ago, a portal from a parallel dimension opened in Hackensack, New Jersey.  (Yay, New Jersey!)  Out of the portal came little people, the Ffanx, clad in little space suits and flying little space ships.  The Ffanx spread over the entire world, and kidnapped and murdered women by the millions.

Feminist-style, Sturgeon tells us that there is very little physical difference between men and women, except that women produce a special chemical that men do not produce, extradiol.  The Ffanx can use extradiol beta-prime, a component of extradiol, to make an immortality drug.  Moral relativism-style, Sturgeon reminds us that if there was an animal that could produce an immortality drug for us, we'd mercilessly hunt it down, just like the Ffanx mercilessly hunted down our mothers, sisters, wives and daughters.  So don't get on your high horse, human!
      

The cover art accurately depicts something that happens in Sturgeon's story

Garth Gesell's father was the world's greatest scientist in these dark days of the Ffanx.  He developed his own gate to another dimension, a peaceful dimension, and many women fled our dimension for that one; Garth Senior gave women who were smart and sexy priority in the queue.  Then he developed a chemical weapon which he tossed through the Ffanx gate, rendering the entire atmosphere of the Ffanx version of Earth a deadly poison to the Ffanx.  Since the Ffanx couldn't breathe the air on our Earth, the Ffanx were exterminated.  Take that!

Unfortunately, one of the last shots of the Ffanx-human war was the shot that took out Garth Senior.

The Ffanx-human war left Earth in a total shambles, and, as happens so often in science fiction stories, humanity quickly reverted to a medieval or even Stone Age existence, with people walking instead of riding cars and hunting with spears instead of guns.  Even worse, 90% of women were gone, either turned into now useless immortality drug or fled to that other, pacific, dimension.  Even though nobody remembers how to maintain an internal combustion engine or a shotgun, lots of horny guys remember that there's a portal to a world of women at the old Gesell mansion. Unfortunately, Gesell set up a ray gun trap at his mansion, and so lots of horny guys get zapped to cinders trying to get to the portal.  Sad trombone sound effect.  :(

Gesell Junior and his hulking buddy Bronze are able to get past the defenses and into the mansion.  With the help of a clever educated young woman (she had access to one of Gesell Senior's hypnoteaching devices), halfway through the story they enter the dimension of women.  They find the Earth women, who are now 75 feet tall!  Every thing in this dimension is huge!  Hey, it's just like how the Ffanx were tiny compared to humans when they came to our dimension!  Sturgeon gives us a long explanation that went over my head as to why things in different dimensions are different sizes. Time also moves at different rates in different dimensions--the women aren't 22 years older, like Gesell Junior is, merely eight months older.  (The hot chicks that went through the gateway are still hot!)  Then comes the happy ending when Gesell Junior explains how to get the fugitive women back to Earth and at the appropriate size for having sex with.    

I often feel like Sturgeon stories are too long (this baby is 50 pages in the edition I own), and that they have lots of complex moving parts that don't actually help the machine accomplish anything.  I felt the same way about "The Incubi of Parallel X."  I don't regret reading it, as it is amusing in its wackiness, and I was curious about the content and character of Planet Stories September 1951 and so felt a need to read the cover story, but I don't really think I can recommend this thing to other people without all kinds of caveats.  Consider all those sentences above caveats.

"Lord of A Thousand Suns" by Poul Anderson

I don't think Grandmaster Poul Anderson needs any introduction.  Let's see what he was writing in the early 1950s.

A small portion of the Janyard fleet, en route to Earth

This story has a frame--two old space hands are shooting the shit, swapping stories of their adventures as space navy officers during the recent galactic civil war and as explorers, surveying the innumerable habitable planets of the universe.  The main story is a tale from Laird, the older and more reserved of the spacemen.  Oddly, it is written in the third person, even though the frame is written in the first person (from Laird's comrade's point of view.).

During the civil war--our main characters are "Solmen," adherents of the victorious conservative faction centered on Earth's solar system, and call the civil war the "Janyard revolt"-- Laird was doing archaeological work alone in pyramids on a planet that, a million years ago, was home to a highly advanced civilization, Vwyrdda.  He hopes to find technology that will help the Solar war effort.  But then Janyards, led by a female officer, land on the planet.  As they are about to capture him, Laird, following instructions in the form of pictographic hieroglyphs, puts on a million-year-old helmet and flips a switch.

The consciousness of a hero of the ancient civilization, Daryesh, enters Laird's brain!  The two wrestle for control, then work together--Daryesh can grok what Laird and the Solar Empire of Earth are going through, because a million years ago Vwyrdda's space empire was destroyed in a civil war of its own!  Or so he says!  Daryesh is attracted to that sexy Janyard naval officer, and acts like he is going to teach her how to use all the super weapons and super force fields from the pyramid.  He even gives the Janyards a little speech about how their vital frontier society should overthrow the boring conservative society based on Earth!  If the Janyards get Vwyrdda technology the Solar Empire is doomed!  Is Daryesh tricking Laird, the Janyards, or both?

Of course we already know that the Solar Empire wins the war, so the suspense in the story centers around how Laird got out of this mess and what became of Daryesh and the Janyard love interest.

This is a pretty fun space adventure.  I like stories in which guys wrestle over control of a brain; I guess I like anytime one guy's brain or consciousness gets moved to another body.  As a kid I loved when The Flintstones or Gilligan's Island used such gimmicks.        

"Sanctuary, Oh Ulla!" by J. T. MacIntosh

Years ago I was quoted in no less a publication than The Onion expressing my utter disdain for J. T. MacIntosh's novel The Million Cities.  Now, people who know me might tell you I am still bitter about the crimes of Philip and Alexander of Macedon, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte, but the truth is I am a real forgive and forget kind of guy, always ready to let bygones be bygones, bury the hatchet, and give a guy another chance.  I even bought a novel by MacIntosh recently!  And it is in this spirit of reconciliation that I will read MacIntosh's story, "Sanctuary, Oh Ulla!"

My wife and I must look like this when we're tooling around in the Toyota Corolla and I spot a bald eagle

"Sanctuary, Oh Ulla!" is written in a jocular tone, but I guess we are supposed to take the plot more or less seriously.  The jokes aren't offensively bad, so I won't hold them against the story.

Al Gannett is an interstellar criminal who thinks he is smarter than he really is--this is where much of the comedy comes in.  As our story begins Al's stint as a captain of a space pirate ship has ended disastrously, and Al is all alone, fleeing the solar system in a tiny space ship, the Galactic Patrol on his tail.  He eludes the forces of justice, and heads for Ulla, a planet he chose essentially at random from a gazetteer.

Ulla has a large population and an impressive industrial base, and could be a mover and shaker in interstellar trade and politics if it threw off its isolationist policy.  So Al works to reshape that policy at the same time he is seducing an Ullan woman.  (The alien Ulla are close enough to human to excite his erotic desire.)  The Ullans study Al and his little ship, getting an understanding of human biology and technology, then build a battlefleet of one hundred thousand ships and set off to conquer Earth.  The Galactic Patrol routs this fleet, however; by basing their assumptions about Earth on inferior specimens--Al and his crummy little ship--the Ullans underestimated what the human race and Earth space navy were capable of.  Now the Earth is going to conquer Ulla.

At first the Ullans want to punish Al, but Al tells them being conquered by Earth need be no problem.  Closely administering the vast population (seven trillion) of Ulla will be more trouble than the Earthlings will want to take, and it won't be impossible to convince the humies to just open trade relations with Ulla.  As the only person familiar with both Earth and Ulla, Al is the perfect person to handle such negotiations.  The factories of Ulla are so productive (they just made 100,000 space warships in a year, after all) Ulla will be able to produce enough consumer goods for the Earth market to make them all rich!  

This story is not very good.  It is full of incongruities, red herrings and dead ends.  Is Al smart or stupid?  He keeps escaping the Galactic Patrol and outwitting the Ullans, so he must be smart, right?  But the plot requires that he be below average, to make the central gag about the Ullan space fleet's defeat work.  As for dead ends, MacIntosh spends quite a bit of time describing how Al plans an escape from Ulla, but then he doesn't need to escape at all.  MacIntosh's love story is also somewhat incoherent.

Obviously, the story of a criminal who betrays his people and falls in love with someone from another civilization could have all kinds of philosophical and psychological resonances and move the reader emotionally and intellectually, and, just as obviously, MacIntosh isn't even trying to do any of that.

Thumbs down!        

"Hospitality" by J. W. Groves

British writer Groves has two novels listed on isfdb, and a dozen stories.  He is quoted in Robert Reginald's Contemporary Science Fiction authors as saying "I've had no career.  Just jobs."  I know your feels, bro!

Have you guys seen Dejah Thoris anywhere around here?

"Hospitality" is a filler story, three pages of text that tell an anemic gimmick story.

Like Al Gannett, Brent and Durgan are interstellar criminals on the run from the space patrol who choose a planet to hide out on from a gazetteer.  But where Al was lucky enough to choose a planet with some hot chicks, the firm of B & D sets up shop on a planet where the purple six-limbed Stone Age people look like the kind of freaks John Carter and Tars Tarkas would have to exterminate on their way to or from rescuing a princess.          

The natives, with whom B & D have no real way to communicate, consider visitors from the sky sacred and so are very friendly, providing food and so forth.  But whenever B & D try to sleep, the natives prod them awake.  This planet does not rotate on its axis, so there is no night in this part of the world, and the natives never sleep.  So when they see the humans losing consciousness they assume their sacred visitors are dying, and prod them awake.  This goes on long enough that B & D are driven to the edge of insanity from lack of sleep and use their radio to surrender to the space patrol.  At least in prison they will be able to sleep!

Lame.

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No real surprises here, Sturgeon, Anderson, and MacIntosh delivering the kind of stories I would expect from them, based on my earlier experiences with them.  The Anderson story is the most entertaining, while the Sturgeon is probably the most challenging and interesting, with its defiance of gender stereotypes, attacks on religion (which I didn't get into here, but which are front and center in the text) and mass of (pseudo?)scientific jargon about materials, chemicals, biology, and interdimensional physics.

Thanks to SFFaudio, for making this exploration of the illustrations as well as text of a very cool magazine from over 60 years ago possible.  As you probably know already, SFFaudio's site is worth the attention of any classic SF fan--if you haven't yet, check it out!