Let's crack open my copy of 2015's The Madness of Cthulhu: Volume Two and read four more 21st-century stories inspired by H. P. Lovecraft that bear the S. T. Joshi seal of approval.

"The Door Beneath" by Alan Dean Foster

Foster's name feels very familiar even though I have read very little of his work during the period of this blog's life; Foster penned the first two Star Wars novels and the Black Hole novelization and I think a lot of his books were at the public library when I was a kid (I was born in 1971 so books like For Love of Mother-Not and Spellsinger would have been in hardcover at the library when I was in my early teens.)  A few years ago I read his story "With Friends Like These..." and thought it OK.  And I think "The Door Beneath" is similarly OK, maybe a little worse than OK, a standard issue science fiction action story with a little Yog-Sothery sprinkled on it.

Our protagonist is the head of safety at an important Soviet installation, the nature of which is kept from us readers.  A big wig accompanied by KGB brutes gives our guy a tour of a secret installation under the main installation.  Down there we find a huge subterranean chamber where toil an army of scientists and technicians on two unusual objects of tremendous size, a towering hunk of what looks like organic matter bigger than a whale and a bizarre contraption like an abstract sculpture above which shimmers a sort of black sphere.  These things were discovered in Antarctica, we learn.  As our main characters watch, the white lab coat crew pumps a bazillion gigajoules of electricity into the organic mass and it quivers to life, scores of eyes and pseudopods ending in toothy mouths emerging.  And then they see something scary in the black sphere--the sphere, they realize, is a portal to some other world and genocidal monsters are going to come out of it.  Our hero hurries upstairs as the monster (eventually Foster just tells us it is a shoggoth) devours his comrades behind him.  Upstairs he somehow convinces his colleagues to blow up the public installation they are standing in, which we learn is the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, killing the shoggoth and closing the portal, and thus saving the world.

A simplistic and plodding story in which the characters don't act in ways that are very convincing and which lacks anything like a Lovecraftian tone or spirit and also fails to supply anything engaging on its own terms, "The Door Beneath" is a barely acceptable filler story, with its focus on nuclear power more like a mediocre story from Astounding than something from Weird Tales.  (Compare "The Door Beneath" to two stories we read last time from Volume 1 of Madness of Cthulhu--Robert Silverberg's "Diana of the Hundred Breasts," which added good human drama to stereotypical Lovecraftian commonplaces and Darrel Schweitzer's "Warm" which embraced Lovecraftianism wholeheartedly and achieved a real Lovecraftian tone and atmosphere.)  Either go all the way with the weird horror goop or give us something new--and good--which integrates some Lovecraftian themes or images; don't give us lowest common denominator science fiction with the most obvious and banal and superficial Lovecraft dressing spritzed on it.

"The Door Beneath" would be reprinted in 2019 in the Foster collection The Taste of Different Dimensions.

"Dead Man Walking" by William F. Nolan

Oy.  I compared Foster's story to a below-average specimen from Astounding, but Nolan's is even less Lovecraftian and even less entertaining--"Dead Man Walking" is like a 1970s TV movie written by somebody influenced by somebody who was influenced by what he heard about Dashiell Hammett.  I think "Dead Man Walking" may be an unfunny spoof of such TV fare, or perhaps was even based on some script Nolan sketched out that he was unable to sell.  Thumbs down!

A writer guy lives in L.A.  (I couldn't care less about L.A. and I am sick of always seeing it on screen or reading about it or hearing people talk about it.  Who the hell still cares about In and Out Burger and Rodeo Drive and Sepulvedra or whatever the hell it is?  Enough already.)  Writer guy is working on a nonfiction book about how the supernatural is a load of crap.  But then a hot chick whose husband, a sculptor, died, calls him up to ask for his help--she thinks her husband is alive and trying to kill her!

We spend like seventeen pages with the writer, the widow, and a gallery owner who is also some kind of medium or witch or something, Madame Jechiel.  Jechiel gave the sculptor a magic ring that allowed him to live forever if he cut a deal with monsters from another dimension--he had to make statues of the monsters and anoint them with human blood and then the aliens would inhabit and animate the statues and take over the Earth.  The writer and the woman outfight the sculptor and the aliens in a way that is not scary or exciting and is not convincing in the least.

This story is bad.  The characters lack personality and act in ways that are not believable, and Nolan writes in a lifeless barebones style that fails to make anything that happens compelling logically or emotionally--plot developments don't follow each other in a way that makes sense, but seem to exist to set up scenes that have the potential to be visually arresting while not requiring much trouble or expense to film.  "Dead Man Walking" is also stuffed with poorly delivered bargain basement jokes, like the writer not liking the nickname his editor has given him and trying to quit smoking and that sort of thing.  I kept flipping through pages to see how many were left, the way I used to look at the clock every thirty seconds at school, at my job in a machine shop, at my job in a department store, at my job at a book store, at my job in a government office, at my job in a warehouse....

So bad I am angry.  Joshi should have deep-sixed this rough draft. 

Looking at the records, it seems I have now read 10 stories by Nolan.  That's right, it is links time.

Title                                                    TLDR quote from my blog post on the story  

Just a few days ago we read Richard Matheson's "Mute," a story which debuted in Charles Beaumont's 1962 anthology The Fiend in You.  "Mute" was about Germans running a ruthless experiment to foster children's psychic powers by isolating them from society and making sure they never learned to read or talk.  Despite the fact that psychic powers are the center of that story, The Fiend in You is advertised as containing sixteen stories "that could really happen."  (Obviously nobody would question the "merciless German who fucking loves science" component of the story.)  In his brief intro to the book, Beaumont says that vampires and werewolves have lost their ability to scare, and the most terrifying monster of all is called "The Mind," and that that monster is what The Fiend in You is all about.

We've already read two stories from The Fiend in You, the aforementioned "Mute" and Robert Bloch's "Lucy Comes to Stay."  Now let's read five (count 'em--five!) more stories that (supposedly) are about the monster that is your mind and which might actually happen, stories by people whose work we have already written about here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  For this purpose I will be using a PDF of the book readily available online for free.

"The Women" by Ray Bradbury (1948)

We start with a story from a man who by some measures is probably America's most successful writer of speculative fiction.  "The Women" debuted in an issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries full of full-page illos by Virgil Finlay and including a tribute to the 73-year-old Edgar Rice Burroughs and a story by Theodore Sturgeon.  Wow, looks like a good issue.  There are so many awesome SF magazines out there, I will die before I can read them all.

Woah, this is a story for you to read for your gender studies class!  You know how in Howard Wandrei's "Danger: Quicksand" and in Donald Wollheim's "The Rag Thing" a blob monster sort of spontaneously appeared via chemical reaction among just the right randomly assembled ingredients?  Well, this is Bradbury's take on this theme, but with a difference: 

It was of the sea.  And being of the sea it was--feminine.

It in no way resembled man or woman.  But it had a woman's ways, the silken, sly, and hidden ways.  It moved with a woman's grace.  It was all the evil things of vain women.  

An evil phosphorescence comes to life in the ocean, drifts close to a beach where are reclining a married couple, a handsome man and his wife, who wears a black swimsuit.  The wife subconsciously perceives that the ocean wants to take her husband, and, as the phosphorescence uses its psychic powers to draw the man into the water, she comes up with all kinds of stratagems to keep her husband from going for a swim, like asking him to go buy her hot dogs, then making him eat the hot dogs, and then telling him he can't swim because he has just eaten.  Who will win custody of the hunk, the wife or the blob monster?

This is a good monster story, with some real suspense and with heavy doses of Ray Bradbury's poetic style that tries to give you a strong sense of place with loads of images and metaphors as well as Bradbury's typical focus on ordinary folks suddenly confronted by inexplicable weirdness.  This is also a story about women and how jealous they are and how they ruthlessly compete with each other; "The Women" would be a good specimen if you were writing your dissertation on how popular literature penned by men exposes men's fear of women.

Thumbs up!  There is a reason Bradbury was such a success!

(Like "Mute," however, there is no way this crazy story about a blob monster "could really happen."  Is it about "The Mind?"  Well, there are psychic powers, so, maybe a wee bit?)

"The Women" is one of the stories included in the collection I Sing the Body Electric!, which has been reprinted a million times.

"Perchance to Dream" by Charles Beaumont (1958)       

In the afterword to his story "A Flourish of Strumpets" in Collected Stories: Volume 2, Richard Matheson mentions Charles Beaumont, how Beaumont was selling stories to Playboy long before Matheson himself would, and says Playboy would pay over ten times as much for a story as would a fantasy or science fiction magazine.  Here is a story Beaumont sold to our most prestigious skin rag two years after Matheson sold them "A Flourish of Strumpets."  (I guess the Playboy people liked the stories they printed to have Shakespearean titles.) 

Beaumont's intro to the Bradbury story here in The Fiend in You was a pointless joke.  His intro to his own story explains how the images in "Perchance to Dream" are autobiographical and, in the process, spoils the images.  (I may write a blog full of spoilers, but I hate spoilers myself and found this a little irritating.)

The main character of "Perchance to Dream" has a weak heart and had a wacky mother.  (Good grief, is this turning into "MPorcius Misogyny Blog?")  Mom died of a psychosomatic illness, and had encouraged her son to push his imagination to the limit by telling him if he concentrated as he stared at a tapestry depicting cavalrymen that he could make them move.  He achieved this feat, though the mounted soldiers returned to their original position when he looked away.  He used this ability on all kinds of books and magazines, until one day the picture of a knight and a dragon in a coloring book didn't change back!  

The weak heart guy explains this to a shrink, and other episodes of extreme imagination.  These include recent dreams of going to an amusement park where an attractive woman tempts him to get on a rollercoaster.  In real life this guy can't ride roller coasters, as the excitement will give him a heart attack.  Every night, the dream continues, our narrator riding the first car on the roller coaster, the woman sitting next to him, flirting and kissing him, each night the coaster getting closer to the top of the first peak.  (I think maybe we are supposed to think this woman is a version of his mother.)  He knows that if the roller coaster starts its descent he will die of a heart attack, so he has striven to stay awake, using drugs and now finally coming to the psychiatrist to seek help.  

The twist ending is that his conversation with the psychiatrist is part of the dream; he has actually fallen asleep in the head shrinker's office before even beginning to describe his problems to the man.  He dies in his sleep from a heart attack when the dream comes to its horrifying climax.

Acceptable.  "Perchance to Dream" has been a success, serving as the title story for a Beaumont collection and being turned into another Twilight Zone episode I don't remember.  The Twilight Zone is like Monty Python, something I was into as a kid that I revisited as an adult and found was not nearly as impressive as a young MPorcius thought.  (I still liked "Scott of the Sahara" and the one in which William Shatner becomes obsessed with a cheesy fortune-telling device, but in general watching these TV shows felt like a waste of time.) 

"One of Those Days" by William F. Nolan (1962)"Finger Prints" by Richard Matheson (1962)

Let's read more from Kirby McAuley's Frights, a 1976 anthology of horror stories devoted to contemporary terrors.  In the last two blog posts we read the contributions of Psycho scribe Robert Bloch, SF Grandmaster Poul Anderson and his wife Karen, unique wordsmith and critical favorite R. A. Lafferty, and military SF icon David Drake.  Today, it's stories by the author of Necroscope, Brian Lumley, the author of The Forever War, Joe Haldeman, and the co-author of Logan's Run, William F. Nolan.  I am reading a scan of the US hardcover first edition that is available at the internet archive, that indispensable website for the impecunious student of 20th-century culture.

"The Whisperer" by Brian Lumley

"The Whisperer" would go on to be the title story of a 2001 Lumley collection and was also anthologized by Dennis Etchison and Eric Protter, so I think we have a right to expect this will be a story representative of Lumley at his best.

Lumley's work, I have found, is uneven, but I am happy to report that "The Whisperer" is pretty good.

Benton, a British office clerk, is terrorized by a hunchbacked dwarf, a hideous creature who wears a floppy black hat and smells powerfully of the sewer.  First, the bowler-clad office worker encounters this apparition on the commuter train--the monster uses its hypnotic power to make the train conductor direct Benton to a less comfortable train car.  Then, a few months later, the dwarf is in a pub Benton visits for lunch, and the creep uses his powers to steal Benton's beer!  When Benton later asks the train conductor and the barman about the little weirdo, they profess to have never seen the apparition!

Benton becomes obsessed with this haunt, his habits and character taking a turn for the worse as he spends his time searching for the malodorous dwarf.  A few months after the episode in the pub comes a horrendous turn of events--Benton returns home to find the dwarf having sex with his wife!  Benton drives the monster off, and then confronts, and strikes, his wife, who claims she has no idea what Benton is talking about!  Benton's wife leaves him and Benton begins searching for the dwarf even more fervently, armed with a knife, intent on slaying his tormentor.  Who will live and who will die when the final showdown comes?

This story is well-written and well-paced, and actually disturbing.  Maybe, for reasons of class resentment, we are supposed to find the crimes inflicted on Benton amusing, but I did not find them amusing--I identified with the victim and his hopeless quest for vengeance and for answers.  Because Benton's quest is hopeless--he ends the story dead in a gutter, and we are never afforded any clues as to what the monster is and why he chose to harass and destroy Benton.

Unless we are expected to observe the torture, cuckolding and murder of a member of the bourgeoisie with the glee of a malicious working-class brute or a supercilious Marxist university professor, I interpret this story as a reminder that ordinary people are essentially helpless when confronted by crime, that justice and safety are impossible to secure, that everything we have--our property, our families and our lives--can easily be taken from us by anybody who is strong enough and brazen enough to do so.

Thumbs up for this black nightmare of a story.


"Armaja Das" by Joe Haldeman

"Armaja Das" has been anthologized by Gardner Dozois, Thomas F. Monteleone, and Margaret Weis, so here we have a piece that has been embraced by the speculative fiction community!

"Armanja das," the story tells us, is Romani for "we curse you"--this is a story about Gypsies!

John Zold is a rich man, a talented mathematician who left academia to make a pile of money in private industry as a computer programmer--he has designed a piece of software that gives computers the ability to mimic human feeling and talk to a computer user as if it is his or her sympathetic friend.

Zold works in Manhattan, lives in Dobbs Ferry.  His Romani parents fled Europe during the Nazi era, but were murdered in America, leaving him an orphan.  John became totally assimilated to English-speaking American culture and, as a wealthy man in his late thirties, has been financing a charity that encourages other young Gypsies to assimilate.  Many Gypsies in America resent this charitable effort, considering that Zold is "stealing their children," and Zold receives threatening letters in the mail featuring that phrase, "armanja das."  Early in the story an ancient little Romani woman sneaks into his building in Dobbs Ferry and casts a spell on him.  Of course, Zold doesn't believe in magic, but immediately after the curse is put on him he is unable to perform in the bedroom and he develops carbuncles on the back of his neck.

Conventional medical professionals prove unable to cure Zold's impotence or his skin problems, which get worse, much worse, and, suffering a severe fever and covered head to tow in hideous boils, he seeks out help from a Gypsy herbal  healer or "white witch."   However, the evil witch who cursed Zold in the first place has deep ties within the Gypsy community and no healers will tend to him!  Desperate, Zold turns to the computer personality that he designed himself!  The computer, with access to libraries all over the world, comes up with a Gypsy spell that will transfer the deadly curse to somebody else and guides Zold in performing the ritual!

Unfortunately, the curse does not transfer to the witch, as Zold hoped, but to his computer.  The curse then spreads to almost every computer in the world, making them "impotent"--this causes havoc because, for example, all electricity in New York City is handled by a computer, so the curse brings the greatest city in the world to a standstill.  The only computers that are immune are the computers managing the Soviet and American nuclear arsenals--when they sense that the world's computers are out of commission they interpret that as a vulnerability amongst the enemy's ranks and both computers launch nuclear strikes.  Civilization is almost wiped out, and the Gypsies, who hadn't come to rely on machines as did all other cultures, are now on top of the heap!

The first half or two-thirds of this "Armaja Das" I took to be a serious piece on assimilation and alienation and psychosomatic illness, and I suppose it is, but the end feels like a nonsensical joke story, undermining much of what I liked about it.  Perhaps we should admire the story for the way it mixes high technology and traditional superstitious beliefs, a reflection of our real 21st-century lives, in which book store browsers will find that there are more shelves for books on ghosts, witchcraft and the tarot than there are for computer programs. 

Acceptable.


"Dead Call" by William F. Nolan

Like the Lumley and the Haldeman story we are looking at today, William F. Nolan's "Dead Call" has been widely anthologized.

This story is very short, and a little gimmicky.  The narrator answers the phone, and it is his friend Len, dead for four weeks, on the line!  Len says that death is nice--peaceful, with no pressure!  Len reveals that his car accident was no accident, that he committed suicide, and is glad he did!  I guess dead people have ways of knowing things, because he tells the narrator that his wife is cheating, his daughter is a junkie who hates him, and his boss is about to fire him.  Len suggests that, seeing how things are going, that the narrator also commit suicide, and the narrator takes his advice.   

In the last few lines of this story the narrator addresses the reader directly, suggesting that, seeing how things are going, we join him in death.

Acceptable.


**********

Maybe we should see these three stories as reflecting particular 1970s concerns about increases in crime rates and divorce rates.  Maybe this is something I should keep in mind when I read three more stories from Frights in the next exciting installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.   

Here's the second of the three installments of our study of the 1970 all-new SF anthology edited by William F. Nolan, The Future is Now.  I own the paperback edition offered to the public by Playboy Press in 1971 with its remarkably unattractive cover illustration, an assemblage by artist Don Baum photographed by Bill Arsenault.

"A Shape in Time" by Anthony Boucher

Go get 'em, John Carter!

In the intro to this two-page story Nolan lists Boucher's many accomplishments in all spheres of life.  Boucher died in 1968, but Nolan tells us that his widow found this story in his unpublished papers.

"A Shape in Time" is a convoluted and nonsensical and unfunny joke about a female secret agent who travels through time seducing men in order to prevent dysgenic marriages.  She has the ability to alter her body shape, and does so on assignments so that her figure will match the prevailing taste of whatever period she is working in.  The punchline of the story (I believe) is that while on a mission in 1880 she thought the large bustles worn by women of the time indicated that men desired women with huge hindquarters, a mistake which resulted in mission failure.

Lame.

I may think it is feeble, but "A Shape in Time" has been reprinted numerous times in several languages, including in Croatian in Sirius.

"Damechild" by Dennis Etchison

Back in 2015 I read Etchison's Hollywood-centric story "The Dog Park" and his quite effective "The Dead Line."  In his intro here Nolan talks a little about his first meeting with Etchison at a guest lecture Nolan gave at UCLA.

"Damechild" is a little opaque and overwritten, with long sentences full of details that somehow didn't paint clear pictures for me, but I think I have a grasp of its setting and plot.

Five thousand years ago the Earth was going down the tubes.  A transmission of some kind was received from the Horsehead Nebula, so, to preserve the species, the people of Earth constructed a space ship and stocked it with frozen eggs and sperm and launched it at the source of the friendly message.  After fifty centuries, as the ship finally approached the Horsehead Nebula, the vessel's machinery thawed some of the eggs and sperm and fertilized some eggs, producing a handful of people--they are the only conscious humans in all the universe!  Damechild, fertilized and birthed ten years before the others, was to be their leader, and spends the story acting like their mother, coaxing and nagging and cuddling them.

Damechild received a final message from the Horsehead people--due to a war and some kind of environmental catastrophe the Horsehead civilization was about to be wiped out and would not be able to shelter the human race.  So she redirected the ship to the next closest potential refuge, which is like 500,000 years' travel away.  Damechild doesn't tell the other thawed people of this disaster.  These others become addicted to sensory machines--"The sexual stimulator, the sleep stimulator, the visual stimulator, the auditory stimulator, the hunger-satiety stimulator"--and spend all their time huddled against a wall with electrodes attached to their heads.  Their minds degrade, so that they become lethargic and mentally ill ignoramuses.  At least one tries to commit suicide over the course of the story.

Etchison doesn't tell the story in strict chronological order, focusing first on the demented addicts and then telling us the jazz about Earth and the Horsehead civilization in flashbacks, with the sad final message from the aliens as a kind of climax.  Etchison tries to shock or sadden us with the suicide attempt and the bathetic message, but the characters are so flat and the style so foggy I was not moved.

   
Maybe this story would work for someone who is less cold-hearted than I am?  The plot isn't bad, it's the execution which isn't working for me--neither the emotional landscape of the people nor the physical landscape of the ship is sharp or interesting.  (Chad Oliver, whom I usually think is not very good, did a far better job of conjuring up human feeling and vivid images with his own disastrous-colony-ship-from-a-doomed-Earth story "The Wind Blows Free," which we read recently in another Nolan anthology.)   I'll rate "Damechild" barely acceptable.  "Damechild" was translated into German for a 1977 publication.

"Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe, Pip-Pop As You Go" by William F. Nolan

In the intro to his own story Nolan uses the lame gimmick of a conversation with himself, Nolan the writer pitching his "nutso" and "wild" story idea to Nolan the editor.  Ugh.

This story is pretty bad, a sort of surreal or psychedelic series of boring jokes following a sort of parody of a traditional SF plot.  It is the future (I think the 21st century) and everywhere you go robots and machines, including the furniture, talk to you and give you nagging medical and psychological advice.  Recreational sex is with a machine; sex with another person is a seldom-practiced religious rite whose purpose is procreation.  The world is run by an industry that sells (or just gives away?) drugs, and most people are addicted to the drugs.  Our hero is in the advertising department of the ruling drug company.  Nobody who actually works for the drug company actually uses the drugs--if you use them, you are thrown "outside."  Our hero is kidnapped by rebels and taken outside; at first he thinks the rebels are all drug addicts, but the opposite is the case--the rebels want to end the drug company's rule and they never get high.  They also believe in recreational sex between human beings.  Our hero enthusiastically joins the rebels.  The end.

A total waste of time.  A bad story that results from a sincere effort can be funny or interesting, but this story is lazy and frivolous; it is almost a show of contempt to the SF fans who spent money on this book.

Like "Jenny Among the Zeebs" and "Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!," "Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe, Pip-Pop As You Go" would be republished in both Alien Horizons and Wild Galaxy.  I guess somebody must like these stories if they keep getting reprinted.

"A War of Passion" by Tom Purdom

I don't think I've ever even heard of Purdom before.  He seems to have made his living as a kind of technical writer, but, over the decades since the late 1950s, produced quite a few SF stories.  In Nolan's intro here he lists Purdom's interests: "urban planning, arms control, wines, politics and the city of Philadelphia."  It sounds like a Temple University professor's dating profile.

"A War of Passion" is kind of ridiculous.  In the future, mankind has colonized many planets, and people can live for centuries via brain transplants, and can have their brains augmented, though brain augmentation leads to oversized skulls.  As people get along in years (like when they are 700 or so), most lose interest in sex, and even order bodies which lack sex glands so they can focus on other things.  Some people think the abandonment of sex is the abandonment of humanity, and so there is an espionage war between the sexless people known as "elders" and the "normals" who retain interest in sex.

Our hero Vostok is 1200 years old and working for the sex-loving normals.  He is on a mission, the object of which is to have sex with Makaze, a young (268 years old) woman who has lost interest in sex because the elders were using her to seduce normals and get them to have scandalous S&M sex with her.  (I think.)  All that violent painful sex has conditioned Makaze to fear sex.  Vostok is desperate to have sex with her because if he doesn't the normal leadership may wrongly suspect that he himself has lost interest in sex and is a spy for the elders--the normals would quickly move to eliminate such a spy.  Vostok's mission is particularly difficult because he has had seven brain augmentations and his head is grotesquely oversized, so Makaze finds him repulsive.

Anyway, there is an explicit sex scene which readers nowadays would likely consider rapey, a sex scene which is several pages long.  While he is having sex with Makaze, Vostok worries that the normals are about to launch an attack on him, and he must decide whether he should climb off Makaze and take control of his robotic defenses or keep banging away at her.

I guess this story is supposed to be funny, like Nolan's "Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe, Pip-Pop As You Go" a parody of all those SF stories (like van Vogt's) about secret organizations of geniuses fighting a twilight war behind the scenes or about revolutionaries fighting an oppressive state, but Purdom's prose is pretty deadpan.  I'm very reluctant to call "A War of Passion" good, but because it is so crazy and feels original I'm going to judge it acceptable.

"A War of Passion" would later appear in Sirius.     

**********

Ouch, four weak entries.   Well, we still have four stories to go.  Maybe The Future is Now can redeem itself?

Our last three blog posts were about SF stories which first appeared (in America, at least) in our most pretentious skin rag, Playboy.  I read them in The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, published in 1966 by Playboy Press.  In the comments to the first installment of this three part series, SF fans George, marzaat and I talked a little about Playboy Press's SF line; when I revealed that I own 1970's The Future is Now, edited by William F. Nolan, marzaat expressed dissatisfaction with the volume.  This piqued my interest, and I decided to read the book myself.  Marzaat actually has a review of The Future is Now, but I am going to hold off on reading it until I have read the book's twelve stories and recorded my own thoughts about them over three blog posts.  In the final post, I'll talk about to what extent marzaat and I agree or disagree about the stories.

The Future is Now is not an anthology of stories from Playboy, which is what I thought it was when I bought it.  Rather, it is a collection of all new stories edited by Nolan and published by Sherbourne Press in hardcover in 1970.  The paperback Playboy Press edition I have was put out in 1971 and has a strange and unattractive cover that reminds me of that famous recalled Beatles record sleeve and perhaps is suggesting the stories therein are about overpopulation.  In his intro Nolan talks a little about the history of all-new SF anthologies, and the decline of the SF magazines, suggesting that the future of short form SF lies in books such as The Future is Now and not in magazines.     

"The Ogress" by Robert F. Young

I recognize Young's name, but for some reason I've never read anything by him.  The intro to the story lists Young's influences and the various blue collar jobs he's held over his life.

"The Ogress" is one of those SF stories which explains the scientific facts behind an ancient legend.  (Just recently we read Ray Russell's story about the truth behind the story of the Fall of the Rebel Angels, and last year we got a scientific explanation from Edmond Hamilton for Norse mythology.)  You see, Grendel was real, a "superbeing" created by the collective mental energy of the superstitious local peasantry.  (Yahweh and Zeus, we are told, were also real for a time, until their creators became more sophisticated and ceased to believe in them.)  Unsophisticated people across the galaxy occasionally create such gods and monsters, giant-sized raiders who murder people and destroy property, and to deal with them the institution known as Galactic Guidance sends out expert hunters, the Beowulfs, who are armed with powerful firearms called Dammerungs.  The plot of "The Ogress" follows the hunt of one such superbeing, a female monster, by one such Beowulf.  Interspersed with the account of the hunt for the ogress are flashbacks to earlier hunts.

This is a decent adventure story.   

"Jenny Among the Zeebs" by "Frank Anmar"

I don't recognize Anmar's name, but I have read things by him, because this is a story by Nolan using a pseudonym.  Tricksy!  The title makes me worry it is going to be a dumb parody story.  I don't want to endure another piece of junk like "Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!"

Well, it is not quite a parody, but it is a dumb joke story that pokes fun at rock music and modern art and has the kind of attitude about sex that nowadays would be considered evidence of "rape culture."  The plot is like that of an off-color sitcom with wacky schemes that fail and mistaken identity hi-jinks.

Our narrator, Hoff, is the Earthling PR man for the Red Dogs, a Martian rock group.  (Martians, called "zeebs," can interbreed with Earth humans, but are physically different from us; most importantly for this story, they have four buttocks instead of two.  These are the kinds of jokes Nolan offers us.)  Hoff uses lots of slang, which is a little annoying.

Hoff has launched a PR stunt--one of the four Red Dogs will marry the Earth girl who writes the best application essay.  While this stunt is underway, an artist, a pretty Earth girl, serendipitously shows up and provides Hoff an opportunity for another stunt.  This artist, Jenny, specializes in making plaster casts of people's asses, and she wants to make casts of the Red Dogs' asses; Hoff has the idea of using the casts to produce chairs to sell to the Red Dogs' fans.  The Red Dogs are shy, and only agree to let Jenny make their casts in a darkened bedroom, one at a time.

The main plot of this unfunny and nonsensical story revolves around the fact that in the darkened room one or more people had sex with Jenny, a virgin before she met Hoff and the band, and is now pregnant, and Hoff has to figure out how to deal with this potentially troublesome situation.  It doesn't make any sense that Jenny doesn't know who had sex with her, because she called the bandmembers into the dark room one at a time, and Nolan further cheats us readers by leading us to believe that only the Red Dogs got casts of their asses made, and then later revealing that Hoff and the band's manager also had casts made.  Why would Jenny want casts of the asses of the band's PR guy and their manager? 

Bad.

"Jenny Among the Zeebs" would be republished in two collections of stories by Nolan, 1974's Alien Horizons and 2005's Wild Galaxy.  I see that these collections also include "Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!" under its alias "The Day the Gorf Took Over."  Tricksy!

"Earthcoming" by Richard C. Meredith

I got interested in Richard C. Meredith when Joachim Boaz wrote about his novel We All Died at Breakway Station but I couldn't lay hands on that novel and so instead read the first two of Meredith's three Timeliner books, At the Narrow Passage and No Brother, No Friend.  For some reason I never got to the third one, but tarbandu read all three.  Like Nolan, Meredith has an association with Playboy, Playboy Press having put out an edition of the Timeliner books.  Nolan here tells us interesting little tidbits about Meredith's academic, business and writing careers.

Back cover of my copy

Nolan lists Astounding among Meredith's influences, and "Earthcoming" does have an Astounding feel to it.  There is lots of hard SF talk about orbits and astronomical distances and the chemistry of space drives and so forth, and the story integrates the point of view of a hostile alien seeking to infiltrate the Earth, like what A. E. van Vogt does in the classic "Black Destroyer" (1939) and "Asylum" (1942), both Astounding cover stories.  (I read the original magazine version of "Asylum" today to refresh my memory of it, and was amazed to find a hotel named "Constantine's" figures prominently in it, while Meredith's "Earthcoming" features a planet called "Constantine!"  Coincidence?  Well, the evil aliens in "Asylum" are the "dreegh" and the good aliens the "lennel," while the evil aliens in "Earthcoming" are the "druul" and the good aliens the "luntinasel."  Both stories include cargo ships, van Vogt's captained by a Hanardy and Meredith's captained by a Haledon.  Lots of coincidences, or sign that this is an homage to our favorite Canadian?)

Earth, allied with some friendly aliens, is at war with evil parasitic aliens, the druul.  Meredith's story takes place on a cargo ship bringing valuable fuel from beyond the solar system to Earth for our war fleet.  Unfortunately for us, one of the crew members of the cargo vessel has had his body invaded and taken over by one of the druul, and, if this druul can get to Earth, it can release a hundred spores which will in turn take over a hundred more humans!  In less than a year all of Earth could be under the control of the druul and the human race kaput!  "Earthcoming" is written in the third-person, but our main character is the alien, and we learn all of his inner thoughts and various doubts as he struggles to accomplish his mission and deal with aspects of the personality of the man whose body and mind he has hijacked.  Most of the text, it feels like, is devoted to the technical issues of steering the ship, but Meredith also describes in gory detail the many injuries suffered by the characters.  The story ends when the druul, in the battered body of the human, crash lands on Earth.  As he has touched ground in an uninhabited arctic wasteland and his host body is incapacitated, I think we are supposed to understand that his spores can reach no hosts and thus Earth is safe.

This story is actually pretty good.

"Belles Lettres, 2272" by Norman Corwin

Corwin is a famous and important broadcaster and Hollywood screenwriter of whom I had never heard; it seems he did a lot of work with government entities and the United Nations creating radio programs designed to "build world unity" and that kind of thing.  In the early 1980s he published a best-selling book attacking American culture.

"Belles Lettres, 2272" is a lame joke story.  I feel that Corwin is one of those men who was a giant in his day but will be quickly forgotten, in part because much of his work is in an obsolete medium, so it is perhaps appropriate that much of the humor of this story derives from the idea that people in the future won't remember much about the major figures or artistic productions of our time.  The form of the story is that of a letter written from one computer to another which includes extensive quotes from a third computer (a poem by said computer) and a fourth computer (an analysis of the poem.)  The story includes lots of pictographs or logograms that, I guess, we are to believe are commonly used in the written communication of the 23rd century:


The punchline of the story is the letter writer's complaint about obscurantism.

Only four pages, but still a waste of time.

**********

Well, we've got two duds so far, but also two decent traditional SF adventures full of sinister creatures, high technology and bloodshed.  We'll continue our look at The Future is Now in our next episode!

In some of the introductory matter in A Sea of Stars, which I was looking over this recent weekend, editor William F. Nolan talks about how Ray Russell brought SF into Playboy.  So now seems an appropriate time to check out some SF from the world famous men's magazine via my copy of 1966's The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy.  I own the 1968 paperback edition, which is a little over 400 pages.

The Preface and editorial duties for The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy are credited to "the editors of Playboy," but according to isfdb it was Ray Russell who was responsible for putting the book together.  In the Preface Russell brags that Playboy changed the SF landscape by being the first "slick" to consistently publish SF, and because Playboy paid much higher rates than the genre magazines.  Russell really sticks it to the SF magazines, claiming they were too "solemn" and "sober" to publish light-hearted stories like "Blood Brother" by Charles Beaumont and too obsessed with realistic science to publish Ray Bradbury's "The Vacation."

Today we'll take a look at four stories from this anthology, two each from Charles Beaumont and Arthur C. Clarke.

"Blood Brother" by Charles Beaumont (1961)

Ugh, a five-page joke story about a vampire who goes to the psychiatrist.  And these are the kind of jokes we get:

"I've been meaning to ask you about that.  Why do you wear it?"

"You ever hear of a vampire without a cape?  It's part of the whole schmear, that's all.  I don't know why!"

It's barely a joke at all!  This dud is followed by complaints about the high price of coffins and replacing white shirts (the blood stains, you know) and then the twist ending in which the head shrinker kills the vampire with a wooden letter opener and then reveals that he too is a vampire.

Back in 2014 when I read Ramsey Campbell's "Sunshine Club" and Michael Bishop's "Gravid Babies" I issued my jeremiad against vampire psychiatrist and werewolf psychiatrist stories, horror joke stories in general, and humor based on references to pop culture.  My aversion to these excrescences has not eased in the years that have passed!  You know how the government compels Breyers to label those of its products that lack a certain amount of milk fat "Frozen Dairy Dessert" instead of "Ice Cream" so picky consumers can avoid them?  Well, I am slapping the "Tepid Derivative Genre Fiction" label on "Blood Brother" so picky readers can avoid it!

Bad!

"The Crooked Man" by Charles Beaumont (1955)

Russell writes a little intro to each story, and in the intro to this one brags that the (unnamed) top men's magazine before the arrival of Playboy refused to publish "The Crooked Man," but Playboy eagerly presented it to the world.

It is the 27th Century.  There are no families and no private homes...and everybody is born in a test tube and lives in a dorm...and everybody is a homosexual!  Well, almost everybody.  The tiny number of heterosexuals are pursued by the police, and if caught given surgery to alter their hormonal balances and brain functions so they cease feeling all those unnatural urges regarding the opposite sex!

This is a switcheroo story, centered on an idea meant to shock you or force you to think in a different way, though Beaumont does try to generate some human drama with a plot-based narrative and lots of verbiage about how scared and confused the main characters are.  The entire story takes place in a bar where men are all hitting on each other and hooking up--or rejecting men's advances, as is the case with our protagonist, Jesse, a straight man who has to pretend to be gay.  Jesse is at the bar to meet his girlfriend, Mina--sounds ridiculous, but there is so much surveillance in this oppressive society that there is no place else to meet.  "There were no more parks, no country lanes.  There was no place to hide at all...."  Mina comes in disguised as a man, a disguise that is not very convincing.  By the tenth of the story's eleven pages Jesse and Mina are on their way to having their heterosexual brains repaired.

"The Crooked Man" is the kind of story which was perhaps a big deal at the time it was written, but is now an historical artifact that feels gimmicky.  Just acceptable. 

"I Remember Babylon" by Arthur C. Clarke (1960)

"I Remember Babylon" begins like a memoir, with Clarke reminding us how he came up with the idea for the geostationary communications satellite in 1945.  (A few pages later he plugs his 1951 book The Exploration of Space and his undersea films.)  Clarke then describes his encounter with a man at an official reception at the Soviet Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka (Clarke moved to Sri Lanka in 1956 and spent the remainder of his life there.)  This guy, a failed US TV exec, is now in the employ of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China!  The commies are planning to put a TV satellite over the Pacific and transmit programming to Americans--they'll get American eyeballs by broadcasting pornography (using the Kinsey reports as market research!) and then slip in some propaganda material!  (As an example of the high-brow stuff that will protect the spaceborne network from moral opprobrium, the renegade broadcaster shows Clarke an expertly made film of the 13th-century erotic sculptures on the Konark Sun Temple.)

And that's it; this is more of an idea than a plot-driven story.  Even though it is over fifty years old, some of the issues "I Remember Babylon" raises--the pervasiveness and effect on people of pornography and how much influence biased media and inaccurate reporting, particularly those generated by foreign entities, has on the political beliefs and activities of Americans--are at the center of public debate today.  Smoothly written, brief, and thought-provoking, I thought this one worth my time.

"Dial 'F' For Frankenstein" by Arthur C. Clarke (1965)

Like "I Remember Babylon," "Dial 'F' For Frankenstein" is more about playing with a provocative idea than telling a story.  A bunch of engineers sit around and talk about the strange events that have been taking place since the new communications-satellite-based worldwide telephone network was switched on at midnight.  It seems that connecting enough computers and electronic devices together has generated a consciousness, and this artificial intelligence, like a newborn baby, is clumsily exploring its surroundings.  American guided missiles have been launched, traffic is snarled because of the erratic behavior of traffic lights, banks and factories have had to suspend operations because machinery and electronics records are going haywire.  Mankind is at the mercy of an amoral child it has unwittingly birthed!

This one feels like a trifle.

**********

Tossing the inimical "Blood Brother" aside, we see that the three other stories from Playboy we've looked at are more about showcasing ideas than portraying human drama or drawing compelling characters.  And so they feel pretty bland. Well, we'll sample some more of the offerings from The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy in our next installment; maybe they will provide some excitement.