I avoid the work college professor Philip Klass' published under the name William Tenn because my impression is that he writes satires and my interest in satire has reached a pretty low ebb.  (I elaborate on my attitude towards humor in fiction at the two links that follow.)  Now, it is true that in 2018 I read Tenn's "Project Hush" and had to admit it was pretty good.  However, in 2024 I read Tenn's "Null-P" and it confirmed all my fears about the man's fiction.  That means that today's Tenn story, the third I will have ever read, is a kind of tie-breaker and will likely determine whether or not you ever see Tenn's name here at MPorcius Fictin Log in the future.

"Eastward Ho!" debuted in an anniversary issue of F&SF and has since been reprinted a billion times, in multiple "The Best from F&SF" volumes, in several Tenn collections, and in a stack of anthologies that includes volumes edited by Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg, Martin H. Greenberg (one printing of which reuses a Games Workshop image of Mad-Max/Car Wars-style automobiles) among others.  In "Eastward Ho!" we have a story welcomed and monumentalized by the professional SF community.  I am going to read "Eastward Ho!" in my copy of the Silverberg anthology, Alpha 4, which served up the story to SF readers yet again in 1973 after they had already have a chance to experience it in one of the F&SF "Best Froms," three editions of the Aldiss, and one of the Tenn collections.        

You know those switcheroo stories in which a German U-boat captain finds himself in hell aboard a merchant vessel as it gets torpedoed, or a guy who kills a spider finds himself in a giant spider web, or Wilma goes down to the quarry to operate a dinosaur while Fred dons an apron and does the housework?  Well, here we go again.  In "Eastward Ho!" it is the post-nuclear war future, and Native Americans have better technology than white people (oil lamps and firearms!) and push white people around.

Our protagonist is an ambassador from the impoverished United States of America, which has been reduced in scope by Indian expansion to New England, New York and New Jersey; he is on a mission to the Garden State to negotiate with the Seminole, but upon arrival finds that the Sioux have taken over the area.  The various Indian tribes are seizing land inhabited by the technologically inferior white people at the same time they are aggressively competing with each other, you know, just like the Spanish and British and French fought each other while conquering the New World.  As the story ends it becomes clear that the United States is going to be entirely extinguished very soon by one or multiple Native American empires--our protagonist is probably the highest-ranking official of the US government still alive and not in captivity.  So he takes command of the last vestiges of the US defense apparatus--three ships--and the last free white people in America sail off to colonize Europe; it is funny because in real life white people left Europe to colonize America, and, in the story, white people leave America to colonize Europe!  Get it?  It is the opposite!  Hilarious!

"Eastward Ho!" is a total waste of time.  There is no real plot and very little by way of character, and we can't accept this story as a serious speculation about the future, like we might a story about communists or China conquering the United States.  The backbone and the meat of the story consists entirely in the  switcheroo jokes.  (By the way, if you think the switcheroo technique is a brilliant one, as Robert Silverberg apparently does, you call it "an inversion," as SilverBob does in his intro to "Eastward Ho!" here in Alpha 4.)  Additional switcheroo, er, inverted, elements I haven't already covered include how, while in real life Native Americans are vulnerable to alcoholism, in this story it is white people who can't handle booze--our protagonist's deputy is humiliated by Sioux who give him a bottle of tequila.  The Sioux leaders also say stereotypical stuff that white people in authority might say at the time the story was written, variations on "you are a credit to your race" and "he is a hotheaded young man" and "I judge people as individuals" and so forth.

As for the purpose of the story, I guess it offers self-hating whites an opportunity to do penance in an effort to assuage their liberal guilt, and perhaps enjoyment to lefties of whatever ethnic or racial background who love to see white people humiliated.  Besides the humiliations I have already mentioned, there's a black person in the story who is smarter and more decent than the white characters and condescends to help them, and a white woman who prefers sex with Indians over white men but is kicked to the curb by the Sioux after enjoying her body and consigned to a dreadful life among palefaces.

(If memory serves, Clifford Simak wrote stories in which nuclear war or some other Caucasian misbehavior left Indians (and robots and animals) in charge of the world, but Simak's stories were heartfelt and sincere, not absurdist jokes, so had more value than this junk.  There's also Michael Moorcock's Oswald Bastable novels in which Chinese people or Africans defeat Europeans and Americans, Warlord of the Air and The Land Leviathan, which similarly serve as leftist revenge fantasies but are also serviceable adventure stories.)

"Far From Home" by Walter Tevis

Not long ago we read three disappointing stories from the December 1958 issue of F&SF.  Well, Walter Tevis had a story in that issue that caught Judith Merril's eye, so let's take a stab at it.  I don't think I have read anything before by Tevis, a successful author several of whose works, both mainstream and SF, were adapted for the silver screen and the idiot box.

"Far From Home" is a well-written trifle, just three pages.  I guess we can recommend it.  Maybe it is meant to illustrate the contrast between youth and old age, and perhaps we should see it as an expression of distaste for life in the American interior away from the coasts.

An old guy who works as a janitor at a public pool in some Arizona town comes to work in the morning to discover a huge blue whale in the pool.  There's a lot about how this guy acts the way he does because he is old, and also some stuff about how he is reminded of the excitement he enjoyed as a child when he saw the ocean while on a trip to San Francisco.  

Hanging around the pool is a little boy with a paper bag.  After being humiliated by the whale, which splashes water on him, the janitor runs for help from the town government, and then it is revealed that the boy has a wee little leprechaun in his bag--the appearance of the whale must be one of his three wishes.  When the janitor returns the whale and the boy are gone and I guess we are expected to believe the boy has left the desert for some more salubrious locale, it having been implied that life in Arizona is not good.

I have to admit the revelation that a leprechaun and magical wishes explained the surreal circumstances encountered by the janitor was a little disappointing--I expected there to be no explanation, or for the explanation to be less prosaic.  Still, Tevis succeeds in producing a sort of sense of wonder as well as recognizable portraits of people stuck in a boring place who have either memories or hopes of life in a more interesting, more vibrant, place.

"Far From Home" has been reprinted many times in anthologies and Tevis collections, and is even the title story of one such collection.

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Sometimes Merril on her Honorable Mentions list recommends stories that received little notice and have been all but forgotten, or stories that lie on the periphery of the porous SF envelope.  But today's three stories not only represent Merril's own taste but a consensus among the professional SF class.  And we don't have to wonder why Merril and her fellow anthologists liked them; the Sturgeon and Tevis stories are skillfully written and full of real human psychology and real human feeling, while the Tenn is outlandish fan service for pinkos, an influential demographic among SF professionals as they are seemingly everywhere.

Next time, science fiction from 1980, the year your humble blogger turned 11 years of age.  

Bobby's father remarried a woman with what sounds like a good body but a bad attitude, Gwen.  Dad sounds awesome, making Bobby toys out of pipe cleaners and forgiving Bobby when the kid accidentally breaks a window and that sort of thing, but Gwen is resentful of Bobby and treats him cruelly.  As the story begins, Dad is away and Gwen, ostensibly as punishment for that whole window caper, confines Bobby to his room and takes away his toys.  Bobby has a vivid imagination and loves to do that shadow puppet thing where you make a bird or whatever appear in the light on the wall from the sun or a lamp.  Bobby, in fact, has concocted in his mind a whole dream world behind the wall upon which the sunbeams lands, and sometimes wishes he could go there to escape Gwen.  Most of the creatures that appear on the wall are the product of Bobby's nimble fingers, but there is one vague and dim shadow that seems to have a life of its own.

Gwen keeps abusing Bobby psychologically, and she gets her comeuppance when Bobby innocently energizes that mysterious shadow and it pulls Gwen into the shadow world behind the wall forever.

I can moderately recommend "Shadow, Shadow on the Wall."  It is well-written, even if the plot is kind of obvious, and there is some uncomfortable sexual tension with all the talk of Gwen's narrow waist and broad shoulders and wide hips and how she searches Bobby's body for concealed toys that adds a layer of emotion and interest.

"Twink" (1955)

It looks like "Twink," which debuted in Galaxy, has only ever been reprinted in Sturgeon collections.  Still, I have hopes it will provide us the opportunity to put up a 100% "good" blog post!

We have here a dense story with quite a lot going on, much of it unsubtle and sort of over the top, with people yelling and weeping and gesticulating wildly, some of it allusive and a little mysterious, Sturgeon hinting at things and expecting us to get the hints, leading us to believe things and then making us question those beliefs.  The main theme of "Twink" is human isolation, alienation, which is cast into relief by the depiction of a uniquely close human connection.

Our narrator works in an office building for a charitable guy who goes out of his way to hire misfits who have trouble fitting in and finding work, like a guy crippled in some war in Asia (the story takes place in the high tech future of 1973 and presumably this is a war defending Taiwan against the Chines Communist Party), an ex-con, and a black person.  Our narrator, we eventually learn, is a misfit because he is (moderately) famous for having psychic powers, and before he got this position he had trouble keeping a job because his colleagues felt uncomfortable around him, fearing he could read their minds.  As well as startling revelations, "Twink" is a story that is full of paradoxes and ironies.  For example, the narrator resents his boss for his charity, I guess because by hiring people because they are disabled or otherwise different, he is reducing their identities to their disabilities or distinctiveness, making it impossible for them to overcome or put aside their differences from others and build an identity independent of those differences.  Or something like that.  Another irony is that the narrator can't really read minds, he is just uniquely good at those Rhine card tests, scoring the best on the tests of anyone in history, and so people's fears he can read their minds, the fears that made our hero unemployable, are spurious.

The narrator has a little girl, Twink, with his wife, Doris.  Twink is in terrible shape because the narrator is a reckless driver and got in a crash while Doris and Twink were with him in the car; Twink is in a coma and has suffered all manner of injury so that it seems likely she will remain a "basket-case" who can't see or hear or walk.  Much of the story's word count is devoted to examining the narrator's psychology, how he feels all alone because he has this problem that almost no other person can identify with, how he isn't sure if he wants Twink to live as a "basket-case" or to die, whether his desire that Twink die is based on sympathy for Twink or guilt and selfishness.  There's a sidelight that offers an illuminating contrast to the narrator's feelings about Twink--while Twink's case is not very famous, another sick little kid's case is front page news; that boy has cancer and is doomed, and the narrator envies the certainty of that kid's fate, but is glad Twink hasn't received the publicity the little boy has.

We were told that the narrator can't read minds, but it turns out that since the car wreck the narrator can communicate telepathically with the stricken Twink.  One of the confusing mysteries of the story is how Sturgeon indicates that this telepathic link began as a result of the car wreck, but then offers reasons for us to believe this link has existed longer, even since she was still in the womb.    

The first half or so of the story follows the narrator as he leaves work early to go attend the surgery that may or may not fix all of Twink's innumerable problems.  The second half of the story is about how the world expert on psychic powers is on hand and insists in no uncertain terms that the narrator support the delicate surgery on his daughter by communicating with Twink during the risky procedures--I guess the idea is that for the surgery to succeed, little Twink must maintain her will to live, and the narrator can make sure that will endures despite the pain of the operation by continually telling his daughter telepathically that he loves her and that even if what the doctors are doing is painful it is to help her.  The operation is a success and Twink will live a normal life, though doubt is cast upon whether the narrator's telepathic link was essential to that success or not--was the parapsychologist just running an experiment on Twink and her father?

Then comes the big bombshell.  At first I thought the last page or so of the story included flashback scenes to the day Twink was born, but then I realized that Sturgeon had tricked me--Twink was born today during the same procedure that repaired her injuries!  I thought Twink was a little child during the car wreck that triggered the psychic connection between father and daughter, but she was in fact still in her pregnant mother's belly.     

As the story ends it is brought home to us that, ironically, the man who felt like an isolated and alienated misfit at the start of the story will enjoy a less isolated life than any man in history, as he will be in constant telepathic communication with his daughter, sharing all her emotions and experiences.  His wife Doris cries from jealousy, as she won't be able to share this intimacy with her husband and daughter.     

I am willing to say "Twink" is good even though it feels a little confusing and tricky.  The story is ambitious, for one thing, and Ted, an emotional guy who always speaks his mind, writes with  conviction.  The style is good, and all the characters behave in believable ways, if loudly and extravagantly.  The trick ending took me by surprise, but when I reread the story it seemed that Sturgeon was playing fair, so I only have myself to blame for falling into the trap.  For today's readers, what with the politics around abortion and euthanasia throughout my own 54-year lifetime, it is also interesting how Sturgeon presents Twink, who is in the womb and in a coma throughout almost the entire story, as a full human being and a locus of life-changing love and not some clump of cells that should be treated by the able-bodied as nothing more than an obstacle to be casually brushed aside.  There is also the implicit criticism of what after 1961 we would call affirmative action programs.  And women may find it annoying that a story about a powerful connection between a parent and child chooses to depict a daughter who is closer to her father than to her mother and even show Mom envying that connection.  "Twink" is a challenging story on multiple levels.  

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Alright, three good stories, happy day.  "Shadow, Shadow on the Wall" is a well-done conventional horror story/wish fulfillment fantasy that is easy to understand and the least of today's stories, though certainly better than hundreds of stories we have read over the long busy years of this blog's life.  "Twink" is challenging and ambitious, a little harder to digest and full of surprise and big emotions and big statements.  The best of the three, in my opinion at least, is "Bright Segment," as unusual as "Twink" but easier to grasp, a smoothly functioning and compelling piece of work.

Next time we meet, three stories from the recent past--the 1980s!  Cross your fingers in hopes we get another blog post about three genuinely good stories!

I'll note first that, while I made a big production out of telling you I am reading this in my flesh and blood paperback and not in a PDF scan of a magazine, "Ghost of a Chance" here in Ballantine #119 suffers from numerous printing errors, including lines printed out of order, rendering a conversation hard to comprehend, so I did end up looking at a scan of Unknown online.

"Ghost of a Chance" is sort of a slight joke story, but the main gag is OK and the minor jokes sprinkled throughout are tolerable and Sturgeon's writing style is quite good and carries you pleasantly from start to finish.  The characters, though they act extravagantly, are likable and you can identify with their all-too-human desires and emotions.  Sturgeon's big theme throughout his body of work is the power of love, and this story demonstrates various species of love, including the brotherly love of men who are friends and try to help each other, in a way that I found affecting.  So, "Ghost of a Chance" adds up to an entertaining piece I can comfortably recommend.

The plot.  A working-class guy, Gus, encounters a pale girl with white hair who behaves strangely.  He falls for her, but she avoids him because she is haunted by a jealous ghost who ruins the lives of every man who gets close to her.  Sturgeon describes many different ways a ghost can torment a living man, some of them slapstick humor, others closer to real horror stuff.  Things get pretty over the top, with the girl threatening to kill herself if Gus won't leave her alone and Gus becoming a homeless drunk in response.  Throughout the story, Gus seeks aid from various sources, including an advice columnist and a friend of his, a head shrinker.  Eventually Gus adds up the various pieces of advice he accumulates and solves the problem--the girl, pale and with white hair, looks like a ghost and so a ghost has a crush on her; the solution is to get the girl a dye job so she is a brunette.

"Prodigy" (1949)

This one first saw print in a pseudonym-heavy issue of Campbell's Astounding alongside stories by L. Ron Hubbard (as by Rene Lafayette) and by John Christopher (as by Christopher Youd) and a portion of a serial by Jack Williamson (as by Will Stewart.) Besides the many printings of Caviar, "Prodigy" has been reprinted in several foreign language Sturgeon collections and volume V of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.

It is the post-apocalyptic eugenic future.  Centuries ago an atomic war damaged the human gene pool, and the government took up the job of sorting and educating all the newly born children.  Every child is interned in the government creche and carefully examined over a series of years, the mutants and other irregulars identified and euthanized.  The normal kids are subjected to government propaganda that justifies the destruction of the freaks; Sturgeon comes up with nursery rhymes to demonstrate this.  

So it went for like 200 years.  Recently there have been reforms.  Now, mutants and other irregulars are separated and carefully studied with the idea that maybe some of them have useful traits that will breed true and improve the genetic stock of the human race--the government is trying to breed homo superior!  It also seems that parents now have to give permission for their kids to be euthanized.

Our characters are one of the women who work in the creche, Mayb, and an irregular child, Andi, who is currently under observation as a possible superior specimen.  Four-year-old Andi is a real pain in the neck, aware of his specialness and always making demands, demands he can back up with his psychic powers.  He escapes and returns to his mother.  Mom initially protects Andi, but soon brings him back to the creche to be destroyed because his demands and his use of his powers is intolerable.  

The twist ending is that the real special thing about Andi is that he is a one-way telepath in a world where almost everybody is a two-way telepath; Andi can transmit psychic messages but not receive them, and I guess because he can't "hear" his own telepathic projections or those of others he doesn't know how to modulate his transmissions, to make them safe and comfortable for others, and so is always doing the telepathic equivalent of screaming or shouting, constantly disturbing everybody around him.

I can moderately recommend this one, as the story is well-written and well-structured.  The twist ending, that Andi is the only person who can't receive psychic messages, is a little questionable, however, as Sturgeon tricks you into thinking Mayb and others are not telepaths.  For example, Mayb's boss calls her on the "annunciator," which I guess is like an intercom, and Mayb calls up Andi's mother on the videophone--if all these jokers can communicate telepathically, why do they need telephones and intercoms?  Maybe because telepathy has limited range?  But the boss, Mayb and Andi are all in the same building, and the boss and Mayb can both sense Andi's psychic screams, but these two adults still use the intercom to talk to each other.  Personally, the fact that mom is eager to kill Andi after spending time with him is enough of a twist for me; the one-way telepath thing feels a little clunky and superfluous.           

"Blabbermouth" (1947)  

"Blabbermouth" is listed as a 1945 story at isfdb but I think they are just reproducing a typo that appears on the publication page of the 1977 printing of Caviar, as my 1955 book has a copyright date of 1946 for "Blabbermouth" and the story debuted in Amazing in 1947.  Amazing printed "Blabbermouth" a second time in 1967 alongside Jack Vance's "The Man from Zodiac,"  and like "Ghost of a Chance," you can find "Blabbermouth" in the third volume of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.

This one feels slow and long, the central gimmick is kind of goofy and the plot does not operate smoothly.  The jocular style, though (like the plot) similar to that in "Ghost of a Chance," doesn't land as well, at least not to me, partly because there is a lot of talk about living in poverty, suicide, and murder that I think we are supposed to take seriously.  "Blabbermouth" is the weakest story of the day, which I guess tracks with the fact that Amazing has a lower reputation than Unknown and Astounding.

Our narrator is a real Mr. Charisma, Eddie the radio DJ (though they call them M. C.s back then, for "master of ceremonies") who gets lots of chicks and has tons of friends.  As part of publicity for his show, he participates energetically in the city's nightlife, yakking it up with fun fashionable people who become his regular correspondents; they call in (or telegram in, in this time period) with song requests and little comments, bringing material, a sense of community, and interactivity to Eddie's show.

As "Blabbermouth" begins our narrator bumps into a beautiful woman as he tries to grab a cab.  She is the best-looking girl he has ever seen!  She looks a little familiar...it is a woman he had one date with back in college, Maria, and she looks better now than she did then.  Eddie pursues her; she is cold at first, thinking they wouldn't be good for each other, but eventually Maria succumbs--after Eddie threatens to jump out a skyscraper window--and they get married.

As the story proceeds, various events occur that provide clues as to why Maria was reluctant to marry Eddie even though our narrator is a charming hunk.  Early in the story we learned that, after college, she made a serious study of the occult, including spending an extended period alone on a mountain top mediating and experimenting, and it seems to us readers that now she can read minds.  Also, it appears that Maria is a compulsive gossip, and when Eddie's back is turned she can't help but, for example, tell women what their husbands are up to when it comes to their extramarital affairs and business deals and all that kind of stuff they are keeping from the little woman.  Soon Maria is ruining all of our narrator's many friendships by spreading everybody's secrets around, jeopardizing his popularity and thus his ratings and thus his career!

Confronted by our narrator, Maria explains to him exactly what is going on, and it is even more contrived and silly than we readers have suspected.  You see, your guilt and suspicion and other negative emotions, kept bottled up inside, create a poltergeist.  Maria is susceptible to being possessed by such poltergeists.  These poltergeists yearn to be free, or something, and so when they take over Maria they compel her to voice--to their objects--the secret hatreds and misdeeds of those around her.  This is not very interesting or very convincing (and it gets worse.)

Maria stops leaving the apartment, so she never is taken over by poltergeists, and things regarding Eddie's friendships and career settle down.  But then, months into their marriage, Eddie's radio station is up for sale to a national network--if the network takes over the station it will mean a 20% raise for Eddie!  But to cement the deal, Eddie has to bring Maria to an important dinner party with the network execs!  At the party, Maria can't help but tell people secret and unwelcome facts about the network's business plans and who is sleeping with who's wife, and a fight breaks out and somebody gets killed.  

Eddie's career in radio is over, and our couple falls into poverty.  Maria tries to commit suicide by turning on the gas but is revived in a nick of time.  Then Eddie has a brain wave and the story becomes even more contrived and even harder to credit.  Eddie theorizes that if Maria doesn't actually tell people the secrets she learns about them, but just writes the secrets down on a piece of paper and then hides the piece of paper so nobody mentioned on it can see it, this will free the poltergeists without breaking up people's relationships.  It works!  Eddie becomes a gossip columnist--he and Maria go out to dinner at night clubs and so forth, hobnobbing with important people, Maria learns all kinds of secrets and writes them down while sitting at the table, and then Eddie works them into a regular newspaper column; Eddie and Maria get rich.

Barely tolerable--the poltergeist "rules" make no sense, and people's relationships make no sense--Eddie has all these friends, then they drop him, then they pick him up again, then they drop him again, then they pick him up again, and nobody puts two and two together when their secrets are revealed in the media after they had dinner with Eddie's wife who the entire dinner is scribbling stuff down in a notebook?    

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It is always sad when the final story covered in a blog post is the worst and the first is the best.  Also sad is the fact that the act of reading this seventy-year-old book has led to its spine breaking and half the pages falling out.  Oh, well.

There are three more stories in Caviar I haven't read yet, and maybe we'll tackle them soon.  But first, three stories published about 20 years after today's subjects.

In the 1970s Ballantine sought to sell Caviar with sex appeal, while our British friends sold it as a horror collection

Let's read four more stories from My Best Science Fiction Story, those from titan of crime fiction Fredric Brown (I fear it is a joke story, but let's soldier on regardless), reliable pro Murray Leinster, the often disappointing Frank Belknap Long, and Grand Master Theodore Sturgeon.

"Nothing Sirius" by Fredric Brown (1944)

The most recent things we have read by Fredric Brown include a short story that I interpreted as a "satire" that suggests "modern life, the era of the radio and the motor car, is driving us crazy" and that I reported "unleashes a lot of speculative economics on us," a novel I called a "page-turner" but which I lamented included lots of "Psych 101 goop" and "pop psychology," and a World War II-era detective yarn in which an Axis agent disguises a baby as a monkey.  Let's see what wild stuff Brown has in store for readers in a story he was, apparently, quite proud of--as the title indicates, the stories in My Best Science Fiction Story were selected by the authors themselves.  "Nothing Sirius" debuted in Captain Future magazine, alongside the 17th Captain Future adventure, this one penned by William Morrison, and has been reprinted in many Brown collections.  I am reading it in the scan of 1977's Best of Fredric Brown at the internet archive.

Oy, "Nothing Sirius" is a yawn-inducing humor piece full of boring and obvious jokes that as you are trudging through it feels like it will never end.  Thumbs down!

Our narrator is a middle-aged married man; he and the wife are small business people.  They fly from planet to planet, setting up a tent full of coin-operated entertainment devices at each stop and then moving on.  In the space ship with them is their sexy daughter Ellen and the pilot of their ship, Johnny.  Johnny graduated from the space academy just two years ago, and one of the foundational jokes of the story is that Johnny is serious to a fault, a rule-follower who has no social skills and won't let his hair down to drink, smoke or chew the fat with the narrator and doesn't notice that Ellen has a crush on him.

One day the Johnny unexpectedly spots a new planet, and the narrator decides they should explore it on foot.  They come upon disconcerting evidence that Earth people have already been there.  They meet an old friend who tells them this planet has been kept a secret by the film production company that is renting it.  They also meet a beautiful movie star with whom Johnny falls in love at first sight, upsetting poor Ellen.  But then the narrator realizes that everything seems wrong, and proves that all the people and buildings on the planet, including their old pal and the actress, are just illusions, making them vanish.

The natives of the planet, people almost identical to little cockroaches, admit what is going on.  Like so many of the aliens in these old stories, they can read human minds, and they have been projecting those illusions, basing them on the memories of the narrator and his companions.  The bug people assert that their civilization and human civilization are totally incompatible--humans are concerned with material things, while the insect people are concerned with thought.  This planet has no mineral wealth and the soil is not fit for agriculture, so there is no reason for humans to ever come here.  

The four humans return to the ship.  Johnny has been shaken up by the experience of falling in love with an illusion projected by a telepathic bug, and for the first time in his life gets drunk.  This triggers or presages a welcome evolution of his personality--he becomes less stiff and serious and it is not long before he and Ellen are engaged.  

Though celebrated, "Nothing Serious" is totally lame filler with no drama or excitement.  All the SF stuff and all the jokes are banal.  Sad!

"The Lost Race" by Murray Leinster (1949)

Almost ten years ago we read an Edmond Hamilton story about an insane French botanist who wanted to reduce the speed of his life down to one-percent normal, "Alien Earth."  Five years ago we read a story by Leigh Brackett about a ruthless trapper who finds an anti-grav device factory in an abandoned Martian city, "Quest of the Starhope."  Three years ago we read a Ray Bradbury story attacking American culture and suggesting women manipulate men with their tears*, "The Concrete Mixer."   All three of these stories debuted in the same issue of Sam Merwin's Thrilling Wonder Stories, and today we (virtually) open the ish up again to read a fourth story offered therein, Murray Leinster's "The Lost Race."

*Like Charles Schulz, Ray Bradbury is a wholesome American institution whose brilliant work has broad appeal but which attentive readers may find surprisingly misogynistic.   

"The Lost Race" hasn't been reprinted much (though if you read German you can catch it in a 1966 issue of Utopia, and if Croatian is more your speed an issue of Sirius from 1985 has you covered), but it was one of the dozen stories that was included in the paperback version of My Best Science Fiction Story, so I can read Leinster's intro to it in the scan of that paperback at the internet archive.  Leinster talks about why he is particularly proud of the story and spoils all the main themes, telling us "The Lost Race" deals with the issue of the value of rocket fuel on the market, and that high value might impede the development of space travel, with psychic powers, and with how spacers will have to deal with the problem of boredom.

The first page of "The Lost Race" is more like a soap opera than a space opera.  Spaceman Jimmy Briggs is engaged to Sally; to amass enough money to marry her, he has signed up on a year-long space voyage.  The crew of the vessel is made up of eight men.  One of them is Danton, who is pathologically jealous about his wife Jane, who is Sally's best friend.  Another is Ken Howell.  Howell was engaged to Jane, but then while he was away on a voyage, Danton married Jane.  According to Sally, Danton employed some underhanded methods to achieve this feat.  Both Jimmy and Ken regret signing up for a voyage with the difficult Danton.

Mankind has explored and colonized many planets, and many more have been charted but await examination.  So commercial ships like the one Jimmy, Ken and Danton are aboard are obliged to make little stops along the way to investigate planets that might be viable for colonization.  On scores of planets, human explorers have discovered the remains of a highly sophisticated star-faring civilization.  This "Lost Race" raised hundreds of magnificent cities, but all have been thoroughly destroyed, apparently deliberately, as if the entire culture, a space empire spanning hundreds of light years, had committed suicide.  Many space men have seen these ruins, and many of them, as a little hobby, theorize as to why the Lost Race destroyed itself.  Ken Howell's theory is that the members of the lost race were able to see into the future and saw something so horrible they would rather die than live through it--he suggests that if Earth's people had foreseen the horrors of the, now long past, Third World War, they also might have opted to commit suicide rather than suffer through that tragedy.

Ken and Jimmy make an unprecedented find--a Lost Race installation that miraculously escaped destruction (it seems it was sheltered by a hill from the blast that flattened the nearby city.)  Their discovery is an amphitheater with a seat at one end--when Jimmy sits there, a holographic projection fills the amphitheater--the moving image is of Sally back on Earth, thinking longingly of Jimmy!  Jimmy figures that the amphitheater is a kind of televising remote viewer, and shows the places and people you are thinking about in real time.  

All the crewmen use the amphitheater and see images of their people back home living happily--this is a relief, as under ordinary circumstances the spacers would have no news from home for a year, their ship moving much faster than light.  Danton is an exception, however--he sees Jane cheating on him!  Danton goes berserk, and there is a whole drama involving ray pistol fire, stolen fuel, and hijacked life boats as Danton pursues a scheme of stranding the ship here and escaping on his own to get revenge on Jane and her lover.  Ken Howell foils the plot by diagnosing Danton's psychology.  Howell is one canny figure; he also realizes the Lost Race's projection device is not a real-time televiewer but simply projects images of a person's thoughts and expectations--Danton only saw Jane cheating because of his own paranoia.  Even more astoundingly, Howell solves the mystery of the Lost Race after finding some bones--the Lost Race were a people who had tails and other particular features, but their use of atomic energy was mutating them so that they were going to lose their tails and other characteristics--they would become what they saw as hideous monsters!  So they all killed themselves.  The shocking ending is the revelation that the people of the Lost Race were going to evolve so that they looked just like we Earth people do!  Could it be that we are the degenerate descendants of a Lost Race colony that didn't commit suicide?

This is a fun classic-style science fiction story with lots of technical, sociological, and psychological speculation, plus decent action and adventure elements and human drama elements.  Thumbs up for "The Lost Race!"

"The House of Rising Winds" by Frank Belknap Long (1948)

"The House of Rising Winds" debuted in an issue of Startling Stories alongside Henry Kuttner's "The Mask of Circe," which we read in 2022, and is illustrated by fan favorite Virgil Finlay.  It would reappear in the Long collection The Rim of the Unknown. 

A young orphan boy, Jimmy, is living with his aunt and uncle--who keep arranging accidents in hopes of killing the kid so they can enjoy his inheritance!  Long does a good job at describing the cruelty and the schemes of the aunt and uncle--it is actually kind of creepy and at times shocking.

Jimmy is hiding in the woods when he is approached by a space alien who calls himself Lacula!  Long, something of a poet, comes up with a long list of metaphors to describe Lacula and how he makes Jimmy feel.  

Lacula was like many things at once--things that Jimmy had seen and imagined and dreamed about.  A big twisted tree trunk....the gold and russet splendor of the autumn woods....the sea, wide and boundless....a mountain, rising pale and purple....a maze of complicated machinery....

Lacula is a kindly gent...and also a big game hunter!  He has with him cages full of vicious beasts from Mars, Venus, and other worlds.  With a little device, Lacula makes these cages float hither and thither.  I guess the cages are like intersections between different points in space or something--when Jimmy looks into one cage he sees the broad expanse of a Martian desert leading to mountains in the far distance, but he can also see through the cage to the mundane surface of the Earth neighborhood with which he is familiar.  Long relishes describing two of the ravenous monsters.  Lacula gives Jimmy a little pipe, and instructions on how to use it.  Later that day, when aunt and uncle contrive yet another attempt on Jimmy's life (they make the kid take a bath and arrange an electric hair curler--still plugged in--to fall into the bath to electrocute him), Jimmy blows the pipe and a ferocious wind hurls aunt and uncle out of the house and into one of Lacula's cages.  Lacula leaves Earth with his latest specimens of vicious beasts, and Jimmy can look forward to living his own life, inheriting the house and turning it from a place of fear and misery to one of joy by marrying and building a happy family within it.

The parts with the aunt and uncle are chilling, and the alien monsters are fun; the stuff with Lacula is maybe a little fey and a little too verbose, but I can still mildly recommend "The House of the Rising Winds" as a weird horror story that mixes fairy tale and science fiction elements.           

"Thunder and Roses" by Theodore Sturgeon (1947)

Here we have a very popular story by Ted "Killdozer" Sturgeon, one that has been reprinted a billion times in Sturgeon collections, Astounding anthologies edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison, and by Tony Lewis, surveys of the SF field published by DAW, Prentice-Hall, Wesleyan University, and Harper and Row, an anthology of stories about nuclear war and one of horror stories about the mind.  The first edition of that last anthology, edited by a British computer scientist who was a technical advisor on The Tomorrow People, a TV show I loved as a kid, has a striking woman-in-bondage/violence against women cover that I am finding mesmerizing.

"Thunder and Roses" is a well-written melodrama that counsels turning the other cheek, unilaterally disarming yourself in the face of your enemies.  It is set in the near future at a remote military base after a sneak attack has nuked the United States--the attack was so successful that the US didn't even fire back at the unnamed enemies, and the land of the free and home of the brave is practically wiped out, save for this remote base, where people are despondent and suffering radiation sickness that dooms them to early graves.  Sturgeon does a good job describing the struggles of the men not to commit suicide under these dire conditions.  

The second half of the story expands on the don't-commit-suicide angle.  A beautiful woman singer, apparently the most popular celebrity in America, who regularly broadcast performances weekly to military bases, is still alive, and arrives at the base, her terrible wounds concealed by cosmetics.  Her final performance has the object of convincing the survivors not to retaliate against the enemies who just murdered the entire United States, as this will result in the total destruction of all humanity.  She argues that a decent civilization might arise someday from the rest of the world, but if the United States launches its weapons then all life on Earth--even lizards!--will be killed so no new intelligent life can arise.  In the same way individuals struggled in the first half of the story to resist the inclination to commit suicide, in the second half of the story the handful of surviving Americans characters struggle against each other to resist the temptation to launch a retaliatory strike, which would amount to the suicide of the human race and all life on Earth.

"Thunder and Roses" is well structured and well written, so I must, albeit grudgingly, judge it a good story.  Some may think it over the top, that Sturgeon's depiction of the singer's martyrdom, for example, goes so far as to become comical, or that many individual scenes are too long or that some scenes are superfluous and repetitive (how many guys do we have to hear have committed suicide?) but it all works in my opinion.  My gripe is with the story's ideology--Sturgeon seems to think you shouldn't resist or deter aggressors and so he contrives an unlikely scenario in which resistance and deterrence are somehow unjustifiable.  This is the kind of thing the science fiction that aspires to be a literature of ideas does, and that Sturgeon and Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. in particular, do--question conventional wisdom, like that slavery and incest are bad, by coming up with crazy scenarios and counterintuitive theories that demonstrate that slavery and incest might actually be good.  I obviously think it is the duty of decent people to resist and deter those who would trespass against others and so I recoil from Sturgeon's ideas here, but I guess that is part of the point of the story and "serious" science fiction, to get a rise out of you.  ("Don't worry about it son," Campbell told a young Barry Malzberg after a long argument in the year 1969, "I just like to shake 'em up."*)

An important story in SF history, likely of value to those interested in science fiction written in response to the use of atomic weapons in World War II and to the Cold War, and science fiction influenced by Christian thought--though Sturgeon never directly mentions Hiroshima, the Soviet Union, or any religious figure or establishment--and science fiction that depicts stress and psychological trauma.

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So here it is, perhaps my favorite story by Sturgeon, a brilliant weird tale I read long ago and reread today and happily find I love as much as I did the first time round.  Five out of five peepholes for "The Other Celia," a speculative fiction masterpiece!

In the past I have complained that Sturgeon has a penchant for describing activities in too much detail, to the point that it is boring and takes the reader out of the story--he does this in "Killdozer" and in "The Touch of Your Hand" when describing the operation of heavy construction equipment.  Here in "The Other Celia" he describes activities in similarly exhaustive detail, but in this story the actions he describes are bizarre and fascinating, and instead of boring you and wasting your time, Sturgeon paints vivid and striking images and generates almost unbearable suspense.  Perhaps more importantly, in "The Other Celia" Sturgeon creates two unforgettable characters, people quite alien to the reader (I hope!) and yet with disturbingly sympathetic personalities that lead the reader to identify with them despite their fundamental strangeness.

Slim Walsh is a tall, thin, shy guy who has no respect for personal boundaries!  He is driven by a powerful curiosity--he feels an irresistible urge to know as much about other people, their secrets, as possible.  He doesn't leverage these secrets to make money or anything, he just gots to know!  Sturgeon describes in detail how he spies on other people in his shabby boarding house, creating peepholes and trespassing while leaving no signs of intrusion and so forth.  All these descriptions are compelling and put the reader on edge--he is invading the privacy of others in a way that is disturbing, and at the same time we sort of sympathize with Slim and worry he will be caught.

The most unusual person in the boarding house is a nondescript woman who studiously keeps to herself, a Celia Sarton.  This woman seems to have no character, no personality--when Slim invades her apartment he finds no sign of any interests or relationships whatsoever.  Intrigued, he takes pains to learn more, and stumbles upon an almost unbelievable reality--Celia is of some other species which has somehow evolved in parallel with humanity and whose members masquerade as human.  Slim, and we readers, watch as Celia conducts the necessary operations to make her totally alien body conform to human shape so she can continue her lonely and humdrum life among us.  Slim, ever curious, interferes with Celia's assumption of her disguise, to see what might happen, and his meddling has tragic consequences.

We might consider "The Other Celia" a story about urban loneliness, and/or a feminist story, an allegory of how women do things in private to alter their appearances, things men might find strange or disgusting but which (according to feminists, at least) they are forced into by men if they want to lead any sort of independent existence in our society.  We might even say that it is the male gaze that kills poor Celia, who never hurt anybody.  Thinking more broadly, the story may be about we all have secrets and the revelation of those secrets might, if only metaphorically/psychologically, destroy us.  

A Sturgeon story the equal of or superior to his famous "Microcosmic God."  The thing is flawless:  every passage contributes to the plot or atmosphere.  Characteristics like Sturgeon's vaunted "humanism" and aforementioned tendency to describe in detail are present and contribute to the success of the story, while other of Ted's recurring attributes, the ones that might annoy me, like the elitism that leads a guy to become famous for saying that 90% of everything is shit and to stuff his stories with misanthropy and condescending lectures, are thankfully absent.  Strongly recommended to fans of all sorts of genre fiction, as "The Other Celia" has crime/detective elements as well as weird/science fiction/fantasy elements, what with all the suspenseful sneaking and spying going on.    

"The Other Celia" debuted in Galaxy, and has appeared in many science fiction and horror anthologies.  

isfdb labels "The Pod in the Barrier" a novelette, and it has the structure of a novel, with lots of characters who have their personalities described and then demonstrate those personalities, and whose personalities and relationships evolve as the story proceeds in ways that drive the plot and resolve the plot obstacles.

I'll try to describe the narrative briefly, background first, which we don't learn in one gulp but in intermittent installments.  The human race is in trouble because of overpopulation, one symptom of which is riots breaking out all the time!  Mankind has explored many star systems, but very few inhabitable planets have been discovered, and the accessible ones are already being overcrowded with human colonists.  An additional bunch of systems with planets we could colonize have been discovered, but they are beyond an impenetrable forcefield!  The people who put up the forcefield, the Luanae, are very friendly, real generous goody goodies who would love to do us a solid, and in fact they have transmitted to us all kinds of useful information that has advanced human technology by leaps and bounds.  But they are unable to turn off the forcefield!  Sturgeon devotes long passages to describing the historical, sociological, and technological reasons why and how the Luanae set up a forcefield run by an AI that is now smarter than they are; these fictional history lessons are actually sort of convincing and rather fun.

The main plot involves the latest of many human expeditions sent to the forcefield in hopes of somehow getting through it to those much-needed planets.  The ship has a crew of four scientists and three crewmembers: the captain/pilot, a sort of handyman lackey guy they call the utility monkey, and a professional prostitute referred to as the crew girl or CG.  One of the scientists is our narrator.  Each of these seven people has an idiosyncratic personality, including the narrator, who is an arrogant jerk.  The CG, for example, is terrible at her (ostensible) job.  CGs are a typical component of star ship crews, and are there to have sex with the men to maintain morale.  But the CG on this trip has a personality that the four scientists find absolutely repulsive, so they have no interest in having sex with her.  This woman is a radical skeptic who doubts everything, and somehow, perhaps just with the tone of her voice, transmits her doubt to others, making the men doubt themselves and all their beliefs, a very uncomfortable situation.  Only the utility monkey can stand the CG, and they don't have sex, though the monkey is in love with her, and strives to get her believe in something.

The ship gets to the barrier.  Each of the four scientists has a theory on how to defeat the force field, and all fail--in fact, the captain points out the glaring faults in their theories even before they have been tried.  This mission has been conducted under false pretenses--the captain himself is an expert in many sciences, maybe the superior to the four passengers, and the CG is the key to penetrating the force field!  She casts a field of doubt that has the potential to make Luanae technology fail.  The captain explains to her how Luanae technology operates, and she doubts the explanation, and this dampens enough of the field that she can fly in a pod to the space station that controls the field and detonate a nuclear bomb to permanently deactivate the field and save the human race.  Her doubt also makes the ship's own Luanae-designed interstellar drive fail; it is expected that she will die in the nuclear explosion, because if she lives the ship won't be able to reach to any human habitable planets!  They have all been on something like a suicide mission!  The sacrifice of the CG drives the utility monkey berserk!

Luckily, the kindness of the Luanae saves the CG's life from the nuclear blast and the love of the utility monkey eases the CG's doubts so that the drive gets back online, so everybody survives the mission.

Like "The Other Celia," "The Pod in the Barrier" has hallmarks of Sturgeon's work--here all the love and Utopian jazz--that can sometimes sink a Sturgeon story, but these Sturgeon hobby horses are reined in so as not to be obnoxious or overwhelming and appear alongside effective adventure and speculative science material.  The result is a story I can recommend.  Thumbs up for "The Pod in the Barrier."   

"The Pod in the Barrier" first saw print in Galaxy, and has reappeared in many Sturgeon collections, but few anthologies--isfdb lists only one, a French one from 1977 with a title that means something like Star Beacons and Atomic Trails or Stellar Lighthouses and Atomic Wakes.

"The Girl Had Guts" (1957) 

Are you ready for a "mind-blowing" bit of "hard science fiction" set in the far future?  Well, that is what we have been promised by the cover text on Mike Ashley's 2006 anthology The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction, which includes "The Girl Had Guts."  

Oy, this story is extreme, and did make my mind reel--"The Girl Had Guts" is one of the most disgusting exercises in body horror I have ever experienced.  Gross!

Our narrator is a space captain who has just returned from a mission, a check up on some scientists conducting a survey of an Earth-like planet.  He describes to his wife what he discovered--the horror that destroyed almost all members of the survey team.  Sturgeon does not skimp when describing these people's horrible injuries, nauseating illnesses, and psyche-shattering terror.  The space captain relates the nightmare suffered by the scientists not in detective story fashion--narrating how he figured it out from documents and interviews and other clues--or in newspaper fashion--the most important facts followed by details--but like an adventure story, chronologically.

The scientists again and again got involved in fights with the large native fauna of the planet and also found themselves falling victim to natural disasters and all were injured, killed, and/or diseased.  One of the monsters was a sort of oozing blob creature that seemed to appear out of nowhere and secreted acids that could burn right through human flesh--a man's face and a woman's fingers were both melted away.  Horrific.  Eventually the astounding truth about this blob monster is revealed to use readers--the creature is the abdominal organs of a mammal, ejected through the mouth during a moment of terror to act as an autonomous defender of its erstwhile owner.  (Apparently Sturgeon got this idea from the behavior of some sea cucumbers, which expel parts of their respiratory systems when attacked, and the way some lizards shed their tails to distract predators.)  A native primate, scared by a scientist, "used" this involuntary, autonomic ability, ejecting its liver and stomach which then proceeded to flop around and attack the scientist.  Even more horrible, even more disgusting, this ability was not native to the primate, but the result of infection with a kind of parasitic virus, and the scientist unknowingly contracted the same ability!  And so did the other scientists!  And when they got scared by other dangers, their organs leapt out of their mouths to start attacking others!  Yikes! 

To cap off the horror, the space captain, after telling this story to his wife, learns his wife has been unfaithful to him with one of his crewmen when she gets a scare and ejects her abdominal organs, she having contracted the virus from his cuckolding comrade!  Yikes again!

A very effective story, well-written, well paced, and well organized, though I will repeat as a warning to the squeamish that the main effect of the story is to disgust the reader.  There are additional themes that develop in parallel to the gore and horror, including a celebration of the heroism of one of the women scientists, and a subtheme that concerns the nature of sexual relationships in the future.  (All three of today's stories have female characters who are integral to their plots and are sympathetic or admirable or both, and all have noteworthy sexual elements or at least undertones.)  Like "The Pod in the Barrier" there is a lot going on in this story and it is all pretty compelling, though the body horror business overshadowed everything for this squeamish reader.      

"The Girl Had Guts" appeared in the same issue of Venture as Poul Anderson's "Virgin Planet;" I read the novel version of Virgin Planet back in 2017 and enjoyed it.  "The Girl Had Guts" has been reprinted in a few anthologies besides Ashley's, including a 1984 French anthology.

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So, we finish off A Touch of Strange with three good stories, including two that are remarkable, "The Other Celia" being a masterpiece and "The Girl Had Guts" being remarkably disgusting.  Did the DAW people deliberately put the three best stories at the end of the book?  The stories are in a totally different order in the 1958 Doubleday hardcover, with "The Pod in the Barrier" the first story and "The Other Celia" and "The Girl Had Guts" together in the middle.  Hmm.

Well, I'm thrilled to have finished this series of blog posts with three winners after having contended with mediocre material in the first two installments of this three-part project, and to have gathered some examples with which to defend Sturgeon from the criticisms of tarbandu and other Sturgeon detractors.

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It's been I think eight posts in a row about short stories by major speculative fiction writers.  Let's mix things up with a crime novel next time.  See you then!