MPorcius Fiction Log: Vance

Showing posts with label Vance. Show all posts

Monday, December 22, 2025

Merril-approved 1958 stories by P Ustinov, J Vance, J Vatsek and K Vonnegut, Jr.

The year: 1958. Our mission: To explore the SF of that year. Our guide: critical darling Judith Merril. On the last leg of our journey through the year the Hope Diamond made its way to the Smithsonian Institution, the first communications satellite reached orbit, and the Fifth French Republic was founded, we finished off the "T" authors included on the Honorable Mentions list in the back of Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume, and today we'll tackle the sole "U" on the list and the three "V"s, reading two stories by people considered important outside our beloved SF ghetto that debuted in mainstream publications, as well as a story by one of the giants of SF that debuted in a lesser pulp and a story by some woman I've never heard of that first saw print in one of the most pretentious SF periodicals. Today we are celebrating diversity here at MPorcius Fiction Log--when the revolution comes, tell them to spare me!

But first! A list of links to the twenty-two (!) previous stages of this epic journey!

Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin
Pauline Ashwell, Don Berry, and Robert Bloch
John Brunner, Algis Budrys, and Arthur C. Clarke
"Helen Clarkson" (Helen McCoy), Mark Clifton, Mildred Clingerman and Theodore R. Cogswell
John Bernard Daley, Avram Davidson and Chan Davis
Gordon R. Dickson
Charles Einstein, George P. Elliot, and Harlan Ellison
Charles G. Finney, Charles L. Fontenay, Donald Franson, and Charles E Fritch
Randall Garret and James E. Gunn
Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert, and Philip High
Shirley Jackson, Daniel Keyes, and John Kippax

Damon Knight and C. M. Kornbluth
Fritz Leiber, Jack Lewis and Victoria Lincoln
Katherine MacLean, "T. H. Mathieu" (Les Cole) and Dean MacLaughlin
A. E. Nourse
"Finn O'Donnevan" (Robert Sheckley) and Chad Oliver
Avis Pabel, Frederik Pohl, and Robert Presslie

John T.Phillifent, Kit Reed, Mack Reynolds, and Charles W. Runyon

Margaret St. Clair, Thomas N. Scortia and John Shepley

Robert Silverberg and Clifford Simak

Cordwainer Smith, Will Stanton, and Job Stopa

Theodore Sturgeon, William Tenn, and Walter Tevis

"The Man in the Moon" by Peter Ustinov

Ustinov is one of those guys who people say is some kind of genius, and who am I to disagree? I barely know anything about him! I recognize his name and face, though, I guess from Spartacus and all those Agatha Christie things my mother would watch.

"The Man in the Moon" debuted in The Atlantic Monthly, one of those magazines smart people are always talking about, alongside a poem by John Ciardi, whose translation of the Divine Comedy I read back when I thought there was a chance I might amount to something and figured I should read real books and not just stuff about monsters and adventures to improbable locales. You can read "The Man in the Moon" at The Atlantic's website, which is what I did; PDF scans of the original magazine are also out there in the Wild West that, for the time being, is still the internet. The story was collected in Ustinov's Add a Dash of Pity.

Ustinov was an Englishman, though of Russian ethnicity, and some kind of activist who worked to confer upon the world the dubious blessings of world government, and "The Man in the Moon" is a tepid satire full of lame and obvious jokes the point of which is to attack British imperialism and promote world government. Good grief!

A British scientist with a Swiss friend develops a means of reaching other planets. He hopes to go to America to discuss his success with other scientists. The British government stops him from going to the US because they want to keep the ability to explore other planets in British hands with the hope of regaining the leading position in the world that Great Britain had in the 18th and 19th centuries. In response, the scientist gives speeches in which he decries fear of the Soviet Union, insists he is not a patriotic Briton but a man of the world, makes disparaging remarks about Rudyard Kipling, denounces European imperialism and racism, compares the current British government to that of Nazi Germany, and laments that if mankind reaches other planets the result will be racism against and exploitation of aliens and war between humans, a replay of the colonialism and world wars of the period 1492-1945.

The story ends with the revelation that the English scientist has managed to get his innovation to Switzerland and so the Swiss are the first to land on the moon.

Banal politics plus tired jokes about the scientist's relationship with his wife and kids equals a story that feels like filler and offers neither entertainment nor intellectual stimulation. "The Man in the Moon" is like a Socratic dialogue you've already heard bolted onto a hunk of bare bones sitcom humor you've already seen. Thumbs down! (You've probably already figured out on your own why leftist Merril, who is always trying to shoehorn mainstream figures and mainstream publications inside the SF tent as part of her project of dissolving the barriers between the literary mainstream and genre literature, felt the need to promote this mediocrity with a snooty pedigree.)

"Worlds of Origin" AKA "Coup de Grace" by Jack Vance

From one of our most reputable publications to a pulp magazine that wikipedia and the Science Fiction Encyclopedia suggest is a piece of garbage, Super-Science Fiction. "Worlds of Origin" is one of the ten Magnus Ridolph stories and has been reprinted many times in Vance collections as well as in a few Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg anthologies under the title "Coup de Grace." I own a copy of the issue of Super-Science Fiction in which the story debuted, and actually have already read the issue's Robert Silverberg, Robert F. Young and Koller Ernst stories, and it is in its pages that I will read "Worlds of Origin" today. I'll also note that the Emsh illustration to the tale, featuring an old bearded skinny guy and an old fat balding guy and a slender elfish young lady, is quite good.

This is a fun detective story full of clever and amusing science fiction elements. Vance with admirable economy sets a scene and describes characters and alien societies in a way that is interesting and his charming dialogue brings a smile to the face of the reader again and again. The story also seems to push (perhaps ironically and insincerely?) what we might call a liberal or left-wing commonplace--moral relativism, the idea that each culture has its own theory of right and wrong and it is pointless to judge one theory as better than any other.

Magnus Ridolph is on holiday in a space station hanging in interstellar space that serves the role of a resort. There are a bunch of people in the station, among them an anthropologist who has with him three "palaeolithics" or "cavemen" he has restrained with various high tech devices. He approaches Ridolph, saying he needs help because he is being pursued by a woman. Ridolph, being on vacation, is not very interested in helping, and their interview is interrupted besides.

The next morning the anthropologist is found dead. The resort space station is floating out in a region of space claimed by no government, so there are no police to solve the crime, so the resort owner enlists Ridolph the famous detective. Lacking the scanners and analyzers that an official police force would employ to solve the crime lickety-split, Ridolph must rely on his knowledge of the cultures of the many suspects to determine who must be the killer. Each suspect is interviewed, and Ridolph solves the case. Because Vance comes up with a strange and fun (and by 20th-century standards, amoral or evil) culture for each of the suspects, and because the relationship between Ridolph and the resort owner is amusing, the interviews are actually fun, not the tedious blah blah blah of red herrings we get in so much detective fiction.

Thumbs up for "Worlds of Origin," a successful detective story which is also a successful humor story and which includes many entertaining science fiction elements and is, perhaps, a tricky philosophical story about moral relativism.

"The Duel" by Joan Vatsek

On her website, Joan Vaczek Kouwenhoven's daughter, Elizabeth Arthur, includes a bio of her mother, whose "The Duel" appeared in F&SF under the name Joan Vatsek. Vatsek was born in the United States during World War One, the daughter of a Hungarian diplomat, and lived in Europe, Canada, Ohio and Egypt before making her career and getting married twice in the environs of New York and Washington, D.C. Vatsek has only three credits at isfdb, but produced quite a number of mainstream (maybe some of them are thrillers?) stories, novels and plays. As for "The Duel," it was included in one of those anthologies with Alfred Hitchcock's name on the cover that has been reprinted in numerous formats.

Laurence, a writer, grew up in a 17th-century house in Virginia, the remains of a slave plantation. He has returned to the now lonely and remote house with his wife, Janine, who is graceful and not conventionally beautiful, but like a Durer drawing, arresting and unforgettable. Janine doesn't like the house. She is a superstitious sort; for example, she doesn't like it when moonlight lands on the bed. (This is a superstition I never heard of before.) One day, Laurence finds Janine using a makeshift ouija board; Janine's mother taught her this technique of communicating with the dead.

Janine acts as if she has developed a relationship with a soldier who died during the War of Independence and is buried on this property. This Major Jamieson brags about his martial and sexual successes, and is jealous when Janine is intimate with her husband Laurence. Laurence of course thinks his wife is loony, and considers taking her to a shrink, even though she seems happier than she ever has been. But he holds off, and we get the horrible climax--Janine, in love with the ghost, helps the Major slay Laurence, but too late Janine realizes that the Major does not love her, only enjoys killing men and seducing women, he seeing other people as no more than opponents to be manipulated and defeated. Janine goes insane.

Of course I think Merril chose to promote this story because it was written by a woman whose work had appeared many times in mainstream venues, but "The Duel" is pretty good so I can't fault her for the choice. The story moves along at a decent clip and has various memorable images; in particular, a fetishistic erotic scene in which Janine, who uses a wine glass as the ouija board's pointer or planchette, grasps the stem of the wine glass and touches her mouth to its rim as if she is stimulating a phallus, all while her poor husband watches.

We might see "The Duel" as a story about gender roles. Janine's mother worked hard to provide Janine a good education, and had hopes Janine would be a writer or painter or actress or something. Janine took a stab at these vocations, including doing actual remunerative work at an ad agency, but was never much good at them, or at least lacked the drive to succeed at them. This sort of broke her morale. Major Jamieson, the 18th-century womanizer, tells Janine a woman need not be useful, merely ornamental, and this assuages her guilt--embodying pre-feminist or anti-feminist views of a woman's role makes her happier than feminist career-oriented ones have, at least on the short term. The story not only contrasts the frustrated career-oriented Janine of New England with the ornamental Janine of Virginia, but middle-class 20th-century Laurence and 18th-century aristocratic Major Jamieson--Laurence is committed to his wife and works for money, while the ghost is a guy whose life (and afterlife) are occupied with seducing women and killing men in duels. The differences between the way Laurence manifests manhood and the Major does seems to advantage the Major--while Laurence, working hard on his books to pay the bills, cannot spend much time with Janine, the Major, a decadent and amoral aristocrat, is with her all the time and makes her happy. Of course, the Major ultimately cannot satisfy Janine, he being totally selfish; "The Duel" may also be about how, for women, sexual relationships with men are always unsatisfactory.

"The Manned Missiles" by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is one of those writers of science fiction like J. G. Ballard and Doris Lessing who has a sparkling reputation among mainstream critics, and "The Manned Missiles" debuted in the mainstream women's magazine Cosmopolitan. (Before TV took over the culture, magazines like Cosmopolitan included lots of fiction; I will also note that it appears that, before the 1960s, Cosmopolitan was geared towards wives and mothers, not sexually-active single career women, as it has been in my lifetime.) It is easy to see why Merril liked the story, why it is in a women's magazine, and why the mainstream critics like Vonnegut--"The Manned Missiles" is a reasonably well-written sentimental and manipulative tear jerker (the characters actually cry) and it is also one of those stories that tries to get you to believe that the Soviet Union is no worse--hell, it's better!--than the United States. A lot of educated people seem to believe this of the USSR, like a lot of educated people purport to believe that a man who cuts off his testicles (or says he plans to someday maybe cut off his testicles) is a woman, and it is hard to tell to what extent they really believe this stuff and to what extent they say it to advance and protect their relationships and careers. "The Manned Missiles" is also one of those stories that tells you space travel is a total waste of time, that individuals probably can't handle it and the human race probably won't benefit from it. (Remember that Camille Paglia quote about how if women were in charge we'd all still be living in grass huts?)

"The Manned Missiles" comes to us in the form of two letters, one from a citizen of the Soviet Union and one from an American, both working-class men who had ambitious sons who became astronauts and died when their space craft, the first manned Soviet and the first manned American space craft, collided out in space. There is a lot of room for interpretation because both writers may be considered unreliable narrators, people deceived by their governments, but on the surface it seems like the Communists put up a manned satellite to study the Earth for peaceful purposes (or maybe spy on us?) and the untrusting Americans sent a rocket up to destroy the Soviet satellite (or maybe just spy on it?) Vonnegut makes the Russian (though maybe he is Ukrainian) sympathetic and admirable, all high-minded and wise and cute (he calls satellites "baby moons"), with a son who was some kind of genius and suffered terribly in space from nausea and so forth. The Yankee Vonnegut makes sympathetic but pathetic, a religious rube whose son was a single-minded and selfish square who was ambitious because of psychological problems.

Like Ustinov's story, "The Manned Missiles" is what you expect a story that employs science fiction devices but appears in a mainstream outlet to be, a rehash of lame left-wing politics married to family dynamics drama. Vonnegut at least makes a go at writing in the voices of diverse characters and showing why space travel is stupid and the commies in the East are no worse than the hypocritical liberal market societies of the West instead of just speechifying about it like Ustinov, and Vonnegut tries to make you cry by portraying parents talking about their sons who were killed by the hubris, venality and paranoia of the ruling class instead of trying to make you laugh at bargain basement jokes about marriage like Ustinov does. We'll call "The Manned Missiles" acceptable.

I read "The Manned Missiles" in a scan of 2017's Complete Stories and you can find it in other Vonnegut collections as well.

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The Vance is the most fun and entertaining and the most science-fictiony story of today's group, Vance coming up with wild settings and cultures, perhaps as a means to illustrate and maybe undermine the idea of cultural relativism. The Vatsek is also a success as an entertainment and it is probably the most sophisticated of today's stories; she takes a traditional ghost story format and hooks it up effectively with a love triangle element with some powerful if sneaky sexual components, and uses this material to talk in an undogmatic way about gender roles. Vonnegut and Ustinov's stories are just tendentious anti-Western Cold War dogmatism, Ustinov bludgeoning you while Vonnegut uses tried and true literary devices in an effort to pull your heart strings. Taken as a group, not a bad illustration of the variety of what could be accomplished in 1958 with fantasy and science fiction techniques.

Monday, November 7, 2022

Thrilling Wonder Stories, Aug '50: Kuttner, Vance, Hubbard and Clarke

Recently I looked at the December 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. While I talked about the fiction and the editorial in that issue of Sam Merwin's magazine in my blogposts, I didn't mention the letters column, and there are actually interesting missives therein from Isaac Asimov and his pal Lin Carter, both of whom praise the Henry Kuttner and Jack Vance stories from the August issue of TWS. This praise inspired me to today check out those long tales, along with the short stories by L. Ron Hubbard and Arthur C. Clarke that appeared alongside them.

"As You Were" by Henry Kuttner

Kuttner--friend of H. P. Lovecraft, husband of C. L. Moore, hero of Barry N. Malzberg--was born and died in Los Angeles, so I guess I should not be surprised that this is yet another story that revolves around Hollywood. Our protagonist Peter Owen left his "managerial job with a Hollywood commercial-film company" to become assistant to his uncle, the famous and comically short-tempered writer C. Edmund Stumm, author of the hit play Lady Pantagruel. Owen is dating actress Claire Bishop, and striving to convince his uncle to sell film rights to Lady Pantagruel to her so she can appear on the silver screen as the title character, a job she desperately needs to steady her career, which is floundering after her appearance in a series of duds. Unfortunately, Claire is almost as volatile as Stumm and things are not going too smoothly between them--a recent disagreement with her over who is the better composer, Shostakovich or Prokofieff, has Stumm smashing his record collection. Also in the mix is a scientist, Sigmund Krafft, who spends his time trying to cast his mind beyond the barriers of time by concentrating on a model of a tesseract (defined here as "a cube exploded into four dimensions, symbolically.") Stumm has invited this oddball to stay with him and Owen in his big house overlooking the Pacific Ocean because Krafft's ideas were an integral part of Lady Pantagruel, a play about time travel, and Stumm is currently writing the sequel and needs some more ideas.

"As You Were" is supposed to be funny, and most of the humor stems from the fact that the characters are all stressed out, constantly yelling, banging the table, throwing things, obsessively worried over something absurd and trying to worm their way out of jams through subterfuge. The plot is intricate and complicated, and I admire how Kuttner put it all together, but the fact is the story comes off as tedious and repetitive. I guess the style and plot are kind of like those of a P. G. Wodehouse story except that a Wodehouse story is actually funny and doesn't include a lot of paragraphs speculating about the nature of time. Lin Carter in his letter in the December issue of TWS says "As You Were" reminds him of Thorne Smith, with whose work I am not familiar.

One noteworthy thing about "As You Were" that is reminiscent of Wodehouse is how Kuttner fills it with oblique learned references; examples: Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break" and J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time. Kuttner just uses the men's last names, not their first names or the titles of the works he is alluding to, assuming the reader is a fellow smart guy and will easily recognize what he is referring to. Of course, we 2022 readers can easily cheat by typing keywords into our search engine of choice.

The plot of this long (35 pages!) and boring story concerns how the three male leads have odd, and oddly similar, dreams and how, from out of nowhere, Owen finds a blue enamel clock in his room that he can use to turn back time. Owen likens the clock to a "backspacer" on a typewriter: by setting the clock back, say, 15 minutes, the universe reverts to how it was a quarter hour ago, with the difference that he himself retains his memories of the 15 minutes he just lived. Owen can act differently from his first go round and change history, though this turns out to be difficult, as many events turn out to be overdetermined. After some long boring scenes in which Owen figures out how to use the blue enamel clock, he employs it in an effort to make sure his reprehensible uncle signs a contract selling the film rights to his play to Claire. A major parallel plot thread revolves around the fact that Krafft needs his good luck charm--a stone frog named Maxl--to pursue his tesseract concentration experiments and he has lost it; it was apparently stolen by burglars, and we eventually learn Stumm faked the burglary for his own nefarious reasons.

In the end Stumm the villain suffers and Owen and Claire marry and live happily ever after. Who cares?

Kuttner's slapsticky screwball sense of humor doesn't work on me, the plot drags, and the characters are broad and neither interesting nor sympathetic--thumbs down for "As You Were." Asimov in his letter in the December '50 ish of TWS says "As You Were" is "very entertaining and pleasant to read" while Carter's opines that "As You Were" is "urbane, witty, polished and clever...Kuttner's best for you in quite a long time." Now, Asimov and Carter are major figures in the history of SF, and I'm a guy who tweets about dinosaur tchotchkes he buys at flea markets, so it is obvious whose opinion you should put more stock in, but in support of my own assessment I will point out that "As You Were" has never appeared in book form and was only ever reprinted on paper in a British magazine with a false advertising cover that suggests it is an awesome space adventure. The experts may disagree with me, but it looks like the market sides with yours truly!

"New Bodies for Old" by Jack Vance

"New Bodies for Old" would be renamed "Chateau d'If" for publication in books, and I am pretty sure I read it under that title in a library copy of the 2009 collection Wild Thyme, Green Magic when I was living in New York in that golden age when my life was interesting enough that I didn't feel the need to share my half-baked opinions and dumb jokes with the broader universe.

Five unmarried middle-class professionals are kicking back in the city of the future, where life is easy--too easy! With little danger or challenge, life is a bore, and people turn to drink. But maybe something new has appeared...the characters know of a mysterious business enterprise, The Chateau d'If, whose allusive and vague adverts promise adventure. Curious, but a little scared, the five guys decide to randomly select one of their number to investigate the Chateau. The youngest, Zaer, loses the dice throw, and heads over to the secretive place, promising to meet his friends at an appointed time to describe his experience. He does not return!

Some time later one of the remaining four friends spots Zaer--Zaer is now one of the richest of the rich, living in great luxury. The four men confront Zaer for having failed to live up to his end of the agreement and tell them all about the Chateau, but he acts like he doesn't know them.

The title of the story here in Thrilling Wonder gives away what is going on, of course. A second member of the group, Mario, goes to the Chateau and is drugged; when he wakes he is no longer in the healthy 29-year-old body he had when he fell unconscious--he is now in the wretched hulk of a weak middle-aged fatso! A note in his pocket briefs him on the identity associated with his new body, that of a quite successful businessman, the owner of an aircar manufacturing firm, and urges him to run the business competently, as, if he can pay the Chateau ten million dollars, he can purchase from them a perfect body!

The rest of the story is about how Mario launches several operations that get him his body back, punish the villains, win him a beautiful wife (that is her on the cover, wearing no facial expression even though she just shot down the lead villain), and even solve the problem of human boredom in a classic sense-of-wonder ending--Mario sets in motion the creation of a star drive that will open the universe to human exploration and endless adventure!

An interesting note: In 2015 we read Vance's novel Bad Ronald, about a creep who lives hidden in a family's house and spies on them. A similar circumstance prevails in the last few chapters of "New Bodies for Old." The owner of the Chateau is assuaging his own boredom by building the world's tallest building--three miles high! Mario is an architect, and ingeniously gets himself on the staff of the firm that is working on the tower. He has secret passages installed in the top floor of the 900-story building, the floor into which the owner of the Chateau moves his living quarters and the operating theater where people's personalities are moved from body to body; from within these passages Mario spies on his enemy.

"New Bodies for Old"/"Chateau d'If" is a very entertaining story, Vance expertly using all sorts of SF and detective-genre literary devices to great effect. The plot moves along quickly and always holds your interest, Vance offering evocative but economical descriptions of settings and people as well as sharp little philosophical and psychological insights. Vance's description of what it is like to be fat and unhealthy, from the point of view of somebody who is used to being fit, for example, is great. He employs fun metaphors. The characters all behave in ways that feel totally natural and believable, to the point that they are all easy to identify with. Strongly recommended.

"Battling Bolto" by L. Ron Hubbard

Here we have the story of a decent country boy who is bamboozled by a fast-talking woman and a tricky college professor--set in a vast space empire. "Battling Bolto" is also one of those stories in which we have First Person Narrator 1 who tells us "I heard a crazy story once from a guy" and then First Person Narrator 2, the guy, takes over the narration.

First Person Narrator 2 is a seven-foot-tall blacksmith from Urgo Major, a decent sort of bloke who goes to church and otherwise behaves himself and contributes to his community, forging shoes for the local six-footed beasts and repairing people's frying pans and so forth. A girl talks him into getting engaged. Then a professor who hawks robots comes to their backwoods planet and gives a sales presentation to a crowd (this guy seems more like a carnival barker or snake oil salesman than a professor, but, on second thought, those are pretty fine distinctions, aren't they?); in the crowd, a pickpocket from the prof's ship steals Narrator 2's watch, a family heirloom. In the ensuing fight, Narrator 2 displays his terrific strength and agility, impressing the professor. Soon our hero is aboard the prof's ship, making robot shells, his pay being beamed back to his fiancé, even though Narrator 2 was content living on his quiet little planet--smooth talkers have outwitted him again!

The prof is a scammer and our hero is slow to realize it. After having a guy dressed up in a robot suit demonstrate his wares to the citizens of unsophisticated planets, he sells them empty shells as if they are real robots that haven't been booted up yet. The duplicitous prof takes advantage of our narrator's heroic pugilistic ability by conning him into donning a robot suit he himself forged and fighting all comers, these contestants enticed by the promise of a cash prize if they can stay in the ring with the "boxing robot" for two rounds. The climax of the story comes when the prof manipulates our hero into having to fight a real robot, and then a robotic tracked pile driver; then follows the twist ending in which we learn the true nature of the prof, how the narrator achieves his revenge, and how his experiences have corrupted him.

A standard criticism directed at pulps like Thrilling Wonder is that many of the stories they print aren't science fiction at all--they don't teach science or speculate about the future or whatever--but are simply Westerns or adventure stories or detective stories with ray guns replacing the revolvers, rocket ships in the place of horses, Martians and space pirates instead of Indians and pirates. "Battling Bolto" is vulnerable to this charge, but should we care? It is a fun little story, and there is nothing wrong with that. Mild recommendation.

"Battling Bolto" would reappear in a 1971 reprint magazine and in a 21st century Hubbard collection.

"A Walk in the Dark" by Arthur C. Clarke

Mankind has colonized the galaxy, and Robert Armstrong is a hard-working engineer who has been to dozens of planets, working on various projects. Today he is on a desolate rock of a world on the edge of the galaxy, so far out that there are only a few stars in the night sky. His work camp is just a few miles from the landing field where he is scheduled to board a ship in a few hours. His vehicle breaks down soon after his departure from the work site, so he has to walk through the black night to catch his flight. Then his flashlight dies. Keeping to the crude road is not easy in the dark, but he can probably make it. Then he remembers the story he heard suggesting that the tunnels on this apparently lifeless planet are not volcanic vents at all but the home of a scary monster!

A fun little horror story; Clarke does a great job portraying the stream of consciousness of a person in this sort of situation, and "A Walk in the Dark" is a compelling and smooth read, focused and tight. When I think of the novels by Clarke I read years and years ago, I think of them as long, slow, unfocused, full of digressions and advocacy of ideas with which I am not in tune, but when I have read Clarke's short stories during the life of this blog (e.g., "The Fires Within," "Transit of Earth," "Sunjammer," and "The Deep Range") I have often thought them quite good.

Clarke being widely acknowledged as one of the top three SF writers of his day, this story has been reprinted many times in multiple languages in Clarke collections and anthologies, including a "best of" collection, The Nine Billion Names of God.

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The Kuttner was ponderous, but Vance, Hubbard and Clarke provide entertaining stories--a good issue of Sam Merwin, Jr.'s magazine. Art lovers will appreciate the numerous Virgil Finlay illustrations that celebrate the beauty of the human body and of women's faces.

In the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log: anthologized horror stories by famous Weird Tales alums. Stay tuned!

Sunday, August 25, 2019

Four more stories by Jack Vance from The Augmented Agent and Other Stories

Paperback editions from 1988 and 1989; the cover illustration on the 1988 printing has nothing to
do with Vance's work--it originally appeared on Barrington Bayley's Rod of Light

Here at MPoricus Fiction Log we are reading 1986's The Augmented Agent and Other Stories, a collection of 1950s and 1960s stories by SF Grandmaster Jack Vance, the brilliant stylist behind such famous series as the Dying Earth and the Demon Princes. I often think about rereading the three Alastor books and the three Cadwal books (I've already read the second and third Dying Earth books and all five Demon Princes books multiple times) but today I explore four Vance tales that I have never read before. Having examined the first four of the volume's eight tales over the last two blog posts, today we'll be finishing up with my hardcover copy of The Augmented Agent and Other Stories.

"Crusade to Maxus" (1951)

In our last blog post I complained that Vance failed to convey to the reader the emotions of the protagonists of 1951's "Golden Girl," and that that story lacked any thrills that might hold the reader's attention. Things are quite different in this 1951 story. You see, Maxus is a planet to which slaves are brought, to be sold to the "Overmen" who employ most of them in vast industrial complexes which produce top-of-the-line electronics and machinery that are critical to the economy of the entire galaxy! Travec has rushed to this world because his family has been captured by the space raider Arman and brought to Maxus to be sold to the highest bidder! Without going overboard or getting too manipulative, but instead with economic understatement that is compelling, Vance depicts Travec's desperation and frustration as he hurries to the slave market to buy back his own flesh and blood and is delayed by all manner of bureaucratic red tape and demands for bribes. Agony follows as he finds upon his arrival at the "Slave Distribute" that his mother Iardeth has died and his sister Thalla has been sold to some overweight aristocrat. There is also melodrama and grue as fate decrees that, in the icy morgue where rests Iardeth Travec's corpse, Travec get into a fight with the noble who has purchased his sister--in the fracas a stray energy blast from the aristo's pistol kills Thalla!

Before she was killed, Thalla told Travec of another captive, a young woman named Mardien who was kind to her. Following the tragedy in the morgue, Travec purchases Mardien at the slave auction. He also goes to see a Maxus official, the High Commissioner, in hopes of purchasing his brother and a younger sister, who were sold before Travec arrived. The High Commisioner offers to hand over Travec's siblings if Travec can deliver to him, dead or alive, the renegade son of a Maxus noble and a slave woman, a desperado who has committed crimes which humiliated members of the Maxus overclass--this offender is none other than Arman the slaver, somebody Travec wanted to kill anyway!

Arman is believed to be on Fell--his mother was an Oro, one of the highland people of planet Fell, all of whom the lowland people of Fell consider insane. On their way to Fell, Mardien reveals to Travec that she is also an Oro, and that Arman is a hero to the Oros, herself included! When Travec confronts Arman he learns that Arman, ostensibly at least, is leading the Oros in a long term plot to overthrow Maxus--they hope to build Fell into a similar industrial powerhouse and put Maxus out of business. Part of the plan is selling to Maxus slaves like Mardien, volunteers who will conduct industrial espionage while toiling in the Maxus factories.

"Crusade to Maxus" starts off strong, but the resolution of the story is a little muddled and lacking in verve. To me it felt sort of contrived, and much of it is related to us in a bloodless second hand fashion that is not very exciting or satisfying.

Mardien's attitudes about Arman evolve as her relationship with Travec evolves; our heroes declare their love for each other and Mardien reveals to Travec the secret of what makes the Oros so special. The Oros are not only telepaths, but have discovered a method of achieving something like immortality, which renders them unafraid of death. When an Oro dies he can shift his personality into the brain of a loved one, where it will merge with the primary personality and live on in a vague fashion. I have to admit that I found this business rather unconvincing and uninteresting--it sounded to me like the consciousness of the dead person is quickly subsumed within that of the primary and quickly forgotten, and thus is not immortal at all. Mardien absorbed her mother's soul, but it's not like she has her mother's memories or talks to her mother or has taken on her mother's likes and dislikes or anything like that--"I felt her presence for a few weeks, as if she were in the room. Then gradually she melted completely into me." This is not any different from when somebody you love dies in real life! This is a half-assed concept that doesn't seem to change what death is like or change how life is lived very much at all, but seems to have been conceived by Vance as a plot device to produce people who are fearless because the plot needed a bunch of people to be fearless. To this end, the Oros can teach people who are not telepathic the technique of shifting your consciousness into a loved one's brain as you die.

After they have killed Arman, Travec and Mardien take over the crusade against Maxus, abandoning the plan of building a rival superpower, a project that would take decades or centuries and probably be strangled in the cradle by the Maxus space navy before a Fell space navy could be cobbled together. Our heroes, instead, direct the Oro slaves on Maxus to teach as many of the other slaves as possible the Oro soul-shifting ability. Because their leaders can communicate telepathically, and none of the slaves fear death, the slaves can launch a campaign of spectacular suicide attacks--for example, all at once, in the space of a moment, every single slave chauffeur on the planet crashes the air car he is driving, killing over a million people. The Maxus government crumples before such terrorism, and slavery is ended and a representative government installed.

"Crusade to Maxus" was first published as "Overlords of Maxus," a cover story in Thrilling Wonder Stories. Prefixed to the story is a funny little note from Thrilling Wonder's editor, believed to be Sam Merwin, Jr. It seems that some readers had written in to complain about SF stories depicting a future full of people fighting with swords and contending with slavers and so forth--surely sword fighting and slavery are anachronisms, totally out of place in a future of interstellar travel! Merwin replies that the modern world of 1951 is full of people who believe in voodoo and is plagued by dictatorial governments who throw dissenters into forced labor camps--he avers that human cultural differences that we might call anachronisms exist now and no doubt will continue to exist in the future.

A glance at the 1951 magazine version of the Maxus story reveals many changes were made to the text for book publication in 1986--the protagonist's name is even different, changed from Gardius to Travec. A long action sequence on Fell involving a fight with giant spiders was deleted--this section doesn't do much to move the plot forward, as it starts with Gardius, having been captured by Arman, being thrown in the woods to be eaten by the spiders, and then ends with Gardius, having slain the spiders, being captured again by Arman and this time sold into slavery on Maxus. In the 1986 version Arman just sells Travec into slavery on Maxus immediately upon capturing him. The 1986 version still contains the foreshadowing of the fight with the spiders--a lowlander tells Travec all about the monstrous spiders, so that the reader expects him to have to fight them, but they are never mentioned again!

"Crusade to Maxus" is like 50 pages, and I really liked the first 40 or so, which reminded me of the Demon Princes stories, but the ending is just OK. "Crusade to Maxus" has appeared in numerous Vance collections; under the title "Kruistocht naar Alambar" (Alambar is the capital city of Maxus) it is the title story of one such Dutch collection.

"Three-Legged Joe" (1953)

This is one of those stories in which academically-trained young men with a lot of new ideas are shown up by the uneducated old-timers for whom they have contempt because they underrate the value of those old goats' accumulated lifetimes of practical experience. In the end the newbies triumph over adversity, however.

John Milke and Oliver Paskell have just graduated from Highland Technical Institute and are going to planet Odfars to do some prospecting. They chose Odfars because there is evidence that it is loaded with valuable minerals, but, for some reason, nobody has staked any claims on the planet. Milke and Paskell try to find an old timer to accompany them as a hired hand, but none of the experienced prospectors they approach want to go to Odfars--these geezers even advise the boys to stay away from the place, making jocular comments about a "Three-Legged Joe" said to live there.

Milke and Paskell head to barren airless Odfars alone, making bone-headed amateurish mistakes both while preparing their expedition and while on the planet. A mysterious three-legged creature which they can never seem to get a good look at bedevils their operations, and they try various means to destroy it; all fail, but they do manage to neutralize the creature without killing it and thus open up Odfars's deposits to exploitation that will make them rich.

This is a slight but entertaining SF story with some amusing bits and a healthy serving of science, mostly about electricity--Milke and Paskell know all about "hysteresis" and "field conflicts," the "resistance of superconductive metals at absolute zero" and "induction coils." I don't know anything about that stuff, but I guess that is why they are rich and I consider buying a five-dollar book an extravagance.

After first appearing in Startling Stories, "Three-Legged Joe" would go on to be included in many Vance collections. A brief skim reveals there are quite a few differences in the text of the original magazine version and the 1986 version; for example, in the magazine version Milke says "If it's liquid...I'll eat your hat" and in the hardcover book version, he says "If it's liquid...I'll eat my hat." I'm finding the rationale behind some of the changes a little opaque.

"Sjamback" (1953)

"Sjamback" first appeared in If, the top story of an issue in which editor James L. Quinn's editorial is devoted to complaints that his new fountain pen is too complicated and praise for the film Breaking Through the Sound Barrier.

Wilbur Murphy is a cinematographer on the TV show Know Your Universe! One of the producers thinks the show is getting stale with all the scientific stuff they have been showing, and needs some sex, some mystery, some excitement! So he sends Murphy to the planet Cirgamesc (the challenge of pronouncing this name is one of the story's jokes), chasing rumors of superstitions and unlikely supernatural happenings, like claims a guy rides a horse from the surface of the planet up into space to greet incoming star ships!

Cirgamesc was settled by Javanese, Arabs and Malayans, and Murphy hopes to be able to film some interesting traditions and exotic rituals, preferably involving dancing girls, but for the most part the people there seem pretty tame--the son of the Sultan of Singhalut, the city in which Murphy disembarks, meets Murphy at the spaceport and tells him that "We left our superstitions and ancestor-worship back on Earth. We are quiet Mohammedans and indulge in very little festivity." One oddity does pique Murphy's interest, however: it seems that occasionally a citizen of Cirgamesc goes berserk--runs amuk--and becomes a "sjambak"--a bandit, a rebel against authority. Such troublemakers wear a metal ornament on their chests, and to facilitate the detection of such renegades the Sultan has decreed that everybody go around bare chested...including the women, hubba hubba!

Murphy is discouraged from investigating this phenomenon by the native authorities, the common people, and by an offworld businessman who has lived on Cirgamesc for nine years--the Sultan runs a surveillance state and things don't go well for those who look too closely into the subject of the sjambaks. A little detective work reveals that the Sultan's son is behind (or taking advantage of) the sjambak phenomenon--he wants to launch a jihad and these energetic rebels are to be his army. Singhalut, like all the cities on airless Cirgamesc, is under a dome, which severely limits opportunities for the city to grow. The solution, according to the atavistic (and perhaps insane) prince is to conquer some other dome cities or maybe some other planet. (The metal thing on the chests of the sjambaks is the visible portion of a device implanted into the sjambaks that allows them to breathe on the airless planet's surface.) In a way that is not very exciting or satisfying Murphy foils the jihad and figures out the kernel of truth behind the weird rumor of a man riding a horse in space.

("Sjamback" brought to mind those reader complaints of anachronisms mentioned by Sam Merwin, Jr. in Thrilling Wonder in 1951--when they venture outside the dome, the Sultan's soldiers wear spacesuits but are armed with crossbows and swords, and the sjamback that faces them down also wields a sword.)

"Sjamback" is just OK. There isn't much by way of thrills, the resolution of the plot is underwhelming, and the satire of TV is a little obvious and rather gentle--Vance's depiction of TV doesn't have the bile we see in other SF stories that address the threat posed by the idiot box, of which there are quite a few. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is perhaps the most famous and sophisticated of such attacks, but during the life of this blog I have encountered many others, among them Robert F. Young's "Thirty Days Had September," Robert Bloch's "Beep No More, My Lady," Charles Beaumont's "The Monster Show," and John D. MacDonald's "Spectator Sport." Vance made a packet of money writing for the Captain Video TV show, and so maybe he had a soft spot for the boob tube.

"Sjamback" might be of value to those interested in SF depictions of Muslims, Asians, and Arabs and Western essentialist views of nonwhites that boil peoples down to a few stereotypical characteristics: that businessman tells Murphy that the people of Cirgamesc are "schizophrenic.... They've got the docile Javanese blood, plus the Arabian elan." A number of SF writers have mined Islamic and Arab history for ideas; I haven't actually read Dune, by Jack Vance's friend Frank Herbert (Vance, Herbert and Poul Anderson would go sailing together in a boat they built themselves--we're talking about real men here!), but it is my understanding that it is largely inspired by Arab history, Islam, and T. E. Lawrence. Andrew Offutt integrates stuff from the Islamic world in some of his work, like King Dragon, but as I recall mostly as romantic window-dressing.

"The Augmented Agent" (1961)

Finally we come to the title story, which was first printed in Amazing Stories under the joke title "I. C. a. BeM." It was the cover story for that issue, and, when it was reprinted in The Best from Amazing Stories under the title "The Augmented Agent" in 1973, Jack got top billing again. (Remember how in the July 1973 issue of Fantastic editor Ted White spoke at some length about what a crummy job the publisher did putting together The Best from Amazing?) In the interim the story had appeared, under its original title, in the Spring 1968 issue of Great Science Fiction.

"The Augmented Agent" starts off like something out of Warhammer 40,000, as we learn that CIA agent James Keith has had all sort of weapons and surveillance and communications equipment integrated into his body. It is the 1990s, the Soviet Union is still a going concern, and Adoui Shagawe, premiere of the Soviet-aligned African nation of Lakhadi, has acquired some old intercontinental ballistic missiles (they lack warheads, for now at least!) Keith has been given the mission of infiltrating the Lakhadi government and disguised to look like Tamba Ngasi, a minister of the parliament of Lakhadi with a face that is "dark, feral and harsh: the face, literally, of a savage." Ngasi is a tough customer, a tribal chief who murdered his own family to win his seat in the Lakhadi legislature.

We observe as Keith sneaks into Lakhadi via submarine, assassinates Tamba Ngasi with one of his high tech secret weapons, takes the man's place and travels to the capital of Lakhadi, Fejo, a city built with Soviet money in a modernistic but African style where the hotel staff address the government bigwigs staying at the hotel as "comrade." (Here we find the inspiration for Ned Dameron's jacket illustration which mixes African designs and figures with Soviet iconography.) Keith as Ngasi attends parliament, where the wisdom of controversial policies of purchasing the ICBMs and allying more closely with the People's Republic of China are debated. One guy even says that Marxism is bunk! Lakhadi's policy is not set in stone, and Western, Soviet and Chinese agents are all there in Fejo, trying to influence the Lakhadi government, and Keith discovers that the Red agents are just as augmented as he is.

Was the man Keith killed the real Tamba Ngasi, or an impostor sent by Moscow? Is the Polish operative who mistakes Keith for a Soviet agent really working for the USSR, or is he a double agent working for Beijing? After much espionage business and killing, Keith, in his guise as Tamba Ngasi, finds himself dictator of Lakhadi. As the weeks and months of his regime go by, Keith begins taking on the personality of the man he is impersonating, a man who is impetuous and ruthless, and his policies begin antagonizing the Soviet Union, the Chinese, and even the United States, attracting the attention of agents from all three great powers who seek to change his policy or get him off the throne one way or another.

"The Augmented Agent" is a good Cold War spy story. I liked all the espionage techniques and all the many high tech devices, none of which I have detailed here. The Cold War issues addressed--e.g., How should Third World countries pursue their interests in the Cold War world? By adopting Western governing philosophies of revolution and socialism or democracy and capitalism? By accepting material aid from the great powers that no doubt come with strings attached? Or by forging a philosophically and materially independent course based on indigenous traditions and culture?--are compelling. "The Augmented Agent" lacks a neat and tidy resolution, but this reflects one of Vance's goals for the story, which is to dramatize the likelihood that conflict between different cultures is inevitable and a peaceful Earth an impossible dream. Like "Sjamback," if you are writing your master's thesis on the depiction of nonwhites by important SF writers, "The Augmented Agent" will provide some grist for your mill.

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With a single exception, the eight stories in The Augmented Agent and Other Stories are enjoyable, and it is definitely fun to find similarities between these lesser-known Vance stories and Vance's famous novels, and to see Vance's take on real life cultures and ideologies.

Science fiction stories from the 1960s in the next installment of MPoricus Fiction Log!

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

"Shape-Up," "The Man from Zodiac" and "Golden Girl" by Jack Vance

In our last episode I talked about "The Plagian Siphon," AKA "The Planet Machine" AKA "The Uninhibited Robot," a Jack Vance story with many versions and titles; I read the version in my hardcover copy of the 1986 collection The Augmented Agent and Other Stories, a book the cover illustration of which made me do a double and then a triple take. Today let's read three more stories from this volume, 1953's "Shape-Up," 1967's "The Man from Zodiac" AKA "Milton Hack from Zodiac," and 1951's "Golden Girl." These are what you might call Vance "deep cuts," stories which were published in SF magazines and then never anthologized, only reappearing in Vance collections.

"Shape-Up" (1953)

The first story in The Augmented Agent and Other Stories made its debut in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy. A glance at the magazine version's first page confirms that the version from 1986 is revised, with the word "copper" being replaced by "coin" in the later version ("he plugged his next-to-last coin into the Pegasus Square Farm and Mining Bulletin dispenser....")

Gilbert Jarvis reads the Pegasus Square Farm and Mining Bulletin as he sits in a cafe, drinking hot anise he has purchased with the last of his coins (or coppers.) In response to a classified ad, he goes to an inn for a rigorous job interview, which includes a sort of group interview component. I still recall with dread some group job interviews of my experience, but this group interview that Jarvis finds himself involved in is more dreadful still. The job applicants are all rough tough adventurer types, and have been called together under false pretenses--according to the man managing the interview process, the gathered men are all suspects in a murder, and have been brought together so that the killer can be identified and then summarily executed!

This is a decent thriller story about violent, dangerous men in a sort of lawless environment. In true classic SF fashion the mystery is solved, and Jarvis's life is saved, because Jarvis is a quick thinker who knows about science (in this case gravity.)

"The Man from Zodiac" (1967)

This one appeared first in Amazing, and was apparently the major selling point of the issue. "JACK VANCE'S GREAT SHORT NOVEL" the cover cries out above a surprisingly bland and busy illustration totally lacking in hot chicks, monsters or spacecraft. Amazing must have been in some kind of trouble, because, excepting "The Man from Zodiac," all the stories are reprints! Not that I am knocking the issue--there is every chance that those reprinted stories, pieces by Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester and Neil R. Jones among them, are awesome. And then there is the fun book column by Harry Harrison in which he says that SF may well be "the last bastion of the short story," praises Brian Aldiss, Keith Laumer and Samuel R. Delany, and takes swipes at widely beloved but also controversial figures Harlan Ellison:

The worst thing about Nine By Laumer by Keith Laumer (Doubleday, $3.95) is the overly long and pretentious introduction by Harlan Ellison.

and Sam Moskowitz:

Moskowitz has yet to understand that literary criticism is more than which parts of which stories resemble other stories.

Yeow, that one hurts!

OK, back to "The Man from Zodiac," which is like 40 pages in the 1986 version I am reading.

Martin Hack is the field representative of Zodiac Control, Inc., and owns an eight percent share of the company. Zodiac Control is an interstellar contractor that offers services to polities large and small--Zodiac will maintain order, enforce the law, extinguish fires, educate the young, manage the economy, and fight foreign enemies of those entities that sign a contract with them--Zodiac basically sets up and operates governments. The recent inheritors of 92% of Zodiac Control sign a seven-year contract with the state of Phronus on the planet Ethelrinda Cordas, and give Hack the job of managing this project.

Upon his arrival in Phronus, Hack learns that its people are semi-literate barbarians in a constant state of war (waged primarily at close range with swords and other such low-tech weapons) against their neighbors, the equally belligerent and primitive people of Sabo--the Phrones had hopes that Zodiac would supply them with high tech weapons with which to wipe out the Sabol. A pack of raiders and pirates, the Phrones would also like to pillage a sort of artists' colony/intellectuals' retreat known as Parnassus that sits nearby and is managed by one Cyril Dibden--the offworlder eggheads at Parnassus are defended by energy fields against which the Phrone cutlasses and poniards are useless. When Hack, surveying the territory of Phronus, suggests to one of the local lords that a charming seaside area be developed into a resort to cater to the tourist trade, this bloodthirsty campaigner responds, "Why entice strangers into the country? Far easier to depredate our neighbor Dibden. But first things first: the Sobols must be destroyed!"

The plot follows Hack's efforts to bring peace and order to the Phronus-Parnassus-Sabo region; through trickery he not only drags Phronus and Sabo into the modern civilized era, but uncovers a conspiracy on the part of Cyril Dibden, who was as interested in acquiring the Phrone and Sabol lands as those marauders were interested in despoiling Parnassus. In the end Zodiac has not only the Phronus contract, but one with Sabo and Parnassus, and Hack is a hero back on Earth at Zodiac's corporate offices.

"The Man from Zodiac" is a sort of light entertainment; it is smooth and pleasant, and made me laugh several times, and I recommend it. While it doesn't really engage with ideas (though we might see it as yet another example of SF elitism that dismisses democracy without a thought), there is one somewhat striking, somewhat incongruous, psychological passage:

At his deepest, most essential level, Hack knew himself for an insipid mediocrity, of no intellectual distinction and no particular competence in any direction. This was an insight so shocking that Hack never allowed it past the threshold of consciousness, and he conducted himself as if the reverse were true.

At the risk of seeming like Sam Moskowitz, I will point out that carefully planned subterranean explosive charges play an important role in the plot of "The Man from Zodiac," and that just such engineering plays a role in Vance's fourth Demon Princes book, 1979's The Face. Also of note, the editor's intro to "The Man from Zodiac" in Amazing, and portions of the text that seem to foreshadow a relationship between Hack and a young woman who owns lots of Zodiac stock, suggest that there were plans, which apparently did not come to fruition, for a series of Martin Hack stories.

"Golden Girl" (1951)

This is a first contact story. A reporter, Bill Baxter, goes to investigate a meteorite that has fallen in rural Iowa and discovers a burning alien space ship! He pulls out the unconscious occupant, a beautiful woman aged 19 or 20 with golden skin! Entranced by her beauty, he contrives to stay by her side in the hospital as she recovers, and, while the government and the press and the world wait with bated breath to learn what she is all about, it is Baxter who teaches her English.

The woman, named Lurulu (also the name of Vance's last published book), describes her society to Baxter--it is a standard issue utopia, with no more war, no more racism, no more crime, no need to work, etc. Lurulu was taking a trip in her space yacht when it malfunctioned and she crashed here on belligerent, racist, crime-ridden, labor-intensive Earth.

Lurulu is shown around New York--her world, she says, has no such skyscrapers or vast bridges, people living in flying houses and not congregating in large groups. Lurulu finds Earth exhausting. Baxter worships her and asks her to marry him, but she refuses--their cultures are too different. Shortly after, Lurulu commits suicide. Vance hints that "Golden Girl" is based upon an 1839 story in a book by J. G. Lockhart, Strange Tales of the Seven Seas, the diary of an Englishwoman who was shipwrecked on the coast of Africa and taken in by a black tribe--though the natives treated her well, in fact worshiped her, she missed English people and English life and so killed herself.

This story is not very good. The SF elements feel tired and obvious, and Vance has no success in making us feel Lurulu's homesickness or alienation, nor in making us feel Baxter's love or lust or infatuation or whatever it is, and the scene in which Baxter realizes she will commit suicide feels gimmicky. This is a filler story, but with no jokes or violence or other entertaining or exploitative components that might hold your interest or give you some kind of thrill. Gotta give this early Vance story a thumbs down.

"Golden Girl" was first printed in an issue of Marvel Science Stories featuring a debate about Dianetics between L.Ron Hubbard, Lester del Rey and Theodore Sturgeon.

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In our next exciting episode we'll finish up with The Augmented Agent and Other Stories. The wraparound illustration on the dust jacket of the hardcover edition of The Augmented Agent and Other Stories features a bust of Lenin and some other communist iconography, plus a female figure that reminds me of African sculpture. I don't recall any references to the Soviet Union or to sculpture in "Shape-Up," "The Man from Zodiac" or "Golden Girl," so maybe the key to the mystery of what story the cover illustrates will be cleared up in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log. Or maybe we will have to go along with the theory put forward in the comments on our last blog post by Transreal Fiction, that the cover illustrates "The Planet Machine."

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Three 1950s stories by Jack Vance: "The Miracle Workers," "The Men Return" and "The Planet Machine"

Flipping through the scan at the internet archive of the October 1958 issue of Astounding, seeking the illustrations for Pauline Ashwell's "Big Sword," which we read in our last blog post, I noticed that Astounding readers had voted Jack Vance's "The Miracle Workers" the best story in the July issue. I'm pretty sure I read "The Miracle Workers" years ago, long before this blog's spontaneous and incomprehensible generation, but I didn't remember much specifically and so I decided to give it another read, along with two other 1950s Vance stories which have yet to be subjected to the MPorcius treatment, "The Men Return" and "The Plagian Siphon" AKA "The Planet Machine" AKA "The Uninhibited Robot."

"The Miracle Workers" (1958)

In the Preface to the 2006 volume, The Jack Vance Treasury, Vance says that he wrote "The Miracle Workers" with the specific aim of appealing to Astounding's famous editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., who, Vance says, "had a predilection for unusual ideas." It speaks to Vance's ability to write for a market, and perhaps to Campbell's own ability to figure out what his readers wanted and transmit that info to writers, that "The Miracle Workers" was the most popular story in the issue in which it appeared.

I'm reading the version of "The Miracle Workers" that appears in The Jack Vance Treasury, via a scan at the internet archive; I believe the texts in The Jack Vance Treasury are derived from those prepared by the Vance Integral Edition project, and thus the text I am reading is as close as possible to Vance's original vision.

"The Miracle Workers" is set on Pangborn, a planet which was colonized by humans, the war-weary crews of space warships, over 1000 years ago. Pangborn's current human inhabitants have access to very little of their spacefaring ancestors' hi-tech equipment or technical know-how--these people ride around on animals or in animal-drawn wagons, their soldiers lug around spears and crossbows. But the Pangbornians of today do not pine for the conveniences of the modern industrial past--instead, they consider the few remaining hover cars and the energy weapons to be relics of an uncouth age, and consider empiricism and the experimental method to be mere superstition and mysticism! In place of what you and I might call science and technology, dear reader, the intellectuals of the story's topsy turvy milieu embrace voodoo and fortune telling! When Lord Faide's army marches off to war on Lord Ballant, behind his mounted knights and foot sore infantry roll the wagons of his cadre of wizards with their cabinets full of voodoo dolls!

The plot of "The Miracle Workers" largely concerns the esoteric work of, and rivalries among, Lord Faide's "jinxmen," "cabalmen" and "spellbinders," each of whom has different ambitions, attitudes and ideas; one young apprentice even suspects the scientific ancients' books and artifacts worth studying. During the battle below the towers of Ballant Keep we witness the sorcery of the jinxmen and cabalmen of both sides--we learn the nature of their spell casting, which consists in part of telepathy and in part of very clever psychological manipulation.

Another major plot element of "The Miracle Workers" is the relationship of the humans to the planet's natives, called by the humans "the First Folk." After Lord Fainde takes Lord Ballant's keep, wipes out the Ballant family and receives oaths of allegiance from Ballant's retainers, he is master of all humanity on Pangborn. This is when the natives, still resentful after being driven out of their ancestral lands and into the forests by human beings many centuries ago, begin their anti-human guerrilla war in earnest--for a long time they have been breeding and training an army of arthropods of all sizes for this campaign of revenge and reconquest. When Lord Faide finds that the conventional warfare methods of his knights and crossbowmen is of limited use in crushing the native uprising, he turns to his jinxmen, but since the jinxmen's sorcery relies on "getting into the heads" of their enemies, will it be of any use against the First Folk, whose mental processes, psychology and culture are radically different from that of humans?

This is a fun story, full of violence and understated jokes, but also a story about imperialism/colonialism and about ways of looking at the world, ways of thinking. Presumably the fact that the story chronicles a renaissance of scientific thinking (the formerly laid back First Folk have seized upon the experimental methods and mass production practices of the early human colonists in their drive to build a war machine with which to take back their homelands, while the quasi-medieval humans, in response, begin to consider a return to such methods themselves--the miracle workers of the title are not the jinxmen but their ancestors who flew spaceships between the stars) appealed to the science-loving audience of Astounding. The siege and bioweapon aspects of the story are obviously reminiscent of Vance's famous award-winning 1966 "The Last Castle" and his 1965 "The Dragon Masters." I feel like I just recently read "The Last Castle" and "The Dragon Masters," but I guess it was over four years ago because I don't see that I have produced any blog posts about them. Maybe it is time for a reread of those classics?

Quite good. "The Miracle Workers" has appeared in many Vance collections and many anthologies, including some purporting to offer some of SF's greatest short novels and some devoted to tales of warfare or magic.

"The Men Return" (1957)

The Earth has drifted into a field of chaos, and logic no longer functions, the laws of cause and effect having been repealed. The Earth's surface changes color and texture at random, the sun is absent from the sky and time is meaningless, the plants you ate "yesterday" may poison you "today." Humanity has almost been wiped out, and only a small number of men survive: insane people, whose disordered minds somehow sync with the disorder of the landscape, and the Relicts, men whose grip on sanity is so firm, whose belief in logic so steady, that they generate a field of order around their own bodies. But to survive, the Relicts must eat and drink from the world of disorder that surrounds them, a perilous endeavor.

Less than ten pages long ("The Miracle Workers" is like 65), "The Men Return" is more a catalog of absurd and insane visions and ideas (cannibalism is a given among the Relicts) than a plot-driven story. We observe the desperate day-to-day existence of a few Relicts, their scrabbling and scheming to find food and avoid becoming food. Then the Earth drifts out of the area of randomness, the sun returns and with it logic and causality--the insane people quickly die from trying to repeat the feats of daily life under chaos (e. g., stepping over a twenty-foot chasm or eating rocks) and the Relicts can begin building civilization anew.

"The Men Return" is well-written, featuring Vance's customary clever dialogue, but to my taste it lacks substance; you might call it experimental if you were being kind, a little gimmicky if you were being callous. Maybe we should see this as a pioneering work of psychedelia. (Remember when I pointed out the psychedelic nature of some passages in Clark Ashton Smith's 1932 story "The Monster of the Prophecy?" Well, elsewhere in The Jack Vance Treasury--on page 384, in the author's afterword to "The Overworld"--Vance admits to being influenced by Smith, whom he read as a child.)

An acceptable strange entertainment. I read "The Men Return" in The Jack Vance Treasury; it first appeared in Infinity Science Fiction, where its experimental nature is heralded on the cover: "A New Kind of Story by Jack Vance." You may recall that we recently read the Algis Budrys story in this issue of Infinity, "The Burning World." "The Men Return" has been widely anthologized, including in Robert Silverberg's Alpha Two (alongside Vance's friend Poul Anderson's quite good "Call Me Joe") and in Brian Aldiss's Evil Earths (alongside Henry Kuttner's fun adventure novelette "The Time Trap.")

"The Planet Machine" (1951/1986)

In contrast to "The Miracle Workers" and "The Men Return," stories anthologized far and wide and beloved by multitudes for their memorable ideas, "The Plagian Siphon" has never been anthologized, only reappearing in Vance collections following its initial airing in Thrilling Wonder Stories. The title used for the tale in the Vance Integral Edition, where it appears in the Gadget Stories volume, is "The Uninhibited Robot." I am going to read the version in my hardcover copy of the 1986 collection The Augmented Agent and Other Stories, which I acquired at a book sale at an Ohio public library--in this book the story appears as "The Planet Machine."

The Augmented Agent and Other Stories is apparently somewhat rare, only 798 pages of this edition having been printed. When I got it, it was in pretty good shape, but here in Maryland I live in the upper story of a 100-year-old house whose landlady considers maintenance optional, and is thus subject to strange and unpleasant variations in temperature, humidity, and odor; as a result, the condition of my books has deteriorated to some degree. Ned Dameron provided The Augmented Agent and Other Stories with a mind-boggling wraparound cover in hideous colors that seems to integrate Soviet iconography and African-influenced modern sculpture. I have not read the story "The Augmented Agent" (original title, "I-C-a-BeM"); when I do, maybe it will provide some insight into this outre vision.

Scans of my copy; feel free to click to zoom and get more intimately
acquainted with this Pepto Bismal Socialist nightmare

(Curious caterpillar that I am, I read the first dozen paragraphs of "The Planet Machine" in my hardcover copy of The Augmented Agent and Other Stories and then the same paragraphs in "The Plagian Siphon" in the October 1951 Thrilling Wonder Stories and found quite a few additional words and phrases in the 1986 version. There are also typos in the 1986 version that do not appear in the 1951 version. The universe is in a state of entropy.)

Remember how in Heinlein's 1955 Tunnel in the Sky, Biggle's 1963 All the Colors of Darkness, and J. T. McIntosh's 1962 "One Into Two" there is a network of teleporters connecting different parts of the world and/or the galaxy? Here in "The Planet Machine" there is a similar system connecting many different Earth locations as well as different planets, facilitating trade and travel. Marvin "Scotty" Allixter is a technician whose job uis to maintain and repair these teleporters. One day a slight irregularity is discovered with transmission to and from Rhetus--maybe the Rhetus machine just needs some fine tuning, but maybe some criminals have acquired their own teleporter machine and are rerouting transmissions of goods to themselves, stealing them. So Allixter puts on an armored suit and straps on a disrupter pistol and steps into the "tube," bound for Rhetus to investigate.

He materializes not on Rhetus but some world unknown to man; he has walked out of an alien teleporter reception machine, but he sees no accompanying transmission machine. How can he get back to Earth? Using a computer translator, Allixter haltingly communicates with some natives of this world. These little weirdos lead him through a landscape of ruins to a machine--it turns out that this machine runs the entire planet in the interest not of the natives but of some aliens, the Plags, mining and refining resources and teleporting them to the Plag home world. The machine is supposed to run itself, and no Plags live on this planet. The machine's security apparatus is currently malfunctioning, blowing up the mining and refining installations at random, and killing all the Plags sent to repair it. With the aid of the natives and his translation device, Allixter figures out how to avoid getting killed by this security system himself, how to repair the machine, and how to get back to Earth. He also figures out that his arrival here was no accident--he was deliberately sent as a kind of cat's paw by a clandestine Plag agent on Earth. Allixter returns to Earth and neutralizes the Plag agent. Then, in the kind of denouement you find in detective stories, he explains to everybody (including readers like me who couldn't figure it out ourselves) how he figured that stuff out.

"The Planet Machine" is not bad, maybe a little long. Vance spends a lot of time exploring how a computer might go about learning an alien language so it can act as an interpreter between an English speaker and a heretofore undiscovered alien civilization, and on speculations on how a complex computer might work, how one might program it and distract it if need be.

A version of "The Planet Machine" appears in this 1980 Dutch collection of Vance stories,
while the VIE edition of the story, "The Uninhibited Robot," appears in the 2013 collection Magic Highways.

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When I think of Jack Vance I first think of things like the two Cugel books, which are so hilarious, the Demon Princes books, with their complicated villains and violent detective/secret agent plots, or the Alastor and Cadwel books, which touch on politics and social issues in the context of an adventure story. But these three 1950s stories have at their centers science (in particular the scientific method itself and circumstances which seem to call it into question) and technology. All three are worth your time, if only for Vance's charming style and clever little jokes, which always bring a smile to my face.

Expect to see more Jack Vance short stories in the near future here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

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