Let's read three more stories from the Richard Matheson collection titled The Shores of Space.  We've already read a bunch of them--check out these links if you are so inclined:  "Trespass," "When Day is Dun," and "The Curious Child"; "Being," "The Test," and "Clothes Make the Man"; "The Last Day"; "Pattern for Survival."  I'm not going to blog about the most famous stories in The Shores of Space, "Blood Son" and "Steel," because I've already read the former (I recommend it) and I already know the story of the latter from seeing a TV version of it and hearing talk of a cinematic version.  I own a 1957 paperback copy of The Shores of Space, but as you can see at one of the posts linked above, it is falling apart and it is a hassle dealing with it so today I am reading a scan of a 1969 Bantam printing.

"Little Girl Lost" (1953)

This story debuted in an issue of Amazing that has one of the least attractive covers I have ever seen on a big name SF magazine.  "Little Girl Lost" has also been filmed for television, isfdb is telling me, but maybe I won't remember it.

OK, I remember it, but it is short and pretty good, so it wasn't annoying to experience the text version of "Little Girl Lost."  Told in the first person, from the perspective of the father, the story is about how a little girl falls through a temporary portal into another dimension and her parents are frantic trying to find her--they can hear her calling for help, but cannot see her.  We get some incomprehensible jazz about how a one-dimensional world is a line and a two-dimensional world is an infinite number of lines and a three-dimensional world is an infinite number of planes and so on, but mostly the story is about the emotions of the parents and Matheson does a good job with that so thumbs up.  A dog is the hero of the story, all you canine lovers should take note.  The plot is resolved by luck more than initiative or logic or strength or whatever, but that adds to the fear element, so is actually a benefit more than a detriment to how well "Little Girl Lost" operates as a horror story.

"Little Girl Lost," an above average piece of work, has been reprinted many times. 

Here we have a lame joke story, overwritten and perhaps offensive.

A married couple consists of a male poet and a female sculptor; neither is very successful financially.  Their toddler keeps destroying their work, and the rest of the house besides. The poet talks about killing his son, using some rarely seen words (this is part of the overwriting) and repeating himself (yeah, more overwriting) for comic effect.

The parents have the idea that a companion for the kid will keep him under control. They purchase a robot child which will grow at the normal human rate, maturing alongside their real child.  But instead of pacifying their little hellion, the robot makes things worse, as junior figures out how to get the robot to help it in its destructive pursuits. So the parents murder their son and raise the robot in its place, a ruse which succeeds for many years.

Thumbs down.

On February 9 we talked about three Richard Matheson stories that were reprinted in The Shores of Space, a 1957 collection which I own.  Let's check out three more stories from this book which is leaving a trail of glue fragments and dried paper shards all over my house.

"Trespass" (1953)

This story first appeared in Fantastic under the title "Mother by Protest" and was advertised on the magazine's cover as a "thriller" and promoted inside as "daring."  "Trespass" has reappeared in many anthologies as well as Matheson collections.

Scientist Collier returns home from a six month trip to the Latin American jungle to find his wife Ann pregnant!  There is no way he could be the father, but Ann insists she has not been unfaithful.  This causes a rift in their relationship and Matheson does a good job depicting how both man and wife react to this dreadful situation.  Ann's pregnancy proceeds, and again and again the Colliers and their doctor are faced with unconventional phenomena--Ann can't stop eating salt; Ann feels compelled to seek out the cold; Ann catches a serious illness and then is miraculously cured without medical intervention; and on and on.  Ann, never interested in serious reading before, speed reads all of her husband's science books and then devours huge stacks of books on science and philosophy she gets from the library.

Collier and his friends come to a startling conclusion--Ann has been impregnated by a Martian and the alien baby growing inside her is already fully conscious and feverishly gathering info on our world and culture to facilitate Martian conquest of this big blue marble we call home!  It even seems like the Martian can take over Ann's body and read the minds of those nearby, as is normal for aliens in these old SF stories.

Will Ann give birth to a hybrid monster?  Is Ann the only victim of this manner of diabolical alien intrusion?  Can the Colliers marriage be patched up?

This is a pretty good one, though maybe a little too long and maybe a little anticlimactic; I was expecting something more in the way of fireworks at the end.

As I have told you before, I own a copy of the second volume of Richard Matheson: Collected Stories, and it turns out that all three of today's stories appear in this 2005 book.  In the brief commentary in that book after "Trespass" we learn that Matheson hated the title put on the story by the magazine staff, and that this story was made into a TV movie starring Barbara Eden called The Stranger Within.    

Left: John Schoenherr     Right: Frank Frazetta

"When Day is Dun" (1954)
**********

Back in October, the internet archive was down (it was a tough time, people!) so I went to Wonder Book to buy a cheap copy of the A. E. van Vogt fix-up novel The War Against the Rull because I wanted to compare its text to that of an anthology version of one of the component stories, "The Gryb" AKA "Repetition."  While there, I also bought a copy of Avram Davidson's The Masters of the Maze.  It turned out that the store was having some kind of "buy 2 paperbacks and get a 3rd free" sale, so I grabbed a decaying copy of Richard Matheson's The Shores of Space, Bantam A1571.  (I didn't have time to hunt through the shelves for something with a good cover.)  In honor of my cheapness and of the man who wrote Vincent Price's best movie and Steven Spielberg's best movie, let's read three stories from this freebie.

But first!  Links to the two stories in The Shores of Space which I've already blogged about: "The Last Day," and "Pattern for Survival." 

"Being" (1954)

"Being" debuted in an issue of If with an awesome meteor shower cover; Matheson's story is graced with some pretty chilling Virgil Finlay illustrations.

"Being" is an effective horror story that exploits the tension between city and country folk, depicts two marriages, convincingly portrays people under terrible stress, and includes two very common science fiction elements; I quite enjoyed it.

It is August, and married couple Les and Marian, Los Angelenos, are driving cross country to New York to visit Marian's family.  Matheson does a good job describing their discomfort and frustration as they drive through the deserts of the South West--the intolerable heat, the need to get off the highway due to construction and follow poorly maintained dirt roads, the ever present risk of the car overheating.  There ain't no air-conditioned Toyota Corolla or GPS in 1954!  On some remote road the couple get kidnapped and held captive in a makeshift zoo owned by a gas station owner!

"Being" is more than hicksploitation.  Merv, widower, war veteran, and gas station owner, is a prisoner himself--a telepathic blob monster from outer space is making him capture people so it can eat them, one man every two days!  (We encounter many blob monsters and telepathic aliens here at MPorcius Fiction Log.)  This is the first time Merv has ever captured a woman, and he is shaken to his core--he's already fed eight men to the blob monster but feeding it a woman feels like an even deeper level of degradation!  And Marian looks like his beloved wife Elsie!  

Matheson's descriptions of the psychology of our four characters as they struggle to survive in extraordinary circumstances, always trying to outwit or outfight each other, are compelling.  Merv and Les in particular are forced to balance the need to survive with their ideas of justice and duty.  All the characters act believably and it is easy to sympathize with any or all of them.

A quite good science fiction horror tale.  "Being" has been reprinted in a bunch of anthologies and Matheson collections, including another I own, Collected Stories Volume 2, where Matheson in an afterword talks about the genesis of the story and his efforts to turn it into a screenplay.

"The Test" (1954)

"The Test" first saw print in an issue of F&SF alongside Chad Oliver's "Transformer," a story I panned when I read it a few years ago, and an Edmond Hamilton story I have yet to read.  There is always new territory to explore!

It is the year 2003.  A law has been passed--old people, I guess 65 and older, have to take a comprehensive physical, mental, and psychological test every five years and those who fail are euthanized!  Our characters are a married couple with two kids and the husband's father, age 80.  The story dwells on ambiguity and ambivalence--the justification for the law is overpopulation and the way it strains resources, but of course there is reason to believe it was passed because many people are sick of having their elderly parents around.  The emotions of the married couple in the story are torn--the old man is a burden, a hassle, but at the same time his son still loves him.

This is only barely a SF story--for the most part it is a mainstream literary story about the relationships between adult children and their parents in our prosperous individualistic age in which family ties are weaker and people live longer, in which people want more and more freedom and (paradoxically) give the government more and more power in hopes of securing that freedom--generally at the expense of the freedom of others.  Matheson handles the material ably, and employs an economical style--every phrase and image is powerful, the story is just the right length and moves at just the right speed.  Thumbs up!      

This is another widely reprinted story.  "The Test" appears under the heading "Overpopulation" in Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Science Fiction Firsts, and in his afterword to the story in Collected Stories Volume 2, Matheson talks about F&SF editor Anthony Boucher's reaction to the story and tells us there was some interest in Italy in adapting the story for the screen, but Matheson doesn't know if anything came of it.

"Clothes Make the Man" (1951)

"Clothes Make the Man" debuted in the final issue of Damon Knight's short-lived magazine Worlds Beyond.  This is a silly filler story.

An ad exec guy is a real clotheshorse.  He has all his clothes custom tailored, even his undies.  He never takes off his hat, even inside, and however hot it is, he won't take off his jacket.  On a picnic his wife, brother, and sister-in-law take off their shoes and socks to wade in a stream, but he refuses.  

This blog post is brought to you by the letter "M," which stands for MPorcius and Merril.  As you know, we've been cherry-picking stories from the honorable mentions list at the back of 1959's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume.  We've reached the "M" authors on the list, of whom there are five.  One is Richard Matheson, whose story "The Edge" Merril gave the nod; I read "The Edge" back in early May.  Another is Sam Merwin, Jr., whose novel The House of Many Worlds I read back in 2017 and said failed as a humor piece, as an adventure tale, and as a SF story.  Merwin's Merril-approved story, "Lady in the Lab," appeared in the men's magazine Adam, in an issue I cannot find a free scan of; seeing as I am too cheap to buy this magazine on ebay (looks like it goes for $13.00 or more) we won't be discussing "Lady in the Lab" today.  That leaves us with stories by three authors, Katherine Maclean, "T. H. Mathieu," and Dean McLaughlin, to read and dissect today.

"Unhuman Sacrifice" by Katherine MacLean 

After debuting in John W. Campbell's Astounding, "Unhuman Sacrifice" would be reprinted by British geniuses Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest in their oft-reprinted anthology Spectrum and by that American icon of high brow SF Damon Knight in his own oft-reprinted anthology A Century of Science Fiction.  So here we have a science fiction story that is endorsed by all the smarty smarts of the SF community regardless of their political commitments or geographic locations!  I read MacLean's "The Gambling Hells and The Sinful Girl" recently and enjoyed it so I have every reason to expect that I too can join the lovefest!

In our last episode we finished up a collection of stories by Robert Silverberg, Dimension Thirteen, and today we finish up a collection of stories by Richard Matheson, Shock!  Back in 2015, at the very dawn of time, we read "Legion of Plotters" and said it was good.  In 2016, as life began to stir, we read "Dance of the Dead" and judged it OK.  In 2018, as man began to use tools, we read "The Splendid Source" and denounced it as a waste of time.  On April 11 of this year, the high modern age, we read "The Children of Noah," "Lemmings," and "Long Distance Call," awarding Matheson two pluses and a minus.  A week later, as society drifted into decadence, we read "Mantage," "One for the Books" and "The Holiday Man," declaring one good, one bad and one merely acceptable.  

That leaves us today, as civilization collapses all around us, with four stories to go, and Matheson at a score of 1 (four pluses, two neutrals and three negatives.)  Matheson is ahead of the game, but a run of bad luck could still find him deep underwater.  Well, let's dig these stories up at the internet archive and make our final determinations.

"The Edge" (1958)

This is a sort of obvious story, and Matheson knows it is obvious, and so does one of those "meta" "recursive" things in which the character in the story remarks to himself that "this thing that is happening to me is like the things that happen in SF magazines all the time."  It is competent, though, so I'm giving it a passing score.  

An executive who lives on Long Island and commutes daily to his Manhattan office is stressed out.  He goes to a restaurant he has never been to before in hopes of relaxing but a stranger joins him unbidden.  This stranger acts like he knows the executive, and he even knows about the exec's college career and military service, where he lives and works, the name of his wife.  The stranger seems to think the harried executive graduated a semester earlier than he really did, however.

Eventually, after a lot of conversation, the protagonist comes to suspect that he has entered a parallel universe much like his own, much like people do in the SF magazines he used to read.  His suspicions are confirmed when he gets home and his wife greets him familiarly but then answers the  phone to find on the other end a man who also claims to be her husband!

"The Edge" debuted in F&SF.  People interested in Matheson's career might find Anthony Boucher's intro to the story of value as Boucher praises Matheson not only effusively but also with some specificity: "Born of Man and Woman" was the second best first story Boucher ever read, and Matheson's speech at a convention (Boucher is not specific, but I think it was the ninth Westercon) was "the most intelligent and moving speech I have ever listened to from a guest of honor--a candid discussion of commercialism and artistic integrity."  "The Edge" has been reprinted many times in many languages.

"The Creeping Terror" AKA "A Touch of Grapefruit" (1959)

isfdb suggests this story made its initial appearance in Frederik Pohl's fifth Star anthology, where it was called "A Touch of Grapefruit."  (Maybe a pun on the phrase attributed to the Corsican Ogre?)  I'm reading it in the 1982 anthology Science Fiction A to Z: A Dictionary of Great Science Fiction Themes, where it appears under the theme "Cities" and the title "A Touch of Grapefruit" but a footnote announces "This was first published under the title The Creeping Terror."  I don't know what is going on here, if somebody someplace made a mistake or if the version of the story in Shock (1961) was revised and the version in Science Fiction A to Z is that 1961 revised version but was printed under the original 1959 title.

This is an annoying joke story in the form of an academic paper, full of joke footnotes, a satire of the powerful influence of the culture of California, specifically Los Angeles, on the rest of the United States, and I guess maybe of the rapid growth in population and geographic size of L.A. in the first half or so of the 20th century.  Citing many sources and offering numerous block quotes, the writer describes how citrus trees sprung up fully grown in the Midwest, how smog spread east to skies all over the nation, and how people all over America began to dress skimpily and became fascinated with show business, automobiles, and going to the beach.  The Northeastern states resist this creeping Californification, to limited effect.

An irritating waste of time.  Thumbs down, but I will admit that this might, perhaps, be a useful document for historians of Los Angeles, a sort of window into public perceptions of the city we call La La La Land; it is perhaps noteworthy that Matheson spent his youth in New Jersey and New York, and Pohl was also a New Yorker.

See, I don't always cherry pick the good covers to post on the blog

"Death Ship" (1953)

"Death Ship" was made into an episode of The Twilight Zone which I don't remember seeing, though I probably did.  The story is well-written, but the ending is a little disappointing.

After spending some quality time in the year 1980 with Barry Malzberg, Felix Gotschalk and Harlan Ellison, let's go back...back...back...to the 1950s and hang out with the guy who wrote Steven Spielberg's best movie as well as Vincent Price's best movie, Richard Matheson.  On April 11 we started reading Matheson's 1961 oft-reprinted collection Shock!; let's read three more stories from that volume today (we're reading the original versions of these stories via the sorcery of the internet archive, world's greatest website.)

"Mantage" (1959)

"Mantage" debuted in Science Fiction Showcase, a hardcover anthology edited by Mary Kornbluth.  Fred Pohl got her the job editing the anthology after her husband Cyril died of a heart attack in 1958; as Pohl tells it, Kornbluth's heart was worn out during his World War II service and the man ignored doctor's orders to stop smoking, drinking, and eating salty food.  As an active SF fan, Mary Kornbluth was qualified to edit an anthology, and Science Fiction Showcase went through multiple editions, but for some reason she didn't go on to edit any more.  (I got all this info from three autobiographical posts at Pohl's blog which focus on his relationship with the Kornbluths, Cyril Kornbluth's death and cremation, and the genesis of Science Fiction Showcase.  (Links: One Two Three.)  Pohl sort of portrays himself as a hero in these memoirs, putting himself out to save the dysfunctional Kornbluths from themselves, and there is some evidence Mary Kornbluth found this kind of thing annoying.  (Link to some evidence.)) 

Enough with the SF gossip.  "Mantage" is what isfdb calls a novelette, and is like 24 pages in Science Fiction Showcase, a scan of which I am reading.  I sighed when I realized the story was about Hollywood; I'm kind of sick of Los Angeles stories.  (I am always glad when a story is about New York.)

"Mantage" is a total bore, even though it does take place partly in Manhattan.  A writer guy sees a movie about a writer guy, and laments that real life isn't like a motion picture, that you can't rush through the ten years of hard work it takes to become a successful writer in a 30-second montage of brief shots of clocks, cigarette butts, and a guy at a typewriter, but have to live every boring or arduous second.  That night, looking in the mirror, he wishes life was more like the movies.  

We kind of know what is going to happen, but, regardless, Matheson inflicts on us a long tedious mainstream narrative of the writer achieving literary success and getting married and taking a ten-week trip to La La Land to write a screenplay based on his novel where he gets involved in a love triangle with a sexy secretary and a sexy actress and thus jeopardizes his marriage but then his wife takes him back blah, blah, blah.  The gimmick that is supposed to make this cliched goop tolerable is that we read it in a series of brief scenes and--dun dun dun--the writer is also experiencing this stuff, his own life, as a series of brief scenes!  He can only remember the significant high points, not the quiet days of hard work, so it feels like his life is passing by in an hour and a half!  He can't recall swearing, he can't recall having sex--his memories of intimate moments with a woman fade to black before she disrobes, you know, just like in a Hollywood movie!  Suddenly his kids are grown without him having witnessed their formative years, suddenly his wife is old without his having appreciated their time together, suddenly he is dying--and he sees the words "THE END" floating before him!

The gimmick is dumb, the plot is sleep-inducing, there is no tension or surprise, and the story is three or four times as long as it need be.  Thumbs down! 

Besides in Matheson collections, after its debut "Mantage" would show up in a few anthologies, including Peter Haining's The Hollywood Nightmare.    

The Hollywood Nightmare has an introduction by fan favorite Christopher Lee

"One for the Books" (1955)

This is an OK story, maybe too long at 14 pages.  An uneducated 59-year-old man works at a university as a janitor.  One morning, he wakes up speaking French.  He can barely control his own speech, French phrases just come right out, almost of their own accord.

Yesterday he worked in the French department, and today his work brings him to other departments, and soon he has an encyclopedic knowledge of many subjects, and will reel off facts and figures and quotes from books autonomically, in response to questions.  He can't manipulate or even really understand this knowledge, he is like a machine, regurgitating words in a monotone when prompted by outside stimuli.

Matheson provides readers many scenes in which the janitor's wife and friends respond with alarm to stuff the janitor says, and we also get many examples of the kind of trivia the janitor now "knows."  The middle of the story thus feels repetitive.  In the final third of the story, assembled college professors rapid fire many questions at the janitor, testing his knowledge, but never think to figure out how this happened to the guy, 

But then we find out how.  An alien space craft appears and sucks the information right out of the janitor's brain, leaving him a blank slate without memory, a man unable to talk or recognize his own name.  We get a superfluous denouement that undermines the shock ending of the tale in which we learn that a year or so later he has learned to speak again.

I would have preferred a story in which a working-class man suddenly has access to vast knowledge and uses this unique resource to become president or a crime boss or a messianic figure or whatever, and faces moral dilemmas and/or undergoes a radical change in values and personality or something--you know, a story in which a character makes decisions and changes, a story which speculates about life and society.  I guess that would be a real science fiction story or a mainstream story--here we just have a horror story in which a guy doesn't act but is merely acted upon by inexplicable forces and suffers.  Oh, well.

We're judging "One for the Books" merely acceptable.  After its initial appearance in Galaxy, "One for the Books" would see print again in several Matheson collections and a few anthologies, including Untravelled Worlds, which looks like a text book inflicted upon British schoolkids.  

"The Holiday Man" (1957)

"The Holiday Man" debuted in the same issue of F&SF which contains one of the better of Chad Oliver's stories about how much better a primitive life is than a modern one, "The Wind Blows Free," as well as stories by Poul Anderson and Avram Davidson we should check out sometime.  It has been reprinted in anthologies like Robert Potter's Tales of Mystery and the Unknown and a book of stories from F&SF, and of course a pile of Matheson collections.

A man is very reluctant to go to work, but his callous wife tells him he must go, nobody else can do his job.  He walks to the station, rides the train to the city, wastes time in a bar not drinking his beer, then sneaks into his office late.  He lays down on a couch and writhes and screams for hours.  Then he gets up, writes notes on a sheet of paper, delivers the paper to his boss.  It seems that this dude goes into some kind of trance and can see everyone who will die the next day or something like that, that he watches them as they expire, be it peacefully in bed or horribly in a fire.  He works for a newspaper and they print his predictions.  It is sort of implied that this is prediction is done only for holidays, or maybe the prediction for holidays is particularly interesting to the public.

This story felt a little oblique when I read it, but I own a withdrawn library copy of Richard Matheson: Collected Stories Volume Two and took a gander at the little afterword to the story therein, to find Matheson confirming that newspapers, in the Fifties at least (I was born in 1971), would regularly predict how many people would die on each holiday, something I don't know that I have ever heard of before.

"The Holiday Man" is well-written, economical, engaging, and successful in setting a mood, and of course I like the theme of being in a difficult marriage and having to commute to an office job you find humiliating or debilitating (you know, like in the unacknowledged classic masterpiece The Kinks Present a Soap Opera), so thumbs up.

**********

Well, we've got a balanced mix here, one long and tedious story, one acceptable story, and one short and effective story.  So a score for today of zero.  The last installment had two pluses and two minuses, so also a zero.  So we are over halfway through Shock! and it's a wash; well, with six stories to go, Matheson has a chance to achieve liftoff or sink into the abyss.

We'll spend our next episode in the 1950s, so stay tuned if that is your thing.