Years ago, in a thrift store in the Middle West if memory serves, I bought hardcover copies of those volumes of Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison's Decade series of anthologies that cover the 1940s and 1950s.  A stamp on the first pages of both books certifies that they were once in the library of one Gary E. Colburn.  Today I'm cracking open the volume covering the Fifties.  Mr. Colburn's copy is an American edition printed in 1978; the original edition of Decade: The 1950s was issued in Britain in 1976.  I guess the same plates were used to print both editions--the text of this copy uses British punctuation, with no period after "Mr" and single instead of double quote marks.  

Harry Harrison writes the introduction, presenting a sort of standard history of SF and offering conventional opinions, with some personal notes: the '30s pulps were crude and garish but Harrison and Aldiss and a legion of other SF fans and future pros devoured them; the '40s were dominated by John W. Campbell, Jr. and Astounding; in the '50s arose new editors and new magazines like Horace L. Gold with Galaxy and Anthony Boucher with F&SF, SF writers gave more attention to the soft sciences like sociology and psychology, and the focus of SF publishing began to shift from magazines to books.  The most remarkable thing about Harrison's intro is his praise for Robert Crane's Hero's Walk, a book which I found exasperating.

Now let's read a few of the stories which Aldiss and Harrison selected to represent the decade of the Korean War, the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising, and "We will bury you."  (Feel free to think of the 1950s as the decade of the plastic hula hoop, the rock 'n' roll sock hop, and I Love Lucy if you are trying to cultivate a good attitude about life or something.) 

"The Edge of the Sea" by Algis Budrys (1958) 

"The Edge of the Sea" first was published in Venture, where it was the cover story.  In his intro, Harrison tells us that Venture "was the first SF magazine consistently to use adult themes."  Alright, let's try some "adult themes" on for size.  

The recurring theme of Algis Budrys's work, and I guess it is an "adult" one, is the question of what it means to be a man.  (We've solved this issue nowadays by asserting that a man and manliness is whatever you say it is, but life wasn't so easy in the past as it is in the 21st century.)  The protagonist of "The Edge of the Sea" is a self-sufficient and independent man of great physical strength and indomitable will.  Budrys lets us know just what a hard ass this dude is with a line that may shock all you foodies out there who have considered opinions about when to harvest avocados or what single source dark chocolate is the best: "Dan Henry had never cared how his food tasted."

(I think Budrys chose his protagonist's name with the intention of reminding readers of John Henry and Paul Bunyan, the muscular heroes of American tall tales of feats of strength.)

This rugged individualist is driving down Route 1 down in Florida, the Atlantic on either side of him as he heads for Key West, when he spots a metal thing the size of a car covered in barnacles at the base of the road; we SF fans assume this must be an alien space ship that has been beached by the rough seas after being underwater for years.  Dan Henry is sure he can get rights to this piece of salvage and make a stack of cash.  So he climbs down to the water's edge, even though a hurricane is coming, to secure the thing to the shore by tying it up with a make shift rope and moving big rocks around it.  He pushes his muscles to the limit and risks his life battling the elements to make sure his treasure isn't carried away by tide or gale.

In his quest to secure his rights to this UFO, Dan Henry doesn't just challenge the power of nature--he resists the authority of government!  A cop comes by and, suspicious about what Dan Henry is up to in the middle of a god-damned hurricane, tries to arrest him, but Dan Henry outfights this agent of the state, fearing arrest will somehow jeopardize his salvage rights to the metal artifact.  

The UFO begins showing signs of life, shooting a ray up into the sky, and the cop drives off to get help.  He brings back a professor, another representative of authority for Dan Henry to triumph over--Dan Henry is sure the thing he found is an alien craft, and the academic is skeptical.  But not for long!  A larger space craft arrives to retrieve Dan Henry's discovery with tractor beams.  Rather than let his treasure slip through his grasp, Dan Henry jumps on the thing, which must be a robot probe or scout or something, and rides it up to the big space ship!  Nothing on Earth or in Heaven is going to keep Dan Henry from achieving his goals!  As the story ends we can't be sure if Dan Henry is about to enjoy the greatest adventure of all time--First Contact with space aliens!--or just get killed.

(Dan Henry's ride is reminiscent of the famous scene in Dr. Strangelove, released some seven years after this story was published.)

While we might interpret Budrys's story as romanticizing the manly man who sets himself goals and overcomes all efforts of nature, government and the intellectual elite to discourage him, the author doesn't sugarcoat the costs of living such a life--the crazy lengths Dan Henry goes to to assert his independence and triumph over the natural and the artificial environment put his health, liberty and very life at risk, and make of him something of an outcast from society.  And Dan Henry, like an addict or a man driven by irrational passions, is conflicted about his own risky decisions, not really knowing why he does the things he does. 

Not bad.  The themes and ideas are fine, but Budrys's descriptions of Dan Henry's struggles trying to move rocks and survive gale force winds are a little too long; his description of the ray that shoots out of the alien artifact is also too long.  While trying to craft powerful images and set a mood Budrys has a tendency to go a little overboard, to overexplain and overdescribe; I find myself getting bogged down in Budrys's paragraphs.  

"The Edge of the Sea" not only impressed Aldiss and Harrison, but other editors as well, including Judith Merril, who included it in her third Year's Greatest SF anthology and Damon Knight who put it in his oft-reprinted Worlds To Come.  The story also was translated into French and Italian--you can see Dan Henry tied to a guard rail, his car precariously balanced over the Atlantic, and the alien probe transmitting its message to the mother ship in Karel Thole's cover for 1966's Urania #444. 

Karel Thole ignored all of Budrys's talk about barnacles

"The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury (1951)

It is time to explore that final frontier--space!  We'll be travelling via the Fall 1950 issue of Planet Stories, then edited by Jerome Bixby of "It's a Good Life" fame.  Our guides into the starry void will be Bixby and some of our favorite people: Ray Bradbury, Henry Kuttner and his wife C. L. Moore, and Poul Anderson.    

The cover of this issue features a gorgeous blonde accoutered with the sorts of accessories all the gals clamor for, among them high heels and a dagger, and the interior illustrations in this issue are also pretty good-- lively, with robots, people getting blasted, and crashing spaceships.  The letters column features a missive from F. M. Busby (we read over 600 pages of small type about his heroine Rissa Kerguelen back in 2017) who praises Ray Bradbury, Leigh Brackett and Margaret St. Clair, and jokes that the blurbs on the cover of Planet Stories and even the story titles often bear little resemblance to the stories' content.  Another epistle is from Lin Carter, who jokes that he doesn't have a girlfriend (at least I think that is what he is doing) and complains that the letters column isn't as good as it was when people like Isaac Asimov and Chad Oliver were regularly writing in.  Like Busby he offers kudos to Bradbury (though he didn't care for "The Long Rain," which made its debut in Planet Stories as "Death-by-Rain") and Brackett, as well as praising Henry Kuttner and Edmond Hamilton.

"Death-Wish" (AKA "The Blue Bottle") by Ray Bradbury

I own a copy of William F. Nolan's 1970 anthology A Sea of Space, which includes the story "The Blue Bottle," a revised version of "Death-Wish."  In his intro to the story, Nolan says that, for this first book publication, the story has been "heavily revised" and "is now virtually a 'new' story."  So I will read "Death-Wish" in the internet archive scan of Planet Stories, and then read "The Blue Bottle" in my physical copy of A Sea of Space, and report my findings.

Bradbury starts off "Death-Wish" with poetic verbiage telling us how dead Mars is, the canals dry, the ancient cities so fragile that beautiful towers collapse into dust at the sound of a man's shout, that kind of thing.  Then we meet Albert Steinbeck and Leonard Craig, tramps, who are driving into one of these ancient cities in a rusty old automobile they spent six weeks repairing so they could drive around Mars.  Steinbeck is a man on a mission--he is looking for the fabled Blue Bottle, an ancient work of art that is said to contain the very treasure every man most wants.  For ten years Steinbeck has searched for this bottle, and the search has given to his life, otherwise bereft of purpose, structure and meaning; at this point he is actually afraid to find the artifact, because when he finds it his life will no longer have any direction.  As for Craig, he has no higher ambition than to drink booze, smoke cigarettes, fill his belly and get lots of sleep; he is just along with Steinbeck, whom he has known for two years, for the ride.

They split up in the city and Craig finds the bottle.  He doesn't realize what it is, and just drinks from it--bourbon--and then puts it aside among the other detritus of the long lost Martian civilization.  Steinbeck realizes what Craig found but right after he gets his hands on it, a fat rich guy appears, gun in hand, and steals the bottle.

Our heroes catch up with the rich guy--he is dead, his body unmarked, and the bottle is gone.  Steinbeck jumps in the car and chases after a party of mounted men he suspects looted the bottle from the rich porker's body--Craig, not interested in getting in a fight, stays behind--and when Steinbeck catches up to them they are also dead.  And there is the bottle.  Steinbeck realizes that the bottle does give everybody what they want, and what most men want is to die, to escape the responsibility and guilt and fear that comes with living!  Steinbeck dies, truly happy for the first time in his life.  When Craig catches up he finds the bottle and finds it is full of booze.

"Death-Wish" is a good story; I like the philosophy, and Bradbury's poetic flights--which I don't always appreciate--work this time around.  Thumbs up!

So, let's read "The Blue Bottle" and see what changes Bradbury made to the story 20 years after it was first published.

The changes are not big; they mostly serve to make the story more compact, and more thin, less detailed and less like an adventure story.  Steinbeck is now just "Beck," and he and Craig have known each other only a few weeks, not two years.  They don't carry guns or cigarettes.  The fat guy is no longer described as rich, and has less dialogue.  The "rusted automobile" is now an "ancient landcar," and Beck worked on it all by himself, and for an unspecified time period.  The guys who took the bottle off the fat guy are now on foot instead of riding horses.  In "Death-Wish" we are told one reason Mars is populated by human tramps is that "resources had petered out forty years ago."  In "The Blue Bottle" we are told instead that "the race had moved on to the stars."  (I guess that means "human race," but maybe we are also, or instead, to think of it as "the space race.")  All the philosophical stuff seems to be about the same, though in "Death-Wish" Bradbury specifically pointed out that rich people also were dissatisfied with life, but in this revised version the fat guy no longer is rich, and Bradbury doesn't say that.

I'm going to say these changes, on net, make the story slightly worse--it has less character, less personality, less texture.  The reason behind most of these changes is a mystery to me; it's not like Nolan could have been demanding he cut the story for length--the story is already short and Bradbury's is the biggest name in the book.     

"The Blue Bottle" has reappeared in several Bradbury collections, including Long After Midnight.

"The Crowded Colony" by Jerome Bixby 

This story appears under the pseudonym "Jay B. Drexel;" according to isfdb, Bixby used the Drexel pen name twice.

"The Crowded Colony" is an anti-imperialist joke story.  We meet three characters with the names Burke, Barnes and Randolph hanging out in an old Martian town.  A couple of days ago the expedition of which they are part landed on Mars and deciphered an old manuscript found in a temple and learned the Martian language and are now treating the Martians like slaves and servants.  The text of the manuscript strongly suggests the Martians were once a vital and creative race but have fallen into decadence and impotence.  The three conquerors argue over whether the Martians deserve the respect accorded to people or are just clever animals.    

So, we readers are lead to think these conquerors are callous, racist humans who are mistreating the natives of the red planet.  Then Bixby makes his gimmick clear.  Burke, Barnes and Randolph are octopoid aliens from another star system.  By a crazy coincidence they landed on Mars just days after the first human expedition from Earth landed on Mars--the real natives of Mars are extinct and the invaders have mistaken the Earthers for Martians.  That "temple" was the Earth space ship; the "Martian manuscript" was an English translation of an authentic Martian manuscript.  The extrasolar conquerors took what they thought were native Martian names because their Psych staff theorized that this would help the native "Martians" get acclimatized to being colonized.  

Anyway, as the story ends the humans are preparing their energy weapons to massacre the octopoids--they have been playing along with the invaders' mistaken belief that they are the real Martians, whom the octopoids assume, based on the manuscript, have no high technology and are unwarlike, and now that the aliens are complacent, they will take them by surprise.

This lame gimmick story would never be reprinted, for good reason.

"The Sky is Falling" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

"The Sky is Falling" appeared in Planet Stories under the pen name C. H. Liddell.  Bixby in the editor's space before the letters column even talks about how excited he is to find a brilliant new author in Liddell.  Is Bixby lying to readers, or had Kuttner and Moore pulled the wool over his eyes with a legitimately pseudonymous submission?  (Didn't J. K. Rowling, whose name has been in the news lately, do this a few years ago?)

As the story begins we are told the Earth is no more!  Holy crap!  Johnny Dyson is flying through space in a ship with a robot, God knows where, and he has a flashback to the story of how he survived the destruction of the Earth....

On Earth tensions are high as the nuclear armed nations teeter on the brink of war.  The defense industry is monopolizing most economic and human resources, and scientists are scrambling to figure out some way to neutralize atomic weapons.  A small amount of taxpayer money is devoted to a long shot--sending a manned space ship to Mars to mine ores there to bring back to Earth; it is hoped that those alien ores might reveal the secret of how to defend against nuclear attack.  Piloting a space ship to Mars takes an electronic brain and mining ores takes a vast amount of horsepower, so along with three men (three losers who aren't good enough scientists or technicians to have been drafted into the military industrial complex) goes a giant robot, an ogre-sized thing with many limbs that looks like a monster ant.

One of the three losers is Johnny Dyson.  Dyson is a pessimist and a depressive who thinks his generation has been screwed by the last generation, who thinks working hard and following the rules is for suckers.  Other people may be sheep, but not Johnny!  Most of the text of Kuttner and Moore's story is a tense thriller, as Johnny tries to convince or trick the two other astronauts--one a guy who misses his wife Poochie, even though she divorced him and even has put out a warrant for his arrest for his allegedly having taken some of her property, the other a drunk who is in command of the mission--into helping him to accomplish his plan of sabotaging the ship while it is on Mars so they don't have to return to Earth, which Johnny is sure is going to be wiped out in a nuclear war very soon.  There are many compelling scenes of Dyson trying to manipulate or evade these two guys, and we learn all about the psychologies of each of the three of them, as well as all about how the robot works, it being essential to the official mission and Dyson's treacherous scheme.  There is also a lot of philosophy, as Johnny rationalizes his traitorous actions and argues with the other men.  Are people good or evil?  What do we owe our fellow man--do we have to keep our word and fulfill our end of a bargain if we later realize we don't like the bargain we struck?

Johnny Dyson whines like one of those kids who spent eight years enjoying themselves studying something useless while the squares their age were working real jobs in stores or factories or starting businesses, and now demand those squares pay their debts for them, but Kuttner and Moore leave the story a little ambiguous, allowing readers to either identify with Johnny or to condemn him.  Are the world's problems the result of the behavior of selfish jerks like Dyson, or the behavior of those who blindly follow the rules like the other two goofs on the Mars mission?  Is Johnny Dyson villain or victim?

"The Sky is Falling" also offers plenty of metaphors and clever images and literary references.  I have several times noted that SF people love A. E. Housman, and here in "The Sky is Falling" we get a quote from "The Laws of God, The Laws of Man," as well as a quote from Eliot's "The Hollow Men."  Kuttner and Moore assume you are educated, just quoting the poems without telling you their titles or who wrote them.

The plot resolves itself in the way a Malzberg story might.  (And don't forget, Kuttner and Moore are Malzberg's heroes.)  Johnny comes close to succeeding in his aim of marooning himself and his comrades on Mars, but in the end they overpower him and he goes insane.  Dyson thinks Earth has been destroyed in a nuclear war, but it has not.  He is taken back to Earth and put in a madhouse he thinks is the space ship--he suffers the delusion that his crewmates and the robot are searching for a new world to settle on.  The final stinger is that Johnny was right, the ore from the Mars mission does not yield a defense against nuclear attack, and when Johnny dies in the asylum it is not from old age, but because the atomic war he predicted breaks out and all of human life is exterminated.

"The Sky is Falling" is a great story, a good thriller that has cool SF technology ideas (the robot stuff is great) and argues philosophical points and has such traditional literary values as compelling characters and images.  I think the story also offers ammunition to those who take sides in SF community controversies.  I think some sciency types who love Astounding and and some literary types who love F&SF think of Planet Stories as a magazine full of poorly written escapist nonsense--well, Kuttner and Moore's story here offers all the literary values and speculation about technology and its effect on people you could want.

Another point of contention.  Among both his detractors and supporters are people who seem to think New Jersey's own Barry Malzberg was somehow radical, somehow outside the SF mainstream, in his tone of pessimism and his depiction of astronauts going insane.  But in 1950's "The Sky is Falling" we have a story by two writers of great popularity who had their fingers in all corners of the SF world, people who had cover stories in both Weird Tales and Astounding, a story suffused with both of those Malzbergian themes, techno-pessimism and astronauts who go insane and put their comrades, and all of humanity, at risk.  This story is yet another reason to believe that Malzberg has roots in the center of the SF tradition and that SF before the New Wave was more diverse and well-rounded than many people today seem to think.

(The case for Malzberg's radical or unique nature rests much more strongly on his use of oblique stream of consciousness narratives, his depictions of sexual dysfunction, and his ability to write stories that are supposed to be funny that actually are funny, characteristics we see in his mainstream fiction as well as his SF, along with skepticism of all large institutions that often manifests itself in his SF work as skepticism of the space program.)

An enthusiastic thumbs up for "The Sky is Falling."  Somehow, this story has never appeared in a "Year's Best" or "SF Greats" or "Essential Classics" kind of anthology.  For shame, editor people!  It can be found in the Kuttner/Moore collection Return to Otherness, including in an abridged German translation of that book. 

"Star Ship" by Poul Anderson

"Star Ship" is one of the stories in Anderson's Psychotechnic League future history, a series totally distinct from the future history which features Nicholas Van Rijn, David Falkyn,  Dominic Flandry and the Polesotechnic League.  Brian Aldiss in 1974 would include "Star Ship" in his anthology Space Odysseys, and the 1950 tale would be the title story of an Anderson collection first printed in 1982.

Fifty years ago a Terran FTL exploration ship came to planet Khazak, a planet inhabited by cat people at an Iron-Age technological level, people split up into monarchical city states who are constantly raiding and warring on each other.  The humans came down to the planet in a space boat, but the boat became nonfunctional and so they were stuck among these warring furries.  For three generations the humans have been living among the bellicose Khazaki, some working to build up a Khazaki industrial base, making firearms and building a rocket to take them back to the starship, while others instead have gone native, human women abandoning the Terran idea of equality of the sexes to embrace the life of a housewife, human men becoming pirates who participate in the endless raiding of the feline natives.

Anson is a third generation human on Khazak who has been living the life of a pirate; his human height and human muscles (the cat people tend to be short and slender) have given him an advantage in the sort of sword and javelin and archery combat the Khazaki engage in.  A handsome and heroic muscleman, Anson has had a lot of luck with the ladies, and Anderson hints that Anson hasn't limited himself to human women--I guess humans can have sex with the furred and tailed and whiskered natives.  Oy.  But the human woman he truly loves, Ellen, has always eluded his grasp, partly because her bookish brother, Carson, does not approve of Anson.

Carson is like the opposite of Anson; this guy has always struck out with the ladies, and like his sister, has refused to embrace Khazaki culture and tried to stay as Terran as possible.  

One day Anson returns from a one-man fishing trip to find the Khazaki city-state where the humans live has been taken over by force by a rebellious aristocrat who was exiled a few years ago for plotting just such a coup.  To the shock and amazement of the human community, Carson was this rebel's right hand man!  He helped the rebels get a hold of the firearms the humans had made for their buddy the king and now Carson plans to use the recently completed rocket to fly to the space ship that is still orbiting Khazak.  With the spaceship, which has atomic weapons, Carson and the rebel aristo can become the invincible rulers of this world!

One wrinkle in Carson's plan: only one person in the world knows enough astrogation to get the rocket to the star ship, and that is his sister Ellen.  Ellen is against the rebellion, and is in hiding with humans and cat people loyal to the old king, but Carson's feline thugs are searching the city for her!

Anson brings Ellen along as he leads a force of picked cat men into the castle via a back way while the main force of loyalists assaults the front, and Anderson gives us plenty of bloody battle scenes with flashing swords and sizzling blasters and siege engines and testudos and all that.  During the fighting Ellen falls in love with Anson.  Anson's party seizes the rocket but suffers heavy casualties.  The rocket takes off with Ellen at the controls.  Anson, in the engine room with his best friend, a cat man he has been on many pirate adventures with, finds that Carson has stowed aboard the rocket!  He has to kill Carson, who has a blaster, and his best friend takes credit for the kill, as if Ellen knew Anson had killed her beloved brother, it would ruin their relationship.  With the atomic weapons of the star ship at their disposal, the loyalists now can depose the usurper, and Ellen and Anson can get in touch with the Terran space empire and bring civilization to Khazak.

This is a moderately entertaining sword and planet or planetary romance style adventure.  Anderson adds a little emotional and intellectual heft to "Star Ship" with a theme of the drawbacks of change.  Both Anson and his native crony realize that their close comradeship will end when he marries Ellen.  And this feline fighting man also reflects on how bringing civilization to Khazak will radically alter Khazak society, and maybe he won't feel at home in it any longer.

**********                                 

Based on what I've read, this is a pretty good issue of Planet Stories.  The Bradbury and especially the Kuttner and Moore stories are in particular recommended.

We'll be taking a break from SF for our next blog post, but with luck we'll see be experiencing technology, danger and death.     

At the internet archive you can browse literally thousands of 20th-century magazines whose raison d'etre was to print photographs of topless young women.  Many of these magazines also published fiction, and a significant proportion of this fiction was produced by people whose names will be familiar to the science fiction fan.  Today let's check out four such stories, two by Harlan Ellison and one each by Fredric Brown and Jerome Bixby. 

"The Hungry One" by Harlan Ellison (1957)

When it was revised for the 1975 collection No Doors, No Windows, "The Hungry One" was retitled "Nedra at f:5.6."  That's right, this is a story for all you photography nerds!  And even better, a story about New York City!

Our narrator is a photographer who has taken pictures of such luminaries as Anita Ekberg and Bettie Page--hubba hubba!  This October day he is walking around Central Park, taking photos, and he sees the sexiest woman he has ever seen, a redhead not only beautiful but who exudes a desire, radiates a hunger, for sex!  Ellison uses up a lot of ink describing this woman, who is perfect in every way, perfect eyes, perfect voice, perfect body, etc.

Anyway, ensorcelled, the photog addresses her and she immediately takes charge of their relationship, volunteering to pose for him in the park and then in his studio.  Ellison tries to throw in real life New York references, but I have to admit I don't remember a statue of Pulaski in Central Park; maybe Ellison is thinking of the monument to King Jagiello that was made for the Polish pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair; maybe to Ellison all Poles look alike.  This is a painful microaggression that is really diminishing my ability as a Polish-American to enjoy this story!  (Ha, ha.)

The forward beauty, whose name is Nedra, strips on her own initiative in the narrator's studio so he can photograph her naked and then have sex with her.  Ellison goes into great detail about the process of Nedra removing her duds and about her perfect body and about their kisses (her tongue is "like an electric eel") and their rough sexual intercourse.  When I was a thirteen-year old with no access to pornography this story probably would have blown my mind.  As a jaded 49-year-old all the sex stuff feels too long. 

Anyway, all the clues that the girl is a vampire that Ellison has been giving us turn out to be legitimate; when the narrator develops the film Nedra does not show up in any of the exposures, and then she, presumably, kills him.

Out of curiosity I looked at the 1975 revision of the story, which has the subtitle "An Hommage to Fritz Leiber."  Ellison actually rewrote a lot of the text, updating the list of women the narrator has photographed (Rita Moreno is out, Ann-Margaret is in), changing the photographer's age, for example.  In 1957 the narrator shoots two rolls of film of Nedra in the park; in 1975 he takes ten rolls of color film.  The 1975 version also has fewer clues that Nedra is a vampire, though the plot and climax are essentially the same.

Competent, I guess acceptable--or maybe mildly good if you are horny.  Interestingly, the isfdb lists "Nedra at f:5.6" as "non-genre."  This is obviously a vampire story (I mean, the girl's unusual name is an anagram of "drane," means "underground," and includes "dra," as in "Dracula," people!) so I would judge this an isfdb mistake.

If we set aside all the photos of half-naked women, the other thing in the magazine besides the Ellison story worth looking at is an article about Salvador Dali's elaborate art installation at the 1939 New York World's Fair, The Dream of Venus--like Ellison's story, Dali's installation, which featured topless women swimming in a pool with a glass wall, one of them painted to look like a piano keyboard, mixed prurience and a desire to push the envelope with traditional artistic values and skills. 

"Trace" by Jerome Bixby (1961)

"Trace" appeared in the fourth issue of Showcase, an issue with multiple SF connections.  The magazine's editorial includes book reviews, and the editor savages Harlan Ellison's collection The Juvies, saying the stories are "garish, hokey, and adolescently intense" and making fun of Ellison's vocabulary.  There is a tedious article by by Forrest J. Ackerman, full of anemic jokes, about actresses who appeared in horror movies.  There is also an article about William Rotsler, who would later write quite a few SF movie and TV tie-ins and illustrate many small press SF publications like Locus and Science Fiction Review.  The article on Rotsler here in Showcase focuses on his nude photography, which, we are told, is meant to not only be sexy and artistic, but funny.

Bixby of course is famous for the story "It's A Good Life."  His story here in Showcase is one page long--one page too long, I say.  The narrator gets lost on the road in an isolated part of Massachusetts, his car fails, and he uses the telephone of a guy living in this remote area--this guy is obviously the Devil, though the narrator doesn't realize it.  They have a conversation, then the tow truck arrives and the story ends.  There is no real plot, climax, or resolution to the story.  I guess there are jokes of the feeblest kind.  The most noteworthy element of the story is the fact that in the second column it is hinted that the Devil is God's (or maybe Christ's) brother, after in the first column we were reminded that Satan is a fallen angel.  How can he be both?  This kind of internal incoherence is annoying.

Thumbs down for this irritating waste of time.  Despite my bitter condemnation of it, "Trace" would be reprinted numerous times!  What is wrong with this world?

Interestingly, the isfdb says that "Trace"'s "first place of publication is unknown."  Now I'm rubbing my hands together like a movie villain, feeling like a person in possession of esoteric information.  How many people out there over the years have read "Trace" in a book and said to themselves "This story is so bad, I wonder who had the temerity to first publish this piece of rubbish..." and turned to the publication page only to find no clues to the identity of the first ground into which this bad seed set down roots.  Well, I know something they do not know!  And now, so do you!  I'll keep this forbidden knowledge to myself, but readers of this blog should feel free to alert the good people at isfdb that the first place of publication of "Trace" has been uncovered by a doughty adventurer who is content to remain anonymous!  (Feel free to tell them about "Nedra at f:5.6," as well.)  

"Tale of the Flesh Monger" by Fredric Brown (1963)

All these girlie magazines were competing with the king of the hill, Hugh Hefner's Playboy, which famously had fiction by the most prestigious authors and interviews with major cultural figures.  This issue of Gent isn't content to challenge Playboy's dominance with contributions from big guns like respected author Fredric Brown and Cassius Clay, one of the world's most prominent athletes, plus articles spotlighting beloved actors Roddy McDowell and Tony Randall; no, in this issue, Gent actually publishes an article making fun of Hefner's "The Playboy Philosophy" column.  From hell's heart I stab at thee, Hef!

The narrator of Brown's story, "Tale of the Flesh Monger," is on death row.  Don't shed any tears for him--he hastens to tell us he wants to die.  Then he relates the tale of how he came to this horrible pass.

Bill (that's his name) was a failed actor flipping burgers in La La Land when he found a lost wallet.  Instead of turning the wallet in to the police, he decided to use the credit cards to enjoy himself.  Amazingly, at the expensive restaurant at which he chose to start his night on the town, he meets the owner of the wallet, a dude named Roscoe!  This joker blackmails Bill in a bizarre way--he insists that Bill accept him as his agent, promising Bill that he will have a successful career in Hollywood if he assents to Roscoe's management and pays him ten percent of everything he makes.

A series of lucky breaks and odd coincidences leads to Bill becoming a movie star!  Also odd: Roscoe doesn't just take ten percent of Bill's pay, but ten percent of his winnings when Bill gets lucky at the craps table, and when Bill marries a woman as a publicity stunt Roscoe has sex with her one time for every ten times Bill does!  

After the marriage of convenience ends in an amicable divorce, Bill falls in love with a sweet girl, Bessie, but is afraid to marry her because he knows Roscoe will take a one-tenth slice of her sweet lovin'!  So he tries to kill Roscoe, but accidentally shoots down Bessie and ends up convicted of her murder.  The kicker at the end of the story is that Roscoe must be the Devil, and Bill wonders what form Roscoe's confiscation of ten percent of his death will take.

Cripes, another lame Devil story.  Who likes these?  This one is better than Bixby's abortion, but the gimmick is dumb and I'm giving it a thumbs down.  

"Tale of the Flesh Monger" would go on to be reprinted in some Brown collections under the title "Ten Percenter."  

We have come full circle...we started with Harlan and now we end with Harlan, and, I have to say, so far today Harlan is blowing away the competition with his sexy vampire story, which actually makes sense and shows some level of ambition and attention, unlike Bixby's and Brown's dumb Devil stories, which don't seem to make much sense and betray little effort.

It looks like "The Late, Great Arnie Draper" made its debut in the 1961 book Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation and was reprinted in this issue of Adam, where it takes up a single page.  The lead story of this issue is a cowboys and Indians adventure by Gary Paulsen, who would go on to become famous for writing young adult novels like Hatchet.  Paulsen's story here is favored with a drawing of a naked young woman being held captive by Native Americans who have bound her wrists, so, fetishists, take note!  There is also a lame five-page spoof comic of Batman and Robin called "Fatman and Bobbin."  Oy.

"The Late, Great Arnie Draper" is an acceptable mainstream literary story with a little twist ending that you might call cynical or a device for deflating people's pretensions and artificiality.  At a university, a smart, popular, successful student who apparently was a hard worker who was nice to everybody is killed in a car wreck.  The students who knew him well, his roommates, former girlfriends, etc., gather in the malt shop to tell stories about how awesome he was.  They all agree about how he was a genius and a gentleman and a kind person and so forth.  Finally, a girl who is just on the fringe of the group, a girl whom the others have seen around but whose name they don't know, says that Arnie "was a lousy bastard," and they all agree to that, too.

Why do they agree?  Were they all envious of Arnie?  Did Arnie have a second life that was a sort of open secret in which he fucked this nameless girl and broke her heart?  Maybe Arnie was a jerk who screwed over everybody but only this nameless woman had the balls to admit it today?  Are these people just sheep who act in a crowd, just agreeing with whatever some assertive person says?  Is the point of the story that Arnie was corrupt and artificial, that these kids are corrupt and artificial, or that everybody is corrupt and artificial, that love is a scam and our lives are just one lie after another? 

A trifle, but not bad.

**********

Ellison' stories aren't great, but they are successful: Ellison has a goal, and he achieves it, and along the way presents phrases and effects that indicate he is a dedicated craftsman with some skill and produce some kind of worthwhile intellectual or emotional response in the reader.  Bixby and Brown have done good work elsewhere, but their stories discussed here are just bad--they lack a goal or aim at a goal that is not worth achieving and don't even reach it, and the journey they take the reader on, no matter how short, is tedious and irritating.  

In conclusion, let me say that looking at these old magazines is always fun, and enlightening, as they serve as a window into a different world, a world with different values and interests and preoccupations than our own, but which actually produced our own.  As always, the internet archive and its contributors are to be commended for making this fascinating and entertaining material accessible.

Last week I purchased Operation Future, a 1955 anthology edited by Groff Conklin and put out by Permabooks, with the last pennies remaining on the Half-Price Books gift card I got as a Christmas gift.  Having just read a bunch of deliberately innovative stories from the 1970s, let's check out some stories from the late '40s and early '50s by Theodore Sturgeon, Murray Leinster, Jerome Bixby and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore; perhaps these are the sorts of stories that laid the foundations for that 1970s work, or the sort of stories those "Me Decade" writers were rebelling against.

"The Education of Drusilla Strange" by Theodore Sturgeon (1954)

Editor Groff Conklin's introduction to this novella (it's like 36 pages here) made me laugh; in my last blog post we witnessed Barry Malzberg make the case that after ten years or so a SF writer should retire because he is out of ideas.  But Conklin here, comparing "The Education of Drusilla Strange" with Sturgeon's 1940 "Derm Fool," tells us that Sturgeon has "matured in the short space of 14 years, both in writing ability and in richness of conceptual grasp."  I suppose these assessments are not mutually exclusive (a guy could write the same basic story again and again for 15 years and get better at it with practice), but Conklin and Malzberg certainly seem to have contrasting attitudes about whether an enduring career leads to growth or degeneration.

A spaceship drops a beautiful naked woman off on the seashore--she is an alien with psychic powers and sophisticated science and engineering knowledge, exiled to our pathetic and disgusting planet of Earth for the crime of murder!  Not only does she have to live among us ignorant schlubs, but alien torture satellites beam down into her mind the beautiful music and art of her sophisticated homeworld, a painful reminder of all she has lost!

"The Education of Drusilla Strange" first appeared in Galaxy

"The Education of Drusilla Strange" is a quite good story that takes the adage "behind every great man is a great woman" and runs with it.  The plot is solid, and full of surprises; Sturgeon gets you to believe one thing about the alien exile or her homeworld or some other character, and then later pulls the rug right out from under you, telling you that the opposite is true. He does this in such a way that it doesn't feel like a cheap trick, but comes as a pleasant surprise that feels quite natural.

The alien, who takes the name of Drusilla Strange, thanks to her superior brain, ultra keen senses and mind reading abilities, has no trouble fitting into Earth society and making a decent living.  She takes up with a musician, Chandler Behringer, and, by designing a superior guitar and amplification system and even doing clandestine surgery on his arm to give him greater dexterity, succeeds in making him the world's finest guitarist!  She has an ulterior motive in doing this that reflects how miserable she is on Earth--she manipulates Chandler into projecting her own alien-style music back up at the torture satellites in hopes this act of insubordination will trigger a bombardment from the satellite which will put her out of her misery!

Fortunately for everybody, another exiled alien, Luellen Mullings, whom Drusilla initially thought was a vacuous trophy wife, saves the day.  Luellen, who is married to a novelist whom she has been shepherding to greatness, reveals the truth to Drusilla about their homeworld (it is decadent and corrupt and in terminal decline) and the Earth (it is young and vital, the "hope of the Galaxy") and how she can enjoy her life on Earth, and contribute to Earth's rise to greatness.  It turns out that Earth's history is full of alien exile women who have been inspiring human men to heroic deeds! A hopeful and happy ending, though I presume one which will not meet today's standards for thinking about gender roles.

All the little scenes and elements are good (Drusilla's reactions to Earth technology and customs are engaging), and the story as a whole is well-paced and constructed.  I really enjoyed ol' Ted's work here--this may now be my favorite thing by Sturgeon! (Feel free to check out the many ups and downs in my relationship with Sturgeon over the course of this blog's life!)

"Cure for a Ylith" by Murray Leinster (1949)

It looks like it has been over three years since I have read anything by Leinster.  "Cure for a Ylith" is one of those traditional SF stories in which a scientist uses high technology and trickery to resolve the plot and achieve his goals and trigger a paradigm shift in his society, and it is pretty good.

"Cure for a Ylith" first saw print in Startling Stories; behold the Chrysler Building!

Planet Loren has suffered under the tyranny of the monarchy for centuries.  Garr, a medical researcher, is one of the tiny handful of Lorenian subjects permitted to travel to another planet via the interstellar teleporter system.  He returns to Garr after two years on Yorath, bringing with him a new device.  The device, he tells people, is able to pick up transmissions of such low power that they have never been detected before.  When people test out the device (by putting on a headset) they report that they have had conversations with deceased relatives--the device apparently allows communication with the immortal souls of the dead!  Good people who use the machine receive comfort and advice from their relations in the afterlife, while people who have misbehaved receive dire warnings of punishment!

Garr finds himself in the royal court after being called upon to help treat one of the King's pet monsters (the "Ylith" of the title.)  He makes sure that the King learns of the Yorathian device and tests it out himself.  This results in catastrophic internecine warfare among the palace guard and aristocracy--among the two million dead are the King and almost all his flunkies.  The monarchy collapses, hopefully to be replaced by a more responsible government.

As Garr explains in the final scene of the story, the Yorathian machine doesn't really communicate with the dead--it brings to vivid life the user's superego, personified as a trusted deceased relative.  (This sounds kind of dumb as I type it, but I felt like it worked as I read the story.)  The King's warped superego warned him of traitors among the elite, inspiring an attempted purge that set off the fighting.

Leinster does a good job of quickly sketching out his setting and characters, economically bringing it all to life.  I also like the plot.  "Cure for a Ylith" is a solid piece of work; can it be time for me to explore the unread Leinster books I have on my shelf: Quarantine World, Space Captain and The Greks Bring Gifts?  

"The Holes Around Mars" by Jerome Bixby (1954)

"The Holes Around Mars" first appeared in Galaxy

Bixby's is a pretty prominent name in SF, but I am not very familiar with his work.  He of course wrote the immortal classic "It's a Good Life;" I also enjoyed "Vengeance on Mars" a few years ago, as well as some of the films he contributed to, so I welcome a chance to become better acquainted with him.

"The Holes Around Mars" follows the investigation of strange geological phenomena on the Martian surface by the first Earth expedition to the red planet.  I'm afraid readers will figure out the answer to the mystery long before the scientists and astronauts do.  I'd judge this story a little slight and kind of silly (a main theme of the tale is the puns made by the expedition's leader, and there is even a "he was so scared he shit his pants" joke) but it is a pleasant entertainment and I'm giving it a passing grade.

"Project" by "Lewis Padgett" (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore) (1947)

"Project" is the main reason I bought Operation Future; I am keen on Kuttner and Moore, and a quick look at isfdb on my battered iphone while at the store indicated that this story has appeared in no other book.

It is the 21st century, and the world is ruled by an autocratic "Global Unit;" only a tyrannical one-world government, it is believed, can keep a lid on nuclear power and prevent the rise of dangerously powerful mutants (homo superior), the product of limited atomic wars.  The Global Unit, however, is not truly in charge--it accepts without question the advice of the scientists of the secretive Council at Mar Vista General.

The people, and some Senators of the Global Unit, are sick of the lack of transparency into the doings of the eggheads who truly rule the world from Mar Vista; no outsider has ever been allowed inside the facility since the foundation of the current governmental system.  So the most pugnacious of the Senators, Mitchell, insists on being allowed to investigate the secretive campus, and his findings will be broadcast to the world instantly from his little hand transmitter!

"Project" first saw publication in an issue of Astounding with a typo on its cover (or is this issue perhaps an artifact from a slightly different alternate universe where Canadian SF writers have subtly different pen names?)

The scientists are afraid that the truth of their work will cause a revolution and they will all be lynched by the ignorant masses. And what is this truth?  Well, not only did they engineer that whole limited atomic war business to increase their own power, but they have kept one of the dangerous homo superior mutants alive, in a sort of suspended animation which prevents it from maturing; they have been picking its brain, passing off its brilliant ideas as their own, while keeping it from reaching its full, world-shattering potential.  Luckily, they are mere hours from activating a super weapon which will give them total power; if they can just distract and delay Mitchell for a few hours they will have absolute control and be able to ignore any attack that may come from the Global Unit's military apparatus, much less a lynch mob.

Just after Mitchell, being held at gunpoint by one of the boffins, learns how much the Mar Vista scientists have been manipulating the rest of the world for decades, the ostensibly retarded homo superior reveals that he in turn has been manipulating the scientists!  He has only been pretending to be retarded, and has in fact achieved his full potential!  This superman will now take over the world, controlling the aforementioned super weapon and infiltrating its homo superior offspring among the homo sapiens populace until homo sapiens is extinct.

This story is disappointing; no wonder "Project" doesn't appear in any later anthologies!  It has no human feeling; it takes no ideological stand for or against human liberty or for or against the rise of homo superior; all the characters are bland and uninteresting.  The whole thing comes off as a boring history lecture about a complicated series of events you can't bring yourself to care about.  Too bad!

**********

Both the Sturgeon and the Kuttner and Moore stories include shocking revelations that flip what we thought was going on 180 degrees, but Sturgeon's twists feel natural and are closely tied to believable and touching characters, while the twists in "Project" had me asking, "Who cares?"

Sturgeon's "The Education of Drusilla Strange" is the stand out here, while the Leinster and Bixby are fun entertainments.  The Kuttner and Moore is worse than filler, it is a waste of time.  Sad, but true.

There are 15 more pieces in Operation Future, and we'll read some of them before the book goes back on the shelf.

Back on November 11 of 2015, SFFAudio tweeted about four stories from the famous SF magazine Planet Stories that have fallen into the public domain and are available as PDFs at the SFFAudio website.  I read this tweet as I sat in the Toyota Corolla, in a dark parking lot, waiting for the wife, and all four of these stories actually sounded pretty good.  So this week I directed the ol' browser to SFFAudio and read these four tales that first appeared in the fall of 1951, those unhappy and happy days when UN forces were defending South Korea from the commies and I Love Lucy first hit the airwaves.

"Last Night Out" by "Lee Gregor"

Lee Gregor is a pseudonym used by Milton A. Rothman, a physicist and active SF fan who wrote a number of SF stories as well as books on science.

"Last Night Out" is about prejudice and race relations.  In the future the human race is in contact with dozens of intelligent alien species, and relations are more or less cordial.  But when a war erupts with a new and mysterious alien civilization, relations have to get a whole lot closer in a hurry.

The best part about "Last Night Out" is how our Terran hero, Grey, and our furry Canopan hero, 647-B-43C (AKA "Joe"), work together.  Joe's people have powerful psychic abilities, but their tentacles are not very good at using tools.  Together, Joe and Grey make a perfect technician: when a piece of machinery malfunctions, Joe can look "inside" the machine and immediately see what is wrong, and guide Grey in quickly and efficiently repairing it.  Obviously, fixing your space battleship fast can be the difference between life and death in a space war, and human-Canopan teams like Grey and Joe's are a vital component of the war effort.

Being in constant telepathic rapport, and holding hands all the time, Grey describes his relationship with Joe as much like that of a husband and wife.  Joe's powers even enable Grey to better enjoy music.  But most humans find Canopans disgusting and/or scary, making downtime on Earth stressful or even dangerous as Grey and Joe are confronted by racist slurs and angry mobs.

Anti-racist stories and stories about the value of cooperation can be sappy or schmaltzy, but Rothman manages to give his story an edge and a layer of ambiguity. At the end of the story we learn that the Canopans can use their psychic powers to instantly kill humans, and perhaps even control them like puppets, and we are left to consider the possibility that the Canopans are stealthily making us their slaves!

Pretty good!

"Tydore's Gift" by Alfred Coppel

I don't think I've read anything by Coppel before, but he appears to have been a prolific writer of short stories as well as a successful novelist inside and outside SF, with quite a few dramatic love stories and espionage thrillers to his credit.

"Tydore's Gift" has a good atmosphere and good images, but the ending is too gimmicky and silly.

The last few Martians are decadent sophisticates, living alone in towers, reading their esoteric books, admiring their intricate art, playing their subtle unharmonic music. Tydore is just such a Martian.  Morely is an Earthman, a spy, drawn by rumors that Tydore has built an atomic rifle that will give Morely's (unspecified) country an edge in the current war on Earth.  Morely pretends to be a student come seeking Tydore's vast and ancient wisdom.  For his part Tydore is elaborately polite and welcoming, while at the same time feeling utter contempt for Morely and all Earthmen, who to his eyes are interloping barbarians.  I guess Coppel is evoking the relationship between the tricky and sophisticated Byzantines and the rude Crusaders, or between calm mystical Asians and impulsive materialistic Westerners.  (We see this in pop culture from time to time--Dante and Spielberg's Gremlins comes to mind.  Earlier this year I saw Gremlins for the first time in decades and was surprised at how naked and relentless was its attack on American culture and society.)

The short (less than four pages) story works well until the end.  Morley gets his hands on the atomic rifle but when he tries to murder Tydore with it he learns, too late, that Tydore crafted it so the muzzle looks like the stock and vice versa.  Morley shoots himself to death.  

Good in a lot of ways, but a disappointment at the end.

"The Watchers" by Roger Dee

Dee only has one novel listed at isfdb, but many short stories, most in the 1950s.

This one is even shorter and more gimmicky than the Coppel, and lacks the Coppel's rich atmosphere and settings.

A writer/researcher has figured out that the Earth has been infiltrated by aliens in disguise, and that these aliens have been manipulating human history.  That is why the Earth has such a history of war and crime, he thinks.  But when, gun in hand, he confronts one of the aliens, he learns the unhappy truth: the aliens are here trying to manipulate us into being good.  Thousands of races throughout the galaxy have been guided by the agents of the Kha Niish, been turned away from violence and set on the societal course to a "benign culture."  Humans, however, are far too violent and have signally rejected the urgings of the Kha Niish agents, and so they are on their way back into space.  Incorrigible humankind will no doubt exterminate itself in a short time.  After the alien missionaries leave, the researcher uses his gun to commit suicide.

Feels like filler--thumbs down.

"Vengeance on Mars!" by "D. B. Lewis"

"D. B. Lewis" is a pseudonym used by Jerome Bixby.  Bixby is the author of the famous story "It's a Good Life," immortalized in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame and as an episode of The Twilight Zone TV series.  He also contributed to the Star Trek TV show and the film Fantastic Voyage, which features much-beloved stars Raquel Welch and Donald Pleasance.

I thought the Mars in "Tydore's Gift" was based on the Near or Far East; I think the Mars in "Vengeance on Mars" is based on the American West and colonial Africa in the late 19th century.  Enterprising Earthmen have come to Mars and set up farms, with the natives (whom they call "redboys") as their field hands.  Earthers more interested in a fast buck than the hard work of building up a farm make money by looting Martian temples.  This pisses off the redboys, and, because the colonial government won't solve the problem (they are regularly bribed by the looters!) the human ranchers have banded together to exact some frontier justice from one looter. The looter is holed up in a temple, a veritable fortress, and if the farmers don't get him out of there and "take care" of him before morning, the redboys will "go on the warpath," likely killing scores or hundreds of human settlers!

The farmers send into the temple to negotiate one of their number who, years ago, was friends with the looter.  Will the looter come out peacefully?  Or come out blasting? Will he escape or pay for his crimes?  Who will live and who will die?

This story is an acceptable entertainment; the Martian setting is well done.  There's no twist or redemption at the end--the looter tricks his friend, steals his friend's blaster, tries to shoot his way out,  and dies in a hail of blaster fire.  I guess this story is about how the frontier can bring out the worst in people.

***********

These stories, taken as a group, are pretty good.  Maybe I'll read more from Planet Stories' September 1951 issue later this week.