From 1966 to '68, If carried Lin Carter's regular column on fandom.  Carter's column this time around is about amateur press associations, and mentions H. P. Lovecraft, an enthusiastic amateur press participant, and Ted White, among other people.  The column is a jokey light-hearted thing, and kind of boring--it feels frivolous, trivial.      

More meaty (or maybe it just offers the kind of trivia I prefer) is the guest editorial by Lester del Rey.  Del Rey courts controversy, complaining that the science fiction writers of the mid-1960s do not incorporate current scientific developments into their work the way the science fiction writers of the mid-1930s did theirs.  Rather than being inspired by the hard sciences and technology, current SF writers, if they care about science at all, write about psychology and sociology, and they don't even use recent developments or discoveries in those fields as grist for their stories, but tired old cliches that shrinks and sociologists have been saying since the turn of the century.  Del Rey also suggests that SF writers have fallen under the influence of academics in the humanities, and replaced the bold, optimistic and exciting can-do heroes of past SF with worriers and pessimists who are a drag.  Ouch!

I wish del Rey had offered examples of the writers and stories he is attacking; I always find these kinds of 50- or 60-year-old blind items frustrating.  One of this blog's early posts, issued back in 2013, consisted of me pondering the identities of the targets of bitter attacks on fellow SF writers by Harlan Ellison and Jack Vance.  Del Rey does single out H. G. Wells and Raymond Z. Gallun for praise as people who integrated about both science and human characters in their work.  Del Rey is a big Gallun fan--I noticed a week or so ago when reading Robert Silverberg's "When We Went to See the End of the World" and William Rotsler's "Patron of the Arts" that del Rey had dedicated The Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Volume 2 to Gallun.

Enough with the features; now let's investigate three stories from the ish, those by our favorite Canadian A. E. van Vogt, the questionable Robert Moore Williams and the one-of-a-kind R. A. Lafferty.

"Silkies in Space" by A. E. van Vogt

There have been periods when the work of A. E. van Vogt was at the center of this blog's activities, but it has been a while since we have read anything by ol' Van.  Well, let's get back aboard the sevagram steam train with this story.

isfdb lists three Silkie stories, published from 1964 to 1967; "Silkies in Space" is the second.  In 1969 the three stories served as the raw material for the novel The Silkie.  In the past I have found that van Vogt stories are often better in their original magazine form than after being altered for publication in a fix-up novel, and that the experiences of reading the novel version and magazine version of a van Vogt story are quite different, so reading this story is not going to discourage me from reading the novel someday.   

Van Vogt's fiction often concerns a man with special mental powers, powers that are in the process of expanding, who discovers the hidden reality behind his world and becomes acquainted with secret elites who are influencing everything from behind the scenes and are likely in conflict with each other, and "Silkies in Space" follows this pattern.  We also find here van Vogt's familiar clunky style, and his fascination with people's thoughts and thought processes--in "Silkies in Space" we face many lines flatly telling us the main character's emotional response to this or that fantastic event, often simply that he finds it fantastic, and many sentences relating to us the hero's deductions and how he comes to his weighty decisions, decisions that will affect the course of history of not only the Earth but the universe!  There is also quite a bit of incomprehensible pseudo-scientific gobbledygook that serves as a rationalization of all the amazing phenomena that take place in the story.  Here's a passage, the three sentences that make up two paragraphs, that I think exhibit these traits of the van Vogt style:

The hard fight had driven him down to a special logic of levels. He felt an automatic outflow of hatred.

Yet, after a little, another realization penetrated: "I won!" he thought.  

It is of course not van Vogt's style that we fans of the mad Canadian like, but his crazy plots and crazy ideas, and "Silkies in Space" delivers on that score.

It is hundreds of years in the future.  Our hero is Cemp, one of the couple thousand Silkies living on Earth.  Silkies are men who have all manner of powers: by manipulation of gravity, energy fields, electricity, and the like, a Silkie can fly, detect and analyze all manner of natural phenomena (down to the atomic level!), and defend himself with crackling energy; via telepathy he can communicate with other Silkies, and with a superior subset of the human race; with his super brain he can memorize vast amounts of data; and there is more.  To make the fullest use of his powers, a Silkie must change into one of multiple Silkie shapes; van Vogt doesn't describe these in detail here, but suggests they have a shape something like that of a slug or fish--at one point we are told a Silkie's natural shape is "bullet-like" and twice that it in this form a Silkie is covered in "steel-hard" chitin.  Silkies, however, usually take the form of handsome human males.  Our guy Cemp is the most powerful of all Silkies, he having learned additional ways of using his powers from some aliens recently (I guess in the first Silkie story, 1964's "The Silkie.")

The conventional beliefs about Silkies, what Cemp calls "the official story" and today we might call the mainstream narrative pushed by the elites, are that the first generation of these super beings was created in a lab like 220 years ago, that there are only male Silkies, and that all of them are registered with a government bureau and work together to further the interests of Earth's inhabitants, both human and Silkie.  Silkies marry human women who are of the superior type, members of a minority of humans who have some limited form of telepathy.  (A subtheme of the story is the political, social and sexual relations between ethnic majorities and more talented ethnic minorities, a dynamic we see all the time in SF, presumably a reflection of how SF readers are both alienated from others and feel they are smarter than others.)  This entire view of Silkie history and of the place of Silkies in the world and the universe is subjected to questioning and radical revision over the course of the story.

As the story begins, Cemp is confronted by a Silkie who is not registered and who issues an ultimatum: he, and all the Silkies, are to abandon relations with the human race and join "the Silkie nation" on pain of death!  What can that mean?  The loyal Cemp reports this encounter to the federal agency that manages Silkie affairs, and is sent to do some investigating.  He discovers that there is a secret underground of unregistered Silkies--their numbers even include Silkie women!  Then he discovers that these unregistered Silkies came from an asteroid that has an orbit that stretches from the environs of Neptune to the region of Mercury, that within this 10-mile-wide rock resides an independent society of Silkies!  This planetoid approaches Earth every 110 years, and is about at its nearest point to Terra now!  Silkies are not the product of a human lab experiment, but natives of an alien world!

The government sends Cemp to this asteroid and he explores the subterranean world of the space Silkies and eventually meets them.  The space Silkies, like the Silkies of Earth, have a warped view of their own history and milieu, and after our hero learns from them what they believe to be the true history of their race, he finally gets the full truth from the being of pure energy that secretly lives in the center of the planetoid.  This creature, the Glis, controls the space Silkies but has managed to remain absolutely unknown--the space Silkies have no idea the Glis exists and that they are under its control.  (One of the first clues that points to this is how nice all the space Silkies are, in contrast to the way the space Silkie who issued Cemp the ultimatum on Earth behaved when they first met--that space Silkie was temporarily under the direct influence of the Glis and acting against his nature.)  The Glis' paranoid desire for secrecy leads it to try to destroy Cemp, the only being in the universe to know of its existence, but Cemp survives these attacks (thanks to his unique alien knowledge) and opens negotiations.

The Glis has the power to alter and even destroy entire star systems, and over millions of years has travelled from system to system, manipulating them to foster intelligent life.  When the Glis discovers or develops intelligent life, it sends some of the shape-shifting Silkies down to the inhabited planet to integrate into the local civilization.  At first this all seems like a campaign of benevolence, but then the truth is revealed.  The Glis is like a gardener and a collector!  Having molded or discovered a successful planetary civilization, the Glis shrinks the planet, inhabitants more or less intact, down to one hundred feet across and stores it within its planetoid!  The Glis has thusly collected over a thousand planets over the course of history!  Cemp narrowly escapes when the alien collector subjects our own planet Earth to this humiliation! 

In a way I didn't quite understand, Cemp exploits the fact that the Glis' molecules are so old they come from a period of history when the laws of physics were different than they are today, triggering an evolution in those molecules that turns the Glis into a sun a hundred or a thousand times larger than Sol and releases the 1800 planets, Earth among them, from captivity to grow back to their normal sizes.  The planets all begin orbiting this new sun, their civilizations are only mildly affected by the processes of shrinkage, preservation and now restoration.  (For one thing, they were in a time stasis, only a single second passing for each day experienced by the rest of the universe.)  Our sense of wonder ending foresees Cemp and the Silkies of all planets taking a leading role in building relationships among these 1800 civilizations--endless adventure and discovery awaits!

The process of actually reading "Silkies in Space" the first time was sort of a slog, as the sentences are not good and there are definitely points at which I was thinking, "What the hell is Van talking about?"  But the ending is kind of mind-blowing, and looking back upon it having read it, the plot is pretty cool, and reading it a second time made clear to my easily distracted mind how everything in the story made sense internally and was connected, with minor details in the beginning of the story, for example, serving as foreshadowing of what happens later on.  "Silkies in Space" is one of those stories that I can easily understand why others might not like it (especially since at 40 pages it represents a real investment of our brief time here among the living) even though I myself do like it.

"Silkies in Space" was reprinted in the French version of Galaxy, and in a British collection titled The Best of A. E. van Vogt, which is distinct from the American book of the same title which has an intro by Barry N. Malzberg and a terrifying white cover.

"The Hide Hunters" by Robert Moore Williams

Here we have a story that has never seen print, as far as isfdb knows, outside the pages of If.  Back in September when we read his story "Death Sentence" in John W. Campbell, Jr's magazine Unknown, I offered links to my blog posts about Robert Moore Williams and pointed out how in my experience his work is a mixed bag, so I won't go into that again, except to say that I have no idea if I will enjoy this story of about 19 pages.

"The Hide Hunters" is an acceptable monster/horror story, kind of like something out of Weird Tales but with a little more science to it.  Williams, for some reason, adds extraneous themes to the story, maybe just to pad out the length of the story (these guys get paid by the word, don't they?) with more or less interesting science and history material.  For example, at the beginning of the story there is a lot of blah blah blah about psychoanalysis and psychedelic drugs, and passages that are informed by psychological theory like

...it would be only a step away from the latent hostility found by the psychoanalysts to exist at the unconscious mind levels among civilized people, in which the father either killed the son or drove him away from home.

and 

Something about the fetid jungle, the hot, steaming wetness of the place, the gross sexuality of it, troubled him deep in his mind where the old fears of the race still lived.

but this stuff goes nowhere; Williams does not link it to the monster or to the fate of the main characters by having the monster be a manifestation of one of their neuroses or having a man use Freudian theory to solve a puzzle or anything like that.

Grayson and MacPherson are chemists in the Amazon rainforest hunting for roots that can be used to make psychedelic drugs.  An aged Indian, a local chief, comes by with a wild story--a demon has stolen his grandson's skin and is wearing and he wants to borrow a rifle to slay the demon and rescue his grandson's hide.  Obviously the white men think this is a load of crap and the man's request for the rifle is refused.  But later Grayson comes upon the chief and sees he is skinning what looks to be a man, having killed "him "via an ambush.  When the chief is done skinning the figure, Grayson sees it is not a human, but a sort of blob monster covered in cilia that had put on the young Indian man's skin!  

The chief figures he has killed the monster, but it was only stunned, and it wakes up after the chief has separated it from his grandson's hide and runs off.

The middle part of the story is kind of clunky, with a poor action scene (it is too long, too slow and too confusing, so it is not thrilling or even interesting, just frustrating and annoying) and a contrived series of events that Williams needs, or thinks he needs, to set up his climax.  For some reason, natives attack with poison blow darts at the very moment the helicopter that brings supplies to Grayson and MacPherson arrives.  The helicopter pilot is killed, but the white men escape, taking cover in the chopper.  MacPherson thinks he can fly the thing, but he doesn't know what he is doing, and so his maiden flight ends abruptly with a crash landing on a hill.  Right there on the hill are ruins of an Egyptian temple or city or something that no white person has ever seen before.  G & MacP are amazed to find this evidence of an Egyptian colony or trading post or whatever in the new world, and we readers are irritated because this potentially engaging element of the story, just like the talk of psychoanalysis and psychedelic drugs, has no bearing whatsoever on the plot.  In the same way that the Westerners need not have been chemists for the plot to work, but could have been police officers or communist rebels or gold prospectors or mercenaries or anything, these ruins could have been those of Incas or Mayans or space aliens or a previously undiscovered race or civilization or anything--the blob monster is not from Egyptian mythology or anything like that.  A truly satisfying story is like a gem whose facets are all connected smoothly, not just a jumble of disparate things that have been piled together because they are each individually fun or interesting.

Our guys find a bottomless pit by an altar, and the chemists figure the blob monster came from there, and ancient people must have tossed sacrifices down the pit to appease it.  The blob monster, they theorize, is an immortal creature from a bazillion years ago that envies more evolved creatures that have a solid shape, and so it skins people and dons their skins in an effort to emulate their solidity.  The monster shows up clad in the chopper pilot's skin, and they fight it.  It escapes.  Grayson was injured in the crash, so MacPherson explores the bottomless pit alone.  The monster comes back in MacPherson's hide, and Grayson destroys it in its final battle.

The downbeat twist ending sees the Indian chief kill Grayson because he assumes Grayson is dead, and the creature he sees approaching him is not his pal Grayson but the blob monster in Grayson's skin.  Oops!  The Indians throw Grayson's body down the bottomless pit, for some reason.

I like this kind of story, and there are some good horrific passages, but because of the problems I have enumerated at perhaps unnecessary length above, "The Hide Hunters" is merely acceptable.

"Golden Trabant" by R. A. Lafferty

Here we have a fun little story, relatively simple and straightforward, that brought a smile to my face, though it is full of brutality and ends with true gruesomeness.  (The ending brought H. P. Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep" to mind.)  

It is the near future in which private individuals can buy space ships and prospect around the solar system.  The story follows some tough customers--cold businessmen and ruthless thieves--who bring on to the world market a vast quantity of gold that they mine from an asteroid.  Lafferty offers an amusing account of how the thieves, who have zero compunctions about committing murder, try to double cross each other, and how a massive influx of gold shakes the world economy, and how the establishment finally stabilizes the situation.  Lafferty succeeds in getting you to admire the ingenuity and sangfroid of at least some of these greedy bastards.

The humor works, the gore works, and there is real speculation here about the economy and politics of the future if you want to entertain it.  Thumbs up!  

"Golden Trabant" was reprinted in the various editions in English, Dutch and French of Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? and then in our own 21st century (in which ingenuity and sangfroid will serve you well) in Mad Man, the seventh volume of Centipede Press's series collecting Lafferty's short fiction.

**********

            Abernathy and Aldiss
            Anderson, Allen and Banks 

            Barrow, Beaumont and Blish

            Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler

"Unbalanced Equation" by Paul A. Carter

Let's start with a story from an issue of F&SF we've already looked at recently, when we read Robert Abernathy's "The Year 2000" (link above.)  Paul A. Carter has like a dozen fiction credits at isfdb, and also wrote a history of SF magazines.  I don't believe I have read anything by him before, so today MPorcius Fiction Log blazes new territory.

Paul A. Carter was a college professor, one of the cognitive elite, and "Unbalanced Equation" is about how in their role as the maintainers of order the cognitive elite sometimes have to trick, manipulate and lie to the common people.  

Nuclear war wipes out the human race on Earth and the communist moon base--but the American moon base survives!  Finally some good news!  The entire human species now consists of like 2,500 people--and only 130 of them are women!  About 110 of them quickly get married, but that leaves 2,400 young men with nobody to marry, nobody to have sex with!  Carter's story is mostly about how the General commanding these 2,500 people tries to maintain order so the human race can endure.

The US moon base was home to a Mars colonization project that was almost ready to go when the war broke out, so the 2,500 blast off for Mars, where, in this story, people can breathe the air (with the help of compressors) and eat the native flora and fauna.  The survivors of the war quickly start building a colony, but it is obvious that the imbalance between men and women is going to cause chaos, with men fighting over the tiny number of women and women betraying their husbands when they get sick of them and so forth.  The number of married couples is so small, every single couple must be protected, must be given every chance to produce as many children as possible!  So, the General comes up with the idea of leaving the married couples at the landing site and splitting the unmarried men and women into four exploratory expeditions.  Some scouts from one of these columns have the delusion they have seen a beautiful woman in the distance; the general encourages the men to believe the sighting legit, and has them search for native women with the idea that if the men have hope they won't devolve into a crazy mass of suicidal or murderous maniacs and spoil any hope for humankind's enduring survival.  There is also the, somewhat obliquely presented, idea that the handful of unmarried women will be promiscuous and sexually satisfy the men of the four exploratory columns. 

(I think maybe the illustration on the cover of the magazine depicts the sighting of the hallucination.)

Even though "Unbalanced Equation" takes for granted the value of the traditional heterosexual family and seems to celebrate women acting as prostitutes to save humanity, it has feminist elements--the Earth women are not foolish enough to believe there are native women on Mars and a woman saves the General from death during a monster attack.

This story is OK.  It looks like other editors didn't like it as much as Merril did--after appearing in the French version of F&SF, it has never been reprinted (according to isfdb.)    

"The Starting Line" by Arthur C. Clarke

Alright, something by one of the "Big Three" classic SF writers.  On Merril's list under Clarke's name appears "'Venture to the Moon,' F&SF 12/56."  A look at isfdb and wikipedia indicate that "Venture to the Moon" is actually a series of six stories that first saw print in The London Evening Standard.  F&SF in 1956 published two of them, "The Starting Line," the first, and "Robin Hood, F. R. S.," the second.  We'll read those two today; if they are good maybe someday I'll track down and read the rest.  But be forewarned: while F&SF editor Anthony Boucher and Judith Merril seem to have liked them, Damon Knight, the hard ass who lost a job because he insisted on telling the truth about how much Merril's novel The Tomorrow People sucked, thought the "Venture to the Moon" stories (reports wikipedia) "remarkably trivial."     

      

I think of Clarke as a pretty optimistic guy, and "The Starting Line" is a cheery optimistic little story.  Not only are the United States and the Soviet Union working together on the project of travelling to the moon, but they have included the United Kingdom as an equal partner in the endeavor!  Each nation has a spaceship orbiting Earth; our narrator is the commander of the British ship, and he tells us he is bosom chums with both the other captains.  When he gets the word from the British government that on D-Day he should jump the gun so that Great Britain will have the immortal honor of putting the first man on the moon, he is appalled, but goes through with it anyway.  The very predictable twist ending is that the god-damned commies and the irrepressible Yanks have gotten the same orders from the Kremlin and Washington, so all three captains fire their rockets early and the three ships land on Luna within a second of each other.  (You see kids, we in the West are just like the Soviet Union!)       

Slight, even silly, but well-written and pleasant if you can look past the way the USSR is regarded as morally equivalent to the US and UK (something Merril presumably had no trouble doing.)  Boucher included the "Venture to the Moon" stories in the seventh "Best of" anthology of F&SF stories, and they would also be reprinted in numerous Clarke collections.  There's a market for these light feel-good stories.

"Robin Hood, F. R. S." by Arthur C. Clarke

The second of the "Venture to the Moon" stories is a traditional hard SF story about astronauts facing a problem and solving it through application of reason and science knowledge.  A load of supplies from an unmanned supply rocket ends up atop a difficult to scale cliff, and the boffins figure out how to get the supplies down by shooting arrows, taking advantage of the low lunar gravity.  The story's main joke is that after this caper that locale on Luna is named "Sherwood Forest."  Another of the story's benign little jokes is a reflection of how Americans are rich and have the most elaborate equipment--a common observation of British people exposed to Americans during WW2.  

A pleasant little thing.

"Clerical Error" by Mark Clifton

The final Merril Honorable Mention we'll be reading today is Mark Clifton's "Clerical Error."  In Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume, "Clerical Error" is listed as debuting in T. E. Dikty's The Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels: 1956, but when you look at that anthology (a scan of which is available at the internet archive) you see it says the story originally appeared in Astounding.  Odd.  In case the story was revised for inclusion in Dikty's book, I will note that I am reading the story in a scan of the February 1956 Astounding.  (I don't know if I have read any Clifton before--more virgin territory falls within the experience of MPorcius Fiction Log!)

"Clerical Error" is a story about the value of skepticism, freedom of speech, open-mindedness, thinking outside the box, and not being a yes-man.  

America is deep in a dangerous cold war, and scientists are needed to develop the latest technologies so we can prevail in the twilight struggle!  But many of our young scientists are suffering nervous breakdowns!  Dr. K. Heidrich Kingston is a Division Administrator at a government psychiatric hospital, and one such case, that of David Storm, comes to his attention when Dr. Ernest Moss requests permission to lobotomize Storm.  Kingston is skeptical of lobotomy, and doesn't just let the headshrinkers under his authority lobotomize people with reckless abandon as they would like to--our hero insists on specifically reviewing all such procedures before authorizing them.  Moss is one of these jokers who loves lobotomizing peeps, and has set Kingston a trap.  Storm knows all kinds of classified information, so only people with a top security clearance can talk to him; Moss, as a yes-man, has such a clearance--he is in fact head of the wing that treats men who are working on top secret projects and have gone off their rockers--but Kingston, a free thinker who gives off strong Thomas Szasz vibes*, isn't considered reliable enough by the establishment to receive a top security clearance, so he can't talk to Storm, and so can't really examine him to determine if a lobotomy is warranted or not.

Kingston is a true man of science--he loves learning!  He was content to be a small-time psychiatrist, but his nurse/secretary, Miss Verity (always with the evocative names!), whom he hired twenty-five years ago, is an ambitious and detail-minded woman, and has guided Kingston's career to its current pinnacle.  Kingston thinks too many of America's scientists don't have the skepticism that is the true essence of science; many of them went into science only because it is a cushy job with decent pay and some prestige, not because of a passion to increase the human store of knowledge, and these careerists are yes-men more interested in not rocking the boat and winning promotions than in pursuing the truth.  The government encourages the prominence of this personality type among the scientists working on our defense by only giving security clearances to the most loyal and predictable men--nobody with new ideas who questions dogma and resists authority can get a security clearance.  As a result, American scientific development is stagnating, producing no new ideas. 

Kingston figures out that Storm lost his mind ("withdrew from reality") because he began to suspect some truth that went against the settled science and his rigid mind--trained to obey superiors and utter no dissent lest he jeopardize his career--couldn't handle it.  Through clever manipulation of paperwork and personnel assignment, Kingston gets himself labelled insane and put in the same cell with Storm!  By talking to Storm he discovers what cognitive dissonance it was that drove Storm insane--the awareness that the scientific method and the regime of rigid obedience to rules were in conflict--and Kingston cures him.  Maybe this success presages a successful effort to loosen the rules and change the culture of the American science establishment in such a way that the free world's scientists will enjoy greater dynamism and productivity and give us an edge over the Reds!  

This is a good science fiction story in the classic mold that romanticizes science as a crusading, pioneering enterprise and the scientist as the heroic individual and denounces sclerotic bureaucracy and collectivist groupthink.  I liked that it suggested that most scientists are just ordinary people subject to ordinary selfish go-along-to-get-along biases and pressures and that it subtly warned us that we should take care that the pressures of the struggle against tyrannical collectivists not lead us to emulate those collectivist tyrannies.  While I am primarily seeing it as an attack on government, bureaucracy and the psychological establishment, lefties can embrace the story as an attack on McCarthyism and 1950s conformity.  (But, look out, feminists--Kingston--and I guess Clifton!--has some theories about women's attitudes about men and society that you are not going to like!) 

Thumbs up!  T. E. Dikty, Judith Merril and I all like "Clerical Error," but perhaps its biggest booster is our hero Barry Malzberg, who says in the intro to the story in Neglected Visions that "Clerical Error" is a masterpiece, Mark Clifton is "the most unjustly forgotten of all science fiction writers" and that he (Malzberg) had the idea to put out Neglected Visions primarily to serve as a way to get Clifton back on SF readers' radar.  Malzberg also suggests that "Clerical Error"'s attack on yes-men and leaders who demand obedience and rigid conformity is also a subtle dig at Clifton's editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., who famously guided his writers' output and put the stamp of his own personality on Astounding.     

More 1950s excitement awaits in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

Kircher unwittingly leads Tarzan to the German captain who (it appears) is truly responsible for Jane's death--the guy Tarzan fed to a lion turns out to be not the expedition leader after all, but his brother.  Tarzan outfights the murderous captain and, ignoring his pleas for mercy, kills him.        

After the British have secured the upper hand in Africa, Tarzan heads off on his own, choosing to cross a wasteland, it being a shortcut to the current residence of a tribe of the species of apes who raised him, and to the little house in which he grew up, built by his shipwrecked parents.  Sick of human civilization, he wants to get back to his roots!  Taking this supposed shortcut is a blunder as this arid waste is crisscrossed with almost unpassable chasms and absolutely bereft of food and water--there aren't even any beetles to eat!  Fortunately, a vulture has followed Tarzan into this valley of death, and when Lord Greystoke collapses in exhaustion and the vulture comes down to eat him, our hero turns the tables on the vile bird; eating the vulture gives Tarzan the strength to reach the other side of the arid valley.  

In the fertile lands beyond the valley of death Tarzan spots a party of blacks who have deserted from their cruel German officers.  These guys are led by Sergeant Usanga, a man both treacherous and lecherous--when Usanga and crew killed their officers Usanga took captive one Bertha Kircher, that nineteen-year-old lady German spy.  Tarzan terrorizes Usanga's party, and his methods are ruthless; for example, he kills a straggler, decapitates him, and arranges for the marching Africans to come upon the pieces of their former comrade.  He, does, however, resist the urge to rescue the spy.  Deserters repeatedly try to rape the German spy but are always interrupted before they can accomplish their foul design; Kircher foils one such attempt by killing her assailant and escapes Usanga's group and ends up among Tarzan and the tribe of apes Greystoke has joined after asserting his dominance over them.

A third of the way through the book, Burroughs introduces a new character, Lieutenant Harold Percy Smith-Oldwick, Royal Air Force pilot.  Smith-Oldwick has to land to make repairs on his craft and is captured by the tribe in whose village Usanga's party is staying.  These villagers are cannibals and plan to cook the pilot up that night.  Tarzan has some bad luck and is also be captured by the villagers and added to tonight's menu; fortunately, the ape tribe Tarzan has just joined rescues him and the pilot just before cooking has begun.  Kircher is a member of the rescue party, which puts Tarzan in an uncomfortable spot--he now has something of a moral obligation to the German spy, a woman towards whose nationality he has sworn eternal enmity.    

Kircher and Smith-Oldwick are protected and provided for by Tarzan, but sense that they are holding back the ape man, who would like to go visit his childhood home, so one day when Tarzan is off hunting, the pilot convinces the spy that they should try to get to the plane and make it to a European settlement.  Of course, as soon as they are away from Tarzan they get captured by Usanga.

As a henpecked husband with delusions of grandeur, Usanga is a bit of a comic relief figure as well as a murderous villain set on raping Kircher.  The treacherous sergeant figures that if he can learn to fly the plane, his fellow blacks will worship him as a god and instead of having one domineering wife he can have 24 submissive wives, plus Kircher as a white wife, and so he forces Smith-Oldwick to give him flying lessons.

The bloody climax of this section of the novel, which is pretty racist what with all the talk of how unprincipled blacks are and how thick Usanga's lips are, but which is also pretty exciting and very entertaining, has Usanga trying to fly the plane away, the bound Kircher in the back seat; Usanga hopes to fly so far away that his formidable wife won't be able to find him and he can get to work enjoying Kircher's body and rounding up those 24 additional wives.  Tarzan intervenes, Kircher, who knows how to fly a plane, seizes the controls, Usanga is thrown from the plane to his death, and then the spy lands the plane, running down many of Usanga's men as she taxis to a stop.  Bertha Kircher does a lot of fighting and killing in this novel, and her running down her would-be rapists' henchmen with an aeroplane is just the kind of cathartic violence we read genre fiction in search of.  Kircher's bravery and resourcefulness also inspires Smith-Oldwick to fall in love with her, while at the same time Tarzan's heroic manliness--and perhaps his indifference to her?--leads Kircher to fall in love with the apeman.

The English pilot and German spy fly off, but over that arid wasteland a vulture blunders into the propellor and the aeroplane goes down.  Tarzan is watching and heads off to help them.  On the way he starts another relationship with a lion, Burroughs apparently feeling he has not mined this vein to exhaustion.  This lion is especially large and has a quite dark hide--this is a lion of a species Tarzan has not met before.  The great cat has been trapped in a pit dug by a black tribe, and Tarzan, who, as we have seen in earlier Tarzan adventures, loves top play practical jokes on the native Africans, frees the lion, and it becomes friendly with Lord Greystoke and comes and goes throughout the rest of the novel, offering aid to Tarzan at opportune moments.

Tarzan finds Kircher and Smith-Oldwick, but these kids can't seem to stay out of trouble.  At night people from a lost city that flourishes within a secret verdant valley in the middle of the arid waste attack and carry off the Englishman and the German woman; Tarzan is knocked out in the fight, but the friendly lion keeps the attackers from molesting our hero.  Tarzan follows the trail to the lost city, where he dons the garb of a soldier as one always does in these adventure stories and searches out Kircher and Smith-Oldwick.

The lost city in Tarzan the Untamed is a little gimmicky, and the sequences there are not quite as good as the previous World War and Usanga sections.  The inhabitants of the city are of some heretofore unknown ethnicity, with a skin color akin to that of Asians but with totally different features.  More importantly, every person in the city has one or more mental illnesses or nervous disorders.  Among the most memorable of these mental cases are a woman who is apparently a nymphomaniac and tries to get it on with everyman she meets, including Tarzan and Smith-Oldwick, and, a soldier who conveniently has an epileptic fit just as he is about to kill Tarzan with a saber.  Again and again we witness citizens of the lost city flying into murderous rages or laughing hysterically at some inappropriate stimulus or impulsively committing suicide.  Perhaps reflecting psychological theories that I'm guessing aren't taught in universities today, Tarzan, Smith-Oldwick and Kircher can tell just by looking at the city's denizens that they are "maniacs," and Smith-Oldwick says that their eyes and hair remind him of those of the inmates of a "madhouse" he once visited.

This city may be a satire of religion, as the maniacs worship parrots and monkeys it is suggested that their insanity is the result of their strange religious practices.  It is also an expression of the lioncentric nature of Tarzan the Untamed--the maniacs have domesticated a large number of lions and these lions serve as guard dogs and even cattle--lions are the primary source of meat for the city population.  Burroughs' depiction of the city is a little hard to credit; the place is in constant turmoil with people killing themselves and each other on a whim, but somehow the agricultural sector is very productive, with well-organized crops and a complex system of irrigation and animal husbandry. 

Kircher is to be the queen of these maniacs, and is tenanted with the current queen, an 80-year-old Englishwoman who has been imprisoned here since she was twenty.  As Kircher is bathed and clad in local fashion, which bares a woman's breasts (hubba hubba), this old woman tells her all about the town, its history and politics and so forth.  There is a lot of mayhem as Smith-Oldwick escapes imprisonment and gets mixed up in fights with men and beasts--this long-suffering bastard is repeatedly mauled by lions--and maniacs fight over Kircher; Tarzan arrives to lead an escape with the help of that friendly lion and a black slave they liberate from the maniacs.  The novel's action climaxes with a ferocious fight in the wasteland between our heroes and their pursuers; the battle is resolved in the favor of the sane when a company of British infantry searching for Smith-Oldwick arrives to gun down the maniacs.  The emotional climax of the novel is the revelation that Bertha Kircher is a British double agent in deep deep cover, one Patricia Canby; Canby has evidence indicating that Jane Clayton, Lady Greystoke, was not murdered by the Germans after all--the evil Bosche captured Jane and put her rings on the hand of a black woman whose body they burned beyond recognition in order to fool Tarzan.  Diabolical!

Tarzan the Untamed is a very good adventure story and I am giving it an enthusiastic thumbs up.  The fight scenes are good, the violence thrilling and cathartic--I've mentioned the spy's running over mutinous native troops with a plane, and another good example of climactic violence that serves as a satisfying payoff for earlier groundwork laid by Burroughs is when Tarzan unleashes his first lion friend lion in a German trench following a long discussion of how Lord Greystoke has trained the beast.  I've also already mentioned how much the book relies on Tarzan's relationships and changing psychology to keep it interesting.

An interesting facet of the novel, linked to these two successful elements--the fighting and Tarzan's psychology--is how, it seemed to me, Tarzan is not quite as invincible as he has appeared in some earlier books.  I feel like Burroughs has dialed back Tarzan's abilities as a fighter a little here; I recall Tarzan killing hordes of lions and panthers singlehanded in earlier novels, but this time around Tarzan is much warier about getting into scraps with great cats, and when he does, he welcomes the aid of the novel's two friendly lions and of Kircher, who is right in there, stabbing and shooting people and animals.  This makes the novel a little more believable and a little more exciting.

It was also interesting to read a classic Burroughs text so soon after reading three of Lin Carter's Thongor novels.  It was easy to spot Carter's models for various elements, scenes and themes, and to see how far short Carter falls of the standard set by the master.  For example, in Tarzan the Untamed, Burroughs provides a detailed description of how Tarzan captures, trains, and employs a lion in his and the British Empire's struggle against Germany.  Carter in Thongor Against the Gods has Thongor capture and train a ceratopsian dinosaur, but whereas Burroughs's sequence is compelling, the lion has a relationship with Tarzan and the lion plays a role in the plot and offers the opportunity for thrilling episodes of violence, the passages about the dinosaur in Carter's book are tedious and make no sense and the dinosaur has no effect on the plot whatsoever.

A good reading experience--I'm looking forward to the eighth Tarzan book, Tarzan the Terrible, which promises us some dinosaur action!

Interrupting the drama concerning King Thongor, Queen Sumia, and Zandar Zan the Black Thief, Carter introduces us to a new character, Shangoth, one of the Blue Nomads, a people who are eight or nine feet tall and have utterly hairless dark blue skin.  These super strong barbarians are split into many warring tribes that follow animal herds across the length and breadth of the plains of Eastern Lemuria in caravans of chariots and wintering in the ruins of long abandoned cities.  Emulating his models, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, Carter again and again has been telling us throughout the Thongor saga that Thongor the barbarian can do things city men and modern men are totally incapable of doing, and he tells us the same thing about the Blue Nomads.

Like so many characters in the first three Thongor books, Shangoth is a member of a royal family who has been forced into exile; Shangoth and his father Jomdath, chief of their tribe, were recently overthrown and are struggling to survive alone in the wilderness.  Shangoth enters a jungle in pursuit of game, and comes to the mountain that Zander Zan and Sumia's distracted driving lead them to crash their air boat into--Shangoth, who has never seen an airboat, witnesses the crash, and sees Sumia fall hundreds of feet down into the lake at the foot of the mountain.  He recovers her unconscious body (he has to fight a 100-foot long aquatic reptile to do it, but no biggie) and is amazed by her beauty--he has never seen a person with hair before or with white skin.

Not content with adding Shangoth to the cast, Carter then spends a few pages describing Shangoth's father Jomdath.  Dear old Dad was kicked out of the tribe he led for a hundred years (blue people live longer than white people) because he broke tradition and wouldn't let his warriors torture captured enemies.  Blue Nomads love to torture people.  We see this prominent feature of Blue Nomad culture up close when Jomdath is captured by the shaman of his former tribe; this joker was leader of the coup and is a wizard with a staff that can emit electricity which can be used to stun people and start fires, and he uses it to torture Shangoth's long suffering father.  (Conflict between the royal and religious establishments is a theme throughout these Thongor books we have been reading.) 

Meanwhile, Shangoth is going to burn on a funeral pyre the gorgeous little woman he found, thinking her dead, but just in a nick of time Sumia wakes up.  Shangoth's back is turned, and Sumia jumps to the conclusion that he is building a fire to cook her (remember, people were going to cook Sumia in the start of Thongor and the Dragon City--you don't just forget that kind of thing.)  So Sumia grabs some spears and is about to stab the blue giant in the back when, just in a nick of time, a wild boar appears to distract her.  The boar has saved Shangoth from Sumia!  Of course, this boar wants to kill both Sumia and Shangoth, but Sumia throws the spears at the beast, killing it just in a nick of time.  Sumia has saved Shangoth from the boar!  Princess and giant nomad make friends over a pork lunch, and march off together, only to be hypnotized by fell sorcery and drawn to a creepy black tower.

Back to our title character.  Thongor has also fallen in that lake, but is able to get himself out of it.  In a long sequence, parts of which make little sense, Carter describes in detail how Thongor captures a ceratopsian dinosaur and puts a bridle on it and teaches it to obey his commands so he can ride it around--the giant reptile can move with much greater speed than a man afoot, and is tireless besides, making it an ideal steed.  The barbarian rides in the direction he suspects his wife and the kidnapper to have gone, and comes upon the coup-plotting shaman torturing the deposed Jomdath; Thongor rescues Shangoth's dad (the shaman escapes) and they quickly become friends.  Thongor and Jomdath ride on, and Thongor blunders them into a field of narcotic and vampiric flowers, where they fall asleep.  The dinosaur wanders off, having contributed nothing to the plot despite the high word count Carter has devoted to describing it, and then the shaman catches up to our heroes and captures them.

Carter sometimes cuts away from all this drama in the east with Thongor, Sumia, Zander Zan and the Blue people to describe events back around Patanga and Tsaragol.  Karm Karvus, exiled Prince of Tsaragol, currently living in Patanga, goes to the mountains to consult the friendly wizard Sharajsha, who was a main character in the first Thongor book.  Sharajsha, an old geezer, is on his death bed, and  one of his last acts on this Earth is to use his magic to identify Tsaragol as the source of the kidnapping plot.  So the Patangan army mounts its fleet of flying machines and bears down on Tsaragol.  This fictional political/military history stuff is pretty boring, as Carter introduces a huge cast of characters on both sides, all of whom are totally forgettable.  (To make everything extra confusing, Carter, who has everybody call the reptile people who ruled the world before man "Dragon Lords," and has everybody call the city of Thurdis "The City of the Dragon," spends a lot of time talking about the toughest unit in the Patangan army, "The Black Dragons.")  

In a complicated way, Zandar Zan survived the crash of the boat he was piloting and acquired the boat Thongor was flying.  When we rejoin him he is flying around, trying tofigure out where he is and what to do, having failed in his mission.  He spots a crowd in a ruined city--it is the shaman and Shangoth's blue tribe just seconds away from burning alive their former chief Jomdath as well as Emperor Thongor.  The appearance of an aircraft, something none of the blue people has ever seen, throws the tribe into confusion, and, thinking the gods are angry, the tribe frees Jomdath and reinstates him as chief and sends the shaman into exile.  Zandar Zan drifts too close, and Thongor seizes the air boat; Zandar Zan gets killed in the process.

Aboard the boat, Thongor is accosted by the ghost of the recently deceased Sharajsha.  The wizard's shade directs him to the black tower where Sumia is in bondage and an evil wizard is summoning a demon that will devour Sumia's soul and animate her body so it can act as a spy and saboteur in Thongor's court at Patanga.  This wizard's dialogue seems to foreshadow the next Thongor book, Thongor in the City of Magicians.  Thongor arrives just in a nick of time to upset the spell, which leads to the destruction of the wizard and his tower and the preservation of his wife.

The last chapter of the novel sees the battle before the gates of Tsargol, which is a close run thing until Thongor arrives in his air boat with a dozen of the Blue Nomads as reinforcements; the city falls and Karm Karvus is installed as its king.        

I pity any Italian grad students who might have bought Thongor Against the Gods thinking it was a Gramscian satire of how Fordism leads to a conformist society

With its overly large cast and profusion of plot threads and superfluous scenes, Thongor Against the Gods is the worst Thongor book thus far.   As I have suggested before, Carter's style is not very good, and Thongor Against the Gods really shows signs that it would have benefited from some further editing.  One thing that stuck out this time around was Carter's use of anachronistic metaphors; e. g., a ceratopsian dinosaur is said by the narrator to be capable of "running like an express train," and when Zandar Zan sees a Blue Nomad caravan we are told that each its "great three-wheeled chariots" is "as capacious as a boxcar."  There are obviously no locomotives in Lemuria; it would be much better to compare the dinosaur and the caravan to something Thongor and Zandar Zan know about, or just skip the metaphors, which add nothing to the plot.  Another issue are little discrepancies, like how we are told the ceratopsians have beaks, but then later informed that they have lips.  Beaks and lips?  And how we are told that the women of Patanga fight on the battlefield besides the men--Carter didn't tell us that during the siege of Patanga in the last book, and there is no indication there are women fighting in the battle before Tsargol in the end of this book.  Carter obviously just came up with this stuff on the fly as needed to, for example, make Thongor's ability to control a huge dinosaur or Sumia's expert spear casting more believable and never revised the rest of the text to make it sit more comfortably within the larger whole.  

I also have to question the wisdom of introducing new characters who are barbarians like Thongor and exiled royalty like Sumia and Karm Karvus--if new characters are to be introduced, they should be different than the established characters.  Tabala the torturer and Xothun the blood-drinking scientist, who appeared in the second Thongor book and were killed in the same book, were novel and interesting, and I wish they had survived to be the villains in this volume--the crew in Tsargol who are the lead villains in Thongor Against the Gods get very little screen time and are totally forgettable, and while I like Zander Zan, he doesn't get much screen time either.  

I will generously grade Thongor Against the Gods as merely acceptable.  It is perhaps for the best that my relationship with Thongor of Lemuria must now go on hiatus, seeing as I do not own a copy of the fourth Thongor book, Thongor in the City of the Magicians.  I will keep an eye out for it, however.  And I own a bunch more Lin Carter books, so we'll be sampling his work again.  But first, a science fiction novel from the 1970s from an author who is, I think, a little more serious-minded than Carter.  We'll see!