On March 12 of this year I explained why I avoid Cyril Kornbluth's work and panned his famous and influential story "The Marching Morons."  But I try to keep an open mind at this here blog, so today I read two more Kornbluth stories, both available for free to all us cheapskates at gutenberg.org.  The gutenberg versions are the original magazine versions, and include the original art by Freas and Ashman.

"The Altar at Midnight" (1952)  

This is sort of a hard-boiled story set in the Skid Row of some Earth town.  The narrator meets a spaceship crew member in a strip bar and takes him to a different bar, one inhabited by crippled drunks who enjoy telling the stories of how they were crippled working for the railroad.  The spacer explains how the regular changes in air pressure and the hard radiation in space have damaged his body, how being a spacer is risky, gets you involved in trouble with women, damages relationships with your family, weakens your religious faith, coarsens your morals, etc.  It turns out that the narrator is the scientist who made space travel possible.  He feels guilty about his accomplishment, because of how rough space travel is on people and (it is hinted) because Earth's Cold War tensions have spread to the moon (where there is some kind of missile base) and maybe Mars and Venus.  

The story is short and to the point, which I appreciated.  Its pessimism about space travel reminded me of Murray Leinster's Other Side of Nowhere (1964) and Edmond Hamilton's "What's it Like Out There?", also published in 1952.  Then there is the story's bleak view of the railroad.  It is remarkable how many science fiction writers and stories express ambiguous or even hostile attitudes towards technological advances - in just the last few days I read L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout (1940), in which he blamed modern war on "machinery," and of course there are many more examples, even before talk about pollution and ecology and the environment became de rigueur around 1970.  

"The Altar at Midnight" is an effective story, even if you aren't some kind of Luddite who thinks that the locomotive and rocket ship were a mistake.  It is economical, the tone is consistent, and the style is not bad.  It is no great masterpiece, but it is worth reading.

"The Adventurer" (1953)

In the future the United States (called "the Republic") is a tyrannical hereditary monarchy, wracked by coup attempts and fights among the elite over succession, perhaps reminiscent of the struggles for succession we see in the Roman Empire.  The United States is still locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union; this conflict has extended out into the solar system, including on Io, which is half Soviet and half Republican.  The story follows events in Washington among the politicians and on Io, where a shooting war breaks out and a charismatic young officer becomes a hero.  Like Caesar or Napoleon, the young man turns on the Republic and makes himself ruler.  It is revealed that his rise was engineered by patriotic conspirators who wanted to end the current political system, but instead of embracing the conspirators, the young officer, who declares himself a god, has them all executed.

This story seems pointless.  The satirical elements, the adventure elements, and the trick ending elements are all weak.  Was Kornbluth just projecting a silly romantic theory of history (that on occasion great men rise up to take over and revive moribund empires) onto the future in order to ridicule it?      

Embedded in the story is an interesting idea, a future art form whose main focus is not line or form or color or composition (as in a painting or sculpture) but texture; one doesn't appreciate these art objects primarily by looking at them but instead by touching them.  I guess this is maybe a joke, perhaps an ironic reference to money (the art objects are called "fingering pieces") but I found it the most memorable part of a weak story.

***************

So, one average story and one poor story.  There is a third Kornbluth piece available at gutenberg, The Syndic, but it is a full length novel and I'm not feeling up to it after the almost useless "The Adventurer."  The Syndic in 1986 received a Prometheus Award for being a "Classic Libertarian SF novel," which is intriguing, so I will probably read it someday, but not today.   

Here we have the last science fiction novel written by British author Stanley Bennett Hough, under his manly pseudonym Rex Gordon.  I am sure there are ordinary people all over world with the name "Rex Gordon," but to my susceptible mind "Rex Gordon" sounds like the name of a guy who punches first and asks questions later, a guy who writes those mens' adventure books like The Destructinator: Peril in Patagonia or The Exculpationer: Massacre in Madrid.  On the other hand, the cover painting by Kelly Freas seems to be illustrating the story of a man who lives on the dole and sits in the park all day and at 5:00 sadly watches the business people file out of their office building.

After making a lot of crazy guesses about The Yellow Fraction based on the author's pen name and the cover illustration, I decided that the best way to find out what it was all about was to actually read the 160 page 1969 novel.  A decision I perhaps took too lightly.

Five hundred years ago an Earth colonization ship arrived at the planet Arcon, where plants grow blue instead of green.  Sick of space, most of the colonists wanted to put down roots on Arcon.  Some, dubbed the Greens, hoped to terraform the planet so that it resembled Earth.  Another faction, the Blues, thought humanity should learn to adapt to Arcon's environment.  A tiny minority, eventually labelled the Yellows, feared Arcon was too unhealthy to colonize.  The Yellows were not only outvoted, but became pariahs and scapegoats on whom all problems, for centuries, were blamed.

The Yellows were, of course, right; Arcon is poison, and after the starship is irretrievably dismantled it becomes clear that human life expectancy on Arcon is a mere 40 years!  Lacking any means to escape the planet, the government conspires to keep people in ignorance of the facts.

I took an almost immediate dislike to this book.  On the second page of text, page 6, Rex gives us this sentence: "He laughed in a voice that gave Len a considerable lack of pleasure."  To my mind this is poor writing.  You don't give somebody a lack.  The phrase should be something like "gave Len considerable displeasure" or "failed to give Len any pleasure."

On page 9 we get a typo, "staying" for "saying."  On page 32 we get this atrocious paragraph:

The man and the voice were known, but not the sense the things the voice said.  The cell was ten feet by six, with toilet and white tiles, which made it look quite clean.  The way it looked so uninviting could be the pain.

How do you know a sense?  Does the sentence mean the things the voice said made no sense?  Does it mean the words were unrecognizable?  Does it mean the tone was different than before?  And the last sentence... should "way" be replaced with "reason?"  There are distracting problems like this all through the novel.

Rex, I don't buy these books so I can relive my experiences copy editing students' papers!

So much for the style.  As for the plot, the first half of The Yellow Fraction is a weak political satire full of anemic jokes.  (The Army's administration building is called "The Hexagon," and the head of the military is J. Adolf Koln.)  The protagonist is Len (I guess short for Lenin) Thomas (perhaps his middle name is "Doubting.")  Len is a college student.  After being inspired by Yellow-sympathizing college professor Berkeley (a nod to Bishop Berkeley?) he gets thrown out of school for his Yellow beliefs, and so decides he wants to launch a revolution.  He is immediately hauled in by the government, and quickly discovers that Berkeley is a high-level member of the secret police!  (Doesn't this happen in 1984?)  The reader soon realizes that the Yellows are not only oppressed by the government--they have infiltrated the government!  (Doesn't this happen in Slan?)

Rex turns out to be an ambitious writer willing to experiment.  Besides the third person narration of Len's adventures, he provides us with J. Adolf Koln's and Berkeley's diaries, the minutes of political party conferences, memos, extracts from the history books of the future, and even a woman's shopping lists.  Rex inadvertently reminds us that not every experiments is a success.  Way way too much of this book consists of uninteresting people sitting around talking.  Are the competition between the Army and the secret police for public funds and Yellow debates about the possibility of constructing a starship without alerting the public supposed to thrill the reader?

The book shows some signs of life in its second half, when Len and 11 other 20-somethings with science or engineering training, an elite carefully chosen by the Yellows, are drafted into crewing a space ship that has been built secretly in the desert.  The Army and the intelligence services have conflicting views on what the ship's mission will be, which creates some suspense, and the dozen crew members, half male and half female, are expected to pair off sexually, generating a little human interest.  Unfortunately, Rex's main focus is on people on the Arcon surface: a philosophical discussion between two Yellows (Rex seems to think that the lies of religious and communist leaders are justified and can lead to improvements in society) and J. Adolf Koln's conspiracy to outwit the intelligence service and take over the government.  Boring.  The whole plot is resolved when Len in space and the Yellows in the intelligence service promulgate the spurious claim that Arcon is under attack from space aliens.  This lie galvanizes the populace and leads to a revolution that somehow solves all of Arcon's problems.

With its mediocre plot, irritatingly bad style, and elitist "vanguard of the revolution" politics, The Yellow Fraction is to be avoided even more assiduously than the poisonous blue planet of Arcon itself.