Digging through the paperback anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library, I came upon Harry Harrison's 1970 volume SF: Authors' Choice 2.  As the title suggests,  this is one of those compilations of stories of which their authors are particularly fond or proud.  Of the twelve stories in the book I think I have only read Algis Budrys' "Contact Between Equals;" that was back in 2019, and I liked it.  That leaves a lot of virgin territory in this paperback; today we'll explore the stories chosen by world-travelling sailor A. Bertram Chandler, hard science fiction icon Hal Clement and the agoraphobic editor of Galaxy, H. L. Gold.

"Late" by A. Bertram Chandler (1955)

In the period before the inexplicable birth of this blog, I read a bunch of stories and some novels by A. Bertram Chandler, most of them about space naval officer John Grimes.  I liked them well enough, but was hardly blown away by them, and I don't think I've read anything by Chandler during the era of this blog...until today!

"Late" is well-written and seems quite sober, but turns out to be a joke story with an unexpectedly unscientific ending.  I think I can mildly recommend it.

Jelks is a British scientist, a man very thorough and very calm, but also very slow.  Everybody jokes to him, and of him, that he will be late for his own funeral, and we hear this phrase multiple times over the course of the story.  

"Late" takes place in a Cold War world in which the United Kingdom has its own independent space program.  Thanks to his stolid reliability and thoroughness, Jelks is selected for the job of staying alone in an orbiting rocket for months, conducting experiments and taking readings.  Many men would crack up all alone in a tin can for such a long period, but those in authority feel they can rely on the steady and unexcitable Jelks.

After a few weeks up there, Jelks sees some kind of cataclysm take place on the Earth below; he is familiar with all the types of nuclear weapons and all the various weather phenomena, and the character of what he sees baffles him, as the disaster is unlike what he would expect from any weapon or meteorological event.  He pilots his rocket back to Earth, back to England.  There are no people around.  He makes his way to a village church and the opened and empty graves indicate that he missed the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgement. 

All the dead pan and believable hard science stuff that occupies 90% of the story, about the way the rockets and space suits operate and so forth, made the Christian resolution of "Late" a surprise, though Chandler does foreshadow the ending with the repeated intoning of the "late for his own funeral" joke and by having Jelk scoff at some prophet mentioned in the newspaper who wins notoriety by claiming the end of the world is nigh.

This unusual story first appeared in Science Fantasy and, besides here in SF: Authors' Choice 2, it has only been reprinted in the Australian anthology Beyond Tomorrow, which was published to coincide with the World Science Fiction Convention of 1975, held in Melbourne.  In his afterward to the story here in Harrison's anthology, Chandler says that his first choice for inclusion in this book was his story "Giant Killer," but that one was too long, and talks about the circumstances under which he wrote "Late" and a little about his move from Britain to Australia.

"Proof" by Hal Clement

As with Chandler, I read some Clement before I started the blog but have not read anything by him since the founding of the quixotic venture that is MPorcius Fiction Log; as with Chandler, I liked what I read but didn't feel much urge to read more by him.

"Proof" is Clement's first published story, and, in his foreword to it here in SF: Authors' Choice 2, he talks about how he first got into SF, about how he is a stickler for scientific accuracy in SF, and a little about John W. Campbell, Jr. and Jack Williamson and their influence on his early career.  

"Proof" is a serious hardcore hard SF story, full of phrases like "...the viscosity of a gas does increase directly as the square root of its temperature..." and "We found that electromagnetic radiations of wavelengths in the octave above H-alpha would penetrate the interference...."  Our main characters are two adventurous types, one a native of the Sun, the other a native of the star Sirius.  These two people are elite members of civilizations that evolved inside stars, beings whose bodies consist of magnetic fields and neutrons and whose "food" is neutronium.  They are aboard a ship travelling from the outer regions of the Sun towards the solar core--Solarians live in cities suspended in the outer regions of Sol, but need more neutronium than is available out there, and so send ships down to the core to collect this essential element.  The reason the Solarians reside far from their food supply is that the inner regions of the Sun are inhabited by monsters, dangerous beasts the ship's crew will likely have to fight to secure the neutronium the cities need.

The actual plot of the story does not involve the monsters or the collection of neutronium.  The Sirian visitor is a scientist who has a theory that, if artificially compressed, elements like iron and carbon that in a star are in an ionized plasma form might take on a solid form.  This theoretical phenomena is difficult for the Solarians and Sirians to visualize, and their senses are ill-equipped to detect such solid matter should they encounter it.  At least that is what I think the Sirian is saying; in my youth, when I should have been memorizing the Periodic Table of Elements and chemical formulas, I was clogging my brain with dialogue from The Flintstones and how many hit dice First Edition AD&D monsters have, so this material is a challenge for me. 

Our Solarian character, the captain of the sun diving ship, upon hearing this theory, describes a tragic and mysterious event he witnessed while commanding a ship on a journey between stars another interstellar craft that was accompanying his own collided with some kind of invisible object and was destroyed--perhaps it was a specimen of the solid iron, silicon, carbon, etc., the Sirian is theorizing?  Clement breaks free from the setting of the Solarian sun diving ship to describe the spectacular crash and cataclysmic explosion of the Solarian interstellar ship in a remote area of Earth from the point of view of a human being.  Then comes the little joke at the end of the story--the Sirian scientist doesn't think solid iron and carbon could exist in the natural world and accuses the Solarian of making the story up.

"Proof" is a good example of a science fiction story that is really about science and not just an adventure or detective story or political satire set in space or the future.  Clement concocts an alternate, speculative, milieu that is very strange but is actually based on the hard sciences and stretches your brain in the way that surreal or psychedelic settings that make zero sense fail to.  Even though there is a minimum of sex and violence, and little plot or character, "Proof" still manages to be entertaining--the setting alone is enough for you to chew on.  So, thumbs up for "Proof."

Since its debut in Campbell's Astounding, "Proof" has been reprinted in numerous anthologies, including several edited by Isaac Asimov and/or Martin H. Greenberg, as well as the Clement collection Music of Many Spheres.          

The cover of Music of Many Spheres is illustrated by a painting by Clement himself

"Love in the Dark" by H. L. Gold

In his intro here in SF: Authors' Choice 2 to "Love in the Dark," which first appeared in the short-lived magazine Suspense as "Love Ethereal," Gold brags about how brilliant his characterization of the protagonist of the story is and makes fun of the woman upon whom he based his character.  Gold comes off as kind of a jerk, frankly.

The character of which Gold is so proud is the unhappily married Livy, a not-very-attractive thirty-something whose husband is Mark Random, a "pudgy" sales manager who wears glasses and a neatnik who is the picture of dull sangfroid; Livy tries to get a rise out of him by loudly kicking her shoes around and scuffing up the walls but Mark just ignores these provocations.  Gold makes it clear that Livy's unhappiness is largely due to Mark's inability to have sex or lack of sexual interest in her.

One night Livy is undressing for bed and feels lustful eyes staring at her.  Of course, those eyes are not Mark's--he has his back to her.  When Livy closes her eyes she can "see" the "man" who is ogling her, muscular hunk of a space alien with blue feathers and pointy ears.  The invisible alien puts the moves on Livy--during the day she can feel this creature kissing her as she does the housework.  The bird man cannot speak to her--his race and ours hear on different frequencies or something--but Livy is thrilled by the sexual attention.

Livy's strange behavior leads Mark to call a friend for help.  Ben is another successful professional who is overweight and unattractive, a guy who has read lots of books on business psychology.  The presence of Ben allows Livy a chance to insult Mark--as she lists off her husband's faults and calls him names, Ben encourages her, telling Mark that it is healthy psychologically for Livy to get this stuff off her chest and, besides, she doesn't mean it.

Of course, she does mean it.  Livy's relationship with the bird man only she can see, and only when she closes her eyes, progresses and she gets pregnant.  Ben figures that she is having an affair and is so guilty over it that her brain is hiding the truth from her by giving her this bird man delusion, and urges Mark to have his wife admitted to an institution.  Livy runs away, but sneaks back to watch the collapse of Ben and Mark's friendship when the invisible bird man hits Mark and Mark blames Ben for the attack.

Livy and the bird man have an invisible baby.  Livy gets a job with a private detective agency; the bird man, being invisible, can gather all kinds of information with ease that Livy tells her employer she has collected.  (Livy and the alien communicate by typing--he has learned English.)      

"Love in the Dark" is an acceptable filler joke story about sex that isn't funny or sexy.  It feels kind of mean-spirited, with its contempt for fat people and its apparent glee in the punishment meted out to Mark and Ben, who don't really seem villainous, just boring and sexually dysfunctional, but maybe we are supposed to feel they deserve punishment because they are business people and not scientists or artists or communist revolutionaries or whatever sort of people Gold himself admires?  "Love in the Dark" is a sort of forgettable routine thing, so it is a little odd that Gold took the opportunity provided by SF: Authors' Choice 2 of this book to make a big deal out of it.

"Love in the Dark" is included in at least three Gold collections as well as some anthologies, including Fred Pohl's Beyond the End of Time, the cover illo of which manages to cram in a multitude of our favorite things: a hunk, a babe, poison gas, a saucer, a space man, and an urban apocalypse, and Basil Davenport's Invisible Men, which has a characteristically awesome Richard Powers cover. 

The 1966 printing of Invisible Men above has the lens on the right side of the illo blacked out, but that lens on the 1960 edition shows a woman's nude torso, a reminder that the master of abstract art Richard Powers can also produce  very fine renderings of the human form

Let's read from another science fiction anthology courtesy of the magic of the internet archive.  I guess Frederik Pohl's 1954 Assignment in Tomorrow first came to my attention in January, when I read Theodore Sturgeon's "Mr. Costello, Hero" in my 1978 DAW edition of the 1958 Sturgeon collection A Touch of Strange. Assignment in Tomorrow reprints "Mr. Costello, Hero" and fifteen other stories, many of which are by people in whom we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are interested.  Today let's check out three, those by that guy who writes adventure stories about the ray-gun-toting heroines of the future, James H. Schmitz, the agoraphobic editor of Galaxy, H. L. Gold, and detective writer Fredric Brown.

"We Don't Want Any Trouble" by James H. Schmitz (1953)

Pohl in his intro to "We Don't Want Any Trouble" here in Assignment in Tomorrow says that the title story of Agent of Vega, a collection I read back in 2016, is "brilliant as a nova."  (I concluded my own analysis of "Agent of Vega" with the declaration that it was "not bad, not great.")  Pohl then assures us that this story here, which debuted in Gold's Galaxy, is "brighter still."  Well, let's see.

OK, this is an acceptable horror story.  More brilliant than a nova?  Not in my book.

A zoologist comes home to his wife to tell her the astounding news--he has been among the important men who interviewed a space alien!  This alien was like a frog man or lizard man, and a government intelligence officer and a bunch of scientists and politicians interrogated it.  All these important representatives of the American establishment were consumed by irrational negative feelings towards the alien, irresistible fear and undeniable detestation.  So disturbed was the zoologist that he could barely look at the alien and certainly couldn't come up with rational questions to ask it.  Our guy almost fainted when the alien's eyes fell upon him--only his fear of embarrassment in front of a blonde woman, the intelligence man's fiancé, there to take notes, kept him from swooning.

The eggheads were at a loss, but the intelligence man was a man of action and when the alien refused to answer questions he threatened the reptilian creature with torture and death.  The alien explained that his people are immune to pain and even death, and will do whatever they want on Earth, probably just act as tourists.  The E.T. was haughty and contemptuous of our civilization.

The intelligence man, hysterical, whipped out his pistol and gunned the alien down; his comrades wrested his gun from him.  Then the spook's hot fiancée stood up from where she was taking notes to strip naked!  The aliens are immune from death because they can move their consciousness from one body to another with trivial ease!  The intelligence man snatches another pistol, but is immediately shot dead himself by one of his fellows--no one can ever know if he intended to fire upon his fiancée's possessed body, or commit suicide.

As the story ends the zoologist speculates on how much human society will be altered by the alien tourists.  How many of these invasive tourists will there be?  And how long will they want to occupy a human body?  Will they be a minor inconvenience, or ruin lives and revolutionize society?

"We Don't Want Any Trouble" may remind readers of John D. MacDonald's The Wine of the Dreamers (1951) and Robert Silverberg's "Passengers" (1967) and probably some other things not coming to mind at the moment in which aliens take vacations (our English friends might say "'olidays") in our bodies. 

After first being reprinted here in Pohl's anthology, "We Don't Want Any Trouble," would go on to reappear in multiple American and foreign anthologies and in the Schmitz collection Eternal Frontier.

"A Matter of Form" by H. L. Gold (1938)

Some of the editors of the big SF magazines are as wacky as any of the big name SF writers, are writers in the own right, and should perhaps be seen as collaborators with the most honored SF writers, having workshopped ideas with them and guided them in developing plots, styles and themes.  At least that is the nice way of putting it--others who are less charitable have seen the big SF editors in question as self-important dictators who arrogantly interfered with the work of the writers whose fiction filled their magazines.  Either way, H. L. Gold of Galaxy and John W. Campbell, Jr. of Astounding are odd, perhaps tragic, perhaps reprehensible, characters who, for better or worse depending on your point of view, worked closely with the most prominent SF writers and played a pivotal role in shaping their work and the entire SF field.  Here in "A Matter of Form" we have a story by Gold that debuted in Campbell's essential magazine over ten years before Galaxy appeared on the scene, a story that has been reprinted many times in anthologies edited by such men as Isaac Asimov (with the help of Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh, of course) and Groff Conklin and in our own wacky 21st century in the Gold collection Perfect Murders: Detective Mysteries.

"Detective Mysteries?", you ask?  Yes, indeed.  "A Matter of Form" has the tone and atmosphere of a noirish hard-boiled detective story.  Set in New York City during the Depression, Gold's story is populated by educated people who are either down and out and suffering or living high on the hog through the proceeds of their diabolical criminal enterprises.  Our initial protagonist is a brilliant newsman, tall and skinny Gilroy, who, when he isn't bitching about how much he hates the septuagenarian rich guy, Talbot, who is half-owner of the newspaper, and relishing Talbot's imminent demise, is investigating the mysterious appearance on the streets of men, apparently unidentifiable bums with no local connections, who are catatonic and/or paralyzed.  What happened to these jokers?  Well, all of them have surgical wounds on the backs of their necks--could some mad scientist be experimenting on these poor bastards?  And why is the top surgeon at the hospital where the latest catatonic/paralytic ended up, Moss, famously a ruthless jerk, quitting his job of hospital director?

The narrative focus shifts to the adventures of Wood, formerly employed "in a stock-broker's office" as a "code expert" or "code translator," now spending his time on the streets, clad in rags, unable to find work.  Wood gets bamboozled by a bogus job offer and falls into the clutches of Moss and Talbot; Moss, it turns out, is experimenting on vulnerable men who lack families and connections in his quest to develop a means of moving people's consciousnesses from one body to another!  His research is supported by Talbot, who hopes Moss will fit him out with a fresh young body, his cis-body having a weak heart and scheduled to expire at any moment!  Moss has learned that to accomplish these identity shifts you don't have to move the entire brain, just a tiny little bit near where the brain meets the spine--this is where identity resides.  (Who knew?)  The unsuspecting Wood soon finds himself in the body of a dog!  In the same room is his old human body crawling around on all fours, it being animated by the consciousness of the dog.  

Gold's journalist and criminal scenes are pretty conventional, but the scenes of the man in a dog's body, fighting his way out of Moss's lab and evading capture by Talbot's flunkies and by the police, are pretty good--Gold's description of a human being's response to living the life of a carnivorous quadruped, of experiencing firsthand a dog's instinctive reactions to stimuli, are good speculative fiction.  It would be easy to give these portions of the book a thumbs up.  The sequences in which Wood, the code expert in a dog's body, strives to contact Gilroy the crusading journalo are not bad, and are fully in the tradition of science fiction that teaches you cool stuff (in this case, cryptography) and portrays people using logic and knowledge to overcome problems; unfortunately these scenes are repetitive and feel pretty long.  In fact, the entire story, which is like 60 pages in Assignment in Tomorrow, feels kind of long and repetitive, the characters doing and saying the same kinds of things again and again.

Another problem with "A Matter of Form" is the weak ending.  We follow Wood (in a dog's body) and Gilroy, accompanied by Gilroy's editor, a sort of superfluous but ever-present sidekick character, through a long sequence of climbing buildings and sneaking around which ends with a confrontation with Talbot and Moss.  Talbot dies of a heart attack in the excitement and, after long scenes of Moss showing contempt for his captors, Wood uses his dog body to just kill the defenseless mad scientist.

With Moss, the only man able to perform the identity transplant operation he pioneered, dead, Wood is  stuck in the dog body.  He and Gilroy get rich performing on stage and in Hollywood.  Gold talks about how Wood is sad and defeated, wishing he could live as a man again, which I think would have been a good moody ending for a hard-boiled detective story that is also an attack on our bourgeois capitalist society--all the money in the world can't make you happy if you are a second class citizen, if you have lost your humanity!  But Gold cops out and has Wood, in a way that is totally inexplicable and Gold does not even try to explain, return to his human body after a year as a pooch.  Lame!  

The plot of Gold's "A Matter of Form" is about as obvious and familiar as that of Schmitz's "We Don't Want Any Trouble," but Gold's story has a style, an atmosphere and an ideology, making it more engaging, even if I'm not impressed by the ideology--the story is suffused with the hatred of the middle-class smarty pants for the upper-middle class as well as that of the self-important creative type for those who work for money; presumably this endeared the story to Fred Pohl, alumnus of the Young Communist League.  Gold lays the atmosphere and ideology on pretty thick, having the reporter denounce Talbot again and again, and telling us again and again about Wood's worn shoes and unshaven face, contrasting his down and out mug with Moss's perfect shave, but a loud personality is better than no personality.  And the story does come to life in the action scenes in which the code expert has to learn how to operate a dog's body tout suite.  So we'll judge "A Matter of Form" marginally good, a notch above Schmitz's story; you commies out there will probably want to crank that up a few more notches.  

For more H. L. Gold coverage here at MPorcius Fiction Log, check out my blogpost on "No Medals,"  another story about poverty and a mad scientist practicing weird medicine, and "Trouble with Water," which is full of ethnic and sex stereotypes.

"Hall of Mirrors" by Fredric Brown (1953)

Here's another story from Gold's Galaxy--it's H. L. Gold day here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Fredric Brown's "Hall of Mirrors" debuted in an issue of Galaxy with a Christmas joke cover--Christmas covers and joke covers always make me groan.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we like blood and guts, sex and violence, thrills and chills, not Santa Claus and yukking it up. 

In our last episode we looked at three stories that appeared in the very first issue of Robert A. W. Lowndes' The Magazine of Horror, and today we investigate three stories printed in the very first issue of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown.  Frank Belknap Longapalooza continues with a story from the man H. P. Lovecraft called "Sonny," "Dark Vision," and we also have a widely admired story from the future editor of Galaxy H. L. Gold, "Trouble with Water," and from Robert Moore Williams "Death Sentence," a story that seems never to have been reprinted.  This inaugural issue of Unknown also includes a story by Weird Tales stalwart Many Wade Wellman, "'Where Angels Fear....", but while I was reading it for this blog post I realized I had already read and blogged about it back in 2022.  

Hello, and welcome to MPorcius Fiction Log.  I so enjoyed rereading R. A. Lafferty's 1960 "Snuffles" in my copy of Nine Hundred Grandmothers while putting together my last blogpost that I decided to read three more stories from that 1970 collection, which has been translated into numerous languages.  I have the Ace printing with the cover by Leo and Diane Dillon.

"Seven-Day Terror" (1962)

This is a charming trifle, an absurdist joke story with a little bit of  twist ending.  In "an obscure neighborhood" in "the boondocks" live the Willoughby family.  The Willoughbys have seven kids, and all are geniuses, and, in the way of kids, mischievous, amoral, callous, and cruel.  Devastation ensues when one of the kids constructs a handheld device that makes things disappear.  This may be a joke story, but as we often see in Lafferty stories, it has an edge, because some of the jokes are about bloodshed, and the story could easily be seen as an example of how people with superior intellect use that intellect to exploit or rob others, or just hurt them for fun.  Does Lafferty mean for us to simply enjoy this silly story, to laugh along as the precocious Willoughby kids make life hard for other people?  Or are we expected to reflect on our own light-hearted reactions to a story about disruptors who turn the world upside down and suffer no punishment for their crimes?

Thumbs up.  "Seven-Day Terror" is beloved of editors, chosen by Judith Merril for her famous Year's Best S-F series and by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg for their Great SF Stories series.  It first was printed in Fred Pohl's If.  

"Name of the Snake" (1964)

It is the spacefaring future, and the Pope has encouraged missionary work among the stars, for aliens have just as much right to hear the Gospel as anybody.  This story tells of a Terran missionary on the planet Analos.  The natives, the Analoi, are somewhat similar to humans, but more advanced, or so they say, and when the missionary tries to spread Christianity among them they claim to have no sin, to have transcended greed (their economy provides each individual everything he could possibly want) and lust (they have evolved a new form of reproduction which obviates all requirement for or interest in sex) and the rest of the sins.  What need have they of religion if they have no sin?

The missionary is certain that the Analoi must in fact sin, and his investigations quickly uncover the sins that have, initially, been hidden from him.  Among these sins are the fact that some of the long-lived Analoi grow bored of life and commit suicide, and that Analoi society has no tolerance for disability or inferiority or dissent, and those young who do not meet societies standards are euthanized.

The quite predictable joke that finishes off "Name of the Snake" is the revelation of another sin of the Analoi, who don't appreciate outsiders trying to change their ways--like in all those old cartoons and movies and TV shows, they cook missionaries in an oversized pot and eat them.  

This feels like a minor story, but it is entertaining, and can be seen as a Christian commentary on the themes that modern advances, however much they make life longer or easier, do not make people better, and that utopias are built on the blood and bones on those who refuse to conform.  Like other Lafferty stories, "Snuffles" in particular, it also reminds us that virtue has to be its own reward, that good people's virtues often do not protect them from a horrible death--hell, sometimes people suffer a horrible death because they chose to do the right thing.  "Name of the Snake" also hints that we are not the first spacefaring civilization on Earth, that memories of the Analoi are the source of the human idea of the gargoyle, a common SF theme (we see this in C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith stories, for example, in which we learn that the Greek idea of the Gorgon Medusa is based upon the dangerous race of which Shambleau is a member); Lafferty's novel The Devil is Dead, which I blogged about almost ten years ago, also has such hints that our civilization was preceded by another, perhaps more sophisticated, one.

Not bad.  After its debut in Worlds of Tomorrow, "Name of the Snake" has primarily reappeared in different editions of Nine Hundred Grandmothers, but also in 1976 in the French edition of Galaxy. 

"Ginny Wrapped in the Sun" (1967)

More dangerous amoral genius children!  The Ginny of the title is a four-year-old mastermind who mercilessly dominates those around her.  We might call "Ginny Wrapped in the Sun" a homo superior story--Ginny seems to be the pioneering exemplar of the new race which is going to overthrow our own human race, and she is the target of a band of religious people who have foretold her arrival and seek to destroy her to preserve the status quo.  Lafferty's story also features esoteric speculations on the history of human evolution; one of the story's characters is a biologist who has a theory considered crazy by the scientific establishment--but supported by all the evidence presented in the story--that argues that at one time the human race consisted of three-foot-tall monkey-like creatures bereft of speech who matured at four years of age.  The humans of today are the mutant descendants of that race, but the biologist believes that humanity could suddenly revert to this earlier form at any time.  Ginny, we are led to believe, is such a reversion, and as the story ends and Ginny's absolute ruthlessness is fully revealed, it seems that the current form of the human race is in trouble, that Ginny has a cunning plan to evade the religious crusaders who would kill her and so her kind will inherit the Earth.

Next up, the March 1935 issue of Astounding, from which we'll read the cover story, which is billed as a novel, by Murray Leinster and two short stories, one by future editor of Galaxy H. L. Gold and one by Raymond Z. Gallun. 

We've already read a story from this issue, John W. Campbell's "Blindness." Campbell not only has two pieces of fiction in the issue, one under a pseudonym, but a letter as well, under a different pseudonym.  His letter is part of an incomprehensible argument with another letter writer about orbital velocities (I think) and includes brain-breaking math.  It seems like Astounding readers really knew about science and really cared about science!  Wilson Tucker has one of his joke letters printed, in which he refers to Robert Lowndes; the letters columns in these 1930s SF magazines make the SF community of the day feel like an intimate, if sometimes contentious, family.  When you flip through them you'll sometimes find people saying the letters column is the best part of the magazine and judging an issue almost as much on whether their favorite letter writers are represented as on the quality of the fiction.    

When I was a kid everybody talked about the 1950s as a time of prudish repression of sexual expression, but woah, check out this Hannes Bok cover!  Zowie!  I guess nowadays we can use this cover as evidence the 1950s was an era steeped in rape culture!

"Proxima Centauri" by Murray Leinster

isfdb calls "Proxima Centauri" a novella.  Whatever it is, "Proxima Centauri" was reprinted in the 1950 Leinster collection Sidewise in Time, and after that quite a few collections and anthologies, including Isaac Asimov's Before the Golden Age, which I own in hardcover, and James Gunn's From Wells to Heinlein.

The Adastra is a spherical spaceship five thousand feet in diameter, mankind's first interstellar craft.  She is propelled by a complex drive that disintegrates things--this disintegration effect must be carefully dampened by supersonic vibrators lest the entire ship, and anything nearby, also be disintegrated.  The vessel is on its maiden voyage, a mission of exploration bound for Proxima Centauri, the star system closest to our own.  The huge ship was crewed with families, rather than individuals, and Leinster likens the ship to an apartment building.  But this is a building that nobody can leave, where nothing changes, and there is very little work to do, and the monotony and boredom of the seven-year trip to Proxima Centauri has proved too much for many of the crew, leading to broken marriages, murder, and mutiny.  Just a few years into the voyage the officers disarmed the enlisted men and barricaded themselves in one section of the vessel, and for years the opposing groups have been separated; occasionally the officers have had to force the crew, at gunpoint, to accomplish some work task or other.

As our story begins the Adastra is finally approaching its destination.  The captain had signals sent ahead to announce their arrival to any potential modern civilization in the Centauri system, and, sure enough, the Adastra has been receiving replies even less comprehensible than one of John W. Campbell's mathematical formulas.  As luck would have it, the best communications operator aboard the Adastra is not from an officer class family, but is the son of two enlisted class parents.  Of necessity, this young man, Jack Gary, has been raised to the officer class.  Romeo and Juliet-like, he and the captain's daughter, biologist Helen Bradley, are in love--Leinster gives his story that old dramatic standby, the love triangle, by having the ship's second-in-command, Alstair, also in love with Miss Bradley, but this middle-aged guy has no chance.

Jack Gary figures out via technical stuff I won't go into here that the alien signals are no longer coming from a planet but from an approaching spaceship, and that spaceship is trying to conceal its movements, as if it is going to attack the Adastra.  Bradley's father, an old geezer, is not up to the task of commanding the ship during this crisis so Alstair takes command.  The alien ship, which has greater acceleration and maneuverability than our Earth ship, comes up and sprays the Adastra with deadly radiation--the Earth vessel's hull absorbs the rays, so the humans survive the bombardment, but the Adastra has no heavy weapons with which to retaliate  So, the humans play possum, luring aboard an alien boarding party which the Earthers ambush with stun ray guns.  Study and interrogation of the captured Centaurians reveals that they are basically mobile plants, and that they treasure animal flesh--like our own!--as a delicacy.  Eating animal tissues drives them to ecstasy, and so they have killed almost all animal life in their system, and are thrilled to find in the Adastra a new source of delicious animal protein.  They even enjoy eating strands of some guy's wool sweater!   

A squadron of alien ships joins the scout and they begin slowly burning away the Adastra's hull with some different kind of rays.  By now Gary has figured out how to communicate with the Centaurians, giving the Earthers a chance to surrender.  The aliens take over the ship, murdering all the crew members, leaving only the officers.  Two officers are selected, along with a bunch of livestock and books and sample devices, to be sent to a fertile but unpopulated planet owned by the monarch of the Centaurians.  Jack and Helen are chosen, and shipped to this prison planet on an automatic ship (the king of the Centarians can't trust any of his subjects who might accompany the delicious humans to resist the urge to eat them.)  The rest of the humans are killed and eaten, except for Alstair.  Alstair has figured out a way to transmit messages to Jack and Helen so that the love birds get to hear him go insane from the horror of seeing his comrades murdered and out of jealous unrequited love for Helen.

The aliens make Alstair land the Adastra on their planet.  The Centaurians' rocket drives make their ships faster and more maneuverable than the Adastra over short distances, but to get all the way to Earth, which they are eager to conquer because to them the whole planet looks like the meat department at Wegmans, they need to learn how to make the kind of disintegration drive the Adastra has, and they want Alstair to show them.  Alstair activates the engine without switching on the supersonic vibration dampeners, disintegrating not only Earth's first interstellar craft, but the entire planet and the entire Centaurian race.  Jack and Helen can see the flash from their prison planet as Alstair saves humanity from becoming the plant people's main course.  Take that, veggies!  Jack and Helen are sitting pretty, all alone on this prison planet until the arrival of humanity's second interstellar ship, which is due in four years.

"Proxima Centauri" is an entertaining enough spacecraft and spacesuit adventure, with plenty of science (e.g., detailed descriptions of the effects of rays and heat on the ship's hull) and engineering (e.g., Gary goes on a spacewalk to install new improved antennas and modifies machines to create a translation device) as well as lots of melodramatic horror elements--murder, torture, insanity, suicide, etc.  The story could have stood some editing for length and repetition, as a bunch of technical descriptions at the beginning get repeated redundantly, and the style is mediocre, but I judge it acceptable.

It is interesting to see another story about how space travel is going to drive people insane, but I'm afraid all that business about the ship being populated with families who get involved in a class war after going bonkers from boredom is sort of superfluous.  Once the main thrust of the story, the struggle with the man-eating plant men of Proxima Centauri, gets going all that stuff about families and class war is forgotten, and all the named characters are officers.  I suppose Leinster introduced the class distinctions jazz as a way to give his love-triangle subplot more oomph, but Bradley and Alstair only ever mention Gary's class origins in the very start of the story, so it doesn't add much of anything.  The fact that the people on the Adastra had psychological problems also casts a shadow on the happy ending of the story--Jack Gary and Helen Bradley are expecting the second Earth interstellar ship to arrive in four years, but if that ship's crew suffers the same psychological issues the Adastra crew did, then maybe they won't make it!  Even if they do make it, the fact that they might be miserable diminishes the relief the story's ending is supposed to give the reader after all the horror business with the planet people.

I enjoyed "Proxima Centauri," and judge it to be a borderline case between acceptable and mildly good.

"No Medals" by H. L. Gold

In his memoir The Way the Future Was, Frederik Pohl describes working with his friend Horace L. Gold, editor of Galaxy in the 1950s; besides selling stories to Gold ("In that decade I was Galaxy's most prolific contributor," Pohl tells us), Pohl acted as Gold's assistant, at times doing just about all the work of editing the magazine, of which he was eventually officially named editor.  Gold had psychological problems (he almost never left his apartment) and Pohl characterizes Gold's editing practices as "Horace's battle to substitute his own conception of a story for the writer's;" nevertheless, Pohl insists that "while Horace was in full swing, Galaxy was where the action was."  Barry Malzberg has said similar things, calling Gold "perhaps the greatest editor in the history of all fields for the first half of his tenure" in his essay "Down Here in the Dream Quarter."

Maybe some day I'll sit down and look through a bunch of issues of Galaxy and try to figure out why exactly Pohl and Malzberg think that 1950-1955 Galaxy is the bee's knees.  But today I'm just going to read this early story by Gold, which has been reprinted once, in 2011's Fighting the Future War: An Anthology of Science Fiction War Stories, 1914-1945.

Pohl, of course, was a leftist who wrote plenty of anti-capitalism satires, and "No Medals" provides us reason to suspect why he and Gold got along like two peas in a pod: the story's mad scientist, Patrick Finch, is a genius at making medical devices "but never could understand the workings of a business deal" and is driven to fits of nerves at the thought of "commercial bickering and haggling, the possibility of being cheated;" this poor bastard is forced by poverty to live on bread and milk!  He has sunk every penny into his masterwork, a project he has toiled at for 23 years!  But today is the day, today his project is complete and he day dreams about being hailed by his countrymen as a national hero!

That masterwork is the invention of a technique of turning dead bodies into remote-controlled drone infantrymen by stuffing them full of electronics!  Before him stands just such a remote controlled zombie, and it works!  Gold spends a considerable portion of this brief piece describing the science of electricity in the body and then how Finch has replaced some of a dead body's nerves with wires.  And then we get an extended fantasy of the mad scientist, his vision of an irresistible assault carried out by the flesh robots, who, having no fear and feeling no pain, will triumph even though they receive no medals.  But the scientist's day dreams get the best of him--as he is imagining all the accolades he will receive for his invention he gets so excited he accidentally moves a lever on the remote control that causes his prototype drone to stab him to death with a bayonet (as depicted in the super spoily illustration to "No Medals.")  Finch won't be getting any medals, either!

This is one of those stories that is just an idea with a scaffolding of mediocre plot and character constructed around it to hold it up, but the idea is good and the scaffolding is adequate.  This is also one of those stories you could analyze to death.  It is an anti-war story, of course--there is no suggestion that the war Patrick Finch's unnamed country is embroiled in is a just one, or that Finch's motives are patriotic instead of selfish.  We might also see the story as being about how new technologies can destroy their creators, how science and/or the modern state have abandoned any belief in the soul or respect for the dignity of human life and thus recognize no limits, how governments treat their citizens like expendable cogs, how soldiers are (or are thought to be) zombies, etc.

Acceptable.

"Telepathic Piracy" by Raymond Z. Gallun

"Telepathic Piracy" would be reprinted in the 88th issue of the American edition of Perry Rhodan, which was edited by Forrest J. Ackerman (Ackerman's German-born wife "Wendayne" did many of the translations from the German.)    

This story comes to us as a document written in 1959, describing an event that took place in 1949, taking as one of its primary sources the diary of an inventor, Roland Voss; the story includes many excerpts from Voss's diary.

One day a neighbor brings Voss a meteorite, in which is embedded a square, apparently manufactured, piece of metal with a jewel mounted upon it.  When Voss holds this alien artifact to his head to listen to it, in case it is ticking like a watch or something, it gives him the power to read people's--and animals!--minds!

I liked how Gallun described the experience of being able to read minds--Voss can see through others' eyes, hear through their ears, etc., as well as know what they are thinking.  Gallun also does a good job of narrating the evolution of Voss's character as he experiments with and begins exploiting the possibilities of the device he calls "the telepathon."  The device has a quite long range--he can read the minds of people all over the Earth.  As a scientist and engineer he is interested in reading the minds of other science brainiacs, but he also ends up reading the minds of people living in poverty and misery.  Feeling their agony galvanizes him--he will use the telepathon to help them!  But we know where that road which is paved with good intentions leads!  

First, Voss "just" steals ideas from other inventors and makes oodles of money marketing "his" inventions and uses the money to give stuff to the poor.  Of course, this doesn't actually eliminate poverty, so Voss figures what the world needs is a dictator who will run the global economy and solve all our problems for us, and hey, who would be a better dictator than one Roland Voss?  To become dictator Voss figures all he needs is a super weapon, something atomic, with which to threaten everybody into submitting to his will.  Now, in real life, by 1949, plenty of people knew the principles behind the making of nuclear weapons and reactors, but in this story nobody has cracked the atomic code yet, so Voss can't just steal that know-how from somebody's noggin.  Or can he?  Voss realizes that, within the moon, there lives a high tech subterranean (er, sublunar) civilization!  And these loonies have all kinds of nuclear power!         

By picking the brains of the moon people, Voss is able to design and then build a nuclear-powered rocket plane armed with powerful ray projectors.  Via radio he broadcasts his demand that the governments of the world surrender to him, and when they are reluctant to do so, he starts shooting his rays from above, devastating sparsely populated areas, to demonstrate his power.  When he is attacked by military aircraft he effortlessly shoots them down, and to show he really means business he sinks a battleship.  His attacks fill the people of the world with rage, and when Voss puts the telepathon to his head to research public opinion the power of all that rage kills him!  When his nuclear-powered aircraft is recovered it provides the key to revolutionary technological development and economic growth--progress which does not require a dictator.

I like Gallun's optimism, his confidence that ordinary people want freedom and wouldn't sell their liberty to the government in exchange for handouts, and his confidence that technological development leads to a better society.  Unfortunately, the resolution of the plot is weak--Gallun described the workings of the telepathon in some detail and never offered any clue that people's anger or hate could harm the user through it.  He should have come up with some other way to neutralize Voss.   

Despite the weak ending, "Telepathic Piracy" is the best of the three stories I'm reading from this issue of Astounding.  It is better written than Leinster's story, and there is more meat--more plot and character--than there is in Gold's story.  I think it rises above the broad realm of the acceptable and into the "good" band.

**********            

These stories all have their virtues and all accomplish what I take to be their authors' goals and are all worth reading.  And it is nice that they are so diverse--this issue of Astounding offers up some doom and gloom about human nature and psychology and the effects of technology, and some hopefulness and optimism as well.  As the crew of the Adastra can tell you, monotony is unhealthy, so bravo to editor F. Orlin Tremaine for offering us some variety.