Over the years I have acquired a tall stack of paperback anthologies, so let's take off the pile a book I've owned for over a decade and read some of the stories printed therein by people with whose work we already have some familiarity.  Today's subject: Seven Come Infinity, edited by Groff Conklin and published here in the republic in 1966 by Fawcett Gold Medal and reprinted in the United Kingdom a year later by Coronet.  I've already digested two stories that appear in this volume, Chad Oliver's "Rite of Passage" (I read it in 2014 and gave it a thumbs down) and Clifford Simak's "The Golden Bugs" (I read that one in 2018 and concluded it was "acceptable.")  Today we'll read the stories Conklin included in the book by Raymond F. Jones, Murray Leinster, and Eric Frank Russell.  Take note that I am reading these stories in this here paperback, and not in their original magazine appearances or in later books, though if I find a puzzling typo or something like that I may consult other such sources.

"Discontinuity" by Raymond F. Jones (1950)

I think I've covered nine Jones productions here at MPFL, the novels The Cybernetic Brains, Syn and The Alien, and the stories "Noise Level," "Fifty Million Monkeys," "Rat Race," "The Non-Statistical Man," "Starting Point," and "The Gardener."  Today we make it a round ten with "Discontinuity," which debuted in Astounding and has not been reprinted in English other than here in Seven Come Infinity.  German readers can find it in Deutsch in Die neuen Gehirne und andere Stories; "Discontinuity" is actually the title story of that 1971 collection.

In the future of force fields and interstellar travel, David Martell was a scientist and medical man of rare genius!  He figured out how the brain stored information, and even began development of techniques to restore memories and other brain functions to people who had suffered brain damage.  But Dr. Martell's life was not exactly one triumph after another.  For one thing, he married a woman, Alice, whom he loved but who didn't understand him and had no interest in science; Alice came to loathe the Doc and started cheating on him.  Ouch!  Then, his experiments with brain-damaged patients produced results that the general public and the establishment didn't consider to be successes--sure, the head injury patients were still alive, but they lost almost all of their intelligence--the Martell Synthesis was tried on 100 people, and all 100 are now "idiots!"  ("Idiot" is the word Jones uses consistently.)  The Martell Synthesis was outlawed!  Ouch again!  Then there was the car crash that left Martell himself brain damaged and almost dead--a crash that many suspect was no accident, but engineered by Alice and one of her boyfriends!  Ouch to the second power!

Such is the background.  The plot of "Discontinuity" kicks off as Martell's team tries to--illegally--use the process Martell developed to revive Martell's own smashed brain.  Part of the Martell Synthesis is to hook wires into the heads of people the patient knew and shift info from their healthy brains to the patient's damaged brain, to fill in gaps.  Alice has to be convinced to submit to this procedure--she would see greater financial benefits from having a husband who is a dead duck than a husband who is a live idiot--so the boffins threaten to reveal evidence she tried to murder her hubby, blackmailing her into cooperating.

(We later learn that the Synthesis process also writes info from many books into your brain.)

In Chapter II (this is a longish story, over 40 pages) Martell wakes up after the Synthesis process is over--he is OK!  Or so he thinks at first!  After he gets out of bed he finds he can't read English, and when he tries to talk, people don't understand him, and when they speak, it sounds like gibberish to him!  His colleagues think he is an idiot, like all the other brain-damaged peeps who were subjected to the Martell Synthesis, but now Martell knows they are not idiots, they just have aphasia!  Martell escapes the lab and in Chapter III hooks up with other subjects of the Martell Synthesis and finds they can speak to each other.  Among them is Marianne, a woman as pretty as Alice but smarter and more intellectually healthy.  (In this future, people who lie, cheat and commit murder aren't considered bad or evil, just ill or ignorant.)  Marianne was one of Martell's top assistants before her brain was wrecked by an electric shock and Martell used his process to bring her back to (it appeared at the time idiotic) life.  

Chapters III and IV are largely given over to speculative lectures on how the brain works and how the Martell Synthesis works--as we expect from these old time science fiction authors, Jones weaves science lectures in with his adventure plot and power fantasy themes.  It turns out that the Martell Synthesis turns you into a superior being, organizing the data in your brain (the data is compared to the punch cards of early computers) more rationally than mere natural processes can and somehow distinguishing irrational beliefs based on emotion from cold hard facts and prioritizing the latter.  

"The semantic selector, in arranging the pre-punched molecules in precise order with semantically correct cross-indexing, has swept clean the crazy, nonsensical filing system accumulated over the years."         

"We have within our hands the means to make a new kind of man, one which can displace the old and bring reason into the world....I am very certain we are the most completely sane people the world has ever known!"

Communication between people with synthesized brains and the old mundane kinds is impossible because synthesized brains are super-efficient and have naturally developed super-efficient means of communicating to each other.  English is too irrational for the efficient brain to comprehend!  Martell also finds that the synthesized no longer need sleep and have acquired superagility.

Chapter V sees the plot resolved.  Martell and Marianne use the Synthesis equipment to reduce their superiority enough that they can again communicate with us normies saddled with all-natural no-artificial-additives brains via the inefficient and irrational tongue of William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and Pete Townshend.  They try to convince people of the benefits of the Martell Synthesis but everybody is too scared of change, so our superman and superwoman start synthesizing people by force.  Among the first beneficiaries of nonconsensual synthetization is Alice; synthesis cures her of her deceitful and murderous ways as well as giving her super smarts and all those other abilities; the Martell marriage, we can be sure, is going to be a super-happy one from now on, and eventually all humanity will be equally super!  (Marianne is a little jealous, having fallen in love with Dr. Martell, but her rational brain will keep her from getting truly heartbroken.)

I love stories about disastrous sexual relationships and I love stories in which people mess with brains, so Jones has me on his side from the start.  "The Discontinuity" is also a decent homo superior story with sense-of-wonder elements as well as the elitism we see in so much SF that suggests their betters are fully justified in using guile and force to drag the ignorant masses into the glorious future.  This elitist attitude is disgusting, but I can't deny that it is exciting in fiction, and I didn't let the disgusting incest in Elleston Trevor's The Sibling stop me from enjoying and praising that novel and I'm not letting the elitism of Jones' "The Discontinuity" stop me from enjoying this story and giving it a thumbs up.

"The Corianis Disaster" by Murray Leinster (1960) 

The Corianis is one of the largest and safest starships in the interstellar civilization depicted in Leinster's story, and it is carrying important officials between two planets who are in the midst of major trader negotiations.  By chance, also aboard is a scientist, a physicist, who is very shy.  A one in a million bit of bad luck causes the Corianis to come out of hyperspace abruptly because a huge amount of debris, the remains of a planet destroyed by a nova a million or so years ago, was in its path.  The hyperdrive is wrecked, but ships the size of the Corianis carry two hyperdrives, just in case.  So the ship gets to its destination, just a little late.  Where they find that an exact duplicate of the Corianis has preceded them!  

The Corianis that is already there is populated by a trade delegation identical to that on the second-arriving ship, but several people aboard the second vessel, including our main character, the physicist, are not duplicated on the first ship.  The physicist quickly learns to overcome his shyness and asserts himself to solve the problem posed by the duplicate people, something only he is able to achieve, as everybody else aboard the two vessels, as well as everybody among the populace among whom they have landed, becomes violently irrational in the face of this unprecedented and apparently supernatural phenomena.  The physicist saves the day and even meets a girl and gets married.

The first part of "The Corianis Disaster," all the stuff about space flight and hyperspace and all that, is good.  But the second part, the puzzle of the duplicates, its effect on people, and the scientist's solution to it, is boring, even annoying.  There's the elitism of the story--everybody but the scientist acts like a violent irrational monster--which is bad enough, but worse, Leinster plays a lot of the confusion among the duplicates and the local populace for laughs.  Worst of all, Leinster makes this part of the story way way too long, hitting the same points again and again in the same way.  To show how irrational non-scientific people are, he has angry mobs form, not just once, but again and again.  He describes people's fears and diagnoses them again and again, uses the same metaphors and analogies again and again.  What Leinster is saying is kind of obvious, so he needn't tell us repeatedly, but he does, and it is no fun.  Maybe Lowndes requested a story of a certain length and Leinster stretched this one out by repeating himself?  A mistake!

As we readers figure out pretty quickly, but Leinster really takes his time to come out and say, during its hyperspace jump, the Corianis with the shy scientist aboard accidentally jumped into a different time line, one in which the bashful physicist didn't make the flight and the ship's flight was uneventful.  Our hero figures out how to return his Corianis to its native universe.  As I guess science fiction readers want to hear, our problems are solved when a scientist is given command over the government and the ship.  The the story ends with a limp joke about marriage--a man may make himself an alpha and save the lives of a ship and all its occupants, but his wife will still tell nag him into doing what she wants. 

Far from Leinster's best work.  I'm calling it barely acceptable.

In 2006 "The Corianis Disaster" was presented in a Russian Leinster collection, and in 2015 Armchair Fiction included it in a double novel along with Harry Harrison's famous Deathworld.

"Panic Button" by Eric Frank Russell (1959)

Advertising works!  In our last blog post we saw an ad for Science Fiction Stories' July 1957 issue in a copy of Science Fiction Quarterly and here we are reading it just a blink of an eye later.  I guess it helps that the cover of this issue, by Kelly Freas, is great, with a cool space ship, fascinating aliens, a terrific monster, and beautiful colors and composition.  I guess Freas deserves those eleven Hugos.

"Neutral Planet" by Robert Silverberg

The people of Earth and the bear-like people of Rigel are at war.  But new forcefield technology has rendered offensive weapons useless, so there are no space naval battles.  Instead, Rigel and Terra compete over exclusive trade deals and alliances with neutral systems.  As the story begins, a Terran ship crewed by a score of men is approaching a planet in the Antares system, hoping to sign a treaty with the primitive reptilian natives; the sneaky Rigelians must have a spy back on Terra who informed them of the Terran mission to Antares, because a Rigelian ship on a similar mission is right behind the Terran one.

The rival missions conduct cloak and dagger operations against each other, but the focus of the story is their competition to sign an exclusive treaty with the scaly spear-wielding Antareans.  The Rigelians suffer a disaster--after being showered with gifts, the natives kill a bunch of Rigelians with their spears.  The human captain figures out the psychology/sociology of the Antareans--the responded badly to the gifts because they were loathe to be indebted to strangers.  The personnel of the Terran mission contrive a way of putting themselves in debt to the reptile men--they stage a starship crash and allow the natives to rescue them.  Now feeling as if the humans owe them something, the Antareans have no objection to doing them the insignificant favor of signing a treaty with Terra.

I guess this story is influenced by the Cold War, in which the United States and the Soviet Union competed diplomatically and via espionage because direct warfare had been rendered prohibitive by nuclear weapons.    

"Neutral Planet" feels a little contrived with its elaborate rules of indirect warfare that seem to be broken occasionally and its counterintuitive psychology, but it is an entertaining piece of work, Silverberg doing a decent job of sketching what the various fun SF elements (the weapons and electronic equipment, the various aliens) look like and how they perform.

It doesn't look like "Neutral Planet" has been anthologized, but it has appeared in several Silverberg collections, including two German publications.  In its magazine appearance here it suffers from many typos, so I would suggest you read it in a book.   

"Femmequin 973" by Fritz Leiber

We often find unconventional sex in stories by Leiber: underage sex, rape, incest, perversion.  (See "The Sadness of the Executioner," "Beauty and the Beasts," "The Bait," "The Glove," "A Bad Day For Sales," "The Princess in the Tower 250,000 Miles High," "The Mind Spider," "A Rite of Spring," and probably others I am forgetting.)  A title like "Femmequin 973" has me suspecting (hoping?) ol' Fritz has some more unusual sexual material for us; well, let's see.

In the early 1940s, L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Dianetics and the religion of Vinnie Barbarino and that woman from Cheers, published in the leading SF magazine, John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding, a series of stories collectively known as The Kilkenny Cats.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we have been reading the Kilkenny Cats series in scans of those old World War II-era magazines, and today we tackle the fifth and final installment, "The Rebels."  As we have followed the adventures of those future revolutionaries betrayed by their erstwhile comrades and exiled to planet Sereon, we have also been reading other stories that appeared in Astounding alongside Hubbard's, stories by people like Manly Wade Wellman, Eric Frank Russell and Ross Rocklynne.  Today we will be doing the same, and we are in for a treat, because "The Rebels" appears in an issue of Campbell seminal magazine full of work by writers of particularly high reputation and importance: Theodore Sturgeon, C. L. Moore, and Leigh Brackett.  There's also a piece by Raymond F. Jones, for whom I have a soft spot, so we've got five stories to deal with today.  This might be a long one!

"The Rebels" by L. Ron Hubbard 

At the end of the fourth Kilkenny Cats story, "The Mutineers," aristocratic naval officer Steve Gailbraith, through skilled (i.e., duplicitous) diplomacy had set the exiles up on a planet of giants.  Since then, six months have passed, and things are not going well for the humans living boring and uncomfortable lives among the giants.  The working class thugs who comprised labor leader Dave Blacker's battalion during the revolution on Earth and were forced to join him in exile have been engaging in petty crime, and as a result the Brobdingnagian natives have been lynching them.  As for Steve, he has become a drunk!  Vicky Stalton, love interest and former top propagandist for the revolution, is broken hearted to see Gailbraith, the hero who saved their lives so many times, reduced to such a state, but none of her pleading or cajoling has managed to get him back on track to fulfilling his destiny, which Vicky and we readers assume is to overthrow the communist dictator, Fagar, who exiled Steve, Vicky, Blacker and the rest after the revolution achieved success.  

This situation is unsustainable, and Blacker tries to cut the Gordian knot by sending a message to Earth and conniving with the Fagar government--Blacker will launch an uprising against the giants that will facilitate a raid on the planet's wealth by Fagar's space navy; in return, Blacker's people will be pardoned and allowed to return to Earth.  As Gailbraith, and we readers, expect, when the Terran government forces arrive they don't just neutralize the remainder of the native defenses, but gather together Blacker and his people and execute them on the spot.  Gailbraith, Stanton, and a handful of the middle-class scientists among the exiles witness this mass murder from hiding and we have a front row seat along with them; one of the particular features of this episode of the Kilkenny Cats is the high volume of eye-popping gore, with Hubbard describing how the giants pull humans limb from limb, for example, and lingering over descriptions of the effect ray guns have on people struck by them.

Fagar's Terrans, then, fall into Gailbraith's trap--our boy Steve has been roused from his stupor by Stanton's feminine wiles, she having inspired jealousy in the man she loves by flirting with Blacker.  Back on an even keel, as he has so often before, Gailbraith preserves the lives of the aristocratic and bourgeois exiles with his knowledge of space navy operations and a fair bit of trickery.  When Fagar's ships take on supplies they unwittingly load water that Steve has spiked with the powerful native alcoholic beverage he has been imbibing--soon the entire fleet is in a comatose state, allowing Steve to seize one of their vessels and disable the rest.  As the story ends, Gailbraith, Stanton and the scientists have an operational space battleship again and Steve's quest to overthrow Fagar--along with his and Vicky's love affair--can proceed.

"The Rebels" isn't bad--I like that the Gailbraith-Stalton relationship moves forward and that there is lots of space naval warfare--but I think it is inferior to its predecessors in the Killkenny Cats series.  I didn't find all that credible the idea that ruthless veteran labor leader and revolutionary Blacker would think he could trust Fagar to keep his end of a deal, the dictator after all having quite recently sent him into an exile meant to kill him after Blacker had helped Fagar win the throne of Earth.  Gailbraith's trick in this one didn't feel as convincing or as fun as some of his earlier plot-resolving schemes, either.  Distractingly, the origin story for Stanton in this one seemed to contradict that in the previous KC story, uninteresting new characters of limited utility are introduced for some reason (a huge "Negro" who acts as a sort of servant to Gailbraith and an earnest young cabin boy type) and I even found some of the sentences here in "The Rebels" puzzlingly opaque.  I also had sort of expected the last KC story to see Gailbraith taking over the Earth or at least overthrowing Fagar, so I was a little disappointed about that.  Maybe Hubbard had planned to continue this series but ran out of steam or was responding to a lack of interest from Campbell or Astounding's readers.  Too bad.

Merely acceptable.  

"There Shall Be Darkness" by C. L. Moore

Catherine L. Moore’s famous Weird Tales stories of Northwest Smith are all about sexy Terran criminal Smith’s dangerous relationships with sexy alien women, and one of the supporting pillars of Moore’s story here in the February 1942 issue of Astounding is a very similar theme, but alongside that facet of the tale are somewhat more "serious" themes related to the politics of imperialism and the supposed cycles of history.  You see, for centuries Earthmen have ruled the solar system, imposing civilization on the natives of the other planets.  But today the Terran Empire is crumbling under the pressure of attack from extrasolar barbarians as well as rebellion in the colonies!

Captain Jamie Douglas is the commander of the last Terran base on Venus.  Douglas is a big wide-shouldered Scotsman, and Moore here in "There Shall Be Darkness" indulges in the romanticizing of Celtic culture and ethnicity we have seen in the work of her husband, Henry Kuttner, as well as the stories of their friend Leigh Brackett, flavoring the story with fragments of Scottish song and intimations that Celts have special powers, that they can gain insight from visions and through dreams and so forth.  Moore's choice of ethnicity for her Terran lead may also be a reflection of the idea that Scotsmen were the vanguard of the British Empire; Moore further reminds us of popular images of martial Scotsmen by having her Venusian natives march into battle to the sound of "skirling" "pipes."

This last Terran base is in a prosperous "Terrestrialanized" city, and living on the base with Douglas is our Venusian lead, his slender beauty of a girlfriend, Quanna; Quanna is perhaps the true main character of "There Shall Be Darkness."  Little does Douglas know that Quanna is in close contact with her brother, Vastari, the ambitious leader of one of Venus’s disparate warring tribes, a man whose ambition is to kick out the Terrans and unite the planet under his own royal rule.  In fact, Quanna has been charged by Vastari with the sacred duty of murdering Douglas with a special ceremonial dagger--Douglas’s name is actually written upon its blade!

In contrast to manly man Douglas, who represents the best of (a now decadent) Earth, the natives of Venus are characterized as effeminate; they are manipulative, inscrutable, sneaky, selfish, and obsessed with fine points of etiquette and ignorant of big abstract ideas--the men are even slender and wear long hair.  At the same time, Venusian society is terribly sexist--among the natives women are second class citizens, generally consigned to harems.  (At times I think Moore is trying to evoke readers' impressions of British soldiers and administrators in Afghanistan or among Arabs--besides the reference to harems there is an ambush in hill country, for example.)  The plot of "There Shall Be Darkness" revolves around Quanna’s clever and underhanded machinations and manipulations, which involve lots of lying, drugging, backstabbing, and passing through secret doors, as she engineers events to achieve her goals, which at times are somewhat mysterious to us readers: is Quanna trying to help the strapping Earthman she apparently loves, or her own wild and beautiful planet and people, or is she just acting out of radical selfishness, putting at risk everything and everybody in her pursuit of her own desires?  The backdrop and foundation for all this action is the theme of cycles of history that reminds us of Robert E. Howard (whom Moore famously admired) and Poul Anderson, the theory that the vigor and expansion of young civilizations is succeeded by decadence and collapse into barbarism.  Terra has lost Mars and its other colonies and as our story begins the rulers of Earth are summoning Douglas and his soldiers back from Venus to help protect Earth from those extrasolar invaders.

Quanna’s elaborate schemes to convince Douglas to take her with him to Earth don’t quite work out, and it is deus ex machina developments—the arrival on Venus of a bunch of those extrasolar barbarian reavers and the manipulations of an alien almost as mysterious and deceptive as Quanna (but more responsible), a Martian merchant resident on Venus—that resolve the plot and offer Quanna and Douglas the opportunity to try and build some kind of life together as well as some kind of enduring civilization on Venus that we might see as a hybrid of Terra and Venus' cultures (perhaps this is Moore telling us that society needs both male and female aspects to prosper.)

"There Shall Be Darkness" is a pretty good story, with numerous strengths as well as elements that will perhaps make it interesting to 21st-century readers.  Moore offers plenty of romantic descriptions of Venus scenery (e. g., mangrove swamps and mountains plagued by rockslides ) and depictions of exotic wildlife (Quanna is a master of flying snakes, Venusian horses and venomous arachnids and employs her knowledge of these creatures in her complex plots.)  In the past I've complained that Moore overdoes all the surreal and romantic description in some of her Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry stories, but the descriptions here in this 1942 tale contribute to the story without overwhelming it.  

There are a lot of feminist/gender studies angles to "There Shall Be Darkness," what with the fact that Moore is herself a woman, the person who drives the story’s plot is a woman who uses stereotypical feminine methods to pursue her stereotypical feminine goals, and that the Venusians are coded female while Douglas the Terran is hypermasculine.  And there are timeless political issues:  When is law and order in fact tyranny, and when is freedom merely anarchy? Should the colonized welcome peace and elevated standards of living if it costs them autonomy?

A solid piece of work, especially if you are interested in depictions of imperialism, gender stereotypes, and ethnicity in SF.  Martin Greenberg included "There Shall Be Darkness" in the 1951 anthology Journey to Infinity (reprinted in German in 1964 as 8 Science Fiction Stories) and in our own century Frederick Krome selected it for inclusion in his anthology Fighting the Future War: An Anthology of Science Fiction War Stories, 1914-1945, which I guess was marketed to colleges as a text book or something--how many SF anthologies cost $64.95 in paperback?

"The Sorcerer of Rhiannon" by Leigh Brackett

This story, the title of which is so similar to that of the book version of Brackett's 1949 Thrilling Wonder piece "Sea-Kings of Mars," appears in two 21st-century collections I own, Haffner Press's Martian Quest: The Early Brackett and Gollancz's Sea-Kings of Mars, but I don't think I've read it before.  

Brackett's "Sea-Kings of Mars" AKA The Sword of Rhiannon involves a Terran archaeologist on tired old Mars who gets a glimpse via esoteric means of the young and vibrant Mars of a million years ago, and endures the experience of having some other intelligence impinge upon his own mind and try to take over his body.  Here in "The Sorcerer of Rhiannon" Brackett presents similar themes.  Max Brandon is a tomb raider guy who illegally uncovers ancient artifacts on the desert planet of Mars to sell to collectors and scientists on the black market; this adventurous behavior apparently wins him lots of girls, but he mostly does it for neither money nor love, but because of his fascination with the mysterious and glorious past of Mars, ancient home of lost races which, apparently, had more advanced technology than today's spacefaring Earth imperialists.

The Sage of Teaneck, the great Barry N. Malzberg, tells us* that Judith Merril "irreversibly damaged" science fiction in the course of her "campaign to destroy science fiction" by "tearing down the walls" between SF and mainstream literature.  If we take seriously this charge from our emotional pal Barry, we must see the 1957 book SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume as an early salvo in Merril's disruptive campaign.  We here at MPoricus Fiction Log have been using the long alphabetical list of Honorable Mentions at the end of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume as a sort of guide to the SF of 1956, cherry-picking from it stories that pique our interest and hunting them down online. 

*In a 2016 essay that appeared in Galaxy's Edge.

The last leg of our journey through 1956 with Merril as our pathfinder saw us reading stories by authors whose names begin with a "G," so today we reach the "H"s.  This batch is fertile ground for exploring Merril's propensity to look beyond the category SF magazines like Astounding and Galaxy for "great" SF, seeing as two of the stories, those by Richard Harper and Robert A. Hart, appeared in men's magazines.  Alas, I can't find the text of Harper's "The Pugilist," which debuted in Nugget, anywhere online.  The issue of Dude that first brought Hart's "The Automatic Gentleman" before the eyes of the world is thankfully available at the internet archive.  Rounding out Merril's three "H"s is Frank Herbert's "The Nothing" which we will also tackle.

Two stories is a little slim for a blog post (not that I haven't done that), so let's also take a look at the two "J"s (there are no "I"s.)  One of these is "A Little Magic" by one of those authors people are always telling you you have to like, Shirley Jackson, but I can't seem to find a text of this story, which first appeared in Woman's Home Companion, online.  (Maybe I just don't know how to use the internet properly.)  We'll just assume "A Little Magic" is a work of genius that heartbreakingly illuminates the manifold contradictions of the life of women under the patriarchy and move on with our lives.  The other "J" who won Merril's approval is Raymond F. Jones, whose story "The Non-Statistical Man" appears on the Honorable Mentions list and is easily available even to us internet neophytes.

"The Automatic Gentleman" by Robert A. Hart

This is a sort of obvious story, a forgettable trifle, but competently written.  The narrator is a successful  businessman (he owns a Chevrolet dealership) married to a woman thirteen years his junior.  He keeps her content by buying appliances that makes her housework easier--washing machine, electric mixer, etc.  Of course, she is never satisfied for long, so when mechanical servants go on the market, he buys her one of those.  The robot looks just like a handsome young man, a college student, in fact, and flawlessly performs all the work from mowing the lawn to cooking the dinner.

The robot doesn't just look like an educated person--it has educated tastes!  It hates game shows and Ed Sullivan and likes modern drama!  It beats the narrator at Scrabble, quadrupling his score!  Soon his wife is more attracted to the robot than to her husband, and both husband and wife begin to wonder if there is another "job" around the house it can perform flawlessly, if you know what I mean!  But their marriage is saved when the high class robot rejects the vulgar wife's advances.

This feels like a filler story, and, seeing as in Dude it is nestled among fiction by big name writers like Michael Shaara, Erskine Caldwell and Tennessee Williams and photos of topless ladies, I guess it sort of is filler.  Merril's choice of it is thus a little odd; maybe the sex joke element of the story lent "The Automatic Gentleman" value in Merril's eyes (one of the standard complaints of New Wave boosters--and Merril is perhaps New Wave Booster Numero Uno--is that SF didn't deal enough with sex.)  And maybe she liked the story's suggestion, however jocular, that technology might pose problems to human relationships.  

"The Nothing" by Frank Herbert

"The Nothing," by Frank "Dune" Herbert, is reminding me of Robert Heinlein's 1957 "The Menace From Earth."  Both are written in the voice of an intelligent and independent-minded young woman, both are full of little jokes, and both have plots centered around the start of a committed love relationship but serve as vehicles for the description of a strange future society (in Heinlein's case, a society located on the Moon.) 

A beautiful old building in Galesburg, Illinois that I was told was once an Odd Fellows meeting hall today houses an antique mall.  As followers of my nearly defunct twitter feed may have noticed, the wife and I are on a road trip, and a few days ago we visited this antique mall, where from a shelf of old paperbacks I purchased for one dollar a copy of 1967's Space War, the third collection of Neil R. Jonses's Professor Jameson stories.  I read the second collection, The Sunless World, back in 2015, so you may recall that Professor Jameson is the last living human being and his disembodied brain has been implanted by aliens into a robot body.  Accompanied by the aliens known as the Zoromes whose brains reside within similar robot bodies, Jameson explores the galaxy of millions of years in our future.  Let's join Jameson in three more adventures first printed in Amazing Stories in the mid-1930s.

"Zora of the Zoromes" (1935)

As the book begins Prof. Jameson, called 21MM392 by his benefactors, is on planet Zor, talking to Zora, Princess of the Zoromes, a woman who has not yet had her brain put into a robot body.  After the Prof tells the princess, who, like all Zoromes before they are upgraded with mechanical bodies, is a six-tentacled crustacean, how he preserved his body in orbit around Earth forty million years ago and was then revived by her countrymen, the Princess brings him up to date on current events here on Zor.  A major war is developing between Zor and planet Mumed, whose spider-like people learned from the Zoromes how to transplant their brains into robot bodies and how to build space ships; these ungrateful eight-legged jerks have turned on the Zoromes and begun attacking Zorome-inhabited planets in Zor's star system!

Prof. Jameson tours the Zor system, Jones giving us a long and perhaps unnecessary description of each of its planets, but then we get our action scenes and the violence we crave!  The Princess's boyfriend Bext is on a star ship which is captured by the Mumes, and Prof. Jameson is a member of the commando squad that goes to planet Mumed in two invisible star ships to rescue this guy.  The Zoromes in robot bodies are able to infiltrate the population of planet Mumed because the Mumes use the same model of mechanical bodies as the Zoromes.  Princess Zora stows away aboard one of the invisible ships, determined to help rescue her boyfriend.

The invisible Zorome vessels conduct useful intelligence operations over planet Mumed, but the effort to spring the Princess's six-armed squeeze is no piece of cake.  Many people are killed in the fighting subsequent to the freeing of Bext, which features tentacle-to-tentacle combat as well as aerial bombardment, and among the slain is Bext himself!  Zora is distraught, and grabs the weapons controls of the ship and shoots down many Mume ships and strafes many Mume factories and residences.  Eventually, by capturing a Mume ship, Jameson, Zora and the other Zorome survivors of the fight elude all the forcefields and detection devices and get out of planet Mumed's gravity well.

Back at Zor we get good news.  Bext's body was torn to pieces by the Mumes, but his skull was not damaged, and the other Zor commando ship collected it and brought it back to Zor where the brain was revived and put into a robot body.  Like so many Zoromes, Bext is now a "machine man."  Zora is at first overjoyed, but, no longer connected to a flesh and blood body, Bext feels no passion for her!  Knowing that a life without Bext's love will be miserable, Zora volunteers to have her own brain prematurely put in a robot body, liberating her from her fleshly emotions and unrealizable desires.  (Getting put in a robot body is like being neutered or spayed!)  Then she volunteers to be a gunner in the space navy!

"Zora of the Zoromes" is an entertaining SF adventure tale.  All the technology and fighting is fun, all the various weapons and defenses and strategies and countermeasures Jones comes up with.  There is also human drama and food for thought thanks to Zora and her passion for Bext, and the idea that, disconnected from an organic body, you will lose your emotions and passions.  I think "Zora of the Zoromes" is eligible for the coveted "strong female character" tag, as Zora charts her own course and bucks the demands of the men around her, but seeing as her big decisions revolve around her love of a man I don't see any chance of this story passing the Braunschweiger test.  That contact with the more technologically sophisticated Zoromes has made the Mumes look just like the Zoromes reminds us of the criticism of globalization that you hear sometimes, that it leads to cultural homogeneity, but I doubt Jones in the early 1930s was offering this sort of critique.  More likely Jones is thinking that it is risky to provide high technology to culturally primitive people who are driven by a lust for conquest.

Thumbs up for "Zora of the Zoromes."  Like all three of the pieces in Space War, this tragic saga of the passion of an alien princess was translated and included in a German collection of Professor Jameson tales published in 1985. 

"Space War" (1935)

Prof. Jameson is captain of a small ship probing the defenses of Mumed.  After a space naval battle that features boarding actions, the enemy ship the professor has transferred to crashes on an uninhabited planet of the Mumes' star system.  Almost everyone on the ship is killed in the crash.  Through the quick thinking of one Zorome, who dies in the performance of his act of subterfuge, the Mumes are led to believe Prof. Jameson is a Mume.  Thus his brain is put into a new mechanical body, and he is given a job on the crew operating the super weapon that guards planet Mumed.  The Mumes plan to draw the Zor fleet within range of this powerful energy projector the way the Jerries might trick British tanks into range of a battery of 8.8cm Flak guns, but when the main Zorome fleet arrives Professor Jameson is able to sabotage the Mume defense, winning the war for Zor.

As the capital Mume city is being blasted to oblivion, Jameson and another Zorome in a robot body escape in a small space ship.  The dictator of Mumed also escapes in such a ship, and the Prof and his comrade follow the tyrant to planet Ablen.  The primitive natives of Ablen hate the Mumes, who oppress and enslave them, and they kill the dictator, and, not knowing the Prof and his friend are Zoromes, try to kill them also, but they escape.  Unfortunately, the Ablenox have disabled both space ships, so our heroes are stuck on Ablen!  (I expected the next Professor Jameson story to be about escaping this planet, but Jones doesn't take this tack, instead at the start of "Labyrinth" just telling us Jameson was rescued by a passing ship.)

This fun and straightforward war and espionage story, full of aliens and energy weapons and defenses, would reappear in 1972 in the reprint magazine Science Fiction Adventure Classics.

"Labyrinth" (1936)   

When "Labyrinth" first appeared as an Amazing cover story in 1936 its title was printed inside quotation marks, like David Bowie's "'Heroes'" (though maybe Bowie called them "inverted commas.")  This is always confusing, and we can see that the quote marks were forgotten on the cover of the magazine, and when the story was reprinted in Amazing in 1968 they remembered this punctuation on the story title page but not in the table of contents.  The quote marks appear nowhere in the 1967 book printing I am reading.

Of the three stories in Space War, this is the most bland and least entertaining, though I still judge it acceptable.  The war with the Mumes being over, Jameson and two dozen other people in machine bodies have set out to continue their explorations of the galaxy.  They land on a planet to investigate the ruins of an extinct race.  Inhabiting the ruined city are some barbarians, people of low intelligence with four legs, four eyes, and many tentacles.  The Zoromes make friends with these primitives, and accompany them on a hunt in a sterile desert where no plants grow.  The traditional prey of the barbarians are slugs that are like 2 or 3 feet long.  These slugs, it turns out, eat metal, and normally subsist on veins of ore on the desert surface and in tunnels they themselves slowly dig with a corrosive they secrete.  This acid has no effect on organic matter.  The Zoromes, who are of course made of refined metals, represent a delicious meal for the slugs, and soon the mechanical men are surrounded by ravenous hordes of the slugs!  There are so many slugs their ray guns will run out of juice before they can exterminate them all, so the Zoromes flee into a cave and get lost in a maze of twisting tunnels and yawning caverns.  Eventually they find their way out.

**********