A few days ago I was looking at the contents page of
Bypass to Otherness, the 1961 Henry Kuttner (and C. L. Moore) collection. Of its contents, it seems I have read seven stories:
"Cold War," "Call Him Demon," "The Dark Angel," "The Piper's Son," "Absalom," "Nothing But Gingerbread Left," and
"Housing Problem." That leaves only one story to go, "The Little Things." Let's read "The Little Things" today, in its inaugural appearance in the Fall 1946
Thrilling Wonder Stories, and three other stories in that issue of Sam Merwin's magazine. We've already read the cover story of this ish of
TWS, Kuttner and Moore's
"Call Him Demon." Looking back at my 2014 (the very dawn of time!) blog post on "Call Him Demon," my plot summary makes the story sound absolutely awesome, and of course then there are the illustrations of the story by Earle Bergey on the cover of the magazine and by Virgil Finlay inside that make the story appear to be a bondage sex extravaganza. But in my blog post I go on to attack the story's characters, style, and length and to give it a negative vote. I'm a tough grader!
"The Little Things" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore
"The Little Things" is credited to Kuttner alone in the magazine, and I am not sure on what basis isfdb also credits Moore. The story has not been reprinted much, just in the aforementioned Bypass to Otherness and in a 2010 Haffner Press collection of Kuttner and Moore stories, Detour to Otherness.
This is an idea story, weak in plot and character--the protagonist doesn't know what is going on and doesn't have any decisions to make or obstacles to overcome. He isn't likable and is hard to sympathize with. The story is also about a revolution, but the motives and policies of the revolutionaries are pretty vague and elicit no intellectual or emotional response in the reader. I suppose the drama of the story is meant to be generated by how the reader is led to believe the protagonist is a hero who is going to join the resistance and overthrow the government only to be told by the authors that the protagonist is no hero and will not be doing any such thing; Kuttner and Moore "subvert our expectations," something the critics always like to see, but maybe us readers aren't always crazy about.
Our guy was a gossip columnist of the second or third rank during World War II, a guy whose column was not nationally influential but was widely read in a medium-sized town. As the war was ending he was seized and put in a prison by the people who were secretly taking over during the period of post-war chaos. You see, the aftermath of the war was going to provide the opportunity for radical changes to occur, and, to make sure civilization was going to transition smoothly to its new form, people who had some level of ambition and influence, like our gossip columnist, but who were not smart enough to recognize the ideal form of society the secret masters were guiding us to and so might cause disruptions, were imprisoned and impersonated by doppelgangers. These doppelgangers would use the positions of influence formerly occupied by the prisoners to smooth the transition, urging the public to support the correct policies, policies which the prisoners, if free, likely would oppose. The prisoners, meanwhile, would live in relative luxury, with access to good health care and lots of books and music and so forth, even pets, but no contact whatsoever with the outside world--all those books and all that music is material published before they were imprisoned. One reason the prisoners are well-treated is that, at least for a while, the doppelgangers share the prisoner's soul or life force and will die if the prisoner dies; eventually the duplicate develops its own soul.
The gossip columnist has lost track of how long he has been in his gilded cage with his pet cat. He sees an opportunity to escape, and gets out of the prison. (Kuttner and Moore refer to the prison as Chateau D'If and make some allusions to Dumas as well as to Tennyson's Enoch Arden.) The outside world does not seem to have changed radically--just "little things" seem to have changed, like the names of the months and days of the week, and the fact that vehicles are now self-driving and people no longer smoke tobacco.
The gossip columnist tries to make contact with people he knew when he was a free man, and finds that the secret masters of the world have given him plastic surgery so he looks totally different (I guess there was no mirror or other reflective surface in his comfortable cell.) It will be impossible for him to renew his old friendships--everybody who knew him before he was seized is sure that the doppelganger is the real him. The gossip columnist meets a woman who has not been able to change with the times, but rather than oppose the quiet, creeping revolution, she just sits around and gets drunk. It becomes clear the gossip columnist will be equally unable to put up any resistance to the changes. While his doppelganger is living a fulfilling life and career promoting the policies of the secret masters, the original gossip columnist, after a brief period of fruitless resistance, will live a pointless existence of drunkenness punctuated by bouts of sterile nostalgia--Kuttner and Moore offer us the metaphor that this woman and the gossip columnist are essentially dead because they can't evolve with society. We even get a scene in which we meet the secret masters and Kuttner and Moore try to convince us that they are swell guys, not dictators at all, but doing civilization a great service.
"The Little Things"' ideology is lame and unconvincing elitism, the day dream of people who want to have their lives regulated by their betters because they associate individual freedom with the rough days of the Depression and the cataclysmic upheavals of the Second World War. And of course I, a man who only reads books or watches movies made over 25 years ago and groans in agony when in a store and his ears are assaulted by music recorded this century, finds the "move with the times or you are as good as dead" theme a little annoying. As for the plot, it is limp and deflating. Writers who are bloodthirsty commies might depict changing the world in an exciting way, with the middle classes getting murdered and suffering their property to be expropriated in the name of justice and commissars and activists of the vanguard dying martyrs' deaths as the bourgeois hoarders and wreckers, in their death throes, use their wealth to deploy weapons of mass destruction. But Kuttner and Moore don't give us those kinds of thrills and horrors--the revolution in "The Little Things" is comfortable, with the masses not even knowing a revolution is taking place, while those who might oppose the revolution are imprisoned in luxury or just sadly drink themselves into oblivion.
Thumbs down!
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| Left: US edition, 1961 Right: UK edition, 1963 |
"The Good Egg" by Ross Rocklynne
According to isfdb, this story has never been reprinted--not a good sign.
"The Good Egg" is a cynical story about how bad parenting leads to evil children, how attractive women use sex to manipulate naive men, how attractive men use their looks to manipulate romantic women, how crooks abuse government programs meant to aid favored constituencies, and how men join the armed services and run terrible risks for civilians who do not appreciate their sacrifices. This may sound like a clear and accurate picture of real life, not SF at all, don't worry, Rocklynne also includes in "The Good Egg" wacky science fiction elements that function essentially as fantasy elements, like the doppelgangers in Kuttner and Moore's "The Little Things," though Rocklynne's tale otherwise has the plot and themes of a crime story. "The Good Egg" is also one of those stories that explains that you have to have a firm hand when dealing with women because members of the fair sex are naturally both duplicitous and gullible and will generally benefit from--and most of them actually crave!--the tutelage of a take-charge kind of man.
Doc Ferris is some kind of magician. He has long employed his pretty daughter Bernice as part of his "stage-setting," and her early recognition of how false the world is and how you can profit by tricking people has had a negative effect on Bernice's morals. Now, at the end of the Second World War, Bernice is a young adult with a boyfriend, Hugh Grant, a recently discharged veteran of combat in North Africa and Italy. Grant is sort of naive, and Bernice has him "wound around her little finger," as she puts it.
Doc Ferris has been showing Grant a magic trick. Some time ago, in a bunch of eggs, Ferris discovered one egg with strange properties; the thing has little glowering sparkles running across its surface, and when you rotate it in your hand, at particular angles it seems to change shape and even vanish from view.
Grant is interested in science and becomes obsessed with the egg and steals it. The egg, we readers learn long before Grant does, was laid by a member of an alien race from another dimension. Inside it is growing, and about to hatch, a telepathic little humanoid being, one fully mature and equipped with racial memory so it has full info about its home dimension and whose telepathy has allowed it to gather full info on our Earth. This little guy can with trivial ease move between our dimension and that of its people, but if it returns "home" it will be killed by its fellows for having been contaminated by Earth ideas. (Is this element of the story a satire of the Soviet Union?)
Faithless Bernice has fallen in love with a handsome man, Morrow, a cunning con artist. Many materials are rationed due to wartime conditions, and are hard to acquire and thus can be sold at high prices on the black market. Businesses owned by veterans get priority from the government rationing board, and Morrow's SOP is to set up a fake business, seduce a girl with a boyfriend who is a veteran, partner with the vet and thus acquire materials, and then abandon his partner and sell the materials to unscrupulous businessmen. Bernice uses her sexual wiles to get a skeptical Grant to partner with Morrow; Morrow gets a big shipment of raw leather thanks to Grant's veteran status. Bernice severs relations with Grant, stupidly thinking that suave Morrow will marry her now that he can make some money, but Morrow has no interest in Bernice, who is far from the first hot chick he has pulled this scam on.
The egg hatches and the alien appears and explains to Grant what is going on. Grant goes after Bernice, and he and Bernice end up bound in the back of a truck of Morrow's, headed for a watery grave--Morrow has decided he has to murder Grant and Bernice because they are witnesses to his crimes. Before our dopey and ethically challenged protagonists can be thrown in the river, the alien teleports back to its home dimension where it battles its fellows and seizes a ray gun that it uses to free Grant upon its return; Grant uses the ray gun to outfight Morrow and his thugs. Morrow and crew end up in prison, and on the advice of the telepathic alien, Grant beats Bernice, turning her into suitable wife material. The ending joke of the story is that Doc Ferris has found another egg from the alien dimension.
"The Good Egg" is acceptable filler. The big problem with it is the inconsistent personalities of Hugh Grant and Bernice Ferris, which seem to change to suit the plot instead of being believably consistent and driving the plot. For example, Grant is obsessed enough with the egg to steal it from the father of the woman he loves, even though he is supposed to be naive and innocent, and then he just forgets about the egg, leaving it alone in his fridge for days. Sometimes Grant acts like a dope, sometimes like a hard-bitten combat veteran, other times like a science-loving nerd. As for Bernice, her behavior is such that it is hard to sympathize with her and to hope she and Grant get together, though I guess it is implied that women's psyches are mere clay that have to be molded by the men in their lives so we need not sympathize with her for the story to achieve its goals. The plot and SF content of "The Good Egg" is serviceable, and if Rocklynne or Sam Merwin had taken the time to polish the story and fix these character issues it would probably rise to good status, but life is short and writers and editors face deadlines and we've all got to pay the mortgage and get the dishes washed and the vases dusted and the lawn mowed and so can't always publish the best possible product. Even so, historians might find "The Good Egg" useful for its 1946 depictions of the wartime economy and attitudes about women.
"Never the Twain Shall Meet" by Edmond Hamilton
This tale appears under the byline "Brett Sterling," a pseudonym used several times by Hamilton and other people, including once by Ray Bradbury. Like Rocklynne's "The Good Egg," it doesn't look like this story was ever reprinted.
"Never the Twain Shall Meet" is a traditional science fiction story full of space suits, airlocks, little lectures about positrons that refer to Carl David Anderson and brainwaves that refer to Hans Berger, and speculations about where the planets and asteroids came from and how the Sun generates energy. "Never the Twain Shall Meet" is also a melodramatic love story, perhaps based on the Hans Christian Anderson tale of The Little Mermaid. Hamilton's style is simple and straightforward and the emotions of his characters, however over the top, ring true. Thumbs up!
Farrel is the 30-year old captain of a space ship that has broken down near the asteroid belt. For like 40 years, the human race has been exploring and colonizing the Solar System, but Venus and Mars are off limits, so humans are focusing their efforts on the moons of Jupiter and Uranus. You see, half the matter of the universe is "positive," and half "negative," and Venus and Mars are negative, and if a piece of positive matter from Earth touches anything from V or M both will be annihilated in a blinding flash!
The crew of Farrel's ship are in serious trouble, but they can maybe fabricate the parts they need to fix the ship if they can drift close enough to an asteroid with the metal they need. Unfortunately, half the asteroids are negative, making searching the belt very dangerous.
Amazingly, the crew spots another crippled space ship in the belt! It has an odd shape--an experimental model? Farrel goes out to investigate in his space suit--he can propel himself with a little hand-held rocket device. Similarly equipped people come out of the other ship to meet him, one of them a beautiful woman. Everybody is astonished when they realize they are from different worlds, represent different races--the beautiful girl and her ship are from Mars! The two groups and their equipment can't touch each other, but Martians have developed devices that operationalize everybody's dormant telepathic ability, so Farrel can communicate with them.
Despite the obstacles facing them, Farrel and the Martian woman fall in love during a crazy adventure in which they get lost in the asteroid belt and have to use logic and science knowledge to reunite with their people, who, in their absence, have repaired their ships. The Martian makes Farrel promise to meet her in this same spot in a year's time. He does so, and they have a joyful reunion and start a happy life together because the Martians have figured out a way to change negative matter into positive, and the Martian woman volunteered to be the first human test subject of this technology so she could move to Earth and marry Farrel!
I like it. The somewhat schmaltzy ending doesn't feel too saccharine because I didn't quite expect it; maybe I am dim, but repeatedly Hamilton had me thinking one of the lovers might die, sacrificing him or herself for the other, or maybe both could die, committing suicide because they prefer death to life without each other. And, as I have told you again and again, I have a weakness for SF stories that are about people in space suits out there facing death in the void between the worlds. "Never the Twain Shall Meet" deserves to be reprinted, in my humble opinion.
"Pocket Universes" by Murray Leinster
Yet another story that has not been reprinted, if we are to believe isfdb. I have found Leinster to be a solid performer, so I have reason to hope I'll enjoy this piece as much as Hamilton's.
"Pocket Universes" is perhaps an illuminating sample of popular beliefs among Americans of people from Latin America, with our narrator, an American, saying stuff like
He was Latin-American—pure Spanish as far as I could tell—and you don’t expect Latin-Americans, somehow, to be scientists....You think of them and of revolutions and politicians, and if you know a few of them you think of poetry and literary effusions and highly intellectual and not very meaty talk. But science, no. Facts seem to hamper most of them.
Our narrator is buddies with a brilliant Latin American scientist, an emigre to the United States living and working in New York. As the story begins, the scientist has just invented an amazing device. When powered up, the apparatus, a bunch of copper and crystal pieces and wires, vanishes, and the space it previously occupied has odd effects on light that passes through it, and on objects which intrude into it. It is as if the space no longer exists--if you reach into the queer blurry area occupied by the device before it was switched on, your hand will vanish inch by inch from your arm while immediately reappearing on the other side of the blurry space, still fully under your control. Turning off the power causes the device to reappear, and, if anything is occupying the area, that intruding object is destroyed. Leinster spends a lot of time trying to explain how all this works, both practically and theoretically, but I can't say he succeeds in making it very clear. (Again, maybe I'm dim.)
The scientist and the narrator take a break from the lab and the sight of a newspaper headline prompts the inventor to tell his tragic life story. Back home, he had an attractive wife whom his nation's dictator took a liking to. The dictator's flunkies kidnapped her and she ended up getting killed. The scientist fomented a revolution against the dictator, but his uprising was crushed. The scientist fled to America, where he has had a successful career in academia, culminating in today's invention, which the narrator expects will revolutionize the economy and human life by, for example, allowing instantaneous travel between two points, regardless of what might be between them. With a small portable device you can reach through walls and floors, a larger device walk through such obstacles, and if one is built on an industrial scale, like a highway, one could travel between cities as easily as one walks between two rooms.
The newspaper story which inspired the inventor to spill his guts tells how the dictator is abdicating under the pressure of the accumulated threats of all his enemies, foreign and domestic, and coming to the United States, to New York, presumably bringing with him all kinds of money and valuables looted from his people and received from Nazis who fled to his country after the war. To make sure we know the dictator is a bad guy, Leinster tells us he is fat and swarthy!
The scientist uses upgraded versions of his device to sneak into the dictator's hotel room and seize the loot, which he has sent to the new government of his native country. Then he murders the dictator. The narrator upbraids him for risking his life on this adventure when only he can build the device which is going to radically improve human life by making trade and travel so inexpensive. But the true tragedy of the story is that the scientist decides to experiment with a battery-powered version of his device, and somehow gets stuck inside the warped space--because the device is battery powered, the narrator cannot turn it off from our universe. The narrator theorizes that, inside the warped space, time passes very slowly, so the batteries may not run out for what we here experience as centuries, even if the inventor only experiences it as a brief period.
(I have to admit I don't understand how the inventor got stuck inside the warped space, as earlier when a guy put his hand in the warped space his hand immediately reappeared on the other side of the warp--his arm wasn't in the warped space, the warped space is like space that is no longer existent.)
"Pocket Universes" is merely acceptable. Leinster spends lots of energy explaining the device, but his explanations are not very clear and his speculations are wholly fanciful, unlike Hamilton's, which refer to real scientists and real phenomena like electrons and protons. Leinster also spends a lot of time on the dictator, on describing how ugly and evil he is, but we readers can't get too enthused about the dictator because the narrator never meets him or sees him--he just reads about him in the paper or hears the inventor talk about him; the drama of the dictator's crimes and punishment all happens "off screen." Unlike with Hamilton's "Never the Twain Shall Meet," I can see why "Pocket Universes" has never been reprinted.
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Only Hamilton's story here is a real winner, though Rocklynne's and Leinster's are not bad. But none of these stories was a waste of my time, even Kuttner and Moore's, as I have a particular interest in the careers of Kuttner, Moore and Hamilton, and hope to read all of their work before I shuffle off this mortal coil (and I may be developing a similar attachment to Leinster.) And as a grad school dropout who served time in a History and then a Poli Sci department, all the references to World War II are interesting.
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| The beautiful header to Thrilling Wonder Stories' letters column |